Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Eternal Cultivation

Chapter 2: Tutorial

Chapter 3: City

Chapter 4: Alchemy

Chapter 5: Entrance Exam

Chapter 6: Breakthroughs

Chapter 7: Forest Hunting

Chapter 8: Outer Sect Disciple

Chapter 9: Cultivation Mechanics

Chapter 10: More Learning

Chapter 11: Alchemists

Chapter 12: Disciple Hall

Chapter 13: Alchemy Achievements

Chapter 14: The Library

Chapter 15: Flame Mastery Scripture

Chapter 16: Taking A Mission

Chapter 17: Mission Complete

Chapter 18: Flame Mastery Practice

Chapter 19: More Practice

Chapter 20: Sect Market

Chapter 21: Yellow Rock

Chapter 22: Alchemy Hall

Chapter 23: The Task of an Aid

Chapter 24: The Alchemy Process

Chapter 25: Formations

Chapter 26: Qi Manipulation

Chapter 27: Muscle Tempering 9th Realm

Chapter 28: Daily Routine

Chapter 29: The First Step

Chapter 30: One Step Forward

Chapter 31: Selling Pills At A Loss

Chapter 32: Battle Technique

Chapter 33: Hunting Once More

Chapter 34: Chance Meeting

Chapter 35: Best Player In The Game

Chapter 36: More Interview

Chapter 37: Helping

Chapter 38: Spiritual Sense

Chapter 39: Outer Sect?

Chapter 40: Invitation

Chapter 41: Explosion

Chapter 42: Kill? or Save?

Chapter 43: Successfully Refined

Chapter 44: Death

Chapter 45: Important Figures

Chapter 46: Invitation

Chapter 47: Double Invitation

Chapter 48: Why not...?

Chapter 49: Returning back to sect

Chapter 50: "Science" Behind Flying

Chapter 51: House with a Courtyard

Chapter 52: Testing His New Strength

Chapter 53: Ebony Corundum Stiletto

Chapter 54: Unlocking...

Chapter 55: Spiritual Sense

Chapter 56: Spiritual Sea

Chapter 57: Third Lily

Chapter 58: Misuse of Authority

Chapter 59: Granted

Chapter 60: Work

Chapter 61: That Was Quick

Chapter 62: Alchemy Lesson

Chapter 63: The 7 Elements

Chapter 64: Shocking Advancements

Chapter 65: Amazing Results

Chapter 66: Put a lid on it

Chapter 67: Auction House

Chapter 68: Rich

Chapter 69: Elemental Guidance

Chapter 70: Elemental Guidance Usage

Chapter 71: Auction Sales

Chapter 72: Another Rock

Chapter 73: Ascension

Chapter 74: Unstable Concoction

Chapter 75: Wednesday

Chapter 76: White...

Chapter 77: Missing Ingredients

Chapter 78: Questioning

Chapter 79: Song Zun

Chapter 80: Immortal Concealment Technique

Chapter 81: Learning The Techniques

Chapter 82: Teaching

Chapter 83: Qi, Records, and Shadows

Chapter 84: Teleportation

Chapter 85: Registering Pills

Chapter 86: Just register them

Chapter 87: Evaluating the Pros and Cons

Chapter 88: Experience for a Cultivator

Chapter 89: Pink Cloud Auction House

Chapter 90: Auction Starts

Chapter 91: Beast Companion

Chapter 92: Small Money Talk

Chapter 93: Yin Gathering Tree

Chapter 94: Pill Sales

Chapter 95: Priceless and Worthless

Chapter 96: Heaven's Impact

Chapter 97: Sold

Chapter 98: Back To Sect

Chapter 99: Spiritual Attack

Chapter 100: Master's Lessons

Chapter 101: Leaving

Chapter 102: Inner Sect Disciple

Chapter 103: Fighting Hall

Chapter 104: Black Stele

Chapter 105: Training

Chapter 106: Testing

Chapter 107: Bad Spiritual Roots

Chapter 108: Elusive Heavenly Sword

Chapter 109: Practicing the Sword

Chapter 110: Training with Master

Chapter 111: Selling a pill

Chapter 112: Prime Disciple

Chapter 113: Challenged

Chapter 114: Badge Number 194

Chapter 115: Beat up

Chapter 116: Fluctuating Friction Dance

Chapter 117: The Man in the Mansion

Chapter 118: Capsules

Chapter 119: Leaving with master

Chapter 120: War and Records

Chapter 121: Fog

Chapter 122: A Tiresome Task

Chapter 123: Worm

Chapter 124: Lucky

Chapter 125: Capsule Presentation

Chapter 126: Free Apartment

Chapter 127: Late on a Saturday

Chapter 128: Battle

Chapter 129: Senior Brother

Chapter 130: Battle of the minds

Chapter 131: Meeting Senior Brother Again

Chapter 132: Production Hall

Chapter 133: Severe Itching

Chapter 134: Pearl

Chapter 135: Beast Care

Chapter 136: Elder Xian

Chapter 137: Blood Essence

Chapter 138: Changes in Pearl

Chapter 139: Time Skip

Chapter 140: Selling

Chapter 141: Finally

Chapter 142: Revealing a bit

Chapter 143: Fighting Meng Yun

Chapter 144: The Fight Continues

Chapter 145: A Strong Fist

Chapter 146: Forced Cultivation

Chapter 147: Faster

Chapter 148: Mortal Cleansing

Chapter 149: Improvements

Chapter 150: Such a Weak Body?

Chapter 151: Attack and Defense

Chapter 152: Quick Library Visit

Chapter 153: Palm of the Sun

Chapter 154: Progress

Chapter 155: Unexpected Match

Chapter 156: Explosive Talismans

Chapter 157: Penta Blade Technique

Chapter 158: Lunch talk

Chapter 159: First Elder

Chapter 160: Clones

Chapter 161: Pearl's First Battle

Chapter 162: Testing Strength

Chapter 163: Popular

Chapter 164: Heaven Impacts once more

Chapter 165: My best Earth Grade pill?

Chapter 166: Talisman and Armor

Chapter 167: Moving

Chapter 168: New Place

Chapter 169: Shopping

Chapter 170: More shopping

Chapter 171: Back to Hong Wu Sect

Chapter 172: Low Ranking

Chapter 173: Shocked Ma Rong

Chapter 174: More Shocks

Chapter 175: Asking for Permission

Chapter 176: Back to Pill Making

Chapter 177: Metal

Chapter 178: Experiment

Chapter 179: Successful Hypothesis

Chapter 180: Exam Date

Chapter 181: Problem with being Rich

Chapter 182: Cab ride in the night

Chapter 183: Show Starts

Chapter 184: 7 Grades

Chapter 185: Nine Revolution Ancient Body

Chapter 186: [Bonus Chapter]Continents

Chapter 187: Fifth

Chapter 188: Developer

Chapter 189: Blushing

Chapter 190: Second Best

Chapter 191: Exam Starts

Chapter 192: Failure

Chapter 193: Calling out Names

Chapter 194: Core Disciple

Chapter 195: Zhou Mei's Confusion

Chapter 196: Walking to the University

Chapter 197: Reincarnation Problem

Chapter 198: Pill Swines

Chapter 199: True Nullifying Pill

Chapter 200: Core Mountain

Chapter 201: Unfair?

Chapter 202: Calling Parents

Chapter 203: Transferring Money

Chapter 204: Just before

Chapter 205: The Forbidden Fields

Chapter 206: Zheng Min

Chapter 207: Trust

Chapter 208: Hurt

Chapter 209: Party?

Chapter 210: Butterfly Pears

Chapter 211: Scorpion

Chapter 212: Snake Monster

Chapter 213: Boss

Chapter 214: A few weeks ago

Chapter 215: Sword

Chapter 216: The Boss

Chapter 217: Revelation

Chapter 218: Assumptions

Chapter 219: Blade

Chapter 220: Get Over It

Chapter 221: Gray

Chapter 222: Human

Chapter 223: Desert

Chapter 224: Return

Chapter 225: Run

Chapter 226: Victory

Chapter 227: Okay

Chapter 228: Approaching Danger?

Chapter 229: One after another

Chapter 230: Gathering

Chapter 231: Wan Li

Chapter 232: Headache

Chapter 233: Game

Chapter 234: Beast hoard

Chapter 235: Unusual Activity

Chapter 236: Second and Third Elder

Chapter 237: Buying Rush

Chapter 238: Raining

Chapter 239: Fraudsters

Chapter 240: Death

Chapter 241: Cardinal City

Chapter 242: Wan Li's Past

Chapter 243: Decorations

Chapter 244: The Party

Chapter 245: Delivery

Chapter 246: Feature

Chapter 247: City Tour

Chapter 248: Ambition

Chapter 249: Frivolous Purchases

Chapter 250: Handwriting

Chapter 251: Rules

Chapter 252: Dual Cultivation

Chapter 253: First day

Chapter 254: Registration

Chapter 255: Space

Chapter 256: First Competition

Chapter 257: Rules of the Competition

Chapter 258: The 10 Ingredients

Chapter 259: Results

Chapter 260: Alchemy Hall of the Capital

Chapter 261: 3 Different Pills

Chapter 262: Leaving the hall

Chapter 263: Royal Family

Chapter 264: Can Hide No Longer

Chapter 265: Sister

Chapter 266: The Different Competitions

Chapter 267: Music

Chapter 268: Talent

Chapter 269: Speed Results

Chapter 270: New Capsule

Chapter 271: A Group of Girls

Chapter 272: Han Jing

Chapter 273: Not Hungry

Chapter 274: Third Day

Chapter 275: [Bonus Chapter]Artifacts Grading

Chapter 276: Beginning of the third Competition

Chapter 277: First batch of Pills

Chapter 278: Next Batch

Chapter 279: Huang Fu's Pill Harmony

Chapter 280: Alex's Pill Harmony

Chapter 281: Up-Grade

Chapter 282: Request Fulfilled

Chapter 283: Good Reviews

Chapter 284: Cardinal Library

Chapter 285: Lower Floors

Chapter 286: History

Chapter 287: Maximum

Chapter 288: Earnings

Chapter 289: Next Auction

Chapter 290: Natural Law of the Body

Chapter 291: Fourth Day

Chapter 292: Unexpected Result

Chapter 293: Beast Attracting Pill

Chapter 294: Unknown Figure

Chapter 295: He is...

Chapter 296: Breakthrough

Chapter 297: Auction day

Chapter 298: First Few Item Sales

Chapter 299: The Man from D4

Chapter 300: True Mortal Grade Armor

Chapter 301: Spirit Stone Cave

Chapter 302: Spirit Disorienting Formation

Chapter 303: Run

Chapter 304: Devouring Earth

Chapter 305: I Sold It

Chapter 306: Face Change again

Chapter 307: Combat Competitions

Chapter 308: Final Registration

Chapter 309: Royal Family

Chapter 310: Damage Test

Chapter 311: Damage Tests - Finale

Chapter 312: Race

Chapter 313: The Royal Family

Chapter 314: Teaching

Chapter 315: Elemental Theory

Chapter 316: Proposition

Chapter 317: More Clarification

Chapter 318: A Few More Competitions

Chapter 319: Top 64 starts

Chapter 320: Intent

Chapter 321: Final Day

Chapter 322: Top 32 - Begin

Chapter 323: Empower

Chapter 324: Top 32 - End

Chapter 325: Maze Rules

Chapter 326: Maze Run - Start

Chapter 327: Stolen

Chapter 328: Am I Pretty?

Chapter 329: Snow Field

Chapter 330: Sleep

Chapter 331: A Feeling

Chapter 332: Illusory

Chapter 333: Blue Gorilla

Chapter 334: The Box

Chapter 335: Wooden Walls

Chapter 336: Leaving the Maze

Chapter 337: Negative

Chapter 338: Attack

Chapter 339: Top 16 - Begins

Chapter 340: Du Yuhan VS Puppets

Chapter 341: Yang Ma vs Wan Li

Chapter 342: Top 8 - Luo Mei

Chapter 343: Sword Intent vs Sword Intent

Chapter 344: Sword-Shaped

Chapter 345: Coward

Chapter 346: Plea

Chapter 347: Disaster

Chapter 348: Disappear [Bonus Chapter]

Chapter 349: Trapped

Chapter 350: Questions

Chapter 351: Battle in the Spiritual Sea

Chapter 352: Memories

Chapter 353: Real

Chapter 354: Chip

Chapter 355: Serene Earth Qi Absorption Method

Chapter 356: Formations

Chapter 357: Post Battle Haul

Chapter 358: No Fire

Chapter 359: Making Formations

Chapter 360: The Pattern for Fire

Chapter 361: Training

Chapter 362: Alchemy Elemental Interaction

Chapter 363: Routine

Chapter 364: First Success

Chapter 365: Unimaginably Rich

Chapter 366: Snarl

Chapter 367: Direction of Motion

Chapter 368: Speed and Temperature

Chapter 369: Training

Chapter 370: The Move In

Chapter 371: Thursday

Chapter 372: Field Trip

Chapter 373: Pine Wood City

Chapter 374: Date

Chapter 375: 600 Years Old

Chapter 376: Globe

Chapter 377: Festival

Chapter 378: Games

Chapter 379: Under the Moonlight and Fireworks

Chapter 380: Back to the Game

Chapter 381: Back to Training

Chapter 382: Composition and Structure

Chapter 383: Shapes

Chapter 384: Meridian Tempering 1st Realm

Chapter 385: Immortal

Chapter 386: Success?

Chapter 387: Spicy Gourd

Chapter 388: License

Chapter 389: Mapleleaf City

Chapter 390: Home

Chapter 391: The farmhouse

Chapter 392: Blink of an Eye

Chapter 393: Gone

Chapter 394: Caravan

Chapter 395: First Invasion

Chapter 396: City

Chapter 397: Base Formations

Chapter 398: Copying the Chip

Chapter 399: Vermin

Chapter 400: Judgement and Morality

Chapter 401: One More Evidence

Chapter 402: Trouble?

Chapter 403: Saving Ma Rong

Chapter 404: Awakened Constitution

Chapter 405: The Courtyard

Chapter 406: Fate

Chapter 407: Swine

Chapter 408: Pill test on Swine

Chapter 409: Different Tests

Chapter 410: Battle against the Lionesses

Chapter 411: Intentional Attacks

Chapter 412: Visit

Chapter 413: Mocking Swine

Chapter 414: Improving The Recipe

Chapter 415: Terror

Chapter 416: Surprise

Chapter 417: Halfway Mortal Cleansing

Chapter 418: Lost Skill

Chapter 419: Null

Chapter 420: Back to Tiger Sect

Chapter 421: 2144

Chapter 422: Attack & Weapon

Chapter 423: Rank 50

Chapter 424: Selling Formations

Chapter 425: Golden Fist

Chapter 426: Training with Luo Mei

Chapter 427: Sect Matters

Chapter 428: Challenge

Chapter 429: Shan Ling

Chapter 430: Problem

Chapter 431: Remember What You Never Learned

Chapter 432: Spreading Awareness

Chapter 433: Jaguar

Chapter 434: Huang and Xing

Chapter 435: Helping

Chapter 436: Lie

Chapter 437: Hannah's Question

Chapter 438: Diagnosis

Chapter 439: Hundred Lives Parasite

Chapter 440: Mind Tempering 1st Realm

Chapter 441: Traversing the Body

Chapter 442: Irrational Hate

Chapter 443: Remuneration and Job

Chapter 444: Goodbye

Chapter 445: More Bandits

Chapter 446: Black Venom Bandit Group

Chapter 447: Wan Li's Revenge

Chapter 448: Thank you

Chapter 449: Black Venom

Chapter 450: Sect Leader Position In Trouble

Chapter 451: Elder's Meeting

Chapter 452: My Problems

Chapter 453: Plans

Chapter 454: Storm

Chapter 455: The Bigger Storm

Chapter 456: The Storm That Shook The Empire

Chapter 457: The Storm That Keeps On Shaking

Chapter 458: Something Shiny

Chapter 459: 100%

Chapter 460: True Pill training

Chapter 461: Final Lesson

Chapter 462: The Two Tasks

Chapter 463: Formation Se

Chapter 464: Improvemen

Chapter 465: True Pill Making

Chapter 466: Elder

Chapter 467: Back again

Chapter 468: First Rank

Chapter 469: Plan to Evade the Saint Beas

Chapter 470: Going For 3

Chapter 471: Bing Li

Chapter 472: Fifth Elder“s Disciple

Chapter 473: Learning about Sword Inten

Chapter 474: Surprise

Chapter 475: Improvement and Worry

Chapter 476: One Sided

Chapter 477: Favor

Chapter 478: Forfei

Chapter 479: Challenging Trevor

Chapter 480: Alex Vs Trevor

Chapter 481: Surprise Guests

Chapter 482: Questions Unanswered

Chapter 483: Get in the Formation, Alex

Chapter 484: Preparation for Battle

Chapter 485: The Emperor“s Search

Chapter 486: More arrivals

Chapter 487: Ruler

Chapter 488: Taken Away

Chapter 489: Questions

Chapter 490: Blood Blessed by the Gods

Chapter 491: The Palace

Chapter 492: Four Great Families

Chapter 493: Bai Jingshen

Chapter 494: One Way Conversation

Chapter 495: Time, Preparation, and Languages

Chapter 496: Garden

Chapter 497: Reason for being Isolated

Chapter 498: Planning

Chapter 499: White Tiger“s Dominating Body

Chapter 500: Answers about the Sword

Chapter 501: More Questions

Chapter 502: Dropping Out for good.

Chapter 503: Training Partners

Chapter 504: Training with the Rhino

Chapter 505: White Tiger“s Golden Claw

Chapter 506: A Month Later

Chapter 507: 9th Mind Tempering realm

Chapter 508: Going Outside

Chapter 509: Spirit Stone Cave

Chapter 510: Meeting Senior Chen

Chapter 511: Level Up

Chapter 512: Missing Elements

Chapter 513: Improving a Recipe

Chapter 515: Intense Hea

Chapter 516: Cannot Cultivate

Chapter 517: Previous Candidates

Chapter 518: Confrontation

Chapter 519: No Way Back

Chapter 520: Return

Chapter 521: Choose

Chapter 522: Spirit Reed pill

Chapter 523: Winter Moon Cultivation Method

Chapter 524: Problems

Chapter 525: Visits

Chapter 526: Interrupted Cultivation

Chapter 527: Another Invasion

Chapter 528: A Significantly Insignificant Battle

Chapter 529: Another Killing

Chapter 530: The Sect Targeted

Chapter 531: Keeping the Black Venom in check

Chapter 532: Qi Sense

Chapter 533: Triple-Defense

Chapter 534: Liu Xun VS Black Venom

Chapter 535: Black Venom defeated?

Chapter 536: Hei Dan

Chapter 537: Hei Dan 2

Chapter 538: Distraction

Chapter 539: The Name

Chapter 540: Father's Name

Chapter 541: Stopping the Formation

Chapter 542: That Face

Chapter 543: Stalling for Time

Chapter 544: Yin and Yang

Chapter 545: Poison

Chapter 546: Funeral

Chapter 547: Promise

Chapter 548: Pursuit

Chapter 549: Confrontation

Chapter 550: Visionless Fight

Chapter 551: Broken Sword

Chapter 552: The Source

Chapter 553: The End

Chapter 554: Finally Free

Chapter 555: Master

Chapter 556: Returning to the Sect

Chapter 557: The City Lord's Task

Chapter 558: You are the Reason

Chapter 559: Home World

Chapter 560: Celestial Grade

Chapter 561: Meteor Shower

Chapter 562: The Skill in the Stele

Chapter 563: Testing and Training

Chapter 564: The Same Thing

Chapter 565: Controlling Constitution

Chapter 566: Graduation

Chapter 567: Sect Treasury

Chapter 568: Silver Stone

Chapter 569: Five Yang Divine Path

Chapter 570: Mountain

Chapter 571: The Palace

Chapter 572: Discussion

Chapter 573: Teach Me

Chapter 574: Equilibrium

Chapter 575: Burnt Book

Chapter 576: Symmetry

Chapter 577: Conversion

Chapter 578: Re-Entering the Beasts' Realm

Chapter 579: Family

Chapter 580: Confronting the Beasts

Chapter 581: The Sword

Chapter 582: Black Slash

Chapter 583: Taking Back his Body

Chapter 584: Clone?

Chapter 585: Heavenly Judgemeent

Chapter 586: Damaged

Chapter 587: Godslayer

Chapter 588: False Gods

Chapter 589: Azure Silverbeak

Chapter 590

Chapter 591: Pearl vs Leader

Chapter 592: Pearl's refusal

Chapter 593: Riverweed Town

Chapter 594: Three Faction Alliance

Chapter 595: Geography of Luminance Empire

Chapter 596: Fever

Chapter 597: Ingredients

Chapter 598: Hopeless Players

Chapter 599: Alchemist Guild

Chapter 600: Alarm

Chapter 601: Pass

Chapter 602: Big Pearl

Chapter 603: Riverweed Auction

Chapter 604: New Destination

Chapter 605: Shen Jing

Chapter 606: Fun

Chapter 607: Using the Sword

Chapter 608: Hurt Meridians

Chapter 609: Mists

Chapter 610: Not What We Want

Chapter 611: Light

Chapter 612: Locating the Ingredients

Chapter 613: Toxins and Poisons

Chapter 614: Formations in Alchemy

Chapter 615: Mosquito

Chapter 616: Place to Get Strong

Chapter 617: Training Location

Chapter 618: Trouble Before the Training Starts

Chapter 619: Night Lynx

Chapter 620: Escape

Chapter 621: Closed Cultivation

Chapter 622: BlueFlame Monkey

Chapter 623: Explosion

Chapter 624: A Tongue of Fire

Chapter 625: Continuous Training

Chapter 626: Gold and Green

Chapter 627: Alchemy Training

Chapter 628: Tries and Failure

Chapter 629: Intent

Chapter 630: True Master

Chapter 631: Advancements in Sword

Chapter 632: Poison

Chapter 633: Poison Testing

Chapter 634: Coincident?

Chapter 635: Poison Swamp

Chapter 636: Dao of Techniques

Chapter 638: Demons

Chapter 639: Runes

Chapter 640: Right of Strength

Chapter 641: Demon Realm Opens

Chapter 642: Trekking down the Mountain

Chapter 643: The Mountains

Chapter 644: Change in Direction

Chapter 645: The 4th Mountain

Chapter 646: Sneak Attack

Chapter 647: Journey to the 5th Mountain

Chapter 648: House of the Undying

Chapter 649: The Elites

Chapter 650: Test at the Door

Chapter 651: The North Mountain

Chapter 652: Diary

Chapter 653: Waiting for a spot

Chapter 654: Training and Forging mountain

Chapter 655: Taking out Trash

Chapter 656: Obstacles

Chapter 657: Followed

Chapter 658: Poison

Chapter 659: Chaos

Chapter 660: Spiritual Attack

Chapter 661: Dream

Chapter 662: Keep Moving Forward

Chapter 663: Just a Little Forward

Chapter 664: Another Door

Chapter 665: The 11th Day

Chapter 666: Death

Chapter 667: The Undying God

Chapter 668: SouthShore City

Chapter 669: Seeking

Chapter 670: Teleportation

Chapter 671: Radiant City

Chapter 672: Hei Lin

Chapter 673: DawnSpring City

Chapter 674: Excuses

Chapter 675: Questions about the Sword

Chapter 676: Guests

Chapter 677: Lord Clearance Pill

Chapter 678: Reunion

Chapter 679: Helen's Story

Chapter 680: Mother-Son Conversation

Chapter 681: Sect and Clan

Chapter 682: Qi-like Aura

Chapter 683: Proud

Chapter 684: Homeschooled

Chapter 685: Talisman Learning

Chapter 686: Three Heaven

Chapter 687: Help

Chapter 688: Willow's Bark

Chapter 689

Chapter 690: Meeting Big Names

Chapter 691: Earrings, Armor, and Shield

Chapter 692: Earth Element Ingredients

Chapter 693: Importance of Spiritual Roots

Chapter 694: Colorful

Chapter 695: A Few Friendly Faces

Chapter 696: Bristled Spider

Chapter 697: Return

Chapter 698: Preparations

Chapter 699: Spring Mist Pavilion

Chapter 700: Up the Stairs

Chapter 701: Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations

Chapter 702: Negligence

Chapter 703: Heat

Chapter 704: Finishing the Pill

Chapter 705: Fighter

Chapter 706: Training

Chapter 707: Qin Shan's Unending Shock

Chapter 708: Resonance

Chapter 709: Pearl's Training

Chapter 710: Take It Back

Chapter 711: Inner Demon

Chapter 712: Third Time is the Charm

Chapter 713: Oath

Chapter 714: The Princess

Chapter 715: Legacy Artifact

Chapter 716: Three Demonic Plants

Chapter 717: Insecurities

Chapter 718: Belong

Chapter 719: Pearl's Cleansing

Chapter 720: Shurin

Chapter 721: Learning New Things

Chapter 722: Medicinal Pastes

Chapter 723: Training with Shen Jing

Chapter 724: Yu Ming’s Medicinal Clinic

Chapter 725: Little Trouble in Little Clinic

Chapter 726: Demonstration

Chapter 727: Overwhelmed

Chapter 728: Get The Recipes

Chapter 729: Stop Making Pastes

Chapter 730: King

Chapter 731: Wei Ruoran

Chapter 732: A Path Ahead

Chapter 733: Another Path

Chapter 734: Spirit Foods Competition

Chapter 735: New Alchemists

Chapter 736: Disturbance

Chapter 737: Winner

Chapter 738: Farewell

Chapter 739: Competition Day

Chapter 740: First Round

Chapter 741: End of the First Day

Chapter 742: Second Day of the Competition

Chapter 743: Third Day of the Competition

Chapter 744: Struggle

Chapter 745: Final Day

Chapter 746: Weight Measuring Formation

Chapter 747: Multiple Immortal Grade pills

Chapter 748: Result

Chapter 749: Anything You Want

Chapter 750: Rewards

Chapter 751: Experiments

Chapter 752: Realization

Chapter 753: Blood Aura

Chapter 754: Blood Experiments

Chapter 755: Icy Hell

Chapter 756: Canyon

Chapter 757: The Real Hell

Chapter 758: Return

Chapter 759: Return

Chapter 760: Plan to Leave

Chapter 761: Back in the Beast Realm

Chapter 762: I'm Back

Chapter 763: Giving the Pill

Chapter 764: Meeting Old Friends

Chapter 765: Introducing the Pastes

Chapter 766: Returning to the Hong Wu sect

Chapter 767: Changes in the Hong Wu sect

Chapter 768: Revisiting the Library

Chapter 769: Guest Elders

Chapter 770: Testing Spiritual Roots again

Chapter 771: Reason for Leaving

Chapter 772: Alchemy Lesson

Chapter 773: Changes

Chapter 774: Indecisive

Chapter 776: An Easier Way

Chapter 777: Justice

Chapter 778: Making Memories

Chapter 779: Passage of Time

Chapter 780: Training

Chapter 781: Bloodlines

Chapter 782: Registration

Chapter 783: Entering the Han Family Manor

Chapter 784: Han Family Leader

Chapter 785: The Human Language

Chapter 786: Intents

Chapter 787: The Tournament Approaches

Chapter 788: Tournament Brackets

Chapter 789: Meeting the Elites

Chapter 790: First Fight

Chapter 791: Top 512

Chapter 96: Heavens Impact

Chapter 100: Masters Lessons

Chapter 161: Pearls First Battle

Chapter 195: Zhou Meis Confusion

Chapter 242: Wan Lis Past

Chapter 279: Huang Fus Pill Harmony

Chapter 280: Alexs Pill Harmony

Chapter 414 - Improving The Recipe

Chapter 415 - Terror

Chapter 416 - Surprise

Chapter 417 - Halfway Mortal Cleansing

Chapter 418 - Lost Skill

Chapter 419 - Null

Chapter 420 - Back To Tiger Sect

Chapter 421 - 2144

Chapter 422 - Attack & Weapon

Chapter 423 - Rank 50

Chapter 424 - Selling Formations

Chapter 425 - Golden Fist

Chapter 426 - Training With Luo Mei

Chapter 427 - Sect Matters

Chapter 428 - Challenge

Chapter 429 - Shan Ling

Chapter 430 - Problem

Chapter 431 - Remember What You Never Learned

Chapter 432 - Spreading Awareness

Chapter 433 - Jaguar

Chapter 434 - Huang And Xing

Chapter 435 - Helping

Chapter 436 - Lie

Chapter 437 - Hannahs Question

Chapter 438 - Diagnosis

Chapter 439 - Hundred Lives Parasite

Chapter 440 - Mind Tempering 1st Realm

Chapter 441 - Traversing The Body

Chapter 442 - Irrational Hate

Chapter 443 - Remuneration And Job

Chapter 444 - Goodbye

Chapter 445 - More Bandits

Chapter 446 - Black Venom Bandit Group

Chapter 447 - Wan Lis Revenge

Chapter 448 - Thank You

Chapter 449 - Black Venom

Chapter 450 - Sect Leader Position In Trouble

Chapter 451 - Elders Meeting

Chapter 452 - My Problems

Chapter 453 - Plans

Chapter 454 - Storm

Chapter 455 - The Bigger Storm

Chapter 456 - The Storm That Shook The Empire

Chapter 457 - The Storm That Keeps On Shaking

Chapter 458 - Something Shiny

Chapter 459 - 100%

Chapter 460 - True Pill Training

Chapter 461 - Final Lesson

Chapter 462 - The Two Tasks

Chapter 463 - Formation Set

Chapter 464 - Improvement

Chapter 465 - True Pill Making

Chapter 466 - Elder

Chapter 467 - Back Again

Chapter 468 - First Rank

Chapter 469 - Plan To Evade The Saint Beast

Chapter 470 - Going For 3

Chapter 471 - Bing Li

Chapter 472 - Fifth Elders Disciple

Chapter 473 - Learning About Sword Intent

Chapter 474 - Surprise

Chapter 475 - Improvement And Worry

Chapter 476 - One Sided

Chapter 477 - Favor

Chapter 478: Forfeit

Chapter 485: The Emperor’s Search

Chapter 486 - More Arrivals

Chapter 487 - Ruler

Chapter 488 - Taken Away

Chapter 489 - Questions

Chapter 490 - Blood Blessed By The Gods

Chapter 491 - The Palace

Chapter 492 - Four Great Families

Chapter 493 - Bai Jingshen

Chapter 494 - One Way Conversation

Chapter 495 - Time, Preparation, And Languages

Chapter 496 - Garden

Chapter 497 - Reason For Being Isolated

Chapter 498 - Planning

Chapter 499 - White Tigers Dominating Body

Chapter 500 - Answers About The Sword

Chapter 501 - More Questions

Chapter 502 - Dropping Out For Good.

Chapter 503 - Training Partners

Chapter 504 - Training With The Rhino

Chapter 505 - White Tigers Golden Claw

Chapter 506 - A Month Later

Chapter 507 - 9th Mind Tempering Realm

Chapter 508 - Going Outside

Chapter 509 - Spirit Stone Cave

Chapter 510 - Meeting Senior Chen

Chapter 511 - Level Up

Chapter 512 - Missing Elements

Chapter 513 - Improving A Recipe

Chapter 514 - Making The Formation

Chapter 515 - Intense Heat

Chapter 516 - Cannot Cultivate

Chapter 517 - Previous Candidates

Chapter 518 - Confrontation

Chapter 519 - No Way Back

Chapter 520 - Return

Chapter 521 - Choose

Chapter 522 - Spirit Reed Pill

Chapter 523 - Winter Moon Cultivation Method

Chapter 524 - Problems

Chapter 525 - Visits

Chapter 526 - Interrupted Cultivation

Chapter 527 - Another Invasion

Chapter 528 - A Significantly Insignificant Battle

Chapter 529 - Another Killing

Chapter 530 - The Sect Targeted

Chapter 531 - Keeping The Black Venom In Check

Chapter 532 - Qi Sense

Chapter 533 - Triple-Defense

Chapter 534 - Liu Xun VS Black Venom

Chapter 535 - Black Venom Defeated?

Chapter 536 - Hei Dan

Chapter 537 - Hei Dan (2)

Chapter 538 - Distraction

Chapter 539 - The Name

Chapter 540 - Fathers Name

Chapter 541 - Stopping The Formation

Chapter 542 - That Face

Chapter 543 - Stalling For Time

Chapter 544 - Yin And Yang

Chapter 545 - Poison

Chapter 546 - Funeral

Chapter 547 - Promise

Chapter 548 - Pursuit

Chapter 549 - Confrontation

Chapter 550 - Visionless Fight

Chapter 551 - Broken Sword

Chapter 552 - The Source

Chapter 553 - The End

Chapter 554 - Finally Free

Chapter 555 - Master

Chapter 556 - Returning To The Sect

Chapter 557 - The City Lords Task

Chapter 558 - You Are The Reason

Chapter 559 - Home World

Chapter 560 - Celestial Grade

Chapter 561 - Meteor Shower

Chapter 562 - The Skill In The Stele

Chapter 563 - Testing And Training

Chapter 564 - The Same Thing

Chapter 565 - Controlling Constitution

Chapter 566 - Graduation

Chapter 567 - Sect Treasury

Chapter 568 - Silver Stone

Chapter 569 - Five Yang Divine Path

Chapter 570 Mountain

Chapter 571 The Palace

Chapter 572 Discussion

Chapter 573 Teach Me

Chapter 574 Equilibrium

Chapter 575 Burnt Book

Chapter 576 Symmetry

Chapter 577 Conversion

Chapter 578 Re-Entering the Beasts’ Realm

Chapter 579 Family

Chapter 580 Confronting the Beasts

Chapter 581 The Sword

Chapter 582 Black Slash

Chapter 583 Taking Back his Body

Chapter 584 Clone?

Chapter 585 Heavenly Judgemeent

Chapter 586 Damaged

Chapter 587 Godslayer

Chapter 588 False Gods

Chapter 589 Azure Silverbeak

Chapter 590 1 V 4

Chapter 591 Pearl vs Leader

Chapter 592 Pearl’s refusal

Chapter 593 Riverweed Town

Chapter 594 Three Faction Alliance

Chapter 595 Geography of Luminance Empire

Chapter 596 Fever

Chapter 597 Ingredients

Chapter 598 Hopeless Players

Chapter 599 Alchemist Guild

Chapter 600 Alarm

Chapter 601 Pass

Chapter 602 Big Pearl

Chapter 603 Riverweed Auction

Chapter 604 New Destination

Chapter 605 Shen Jing

Chapter 606 Fun

Chapter 607 Using the Sword

Chapter 608 Hurt Meridians

Chapter 609 Mists

Chapter 610 Not What We Want

Chapter 611 Light

Chapter 612 Locating the Ingredients

Chapter 613 Toxins and Poisons

Chapter 614 Formations in Alchemy

Chapter 615 Mosquito

Chapter 616 Place to Get Strong

Chapter 617 Training Location

Chapter 618 Trouble Before the Training Starts

Chapter 619 Night Lynx

Chapter 620 Escape

Chapter 621 Closed Cultivation

Chapter 622 BlueFlame Monkey

Chapter 623 Explosion

Chapter 624 A Tongue of Fire

Chapter 625 Continuous Training

Chapter 626 Gold and Green

Chapter 627 Alchemy Training

Chapter 628 Tries and Failure

Chapter 629 Intent

Chapter 630 True Master

Chapter 631 Advancements in Sword

Chapter 632 Poison

Chapter 633 Poison Testing

Chapter 634 Coincident?

Chapter 635 Poison Swamp

Chapter 636 Dao of Techniques

Chapter 637 Gratitude

Chapter 638 Demons

Chapter 639 Runes

Chapter 640 Right of Strength

Chapter 641 Demon Realm Opens

Chapter 642 Trekking down the Mountain

Chapter 643 The Mountains

Chapter 644 Change in Direction

Chapter 645 The 4th Mountain

Chapter 646 Sneak Attack

Chapter 647 Journey to the 5th Mountain

Chapter 648 House of the Undying

Chapter 649 The Elites

Chapter 650 Test at the Door

Chapter 651 Test at the Door

Chapter 652 The North Mountain

Chapter 653 Diary

Chapter 654 Waiting for a spot

Chapter 655 Training and Forging mountain

Chapter 656 Taking out Trash

Chapter 657 Obstacles

Chapter 658 Followed

Chapter 659 Poison

Chapter 660 Chaos

Chapter 661 Spiritual Attack

Chapter 662 Dream

Chapter 663 Keep Moving Forward

Chapter 664 Just a Little Forward

Chapter 665 Another Door

Chapter 666 The 11th Day

Chapter 667 Death

Chapter 668 The Undying God

Chapter 669 SouthShore City

Chapter 670 Seeking

Chapter 671 Teleportation

Chapter 672 Radiant City

Chapter 673 Hei Lin

Chapter 674 DawnSpring City

Chapter 675 Excuses

Chapter 676 Questions about the Sword

Chapter 677 Guests

Chapter 678 Lord Clearance Pill

Chapter 679 Reunion

Chapter 680 Helen’s Story

Chapter 681 Mother-Son Conversation

Chapter 682 Sect and Clan

Chapter 683 Qi-like Aura

Chapter 684 Proud

Chapter 685 Homeschooled

Chapter 686 Talisman Learning

Chapter 687 Three Heaven

Chapter 688 Help

Chapter 689 Willow’s Bark

Chapter 690 30 Thousand

Chapter 691 Meeting Big Names

Chapter 692 Earrings, Armor, and Shield

Chapter 693 Earth Element Ingredients

Chapter 694 Importance of Spiritual Roots

Chapter 695 Colorful

Chapter 696 A Few Friendly Faces

Chapter 697 Bristled Spider

Chapter 698 Return

Chapter 699 Preparations

Chapter 700 Spring Mist Pavilion

Chapter 701 Up the Stairs

Chapter 702 Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations

Chapter 703 Negligence

Chapter 704 Heat

Chapter 705 Finishing the Pill

Chapter 706 Fighter

Chapter 707 Training

Chapter 708 Qin Shan’s Unending Shock

Chapter 709 Resonance

Chapter 710 Pearl’s Training

Chapter 711 Take It Back

Chapter 712 Inner Demon

Chapter 713 Third Time is the Charm

Chapter 714 Oath

Chapter 715 The Princess

Chapter 716 Legacy Artifact

Chapter 717 Three Demonic Plants

Chapter 718 Insecurities

Chapter 719 Belong

Chapter 720 Pearl's Cleansing

Chapter 721 Shurin

Chapter 722 Learning New Things

Chapter 723 Medicinal Pastes

Chapter 724 Training with Shen Jing

Chapter 725 Yu Ming’s Medicinal Clinic

Chapter 726 Little Trouble in Little Clinic

Chapter 727 Demonstration

Chapter 728 Overwhelmed

Chapter 729 Get The Recipes

Chapter 730 Stop Making Pastes

Chapter 731 King

Chapter 732 Wei Ruoran

Chapter 733 A Path Ahead

Chapter 734 Another Path

Chapter 735 Spirit Foods Competition

Chapter 736 New Alchemists

Chapter 737 Disturbance

Chapter 738 Winner

Chapter 739 Farewell

Chapter 740 Competition Day

Chapter 741 First Round

Chapter 742 End of the First Day

Chapter 743 Second Day of the Competition

Chapter 744 Third Day of the Competition

Chapter 745 Struggle

Chapter 746 Final Day

Chapter 747 Weight Measuring Formation

Chapter 748 Multiple Immortal Grade pills

Chapter 749 Result

Chapter 750 Anything You Want

Chapter 751 Rewards

Chapter 752 Experiments

Chapter 753 Realization

Chapter 754 Blood Aura

Chapter 755 Blood Experiments

Chapter 756 Icy Hell

Chapter 757 Canyon

Chapter 758 The Real Hell

Chapter 759 ¬†Return

Chapter 760 Plan to Leave

Chapter 761 Plan to Leave

Chapter 762 Back in the Beast Realm

Chapter 763 I'm Back

Chapter 764 Giving the Pill

Chapter 765 Meeting Old Friends

Chapter 766 Introducing the Pastes

Chapter 767 Returning to the Hong Wu sect

Chapter 768 Changes in the Hong Wu sect

Chapter 769 Revisiting the Library

Chapter 770 Guest Elders

Chapter 771 Testing Spiritual Roots again

Chapter 772 Reason for Leaving

Chapter 773 Alchemy Lesson

Chapter 774 Changes

Chapter 775 Indecisive

Chapter 776 New Proposal

Chapter 777 An Easier Way

Chapter 778 Justice

Chapter 779 Making Memories

Chapter 780 Passage of Time

Chapter 781 Training

Chapter 782 Bloodlines

Chapter 783 Registration

Chapter 784 Entering the Han Family Manor

Chapter 785 Han Family Leader

Chapter 786 The Human Language

Chapter 787 Intents

Chapter 788 The Tournament Approaches

Chapter 789 Tournament Brackets

Chapter 790 Meeting the Elites

Chapter 791 First Fight

Chapter 792 Top 512

Chapter 793 2nd Round

Chapter 794 Fighting A Puppet Master

Chapter 795 Top 128 Begins

Chapter 796 Here Goes Nothing

Chapter 797 No Restraint

Chapter 798 Single Attack

Chapter 799 Testing for Cheats

Chapter 800 Return to Fight

Chapter 801 Victory

Chapter 802 Called onto the Stage

Chapter 803 Sword Qi

Chapter 804 Illusory Swords

Chapter 805 Wounded

Chapter 806 Nothing

Chapter 807 Top 8

Chapter 808 Blood Aura

Chapter 809 Guo Chiang's Strength

Chapter 810 Fighting Fu Tao

Chapter 811 More Barriers

Chapter 812 Tournament's End

Chapter 813 Saints

Chapter 814 Rewards

Chapter 815 The Mask

Chapter 816 A Purpose

Chapter 817 A Seed

Chapter 818 Restricted Information

Chapter 819 Breakingthrough

Chapter 820 Surprise

Chapter 821 Intent Assault

Chapter 822

Chapter 823 The West

Chapter 824 Preparation

Chapter 825 Arrival on the Island

Chapter 826

Chapter 827

Chapter 828

Chapter 829

Chapter 830

Chapter 831

Chapter 832

Chapter 833

Chapter 834

Chapter 835 Running Away

Chapter 836 Did you say...

Chapter 837 Death and Darkness

Chapter 838 Outside

Chapter 839 The Final Mountain

Chapter 840 Melting the Ice

Chapter 841 The Empty Peaks

Chapter 842 Understanding Death

Chapter 843 Undying

Chapter 844 The Undying Gods

Chapter 845 Leaving the Mountain

Chapter 846 Spoils of War

Chapter 847 Infinite Heavenly Ice Spears

Chapter 848 Manual

Chapter 849 Blood Armor

Chapter 850 Another One

Chapter 851 The Sacrifice

Chapter 852 Hybrids

Chapter 853 Burning Eyes

Chapter 854 Getting Out

Chapter 855 The Village

Chapter 856 Runes

Chapter 857 Gardening

Chapter 858 Back to Basic

Chapter 859 A Month's Improvement

Chapter 860 Harvest Earnings

Chapter 861 Snow Road City

Chapter 862: Steps

Chapter 863: History

Chapter 864: The Nine Wonders

Chapter 865: Useless

Chapter 866: Tutoring

Chapter 867: Complaint

Chapter 868: Scarcity

Chapter 869: Scouted

Chapter 870: Talk with the Sect Master

Chapter 871: Farewell

Chapter 872 Intrusion

Chapter 873 Trial

Chapter 874 Forbidden

Chapter 875 Along the Bridge

Chapter 876 The Alchemy Room

Chapter 877 First Day at Work

Chapter 878 Going Wide

Chapter 879 That Corpse

Chapter 880 Improvements

Chapter 881 Whisker's Improvement

Chapter 882 Responsibilities and Opportunities

Chapter 883 Many pills

Chapter 884 Getting Behind

Chapter 885 Through the Pain

Chapter 886 Second Opportunity

Chapter 887 The Dao Mountain

Chapter 888 Selection Starts

Chapter 889 Weird Metal

Chapter 890 Rules

Chapter 891 Opening the Seal

Chapter 892 Hot Spring

Chapter 893 Learning another Dao

Chapter 894 Elemental Interaction

Chapter 895 Leave

Chapter 896 Snowsoot City

Chapter 897 Understanding the Basics

Chapter 898 Mining

Chapter 899 Break from Mining

Chapter 900 Smelting Tungsten

Chapter 901 Apprenticeship

Chapter 902 Making a Sword

Chapter 903 Fully Tempered

Chapter 904 Metal Compounding

Chapter 905 Weak or Strong

Chapter 906 Silvermoon City

Chapter 907 Auction

Chapter 908 Jin Baiquan

Chapter 909 Auction End

Chapter ﻿910 Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array

Chapter 911 Ancient Battlefield

Chapter 912 Intent and Aura

Chapter 913 What Can You Cut?

Chapter ﻿914 Intent

Chapter 915 Training

Chapter 916 Breakthrough

Chapter 917 Bells Ringing

Chapter 918 Space and Matter

Chapter 919 A Property of Space

Chapter 920 Revelation

Chapter 921 Ambushed

Chapter 922 Break the Shell

Chapter 923 Mental Obstacle

Chapter 924 10 Bolt

Chapter 925 More Lightnings

Chapter 926 Yin and Yang

Chapter 927 Temporary Return

Chapter ﻿928 Ingredients From Pill

Chapter 929 Supreme Elemental Accord

Chapter 930 Back to the Mountain

Chapter 931 Up the Mountain

Chapter 932 Some More Dao

Chapter 933 True Fire Dao and...

Chapter 934 Leaving the Dao Mountain

Chapter 935 Liz's Story

Chapter 936 Blazing Earth Sect

Chapter 937 Body Cultivation

Chapter 938 Alchemy; Bad

Chapter 939 Minor Training

Chapter 940 The 13th Mountain

Chapter 941 Flame Mastery Scripture - Heaven Grade

Chapter 942 Returning

Chapter 943 The Crack

Chapter 944 Experimenting the Crack

Chapter 945 Cutting

Chapter 946 Ma Tianxin

Chapter 947 Small Journey

Chapter 948 New Destination

Chapter 949 Pearl's Concerns

Chapter 950 Senior Bu

Chapter 951 Battle against Bu

Chapter 952 12 Bolts

Chapter 953 Blue Spring Sect

Chapter 954 Ren Xiuyin

Chapter 955 Guest

Chapter 956 Improvement for the Improvement

Chapter 957 Blood Rhino

Chapter 958 Weak

Chapter 959 The Demonic Forest

Chapter 960: Finding Beasts to Fight

Chapter ﻿961 Fighting with Dao

Chapter 962 Blood Absorption

Chapter ﻿963 Solo Training

Chapter 964 Small Insight into a Dao

Chapter 965 Ice Moose

Chapter 966 Going West

Chapter 967 Ghostbane City

Chapter 968 The Nine Wells of Time

Chapter 969 Divination

Chapter 970 Improving Saint Recipes

Chapter 971 Frozen Leg

Chapter 972: Antidote

Chapter 973: Storm, Shards, and ...

Chapter 974 Xue Kuangren

Chapter 975 Pill Cloud

Chapter 976: No Way Out

Chapter 977: Heal or Kill

Chapter 978 Fear

Chapter 979 Tungsten Sword

Chapter 980 Stars

Chapter 981 Malleability

Chapter 982 Midnight

Chapter 983: Memory

Chapter 984: Surviving a Lightning Strike

Chapter 985 Pill Vein

Chapter 986 A Few Things to Try

Chapter 987 8 Years

Chapter 988 Seeing Aura

Chapter 989 Memories of that Day

Chapter 990 False False Immortal

Chapter 991 Final Pill

Chapter 992 4 Veined Pill

Chapter 993 Your One Mistake

Chapter 994 Run Away

Chapter ﻿995 Get Away

Chapter 996 The Bird

Chapter ﻿997 Scarlet

Chapter 998 Solid Earth

Chapter ﻿999 Pretty

Chapter 1000 Sacred Flames

Chapter 1001 Stepstones Tribe

Chapter 1002 Inside A Fish

Chapter 1003 Talk By The Flame

Chapter 1004 Incident At Night

Chapter 1005 Wounded

Chapter 1006 Baits

Chapter 1007 Fighting The Beasts

Chapter 1008 Bonehead

Chapter 1009 Leaving

Chapter 1010 Bonehead Tribe Grounds

Chapter 1011 Getting Answers

Chapter 1012 Swift Return

Chapter 1013 I Win

Chapter 1014 Slaughter

Chapter 1015 Avenged

Chapter 1016 Leaving The Tribe

Chapter 1017 True Realm Scarlet

Chapter 1018 Grand Bazaar

Chapter 1019 The Barrier

Chapter 1020 Going East

Chapter 1021 HiddenBay City

Chapter 1022 King Surpassing Pill

Chapter 1023 Stunned Crowd

Chapter 1024 Selling The Pill

Chapter 1025 Forever Spring Auction House

Chapter 1026 The Sun's Womb

Chapter 1027 True Sun Copper

Chapter 1028 The Alchemy Room

Chapter 1029 Dual Lightning

Chapter 1030 Eating The Pill

Chapter 1031 Squid

Chapter 1032 Fighting The Squid

Chapter 1033 Blood Squid

Chapter 1034 Searching Continued

Chapter 1035 Anxiety

Chapter 1036 Weekly Routine

Chapter 1037 Foundations

Chapter 1038 City Of Many Flowers

Chapter 1039 Registration

Chapter 1040 Making The Fairy's Touch

Chapter 1041 The Leader

Chapter 1042 First Day

Chapter 1043 Accusation

Chapter 1044 A Good Amount

Chapter 1045 Teaching

Chapter 1046 Noisy, Shut Up!

Chapter 1047 Artificial Scarcity

Chapter 1048 More Pills

Chapter 1049 A Week Of Pills

Chapter 1050 Qiu Jianhong

Chapter 1051 The Barrier

Chapter 1052 Sunborn Sanctuary

Chapter 1053 List Of Pills

Chapter 1054 Strong Indivduals

Chapter 1055 The City

Chapter 1056 Making The Pills

Chapter 1057 Buying Information In Advance

Chapter 1058 Working On Upgrades

Chapter 1059 Awake

Chapter 1060 Information

Chapter 1061 Ancestor's Request

Chapter 1062 Carriage Ride

Chapter 1063 The Secret Realm

Chapter 1064 Fire

Chapter 1065 Battle Hall

Chapter 1066 Added Rules

Chapter 1067 Easy Fights

Chapter 1068 One Strike

Chapter 1069 Yao Bujiang

Chapter 1070 Terrifying Combination

Chapter 1071 Kill It

Chapter 1072 Quad Annual Pill Making

Chapter 1073 Yusong Muzhou

Chapter 1074 Heavenly Silkworm

Chapter 1075 So Stupid

Chapter 1076 Jade-Faced

Chapter 1077 The Dark Room

Chapter 1078 The Orchard Opens

Chapter 1079 How To Pick Your Lily

Chapter 1080 Finding Willow

Chapter 1081 World Defying

Chapter 1082 Picking Mushrooms

Chapter 1083 Battle Against The Unknown Man

Chapter 1084 Core Explosion

Chapter 1085 Back To The Association

Chapter 1086 A Few Changes

Chapter 1087 Upgraded Pill

Chapter 1088 Zhu Shaofan

Chapter 1089 Test Number 1

Chapter 1090 Test Number ???

Chapter 1091 The Red Haired Assassin

Chapter 1092 The First Shadow

Chapter 1093 Returning

Chapter 1094 Scolding

Chapter 1095 Reason To Go

Chapter 1096 Journey To The Sanctum

Chapter 1097 The Sanctum Calls

Chapter 1098 The First Floor

Chapter 1099 Second Floor

Chapter 1100 Going Up The Floors

Chapter 1101 Playground

Chapter 1102 Riddles

Chapter 1103 Ball Fight

Chapter 1104 Punishment

Chapter 1105 Illusions

Chapter 1106 Insects

Chapter 1107 Finishing The Fight

Chapter 1108 Information Sharing

Chapter 1109 Skipping Floors

Chapter 1110 Duel

Chapter 1111 Bring Out The Tools

Chapter 1112 Puppet Battle

Chapter 1113 Continued Climbing

Chapter 1114 A Simple Path

Chapter 1115 Colors

Chapter 1116 Reclimbing

Chapter 1117 Fighting The Girls

Chapter 1118 Battle On The 44th Floor

Chapter 1119 Victory?

Chapter 1120 Demon

Chapter 1121 The Final Few Floors

Chapter 1122 One Last Battle

Chapter 1123 Giving It His All

Chapter 1124 Pocket

Chapter 1125 Through The Crack

Chapter 1126 The Many Formations

Chapter 1127 Gift

Chapter 1128 Result Of The Oath

Chapter 1129 Blackout

Chapter 1130 Blood-Tainted Lead

Chapter 1131 Going Into The Mansion

Chapter 1132 Immortal Rank

Chapter 1133 The Kang Family's Mines

Chapter 1134 The Sunless Lands

Chapter 1135 Abducted

Chapter 1136 Not Again

Chapter 1137 Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array

Chapter 1138 Losing Control

Chapter 1139 Battling The Siblings

Chapter 1140 3 Drops

Chapter 1141 Answers

Chapter 1142 Fiery

Chapter 1143 Run Away

Chapter 1144 Threat

Chapter 1145 A Recounting Of Old Memories

Chapter 1146 Requiem

Chapter 1147 Feng Nuanhuo

Chapter 1148 Father-Son Conversation

Chapter 1149 Returning

Chapter 1150 Rebirth

Chapter 1151 Return To The Palace

Chapter 1152 Enter The Dome

Chapter 1153 Nine Yang Court

Chapter 1154 Immortality And Mortality

Chapter 1155 A Weird Feeling

Chapter 1156 Purple

Chapter 1157 A Short Alchemy Session

Chapter 1158 Preparations

Chapter 1159 Preparation

Chapter 1160 The Coronation

Chapter 1161 The Ruler Of The Southern Continent

Chapter 1162 Backlash

Chapter 1163 The Three Attacks

Chapter 1164 First Decree

Chapter 1165 Purelake Qi Absorption Method

Chapter 1166 Spirit Vein

Chapter 1167 Treasure Room

Chapter 1168 Mental Defense

Chapter 1169 The Logistics

Chapter 1170 An Evening Walk

Chapter 1171 Empty Seat

Chapter 1172 Proof

Chapter 1173 The Tests

Chapter 1174 Thoughts

Chapter 1175 North

Chapter 1176 Jai Heiyun

Chapter 1177 Fun

Chapter 1178 Competition

Chapter 1179 More Fun

Chapter 1180 Rewards

Chapter 1181 Linlin

Chapter 1182 Emergency Guests

Chapter 1183 Trip

Chapter 1184 Immortal Grade Skills

Chapter 1185 The Pill

Chapter 1186 New Dao

Chapter 1187 Skill Improvement

Chapter 1188 Request

Chapter 1189 The Order

Chapter 1190 Leaving

Chapter 1191 Flying Home

Chapter 1192 Reunion

Chapter 1193 Ronron

Chapter 1194 Birth Omens

Chapter 1195 Healing

Chapter 1196 The Void

Chapter 1197 A Man Surnamed Yang

Chapter 1198 Malfunction

Chapter 1199 The Sun God

Chapter 1200 Thief

Chapter 1201 God Summit

Chapter 1202 The World Tree

Chapter 1203 The Other Self

Chapter 1204 Space

Chapter 1205 The Soul Space

Chapter 1206 Reasons

Chapter 1207 Go Back Home

Chapter 1208 Guilt

Chapter 1209 Chambers

Chapter 1210 Unique Eyes

Chapter 1211 Surrogate

Chapter 1212 Unique Meridians

Chapter 1213 Ready To Leave

Chapter 1214 The Train Ride

Chapter 1215 Back Home

Chapter 1216 Spending Some Time

Chapter 1217 The Next Continent

Chapter 1218 The Cuts

Chapter 1219 The Alchemy Peninsula

Chapter 1220 Request

Chapter 1221 Yu Ronron

Chapter 1222 Matt

Chapter 1223 An Exchange

Chapter 1224 Another Request

Chapter 1225 Father

Chapter 1226 Returning To Silvermoon City

Chapter 1227 To The Auction

Chapter 1228 Ronron's First Auction Experience

Chapter 1229 Greed

Chapter 1230 Expensive

Chapter 1231 Auction Final

Chapter 1232 Acquainted

Chapter 1233 Battle

Chapter 1234 Threat

Chapter 1235 Meeting Someone

Chapter 1236 Meeting Senior Luhei Again

Chapter 1237 The Endless Tunnel

Chapter 1238 The Blazing Earth Sect

Chapter 1239 Compensation

Chapter 1240 Devour

Chapter 1241 Direct Disciple

Chapter 1242 Time To Leave

Chapter 1243 A Few Questions

Chapter 1244 The Three Treasures

Chapter 1245 Take A Break

Chapter 1246 To The Western Continent

Chapter 1247 Destinations

Chapter 1248 Nervous And Anxious

Chapter 1249 The Real One

Chapter 1250 As Beautiful As Ever

Chapter 1251 No Longer Empty

Chapter 1252 Pearl's Situation

Chapter 1253 Master

Chapter 1254 A Task

Chapter 1255 Hei Yun

Chapter 1256 Blood

Chapter 1257 The Pool

Chapter 1258 The Upper Garden

Chapter 1259 Authority

Chapter 1260 Human

Chapter 1261 Wench

Chapter 1262 Married

Chapter 1263 The Hong Wu Sect

Chapter 1264 Meeting Old Friends

Chapter 1265 Take Away

Chapter 1266 Resonance

Chapter 1267 Ronron's First Battle

Chapter 1268 Evening Gathering

Chapter 1269 Ronron's Morning

Chapter 1270 Returning

Chapter 1271 Helping The Sects

Chapter 1272 Threading The Needle

Chapter 1273 Sword

Chapter 1274 Spiritual Providence

Chapter 1275 Training

Chapter 1276 Transaction

Chapter 1277 Making Pills

Chapter 1278 Obstacles For Pill Clouds

Chapter 1279 Blood Absorption

Chapter 1280 Multiple Tries

Chapter 1281 At The Same Time

Chapter 1282 New Plan

Chapter 1283 Radiant City

Chapter 1284 The Message

Chapter 1285 Status Of The Sects And Clans

Chapter 1286 Apology

Chapter 1287 Meeting Qin Shan Again

Chapter 1288 To The South

Chapter 1289 Fu Clan Patriarch

Chapter 1290 Truths

Chapter 1291 Spirit Search

Chapter 1292 Ashes

Chapter 1293 Broken Ravine Sect

Chapter 1294 The Ravine

Chapter 1295 Darkness

Chapter 1296 Creation

Chapter 1297 A Vessel

Chapter 1298 Return

Chapter 1299 Loss And Gain

Chapter 1300 Old Figures

Chapter 1301 Murder

Chapter 1302 A Surprise In The Making

Chapter 1303 Lang Shun's First Time

Chapter 1304 Goodbye

Chapter 1305 Return

Chapter 1306 Few Days Of Normal Life

Chapter 1307 End Of A Saga

Chapter 1308 First Three Tasks

Chapter 1309 Saint Poison Neutralizing Pill

Chapter 1310 Splitting The Splitting Technique

Chapter 1311 A Quick Trip To The Orchard

Chapter 1312 Alter And Combine

Chapter 1313 Pearl

Chapter 1314 The Treasury

Chapter 1315 Bond Of Equals

Chapter 1316 Arrival

Chapter 1317 Preparation

Chapter 1318 Take Off

Chapter 1319 Tens Of Millions

Chapter 1320 Sailing Through The Storm

Chapter 1321 General Information On The Eastern Continent

Chapter 1322 The Many Hidden Realms

Chapter 1323 6-Armed Feathered Water Wyrm

Chapter 1324 The Wyrm's Desperate Attack

Chapter 1325 Hundred Arms Golden Sphere Technique

Chapter 1326 Closing In

Chapter 1327 The Old Man

Chapter 1328 The Eastern Continent

Chapter 1329 News Board

Chapter 1330 Long Fangyu

Chapter 1331 Criteria

Chapter 1332 The Royal School Of Alchemy

Chapter 1333 Level System

Chapter 1334 End Of Tour

Chapter 1335 Tiankong

Chapter 1336 The Dragon Palace

Chapter 1337 Trade

Chapter 1338 Swan Courtyard

Chapter 1339 Planning

Chapter 1340 The Next Day

Chapter 1341 Hanjue

Chapter 1342 Kings And Queens

Chapter 1343 First Test

Chapter 1344 Many Invitations

Chapter 1345 The Second Test

Chapter 1346 The Third Test

Chapter 1347 Bet Between The Monarchs

Chapter 1348 The Three Ingredients

Chapter 1349 The 10 Days

Chapter 1350 Like That Day

Chapter 1351 The Pill's Effect

Chapter 1352 End Of The Competition

Chapter 1353 The Oaths

Chapter 1354 Dragon Medallion

Chapter 1355 Level 10 Poison Master

Chapter 1356 Cooking School

Chapter 1357 Royal School Of Beast Taming

Chapter 1358 A List Of Four

Chapter 1359 Royal School Of Painting

Chapter 1360 Importance Of Paintings

Chapter 1361 Hall Of Fame

Chapter 1362 More Paintings

Chapter 1363 Tian Honglui

Chapter 1364 Qi Lines

Chapter 1365 Making Artifacts

Chapter 1366 Greenheart City

Chapter 1367 King Jin's Palace

Chapter 1368 Emerald Vine Restaurant

Chapter 1369 A Date With Talia

Chapter 1370 The Orphanage

Chapter 1371 Frosted Glacier Sect

Chapter 1372 The Sect Leader

Chapter 1373 Fighting The Sect Leader

Chapter 1374 Knowledge

Chapter 1375 The Kids

Chapter 1376 A Pill To Erase

Chapter 1377 Transplant

Chapter 1378 Horrible

Chapter 1379 Reconstruct

Chapter 1380 Jade's Shadow

Chapter 1381 The Abyss Island

Chapter 1382 Into The Abyss

Chapter 1383 In The Darkness

Chapter 1384 A Dagger

Chapter 1385 A Bittersweet Memory

Chapter 1386 Imbalance

Chapter 1387 Testing

Chapter 1388 Searching Through The Darkness

Chapter 1389 The Black Book

Chapter 1390 Shadow Aura

Chapter 1391 End Of The Event

Chapter 1392 Mossbloom City

Chapter 1393 Adventure Through The Emerald Kingdom

Chapter 1394 Hundred Blossom Valley

Chapter 1395 Surprise

Chapter 1396 Inspired

Chapter 1397 The 10 Rows Of Fields

Chapter 1398 The 7th Row

Chapter 1399 Searching For The Nightsbane

Chapter 1400 Anger And Frustration

Chapter 1401 Yin Taming Pill

Chapter 1402 The Girl In A Coma

Chapter 1403 Method To Treat

Chapter 1404 Connection

Chapter 1405 A Higher Grade

Chapter 1406 Scared And Excited

Chapter 1407 Ice Mist Palace

Chapter 1408 Fate

Chapter 1409 Payment

Chapter 1410 Trade

Chapter 1411 Simple Talk

Chapter 1412 Leaving The Hundred Blossom Valley

Chapter 1413 Breakthrough

Chapter 1414 Brightfalls City

Chapter 1415 Beast Paradise

Chapter 1416 The 7 Colonies

Chapter 1417 Trade

Chapter 1418 The Lizard Colony

Chapter 1419 The 6

Chapter 1420 Shi Guyong

Chapter 1421 The Ropes

Chapter 1422 Heavenly Mulberry Tree

Chapter 1423 A Little Bit Of Lightning

Chapter 1424 Business

Chapter 1425 Improvement

Chapter 1426 More Trades

Chapter 1427 Storage Pouch

Chapter 1428 The Deer Colony

Chapter 1429 The Other Colonies

Chapter 1430 The Lion Colony

Chapter 1431 Shi Meiyong

Chapter 1432 Shi Mansion

Chapter 1433 Roaming The Mansion

Chapter 1434 Against The Lion

Chapter 1435 Roar

Chapter 1436 News Of Death

Chapter 1437 Servants

Chapter 1438 More Questions

Chapter 1439 The Scrolls

Chapter 1440 Regression

Chapter 1441 Return

Chapter 1442 Spirit Pill

Chapter 1443 A Few Pill Recipes

Chapter 1444 Working Hard

Chapter 1445 Blueheart City

Chapter 1446 A Cup of Tea

Chapter 1447 Specific Pills

Chapter 1448 Onward to Enlightenment

Chapter 1449 Boundless Enlightenment Domain

Chapter 1450 Many Dao

Chapter 1451 Some Alone Time

Chapter 1452 Learning About Other Daos

Chapter 1453 City Of Gold

Chapter 1454 Into The Palace

Chapter 1455 The Gold Mine

Chapter 1456 The Collapsed Wall

Chapter 1457 Tian Honglui

Chapter 1458 Intent

Chapter 1459 Mountain Of Gold

Chapter 1460 Painting Guild

Chapter 1461 First Painting

Chapter 1462 Mistakes

Chapter 1463 Cheap Copy

Chapter 1464 Tired

Chapter 1465 In The Auction House

Chapter 1466 4 Pills

Chapter 1467 Honglui's Past

Chapter 1468 The Evaluation

Chapter 1469 The Final Verdict

Chapter 1470 A Realm in Chaos

Chapter 1471 Veil

Chapter 1472 The Emperor's Command

Chapter 1473 The Day before the Auction

Chapter 1474 New Arrivals

Chapter 1475 Auction Starts

Chapter 1476 Stallion and Gauntlet

Chapter 1477 Mirror of Barren Truth

Chapter 1478 Inkbrush

Chapter 1479 Fan And Flask

Chapter 1480 Close To The Final Day

Chapter 1481 Pill Auction

Chapter 1482 Final Pill Sales

Chapter 1483 Mountain Crushing Sect

Chapter 1484 Flaw

Chapter 1485 Desire

Chapter 1486 Request

Chapter 1487 A Deal

Chapter 1488 Something Unexpected

Chapter 1489 Maximum Bid

Chapter 1490 You Win Some, You Lose Some

Chapter 1491 Auction’s End

Chapter 1492 Excited Checking

Chapter 1493 Mirror and Crusher

Chapter 1494 First Test

Chapter 1495 Pain

Chapter 1496 Shadow Fan

Chapter 1497 Artifact Creation and Testing

Chapter 1498 Leaving

Chapter 1499 Not Bandits

Chapter 1500 Change

Chapter 1501 Oathbreaker

Chapter 1502 An Epic Clash

Chapter 1503 Two Things

Chapter 1504 Qian Yanglin

Chapter 1505 Snowthorn Valley

Chapter 1506 Ren Wujin

Chapter 1507 The Spirit of the Alchemy Trial

Chapter 1508 The Trials

Chapter 1509 Pill Fire

Chapter 1510 Trade

Chapter 1511 The Dragon's Reason

Chapter 1512 Hardest Trial

Chapter 1513 Success

Chapter 1514 Weak Memory

Chapter 1515 From One Trial to Another

Chapter 1516 Simple Failure

Chapter 1517 Re-Entering

Chapter 1518 Final Test

Chapter 1519 Completing the Test

Chapter 1520 Surprised Crowd

Chapter 1521 Painting Trial

Chapter 1522 Third Trial

Chapter 1523 Emotions

Chapter 1524 Sign

Chapter 1525 Nascent Soul

Chapter 1526 Space

Chapter 1527 Traversing The Soul Space

Chapter 1528 Found It

Chapter 1529 Arrangements

Chapter 1530 Return

Chapter 1531 Once Again

Chapter 1532 I Will Kill Him

Chapter 1533 Important

Chapter 1534 Inside the Soul Space

Chapter 1535 Life

Chapter 1536 Another Possibility

Chapter 1537 Spirit Water

Chapter 1538 Side Effect

Chapter 1539 Purpose

Chapter 1540 A Gift

Chapter 1541 Back to Eastern Continent

Chapter 1542 Second Trade

Chapter 1543 Switched Trade

Chapter 1544 Snowheart City

Chapter 1545 The Cave of Frost

Chapter 1546 Evening Mist Lake

Chapter 1547 Outside the Ice Mist Palace

Chapter 1548 Fairy

Chapter 1549 Elements

Chapter 1550 No Answer

Chapter 1551 Cave Of Frost

Chapter 1552 Through the Cave

Chapter 1553 Jiaolun

Chapter 1554 Questioning

Chapter 1555 Demands

Chapter 1556 Deal

Chapter 1557 Stronger Yin

Chapter 1558 The Center of the Cave

Chapter 1559 Walking Out

Chapter 1560 Prisoner

Chapter 1561 A Party

Chapter 1562 8th Year

Chapter 1563 The Three Mountain Ranges

Chapter 1564 Han Ahlin

Chapter 1565 A Few Years Later

Chapter 1566 9-Veined Pill

Chapter 1567 A Single Stroke

Chapter 1568 The Empress' Death

Chapter 1569 Two Keys

Chapter 1570 Silverheart City

Chapter 1571 Martial Coast City

Chapter 1572 Martial House

Chapter 1573 Sword Match

Chapter 1574 Martial Island

Chapter 1575 Bets

Chapter 1576 Information

Chapter 1577 Transcendent Martial Ground

Chapter 1578 Battles

Chapter 1579 Loss

Chapter 1580 Some Free Time

Chapter 1581 Reset

Chapter 1582 Rules

Chapter 1583 ¬†First Break

Chapter 1584 Prime Disciple of Cloud Iron Sect

Chapter 1585 3 People of Interest

Chapter 1586 Out of Bounds

Chapter 1587 Improvement to Sword

Chapter 1588 Nothing

Chapter 1589 Practice

Chapter 1590 Shan Wangjiu

Chapter 1591 Searching for Opponents

Chapter 1592 Shan Wangjiu’s Sword

Chapter 1593 Teaching

Chapter 1594 Acceptance

Chapter 1595 A Show of Skill

Chapter 1596 Points

Chapter 1597 Wind

Chapter 1598 Volcanic Eruption

Chapter 1599 Chaos

Chapter 1600 Green Flames

Chapter 1601 Shan Wangjiu’s Battle

Chapter 1602 Learn

Chapter 1603 Shan Wangjiu’s Final Hour

Chapter 1604 Meeting Again

Chapter 1605 Leader of the 8th Battalion

Chapter 1606 Rematch

Chapter 1607 Fighting Fang Yimu

Chapter 1608 In The Valley

Chapter 1609 Familiar

Chapter 1610 Shang Hongxi

Chapter 1611 Sarah

Chapter 1612 Freedom

Chapter 1613 Silent Travel

Chapter 1614 Puppet Battle

Chapter 1615 Against the Golden Fox

Chapter 1616 Breakthrough

Chapter 1617 Terror

Chapter 1618 Punishment

Chapter 1619 ¬†Close to the End

Chapter 1620 ¬†Final Days

Chapter 1621 ¬†Sarah vs Zhao Boqin

Chapter 1622 ¬†Contemplation

Chapter 1623 Wind and Lightning

Chapter 1624 Wood Element

Chapter 1625 Something More

Chapter 1626 Bet

Chapter 1627 Wheel

Chapter 1628 The Result

Chapter 1629 Inconsistencies

Chapter 1630 Cut

Chapter 1631 Trial

Chapter 1632 Verdict

Chapter 1633 The Troubled Dragon Emperor

Chapter 1634 Outside News

Chapter 1635 Golden Binding Chain

Chapter 1636 Meeting with the Monarchs

Chapter 1637 Tournament’s Start

Chapter 1638 The Tournament

Chapter 1639 Ticket

Chapter 1640 Around the Silver Kingdom

Chapter 1641 Blackheart City

Chapter 1642 Mountain Crushing Sect

Chapter 1643 The Truth Behind the Downfall

Chapter 1644 The Celestial Peak

Chapter 1645 A Barrier

Chapter 1646 The Edges of the World

Chapter 1647 Intense Sunrise

Chapter 1648 Yang

Chapter 1649 Scary Intent

Chapter 1650 Theories

Chapter 1651 Small Changes

Chapter 1652 Escape

Chapter 1653 Before Departing

Chapter 1654 The Carriage Ride

Chapter 1655 Zhan Family Manor

Chapter 1656 Trust

Chapter 1657 The Prince

Chapter 1658 The Patient

Chapter 1659 Talk

Chapter 1660 Diagnosis

Chapter 1661 Missing Information

Chapter 1662 The Problem

Chapter 1663 Testing the Poison

Chapter 1664 Trying To Get Answers

Chapter 1665 Old Zhou

Chapter 1666 Why and How

Chapter 1667 High Level Poison

Chapter 1668 Story

Chapter 1669 Truth

Chapter 1670 ¬†Dantian Closing Pill

Chapter 1671 ¬†Best Course of Action

Chapter 1672 Right Now

Chapter 1673 Teleportation

Chapter 1674 The Ivory Sword

Chapter 1675 Balance Haven

Chapter 1676 Emperor's Arrival

Chapter 1677 Predicament

Chapter 1678 Escape Attempt

Chapter 1679 Downhill

Chapter 1680 Shock

Chapter 1681 Out of the Gate

Chapter 1682 In the Palace Hall

Chapter 1683 Plans

Chapter 1684 Orders

Chapter 1685 The Past

Chapter 1686 The Future

Chapter 1687 Divinations and Prophecies

Chapter 1688 More Divinations Come True

Chapter 1689 Change Fate

Chapter 1690 Prince and Kings

Chapter 1691 The Agreement

Chapter 1692 Strange Phenomenon

Chapter 1693 Pure White Tiger

Chapter 1694 Oath and Command

Chapter 1695 Azure Dragon's Defense

Chapter 1696 The Judgment Comes

Chapter 1697 Survive and Live

Chapter 1698 Descent

Chapter 1699 Choose

Chapter 1700 In a Cave

Chapter 1701 The Old Man

Chapter 1702 Thoughts

Chapter 1703 Healing Paste

Chapter 1704 The Old Man’s Past

Chapter 1705 Spirit Test

Chapter 1706 The Better Island

Chapter 1707 A Sudden Trouble

Chapter 1708 Something Incredible

Chapter 1709 Consuming the Lily

Chapter 1710 Saint Qi

Chapter 1711 Return

Chapter 1712 Reckless

Chapter 1713 A New Plan

Chapter 1714 Underwater Battles

Chapter 1715 Fire Coral

Chapter 1716 Time to Return

Chapter 1717 Attack

Chapter 1718 Strong Enemy

Chapter 1719 Desperate

Chapter 1720 Blinded Fury

Chapter 1721 Godslayer's Plan

Chapter 1722 Act Quickly

Chapter 1723 Returned

Chapter 1724 Talk

Chapter 1725 Mixture

Chapter 1726 An Uncommon Happenstance

Chapter 1727 Checking on Hannah

Chapter 1728 Luo Beihan

Chapter 1729 The Two Pills

Chapter 1730 Healing Starts

Chapter 1731 Unforeseen

Chapter 1732 Healed

Chapter 1733 Preparations

Chapter 1734 An Unannounced Arrival

Chapter 1735 The Message

Chapter 1736 The Gift

Chapter 1737 Preparation Begins

Chapter 1738 Scarlet's Lightning Tribulation

Chapter 1739 The Dao Lightnings

Chapter 1740 The Immortal Queen

Chapter 1741 In The Throne Room

Chapter 1742 Squid

Chapter 1743 Stability

Chapter 1744 Absorbing Blood

Chapter 1745 Quick Progress

Chapter 1746 A Different Experience

Chapter 1747 Pearl

Chapter 1748 The Choice

Chapter 1749 Shi Meiyoung

Chapter 1750 The Past

Chapter 1751 A Promise

Chapter 1752 Preparation for War

Chapter 1753 Through the Voidgate

Chapter 1754 Notice of Arrival

Chapter 1755 Half an Hour

Chapter 1756 Time Up

Chapter 1757 Search In The School

Chapter 1758 First Trade

Chapter 1759 The Emperor’s Anticipation

Chapter 1760 Declaration

Chapter 1761 Trade

Chapter 1762 Lin Xiaojing

Chapter 1763 Leader of the Battle Array

Chapter 1764 To The Beasts

Chapter 1765 A Talk

Chapter 1766 Ying Weishu

Chapter 1767 Reinforcements

Chapter 1768 Whisker at Work

Chapter 1769 Some More Time

Chapter 1770 Negatives and Positives

Chapter 1771 The Gathered Leaders

Chapter 1772 Long Tiankong’s Hope

Chapter 1773 Darksteel

Chapter 1774 War Resumes

Chapter 1775 Isolated

Chapter 1776 The Reply

Chapter 1777 Sword Array

Chapter 1778 Newsboards

Chapter 1779 Relayed News

Chapter 1780 Long Huan's Message

Chapter 1781 Battle Outside the Headquarters

Chapter 1782 Yan Yating

Chapter 1783 Understanding

Chapter 1784 A Chat

Chapter 1785 Coordinating the Battlefield

Chapter 1786 New Arrivals

Chapter 1787 Truth

Chapter 1788 Lies

Chapter 1789 Proof

Chapter 1790 The Beasts' Choice

Chapter 1791 Indecisive

Chapter 1792 Special Mark

Chapter 1793 Terrible Battle

Chapter 1794 Twilight

Chapter 1795 Temporal Daos

Chapter 1796 Done

Chapter 1797 Ethereal

Chapter 1798 Danger

Chapter 1799 Defenses All Around

Chapter 1800 Key

Chapter 1801 Return to Battlefield

Chapter 1802 Despair

Chapter 1803 Declaration

Chapter 1804 Free

Chapter 1805 Sneak Attack

Chapter 1806 Headless

Chapter 1807 Convert

Chapter 1808 A Chance

Chapter 1809 The Right Choice

Chapter 1810 Stalemate

Chapter 1811 A Few Attacks Remaining

Chapter 1812 Instinct

Chapter 1813 Dishonorable

Chapter 1814 Weak

Chapter 1815 One Pill

Chapter 1816 Coming to an End

Chapter 1817 Pearl’s Command

Chapter 1818 Getting Close

Chapter 1819 Pure Power

Chapter 1820 Golden

Chapter 1821 Unclear Situation

Chapter 1822 Worst Case Scenario

Chapter 1823 Dilemma

Chapter 1824 Only Chance

Chapter 1825 Why I Must Fight

Chapter 1826 I Can Win

Chapter 1827 The Emperor's Breakthrough

Chapter 1828 Staying Behind

Chapter 1829 Breaking Through

Chapter 1830 Hannah’s Last Stand

Chapter 1831 Never Alone

Chapter 1832 Strong

Chapter 1833 Immortal Level

Chapter 1834 Not Much Longer

Chapter 1835 Weakened

Chapter 1836 Battle of Attrition

Chapter 1837 To Protect

Chapter 1838 Stored

Chapter 1839 The Chance

Chapter 1840 Sword Intent

Chapter 1841 Endless Severing

Chapter 1842 Dead

Chapter 1843 News

Chapter 1844 Earring

Chapter 1845 A Legacy

Chapter 1846 Back Again

Chapter 1847 The Funeral

Chapter 1848 Meeting

Chapter 1849 The Mulberry Saplings

Chapter 1850 The Decision

Chapter 1851 Inside the Soul Space

Chapter 1852 Growing

Chapter 1853 Future of the Empire

Chapter 1854 Azure Dragon's Funeral

Chapter 1855 The Coronation

Chapter 1856 Scarlet's Answers

Chapter 1857 The Treasures

Chapter 1858 Learn More to Know Less

Chapter 1859 Learning Some More

Chapter 1860 Primordial

Chapter 1861 A Short Trip

Chapter 1862 Separate

Chapter 1863 Emily

Chapter 1864 A Decision

Chapter 1865 The Wedding

Chapter 1866 The Court Meeting

Chapter 1867 Another Dao

Chapter 1868 To the Northern Continent

Chapter 1869 Talk of the Wells

Chapter 1870 A Person

Chapter 1871 Blocked

Chapter 1872 Breakthrough

Chapter 1873 The Hexagonal Sign

Chapter 1874 Daoist Title

Chapter 1875 3rd Major Spirit Realm

Chapter 1876 Revisiting the 13th Mountain

Chapter 1877 The Great Discussion

Chapter 1878 Fully Refined

Chapter 1879 Announcements

Chapter 1880 Some Training

Chapter 1881 More Blood

Chapter 1882 Hannah’s 100th Birthday

Chapter 1883 Something for the Family

Chapter 1884 A Unique Opportunity

Chapter 1885 A Surprise

Chapter 1886 Hannah’s Tribulation

Chapter 1: Eternal Cultivation

A young man walked out of a train in Oakleaf city. 'Woah!' he looked at the surrounding train station and was surprised at how glossy and expensive-looking it was. His black hair, fair skin, and child-like face made him look so very naive and simpleminded.

He followed some signs to get out of the train station and finally saw the Oakleaf city in its full glory. He stopped in his tracks amazed at how big the buildings were, how many vehicles there were on the road, and just how well dressed everyone looked.

"So, which way is the Oakleaf University?" He wondered as he took out his cheap-looking phone and started looking up the map.

After learning the directions, he started walking. He had a suitcase with him that he dragged along the city. Throughout the city, he would see giant billboards and posters promoting a single thing, making him wonder just what was Eternal Cultivation?.

"Hmm… is that a new movie? Looks good. Maybe I will get to see what a big city's cinema looks like. " His countryside village also had cinemas, but the screen was small, so he usually preferred watching the movies on his family computer.

He finally reached the university and asked a few people to find his way to dormitory A. He walked up to a register table and got his key for his room.

His room was numbered 205, so he walked into an elevator and got up. As he came out of the elevator, he got a phone call. He looked at the caller and realized his mom was calling him. He accepted the call.

"Alex? Where are you? Did you reach the university?" a worried voice came from the other side of the phone.

"Yes, mother. I am currently in the dormitory, look for my new room." Alex replied.

"Oh good, good. Here, your father wants to talk to you."

"Hey son, how are you doing? Was the train ride okay? You didn't find it discomforting, right?" His father asked him in a worried voice.

"No, father. It was fine. In fact, it was amazing. I never knew trains went that fast." Alex said.

"Haha," his father laughed from the other side of the phone, "That's what you get when you live your entire life on a farm. We shouldn't have home-schooled you either. Fortunately, you will be getting new experiences now."

"It's okay father. The school was in the town. It would've been hard for you to take me there regularly on a 2-hour ride." Alex said.

"Alright. Remember what I told you okay. Don't be friends with bad people. There are a lot of different people in the big cities. Learn to figure out which people are good and which are not. You should be old enough to know what to do and what not to do. Oh yeah, and just because you are 18 and you can, don't go to those stupid clubs, I hear they are just a waste of money."

Alex smiled a little and replied, "I understand, father. Oh, I'm in front of my room now. I will call you guys later, bye. "

"Alright, I will end the call then. Oh, right! Call Hannah and let her know you have arrived." "Bye," his father and mother said at the same time and ended the call.

Alex walked up to Room 205 and opened the door using his key. When he opened the room, he was surprised.

He didn't expect his room to already have people staying in it. Inside were 3 young men. 2 of them were up and talking, while one was seemingly sleeping. The room had 2 bunk beds and 4 closets. Aside from that, Alex couldn't see anything there.

"Hello, are you guys staying in this room as well?" he asked as he walked in.

"Yes, Are you our new roommate?" one of the people asked.

"Ah, yes," Alex said as he showed the key numbered 205. "Hello, my name is Alex Benton." He said as he walked in.

"Oh, hi. My name is Eric and this is Matt" Eric said introducing himself and the other person.

"Hi," Matt greeted as well.

"You just arrived right? So, I assume you haven't eaten anything yet. It's nearly 3 pm. Why don't you freshen up and we can go get some afternoon lunch in the cafeteria."

Alex nodded and changed to a normal shirt and pants. He went to the bathroom attached to the room and cleaned himself. By the time he got out, the third man was already up.

"I'm sure you can do it next time. Just buy a pill if you can't."

"I know, but those cost money. And I'm not really playing to make money."

"Then you just gotta hope you breakthrough next time."

The man finally saw Alex. "Hey, you the new guy? Hi, I am Logan. What's up?"

"Hello, my name is Alex," he replied too. Afterward, all of them went to the cafeteria to get some food. The 3 started talking about the same thing they were talking about in the room and it made Alex confused. He didn't know the context.

"What are you guys talking about exactly?" he asked.

"Eternal Cultivation," Matt replied.

"Oh, the new movie? I saw posters of it on the streets." Alex said with a face of understanding.

Matt, Eric, and Logan looked at him with a look of confusion. Logan then said, "it's not a movie. It's the best VR game in existence. Don't you know about it?" he asked.

"A VR game? I didn't know about that. I only heard about the name today." Alex said.

"It's already been out for a month and is already the most played game of all time. How come you've never heard of it?" Matt was surprised.

"Oh, that's probably because they don't have any billboards and posters near the farm. And I don't really get to be on the internet since I have to help my father with the work." Alex said.

"Well, you can play now. You really must experience it." Eric said.

"Is that so? but I don't have a VR helmet or money to buy one." Alex said.
New n0vel chapters are published on

"Don't worry about that, Eric here had got an old one, you can use that," Matt said.

"If that is so, then I will try it."

Alex and the 3 walked back to the room and Eric handed him the old helmet that he was keeping in the closet. Now that he looked at it, 3 of the 4 beds all had VR helmets in them.

"They must've been playing before I came," Alex mumbled a little.

"Just plug it in the socket there and you can start playing. Be sure to log out before 7 or you will miss dinner." Saying that Matt and the rest got into their beds and put on their helmets. After that, they went asleep.

Soon a light started shinning from inside the helmet and he finally heard something.

Chapter 2: Tutorial

A voice sounded in Alex's head. He slowly opened his eyes to look at the white nothingness in front of him.

'Where am I? Is this the game?' he thought.

A customization menu appeared in front of him. He looked at the different options possible and got easily overwhelmed. He saw a Randomize button at the top and clicked it without hesitation.

It created a new character with long, silky black hair, a lean body, and blue eyes. "This doesn't look bad," he said to himself.

He clicked OK.

He didn't want to set Alex as his username, but also couldn't think of one. So he simply chose the Randomize option once more.

'Doesn't sound bad,' he thought as he pressed OK.

Suddenly, everything turned white.

Alex found himself surrounded by trees on all sides. Everything so vivid and real and colorful.

"Is this really a game?" he thought.

He looked down on himself and saw that he was wearing a simple robe and pants similar to what his character looked like.

"So, this is what a VR game looks like, huh." He was amazed at the surrounding. His senses all told him that it was real. That he was in a real place.

"What do I do now?" he wondered and started looking around. There wasn't a map or a health bar that told him it was even a game.

Not long after, he found a small pouch tied to his sash. He tried to pick and see what it was when suddenly, a holographic panel appeared in front of him.

The panel had a bunch of boxes in it, with only 2 boxes being filled up. "What is this?" he wondered as he touched the first box.

[Tutorial]

[This game mostly works through voice commands. Say 'Settings' or 'Status' to open up settings or your info. Your first job is to make time and HP bar visible for your HUD from the settings. Say 'Settings' ]

"Settings"

A new screen appeared once more that had a bunch of little settings in it. He didn't know what most of them did as they were turned Off, but he quickly found 2 settings related to HP Bar and TIME. He turned both of them ON.

Suddenly on the top left of his vision, a green bar appeared representing his current HP amount. On the top right, a bunch of numbers appeared representing the current time.

It seemed the time in the game matched the real-life time.

[Tutorial]

[Congratulations on using the settings. You can later change the different settings as you see fit. Now, to check your info say 'Status']

"Status"

Another blue screen appeared in front of him. This time it had a bunch of information about him.

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Mortal (1 Qi : 100%)

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 Elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: None

Qi: 0

]

"Oh, is this my info?" Alex looked at the status with curiosity in his eyes. He didn't understand what most of it meant though.

The tutorial screen popped up again.

[Tutorial]

[Congratulations on opening your status. Here is an explanation of what each of these means.

Cultivation is your current cultivation realm and level. It shows you how much Qi you have to invest to increase cultivation, and what your chances of breaking through are.

Body: is your potential in cultivation. It determines how far you can cultivate. Special bodies also give other benefits.

Talent is your talent in cultivations. It determines how fast you can cultivate.

Spiritual Roots: Spiritual Roots represent your spiritual affinity towards the element. You can learn and use elements you have an affinity to more freely than the rest.

Cultivation Method: is the technique you use to cultivate. It teaches you how to gather Qi and use the Qi to increase your cultivation.

Qi: is your source of energy. The more Qi you have, the stronger you can become. The speed at which you gather Qi can depend on your location, your cultivation method, and your talent.]

Alex was truly overwhelmed now. He couldn't understand half of what was happening right now. He had decided to play this game because his new friends had told him it was the best out right now. So, why were there this many explanations?

Once he read it all, he clicked on 'next'. A new set of texts popped up from the tutorial panel.

[Tutorial]

[you can use the following commands.

Logout: to logout

Cultivation methods: to see all the cultivation methods you have learned.

Pills: to see the list of pills you have.

Techniques: check the different techniques you have.

Inventory: to see your inventory. (shows items from all of your different spatial bags or rings)

Finally, congratulations on completing the tutorial. You can now open the chest in your inventory to obtain a random technique, weapon, pill, and cultivation method.]

He closed the Tutorial by clicking the 'X' on the top. He tried saying all the commands, except log out, to see if they worked. As expected, all the commands worked.

Every single panel those commands brought up was empty, except for the inventory.

"Alright then, let's see what the chest gives me. Hopefully, it's something good." Alex clicked on the chest and a notification popped up.

He clicked 'Open'.

"Weapons" he decided to check weapons first.

The weapons panel now had a new addition to it. From the icon, it looked like a sword. Alex clicked on it and the option to equip or description popped up. He chose description.

[Steel Sword

Grade: Mortal

]

There were no more descriptions than that.

"What's the mortal grade? Is that good or bad? Also, is there no attack bonus or anything? How is this a game if the item has no stats on it?" Nothing of what Alex had learned from the little video games he played on his home computer helped him at all right now.

He then checked the pill.

[Qi providing pill: 10%

Gives you 10 Qi]

"This is not bad. Didn't my status say I need 1 Qi to level up?" Alex was quite happy to find this pill.

"How do I use the pill though? Is there a button to use it?" Alex looked into the options that popped up but didn't realize what to do.

"Since this is a pill, like a medicine. Do I just eat it?" he wondered.

"Whatever, here it goes."

POP

He put the pill into his mouth. As soon as it entered his mouth as if the pill melted, it slid down his throat before he even noticed.

"Oh. I was right". He quickly opened his status page to check the change now. He had indeed gotten 10 Qi now.

Now that he had enough Qi, he had a new [Breakthrough] option in his Cultivation.

"Ah, there it is. So I can become a cultivator now? Is that what it is?" Alex wondered as he pressed the [Breakthrough] button.

"Oh! I need a Cultivation Method eh. Let's check my Cultivation method then." Alex opened his Cultivation method page and saw the book icon in the panel.

The Cultivation method had a separation in the panel that divided the panel into 2 sections. 'Learned' and 'Ready to Learn'. The book was in the 'Ready to Learn section.

He clicked it and two options popped up. 'Learn' and 'Description'. He clicked on the description.

[Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method:

Grade: Heaven

Absorb 20 Qi every minute. Amount doubles during the night]

"Woah. 20 Qi every minute? That's crazy," Alex thought. "Wait? Does that mean the pill I ate wasn't actually good.?" he was starting to regret even eating that pill now.

"Do I learn It now?" he thought. He quickly went back to the same panel and clicked learn.

"Nice. Now I can breakthrough right?" Alex quickly set the new method as his cultivation method. After that, he clicked [Breakthrough]

Chapter 3: City

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Skin Tempering 1st Realm (500 Qi: 100%)

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 9

]

"Huh, I need 500 Qi now? That's …" Alex quickly did some calculations in his head, "25 minutes. That's a lot."

"Do I have to use that technique for 25 minutes just to level up once? Isn't that a really bad system? What about later on? Will the time increase again?" he wondered.

"Hmm… I should find some pills to give me more Qi. However, at this rate, I will need 50 of those previous pills just to level up once. That should be harder than just using the ability for 25 minutes.

"Whatever, I will just look around for now. This looks so darn realistic. Maybe I should get rid of the health bar, for now, to let me see more."

Alex walked around the jungle looking at the greenery. He quickly found a small path and took it. Coincidentally, within 5 minutes, he was out of the jungle, looking at a big perimeter of wall, blocking off an entire city in front of him.

He looked to the side of the wall to see a gate with people and carriages lined up near it. There were guards waiting near the gates taking something from the newcomers before letting them in.

'Do I need money?' he wondered. Just then, someone else walked out from the forest. It was a man wearing a yellow robe with green in the linings.

He saw Alex looking around blankly and especially, noticed his plain robes. So he asked, "hello brother, are you new around here?"

"Yes, I just arrived here today, and don't know what to do to get inside," Alex replied.

The man heard that and softly asked, "Are you a player?"

"Yes," Alex said excitedly. 'So he was a player all along huh.'

"Well, just cultivate for an hour or 2. After that, once you breakthrough, you can go hunt some weak monsters in the jungle, and sell their bodies to one of the merchants that always run through here."

"That should get you about 5 or so silver coins, enough to enter the city." The man said.

"Cultivate? What's that?" Alex questioned.

The man looked at him weirdly. "You learned your cultivation method right?" Alex nodded.

"Then, just sit around and meditate. Your cultivation method will kick in on its own," said the man. After that, he bid farewell and left the place.

"Hmm… since I already broke through, I should just go and kill some animal." He walked back to the forest he had just come from. However, it didn't take long for him to find an animal.

The creature he met had a name floating on top of it.

"Woah, it's a level higher than me. Can I even fight it?" the fox was definitely stronger than him. Alex was worried and wondered if he should change his targets.

"I'm only level 1, so there should be a protection mechanic in the game that doesn't let me die, right?" Alex decided to fight the fox.

He quickly opened his weapons panel and equipped his sword. The sword was about 2 meters long in length and was very precious looking.

He tried to go forward, undetected by the fox, but that was all a dream. There were way too many things in the jungle that made noises when one walked.

The fox immediately lunged at him the moment it saw him. Alex tried to swing his sword at the fox, and ended up hitting it right in the face.

The fox whimpered and backed off. An angry look appeared on its face as it started growling. It once more jumped at him.

This time instead of using the sword as a sword, Alex swung it down hard like he was back home chopping woods with an Axe.

"Core? What is that?" he wondered. He took it out from his inventory and looked at it. It was a small reddish-brown sphere that felt a little coarse to the touch.

"Is this like that pill I ate earlier?" he wondered. It looked like it, so he assumed it was. So, without any hesitation, he put the core in his mouth and swallowed it.

"Oh wow, so it was a pill. Maybe I should go find some more of those foxes."

He was already near the city, so he decided not to. Instead, he decided to breakthrough.

He opened his status and as expected, a [Breakthrough] button had appeared in his cultivation line.

He clicked the button.

He was now a level higher. He looked at his status again and realized the [Breakthrough] button was still there. So, he pressed it once more.

He opened his status page once more.

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Skin Tempering 3rd Realm (1500 Qi: 100%)

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 509

]

Alex picked up the fox's corpse and walked out of the forest. Along the way, he realized he could put the corpse inside his inventory. And so he did.

He found his way to one of the merchants waiting in line. He read the name, 'Victorious Snow Merchant Group'.

The merchant there traded his corpse for 10 silvers. Alex took it and went to the gate. The gatekeeper asked him for an identification or 2 silvers to enter the city.

Alex didn't have anything that could identify him, so he simply paid the fee and entered.

He tried to log out after entering the city, but the game told him that he wasn't in a very safe place to log out.

Only after renting a room in a tavern did the game tell him that it was safe to log out.

Chapter 4: Alchemy

Alex opened his eyes and slowly felt the helmet as he pulled it off. He had logged out a little early because he didn't know what to do in the game any longer and decided to leave.

He tried to stand up quickly and hit his head. "Ow," he looked at what he had just hit and said in realization, "Oh, that's right. I'm not in my room." This made him feel a little sad and started to miss home.

Seeing that the others were still in the game as it was still quite a bit away from the 7 pm they said they would log out at, he decided to call his parents and tell them he had settled.

"Did you message your cousin?" his father asked from the other side.

"Oh, I forgot. I will message her right now," said Alex. After ending the call with his parents, he sent his cousin a simple message.

Soon, his three roommates logged out as well, and they went to the cafeteria to have dinner.

"So, how did you like the game?" Matt asked from the side curiously.

"It was good. I mean, I didn't like that you have to meditate around for forever just to level up, but the realistic senses make up for it more than enough."

"Oh, that? You will get used to it," Logan said from the side. "Everyone complains about the slow leveling at first. But you will soon find why that is at an appropriate speed."

Eric chimed in from the side saying, "Deva corp did earn over 2 billion dollars just in the first month of release of Eternal Cultivation. That should tell you how good that game is."

Matt said, "You will soon get used to it. Although I think it's better if you drop your ideas of this being a game. This is another world that Deva Corp has made for us to live in. They do say, You don't play Eternal Cultivation, you live it."

That statement struck Alex in a way he hadn't expected it to. 'So I should just stop caring leveling up and just enjoy the world, huh. Guess I can do that.'

Together they went back to their room. Alex was about to go to the bathroom when he saw every one of them putting their helmets back on.

"You guys are going to play again?" he asked.

Matt laughed and said, "We play every moment of waking and sleeping hour. It's just that fun."

"Sleeping hours? Do you guys play instead of sleeping? Isn't that bad for your health?"

Logan said from his bed, " No, we sleep. But the VR helmet makes it so that we can play even when asleep. You should try it today."

Eric added, "You should play it too. Maybe you can earn enough money to buy your own headset."

"Earn money? How?" Alex questioned. 'They must be joking with me right?' he thought.

"Oh, you can earn money by converting in-game currencies to dollars. We make some good bucks, enough for our monthly pocket change" said Logan. "Alright, we are logging in, you should go too, Alex." All 3 of them logged in afterward.

"Me? Earn money with the game?" that concept was quite funny to him. A kid who barely played any video games could never earn money from it.

He quickly freshened up and went back to his bed. He saw that his phone had a notification and checked it.

His cousin, Hannah, had replied. He put down his phone and put on the helmet. Before he knew it, he was back in the game.

He opened his eyes in the room in the tavern. As soon as he did, he heard the rumbling of his stomach.

"I can get hungry as well?"

Thankfully, he was already at a tavern, so he walked down to the ground floor and ordered himself a bowl of stew. It cost him one Silver, but he didn't care for the money right now.

He listened to the conversations of different people in the tavern and came to a piece of information that interested him. Hong Wu sect was holding an entrance exam tomorrow.

During dinner, the 3 guys have told him that he should find a sect as fast as possible. 'If they are really taking a test, then I should try in it as well.' He thought.

He walked to the people who were talking about this and asked, "Hello, can you tell me where this examination is taking place exactly?"

"I would suggest you don't bother, brother. Hong Wu Sect is an alchemy sect, so they are very hard to get into. But, if you still want to know, it will take place at around 8 am in the Hong Wu Sect."

'Alchemy?' he was confused as he had never heard that term before. 'I should check what it is tomorrow morning.'

He went back to his room after eating the food and thought, "It's already so late at night. So, I probably shouldn't go out, right? Why don't I take this chance to cultivate instead."

He sat cross-legged in the bed and started to meditate. Slowly, he started getting drowsy, and before he knew it, he had lost consciousness and entered a trance-like state.

.

.

.

Alex suddenly woke up. He didn't realize when he had fallen asleep in the game, but by the time he was awake, it was already 6 AM in the morning.

"Where am I?" he got confused for a second before he realized that he was still in the game. "But, I fell asleep, how am I still in the game?" he was confused. After he stopped thinking about it, he logged out.

Chapter 5: Entrance Exam

Alex came out of the game and realized his body was not tired at all. In fact, he felt very well-rested. 'So sleeping in the game does in fact work.' He was very surprised.

He washed up and waited for the guys to log out. During the time, he decided to check up on what exactly alchemy was. According to the Internet, Alchemy in Eternal Cultivation was the process of making pills.

"Hmm... Along with artifacts, Pills are one of the most expensive items in the game, Eternal Cultivation." He read what the information outlet was telling him. He closed his phone as his roommates started waking up and went to have some breakfast.

After breakfast, he wanted to go back into the game, so he did. He looked at the time and realized he only had 45 minutes to make it to the Hong Wu Sect.

He hurriedly went down to the tavern and asked the keeper for directions. The keeper's directions were simple. Hong Wu sect to the North and Tiger Sect to the south of Scarlet City. When Alex asked him what the Tiger sect was, he found out that it was a place where normal cultivators went to join.

"So there are 2 sects in this Scarlet City, huh. I still like the idea of joining the Alchemy sect, rather than the other normal one." He said to himself.

Quickly he made his way north, asking for direction to the Hong Wu sect along the way. When he finally reached the Hong Wu sect, he was surprised.

Alex was now outside of a gate. Beyond the gate, he could see a tall mountain with many houses on it. The mountain was the sect ground on the Hong Wu sect.

Time was running out, so he quickly registered himself at the gate and was directed to a large tent inside the gate. Alex looked at his piece of paper that was the registration slip. It simply had a number 174, along with his name Yu Ming and age 18.

He had almost reflexively said Alex but caught himself in the last second. He walked into the large tent and sat in an open spot on the ground, among the many other people who were all sitting in a symmetrical fashion.

Very soon, an important-looking man, in his late 20s walked inside the tent. He was wearing a green robe with silver linings. Soon after he entered, a few dozens of younger-looking men and women walked in.

"Everyone listen up," the man said as he stood upon a podium of sorts. " I am your examiner, and I will be taking your test here. " The man gestured to the side.

The group of men and women who had entered walked around the place and handed each of them a storage bag and a slip of paper.

"You have one hour to name all the 100 ingredients inside. If you can name more than 50, you pass. Makes sure the talisman you answer in also has your registration number and name." Saying that the man left the tent. The other people, however, stood there, watching the different examinees taking their exams.

Alex tried to take out each of the ingredients to see what it was called, but each time to took it out, it only said [?????????]. The game wasn't helping at all.

"They did say the exam was hard," he sighed as he stopped thinking about the exam and instead started looking at his settings through the different things. He wasted another 15 minutes in that.

Suddenly, he remembered something. 'Isn't my inventory supposed to show everything I have? What if I look at the ingredients using the inventory and not from the outside?'

"Inventory," he said in a low voice. A blue panel popped up in front of him that indeed had over a hundred items. He randomly picked one to see if it was named, but it was still called ??????.

'Sigh,' he was about to close the inventory when he noticed something. At the very first box of the inventory, there was an icon for a book.

"A cultivation method?" he wondered. He tried to click on the description but accidentally clicked on learn.

"Huh, Alchemy?" he was stunned.

"Cultivation Method," he said and the list of cultivation methods popped up. There was only one. 'But it was a book?' he was confused.

'Ah right, didn't the treasure give me a technique as well. I completely forgot about that. Is this a technique?'

He opened the techniques panel, and there in the learned section, he could see a book icon. He clicked on it and opened the description.

[Alchemy God's Manual: Level 1

Grade: Mortal (Growth)

Unlocked: You have knowledge of all alchemy material.

Unlocked: Can learn any alchemy recipe instantly.

Unlocked: +50% chance to produce an extra pill during alchemy.

Level 2 required to unlock more

]

" Growth? What is that supposed to mean? This technique can level up?" he wondered, but he didn't care about that for the moment. The thing that attracted his attention was the first thing that was unlocked,

' Unlocked: You have knowledge of all alchemy material.'

"Does that mean...?" he started to have a sliver of hope and anticipation brew up deep within him. He took out an inventory and saw its name.

[Bluethorn Leaf]

"Yes," he shouted softly.

[Horn Root Grass]

[Aquatic Berry]

It was working. He picked up the paper to start writing down the names. There was no pen, but he realized he could write in it what he wanted just by thinking about it.

As he started writing down the name, a weird-looking pattern started to appear on the piece of paper. It took him a few minutes to name all the materials in the bag.

At 9 o'clock exactly, the man returned to the tent and shouted, "Time Over, Everyone put your answers in the bag and pass them to your seniors."

After handing the bag, Alex walked out. He heard that they could come by tomorrow at 8 to see their results.

Alex took his time walking back to the tavern and logged out when he reached his room. It had taken him an hour to return, so by the time he logged out, it was nearly 10 am.

Just as he got up from his bed, he heard Logan shouting, "Yes. I did it. I broke through to True realm."

"Did you use any pills?" Eric asked.

"Nah. Those cost too much. The alchemists take about 50 dollars for even the lowest ones. I'm not wasting my money on that unless it's extremely necessary.

Alex didn't get in on the celebration. Instead, he looked at his phone that had a new notification on it. It was a message from his cousin.

Chapter 6: Breakthroughs

It was 1 PM during the day. The sun was past the zenith, and there were no clouds visible in the sky.

Alex arrived at the university's east gate. He looked around and quickly found Hannah standing in the shade, and walked up to her.

Hannah was wearing a yellow sundress with a white hat on. She was about 170 cm tall and had a lean body. She took off her sunglasses when she saw Alex walking towards her.

"Alex? Oh my god, look at you... you have grown up so much. How long has it been since I saw you last? 2 years? 3?" Hannah was astounded to see him so tall.

"Hello, sister. I believe it's been 2 and a half years since you guys last visited us. How are you?" Alex replied with a greeting.

"Oh, look at you being so formal. If you have to ask, I am perfectly fine. How are you? How are aunt and uncle? " She started inquiring about Alex's family's well-being.

"I am good, sister. Father and mother are fine as well." He replied.

"Come, let's go to a cafe or something. It's too hot out here." Hannah said as she brought Alex to a nearby cafe.

Alex was astonished to see all the cool little things the city had. He was amazed to see how many people there were constantly on the street, even during the hot day. The many cars and vehicles, some he had never seen before. The tall buildings that made you nearly break your neck just to see the top of it.

Alex felt very overwhelmed by everything. After they reached the cafe, Hannah entered it, and Alex followed behind her.

'Woah,' feeling the hot air from the outside immediately shift to the cold air from the air conditioning in the cafe, nearly made him vocalize his amazement.

He had rarely been to places with air conditioning, never one this fancy. Most of the places he visited back home had fans instead of air conditioning.

Hannah walked up to an empty table and said, "Sit here, I will bring us some food, what do you want to eat?"

Alex didn't know what to say. " I don't know what's good. Maybe some burgers would be fine?"

"Okay," she left for a bit and came back with 2 sets of burgers and drinks. They started eating.

"So, you are staying in a dorm, right? Made some friends yet?" she asked.

" Yeah. I have 3 roommates. They are friendly." Alex replied

"Good. Good."

Alex and Hannah talked for quite a while. Alex learned a few things about Hannah. It seemed she was currently in her third, and last year of college. She was renting a place a few blocks away from the university, where she and 2 other friends of hers lived together.

After finishing their food. They stayed there and talked for a bit. After catching up, at around 3 PM they both said their goodbyes and left.

In a few short minutes, Alex made his way back to the dorm. He was about to enter the room when he heard someone call his name.

"Hey Alex, where have you been?" Logan asked.

From the looks of it, Logan, Matt, and Eric were just returning from the cafeteria.

"I went to meet with my cousin. She studies in the university as well." He said.

"Oh. Cool. You had your meal? If not, you should probably go to the cafeteria before they close." Matt said.

"I already ate outside. Oh right, can I keep the VR helmet for a bit longer?"

Matt looked at him and laughed, "You got hooked as well, didn't you? Hahaha. Eternal Cultivation does that. Go ahead, keep it as long as you like." Eric was very generous about the VR Helmet.

They all went into their rooms, put on their helmet, and went back to the game.

Alex opened his eyes back in the tavern room. He slowly stood up. He looked around the room, and thought, 'Hmm... the sun is still up, should I just go fight some monsters and level up?'

The level system in this game was a little weird, it had names, instead of numbers one could remember.

"What level am I at again?"

He then opened his Status to check. What he saw shocked him.

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Skin Tempering 3rd Realm (1500 Qi : 100%) [Breakthrough]

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 131709

]

'What? How do I have so much Qi?' he couldn't understand. ' If I remember correctly, I had around 500 after eating the pill from the fox's body. So how come I have so many now? I don't remember eating any more pills or even cultivating at a-wait, did I actually cultivate last night when I fell asleep?'

Millions of thoughts were going through his mind. He didn't understand how he gained so many Qi. He did vaguely remember starting to cultivate last night, but he had fallen asleep immediately.

'Maybe I did cultivate during my sleep. They did say you can play the game while sleeping. Maybe I did just that.' He thought.

'Either way, since I have so much Qi, why don't I level up?' Alex decided to press the [Breakthrough] button.

He lost 1500 Qi. The next level-up requirement was now at 2500 Qi. He pressed the [Breakthrough] button again.

And again.

And again, and again.

'Oh. A new name.' Alex stopped breaking through when he reached 'Muscle Tempering: 1st Realm'. He looked at his status and realized he had used up 23,000 Qi, and the next requirement for a breakthrough was 10,000 Qi.

He still had enough Qi left, so he pressed [Breakthrough] once more.

"Oh," Alex realized something when he looked at his status once more. It looked like the requirement for each realm in this level was increasing by 5000 Qi. The next requirement was 15000 Qi.

'Wow, the requirement went up by a lot,' he thought

He broke through once more.

He once again checked and found the requirement for the 4th level to be 2000. He still had half of his original Qi left, so he proceeded to click [Breakthrough] multiple times once more.

He couldn't break through anymore after that.

'Woah,' Alex got a weird feeling from his body. It didn't feel like his body anymore. The skin was smooth and shiny, and he could see the muscle definitions inside his body, even though he vividly remember not having as much muscle before.

He also felt unusually hungry. 'Do I have to eat in-game as well?' he thought. Thankfully, he was staying in a tavern, so he could go down to eat anytime he wanted.

For now, He checked his status once more.

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Muscle Tempering 6th Realm (35000 Qi: 100%)

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 8709

]

'Wow, that's nice,' he thought. He didn't really understand how good or bad, having the 6th realm of Muscle Tempering was, but he assumed it had to be good.

He believed he was essentially around level 15 in the game. But, he couldn't tell how much further he had to level up since he had no idea about the higher levels.

He decided to put those thoughts to the back of his mind and went downstairs to have a meal. He got a good meal for a silver and ate it with enjoyment.

After he finished eating, he got out of the tavern. 'Man, if the game requires me to eat, and food costs 1 silver every time, I am going to go broke in no time.'

'I should probably go hunt those monsters more.' He thought. He walked to the city gates and saw the guards there checking the people going in and out.

He walked up to one of the guards and asked if he needed to pay another 2 silver for leaving the city for a few hours. Unfortunately, he did.

'Oh, well. I can pay them after I earn from the monsters I will kill.' He thought and went towards the forest.

Chapter 7: Forest Hunting

Alex walked out of the eastern gate of the Scarlet city and soon realized that he had come to the wrong place accidentally.

It was an evening last time when he had entered the city and had gone straight to a tavern to look for lodging to log out, and not bothered to remember any of the interior landscape of the city.

Now that he had randomly come out of the eastern gate, he realized that he had actually entered the city through the western gate. But that shouldn't matter to him that much.

'Whatever. I just need to hunt some monster that's all,' he thought. The east side of the city was also covered in forests, the same as the west side, so he should have no problem in finding the monsters.

He walked into the forest and started looking for any signs of a monster. Suddenly, he saw something.

It wasn't a monster, but a small tree. For some reason, the tree was nothing special. It was easily overlooked in this large forest, but he couldn't do so. Something about this tree called to him.

So, he did what his heart told him to and slowly walked towards the tree. The tree itself was about Alex's height, making it look like a little growing tree. But it already had big leaves and was sprouting a little fruit.

Alex saw a name appear on top of the tree when he came close to it.

[Dwarf Berry Tree

Bears the 'Dwarf Berry']

"The dwarf berry?" Alex looked at the only fruit sprouting in the tree. He reached his hands forward and touched the berry.

[Dwarf Berry]

He didn't get any more information than that. This felt the same as when he touched all those materials in the entrance exam for the Hong Wu sect.

'Is this an alchemy material? Is that why I know the fruit's name?' he thought. He believed his conjecture to be correct. So, he plucked the fruit and kept it in his inventory.

He couldn't tell how good this material was, or if it even made anything useful, but he still decided to keep it.

He found a few more alchemy materials along the way. So he picked whatever he could and kept it in his inventory. After walking a bit longer, he finally found a monster.

It was a deer with blood-red fur on it. It had dark black eyes and sharp thorn-like antlers on it. Alex got a little frightened when he saw it. Then he looked closely to check what level it was at.

[Carmine Coated Deer: Skin Tempering 6th realm]

The deer was 4 levels higher than the fox he fought in the western forest. But, that didn't matter to him anymore. After all, he was 16 levels higher than when he fought the fox.

He quickly brought up his weapons panels and equipped his sword. The steel sword gleamed brightly in the scattering sunlight in the forest.

The deer saw him, and turned towards him, preparing to charge. Alex got his weapon ready.

The deer suddenly started running towards him, directing its antlers towards him. This monster was much faster than the one he had fought yesterday.

But, for some surreal reason, it didn't feel like the monster was very fast. In fact, he almost thought the deer was running in slow motion.

Alex realized at that moment all of his senses were amplified. He could hear the trees and leaves in the forest rustle in the wind. He could smell the different plants and even the ground in the forest.

He could feel the subtle change in air pressure and temperature that he couldn't normally be able to tell. He could see the colors in the forest much more vividly than he could just a minute before.

Similarly, his sense of time was amplified as well. The deer that was charging intensely, felt so very slow for him.

He slowly raised his sword. It was only slow for him. In reality, this action was very fast.

As soon as the deer reached him, he swung the sword down.

Swish

The deer's left half split, and fell away from its right half. It was cut precisely through the middle in one hit. Alex was used to seeing farm animals butchered so he didn't get disgusted seeing the innards of this monster.

'I don't get the pill I got from the fox yesterday?' he thought. He was looking forward to getting the pill that gave him 2000 Qi yesterday.

He proceeded to open his inventory and check the antlers. He brought them out but didn't see their names pop up.

'Is this not an alchemy material?' he thought. That must've been why there was no name to it. He put it back into his inventory and kept the deer corpse with him as well.

After there was nothing left to do, he started to wonder, 'what happened to me during that fight? Is it because I'm a cultivator now?'

Along the way, he found few more alchemy materials and some other monsters. He managed to kill every single one he fought in one strike.

None of the monsters he fought were above the Skin tempering realm, and whenever he got into combat, he started to get into this bizarre experience where all of his 6 senses amplified. So, he easily killed those monsters.

Sun was starting to go down, and the moon was coming up. It was time for him to leave the forest, and return back to his lodging. But on his way, he saw something. In a small ground that looked like a natural flower field, there was an unusual flower, growing amid a bunch of other normal flowers.

He only thought the flower was unusual because he felt something unusual about the flower. 'Is that an alchemy material? Is that why I can tell it's different from the other flowers?' he thought.

He decided to pick it up, so he went closer. Suddenly, he heard something moving along the ground. He immediately turned to look behind him, but there was nothing there.

He slowly looked to his left and started scanning the land with his eyes. But, aside from plants and trees, he could see nothing else in the forest.

Rustle. Rustle.

The sound was still there. He looked towards the ground and saw a small brown snake slithering among the fallen leaves. He immediately jerked back.

Having worked on a farm did not mean he was no longer afraid of snakes. A game was no exception. Especially one as realistic as this.

But, he couldn't back away. There was something about that flower that made him think it was too important to skip out on. So, he readied his sword.

The slithering snake finally showed itself fully and was now looking straight at him. Alex looked at the name floating on the snake and frowned. The name itself wasn't the problem, it was the cultivation.

[Earth Snake: Muscle Tempering 3rd Realm]

It was only 3 levels lower than him. He didn't know how much difference each level made, so he started to get worried. Still, the flower was way too captivating for him.

So, he took a deep breath and focused. Suddenly, he felt the time slow down once more. All of his senses worked in overdrive.

The snake however didn't seem to be slowed down. It slithered towards him at nearly regular speed. 'Is the snake too close to my level, so it's just as fast as me?' he thought.

He swung the sword down once more, but the snake easily slid out of his attack path.

The snake jumped at him, baring its two fangs, but he too was pretty fast and easily dodged it.

Once more he tried to attack the snake, but once more it dodged him. The snake was just way too fast on the ground. He couldn't hope of touching it as long as it was slithering in the ground.

'Hmm... if it is impossible to catch this snake while it's slithering, then what about when it's not on the ground,' he thought. He felt like he had come up with a perfect plan.

He once more attacked the snake in order to aggravate it to attack himself. The snake did as expected, and lunged at him once it got to a close enough range.

Alex immediately sidestepped and swung his sword at the mid-air snake. It couldn't dodge while jumping, so it took the sword right to its neck.

Thud.

The snake hit the ground with a large thud, scattering a lot of trees and dust. But, Alex felt unsatisfied. He hit the snake with a sword, but there was resistance on his swing, unlike the other times.

Rustle. Rustle.

The snake slithered out of the place where it was sent to, with only a small wound on its neck. It would seem that Muscle Tempering realm monsters weren't that easy to deal with.

Chapter 8: Outer Sect Disciple

The snake started to change its attack pattern once it got hit. Instead of lurching at Alex, it started going for his legs.

Alex didn't know exactly how strong a Muscle Tempering 3rd realm monster could be, so he was apprehensive about going on the offensive and risk getting hurt.

Alex also didn't know if it hurt inside the game, the same way it did outside. They had told him the developers wanted to make the game realistic, so pain might have been added to add realism to the game.

He kept trying to hit the snake, but the snake was just too agile. It constantly weaved and dodged his attack while simultaneously going on the offensive from time to time.

After a while, the snake targeted his neck and attacked him once more. Similar to last time, he dodged the attack and hit the snake once more.

Thud

The snake only got a minor cut once again. Alex started to get worried. 'I don't have any abilities. I should have waited until I got my class or whatever equivalent this game has before coming here.' He thought.

The snake was getting cautious now. It wasn't attacking any chance it got any more but was rather waiting for the perfect moment.

Alex decided to do something. He didn't care he if died. This was a game, so he probably would just respawn somewhere.

Thinking that Alex unequipped his sword. He had never learned to use a sword, so doing it now was just not the right choice. Instead, he would fight with his hands.

Seeing Alex keep away his sword, the snake must've thought it was its opportunity, and lunged at Alex. Seeing it jump at him, Alex immediately caught the snake with both his hands, around its neck and started choking it.

The snake started to fidget around now that its head was immovable. It wrapped its body around his hands trying to squeeze him, but it didn't work.

He was after all 3 realms higher than him. Alex put his hand to the ground and started stomping on the snake's head. After a few vigorous stomps, he got a notification.

'Finally' he thought. He took out his sword once more and looked at it. "This is kind of a bad sword huh. Guess I'm not very lucky." He put the sword back.

He took the snake's corpse and put it into his inventory as well. He then looked towards the flower.

If it wasn't for the feeling he got, he would be completely incapable of telling apart the flower from its surrounding ones. It had 5 petals, was yellow in color, and completely ordinary.

He got closer to the flower and touched it. A name popped on top of it.

[Spirit Cleansing Lily]

'Woah,' he slowly plucked the flower from the plant and took a closer look at it. 'This must be a very good alchemy material for me to get this fantastic of a feeling.'

He quickly kept the item in his inventory. His inventory was getting full, and he would have to do something about it soon.

He looked at the time, and it was half-past 6. He ran his way back to the city. He didn't bother selling any of the animals today and kept it for tomorrow.

After he reached the tavern room, he logged out.

Alex got out of his bed and waited. In a few minutes, all 3 of his roommates woke up too, and together they went and had dinner.

After returning from dinner, the rest of the 3 went back to the game. Alex however didn't. Tomorrow was the first day of university, and he wasn't used to playing overnight.

So, he called his parents, talked for a bit, went onto the internet for a bit, and then went to sleep.

He woke up around 7 AM. Logan and Matt were already awake, so they waited for Eric, and went to get breakfast.

After returning he looked at the time. It was about 7:20 AM. He remembered the person in the game asking him to return tomorrow to check his result.

'Should I go play the game right now? The orientation starts at 11.' He turned to look at the other 3, but they were already in the game.

'Whatever,' he said as he entered the game as well.

He logged in to the tavern and quickly left the room. Within 15 minutes he was at the gate of Hong Wu Sect.

He had arrived a bit early and had to wait around 10 minutes for the results to be posted. There were many other youths hoping to get a chance. They were practically begging to get into the sect.

After the result got posted, there was a massive crowd around it. Alex weaved his way into the crowd to see the results.

The results were very simple. They were simply numbers on the list. The numbers were the same numbers everyone had on their registration slip.

He didn't remember his number so he took out his registration slip to look at it. After seeing his number, he started looking for number 174 on the result sheet.

The numbers were written in ascending order, so it was very easy to find the numbers. Very soon, Alex found his.

He looked around and saw a few people walking up to a person, and showing them their registration slip. He too walked up to them and asked, " Hello, I have passed the test, what should I do now?"

The men asked for his registration slip, and after confirming his number, they sent him to a group of other youths who had just passed.

After an hour and a half or so, around 27 people were gathered in the group. These were all the people who had passed the test.

The man who took their test yesterday walked up to them and introduced himself.

"My name is Lang Shun. You can call me elder Lang."

"Greetings elder Lang." Everyone greeted. Alex hastily greeted too.

"Since you have all passed the test, you are now a disciple of the Hong Wu Sect. Though you are still an outer sect disciple, if you do well in alchemy, you will be promoted to the inner sect. And who knows, you may even end up being a core disciple."

Elder Lang continued, " In Hong Wu Sect, your cultivation matters not. Only your talent, knowledge, and passion will get you forward here. You may have true Qi, but if you can't form a mortal grade pill, you will forever stay as an outer sect disciple."

He then turned around and went forward. "Follow me," he said after going a bit ahead.

They soon followed the elder to a residential area in the mountains. Alex wondered if these were the homes he could see from the gate.

The elder then assigned a single-room cottage to each of the 27 disciples. There were thousands of these small cottages on the mountain range, so they had no problem assigning one to each.

The elder then took out 27 different small pouches, and in a single wave handed it to every single one. He then proceeded to explain.

"These bags have 2 sets of sect outfit, 1 handbook that has all the rules and regulations of the school, a map of the sect grounds including the places you are forbidden to go to, and an alchemy introduction book to get you started on the theory of alchemy. Read them when you have time."

Alex was startled to hear his name. Still, he raised his hands and said, "I am called Yu Ming."

"Show me your registration card." The elder asked.

Alex took out his registration card and handed it over to the elder. After confirming he was in fact 'Yu Ming', the elder took out a weird-looking metal coin.

"Everyone else but him, leave, and go to your cottage." He said sternly. After everyone left, he looked at Alex and handed the metal coin he was holding.

"This is a library token, your reward for the test results. Take this to the library, and you can borrow 1 Earth grade or lower book for free. Do well." The elder then left.

Alex looked at the metal coin, and was confused, "Earth Grade or lower? " He didn't know what that meant. He walked to his cottage and closed the door.

He opened the bag he had just got and was stunned. He was about to open everything inside when he realized, he had completely forgotten about something.

It was nearly 10 AM now, and he had to leave. It was the first day of the University after all.

He put everything back into the storage bag, including the library token. Once everything was gone, he logged out.

Chapter 9: Cultivation Mechanics

Alex logged out of the game and went to eat his lunch at 10 am with his other 3 friends. After lunch, all of them started to get dressed for the Orientation.

Today was the unofficial first day of University where they would be welcomed, and get to choose their subjects and class schedule.

After getting ready, all 4 of them went to the University. Since they lived in the dorm, it was a 5-minute walk at best. They just had to leave the dorm, and walk a few minutes away to the main building.

They were quickly shown their way to the main hall where the orientation was going to take place.

They sat around and waited, as the main program started to take place.

The dean of the university got on to the stage and started giving a speech about how important university studies are, how good Oakleaf University is, and how they have a legacy to uphold.

Alex wanted to focus on the speech but quickly lost focus. A few more people came onto the stage to speak about some more things.

2 hours went by before Alex even noticed it. A clean-shaven man in his late 20s got onto the stage and said,

"The Orientation program is now over. An email has been sent to your address with your username and password, for the university website."

"You can either use the website to select your courses and schedule, or you can go to the reception to do it. Good luck, I look forward to teaching you all."

The man walked out. Alex opened his phone and checked his email. There really was a new mail from the university. He quickly used the given credentials to log in to the school website.

He chose 3 business and economics courses, and 2 technology-related courses, one of them being a VR-focused course. He was looking forward to them.

He managed to get an easy schedule. From Monday to Thursday, he had classes from 11 am to 3 pm. There would be 3 classes every day, each an hour-long, with a 20 minutes break between each class.

There was one problem he quickly realized, however. Given that he had taken 2 technology courses, he would sooner or later need a computer.

He might also require a VR Helmet, but he had one for now so he didn't care about it.

"Do I need to ask my parents for money?" he started to regret taking the technology classes. His parents had sent him to university only because they were free. But they hadn't thought about the extra needs he might have had.

'Oh! What about making money from the game? If making pills really is the best way to make money in the game, then I should learn more about it.' He thought.

"Alex, you done?" Matt asked from the side.

"Huh, oh yeah, I'm done. Are we leaving?" he asked.

"Yeah. Let's go to the cafeteria. By the way, what classes did you choose?" Matt asked.

Alex opened his phone and showed him the schedule.

"Woah, you got lucky. I think I might have to cut down on my games from now on. The schedules are so erratic for me." Matt sighed

"Me too. I have classes at 7 on Fridays. University is going to somehow make me hate Fridays, isn't it?" Logan said from the side.

"Well, sucks to be you guys, cause mine is pretty good," Eric said from the side. His schedule seemed somewhat similar to Alex's.

They went to the cafeteria to have their afternoon lunch and quickly returned to their room.

As if doing anything else would be sacrilegious, the 3 friends jumped onto their beds the moment they got to their room and started playing their games.

Alex changed his clothes to something freer and sat on his bed. He wanted to immediately go into the game as well. But, he couldn't.

Previously, he was just fascinated by the game and wanted to play it casually. Afterward, when he learned about pills earning a lot of money he wanted to play the game because he wanted the money.

But now, things were different. He could no longer 'want' the money. He needed it. So, he could no longer stay ignorant about the games.

The game and the game developers made almost no effort to teach the players about the game except for the bare-bones stuff so that the players could experience things on their own.

However, the players weren't as inconsiderate and openly posted stuff about what they learned or found. In fact, there was an entire forum about it.

There were a few pinned forum posts, but the very first one caught Alex's eyes. It simply had 2 words in the title, 'Don't Die.

Curious he opened the post and learned shocking stuff, if you died in the game, your character would be deleted, and you would have to start all over again. Some comments said this might have been to give the players a 'reincarnation' feeling.

The next thing he learned was about cultivation. The cultivation was the level equivalent of these games. From what the players had learned, the cultivation realms were divided into 3 parts.

The self tempering realm, or also commonly knows as the common Qi realm. The second was the True Qi realm, where one's common Qi elevated to become True Qi. The third one, being mostly hearsay, was the saint realm.

The true Qi realm had 5 realms each with 9 levels as well. They were True Disciple, True Master, True Lord, True King, and True Emperor.

The players did not know the saint realm as of yet. The highest known cultivation among the players was True Master 5th realm. Of Course, many were hiding their cultivation, playing in secret.

Chapter 10: More Learning

The next thing on the list was the grading system. The post gave general information about the different grades the cultivators used in 'Eternal Cultivation'.

There were 4 grades known to the public as of yet. They were Mortal, Earth, Heaven, and Immortal. Mortal was the lowest of the grades, and Immortal was the highest.

These grading systems applied to different items, formations, artifacts, pills, cultivation methods, techniques, and even a cultivator's talent itself.

"Huh? Talent too? But my talent is of 'God' grade. Is the existence of a God grade not known to the public yet?"

He looked through the comments but saw nothing about a God grade. There were however some comments that said they knew a higher grade existed, just that they didn't know the name of it.

"That must be the god grade. It can't be I am the only person with a God grade, right? There must be other people who have it. They must be keeping quiet about it for some reason."

Alex decided to not reveal anything about it either.

Alex remembered there not being a grade for the pill, but he might have been wrong about that. No one in the comment was contradicting the poster, so he was probably mistaken.

The last thing he decided to look at was about the alchemy itself. The game didn't allow recordings, so most of what was written here were hearsay.

They said alchemy was similar to cooking. You took a pot, lit the fire underneath, and put all your ingredients at a specific time. You took care of the temperature, and timing and a pill would be formed at the end.

Of course, it wasn't that simple. You also needed to know alchemy techniques as well to properly mix together all the Qi and energies in the ingredients so as to not burn them, or in worse cases, explode them.

Once you were successfully done, a pill would be formed.

Alex decided to check what pills usually sold for, but found the information unhelpful at the moment since he didn't know what any of the pills were or did.

"Guess I will check after I learn a bit more in-game."

After checking a few more things in the forum, he logged in to the game.

Alex opened his eyes in his small cottage. It was nearly 4 pm, so he sat down and decided to look at the different items he got from elder Lang.

There were 6 new items in the inventory now. The first 2 items were clothes. He decided to change into the sect's outfit.

He was now wearing a light green robe with bronze linings along the sides. He then looked at the other 4 items. One of those items was the token for the library.

The other 3 looked like a rectangular piece of paper, not unlike the one he wrote his answers in during the entrance test.

The system seemed to call it a talisman. He took one of the talismans out and decided to read it. The talisman had the same unreadable squiggly lines that had appeared on the talisman he wrote his answers in.

Just as last time, a panel popped up in front of him with all the information in the talisman. It seemed he had taken out the map of the Hong Wu Sect.

Hong Wu Sect had 6 mountains under it. Of the 6, the one closest to the gate was the outer disciple mountain.

The adjacent mountains to the outer disciple mountain were the Inner disciple mountain on the left, and the core disciple mountain on the right.

Opposite to Outer Disciple mountain was the mountain where the sect leader lived. The sect leader's mountain was surrounded by two other mountains that were named the alchemy gardens.

At the center of all the 6 mountains was the valley, which was the main grounds of the sect. This was where the sect disciples went to learn, train, make pills, buy pills, etc. The elder also lived in the valley.

"Wow, do I have to walk so much all the time? Going up and down the mountains would take a lot of time."

He was worried about how much time he would waste just walking around the sect.

He put back the map talisman and took out another talisman. This was the rulebook for the sect.

There were 4 rules for the outer sect disciples.

The outer sect disciples were not allowed to visit the inner sect and core disciples mountains without strict permission from the Elders. If they were found wandering in any of the other mountains, they would be punished accordingly.

The outer sect disciples were not allowed to go into the forbidden alchemy gardens and the sect leader's mountain. If they were found anywhere close, they would be immediately expelled.

The outer sect disciples had to earn at least 20 contribution points a week from the sect. Anything less, and they would be expelled.

Finally, the outer sect disciples were only allowed to perform alchemy at night time, when the inner sect disciples and core disciples would not be hindered.

"Wait, so I can't perform alchemy during the day at all?" he was surprised. He wanted to earn money through making pills, but if he could only do it at night time, when would he sleep?

"Oh wait, they did say you sleep outside while you play the game at night. Maybe this won't be a problem at all."

He was worried for a moment before sighing with relief. Another thing that confused him was the mention of 'contribution points'.

"What are contribution points? If I go by the name, they must be points I get by contribution to the sect. But what could an outer sect disciple do that counts as a contribution? I hope I won't have to sweep and pick up garbage."

There were a few other things in the handbooks that mentioned how everything in the sect cost contribution points, and that one would even go hungry without them.

He decided he would learn about it once he went to the sect valley.

Chapter 11: Alchemists

After learning about the different rules and information in the rules talisman, he put it back into his inventory. He then took out the last talisman in the inventory.

The first thing it taught was how alchemy is performed. It went in-depth into the action behind the alchemy than what he had found on the Internet.

Basically, Alchemy was about the synergies between the various ingredients as they are slowly converted into a pill in the cauldron. The better the harmony between the different synergies in the ingredients, the better the quality of the pill would be.

He also learned why he hadn't seen a grade in the pill he had got.

"So I was right, there are no grades, but just unofficial grades." He thought.

A pill's efficiency was based on how well the harmony in the pill was. Pills below 10% harmony between the ingredients were called a failure.

At 10% harmony, a pill would be considered a mortal grade pill. They would barely be a pill and were considered the worst of the worst. Alchemists who could only make Mortal grade pills were called Mortal Alchemists.

At 25% harmony, a pill would elevate to earth grade. Once you started forming earth-grade pills on a regular basis, you were called Earth Alchemist. You were considered a proper alchemist once you became an Earth Alchemist.

At 50% harmony, a pill would elevate to heaven grade. Any alchemists that made even 10 heaven-grade pills were considered Heavenly Alchemists. Heavenly Alchemists were revered by everyone and were very hard to come by.

At 75% harmony, a pill would be considered an Immortal grade pill. But that was just a myth. It was near to impossible to form an Immortal grade pill, so Immortal Alchemists were nonexistent as well.

There were also other classifications to pills as well. These classifications were based on which realm of cultivators could use the pill.

The different types of pills were common pills, True pills, and saint pills. Only self tempering realm cultivators could use Common pill. Similarly, only True realm users could use True pills, and Saint realm users could use Saint pills.

He did not learn about the pills for the other realms. One would need to be in the realm or have crossed it to form those pills.

A True realm alchemist could make True Pills, and they could also make Common pills, but they could not make Saint pills. Forming pills required one to infuse qi into the ingredients to create harmony between them, and without having that Qi, one couldn't possibly make the pills for that realm.

There was a few other information in the talisman, such as different names and images for different alchemy materials. But Alex didn't need those.

Once he was done learning everything he could from the talisman he put it back. He took out the final item in the inventory. The metal token.

"Guess I should go and get a book from the library, huh. It's free after all. Such a shame I can only take an earth-grade book."

Alex stood up and got out of his cottage. There were dozens of different disciples walking around with different shades of green robes. Most of them were wearing the same light green robe as him.

'This must be the robes that outer disciple wore.' He thought to himself. He wondered if the other people wearing the different shades of green were the inner disciples and core disciples.

He didn't ask. He took out the map once more from the inventory and checked the direction to the valley.

Even though most of the way was just a dirt path, the way was very smooth. And since it was mostly downhill, he had no problem reaching the sect valley without losing a single breath.

There was a special scent in the air that he couldn't put a finger on. It was a weird mixture of flowers and a medicine-like scent.

"Is this from all the alchemy that is being done he-... Woah"

He was shocked to see how many people there were in the sect valley. It was almost like a festival was currently going on in the valley. There were hundreds of green robe-wearing disciples walking around in the valley.

There were dozens of large buildings, some spanning more ground than his massive University. He was truly shocked to see the sects valley.

"If the valley alone is this big, then how big is the entire sect?" he wondered.

He looked at his map again and found the direction to the library. After a short walk among the crowd, he quickly reached the library.

The library was a massive tower that went up at least 10 floors. The library was circular in design and was very wide as well.

He walked into the tower but was quickly stopped by the elder who was in charge of the library. The elder wore a dark green robe with silver linings. He was short and bald but had a long white flowing beard.

"Give me your nameplate before entering." He asked. Alex was startled. 'What is a nameplate?' he wondered.

"Good afternoon Elder. I am a new disciple who only entered the sect today. I do not know what this nameplate is. I wasn't given something like that." He truthfully answered the elder.

"Hmm... you only entered today, yet you are coming to the library already? Go away, kid. Go get your nameplate from the Disciple hall first before doing anything else in the sect." The elder said in an indifferent manner.

"Thank you for the information, Elder," Alex thanked the elder and walked away. Soon more disciples arrived at the library, and the elder went back to doing his job.

Alex opened his map once again and searched for the Disciple Hall on it. Once he found it, he went there as fast as he could.

Chapter 12: Disciple Hall

Alex made his way to another large building in the valley. This was the Disciple hall.

When he reached the Disciple Hall, once again, he was simply shocked at the scope of it. This building only had 3 floors but took up an enormous area.

He walked towards the building but stopped. In front of the building was a massive block of black stone at least 10 meters tall and wide, and 2 meters thick.

He looked at the front side of the block, and there were many little carvings on it. It looked like they were a list of names. At the top, in big letters, it said 'Contribution Ranking'.

Below it was the list of names. At the First spot on the ranking was someone named Wan Li, at the Second spot was someone called Zhou Mei, at the Third spot was someone called Fan Ruogang, so on and so forth.

There were quite possibly more than thousands of names in the block of black rock.

"Hmm... does Contribution Ranking mean this is a ranking based on how many contribution points a disciple has gotten?" he wondered.

He was truly surprised at seeing the rankings of the students in the sect. However, that wasn't what surprised him the most. The most surprising thing in this piece of ranking was the constant update.

The big black rock seemed to have magical properties as the rankings on the rock constantly changed, even changing the carvings magically.

"I wonder how they made a stone change forms so constantly like that." The game was truly amazing he thought.

After looking at the rankings list for a bit, he walked into the gate to the disciple hall behind it. There were dozens of people walking in and out of the disciple hall.

He didn't know what he was to do here, so he walked up to an elder and asked, "Good afternoon elder. I am new to the sect and require a nameplate. Would you mind showing me the way?"

The elder was a woman in her 40s. She wore the same green robes with silver linings as the other elders did. She seemed to be on the way out of the disciple hall when Alex met her.

"New disciple?" she looked at Alex up and down for a bit and said, "go stand in that line and tell the disciple working in the room that you need one." She said and walked out.

"Thank you, elder." He said even as she left and was already quite a distance away.

He went to stand in one of the lines. He saw quite a few darker green-robed disciples walk up and down the stairs, but not a single light-green-robed disciple like him went there.

"The upper floors must be for the inner sect disciples and core disciples." He assumed.

Soon, it was his turn to enter. He walked in and saw a small room with only one desk. Behind the desk was a disciple with an interest looking medallion on his hand.

However, when Alex realized that the green on his robe was darker than his own, he was shocked.

'An inner sect disciple?' he didn't think an inner sect disciple would be doing what he would normally assume to be an elder's work.

"Your nameplate." The disciple said with an irritated voice. He was annoyed that Alex was just standing there doing nothing.

"Oh, I don't have one. I am a new disciple, and am here to get one." Alex said in haste.

"Hmm... new disciple? Why are you here so late? Most already came by in the morning, and took their nameplate." The disciple started to question.

Alex gave an embarrassed smile. He couldn't say that he had to log out because he needed to go to his actual school, instead of this one.

"Doesn't matter." The disciple said as he took out a rectangular metal plate with an interesting design on it. The disciple held his medallion with his left hand, and the metal plate with his right hand, and asked,

"What is your name?"

"Ale-Yu Ming" Alex nearly said his real name out loud. Thankfully the disciple didn't catch that.

"Yu Ming... okay." He brought the metal plate to his forehead and kept it there for a bit. After a while, he brought down the metal plate and handed it to Alex.

"See if anything is wrong." The disciple asked.

Alex tried to do what the disciple did, and tried to bring the metal plate to his forehead. But, before he could even do that, a panel appeared in front of him.

[Hong Wu Sect, Outer Sect Disciple 'Yu Ming'. Contribution: 0]

He looked at the information for a few seconds. 'Hmm... so I have no contribution points at the moment huh. Makes sense.' He then closed the panel and looked towards the inner sect disciple as he said,

"Yes. Everything is fine. The information in this is accurate."

"Alright." The disciple said as he brought his hand to a nearby drawer where there were many storage bags. He casually placed his hands on top of one and brought out 3 objects.

He handed all 3 of the object to Alex. Alex took the items and looked at them curiously. He focused on the pink pill, and a simple information panel popped up.

[Minor Healing Pill: 16%

Heals minor injuries within seconds.]

'Oh! It's a healing pill. 16% harmony so, it's a mortal grade pill huh.' Alex thought as he looked at the pill. He then focused on the white pill. Similar to the pink pill, a panel popped up.

[Qi Improvement Pill: 19%

Improves cultivation speed by 19% for 12 hours

]

'Hmm... 19% improvement of cultivation speed? Does that mean I gain 24 Qi every minute, instead of 20 Qi now?' he wondered.

Next, he looked at the white stone in his hand.

Chapter 13: Alchemy Achievements

The white stone was about 3cm by 2cm by 1cm in volume. It was a rectangular piece of stone that was very translucent. While the overall stone was white, if one looked carefully, it had a cloudy texture inside it.

Alex had never seen anything like this before. 'It can't also be a pill, can it?' he thought. He focused on the stone for a bit before a panel popped up. The panel only had three words on it.

[Common Spirit Stone]

'Common Spirit Stone? What is that?' he was even more confused now. He wanted to come back to the game fast, so he had only learned what he thought was necessary to him, and not bothered with the nitty-gritty stuff.

"What is this?" he asked as he picked up the common spirit stone.

"That's a spirit stone." The inner sect disciple said without missing a beat.

"What's a spirit stone. " Alex continued to ask.

"What? Have you never seen a spirit stone?" the disciple asked with a questioning look on his face.

"No. This is my first time hearing about one, let alone seeing it." Alex answered truthfully.

"Oh. This is a common spirit stone. The inside of it is full of Qi that you can absorb while cultivating to improve your cultivation. Or, you can also choose to use it as a currency as most of the cultivators only exchange stuff in spirit stones." The disciple was smiling while answering this. It seemed it was his first time meeting a cultivator that did not know what a spirit stone was.

"Go now. You are taking up the line. You can come back exactly a month from now to get another [Minor Healing Pill], [Qi Increasing Pill] and a spirit stone." The inner sect disciple ignored Alex and started calling the next person forward.

Alex silently put the 3 items into his inventory. He thanked the disciple and walked out of the room.

Now that he had a nameplate, he could go get a book from the library. So, he headed towards the library.

He was just walking out of the Disciple Hall when he noticed something. It was the big black rock that kept the rankings for all the disciples in the sect.

Even the back of it had a list of all the students in the ranking, ones that were constantly changing every second. The stone was still as magical as ever.

But there was something different about this ranking. For one, the ranking no longer said 'Contribution points' but instead said 'Alchemy Achievements'.

Alex quickly went to the front side of it to check if the ranking was still there, and it was. It seemed the rock showed two different rankings, and he had missed the backside because he was too hasty at going to the disciple hall.

He went back to check the names on the backside. Wan Li was still in the first place, Zhou Mei was still in second place, however, Fan Ruogang was not in third place but instead the fourth place.

The third place was instead occupied by someone named Song Zun. The name Song Zun was nowhere to be found in the contribution point's list's top 20 names.

This made Alex quite befuddled. The term 'Alchemy Achievements' was very vague for Alex to know what the rankings were based on.

"Guess I will learn it later, " he thought and decided to go to the library. As he was about to leave, a name caught his eye.

Yu Ming.

After a while, he left. He made his way back to the library where the elder was taking in the different disciple's nameplates while giving others back.

He walked up to the elder with a nameplate in his hand.

"Nameplate," the elder said absentmindedly. Alex handed him his new nameplate.

The elder instinctively took the nameplate and brought it up to his head, and frowned. He jolted out of his absentmindedness and looked at Alex.

"Hey boy. Why don't you have a single contribution point?" he asked.

"Elder, I am new to the sect. I joined today, so I haven't done anything to earn contribution points yet." Alex said nervously. Was this man going to turn him back? He was worried.

"If you don't have contribution points, then you can't enter boy. Everything in here costs contribution points to borrow. The better the book, the more it costs. Even the cheapest ones cost at least 100 points. "

"So go to the contribution hall and take some missions. Earn some points, and only then come back. Doing anything else will be a waste of your time." The man said as he handed Alex back his nameplate.

Alex didn't immediately take back his nameplate. Instead, he started saying,

"Elder, I might not have any contribution points at the moment. However ..." he opened his inventory and brought out the metal token," I have this. I was told that I could pick any Earth grade or lower book for free from the Library."

"Hmm..." the elder squinted. "A silver library token?" the elder was surprised. He didn't even see a bronze token normally, but to think a silver token was here.

"How did you get this boy?" he asked Alex.

"Elder Lang gave this to me this morning." He replied truthfully.

"An outer sect disciple getting a silver library token huh. You must've done very well in the entrance exam then. " The elder mused. He then handed back the nameplate and the silver token and said,

"Alright, you can go in. Since you are an outer sect disciple, you can go anywhere up to the 5th floor. Pick whatever book you want in there. As long as the book is earth grade or lower, you can borrow it for a week for free."

Chapter 14: The Library

"Remember, you have 1 hour to look for whatever book you want. After 1 hour has passed, you will have to come out. If you stay in there for more than an hour, you will be fined for 10 contribution points for every 10 extra minutes you spend in there."

The elder gave him the last warning before sending him in.

Alex went into the library and was immediately amazed. The number of books in there was simply astronomical. There were dozens upon dozens of shelves each holding at least a thousand books of their own.

Alex was surprised at how many different books there were inside the library. "Do people really read all of these?" he wondered. He looked at the first book on the nearest shelf to him.

It was called [Sleeping Mantis Scythe]. He read a bit to learn what it was about. The [Sleeping Mantis Scythe] was a mortal ranked fighting technique that was specifically made for scythe users.

The technique could only be used if one had a scythe. Alex was surprised to even find a fighting technique here. He had assumed that there would only be Alchemy-related techniques in Hong Wu Sect's library.

He returned the first book to where it was and checked the second book. The second book was also [Sleeping Mantis Scythe].

"Huh... what's going on?" he was taken aback a bit. He looked at the third book, and it was still the [Sleeping Mantis Scythe].

The fourth, the fifth, all the way up to the twelfth were all [Sleeping Mantis Scythe].

Only on the thirteenth one did he find a new book called [Flickering Leopard]. This was a mortal-grade technique that could make a cultivator run as fast as a leopard could for small bursts of time.

There were once more 12 different [Flickering Leopard] books in the library. He finally understood why that was.

"I see. So they have a dozen copies of each book. They must've done it so that a student can borrow a book for a week, and the other student can also take the same book at the same time, and not worry about waiting for another week before getting a chance to borrow the said book."

He then went on to look at the rest of the books on the ground floor. All of the books on the ground floor were of mortal grade. So, he decided to skip them and went up to the first floor.

The first floor had some good techniques, but they were all still of mortal grade.

"Is there no techniques for alchemy here? Why are all the books related to fighting?" he wondered. He wanted to learn alchemy, but somehow he could only find battle techniques in the library.

Finally, on the second floor did he find his first alchemy technique. It was a mortal grade technique called the [Swirling Mists] technique. It focused on moving the ingredients inside the cauldron in a spiral manner before condensing them to form a pill.

The technique felt hard, and not so useful to Alex. It was nothing but a fancy method of forming pills, and not very helpful to the entire alchemy itself.

He left the technique where it was and walked around the 2nd floor looking for other different alchemy techniques. He found a few others, but most of them were either forming pills or increasing their efficiency at the last second. While they did look promising, they were all mortal-grade techniques, so Alex skipped on them.

Finally, walking up to the third floor, he saw his first earth-grade technique. Granted it was a battle technique, he was still happy to see an earth-grade technique after a literal slew of mortal-grade techniques.

He walked around the third floor and found a particularly weird technique. The technique was a mortal grade technique, but, it was neither a battle technique nor an alchemy-related technique. It was actually a formation-building technique.

He read it with particular interest. The formation was called [Qi Gathering Formation]. Its function was to gather Qi from spirit stones placed inside the formation to a single spot and make it many times faster for the cultivator to absorb the qi in them.

Alex liked the idea of having a formation technique, but he needed to get an alchemy technique first.

"I should earn a bunch of contribution points and come back to get these books," he said to himself. He searched around for other books.

He found another unusual book. This time it was an artifact refining technique. While artifacts did sell as well as pills in the outside world, Alex would still choose an alchemy book right now.

After getting an alchemy technique, and getting into an alchemy-focused sect, it would be a joke if he decided to learn artifact refining technique here.

He couldn't find any good techniques on the third floor, so he went up to the fourth floor. This was the last floor he was allowed to enter. If he didn't find any good techniques here as well, he would have to leave empty-handed.

His one-hour time was close to being up, so he hastily started looking for good alchemy techniques. Most if not all of the techniques on the fourth floor were of the earth grade, so he didn't have to worry about getting a low-grade technique.

He searched and searched, but couldn't find one he was satisfied with. Finally, he found one but it was a mortal grade technique. He was about to instinctively skip it, but he stopped.

It was a mortal-grade technique, but the reason why Alex was interested was simple. He read the techniques name,

" Flame Mastery Scripture. Grade Mortal. Growth." That was it. Similar to his amazing mortal grade [Alchemy God's Knowledge] technique, this was also a Growth type technique.

Chapter 15: Flame Mastery Scripture

[Flame Mastery Scripture

Grade: Mortal (Growth)

Freely control flames to your wishes.]

Alex read the panel that had popped up in front of him. The physical book itself only mentioned the technique being in Mortal grade. However, when he viewed it through the system, it actually mentioned a growth element along with the grade as well.

His technique hadn't grown past level 1 so he still didn't know what growth exactly did to the techniques, but if he were to go by how good [Alchemy God's Knowledge] was, [Flame Mastery Scripture] would also be a great technique.

An hour had passed since he had entered here. So, he took the [Flame Mastery Scripture] and left the fourth floor. He soon reached the entrance to the library.

He went to the elder and said, "Elder, I wish to take this with me." He brought the scripture forward and handed it to the elder.

The elder took the book and looked at it for a few seconds. He was surprised. He turned to look at Alex and asked, "Are you sure you want this? If you have run out of time, you can come back tomorrow to check for more."

He didn't think Alex would actually bring out a Mortal grade technique when he was free to choose any earth grade technique.

"It's an okay elder. I didn't run out of time. I chose to take it." Alex insisted on taking the book.

"Very well then. I guess this is not a bad book. It's at least one of the better ones in the Mortal grade. Especially since you can use it in both Alchemy and Battle." The Elder said.

'I knew it. So I in fact can use it for both.' He thought.

"Alright, give me your token, and nameplate." The elder said as he brought forth his hands.

Alex opened his inventory and took out both the token and nameplate. He then handed it to the elder.

The elder took the nameplate to his head and closed his eyes. Then he took out a talisman from somewhere and brought it to his forehead as well.

"Alright. You can go now. I have recorded your information for today. You can have the book for a week. A week from now you will have to return the book in perfect condition."

"If you fail to return the book in time, you will have to pay 50 contribution points for each additional day you don't return it. And if you somehow end up destroying the book, you will have to pay the book's worth in contribution points." The elder gave him a warning as he returned his nameplate.

"Thank you, Elder" Alex walked out of the library into the crowded streets of the sect valley.

"Hmm... Oh! It's nearly 7. Wow, have I already been in the game for 3 hours?" Alex didn't want to return to his cottage as it was quite far, and it was an uphill journey.

"What happens if I logout out of the streets?" he wanted to try it, but quickly dismissed the idea.

"No, I won't be able to explain to people how I disappear and appear so randomly. Let's just find an empty spot and log out." Alex walked to the side of a building, to a dark alley that wasn't populated.

He looked around to see if anyone was there, and once he saw no one was visible, he logged out.

Alex got out of his bed and waited for the others to log out as well. Once they all logged out, they went to have their dinner and returned.

As soon as they got back, they jumped onto their beds and logged into the game. Alex didn't hesitate to do so either.

Once he logged in he found himself in the same dark alley he had logged out of. He walked out of the alley in the main streets.

He opened his map and looked for something. He needed contribution points for everything in the sect, to begin with, so he had decided to earn some right now.

According to the elder in the library, you could earn contribution points by doing missions given out by the sect. So, he was now looking for the 'Contribution Hall' on the map.

He soon found it on the map. It was about 5 minutes walk away from where he was, so he started walking towards it.

The sky was dark now, and the star had come out. The moon was a bit above the horizon too. The sect valley had started glowing up in a yellowish tinge with all the different lanterns they had put out to light the streets, and buildings.

The night was just as beautiful as the day, perhaps even more so.

Although night had come, somehow, the disciples had grown in number in the streets compared to the day. Finally, Alex reached the Contribution Hall.

In front of him was a massive building with huge corridors, jam-packed with disciples. The contribution hall had 3 floors as well, separated for the outer sect, the inner sect, and the core disciples.

He walked into the massive corridors of the contribution hall and found multiple boards hung up on each side of the wall. Each with texts written on it.

Although the board looked like a normal wooden board, for some reason, this board also had the same magical property as the rankings rock in that it too had magically appearing and vanishing texts.

He started looking through the texts and started reading them.

[Help Sweep the sect valley - 5 points]

[Buy foods from the city - 3 points]

[Run errands for inner sect disciple Gu Zan - 7 points]

[Help make ...]

So on and so forth. There were thousands of menial tasks that one could do here to get some contribution points. Alex started to look through them all.

Chapter 16: Taking A Mission

The tasks in the contribution hall were mostly given out by either the sect, the inner sect disciples, or the core disciples. There was not a single task that gave more than 10 points in the whole board.

After looking at the different tasks, Alex found that there were only 2 tasks that truly interested him. The first one was to kill and bring back some monster corpses, along with any other objects he found. The second one was to become an alchemist's aid.

The first one gave points depending on how strong the monster was. While the second one said to give hourly points.

He wanted to take them both. He looked around to see if there were anyone that he could ask to take the missions. But to his surprise, there was no one.

"Huh... how am I supposed to take the missions then?" he wondered. He looked around to see what the other disciples were doing. Most of them were just standing near the boards doing nothing.

After a while, they would leave, which confused Alex even more.

He stopped one of the disciples that were leaving, and asked them,

"Hello brother. Can you please tell me how I can take these missions?"

The disciple looked back, and asked in a confused manner, " is this your first time?"

"Yes, I only joined the sect today," Alex answered without hesitation.

"Oh. It's very easy. Take your nameplate and put it on one of those holders there. You can choose up to 3 missions to take at once." The disciple answered and left.

Alex looked towards the board once more, and this time saw multiple rectangular cutouts at the bottom of the board.

"Are those indentations for the nameplate?" he thought. He walked up to one of the open ones and put his nameplate in there. Suddenly, a panel appeared in front of him with all the different tasks available on the board.

For some reason, however, neither of the 2 tasks he wanted to take was on the task list. "What's going on?" he wondered.

He searched for a few more minutes, but he still couldn't find one. Confused he decided to ask someone again.

He stopped a female disciple who was just leaving and asked,

"Hello sister, can I ask you a question?"

The girl seemed to be an outer sect disciple but had an air of elegance to her. She didn't seem to be much older than him but seemed very mature for her age.

"What do you want to ask junior brother?" she asked.

"You see, I wanted to take those 2 missions, but I can't find them anywhere when I put my nameplate in the carvings. Can you tell me what's wrong?" he asked while pointing to the 2 missions he wanted to take.

"Hmm... " she turned to look at what the 2 missions he wanted to take were. When she finally saw the two tasks, she laughed a little.

"Of course, you won't find them, junior brother, they are permanent mission after all." She said as if the information she just gave was a matter of fact.

"Permanent?" he looked confused.

"What? Don't tell me you have never seen a permanent mission before?" she asked. It was her time to be surprised.

"I am new to the sect, so I don't know what that means, sister." He said.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Permanent missions just mean that anyone can earn points from them, and you don't have to take the missions here. They are usually the ones where the points are not set. For example, you can just go to the sect market, a few minutes away from here, and sell monster corpses directly. "

"You don't have to go through the hassle of taking the task and only then going to sell the corpses every time you want to sell them. Similarly, you can just go to the Alchemy Hall and tell them you want to be an alchemist's aid. "

"You only need to take the missions for specific ones where there would be a contradiction if 2 people were to do the same mission at the same time. I hope that helped junior brother. Now if you will excuse me, I have a mission to complete." She said as she left the contribution hall.

Alex stood there and looked at the board once more. "So I don't need to take these two missions huh. Then should I take something else?"

He started looking through the mission board once more. Finally, something caught his eyes.

[Find a dwarf berry for inner sect disciple Kong Yuhan: 8 contribution points]

"A dwarf berry? Isn't that what I got from the eastern forest?" he quickly opened his inventory to check. A Dwarf Berry was in fact in there.

"Alright then, I will take this mission." He put his nameplate back in the carvings of the mission board and quickly navigated through loads of missions to find this specific mission.

The nameplate shined a little to inform that the mission had been accepted. Alex looked back to the board and found the mission was no longer there.

He looked at his nameplate, something more seemed to have been added to it. He focused on the nameplate a bit, and a new set of information popped up.

——————-

[Hong Wu Sect

Outer Sect Disciple

Yu Ming

Contribution Points: 0

Go to the inner sect disciple mountain, and look for Kong Yuhan after you have completed the mission.

Reward: 8 contribution points

]

—————-

"The inner sect disciple mountain huh. Where is it again?" Alex opened his map to look for the direction to the inner sect disciples mountain.

The mountain was southwest from he was currently. He walked out of the contribution hall into the brilliantly lit road of the sect. He looked around in admiration at how good everything looked.

After making sure everything was set, he made his way to the inner sect disciple's mountain.

Chapter 17: Mission Complete

Alex walked slowly in the beautifully lit streets of the sect valley. Hundreds of other disciples were walking around doing their own things.

They had also taken missions from the contribution hall and were on their way to do different tasks. He realized, however, that there were a lot fewer inner sect disciples and core disciples around at night times.

"Is it because they only work during the day, and need to sleep at night?" he wondered. He felt bad for the outer sect disciples who weren't free enough to do what they wanted, whenever they wanted.

After remembering he was also an outer sect disciple, he just laughed and shook his head.

After a while, he had come to the entrance to the inner sect mountain.

"Do I just go in?" he wondered. The rulebook clearly mentioned that going to the inner sect mountain for the outer sect disciples was forbidden.

"How am I going to complete my mission then?" he got confused. He looked at the information about the nameplate, and it clearly mentioned going to the inner sect disciple's mountain and looking for Kong Yuhan.

"Whatever. If I get in trouble, I will just tell them I did what the mission told me to." He started walking inside.

"Hey you, stop." A voice came from the side. Hidden in the darkness near the entrance was a small cottage-like open building. A man walked out of the building and stood in front of him.

The man looked at his clothing and asked, "Aren't you an outer sect disciple? What are you doing here?"

Alex looked at the man carefully and realized he was wearing a green robe with silver linings along the side. 'An Elder!' he was surprised.

"Good evening, Elder. I came here to complete my mission." He told the elder honestly.

"Hmm... Mission? Let me check your nameplate." He asked for the nameplate. Alex swiftly handed the nameplate to the elder.

The elder brought the nameplate to his forehead and closed his eyes for a few seconds. Once he had verified that Alex had indeed come here with a mission, he took out a medallion from his inner robes.

Alex looked at the medallion curiously. It looked similar to the one the disciple in the disciple hall had, but yet somehow different. This medallion seemed to be made up of expensive material.

The elder brought the medallion to his forehead and closed his eyes once more.

After a few seconds, he opened his eyes and spoke, " Wait here, I have called Kong Yuhan. He will be here soon."

This surprised Alex. 'He called the disciple from here? Does that medallion function like a phone?' he wondered. A few minutes later Alex saw someone coming down.

The disciple who just came down was a man in his early 20s and was wearing the inner sect disciple's robes. He was at least a head taller than Alex and had better muscles as well.

His hair somehow seemed blue, even in the darkness. 'This must be Kong Yuhan' Alex thought.

"Disciple Yuhan greets elder Zhang. Why has elder Zhang summoned me?" he spoke in a very formal manner. Alex focused on the newcomer a bit more to see if his hair was really blue or not.

'Woah' he got surprised. Something unexpected popped up. Above Kong Yuhan's head, a set of words popped up.

[Organ Tempering 9th Realm]

'Wow, that's 2 entire realms ahead of me.' Alex was surprised. He then tried to see if it worked on the elder too. Something did pop up, but it just said [Mortal]

'Mortal?' that was impossible. He didn't believe anyone who was still a mortal could be part of the sect, let alone be an elder. 'Does that mean that he is so strong that I can't even tell what realm he is in?' that was the only logical answer for Alex.

"This outer sect disciple is here to complete the mission you had given to the contribution hall." The elder pointed towards Alex as he spoke to Kong Yuhan.

Kong Yuhan's eyes popped up a bit when he heard that. He looked at Alex with a sudden turn of his head. Inside his eyes, Alex could see a mixture of shock, excitement, and hope.

He practically ran as he came to stand in front of Alex, and asked with a shaky voice, "Ju-Junior Brother, Is- is it true that you found a dwarf berry?" he asked.

Alex didn't expect that an inner sect disciple would be this excited for something that grew in the forest nearby. He brought out the berry from his inventory and handed it to Kong Yuhan.

"Brother Kong, I hope this is what you were searching for. "

Kong Yuhan looked at the berry in his hand absentmindedly. Only after a while did he realize what he was holding.

"Oh, OH!, yes. This is exactly what I had been searching for." He said happily. " A 10-year-old Dwarf Berry." Kong Yuhan seemed to have not expected such an old berry.

He slowly started walking back towards his home.

"Disciple Kong." A stern voice came from the side that jolted Kong Yuhan out of his trance.

"Yes Elder?" he asked the elder.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" the elder said as he gestured towards the standing Alex.

Kong Yuhan looked back and immediately started apologizing. " I'm so sorry, junior disciple. I was so happy to get the berry, that I forgot my manner. Here, give me your nameplate, let me pay you for the berry."

Alex handed him his nameplate. Kong Yuhan took out his own nameplate and put them together, and pressed them to his head. After a while, he returned Alex's nameplate back to him.

Alex checked the nameplate.

[Hong Wu Sect, Outer Sect Disciple, Yu-Ming. Contribution Points: 10]

"Hmm... Brother Kong, there seem to be 2 more points than the reward in the mission." He said.

"That's intentional. I had put up that mission almost a month ago. I was stuck in a bottleneck forever and needed a 2-year-old berry. They were very hard to come by. However, you brought me one, that too a 10-year-old berry. Of course, I am going to give you a little extra."

Chapter 18: Flame Mastery Practice

Alex stood there stupefied looking at the 10 points in his nameplate. An outer sect disciple was required to earn at least 20 points every week. He had earned 10 in less than an hour.

"Good night elder." He said as he left the mountain back towards the sect valley. Along the way, he started to wonder.

"Do I go earn some more points? Or do I got to learn the flame controlling technique I got from the library?"

He was in a dilemma. "Hmm... I already have some contribution points, it might be more useful to have at least one technique before I go to aid any alchemists."

"Alright. That settles it then. I'm going to learn the flame controlling technique." He said and started walking back to his cottage in the outer sect disciple's mountain.

He soon reached his cottage and opened his door. To his surprise, there was light inside his cottage. "Did someone come in?" he wondered.

There was a lantern hanging in the middle of the empty room, illuminating his room with flickering light. There was no one inside.

'Who lit the lantern?' he thought.

He sat down on his small bed and took out the technique from his inventory. He looked at it once more.

[Flame Mastery Scripture]

As he focused on the book a little more, a panel popped up.

[Do you want to learn ]

He instinctively brought up his hands to click the 'Learn' button, but stopped. 'Wait. What happens if I learn it? do I lose the book?'

Every cultivation method and technique he had learned up to this point had been from the inventory. And after learning them, the source had always disappeared.

He started to get worried. If he really did lose the book, he would have to pay a massive amount of fines to the sect in the form of contribution points. He didn't want that.

'Why don't I learn it like everyone else then?' he flipped the book open and started to read it.

The book seemed to be written in ineligible alphabets, but for some reason, when he saw it, he understood what they meant. In fact, reading these ineligible words was much faster in his opinion.

Within 15 minutes, he finished reading the whole book.

Alex looked at the intact book in his hand and sighed in relief. "Thank god that worked."

"Techniques," he said as a panel of learned techniques opened in front of him with 2 items in it. The first one was obviously the [Alchemy God's Knowledge]. The second one was the newly added [Flame Mastery Scripture].

He clicked on it and opened its description.

[Flame Mastery Scripture: Level 1

Grade: Mortal (Growth)

Level 1:

Unlocked: Can freely control existing fire and influence its temperature

Level 2 locked.

]

He had yet to learn how he could level up a skill. He looked at the description and realized he needed fire to control it in the first place. Thankfully, the fire was everywhere during the nighttime.

All the lanterns around the sect were lit with fire. Same for the lantern in his room. He stood up and slowly brought down the lantern from the very low ceiling.

He put it on the ground and took off the lantern's covering. Inside was a metal plate with a ball of fire floating on top of it.

"Wow. How does this work?" he wondered. There was a lot of magical stuff in the sect, and he was happy to see them.

"Okay. So how do I use the technique?" he wondered. He somehow hadn't thought of this point.

"Flame Mastery Scripture" he shouted hoping to get a reaction. Nothing happened. He looked at the technique list to see if there was a 'use' button. There wasn't.

He was now confused. How was he to use a technique then?

"Hmm... if the developers really went for as much realism in the game as possible, then there is no way using a technique should be so simple."

Not even fighting was simple in this game. To even fight a normal snake he had to...

"Wait. What happens if I go into that weird time slowed state."

He looked at the flame and started to focus. Suddenly, time started to slow down. The small ball of fire floating in the center looked ever so vibrant. It's light shining brighter than ever.

He could feel the increase in the temperature of his surrounding, and how the hot air was moving up. He could smell the minute particles in the air burning and leave an almost unnoticeable smell.

He ignored all of those senses and focused only on the fire. He looked at the fire and saw it the same way as he ever did.

But, for some reason now, he could feel the fire as well. It was almost like he could touch the fire, without actually touching it. He slowly brought forth his hand and stopped a few centimeters away from the fire.

As if he was born with the knowledge, he started moving a sort of energy in his body. "Is that my Qi?" he wondered. His Qi was all over the body in small amounts in every single vessel.

He instinctively started moving the Qi in a certain path. Within a few seconds, the Qi had gathered in one spot, his hands. He could see the space in front of his hands fluctuate, as tiny invisible Qi came out of them.

As the Qi touched the fire, he thought of turning the ball of fire into a candle flame-like oval shape. As if understanding his commands, the fire slowly started to change its form. It started twisting and turning until it finally came to a stop in the oval shape of a candle flame.

Chapter 19: More Practice

Alex looked at the oval flame and thought, "Did I do it?" suddenly, he lost his concentration, and the oval flame went back to being a ball of flames.

"Awww... I think that was it. Let's try once more." He tried to do it once more. He went back to the slowed time state and began to feel all the Qi inside his body.

He moved the Qi according to what the technique required until it appeared out of his palms. As the invisible Qi touched the flames, he had to just think of what he wanted to do with the flames and it would happen.

For now, he could only change the shape of the flames. That transformation too took about 5 seconds to complete. He slowly did it more and more, until he was able to change the shapes within 2 seconds.

Of course, the shapes he could create were rudimentary shapes, like Oval, or spherical, or spiral, and other simpler shapes. Making figures out of the fire was impossible for him to do right now.

After becoming a little more proficient in the shape-changing aspect of the technique, he moved on to the temperature aspect of it.

Once again, he focused and brought his Qi into his hands and sent it to the fire. However, instead of thinking of a new shape, he thought about increasing the temperature of the flame.

"The flame's highest temperature is 816 Celsius, while the lowest temperature is at 316 Celsius." He could somehow instinctively tell the temperature of the flames.

He was unsure if he got this ability from the [Alchemy God's Knowledge] or [Flame Mastery Scripture]. If he had to guess, he would guess the second one.

He thought of increasing the lowest temperature, and decreasing the highest temperature so that the temperature would be a constant 500 Celsius everywhere.

The minute color differences in the fire suddenly turned to a steady color with no changes. The fire also stopped fluctuating in temperature as it came to be a steady 500 C.

He could feel it. He had succeeded. He quickly focused back and didn't let his concentration waver. Slowly he started to change the temperature.

He made the temperature of the fire go down to 300 C. He succeeded at it. He then made the temperature go up to 900 C. He also succeeded in that.

He brought the temperature back to 500 C. Now, he tried to change the shape of the fire, while keeping the temperature constant.

He tried to turn the fire into a spiral shape but quickly lost his control over the temperature. As soon as he brought his concentration back on the temperature, he lost his control on the shape of the fire.

"Doing both at once is going to be really hard, isn't it?" he thought. He slowly started to train. Through multiple failures, he was finally successful at forming his first oval flame with 500 Celsius.

He practiced for an hour. He was getting the hang of the technique.

He practiced for another hour, he was getting better at the technique.

By the third hour, he could change both the shape and the temperature into whatever he desired within seconds. While he couldn't do a lot with the shape, he could still make a lot of geometrical figures without a problem.

He tried to control the fire once more. He tried to move his Qi to his hands but realized he couldn't anymore. He didn't have any Qi left.

"I should have know when I ran out of my Qi." He thought. Unlike his excess Qi, his normal amounts of Qi weren't shown by the system, and he had to know when he was full or low on it just by the feeling of it.

He put the cover on the lantern and hung the lantern back on the ceiling. He then sat on the bench to refill his qi. He slowly focused on his breathing, and before he knew it, he was asleep. He was once more unconsciously cultivating.

However, he didn't immediately start to collect Qi this time. He had to first fill his empty body before he could store the Qi for breakthroughs.

At exactly, 6:30 AM he woke up. He was still in the game, sitting on the bed.

"Did I fall asleep once more?" he wondered. "Did I cultivate without knowing once more?" He thought as he quickly opened his status to check.

———————

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Muscle Tempering 6th Realm (35000 Qi: 100%) [Breakthrough]

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 72709

]

——————

"The next breakthrough is at 40K Qi huh. That's quite a lot." Now that his Qi was back to full, he wanted to try the Flame mastery once more. But to his dismay, the lantern flame had gone out.

"Guess I will just leave then." He quickly logged out of the game.

He freshened up and went to have his breakfast with the rest of his roommates. Afterward, none of them went back to the game as it was the first day of university classes.

Alex went to the university at 11 after having his lunch. Nothing special happened to the entire class. The classes were mostly introduction-focused, and less about studying on the first day.

He found out that Matt and Eric shared at least one course with him each. All of the classes today were the economic and business courses, so he wasn't really excited about them.

After the classes ended at 3 PM, he went to the cafeteria to have his afternoon lunch and went back to his room. He changed his clothes back to his casual shirt and pants, and without missing a beat, jumped back into the game.

Chapter 20: Sect Market

Alex opened his eyes back in his cottage. He looked up at the ceiling, but as expected, the lantern was still out.

"I should find other sources of fire. Maybe I should just go buy some matches or whatever equivalent this game has for making fires."

He stood up and walked outside. He saw the same scene as yesterday. Dozens of disciples going on about their daily lives.

He didn't need to open his map this time, he knew how to get to the sect valley. After a few minutes of walking, he reached the sect valley.

He still wasn't used to seeing hundreds of disciples running about in what was basically a small-sized city. He had two things to do here today.

The first thing he needed to do was sell all those monsters he killed in the forest the other day. According to the female senior, he met yesterday, he had to sell the items in the sect market.

He opened the map to check where it was. He quickly located it next to the Disciple Hall on the map, so he walked towards there.

In just a few minutes, he was in front of the sect market. Looking at what was in front of him truly surprised him, as it was nowhere close to what he had been expecting.

He had been expecting a massive building just like all the other buildings he had been to. Except, the sect market was nothing like it.

In front of him was a long road that was at least 200 m long. And all over the side of the roads were disciples laying objects in front of them, trying to sell them.

There were 3 or 4 properly set stalls that Alex could tell were set up by the sect itself as the owner of those stalls had silver linings in their green robes. They were run by sect elders.

He walked up to one of the stalls. There were a few disciples in front of him waiting for their turn to buy or sell their stuff. Eventually, his turn arrived.

"Are you here to buy or sell?" the elder in the stall asked. The elder seemed quite old, at least in his late 40s. There were signs of wrinkles on his face, and his beard and hair had a lot of white streaks on them.

"I am here to sell, Elder," Alex replied respectfully.

"All right, give me what you have." The elder said as he prepared the table in front of him for the items.

"Umm, Elder, I am here to sell monster corpses, so this table won't be enough," Alex said seeing the little space on top of the table.

"Oh." The elder said as his eyes perked up a bit. He brought out a small storage bag and handed it to Alex. " Alright then, put them here."

Alex took the storage bag and opened his inventory. Aside from the alchemy materials, there were exactly 27 items related to his hunt in the eastern forest. 12 of those were corpses. 11 Skin tempering realm corpses, and 1 Muscle Tempering realm corpses.

He didn't know if the other materials were alchemy materials or not, so he decided to just sell them. The monster cores as well would give him too low Qi if he ate it like a pill, so he decided to sell it too.

He wanted to eat the earth snake's core, but the snake was only at Muscle Tempering 3rd Realms so he didn't bother to. Even if he got 2 realms worth of Qi, that was just a night of sleep for him.

All in all, he sold all 27 items. He put them all in the storage bag and returned them to the elder.

The elder took the bag and looked at it. Within seconds, his eyes went wide. Most of the disciples that came to sell monster corpses only had 2 or 3 at most.

Since the sect was alchemy-focused, the disciples usually didn't bother killing monsters and just bought the materials instead. However, this disciple had just brought back 12 corpses and was also selling their cores and materials.

"Are you sure you want to sell it all?" the elder asked. Most disciples tended to keep the cores and materials as they were important alchemy materials. The elder was surprised to see a disciple that was selling it all.

"Yes," Alex said without hesitation. He had no idea about the usefulness of the cores and materials, as he still believed alchemy only needed plants and herbs.

The elder looked at the items he had on him and started calculating. He spoke in a low voice, "Let's see. 11 points for 11 corpses, 5 points for 1 corpse, 14 points for the cores, 10 points for the other core, 14 points for the material, and 10 points for the venom."

"So, a total of... 78 points" the elder stopped mumbling.

"Give me your nameplate," he asked Alex.

Alex was ready with the nameplate, so he handed it to him. Unlike the other elders and disciples, he didn't bring the nameplate to his forehead, and instead just kept it in his hand.

"Alright, here you go. You have been credited 78 contribution points. Good job young man." The elder congratulated him and handed his nameplate back.

'Huh! 78 points? How?' he was dumbfounded. He looked at his nameplate, and he indeed had 88 total points now. 'Damn, so I can just sell monster corpses here, and I can get enough points to survive for the week, huh' he thought to himself.

He took his nameplate and left the stall. He was about to leave the sect market altogether when he noticed something at one of the street vendors.

Something had caught his eyes. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, something had caught his ... feelings?

Chapter 21: Yellow Rock

Alex had a similar feeling to the one he had when finding the [Spirit Cleansing Lily]. However, this feeling was somehow completely different in both type and origin.

For starters, the feeling he had for the [Spirit Cleansing Lily] originated from somewhere in his mind. Something in his mind had slightly nudged him into thinking that was a good item.

However, this time, the feeling originated from his body. His entire body was reacting as a hungry lion that had just seen an injured deer. His body was ready to pounce on it.

He went towards the vendor to look at what the item really was. The vendor was an outer sect disciple and there were several items that she was selling.

Out of all of them, the one that Alex was interested in was a small, smooth but jagged piece of yellow rock.

"Hello sister, can you tell me what this yellow rock is?" he asked the vendor.

The girl looked at Alex and said, "I don't really know what it is. It was constantly warm so I thought it must've been something good, and chose to sell it. Why? You want it?" she looked at Alex expectantly.

"Yes, I do sister. How much do you want for this?" he asked.

"100 points. No bargaining," she said without hesitation.

'I don't have 100 points though' Alex was confused as to what to do.

Seeing his frowned face, the outer sect disciple got more confident in her attitude and said, " If you don't have the points, then go away. Let other people look at my stuff."

"I only have 88 points right now sister. Is there any way to lower the price?" he asked hoping she would drop it. He was already finding it hard to stand near the stone without grabbing it immediately and shoving it in his mouth.

"No can do. If you don't have 100 points, then go away." The girl closed her eyes after saying this and started meditating.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "While I don't have the full 100 points, would you accept some alchemy materials, sister?" he asked

The girl opened one eye and looked curiously as she said, "Depends". Alex immediately rejoiced and brought out 4 different alchemy materials he found in the forest.

There were normal materials that he had come across in the forest. The girl looked at the items and was surprised.

"You are going to give me those 4 materials, and 88 points?" she asked inquisitively.

"Yes, sister," Alex replied with zero hesitation.

"Okay, it's yours," she said as she handed him the yellow rock, and her nameplate. Alex took both of the items. The yellow rock was too irresistible, so he immediately kept it in his inventory.

That helped quite a bit. He no longer had the impulse to eat the stone at once. He looked at the other item in his hand, the girl's nameplate.

He had to transfer 88 points to her, but he didn't know how to. He decided to do the same thing Kong Yuan had done and put his and her nameplate together.

He focused on them a bit and got the option to transfer contribution points. He unhesitatingly passed 88 points into the girl's nameplate.

He then handed her nameplate back to her, along with the 4 alchemy material. He said his goodbye and went out of the sect market.

His second work in the sect valley was to learn how to become an alchemist's aid. But, he now had to wait until he found out what the yellow rock was.

He had just left his cottage half an hour ago, and now he was back in it. He sat on his bed and got comfortable. He then opened his inventory and brought out the yellow rock.

The yellow rock looked like a normal piece of rock. It was both smooth and jagged in shape. It was smaller than a spirit stone in size and wasn't translucent either.

The yellow in the rock was truly yellow, and not some cloudy yellow inside the rock similar to a spirit stone.

Once the rock was on his hand, the urge to eat it appeared once more. His mind was being the reasonable one and telling him not to do something stupid as eating a rock.

But his body's urge to eat the rock was too big for him to ignore. He decided to go with the body on this one, and reluctantly, ate it.

The moment the stone touched his tongue, it melted into a hot, scalding liquid that traveled down his throat. However, even though it was scalding hot, he didn't feel any pain.

Once the liquid reached his stomach, it started to distribute to every corner of his body.

Suddenly, his body started to hurt like hell. It felt like his entire body was submerged in a tub of boiling lava, that was also somehow injected into his veins.

This was the worst pain he had ever felt in both real life and the game. It took five minutes for the pain to slowly start to disappear.

As the pain subsided, all that remained in his body was power and vigor. He could sense that the amount of Qi his body could store had increased substantially, as well as that the yang qi was dozens if not more times stronger than normal Qi.

He could easily tell that he was twice as strong as he was before.

Chapter 22: Alchemy Hall

Alex made a fist with his hands and was shocked at how much strength he could feel in them. The pain he had just felt, the transformation of his normal Qi into Yang Qi, had also in some minor ways changed his physical body as well.

While he was still at Muscle Tempering 7th Realm, he could tell that he was ever so slightly stronger. He wanted to check what changes his new form of qi brought to his techniques.

But alas, there was no fire around to see if anything had changed.

Grrrrrr

His stomach cried out hunger. The inner transformation had left him feeling a little peckish.

"Now that I think about it, I'm surprised I have gone so long without feeling hungry or thirsty. Does being a cultivator make you no longer need a lot of sustenance?" he wondered.

He looked at the clock and realized it was only 4 PM. There were still 3 hours before dinner time. There was no homework, so he was free to do whatever he wanted today.

He decided to go eat something in the sect valley but stopped.

"Wait, doesn't food cost contribution points as well?" he quickly checked the rulebook and he could in fact not eat anything without contribution points.

Even the cheapest stuff cost about 2 contribution points. Also, he couldn't leave the sect without permission from an elder, so there was no way to go to the city to get something to eat.

'Sigh. I guess it's time to go work now.' He got out of his cottage. He walked back to the valley. This time, however, he needed to go to the Alchemy Hall.

He quickly checked the map and found it. He thought he would be jaded by now, seeing all the different massive halls, but, he was still surprised when he saw the Alchemy Hall. Perhaps more than everything else he had seen in the sect valley.

The Alchemy hall wasn't just a simple building. It was located at the very corner of the sect valley and seemed to be carved into the sect leader's mountain.

It was a simple one-story building, but he couldn't tell how far into the mountain the hall went. He looked at the entrance of the hall and saw a bunch of light green robe-wearing disciples standing side by side.

Once in a while, an inner sect disciple would come, and pick one of the outer sect disciples and take them inside.

'Were the outer sect disciples standing here to be chosen as aid?' he wondered.

He walked up to a small station outside the hall where an elder was staying.

"Good afternoon elder. I wish to work as an Alchemist's aid. Can you tell me what I have to do?" he asked politely.

"Hmm...." The elder looked towards Alex and asked, "Is this your first time here?"

Alex was surprised. 'How did he know?' there shouldn't have been any clue yet the elder found out at once.

"Yes, elder. This is my first time." He said honestly.

"How good are you at recognizing ingredients?" the elder asked him.

Alex was surprised. That wasn't what he had expected the elder to ask him at all.

"I would say it's very good," Alex said, not knowing if that felt like he was bragging or just being honest.

The elder's eyes perked up at the answer. He reached into his storage bag and brought out 3 items.

One was a small, yellow fruit. The other was a strangely purple leaf. And the last one was a brown bark from a tree.

"What are these?" the elder simply asked him to name them.

Alex focused a little on the ingredients and their names popped upon them.

"They are Cat Eyed Berry, Purple Bane, and Forest Scale." He answered confidently.

"Correct," the elder put back the items and said," Go stand among your fellow disciples. If an inner sect disciple needs you, they will call for you."

"Thank you, elder," Alex left and stood in an open spot next to a female disciple.

He looked next to him and saw the female disciple fidgeting about, almost to the point that it looked like she was shaking.

"Are you okay, sister?" he asked.

The girl turned towards him. She was not the best-looking female he had seen, but she didn't look that bad. She had long black hair, and a small face with big eyes. And in those eyes were a small amount of fear.

"I'm fine," she took a deep breath and stopped fidgeting. " It's just that I haven't earned enough contribution points for the week, and if I don't earn 5 more points in the next 10 hours, I will be punished. I am just nervous that no one will pick me."

"Ah, I'm sure someone will pick you, sister." He said as he comforted her. They made some small talk before an inner sect disciple chose her as his aid, and went it.

Her eyes had gotten truly bright when she was chosen. He thought he would have to wait out here alone for now, when suddenly someone talked ahead of him.

"Eh, junior brother. Aren't you the same junior brother who completed my mission?" A voice came from in front of Alex.

Alex turned around to find a big, buff man in front of him. He looked at the person's face and thought he had seen it before.

"Ah.it's you Brother Kong. it's good to see you here. I almost didn't recognize you since I only saw you in the darkness of evening."

Yes, the man in front of him right now was Kong Yuhan, the inner sect disciple. The same person to whom he had sold his Dwarf Berry last night.

Chapter 23: The Task of an Aid

"What was your name again junior brother? Yu Ming?" Kong Yuhan asked.

Alex was surprised. He didn't remember ever telling him his name. He replied with a shocked expression, "That's right, brother Kong."

Kong Yuhan saw his shocked expression, and asked, "why do you look, shocked junior brother? Did you think I wouldn't recognize you just because I only saw you once? You brought me a very important ingredient. You are a benefactor to me, and this Kong always remembers his benefactors."

"Ah, no brother Kong. I was just surprised you somehow figured out my name. Even though I didn't remember you asking for my name." He replied honestly.

"Hmm. You didn't? Then I must've read it in your nameplate. Anyway, that doesn't matter right now. Are you working as an aid right now, junior brother Yu?" he asked.

'Oh! The nameplate. Of course.' Alex felt stupid for not realizing that.

"Yes. I am waiting for someone to pick me as an aid."

"Do you want to come with me?" Kong Yuhan asked.

Alex's eyes brightened. 'Finally' he thought.

"Yes, brother Kong. I would love to."

Kong Yuhan walked into the hall and brought Alex along with him. The inside of the Alchemy Hall was not what he had been expecting.

The inside of the hall looked like catacombs. It had a relatively narrow path that went straight for a dozen or more meters before splitting into 3 paths. Each of the paths had multiple rooms on each side of the path. The doors themselves were made of stone, similar to the walls.

Lanterns hung on the wall to light up the pathway. At the very entrance of the hall, there was a big white rock embedded into the walls. There were many small boxes that either lit up with red lights or green lights.

Alex looked at the carvings and immediately realized that this was the internal map of the Alchemy hall. Similar to all the other stones, and boards he had seen around the sect, this was also constantly changing forms, going from red to green, or green to red.

Kong Yuhan looked at the map once and saw a clump of green lights in an area. "Come on junior brother Yu. Let's go find ourselves an open room."

Kong Yuhan knew the path very well, so he simply walked straight through the maze-like the hallway and reached an open room. He walked into the room and waited for Alex to enter.

Alex walked in and was surprised to see the room. The room was bigger than his cottage and had a giant hole in the middle. A steady fire was burning inside the hole, and on top of it was a black cauldron, ready to be used.

Kong Yuhan took out his nameplate and placed it in a carving on the wall next to the open door. Suddenly, a massive block of stone came down from the open door and blocked it entirely.

He took the cauldron on top of the fire, and set it aside at a corner. He then took out his own cauldron and put it on top of the fire. His cauldron seemed to be made of a dirt-like brown color, but more polished than the black cauldron. It was without a doubt better than the other cauldron.

He waited for the cauldron to heat up and took out his storage bag. He then handed to storage bag to Alex.

Alex was confused now. What was he to do with the storage bag? He looked inside and saw a bunch of alchemy ingredients, including the dwarf berry. He decided to ask.

"Brother Kong, what do I do with this?"

"Huh, why are you asking? You should know this as an aid already." Kong Yuhan was surprised at the question as well,

"This is my first time working as an aid brother. I only joined the sect yesterday." Alex said as he laughed wryly.

Kong Yuhan frowned. "This is bad, brother. You should have let me know it was your first time. If you mess something up, I will be in big trouble."

Alex got a little worried as well. 'I should have tried to find out what an aid does before coming here as well.'

"What does an aid do brother Kong?" he asked.

Kong sighed, "The job itself is very simple, junior brother. You just have to give me the ingredients when I ask you to. The problem is that Alchemy requires near-perfect timing. So if you were to hinder my process by not being able to find an ingredient in time, I will fail in making the pill."

"And this pill is very important to me. I only have one set of ingredients, so if I mess up here, I won't be able to break through to the Meridian Tempering realm. I'm just worried that you won't be able to recognize what ingredient I ask, and be slow at delivering it."

Alex's eyes perked up when he heard this. "If it's just recognizing ingredients, then I am confident in being able to do that, brother Kong."

"Very well then junior brother, I shall trust you. The room already took my points, so there is no going back. Familiarize yourself with the pill ingredients and recipe in the bag," Kong Yuhan said as he closed his eyes and started meditating.

Alex looked inside the storage bag and found out there were 13 different items inside. 12 of them were the ingredients, while the last one was a talisman.

Alex took out the talisman and started to read it.

"Oh wow." He was surprised. He didn't expect to learn the recipe the moment he read it.

'This must be because of the feature of [Alchemy God's Knowledge] that says I can learn all recipes instantly.' He thought

Chapter 24: The Alchemy Process

He realized that the information on the talisman was already on his head and that he didn't require the talisman itself anymore. So he kept it back in the bag and looked at the other 12 ingredients.

Once he thought about the recipe, he somehow knew which ingredients he had to put in, at what time, at what temperature. The recipe had even mentioned how to move the ingredients inside the pot while performing alchemy.

"This is quite thorough," he thought.

After a few minutes, the cauldron started to make sounds, signifying that it was ready for alchemy.

Kong Yuhan opened his eyes and took a deep breath.

"Are you ready junior brother, I will start asking for the ingredients one after another?" He said.

"Yes," Alex replied with a single word.

"Very well then. Horn root grass." He said.

Alex knew [Horn Root Grass] was the first ingredient and was ready for it. Without missing a beat, he took out the Horn Root Grass and handed it to Kong Yuhan.

Kong Yuhan took the ingredient and put it inside the cauldron. Alex wanted to see how he would now follow the recipe and move the ingredient all around the cauldron for 2 minutes.

Kong Yuhan simply moved his right hand in a circular motion without using anything to move the horn root grass.

'He is using his Qi to move the ingredient? That doesn't look like a technique. Does that mean one can normally use Qi to move stuff?' Alex needed to test this as soon as he could.

But now was not the time. After nearly 2 minutes had passed, Alex took out the next ingredient, ready to hand it to Kong Yuhan.

Kong Yuhan called out the name and took the ingredient. He then put the ingredient into the cauldron. This brought a reaction out of Alex.

'NO!!' he internally shouted. 'There were still 2 more seconds left before the 2 minutes were over. He put it in too early.' But he didn't voice his opinion out loud as that might disturb Kong Yuhan out of his concentration.

He then gave him the next ingredient, which looked like a wilted leaf. Kong Yuhan increased the temperature of the fire and put in the wilted leaf.

'The fire is 10 degrees lower than what it should be.' Alex once again found a flaw in Kong Yuhan's process.

Similar things kept on happening with Kong Yuhan's process. Either he put in the ingredients too early, or put them in too late. Sometimes the fire wasn't at the right temperature, other times it changed too slowly.

He took out the last remaining item from the bag, the dwarf berry. Kong Yuhan was full of sweat, still concentrating on the alchemy and ready to put in the final ingredient.

He held out his hand and asked for the berry. He waited for the right moment and put in the berry.

'He timed it quite right this time.' Alex thought. He then looked as Kong Yuhan finally mixed his last ingredients in the cauldron.

All the ingredients had already lost their forms and turned into a bunch of powder by now. The dwarf berry was no different either and soon turned into powder.

Now came the final phase of the alchemy process, making the pill.

Kong Yuhan used a pill-forming technique and slowly brought the powders together to form a clump. He put Qi into the clump to slowly compress them into a ball.

After a few minutes, he had successfully formed a ball out of the clump, and thus successfully, formed a pill.

Kong Yuhan flicked his finger, and a small yellow pill flew out of it, into his hand. A magnificent burst of medicinal scents followed the pill.

Kong Yuhan looked at the pill with wide eyes. He was beyond happy to have succeeded.

Alex was also surprised to see the pill. He had expected Kong Yuhan to fail, given how many mistakes he had made during the alchemy process.

He focused his eyes on the small yellow pill. Suddenly a name popped up on the pill.

[Spirit Enhancing Pill]

He couldn't see its other information as he was not in contact with the pill. He wanted to ask Kong Yuhan to let him touch the pill but decided not to.

He walked forward towards Kong Yuhan.

"Congratulations, brother Kong. You succeeded in making the pill."

"Oh thank you, junior brother. I was quite skeptical about letting you be an aid, but you really helped me a lot." Kong Yuhan said with a big smile on his face.

"With this pill, I can finally break through to the Meridian Tempering realm. That would help me a lot on my path to becoming a better alchemist. Maybe it will even help me become a core disciple" Kong Yuhan started laughing a little.

"What are the requirements for being a Core disciple? If you don't mind me asking." Alex pried a little.

"Oh. Similar to how you have to make 10 different mortal grade pills for becoming an inner sect disciple, you have to make 20 different 20% harmony mortal grade pills for becoming a core disciple." Kong Yuhan said.

"Oh. That seems quite hard. Making 20 different near-earth-grade pills must be quite a task." Alex said.

"They sure are. However, if you manage to make a single Earth Grade pill, the sect will immediately make you a core disciple. That's how Wan Li became a core disciple too." He said.

'Wan Li, that was the name of the First place holder in the rankings, wasn't it?' Alex thought.

"Oh, then what is the harmony level of your current pill brother?" Alex asked.

"Ah, let me see." He focused on the pill for a bit and said, "well, it definitely isn't an earth grade. It's still a mortal-grade pill for sure. Let me check the exact numbers though."

He then reached into his storage bag and brought out a glass beaker with a metal plate on the bottom.

Chapter 25: Formations

Alex looked at the weird-looking glass beaker and wondered what it was. The glass beaker was small, wide at the bottom, and narrow at the top. It had a circular metal place at its base.

The metal plate was on the outside of the breaker and looked magical with intricate designs. The glass itself had a single black line going across it vertically. There were small dots, along the side of the black line.

Kong Yuhan took his pill and dropped it into the beaker. He then focused as he poured his Qi into the metal part of the beaker. The beaker started to slowly fog up.

At the base of the glass beaker, the mist slowly appeared. The mist appeared on the outer edge of the metal, and it started to mist the glass itself.

Slowly, the mist rose up and started appearing more and more on the glass beaker .it had started at the bottom, and was moving upwards.

After a few seconds, it stopped moving and showed no other signs. Kong Yuhan looked closely at the black dot, next to the black line where the mist had stopped forming.

"Aww... it stopped at 19%. I was so close to 20%." Kong Yuhan sighed. Alex was puzzled. He asked, "What do you mean 19%, brother Kong?"

"Look," Kong Yuhan said as he passed along the beaker to Alex. Now that Alex had it in his hand, he could see that the black dots were not in fact dots, but numbers. They were just too tiny to tell apart from where he was previously.

"Is this the pill's harmony level?" he asked.

"Yes," Kong Yuhan said and started to pack his cauldron.

"How can a glass tell you what a pill's harmony level is, brother kong?" he asked.

"What are you talking about, Junior brother? Of course, it doesn't. It's the metal base that shows it." Kong Yuhan answered as if it was common sense.

"The metal?" Alex was even more confused.

"Well, more precisely the formation on the metal." Kong Yuhan clarified a little.

"A Formation?" Alex was shocked. He had never seen a formation before and only heard of it. "Wow, this is my first time seeing a formation," Alex said as he looked at the metal at the bottom of the beaker.

Kong Yuhan took the beaker back, and put the pill inside into a ceramic pill bottle, quickly closing the bottle with a stopper.

Alex was confused now. " I ... I have?" he questioned the statement.

Kong Yuhan took his nameplate out of the wall and looked at the stone door disappear above the door. " Of course, you have. How else do you think this door works?" he laughed a little.

"That is a formation too?" Alex was surprised.

Kong Yuhan then pointed at the lantern in the hallway and asked, "Have you ever looked at what's inside a lantern, junior brother?"

Alex had just done that the day before, so he answered, "Yes. I took off the outer cover yesterday night. Inside was a floating ball of fire, and a metal... Don't tell me that metal plate is a formation too?" he eyes were wide with shock.

'How could I have missed it?' he thought. But, then he thought of something.

" But, wait. The lanterns don't require someone to infuse Qi into it as you did to that glass beaker." He asked.

"The 'Pill Tester'? Well, that's because the formation on it doesn't have an energy source to run, so you have to give it Qi to work. The lanterns are different. They aren't individual formation, but rather a part of a larger formation." Kong Yuhan explained.

" A larger formation?" Alex questioned.

"Junior brother, did you know there is a massive formation laid down on the sect ground. It encompasses all 6 mountains and a little more." Kong Yuhan asked.

"Such a large formation? I did not know that brother." He answered.

"Well, I don't know its actual name, but it's unofficially called the 'Sect Running' formation. It taps into the spirit vein below the sect, and uses its energy to run the sect." He explained.

Alex thought of something, and said, "So the lanterns are part of that 'Sect Running' formation?" he asked.

Kong Yuhan laughed a little and answered. "Not just the lanterns junior brother. The nameplates, the sect medallion, the doors in the alchemy room, the fire burning inside, the map at the entrance, the mission board, the puppets, the ranking rock. Everything is part of the 'Sect Running' formation."

Alex was truly dumbfounded right now. He couldn't even in his wildest dreams think of something like that. 'So everything I thought was magical, was in fact just part of the 'Sect Running' formation.' He thought.

Kong Yuhan explained a little more, " How else do you think the rankings constantly change. How else do you think the mission board knows what missions you have taken. How else do you think the elders can call out disciples on their nameplates. Everything inside the sect that runs by itself, is a formation."

"So, it's better if you don't go around saying you have never seen a formation before. People will just call you ignorant."

Alex couldn't keep his thoughts straight until he got out of the Alchemy Hall. "Give me your nameplate, Junior brother." Kong Yuhan said. Alex absentmindedly handed him his nameplate.

Kong Yuhan transferred 5 contribution points. "I will see you later junior brother." He said and walked away.

Alex was still having a hard time grasping the sheer scope of the formation in the sect. So many things used formations.

'I guess the things around here aren't exactly 'magical' huh.'

Grrrrr.

He finally came back to focus. He looked at the nameplate in his hand and checked it. 5 points had indeed been added to it. He sighed a little and thought,

'Either way, it's time to get some food.'

Chapter 26: Qi Manipulation

Alex easily found a restaurant in the sect valley using his map. Dozens of disciples were going in and out of the restaurant. Almost all of them from the outer sect.

'Do you require less food, the higher your cultivation?' he wondered.

He walked in and found a board on top with words on it. He wondered if that was a formation as well, but no. It was just a normal board someone had written in.

He looked at the cheapest dish in the whole restaurant. A meat stew with some vegetables in it. Most of the outer sect disciples were ordering it, so he ordered it too.

While it was the cheapest dish, the restaurant was very generous about the food and gave a lot. The stew was delicious, and he ate a stomach full.

He slowly ate it, taking in all the different flavors, and it took him fifteen minutes to finish the dish. After finishing it, he paid the 2 contribution points and got out of the restaurant.

Sun had already gone down, and darkness was approaching. This only meant, the light of the lantern shined brighter than ever. Alex walked along the festival-like road, thinking what to do next.

He looked at the time and realized it was nearly 7 pm. It was about time to log out. He decided he would practice some more fire controlling after he returned, so he went back to his cottage and logged out.

There was still a few minutes before the other guys logged out, so he decided to call his parents. He talked for a while, told him about his first day in college, talked about the friends he made, etc.

His roommates were out of the game by the time he had hung up the phone. They went to the cafeteria together and talked about a few different things.

He had wanted to ask something for a while, so he did. "Hey guys, why does time slow down sometimes when you are fighting or training?" he asked.

"I think that's called the 'Focus Mode'. Since every player has different strengths or cultivation, it's difficult to speed up the things in the game so that it matches the players. So, instead of speeding up the game as a whole, they just speed up the thought process of a player who has higher cultivation."

"In the end, the player with higher cultivation does stuff faster than the player with the lower one, and it achieves the same result. Since they don't want the higher cultivation players to constantly suffer from everything around them slowing down, the developers just turned it into a mode that activates sometimes"

Eric gave a full and proper explanation that satisfied Alex very much. After they ate their dinner, they went back to their room. Alex was more than happy to get back into the game.

He opened his eyes in his room, with a lantern-lit bright, hanging from the ceiling. He almost went to grab the lantern when he thought, "Wait. I should probably try moving all kinds of stuff with Qi, instead of wasting it all on flame mastery."

He looked around his room to see if there was anything there. His barren room had nothing. So he walked outside and brought back a few small pebbles.

He put down the tiny stones in front of him and took a deep breath. He instinctively activated focus mode. Everything around him slowed down once more. He could feel the heat from the lantern on his skin and see the stones brighter than he would in the daytime.

If he were to attribute what he saw to colors, then he saw about 7 different colors all over his entire body. But it only lasted for a single second and disappeared the moment he found his Qi.

Unlike yesterday, his Qi was different now. There was a sense of vigor and heat to them. Since he wasn't following any technique, there wasn't any specified path for the Qi this time.

So, he just brought it all to his palms and let his qi bleed out of them. As if they were an extension of his own hand, he was still in control of his Qi even after they left his body.

He slowly pushed them forward until they reached the stones. He let the shapeless Qi envelope one of the stones as if he were catching them in his own palm. The Qi followed his command and fully covered the stone.

'Up' he thought. The Qi slowly started moving upwards, while at the same time picking the stone up as well. He watched as the stone hovered in midair.

'I did it he thought. He was still concentrating on the stone, keeping it in the air. Next, he split his attention. While still keeping the stone midair, he tried to bring out more Qi from his body.

He did it very slowly. The Qi had collected on his palm and were starting to bleed out of it. He watched as the formless Qi once again escaped out of his hands.

"Okay. Now all I have to do is put the Qi over the stone and -"

Clink

The stone in midair dropped. "Haaa- alright, once more." He did that a few more times and was easily hovering the tiny stone in mid-air, but when he had to multitask with it, he failed.

"Once more," but he didn't give up.

After a few more tries, he finally managed to hover 2 stones at once. That was when he thought of something.

"What if I think of both objects as a single one?" he brought out some more Qi, and instead of individually wrapping the stones, he wrapped them all at once.

The stones stuck to each other but were easily moved using Qi.

Chapter 27: Muscle Tempering 9th Realm

Alex practiced both methods of moving multiple objects with Qi.

The first one was where he would individually wrap the object with his Qi, and move them separately.

The second one was where he would wrap all the objects with his Qi at once, and move the objects with Qi.

He found pros and cons for both of these methods. The first one allowed him to move multiple items in multiple ways. He could move one item horizontally, while spinning the other one, and at the same time revolving another item around his body.

The problem with this method was that, it took a lot of concentration.

The second one didn't require any concentration at all. As long as he wrapped the items with his Qi, they easily moved to his commands. But, he could no longer move them individually, and could only move them in one single way.

Alex decided he would learn both way of manipulating items with Qi. He went outside and brought larger stones and started to practice.

He practiced for about 2 hours or so before stopping.

By now, he could easily pick up 2 kilograms worth of items at once, and move them around on his command. When separated, he could pick up 3 different items, each about 500 grams, and move them all individually.

He was very quickly becoming proficient at the task. After 2 hours of doing this, his Qi went down to about half it's original amount.

He then stopped and brought down the lantern. It was time to learn Flame Mastery.

He took out the cover, and looked at the flame hidden within it. Moving the Qi according to the dictation of Flame Mastery Scripture was a muscle memory to Alex.

Without even thinking about it, he started to move and manipulate the fire. With one thought, he changed the shape of the fire into a cube.

"So fast." He was surprised. He had changed the shape of the fire in less than a second, when it should have taken him about two. He changed the fire into other different easy geometric shapes.

It changed very quickly. He put in more Qi, and the size of the fire started to change as well. He quickly increased the fire to half a meter in diameter.

He looked at the massive flame in front of him. Then, a thought came to him, 'Can I split this fire into two?'

He slowly willed the fire to create a divide in its middle. The fire was surprisingly not resisting him at all. Within a few seconds, he managed to split the fire into two.

He let go of one of the half, and it returned to being the lantern flame. He now had another piece of fire floating in front of him to play with.

He tried to split that fire, once more and started to manipulate them separately. He was trying to use his Qi manipulation method to control the fire. It worked.

He let go of the fire, and it disappeared. A confused look had now appeared on Alex's face.

"Too easy. It's too easy. The fire wasn't this easy to manipulate yesterday. It was taking me about 2 seconds to change it's shape, but now I can do it in less than 1? What changed?" he started to wonder.

"Could it be? My new Qi?" he looked into himself to see the vigorous and hot yang qi. "Hmm... my qi seems to align well with fire. Is that why it suddenly got easier?" he thought he cracked the code.

He went back to practicing. It had taken him 3 hours of practicing to go from full Qi to no Qi yesterday. But somehow, it took him over 5 hours to go from half Qi to zero Qi today.

If he hadn't wasted so much of his Qi trying to futilely move around multiple objects, and instead just practiced Flame Mastery, he didn't doubt he could go on for the entire night.

Now that he was out of Qi, he decided to cultivate. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Before he knew it, he was subconsciously cultivating, while his consciousness had fallen asleep.

He woke up early in the morning at around half past 6. He opened his eyes and saw the mess of stones, and lantern in front of him.

He hung the lantern back up to the ceiling, and threw the bunch of stones outside. He opened his status once more. This time he wasn't surprised he had cultivated over night.

This was a normal phenomenon to him now.

————————

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Muscle Tempering 7th Realm (40,000Qi : 100%) [Breakthrough]

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 87909

—————————

'So the leftover from yesterday helped, huh.' He thought. While his Qi had turned to Yang Qi, it still said Qi on the status page. He hit the [Breakthrough] button and broke through to the 8th realm.

He was about to close his status when he realized he could breakthrough once more. 'Oh' he was happily surprised. He clicked on the [Breakthrough] button once more.

The requirements from 7th to 8th realm was 40,000 Qi, and from 8th to 9th realm was 45,000 Qi. But, for some reason, the requirement for Muscle Tempering 9th Realm to Bone Tempering 1st realm was 100,000 Qi.

'Is that because they are two different major realms, and not minor separation in between the realms?' he wondered.

He had just gone through 2 different breakthroughs and was feeling amazing. He felt more strength in himself than before. The amount of Qi had increased as well.

If he wanted to, he could probably go a full 12 hours of Flame Mastery training and not lose all of his Qi.

He once again looked at the time, realized it was nearly 7 AM and hastily logged out.

Chapter 28: Daily Routine

It was 3 pm in the afternoon. Alex had just returned to his room from the cafeteria, after a full day of classes. After logging out of the game this morning, he hadn't gone back.

Instead, he spent his morning cleaning the room and washing his clothes. Now that he was back from the university, he couldn't wait to go back to it.

He logged into the game as soon as possible and opened his eyes inside his outer sect cottage. It was an afternoon in the game as well, and the light was shining through his windows.

He walked out of the room to the usual masses of green-robed disciples. He had only one task in his mind today, work as an aid for as long as he could.

He quickly reached outside the Alchemy hall and waited in line to be an aid. He talked to the few aids in the group while waiting.

He came to understand a few things about why the alchemist aids were even a thing. Normally, in an alchemy process, an alchemist had to take care of 3 different things.

The fire, the ingredients in the cauldron, and the ingredients outside the cauldron. They had to maintain the fire's temperature and mix the ingredients in the cauldron properly. These were very important.

So when they had to divert their attention from the alchemy itself to look into their bags and search for ingredients to put in next, it hampered their process, even leading to failure many times.

Inner sect disciples were similar. They couldn't multitask all those 3 things and hope to succeed in making the pill. So, the sect decided to have the Outer sect disciples help them with the third part of the alchemy, giving them ingredients.

This way, the outer sect disciples too could gain knowledge and inspiration in the process of alchemy from watching the inner sect disciples.

Of course, not all inner sect disciples needed aids, but most of them did.

Alex didn't have to wait long before a female disciple took him in as an aid. This was the second time he had gone into the catacombs like Alchemy Hall.

The female disciple quickly found an open room and got it. Alex followed closely behind her and entered.

Without speaking, she handed him a bag of ingredients with a talisman. Alex was hoping for another recipe, but alas his luck wasn't as good.

The talisman only listed the items required for the recipe and the order in which they would go into the cauldron. The female disciple decided to use the black cauldron already heating up in the room and started immediately.

One after another, the ingredient's names came out of the disciple's mouth. Alex gave her exactly the ingredient she asked for. Within half an hour, she completed the alchemy and successfully made a pill.

Alex didn't have the recipe this time, so he couldn't tell everything she did wrong, but his instinct told him she made a few mistakes at least.

The girl brought out a pill tester and put the newly formed pill in it.

18%. This wasn't a bad harmony for a pill made by an inner sect disciple.

The girl put the pill in a ceramic bottle and kept it in her bag. There were still a lot of the same ingredients left in the bag Alex was holding. She had brought multiple sets of the same ingredients.

She started making the pill once more. Names after names came out of her mouth, and Alex accurately handed the ingredients to her.

Once again, she succeeded in making the pill. She tested it and it turned out to be 18% as well.

Alex looked at the bag in front of him. There was enough for one more. She performed alchemy once more. Everything went the same way this time too.

Once again, she successfully formed a pill. 'If she is so good at alchemy, then why did she use 3 different sets?' he wondered.

She brought out the pill from the cauldron and put it in the pill tester.

20%. The female disciple had managed to make a 20% harmony pill. For the first time since he saw her, she smiled.

She kept the pill in a ceramic bottle and looked at him. " Give me your nameplate." She said.

Alex handed it to her. After transferring the points, she handed it back to him and left the Alchemy hall.

He walked out of the Alchemy Hall, and once more waited outside to be an aid. Another person came later and took him.

He worked as an aid until 12 am. He worked as an aid about 12 times before 12 am. Some disciples gave him the whole recipe, some just gave him the ingredients list and order.

He learned a total of 4 new recipes. Every time he learned a recipe, he could immediately tell when someone made a mistake. It was as if the recipe was ingrained into him, and he knew everything about it.

After watching the alchemist perform alchemy so many times, he was starting to get the hang of it. There were even times when he could tell they made some mistakes without having a recipe for the pill.

He earned about 60 points in total. Some made multiple pills, some gave him a little extra.

After returning to his cottage at 12 am, he started practicing the qi manipulation, and Flame Mastery Scripture. He learned each method for 3 hours, and before he knew it it was 6 am.

He wrapped his Qi around the lantern and slowly hovered it up to hang it to the ceiling. He then used Qi once more to throw the rocks out of the room, one by one. Once, everything was gone and the room was clean, he logged out.

******Author's Note******

June 11, 2021 -- if you started the book after this date, then you don't have to read this note.

I changed the 5 true realms' names to True Disciple, True Master, True Lord, True King, and True Emperor. I have already gone back to change the names in the previous chapters.

These are only 'name' changes, and won't affect the chapters so far.

Chapter 29: The First Step

"So, how did you like the movie?" Hannah asked while walking out of the movie theater at around 5 pm.

"Uh, it wasn't bad. I really liked the twist at the end." Alex said walking out of the movie theater at the same time.

Yesterday was Friday, so he had played 'Eternal Cultivation' the entire day as he didn't have classes on Fridays through Sundays. When he woke up this morning, he had received a message from Hannah asking him to go to the movies with him.

He and Hannah reached a fast food place, where they got some food and sat down to eat.

"So, how are you liking the city?" she asked.

Alex looked a little embarrassed as he replied, "Well, I haven't visited the city at all. I spend my days playing games."

Hannah's attention immediately snapped towards what he had just said. "What game?" she asked.

"It's a VR game called Eternal Cultivation," he said.

"Oh, so you are playing the game too?" Hannah's surprised voice came from in front of him.

"Too? You play it as well sister?" he asked.

"Of course. Everyone plays it. How did you buy a helmet? Did you lie to your parents for money?" she frowned a little as she asked.

"Oh, no-no. One of my roommates had an extra helmet, so he gave me one to use for a while." He answered honestly.

" If that is true, then good. When did you start playing?"

"I think it's been a week now. I started playing the night I came to the dorm." He answered.

"Where are you in the game? What are you doing right now?" she asked.

"I'm learning alchemy right now, in Hong Wu sect." He answered.

"Oh, you are learning alchemy? If you make good pills, remember to send me a few." Hannah laughed as she said that.

Alex wasn't sure if she was joking or not but agreed nonetheless.

After half an hour, he was back in the dorm room. He wanted to go back to the game but decided otherwise. He rested a little until dinnertime, and only went back to the game after that.

He opened his eyes in his lantern-lit cottage. His last few days had been the same. He would work as an aid until 12 am at night. After that, he would come back to his cottage, and practice Qi manipulation and Flame Mastery. After he ran out of Qi, he would cultivate.

By now it was getting harder to cultivate more than 2 hours each night. After turning into Yang Qi, his Qi amount had increased by quite a bit and didn't require as much Qi to do the same task.

He stood up and walked out. After working as an aid for the last few days, he had got to learn about 10 or so pill recipes. Some increased your qi, some healed you, some helped make breakthroughs easier.

One pill was even as simple as making you smell good. Alex was shocked that people would spend their hard-earned contribution points on such menial pills.

By now, he had earned about 450 or so contribution points. So, he decided to finally make a pill for himself. It was nighttime, so the outer sect disciples were finally allowed to learn alchemy.

The pill he had decided upon was the [Qi Improvement Pill]. He had read the recipe from one of the inner sect disciples and found out that the ingredients were very easy to come by and didn't cost a lot.

He bought 7 sets of the ingredients, and it had cost him 420 points.

He reached the Alchemy Hall and looked at the outer sect disciples grouped up to work as an aid. For some reason, he felt he didn't need aid, and simply walked in.

He had about 20 points remaining, so he could only use the rooms for 4 hours at best. The remaining 10 points he had spent on ceramic bottles to keep the pill.

He walked into a room and closed the door. He was nervous. He walked up to the cauldron and sat down cross-legged beside it.

He opened his inventory and put the panel to the side. This was the reason he thought he didn't need aid. He could simply order the ingredients in the inventory and pull them out one by one as needed.

His concentration was now divided into 3 parts. While the inventory didn't need too much attention, the fire and the ingredients in the cauldron certainly did.

He had to now drop the fire to 800 Celsius, put the second ingredient, move it around for 4 seconds, and then bring the fire up to 1500 Celsius.

He tried to do just that. He put his Qi into the fire to drop the temperature. But due to his constant Flame Mastery practice, he was too good at dropping temperatures and ended up reducing the temperature too fast.

He took out the second ingredient, and put that into the cauldron. But, for a split second while he was taking out the second ingredient, he forgot to move the first ingredient.

It was a very small mistake, but it was a mistake nonetheless. Similar things kept happening during the pill-making process. Either there would be a lapse in attention towards some ingredients, or he would change the fire too suddenly, or too slowly.

By the time he put in the final ingredient, he knew he had made too many mistakes. After the final ingredient turned into powder, he used his Qi to slowly form it into a spherical shape and condensed that into a pill.

After he finally succeeded in making it into a pill, he pulled it out of the cauldron. When he saw the pill, he sighed. It read,

[Qi Improvement Pill: 6%]

His first attempt at alchemy had ended in a failure.

Chapter 30: One Step Forward

Alex ran his qi through the inside of the cauldron to wipe away any little impurities that had remained there. He had seen the other inner sect disciples do this trick to prepare for their next batch of ingredients.

He once again took a deep breath and put in the first ingredient. He used his Qi to move it around, slowly turning it into powder. He lowered the heat to 800 Celsius but made sure to not do it very fast.

While he did end up not getting the timing right, it was still much better than the first time. He took out the second ingredient and put it in, while constantly monitoring the first ingredient.

After a while, he turned the heat up to 1500 Celsius. He followed the recipe and did as it asked. However, keeping his attention on 3 different things, while at the same time constantly remembering what he had to do next was too hard for him.

He started to lose focus from time to time. Still, this turn went better than the last one. Finally, once all ingredients were inside the cauldron, and fully turned into powder, he started condensing them.

Slowly but surely, he turned them into a pill. He pulled the successfully formed pill out and held it in his hand.

[Qi Improvement Pill: 12%

Improves cultivation speed by 12% for 12 hours]

Alex took a small rest. While alchemy wasn't physically taxing, it was mentally very draining. Doing 3 different things, all with smalled different things from time to time was too much for Alex.

Suddenly, Alex thought of something.

"Wait, what if I slow downtime? Wouldn't that reduce the load off my mind?" he thought that was a brilliant idea. He decided to try it.

He slowed downtime and started putting in the ingredients. As soon as he put in the first ingredient, he realized he made a mistake. Since he was now in focus mode, time was now slow. But, he could not tell how slow he had to move the ingredients since he didn't know how slow time was. He didn't have a clock to look at.

He now wished the clock at his vision's top right corner showing the seconds.

He had already put in the ingredients so, he decided to follow it through. Since he couldn't follow the timing as the recipe dictated, he decided to go off of his instincts.

He instinctively slowed down every process by what he assumed was the rate of time dilation. He followed the recipe and did what the recipe told him to, only at a slower rate.

The slowed down time helped with every other aspect of the pill-making process, however.

Finally, after a while, he managed to condense the ingredients into a pill. He took the pill out with nervousness, as he didn't know how it would turn out.

[Qi Improvement Pill: 10%]

He had succeeded. It was barely at the cusp of being accepted as a mortal-grade pill. He had managed to successfully create a pill, even though focus mode.

After a short rest, he started once more.

This time he managed to create a 12% harmony pill. He was getting better at creating pills with Focus mode activated.

After a short rest, he started on his 5th set of ingredients.

He followed the same technique all the way through until the end when suddenly something happened within him that startled him. As he was started to condense the powders into the pill, a bunch of Qi inside his body started to move.

Similar to when he activated Flame Mastery Scripture, they moved in a certain path through his meridian. This path was different from the one Flamer Mastery Scripture activated.

Once the Qi moved through his entire body, it arrived at his hands and diffused from it. The arrival of the new Qi made him intuitively use it.

He slowly guided the Qi to enter the cauldron and split it into 2 portions. Both portions of the Qi started to condense the powder into 2 separate balls.

And as a result, they turned into 2 different pills. Alex was astonished at what had just happened. How did he know that he had to split the powder into two portions to form two pills?

Also the pathway the Qi took through his body was the first time they had been used. He only had 2 techniques as of now. Since this wasn't the pathway of [Flame Mastery Scripture]...

"Could it be the [Alchemy God's Knowledge]?" he wondered. He quickly opened his techniques to check the description and realized what had happened.

With Level 1 of [Alchemy God's Knowledge], he had a 50% chance to create an extra pill. That chance had just activated. Alex was both shocked and happy with learning that he could make 2 pills from a single set of ingredients.

He took out both of the newly formed pills and checked.

[Qi Improving Pill: 15%

Improves cultivation speed by 15% for 12 hours]

"Wow! That is the best pill I have made as of yet." He was shocked. He turned his attention to the other pill in his hand.

[Qi improving pill: 15%

Improves cultivation speed by 15% for 12 hours]

This was the same pill as the first one. "Will the harmony level always be the same between the two pills when the 50% chance is activated?" he wondered.

He soon got his answer. After resting a bit he started once more and got 2 pills. One was 12% in harmony, and the other was 14%. He didn't know why that was, but he was glad to know it was possible.

He started with the last pill and succeeded in making it. The last pill came out with 16% harmony. He was really happy to see that.

Seeing that all his ingredients were gone, he walked up to the door and took out his nameplate. 15 points were taken off of the nameplate, meaning he had been here for 3 hours, making pills.

Once he made sure all the pills were in the ceramic bottles, he walked out.

Chapter 31: Selling Pills At A Loss

Alex walked out of the Alchemy hall at around 10 pm. He had managed to make 8 mortal grade Qi Improvement Pills.

"Do I go sell them now? Or should I register one at the disciple hall first?" he stopped for a moment to decide.

To take the test to become an inner sect disciple, the first requirement was 10 different mortal grade pill. This meant he had to somehow find 10 different recipes, and create a mortal grade for each of them.

Every time he made one, he would have a chance to register them as one of his 10 pills. Once he made 10 pills, he would be given the opportunity to become an inner sect disciple.

He didn't however hear anyone talk about what the test was to become an inner sect disciple, however.

After more than a second of contemplation, he decided to go to the disciple hall.

Walking along the festival-like valley road, he quickly reached the black ranking rock. He hadn't come here since getting his nameplate the first day. When he saw his name that time, it was dead last in the ranking.

He wondered where he was now. It didn't take him more than a few minutes to find his name. However, he was happy it even took him that long.

The total names on the list were 4883. His name was on the 4545th ranking. He had earned more than 300+ disciples. Most of them were probably newcomers like him, but just the fact that he got that ranking made him happy.

He walked over to the other side and checked his name there. However, on this site, his name was near the last place. From what he could infer, he didn't have any alchemy achievement at the moment.

He walked into the disciple hall and quickly got into a line. When his turn came along, he handed the inner sect disciple working there the 10% harmony pill.

"I wish to register this pill." He said.

The disciple took the pill and used a pill tester to check the harmony. After confirming that he had indeed brought out a mortal grade pill, the disciple took up a medallion and place it on his forehead.

'Since the medallion is also part of the sect running formation, I wonder if he is checking for something.' Alex was intrigued.

The disciple was indeed checking for something. He was checking Alex's purchase history at the sect market. Anything bought and sold from the official stalls where the elder stayed was recorded in the sect running formation.

The disciple was checking if the pill Alex brought in matched what he had bought in the sect. This was a way of finding out if the disciple had indeed made the pill or not. Another thing he was checking was also the pill room usage by Alex.

Once he found that Alex had in fact bought the items for the pill the day before, and had just gone into a pill room about 3 hours ago, he registered the pill under Alex's name.

The disciple then handed back Alex's nameplate but kept the pill. Alex knew they kept the pill brought for registering, which was why he decided to use the lowest harmony pill in the first place.

Once he was done, he walked out and checked the Alchemy Achievement rankings again.

His name had somehow jumped from the 4800s to 4234.

"Wow. Does that mean almost 600 outer sect disciple had yet to succeed in making a pill?"

He left and went to the sect market. He arrived there in less than 5 minutes. He got in a line and waited for his turn at one of the sect stalls.

He walked up and put out all the remaining 7 pills to sell them.

"I wish to sell these, elder." He said to the elder working in the stall.

This was the same bald elder with wrinkles and streaks of white on his hair and beard. The elder took the pill bottles and checked the pills inside.

Once he confirmed they were indeed mortal-grade pills, he took out a pill tester and tested them.

12%,12%,12%,14%,15%,15%, and 16%.

The elder calculated and said, "you can sell these for 226 points."

"226? But elder I bought 7 sets of ingredients for 420 points, so why are the pills selling for half the price of the ingredients?" he was confused.

"Secondly, if we don't sell the pills for fewer points, a skilled disciple could use just 60 points to buy a set of ingredients, sell the pill for 60 points, then buy another set, and sell another pill, and on and on. This way the sect will soon go into a points crisis."

"This way, the sect can run properly, without having to worry about the same 60 points clearing the entire sect garden."

"So, do you want the points or not?" the elder asked.

Alex sighed, and said, "Yes I do, elder." He handed the elder his nameplate.

"You want to buy anything?" the elder asked.

Alex wanted to, but he had his own idea about what he needed to do.

"No, thank you." He rejected the offer.

The elder handed him his nameplate back with the 226 points. Alex walked out of the market and walked along the night streets.

He didn't need to become an aid anymore, as he could make pills himself. What he needed now was contribution points to buy the alchemy ingredients. And from his experience, the best way to earn contribution points was by selling monster corpses, cores, and materials.

So, the first thing on his agenda was to go out and kill some monsters. And, to kill monsters easily and successfully, he needed to learn some battle techniques.

Chapter 32: Battle Technique

Alex made his way to the sect library. At the entrance, he showed his nameplate to the attending elder and walked in. He didn't have a lot of contribution points, so the best he could get was a low-tier mortal grade technique.

He had an hour to look through the techniques, but it didn't take him that long this time.

Very soon he found a sword-related technique called [Smiting Blade]. It cost only 200 contribution points, so he happily took it. For comparison, the [Flame Mastery Scripture] would've cost him about 800 contribution points.

Mortal grade techniques cost between 100 and 1000 contribution points, while the highest Earth grade technique Alex had seen previously was 4000 points. There might have been some that cost even more.

Alex had tried to read the books in the library but realized they wouldn't open for some reason. So, he walked out of the library with the book in hand.

He handed it to the elder, along with the nameplate. The elder handed it to him and reminded him to return the book in 7 days. Alex also returned the [Flame Mastery Scripture] at the same time, as he didn't need it anymore.

He went to a quiet place and took out the book. Under the lantern's light, he started reading it. He didn't understand what the book really said, but when he finished it, he got a notification.

He opened the description of the technique.

———————————-

[Smiting Blade

Grade: Mortal

Infuse Qi into the blade to increase its penetrating power.]

—————————————

"Alright, time to train now." He said as he looked at his new technique's description.

He needed to look for a place to train this technique now. And there was no place better for this in the sect than the training hall.

Alex located the training hall a few distances away. Although it was called a hall, it was just a massive open field. He could see a few dozens of disciples training their battle techniques.

Some were shooting out arrows, some were using a sword, some threw fire from their hand, while some just ran around a lot making weird moves.

All of these disciples were far away from each other, so there was no way they could hamper each other's progress.

There were about a few hundred wooden posts in the field denoting the place for training. Alex walked up to one of the posts that were far away from any disciple.

He looked at the carving on the surface of the post and places his nameplate there. As soon as he did that, about a few meters away from him, the ground opened up and a wooden puppet came out.

The puppet was what the disciples trained their techniques on. Similar to the alchemy room, the training hall too took 5 contribution points per hour, so he needed to get on with it.

He brought out his steel sword and activated focus mode. Once everything slowed down, he closed his eyes and tried to feel his Qi. This was too easy for him at this point.

He thought of the new technique, and the Qi started moving through his meridian. This was the first time, so it was going to take longer to complete the travel through the new path.

It slowly moved all over his body and reached his hands. However, instead of diffusing from his hands, it instead traveled from his palm to the hilt of the sword.

The Qi felt some difficulty in entering the hilt but still managed to enter it at last.

The Qi had visibly entered the sword hilt as Alex saw the hilt's color change to a slight yellowish hue. The color then traveled up the sword as it crossed the cross-guard, moved along the blade, and stopped at the tip.

His Qi has trouble moving along the entirety of the sword but succeeded in it at last. Now, the sword was glowing a mild yellow.

"I wonder if the Qi is having difficulty because it's a metal object?" Alex wondered.

Now that he had successfully activated his [Smiting Blade] technique, it was time to test how good it was. He held the sword in a fighting stance and pounced forward to cut the puppet.

BAM

A massive cut appeared on the puppet where Alex had just cut it. The sword had stopped glowing yellow as he stopped the flow of Qi.

He looked back at the wooden post as a few words appeared on it.

He smiled. His attack just now had been equivalent to a Bone Tempering 1st Realm cultivator's normal strike. That meant his new battle technique improved his damage by 1 realm's worth.

Adding to the fact that this 1 realm was an entire minor realm jump, the battle technique returned its worth twice over. He decided to attack once more.

Once more, he did the same damage as a Bone Tempering 1st Realm cultivator.

[Muscle Tempering 8th Realm]

"Huh? Why is my damage lower than my actual cultivation base? What is going on?" he was very much confused.

He tried attacking the puppet with his bare hands.

[Muscle Tempering 9th Realm]

"Wait. So I do more damage with my fists than I do with the sword? What sort of garbage was I handed during the tutorial." Alex couldn't believe what he was saying.

"Is this the game's way of balancing things out? Giving me ultra good talents and techniques, but then giving me trash pills that give 10 Qi, or a sword that does less damage than my fists."

Alex didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He picked up his sword once more. The puppets were part of the sect running formation and had self-mending techniques, so they were back to perfect condition once more.

He infused Qi into the sword once more and started attacking.

Chapter 33: Hunting Once More

Alex woke up in his cottage at nearly 7 am in morning. He had stopped training 2 hours later last night, and come back to the cottage to cultivate.

He had only cultivated for 4 or so hours, but that was enough.

[Breakthrough]

With all the Qi he had accumulated throughout the last few days, he had enough to break through to the next minor realm.

The requirement for Bone Tempering 2nd realm was 150,000 Qi now. He logged out of the game for now. He had to go hunt some monsters today, so he quickly had his breakfast and returned to the game.

He went to the disciple hall and requested leave from the sect for 3 days. Once it was approved, he walked out of the sect and went to a random tavern near the eastern gate.

He purchased a room for 3 days and logged out from there. He went to have his lunch with his roommates. Today was Sunday, and there were no classes for anyone.

Alex never asked them questions about their cultivations or talents in the game. He felt that if he was to keep secrets from them, it was only fair he didn't inquire answers from them.

After finishing their lunches, everyone returned to their room and logged into the game.

Alex opened his eyes in the tavern. He walked out of the city through the eastern gate and entered the forest on the southern side of the city.

He walked slowly in the forest trying not to miss any alchemy ingredients. Along the way, he found a few different ingredients, including a dwarf berry. This dwarf berry was quite hidden in the bushes and would be unnoticeable if not for his focus mode enhancing his senses.

He was constantly turning on and off his focus mode so as to not miss anything. He walked along a bit more, keeping any ingredients he found before he met a monster.

It was a skin tempering realm monster, so he didn't even bother using any special technique. He just lunged at it and gave it a good pounding on its head.

"Ughh. Is that an alchemy ingredient as well?" Alex wondered. To think the monster would drop urine as a loot.

After selling the corpses last time, he had come to find out that the monster cores and materials were actually alchemy ingredients. So he had decided he wouldn't sell it that easily this time.

He continued walking as he went deeper and deeper into the forest. He found many different alchemy ingredients and killed quite a few monsters as well.

Some dropped cores, some dropped materials, sometimes both. However, killing monsters never dropped weapons or armors like in other games.

Well, Eternal Cultivation wasn't 'like' other games. He walked on for quite a lot of time, but couldn't find any monsters that could make him use more than just one slash of his casual sword swing.

Finally, after searching around for the whole day, he found a Muscle Tempering 8th realm monster that didn't die to a sword swing.

"Alright. Time to try my new technique on an actual enemy." He though. The monster was a feline monster with patches of cloud-like design on its body.

With him currently at the 1st realm of Bone Tempering, this situation was the equivalent of when he fought a Muscle Tempering 3rd realm Earth Snake, as a Muscle Tempering 6th Realm cultivator.

The leopard had seen him approaching and was starting to crouch, ready to attack. Alex also got into his attack stance as well. He held the steel sword with both of his hands to the side, kept both of his feet wide, and took a deep breath.

He went into focus mode.

The leopard jumped. It was about 10 meters away from Alex, but it was going to cross the entire distance in a single jump.

The jump felt slow to Alex, but not as slow as everything else around him. He slowly moved his Qi around and started infusing it into the sword. The sword showed some resistance to his Qi, but quickly accepted it.

Just when the leopard was 2 meters away from him, Alex swung his sword. Due to both of them being at similar cultivation, their speed wasn't very far off.

However, because Alex was still ahead, his sword reached the leopard's head before the leopard's claws could reach his.

CHOP

In a single smooth sweep, the leopard's head came off its body.

Alex looked both surprised and happy. He remembered when he had such a hard time with the snake, and now he could kill this monster with just a single strike. Even though [Smiting Blade] was a mortal grade technique, it was still a battle technique nonetheless.

"I wonder how strong my attacks would be if my sword was anything but a mortal grade."

Alex was now out of focus mode. He kept the cloud leopard's body into his inventory and walked off. It was getting dark, so he returned back.

He walked into the city without having to pay 2 silvers anymore. His nameplate was now a form of identification that the city guard accepted.

He got into his tavern room and logged out. He called his parents again, waiting for his roommates to log out of the game. Once they logged out, he went to have his dinner and got back to the room.

Once again, he logged back into the game. He cultivated inside the tavern room for a few minutes to get back what Qi he had lost during the day's hunt.

Once he was ready he walked out of the city. This time, he wouldn't return until the sun came up.

Chapter 34: Chance Meeting

Alex was inside the jungle in the dead of night. The moon was shining brightly in the sky. For some reason, the moon always shined brightly in the sky.

The moon never went past being a half-moon. It changed its states between a full moon, half-moon, and in-between. So, he never had to worry about the night being dark in the game.

He didn't know if it was an intentional change from the developers, or they just wanted to let the players know this world was not their own.

But, the moon didn't matter to him anymore. He could see a lot better at nighttime now that he was a cultivator. Especially when he went into focus mode, his vision would amplify as well, letting him see the most minute of things in bright light even in the darkest of caves.

He realized that nighttime had way more monsters than the daytime. Most of the monsters seemed to only come out during nighttime, and he had a great time hunting them.

He wasn't particularly happy about the hunt or fascinated with killing. He was just happy when he thought about how many points he could get from these monsters.

Time slowly went by while he kept finding new materials, and encountering quite a few monsters.

It was about 2 am at night when he suddenly heard something.

Rustle Rustle

He immediately went into focus mode and started looking around to see if he could find what was making the noise. Time was slowed down, so he saw a bunch of leaves hanging from a branch on a tree move unnaturally.

He kept looking as he waited for a monster to appear from behind it. As the leaves parted to show what was behind them, he was surprised.

The thing making the rustling noises was actually a pair of females. He looked at them with wide eyes, while they also seemed to be surprised to find him.

They both seemed to be around 20 years old and held a small thin sword in their hand. They were both beautiful girls, but one just seemed infinitely more beautiful than the other.

Alex was still in his focus mode. He quickly looked at the less beautiful girl. She was wearing a yellow robe with blue linings around the robe. Her thin sword looked simple and made of steel.

There was a slight shine to it, but it wasn't very much.

The other girl on the other hand was something else. She was probably the most beautiful person he had seen in real life or in-game. She was wearing a similar robe to the first girl, with yellow all over it.

However, unlike the blue linings, this robe had red linings on it. She had flowing black hair that shined with a hint of blue in the moonlight. The sword she was holding looked like a crystal sword and was shining with a blue hue to it.

Even without the focus mode, one could see the shining from the sword. Alex looked at his own steel sword in hand and felting like laughing at the dull blade.

He turned off his focus mode, still surprised at seeing peoples in the forest at 2 am.

"Hello," he greeted.

The girl with the blue linings looked at him and asked," A disciple from the Hong Wu Sect? What are you doing here?" she practically demanded the answer.

Alex frowned a little, but still chose to answer, " I'm here to hunt monsters." He said.

"What monster could you possibly want to hunt in the middle of the night?" the girl asked once more.

"Meng Meng!" the other girl said, clearly disapproving of the rude tone in her voice.

"I'm a sorry senior sister." The blue linings girl immediately apologized to her senior sister.

The senior sister looked towards Alex and asked, " Are you looking for any specific monster, fellow Daoist? Do you require our help?" she asked.

Her tone was polite as she asked her question with a smile. Alex looked at the junior sister with a bit of focus and was shocked.

[Bone Tempering 7th Realm]

The girl was already in the 7th realm of Bone Tempering. That was 6 realms higher than his own. Judging from her tone, her senior sister must be stronger than her.

He slowly looked at the senior sister. His already wide eyes became even wider.

[Mind Tempering 5th realm]

'Holy Sh*t,' he couldn't help but cuss. This was the highest cultivation he had seen on someone so young. In fact, this was the highest non-hidden cultivation he had seen yet in the game.

To reach her level, he would have to cross the entire bone tempering realm, the organ tempering realm, and the meridian tempering realm. He wondered how much Qi that took.

The girl was 5 realms away from becoming a cultivator in the true realms. The girl looked at him with a weird look, and he realized he hadn't answered her question yet.

"I am just hunting random monsters, and am not looking for anything specific. So, thank you for your offer, but I will have to decline it." He tried to say no as politely as he could. This girl could probably kill him if she wanted to.

She didn't seem that type of girl, however. "Very well then, fellow Daoist. We shall take our leave". The girl turned around and walked off. The other girl also quickly followed behind her not giving Alex another glance.

It took a while before Alex was back in his usual mindset. He walked on from where he was and started looking for the ingredients and the monsters once more.

Slowly time passed by as he hunted the monsters throughout the entire night. The first rays of sunlight were scattered through the forests from the east.

It was about time to leave the forest, and log out of the game.

Chapter 35: Best Player In The Game

The morning had arrived, and his first day of the 3-day leave was over. Nothing of significance had happened the entire night, aside from meeting different people in the forest.

Over the course of the night, he had met a few more people after the 2 female cultivators. Most of them had the same yellow robe on them, but none had the red linings like the beautiful girl, only green or blue linings.

He did meet a few disciples from Hong Wu Sect, but they seemed to be inner sect disciples so he didn't talk a lot to them besides the casual greetings.

He realized that monsters were active during the nighttime a lot more than daytime, so most of the people that wanted to hunt the monster only visited the forest during the night.

Now that it was nearly 7 am, Alex walked out of the forest and went to the city. Once he reached his room in the tavern, he logged out.

After breakfast, he decided to study instead of going back into the game. There was nothing to do in the game at this time, so it was better to just study.

At 11 am, he went to his class. Today was a computer science class, and he really enjoyed this class.

There was only 1 course he took this semester that didn't have either of his 3 roommates, so most of these classes he just sat with them.

After the classes were over, he ate his afternoon lunch and went back to his room. Instead of going back into the game, however, he just started doing his homework from his classes.

He had wanted to do it in the morning, but there was nothing to do right now. If he went back in the game, he would have nothing to do there. He couldn't go to the forest only to return a bit more than 2 hours later just to log out.

Rather, he would do his work now, eat his dinner, and then go into the game.

After finishing the homework, he decided to watch some online videos to pass his time. The site he visited regularly was now starting to recommend 'Eternal Cultivation' videos on its own.

"I haven't even searched for anything related to the game on this site, and it's somehow recommending videos related to it? Is this because the search engine and the video site are owned by the same company?" he talked to himself.

He was about to reload the page when he saw the word 'Best' out of the corner of his eyes. He stopped, and read the title of the video.

"Exclusive Interview with The BEST player in Eternal Cultivation!!" the thumbnail was a massive 'BEST' test covering the face of the player, while the interviewer looked very shocked with comically large eyes.

"The best?" Alex was intrigued. His curiosity took the better of him as he clicked on the video.

The video opened with the interviewer talking to the viewers, hyping them up, saying how they were the first channel to find the best player in Eternal Cultivation.

"This player has been playing this game since day 0, and has remained hidden the entire time he was in the game." The interviewer said, " However, today he has agreed to have us take an interview of him, and reveal himself to the world through our channel."

The interviewer kept talking about how his channel was the best for doing this. "Now everyone, please welcome, Mister Connor Root."

The interview was going to take over a video call, so on another side, a young 20-ish years old man with bright red hair showed up on another side of the video.

"Good morning Mister Root." The interviewer said.

"Good morning, you can just call me Connor." He replied

"Alright. Hi, I'm Connor Root. I live in Black Cherry City, and I am as of yet, the player with the highest cultivation in 'Eternal Cultivation'."

The interviewer acted shocked when he heard this, "If you don't mind us asking Connor, what is your cultivation at currently?"

"It's at True King 4th Realm. I just broke through yesterday actually." Connor answered.

"Oh wow, I heard the highest know cultivation as of yet was in the True Master Realm, yours just blows that out of the water. Can you tell us how to cultivated so fast?" the interviewer asked.

"There is really just one reason why I cultivated as fast as I did, and that reason is 'Luck'. I was just lucky, that's it." Connor then looked at the camera, and pointed at it as he said, " You too can become as good as me if you just get a bit lucky."

The interviewer's face was blank for a moment. He was expecting an actual answer from the interviewee, yet he just babbled about being this good due to luck.

"Umm... Connor, I think our viewers wouldn't mind learning a bit more as to how you cultivate so fast." The interviewer tried to solve the situation.

"Ahaha. I'm sorry, I was just joking for a moment. Let me get serious then. Let's see, the reason for why I cultivated so fast, huh. Well, there are many reasons, most of them being actually just luck. But if I had to condense them down to a few then, I would say I cultivated so fast because of 3 reasons exactly."

The interviewer seemed happy with this response. He had somehow kept the interview from going into a bad turn, "Oh, 3 reasons. I wonder how good these reasons are. If you wouldn't mind, can you tell us what these 3 reasons are?"

"Yes, I can. From what I have learned off of the forums and such, the internet has no idea about this, but, you know the Body in the status of the players? There are actually grades to these bodies as well. And the first reason as to why I cultivated so fast was because the body I was given in the game was one of the best bodies anyone has ever been given."

Chapter 36: More Interview

"The body of a cultivator is graded as well? This is the first time I have heard of this." The interviewer was shocked. This was new information he was not expecting to get in this information today. He was genuinely shocked.

Alex was shocked too. He hadn't given much thought to his body. He started to wonder what grade his body was.

"Yes. I found that out a few days ago as I searched the internet trying to learn everyone's body's name. I had my suspicions before, but the searches I made proved my theories. You see a player is given a random body. Most of the time it's just called 'Mortal body'. People think this just meant the bodies they got was a non-cultivator to start with, but they are wrong."

"Also, since the Earth grade bodies and Heaven grade bodies do not have the words 'Earth' and 'Heaven' in it doesn't help it either. Only after the heaven grade does the bodies actually start to have their names in it."

The interviewer cued in and asked," And what body do you have?"

"My body is an Immortal Grade body. It's called the 'Immortal Tyrant Body'. With this body, I can produce the strength equal to 2 realms above my own realm. Meaning, I can currently produce the strength of a True Dao 6th Realm cultivator." he replied.

"Oh wow, that's one of the reasons for your fast cultivation huh. What are the other 2 reasons?" the interviewer asked.

"The next 2 reasons can in fact be called the same reason, but since they are different I decided to call them 2 reasons. And they are the fact that I got an Immortal Grade Cultivation Method for self-tempering realm through the gift box, and somehow managed to get a Heaven Grade Cultivation Method for the True realm."

"Add onto the fact that I bought a lot of Qi providing pills using the monsters I hunted, I got to where I am right now."

The interviewer was shocked again, "Oh wow. You really had a stroke of good luck going into the game, didn't you? What about your talents? Are they any good?"

" It's just a Heaven grade talent, nothing to call home about."

The interviewer then went on to ask other questions, but none of them interested Alex. He closed the video, and just sat there thinking.

"Sun God's Divine... would that be God grade or is there a grade called Divine as well?" he was shocked again. The only thing his body could do he could tell as of now turned natural common Qi into Yang Qi. Yang Qi lasted twice if not longer than normal qi and didn't need to be used as much to get the same result.

He was already happy to get Yang Qi from his body. But, if what the person said was true, then that just wasn't good enough for a God Grade body. so was it a Divine grade?

"What else can it do then?" he wondered.

The 3 roommates soon woke up, and they went to eat their dinner. He decided to tell them about what he found out today, but it seemed they had already learned about it during the day.

Apparently, they liked to frequently visit the forum and had done just that today during the recess. They lamented that they either had Earth or Heaven-grade bodies.

Alex also lamented along with them saying his body was Earth grade too.

After dinner, they returned to their room and jumped into the game. Alex logged in his tavern room. He hadn't returned to the game since waking up this morning and was quite eager to hunt once more.

He got out of the city and went into the forest through the eastern side once more. From what he understood about the forest, the monster got stronger the deeper one went into it.

If you were on the outer edges, you would only find skin tempering realm monsters. Monsters with Muscle Tempering realm only appeared about half an hour into the forest.

And only about 2 hours away from that did Bone tempering realm monsters start to appear. He never went that far and only stayed at the edge of it.

He had met a few monsters at Bone Tempering 1st realm, but he had managed to win against them with his Smiting Blade technique. Although it did take more than 1 strike with Smiting Blade each time he fought them.

Tonight was a moonlit night as always and Alex had walked about 2 hours into the forest. The monsters he found in this area were Muscle Tempering 7th realm to Muscle Tempering 9th realm.

Changing the place he hunted was a good idea on first thought, but once he realized that many other people hunted as well, it wasn't necessary to go out of his way to find monsters.

That said, Alex still changed his path so that he could find more alchemy ingredients. The forest was a treasure trove of alchemy ingredients that no one seemed to have searched for.

Or maybe they did but didn't realize which were alchemy ingredients, and which were not.

A giant bear fell down with a massive cut running across its chest. Alex walked up to the bear and kept its corpse into his inventory. The bear was at the 7th realm of Muscle Tempering, so he had managed to kill it in one hit.

He stood up and walked on ahead, searching for more monsters.

BAM

Suddenly the monster's corpse vanished, and he finally saw what laid behind it.

There were two ladies, one a little further back than the other. The one that was right beside the monster looked up with surprised eyes, and smiled a little as she said,

"Fellow Daoist, it seems fate has brought us together again."

Chapter 37: Helping

Alex was surprised to see it was the same two girls he met yesterday.

'Fellow Daoist? Is that what the cultivators call each other?' he wondered. He decided to reciprocate the greeting.

"It's good to see you once more, Fellow Daoist. I don't really think fate has to do anything with us meeting again," he tried to make small talk.

"Oh. Are you trying to imply that you met us here on purpose then, Fellow Daoist?" she asked with a smirk. She knew the answer, but still decided to tease him.

Alex's face changed to a brighter shade of red. "Of course not, It was just a random meeting. I just came here because I heard a sound."

"Haha, you don't need to defend yourself, Fellow Daoist. I was just joking." Her laughter made her look even more beautiful.

Alex looked a little hurt. "I shall take my leave then." He said as he started to turn around.

"Wait a minute, fellow Daoist." She called from behind.

"Since we met each other, why don't we hunt together?" she tried to invite him to the group.

Alex was surprised. 'Why would she want me to join? I'm the weakest one here and am not even that strong-looking. There must be some other reason.'

"If you want something, you should just ask it, Fellow Daoist." He tried to figure out what she wanted.

"Quite a sharp one, aren't you? Yes, to be honest, fellow Daoist, we do require something." She said as she sighed a little.

"Senior sister, you shouldn't. It's risky to tell him." The girl in the back spoke for the first time tonight. She was about to talk some more when she was interrupted by the other girl's hand gesture.

"I think we should introduce ourselves first. I am Luo Mei, and this is Meng Yun. We are disciples of the Tiger Sect." The girl introduced both herself and the girl at the back.

"I am Yu Ming. I am a disciple of the Hong Wu Sect." He decided to introduce himself as well. "So, you said you wanted something? If it's something I don't mind parting with, I can give it to you." He said. He was slightly worried they might just attack him, and take it away forcefully.

Luo Mei immediately corrected herself, " Oh no. We don't want something you have. We just want your help in something."

"Okay, what do you want my help in?" he asked.

"We are at our last leg, so we need the help of an alchemist like yourself. Please, follow us," she said as she started walking in a certain direction.

Along the way, Alex stopped a bunch of times to collect the alchemy ingredients he found. The two ladies were very surprised when they saw him pick so many things.

Meng Yun softly whispered into Luo Mei's ear as she said, " Senior sister, do you think he knows what we want him to do? He seems to be showing off by randomly picking up ingredients. I think he is a fraud."

Luo Mei frowned when she heard this. "That is a definite possibility, but it doesn't look like he is faking it. Some of the ingredients he picked were ones even I recognized. He must be a genuine alchemist who recognizes the ingredients. I hope he recognizes that one too."

Luo Mei continued to walk deeper and deeper into the forest. Alex started to get worried. They were now constantly meeting monsters that would definitely be able to kill him easily.

But to a Mind Tempering realm cultivator like her, these monsters were a piece of cake. She killed every single monster they came across and took all the drops from the monster.

Alex didn't mind her behavior as he was already getting enough benefits from the ingredients here.

After a short while, she had managed to kill over a few dozen of bone tempering realm monsters. This was an amount that Alex couldn't even hope to have achieved in all the 3 days he had taken a leave from the sect.

And this girl had somehow managed to kill them in less than 2 hours.

"We're here," Luo Mei said as she increased her walking speed a little faster. "It's right around here, somewhere."

Finally, she stopped as she saw a small opening in the forest where there were no trees and only bushes. In front of the bushes was an Ox-like monster currently sleeping.

[Meridian Tempering 3rd Realm]

This was a monster that Alex didn't doubt could kill him in a single blow. He was really scared now. He looked at Meng Yun, and she was shivering a little as well.

Luo Mei however showed no fear, only some irritation at the fact that she had to fight when her goal was so close.

She kept her sword in its scabbard on her waist and started moving her arms in a certain manner. Alex looked at her arms and saw Qi slowly seep out of her palms.

The moment the Qi left her body, however, something weird happened. All of the Qi started to change as they slowly transformed into water.

Alex had unconsciously started focus mode due to his fright, which was why the transformation looked so slow to him. In fact, the transformation happened in a split second.

A massive ball of water appeared in front of Luo Mei which she sent towards the Ox. Within seconds, the Ox opened his eyes and frantically tried to move. But it couldn't.

Luo Mei had already encased the Ox in the water ball and was slowly drowning it to death in midair. The ball started to move higher and higher as the Ox tried to breathe more and more and failed. Minutes passed by and the Ox finally stopped breathing.

It was dead.

Luo Mei then let go of the water ball, and the entire thing, water, and Ox fell to the ground with a loud bang. She then turned to Alex and said, "This is where I need your help, Daoist Yu."

Chapter 38: Spiritual Sense

"This way, Fellow Daoist. This is where I require your help," Luo Mei said as she walked forward towards the bushes. She had already kept the Ox monster's body in her storage bag.

Meng Yun followed behind her unquestioningly. Alex decided to follow as well. Alex reached where they had stopped behind the bushes and was immediately surprised when he saw what it was.

Hidden behind the bushes was an array of multicolored flowers, thousands in number, all naturally arranged to look like a flower bed. The flowers were all normal looking individually but were a sight to behold when viewed altogether.

This, however, wasn't the most shocking thing to Alex. The thing he was much more surprised about was what was happening to himself.

'This feeling,' he was starting to feel a very intense pull towards one of the flowers. He recalled the time he had fought the 'Earth Snake'. He had had the same feeling that time as well.

'Same feeling... no way!' he looked at the flowers and focused,

[Spirit Cleansing Lily]

'It's the same flower.' To this day, Alex had covertly tried to find out what this flower was in the sect but had no result. Today, he saw one more and was reminded of his 'want' to have it.

He resisted his feeling and looked at Luo Mei. "What do you want me to do, Daoist Luo?" Meng Yun's eyes shot up as she heard him talk to her using her name.

Luo Mei however didn't give it a single thought, instead, all of her focus was on the flowerbed of Spirit Cleansing Lily.

"Do you know what this is, Daoist Yu?" she asked.

Alex just simply answered, "This? This is a flower bed of course."

Luo Mei frowned a little, and asked once more, " Do you know what this flower bed is?" she asked.

Alex saw her frowning face and got scared. He decided to answer properly this time, "I don't know what the flower bed is called, but I know one of the flowers here is the Spirit Cleansing Lily."

Hearing the name, Luo Mei's eyes got bright with excitement and hope. "So you do know the name? Does that mean you can choose the right one?" she asked.

"The right one?" 'was she talking about finding the exact flower' he wondered.

"Yes, the right one. Don't you know that picking the wrong flower makes the entire flower bed wilt?" she asked.

"I didn't," he simply answered.

"Can you pick the right one then?" she asked once more.

"Yes. I can pick the Spirit Cleansing Lily without making a mistake." He said.

Hearing his answer she got even more excited. This was the first time she was showing such expressions. Normally she was very calm and collected.

She took out a storage bag from her side and handed it to Alex. "Check it," she said gesturing the bag.

Treasure. That was the only word Alex could think of when he saw what was inside the bag. There were more monsters and cores in here than what he had collected over the course of the 2 days.

And to make things better, all of them were over Bone Tempering realm. He breathed in a little and killed his own awe. There must've been a reason why she showed him her loot, so he asked," What's the meaning of this, Daoist Luo?"

As if she was waiting for the question, she answered immediately, "If you can bring me the Spirit Cleansing Lily without wilting the entire flower bed, you can keep that bag."

Alex's eyes went wide with excitement now. He could hide his awe, but he couldn't hide his excitement. Still, he tried to keep it on the low and asked her, "Why do you want the lily so bad, Daoist Luo?"

Luo Mei frowned. She was worried if she told him the reason, he would just keep it for himself, or intentionally try to destroy it. That would be too bad for her.

Alex saw her frowning face, and said, "Don't be mistaken, Daoist Luo. I will get the flower to you. I am asking because I only know the flower by name and appearance, and never learned of its use. So I was hoping you could tell me what the use is."

Luo Mei didn't immediately believe him, but decided to explain anyway, "Spirit Cleansing Lily is a precious treasure. If you cultivate overnight with the lily on your body, you will unlock Spiritual Sense."

Meng Yun was surprised her senior sister actually told him the reason.

"Well, there is no point in hiding it anyway. You would know about it sooner or later, given your knowledge." Luo Mei continued.

Alex frowned. 'Spiritual Sense?' he had never seen or heard anyone talk about this, inside or outside the game.

"What is Spiritual Sense, Daoist Luo?" he asked.

She looked at him with a surprised face, "Has no one in Hong Wu Sect told you what it is?" she asked.

Alex laughed a little and shook his head. Luo Mei explained, "Spiritual Sense is a type of sense, or ability, that you can use to sense your surrounding using your mind. There are many abilities that you can use your spiritual sense for. The best explanation is probably that it is similar to Qi for your brain."

Alex had never heard of it, but it sounded good.

"So, can you get it then?" Luo Mei was getting agitated.

Alex immediately went to the flower bed and easily plucked the lily and returned. Luo Mei and Meng Yun were shocked to see how simple that looked.

They had been dreading this for the entire day since yesterday night when they had found it. And somehow this man managed to pick it within 5 seconds. Just how good was his ingredient recognizing skills.

Luo Mei looked at the flower bed and realized he had indeed succeeded. 'This man must be a high-ranking disciple in the Hong Wu sect,' she thought to herself.

"Here you go, Daoist Luo. I hope this fulfills what you required of me."

Chapter 39: Outer Sect?

Luo Mei looked at the flower in her hand as tears started streaming down her eyes. He hands holding the lily were slightly shivering.

Alex was surprised to see this. He had expected to see her surprised face, or maybe even eyes bulging out of their sockets. But never had he expected her to just cry.

"Is Spiritual Sense really that good?" he couldn't help but ask.

Luo Mei wiped her tears and answered, "Of Course it's good. It's something you can only unlock after reaching the Saint realm, if that's not good then I don't know what is."

"Saint Realm??" it was his turn to get shocked now. Luo Mei took out a small jade box and kept the Spirit Cleansing Lily in there. She then kept the bag in her storage bag and thanked Alex once more.

"I will take my leave now, Daoist Yu. I hope we will meet again." She said her goodbyes and started walking back towards the city.

"Wait, Daoist Luo." He immediately cried out.

Luo Mei stopped and looked back. "What is it, Daoist Yu? Do you require something now?" she asked.

Alex looked a little embarrassed and scared as he said, "This area is too much for me to handle. Would you mind if I tag along until I got a bit out of the forest?"

Alex felt like crying at the fact that she just called him weak so nonchalantly. 'Alchemy is important, but I need to get stronger too.' He thought.

They walked back in a different direction from the previous one under Alex's request. Along the way he found many more alchemy ingredients.

By now, he had more than half the ingredients for most of the recipes he knew. For some, he even had all the ingredients. He couldn't wait to return and perform some more alchemy.

On the way back, a silver fox-like monster appeared before them. Alex read its name, [Swift Wolf: Bone Tempering 4nd Realm]. The monster was a realm higher than him.

Luo Mei casually took out her sword and slashed it horizontally. The swift wolf immediately jumped to the side but was still grazed by the incoming slash. There was a long gash on its back and was now bleeding into its silver fur.

The moment it got hurt, it ran away. It really did live up to its name and was very swift.

"Should we follow it?" Alex asked.

"No need. Unless that monster finds a monster core of a monster stronger than it, it won't survive my attack. The most it can live for now is 2 days." Luo Mei was very confident in her attack.

"What does a monster core have to do with other monsters?" he asked.

"Monsters cultivate very slowly, so one way to cultivate faster for them is to hunt down other monsters and eat their cores. Similarly, when they are hurt eating other monster's cores helps them heal as well. But the monster core should also come from a relatively high-level monster for it to work. Otherwise, it would have to eat many low cultivation monsters." Luo Mei replied

"I see," Alex was grateful for her teaching him different things.

After a while, they were nearly out of the forest when all 3 of them stopped. There was noise in front of them.

Suddenly, a green-robed young man appeared from behind the trees. He was surprised to see the 3 of them as well. He saw a single outer disciple among the two yellow-robed females.

'Are they threatening him? Is he in trouble?'

"Junior brother, do you need any help?" he tried to see if he was being forced by them or walking on his own accord.

He looked at Meng Yun's robe and was surprised to see a blue lining. 'Inner sect disciple of Tiger Sect?' he was surprised. He doubted he could take her on if the junior disciple really needed help.

He then turned to look at Luo Mei. The moment he saw her red linings, his eyes went wide.

Alex decided to answer, "Thank you but I don't need any help, senior brother. These fellow Daoists are taking me out of the forest since it was dangerous for me."

"I-Is that s-so. Th-Then I s-shall take my l-leave." He bowed towards Luo Mei a bit and ran off.

'What's up with him?' Alex was confused. Meng Yun looked at the young man running away and was surprised.

She walked up to Luo Mei and slowly whispered in her ears, "Senior Sister, that man's robes are darker in color than this guy's."

Luo Mei was surprised when she heard this. She immediately compared the robes and realized Alex's robes were lighter in shade. She knew what this meant.

"Daoist Yu, is that man a core disciple from your sect?" she asked.

"Hmm... I don't think so. He should be an inner disciple. " Alex thought of nothing when he heard this question.

Luo Mei's eyes went wider, "Then why are you calling him senior brother?"

"What else would I call an inner sect disciple? Anything else from an outer sect disciple like me would be considered disrespectful." Alex simply replied.

Luo Mei was surprised. 'An outer sect disciple? No way. He is so talented. Even in our sect, a bone tempering realm cultivator would automatically become an inner sect disciple. How is he still an outer sect with his amazing ingredients-finding ability? Should I try to rope him in?' she thought.

"Why aren't you an inner sect disciple already Daoist Yu?" she decided to tread the waters slowly.

"I haven't completed the requirements for becoming an inner sect disciple yet."

Luo Mei was surprised. " A bone tempering realm cultivator like you doesn't meet the requirement? What are the requirements then?" she asked.

"Oh, I just have to make 10 different recipes mortal grade pills, that's all." Alex didn't hide anything.

"I see... and how many have you made so far?" she asked meekly.

"Well, as of yet, only 1," Alex replied

Chapter 40: Invitation

Luo Mei's eyes became bright as she thought of something. 'Bone Tempering realm cultivator with only 1 pill made so far? His talents in alchemy must be very bad.'

"Daoist Yu, come join the Tiger Sect. I can immediately make you a core disciple and give you heaven-grade cultivation methods, techniques, and weapons. The sect will also take care of all your other necessities as well. All you will have to do is go on a venture with our sect elders and help them find alchemy ingredients from deep in the southern forest." She said, trying to tempt him to join the Tiger Sect.

Alex was surprised at the offer that came out of nowhere. He smiled a little and said, " Thank you for the offer, Daoist Yu. But I will have to decline. I wish to learn alchemy, and I don't think I will be able to pursue it as well as I currently am if I join the Tiger Sect."

"But, look at you. You are already at Bone Tempering realm and have only managed to make a single pill. I think you should give up on making pills Daoist Yu." She tried to reason with him some more.

"It's fine. I only made a single pill so far because earning contribution points in the first week as an outer sect disciple takes a lot of time." Alex tried to decline politely.

Luo Mei thought she heard wrong. "Can you repeat that, Daoist Yu?"

"Oh, I said that my first week as an outer sect disciple took me a lot to earn points. Which is why I was only able to make a single type of pill." Alex repeated.

Luo Mei asked inquisitively, "Are you saying that it's only been a week since you joined the Hong Wu Sect?"

"Yeah. Maybe 8 days, but not more. I did make my first pills 2 days ago." He said.

Luo Mei gave a wry smile as she asked, "umm... how long have you been pursuing alchemy, Daoist Yu?"

"Hmm... let's see. I believe it was the day after I started cultivating, so 9 days now. I took the entrance test for Hong Wu Sect on the day I learned about alchemy. "

Luo Mei's eyes were wide open. Even Meng Yun on the behind couldn't keep her stoic appearance anymore. 'He entered the sect 9 days ago and managed to make a pill in 7 days. What sort of alchemy monster is this?' she thought.

She repeated what he had just said in her head and her eyes went even wider. Her voice was quivering as she hoped she had heard wrong, " Umm... Daoist Yu. Did you just imply that you started cultivating 10 days ago?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex answered without thinking. And then he realized what he had said while going in the flow of the conversation. 'Sh*t. I accidentally revealed a bit too much.' He thought.

"Now I must really ask you to join our Tiger Sect, Daoist - No, Brother Yu." She started to rope him in even more.

"We will give you everything you ask for Brother Yu. Just join our sect." She hoped he would change his mind.

Alex frowned a little. "Please stop this Daoist Luo. I will not join your sect. I joined the Hong Wu sect to learn alchemy, and I will continue doing so. Please don't embarrass yourself any further."

Luo Mei stopped talking. Not even Meng Yun said anything when she heard this, she knew Luo Mei was in the wrong this time.

Alex took this opportunity and said, " Thank you for letting me walk with you till here, I should be able to leave on my own now. Hence, I shall part with you fellow Daoists. May we meet again." He started walking away.

Luo Mei and Meng Yun stood there not knowing what to do. She really wanted to have him join her sect, but she couldn't use force as that would only worsen the situation.

"Senior Sister, what do we do now?" Meng Yun asked from the side.

"There is nothing else we can do. So, we should leave this task to someone who can do something." She said.

Luo Mei looked at the disappearing figure of Alex and said, "C'mon, Let's go. I need to tell my master about him. He should be able to convince him." Both of them then disappeared into the forest.

Alex hunted for a few more hours. Although he didn't need to hunt monsters anymore after what the 2 ladies had given him, he still wanted to find more alchemy materials.

He started ignoring skin tempering realm monsters and only fought at anything above Muscle Tempering. He was so focused on finding the ingredients, that he forgot to log out for breakfast as well.

'Doesn't matter. I will just go for lunch directly,' He thought. After a couple of hours of more hunting, he returned to his room in the tavern.

He looked at the time, and it was 10 am. He logged out and went to get a shower. He left the bathroom a little while later and decided to wait for his two roommates.

Matt had a morning class, so he was already gone. Once Logan and Eric logged out, they went to the Cafeteria together and had their lunch.

Afterward, they went to their individual classes. Alex paid as much attention as he could in the class, but the business statistics class was just too boring for him.

Finally, once the classes were over, he went to the cafeteria to get his afternoon lunch. Afterward, he did his assignments, and other works until it was time for dinner.

Once the dinner was over, he finally went into the game. He logged in to his room at the tavern.

'Do I go back to the sector hunt some more?' he wondered. It took him a while, but they finally decided to hunt some more. Since he took a 3-day leave from the sect, it would be impossible to get another one anytime soon. So, he had to make the best of his last day out of the sect.

Chapter 41: Explosion

Alex had gone to the eastern side of the Scarlet City for 2 days straight now. So, he decided to visit the western side this time. When he walked out of the western gate, he felt a sense of deja vu as he remembered that this was the place he was first brought to when he logged in.

He started combing the outer areas of the forest for alchemy ingredients and was very happy when he realized there were a lot of them here. Unlike the eastern side where he had foraged for 2 entire nights, the western side's ingredients were pretty much in an immaculate state.

He started picking up all the ingredients he could find. He didn't know how many of them he would ever even find a use for, but he still kept them just in case.

He ignored most of the Skin tempering realm monsters unless they were too annoying to ignore, it which case he would just lift them up with his Qi and smash them into the ground. He was at least that good with his Qi.

He was fascinated with the concept of controlling his whole body with his Qi and thought it would be practically flying if he could do that.

But alas, the most he could do with himself was hover about 20 centimeters off of the ground. He had tried a few more times, but 20 cm was the best he could do.

He hadn't tried after reaching Bone Tempering 1st Realm but had assumed the result would be the same. Still, he was happy he could lift other objects as well.

He had also realized that when using Qi manipulation on anything with cultivation, it became increasingly harder to move them with Qi the higher their cultivation was.

It was as if higher cultivation monsters were resistant to lower or similar cultivation's Qi amount.

After finishing the outer part of the forest, he walked into the inner part where the Muscle Tempering realm monsters lived.

Alex kept the monkey's corpse and walked along. He didn't see a lot of cultivators on this side of the forest. He had seen quite a few Skin Tempering realm rogue cultivators on the outer edge of the forest, but there were almost none where he was.

It didn't take him long to realize why that was. He had walked for over 5 hours and had yet to see a single monster above Muscle Tempering 6th realm.

Granted he was combing more area due to his search for the materials, but it still should not have taken him this long to see a monster with cultivation close to his.

'No wonder there are no cultivators here. There are barely any monsters, to begin with, and even if there were, one would have to walk in so deep to find them.

Alex kept walking forward. The night was particularly cloudy today, but his vision was still not hampered at all. He walked a little bit further and met his first Bone Tempering realm monster.

It was a giant bird that had a particularly sharp beak. He focused on the bird and something popped up above it.

[Green Blooded Owl: Bone Tempering 1st Realm ]

The owl started flying up when it saw Alex. At first, Alex thought the bird had run away because it did not want to fight him. But soon he realized that the owl was actually just gaining some distance to create momentum. Once the owl reached the appropriate height, it turned around and fully dived towards Alex.

Alex activated Focus Mode. Time slowed down. He could see the individual feathers on the bird and could hear its silent dive even from so far away.

Alex readied his sword and started pouring his Qi into it. Every time he did that, he would feel a resistance from the sword as if it was not accepting the Qi but eventually accepted it.

He felt like he was filling a water bottle with its cap still on. Only that the cap had holes in it and could actually fill, but took a lot of time.

As the owl swooped down, he swung his sword, and the Smiting Blade did its job. With the increased penetration powers of the blade, he killed the owl in a single swing.

He kept the bird's corpse in his inventory and took out the core. He looked at it and thought,

'The first time I saw a core, I mistook it for a pill and ate it. Can I still do that?'

Without thinking for another moment, he put the pill into his mouth.

"Oh wow, that's a lot. Should I eat another one too?" he said to himself. He took another bone tempering first realm monster core and ate it.

"Hmm... that's not as much as the first one." He quickly let go of this thought and opened his status. Once he did that, he immediately broke through.

He was now Bone Tempering 2nd Realm. He decided not to eat any more core since he needed contribution points. He wandered around until sunrise, and finally turn back to return to the city.

BOOM

A massive explosion shook the very earth. Alex stumbled a bit from the shock wave he felt. The explosion happened very near to where he was.

He ran towards the sound, and within minutes saw a massive scene of destruction.

Chapter 42: Kill? or Save?

Alex looked at the scene of destruction. Trees were uprooted by the shock wave and were on fire. Stones crumbled to dust were still in the air.

And at the center of the explosion was a massive crater. The crater had not been there previously and was made by the explosion that had just happened.

He walked up to the edge of the crater and waited for the dust to settle down. Once the air was clear, he finally saw what was inside.

The crater was about 10 meters deep and about 20 meters wide. Broken trees and bushes were on fire all over the crater. At the center of the crater was a white and red-figure.

Alex moved a little closer to see what it was. When he went closer he finally realized that the white and red-figure was a monster. Alex's first thought was to run away, but he stuck around once he noticed the monster wasn't moving at all.

'Is it dead?' He thought. He went a little closer to look at what it was. The monster was a cat-like monster with big whiskers. It was about as big as a rhinoceros, and its fur was white with red patches.

'Wait, those aren't red patches,' he thought. He walked up a little closer to see what it was and found out that what he thought were red patches were actually blood.

The cat-like monster was bloody all over. He looked at its wound and saw something sticking out from its back.

'Hmm...' Alex stopped. He thought he heard something. It was the cry of a cat, but it was very small and didn't feel like one this humongous cat could make.

Meow

He once more heard the meek little cry of a cat. He went closer to the dead cat monster when suddenly it started moving.

Alex ran to the outer edges of the crater before he could even take another breath. The cat wasn't dead. It was actually moving. He decided to check the description of the cat, so he focused on it.

[????????????]

That was all he got. He could neither see the name, nor the cultivation of the cat. 'How strong is this cat?' he thought.

'What would happen if I kill it right now? It seems to be wounded for some reason. Killing it should be easy. Given the high level of this cat, the corpse and core should sell for a lot.' Greedy thoughts started to appear in his head.

The cat was slowly starting to stand up, but could barely do it. Blood dripped from its body like it was a packet of ketchup.

The cat was standing with 3 of its legs and was holding 1 of its front limbs to its chest. At first, he thought the cat was holding onto its wound in the chest, but he was wrong.

He now realized where that small and meek 'meow' had come from. The giant cat was currently holding a small, newly born cat in its arms.

The cat stumbled once more and fell to the ground. Its wounds were too much for it to handle. Alex just stood there and watched, unsure of what to do.

Just as he was contemplating on what to do, something moved on the other side of the crater. From far away, it looked like a blob of red and white.

When Alex focused to see what it was, he realized it was a silver-colored wolf with a giant wound on its back making it red.

'That wolf...' he thought. It looked very similar. He checked its name, and he was correct. It was the Swift Wolf that Luo Mei had failed to kill.

It was at Bone Tempering 4th realm and was currently making its way towards the wounded cat. The cat made a loud growled that deterred the wolf for a few seconds, but it had more than realized that the cat was in its death bed, and couldn't do anything anymore.

He was scared. The cat couldn't move right now, so it would die to the wolf for sure. Besides, it had its child with it. Alex couldn't stand around and watch the parent and child die.

He decided to help them. He took out his sword and ran up to where the cat was. Listening to something else appear towards him, the cat made another large growl.

Alex felt his spirit grow cold as that growl left him very scared. The wolf also got scared once more. Alex took a deep breath and walked in front of the cat.

"I am not going to hurt you. I am here to save you and your child," Alex said out loud and stood with a sword in his hand. The Cat looked at him with its clear, cat eyes and closed his eyes.

'Did it understand me?' he wondered. It certainly acted like it. He turned his attention back to the wolf. He turned focus mode on and prepared his Smiting Blade technique.

The wolf was apprehensive of him. It seemed to have enough intelligence to realize that he was with Luo Mei when it got hurt. It was considering whether to attack or not.

If he was as strong as Luo Mei, that would just be asking for death. The wolf slowly walked around the cats and the human, taking its time, understanding the situation.

It wanted to delay a bit longer, but it was heavily wounded. So if it did not kill the cat and eat its monster core, he was sure to be dead by tomorrow.

It had come all the way to the western side of the jungle to get away from the stronger monsters, and now there was an opportunity for it to not only heal but get stronger in the process too.

Given that the situation was life or death, the wolf no longer hesitated and went for the attack.

Chapter 43: Successfully Refined

43 Successfully Refined

The wolf's target was the cat, but it was scared of how strong the human could be, so it first decided to check the human.

Seeing the wolf come towards him, Alex immediately swung the blade. The Smiting Blade-driven sword came down at an incredible speed, and ... did nothing.

The wolf had managed to dodge the attack and jump to the side. Seeing the cultivation he emitted while attacking, the wolf was sure that the human was not strong at all. He was weaker than himself.

The wolf started to get more aggressive now. Even though the focus mode was active, the wolf was actually very fast for him. He could not touch it with his sword, no matter how fast he tried to swing it.

Seeing that Alex couldn't do anything, the wolf went on the offensive. Alex got scared and started using another technique.

[Flame Mastery Scripture]

Alex had never used this technique during his fights against the monsters for one simple reason, there was no fire to manipulate. But now, thanks to the massive explosion, there was fire all around him.

With his left hand, he called a little tongue of fire towards himself and immediately increased its size and temperature. He shot the fire toward the incoming wolf.

BAM

The fire hit the wolf right in the face. The wolf immediately whimpered like a dog and ran backward. Its silver fur was now charred around its face.

Gurrrrrr

It started to growl a little. The cat behind him was starting to huff and puff. It was dying but refused to. It was staying alive as long as it could for its child. It could not die as long as the wolf was still alive and wanted it and its child's life.

The wolf was a little cautious this time. It once again started circling looking for an opening. Alex had brought another piece of fire and was invigorating it with his Qi.

The wolf once again came towards him and tried to attack him. Similar to last time, Alex once more shot fire at the wolf. But, the wolf was ready this time, it immediately side-stepped the fire.

Seeing this, Alex suddenly pulled the fire backward and attacked the wolf. The wolf however was already near Alex. With one massive swing of its paw, it hit him right in his left arm, breaking the bones underneath.

"Ahhh!!!" he shouted. This was the first time he had felt such pain in the game. The fire caught up to the wolf and slammed it in the back where the previous wound was.

He could now only move his arm from the elbow below. Everything above that was starting to swell. It was hard but, he could still use Fire Mastery.

The wolf had created a distance between them after getting hit by the fire. This time, it even got hit on its old wound, making it start to bleed again.

The wolf needed to attack again. It once more swiftly ran at him with the intention of killing if possible. Alex however couldn't use the fire very well and instead used it to deter the wolf.

The wolf wasn't going to be fooled. It came straight at his chest. Alex blocked the strike with his sword, but the force of the strike still broke a few of his bones.

The attack made him fly backward and land on the ground. The wolf immediately came upon him and started to bite his head. With the focus mode on, he could feel the teeth of the wolf start to crack his skull.

He was afraid he was going to die.

GROWL

The wolf immediately stopped biting and ran away. The cat had used whatever remaining energy it had left to send the wolf running away.

Alex slowly stood up, his head bleeding profusely. The blood ran along the side of his face and was now dripping to the ground. Some of the blood even covered his right eye completely.

The wolf had fallen for the same bluff 3 times in a row now. It was incredibly angry. It was now preparing for one last attack to kill Alex for sure this time.

Alex was already at death's door, so he was sure if he took another attack from the wolf, he would die for sure. He pulled what little fire he could with his left hand.

He stabbed the sword on the ground and used his only usable hand remaining to wipe the blood off of his face and eye. The wolf started running towards him.

Alex wasn't going to die without one last stand. He picked up his sword, ready to give out one last attack when suddenly something happened.

Three notifications appeared in front of his eyes out of nowhere.

<'Steel Sword' has taken in your essence>

<'Steel Sword' has accepted you as its master>

<Congratulation, you have successfully refined the True Mortal grade weapon 'Steel Sword'>

"What?"

The wolf was right upon him. He had lost control of the fire due to his surprise. Seeing the wolf, he immediately used Qi's manipulation to stop it.

The wolf was at a higher level than him, so there was no way for him to stop it. However, it did slow down the wolf for just enough.

Alex activated the 'Smiting Blade'.

SWOOSH

As if the floodgates were opened, Qi started rushing into the Steel Sword at a speed that was incomparable to the previous times. The sword started to glow in bright yellow color, with enough shine that it seemed to outshine the sun.

Alex turned to look at the wolf that was right upon him. Its right paw was ready to attack his head, but it was moving very slowly due to his Qi. Alex swung his sword and cut off the limb that was outstretched.

The wolf was about to cry out in pain when Alex's sword returned just as quickly and cut off its head.

<You have defeated 'Swift Wolf'>

<You have obtained 'Swift Wolf's Core'>

<You have obtained 'Swift Wolf's Paws'>

Please read My new book, that I wrote for the WPC, called [Reincarnation as an Energy with a System].

My other book will have no impact on the writing or releasing of this book, so feel free to read both.

Chapter 44: Death

Alex slumped onto the ground once he saw the wolf die. As soon as he sat, he started to vomit out blood. It didn't look as bad on the outside, but the attack on his chest had left a hemorrhage inside.

His head was burning with intense pain, and he could barely move his left arm. The blood from his head had once more covered his eyes, but he didn't have the strength to wipe it off this time.

"Thank You," he heard a voice in his head.

'Am I hallucinating?' he thought. 'Is this what being close to death feels like. Full of pain and hallucinations.'

"Thank you for saving my child." He heard the voice once more.

His eyes immediately opened as he looked towards the cat monster. Its eyes had lost their clarity and started to get groggy, but it was still very much looking at him.

"Did you just talk?" he asked, biting through his pain.

"I have two requests. Would you mind listening to my requests?" the cat's mouth didn't move, but he could hear its voice in its head. He was now sure that it was in fact the cat talking.

"Tell me what your requests are. If I can fulfill it, I shall." He said.

"Thank you," the cat spoke in his mind and brought out its child from underneath. "This is my son. I don't know if you will survive your wounds or not, but if you do, please take care of him. His destiny is to grow up to be the strongest, and I, as his mother, can't let him die here," The cat said.

Alex stood up with what little energy, and walked up to the cat. The little kitten was weak and had wounds all over its body as well. But those wounds were mostly just minor wounds, and even without any help, it would survive.

Alex took out the Minor Healing pill from his inventory. It was the only healing pill he had and it only worked on minor injuries. He fed the pill to the little kitten without hesitation. His wounds were not one that he could heal with a meager Minor Healing Pill.

The kitten's wounds healed within seconds, and it started to stand up on its little feet. Alex smiled as he saw the little kitten jump around in his hand and jump down to the ground. It then ran towards its mother and started nudging her a little.

The cat smiled a little and brought out its tongue and started licking the little kitten. Tears started streaming down her eyes as she kept on licking the little ignorant kitten.

Alex's eyes watered a little as well. The cat then looked at him, and said, "Now, for my second request." The cat looked at him and then turned to look at its child for a few seconds, before turning back to him.

After a few seconds of silence, it finally closed its eyes and said, "Please kill me."

Alex was shocked. That was not what he had been expecting. He coughed a bit more blood as it was getting harder for him to breathe. he looked at the cat, and said,

" I don't think I can fulfill this request of yours. I myself am nearly dead. Even if you yourself are on your death bed, I don't have enough strength to kill you, even if I wanted to."

The cat looked at him and said, "That's okay. You don't have to kill me with your own strength. Just pull out the sword on my back and I will die in no time."

Alex turned to look at the thing sticking from its back. 'So that was a sword handle huh.' He thought.

He walked up to the back of the cat and tried to pull the sword off. But it was too heavily stuck in there, and he didn't have the strength to pull it.

He tried a few more times, but it was fruitless. He was about to give up when he thought of something. He looked towards the cat and said, "I am about to try something different. If it works the sword will leave your body, are you ready?"

"Yes," the cat said.

Alex looked at the handle and grabbed it. However, instead of pulling it this time, he just closed his eyes. His Qi started flowing around the surface of the sword. He felt some resistance from the remnant Qi of whoever owned the sword, but without someone to guide it, the Qi simply disappeared.

Whoosh.

MEOW

The cat purred loudly. The little kitten was scared for a moment but returned to nudging its mother. The cat slowly licked the little kitten as Alex heard it speak in its mind.

"Thank You," its tongue had stopped licking its child. The cat was dead.

This was the first time Alex felt horrible for seeing a notification appear.

"Meow?" the little kitten nudged its mother a little more but there was no response. "Meow! Meow!" it kept calling its mother to lick him some more, but Alex knew there was no way the cat was going to do anything anymore.

Tears started welling up in his eyes as he was saddened by the little kitten's cries.

*Cough*

Suddenly, he vomited some more blood and got lightheaded. He couldn't keep standing anymore and fell down hard onto the ground.

"Meow?" the little kitten saw him fall down and walked up to him.

Alex's mind was starting to get hazy as he couldn't tell what was going on outside. He saw a vague silhouette of the little kitten come up to him. He thought he felt something on his forehead, but wasn't sure if it was the little kitten or just his pain.

Suddenly, white light shined bright in front of him. He closed his eyes as the light was too much for him to look at. He heard a bunch of notifications pop up, but he wasn't in the state to read them at all.

Once the light died down, he opened his eyes once more. The little kitten was there no more.

Chapter 45: Important Figures

Everything was blurry. His head ached so hard he couldn't even think properly. He had accidentally dropped on his broken left arm, and it was starting to burn with pain as well.

His green robe was died red in most parts. The most painful part was probably his chest. Most of his ribs were broken, and he was pretty sure some of them had punctured into his organs.

Huff Huff

He was having a hard time breathing as well.

'Please, just let me die.' All he wanted now was to die. 'How was the cat able to keep staying alive for so long with so much wound. Only 3 wounds and I feel like dying.' He couldn't help but think.

He kept on wishing to die, but for some reason didn't. From time to time warm bursts of energy appeared from deep in his body, that kept him from even fainting. So he had to stay awake and endure the pain.

Whoosh Whoosh Whoosh

He heard multiple objects moving in the vicinity. 'Are these the monsters? Will, I finally die?' he thought. He tried to see what monster it was but his one open eye was too blurry to tell anything apart.

That was when he started hearing voices.

"What happened here?"

"Hey, there is a kid here."

"Ma Rong, this is a disciple from your sect."

He felt someone pick him up and place something in his mouth. He heard a lady say something,

"Young Man, if you can hear me then swallow this pill," he heard. Unquestioningly, he swallowed the pill.

The intense pain from his head, arms, and chest all disappeared as cool energy washed all over his body. He physically felt his ribs go back to normal and could feel his left arm moving again.

Once all the different feelings were gone, and he was back to normal, he opened his eyes.

There were multiple people in front of him, all high authority figures. He saw 3 sets of clothing in between these people. One was the green-robed figures from Hong Wu Sect, the second was the yellow-robed figures from the tiger sect, and the last ones were 2 people, a man and a woman both wearing purple robes.

One of the green robes-wearing figures was holding him up at the moment. It was a woman in her late 30s, but with no sign of aging. She was elegant yet authoritative.

"Are your okay, young man?" she asked. He tried to understand who she was, but couldn't. While she was wearing green robes, the linings looked yellow in the morning sunlight.

He didn't know anyone who wore yellow linings in the sect.

"Yes, I am alright. Thank you...uh, Elder" he said.

She snickered a little as her eyes turned crescent. A green robes elderly gentleman with long flowing white hair and beard walked up to him and said, "Disciple, this is the Sect Leader. Please, do not call her an elder. That is disrespectful."

Alex was shocked. 'The sect leader?' he immediately turned to the lady and saw something he had missed previously due to the morning light. Her robe did not have yellow linings. Her linings were golden.

Bronze linings in the sect belonged to the disciples. Silver linings belonged to the elders. So, accordingly, Gold linings must belong to the sect leader.

He immediately apologized, "I'm sorry, Sect leader. I only joined the sect a week ago, and know nothing about the important figures in the sect yet." He bowed down.

"See Great Elder, disciple here wasn't trying to be disrespectful. He just didn't know who we were." She said looking back at the elderly gentleman.

'Great Elder!! So he is the Great Elder of the sect.' He thought.

"You had enough of your talking, Ma Rong? We need to know what happened here. Let us ask your disciple some questions." A big, buff man in his 40s with not a single spot of white in his short hair or scruffy beard appeared behind him.

This man was wearing a yellow robe with golden linings as well. 'Sect Leader of the Tiger Sect?' he thought.

"So, is he alright?" the buff man from the Tiger sect spoke.

Ma Rong took one glance over his body and sighed as she said, "Yeah, he is alright. I would be shocked if he wasn't alright after eating a 'Body Restructuring Pill'. Okay, Disciple, let us ask you some questions."

Alex simply nodded.

"Tell us, What are you doing here? first of all?" she asked.

"The forest? I took a 3 day leave from the sect to come hunt in the forest." Alex answered.

"No, not the- What are you doing here in the crater, where an explosion occurred." She asked.

"Oh. I was nearby when the explosion occurred, so I ran to this place to check what it was. After seeing the parent and child monsters being attacked by a wolf, I came down to protect them. While fighting with the wolf I got injured and nearly died. That's when you found me." He said.

"Oh," everyone looked surprised. They all looked at the swift wolf corpse at the side with its limb and head cut off. Ma Rong turned around and asked him.

"So, you defeated the wolf. Then, what happened to the parent and child monsters?" Ma Rong asked. It was a question in everybody's mind.

"Hmm...I don't know where the little kitten went, but the mother cat is right the-" he looked around to see an empty spot in the middle of the crater. The little cat, as well as the corpse of the mother cat, had disappeared from the huge crater.

Chapter 46: Invitation

"Huh? Where did it go? It was right here!!" he shouted.

"The white cat monster. It was right there. The white cat's corpse." He said.

Everyone looked around. While there were traces of another monster being here before, there was no corpse here. The presumed sect leader of the tiger sect asked, "Are you sure the cat was dead? Maybe you were mistaken about it dying?"

"No way!! I killed the cat myself." He shouted.

Ma Rong's eyes furrowed as she frowned as asked, "Didn't you say you were protecting the mother and child? Why are you saying you killed it now?"

"I did protect it. But the cat's wound was too much for it, and it asked me to kill it." He said.

Everyone presently listening suddenly jerked up a bit. The purple robe-wearing man walked forward and asked," Young man, you said the cat spoke to you? Can you tell us how it spoke to you?" he asked.

"Well, the cat didn't actually speak. I just heard its voice in my mind." He said.

Everyone's eyes went wide. The sect leader's eyes too were wide as she softly muttered, "Saint Realm"

"The monster was in the Saint Realm? If this is true, then this is big news for us."

"The monster must've spoken using spiritual sense. Only Saint realm and above have those according to the records."

"Wait, if the monster really was in the saint realm, then this kid could not have killed it. Either he is lying about killing the monster, or lying about the monster having spiritual sense." An elder from the Tiger Sect spoke.

Everyone immediately realized that what he had just said was true. Ma Rong looked at him and asked, " how did you say you killed the monster?"

Alex realized what was happening. he thought, 'If what they say is true, and the white cat was, in fact, a Saint Realm monster, then I can't let them see the weapon it came with. But, if I don't tell the truth, they will think I'm hiding something, and may forcefully look through my stuff. That would be very bad.'

He thought of something and pulled out a sword, and said, " The cat had this stuck to its back. It told me that if I took this out, it would die due to the wound it would leave behind."

The purple-robed man took the sword from Alex without his permission and looked at it closely. "It's a True Mortal grade sword. The cat monster must've been attacked by someone in the higher realms and didn't mind letting go of this sword to kill the monster" He came to a conclusion.

Alex had decided at the last second to bring out the Steel sword and tell the truth about everything else.

Seeing a true mortal grade sword with him, no one doubted him anymore. While a true grade sword was tempting, everyone present here already had better artifacts, so they returned the sword back to him.

"Good job, disciple," Ma Rong came from the side. "You managed to meet a saint realm monster and lived to tell the tale. What is your name?" she asked him.

"Disciple's name is Yu Ming," he said as he bowed a little.

The sect leader was about to say something when a loud voice came from someone else, "YU MING!!! Is that true, kid?" Wen Cheng, the presumed sect leader of the Tiger Sect cried out.

'What's going on? Am I in trouble?' he was surprised.

"Are you really Yu Ming?" he asked once more.

"Yes," Alex replied in a small voice.

"Where were you yesterday night?" he asked.

"Yesterday? Umm... I was in the eastern side of the forest hunting monsters." He replied simply.

"And you didn't meet anyone else?" he asked. His presence was very heavy on Yu Ming right now.

"Umm... I did meet a few people. Namely Luo Mei and Meng Yun of the Tiger Sect." He said.

"So it is you. I have been searching for you the entire night on the eastern side. To think you were out here in the west." Wen Cheng said.

'Searching for me? Why?' he couldn't understand.

"What's going on?" Ma Rong said from the side."Why is the sect leader of the Tiger Sect searching for my sect's disciple?" she asked.

"Ma Rong. I want this disciple of yours. I want him to join our sect." Wen Cheng said.

"Oh," Ma Rong got curious. "And why do you want him, exactly?"

"Uhh... My direct disciple told me that she met an outer sect disciple from your sect with great talent in cultivation. From her information, that disciple was this kid. Since you people focus on alchemy, and not cultivation, it would be a waste to let a gem get buried under the mud in your sect." Wen Cheng tried to give reasoning as to why he wanted him.

Of course, he didn't give out the fact that he knew Alex had cultivated for less than 10 days and had reached his current cultivation. Or the fact that Alex had a fantastical ability to find alchemy ingredients. Most of all, he didn't tell them of the fact that Alex was also a genius in alchemy too.

If Ma Rong were to find that, he was absolutely sure she would never let go of her disciple.

Ma Rong wasn't stupid either. She knew he was hiding something, but couldn't be sure what. There was no reason for a Sect Leader to go around searching for an outer sect disciple of Hong Wu Sect, just to invite them.

However, she couldn't stop making the choice to go to the Tiger sect either. If he was an inner sect disciple, she could have made some arguments. But, since he was an outer sect disciple, one that joined very recently as well, she couldn't keep him forcefully at all.

Ma Rong was now stuck in a dilemma, and couldn't come up with any reason why she should decline Wen Cheng.

Chapter 47: Double Invitation

"I can give you a True Earth Grade artifact if you let me take him right now." Wen Cheng saw that Ma Rong was in contemplation, so he offered a transaction.

Seeing Wen Cheng actually offer something so expensive, Ma Rong was more than sure that there was something he wasn't revealing right now.

The other Tiger sect elders in the back started to murmur, and wonder why their sect leader would ever make such an offer. Was the kid really worth that?

Alex was stunned too. 'Did Luo Mei tell him about me? Is that why he is making such an offer?' He wanted to say something but couldn't think of what to say in front of such an important crowd.

"Sect Leader," suddenly, a voice shouted from the back. Ma Rong looked back and found it was the Great Elder who had just spoken.

"What is it, Great Elder?" she asked.

"You see, about a week ago, the Eighteenth elder came to me and talked about how fruitful that week's examination was, and that over 25 participants had passed at once." He started talking.

No one understood where this was going, so they kept listening.

"Apparently, one of those participants got a full score on the examination test. They had identified all 100 ingredients in their bag, and had managed to get a silver library token." He said.

Ma Rong seemed to know what he was alluding to, so she asked, " Are you trying to say that he is that disciple?"

Ma Rong looked at Alex and asked, " Did you get a silver library token when you entered the sect?"

"Yes, Elder lang gave me one the day I entered," Alex replied.

Ma Rong smiled. She finally had a reason to decline Wen Cheng's offer. "See, Wen Cheng, My disciple is talented in alchemy as well. Even before joining the sect, he already knew a lot about alchemy. So you should give up on trying to force him to join."

The purple robes duo were watching the ongoing drama with a little smile on their faces. Ma Rong and Wen Cheng kept going back and forth on how one wanted the disciple, and another didn't want to send him away.

The purple-robed female finally talked for the first time. "How about this then Sect Leaders? Why don't we ask the young man himself which sect he chooses?"

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng stopped arguing and thought for a second. Wen Cheng was the first to agree.

"Yes, Lady Mo is correct. We should let the disciple choose." Wen Cheng stepped forward toward Alex, who was still dazed. "Your name is Yu Ming right? If you join my sect, you will have free access to all the cultivation methods and techniques in the sect. I will also allow you to choose 1-NO, 2 artifacts from the sect treasury. And on top of that, I will make you my direct disciple."

Everyone's eyes opened wide as they heard Wen Cheng's proposition. Ma Rong was also astonished. Even the purple-robed couple's eyes were wide at what was being offered.

Amongst them all, however, nobody could top the surprise that Alex felt listening to the Tiger Sect's Sect Leader. Even though his heart said to stick with Hong Wu Sect, his brain argued that this was a brilliant chance that he could not pass.

He had joined Hong Wu Sect so he could play games and earn money, and alchemy was the best at that. But that wasn't the only way. Even by playing normally, one could earn a lot of money. If he were to join Tiger Sect right now, he could do that as well.

He was in a dilemma. Thoughts ran through his mind at a speed faster than he could understand what they were.

Ma Rong looked at Alex and saw that he was starting to get swayed. She didn't know what this disciple had aside from good talent in cultivation and the knowledge of alchemy ingredients.

From her perspective, Alex was a good disciple. Maybe even one of the better ones. But there was no way she would give out as much as Wen Cheng even for her best student.

'He definitely knows something I don't. But, what?' she couldn't understand, but she needed to do something quickly.

"Disciple, if you stay at Hong Wu Sect, I will make you my direct disciple as well, and let you live in the Sect Leader's mountain. You will have full access to both the alchemy gardens, and," she reached into her storage bag, and brought out something, "I will also give your this True-Earth Grade artifact."

The thing she took out was a large green and gold cauldron. Alex looked at the cauldron in awe. This cauldron was many times better than the one used by Kong Yuhan. It was incomparable when it came to the black cauldrons in the Alchemist Hall.

"Umm..." a new offer had arrived that left Alex speechless. Now that there was an incentive to stay at the Hong Wu Sect, he was getting more and more restless, unable to make a decision by himself.

He was close to ripping his long black hair out in frustration. Both of the offers were brilliant, so it was hard to make a choice.

Going to the Tiger sect meant being the sect leader's direct disciple, with access to 2 items from the sect treasury, and full access to all of the sect's cultivation resources.

Staying at the Hong Wu sect meant being the sect leader's direct disciple, full access to all alchemy ingredients in the 2 alchemy garden, and also get the True earth grade cauldron.

'Should I choose the Hong Wu sect since my original intent was to learn alchemy, and staying now would give me better access to the ingredients?' he thought.

He had decided. He was about to speak up when the purple-robed man walked forward and spoke.

"I don't think the young man can choose if both of you offer him something so good. So, I might have a solution to your problems, Sect leaders."

Chapter 48: Why not...?

"What solutions do you have, City Lord Fu?" Ma Rong asked.

"I wouldn't mind listening to a suggestion from City Lord Fu." Wen Cheng spoke as well.

The man in the purple robe was the city lord of the Scarlet city. His name was Fu Wen, and along with his wife Mo An, was in charge of the Scarlet City.

"Here is my suggestion. Since both of you want this disciple so much, why don't you both accept him as your disciple? This way you can both teach him, and he can be part of both of your sects." he said to the two sect leaders.

""Hmm..."" both the sect leaders fell into deep contemplation. Ma Rong looked at Wen Cheng and asked, "Tell me the truth. Why do you really want him?" she asked.

Wen Cheng was about to lie but instead decided to just tell the truth, "Your disciple has only cultivated for 10 days to reach the cultivation he is at now. He really is a genius in cultivation."

Ma Rong stared at him, too shocked to speak. She immediately turned to Alex and asked, "Is this true?"

Alex was surprised for a second. 'How did he know?' but soon realized that it must've been Luo Mei who told him. He had let himself speak a bit too freely at that time.

"Yes," he said softly.

"Is there any way you can prove it?" she asked him. She was having doubts since there was no way a person could cultivate bone tempering 2nd realm in just 10 days. At least not without incredibly fortuitous encounters.

Alex thought for a bit. "I don't have anything to prove it, but I can do this." He said as he opened his status and hit [Breakthrough]. He could break through about 3 times if he wanted to with the Qi he got from the pill but decided to stick with a single one.

Still, that was enough to cause a stir in the crowd. The elder, the sect leaders, and even the city lord and lady duo were surprised at how casually the young man in front of them just broke through.

Ma Rong asked with her eyes still wide, "Why are you in Hong Wu Sect if you have such talents in cultivation? You are wasted in our sect." She said. Even she believed that sending him to Tiger Sect was the right choice.

Alex simply replied," That was because I am really interested in alchemy, and have some talent in it as well."

Ma Rong sighed and said, "I understand what you mean. Being able to name all the ingredients in the test is good, but it's nothing compared to your actual talent in cultivation." Ma Rong was now trying to talk sense into him.

Wen Cheng was pleasantly surprised at the change in Ma Rong.

Alex on the other hand was starting to get nervous. ' I have an alchemy skill with the word 'god' in it. If it's anything half as good as it sounds, it will be a waste to not learn alchemy properly.'

"Ever since I was young, I can name every single alchemy ingredients I come across, and have an uncanny ability to recognize them in the wild." He said. He was spilling his own beans, gambling it at the fact that he would somehow get to have the cake from both of the sects.

"Name every single alchemy ingredient and recognize them in the wild? What do you mean?" Ma Rong was slightly confused. 'He doesn't even look 20, there is no way he could have lived long enough to see and remember every single ingredient in alchemy.' She thought.

In response, Alex brought out 3 storage bags and handed them to Ma Rong, and said," These are all the ingredients I gathered from the forest in the last 3 days."

Ma Rong took a look inside one of the bags. As soon as she saw what was inside the bag, she shuddered a bit. She immediately opened the other 2 bags.

'There are just too many shocking things happening, one after another today. This amount of ingredients is what we collect on both the gardens in a week, and this kid collected it in just 3 days? That too in the southern forest.'

The Great Elder came forward after seeing the sect leader basically stop doing anything. "What is wrong sect leader?" he asked.

Ma Rong didn't speak and simply passed along the 3 bags. When the Great Elder saw the bag, he was shocked as well.

Ma Rong looked at Wen Cheng and said, "I'm sorry, but it seems I can't let you have this disciple all to yourself. How about we share him just as City Lord Fu suggested?" she asked.

Wen Cheng knew there was no way Ma Rong would accept anything less after learning the young man's talents, so he simply agreed.

"That settles it then. Young man, from today on I, will take you on as my direct disciple, do you agree?" he asked.

"Yes, and I, as the sect leader of Hong Wu Sect, will take you as my direct disciple as well, do you agree?" Ma Rong took the opportunity to ask as well.

The elders and city lord duo were watching something extraordinary unfold in front of their eyes. Alex was too shocked and forgot to answer for a second.

As soon as he realized that, he spoke out," I agree.". The two sect lords smiled.

The Great Elder spoke from the behind and said," Young man, greet your new masters."

Alex immediately realized what he had to do, " I, Yu Ming, greet both of my masters." Alex bowed towards both Wen Cheng and Ma Rong.

Both the sect leaders smiled, and Wen Cheng said, "That settles it then. Let's go to your new sect now, disciple."

Ma Rong immediately chimed in, " No, he will stay in the Hong Wu Sect for now."

The sect leaders were once more starting to quarrel with each other.

Chapter 49: Returning back to sect

"He will stay with me. I need to teach him cultivation techniques and martial arts. They take a lot of time."

"No, he will stay with me. I need to give him my alchemy knowledge. They take more time.

The surrounding elders watched the two sect leaders quarrel with a wry smile on their faces. The two sect leaders were always like this, whenever they met.

Alex listened to the argument between the two as he too was unsure of what to do exactly. He thought for a moment and spoke.

"Master!!"

""What?"" both sect leaders looked at him together.

"Uhh..." he didn't know how to let them know who he was speaking to. " Martial Master, I have a request."

Wen Cheng realized he was talking to him, so he spoke, "Go on, tell me your request."

"My request is that master wait 2 weeks before taking me into the sect. Currently, I am in the middle of learning Alchemy, and I don't want to stop. I have a lot of alchemy ingredients, and I want to use them to make pills. I should be done with all of these in 2 weeks and after that, I will come to stay at Tiger sect for 2 weeks before returning to Hong Wu Sect, where I will stay 2 more weeks."

He stated his request.

Ma Rong spoke, "So you will stay 2 weeks with us, and then 2 weeks with Wen Cheng, huh? That's not a bad idea. Very well then, we should do that."

Wen Cheng sighed as well, and said, "Alright. I guess I can work with that. But be prepared, after you join, I will not only teach you about cultivation. You will be learning how to fight from the ground up. You will be learning many different martial arts and finally, you will learn other techniques."

"I understand, Martial Master. Thank you."

Hearing his new disciples thanks, Wen Cheng breathed a little in, and said to his elders, "Look around a little, and see if you find the cat's corpse. Also, take a little bit of this blood from where the cat landed in the crater. We might get some use out of it."

He then turned to Alex and said, "I will see you in 2 weeks, disciple." After saying that, he started to slowly hover, and fly away.

Alex was shocked. 'So you can fly with your Qi. Why is it that I am not able to then?' he wondered.

Ma Rong looked back at Great Elder and said, " Great Elder, I think we should take in some of the blood as well. They might come in handy for some alchemy research."

"I shall do as you say, sect leader." The great elder went and gathered some blood from the place where the corpse was.

"Alright, Let's return," Ma Rong said as she took out a small boat-like artifact, and jumped on it. She turned back to look at Alex, whose eyes showed awe towards the artifact, and said, "Come on up. I will fly us back to the sect."

Alex got out of his stupor and jumped up onto the boat. The other elders simply started flying on their own without any artifacts, similar to what Wen Cheng did.

'Is the sect leader not capable of flying on her own?' he thought. The boat started flying at a faster speed than the other people.

"We will take our leave now, City Lord and Lady," she said and flew away.

The speed at which the boat flew reminded him of the bullet train he took to get to Oakleaf city. 'Does flying in a plane feel the same?' he wondered.

He looked around and saw that the other elders were now flying faster and catching up to the boat. So, he decided to ask.

"Master, why are we using this boat to fly when the other elders are flying on their own with equal speed?"

Ma Rong looked back and answered, "Flying alone is easy, but when you have multiple people to take with you, it's hard to split your attention to the different people. So, instead of flying all the different people individually, flying a single boat with people on top of it is easier."

"As for the reason why we aren't faster than the other elders is because I am choosing not to go that fast. You are only at bone tempering realm, if you were to fall at the full speed of this boat, you would fall, and not be able to handle the impact of your fall."

Ma Rong's eyes widened as she heard what he had just said, " You can hover with your current cultivation?" she asked.

"Yes. I mean last I tried was before I entered the Bone Tempering realm about 3 days ago. I haven't tried with my current cultivation." He said.

Ma Rong turned towards the other elders and said with a serious face, "Everyone, I'm going to go first. Take your time coming back." She then looked towards Alex and said, "Hold on"

Alex didn't know what was going on, but he gripped the boat on both sides. As soon as he did that, he felt a massive whiplash as the boat sped through the forest, and within 5 minutes reached Hong Wu Sect.

Ma Rong didn't stop there and flew the boat directly to the sect leader's mountain and stopped it only after getting to the peak. She got off the boat, and Alex followed right behind.

His legs shook a little as he landed on the ground. The speed was a bit too much for him to handle.

'It took me an entire night to reach that place in the forest, and she brought me back in less than 6 minutes?' he was shocked beyond belief.

Ma Rong was a little out of breath as well. It seemed she had to use a little too much Qi to speed up the boat by this amount.

'Why did she do that?' he thought.

"Yu Ming, you said you could hover? Show me." She said simply.

Chapter 50: "Science" Behind Flying

He had assumed he would stop at around 20 cm, or maybe a little more since he broke through a bit. However, he started floating continuously without stopping. The speed at which he was rising was very slow, but he was rising nonetheless.

When he got to about a meter high, Ma Rong told him to stop. He landed on the ground.

"So you can do it." Ma Rong was in disbelief once more. 'How is a bone tempering realm cultivator able to carry so much weight with his Qi?' she questioned.

She looked at Alex, who was looking at her expectantly for an answer. She sighed and asked," Do you know how cultivators normally fly without artifacts?"

Alex thought for a second, and said, "isn't it by wrapping themselves with their Qi?"

"Yes, but what I'm asking is, do you know why that works for the cultivators? But doesn't work much for you?" she asked.

Alex simply shook his head. Ma Rong answered, "You see, our Qi increases in quantity when we breakthrough. It keeps getting thicker and thicker as we keep on breaking through the realms. At some point, it gets so thick that we can physically pick objects off using it like a rope or a stick."

"The thicker they get, the heavier the object they can carry. Imagine Qi as balloons. Once the balloons have more air in them, they become able to carry objects. The more air there is, the heavier the objects they carry."

"What do you think would happen if I tie a balloon light enough to carry 50 kilograms of weight, on a 50 kg rock?" she asked.

" It will carry the rock?" he said.

"No. The balloon will stay stationary. Since the balloon is tied to a 50kg rock, it is now effectively able to carry 0 weight, so it doesn't fly away. Now, what if I were to break off a small piece of the rock, what would happen?"

"The rock will now start to fly." He answered confidently.

"Yes, but between the balloon carrying the rock, and another balloon of the same capability carrying a 25 kg weight, which do you think would rise faster?" she asked.

"The one with the less weighing rock." He answered.

"Yes, Exactly. Qi is similar. When you were not in the bone tempering realm, your Qi was thick enough to only carry your weight. But once your broke through, it is now able to slowly lift you higher. Since you couldn't change the weight of the rock, you made the balloon even lighter."

"So, you are able to float up every so slightly. Once you are at a higher realm, your Qi will get thicker, and you will be able to fly faster." She explained.

Alex felt like he learned something important today. 'So, I can fly once my Qi is able to carry more weight, huh?' he thought.

But then he thought of something, " But master, I was able to carry monsters up easily when I was at the 1st realm of Bone Tempering. My Qi shouldn't have been so thick at the time."

Ma Rong chuckled a little, " That is simple. Take the balloon and the rock for example again. Since they have 0 weight effectively, any outside influence from you is able to lift them up easily."

"But when you are tied to the balloon, that doesn't work. You can't push the balloon to carry you higher, since the balloon and you are one entity. You were probably hovering above the ground at all because you lifted your feet in anticipation of flying."

Alex seemed to have understood a bit. 'There is a lot more science involved in this than I previously knew' he thought.

Ma Rong then said, "I know you may be excited to fly soon, so you might try to break through a lot, but don't. You need to stay a bit in each cultivation base to understand the intricacies of it. If you keep on breaking through without stabilizing your cultivation, your foundation will be bad for the future, and you will be sure to end up in Qi deviation, and might lose your entire cultivation as well as your life. "

Alex was a little surprised. 'Stabilizing my cultivation? I haven't heard that before. Is leveling up too fast really that bad,' he wondered. Still, the threat of death was enough for him to accept it.

'Alright, come with me," Ma Rong said as she walked down the peak. In less than a few minutes, they reached a large, but simple-looking house.

A step below the house were other several houses with their own courtyard. "Choose any of the houses. Since you are my disciple you will be staying here for now. Starting tomorrow, every morning I will teach you about alchemy. You will take what you learn and use it to try out alchemy. While you are my student, you are still an outer sect disciple. Quickly make pills to become an inner sect disciple."

"Also, there is an alchemy room in each of these houses, so you won't have to go to the alchemy hall to practice alchemy. However, I suggest you don't do any alchemy today and finish other business. It's better if you wait until I teach you some basics tomorrow morning."

"Now go and take a rest. You nearly died today, and are still full of blood and dirt. Go clean yourself."

Alex nodded and said his farewell as he left for the left-most house below the sect leader's house. Once he entered, he looked at the massive interior of the house, with its own backyard and a pond.

This had been a long night and day now. He looked at the time and realized it was nearly 10 am. He had unintentionally missed his breakfast today. He sighed and walked into a random room, and then logged out.

Chapter 51: House with a Courtyard

Alex got up from his bed. He was feeling terrible right now. All the pain he had to suffer today was so real, that he started to wonder if he was even playing a game.

He went and took a cold bath, washing away all the fatigue he felt until now. The near-death experience had traumatized him to some extent, yet somehow he didn't think of it as a bad thing.

He went to have his lunch with his roommates and went to his classes.

*******

In Deva corporation, a bald man in his late 40s was sitting in a meeting room apparently waiting for someone. He seemed to be both nervous and excited about who he was about to meet.

"Welcome miss Hao, I hope you are doing well." He said with a smile that was incapable of hiding his excitement. The girl felt disgusted but didn't say anything as she walked ahead and sat down at the table.

"Is it ready?" she asked.

The man practically ran towards her to bring her a stack of papers in a neat binding. "Here are the records from the Eternal Cultivation miss. We have prepared them just as you asked."

The young lady briefly looked through the papers and nodded to herself. "Good, I'm leaving." She stood up and started walking away.

"Miss Hao," the man immediately called her, stopping her in her tracks. "Is it possible for us to meet the genius that made this game?" he asked.

The lady simply turned around and said, "You aren't worthy to meet him. Just sit back and hope something new comes along your way. That is all you deserve." She then walked away.

The company had made billions from the game the lady Hao had given to the Deva Corporation, and he as the president would get most of the profits. So, he happily took the woman's insults without any annoyance.

He was now starting to hope the lady would bring along something else from the game's creator. He could only hope that much.

********

Alex returned from his classes. He didn't learn much today as he was mostly distracted by the thoughts of what had happened this morning.

He returned to his room after having his afternoon lunch. As soon as he was done changing his clothes, he jumped back into the game.

He opened his eyes inside the random room he had walked into when he logged out this morning. He walked around the house to check it out. The house had about 5 rooms in it, with 4 of them being normal rooms, and the last one being an alchemy room with a fire pit in the middle.

Behind the house was a small courtyard with an artificial-looking, small pond in it. He walked up to the pond and took a look at it.

What he saw was an unrecognizable man with long black hair and blue eyes. The man was wearing a light green robe with red all over it.

'Is that... me?' he thought. He had only seen his in-game appearance once when he first made the character. That was a 5-second glance that he checked no further after that. Looking at it now after nearly 2 weeks. He was surprised at how different he looked from real life.

He decided to take a bath right here with the water in the pond. He took off his clothes and looked at his well-built body. 'I wouldn't mind having this body for real.' He thought.

He used Qi manipulation to carry some water from the pond and poured it over himself. He started washing away the hardened blood in his hairs and skins.

The water running down his body turned red as they washed away all the blood. As he was rubbing away more blood, he noticed something.

On his left arm, where the wolf had first hit him, there was a red scar. The scar was in the shape of a monster's paw.

'Did the wolf hit me so hard that it left a paw mark even after healing the wound?' he thought. He slowly touched the tattoo-like scar, wondering if it would ever heal.

"Hmm..." he thought he felt something from the scar. Something like a vibration from a sound. He touched it once more, but nothing happened. So, he went back to cleaning himself.

After he was done bathing, he took out his remaining clean robe and wore it. After that was done, It was time to go down to the sect valley for the multitude of things he had to do.

He walked down the sect leader's mountain and quickly reached the bottom. As he was walking out, an elder he had never seen before, came up to him and asked, "Are you, Yu Ming?"

"Yes," he said skeptically, not knowing what the elder wanted.

"Give me your nameplate," he asked. Alex took out his nameplate and handed it to this elder. The elder took out a medallion and held it as he placed Alex's nameplate on his forehead.

Soon after, he handed back the nameplate and said, "With this, you have the freedom to go to the alchemy garden, and can take out anything you want from there without charge. But make sure not to go overboard with what you take. While you may have the right to take the ingredients from there, you do not have the right to waste those ingredients for your own selfish reasons, understand."

The elder seemed a little too stern. Alex agreed without question. Besides, he didn't intend to use that many resources from the gardens anyway. He would only use them when he couldn't find the items elsewhere.

After the elder let him go, he started walking straight to the Disciple Hall. He had taken a 3-day leave and needed to tell them that he was back.

Chapter 52: Testing His New Strength

It didn't take long for Alex to reach Disciple Hall. He looked at the ranking board in front of the hall and realized, he had gone down in ranking.

'I was gone away for 3 days, and I am already down by 200 ranking spots?' he thought. He walked back to the Alchemy Achievements and realized he was down on that side too.

He laughed wryly and didn't think much of it. He had returned now, and with the number of stuff he had got back, he could easily get those rankings back and more.

He went into the disciple hall and let them know of his return. After that, he walked towards the sect market. It was around 4 pm and the sect valley was at the peak of crowdedness.

He walked into the sect market and went straight to the elder's stall. He had to wait a while before his time came up eventually.

The elder looked at him, and asked, "Are you here to buy or sell?"

"Both," Alex simply answered. He then reached into his robes and took out 2 storage bags. He checked the storage bags one more time and handed them to the elder.

The elder was surprised someone actually initiated to hand him a storage bag of their own. He then diverted his attention to the storage bag.

The elder's eyes started to widen. The more he looked, the wider it got. He snapped his head as he looked at Alex.

'Bone Tempering 3rd realm. So how are the corpses here so strong?' he wondered.

"Are you selling these in the place of someone else?" he asked.

"No, those are for me." Alex simply answered.

"Young man, if these belong to someone else, and you stole this, you must confess. Lying will not get you anywhere." The elder got more vocal about it.

Alex didn't know what else to say, so he simply insisted on it being his. "Those belong to me, and me alone elder. I did not steal them from anybody." He said.

The elder was starting to get irritated. "Are you saying you killed this organ tempering realm bird monster?" he asked, mentioning one of the monsters inside the bag.

"No, I didn't. Someone else did. But they gave me the monster corpses, so it's mine." He said.

The elder finally felt like he was getting the truth out of him. "See, these don't belong to you. Tell the core disciple who killed these monsters to come to sell these monsters on their own. "

The elder believed that only a core disciple could possibly be strong enough to kill all of these monsters. He handed the bag back to Alex.

Alex frowned a little but said nothing. 'Whatever, I will ask master tomorrow to sell these in my stead. I will like to see how he will refuse master.' Although he was the sect leader's direct disciple, aside from a handful of elders who were there, and the elder below the mountain, nobody else had the information.

Alex didn't like flaunting his master's name around, and also didn't have anything to prove he was her disciple. So, he simply took out the strong monster corpses and handed the bag back to the elder.

The elder frowned as he looked at the bag once more. This time, only Bone tempering 3rd realm and fewer monster corpses were there.

"Are you saying you killed these?" the elder asked.

Alex simply nodded. There was no way the elder could prove this claim false, so he simply started counting the points. The bag only had corpses and not cores or materials. Alex had learned that both of those latter were extremely useful for pill making.

After a while, the elder spoke out, "52 points for skin tempering realm corpses, 360 points for muscle tempering realm monsters, 220 points for bone tempering realm monsters-for a total of 632 points."

Alex handed him his nameplate and got the points. For buying, he bought some of the ingredients he lacked for making a [Spirit Enhancing Pill].

After getting those ingredients, he walked to the library. He was here just to return the Smiting Blade book. Once he did, he left. He had wanted to get some recipes for new pills but lacked the points right now.

'I will wait until tomorrow when I meet the master.' He thought. Since he still had some time to spare before having to log out for dinner, he decided to visit the Training Hall.

'I wonder how strong a True Mortal grade sword is,' he was really curious about his newfound strength. He placed his nameplate in a wooden post inside the training hall, and a wooden puppet jumped up.

He took out the steel sword and held it in his hand. Even without doing anything, he could feel a sense of connection to it as it started to passively suck in his Qi to glow a bit.

While the amount of Qi it sucked wasn't a lot, it was substantial enough to increase its strength for sure.

Previously, without using a technique, the steel sword did exactly 1 realm lower than his cultivation in damage. Now that he had refined it, he was looking forward to the new damage.

He held his sword in an attacking stance and jumped forward. As soon as he reached the puppet, he simply swung the sword onto the wooden puppet.

BAM

He could tell the damage was much higher than what he could do with his own fists. He turned back to look at the information on the post.

2 realms higher. That was how good a refined True Mortal grade sword was. If simply using this sword without any technique already resulted in such damage, then how much more damage can using a technique give him.

The thought of this was starting to excite Alex.

Chapter 53: Ebony Corundum Stiletto

Alex got ready to attack once more. He picked up his sword and started channeling his Qi around his body as per the Smiting Blade technique.

His qi was flowing into the sword at an incredible speed. He had been in a half-dead state when this first happened, so he didn't have to luxury to fully experience what it felt like. But now that he did, it was glorious.

Feeling the Qi slide into the blade with zero resistance was such a cathartic experience. Once the blade was filled to the brim with his Qi, he moved.

The sound the hit made was actually quieter than the last time, yet he could tell the damage was much higher. The penetration power of the sword was much higher with the technique, so it didn't hit enough of the wooden puppet to make much sound.

Alex turned around to look at the damage value.

'4 realms higher?' he was shocked. 'That's much higher than I had expected.' He looked at the puppet which had a deep, almost invisible cut going from its left shoulder to its right waist. It took a few moments for the puppet to heal back.

Now that he was done checking his damage with his 'new' sword, he decided to leave. But just then, he remembered. 'Wait, what about the other sword?'

He decided to check that one as well. He opened his inventory to see the new sword. Once he found it, he brought it out.

BANG

The moment the sword left his inventory, it fell onto the ground with a loud sound. This sound was larger than when he first hit the puppet with his sword.

Thankfully, this was the Training hall, so nobody checked what had just happened.

The sword had been inside the mother cat when he put it into his inventory, so he hadn't seen what the sword looked like and only the hilt. Now that he was looking at the actual sword, he was in awe.

Despite how big the hilt gave the impression of the sword being, the sword was actually tall, but a thin two-sided sword. It looked like it had some sort of marking or words on it at first glance, but looking at it more carefully, it was just the texture of the metal itself.

The blade itself had a brownish color to it with some gold hue to it. The crossguard was quite long for such a thin sword and made purely of silver-like metal. The hilt was wrapped in red leather, probably from some high-level monster.

He focused on the blade a bit, and a panel appeared.

[Ebony Corundum Stiletto

Grade: Earth

]

'It's not giving me any information aside from the grade,' he thought. He checked the steel sword.

[Steel Sword: Refined

Grade: True Mortal

Elemental Alignment: None

Weight: 10 KG]

'Okay, the steel sword is giving a few more information now. Is it because I refined it?' he wondered. He tried to recall back to how the refinement actually happened.

'Didn't it say something about the sword accepting my essence?' he thought. 'What is essence though? Essence, I have heard of that word somewhere else... That's right.' He immediately opened his inventory.

There was an item in there that he got after killing the cat monster.

[????????'s Blood Essence]

'So does essence mean blood?' he wondered. He remembered that he had never before been bled in the game. The only time he did was the fight against the wolf. So, if that was the exact time the sword was refined, then blood would make sense to be the essence.

'Do I have to cut myself now?' he didn't want to intentionally bleed. Still, he braced himself and cut his fingertip. Blood started pooling on top of his finger.

He looked at his finger and was actually surprised. His finger was actually starting to close up a bit. 'Is this because I am a cultivator?' he wondered.

He dropped the pooled-up blood into the sword. The drop of blood fell onto the blade, but it just slipped off the surface of the blade and fell into the soil below.

He was curious about what had just happened, so he bent down to grab the sword. Surprisingly the sword was heavy. In fact, it was so heavy that he was unable to move it even a single centimeter.

'How is such a small sword, so heavy,' he wondered. He tried a couple more times to no avail. 'What if I try to put my Qi into it? Will that make it better?' he thought.

He grabbed the hilt of the blade, and slowly started to pour in his Qi. The resistance he felt was massive. The sword absolutely didn't want his Qi and was vehemently refusing it.

He started using more force to put in the Qi, and suddenly massive energy started pouring into him from the sword. His body started to hurt and he immediately stopped forcing in the Qi.

'Any longer and I would've been seriously hurt.' He thought. The sword refused his Qi so much that it nearly wounded him in return. He looked at the sword with a little bit of dread in his eyes.

'The sword is too strong for me right now. I should try again once my cultivation base is higher.' He thought.

He hadn't been here for more than 10 minutes, but the nameplate still took 5 points. He didn't care though. He took his nameplate and walked out of the training hall.

Now that he could think of nothing else to do, he decided to go back to his residence in the sect leader's mountain. Nobody stopped him this time, so his way to his residence was smooth. Once he was in the house, he looked at the time and realized it was about time for dinner.

So, he logged out.

Chapter 54: Unlocking...

After dinner, Alex logged back into the game. The evening had turned into night, and his new house was lit with lanterns. There were multiple lanterns all around the house for light.

He took a lantern and walked out into the courtyard. The lantern wasn't bright enough to light up the giant courtyard, and only dimly lit it. But that was enough for a cultivator like Alex who could see well even without lights.

He sat down on the grass near the pond and took off the lanterns covering. He was going to practice Flame Mastery Scripture for now. For 2 hours straight, he did nothing but manipulate the fire. By now, he didn't require a lot of Qi to manipulate the fire.

He was worried that his speed at cultivating would be bad for him, and he would start to lose proper control over his qi. Thankfully, 3 nights of hunting monsters had greatly stabilized his fast-growing cultivation.

Now, he just had to stabilize the cultivation he was in, and he could breakthrough once more. He hadn't met a single bottleneck as of yet, which he was unsure was related to his talent or not. The number next to the required Qi amount never dropped below 100%.

After he was done with practicing Flame Mastery Scripture, he started practicing to fly. While he only moved upwards very slowly, he could still learn how to move from side to side.

He brought out his qi and started wrapping it around himself. Once he made the Qi lift him, he slowly started to rise up. At around 1 meter off the ground, he stopped his Qi from lifting him up any further and started to hover there.

After that, he took some more Qi and started to move with it. It was only due to gravity that he had problems moving upwards. Since there was nothing keeping him from moving sideways, he started to freely float around. His speed at moving sideways was a little faster than moving normally.

He dropped to the floor once more and thought of something. Ma Rong mentioned something about him only being able to hover because he unconsciously lifted himself off of the ground before trying to fly.

'What will happen if I jump first, before trying to fly?' he wondered. Once more, he wrapped himself with Qi and jumped really hard. With his current cultivation, he could easily jump 4-5 meters of height. At the highest height, he suddenly used the Qi to keep him afloat. Finally, it started feeling like flying to him.

At this high, he started to look at the night sky, the open mountain range, and the light scattering into the atmosphere from the sect valley. It all looked so fantastical to him. He realized, at some point while playing this game, he had stopped wanting to play it for the money, and instead wanted to play it for himself.

He practiced flying for a while. Every once in a while, he would try floating some small stones from nearby with him. Splitting his attention between himself and the other things was hard, and that was exactly why he was practicing.

Manipulating his entire body with his Qi to keep it afloat was a very draining task. Before he knew it, he had used up all his Qi. So, he sat down to cultivate.

But, before he started, he had one more thing he had to do. He quickly opened his inventory and took out something. He looked at the thing in his hand, something that he had been looking forward to for the last 2 days.

It was a small flower with 5 yellow petals. The Spirit Cleansing Lily. According to Luo Mei, if he were to hold this flower while he cultivated overnight, he would unlock the spiritual sense that only someone in the saint realm could do.

He took a deep breath and started cultivating. Very soon, his Starry Sky Qi Absorption method was activated and he fell into a deep trance.

At first, it was a normal night of cultivation. Nothing happened with the flower in his hand. But after a while, the yellow flower was faintly glowing with yellow light.

It would light up for a moment, and then die down. Light up once more, and die down again. The rhythm at which it did that was erratic at first. But slowly, after some time, it started to harmonize with Alex's breathing. Every time he took a breath in the flower lit up. Every time he let go of his breath, the flower got dark again.

Every single breath, the flower was starting to light up more and more until at one point it lit up so much that some of its lights started breaking off of the flower and floating up.

They slowly reached Alex's face, and he breathed them in. Every single breath, the flower broke more and more into light ember-like fragments that were breathed in by Alex.

After some time, the entirety of the flower was devoured by Alex's breathing. Once they well all inside him, his body started glowing slightly as well. The flowers had reached his lungs. From there, they got into his bloodstream and made their way up to his brain.

The water was turbulent for a while as it grew. After it reached a massive size, it stopped growing and became still. Suddenly, a notification appeared in front of the unconscious Alex.

Chapter 55: Spiritual Sense

The early dawn brought in rays of light that lit up Alex's courtyard where he was currently cultivating. Alex slowly opened his eyes as he got out of what he considered was basically sleeping.

Every time he cultivated, he would always fall asleep. But somehow never wake up later than the morning. He would always wake up at some time between 6 and 7 am for some reason.

He had gotten used to that by now. He looked at the rays of light coming in from the front of his house. It seemed his house was facing east. At the same time, he saw the walls of the house, the trees in the courtyard, the multitude of blades of grasses in the ground, as well as the pond that was currently behind him.

'Wait a second. What is going on?' he thought. He could currently see things he wasn't even looking at. The pond was currently behind him, so how could he possibly see it?

The blades of grasses were too many for him to be able to 'see' at the same time. He closed his eyes to clear all of the visions he was seeing right now, but that didn't help.

He could still see everything clearly. Well, almost everything. He could no longer see the rays of light coming from afar, or anything that wasn't in his courtyard.

He could see the walls of his house, and also see beyond those walls, but not far off. He could see the pond, and also everything in it. He could see the many fishes swimming in the pond.

Once he started focusing on specific things, everything else stopped overwhelming him. While he could still see everything, he started to ignore them. Yet even when he focused on something, he could still feel the thing he was looking at had multiple things in it that he was looking at once.

For example, when he looked at the pond, he could see all the fishes at once, and individually at the same time. He felt that he could keep track of all the fishes even though there were hundreds of them in there.

He looked at the multitudes of grass blades on the ground. Since there were easily more than a hundred grasses, he was having trouble focusing on them all at the same time. He had to section off about a hundred or two hundred of the grass blades to see them all at the same time as well as individually.

He could clearly feel his mental strength had improved a lot more. He kept looking around at the different things with his eyes still closed. He kept wondering what was happening, why he could see so much.

Then he looked at his own self and realized something—The yellow flower was gone. Only then did he understand what happened.

'Wait, so this is the 'spiritual sense' that Luo Mei was talking about?' he thought. He used the spiritual sense to look at himself. He finally saw what the other people would see when they looked at him. No more reflected image in the water, this was the true him.

He quietly admired how he looked. He started looking at the different things with his spiritual sense. Slowly, he realized that 'seeing' was not all there was to the spiritual sense.

He could also 'feel' the objects he was looking at. He could tell whether an object was smooth or rough. He could tell whether something was hot or cold. He could even tell apart which objects weighed more, and which weighed less.

As he was looking at the different things, he realized something was being drained in his mind, and before he knew it, he stopped seeing anything. He was now in the dark.

'Did I deplete my spiritual sense already?' he thought

He opened his eyes to look properly once more. Looking with his eyes felt like a degrade now that he had spiritual sense. Still, due to his increased mental power, his eyes could keep track of a lot of different things now.

While the amount wasn't as large as when he was using his spiritual sense, it was still a lot.

He decided to check if he could handle multiple objects with Qi manipulation now that he was able to track multiple things at once. He started floating a small stone. Then, he started to do the same to another stone. And another. Soon, he was individually keeping 5 stones afloat.

He tried some more. At around 8 stones, he started feeling some mental strain, and at 10 he had reached his limits. After moving them all separately for a while, he dropped the stone.

'Hmm... I have an alchemy lesson with master today. I should go and come back to the game as soon as I can,' he thought. He quickly logged out and did all of his morning business. Once he ate his breakfast, he returned back to the room and logged into the game.

He had returned to the game in about 15 minutes, so decided to go to the sect leader's abode as soon as he could. He opened his eyes and started to stand up, but suddenly he noticed something.

The first thing he noticed was that quite a lot of his Spiritual Sense had come back. But that was not what surprised him the most.

He slowly looked around, using both his eyes and spiritual sense. He was no longer where he had logged out and had in fact logged in a room somewhere else.

'Where am I?' he thought. Just as he thought that the door to the room opened, and he looked up to see who it was. He looked at the person who had just entered and said in surprise, "Master?"

Chapter 56: Spiritual Sea

"Are you alright?" Ma Rong asked as soon as she entered.

Alex was a little perplexed as to what she meant. So, he simply answered, "Yes. I am alright."

"What were you doing sleeping in the courtyard? I was worried you were sick or something." She said with a concerned look on her face.

"Oh, uhh... I was cultivating over the course of last night, and must've fallen asleep outside in the courtyard," He said.

'Damn. Does the game not remove your character from the world while you log out?' he thought. Until now he had assumed that whenever someone logged out of the game, the game would remove their bodies from the play so that it didn't hinder anything else.

'I shouldn't log out in dangerous places from now on,' he said to himself.

"Fall asleep while cultivating? Why would you fall asleep while cultivating?" she asked.

"Huh? Do you not fall asleep while cultivating? I have never been awake when I cultivated," he answered simply.

Ma Rong looked at him like she had just heard something very absurd. "What sort of cultivator falls asleep while cultivating? What if you get attacked while you were cultivating? What would you do then? Simply die?" she asked.

Alex thought for a moment and couldn't come up with an answer. 'That's right. What would I do if something life-threatening happened while I was cultivating? Would I get woken up by the threat? Or would I simply die?' His master's worries made sense.

He followed his master to the alchemy room in his house. There was no need for paying contribution points to use alchemy rooms here.

She sat down on one side of the room and told him to sit on the other side. Once they were both seated, they were both on either side of the fire.

She took out a cauldron and placed it on top of the fire. The cauldron was made up of green material, with gold objects attached to it.

"I promised to give you this cauldron, didn't I? This cauldron is called the 'Golden Jade cauldron'. It was given to me by my master when I surpassed him in alchemy. It's a True Mortal Grade cauldron, and from today on, it is yours." Ma Rong spoke with a bit of emotion in her voice.

"Alright. We will start now. You don't have anything to do before we start right?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit and decided he should ask her something. He took a deep breath and said, "Master, I unlocked my spiritual sense today."

"Okay. If that is all then we can sta-" Ma Rong stopped as she was talking. "What did you just say?" she looked at him as if she misheard what he had just said.

"I unlocked my spiritual sense today," he repeated once more.

"No way, you are a bone tempering realm cultivator. You cannot unlock spiritual sense until the saint realm. You must've mistaken your normal Qi sense as spiritual sense. Although even Qi sense is only supposed to unlock once you reach True realm," she refused to believe it.

"Master, I used a Spirit Cleansing Lily to unlock my spiritual sense." He told her.

Ma Rong's eyes were wide with shock. "How do you know about the spirit cleansing lily? No, where did you even get it from? They are incredibly expensive," she was still refusing to accept the fact that he had unlocked.

"Did you forget master? I can recognize every alchemy ingredient I see in the wild. I got mine in the western forest, outside of the city," he said whatever he could to make her believe him.

Ma Rong thought for a second. "Does that mean you have a spiritual sea now?" she asked.

"Sea? What's a spiritual sea?" he asked.

"If you really did unlock your spiritual sense, then you must've unlocked your spiritual sea. The Spiritual Sea is where your sense is located. According to the records, the sea is in your mind that you can feel with your spiritual sense. The larger your sea, the more powerful the spiritual sense." She explained.

Alex quieted for a second . 'A sea? Do I have one?' he thought. He quickly started probing into himself with his spiritual sense. He felt no resistance as he looked inside his mind.

Somewhere on his head was a small bubble of spiritual energy. Once he looked at what was inside, he saw a massive, but quiet sea with some occasional waves. The sea looked a bit dried up but was constantly getting back to its previous state.

"Yes, Master. There is something in my head. It's like a bubble of spiritual energy, and inside the bubble is a vast body of water, just like a sea." He said.

Ma Rong was shocked, "So you really did unlock your spiritual sense. That-that is too fast." He was looking at him like she was looking at a monster.

"But-but wait, you said you found a spirit cleansing lily? How did you choose the right one? Do you know that choosing the wrong flower destroys the entire flower bed?" she asked.

"Ah yes. I just know which flower is the right one. I have picked 2 lilies by now. One by myself, and another for Luo Mei of Tiger sect, who I met during my hunt." He said.

"So are you saying, you can pick the right flower out of the entire bed of flowers?" she asked once more. Alex simply nodded. Ma Rong's eyes seemed to light up with excitement.

She abruptly stood up and walked outside. She almost forgot about Alex in her excitement and left by herself. She turned back to look at Alex, who by now had a curious look on his face.

Ma Rong's eyes lit up as she said, "Follow me. If you really can tell apart a spirit cleansing lily from the normal lilies, then you have a job to do."

Chapter 57: Third Lily

Alex followed Ma Rong down the mountain. The time was late morning so a lot of people were already in the sect valley going about their own business.

As soon as she left the mountain, she took a sharp right turn and walked towards another mountain.

'One of the alchemy gardens?' he thought. This was Alex's first time entering the alchemy garden, so when he finally got to see what the mountain was like, he was extremely surprised.

When he first heard the word 'garden', he had expected a well-organized and well-kept botanical landscape. But it was anything but that. This looked more like a jungle that no one had visited in over a century.

There was no proper walking path, plants grew wherever they wanted, and there was no way to tell what was required in alchemy and what was just useless weeds.

"Hmm... is this your first time? The garden is always like this. We try not to interfere with how the plants grow and only take what we need. Although sometimes it's hard to find exactly what you are looking for." She said

Alex looked around a bit more. He was ignoring the feeling he had when he saw an alchemy ingredient. He was jaded to the feeling and could control himself now.

He used his spiritual sense to look at the different plants. Various information flooded into him, even telling him what the ingredients were. He didn't even have to focus to know now.

As he went forward, he stopped when he saw his master had stopped as well. He tried to look at what was in front of her. When he saw the flowers, he was surprised.

"A Spirit Cleansing Lily?" he asked.

"Yes. It has been in this garden for years now. It's highly regulated by the elders, so nobody gets to even look at it under normal circumstances."

She turned towards Alex and asked, "Can you tell me which one is the real one?"

Alex looked at the flower bed and walked towards it. After reaching it, he simply pointed to a blue flower in the midst of the flower bed.

Ma Rong looked at him nervously, "Are you absolutely sure?" she asked. He nodded confidently. Ma Rong took a deep breath and grabbed the blue flower with a nervous hand.

"Here goes nothing." She picked the flower. She half expected all the rest of the flowers to wilt, but they didn't.

"I did it. I did it. Haha, I finally got a Spirit Cleansing Lily." She was so excited that she nearly jumped up and down. After she settled down from her excitement, she looked at Alex like he was a gem. "So, you really have the talent to tell apart the alchemy ingredients huh. That is gonna come in handy very much."

"Give me your nameplate." She said. Alex took out his nameplate and handed it to her. She was about to change something in the nameplate when she noticed he already had a pill registered under his name.

"You have already made pills? Didn't you join less than 2 weeks ago?" She asked.

"Yeah. I made it the day before I left to hunt." He answered.

'Monster,' was all she could think.

"When did you start making pills?" she couldn't help but ask.

"Oh, I started the same day." He replied

"Oh, is this the only pill you were able to make that day?"

"No, I made 8 of those pills. I had sev- Nine batches of ingredients and failed the first time. After that, I succeeded in all the other attempts. I gave the 10% harmony one to the disciple hall, and sold the remaining 7 for points." He answered.

'Monster. He can't be called a genius any longer. Monster is the only word that fits him.' She was shaking internally hearing his success rate. 8 out of 9 success rates was something normal alchemists would only hope for.

A beginner making a single mistake and succeeding the rest of the attempts was unheard of.

"You gave them 10% one? What was your highest harmony level?"

"Hmm... if I remember correctly, it was 16%."

Ma Rong's eyes were wider than the flower she was holding. "Monster," she said out loud.

"What?" Alex asked. 'Did she just call me a monster?'

"Nothing," she said as she focused back on his nameplate. She did something to the nameplate and returned it. And then she said something that shocked Alex, unlike anything he had felt before.

She said, "You are now a core disciple of the Hong Wu Sect, with the privileges of an elder."

Alex had a problem grasping at the concept of what had just happened. "But I haven't completed any tests. How can I be a core disciple?" he asked.

Ma Rong simply said, "Of course you can. I am the sect leader. If anyone had problems with that, they can come to talk to me. I will go tell the elders about what you did, and not even they will argue against me."

She took out a medallion from her storage bag and started talking into it. "Great Elder and all the numbered elders. Please come gather in the Elders hall within the next hour. I need an emergency meeting with you all to talk about some important topic."

All around the sect, the great elder and the different numbered elders, namely first elder to 18th elder heard the announcement and started preparing to go to the Elders Hall. It was not always that the sect leader herself called for a meeting.

Once she was done making the announcement, she turned towards Alex and said, "Thank you. Thanks to you, I can also unlock my Spiritual Sea and Spiritual Sense. Go back and do what you want, for now, I need to go to the meeting. I will come to meet you tonight."

Alex watched as she left the garden. He looked at the time and it wasn't even 9. He decided to look around the garden a bit longer.

Chapter 58: Misuse of Authority

While Alex was going around the garden looking at everything, while the elders were convening in the elder's hall.

Some elders arrived before even 15 minutes had passed after the sect leader's message had been sent out. There were 20 seats in the meeting chamber inside the Elders Hall.

3 of them were on top of a small podium, while the rest of them were on either side of the room. Elders started to enter the room and seating in their respective numbered seats.

"Oh seventh elder, you came rather early." A young man walked into the room. He was in his late 20s but didn't look that old.

"Oh, Elder Lang congratulations on making into the numbered elders rank. Your father and master must be proud. Oh, I should probably start calling you eighteenth elder so that I don't confuse you between you and your father." The seventh elder laughed as he said this.

"I don't think that is even possible, Seventh elder. My father won't respond to anything you call him other than the first elder. he is way too used to it now." Elder Lang laughed as well.

Lang Shun was the son of the first elder, Lang Luoyang, and a direct disciple of the Great elder, Chang Peng. He had shown great progress in both alchemy and cultivation and had recently been granted the title of Eighteenth Elder.

As the Eighteenth elder, his primary task was to filter the disciples entering the sect. This was how he had come to learn about Alex's incredible test results and had given him a Silver library token.

Time passed slowly, and more and more elders entered the room. The seats on either side of the room started to slowly fill up. The seats on the podium however remained empty.

Sometimes later, the sect leader finally entered the meeting hall. Following behind her was a white-haired, and white-bearded old gentleman, who was the Great Elder.

Slightly behind them was a man that looked young, but wasn't, based on the whites in his hair and beard. He looked an older image of the eighteenth elder. This was the first elder, Lang Luoyang.

The sect leader walked up the podium and sat on the middle seat. The great elder sat to her left, and the first elder sat to her right.

Ma Rong looked at the elders in the hall and was about to start the meeting when she noticed two of the seats nearest to the podium empty.

"Have the 2nd and 3rd Elder not returned from the capital?" she asked the group.

"Hopefully they didn't forget to get back the information about the upcoming competition. Since we are all here, let's start the meeting." Ma Rong said.

"I am holding this meeting to talk about 2 things, both regarding my disciple."

Many of the elders that heard her were confused. "Sect leader has a disciple? Why have I not heard this before?" some of the elders started discussing amongst themselves.

"The first reason is I am going to make my disciple a core disciple" The sect leader simply said.

Most of the elders didn't say anything. If the sect leader had a disciple, then the disciple must be a high leveled alchemist. Only the fifth elder, the ninth elder, and the Great elder looked at the sect leader in surprise.

They were there on that crater where the saint realm cat monster had landed, and they had firsthand seen that the disciple was only an outer sect disciple. Even if he became a direct disciple, he would still have to go through the normal procedures to become a core disciple.

"Sect leader, are you sure that's alright?" the great elder asked from the side.

"I will go into the reason soon, great elder," she reassured the elder about her decisions.

"The second reason is I am here to authorize my disciple to have free access to everything in the sect. " This decision was a lot more controversial than the first one.

Nearly every elder chimed in to give their piece of opinion on the matter. Giving a disciple free access to everything in the sect, was a massive deal to the elders. While an elder may have more authority than such a disciple, they would still be bounded by rules in the sect, and not be able to access everything freely.

Ma Rong had expected the cries of refusal, so she was ready. She brought forth her palm in the air to stop them from talking. Once they saw it, the elders all quieted down.

The 6th elder spoke, "I am sorry but this feels like a blatant misuse of your authority, sect leader."

"Yes, sect leader. Can you tell us why you are doing this?" the 12th elder asked.

In response, Ma Rong simply took out a 5 petaled blue flower. "Does anyone recognize what this is?" she asked the crowd.

The first elder and the great elder immediately got more attentive to the flower in her hand. They recognized what it was, and understood what it meant for the sect. This flower was a major deal for the progress of the sect.

As for the other elders, they were stumped. The flower was too... normal for them to recognize what it was. They turned around to look at each other in the hope of finding an answer.

Ma Rong looked at them and understood that not everyone could recognize this flower without reading its description in the records. She looked towards the first elder and said, "First elder, could you please tell the other elders what the name of this flower is?" she had seen his reaction and knew he recognized it.

The First elder slowly spoke, " Sect leader, is that really it? Is that the Spirit Cleansing Lily?"

As soon as the crowd heard the name, they were in absolute disbelief as well.

Chapter 59: Granted

"What? That's the Spirit Cleansing Lily?"

"No way. That is the flower that gives you spiritual sea and sense?"

Ma Rong looked at the elders' incoherent noises and waited for them to quiet down. Once the voices stopped talking, she spoke,

"Yes, this is the Spirit Cleansing Lily, and the one who got this is my disciple." She continued, " What do you think is the contribution to finding one of these for the sect?"

The crowd was stumped on that question. No one had ever been able to pick out a Spirit Cleansing Lily without harming it as far as they knew. There were only the occasional lucky people who did pick them, but that was more luck than technique.

"Did your disciple get lucky, sect leader?" one of the elders asked.

"No, this was the third lily he picked from what he has told me. He has already used one for himself, and found another for someone he met during one of his hunts."

The Great Elder himself was curious, "Is this about what he said back in that forest, sect leader? About him being able to find any ingredients?" The Great Elder had also seen the bag full of ingredients that Alex had gathered in the forest.

The sect leader simply nodded.

"Then the contribution to the sect is beyond imagination. An alchemist with a spiritual sense can is dozens of times better than an alchemist without one. If sect leader were to gain one now, it would increase your ability by a lot. You might actually be able to make heaven-grade True pills." The Great Elder said in shock.

The first elder spoke, "how about this, sect leader. Since your disciple's contribution is unimaginable, we can give him free access to everything in the sect, but he must still go through the normal procedure to become a core disciple. How long will it take him to make the 20 different high-tier mortal grade pills?"

The sect leader chuckled a little when she heard this. The Great Elder and the other 2 elders smiled wryly too.

The sect leader looked at the others and asked, "What do you guys think about the first elder's suggestion?"

The elders felt that was the correct choice. While his contribution was unimaginable, one didn't become a core disciple on contribution alone. If the sect leader's disciple was made one, based on it, then it would be unfair to the other disciple who was learning alchemy day and night.

So, all the elders started voicing their agreement to the first elder's words. Ma Rong thought for a bit and realized they were right.

'I got hasty in my excitement,' she thought. "Very well, then. We will do what you guys say. From now on, my disciple, Yu Ming will have unobstructed access to everything in the sect, aside from the sect treasure of course."

"Now, there is another thing I wanted to talk to you guys about. It's regarding the alchemy gardens." She said. "I am thinking of changing how we work in the alchemy garden for 2 weeks."

"Tell all the elders working in the garden itself to stop. Only keep elders for guarding the garden and maintaining it, and not picking the ingredients."

The elders were confused. "Huh, then who will pick up the ingredients, sect leader?" they asked.

"My disciple will. He has an unearthly ability to recognize alchemy ingredients, and now that he has spiritual sense, it would be much faster for him to do the searching, than the other elders and disciples." She said.

"Have you thought of how we will go about it, sect leader?" the Great elder asked.

"Yes," Ma Rong replied, "Every day, we will ask the disciples to request what they need, and put it in a list. And that night, my disciple will go around the garden looking for the ingredients. This is only for 2 weeks because I want to see how good my disciple's ability really is."

The elders stopped for a second and then accepted it. If a disciple could find a Spirit Enhancing lily, then it would be better to let that disciple do all the alchemy picking. Besides, he had a spiritual sense.

He would already be better than most elders at locating ingredients just based on that.

"Alright then. The meeting is over. You can all go now." Ma Rong said. All the elders slowly started to bid farewells to her and left the room.

"I will take my leave as well, sect leader." The first elder left as well. Only the sect leader and great elder were left in the room.

The great elder took a big sigh and spoke, "What are you doing Ma Rong? You will antagonize the elders if you decide to randomly make decisions like that. They will view it as you giving priority over your disciple compared to others. They already think you made Lang Shun an elder just because he is your junior disciple brother but doesn't dare to voice it."

Ma Rong was silent for a bit and then spoke, "But master, Wen Cheng wasn't lying when he said Yu Ming is a genius. He has already made a 16% harmony pill on the first day he tried alchemy. That was 7 days after he joined the sect."

The great elder's eyes widened, "are you sure he isn't just lying?" he asked.

"No, he isn't. I checked his sales records, and he really did sell 7 Spirit Enhancing pills ranging from 12% to 16% harmony the day after he bought the ingredients. He is a genius in alchemy that comes once in a thousand years. Now that he has unlocked spiritual sense this morning, he should be much better."

"I will properly teach him starting tomorrow, and I am sure he will rise very fast." Ma Rong said.

"Ho... If my grand disciple really is that talented, then I can't wait to see what he can do in the future."

Chapter 60: Work

Ma Rong left the hall and went back to her mountain. The other elders had already been informed of the decision and the disciples were let known that they could request an ingredient from the elders in either garden.

The elders usually kept a list of what they could find in the gardens so that they could pick it later if needed. The students could also use that list as a sort of menu to order for it using their contribution points.

Ma Rong quickly reached Alex's place in the mountain and looked for him.

'Is he back or not?' she wondered.

She checked the house and found him asleep in one of the rooms. So she decided to leave him alone for now.

Around 4 hours later, Alex opened his eyes. He had gone to his classes and come back online just now. He stood up and suddenly noticed something, there was some sort of vibration from one of his storage bags.

He instinctively checked what it was using his spiritual sense. He was a mental image of his nameplate slightly flashing with light as it vibrated inside his storage bag.

'Wow, I can check the items in my bag with a spiritual sense too? So, I don't even need the inventory anymore,' he thought. He thought of taking the nameplate out, and suddenly it came out on its own.

'Wha- do I not need to take it out on my own? Does it come out as soon as I think?' he tried a bit more with a few more items and turned out he was right.

He looked at his nameplate to see why it was shining and realized he could read the plate with his spiritual sense. He was learning some very important things with his senses.

The nameplate read, "You are still an outer sect disciple, but you now have free access to anything you want in the sect. In exchange, you will have to gather ingredients from the alchemy garden per a list given by the elder at around 8 pm. I will continue your alchemy lessons tomorrow morning at 8 am."

"Oh, I have work now, huh?" he got out of his courtyard and walked down the valley. He thought of what he could do now that he had free access to everything.

There was so much he could do now, so he had a hard time choosing what he could do. He thought for a bit and walked to the sect market.

He walked up to an elder and asked, "Greetings elder, Can I get all the recipes in the sect?"

The elder looked at him with a blank expression. "Do you have the points for that?" the elder asked.

Alex passed along his nameplate. As soon as the elder scanned the nameplate, he understood what he meant. "So you are the sect leader's disciple huh. I didn't expect you to be an outer sect disciple still." The elder was surprised, and he continued, "You don't need to buy the recipes here. Since you have free access to everything, you can go read the recipes stored on the top floor of the library."

"You can't take them away, like normal techniques, and will have to stay there and read. But, since you are allowed to stay there as long as you want, it's not really a problem." The elder explained to him quite a few things.

Alex thanked the elder and walked to the library. He had thought of learning some new techniques but ignored that thought right now. First, he had to learn some recipes, and then make some pills. It had been a long time since he had done anything alchemy-related.

He greeted the elder at the front door and walked straight to the 4th floor. He showed his nameplate to the elder on the 6th floor. He knew he would get distracted if he started looking at the techniques now, so he rushed to the 9th floor.

He had to show his nameplate once more on the 8th floor. Apparently, only elders were allowed on the 9th floor, and there were no techniques there, only old records and pill recipes.

There were only 2 shelves on the top floor. One was filled with normal pages of paper that held records that were either very important or very old. The other shelf was filled with all types of pill recipes.

This was different from instinctively knowing what to use, and when to use it. It was more like his memory power had upgraded several times. He tried to think of what else he could remember, and realized, he actually remembered every single thing he had experienced from this morning till now.

He was genuinely surprised. 'Do I have eidetic memory now?' he wondered.

It took him around an hour to fully read every single recipe in there. In total there were about 200 recipes in the room. About 140 of those were for common pills and the rest for true pills.

Although he read a lot of recipes, once he reviewed them in his mind, he realized that most of them were actually just worse or better versions of other pills. Or they did just the same thing but targeted a different part.

He spent a bit more time in there basically trying to learn what he had memorized. His genius memory once more came in very handy. With his spiritual sea already so big, he had no problem understanding the process of the alchemy behind the recipes.

His master had now given him a task, to gather ingredients at the alchemy garden, that he had to do every night, and it was about time for that. So, at 6 pm, he got out of the library and went back to his residence to log out.

Chapter 61: That Was Quick

After dinner, Alex logged back into the game. He walked out of his home filled with the light of the lanterns. He slowly walked down the mountain and to the sect valley.

The sect valley was ever the same. Lit with lantern and festival-like atmosphere. The moon was hidden in the clouds today, but it didn't look like it would rain.

He walked to the right alchemy garden and saw an elder waiting in front of the path to the garden.

"Greetings elder," he said as he reached the place.

"Hmm... " he looked at the outer disciple clothing of Alex, and said, " If you are here to request for alchemy ingredients, then you better have contribution points, otherwise you will just be wasting our time."

Alex chuckled a little and said nothing. Instead, he just handed the elder his nameplate. When the elder read the nameplate, his eyes were wide with shock.

"I will be honest. I can't tell if the sect leader likes you or hates you. She gave you free access to everything, yet she is tasking you to this job that usually takes over 10 elders overnight." The elder said.

"Oh wow, really?" he said. Alex didn't worry a lot, however. He had the [Alchemy God's Knowledge] and spiritual sense, so he was sure he would be just fine.

Many disciples came to the elder and requested different ingredients. At exactly 8, they stopped accepting any more requests for the day. An elder arrived about 5 minutes later from the other alchemy garden gate.

Together, the two elders combined their list and tallied the ingredients. Once everything was set, they handed the list to Alex.

"Here is the list, disciple Yu. You can start looking for the ingredients now. Please take care not to make any unnecessary damage while you are completing your punishment," the elders gave their sincere intentions towards him.

Alex bade them farewell and walked into the garden. He took a look at the talisman on which the list was written in. He used his spiritual sense to look at the paper and easily remembered all the ingredients in there. It was amazing.

He immediately started matching the ingredients in the list to some of the ingredients he found while walking around the garden this morning.

He expanded his spiritual sense to its maximum 20 meters radius and started scanning everything for a potential match. He immediately started using his Qi to pick up the ingredients and bring them to him.

"One down." He saw a few others as well and started gathering them too. He walked around the mountain looking at the different ingredients. The mountain was quite vast, and it took him a lot of time to just travel through it.

With his spiritual sense and Qi manipulation, he was easily collecting all the ingredients in the alchemy garden that was on the list. After about, 2 hours, he was done collecting everything on the list that was available in this mountain.

He had managed to find about 60% of the total ingredients on the list in this mountain. Before getting out, however, he sat down and just waited.

He didn't cultivate, but rather just took some time to restore his spiritual sea that had dried up quite a bit. After he was ready, he walked out.

The two elders were still outside. When they saw him come, they frowned.

"Is something wrong, Disciple Yu?" one of the elders asked.

"No," Alex gave a single one-word answer and started walking away from them. The elders were confused. They looked at each other and immediately stopped Alex.

"Disciple Yu, Stop!! Where are you going? You can't leave your job." The elder said.

"Hmm... I'm going to the other garden. There is nothing in here that is in the list anymore." He said and started walking once more."

"What?" they were surprised. "Disciple Yu, can you please show us your collection until now?" one of the elders asked.

Alex simply tossed him a bag. When the elders saw that he had really collected all the ingredients, they were shocked.

Alex took back the bag and walked straight to the other garden. This garden was the same as the first one as well. The elders had let the plant life grow however it felt right.

Alex once more got to collecting the ingredients. With his spiritual sense and robust Qi, he was very quick at collecting the rest of the ingredients.

Something that Alex found fascinating while collecting these ingredients was the method with how they had to be collected. Most of the ingredients could be just plucked straight out of the plant like it were a normal flower or fruit.

But for some ingredients, his instinct didn't allow him to simply pluck them. He had to perform some weird operation to obtain the ingredients.

For example, one of the fruit growing required him to twist the fruit's branch 5 times before it plucked by itself. Otherwise, it was near impossible to rip it off.

Once he was done collecting the ingredients, he handed the bag back to the elder and walked off. The elders looked at the ingredients in the bag. Over 90% of the ingredients had been collected.

The remaining less than 10% ingredients were rare ingredients that even the elders knew couldn't be found in the garden. They looked at the time and were shocked.

Alex walked back to his residence by himself too. He looked at the time and realized he had collected the ingredients before 12 am. If it had been 2 days ago, it would've probably taken him all night to collect them all.

But with his new spiritual sense, and a better understanding of manipulating objects with Qi, the task of collecting the ingredients had been way too quick.

Chapter 62: Alchemy Lesson

Alex woke up sometime after 6 am. He was inside a room in his residence. After coming back from his new work of collecting ingredients in the alchemy garden, he had decided to train a bit more with his spiritual sense and see what else he could do.

He had made a few different discoveries.

First of all, his spiritual sense could expand beyond the 20 meters normal radius. However, doing so caused his spiritual sea to massively dry up, and the maximum he could expand to was 30 meters anyway.

The next thing he found out was that he could use his spiritual sense to move around objects similar to his Qi manipulation as well. However, his spiritual sense wasn't powerful enough to pick up even the smallest stones, and could only sway the blades of grasses in the ground for now.

The final thing he realized was that getting an item out of his storage was way faster than using the inventory. His superior memory now allowed him to remember where everything in his storage bag was, so the inventory was basically useless now.

He had nearly a million Qi now, but since his master told him breaking through too many times at once was harmful to one's cultivation, he decided to not breakthrough right now, and wait until his current cultivation was stabilized. Which he felt was done or very close to being done.

He logged out to get some breakfast. After breakfast, he logged back in once more. Today was Friday, one of the three days when he didn't have any classes.

He waited in the courtyard for a while unsure whether to go find his master for the morning lesson or wait for her in his house. Thankfully, Ma Rong came by herself just like yesterday.

"Oh, you are awake today. Come to the alchemy room." He heard a voice from far away. He felt something wash over his body, and quickly retract back.

He was surprised. Then he walked to the alchemy room and said, " Congratulations master, on unlocking spiritual sense."

"It's all thanks to you. Now sit, we skipped our lesson yesterday, so we can't waste any more time. Bring out your cauldron." Alex immediately brought out his cauldron and placed it on the fire.

"Tell me, what are the most vital things during a pill-making process?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex thought for a second, and answered, "Temperature of the fire, method of burning the ingredients, and timing of everything." He answered confidently. He had made his pills before and knew the answer.

"Wrong!" she said. Alex was taken aback. "Aren't those the most important things to remember and keep track of when making a pill, master?" he asked.

"Those are important, but not the most important thing during a pill-making process." She looked straight into his eyes, and said, "The most important things are the cauldron, the ingredients, and the elemental synergy."

Alex's full attention was on her words now. She continued, "Tell me, why did you say the temperature was important?"

Alex answered, "Because the recipes tell you that you need to burn certain ingredients at a certain temperature. Also, you have to constantly change the temperature throughout the entire pill-making process according to the recipe. So, having the fire at accurate temperature is necessary."

Ma Rong smiled and said," That is correct. Having an accurate temperature is important. But tell me, what burns the ingredients? The fire or the cauldron?"

"Uhh... the cauldron?"

"Yes. So, it doesn't matter if the temperature of the fire is accurate or not, if the temperature of the cauldron isn't accurate at all. However, we can prevent this from happening. We can make the transition of heat from the fire to cauldron very fast if we use the right type of cauldron."

"So, it doesn't matter how well your fire manipulation is if your cauldron itself is garbage. This just leads to a bad pill."

Ma Rong then proceeded to the next topic. "Next on the list is the ingredients. This is pretty simple. If you have good ingredients, you end up with good pills. If you have bad ingredients, you end up with bad pills. However, while the concept itself may be simple, applying it not very much."

"There are 3 things in an ingredient that determines whether it's good or not. The first one is age. The older the ingredient is, the more energy it contains, making it better in general. The second is the time from when it was obtained, to the time it was made into a pill. The third one is the elemental affinity of the ingredient."

"Age is pretty easy to determine based on how much energy it has. Once an alchemist has been used to the ingredients, they can usually tell its age just by feeling the energy in it."

"The second point about the time can be fixed using some wooden or jade boxes that don't leak the ingredients aura. This way you can conserve the energy inside the box, and have it be more useful during your alchemy process."

"As for the third part, the elements are a way vaster topic that I am not able to teach you fully, because I myself do not know a lot about it. However, I still do know quite a bit, and knowing about this topic is absolutely crucial if you ever want to be an earth grade or a heaven grade alchemist."

"The third point is about an ingredient's element also is in part the third most important thing to remember when making a pill, the elemental synergies. This basically means that every element has a certain elemental energy in it, and based on the different elements in the ingredients you can either make an incredible pill or end up with your cauldron exploding."

Chapter 63: The 7 Elements

Ma Rong started explaining the different elements and the elemental synergy between them.

"So, the first thing you need to know is the 5 normal elements and the 2 higher elements."

Alex was listening to her very intently, his eyes focused on what she said.

"The two higher elements are Yin and Yang. Yin is the element associated with dark, cold, or moon. Yang is the element associated with light, heat, or sun. These two elements on their own are quite powerful, and maybe dangerous if not taken care of properly."

"When together, based on what the alchemist can do, the Yin and Yang can cancel each other out, and make a pill neutral, or help each other to become even stronger, and make a pill with highly volatile energy. You should always think twice if you have to deal with either of these elements in a pill, especially if they are together."

Ma Rong was teaching Alex about the elemental affinity and alignment of an alchemy ingredient and how that would make or break a pill.

"The 5 normal elements are Wood, Fire, Water, Earth, and Metal. These, similar to the 2 higher elements, can cancel overwhelm another element or make it stronger. These are the hardest thing to keep track of in a pill-making process. You have to know how each ingredient's element interact with each other."

"For example, if you put an ingredient with the fire element in it and another ingredient with the water element in it, then the resulting pill will either be a low fire elemental strength, or a low water elemental strength. This is because when water and fire elements mix together, they fight each other, and the stronger enemy remains. The water seeks to extinguish the fire, while the fire seeks to evaporate the water."

"On another example, if you put an ingredient with the fire element in it and another ingredient with the wood element in it, then the resulting pill will always be of a higher fire elemental strength. This is because when wood comes in contact with the fire, it feeds the fire, making it stronger."

"There are 5 ways these elements can interact with each other. They can either 'Empower' the other element, 'Control' the other element, 'Overwhelm' the other element, 'Weaken' the other element, or 'Ruin' the other element."

"Just like wood 'Empowers' fire by feeding it, water can 'Empower' wood to make it grow. Earth can 'Control' water by absorbing it. Metal can 'Ruin' fire by taking its heat away and de-energizing it."

"All 5 elements do something to one of the other elements, in all of the 5 different categories. Knowing what does what, and which ones you can use is very important when making pills with higher harmony."

Ma Rong reached into her bag and took out a piece of paper. It was a small talisman, which she then handed over to Alex. Alex caught the talisman and quickly scanned it with his spiritual sense. He soon realized what it was.

Ma Rong continued, "That paper has all the knowledge I know of about the different elements and their interaction with each other. Make sure to read that when you have free time."

"Just remember, there will sometimes be ingredients with no elements, but those are incredibly rare, and the easiest to deal with. They get along with every other ingredient.

She then moved on from the current topic and started going into the original one.

"Now, on to the main topic of our lesson. The 3 things I mentioned to you cauldron, ingredients, and elemental synergy, while they are important for making pills, they aren't controllable."

"Even two different ingredients picked out from the same plant can differ in terms of age, energy level, and sometimes even in their elemental affinity."

Alex looked at his own new cauldron wondering how good it was to use.

"Sometimes, the recipes itself may be flawed. Maybe the alchemist who made the pill wrote something wrong, which is why the pill never reaches 100% harmony."

"What I am trying to say is, even though you might do everything right just as the recipe dictated, and still end up with only an earth-grade pill. And that is the very first lesson you need to learn when you are trying to make pills. You will never make the perfect pills. The reasons are beyond your control and you need to be satisfied with what you end up with."

"Now, let's talk about recipes. How many recipes do you know?" she asked.

Alex thought for a second, and said, "more than 200". Ma Rong was surprised to hear that. "Where did you learn so much?" she asked.

"The library's top floor." He simply answered.

"And you were able to remember all of the 200 recipes in the library? You should have only had a night to remember all that." She was still surprised.

Alex smiled a bit and said, "Master, with the spiritual sea, we also get eidetic memory. So, I pretty much remembered everything I read."

"Do we?" Ma Rong tried to see if she could remember things and realized he was correct. She too had eidetic memory now.

"Okay, what pill was it that you made before?" she asked.

"Uh, the Qi Improving Pill?" he asked. That was the first and only pill he had made till now.

"Yes, take out the ingredients for it, and make a pill. I will see what you do," Ma Rong walked over to his side and sat down beside him.

Alex looked into his bags and quickly found all the ingredients required for the Qi improving pill. He had already made this pill before and was super familiar with it.

This time, since he had spiritual sense, he decided he didn't need to go into focus mode to get more time for handling the ingredients. Now, he could split his attention between 5-6 tasks. If he were to do that to the different aspects of making pills, he was sure he could most certainly end up as an earth-grade alchemist by the time he had to go to the Tiger Sect.

Chapter 64: Shocking Advancements

Alex took a deep breath and prepared himself. Once the cauldron was at the right temperature, he put in the first ingredient. Thanks to his spiritual sense, he could see what was happening inside the cauldron to a frighteningly accurate degree.

As he moved the ingredient around, slowly burning it, he felt the ingredient release some energy from within it. He felt some of the released energy move back into the now powder ingredient while some hung about in the air inside the cauldron. Some energy even flew out of the cauldron.

He tried to catch them with his Qi, but the energy seemed to just phase through it. Ma Rong watched every step of his. She could see how accurate his Qi manipulation was and how accurate his temperature changing ability was.

Alex put in the second ingredient. The same thing happened with this one as well. Energy release out of the second ingredient as well. However, somehow the energy from the first ingredient immediately moved towards the newly released energy and 'devoured' it. He could feel the energy was still there, but somehow the 'feeling' the energy gave off was changed.

'Am I feeling the elements in the energy?' he thought.

He continued with the pill formation. Due to his increased mental capacity and being able to handle more than 5 things at once, he was able to easily handle the pill-making process.

From the first ingredient to the last ingredient, he felt like he made little to no mistake. A lot of the energy skipped out of the cauldron, but that wasn't something he could control.

By this time, the ingredients had turned to powder, and the energy behind them had harmonized to some level. Now it was time to form the pill.

He slowly started to condense the powders into a pill. There were 2 sets of energies inside the cauldron now. The ones in the powder, and the ones in the air.

As he started to condense the powder to form a pill, the energy in the air started to skip out of the cauldron. Almost half the energy from the ingredients was in the air, and somehow it had been lost now.

He stopped caring about that and started focusing on the pill formation. Soon, a pill was finally done being formed. Alex slowly took it out and looked at it,

[Qi Improving Pill: 26%

Improved Cultivation speed by 26% for 18 hours]

Alex couldn't process what he was seeing. '26%... that- that's an earth grade pill, right?' he thought. Suddenly, the pill started floating and landed on Ma Rong's hand.

"An earth grade pill!!" she somehow had a shocked face as well as a face of understanding. "I had expected you to do good, but I didn't think you would improve so much." She said.

"Having a Saint realm cultivator's sense as a self-tempering realm alchemist is practically just cheating." She said with a blank look. She was starting to wonder how much she had improved now that she too had spiritual sense.

She reached into her bag and took out another piece of talisman and handed it to Alex. She then said, "This talisman has information about some of the widely available ingredients. Burn a few of them to release some energies, and try to feel their elements. The better you become at recognizing elements and understanding their relationship, the more you grow as an alchemist."

"Also, Refine the cauldron and you can make better pills." She said

"Master, how do I refine an artifact?" he asked. This was the perfect opportunity. He had tried refining the Ebony Corundum Stiletto but had nearly gotten hurt instead. So he wondered if his idea of refining was wrong.

"Refining is easy. Just pour your Qi into the item, and continuously wash it from the inside. At some point, it will be easier to pour in the Qi, and at that moment, you drop some of your blood to it. The blood must be blood with your essence in it, meaning it must originate in your forehead. "

"We can communicate using this communication talisman." She said and left.

Alex stayed there looking at the talisman. It looked similar to another normal talisman, but instead of storing some text, this talisman helped with communications.

Alex looked inside using his spiritual sense. Ever since unlocking his spiritual sense, he hadn't had to use the system at all. He could do almost everything with his spiritual sense.

The talisman seemed to connect to another talisman only. That talisman was probably on his master. He put the talisman in his bag and looked at the two other information talismans he had acquired.

One of them explained the relationship between the five elements. It didn't talk about the other 2 higher elements Yin and Yang. The other talisman talked about the different ingredients and their elemental affinity.

He read the first talisman for about half an hour and understood the concept behind it. He then read the second talisman and tried to memorize it.

Once he was done, he was shocked at what he had just learned.

'So that's why!!' he thought.

The first ingredient in the recipe for Qi Improving Pill had water energy in it. The second ingredient he put in had fire energy in it. The water energy was vastly stronger in power and amount in this case and had destroyed the fire element behind the second ingredient. Which left the cauldron with a lot of energy but very low water energy in it.

This then played into the next ingredients and so on. Alex decided to try making the same pill once more.

Chapter 65: Amazing Results

Alex had spent quite a while reading the two talismans and had managed to remember it all. At the same time, he had also recovered much of his spiritual sea.

He had realized that currently, his spiritual sea was actually very small, despite the massive spiritual sea he could see inside his head. If he just let the spiritual sense be used normally, it recovered fast enough that he felt like he had a lot of it. But if he had to use it excessively, it actually disappeared in less than half an hour.

This also meant that it didn't take long for his spiritual sea to recover as well.

He had decided to make the pill once more, so he cleaned the cauldron of any remaining byproducts from the previous pill. He then waited for the cauldron to reach the right temperature and poured in his first ingredient.

Once again, he could feel the energy released from the first ingredient.

'So, this is what a water elemental energy feels like huh,' he thought.

After a while, he put in the second ingredient. When the ingredient started burning into powder and its energy getting released, he realized the energy behind it was actually weaker when compared to the first energy.

He watched as the water-energy quickly envelope the fire energy, and destroy it completely-or so he thought was what happened.

'Wait for a second, while the water-energy did get weaker after suppressing the fire energy, neither of the energy has decreased at all.' He was surprised.

He could feel that after coming into contact, the water and fire had tried to attack together, which he thought would destroy each other and only the remaining water energy will be left.

But now that he could tell the energies apart by feeling, he could see that both the water and fire energy that he thought had destroyed each other were actually hidden inside the neutral remaining energy.

The new energy was in an equilibrium between the two energies. Almost as if they had—

"Harmony. When the elemental energies mix together they create harmony with each other. Is that what making pills is truly about?" he couldn't help but shout out loud.

He took out another ingredient and put it in. Soon that ingredient produced different energy too. Based on the talisman his master gave him, this ingredient produced metal elemental energy.

Now the little water elemental energy that remained in the mixed with the mental energy, and suddenly the water energy started getting stronger once more. The metal energy was now harmonized with the water energy such that, the metal energy was 'Empowering' the water energy.

Similar things kept happening, some elements empowered other elements. Some elements overpowered the others. Some weakened the other elements, while some simply controlled the other elements.

He also came to recognize the elements by their energy. As more and more energy got into the mix, the harmony between the elements was getting more and more complicated.

Once the final ingredient was put in., it controlled the remaining elemental energy in the cauldron and the entire energy came to a neutral state with many elemental energies in harmony with each other inside that neutral energy.

Finally, it was time to turn the powder into the pills. Following the recipe, he slowly started collecting the powder to shape it. Suddenly, his Qi started to move on its own.

'Is it happening?' he thought.

Slowly the Qi moved through his entire meridian system and released out of his palm. It moved into the cauldron and started separating the powder into two portions. The separated portions somehow started to shape it into spheres of about the same size as the original sphere.

'Isn't the energy in the pills going to be lower this way? After all, it's one pill split into two, right?' he thought.

From his logical perspective, he should be correct. So he started wondering how the pill is going to overcome that problem. It was then he realized the answer.

Suddenly, his Qi worked on its own to create vortexes that started sucking the energy that we're in the air.

'What sort of technique is this?' he wondered. He couldn't tell how it worked, or how his Qi was even able to manipulate the energy to get into the pill.

It took about 2 minutes for the pills to completely suck in the energies in the air and finally, the 2 pills were ready. He took both the pills out of the cauldron and looked at them.

He first focused on the one on the left.

[Qi Improving Pill: 24%

Improves cultivation speed by 24%]

He was surprised. The pill had separated into two different parts and it was still above 20%. He then checked the second pill.

[Qi Improving Pill: 28%

Improves cultivation speed by 28%]

"Holy S**T," he couldn't help but cuss. He had somehow managed to create two pills, both over 20% harmony, and one of them even near 30% of harmony.

He started thinking, 'If I discount the energies that got away from the cauldron's mouth, does it mean that the total harmony I could have obtained if this became a single pill. Was over 60%?'

He was stunned at that thought.

'What if I keep the energies that got away as well? But I can't control the energies...' He thought. Suddenly, he got an idea.

He looked to the side of the cauldron, where he had kept the lid for the cauldron, and thought, 'I may not be able to stop the energies from going out, but the lid surely can. And now that I have a spiritual sense, I don't even need to keep the cauldron open to look inside.'

He got excited once and decided to try out this new technique at once.

Chapter 66: Put a lid on it

Ma Rong had just succeeded in making a pill. She took a pill tester out of her bag and put her pill inside it. She looked at the pill tester with full attention, hoping for the fog that slowly rose up the side of the glass to never stop.

As the fog kept on going, her eyes got wider as well. It kept going on and on and on until it finally stopped. Her hands started trembling as she looked at the number next to the black line where the fog had stopped.

45%. She had a massive smile on her face as she took the pill out of the pill tester and kept it in a pill bottle.

45% wasn't that high when one thought about it. A sect leader of an alchemy sect only being able to make 45% harmony pills would usually lead to ridicule.

However, these weren't just any pills. These were True pills. Unlike Common pills, True pills were ridiculously hard to make. Just the amount of energy one had to keep in control and make sure they didn't violently explode every single second was incredibly high.

Even making a 25% Earth Grade True pill as an alchemist meant one was a rather talented person. Ma Rong had just managed to make a 45% Earth Grade True pill.

This meant she was beyond talented and very much deserving of the sect leader title.

'This is all thanks to the spiritual sense, which is all thanks to Yu Ming,' she thought. She was about to start another batch when she realized something was making noise in her bag.

She quickly took out a medallion which she immediately scanned with her spiritual sense. She read the message that had been sent to her.

'Oh, the elders are back from the trip, huh. I should go and learn what they got back about the upcoming competition,' she thought.

She stored her cauldron back into her bag and walked out of her residency. She started walking down the mountain towards the sect valley when she realized Alex was still in his home.

She walked in and scanned the house with her spiritual sense. For some reason, her spiritual sense could expand to about 50 meters. 30 meters more than Alex's.

'Oh, is he still making pills?' she thought. The time was well past noon, so if he really was still making pills, then he would've been going on at it for about 5 hours now. That was some dedication.

She walked into his alchemy room making as little noise as possible to not disturb him. When she got in, she was surprised.

Alex was in front of the cauldron, moving his hands in the air, presumably controlling the ingredients inside the cauldron. But the thing that she was surprised by the most was that the cauldron had its lid on top of it.

She knew of absolutely no one that performed alchemy with their cauldron's lid closed.

'How can he see if-Oh, that's right. Spiritual sense. But why put a lid on it at all ?' She couldn't understand the reasoning behind it. She did nothing but stand by the door and watch.

Alex had already noticed her entering his room and had decided to ignore her for now. He was in the final stages of forming the pill. Thankfully, the pill-splitting Qi did not rise from inside him. Otherwise, he wouldn't know how to explain her.

As soon as he finished making the pill, he opened the lid. He could feel the strong energies in the cauldron leak away as soon as he opened it.

'I should quickly learn some method to do something with those energies,' he thought.

He was about to take out his pill when suddenly, it flew off on its own. He looked to the side and saw his master holding it. He hadn't looked at the pill himself and was waiting to learn what its harmony level was.

Ma Rong took out her pill tester and put the pill inside it. She watched as the fog started rising from the metal plate and go up the glass beaker.

The fog steadily rose along the outside of the glass. The fog ended up stopping quite a bit higher than what she had been expecting which surprised her a lot.

'33%? From an outer disciple? did unlocking spiritual sense help him or is he just that talented?' her jaw dropped as she saw the harmony level of the pill he had just created.

She took the pill out and looked at it carefully. It was a slight blue pill around the size of her thumbnail.

'A 33% harmony Swift Feet pill? How did he even reach to be this good at making this pill, when this is his first day of making this pill?' she was amazed.

Alex stood from the side with a wide grin. He had seen the 33% harmony level on the pill tester as well.

"Master, I discovered something amazing." He said.

"Did you know that using a cauldron with a lid always makes your pill come out with higher harmony levels? I saw the energy always leaked from the cauldron, and tried to keep it in with the lid, and it worked. When the pill is formed, it gets a little bit more energy overall and has higher harmony." He said

Ma Rong stood there dumbfounded. She had just realized a few hours ago that most of the energy leaked out of the cauldron. She had some idea as to how to redirect energy and keep it inside the cauldron.

But that was still not a very efficient method, as redirecting energies wasn't the same as controlling them and keeping them inside the cauldron.

Now that she heard Alex's discovery, she felt stupid for not using a lid. She could've increased the harmony of her most recent pill, and maybe even end up with a Heaven Grade True pill.

That would've been something glorious.

Chapter 67: Auction House

After Ma Rong left, Alex still stayed behind and made quite a few more pills. He made 3 different types of pills after the Qi Improving pills.

They were,

Swift Feet pill: this pill decreased a person's weight for a limited time and made them move around faster.

Qi Enhancing pill: this pill helped people in the self-tempering realm overcome their bottleneck when trying to break through from one realm to another. This was the same pill that Kong Yuhan made when he first met him. He had also learned the recipe for this pill thanks to Kong Yuhan himself.

The final pill that Alex made was probably one that Alex was surprised the most with himself. He didn't think such a pill even existed. Now that he did, he started wondering what other wondrous things you can do with pills.

The pill was called Face Changing pill. If you ate the pill, depending on the harmony levels of the pill, the pill would randomly change your face to a completely new one.

Alex had made 2 of these pills and had managed to make one with 26% harmony that changed a face for 26 hours, and another 35% harmony that changed a face for 35 hours. Both of the pills were above the threshold of an Earth Grade pill.

In fact, none of the pills he had made after obtaining the spiritual sense had been lower than 20%.

In total he had about 12 Qi Improving pills, 5 Swift Feet pills, 4 Qi Enhancing pills, and 2 Face Changing pills. If he kept on going like this, it wouldn't take him more than a few days to earn the title of a Common Earth Alchemist.

Finally, it was time to do the one thing he had been looking forward to since the first day since he started playing the game. It was time to go earn some money.

He logged out to get some food and returned after a while. He walked down the mountain and reached the sect valley. He went past the valley and walked up the outer sect mountain.

He reached his previous cottage and realized someone was already staying there now.

'That was fast,' he thought.

He walked out of the sect gate. Thanks to his new status and authority, he no longer required permission from the disciple hall to leave the sect.

He walked toward the center of the city, looking for an auction house. From his understanding, you could sell your pills in an auction house and get some silver, or gold, or even spirit stones.

He finally found a small auction house that looked not too fancy, yet not too simple either. He walked up the stairs and a girl in a mask came out from inside.

"The auction takes place tomorrow at noon dear customer. If you are here for it, please return." The girl simply said.

"Uh... no, I am here to sell some stuff," he said.

"Please follow me then," she said as she took Alex through a long hallway to an open room with multiple doors leading to multiple rooms. She walked up to someone and whispered something in their air.

The person turned around to look at Alex. Alex saw a beautiful middle-aged woman with long black hair in dark red cloth with white ribbons on it.

She was almost a head taller than him when she came and stood right in front of him. The women quickly scanned his outfit to guess what sort of customer he was.

'Light green robe... Hong Wu outer sect, huh. They usually don't sell outside. I wonder how this one came to be here,' she wondered.

"I heard you are here to sell something, the customer. Can you tell me what they are?" she asked respectfully despite his standing. She respected money, and if a dog could bring her money, she would respect it too.

"Oh, I am here to sell some pills. Uhh... do you also take monster corpses?" he asked.

"We only auction monster corpses that costs over 10 golds. Anything else, we don't accept. Same with pills." She said.

'How much are 10 golds again? That's like 1000 silver coins right?' he wasn't accustomed to the currency of this world as he didn't have much interaction in the marketplace aside from the occasional taverns and food stores he visited.

"Um, what realm of monsters sell for over 10 golds?" he asked.

The women thought for a bit, and said, " It's a little hard to tell exactly what cultivation. It depends more on how good or bad the corpse is. But, usually, if the monster's body isn't destroyed a lot, anything at organ tempering and above will do." She said.

Alex took out a bag full of monster corpses and handed it over to her. "Can you tell me how many of these are useful?" he asked.

The woman opened the bag, and immediately got shocked. 'So many. And one of them is even at Meridian tempering.'

She tried to reel in her shock and looked through the different monsters. There were quite a few monsters in there, and almost all of them were either cleanly cut off, or still had their bodies intact with zero injuries.

She took out an empty storage bag and transferred most of the corpses to that bag. She handed the original bag back to Alex.

Alex looked into the bag and realized there were only a few monsters, all of which were lower than Bone Tempering 6th realm.

'She accepted Bone Tempering 7th realm? Didn't she say she didn't accept anything lower than Organ Tempering realm?' he thought. Still, this was good for him, so he didn't complain.

He then took out 6 different pill bottles, each containing 5 or fewer pills in them.

Chapter 68: Rich

Alex slowly handed the bottles to the lady and said, "Here are the pills. These 3 bottles have 12 Qi improving pills in total. This one has 5 Swift Feet pills., this one has 4 Qi Enhancing pills, and this last one has 2 Face-changing pills."

The woman took the pills and opened the cork to look at the pills inside. As soon as she opened it, an amazing medicinal smell wafted out of the bottle, making the entire room smell like it.

She was stunned. She quickly looked inside the bottle hoping for something good based on the smells, and when she actually saw them, her jaw nearly dropped.

Every single one of the pills inside was definitely in the Earth grade. She quickly brought out a pill tester and put the pills in one at a time.

The numbers she got from them ranged from 24% to 36% harmony. She quickly kept the pills back into the pill bottles so as to not lose any of their effects.

She looked back at Alex and asked, "Are you sure you want to sell these?" she had rarely seen such high harmony levels from the pills brought into the auction in a while.

Most alchemists were the aloof kind. They thought of themselves as somebody very important, which they were, but it made working with them nearly impossible. Most of them had horrible personalities from their overinflated ego, and also take an exorbitant amount of money for their work.

Or at least that was the impression she had gotten from the few rogue alchemists that had come to sell their works.

Alchemists from the Hong Wu sect rarely sold to auctions, and this was the first time she had personally dealt with one herself. Her impression of alchemists was slowly changing.

Alex nodded to her question and told her he wanted to sell everything. She quickly tallied the items and gave him a rough estimate of 80 common spirit stones post deduction. She told him how the auction house took 10% of the money the item was sold for.

After confirming the items being sold, she took Alex through one of the rooms through the many doors. Inside, she picked up one of the many talismans laid out on the ground.

She wrote down everything he was selling on the talisman and imprinted it with her Qi.

"This will be our contract to make sure neither of the parties make any wrong attempts to harm the other party," she said as he handed it to Alex.

After everything was done, Alex left the auction house. The entire way back to the sect there was one thing that he kept thinking about but couldn't come up with an answer to.

'How does selling my items in a normal auction house reach the other players? Do they come to the auction house to buy as well? Or can they buy it from wherever they are?'

This was the first time he had sold anything, and from what he learned on the internet, it just told him to go and auction it in any auction house.

He scanned the talisman in his bag and thought, 'So her name was Cai Ping huh. Wonder why she didn't introduce herself normally.'

Well, he hadn't introduced himself either, so he didn't think about it for too long. After reaching the sect, he logged out to check about the auctions.

It didn't take him long to learn how auctions worked in Eternal Cultivation.

'Wait. So my items won't get sold to the other players but the NPCs?' that was quite an unexpected piece of knowledge he had learned.

'Hmm... so how do Deva corporation make money at all?' he was confused. If players could sell in-game items to NPC and make money off of them, then the company should have gone bankrupt by now.

He researched a bit longer, and only then did he find out that players could convert the money in their banks to in-game currency. Of which, Deva Corporation took 10% charge.

Similarly, they also took 10% commission off what you converted back to real-world money.

'So they do what they can to take your money, and also do what they can to not give you your money,' he found it quite funny.

'Oh, that's right. Let's see what the conversion rate for the in-game currency is. Hopefully, I can make a few bucks with the items I'm selling.' He quickly searched up the current conversion rate for the game.

When he finally found it, he was shocked.

'That can't be right,' he looked at it again on a different site, but it showed the same result.

'Huh?? How can it be 10 dollars per common spirit stone?? Doesn't that mean I make uhh... 720 dollars after the deduction from the 80 spirits stones I will get?' he was truly flabbergasted.

He was expecting to make some 20~ dollars at best. But to think his items were valued at such a high price.

'They did say pills and artifacts sold the highest, didn't they?' he thought to himself.

After learning he could make quite a few amounts of money, his eagerness to practice alchemy and make more pills got reinvigorated. He tried to look at what prices which pills were being sold so he could make those exact pills, but unfortunately, the public had no information on most pills.

Regretfully, Alex closed his phone and went to go get his dinner along with Logan, Matt, and Eric. He was looking forward to getting back into the game, so he finished his dinner very fast and had to wait for the other 3 to complete.

Once he returned back to his room, he immediately logged back into the game to make some more pills. But then he remembered, He had work to do now that was assigned to him by his master.

Chapter 69: Elemental Guidance

Alex went down to the sect valley a little earlier than required and went to a restaurant to eat something. Somehow just eating in the real world didn't affect his appetite in the game.

He checked his nameplate and saw that he had around 200 contribution points.

'I wonder if I need to pay to eat or not,' Although he had full authority over everything in the sect, he didn't know if the restaurant counted in that authority.

He walked in and check out what was being served today. Unlike the last time he had visited the restaurant, he wasn't broke today, so he decided to order one of the finer dishes.

Soon his order came back. It was a slow-roasted monster bird leg, with some fried vegetables on the side. He used his hand to pick the giant monster bird leg and took a massive bite.

The meat slid off the bone and dissolved in his mouth. He couldn't help but moan with pleasure as the sweet taste of meat filled his mouth. He took some vegetables with Qi on the side and ate them too.

Together with the freshness of the vegetables and the meaty flavor of the monster bird, he ate what he assumed to be the best food he had eaten in his entire life.

He took his time with the food and paid 20 contribution points at the end. He was hoping to not have to pay, but alas those were just hopes.

He walked towards the alchemy garden where the elders were tallying the requests by the disciples. Once they were done, they handed the list to Alex, who went into the garden to look for the ingredients.

Thanks to his amazing eidetic memory, he knew where every single one of the ingredients was, so he didn't need to spend a lot of time this time around.

Within half an hour, to the utter shock of the two elders, Alex came out of the garden and went to the other one. It took him a little more than half an hour on this site, but that was still a very unbelievable time.

He handed the collected ingredients back to the elders whose expression was just shock and amazement. After return back to his residence, he rested a bit and started trying out new pills.

He started with a pill called Hundred Poisons Antidote. It was a pill that could cure almost any poison so long as it was produced by a plant or monster in the self tempering realm.

He followed the recipe and made the pill with the cauldron's lid closing the escape. The energies would run out of the cauldron every time he had to put in a new ingredient, but it still helped a lot to keep most of the energies in.

He managed to successfully create the Hundred Poisons Antidote on the very first try. That too with a whopping 28% Harmony.

He tried some more and managed to make 5 more pills out of the remaining 3 sets of ingredients. All of those pills ranged from 30% to 36%.

He was really happy with the result. He was mentally fatigued by the 4th time, so he decided to take some rest, and recharge himself.

He felt like he had stabilized his cultivation enough and decided to break through once more. He opened his status and hit a breakthrough.

He had enough Qi right now, so he didn't want to cultivate. So, he decided to just quit for the day, and sleep. He logged out of the game for the first time in a while during the night and just fell asleep.

"Alex!! Alex!!" he heard someone calling his name. He slowly opened his eyes and saw Logan calling him.

"What's up?" he asked in a hoarse voice.

"It's 7 am. Wake up. We are going to get some breakfast." Logan said.

"You guys go ahead, I will go soon." He said and walked into the bathroom.

He washed his face with cold water and started brushing his teeth. 'How come I wake up so accurately in the game, yet someone else had to wake me up in here?' he wondered.

He went to get some breakfast too and returned back soon. He logged back in to learn some more from his master.

Just like yesterday, Ma Rong came at around 8 am and taught him for 2 hours. She asked him a few questions to see how much he had understood but soon realized how redundant that was since he had opened up his spiritual sea and now had an eidetic memory.

"How many pills did you make yesterday?" she asked him.

"I made around 23 pills during the day and 6 during the night," he replied confidently.

"Show me," she said, asking him to bring out the pills.

"Master, I already sold all the pills I made during the day. I only have the ones I made last night."

"What? Why would you sell them? Never mind. Those are your pills and you are free to do with them whatever you please. But remember, keep some pills above 20% harmony. You need to register them to become a core disciple." She reminded.

"Oh, that's right. I almost forgot master. I will keep that in mind."

They focused back on the alchemy. Ma Rong watched him make pills and realized he was extremely talented at it. Perhaps, if he had the same cultivation as her, he would have surpassed her long ago.

She took out a talisman and handed it to him. Alex wondered what this talisman did. The first two talismans he got had high-level information on alchemy, and the third one was a communication talisman.

He quickly scanned the talisman and found out he couldn't understand a single word in it. Still, he read it all the way through and when he got to the end, suddenly something popped up in front of him.

He had just learned a new technique.

Chapter 70: Elemental Guidance Usage

'Did I just learn a technique?' Alex was surprised by the sudden notification. He quickly opened up the notification to look at the description of the newly learned technique called 'Elemental Guidance'.

————

[Elemental Guidance: Level 1

Grade: Earth (Max)

Level 1:

Unlocked: Able to somewhat control the openly moving elements.

]

————

'Oh, an Earth grade technique. But why does it have Max next to the grade? Is that like growth? Also, it says Level 1 unlocked, but there seems to be no sign of level 2. What a weird technique,' he thought.

The technique made him quite curious. According to the technique, he can now control the elements while making pills. Or at least show some semblance of control.

He looked at the technique description once more and wondered if Max instead of Growth meant that this ability was already at its highest level. If that was the case then what was the point of letting someone know Level 1 was unlocked when that was literally all that was that could be used.

Ma Rong looked at his blank face and said, "That is an Earth Grade technique called 'Elemental Guidance' it is a simple technique that guides elements inside the cauldron. "

"Although you can guide the elements, that doesn't necessarily mean you can tell them what they do. It is like opening a small waterway near a river, and hoping the water flows there."

"The purpose of this technique is to keep as much elemental energy inside the cauldron as possible, and not leak a lot. Plus, you guide the energy towards the power, although that doesn't mean the powder will observe it all."

" Still, you will lose quite a bit of energy since the technique isn't full proof. However, you should be able to greatly decrease your losses and increase your pill's harmony levels."

"Learn this technique by tomorrow, and I will test you on how well you have gotten. Also, make sure to register at least 2 20% harmony pills by the end of the day."

Ma Rong left after saying this. Alex's lesson hadn't been as intense today as it was yesterday. Still, it was quite fruitful, to say the least.

The technique worked worse than his pill separating Qi that randomly started. The pill separating Qi controlled all of the energies while this technique only guided it a bit.

Still, after using it in a couple of pills, he realized that his pills were getting about a 5% bump in harmony levels. Every single pill he made now was above the 25% harmony levels.

This technique also helped him in a way he didn't know he needed. Since the technique kept the energies from running away from the cauldron, whenever his second pill would form inside the cauldron, both of the pills showed a massive increase in harmony as well.

He logged out for a bit to get some food and came back to start making some pills again. He still had over 80% of his original batch of ingredients. If he counted in terms of sets of ingredients, then he had about a bit less than 100 sets of different ingredients.

Aside from the sets of ingredients, he also had a bunch of extra ingredients that didn't go together on any pills. He made a few more pills until a bit past noon. Each of the pills an actual Earth Grade pill.

After he was done making pills, he took the cauldron and started refining it. It had only been a day, so he had a bit of a problem pouring in his Qi, so he didn't bother dropping in his blood yet. He would wait for a few more days when his Qi would more easily pour into the cauldron.

He walked outside and saw the clouds hanging in the sky. 'Is it finally gonna rain today?' he thought. He walked among the shades down the mountain.

He decided not to register the pills for now, but rather when he had all 20 of the pills at once.

He assumed the auction would be over by now, so he went to the auction house to get his money. It took him about half an hour to reach there.

He walked up the stairs and a lady came up to him. This lady was different from the one that took him inside yesterday.

"The auction is already in session so entering is no longer allowed now, please come back in a week if you want to take part in the auction." The lady spoke with a respectful tone.

"Oh, the auction is still going on? I thought it would be over by now. I came back to take my money. Do you know how much longer the auction would go on for?" he asked the lady.

The lady was surprised to see someone so young selling something. But once she saw the robe, she realized he must be an alchemist from the Hong Wu sect.

"Can I see the contract to verify your claims, Daoist?" she spoke.

"The contract?... oh the talisman. Here it is," he took out the talisman the woman named Cai Ping gave him yesterday and handed it to the lady in front of him.

Once she verified that he was in fact a seller, she took him to one of the rooms he had seen inside.

"Please wait here. The auction's end time usually varies depending on how many items are being sold, but it shouldn't last more than half an hour from now." The lady said and bowed a little. She then walked out of the door before Alex could even reply.

He had to wait upwards of 45 minutes in the room before the door to the room opened up, and Cai Ping walked in.

Chapter 71: Auction Sales

"Greetings, Daoist. I am so sorry you had to wait so long." Cai Ping apologized as she walked it. She constantly bowed and kept saying how sorry she was. For some reason, she had started calling him Daoist as well.

"Oh, it's ok. I don't mind waiting," Alex got a little nervous seeing her bowing towards her so much.

Cai Ping smiled a little and sat down on the couch opposite to where Alex was currently sitting. She seemed a little tired and distraught for some reason.

"Are you okay, Miss Cai? You seem a little tired," he said.

Cai Ping immediately straightened her posture and looked a little more active as she said, "I'm so sorry for showing you such a terrible sight."

"Is working in an auction house that hard?" he asked.

"Oh no, it's usually really easy. But today was different. The auction was a bit hectic and to be honest, mentally exhausting," she laughed a bit and continued, " Your pills were actually the most problematic of all. Most alchemists don't auction their pills, so when so many pills showed up at once, people kept bidding for it one after another. Those took a lot of time."

"Does that mean all of my pills sold then?" he asked expectantly. He was really hoping to get the 80 spirit stones today.

"Ah, yes. All of them sold. I believe the after-auction transactions are being completed right now, and someone will bring your total here."

"Oh, okay," he said and waited for a bit longer.

About 5 minutes or so later, a knock sounded from the door to the room. "Come in," Cai Ping spoke from inside. A middle-aged man walked in and bowed to Cai Ping. He then turned to Alex and bowed once again.

Alex wasn't used to being bowed at so much, so he just nodded.

The man walked up to Cai Ping and handed her a bag. Cai Ping looked at the bag for a bit and nodded to the man, who then walked away.

"Your money after the reduction is here, Daoist," she spoke. "Your monster corpse sold for a bit more than expected and brought in 15 common spirit stones. After reduction, you get 13 common spirit stones and 50 gold coins."

Alex was surprised when he heard that. '13 common spirit stones are about 120 dollars right?' he thought.

Cai Ping then continued, " Your pills, however... I have never been so wrong on my estimate before."

Alex frowned. 'Wrong on her estimate? Does that mean I am not getting the full 80 spirit stones she said?' he started to get disheartened. He was hoping for quite a bit of money, but from her talk, it seemed like the pills didn't do as well.

Then, Cai Ping said, "I can't believe they sold for so much more."

"Huh? They didn't do badly?" he asked.

"Badly? Of course not. They did amazing in the auction. Far better than I had anticipated." She took out a talisman and started reading something.

"We sold all of your pills separately, which was why the auction took so much longer than usual. First off, we sold your Qi improving pill. We started from the ones with the lowest harmony to the highest."

"These were commonly found pills, so they didn't sell for a lot. Still, the 12 pills in total brought us about 42 common spirit stones."

"The next pills we sold were the swift feet pills. While uncommon, people didn't require them a lot so it didn't get a lot of bids, but still somehow managed to be sold for 32 spirit stones for the 5 pills."

"Next we sold the 2 face-changing pills. These pills sold quite a bit as they were very rare. These pills had quite a few bids compared to others. The 26% harmony face changing pill sold for 15 spirit stones, and the 35% harmony face changing pill sold for 28 spirit stones. I had no idea this was how receptive the audience would be to these pills."

"Lastly, the 4 Qi Enhancing pills. We sold them last because people really cared about pills that helped them break through their bottlenecks and helped them increase their cultivation. As expected, they did really well. Perhaps, too well."

"It seemed due to the rarity of one of the ingredients for this pill, people hadn't been able to get this pill made by the alchemists at all. So, when they heard we were auctioning Earth grade Qi Enhancing pills, they really bid in droves to get it."

"Similar to the other pills, we started with the one that had the lowest harmony and moved our way to the highest. In total, the 4 different pills actually ended up selling for 83 common spirit stones."

Alex had stopped converting the spirit stones to dollars long ago as he heard the number of spirit stones grow higher and higher. Cai Ping looked at his shocked eyes and found some mutual feelings in them. She too had been similarly shocked when she presented the pills to the audience.

He really did get 194 common spirit stones. That was really a lot.

"When is your next auction?" he asked Cai Ping.

She didn't think much about the question and answered, "It the next Saturday. Though that will be a rather big auction since it's our bi-annual auction, where only items above 5 spirit stones are sold and the auction itself lasts longer than usual."

Alex stayed quiet and thought for a bit. 'I should be able to finish making the pills by the next Wednesday, maybe even Tuesday if I really tried.'

"Can I come back next Friday to put more items in auction?" he asked.

Cai Ping looked at him with a confused look and asked, "Do you have something else to sell, Daoist?"

Chapter 72: Another Rock

Alex heard her ask the question and answered, "Oh, yes. I was thinking about selling some more pills. Is that alright? It did cause a bit of a problem from what I heard."

"Oh absolutely. But, we can only take in items by Wednesday. We will be getting a large number of items to sell for the bi-annual auction and will have to tally the items and send out information about the items we will be auctioning. So, if you have more pills to sell, you will have to get it in by Wednesday."

Alex thought for a while. 'I should be able to complete the pills by Wednesday right? Especially if I make them throughout the night as well,' he speculated.

"Alright then, I will bring some more pills by Wednesday. Thank you for selling my pills," he said and started walking out of the door.

"Wait for a second, Daoist," Cai Ping hurriedly stopped him.

"What is it?"

"Umm... can you tell me who you are?" she really wanted to know his name now.

"Oh, I haven't introduced myself, have I? I am so sorry about that. My name is Yu Ming, and I am a disciple of Hong Wu Sect." He nodded and walked out before she could say anything.

Alex went straight back to the sect. There was nothing as of yet that he had to do, so he decided to go back to his residence.

He walked along the way when suddenly he sensed something.

'This feeling...' he walked towards where he felt the thing. Somehow, unlocking his spiritual sense had far sharpened his senses, so he could feel it from quite far away.

Following the feeling brought him close to the sect market. He walked into the market and went to one of the disciples who was setting up a vendor there.

"Hello brother, How much do you want for this stone here?" he asked the male disciple setting up the vendor.

The thing Alex was pointing to was a small stone that was slightly yellow in color. This was the same type of stone that he had found in the sect market that one time, the same stone that had turned his Qi to Yang Qi.

"This stone? You can take it for 80 points brother." The disciple said.

Alex paid the amount and took the stone. Then he asked, "Can you tell me where you found this stone, brother?"

The man thought for a while and said, "I think I found in on the ground in the forbidden fields while I was suspended."

"Forbidden fields? What's that?" he asked.

"Don't you know about the Forbidden Fields? It a place where disciples are sent for a period of time as punishment. You have to survive in that treacherous place on your own." The man said.

"Punishment? Does that mean there are a lot of monsters in there? It must've been dangerous," Alex sympathized with the man.

"What? No. There are no monsters. In fact, there are no plants or animals either. The worst part is there is no Qi either. You have you survive on your own in that place with no Qi, and since your Qi gets used up, you start to get hungry and don't have anything to eat either."

"Plus, it's mostly just grassland, followed by an unending desert. It's truly one of the worst places you can be in." The man said with a scared face remembering what it had been like.

'I should ask master about it. If I can find more of these, that would be awesome.' He thought and left the sect market.

He was walking towards his residence, lost in his own thoughts when suddenly he heard someone calling for him.

"Hmm..." he quickly sent out his spiritual sense to see who was calling him and saw a certain man walking towards him.

"Oh hey, Brother Kong. Long time no see." He said as he waved towards Kong Yuhan who was steadily approaching him along with a few different people with him.

"Long time no see? What a weird way to greet you have there, Brother Yu," Kong Yuhan arrived and stood in front of him.

'Do they not say long time to see in this game? I should probably stop saying that,' he thought.

"What are you doing here, Brother Kong?" Alex looked at the 3 people behind Kong Yuhan, who had a curious expression behind him.

"Hopefully same thing you are here for, Brother Yu," Kong Yuhan pointed behind Alex.

Alex looked back and saw the Alchemy hall behind him. 'Does he think I am here for Alchemy?' he thought.

"You are quite chummy with an outer sect disciple, huh Kong?" one of the men standing behind him said.

"Of course. You don't know how much he helped me the past week. He brought me the very rare Dwarf Fruit, and also aided me with creating a Qi Enhancing Pill. It isn't much of a stretch to say I broke through to Meridian Tempering only because of him. " Kong Yuhan was quite genuine when he said that.

Alex checked the 3 people behind Kong Yuhan and realized they all had Organ Tempering realm power. The man that just spoke had an organ tempering 5th realm, while the other man had Organ Tempering 4th realm. The girl on the other hand was higher than the 2 and had an Organ Tempering 9th realm cultivation.

Kong Yuhan saw Alex looking at the three behind him and finally remembered to introduce them. "Oh, I forgot to introduce you guys. This is brother Yu Ming. Brother Yu, this is Wei Xun," he pointed at the man who had talked, " This is Jia Fen, " he pointed at the other man, "and finally this is Zhou Mi."

Alex nodded to them and greeted them. Both the males reciprocated with their own greetings, while the lady only nodded a little. She didn't seem to be the talking type.

Chapter 73: Ascension

"Ascend? What do you mean?" Alex was a little confused by the statement. He had never heard of someone 'ascending' in-game or out of the game.

'Does this have something to do with alchemists?' he wondered. He didn't have any friends he talked to regularly, so he didn't know a lot about the practices in the sect. Even Kong Yuhan was merely just an acquaintance to him.

Kong Yuhan looked like he had realized something when he saw Alex's confused face and said, "Ah, I forgot it hasn't been long since you got here. Ascending means going from being an outer sect disciple to an inner sect disciple or an inner sect disciple to a core disciple."

" In my case, I am one step away from being a core disciple. I have brought a few sets of ingredients with me today, and if I made to make a single pill with over 20% harmony, I can take the exam to become a core disciple."

"Ah" Alex made a sound of understanding. But then he thought of something,

"Brother Kong! If you have to take an exam after creating this pill, then why not call the exam the Ascension. Why call it this one?"

"Well that's because it's a tradition," the silent man name Jia Fen finally spoke.

"You know the reason, brother Jia?" Kong Yuhan turned around to ask the man.

"Yes. Going back a couple dozens of years ago when the sect wasn't as big as it is now, you could promote from being an outer sect disciple or inner sect disciple just by making the required amount of pills, and didn't have to take any tests back then."

"So, when it came to the final pill before promotion, the disciples started calling it 'The Ascension'. But, once the sect got more popular and started getting more and more disciples, they found out that disciples had started to sneakily promote themselves by using pills made by others."

"The elders couldn't keep track of everyone's pills back then, so they started making the disciples take tests for it. They should have stopped after creating the sect running formation a few years back, but the exam was just an extra layer of security that they didn't want to get rid of."

The man named Jia Fen spoke quite a bit and explained it quite well.

"Is that so... anyway, Brother Yu, do you want to come to watch? I brought these 3 to watch as well." Kong Yuhan asked quite expectantly.

Alex thought for a bit and decided to skip the afternoon lunch today. "Sure brother Kong, I can probably learn something from it as well"

Together the 5 walked into the Alchemy hall. It didn't take Kong Yuhan long to find an empty room and immediately entered it. Alex and the other 3 also followed behind him to the room.

"Do you want me to aid, Brother Kong?" the girl finally spoke and walked forward.

"Ah, thank you for your kind intentions, Sister Zhou. But I will have to refuse. In the exam, I will have to make the pills on my own, so I should start making pills on my own, without any aids."

Kong Yuhan started preparing by keeping aside the black cauldron and taking out his own cauldron. He started heating his cauldron and took a deep breath as he started meditating.

Alex didn't know what pills he was going to make, or what ingredients he was going to use. He waited in anticipation to find out.

After a bit of time had passed, and the cauldron was finally heated, Kong Yuhan took out the first ingredient and put it in.

Alex saw the ingredient and thought, ' A Slim Bane Treeleaf huh, that means he must be making one of 4 different pills.'

After a while, Kong Yuhan took out a second ingredient and put it in. This one gave Alex no information, as this ingredient followed the first one in every single one of his recipes.

'His cauldron isn't transferring the heat fast enough. The energy in the second ingredient isn't controlling the first one as quickly as it should.'

Alex could see the minute errors in Kong Yuhan's alchemy process thanks to his spiritual sense. Even while standing so far away, he could see the happenings in the cauldron very clearly.

Then Kong Yuhan put his third ingredient and put it in.

'Huh?' Alex was surprised. 'That's not one of the ingredients from a recipe I know. Did he get a recipe somewhere out of the sect?'

Alex watched as Kong Yuhan put in more and more ingredients to make a pill that he had absolutely no idea about.

Finally, after a while, the pill came out. Kong Yuhan frowned a little after seeing the pill's harmony. He took out a pill tester and tested the harmony of his new pill.

As soon as the pill touched the base of the glass, the fog appeared from the metal base and started crawling along the side of the tester, until it stopped.

Kong Yuhan looked at the number as sighed.

"Only 16%. Not having an aid really does make it hard. Especially when it's a new pill like mine." Kong Yuhan cleaned the cauldron in preparation for another batch.

"Don't fret brother. You still have quite a few sets left. You can do it." Jia Fen encouraged from the side.

"Yes, Brother Kong. You don't have to get disheartened." Zhou Mi encouraged as well.

Alex and the other man stayed quiet but gave encouraging nods towards him.

Kong Yuhan smiled a little.

"You guys are right. This won't stop me at all. This was only my first time so I failed. The next times will be different." Kong Yuhan switched his attention back to the cauldron and prepared for the second batch of ingredients.

Chapter 74: Unstable Concoction

Kong Yuhan held a pill inside a pill tester. The fog slowly rose up from the bottom of the glass and started going upwards.

Everyone in the room watched as the fog reached the number 16. They watched with bated breaths as the fog slowly rose up to the number 17.

"Go up. Go up," they slowly chanted wanting the pill fog to keep on going up.

18.

"Just 2 more. Go. Go." Kong Yuhan was full of sweat watching it.

19.

"Just once more," Kong Yuahn shouted with his voice full of hope. Alas, the fog didn't rise up.

"No!!! I was so close." Kong Yuhan got dejected. This was his third try at making the pill. The second one had ended up being an 18% harmony pill, so he had wished to make this one have 20% harmony. But his wish remained just that, a wish.

"Alright, I will surely make the next one be it." He got back to making the pill once more without anyone's encouragement.

Kong Yuhan had never focused this much in his life before as he did on the 4th pill. He focused from the start to the very end, careful at every turn, and made as few mistakes as possible.

'This turn has quite a few amounts of mistakes. Maybe he will succeed now.' Alex was constantly checking the inside with his spiritual sense. As long he didn't try to strain his senses, his spiritual sense would last for a while.

After Kong Yuhan finished making the pill and took it out to put it in the pill tester.

Once more the crowd watched as the fog started to rise up. The fog quickly rose up to 16% before slowing down.

17%. 18%. 19%.

The pill tester started to shake a little as Kong Yuhan's had started trembling with nervousness.

20%.

"YES!" Kong Yuhan shouted.

"Congratulations, Brother Kong. You are now eligible to become a Core disciple." Everyone started congratulating him one after another.

"Hehe," Kong Yuhan embarrassed a little over the bombardment of congratulations. His large physical build with an embarrassed face was something you didn't see every day.

"How long has it been since we came here?" Kong Yuhan asked the group.

"I think it's been about an hour and a half. Definitely more than an hour for sure." Wei Xun spoke from the back. Everyone else nodded.

"Oh. That means the room already took my contribution points. Might as well finish the final pill." Kong Yuhan started preparing for the next batch of ingredients.

The others also waited for him to make the last pill. Kong Yuhan wiped away his sweat and started once more. He had already ascended so he had no worries for this particular.

He was already tired from making 4 different pills, especially the last one. Plus, he had no need to do everything perfectly, so he was a bit too relaxed while making the pill.

He ended up making more mistakes than usual. Alex caught all of those mistakes.

'He is not getting the timing right. He keeps dropping the ingredients a bit too late, so the energies aren't getting properly harmonized.'

If only the ingredients were burnt and charred instead of turning to powder, the energy could have escaped from the cauldron. But, since they were all powder, the unstable energies were getting taken in by the powder making the powder itself massively unstable.

"Oh no," Kong Yuhan lost control of the situation.

'It's going to blow up!' Alex immediately shot out forwards and used Qi manipulation to throw away the entire cauldron to the corner of the room.

BOOM

A massive explosion rang out from the corner, throwing heaps and heaps of energies towards their direction. Almost instinctively, Alex brought forth his hands and used Elemental Guidance to steer away as much energy from the explosion as possible.

Everyone in the room had a disheveled look as the ringing from the explosion still rung in their ears.

"What the hell are you doing?" Jia Fen immediately cried out.

Alex turned around to see Jia Fen charging at him with the intention to harm. Alex didn't understand why he would do that but immediately used his Qi manipulation to stop him.

Due to their massive gap in cultivation, he was only able to stop his for a few seconds before Jia Fen got free from his clutches and came for him once more.

"Wait brother Jia, It was my fault." Kong Yuhan got out of his stupor and stopped the fight.

"What?" It wasn't just Jia Fen who was confused by the statement. Wei Xun also came forward looking for an answer.

"I was too relaxed and ended up making the ingredients unstable. If brother Yu didn't throw it away in time, I would have been seriously injured right now."

"So, he didn't do it on purpose?" Jia Fen was still quite skeptical about it.

"No. In fact, I had already lost control of the ingredients. It was brother Yu's quick thinking that saved us." Kong Yuhan looked towards the wall. The wall itself had no problems, but the cauldron was now in pieces.

"Aww... I will have to pay quite a few points for this." Kong Yuhan turned around to look at the other 4, focusing especially on Zhou Mi, and said, "Thankfully, none of you were hurt."

"I'm sorry for assuming you did it on purpose, Brother Yu." Jia Fen apologized when he got the chance.

"It's okay." Alex understood why he was mad. He would probably get mad himself if he saw what had just happened.

They all left the Alchemy hall and said their goodbyes. Kong Yuhan kept thanking him for saving him. Alex split from the group and went back to his residence.

He looked at the time and saw it was 5 pm. 'I should be able to squeeze out 4 or 5 pills before it's time for dinner.'

Chapter 75: Wednesday

Alex logged out to get some food after making 6 pills before dinner. He hadn't skipped the lunch today so he was feeling unusually peckish.

After dinner, he logged back to the game and went to the sect valley for his daily work. He took his time and only reached the valley around half past 8.

It didn't even take him an hour in total to pick up all the ingredients. After he was done, he immediately ran back up the mountain to make some more pills.

Throughout the entire night, he managed to make around 22 pills. Today was a free day too, so he decided to make pills once more. He spent the entire day in the alchemy room, making pills whenever possible.

In fact, his next three days went the same way. Every morning, he would have a lesson with his master, and afterward, he would make pills whenever possible.

Finally, on Wednesday, he managed to make a total of 135 different pills. Surprisingly, all of the pills were in the Earth Grade, not one pill below 25%.

He looked at the remaining ingredients he had in his bag.

'Hmm... if I get some ingredients from the alchemy garden, I should be able to make a few more pills than I can register.'

He still had the 194 spirit stones he got from the auction house. He wanted to transfer it immediately to his bank account but didn't since he wanted to see if there were anything important in the auction.

He wanted to buy something himself too. Still, he wouldn't waste much of the spirit stones and together with what he would get from the auction house after selling the current pills, he would transfer them all at once.

Once he was ready, he left the sect leader's mountain at some time around 4 am.

It took him about half an hour to reach the auction house. The path felt quite short this time around for him.

"Yes," Alex let the new lady take him to one of the waiting rooms inside the auction house. After waiting for a while, Cai Ping walked in through the door.

"Ah, good to see you, Madam Cai. I am surprised I only meet you when I come to the auction house." He jokingly greeted the sitting Cai Ping.

"You jest, Daoist Yu. You only see me because I ordered the juniors to let me know when you came." Cai Ping properly seated herself on the couch opposite Alex.

"So, what do you have for us to Auction, Daoist Yu? More pills, I presume." Cai Ping looked at Alex expectantly, waiting for him to take out the batch of pills.

"Yes, Of course. I am an alchemist after all." Alex said with a smile as he reached into his bag and carefully took out 5 bottles, so as to not harm the pills inside.

Cai Ping's eyes lit up as she saw that the 5 newly arrived bottles were all filled with 5 different pills.

'25 pills?' she was happy to see that. Then something weird happened. Alex reached back into his bag and took out 5 more pill bottles, each filled with 5 pills.

"Umm... Daoist Yu? This is?" she asked.

"These are pills of course." Alex reached back into his bag and took 5 more bottles.

Cai Ping started to breathe faster as she saw the 5 new bottles. 'How many pills does he have?' she looked at the 15 different pill bottles and counted 75 pills in total. That was an enormous amount.

But then, Alex reached into his bag and took out 5 more bottles.

"What!!" she freaked out. The newly brought-out bottles were filled with 5 pills each as well.

"What's wrong madam Cai?" Alex was surprised at her loud exclamation.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I showed you something unsightly. I was just surprised that you brought forth so many pills. Did the Hong Wu sect send you as an ambassador for this time's auction, Daoist Yu?" Cai Ping was still calming down from the sight in front of her, but every time she saw the pill bottles laid out in front of her, her eyes would get wide and she would start breathing faster.

"Hong Wu Sect sends ambassadors? I didn't know that. Unfortunately, I am not that. I just wanted to earn some money from my sold pills, so I came here."

He then reached into his bag and brought out another 5 bottles.

This time, however, they weren't completely filled and had about 3 or 4 pills each. He reached back into his bag and took out 5 more bottles with less amount.

Cai Ping just wasn't used to this many pills being taken out at once by a single person.

'And he said he made all the pills by himself? Impossible.' It really was a very hard thing to believe.

Alex finally took out 10 more bottles, each with a single pill inside. Alex looked at 2 of the bottles with a single pill each. There were some pills in other bottles too, but these 2, in particular, were his best alchemy result to date.

The first one was a Hundred Poison Antidote that had a shockingly high harmony of 40%. The next one was a different pill, something he made just this morning.

It was a pill called the Healing Lotus pill. Its main ingredient was a Lotus that grew on earth. It was something he had found in the southern forest.

The Healing Lotus pill itself was one of the best pills he knew of. The pill was regarded as the number one healing pill below the True pills. There was no other healing pill that could rival its healing power.

And somehow, he had managed to make this pill with a harmony of 45%. This pill was also to this day, the pill with the highest harmony level he had made.

Chapter 76: White...

"There are a total of 135 pills in here. All of them are Earth Grade pills. You can check them as you please."

Alex then showed the two pills in his hand and said, "These 2 are my best pills yet. This is a Hundred Poisons Antidote with 40% harmony, and this is a Healing Lotus pill with 45% harmony. Please be careful with them."

He let Cai Ping take everything into her own bag. Cai Ping, however, was still in her shock and didn't manage to get out of it in time. Only after a while did she realize that she was dazed and hurriedly took out a pill tester to check the pills.

28%, 32%, 27%, 29%, 38% ... 26%, 40%, and 45%.

Cai Ping reeled in her shock as she carefully tested each of the pills. In total, there were about 8 total types of pills here.

"Do you have anything else to sell?" Cai Ping asked him, but she didn't expect him to bring out anything.

"Oh, no. These are the only ones I have, unfortunately. If I had more ingredients, I might have been able to squeeze in 4 or 5 pills, but that's it. Making so many pills in 4 days took a lot of physical and mental effort"

Cai Ping suddenly stopped what she was doing and looked back at Alex. With a peculiar smile, she asked, "Umm... Daoist Yu, did I mishear, or did you just say you made all of these pills in 4 days?"

"Hmm... oh yeah. Well, I made some on Saturday night, but others I made in the last 4 days." Alex didn't mind clarifying her confusion.

Cai Ping had a really hard time believing it. She already didn't believe it was him who made the pills, but hearing him say he made them in 4 days just made it even more unbelievable.

She decided to inquire a bit. "Daoist Yu, from what I have heard of Hong Wu sect, they say you guys have to make 10 pills with 10% harmony to become an inner sect, and 20 pills with 20% harmony to become a core disciple, is that true?"

"Yes, that's true." Alex got confused. 'Why would she ask me this?'

"Then why is Daoist Yu still an outer sect disciple, if you don't mind me asking."

"Well, things are kind of complicated in the sect regarding me." Alex scratched his head with a bit of embarrassment.

"Shouldn't you be a Core disciple by now, with all of these pills you have made?" Cai Ping thought she was getting closer and closer to getting him to slip and fess up who really made the pills.

"Oh no. I am a long way from being a core disciple. To become one, We have to give away the pills to the sect for the pills to count. Also, each pill has to be from a different recipe. Since I wanted to sell my pills instead of giving it away, I still haven't been able to become a core disciple. Although I hope to become one in the near future."

Alex was quite confident in his answer. Cai Ping on the other hand got dejected that she couldn't make him tell who really made the pills.

'I can almost guarantee that he is just an errand boy for someone more important. But still, on the off chance he is a genuine golden goose, I cannot offend him.'

"Why don't we set up the contract now?" Cai Ping said as she took one of the talismans laying on the ground and wrote it will everything Alex had brought to her.

She then signed the paper with a signature using her Qi and handed it to Alex.

"By the way, Daoist Yu. We will have to use a name to represent the pills here. Do you mind if we use your real name or do you want to use some other names?"

Alex thought for a bit. 'A different name? Like a nickname huh, what should I name myself?' He couldn't think of anything to call himself. He thought of calling himself 'Alchemy God', but immediately erased the idea since that was way too pretentious and most definitely a lie.

He looked around the room hoping for inspiration. He looked at his own body as well looking for just anything that can help provide him with an idea for his name.

Suddenly, he stopped. He slowly brought up his right hand to touch his left arm. More accurately, He touched the scar on his left arm.

Then, he suddenly remembered back to the wolf that gave him this wound, and he also remembered the cats that were there. The cats that he fought the wolf to protect.

He remembered the giant mother cat with its bright white fur covered in blood.

'White... White Wolf.' Alex smiled. That wasn't a bad name if he said so himself.

"White Wolf, You can use the name White Wolf for me."

Cai Ping smiled as well. "White Wolf, huh. I quite like that name. I shall refer to you as White Wolf from now on in the stage, Daoist Yu."

"By the way, Madam Cai is it okay if I come to the auction. I don't know if I can buy anything, but I just wanted to see what an auction was like."

Cai Ping laughed a little, "You are more than welcomed to be in the auction, Daoist Yu. We shall prepare a VIP room for you."

"Oh, no. That's not necessary. I can manage in a normal room as well. Please give your VIP room to the guests who can actually buy something."

Cai Ping smiled and complied. Alex took the contract and bid farewell to Cai Ping. He walked out of the auction house and reached his residence back in the sect in about half an hour.

He had made it in time for dinner, so he logged out.

Chapter 77: Missing Ingredients

"Good Evening, Elder Wang. Is the list ready yet?" Alex arrived at the foot of the alchemy garden late at night. He had purposefully waited as much as he could without doing anything before coming here.

"Oh, you are here, Disciple Yu. Yes, Elder Zhan has prepared the list. Here you go." He handed Alex the list of ingredients.

Over the last couple of days, Alex had come to know the elders quite well. He respected them as elders and they respected him as someone with talent.

They would still be surprised every time he walked out of the garden within an hour.

"How do you do it, Disciple Yu? The mountain is quite huge, so how do you manage to find the ingredients so fast." The elders asked.

"Oh, hehe... that's a secret. I can tell you that it's because I know where every single ingredient is already. So I just go and take it. I don't have to waste time searching for it."

Ma Rong had told him not to reveal anyone about his Spiritual sense yet, so he tried to work around the question and answer them without really answering the question.

"I'll be off then, Elder Wang." Alex walked into the valley in search of the ingredients. He quickly scanned the list and thought of where all the ingredients were.

'There are 2 there, 3 next to that, only 1 near the top...' he revised the locations in his mind and walked off.

Ingredients started to fly on their own and landed inside his storage bag. His Qi manipulation and Spiritual sense coordination had gotten just that good.

One after another, he started finding all the ingredients in the list. It took him half an hour to finish it all, so he walked out.

"Always so punctual, aren't you? Disciple Yu. " Elder Wang spoke as he saw Alex coming out of the garden.

Alex just smiled and said, "I will head to the other garden." He walked across the valley to the other garden and entered.

He once again started looking for the ingredients.

"Hmm... it's missing." Alex knew for sure there was an ingredient here yesterday, but there wasn't one anymore. 'Did some animal take it?' he wondered.

He kept on looking for the other ingredients. Once more he found another ingredient missing.

"That's the second time. Is there really some animal in here?"

He searched for more ingredients. By the end, he found about 4 different ingredients missing. And those were just ones he searched for because of the list.

'Let's check everything.' He immediately sent out his spiritual sense and looked at all of the different ingredients growing in the valley. He found out more than 20 ingredients had been stolen by now.

He quickly thought of the materials and realized they were ingredients for the pill [Heart Stopping pill]. It was a common-grade pill that would kill anyone below the Mind Tempering realm by solidifying their blood and stopping their heart from pumping blood.

The only thing that could possibly save a person that had taken a Heart Stopping pill was either the Healing Lotus pill or a True Grade healing pill. He didn't know of any pills other than that, that could possibly save a person.

Of course, this was with his limited knowledge of 200 pills. There were many other pills out there that he had no idea about.

"Master, I thought I was the only one allowed to pick from the gardens for now. Someone else is taking ingredients for a Heart Stopping pill in the alchemy garden." He sent out a message using the communication talisman Ma Rong gave him.

He walked out of the valley and gave the ingredients to elder Wang and elder Zhan.

"You took quite some time today, Disciple Yu? Were the ingredients hard to find this time around?" Elder Wang asked.

"Oh, no. I just found some ingredients missing from where they should have been. So I looked around for a while and realized that a lot of ingredients had been taken in the last few days. Are elders allowed to take away ingredients nowadays? I thought I was the only one."

Elder Wang and Zhan lost their joking smiles and immediately got serious. "Someone took away ingredients? Are you sure you didn't make any mistake?"

"No. I counted and realized about 20 ingredients were missing. All ingredients required for a Heart Stopping pill are missing."

Elder Wang contemplated a little. "If that is true then we need to call the sect leader."

"No need. I am already here." Ma Rong flew down to where Alex and the elders were.

"You said somebody took ingredients for a Heart Stopping pill? " She asked Alex.

"Yes. I don't know when they were taken as I only found out about them missing today, but I can guarantee they were there 3 days ago, and I did not pick them."

Ma Rong knew about the amazing memory of someone with a spiritual sea so she believed him instantly.

"Who had entered aside from my disciple?" Ma Rong looked to the elders.

The elders only stood outside every day and took requests from the disciples so they didn't know. Ma Rong immediately sent out a sect-wide message for every elder who had to enter the garden within the last 5 days to gather here.

Within 10 minutes, a group of about 10 elders was standing in front of Ma Rong.

"Did anyone of you take out ingredients from the garden in the last 5 days?" Everybody denied having taken any ingredients. At least not since the sect leader took away their authority too.

Ma Rong frowned and took out 2 pill bottles, and 10 pills flew out of them to the elders' hand.

The elders had a confused look as they looked at the pill. Immediately, their eyes went wide with shock. All of the elders knew what the pill was.

Chapter 78: Questioning

"Eat it," Ma Rong said as they looked at the elders standing in front of her. Her cold eyes and voice made all the elders shiver.

The majority of the elders ate it at once, while a few reluctantly followed. Suddenly, their eyes started to get lazy and their arms limped a little. Their entire body posture slumped and they have no emotions on their face.

"Now, Answer me again. Did anyone of you take away ingredients from the alchemy garden in the last 5 days?"

""" No"""" A collective answer came out of all the elders.

The elders once again all denied it. Ma Rong looked confused. There was no way someone below the saint realm could possibly lie after eating a Truth-Seeking Pill.

She dismissed the elders. After they started recovering once again, they left. Ma Rong got to thinking once more.

If it was not one of them, then it would be near impossible to catch the culprit unless they were stupid enough to make a transaction with the ingredients or the pill.

Ma Rong immediately took out her medallion to check the records, and she found someone selling a Heart-Stopping pill.

'5 hours ago? By an outer sect disciple, no less.' She checked the buying records of the disciple and found no ingredients for the pill.

"Come, we are going somewhere." She grabbed Alex by the arm and started flying away. The two elders just stood there and watched them leave.

Soon the sect leader and Alex were in the outer sect mountain, and Alex slowly flew down to one of the cottages.

"You do the talking." His master's voice rang inside his mind.

'Wow. She can already talk to my head? I forgot that was even possible with a spiritual sense.' He simply nodded to his master and walked up to the cottage.

Knock. Knock.

A female disciple slowly opened the door and looked at Alex confusedly.

"What do you want?" she asked in a very unfriendly tone.

"I am here on behalf of the sect to ask you a question. You sold a Heart-Stopping pill with 22% harmony today. Did you make the pill by yourself?" Alex asked the girl.

The girl was somewhere in her early 20s. As soon as she heard his words, she frowned.

"How do you know that?" She started getting a little apprehensive.

The girl started to get a little scared and answered, "I only sold the pill, I didn't make it myself."

'Now we're getting somewhere.'

"Can you tell us where you got the pill from?" he asked

"Someone found me and asked me to sell the pill for them."

Alex frowned a little. "Ask who it is." Ma Rong's voice came to his head.

"Who is it that asked you to do that?"

" I don't know. I only met the person today. They were wearing a black hood over his head, and said that if I sold the pill, I would get 10% of the contribution points from it."

Alex fell into contemplation.

"Do you remember how the person looked like? How did they act? Maybe their gender or even the fact about if they are disciples or elders?"

The girl fell into thought. "I can't tell if they were a disciple or elder, but they wore a really dark green robe underneath, so they must've either a core disciple or an elder. As for the gender, I think they are a male. They tried to hide it but my instinct said they were a male. Aside from that, I don't know."

"I only met them about 6 hours ago so I don't know a lot about them. But, there was something weird about them. The person felt like a completely mortal person with no Qi. I can't tell if that is helpful, but that's all I have got."

Alex nodded. "Oh right. I am supposed to get the ingredients I bought with the remaining 90% of the contribution pill to them in the sect market tonight at midnight." The girl suddenly shouted.

"I see." Suddenly, a talisman fell from above. "Tell her to carry this with her." Ma Rong spoke to him.

"Keep this on your person when you go to the sect valley tonight, just in case."

Alex left the outer sect mountain. For a while, the walk to the sect valley was really silent.

"This person is smart." Ma Rong spoke from above. "Not only are they making other people sell the pills made out of stolen ingredients, but they are also even making the other disciples buy the ingredients for them. They are doing absolutely nothing to get tracked by the sect running formation."

"You are right, master. Who knows how many such stolen pills they have sold already." Alex was shocked that someone was deceiving the sect in such a manner.

"I don't have any hiding abilities, so everyone will see me if I keep flying in the sky like this, especially in the sect valley with all the light. And I can't show up in the sect valley itself, since that might deter away from the culprit."

She turned towards Alex and said, "So you will have to be the one to find this culprit. As soon as you see him, call me. Before that, I can't be seen. "

Ma Rong immediately flew away. 'What did I get myself into?' Alex wondered as he got back to the sect valley. Thankfully, he was done making for the auction or he would have regretted finding out about the missing ingredients.

He decided to wait for the culprit in the sect market, so he went and looked around the market as if he was looking through the different vendors.

About 2 hours later, midnight arrived. And so did the female disciple. He stayed about 15 meters away, hidden in the crowd, constantly surveying the area around the lady, waiting for the culprit to arrive.

Chapter 79: Song Zun

Alex made sure he didn't stand out in the crowd, so he split his attention keeping most of it on the woman and around her, and some of it on acting like he was there to buy something.

He had his master's communication talisman in his hands, ready to call her any moment.

The female outer sect disciple seemed to not know where to find the person, so she looked around hoping the person would instead find her.

Minutes passed by and nothing happened. Still, it was the only midnight now, so both Alex and the female disciple stayed there. The female disciple especially was in a jumpy mood.

From her understanding, she had gotten involved with something bad and wanted to get out of it as soon as possible. If even the sect was after this person, then he must be really bad.

Alex watched the woman's nervousness increase as she started getting fidgety. She was still walking around the market, unsure if the person would even come.

Suddenly, she turned stiff.

"Have you brought the ingredients?" a voice entered the woman's ears that made her jump.

Alex had his spiritual sense on the woman, so he heard the voice too. 'It's a man for sure. But where is he?' he looked through the crowd towards the female disciple but saw nobody standing around her.

'This is weird.' He immediately sent out his spiritual sense and found a figure in a cloak standing beside the woman.

'He's invisible. And it's just like she said, he has no aura or Qi. It's almost like he is a mortal.' Alex finally understood why he couldn't see the man at all.

Thankfully, he had a spiritual sense. The man's techniques could hide his aura and Qi, and hide his body, but it couldn't hide his figure from being seen with his spiritual sense.

He looked at the man and was shocked. 'So young!' the man didn't look a day over 20. Alex looked at the robe linings and realized he was a core disciple.

He immediately sent out a message. "Master, he's here. It's a core disciple. But be careful, he is invisible and has no qi or aura. Only your spiritual sense works on him."

The man was giving off no qi so he couldn't guess or see what his cultivation base was.

"Give me the damn ingredients." The man demanded in the woman's ears. The woman slowly took out a storage bag which the man immediately snatched. As soon as the bag left the woman's hand, it vanished as well.

The man started leaving and Alex started following. Suddenly, Ma Rong flew down from above. The man stopped and looked up to see the sect leader was landing nearby.

But he didn't seem to care much about it. He started walking away, still invisible.

Most of the disciples at night were outer sect disciples who had never seen the sect leader, so when she dropped they only assumed an elder was flying.

The elders from the stalls stopped what they were doing and walked out. "Sect leader, is something wrong? Why are you here?" they started wondering if they did something wrong during the sales today.

Ma Rong ignored everyone and looked towards Alex.

"Where?" She asked as soon as she flew down. Alex immediately pointed to the invisible man walking away, "There."

The invisible man turned back to see Alex point directly towards him, his eyes staring right at him. Ma Rong looked in his direction as well and within seconds her eyes that were looking everywhere else suddenly locked onto him.

"Not good." The man started to immediately run away, but there was no way he was going to be faster than the sect leader herself.

Ma Rong caught up to him in what felt like a blink of an eye and immediately pushed him down to the ground by just releasing her cultivation base on him.

The man stopped using his techniques and instead flared his cultivation base to struggle against the sect leader's power. His figure was finally visible to all.

Ma Rong saw the face and exclaimed with surprise. She immediately took him and flew off. Alex followed in their direction as well.

Ma Rong landed in front of the elder's hall surprising the many elders that were standing nearby. She had just been here a moment ago, and flew off with no indication, and came back just as quick.

Now, she even had a core disciple with her.

"What is going on, sect leader?" the elders asked.

"Nothing. I just found a thief who has been stealing from the alchemy gardens." She said as she tossed him down. Alex arrived just in time to see the man look up to the numerous elders with fear creeping up in his eyes.

"Song Zun?" the elders were surprised. "Are you sure there is no mistake here, sect leader? Song Zun is one of our best students. There is no way he could be a thief."

Ma Rong sighed and said, "I know. But a thief is a thief. And we don't look away from someone's crime just because they are good."

Alex looked at the man. 'Song Zun... I've heard of that name somewhere before.' He thought. He tried to remember, but couldn't think of where he had heard of him.

"What exactly did he do, sect leader? Couldn't we pardon him with a little punishment if the crime isn't that big?" one of the elders said.

"Let's see how big his crime is then, shall we?" Ma Rong pulled out a pill bottle and took out a single pill from it. It was the same Truth-seeking pill that she had given to the elders.

She force-fed it to Song Zun, who immediately got passive with no emotion in his face.

"Did steal the ingredients from the alchemy garden to make a Heart-Stopping pill?" she went directly for the question.

Song Zun couldn't lie or say anything other than the truth, so he simply said, "Yes."

Chapter 80: Immortal Concealment Technique

"Yes."

As soon as the elders heard him confess to stealing something from the alchemy garden, they gasped.

The alchemy garden was one of the forbidden lands in the sect that not everyone was given permission to enter. Only elders were allowed in it to pick the ingredients previously, but even that had changed.

Now the elders were only allowed to care for the garden, and not pick up anything. That task was apparently given to the sect leader's new disciple. The elders didn't know if that was the right choice, but they heard nothing but praise from Elder Wang and Elder Zhan who took care of it now.

So, when they heard that Song Zun had entered the alchemy garden to steal ingredients from it, they knew there was no pardoning him.

Ma Rong was starting to get angry. "Why did you steal the ingredients and not buy it?" she asked.

"I am not going to do these menial tasks just to buy something I can easily steal. All I want to do is make pills and nothing more" Song Zun said with a blank face.

"Why do you want to make the pills so bad?" she asked.

Alex was surprised to hear that as well. ' First in Alchemy Achievement...Alchemy Achievement..." suddenly he remembered something.

'That's right. Song Zun is the name of the third-ranking disciple in Alchemy Achievement. He is the anomaly in the black rock who has a high alchemy achievement with a very poor contribution ranking. Does that mean he didn't do many contributions to the sect at all?' he suddenly thought of something.

"How long ago did you join the sect?" he walked forward and asked Song Zun.

"Hey who are you?" the elders cried out.

"Go away disciple, this is not a place for you."

Ma Rong suddenly shouted "Quiet!" and all the elders quietened down. She waited for Song Zun to reply.

"4 years." He said.

"Where are you going with this?" she asked Alex.

Alex gestured her to wait and see and asked another question. "How long ago did you become a core disciple?"

"1 year ago." Song Zun was still under the effect of the pill, and it didn't look like it was going to go away soon.

"And how many contribution points have you earned after becoming a core disciple?" he asked. Ma Rong started getting curious as to why he was asking such unrelated questions.

"I make the weekly required 100 contribution points." Song Zun replied.

"Then, where do you get the ingredients for your pills to rank third in the Alchemy Achievement?" as soon as she heard this question, Ma Rong's eyes turned wide as she finally thought of a possibility that she had forgotten in the heat of the situation.

She looked back at Song Zun, and the answer she dreaded came out of his mouth. "I steal all my ingredients from the alchemy gardens."

Ma Rong immediately questioned "How many ingredients have you stolen so far?" the revelations were getting too much for her, but she still had to ask the question.

Song Zun stayed quiet for this question. The deafening silence lasted for a few too many seconds before he opened his mouth to say, "I don't know."

Ma Rong was shocked. She changed the question, "Since when did you start stealing the ingredients?"

This question he didn't think at all and said, "3 and a half years."

The pill's effect ran out with the answer and Song Zun realized what he had just said. "No! No! That was a lie. That was wrong. I wasn't thinking straight. Sect Master, please give me a chance. Elders, please help me. I am one of your best students. I am so close to becoming an Earth Grade alchemist. Please don't punish me. I can change. Please."

Ma Rong felt disgusted looking at his face. She scanned his body with her spiritual sense and pulled out 3 storage bags. She threw them each towards Alex and said, "This is your reward for your contribution tonight. If not for you, this criminal would have gone unnoticed by us."

The elders were looking in shock as Alex took all 3 bags. Alex quickly scanned the bag and found most of the items inside were just alchemy materials, pills, and a few dozen spirit stones.

There were also 2 books that he quickly scanned the cover of. One of them was called [Veiled light technique]. It was an Earth Grade technique that used Qi to cover one's body with refracted light to make them invisible to the surrounding.

This was what Song Zun was using to hide in the sect valley.

The second book was perhaps the best book Alex had found as of yet. It was called the [Immortal Concealment Technique]. It was a technique that ran on its own and hid people's cultivation base from others as well as their aura and Qi.

To anyone that is not at least a major realm higher than the user, the user would appear to be a simple mortal with no cultivation. To top it all of, it was an Immortal grade technique. The first one he had ever seen.

"Thank you, master."

Ma Rong nodded and looked back at Song Zun, whose eyes were glaring daggers at Alex, who had been the one to find him. He was the one that had pointed at him back in the market and had asked those questions that got him to where he was.

And now, he also had all of his items.

Ma Rong closed her eyes and said, "Throw him into the forbidden fields for 2 months. That shall be his punishment."

A few elders with a badge on their robe that said 'Protect' walked out and carried Song Zun to take him to the forbidden fields.

"Go back and rest." Ma Rong said towards Alex and went along with the elders, leaving Alex alone.

Chapter 81: Learning The Techniques

Alex walked up to his residence in the middle of the night. The last few days had been tiring, with all the nonstop pill-making, especially today.

'Or should I call it yesterday since it's already past midnight' he thought.

Alex walked straight to the courtyard as soon as he returned. It was time to learn some books. He quickly took out the Earth Grade [Veiled Light technique] and started reading it.

As soon as he finished, he got the notification.

<Congratulations. You have successfully learned [Veiled Light Technique]>

"Alright then, let's try it." He started using the technique. His Qi started flowing across his body and slowly seeped out of his entire body. As it touched the air, the Qi started to move on the surface of his body, slowly warping the lights around him.

The Qi would take the light coming from one direction, move it across his body and send it out of the other direction. To anyone looking from the outside, it looked like there was nothing between the viewer and the source of the light.

This worked omnidirectionally and always kept the light moving towards its original destination. Alex slowly looked down at his hand and realized, they weren't there anymore.

In fact, his entire body was gone. He tried to use his spiritual sense and found out that there was no problem while looking at his hands through the spiritual sense.

He tried walking around with the veil active and trained to keep the veil even under difficult situations. He tried flying with the veil active and realized he could do that as well.

'Oh... I'm flying faster now,' He thought. Getting to the 4th Bone Tempering realm had made him just a tiny bit faster at flying now.

He got back down, still invisible, and took out the next book. He started flipping through the book. This book was about the same length as the first one, but somehow it took him double the time to finish reading.

<Congratulations, You have successfully learned [Immortal Concealment Technique]>

Suddenly, all his Qi inside his body started to stop giving out an aura and stayed inside all the time. His cultivation base started to keep in its aura as well, and he started becoming more and more like a mortal human.

"Woah, that's quite good." He didn't have to do anything for this book, it worked by itself. He opened the description to check.

[Immortal Concealment Technique

Grade: Immortal

Hides your cultivation base and Qi from cultivators that are not at least a major realm higher than you]

'Hmm... so only someone in the True realms can truly know what cultivation I have. And even then, it's hard for them to instantly figure out. Add that to the invisibility, no wonder Song Zun got away with so much theft.'

'Just being invisible meant anyone without a Spiritual sense could not find them when they had the Immortal Concealment technique.'

Alex finally realized how Song Zun had managed to keep his actions hidden from the different elders.

'What else do I need to do?' he thought. 'I still need to absorb that yellow stone. I kept it aside since I had to make the pills, but now that it's over, I should do it... maybe tomorrow.'

He practiced with the technique a little longer and started cultivating.

At exactly 6 am, he woke up. He logged out and got back into the game about an hour later. He waited for Ma Rong to arrive, and learned alchemy from her for a bit.

"Give me your nameplate." Ma Rong said after the classes were done. Alex took out his nameplate and handed it to her. Ma Rong quickly scanned the nameplate and frowned.

"Why haven't you registered a single pill? You should have made at least 5 different ones by now." She got a little irritated at how slow Alex was with becoming a Core disciple.

"Uhh... I will, master. I will start making pills today onward exclusively for registering." Alex got a little embarrassed. He didn't think his master would ask him for the pills so soon.

"That reminds me, master. Here." He handed the 2 books he got from Song Zun to her. "It's the techniques Song Zun was using to sneak around in the alchemy gardens."

Ma Rong took the books and flipped one to the front page. She read the page and said, "It makes you invisible, huh?"

Alex was surprised she was able to tell what the book did from the front page alone. 'Can she actually understand the unintelligible words?' he could only read the letters but was never able to tell what anything meant.

The only thing helping him was the fact that at the end of the book, he would somehow thankfully learn it.

Ma Rong checked the next book and was surprised. "An immortal grade technique? There is only one of those in the sect. Where did that thief get this?"

"There is an immortal grade technique in the sect?" Alex got surprised when he heard this.

"You don't know? You have full access to the library, haven't you checked yet?" she said.

"Uhh... I was so focused on making pills, I forgot about learning new techniques." Alex said with a bashful face.

"Anyway. Keep these books, they are yours now. You can give them to me after you've learned them." Ma Rong said as he gave back the book.

But Alex didn't take them and instead just said, "Oh, I've already learned them, master. That's why I am giving you these."

"You already learned them? But you only got it last night. It hasn't even been 8 hours since you got these." She was surprised.

"I learned it last night at around 2 am. I stayed up late instead of cultivating."

"WHAT? You learned it in less than 2 hours?" Ma Rong was getting more and more shocked. "Show me," she said.

Alex had simply stopped the technique from automatically working, so when he let it work again, all of his presence, cultivation base, and aura disappeared in a flash-All Ma Rong could see in front of her was a mortal Alex.

Chapter 82: Teaching

Ma Rong looked at the complete non-existence of Alex in front of her and was surprised. "So he got past the elders using this and the invisibility technique?" she asked.

"Yes. It's quite a good combination actually." Alex said as he used the Veiled Light technique as well.

Suddenly, he was out of sight as well. Ma Rong immediately sent out her spiritual sense, and only then did she manage to find him.

"You learned this technique already too?" she asked.

Alex stopped using the invisibility technique, and also stopped concealing himself. "Yeah."

"Have you already learned the Elemental Guidance technique I gave you?" She asked.

Alex couldn't understand why she was asking all of these questions, so he simply answered, "Of course. I learned it the moment you gave it to me."

'Heavens! Is he even more of a genius than I thought he was?' Ma Rong couldn't comprehend how he could learn everything so fast.

"Listen to me. If anyone asks you how long it took you to learn the techniques, tell them it took you a few days or a week at least. If it is heaven grade or higher, tell them it took you about a month. Never tell anyone you learned it in a few hours."

Ma Rong was very stern about it. Alex didn't understand what she was talking about.

'Why can't I learn it so fast? I'm already using up so much time by not using the system's learn function.'

"Is learning in a few hours good?" he couldn't help but ask.

"It's beyond good. Most normal people take about 2 to 5 days to learn a mortal grade technique. Earth grade techniques take them a little over a week. They can't learn a Heaven Grade technique without studying the book for about a fortnight or more. While Immortal grade techniques may take the cultivators anywhere from a few months to a few years to completely learn."

"I myself was called a genius and it took me about 2 months to learn the [Flickering Shadows] technique. If someone with malicious intent finds out that you have so much talent, they might harm you out of envy and pettiness."

"So, make sure you do not let anyone know about your talents. Doesn't matter if it's in cultivating, learning techniques, or alchemy. Always learn to be modest, and never reveal your true talents. Not even to your closest friends."

Hearing the serious tone in Ma Rong's voice, Alex got serious as well. "I understand, master." He said.

"Good. Go and learn the technique from the library later. It's a movement technique that should help you a lot. Most of the alchemy techniques in the library should be useless to you now that you are so practiced at Qi manipulation and have spiritual sense. As for the battle techniques, don't even bother learning them."

"Since you will go to the Tiger sect in a few days, you can learn the techniques from there. They have a far better collection of battle techniques than we do." Ma Rong advised him.

She taught him alchemy a bit longer, but there was no longer anything left to teach him. Not unless he got into the True Realm.

"I will stop coming here from tomorrow. I don't have anything else to teach you until at least 50% of your Qi turns to True Qi. After that, I will give you advice on how to make True pills." Ma Rong said.

"Turn Qi to True Qi? Don't you just acquire True Qi after you enter the True realm?" Alex got a bit confused.

"No. It's the other way around. Only after turning all of your Qi to True Qi do you finally enter the True realm. Even then you have to break through to the True Realm. Most people with low talent will forever be stuck in the self tempering realm. Few pills help to elevate the chances, but even then it mostly depends on your base talent itself."

"Have you ever felt a bottleneck before?" she suddenly asked.

"Bottleneck? Like the one that stops you from breaking through to a higher realm? No." He said.

"I thought so. Then, you don't have to worry about it much. Just cultivate normally, you will definitely enter the True realm." Ma Rong stood up and started preparing to leave when she suddenly remembered something.

"Oh, and there is something you should know about. In less than a month, there will be an Annual Sect competition that will take place in the Cardinal city. Many different types of competitions will take place there. I want you to take part in Alchemy-related competitions, so prepare for it."

"If we win in the alchemy competitions and we somehow do well in other competitions as well, we might get enough points to become a first-grade sect. The Tiger sect is already ridiculously close to becoming one. We need about a few hundred points to become one. Hopefully, we can do it this year."

Ma Rong seemed hopeful about the competition.

"Master, what's a sect grade?" Alex was a bit confused. He didn't think he had ever heard about those before.

"It's just an arbitrary term made by the Crimson empire to let the various cultivators know how good a sect is or how well it can train its disciples. "

"Every year the various sects from around the empire come together to take part in the competition, and those that win get points. As the points accumulate, their grade increases. We managed to get to the second grade almost a decade ago. Only now are we finally reaching the point where we may reach the first grade."

"Of the many competitions, we can win in maybe 2. The alchemy ingredients recognition competition. And the pill-making competition. We always did well on those. If we somehow do good on a few more, we will surely get the 1st grade."

"So, I am counting on you to do good on those two. As for the others... we will see when the time comes." Ma Rong left after saying this. Alex got into thinking for a while before logging out to go to classes.

Chapter 83: Qi, Records, and Shadows

At 3 pm, Alex logged back into the game. He had 3 tasks to do today. Make pills for the disciple hall, use the yellow rock, and learn the immortal technique.

He could make the pills a bit later, and he could also go learn the technique when he had to go to the sect valley for his work. So he decided to start with the yellow rock.

"This is going to hurt once more, isn't it?" He could still remember the pain the first yellow rock put him through. The result from using the rock was amazing, but the process itself, not so much.

Thankfully, he had been through worse pain, so he was okay with the pain he would feel now. He took out the yellow rock and took a deep breath. Then, he swallowed it.

The rock immediately melted in his mouth and turned into a smooth-flowing liquid that slid down his throat. The liquid was still the same scalding hot one, but he still felt nothing.

However, he started feeling the pain when the liquid reached his stomach once more.

<You have ingested a 'Yang Jade'>

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body is turning the yang energy in the yang jade to Yang Qi>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 2%>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 3%>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 4%>

The already hot and vigorous Yang Qi in his body started to feel more hot and vigorous.

The pain wasn't as bad as he remembered and it disappeared in a few minutes.

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 98%>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 99%>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 100%>

<Congratulation, the Yang Qi in your body has been purified and condensed>

<Yang purity at 20%>

The change wasn't as intense as he had expected it to be. All the Qi he had in his body had been condensed to about 90% of the original size, yet it did the same amount of work as the previous 100%. Meaning, when his body was full of Qi, he could now do more.

"Hmm... will my Qi last about 10% longer now? That is more substantial than I had previously guessed."

He tried his new 20% purity Yang Qi on different things. He used Flame Mastery Scripture and found it more manageable. Qi manipulation could carry heavier things now, meaning he could also fly a bit faster. His Smiting Blade was probably more powerful now as well, though he didn't dare use it here.

After he was done testing with his techniques, he decided to try making some pills. Unfortunately, his alchemy skills didn't get any better from having a better Qi.

"So my previous Qi was already good enough for it, it seems." He made about 6 different pills using the ingredients he had left, mixed with the new ingredients he got from Song Zun's storage bag.

He logged out to get some food and came back in. He decided to learn the new technique before going to do his work, so he walked down to the sect valley.

He had about an hour before he had to go to work, so he walked to the library. He showed his nameplate through the different floors and reached the 8th floor.

He had an hour to spend, and taking back the book only took a minute, so he decided to go up a floor and read all the records on the 9th floor that he had previously skipped.

Since everything on the 9th floor had to stay there, he started picking the records one by one and started reading them. He read one after another record and realized something.

"Hmm... most of these aren't even alchemy related."

Most of them were just historical records, some about the sect and some about other things. It seemed the sect only went as far back as 50 years, so it didn't have a lot of history in this place.

Some of the records also talked about cultivation rumors and rare monsters. Very few records had anything to do with alchemy, talking about pills with no recipes or ingredients that were very rare and hard to find.

He saw a record of Spirit Cleansing Lily talking about how hard it was to actually pick it. The person who wrote the record had no idea what to do when one actually found it and only talked about how to recognize it.

Alex read through all the records and quickly memorized them. After finishing the records, he looked at the time and realized it was time to leave. He walked down to the 8th floor and quickly found the immortal technique with his spiritual sense.

He took the book down to the ground floor, where the attending elder at the gate unlocked the seal on the book. Every book had these seals to stop the disciples from reading the books inside the library, and the seal could only be removed by an elder with a corresponding medallion.

After the book was unsealed, Alex walked towards the alchemy garden while constantly reading the book in his bag using his spiritual sense.

Before he could even reach the garden, he got a notification.

<Congratulations. You have successfully learned [Flickering Shadows]>

'Hmm... that took about the same time as the Immortal Concealing technique. I wonder how it compares to that technique. Master did say it was a movement technique so maybe comparing those two isn't the best idea.'

He immediately opened the techniques panel and looked at the description of the technique.

[Flickering Shadows

Grade: Immortal

Teleport to any shadow with a larger area than your palm within 10 meters. You can also travel to where ever your own shadow is. Qi used to teleport depends on the distance.]

"Huh?? Teleport?" he was expecting some techniques that allowed him to move really fast when he heard the word 'Movement Technique', but somehow this was on a whole other level.

'If I can teleport to anywhere with a shadow then... isn't that pretty overpowered? No wonder it's an Immortal grade technique.'

Chapter 84: Teleportation

Alex practically ran to reach the garden after learning the new technique. He couldn't wait to learn the technique, so needed to finish his work fast.

'Is it really teleportation?' he was getting a little excited.

He greeted the two elders and was handed the lists to the ingredients. He immediately walked in to start looking for the ingredients. He was looking around with his spiritual sense when he stopped.

There were absolutely no lanterns in the alchemy garden as anyone allowed to enter there was usually elders or other people with authority who already had great eyesight and could see everything in the garden clearly, even at night.

But just because someone could see at night, didn't mean there was light there. Which meant,

"It's all shadows!!" Alex got excited and decided to try out the technique right now.

The Immortal Concealing technique was one that worked on its own and he himself didn't have to do anything. So, this was the first time he was truly using an Immortal grade technique.

The alchemy gardens were forbidden grounds in the sect as they were too precious to let just about anyone in it. So, in order to not make some stupid mistakes and accidentally destroy some plants, he decided to use Focus mode.

Ever since he learned spiritual sense, he had no longer required Focus mode. His mind was just that quick at processing the information he obtained. Especially during alchemy, Spiritual sense had made focus mode pretty much redundant.

Still, Focus mode was amazing at amplifying the 6 senses of a cultivator and elevating their entire state of awareness to another level.

As soon as he activated Focus mode, Alex felt like he had breathed in a new life. Everything started looking so vibrant again. The numerous smells of the alchemy ingredients fragrantly drifting in the air made his nose tingle a little.

The cool air of night made his skin refreshed and he could hear the rustling of leaves and plants from far away.

Although everything was bright to his eyes, he knew they were all dark in reality. So, he started activating his technique. He looked inside of him with his senses and saw a flash of multicolored light before it vanished and he saw his qi.

The yellow in his Qi reminded him of the Yang jade he intakes just a few hours ago. Slowly, the Qi started moving around his body. His Qi moved along the familiar meridians taking a different path.

It moved towards his eyes and brain, and suddenly spots around him started to light up. The spots closer to him had less light, while the ones further had more. The furthest spot was no more than 10 meters away from him.

He used his spiritual sense and realized similar things were happening all around him even without his vision. The Qi suddenly stopped moving when it reached his head, and the light stayed lit up all around him.

'What's happening? Am I supposed to choose a spot right now?' he focused and looked at a spot that was open and not near any ingredients. Suddenly, the Qi started flowing once more, and he felt as if his entire world disappeared.

The world appeared once more, but he was no longer where he had been before. He had teleported to the spot he thought of. The juxtaposition of the previous senses followed by the instant shift to the new senses caused him to not realize what was happening for a brief moment.

He collected himself and looked where he was. He was facing the same direction he had been before and had teleported to the exact spot he thought of. He felt his Qi and found almost none of it had been used.

'I can do this for a long time.' He started moving his qi once more and spots of light started appearing in his vision. This time he chose one that was the furthest away.

The Qi started moving once more from his head, but it took a while before his teleportation activated. Once more, the sudden change was too much for even his spiritual sea enhanced brain to handle.

'I need to practice more.'

He teleported around the place while picking the ingredients at the same time. It took him quite a while to finish picking up the ingredients on this alchemy garden.

He walked out of the garden after a while and met the agitated faces of the two elders.

"Disciple Yu, is something going on inside? We were worried about you. You took so long." Elder Zhan said.

"That's right. We thought you might have fainted or something. Or did you find another set of ingredients missing?" Elder Wang seemed pretty worried too.

'Why are they so worried about me? It's not like I took a lot of ti-' he looked at the clock on the top right corner of his vision and realized it was nearly midnight.

"What? It's been 3 hours?" he was shocked. Elder Wang and Elder Zhan got a little startled seeing his sudden shouting. Alex looked back at the elders and said,

"I'm so sorry elder. I learned a new technique today and was practicing it inside while picking the ingredients. I somehow completely lost the track of time. I will go and pick the ingredients from the next garden immediately."

He said and ran off towards the other garden. He didn't practice his technique in this garden so it only took him about half an hour to finish.

"Here you go, Elders." He handed the ingredients and bid them farewell for the day.

He was near the second garden, which was close to the disciple's hall, so he decided to go register the pills he had made today. He looked towards the direction he needed to go and thought about using the technique.

He started moving his Qi to teleport a bit away, but when the time came for the spots to light up, not a single light appeared near him, aside from a few near the bases of the different buildings. Everything else was lit up like the day.

Since he had nowhere to teleport to, he decided not to, except...

"Wait... how do I stop this?"

Chapter 85: Registering Pills

The Qi was now stuck in his head and wasn't moving anywhere. So he constantly saw the places light up in his vision. He looked around didn't see a single place he could properly teleport to.

The places he could were either near a building or in the midst of multiple disciples.

'Wait, let's check with my spiritual sense.'

He sent out his spiritual sense in a 10-meter radius and found more places he could teleport to. Some of them were inside the buildings, some on the roof of the buildings.

But one spot he hadn't thought of had also lit up. It was the underside of everything that touched the ground. From barrels to the lanterns to the numerous people walking, the underside of all of those was lit up.

'Of course, those places are always in the shadows. So, I can teleport there, huh?'

He couldn't think of a good place to teleport for now other than his own shadow under his foot, so he chose that. The Qi moved and vanished.

'Huh? Did I even teleport?' the senses never changed so he didn't know if he actually teleported at all or not. But the Qi started moving so he stopped caring about it.

He walked the rest of the way to the disciple hall. He looked at the ranking stone in front of the hall and realized his spot on the stone had fallen down quite a lot.

'Well, I don't think I should even care about the rankings anymore. It's difficult to compare me with the normal disciples.'

He walked towards the back and looked at the rankings there too. The alchemy achievements ranking no longer had Song Zun in the third place like it used to. in fact, Song Zun was no longer on the list.

He walked into the disciple hall and got into a line. When his time came, he walked in and saw an inner sect disciple on the desk. He took out 6 different pill bottles with a single pill in each of them and placed them on the desk.

"I'm registering these pills."

The inner sect disciple was one step away from falling asleep. He wanted to go back to his cottage, but because he hadn't gotten enough contribution points for this week, he was stuck here working through the night.

He said nothing and took one of the pill bottles and took out the pill inside. His lazy eyes immediately got serious as he felt the quality of the pill.

He took out a pill tester and put the pill inside. He watched the fog slowly rise up and stop at 33%. His eyes were wider than they had ever been. Same with his jaw.

He looked up at Alex and checked his appearance closely. Alex had the face of someone who hadn't even reached 20 years old and was wearing an outer sect disciple's clothing.

'Is this a joke?' he thought.

"You are registering this?" the disciple asked.

"Yes," Alex didn't think much of the question.

The inner disciple frowned. "Did you make this?" he asked.

"Of course. Why else would I bring it here to register?" Alex found the line of questioning weird but thought that it probably was the first time the inner sect disciple had seen an outer sect disciple bring a pill that even the core disciples would be jealous of.

The inner sect disciple's frown remained as he took out a medallion to check the latest sales info about Alex. The only info he got was that Alex had bought ingredients on only 2 occasions. Once about 12 days ago, and once about a week ago. Other than that, there was no transaction history between him and the sect.

Furthermore, the ingredients he bought both of the times did not match the pills in his hands, so he started to get more suspicious.

If it had been a normal scenario, he might have sent Alex away saying that wrongly claiming someone else's pill as his own was a crime that was punishable in the sect. But the pill he was holding was one that even the majority of the core disciples couldn't make with their best effort.

So, he immediately notified an elder that someone was trying to falsely register a 33% harmony pill.

"Stay here, I have called an elder." The inner sect disciple said while keeping the 6 pill bottles with himself and went on to do his task starting with the next one in line.

After 10 or so disciples in the line were done, someone wearing an elder's robe walked in. As soon as the inner sect disciple saw the elder, he stood up and greeted him.

"Greeting, Eighteenth Elder."

Alex turned around to see who had just come in and saw the elder's face too.

"Greetings, Elder Lang." This was the same person that had taken his entrance exam and brought him into the sect.

Lang Shun walked in and saw Alex standing to the side and was surprised.

'Did he do something wrong?' he walked up to the inner disciple and asked, "What's going on?"

The inner sect disciple immediately took out the 6 different pill bottles and put the pill back on the pill tester. Lang Shun found the action weird but said nothing. He slowly watched the fog rise up the side of the glass.

He thought of nothing as it reached 10%. When it reached 15%, he was impressed. He was surprised when he saw it reach 20%. But the fog still kept on going and reached 25%-this got him really astonished.

But the fog still kept on going and reached 30% and it was showing no signs of stopping. Lang Shun watched the fog slowly creep up more and only stopped at 33%.

He immediately walked forward and took the pill tester and looked at it closely to absolutely make sure he was reading it right.

"What is this? Who brought this pill?" he asked.

The inner sect disciple simply pointed at Alex and said, "That outer sect disciple over there. He says he made it himself, but there is no proof."

Chapter 86: Just register them

Lang Shun looked at the direction the inner sect disciple was pointing and realized the one being pointed at was Alex. He took the 6 pill bottles and walked to Alex while the inner sect disciple got back to his work.

"Martial nephew, did you bring in these pills?" he asked.

"Yes, elder." Alex simply answered.

Lang Shun smiled a little and said, "Don't call me an elder. Call me martial uncle. You master and I are disciples of the same master."

Alex was surprised. Ma Rong had never mentioned anything about it. "Yes, martial uncle. I brought those pills."

"The disciple says you claim to have made these pills yourself, is that true?" he asked.

"Yes. I made these pills today by myself." Alex answered.

"You know that you shouldn't lie about these things, right martial nephew? Even if you are the sect leader's disciple, you can get punished for these sort of things." Lang Shun tried to be gentle with the approach.

Alex found it funny, and said, "You don't have to worry about that, martial uncle. I didn't steal them or anything. I made them on my own."

Lang Shun felt a problem coming. He turned back towards the inner sect disciple and asked, "You said there was no proof or something. What did you mean?"

The inner sect disciple who was busy dealing with something immediately stopped his work, and said, "Elder, there is no sales information regarding the ingredients to his pills." The inner sect disciple said.

Lang Shun got curious and asked, "Where did you find the ingredients from then?"

"From the southern forest. I spend 3 days searching day and night for the ingredients before being found by master in a near-death situation." Alex answered without hesitation.

Lang Shun got a little surprised. 'Searching for alchemy ingredients in the southern forest? And what is this about him being in a near-death situation?"

Lang Shun thought for a bit and said, "Alright. You can go. I will take these pills and see what I can do about registering them." He assured Alex, so Alex went back.

Lang Shun also walked out with the pills and called Ma Rong in her communication talisman.

"Sister, can you come to the elder hall for a bit. Your disciple did something that is creating a little sticky situation."

He himself walked to the elder hall and waited for Ma Rong in a private meeting room. Ma Rong flew down and immediately found Lang Shun with her spiritual sense.

The elder around her almost expected to see a disciple get thrown to the ground like yesterday. But alas, she was alone.

Without batting an eye to anyone's greeting, she walked straight to the room with Lang Shun.

"What's going on? Is something wrong with Yu Ming?" she started asking the moment she walked through the door.

Lang Shun wasn't expecting her to be so stirred up. He tried to calm her down by saying, "Nothing is wrong with your disciple. He is fine. It's more like he might have done something wrong."

Ma Rong got a little confused, "What do you mean?"

Lang Shun took out a pill bottle and put the pill inside it to a pill tester. Ma Rong watched the pill tester fog up to 36 to signify that the pill had a 36% harmony.

But she still couldn't understand what was going on. "Did you make the pills? Why are you showing me this?"

"No, I didn't. But, your disciple claims he did, and he got caught at the disciple hall today while registering these."

Ma Rong heard that and said, "Oh, he finally started registering, did he? Took him long enough. So? What is wrong here? I still don't understand."

"Sister, your disciple obviously didn't make these. He joined the sect 2 weeks ago. It's impossible for him to have made these." Lang Shun tried to reason.

Ma Rong just found that funny. She forgot that she was one of the only ones who knew about Alex's talent.

"Check the other pills." She said.

Lang Shun complied and tested all the different pills. 33%, 35%, 34%, 43%, and 39%. Together with the previous 36%, the 6 pills all had a ridiculous amount of harmony. Something impossible for even someone in the top 10 list of Alchemy Achievements ranking.

"Hmm... he is getting better than I thought. Alright, register those pills under my disciple's name. If that is all, I'm leaving." She started walking out.

"Wait, sister." Lang Shun was shocked at how little she cared about the situation. She should have been showing more interest in this situation since her disciple was involved.

"What is it now? If you won't register it then make the elder who called you register it." Ma Rong started to get irritated.

"Why are you giving this situation so little care, sister? Your disciple is trying to cheat here. So blatantly, as well."

Ma Rong just laughed it off now. "He is not. He made those pills. I've watched him make similar pills every morning. Just go register those pills. And also tell the elder who 'caught' him to stop thinking about it."

Lang Shun was surprised to hear that Alex had really made this. He still found it unbelievable, but if his sister was saying that, then he had no choice but to believe.

"Alright then, I'll register them and tell the inner sect disciple who stopped him to forget about it." Lang Shun said sluggishly.

Ma Rong stopped in her step, and turned back, "Inner sect disciple? Why would an inner sect disciple stop him instead of an elder?"

Lang Shun cocked his head and said, "Of course an inner sect disciple would stop him. Do you even know how the disciple hall works, sister?"

Ma Rong was taken aback a bit. "Of course I know how the disciple hall works. I'm just asking why an inner sect disciple would ..." suddenly she realized something and sighed,

"Don't tell me that idiot tried to register in the outer sect portion of the disciple hall?"

Chapter 87: Evaluating the Pros and Cons

"Of course, he would register in the outer sect section of the disciple hall. He is after all still an outer sect disciple. Where else would he register then?"

Ma Rong felt a headache coming. "I should have told him to go to the elders directly. I can't believe he tried to register such important pills through an inner sect disciple. I can see now why you were called."

"Honestly, I don't understand how someone can be so talented in cultivation and alchemy, yet so dumb when it comes to having the most basic of sense. It's almost like he was born a month ago, or at least was born in a place where cultivation isn't a thing at all."

Lang Shun was stunned at his senior sister pretty much bashing on her disciple. Still, something she said caught his attention.

"Is he really that talented? I knew he was good from the entrance exam, but I didn't think he would be so talented to make 30+% harmony pills in less than a month." He said.

"You don't even know the half of it. If he were to break through to the True Qi realm right now, he would best you in making True grade pills in less than a month, and best me in a month after that. That's how good he is."

Ma Rong immediately changed from bashing on her disciple to praising him.

Lang Shun didn't know what to say, but the praise felt a little too unbelievable. "Do you really believe that?" he asked.

Ma Rong simply said, "You will see in a few months after he reaches True realm. Maybe it won't even take that long since I will start teaching him when half of his Qi transforms to True Qi."

Ma Rong left after that. Lang Shun just stayed there stunned as only one question ran through his mind. 'Bone tempering to True realm in a few months... Is that even possible?'

Alex, in the meanwhile, had finally returned to his residence. The entire way through, he kept practicing the Flickering Shadows technique. He didn't walk a single step from the base of the mountain to his residence. He teleported the entire way through.

He was starting to get the hang of it but still had some trouble mentally processing the instant change of environment.

'I wonder if I would be better at it if my spiritual sea were to get larger.' Gaining spiritual sea had vastly increased his mental capability, so it would go without question that he would start thinking this way.

He went to his courtyard to train some more. He learned quite a few things while practicing the technique.

The technique had features he didn't expect, but also had a multitude of limitations he hadn't even thought of.

The technique was best used during the nighttime when everything was in the shadows. He could teleport to walls, trees, or even the shadow on some things underside, and would always appear to the side or upon it depending on which was closer without harming the cultivator.

The next thing was that the teleportation was pretty much instantaneous. He threw a rock towards the pond and waited for the rock to just touch the surface. He then instantly teleported to the rock and managed to graze it with a few fingers before it sank to the bottom.

While his aim was still a little off, he did learn that there was no time between moving from one spot to another.

Another thing he learned was that there was almost no downtime between his teleports. He could teleport to one spot and immediately teleport to another spot. Theoretically, he could go around the entire city and return to this spot within a dozen seconds.

However, life wasn't always so easy. Along with those incredible abilities, the technique also came with a lot of limitations that stopped him from doing what he wanted to do.

The first and most obvious thing was that his mental ability wasn't strong enough to process where he was and where he needed to go fast enough for him to teleport without stops.

The second most obvious problem was that the ability was useless during the day, in an open ground like the training areas or desserts, or other flat surfaces where there were not a lot of shadows in general.

The more he thought about this problem, the more he found how annoying the problem was. If he were to someday fight while flying, the technique was pretty much useless as there would be no shadows in the sky.

Also, while the amount of Qi used during the teleports wasn't substantial, it would still accumulate after a while to become a moderately big factor for getting low on Qi.

Another thing that bugged him was that while it was called a 'movement technique', it more so focused on dodging and getting surprise attacks on the enemies. It would also help him to get out of traps or another enclosing.

'They should have instead called it an escaping technique, instead of movement technique. I should probably get an actual movement technique when I go to the Tiger sect.'

Still, despite all its flaws, it was an amazing technique befitting of its immortal grade. The next day, he split his day between practicing the Veiled Light technique, the Flickering Shadows technique, and making some pills to register.

His master had messaged him and explicitly mentioned that he should only find an elder in the core disciple section of the disciple hall if he wanted to register the pills.

His night went similarly as well. He started his evening going down the mountain to complete his job in the alchemy garden. Then he went to the disciple hall's second floor amongst the confused and curious eyes to register the 4 new pills he had made, each above 30% in harmony.

Then he went back to his residence to practice the Flickering Shadows technique once more. He had made massive progression in it with just days worth of practice. He couldn't wait to see how good it would be when he used it to its fullest potential.

Chapter 88: Experience for a Cultivator

Alex had practiced the entire night without stop. His Qi was enough for him to practice more than 8 hours before his Qi ran dry.

Still, he cultivated after three-quarters of his Qi was gone so that he could recover it for now. He decided to check where he was with his status.

"Status"

————————

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Bone Tempering 4th Realm (300,000 Qi : 100%) [Breakthrough]

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 1,825,388

]

—————————

He had managed to accumulate a lot of Qi, but if he were to breakthrough right now, it probably wouldn't be enough to even reach Bone Tempering 9th realm.

'I should have stabilized my cultivation base enough, right? It has been a few days since I broke through,' he thought and pushed the breakthrough button once.

<Congratulations. You have broken through to 'Bone Tempering: 5th Realm'>

"Alright, let's go get some food." He decided to log out to get some breakfast when suddenly, he sensed his master coming.

'Hmm... didn't she say she would no longer teach me? Why is she here then?'

He walked out to greet her. "Good morning, Master. Do we have alchemy lessons today?" he asked.

"No, I was on my way down to the sect valley when I remembered something. Do you have anything going on today?" she asked.

He didn't have to think to know that today was the day his pills were getting auctioned off, so he was looking forward to going to the auction to check out how it was. "Yes, Master." He simply told her.

"Cancel that then. Today you and I are going somewhere else." She said.

Alex got a little surprised. "Umm... master, does it have to be today? I was quite looking forward to my thing today." He said.

Ma Rong frowned, and asked, "Do you need to do your thing, or want to do your thing?"

Alex thought for a bit. 'I don't really need to be in the auction for my pills to sell. I only wanted to check them out, that was all.'

He sighed and said, "I just wanted to, master."

Ma Rong looked proud like she had just won, and said, "Good. I will come to get you in a few hours, and we will leave then."

She then left.

Alex got a little disappointed at the fact that he wouldn't be able to view the auction. He finally accepted the fact and logged out to get some breakfast.

He went back to the game to make a few more pills before logging out once more for lunch. He went back to the game after lunch once more.

He decided to stabilize his cultivation base while he was waiting for his master. He started using the various different techniques he knew, aside from the Immortal Concealing technique.

Otherwise, his master might actually miss his existence and not find him. He was in the middle of flying when his master walked into the courtyard.

Her eyes widened a little as she saw him freely, albeit slowly, flying through the air. 'His Qi can already carry his weight so much? How thick is his Qi?' she wondered.

Alex looked at his master and realized she was weaker than before. 'Did something happen to her?'

"Master, is something wrong?" he asked.

Ma Rong got a little confused, so she asked, "No, why do you ask?"

"Oh, it's just that you felt weaker to me." He said.

Ma Rong laughed a little and said, "That means it's somewhat working. I have started learning the Immortal Concealing technique. I can somewhat use it right now, but it only hides a fraction of my Qi, not all. That's why you thought I was weaker."

"Oh. I should have known that. How long do you think it will take you to completely learn it?" he asked.

"Hmm... I can't tell right now. Although it's going smoothly right now, I might hit a bottleneck somewhere. However, it shouldn't take more than a few months as most. I am quite confident about that." She said.

She then thought of something and asked," Did you learn the Flickering Shadows technique?"

Alex immediately got more attentive and said, "Yes, master. It's such a good technique."

He then activated the technique and started randomly teleporting to different shadows. Some of the walls, some of the trees, and some even of the hidden side of the rocks near the pond.

Ma Rong looked his with a bunch of envious eyes. 'How can he be so talented. When I first started teleporting, I had to vomit because I couldn't handle the sudden change in scenery. Is it because of his spiritual sense?' she wondered.

"Alright, stop," she said and watched Alex teleport to a shadow next to her.

She looked at him and asked, "Is that your best robe? It looks a little dirty." Alex looked at his robe and realized it had a lot of dust on it, and needed to be washed. He had been wearing this robe for almost 10 days now.

"I have a new robe I haven't worn yet," he said. He had gotten a replacement robe after he had notified that his first one had been torn apart from the fight in the forest. Fortunately, thanks to his full access to everything, he was able to get the robe without giving a single thing in return.

"Alright, go and change into those." She said and waited for him to change.

Alex came back out within minutes in his clean, new robes. "Are we leaving now, master? Is it okay if I ask where we are going?" he asked.

Ma Rong simply said, "As a cultivator, you lack a surprising amount of common sense. It might be because you are new to cultivation and don't know much about it. But now that you are a cultivator, there are things you need to be experienced on if you want to be successful in cultivation."

"One of those is to find appropriate cultivation methods, techniques, artifacts, and pills for yourself. So, today we are going to the best place to get these things, which is an auction house."

Chapter 89: Pink Cloud Auction House

"Huh... did you just say auction house, master?" Alex thought he heard her wrong.

"Yes. Auction house. You need to learn how to search for items in auctions as well as have the proper etiquette in there." Ma Rong repeated.

'Oh, so we are going to an auction after all. I wonder if it's the same auction house as the one I was going to. I should have checked if there were others.'

"Alright, master. Let's leave." He said as he started walking outside.

"Where are you going?" Ma Rong asked him.

"Uhh... to the auction house?" why would she ask him this?

Ma Rong chuckled a little and said, "get back here." She then proceeded to take out her boat-like artifact. "We aren't going to walk all the way there. It's too inefficient. We are going to fly there."

She jumped and got onto the boat. "Oh, right. Make sure to not use the Immortal Concealment technique today. It's not good to show other people that you can hide your cultivation from them." She also canceled her technique and her cultivation base started giving off the same strong aura as before.

Alex wasn't using his technique so he just nodded and told her he won't use it today. He got onto the boat without asking and settled himself on the back of the boat.

After seeing everything was ready, Ma Rong flew off. Ma Rong hadn't sped up or anything. She just flew at her normal flying speed that just made Alex feel a cool breeze on his face.

Still, they ended up reaching the auction house in less than 10 minutes. 'Not having to go up and down the mountains or walk jagged path really does help trim down your travel time a lot,' he thought. He couldn't wait for the time when his flying speed would be faster than his walking speed.

Ma Rong flew down in front of the auction house and jumped down. Alex followed behind her as well. He was happy to find out that this was the same auction house as he wanted to go to. Somehow fate had taken away his chance and gave it back to him.

"This is the Pink Cloud Auction house. This is their secondary branch, while their main branch is in the capital of the empire, Cardinal city. There are only these 2 branches. Today, they will sell quite a lot of things, so I brought you here to check it out."

Alex hadn't even come during the auction time so he was quite shocked at the number of people waiting outside. "Come," Ma Rong said as she walked towards something she seemed to have noticed.

"Greetings, City lord, lady," Ma Rong greeted a purple-robed couple that just flew down. These were Fu Wen and Mo An, the husband-wife pair that ruled the Scarlet City under the authority of the crimson empire.

"Ah, Sect leader, you are here early." Fu Wen said with a big smile. Mo An greeted from the side as well.

Fu Wen then saw Alex to her side. "Oh, isn't this our little friend from back then? Hello." He said with a smiling face.

"Greet the city lord," Ma Rong's voice sounded in his head.

"Greetings, City lord, lady," he used the same greetings as his master.

"Let's go inside," he said and started walking towards the door. Alex looked around and saw the many people still standing outside. There still sometime before the auction started, and seeing the many people standing outside, he wondered if he would even be allowed inside so early.

But, he seemed to be overthinking things. The people he was with were some of the VVIPs in the city. The auction house wasn't going to offend the City and one of the only 2 sects that was in the city, just because they arrived early.

He had just walked inside the door when he saw a girl walk up to his master-No, she was walking up to him. He looked at her face and realized who it was.

"Hello, sect leader Ma, little brother. It's good to see you here." Luo Mei had arrived in front of them.

"Hello, Lady Luo," Ma Rong greeted her.

"Hello, Daoist Luo," Alex greeted her as well.

Both Ma Rong and Luo Mei looked at him weirdly. Both of them suddenly started chuckling. Alex got weirded out as he couldn't understand why they were laughing.

"Why are you acting so distant towards her?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yeah, little brother. You should call me sister now that we have the same master." Luo Mei said as well.

Alex was a little surprised. Then he understood what was going on. "Oh, I didn't know that. In that case, I should call you senior sister."

Ma Rong looked towards Luo Mei and asked, "Lady Luo, are you here with your master?"

"Oh no. I'm here with my friends. Master should be arriving anytime soon by himself. I came early." She said.

"Oh, my friends seem to be restless, I will see you guys later." She left towards her friends somewhere deeper in the hall.

"Hmm... did she try to run away from us?" Ma Rong got a little taken aback.

"I don't think so, she probably saw her friends and went back." Alex simply said.

"Can't be. She didn't even turn around." Ma Rong said.

"Oh, did you forget master? She has a spiritual sense too. I told you I only learned about spiritual sense after she asked me to pick up a Spirit Cleansing Lily for her."

Ma Rong didn't remember much from that day. The whole day had gone by in a flash because of how unbelievable that day was.

She cleared her thoughts and started walking down the hall once more. "Come on, let's go. The auction should start anytime now." They finally reached the end of the hall where a lot of staff members, both high and low ranking of the auction house were standing there waiting to guide the newly arrived guests to their rooms.

Chapter 90: Auction Starts

Alex looked around and didn't find Cai Ping anywhere in the hall at all. 'Is she somewhere else, busy preparing the auction?' he wondered.

A girl walked up to them and took them to a VIP room from where you could see the stage, but nobody else could see you.

There was an array of seats inside spread among the almost 10 by 10 meters big room. Alex sat on a random seat near the window at the front where the view was the best. Ma Rong sat where she could only see the stage.

The girl who came with them also stayed in the room but remained standing next to the door.

There was time to spare, so Alex decided to ask his master something. He made sure he wasn't loud enough for the girl to listen.

"Master, how do I speak into someone's head?"

Ma Rong wasn't expecting such a question in an environment like this. Still, she answered. "It's easy. Just send out your spiritual sense to someone's head and say things in your mind. They will be able to hear it in their head."

Alex heard it in his head and decided to try. He sent out his spiritual sense towards Ma Rong and asked, "Can you hear me?"

"Yes," an answer came to his head. He was happy learning it had worked. Now he didn't have to worry about communicating in secret if the need ever arises.

Time passed by as more and more people came and sat at the seats in the open down below.

"Oh, he's here too." Ma Rong seemed to be quite surprised by someone's arrival. Alex looked below the window but didn't recognize anyone. So he asked, "Who are you talking about master?"

"The man with the black hat, 5 rooms to our left. He is the sect leader of Honor sect from Rosewood city." Ma Rong said.

He tried to look who it was, but his spiritual sense couldn't reach so far away. 5 rooms were about 50 meters in total length, even when stretched to the maximum, he could only cover a radius of 30 meters with his spiritual sense. So, he couldn't see who his master was talking about.

"You can see that far master? What is your radius on your spiritual sense?" he couldn't help but ask.

"My radius? It's about 50 or so meters. I can do about 75 at best. I need to eat more spirit-enriching pills to be able to increase it more." She said.

'Wow, so far,' he was amazed at how far she could send out her spiritual sense. 'But what's a spirit-enriching pill? I don't remember any pill like that in the recipes I got from the library. Nor did the records have anything about them.'

"Do you have a recipe for that pill, master?" he asked.

"Yes, I do. It's a personal recipe my master handed down to me. I will give you the recipe when you have True Qi. Since it's a True pill, giving it to you now would be useless." She said.

Alex accepted the reasoning and sat back. He watched as the entire room filled up. There weren't a lot of people he recognized here if any. He saw some disciples from both of his sects, most of whom seemed to be a core disciples.

He sent out his spiritual sense to the 2 different rooms on either side of his room and realized he didn't know any of them either. The world was big, and he hadn't lived in it for long. So it was obvious that he wouldn't recognize them.

There was one thing that surprised him, however. There was a person in a room next to the room adjacent to his left. The thing that surprised him regarding this person was that he was fat, extremely fat.

It looked like he could barely walk, especially with all the jewelry he was wearing. There seemed to be 4 people next to him all fit and seemed to be very alert.

"Master, who is the fat guy 2 rooms over?" he asked through his spiritual sense.

Ma Rong checked the room and said, "That is Huo Zemin, he is the head of the Victorious Snow merchant group originating in our Scarlet city. They are the third richest merchant group in all of the Crimson Empire."

'Third richest? I wonder how many spirit stones he has.'

Alex moved his attentions elsewhere waiting for the auction to start. He looked at the talisman on the table. He had already scanned it and realized it was the list of items that would be auctioned off today.

He wanted to be completely in the unknown so didn't read it at all.

Finally, once everyone had arrived and the seats on the base were full, the lights in the room and the hall started to dim, while the lights on the stage started to shine brighter.

Everyone waited with bated breath as the curtain on the stage finally started to move and a woman walked from the inside.

"Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you are all settled and ready for the auction. Welcome to the bi-annual mega auction of the Pink Cloud auction house, presented to you by myself, Cai Ping." Cai Ping had finally appeared in a beautiful blue dress. She swiped her hands and a large desk along with a wooden hammer appeared out of nowhere.

"If you are all prepared. We will bring out the first item." She said, and a few people walked up with a square-shaped box with a cloth on top of it. They placed it on the desk and walked away.

Cai Ping walked ahead of the box with exaggerated theatrics in her motion and held a corner of the cloth.

"And for our first item of the day, we have..." She paused for a moment to increase the suspense and finally lifted the cloth to show a small uneven ball of yellow color with a bunch of white patches all over it.

"A Clouded Tiger Cub."

Chapter 91: Beast Companion

"A Clouded Tiger cub."

Cai Ping proudly showed off the first item at the auction. It was a newly born monster that they had somehow captured and brought to the auction.

'What is the point of selling a cub? Why not just capture an adult and sell them. Is this for some rich people's amusement? It certainly can't be for the ingredients or even the meat.' he wondered.

"As many of you may know, a Clouded Tiger has an almost guaranteed chance to reach the True realms, and even a very little chance of reaching the Saint realms."

"The cub is 4 weeks old and perfectly healthy. We have checked and found him to have no physical problems as well. We will start the bid at 5 common spirit stones, with 10 gold of minimum increment."

"510 gold"

"520 gold"

530 gold"

.

.

.

The auction house suddenly started thundering with the sound of the numerous bid. Cai Ping's smile got wider each time she heard a bit. She would get about 2% of the revenue from each of these sales, so the more it sold for, the richer she got.

Within the first 20 seconds, the bid had crossed 10 spirit stones. Alex got surprised seeing this. This behavior was completely different from what he had expected. He thought only a few people would bid for the cub; but seeing so many people bid for it, he realized his idea of what the cub was used for must be mistaken.

Ma Rong looked at his interested eyes and got a little surprised. "Do you want the cub?" she asked him.

Alex was startled as he was focused on the happenings below. He looked towards his master and said, "No, master. I was just curious why so many people would want a tiger cub and not just get an adult tiger?"

"Of course, that's because they want to raise the cub themselves. A monster trained from birth is so much easier to make a companion out of than a normal adult monster." She said to him explaining why so many people were bidding for the cub.

"A companion? What's that? Do you make friends with monsters? Why would you?" he got so very confused hearing his master's explanation. They only brought forth more questions than answers.

Ma Rong suddenly remembered how much common knowledge her disciple was lacking. She laughed a little to herself and started explaining.

"Beast companions are an important aspect of a cultivator's life. Cultivators can make a bond with a beast and control them. They can make the beasts fight for them, or just have them as a friend through their journey as a cultivator. Overall, the beasts can help you in a lot of places."

"That cub right there is a newborn monster. Those are somewhat rare to come by. A young monster is very naive and gullible, so after a few weeks or months of getting treated well by the other party, they happily bond to them. That is why the people down there are so excited to bid for it. "

"If they manage to get it and raise it to the True realms. It can be a true powerhouse that can deter their foes and help them gain fame, money, and status in life. Even if they themselves happen to be weak or untalented in cultivation, having such a beast companion would offset everything."

"In fact, even I am a little tempted to get the cub. But I won't as I am quite satisfied with my beast for now." Ma Rong said.

Alex got surprised to hear that, "You have a beast companion, master? How come I haven't seen it yet? Does it not live in the mountain?"

"Oh, I forgot to mention. Beast companions are a little unique, in that they don't live in the physical world after they bond with a cultivator. Look," she said as she swept aside a bit of her long hair to show her beautiful white skin on her neck.

On the neck was a small circular pattern that looked like it was a long beast coiling. "This is where my beast lives. I can call her anytime I want, and she would fight for me."

Ma Rong let go of her hair and asked, "So, do you want to get the cub?"

Alex gave the question serious thought. From what his master had just said, a beast companion would be an amazing help for him if he wanted to become a stronger cultivator. However, he didn't want that. He just wanted to cultivate normally, and see where life went in the game.

His main focus was on Alchemy, which he both liked and had a great talent in. He had gotten lucky with the technique, and now he was incredibly happy with it. So, he didn't think getting a beast companion could make that any better.

"No, master." He simply shook his head. Ma Rong nodded, seemingly thinking that was the correct choice for him. Distracting himself with a beast right now might hinder his progress in alchemy.

By the time the master-disciple pair's conversation had come to a stop, the bidding war for the tiger cub was also ending.

"13 spirit stones." Someone shouted.

"13 spirit stones, is anyone else bidding." Cai Ping asked the crowd.

"13 spirit stones and 50 golds." Someone else shouted from the crowd.

"13 spirit stones and 50 gold, does anyone else have a higher bid?" Cai Ping asked once more. She waited for a few seconds and heard back nothing from the crowd. So, she took the gavel and started saying,

"13 spirit stones and 50 golds going once." Nobody talked.

"13 spirit stones and 50 golds going twice." Still silence.

"13 spirit stones and 50 golds going thrice, Sold!!" Cai Ping hit the gavel on the table with a loud bang.

"The first item of the day, the Clouded Tiger cub, has been sold to the lady on seat 45 for 13 spirit stones and 50 gold coins. Congratulations."

A few staff members came and took the cub away, and replaced it with another box hidden with a cloth.

Chapter 92: Small Money Talk

The next items on the list sold at a similar rate. People started bidding as soon as it was allowed, and mostly the ones who bid were from the lower hall.

The prices of the items were slowly getting higher and higher as the bid price for the latest sold sword started with 18 spirit stones.

Once again, after the sword was taken away, another box arrived with a cloth on top of it. Cai Ping acted exaggeratedly and pulled down the cloth.

The item was an armor artifact. It was in a shiny blue color and looked very thin. "This is an armor made by using the incredibly defensive Blue rhino's hide as the main ingredient. It's a Common Earth-grade armor artifact that is both tough and flexible. Let us show you how strong it is."

Cai Ping gestured as 2 people walked onto the stage. One was a middle-aged man in the Mind Tempering 8th realm, while the other was at the True Lord realm.

The True lord realm wore the armor and retracted his Qi so as to have it not protect the armor. The Mind Tempering 8th realm man lunged and hit the armor without using any techniques. The armor suffered no damage at all.

"Woah," the crowd was surprised.

"As you can see, the armor is able to defend against even someone at the Mind Tempering 8th realm. From our measurements, It can defend against a fully charged earth grade technique of a Mind Tempering 6th realm cultivator."

"So, the starting bid is going to be 20 spirit stones, with at least 1 spirit stone minimum bid"

As soon as Cai Ping finished saying that, the audience exploded with bids. Before Alex could even comprehend how good the armor was, the bid had already reached over 40 spirit stones.

Even the people in the VVIP rooms were starting to bid. Everyone whose voice came out of the rooms on the upper floors was heavily distorted and no longer sounded like their original voices.

Alex could easily hear the fat merchant head's voice through his spiritual sense, yet when he heard it through his own ears, he was shocked at how different the voices were.

'I assume they do that for privacy reasons. I wonder if they are using formations for this as well,' he thought.

"50 spirit stones," his master voiced in her bid as well.

"Master, do you required that artifact? It should be useless to you, right?" he asked.

"Of course it's not for me you stupid disciple, it's for you." She said.

"For me?" he was shocked. "I don't need that master. You don't have to spend so many spirit stones for me." He said.

"So many? It's just 50 spirit stones. That's not much at all," she said.

"Huh?? 50 spirit stones is not a lot? But that's like 50 months' worth of spirit stones for the outer sect disciples master." He said, shocked at how little she thought of so many spirit stones.

"What are you talking about? That's only because they are outer sect disciples and we give it to them. If they were to make pills and sell them, they could make it in well under 3 months. Inner sect disciples get 10 spirit stones every month, so even if they do nothing, they can get 50 spirit stones in 5 months. If they went ahead and made pills, I'm pretty sure they can collect that much amount in less than a month."

"Let's not forget about the core disciples who get 50 spirit stones monthly. If they were to try, they could actually make a dozen of really rare or useful pills with decent harmony and sell them for 50 spirit stones. It wouldn't even take them a week if they tried."

Alex was shocked at what he had just heard. He didn't know about the different monthly spirit stones allowances of the different tiered disciples. But what shocked him more was how little the others valued what he assumed was a rare commodity.

'50 spirit stones are 500 dollars though. So the core disciples get 500 dollars every month.' He thought for a bit and realized where he was wrong.

'This is not the real world. I shouldn't bring my countryside common sense to this place. It's a land of cultivators, it should be no surprise if they are rich. I should stop comparing everything to the real world.'

"55 spirit stones," Ma Rong bid once more. The bidding war slowly shifted from the people at the lower hall to ones at the upper rooms.

There were 3 people left. His master, the fat merchant head, and someone in a faraway room whose identity he couldn't tell because of the voice changes.

All 3 of them kept bidding for a while until the fat merchant took away the armor at 85 spirit stones.

"The gentleman at room B3 has won the Common Earth Grade armor, congratulations." Cai Ping said as a bunch of staff came along and replaced the armor with another item hidden under a cloth.

"Hmm..." everyone suddenly got more attentive as they saw the item that had just been brought to the table was actually really small. The cloth was almost flat on the plate the object was brought on.

If not for the small bump at the middle of the cloth, the people would surely assume that the next item had been accidentally left behind by the staff members.

Cai Ping saw the people's confusion and smiled. She walked to the front and lifted the cloth to reveal a round small green pellet-like object.

'A Pill? But it's not in a pill bottle?' Alex got surprised to see the small round object. A small feeling spawned inside him, one that spawned whenever he saw an alchemy ingredient. But this feeling was very unnoticeable, so he doubted the item was an alchemy ingredient on its own.

Cai Ping started speaking, "Dear ladies and gentlemen, the next item on the list is this seed."

Chapter 93: Yin Gathering Tree

Cai Ping smiled as everyone looked at the seed, and didn't recognize it. These were the times she liked the most when she would reveal what the item was and everyone would be shocked.

"This seed comes from a tree that all of you most certainly know about. This is a seed for the ever famous, Yin Gathering Tree." She glanced at the audience as she made the dramatic reveal.

"Yin Gathering Tree? I think I've heard of it before. But where?" someone said.

"Wait! Is this the same Yin Gathering Tree as the one in the Capital?" another person exclaimed.

"Wow, that's an extremely rare seed."

Sounds of awe and surprise rang out from the entire crowd.

In room B1, Ma Rong who was slumping in her seat suddenly stood up straight and alert. Her eyes burning with desire. Alex had never seen his master in that state. Not even when she had gotten the Spirit Cleansing Lily.

'Can it be that the seed is of greater importance than even the Spirit Cleansing Lily?' he wondered.

Cai Ping once again started talking.

"Please quiet down." She said trying to proceed with the auction.

"Can you tell us who is selling such a precious seed?" someone screamed from the back of the hall.

"The seller has told us that they want to be remained unnamed, so we will not be revealing any information regarding them. Now, let us proceed with the auction for the Yin Gathering Tree seed. The bid will begin at 30 spirit stones, with a minimum of 1 spirit stone increase."

As soon as Cai Ping said that, the people in the hall started bidding one after another.

Before Alex could even ask his master why the seed was so important, the bidding war down below had reached a height never seen before.

"Master, what is the Yin Gathering Tree? Is it good?" he asked.

"It's good for disciples that have Yin-related body, spiritual root, or just a regular Yin-aligned cultivation method. It is very beneficial for them. It gathers Yin energy from the surrounding and makes a certain area around it filled with high-quality Yin Qi."

"52 spirit stones," Ma Rong bid as she answered his question.

"Is it better or rarer than a Spirit Cleansing Lily?" he couldn't help but ask.

"In terms of which is better, it depends from person to person. If I were to look at it from the perspective of a normal cultivator, the Spirit Cleansing Lily is infinitely better than the Yin Gathering Tree. However, If I were to look at it from the perspective of a sect leader, the Yin Gathering Tree can bring benefits to the sect that a single Spirit Cleansing Lily could never."

"As for rarity, The tree itself is not rare, as there are more than dozens of them around the Crimson empire. However, the fruit the tree bears is very rare. And to add to that, even the fruits themselves very rarely have a seed in them. So, the seed is considered very rare. It is for sure rarer than the Spirit Cleansing Lily." She said.

"Hmm... master, then why is it being sold for so less?" he asked.

"Well, the seed isn't guaranteed to sprout. Especially if the environment has a lot of yang energy. So, most sellers sell it at a low price of around 50 spirit stones. The auction house probably decided to lower its initial price to gather more bidders to eventually get the price through the ceiling."

As Ma Rong explained this, the bid for the seed kept on going up. It had now reached the 90s.

"1 True Spirit Stone" Ma Rong suddenly bid.

"101 Common spirit stone" a bid came from a room far away from them.

"Damn him. He wants the seed for his honor sect as well." She said out loud. The sect leader of the honor sect that had come to the auction decided to bid against Ma Rong.

"105 common spirit stone," another voice came from a room some distance away. Ma Rong's spiritual sense didn't extend that far, so she couldn't tell who the bidder was.

"110 common spirit stone," Ma Rong didn't back down.

'Master really wants this seed huh,' he thought.

The raging bid kept on continuing. The other bidder had stopped and now it was only the sect leader of the Honor sect versus Ma Rong.

"182 Common Spirit Stones," the Honor sect's sect leader said after some deliberation. He didn't seem like he wanted to spend so many spirit stones on a seed that had less than a percent chance of growing.

Ma Rong fell into contemplation as well. While 180 spirit stones weren't that expensive in her eyes, it definitely was for the Yin Gathering Tree.

"182 Common spirit stones is the higher bid. Anyone who wants to bid higher?" Cai Ping asked.

"182 common spirit stones going once"

"182 common spirit stones going twice"

"182 comm-"

"2 True spirit stones" Ma Rong bid just as the bidding was ending.

Cai Ping smiled. She was always happy to see more bids, as 2 percent of the bid always went to her pockets. The honor sect's sect master didn't bid after that and the seed went to Ma Rong easily after the increased bid.

The next item was brought to the table. It was a large table that was wheeled in with a massive cloth hiding what was inside.

"For our next items, we have—" Cai Ping took off the cloth to show a bunch of pill bottles.

"Wow, so many pill bottles!" the people were shocked.

"Did the auction house accidentally bring out all the pills they needed to sell for today?" someone asked.

Alex looked at the newly revealed items and was surprised. 'I'm up next huh,' he thought.

For some reason, he was starting to get nervous and excited. He couldn't wait to see how much the 135 pills would bring him. He very much looked forward to the next bidding war.

Chapter 94: Pill Sales

After the crowd quietened down a bit, Cai Ping started speaking.

"Anyone who came to the last week's auction surely remembers the many pills that were sold towards the end of the show. The alchemist who made the pill had decided to sell the pills with us back then for the first time. At that time, we weren't able to reveal who the alchemist was, not because they wanted to rename unknown, but because the auction house didn't dare ask them for their name."

"However, after last week's sale, the alchemist was happy towards our auction house and decided to give us their nickname. The alchemist from last week will henceforth be known as 'White Wolf'."

"After last week's success, Senior White Wolf has brought us many pills to sell once more. To be exact, there are 135 pills in front of you folks right now."

Cai Ping stopped talking to listen to the crowd.

"Wait, that's all from one alchemist? Madam Cai, is that true?"

"No way! I thought they accidentally brought out their entire pills for today. That's just one person?"

"This White Wolf senior must have taken months to make these pills. The last week's sales was probably him just treading waters."

"Has anyone heard of an alchemist named White Wolf?"

The crowd kept on talking until someone said something that silenced the crowd for a while.

"Madam Cai, how are you going to sell those pills? It can't be you will auction each pill on its own, right? That would take forever." A person from a VIP room spoke.

Cai Ping smiled, "Yes, we have given some thought to that. Instead of selling the pills separately. We will be selling multiple pills as a batch."

"For the first batch, we have a Hundred Poisons Antidote, Minor Healing Pill, Qi Improving Pill, Swift Feet pill, and Body Warming pill. Each of these pills has exactly 32% Harmony. The bid will start at 40 spirit stones with 1 minimum spirit stone bid as increment."

"41 spirit stones"

"42 spirit stones"

People started bidding right away.

"Hmm... those are all common pills, but they are quite good. Someone must've really been preparing for months to sell them at this auction," Ma Rong commented from the side.

"No," Alex unknowingly blurted out while looking at the crowd below.

"What do you mean no?" Ma Rong turned around to look at him after hearing his remark.

Alex realized a little too late what he had accidentally blurted out and turned around to face his Master's eyes.

"I'm sorry for not telling you master, but I decided to auction the pills I made. Those are my pills," He said with his spiritual sense.

"Yours?" Ma Rong was shocked.

Since they started talking using spiritual sense, the girl behind them didn't know what was going on.

"Are you telling the truth?" She asked inquisitively.

"Of course, master. Why would I lie to you?" he simply said.

Ma Rong squinted her eyes and asked, "You made all those pills? when did you do that? the auction house stopped accepting items after Wednesday."

"I'm not stupid master. Of course, I submitted the items on Wednesday. " Alex acted as if he was being wronged.

Ma Rong then slowly asked, "So... how many days did it take you to make these? 8? 10?"

"Uhh... 4."

"What?" Ma Rong blurted out in her real voice. thankfully, the soundproof design of the room stopped other people from listening to him.

"You finished all of these in 4 days?" she then thought of something else and asked, " So, the reason you didn't register any pills was..."

"Uh, yes. I was collecting them to sell in the auction. I really wanted the spirit stones, so I decided to sell them." He let her know.

"It's your pills, so you can do what you want, but, Why do you want the spirit stones so badly? Do you want to buy something?" she asked.

"Uhh... " he didn't know how to answer that. 'Do I tell her I'm doing this for money? probably shouldn't.'

"Something like that." He simply sidestepped the entire question.

Slowly, the bid down in the hall started to die down and the batch of pills was sold for a total of 88 spirit stones. Alex felt that was quite good.

However, there was one thing that kept bugging him for the last few days, and it had been enhanced right now.

"Master, how much does a pill usually cost someone?" he asked.

" Well, that depends on the pill and its ingredients. When it's not in the auction, one would have to gather the ingredients by themselves. If you give the alchemist the ingredients, that would cost you as little as 5 spirit stones."

"However, if the alchemist finds ingredients on his own, that costs the buyer a lot. Just like how your auction for the pills is getting a lot of spirit stones."

The next batch of pills was being sold right now, and the bid had reached as high as 60 spirit stones already. Every single batch of pills had pills with higher harmony, so the bids were also getting higher now.

Soon almost all of the pills on the table were auctioned off. Only two pill bottles were remaining. The audience watched with anticipation as they knew whatever was in the pill was definitely something of high harmony.

Ma Rong always knew her disciple was talented, but getting a first-hand experience like this was a very surreal feeling. Alex on the other hand, had a big smile plastered across his face as he realized he had managed to gather about 27 True spirit stones by now. That was about 2700 common spirit stones.

Or in his real-life terms, he had just earned over 25 thousand dollars. And the final 2 pills were still yet to be sold.

Chapter 95: Priceless and Worthless

The staff members had taken away all but 2 pill bottles. Cai Ping picked up a bottle and said, "This pill bottle contains the Hundred Poisons Antidote. While we did auction off a few Hundred Poisons Antidote just now, this one gets to have its own time in the spotlight, because, it has a harmony of 40%."

A bunch of incoherent noises started appearing from the crowd as they whispered amongst themselves. Cai Ping waited for the noise to die down a bit before she started speaking once more.

"This pill is able to cure any poison below the True grade. So, the starting bid for this pill will start at 30 spirit stones, with 1 spirit stone minimum increase in bid."

The crowd started bidding for the pill. Even after this many pills, their enthusiasm for the pills had barely died a little.

Ma Rong looked at Alex and asked, "Did you make the 43% harmony Tiger strength pill after this pill? " she asked.

Alex was surprised. "You know about that pill, master? Oh wait, you must've seen what I registered. That was a pill I made 2 days ago. While this one, I made it on Sunday, so 6 days ago."

"Good. You are improving a lot. Make sure you don't get overconfident from just this and change your personality. While you are naive, people like naive fellows more than snobby ones."

Alex was relieved she didn't get angry.

The bidding ended with a person buying the pill for 63 spirit stones. Alex was quite happy about this. Managing to get 63 spirit stones just for a single pill was beyond his dream right now.

Then Cai Ping revealed his next pill. "This is the second-best pill we have today. However, the other one is a True grade pill, so I don't know if it even makes sense to compare them."

"This pill is a Healing Lotus pill. Anyone who knows about pills knows that this is one of the best healing pills of all the common pills, maybe even the best. This pill can even bring you back from death as long as you have a little life left in you. Diseases heal just like that if you take this peal."

"And senior White Wolf has not only provided us with such an impressive pill, but They have also managed to make this pill with an incredible 45% harmony."

Cai Ping made sure everyone heard that.

"45%? Did she just say 45%?"

"Oh lord. That is 5% away from becoming a Heaven grade pill."

"Can it be that this Senior White Wolf is a True Earth Grade alchemist, and he simply decided to grace us with some common grade pills?"

The shock the crowd showed towards the pill was way more than Alex had expected. They were acting as if 45% was a hundred times better than the 40% pill they just saw beforehand.

He looked back at his master, who was also slightly surprised.

"You keep on surprising me these days. You even managed to make a 45% pill?"

"Is it really that impressive when you already know I made 43% pill?" he asked.

"Of course. It gets harder and harder to increase the pill's harmony. A difference between 43% and 45% is about the same increase in difficulty as 10% to 18%. The higher the pill's harmony, the higher the difficulty. This just goes to show how talented you are."

Ma Rong cleared his confusion. 'No wonder the people are so shocked about it.'

The heated bidding war slowly came to an end as Alex's eyes widened by the final bid.

"139 spirit stones, going once."

"139 spirit stones, going twice."

"139 spirit stones, going thrice. Sold." Cai Ping slammed the gavel on the table. A staff member came out and took away the pill. Another staff came out with a small plate, hiding something rectangular, going by the shape of the silhouette.

"The next item on the auction is this book." Cai Ping unfurled the cloth to reveal an old, dusty, almost rotting book. The outer cover looked a little torn but overall the book seemed to be without damage.

Cai Ping held the book and showed it to the audience. The outside of the book had something written on it, that was visible even though the book itself was very dirty.

The letters seemed black in color but shined like they were made of gold. Cai Ping started by saying, "This book has the potential to be the best item we have ever sold in our auction house. However, it might also be the worst item we have sold as of yet."

Cai Ping stopped talking to create some suspense.

"Best item, yet worst item? What are you talking about, Madam Cai?"

"Yes, please explain, Madam Cai."

Cai Ping started talking once more. "This book was given to us by somebody who wished to remain unknown. This book is the family heirloom that they have guarded for thousands of years. According to their ancestors, one day, people flew down from the heavens and stayed in their tavern."

"Those heavenly folks didn't have money with them at the time, so they gave the tavern owner this book instead, and left back to the heavens."

"Within those thousands of years, many cultivators came and went in their family, yet not a single one could comprehend this book."

"Given to them, by what could only be immortals of the legends, yet unable to even read the book. This book is truly both Worthless and Priceless. If your customers can't read it either, It's the worst item we have sold yet. However, if you can read it, it's the best item we have sold yet."

"As such, we will first let you people check the book for yourself." A staff lady came out and took the book.

"We will pass it along to you all, so you can check. The people in the hall will have only 10 seconds to see if you can read the book. The people in the VIP will have 30 seconds to see if they can read the book. As for the ones in the VVIP, they will have a whole minute to check the book."

Cai Ping nodded to the female staff, and the lady walked down the hall passing along the book to the various people.

Chapter 96: Heaven's Impact

Cai Ping sold quite a few items as the dusty old book traveled from one person's arm to another's. Slowly, more than an hour had passed. Alex realized while he had probably earned the most from this auction in general if he counted individual prices, his pills came nowhere close.

The latest items were being sold at 5 True spirit stones at starting bids alone. By the end, most of them crossed 10 true spirit stones.

Cai Ping showed off the third to the last item for the auction today. She unfurled the cloth to reveal that it was a pill bottle.

"This pill is a Soul Reuniting pill, that was made by Hong Wu Sect's sect leader, Ma Rong. In case you do not know, the Soul reuniting pill is a True grade pill that can increase your chances of breakthroughs in the True realm by at least 3 fold at Mortal grade.

"At earth grade, it can increase your chances by at least 10 fold. "

"And at heaven grade, it can pretty much guarantee your success at breakthrough."

"This pill on my hand has a harmony of 48%. That means, whoever gets this pill, is guaranteed to move forward in their journey as a cultivator. For the starting bid, we will start with 20 True spirit stones, with a minimum increase of 10 common spirit stones. "

The crowd started speaking so loudly that Cai Ping didn't even manage to comprehend what the first few bids were.

"21 Spi…."

"21 spi…"

"22 spi.."

Someone would be half finished with their bids before the other one started. Alex on the other hand was just stunned at the harmony of the pill.

He turned around and said, "Master, You are more talented than me. You made a 48% harmony true grade pill."

"It's not talent. It's experience. Once you get enough experience, you will be able to do that as well." She said.

Alex simply nodded and turned around to look at the people climb over each other to bid for the pill. He finally saw how much people cared about their cultivation and how far they would go to increase it.

'Do people really have a lot of trouble for a breakthrough?' he wondered. He himself had never cared for it, as he always had a 100% chance of breaking through. In fact, he had to slow down, cause he was too good at it.

His master's pill was still being bid, and it didn't seem like it was going to stop anytime soon.

KNOCK KNOCK

The staff lady inside opened the door to let more of the staff in. Another lady appeared with a book on a tray. "Here you go, sect leader Ma," the girl spoke respectfully.

The dusty old book had finally arrived at the VVIP rooms. Ma Rong picked up the book and started reading it. At first, she had hoped to understand just a few sentences to see what the book was called and what it could do, but to her surprise, she couldn't even read a word of it.

The language was just too foreign for her. She flipped through the entire book, which was filled with words, to see if there was anything she could read. On the last page, she finally found something she could read, only to be disappointed by the fact that it was the family's message saying that it was their heirloom.

A minute had passed, so she gave back the book to the staff, who bowed and swiftly left the room.

She sighed and turned back to see how the auction for the pill was going. Suddenly, she saw Alex who was concentrating on something. He wasn't looking at the auction, that was for sure.

"Yu Ming? What's wrong? You seem serious." She asked.

Alex got out of his stupor and smiled as he said, "Oh, it's nothing master. I was just surprised that one could even use spiritual sense to attack other people. That was truly eye-opening."

"Use spiritual sense to attack other people? What do you mean? There is no way anyone can do that." Ma Rong said, wondering just where he got such an absurd idea from.

"Huh? But that's what Heaven's Impact does, right?" he said.

"Heaven's Impact? What's that?" she had never heard of such a thing. This just brought more confusion to Alex's face.

Alex smiled a little and said, "What are you talking about master? It's obviously the book we read just now."

"The book?" Ma Rong got confused for a split second before her eyes started opening wide. "Did you read the book just now?"

"Oh, was I not supposed to? I'm sorry. I only read the introduction page though, so I didn't really read it all." He said.

Ma Rong was shocked. "You read it. You can read that book?" she practically shouted at this point. Thankfully, the room was entirely soundproof other than when one was bidding.

"Of course I can, master. Can't you?" Alex was surprised now.

"No! Didn't you hear what the auctioneer said? No one can read the book?" she said.

"I mean, isn't that how all higher grade books are, master? Even you said it took you about 2 months to read the immortal technique. Maybe, the family members weren't as talented, so they took forever to read it."

Ma Rong was stupefied. Her disciple had completely misunderstood the difficulty of the situation here and done something seemingly impossible in her eyes.

"Yu Ming, Can you read that book?" she asked once more.

"Yes," Alex answered seriously, hearing the tone in her voice.

"Then you can read that language?" she asked.

"Language? What language?" he asked.

"Obviously the language the book was written in," Ma Rong started to get angry now.

Alex was surprised. "That book was written in a language? Aren't those just scribbled lines that are supposed to put information into your brain?" he asked.

"Of course not. Those are words you are meant to read and comprehend. That's how you learn a technique in the first place."

Alex was stunned. He quickly took out the Flickering Shadows book he had with him and showed it to his master. "Master, are you telling me these lines are a language too? And that you can understand them?"

Ma Rong was even more stunned as she said, "Of course that's a language. Are you telling me you learned the book without knowing the language?"

Chapter 97: Sold

"Master, are you telling me that people can read this language?" Alex asked while pointing to his book.

"Of course. Everyone can read this book, how else are we supposed to learn new techniques?" Ma Rong said.

"But, the writing on the walls and such don't have this language. Most buildings I've visited also don't use this language in their name. How can everyone read it if they don't even use the language?" He said.

"By everyone, I meant the cultivators. Every cultivator starts by learning this language. Since it's just our own language, just written differently, it's easy to learn. Only after that can they learn a cultivation method in the first place."

"So, why doesn't everyone write in the normal language then? One wouldn't have to learn this language in the first place." Alex said after giving it some thought.

"Oh, and what would you do if you come across some ancient texts written in that language? You can already see what is happening right now by people not being able to read that dusty book. What would happen if everyone stopped learning this language?" she asked.

"Hmm... I guess you are right. If that's how the language started then that argument is valid," Alex said.

"Now you get it. Besides, using 2 different languages helps separate a cultivator's text from a normal person's text. But let's forget about that for now. I want to know how you can read that text." She asked.

"I..." 'I can do it because the game developers made it so.' He wanted to say that, but he couldn't. "I don't know. I don't understand the language but can somehow read it. Same with our own language." He said.

Ma Rong couldn't make heads or tails of the answer, so she decided to give up for now and instead focused on her pill being sold. The soul reuniting pill sold for a total of 43 True Spirit stones.

The next item on the auction was an alchemy ingredient called Revitalizing Ginseng. Alex remembered the name from the records he had read on the top floor a few days ago.

"An ingredient for the Body Rejuvenating pill? But I thought those were pretty much extinct?" he said.

"You read the records too? Yes, they were said to be extinct, but it seems our information is wrong." Ma Rong commented.

Cai Ping started explaining the ingredient. "This ginseng on my hand is called a Revitalizing Ginseng. This is the main ingredient for the pseudo-Saint rank pill called the 'Body Rejuvenating Pill'. The pill is incredible, as it can increase a person's life span by an entire Century regardless of if you are a cultivator or a mortal."

"Oh wow. A 100 years?"

"That's a lot!"

"Can anyone really make that pill though? It's a pseudo-Saint rank pill."

"Maybe Hong Wu sect leader can make it, if not, we can ask the Royal alchemist for it."

Numerous people talked about the ingredient in the crowd. Cai Ping continued, "The auction will start at 30 True spirit stones, and each bid has to be 50 common spirit stones higher."

The crowd didn't bid as much this time. 30 True Spirit stones were a lot for most of the people on the ground floor. The people in the VIP however, bid as though their spirit stones grew in their home's backyard.

Alex watched as his master also bid. He had read the records so he knew how good the ingredient in front of him was. A mortal on average lived around 60 years and 100 years at max.

A self tempering cultivator however could live from anywhere between 100 to 200 years on average. Some even lived as long as 300 years.

A True realm cultivator on the other hand could easily live between 500 to 1000 years on average. Maybe even 1500 in some cases.

The Saint realm cultivator's life span wasn't recorded in the records but they were sure to be high in number. Just looking at that, to anyone who was a True realm cultivator or less, a Body Rejuvenating Pill would be a miracle. Especially when they were at the end of their life.

The bidding was quickly ended at the merchant head fatty managed to outbid everyone with his immense wealth. He bid 100 True spirit stones for the Revitalizing Ginseng and snatched it away from everyone.

After buying Ginseng, the fatty immediately walked out of his room and left the auction house. He wasn't a good cultivator so the next item was useless for him.

Quite a few people left the auction house, acting as if the auction was over. After a few minutes, only about 10% of the original audience was left. Most of them being in the VIP and VVIP rooms.

"Finally, here we go fellow customers. You have all checked the book, please bid whatever you feel this book deserves." Cai Ping said not expecting the people the bid at all.

"1 common spirit stones" someone bid as Cai Ping had not set a minimum bid. Cai Ping felt bad but didn't say anything.

"2 Common Spirit stones."

"3 Common spirit stones."

People started slowly increasing their spirit stones in the hope that they could get the book at a low price, and maybe sell it somewhere else for a higher price.

Suddenly, Ma Rong spoke, "10 True spirit stones."

The entire auction hall became silent. The people who were slowly increasing their bid hesitated as 10 true spirit stones was a lot of money. But then why would that person pay it?

The people in the VIP and VVIP rooms were confused as well, but they didn't bid either. Cai Ping on the other hand became grateful towards the guest in room B1.

She waited for a bit for others to bid, and when they didn't she started the countdown.

"10 True spirit stones, going once."

"10 True spirit stones, going twice."

"10 True spirit stones, going thrice. Sold" she hit the gavel on the table with a loud bang. "The final item in the auction has been sold to the Customers in Room B1."

Chapter 98: Back To Sect

Once the book was sold, Cai Ping thanked everyone for coming and waited as everyone left the hall. Ma Rong took Alex with her as the lady in the room guided them to a room outside.

After waiting for a while, an old man with white hair finally entered the room.

"Hello, miss Ma. It's good to see you again." He said as he bowed towards Ma Rong a little.

Ma Rong also nodded a little and said, "Hello senior. It's been a while, hasn't it?"

Alex took the opportunity to greet as well. The old man then proceeded to take out two bags of storage and handed them to Ma Rong and Alex. "Please check it," he said and sat opposite them.

Alex looked into his bag and realized there were about 27 True spirit stones and a few Common spirit stones. After taking their cut of the sale, this was what the auction house had given him.

Even after giving 10% of this to the Deva Corporation, he would still have about 25K dollars for himself.

"Take it," suddenly he heard Ma Rong say something from the side. "Hmm..." he turned around to see that she was holding the dirty old book in her hand, giving it to him.

"Me?"

"Yes, I bought it for you. So take it." She said.

"Thank you, Master." He said and gladly took the book. He read the introductory page and was still amazed that the writings on the book were languages that people spoke.

'Why would the developers change the language?' he wondered. 'If most mortals speak the real-life language, I don't think it was necessary to make an entirely new language right?'

"Let's go," Ma Rong started walking away, and Alex followed her as well.

Most of the people had already left the auction hall, so they didn't meet anyone while walking out. Ma Rong took out her flying boat and flew back to the sect along with Alex.

It had taken them nearly 3 hours in total, and Alex wanted to go get some food. He logged out for his afternoon lunch and returned back.

'Should I leave my dorm room, so I can have a flexible schedule for myself?' he wondered, but immediately shook his head. Being in a dorm room had given him the freedom to play whenever he wanted, and also the university was just 5 minutes away.

If he were to leave now, he would have a hard time balancing his university, home, and game time.

'Alright, let's send my money first.' He opened the settings and found a button that opened the bank's panel for him. He put in the information for his bank and saved it. Then, he pressed another button that opened a panel to transfer his spirit stones to the saved bank account.

He put in all of his spirit stones and hit send.

<Do you want to send '2560 ($25,600) to XXXXXXXXXX343?>

He clicked yes. The spirit stones disappeared from his inventory, and he logged out. He waited for a moment and heard a notification sound.

He quickly opened his phone to see a message on it.

<$25,600 has been successfully transferred to your account>

He kept staring at the number and was shocked. It had been less than a month since he came to the city, and he had already earned so much.

"I should buy my own helmet on a free day," he thought. He marveled at the money for a while and went back to the game.

He took out the dusty old book and started reading. For some reason, this book took him an exceptionally long time to read. Almost twice as much as the Immortal Grade techniques. He didn't know if the reason for that was the difference in language, the length of the book, or the fact that it was just that exceptionally hard to understand.

Still, after about 10 or so minutes, he fully learned it. He opened the description to the technique. For some reason, the information took a couple of seconds to load, instead of loading instantly like every other time.

[Heaven's Impact:

Grade: Heaven

Use your spiritual sense to hit your opponent's mind with a mighty blow. The greater the difference in mental prowess, the more the damage]

He wanted to test it out, but there was nothing he could try it on. This stumped him for a minute. 'I guess I'm not going to test it anytime soon then.'

He had nothing to do now, so he went to take some pills. There were still a few pills he could make today, and tonight he would have to get some ingredients from the alchemy garden to make the remaining 20 pills to be a core disciple.

He started making simple pills with the remaining ingredients for already made pills and went on to try out the new pills. He was already used to making high-quality pills, so every pill he made ended up having over 30% harmony with ease.

Around evening, he logged out to get his dinner and came back to the game to do his task for the night. He met elder Zhan and elder Wang and took the list for the ingredients.

He walked into the alchemy garden and got every single ingredient on the list as well as the ones he required for the pills he was going to register.

Between the two gardens, they had enough ingredients that he could use to make 7 of the remaining 130-ish pills he had recipes of. After handing the collected ingredient, he walked to the disciple hall. By now, his alchemy achievements had shot through the roof. While he wasn't in the top ten yet, at this rate it wouldn't take him more than a week to be at the top.

He went into the hall to the core disciple's section and registered his 3 new pills to the elder working there. Afterward, he returned to his residence.

"Alright! 7 more pills and I will become a core disciple as well."

Chapter 99: Spiritual Attack

Early in the morning, Alex woke up from his cultivation. He was tired from yesterday's auction, so he had decided to just cultivate for the night.

He opened his status to check his current Qi. He had about 1.6 million Qi right now. If he wanted to, he could easily break through to the Bone Tempering 9th Realm. But, that would be bad for his foundation as his cultivation base would be hugely destabilized.

The further one went, the worse it would be. He logged out to get some breakfast and came back. Just as he logged back in, his master arrived as well.

'Huh? Are we going somewhere today too?' he wondered.

"Come, it's time for our lesson." She said as she walked into a room that was not the alchemy room. Alex was more surprised now.

"Master, weren't we done with lessons? At least, until I was able to turn 50% of my current Qi into True Qi?" he asked.

"I am not here to teach you alchemy today. I'm here to teach you about the basic knowledge every cultivator should have, that you certainly don't."

"Let's start with language..." Ma Rong went on to teach him how to read the language for about 2 hours. She was confident he could learn it in two hours with his superior memory and mental strength.

In two hours, Alex was good, if not better than most of the cultivators out there in reading the language.

"Alright, take out that old book. Let's see if you can translate that book." She said.

Alex nodded and brought out Heaven's impact book. Ma Rong looked at the book and asked, "See if you can read it now that you know it's a language."

He tried to read it, but he couldn't understand a single word in the book. To him, they were just another piece of paper with scribbles on it.

"I can't master. I can't read it." He said.

"Hmm... didn't you say you read the introduction page?" she asked.

"Oh, that. I didn't exactly read it. It's more like after I look over it, the information just comes to my mind." He said.

Ma Rong frowned a bit. The book had an unknown origin, meaning if anyone could read these books, they might be able to use abilities not yet seen in the Crimson Empire. "Alright then, did you learn it?"

"Well, I did learn it, but..." he trailed off.

"But what? Is this not a technique? Is this something else?" she asked.

"Oh, no. This is a technique. It's only that I couldn't use it at all since I didn't have a target to practice on. So, I still don't know exactly what it does, only that it uses spiritual sense to attack another person's mind."

"Hmm..." Ma Rong contemplated for a moment and said, "Alright, attack me."

"Umm... are you sure master?" he asked.

"Yes, if it does in fact attack the mind, I'm confident that my mind is stronger than yours." She said.

Alex felt the reasoning made sense. "Ok, then, here I come master." He immediately started using the technique. He expected his Qi to start flowing as he started the technique, but to his surprise, they stayed where they were.

Instead, his spiritual sea started churning like crazy. Suddenly, a vortex appeared in the middle of his spiritual sea and quickly drained as a quarter of his spiritual sea dried up within a second.

All of the disappeared sea turned into a massive cloud of spiritual sense that started forming what he felt was a solid shape. They came together to form a fist, ready to launch outward.

He looked towards his master and regarded her as the target. Suddenly, the newly formed fist made up of spiritual sense flew out of his Spiritual sea and slammed right into Ma Rong's head.

Ma Rong had been waiting for the attack to arrive, so she had been monitoring with her spiritual sense. Suddenly, she felt something move near her disciple. And out of nowhere, it struck her head.

Ma Rong felt her consciousness die for a moment as everything around her dimmed to the point she couldn't see anything. Her body went limp without the control of her mind and started falling to the ground.

Within mere split seconds, she caught herself from falling and stabilized herself. Her breathing had gotten disorderly and there were traces of fear in her eyes.

"Are you okay, master?" Alex asked as he was worried that she might have been hurt.

"I- I'm fine. I'm fine." She was shocked at just how strong the attack was. Even without considering the difference in their cultivation, she had more than twice his mental strength, yet she had lost consciousness for a second there.

That went to show just how terrifying this ability was. "How is your spiritual sense? Any changes?" she asked.

"Changes? No, but I did lose a quarter of my spiritual sea on that attack." He said.

"I see. Well, it only makes sense for you to do so much damage if you had to use such a high amount of spiritual sense. Don't worry, after mind tempering realm, you will have a much stronger mental strength and can easily use that technique multiple times." She reassured him.

"Mind tempering realm? I understand master." Alex was looking forward to growing stronger as a cultivator now.

"Alright then, try and see if you can somehow understand the language there. It will help me as well if I can understand that language. As for alchemy, how many pills do you have yet to register?" she asked.

"7, master." He said.

"Alright. Do what you want for now. I will return back around noon to continue our lesson." She said and walked away.

Alex was just happy that his master was investing so much time in him. He was looking forward to seeing what his master would teach him now that she was done teaching about the languages.

"I guess I will have to wait and see. For now, let's go get some lunch." He logged off.

Chapter 100: Master's Lessons

Ma Rong came back at noon, exactly on the dot, and spent the next 3 hours teaching him the various things one would have to know as a cultivator. She taught him from the smallest things such as what a cultivator should and should not call each other to things such as the different cities and the powerhouses in them across the Crimson Empire.

She taught him about the Royal Fu family and Fu Tian, the King of the Crimson Empire. She taught him how the royal Fu family sent its descendants around the empire to rule as city lords and ladies.

She also gave him a map of the crimson empire to learn and memorize where all the cities were relative to one another.

She also taught him about how a cultivator fought. Some fought with weapons, some fought with their bare hands, some fought using impressive techniques, some fought using poison, some fought using beasts, some fought using bugs, some fought using formations, some fought using talismans, some fought using weird artifacts, and some even fought using pills.

She also taught him about the other production methods aside from the alchemy itself. Some made formations, some made artifacts, some made solely weapons, and some made talismans.

"The last thing, make sure to hide your true talents in front of others. Like I said before, people are envious creatures. Cultivators are no different either. They will betray you the moment they learn you have something they don't. It won't matter to them whether they can obtain it or not, if they can't have it, no one can."

"You are young and you are pure-hearted, but that heart will for sure dye in the filth of the world of cultivation. Make sure you never let that filth stick to yourself. You might get drowned in it, but you have to learn to climb over it."

"For that, you can't just be an alchemist and hope to live in the cultivation world safely. There are strong people out there with bad motivation that might force you into working for them if you aren't strong enough to defend yourself. So, you have to be strong, strong enough to fight off your enemies. I wish you never have to kill anyone, but I know you will have to, even if it's just to defend yourself and your loved ones. The only thing I can do is hope is you don't lose yourself along with your enemies."

"Alright, that's enough for today. You don't have to worry about all these things right now but keep it in mind. I taught you almost everything I could. There are many things I still haven't taught you but that's just because I am not too knowledgeable in them either. You will hopefully learn them soon."

"I'm leaving now, you do what you have to." Ma Rong left the room and walked outside. She took out a medallion and used her spiritual sense to send out a message to all the elders saying, "Starting tomorrow, all the elders who used to work on the alchemy garden are to go back to working on it."

The elders got confused why the sect leader would do that, but they accepted them anyway.

Alex on the other hand remained stunned in his home. He had learned a lot today, yet the final words of his master were what remained to playback in his mind.

'I will have to kill people.' He didn't question the statement and took that as a fact. He knew that was true. After all, this was a game and killing was just an aspect of it. Still, for some reason, killing people wasn't something he would look forward to.

He spent the next few hours absorbing the information his master had just gave him. After he was done learning everything, he left the game to get some dinner.

After dinner, he came back and went to the sect valley to work. This day, he hadn't got the time to make any pills, so he wasn't going to register any. After finishing his work, he went back to his residence and managed to make the 6 different pills throughout the night.

After today's lesson, he didn't have the mental energy to make any more so he just cultivated throughout the rest of the night. In the morning, he logged out of the game and stayed logged out to do some of his classwork.

He only returned back to the game after his classes were over. After logging in, he looked at his storage bags and realized he only had one more pill to go. He was feeling unusually fresh today, so he went on to finish the last pill.

Ma Rong came to his house at around 4 pm. She walked in and sent out her spiritual sense to find him in the middle of alchemy. She walked into the alchemy room to see his absolutely focused face carefully looking at the cauldron.

After a few minutes of intense concentration, he finally opened the lid and a pill flew out of it. As he pulled the pill out, he slumped in exhaustion.

The pill that had just formed was blood red in color and used blood ginseng as its primary ingredient. It was called the Blood Improving pill. It was a common rank pill that would instantly refill a person's blood after they have lost a lot of blood. Or if they did already have blood, it would thicken it and invigorate it with more strength.

This pill was especially important to people in their old ages or people with anemia, as it would counteract their loss of blood and give them a much-needed boost in stamina.

Alex looked at the blood-red pill in his hand and felt its aura. Just the smell alone nearly brought him out of his fatigue, while the aura was something he had never felt before.

He focused on the pill to look at its information as a small panel popped up on top of it.

[Blood Improving Pill: 50%]

He had just made his first Heaven-grade pill.

Chapter 101: Leaving

"Hahaha hahaha," he started laughing like an idiot. Ma Rong could already tell that the pill had a high harmony, still, she walked in to test it.

Alex looked at her and said, "Oh, hello master. I didn't see you come in." He got up from the ground and dusted himself off.

Ma Rong had already taken out a pill tester and brought it forward. Alex didn't question anything and just put the pill directly into the pill tester.

Ma Rong watched as the fog slowly rise up. She had expected it to cross 40% and wasn't surprised when it did. As she watched the fog slowly rise up, more and more until it stopped at 50%.

"Heaven! You made a Heaven grade pill!!" she involuntarily let out a loud shock.

"Yeah. I got lucky for the most part, but yes. Getting fresh ingredients also helped a lot." He said with a smile.

Ma Rong didn't say another word as she kept on looking at the pill and only spoke after a while, "It took me until I was an elder before I made a heaven-grade pill, yet you made it in just under a month. This is way too shocking."

Alex didn't reply, but instead asked a question, "What are you doing here master? Are we going to have another lesson?"

"Hmm... No. Did you forget what day it is today?" she asked.

"Today? It's Monday of course. Was something supposed to happen today?" he was a little confused.

"Did you forget what you said 2 weeks ago?" Ma Rong asked.

"2 weeks ago?" he started thinking. His perfect memory only went back until the Wednesday before the last one, so he needed to think a bit to remember.

"Oh, wait. Tiger sect. Am I going to Tiger Sect?" he asked, finally realizing what she meant.

"Yes, I'm here to take you to the Tiger sect right now. Come with me." She said as she started walking out.

"Master, the pill?" he asked, stopping her in her tracks.

Ma Rong only then realized she was still holding the pill tester. "Oh right," she quickly took out a pill bottle and put it back.

"Here," she handed him the pill back. Instead of taking it, however, he brought out 6 other pill bottles. "Master, take these. Please register them on my behalf when you have the time. I won't be able to now that I'm leaving for Tiger sect."

Ma Rong checked the pills and realized all of them were some of his best products. "How many more pills do you have to make?" she asked.

"None. That was my last one." He said pointing to the blood-red pill.

"Alright then, after you come back from the Tiger sect in 2 weeks, you will have to take the core disciple test." She said and kept the pills. She then gave him a storage bag.

Alex took the bag and found out it was full of different types of healing pills. "What's this for master?" he asked.

"You will need them if you are going to the tiger sect. Especially since you won't have Wen Cheng's protection for about a few weeks." Ma Rong said.

"Not have master's protection? I don't understand, Master."

"Basically, Wen Cheng wants to keep your relationship as a secret for a few weeks. That doesn't matter right now, Wen Cheng will explain to you most of the rest." She then took out a set of bluish-gray robes that were very plain to look at.

"Wear these for now," she threw the robes at him.

Alex quickly changed into his new plain robes and walked outside with her. "Master, I can go by myself if you are busy by the way." He said.

"Nonsense. Come on, I'm taking you there." She said as she took out the flying boat and got on top of it.

"Master, do you really need the boat now that you have spiritual sense?" he asked.

"Not really, but it is still easier to use, and I'm used to it." She said and gestured for him to climb up. Alex jumped onto the boat and the boat set off.

"Alright, listen up. I talked to Wen Cheng, and we decided that you need to learn to confront a normal sect on your own. You will enter the sect as a normal disciple and rise along with the ranks the normal way. Also, this might be the chance for you to breakthrough in your cultivation, so make sure to properly cultivate every night. "

"Wen Cheng will teach you the rest. While I may not like admitting it, he really is a good teacher. Both of his disciples are the best Tiger sect has produced in a while." Ma Rong talked a lot but somehow didn't give out a lot of information.

"Alright, go invisible," she said and watched Alex disappear in front of her eyes. "Oh yeah, one more thing. You are not allowed to use the invisibility technique or the Flickering Shadows technique during your fights. Only use them in training, or when you spar against Wen Cheng."

Alex couldn't understand why that was, but it probably had something to do with hiding his talent and abilities. His master did say it made people jealous.

"Here we are, Jump down and reappear in an alley. After that just go to the sect gate and tell them your name and that you are a new disciple of the sect. They should know that someone like you is arriving."

Alex nodded and did as she said. "Goodbye master," he said and jumped down, slowly floating his way down. After landing, he went to a nearby alley and appeared from the other side finally visible.

He walked towards the north side of the town looking for the gate to the sect. When he finally found it, he was shocked.

He had been expecting a big gate with no other building in the vicinity. But instead, the Tiger sect's gate was actually a small bustling market on its own.

Chapter 102: Inner Sect Disciple

Alex was shocked that the entrance to the sect was actually a bustling market. He saw some shops that sold alchemy ingredients, some that sold weapons, some sold general artifacts, some sold talismans, and some even sold formation flags.

'What is going on here?' he wondered. Most of the customers in this market were disciples of the Tiger Sect with their yellow robes and either green or blue linings.

'Blue, I think was Inner sect disciples, right? So green has to be the outer sect. Was senior sister's red-colored lining for core disciples?' he wondered.

He walked past the many disciples and finally saw a small but expensive-looking gate. The gates had two pillars with a statue of a mighty tiger in a mid striking pose on top of both the gates. Between the two pillars was a massive curved board that had the words, 'TIGER SECT' written on it.

Alex walked past the gate and was immediately stopped by a man in a yellow robe with silver linings. 'Elder?' he thought.

"Stop right there. Who are you, and what are you doing here?" the elder inquired.

"Ah, hello. My name is Yu Ming. I am a new disciple of the Tiger Sect. I was told that you guys would know about it." He said.

"Hmm... Yu Ming?" the elder quickly checked his notes and exclaimed, "Ah, yes. We are waiting for you. Come with me." The elder took him to a building right next to the gate and knocked on one of the doors inside the building.

"What is it?" a sound came from the inside.

"Leader, the disciple named Yu Ming is here." The elder said and waited.

"Come in." The elder opened the door and walked it. Inside the room, was a very young man sitting on a chair. He had short black hair and was wearing an elder's clothes. As for his age, he was barely in his late 20s.

'Such a young man, and he's already an elder? He looks way younger than even martial uncle.' Alex thought.

"Leave," he commanded and the other elder left. "So, you are the new disciple huh." The young man said.

"Yes, Elder," Alex replied. The elder stopped for a second but continued as if nothing happened. "Hmm... Bone Tempering 3rd realm huh. He did say you were around this cultivation stage. That means you will directly become an inner sect disciple."

The elder took out a couple of things from his bag and handed it to Alex. "Here are 2 sets of clothes, and this is your badge." Alex took the clothes and kept them in his bag. As for the badge, he looked at it and just saw a big number '2608' written on it. He tried to scan it with his spiritual sense and realized it had a formation plate inside of it. But unlike a nameplate, he couldn't access it.

The elder then began to explain, "Tiger sect is different from Hong Wu sect. The alchemists are a bunch of pacifists who only hole up in their homemaking pills. In the Tiger sect, everything depends on your cultivation and fighting strength. You are currently the lowest-ranked disciple in the sect."

"However, you can go challenge anyone in the top 275 that is not in the Bone Tempering realm and get their homes for free. I suggest you go for the person at 275 so that it's an easy win and you don't need to go through a lot of trouble today."

"In Tiger sect, the disciples are separated into Outer, inner and core disciples based on their Cultivation base. Anyone with cultivation can automatically become an outer sect, anyone with Bone tempering realm of cultivation can become an inner sect, and anyone with Meridian Tempering realm can become a core disciple."

"There is a maximum quota of 50 core disciples, 225 inner sect disciples and the rest are outer sect disciples. Depending on your rank, and the strength of other disciples, you can be a disciple with high cultivation base and still be an outer sect disciple."

"Also, I don't know why, but I was told to give you this." He took out a normal-looking sword. "It's a Common mortal-grade sword that doesn't even have a name. From now on you are to use this sword to fight."

Alex was surprised. 'How often do I have to fight in this sect?' he wondered. "Now go and settle or fight. Here in Tiger sect, we do whatever we want."

Alex was stunned as he was sent away. The elder didn't give him a single piece of information about the sect itself. 'Where am I supposed to live? I don't even have a map,' He thought.

After he left the building, he walked a little further to see a massive mountain. The mountain wasn't very tall, but it was very wide. He saw thousands of houses on the mountain and a single pathway up the mountain. Many disciples were walking up and down the mountain.

He walked up the mountain and saw the houses had numbers. "Hmm... 2138" he walked to the right of the house and saw the next house had the number 2139. "Oh, so we are supposed to live in these houses huh. Since I'm already an inner sect disciple, I should do what the elder said and challenge someone in house 275.

It took him a while to understand the logic behind how the houses were named. From the ground to the top of the mountain, there was only a single path. However, every time the path crossed a line of houses, there were another 2 paths spawning from the original path, that circled the mountain.

The lower the base a house was, the higher its number was. Alex immediately started walking upwards, skipping tons of houses.

Finally, after skipping dozens of lanes, he reached the lanes where the houses were numbered in the 200s. After searching for a while, he found a house numbered 275. He scanned the house using his spiritual sense and found that no one was inside.

Alex was puzzled as to what to do next.

Chapter 103: Fighting Hall

Alex looked at the house carefully. It seemed to have been made out of brick and mud mostly, yet had a moderately large wooden board on the outside.

'That's a weird choice for a design,' he thought. He looked around thinking what to do next.

He then saw a person walking on the road outside and stopped him. "Hello brother, I'm new here. Do you mind telling me how I can find the owner of this house?"

"New?" he looked at Alex's cultivation base and realized he was just as strong as him. "If it's for challenging, just go to the fighting hall and challenge him. Unless he is out of the sect, you can fight him for the house."

"Oh, and where is the fighting hall?" Alex asked.

"Take this road straight around the mountain, and you will find the fighting hall in the sect crater." The man left after saying that. Alex decided to follow what the man was saying and followed the path that went around the side of the mountain.

After a few minutes of walking, he went past the mountain, coming up on the other side. When he looked down on the other side of the mountain, he was surprised.

"He wasn't kidding when he said crater." In front of him was a massive crater on the back half of the mountain. The crater had reshaped the mountain to have a crescent shape on the backside, and the paths that went around the side, all joined eventually to go down to the crater through either of the two narrow parts of the mountain remaining.

Alex walked down to the crater and was shocked at just how large it was. The crater, just by itself, was about twice the size of the Hong Wu sect's sect valley.

'What could have fallen here to have caused such a large crater?' he wondered. Even a saint realm monster only made a 20 meters wide crater. For something to make such a big crater, it would have to be very large or very powerful.

He walked into the crater looking at the different buildings. Surprisingly, there were very few buildings here. What there were a lot of were fighting stages. Everywhere he turned his head to, he could see two disciples fighting each other with an elder staying as a referee.

He finally found a building named Fighting Hall. He saw at least a dozen different lines of disciples outside the hall. He asked the person in front of him how he should go about fighting someone, and the person simply pointed towards the wall behind the elders recording the fight requests.

'Oh wow, that's quite a comprehensive list of rules.' He thought. He read the rules and was surprised just how much fighting was allowed in the sect.

A disciple could challenge 10 times in a day, and could also be challenged 10 times a day. Unless the disciple was out on leave by the authority of the sect, he would have to fight every single one of the challenging battles.

Every Monday to Thursday, one would have to finish their fights by 9 pm. On Friday and Saturday however, there was no limit to how much someone was challenged. But also, one didn't have to end all of their fights at all. But, if they went an hour without fighting, the match would be automatically forfeited.

Sunday was the only day of rest for these people and nobody was allowed to challenge anybody. This was his first day today, so he was exempted from the rules, but starting tomorrow, he would have to fight this way too.

Finally, when his turn came, he took out his badge and handed it to the elder, and said, "275". According to the rules, one could register a fight with someone based on their names or their badge number.

The elder was surprised to see a number difference between the number in the badge and the number of the opponent. But when he looked at Alex's robe, he understood.

The elder quickly registered the fight and took out a medallion from his bag to transmit something. "Go to stage 24 and wait for your opponent to arrive. If he doesn't arrive by 9 pm, you win."

Alex thanked the elder and searched for stage 24. It didn't take him long to find the stage as there were numbered stones in front of the stage.

He waited outside the stage and watched the people in front of his fight. Most of the people used swords or spears, while very few liked to fight hand to hand. He didn't see any of the other types of fighters his master has told him about.

Many people came and fought. The elder would call out his and his opponent's number from time to time, but only he would respond. His opponent was nowhere to be seen.

Once again another fight ended. The elder always took the disciples badged before they fought and gave the lower numbered badge to the person who won. 'What exactly is the benefit of having a lower-numbered badge aside from getting to live in the inner set disciple's area?' he wondered.

"Number 2608 and 275"

"" Here"" two sounds came out at the same time. One of them was Alex, while the other one belonged to a 20-year-old man with an elongated face. The man looked towards Alex and was shocked. Hearing the number, he had expected an outer sect disciple to try out his luck at the lowest-ranked inner sect disciple. But when he saw Alex in his inner sect clothes, he was shocked.

Alex looked at the man and realized he was in Muscle Tempering 5th Realm. 'So weak?' he thought.

Both of them walked up to the stage and handed their badges to the elder. The elder too was surprised to see Alex wearing inner sect disciples' clothes, but said nothing about it.

Alex wasn't sure how exactly to fight this person. His only fighting experience till now had been with the monsters in the forest, and those were the ones he killed. He couldn't even hurt his opponent badly here, much less kill them. He was in a real dilemma now.

"Fight"

Chapter 104: Black Stele

"Fight," the elder shouted. The young man immediately got into a fighting stance with a blue shining sword in his hand. Alex took out his new unnamed sword as well.

Not knowing what exactly to do, he waited for his opponent to start the fight. As soon as his opponent charged at him, he started using his Focus mode.

Suddenly, everything around him started to slow down. The blue light from his opponent's sword got much brighter as he saw both fury and despair in the young man's eyes.

Alex easily sidestepped the thrust and used the flat side of the blade to hit the man on his back. With a cultivation base higher than his opponent by an entire minor realm, his force was enough to make the man fly out of the 20-meter wide stage.

Alex looked at where the man had gone to and turned around to look at the elder. He didn't know the rules to a fight and was wondering if going out of the stage was considered a loss or not.

Once the elder gave the signal for the match over, he walked over to the elder and got the badge with the number '275' on it. The other man was already standing up and walking towards the elder to get his new badge. Seeing how low it was, he immediately got in the line outside the fighting hall to fight some higher opponents.

Alex on the other hand didn't know what to do. He didn't want to immediately fight after coming to his new sect, so instead, he walked around the sect looking at the different buildings.

There weren't a lot of buildings. There were only 4 buildings there, aside from the Fighting hall. They were a Training hall, a library, a disciple hall, and surprisingly a production hall. He hadn't expected a sect focused on fighting to have a dedicated hall for productions. He learned that one could produce talismans, artifacts, and pills in there.

'At least there is a place here where I can practice alchemy,' he thought.

Almost all of the other places in the sect crater were just fighting ground, except for one. At the very center of the crater, there was a massive black stele with texts on it that shined iridescent colors.

Alex tried to read the texts but realized he couldn't understand them. The text didn't belong to the language the mortals used or the ones cultivators used. 'Can it be?' he wondered and compared the text to the one in the Heaven's Impact book. They were the same.

"What a coincidence. I hope this is another spiritual technique." This type of text required him to read with a spiritual sense for some reason, so he decided to do so. He tried to use his spiritual sense to read it but he suddenly felt something attack his spiritual sea. He immediately brought back his sense and crouched on the ground with his hands around his head.

It hurt him like crazy. "Arghhh... What was that?" he thought. It took a while before the pain in his mind subsided and he realized he had lost all of his Spiritual Sea. It was totally dry.

It would take some time to restore, but if he hadn't reeled back his senses in time, he would have taken some real damage. He felt his forehead brimming with sweat as the fear started to die down finally. He looked towards the black stele once more with some remaining fear in his eyes.

'Screw this,' he thought and went back to his new home. It took him a while to return back to house number 275. Once he finally did reach it, he was confused as to how to open the doors.

He looked around the doors for a second but didn't find anything. So, he started using his spiritual sense to check for any locks. Suddenly, he noticed a formation plate inside the wooden board outside the house.

'That looks similar to the one on my badge,' he thought. He took out his badge and placed it near the wooden board.

KADAK

The door opened. He walked inside with his badge and pushed the door back and heard it lock back. Now that he was inside, everything inside started lighting up.

The house was fancy with multiple lanterns, but in the end, it was still just a single room. He sat on the bed and looked up. Suddenly, his eyes went wide.

On the wall in front of him, there was a large wooden board that had many names on it. He counted them and realized there were exactly 274 names in there. 'Everyone that is higher than me?' he wondered.

He memorized the names starting from the top. When he looked at the name on the top, he was surprised. "Well, I shouldn't be, but it's still surprising."

The name in the first place was Luo Mei. He also found another name he knew, Meng Yun, around 112. 'Wasn't she in the 7th realm of Bone Tempering back when I met her? Wonder how much stronger she has gotten.' He thought.

"hmm..." he was shocked to see a few names that just didn't match the other names in the list. "Lucy, David, Adam... " he started reading a few more names in the list.

"These are Players? Wow, I didn't think I would meet one here. Hong Wu sect has none of them." He was finally in a sect with players.

It was time for his dinner, so he logged out to get some food. He returned back to the game shortly after and realized something was different in the room.

The wooden board that had names on it was now blank with a bit of dim light around its edges. There was a black circle on its bottom left corner about the size of a small bowl.

'What's that?' he decided to check with his spiritual sense. Suddenly, he realized that behind the wooden wall was a massive metal plate that has the formation scribbles on it. While next to it was a smaller, circular metal plate, very similar to the one outside.

He walked up to the board and placed his badge on it. Suddenly, the light around the wooden board died and a bunch of texts started appearing on the wooden board.

"Come to the top of the mountain, behind the sect leader's building. Try not to be seen by other disciples if possible, since I want your existence to be a secret for now. I will wait for you-Master"

Chapter 105: Training

"Oh, Master sent me this message," he said as he read the message on the wooden board. He took the badge off of the wooden board and the message disappeared.

Alex walked to the door and placed his badge on the wooden panel next to the door.

KDAK

The door opened once more. He sent out his spiritual sense to see if there were anyone. After confirming there were none, he turned invisible and activated his Immortal Concealment technique. Once he was basically untraceable, he left the house.

He went onto the main path and started walking upward. Quite a few disciples were walking around, but he managed to pass them without being noticed.

He looked straight at the top and saw a giant building. 'Is that master's building?' he wondered. He walked there without any distractions. After reaching the building, he went through the building to the back.

"Oh, wow" he looked down the mountain to see the sect crater fully lit up, looking extraordinarily brilliant. A person was sitting cross-legged on a giant rock nearby looking at the sect crater in a daze. He seemed to be in his late 40s with a scruffy beard.

The night was dark, but Alex could see the golden linings glittering brightly in the otherwise pale yellow robe.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense to see if anyone else was around, and dropped his invisibility and concealment after not noticing anyone.

"Master, I'm here," he called out to Wen Cheng sitting on top of the giant rock. Wen Cheng looked at him, surprised.

"You arrived much faster than I expected. You didn't let anyone see yourself while coming here, right?" he asked.

"Yes, master. No one saw me."

"Alright, come with me," he took Alex to a lone standing room away from the main building. It looks dirty from the outside, but when he walked in, he was surprised at how well kept it was.

The walls were white all around, while the floors were metallic. He looked at the weird carvings on the floor and asked, "Is there a formation here as well?"

"Yes, there is a formation set to the room that absorbs all sort of energy from escaping the room, including sound energy. So we can practice as much as we want without anybody noticing."

He then turned around to Alex and asked, "So, How did you like the sect? is it better than Hong Wu Sect?"

"It's not bad. although I will have to check it for a little bit longer, but this seems like a good place," he said. They talked for a little longer before Wen Cheng decided it was time to train.

"Alright, are you ready? We will be starting with the basics now. What do you use most? Swords, spears, or some other weapons?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I have a sword that I use, but I'm not a swordsman so I can train in other weapons if need be," Alex said.

"Hmm... since you have that True rank sword, I think it will be better to teach you in sword fighting. Did you get that normal sword I asked Liu Xun to give you?" he asked.

Alex took out the normal sword he got from the young leader of the guards today and showed it to Wen Cheng.

"Alright, let me see how good you are. Come attack me." Wen Cheng said as he got into position.

"Attack you? With the sword?" Alex was surprised. He didn't expect Wen Cheng to immediately start fighting without even giving any training.

"Yeah, attack me. I'm trying to test your limit as a fighter. I can't help you improve if I don't know where you are right now. So just attack me without any reservations. You won't hurt me even if you hit me. Although, don't use any damaging techniques, since I just want to test your martial skills right now."

Wen Cheng's explanation felt reasonable to Alex, so he nodded and readied his sword.

With a single dash, he arrived right in front of his master with the sword halfway through his swing. Without a single worry in his eyes, Wen Cheng simply stepped back and let the sword hit the empty space.

Alex didn't hit his target so he stumbled as his balance nearly destabilized, but he immediately steadied himself and went for a single thrust. This time, Wen Cheng simply brought a sheathed sword and lightly touched the tip of the incoming sword.

The small touch was enough to derail Alex's entire attack, making him miss by a very wide margin. Wen Cheng then thrust his sheath directly into Alex's chest sending him flying.

"This is what happens when you only focus on Alchemy and don't give enough time for normal cultivation. Just two attacks, and it's enough for me to know that you have simply no idea how to fight. No sword style, no footwork, or any other form of martial art. I had expected as such, but seeing you waste your talents still hurts my heart."

"Look at you, you broke through to the 3rd realm two weeks ago when I saw you first, yet you are already at the 5th realm. What people wouldn't give for such a talent, yet you don't even know how to fight. This is too much of a waste."

"Starting tonight, You will have a rigorous training schedule from 9 to 3. You can spend the rest of the time cultivating or doing whatever else you like. I will usually have to do my work as a sect leader during the day, so you will have to practice some stuff on your own during the day."

"Come here," Wen Cheng called Alex towards himself as he too walked next to a wall in the room. Wen Cheng banged twice on the wall and suddenly the wall split open to show a rectangular opening. Wen Cheng took out a metal plate and placed it on the opening.

"Ma Rong mentioned about teaching you a lot of things, but left Spiritual roots mostly untouched. Do you know what they are?" he asked.

"No, Master. Other than the fact that they exist and have something to do with the elements, I know nothing about them." Alex replied honestly.

"I figured as much. Alright then, I guess I will have to start teaching you about it from the very basics."

Chapter 106: Testing

"From what I know of Alchemy, it doesn't seem to have any specific element-based techniques, so it's understandable why Ma Rong didn't teach you about Spiritual Roots and left them for me."

The metal plate that Wen Cheng had put up on the wall had started to glow as 5 distinct colors started appearing on it in a circular shape in 5 different places.

On the top center was a circle with a red light on it. To the right, a little lower was a circle with blue light coming off of it. On the bottom right was another circle with green light coming off of it. On the bottom left was a circle with a brown light coming off of it. And finally, a little lower to the top left was another circle with Golden yellow light coming off of it.

At the center of the bigger circle that had lines connecting it to the other 5 circles. Inside the big circle was a drawing or a carving of a palm. At the center of the palm was another small rectangular cutout.

"This is a formation plate used to find a disciple's spiritual roots. Take a spirit stone and put it in that slot. After that place your palm along with the diagram and wait for the formation to do its work."

Wen Cheng stepped aside for Alex to move to the front and do what he was just told to. Alex walked to the front and was about to do what he was told, but he stopped. "Umm... Master, I don't have a spirit stone. Can I get one?" He was embarrassed even asking for one, but he had to since he had sent all of his to his bank account.

"You don't have a single spirit stone? I thought you alchemists were supposed to be rich." Wen Cheng was surprised but he still took out a spirit stone for him.

"You are going to have to sell your pills here if you want to do anything here. Unlike the Hong Wu sect, we don't do transactions in contribution points. Everything here is done through actual money. So if you don't have any spirit stones, you might as well not be here."

Alex took that advice to heart and took the spirit stone Wen Cheng gave him. He then inserted it into the slot and placed his palm on top of it.

"Alright, it's going to send a bunch of Qi into your body, don't try to stop it. Once it is in, use your cultivation method to allow it to coarse through your meridians. Once it is done, it will come back to the metal plate and light it up depending on what your spiritual roots are."

Wen Cheng started advising him on what to do. Alex then prepared himself, waiting for the Qi to come in. The Qi started to flow slowly into him and picked up in intensity as time went on. It started pooling along his palm waiting for him to use his cultivation method to take it in.

'Wait, if I use my cultivation method, won't I fall asleep?' He started getting worried. There hadn't been a single time when he had cultivated and not fallen asleep. He racked his brain to try and think of any other way, but couldn't.

'Whatever, here it goes.' He closed his eyes and started breathing slowly, waiting for his cultivation method to kick in. He fully expected his consciousness to vanish, but it didn't. For some reason, for the first time, he could finally cultivate without falling asleep.

'What is going on?' he wondered. This was a very unique situation he was in, but he instead ignored the situation, for now, to focus on the Qi moving into his body.

The Qi started to move along his body at a steady speed. The Qi went around his body through the meridians in his body. Alex used spiritual sense to look at the Qi moving along his body and was surprised.

For the first time, he properly saw the seven-colored light properly, instead of it being just a glimpse. The lights weren't very bright, but they were there. And they were all coming from his meridian.

'7 colors'... 5 of those colors are the same color as the one in the metal board. Wait for a second, is the meridian my spiritual root?' he was surprised. He had wondered what a spiritual root was, but never got a proper answer from anywhere on the Internet.

'Do people not know about them since they don't have a spiritual sense yet?' he wondered.

The Qi moved through his entire body and returned back to his palm in exactly 1 minute, and by this time, all of the Qi had shrunken in size by more than half and instead gotten more viscous as well as vigorous. They had also gained a slight yellow color to them. His Sun God's Divine Yang body had converted the Qi to Yang Qi.

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body increasing cultivation speed by 500%>

<Starry sky Qi Absorption method's Night bonus increasing cultivation speed by 200%>

<Obtained 200 Qi>

<Obtained 4382 Qi>

He had gained a lot of Qi from the spirit stones, yet the Qi wasn't in his control, so it left his body and entered the metal plate. Wen Cheng came forward and looked at the metal plate.

"You can remove your hand now," he said and waited for Alex to get back.

Alex did as his master said and stopped using his cultivation method. He got back to where his master was standing and looked at the metal plate as well.

It took a while for the metal plate to process the result, so Wen Cheng took the time to explain how it worked.

"The metal plate will take your Qi and use it to look for your spiritual roots. Depending on your elemental alignment, the board will light up to show your spiritual root. Depending on which light shines, we can tell what your spiritual roots are. Oh, look. It's starting."

Wen Cheng stopped talking as the board started lighting up. Slowly, under both of their eyes, all 5 of the circles started lighting up at the same time.

They were very dim at first but slowly increased with intensity as time passed.

Chapter 107: Bad Spiritual Roots

The light slowly started growing brighter and brighter. All 5 circles were shining with the same intensity. The board aside from the circles was also shining a bit yellow.

"The lights determine how well you can use that particular element. So at some point, some of the lights will go out leaving you with the ones that you have elemental alignment with." Wen Cheng said from the side.

Alex knew what his spiritual roots were, but he still looked forward to seeing how a normal cultivator went about to determine theirs.

The light shined brightly with no sign of going out and this started to make Wen Cheng nervous. The longer it went on, the more his face frowned.

At last, the lights in the circle stayed bright with no sign of increasing and the overall board also shined in bright yellow light.

"Sigh, so unfortunate," Wen Cheng said while shaking his head. Alex was surprised to see such a negative reaction.

'Isn't it good? I have all 5 elements. Why is the acting disappointed?' He was curious, so he asked.

"Is that bad, master?"

Wen Cheng sighed once more and said, "From my knowledge, Yes. It's not bad on its own, but when compared to other spiritual roots based on their advantage and disadvantages, it's the worst."

Alex got really confused at the very vague answer. Wen Cheng saw his confused face and said, "Let me explain."

"There are two types of people born in this world. Those with a spiritual root, and those without it. For the ones that don't have a spiritual root, the best they can do in a cultivation world is reach the top of the organ tempering realm. They cannot go above that."

"The ones who are born with spiritual roots don't have any sort of inherent limitations due to spiritual roots. However, even among them, there are ones that are superior and ones that are inferior."

"A superior spiritual root is one that is aligned to a single or at most 2 of the 5 elements. If it is aligned with 3, it is considered an average one. While having 4 and 5 are considered the worst of the worst."

He sighed once again. Alex was surprised too. He hadn't expected his spiritual roots to be actually considered bad. As for why that was, he decided to ask.

"Why are they the worst master?"

Wen Cheng stopped sighing and started explaining.

"Spiritual roots determine how effective a person is at handling an element. If a person has a single element root, they can use that element to its highest power. However, the more elements you introduce to one's spiritual roots, the less effective their grasp of the elements gets."

"In this manner, both ends of the spectrum have an advantage and disadvantage. The ones with fewer elemental roots can only learn techniques with those elements, but have those techniques be really powerful"

"While those with more elements, they have more freedom at learning techniques, but those techniques won't be as powerful."

"In the end, being strong in a single type of element is way better than being weak in five. Ah, I was really looking forward to teaching you many things. It seems we will have to stick to the normal non-elemental techniques." Wen Cheng said as he sighed once more.

Alex also started getting a little sad knowing that his talent, basically magic, was going to be bad. Suddenly, he remembered something.

"Hmm... but, master. But, I am good at controlling fire though. According to this, shouldn't I be bad at that?" he asked.

"Hmm... show me." Wen Cheng said.

"Uhh... I need fire to control it. It's an alchemy technique." He said.

Wen Cheng immediately brought out a piece of paper and used a fire technique on it to burn it. Seeing this Alex immediately got to work. He started channeling his Qi and used the Flame Mastery Scripture.

Suddenly the little tongue of fire that was about to go out, burned brilliantly as it expanded in size to be about a meter in diameter. Alex controlled it for a second, then started to change its size once more. Once its size was changed, he changed its size. He fluctuated between making the fire very hot, to making it very low in temperature.

Alex himself had been previously surprised at how good his control of the fire had been, once his Qi had gone through another change and increased in intensity.

He dropped the fire, letting it disappear as he thought, 'Hmm... what if the reason my control is so good is because of my Qi? I doubt many people have Yang Qi if any.' He thought.

That was a logical assumption and the only one he could think of right now.

"You really are good at it. It doesn't make sense though? Is it because you also have a yang-focused spiritual root?" Wen Cheng thought.

"Yang focused spiritual root? What makes you say that master?" Alex was surprised his master got it wrong.

"Look at the board, it's yellow, meaning your spiritual roots are yang focused. If it was yin focused, it would've turned azure, and it wouldn't have glowed if it is neutral, which is what 99% of the people have." He said. Alex assumed the yellow was because of his Yang Qi, which overshadowed the yin element in his spiritual root.

'Does that mean me having both Yin and Yang is also a rarity even among the rarity? What if that is the reason behind my fire being so good?' he thought.

"Alright, that settles it. We will do something about your spiritual roots tomorrow. For today, you will have to learn swordsmanship and other non-elemental techniques."

"Now, tell me, did your Ma Rong teach you any battle techniques?"

"No, master. She only taught me alchemy-related techniques. She said that I should learn battle techniques from the Tiger sect since I can find the best techniques here. Although I did learn a mortal grade sword technique, that's it."

"Oh, you did?" Wen Cheng smiled a little and said, " Show me."

Chapter 108: Elusive Heavenly Sword

Alex took out the mortal-grade sword and started pouring his Qi into it. The sword showed some resistance at first, but quickly let his Qi in and started glowing yellow.

"This is a mortal grade technique, Master. It's called Smiting Blade and all it does is make my sword sharper and deal more damage." Alex explained to his master.

"Hmm... that is quite bad. Only a mortal grade? Ma Rong should have at least taught you an earth-grade technique. Honestly, what is that woman thinking?" Wen Cheng showed disapproval towards the technique.

"Oh no, I learned it before I went to the forest 2 weeks ago. So master has nothing to do with it." Alex cleared some misconceptions.

"Oh, if that is so, then okay. I can understand why you would learn such trash. It doesn't even have an elemental attribute to it. I will get you some better ones to choose from tomorrow."

"For today, let's focus on just swordsmanship."

Wen Cheng took out a common-looking blade and started talking.

"Fighting with a sword is not about using the sword to hit an opponent as hard as you can. It's about the proper techniques and practice."

"The techniques can range anywhere from how to swing a sword to how to best apply forces to how to move your feet to get the better advantage."

"Now, look at me."

Wen Cheng started swinging in mid-air randomly, but to Alex's eyes, it looked like he was fighting a very strong opponent. He weaved and dodged his enemy's attacks by moving in a weird way using his feet, and cleaved his enemy through the chest when he could.

As Alex watched more and more, he started becoming entranced. He slowly walked to an open space and started following Wen Cheng's movements.

The copy of the arts looked very wonky and not at all refined, but the basics were there. About 10 minutes later, Wen Cheng finally stopped and looked towards Alex, only to find him a distance away copying his moves.

He watched his move almost the same as him and started getting shocked.

'This guy managed to nearly copy my moves just by watching me move a while?' he thought. This was what they called talent. Wen Cheng was really happy inside that he made this kid his disciple.

Alex stopped moving after a while, as he had nothing more to copy. He got out of his entranced state and was surprised at what he had just done.

He looked at his own hands. 'Was I even controlling them?' he was honestly too surprised. He hadn't registered any of the things he did but somehow could remember them. It was a very odd experience.

"Did you try to copy me?" Wen Cheng asked. "Although that wasn't very good, the basics were there. Just the fact that you managed to do it means that you probably have a talent for it."

Wen Cheng took out a rather thick book, at least thicker than most cultivation techniques Alex had seen and handed it to him. "This book contains the sword fighting style I use called the 'Elusive Heavenly Sword'. It's mostly focused on footwork and dodging more than attacking. But it also has some strong attacks that would be considered Earth grade if they were a technique on their own."

"I will get you some techniques tomorrow that you can use as proper damage technique. Read this book for now and learn as much as you can. Since it's a heaven-grade technique, it is going to take you a while."

Alex started turning the book's pages over and realized there were a lot of images along with the text. 'This is going to take a while,' he thought.

"Master, is this considered a movement technique too? cause I need one of those as well." He said.

"Oh, no. This is just a set of footwork for swordsmanship. Real movement techniques are something else. Wait a second, did Ma Rong not teach you the Hong Wu sect's immortal grade movement technique?" Wen Cheng seemed to know about Flickering Shadows and asked about it.

"Oh, I already learned that technique, Master. But it's really hard to use during the daytime, in flat surfaces." He said.

"Is it? I don't know how that technique works. Ma Rong is too secretive about it." Wen Cheng said. Then suddenly, he recalled the first part of the sentence and immediately asked.

"Did you just say you already learned it? But it's an Immortal Grade technique, and you had at best only learned it 2 weeks ago."

"Yes, Master. I can somehow learn techniques very fast. Although practicing and perfecting the technique will take me a while, learning it however is pretty quick" Alex explained.

Wen Cheng looked at him closely. "Are you really not lying about it?" he asked.

"Of course not, master. Why would I lie?" he said with a little chuckle.

"Alright then, show me. Use that technique."

Alex was ready for him to say that, so he immediately disappeared from the spot and appeared behind Wen Cheng from his shadows.

"Oh my god. You really do know it. Then you won't need another movement." Wen Cheng was surprised at how talented his disciple was.

"But master, this technique doesn't work as well during the daytime at places with little shadows. The technique relies on shadows to be functional." Alex explained when it started sounding like he wouldn't be getting a movement technique.

"Alright, Learn this book for now. Since you are so quick, you should be done with it within the week. I will also get you a good movement technique tomorrow along with a few damaging techniques, defensive techniques, and a very important escaping technique to choose from." Wen Cheng promised.

"Thank you, master," Alex was genuinely happy at how much Wen Cheng was giving him. It had only been a few minutes, and he had already given so much knowledge and opportunity.

"Alright, you read that book. I will come to see you at around 3 am." Wen Cheng left after saying that.

Chapter 109: Practicing the Sword

Wen Cheng left Alex to learn the book by himself. Alex looked at the book and was still surprised by how big it was. However, he was also happy that he could read the language by himself now.

"Elusive Heavenly Sword. A technique that improves a cultivator's dodging ability and provides great offensive attacks. The elusive part is only useful against cultivators that fight in close combat, while the attacking part works on everyone. Attacks use wind, so cultivators with wood-aligned spiritual roots are preferred. But since the wind aspect only affects 2 of the 3 latter strikes, even those without spiritual roots can learn it."

Alex read the book's first page and was surprised. "Wow, that's a lot of information on the introductory page. It even talks about spiritual roots."

He used his system to read it and found that the description it came up with had barely any information. Aside from the name and the fact that it was a sword technique focused on dodging and attacking, the description gave no other information.

'Do other books give such information as well?' he couldn't check right now as he didn't have any books on him at the moment. He had already returned the Flickering Shadows book prior to arriving here.

He then proceeded to flip the page and was immediately surprised by what he saw. Instead of normal words like any other cultivation technique, this one had drawings telling one what to do.

The first set of 5 pictures showed one how to move with their feet. There was a bunch of text right below, explaining the movement in extent.

Alex put the book to the side and started to do what the picture in the image did. There was no Qi or other type of energy involved. It was just a simple way to move one's body.

Yet when Alex tried it, he found the movements he had just done to be wrong. 'That's not it.' He tried once more. 'That's not it, either.'

'How can I follow easily after watching master, but can't follow a book.' It was then that something came to his mind.

'Wait, do I need to finish the book before I start. Because that was exactly what I did with the other books. Just because I can read the books now, doesn't mean I have to change my learning style right?'

He immediately started using his spiritual sense to read all of the books. It was hard not to ignore the basic understanding from being able to understand the language, but he managed to do it at last.

Finally, after around 15 minutes, he finished reading the whole book.

'Alright, now it should be fine.' He thought and started using the movement technique. Surprisingly, he was still making mistakes at it.

'What's going on?' he couldn't understand what was happening. He still kept on practicing and at some point, started going into another trance.

During the trance, he couldn't think of anything or do anything. But the knowledge of what to do and how to do it kept flowing out of his brain. He practiced more and more, and four hours later, he had perfected it.

<Congratulations, You have learned 'Elusive Heavenly Sword'>

Finally, he woke up from his trance to see that he had learned the sword technique. He looked at the time and saw surprised that it was nearly 2 am.

'Did I fall asleep once more? That too while practicing?' he was starting to doubt if there was really something wrong with him. But just the fact that he had truly learned the sword technique kept him from believing it.

'Also why did it take me so long to learn the technique? Is it because the technique doesn't have anything to do with Qi and spiritual roots for the most part?' he wondered.

He practiced once more now that he had learned the technique and he managed to do every single footwork perfectly. Elusive Heavenly Sword had 3 different attacks.

None of the attacks had any name and were dependent on one's spiritual roots to use all of the 3 attacks.

The first strike was a simple sword strike that was used in close combat. As long as one had Qi, they could use this attack.

The second strike was one that was used from a little further away from the opponent. It required the cultivator to have a wood elemental spirit root for this attack to work.

With this strike, one could send out a small human-sized wind slice through the air that would fly towards the enemy.

The third and final strike was one that could be used from very far away and was the most devastating of all. It sent out a very fast wind slice through the air that had a very high penetrating power.

However, it required the person to only have wood elemental spirit root or dual elemental spirit root with wood being one of them. Anything more, and the cultivator could not use the technique to its full power.

Alex tried practicing the 3 attacks. The first attack was integrated with the footwork. At a certain segment of the footwork, he brought up his sword and poured Qi into it. As he brought it down, it glowed yellow and gave a loud sound as it cut through empty air.

He then tried the second strike. For this strike, he didn't require footwork. He simply started moving his Qi around his body. He brought it around his body to his palm, where the Qi entered the sword through the sword handle.

However, just before it entered, the Qi changed from Yang elemental to Qi with yang and wood elemental. The color, however, shifted to just green and the yellow from the yang didn't show.

He brought the sword up to the top and sliced it down. A massive slicing wind came forth from his blade and flew away to the wall in the room and disappeared with a boom.

The blade kept ringing in his hand as he looked forward in shock at the power of the strike.

Chapter 110: Training with Master

Although he couldn't tell the exact output of the attack, he could tell that it was without a doubt the strongest attack he had done until now.

Just the first strike alone was better than Smiting Blade, yet the second strike somehow far surpassed that.

'What would the third strike be like?' he wondered. He held his blade next to him once again and started pouring in the Qi. In the end, he swung the sword directly towards the wall once more.

A very sharp green slice came out of the sword and hit the wall far away.

BOOM

A big explosion rang out at the wall. However, instead of being happy, Alex frowned.

"The damage is much lower than I expected. It's barely any better than the second strike and yet it uses more Qi." He started to believe that his fire abilities were only good because of the Yang Qi. Now that Yang Qi wouldn't help Wood element, his true power finally showed.

"I guess I really have a bad spiritual root. I guess I don't care as long as it doesn't hamper me in my path in alchemy. Cultivating and fighting are just extra stuff for me. But still, it hurts a bit, knowing that I have a bad spiritual root." He thought.

He decided to only use the first 2 sword strike from now on since the third strike was bad when considering Qi to Damage ratio. Still, practicing it just in case he ever needed it was not a bad idea.

He kept on practicing for another hour and finally stopped when his Qi ran out. Sending out wind slices continuously for an hour was really draining for him.

A few minutes later Wen Cheng arrived just to see him down on the ground panting heavily.

"Oh, are you done for today?" he asked.

"Ah, Master. Yes, I'm done for today. I have run out of Qi." He said.

"Oh, okay. How much did you learn? Did you manage to practice some of the footwork?" he asked.

"Oh, I learned the whole thing master. It took me 5 hours to read it."

"5 Hours? Okay, lets tes- HUH? You finished reading all of this in just 5 hours?" Wen Cheng was shocked. When Alex had said fast, he had thought he was talking about taking just a few days to learn the stuff, but to finish it in a few hours? That was too shocking.

"Stand up. I will test you to see if that is true." He ordered sternly. He needed to check if he was lying or not, as it was a really hard thing to believe.

Alex stopped panting and stood up with his sword at the ready. Wen Cheng internally nodded when he saw that he was using a stance from the Elusive Heavenly Sword.

"Come," He said giving permission for Alex to attack. Alex too didn't waste another second and lunged forward with his sword. Wen Cheng saw the sword coming and stepped to the side to dodge it. At the same time, he also used his own sword to make a simple yet precise attack.

Alex immediately moved his feet in such a way that his whole body twisted to barely dodge the attack. Using the same momentum, he once more twisted his body to get in another attack from the side.

Wen Cheng's eyes widened at this. 'His body has yet to properly adapt to the technique, but he himself knows what he is doing. Just a few more days of continuous practice and he will become an expert at this rate.' Wen Cheng was truly shocked seeing Alex fight.

Wen Cheng once more dodged the sword and started making his own hits faster. Alex however, was dodging every single attack that was coming his way.

The fight went on for about 5 more minutes before Wen Cheng's hits were just too fast for Alex to dodge and finally got hit. He was hit straight in the chest and sent flying into the wall.

He dropped to the ground and started coughing. Wen Cheng on the other hand had bright eyes full of admiration. "Are you okay, Yu Ming?" he asked.

He stopped coughing and answered, "Yes, master."

"Good. You have truly learned the Elusive Heavenly Sword. A few more days of it, and you can be considered a Master at it."

"So, for tonight you will go back to your room and cultivate until you are challenged by someone. However, by 9 pm tomorrow, rank up until you are.... Let's see," Wen Cheng checked something using a medallion and said, "Okay, rank up until you are at 194. The person with that badge is a realm lower than you, but since they've been here for a long time, they will probably have more fighting experience than you."

"Only after acquiring the badge 194 will I give you the other techniques. If you can't get it, I will just train you in the sword for another day. Now, Go and cultivate. It would be good if you can breakthrough within the week. The faster the better."

"Yes, Master," Alex was about to leave when he suddenly stopped. "Umm... Master, you said I should break through as fast as I can?"

"Yeah. The faster you get stronger the better." Wen Cheng simply said.

"Umm... So I can breakthrough today?" he said.

"Yes, Of course. Go back and meditate properly. Be in the best state so that you don't fail your break through," Wen Cheng said.

"Are you saying this because you don't know, Master? I thought master told you about me."

"About you? What else is there to know about you? Ma Rong just told me a few things as to what to do. Although, she did say something about me being surprised by your talent. "

"But I already have been. You being able to learn the Elusive Heavenly Sword in 5 hours was very surprising. So I don't think there is anything else left." Wen Cheng said.

Alex finally understood. Ma Rong had purposefully kept his cultivation and learning talent a secret. Wen Cheng didn't really know how talented he was in regards to cultivation. He was mistaken by his own information.

Alex chuckled a little and asked. "So, Master didn't tell you that I can breakthrough whenever I want, did she?"

Chapter 111: Selling a pill

"You can breakthrough any time you want?" Wen Cheng was a little confused. But then, he remembered something and his eyes became a little wider.

"Is it like what you did back in the southern forest? Don't you have to gather your Qi first to breakthrough?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Oh, yes. I do. But I already have enough Qi to breakthrough 4 more times if I wanted to." Alex said.

"What?" Wen Cheng shouted once more. "Is that true? They why haven't you done so already?" he asked.

"Well, that's because Master said that I should wait until my cultivation base is stabilized before I proceed any further with the breakthroughs." Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, yeah that's right. When did you last breakthrough?" he asked.

"Umm... it was the day of the auction." He replied.

"Just 2 days ago then? That's probably not enough time for you to stabilize. But after today's training, you should be close to it. Just a few more battles and you should be able to do it. Battle is one of the best ways to stabilize your cultivation after all."

"Alright, then. Let's train some more. If you have enough Qi to breakthrough so many times, then you might as well spend the rest of the night stabilizing it. You can cultivate later on during the day to get more Qi." Wen Cheng said.

'Or I can just eat some monster cores and pills. But I don't know if that has any effect on my cultivation base yet.' He thought.

They went back to fighting until the early morning and only then did they stop. Alex got a lot more understanding of the technique and was happy with the outcome. Before sunrise, Alex left the sect leader's building and disappeared.

He only reappeared when he reached near his new house and entered.

'Hmm... my Qi is depleted completely. Can I just eat a core to replenish it?' he wondered as he sat on his bed. It was too late to cultivate and he would have to log out in a while.

'Doesn't hurt to try,' he thought. He took out a random core from all the different monster cores he still had that he didn't sell. At the auction, he had only sold the corpses of the monsters that Luo Mei had given him, and he had kept the cores and materials for himself.

He put the core into his mouth and swallowed it. As soon as it entered his mouth, it turned into a creamy liquid that slid down his throat.

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body disintegrates everything>

<The monster core's element aligns with your spiritual root>

<You have gained 192,524 Qi>

'Well, at least my spiritual roots have that as an advantage. I can eat any core without worries.' He laughed a little.

However, he frowned once more. He had taken in the Qi, but it didn't fill up his body at all.

'Status' he decided to check if what he thought had truly happened.

————————

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Bone Tempering 5th Realm (350,000 Qi : 100%) [Breakthrough]

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 1,856,446

]

—————————

"Just like I thought. The Qi from the monster core added to my Qi. Urghh... I don't want to cultivate at all. I hope I passively absorb enough Qi fill myself by the time I return from my university classes."

And so he logged out. He came back after a little while and started wondering what he should do in the less than 3 hours he had before university.

"Hmm... Master said I need spirit stones for everything, right? Let's go sell some pills." He walked out of his house and went to the small market out of the sect.

It didn't even take him 10 minutes to get there, and when he did, he was surprised that the market was already busy with many people from both in and outside of the sect.

Alex walked to a shop that sold pills and asked, "Hello, do you buy pills?"

The man in the shop was surprisingly an elder from the Tiger sect. "Yes, we do. Are you here to sell one?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said as he brought out a pill bottle with a single pill inside. He had made a few pills as a warm-up before making the many different new pills and was going to sell one of those.

The pill he took out was a Common Healing pill. It was a better healing pill than a minor healing pill but not by much. The elder took the pill and put it into a tester.

Before he knew it, the fog around the glass reached up to 33% and stopped. The elder was really shocked at the pill.

"That's a nice pill you've got there. Sell it to me." A voice came from behind Alex. He turned around to see a man wearing a yellow robe with an orange lining on it.

"I don't really mind selling it to anyone in particular," Alex answered as he looked at the man more carefully. The man seemed to be in his early 20s and was in Meridian Tempering 3rd realm.

He was about the same height as Alex but was almost twice as wide. His unshaven facial hair also made him look like he was older than he actually was.

Behind him were a few inner set and outer sect disciples, who seemed to be following him. The man took out a few spirit stones from the bag and gave them to Alex.

Alex looked at the 10 spirit stones he was just given and hoping it was not what he was expecting asked, "What is this?"

"For the pill," The man said with a gentle-looking but clearly haughty smile.

Alex handed the spirit stones back to the man and said, "Thank you, but I'm not selling my pills for 10 spirit stones." He then turned to the elder and asked, "How much will you take this pill for, Elder?"

The young man was surprised at the refusal just now and started getting unreasonably angry. "How dare you turn your back on me and be disrespectful. Do you know who I am?"

Chapter 112: Prime Disciple

Alex startled at the sudden shout. He turned back to look at the man and asked, "What do you want?"

"I told you I wanted the pill and yet you deny it to me. If I say I want the pill, then I will get the pill." The arrogant man started spouting nonsense from what Alex could hear.

"Hey brother, why are you messing with brother Huo, he is the 7th elder's disciple? Just sell the pill if you don't want to be constantly challenged by everyone, every day."

"Yeah, if you don't want trouble, it's better to just sell the pill to him. He is 18th in ranking in the core disciples after all. So there is glory in selling the pills to him."

The disciples behind the young man started to fawn over the young man's ranking and privilege in the sect, while seemingly trying to pressure Alex into giving up the pill.

The young man had a smug smile on his face after hearing his lackeys announce his glorious achievements.

'Master did talk about these sorts of people. But it's still surprising I get to meet one so soon. I don't remember people in the Hong Wu sect being like this. Although, I didn't really socialize there, so maybe there are.' He thought. One thing the disciples behind the young man had said had caught his attention.

"You are a core disciple?" he asked the young man directly.

The man thought Alex had gotten scared from hearing about his achievements and simply nodded.

Alex turned to the elder and asked, "Elder, if the orange lining on his cloth means that he is a core disciple, then what does a red lining mean? Are they not a core disciple, but something else?" he asked. He wanted to learn what Luo Mei's position was in the sect.

"Ah... you must be talking about disciple Luo Mei. She is the direct disciple of the sect leader and first in ranking amongst the core disciples. She is our Prime Disciple, and thus gets to wear red linings in her robes." The elder said with a face of fondness.

"Oh, I see." Alex then asked, "So, about the pill, elder. how much will you buy it for?" He asked.

The core disciple called Huo started getting mad. He stepped forward about to shout once more when the elder suddenly looked at him. "If you are here to disturb the sect's business, then you will have to suffer the consequences, disciple Huo Tu."

Huo Tu immediately got scared and bowed to the elder a little before leaving the shop. Alex was surprised that even such a haughty disciple would get scared of the elder.

'He must've thought he could make me give the pill to him, with just the fear of his name alone. He will come for revenge later, that's for sure.'

Alex however wasn't worried about that. Disciples in the sect weren't allowed to fight. If they wanted to, they would have to set up a fight in the fighting hall. The most important part of this situation was still the badges everyone got.

Only a disciple with the lower badge can request a fight with the other disciple. So, no matter how much the Huo Tu guys wanted to kill him, as long as he was in the sect, that would be impossible.

He turned his focus back to the elder who was looking at the pill and contemplating. After a while, he said, "I can give you 24 spirit stones for this pill. I don't know where you came to find this pill, but it's really good and deserves this amount."

Alex thought for a second. While the common healing pill wasn't the best, it was at 33% harmony. Since it wasn't an auction, he thought the specific price was okay.

"Yes, elder. I would like to sell it for that amount." Alex said. The elder kept the pill and passed along 24 spirit stones to Alex.

Alex left the market and started returning back to his house when suddenly he noticed something. He sent out his spiritual sense and found out that 2 of the lackeys that followed the core disciple named Huo Tu were currently tailing him.

'What are they trying to do?' he wondered. They couldn't attack him in the open or anything. There were a ton of disciples on the path. Even If they wanted to, they were way too weak to be a challenge for him.

So he ignored them and minded his own business as he returned back to his home. Just as he was about to open the door, however, the two lackeys ran away.

"Hmm..." he was confused for a second, but immediately realized what happened afterward. "They must've wanted my badge number, haha. I would've given it to them had they just asked." Alex chuckled a bit and returned back to his room.

Now that he had nothing to do, he logged out for the day. It was Tuesday, so he had to go to his classes for the day. Around half-past 3 after he was done with his afternoon lunch and after having called his parents back home, he returned back to the game.

He felt his Qi and realized it was back to full. 'So, I only need about 8 hours to get my Qi fully back huh. Or maybe even less.' He thought.

"Might as well breakthrough right now." He clicked the [Breakthrough] button and instantly reached Bone Tempering 6th realm.

Once done, he looked up, straight ahead of him at the wooden board with all the rankings on it, and thought, "If Master said I have to get to 194 by the end of today, I should fight the others in between to get the experience, right?"

He started looking through the different names. Thankfully, the names also had simple info next to their names that said whether someone is in their house, just within the sect, or out of sect.

Out of them, Alex chose the ones that had 'Their house' as their location. In the end, he gathered a few names he would fight today.

"Alright, let's go register some fights."

Chapter 113: Challenged

After a short walk, Alex reached the sect crater and got into the line at the Fighting hall. For the first fight, he challenged someone with the 250th badge.

According to the info on the board back in his room, the person was in their home. So, he decided to wait for the person to arrive. When his number was called, he responded. Another person also responded at the same time after hearing their number. Realizing his opponent had come, Alex walked up to the stage.

Alex had decided to hide his cultivation entirely so that people wouldn't realize how strong he was, or how fast he broke through. His opponent this time was an older girl with a simple ponytail. She was shorter than him, but not by much.

Alex took out his common rank sword and got ready to fight. 'Should I show off my Elusive Heavenly Sword so early?' he wondered. He looked at the girl and realized she hadn't taken out any weapons.

He was surprised. 'Elemental techniques user or close combat fighter?' he started guessing as to how the girl fought. However, seeing as she was only at Muscle tempering 6th realm, he wasn't very worried.

As soon as the elder gave the go, the girl immediately started pouring out her Qi and created a fireball that she shot towards Alex. Alex was surprised, but that was the extent of his reaction. He immediately used Flame Mastery Scripture to control the incoming fire. It showed a little resistance but instantly obeyed his commands. So, he basically killed the flame and made it disappear.

The girl was surprised at what just happened. 'Is my opponent very strong?' she thought. She took out another fireball and threw it towards Alex. This time, however, Alex didn't destroy it. Instead, he controlled it and sent it back to her with a bigger size and higher intensity.

BOOM

The girl was hit directly in the chest and thrown the ground a few meters back. She wasn't sent out of the stage but was really close to it.

Alex was about to charge at her and push her over when she suddenly shouted, "I give up."

"Huh?" Alex nearly stumbled where he stood. He balanced himself and looked towards the elder. The elder nodded and declared the fight over.

Alex took his new badge, numbered at 250, and turned around to walk back to the fighting hall. As he was about to leave the stage, however, he heard the elder call out numbers 275 and 367.

'Hmm... is that me? Or the girl now?' he wondered. The girl was surprised and responded to the call. Alex looked at her walk up to the stage and found that her opponent was one of the lackeys from this morning.

"Hahaha, did they make a mistake? They probably didn't expect me to have won already, huh." The lackeys had only taken his house number, so they couldn't request a fight based on the person, and instead did it based on the badge. And the poor girl fell into a fight once more.

Except for this time, she wasn't so hopeless. The same thing that happened between him and the girl, happened between the girl and the poor lackey.

'Why would they target me with such a weak opponent? Is it really just to bother me?' he wondered. He thought for a moment and said, "They must be checking how strong I am. Like I will every give it them straight." He turned around and walked back to the fighting hall. However, before he could sit in a line, his badge buzzed.

"Hmm..." this was the first time he had seen the badge do anything other than unlock his doors and that wooden tv.

He sent his consciousness into the badge and realized he had a fight in Stage 42 with someone at 312th ranking. Alex sighed with disappointment as this was going to be too easy. He didn't want to waste time with such a useless fight and just reach 194th by the end of the day. But if they were to continue harassing him with the useless fights, he wouldn't have enough time to challenge all those other people.

Reluctantly, he walked over to stage 42. Once his number was called, he walked up to the stage. When his opponent came out, he sighed. 'An outer sect disciple really is too weak,' he thought. His opponent was barely at the 3rd stage of Muscle tempering. He was way too weak to be challenging him right now.

As soon as the elder gave the go, the outer sect disciple ran towards Alex with a small dagger. In response, Alex just put out his hand and used Qi manipulation. Suddenly, the outer sect disciple stopped where he was and started struggling to get out of his clutch.

Alex simply floated him up and tossed him out of the stage. The match was over. Alex took his badge back and walked down the stage.

He could hear the numerous disciples murmur as they started wondering how he did that. Alex on the other hand started realizing what he had just done.

"Urgh... I shouldn't have done that. I got a little angry and forgot you could use Qi manipulation of that order only when you are near the True realm. Whatever, I'll just say it's a technique if someone asks."

He walked back to the fighting hall and finally registered another battle with someone numbered 236. He had to wait for a while before they arrived.

"Number 250 and 234" The elder shouted.

"Here"

"Here"

Two voiced came out from the crowd. Alex walked up onto the stage and looked at his opponent. He was a generic-looking man with long hair. The man took out a weird weapon to fight with, A sickle.

Alex was surprised at first. He hadn't seen a sickle anywhere other than back at his farm. 'You can use a sickle as a weapon too? Master did say people used various weapons, but I didn't expect they would even use something this unorthodox.'

From the side, the elder working as the referee shouted, "Start".

Chapter 114: Badge Number 194

Alex was surprised at seeing the sickle, but the man was still only in the Muscle tempering realm, so he had no worries. He simply walked forward with his sword and started swinging it randomly.

He wanted to see how one would fight with a sickle in this case. The man swung his sickle in a simple manner, which Alex easily dodge. The man once more brought back the sickle the other way around, which Alex once more dodged easily.

But, on the third swing, something weird happened. Suddenly, as the man was swinging, the sickle left in hand and flew past Alex. 'Did he make a mistake?' But before Alex could even think of a reason, the sickle immediately flew back, targeting the back of his head.

Thankfully, Alex had spiritual sense so he could see what was happening even behind him. He simply ducked as the sickle was about to attack him.

The young man who caught the sickle, and the elder who was about to save him were both surprised. Alex nodded to himself, thinking he did well sending out his spiritual sense even during a fight with a weaker opponent.

He would've been badly hurt if he hadn't. The man with the sickle tried attacking some more but he didn't use any different techniques. He had a pretty simple movement technique that made him just as fast as Alex, but his damage was nowhere sufficient.

After a few bouts, Alex struck him to the ground and the match was over. Alex left the stage after taking his badge.

Over the next couple of hours, Alex fought quite a few disciples and managed to win every single one of them without using any of his techniques. He just used his superior cultivation and spiritual sense to knock down everyone.

Thankfully, he also wasn't challenged. Finally, around 8 pm, he challenged his final opponent for the day, number 194. He waited around half an hour watching the other people's fight in stage 4 before his turn came.

"Number 198 and 194," the elder shouted from stage 4. By now he had managed to defeat the 198th ranking opponent who had a cultivation base of Bone Tempering 2nd realm.

"Here," Alex shouted and waited for another voice to appear.

"Here," someone did speak, and Alex walked up to the stage.

The one who he was going to have to fight was a massive guy with a very well-built body. He was also tall and looked more like a bodybuilder than a cultivator.

'Damn, he looks even beefier than Kong Yuhan,' Alex thought. He took out his sword and got ready to fight as he checked his opponent's cultivation base.

'Bone Tempering 3rd realm? And a person who knows how to fight at that. This is going to be troublesome.' He would have to show more focus in this fight than any of the ones before this. He activated focus mode and adapted to the sudden changes to his senses.

The passage of time slowed down as the different lights from the lanterns started painting the stage in bright orange color. Alex got into his fighting stance as per the Elusive Heavenly Sword for the first time today. He couldn't afford to underestimate the fighter here.

He would also have to be careful about his damage output. Even if the opponent was a veteran fighter, he was still a 3rd ream Bone Tempering cultivator. And all of Alex's damage abilities did way more than that.

"Start," the elder shouted from the side.

Alex waited for the beefy man to come into close combat so he could fight him. But, suddenly, the man did something completely unexpected.

He started using a technique. With a move of his hands, the wind started moving at extreme speed trying to blow away Alex. The only thing Alex do was struggle through it.

'He is using techniques, and not close combat?' Alex was surprised. Alex also used the 2nd sword strike in the Elusive Heavenly Sword and fought wind with the wind. Alex however, did much more damage and destroyed his opponent's wind gust. The remaining damage went on to attack the beefy man and damage him a little.

The man started swiping his hands left and right, creating blades of wind that attacked him. Using the evasive part of his sword style, Alex dodged every single one of the wind blades the man was using.

'Does he only have wood-type spiritual root?' he wondered. His attacks were strong enough to hurt Alex if he let them hit him. The man was also only using Wood type techniques and nothing else.

Suddenly, the man places his palms on the ground. Out of nowhere, roots and vines started appearing out of the ground that targeted Alex.

Alex weaved and dodged as he started cutting every root and vine that came his way. He slowly moved forward while doing that and reached the beefy man. The man had an absolutely shocked face. He had never seen someone so efficiently destroy his Rooting Vine Technique.

The technique wasn't meant to damage, but to obstruct their movements so that other techniques could land easily. Yet, the young man in front of him had used a weird dance-like sword style to cut off all of his roots and vines and nearly reached him.

Immediately, he turned into a bunch of roots and barks as he didn't remain there any longer. That wasn't a problem for Alex however. With his spiritual sense, he could see the beefy man appear inside a cluster of roots and vines in the side. He brought his sword to the highest point above his head and swung it down.

The sword itself did nothing, but Alex secretly used Qi manipulation to throw the whole group of vines, roots, and the man outside the stage.

"Fight over," The elder shouted. Alex walked up to the elder and took the 194th badge. He walked away from the stage thinking, '194 is already so unique at fighting, what are the ones in the higher numbers like? I can't wait.'

Chapter 115: Beat up

"Hey, Brother, Wait please."

Alex was near the outer end of the crater, about to leave the place when he suddenly heard someone calling. He turned around to find out that it was the beefy man who was calling him.

"Can I do something for you?" Alex asked.

"Ah brother, I've never seen you before, are you new around here?" he asked.

"Yes, I joined not long ago," Alex simply answered waiting for the man to get to the point.

The beefy man was surprised when he did learn that Alex really was a new disciple in the sect. "Oh, brother. You are so strong after joining the sect for so little time. Can you tell me your name?" the beefy man asked.

"It's Yu Ming," Alex simply replied. "Ah, Good to see you brother. I won't stop you now. I will take my leave." The man said and left him there.

Alex frowned. Something was fishy. There was no way the beefy man came here to just converse with him. Especially after he had just been defeated by him.

'How come he is not angry or upset with me? And the more troubling part, why did he only ask for my name, yet didn't give me his own?' he decided to follow the beefy man to see where he went.

After walking back inside the sect crater for a few minutes, the beefy man openly met another man and started talking to him. Alex recognized that guy. 'The inner sect disciple, that's the lackey to that Huo Tu guy? What does he want with my na-Oh. Sh*t, this is going to be troublesome now.'

Only now did Alex realize that he had just hit himself in the foot by giving that man his name. Now, those lackeys wouldn't have to worry about his ranking, and could fight him using his name.

'Whatever, it's not like they can ever beat me. The most they can be is annoying. I will see how long they can keep being annoying.' He thought and threw the matter into some dark corner in his mind.

It was late, so instead of going to his new house 194, which he would have to search for, he directly went to the training facility at his master's place.

Somewhere along the way, he disappeared, and only appeared when he reached his destination. The door to the training facility was open, so he simply walked in there.

"Master, I'm here," he said as he walked in.

Suddenly, a girl with a pouting face appeared in front of him and started talking to him. "Junior brother, Why didn't you come to see me yet? You already joined the sect yesterday and yet I have to be the one to come find you."

Luo Mei acted as if she was angered by this. Alex smiled and said, "Hello, senior sister. I had a lot to do after joining the sect yesterday, so I couldn't come to find you. Please forgive me."

"Hmph. There is no way I'm forgiving you until I beat you to a meat pulp." She said as she waved her fist. Alex was a bit surprised at the sudden and unexpected threat.

Wen Cheng walked from the side and said, "Ah, you're finally here. Did you do what I told you to do?"

Alex reached into his bag and took out the badge numbered 194. He showed it to Wen Cheng, who nodded in satisfaction. "Good, good." Wen Cheng then reaching into his bag and pulled out a stack of books.

There were about 7 books in the stack and he handed them all to Alex. "Here you go. These are all the books I found for you. They are the best of the best we have. Learn them when possible and practice them as much as you can."

"Thank you, master," Alex bowed a little to Wen Cheng as he started to look at the books.

"Nuh Uh. You don't get to learn that now. First, we fight right now. I want to see how much you've learned of the Elusive Heavenly Sword. Also, I said I was going to beat you and I was not lying about it. Come."

Luo Mei took out her blue blade and walked to the middle of the training hall. Wen Cheng shook his head as he smiled a little. "You better do what she says Yu Ming, your senior sister gets really angry when she is mad about something."

"Master, stop talking bad about me." She shouted. We n Cheng simply laughed in response. Alex found himself unable to come up with any excuse so as to not fight, so he just took out his sword and went to the middle to fight.

As soon as both of them were ready, they started fighting. While Luo Mei did act angry, she was genuinely curious about how much he had learned.

Just prior to Alex coming here, Her master had told her that her junior brother had managed to learn the sword art overnight and she was very curious as to how much he had progressed.

After fighting for about 10 minutes, Luo Mei was absolutely shocked at how far he had come. 'Did he really just learn this sword art yesterday? How is he so good at it already?'

As she fought him more and more, she started becoming certain that telling her master about him at that time was the best choice. 'God, I thought I was already the most talented disciple of the master. However, he just overshadows us without even trying.'

After a few more minutes, Luo Mei got serious and started beating Alex all around. She used the flat side of his thin blade, but the strength of a Mind Tempering realm expert was too strong and by the time she was done, Alex was bruised all over.

"Next time, be sure to come to meet me, or you will have to train with me once more." She said and left the training hall.

Alex looked at himself and started laughing. Although she beat him all over, she only did damages that were easily healed and only hurt a lot.

Chapter 116: Fluctuating Friction Dance

Wen Cheng walked up to Alex who was still on the ground and said, "Alright, I need to talk to you about something."

Alex stood up and waited for his master to continue.

"So, I have 7 techniques here with me. Aside from one technique, all of them are heaven grade. Thankfully, you had 5 elemental spiritual roots, so I didn't have to filter through the techniques and the search didn't last for long."

"What I am thinking of doing is every day, I will give a target for you to defeat. After each time you defeat the target, I will give you one of these books. So, since you completed today's task like I said yesterday, you get a technique."

"Choose, which one do you want? There are 3 offensive techniques, 2 defensive techniques, 1 movement technique, and 1 escape technique. The escape technique is the only one that is in immortal grade, while the others are in heaven grade. So, choose," Wen Cheng really outdid whatever expectations Alex had of him.

"Master, didn't you say that I needed spirit stones for everything in the sect? How come I'm getting free stuff from you?" he asked.

"Yes, you do. In fact, these books cost spirit stones as well. Only thing is, I paid for them instead of you." Wen Cheng said.

"Aw, Master. You didn't have to do that. I could've paid for them myself." Alex said. He had a few pills he could sell, and he could've made more pills if he needed to.

"You could've paid 15 True spirit stones? Didn't you say you were broke yesterday?" Wen Cheng said with a snort.

Alex was shocked. "They cost 15 True spirit stones? Don't you rent them? Why are they so expensive?" he asked.

"These are rented for 2 weeks. As for why they are so expensive, well, our sect's gotta do something to survive. We use whatever method to get spirit stones. Most of them are from our own disciples. Some from outsiders who use our disciples for their requirements like protecting them, or helping them move cities and other stuff." Wen Cheng explained.

"Either way, we are getting out of topic. Choose one for today and get to training."

Alex thought for a bit. He didn't care about the offensive or defensive techniques for now. He only cared about the movement technique. However, the immortal grade escape technique was too good to pass on.

He racked his brains for a bit and chose the movement technique. From his reasoning, during the next day, he wouldn't get into a fight where he would have to escape from it. So, the movement technique was something that would make his life much easier.

"Alright, here you go. Read it and learn it. Shouldn't take you more than 5 hours once more right? Since it's the same grade as Elusive Heavenly Sword." Wen Cheng said.

"I will see you at around 2, and we will practice till dawn once again. I had hoped to keep you till 3, but since you can just use pills, for the most part, it's quite helpful. Okay, I'm leaving. I will see you later." Wen Cheng left with the other 6 books and left Alex with the single movement technique.

Alex looked at the book and started reading it. "Fluctuating Friction Dance. Use your Qi on your entire body to remove or add friction to your movements. Helps one move and stop as required. Doesn't have any elemental alignment, so anyone can learn it.

"Hmm... Friction? That's a very unique thing for a technique. So, it's like increasing and decreasing my resistance to the surrounding? How fast can I get by just removing some friction?"

He read the whole book and didn't have to stop to practice mid-read like he had yesterday. After a few minutes of reading, he got the notification.

<Congratulations, You have learned [Fluctuating Friction Dance]>

"Okay, let's test this out." He started moving his Qi around his body. Some of the Qi started to leak from all over his body, while most of it ended up in his legs where it strengthened them. He willed the Qi to make his immediate surroundings frictionless and moved forward.

His legs were now too strong and he moved at an incredible speed due to the lack of friction. As such, the room wasn't large enough for his first maneuver

BANG

"Ow," Alex screamed as he hit the wall. His already hurting body hurt even more. "God, that hurts." He looked around the room and wondered if it would be large enough for him to train in.

"Alright, let's not remove all of the friction, I will need some to control myself." He once again started channeling his Qi around his body as he coated himself in Qi, removing most of the friction around himself. However, he didn't send as much Qi into his leg and only increased the strength by about half as much as last time.

He prepared himself and dashed forward. He was still quite fast, but not as fast as he was previously. So, when he reached the end of the hall, he managed to easily stop himself by removing the Qi around him.

'Hmm... what if I increased the friction at the end of the run?' He decided to try once again. He removed his friction, strengthened his legs, and dashed.

He smoothly ran forward and just before he was about to reach the end, he increased his friction. Abruptly, his speed decreased at once and he came to a stop at once. The Qi formed a soft blanket that stopped him from moving forward and cushioned his abrupt stop.

Over the next couple of hours, he started testing different ways to use the movement technique and started getting good at it. Unlike Elusive Heavenly Sword which was focused on one's body, Fluctuating Friction Dance required Qi, so it took him a while to properly learn it.

By 2 am, however, he had made quite a bit of progress in using the movement technique.

Chapter 117: The Man in the Mansion

Alex had lost all of his Qi by now. He was sitting on the floor, waiting for his master to come back. Within a few minutes after it was 2 am, his master finally arrived.

"Did you learn the book already?" his master asked.

"Yes, Master. I'm done." He replied.

Wen Cheng had no problem believing him. "Okay, stand up. It's time we train again. I won't go as easy as last time today."

Over the next 4 hours, they trained until the morning and only stopped when the sun started to rise. "Alright, that's enough for today. I see you've already broken through so you won't have to for another day."

" For today, I suggest you fight until the badge number 184. Although that's not that much of a higher number, starting now, the opponents will be harder and harder to fight for you. After you get the 184th badge, I will give you the next technique."

"Okay, master." Alex nodded and left the training hall. He went back to his room and logged out.

* * * * * * * * * *

Somewhere else in the real world,

Outside of a giant door, a girl was sitting in the hallway, twirling her bangs along her face, clearly bored. She was wearing a blue dress and had a red bag with her. Her cute face looked cuter as she pouted. She had to wait outside the door for so long, and she didn't like that.

Another hour passed and the girl was still there, waiting for the door to open. Suddenly, the lock to the door opened and a middle-aged man in a white robe walked out.

He had no beard or mustache on his face and his long hair was tied in a ponytail behind him. He looked a little weak, almost as if he hadn't gotten sleep for the last few days.

"Hmm..." he noticed the girl in front of his door who was looking at him with a pout on her face. " Oh, Hao Ya, how long have you been waiting here?" he asked.

The girl was called Hao Ya. She was the same Hao that the president of the Deva corporation practically worshiped as his benefactor. While she had a haughty face and attitude around others, in front of this man, she was a little child pouting because he took too long to leave his room.

"What took you so long? I have been waiting here forever." She said in an angry voice.

The man laughed a little and said, "Ah, it took me longer than I had assumed it would. I was giving some final touches to the new items and I lost track of time."

The girl took out a stack of papers. "Here you go. You asked for these, didn't you?" she said as she handed the stack of paper to the man.

"These are?" he looked at the stack of papers with a look of confusion.

"The records from Deva Corp., for the last month and a half." Hao Ya said.

A light shined in the tired eyes of the man. He started flipping through the pages and reading the assessments written there.

"Have you read these?" he asked the girl.

"Yes," she nodded.

"And?"

"And what?" she asked.

"How are they? Is there anyone with any good talents? Is anyone worth recruiting?" he asked.

"From what I saw, there are a few that are definitely worth it. There are a few that are close to becoming saints and some more in the True Emperor realm. However, the highest one that has revealed himself right now only has a True King realm. I do not know who these other people are."

The man thought for a second and said in a stern voice, "We do not want any of these people who broke through to the True Lord realm or higher. Let's look for better ones. How many of them died by now?"

"Around 30% of these people have died by now." The girl replied.

The man shook his head after hearing this. "The ones that have died are useless now. They can't progress any further."

"Is nobody else bragging about their body or talent? I worked so hard to make a reading of someone's talent possible. At least someone must have a really good talent right?" he asked.

"Well, there are. See here," she turned the records to a different page and said, "According to this, there are about 10 different individuals with God Grade talent, around 50 with Ancient Grade talents, and 500 with Divine grade talents. Although 30% of these have died as well, and we have no way of telling who."

"Oh, and what about bodies? Any special bodies?" The man didn't want to read the whole thing so he instead just asked the girl.

"From what I saw, there is someone special. Someone had an Ancient Grade body, but the name isn't recorded here. There are also a few divine-grade bodies and quite a few immortal-grade bodies. But as I said, quite a few of them died, so I don't know how many of those remaining."

The man got solemn and turned the record's page. After a while, he said, "Go back to the Deva Corp and tell them that I have finished making the sleeping artifacts and that they can come to get it. That should help us gather a more accurate result than just that helm artifact."

"Yes, master," the Hao girl nodded and left. The man kept looking at the different pages of records until he came across a certain piece of information.

"Hmm... it's gone? The god grade technique is gone?" he flipped the pages to see if there was any more info about it. "Who got it? But the technique is only supposed to go to someone with-Ahh, I see. " The man said with a face of understanding

"So finally, someone has come along with those spiritual roots, huh. Hopefully, they haven't died by now and we can once again see the glory of the technique paired together with those spiritual roots." The man's eyes started trembling in hope and anticipation.

"Will another god be born again?"

Chapter 118: Capsules

It was 3 am in the morning. Alex was still training with Wen Cheng. He had just finished learning another new technique a few hours earlier and had exhausted his Qi training on it.

"Alright, let's stop here for today." Wen Cheng said as he casually blocked one of Alex's sword thrusts. Alex stumbled a little but came to a stop easily.

"Huh?" Alex looked at the clock in his vision and asked, "But it's only been 3 am, Master. Aren't we going to fight until sunrise? Do you need to go anywhere?"

"No. We have an important job today. Around noon, I want you to come back here with a different face. Do you have a face-changing pill?" he asked.

'A different face?' Alex got confused. Still, he answered his master.

"Yes, master. I have one." He said as he took out a Face Changing pill that he had made recently. Half of the pills he made for registering ended up with an extra pill. This was one of them. It was a 38% harmony Face Changing pill that could change a person's face for 38 hours.

"Good. I won't have to give you one then. Alright, at noon, come here with a different face. I, along with a few elders will take you deeper into the southern jungle, where you can find more alchemy ingredients."

Wen Cheng had arranged an expedition along with a few elders to take Alex to find more ingredients. He was hoping he would find a Spirit Cleansing Lily so that he too could unlock spiritual sense just like his disciple, Luo Mei.

"I understand, Master," Alex said. Wen Cheng handed him a small paper slip and Alex left the training hall. He disappeared after getting outside and made his way back to his house in the darkness of the night.

It didn't take him long to find his house numbered 168. During the last 3 days, he had managed to obtain badge 168. He walked into the house and sat on the unfamiliar, yet familiar bed. All the houses in the sect were designed according to the 3 ranks.

Outer sect disciple's houses were all the same. They had multiple rooms in one house and up to 5 disciples could live there at once.

The inner sect disciple's houses were simple, yet elegant. It had a single room, yet it gave the disciples peace and quiet while cultivating.

As for the core disciples, they had houses with courtyards, not unlike what Alex had back in the Hong Wu Sect. He had seen how good his senior sister's house looked when he had gone there to visit her.

He was now at Bone Tempering 8th realm as he had just broken through last night before training. He needed to be ready for the expedition at noon so he started cultivating. As usual, he lost his consciousness and ended up cultivating till the morning.

Once again, early in the morning, between 6 am and 7 am, he woke up. He directly logged out and went to get some breakfast along with the other 3 people.

"Hey, Alex. I need to talk to you about something." Eric said in the cafeteria.

"Sure, go ahead. What do you want to talk about." Alex was surprised he even brought up anything. Ever since he had gotten here, they only ever focused on playing Eternal Cultivation. They never really talked about anything outside of it. To think Eric would be so serious about it, he wondered what it could be.

"Umm.... You see, I will need to get that helmet back from you." Eric said. Alex was shocked. He hadn't expected the topic in question to be about giving him back his helmet.

'I already have the money, so I should just buy another one by now. I should stop being so lazy.' He thought.

"Okay. Do you want me to return it to you today?" Alex asked.

"Oh no. You can keep it for a few more days. I need that helmet back when the capsules are released," Eric said.

"Huh? Capsule? What's that?" Alex asked in confusion.

"Have you not heard the news? Deva Corp is coming up with capsules that you can sleep inside while playing the game. Apparently, they are much better than the helmet," said Eric. "Apparently, you can sell your helmets and get a discount for the capsule. That was why I wanted it. You can give it to me back on the day the capsules are sold."

"Oh. Do you by any chance happen to know when the capsules are going to be sold? Also at what price they are going to be sold?" Alex asked.

"Hmm... I think they said in around 3 weeks or so. I don't think they have a specific date set as a selling day. As for the price, they've given us a range between 300 to 500 dollars after a helmet has been returned. Without the discount, should be around 800 to 1000 dollars," said Eric.

Alex was stunned at how high the price was but shook his head as he remembered that he could afford such money now. 'Although, I will have to earn some more money somehow. After I get the ingredients back today, I should make a lot of pills on the upcoming Sunday and sell them at the auction once more.'

While he had about $25 thousand in the bank right now, that wouldn't be enough for him at all. He could tell that. If he ever was in desperate need of spirit stones, he needed money in the bank for a quick transfer.

'I guess I will care about it when the time comes. Let's just go gather some ingredients for today. It's been nearly 3 weeks since I went hunting in the southern forest. Master says we are going even deeper now. I wonder where we will be going this time. It should be further in than where my senior sister took me to. I'm getting kinda excited now.'

He and the other boys returned back to the room and logged back into the game.

Chapter 119: Leaving with master

Alex logged back into the game at half-past 10. He had decided to sell another few pills at the market in front of the gate and had gotten 45 spirit stones from that sale. He had then decided to tour around the sect and look at more of the locations.

He had gone around the sect crater and looked at the different fights that were already taking place. He had once again seen that black stele, but this time he was too afraid to do anything and had simply left.

After logging out to get his lunch, he had logged back in once again. He waited for a while and only then ate the Face Changing pill. The pill entered his body and started to dissolve. Thick energy streamed out from his stomach reaching every corner of his body as he felt himself getting melted from inside out.

However, it didn't hurt at all. In fact, he felt like he could influence these melted portions. He started to think of a face to change to. The only face he knew was his own. So, his body slowly morphed into what his real-life mirrored version would look like.

His hair shriveled and shortened itself and his eyes changed color. His face started to slowly change as well. Other than that, there was no change to him. But, this was still enough to make him unrecognizable to the rest of the people.

He walked out of the house after checking that there was no one around to see him leave this exact house. He walked in broad daylight up to the sect leader's building.

Funnily enough, nobody was here to care about this at all. Most of the people were down at the sect crater fighting, as it was Friday today with unlimited challenges.

Alex had come to learn that having a higher badge gave you many benefits in the sect. Everything in the sect needed to be bought with real money. From time in the training hall or a room in the production hall. Or even the techniques in the Library. If one wanted them, they would have to pay a certain price.

But with badges, the higher the badge, the more discount they got. The badges also set an order on who gets what first. If 5 people were waiting for the same technique in the library to be returned, when it did get returned, the one with the highest badge would be allowed to get it.

Sometimes, the disciples with lower badges took forever to get a single technique. So they always looked forward to having a higher numbered badge as it meant life would be better in the sect.

The one thing that Alex found odd regarding the Tiger sect was that the disciples didn't get any form of help to start on their journey. Unlike how Hong Wu Sect gave its disciple's spirit stones and pills monthly, the Tiger sect did nothing of that sort. Every disciple was on their own.

This was also the reason why outer sect disciples and inner sect disciples went around following core disciples just so that they could give them something that would help them. It may be weapons, or techniques, or spirit stones, or even simply just the threat of their name. The disciples could use any of these things to go higher in rank.

'Did that Huo Tu guy think I would do anything for money? Or was he legitimately expecting me to get scared and give him that pill for 10 spirit stones?' he wondered.

He finally reached the sect leader's building. He had never walked in here before. Since he was asked to come secretly every night, he had always sneaked around the side instead of walking through the main hall.

He walked in through the hall and came out of the other side. He saw a few people standing around there. Aside from his master, there were 5 people standing in a group, talking to each other.

Wen Cheng saw him walking towards the group and looked at him with a confused face.

'He doesn't recognize me.' Alex chuckled to himself learning that. He walked straight to his master and bowed down to make a greeting.

"Good Afternoon, Master." As soon as he said that, a light flashed in Wen Cheng's eyes as he realized what was happening.

"Yu Ming, you are finally here. Come here, let me introduce you to the elders."

There were 2 female elders and 3 male elders in the group. Wen Cheng introduced Alex to them all. Wen Cheng unhesitatingly introduced Alex as his disciple as well. Now that nobody could see his face, he didn't care about hiding his relationship.

"Alright, let's leave. We need to reach there as soon as we can. We only have a day's worth of time. My disciple will be the one doing all the ingredients picking, so we old guys are there to protect him only."

Wen Cheng started flying simply and pulled Alex along with him. Unlike Ma Rong, he didn't care about having an artifact when flying. The high speed and the air hitting his face finally made him understand how fun flying really was.

While the speed of their flying wasn't as fast as when he was in Ma Rong's boat, it was still significantly fast. Alex knew that his master could go faster. Maybe even faster than Ma Rong could, but he didn't. Only because doing so would harm Alex.

"Where exactly are we going master?" he finally asked about the destination. While he knew they were going further into the southern forest, it seemed like his master and the elders had a destination in mind.

"Our records speak of a sacred land that we used to have. But ever since the war, most of the records were lost, and we never learned what this sacred land was. In search of the said sacred land, we found a special place in the southern forest that has a lot of different vegetation, no different from the alchemy gardens of Hong Wu Sect."

"We are going there right now."

Chapter 120: War and Records

"As many ingredients as the alchemy gardens?" Alex was shocked. If that was true, then there would be more than a mountain of ingredients there.

"Have you been to the alchemy gardens before, master?" Alex couldn't help but ask.

"Not, really," said Wen Cheng. "I've only ever seen it from afar. But even then I can tell that the place we are going to has as much alchemy ingredients as the alchemy gardens."

Wen Cheng seemed to be confident in his assessment, so all Alex could do was wait.

"By the way, master. What did you mean by war? Was there a war in the crimson empire?" he asked. To him, war was something that took place ages ago where one country would attack another country.

"No, not the empire. War in the sect. Although it might be better to call it infighting, it was too big to be called something so simple. So, we just call it the war. It's appropriate since more than 4000, 80% of the sect members at that time died in that war." Wen Cheng seemed to be getting a little emotional saying that.

"Were you there master?" he asked.

"Yes. I was but an inner sect disciple at the time. I bore witness to the death and destruction in the sect. Elders of two factions, fighting each other, each dying to the other's hands." Wen Cheng didn't seem to like remembering about the past.

"What was the cause of the war master?" Alex asked. He was getting interested in the history of the sect he joined.

"The 2nd Elder at that time was a powerful, but greedy man that wanted the sect all to himself. However, he couldn't beat the sect leader who was much stronger than him at the time. So, the 2nd Elder was never able to become the Sect Leader."

"Until one day, when the sect leader returned back to the sect from an outside visit, all bloody and weak. The 2nd Elder took the chance to launch a rebellion against the sect master."

"The ones that believed in the 2nd elder fought against the ones that defended the sect leader. It was an all-out war that resulted in huge destruction." Wen Cheng said.

"Was that what made the giant crater in the sect?" Alex asked.

"Crater? No. We still don't know what the crater was since most if not all records were lost. Although we do believe it was the black stele, We are not sure, however."

"The destruction I was talking about was more so the buildings and the lives we lost that day. Plus, we lost most of our history and records that day. It was truly a devastating event." Wen Cheng shook his head as he remembered more.

"Did the sect leader or the 2nd Elder die?" he asked.

"The sect leader died, unfortunately. His wound was just too severe. The 2nd elder was also heavily injured and was sent away to the southern forest at the time. We can only assume he died a few weeks later."

"It was actually at that time we came up with the idea." Wen Cheng said with a smile. "We made the rules on how sect leaders were chosen in the sect from that point forward."

" Do you know how sect leaders are chosen in the Tiger sect?" he asked Alex.

"No?" He wondered if this was common knowledge that everyone knew about.

"In the Tiger sect, the sect leader is based on the ranking of their respective students. The person whose student is the prime disciple gets to be the sect leader. As such, I have been a sect leader for nearly 10 years now." Wen Cheng said.

"hmm... Is it okay as long as it's a disciple? no other requirements?" Alex asked.

"Oh, no. The disciples must be below the age of 25, and not in the True realm yet. For now, your senior sister is the prime disciple, so I will be a sect leader for a little while more."

Alex thought and asked, "And what about after senior sister has crossed those limitations? Do you leave the sect leader's position?"

"Yes, that is how the sect works now. All I can do is rear another disciple to the same strength and hope they are the strongest. Otherwise, the first elder becomes the sect leader, while I turn to whatever rank my newest disciple is among the other elder's disciples."

"Oh..." Alex fell into contemplation after having been dumped such a huge amount of information on. He tried processing all he had just heard and thought of something.

"What is the Sacred land you talked about master?" he had remembered Wen Cheng saying the Sacred Land as they had been searching when they found this mysterious place.

"I don't know either," Wen Cheng said. "If we still had the records from the old times I could tell you, but we don't. Most of our history and information was lost during the war and no one knows what had happened in the sect before the war. All of the elders died so we don't even have hearsay."

"However, there are 2 pieces of information that we managed to find from what records still remained."

"The first information we have is that the Tiger sect actually moved to the current location around 150 years ago or so. We don't know where the Tiger sect was situated before it was shifted to the new location. Only that it was near the Sacred Land"

"The second thing is that the elders and disciples of that time didn't dare step in the sacred land. We can only assume that it was holy to them by what it was called. The records say the sacred land looked over a great landscape of blue, but we haven't found a river or lake matching this description yet."

"I will be honest. I don't know if you can even call those records trustworthy. We don't know how much of it is true and how much of it is just something we misunderstood. So you better take these with a bit of doubt in your heart." Wen Cheng explained a lot.

"I understand Master" Alex nodded seriously.

Chapter 121: Fog

Alex found himself unable to come up with any other topics to talk about at the moment so he decided to stay quiet. The rest of the journey was filled with nothing but the sound of wind hitting their ears.

Alex just took in the feeling of flying, something that was impossible to do in real life, and got happy. It took them about 2 hours just to fly to their destination.

Not only was the destination deep into the southern forest, but it was also far away from the scarlet city, so they had to take a much longer path than what others would have.

"Here we are," said Wen Cheng as he looked ahead.

Alex stuck out his neck to the side to see what was in front. To his shock, in the middle of the unending forest, there was a massive area filled with fog that was very unusual for the forest.

'Why is there fog in the middle? Is there a body of water nearby?' he wondered.

As he got near, however, his body shook. 'This!!' he was truly shocked this time. The fog he was seeing in front of him, wasn't actually a fog made out of water vapor. It was actually a fog made up of purely Qi.

'How much Qi will I be able to gather if I cultivate here?' he wondered. Just before they reached the fog, however, the group of 7 dropped to the ground.

"This is the place I talked about, Yu Ming. Ahead is a land filled with Qi, so the vegetation that grows here should be mostly alchemy ingredients. I as well as a few other elders come here once in a while to gather some ingredients, but we don't have a lot of knowledge about the ingredients, so we only take what we know is an ingredient and leave the rest to grow. "

"Thankfully, people don't visit the southern forest a lot, and this location is very unknown." Wen Cheng said. He took out a handful of empty storage bags and handed it to Alex.

"Take these bags. You will go inside to collect the ingredients. This area is safe, so you don't have to worry about monsters here at all. I don't know how long it will take you, but just go at your own pace. Us elders will go around the fog to protect you from monsters just in case they come from the outside."

"Still, if there are some inside, your escape technique should be enough for you."

"Alright, go now and gather everything you can. At least fill all of these storage bags, you should be able to do that, right?" Wen Cheng answered.

"If there are indeed ingredients inside, then that should be no problem," Alex said.

"Alright, go and do your task. We will do ours."

Wen Cheng said as he gestured for Alex to leave. The other elders also started to walk around the fog to the other side of the special place.

Alex walked just a little bit into the fog and he felt like he was getting cleaned with all the Qi. As they touched his body, he realized that it wasn't just normal Qi.

The Qi was a mixture of different elemental Qi. He could feel all of the different elements in the air. He really wanted to cultivate right now, but he didn't. He needed to get to work right now.

He made sure he had enough storage bags to fill up all of these ingredients. Other than the 5 his master had given him, he also had a few storage bags himself. Due to always having to store so many ingredients and monster corpses, he had gotten quite a few when he had the time.

"Oh, what's this?" he thought curiously when he found a talisman inside one of his storage bags. "hmm... oh, this is the paper slip master gave me yesterday. I can't believe I completely forgot to read it," he thought.

-There are spirit cleansing lilies inside. If you do pick them up, do not let the elders know about it. Tell them you weren't confident about it and left it behind. They shouldn't be able to tell the difference between the ones left behind. -

"Oh!" Alex's eyes started shining when he realized spirit cleansing lilies inside. "So, they aren't as rare as I thought... or this place is something special."

"Did master make himself and the elders purposefully stay outside so that they don't see me pick up the lilies? I don't see another reason why." Alex thought as he looked in the surrounding.

He sent out his spiritual sense to the max without overstraining himself. The limit for that was still 20 meters. He then activated his Immortal Concealing technique and used the Veiled light technique to completely hide his body and aura.

After that, he got to work. He didn't even care what any of the ingredients were. As long as he knew them, he picked them up. Leaves, fruit, flower, root, vine, bark, thorns, stalks, stem, branch. Whatever he could find, he would pick it up.

He felt the energies the ingredients gave off and wondered, "That's quite a bit of energy. Are these about 100 years old?"

While he still wasn't experienced enough to tell the age accurately, he could vaguely guess how old an ingredient was based on their concentration of energy. And he was sure these were some of the oldest ingredients he had come into contact with. Even the alchemy gardens in Hong Wu sects which were about 70-80 years old didn't have ingredients with energies this thick.

He kept gathering many ingredients and came across many that he could even use himself. However, the best part about this was that most of the ingredients here were for pills that used True Qi. He knew about 40 different types of True rank pill recipes, and out of them, he had found about 25 main ingredients and a lot of other secondary and tertiary recipes.

This place was a treasure trove of ingredients and he was enjoying every single minute he was in here.

Chapter 122: A Tiresome Task

"Has master never been to the alchemy gardens of Hong Wu Sect?" Alex wondered as he looked at the time on the clock. It had been 3 pm already. He had been working for the last hour and he wasn't even close to clearing a fourth of this garden.

This was after having continuously used his spiritual sense and Qi manipulation at Bone tempering the 8th realm. By now he had made enough pills and also worked at the alchemy garden long enough, where even diverting his attention into 10 different things at once was considerably easy for him.

"Can I log out here? I hope there is no problem with that." Alex needed to log out to get some food but was worried at the consequences of leaving in such an open area.

He knew that his body didn't disappear when he logged out, so it was imperative he was in a safe spot when he logged out.

"Urghh... Whatever. Master and the elders are looking after me. All I can do now is hope that I don't end up losing my concealment techniques when I log out. If I can keep them active, that would be great." Saying that he logged out.

After a few minutes, he logged back in. He looked at himself and was surprised.

"Oh, wow. It's still active. So, we can log out and still have our techniques running? Wait, what about normal cultivation? Can I do that too?" Alex got unusually excited when he found that out. Only for it to excruciatingly disappear when he realized.

"I fall asleep when I cultivate, So I can't log out." He facepalmed when he remembered such a simple fact. "I can't believe I forgot about that."

After a few more seconds of self embarrassment, he got back to work. There were a lot more ingredients to gather and the time was short.

He walked around the place with his spiritual sense noticing all the ingredients and his Qi picking them all up.

"Man, there are so many ingredients here. It's like the alchemy gardens if it were left alone for a hundred years." He thought. Although one thing was confusing him still.

"Where is all of this Qi coming from though. Is the valley special? Does it have something that makes it special?" this was all he could think of as he collected the different ingredients.

About 2 hours later, he finally found a big group of Spirit Cleansing lilies. There were at least 10 flower beds in there, ready to be picked. Alex was both nervous and overjoyed at the view.

He didn't dare let himself pick them up using Qi manipulation. He went where they were and hand-picked them. After he was done picking them, he kept them in his own storage bag.

Once he was done, he was about to continue when he noticed something.

"What is that?" the thing he noticed wasn't with his vision, but with his spiritual sense. And the place he noticed wasn't around him, but rather below him.

A few meters ahead of him, there was a giant hole in the underground. It was probably more appropriate to call it a tunnel. The tunnel was about 5 meters in width and went on as far as he could sense.

He decided not to worry about what that was for now and continued with the ingredients.

It was 7 pm by the time he was done with 3 fourths of the place. 4 of the 5 storage bags his master gave him were already full and the 5 one was on its way to get full as well.

"I guess I will just keep the rest in mine," he thought. After that, he logged out. Coming back about half an hour later, he was truly surprised to see his concealment techniques still active.

"Well, even if I can't cultivate, I can at least hide in open areas and won't have to look for a safe space when I log out now."

He went on to collect the last portions of the ingredients that were still remaining. After completely collecting them all within the next 2 hours, he decided to go back to his master.

As he was walking back, however, he once more came across those tunnels in the ground.

"These are in a different location from the previous one. Did someone dig them out? Or is this something like a plot hole that occurred on its own?"

The mystery was now too much for him to ignore. "Let me go and check," he said as he disappeared right where he was standing. He reappeared in the tunnel underground.

"I love teleporting like that," he said to himself. He started walking around the tunnel trying to learn how it was made.

"Everything is so circular. Doesn't look like it's something natural. Has to be something made by someone right?" he wondered. As he was walking, he came across something weird stuck on the ground.

It was a metal rod with some sort of weird markings on them. At the end of the rod was a triangular piece of... something that looked like a mixture of paper and cloth was attached.

"That's definitely man-made," he thought and picked it up. He kept on walking through the tunnel and found other metal rods just like this. These thin metal rods were numerous in numbers and were all over the place.

After gathering exactly 24 of these metal rods, he felt something change in the surrounding. It was almost like... the Qi that was gathered in the area was leaving.

"Was this what was causing the Qi to gather here?" he wondered as he looked at the metal rod. He tried recalling anything he had heard about these metal rods and finally realized. "Wait, these are formation flags, aren't they? That means the Qi gathering here was a result of formations as well."

He felt like he had discovered something really mysterious. As he walked, he decided to leave but kept walking just a little further.

It was then that he noticed something in the distance.

Chapter 123: Worm

'Hmm... what's that?' he walked a little further and saw the object in full clarity. He was expecting to see something that had to do with the formation that was laid down, but instead, it was a corpse.

And a very old one at that. The corpse's flesh had mostly rotted away, and all that was left was the skeleton. The clothes were also in tatters and the skeleton itself was pressed to the side of the tunnel.

"Was he buried here and only showed up when someone opened this tunnel? Or was he already here and whatever opened the tunnel pushed him to the side?" he wondered.

He walked closer to the corpse and looked at it. He didn't feel any disgust or awfulness when he looked at it. Instead, all he felt was sorry for the poor guy.

"Hmm..." he noticed a small slip of talisman on his hand. "What is that?" he wondered as he picked it out. He tried to read and see what it was but realized very soon that it wasn't a records talisman. It was a talisman that did something. As for what a dying man would've wanted to do, he was not sure.

He checked the corpse a little further and found 2 storage bags on him. One of the bags had a bunch of talismans that he guessed were similar to what he was holding. The second bag, however, surprised him. The second bag had plenty of wooden boxes. When he tried to penetrate his spiritual sense into the boxes, he realized that they were all actually full of Alchemy materials.

"Using Jade or Wooden boxes to protect the energy of the ingredients from diffusing is generally helpful, but I've never done it so myself since I use the ingredients pretty much instantly. It's nice to finally see someone do that for its correct cause."

He then looked up at the corpse and thought, "so this person was an alchemist?" suddenly, the ground started shaking.

"What's happening?" he got a little scared. The shaking got larger and larger until he was a giant worm come his way. The worm was quite slow, but it covered the whole tunnel, almost as if it was the one that made all of the tunnels.

Alex was still in his concealed form, so he didn't worry about the worm, but the aura the worm sent out was stronger than anything he had sensed yet. Not even either of his masters was as strong as this worm. That did scare him well.

Suddenly, the worm turned towards him. 'Can it see me?' Alex was surprised and his fear of the worm started to rise. But then, he saw that the worm had no eyes. In the first place, it shouldn't have been able to see him anyway since he was invisible.

"Unless... " a bad premonition appeared in his head. Suddenly, he rotated his Qi, until it came to his head and all the surrounding area started to light up. The worm sped up so fast towards him, that he almost fumbled. But at the last second, he managed to use Flickering Shadow to leave the underground and come back outside.

"Huff Huff... So, that thing was actually looking towards me through its sense of smell huh," he thought.

He watched the worm dance around searching for him, but since he was no longer there, it couldn't find him anymore. The worm then went away opposite to the direction it came from.

Finally, he looked up at him current surrounding. He saw that while the vegetation was still there, there were no more fogs in the surrounding. 'Is it because I took out those formation flags?' he wondered.

Now that the elder was probably searching for him, he deactivated his concealing technique and stopped using his invisibility.

He walked a little forward and saw an elder hurriedly coming his way. "Disciple are you alright?" he asked worriedly. The elder then immediately called the rest of the elders and sect leader.

"Yes, I am fine, elder." Alex simply answered." Wen Cheng looked at his disheveled state and asked, "What happened? Did you manage to get all of the ingredients in there?"

"Aside from a few, I managed to get all," Alex said as he handed 4 full bags and 1 three-quarter full bag. The elders also got in close to look at the ingredients.

Wen Cheng sighed and asked, "You didn't get any Spirit Cleansing Lilies, did you?"

"No, master. Those are impossible; even for me." Alex said while shaking his head. "Alright then, let's return."

Wen Cheng flew off and took Alex along with him. It took them about 2 hours again to return back to the sect. They all landed in the sect leader's backyard.

"Alright, as previously mentioned, my disciple gets half of the ingredients. Do any of you oppose this?" Wen Cheng asked. Nobody there spoke a word of opposition. So, Wen Cheng took out an empty storage bag and filled it a bit. He then handed Alex 2 and nearly half full storage bags.

Alex was surprised. 'Why did master not give me the empty bag back in the special place? Did he intentionally do that?'

The elders took their portions and left without hesitation. Only after seeing the elders leave did Wen Cheng let out a big sigh. "While they are helpful, we are all fighting for the sect leader's position. So nobody wants to give the others a chance to one-up them. If I tried to openly help you, they would shut me down without question."

Alex finally understood. He took out 3 flowers from his bag and handed them to his master. "These should be enough, right master?" he asked.

"So you can get them. Little Mei wasn't lying. Oh god, I was so worried you couldn't do it. Good. Good. You keep one and try to unlock your spiritual sense as well." Wen Cheng said as he handed one back to Alex.

Alex felt warm seeing his master treat him so nicely. "Keep it, master, I already have some more." He said as he took out a few more of the Spirit Cleansing lilies.

"Alright. Go back to your house now. And unlock your spiritual sense." Wen Cheng said and sent him back during the night.

Chapter 124: Lucky

Alex walked back to his home in the dark. He quietly entered the home numbered 168. Thankfully, his master had registered him as someone who had left the sect, or else he would have lost his home today and would have to go somewhere in the outer sect to live.

He went on to stay in the bed and finally started to think about what had happened today. All those ingredients, the tunnels, the corpse, and the worm.

He took out 6 different bags from within him. After the 5 original bags were filled to the brim, he had used his own bags to collect them. As such, out of everyone today, he had got the most profit.

"This was way beneficial than the 3 days of break I took to gather ingredients in the southern forest."

He thought back to the day and shuddered as he remembered the worm again. "Just what was that? What cultivation was it to make me feel so physically scared?" he wondered. Due to the suddenness of the situation, he hadn't managed to look at the name of the worm or its cultivation.

"I doubt it would've worked. It would've probably said Mortal like it does for all beings with high cultivation base." He decided to not think about that for now and instead looked at the 2 storage bags he had gotten from the corpse.

One of them was full of talismans that he thought did something like that one talisman he was holding. The others had a bunch of ingredients in them.

He looked through the ingredients, and while he recognized all of them, barely any of them were useful for the pills he knew about. "That's odd. I have seen some ingredients that didn't align to a recipe, but not so many at once." He started wondering what other recipes might be out there that used these ingredients. And for them to behold on to using a wooden box, the owner really must've been worried about losing its energy.

He kept the bag and looked at the next one. He had already kept the original talisman the corpse was holding in his other bag, so this bag only had the other ones.

"Let's see what they are about." He took out a single talisman and tried to see what sort of ability it could have or if he could even find that out without trying.

However, when he used his spiritual sense to look at it, he realized something different. The talismans were recording talismans, unlike the other one.

"Hmm... it's a recipe?" he was shocked. The talisman was actually a recipe. He quickly read it all, and suddenly.

<Congratulation. You have learned the recipe for 'Heaven Profound Pill'>

Heaven Profound pill, according to the recipe, was a pill that helped people breakthrough from the True realm to the Saint realm. The most amazing thing about this pill was that it was actually a Saint Rank pill.

"What? A Saint rank pill's recipe?" he was stunned. He quickly started reading the other talismans. Almost all of the talismans were recording talismans, which had one of two things.

It either recorded a pill recipe or formation blueprints. "Was the one who set the formations in that place this guy?" Alex wondered.

He read through all of the talismans in about 2 hours of time. There was truly a lot of them. Unfortunately, only a handful of the talismans were Saint Rank pills. Still, getting to learn 8 Saint Rank pill recipes and over a hundred True Pills recipes was a chance that would rarely ever come by.

He also remembered about 20 different formation blueprints. But since he had no idea how formations worked, he didn't understand a single thing. Not that he wanted to.

He looked at the time and realized it was 2 am. He decided to cultivate for the rest of the night, when he suddenly realized, his face was still the same as when he ate that pill.

'How do I stop this effect?' he wondered. There weren't any abilities that canceled the pill's effect. He calculated the time and realized that his face would change back at around 4 am in the morning tomorrow. So, he still had over an entire day to go.

'Whatever,' he thought and simply started cultivating. Before he knew it, he was already in a trance state, falling unconscious due to the cultivation.

Early in the morning, a little past 6 am, Alex opened his eyes. He logged out to have his breakfast. As he got out, he saw a notification on his phone. It was from his cousin Hannah.

They hadn't met in a couple of weeks, so she wanted to take him to an amusement park today.

"An amusement park huh. I wonder how different it is from the fairs in the countryside," Alex thought out loud. The time set for the amusement park was around 11 am, so he could only go back to the game for 3 hours at most.

He went to have his breakfast and returned back to his room. While his other 3 roommates went back to the game, he had nothing to do in the game this morning, so he decided not to.

"Guess I won't do anything for this morning then." He went back to bed and tried to sleep, but the game was too good at making him rest well, so he couldn't even sleep.

"Arghh," he said as he started tossing and turning but couldn't sleep at all. So, he took out his phone and started surfing the Internet. "Should I go to the forum?" he wondered but decided not to. "I am already making money and am getting enough information from masters in the game. I don't see why I should spoil myself with other information instead. I want to play it the way the developers intended." Alex thought.

So, he opened up his go-to video hosting site to watch some new videos. On the recommended page, there was a new video released by Deva Corp explaining their latest capsules.

Chapter 125: Capsule Presentation

"Oh, are these the capsules Eric was talking about?" Alex thought as he clicked on the thumbnail. The video opened up to show a large capsule in the middle of the room and a man ready to talk.

"Welcome to the video everyone. Today is the first unveiling of the capsules for the ever-popular game Eternal Cultivation. And Deva corp has given me the honor and opportunity of being the person to introduce these capsules to you."

The man walked up to the capsule and talked as he put his hands on it.

"These bed-sized capsules are the latest products of Deva Corp. You can open these capsules like this and enter here. Once you are inside, you will have to put nothing on your head or body to be able to play. All you do, is you press this button right near your left hand and let the lid close."

The man showed everything one had to do to log in. It seemed pretty easy to Alex.

"As you guys know, Eternal Cultivation can recognize you as the same player no matter how many helmets you chance, this is the same. As long as you log in, you will end up with the same character."

The man moved to the front and started talking about the various other features of the capsule. Saying how fast it processed everything or how much more realistic the game would look now.

"Do you know what the best thing about this capsule is?" the man prompted a question to the camera.

"It is the fact that you won't have to leave the capsule to eat or drink or go to the bathrooms at all. The Deva Corp has managed to make it so that all of your normal bodily functions slow down when you enter the game."

"So all of you game addicts can go into the game without worrying about food or bathrooms ever again. However, Deva Corp still recommends you log out once a day to eat some food and do other things. Also, don't forget to exercise guys. I know you guys only sleep and don't exercise."

The man laughed as he was handed a piece of paper from the side.

"Here we have it, folks. The official numbers. This piece of paper contains the cost and the release date of these capsules. Even I do not know what information is inside, so you guys will know it along with me," as he said that, he started to open the piece of paper very slowly to build suspense among his viewers.

"Oh, we have the date first. And it is going to be released in..." When Alex heard the date, he was surprised.

"That is around 2 weeks from now. Much closer than I had expected." Eric had mentioned it is about 3 weeks away, but it seemed that was not the case. The capsules would be here before they even knew it.

'Where would I even keep it if I got it?' he started to wonder. While the dorm room was big, it wasn't big enough to fit 4 capsules along with the beds and the closets. He stopped thinking about the problem for now and kept on watching the video.

The man further opened the page until it was fully opened.

"Hmm..." a sound of surprise came from the man. "This can't be." The man spoke out loud in shock as he kept on looking at the piece of paper. He slowly looked up at the camera with a face of incredulous and started talking.

"You won't believe me, folks. That is how good the price is." The man stopped talking to increase the suspense more.

"The capsule will be on sale with a cost of $600. 600 dollars guys, 600 dollars. That's a steal if you ask me."

"However, that is not the best part about the price announcements. It would seem the rumors about us being able to return our VR helmets for a discount at the store were true. Depending on the time of the purchase of your helmets, these are the discount percentage you would get."

"To anyone who bought the VR helmet within the first two weeks of sales, you get a 50% discount while buying the capsule."

"To anyone who bought the VR helmet within the second 2 weeks of sales, you get a 60% discount."

"To anyone who bought the VR helmet within the last 2 weeks of sales, you get a 70% discount."

"As for those who can't wait for the capsule coming up in the next 2 weeks, you can just get a helmet and return it back for absolutely free for a whopping 80% discount.

"Guys, you can just go buy a helmet, play for two weeks, then return it back and get a capsule for 120 bucks. That's 20 bucks more than the original price for 2 weeks worth of playing. Go get it if you haven't right now."

"Honestly, with such advanced technology, I wonder why Deva Corp is still refusing to use them in sectors like education and health care. And instead, they just focus on the game."

The video ended soon after. 'Should I get it?' Alex started wondering. Just the fact that he wouldn't have to log out 4 times a day made the capsule worth it. With that, he could play a lot more and earn a lot more money. But, there was no place to keep the capsule.

VR Helmet was one thing, but he wasn't sure if the dorm even allowed its student to get something like a capsule inside.

"The other 3 want one as well. Even if the dormitory allows us, I don't see where we are supposed to keep them." Alex thought as he looked around. 4 capsules could fit, but then there would be no place to move around in the room.

He sighed and thought, "Now that I have money, should I just rent a room somewhere near the college?"

Chapter 126: Free Apartment

"You wanna ride that?" Hannah asked hesitantly while looking at a big Ferris wheel in front of her.

"Yeah, Hannah, let's ride that. Alex, you should ride that as well. Have you been on a Ferris wheel that big?" Hannah's friend, Vinny asked.

"No. We occasionally had a small one during the fairs, but those were like half the size of these," Alex said.

"Alright then, come on. It's my treat anyway," said Vinny as she dragged both of them along.

Vinny and Hannah were roommates that rented an apartment together. She had recently completed university, so she was leaving the city next week. So, as a sort of farewell party, she had decided to take Hannah to the amusement park. When she mentioned that she had a cousin in town that might also want to come to one, she had allowed Hannah to invite Alex.

Hannah's other friend that she used to live with had also completed university and had already left. While Hannah still had a few more months of study, so she was now going to be alone.

They got up on the Ferris wheel and started enjoying the experience as the Ferris wheel brought them up high. However, Alex didn't find the height scary at all.

'Is it because I am quite used to flying inside the game?' he wondered. Hannah seemed to be less phased by the height as well. While Vinny on the other hand was having the time of her life. Although he wasn't scared, he still enjoyed the experience of rapidly falling.

After 10 minutes, they came down of the Ferris wheel. Vinny took them to a lot of other sites in the amusement park. By the time they left the amusement park, it was already past 3 pm.

Vinny took the two to a restaurant to get something to eat. There, they started talking once more.

"Where are you at in EC, Alex?" Vinny asked while taking a bite out of her fries.

"EC... Eternal Cultivation? How did you know I played it?" Alex asked with a surprised face.

"Everyone plays it, haha. Besides, I think I remember Hannah mentioning something about it." Vinny said as she laughed.

"Yeah, Alex. You didn't mention last time where you were at. What continent are you in?" Hannah asked.

"Continent?" Alex said with puzzlement. "I don't really know what a continent is, but I'm in a place called Scarlet City in the Crimson Empire."

Hannah thought for a bit and said, "I haven't really heard about any empires called Crimson Empire in the game. Must be a different continent from the East then."

Vinny suddenly spoke as she thought, "Ah, I think I have heard about that Empire in the forums. The players say that none of the NPCs know what continent they are in. But, from their description of the place, it's full of trees and greenery, so I think it's not the northern continent that is completely frozen or the southern continent that is said to be barren for the most part, right? So, It has to be the western continent."

"Oh, the Western continent? I heard that it gets the least amount of players for some reason. Also, the NPCs from there have a very weak cultivation base" Hannah said

"Speaking of that, what cultivation base do you have, Alex?" Vinny asked.

"Oh, I am only at Bone Tempering 8th realm. I should reach Bone tempering 9th realm soon." Alex said.

"Huh?" Hannah exclaimed from the side. "Hasn't it been nearly a month since you started playing? How are you not even in the organ tempering realm yet? Don't you have a good cultivation method or money to buy pills?"

"Oh no, I'm fine on that aspect. My method is good. And also, I am an alchemist so I don't have to worry about pills." Alex said.

"Then why are you so slow?" Hannah asked. She seemed to be unusually frustrated for some reason.

"Oh, people in the game told me that it wasn't good to break through very fast. It destabilizes your cultivation base and as a result, your later realms become weaker, or breaking through gets harder." Alex answered.

"I haven't heard of anything like that," said Vinny. "I don't think the forums have something about it either."

"No, I think he is correct. Breaking through too fast does make you weaker. Now that I think about it, I might have been too fast as well. No wonder I am so weak compared to the other cultivators. I will have to make sure my cultivation base stabilizes now," Hannah said as she pondered a little.

They talked about a few other things but nothing important until the conversation shifted towards the capsules that were going to be released soon.

"Ah, I want one right now. It looks so good," said Vinny.

"Yeah. Hey Alex, are you going to get one? Or you can use my helmet instead," said Hannah.

"Oh, no sister. I can't have that. I have earned some money by selling pills. I will use them," said Alex. "Although, I'm not sure if I can even use it in the first place. My dorm might not allow it. If I want a capsule, I will have to leave the dorm."

"Hmm" Vinny hummed as she realized something. Hannah and Alex seemed to suddenly realize it as well. "Woah, you guys can stay together then. That works perfectly, right?" Vinny exclaimed.

Alex thought that was a good idea as well.

"Oh wow. I can't believe I didn't think of that before. I was dreading that I will have to leave the apartment or somehow find other people. But, if you come to live with me, my problems of being alone will be solved."

"Also, it seems you can solve your problem of not being able to play will be solved as well." Hannah said.

"I think that's a fantastic idea, sister. I will talk with the dorm staff tomorrow about my leaving in a week. And I will also call my parents."

Afterward, Hannah and Vinny walked back to their room, while Alex quickly returned back to his dorm room. It was a little late, so he didn't immediately log in. Instead, he called his parents and let them know about the situation. They were happy to hear that he would stay with his cousin.

Soon, he went and had his dinner. Only then did he finally log in for the night.

Chapter 127: Late on a Saturday

Alex opened his eyes inside his brightly lit room. He tried to remember what he was doing today before leaving the game.

"Ah, that's right. Those talismans. I learned all the recipes and blueprints. It's amazing how I can remember everything in the game, yet in the real world, I can't even remember to call my parents." He laughed as he said that to himself.

"Hmm... " suddenly, he noticed something. Something was vibrating close to him. When he tried to look around for what it was, he realized that it was coming from one of his numerous storage bags.

As he looked into the bag to see what was making so much of a ruckus, he realized that it was his badge. He took out the badge numbered 168 and saw that it was not only vibrating but also flashing as well.

'What's going on?' he thought as he sent his spiritual sense into the badge. "What?!!" he exclaimed loudly as he realized there were numerous notifications in his badge, and all of them were similar.

-Number 182 has registered a match with you. You have 1 hour to fight-

-You have forfeited the match. Your number is now 182-

-Number 198 has registered a match with you. You have 1 hour to fight-

-You have forfeited the match. Your number is now 198-

.

.

.

-Number 873 has registered a match with you. You have 1 hour to fight-

-You have forfeited the match. Your number is now 873-

-Number 943 has registered a match with you. You have 1 hour to fight-

Alex was really surprised now. "Oh no. Today is a Saturday. I forgot you had to fight every hour on a Friday and Saturday." He looked at the time and realized there was only an hour and a half left before the fightings were over.

He hurriedly ran out of the house. He put the badge on the wooden panel and walked out after the door opened. As soon as he was out, the badge suddenly showed a change.

The number of the badge suddenly changed from 168 to 873. "It can do that too?" Alex was surprised. He didn't give it another thought, however. He started running towards the sect crater and reached it in less than 10 minutes.

However, by the time he was there, his hour was over, and his badge had changed from number 973 to 943.

He immediately went onto a queue in the fighting hall and waited for his turn to register. As soon as his turn came, he registered a fight with the same person with badge 168.

He had made it in time. There were still quite a few minutes before it was 8 o'clock, so even if the man didn't choose to fight and waited out his hour-long break, Alex would still win.

He calmed down a little and started looking at the fights going on all around him. It was almost as if the entire sect was down here in the crater and they were all fighting today.

"Is this how the Fridays and Saturdays are normally spent in Tiger Sect? No wonder they are so much better at fighting." He wondered.

The entire thing looked like a festival. The number of people here was way higher than the amusement park they went to today could ever hope to have.

Finally, after waiting for nearly an hour, his opponent arrived. Alex walked up to the stage and handed his badge to the elder. He then turned around to see a male disciple wearing inner sect clothes. He had a clean-shaven face with short black hair. The most interesting thing about the man was that he was in the same cultivation realm as him. The bone tempering 8th realm.

'The last guy I fought who had the badge 168 was in the 6th realm. Yet, somehow he who came from below has higher cultivation? That shouldn't be possible.'

The guy on the other hand had a confused look. "You don't match the description either," he said to Alex.

"What?" he was confused.

"Hmm... I am pretty sure the person I was supposed to fight was a tall guy with an oval face and long hair. Your face is neither oval nor is your hair long. is that guy still in hiding? I thought he would come to get his badge back by now." the man said.

"What do you-" suddenly Alex remembered. 'My face is still different? Ah, that's right. It's supposed to go away after another 8 hours only.' He finally remembered that the effect of the Face Changing pills was still there.

'Does that mean this person came to fight me specifically? I don't remember getting into trouble with someone like him,' he thought.

"Did you want to specifically fight this guy or what? You seem to have some sort of purpose?" Alex asked.

"Uh, yeah. Sigh. Brother Huo even specifically asked me to beat him up. It seems I will have to return back with the news of failure. Urghh... now I'm frustrated. Why did you have to go and take that guy's spot huh." The man started with an annoyed looked, then got frustrated and finally, got angry.

'So, it was that Huo Tu guy again. Is his ego so fragile that just one deny and he sent his entire collections of lackeys behind me? What will that even get him? He is not even the one taking his revenge.' Alex started frowning too as he thought that.

"Arhh... Screw this. If I can't beat him, then I will beat you up. You dared to register a fight against me huh, see how I torture you during this battle." The man suddenly took out a saber. It looked fancy and was definitely a high-grade weapon.

Alex got a little apprehensive as well. He deliberated between taking out the normal sword or taking out the True ranked sword. In the end, he went with the normal sword since he still had to furnish his techniques.

The elder then brought out his hands forward and screamed, "Fight!!"

Chapter 128: Battle

'He is after me?'

'Huo Tu still hasn't given up on beating me?'

'How did he even get to fight me?'

'Was he below me in the ranking? That can't be.'

'Did he purposefully got a lower badge number so he could challenge me?'

These and other various thoughts suddenly disappeared from Alex's head as soon as he heard the elder start the match. The man didn't seem the least bit fearful towards Alex.

'He can't see my cultivation base, so he is ignoring the danger.' He thought.

The man wielding the saber suddenly brought it to the side and made a giant slash horizontally that sent out energy towards Alex. The color of the man's sword was brown in color, so the element of the attack must've been earth aligned as well.

Alex sent out the second sword strike of Elusive Heavenly sword. He channeled his Qi into the sword and a green light was produced, which he sent flying towards the incoming brown light.

BOOM

A violent explosion of energies rang out in the middle of the stage. Alex took this opportunity to use his Fluctuating Friction Dance to get closer to the man. The man seemed to have the same idea, so he too came close to it.

However, unlike Alex, he couldn't see through the smoke. Alex managed to take him by surprise. With a swing of the sword, he hit the man right on the side of his chest, sending his entire body flying. With his current strength, the man's ribs must've been broken.

Alex fell back and waited for the elder to call off the battle. But the order to stop fighting never came. His opponent didn't falter either.

The man with the saber slowly got up from the ground and looked at Alex as he gnashed his teeth together. "Don't think you are amazing just because you managed to hit me," the man started shouting.

'What is going on? I clearly hit him?' Alex thought as he sent his spiritual sense inside the man to check his ribs, but suddenly, he noticed something.

Inside the yellow Tiger Sect robe, the man was wearing something else as well. Something that was hard and brown in color.

'An armor artifact?' Alex was surprised. This was the first time he had seen someone wear one outside of that blue armor in the auction.

'Can it be as good as the one in the auction? No way right?' he started questioning himself. 'Even though he didn't get harmed, he should have still been hurt. Dammit! I could finish the fight at once if I could use Heaven's impact, or the Flickering Shadows technique. Hell, he wouldn't last a minute if I went invisible. '

Alex started preparing for his second attack. He used Smiting Blade to charge up his blade with yellow light. And then, he dashed forward.

The man showed a little fear when he saw Alex move. He had severely underestimated his opponent and his body hurt like hell. His earth armor was supposed to block attacks from anyone under the Organ Tempering realm. Even Organ tempering 1st realm cultivators found it hard to do damage to him when he had his armor on.

As soon as the man saw Alex closing in on him, he used a weird technique. Suddenly, all of his body started producing a crisscross pattern of brown lines.

Alex was surprised at the change and also the fact that the man was doing nothing to dodge the attack. This time the sword hit him right in the chest, but the man didn't move a bit. In fact, he didn't even show a single reaction to the attack.

'Damn! A defensive technique?' he thought. Not only did the man have armor, but he also had a defensive technique.

'What else does he have?' Alex sent out a relentless set of attacks that forced the man to keep his defensive technique up for as long as possible. And Alex knew that wouldn't be so long.

'Let me see how long you can last like this,' Alex thought as he kept on hitting the man for a while. However, the man's defense didn't go down.

The man too started swinging his saber at him. Alex had no problem dodging that. Soon, it became a close combat fight between a sword and a saber. The man's saber arts were good, but they weren't able to hit Alex thanks to his amazing dodging ability.

The man started to run out of Qi as he constantly used his defense arts. "God damn you-" he couldn't even finish his sentence as Alex's attacks started getting faster.

'Is this all he can handle? Guess I expected too much of him. It's not like he is my master of anything.'

Suddenly, the man leaped backward, creating a distance among them. He landed right at the edge of the stage. "Damn it. I can't believe you forced me to use it," said the man as he started channeling his Qi.

Brown Qi flowed into the saber as he prepared one more attack. The saber slowly left the man's arm as it started to spin in midair. He made some weird gestures as he sent the saber flying towards Alex in a blink and you miss its speed.

BOOM

An explosion, louder than the first one occurred. Dust rose up, blinding everyone in and out of the stage. The elder got a little startled. He had expected the other disciple to block it with his own attack, but for some reason, he didn't.

"Hey, Are you alright," the elder shouted from the side with a bit of nervousness. The dust was still high, so he swiped his hands sending away the dust from the air on the stage.

"Yeah, I am alright," Alex's voice came from the other side. When the elder finally turned his head to where the sound came from, He saw Alex standing near the unconscious body of the other disciple.

'What happened?' he was surprised. Alex's clothes seemed a little roughed up, but overall he was okay. Alex walked up to the elder to take his badge and simply walked away, leaving the elder and the crowd in stun.

Chapter 129: Senior Brother

Alex looked at the badge numbered 168 and kept it in his storage bag.

"Argghh..." he softly cried in pain. "Goddammit that hurt," he said as he held his left arm that he was sure was broken even without looking at it. Although it hadn't looked like it, he had taken quite a bit of damage.

He took out a Common Healing pill of 38% harmony and ate it. Slowly, he felt the energy from the pill dissolve in his stomach and move all over his body as it healed what was harmed. His broken arm quickly got fixed as the energy washed over the left arm. He felt a bit of energy disappear when it reached his wound, but most of it still continued onward.

<Sun God's Divine body disintegrates everything>

<Common Healing Pill's energy aligns with your spiritual roots>

<You have obtained 26,000 Qi>

"Ah... that's much better." He said in relief as the pain went away. "I probably should have used the Flickering Shadow technique, but I don't want to reveal it yet. Thankfully, I learned the Jade Skin technique."

Jade Skin technique, a defensive technique, was one of the 7 techniques that Wen Cheng had brought for him. Although the name of the technique contained Jade, it had no elemental alignment to the Earth element or any elements for that matter.

When used, the Jade Skin technique would increase the defensive capability of the cultivator's skin allowing them to block attacks up to 2 realms higher. But even then, the bone in his arm was broken.

"That man's saber must've at least been a Common Heaven rank artifact to damage by bones through the Jade Skin." Alex had blocked off most of the energy of the saber, but the saber itself had damaged him quite a bit. He had taken the opportunity to dash forward at the time and knock out the unprepared opponent.

"Do I go to master's today as well?" he thought. In the end, he decided to just go. If not needed, he would simply return back to his home.

"Ah, you're here." He heard a sound before he even reached the training facility. "Hmm... why can't I see you thought?" Wen Cheng said as he walked towards him from around the corner.

Alex dropped his invisibility and showed himself to Wen Cheng. He curiously looked at Wen Cheng and asked, "Did you unlock spiritual sense, master?"

"Oh yes. It's all thanks to you. Hmm... why were you invisible just then? Is that a sort of technique?" he asked.

"Yes. It's a technique I learned a few weeks ago." He simply said as he walked towards the training facility.

"Okay, what ranking are you now? Did you improve at all?" Wen Cheng asked as he also went to the training facility.

"Uhhh..." Alex was a little stumped as to what he could say right now. "I... spent the entire day cultivating my spiritual sense master. I only fought one match to get back my badge." He decided to lie a little.

"Oh, you have a spiritual sense too? How many lilies did you use?" he asked.

"Huh?" Alex got a little surprised. "How many? Don't you only need one lily to unlock Spiritual Sense? Why would I use more than one?" he asked.

"Oh, is that what the records in Hong Wu Sect say? Haha," Wen Cheng gave a hearty laugh and followed it by saying, "No. While it is true that you require one to unlock your Spiritual sense. Using more, you can increase your spiritual sea and thus improving your spiritual sense."

Alex was surprised. "Thank you, Master. For telling me about it."

"It's alright. I have already used 2 and given 1 to your senior sister. I don't know how many you have, but if it's possible, save one for your senior brother as well. He might want it as well?" Wen Cheng said.

"Senior brother? I have one?" Alex said in surprise.

"Hmm... he didn't introduce himself to you? But he should have already met you. He became an elder a few years ago, and is currently working in the sect as the leader of the guards," said Wen Cheng.

"Leader of guards? Him? He is my senior brother?" Alex asked with a surprise.

"Yeah. I even gave him the sword to pass along to you. That damn boy should have introduced himself. Anyway, if you can save some lilies, save one for him too,' said Wen Cheng as he walked into the training facility.

"By the way, why haven't you taken off your changed appearance yet?" he asked.

"I don't know how to, so I have been wearing it for now. It should wear off in 7 hours though," said Alex.

"I see. I thought you alchemists would know about reverting the changes, but it seems I was wrong. Or maybe 2 weeks just isn't long enough for you to learn it. As Ma Rong about it when you enter. For now, let's proceed with the training. Since we missed yesterday, you can take a new book today out of these 4." Wen Cheng said as he brought the 4 books out from his storage bag.

Of the 4 books, one was a defense technique, while the others were offensive techniques. Alex decided to choose an offensive one today. He didn't have any offensive technique that he couldn't use without his sword, so he decided to learn one that didn't require a sword.

It was a metal-aligned fist technique that could be used from a long-distance away. He happily learned the book for the rest of the night and went back to his home at 3 am.

He took out a Spirit Cleansing Lily and tried it to see if it could indeed increase his spiritual sea just as the master said. He looked at the red flower in his hand. 'They are never the same color, are they?' he slowly closed his eyes and started to cultivate. Soon, he fell into a trance and went unconscious.

Chapter 130: Battle of the minds

A red spot of light started floating from the brightly lit red flower in Alex's hands. They slowly entered his body, mixing into his bloodstream through his lungs, and went up to his brain. There, the little spots of lights started merging with the already available spiritual sea.

Little by little, the spiritual sea started to expand. By the end, the flower was completely gone, and the spiritual sea had nearly doubled in size.

Near 7 am in the morning, Alex opened his eyes. He looked down at his hands and realized that the flower was no longer there. "Did I use it?" he wondered. He sent out his spiritual sense to see how far he could reach with it. To his disappointment, it was still at 20 meters.

"But the spiritual sea has clearly gotten bigger. Why can't I expand my spiritual sense then?" he wondered. He tried different things like concentrating on multiple objects, sending out the spiritual sense as far as he could, and trying to deplete it to see how fast the sea would reduce.

'Hmm...' he hummed as he realized something. While his ability to concentrate on multiple things was still the same and the maximum distance he could stretch was still 30 meters, he could now keep the spiritual sense going on for double the previous time. Basically, his amount of spiritual sense had doubled.

'Oh wow, that means I don't really have to worry about it ending, huh,' he thought. Suddenly, he also realized, "Does that mean I can use Heaven's Impact 8 different times instead of just four times now?" he wondered. Unfortunately, he didn't have anyone he could try it on.

After checking his spiritual sense and spiritual sea for a little more, he decided to leave for breakfast. After half an hour or so, he finally returned back to the game.

As soon as he returned, he shouted "status". His status window appeared in front of him allowing him to view his current amounts of Qi.

"Enough to breakthrough once more, huh. I should be good enough to break through now." As he said that, he hit [Breakthrough].

<Congratulations. You have broken through to 'Bone Tempering: 9th Realm'>

————————

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Bone Tempering 9th Realm (1,000,000 Qi : 100%) [Breakthrough]

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 219,588

]

—————————

"Urghh... it's going to take forever to break through if I just use the cultivation method. I will have to resort to eating pills and cores now." Alex said as he shook his head. The upcoming breakthroughs were going to take forever, but with the right pills and cores, that shouldn't be a problem.

He reached into his bag and took out a monster's core. It was from a monster with the cultivation of Bone Tempering 9th realm, the same as his. He looked at it and ate it.

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body disintegrates everything>

<The monster core's element aligns with your spirit root>

<You have gained 340,000 Qi>

"Sigh. That's barely any. I will have to eat 2 more of these just to have enough to level up. Thankfully, my senior sister gave me a lot so I can just use them." He thought himself lucky when he realized he wouldn't have to waste days on end, just sitting in one place, cultivating.

He reached back into his storage bag and took out another core. This time, it was the core of a monster in the 1st realm of Organ tempering. Just like the last time, he put the core into his mouth and swallowed it.

Rawr!!

A beastly scream rang inside of him. He saw the silhouette of a monster with 8 legs and 2 horns that liked to crawl around like an alligator. The beast's roar started creating turbulences in his head as the spiritual sea started splashing around.

Alex suddenly found himself in another place. He tried to look around with his spiritual sense and realized he couldn't use it. So, he simply just looked around. It didn't take him long to realize he was inside his mind floating on top of the dark and cold-looking spiritual sea.

The only thing he could see around was himself with no clothes on, the sea itself, and a weird-looking figure up ahead. It was the figure of the same alligator. It was somehow in his head as well.

The alligator came lunging towards him with all of its 8 legs and tried to impale him with its 2 horns. Alex instinctively reached to his side to take out his sword and remembered that he didn't have his storage bags with him.

"Sh*t," he shouted. The alligator was still quite far away as it seemed to be very slow for some reason.

'Is it slow, or am I just fast?' Alex wondered. Since he had no weapons, he could only hit it with his arms and legs. And he had just learned the perfect technique for that.

The technique was called the Iron Fist Punch and allowed one to send out a punch with massive energy behind it. Being a heaven-grade technique, it was not something the opponents could easily ignore.

Alex brought his arms to a fist and out of nowhere, his fist started glowing yellow. He simply punched and a massive yellow fist-shaped energy flew out from his arms. It flew directly towards the alligator and hit it squarely in the head.

"Take that," Alex said as his first proper usage of the fist technique had landed. However, when he saw the Alligator moving again, he was surprised.

The alligator seemed to be a little hurt, but it still had a lot of fight in it. "Goddammit," Alex said as he went forward to accept the fight. Surprisingly, he realized that he could use all the techniques without care for Qi as they seemed to not use any.

He sent out punches after punches with the Iron Fist Punch and used the Elusive Heaven Technique to dodge the alligator's attack. The only thing he couldn't do in his mind was conceal himself and use his spiritual sense.

After a while of tumultuous fighting, he finally managed to beat the alligator and with a final Iron Fist Punch, killed it.

Chapter 131: Meeting Senior Brother Again

Alex looked at the alligator's corpse in front of him, still somehow floating in the air, just like him.

"It was too weak. There is no way that was an Organ tempering realm monster right?' he thought. He instinctively related the monster to the monster core he had just eaten.

The battle had taken a while, but that was just due to how tough the alligator was. Its actual offensive capability or speed was nowhere near the level of what an organ tempering realm monster should have been able to do.

Suddenly, a yellow aura started to leak out from under the sea. It started off slow near a small shadow, but by the time it reached him, it had sped up by a lot. The yellow aura consumed both him and the corpse in front of him.

Alex realized that he was back in his body and wasn't in his mind anymore. Out of nowhere, a couple of notifications started popping up before him.

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body disintegrates everything>

<The monster core's element aligns with your spirit root>

<You have gained 680,000 Qi>

'What was that?' he started wondering. That fight was in his mind, but it felt so... Real. Almost like he would die if we weren't careful. 'Was that monster real? Did I really fight it? Why in my spiritual sea though?' many questions started running in his mind, but there wasn't anyone who he could ask about it.

He looked at the time and realized he had spent nearly 15 minutes fighting that monster in his mind. He simply shook his head wondering if that had something to do with his body.

'Since it's my body, I should try asking master just in case he knows about it,' Alex thought. He took a deep breath and decided to forget about it for now.

'Do I have to fight today?... No, today is Sunday, so everyone is free to do what they want. I should go and make some pills today.' He thought. 'But before that, I have something else to do.'

Alex got up from his bed and walked out. He walked out to the sounds of numerous noises from the area. Since no one had to go to the sect crater today, they were spending most of their time on the residential mountain.

Alex walked out of the sideways path and walked down the main path towards the main road. He walked up to the gate, however, instead of walking out, he went up to a guard.

"Hello elder, I am here to see elder Liu Xin, can I meet him?" he asked.

"You want to meet the leader? Do you have an appointment or something?" the guard elder asked.

"No, but the sect master sent me. Can you tell him that Yu Ming has come to see him?" he asked.

The elder was surprised when he heard that it was the sect master who had sent the inner sect disciple. He didn't dare go against the sect leader, so he just walked into the building.

After a while, the elder came back out and said, "the leader is waiting for you inside, go."

Alex thanked the guard elder and walked into the building. He found his way to the familiar room he had entered when he came here.

Inside the room was the young black-haired leader sitting in his chair with his feet on the table. "So, you said you came to see me?" he asked as Alex entered.

"Yes, senior brother," Alex replied. The man's eyes perked up when he heard that. He smiled a little and asked," How did you find out? Did little Mei tell you about me?" he asked.

"No, it was master," Alex replied. The man, Liu Xin, stopped acting like an elder and started acting like an elder brother. "So, did master really send you? He usually just called me in my communication talismans," Liu Xin said as he scrutinized Alex's expressions to see if he was lying or not.

Alex simply said, "No, I needed to meet you so I came up with an acceptable lie."

"Oh, needed? Not wanted? Why would need to meet me? Do you need something? Are you in some sort of trouble?" he asked curiously.

Alex reached into his bag and took out a pink flower. Liu Xin watched him take out the flower with a puzzled face. "What is this?" he asked.

"This is a Spirit Cleansing Lily. Cultivate with this in your hand overnight and you will unlock Spiritual sense," Alex sent the message directly to Liu Xin's head.

Liu Xin was surprised when he heard a voice right in his mind. He asked with wide eyes, "Do you already have a spiritual sense?"

"Yes," Alex replied. Liu Xin was still in awe as he looked at the flower in his hand. Hidden in that awe seemed to be excitement and nervousness.

They talked for a while longer and Alex returned back to his room around 15 minutes later. He logged out a little before lunchtime to talk to the dorm warden about leaving the dorm room.

The dorm warden didn't think much about it and simply noted his name down in his notepad while constantly mumbling, "how many more are going to leave because of that damn game."

Alex was surprised he wasn't the first one to decide to leave the dorm just to play the game. During lunch, he told Logan, Matt, and Eric about his ideas of moving, and surprisingly, they weren't surprised about it.

"Yeah, we are thinking of moving too," said Matt. "But, we will stay as long as possible since staying in a dorm is very much simpler than having your own place and taking care of it. Maybe the dorm will change its policy on the capsules, who knows."

They finished their meals and returned back to the game. Alex opened his eyes inside his room. He looked at his storage bags and started thinking of the many pills he could make.

Finally, after he finished choosing what pills he would make today, he walked out.

Chapter 132: Production Hall

In a few minutes, Alex reached the sect crater. It was past 10 am in the morning, so there were many people here already. However, no one was in the fighting stages and was here for either getting a new technique from the library, training in the Training Hall, or creating something in the Production hall.

Alex wanted to take pills so he beelined his way to the Production hall. There weren't as many people in the Production Hall as he had expected.

'Maybe I'm just too used to seeing every disciple from the sect come down to make pills back in Hong Wu sect,' he thought.

He walked up and got into a queue. Very soon, it was his turn. He took out his badge and handed it to the elder.

"What are you here for?" the elder asked.

"Alchemy," said Alex as he gave a short and to-the-point answer.

The elder walked to the wall behind him and placed Alex's badge on one of the square outlines in a giant wooden board. A small wooden-token-like object fell from the square where the elder had placed the badge.

He came back and handed the wooden token to Alex and said, "Room 26." He then started tending to the other person in the queue. Alex walked into the hall and looked at the doors around the hallway. They all had numbers in them.

He quickly found his way to the 26th door and saw a small hole in the place where a keyhole should be. Alex slid in the wooden token and with a CLANK, the door opened.

"Oh wow," Alex said as he saw the inside of the room. The room looked exactly the same as the rooms in Alchemy Hall back in the Hong Wu sect.

"Did they copy from Hong Wu Sect?" he wondered. "Or did Hong Wu sect copy from them?" but he didn't need to know that. He went and sat near the middle and put aside the black cauldron that was already there.

He took out his own cauldron and put it down on the fire. It still smelled a little like the Blood Improving Pill he made last time, so he gave it a simple swipe with his Qi to get rid of any remaining odors and powders.

Soon, he started making his different pills. He hadn't made one in about a week, so he started off with something easy. And once he got back his habit, he churned out pills after pills.

Unfortunately, none of the pills he made ever crossed the Heaven-grade threshold. However, they did come very close to it. Two of the pills ended up with 47% and one got 49%.

But that only happened when the pill did not split into 2 different pills. When the powders in the cauldron did split to form two pills, the harmony level would generally stay under 40% for each of the pills.

Only on rare occasions when his ingredients were the right age, or when they had the right amount of energy would he get pills with very high harmony even when it split.

After a few hours, he stopped making the pills as he was mentally fatigued and decided to take a few minutes of break. He looked at all the pills he had made by now.

"Oh wow, 26 pills in just a few hours? I have clearly exceeded my record from last time and I could still go for a few more pills if I wanted to," he thought.

"Is it because I broke through so many times that I have so much more stamina? " He wondered. "I should level up more," he thought. But as he thought that, he shuddered a little as he remembered the fight in his mind this morning.

'Just what was that? Now that I think about it, the aura from the monster was definitely the same as the aura from the monster's core I ate," he thought. "Does that mean that the monster only arrived after I ate it?"

"Could it be the monster was already inside the core and it only came out because I ate the pill? If so then how did I not get them from the other cores I ate until now?" he had unintentionally started thinking of it again.

"Wait for a second, the only difference between the core I ate today and the core I ate before then was that none of the monster's cores before were of the Organ tempering realm."

He waited for a few seconds and thought, "Should I try it again?"

He took out a random monster core from his bag and looked at it. It was a monster core from a Bone Tempering 8th realm monster. Without thinking he put it into his mouth and swallowed it.

Within seconds he got a notification.

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body disintegrates everything>

<The monster core's element aligns with your spirit root>

<You have gained 109,000 Qi>

"So little. Having too many similar strength cores does reduce its efficiency," he thought. Then he reached into his bag and took out another core. This time, it was a core from a monster in the Bone Tempering 9th Realm.

He took the core and put it in his mouth. Similar to every other time, he swallowed the core as if it were a pill and within a

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body disintegrates everything>

<The monster core's element aligns with your spirit root>

<You have gained 186,000 Qi>

"Urghh... it dropped by so much."

He then reached back into his storage bag and took out another core. This time, it was a core from an Organ Tempering 1st realm monster. As he did, a small fear started spurting from deep within him.

"God! Should I do this? What if there really is something inside here and I can't kill it this time." He started worrying. But, in the end, he still needed to know if what happened last time was a coincidence or the norm.

So, he mentally prepared himself, put the core into his mouth, and swallowed.

Chapter 133: Severe Itching

As soon as he swallowed it, he mentally prepared himself to find himself flying up above his spiritual sea, facing another monster in front of him. However, all he got was a bunch of new notifications.

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body disintegrates everything>

<The monster core's element aligns with your spirit root>

<You have gained 540,000 Qi>

'Huh?' he thought, 'what's going on?'. He saw the notification and was surprised that he just got the points with no problem.

"Was the last time a fluke then?" the thought of it made him scratch his head. "Ok, I will try this one more time and see if it really was a fluke or not. If nothing happens, I will go back to making pills," he said as he pulled out another monster core from his bag.

From the aura, he could easily tell it belonged to an Organ Tempering 1st realm monster. Without thinking, he put the core in his mouth and swallowed. He was half expecting to just see another set of notifications, but instead, he found himself in a familiar place.

'It happened once more,' he was shocked. 'Then that means that in front of me is...' he slowly looked forward to seeing something clearly visible in the otherwise black sky.

The monster was a bull-like monster with tusks. It suddenly saw Alex and started running towards him.

"Still slow for a monster that is supposed to be in the organ tempering realm. I wonder If I am the stronger here or the monsters are just that weaker in my spiritual sea?"

Similar to last time, it took some effort, but he defeated the monster. As he looked at the corpse, his spiritual sea started to glow. Yellow light started shining from the spiritual sea, surrounding a small shadow. The yellow aura started covering everything and just like last time, it devoured both him and the corpse.

Alex found himself back in the alchemy room as a bunch of notifications went off.

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body disintegrates everything>

<The monster core's element aligns with your spirit root>

<You have gained 425,000 Qi>

"So, it wasn't really a mistake, huh. Monsters do show up in my head when I eat the pills," he said as he sighed. "This monster was weak, comparatively, but what would happen if a strong one showed up."

"Would I die if I ate that one core?" he wondered. He sent his consciousness into his storage bags to search for it. He had never really taken it out or done anything with it as he had felt a bit guilty about it, but now he was thankful he didn't.

He quickly found it and took it out. The Mother cat's monster core. A very thick aura started to permeate from the core as it filled up the room.

Alex's body started to shake as he had two different feelings in his mind. One was an instinctual feeling of fear and made him want to get away from it. While the other was an instinctual feeling of eating, that made him want to devour the core.

Thankfully, the two feelings counteracted each other and helped him keep a clear mind. The aura was something he hadn't felt ever. When the mother cat died, her aura had all but gone, so she couldn't make Alex fear her. But now that he was looking at the core, he started to wonder just how strong the cat monster really was.

Just as he was thinking that his left arm started itching. He tried to scratch the itch away but it didn't go away. "Huh? Did the wound from the saber not heal properly?" he wondered as he kept on scratching it.

He put the monster core back into his bag, and suddenly the itching stop. "Huh?" he was surprised. "Did it..." he took out the monster core once more.

The monster core filled the room with its aura once more and his left arm started to itch as well. "What is happening?" he was surprised. He tried putting the monster core back in and taking it back out. Each time he did that his left arm would either start to itch or stop itching.

He stripped his upper half, revealing his smooth, white skin except for that one scar the wolf gave him. He took out the core once more and realized it was exactly this scar that was itching.

He slowly brought the core towards his arm and it started itching more and more. Finally, he tapped his scar with the core.

FLASH

A bright light flashed from his scar as something shot out. Alex stumbled back in fear as he tried to at what has just come out of his arm.

"Huh?" he was even more surprised now. "No way!! It's you. How did you?" he couldn't come up with any questions to ask.

In front of him was a small monster trying to nibble on the monster core that it took from Alex just now. The little monster was barely any bigger than his actual palm and had white fur all over its body. It was the little white kitten.

It was the same little white kitten that he fought for and nearly died saving. The mother and son pair of the cat monster had disappeared while he was near death and he had not been able to find where they had gone as not even the elders had found anything.

But now, the little cat was in front of him. He finally got out of his surprise and realized the little kitten was trying to eat its mother's core. Alex didn't care if the kitten ate its mother's core or not as it might end up benefiting it in the end. However, if the same thing that happened to him, happened to the little cat, It would certainly take a lot of harm.

"No, don't eat that. Give it to me," Alex said as he tried to take back the core.

"MEOW," the little purred and moved away from the core. Alex was stunned once more as he couldn't help but ask,

"Did... Did you just understand me?"

Chapter 134: Pearl

Alex was a little surprised when he saw the little cat move away from the core. But once he stopped telling the cat what to do, it immediately gravitated back towards the core.

Alex swiftly pulled the core towards him and kept it in his bag. Now that there was no aura from the core available, the cat started blinking its black eyes around, not knowing what to do.

"Meow," it meowed a little.

"Come here, little buddy," Alex said as he gestured the cat to come towards him with this hands.

"Meow," The cat meowed as it clumsily jumped towards Alex and started nudging his head on his knees.

"Where did you come from, buddy?" he asked, and started to think back on what had just happened. 'My arm,' he thought as he looked at his arms once more. 'It's gone. Did my scar heal, or...' he finally remembered what his master had said that day in the auction hall.

'Beast companions are a little unique, in that they don't live in the physical world after they bond with a cultivator,' was what Ma Rong had told him in the auction hall just before showing the tattoo of her own beast in the nape of her neck.

'A tattoo... was my scar, not an actual scar, but a tattoo?' he started to finally understand what had happened.

'But, that would mean...' he looked down at the little cat and tilted his head as he asked, "Did you form a bond with me?" he wasn't expecting an answer and he didn't get any.

He pet the little cat on its back and scratched its belly. "Meow," the cat meowed once more.

"Hmm... don't I have to feed you my blood essence for you to make a bond with you?" he asked. He remembered reading records on beast companions in the library. Although they weren't extensive in knowledge, they did give a general idea of what had to be done.

According to the records, beast companions could only be bonded by the beasts themselves. The humans could only 'influence' the desire to bond. This was why people got cubs and other newly born monsters. So that they could influence them from early on and make them voluntarily bond with them.

"But, Master did say the bonding requires humans to present their essence to the monsters. And the bond is only successful when the beasts accept the blood and drink it. But I haven't given the little cat any blo-" his words stuck in his mouth as he remembered the day back then.

That was the same day he had managed to refine the Steel sword. And refinement process was only done when the artifact accepted the person's essence, an essence which meant blood from their foreheads.

"That's right. The wolf bit me in my head and I was bloody at the time. Did you take in some of the blood at that time? Now that I think about it, I don't remember much of what happened after I pulled out the sword." Alex guessed that the little cat must've accepted his blood essence when he was down and nearly unconscious.

He pet the cat some more and as he was rubbing its belly, he felt its stomach move a little. "Hmm... are you hungry?" he was a little surprised.

He tried to look up its name and suddenly a bunch of extra information came to his head.

[White Cat (Infant) - Bonded

Name: None

Cultivation Base: Skin Tempering 2nd Realm

Evolution Chance: 5%

Cultivation Method: None]

"Oh," he was slightly astonished when he saw the entire panel pop up. This was a new set of information that he had never seen before.

"Name? You want a name buddy?" he asked the cat. "Meow," Alex thought he heard some sort of affirmation in that meow just now.

"Okay then, let's see... should I use real-life names like Toby or Felix? Nah, that doesn't sound right? Can I not choose and instead use a randomizer?" he thought as he clicked on the name.

A panel opened up where he could type and at the bottom left was a randomize button. He clicked on it, and it gave the name 'lingling'.

'Lingling? I don't like that.' Alex went on to randomize once more. He randomized a few times before he saw a name that he liked.

"Hmm... Since you are mostly white, the name fits too." He clicked confirm on the panel. "Alright then, from now on, your name will be Pearl."

"Meow" the little cat gave a questioning look. "Yes, Pearl. That's your name now." Alex said with a smile on his face.

The cat smiled as well and started meowing about. It started running laps around him but after a few laps, it sat near him in exhaustion.

"Are you okay little Pearl?" he asked for a second. The cat purred a little, its voice very weak.

"Oh, right. You were hungry. What do you eat though, meats? I don't have any." Alex said. Any restaurants he could visit were outside the sect and that would take quite a while to reach.

"Ah, that's right, monsters eat other monster's core too, right?" he took out a core from a very weak Skin Tempering 3rd realm monster and gave it to the little cat.

"Here Pearl, can you eat this?" he asked the cat.

"Meow Meow," seeing the monster core, the little cat's eyes immediately lit up with hunger. Alex put it near its mouth and it started to immediately nibble on it.

Unlike its mother's core, however, it easily started biting off the low-level core. Within minutes, it managed to finish the entire core and started meowing like it was getting tired.

"You want to sleep buddy?" he asked. He wanted to put him in his robes, but then remembered that beast companions usually stayed on the person they bonded with.

"Alright, can you go back here?" he asked as he pointed to his left arm. Immediately, white light shone from the cat as it leaped into his arm, turning to a tattoo of a paw.

Chapter 135: Beast Care

"What does a monster eat exactly? Meat may be?" he thought. "Urghh... I wish master had gone more in-depth when she taught me about the beast companions," he started whining a little.

He decided to go to the market outside and buy something for Pearl later on. For now, he would continue with the alchemy.

He proceeded to make a few pills before taking a break to get some food and returned back to make some more pills. He continued until it was 6 pm.

"I should stop now, and go do the other things," he thought as he left the alchemy room. He took the wooden token from the door and returned it back to the elder outside.

The elder looked at the time and calculated the price based on the amount of time he had spent in the room and the discount off of his badge number.

"168... that is 46% discount off of 2 spirit stones for each hour. Rounded off, you have to pay 8 spirit stones for the entire day." The elder said.

Alex took out 8 spirit stones from his storage bag and paid for it. The sky was starting to darken and since nobody was fighting today, most of the disciples had returned back from the crater.

Alex slowly made his way back to the other side of the mountain. However, instead of going back to his home, he left for the market in front of the sect.

After walking past the gate, he looked around to see if there were any restaurants there. Instead, he found something better. Towards the outer area of the market, he saw a small shop called 'Beasts Care'.

"Is that like a Veterinary?" he wondered and walked towards the shop. The shop was very small compared to the other shops in the market.

As he entered, he saw a very old man sitting in a chair, petting a little bunny on his lap. As soon as he realized someone had entered, he looked to the side and asked, "What do you want, boy?"

Alex was surprised when he saw the man be grumpy without even him doing anything. The man was wearing an elder's robes, so he decided to not say anything regarding his grumpy personality. Instead, he put on a friendly smile and asked,

"Hello elder, I got a new beast companion and it seems to be hungry, can you tell me if there is something I can buy here to feed it?" he asked.

The elder didn't look towards Alex at all and went back to petting the rabbit on his lap as he asked, "What beast?" he asked.

"It's a little kitten of a White Cat monster," Alex replied.

"Hmm... " the man turned towards Alex as he looked at him with a confused look. "What beast did you say?" he asked once more.

"A White Cat monster's kitten," he replied.

"A White... Cat? Show me," the elder said as he got curious.

"He is currently sleeping elder," Alex tried to say, but the elder just spoke back once more with a more authoritative voice, "I said show me."

Alex flinched a little. "Hey Pearl, can you come out?" he slowly whispered to the cat. However, the cat showed no response whatsoever. He tried softly calling it a few more times, but he was left unattended by the cat.

"What is going on boy? I told you to bring out the beast?" the older man started to get angry.

"I'm sorry senior, this is my first time trying to call out my beast companion, but he seems to not hear it when he is inside the tattoo," Alex replied.

"Your first time? Just pour some Qi into your tattoo and call it, let me check," the elder said.

Alex did as the elder said and poured some Qi into the tattoo. Surprisingly his tattoo swallowed in the Qi, never to be seen again. Alex faltered slightly when he saw that immediately found his footing and started calling Pearl out.

His tattoo suddenly itched and within a single second a white light suddenly shot out of his arms. Pearl, the little cat, was standing straight on top of the counter.

It turned around to look at Alex and meowed but immediately started purring with a serious face when it saw the old man.

"It's okay Pearl, he's not here to hurt you," Alex said calming Pearl down, and only then did pearl stop purring.

"Fascinating," the old man started mumbling as he walked up to Pearl and looked at him more carefully. "So fascinating. A monster I have never seen before. I never thought I could find one that I wouldn't recognize."

He suddenly turned to Alex and asked, "You said this is your first time taking the cat out, right? Then you must've gotten it recently. Tell me, Where did you get it?"

"Umm... it's actually been around 3 weeks since I saw him last. He bonded with me in the southern forest without me knowing and only came out today for the first time," Alex answered.

"Hmm... 3 weeks ago... southern forest... cat..." the elder's eyes suddenly lit up as he turned back towards the cat. "No way, the cat monster that was said to be in the saint realm. That cat?" the elder said with shock.

Alex was shocked too. 'He knows about the crater? I don't remember seeing him back there?' he thought.

"I see, no wonder I have never seen it. It's the child of a saint realm monster that came here from far away. Then that must mean that you were the Hong Wu Sect's Disciple there at the time."

The elder eyed Alex up and down and started saying, " I see, I see. You were the little kid they said Wen Cheng went out of his way to make a disciple."

Alex was a little shocked, "You know about me?"

The elder chuckled a little, "Hahaha, I am one of the few ones who do. In fact, I am even part of the reason why the other elders do not know about you."

Chapter 136: Elder Xian

"You were the reason the other elders don't know about me?" Alex asked curiously.

"Well, a part of it, but yes. Basically, when Wen Cheng and the rest returned from the crater where the saint realm monster fell, they started talking about how Wen Cheng had gone far and out to make you a disciple even though you were a part of the Hong Wu Sect already."

The man reached into his storage bag and took out a small piece of what looked like dried meat. He put the meat near Pearl's nose and suddenly, Pearl started munching on it, meowing from time to time.

The man smiled and continued, "Wen Cheng justified his action by talking about how talented you were and some other things. So, the few elders that were there came to a decision to only spread the information about the monster, but nothing about you."

"If your information of you being the sect leader's disciple is ever spread, the other elders would target you and make sure you were never high in the rankings. All so they can fight at a chance to become the sect leader themselves."

He then looked at Alex and tilted his head as he said, " In maybe a year or maybe even half a year if she is lucky, little Mei will surely breakthrough to the True realm, at the time, the seat for the first place will be empty and in contention from everyone. Will you be able to do your best and take the seat by yourself?"

Alex was a little surprised, 'Will I?' he started wondering. While his initial speed of breaking through had been very fast, he was starting to slow down. And now that he couldn't eat monster cores as freely anymore, he was starting to doubt if he could reach the higher realms as quickly.

'No. I shouldn't doubt myself. I still have many other ways I can do that. Especially since I have the God Grade talent,' he thought.

"Yes, I am sure I can do it," he replied to the elder.

The elder simply smiled and said, "Anyway, let's get back to what you were here for initially. What exactly did you want to know?"

"Well, I originally came to buy some food for little Pearl here, but now I want to learn as much as I can about beast companions and how to take care of them," he said.

The elder thought for a little and said, "Let's see, I think it would be better if you just go and learn these from the library." The elder said.

"The library? Don't I just get techniques from there? Will knowledge like this also be available there?" he asked in confusion.

"Ah, it seems your time in Hong Wu Sect has clouded what is normal and what is weird. The library is originally made for information to be shared for free."

"You can just go to the library and read anything on the lower 3 floors for free. The techniques and other important records are kept on the 4th floor and up, and will cost you money."

Alex nodded in understanding as he said, "I see. I will do as you say, elder. In the meantime, can I know what I should and should not feed my cat?"

"Stop treating a monster like a house pet. They are used to living in the wild and will eat anything they can. As for beast companions, they need even less food as long as you give them your Qi from time to time. It was probably hungry in the first place since you never fed it your Qi since you didn't know about it."

"Now that you do know it is staying with you, feed in a little Qi every day and it will be satisfied." The elder said.

"Oh, and what about the different monster cores? I heard that monsters can eat other monster's cores to increase their own cultivation. Does that mean, I can feed the cores to my cat and he will increase in cultivation as well?" he asked.

"Yes and No. While it can eat cores to increase its cultivation, if it eats a core from a monster stronger than it, it will not be able to handle all the energy and will die. There have been cases where the monsters simply exploded from eating a monster core from a much stronger monster."

"Also it is better if you don't feed your beasts as many cores. Similar to normal cultivators, they also need to stabilize their cultivation base before breaking through. If you keep on feeding them from very early on without properly maintaining their cultivation, they will end up with a bad cultivation foundation and will end up much weaker than what they should have been."

"Well, that is all I will tell you. Learn other things on your own at the library," the elder said and went back to sitting on the chair and started petting the little rabbit he was petting when Alex first came in.

"I understand, Thank you ... uh, what should I call you, elder?" he asked.

"You can call me elder Xian," the elder said.

"Thank you for the information elder Xian," Alex bowed a little in respect as he called back Pearl and started to leave the shop.

"Where do you think you are going boy?" the elder suddenly shouted from behind him.

Alex stopped in surprise and turned around to look at the elder with a curious face, "Do you have some more things to tell me, elder Xian?" he asked.

"No, I don't, boy," the elder simply said which confused Alex even more, but then he followed it up with, "But you should know I am not operating a charity here. You came into my shop and took information from me, it's time you pay up."

"Oh, yes elder," Alex was a little surprised, but still complied and took out some spirit stones and gave them to the elder. The elder took what was handed and simply said, "I have checked your little cat, he is perfectly healthy and you have nothing to worry about."

"I see, thank you, elder." Finally, Alex left the shop and went back to his room.

Chapter 137: Blood Essence

Alex returned back to his home a little later and logged out to get some food. He returned back to the game after a while.

He logged back into his lit-up room and looked a the time. It was half-past 7 right now.

"Hmm... what should I do now? Just wait around for it to be 9 pm?" he started to wonder. There was still over an hour before he had to go train with his master.

"Oh right, the cauldron. It should be used enough that it will be refined now." Alex thought and brought out his cauldron.

He placed the cauldron in front of him and placed his palm along the side of it. He slowly pushed his Qi towards the cauldron and instead of sending it in, he started washing the insides of the cauldron walls with his Qi.

"I don't feel any resistance anymore. Should be enough," he thought and took out his steel sword. He looked at the giant sword in front of him and thought, 'I should get a dagger or something like a knife. I can't keep on taking out such a big sword for small things like cutting my skin.'

He proceeded to turn the blade's tip towards his forehead and slowly made a small cut on it. His forehead started to bleed, but it also started to heal immediately. Alex stopped and looked as his skin wound healed within 5 minutes.

But, blood had already flowed out of his head, so he was fine with the wound healing. He took the blood, which was his blood essence, and slowly dropped it inside the cauldron.

ZMMMM

A small vibrating sound appeared from the cauldron and it started to glow. The drop of blood inside the cauldron started to move around but then was immediately swallowed by the cauldron.

The vibrating cauldron stopped, and a pair of notifications appeared.

<' Golden Jade Cauldron' has taken in your blood essence>

<' Golden Jade Cauldron' has accepted you as its master>

<Congratulation, you have successfully refined the True Earth grade artifact 'Golden Jade Cauldron'>

"Yes!! For a second there, it scared me," he thought as he looked at the cauldron's stats now that it was refined.

[Golden Jade Cauldron: Refined

Grade: True Earth

Elemental Alignment: Metal - Earth

Weight: 22 KG]

"Oh, it actually has elemental affinity as well? Thankfully that doesn't harm my pill-making," he thought. Alex wanted to bring out the stiletto as well, but he didn't want to break the floor with how heavy it was.

"Uhh... I want to check if there are any differences when making pills with the cauldron. Maybe I will have to wait until tomorrow," he thought. Then immediately thought, "No, I have to look up the information about beast companions tomorrow. After school then? Uhh... I need to go sell those pills in the auction."

"I guess I will have to wait a few more days before I see if there is any more improvement. Although, I don't see why there would be any?"

He kept back the cauldron and started rubbing his forehead to get rid of the remaining blood.

"Is this a waste of blood essence?" he started wondering as he looked at the little bit of redness in his hand.

"Ah, that reminds me, if my blood essence can help refine objects, then what can the blood essences of other animals do?" He quickly thought back to the item that he still had with him. The [????? ?????'s Blood Essence].

"I don't think it's an alchemy material. If it was, I would've known its name, right?" he thought as he took it out the check it. He looked into his storage bag to search for it and found it very quickly.

He took it out and was surprised when he saw it. While it had said blood essence, it was actually a solid ball of blood. Almost like, all the liquid in the blood had dried off.

'Is this what monster's essence looks like?' he wondered. Immediately a thick bloody scent started to fill the room.

"What the..." Alex started to get shocked. The aura that the blood was producing was so suffocating that he almost felt like he couldn't breathe anymore. He tried to use his Qi to bring the essence back into his storage bag, but he couldn't even get his Qi out anymore.

'What is happening?' he wanted to scream, but not even his voice escaped his mouth. The most he could do was grunt in pain as he was slowly brought down to his knees.

Suddenly, a warm flow of hot energy burst out from deep within him, relieving most of the pressure he was feeling. However, he still couldn't stand anymore or even use his Qi.

All he could do was sit around and watch the blood essence float in the air.

"What do i-" suddenly, his left arm started itching and the little cat jumped out. "Pearl? Why are you out?" Thanks to the little relieved pressure he could speak now.

"Meow." Alex thought he could almost hear the eagerness to eat the essence in Pearl's meow.

He remembered back to elder Xian telling him how a monster could die if it ate cores with too much energy in it. If this blood essence was the same thing as the cores, Pearl would be in serious danger if he ate that.

"No, don't. You can't mo-" his words left stuck in his mouth as he saw Pearl walk freely in this intense pressure. He could barely not feel the pain thanks to whatever his body was doing, yet Pearl was walking forward like a fish in water, completely unobstructed by the pressure.

'Is it because the essence came from his mother?' he wondered. He stopped feeling the same panic and fear he felt before and watched as little Pearl stopped right below the floating ball of blood essence.

In a single jump, Pearl reached the essence and opened its mouth. And without a shred of hesitation, he swallowed it.

Chapter 138: Changes in Pearl

Suddenly, the aura inside the room disappeared, leaving Alex finally free to move. He immediately got up and ran to where Pearl had landed.

He took pearl in his arms and started asking, "are you okay? Are you hurt?". But Pearl couldn't hear him. "What is happening?" Alex wondered as he looked at Pearl.

Pearl seemed to be asleep, but his eyes were fully open. His breathing was calm and there were no irregularities in his aura as well. Alex started to worry about what was happening to him.

Suddenly, Pearl jerked as he jumped down from his arms and started running around the room like crazy. "Meow," it screamed as if it was in pain.

"Wha-what's wrong?" Alex didn't know what to do. After a few laps around the room, Pearl finally stopped and released a loud growl, that sounded neither like a meow or a cat's purr. It almost sounded like...

Pearl looked up. His fur even more white, eyes filled with great intelligence and-

"Did you grow in size, buddy?" Alex said as he went up to Pearl to grab him. Pearl went from being about 15 cm in length to about 25 cm. He had grown a little bigger.

"Meow," Pearl meowed in confirmation. Alex got stunned. He could easily tell that Pearl was saying 'YES' to his question. Before, it was a vague feeling of an answer, but now, to him, it felt pretty clear. This was a chance he wasn't expecting.

"What happened to you? Why did you suddenly go to eat the blood essence?" he asked.

"Meow." A long meow came from Pearl and Alex once again was stunned as he could more clearly understand what Pearl was saying. 'I ate it because I had to.'

"Ho-How do I understand you?" He tried to think back to the records he had read and the lessons his master had given him. "Master said that once a beast companion turns adult, you can communicate with them. Did she mean that they could communicate both ways and not just the monster understanding the cultivator's word?" he wondered.

"But, that would mean that you are already an adult, and that is impossible, right? I just saw the system calling your infant this afternoon."

Alex nervously opened the cat's status page once again and was surprised by the difference from before.

[White Cat (Child) - Bonded

Name: Pearl

Cultivation Base: Skin Tempering 8th Realm

Evolution Chance: 40%

Cultivation Method: ????? ?????'s Dominating Body (Shared)]

Pearl had changed from infant to child according to the game. Also, his cultivation base had had a massive leap in the realm.

'Is this normal? Does a beast not need to be an adult to start communicating?' Alex started to wonder. He looked at the Evolution Chance stat and was shocked to see that it had gone from 5% to 40%.

"What brought along such a massive change? Could it be him breaking through? No way, right?" When Alex properly thought about it, he came to a single conclusion. "It was the blood essence, wasn't it?"

He looked at Pearl and thought, " That was your mother's blood essence, but it didn't belong to your mother. If it did, it would say White cat, wouldn't it?" He asked.

"Meow," Pearl meowed in confusion as none of what Alex was talking about made any sense to him.

"That must be it. What if that thing whose blood essence you took, what if this evolution turns you into that? Maybe you have a 40% chance to become something else." Alex felt pretty good about this theory and moved on.

Finally, he saw the new cultivation method that Pearl had acquired. "Dominating body?" he was slightly caught off guard. "Why is your cultivation technique a type of body? That should be its own thing no?" he asked.

"Meow"

"Yeah, you wouldn't know. I know. Still, it's weird that a body is a cultivation method. I would've never guessed that." Alex started to accept what was written and was about to close the status page when he finally noticed the 'shared' thing written on the cultivation method.

"What is this?" he was about to question it when suddenly, Pearl started coughing.

COUGH COUGH

"What's wrong? Are you okay?" he panicked as he started rubbing Pearl's back to relieve some stress.

COUGH COUGH

But he kept on coughing. "Is something stuck in your throat?" he tried to send his spiritual sense into Pearl's body, but it couldn't penetrate past his skin.

He started feeling more worried.

COUGH COUGH

COUGH

Suddenly, Pearl coughed out something red onto the floor and stopped coughing. Only then, did he start breathing normally with no more cough.

"It's okay, It's okay," he consoled Pearl while slowly rubbing his back. "What was that?" he turned to look towards the red thing that flew out of his mouth.

There, Alex saw it. Crimson red blood, floating in the middle of the air. Unlike the blood essence previously, it was all liquid. It was floating with an unstable form, constantly moving around, unable to keep a shape for more than a moment.

"Is that Pearl's blood or..." he started to wonder if this was the true form of the blood essence that Pearl swallowed.

Just as he was thinking this, he felt his body start heating up. "What now?" there were just too many things happening one after another for him to process.

"Pearl, get back," he said and waited for Pearl to go back to being a tattoo. Once he was inside, Alex started feeling more and more heat from the inside of his body.

Suddenly, a gravitational force erupted from him. The heat all rushed up to his head and that had become the source of the gravity. The shapeless blood suddenly stopped moving and immediately shot towards him.

It hit him right at the middle of his brows and pierced its way through.

<Blood Essence discovered>

<Source not in database>

<Player is...>

Alex never got to hear any of these as he fainted the moment it entered his head.

Chapter 139: Time Skip

"Uhh... My head!!" Alex stood up, rubbing his forehead as he came back to consciousness. "Wha-Where?" he looked around.

"Game?" he looked around a little more. After rubbing his head for a few moments more, he finally started to think. 'The essence..' He finally remembered what had happened.

He released his spiritual sense to see if anything was different about him. He found nothing. Even his forehead where the drop of blood had pierced through was already healed.

"Is there really nothing wrong with me then?" He had expected to at least be hurt a lot, but after the first minute of intense headache, nothing happened.

"What's the time?" he looked to his top right corner to view the current time. "9:23? I'm late," he thought as he stood up and walked to the front door.

He was supposed to meet his master at 9 pm, yet over 20 minutes had already gone by. His master must've been waiting for a long time.

He immediately opened the door and...

"What?" he was surprised when he saw the outside. It was bright. As bright as the brightest day he could remember. He slowly turned his eyes towards the upper right corner of his vision once more and saw what he had missed at first.

AM. It was 9:23 AM.

"I slept through the entire night?" Not only had he missed his training with his master, but he had also missed the entire night. The only thing he did last night was sleep. Not even normal cultivation.

He walked back inside and got to thinking as to just exactly what had happened. The blood essence had hit him, and he had fainted. He saw nothing else happen.

He slowly poured his Qi into his tattoo and called out Pearl. "Pearl came out with a mighty 'Meow'. Thankfully, he hadn't grown since yesterday and was the same size.

He looked him over and felt his aura. "You look fine. Do you feel fine buddy?" he asked as he petted him.

"Meow," Pearl meowed in confirmation. "Alright, go back now. I have to go to my classes. I will see you later on, okay?" Alex said.

"Meow?" Pearl didn't understand what he meant but went back into his left arm without hesitation. "Alright, let's log out," he said as he logged out from the game.

He went to his classes as normal and studied them properly. Even though he was making a ton of money thanks to the game, he couldn't tell when it would all come crumbling down, so he needed to have some knowledge to get jobs later on.

After he was done with classes, however, he rushed back to the game. He logged into the game at 3 and a half o'clock and walked out of the home.

He walked out of the gate of the sect without saying anything. He quickly found his way to an empty alleyway and entered there. Once inside, he went invisible to change his garments. He took off the yellow robes that would identify him as a Tiger sect disciple and wore light green robes representing the Hong Wu sect.

Once he was changed, he turned off his invisibility and walked out. Then as swift as ever, he made his way to the Pink Cloud auction house.

He wasn't stopped at the entrance at all and was led to one of the rooms inside the hall without hesitation. After a few minutes, Cai Ping entered. It seemed that she was the only one told about his arrival whenever he came here.

"Hello, Daoist Yu. It has been a week since I saw you. We missed your pills during yesterday's auction. Quite a few people were disappointed." Cai Ping said as he teased Alex a little.

"Ah, I'm sorry. I have been busy this week due to something that came upon me unexpectedly. I have barely gotten any time to make pills now. However, I had free time yesterday, so I could make some more pills."

Alex slowly reached into his storage bag and pulled out a bunch of pills bottles. "Here you go," he said as he passed them along.

Cai Ping looked at the pill bottles and picked them up to count exactly 21 pills in total. She then proceeded to take out a pill tester to check every single pill he had brought in.

When she was finally done with all of them, she was dumbfounded. Half the pills among the 21 different pills were above 40% in harmony. 3 of them were even above 45% with 2 being at 47% and 1 being at 49%.

This was beyond what she had been imagining he would take out. The few other times he had come here, she was already shocked by the sheer number of quality pills he had brought, but now, the quality had gone up in level once more.

'I almost started to believe it was him who made this pill, but even if he is really a genius, that should be impossible. Did senior Ma Rong make it? That would make sense since he was together with senior Ma Rong during the previous auction, but her Common rank pills should definitely go above and beyond Heaven grade.'

'Did she send her failure with him?' she started to wonder.

"Daoist Yu, are you sure you want to sell these pills. They are quite amazing, so don't you want to keep it to yourself?" she asked.

"No. I'm an alchemist. I made those pills in the first place to sell. What would I do with them, if I just keep them in my storage bag, collecting dust?"

"I, see. Then let me set up your contract," Cai Ping said as she proceeded to prepare a contract using the talismans available on the table.

"Wait," Alex said as he saw her hand moving towards the talismans. "I have more to sell this time, other than just the pills."

"Oh," Cai Ping said in surprise. "Can I see what it is then?"

Chapter 140: Selling

Alex reached into his storage bag once more and took out a small box from it. He then handed it to Cai Ping, who curiously looked at it.

It was a wooden box and quite small in size. "An alchemy ingredient?" she asked.

"No-" Alex stopped for a moment. 'Wait, isn't it an alchemy ingredient? Why else could I know what it was?' he felt like he was missing out on this core information for a long time now.

"It's a Spirit Cleansing Lily," he answered, still trying to calm his reeling mind. 'It must be an ingredient to a pill I have no idea about.' That was the conclusion he came to.

Cai Ping opened the box and looked at the orange lily inside curiously. "A Spirit Cleansing Lily?" she was a little confused. "I think I have heard about this somewhere before, but I can't remember. Please wait for a second, Daoist Yu, I will have to call someone."

Cai Ping took out a communication talisman and used it. Within minutes, an old, white-haired man walked in.

'It's him!'. Alex was surprised to see that the old man was the same person that had given them their spirit stones 2 weeks ago after the bi-annual auction. His master had even called him 'senior'.

'Who exactly is this person?' he couldn't help but wonder.

"Senior, " Cai Ping bowed to the old man as he walked in.

"What is going on? Why did you call me?" The old man said as he looked at Cai Ping and then towards Alex without a single bit of change in emotion. It seemed he was too used to meeting different people and seeing many different things.

"Here is the thing, senior." Cai Ping passed along the wooden box with the Spirit Cleansing Lily to the old man. She waited for him to open the box and see what was inside.

The old man, once again, showed no emotions as he opened the box and saw what was inside. He looked at the orange lily and didn't seem to realize what it was either. To him, it seemed like a normal lily.

"What is this?" he asked Cai Ping.

"Daoist Yu here wants to auction this flower. According to him, it's called a Spirit Cleansing Lily. I thought I had heard of it from the records but couldn't remember it. So I decided to call you senior."

The old man listened to this and then mumbled, "Spirit Cleansing L-" suddenly his eyes turned wide open. He immediately took out a communication talisman of his own and called someone else.

A lady came in with a stack of papers and left just as quickly.

The old man immediately flipped through the records and landed on an image of the Spirit Condensing Lily. He looked at the image, and then at the flower in the wooden box.

"It's the same!!" he screamed with astonishment. Cai Ping was now getting confused as to what exactly was happening. The old man looked at Alex, with emotions in his face for the first time, and asked," Where did you get this flower, Daoist?"

Alex was surprised that an auction house would actually ask for the origin. "Can I not sell this without revealing its origin?" Alex asked.

"Ah, I'm sorry. I was too excited," said the old man. "Of course you can sell it. I was just surprised since it's been forever since one of these popped up in the market. Are you sure you are willing to sell this?" the old man asked.

"Yes, please do." Alex was looking forward to having it sold since it could really bring him a lot of money.

"Yes, we will do that. However, it might take a while, Daoist," The old man said as he contemplated for a while and said, "I don't think we can sell it here."

"Huh?" Alex said with a surprised face. "Are you saying you won't sell it? Didn't you just say you will?" Alex asked with his head full of confusion.

"Oh, no. We will sell it. Just not here. We will have to send it to the capital to our headquarters where we can get the full benefit of selling this."

"The headquarters?" Alex remembered Ma Rong saying something about Pink Cloud auction house's headquarters being in the Cardinal City.

"Is there any special reason?" he asked.

"Well, the Auction house in the cardinal cities has a lot more guests on a weekly basis and also is used to dealing with objects of high value. We will transfer this flower over there during the weekend and as per the result, we will give you your spirit stones right here," the old man said.

"So, it won't take any extra time? I will get my spirit stones this Saturday?" he asked.

"Uh, it might be better if you come on Sunday. The auction in the Capital always takes a little too long." The old man said.

"I see. Please do that then," Alex said.

The old man himself set up 2 different talisman contracts for Alex, one for the pills and one for the flower. Alex thanked both the old man and Cai Ping and walked out of the auction house.

He looked at the time and realized it was barely 5 PM. "Should I go to the library now?" he wondered. He walked towards an empty alleyway and changed back to his yellow robes for the Tiger Sect.

Once he got out, he walked straight back to the Tiger sect. He walked past the gates of the Tiger sect, and as soon as he did that, his badge inside his storage bag started vibrating.

"Hmm..." he sent his spiritual sense inside his badge and saw that he was registered to fight with someone. 'Someone wants to fight with me?'

The badge said that it was someone with the number 173. 'Is this another one of Huo To's henchmen? I hope this isn't someone strong like that last guy.'

'On second thought, they do help me train. Let's see who my opponent is this time." Alex walked straight towards the sect crater.

Chapter 141: Finally

Alex soon arrived at the sect crater. He looked at his badge once more and found his way to a fighting stage. He watched the fight on the stage go on and waited until it was over.

Once it was, he heard his number being called.

"Number 168 and 173," the elder screamed through the crowd.

Alex walked up to the stage and saw another man come up. It was a young man with short hair and a thin body build. He looked like he had barely anybody mass on him.

'Is he okay?' Alex wondered. He had never seen anyone this thin in his life. 'How does a cultivator even end up being this thin?'

"It's him, right?" a girl whispered a small distance away from the stage. Alex could barely catch her voice thanks to his spiritual sense.

"Yeah, I heard he had won all of his matches and breaks through very fast. Apparently, in the little time he has been here, he has broken through quite a few times already. It's honestly unheard of how fast he is progressing." Another girl spoke, answering the first girl.

'Are they talking about me?' Alex wondered. He was surprised that they found out about his breakthrough speed somehow. 'But they shouldn't know about my cultivation breakthroughs at all. I make sure to keep it hidden most of the time.' He was truly confused.

"Do you know his name?" a boy spoke somewhere else in the crowd.

"Hmm... I don't really remember. It's a very weird name. It A-something." Another person in the crowd spoke.

Alex was truly surprised now. 'How do they know my name too? I have never used the world Alex at all.' He was starting to wonder if the NPCs could see his real name or were bugged.

"But why is he so good at cultivation, when he has a body like that?" another voice came.

'Huh?' Alex got confused.

"I heard he was at 7th Bone Tempering realm just a couple of days ago and now he is already at 8th Bone tempering realm. Honestly, that Adam guy might end up becoming a core disciple at this rate."

Finally, it all clicked in Alex's head. "Oh," he said as he realized that they were talking about the thin person in front of him.

'Adam? He is a player, isn't he?' this was the first time Alex had ever met a player in the game, aside from the first day when that person had helped him.

'I wonder if that guy already left this place and moved on to some other location,' he couldn't help but be distracted.

"Ready," the elder shouted.

Alex slowly took out his sword and got into a proper stance. The thin man named Adam proceeded to take out nothing and just fighting empty-handed.

"Fight!"

Alex immediately rushed forward, with friction to slow him down, and did a horizontal slice on the young man named Adam. Adam was surprised by the fast movement of Alex, and also started to immediately move away from the spot.

He was somehow faster than Alex, who was moving around at incredible speed due to his strong legs and frictionless body, thanks to the Fluctuating Friction dance.

Alex started chasing with his movement technique but couldn't catch up at all. The man was just way too fast.

'Does he have an immortal grade movement technique?' Alex wondered. It was very much possible that during the first treasures that were gifted to the new users, they randomly got a technique.

Alex got [Alchemy God's Knowledge] from that. It could be possible that this guy got a movement technique.

Alex was starting to get annoyed seeing the man run away so much. So, he put his hands forward and tried to stop the man from running.

Qi Manipulation easily stopped the man for a few seconds, enough for Alex to catch up. Just as he was getting close, the thin man used his own technique.

Suddenly, an illusory wall of golden light formed in front of Adam. Alex didn't want to stop from running his way, so he simply swapped the blade to his other hand and made a fist.

His fist started glowing yellow as he immediately sent it to Adam's way. Given that both of the abilities had yellow colors and were thus metal aligned, Alex thought that his ability would at best create an explosion and destroy itself and the barrier in the process.

But, something very unexpected happened. Suddenly, the barrier made out of the golden light crumbled to pieces under the slightest touch of the flying Iron Fist Punch as it continued its way to Adam.

Adam tried to move away from the line of target, but he found out that he was still stuck in the place due to Alex's Qi Manipulation. Horrifying fear ran across his mind, thinking he would die now.

Out of nowhere, the elder got into the middle of Adam and Alex and with a single thrust of their palm, the elder destroyed Alex's punch.

"Fight is over," the elder declared. Adam took a huge sigh of relief and thanked the elder. He then took the badge and immediately walked down from the stage. But as he did so, he turned back to look at Alex with eyes full of Hatred, Surprise, and Fear.

Alex walked up to the elder and took his badge and left as well, leaving only the elder on top of the stage. The elder looked at his hands and then remembered the badge number.

'Number 168? What is his cultivation base? I couldn't see it at all. Given that the attack was so strong, he must be around Organ tempering 3rd realm at the very least. Someone in the organ tempering realm and someone who can use the Iron Fist Punch, I wonder why I haven't seen this disciple before at all.'

The elder suddenly remembered that he was still looking after the fights, so he proceeded to call along with the other 2 contestants and forgot about the previous match.

Chapter 142: Revealing a bit

"Anyone knows who the guy was? I don't think I have ever seen him before."

"I think I have seen him fight a few times before, but I don't know his name."

"I believe, he too is like Adam, someone who joined recently and is gaining ranks very fast."

"Can you tell what his cultivation base was? I didn't see it."

"He must have a high cultivation base, his attack was so strong."

Even after he was gone, Alex was the talk among the people watching below the stage. His display of power was too great for him to not leave a lasting impression.

Alex, on the other hand, was himself shocked at what he had done in the match. 'How did my punch become so strong?' he couldn't help but wonder. Iron Fist Punch wasn't supposed to be very strong, a realm or 2 above his own. However, the display of power that he had just shown was far above that.

If his punch had been on the same level as the other guy's defensive wall, they would have most likely cancel out each other. If it had been a few realms higher, then the punch would have caused a big explosion where most of his attack would've hit the other guy. But, simply breaking the defense like it was a sheet of glass, that meant that his attack was very strong.

'How did I get so strong?' he couldn't come up with a reason at all. He gave the problem a bit more thought and finally ended up with a reason why that might have happened.

'Does it have something to do with the blood essence from last night?' he wondered. He was still confused as to what had happened to him last night. The most he could assume is that his body had to somehow fend off or absorb the blood essence, and that was what had knocked him out.

He decided to ignore the thought for now. "So, do I fight some more, or do I go to the library?" he was in a dilemma.

'Can I tell my master that I need to learn about beast companions and fight for now? Oh, or maybe master even knows a lot about them. Pearl should be fine for today. I will ask master about him later tonight.'

He went on to register some more fights. He fought around 3 more times and realized that he had gotten a lot stronger. Every single battle, he was able to overwhelm his opponents, and as such managed to win the 156th badge by 9 pm.

If he hadn't had to log out for dinner or his 2nd opponent hadn't taken forever to arrive, he might have reached a much higher ranking.

'Doesn't core disciples start from 50th ranking? I wonder how many of them are truly in the Meridian realm and above. The difficulty level will only get higher, so I will have to level up as fast as possible as well. I wonder when I can do my next breakthrough.'

Alex was on his way to his master's place. It took him a dozen or so minutes to go from the sect crater all the way to the training hall.

"You are here, finally." Wen Cheng said as he sensed Alex coming his way.

"Good Evening master," he greeted as soon as he saw his master.

"Why didn't you come yesterday? I kept waiting for you and you didn't come at all. Were you busy with alchemy or something?" he asked.

"No, uh... something happened yesterday and I fainted for the entire night. I only gained consciousness this morning." Alex replied.

"Lost consciousness? Did something happen? I didn't bother calling you yesterday because I thought you were exhausted from the day's alchemy and needed a break. Was I wrong?" Wen Cheng asked.

Alex thought for a bit about how exactly to explain the issue.

"We should go inside the first master," he said. Both master and disciple then walked into the soundproof training hall.

"Come out, Pearl."

With a bright shine, Pearl came out from his arm and landed between him and his master. Wen Cheng was surprised when he saw the little guy. Pearl was barely any bigger than his palm and that small size made him look quite cute.

Wen Cheng squatted down on one knee and started petting Pearl, who happily let him pet him. "Did you get a beast companion yesterday? Is that why you were absent?"

"Actually, no. But he is part of the reason." Alex said.

Wen Cheng looked at him with a curious face and said, "Explain,"

Alex went into detail about what happened yesterday, but still kept some of the happenings vague. He didn't tell about the Saint Monster core and kept a pretty vague explanation for how he came to acquire that ball of the essence. But everything else, he told his master without hesitation.

Wen Cheng was shocked for a while, so much information that just seemed so ridiculous that he had a hard time believing it, but he couldn't deny it since it was his disciple. While his disciple could also lie, he didn't see why he would decide to.

He then looked down to see the cat he was still petting. "So this is the child of the cat monster you talked about back in that crater?" he asked.

"Yes, master. The reason we couldn't find him back then was because he was bonded with me and had already come inside my arm to live with me." Alex felt better after informing what had happened to master. Finally, he didn't have to suffer the burden alone.

Wen Cheng's face lost any sort of emotion as he got very serious for a moment. "Have you told anyone about the cat yet?" he asked.

"Yes, I did take him to the beast care to see what he needed, so elder Xian knows about him," Alex replied.

"If it's only him, then that is fine for now. Remember, never let anyone know about the origin of your beast companion. That will only bring trouble to you."

Chapter 143: Fighting Meng Yun

"Bring trouble to me? Is it because his mother was in the saint realm?" Alex asked.

"Yes. Since his mother was in the saint realm, he has a high chance of being able to break through the True realms and reach the saint realm as well. Since both you and he are very weak right now, people will either try to steal him from you or harm you both lethally." Wen Cheng said.

"They can steal my beast companion? How?" Alex asked with surprise.

"Yes, they can. they either make the owner break the bond willingly by force, or they kill the owner with the beast still out of him." Wen Cheng said.

"I will make sure to not reveal Pearl to the outside then, master. Thank you for telling me." Alex said. He then thought of something and decided to ask about it right now.

"Master, do you know anything about something called Sun God's Divine Yang Body?" Alex wanted to know more about his body.

Wen Cheng thought for a second and replied, "I don't think so. But then again, I haven't read every record in the library. Maybe you will find some if you read them."

"But, won't it cost a lot of spirit stones?" Alex asked. He was worried about having to spend too much money.

"Ahem... don't tell anyone what I'm about to tell you okay?" Wen Cheng said, lowering his voice to a whisper even though they were in a soundproof room.

"While the technique is all sealed, none of the records are. So you can just walk into the higher floors and read everything with your spiritual sense." Wen Cheng said.

Alex was surprised that the sect master of the sect would teach his student how to steal stuff in his own sect. "Can I go all the way up without being a core disciple or elder?" he asked.

"Yeah, there is no other restriction in the Tiger sect. As long as you can pay, you can go anywhere and get anything. So, you can walk all the way to the top of the library, while reading everything. However, maybe rent something just so it looks like you aren't wasting your time in there and are not so suspicious." Wen Cheng's advice seemed really enticing to Alex.

"I will do that tomorrow then, master," said Alex and finally started to train for the day.

"Alright, since you learned so many techniques, today you should just train in them. Let's hold off learning another one for tomorrow. Okay?" Wen Cheng said.

"Yes, master." Just as he said that he noticed someone coming near the door. So did Wen Cheng. Alex hurriedly called back Pearl.

"You guys are training already?" suddenly a voice came from the door. Luo Mei walked in with Meng Yun behind her. Alex hadn't seen her since that time in the forest and was surprised to finally see her.

"Hello, senior sister." He greeted Luo Mei and turned towards Meng Yun, "Hello daoist Meng, it's been a while."

"Hello," Meng Yun gave a small response too and immediately turned towards Wen Cheng to give the sect leader a bigger greeting.

"Little Mei, why have you brought along Yunyun? It's time for your junior brother to train. You aren't here to disturb him or worse beat him again, are you?" she asked.

"Of course not master, what do you take me for? I brought Yunyun along to test how strong little brother had become." Luo Mei seemed to want to have Meng Yun fight with Alex. He was quite shocked when he heard that.

He slowly focused himself and looked at Meng Yun, and was absolutely shocked at what had shown up.

[Organ Tempering 1st Realm]

'Wasn't she still in Bone tempering 7th or 8th realm back when I met her in the forest? It's only been 3 weeks. How is she already so high in cultivation?'

'Unless... she is a player as well,' He thought.

"Alright, little brother, you should fight Yunyun. She is one of the fastest up-and-coming disciples in the sect right now. She joined only a few months ago and is already in the Organ tempering realm. Within a few months, she is sure to enter Meridian tempering. If you don't focus on cultivating, you might never be able to catch up to her," said Luo Mei, who seemed to be quite proud of Meng Yun's achievements.

"Okay," Alex simply nodded and got into position. Under Wen Cheng's instruction, Meng Yun walked to the other side and prepared herself as well.

Alex brought out his normal sword, while Meng Yun brought out a not-so-simple-looking flute. 'A flute?' Alex has heard people fought using music but had never seen it himself.

Wen Cheng walked up to the middle and acted as the referee. With a single swing of his hand, he started the fight.

A sweet sound started flowing out of Meng Yun's flute that sounded very simple and sweet. Alex didn't immediately attack as he felt a little apprehensive towards an unusual weapon like a flute.

More sound slowly appeared and he started to feel something heavy pressing down on his consciousness. But, it was barely anything, so he ignores whatever it was.

He crouched a little and in a single leap, crossed the entire fighting hall, arriving right in front of Meng Yun. He decided to use not techniques to attack her vulnerable self, but before he could even do anything, the music coming out of her flute changed dramatically, and Alex was immediately sent far away, hitting the wall on the other side.

"Ow, what was that?" he asked as he got up once more. The flute's melody had changed back to the first one that put some load on his consciousness.

'Seems I can't attack just like that.' He started to pour his Qi into his sword. However, instead of turning yellow like how most of his Qi lit up things, the sword started glowing a not-so-dark shade of green.

Alex was preparing to use the second strike of the Elusive Heavenly Sword.

Chapter 144: The Fight Continues

The blade glowed bright green as Alex prepared to unleash the second strike of the Elusive heavenly sword. Meng Yun got serious when she saw this. Apparently, she could tell that the strike was going to be strong.

Her flute immediately changed tone as she started to play an even more aggressive sound. Qi built up right in front of her, threatening to fly off at any moment.

Alex took one step forward and with a single slash let go of the energy in his sword, sending a green slash flying towards Meng Yun. At the same time, Meng Yun as well let the pent-up energy lose, and the aggressive energy flew off towards the green slash.

As expected, a massive boom appeared right in front of them, sending shock waves towards both of them. Alex somewhat stood his ground, while Meng Yun had to take a step back.

'Is he stronger than me?' Meng Yun was shocked. She had expected herself to be stronger in general since she thought she had the higher cultivation, yet, he was doing very well with the fight.

She immediately got even more aggressive. A sudden shift in tone caused a bullet-like energy projectile to be sent towards Alex. Alex barely managed to dodge the projectile, when another one arrived. He shifted his body to dodge that one as well when the next projectile arrived.

One after another, multiple energy projectiles were thrown at Alex who was starting to get more at ease with the dodging thanks to the Elusive Heavenly Sword's evasion footwork.

'Dammit,' he thought. 'My blade is low graded so I can't use my attacks to their full potential.' Up until now, he had been fighting opponents that were weaker or equal in cultivation base as him. Each time, he had used his mortal grade sword that was enough to fight against his opponents.

However, against Meng Yun, who was a realm higher than him, in fact, a minor realm higher even, the blade wasn't as effective. Wen Cheng and Luo Mei watched from the side, still wondering where the match was gonna go.

"Do you think little brother can win, master?" Luo Mei asked using Spiritual sense.

"Hmm... tough to say, it seems his skills aren't enough to break through Meng Yun's own counter-attacks. Even the 3rd strike of the Elusive heavenly sword shouldn't be enough for him to disrupt Meng Yun's momentum in any way. Especially, since he doesn't have a wood-type superior spiritual root."

Wen Cheng thought for a bit and said, "Although, if he had the same grade weapon as Meng Yun's flute, he might be able to win quite easily. Also, there are a few techniques he isn't using yet which would give him an obvious advantage. You could even say that he is fighting with both of his hand's behind his back."

Luo Mei's eyes turned wide when she heard this. "Huh? Haven't you given little brother a proper weapon yet?"

Wen Cheng shook his head as he said, "Ma Rong suggested that I teach him fighting without any external help. So, I gave him a common mortal-grade sword and hid his relation to me. That also helped him from getting into trouble with the other elder's disciples."

"Not really. That merchant Huo's second son is already after little brother for quite a while now." Luo Mei said.

"Huo Zemin's son, what was his name? Huo Tu. What does he want with Yu Ming?" Wen-Cheng asked with a confused look. He couldn't understand why someone like Yu Ming would be in trouble with a scum like Huo Tu.

"From what little brother told me, He tried to buy little brother's pill for 10 spirit stones, and when little brother denied it, he got angry. Apparently, he has sent a few of his lackeys after little brother, but the little brother has been able to take care of them easily." Luo Mei said.

"He never told me anything about it," Wen Cheng sighed as he said that.

"There was no need to, master. If little brother needed anything, I could have just interfered." Luo Mei replied.

"I guess so. Still, making everything in the sect available to one with spirit stones doesn't really work well some of the time. We get scums like Huo Tu who only know how to flaunt their parent's money and gather lackeys to do their tasks for them. He's probably never been rejected in his life on anything. Sigh, if I could, I would remove him from the sect right here and now."

"Alas, due to our trade with Victorious Snow merchant group, it's impossible. I can't understand how Huo Zemin can raise two children completely different in personality and talent." Wen Cheng sighed quite a bit.

"Let's forget about such matter, master. Tell me more about what you said about little brother." Luo Mei asked, trying to change the subject.

"What I said about Yu Ming? Which part?" Wen Cheng questioned.

"The part where you said that little brother is still not using quite a few techniques. Is that true?" Luo Mei was truly curious about this. From her perspective, her junior brother was having trouble with the fights, but if what her master said was true, then that might not have been the case.

"Oh yes. Let's see if the 5 techniques I have already given to him, he is only using 2 of them. And he is also not using a single of the techniques he learned back in Hong Wu Sect. Some of those would have the match over within seconds. He probably doesn't want that and is only trying to fight properly" Wen Cheng explained.

"Although, if he isn't going to use any of the other techniques, he might end up losing soon. Hopefully, he doesn't do that," Wen Cheng said while shaking his head.

Luo Mei brought her attention back towards the match that was taking place between her junior brother and her trusted aid, Meng Yun. She then mumbled to herself, "Can he really win against her?"

She would find that out very soon.

Chapter 145: A Strong Fist

The barrages of the sounds-based projectiles from Meng Yun finally stopped. She put down her flute and started breathing a little heavier. Droplets of sweat had formed across her brow as she tried to catch her breaths.

The relentless playing of the flute was very exhausting, and worst of all, the damned guy in front of her had somehow managed to dodge every single one of the attacks.

'How good is his evasion ability?' she wondered.

Alex, on the other hand, wasn't tired at all. Training for over 6 hours every night had been a norm for him during the last couple of days and the fight right now didn't feel any different.

Now that her attack had ended, he could finally use his own. Instead of pouring Qi into his blade, he put his sword into his bag. Everyone in the room was suddenly surprised.

"Please be ready to intercept this attack," a familiar voice spoke in Wen Cheng's mind. He immediately got vigilant as Alex was starting to prepare for his next attack.

He made his hand into a fist and poured his Qi into it. A yellow glow started to appear in it as it started getting brighter by the second.

Men Yun immediately put her flute next to her mouth and started using more tones. A tone started playing that seemed to wrap around Meng Yun, pushing anything that came towards her, aside.

Seeing this, Alex finally let out his glowing fist, as he used the Iron Fist Punch towards Meng Yun. A large, golden-yellow energy in the form of a fist flew towards Meng Yun.

Meng Yun prepared herself to take the full force of the attack with her own technique, but suddenly, someone else appeared in front of her. He looked to see the back of the sect leader.

Wen Cheng put forth a palm and lightly sent it forward. That light palm immediately dispelled any energy the flying fist had, making it disappear as if it never had been there.

"You lost, Yunyun," Wen Cheng said as shook off his hands and kept them behind his back.

"I... lost?" Meng Yun was confused. She never even got to face the attack, yet she had lost?

"What is going on master?" Luo Mei came forward and asked. She was very confused with what had just happened as well. One moment her master was standing with her, the next moment he was in front of Meng Yun, saying she had lost.

"If I hadn't intercepted your junior brother's attack just now, Meng Yun would probably have been gravely injured," Wen Cheng said as he looked towards Alex. 'That attack just now... it was definitely in the 4th realm of Organ Tempering. But how did he get so strong suddenly?' Wen Cheng wondered.

"Congratulations on winning, Junior brother," Luo Mei came from the side and started patting him on the back.

"Thank you, sister."

"Whats your current cultivation base? I can't see it right now," Luo Mei asked. Alex stopped using the Immortal concealment technique and let his cultivation aura spread out.

"Oh wow, you're still at only Bone Tempering realm and you already beat Yunyun who is at Organ Tempering 1st realm. You really are very talented, little brother. More than me and senior brother ever were."

Alex got a little embarrassed, unsure of how to respond. " Oh, right!!," Luo Mei shouted catching the attention of everyone in the room.

"Master said you weren't using some of your techniques, brother, is that correct?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yes, that is true," Alex simply replied.

"Oh, Why didn't you use it then? Were you trying to use Yunyun as training?" Luo Mei kept on asking the question.

"Oh no, Of course not. I wasn't trying to handicap myself or anything like that. It was just that... the match would've been over immediately if I used them." Alex replied genuinely.

"You would've won immediately? Are you saying you can win against Yunyun immediately if you wanted to?" Luo Mei asked after hearing Alex's reply.

"Well, kind of. Yes."

"Oh," Luo Mei said with surprise. "How many techniques did you not use?" she asked.

"Umm..." Alex counted in his head, and said, "3 primary ones."

"Primary ones? What does that mean?" Luo Mei asked curiously.

"Well, there were 3 techniques I had thought of absolutely not using. Others I just didn't have to." Alex said.

Meng Yun's eyes turned wide. Not only had he admitted to having handicapped himself, he also said he could've been fine with a little more handicap. That was just an insult to injury for her.

"Really?? wow. You will be as strong as me at this rate." Luo Mei said. After chatting for a bit more time, Luo Mei took Meng Yun and returned back to their houses.

After the ladies were gone, Wen Cheng finally asked a question that was burning deep in his heart. " What is going on, Yu Ming? Why was your attack so strong?"

"Yeah. I wanted to tell that to you earlier but didn't get the time, Master. After I took in that blood essence, my Iron Fist Punch has gotten a significant leap in power.

"I did feel it. Go on, use it once more on me. Let me see it once more." Alex did as Wen Cheng said and attacked him with the full force of his Iron Fist Punch.

It was much stronger than last time, barely touching on the threshold of the 5th realm of Organ Tempering. "It really is so much stronger. It wasn't like this Saturday night, was it?"

"No master, and for some reason, that is the only ability that has increased in power. All others are still the same power as they were before." Alex was really confused by the current situation, and it seemed Wen Cheng had no idea either.

"I don't think we can do anything about it for now. Go read the records in the library and see if there is anything about it in there tomorrow." That was the only advice Wen Cheng could come up with for now.

Chapter 146: Forced Cultivation

"Alright, train by yourself for now. I don't think there is anything you will need me for tonight, so I will come back at 3 AM." After saying that, Wen Cheng left the training hall.

Alex didn't know what to do, so he decided to let out Pearl.

"Come out, Pearl." With a bright shine of light, Pearl appeared in front of him. "Meoow"

"You are not sleepy, are you?" he asked. "Meow," Pearl seemed to say 'no'.

"Alright then. I will practice my techniques for a while. As for you, you can... uhh," Alex was stumped for a moment on what to make Pearl do. He wanted Pearl to practice as well, but he was still a child. He thought a bit more and came up with something.

"You can use your cultivation method to cultivate a bit more," Alex said.

"Meow," the little cat had no idea what cultivate was. "Uhh... you don't know? But it says you have a cultivation technique now in your status." Alex was a bit confused.

"Hmm... maybe it's like mine and you have to meditate? But can cats even meditate? Let's see, normal monsters just absorb the Qi in the surrounding to get stronger, or occasionally eat other monster's cores to improve."

"Sigh, just try to meditate for now and see what happens." Alex gave up in the end and went with his first choice.

"Meow," the cat was even more confused.

"Ah, just close your eyes and breathe slowly," Alex explained what meditating meant.

The cat did as asked and closed its eyes to meditate. He watched to see if anything would happen. Nothing happened for the first minute, but after a few, Pearl's fur started glowing a little white.

Slowly, the white turned to yellow, which then turned to golden as time went on. Suddenly, as soon as the radiating light turned golden, Alex felt a small thump inside him. Then, came a flood of notifications.

<Pearl has started using "????? ?????'s Dominating body">

<Cultivation is now being shared>

<Cultivation Method is not compatible with human physiology>

<Cultivation technique is compatible with your Sun God's Divine Yang Body>

<Cultivation technique is not compatible with human meridians>

<Cultivation technique is compatible with your 5 Elemental Yin-Yang roots>

<You are now forcefully cultivating "????? ?????'s Dominating Body>

"AHHHH!!" Suddenly, a massive pain coursed through Alex's body that brought him to his knees and then to his ground. His scream was loud enough that if there weren't any soundproof formations set in the training hall, people could probably hear it all the way from down at the sect crater.

The pain was the worst kind of pain Alex had ever felt. Even worse than when he ate the Yang Jade or when he had to fight that wolf to protect pearl and his mother.

Pain pricked all over his skin and organ as it felt like he was surrounded by thousands of needles pricking every part of his body, and it was somehow amplified by a hundred times. Even his organs started to hurt.

'What is going on?' he could barely form a thought as the relentless pain attacked him. He tried to open his eyes to see what was happening around him, but even his eyes and eyelids hurt a lot.

The only thing he couldn't feel pain in was his brain. So, he slowly let out his spiritual sense, barely able to concentrate on it. He tried to look at what was happening.

'WHAT!!' he was shocked to see that numerous wounds were opening and closing all over his body. His skins split, muscles torn, bones micro fractured, organs tearing up, meridians constantly damaged and even his brain was bleeding somewhat.

But as soon as those happened, they were also healed. His split skin shut tight, his torn muscle's reattached, his fractured bones reformed, teared up organs regrew, meridians healed and the brain stopped bleeding as if nothing had ever happened to it.

He tried to send his thoughts to Pearl. But the pain was too much for him to do such a specific task right now. He lost all focus and his spiritual sense retreated to himself.

"Ahhhh," he was still shouting. His pain lasted a while. Whether it was long or short was irrelevant to him. For him, the pain lasted an eternity.

Finally, after some time, he started to grow a little accustomed to the pain, or even numb to it. He resisted the urge to let go of all thought and scream once more and sent out his spiritual sense to pearl.

"Stop Pearl!," he shouted directly into Pearl's head. Pearl was way too focused on cultivating and didn't hear any of the shoutings Alex had done the past however long it had been.

"Stop!," he screamed once more using his spiritual sense.

Pearl suddenly opened his eyes, color fading from his body. "Meow?" he said as he looked at Alex who was down on the ground.

As soon as pearl stopped cultivating, the pain finally went away. The remaining wounds on his body slowly healed and within a minute, he was back to normal with no more pain running across his body.

HUFF HUFF

He wanted to speak out, but he couldn't form any words to speak. The experience was just too traumatizing. Only after a few minutes did he manage to string up a few words to form a sentence, "What happened to me?"

His eyes still had a hard time focusing when he remembered the notifications that he had read. "Pearl forcefully cultivated me?" he was beyond dumbfounded at what he remembered reading.

"But how could he force me to cultivate along with me? What is going on?" he was very confused as to what had happened just now. Still breathing heavily, he remembered something.

"Oh wait. what about that 'sharing' thing mentioned in Pearl's info?" he wondered as he looked up Pearl's status.

[White Cat (Child) - Bonded

Name: Pearl

Cultivation Base: Skin Tempering 9th Realm

Evolution Chance: 40%

Cultivation Method: ????? ?????'s Dominating Body (Shared)]

When he saw Pearl's status, he was surprised.

"Huh? Did you breakthrough already?"

Chapter 147: Faster

Alex was surprised to see that Pearl was stronger than he was before just by cultivating for a little time.

"Speaking of time, how long has it been?" Alex wondered as he looked at the time of the upper right. It was a few minutes past 12. "Sigh, I really have to suffer through that for over 2 hours huh. All so you can get stronger?" he felt a little agitated.

"Hmm... wait a second. It said I was being cultivated too. Could it be...." His eyes turned wide and hopeful as he quickly said, "Status,"

————————

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Bone Tempering 9th Realm (1,000,000Qi : 100%) [Breakthrough]

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 1,947,354

]

—————————

"Huh? Why are there no changes?" he wondered. The numbers in the status were all the same as before. "Did I go through all that pain for nothing?" he tried to see if there were anything else that was different about him in all the other settings, but he couldn't find any.

"I don't feel like doing anything anymore, but, what do I do then?" he couldn't think of anything.

So, reluctantly, he decided to go back to normal practice. "Alright, C'mon buddy, I need to train now, and I can't have you cultivating. That will be bad for me. Get inside," he said as let Pearl get inside his arm.

'Alright, back to training.' He started using all sorts of techniques and practicing with them. He deliberately chose to use the Iron Fist Punch more than anything, just to see how much stronger it was.

"I need to measure all of my attacks and see just how much stronger they are." He remembered his attack having a 4 realm higher attack damage, so he needed to check if that was still the case.

"Guess, I will have to visit the Training Hall while I go to the Library as well." He kept on practicing. He moved on to using the Elusive Heavenly Sword and Fluctuating Friction Dance as he practiced them too for a while.

"Hmm... Have I gotten faster now?" he couldn't tell if he was projecting what he wanted to see, or if he really was more faster and flexible.

After a while, Wen Cheng returned to see that Alex was still practicing. 'Oh, did he breakthrough again? He seems to be better now,' he thought as he walked up to Alex.

"Congratulations, for making it into the Organ tempering realm. It won't be much longer before you reach the True realms at all." Wen Cheng couldn't see Alex's cultivation due to his concealment technique and thought he had broken through between the time he fought with Meng Yun and right now.

"Organ tempering realm? I haven't broken through yet master." Alex said as he got a little confused.

"Huh? Aren't you at Organ Tempering 1st realm?" Wen Cheng asked as he got a little confused as well.

"No. I am still at Bone Tempering 9th Realm."

"What? How are you so much faster then?" Wen Cheng had seen him use his movement technique and it was must faster than when he used it against Meng Yun just a few hours ago.

Alex's eyes shined. "I am, aren't I? I thought I was fooling myself, but I really must be faster."

"Can you tell me how you are so much faster without breaking through?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Well, I think it's because of Pearl again," Alex said still remembering the horror he had to go through.

"Your cat? What does it have to do with you?" Wen Cheng said with confusion.

"I don't know how, but when Pearl cultivated after your left, I started feeling this pain all over my body. My entire body was covered with small cuts and tears all over the outside and inside, which also healed very fast. After I finally managed to tell Pearl to stop after 2 hours did my pain go away, and I was a little faster." Alex shivered at the thought of what he had gone through.

"Damage all over your body... and they healed? ... No way," Wen Cheng's eyes widened as he heard what Alex had just said.

He immediately started speaking, "Withdraw all of your Qi into your meridian and hit my hand." He slowly put forth his palms to give Alex a target to attack.

"Huh?" Alex got confused.

"Do what I say. I want to check something," Wen Cheng started to get impatient.

"Ok, Master," Alex slowly reeled in all of his Qi. All the Qi in his skin, his muscles, bones, everywhere. They all reeled back into his meridians.

'Urghh... I feel so bloated right now.' He no longer gave any sign of what cultivation he was in right now. Similar to the Immortal Concealment Technique, he looked like a complete mortal right now.

The only difference was, with the Immortal Concealment technique, he hid the aura of his Qi and Cultivation base. While, by doing this, he was hiding the Qi and Cultivation base itself, basically leaving his body defenseless, as if he was a mortal.

"This feels so uncomfortable, Master," he said as he tried to keep it all in without leaking any Qi.

"Alright, since you are comparable to a mortal now, Hit my palm."

Alex didn't wait another second. He was already very uncomfortable and immediately decided to attack his master. With a single dash, he reached his master and delivered a perfect punch.

BAM

"Ow," Alex said as he started shaking his hand in pain. His master's palms were harder than he had imagined them to be. After the pain settled down, he looked up to see his master. Only to find his eyes wide and his jaw wide open.

'What's going on?' he wondered. He released his Qi back and asked his master, "I am done, right master? Why did you want me to do that?"

Wen Cheng returned back from his stupor. "Yes, yes. You are done. And I have confirmed what I had wanted to as well."

After a few seconds of silence, he finally spoke, "You have become a body cultivator."

Chapter 148: Mortal Cleansing

"Huh? Me, a body cultivator?" Alex asked, stunned by what he had just heard.

"Yes, Your body is stronger than what it used to be. From what you said about your experience earlier, you must've gone through a tempering of sorts. That's how body cultivators are born. They temper their body through pain and hard work, and become stronger." Wen Cheng was still in shock as he explained.

"But, aren't body cultivators supposed to be very rare. I remember master saying something about there rarely being a body cultivator in the Crimson empire and that I don't have to worry about them much." Alex repeated what he had remembered from Ma Rong.

"Ma Rong explained to you about them, did she? Well, she is not wrong. It is extremely rare for there to be a Body cultivator in the Crimson Empire, but it's not rare. There have been a few times that body cultivators arrived in the Crimson empire, but they don't stay as one for long since there aren't many things they can use to temper themselves with."

Alex got curious about something, "Master, when you say Body cultivators temper themselves, is it different from the normal tempering realms of Qi cultivation?"

"Of course there is a difference. The tempering for both is meant for completely different results. A normal cultivator's tempering is meant to temper their body with internal Qi so that it is less resistant to the Qi during cultivation and they can succeed in future cultivation."

"However, a Body cultivator's tempering means he is destroying and fixing his body a lot of times so that he can make his body stronger."

"Normal cultivators temper to improve cultivation, while body cultivators temper to make their bodies much tougher. You... are now one of them." Wen Cheng finally let go of his shock.

"That is not a bad thing, right?" Alex asked as he hoped for a positive answer.

"No, but since you won't really have that many ways to improve your body, you will stagnate later on and it will be quite useless in the long run," Wen Cheng just finished saying this when he thought of something and added, "Although, since your body tempering came from your cat, ... maybe you can do it indefinitely." Wen Cheng started getting lost in his own thought.

"Master?" Alex called to bring him out of his stance. "What are you thinking about?"

"Hmm... I... want you to do it again." Wen Cheng's reply came out of nowhere.

"Do it again? But, it hurts so much, master." Alex's eyes turned wide as fear crept upon them.

"Yeah, that's what body tempering is. You have to get hurt to become stronger, and you have to do that without going overboard and injuring yourself badly." Wen Cheng explained as such.

Alex took a deep breath. "Alright, Pearl come out." Light shined from his left arms as Pearl came out of it and stood in front of him, licking his front paw.

"Meow," it spoke as he looked towards him. "Master, make sure you stop him from cultivating if it gets really bad, okay?"

Alex then tried really hard to find the next set of words to speak, "Pearl, Cultivate once more."

"Meow"

Pearl closed his eyes and started to meditate again. Slowly, a light started coming off of him. It started with white light, then yellow, and finally, it moved to golden light.

Alex fully prepared for the pain to hit him, but even then he wasn't ready at all. "AHHHH," his scream was as loud as ever as he found it hard to focus on anything other than the pain.

The scream also shocked Wen Cheng. He wasn't expecting such a horrific scream from his own student. He immediately wanted to stop the cat from cultivating any more but decided to wait.

He used his spiritual sense to look all over Alex's body. He was terrified to see what he was going through. Hearing the explanation of what had happened last time did not do the actual thing any sort of justice.

"Should I stop it?" he started deliberating. He wanted to stop Alex from feeling more pain, but then, he saw something. Throughout Alex's body, tiny black spots were oozing out of his skin.

"No Way!! Mortal cleansing? Without any external assistance?" Wen Cheng was shocked at what he was seeing. "How is body tempering helping him in Mortal cleansing, when it should only be for normal cultivation?"

Wen Cheng felt like he was seeing a miracle. He no longer gave any thought to stopping the cat and watched as Alex's body kept on pushing out the tiny black bits.

Alex's screams, however, were ever so violent. Wen Cheng has to ignore all noises for a while. Only after a few hours did his scream started dying down.

Finally, Wen Cheng saw that the black bits were no longer oozing out of Alex and decided to stop the cat. "Meow" the cat woke up from its cultivation with a single command from Wen Cheng. He then turned to look at Alex.

He slowly walked up to Alex's completely black and filthy body to give him a nudge. But as soon as he got close to him and realized what he really smelled like, he ran back.

Wen Cheng looked at Alex who was on the floor, completely unmoving, and said," He's gone unconscious from all the pain."

He felt bad for letting his disciple go through this, but he also felt happy that his disciple had done through this. Mortal cleaning was one of the best things a cultivator could hope to experience, and his disciple had just done it.

"He is really going to go very far in his journey as a cultivator," Wen Cheng started to feel proud. After a few minutes, he told Pearl to go back into Alex, to which the cat complied.

"Yeah, you need a bath," Wen Cheng thought as he used his Qi to carry Alex and bring him inside his building to cleanse his body of the filth from Mortal cleansing.

Chapter 149: Improvements

Alex slowly opened his drowsy eyes as he felt something wet around his body. "What?" he asked through his sleep as tried to stand up. Suddenly, his leg slipped on something as he submerged into the liquid once more.

He was now underwater and desperately tried to get back up. Once he came out of the water, he was fully awake. He immediately looked around, sending his spiritual sense to look at the different things.

He found himself in a small room with a small pond-like bath inside of it. "Where..." he looked around confused.

Suddenly, the door to the room opened and Wen Cheng walked in. "Oh thank god it's all clean now," he said as he walked in.

"Master, where am I?" he asked. He was still trying to recollect what the last thing that happened was. Only then did he finally remember the unbearable pain he had to go through once more.

He shuddered as he remembered the pain and asked, "Why didn't you stop Pearl master? It hurts so much." He actually felt like crying from all the memory of the pain.

Wen Cheng looked a little guilty as he said, "Get out of the bath and change into these clothes here." He brought out a set of inner sect robes and pants.

He also took out a bunch of storage bags and kept them on the robe. "You have quite a few storage bags. Do alchemists always need so many?"

Alex was surprised when he saw that. 'Did he check inside?' He was worried his master would find all the ingredients and talismans he found from the corpse. He didn't want to explain that right now.

Alex quickly walked out of the clean bath and changed into his robes. Following Wen Cheng, he walked out of the room.

"I had to change the bath 3 times because of how much filth was on your body." Wen Cheng's face seemed disgusted at the thought of this filth.

Alex got surprised a little. 'It can't be that I sh*t myself due to all the pain, can it?' he started to fear this thought more than anything now.

Wen Cheng walked out of the building, back into the training hall with Alex in tow. Alex looked at the outside and was surprised. 'It's already day?'. He quickly checked the time and was stunned to find out that it was past 10 am already.

"What?" he shouted out loud.

"What's wrong?" Wen Cheng looked back.

"Oh, nothing master. I was just surprised at how late it was."

"Yes, you were unconscious for quite a while. I was about to go get a healer if you didn't wake up in the next 2 hours."

Only after entering the training hall did Wen Cheng finally stop. "Sigh. Tell me, how does it feel right now."

"Feel? I feel fine right now," Alex answered as he wondered if he had a fever or something when he was unconscious.

"No, I mean your body. How does your body feel after going through such a long tempering process and an entire mortal cleansing." Wen Cheng seemed eager to find out just how much his disciple's body had changed.

Finally understanding his master's questions, Alex moved around his arms and shoulders around trying to feel them. "Oh," he sounded surprised. He jumped a bit here and there, all while his eyes were wide.

"It feels so much better master. Almost like I lost half my body weight or something. I feel so light." His words couldn't explain how he was feeling right now. "Is this because of body tempering too, master?"

"I expected so, and no, it's not because of the body tempering. It kind of is, but it's mostly due to Mortal Cleansing."

Alex's face got confused when he heard that. "Mortal cleansing? What's that master?" he tried to remember if he had ever heard that word before, but he couldn't remember. Not even his master had taught him that when she gave him a general lesson on everything.

"It's no surprise you haven't heard of it. In fact, I would be more surprised if you had. Mortal cleansing is a very rare occurrence where one's body discards all of its unwanted filth and leaves you with a pristine body that is prime for cultivation."

Alex asked, "Have you gone through it as well master?"

"Me? No. Like I said it's very rare and you can only do this if you find... some sort of fruit, that I do not know the name of. It's said that only if you eat this fruit can you go through mortal cleansing. However, it seems that is not just the way. It seems your cat can somehow help you as well."

"What exactly does mortal cleansing help me for, master?" Alex was still a little confused.

"You remember how I said that self tempering helped your body store more Qi and thus progress in terms of cultivation?" Wen Cheng asked, to which Alex nodded. "Similarly, Mortal Cleansing also removes your body of everything not required for cultivation and leaves you with only that which is required to reach for immortality, the final destination of a Cultivator. Thus it also improves your bottlenecks for cultivation."

"Hmm... Does this mean I can store more Qi in my body now, Master?" he asked.

"Sort of, yes. But it's more so that your body can now use Qi more efficiently than before. Try using a technique, and see how much easier it is."

Alex did as asked and circulated his Qi to use the Jade Skin technique. As soon as he started, his body produced textures around his skin that made him look like he was made up of jade.

"Oh wow, it took less than half the time it normally takes to use it." His surprised voice gave all the answers Wen Cheng required. He nodded a bit and said,

"Go and check how strong you've become in the actual Training Hall. Also, since you've become quite strong, reach as high as you can by tonight. I want to see you with at least a badge of number 120."

Chapter 150: Such a Weak Body?

"Oh yeah, make sure to keep training your body with your cat. Not many people get the chance to become a body cultivator. This is an amazing opportunity that you can't miss." Wen Cheng said as Alex left the training hall.

Alex looked at the clock and sighed. "Guess I am going to have to skip the first class today."

He quickly went back to his house, hidden from the others and logged out. He hurried his way to the cafeteria and then went to his 2nd class, which he arrived during the 20-minute recess.

Matt was there as well and looked at Alex and asked, "You didn't log out for the lunch, what happened? Game so good, you forgot reality?" he asked jokingly.

"No, I was just unconscious in the game. Barely managed to log out in time to catch the 2nd class."

Matt said, "Oh, you gonna complain in the forums too? Hehe."

"Complain? About what?" Alex asked in confusion.

"About fainting in the game and becoming unable to log out of course. So many people complain about missing their work, or school, or in worst cases, not being able to log out for days, only to log out weak and hungry."

Alex was surprised. " That really happens to people? I guess I did faint 2 days in a row, so I shouldn't be surprised. It might not be as uncommon as I would want it to be then."

"Of course it happens often, don't you read the forums?" Matt asked.

"Only in some cases. Otherwise, I like to stay unspoiled about the game. Finding out the things on your own had a certain charm to it." Alex didn't think knowing every aspect of the game to be very appealing. He had done what he had to, to earn some necessary money, but now, he hadn't even needed it.

'I was way too worried about a laptop, haha. They don't even require it until the 2nd semester.'

"Ah, so you're that kind of player huh," said Matt.

"That kind?" asked Alex

"You know, the kind that likes to go in blind to a game. It's rare to see someone like you nowadays. Although, I can see why that would be fun to some," said Matt.

Alex simply smiled.

About 2 hours later, Alex's classes ended and he went to the cafeteria. Afterward, he went back to his room and logged into the game.

He looked at the names on the wall in front of him. Most of them were already changed and some of the names from previous times weren't even there anymore.

'Why is it that it's only the players that are leaving?' he wondered. There were still a few names that were definitely from the players that he could recognize, but they were in the top 100, and it would take some time for him to get there.

"Let's go check just how strong I am first," he said to himself and walked out of the house. He soon made his way to the sect crater and went to the training hall.

The Training Hall was a tall pagoda-like tower at least 20 floors tall. "That's quite tall," he thought and walked in.

He saw people waiting in a queue here as well. When his turn finally came, the elder asked, " What room?"

"Sorry?" Alex asked in confusion.

"What do you want to train in. Attack, Defense, or Movement?" the elder asked.

"Oh, umm... is it possible to go for all 3? I want to train in all," Alex said.

The elder nodded and took Alex's badge. He then gave him a small wooden token. Alex looked at the token and saw that it was numbered '4-12'. "Go to the 4th floor's 12th room," the elder said.

Alex thanked the elder and quickly found a staircase. "Oh, it goes down too?" he was surprised to see that the Training hall was not only tall, but it was also deep too.

Alex walked up the stairs to the 4th floor, and quickly found his room. Similar to the production hall, he put his wooden token in the keyhole. The door opened to reveal a completely white room.

"Hmm... " Alex wondered and walked in. The room was quite wide and had enough place for him to try out his techniques.

As he walked in, he noticed a metallic puppet on the other side with a rather long wooden pole extended horizontally around its arms.

He walked up to it and saw that it had 3 switches on its head. He flicked the switch that said 'Offensive Training' and left defensive and movement training as is.

"Alright, does this work how I think it does?" he thought as he knocked on it a few times.

<Skin Tempering 3rd Realm>

"Oh, it does. Let's try with just my body then." He started to pull in every single Qi he had in his skin, muscle, bones, and organs, back into his meridian.

"Urghh... Why is this so uncomfortable every time I do this?" he thought. Keeping all the Qi inside the meridian and not letting it flow as well, was an unnatural feeling he wished to avoid.

"I better get it done with," making sure he wasn't leaking any Qi unintentionally, Alex prepared his attack. 'Here it goes,' with a single dash, he reached the puppet in front of him and...

BAM

A strong sound rose out from the board that shocked Alex. 'That sounded so strong!!,' he was shocked. He looked at the puppet and saw that it was taking a while to show the result.

Only after a few seconds did it show the result.

<Muscle Tempering 4th realm>

'That... is quite weak.' He was surprised to see that the Body tempering that his master praised so much had resulted in such low damage. 'If it's this weak, then what is so good about it?' he wondered.

Only after a few seconds did he realize, "Wait... no, this is quite strong, isn't it? Only one night of cultivation, and I'm already at Muscle Tempering 4th realm. Does that mean... I can get a lot stronger this way?'

Chapter 151: Attack and Defense

Alex felt like he had just realized the importance of body cultivation. Everything his master had said until now had barely influenced his thoughts against body cultivation. At best, he would reluctantly accept the pain and cultivate.

But now, he had an incentive to. "Even if I could cultivate more than this with Qi cultivation alone, I still wouldn't get as strong since continuous breakthroughs are bad for your foundation. But, this seems entirely different."

"This is quite exciting."

Now that he knew how strong his Qi-less body was, he decided to check how strong it was with the Qi. "If I'm remembering correctly, my fists did the same damage as my cultivation base. So, with the Body cultivation, it should be higher, right?"

"Although, I don't know how much more damage a simple muscle tempering realm can add to my current strength." Alex let go of the withheld Qi and let it fill his body.

He prepared his fist once more and punched the metallic puppet as hard as he could.

BAM

This was a much louder sound than he was imagining. He looked up at the puppet to see what the result was.

<Organ Tempering 2nd Realm>

"Or-Organ Tempering 2nd Realm?" he blurted out, shocked at the result. "But..how? My body isn't strong enough to show that kind of result. Was I mistaken earlier?" he wondered.

The last time he had tested his physical strength was when he had just gotten the Smiting Blade technique. After that, he had trained under the assumption that all of his damage would always be equivalent to his cultivation base.

"Even master had said the same thing. Due to one's Qi, your strength without any external techniques or artifacts would be equal to your cultivation base under normal circums—"

His eyes went wide. "Is there something more to my strength other than the weak body cultivation right now?" he tried to think of the reasons.

"I see..." he finally said after a minute. "It has to be either because of the Yang Jade, the Mortal Cleansing I went through, or the unknown blood essence, right? But which one? Maybe even all three."

He punched once more just to be sure it wasn't a fluke and the puppet indeed showed 'Organ Tempering 2nd Realm' once more.

He took out the normal sword and used it this time.

<Organ Tempering 1st Realm>

"Woah! Even a normal Common Mortal grade sword's damage increased by so much? What about my actual sword?" he thought as he took out the Steel sword and used it.

<Organ Tempering 3rd Realm>

"Yeah, that's more like it." He went on to test on a few more techniques. He managed to deal a realm higher worth of damage with his Smiting blade. Sadly, techniques like the 2nd and 3rd strike of the Elusive Heavenly sword which were more focused on the Qi were the weakest of the different techniques Alex knew now.

Iron Fist Punch, however, had become amazing.

<Organ Tempering 5th Realm>

"But, it's not even focused on the body. Why is only this Qi-based technique so strong?" he couldn't help but wonder. After going through Mortal Cleansing, his strength had gone a realm higher. But he didn't know that yet.

"I should see if cultivation truly had no influence on body cultivation," he thought as he opened his status page, and pressed on the button, [Breakthrough].

<Congratulations, You have broken through to 'Organ Tempering: 1st realm'>

'Finally, on the 4th minor realm.' Alex once more reeled in his Qi and tried to punch the puppet with just his body strength.

<Muscle Tempering 4th Realm>

"As I thought, it didn't increase."

He went on to test the other techniques and realized that they all had increased by a realm in damage. "I should test defense next," he thought and walked up to the puppet to flip the 'Defense training' switch while switching off the other one.

Out of nowhere, the puppet moved to the side, hitting him with the stick it was holding. His reflexes kicked in as he put up his arms to protect himself, only to realize that it didn't hurt at all.

The puppet returned to its original state, and Alex could see the words 'Skin Tempering 1st Realm' written on it. The puppet moved once more attacking him. This time, it's damage one step further.

Hit after hit, it increased its damage with every hit, returning to its initial position with each one. Still, Alex didn't feel any damage whatsoever.

Even after the damage entered the threshold of the Bone Tempering realm, he was barely feeling any damage. "Is this how good body cultivation really is?" he couldn't help but wonder.

Only around the 5th realm, did he start to get hurt a little. Still, it was more of a pat on the back, than actual damage. Another attack came from the side, dealing a bit higher damage.

Another attack with 7th realm damage came and he finally thought it was a bit substantial in damage. The 8th realm damage started to get him worried.

The 9th realm damage finally hurt him a little. He braced for the next attack.

Finally, an Organ Tempering 1st realm's equivalent damage-dealing attack appeared in front of him and hit him, sending him flying backward.

"Urghh, that hurt. But I can take another one." The puppet was already back to its original position, moving once more. Alex walked forward and braced himself again.

BAM

He was sent back flying. "Arghh," he shouted as that was the highest bit of damage he could take right now. "Urghh..." he stood up once more and waited for the attack to come back.

Qi started flowing through his body as his skin started to get textured, making it look like it was made up of jade. Alex had used the Jade Skin technique and waited for the attack to hit him.

"Umphh," he stopped the attack and felt a little damage. He smiled at the situation as he watched the puppet rotate back to hit him once more.

Chapter 152: Quick Library Visit

Organ Tempering 3rd Realm had hurt Alex a little through the Jade Skin technique, but he could keep going.

He waited for the 4th realm attack to hit and braced himself. "Mmm," he screamed as the hit just now actually hurt. It wasn't enough to make him suffer or anything, but it did hurt quite a bit.

Alex started to wonder if taking the next shot was a good idea or not. Alas, he took a little too long to decide. The puppet had already spun, swinging its staff at him.

Alex prepared his Jade Skin technique the best he could and blocked the attack.

BAM

He was sent flying back to the wall when he hit and fell down. "Argghhh," this had hurt him quite a bit. He immediately looked up, scared another attack was coming, but the puppet had stopped moving at all, and its body had nothing written on it.

It took a few minutes for the pain to subside. "I can barely take the 5th realm attack, which I can easily survive a 4th realm's attack. Maybe I can do better if I cultivate my body," he thought. But the thought alone was enough to make him shiver.

"I will think about that later." He went to the puppet and switched off defensive mode. "How does movement training work though? Will it tell me what realm my movements are at? But that doesn't seem like a quantifiable value, unlike cultivation base, which normal persons have the equal amount."

Still, he decided to check it out, so he flipped the switch.

Suddenly, multiple holes appeared on the white walls around the room. Alex prepared for what was coming. A burst of small air appeared near his face that he managed to dodge easily.

Another burst of air came from behind him. He ducked to dodge this one as well. After that, burst upon bursts of air were sent out of the holes at a steady rate.

Alex started with Elusive Heavenly sword's evasion skills but soon realized that it wasn't going to be enough. So, he started to use Fluctuating friction dance as well.

He kept on dodging for at least 15 minutes, before finally, the number of air shots was just too much for him to dodge. Without a way to move out of the way, he got hit.

All the openings in the wall closed off and Alex heard a 'click' sound. He looked around to see that the Movement training switch was turned off.

"This is actually quite a good way to train your movement technique."

Alex left the room and walked out of the training hall after paying the spirit stones. He looked at the time and realized not much had passed since he logged in, so he went to the library.

The library wasn't as different from the library in the Hong Wu sect. It was in a pagoda shape with around 8 floors. He walked in to see not that many shelves of books. However, there were quite a few disciples in here, sitting around a table, reading the books. Somewhere even copying them into a talisman.

"Finally, this feels like an actual library," he said out loud. He walked around looking for the different things to read. "Oh, most of these are just introductory books," he realized as he saw that most of them were just basic knowledge regarding the fields they were about.

Cultivation books taught how to cultivate, Alchemy books taught how ingredients were required, and so on. So, he skipped the first floor and walked up to the second floor.

"I can't waste much time here today. I still need to go register a fight."

The second floor was much the same. With the content being a little more advanced, it was still there for outer sect disciples to read. Alex wanted to skip this one too, but he found a beginner's guide on beast companions so he quickly read it.

There were other fun books too, but he had to ignore them for today. He walked up to the 3rd floor and found more books on beast companions, but they were still very basic.

They mostly just explained how beast companions worked, how they formed bonds, and how they were stored. Although, he did learn the beast companions required no sustenance to survive after bonding with a cultivator, which relieved him regarding not feeding Pearl at all.

"Still, I should give him some food from time to time just for enjoying a meal," he thought.

He decided to go to the 4th floor. An Elder stood guard on the staircase that led to the 4th floor and asked for a spirit stone.

"It costs me a spirit stone just to enter the 4th floor?" he asked in surprise. The elder seemed to be used to this question so he answered in a very practiced manner.

"No, you do not. We will remove the cost from the book you will borrow. However, if you won't borrow anything, you will not get the spirit stones back. This is a way to not overcrowd the upper floors with people who don't mean business. All the books on the 4th floor cost 5 spirit stones. If you don't have it, you can return back."

The elder had a very monotone voice when he explained this. Alex decided to just go up and read whatever he could find there. He started searching for 3 different things in here. First, he looked for books on beast companions. Second, he looked for books on alchemy. Third, he looked for books or records that could give him the knowledge that was more trivia-like.

He actually wanted to find information on the different bodies and see if his body was written in it or not. He sent forth his spiritual sense to check for everything in the area. Once he found what he was looking for, he started reading it. Time slowly passed, and before he knew it, it was time for him to leave.

Since he had just used a single spirit stone, he didn't bother renting anything else and just left the library.

Chapter 153: Palm of the Sun

Alex stood over his opponent he had just fought. The opponent was a lackey of Huo Tu. He had found it quite funny when the person he randomly chose for fighting today was actually one of the lackeys.

The opponent was quite surprised when he realized who his opponent was. The fight itself was pretty easy since his opponent was only at the Organ Tempering 1st realm, the same as him.

"Fight Over!" the elder shouted.

Alex walked over to the elder to get his new badge, numbered 105. As he left, he heard the lackey saying in a low voice to himself, "I must tell brother Huo. This master-less bastard is starting to target us."

"What?" Alex thought to himself, confused. "Is he misunderstanding the coincidence?" he thought but didn't bother explaining. It was already 9 PM and he was late for his training with his master.

"Ah, you came, finally. I thought you decided to skip today as well." Wen Cheng was waiting for him outside of the training hall.

"The fight I registered today took a little too long to end master, I didn't purposefully be late."

"Oh what badge did you obtain?" he asked.

Alex took out the badge and handed it to Wen Cheng. Wen Cheng looked at the badge and was shocked. "You are already this far ahead? In just a little over a week too. And here I thought those new people that keep joining and leaving were talented."

'Talented new people? He must be talking about the players,' he thought.

"Are these people really talented, Master?" he asked.

"Well, not as much as you. But, they were pretty fast at learning techniques too. Such a shame they just leave the sect after learning a few more techniques. " Wen Cheng shook his head at remembering all the new talents he lost.

"Although, they were still slow in cultivation so I guess its not that big of a loss. Some of them we actually expelled because they kept destroying the copies of the techniques they took and couldn't pay the fine."

"Honestly, I don't know where this new surge of cultivators came from, but they are as talented as they are annoying." Wen Cheng seemed to change his opinions on the player quite frequently.

"Nevermind them, since you did what I asked you to, take this offensive technique and learn it. I will come back around 2 am. After that, I will stay with you to make sure your body cultivation goes well. "

Alex suddenly was horrified at the thought. "I will have to cultivate body tonight as well, master?" he asked. He had thought of doing it once more, but a little later down the line. Having to do it immediately after suffering yesterday, made his palms and feet sweat from anxiety.

"Don't worry," Wen Cheng said, "Since you already went through it once, it won't be as painful as last time. Especially, since you also went through Mortal Cleansing. That should at least help you keep your mental bearings."

Alex thought for a second and nodded. Wen Cheng handed him the book he had and left. Alex looked at the book he had with him and read it out loud.

"Palm of the Sun?" he read with interest. 'Is it what I think it is?' he thought. He read the introductory page and realized that it was in fact 'Yang Qi' related.

"Palm of the Sun. Throw a palm strike with Yang energy from a distance away. Works better for people with Yang-type spiritual root, but doesn't necessarily need it."

"This is quite good. Hmm... will my body affect it at all?" he wondered. It didn't take him long to learn the technique, so he started practicing it immediately.

It didn't take him long to realize that the palm strike was as strong if not stronger than the fist. "Hmm... does this mean that I have something too that is making the fist strong?" he wondered, but couldn't think of any answer even though he had a big suspicion that it had something to do with the blood essence.

After an hour of training the palm, he started to get bored. He had done the same training for the last week or so and he didn't want to do that either. "What do I do now?" he thought.

He so desperately wished to make some pills right now, but there was no fire.

"Hmm... the books did say that beast companions needed no training for fights, but it can't hurt to try, right?" he thought as he called pearl out.

"Meow," Pearl looked around and realized he was in the same familiar place as yesterday. He immediately started to lay down and meditate as that was what Alex had been asking for him every time he was called out.

"Wait, no." Alex's heart skipped a beat as he immediately stopped Pearl from cultivating. "We are going to practice fighting today buddy."

Alex brought Pearl to the center of the training hall and proceeded to train him. "Alright, bub. Come attack me."

"Meow," Pearl tilted his head in confusion as he didn't understand what Alex meant exactly. Alex gestured by punching himself in his own arm. "Come hit me here with your hands."

Pearl finally understood what Alex meant and suddenly, jumped towards him to attack.

BAM

Or so Alex expected to hear. But what he heard was just a small 'pat' sound on his arm. He barely even felt anything. "Are you weak? Or am I just too strong now?" he wondered and asked.

He decided to check Pearl's status.

[White Cat (Child) - Bonded

Name: Pearl

Cultivation Base: Muscle Tempering 4th Realm

Evolution Chance: 40%

Cultivation Method: ????? ?????'s Dominating Body (Shared)

]

"Oh, you already reached Muscle Tempering realm? That is very fast. As fast, if not faster than why I cultivate normally. Are you stealing Qi from me by any chance?' Alex jokingly asked. And then, he noticed something weird. "Wait a second..." Alex was surprised. "Is your cultivation realm the same as my body cultivation realm?"

Chapter 154: Progress

Alex thought for a bit. Pearl's cultivation base had come from sleeping for a few weeks in his tattoo, then eating the blood essence, and then finally, cultivating. Only one of which was responsible for his body cultivation right now.

"So that can only mean that it is a coincidence right?" he thought. He then wondered 'Since we have the same cultivation base in a way, maybe it will be equal if I take back my Qi? Although it feels really uncomfortable, I should try it.'

He started pulling in the Qi into his meridian and leaving his body Qi-less. "Alright, hit me again buddy." Pearl didn't wait for him to say anything else and immediately slapped his arm with his paw.

Alex stumbled a few steps back as the hit was a bit harder than he thought it would be. "Shouldn't be surprising that I took so much damage. We are the same cultivation base technically after all. Although, it doesn't hurt as much as I expected it to."

He then looked at Pearl and said, "Alright buddy, come attack me."

Pearl once more hit him, but this time Alex dodged it. Alex did nothing but dodge as Pearl tried to hit him continuously. In the end, they had to stop because Alex realized that Pearl just wasn't good at fighting.

"I can't even teach you how to fight, can I?" Alex fell into a dilemma. 'How do the normal monsters know how to fight then?' he wondered.

He continued fighting with Pearl once more. This time, he went on for as long as he could, however, Pearl barely learned anything once again.

"Is it because he is still a child that he can't learn how to fight? Or am I just that bad of a teacher?" Alex thought. "Guess, I will have to wait until he is an adult then."

Alex decided to solo train for the next few hours. It was a shame, but he couldn't train his Flickering Shadows technique in the brightly lit training hall. So, he just kept the training to the things he had learned in the Tiger Sect. But that was getting boring.

Perhaps he was getting really good at it, or he just didn't see the point of training solo for so long. He just wanted to stop for once and do something else. But his mind told him this was important.

"Urghh... I just want to go back to making pills. That is so much more interesting. But I also need to learn to fight so that I could protect myself."

He reluctantly practiced for a bit longer until Wen Cheng came back around.

"Did you learn it?" he asked.

"Yes master," he proceeded to show exactly how good the attack was. "Hmm... did your yang-type spiritual root amplify the damage a bit?" Wen Cheng said as he felt the dangerous aura radiating from the palm.

"I think so master," Alex said.

"Alright, let's get on with the body cultivation. I will stay with you until the end to make sure nothing bad happens," Wen Cheng said.

"Uh..." Alex wanted to complain some more, but reluctantly agreed. "Alright, master."

He called out Pearl and told him to cultivate. Within minutes, Pearl's fur was glowing bright gold, while Alex was gritting his teeth trying to not scream.

Wen Cheng looked at Alex in surprise. "Wow, he isn't screaming at all. Did the mortal cleansing actually help him that much? Or is his body just that strong that he doesn't feel as much pain anymore?"

Alex was grunting the entire time, but he never outright screamed. Morning came by and before Wen Cheng could even ask Pearl to stop, Alex did it himself.

"Huh? You could think properly despite the pain?" Wen Cheng asked.

"The pain... it wasn't as horrible as last time. So, I could maintain some thoughts," he said. Alex checked Pearl and realized he had gone up 2 realms. 'Is it the same for myself?' he wondered.

"Alright, go now." Alex didn't go through mortal cleansing again, so he did not require any bath this time. Alex returned back to his room and decided to visit go sell some pills before visiting the library once more.

In such a way, a few more days went by. Every day started with Alex opening his eyes after the intense pain of body cultivation subsided. He would then go back to his house to log out for breakfast.

After his breakfast, he would visit the library for 3 hours, before logging out to go to his university classes. After school, he would return to visit the library once more for a few hours.

Afterward, he would go fight some disciples in the training fields. After reaching the top 100s, it was getting really hard to progress higher. Everyone in the top 100s was a genius when it came to cultivation or fighting. Unless he got better in either, he wouldn't make it far here.

The problem with this was that he was only focusing on body cultivation the last few days so he was forced to eat a few monster cores. Monster cores however started to create more and more fights in his head.

He could still fight the monsters quite easily, however, the monster spirits he had to fight seemed to be getting closer and closer in strength to their real self. With not having a spiritual sense or his body and having to only use Qi to fight, he was worried that sooner or later something bad would happen.

During the night, he would train with Wen Cheng. He had learned another fighting technique and defensive technique, both of which he liked very much because they used swords. He would practice these techniques and train with Pearl until Wen Cheng came back.

After Wen Cheng did, he would start to body cultivate once more. As such, by Friday, he had managed to reach the 3rd realm of Bone Tempering for Body Cultivation and 3rd Realm of Organ Tempering for Qi Cultivation.

Chapter 155: Unexpected Match

Alex was on the final floor of the library walking around looking at the different books and records on the shelf. From time to time, he would stop in front of a shelf, pick a book, look at it for a big and then put it back. Any outsider looking at him would think that he wasn't able to find something that suited him.

But, on the contrary, his spiritual sense was in full focus, reading a book regarding Beast Companions. Finally, there he found some information that he had been desperately searching for.

"So, that is how beast companions learn to fight, huh," he sighed in relief knowing that Pearl wasn't an anomaly.

Beast Companions were born with inherent memories, or it might be more accurate to call them instincts. These instincts would allow them to learn how to fight, as well as learn new techniques.

Also, another thing the book mentioned that caught his eyes was that the more potential or talent a beast had, the longer a child they would remain.

"So, Pearl won't necessarily grow up from his child form until he has overcome his latent potential, huh. I wonder how long that will take." He then looked all over the book, trying to find specific information, but there just wasn't any.

"What about evolution though?" he kept searching but didn't find an answer. He decided to skip it for now and look at the other records. He walked up to another shelf and sent out his spiritual sense to search for other records that were free.

He needed to see if there was any record of his body in here. "Hmm..." he suddenly sensed an unusual record among the many. "Ah, is this one of the records that survived that fight 50 some years ago?" he wondered and started reading it.

The information in the record was very broken and scattered. From what he could gather, it mostly spoke of the writers wanting to return to the land where no one entered.

"Is this the sacred lands where nobody placed their foot on because it was so holy to them?" he kept on reading. The Tiger Sect was set near the land where no one stepped in. But they had to move locations to where they were now. The records spoke of their reluctance but gave no reasoning as to why.

"What was so sacred about that land?" he wondered. Finally, there was one bit of information that he managed to read.

Where the Fiery Earth embraces the Yin-like Water, the Golden Wood of Yang emerges.

"Fire, Earth, Yin, Water, Gold, Wood, and Yang. All of the 7 elements are in one place. Is it talking about some sort of Alchemy garden?" that was Alex's first thought. "Yin like water... what does that even mean? Also, Fiery Earth... why would earth be on fire? Not to forget the Golden Wood of Yang... huh?" the more he thought about the record, the more confused he was.

Maybe his master was confused as well, which was why he didn't mention this part.

He stopped thinking about it and read the other records. None of them had any vital information. Suddenly, his badge started vibrating. He took it out looked at it.

"98? I'm 12 levels higher than him. Why would he want to fight be? Whatever, I still have an hour." Alex decided to look around for a bit first. He spent the next 45 minutes reading as many of the records and books as he could and took a random book before leaving the library.

After the fourth floor, each additional floor had cost him 5 spirit stones each to enter. By the 8th floor, he had spent 21 spirit stones and didn't want to let it go to waste. So, he took a book that looked interesting.

He paid an additional 20 spirit stones for the book and left.

He quickly reached the fighting stage where the disciple with the 98th badge had registered for a fight with him. By the time he made it there, only 10 minutes were left on his timer.

"Number 86 and 98" the Elder called out. Alex walked up to the Elder and handed him his badge. His opponent also walked up to the elder to hand in his badge.

Alex turned around to see who his opponent was. When he saw who it was, he was shocked.

In front of him was a young and fat man about the same height as him. "You!!" Alex said in surprise.

"Not only did you disrespect me, but you also purposefully target my subordinates now. I will show you what the result is after you mess with me, boy." The man in front of Alex was Huo Tu.

The last few days, 2 of the people he fought had turned out to be lackeys of this guy. So, he had started to assume that Alex was targeting his subordinates on purpose to mess with him.

Alex started getting concerned. He had never expected the man in the 18th ranking himself to drop his ranking to the 98th position just to fight him. 'Sh*t. This is going to be troublesome,' he thought.

He looked at Huo Tu and saw that he was still in the Meridian Tempering 3rd realm like the last time he saw him. Alex being in the 3rd realm of Organ tempering was a bad match-up right now.

"Hey, isn't that senior brother Huo? What is he doing here?" someone recognized Huo Tu after he got on the stage.

"Did that kid challenge senior Huo?" somebody else asked.

"No, their rankings were 86 and 98. I think senior brother dropped his ranking to teach that guy a lesson."

"Who is he? Does anybody know?"

"His name is Yu Ming. He disrespected brother Huo, so he has come to take revenge today."

The lackeys started making noise, so more people started to gather to watch the match. The match between the two was turning out to be a spectacle before it even began.

Chapter 156: Explosive Talismans

People started gathering just by the ruckus that was being made. Some recognized Huo Tu, some recognized Alex, some just came to watch what the hub hub was about.

Knowing that a core disciple had registered a fight with an inner sect disciple, many other people started getting called by their friends watching the fight too.

"What's the point? It's not like the inner sect disciple is going to win," someone said.

"Yeah, but that's not the point. It's not every day you see a core disciple fight. Don't you guys want to see it?" someone else said.

"You sound like you've never seen Huo Tu fight. You must be quite new here then," another person spoke.

"Huh? does he fight violently or something? Since he is a core disciple, he must be really good right?" the previous person asked.

"Haha, quite the opposite actually. Just watch, you might be surprised by his fighting method," the person spoke once more.

On the stage, Alex heard the person speak. 'Not good at fighting? Does he have a different fighting method?' he wondered. He took out his Steel Sword for this fight. This fight was way out of his league, and he was not going to bother limiting his abilities only to get badly hurt in this fight.

He looked around the stage. It was around 3 PM and the only shadow he could see was either his own or the opponent's. 'I can't use it then,' he thought. 'Well, it's the last option either way.'

He got into a fighting stance, waiting for his opponent to take out his weapon as well, but he never did.

"FIGHT!" the Elder started the match.

Alex got cautious. His opponent was just standing there with a smile on his face. "Come," Huo Tu gestured with his hand, inviting Alex to attack him.

'Is he not scared of my attack?' Alex wondered. 'Whatever.' He dashed straight to the front and swung his sword. Dark lines appeared on Huo Tu's skin as he placed his single hand forward to block the blade.

CLANK

As if he just hit Iron, Alex's hand shook from the rebound damage. 'He knows Jade Skin? How strong is his hand?' Alex thought in pure shock. Huo Tu smiled in contempt when he saw the shock on Alex's face.

"Now you're going to get it," Huo Tu said as he tried to punch back. However, Alex was fast and managed to run out of the attack range in good time. Huo Tu's face got serious for a second when he realized Alex was faster than him.

Then he started to get angry. He started to run towards Alex with his fat body and tried to punch him once more. However, Alex was too fast for him and managed to get out of his way.

'Why is he so slow? Does he not know any movement techniques?' Alex wondered. If that was the case, then there was still hope for him. Alex started to run around the stage.

From time to time, he came in and struck Huo Tu from his blind side. But not one of those managed to deal any sort of damage. 'Damn it,' he thought and used Smiting Blade. Yellow Qi flowed into his sword, dying the whole blade yellow.

With his strong body and his amazing movement technique, Huo Tu could no longer keep track of him. Alex started attacking more and more. His skin started so show some scratches after he used the Smiting blade, and also Huo Tu's robes were slowly being cut apart.

Something blue in color shone underneath, Alex cut more and more until the robe was in tatters and the underbody was visible.

"That is..." Alex thought in shock. He looked at the shiny blue armor underneath the man's body. 'That's the armor from the auction house. I thought it was taken by that merchant guy. Why does he have this?' he thought.

"Haha, you shocked. This is a Common Earth Grade armor artifact that my father got for me. Your physical attack does nothing to me. Not even Luo Mei or Du Yuhan can harm me with their attacks when I'm wearing this." He started to laugh manically.

The situation started to seem grimmer and grimmer by the second.

Alex ran away after realizing that he couldn't beat him by just attacking him. So, he decided to try some Qi-based techniques and see if those worked. Green Qi filled his sword and he got ready to swing it.

He used the 2nd strike of the Elusive Heavenly sword and let the attack fly. Huo Tu didn't do anything and simply let the attack hit him.

An explosion rang out, but Alex could tell that Huo Tu wasn't injured at all. 'Dammit,' he thought and prepared another attack. Darker green light filled the sword as Alex got ready to attack.

At the same time, Huo Tu did something as well. He reached into his storage bag and took out something. Alex looked at it and was surprised. 'A talisman?' he thought.

He let swung his sword and used the 3rd strike of the Elusive Heavenly sword. A green slash flowed through the air towards Huo Tu. Huo Tu as well threw the talisman directly at the incoming slash.

BOOM

Massive energy erupted where the two attacks met. Huo Tu had no problem standing through the shockwave, which Alex was pushed back a little.

"What was that?" Alex looked at the explosion in shock. He hadn't expected Huo Tu to use a talisman for fighting. He had remembered his master speaking about such things but had finally seen it for the first time.

Suddenly, Huo Tu took two talismans out and looked at Alex with a smile. Before Alex could even prepare another attack, he immediately threw both the talismans on either side of Alex, trying to sandwich him in between the explosions.

Alex got terrified. Without any other immediate ideas, he switched his holding of the sword from over to under and threw it right at Huo Tu just as the talismans exploded.

BOOM

Before Alex could even use any defensive techniques, the explosions devoured him whole.

Chapter 157: Penta Blade Technique

Huo Tu smiled seeing the explosion, but suddenly Alex appeared in front of him and hit him directly on the head with his blade. The attack did absolutely nothing to Huo Tu, but Alex's presence did anger him.

Alex immediately stepped back. His heart was beating crazily as he realized how close he was to being hurt. If he hadn't sent out the sword in time and teleported to its shadow, he would've taken serious damage right there.

He looked at the two small holes in the place where the talisman exploded. 'Was that damage in the Meridian tempering realm? I need to be more aware of my surrounding,' he thought and activated focus mode.

Suddenly, time slowed down. All the senses around him amplified, including what he picked up from his spiritual sense. His beating heart was just as loud as the rest of the crowd watching the fight.

The lights around him were brighter and he could more distinctly see the hideous face of Huo Tu. The smell of smoke and dust was in the air from the recent explosions. He could feel the fluctuations in the air made by the last 2 explosions.

He saw Huo Tu reach into his storage bag once more. This time, however, instead of a talisman, he took out a pill. "How did you survive that?" Huo Tu asked but got no response.

He got angry and threw the pill right at Alex. Alex was prepared, however. He simply made a fist and punched out. A massive golden fist flew out from him and traveled towards Huo Tu. In the middle, the pill and the Fist met, creating another massive explosion.

This time, Alex too stood unphased by the shockwaves. Huo Tu got angry and took out another 2 pills. Alex wanted to use another technique but wasn't given any chance.

The two pills flew out and struck just below Alex. Alex didn't move.

BOOM

Another giant explosion rang out. This fight had ended up being a battle of explosion. The audience waited with bated breath to see what happened as the smoke and dust cleared.

Alex emerged out barely damaged at all. He definitely took the damage, but the most it seemed to have done was make him disheveled. Alex's heart, however, was beating faster as he realized he just survived another close call.

'Like I thought. Elemental Guidance technique works with the pills explosions,' he thought. Huo Tu started to get even angrier.

He took out dozens of talismans and pills at once. 'Just how many of those does he have?' Alex was shocked to see the many pills and talismans with him. 'I guess that makes sense since he is the son of that fat merchant. He must really spoil his son to make him turn out like this,' Alex thought.

Huo Tu started to throw pills after pills talismans after talismans. Alex too threw whatever he could at the incoming attacks.

Elusive Heavenly Sword 2nd and 3rd Strike, Elemental Guidance, Iron Fist Punch, and Palm of the Sun. 'Sh*t. I don't think I can stand the onslaught anymore. I will have to finish this match in one shot,' he thought.

He kept throwing whatever he could at his opponent and waited for his opponent to end his current supply of 'attacks'.

Finally, the moment came. Huo Tu threw his last pill and Alex threw a massive yellow palm towards the incoming pill. Immediately afterward, he slid his 2 fingers from another hand across the blade.

Suddenly, the sword started glowing golden. He then made an arc around him with the sword. At specific intervals, the sword left a golden after image where it passed through.

After leaving the final golden image, the light in the sword disappeared, and all that remained were the 5 golden sword images on top of him. This was the final attack technique he had learned called the Penta Blade Technique. It was a heaven-grade technique that made 5 images of the blade using Qi. All 5 images would be as strong as a normal attack from the sword.

The technique could only be learned by people with Metal spiritual roots. This was the final technique Wen Cheng had given him and perhaps his strongest Qi-based attack.

The 5 blade images on top of him slowly started to tilt on his command and targeted Huo To. When he saw this, Huo Tu disregarded the need to take out more pills for now and prepared to take the full brunt of the attack by himself.

Dark lines appeared on his skin as he used Jade Skin to protect himself.

"Go." With a single command, all 5 of the sword flew directly towards Huo Tu. Golden light shined through the air as they passed by and hit Huo Tu.

BOOM

No explosions occurred but shockwaves still appeared. Huo Tu blocked the attack with just his body and smiled.

But then, suddenly, his eyes turned white and he fell to the ground.

Huff Huff

Alex breathed heavily as he stopped using focus mode and finally caught his breath. Huo Tu was in front of him unmoving, and the Elder waited for him to stand up.

But Alex knew he wasn't going to, at least not for a while now. He doubted someone in the meridian realm could withstand a full onslaught of Heaven's Impact, an attack that made Ma Rong nearly lose consciousness.

Hidden Behind the brilliant golden light of the Penta Blade technique was an undetectable fist made up of Spiritual energy that attacked Huo Tu's mind, suddenly fainting him.

"Elder, the match is over," Alex said, jolting the Elder out of his delusions. The Elder walked up to Huo Tu to make sure he was in fact unconscious and then looked at Alex in horror.

The stage was full of holes and needed repair. That was what these two people's fight had done.

The Elder couldn't imagine how an Organ tempering 3rd realm cultivator had defeated a Meridian Tempering 3rd realm cultivator. The result was just way too absurd.

"Elder, the result," Alex reminded once more.

"Ah, Fight Over." The Elder shouted out shocking the entire audience. Alex slowly walked up to the Elder and took his badge number 86 and left. Leaving the Elder and Audience in total silence.

Chapter 158: Lunch talk

"Huh?? He just won like that?" someone said in shock.

"What was that last attack?? It was so dazzling." Somebody else said.

"Look at that stage. The Elders must be angry right now."

"Of course. If they had known that the fight was going to take this turn, they would've sent them to a higher numbered stage."

"Is brother Huo Tu alright?" another person spoke.

"What was that inner sect disciple's name again? Yu Ming, right?" People started remembering his name.

"Is he a core disciple now?" another person asked. Numerous people were talking about the outcome of the battle just now.

Somewhere far away, a middle-aged man with a bald head and no facial hair was looking towards Alex who had long since left the stage and walking out of the sect valley.

At first, when he had heard that the match was between a core disciple and an inner sect disciple, he had given no attention to the match, but after the first few explosions, he had turned his attention to the match and watched it ever since.

"Who is that? His fight with Huo Tu left even stage 15 in tatters," he asked. Next to him were two people, both around the same height and wearing yellow robes with orange lining.

"I have never seen him, master. He must be new here. Maybe he is one of those new disciples that keep joining and leaving?" The young female spoke up. She had fair skin, with long black hair tied behind her back. She looked like she was 20 years old.

The male on the other hand didn't bother speaking at all. He seemed to be in his early 20s and had no facial hair on him. His stoic and handsome face showed no emotions at all.

The master didn't wait for the male to speak up either. He knew how his disciple was.

"Go and find out who he is and what his rank is," the bald man gave the order and the young female immediately ran off towards the fighting stage where Huo Tu was being carried out.

After a minute or two, the female disciple returned. "His name is Yu Ming and his rank is 86. Apparently, he has been improving his ranks very fast. Like I thought, he must be one of those new disciples that are very talented. I think we should rope him in master," the female disciple said as she chuckled.

"Hmm... beating a core disciple as an inner sect disciple, that is quite a feat. I hope he hasn't...," the bald mumbled almost to an incoherent level. He then looked at the Huo Tu that was being taken away.

"Do you think you could've beaten Huo Tu as he did?" the master asked.

"Absolutely not. I doubt I could've even won against him normally without his annoying pills and talismans. Not to mention, The pills and talismans do Meridian Tempering 1st realm damage. Thankfully, he doesn't have higher-ranked pills and talismans" said the female disciple.

"His father and master know he is trash, so they won't let him get anything more expensive," The master explained and then turned to the young man next to him and asked, "Would you have problems fighting him?" he asked. The young man thought for a while and spoke, "The armor would be annoying."

"Other than that, there is no problem, right?" the master asked with a smile and the disciple nodded.

* * * * * *

Alex was walking back to his house. Along the way, there was only one thought in his mind.

"If I register for the 18th rank right now, I will be a core disciple too." That was all he could think of.

"No, I can't. That will only make the other core disciple's target me. And after some time, I will have to fight against someone that would withstand Heaven's Impact. I can't handle them right now."

He soon reached home and logged out for some afternoon lunch. This would be his last afternoon lunch in the dormitory. Just as he was about to leave, he saw his phone blinking. He opened it up to see that he had missed a call from his cousin.

He immediately called back.

"Oh, Alex. You finally picked up. Were you in the game?" Hannah was on the other side of the phone.

"Yes, sister. Did you need anything?" he asked.

"Yeah. I just called to tell you that you should pack your luggage today so that you won't have to worry about early tomorrow. You did tell your parents you were moving, right?" she asked.

"Oh yes, of course. Everything is ready. I just need to pack my luggage, which isn't a lot."

"Alright. I will send you the location tomorrow morning. Grab a cab and get there, okay?" she said.

"Ok, sister."

Alex went to have lunch with the rest of his roommates.

"You are leaving tomorrow, Alex?" Logan asked.

"Yes," Alex replied with a hint of melancholy in his voice.

"Where will you be living?" Matt asked.

"With my cousin, a few distances away from here. Her friends all left, so she was alone and asked me to move in with her."

"What about university?" Eric asked.

"Oh, it's not that far away I hear. It should take me at most half an hour to get to the university," Alex said.

"That's not bad."

"What about you guys? You guys decided to stay or leave?" Alex asked. The dorm had still not made any sort of announcement as to what they would do regarding the new capsules coming out.

"We will wait until next week and see what the dorm says. Even finding a room in the city is hard and not to mention it costs a lot. I am surprised that your cousin and her friends can afford so much. Aren't you guys supposed to be from the countryside?" Eric asked.

"Oh, haha, Yes I am from the countryside, but my cousin is not. In fact, she is quite rich. Her parents pay for her apartment rent," Alex said.

"Ah, I see." They talked for a while and Alex went back to the game once more.

Chapter 159: First Elder

Alex opened his eyes back in house number 86 and looked at the time. It was close to 4 pm so he checked his badge to see if anyone else had registered a fight with him.

Thankfully, after the last match, nobody dared to register a fight against him. They had learned what he did to a core disciple and had thus left him alone. "I wonder if the poor guy at the 18th rank right now is fighting a core disciple right now," he wondered and chuckled to himself.

Suddenly, he heard a knock on the door. "Who?" he wondered and sent out his spiritual sense. Outside of the door were two people. One male and one female.

The female was a young woman wearing a yellow robe with orange linings, and the man was wearing yellow robes with silver linings. "A Core disciple and an Elder?" he was surprised.

He walked to the front door and opened it. He acted surprised when he saw the two as if he didn't know who was outside. "Greetings Elder, senior sister. Can I help you with something?"

"Hello," the girl said with a jumpiness in her voice.

"You must be Yu Ming, am I correct?" the Elder asked.

"Yes, Elder," Alex replied.

"Do you know who I am?" the Elder asked.

Alex looked at the elder closely. He couldn't remember seeing any bald Elder before this, especially not one that had no facial hair either. "This is my first time meeting Elder, so please forgive this disciple for not recognizing who you are."

"I see. So, you must really be new here." The Elder spoke as he kept on nodding to himself. The girl beside him was also nodding continuously.

"Yes Elder, I only joined 2 weeks ago," Alex replied.

"Just 2 weeks ago? And already so much progress. You must be really talented. Do you have a master?" the Elder asked.

Alex was about to answer when he realized that his master had told him to not reveal their relationship yet. 'He did that to make sure I don't get targeted by the other elders. Should I keep lying?' he thought.

"No, I don't, Elder," Alex replied.

"Oh, good, good," the Elder said with a smile. "Then, do you want to be my disciple?" he asked.

Alex was shocked. 'He came here to make me his disciple?' he thought in surprise. The Elder continued, "I saw your match with Huo Tu today. You have a lot of potential. Come under my wing and I will teach you how to soar to the heavens."

The Elder had a face of pride as he said that. Alex couldn't think of any answer for his invite. So, he decided to just refuse directly.

"I'm sorry Elder. But, I am not looking for any Masters at the moment." Alex tried to reject as politely as he could.

"Hehehe," the girl behind the Elder giggled. "You don't even know who master is, and you are already rejecting him. You got quite the confidence."

Alex was surprised at her words. 'Who is this Elder?' he thought.

"Now now. Little Su, don't say that. Disciple Yu, I am the First Elder of the sect, directly below the Sect Elder. Are you sure you don't want to become my disciple?" the First Elder asked.

"The First Elder?" Alex was even more surprised. 'Why is the First Elder here to take me as a disciple? Does he know about my talent, or is it really just the match with Huo Tu?' he wondered. Still, he had to reject him, so he said,

"I am sorry, Elder, but my answer remains the same. I am not looking for any masters at the moment."

"Is that so..." the First Elder's smile dropped a little. "Very well then, I shall leave you alone. However, my offer still stands. Come find me if you ever change your mind," the First elder turned to leave after saying that.

"You are kind of dumb, aren't you? Not even accepting master's offer. What? You think you will get to the top without a master?" the girl named Su left after her master.

Alex stood stunned for a moment and immediately locked the door. He then walked back into the house. He looked at the board in front of him and thought, "So that was Du Yuhan's master huh. I should notify the master about this tonight.

He sat down to read the book that he had borrowed from the library today.

* * * * * *

"That kid is kind of stupid master. Not even accepting after learning who you are. He will surely regret someday." The more she thought about what had just happened, the more irritated she got.

"That's enough, little Su. You don't have to get angry at every little thing," the First Elder replied.

"Master, are we just leaving like that? We could persuade him in other ways though," The girl immediately changed her tone of speech.

"That won't work. We have to be genuine in our approach to recruiting new disciples. What would you do if I threatened you to become my disciple," the First Elder said.

"I didn't mean threatening him. I meant like persuading him with spirit stones or some techniques and such," the girl pouted at her master misunderstanding her intent.

"Is that so? I'm sorry then," the master said with a smile.

"What do we do now then, master? I don't think you will let him grow as he is, will you?" she asked.

The master's smile immediately dropped, changing with a serious look. "I can't allow him to get higher rank and be noticed by the other elders. He is so young and talented that if the other elders find out about him, they might try to rope him in with whatever tricks they have. At that point, I will have no choice but make sure he doesn't get in my way of becoming the next sect leader, even if it means seriously injuring him through a fight."

"I see, master. Let's hope it doesn't come to that." The master-disciple duo then walked up the mountain and returned to their residence.

Chapter 160: Clones

Alex sat down on his bed and looked at the book in front of him. "The hell did I pick up?" he wondered with a strange face as he looked at the title on the page.

How to create a clone.

"A clone? Like another one of yourself? Master didn't say anything about these other than that it existed," he thought as he started reading. The book in fact told what methods one could use to make different clones. It didn't teach the 'recipe' on how to create a clone but taught more of the methods to create one.

The first method mentioned in the book was using dead bodies. If you took a recently dead body, you could have it resurrected with a part of your soul inside of it.

The upside of this method was that there was no other requirement aside from a few materials to fix the corpse before resurrecting it with your own soul.

The downside was that it took forever to properly integrate your soul into the body since it used to host another one. Also, it needed the real body to control it at all times, otherwise, it would be like a mindless puppet.

The second way mentioned was to grow another body using a sample of the real body to create an entirely new body. This new body would grow a soul and mind of its own with memories from the real body.

The upside of this method was, the clone had its own mind and had free thought. The growing process could be accelerated if needed, and the clone would be ready in just a few weeks. The real body also didn't need to provide part of its soul to cultivate a new body.

The downside of this method was that the clone could not be controlled by the real body at all. Also, the clone did not have any unique bodily constitutions or spiritual roots. Meaning, the body was born a mortal.

There were possibly other ways out there, but the book only mentioned the two. "So, I could make a body of my own? I wonder how that would work." He wondered.

After he finished learning the book, he kept it inside and decided to immerse himself into the other knowledge he had gathered the last few days. Some regarding cultivation, some regarding talismans, some regarding formations, some regarding artifact creation, and most of all regarding alchemy.

He had managed to find alchemy books that recorded stuff he hadn't read even in Hong Wu Sect. "So the explosive pills that Huo Tu used most likely came from Spring Song sect, huh. And the talismans from Little Dawn sect?" he wondered.

"Oh yes, this is interesting. Making specific pills catering to specific requirements. Finding out new recipes on your own? Can I even do that his early?"

At this point, he knew about a couple of hundreds of recipes and needed to understand the reason behind why they did what they did. "I should start focusing on the elemental aspects of the pills more," he thought.

He kept remembering more and more of what he read. "Hmm... so Meridian Tempering helps make the meridians stronger and carry more Qi around. Is it different from the tempering I have to sit through during body cultivation? Now that I think about it, I've never seen what cultivation really looks like. I keep falling asleep as soon as I use it."

He started wondering how different normal cultivation was from his body cultivation.

"Since it says Mind Tempering helps increase your mental strength, I wonder if it will have any impact on my spiritual sea." After thinking about it for a bit more, he decided to eat some more cores.

He found himself in the familiar landscape of his spiritual sea, fighting against a snake monster. "Urghh... I hate not having my sword with me." He started throwing punches and palms of golden and yellow color.

Within a few minutes, the snake was dead. From a small shadow at the surface of the lake, a yellow aura was released that devoured both the snake monster and Alex.

'Hmm... should I breakthrough right now?' he wondered. "I should wait until after today's lesson at least," He thought.

He decided to go check his progress in the training hall. After about half an hour, he had gotten all the results he needed to know. His physical attacks were doing damage as much as 3 realms higher than his normal attack. Introducing Qi to those physical attacks increased the damage by a small amount depending on the grade of the technique.

At the moment he had only 2 physical attacking techniques. First was the Smiting blade which dealt the same damage as normal attacks, but had a more penetrating force behind it. While the second attack, the 1st strike of the Elusive Heavenly sword dealt 4 realms higher than his current realm.

The Palm of the Sun and Iron Fist punch did the same amount of damage even though they weren't reliant on the physical body. He could make sense of why the Palm of the sun was so strong. But Iron Fist punch was still a mystery to him.

The Palm of the Sun used Yang energy, which his body and Qi provided plenty. However, he didn't have anything that increased the power of the Iron fist punch other than the mystery blood essence that entered his body.

The other attacks increased a little in damage compared to normal cultivators due to his thick Yang Qi and a body that went through Mortal Cleansing. Still, they weren't as substantial as the other techniques.

"I got strong so quick that I don't even know exactly how strong I am. Now that I think about it, have I even tried flying in while? I should go do some tests in the forest before I log out for dinner."

"You might want to go on a small walk as well, won't you Pearl," he said as he looked at his left arm. Thinking that he got out of the Training hall after paying the fee and walked towards the southern forest on the other side of the sect crater.

Chapter 161: Pearl's First Battle

It was close to 5 pm right now. Alex walked to the gate on the southern end of the sect crater. Calling it a gate could even be considered wrong, as it was just a small opening in the giant wall that prevented monsters from the Southern Forest from entering.

He walked up to the small entrance and was stopped by the elders guarding the gate.

"Badge!" an elder asked.

Alex took out his badge and handed it to them. The elders recorded the badge number and handed it back to Alex. "You should know that since today is Friday, you won't be exempt from the matches by leaving the sect right?" the elder asked.

"Yes," Alex replied and walked out of the opening. He looked back at the wall and wondered," Is this the wall for the Scarlet City?" He watched the wall go around the outside of the forest and curve outward after reaching a bit further.

"I wonder where the wall lies on Hong Wu sect."

He walked a bit further and started running. He didn't want to mess around with weak monsters on the outer side and needed at least a late Muscle tempering realm monster for what he was about to do.

His running speed, with zero air resistance thanks to making the air frictionless, was beyond amazing. In just a few minutes, he reached what would have taken him an hour at his speed a month back.

Now that he reached this far he decided to bring out Pearl. With a bright shine, Pearl came out of his left arm. He focused and saw the new stats on Pearl after the last few days of training.

[White Cat (Child) - Bonded

Name: Pearl

Cultivation Base: Bone Tempering 6th Realm

Evolution Chance: 40%

Cultivation Method: ????? ?????'s Dominating Body (Shared)

]

"You are stronger than I was back when I came to this forest," he said with a chuckle. "Come, let's see if there are any monsters around for you to fight." He started walking in a certain direction while spreading his spiritual sense at a max distance without overstretching.

Finally, he found a small monster with a shell on its back.

[Smooth Pangolin: Bone Tempering 3rd Realm]

"Oh, that is perfect for you. You should be able to win easily, right?" Alex made Pearl go and fight the pangolin. Alex looked at the monster and deduced, "since it has a shell, it must be a defensive monster and have bad offensive ability."

Pearl didn't know what to do at first, but after Alex explained that he had to fight with the Pangolin, Pearl sped up and reached the pangolin and started purring at him.

The pangolin got surprised by the sudden incoming of Pearl and immediately got into a ball. "Meow," Pearl jumped forward and hit the ball with his paw. Like a football being hit by a professional player, the ball flew far until it hit a tree, and jolted awake a few birds.

The tree had a small dent on the trunk as the ball fell to the ground, taking no damage. The birds in the tree saw Pearl running towards the ball and started to target him.

Alex looked at the birds and realized they were in the lower realms of Bone Tempering, so he wasn't scared. Still, he ran a little behind Pearl to make sure he doesn't get swarmed by different enemies.

Seeing the birds coming towards him, Pearl jumped high into the air and swung his claws at one of the birds. In a single hit, the bird was sent flying to the ground with most of its body broken. The bird was dead, and Alex had gotten the notification for obtaining its core and feathers.

Pearl landed lightly on his feet, leaving Alex in stun behind. 'Just one hit?' he truly hadn't expected the disparity of a few levels to bring forth such a gap in strength.

'Is it perhaps because his body is also cultivated?' he wondered. Training with Pearl, Alex had realized that the cultivation technique that Pearl used was one that both cultivated his Qi and Body. Only because it wasn't compatible, Alex had to suffer through intense pain and only get rewarded with Body cultivation alone.

'At this stage, he must be as strong as a late bone tempering realm monster.' After seeing the attack just now, Alex had no doubt that he had been underestimating Pearl until this point.

Pearl ran off towards the pangolin when another bird started to swoop down and attack him with its sharp talons. The small Pearl didn't even bother protecting himself. He took the full brunt of the attack and shoved it off like it was nothing.

His body was stronger than the bird's talons, and so the talons did not even put a scratch on his beautiful, white fur. Pearl once more jumped up to reach the bird, but by this point, all of the birds had flown away.

They had some intelligence and had already realized that this was an enemy they couldn't beat. Pearl landed on the sticks and stones in the forest, disappointed.

He then ran towards the pangolin and nudged it a little. It didn't move. Pearl cocked his head and didn't know what to do. Alex had arrived at this point and he used his spiritual sense to see what was going on with the Pangolin.

"Holy…" he was astonished. The pangolin's inner body had mostly been destroyed and it was on its last breath. Alex used his Qi to crush its body a little and got the notification that it had died now.

"No need to keep it suffering," he said as he looked at Pearl in a new light. He might look like a little cute fluffy ball of goodness, but that strength was anything but cute.

"Although you have started to slow down, if you keep on getting stronger like this, I can't say how long it would take for you to overtake me," Alex said, and then with a smile added, "Actually, I will look forward to the day when you are stronger than me if it ever comes."

Chapter 162: Testing Strength

Alex let Pearl fight for a bit longer. He kept finding monsters a little stronger than last time and had Pearl fight them. In the end, it was still the massacre. The cute, little guy could kill anything a realm lower than him in a single swing of his palm. Even monsters in his own realm struggled to stay alive.

Only monsters 2 realms higher than him could threaten him.

Along the way, he had seen quite a few alchemy materials by now and had taken them whenever he found one. He then found an area devoid of alchemy ingredients and no other monsters around.

"Alright, that's enough training against monsters. I came here to train and see exactly how strong I have become compared to the environment."

He stood in front of a giant tree and reeled in his Qi so that it was hiding in his meridian and was no longer available around his body. His natural defense and offense dropped by over an entire minor realm.

He made a fist and punched straight into the tree. The tree was about 2 meters in thickness and Alex punches the exact center.

BOOM

The tree rustled as hundreds of leaves started falling. As for the place itself where he hit, there was a gaping hole, at least 20 cm deep. "Wow, that is more than I would've imagined. "

He looked at the hole and realized just how strong he was. "Fighting against people in your own range doesn't exactly help you understand this sort of thing, does it?" he thought.

He punched the tree a few more times and decided to use different attacks. Legs, elbows, shoulders, fingers, palm, chops. He used whatever he could. In the end, the tree fell down from the overwhelming amount of holes in it.

Alex wasn't even a little bit out of breath. He looked around with his spiritual sense to see if he had attracted anyone, but thankfully he hadn't. He proceeded to the next tree about the same size as this one.

He let the Qi he was keeping inside his meridian flow out to every part of his body. Power coursed through his body once more as his cultivation base returned back to Organ Tempering 3rd realm.

"Alright, let's see what happens with a minor realm higher cultivation base. Although I don't think my cultivation base counts as a normal cultivation base," he chuckled to himself as he thought about it.

He separates his cultivation from his body, but he couldn't separate his body from his cultivation unless he resorted to Qi-based attacks.

He prepped his fist once more, expecting to make a deeper hole this time. Without further ado, he punched the tree.

BOOM

This time the sound was so big, that it caught Alex himself off guard. He looked at his arm, or rather, he tried to look at his arm, but it was so deep inside the tree that it wasn't even visible anymore.

He sent his spiritual sense to see inside the tree where his fist was and realized that his fist wasn't actually touching anything. He slowly sent the spiritual sense forward and realized that beyond where he punched was another massive hole.

Following the hole, he realized that a chunk of the back of the tree's trunk had been entirely destroyed. He quickly pulled out his arm and walked to the back to look at the tree.

"Holy..." he was genuinely astounded at what he was seeing. The hole behind the tree was massive in size, almost as if an explosive had been set off right there.? The small bits of the tree trunk were all over the ground in front of the hole.

"Am I really that strong?" he was curious. Without hesitation, he gave one solid kick to the side of the tree and the whole tree fell to the ground. Its truck had been decimated.

"This is beyond comprehension."

He tried attacking a bunch more trees, and the result was the same. Some trees were stronger and could survive a few more hits, but in the end, they didn't take more than 5 kicks and punches to go down.

"What about my techniques?" he wondered and took out his True Mortal sword. With the sword, it only took him a single hit to cleanly chop off the tree. He didn't even have to use the Smiting Blade technique or the 1st strike of Elusive Heavenly sword.

He threw around other techniques, sending Qi-based attacks to the trees nearby. Most of them fell down with a single attack. Especially Iron Fist Punch and Palm of the Sun, they were the cream of the crops among the abilities he had.

"I wonder when the growth abilities would level up," he wondered. He looked at the time and realized it was close to half-past 6, so he had to hurry back to the sect.

Instead of running, however, he decided to see how fast flying would be for returning. He manipulated his Qi to carry himself and was pleasantly surprised that he was taken off the ground pretty easily.

"Woah," he immediately slowed down the Qi outpour and balanced himself in mid-air. Then, he used the Qi to slowly push him from behind. At first, it was really slow, but soon enough,? as he started using more and more Qi, he was flying at phenomenal speed. It was much slower than when using his movement speed but still moderately fast enough.

"Hmm... How about if I use the movement technique to remove all friction?" he wondered. He started moving his Qi to use Fluctuating Friction dance, as he coated his body with his Qi to make it have zero resistance with the Air.

Suddenly, his speed in the air pretty much tripled. It was now nearly as fast as when he walked, and before he knew it, he had arrived back to the sect.

He walked into the small gate and registered his name back. Thankfully, nobody had bothered to challenge him for a fight while he was gone.

Chapter 163: Popular

Alex walked back to his house to log out and go eat his dinner, happy that nobody cared enough about him to challenge him.

Unbeknownst to Alex however, his reputation in the sect was steadily growing. Pretty much everyone who went down to the fighting stages had heard about the match between the Inner sect disciple and the core disciple where the inner sect disciple won against the core disciple, going as far as to even make him unconscious.

The news spread like fire, and quickly 80% of the people were in the know. However, they only knew the name of the disciple and were unsure of how he looked like aside from the general description of a tall and lean body with long black hair.

Some people higher than him were scared that he might come for them next. Most people lower than him were waiting for him to beat the upper disciples. Core disciples were intrigued as to how he managed to beat Huo Tu, who they knew had a very tough defense that even they couldn't breakthrough.

However, Huo Tu was still unconscious and they couldn't ask him.

Alex returned back from his final dinner in the cafeteria and got back to his room. However, instead of going back into the game, he looked at the time.

"Hmm... it's 7:21 right now. I should pack my stuff right now. I can go play the game later when it's time for the daily training." He went to the closet and took out the small luggage he had brought from his home. He took out all of his clothing and started packing it.

His roommates had gone into the game before he had even thought of doing this, so he was left alone working on it. He didn't mind it though. He packed everything but a pair of clothes that he would be wearing tomorrow.

With that done, he finally went back to the game. He entered the game a little bit before his meeting with the master, so he decided to eat another one of the monster cores.

He took out two monster cores. One belonging to a monster with a cultivation base of Organ Tempering 4th realm, and another belonging to a monster with the cultivation base of Bone tempering 7th realm.

"Come out Pearl," he said as he sent his Qi to the tattoo on his left arm. Pearl came out in a flash and looked around confused, and he had rarely been called out in this room before.

"Meow," he looked at Alex, all confused. But just then, he smelled the brilliant scent of a monster core and started to climb on top of Alex to find the core. Alex showed him the core when he reached on his shoulder and let him eat it.

While he was eating that, Alex himself too decided to eat the core. With a single push to his mouth, the core vanished into this stomach and Alex to his spiritual sea.

He saw the monster the core belonged to, a massive rhino-like monster with no horns. Similar to last time, it only took him a few minutes to defeat the monster, but he could visibly see the strength of the monster in higher realms having a stronger form in the spiritual sea.

Once the monster was dead, a yellow aura once again came out from around a shadow at the surface of the sea, devouring both of them.

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body disintegrates everything>

<The monster core's element aligns with your spirit root>

<You have gained 1,240,000 Qi>

Alex opened his eyes and said, "It should be fine to break through now, right?"

So he opened his status page and hit [Breakthrough] without even looking at anything. He used up 2.5 million Qi at once and broke through to the 4th realm of Organ Tempering.

He looked at Pearl and saw that he was done consuming the core as well. "Come, let's go. Or we'll be late," he said and let Pearl get back to his arm. He disappeared and walked to the leader's building.

When he finally reached the building, he saw that there was more than just his master. There were also Luo Mei, Liu Xin, and Meng Yun. He let the illusion drop and showed himself.

"You're finally here. I heard you've made quite a bit of ruckus out there today," Wen Cheng said as soon as he came.

"Ruckus? Huh, Senior Brother, Senior Sister, what are you guys doing here?" Alex looked at them curiously.

"Of course, we came after hearing what you did, little brother," Liu Xin said.

"What I did? Did the information about my fight with Huo Tu spread to you guys somehow?" he asked.

"Not just us, little brother," said Luo Mei and continued, "The whole sect knows about your match now."

"Huh? Did the information spread that much?" he was shocked. "Oh no, no wonder even the First Elder came to recruit me. I didn't think it would be such a big event."

Wen Cheng's eyes perked up, as did Luo Mei's and Liu Xin's. Wen Cheng asked, "Did you say the First Elder came to recruit you?"

"Yes. He came by my house with a senior sister, his disciple I think, and tried to make me his disciple." He relayed what had taken place.

Wen Cheng's face got solemn, and asked, "And? What did you say? You didn't reveal our relationship yet right?" he asked.

"Oh, no. I only told him that I was not interested in being anyone's disciple right now. He left after I told him that," Alex replied.

"That should be enough, right master?" Liu Xin asked.

"I would say that's a crisis averted if you ask me," Luo Mei said so too. However,? Wen Cheng fell into deep contemplation, and he finally said,

"Qiu Ju is not a man that would give up so easily. He will come back to recruit you a few times more. However, that is not the problem now. The problem is that you have been recognized by everyone in the sect as a genius, so the Elders will come after you to make you their disciple."

"And not agreeing to a single one would make you the enemy of all of their disciples."

Chapter 164: Heaven Impacts once more

Alex and the rest of the group fell into thought. Finally, after a while, Alex said, "Will the Elders do something to me?" he asked. He was afraid that if the Elders themselves get in the way, then he would have little way to get out of the situation.

Even his nigh-invincible Immortal Concealment technique could be detected if it were the Elders. They were after all a major realm higher than him.

"No, that won't happen. The Elders care either too much about the sect, or at the very least too much about their face to something so underhanded. However, they would start sending their disciples to mess with you. They won't let you learn or train the entire week, and continuously register you to battles, trying to tire you and maybe eventually beat you."

"If they do that, you won't have enough time in the day to focus on yourself and go do something productive or maybe register your own fight to get to a higher rank. Who knows honestly what they would do? But they will try to hinder you, that's for sure. Especially to not let the other Elders have you."

Alex thought for a moment and said, "That should be fine then. At the very least, I am confident in beating any of the students I meet in the sect for now."

Wen Cheng got a little surprised at such an ostentatious statement from his disciple. "What do you mean you can beat anyone? You think you can beat the core disciples?" he asked.

"I should be able to, but that would be revealing all my secrets, master," he replied.

Wen Cheng started getting more and more curious. "What do you mean? What other secrets do you have?" he asked.

Alex stopped talking for a second and thought for a while. 'Should I tell them?' he contemplated for a bit and said, "Let's go inside first." He walked into the training hall where nobody could eavesdrop into.

"Here is the thing master," he said as he brought out an old, dusty-looking book. The moment they saw it, both Wen Cheng and Luo Mei were surprised. "The book from the auction? You got it?" he asked.

"Yes. Master bought it for me since I could read it," he said. The moment he said that both Wen Cheng and Luo Mei's eyes turned wide, while Liu Xin looked at them wondering why they reacted in such a way.

"Wait, did you say you can read it?" Luo Mei asked in surprise.

"What is the book about?" Wen Cheng asked, accepting his disciple's words without questioning. He had seen enough to be deterred by such small things at this point.

"It's a technique called Heaven's Impact, that lets you use Spiritual sense to attack the other people's mind. Depending on how different our mental capacity is, I can make them faint like I did Huo Tu back in the fighting stage today," he explained.

"So, you really did read that language," Wen Cheng said in shock. "Does that mean you've read the language in the black stele as well?"

"What is going on?" Liu Xin asked and Luo Mei explained to him. It was his turn to get shocked now. "But master, that stele has been here since before the sect even transferred here right?" he asked.

"Yes, but if he can read it, it might help us know about its origins." Wen Cheng said.

"Actually master, I can't read that stele. I have tried it earlier and I felt like I was close to death." He explained the circumstances under when and how he nearly lost all of his spiritual sense and was almost hit with a spiritual attack from the black stele.

Wen Cheng looked confused. "Why use spiritual sense at all if you can read it?" he asked.

"Oh, uhh... how do I explain this. I don't exactly read the language. It's more like I look over it with my spiritual sense and after enough time, the knowledge comes to me."

"If it were normal language, I wouldn't even have to use spiritual sense, but since it's not, I have to. Which turned out to be a bad idea when concerned with that Black Stele. You guys shouldn't use spiritual sense on the black stele either. It's really dangerous." He cautioned the three.

Meng Yun was standing behind Luo Mei, listening to the conversation. 'Attacking someone's mind? Like what I do with my flute?' she wondered.

"Alright, let's see what it can do. Use it on use, little brother," Liu Xin said as he walked in front. Alex hesitated for a bit, but then remembered that she was perfectly fine after using it on her, so he decided to do it.

Without giving Liu Xin any chance to prepare himself, Alex used Heaven's impact. A whirlpool appeared in his spiritual sea that drained an eighth of his spiritual sea, which turned into a mist that floated up and formed the shape of a fist.

It immediately flew towards Liu Xin's head. He wasn't even ready when suddenly, he lost consciousness. His whole body went limp as he fell to the ground with a loud sound.

"Wahh, Senior Brother?" Luo Mei immediately ran forward to pick him up. "Urghh... " Liu Xin couldn't form any words as his head hurt him like crazy. "What.... What was that?" he said as he woke up with his head in his arms.

'Huh? Is senior brother's mental strength much weaker than master's? She was able to stop herself from falling even a little bit, which senior brother fell to the ground,' he started evaluating the two and quickly remembered, 'oh right, Master did say she ate some pills that increased her mental strength. That should be the reason why,' he thought.

Wen Cheng watched as Liu Xin barely got up from the floor, eyes moving everywhere as he couldn't focus on anything immediately. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"I-I'm fine, master," Liu Xin replied.

Wen Cheng then turned around to Alex and said, "It seems we were wrong in worrying about you."

Chapter 165: My best Earth Grade pill?

"Little brother... that was too strong," Liu Xin said as he tried to stand still, his head still hurting a bit.

Alex looked at Liu Xin, feeling a little guilty. "I'm sorry, Senior Brother. I should have told you when I was going to attack," he said with a hint of sadness in his voice.

"It's okay. In fact, it's better this way since I get to see the actual effect of the attack. And I must say, it's stronger than I would've expected. However, are you sure you can win against the disciples in the higher realms?" he asked.

"Higher realms? Wouldn't this work well against anyone without spiritual sense?" he asked.

"I don't think so, Junior Brother. I think you are mistaking the spiritual sense for mental strength. One can have high mental strength without having a spiritual sense. I don't know if the other way around is possible or not, but anyone who is in the Mind Tempering realm should be able to get back up from your attack within 10 seconds. Unless you can somehow beat them to a victory in the 10 seconds, I don't think you will be fine while fighting against them," Liu Xin said.

Alex was left speechless for a few seconds. 'That's right. Mind Tempering does increase the mental strength of a cultivator, and Heaven's impact's description does say that the damage is the difference between our mental prowess. Although gaining spiritual sense might have increased my mental prowess quite a bit, that doesn't mean that other people won't have it as well,' he thought.

Seeing that he was silent for quite a while, Wen Cheng finally spoke. "Stop scaring little Yu. Don't worry, little Yu. There are only 7 disciples in the Mind Tempering realm and one of them is your senior sister. So effectively, you only have these 6 to worry about. And they won't be able to come after that easily without the entire sect learning about their masters trying to silence an inner sect disciple."

"Oh," Alex finally stopped thinking. He felt like a load had been taken off of his mind.

"However, we should still think of something." Wen Cheng started to think of ideas to keep the elders away from his disciple.

Just then, Alex spoke once more. "Umm... Master? I don't think we will have to do anything actually. At least, not for the next 2 weeks. Perhaps, even more, depending on the competition."

"What are you planning little brother?" Luo Mei inquired.

"Nothing really. I just thought I will go back to Hong Wu Sect tomorrow evening. After that, the Elders should be unable to do anything to me right? Also master said that the annual competition is coming up next, and I will have to prepare for that. I have ignored Alchemy for quite a while now. I might be getting rusty."

Wen Cheng thought for a while and said. "Hmm... Alright, that makes sense. Although there are still 2 more days, I don't think there is anything you can do by staying here. At least back in Hong Wu Sect, you could get a little better in alchemy."

The others in the room nodded as well.

"Oh, now that I think about it, I don't remember asking this, but how is your alchemy training. Have you made any progress? If not, you can leave the Hong Wu sect and come here. You have shown so much progress that you will definitely be somebody big in the future by staying here." He tried to steal Alex away from Hong Wu Sect.

Alex chuckled a little. "Don't worry master. I have made quite a bit of progress. Me studying is more than worth it," he said.

"Oh, you act like you've made quite a few earth-grade pills by now. How many have you made?" Wen Cheng asked.

Alex tried to remember, but it took him a lot of time to. "What's wrong?" Wen Cheng asked," are you not answering because you have not made any yet?"

"Oh, no master. It's just that I have made so many that it's hard to remember exactly how many. But it should be over 200 by now."

As if a noise-removing formation had just been employed in the room, everyone went silent. Only after a while did Luo Mei finally manage to speak. "Umm... Junior Brother, did you say you made 200 Earth grade pills?" she asked.

"Is that so surprising? I thought you guys knew I was talented. Didn't master tell you anything?" he asked as he turned towards Wen Cheng.

Wen Cheng's eyes were wide. He shook his head a little and said, "No. She only mentioned that you were talented. After seeing your speed in cultivation and learning new techniques, I thought I knew what she meant."

"Oh, ok well, that was what she meant then," he said. He didn't know what else to say.

"What is the highest harmony of the earth-grade pills you've made?" Luo Mei asked.

"Hmm...49," Alex said.

"""49??!""" All 3 of them shouted at once.

"You've made pills with 49% harmony?" Luo Mei shouted.

"How many of such pills have you made, little brother?" Liu Xin asked.

"When did you manage to make such a pill so fast?" Wen Cheng asked with his eyes wide.

"One at a time please," Alex said. "Yes, I've made a 49% harmony pill. I have only made one of such a pill, however, there are a few that came close to it among the different earth grade pills."

"Why are you guys so hung up on it though? It's not even my best pill." Alex had a smile on his face.

Suddenly a thought ran through the heads of all the three master disciples. Even Meng Yun in the back had her eyes nearly pop out when she heard this.

"Uhh... Little brother, you don't mean to say that... uh..." Liu Xin never finished the sentence.

"Yes. Just before I left the Hong Wu sect to come here. The last pill I made there was a Heaven grade pill with exactly 50% harmony."

Chapter 166: Talisman and Armor

"This..." Wen Cheng didn't know what to say. He was having trouble coming up with words to form sentences to speak right now. Luo Mei and Liu Xin were the same.

Alex on the other hand was just having fun. After a while, they finally calmed down.

"Is that the only Heaven-grade pill you made?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Yes. I haven't been able to make another one since then. Although, I should be able to once I go back and focus only on Alchemy."

"Hmm... that should help you," Wen Cheng said. "Alright then. All of you go back to your residence. You too, Yu Ming. Go take a rest for today. You've been training every day for 2 weeks now. In fact, I don't think you've cultivated in the last 5 days, have you?" Wen Cheng asked.

"No, master," he replied.

"Yeah, you should not miss those. Don't just eat pills for your Qi. Cultivation is more than just gathering Qi. A little break in between is not bad, but you shouldn't go too long without cultivating.

"I understand, Master." Everyone left the room and started going back to their own houses. "Yu Ming, wait a minute. I need to talk to you about something," Wen Cheng said.

"Yes, master?" he asked.

"I decided to wait until you were a Core disciple, but it seems that they will come after you regardless of what rank you are in, so here you go." Wen Cheng took out a small talisman and handed it to him.

"This is a talisman that can defend against the attack of a True Lord realm cultivator. Keep it on your body at all times, since you don't know when you might need it." Alex looked at the normal-looking talisman and was surprised that such a little thing could withstand the attack of a True Lord realm cultivator.

'Isn't True lord the third of the True realms? This thing can block their attacks?' he thought to himself.

"However, It can only block the attack for 1 time. So make sure that when it does happen, use your escape technique immediately. Since you have the concealment technique, you should be able to get out of harm's way soon," Wen Cheng said.

"I understand, Master," Alex said as he kept the talisman inside his robes, instead of his storage bag.

"Also, take this," Wen Cheng took out an armor from the storage bag. Alex was a little surprised as he saw the armor. The armor looked very weird as instead of having 1 opening for neck, 2 for arms, and 1 for torso; it had 1 opening for the neck, 4 for arms, and a small opening for ... another arm?

"What type of armor is this master? Can I even wear this?" he asked.

"Hahaha... This is not for you silly. This is for your beast. Take it." Wen Cheng handed it to Alex as well.

Alex curiously looked around the armor and felt that it was quite sturdy. Actually more sturdy than he could have imagined. He turned the armor all over and started to get confused as he saw the entire surface.

There were 2 problems with the armor. Firstly, it was too big. Pearl was at most the size of two palms now, but this armor would fit a grown adult's torso in it easily.

Secondly, there was not a single seam in the armor, almost as if it was made entirely from a single ingredient. Looking at the material it was made up of, Alex thought that was impossible as the various green and brown colors would say otherwise.

So, he decided to ask his master. "Master, do I wait until Pearl is as big as this armor before I make him wear it? I don't think he will need an armor by the time he gets this big. Also, how do I even make him wear this? Do I just put Pearl inside here and wait for him to grow into this armor?" he asked.

Wen Cheng chuckled at the hilarity of the statement and said, "Of course not silly. Just refine the treasure and you can freely use it on any beast companion you have. It can freely change its shape and size to match your beast."

"Oh," Alex said, finally understanding. "How strong is it, master? What grade is it?" he asked.

"This armor is a Common Heaven grade armor. The armor itself can block the damage of an early Mind Tempering realm cultivator. With your cat's current cultivation, he should probably be able to block up to Mind Tempering 4th realm attacks."

"Hmm... Although, I don't think that will be much help to you since your cat is so small and cant really block attacks."

"I see..." Alex kept looking at the armor.

"Oh, and also, It can stay with your beast in their personal space inside your body, so you don't have to keep on putting the armor on them when they come out." Wen Cheng seemed to really like that part about the armor.

"So, I just need to refine it and it's fine right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Wen Cheng replied and he sighed as he continued, "honestly, I wanted to give you an armor as well, but with your current rate of body cultivation, there isn't a single armor in the treasure hall that would be suitable for you. Also, I wanted to give your a sword too, but you already have that True grade sword, so I decided to change the sword for the defensive talisman."

"I see, thank you, Master," Alex bowed a little towards Wen Cheng.

"You don't have to bow to me. When I first got you as a disciple, I had already promised you about 2 artifacts from the treasure hall. Although one of them isn't really an artifact, I'm just keeping my promise." Wen Cheng said.

"Either way, Thank you, master," Alex said.

"Alright, you can go now," Wen Cheng said as he sent Alex back for the night.

Saying his goodbyes, Alex too went back to his house number 86 to cultivate.

Chapter 167: Moving

Alex walked into his room and felt it a bit weird to be here during the nighttime. The only time he hadn't left the house at night was when he had the Blood essence enter him and had fallen unconscious for over 12 hours.

"Well, it's not like something different is going to happen tonight either," he said as he chuckled to himself remembering, or rather not remembering, how each night of cultivation went.

He sat down on the bed and closed his eyes. Abruptly, he opened them again. "It's been so long that I nearly forgot," he said as he took out a small pink flower from his storage bags, the Spirit Cleansing Lily.

"I can't forget about increasing my Spiritual Sea," he thought as he closed his eyes and started to cultivate. Slowly, he fell into a trance and fell asleep.

Early in the morning, just a few minutes past 6 am, Alex opened his eyes. He looked down at the flower and realized it was not there. He smiled. He sent out his Spiritual Sense and his smile went even wider as he realized that the Spiritual sea had grown once more.

It was now 3 times as wide as the first time he unlocked it. "So, it will last a long while, if I don't over-extend it right? Actually, it should be pretty much forever." He was happy thinking about this fact.

'Alright, let's leave.' He then logged out.

He woke up and took off his helmet. He looked at the helmet, thinking this was the last time he would be using this. 'Well, I should stop being lazy and go buy my own,' he thought.

He freshened up and got back. He changed into a different set of clothes and made sure nothing of his was left behind. After he was all set, he was ready to leave... except,

"Why is she not picking up? Is she still in the game?" Alex wasn't able to get a hold of his cousin, without whom, he wouldn't get the address. He called a few times and decided to wait for her to call back.

Time slowly passed by and it was 7 am now. The roommates slowly started logging out of the game and saw the Alex was all packed.

"Are you ready to leave already?" Matt asked.

"Yes. Oh yeah, Eric, here's your helmet. Thank you so much for letting me use this. You can't imagine how much this meant to me." He handed the helmet back to Eric who just smiled and said, "Don't worry about it."

TRING TRING

Suddenly, his phone started ringing. He looked at the screen and it was his cousin Hannah. He picked up and could immediately hear the loud voice from the other side.

"Alex? I'm so sorry. I was busy answering some important emails and I lost the track of time. Also, just my luck that my damn phone was on silent for some reason. Anyway, are you prepared to leave? I will text you the location now," she bombarded his ear with a whole bunch of things.

"Okay, sister. You don't have to worry about it. Just send me the location info and I will be on my way," he said.

"Alright. Let me do that real quick. Call me when you are near okay?" she said and ended the call before she could even hear a reply.

Alex looked at the phone and just shook his head.

"Was that your cousin you are going to stay with?" asked Logan.

"Yeah. She will send me the location soon and I will have to leave," he said.

TING

The location info arrived. "Alright, I should leave now. She will be waiting for now." Alex started to get up to leave.

"Wait, let us escort you to the gate." The three of them stood up too.

"You guys don't have to," Alex tried to refuse but they wouldn't budge.

"It's just the gate. Besides, we have to leave for breakfast right now anyway," Matt said.

Unable to refuse anymore, Alex let them follow along. At the gate of the university, Alex stopped a cab and got on it. "See you guys in class," he waved the 3 goodbyes and finally left.

In 10 minutes or so, he reached the location mentioned in the message. He paid the cab driver and got off. He looked around but couldn't see his cousin at all. "This is the right place, right?" he thought as he started calling her once again.

"Sister, I'm here," he said.

"So fast. Wait, let me get down." She ended the call. Alex looked at the tall building in front of him. The building was mostly gray in color and was similar in height to the other buildings around it. A height of over 10 floors. 'Oh my god. She lives in such a tall building.' He was quite surprised.

Within a minute, Hannah came out of the door. "Ah, you're finally here. Vinny left a few days ago, so I've been bored all alone in the apartment. C'mon, let's go in." She made him follow her.

They got into an elevator and Hannah pressed button 11. Alex was surprised. "You live on the 11th floor, Sister?" he asked.

"Yeah. That was the only floor available to us when we moved in." She said.

"Wait, the whole floor is just for you?" Alex asked in surprise.

"It was meant for four different people, but now it's just me, i guess. oh, and you too now." Hannah chuckled a bit.

"How much does the rent cost here then?" he asked. He didn't know anything about renting places and could only wonder.

"Well, the monthly rent is around $10,000. The location is very populated, so it just costs a lot. I had to pay $2500 before, but ever since the other girls left, I have been stuck with it all." Her reply shocked Alex. $10000 dollars was a lot of money.

'I will be broke in 2 months if I had to start paying for the rent,' he thought.

DING

Finally, the door of the elevator opened and revealed what lied beyond it.

Chapter 168: New Place

"Come, this is your new home for probably the next 3 years of university," Hannah said as she opened the door in the hallway outside of the elevator. Alex walked inside to see another door to his front and two smaller doors to his either side.

"These are for shoes and coats, don't worry about them and come on it," Hannah said as she opened the actual door to the house. Alex walked inside and saw a massive lounge room with white walls and gray sofas. There was a big TV in the middle of the room above the fireplace.

'No wonder it costs $10,000 a month. But still, isn't that a lot?' he wondered. "Come, I will show you the other rooms," she said as she walked towards another small corridor. There were 2 doors on either side and she opened one of them.

"This will be your room from now on."

Alex walked in a saw a massive room with light blue walls. The room was about the size of his dorm room, but instead of 4 different people, only he was going to stay there now.

The room, however, was all but empty and only had a closet in it. "No bed?" he asked.

"No. This room used to be used by the first girl that lived here, and she took everything in here when she left. We wanted to put a bed in here, but since no one was staying, we laid it off until someone came along."

"We can go buy one today. I'm free all day," Hannah said.

"It's okay sister. Actually, I don't even know if I will be needing a bed in the first place, since they will be releasing capsules next week where we can sleep all we want," Alex said.

"Don't be silly. Sleeping in a bed, and sleeping in a capsule are two entirely different things. You absolutely need a bed," Hannah reprimanded her little cousin.

"Alright sister, if you say so." Alex just accepted her words as truth and didn't go on further about getting just the capsule.

"Okay, keep your luggage there and come eat some breakfast. You must be hungry," she said as she headed back out.? Beyond the lounge area was a half-open room, which was the kitchen.

Hannah put some bread in the toaster and started frying some eggs. Alex happily ate all of that. After they finished the breakfast, Hannah proceeded to show him more of the house.

About 10 minutes later, she finally stopped when her phone got a notification. She picked up her phone and smiled when she saw what was in it. Alex was curious as to what could make his cousin smile like that but refrained from asking. If she deemed it important, she would tell him herself.

'Her phone looks quite good. I should probably buy myself one as well.' Although the phone he currently had was a birthday present, it was a cheap model and was thus quite slow.

' I should get myself a laptop as well,' he thought. After learning that he could complete his first semester of university without requiring a laptop, he had decided to buy it later.

That later was now. 'What else do I need? Let's see... a bed, a VR helmet, a phone, a laptop, maybe some clothes as well.'

"I have something to do for a few minutes. Why don't you go watch TV or something? I will come back, and we can go shopping," Hannah said and left Alex alone in the living room.

Alex stayed behind and watched TV for quite a while. Since he had nothing else to do, he just switched the channels over and over, until he landed on a news channel with a flashing headline.

Alex read the headline and thought, 'should I set a reminder so that I catch it?'

"Hey, are you ready?" Hannah suddenly appeared.

"Oh yeah, I'm ready to go anytime," Alex said and got up.

"Okay, let's leave." They both got out of the house and Hannah locked the doors. "Oh yeah, keep this." She handed him a key. "This is the key to the house. You should keep it for now," she said.

"Do we have to take a cab?" Alex asked.

"No, the market is right around the corner, we can just walk there," Hannah replied. "What do you need exactly other than the bed?" she asked. Alex relayed everything he had thought of buying earlier.

"Oh wow. You really want to buy so much huh? Thankfully, your big sister is rich and she can buy you anything," Hannah said with a smug face.

"Oh, have Aunt and Uncle been sending you money?" he asked.

"No silly. I'm talking about my own money. I have already told them that I don't need their money anymore since I have a lot of it," Hannah said.

"You have a job, sister?" he asked. He had never heard of his sister working during the last 2 times they had met.

"No. I am making money from the game." Hannah seemed quite proud.

Alex was surprised. "You make money from the game too, sister?" he asked.

Hannah looked towards him with a curious look and asked," What do you mean 'too'? Do you earn money too?" she asked.

"Yeah, I've been making pills in the game that I later sell to auctions. I have sold it a few times and was able to accumulate quite a bit of money," he said.

"Not bad. Making money in this game is quite easy, so you shouldn't have a lot of problems with it," Hannah said. But then she thought about something and said," Actually, maybe it's just me that got really lucky, and making money isn't that hard. How much money have you even made till now?"

Alex thought for a second as to whether saying it was a good thing or not, but since she was his sister, he decided to say it.

"I have managed to make about 25 thousand dollars by now. I should have some increments from my earning tomorrow," he said.

Chapter 169: Shopping

"Oh, 25,000 dollars? Not bad. So, I wasn't alone case like my friends said." Hannah's reaction was nowhere near what Alex would've expected it to be. She seemed to be completely fine with the idea of someone making 25,000 dollars a month after playing a game.

This made him curious. So much so that he couldn't help but ask.

"Sister, you said you earned money. How much do you earn?" he asked.

"Umm... I don't know. A couple of hundred thousand dollars. But that is just cause I am much higher in cultivation than you. So, if you reach my realm, you will make the same amount as well." Hannah seemed to be completely unphased by what she had just said. Yet, those words were like bombs to Alex.

'Hundreds of thousands of dollars? Do people make that? How does a company like Deva Corp even survive after giving that much money away to just a single player?' Alex couldn't understand.

"What exactly do you do to earn so much money, sister?" he asked. Hannah seemed to be waiting for this question because when she was asked, she started giggling like a little child.

"Hehehe. I don't do anything actually. The money just comes flooding in." Hannah was still giggling.

Alex didn't know what to say. 'Money comes in without doing anything?'. He was surprised to hear that. "How exactly does that work, Sister?" he asked.

"Don't tell anyone the secret okay?" she said while moving in close to whisper, " I got married."

"What?" Alex instinctively shouted.

"Keep your voice down," she said while making sure so one heard her.

Alex hurriedly quieted down. "What do you mean you got married? To whom? Do Uncle and Aunt know?" he asked.

"In the game, Silly. The game. I got married to someone in the game," Hannah clarified.

"Oh," Alex finally said in understanding. "Who did you marry?" he asked.

"His name is Long Huan, he is really, really handsome, and he also turned out to be really rich," Hannah said.

"Turned out to be?" Alex was confused.

"Yeah, I didn't know at first. He just randomly started talking to me and before we knew it, we were together most of the time. Soon after that, he asked me to marry him, and since it wouldn't hurt trying once before doing the real thing here, I married him."

Hannah had a little blush on her checks that she tried to desperately get rid of, but it never went away.

"Do you like him, Sister?" he asked.

"Yes, of course. He's so sweet. Also, I didn't randomly get married to somebody I didn't think was worthy, okay? It was mutual liking. Either way, let's not talk about this anymore. It's too embarrassing to think about."

Hannah started walking a little fast. "Ok, Ok Sister. Now, wait for me," Alex walked a little faster as well. Within 5 minutes, both of them came upon of rather large building. It was a store for different types of furniture.

"Let's see. You will need a bed, some small furniture by the bed, a studying desk and a chair. Do you need a bookcase?" she turned to Alex who simply just shook his head.

Hannah went ahead and chose what she would think would be nice. Alex didn't mind since she seemed to have experience doing this and was choosing some good-looking furniture and other things to go along with them. After selecting all of them, they went ahead to pay for it.

Hannah decided to pay for it herself and was about to take out money, when Alex said, "What are you doing sister? I will pay for myself. Keep our money."

"It's okay, I will do it. You just keep your money. Uncle and Aunt will need it." Hannah didn't back down and insisted on paying it herself.

"No way sister. Don't worry about mom and dad, I will have some money coming my way tomorrow as well." They argued for a bit as to who would pay and in the end, Hannah reluctantly backed down letting Alex pay for it.

Learning that the furniture would be delivered to them later on, they decided to go buy the other stuff. In another store with big glass doors and windows, Alex saw a bunch of phones and laptops.

"Let's go in," Hannah once again walked in first. They walked in and saw a large number of people inside the store, browsing through the different items in there.

"Look around and see what you like."

Alex decided to look at the smartphone section first. "Woah," he was surprised. "I didn't know phones could get this expensive." Most of the phones in there were between $800 to $1500. He who had a $150 phone, couldn't imagine using such an expensive phone.

"Hmm... isn't that there a new model?" Hannah said as she pointed at one of the phones.

"I don't know much about phones sister," Alex replied.

"I think it is. You should get that one. It's really good."

Alex decided to do so and chose that phone. He then moved on to laptops. When he saw the laptops, he was floored at the variety. Even a laptop with similar-looking names was completely different on the inside.

"You know much about laptops? Cause I don't," Hannah said.

"A little. I can tell what's good from my Computer Science classes. However, I can't tell how good they are so we will just have to go off of the numbers they provide," Alex replied.

They decided to ask the store clerk which laptop was better. The store clerk politely explained the features and differences of the different laptops. At the end of that, Alex chose one of the better ones and bought it.

"Alright, now that we are done with phone and laptop, let's just buy the remaining item and get it over with." Hannah was starting to get a little hungry by this point.

Finally, she took Alex deeper into the store, and only then did Alex see what he truly wanted. A VR helmet.

Chapter 170: More shopping

There were not a lot of people at the place where the helmets were stored. Most people were waiting for the new capsule to arrive and didn't want to waste money right now.

Alex looked at the brand new helmets on the shelves and was quite shocked at how many there were. Not just in amount, but in different brands too. There were barely any helmets for Eternal cultivation.

'Why did Deva corp even decide to make helmets if they were making capsules in the first place? From a business perspective, that doesn't make sense. Aren't they losing money in production?' he wondered.

He then looked at the other helmets in the business. They were nothing like the one made for Eternal Cultivation. These were the helmets, about which he mostly learned in the VR class.

Apparently, due to having proprietary technology and design, no one was allowed to know how it worked or was able to produce such amazing realistic senses. So his class was stuck with these other VR technologies that were trash when compared to Deva corp's helmets.

"What can I do for you?" the Clerk asked seeing the two of them come towards the counter.

"One of those please," Hannah said the moment she reached there.

"The EC Helmet?" The clerk asked in surprise.

"Yes, please," Hannah said.

"Dear customer, we are required to let you know that a better version of the helmet is going to be available in about a week. Deva Corp will start selling a capsule at about the same price range for a similar amount of money," The clerk said.

"Yes, we know, and we still want it."

The clerk sighed and took one out from the shelves. They went to the front of the store where they paid for all of the items at once. Together with the phone, laptop, and helmet, Alex had to pay exactly $3200.

'Oh my god. Just one day of shopping and I'm already down so much money.' The furniture had cost quite a bit as well, but not as much as these 3 items. They got a free backpack with the items, which they carried the 3 things in.

"Let's go back and eat something. The clothing section is on the other side of the house, which we can go to after eating." They walked back to their home. Alex was still surprised every time he saw the large building, but after being in the city for a month, he was starting to get used to it.

They took the elevator back to their apartment and Hannah proceeded to cook some food.

"You need some help sister?" he asked.

"Hmm... okay. Cut the onions and potatoes, while I prepare the other dishes," she said and proceeded to make the other food.

Alex looked at the vegetables that were already on the table. He took a knife from the counter and started cutting them.

"Hmmm...." He voiced out as he stopped cutting. Hannah looked back hearing him and asked, "What's wrong?"

"Oh, uh nothing. It just felt a little awkward chopping the onions for some reason. Maybe not cutting something for over a month has messed with my ability to cut." Alex tried to squeeze his palms almost as if that would reawaken his senses.

"Oh, okay." Hannah went back to cooking. Alex resumed cutting as well. He finished the onions and proceeded to cut the potatoes. He still felt awkward cutting them but kept at it.

Suddenly, "OUCH!" Alex screamed.

"What's wrong?" Hannah immediately came to him after hearing him scream.

DRIP DRIP

Droplets of blood fell onto the marble floor. Hannah then saw that Alex had ended up cutting his finger while cutting the potatoes.

"Oh, no. Are you okay?" she rushed to check his finger. Thankfully, it was just a shallow cut and he was fine.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I just cut a little." Alex held his finger up high.

"Let me get some bandages," Hannah said as she left the room and came back with a small bandage and put it on his finger.

"Honestly, you should have told me you were bad at it if you couldn't cut potatoes. I would've done it myself."

Alex's finger had now stopped bleeding after the bandage was put on. "I know how to cut them, Sister. Or rather, I knew it. It seems I have lost my muscle memory. Probably because I spend so much time in the game," he said.

"I think so too. You should exercise every day after playing the entire night. You probably have a really bad lifestyle right now with only playing games and sleeping. " Hannah chided quite a bit.

"I guess so," he said.

"Alright, go and rest. I will do the rest," she said as she took over the potatoes and started cutting them. Alex went outside to the lounge room and sat there watching the TV once more.

"Have I really gone that bad with the rest of my skills as well?" he wondered. He continued watching TV, flicking through the channels but nothing fun was on it. So, he took out his new smartphone and started setting it up.

After a while, he finally managed to get it working properly. When it finally worked, he was absolutely floored at how fast it was. He switched the number from his old phone and started using it.

"Cmon, the food is ready," Hannah shouted from the kitchen.

"Coming sister," Alex said and went to eat his food.

The food was delicious, much better than the ones made in the cafeteria. After eating, they went to the clothing stores on the next side of town and bought a bunch of clothes for themselves.

Just as they were returning from their shopping, their furniture was delivered as well. They opened the door for the delivery people and had them set up the bed and the other furniture.

Alex put his clothes inside the closet and finally, after a long day's work laid on his bed.

Chapter 171: Back to Hong Wu Sect

Alex set up his new, expensive laptop. He was really fascinated by how good the laptop was. He quickly set up everything required for his school and used it for a bit.

At around 3 PM, Hannah asked him to go eat something.

"Oh, this is quite tasty," Alex said as he ate the stir-fried noodles.

"Right, Vinny taught me this recipe. I try to eat this whenever I can," Hannah said.

"Oh yeah, sister, when is dinner? By what time should I log out?" he asked.

"Dinner? Don't worry about it. I will set quite a lot of it now and put it in the fridge. You can heat it up in the microwave whenever you want and eat it," Hannah said.

"Oh, That is quite convenient," he said.

"Yeah, we've been doing that ever since the game arrived more than 2 months ago."

After finishing his food, Alex went back to his room, while Hannah remained for a little longer to prepare the dinner. Alex took out his new helmet and quickly found a socket to plug it into. With everything set, he laid down in his comfy bed, put on his helmet, and logged in.

<Old player detected>

<Establishing connection with Oakleaf server>

<Connection Successful>

Alex opened his eyes inside the house. He looked around, and then looked at the time. "I guess it's time for me to leave," he thought out loud.

"Master, I'm leaving soon." He sent out a message on a communication talisman meant for his master. He expected his master to come and give him a farewell, but instead, he just got a message telling him to meet his senior brother before leaving.

"Guess, I'll just go say my farewells to Senior Sister, or who knows how much she will beat me when she meets me next." He laughed to himself and made his way to Luo Mei's house.

There was barely anyone on the mountain, and those that were didn't bother with him. Only after walked higher up the mountain did he have to change his aura to not be noticed by others.

He found Luo Mei still inside her house, learning some sort of book.

"Oh, Junior Brother, you're here," she said. He looked around and didn't find Meng Yun, who usually was with Luo Mei. 'Is she logged out?' he wondered. Based on her speed of cultivation, she could only be a player who had joined the Tiger sect from very early on.

As to give her her privacy, he hadn't asked or even talked about it with Meng Yun. After, she was just playing a game like him.

"Are you ready to leave, Junior Brother?" she asked.

"Yes, that is what I came to say, Senior Sister," he said.

After a couple of exchanges, he bade farewell walked down the large, main road straight to the gate. There, he asked an Elder and was taken to his Senior Brother.

"Oh, you're leaving already?" Liu Xun asked when he saw Alex ready to leave.

"Yes," Alex replied.

"Alright. Master wanted me to tell you a few different things. He wanted to tell you himself, but he understood how hard it was for you with so many Elders in front of your door." Liu Xun shook his head.

'Elders in front of my house? Hope they don't get mad just because I ignored them,' he thought.

"Anyway, the no-reply tactic must've worked since all the Elders left you so soon. Oh yeah, I completely forgot about the master's message," Liu Xun said.

"What is it, Senior Brother?" he asked.

"Since it is unlikely you will be representing Tiger Sect in the Annual sect competition, Master wants you to focus solely on improving the Hong Wu Sect's points in the competition.

"We are pretty much guaranteed to upgrade to a First Grade sect even if we fail a majority of the events, but Hong Wu Sect requires quite a lot still, so you should do it. "

"Also, don't worry about hiding your face or anything in front of the Tiger Sect. Master plans to reveal your relationship the next time you come back to the sect." Liu Xun finished speaking.

"I see. I will do as master says," Alex replied. "Also, can you return it to the library for me brother? I completely forgot." Alex handed the book about clones to Liu Xun.

"Alright. Goodbye little brother, see you in 2 weeks." Liu Xun saw him off.

Alex walked out of the gate and went past the busy market.

"Hey, isn't that the new disciple?" somebody spoke.

"What new disciple?" somebody asked.

"You know, the one from the battle yesterday," the first person spoke.

"Hey, that's him right?" another person spoke.

"I was there during the fight, it's definitely him," another person spoke.

'It seems more people know of me than I had hoped,' Alex thought. He quietly walked past the market and when nobody was looking at him, he entered a quiet alleyway. He took off his yellow robes and swiftly changed into green ones.

After walking out of the alleyway now, he was a Hong Wu Sect disciple. He slowly walked back to the sect, while looking through the entire city.

'I have never been to this part of the town, have I?' he thought. He kept looking around and finally saw something that surprised him a little.

"Oh, so this is where it is," he thought. In front of him was a store with many people walking in and out of it. The store was quite big compared to its surroundings and was ran by young men and women wearing green robes.

This was the Hong Wu Sect's Pill store. This was where most of the higher grade pills ended up after they were sold by the disciples. Most of the people working here were Inner Sect disciples, with a few elders behind looking over the entire thing.

'No wonder I never saw it. It was in such a place. I never had even bothered walking this way,' Alex thought. He had heard about it from his master but had never actually seen it before. Having finally seen it, He walked towards the sect's direction and reached it very soon.

Chapter 172: Low Ranking

Alex was stopped at the gate of the Hong Wu sect by the elders to check if he had permission to leave the sect, or not. But after looking at his nameplate, they immediately let him go.

Alex simply smiled and walked along the outer sect mountain.

'It's only been 2 weeks and I'm already getting nostalgic,' he thought. He walked down the mountain and reached the sect valley.

'This place is as rowdy as ever,' he thought as he laughed to himself. The disciples, both outer and inner were walking around the sect valley, minding their own business.

"Hmm... Let's go see if the ranking has changed in any way," he thought and walked to the disciple hall. In front of the Disciple Hall was the black rock with constantly moving figures that spelled out the names of the students in the rankings.

He looked over the contribution ranking and saw virtually no difference from the time he left the sect. His name had in fact went lower by quite a bit due to not contributing enough.

'I guess that's alright,' he thought. He saw no point in the contribution points for now aside from eating in the restaurant. If he really wanted to, he would do so in a restaurant outside.

He then walked to the back of the black stone and looked at the list of Alchemy Achievements. The names were once again the same. Only this time, it was a problem.

'Where am I then?' he thought. He started looking lower and saw his name around rank number 33. 'Huh? I've made a Heaven rank pill, and that puts me to rank 33? That's impossible.'

He remembered his master saying that even core disciples had a hard time making Earth Grade pills with high harmony, and yet his Heaven Grade pill didn't give him much Alchemy achievements. He also had a lot of other pills that should have increased his ranking by a lot.

'Just what is going on? I should ask master,' he thought and took out a communication talisman. He then started sending a message to his master.

"Master, I'm back. Also, I need to talk with you about something." He sent the message. He waited for a bit and got a reply.

"Come to my residence."

He skipped the rest of the places and walked straight to the sect master's mountain. In a couple of minutes, he reached his home, but he skipped that as well and walked straight to the sect master's home.

He spread out his spiritual sense to see where she was and found her in her alchemy room, so he decided to wait outside. After a few minutes, Ma Rong walked out.

She looked at Alex and said, "You are back quite early. Isn't there still 2 more days to go before you had to return?" she asked.

"Yes, master. However, something happened in the sect that forced me to leave early," he said.

Ma Rong got curious and asked, "What happened?"

Alex proceeded to explain everything that happened between him and Huo Tu and how he beat him using Heaven's Impact. After listening to it all, Ma Rong said, " You made a good choice. I don't know how Wen Cheng could've handled it all without revealing your relationship. That would've only added fuel to the fire at that point."

"So, was that what you wanted to talk about?" Ma Rong asked.

"Actually no, Master. I saw the ranking stone and found out that my name was in the 33rd position for Alchemy Achievements. Does making a Heaven Grade pill not put me in even the top 30?" he asked.

"Oh, that? Of course, it does. It's only that I never registered your pill in the first place, so you weren't high in the list." Ma Rong seemed to be quite casual about it as if it wasn't a big deal.

"You didn't register my pill? Why master?" he was confused and was starting to get a little annoyed as well.

"I didn't have time to absorb what you had really done at that point and had agreed without thinking. But later on, when I was about to register the pill, I finally remembered something very important that was not very much remembered because of how rare it was."

Alex was both confused and curious at this point. "What is this important thing, Master?" he asked.

"There is this rule amongst the core disciples where they have to make 50 pills with over 35% of harmony and register it to the sect. If they manage to do that, they are eligible to take a test to become an elder."

"However, if any disciple can produce a Heaven grade pill, they are automatically promoted to the rank of an Elder. Because at that point, the sect deems it useless for a disciple to remain a disciple."

"As such, had I registered your pill and someone realized that there was a heaven grade pill made from a disciple, the Sect would be in an uproar, and you would be forced to work as an elder from then on. Meaning, you wouldn't be able to enjoy the freedom you have right now."

Ma Rong explained the situation to the best she could. So, Alex finally understood what was going on.

'I see. So I was this close to suddenly becoming an Elder huh. But, is that really bad?' he wondered.

"What are the downsides of becoming an elder, master?" he asked.

"There necessarily isn't one aside from not having free time. However, if you, who became a cultivator just over a month ago, were to become one, it would seriously slow down your learning and training time. You would be forced to do work for the sect at a higher rate than the normal contribution."

"Alchemy is a slow and gradual process, so most of the elders don't actually mind not having much time since they wouldn't be able to do anything if they even had one. However, you are different," Ma Rong said.

"You are more talented than anyone I have seen in my life. So if there were even a single thing that hampered your training and cultivation, that would be disastrous."

Chapter 173: Shocked Ma Rong

"So... what do I do now, Master? Do I not take part in the upcoming Core Disciple exam? I thought that was what you had told me," Alex said.

Ma Rong made a judging face and said, "Of course not. You're still taking place in the Core Disciple exam. You will just have to give me a pill that is not as good as the Heaven grade pill and I can immediately register you for the core disciple exam."

"Oh, okay," Alex said.

"So, do you have one or did you spend the entire time in the Tiger sect just fighting?" Ma Rong asked with a chuckle.

"Most of my days were just fighting and training, so I was only able to make pills for a single day last Sunday. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make a Heaven-grade pill at that time. I think my last one was just a fluke and I will have to still train quite a bit to produce a Heaven grade pill again," Alex said.

He then reached into his bag and took out a pill bottle with a single pill. He then handed it to Ma Rong. Almost instinctively, Ma Rong took out a pill tester and put the pill inside it.

She slowly watched the fog rise up along the side of the glass until it reached 39% and stopped. She nodded affirmatively and took the pill out to look at it. She looked for a bit, and the more she looked at it, the more her eyebrows furrowed.

She looked at it for a bit more and without any information, decided to ask Alex. "What is this pill? I have never seen such a pill," she said in curiosity and amazement.

"Oh, that pill is called the Great Illusion pill. It's like a Face Changing pill, but instead of changing one's face, it puts an illusion on top of it for a limited amount of time. It can be maintained for a long time. Much longer than the Face Changing pill. However, the illusion disappears if you stop feeding it your Qi."

Hearing Alex's explanation, Ma Rong was stumped. She had never heard of a pill like this so she was confused as to whether her disciple was lying or not.

"How did you make this pill?" she asked.

"Oh, it's quite simple, as long as you have the ingredients. I have the recipe right here," he said and took out the recipe from his storage. Ma Rong looked over the recipe and was surprised that it was actually a new recipe.

"Where did you find this? Was this in the tiger sect? Can't be. I know their entire catalog of pill recipes and this is absolutely not one of them. Did you get it from somewhere else then? Where? I have never seen such a pill before in the entire Crimson Empire."

Ma Rong went off with her questions and speculations leaving Alex not a single room to answer her questions. Only after she finally stopped did he answer her questions.

He told her how he was taken to an amazing place in the southern forest with a high amount of Qi and how he found tons of alchemy material there. He also told her about the skeleton where he found the recipes from.

"So, you found recipes from the dead person? How many did you get?" Ma Rong asked in anticipation.

Alex simply took out the storage bag and handed it to Ma Rong. "Take it, Master. These are the recipes. Also, there are quite a few formation blueprints that might or might not be useful to the sect."

Ma Rong took the bag and used her spiritual sense to look at it. At first, she only showed amazement at the number of different recipes. But as she looked through more and more of the recipes, she was shocked. Absolutely shocked.

"Th—Th-This..." she wasn't able to form any sentence. Her eyes stayed wide while her jaws fell to the ground.

"This is a Saint rank pill recipe," she said.

Alex nodded while understanding her feeling. He was also quite shocked when he first saw them.? Ma Rong went ahead and checked the rest of the pill recipes as well.

Every time she saw a Saint rank recipe she would cry out in shock. This lasted for quite a while. At the end of this, she was breathless from all the shock. She tried very hard to calm herself and asked, "You really found all of this at the place?"

"Yes, master. I think that man might have not been from the Crimson Empire and had instead come from outside," Alex said.

"That could be the possibility. After all, there have been other such cases as well," she said.

"Oh yeah, that reminds me, master," Alex said garnering Ma Rong's attention. "Come out Pearl," he said.

In bright white light, a 20-25 cm long white cat appeared in front of Ma Rong shocking her once more. She looked at the small white cat and could tell that it was a child. However, she could also see that it was giving off an aura of Bone tempering realm.

"Is this..." she asked without finishing the question.

"This is my beast companion, Pearl. Pearl, this is my master okay. She is a good person," he taught Pearl.

"Meow," the cat meowed in affirmation.

"He is quite good, isn't he?" Alex asked.

"You got a beast companion in the Tiger sect? Did Wen Cheng not deny this?" she asked.

"Oh no. I didn't get pearl in the Tiger sect. I actually had him all the time since my near-death experience back in that crater in the southern forest," Alex said.

"The crater?" Ma Rong tried to recall back to what had happened there and suddenly remembered something. "The mother and child cat?" she asked in shock.

Alex nodded. "Yes, master. Pearl is the little cat I told you guys about in the crater. He had made a bond with me when I was nearly dead, so I never knew about him. But after being released back in Tiger sect, I have been training with him," he said.

Ma Rong's eyes remained wide open. "You bonded with the child of a monster that was in the Saint realm," she said in shock.

Chapter 174: More Shocks

Ma Rong's eyes were wide open as the shock came on coming one after another. Her disciple was just a fountain of surprises and shocks that never dried up. She looked down at the cat and took notice of its small size.

"It really is a different monster. I've never seen anything like this," she said.

"Elder Xian of Tiger sect said the same thing as well," Alex replied.

"Elder Xian? Ah, the previous head of Cloud Valley. If he said so, then it must really not be from the Crimson Empire. Maybe it too came from past the southern forest," Ma Rong said.

"Since your beast is still so small, I assume it doesn't have very high cultivation. You should slowly build up its cultivation while constantly training it. Although, beasts usually have Inherent memory, getting their body used to fighting is always a good idea."

Alex nodded and said, "I thought so as well, master. So, I've been training him for the last week and having him constantly cultivate to increase his cultivation. He's already reached Bone Tempering 7th realm by now."

Ma Rong was about to affirm when she realized what she had just heard. "Did you say this child is already at Bone Tempering 7th Realm?" she asked in surprise.

"Yes, Master. Although Pearl has a child's body, his cultivation has been really fast. I am actually afraid if his foundations would be shaky, but He's also been training quite a bit, so maybe not," Alex said.

Ma Rong breathed in and out slowly to bring herself back from the state of shock. "You are giving me quite a lot of shock today. If there is anything else that can shock me, lay it out right now," She said.

"Anything that might shock you? Let's see... umm... oh yeah. Master, have you heard of Mortal Cleansing?"

"Of course. Anyone worth their money in Crimson Empire has heard of it. Although, I'm surprised you know the word as well. Did Wen Cheng teach you ab—" she suddenly stopped as a thought came across her mind.

"Actually Master, I went through Mortal Cleansing," Alex dropped the bomb.

Ma Rong's eyes went wide once more. " Wait wait wait... Mortal Cleansing? YOU went through Mortal Cleansing. Where did you even find the Divine Devil's fruit?" she asked.

"The Divine Devil's Fruit? Is that what is needed ?" He asked. He had never before heard of such fruit, but Wen Cheng had indeed mentioned some fruit being required for the Mortal Cleansing.

Ma Rong's eyes squinted as she got a questioning look. "Didn't you say you went through Mortal Cleansing? You must've eaten some fruit, right?" she asked.

"Oh no, master. My mortal Cleansing was different from others. Or at least that's what the master had said at the time. He said that normally one would have to eat fruit to go through Mortal Cleansing. He must've been talking about this Divine Devil's fruit. However, the way I went through mortal cleansing is by having Pearl Cultivate."

"Every time he cultivates, I somehow get put under a body tempering state and have to suffer through it. The first time it happened, I also went through Mortal Cleansing," He explained.

"Wait, so you didn't eat any fruit and went through Mortal Cleansing just like that?" she asked.

"Yes, Master. It happened while I wasn't conscious due to my body tempering being very painful, so in the end, I only found out after master told me what had happened," he said.

Ma Rong's eyes once again squinted as she asked, "You keep saying you went through body tempering, don't you mean just normal cultivation?"

"No Master, I went through actual body tempering. I'm now a Body Cultivator as well," Alex said.

Another Shock. This was the Fifth shock of the day she had received, and it hadn't even been 5 minutes since her disciple had returned.

The first shock was the new pill her disciple took out. The second shock was the rest of the pill recipes and formation blueprints her disciple had brought back. The third shock was the Saint realm monster's child, the little Cat that her disciple had bonded to. The fourth shock was the fact that her disciple had gone through mortal cleansing.

And now, learning that her disciple was a body cultivator, she was shocked once more. "You really are a Body cultivator? How exactly?" she asked.

Alex went on to explain every single thing that had happened with him and Pearl cultivating. When she heard that he had to suffer through so much pain every single day, she winced a little.

Finally, after hearing everything, she said," So, how strong are you right now?"

"My body is about the same strength as a Body Tempering 3rd realm cultivator," he said.

Ma Rong nodded and sighed, "That is quite strong. I didn't expect you to leave to Tiger Sect for 2 weeks and come back so strong."

"Speaking of which, what is your cultivation base? I can't see it right now," she asked.

"Oh, let me remove the concealment for a moment," Alex said and showed off his cultivation aura once more. A cultivation base of Organ Tempering 4th realm slowly spread out its aura and Ma Rong felt it.

"You've truly become quite strong," she said with a sigh. She had expected him to get stronger, but not by this much.

'Am I stifling this child's potential as a cultivator by not letting him cultivate and only having him make pills?' she started to wonder. While he was good at making pills, in her eyes, he was better at cultivating.

She started to have second thoughts about making him fully focused on Alchemy.

"Master?" Alex asked seeing her lost in her thought.

Ma Rong shook her head, ignoring the thoughts for now. "You've done well. You've increased your cultivation by quite a substantial amount. Although you stopped practicing Alchemy for a while, it isn't as bad since you can continue it now. Alright, If you have nothing else to tell me, go register this pill and prepare for the upcoming core disciple test," she said.

"Wait Master, I still have a few things more to tell you."

Chapter 175: Asking for Permission

"Hmm... you've got something more to tell me?" Ma Rong asked.

"Actually, I have this to give to you," Alex said as he took out 2 Spirit Cleansing lilies.

Ma Rong had enough shock for the day, but she was shocked once more. Her eyes turned wide as she involuntarily screamed, "Spirit Cleansing Lily? 2 at that. Where did you find them?" she asked.

"The same place I told found the corpse and the recipes. Not only that, I have quite a few alchemy resources as well." Alex brought out a storage bag to show them.

"You can keep some if you want it," he said.

Ma Rong sent her spiritual sense into the bag a saw a load of alchemy ingredients stacked on top of one another. She immediately screamed, "What are you doing keeping them like that? Put them in an individual wooden box or something." She was horrified seeing such precious materials being kept like that.

"I know that I should master," he said as he brought out more storage bags and said, "There are just too many."

Ma Rong felt like she was being tortured. Showing such a horrifying sight of keeping alchemy materials without any protection to keep their energies from leaking out or mixing with each other.

She immediately brought out one of her storage bags with a ton of jade and wooden boxes and handed it to Alex. Alex complied and put the ingredients in, but there were just too many. He was able to only fit one bag's worth of ingredients in there, while the rest of them were still the same.

Ma Rong wanted to cry rivers of tears seeing those ingredients in such a state.

"Don't worry master, I will make a lot of pills very soon and use up most of these ingredients, and I will keep the True rank pills ingredients in the wooden boxes." He reassured her again and again.

Finally, she was fine with how the pills were kept.

"Alright, go register the pill and I will make your core disciple exam as soon as possible," Ma Rong said.

"Okay, Master," Alex said and called Pearl back into his arm. He was about to leave when he remembered something. He turned around and asked, "Master, Do you know much about bodies?"

"Bodies? What do you mean?" she asked.

"You know. Cultivator's body type," he said unable to explain properly.

"Oh, those. I know about them, why?" she asked.

"Then, do you know anything about Sun God's Divine Yang Body?" he asked.

Ma Rong thought for a moment and answered, "No. I don't think I have ever heard of that body. I don't think there are any records about them either. Why do you ask?"

'So, she doesn't know it either huh?' he thought.

"Nothing important really," he sidestepped the questions. "Oh right, master. There are these small rectangular yellow jade-like stones that are found in the Forbidden Fields, do you know about them?" he asked.

"Yellow rectangular jades?" Ma Rong quickly reached into her storage bag and took out a slightly yellow yang jade and asked, "Are you talking about this?" she asked.

Alex's eyes turned bright. "Yes, Master. That's exactly it. Do you have more of these?" he asked.

"Why do you ask?" Ma Rong squinted her eyes questioningly.

"Uhh... I'll tell you later master. For now, do you have some more?" he continued asking.

Ma Rong sighed and said, "No. This is the only one I have right now, and even this is almost done."

"Almost... done?" he asked questioningly.

Ma Rong reached into her storage bag and took out 2 more of the same stones. Except, this time they were both white with not a single hint of yellow. She then said, "See how these are white? These stone lose their energies after being out of the Forbidden fields for a week or two. What's more, they are incredibly rare and are only ever found once in a while."

Alex walked ahead and reached out to the slightly yellow yang jade and looked at its name.

[Jade Stone]

There was no hint of Yang in these jade and thus the name had been changed to the game system as well. Alex sighed, "I expected too much." He then thought about what his master just said and asked, "Master, then can I go to the forbidden fields to try my luck? These stones are very important to me and I need quite a lot of it."

"Absolutely not. The Forbidden Fields is a place we send to punish the students. There is not a single Qi in there and you will starve to death if you are not careful. We will ask the students who leave their punishment and see if they have any more of these stones, that should be enough," Ma Rong said.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "That's fine. When is the next disciple coming out?" he asked.

Ma Rong looked into her medallion and saw that the next one was coming out in a week and relayed that information to Alex.

"A week? But master, it will be too late by then. I will need to be stronger by the competition right?"

Ma Rong thought for a bit and realized that he would in fact be in the competition within a week. "Tell me, honestly, why do you need them? How do they help you?" she asked.

Alex wanted to avoid the question once again, but decided against it and answered. "I can use the Yang inside the jade to make my Qi thicker. I've used it twice now and it's made my Qi at least twice as thick, maybe a little more, and even given it a yang quality," he said.

Ma Rong was confused at first as to how it could possibly be true. But the more she thought about how vigorous her disciple's Qi was or how he could do things beyond his cultivation base, she fully accepted it.

"If what you say is true... then I will allow for you to go to the Forbidden Fields."

Chapter 176: Back to Pill Making

"I shall allow you to enter the Forbidden Fields, but only for 3 days. We don't have much time otherwise. We will have to leave for Cardinal City on Friday if we want to reach it," Ma Rong said.

"When exactly is the competition starting, Master?" he asked.

"It should start around Sunday, but it will take us time to reach there. So, you will only have 3 days of searching inside the forbidden fields. I don't know how useful that would be, but you will get the time."

"Thank you master!" he said from the bottom of his heart.

Seeing that there was nothing more to talk about, Alex walked out of Ma Rong's house and walked all the way down to the Disciple hall in the sect valley.

'Let's see. I had 12 when I started, I used up 2, 4 were used by the folks at tiger sect, 1 was given to auction, and I just gave 2 to master. Meaning, I only have 3 left.' Alex sighed as he counted the amount of Spirit cleansing Lily he still had.

The sect valley was bright and full of light as the lanterns in the road gave it the feel of a festival. "Ah, I've missed this," he thought. He reached the Disciple Hall and went directly to the third floor under the stares of different people.

He walked up the stairs to the third floor, and just as he was nearing the 2nd floor, he bumped into someone walking outside. Both he and the other person stumbled backward.

"Hey, watch where you're going," a voice came from in front of him. He saw a person being caught by another person they were with. They were both female disciples.

"I'm sorry. It was my fault," he said as he looked more closely and realized that he knew one of the two females. The female disciple he had bumped into was a tall woman with black hair and an emotionless face. Although she looked a little angry right now.

On the other hand, the girl who caught the tall girl was a little shorter than her and looked the same. Only, her face wasn't as emotionless.

"Oh, it's you, sister Zhou Mi. I'm sorry about that, I was in a bit of a hurry," Alex said as he looked at the smaller girl. This was the girl he had met when he had attended Kong Yuhan's ascension.

"Junior Brother... Yu Ming, right? What are you doing here? The upper floors are not for outer sect disciples," Zhou Mi said.

"You know this guy?" the taller girl asked.

"I've met him once before when I was with my other friends," Zhou Mi replied.

As the two sisters were talking, Alex noticed something finally. 'A core disciple,' he thought. He had only seen core disciples before, and only now he was interacting with one, finally.

"I'm letting you go just because my sister knows. Be wary of your surroundings next time," said the taller girl, and started walking past Alex to go down the stairs. Zhou Mi nodded a bit and walked after her sister as well.

'But you bumped into me,' Alex wanted to say, but he decided not to prolong the drama and simply went to the 3rd floor. He registered his new pill with the Elder in there and walked back out.

Seeing that he had nothing to do, he went back up the mountain to his house.

"Let's make a few pills before logging out to have my dinner," he thought. He walked into his familiar alchemy room and sat down in front of the fire pit. He took out his cauldron and put it on the fire to heat it up.

In the meantime, he looked through the different recipes in his mind that he could make right now. After choosing one, he gathered up the materials separated among multiple storage bags into a single one.

He started making the pills and in less than 20 minutes he made one easily. The pill ended up having a harmony of 36%, which he found quite disappointing, however, since it was only the first pill of the day, it wasn't as bad.

He prepared another set of ingredients and started making his next pill. This one took a little less time, and by 15 minutes, he was done with it. He managed to make this one with a harmony of 43%.

"That's more like it," he thought as he smiled a little.

He rested a little more and prepared another set of ingredients for a different pill. After the cauldron had heated plenty, he put in the first ingredient and started making the last pill before dinner.

He started moving the ingredients inside and the energy started to get slowly released. He added another ingredient inside and slowly started moving that energy as well. Those two energies mixed and formed a new form of energy where one energy had the other energy suppressed for a new type of energy.

He put another ingredient and the energy from this pill mixed with the energy in the cauldron as well, forming a different type of energy that was a mixture of all of these energies.

Of these energies, there would mostly be a single type of energy that would be at the forefront in it due to the other energies suppressing each other. As Alex put more and more ingredients inside, it was soon revealed that the final energy that was at the forefront was Metal energy.

Although the Metal energy wasn't abundant, it was still abundant enough to make the pill's energy alignment be Metal. Once everything was done, it was time to form that pill.

He started forming the pill and used Elemental Guidance at the same time to move the energy towards the newly forming pill in hopes of adding more energy into it.

Suddenly, he noticed something very weird. Usually, Elemental guidance was only there to help him guide the energy, he would have no way of forcing them to move in any way he wanted them to.

But, for some reason now, a lot more energy was being guided around with elemental guidance. In fact, they weren't even being guided anymore, but just moved around.

Chapter 177: Metal

'What's going on?' Alex was surprised. This was an unprecedented event for him during all of his time, making pills. However, as an expert alchemist, he didn't let the unusualness of the situation, derail his concentration.

He made use of the situation and moved the energy directly into the forming pill. The pill absorbed as much as it could before the energy left it. While he couldn't instill a lot of energy, he could tell that it was still better.

He waited for the pill to be formed and when it did, he directly brought it out. He caught the pill in his hand and looked at its name.

[Bronze Tiger's Rage: 58%]

"What??!" he was beyond surprised at this point. He had a hard time crossing 45% on normal pills and had barely reached 49% occasionally, yet today, he had somehow reached 58%.

'That... has to be incorrect right? No way that's correct,' he couldn't believe his own eyes and so he checked again. It was in fact 58%.

"But... But how?' he couldn't make head or tails of the situation. It was almost the exact scenario as when his Iron Fist Punch was all of a sudden much stronger.

'Wait a second...' Alex fell into deep thought. He thought of the similarity between the two situations and realized that the only thing similar between them was...

"Metal!" he shouted out. "That's it. Metal Energy. Iron Fist Punch uses Metal spiritual root, while the pill just now was had a majority of Metal energy. So, did I get a benefit regarding Metal Energy? But how?" he started thinking.

It didn't take him long to come up with the answer. "That blood essence. Did it somehow increase my affinity to metal energy?" he wondered. That was the only explanation he could come up with.

This certainly didn't feel like the advantage of Mortal Cleansing or Body cultivation. Besides, those came after he was already strong at using Iron Fist Punch, so the essence was the only answer.

"But why?" he thought for a while, but couldn't come up with an answer. Sighing to himself, he left the game.

He logged out and woke up in his new room, in his new bed. The temperature of the room was perfect thanks to the AC and the bed was softer than any bed he had been in.

'Such a shame I won't be able to sleep on it for long due to the new capsules.' He walked out of his room to the brightly lit corridor that leads to the living room. Past that he walked to the kitchen, only to find that Hannah was also there about to eat.

"Oh, you logged out?" she said as she looked at the time. "But it's only 7 pm, don't you want to play some more?" she asked.

"I do, but it's ingrained into me at this point that I should log out at 7 for dinner. Will take some time to adjust to the new changes," he said.

"Alright, sit down. I'll put some food for you in the microwave as well." Hannah set the timer on the microwave and sat back down on the chair.

"So, how do you like your new crib? Isn't it fancy?" she asked.

"Very, sister. I didn't even imagine that such a place was available in the world. I had thought that such places were only for the rich people with fancy business and titles," he said.

"Well, we can be considered rich now," Hannah said with a giggle. She then looked down at his hand and asked, "Does the cut hurt anymore?" she asked.

Alex looked down and finally remembered he even had one. "Oh yeah, it's fine. It's barely noticeable," he said.

DING

The microwave sounded after a few moments. Hannah went to bring out the food and laid it down in two portions. Without saying anything, they started eating.

"Mmm... This is quite good," Alex said.

"I learned the recipe from the Internet. It's quite easy, you can make it too I bet," she said.

"I doubt it, sister. Not after I have already lost my muscle memory. It will take me a long while to be able to do that," he said.

"Alright, let's stop talking about that. There is something that I've been wanting to talk to you about but haven't had the chance to," she said.

"What is it, sister?" he asked curiously.

"Do you have free time tomorrow?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "Yes I do. It's Sunday tomorrow and I don't have school," he said.

"No, not just school. What about the game? It's your source of earning now, you have to treat it like work. You cannot miss a single day if it hampers your pay," Hannah said.

'Think of the game like work?' he was surprised that people had even thought of that. 'Why would I want to turn something I enjoy into work? Isn't that the easiest way to lose interest in something?' he thought.

However, he didn't voice it out loud. Instead, he replied to her earlier question, "I have some work during the day, but I am mostly free at night. I don't know how much that would help you," he said.

"Oh, that's perfect actually. I want you to accompany me somewhere tomorrow night," Hannah said quite excited about something.

"Where to, sister? Some sort of party or something?" he asked.

"Uh... no, more like... you'll see tomorrow. Let it be a surprise," Hannah said. She just couldn't hide the excitement in her eyes.

'What's going on with her tomorrow?' he wondered. The two of them talked about a few different things for a while and after taking care of the dishes, went back to their individual room.

Alex went up on the soft bed again and laid down on his back. 'Sigh, I just want to sleep in this bed for today,' he thought. But, he had, as Hannah had put it, work to do. So he put on his helmet and once again, logged back into the game.

Chapter 178: Experiment

Alex went out of to courtyard after logging in. He felt like taking a bath before doing anything. So, he took off his clothes and jumped into the pond. He didn't care about the little fishes in there and only enjoyed the cool water.

"Pearl will probably like this as well," He thought and called out Pearl. With a bright white light, Pearl appeared on top of the water.

SPLASH

As soon as he appeared he fell into the pond, desperately struggling to walk out of it. However, having never been in the water before, he didn't know what to do. He swung his little waves around, causing waves after waves to appear on the surface of the pond.

"It's okay Pearl, it's okay," Alex immediately swam forward to hold the little cat and pet him. Only after being held out of the water did he finally stop struggling and let out a weak meow.

"You don't like water, do you? I should have known that would be the case. You are a cat after all. Still, you need to take a bath," Alex said and proceeded to dunk Pearl in the water and washed him off. He then put Pearl back into his arm and proceeded to wash.

After he himself was fully washed he decided to get out. He started swimming forward but soon realized that even though he was so strong, he was still feeling a bit of resistance in the water.

'Wait a second,' he thought. 'What if I...' without deliberating any further, he immediately used his technique, Fluctuating Friction Dance.

Soon, his body was covered in Qi, which his legs were exceptionally strengthened. He then pushed his Qi outside to remove the friction, but it barely worked. He pushed more Qi and it was starting to do some work, he was feeling a lot less resistance, but there was still some.

Finally, he pushed the Qi to its limit and suddenly, there was no resistance. Suddenly, with no resistance, he started falling to the bottom of the pond, which wasn't very deep.

After reaching the floor of the pond, he simply started walking forward. He felt absolutely no resistance. It was as easy, no, easier than walking on land. The water was pushed around by the Qi faster than he could move forward.

'Wow,' he was surprised. This was not a sight he thought he would be able to see when he became a cultivator. 'This is so good,' he thought. 'Sigh, but it also costs a tremendous amount of Qi. If I were to keep it up, my Qi which lasts for hours on end will be used up in less than an hour,' he thought.

Thinking so, he walked out of the water, and put on his robes, and walked back into the house. It was time for him to make some more pills.

However, he didn't just make pills. He needed to test his theory too.

"I need to see if it is only Metal energy or if there are other energies that I am unaware of that I can use just as well. He racked his brain thinking of the different pills he could make, and the different energy each pill had.

Finally, preparing 6 types of pills for the 6 different types of energy, he started making these pills once more. "Shame there aren't any pills that have Yin or Yang energy as their main result," he thought.

He walked into the Alchemy room and put the cauldron into the fire to heat it up. He used Qi manipulation to get rid of any remnants from the previous alchemy process and started preparing his ingredients for the first pill.

The energy produced for the first pill was none. It was a neutral pill where the resulting energy was a combination of all and thus neither of them. The resulting energy didn't align with any of the other 5 elements so he decided to start with that.

He took as much care as he could during the making of this pill, and finally, when it came time to form the pill, he used Elemental Guidance once more. He didn't expect anything to happen, and just as to fulfill his expectations, nothing did happen.

The energies were guided as expected and only some of them fused with the forming pill, while the rest of them moved away. Suddenly, the powder that was still in the process of forming the pill split into two, making two separate pills. Suddenly, two vortexes formed above the newly formed pills, sucking in all the energy from the surrounding, which was the inside of the cauldron.

Finally, the two pills were formed at 36% and 42% harmony each. "So, Neutral energy pills aren't it" he thought.

He then proceeded to gather ingredients for the Fire energy pill. He started making the pill and after they were done being powder and the energies were up in the air, he started using the Elemental Guidance to guide the resulting fire energy. As expected it worked normally. It just guided the energy and did nothing whatsoever to move the energy.

Finally, the pill formed with a harmony of 48%. "As I thought, Fire energy pills don't work either,' he thought.

Next up was the Earth energy pill. Similarly, he turned the ingredients into powder form and once the resulting energy in the cauldron was earth aligned, he used Elemental Guidance. This one was a failure as well. The pill only had a harmony of 45% and it was a single pill at that too.

"Sigh, not Earth either. Is my theory really correct?" he thought.

The next one on the list was a pill whose resulting energy was water-aligned. As usual, he formed the powder and once the resulting energy was formed, he used Elemental Guidance to move the energy to the forming pill once more.

The result was as expected, a failure. However, he did manage to push himself to the limit and formed a pill in heaven grade with 50% harmony.

"Good pill, but the theory still stands. I couldn't move the energy at all" he thought.

Finally, it was time for him to make a Metal energy pill.

Chapter 179: Successful Hypothesis

He cleaned the cauldron of any remaining by-products and prepared his ingredients. The pill he was going to make was different from the one he had made before dinner.

He wanted to make sure that it was the energy that was the cause of the advancement, and not the ingredients. Finally, when the time arrived, he put in his first ingredient.

Slowly, one by one, he put in ingredients and turned them into power. Finally, when the time came, he used Elemental Guidance. The energies started being moved. They weren't being guided but moved once more.

"It's happening, I was right," Alex thought but concentrated on the pill once more. He moved the energies towards the forming pill which were absorbed in a higher amount by the powders.

Once again, a simple stream of Qi ran out of his body involuntarily and moved into the cauldron through the path established by his previous Qi. The pills were splitting into two once more.

The powders were separated into two parts and formed into pills.? As soon as they were pills, they started to vigorously suck in the remaining energy in the cauldron.? Finally, after a while, the pill was ready.

Alex expectantly brought out the pills from the cauldron. He was somehow both amazed and disappointed by what he saw. The harmony levels on the two pills were 43% and 45%. They had a combined harmony of 88%, which would have been amazing if it had been a single pill, but he knew that the pills rarely accepted that much energy. Which was why being split into two was good.

However, neither of them had ended up being a heaven-grade pill which was disappointing.

"Sigh, at least my theory is correct. Metal energy is in fact being controlled much easier than the rest of the energies." He didn't still have complete control over the metal energy. However, compared to the other energies, it was as good as being fully controlled.

"I will have to ask master what this means." He proceeded to make two more Metal energy pills. Neither of them split, so one of them ended up having 57% harmony, and the other one ended up with 59% harmony.

The rest of the energies were still being let go of into the air. 'Sigh, if only I had complete control. I wonder if I would if the energies inside were fully Metal instead of Metal just being the highest amount,' he wondered.

Finally, he stopped making pills and decided to cultivate for the rest of the night. He put his cauldron into his storage and walked over to the next room.

Before starting to cultivate, however, he took out one of the 3 remaining Spirit Cleansing Lily. He was going to increase his Spiritual Sea once more. Although they only increased in size, it was still worth it to him. The spiritual sense lasted longer now.

"Ah, I should let master know that a Spirit Cleansing lily can be used twice. She will probably want to know about it," he thought and contacted Ma Rong using the communication Talisman.

He let her know what he learned about it in the Tiger sect and returned back to cultivating.

He took the flower in his hand and started meditating. Qi inside his body started moving on their own as he let go of all control and as usual, he fell into a trance, unaware of his surrounding.

Alex slowly opened his eyes. He slowly sent out his spiritual sense and looked at his Spiritual Sea.

"Huh?" he was surprised. The size of the sea hadn't increased at all. He looked at the water in his spiritual sea and realized that that wasn't the case either. It was then he saw it.

The Spirit Cleaning lily in his hand hadn't disappeared at all. It was perfectly intact, just the way it was last night.

"What's going on? Why didn't I use up the flower?" he started wondering. He tried to think of any records he read that spoke of these things, but couldn't find any.

"Did I make a mistake somehow?" he started to worry. He looked to see if there was any change to the flower, but just like the first time he looked at it, it was intact.

"I must've done something wrong then," he put the blame and forgot about the flower for now. He looked at his surroundings and noticed something out of the corner of his eyes.

"Huh? No way."

He immediately ran out of the dark room and into the courtyard. It was bright, unusually bright. Almost as if it were.... He looked out at the corner of his eyes once more.

"So I'm not seeing things. I did over-cultivate. It's already 10 am."

He didn't know how or why, but for the first time since playing the game, he had ended up cultivating till it was 10 am. The only other times he had woken up this late was when he had genuinely fainted.

But that was different from the current situation where he was fine and it was just normal cultivation.

"Thank god I don't have college today or I would've missed it. If I were in the dorm, I would've already missed breakfast. Whatever, let's go eat some food. Sister must be waiting for me."

He went back into his room and logged out of the game.

He had been in the game for over 14 hours, so he decided to take a bath. After bathing, he walked out into the kitchen and saw Hannah eating her food alone.

"You took quite some time. Why did you log out so late?" she asked.

"Sorry, Sister. I was cultivating and woke up only just now," he replied.

"Woke up?" Hannah looked at him weirdly. "Aren't you in the Organ Tempering realm?" she asked.

Alex wondered why she could ask this, but he still answered, "Yes, sister."

Hannah then asked, "Then why are you still falling asleep while cultivating? That should have stopped after the first few times."

Chapter 180: Exam Date

"What do you mean by it should have stopped, sister? Is this phenomenon supposed to stop after the first few times?" he asked.

Hannah said, "Yes. At first, you fall asleep a few times, but after a while, you get used to it and can start staying awake during cultivation."

"But, I have never been able to do that sister. I have always fallen asleep. Am I doing something wrong then?" he asked.

"Uhh... I don't think so. I don't think it has anything to do with you since it's supposed to stop of its own. Maybe it's your cultivation technique? Or maybe you are just an outlier. In any case, make sure you're in a safe place when you cultivate then."

"Okay sister," he replied.

"Alright, eat some food. It's in the fridge. Put it in the microwave for 2 minutes, and it should be okay. Also, don't forget, tonight you have to go with me, ok? I hope you won't end up cultivating and forgetting to wake up." Hannah put her dish on the dishwasher and left.

Alex ate the food alone and put the dish in the dishwasher after finishing as well. He waited for the dishes to be cleaned and reorganized them into their original places in the kitchen. Only after then did he leave.

He didn't immediately go to the game and instead used his new phone and laptop for some time. He needed to get used to them if he wanted to use them. After an hour or so of using them, he logged back into the game around 12 pm.

Just as he logged in, he felt a sort of vibration from one of his storage. He looked inside to find that it was his communication talisman from his master. He picked it up and looked at the message.

"Come to my place as soon as you can."

Without hesitation, he left for his master's building. As he arrived, his master was also about to leave.

"Oh, you're here. I was about to go find you since you didn't respond at all," she said.

"Oh, sorry master. I was kind of busy and didn't see your message in time. But I have some questions so I came rushing."

"Come in, I also have something to talk to you about," Ma Rong said as she walked back inside. Alex followed her and walked into one of the rooms as well.

"What do you want to talk about, master?" he asked.

"Alright, your exam date for Core disciple has been set. It will be tomorrow morning around 8 am. Make sure you are at the Elder's hall in time tomorrow," she said.

"Oh, alright. Thank you, master," he said.

"Alright, tell me. What do you want to talk about?," she asked.

"It's regarding these,' he said as he pulled out 3 pill bottles. Ma Rong wasn't sure what was happening, but she took the pill bottles and popped the stopper for one of them.

Immediately, a strong medicinal scent escaped out from the bottle. With just a single smell, Ma Rong could tell, this was not a simple pill. She immediately took out a pill tester and tested the pill.

57%

Her eyes turned wide seeing the absurdly high harmony percentage. "Wha-how?" she asked, shocked that her disciple was able to make this so fast.

"This is what I wanted to talk to you about, Master. Check the other two pills as well," he said. Ma Rong followed his suggestion and took the stopper out of the remaining two bottles. Similarly strong medicinal scent escaped from both of those bottles.

Her hands started to shake a little as she put the pill into the Pill tester. Both of them resulted in 58% and 59%. This just caused her to have more shock.

"What is going on? Did you make these?" she asked. As the harmony levels got higher and higher, the more difficult it was to make the pill. An alchemist could only have so much energy in the cauldron after the intense process.

Due to the multitudes of minor mistakes, the energies released would always end up in some ways not mixing together. That would make the total energy in the cauldron have less than ideal amount of the resulting energy.

This energy would then have to be absorbed by the powder before forming the pill, which was another place where the energy would be less. All in all, an Alchemist would have a very hard time making a pill with high harmony. Especially, once it got above 40%.

And yet, her disciple in front of her had 3 pills all with harmony above 55%. This was something unprecedented to her.

"Yes, master. I made these yesterday night," he replied

"How did you do this?" she asked. Suddenly increasing your ability as an alchemist, at this level was not an easy task.

"That is what I wanted to talk to you about master. In the tiger sect, I accidentally took in an unknown blood essence, and ever since then my ability towards anything Metal aligned has improved significantly. "

"I can use metal aligned skills with damage behind them, and make pills where the final energy is Metal at Heaven grade quite easily. Do you have any idea why a blood essence would do this?" he asked.

"What do you mean unknown blood essence? explain thoroughly," she asked.

Alex explained all the circumstances surrounding the blood essence and the resulting effect as much as he could.

Ma Rong fell into deep thought after hearing that the essence had targeted her disciple on her own.

"I do not know the answer to this. I have never heard of someone directly taking in blood essence without putting it through a pill or something. Go and check if there are some other things that have changed in you. Since we don't have any records about this, the only thing we can do is wait to get to the Cardinal City and look through the library ourselves," Ma Rong said.

"I see, Master. Let's do that," Alex said.

Chapter 181: Problem with being Rich

Alex left his master's house and went back to his house. He made a few more pills to pass some time and prepare himself for tomorrow morning.

"Hmm... I should have asked the master how the test is done. I hope I don't have to make a Metal aligned pill for the test or I don't know how I would make it so that it doesn't have a high harmony. Similarly, Other pills can't have high harmony or it would cause some trouble too. Although, I should be fine as long as I don't make a heaven-grade pill."

" I should also not use Elemental Guidance tomorrow so that the pills I make don't have a lot of Harmony," he said. He was making as many plans as possible to not do well in tomorrow's test.

After making those pills, at around 1 pm in the afternoon, he left the sect. It took him about 15 minutes to go from his house in the sect leader's mountain to the gate at the outer sect, and then it took him about 15 minutes of walking to go from there to the Pink Cloud Auction house.

"I hope the items have been sold by now. They did say

A staff lady who knew his face took him to the inside of the auction house where the Cai Ping and the old person from before were waiting for him.

"Fellow Daoist Yu, you're here," the old man with the long white hair spoke.

"Good afternoon, Fellow Daoist Yu," Cai Pint greeted as well.

"Hello," Alex gave a single nod as a greeting in return.

Alex sat on the chair opposite the two people and waited for them to speak.

The older man simply reached for a storage bag and gave that to Alex. Alex looked into the storage bag with some expectations, hoping to make some good bucks, but what he saw astounded him.

He started counting, one after another.

'1, 2 ,3 ... 51, 52, 53 ... 172, 173, 174 ... 293, 294... 389, 390, 391 ... 422, 423, 429.' His eyes went wide with shock. "429 True Spirit stones?" he asked the people in shock.

"Yes," The old man nodded.

"Is this... after the 10% charge?" he asked hesitatingly.

"Of course, Fellow Daoist Yu," the man smiled seeing Alex's reaction. In fact, he himself was surprised at how much money had been issued for him to give back. However, he wasn't surprised why that was at all.

Being near the Saint realm himself, the man could understand the people's willingness to spend so many spirit stones to get their hands on something that could help them get the fabled Spiritual Sense.

Alex's hands were slightly trembling, holding the most expensive item in his whole life up until now.

'If I sell my remaining 3 flowers, I... I... I will be a millionaire,' he thought. This was a very tempting thought for him, but he managed to shake himself out of that thought.

'Take it slow. There will be other changes for that in the future. Invest these flowers on yourself for now,' he said to himself and started thinking about other things.

"How much did the pills earn?" he asked.

"The pills themselves earned you 29 True Spirit Stones. It was the flower that earned you the rest," the old man said.

Alex didn't know what else the two said by the time he was already out of the auction house.

'So much money... nearly 400 thousand... do I even have to worry about money anymore? I can just make pills daily and sell them, can't I? I can probably take care of mom and dad like this,' He thought.

'Is that what sister meant when she said to think of this like work? Is this what this is now? Work. I... should start working hard. I will have to earn more money soon,' he thought.

The path back to sect took longer this time since he had a lot on his mind. He slowed down his pace quite a few times even. Slowly a different feeling started to appear in him.

'I can earn money by making a few pills every day. I don't even have to stay online all the time. Why would I even stay online? I don't even need to play the game most of the time. Is that what this is all forcing me to do? Stop playing?' he asked himself.

Having been handed so much money suddenly made him lose all sources of motivation to play the game for fun. He started thinking of how he could earn money or manage his time.

Thinking so, he got back to the sect and went straight to his house. Once he reached there, he decided to send back all but a few spirit stones.

He put in all 400 True spirit stones in the transfer settings and hit send.

<Do you want to send '36000 spirit stones ($360,000) to XXXXXXXXXX343?>

"Uhh... the 10% charge. It took away more than what I earned the last time," he said as he felt a little annoyed but still clicked yes. The spirit stones disappeared from his inventory, and he logged out. He waited for a moment and heard a notification sound.

He quickly opened his phone to see a message on it.

<$360,000 has been successfully transferred to your account>

He smiled and then thought, "What do I do now? Go back to making some more pills to earn more money?" he thought and then immediately got a little depressed.

"Sigh. I don't want to play anymore today. Let's just stay logged out for the day. Hopefully, I have more will to play tomorrow," he said and went on to use his phone and laptop.

He surfed the Internet to see what new things were happening, or just call home back to talk to his parents. He even decided to do some exercise to be a little more fit again.

He did that until at 7 PM, he had a knock on the door.

Chapter 182: Cab ride in the night

"You can come it," Alex said when he heard the knock on the door.

Hannah opened the door and walked in. She was wearing a beautiful purple dress that matched her fair white skin and dark brown hair very well. She looked at Alex who was looking at the computer and frowned.

"Why aren't you dressed yet?" she asked.
New n0vel chapters are published on

"Dressed?" he quickly looked at the time and realized it was 7 pm. "Is it time for us to leave already?" he asked.

"Yes! We need to leave in 15 minutes," she said exasperated.

"Oh," Alex immediately stood and closed his laptop. "I will dress right now sister. Are we going to a fancy restaurant or a dinner party?" he asked.

"No, it's much better than that. Just dress well, you don't really have to look the absolute best," she said and left him.

Alex looked through his old clothes and didn't find any that would be considered well enough for how Hannah was dressed. So he opened his bag of new clothes and chose a simple shirt, coat, and pants that looked sophisticated enough for whatever his sister was taking him to.

After getting dressed, he took his phone and left the room. Hannah was waiting for him in the living room and stood the moment he entered the room.

"Finally," she said and looked at him. "Oh, you look nice. You might just end up getting a girlfriend for yourself tonight," she said.

Alex blushed a little and asked, "Are we going somewhere where there will be a lot of girls my age?" he asked.

Hannah made an embarrassed smile and said, "Not really. At least, I don't really know. Maybe there will be, but probably not. It's not a socializing place either so… sorry if I gave you any expectations."

Alex chuckled a little and said, "It's okay sister. I wasn't being serious. Should we go now?"

"Oh yes, let's go," Hannah said as she took her bag and walked out of the house with Alex in tow. They went down the elevator and got into a cab a minute later.

Hannah gave an address to the driver, but Alex didn't know that many places in Oakleaf City, so he had no idea where this place was. He just looked outside the cab, enjoying the nightlife of the city.

After 15 minutes of the ride, they were still in the cab, and Alex was surprised by how far away this place was.

"Wouldn't it have been better to take the train, Sister? It looks like this place is quite far away," he said.

"No. I looked up the map and the building is quite far away from any train station, so it's better that we took a cab," she said.

"Where exactly are we going sister?" he asked.

"To Channel 8's station," she answered finally.

"Channel… 8? Isn't that a news channel? Why are we going there?" he asked.

"Hehe, Your sister has been selected for an interview in tonight's 9 PM show," she said.

Alex was shocked. 'An interview? With sister Hannah? What is going on?' he wondered.

"Interview about what?" he asked.

"Oh, it's an interview with the people in Eternal Cultivation who have really good starting points like High talent, or great spiritual roots and body," she said.

"Huh?" Alex was surprised. "You have one of these, Sister?" he asked.

"I have all of these," Hannah said with a smug smile on her face.

Alex tried asking for more information, but Hannah just smiled and told him to wait for it on the news.

"How did those people even find you?" he asked.

"Oh, I saw it in the forum. The people at Channel 8 made a forum post requesting everyone with great talent to fill a form if we wanted to appear on an interview. I didn't want to at first, but then thought, why the heck not. Maybe I can even be popular like this," Hannah said.

"After that, I got a mail yesterday morning to verify some of the information I had put in. Can you believe I had to show them some screenshots of my transaction with Deva corp to prove that I was in fact a high-ranking player?"

"Thankfully, that was all I needed to prove. So I get to have an interview today. Although, there will be quite a few others there with me too," she said.

Alex fell into deep thought. 'I wonder if I could get in there with my current income as well?' he wondered. 'Although I don't think I would like that. I can't imagine myself on the TV,' he thought.

Suddenly, he remembered something about the TV. 'That news yesterday… that was… Oh, so this was what they were talking about when they said not to miss it as it would be the greatest news regarding Eternal Cultivation to date.

'I did want to see it, but it seems I will be seeing it live,' he thought.

The cab ride lasted 30 minutes more where Alex just looked through the different buildings lighting up bright in the night.

'This looks exactly like Hong Wu Sect's valley, only more modern. I didn't know cities lit this much at night,' he thought. This looked better than the festivals they had back in his hometown.

Approximately, 50 minutes later, They finally reached the Building for Channel 8. It was a massive building that was wider than his imagination, going up to more than 30 floors.

'Woah!,' he thought as he looked at it. Hannah paid the cab driver and walked out of the car with Alex.

"It's really big, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes, Sister."

"Is this the place?" another voice came from behind them. They both turned around to see an elderly man walk out of a cab. He looked to be in his 60s and was dressed quite well in a simple coat and pants.

He looked at the sign that said 'Channel 8' and said, "Ah, this really is it." He then turned his head around to see Alex and Hannah in front of the building too and asked, " Are you kids here for the Eternal Cultivation interview as well?"

Chapter 183: Show Starts

"Yes, I am, but my brother here is not. He's just accompanying me," Hannah replied.

"Ah, I see. Nice to meet you two," the elderly man said.

"Nice to meet you too," both Hannah and Alex replied the greeting.

The three of them walked inside the building and were stopped by the guards. After verifying their information, they were made to go to a certain room to wait before the program went live.

There were already a few people, all young ones, in the room when the group of three arrived. Slowly people started being added one after another and soon it reached around 30 people in the room.

However, not all of them were being interviewed. Half of the people were like Alex, who came with their friends or family to support them today. Nobody decided to start up a conversation with someone they didn't know and only kept talking with the people they came in with.

After a while, a woman from the staff entered and started calling out names. She called about 13 names before she stopped. Hannah's name was among them as well.

"Alright, I will be off. You should be able to see me on that TV over there," Hannah said and left. 12 other people consisting of 5 young women, 6 young men, and the elderly gentlemen left as well.

Alex looked at the time and realized that there was still 15 minutes before the actual program began.

'Are they going to prepare their talking points or something?' Alex started wondering.

'I wonder if these people think of their time in the game as a job too. Sister did mention that they were selected based on their bank transaction. Also,' he looked around and thought, 'What happened to that guy that said he was the best in the game? He seems to be missing.'

After a few minutes, about 10 minutes before the show started, a woman walked in and asked, "Hello, would you people want to sit in the audience of today's show?"

"Yes, please," a bunch of people stood up and started walking out of the room. Alex decided to do so too. Along the way, the staff member gave them a bunch of information on the do and don't in the studio like putting your phone on silent or vibration mode.

Alex got seated at the corner seat with a girl about the same age as him seated next to him. She was wearing a small pinkish-red dress with frills all around it. She had glasses on that complimented her big and beautiful eyes. She seemed to be a little anxious about something and was constantly fidgeting about it.

"Are you alright?" he proceeded to ask.

"Oh!," the girl jumped in response. She then immediately apologized. "Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to freak out like that. I-I'm just not used to being around people," the girl said.

"It's okay. I just saw you fidgeting a lot and wondered if you were alright. If you are fine, then it's okay," Alex said.

"Thank you," the girl said.

Alex looked back to the stage and nobody was there yet. There were still about 5 minutes for the show to start, so he decided to make some small talk.

"Are you here with someone?" he asked.

"Ah, yes. I-I'm here with my roommate. She is quite good at the game and told me that she landed an interview and dragged me here. I wonder when it will start," she started to drift off with her thoughts and then remembered that she was still talking.

"Oh, what about you?" she asked.

"I'm here with my cousin. She didn't tell me what was going on and just dragged me here," he said with a chuckle.

"I'm Alex by the way," he said as brought forth his hand for a shake.

The girl hesitated for a bit, but reciprocated at the end with a handshake and said, "I'm Emily. Nice to need you, Alex."

"Nice to meet you, Emily," Alex said with a smile.

Then, a bunch of noise started coming from the stage as the 13 people in the show starting walking up the stage to sit on one of the 13 seats on the stage. There was another seat a bit to the right reserved for the host.

"Ah, she said interview, but it seems like it's more of a talk show," Alex said.

"M—My friend said it was an interview as well. Seems like there were too many people for it to be an interview and they will have to change the format," Emily suppressed her anxiety to speak.

Once all the 13 people were seated in their seats, the host walked onto the stage and sat on his seat.

Within a minute, the light in the audience dimmed and the show started.

"Good evening everyone. This is your host, Drake Hamil from Channel 8. Tonight, we have these 13 people in front of us. Now, while they may look like some ordinary high school students ... or maybe teachers for one person's case, they are actually something way better."

"Ladies and Gentlemen, Let me introduce you to the 13 Best of the best players in Eternal Cultivation right now," the host spoke.

Countless applause rang up around the studio devouring any other sound. After the crowd was finally silent, the 13 people went around introducing themselves.

Hannah introduced herself 3rd. When a lady named Sarah introduced herself, Emily let Alex know that she was her friend there. The old gentleman introduced himself as Sean White. He was at least 20 years older than the host, so the host didn't try to make any more funny remarks about the man.

Soon, after the round of introductions were done, the host spoke, "Let's start tonight's show where we talk with the current top players of Eternal Cultivation. Go in-depth with some of the mysteries surrounding the game and maybe have some questions that a game developer over at Deva Corp can answer to us, all in today's show.

Chapter 184: 7 Grades

"First of all, let us tell the audience why you guys are the best of the best, shall we? Let's start with your Cultivation base in Eternal Cultivation okay?" the host said.

Some of the guests hesitated at first, but in the end, they all agreed.

"Let us start with our first guest on the left, Mr. Sean." The host started talking with the older gentleman. "Can you tell us your cultivation base?" the host asked.

"Yes, Of course. My cultivation base right now is the 4th realm of True Masters realm," the old man said.

"Oh, that is quite low, isn't it?" the host said.

"Haha, compared to the energetic youths? Maybe. However, I only play 3 hours a day at most since I have a very young grandchild right now. I would rather spend the rest of my time with her," he said.

"Oh wow. You only play for 3 hours a day and you are already in the True Master Realm? That is quite good," the host said.

"Haha, yes. I believe so too."

The host then went on to talk with the other. The young men and women he talked to were mostly in True King or True Emperor realms. None higher than the 5th realm of the True Emperor realm.

But that didn't matter to the audience. They gasped every time they heard the high cultivation base. However, Alex on the other hand cringed.

'That is clearly very bad, right? Getting to that high of a rank in 2 months would mean that they broke through non-stop using external means. Their bodies didn't have enough time to get used to a cultivation base before they were in another.'

'Why are these people acting like they are doing something very good? They are only seeing explosive growth for now. They will have to struggle to even breakthrough later on,' Alex thought

The host went on to talk with Hannah too.

"What about you, miss? What is your cultivation level?" he asked.

"I am currently in the 6th realm of True emperor," She said.

"Oh wow, that is the highest we've heard yet, isn't it?" the host said. The entire audience gasped hearing how high her cultivation base was. Alex gasped too this time.

He hadn't expected her sister to have such a high cultivation base either. 'But sister knows that cultivating fast is bad. Does she not worry?' he wondered. Then he realized another possibility.

'She doesn't care. Not only her but even the rest of them also don't care either. If they are making money by having such high cultivation, why should they care? It's only a game after all. In fact, it's probably more than just a game to them, it's their work. If being stronger earns them more money, they will gladly do so, won't they?' He felt like he was just enlightened about something.

'What about me? Should I go and eat lots of pills to break through very fast as well? There are not many monster cores left so I might as well make a lot of pills,' he thought.

'Wait, these people are getting stronger to earn money, which means I won't even have to get stronger since I make money without my strength,' he thought.

He suddenly realized where his thought process was being strayed to. 'Ughh... money again. Why am I so fixated on it even when I can earn so much of it so easily?' he started wondering.

'Is that how I think of the game now? Just a way to earn money? What happened to the little bits of fun I was having previously? Is it all going to drown in my need to make money now?' he wondered.

The host had at this point proceeded to ask the rest of the people about their cultivation base and the highest had still been True Emperor 6th realm, which belonged to Hannah and another man.

These two were now unconsciously being viewed as the strongest players in the game, giving them respect much higher than the rest.

"Now, let's move on to the reason why these people, in general, had such a high cultivation base. The reason of which being undoubtedly their Talent and their Body," the host said.

"More specifically speaking, the grade of their talent and body. Now we've come to learn a few critical pieces of information these last few days through the forum post that we made a few days ago. The most important is the true grades of everything. "

"Dear Viewers, Did you know that there are 7 different grades in the game Eternal Cultivation?" The host asked and paused a bit. 'What?' 'huh?' 'No way! These sort of small murmurs ran through the crowd.

Alex himself was startled when he heard of this. '7? I only know of 5, maybe 6' he thought.

The host then spoke. "Yes! There are 7 different grades, and they go as follows. First is the three we all commonly knew from very long ago. These are the Mortal grade, Earth Grade and Heaven Grade."

"Then we have the next two that we only learned a little more recently thanks to people sharing it on the forum. These are the Immortal Grade and the Divine grade."

'I knew it. Divine grade really is a thing. So am I ever going to figure out if my body is God grade or Divine grade?' he wondered.

The host continued, "And finally, the 2 new grades we have come to learn are the highest two grades available in the game. The first one is called Ancient grade. This is one of the best grades in the game."

"However, the next one is even better. The final grade in the game is called God."

'Ancient grade? I don't think I have ever heard about that one before. To be fair, I only thought about Divine grade thanks to my body, to begin with, and I wouldn't have known about god grade if it weren't for my talent.' Alex thought.

Chapter 185: Nine Revolution Ancient Body

After letting the audience and the viewers have a bit of time to process what he had just dropped, the host continued the show.

"Now, let us ask these top players what their body and talent grades are and why they are so high up on the list," the host said.

"Let us start with the oldest of all, Mr. Sean once again." The host then turned to the old man and asked," Mr. Sean, can you tell us what grade your body and talent rank is?" he asked.

"My body is not that good. It's only Immortal grade," the man said with a small smile and continued, "However, My talent... is God Grade."

'What?!' Alex nearly screamed out loud when he heard this. Some people in the audience actually did shout out loud in disbelief.

'I had expected there to be other people besides me with God grade talent, but learning there really are others is truly surprising. No wonder the old guy could break through so fast. He must face no bottleneck at all, just like me,' Alex thought.

The host asked the others the same question and the answer he got were amusing, to say the least. Emily's friend seemed to have a Heaven-grade body with an Ancient grade talent.

The best body that had been mentioned yet was only a Divine body belonging to another girl in the group. The host had purposefully kept the two people with the highest cultivation at the last place.

"Mr. Aaron, what about you?" the host asked.

The man was a little smug as he said, "My body is just a simple Divine grade body that allows me to eat monster cores and gain a massive amount of explosive strength from it. Although I have only been able to use it rarely lately, it's still good. As for my talent, it's at God Grade as well."

The host seemed to be curious about his explanation and asked, "Sorry, can you go back to your bit about your body. You said that you could eat monster cores for strength using it, but now you don't. Can you give us an explanation as to why?"

"I don't really know the reason why, but I just had to. When I started very early on, I did exactly what my body, Divine Devourer told me to do. I devoured pills, spirit stones, herbs, and monster cores. The first three only gave me a little Qi when I ate them, but the monster core, whenever I would eat them, along with Qi, I would get the strength of the monster whose core I ate."

"I slowly started to kill monsters and eat their core to become stronger and kill more monsters. Until about 10 days later, I got a small headache when I ate one. After that, from time to time I would get headaches whenever I ate one. Until one day I straight up fainted when I ate one. It also left my mind hurting for nearly a week. Ever since then, I have only stuck to the other items for Qi, and skipped monster cores."

'That is kind of like me,' Alex thought. 'Does he also need to fight the monster in the spiritual sea which is why his head hurts?'

'Wait, no. He probably hasn't unlocked his spiritual sea yet. so, he can't fight the monsters even if he wanted to. No wonder he has so much headaches. Atleast it's good to know that nothing bad other than some headache would occur in case I lose to the monsters,' Alex thought.

The host nodded a little and asked, "So, do you use the Qi from pills, spirit stones, and herbs to gather Qi and breakthrough now?"

"Kinda, but not really. The pills would help me gain Qi regardless of my body. I can just cultivate with a spirit stone instead of eating it. As for herbs, they are better if they are made into pills. Since these 3 things don't really have a huge impact on my cultivation process, I don't usually mention these when I talk about my body," he said.

"I see. That is unfortunate. Now, let us move on to miss Hannah. Can you tell us about your body and Talent?" he asked.

Hannah nodded and started talking. "My talent is not so special it seems. Most people seem to have Ancient grade talent, I have one as well. However, I also happen to have an Ancient grade body."

"What?" The guest on the stage turned their heads towards her in surprise, not to mention the shock amongst the people in the crowd and back home. Alex himself was surprised by this sudden information as well.

Even Aaron was surprised and slightly jealous of her now. Even though he had a better Talent than her, in the long run, the body would surely be much more useful. Especially if it was anything like his own.

"Isn't that your cousin? Does she have that good body?" Emily asked from the side. She was no longer timid as the shock had taken away any timidness in her for now.

"I-I did not know about any of this. She never shared to me about her talent or anything," Alex said.

The host was stupefied for a moment as well. It seemed he was not informed about this fact from the TV studio, probably for a more genuine interaction on today's show.

"Ms. Hannah, do you really have an Ancient grade Body? What does it do?" he asked.

Hannah chuckled a little and said, "Yes I do. It's called the Nine Revolutions Ancient Body. Basically what it does is every day and night, it gathers Qi from the surrounding until I cannot gather anymore. Which for me is around a few million Qi. Even when I am asleep or offline, It constantly brings in Qi for me."

Hannah's words caused a great amount of shock and envy among the crowd, but the Host seemed to have thought of something and asked, "While it does sound like an incredible body Ms. Hannah, I find it a bit too dull to be an Ancient grade body. Is there anything else you have to add to that?"

"Hehe, you are not a host for just any reason, are you? Yes. I do have something else it does that work in tandem with the Qi gathering. And that is the fact that I can break through any realms without using any cultivation method at all. My body allows me to bypass that restriction."

Chapter 186: [Bonus Chapter]Continents

"Sorry, you said you don't need a cultivation method at all. Can you explain that?" the host asked shocked at what he had just heard.

"Yes. What I mean is my body can gather Qi on its own which I can then use to breakthrough without needing to learn a cultivation technique. If I had relied on the mortal grade technique that was gifted to me when I first created my character, I would have probably still been stuck at the self tempering realm like a lot of others," Hannah said.

"Oh, so does that mean that you breakthrough continuously without needing to stop at all?" the host asked.

"Theoretically, yes. But realistically, No," she replied.

The host got confused at that answer. So did the rest of the people watching the interview. "Can you elaborate?" the host asked.

"Of course. What I mean is that while I can go on breaking through forever, I don't do that. A bit recently, I came to learn that breaking through one after another without having a stable cultivation base first is really bad for you."

"I'm sure everyone here can attest to the fact that they are weaker than their peers in the game who are at the same cultivation base. All because we didn't spend much time in each individual realm, trying to become the best at that realm before moving on to the next one. I am regretting not learning about this beforehand."

The host looked with wide eyes. "I didn't know anything about this at all." He then turned to the camera and said, "There you have it, folks. If you aren't at a high enough realm yet, this is your time to fix your cultivation right now."

"Now, since spiritual roots don't add anything to cultivation itself, we will skip asking the guests about that. So, let's move on to another topic of today's show, The geography of Eternal Cultivation.

"Many of you viewers might already think you know this, but I promise you don't. This is exclusive information that only 3 of our guests today knew. Others were completely in the unknown about this."

Suddenly, a massive picture appeared on the screen behind the host and the guests. The picture consisted of a blue background with 4 irregular pieces on all 4 sides. It was a map.

Alex looked at it and wondered, 'What is that giant blue thing in the back?'

"This is the map of Eternal Cultivation, or at least an estimation of it since no one has really seen a true map of it yet. To all the viewers who have never seen a map of the game, you are in for a big surprise."

The host stood up and moved to the picture. "Look at this," he said as he pointed at the blue sections on the map. "Can you guys guess what this is?" he asked the oblivious viewers and audience.

"This... is... Water," he spoke trying to create suspense. "These," he gestured to all the blue parts of the map and said, "are all water. It is called an ocean. It houses more water than the land in the world itself."

The audience gasped. They had never heard of this 'Ocean' thing and when they saw that so much of the game was just water, they were surprised. Alex himself was quite surprised too.

'If the blue is the water, then the different 4 objects on the map have to be land right? Even if the left most land is half the size of our world, that is still so much water.'

His eyes shined brightly as he looked at the thing. 'Ocean... what a fantastical thing.'

The host continued, "Now,? look at the lands themselves. We have 2 green ones on the east and west that are similar to our own world, full of mountains, trees and rivers and ponds and cities. The north one, however, is fully clad in snow... all year round."

"Yes, the same snow that only occurs once a while on the northern area of our own real world. The northern lands are forever covered in the snow. The south, however, is perhaps more so bizarre. The southern land is actually covered in sand, all of it. There is not a single place that doesn't have sand in there," the host said.

Alex was listening intently to the new information he was learning through the host. 'Forever snowing land? Place all covered in sand? What sort of mystical land are these? The developers must have really gone above and beyond preparing the world for this game,' he thought.

"This land full of sand is called a desert. This southern continent is just a giant desert, through and through."

"Now, for the thing that is the most surprising of it all. For that, I will have to explain what Continents are. These all 4 lands are called Continents," the host said.

'That was what sister told me,' Alex thought.

"Continents are massive pieces of land on the ocean where the game actually takes place. Unlike our own real world, these lands have an actual edge to them. In our real world, if you walk in a straight direction, you will reach the endless forests and if you walk through the endless forests, you will just fall off the edge into the void and die. "

"But in this place, if you walk in a straight line, you would just reach the water. No worries about falling off and dying," the host said.

"Now, imagine the world we live in, all the 17 different cities with the nearly billion people was a circle, okay. Now look at this," the host said. Suddenly a circle appeared on the Northern continent that was always frozen.

However, the circle that appeared on it was about the size of a door handle on a door. The host then spoke. "This is how big the lands in Eternal Cultivation are. Just the Northern Continent alone is about 40 times the size of our own world."

"You can see why I would call it very surprising."

Chapter 187: Fifth

Most of the audience members including Alex were shocked at this information. This was such an out of nowhere piece of information that it had caught them truly off guard.

The host was smiling wide seeing the look of disbelief on the faces of the audience. Not only them, but it also seemed that even some of the players, including the old man named Sean, were completely unaware of this information.

"The world of Eternal Cultivation is truly vast, and it also contains a lot of different places not available in the real world. For example, in the northern continent, there are flowing frozen rivers called glaciers. In the eastern continent, there are mountain peaks that spew out fiery liquid from the top. The west has an unending forest."

"There are beaches, which are small strips of land on the edge of the world that meets the water. There are giant cliffs with deep ravines in between called canyons. There are so many different things to explore, and most of us just stay in the cities. Such a shame," the host said while shaking his head.

Alex thought so too. 'There is so much more world that I have yet to see, and I am just staying in one city. I should leave to explore other places.' A small fire of excitement began to light up deep inside him, bringing the fun back into the game.

"Now, returning back to the players while still staying on the topic of continents. How many of you are from the eastern continents?" the host asked the guests.

5 people raised their hands, including Hannah and Emily's friend.

"How many of you are from the Northern continent?" he then asked.

4 hands raised this time including the old man Sean.

"The Southern continent?" the host asked.

All of the remaining 4 hands were raised at this point, including Aaron.

"And we can see that there are none of you from the Western Continent. It's weird, isn't it? We have seen the statistics report and surprisingly, only 12% of all players are in the Western Continent."

"And furthermore, they are always slow on the rise. The resources there are lower than the ones in the other continent. Do any of you have an idea why that might be?" the host asked.

'Didn't sister say that I was from the Western Continent? Is it really that bad?' he wondered.

The guests there made some guesses as to why that might have been. Some said they might have been slow to develop. Some said, the developers just made it that way. However, none of the guests could make any credible guesses, so the host decided to change the topic.

"Since we do not know about it that much, let us move to another topic. That topic being..." the host immediately turned around to point at the center of the map which was nothing but water.

Suddenly, a green land appeared in the middle of the map. "... The Fifth Continent," the host spoke.

Everyone was suddenly confused. Murmurs started appearing among the crowd as they tried to figure out how there could even be a fifth Continent. There were quite a few in the crowd that were quite learned regarding the geography of Eternal Cultivation.

Even though they didn't know the exact area of the continents or their relative location. They still knew that there were 4 different continents. Yet, the host was speaking about the existence of the fifth one that they had never heard of.

The host smiled when he saw the different reactions on the faces of most of the guests and all of the audience.

"You heard it here first. We are revealing to you the yet unrevealed fifth continent of the Eternal Cultivation. This is a very different continent from most of the other continents. Let us ask the three people who provided us with this information," said the Host.

"Ms. Hannah, Mr. Aaron, and Mr. Shane, could you tell us how you came to learn about the existence of this continent and why no one else knows of it?" he asked.

The man named Shane first spoke, "I actually do not know much about the Fifth continent aside from the fact that it exists. I came to learn about it on an accident when my master mentioned that we would have to take a detour through the Eastern Continent if we ever wanted to go the Southern Continent from the Northern continent. All because of the weirdness of the fifth continent."

Aaron followed up, "The fifth continent is actually way more commonly known in the Southern continent. Well, at least on the higher level it is. There are records of land being visible from the southern continent itself when the weather conditions are perfect. Although, because of how hard it is to stay around at the northern part of the Southern Continent, I myself have never personally seen this fifth Continent appearing."

"I see," the host said. He then turned to Hannah and asked, "What about you Ms. Hannah? How do you know about the Fifth Continent?"

"My Hu-Friend from inside the game told me about it. He has a rather high rank among the people in the Eastern continent and has access to a lot of important information. He let me know about, rather cautioned me against ever going towards the Fifth Continent cause of the dangers there."

"Danger?" the host was curious. "Any idea what sort of dangers?" he asked.

"Apparently, a very high-level battle took place in the fifth continent a few generations ago, and the land was left torn apart from the battle. Ever since then, the final continent has remained unapproachable by anyone due to the turbulent Qi in it."

"However, I believe that is what the developers are telling us right now," Hannah said.

"Hmm... what do you mean Ms. Hannah?" the host asked.

Hannah replied, "I believe that this Fifth Continent is going to be the next expansion of the game and is going to open up soon in the near future."

Chapter 188: Developer

"Oh," the host got a little curious. "Is that so? So you believe the reason no one can visit the fifth continent is that the developers haven't fully made it yet and it is still under development. That kind of makes sense."

"Doesn't it?" Hannah said with excitement. "Imagine later down the line we reach the saint realm and have to go up, and the only way to do that is to move to the fifth continent where there will be much stronger people, better techniques, and all the pills and weapons and artifacts. It will truly be an amazing time."

The host talked with the guests about the fifth continent for a little longer before saying that the talk with them was over and going on a break.

Alex was still taking in the pieces of information he had just gotten. "I didn't know there was so much more to the world of Eternal Cultivation. And here I am staying in one city in one empire in one continent," he said out loud.

Emily didn't know if he was talking to himself or to her so she just decided to respond, "I-I also just stay in a city in the northern continent. I haven't left the city yet since I started playing 2 months ago."

"Oh, you played the game right after its release?" Alex asked.

"Yes. My friend forced me to buy a VR Helmet within the first 4 days of the release. I've been playing passively ever since then," she said.

"Oh, then you must be at quite a high realm," he said.

"Not really. I-I don't go out to fight monsters or buy pills or even get spirit stones. So, I am very slow at cultivating. I barely reached the true realm a week ago," she said.

"Oh, that's not bad," Alex said.

"What about you?" she asked.

"I only started playing about a month ago, so I'm not really that high. Only Organ tempering realm," he said with a smile.

The guests were taken to a different viewing spot in the audience reserved for them where they chatted amongst themselves and in a few minutes.

Then, the show was back on.

"Welcome back viewers. We finished talking with the 13 best of the best players in Eternal Cultivation. Now, we move on to the developer side of the game. I believe we have a developer from the game with us on the line."

"Can you hear us, Mr. Developer?" the host asked.

"Hello? Yes, I can hear you." The person on the other side of the connection said. There was no video and the audience and viewers could only hear the voice.

"Can you please introduce yourself to the audience?" the host spoke.

"Yes. Hello, I am Robin Howard and I have been a developer for Deva Corp for about 9 years now. I have been a part of the big games Deva Corp put out the past few years. Recently I was assigned to Eternal Cultivation as one of the people in charge of looking after the feedback and collecting data."

The host then asked, "So, let me get this straight. You are not part of the developer team that made the game, and you only came to the team later on."

"Uhh, you're not wrong in saying that," Robin said. "Except for the fact that Eternal Cultivation has no developers team."

The host and the other audience members were a little taken aback.

"Sorry, what do you mean Eternal Cultivation has no developers team?" he asked.

"Just what I said. The game Eternal Cultivation was not made by anyone in Deva Corp. It was actually sold to us by a different group of people using another person as a middleman."

"We still have no idea how the game was made, how the helmets made the game seem so realistic, or even how the capsules work. However, we have already tested the capsules and they work fantastically. In fact, it might be considered better than the helmets due to a certain feature that I am not allowed to tell you guys yet," Robin said.

This was a new piece of information that nobody in all the 17 cities knew.

"So Deva Corp is not responsible for making and distributing the game?" The host asked to confirm.

"Oh distributing absolutely, but not making the game. I know Deva Corp has gotten a lot of hate for not answering comments like why the game is not fair, or why we keep the helmet internals proprietary, or even just why we won't let the technology be used in other sectors than just the game," Robin said.

"I see, I was about to ask you if you guys got the idea for the world in the game from the old texts, but it seems you guys probably do not know about it," the host said.

"What is this about the old texts? The ones left by our ancestors?" Robin asked.

"Oh don't worry about it. A player actually found it and had posted on his own forum, but due to lack of exposure, it had been left buried until now. The thing that person found was that Eternal Cultivation was inspired by the old texts. The geographical anomaly all matches the old texts. Of course, except for the part where they were mistaken about the world being round when it is perfectly flat. "

" It would seem that the real developers of the game read the old texts left behind in Pinewood city, and implemented it onto their own game. Unfortunately, due to it being not allowed to be photographed, we couldn't show exactly what the old text said." the host said.

"I see. We wouldn't know anything about that," Robin said.

"Anyway, Thank you for taking the time to appear on today's show, Mr.? Robin."

"Thank you to both you and Channel 8 for having me," Robin said and cut the connection.

"Anyway, that is it for tonight folks. Keep watching for more fun stuff coming along. We will be sure to have prepared more Eternal cultivation. Goodbye."

And with that, the show ended.

Chapter 189: Blushing

"Finally, it's over." Alex took out his phone to look at the time and realized it was 10 pm. His stomach was starting to growl a little.

GRRR

He heard a stomach growl from his side too. He turned left to find Emily's face nearly red in the studio light from the embarrassment. He chuckled a little and said, "You must be hungry as well. I haven't eaten anything since during the day."

Emily chose to say nothing. A staff member came by hauling everyone out through the side door.

Alex met Hannah who was outside, along with the other 12 people.

"That went quite well, right?" Hannah asked.

"Yes. I can't believe you hid how good you were in the game. If not for the interview, I would've never known," Alex said.

"Nah, I would've told you sometime soon. I can't keep it to myself at all," Hannah said with a giggle.

"It's so late, we should return now," Alex said.

"Let's get something to eat before we do," Hannah said. "Hey Sarah, you want to get something to eat before we leave?"

"Sure," A voice came from the group. Alex was a little surprised because the person who had just spoken turned out to be Emily's friend.

"You guys are already familiar?" Alex asked.

"Kind of. She was in one of my classes a year ago. I noticed her in the waiting room but didn't remember her name, so I stayed quiet," Hannah said with a chuckle.

"Yeah. I'm so hungry. Let's get some decent meal if the restaurants are even open at this time," Sarah said as she walked towards Hannah and Alex. Emily was following her timidly among the group as well.

They went to a nearby diner, the only one that was open at this time of the night, and ordered some meals.

Hannah and Sarah started talking with each other, while Alex and Emily were just left there silently eating their food.

"So, is he your younger brother?" Sarah asked.

"He is my cousin. He is in the first year of university and is staying with me right now," Hannah said.

"Oh, Oakleaf University?" Sarah asked.

"Yes."

"Emily here started studying at Oakleaf University too. She is in the 2nd semester of the first year," Sarah said.

"Oh, Alex is joined just a month ago, so he is only in the 1st semester," Hannah replied.

They talked a bit more and finished eating. They left the diner and Hannah started looking for cabs to return back home.

"Since we are going the same way, why don't you two come with us?" Sarah asked.

"With you guys? Sure. Are we sharing a cab?" Hannah asked.

"Oh god no. I brought my own car," Sarah said.

"Oh, nice. I should learn to drive too now that I can buy a car myself," Hannah said.

From a nearby parking lot, Sarah brought out the car. Hannah got on to the front seat, leaving Emily and Alex to take the back seat. There wasn't a lot to talk about so, the car was mostly silent the whole way back.

At some point, thanks to it being boring and having just eaten, Emily fell asleep on Alex's shoulders. Alex thought of waking her up for a second but decided not to.

"Oh, is she asleep?" Sarah said looking at them through the rearview mirror and quickly took a photo of them.

"Hehe, she will be so embarrassed when she sees this photo." She then told Alex," Don't wake her up. She usually goes to bed early, and it's already 11 pm. We still have half an hour left before we get back."

Alex just let her sleep on his shoulders the entire way back. He himself, however, couldn't fall asleep. Having been homeschooled and having barely any contact with girls before, his heart was racing like crazy.

It remained that way the whole way back. Hannah would look back through the rearview mirror from time to time and smirk. Finally, at around half past 11, Sarah stopped in front of a moderate building.

"Let me just get Emily into the room and I will come back to get you guys to your place," Sarah said and got out of the car.

"Oh, no need," Hannah said. "Our building is right over there," she said as she pointed to the tall building a few hundred meters down the line.

"Thank you for giving us a ride, we can walk from here," Hannah said. "Alex, Come one, let's go."

Alex didn't move however and simply pointed at the sleeping Emily.

"Oh," Sarah said as she chuckled and pulled Emily towards her from the window to shake her awake. Emily woke up and looked around, confused as to where she was.

"Am I still in the game?" she asked.

"Haha, silly. You were asleep in the car back home. Now get out," Sarah said.

Finally realizing where she was, Emily hastily got out of the car and fixed her clothes. Sarah and Hannah laughed and Alex finally left the car.

Saying their goodbyes, Hannah and Alex walked back to their home.

"It seems I was right," Hannah said.

"About what, sister?" Alex asked.

"About me telling that you might find a girl today," she said.

Alex immediately blushed. "Oh look at you, already embarrassed about it," Hannah said. "You are blushing more now than when she was sleeping on your shoulder."

"Can we not talk about this, Sister?" he said.

"Hehe, alright, alright."

They reached back home and Alex went straight to his room with the intention to sleep. He laid down on his bed ready to sleep when he remembered something.

"Ah, that's right. There is the exam tomorrow. I almost forgot. Do I go into the game or do I sleep?" he wondered.

He decided to sleep for the night but everything he learned today started appearing on his mind distracting him from his sleep.

'Sigh, I will just go to the game and cultivate for now.' Thinking so, he logged back into the game.

Chapter 190: Second Best

Alex logged into the game at midnight. He originally planned on cultivating when he came here, but then he remembered what happened this morning.

"If I also mess up the time of me waking up tomorrow morning as well, I will miss the exam," he thought. So he decided to just not cultivate his Qi for now. Since he could manage to cultivate his body without going unconscious now, he decided to do that instead.

He called out Pearl and told him to cultivate. Within minutes, Pearl was glowing gold, and he had started to cultivate. Intense pain shot throughout Alex's body, but it was nowhere near concerning for Alex. He was perfectly fine handling this sort of pain, even though it hurt a lot. His pain tolerance had really gone up a few realms after the continuous body cultivation in the Tiger sect.

Throughout the entire night, he cultivated his body, and a bit before 7 in the morning, he stopped. He sent Pearl back into his arm and logged out. After getting refreshed, he went to the kitchen to have some food. Hannah didn't seem to have woken up yet, so he prepared breakfast only for himself and ate it.

After having his breakfast, he logged back into the game.

The exam started at 8 am, so he decided to leave now. He slowly trekked down the mountain and reached the Elder's hall a bit before it was time for the exam.

'Woah,' he thought as he looked at the slew of disciples standing outside the Elder's Hall. 'What's going on?' he wondered. There were nearly a thousand of them here.

If it had been only a few disciples in front of the Elder's Hall, he would've just assumed they were here for the exam, but the disciples in here were from all 3 sections of the sect numbering in 4 digits.

'I… am at the right place, right?' he thought.

"Alright everyone, come on in," an Elder said and the crowd of disciples walked in. Alex didn't know what was going on, but since his master told him to come here, he didn't think he was in the wrong reason. So, he just followed the group of disciples.
New n0vel chapters are published on

He passed a number of doors and took a sudden left turn. He sent out his spiritual sense to look at everything and realized that he was walking into a big open area.

As soon as the disciples walked into the open area, nearly 90% of them split from the group and started sitting on the floor all around the room. Alex was a little confused.

'Do I sit down too?' he wondered.

"Alright, Examinees and Viewers come with me," the elder said once more and walked even further.

'That's where I go?' Alex thought and walked along, but he still looked at the different disciples sitting on the ground, as if they were at a concert or something.

'A concert… wait a second. Of course.' He felt like facepalming right now.

'God, I can't believe I forgot about the weekly lectures. No wonder there are so many disciples in here,' Alex thought.

The elder took them through a narrower corridor to a different open room, only this time it didn't have many places to sit as there were fire pits all over the floor.

'Are we supposed to make alchemy out in the open?' he wondered.

The entire floor was about a hundred meters long and 50 meters wide. There were about 60 fire pits on the ground and a section had been separated for the spectators.

"Wait here for the other elders to arrive," The elder said and left. Alex took the time to send away his spiritual sense into the crowd to see who was here.

'Oh, it's the core disciple from yesterday,' he thought when he noticed the core disciple that was with Zhou Mi, the one that had bumped into him the day before yesterday.

He found Zhou Mi right next to her as well. He then found a man next to him, another core disciple, and he was looking directly at him. He started walking and came up right next to him.

Alex looked at him in surprise and he hadn't expected to see a core disciple's robe on the man's shoulders this soon. He smiled and said, "Congratulations, brother Kong. I see I missed your actual ascension."

"Thank you, Brother Yu. You could've come watched me pass it as well. I did it last week," he said.

"I was out of sect for the last two weeks, so I couldn't have even if I knew it," he said.

"It's alright. Why are you here? To spectate?" he asked.

"Oh no, I'm taking part in the exams as well," he said. "What about you? It can't be you are already going to take your examinations for the elder role, right?" he asked.

"Oh, you know about that? I'm quite surprised. Also, No. I'm actually here to cheer for sister Mi who is going to take part in the core disciple exam today," he said.

"Oh," he said as he looked towards Zhou Mi. He also saw the core disciple with her and asked, "by the way, brother Kong. Who is that senior with Sister Zhou Mi? They look so similar," he asked.

Kong Yuhan didn't even have to look back to know who he was talking about. He looked at Alex with a small shocked expression on his face.

"You don't know who that is?" he asked as if not knowing who she was unheard of.

Alex started to get more curious. 'Just who is she to garner such a reaction from a core disciple?' he wondered.

"Brother Kong, you seem to forget that I am quite new around here," he said.

"Yeah, but it's still unusual for anyone to not know who she is. Although, I guess outer sect disciples might have only heard her name and never really seen her."

He then turned to Alex and started whispering as he said, " That is Zhou Mei, the second highest-ranking disciple of the sect."

Chapter 191: Exam Starts

Alex was a little surprised. "I should have guessed. They do look similar, so I could have just known name by associating her with sister Zhou Mi," he thought.

He started wondering how good she might be at making pills or how far along she was at becoming an elder by now. He was also curious if she would be one of the people taking part in the annual competition. It was an obvious choice if he thought about it.

He talked with Kong Yuhan for a few more minutes as the rest of the elders came to the exam fields.

The elder from before started calling out names, sending the examinees to specific elders who were waiting for them. The names were at random from what Alex could tell and thus he had to wait a bit before he was called.

"Yu Ming!" the Elder said out loud. Alex walked up to the Elder. The Elder looked him up and down and said, "You're the sect leader's disciple huh? I heard you're quite good at taking pills. Good luck on your exam today." He then sent Alex to an Elder who was waiting for him near a fire pit.

Alex walked to the Elder and greeted him. The elder was on the younger side like he had just been transferred from the core disciples to the elders. The elder didn't speak much and directly told him to sit down and prepare.

"Have you chosen what pill you are going to make?" the Elder asked.

Alex didn't have to think as he had prepared for this moment. He chose the Bone Sealing pill. The Bone Sealing pill was a pill that blocked the cultivation base of anyone in the Bone Tempering realm of lower for a few hours, depending on the pill's harmony.

It was one of the pills he had only made a few times and was thus one of the few pills that fell under the criteria for his choice in the exam. The criteria being it wasn't registered to the sect, it was a recipe sold in the sect, and it was a recipe he had the ingredients for.

"Do you have your own ingredients and cauldron?" the elder asked. Alex was about to nod his head in affirmation but then realized that it was probably not a good idea to show his True Earth grade cauldron in front of everyone here. So he told the Elder that he only had the ingredients and not the cauldron.

The elder asked for him to take out the ingredients for checking. Alex happily complied and took out the ingredients. After seeing that Alex's ingredients had no tampering done to them, the Elder said, " Keep your storage bags aside please."

Alex was a little surprised at first, but then the Elder gave him a moderately big box that could fit about 10 storage bags in them. Alex put his bags in there and locked the box. He took the key with himself.

The elder took out a simple black cauldron, the same ones that were found in the Alchemy hall. This one had no lid either.

Alex had planned to not use Elemental Guidance and definitely not make pills whose resulting energy was metal so as to not stand out in the crowd. And now, he had to use a less than mediocre cauldron too.

'Oh god. If the pill splitting Qi activates, I might actually end up with pills below 20% harmony and just might fail,' he thought.

After the Elder handed him the cauldron and the ingredient, he said, "You have an hour to make the pill. Your time starts now." He then sat directly in front of him.

Alex stopped caring about the Elder and focused on the cauldron. He put the cauldron on the fire and let it heat up. As he was doing so, a small film-like substance started appearing around him and the fire pit. Not even the Elder was inside there.

Alex realized that this was a sound-blocking formation at work. 'I am really curious how these formations work,' he thought.

He then turned his focus back to the task at hand. The first thing he did, even before putting in the ingredients was clean the cauldron. Sending out a wave of Qi, he scraped off whatever bits of powder were left behind from previously made pills.

The Elder simply nodded when she saw this, approving of the choice.

Alex then waited for the cauldron to reach the proper temperature. The cauldron wasn't very good at transferring heat fast enough, so he would have to time it right. Thankfully, he remembered what the pill was supposed to look and feel like throughout the process of making it. So, he could base how close he was using that memory.

He could also use his spiritual sense to figure out the temperature of the cauldron. However, it wasn't as accurate as Flame Mastery Scripture.

When the cauldron was properly heated up, he put in the first ingredient, a tendon from a beaver-like beast. He waited until the tendon was heated enough and the energy started releasing into the air.

Due to having no lid, most of the energy flew away, while some of them stayed behind and got recollected into the powders. He then put in the second ingredient and moved it around inside the cauldron, turning it into powder and releasing its energy too.

The two energies mixed together in the powder forming a simple harmony of energy.

Compared to the first time he made the pills in the Alchemy hall, this was a much easier time. Thanks to his increased mental energy due to the spiritual sea being unlocked, he had a far better concentration and multi-tasking ability than a month ago.

He could also use spiritual sense to constantly check on the ingredients and energy, instead of just watching the powders move in the cauldron-like last time.

All in all, he was doing much better than the first time he had made a pill. Which, he started worrying might come around to become a problem for him.

Chapter 192: Failure

Alex continued making the Bone Sealing pill as per the recipe. While more than half of the energy had escaped, he didn't worry about it. The pills would have enough energy left for him to pass.

He continued putting in more and more ingredients as the Elder kept on watching. Finally, with the last ingredient, he was done putting in everything. It was now time for him to form the pill.

He slowly gathered the powder around to shape it into a sphere. It was beginning to form a clump of powder when suddenly, a different strand of Qi escaped from his body and went into the pills.

'No!' he thought, horrified. This was the last thing he wanted happening to him. He wasn't worried about the Elder seeing him split a pill into two. The cauldron was at a distance where the Elder couldn't see inside at all, but the problem was...

The powder clump separated into two equally sized clumps that started forming into pills. A vortex started on top of them sucking in as much energy as they could from their surrounding. However, most of it had already escaped and so the pills were left with none.

After a minute or two, the vortexes stopped forming and the pills were done.

Alex went into Focus mode. Time slowed down as his senses started to become a lot more acute. A little scared, Alex quickly put his hands into the cauldron, hiding the pills from the Elder. As he brought his hands back towards him, he looked at the pills.

[Bone Sealing Pill: 19%]

[Bone Sealing Pill: 17%]

'Sh*t,' he started distressing. He quickly shot the 17% pill down his sleeve and showed the 19% pill in his palm. The pill suddenly flew off as soon as he opened his arm, falling into the Elder's hand.

The Elder started testing the pill's Harmony level in the Pill tester and sighed. He shook his head as he saw the number 19 on the pill tester's glass body. Seeing that number was a little disappointing for him.

The Elder had heard quite a bit about the Sect Leader's disciple from the other Elders, especially the one in charge of registering pills for the core disciples.? 'Was he lying? Or was the disciple cheating at those times?' the Elder wondered. His gaze turned a little harsh now that he knew that the disciple was not very talented at making pills.

However, nothing could be harsher than the way Alex was berating himself on the inside.

'You stupid idiot. You could've just used Elemental Guidance at the end and you would've been fine. Just a single percentage increase and you would've passed the exam. Goddammit! Why did the stupid pill splitting Qi had to get come out at this time.'

'I should have just used my cauldron and I could have fixed this. If only I had a lid, the harmony would go up by about 5% for sure.'

He started thinking about the different things that went wrong or the mistakes he made. However, nothing would now change the fact that he failed to make a 20% pill during the core disciples exam.

'Sigh. Half an hour went just like that,' he thought.

The Elder stood up at this point and walked a little closer towards him. He then spoke.

"Disciple Yu Ming, You have failed to make a pill with 20% harmony under an hour. Do you have anything to say," the Elder asked?

Alex sighed. He was about to shake his head when he suddenly caught up on something. "Um... Elder, Do I pass the exam as long as I can produce a 20% harmony pill in under an hour?" he asked.

"Why are you repeating what I just said and asking if that is true? Of course, it is," The Elder replied a little annoyed at Alex.

Alex however didn't mind it. His eyes were shining from the bit of information he had just received. "Elder, so I can make another pill, and if it turns out to have a harmony higher than 20%, I am fine, right?" he asked.

"Yes, but I will have to inspect your ingredients again and it's already over half an hour now," the elder said.

"No worries," Alex said and immediately opened the box to take out his storage bags. He looked into a few of them and took out the ingredients for the pill once more and handed it to the Elder.

The Elder spent some time checking the ingredients and handed it back to him. Alex looked at the time and only 20 minutes were left. He had to hurry up.

Alex was worried the Elder would waste more of his time if he brought out his cauldron at this point, so he decided to stay with the bad one for now.

Without hesitation, he put the first ingredient into the cauldron. The tendon started turning to powder and releasing energy. Alex slowly used Elemental Guidance to keep those energies inside the cauldron as much as possible.

After some time, he put in another piece of ingredient and used Elemental Guidance to keep its energy inside the cauldron too. As more and more ingredients were added into the mix, the harmony between the elements began to set.

Alex made sure everything was fine when he decided to start forming the pill.

'Oh god please don't release the pill splitting Qi,' he prayed. He then collected the powders in the cauldron to a clump and used Elemental Guidance to move whatever energy was left in the cauldron.

The little amount of energy passed through the powder, increasing the harmony ever so slightly. He could tell that the powders had absorbed a good amount of energy and that the pill would be high leveled now.

He was starting to get hopeful about his chances to pass at this point. He looked at the time and realized he only had less than 2 minutes to complete the task.

He proceeded to complete the task, but just then, the thing he least hoped for happened. The Pill Splitting Qi came out of his body once more.

Chapter 193: Calling out Names

'Oh no,' Alex thought as he felt the new strand of Qi come out of his body and enter the cauldron. The Qi immediately split the pill into two giving him horrifying thoughts about the result.

He wanted to control the Qi, but as usual, it was beyond his control. The separated clumps of powder suddenly started sucking in the energy from the cauldron, taking in the remaining energy he had managed to keep in there thanks to the Elemental Guidance.

Time was ticking down while the pills were still sucking in the energy.

Alex only had 10 seconds remaining on his time when the pills were formed. Without hesitation, he took one pill out of the cauldron and gave it to the Elder as he had no time to look at it himself.

As for the second pill, he couldn't think of how to covertly take it out now. He couldn't use his Qi manipulation or simply put his hands inside to grab it. There was only one thing he could do now.

Using an intense Qi manipulation, He crushed the pill inside the cauldron, scattering it everywhere. He then watched the Elder put his pill inside the pill tester. He hadn't touched the pill yet, so he didn't know if he had passed yet or not.

He watched with bated breath as the fog on the pill tester started to rise from the metallic plate. Slowly, the fog went up the glass beaker of the pill tester, soon reaching 10%.

But it didn't stop there, it kept on going up as more and more fog appeared on the beaker. At around 16%, the fog slowed down. Alex started worrying. It went up to 17%, which made him a little happy, but still worried.

'A little more, just a little more,' he wished worriedly. 18%, the fog went up once again.? And again it went up to 19%.

'Just one more, please,' Alex started praying. He could almost swear that he looked at the pill tester for an eternity before it went up.

20%.

A big smile appeared on Alex's face as he saw the number. He had passed. The pill tester didn't stop there however, it went up 4 times more and stopped at 24%.
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He had safely passed the test by a huge margin. The Elder looked at the harmony level of the pill and nodded. He then turned around to Alex and said, "Congratulations, You've passed the exam. You are now a core disciple. Give me your nameplate."

Alex took out his nameplate and handed it to the Elder. "You can go and sit with your friends in the audience now," The Elder said and walked away. Having nothing else to do, Alex took his storage bags and walked back to the spectator's zone.

While walking back, he could hear the sigh of relief, the sigh of disappointment, the cry of sadness, the optimism, and a whole lot of other emotions on the voice of the numerous disciples that took the test.

He looked ahead to the spectator's zone and saw that Kong Yuhan was smiling happily while talking with Zhou Mi, who herself was smiling as well. The ever-frowning Zhou Mei was smiling too.

'It seems she passed,' Alex thought.

Alex went to a relatively isolated section of the spectator's zone and waited for the results. Only after a few minutes did the elders return back to the hall.

"Alright, we will now announce the disciples who have passed the exam," the Elder said.

"For the first list, we have 9 new inner sect disciples. I will call your name and you come on the stage. The list is based on who passed the earliest," the elder said. He then started calling out names. Every disciple he called would walk up to him, whereupon they would be handed 2 sets of new robes, a new guidebook, and their nameplate.

One by one, the new inner sect disciples were called to get their stuff. Once the disciples took their stuff, they walked back to the spectator zone. Kong Yuhan had at one point managed to find him and had made his way over to Alex.

"Brother Yu, how was your exam?" he asked.

"So-so, I would say. At least I passed," Alex replied.

"Well, passing an exam is always good," Kong Yuhan said.

One after another the disciples went up to the elder and returned back. Soon, the 9th name was called upon. The disciple walked a little ashamedly, hiding his face from the crowd as much as possible, and made his way up to the elder.

After taking his stuff back, he hurried his way back to the spectators.

"Now, let's move on to the new Core disciples. This time, we have a surprising 3 new core disciples," the elder said.

"Woah, 3 at once? That's a good amount. But, brother Yu, didn't you say you passed? Why was your name not called yet?" Kong Yuhan asked.

Alex was still waiting for his name so he simply said, "I did pass. It will come up soon probably."

Kong Yuhan was about to tell him he was wrong and that the names for inner sect disciples were done when the first name on the Core disciples list was named.

Hearing the name, a male disciple walked out of the group of people with his head held up high and a smug smile on his face.

"Tsk, it's not sister Mi who was first?" Kong Yuhan clicked his tongue as he said that.

Alex was a little surprised to hear him care about the order at which the names were called. "Is there an importance to the order of names being called? He asked.

"Not really, it's just that…" Kong Yuhan started to get a little embarrassed as he searched around for words to speak. "It's just that the new core disciples get their houses based on who came first. Since I was the only disciple to pass last time, the one who passes first this time is housed next to me, and… I really wanted it to be Sister Mi."

Chapter 194: Core Disciple

Alex was quite surprised by how open Kong Yuhan was being about his affection towards Zhou Mi. 'He must really like her,' he thought. The student who had gone up first returned back with an equally smug look as when he went up.

"Zhou Mi," the Elder spoke. Alex watched as Zhou Mei pat her sister on the back before sending her out. Zhou Mi walked straight to the elder and bowed. Kong Yuhan watched her with a smile on his face.

Zhou Mi wasn't smug like the first guy, only happy and had a cheerful smile as she returned back.

"Brother Yu, I will go find that disciple from earlier and ask him if he can change his house with mine, Okay?" Kong Yuhan said and was about to walk out when suddenly, he stopped mid-step and looked back with wide eyes.

The elder had just called the name 'Yu Ming' to come out. "Brother Yu?" Kong Yuhan said as he tried to inquire, but Alex just gave him a simple smile and walked out.

"Huh? An outer core disciple?" someone was surprised.

"Wait, did he take a core disciple exam?" another person said in shock.

"Not only that, he passed it too," another person was surprised.

Zhou Mi had just reached her sister when she looked back when she heard the name the Elder call out. "Brother Yu?" she also shouted in surprise. The shock and surprise didn't let go of Zhou Mei either.

"It's that guy from last time. He is a core disciple now?" she said in shock. She had been in the sect for a little over 5 years now but had never seen an Outer sect disciple jump straight to Core disciple. She kept looking at him in shock as he walked to the elder.

Alex reached the Elder and bowed a little. "You finished last minute I hear," the Elder said in a low voice. "Yes, Elder. Some problems came up as I was making the pills," Alex said.

"Well, it doesn't matter. Since you passed, you are now a Core disciple. Congratulations," the Elder said as he handed the items to Alex who quickly put them into his storage bag.

"You might live on the Sect Leader's mountain, but since you are a core disciple now, you also have a house at the core disciple's mountain. Check your new nameplate to locate your house," the Elder said.

"Thank you, Elder." He then bowed to the Elder once more and started walking back.

"The Tests are over. You are all dismissed," the Elder shouted. The student didn't leave however, they kept looking at Alex in shock. He walked back to the spectator zone since that was where the way out was.

Kong Yuhan was about to step out to question him when suddenly the hoard of disciples walked forward to question him first.

"Hey brother, you are called Yu Ming, right? When did you join the sect? I have never seen you before."

"Are you an Elder's son?"

"Did you cheat?"

"Did you come from another Alchemy school?"

"Brother, teach us how to go from Outer sect Disciple to core disciple too."

"Hey, Brother Yu, Do you have a girl you like?"

"I can be your girlfriend if you want. Just teach me a little Alchemy for free."

"Brother, my name is Huang Lei, I can be your aid if you ever want to make pills in the Alchemy hall."

"He is a core disciple now, he doesn't need an Aid."

"Hey, nothing wrong in just asking, right?"

"I guess so, Brother you want me as an aid as well?"

Alex was a little surprised when he was suddenly surrounded by all sides and asked multiple questions. "Ah, Ah," was the only words he had managed to get out. He couldn't even see Kong Yuhan anymore.

The pathway out was packed with the student and he didn't know what to do anymore. He looked at the time and it was about time to log out as well. 'Sh*t, I'm going to be late for school,' Alex thought.

He tried to push through, but the students were truly a lot. Without any choice, he reached into his storage bag and took out a pill, stunning everyone in there. He raised the pill high up and shouted, "This is a 17% harmony Bone Sealing pill. Whoever catches this can take it."

He then suddenly threw it up in the air. Numerous hands reached out to grab the pill, and only one managed to get it using their Qi. When the person grabbed it, the rest of the people looked back towards Alex, but he wasn't there anymore.

The disciples looked around for a bit but couldn't find him. He had walked out while they were distracted. So reluctantly, they left the Elder's hall and walked outside.

Kong Yuhan and Zhou Mi were quite surprised at his sudden disappearance too but thought he must've walked out fast when he threw the pill in the air.

"I can't believe brother Yu is a core disciple now," he said. His mind was still reeling by the fact that a disciple that knew nothing about Alchemy a month ago, was now a core disciple.

"Just how talented is he?" he wondered

"Me neither. I thought he was just a normal outer sect disciple. No wonder he was there in the Disciple Hall that day," Zhou Mi said remembering back 2 days ago when she met Alex on the staircase to the top floors.

"Alright let's go out," Kong Yuhan said as there was nothing more to do here and started walking out.

"Let's go, Sister," Zhou Mi said as she tried to pull her sister, but she wouldn't budge. Zhou Mi turned around and was a little surprised to see the face of utter shock on her sister's face.

"What's wrong, Sister?" Zhou Mi asked, but her sister wouldn't respond. Only after a while did she say 3 words out loud that formed an incomplete sentence.

"That man, He..." Zhou Mei said out loud and thought the rest by herself.

'That man, He definitely just used the Flickering Shadows Technique.'

Chapter 195: Zhou Mei's Confusion

'But how could he get his hands on the only immortal technique of the sect that costs over 50,000 contribution points, as an outer sect disciple?' Zhou Mei wondered with her eyes still wide open.

'Could the disciples be correct and he is actually a son of an elder?' she wondered. 'But even then getting your hands on the technique should be impossible, unless…' her eyes turned wide at her own speculations.

'Unless he is the sect master's own son. Besides, she is the only one that I know of that has fully learned the Flickering Shadows technique. Was she hiding him from us? Is he a secret love child with an outsider?'

Numerous thoughts ran across her mind trying to make sense of how an unknown Outer Sect disciple could become a core disciple directly, and how that person could have learned an immortal technique.

"Sister? Sister!" Zhou Mi called out trying to wake Zhou Mei out of her own thoughts.

"Yeah? What's wrong?" she asked.

"You seemed to be lost in your thought, Sister. What happened?" Zhou Mi asked.

Zhou Mei thought for a second and asked, "You people know him right?"

"Him?" Zhou Mi cocked her head to the side in confusion. Only after realizing who she was talking about did she say, "Oh you mean Brother Yu?"

"Yes, that disciple, the new Core formation disciple. You guys seem to know who he is. Do you know how he is close to the Sect Leader?" she asked.

"Close to the sect leader?" Zhou Mi was once again confused. "I have no idea sister, I have only met him once and that was during Brother Kong's ascension too. In fact, Brother Kong knows more about him," she said.

Zhou Mei turned her head towards Kong Yuhan and glared at him, waiting for him to answer. Kong Yuhan on the other hand started feeling uncomfortable under the intense gaze and said, "I've only met him a couple of times. Due to him helping me a few times I call him a brother. That's just to the extent of what I know about him," he said.

"Helped you a couple of times?" Zhou Mei got a little curious. "Explain."

Kong Yuhan proceeded to tell her how Alex had managed to help him by finding him the incredibly hard-to-find Dwarf Berry, being an Aid during the preparation of the Qi Improvement pill, and then helping him once more during the pill cauldron exploding accident.

"Explain more about the accident again," Zhou Mei asked.

Kong Yuhan proceeded to explain in more accuracy how Alex had managed to throw away the cauldron just before it had exploded during his ascension and how he also blocked the incoming shockwaves and protected him.

"You didn't realize what had happened to your cauldron yourself?" she asked with a look of disdain. Kong Yuhan knew that she hated him for liking her sister, but didn't say anything because of her sister, so he didn't say anything except shake his head.

Zhou Mei then turned to her sister and asked, "You were there too, right? You didn't do anything?"

Zhou Mi simply shook her head as well. "He moved and saved us before any of us even realized what had happened," she said.

Zhou Mei could only think of one thing after listening to the story, ' This person definitely used Elemental Guidance. Another technique that is only known by elders and high-level Core disciples. Just who is this person?' the curiosity was eating her up from the inside.

"Sister?" Zhou Mi had to wake her sister once more as she was lost in her own thoughts once more.

"Huh?" she was jolted awake again.

"Aren't we going to leave?" Zhou Mi asked.

Zhou Mei took her eyes off her sister and looked at the testing hall only to find out that nobody was inside anymore. Not even the elders.

"Right, let's leave." Zhou Mei started walking up front and the two followed behind her. The lecture was already done, so the lecture hall was empty as well. Instead of leaving towards the core disciple's mountain, however, Zhou Mei walked towards the place where the Sect Leader's mountain and the left alchemy garden met.

"Why are you going there, sister? Do you need something in the gardens?" Zhou Mi asked.

"No, I'm not going to the garden. I'm going to the Elder's quarters," she said and kept on walking.

"But why, sister?" Zhou Mi asked in confusion.

"Just go back to the Core disciple mountain, for now, I will come by later. I have something I need to ask my masters about," She left without waiting for a reply.

"Bu— " Zhou Mi was about to say something, but her sister was already far away.

"Sigh, she's always like this." Zhou Mi simply shook her head and looked at Kong Yuhan, who was looking at her too. Kong Yuhan gulped before he said, "Sister Zhou Mi, let us go back to the core disciple mountain and wait for your sister there. In the meantime, we can set up your new home as well," he said.

Now that they were alone, Zhou Mi got a little embarrassed as well and made a simple "mmm" sound to show affirmation. Kong Yuhan smiled and showed her the way to her new residence.

Alex, on the other hand, was already back at his home in the sect leader's mountain. He had employed both the Flickering Shadows Technique and the Veiled Light technique to escape from the crowd of people.

He was late for his university classes, so he took out the communication talisman and messaged his master. "I passed, master. I am currently tired due to cultivating all night and the exam, so I am going to rest. I will see you later for the talk about the forbidden fields."

He got a simple reply back saying, "Okay, and Congratulations." He smiled when he saw that.

Once he was inside the house, he walked into a random room, sat cross-legged, and logged out.

Chapter 196: Walking to the University

Alex logged out from the game at around half past 9 in the morning. Any longer and he would be very late for school.

"Oh no," he said as he hurriedly ran out of the room to go have his lunch before leaving for his classes. He didn't know how long exactly it would take him to reach his university, so he had to hurry up today.

He reached the kitchen and found Hannah halfway through finishing her meal.

"What took you so long? Were you asleep till now?" she asked.

"Uh no. I had a promotion exam in the game and was late because of it," he said.
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"Oh, promotion exam? From what to what?" she asked.

"Uh, from an outer sect disciple to a Core Disciple one," he said.

"You passed it?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Congrats. Now get plate yourself the dishes and hurry up," Hannah said as she continued her food. Alex put some food for himself and ate it as fast as he could. Hannah however still had a quarter of the food left.

"Why are you eating so slowly, sister?" he asked.

"Why should I eat fast? It's not like I have school or anything," she said.

"Huh?" Alex was surprised. "Your school days are over?" he asked.

"Nah. It's only from Tuesday to Friday. I have Saturday to Monday free," she said.

"Oh," Alex said in understanding and ate his food. Slowly he started getting anxious about how to go to the university now that he was alone. 'I don't even know the way. Do I have to use my phone?' he wondered.

'Sigh, whatever. I will just use the phone map.' He quickly finished the meal and wore a fresh pair of clothes for his university class. He put his new laptop into his backpack and opened up the map app on his phone and walked out.

He took an extra key of the apartment and put it in his bag. "I'm leaving," he said and walked out of the house. He got on the elevator and went all the way down. He then looked at his phone for which direction to leave in.

'Left from here,' he thought as he looked at the map.

He had just walked out of the building when he saw someone in front of him. There were 2 people there, but his eyes only saw a single person. It took him a second more to notice the other one.

"Emily? Sarah?" he was surprised.

"Good morning Alex," Sarah said with a smile.

"Go— Good Morning," Emily said in a shy voice with a blush on her face.

Alex reciprocated their greetings asked them what they were doing in front of the building he lived in.

"Oh, I was just on my way to take Emily here to school, but then your cousin messaged me asking if I would mind showing you the way if I had classes today, which I don't," Sarah said.

Alex waited for her to continue and she did.

"So, when I heard that, I instead decided to just let Emily go to the university with you. She needs company, and you need a guide. You two are perfect for each other," Sarah said with a smug smile. There seemed to be another meaning hidden behind her words.

Emily nudged her in the side with her elbow as she got even more embarrassed.

Sarah just laughed it off and said, "Alright, I'll leave you guys to it now, or you will be late. See you tomorrow. Have fun, Emily." Sarah returned back towards her home after waving them off.

Alex was a little stunned at what had just happened, but he still managed to gather his wits and ask Emily, "Shall we go now? Or else we will be late, I think."

Emily checked the time and meekly said, "We- We will still have over 10 minutes remaining on our time even if we walked right now. Either way, w-we should move."

They started walking to the university. Alex was quite unsure of what to do, so he tried to start a talk a few times, but each time Emily would stop the conversation with a simple answer and not keep the conversation flowing.

At first, Alex thought she was doing that on purpose, but then he saw her beet-red face and realized she was just as, if not more, nervous and anxious at being around him than him being around her.

The path to the university was quite convoluted with a lot of twists and turns.

"I would've probably been fine with the map, but I don't think I could've made it here this fast if not for you," Alex said out loud.

"Yo-You think so?" Emily asked.

"Yes, really. Thank you," Alex said.

Emily just smiled a little.

They finally reached university, and it took them about 20+ minutes of walking. "Although walking is fine and healthy, a vehicle would be much better," Alex said.

"Oh, w-why don't I ask Sarah to give you a ride on the days she does have classes?" Emily said.

"Will you? That will be helpful. I will start learning how to drive together with my sister as well," Alex said.

"I- Should I learn it as well?" she seemed to be considering the prospects. "Although, I'm not as rich as Sarah so I don't know if I can even buy a car. Not sure if my parents will get me on either," she said.

"You should be able to earn a few bucks from the game, right? Especially now that you are in the True Realm," Alex asked.

Emily hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should say it or not, but in the end, she did. "I am actually no longer in the True Realm," she said.

Alex was a little surprised to hear that. At first, he wondered why she would lie about the realm yesterday, but when he thought more about it, he was shocked.

"Wait, did you already reach Saint realm?" he asked with wide eyes.

Chapter 197: Reincarnation Problem

"Saint Realm? What? No," Emily said. She was a little exasperated from the absurd guess. "No, I- I actually just died in the game after I reached True realm. I am starting once more, but it's hard since like everyone, I don't have the same talents as my previous self. They are all mortal grade now," Emily said.

"Oh. That sounds quite unfortunate. Would you mind telling me how you died?" he asked.

"Um... I was out on a mission from the sect, a-and I was attacked by a monster who caught me by surprise. I was logged out before I even realized I had died," she said. "After that, the next time I joined, I was made to create a new character and sent elsewhere in the same continent, and that was about a week ago."

"Since I'm not as good as before, I can't earn much money from the game," she said.

"I see." He then thought of something and asked," by the way, what time do your classes end?"

"Around 3 pm," Emily said.

"Oh, the same as me. Would you walk the way back with me as well? I would rather not walk back alone," Alex said.

"S-Sure. I can do that," Emily said timidly.

"Would you mind adding your number to my phone?" Alex took out his phone and asked.

"Of course not," Emily said and timidly took the phone from him and added her number onto his name. She then looked at the clock and said, "umm... My classes are this way. I should hurry up now."

"Oh, my classes are that way. Thank you for showing me the way today," Alex said.

"It was nothing. Don't worry about it. See you later," Emily said and walked towards her classes.

Alex was left standing there feeling something deep within him make him feel weird. "Am I?... no way." He walked to his class.

After the classes were over, he messaged Emily for a place to meet, and together they walked back home. Alex walked a little further to take her to her apartment and returned back to his own.

He got up the elevator to his apartment and entered.

"Oh, you're back already? What time is it?" Hannah was in the living room using her phone.

"It's half past 3. What are you doing sister?" he asked.

"Oh, just browsing the EC forums, looking through the responses to the interview yesterday. Hehe, look at this, so many people are calling me cute and pretty. I might just have to go become a model at this rate," Hannah said jokingly.

"Go change your clothes. I'll prepare some food," Hannah said.

"Alright, sister." Alex went to his room and freshened up. He walked to the kitchen to see Hannah shaking her head as if she had just read something very sad.

"What's the wrong sister?" he asked.

"It's this guy named Connor. You probably don't know him, but this guy came out a month ago as one of the strongest players at the time," Hannah said.

Alex remembered the person. He was the one with the interview from back when he was only a week into the game. "I saw his interview. What about him?" Alex asked.

"Oh, you did? It's just that people were constantly asking in the forums why this guy wasn't invited to the show or why he didn't want to show up, and he finally made a post on his own."

Alex was a little curious about this as well, so he asked, "What about him? Did he not want to come?"

"No, it seems he did. But it turns out, his character died while fighting a relatively stronger monster in the forest. He says, the monster wasn't necessarily stronger than him, but it was more poisonous and he got caught up in the poison."

"Tsk Tsk. Poor guy had to restart all over again, and also lost all of his amazing body and talent. He says he respawned as trash now. He is barely at Bone Tempering realm after 2 weeks of cultivating and constant usage of spirit stones. If this keeps up, he will end up using his entire fortune on the game."

Hannah kept on shaking her head.

"That's quite a coincidence," Alex said a little surprised by the news.

"Hmm... coincidence? How?" Hannah asked.

"Emily said that after her character died, she too got really bad talent and body. She is restarting her climb once again, but with mortal grade talent and body, it will probably take a long time," Alex said.

"Oh, that is actually not a coincidence at all," Hannah said, which confused Alex a lot.

"It's not?" he asked.

"Yeah, there have been many other people who have died and gone back to the game only to find that their new body was unbelievably worse than their first one. It's like the game is punishing them for dying or something," Hannah said.

"Woah, I'm glad I didn't die a month ago. I was damn near close to as well," Alex said.

"You were?" Hannah asked in surprise. "What happened?"

Alex proceeded to tell her about how he fought against the wolf to protect Pearl and his mother.

Hannah cringed when she heard that the wolf bit his skull and left him bloodied. "Ouch, that sounds like it hurt a lot. Well, at least you didn't die from it. And hey, you also got a beast companion from it. I wanted to get one as well, but the monster cubs take too long to grow up," Hannah said.

"Yeah, my cat is quite cute and very strong too," Alex said. They stopped talking and finished their food. Alex helped with the dishes and only returned to his room at around 4 pm.

He logged back into the game and checked his communication talisman, but there was no message. So he messaged his master to ask where she was and if she had the time to meet him. He got a message back.

"I'm in my home. You can come right now."

Chapter 198: Pill Swines

Alex reached his master's home a few minutes later. He walked into the room he previously had gone to and waited for his master. Ma Rong came soon enough.

"Congratulations on becoming a core disciple," she said.

"Thank you, master," he said with a big smile. He didn't know how being a core disciple would help him, but it should ease his master's problem a lot.

"Now that you are one, you should start dressing like it too," Ma Rong said.

"Huh? What do you— Oh," he looked down to clothes and made a goofy smile. "I just woke up from my sleep so I forgot to change," he said.

Ma Rong chuckled a little too. "Although, I heard you did quite badly at the exams," she said.

"Oh yeah, master. To not reveal our relationship yet, I decided to choose a normal cauldron without a lid, and I didn't realize how bad I was at making pills without my regular cauldron and lid. I also stupidly decided not to use Elemental Guidance the first time and it made the pills quite bad as well," he said.
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Ma Rong nodded, "Well, at least you learned how to get a good harmony level even with a trash cauldron. Most other core disciples would simply fail at creating anything above 15% as well."

"However, now you should start learning how to make a pill better, and for that, you need to understand how pills are made," she said.

"How pills are made? Is there more to pill-making than what you've taught me?" he asked curiously.

"Hmm… my bad. I should probably say how pill recipes are made. What I mean is, you should start making your own pills," Ma Rong said.

Alex was surprised. "I should make my own pills? Is that even—"

"Possible?" Ma Rong cut him mid-sentence. "Yes, it is possible. But it is also highly unlikely you will succeed anytime soon. At least, even with your talent, I doubt you will be able to make one without reaching the latter realms of True realm," she said.

Alex got a little confused. "If making new pills are impossible for me until I get into the True realms then what is the point?" He asked.

"Experience," Ma Rong said. "Making pills from the recipe will only help you understand how to make pills, they will never teach you how the interaction between the energies end up affecting a human body when they eat the pill."

"You can tell that fire energy will overwhelm wood energy, but you can't tell what the resulting energy will do. Will it harm a person? Heal them? Increase their strength or speed? What about affecting one's Qi itself?"

"There are many aspects to the energies that you will have to learn and figure out by yourself. And you can only do that by making your own pills," Ma Rong said.

Alex couldn't see any flaw with that statement. Until now, he had made pills based on the recipe. He would easily learn the recipe without any problem and would mostly know what to do.

This, however, had dulled his instinct in pill-making. If only he started to make one by himself could he truly understand how everything worked. But there was one problem that he needed to think of a solution to first if he wanted to do that.

"Umm… Master, if I add in random ingredients willy nilly, won't I cause an explosion? That would at best harm my cauldron and at worst kill me," he said.

"Yes, I know," Ma Rong said. "Not only that, there is another worse problem too. Say you happened to make a pill, what do you do after that?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex thought for a second, couldn't come up with an answer that didn't include eating the pill himself or giving it to some other person. However, that would be completely immoral and dangerous as he wouldn't know what the function of the new pills would be.

"I honestly do not know master. I assume it has nothing to do with feeding other people?" he asked.

"There are evil alchemists out there who will do that, but not us. For normal alchemists there are two methods," Ma Rong said.

"The first one is to feed it to a domestic monster called a Pill Swine. Pill Swine's body composition is very close to a human body, however, they are very bad at cultivation and are slow to breakthrough. This makes them the perfect test subject to experiment on. It, however, can be considered immoral as well depending on your standing."

"The ethics of the method is highly debated as to whether it is good or not among the higher level cultivators who can afford to make their own pills," Ma Rong said.

Alex thought about it, but he couldn't think of why it would be immoral. 'We kill the animals on our farm all the time. If they were bred with an aim, I don't think it's immoral for humans to use them for that,' he thought.

"They don't seem any more different than the ones we rear for food, so I don't think it is unethical at all," Alex said.

"Well I disagree," Ma Rong said. "But, as I said, it's still a debate and nothing is fixed. Maybe I will come to appreciate them at some point," Ma Rong said.

"Are there Pill Swines in the sect?" he asked. "I don't think I have ever heard or seen them."

"That's not weird at all," Ma Rong said. "Pill Swines are only useful for high-level alchemists who can create new pills, so most alchemists won't even have a use for it. As such, we have elders rearing it behind the alchemy garden on the left."

"You can reach it from both here, if you fly down left from here, or if you just walk to the back of the core disciple's mountain. Since only Elders and Core disciples have any possible use for it, the sect keeps them at a place where they both can easily reach it."

Chapter 199: True Nullifying Pill

"I didn't know there were other locations in the sect," Alex said.

"There are. However, they only get revealed to you once you have been promoted. You could've learned about the Pill Swines' location if you had read the new maps," Ma Rong said.

"New map?" he wondered for a second what she meant. "Oh, the new guidebook. I should look at it later. Anyway, Master. What is the second method?" he asked.

"The second method is a bit more controversial since it has to do with using the pills on yourself," Ma Rong said.

Alex was both surprised and shocked when he heard this. This wasn't what he had expected. "Experimenting on oneself? Isn't that extremely dangerous, master?" he asked.

"Yes, it is. But you only do that in the last case scenario where you don't have Pill Swines or have zero clues about what your pill does. You read all the pill recipes, right? Then you must know the recipe to the True Nullifying Pill," she said.

"True Nullifying Pill?" he looked into his memories and found a pill with the same name. However, he had never bothered learning or making it since it was a True pill, and all he could make were common rank pills.

"It's a True Rank pill, master. Is it even useful for me?" he asked.

Ma Rong snickered and asked, "What? You think you can make proper new pills before you reach True realm?" she asked. "Besides, you will just use the Pill Swines most of the time due to the limitations of the True Nullifying pill," she said.
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Alex recalled the information about the pill.

True Nullifying Pills. Nullifies the effect of any recently taken pills. The pill must be less than 5 minutes old to use and the pill taken recently must also be less than 5 minutes old.

"What's up with the time limitations on both pills for True Nullifying pill to work, Master? He asked.

"Well, the first one is just an assumption. We just assume that a normal pill takes effect immediately and is fully integrated into your system within 5 minutes. It can be more or less depending on the pill."

"The True Nullifying pill, however, is an extremely volatile pill that interacts with the energy on the environment itself and counteracts the energy on the environment to nullify it. In about 10 minutes, it can fully release all of its energy to nullify its surrounding. So it is suggested that we use it within 5 minutes to get more than half of its effect."

"You don't have to worry about it for now. Since you will need True Qi to even approach making this pill. Just focus on practicing normally for now," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded his head. "What about the exploding problem then master?" he asked.

"Just get some random low-level cauldrons from the sect market. Since you have full authority in the sect, the elders in the sect market will accept Spirit Stones too for those cauldrons," Ma Rong said.

"I see. Thank you, master. I will do that," He said. "However, I will have to lay it off until after the competition."

"Why?" Ma Rong was a little taken aback. "You still have some time unt— Oh, right. You still want to go there?" she asked.

"Yes, master. I really need those yellow jade rocks from the forbidden fields," Alex said.

Ma Rong sighed unable to deny it since she had already allowed him. "Alright. Go to the right alchemy garden tomorrow morning at 6, I will ask Lang Shun to take you to the fields."

"Thank you, Master," Alex said.

"Don't thank me. I'm sending you to your torture. There is nothing for me to be thanked for. Instead, take this time to prepare yourself. You might be fine the first day, but the following days will be the worst days of your life."

Alex got a little scared now. "I thought there was nothing in the forbidden fields. What you are saying is scaring me now, master," he said.

"You are correct.? It is a really weird place. We didn't know what to do with it at first when we settled down here decades ago, so the sect leader at that time decided to make it a makeshift prison of sorts. "

"There is nothing in the forbidden fields. This is also why it is the worst. The torture for the first few days is Boredom. However, after a week or two, the reason for torture slowly changes from boredom to hunger. There is barely any food, It's all open so nothing to keep you safe from the elements. And probably the worst of all,? there is no Qi."

"Not only is there no Qi, but you also lose all of yours the moment you reach the fields." Ma Rong said.

"Umm…Master. The other disciples were punished so they can't, however,? can't I just take my own food and water there?" he asked.

"Yes, you can. However, you can't use a storage bag. It would have to be a mortal bag, and food that won't get bad very fast," Ma Rong said. "I will ask Lang Shun to prepare some for you. You go and prepare for tomorrow," Ma Rong sent him back.

Alex walked out of his master's house and thought about the forbidden fields for a few seconds. There was one problem that he just couldn't tell master because she couldn't understand or relate to it at all.

"God, what am I going to do about logging out? Do I really just leave my body out in the open. Hopefully, I will be perfectly fine since there aren't any animals out there. I should be mostly fine given my body cultivation. I doubt not having Qi will affect my cultivation at all," He thought and walked back to his home

Instead of staying back at his home to prepare for tomorrow, or going to the sect market to buy some low-grade cauldrons, he decided to change his robes and go check out what the core disciple's mountain really looked like.

Chapter 200: Core Mountain

Alex gave the guidebook a general look-through. It didn't have anything that would pertain to him, other than the fact that he could be an elder if he ever made? 50 pills over 35% in harmony or a Heaven-grade pill.

It also marked the location of the Pill Swines, but he already knew where it was now.

The only new thing he really got to know was the general location of the forbidden fields. But the map was vague about it for some reason. It didn't mark any specific places.

'Is that because it's big?' he wondered.

He walked down to the base of the mountain and walked left to go to the core disciple's mountain.

Now that he was a core disciple, he felt like there were more eyes on him, looking at him with slight respect. Alex didn't let it get to his head, however, and walked directly to the core mountain.

Looking at his robes, the elders that stood guard didn't block him at all. Alex remembered the way to his house and walked along the pathway, keeping all locations in mind.

He looked at the houses along the way, however, none of it were inhabited.

"Hmm… is that what brother Kong told me? Everyone gets put into the houses in order of their entry to the core mountain. So right now, I must have the final inhabited house."

He walked along the way and finally reached his house. From the outside, it didn't look like anything fancy at all. It looked just like the hundreds of other homes lined by its side.

However, he wanted to check how it was on the inside. The door had a similar system to the one in the Alchemy hall, wherein he could place his nameplate on the door frame and it would open up.

He walked inside to check the interior, but it was hardly worth talking about compared to his home in the sect leader's mountain.

"At least it has an alchemy room too," he thought. He walked to the back of the house and saw that it also had a courtyard with a pool in it. Although both were much smaller when compared to his other house, they weren't that bad.

After checking it all, he decided that he liked his other home better and prepared to leave.

He took the nameplate out of the outside and walked out.

"You should be fine staying here now that all the furniture and stuff has been transported. Do you want me to wait here with you for your sister to come back?" a voice came from a house over.

"Yes, I will be fine. Although, I won't mind if you wait with me," A girl's voice came.

Alex didn't even have to look to see who it was.

"Brother Kong, it's good to see you again," he said as he walked out of the house. He then turned to Zhou Mi and said, "It's good to see you've settled in already Sister Zhou Mi."

"Ah, Brother Yu," they both shouted when they saw him.

"You are here finally. I was waiting for you. Congratulations on becoming a Core disciple, Brother Yu," Kong Yuhan said.

"I was quite surprised to see you become a core disciple too, Brother Yu. Congratulations," Zhou Mi said.

"Thank you," he simply said.

"How did you get so good at alchemy? Were you hiding your abilities when you met me?" Kong Yuhan asked.

"Uhh… I don't think it will be appropriate of me to reply that with anything. Sorry brother Kong," Alex said. He didn't want to lie and say that he was good from the very start, or tell the truth and reveal his talents here.

Kong found it a little weird that he wouldn't answer a simple question, but decided to think nothing about it.

"By the way, did you go back to take your stuff too?" Zhou Mi asked, trying to change the topic at hand.

"Uhh… no. I won't be staying here, I got a different place," Alex said.

"Where are you going, Brother Yu? It can't be that you are going to go back to the outer sect, right? Are you leaving the sect for another few weeks?" Kong asked.

"I… " before Alex could even answer anything, a voice came from behind him.

"He is going back to the Sect Leader's mountain. He has a place there after all."

Alex sighed. He had sensed her coming, but he didn't expect her to reveal such information.

"Isn't that correct? Sect leader's disciple?" Zhou Mei asked.

"Sect leader's… disciple?" Kong Yuhan was shocked. Zhou Mi gasped as well.

"Yes. He is the sect leader's first and only disciple. I had my suspicions after seeing his techniques today, so I went to my masters to ask them, but it seemed that they were already in the know. "
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"In fact, most of the elders in the sect are in the know that he is the sect leader's disciple by now," Zhou Mei said.

Alex heard a bit of hatred and jealousy in her voice and was confused for a second if he had ever offended her to get such a response.

"Yes, that is me," Alex said. "Can I do something to help you?"

"Yes, in fact, you can. Stop using the fact that you are a sect leader's disciple as a reason for getting all the different techniques to learn. Some of us here had to struggle for years and still haven't been able to gather enough contribution points for the Flickering Shadows technique, and you've already learned it."

"You must've gotten it months ago and hid your identity from the public, didn't you? Why did you become a core disciple now? Was it to take part in the competition?"

"If so, you better forget about it. Disciples are chosen based on their Alchemy ability. A new core disciple like you can't match up to anyone."

Zhou Mei grabbed her sister and went inside her sister's house, leaving Alex and Kong speechless outside.

Chapter 201: Unfair?

"Uhh… don't mind her, she is known to be cold around here," Kong Yuhan tried to make Alex feel better, but he couldn't think of anything proper to say in response to what had just happened. In fact, if what she said about him getting everything for free was true, even Kong himself felt that the situation was really unfair.

But, he didn't want to say anything about that until he got more information.

"It's okay brother Kong. She wasn't wrong about it being unfair," Alex said.

Kong was stunned. "So, it's true?" Kong asked in a stupefied voice. He couldn't accept what he was hearing.

"About it being unfair? Yes. But what can I do about it? I got lucky. I can't just throw away my luck in search of fairness for others, now can I? It's not like I deliberately went out looking to create problems for others by getting what I got. I took what I was handed and used it to the best I could. If that is unfair, then I am the least of its offender," Alex said.

"But still, If you truly got everything with 0 contributions, then it is wrong. It makes us who actually try and contribute feel like we are looked down on by the sect, never give anything," Kong Yuhan said.

"I never said I didn't contribute at all," Alex said. "I did a lot of things to contribute to the sect. While it is true what I got back might or might not measure up to what I contributed, it is still wrong to ignore my contribution and only look at what I got."

Kong Yuhan's eye brightened up. "So you did contribute. Even if it's a little, it makes me feel better. It no longer sounds like you got everything for free," he said.

Alex simply smiled. He turned around to look back at the house he was going to leave empty for who knew how long. He then looked back to the house two sister's house.

"Zhou Mei's house should be further away, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, but she says she wants to spend a few days with her sister now, so she is staying here," Kong said.

"I see," he said as he looked around the place with the lined-up houses. "By the way, which one is your brother Kong?" he asked.

"Mine? It's that one. The one after that one," Kong said as he pointed to a house that was two houses over Zhou Mi's house.

"Oh right, I recall saying you were the only passing inner sect disciple from last test right? So the house in between yours and sister Zhou Mi's must be that guy from this morning," Alex asked.

"Yeah. He already brought all of his stuff over and is down at the sect valley, I think," Kong replied with a dejected voice.

"What's wrong? You sound depressed right now," Alex asked.

"Remember when I told you I would ask him to switch houses with me? Well, I did and he refused. He had already brought in all of his furniture by the time I got to ask him, and he didn't want to go through the hassle all over again."

"I even offered to do it myself, but the man said he didn't want to live in a house that was already inhabited by someone else," Kong said as he sighed.

Alex thought for a moment and asked, "So… correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't really want his house, right?"

"No, I do want it," Kong replied with a weird look. He wondered why Alex would ask something he had already explained beforehand.

"No, what I meant to say is, you only want a house that is next to sister Zhou Mi's right?" Alex asked.

Hearing this, Kong Yuhan's checks started getting red as he blushed. "Ye-Yes," he answered. Alex smiled and asked, "Why don't you take mine then?"

Kong Yuhan froze for a moment after hearing Alex's proposition. Then, he immediately facepalmed himself, screaming to himself, "Idiot. Why did I not think of that? Brother Alex, would you really be willing to swap house with me?" Kong asked, desperately.

Alex chuckled. "Didn't I just say you can take mine?"

Kong Yuhan's eyes started shining. "Thank you, brother Yu. You are a lifesaver. Let me go get my stuff from my house and we can swap the keys," he said. He immediately ran to his house to get all of his stuff.

It seemed he was waiting for this moment for quite a while and took less than 5 minutes to store everything into his storage bag. He came running back out.
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"Let's swap the key, Brother Yu," he said. Alex nodded and handed over his nameplate. Kong Yuhan took no time to swap the key and handed Alex's nameplate back to him.

Alex checked the nameplate, nodded, and kept it in his bag. "I have the stuff to do tomorrow, so I will leave, brother Kong," he said.

"Huh, you are not going to look at your new home?" Kong asked. "Is it because I used to live there? Cuz I can promise you, it's only been a week since I got it and I haven't touched anything in there aside from the alchemy room."

"That's not it, Brother Kong. Remember, I have a home in the sect leader's mountain as well? Well, it's actually better than this house and it's closer to my master's so I like staying there. I might actually just ask master to give away the key to this house to someone else if I get the chance," Alex said.

"Ah, I see. That makes sense," Kong Yuhan said.

"Anyway, it was good seeing you, Brother Kong. See you later," Alex said and started walking away. While returning, he passed along the sect valley to check if there were any Yang Jade, but there weren't any.

Disappointed, he returned back to the sect leader's mountain and went back to his house.

Chapter 202: Calling Parents

Alex made a few more pills before the end of the day. They turned out to be pretty fine, although none of them reached Heaven grade. One did come very close though.

Afterward, he logged out of the game.

"I haven't talked with my parents for a while. I should let them know about the money at least," he thought. Until now, he had been scared that they would scold him for not studying properly when they specifically sent him here just to study.

But now that he was making a lot of money from the game, he didn't fear anything they would say. In fact, he hoped to change their views.

His mother picked up the phone after only 2 rings.

"Hello? Alex? How are you doing son?" she asked.

"I'm fine, Mom. How are you? How is dad?" he asked.

"Oh, we are perfectly fine, did you eat your dinner?" she asked.

"No, I was just about to go eat it and I thought I should call you first," Alex said.

"Awww, Did you hear that? Our son has grown up so well," Alex's mon said.

"Of course I didn't hear it. You don't have the phone on loudspeaker," his dad's voice came from the back.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm putting it on. So, how is the new place, and don't lie to me. You've lived for 3 days now, you must have some ideas, right?" his mom asked.

"It's actually one of the best places to live in the city, I think. It's really high in the building and it is very fancy. Let me show you my room," he said and quickly turned on the camera.

He showed around his room and started describing everything he thought his parents would not recognize.

"Wait, go back, go back, go back," his mother said.

"Where?" he asked.

"To your bed," she said. He quickly turned his camera to show his bed, and only then realized why she had done that. 'She is really sharp,' he thought.

"What is that? Is that game thing?" she asked.

"Yes mother," he said.

"Who gave you that? Give it back immediately. It is so harmful to you," his mother said. This quite surprised Alex. He hadn't seen her go this angry ever since one of the neighbor's cows escaped the enclosure and ate a lot of the growing plants on their farm.

'Is the severity of the situation the same in her eyes?' he wondered.

"Nobody gave it to me, Mom. I bought it myself," he said.

"What? With what money?" she exclaimed. "Dear, did you send money to our son without telling me?" she asked his father.

"What? No. Don't accuse me of such a thing willy nilly. I don't even have the money to pay for the new tractor's installment this month. I will have to ask John for some. Why would I be sending him money?" he said.

"You guys are lacking money?" he asked. His parents never talked to him about the finances other than the occasional stuff he would hear about accidents. He only knew that his parents didn't have a lot of money, but still did their best.

"That is not the topic of discussion we are having right now. I asked what money you bought that harmful thing with," she asked.

"Harmful? It's not harmful, mom. It's for playing games. It just makes you see and hear different things; it makes you feel like you are in a different place. That's all. There is nothing harmful there," Alex said.

'No, I know it's harmful. I heard what it does to your body. John's sons both started to get lazy and stupid after using that thing. He bought it for them a few weeks ago and now he regrets it, saying that his children are all lethargic all the time, never there when he needs them and worst of all, they can't even work in the fields properly anymore. So, he had to make them get used to it all over again."

"He already sold back those things, and is now starting to rehabilitate his children, making them get used to the work again," his mother said.

"Anyway, give that back to who you got it from. Was it Hannah?" she asked.

"What? No. I got it myself," Alex said.

"With whose money?" she asked again.

"With mine. I earned money from the game," he said.

"What? Who do you think you are lying to? You think I will believe something as stupid as someone earning money from those childing video games?" she said.

"I did, mom. I actually earned a lot more than just a little," he said. He then switched the subject. "Do you know how much this apartment costs, mother?" he asked.

"What? Apartment? I don't know. 300 dollar? 400 dollar? I know it's expensive, but it shouldn't be more than that right?" she asked.

Alex chuckled a little. His parents were just as oblivious about the expensiveness of the city. "It costs about 10,000 dollars a month," he said.

"What?!" both his mother and father shouted at the same time. His father who had been silent for the most part started speaking. "Is that true, son? Why are you staying in such an expensive place? I doubt my sister and brother-in-law can pay for that much every month," his father said.

"That's the thing, father. They don't. Sister Hannah pays for it all herself. She too earns money from the game," he said.

"But... 10,000 dollars is a lot son. That's what we make in a year before counting the profits," his father said. Out of nowhere, his voice grew solemn, "are you really making that much son? Are you really making that much money son?" he asked.

Alex tried to nod and say yes again but instead decided to do something else. He quickly went onto the internet to access his account and took a screenshot of the money.

"I have something coming for you," he said and then sent the screenshot to his parents.

Chapter 203: Transferring Money

"Hmm… what is this?" his parents didn't realize what was sent to them so they opened it up on their old smartphone. "Why is the text so small? Wait for a second, let me get my glasses," his father said and left the room, leaving his mother with the phone.

She didn't know how to zoom the picture either, so she just waited for her husband to come back with his glasses. He returned in less than a minute with a large, string-tied spectacle on his face.

"Let's see then, what is this?" he looked at the text, but the only thing that he immediately saw was a number around 380,000. "What is this number?" he asked.

"Look carefully, father," Alex said.

"Alright," his father said as he looked at the picture a bit more. It didn't take him more than a second to realize he had missed a crucial symbol from the number when he read it beforehand. He had missed the $ sign.

"This— This can't be true," he said as his hands started shaking and he nearly dropped the phone. Alex's mother hurriedly grabbed the phone and started scolding, "stop acting like an old man and hold the phone properly.? What are you doing shaking like that suddenly?"

"But honey… L-look at that. Look at what our son just sent us," Alex's father said in a shaky voice and handed her his glasses.

"What? What did he send us?" she said as she took the glasses and put them on. It didn't take long before she started shaking too.

"A-Alex. What is this?" she asked.

"That is what I earned from the game, Mom," he said.

"But..but how? How do games pay so much? You aren't lying, right? You didn't get into any shady business, right son?" she asked.

Alex wholeheartedly chuckled. "No mom, it's all from the game. In fact, sister Hannah makes more than me," he said.

"Oh, lord! These children are going to earn more in a month than we did in our lifetime," his father's voice came from behind.

"So, father. You said something about payment for the tractor or something. How much do you need?" he asked.

"It's an installment system. I need about 600$ a month for 4 years to pay off for the new tractor," his father said.

"Hmm… so, about 30 thousand? How about I send you guys 50 thousand today. I will wire it into your guy's bank. Buy yourself something good with the remaining money," Alex said.

"No, son. You earned that money. You keep it yourself. So, you keep it for yourself. We will manage on our own. Just seeing our son grow so much is more than enough for us," his father said.

"Don't say that father. I wouldn't be here if not for you. I will send you the money today. I don't have much need for it. You guys might as well put it to good use," he said. "Besides, I can earn more if I needed to."

"I-is that really true, son?" his mother asked. She had tears on her face.

"Yes, mom. You can finally buy that solar-powered water heater you have wanted for so long," he said.

"Oh," his mother chuckled. "You know about that too? I thought I kept that to myself quite well," she said.

"Yes mom," Alex said.

The parents-son talked for a little longer before ending their talk. Alex then opened his account once more to transfer 50 thousand of his money to his parents for their needs. He felt no hesitation there whatsoever.

In fact, he felt proud of himself. Pride in what he had done to help his parents further. Proud of what he had become.

He looked at the time and realized that it was almost 8 pm, so he quickly walked out to go to the kitchen.

"Oh, hey sister. You are done with your food?" he asked.
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"Yeah," Hannah said as she looked back from the sink. She was just done washing her plates. "What took you so long? I even waited for you for almost half an hour."

"Oh, I called my parents and we talked for a lot longer than I had expected to," he said.

"What? You called Aunt and Uncle and didn't let me talk to them? What kind of stupid little brother are you?" she said.

Alex laughed and said, "I told them about the money I earned. I doubt they would be interested in anything else after that."

"Oh, so they know you make 25 thousand dollars now? I haven't told my parents yet," she said.

"You probably should. Also, it's not 25 thousand anymore sisters. I made an additional 360 thousand dollars yesterday," he said.

"Wait, you did what?" Hannah was surprised. "I thought you didn't have that high of cultivation base. How did you earn so much? Did you follow me and got married to someone too?" she asked.

"Haha, no. I got lucky and found a very special flower called Spirit Cleansing Lily that allows you to unlock Spiritual Sense before even entering Saint realm," he said.

"What? There is a flower-like that? What do you do with it? Eat it? Make a pill with it? Some sort of soup? Or use it in a formation?" she asked many questions.

"No, you just cultivate with it," Alex said. "As long as you hold it with you while you cultivate, you will unlock spiritual sense," he said.

"Oh, I don't know if such a thing will even work for me," Hannah said.

"Why not? You just have to cultva— Oh, that's right. You don't have a cultivation method. Well, I don't know what to do about that. Maybe it works? Who knows. Either way, if you ever get your hands on them, use them. That is if you haven't already reached Saint realm by then," Alex said.

Hannah left Alex behind and went back to her room, while Alex finished eating what was prepared today. After washing the dishes, he too went back to his room and logged into the game once more.

Chapter 204: Just before

Alex logged back into the game at around 9 pm and decided to make some more pills for now. During the next 3 hours, he made the pills, he managed to make exactly 2 pills in heaven grade.

One of them was a metal-aligned pill, so it was not a surprise when it came out with 53% harmony. However, he was pleasantly surprised that the wood-aligned pill also turned out to be 50% harmony.

He was quite happy with himself with this result.

"Once again, I can't cultivate, can I?" he thought. He needed to wake up at 6 tomorrow morning as well, so he just didn't cultivate once more. He didn't want to fall asleep and not wake up in time.

So, he called out Pearl once more. "Meow," Pearl said as it came out. He walked up to Alex and started licking his arms. Alex slowly rubbed his back and said, "We are going to cultivate once more, buddy. You alright with that?" he asked.

"Meow," Pearl screamed in confirmation.

Pearl's body started glowing once more. Going from white to yellow to golden light when numerous small cuts appeared all over Alex's body. However, he was easily enduring these.

"Sigh, ever since the pain has disappeared, my body cultivation speed has dropped significantly as well," he said. "Do I feed pearl some monster core so he can get ahead of my body cultivation and I have to catch up once again?" he wondered.

There were numerous theories in his head as to what was going on, however, none of them made sense due to the sheer lack of information available to him. He still had yet to find anything about Evolution in the game itself.

"Do I really have to go and check the internet? But I don't want to spoil myself." He was falling into a dilemma. For now, he decided to ignore the possibilities and concentrated on the ongoing circumstances.

Pearl cultivated in peace over the course of the entire night, while Alex just sat there bearing the pain that barely got him any stronger than he already was. Still, he was sure that this small amount of increase would soon gather up and be substantial enough.

Early morning, at 6 PM, he finally stopped Pearl from cultivating anymore. Once he was done, he sent Pearl back into his tattoo space and got ready to leave.

"Martial uncle is supposed to get the food for me, right?" he thought back to what his master said, and hoped she remembered.

Suddenly, a string of information appeared on his communication talisman which he took out to read.

-Lang Shun is waiting for you at the Right Alchemy garden-

-Take your food from him-

-Stick to the safe parts and return in 3 days-

"The safe part?" he wondered what that meant. 'Wasn't all part supposed to be dangerous, yet not?' He thought. He assumed he would know what she meant after entering the forbidden fields and went out of his house.

He went down the sect leader's mountain and quickly reached the Alchemy garden on the right side.

"Oh, there you are martial nephew Yu." Lang Shun was a bit further away when he noticed him.

"Good morning, Martial uncle Lang. I will have to rely on you this morning," he said.

"That is no problem. Congratulations on becoming a core disciple, finally. I knew you could do it," Lang Shun said. Alex thanked him with a big smile.

"I heard you said you wanted to go to the Forbidden fields. Why?" he asked.

"I ... have my reason," Alex decided to not speak about his pans.

"Whatever. If my senior sister couldn't make you stop, then I'm not even going to try," Lang Shun said.

"Alright, come with me," he said and took Alex towards the crevice between the sect leader's mountain and the alchemy garden. There, Alex finally saw a small opening.

"Is this what leads to the forbidden fields?" Alex asked.

"Yes. You have to go through here and only then will you reach the forbidden fields. Now, I must warn you about a few different things," Lang Shun said.

Alex started to listen attentively.

"First of all, since you will lose all of your cultivation temporarily once you enter there, you will start to get hungry very soon. So, Senior sister asked me to prepare these foods for you," Lang Shun said as he took out a small pack of food.

"Don't put these in your storage bags, or you won't be able to take it out anymore," he said.

"Yes, martial uncle," Alex said as he took the food.

"Secondly," Lang Shun continued, "If you do end up finishing your food too early, there are cliffs along the side of the field with food growing on top of them. Try to hit them with stones to drop them. Absolutely do not try to climb them."

"You sometimes end up forgetting that you are nothing but a mortal in there and try to get up there when you are really hungry. Try not to do that. Go against your instincts. However, I hope it doesn't come to that, since you will have plenty of food for now."

Alex was still listening.

"Oh yeah, if anyone asks what you were punished for, just say something generic like you stole some ingredients from your neighbor. Although..." Lang Shun looked at Alex's cloth and said, "You might want to change to less attracting clothes."

"Less attracting?" Alex looked down on himself and realized his Martial Uncle was talking about the Core sect's robe. He swiftly changed his clothes to the ones from outer sect one that he had kept.

"This should be fine, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, That is enough," Lang Shun said.

"Now, the third and most important thing you have to remember. A few kilometers past where you enter, you will find a river with clean flowing water. Most people in their punishments stay around here for the water source, and that is how far the forbidden fields under our control actually goes to."

"Beyond that live dangerous beasts. Not very dangerous to cultivators, but to mortals, any attacks of theirs are lethal. Make sure you never cross the river,"

Chapter 205: The Forbidden Fields

Alex was a little shocked. He had not heard about this danger from his master or anyone before.

"But I thought that the Forbidden fields were a bunch of grasslands with nothing in it. Was that false?" he asked.

"Oh no, it is what you have heard for the most part. The part we call Forbidden Fields is actually just a small part of the otherwise huge land where one's cultivation is stifled. Forbidden Fields just last until the river, after that is the desert where the monsters live," Lang Shun said.

'Desert?' he was shocked. 'A land of sand, like the southern continent? Aren't I in the western continent according to sister?' he thought.

"Are these monsters in the desert of high cultivation?" he asked.

"Cultivation? No. As I said, the forbidden fields and beyond don't have Qi. These monsters just grew up with a strong body after adapting to that environment," Lang Shun said.

"So, do we know how strong they are?" Alex asked.

"Not really. From the speed and strength they show, it is assumed that they are around the Muscle tempering realm in terms of strength, but who knows. There could be stronger ones inside the desert. No one who has ever entered the desert has ever come back to give us information."

"So, just try to stay away from the desert. Be careful when you drink the river water too. Although the monsters stay on the other side of the river, they might come to this side if they see you. There has been only a few cases so far, but it's okay to be careful."

Alex fell into contemplation. Assuming the lack of Qi did not stop his body from being as strong as it is, he should have no problem in the forbidden fields. However...

'What will I do if I have to leave the grassland and enter this desert,' he thought.

Soon, Lang Shun and he came across light at the end of the tunnel. After coming out of the tunnel, he finally saw it.

A vast land of green grass far away into the distance. Beyond that was a slight color of reddish-yellow. Alex looked directly in front of him and saw the steep slope all the way down to the grassland.

There were two elders standing guard on either side of the openings of the cave he had just exited, probably looking after the 'prisoners' in this open prison.

"Another disciple, Eighteenth Elder? We weren't notified about this," the elder on the left asked.

The elder on the right just looked at him and asked, "Isn't he the sect leader's disciple? It can't be that he did something worthy of this punishment, right Eighteenth Elder?"

"Don't mind me and my martial nephew elders. He requested to enter the forbidden field himself," Lang Shun said.

"Requested himself? Does he not know how troublesome the forbidden field is?" the elder on the left asked.

"It's alright, Elders. I requested this despite knowing the problems," Alex said.

"Alright then. Since you are going in on your and are not being punished, you can come back here whenever you want," the elder said.

"Thank you, Elders," he then turned to Lang Shun and said, "Alright, Martial Uncle, I will leave now."

Alex thanked Lang Shun and left the cliff. The road downhill was steeper than he realized. Thankfully the rough terrain had plenty for his sole to grip. Now that he was coming down, he looked at the side of the cliffs.

Numerous trees were growing on it horizontally. 'Is that where the fruit grows?' he wondered. Below the cliffs were tiny, nearly dust-sized specs of something moving. 'Are those the disciples being punished?' he thought.

Judging by the number, there were a lot. 'I wonder what they did to deserve their punishment and how long they've been here. From the Elder's explanation, any time over a week would be a torture,' he thought.

Finally, after a few minutes, he reached the bottom of the path and was in the grassland.

Suddenly, a force surrounded his body, forcing his Qi to stop showing out. He tried to fight it back, but the force was too strong. Slowly, all of his Qi was pushed to inside his meridians and his body was now a mortal.

At least, it was mortal from the perspective of Qi cultivation. 'Is my body cultivation fine?' he wondered. He tried jumping high and was happy to find that his body wasn't changed at all.

However, he realized that his Spiritual sense was suppressed as well.

'Welp, at least that is there. Still, this force... feels so familiar, and yet so distant. What is this?' he wondered. Either way, he needed to look for Yang jades now, so he moved along.

The grassland was truly vast. It was only from the top of the cliff that it looked like he could see it all. From the bottom, it looked like it was endless. He didn't know where he should start looking for the jades, so he starts with wherever was closest and moved out.

The problem he had now was that he would soon have to log out to go to his classes and due to the lack of Qi, he couldn't hide his body. 'That is going to be a problem,' he thought.

Still, there were around 2 hours before he had to leave, so he was fine for now. Searching for the Yang jade should have been easy for him. All he had to do was be in the vicinity and his body would locate the yang jade itself.

And yet, no matter where he went, he couldn't find a single one. 'Damn, can I even roam it all in 3 days?' he started to worry. The flat plain was so vast that Alex couldn't even see a single disciple.

After 2 hours, he got unnaturally hungry. 'Is this because I haven't eaten in ages?' he thought as he brought out the food his martial uncle had given him and ate some of it.

Finally, once his stomach was full, he found a batch of tall grass and laid down on it. He didn't know if this was the correct thing to do or not, but given that both his master and martial uncle said there was no danger in the grassland itself, he logged out.

Chapter 206: Zheng Min

Alex logged out of the game and woke up from his bed. He had woken up on time today. He freshened up and decided to check his school works for a bit before going to the kitchen for dinner.

Hannah was out already and had cooked the food.

When she saw Alex walk in she asked, "Don't you want breakfast? Why didn't you log out earlier?"

"Ah, I had things to do in the game," he said.

"This early in the morning?" Hannah asked.

"Yes," he replied.

Hannah stopped asking any further questions and got the food ready. "Sorry about not helping you sister. I will try to log out to at least help with the vegetables, "he said.

"No need, I can do it myself. Besides, I don't like eating potatoes with blood all over them," Hannah teased him.

Alex sighed as he looked at the finger he had cut. 'Mom was somewhat right about us losing our abilities to function normally, wasn't she?' he thought.

He quickly got ready for his classes and walked out of the house with Hannah. Sarah and Emily 'happened' to be outside their door when they arrived at the bottom of their buildings.

"Oh, you guys are finally down. We waited for nearly 10 minutes," Sarah said. It seemed Hannah was now good friends with Sarah after their last meetings and Hannah had asked Sarah to take them with her in her car.

Alex was still somewhat shy around Emily but did his best to not show it. Soon, they arrived at the University and walked towards their own classes.

While returning, however, Alex was stuck walking back with Emily. It seemed Sarah had more classes even after 3 pm, while Hannah's classes were done more than an hour ago.

So they walked back together, talking about different things. Alex came to know a few more things about Emily, while she learned a few more things about Alex. Both giggled their way back home.

Alex wanted to bring her to their apartment to serve her some snacks while she waited for Sarah's classes to be over, but he remembered that he left his body alone back in the game. So he hurriedly said his goodbyes and went up the elevator.

Thankfully, Hannah had the lunch prepared which he hastily ate and went back to his room. Then, he logged in.

Alex realized that he was right where he had left his body, his food right next to him as well.

GRRR

He felt himself go a little hungry and was surprised. "Just how hungry can I get? I only ate this morning," he thought. But then he remembered that what he ate this morning was nowhere near what a mortal would eat in a day, so he just shook his head and ate a bit more.

He hung the bag in front of him and looked at the size of it. Only half a day had passed, and he was already done with more than a third of the food his Martial uncle had sent him.

"Urghh... martial uncle miscalculated how much food a mortal needed to eat," he thought. He was disappointed, but he didn't have time for that. He needed to search for the yang jades.

He put his food inside his robes and walked around the land waiting for his body to tell him anything. 'I hope I don't need to have Qi for my body to find the yang jades. That would be tragic,' he thought.

He didn't believe that to be the case, however, since it had to do with the Body and not cultivation at all. He walked around for hours searching the yang jades but found nothing. "Damn, just how rare is it?" he thought.

Suddenly, Alex heard some groaning nearby. He looked back and saw someone lying down on the floor, trying to move around, but unable to. He couldn't tell what was happening, but he immediately ran towards the person.

The person was on the floor, with chapped lips and sunken cheeks. "What's wrong?" Alex asked seeing the dastardly look on the person's face.

"Wa-wat—er ," the man said, unable to form a single sentence. Alex was shocked to see someone like that. He didn't have any water on him, so he decided to carry him to the river source a few kilometers ahead.

He picked the man upon his back and started walking in the direction of the river. It didn't take him long to arrive at the river source where he put the man down and walked forward to the river to get him some water.

"What do I gather water with?" he thought for a second. He didn't want to bring the dying man here due to the dangers his Martial Uncle told him about. He decided to gather water in his two palms.

By the first time he walked back to the man, he realized how ineffective that was. He needed to find another way. Suddenly, an idea struck him. He took off his robe and dropped it in the river, waiting for it to absorb the water.

He then brought it back to the man and put it over the man's mouth, letting the water drip on his face. Within a few minutes, the man started to show signs of recovering and by 10 minutes, he was back to walking and talking.

The man still had chapped lips and sunken cheeks but his complexion was healthier than before. He looked at Alex with his hollow eyes and said, "Thank you brother. You saved me. If you weren't here, I would've died of thirst in this treacherous place," he said.

"It's okay brother. It is my duty to save a fellow disciple from my own sect," he said. Alex only now looked at the man's robe and realized that he was actually an inner sect disciple.

"My name is Zheng Min, what is your name, brother?" he asked.

"Yu Ming,"? Alex replied, giving him his in-game name.

Chapter 207: Trust

"Once again, Brother Yu, thank you for saving me." Zheng Min nearly got on his knees to thank Alex for saving him. "As I said, Brother Zheng, don't worry about it," Alex said.

Zheng Min stood up and walked to the river to drink some more water. By the time he returned to Alex, he was breathing very heavily. "Are you okay, Brother Zheng?" Alex asked.

"Huff huff, My body is still not fully ready for me to walk so much," Zheng Min said as he laid back down on the ground, breathing rather heavily. Alex was going to ask him about Yang jades but decided to wait until he was ready to talk.

Zheng min looked around and looked at Alex. He noticed something black on Alex and asked, "Brother Yu, what is that black thing?"

Alex didn't know what he was talking about at first, but then he saw the little black bag where he kept his food, and answered him, "Oh, this? This is my portion of food."

Zheng Min's eyes perked up. "That's food, brother Yu?" he asked. "I am really hungry right now, brother Yu. I haven't eaten in days, can I ask you to give me some food?"

Alex didn't want to waste any more food, but seeing the sorry state of Zheng Min, he decided to hand him some. He took out some food and gave it to him. Zheng Min finished the given food in less than a minute.

"Ah, that was good," he said in satisfaction. "Where did you get such food, Brother Yu?" he asked.

"I brought it along with myself," Alex said.

"You brought it yourself? They allowed you to?" he asked, but then noticed the wet robe Alex was holding and said, "Is your cultivation base really not that high that the sect decided to let you carry your food? Hehehe."? He started laughing and didn't stop for a while.

"Anyway, what crime did you do to come in here, Brother Yu?" he asked.

"I... uh stole some ingredient from my neighbor while he was sleeping," Alex lied through his teeth. However, Zheng Min thought nothing of it. "Same here brother. I've been here for nearly a month now. I hope yours is not that long, or you won't last with that little food," Zheng Min said.

"I should be fine," Alex said. They stood up and walked back away from the river. It was dangerous and they didn't want to stay there that long. Along the way, Alex asked Zheng Min about the yang jades but turned out Zheng Min didn't even know what Alex was talking about.

Disappointed, he dropped the subject. Soon, Zheng Min started to huff and puff again. Learning that the time was nearly 8 pm, he decided to log out for now.

"Why don't you rest, for now, Brother Zheng? I will rest too," Alex said.

"Really? Thank you, brother Yu," Zheng Min said as he fell down to the ground and started taking deep breaths again. Before Alex could even say anything, he fell asleep.

'He must've been really tired,' Alex thought and he sat down near and got into a meditating lotus position. After that, he logged out.

He had gotten into the game without changing his clothes, so he quickly changed his clothes before going to the kitchen for dinner. Hannah was already there waiting for him, so he had a proper dinner with his sister.

After helping her with the dishes, he went back to the game half an hour later.

He logged back into the game and opened his eyes. In front of him was Zheng Min, standing a little further away. His eyes were wide open. On the right hand, he held a pointed stone with a red tip, dripping something.

On the left hand, he had a lump of something black.

Due to not being a cultivator anymore, Alex couldn't see everything as clearly as he could when he was a cultivator, but thanks to body cultivation, it was still much better than normal humans.

"What is that?" he asked, a little disoriented as to what was happening. Suddenly, a sharp pain appeared in his chest. Alex looked to his left chest to see that his robe was in tatters and there was a large cut on his skin.

The cut was a little deeper than his skin, but that still hurt him quite a bit. He quickly tore off his robes and put them on the would. The wound itself wasn't bleeding a lot, but he still decided to do it.

Once the robe was torn, he realized that there was nothing inside. His ration of food had disappeared. His eyes turned wide and he immediately looked at Zheng Min who was still in shock. It was then Alex realized that the black lump on his hand, was his food.

It didn't take much after that to realize that he had been attacked by Zheng Min.

"Wh-Why?" Zheng Min asked. "Why won't you die? How are you still alive?" he asked.

"You-You attacked me?" Alex asked in shock. He had helped the guy so much, even saved him from near death, and yet, he had attacked his heart with a sharp rock If it wasn't for the fact that he cultivated body, he probably would've successfully plunged the rock into his heart.

"I saved you-why would you attack me?" he asked.

"Ha-Haha-ha ahaha," Zheng Min started to laugh. "Can't you see? I want your food. I nearly died due to the lack of food. I'm not letting that happen again," he said.

"But I saved you?" Alex asked.

"So? As a criminal, you must know that trust is as fickle as the snow in summer. Still, as a thank you, I wanted to kill you while you were in your sleep. Why wouldn't you die? What kind of treasure are you wearing over your body?" he started asking.

"You... betrayed me because you wanted my food and tried to kill me in my sleep as thanks?" Alex asked in shock. He was starting to feel something he had never felt before.

Chapter 208: Hurt

Betrayal. Alex had heard about that before. Seen them in many movies and television series. He even made sure to remember not to get tricked when his master had taught him different things.

Yet he never understood what it felt like to be betrayed. Well... now he had.

Multitudes of emotions were running across Alex. Shock, surprise, pain, anger, and disbelief. He couldn't believe that the person he saved today had not only tried to steal his food, but also tried to kill him.

"A criminal, huh?" Alex said. "I should have known about this. You guys aren't good people. Some, maybe... but definitely not all of you. Haha"

Alex laughed at himself. " I was too gullible to have helped you in such an environment. Not only did I helped you, but I also did more than I needed to do, and for that I got back-stabbed. Well, that is a good learning lesson. Thank you for that," Alex said as he stood up which still holding the cloth to his chest.

"Now, if you would be so kind as to return my food back to me, I might consider letting you go with simple bruises for what you did to me," Alex said.

"Wha-What? Do you think you can take this from me? Keep dreaming," Zheng Min said as he turned around and ran as fast as he could.

Alex simply shook his head and dashed forward. With his incredible strength, he crossed a great distance in an instance. In less than 3 instances, he reached Zheng Min and tried to grab him.

Zheng Min blocked with his left hand, and Alex accidentally grabbed the black bag of food. Alex decided to pull the bag out of Zheng Min's hands, but he had a surprisingly good grip.

Unfortunately, the bag wasn't as strong as either of their grips. Right through the middle of the bag, a tear opened up that slowly traveled all over the bag, and before either of them could do anything, the contents of the bag got thrown all over the grasslands.

Alex was scared to see the food get thrown all over the place. This was his only food for the next 2 days and he had now wasted it.

"No, the food," Zheng Min cried out in shock. He was more horrified at the sight of the foot getting thrown away than Alex was. After all, Zheng Min had to stay here until his punishment was complete, while Alex could leave anytime he wanted.

Alex got angry at the situation. "You not only betrayed me and tried to kill me, and now you ruin my only supply of food too," he said angrily through his gnashing teeth. He immediately jumped forward and dropped Zheng Min to the ground.

"You are here for punishment for some crime you committed, right? Let me punish you then," he said as he stepped on Zheng Min's arm.

"ARRRHHHHH,' loud, painful sound came from Zheng Min's mouth as Alex pressed down on his arm. "Stop, please stop. NO. I'm sorry, I won't do it again, stop," he started crying, but Alex didn't lift his leg. Instead, he pressed more.

"AHHHH." A more painful sound came out of Zheng Min's mouth as the pain started to become unbearable.

"Wasn't this the arm you tried to kill me with? Don't worry, I won't kill you for trying to kill me. I'm not as petty as you," Alex said.

"Ahhh, then stop. Stop hurting me," Zheng Min shouted.

Alex, however, just said, "I said I'm not as petty as you. That doesn't mean I'm not petty at all."

CRACK

Suddenly, the sound of a broken bone rang out from Zheng Min's arm after Alex finally crushed it beneath his feet. The sound that left Zheng Min's mouth after that couldn't be put into words.

The sound was so painful and loud that even Alex winced a little. He lifted his leg to look at the nearly flattened arm.

"That is for trying to kill me," Alex said. Zheng Min continued to wail, listening to nothing Alex was saying. "As for betraying me and stealing and ruining my food...," he trailed off as he moved his leg up the arm to his shoulders and placed it there.

"You really deserve to be punished." Without a single ounce of hesitation, he crushed his shoulder too. Audible cracks could be heard even through the wails of Zheng Min as the shoulder plates and collar bones broke in succession.

Even Alex felt a little shiver when he heard that. He decided to leave him there and looked for his dropped food. He found a few, but due to being unable to use spiritual sense, he could not find any others. It didn't matter, he was sure they were dirty now.

He didn't even have anything to carry, as even the robes he was wearing were in tatters. 'Sigh, now all the food is gone and I feel horrible,' he thought.

He left the place soon after there were no more cries in the air as Zheng Min was already unconscious from all the pain. Alex first wanted to destroy both his arm in anger but decided to let him a way to live. He didn't want to get on the level of a criminal like him and kill people.

He ate what food was remaining along the way, while still holding his wounds. He looked at the wound that was still bleeding a little and said, "Dammit, why has it not healed yet? Does healing has to do with Qi too?" he wondered.

All the other times he had healed quickly from the cuts, he had assumed that it was because of his body, but it turned out it was because of his Qi. The pain wasn't unbearable, but it also wasn't something he wanted to stay with.

Soon, he stopped walking. He looked at the dark sky and sat down there. He wanted to do nothing more after how sh*tty the night had been. So, he decided to search for the Yang Jades tomorrow morning, and for today he simply logged out.

Chapter 209: Party?

For nearly two hours, Alex couldn't sleep at all. After how horrible the night had been, the feeling of being betrayed still left a bad aftertaste in him. He saw where the problem lied, he knew he was good to others. But he would have never imagined that someone could do such a horrible thing to their own savior.

"He must've lied about how he became a criminal too," Alex thought. Nobody capable of doing such a thing could be a simple thief.

The other thing that had horrified him was the reaction he had shown to betrayal. He had nearly killed the man. Although the man had tried to kill him too and definitely deserved it, he was still shocked that he could even think of doing such a thing.

"At least I didn't kill him. I don't think I am capable of that right now," he thought. His master had said that he would have to kill to survive in this cruel world very soon. He didn't want the very soon to become now.

However, if push came to shove, he wouldn't hesitate to do that either. Just like what he did today, he knew deep down, that he was capable of doing that as well. No, he had to be capable of doing that.

"You can't live a kind soul in a world of cruel ones. You end up getting even more tainted." Alex decided to forget about everything and fell asleep.

Early in the morning at around 7 am, he woke up from his sleep. He quickly freshened up and went to the kitchen for breakfast. Surprisingly, Hannah wasn't up yet. So, he decided to return the favor for her, and make some toast and eggs.

By the time he was done, Hannah had already come out of her room.

"Wow, I thought I smelled something nice. What are you making?" she asked.

Alex served him and his cousin as he put the breakfast on the table and said, "Toast and Eggs. Come sit. You've been preparing me food for so long, so I decided to return the favor."

"Oh, you didn't cut your finger again right?" Hannah teased. It was either this or something about Emily that she always teased him with.

"Oh, right. I need to ask you about something," Hannah said.

"Yeah, go ahead," Alex said inquisitively.

"So, on upcoming Saturday, Sarah has asked me to go shopping with her for the new capsules. It will be us 4 and some of her other friends, I think. Do you think it's a good idea to throw a small celebration party of some sort afterward?" she asked.

"Saturday? I don't know, sister. I have something important going on in the game around that time, and I don't know if I can leave that or not," he said.

"Important?" Hannah was surprised. "How important?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "Depending on the time frame, I might have to skip classes that week."

Hannah was a little shocked at his response. "Skip classes? That important? What is happening in the western continent?" she asked.

"It's just in the Crimson Empire. We have an upcoming annual competition for all the sects there. I haven't confirmed how long it will last, but I will leave for the capital city around Friday. So, I may or may not be able to do anything on Saturday," he said.

"Although, the competition should be starting on Sunday, so maybe we might get lucky," he said. "You know what, let me confirm with my master on Friday, that should be enough time for preparation, right?" he asked.

"Yeah, that should be fine. It's just ordering some stuff online," Hannah said. Soon they finished breakfast and Alex helped Hannah prepare their lunch before they left for their classes.

Alex went back to his room and logged in to check on himself.

He was back in the familiar grassland, laying on the ground. The sky was as clear as ever, with no signs of clouds, let alone rain.

"Now that I think about it, has it ever rained since I got in this game?" he thought. He remembered quite a few days with clouds hanging in the sky but It never rained.

"Urghh," he grunted as he stood up. His hand was somehow still holding the torn robe to his chest. He tried to pull it off but turned out, the blood had dried up and left the robe stuck to his chest.

He slowly pulled it out, making sure he didn't reopen his closed-off wound. Finally, he sighed in relief once the robe was out. While his physical healing wasn't as good as his Qi one, it still was enough for him to not lose too much blood to such a small wound.

He tried to see if he was hungry, but thankfully he was not. However, given that he would have to get some food for himself later on in the day, he decided to do it now and leave later for finding the yang jades.

He still wasn't getting anywhere close with that thing.

He walked to the cliffs where the fruits were growing high up and reached there in about 15 minutes. "I still have more than an hour before I need to leave," he thought.

There were more than a few people near the cliff. Some trying to climb up the side, some just throwing stones, hoping to hit the fruits. However, neither of them was successful as the fruits were over 50 meters up the cliff.

That was a very high place for all of them to reach. Alex was also stumped for a second. He didn't want to climb the cliff, so he could only throw stones at the fruits. But at such a? height, his accuracy would suffer a lot.

The dozens of disciples there were all either outer sect disciples or inner sect disciples. He didn't see a single core disciple.

"That Song Zun guy was sent here too right? For 2 months I think. I wonder where he went," Alex thought, but quickly ignored it. It was time for him to get some food for himself.

Chapter 210: Butterfly Pears

Alex walked up to a relatively free spot and picked up a decent-sized stone.

BAM

A small noise came from right next to him as a stone rolled a few times before stopping. "Sh*t. I need to be careful of falling stones too, huh?" he thought. With everyone throwing rocks high up in the air, it felt like a rain of rock was falling on them.

Alex looked up at the fruit hanging high up the side of the cliff and threw his rock at a moderate force. He didn't know how strong he could throw the rocks, but given that he could punch dents into trees, it should be quick hard.

The stone flew off of his hands like a professional baseball throwing his perfect pitch. The speed was amazing, however, the accuracy was nowhere near enough to even hit the trees on the side of the fruit.

He missed the entire thing by at least a 3-meter margin. Alex cringed at himself, seeing the bad throw. He looked to his left and shouted, "Oi, dodge. The stone is falling." The man who was about to throw his rock took 3 steps back and Alex's rock fell exactly where he had been standing.

The man nodded to Alex and continued throwing his rock. Alex found it a little funny that he couldn't even reach 30 meters with his throw. 'How are they ever going to eat that food?" he wondered.

Alex tried his own a few more times and got the hang of it. Soon, he was passing by the side of the fruits by a couple of centimeters.

"Ohh, so close," he thought. He threw a few more times and hit the branch holding fruit, and the fruit came floating down. The leaves of the fruit made a sort of parachute for the fruit so that it didn't smash into pieces as it fell to the ground.

Alex caught the fruit and looked at it more carefully. Suddenly, a name popped into his head. [Butterfly Pears]

'It's an alchemy ingredient?' Alex was a little surprised. Still, he didn't bother thinking about it a lot. He rubbed it a bit with his cloth and dug into it.

Juices dripped down the side of his mouth as the sweet nectar slid down his throat. This was the first time he had bothered eating something that was not cooked in the game, and it truly showed just how much he was missing out on.

Before he even realized it, he had finished the entire pear. He could feel his body being revitalized from that single fruit and he couldn't help but be curious just how much better he would feel after eating more.

Suddenly, a notification appeared in front of him

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body disintegrates everything>

<The fruit's element aligns with your spiritual roots>

<You have gained 23,485 Qi>

Qi appeared in his as it passed through his body. He felt the wound on his chest quiver a little as if they were being healed.

That wasn't a lot of Qi. However, he wasn't expecting any, so that was quite a surprise. Suddenly, on his mortal body, he could finally feel where the Qi he acquired went.

The Qi traveled across his entire body until it came down to his naval area and suddenly grew dormant. It was so still that Alex had a hard time knowing whether it was even there or not.

Any other time he ate a Core or pills, or the new Qi he acquired would vanish into his body, never to be used towards his cultivation. They would only show up on the status page and nowhere else.

Alex had started to believe that the Qi that did not belong to his cultivation base were just random numbers that would produce extra Qi for him when he broke through.

But finally, he needed to be a mortal to figure out that the new Qi was actually going to his naval area and hiding.

"But why there?" he wondered. However, there was no answer.

Alex continued throwing a bunch of more rocks and got 3 more fruits. By now, the nearby disciples had already come to ask him for some of the fruits. However, Alex wasn't so naive as to hand over them his own food. Especially to these disciples who were being punished for some crimes they did in the sect.

He told them to get their own and left the place with his fruits. Some tried to follow him, seeing his 3 fruits, but after realized that they would be far away from the cliff, they returned back.

Alex ate the three remaining fruits and searched for the yang jades a little more. In the end, he never found any. So, reluctantly, he logged out.

It was time for lunch, so he went to get some food. Hannah was already there, so they ate together. After washing the dishes, they both went back to their rooms to get ready for their classes and left.

Once again, Sarah and Emily were waiting for them. The 4 of them got in Sarah's car and went to their classes.

"God, I need to learn how to drive a car too. It looks so handy," Hannah said.

"Why don't you? You should have enough money, right?" Sarah asked.

"Yeah, but I don't have the time. I will try to make some soon," Hannah said. "I will need to talk to him about it," she said in a small voice.

"What?" Sarah asked, unable to hear what she was saying.

"Nothing," Hannah changed the subject.

Soon they reached the university and went to their own classes.

After the classes ended, Emily and Alex were once more left together, forced to go home. They didn't complain. They walked back home together, talking the entire way.

After getting back, Alex once more wanted to invite her in, but couldn't. He went back to his apartment, ate some snacks, and jumped back into the game. It was time to seriously hunt for some more Yang Jades.

Chapter 211: Scorpion

Alex logged back in and woke up in the familiar grassland. He stood up from where he was sleeping in the grass and looked at his wound immediately. Fortunately, it was all but healed.

"2 more fruits should do it," he thought. He would go back to the cliff once he was hungry. For now, he decided to start looking for the yang jades.

His tattered robes were not a good sight to look at and he desperately wanted to take another robe out from inside his storage bags. Unfortunately, due to his qi not working, he couldn't.

"God, even if my spiritual sense just worked, I could do something," he thought. He tried to push out his Qi, against the pressure of whatever was suppressing it, but in the end, his efforts were futile.

Next, he tried Spiritual sense once more. He tried to push the suppressing force once more, using a lot of his spiritual sea in the process.

It was working. He was pushing back the suppression force from his mind and was starting to be able to use his spiritual sense a little. It was one a few centimeters around his mind, but that was a positive result nonetheless.

In the end, he ended up drying his spiritual sea in the process and stopped. The suppression force slammed back, making him unable to use it again.

Alex breathed heavily as what he did took a lot of effort out of him. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead and he was feeling really hot right now. After resting for a while and cooling down, he moved on.

Every location in this place looked the same. There was not a single tree in sight and the entire land was covered in grass. If it were not for the cliff behind him and the sun's location, Alex doubted he could even remember where he had been and where he had not with his eidetic memory.

He walked on and on and on, for hours on end but still didn't manage to find any yang jade.

"Damn, just how rare is it?" he thought. He continued searching and searching and found that he had searched every single place in the grassland. He only had 2 places left to be searched.

One was the cliffside where the disciples were. He could go along the base of the cliff and see if there were any. He could also try to swap fruits for yang jades with the desperate ones if they had any.

The next place was the river bank. There could be some there, but Alex hesitated a bit due to the danger his Martial uncle said was there. However, he couldn't stop now because of some danger.

He was quite thirsty too, so it was the perfect time to go there. He reached the river bank on one end, where the cliff met it. The other side of the river was a desert that Alex had seen previously.

He didn't have time to admire it last time given that Zheng Min was dying and he was busy helping him. He did however remember the yellowish-red sands. Those were quite surprising to him.

When they had mentioned that a desert was a land filled with sands, he had assumed it would be white sand, like the ones found in river banks, but this was different.

"How different are the other places too? These volcanoes, glaciers, oceans," he couldn't help but wonder.

He drank water from the river and was about to leave when something rustled behind him. He immediately turned around to see what it was.

Surprisingly, or maybe as expected, it was a monster. It was a normal-looking scorpion, with a black exoskeleton and a pointed tail that was sure to have venom in it. The thing that surprised Alex the most was its size.

It was nearly 2 meters in length and a meter in width. He looked at the scorpion with wide eyes, and the scorpion looked back. The scorpion showed no contemplation before it directly ran towards him to attack.

It tried to snap at him with its two pincers in the front, but Alex was fast enough and he jumped back. The scorpion didn't stop, however. It continued moving forward and tried to snap at him a couple more times.

Alex didn't have to worry much, however. His Elusive Heavenly Sword was good enough for him to dodge the monster's attack. He tried to look for an opening to smash the beast's head.

The scorpion attacked him once more, trying to snap at him. But Alex managed to dodge and threw a punch at its head.

Suddenly, the scorpion's tail came at him, faster than any attack that the scorpion was doing until now. Alex hastily dodged backward and the venomous stinger barely went past his head.

Had he been a second late, he would have lost his head right now. Even if his body was strong enough to survive the hit, the poison would surely kill him.

Putrid smell hovered in the air as Alex subconsciously breathed it in. Realizing what he was doing, he immediately exhaled every single breath of air he had taken just now.

"That was close. I nearly breathed in the venom," he thought. He didn't know if the venom in fact did work like that or not. But it was never a bad idea to prepare against the worst.

He once more tried to attack the scorpion, only this time he was ready for the stinger. The stinger came as expected and went past him. Just as the tail was outstretched, Alex jumped on the scorpion's back and grabbed its tail with all of his body.

And then, he ripped it out. Surprisingly, the scorpion's defense wasn't as strong as he had assumed. He rotated the ripped tail and slammed the stinger back into the scorpion, killing it in an instant.

Only then did Alex got off of it, and look a large breather. The fight hadn't lasted long, but it was a very dangerous one, and he was happy to have won in the end.

Chapter 212: Snake Monster

A full moon hung in the southern part of the sky and illuminated the grassland. The sun had been down for nearly two hours, but thankfully, there was light now.

Alex was walking down the river, searching for the yang jade, but he couldn't find any. He had come across a few more scorpions as well and had killed them just like the first one. He had also come across a few torn bodies, clearly belonging to the Hong Wu Sect.

He managed to find a perfectly fine robe belonging to what he assumed was a now dead inner sect disciple, so he quickly changed into it.

"I will continue later," he thought and walked back towards the grassland. He had been walking along the river bank for over 4 hours now, and it was time to log out for dinner.

After finding a good place to keep his body, he logged out.

Hannah had been waiting for him at the kitchen table. He quickly ate his food and helped his cousin with the dishes.

After they were done, he quickly got back into the game.

Once he stood up from the place, he realized that he was getting hungry. However, he still had to search for the yang jades. That was the entire reason he had been here in the first place. If he couldn't find a few tonight, it would be 2 days wasted here, just like that.
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"Why are they so rare? Master had 3, and those at the marketplace had one each, so why am I having such a hard time finding it, when I should be the one finding the most," he thought.

Reluctantly, he started to scour the river banks once more. He was extra careful not to fall victim to an ambushing monster, so he kept his eyes and ears open. The river kept on flowing, and the moon shone bright; the night was beautiful, and yet Alex hated it because he couldn't find any yang jades.

"That is just ridiculous. Why can I find snakes, and centipedes and scorpions and not a single Yang Ja— " Suddenly, he felt a THUMP inside him.

"This feeling… " His eyes started shining brightly as he knew what was happening. He had finally found one.

He started looking around for the yang jade, trying to locate it using his body. It didn't take him long to realize that the yang jade was inside the river. He started to get worried.

Outside the river, he could fight with the monsters and be on the lookout for them. But in the water, where nothing was visible and made no sound… that was a problem.

"Sh*t," Alex thought. He started thinking of ways to go into the river and not get attacked in the water. He tried thinking of ideas and only a single one came to his mind.

If he didn't want to get attacked in the water, he needed to get attacked out of water.

He started shouting and smashing rocks together to make as much noise as he could and tried to lure the monsters in the vicinity so that they would leave the water. It was a crazy idea as the noise he was making, made it hard for him to hear the monsters approaching as well.

But he had no choice and could only hope for the best. He did stop once in a while to make sure there was nothing around him.

However, no monster or even humans came by. In the end, he figured there were none in the vicinity and decided to walk in. Just then, he saw an unusual pattern of waves on top of the river, illuminated by the moonlight.

"Something's there," he said to himself.

Suddenly, a rather large snake appeared from the water as it started hissing at him. Alex's first thought was to run away, but then he felt something. The yang jade was moving. His eyes turned wide as he looked at the snake. The yang jade was inside the snake.

The snake itself was about half a meter in diameter, but it was way too long. Thankfully, it looked like it was a water snake, so the chances of it being venomous were very low. Still, it was a good idea to stay cautious.

The snake saw him and slithered towards him, opening its mouth wide, showing the two bright fangs. Alex immediately dodged its attack and started punching at the snake. The snake wasn't as fast or had a poisonous stinger as the scorpion, so Alex freely attacked it, keeping tabs on where its head was at all times.

But suddenly, its tail came from behind him, slamming at him and sending him flying away. Thankfully, Alex landed on the grass and wasn't hurt much.

"Sh*t," he said and ran back at the snake. The snake was pretty beat up with just a few attacks, so it was nothing strong. So, he went and attacked some more. The tail made it very annoying to hit it for long and the fangs were just as scary, even when he had deduced that they weren't venomous.

In the end, he managed to kill the snake with enough blunt trauma. He pulled the snake's corpse onto the grassland and started ripping it apart with his own hands.

Slowly, he felt his way through the snake's body, until he found something. He yanked it out and saw it under the moonlight. It was a disciple's corpse, and he was holding the yang jade with him.

Alex was stunned for a second. A disciple had just died like that, eaten by a snake. Did this disciple really commit a crime that was worthy of death like this? The cruel fate the disciple had to suffer made Alex nauseate.

Was the sect right in doing what they were doing? Was cheating or stealing punishable by a death sentence? He couldn't understand what was going on. In the end, he dug up some land and buried the disciple while taking away the yang jade.

Chapter 213: Boss

Alex walked along the river once more, but couldn't find any yang jades anymore. He had washed the yang jade and kept it in his new robes and hoped that he didn't lose it. How he wished he could use a storage bag right now.

Seeing that there was nothing in the area, he walked towards the cliff to gather some fruit to eat. He was after all starting to get really hungry. When he reached the cliff, there were very few people there, only 3 at most.

"Are they all asleep right now?" he wondered. It was late into the night and their mortal bodies probably couldn't handle the fatigue all they, so they had gone to rest for the day. As for these people awake right now, they probably hadn't had anything to eat all day and were really hungry.

Alex was hungry too, so he could understand their sentiment. He picked up a stone from the ground and targeted one of the branches with multiple pears. He arched his arm back and released the stone with a massive swing.

He hadn't used his full power, and yet the stone made a swish sound in the night, very audibly. Unfortunately, he missed.

"Look out for the stone coming down," he cautioned them. It was especially hard to see the stones now in the moonlight when they were moving really fast. Once Alex heard the stone fall somewhere behind him, he picked another one and threw it up.

He had to throw a couple of times to accurately hit the branch that was over 50 meters high above him, and even then, only 1 butterfly pear fell down towards him.

He caught it and bit into it. Once more, juicy sweet nectar slid down his throat. He just couldn't get enough of it. The 3 disciples around him looked at him in envy, at the fact that he had only just arrived and was already eating something.

They directed their anger towards the fruit and started throwing the stones harder. Alex could hear both the grunts and the growls the 3 disciples were doing.

He ignored them and focused on hitting more of the fruits. After a few more tries, he managed to hit the branch once more and two more fruits fell down gently.

He caught both of them and started eating another one. His hunger was starting to be satisfied, but the taste of the pears was so good that he started to want to overeat them.

The other 3 disciples were more than just jealous now, they were subconsciously thinking of how to get the food from him. Alex saw that too. So, before they could do anything, he spoke.

"I have an extra fruit here, and I am willing to trade it," he said.

"Trade?" the three disciples made a weird expression. "We can't access our storage bags, how do you want us to trade?" they asked.

"Simple," Alex said as he brought out a Yang jade and showed it to them. "If you can find me one of these, I can give you this fruit," he said.

The disciples looked at each other for a few seconds, making an awkward atmosphere, and then violently started laughing. "HAHAHAHA, What? Are you trying to be the boss?" they said with tears in their eyes from laughing too much.

Alex was not expecting this reaction from them. In his mind, they would either get angry, saying that they didn't have it, and order him to give it to them if he didn't want to get hurt.

Or get happy and show him a yang jade, in which case he would swap one with the food. But he never expected them to just laugh at him. This was a really weird incident.

"What's going on? Why are you laughing? Do you not have these?" he asked.

"Hahaha, Stop trying to act like you're the boss. We've already seen the boss before," one of them said.

"Haa, That might have worked on some poor newcomers, but us who have been here for a while now won't get so easily scammed. If you think you can swap the yang jade with us old ones for a single fruit, then you are mistaken boy," another one said.

"It seems you don't know that the boss trades two fruits, instead of one for the yang jade," the third one said.

"Huh?" Alex was truly confused now. "What boss are you talking about? It seems you know what a yang jade is, so, will you swap it with me or not?" he asked.

"Go away kid, we don't have any. If we did, we wouldn't be stuck here, trying to hit the fruits down," the first person spoke. "We could've just trades yang jades with the boss for food if we had one. We wouldn't be in this current predicament."

Alex was really intrigued by the current information, so he said, "Give me information about this boss and I will give you this fruit."

The three guys looked at him weirdly. "You want to know about the boss? We don't have much information about him," one of them said.

"Give me any. This is my first time hearing about this boss and is really curious why he wants yang jades so much," Alex said.

"You really don't know anything about the boss?" the three asked in confusion. If he didn't know about the boss, why did he try to impersonate him? They were quite confused right now.

"No. I only came to the Forbidden Fields two days ago and I do not know much about this boss," Alex said.

The three people's eyes went wide when they heard this. "If that is true, then... you really don't know about the boss?" They asked.

Alex simply put forth the pear towards them and said, "Enough nonsense, do you know anything or not? I don't have time to waste on you people."

"Wait, wait, wait, we will tell you. We will tell you about the boss," he exclaimed and continued, "It all started about a week and a half ago."

Chapter 214: A few weeks ago

"Everything was normal for a while now. I had been here for half a month by then, these two came a few days after me. At first, we had no problem living in this place. It was dangerous around the river, but that was that." He said.

He then pointed up the cliff and asked, "Can you see that? Around 30-meter marks."

Alex looked at where he pointed and saw marks of something. He couldn't make it out exactly due to it being so high up and the moon wasn't at an angle to hit the walls of the cliff yet.

"What is that?" Alex asked.

"That, my friend, is the remnant of the trees that used to grow there," he said. "Before the boss came here, there used to be trees around those marks. Numerous fruits hung there, and those who were punished would stay around here, hitting the tree in hope of making it fall."

"We were still punished, but life wasn't terrible. But then, he arrived, the boss."

"Around a week and a half ago, he came to that spot in the corner and surprisingly, climbed all the way up to the 30-meter mark on the cliff. And then, he destroyed everything," the man said. The other two were just listening.

Alex was a little surprised at where the story was going. 'Did a glutton enter the forbidden fields?' he wondered.

"There already wasn't enough fruit for all of us, and yet the man took most of them all himself. People started to criticize him at first, but quickly stopped and instead cheered him. That was because he moved along the side of the cliffs and started dropping all the fruits to the ground."

"Before a day had even passed, he managed to drop hall the cliff's worth of fruits to the ground. Everyone was happy seeing this, but soon, they started to get worried. The man had gone to the other side of the cliff as well."

"People realized too late that he was getting rid of all the food for us. In the end, aside from the boss, nobody could get the food. It was then that the boss named himself the boss and put on a new rule," the man said.

"What rule?" Alex was curious.

"He said that if we could get him Yang Jades, he would give us 2 fruits. Now, yang jades were rare, but not impossible to find. However, the many disciples here scoured the entire grassland and in less than a week, there was none to find."

"Some stupid idiots even tried to go to the other side of the river to get yang jades. Some succeeded, most died there. In the end, most of us got stuck here trying to find food for ourselves," said the old man.

Questions started running across Alex's head. So, he decided to ask.

"What is this boss's name?" he asked.

"No idea, he only refers to himself as the boss," the man said.

"Then, what does he want with the yang jades?" Alex asked.

"Again, No idea. He takes the jade and leaves. He never tells us what they are for," he said.

"Where does this boss of yours live then?" Alex asked.

"He is not our boss. We just refer to him as one. Also, he lives in a cave on the cliff on the left side," the man said as he pointed far away.

Alex realized these people didn't know anything about this boss. So he decided to change the question.

"What did you do to get here?" Alex asked.

"Me? I got into a fight with someone else and beat them. Both of us got sent here, but the other person didn't have to stay as long and left a week ago," the man said.

Alex looked at the other two and expected them to answer too.

"I stole ingredients for a pill from the inner sect disciple I was aiding," said one man.

"I destroyed the house of someone who was trying to court the girl I liked," the last person said.

Suddenly, hearing their reasons for being sent here, Alex's perception of them changed. At first, he thought they were vile criminal scum that deserved to be hungry and punished, and now, they were just broken people who did stupid things on impulse.

One stole, another got into a fight, and the last one destroyed a house. What was stolen, could be given back. One could make up after a fight. Houses could be rebuilt. But sending people like these to suffer for so much time was not something he saw the sect doing.

"Unless..." he thought. It originally wasn't meant to be a tough punishment. "Master did say one would be really bored here. Hunger was just something that came later," he thought.

'These people were sent here to be banished from society for a few weeks and contemplate on their mistake. And yet, their very survival has become hard. I should tell master about this when I get out.'

'Also, I will have to find this boss and see what need he has for these yang jades. Given that he collected them, he must have a lot,' Alex started to get excited at the notion of dozens of yang jades.

"How much longer do you have to stay here?" Alex asked

"A few more days," they all answered.

"All right," Alex said. He picked up a couple of rocks and shoot them at the trees up above. Soon, the pears started dropping and he handed out one to each of them in thanks for the information.

The three were nearly brought to tears seeing food after so long. It turned out, they hadn't eaten in over a day and were really desperate for it. They were even planning to go to the boss and try to beat him up for the food.

Alex asked them why they didn't already. If the boss had so much food, they should have tried to at least steal it, if they couldn't beat him. Their response was simple.

The boss was way too strong.

Chapter 215: Sword

"Strong?" Alex asked. He was a little surprised to hear the word 'Strong' on a disciple from Hong Wu Sect, in the forbidden fields. 'Is the boss a body cultivator like me as well?' he thought.

Those were supposed to be incredibly rare due to the limited opportunity one had to become a body cultivator.

'If he really is a body cultivator, what need does he have with yang jades? Could it be?' Alex started thinking of many things. One thing he felt was guaranteed. This man was definitely not a player.

So, if an NPC had a body similar to his own... Alex had some questions to ask.

'But if he really is a b0dy cultivator, then dealing with him will be hard. I will at least need a weapon with me.' There was only one thing he could think of doing to increase his opportunity of winning against this boss if they ever got into a fight.

He needed a weapon. And what better weapon was there than his steel sword. Alex had tried to use the inventory, but the system said that he did not own any storage bags and was empty.? Thankfully, He knew of another method.

"I need to fight against this suppression and increase my area until I can release my sword from my storage bag," Alex said to himself. He knew that was possible. At least, it was possible to fight against the suppression with his spiritual sense.

"I should be able to do it if I bring my storage bags next to my head right?" he thought. The idea felt a little stupid, but if it worked, it wouldn't be stupid at all.

Alex left the three men and went along the side of the cliff, constantly trying to fight the pressure with his spiritual sense. He didn't immediately use everything in his spiritual sea and instead sent out a steady stream of spiritual sense that continued to replenish at the same rate as his expenditure.

He was trying to get used to fighting the pressure before actually fighting it. Along the way, he asked a few more people for yang jades just to see if they had it, but he found that almost all of it had been given to this boss in exchange for food.

'Damn, If I had gotten here a few weeks ago, I would've had yang jades everywhere,' Alex thought.

He didn't go ahead anymore and instead just walked over to a random spot in the grassland and started intensely practicing his pushing with a spiritual sense.

At first, it felt easy cause he was getting used to the pressure, but once he tried to actually push with more than just minimal force, he remembered just how hard it was.

His spiritual sea was getting used up very quickly and had disappeared a lot. He felt his spiritual sense spill out of his head and go a little further away.

His range was around 30 cm now. He quickly took a storage bag and brought it to his head. He sent what little spiritual sense was coming out of him and sent it into his storage bag.

Once inside, he realized that his spiritual sense couldn't enter all the way through the bag. Even inside the bag with massive space that was disconnected from the real world, he was still being suppressed.

Thankfully, a different sword was right on the front. He quickly pulled it out using his spiritual sense. A muffled sound rang out as the sword fell onto the grasses.

Alex stopped fighting the suppression force and let his spiritual sense get pushed back into his spiritual sea.

Huff Huff

He hadn't realized how much pressure he was putting himself in and had even forgotten to breathe somewhere through the process.

He lowered himself and picked up the sword. The sword he had taken out was the common mortal grade sword that his master had given to him.

Unlike his Steel sword, however, even after refining, this sword had never displayed any better abilities. "Guess that is what you get from the trashiest of the swords out there," he thought.

Alex practiced his Elusive Heavenly sword to make sure he could still use it even without the Qi, and he could.

He then looked at the time. It was 4 am. 'Sh*t, I need to find the boss and take away his yang jade,' Alex thought and walked towards the direction the 3 men had given him.

It took him about an hour to reach the place where the boss stayed. Surprisingly, there were a few different people already here.

"Please, just a little bit. I swear I will find the stones tomorrow," a man cried.

"Please boss! I haven't eaten in 3 days. I don't have the strength to look for the yang jades or even throw stones. Please, give me something to eat," another woman was wailing. Her cheeks looked very sunken.

"Brothers, please ask the boss for something. I-I can join you guys too. I can help you. Just give me some food."

Everyone here was here in the first place because they were desperate for some food. The feeling of hunger was not something one enjoyed after being content for months on end.

Now their bodies didn't have Qi to survive, and the boss had taken away all other forms of satiety. They were ready to do anything for just a single bite of the fruit up there.

Alex felt bad for them. Even if they did the most heinous of crimes, they were already being punished. They didn't need another random person to come here and add more punishment onto them.

"Get away from here. Go and find some yang jades for the boss. Only then will you get something to eat," a big-bodied person said to the group of people that were begging.

His body was almost as big as Kong Yuhan's but he looked more like a thug with his current situation than a cultivator.

Alex knew exactly where he had to start his operation from.

Chapter 216: The Boss

Alex had the sword somewhat hidden behind his back. If someone were to give him more than just a glance, they could see the hilt in his hand and the shiny tip revealing from the side of his shoulder.

Hiding was never Alex's intention in the first place. He only wanted to not stand out immediately.

He walked straight ahead, past the begging crowd who ignored him. The big guy and the other lackeys of the boss that were behind him saw him coming and said nothing.

In their eyes, he was just another person coming to beg. However, the boy that had just come looked straight at them and asked, "I'm here for you boss. Can you tell me where he is?"

Alex wasn't expecting a proper answer but still wanted to see how these henchmen of the bosses would react to him asking that. As expected, they started laughing.

"Hahaha, you want to meet the boss? Dream on kid. Even we get to barely meet the boss every day, and you think you can meet him after just arriving here? Haha," the man kept on laughing.

"Brother!!," one of the other lackeys walked up to him and said in a small voice and said, "look behind him, is that...?"

"Hmmm? What's behind him?" the big guy to look.

Alex didn't bother hiding the sword anymore. "You guys talking about this? Oh, I only brought it here to deal with your boss. However, I can use it to deal with y0u too, if you want me to, that is," he said.

The group of henchmen was shocked. Not at his statement, but the fact that Alex had a sword. No one was allowed anything before they were sent away here. Even their storage bags were confiscated by the elders.

"How do you have a sword in the forbidden fields?" the big guy started to get a little scared. He could fight against these empty-handed, weak, hungry, and tired folks that knew nothing but how to beg.

But a fine person with a weapon on top of it was an actual problem.

"Oh, let's just say I got lucky, hehe," Alex said. "Anyway, so is your boss not here?" he asked as he poked his head to the side and looked toward the hole in the cliff.

That was where he was supposed to be staying.

"You can not meet the boss. You think our boss is afraid of a random sword from a nobody?" a henchman at the back screamed.

"Oh, then what about you. Will you take a sword strike from this nobody?" Alex asked as he stared at him with a slight smile on his face. The henchman hesitated.

"Alright, I will have to ask you to step aside so I can meet this boss of yours," Alex said as he started walking towards the cave.

"No you don't," the big man tried to use his carelessness as an opportunity to strike at him. Alex was waiting for him to do that. The punch was very slow for him, as it was done by a mortal after all.

Alex easily dodged the incoming punch by a hair's width of distance and returned a simple punch with no force, to his solar plexus.

The goon fell to the ground and start wheezing as the pain and difficulty to breathe hit him at once. The other people behind him got shocked that the strongest one of them got defeated in a single hit.

"You dare!!," another of the henchmen screamed and came right at him. Alex straight kicked his legs, stumbling him to the ground and have a solid kick to the back of his head, fainting him in the process.

Alex turned toward the rest who had made no movement yet and asked, "You guys gonna fight me too?"

The goons immediately shook their head violently and started pointing towards the cave. "The boss is there, don't hurt us." They immediately shouted and gave up on their boss and ran away.

The begging disciples on the ground had noticed the violence and were now staring at Alex in shock. They couldn't believe that someone would actually dare come fight against the boss.

"Is he...? stupid or brave?" someone asked.

"Whatever he is, if he can succeed, it will be awesome. I will help a little if he needs my help," another person said.

Alex ignored the rest and started walking towards the cave. He had his sword with him, still unused, shining in the moonlight.? Just as he was nearing the cliffside, he suddenly heard something and saw some movement at the opening of the cave.

"Goddammit, who is making so much noise during the night. I'm trying to sleep here," A voice came from inside. It was the voice of a man unenthusiastic about what was happening and angry that he had been woken up for no reason.

Soon a man with a lean body and scruffy beard came out of the cave, being lit by the distant moonlight. The man lazily stretched himself as he yawned and looked at the different people in front of him.

He saw the group goons that he had employed looking at him terrified. He saw the group of beggars on the ground looking at him and another man that was standing there.

He finally looked at the single man standing in the moonlight with a blade on his back. At first, he didn't care much for the newcomer. Plenty had tried to fight him before, but they never won against him.

However, when he looked at his face a little more carefully, he lost all sense of laziness and an evil grin appeared on his face. "It's you."

Alex was shocked when he saw the boss as well. The dark green robes, the lean-looking body, and the face of someone bad. He remembered this core disciple very clearly, as he had helped Alex a lot indirectly.

The boss was Song Zun.

Chapter 217: Revelation

"It's you!," Alex said in shock as he stared at Song Zun standing in front of him.

"So you came here by yourself brat. I wanted to kill you myself when I went back to the sect, but it seems that I won't have to do anything crafty to find you and kill you. You came to your death yourself," Song Zun said.

'Kill me?' Alex was shocked that that was the intention Song Zun had. If he was strong, it would be dangerous right now.

"Kill me? Just because I found you doing something evil?" Alex asked with a snort.

"Hehe, I've killed people for less," Song Zun said as the grin on his face became even more dangerous.

Alex finally realized. He wasn't up against a person who did some low-level crimes and got sent here for a few months. He was now going to fight against an actual killer.

'Damn, does that mean he had killed people from Hong Wu Sect before too?" Alex wondered but immediately ignored the different thoughts popping in his mind as this was not the time to be getting distracted.

"You should be ashamed making so many people hurt and hungry for no reason at all," Alex said.

"Is that all you want to say to me? Don't you want to apologize before I kill you?" Song Zun asked.

"Apologize? You got into this situation because of yourself. If you hadn't stolen your alchemy ingredients from the alchemy gardens, you would've never been here in the first place," Alex said.

"Besides, I'm not here for them in the first place. My original intention is to take away the yang jades you have gathered anyway. So our intention to fight each other is the same."

Song Zun frowned. "You want my yang jades? What use do you have for them?" he asked.

"What use do you have for them?" Alex asked the same question back.

"Pfft. HAHAHAHAHA," Song Zun laughed. "Nice one kid. Alas, you are a day late. I have used up all the ones I gathered by now," He said.

"Used up?" Alex asked in confusion. 'He knows how to use the yang jades too? Does he had the Son God's Divine Yang body like me or is it something else?' Alex wondered.

"Enough talking. You can go die now." Song Zun launched forward and delivered a normal punch at Alex. Alex immediately brought both of his hands upfront and tried to block the attack.

Instead of blocking, however, he was sent flying backward by the sheer force behind Song Zun's punch. Alex managed to flip in mid-air and landed on his feet, but he couldn't help but be surprised by the force behind Song Zun's punch. His arms were fully numb from the strike.

Song Zun was shocked to see Alex perfectly fine as well. He had expected to put a hole in his body, and instead, he was just sent flying backward. There weren't even any signs of broken bones or anything.

"Did... Did the boss get weaker?" one of the people on the side asked.

"No way, he defeated that terrible Zheng Min without any problem. He can't have gotten weaker than before," another person said.

"But, that new guy wasn't even hurt," another person said.

"Are you guys idiots? Look at how far he was thrown back with a single punch. You think somebody weak can do that. Instead, the newcomer must be really strong as well. Hell, I'm getting out of here. I don't want to get in the fight between these two," the girl said and immediately ran away from the area.

The others got up and ran away as well after realizing that she was right.

Song Zun looked at him with a stunned expression and asked, "Was that a fluke, or did you really block that?"

Before Alex could even answer anything, Song Zun once more rushed forward with a much stronger punch. Alex didn't let him get him this time. He too threw a punch right back at him.

A not-so-small sound resulted from the clash of their two punches. They were both sent back and stood on their feet. Song Zun looked back at Alex dumbfounded.

"How are you not dead right now?" Song Zun asked. "You blocked my punch without a single treasure or armor. That would only mean your body is strong."

He then looked at Alex more curiously and asked, "hmm... are you a clone? Did someone make your body strong too after your death and are using it?"

"No, can't be. Only your skin or muscles would be strong that way. But you are actually fully strong from the inside out. That could only mean.... A body cultivator?" he was shocked by his own analysis.

"That's right," he smiled as he looked at Alex and asked, "You are a body cultivator, aren't you? It's very rare to see your type. No wonder you came here trying to fight me. You must've thought you could beat me."

"Well, bad luck to you. I have a strong body as well," Song Zun said.

Alex heard everything that was said. He understood how Song Zun came to the answer that Alex was a body cultivator. Body cultivators were rare, so it was no surprise Song Zun would be surprised by the fact that Alex was one.

However, at the moment, Even Alex himself was surprised. Somewhere along with his speech, his analysis, Song Zun had slipped something that he probably didn't intend to say, but accidentally did.

"So you are not a body cultivator like I thought you would be, huh?" Alex asked, still with some surprise on his face.

"Hmm? A body cultivator? Sorry to say it you kid, but I'm not one of your types. I wouldn't even know where to begin," Song Zun said. He was very honest about it.

"I understood that. I came here expecting to fight a body cultivator. However, I would've never in my wildest dreams expected the boss of these forbidden fields to actually be a clone."

Chapter 218: Assumptions

"Oh, a clone huh? And what made you come to that conclusion?" Song Zun's face had changed to show a weird emotion when Alex guessed that he was a clone.

"You asked if I was a corpse that was strengthened and turned to a clone too, didn't you? That would mean that you were either one or were currently using one somewhere else. I would go as far as to guarantee that you are actually the one that is the clone"

"Which means... your real body is out there somewhere," Alex said with a stunning face. He hadn't realized what Song Zun being a clone meant before he spoke it out himself.

"You... you have a real body somewhere else, and this is just a clone of yours that you made from a dead body. The clones are always supposed to be worse than the original. So, if ... if the body that got to the 3rd spot in alchemy achievements and had immortal grade techniques is a clone then..."

Alex got serious and looked at him dead in the eyes and asked, "Who are you?"

Clap Clap Clap

"Bravo little guy. You perfectly figured out everything. Hah, I must be getting old to let slip such an obvious thing, haha. I'm surprised that someone from the Hong Wu sect even knows about clones."

"I don't remember seeing any information about ones in the library. Not to boot, you are a body cultivator, someone impossible to find in the Hong Wu Sect as well," Song Zun said and his face got serious as well.

"So, who are you, and why are you trying to get in my way? What? Are you trying to act like a savior so that you won't have to work hard to get accepted by the people here before you do what you came here to do?" Song Zun asked.

Alex was surprised at the conclusion Song Zun came to. 'I can see why he would think that,' he thought.

Song Zun too Alex's silence as an acceptance of guilt. "Well, I don't care what you came to do here anyway. At first, I thought you had ruined my chances of doing what I came here to do. But in the end, the exact thing you did send me here, the place I wanted to come to, but didn't know."

"You... wanted to come here?" Alex asked. "To find the yang jades?"

"No. I came to find something else. The yang jades were just some interim stuff to get me stronger. Was it not for them, This body would've died to your punch just now," Song Zun said with a smile.

"You got stronger after using Yang jades? Then, does that mean... you have none of it anymore?" Alex asked in shock.

"Hahaha, not anymore. When I first came here, this body was weak. However, thanks to a technique of mine, I managed to use the yang jade to temper this body. It was then that I realized that yang jades were extremely important for my body. So after strengthening a bit, I made everyone gather me some more in exchange for the food."

"And now, I'm ready to go venture out into the desert and find what I was looking for," Song Zun said. "Who knows, maybe my body will get stronger under the harsh atmosphere there," he said.

"Anyway, why don't you tell me why you are in the Hong Wu sect? Maybe I can help you," Song Zun asked.

"Well, I don't know what to say. I am a genuine student of the Hong Wu sect," Alex said.

"Hahaha, who are you lying to? I know the Hong Wu sect has nothing about clones. If you know about clones so much, then you must've learned it somewhere else," Song Zun said.

"Yes, I did learn it from the Tiger sect, but I'm still a disciple of the Hong Wu sect," Alex said.

"Tiger sect?" Song Zun's face changed when he heard that. "I see, then you have to die now."

"You don't get to decide that," Alex said as he prepared his common rank sword.

Song Zun lunged at him with his bare hands, while Alex swung his sword at him. Song Zun easily knocked the sword out of the way and punched Alex.

Alex was using the Elusive Heavenly sword, so he didn't have to worry about dodging the attacks in close combat. A punch to the left, a kick to the right, an uppercut, a horizontal sword slash.

Attacks after attacks were thrown at each other. Alex was too slippery while in close combat, and Song Zun couldn't land a single hit on him.

While, Alex couldn't do any damage, as Song Zun's entire body was as strong as armor.

'Sh*t. Is this guy's skin stronger than my sword?' Alex thought. Song Zun was stopping every single attack with his arms without fear.

Alex swung his sword sideways and tried to hit his chest. Song Zun instead didn't bother blocking and punched towards Alex's head. The sword strike landed cleanly at the chest but didn't do anything to Song Zun. Alex on the other hand easily dodged the punch, making Song Zun hit empty space.

"Hehe, you can dodge quite well... not bad. It's your sword technique, isn't it? So you must really have been to the Tiger sect. I can't believe they let you learn one of their techniques," Song Zun said.

'Huh? Does he know about the Elusive Heavenly sword? Or did he just fight with master and knows of this stuff?" Alex wondered.

Song Zun was starting to get worried. He couldn't keep up the fight with a body cultivator he couldn't hit. If this went on for much longer, he would surely lose. So, he decided to go all out.

"So, you aren't going to back off, are you?" he asked.

"No way. Not until I beat you," Alex said readying his sword once again.

"Sigh, what sort of hot-headed youth did I stumble upon. I guess you can go die now."

Chapter 219: Blade

Song Zun started moving his legs a little, jumping ever so slightly each time. Alex was surprised at first since he didn't know what the opponent was doing, but soon he figured out.

" A footwork!"

Suddenly, Song Zun disappeared from the spot. Before Alex could even realize where he was, A punch came from the side of his face, barely missing his ears by a few centimeters.

Alex immediately stepped to the side and looked back to see a Song Zun taking a deep breath. "Urghh, I haven't used this technique with this body. I am not used to it," Song Zun said.

He took another deep breath and disappeared once more from the spot. Another punch appeared from the side, however, this time it managed to hit Alex straight onto the back of his head. Alex was sent flying to the grasses.

"Ah, I missed again. At least my punch did land on you, just not where I wanted it to," Song Zun said and disappeared from the spot.

Alex really didn't know how he was disappearing, but he knew he needed to dodge. So, he hurriedly crouched. A punch passed his head previously was, stopping just a meter ahead of him.

Alex saw Song Zun standing in front of him. His legs were trembling beyond crazy. 'He is using something his body can't handle just to deal with me,' he thought.

He slashed the sword directly at Song Zun's neck from below, but a casual hand blocked it. "You are... huff... not going to get me... huff... so easily," he said while continuously taking in breaths.

'Sh*t. At this rate, even my movement technique won't be able to handle this kid. He just won't take much damage. Unless I get a clean hit on his head and manage to knock him out, I won't win this fight,' Song Zun thought.

Alex on the other hand rubbed the back of his head. He was still kinda numb from the last attack and didn't have the time to attend to the pain.

He ignored the pain once more and readied himself for another attack. The moment Song Zun disappeared, he moved too. Elusive Heavenly sword had footwork too. It was in a way, a sort of movement technique. But since it didn't improve a user's speed, it wasn't considered one.

Still, that was his best bet at the current fight. 'That or if I manage to take out my steel sword. I doubt his skin is tougher than that,' Alex thought.

Song Zun was done taking his breath and once more disappeared. Alex used the Elusive Heavenly sword's footwork to increase his speed somewhat by taking better steps around the battlefield.

He managed to dodge Song Zun's attack by a hair's breadth and immediately struck his neck. Song Zun wasn't hurt, but he was hurled far away.

The fight continued for a little longer before both Song Zun and Alex were breathing heavily, neither able to get a hold of the other.

"Do you still want to continue, kid?" Song Zun asked.

"Yes, I will surely kill you if that's the last thing I do tonight," Alex said. He immediately launched towards Song Zun and delivered a sword blow to the head, but Song Zun locked the sword with his hands.

"This is getting an annoying kid. Neither of us can hurt each other, let's just go our own way," Song Zun said.

Alex didn't budge however, he continued churning out attack once more, annoying Song Zun even further. His plan was working.

"You little sh*t!," Song Zun shouted and started attacking himself. The fight went on for much longer than both of them expected it to. Alex never managed to cut Song Zun and Song Zun never managed to hit Alex's head like he wanted to.

Suddenly, Song Zun disappeared. 'This is it," Alex thought. Instead of moving sideways or backward, or even forwards. Alex jumped up. He used the full strength of whatever remaining ones he could use on his leg and jumped high up.

Song Zun appeared where Alex was previously and looked up.

Suddenly, a glint of light appeared in the darkness as a sword came flying down at Song Zun from above. Song Zun managed to barely turn his head around and let the sword fly past his head.

BANG

A rather large noise appeared from the place where the sword struck. Song Zun was sure that he wouldn't have been hurt from that, but he sure as hell would've been dizzy for a long time.

"Haha, you missed," He said as he turned around to look at Alex who was still in mid-air. However, before he continued saying anything else, he froze.

There was another sword in Alex's hand. It was already weird enough to see a sword in the forbidden fields, and now there was another one.

This new sword looked even better. Its crossguard shone with silver light, the handle had red leather poking out of it, and the blade itself wasn't like anything Song? Zun had ever seen. It was brownish in color and had a noticeable golden hue around it.

Alex had used his spiritual sense as a last-ditch effort to take out the steel sword. He had flared his spiritual sea to use all of it just to find the steel sword, but he never got to it. However, he found another sword. A sword that he had never used because of how heavy it was.

He had taken out the Ebony Corundum Stiletto. He still couldn't handle it around or use it like any other normal sword. But what he could do was let it fall by itself, guided by gravity.

And that was exactly what Alex let it do. The stiletto fell from the sky making no noise whatsoever and the blade barely shining any light. Song Zun brought up both of his hands to block the attack.

However, the moment the blade touched his hands, he realized. He had f*cked up.

Chapter 220: Get Over It

The brown blade cut into Song Zun's arms like it was butter. It then went through the side of his shoulders, chest, and leg, chopping the right side of his body clean off.

BAM

A massive loud sound erupted from where the blade landed. The blade itself was halfway into the earth, only a part of the blade and the remaining part of the sword was up above.

The right half of Song Zun's body dropped to the right as the innards started spilling out from wherever it could. "You..." Song Zun was still a little conscious as he spoke a few words in a daze.

"You killed this body. I... I worked hard to make this body and you..." his eyes could no longer focus as his mind was starting to go blank due to the lack of blood.

"I will kill you."

He managed to say that just as he fell to the ground. He was dead.

Alex breathed deeply. He had never intended to kill him, only incapacitate, and yet... "I killed someone," the realization of what he had just done was coming back to Alex.

He had killed many monsters before, but they were just that, monsters. To him, they were like the farm animals back at home. However, a human on the other hand.

"Oh no.... Oh my god. What have I done?" his face started to drain in color as he slumped to the ground and got face to face with the corpse that had dropped to the ground.

The moment he saw that his stomach started churning and everything he had eaten beforehand came out the wrong way. He would vomit for a bit and see the mess he made once again and vomit again.

It took him about 4 to 5 vomits to even manage to turn around from the gore in front of him. Both of his swords were right there, but he cared about none of them for now.

He ran a little forwards to the grass and fell onto it. He put his hands behind his head tried to forget everything. But that was impossible. He could never forget what he had just seen, what he had just done.

The experience remained vivid in his mind as he couldn't forget anything. He wanted to forget everything, and just go hide inside his mind. He felt like his soul was reaching a breaking point and he would tear it down into different pieces at any moment.

Suddenly, he felt someone touch him. It wasn't a real person, only something he felt in his mind. He imagined himself standing behind him, with a hand on his shoulders, telling him, "It will be fine. You will be fine.".

Alex looked back in real life, but obviously, no one was there. "I will be fine?" he thought. He stopped constantly remembering the gore and the event.

"He... was a clone. Not a real person," he tried to tell himself. He knew the body belonged to someone else that the man stole and used, so in his head, he knew that it was a real person before this. However, on the outside, he kept telling himself that it was not a real person.

It was then he remembered his master's words. The exact words.

"You are young and you are pure-hearted, but that heart will for sure dye in the filth of the world of cultivation. Make sure you never let that filth stick to yourself. You might get drowned in it, but you have to learn to climb over it."

"I wish you never have to kill anyone, but I know you will have to, even if it's just to defend yourself and your loved ones. The only thing I can do is hope is you don't lose yourself along with your enemies."

He remembered those words as clear as if they were said today.

"Climb over the filth," he said in a monotone voice. "Don't lose yourself along with your enemies." His eyes started turning serious.

"Don't lose yourself, Alex. Climb over the filth. Get over it. You will have to deal with stuff much worse than this. You can't let yourself be devoured by the ones you destroyed," he said with an angry tone.

"I am not going to lose myself because of filths like them. There are bigger things in the wait for me. I can't let these incidents be roadblocks for me. I will NOT let these incidents be a roadblock for me," Alex stood up and turned towards the corpse.

He felt his stomach churn, but he held it in. Instead, he walked up to the corpse and reached the Ebony Corundum Stiletto. He needed to get down to the sword to put it inside his storage once more.

He was right next to the innards, but he didn't let it bother him anymore. Once the stiletto was back into the storage bag, he took hold of the second sword.

Suddenly, he heard rustling behind him. He immediately turned around, sword at the ready to cut anyone else if necessary.

"Woah, brother wait, I..." before the person could even finish saying anything, he saw the corpse in the moonlight and immediately went to the side to vomit. More sounds of vomits and general disgusts arose from the surrounding,

It seemed many people had come back after the sound of fighting was done. Many people voiced disgust towards the dead body, but there were some who were awed in amazement.

These were the people who had actually fought the boss before and got their butts handed to them. They were stunned to see that the boss who had beat them so effortlessly was now dead.

Not just lost, dead. This was something these people would've never expected. Even the three men who gave Alex the information about Song Zun were amongst the crowd, looking at the scene in disbelief.

Alex ignored everyone that was watching, however. Instead, he put his sword behind him once more and walked into the cave.

Chapter 221: Gray

Alex walked up to the cave and entered. The cave wasn't as deep as he was expecting. Inside was darker than he expected it to be, and without Qi. His eyes couldn't view that well

Still, with what little light there was, he managed to find outlines of a pile of stuff. He couldn't tell exactly what they were, so he walked over there to check.

He slowly put his hands on them. They were round and juicy, just as one would expect them to be.

"So he stored quite a few of them here as well, huh," Alex thought as he picked one of them and took a bite of it. Sweet juices flowed out of the Butterfly Pears and entered his body.

His numbed body got a bit better as the energy from the fruits healed him a bit. He ate a few more as he was extremely hungry after the battle and moved further into the cave to look at the thing he was most curious about.

There were a bunch of stones, laid all around the cave and interesting-looking art was drawn on the ground. "What's that?" Alex went around looking at what the drawing was of.

He moved around the small pieces of stones all over the place. The more he cleared the stones, the more the art became clear. When he finally swiped away the last stone with his feet, he finally saw what it was.

It was no art at all. It was actually a formation drawn on the ground itself. Alex was shocked. He could feel a small force pushing on him, something other than the suppressing force from outside.

"What? How is this formation working? You need at least an energy source for a formation to work," he said. He didn't know a lot about formations, but he knew at least this much.

Even the sect running formation could only work because it took energy from the spirit veins on the sect ground. But there was none of that here.

"How the hell is this formation working without any source of energ-" he realized what he had missed. He immediately lowered himself and picked one of the stones he had moved aside because it was blocking him.

In the darkness, he couldn't see the color, but he could see the shape and size of the stone. They were all small stones, rectangular in shape.? Alex knew exactly what it was. It was in fact what he had been looking for in the first place.

They were all Yang Jades.

"But all the energy is gone. He used them to power the formation and make himself stronger," Alex said, dejectedly. He looked through the rest of it, but he didn't have to do it.

If his body didn't tell him there was any, then there was no way there was any.

"Sigh, guess I was expecting too much," he said. His disappointment was immeasurable right now. He decided to forget about it and walked outside.

The moment he was at the opening of the cave, he saw a bunch of people standing a little outside it. There were signs of dawn approaching in the sky.

"He-hello brother, are-are you our new boss?" a girl asked.

"Boss? No, I'm no such thing," he said.

"But-but then who will bring us the fruit now? You killed our only source of the fruits," the man standing next to her asked.

Alex was surprised. He had helped them by taking out their oppressor, even nearly ruining himself in the process and the first thing they did was tell him their selfish wishes.

'I see... master was right about these guys. They are selfish, jealous, envious, the filth that knows nothing but to think about themselves,' Alex thought.

"What the hell are you saying?" someone screamed from the side. "He helped us by getting rid of that demon and instead of thanking him, you blame him for your own incompetence?"

"Yeah! Brother, thank you for getting rid of the boss. He was the worst thing to come out of our sect in years. Please tell me your name brother, I will leave this place in 3 days, I will tell the Elders to lessen your punishment," someone else said.

"Brother, you must be tired from the fight. Come, I will give you a massage," another man in the back spoke.

The light of dawn shone through the clouds as Alex's views of the surrounding started to change once more.

'Of course. Not everyone is bad. But not everyone is good either. I will need to judge each person on their own. I see this will be a good lesson for me,' he thought.

"Anyone with ability in your body, go call everyone here. There is more than enough food for you here," Alex shouted. Immediately, people started scattering to tell the others about the death of the boss and the free food available in the place.

Soon there were at least 50 people in the group. Alex was truly surprised at how many people were actually being punished. He called a few people to carry the fruits back out and distribute them to the rest of the disciples there.

Once he made sure everyone was fed, he left the group. People wanted to stick with him, but he ran away fast and found an open, quiet place in the grasses.

He sat on the grasses and felt them. Not a single hit of dew. "This place is really strange," he thought. His only purpose in coming here was gone now. There were no more yang jades here.

"Wait, what did he say about the desert? He said that yang jade was just an interim solution before going to find whatever was there," Alex thought as he turned around to look towards the direction of the desert.

He tried to think of what to do, but too many things had happened today and he couldn't focus his mind at all. "Sigh, I will think about it later," he said and logged out of the game.

Chapter 222: Human

Alex didn't log back into the game that day.

He woke up, ate some breakfast, studied a bit, helped prepare lunch, ate it and went to school. Once more it was with Sarah and Emily. These 4 were now very close friends.

"Urghh... I can't wait for saturday. Oh god, it must be so fun in the capsule," Sarah said.

"I'm highly anticipating it as well," Hannah said.

Alex didn't listen to any of their talk. He was so out of it today that he didn't even remember half the thing that happened today.

Emily seemed to be curious as well as to why he was so distant today, but she couldn't bring herself to ask anything. In the end, they went to their respective classes and didn't get to say anything.

On the way home, Sarah seemed to not have classes on thursdays, so she took them both back home.

Alex ate some snacks and went back to his room. He wanted to go back into the game, but just couldn't motivate himself to touch the helmet on the bed.

So instead, he took out his laptop and went online. He went to a video sharing site to watch something, anything, but there was nothing of interest there.

He then came upon a video and was shocked at the sheer number of clicks on it. The video of his cousin speaking about the body she got in Eternal Cultivation, and it had gotten nearly 200 million views.

For a world with less than a billion people, 200 million views were more than good enough. That was enough to show the true reach of Eternal Cultivation in the real world.

However, he was surprised that the video wasn't popular because of the content, but rather the unfairness behind it. There were people who wanted to hate on his cousin and Eternal Cultivation all because his sister got lucky.

He clicked on these people's profiles and saw that they had left some beautiful messages on other videos for other peoples. These people knew nothing about the other people, yet they showed their hate and love just as openly.

Once again, Alex saw the two sides of people. People were quick to hate on something completely unrelated to them. Even when new information was being given out, people focused on what they personally did not get.

However, there were also people who were good. Whether there was a reason or not, they were all sending out positivity towards the ones they didn't even know.

'It seems it is the same inside and outside of the game, huh,' he thought. 'Good or bad, you can't tell something about a person without getting to know them.'

He felt a little better about himself. The guilt of killing someone was very low for Alex since he knew there were others that were helped due to what he did and were in fell support of him.

He didn't know if they hated him inside or not, but that didn't matter. What mattered is that he now knew not to after a single interaction.

He looked through more of the videos and ate his dinner. Only then at dinner did he finally returned back to his room. He really wanted to play by now.

So, he put on the helmet and got into the game.

"AH, goddammit, why does it prick so much?" Alex thought as pulled whatever was behind him on the floor. It was his normal sword. He had been in a hurry to leave, so he had slept on top of it.

He sighed and put the sword aside to think of something to do. He looked in two direction, one was the direction to the south of him, towards the top of the cliff.

He could go and tell the elders about the happenings here and they could probably take the disciples back and give them another punishment fitting their crime.

The other direction was to the north of him. It was the desert he had heard so much about and wanted to visit so much. He was really interested in going there, but that would mean he needed to let the people suffer for a little longer.

'Sigh, what should I do?" he thought. He thought for a few seconds as to what exactly he wanted and? needed more. In the end, he just shook his head.

"Humans really do all have the same duality. Wanting to help to do good, and wanting to leave for the desert and leave people to starve. There is an obvious answer that anyone not selfish could choose in a heartbeat. And... hehehe... sigh,I am a human after all," he said as he ridiculed himself with laughter and got up.

He then started walking straight towards the river to go to the desert. He was being a human and taking the selfish choice.

He stood up and walked towards the river in this pale moonlight. With a sword in his hands, he didn't worry about any monster in the area.

The river was about 20 meters wide, and monsters easily hid there. This was a dangerous place. "Can I jump across 20 meters?" he wondered.

He had checked his strength with his physical body but never did any other forms of tests with it. 'Maybe it can work?' he thought. He wouldn't know until he jumped across.

He walked back to create some runway to launch himself off of one bank of the river to the other. With a deep breath, he held his sword on this right hand and ran.

He could clearly feel himself slower than when his Qi was working, but those were unfair to be compared. He ran in the fastest speed he possibly could.

At the end of the bank, he launched himself up and leaped. The speed was amazing enough that he didn't fall into the river and would easily cross the river.

However, on the other side of the river, a centipede appeared. And it was ready to attack him any chance it got.

Chapter 223: Desert

Alex grabbed hold of his sword midair and pulled it out from behind him. In a single sweep, the sword hit the centipede square in the head. He didn't manage to cut it open, but the force alone was enough to break it open.

Alex landed with a thump and roles over a few times to stop himself. He immediately turned around to attack the centipede again, but it was dead.

He took a deep breath and calmed himself. He wasn't expecting a monster to appear out of nowhere here.

"Damn, isn't there a ton more monster around this place?" he thought. He had to be careful now.

He felt the heat radiating from the ground and was surprised just how hot the ground still was. He leaned down to grab a handful of the sand and felt it. It was way hotter than he was expecting it to be.

He let it fall from his hands and watched just how fine it was. Riverbanks had sand too in the real world, but they were nothing like this. The sands outside were mostly white in color and were usually wet and lumpy from being around the rivers.

This, however, was yellow in color and very, very dry. Even just a few meters away from the river, it was no humidity in it. He felt it a bit more and said, "It's so coarse and rough."

He looked around the desert; It was everywhere. He was baffled by just how much sand there was in this place, and even more so baffled by just how large the land itself was.

As far as his eyes could see, there was nothing but desert.

"I'm going to get dehydrated at this rate,' he thought and went to the river to drink some more water before leaving the place. He didn't know where he had to go in this vast desert, so he randomly chose a direction and walked forward.

Along the way, he made sure to drag his feet or sword and make a marking wherever he went. He wanted to find his way back in case he reached a place from where he couldn't see the cliff side anymore and needed to come back.

The dire direction he chose to go was in a small angle from the river such that the further he traveled, the further he would get from the river.

Still, he didn't wish to go very far away as he didn't know exactly what monsters there were in the desert. Just the ones on the river shores were skin tempering and muscle tempering equivalent.

If he went in and found some bone tempering equivalent monsters, then he would have a hard time fighting them. If he found some organ tempering equivalent monsters, then he would be as good as dead.

A lizard monster appeared a few minutes after he started walking, so Alex killed it without hesitation. A few minutes later, another centipede appeared. Alex had no problem dealing with that as well. However, he was a little slower in killing this monster.

He went further and killed more monsters. Within the next hour, he had killed over 15 different monsters in the desert. They were all the same speed and strength as any other monsters he had fought till now.

But he realized that killing them was taking longer than usual. That was all because of the pressure he was feeling. The same pressure that suppressed his Qi and spiritual sense, was now starting to suppress his body too.

It was very little suppression when compared to the one he got for Qi and spiritual sense, but it was still there. He could clearly feel the slight pressure all over him.

And it got worse as he walked forward.

A snake monster slithered towards him from underneath the sand. Alex could clearly see the undulations on the ground and got ready. As usual, just as it was near him, the snake monster jumped out of the sand and tried to bite and eat him.

Alex sidestepped the attack and prepared his sword. As soon as he saw the exposed neck of the snake, he hacked at it.

BANG

A large sound appeared as the sword dug deep into the snake's body, but the snake didn't die. The wound wasn't enough to cause severe harm to the snake, and could only harm him.

The snake launched an attack with its tail and managed to hit Alex. Alex immediately grabbed the snake's tail in hope of not being thrown away.

The snake shook its tail around, in hopes of making him let go, but it couldn't. In the end, Alex took the opportunity to leave the tail and run right at the snake.

The sands made it hard to run, but he still managed to reach it in time. The snake was once again bringing back its tail around to hit him, but before it could even do anything, Alex slashed it one more time, with extra power this time, and managed to fully hack through the snake's already half cut neck.

He took a few minutes for a breather and thought to himself, "The monsters are getting stronger and stronger. Thankfully, the pressure is stopping them from becoming strong as well. Still, their defense is unaffected."

He looked at his sword that was starting to get dull and thought, "will this even be useful anymore?"

After killing the monster, he walked forward until he felt like he wasn't going anywhere. He could still easily see the cliffs and knew that if he were to walk for a few minutes, he would reach the riverside.

"I do have to walk towards the north if I want to get anywhere. However, that would mean getting attacked by the monsters that are much stronger than the snake just now. Can I even do that?" he thought.

He deliberated for a while and in the end decided to walk towards the north direction, directed away from the cliffside. If anything dangerous came up, he thought he could just run away.

Chapter 224: Return

The feeling had returned. Alex had barely walked 10 minutes north in this treacherous desert, and he was already finding a new yang jade.

He got happy and sped up the pace. A new monster came towards him, with the intention of killing him, but he didn't care. Monsters were very normal for him now and he could kill them easily.

However, that did not mean that it was a swift process. Due to the increased pressure on his body, fighting the monster was more taxing than usual.

"At some point, I won't be able to fight at all," he thought. He was already second thinking about his decision to walk directly up north as more monsters were showing up.

Still, the feeling of being near a yang jade was too enticing, so he didn't go back.

He finally arrived at the place that contained the yang jade. It was a simple land, filled with sand everywhere like any other place in the desert. His body was telling him it was right there, but he couldn't see any.

"Sh*t, is it buried?" he thought. He started moving away from the sand from the place he sensed the yang jade from. However, the sand would slide down from the pile he made, filling the hole again. It was slowing down his progress a lot.

He hadn't interacted with sand before and was really annoyed by what was happening. In the end, he started using more force to throw the sand further away such that it didn't go back into the hole he made.

After 10 minutes, he finally made a meter deep hole and jammed his arm through the rest. When he pulled his hands back out, he was holding a yang jade.

It was the second yang jade he had found after coming to the Forbidden Fields. He looked at the stone in his hands and sighed in relief.

"It's not a waste of time if I got at least 2 right?" he thought. He was breathing heavily now as the pressure from the surrounding was making him feel as though he really was nothing but a mortal.

His super-human abilities from being a body cultivator were questionable at best right now.

He took out his sword and looked at it. The metal sword no longer had the same edge as it did when he first got it and was full of dents and chips on it.

"Even my sword is almost as destroyed as I feel," he said. He used his spiritual sense and barely managed to send the yang jade into his storage bag. The pressure was starting to catch up to his spiritual sense too.

"Damn, should I even go on anymore?" he thought. However, a familiar feeling arose inside of him. There was another yang jade nearby.

After a while of deliberation, he went to find that one as well. He fought another few monsters and managed to defeat them. However, the sword was getting more and more tattered and he didn't know how much longer it could hold on. He didn't know how much longer he himself could hold on.

However, there was one good outcome from all of this happening. Just like all the monsters in the desert, his body was getting stronger as well.

It was very slow and annoying, but he was cultivating his body right now. The pressure was making him cultivate his body. It didn't have the same efficiency as his body cultivation with Pearl, and he doubted that anyone could start body cultivating here just like that without at least having a muscle tempering body.

But, if one did have that, they could do it.

Alex could sense one more yang jade a little further away. He didn't want to go there, but it was close enough that he didn't care about the dangers.

He walked towards it and slowly felt that the feeling wasn't getting stronger at all, no matter how close he got to it. The yang jade was right in front of him now and he still didn't have an increased feeling of wanting it.

The pressure was crashing on him harder than ever, but that was not what was causing this loss of want for the yang jade. No, it was actually another feeling of want coming deep inside from him.

This one was similar to how he felt around yang jades but far stronger than any. He could tell that it was somewhere far away in the north, and even then... the feeling of wanting it was much stronger than the yang jade right in front of him.

"Just what is there?" he thought in awe as he looked to the north. It was around 1 am at night, and he couldn't see clearly, but he was sure he could see nothing in that direction even if he wasn't suppressed all around right now.

He picked up the yang jade and unconsciously started walking forward, but then he stopped.

"What am I doing?" he thought. He shook himself out of the intense want his body was making him feel, and started walking back in fear.

"What the hell is there that is making me do things against my will?" he spoke in fear. He immediately turned around and started running in the opposite direction.

Once he was sufficiently far away and could barely feel it anymore, he stopped. The previous time he was here, the yang jades were masking its location, but now without the yang jades, he could feel the small sense of desire his body was giving off.

He could tell that whatever was there in the north was very good for him, but right now, it was very dangerous for him.

"I can't go there right now. I get suppressed the closer I get to the north and at some point, I will end up having to find a monster and d-"

Suddenly, he heard movements in the sand and looked back. Behind him were two pitch-black scorpions standing side by side. They had found themselves a meal.

Chapter 225: Run

Alex got a little scared. He didn't think he could fight scorpions right now. His body was still suppressed quite a bit by the pressure and his sword was nearly useless.

Fighting any monster right now was difficult for him. Fighting 2 monsters at the same time were completely suicidal. There was only one thing that Alex could do right now, and he did exactly that.

He ran.

He ran away from the scorpions and maneuvered his direction towards the river. However, the pressure in the area was stopping him from showing off his best physical ability, and running in the sand wasn't exactly the easiest thing to do.

As such, his overall speed at running was very weak. The scorpions didn't stand there either. The moment they saw Alex run, they followed him as well.

They were used to the pressure and their exoskeleton was strong enough to handle it right now. And they didn't have a problem running in the sand as Alex did.

So, even if they weren't exactly the fastest thing in the desert, they were fast enough to keep up with Alex. They were actually much faster than him and were going to catch up sooner than later.

Alex put all of his hope right now on the fact that the pressure would lower once he ran further south and he wouldn't have to worry about his body functioning at a lower rate than usual.

However, in his terrified state, he forgot to realize that the same thing applied to the scorpions as well. The further away they went, the faster they were becoming.

And soon, one of them caught up to Alex. It brought forth its pincers to grab at his legs, but Alex jumped up and dodged it. However, because of that, he rolled forward and came to a stop.

He had now stopped and both of the scorpions were upon him.

"Sh*t, " he thought. He couldn't run away anymore, so he took his sword and got ready to fight. He had one weapon, fighting against their 6, he had to be very careful now.

"That venom will be dangerous," he thought. He didn't want to die in a place like this, especially not from a scorpion sting.

His eyes flickered side to side as he looked at both of the scorpions. Suddenly, the second scorpion moved forth and tried to snap at him with its pincers.

Alex dodged the pincers and swung his sword at its overextended hands. The sword was nearly at the hand when the scorpion's tail came right at him.

Alex had to stop his movement mid-attack and return the sword back to stop the stinger. He barely managed to change its direction so that it hit the ground and not him.

He stopped breathing for a moment to let the venom's smell go away from the air. He immediately turned his sword around once more and swung at the overextended tail.

It was a clean sweep, but he managed to cut only half of it. "Their body is too strong," he thought. He immediately ducked as a pincher grab went just past where his head previously was.

After that, Alex rolled to the side to dodge the tail.

He had been keeping an eye on the second scorpion, and when it did, he managed to dodge it quite easily. He was about to go attack the overextended tails once more, but the other scorpion came running at him.

It immediately jumped into the air, shocking Alex. When it landed, it was on top of Alex and was attacking him with its pincers. Alex jumped and rolled to the side, dodging the scorpion.

Immediately, he ran back and attacked the scorpion's tail once more. This time, it came completely off. However, at the same time, the pincers came towards Alex's torso.

Alex swiftly returned the sword back to the scorpion in a uniform motion and tried to attack its hands.

However, Alex made a mistake. He didn't think before he attacked and instead hit the pincers instead of the arms.

CRACK

A massive snap sounded out in the surroundings as Alex's sword snapped in two at the base. He didn't even manage to get a single scratch on the pincer and yet his sword was now in 2 half. There wasn't even half a sword attached at the handle he could use to fight with.

"Sh*t," he cursed at the situation. He jumped back to dodge the next pincer that was next to him. But then, the other scorpion had made its way here too.

So he dodged once more. They were relentless in their attacks and weren't giving him much room to fight with. He desperately wanted to use the escape technique he had learned, but without Qi it was useless.

"I can't do this anymore. Running away is not the option," he thought. It was time to properly fight back. The scorpions were already attacking him.

His Elusive Heavenly Sword's footwork was pretty good, but he couldn't use it as well in the sand. So, his dodging ability had also gone down.

So, he decided to care about the one with the tail more than the one without it. Their pincers were way slower compared to their tails so the tail was what he was worried about.

The scorpions snapped at him once again and attacked him. Alex didn't dodge. Instead, he jumped over the skeleton and landed on it. It was the one without the tail so he had no worries.

The scorpion wiggled its half tail around and tried to hit Alex, but it couldn't reach him. He started punching the back of the scorpion while constantly taunting the other one.

The other scorpion came rushing at him and tried to snip at him. Alex easily dodged the pincers and continued attacking the scorpion he was on. It was trying to wiggle itself to throw Alex from its back but it couldn't.

Alex was firmly grabbing onto its back with one hand while punching down with the second. The scorpion was now half dead.

Chapter 226: Victory

The other scorpion tried to use its pincers once more, but Alex could easily dodge it. In anger, it used its tail to attack Alex. Alex jumped out of the way and landed on the sand.

He immediately turned around to see that exactly what he wanted to achieve had happened. The scorpion with the tail had pierced the other scorpion's back with the stinger.

It was now dead.

Finally, there was only one enemy left. Alex was tired, but now was not the time to rest. He stood up and looked towards the scorpion. It was now time to fight it.

Alex remembered the first time he had fought the scorpion a day ago. He had used the stinger to kill that one, so he wanted to kill this one the same way as well.

He ran forward. The scorpion too came running at him, blood dripping on its back from its tail; blood that belonged to the other scorpion. The pincers came as expected and Alex managed to dodge it in time.

As expected, the tail came down too. Alex easily dodged it and jumped onto the scorpion's body, expecting to rip off its tail. He grabbed it with his arms and pulled it.

However, no matter how much he tried, he couldn't rip it off. "Damn, this is way harder than the one back in the river. Just how strong are the ones in the desert?" he thought.

Unable to do what he wanted, he punched and kicked the scorpion a few times and tried to jump off. Suddenly, the scorpion turned around at a terrifying speed and grabbed his left arm.

It tried to snap it, but the most it could do it crush it. Still, that was enough.

"ARGHHH," he screamed as intense pain ran inside him from the multitudes of broken bones. The scorpion didn't let go of the arm and brought around another pincer to grab his right arm.

CRACK

His right arm was gone too. The pain was equally as intense, forcing Alex to cry out as loud as he could. He tried to pull out his arms, but they were firmly in the scorpion's pincers. It was now holding on to him.

Suddenly, it attacked him with its tails. Alex managed to barely move away from his head enough so that the stinger barely went past his head.? This time, however, he couldn't hold his breath as the pain was too intense and he had to cry out.

His mind was starting to go numb from the scent of venom. It wasn't enough to kill him or even harm him, but it was making his mind dull and lazy.

"That's... bad..." he barely managed to think, when suddenly, he heard a bunch of notifications.

<Toxic Substance detected>

<Sun God's Divine Yang body disintegrates everything>

<Toxins have been destroyed>

<No Qi found>

His mind went back to being as sharp as ever, as all the venom from his body was destroyed by his body. He didn't think about the notifications for now, and instead, used his legs to hit the scorpion's head as hard as he could.

Usually, the head was protected by the pincers, but now the pincers were in use. It tried to pull back its pincers while still grabbing Alex's hands, but couldn't as Alex was equally as strong.

Instead, Alex pulled his on its pincers with his own broken arms. And then,

BAM

He hit its head with his legs as hard as he could. The scorpion tried to hit him with its tail, but he could dodge that easily. He hit his head as hard as he could while dodging the tails.

The scorpion's head was starting to bleed a little now. Finally, the scorpion let go of his arms to protect itself, but just then, Alex caught it. He was the one now pulling on the pincers while continuously attacking its head.

Finally, the scorpion started to lose consciousness from all the damage its head was taking and stopped fighting. Soon, it had fainted. Alex didn't stop, however.

Now that there was no threat of the tail attacking him, he kept on hitting its head until it was completely destroyed. The scorpion was dead.

He finally slumped onto the ground and cried out in agony as he finally felt all the stress and pain hit him altogether. He slowly lifted his arms to see that around the wrist area, they were completely swollen.

Both of his arms were blue and black, and it hurt like hell. He needed to find a fruit to eat to heal himself a little or just directly go to the sect.

After a while, the pain subsided and he could no longer use his arm. If he were to come across some monster here, it would be bad. He stood up and looked around. He found his broken blade a little further away, so he walked towards it. It was beyond usable now.

He sighed and just left it there. It had helped him as much as it could. He silently and carefully made his way back towards the river. Along the way, he met a few monsters, but thankfully, they were weak enough that he didn't need to use his hands to kill them.

Finally, he reached the shore. He needed to jump once more. He didn't know if he could do it without his arms or not, but he tried. He walked a little back to make some runway and ran as fast as he could.

In a single leap, he flew high into the air and went past the shore on the other side, landing on the grasses. There were no monsters on this side like last time when he jumped to find the centipede. "Thank god," he said in relief.

He rested for a few minutes there to let his throbbing arm stop hurting. Then, he went to the river and drank some water.

Afterward, he turned around and walked towards the cliff, back to the sect.

Chapter 227: Okay

Alex was walking up the cliff with both of his hands inside his tattered robes. It was still nighttime, however, dawn was soon approaching. Alex looked along the side of the cliff and saw nobody.

'Everyone must be sleeping peacefully now that they didn't have to worry about food and water anymore,' he thought. The walk uphill was steep, but it wasn't a problem to Alex.

There was a lingering pressure around him as he walked upwards that was slowly leaving him and his cultivation base was starting to return. Soon, his body was invigorated by the yang qi being released from the meridians and the pain and fatigue in his body slowly subsided.

Soon, the pressure stopped affecting him and his entire cultivation base came back to full. The first thing Alex did was looking into his storage bags and find a healing pill.

He didn't hesitate at all as he took out one of the true pills his master had given him when he left for the Tiger sect. Without even checking what pill it was, he ate it.

A wave of energy passed along his body as it found its way to his arms. A little energy was spent away when it reached the tattoo on his arm, but most of it still went to the broken bones and torn muscles.

Slowly, his arms were healed and were back to normal. Then, he got a set of information.

<You have consumed 'Body Restructure Pill'>

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body disintegrates everything>

<' Body Restructure Pill's energy aligns with your spiritual root>

<Excess energy turned into Qi>

<You have obtained 1,548,656 Qi>

"Ahh, finally," he said as his hands stopped hurting. He put his yang stones into his storage bag and reached the cave on the cliff. The two elders were slacking around as there wasn't anything to do.

As soon as they saw someone approaching, they focused back on their work. But when they saw that it was Alex, they lost their guards. "Is it time for you to leave, disciple?" the elder on the right asked.

"Yes, Elder," Alex said.

"Very well, let us call someone to take you back," he said.

"No need elder, I will call someone myself," he said as he took out the communication talisman and called his master. Her first reply was her telling him to just come directly to her, but once he explained that it had to do with the sect and the disciples down at the forbidden fields, she couldn't stay back.

From up above the cliffs themselves, she came down flying.

The elders were a little surprised to see that Alex had called the sect leader herself, but said nothing as they knew their relationship.

She looked at his tattered robes and asked worriedly, "Are you okay? Do you need pills?"

Alex felt warm in his heart hearing that. "No, Master, I'm fine. I called you to talk about the other disciples in the Forbidden Fields," he said.

"What about them?" Ma Rong asked. Alex explained everything exactly as he had heard from the 3 disciples and later from Song Zun himself. He let her know that Song Zun was actually a clone of someone that entered the Hong Wu sect in search of something, and that something was in the Forbidden fields.

Ma Rong listened in shock as she heard how the different disciples had come to be used by Song Zun to look for Yang Jade and in the end, how Alex killed him.

Her eyes went wide when she heard this. Even the elders beside her were shocked to hear that someone fought in the forbidden fields and actually managed to kill the other person.

"Are you... really okay?" Ma Rong asked softly.

Alex gave a soft smile and said, "Yes, master. I'm fine. I didn't let it drag me down."

"Good, Good. Come, let me take you back. Let the elders here take care of the other disciples," Ma Rong said.

"Okay,? master," he said.

"I will send a few elders here, make sure you get all the disciples out. If every single one of them were to die of hunger now, that wouldn't be fair to them. Their crime isn't worthy of death," she said.

"Yes, Sect Leader," the elders said.

"Come, let's go," Ma Rong said as she wrapped him with her Qi to pull him up.

"It's okay, Master. I can fly on my own," he said as wrapped his body with it himself. After not using Qi for 3 days, it felt like a dam had been opened as it all came flooding out.

Soon, he was hovering in the air, and both master and disciple were flying away. The Elders were shocked to see a disciple actually being able to fly.

"No wonder sect master took him as her disciple, he is so talented," one of them commented. They waited for more elders to arrive and once they did, they went down to the forbidden fields to call them back.

Alex was surprised to finally see the back of the sect leader's mountain. He had never been on this side of the mountain. It turned out, the back of the Sect Leader's mountain was actually part of the cliffs in the forbidden fields.

Finally, Ma Rong reached her home and flew down and so did Alex.

"Come in, tell me more about what transpired in there. I want to hear everything," she said.

Alex nodded and walked in. Back at the cave opening, he had only given them a general story about what happened, but in here, he told her everything.

He told her about the first day and how nothing happened, aside from the fact that a disciple tried to kill him, so he broke all of his arms.

Then about the second day and his meeting with the boss, Song Zun, and how he managed to kill him thanks to being able to use his spiritual sense for a few seconds.

"That bastard! I should've just crippled his cultivation like I originally wanted to. instead, I cared about what the other elders would say and just threw him in there for 2 months," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded and finally, but reluctantly,? explained to her about his adventure on the other side of the river.

This had truly shocked Ma Rong to her core.

Chapter 228: Approaching Danger?

"You went to the other side of the river? You were supposed to only stay on this side of the river.? Did Lang Shun not explain how dangerous the other side was for the mortals like us?" Ma Rong started scolding him, rightfully so.

"But master, I am a body cultivator. So it was mostly fine going to the other side. As long as I didn't go very far away, the monsters wouldn't be very strong," Alex explained.

"Still, the desert is an unknown ground, we don't know what lies over there," Ma Rong said. "You were supposed to stay on this side of the river because there were no monsters here. Why would you go looking for monsters on your own?"

Alex was a little surprised at this question, and a little confused too. "I remember both you and martial uncle telling me that the monsters were on the other side of the river, but that's not true."

"I fought plenty of monsters on this side of the river too. I even found a few corpses on this side of the river. Going to the river itself was very dangerous," Alex said.

"What? No... that can't be. The monsters have always stayed on the other side of the river. That has been the case for the last few years I have been a sect leader," Ma Rong said.

"Oh... what about before that?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. Not many people from the previous era are still active right now. The only one who is would be..." Ma Rong stopped talking and instantly took out her communication talisman and called someone.

Soon, she got an answer back, and her eyes started getting wide.

"Even beyond the river... there was grassland before," Ma Rong said in shock.

"What?" Alex was surprised too. He was expecting to hear if there were monsters on the other side, but the answer he got was different. 'What does that mean?' he couldn't help but think.

"It can only mean that whatever is stopping the monsters from leaving is weakening. But that would mean that monsters could leave far away and there weren't any beyond the river banks right?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Then it can only mean that the monsters don't live on the other side because they are being stopped from leaving. It means that they don't choose to leave it. Which would tell us that... whatever is making them stay on the other side of the river, and is turning the entire land to the desert is growing."

"In other words, soon, the forbidden fields will also become desert. After that... the sect," Ma Rong's eyes were beyond wide after realizing what information her disciple had brought back.

"Does that mean our sect is in danger?" Alex asked.

"Possibly. But not right now. You shouldn't worry about it unless you plan to become the sect leader," Ma Rong said.

"No, no. I don't want to become something like that," Alex said while shaking his head.

"Something like that? You think being a sect leader is bad?" Ma Rong asked with a smile.

"Oh no master, I think it's wonderful. I just don't see myself as one," Alex said.

"Alright, alright. You brought back useful information, so I won't punish you for not obeying what I said. So, you said Song Zun used all the yang jades to strengthen his body?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes. He made some sort of formation to use yang jade as a power source and tempered his body," Alex said.

"Are you sure about that? Do you know much about formations?" Ma Rong asked.

"Uhh... not really, but I learned a few things about them in Tiger sect, and I do know it needs a power source to run, and he didn't have one," Alex said.

"Do you know what formation it is?" Ma Rong asked.

"Hmm... no. I know around 20 formations, but that blueprint matches none of them," Alex said.

"Alright, draw me the formation. We can ask the experts in the Cardinal city when we go are there tomorrow," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, we are leaving for the capital tomorrow?" he asked in surprise.

"No. We are leaving for the capital in a few hours. We will be reaching there by tomorrow," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, it takes that long?" he asked in surprise. He had been on bullet trains and those took a few houses to cross hundreds of kilometers. If it took nearly a day to reach there even with the speed his master had taken him then...

"Just how far is the Cardinal City?" he asked.

"Hmm... I don't think it's been measured yet, but it should be something like 10,000 kilometers," Ma Rong said without any amazement at that number.

Alex however was shocked. 'Woah, 10,000 kilometers? At that much distance, I could go back and forth from home to Oakleaf City around 12 times,' he thought.

That was truly a long distance for him.

"Are you surprised at that distance?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yeah. I don't think of distances like that ever," he said truthfully.

"What the hell? Why are you acting like that from just 10,000 kilometers? What will you do if you learned the true size of the crimson empire?" Ma Rong said with a snort.

"True size of the Crimson empire?" Alex asked curiously.

"It's somewhere between 50 thousand and 70 thousand kilometers in length. And something like 20 to 1000 kilometers in width," she said.

"Woah, so long. But not very wide. Why is that so master?" he asked.

"It's all because of the Southern forest. Someplace like Scarlet city, it only allows a single piece of land to existing, while in some pace, there could be over 20 cities in a row width-wise. So, its not the same distance everywhere," Ma Rong said.

"Anyway, enough about the distances. You went to get yang jades for yourself right? You said it helps you? Show me if you got any."

Chapter 229: One after another

"Oh right," Alex said as he took out 4 very yellow yang jades from his storage bag. "I managed to get 4. 1 was from a snake's stomach, the other 3 were in the desert. Song Zun had managed to make the disciples find all the other ones by himself," he said.

"I see, and they are full of yang energy too. So much that I kind of feel uncomfortable around it. Anyway, how do you use it again?" Ma Rong asked.

"Like this."

Alex took one of the yang jades and put it in his mouth. Ma Rong immediately started shouting with her eyes wide open, but it was already too late. He had swallowed it.

<You have ingested a 'Yang Jade'>

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body is turning the yang energy in the yang jade to Yang Qi>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 2%>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 3%>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 4%>

The already hot and vigorous Yang Qi in his body started to feel more hot and vigorous.

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 98%>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 99%>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 100%>

<Congratulation, the Yang Qi in your body has been purified and condensed>

<Yang purity at 30%>

The pain was nowhere as intense as he had remembered it. Maybe he was used to being in pain, or maybe his body was strong enough that this little pain was nothing for him.

Either way, he was now perfectly fine even while ingesting a yang jade that completely burned his insides.

"Are... are you okay?"Ma Rong asked with fear in her eyes.

"Of course, master. Don't worry, I know what I'm doing," he said as he took another yang jade and devoured it.

<You have ingested a 'Yang Jade'>

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body is turning the yang energy in the yang jade to Yang Qi>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 2%

.....

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body... 100%>

<Congratulation, the Yang Qi in your body has been purified and condensed>

<Yang purity at 40%>

And again.

<You have ingested a Yang jade>

.......

<Yang purity at 50%>

And again.

<You have ingested a Yang jade>

.......

<Yang purity at 60%>

Finally, he was out of yang jades.

He looked up to see Ma Rong's shocked face looking at him like she had just seen a ghost.

"How did you eat that many stones and survive?" Ma Rong asked.

"I don't know master. I could always do this from the first day I joined the sect," Alex said.

"You... you-is anything different now then?" Ma Rong asked.

"Different huh?" he thought as he tried to feel his own Qi. It was beyond vigorous now and it felt really dense and viscous now. He Qi had condensed about 40% once more and could thus hold onto a lot more of Qi in general.

Their strength, however, didn't seem to increase all that much. Aside from the first yang jade he ingested, the following once had only benefited him in condensing the Qi, and not really in increasing damage of his skills, however.

'It didn't even go up a realm in strength from what I can feel it,' he thought.

"My Qi is a lot denser now, so I can probably fly much easier now and use Qi manipulation more effectively. Hmm... feels like the cultivation base is the best it can be at this level," he said and opened up the status page. Then, he hit [Breakthrough]

Immediately, he jumped from Organ Tempering 4th realm to Organ Tempering 5th realm. He had been in the realm for a while now, so he felt it was right to increase it now.

Ma Rong was surprised at the random breakthrough no matter how many times she saw it.

"At some point in the future, you are going to give me a heart attack, I swear," she said. "Alright, go and rest or maybe try to stabilize your cultivation base. After that, be ready to leave at 8. I will come to get you," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, master," he said and left her house.

His master was trying her hardest to not show it, but she really was worrying a lot today. Her precious disciple had to kill someone, Someone had infiltrated her sect for some reason, the forbidden fields were increasing in size.

Then there was the fact that she had to now take disciples to the annual sect competition and also make sure to get good points in the competitions to become a 1st-grade sect.

Alex didn't realize exactly what it must be like having so many burdens on oneself, but he promised himself to help her relieve a bit of it.

He couldn't stop the forbidden fields from increasing in size. He couldn't stop the person behind Song Zun from infiltrating. He couldn't stop her from worrying about the different disciples that would be at the capital city.

What he could do was show her that killing someone hadn't changed him for the worse but instead made him better, and he could help the sect win a lot of points at the competition.

Sun was up the horizon and Alex went inside his home. He realized that he was still in the tattered robes and full of sand everywhere. So he took off his clothes and jumped into the pond inside the courtyard.

"Ahh, this feels so good," he said. "Ah right, come out Pearl," he said as he called Pearl in a flash of white light. Pearl appeared for a moment before disappearing from view as he fell underwater.

Alex used Qi manipulation to carry him out and gave him a good bath too, despite his constant disapproval.

After taking a bath for what felt like forever, Alex got out and changed his clothes to the Core disciple's robe that he was given after becoming one.

Not sure when exactly they were to leave, Alex decided to log out and have some breakfast.

Chapter 230: Gathering

Early morning, Alex got out of his room and made his way to the kitchen. Hannah was probably still in-game, so he didn't bother preparing anything for her. It was too early after all.

Once he was done, he left her a note at the dinner table saying that it was Friday and he didn't have any classes, do he would eat later whenever he could.

Once that was set, he went back to his room and logged back in. It was still a while before he would be taken away, so he decided to practice his techniques.

Fighting with a mortal body had made his body move way better than it did before. When combined with Qi, he was on a higher level. He practiced the Elusive Heavenly sword.

A slash, a stab, a swing, he practiced every stance there was in the Elusive Heavenly Sword and before he knew it; he was starting to lose vision of the surrounding.

It was just one man and one sword against the world. Soon, Alex lost himself too, and it was only the sword.

After a while, he abruptly stopped practicing. Alex felt a sort of mental whiplash from suddenly being in control of his body once more, fully conscious.

"It happened once again..." he thought. The first time he learned the sword technique, he had fallen in a trance as well. 'Why does this keep happening?' he wondered.

"You out of it now?"

A question came from the side. Ma Rong was standing at the door, looking at his train.

"Ah, master. When did you get here?" He asked.

"I've been here for 5 minutes now. Took you quite a while to notice me," she said.

Alex just gave small smile and didn't tell her that he didn't notice her at all. He quickly looked at the time and was shocked at how late it was.

'It's 8 am already?' he thought in surprise. More than an hour had gone by without him even realizing it.

"Come one, we are leaving now. People are going to arrive at the place soon," she said.

"Oh, okay," he said as he walked out with her. "Have the disciples who are leaving been already selected?" he asked.

"Yes. There are over 15 disciples who will leave with us. Considering that one sect can only have 3 disciples in each of the competitions at once, and each disciple can only take part in 3 competitions; we will need a lot of these disciples," she said.

"Oh, we can only take place in 3 competitions huh. Have you decided what competition I am going to take part in?" he asked.

"I am going to put you in two of the alchemy competitions. The Ingredients Recognizing competition and the best pill-making competition. As for the third one... I haven't thought about it yet."

"There are other alchemy competitions such as the fastest pill making, where as long as you make a mortal grade pill, you pass the competition. Or the one where one is made to make the most unique pills out there."

"I could put you in the second one, but that would mean you will have to show the different recipes you got from the corpse, and I don't want to do that right now," Ma Rong said.

"I see. Alright, master, I will do as you say," Alex said while nodding. He could be said to be above average in terms of speed in making pills, but he was nowhere near the fastest amongst his peers according to his master.

He flew with his master and landed directly in front of the Elder's hall. There he saw about 11 different disciples and a few elders standing around.

"Hmm... are the 3 not here yet?" Ma Rong asked. Just as she said that a voice came from behind her. "We're here. Sorry, we took a while. Hmm... are the other 2 not here yet, sect leader?" an older man asked.

Alex looked at him and felt like he saw him somewhere before, but didn't know where. 'That face looks so familiar,' he thought. Next to the older man was a girl with blonde hair in ponytails who was looking around with playful eyes.

Her eyes fell on Ma Rong and she quickly greeted her. She then switched her eyes to Alex and was puzzled for a second before she realized who he was.

"Ah, you are the sect leader's new disciple, aren't you?" She said in surprise. It seemed that she was in the knowhow about the sect leader somehow.

Alex was a little surprised. A girl he had never seen before suddenly knew who he was. He looked at her robes and realized that she was a core disciple as well.

'I don't remember interacting with her before, have I?' he gave a confused look as he thought about the girl, but couldn't remember anything.

Even without eidetic memory, he was sure that such a lively girl with a not bad face and child-like attitude would be hard to remember. He was about to ask his master who she was when she instead talked first.

"Yu Ming, greet the First Elder," Ma Rong said. "He is Lang Shun's father, Lang Luoyang."

"Ah, good morning First elder. It is really nice to meet you," he said with a slight bow. 'Martial uncle's father? No wonder he looks so familiar. They practically have the same face.'

He then turned to his master, waiting for her to introduce the lively girl as well, but instead, she just looked at him in confusion.

"What?" she asked.

"Umm... who is she? She seems to know me, but I don't remember ever meeting her," Alex said with his spiritual sense.

Ma Rong nearly face-palmed herself. "Don't you interact with your fellow disciples or what? How come you don't know her?" she asked.

"Umm... master, I usually spend my free time learning alchemy and remember that I have been absent for the last 2 weeks and a half?" he said.

"Sigh, I understand," she said as she looked at the girl and said, "My disciple doesn't seem to know you, introduce yourself, Fanfan."

"Oh," the girl said in surprise and then proceeded to introduce herself.

"Hello, My name is Fan Ruogang, you can call me Fanfan."

Chapter 231: Wan Li

"Ah, hello, my name is Yu Ming, nice to meet you," he said.

"Nice to meet you too, Mingming," she said.

'Mingming? She is already making nicknames for me? Anyway, Fan Ruogang, I know that name rig—' his eyes went wide as he realized where he knew her name from.

'The third-ranked core disciple?' he said in shock. He finally remembered her. Both the contribution ranking and Alchemy Achievements ranking were as follows.

1. Wan Li

2. Zhou Mei

3. Fan Ruogang

He was surprised that such a bubbly girl would actually be so talented in alchemy. 'You really can't judge a person's ability by their appearance.'

"Oh, thank god."

"We made it in time."

Two voices spoke, one male, one female. Alex turned his head to see two Elders flying down with a disciple behind them. He didn't recognize the elders, but he sure as hell recognized the disciple.

'Zhou Mei? Of course, she is going too,' he thought.

Zhou Mei seemed to have also noticed him and was making angry faces while looking at him. She seemed to be still mad about the fact that he got for free what she had to work hard for.

"You are on time. Yu Ming, these are Song Heng and Su Shu. They are the second and third Elders respectively," Ma Rong said.

"Good Morning Elders," Alex greeted them

"Oh, we finally get to see the Sect Leader's disciple we've heard so much about huh?" the man Song Heng said.

"I didn't expect him to be this young, however. He barely looks 20," the woman Su Shu said.

"Right, Honey? I was thinking the same thing," Song Heng said.

"Ughh," Ma Rong said as she rolled her eyes after seeing the two husband and wife pair being lovey-dovey with each other. Even Zhou Mei was cringing a bit.

"Meimei, where is Wan Li?" Ma Rong asked.

"He told me he would come by on his own earlier, so I went to find masters. Is he not here yet?" she said while searching for him.

"Sigh, that guy. Alright, let's just wait for him," Ma Rong said.

About 5 minutes later, they finally saw someone walking down the core disciple mountain. Alex looked at the man coming down the mountain.

He was quite thin in build and wasn't very tall. His short hair was a mess and looking at his face, Alex thought he was the same age as him.

'Is that… ?' Alex thought.

"I'm sorry Elders, Sect Leader. I am late, aren't I? Oh no. I was sure I would make it here in time. I— I started making pills and soon forgot about the time. I am so sorry," the disciple started saying.

"It's okay, Wan Li. You aren't late. We only got here too," Ma Rong lied a little to make the disciple not feel as bad. Alex was quite surprised that she actually let him get away with being late.

He didn't think being late was punishable or anything, still lying outright to make him feel better… was this what it meant to be the best disciple in the sect?

"Oh, so I am not late? Ah, that makes me feel so much better." The disciples in the back seemed to be in the know about Wan Li's personality, so none of them got angry at all.

"Alright, since everyone is here, it is time for us to leave. First Elder, I leave the sect in your care while I am away," Ma Rong said.

"Don't worry sect leader. We old men will look after the sect. You just take care of the disciples that are away," the First Elder said.

Ma Rong nodded and pulled out a small item from her robes. It looked like a…

'A ship? Can a small ship even fit all of their disci—' before he could even finish thinking anything, Ma Rong threw the ship into the air, and suddenly, a massive ship of over 100 meters in length and 20 meters in height and width appeared.

Alex's jaw nearly dropped when he saw the massive ship in front of him.

The ship was nothing like what he had seen before. Even the ships in real life were nowhere near as big as this. 'Woah,' he thought. The more he looked at it, the more absurd it was.

How is such a massive ship even floating in the air? How was such a massive ship, even so, small that it could fit in his master's hands? She didn't even pull it out of any storage bags from what he could see.
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Many questions ran across his head. "Alright, everyone gets up," she said.

5 elders beside Ma Rong and the 2nd and 3rd else flew up to the ship while carrying the other 11 disciples. 2nd Elder carried Zhou Mei, while 3rd elder carried Fan Ruogang.

Wan Li looked at only Alex remaining along with the Sect leader and said," I can go second. Let little brother here go up first."

Ma Rong smiled a little and suddenly grabbed Wan Li with her Qi, and turned to Alex to say, "Let's go."

Alex nodded and used his Qi to fly into the air and land on the deck of the massive ship. Some of the disciples who were paying attention realized that he flew up on his own.

"Woah, how high is his cultivation?" they wondered. All of these disciples were either core sect or inner sect disciples.

Alex landed beside his master and Wan Li and looked at the deck full of people as he thought, ' if even Inner sect disciples are being taken, then that means that we will be taking part in more than just the Alchemy tournament right? I hope it's not a battle. I don't have a very high cultivation base to fight against other people.'

Ma Rong looked at the surroundings to make sure everyone was there. Once she made sure no one was left behind and they were all settled on the deck of the ship, she said,

"Forward."

Chapter 232: Headache

At first, the ship barely moved an inch. But slowly, it started catching up speed. Before Alex could even think of anything to say, the ship started moving at a faster speed than the bullet trains he had been in ever could.

'Holy Sh*t, that is a fast speed. Just how fast is this boat going?' he wondered.

Ma Rong was the one giving orders, while the one actually running the ship was actually an elder who was staying at the bridge of the ship. Ma Rong instructed the elder something and started walking towards Alex.

"So, how are you feeling? Do you think you can handle the b0at? Most people usually vomit when they get on something so fast," Ma Rong said.

"It's fine master, I am perfectly fine," he said. Thankfully, he was used to being on such fast vehicles, Or else he would have gotten dizzy by now.

Ma Rong nodded when she heard this and voluntarily started explaining the origin of the ship.

"This is actually a sect treasure that the sect leader gets to use once in a while if the sect requires it. The boat was made around 40 years ago, and it has been used maybe 100 times at most. "

"It's mostly used to carry around disciples from the sect to a different location and back. If not for this ship, we wouldn't even reach Cardinal City by day after tomorrow," Ma Rong said.

"Hmm... but the small boat you use is also pretty fast master. Maybe not as fast as this, but it shouldn't take more than twice what this one takes right?" he asked.

"Oh, that's not how flying works though. At some point, with small boats, we will exhaust all our Qi and have to rest. While with this boat, it uses True Spirit stones as a power source, so we can fly around non-stop," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, that makes sense," Alex said as he looked around. He looked at the back of the ship, beyond where the different disciples were staying, and asked his master, "What are those rooms? Do we get to stay there?" he asked.

"Of course. Just go into any open room and lock it from inside. It will be yours until you leave," Ma Rong said.

"Can I go there now? Honestly, I'm feeling kind of exhausted after staying up for nearly 3 days. Can I get the rest of the information later?"? he said.

"Oh, okay. Sure, go and rest," Ma Rong said. He could hear the concern in her voice.

He nodded to his master and walked towards the back of the ship where the rooms were. Just as he was about to enter the rooms, he heard someone calling him.

"Hey, brother." It was a whisper at best with how quiet the voice was. If not for his acute senses thanks to his body cultivation and Qi Cultivation, he wouldn't even have heard anything.

He looked around and found Wan Li staying behind a crowd of elders as if he was trying to hide or something.

"What's going on?" Alex asked him in his regular voice.

"Sshh Sshh. speak quietly," Wan Li whispered

"What's going on?" Alex asked in a whisper as well.

"You are the sect leader's disciple right?" he asked without any other questions to bridge it. Alex was a little surprised at the sudden question and started to wonder if he wanted to tell him that he was being unfairly treated, just like Zhou Mei.

"Yes, I am the sect Leader's disciple. Nice to meet you," Alex said showing a fake smile, waiting for the obvious question to arrive. Instead what he heard next was truly out of the left field.

"Oh yeah, Hi. I am Wan Li. Brother Yu, can you do me a favor and take me inside the door to the different rooms?" he asked.

Alex surely wasn't expecting this at all. "Take you inside? You want me to carry you?" Alex was a little weirded out by the response.

"No, no. Just hide me while you are going inside. You just need to hide me until I enter the door," Wan Li said.

"Why though?" Alex asked.

"Please brother hurry up. Don't ask any questions or I will get into trouble," Wan Li said.

'Is it so serious?" Alex was a little surprised. "Alright, let's go," he said and stood up. Wan Li hurriedly stood up and hid in front of him as they both walked towards the door.

Wan Li hurriedly opened the door and walked in, closing the door behind him. Alex was surprised at how hurried he was. 'Does he have to go to the bathroom or what?'

"Wanwan, where are you? Wanwan! Come on out and we can play. Oh, Mingming, have you seen Wanwan?" Fan Ruogang suddenly walked up to him and started asking him questions.

"Wanwan? You mean Wan Li?" Alex asked as he got a foreboding of what the answer was.

"Yeah. I have been looking for him but he went somewhere. Doesn't matter now; I found you. Wanna come play with me? It will be fun, I promise!" Fan Ruogang said.

Alex's eyes were wide open as he finally realized what Wan Li was running away from.

"Umm... I have a headache, and I was going to go to sleep for now," Alex tried to lie to get away from her.

"Oh, you have a headache? That's bad. Here take this," she said as she took out a pill from her storage bag. "This pill will help you with your headache. Eat it."

Alex was dumbfounded at what just happened. 'Sh*t. I didn't expect her to take out a pill,' he thought.

"Actually, It's more than just a headache. I haven't slept in a long while and I feel like I am going to faint anytime now. So I really need that sleep. How about I play with you after I come out later?" he said and went inside without even waiting for a response.

Soon, he found an empty room and settled in it. After that, he logged out.

Chapter 233: Game

Alex logged out of the game and realized that it hadn't actually been that long since he had gone in, only 8 am. It had just felt like it had been a while due to the different people he had met.

'Whatever, I will just eat something that will keep me full until late afternoon today' he thought. So, he went to the kitchen to get something to eat.

"Oh, hey sister. Why are you here so early? Are you cooking lunch?" he asked.

"No, I got your note," she said as she showed the note and said, "it's my day off too, so I decided to take a break and cook the lunch later on," she said.

"Oh, ok."

"Oh yeah, did you ask about tomorrow?" Hannah asked.

"Tomorrow?" Alex was a little confused.

"The party? Will you have free time to party tomorrow?" Hannah asked.

"Oh, that. Uhh… so many things happened that I forgot to ask. Although we left our sect and are going to the capital city which we will reach tomorrow morning, I think. So I don't know if I will even have time for the shopping itself, let alone the party," Alex said.

"What? Try to make some time," Hannah said.

Alex got some food to eat and fill his stomach for the rest of the day. After that, he went back into the game. He logged into the same room on the ship. It was getting a bit boring to stay in the room so he walked out of the room to go back to the deck with his master.

'I need to ask her about tomorrow,' he thought.

He opened the door of the room and saw Fan Ruogang dragging the nearly crying Wan Li outside. 'What the… ' he didn't even finish talking when Fan Ruogang saw him.

"Oh hey Mingming, is your headache gone?" he asked.

"Uh, yeah. It's gone," he said reluctantly.

"Oh, then you come too, we are going to play," she said and started dragging Alex with her other hand. She found a relatively spacious place on the deck and sat down.

She made both Wan Li and Alex sit a little further apart.

"Ok so…" Fan Ruogang was about to speak when Zhou Mei arrived from the side. "Meimei, come sit and play with us," she said.

Zhou? Mei looked towards Alex and asked, "What is he doing here?" she asked.

"Mingming? Of course, he is here to play. I brought him here," Fan Ruogang said.

"No, I mean he barely passed the core disciple a few days ago, you think he can play your game?" Zhou Mei asked. Alex was a bit surprised.

'Just what sort of game is this?' he wondered.

"He is the sect leader's disciple though, so he should be fit to play this right?" Fan Ruogang asked.

"I don't know. Try to play some and you will know," Zhou Mei said.

"Alright, you sit too," Fan Ruogang said.

Zhou Mei nodded and sat down between Wan Li and Fan Ruogang, opposite Alex, and kept staring daggers at him. Alex was getting used to that.

"So, what is this game? How do we play it?" Alex asked.

"Oh, it's quite simple. So, we take out a pill from our storage and hold it in our closed palm. Then the other people will go around guessing the ingredients, and the one holding the pill will tell if they are correct or not."

"The goal of the game is to know what the pill is and you can guess it anytime. However, if you guess wrong, you are out for that round, understood?" Fan Ruogang asked.

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. 'That sounds pretty simple,' he thought.

"Alright, I will start," Fan Ruogang said and brought out a pill from her storage bag and quickly hid it in her hand.

"Meimei, guess," she said.

"Aquatic Berry," Zhou Mei guessed.

"Haha, No. Wanwan, your turn," Fan Ruogang said.

"Hmm… what about a Curling Dragon root?" Wan Li asked.

"Nope," Fan Ruogang said with a giggle. "Mingming, your turn," she asked.

Alex could look into her hand and see what the pill was, but he decided not to. "Umm, Morning Rose seeds?" he asked.

"Yes. Finally, someone got it," she said. Alex simply smiled. Alex was looking into the recipes of the pills in the Hong Wu sect and choosing the most common ingredients. It was working.

"Spirit Rat Femur?" Zhou Mei asked.

"No," Fan Ruogang said.

"Uhh… Star Deer guts?" Wan Li asked.

"Yes, good job Wanwan," Fan Ruogang said.

'A pill that uses both Star Deer guts and Morning Rose seeds? There are 4 of them. However, if I narrow it down any further, it will make it easier for them,' Alex thought.

"Spirit ginseng," he chose a random ingredient that didn't align with any of the ingredients in the pills.

"Nope," Fan Ruogang said.

The game continued as they each said more and more ingredients and soon Alex realized, they were circling around the pills as much as he was.

'No wonder they are top 3 of the sect. They know just as much as, if not more, than me,' Alex thought. He then decided to cheat a little. Suddenly, he went into focus mode.
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All of his senses were enhanced in this state and he could do something that was nearly impossible for him to do before this. He could smell the pill.

Normally, it was very faint for him, but with focus mode on he could smell the pill all the way from where he was sitting.

'I see, ' he thought.

"Hillside Roses?" Wan Li asked.

"Nah, you guys need to choose better answers, I'm getting bored," she said. "Mingming, please choose a serious answer, okay?"

Ning thought for a second and said, "Is it the Dawn Spirit pill?"

Fan Ruogang forgot to speak for a second and said, "Yes! It is. Finally, someone got it." She turned to Wan Li and Zhou Mei and said, "You guys couldn't even guess that much? You guys need to study more."

"Alright, let's continue. Whose turn is it now?"

Chapter 234: Beast hoard

Alex was forced to play for quite a while before he was allowed to leave. Aside from the first time, he didn't cheat anymore and decided to play fairly.

Finally, he made his way to the front of the deck where his master was.

"Did you have fun playing Fanfan's little game?" she asked.

"You were spying on us?" Alex asked with a chuckle.

"No, you guys were just creating too much of a ruckus. The top 3 disciples playing with the sect leader's disciple. That causes a small commotion no matter how one thinks of it," Ma Rong said.

"I see," he said as he looked around the area they were traveling through. Although the nearby areas were passing by in a flash, the areas further away were moving very slowly and were thus much better to look at.

"The southern forest is really large, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yeah, from what I have heard, it's larger in width than crimson empire is in length," Ma Rong said.

"What? Is that true master?" he asked.

"I don't know. As I said, I only heard that. Might be true, might not be," Ma Rong said.

Alex looked around and thought of a question and asked, "Master, do you know what an ocean is?"

"Ocean? Of course, who doesn't? The ocean covers just as much of Crimson empire as does the Souther forest," Ma Rong said.

"What? There are oceans around the Crimson empire? Can I see it on the way to the Cardinal City?" Alex asked.

"Oh no. The Oceans are around the outside of the Crimson Empire, while the Cardinal city is at the center of the empire, so you will never see the ocean around there. But don't worry, once you are strong enough, you can go roam the empire and see the different sites," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded in disappointment. "What about continents then? You know about them?" Alex asked.

"Continents? Hmm… that word doesn't feel familiar at all, so no," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, ok," Alex said. He was dejected, but he had guessed the answer. 'So people really don't know we are in the western continent, do they?' he thought.

'Ocean and Continent, I will need to travel away from the city soon on my own,' Alex thought.

"By the way, Master. We will be reaching tomorrow morning right? Since the competition will start on Sunday, what do we do all day tomorrow?" Alex asked.

"Well, we usually give disciples free rein in the capital so that they can go out and grow. You can do the same," Ma Rong said.

That solved one of his worries. He could now go get a party happening in his place without worrying about not being able to participate in it.

Alex stayed on the ship talking with Ma Rong until a few hours later. He was once more reminded about the Royal Fu family and the different things he needed to take care to not reveal in the capital city and competition.

Afterward, they spent some time in silence, just looking towards the distance. After a while, Alex started feeling drowsy from the lack of engagement to anything.

'Maybe I should go sleep for real,' he thought.

"Master, I will go back to the room. You should go take some rest too," he said.

"Alright, go. I will take a rest when the second elder is done resting as w— Hmm" Ma Rong stopped abruptly when she noticed something in the distance.

She suddenly stood up and walked towards the front of the deck.

"Stop there," she told the elder responsible for flying the boat. As ordered, the elder stopped the boat right on top of a group of people who were on their way to another town. From the looks of it, they were part of a caravan.

Currently, they were being ruthlessly attacked by different monsters from the southern forest. Alex had at some point reached the edge of the deck and was looking down as well.

When the people in the caravan saw the large shadow appear and stop near them, they started shouting at the ship for help.

"Stay here," Ma Rong said and took a step off the edge of the ship. Suddenly, she disappeared. Many disciples didn't see where the sect leader went and was surprised.

Alex was surprised too, but he soon found her. Ma Rong was already at the bottom, in front of the various monsters. With the Flickering Shadows technique, she could teleport to her shadow regardless of the distance between her and the shadow.

Once she was below, she waved her hands once, and suddenly, all of the beasts were on the ground, frothing at their mouth. They were already dead.

Alex was beyond shocked when he saw the display of prowess. 'A single palm to clear a hoard of organ tempering realm monsters. I wonder when I can do that,' Alex said in pure surprise.

"Thank you senior for saving us, Senior. We thank you very much," the people in the caravan started to show their gratitude towards their savior. However, Ma Rong wanted none of it.

She got straight to the questions. "Why were you attacked? Do you have something in the cargo worth attracting a monster hoard?" she asked.
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"No, miss savior. There is no such thing," the caravan merchants told her. Ma Rong had already checked the insides with her spiritual sense and really had found nothing from there.

She turned around and stored all of the dead beasts into her storage bags and said to the people, "Continue along." After that, she flew to the boat and landed on the deck.

Many disciples had gone to either side now, and while they missed Ma Rong's fight, they had seen the multitudes of monster corpses lying by the side. When paired with time, they knew what exactly had taken place down there.

Ma Rong went to where she was previously seated and sat down. She then said to herself in a small voice, "So the beasts really are getting restless."

Chapter 235: Unusual Activity

The ship started moving once more and soon they were back to the same speed.

Alex sat down next to Ma Rong looking at her contemplating something and thought, 'the beasts are getting restless? What does she mean?'

He didn't speak for a few minutes, but the curiosity got to him in the end, so he asked, "Master, What is happening with the beasts? Why are they attacking the caravans?"

Ma Rong thought for a while and said,? "I do not know. I have tried making sense of what little information we have, but nothing makes any sense."

Alex got more curious, "What exactly is happening, Master?"

"Ever since a while ago, the monsters in the southern forest have been getting restless in several places. Monsters that never leave their side of the forest are coming out, attacking the people in the roads."

"I previously thought that these were just one-off incidents and would go back to normal after a while, but...? it has only started to escalate since then," she said.

Alex fell into thought as well. There was no such thing happening in the Scarlet city yet... but what if it did? What if suddenly, one day the monsters started attacking them from the south, while the monsters in the desert arrive from the north.

If that happened, the city would have to evacuate and relocate.

'Are these two things related? Can't be, right?' he thought. The monsters in the desert were strong, but they were not strong like regular monsters that had access to Qi.

No monsters in the desert could ever make him feel fear the way the worm had back then.

'Worm...?' he thought.

"Master, did I ever tell you about the strong worm? No, right?" he asked.

"A worm? What's this about?" she asked.

He proceeded to explain to her how he met a worm that was stronger than both her and Wen Cheng. Ma Rong heard it all with a face of shock. "Thankfully, you didn't get caught by it. You... I don't even want to think what would've happened to you," Ma Rong said.

"So, do you think the worm might be behind it?" Alex asked.

"No, I don't think it's possible for a worm that is not even the peak of True Realm to do anything so as to launch a coordinated attack against the empire. Besides, given how random these beast attacks are, I doubt a single monster could plan the attacks that currently happening. No, it's something else. Something entirely different," Ma Rong said as she looked far away into the south.

"Then... " Alex asked, "Could it be Pearl's mother? Is her corpse somehow responsible for this?" he asked.

"The cat monster? Why do you ask that?" Ma Rong asked.

"I mean, she was a saint realm monster. Considering how nonexistent saint realms are in the crimson empire, maybe that has something to do with it?" he asked.

Ma Rong chuckled a little and asked, "Who told you saint realms are non-existent?"

"Wha-aren't Saint Realm what everyone in the crimson empire is looking to be?" Alex asked.

"Yes, but that doesn't mean that no one has reached it. There are a few hidden figures in the Crimson Empire that are in the Saint Realm. Heck, I know for sure there are some old foggies in the Royal family that are hiding away in a dungeon as a saint realm expert, hoping time won't catch up to them," Ma Rong said and then immediately gestured to him to never talk about the royal family in this way again.

"Wait, if Saint Realm is not unreachable, then why were you guys so hung up on Spirit Cleansing Lilies and pearl's mother then?" he asked in confusion.

"It's not that Saint Realm is unreachable, but more so that we have no idea what to do in that realm. Admittedly, from what I know, Saint realm is nothing like the self-tempering realm and True realm that comes before it."

"They say that the process of cultivation itself changes when one enters the Saint Realm. I have no idea what that means and I would love to get some. But those goddamn old people will die with their secret buried with them," Ma Rong said.

"We just want Spirit Cleansing Lilies cause spirit sense is helpful early on. As for the cat mother, I don't think there has been a saint realm monster in the crimson empire in a long time, so it was curiosity that we cared about them. Also, having a monster beast that can grow to Saint Realm for guarantee is very tempting."

"Which is why you shouldn't show around Pearl willy nilly. Not everyone you meet is a good person. Until you can be a good judge of character, try not to reveal your hands too much," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, Master." 'I know. I've seen those people who will take help and return poison instead of gratitude," Alex thought.

"By the way, you guys never found Pearl's mother's body right? What happened to it?" Alex asked.

"No idea. We searched the area for a long time, but there was no sign of anything from the outside interfering. Unless there is a strong bird that flew away with the corpse before we arrived, we don't know what happened to it. Why do you want to know?" she asked.

"Oh, I... just wanted to perform a small funeral for Pearl's sake," Alex said.

Ma Rong nodded and patted his head while saying, "I hope you can stay just as kind forever."

Alex kept quiet and thought to himself, 'I hope so too.'

Alex talked to Ma Rong a little more and asked different questions such as the Royal family's saint realm experts or the forbidden realm. But Ma Rong didn't know much of either, so the two remained mostly quiet.

"Sect Leader, You can go back, we will take it from here for now," A voice came from the back. Both Ma Rong and Alex looked back and saw that the second and third elders had arrived.

Chapter 236: Second and Third Elder

"Ah, You guys are here. Alright, take over. I will go get some rest," Ma Rong said as she looked towards the two elders.

"Are you gonna go take a rest as well, Yu?" she asked.

"Umm... I will stay here for a while and leave around evening time," Alex said.

"Very well. You can stay here with Second Elder and Third Elder," Ma Rong said as left.

The two elders came and sat a little to the left of Alex and looked towards the horizon. "I'm really surprised sect master is letting you take part in the competition so soon, Disciple Yu," the Third Elder said.

She was a little younger than Ma Rong and was shorter too. She also had robes that were custom-tailored to fit the curvature of her body. Overall, she looked much more appealing to the eyes than any of the other Elders Alex had seen, including his master.

"Yes, Elder. I was surprised when I learned it too," Alex said.

"But I heard you are quite talented, Disciple Yu. Is that true?" the second Elder asked.

"I wouldn't really know about that. I haven't had much interaction with the other disciples, so I don't know what is normal and what is not in terms of talent," Alex replied.

"Oh, nice reply. Not arrogant at all, I like it," the Third Elder said.

Far away, Zhou Mei saw her masters talking with Alex and got a little ticked off. She walked up to them and heard,

"So you will be taking part in two of the competitions huh? Any idea what the third one will be?" Second Elder asked.

"He'll be taking part in the competition? Isn't he too new to all of this to take part in them?" Zhou Mei asked.

"Oh, maybe. But he is talented, so he gets to," Third Elder said.

"How talented can he be if he only just entered the core sect? Master, you must be pulling my leg," Zhou Mei said.

"Oh, then you mustn't know about his ingredient finding and pill-making abilities. I thought you already talked with him after finding out who he was a few days ago?" Second Elder asked.

"I... I didn't talk with him. Why? How talented can he be?" Zhou Mei asked.

"Oh, Disciple Yu, what is the highest harmony pill you've made yet?" Second Elder asked.

Alex was a little surprised by the line of questioning. 'Why would you ask that of someone?' he thought. But they were elders and probably already knew about the ones he registered, so he replied, "It was 43%."

The two elders nodded as if they were just testing him, but Zhou Mei's eyes were wide open. "Wait what? No way he is making 43% harmony pills. That is way too high. Even Wan Li can barely make 40%, and that's under best conditions," Zhou Mei cried out.

"What can I tell you, Little Mei, that is true," Second Elder said. The third Elder giggled at the side.

"But... But... That must be because he got everything handed to him. He learned everything in the sect was treated with bias," she tried to make accusations.

Alex started to get annoyed a little. 'Why do I have to sit here and listen to her bullsh*t?' he thought and decided to leave.

But then, the second elder spoke, "No, there was no bias in his treatment as far as I know. To be fair, me and her were out here learning about the competition when he joined the sect. But from what we heard afterward, he made a great contribution to the sect."

"So big, that everything in the sect was given to him to use with full authority," he said.

"What? What could he have done to gain that?" she asked. Full authority over everything meant that everything in the sect was free for him to use. That would obviously help everyone get a little better even if they put no effort into anything.

"Oh, that's a secret for now. I don't know if anyone other than the elders is allowed to know it or not. You will have to ask the sect leader herself," Second Elder said.

Not getting any answers, Zhou Mei left. Alex felt a little weird about everything and left them as well and went back to the room in the ship.

Having nothing to do anymore, he logged out.

He woke up from his bed feeling hungry. "Uhh... I haven't eaten in nearly 9 hours," he thought and walked out of the room. He made his way to the kitchen and found Hannah in the living room watching the TV.

"You ate already, sister?" he asked.

"Hmm... oh yeah. Go get your food," she said.

Alex went to the kitchen and got himself a snack. He then walked back to the living room and sat down on the sofa watching the TV.

"What are you watching?" he asked.

"Oh, I was watching the news about the capsules and one thing lead to another. Now I'm just watching whatever is on," she said.

"Oh, what was the capsule's news about?" he asked.

"Oh, it seems we won't have to go to the shop for shopping at all. It will be delivered to us. We only have to go to the shops to give them our helmets and get a discount," Hannah said.

"Oh, then I should go there tomorrow, right?" he said.

"What? Do you really care about some measly discounts after earning so much?" she asked.

"Umm... I guess not?" he said. "Oh yeah. My master said that we can stay in the hotel tomorrow, so we can have that party? you've been meaning to have for the longest time."

"Oh, nice. I will start ordering stuff. Wait, no. I have to let them know first," she said and started messaging the guests.

Alex just stayed there and ate his snack. "Sister, I think I have a little problem for next week. I don't know what to do about it," he said.

"Oh, what problem?" she asked.

Chapter 237: Buying Rush

"You see, it seems like there are going to be a lot of different competitions in the upcoming annual competition and I might end up missing a lot of days of classes," he said.

"Haha, you are worried about that? Then you will love the news that came out today at noon," Hannah said.

"Hmm... what news?" he asked.

"Look," Hannah said as she handed him her phone. Alex took it and saw that it was an official email from Oakleaf University.

-Due to the upcoming release of a gaming capsule from Deva Corp. for the game Eternal Cultivation, the university is going to remain closed for the next week. Classes will run as usual from next week-

"What? They are stopping classes just for a game, why?" he asked.

"Just a game? Do you not know how big Eternal Cultivation is right now?" Hannah asked in surprise.

"I mean I know, but still. Closing a university due to the game, isn't that a little extreme?" he asked.

"Not really. Just think about how many students will be absent from their classes due to playing forever. Especially since you won't have to log out as much with the capsules. Besides, I'm pretty sure the teachers want to play the game too," Hannah laughed.

"Maybe that is the case," Alex thought and nodded.

"Yeah, either way, it doesn't matter to us, d—," Hannah stopped talking and looked at the news. "Oh, sh*t. Go get your laptop and phone, fast," she said and ran from the sofa.

"What?" Alex was a little surprised and looked at the TV. There was flashing breaking news at the bottom.

- From Deva Corp.

- Sales for Capsules will start at 5 PM today. The sales system will be a first come first serve. Meaning, whoever orders first will get a capsule delivered to them first.

- One will only be able to order a single capsule at a time.

"Ah," Alex exclaimed and ran to his room too and brought back his laptop and smartphone. Hannah was already in the room with her laptop open.

She was furiously typing something. Alex looked at the time and saw that it was only 4:50 PM right now. So the sales shouldn't have started yet.

"What are you doing, sister?" he asked.

"Oh, you are here. Open your laptop and start typing everything necessary for buying a capsule, like the home address, your bank account, and everything. It will be easier to copy-paste later," she said.

"Oh, that's not a bad idea," he thought and started typing the same as well.

Time started ticking by. They were constantly refreshing the website trying to not miss it.

The clock hit 5, and the page was available.

Both of them furiously started inputting the data into the different fields. There were a few more fields to type in than they had prepared for, but they could just type that right now.

"Done," Hannah said and exclaimed.

Alex jumped of fright from the sudden exclamation and missed the 'BUY' button. So he brought the cursor back and pressed it again.

"Sigh, I did it as well," he said as he took a breath.

"Hmm... tomorrow at 3 pm huh? That's... around the time the party will end. That actually works out for me perfectly," Hannah said.

"Oh," Alex heard her and looked at his information as well. Then, he started laughing. At first, he chuckled and then broke out into a burst of full laughter.

Hannah was caught off guard. "What's wrong?" she asked. That was definitely not good laughter from her perspective.

"I finished a split second later than you, and yet my delivery date became Monday in the morning," he said.

"What? That's so late though," Hannah said, not realizing that she was the entire reason he was slow in the first place.

"It's fine, I can work with my helmet for 2 more days," he said.

"Alright then," Hannah said.

Alex went back to eating his snacks. With the laptop right next to him, he decided to check a few things that had been bothering him for the last few days.

He went to the forum and looked up stuff about Crimson Empire. Especially, he wanted to see if he could find any information about the beasts getting restless.

"They only talk about the beasts attacking and never say why," he thought as he read through the information. He looked up other information about the Crimson Empire and found out that the upcoming competition was quite popular amongst a small group of people.

These were probably the only people who were in the Crimson Empire. Most of them were taking part in it as well.

Next up, he looked up the Evolution thing that was in Pearl's status.

Unfortunately, only 30 people had even managed to bond with a beast and of them, not one of them had a beast with over 2% in evolution chance.

The highest one was 6% that the person acquired through a guardian in their sect. Aside from that, there was no information about evolutions at all. Everything else was just speculation.

And they matched what he had been thinking in the first place.

He sighed and looked through more information that was popular on the forum. Apparently, a tournament in the southern continent had just ended, and a lot of players had managed to get a good result there.

He looked through the other information and found a post that talked about the reincarnation problem the game had right now. Unfortunately, it was nothing but people complaining. There was nothing informative about that post, so he closed it.

He went to the kitchen to help his cousin prepare food for the night and ate it afterward as well. At the same time, the things she had ordered for the party arrived as well.

"I can do it myself, you can go," she said and sent Alex who wanted to help. So, he returned back to his room and logged back into the game.

Chapter 238: Raining

Alex logged back into the game and walked out of the room.

As soon as he was in the hallway, he heard something. It was an ambient sound, like a static of a radio. "Could it be?" his eyes went wide and he walked out.

Opening the door, the sound got much louder and he could hear each individual sound that collectively made the overall sound. Cold air with drops of water struck his face.

It was raining.

This was the first time he had seen rain in the game.

"Haha, it's actually raining," he said with a smile. He looked out and saw many disciples in the rain, practically dancing, letting the rain hit their faces.

Alex was quite surprised, but he understood. 'They haven't seen rain in a long time as well, have they?' he thought.

He walked out into the rain and let it fall on him. He could easily create a layer of Qi to block it, but he didn't do so. He walked to the front of the ship and saw that his master was already there.

So were the two elders.

"Ah, you are here disciple Yu. Came to check the rain?" the Second Elder asked.

"I just came out because I thought I had enough rest," he said as he looked around the deck. The various disciples were all happily walking around in the rain.

Fan Ruogang had Wan Li in her clutches and was walking around the rain with him. Even Zhou Mei was smiling a little after seeing the rain.

He then looked up at the sky and saw the clouds were looming for quite a long distance. There were even some lightning discharges in the rain.

"We... won't get hit by the lightning, right?" he asked.

"Don't worry, the ship has protection. It can divert lightning attacks around us with its barrier, similar to how air is diverted away," Ma Rong said.

"But the rain still hits us?" he asked.

"That's because we can allow what to enter and whatnot," Ma Rong said.

"I see," he said. "Anyway, this is my first time seeing rain since I joined the sect. I wouldn't have imagined the sect to be in such a place of drought," he said.

"It's not really in a place of drought. There are springs of water deep underground. It's only that it never rains. Even when the sky gets cloudy, it immediately goes away," Ma Rong said.

"Huh, Why?" Alex asked.

"No idea. It's never rained in Scarlet City for nearly hundreds of years. Thankfully, the weather doesn't get too hot, or we would be a desert right now," Ma Rong said.

"Like the forbidden fields?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, like the forbidden fie—," Ma Rong stopped. She remembered what was happening in the forbidden fields for the last few years. The land was getting deserted.

Alex realized what she was thinking. It was not far off in the future when the scarlet city would become a desert as well. And no one knew the reason why.

"I think we should put up the barrier, sect leader. Or the deck will be full of water," Second Elder said.

Ma Rong got out of her stupor and nodded. Suddenly, with a wave of her hand, the rain stopped falling. All the disciples stopped and looked up. Rains were streaming down the air as if there was a glass roof on top of them.

"We will go back now, sect Leader," Second Elder said and walked away with the third elder.

Alex was left alone with his Master.

"Are you worried about the sect becoming a desert later on?" he asked.

"Yes. As a sect leader, I can't help but be worried about it. At first, I thought it not raining in Scarlet City had to do with the geographical location, but now, I'm starting to think it has something to do with the desert in the forbidden fields," Ma Rong said.

Alex had no answer for that.

"Anyway, you should go back and cultivate or something. You don't need to stay out here in the rain. I can stay all by myself," Ma Rong said.

"It's okay, I can cultivate here too," Alex said and called out Pearl.

"Hide him," Ma Rong got a little frantic.

"It's okay, master," Alex said and quickly hit Pearl in his robes. "Pearl, start cultivating," he said.

"Meow," Pearl said and started to snuggle up on his body before glowing a bright white color. He then turned to yellow before fully glowing in golden color.

Thankfully, Alex's robe was hiding most of the light so only Ma Rong could see the shine.

Slowly, cuts started appearing on Alex's skin. Ma Rong got scared a little thinking he was hurt. "Yu Ming, are you okay?" she asked in a hurry.

"I'm okay, don't worry. This is just how I body cultivate," he said.

"But... that looks so painful. Are you really fine?" she asked.

"Yeah, don't worry about it. I'm used to the pain now," he said.

'Used to the pain' and not 'it's not painful'. Ma Rong felt a deep pain in her heart when she heard that. She knew she couldn't shelter him forever, but she wanted to keep him safe for as long as she could.

However, he was already getting hurt in ways she couldn't imagine. The physical pain of such body cultivation and the psychological pain of killing a person. She never wanted him to feel those. Yet, he did, and she couldn't stop it.

She stood there for a few hours, watching him cultivate and making sure that he didn't make a mistake during his cultivation. Fortunately, she was worrying needlessly.

Alex could talk through his cultivation now, so she just talked back whenever he spoke and let him be when he was just cultivating.

Soon, the clouds parted away, giving ways to the moonlight. Clears rays of moonlight lit the world below. And in that light, Ma Rong saw something.

Another monster hoard attack.

Chapter 239: Fraudsters

'Another one?' she thought in surprise.

"Stop the ship," she ordered the elder who was currently driving it.

Feeling the ship stop suddenly, Alex opened his eyes and told Pearl to stop cultivating. The cuts all over his body quickly healed from the Qi his body had.

"What's going on master?" he asked.

"Another monster hoard attack, down there," she said.

Alex looked from the front and saw a bunch of monsters attacking a small carriage.? "Come, let's see what is going on," Ma Rong said and beckoned Alex.

Alex nodded and flew with her to the bottom.

On the ground were a bunch of young people trying to fight the monsters with an elderly at the front trying to fend off the beast. The young people had at best the Bone Tempering realm of Cultivation and the old man seemed to be at 1st realm of Organ tempering realm too.

They were very weak against the hoard of beasts in front of them. Just the fact that they were alive right now was a miracle.

Ma Rong couldn't quickly teleport down as she did during the day without her shadow being there. However, before even reaching the 10-meter mark, where one was supposed to be able to teleport, she disappeared.

Alex was surprised. "How did she teleport 30 meters away?" he wondered in surprise.

Ma Rong immediately suppressed all the beasts down there and waited for Alex to arrive. Once he was there, she said, "Kill them."

Alex nodded and took out his Steel Sword. The monsters were around the Bone Tempering realm, with some being in the mid organ tempering realm, but that was no problem for Alex.

He easily cut through the different beasts with his sword like it was a hot knife attacking butter. Within a few slices, most of the monsters were dead.

For the monster in the Organ tempering realm, he used Smiting Blade, and soon they were dead as well. He quickly took the corpses into his storage bag.

Ma Rong saw that the fight was over and nodded; she then looked towards the old man asked, " Who are you people and what are you guys doing here?"

The 5 young people in the back were shivering with fear and didn't speak at all. So, the old man decided to speak.

"We come from a nearly by village. I am a sect leader and these are my students. I wanted to take them to the capital to register them in the annual competition."

"We were riding the carriage to the capital and... and... the beasts, they came out of nowhere and attacked us."

"I thought we were going to die, but you saved us. Thank you, Miss, young man. You saved this old man's life," the old man said.

Alex nodded and said nothing as he accepted the gratitude in silence. Ma Rong nothing whatsoever.

Alex looked at the poor young people, still shivering from fear. 'I would probably be scared just like that if I knew I was going to die too," he thought.

"Can I ask who you are Miss? I see that your ship is big. You must be from a well-known sect," he said.

"You don't need to know," Ma Rong said and looked around. She then asked," Where are your horses?"

"They were eaten by the monsters miss. Gobbled up entirely. Honestly, I was scared to death. Thankfully, you guys saved me. I don't know how I can repay you," the old man said.

"You don't have to repay us. We were just doing what anyone would do in this situation," Alex said. Ma Rong kept quiet.

"Alright, you said you were from a nearby village right?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, it's about a few dozen kilometers that way," the old man pointed behind him.

"I see. Then gather up your belongings and go back. You do not have horses to carry the carriage anymore, so you won't make it to the capital before the registration date. I doubt you could've made it even if you had one. So just return back to your village," Ma Rong said.

"I can't do that. These disciples of mine have wanted to take part in the competition for such a long time. I cannot let their dreams go to waste. Please, can't you just let us up on the ship? I'm sure you have a lot of room, right?" the old man asked.

"No," Ma Rong said with a cold face and flew away, forcefully pulling Alex along with her. Alex was surprised at the abrupt pull, but let her do it.

They both landed on the ship and Ma Rong told the elder to start moving again. Very soon, they were moving at a fast speed away from the place.

Alex was confused as to what had just happened. His master was unusually cold today after helping the people down there. 'Does she hate outsiders that much? Can't we just take little stowaways? I'm pretty sure there is plenty of places,' he thought.

"What's going on master? Why didn't you help them?" Alex asked.

"They... didn't need our help," Ma Rong said.

"But their carriage is broken. I'm sure we could've ta-"

"No, before even that, they didn't need our help. That old man was crafty. I don't know if he is a thief or what, but he wanted to get onto our ship for some reason."

"If I am not mistaken, that wasn't a monster hoard that randomly attacked them either. It was clearly set up beforehand to make it look like they were attacked. The horses were never there either, it was all a lie."

"He must've paid some kids to act like they were in trouble and take the chance to rob whoever stopped to help them. The old man was looking towards our ship from the very moment we arrived."

"He wanted us to help him, that bastard," she said.

Alex was surprised. 'How much experience do you need to have to catch things like that? If it were me, I would've just let them into the ship openly,' he thought.

'I still have a lot to learn.'

Chapter 240: Death

Down at the ground where the old man and the 5 young people were staying at,

The old man watched the ship fly off into the distance with his crafty eyes and made an angry smile.

"Tsk, that young girl is too crafty. She saw through my ruse too easily," he said. He shook his head and looked at the blood on the ground.

"Sigh, I worked so hard to gather the beasts. You could've at least stopped the young man for a few moments if not for a minute," he said. His eyes would have hints of irritation whenever he remembered the young man's face behind the young woman.

"Tsk, I'm getting annoyed again," he thought.

He looked back at the 5 young people and looked at their shivering figures. "Stop shivering for one second," he shouted at them. That only made them shiver harder.

The fear on the faces of the 5 people was even higher than it was when fighting the monsters. He stopped looking at them and thought, "Urghh... I could've killed them if I was just a little stronger," he thought.

"At least that young man. Ughh... I so want to kill him," he said in agitation.

"And then, I would kill that girl, Ma Rong. That little girl thinks she is something huh."

" Well, she did help me a little... No, I will still kill her someday." He then turned back to the young ones again and saw them shivering with a face full of fear.

"Sigh"

Suddenly, the old man's cultivation base flared and started increasing. From Organ Tempering 1st realm to 2nd realm to the third realm... Organ Tempering 9th realm... Meridian Tempering 1st realm... Meridian Tempering 9th realm... Mind Tempering 1st realm... Mind Tempering 9th realm...

True Disciple 1st realm... True Disciple 9th realm... True Master 1st Realm... True Master 9th realm... True Lord 1st realm... True Lord 5th realm.

Finally, it increased once more to True Lord 6th realm and stopped increasing.

"Ahh... It feels so much better when you don't have to hide your cultivation base. Sigh, I'm still too weak to fight the girl with her True King realm cultivation," The old man said.

He then turned around to the 5 people and said, " You guys must be lonely. Why don't I send you to your friends and families from the village?"

The young people were relieved for a split second before realizing what he meant. The man in front of them had killed their entire village to capture the 5 of them for this one thing.

If he were to send them back, then...

Before the young ones could even think anything anymore, the old man swung his hand horizontally and 5 heads fell to the ground.

"Ahh... I wish I could do the same to those people. Especially the boy. Although, letting him grow a little stronger before taking his body doesn't sound too bad either," he said as he looked towards the distance where the ship had flown to.

And then, his cultivation base started to disappear once more until it was no more. Not even the previous organ tempering realm remained and he looked just like a mortal.

Then, he turned right and started walking into the southern forest. Before entering, however, a veil of light came upon him, and soon, he disappeared from where he was.

********

Alex was back to body cultivating on top of the ship under Ma Rong's supervision. He didn't need it, but having someone look after him why he was cultivating was still very much appreciated.

Ma Rong kept on watching him for a while and asked a question that she had in her heart for a long time.

"How long has it been since you cultivated normally?" she asked.

"Hmm... normally? Let's see... I have cultivated my Qi for a single time since I could do body cultivation," he said.

"Hmm... do you find body cultivation better than Qi cultivation?" she asked. She was genuinely curious about body cultivation.

"Not really," he said. "It's both the same. At least with Qi cultivation I don't have to feel this pain, and it doesn't get slower as you get stronger," he said.

"Oh, sounds like body cultivation is not as good as Qi cultivation. Then why do you keep on body cultivating? You can just cultivate your Qi too. I can look after you," She said.

"Uh... you remember the first time you came to teach me? The thing I said that morning you found me in the room?" he asked.

"Hmm?" Ma Rong didn't know what he was talking about. It was before she had unlocked her spiritual sense, so it took her a while to remember.

"Ah, that time I found you asleep? What about it?" she asked. She remembered the first time she went to his house to give him his alchemy lessons, and he was in one of the rooms, asleep.

"You see... I still fall asleep when I cultivate and... I don't know when I stop doing it," he said.

"What? You haven't fixed that yet?" she asked.

"I don't know how to, master. I keep falling asleep. At first, I thought that was normal, but it seems that it is not. I don't know what to do," he said.

"You should have let me know that way earlier," Ma Rong said. "Alright, Cultivate right now and I'll try to see what the problem is."

Alex nodded and asked Pearl to stop cultivating.

"That's enough for today, Pearl. You can go back now," Alex said.

"Meow?", Pearl woke up from the cultivation and went back to his beast space in Alex's arm. Ma Rong waited for Alex to start.

Alex knew he was in safe hands, so he sat in a relaxed posture and closed his eyes. He started breathing in and out slowly, and soon the cultivation method kicked in.

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body increasing cultivation speed by 500%>

<Starry sky Qi Absorption method's Night bonus increasing cultivation speed by 200%>

<Obtained 200 Qi>

And, as usual, Alex fell into a trance and lost consciousness.

Chapter 241: Cardinal City

Alex slowly opened his eyes and saw the rays of sun hitting him in the eyes. It was early in the morning, and the sun had just come up of the horizon.

He looked in front of him and saw a massive cityscape in front of him. He was high in the air, so he could see everything clearly.

Surrounded by giant mountain ranges was a massive city, at least 4 times as large as the scarlet city itself. Alex saw the tall buildings all over the city with a central area that was a massive open space with a single castle in the center.

Most of the houses were painted red, so the whole city had a red aesthetic.

"The Cardinal City?" Alex thought. Only then did he realize that the ship had stopped moving. He looked to the left and saw a few more ships approaching the city and stopped just as far as they had as well.

The disciples in that sect started getting down as well with the help of their elders. Alex looked back to check the disciples of his own ship and saw that there were none anymore.

'Are they gone anymore,' he thought and spread out his spiritual sense to check the surroundings.

"Oh, you are right here maste-" he turned around to see his master with red eyes and generally redder face. She had been crying.

"What's wrong, Master? Why are you crying?" he asked in surprise.

Ma Rong woke up from her stunned state and quickly rubbed her eyes. "Nothing. I'm not crying," she said as she sniffed a little.

"C'mon, let's go. Everyone had already left for the hotel. We are the only ones left," Ma Rong said and got up. She walked to the edge of the ship and jumped down.

Alex stood up and followed her. Alex still didn't know why she was crying. 'Did something happen while I was cultivating?' he thought. 'Speaking of which, I fell asleep once more, and master didn't wake me up? I thought she was going to.'

He looked at the sun and thought, 'Well, I woke up in time, so I guess it's fine.'

Once they were both down on the floor, Ma Rong swiped on hand mid-air and the ship suddenly changed into its miniature size. Ma Rong kept it in her robes and started walking in.

"Master, what happened in the ship? Why were you crying?" he asked once more.

"As I said, don't worry about it. Nothing happened," she said. But Alex didn't believe that whatsoever. 'Something definitely happened,' he thought, but he couldn't tell what. So he decided to change the question for now.

"So, about me falling asleep while cultivating, is that fixable?" he asked.

"Don't worry about that either. Just cultivate normally, and you will be fine. There is nothing wrong with you falling asleep," Ma Rong said.

Alex was genuinely confused now. 'Me falling asleep while cultivating is fine? What? That shouldn't be the case. That was the entire reason I cultivated last night. why would she say that?' he wondered.

He wanted to ask more questions, but they reached the gate of the city.

"Oh yeah, there are hidden masters all over the city, so try not to use your spiritual sense recklessly. They can sense it too if they have it," Ma Rong said to his through spiritual sense.

"I see, I will try not to use it then, Master," he said and quickly sucked in all the spiritual sense he was spreading to check the place.

There were many people lined up to enter the city, both individuals and big merchant groups.

"Daoist Ma, is that you?" a voice came from the left.

Ma Rong turned around to see who was calling her, and forced herself to smile a little as she said, "Nice to meet you again, Daoist Li, it's been a while."

"Haha, yeah. I haven't seen you since last year's competition." The person named Li was a tall man with a white robe and a clean, shaven face. He was holding a paper fan in his hand and made an amicable face when he spoke.

He then looked around her and asked, "Where are your sect members? Did they not arrive?"

"Oh no, they've already gone in first. I had a little something to do, so I stayed behind," she said.

"I see,' he said and then turned to Alex and asked, " Who is this young fellow?"

"This is my disciple, Yu Ming. Yu Ming, this is Daoist Li, the sect leader of Golden Eagle sect, from Rose City," she said.

"Good Morning, Sect Leader Li," Alex greeted. The person named Li simply nodded.

"So, where are your sect member, Daoist Li?" Ma Rong asked.

"Oh, they are getting off the ship right now. I saw your ship earlier and came here to meet you," he said.

"I see. Oh, they're there. You will probably need to make some arrangements of yourself too, so I will leave you to it," Ma Rong said and walked away.

Alex felt that that was a very abrupt change in conversation, but he made no comments. Soon, they reached the gate and Ma Rong was way too recognizable to be stopped at the gate.

Only after walking in did Alex ask, "why did we leave the sect leader Li like that?"

"Cause he is annoying," Ma Rong said.

Alex was a little surprised. "But you seemed quite happy to talk with him," he asked.

"He's not a bad guy, it seems he likes me a lot, so it gets annoying when he keeps talking. See how he literally left behind his sect members to talk to me?" Ma Rong asked.

"I see," Alex said.

"Come, let's go to the hotel. The others must've already settled. You should get settled too," Ma Rong said.

Alex walked amongst the busy street of the capital city, looking at the festival-like atmosphere with everyone moving around in the street as if they were dancing. This was much crowded than the big cities in real life.

Chapter 242: Wan Li's Past

"Is this a regular thing, or are there more people here due to the competition," Alex asked.

"There are a little more people here due to the competition, but it's mostly just like this," Ma Rong said. She too was a little affected by the festival-like environment but not nearly as much as Alex.

Soon they reached a massive building with floors in the dozens. "Woah, that's a tall building," Alex said. He knew there were taller buildings in real life, but had never seen any personally.

Even the tv station building he had gone to with his cousin wasn't as tall as this.

Ma Rong walked in with Alex behind her. The hotel clerk did nothing when they saw the robes and stayed aside. Even if they dared to, the aura Ma Rong was sending out would scare them away.

"Ah, sect leader, you are here," Second Elder was standing in the hallway with the 18 other disciples and a few more elders nearby.

"You got the room?" Ma Rong asked.

The second Elder shook his head, and said, "They say they need the talisman from the association I gave you."

"Alright," Ma Rong said and walked up to the registration and showed the talisman. The man quickly nodded and gave them a bunch of keys.

"Let's go," Ma Rong said and was about to walk to the stairs when suddenly someone spoke up.

"Oh my, Oh my. If it isn't the sect known for getting second place in the alchemy competitions last year. What a stroke of luck that we could meet them here," someone said.

Ma Rong's face turned a little cold and a general air of hostility appeared in the other elders and disciples too. Only Wan Li and Alex were looking around the place, unknown about what was going on.

"I see you successfully found the way to the hotel, Daoist Xu. It's good to know that all those explosions haven't left you blind," Ma Rong said.

"Hah, why would they blind us?" the person named Xu asked.

"Oh, it's truly a surprise that you weren't deafened either. I'm happy for you, Daoist Xu," Ma Rong said.

The person named Xu was a short, chubby, hawk-faced cultivator wearing orange robes. He was currently seething in anger, and so were the rest of his sect members.

"Ah, you must be late to go make some more explosions. I won't stop you," Ma Rong said and left up the stair. The rest of the elders and disciples did the same as well.

The Daoist Xu remained behind, fuming at the fact that he didn't get the last word in.

Alex walked up to Ma Rong and asked, "Who's that?"

"Xu Beng, sect leader of the Spring Song Sect," Ma Rong said.

"Ah, that sect that makes the explosive pills? Those were annoying to fight against," Alex said.

"Yeah, they are one of the best alchemy sects in the Crimson Empire," Ma Rong said. There was a hint of annoyance in her voice.

"What's their grade? Are they better than us too?" Alex asked.

"They are around the same level as us in terms of Alchemy achievements. But they were created before us so they are already a first-grade sect. Since we are so close to each other in prowess, we have a deep-rooted history of the rivalry."

Ma Rong didn't seem as angry when she talked about this aspect of their relationship.

"Also, they said we were the second-best in last year's exam. Does that mean that we didn't do very well?" He asked.

"We did well. It's just that they did better. However, that won't be the same case this year. This competition, we will surely win," Ma Rong said with an eye full of determination.

"What makes you say that?" Alex asked. 'It's not just because of me right?' he wondered.

"Because this time we have you and Wan Li," Ma Rong said.

"Wan Li? He wasn't there in the last competition?" Alex asked.

"No, he… we made him stay behind to grieve the loss of his parents," Ma Rong said.

Alex didn't expect such reasoning. "His parents died?" he asked.

"Yes. His parents were merchants that left their son at Hong Wu sect ever since he was 10 years old. He's worked his way up to where he is for the last 9 years."

"While he was here, his parents were away on their business. But then, one day during a normal caravan ride, they were targeted by bandits and were killed. We tried to find the bandits, but they got away," Ma Rong said.

Alex remained quiet. 'Why is there so much death and tragedy in this game? Can no one have a normal life here?' he wanted to shout.

Alex turned back to look at Wan Li who was walking up the stairs with Fan Ruogang holding his arm.

"The boy hadn't been with his parents for so long that he didn't know how to feel when he learned the news. Poor boy didn't even know how to grieve. He spent his days doing nothing but preparing for the competition, holed up in his house."

"He didn't listen to any one of us, so when the time came for leaving, I made him stay behind and made sure he took care of his emotions. His grief was too much and it was eating him away inside. He just didn't know it," Ma Rong said.

"Thankfully, after the competition, Fanfan has been there with him, making him do other things aside from just alchemy, trying to take his mind off of his feelings once he was done grieving."

"She has truly been a blessing for him," Ma Rong said.

"I see," Alex said. He couldn't have imagined that the bubbly girl that seemed to want to do nothing but play was actually just trying to help him.

Alex started seeing both of them in a new light. Finally, he stopped looking at them as just Number 1 and Number 3 and instead thought of them as actual human beings with thought.

Chapter 243: Decorations

"Floor 18, this is our floor. Everyone listen up. There are about 12 rooms on this floor. That will be enough for the 23 of us. Get a partner and get yourself a room," Ma Rong said.

"Also, if you want to go outside, visit the shops, you are free to do so. However, do not cause any commotion or problems. If you want something, get it, if you can't leave. Also, don't leave the city, and be here by 6 pm in the evening. Dismissed."

She handed 1 key to the 2nd elder, kept 1 for herself, and handed the other 10 for the elders to distribute.

"Yu Ming, You will stay with Wan Li," She said and went to a room that the key belonged to. Alex took a key from the elders and walked to the room.

He opened the door and —

"Woah," he said in surprise at the somehow traditional and yet somehow modern-looking room. The floor was all marble and yet the beds and closets had no designs on them, making them look simple. There was a window to the side, showing an amazing view of the city.

Alex walked up to the room and opened the window. The room was facing south and he saw the tall trees of the southern forest far away from the wall.

The door opened once more.

"Oh h-hey Yu Ming, we are together for a while now, huh?" Wan Li tried to make some small talk.

"Yes. I see that is the case," Alex said. Wan Li looked around and saw the two beds and asked, "Which one do you want?"

"I'm fine with either. You can choose one," Alex said.

"Really? Ok then, I will take this," Wan Li said and took the bed that was left of the door. "By the way, are you excited about the competitions?" Wan Li asked.

"Kind of, yes. I actually don't really know what to expect so I can't get more excited," Alex said.

"Oh. I wish I could get excited. Instead, all I feel is nervousness. I- I have never done alchemy in front of many other people. Oh god, what if I fail?" he started worrying.

"Hey hey hey, you'll do fine. You are the best disciple of our sect. What are you worrying about?" Alex asked.

"But I've never made pills in front of others. It feels a little scary. I think I might mess up," Wan Li said.

"Didn't you make pills to pass the core exam in front of everyone?" Alex asked. For his turn, there were nearly a hundred people there, so he assumed the same would have been true for everyone.

"Y-yeah, but those were elders and a few other disciples. Not the thousands of people that are going to be there tomorrow. Just the different sects alone would reach a thousand members. Add onto that the competition staff and the audience-Oh god I'm getting nervous again," Wan Li said.

Alex was a little surprised. He hadn't really thought of how many people were going to be there. 'Sh*t. Thousands of people is a lot. Now I'm getting a little nervous,' he chuckled as he thought that.

"Don't worry. It will be fine. Besides, it won't be only you who takes part in the competition, it will be all of us. Have some faith in your teammates," Alex said.

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Wan Li calmed down a bit.

"Arghh, I'm quite tired. I think I will go sleep for a while. What will you do, Brother Wan?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, I think I will study for a while. Need to prepare for the competition the following days," Wan Li said. Alex smiled and went to lay down on his bed.

He laid down in a sleeping position and logged out.

Alex got up from his bed and checked the time. "Quite close to 8 huh, I guess I have some time. Although, when is the party happening?" he wondered and quickly freshened up before walking to the living room.

What was waiting for him there was a surprise.

"Woah," he said as he looked at the different decorations his cousin had put up on the house. To him, the amount of work that had to be put into this was beyond ridiculous.

He quickly found his cousin in the kitchen.

"Sister, you did all of this?" he asked with a look of disbelief. The decorations were truly a sight to behold for him.

"Oh hey, you are awake quite late," she said. "So... you like this right? I don't really know about designing myself, but... I think it looks good."

Alex looked at the decorations once again and said, "I am going, to be honest... I don't really know what is good and what is not. Now that I think about it, I don't even know what city parties are like. However, this does all look brilliant, so you can be proud of yourself, Sister."

Hannah smiled after hearing the compliments. "Alright sit, I will put on some breakfast for you," Hannah said, but Alex cut her off.

"Just sit and eat. I will get my own; you've already done too much today," Alex said and walked up to the counter. He put himself some milk and cereals and started eating.

He looked around the kitchen while eating and asked, "So, when are the guests coming? It should be early now that there is no shopping involved, right?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, they will come over for lunch. So we have.... About 3 hours or so. Enough time to cook. I've already put the turkey in the oven for a roast. As for the other things, we can cook an hour later," Hannah said.

"Alright, I will help you. I don't have anything to do today in-game, so I'm pretty free," Alex said.

"Okay, I will need your help anyway," Hannah said with a smile.

Alex soon finished his breakfast and started helping his cousin with the preparation of the different dishes for the party.

Chapter 244: The Party

TING TONG TING

The doorbell rang at around 10 am. Alex and Hannah were in the kitchen and had just started to cook. They had finished making a few side dishes but the main dishes were still remaining.

"Who is that?" Alex asked.

"I… don't know. It's barely 10 am. There's still an hour before the guests should be arriving. I wonder who it is," Hannah said and walked to the door.

She looked at the footage from outside of her door and after seeing who it was, she quickly opened the door.

"Hey, Hannah!!" Sarah said with a big smile and immediately hugged her with a few bags in her hand.

"Hello." Emily walked in from behind Sarah.

"Hey! Why are you guys so early? Did I give the wrong time on my message?" Hannah asked.

"Oh no. We thought that you guys might need some hand in getting everything ready, so we came to help," Sarah said.

"Oh thank you so much. I don't know if we need it, but a few extra hands never hurt anybody," Hannah said with a smile and looked at Emily as she said, " Thanks for coming too, Emily. Both Alex and I really appreciate it."

Emily made a meek little nod and said nothing.

"Haha, it was Emily's idea to come help in the first place. I was fully ready to come on time, but she made me come help," Sarah said.

"Oh," Hannah said with a surprise.

Emily quickly pinched Sarah on the side, clearly not enjoying the attention. Sarah just said 'ow' a few times and jumped to the side.

"Haha, here. We brought you guys a housewarming gift," Sarah said as she handed Hannah the bags.

Hannah smiled and took it as she said, "Thank you, we really appreciate the both of you coming here today. Come on in." Hannah took them inside their home.

Sarah and Emily walked in and were immediately shocked at the utter size of the place. "Woah," Sarah said as she looked at the place that looked like it was meant to house a millionaire.

"Damn, you guys own this place or rent it?" Sarah asked.

"We rent it. My parents are from the North and Alex is from the south, so we are here temporarily for at least a while," Hannah said.

"Still, this is an amazing crib. How much does it cost monthly? I assume it's something like 4000 dollars right?" Sarah asked.

Emily was a little surprised when she heard the price.

Hannah gave a smug smile and said, "It costs 10,000 dollars a month."

Both Sarah and Emily's jaw dropped in surprise. "Wait wait wait, you are pulling my leg, right? We have the exact same amount of space back in our place and it costs 2000$."

"I know this is better furnished and in a better building, but… isn't 10,000 dollars a lot?" Sarah asked.

"Oh, that's probably because we don't have the same space," Hannah said.
New n0vel chapters are published on

"What do you mean?" she asked. Hannah simply pointed to the staircase at the side and said, "The upper floor is ours too."

"Wait? You guys are taking up 2 floors?" Sarah asked in surprise.

"Yeah. Come let me show you guys," Hannah said and took them both upstairs. Alex was left alone to do all the current cooking and simply just waited for them to come down.

"Damn, if that is truly what you get for rent then… I can see why it would be worth it. Wow, I thought I hit the jackpot in apartments, you guys are something else," Sarah said.

Emily was still silently carrying the look of shock.

"Hello, Alex." Sarah and Emily made their way into the kitchen and started helping. An hour quickly passed and they managed to finish making the dishes 15 minutes before the guests were to arrive.

Most of them were friends of Hannah from her classes, some were Sarah's friends. Alex hadn't invited anyone since he didn't have the time to.

So, the guests who arrived were all girls. Alex talked to a few of them out of courtesy, but it seemed they talked back to him out of courtesy too.

He even secretly asked her once.

"Sister, you don't have a guy friend?"

"I do, but I decided not to. I didn't know who was coming, so I only brought the girls," she had said.

The foods and drinks were soon distributed and Alex was simply surprised at just how much these girls drank alcohol.

The party was for the release of the capsules, so they eventually ended up talking about the game. Alex sat there listening to the different things they were saying.

Only one of the girls there was from the western continent but not from the crimson empire, so he couldn't even ask her anything.

In the end, after a couple of hours, the party was over and people started leaving. Soon, everyone but Sarah and Emily was gone.

"You guys should return too," Hannah said.

" No, we will help you with the cleanup," Sarah said. Hannah simply smiled and said nothing. She really needed the help.

Soon everyone was helping with the cleanup. Alex picked up the paper plates and started stuffing them down the trash bag, Sarah vacuumed the floor, Emily cleaned the tables and furniture while Hannah washed the remaining dishes.

After 15 minutes, they finally finished it and sat down in the living room to rest.

"That was a nice celebration party," Sarah said.

"Thank god everything went as planned," Hannah said with a laugh.

"So many people kept commenting on how nice your place is haha. To be honest, I can understand their feeling. It really is a nice place," Sarah said.

"Yeah, it's a nice place. I got it with 3 of my other friends, but they all left after their studies ended. So now, only Alex and I stay here. Honestly, the extra rooms are wasted on us," Hannah said. But then, she thought of something and slowly turned and asked.

"Sarah, Emily, would you guys be willing to move into the spare rooms?"

Chapter 245: Delivery

Alex was a little surprised that his cousin asked the two something like that without consulting him. However, he didn't find himself opposed to the idea.

"Stay here? I... I don't know if we could. It's an amazing place, but it's quite expensive I have to say," Sarah said.

"Why would you care about that? You are making a lot right?" Hannah asked.

"That... is true. But still, it's quite a lot of money," Sarah said.

"Don't worry. We will be sharing the rent. To be honest, that will help us alleviate some of the pressure too," Hannah said.

"Hmm... I will have to think about it for a few days. What about you, Emily?" Sarah asked.

"I'm... not really opposed to the idea. It's just that I don't think I will be able to afford the rent at all. Just 500 dollars a month is already a lot for me. 2500 is not something I can do easily," Emily said.

"Alright then, I will let you guys think about that. You are always welcome," Hannah said.

TING TONG TING

"Huh? Did someone forget something?" Hannah said and went up to check the live footage outside her door. There were two men standing there, but they were someone she didn't recognize at all.

At first, Hannah got scared a little, but then she noticed their clothing. It was a matching uniform.

"Oh, wait for a second, what time is it?" She quickly took out her phone and checked the time. It was 3 Pm. "Hey guys, my capsule is here," Hannah said.

"Oh, it's time already?" Alex said as he walked up to the door, which Hannah opened.

"Hello, are you Ms. Hannah Wright?" the men asked.

"Yes, that is me," Hannah said.

"We have a package from Deva Corp., please sign here." Hannah quickly signed the package and 2 meters by 1 meter by half a meter cardboard package was soon hauled in by the two men. After bringing it inside, they left.

"Huh? They aren't gonna help us set up the thing?" Alex was a little surprised.

"I don't know. How are we even going to carry such a heavy thing?" Hannah worried.

"Oh, you guys didn't read the forum this morning?" Sarah asked.

Alex and Hannah looked at each other in confusion. "Why? We've been busy with the party all morning, so I haven't had time to check it," Hannah said.

"Of course. Umm... you two, try carrying it," Sarah said. Hannah didn't know what she meant, but that was the only thing they could do, so Alex and Hannah got to either side and started grabbing the bottom of the package.

"On 3 okay? 1, 2, 3"

Both Alex and Hannah put massive force into picking the package. "Woah" they both screamed as they nearly lost their balance.

The capsule was incredibly light. Perhaps only 30 kilograms at best.

"Hahaha, that's a nice reaction from you guys," Sarah said as she put down her phone that she was using to secretly film them.

"W-Why is it so light? Did they forget the capsule?" Alex asked.

"No, it's just supposed to be that light. People have been posting about it in the forums all day long," Sarah said.

"Let's open it up here then," Alex said. Hannah quickly brought a knife from the kitchen and started cutting open the cardboard box open.

Alex spread apart the cardboard flaps and revealed the capsule. "Woah," he said in surprise. All 3 of the girls came in close to check as well.

"Damn, that looks better up close than in the picture," Sarah said.

The capsule was a little smaller than the cardboard it came in. It had a curved cover on top and was made entirely of something that felt like both steel and metal.

It was mostly white in color with the occasional gray and blue streaks of lines running across it. Alex and Hannah carried the capsule up to her room and put it in the corner of the room.

"Wait, it's so light. Won't it fall over if I move while I'm in the game? Or even when I'm trying to get in or out of the capsule?" Hannah asked.

"Oh that. Wait for a second, it should be in the box," Sarah quickly ran downstairs and came back up a minute later with a bunch of things in her hand.

Some of them were wires for the capsule, but there was one thing that was a little unexpected. They were suction cups.

"Take these and put them under the capsule or around the side. If you manage to grab hold of something smooth with these like the floor or the wall, you don't have to worry about falling over at all," Sarah said.

Alex quickly took the suction cups and put them under the capsule before setting them on the floor. After pushing on it a little, the suction cups got to working and the system was as rigid as if it were super glued to the place.

"There are also screws in the box, but I don't think you guys would want that," Sarah said. They put the cables in place and finally, the capsule turned on.

They admired the capsule for a bit. "Should I... get in?" Hannah asked the crowd.

"Uhh... you can get in, but we will have to leave for now. Sorry, but My capsule will be coming soon too, so we have to leave," Sarah said.

"Oh, when?" Hannah asked.

"Should be within the hour."

"Oh, then you better hurry. Let us walk you down," Hannah said and along with Alex, took the two girls to the building door at the bottom.

"Thank you so much for coming today. We will see you guys next week when the classes are back on," Hannah said. "Oh, and don't forget to think about the proposal. We would love to have you two as roommates."

"Ok, bye."

After the girls left, Alex and Hannah went back to their apartment. They couldn't wait to try out the new capsule.

Chapter 246: Feature

Alex and Hannah were back in the room.

"Umm… you wanna try it first?" Hannah asked after seeing Alex's enchanted face.

"No, sister. It's yours, you should get in," Alex said.

"Stop trying to act nice and just get in," Hannah said as she pushed him towards the capsule.

Alex stopped rejecting the offer and got into the capsule. The suction cups worked very nicely and the capsule did no wobbling as expected.

He slowly sat down inside and then laid inside it. It inside had its own mattress and pillow to make the players feel comfortable. It was a snug fit for him.

"What do we do now?" he asked.

"Um, try closing the lid? I'll see if there are some manuals somewhere," Hannah said and left the room. Alex did as she said and lied back down before closing the lid to the capsule.

As soon as he did that, his mind started feeling heavy, and soon, he logged into the game.

He opened his eyes and got up from the bed back in the room inside the hotel. He had successfully logged in without any notifications from the system.

He immediately put up his hands to block the intense light coming from the window. There was a loud noise right next to him. He turned around to see that Wan Li was reading his book in a very loud voice.

Also, he felt like he had a massive fever right now with how hot he felt. 'Is that me or is something on fire?' he wondered. There was also a weird smell in the air that he just couldn't put a finger on.

Wan Li seemed to have noticed him moving and very slowly lifted his head. He then said something quite incomprehensible.

"O-H-H-E-Y-B-R-O-T-H-E-R-Y-U-Y-O-U-A-R-E-A-W-A-K-E." Wan Li spoke so slowly yet so loudly that Alex couldn't really understand what he meant.

Alex realized just then what actually was happening. Everything happening right now hinted that his Focus Mode was on.

The bright light, the hot environment, the slowness of time, the weird smell, and the loudness of the sound we're all the things that happened when his focus mode was active.

He quickly tried to cancel his focus mode, but he couldn't. 'Huh? What's happening?' he wondered. He tried to cancel the focus mode once more, but nothing was happening.

Not sure what was happening, he wondered if it was a bug of the game or something. This wasn't a normal Focus mode either. All of his senses were on another level when compared to the normal focus mode.

"A-R-E-Y-O-U-O-K-A-Y-B-R-O-T-H-E-R-Y-U," Wan Li spoke once more. Alex looked at him and slowly did a gesture to inform him that it was okay. He didn't want to tip him off that something was weird.

'Damn, maybe it really is a bug. I should leave and check it online," Alex thought and immediately logged out.

He slowly opened the lid back and got out of there. Thankfully, he wasn't disoriented or anything. He was still weirded out by the experience.

Hannah walked into the room with a manual for the capsule.

"Hey, why are you out? Get back in. I told you to try it out, didn't I?" Hannah said.

"Huh? Oh, I… already logged in and came back out," Alex said.

"Oh, so you found out how to get it working? Then you should have to spend a little more time in there," Hannah said.

"I… It was weird. I think the capsule has a bug in it. I can't stop the Focus mode at all," Alex said.

"Huh? A bug? Don't tell me we have to return it back. Tsk. Let's check the internet, maybe they have some answers," Hannah said, and quickly opened the forums.

"Oh, here it is, the Bugs post. Let's see…. Huh? It says that it's not a bug though. Lemme check this link, wait for a second," Hannah said and clicked some link the comments had.

"Features? Look at this, Alex. It says that the focus mode is a feature,? not a bug," Hannah said. Alex quickly went and read what was written on the post.

-Focus mode has been permanently added to the players who play with capsules. Players will have to learn to deactivate it, instead of activating it now.-

"It's auto from now on? That's gonna be a problem," Alex said. His pill-making required expert precision in his timing and movement when using his Qi. With focus mode ON, it was very hard to grasp the proper timing of when to follow the recipe as his perception of time would not be correct at all.

"Hmm, maybe. Or maybe it's easy to deactivate it. You should try it out extensively when your capsule comes too," Hannah said.

"Maybe," Alex said as he kept on reading. There weren't many other in-game features worth reading and most of the features were from real life.

One of the most beneficial ones he found was that if the player ever lost consciousness, they would be ejected from the game, unlike the previous times when they would just be in the game forever until they woke up, they were now force logged out.

'I wonder that will work with my sleeping issue if that even counts as a faint in the first place,' Alex thought.

"Alright, I will go back in. Since we won't need to eat food anymore, if I don't get out, don't wait for me, okay?" Hannah said and went into the capsule.

She closed the lid and soon logged into the game. Alex left the room and went back to his room. He couldn't wait to have his own capsule as well.

He entered the room and got on the bed. He looked at the helmet on his bed, something that he would have to store away soon.

'Ah, I probably have some explaining to do,' He thought as he remembered his interaction with Wan Li and put on the helmet before logging back into the game.

Chapter 247: City Tour

Alex opened his eyes at the same place he left. The window was no longer glaring with intense lights. He couldn't feel the hot temperature or hear the loud sounds.

Wan Li seemed to have gotten back to reading his books and didn't bother with Alex.

'This feels much better. Why would the developers have to do something so stupid like making Focus Mode permanent?' he thought He really disliked the complete change in senses from when he was out of the game to inside the game.

He stood up from his bed and looked at the time. It was around half past 3. 'Maybe I should go out and check the city,' Alex thought.

"Hey brother Wan, you want to go see the city?" Alex asked.

"The city? Uh... I already did it in the afternoon. You were asleep the entire time I left and came back," Wan Li said.

"Oh, then I will go check it out. Is there anything good I should check?" Alex asked.

"I don't really know; we didn't cover a very large area," Wan Li said.

With the sheer scope of the city, Alex could understand why. "Alright then, I'm leaving," Alex said and walked out of the room.

Wan Li was in the room, so he didn't really care about locking the room.

"Hmm... Yu Ming, you are out? Are you going somewhere?"

Alex saw his master walking up the staircase with a bunch of elders.

"Yes, master. I was thinking of going out to visit the city," Alex said. "Where are you coming back from, master?" His master and elders didn't look like they were coming back from a normal visit to the city.

"We are coming back from the sect meeting that was held by the competition holders in the city. They gave us some more information about the upcoming competitions," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, it must be something important then. Do I need to stay and listen?" Alex asked.

"No, I will tell you guys later tonight. For now, just go and visit the city. Remember to not leave very far away and come back to the hotel by 6 am," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded and bowed to the elders before leaving. He walked down the 17 flight of stairs and finally left the hotel.

The hotel was situated in the western quadrant of the city. He remembered the location and started walking towards the north.

Along the way, he saw the general festiveness of the city. There were many people out on the streets. The vendors shouted the best they could to attract the people on the streets, while the people looked around for fun things to buy.

Alex was a little overwhelmed seeing so many people in the city. When he had entered the city this morning, it was just that, morning. That couldn't compare to the late afternoon when most people left to shop.

He looked around him and saw an unnatural amount of young people in similar robes. "So many sects are here today," he thought as he looked at the myriad of different robes.

He walked along the roads as he looked for more things.

"That looks nifty." He would buy it.

"Master might want that." He would buy it.

"That should fit Senior Sister." He would buy it.

"Ah, I really like that." He bought that too.

The items were quite cheap and didn't even cost a single spirit stone in total. He was buying items not very useful to normal cultivators.

He saw a weapon and artifacts shop and looked at the armors on display. 'Should I buy an armor? I do need them quite a bit,' he thought, but soon decided not to.

"I should buy one at the auction house; Those are probably better," He said to himself. So, he left the place and walked to other places.

He entered an area that was made for cultivators. There were places that sold cultivation methods, different techniques, formation blueprints, formation flags. Talisman inks and papers, Alchemy ingredients, pills, puppets, etc.

The stuff around him was on another level. He could even feel a high cultivation base walking right past him from time to time.

'Damn, so many experts. I need to be careful here,' Alex thought. He looked around but didn't really see anything that was worth buying. Still, he walked into the alchemy buildings to see if they sold any new types of pills.

He walked in and started looking through the glass cases that showed the different names of the pills and transparent pill bottles within.

Unfortunately, nothing there caught his eyes. The pills were mostly Earth Grade pills and almost all of them were common rank pills. The True Rank pills and Heaven-grade pills were hidden in the back room probably.

He wanted to buy recipes, but unfortunately, nobody sold any that he already didn't have. 'Master must've already bought everything available for free in the market,' he thought.

As for the alchemy ingredients, he found a few that he didn't have and bought them. It cost him a few spirit stones that he was willing to let go of.

After finding nothing else to buy, he walked out of the alchemy building. Talisman and Artifacts didn't really interest him. Formations, however, seemed quite... intriguing.

'That formation Song Zun had... it somehow used the Yang Jade to strengthen his body enough to not take damage from a sword that was being used by me. He didn't have much attack himself, but the defense was very high.'

'I might not be able to get the same formation for me, but... there might be others that do the same thing. I will need to understand formations to even begin to understand what I have in my mind,' Alex thought and made his way to the formations building.

However, before he could even make it to the building, he saw someone coming out of the building. It was a man around the same height as him.

That didn't catch Alex's attention, however, what did was the yellow robe he was wearing.

'Tiger Sect.'

Chapter 248: Ambition

Alex looked at the man in front of him. He was a couple of years older than him, not much, and had a stoic-looking emotionless face that was cleanly shaven.

The most surprising thing about him to Alex however was the orange linings on his yellow robes. 'A Core disciple? Of course, that makes sense,' Alex thought.

He didn't remember seeing the man anywhere in the sect before, so the man shouldn't remember him at all. 'To be fair, I didn't see very many core disciples in the sect,' he thought.

The man looked at Alex for a single moment before ignoring him. He didn't care about anyone else at all. He started walking down the stairs and soon went past Alex.

Alex secretly checked his cultivation base and nearly missed a step of stairs in surprise. 'Holy sh*t. 3rd Mind Tempering realm? That's nearly as strong as Senior sister. The core disciples of Tiger sect are no joke,' Alex thought.

As he turned away from the guy, a girl walked past him. "Brother wait for me, don't walk out so fast," the girl said as she tried to catch up to the man.

'Sh*t,' Alex thought. He quickened up his pace to hide inside, but suddenly, a hand fell onto his shoulders stopping him in place.

"Hey mister, wait for a second," the girl stopped him. "Can you turn around?" she said. Ning sighed. He didn't know if he should turn around or not.

In the end, it would be more suspicious to just keep walking, so he turned around. "Can I help you with something?" he asked.

"YOU!" the girl said in surprise. "I thought I recognized you, but how could it be you?" She said in surprise.? She looked all over his body and asked," W-Why are you wearing this uniform? Where is your Tiger Sect uniform?"

'Sigh, Master made us go separately so that I didn't have to face this same situation, and yet, here we are,' he thought. He looked at the girl in front of him. The twin-tailed cheerful girl, he recognized her very well.

'She's the First Elder's disciple, right? She came with him to recruit me. Which mean...' Alex's eyes moved past her to the young man behind her who had stopped to see what his junior sister was doing with this man.

'Du Yuhan, Number 2 of the Tiger sect. He had finally met the second-best disciple of the Tiger sect.' Alex looked at him a bit and thought, 'His reputation suits him.'

"Hey, I am talking to you," the girl said. "What are you doing in these robes? Who did you even come with? I didn't see you on the ship?"

"I am a disciple of the Hong Wu Sect. Is there anything wrong with me wearing these robes?" he asked.

"What? What are you talking about? Did you leave the tiger sect? Is that why nobody has seen you this last week?" she asked

"SuSu, what's wrong?" Du Yuhan walked up after seeing his junior sister in a heated talk with the man.

"Brother, it's him. The disciple that defeated Huo Tu; the one master wanted to recruit but got denied," the girl named Su said.

Only finally did Du Yuhan's bother to take notice of the man in front of him. He was very far away when he checked the man's fight on the stage back at Tiger sect, so he hadn't got a good look at him, but now, he saw him clearly.

He took notice of his clothing and asked, "Are you not part of the Tiger sect anymore?" he seemed genuinely confused as he asked the question.

'Damn him, he got straight to the point I wanted to avoid. Sigh, the master said he would reveal the next time, but I am afraid I might have to do it now. Damn, should I say it or not,' he quickly thought and in the end decided to say that he was still part of the Tiger sect.

"If you don't want to speak, then you don't have to say anything. If you aren't part of the Tiger sect, I'm not going to say anything about it. Even if you are and are dressing like this for some reason, I will just ask that you don't do anything to bring down the name of both Tiger sect and Hong Wu sect."

Du Yuhan then nodded and left Alex. 'What the—? I didn't expect that at all,' Alex thought.

"Huh? Brother, are you going to leave just like that? Don't you want to ask him how he won against Huo Tu" the girl asked.

"It doesn't matter. As long as I become the strongest, nothing else will matter," Du Yuhan said and started walking away.

The girl wanted to ask Alex some more questions but quickly left behind her senior brother.

Alex stood in the middle of the stairs, dumbfounded at what had just happened. 'I thought the First Elder wanted to recruit me, so I assumed he would be the same type to either get me on his side or get rid of me in case I turn into? an opposition in the future.'

'However, he seems nothing like that. He... just wants to become strong huh? I can't help but admire his resolve. The strongest, as long as I become one, nothing else will matter.' Alex replayed the man's words in his mind.

"One doesn't simply become the second greatest disciple of a nearly 1st-grade sect without having an ambition huh?" Alex thought. "What about me? Do I have any ambition?" he started thinking.

He had wanted to see the city from early on, which he fulfilled. He wanted to earn money; he fulfilled that as well. Now, the next thing he wanted to do was...

"I want to explore the world. I want to see The desert, the ocean, the frozen lands, the giant jungles, the volcanoes. But I can't do that unless I... I cannot do that until I become strong as well."

Chapter 249: Frivolous Purchases

Alex walks into the building with the different formation items. Only after entering did he realize that he didn't know the first thing about formation. He realized that what he knew about formations from the books and hearsay didn't even crack the surface.

There were items around him that he didn't even know the use for. People were talking about stuff he didn't understand at all.

'Damn, I thought knowing that it was just putting flags and items in a specific order was all it was, but it seems even they themselves are very specific. This is not any less extensive than alchemy, huh,' he thought.

'Still, I need to buy at least the most basic formation blueprint and required items. I want to start learning with it,' He thought.

Although, learning both Alchemy and formations might have him spreading himself too thin, but he had planned to focus on Alchemy more than Formations, so that should be fine.
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He bought a basic formation blueprint called the Qi Gathering formation. It was a common rank formation that gathered Qi from 5 spirit stones in 5 points of the formations and gathered it all at the center of it. It was a common rank formation that would be about 2? meters in radius at most.

'This should be a good starting point,' Alex thought. 'I should go learn some better formation books from the library here in the capital in the following days.'

After getting what he wanted, Alex walked out of the building. He looked around at the other buildings and thought, 'Now that I'm already here, it will be a waste to not visit the other buildings right?' he thought.

He went to the talisman building and bought himself a few pairs of communication talismans that could work up to 2 kilometers away. These talismans came in pairs and were always linked to one another.

'Shame it's not like a smartphone. I will have to take one for each contact,' Alex thought.

He then walked to the Weapons and Artifact building. He surprisingly found that there were a lot of things to buy here.

"Oh wow, these storage bags allow so much extra space. I should buy a few," he thought as he looked at the various storage bags in the sale. They ranged from the ones he currently had to ones that had nearly 20 times as much space.

Although, those cost a lot. So, Alex only bought around 5 storage bags that were about 5 times larger in storage capacity. These would help him hold a lot more items in fewer bags. He wouldn't have to carry around nearly 10 different bags as he did right now.

He was also surprised when he found disposable cauldrons. These were much worse than the ones in Alchemy hall, and that was perfect for Alex who was looking to make random pills that might explode at a moment's notice.

They were also incredibly cheap, so he bought around 100 of these. He wasn't sure if that was enough or nor however.

The next thing he did was buy a Common Mortal grade sword and armor. They weren't cheap but were cheap enough for Alex who held hundreds of spirit stones.

'These should help me a bit. The sword can be used as a decoy during fights, and the armor will help deceive my enemies into thinking my defense is good because of the armor. Although, it should help increase that a bit,' Alex thought.

He wasn't optimistic about getting an armor at the Auction house now. Especially, since he didn't have many True Spirit stones anymore.

Once he was done buying other things like boxes for alchemy ingredients and bottles for the pill, he was left with not a lot of spirit stones.

'Sigh, I might have to sell some of the pills in the auction houses,' Alex thought. He didn't have many pills that he had made for the purpose of selling, and the ones he did, he didn't think were worthy of being sold.

'I might have to find a place to specifically make pills to sell,' he thought. He remembered master talking about Alchemy guilds and halls that allowed rogue alchemists to make pills, so he would try going there someday.

Once he was done with that section of the city, he took a detour back to the hotel. Along the way, he saw a restaurant for cultivators and went in to see how it was.

Apparently, one could spend a little extra to go upstairs to get a premium service, but Alex didn't care. He sat alone by a window and ordered a simple stew.

It wasn't as simple, however. With every bite, his system kept on activating to give him notifications about his body accepting the meal and its Qi. It was almost annoying at one point.

The Qi was only at the 1000s though, so it was quite negligible. Still, the taste was heavenly. The vegetables in the stew were well cooked and the meat practically melted with each chew.

Finally, after 15 minutes of continuous eating, he finished the meal. He paid the money and left the restaurant.

Just as he was walking out, he saw a girl enter the restaurant. She was quite beautiful, but not captivating. Quite tall, but not taller than him. Lean and thin, but not anorexic.

Anyone who saw her would think of her as a true beauty, But Alex didn't. He only had a single thought, 'Have I seen her before?'

The girl quickly walked past him and he didn't dare use spiritual sense to check her face again. So,? he just forgot about it and walked back to the hotel.

He bought a few casual clothes for himself along the way, before reaching the hotel a few dozen minutes before it was 6 pm.

He walked up the 17 flight of stairs, wondering if a lift was even feasible in this place. Finally, he reached his room and walked in.

Chapter 250: Handwriting

The door was open, and Wan Li was inside still reading. 'Damn, he must be really studious. No wonder he is the best disciple in alchemy,' Alex thought.

'I should read some more advanced knowledge in the library some next days. At the very least, I can keep them in mind while I tread for True realm,' he thought. His next course of action was to go to the Tiger sect and fight a lot to stabilize his cultivation base and breakthrough as fast as possible.

It was getting late but he had already eaten a lot at the party so he didn't want to eat anything for the day. He couldn't even cultivate in front of Wan Li, so he just decided to stay there doing nothing.

'Oh right, let's manage my storage bags,' he thought and started to quickly swap items around. He quickly filled 3 different bags with 2 different types of ingredients, two bags for common rank pill ingredients, and one bag for True rank pill ingredients.

He kept the Saint Rank pill ingredients in their original bag since that was enough. He kept his weapons and armors and cauldrons all in a single old bag, and everything miscellaneous was spread around the older bags. He decided to keep the other 2 new bags for something he might end up encountering in the future.

"What are you doing, brother Yu?" Wan Li asked.

"Oh, I was just organizing my things," Alex said.

"Ah, I thought you were just bored or something. It looked like you had nothing to do," Wan Li said.

"You're... not wrong. I didn't know what to do so I started to organize my bags," Alex said.

"I see. Do you want to read my books? I have a lot of those," Wan Li said.

Alex thought for a bit. He didn't really have anything to do so he accepted. Wan Li took out a book from his storage bag and handed it to Alex.

Alex sat back down on his bed, looking at the very unprofessional-looking book. 'There isn't even a title,' Alex thought as he opened the book.

The very first page of the book was surprising for him. That was because the handwriting on the book was very bad. 'Huh? What sort of person sells a book with such bad handwriting?' Alex wondered.

He thought for a bit and a possibility struck him.

"Brother Wan Li, did you by any chance write this book?" he asked. Looking at the condition of the book, that was the only thing that fit the situation.

"Oh yeah. I have a not-so-great memory, so it takes time for me to learn stuff. As such, I instead write everything down on my book so that I can easily read it later on and remember it," Wan Li said.

"You will hopefully learn something from it too, Brother Yu," Wan Li said with a smile. Alex was surprised. Someone actually wrote a book on their own? He couldn't believe it.

He sat back down and decided to read it despite the nearly illegible handwriting.

He read for a few minutes, and soon his eyes started opening wide. The more he read, the more he would be surprised.

'What in-depth analysis. He has written everything that happens during an alchemy process down, and that is despite the fact that he doesn't have a spiritual sense.'

'Just how good of an alchemist would he become if he could use spiritual sense and the Eidetic memory that came after unlocking it,' Alex thought.

The book alone was evidence enough as to how much Wan Li had put in to reach the spot he was at. It was easy to see someone's success and assume they were successful because of their luck.

However, nobody saw the labor and pain that went into making a successful person. Wan Li was such. In the sect, he was revered as a disciple on a status that couldn't be touched.

But many people forgot that he was once an outer sect disciple too. He too started right where they had started. He worked hard, while others waited for their luck.

Alex continued to read the book and absorb more of the information. The book was about normal common pills and the in-depth analysis of their production. They were more of an experimental log where Wan Li would make the same pills and determine why they came out different.

From his perspective, it seemed that the most common causes were ingredients. The second was timing, and the third was the temperature of the flames.

The better one was at controlling or choosing these things, the better a pill would be. Alex knew these things from his lesson with master and his pill-making as well. But, he had never seen such a detailed note down of the things that happened when the pills were made.

'Damn, this is comprehensive. It details everything he discovered. One does not simply become so good in alchemy huh. I am the only one who got something that helped me in alchemy. How long would it take me to reach my current level if I didn't have the Alchemy God's Knowledge? 10 years? 15 years?' Alex wondered.

He continued reading the book and took in as much as he could, and finally finished the book after nearly an hour. He had read as fast as he could and even then the contents in the book had taken him an hour.

He walked up to Wan Li and handed the book. "Thank you, Brother Wan," Alex said.

"Oh, you finished it? You want another?" Wan Li asked.

"It's okay. I will need time to absorb what I just read," Alex said.

"Okay"

KNOCK KNOCK

"Hmm" both of them turned towards the door.

"Oh god, it's probably Fanfan. She must be coming to play," Wan Li said. Alex walked to the door to see if it was her.

However, the person at the door was Fan Ruogang.

"Sect Leader has called everyone to her room for a meeting," she said and left for another door.

Alex turned around towards Wan Li and said, " Brother Wan, it seems it's time for the meeting."

Chapter 251: Rules

15 disciples, 7 elders, and 1 sect master were all currently standing inside Ma Rong's room. Within 5 minutes of being summoned, everyone was gathered.

Ma Rong quickly did a headcount and determined that everyone had in fact come to the room.

"Alright, since everyone is here, I will start talking about the competitions. Listen up carefully," Ma Rong said. All the disciples and elders got more attentive, ready to listen to what was coming.

"The different mini-competitions for the next 5 days have been revealed. For the next 4 days, meaning Sunday to Wednesday, there will be different competitions from 7 am to 12 pm in the morning. This is the time in which the different production and specialty-related competitions will take place," Ma Rong said.

Alex was a little surprised when he heard that the battle would take place in the morning.

'That would leave enough time during the day to do what we want. Was that the competition holder's plans? To allow the different sects some free time during the day?' Alex wondered

Ma Rong continued to speak after a small pause. "As for the battle-related competitions, they will take place on Friday, starting from 7 and going until as long as it is required," Ma Rong said.

"Now, we don't care about the battle competitions all. We are a production sect, so our focus will be all on Alchemy, and a few other production battles," Ma Rong said.

Everyone nodded when Ma Rong said that. Alex didn't expect them to be okay with what she had said. 'Do we even have disciples capable of taking part in the other production matches?' he wondered.

"First of all, the rules have been confirmed. Only those who are not in the True realm and under 25 in age can take part in the competitions."

"There can only be 3 disciples from a sect in a single competition, and a single disciple can take part in only 3 competitions. So, we will have to carefully choose what competition to send you guys out on," Ma Rong said.

"For the next 4 days, the competition has been separated into 4 themes. Sunday will be all about ingredients. Alchemy ingredients, formation flag, and ingredients, Talisman ink ingredients, etc. The exact competition hasn't been revealed, however, so we will have to choose the participants tomorrow on the ground."

"For Monday, the theme is Speed. It's how fast you can do stuff. I assume for alchemy it will be making pills very fast, but we will have to wait until the competition is revealed."

"For Tuesday, the theme is Perfection. It's how well you can do a single task. It's almost certainly the highest harmony for pills. But, as I said, we will wait until the competition is revealed."

"For Wednesday, the theme is said to be Learning. From the way the competition holders talked about it, I assume it has to do with who can learn the fastest and use it. You might get a new recipe, technique, whatever. We will have to wait until it is fully revealed."

"Thursday is a break and the normal sects will have an ample opportunity to get ready for the battle competitions next. This is until where we can do anything. Past this, the chances of us winning is almost nil," Ma Rong said.

The disciples listened to the sect leader solemnly. They didn't know if they could do good or not, but they would certainly do great.

"Now, time for you newcomers to learn something. It's the point system. The point system for the first 4 days and the last one is completely different. For battle-related competitions, the point is always fixed to the top 16 place holders."

"The Winner gets 100 points. The 2nd winner gets 80. The 3rd and 4th winners get 60 points, and 5th to 8th winners get 40 points and 9th to 16th winners get 20 points," Ma Rong said.

"For the production and specialty competitions, its... kind of weird. You basically get points equal to 100 divided? by your rank."

"If you are 1st in rankings, you get 100 points. 50 for a second, 33 for a third, 25 for a fourth, 20 for a fifth, and so on. So, the higher your ranking, the better points you get," Ma Rong explained.

"Now, we need exactly 523 points to get upgraded to a 1st-grade sect. That is what we will be working for. In the overall competitions, we need to get at least that many points."

"Any questions?" Ma Rong asked.

"Sect Leader, can't we go by last year's competition to figure out what this year's competition will be?" someone asked.

"No, it's always different," Ma Rong said. "We have no way of telling."

"Will there be no non-battle and non-production-related competitions?" someone else asked.

"There will be. Those are considered battle-related since fights are sometimes inevitable," Ma Rong explained.

Everyone else thought and found nothing else to ask. Seeing that no one had any more questions left Ma Rong dismissed everyone.

"Yu Ming, wait," she said as everyone was leaving.

"What is it, Master?" he asked. He wondered if she was going to tell him what competitions he was going to take part in.

"Starting today, I want you to cultivate both body and Qi at the same time. Don't stop one for the other. You can only get stronger if you can increase both body and Qi cultivation at the same time," Ma Rong said.

"But, Master I can't wake up in time if I cultivate Qi. I was thinking of skipping Qi cultivation until the end of the competitions actually," Alex said.

"That won't do. Just do as I say and cultivate both while you can," Ma Rong said.

"But I can't wa—" he remembered this morning, his master was crying. She told him there was nothing wrong with him falling asleep, but explained no further.

'Does she know something?' Alex thought.

"Master, can you explain to me why I will be fine if I fall asleep while cultivating Qi," he asked.

Chapter 252: Dual Cultivation

Ma Rong shook a little when she heard the question. It seemed she found the question a little too hard to answer.

"I can't tell you right now. You will find out on your own someday. You naturally finding out what is happening is the best we can hope for," she said.

Alex was now even more intrigued. 'What does she know? And why is she trying to hide it from me?' he wondered.

"Still, Master, I can't go into cultivation knowing I might end up being late tomorrow. Why don't I just cultivate body?" he said.

"Don't worry. Just go and cultivate. If nothing else, I can guarantee that you will wake up on time," Ma Rong said.

"That's a lie right, Master? There have been many times when I woke up at random times," Alex said.

Ma Rong saw that the conversation was going nowhere, so she said, "If you don't wake up on time, then it will be on me that you couldn't take part in tomorrow's competition. I will take the blame. Now go and do as I say."

Alex finally saw that she was really serious about this. He nodded and left to his room. He sat down on his bed and started wondering.

'Why is she not telling me this? Is something wrong with me? Is this a disability? Do I have a short lifespan? What is it?' From Ma Rong's expression and tone of voice, he knew that it wasn't anything good.

However, he was unable to tell if it was anything bad either. He thought of many possibilities, but in the end, none of them fit the situation.

'Sigh, I guess I will do as she says,' he thought and called out Pearl. The moment Pearl came out, he told him to stay quiet and sneaked a glance at Wan Li who was busy reading his book.

Alex put Pearl into his robes and told him to start cultivating. Pearl didn't meow once at all and started cultivating. Soon, light spilled out of his robes and numerous cuts started appearing all over his body.

Wan Li accidentally caught sight of that and nearly screamed. "Brother Yu, are you okay? What happened to you?" he said, clearly concerned about his situation.

He immediately brought out a bunch of pill bottles and started flipping through them to find ones that would help Alex at the moment.

"Don't worry about me, Brother Wan. This is my cultivation method. I'm fine," Alex said.

"A-are you sure? You have so many cuts all over you," Wan Li said.

"Yes, I am sure. Please get back to your reading," Alex said. He then thought of something and said, "I'm going to meditate now, so, please don't bother me overnight, okay?" he asked as politely as possible.

"Sure, Brother Yu," Wan Li said and got back to his studies.

Alex started to meditate. He took a deep breath to start his Qi cultivation, but the pain made it hard to focus. It was nearly impossible to blank out his mind when he had to constantly keep on feeling the pain.

'Ignore the pain. You've felt it many times already. Ignore it,' Alex said to himself and started focusing back on the cultivation.

He ignored the pain as much as he could, but as soon as he let his mind slip away, the ignorance would slip away as well and the pain would bring him jolting back to awareness.

He kept on trying to cultivate Qi many times after that, however, most of the time he would forget to ignore the pain.

'I can't keep on doing the same thing and fail without changing my approach.' He decided to try something else.

He started to split his consciousness. His mind was capable of focusing on 10 different things at once, although it was a little difficult. 2 things were a piece of cake.

He used a small part of his mind into ignoring the pain and the other big part to start meditating. He took deep breaths in and out. Soon, he was starting to feel like letting go of all control and just fall asleep.

But Alex kept the ignorance in check and made sure to never let go of it.

He failed to do that. In the end, he let go of the ignorance and the pain was back. Fortunately, this was enough time to fall unconscious.

Alex slowly opened his eyes as pains creaked throughout his body. "OW! OW! OW!. Pearl stop," he ordered. "Meow," Pearl said as he stopped cultivating.

The cuts all over his body disappeared and the body returned to its pristine state. In fact, it looked like he got a little bit stronger.

"Wait, did I miss the match?" he quickly turned his eyes towards the top right to check the time. It was 6:12 am.

He had woken up on time. "Woah, so master was right. But why? Damn, if only she explained to me straight and didn't say anything convoluted like 'it's better if you find out on your own' sh*t," Alex thought.

"Damn, isn't it time soon for us to leave for the tournament? I must be getting really hungry outside. I will eat something fast and return back," Alex thought and quickly logged out.

He freshened up quickly and went to the kitchen as fast as possible. He reheated some of the foods that remained from yesterday's party and started eating them.

'I can't get hungry prior to 12 pm,' he thought and ate. After eating, he returned back to the game. Wan Li was still reading his book.

"Brother Wan, I think you should get ready to leave," Alex said. Wan Li was distracted by Alex and looked up from his book. "Did you say something brother Yu?" he asked.
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"Aren't you going to leave? It's time for the competition," Alex said.

"Huh?" Wan Li immediately looked towards the window and saw the morning light.? "Oh, it's already daybreak," Wan Li said.

"Yes, Brother Wan. So get ready, we are leaving for the competition."

Chapter 253: First day

Everyone got ready and went downstairs. Once everyone was gathered, they left. Most of them were returnees, so they knew where the competition took place.

The group walked for about 15 minutes, going through the busy streets of the west side of the capital, all the way to the east, where the competition was being held.

Right inside the wall on the east was a massive coliseum. People stood in front of the coliseum entrance in a line encompassing a large area.

They were all different people of different status, coming to watch the once in a year competition between the various sects from around the empire.

They all wore clothes of different colors and types, according to the current fashion of the city they were from. There were also hundreds of different disciples with robes of myriad colors.

"Will they make it in time?" Alex asked his master.

"Yeah. There is still a small briefing to be done by the Royal Fu Academy to tell us about the different competitions today. These people will make it in time by then," Ma Rong said.

"Royal Fu Academy?" Alex was a little confused. "Aren't they the sect run by the royal family? Is the competition set by them too?" Alex asked.

"Yes. They are the competition holders for each year. And are also the winners most of the time," Ma Rong said.

"Hmm... they must be a 1st-grade sect then. Oh yeah, by the way, master, how many 1st grade sects are there in the competition? Any numbers that have been revealed by now?" he asked.

"There are around 12 by now. Also, there are 36 2nd grade sects and some 80 3rd grade sects that will be taking part," Ma Rong said.

"Woah, that's a lot. Won't the competitions take too long?" Alex asked.

"Don't worry, it won't. Most of the sects will only take part in some of the competitions, not all. Especially since their limited disciples have a limited number of times they can take part in."

"I mean, just look at us. Even if we were to put a single disciple in a single competition, we would only take part in 45 of them. However, we don't have that luxury. We will only take part in as much as it is required to get 1st grade," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded and walked into the coliseum with the nest of the sect members. They were freely allowed entry once Ma Rong showed a card.

They were soon led to an open area inside the giant coliseum. As Alex and the rest walked out, they finally saw just how massive the coliseum was.

'This is bigger than most sports stadiums back in the real world, isn't it?' Alex thought. He hadn't been to any, but he had seen them on TV, and this looked so much bigger.

'I could probably fit my farm in here,' he thought. 'Although... if they are going to have multiple competitions at once, won't this space actually be really congested?'

A man got onto a temporary stage. He had a head full of white hair, all tied up in a knot, and wore a black robe with white linings. He stood in front of the hundreds of sects and started.

"Good Morning everyone. My name is Fu Zhen. I welcome you all to the Annual Sect Competition. You must be pretty excited about the competition, so I will skip the actual speech for later. "

"We have learned that everyone is here, so we will start the explanation for today's competitions."

"The theme of today's competition is ingredients. It's mostly focused on the production and specialty sects, so the competition will have to do with ingredients required in these fields."

"Please look at the screen, These are the competition for today," Fu Zhen walked to the side and an image popped up behind him. There were a bunch of texts written on it.

Everyone in the competition started looking at the screen and reading it. The list contained the different competitions and their descriptions as well as the time they were going to take place.

'Oh, there are 2 alchemy competitions huh,' Alex thought in surprise.

Ma Rong looked back and said, "Alright, aside from alchemy, is anyone confident in any of the other ones?" she asked.

A male and female disciple spoke up from behind.

"I can do the formation ingredients, sect leader," he said.

"I think I can do well in the poison ingredient competition," she said.

"Okay, good. As for alchemy, Fanfan and Wan Li will take part in the pill ingredients recognition, while Yu Ming and Meimei will take part in the raw ingredient recognition," Ma Rong said.

Alex looked towards the screen once more. The Pill Ingredients test, according to the explanation, was where the participants would be given a mystery pill and would have to recognize the ingredients in the pill from the effects it provided.

These pills were usually new common rank pills made exclusively by the royal alchemist for the competition, so there wasn't any way for others to really know the recipe beforehand.

The second ingredients test was the raw ingredients test. It didn't mention the exact procedure of the test, but given that it dealt with ingredients, Alex was sure that he would be able to do well in the competition.

"Sect Leader, I want to take part in the second test too," Fan Ruogang shouted.

"No. There are only 3 competitions a participant can take part in. I want you to take part in only a single one today," Ma Rong said.

"Okay," Fan Ruogang said with a dejected voice. However,? her voice immediately got cheery as she said, "Let's do well okay, Wanwan?"

"Mmm," Wan Li said nothing more.

Ma Rong chose the third participant for either competition. Alex didn't really know them or care about them. Ma Rong looked back to check on the screen once more.

"Since the first one is at 8, and the second one is at 11, we have ample time for preparation. Okay, let's go register your lot in the competition."

Chapter 254: Registration

All the sects walked over to a room inside the coliseum. The sheer number of people in the room was enough to scare anyone away.

'Just how many cultivators are there in this room alone? And they are the best of the best too,' Alex thought.

Alex looked around and saw a lot of different people. All of them were from sects he had never heard of before. 'I only know a handful of sects, to begin with, and even amongst them, I only know Tiger sect and the Hong Wu sect by looking at them,' he thought.

He looked around and caught sight of someone. It was a lady in a red robe and was surrounded by other cultivators of her own sect.

'Ah, that's the lady I saw in the restaurant. Her face still seems so... familiar. Who is she?' Alex wondered.

He looked at her for a few more moments but could remember nothing. 'Weird, I am pretty sure I haven't seen her before,' he thought. Soon, he forgot about her and focused on what was happening in front of him.

There were multiple stands with people in black robes noting the name of the participants and which competitions they were taking part in.

It was sect wise and the 1st-grade sects got their turn first. The 12 different 1st-grade sects had disciples taking part in nearly all of the tests, so it took quite a while for Alex's turn to come.

Alex finally saw the group of disciples from the Tiger sect a bit further away getting ready for their registration. However, he didn't see his senior sister anywhere. 'She must not be participating until the final day,' he thought.

Soon, it was Hong Wu Sect's turn as well.

There were 8 people in total taking part in the competition today, so they all walked forward. Ma Rong gave the black-robed woman working in the registration her card and soon they were ready for registering.

The woman tapped on a metal ball next to her that was being kept on next to her and it sounded a small TING.

"Grab the metal ball and put some Qi into it and put it back," the woman said.

"Go, Meimei," Ma Rong said and Zhou Mei walked forward and grabbed the sphere. She then put some Qi into it. The sphere made no denotation of it being filled with Qi, but Zhou Mei was sure that it was.

She slowly put it down on its place in the metal sheet. The woman checked the result and said, "Hmm... 23-year-old, 4th realm of Meridian Tempering. tell me your name and the competition you are participating in?"

"Zhou Mei, for the raw ingredient recognition test at 11 am for Alchemy," Zhou Mei said.

"Alright, registered. Next," the woman said.

Fan Ruogang did the same thing. She walked up and grabbed the metal ball before infusing her Qi into it. After she was done, she put it back in its place.

"20 years old, 9th Organ Tempering realm. And your name and competition?" the woman asked.

"Fan Ruogang for Pill ingredients competition for 8 am," Fan Ruogang said. The woman registered it and called for the next person.

Alex walked forward and picked up the ball and infused his Qi into it. The metal ball glowed a little yellow, but no one noticed it.

Alex put it back on the metal plate and the woman read the information with a little surprise to her voice. "18 years old, 5th Organ Tempering realm. Not bad kid, what competition are you here for?" the woman asked.

"Yu Ming for Raw ingredients recognition for Alchemy. 11 AM," Alex said.

Next up was Wan Li. Alex hadn't bothered checking any of their cultivation bases yet and only went by feelings like everyone else did.

Due to his rapid growth and unusual battle prowess, he still hadn't been able to accurately measure other's cultivation base yet. He still needed some practice.

However, he could tell that Wan Li was quite weak. Or at least Alex got that impression. 'He must've spent the majority of his time on Alchemy.' This was the only reason why he would be so weak in cultivation right now.

Wan Li put down the sphere after infusing it with his Qi. "19 years old, M-Mind Tempering 3rd realm, what are you taking part in?" the woman asked.

Alex's eyes went wide. 'Mind Tempering realm? But I can't feel it at all. How is he hiding his cul-Ah, Master must've given him the book,' Alex thought.

The immortal Concealment technique was quite useful, and Alex had learned it fully. Ma Rong was still not used to it and Wan Li from the looks of it was just starting to practice it.

'No wonder he is just weak and not actually hiding his presence all the way,' Alex thought. There was no way that the top disciple of the sect who had been in the sect for nearly 9 years was going to be so weak.

Once Wan Li told the woman his competition, he walked back. The other remaining 4 members walked forward and got registered as well. However, they weren't good enough in Alex's eyes to hold up to Wan Li's performance.

"See, Brother Alex. I told you there would be so many people here. I'm starting to get nervous once more," Wan Li said. However, Alex didn't bother consoling him this time.

"Honestly, I am kind of nervous too. However... I am confident in my abilities enough to not let this nervousness hamper my performance. You should be better than me Brother Wan, I'm sure you will do well despite the nervousness."

Wan Li smiled after hearing that. "Yeah, I will do fine," he said. Once the registrations were done, Ma Rong took the group with her to dedicated seats for the sects in the coliseum's audience.

Different people were still coming in and the various sects were still getting registered. Only after 20 more minutes of patiently waiting did the people from the different sects finally arrived at their seats and the audience was fully packed.

The competitions were finally going to begin.

Chapter 255: Space

Alex looked at the coliseum arena being set. He then looked at the schedule handing in the air and was confused.

For the 8 AM schedule, there was going to be 4 different competition at once. Alchemy pill recognition, Artifact Material recognition, Talisman paper ingredients, Poisonous Material recognition.

'They are going to have 4 different competitions at once?' he thought in surprise. 'Yeah they are is quite large, but so are the number of people. If nearly 100 people take part in each competition, how are they going to manage it on the stage?' Alex wondered.

Suddenly, something weird happened on the ground below. The arena that was a bit larger than a football field suddenly grew to two times as large, without actually increasing in size at all.

"What?" Alex said in shock. A lot of other people throughout the audience were shocked a little too. Even Wan Li was shocked.

"What? You guys haven't seen it yet? Hehehe," Fan Ruogang said with a smug smile. She had been here last year as well and had seen this happening before.

"Master, what is going on? Why does it look like everyone in the arena just shrunk down and the area doubled?" Alex asked.

"That's... thanks to a space formation employed by the Royal Fu academy," Ma Rong said.

"Space... formation?" Alex said slowly trying to figure out what that meant. Before he could even come up with an answer, however, Ma Rong explained.

"They basically manipulate the space inside the arena to make it larger or smaller as required," Ma Rong explained.

"Manipulating space..." Alex couldn't understand just how complicated this topic was. Space was something he couldn't imagine being able to interact with, let alone touch, and yet here it was in front of him.

'Damn, this game is something else,' he thought. Suddenly, he thought of something. He had seen space manipulation before. He had ignored it previously because it was a game, however, it seemed everything in the game was on purpose. So, maybe this one was too.

"Master, is this the same thing as what they do to storage bags?" Alex asked.

"Storage bags are a little different. The thing we see in front of us is people using a formation to manipulate space to stretch and shrink it was required. However, in a storage bag, it's actually a part of space ripped directly from our world and put into the storage bags," Ma Rong said.

"What? People can rip space apart?" Alex asked in shock.

"Haha, no. Maybe people can, but not when making storage bags. They instead use a special formation passed throughout the ages to drag the space into a premade bag. Of course, the bag has to be made out of special materials to be able to handle space being put inside it, but I do not know how they do it," Ma Rong said.

"It's a heavily guarded secret amongst the Granite Forest sect and the Southern Sanctuary sect. We don't know exactly what is used to make the storage bags. But we can guess that it's probably not very expensive given how cheap storage bags are," the Second Elder said from the side.

"I see," Alex said. The other disciple also nodded as they learned something new today.

Fu Zhen walked up to a newly set stage and started talking. His voice seemed to be amplified as he started speaking.

"Welcome to the Crimson Empire's Annual Sect Competitions. I am going to be your main host going forward. We are truly excited to have every one of you here," he said.

He went on to speak some more flowery words and told the audience about the competitions that were going to take place today.

"Wan Li, Fanfan, go and get ready. Your competition is up next," Ma Rong said. It was nearly 8 AM and the competition would start at any moment.

One of the elders stood up and took the three disciples to the gate.

Soon the stage was separated into 4 different parts and the competitions were going to start. Disciples started gathering along the different stages and the audience waited with bated breaths.

"Ah there they are, it's starting," one of the disciples said when they saw Wan Li and Fan Ruogang walk into the coliseum arena. They walked to their respective spot where the competition was taking place.

The host was a middle-aged woman for the alchemy contest and she started explaining the competition rules.

"Here are the rules of this competition. Each one of you will be given a single blank talisman to write your answer into. You will be given a Pill made by the alchemists working for the Royal Alchemist. He is the founder of this current pill and it is your job to find the ingredients used to make the pill."

"You only need to write as many ingredients as you can recognize. Each correct answer will award 2 points, and each incorrect answer will deduct 1 point. In the end, a half an hour later, the one with the most points wins."

Suddenly, an image appeared behind the woman. "This is all the information you will get regarding the pill and what it does. At 15 minutes mark, we will also feed one of the pills to the Pill Swine, and you can look firsthand what the pill does."

Someone brought out a pill swine to the stage and kept it there for later. Wan Li and Fan Ruogang waited for the pill to be handed out.

"If you yourself eat the pill or were found to have cheated in any way, you will be instantly disqualified from this competition and will lose all remaining turns to participate in the upcoming competitions," the woman said.

Similar explanations were going around all throughout the coliseum arena as all the different sect disciples were getting ready.

Wan Li and Fan Ruogang were finally handed a pill after some time along with everyone else, and at exactly 8 am, a bell rang, announcing the commencement of the competition.

Chapter 256: First Competition

Wan Li and Fan Ruogang could only use 2 senses of their 5 senses to fully understand what the pill was made up of. Sight, and Smell.

Everyone in the area started checking the pale yellow color of the pill. It had a size of nearly 2 centimeters in diameter.

The explanation for the pill was hung up behind the woman in front of them.

-The pill increases the muscle density of the human body by a certain percentage above 10% and below 25%. It increases the strength of someone's physical body by just that amount. However, it does not increase the bone's rigidity, so there are chances of breaking the bones due to high strength.-

That was all that was written in the text. With the sight, smell, and information floating in front of them, everyone got into thinking about the potential ingredients that might be in the pills.

"Woah, I don't think I could figure out a single ingredient if I were in this competition," Alex said.

"Yes, until you start making your own pill and testing them, it is hard to understand what ingredients are responsible for what in a pill."

"Once you are used to it to an expert level, you can even start tailoring pills to meet your requirements. However, not many people can reach that level. I am still far off from that. The only one aside from hidden experts that can do this is the Royal Alchemist," Ma Rong said.

Time slowly passed as Wan Li, Fan Ruogang and the rest started to insert their answers into the talisman. Wan Li found specs of minuscule red dots at some places in the pills when he looked closely.

"Hell Chery pits?" He wondered as he went in for a sniff. Yes, this was exactly what it smelled like. So, he quickly jots down the answer.

Fan Ruogang read the muscle density increasing part and thought of Red-eyed Stork tendons. There was no visual or Olfactory aspect of it to the pill, but it rarely did. So, Fan Ruogang put that in as well.

Similarly, everyone else used their own experience to figure out answers.

Soon, 15 minutes passed, and most people had put in what they believed were the answers.

"We will now show the effects of the pill on the pill swine," the woman said and brought forth the pill swine that was brought to the front of everybody.

The footage of whatever happening was all floating in giant panels in the air and the entire audience could see it.

The woman took the pill and fed it to the pill swine. From Alex's perspective, a pill swine looked no different from a normal swine, so he was curious why the pills worked for them.

Once the woman fed the pill, the swine started to fidget a little, and soon people could see well-defined muscular figures appear on the swine's body beneath its skin.

The participants quickly looked at the information they could gather from this event, aside from what was already told in the explanation.

The swine fidgeting, its muscle getting stronger from the feet up, its eyes turning slightly red, the amount of time taken for the change to happen, the slight increase in temperature and heartbeat they could tell from all the way back where they sat, Everything gave them the exact information they were looking for.

The group started to quickly answer the questions, and by 20 minutes mark, most of them had already handed their answer.

Getting a wrong answer deducted points, so many didn't want to take the chances and stuck with what they had written. Soon, the competition was over.

The group stayed where they were as they waited for the competition holders to tally the result.

"The result is ready. You all did well, and some exceptionally well. The pill had exactly 17 ingredients, you people, in total, managed to figure out all of them," the woman said.

"As for the result, we will now announce the top 3. The top 3 people who successfully answered the most ingredients, starting with the 3rd place is…"

"Wan Li, from Hong Wu sect, who managed to get exactly 28 points."

Wan Li's face drooped in slight disappointment when he heard that he was in third place.

"In the second place is… Fan Ruogang, from Hong Wu sect as well, managed to get exactly 29 points."

Fan Ruogang's eyes opened wide when she learned that she was in 2nd place.

"As for the first place, it is none other than, Huang Fu from Royal Fu Academy, who scored exactly 31 points. The rest of the results are on the board," the woman said as a ranking screen appeared behind her.

"Huang Fu, is that supposed to be someone famous?" Alex asked.

"Yes, he is the Royal Alchemist's direct disciple. Considering that he got 31 points, he must've made a mistake on the final ingredient. What terrifying talent to know that there were exactly 17 ingredients in the pill," Ma Rong said.

Alex wished he could be that great of an alchemist soon. It seemed he had to forget about everything else and focus solely on cultivating and making pills now.

After returning back to the sect, he doubted he would have anything else to do, so he would have a lot of time.

'Oh, I will have to go back to the tiger sect as well. That's gonna cause a lot of problems,' Alex thought.

He was a little worried about that. Wan Li and Fan Ruogang returned back to the seating area.

"I'm sorry sect leader, I couldn't do better," Wan Li said in a sad tone.

"Are you kidding me? You only got 1 less correct than me, and I'm used to playing such games. Why do you keep talking down on yourself? She said as she patted his back a little too strongly.

"She is correct. You did well, far better than I would have expected honestly. Come and sit now, the rest of the competition is continuing," Ma Rong said.

Chapter 257: Rules of the Competition

The competition continued as per usual. There were always two or more competitions taking place at once in the arena and people could see whichever one they wanted.

"Is us being able to individually hear and understand the different competition something to do with formations?" Alex asked.

"Yes. It's a formation that only provides sounds based on which screen you are looking at," Ma Rong said.

Alex focused on the competition regarding formations itself. The goal of this competition was for the participants to recognize which flags belonged to which formation and gather the different materials that were used for those formations.

He was in part curious about this competition in part because it had to do with formations, and in another part, because the familiar girl was taking place in it.

After several minutes people started completing the competition one after another. The girl didn't take long to gather them, but she wasn't the fastest either.

The top 3 winners were Sky soaring sect who won 1st and 3rd, and Royal Fu Academy who won 2nd place.

"The Royal Fu Academy is quite terrifying, aren't they?" Alex asked, not really looking for an answer.

"They are the Royal Academy after all. A place where only the best and brightest go to. You don't really hear its name when people talk about sects specializing in certain aspects, but make no mistake. They are amazing at every single part of cultivation," Ma Rong said.

"Haha, True, True. It's collected so many points throughout the different annual competitions that it probably has enough to go a step beyond the 1st grade too," the Third elder said from the side.

Alex sat there, watching the competitions for a while longer. He saw sects that focused on poison, sects that focused on the talisman, sects that focused on music, sects that focused on artifact making.

Finally, it was his turn for the competition.

An elder stood up as he took him, Zhou Mei, and another disciple to an area inside the coliseum. They reached a separate room where people were made to go past a certain barrier.

Alex didn't know what was happening, but he did as everyone did and walked past it. He felt his Qi fluctuate a bit as he moved past the barrier giving him a weird feeling.

"Oh, so it's just checking my qi to see if I am taking part or not," Alex realized.

They were then taken to the arena. Alex walked past a certain area, and suddenly he felt as if the world around his had expanded by a lot. The audience who were just a few dozen meters away were suddenly hundreds of meters away.

'Can I possibly get used to such a magical phenomenon?' Alex wondered.

The place they were going to take the competition in was a little different from the ones for Wan Li's turn. The disciples were made to stand in a line with a curtain behind their backs.

They were then made to give away their storage bags and store them in a box that could only be opened by them.

A man wearing black robes walked up on the stage and started speaking.

"Everyone, Welcome to the Ingredients Recognition Competition. I will be your host and competition holder for this competition."

"I will now explain the task and the rules of this competition," the man said.

"Behind every one of you is a curtain hiding a hoard of ingredients that will remain invisible to you until you cross a certain line. Once you go past the line, you will have exactly 5 seconds where you can pick an ingredient."

"Each ingredient will give you points of anywhere from 10 to 1 points. How do you know which ingredient is cost what? Easy. All you have to do is look at the list of names hung in the sky when you enter the curtain."

" You can only pick ingredients that are in the list. Picking up any ingredients, not on the list will result in you earning negative 5 points."

"You will go 5 at a time and you will have to cross the line on my command. Speaking at any moment throughout this competition will have you immediately disqualified."

"Not physically touching the ingredients, and choosing more than 1 ingredient at a single turn will have you disqualified."

"Delaying to return back after the 5 seconds have passed will have you disqualified."

"There are exactly 100 ingredients on the list, and the exam will end when all the ingredients on the list are gathered," the man said.

Everyone nodded once they understood what the competition entailed and got in a single queue, waiting for their next turn.

The ones at the front of the queue had a higher advantage than the ones at the back, but the competition holders didn't seem as worried about that for some reason.

'There must be some level of difficulty in this exam that going first won't give a large enough advantage,' Alex thought.

With 5 people going in every turn, Alex was in the 4th group, while Zhou Mei was in the 2nd. The last disciple was around the 11th group, but they didn't care about that.

Soon the competition started. The first 5 people walked past the curtain and no one on the other side could see what was inside.

"Go," the host said and the people in the queue could hear some scurrying. After 5 seconds passed, 5 dejected young men and women walked out from behind the curtain.

They weren't allowed to speak so they couldn't vocalize their current feelings, but if they could, they would surely say the words like 'Hard' and 'Difficult' for sure.

Maybe some would even use the word complicated.

'It isn't so simple after all,' Alex thought.

Next up was Zhou Mei's group. They too went in and were given the signal to proceed. 5 seconds later, all 5 disciples came out with similar emotions on their faces.

Zhou Mei was clearly frowning from the difficulty of the task. The same was the case for the 3rd group of disciples as well.

Next up was Alex's turn.

Chapter 258: The 10 Ingredients

Alex and 4 other young folks walked past the curtain onto the other side. 5 men stood there, who swiftly handed them an empty storage bag.
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"You will be using this to gather the ingredients," they told them.

Alex looked in front of him and all he saw was a black barrier blocking his view from what was in front of him. He looked to the side and saw the other 4 quite nervous about the various things.

The host was to the side and without wasting a single moment he told them to go. Alex activated Focus Mode.

Time slowed down as all of his senses amplified to another level. Alex walked in with all of the rest, waiting to see what was in there that made everyone so worried.

The moment he entered, 2 things became clearly visible for him. The first was the list that was hanging in the air, and the second was the ingredients laid out in front of him.

The list had exactly 10 groups inside of them, each group consisting of 10 ingredients. The groups were separated into points where the first group of ingredients won them 10 points, the second 9 points, all the way down to the last which earned them 1 point.

This was a little overwhelming to remember at just 5 seconds, but not as much as what the others were.

On a large surface in front of them were nearly 1000 different ingredients, all laid down randomly. The entire front of him lit up as thousands of names started popping up. The number was so much that even he was easily overwhelmed.

'I could use my spiritual sense to easily check through it all individually, but it seems I will have to wait until my next turn to do so,' he thought.

The 5 seconds were over.

All 5 of them walked back to the end of the queue. The other 4 were currently frowning as they didn't even know where to begin with finding the ingredients, while only Alex was the first person without a single negative emotion.

He was overwhelmed when he saw so many names for sure, but now that he had time, he could slowly digest it and see where everything was.

'I am sure I can actually afford to waste next turn too,' Alex thought. His first course of action was remembering all the 10 ingredients that would earn him 10 points.

He recollected all of his memory from the few seconds worth of massive information that was in his head. He first remembered the list of 10 ingredients.

[Blue Spirit Lotus]

[Dizzying Daffodil]

[Fire Ox's Tendons]

[Spirit Cows Milk]

[Tear Bearing Plant]

[Demon Faced Leaf]

[Solar Tree's Apricot]

[Midnight Fox's Blood Essence]

[Crying Deer's Tears]

[Earth Chrysanthemum's Bud]

These were the 10 ingredients that in total got a person 100 points. If the other participants were anything but bad, they would definitely go for these ingredients.

They would do their best to remember the names from this list and look for it on every turn they got.

Alex thankfully was all done with remembering the names, he was now looking for the ingredients among the 1000 ingredients that were laid there.

It took him a while to remember where exactly the ingredients were and which ones were the easiest to find. He would target the easy ones first.

'I will focus on those 10 for now and then move on to 9 points and 8 points and so on,' he thought. He didn't know if he could get all 10 turns to gather the 10 ingredients or not, but he planned on making the best of what he would be given.

Soon, it was his turn to gather again.

He walked into the curtain and stood in front of the dark barrier once more. 'I wonder if I could see what is beyond here if I used my spiritual sense,' he wondered.

He wasn't stupid enough to use it here however though. Considering how many different people were in the audience, having a single powerhouse who took interest in a self tempering realm brat that could use Spiritual sense could end up being a dangerous situation.

"GO," the host gave them the signal to enter. Alex removed all sorts of thoughts from his mind as he entered the barrier and immediately ran to the group of ingredients and grabbed an ingredient directly without hesitation and put it in his storage bag.

He had got the Solar Tree's Apricot. 'That's 10 points for me,' he thought and looked at the list of ingredients above him once more before returning.

Alex returned back to the queue with no worry on his face while the 4 other people besides him were still frowning. This was especially increased when they saw Alex actually choosing an ingredient on his 2nd try alone.

He looked upon the list of ingredients that were in this mind from the recent most viewing and smiled as he realized not a single one of the ingredients were taken yet.

He wasn't sure how long it would last, but he would wish for it to last as long as it could. The queue was so long that it would take him another 3 minutes before it was his turn again.

During this time, he made sure to revise this plan again. He had taken the apricot, so he planned on taking another one of the easy to get ingredients.

'I should try and get the Tear Bearing plant. It's one of the biggest ingredients in there and quite easy to recognize in a single glance,' Alex thought.

He planned on how to get some of the other ingredients as well. All in all, he now knew exactly where all the 9 remaining ingredients were and exactly how he could get them.

Soon, it was his turn to go in again. He walked up to the curtain and entered it, standing in front of the barrier. The other seemed troubled, but not him.

Alex simply waited for the host to give him the go-to enter.

Chapter 259: Results

With a single gesture from the host and the word 'go', Alex and the other 4 people entered the dark barrier once more. While the other 4 stayed behind to remember the list and the ingredients in front of them one more time, Alex went ahead and gathered the Plant.

'That's two down,' he thought and looked at the list of ingredients. He was slightly shocked. He returned back to the queue along with the other 4 people.

'So, someone managed to grab an ingredient from the 7's list huh?' he thought. When he checked the list just now, he saw that there were two names that had been grayed out from the list.

The first was the apricot that he had gotten the turn prior, and another one was an ingredient from the group that earned one 7 points.

'The ingredients are going to get taken away faster now that we are coming up on the 4th turn,' Alex thought.

As expected, on his next turn, 3 more ingredients from the list were taken away. Alex grabbed the Demon-Faced Leaf and walked out.

On his 5th turn, he grabbed the Spirit Cow's Milk. By now, around 20 items out of the 100 were taken. This was just going to get snowballed and soon, there would be no more ingredients left to gather.

On the 6th turn, he walked up to the Fire Ox's tendons and grabbed them. A few of the 4 people along with him also grabbed some of the ingredients.

Alex didn't know if they grabbed anything important or not as he would only know what was missing on the other round.

He looked up at the list of the remaining ingredients and was a little surprised. Yet, he also knew it wasn't something he needed to be surprised about.

Dizzying Daffodil was grayed out of the list of names with 10 points. 'Someone got to it before me, huh? I guess it about time people start to obsess over the items with 10 points,' he thought

As of now, including the 4 10-points ingredients, there were only about 50 ingredients in total left.

'I can't think of which ingredients to pick now. I will have to make my choice depending on what is left,' he thought.

On the 7th turn, he walked into the dark barrier and immediately looked up at the list. He saw that there were only 3 names lit up for the 10-points ingredients.

Someone had taken away the Midnight Fox's Blood Essence. Alex gave no thought to what was taken and immediately walked up to the Earth Chrysanthemum's Bud and picked it up before walking back.

'Tsk. There are only 30 ingredients remaining,' he thought. Everyone went through their turn and eventually, it was Alex's turn once again.

It was his 8th turn and so he walked in once more. By now he had gathered 6 ingredients in total. Given that there were nearly a hundred participants, that was one of the best results one could get.

Once he was given the go, he entered the dark curtain for the 8th time and looked up at the list to check what ingredient he could go for.

'Wha?' he was surprised. The list had very few names that actually were not grayed out. They were about 12 in total. The worst part was that all of the 10 points ingredients were taken away.

'Sh*t,' he thought. He quickly looked over to the other list and then to the different ingredients laid out below. There weren't many ingredients left, and he hadn't been concentrating on the remaining ingredients at all.

So, unfortunately, he had to give up on this turn. Alex returned back to the end of the queue and started remembering the position of every single ingredient there.

He wouldn't be caught off guard this time.

2 more turns passed by and Alex took a 5 point and a 3 point ingredient, earning in total 68 points. 'That should be enough to win right?' Alex thought.

He had only missed 2 of the 10 turns, so he was confident that his performance was one of if not the best today.

Once all the ingredients were done and the list was fully grayed out, the host made them all hand over their storage bags for a tally.

In the meanwhile, Alex and the rest of the participants took back their storage bags. Alex checked to see if anything was missing just in case and was relieved that it was all there.

They waited for the results to be done for over 10 minutes, and only then did the host return back from beyond the curtain.

He stood up on the stage and started speaking.

"Congratulations everyone on competing in today's competition. You guys managed to complete the task faster than we anticipated."

"I am now going to announce the results."

"In the third place, with 33 points, is Nan Ren from the Spring Song sect," the host said. A man dressed in the same dress as the fatty from yesterday got happy when he heard the result.

"In the second place, with 42 points, is Jia Fang from Royal Fu Academy."

The young lady in black robes seemed a little disappointed that she didn't manage to obtain first place even though she believed she had gotten a good enough point in the competition.

Alex didn't even need to keep listening to know that he had won. Still, he let the host announce the result before he showed any signs of celebration.

"And in the first place, with an incredible 68 points, is Yu Ming from Hong Wu sect. Congratulations to the winners. The rest of the rankings, you can see on the board behind me," the host said and got off the podium he was standing on.

Alex looked at the list hovering in the air. He truly had gotten quite a lot compared to the rest of the people. With nothing else remaining, he walked back out of the arena, returning to the seating area in the coliseum.

Chapter 260: Alchemy Hall of the Capital

Zhou Mei looked at the list and sighed a little. She had gotten 26 points in the competition and had thus become 5th in the rankings. Normally, she would've been happy, but right now, she only frowned.

'How did that guy get so many points while everyone else struggled?' she thought. It was really hard to believe that someone that was not even in the same cultivation realm as her could possibly gather so many ingredients.

'Does he have a really good mind or what?' she wondered. She knew he was talented. Even with all the opportunities, one was given, it was impossible to reach where he was without having some talent of one's own. But she found it difficult to accept precisely because he was given so many opportunities.

She sighed and moved out of the arena along with the other nearly hundred disciples.

Some of the hundred disciples were a little happy to have earned something, but most were actually sad and frustrated. It wasn't so easy to go in, look at the list, remember it, look at the thousands of ingredients in front of them and pick one that matched the list.

Even if they did remember a few, they weren't sure if they would be gone by the next day. That was just how hard the competition was.

Alex and Zhou Mei as well as the other disciple made their way to the seating area.

CLAP CLAP CLAP

"Congrats on the 1st place Yu Ming"

"Nice job."

"That's the sect leader's disciple for you."

"No wonder she took him as her direct disciple."

Alex smiled and thanked them as he walked up to and sat in his seat. "Great job Yu Ming. I knew you could do it for sure. You too MeiMei, good job on getting 5th place. That was a terribly difficult task. I doubt Fanfan could get that much, let alone Wan Li."

Zhou Mei nodded when she heard Ma Rong say that, but internally she was still disappointed. Out of the top 3, she was the only one to not be in the top 3 of the competition.

"Alright, let's leave," Ma Rong said and stood up. The rest of the members stood up and started walking too. The competition was over for the day, so everyone else would be leaving soon as well.

The other sects didn't want to be stuck among the waves of the audience trying to leave the place, so they started to leave as well.

Alex and the rest smoothly got out of the coliseum and went back to their hotel. "You guys can go around and roam you know? You don't have to follow the rest of us back," Ma Rong said.

Some of the disciples nodded and got out of line to leave but the rest of them followed the group back.

The group walked all the way to the west of the city where they finally went to their hotel room. "Alright, everyone. The rule is the same as yesterday. Do what you want until 6 pm, by which you must be in the hotel," Ma Rong said and went to her room.

Alex went to his room with Wan Li as well and made some excuse about being tired and went directly to bed before logging out.

"Urghh... that took a while. I am so hungry," he thought and quickly went to the kitchen to get something to eat.

There was something in the refrigerator, so he simply microwaved it and ate it. It wasn't very tasty, but he was too lazy to want to make anything on his own.

After finishing his food, he went back to his room and logged in.

He was now back to the game after leaving for 20 minutes. "Ughh... I can't sleep," he said as he woke up and stretched a little to give Wan Li the impression that he really did try to sleep."

"Do you want to go out to the Alchemy Halls Brother Wan? I want to make some pills," he said.

Wan Li thought for a few moments and said, "It's alright brother Yu. You can go by yourself. I want to write and study what I learned today in the competition." He then took out a pen and a book and started writing on them.

Alex was blown away by how incredibly hardworking the boy was. 'If only he had a mind that could keep up with that,' he thought. Wan Li was already in the Mind Tempering realm, and that was supposed to have boosted his mental abilities quite a bit.

However, if he was still such a forgetful person then...

'I really want to give the poor guy one of the flowers so that he could have an eidetic memory too. But I can't. If someone else from the sect ends up finding out that I had some, I would be in deep trouble,' Alex thought.

"Alright then, I'm leaving," Alex said and walked out of the room. He soon walked out of the hotel and started walking towards the middle of the city.

The middle of the city was where the Alchemy Guild and Halls were. This was where all the different guilds and halls were, so he swiftly made his way there.

He didn't know how much it cost to make pills for around 5 hours but hoped that it didn't cost any more than 2 true spirit stones. That was all he had left now.

He finally reached the place and saw the gigantic buildings that were the different halls. There were hundreds and thousands of people going in and out of these places. Some were mortals, some were in the Self Tempering realms and some were in the True Realm.

He quickly found the Alchemy hall right next to the Alchemy Guild. It was a building colored in light green and had perhaps the most number of people going in and out of it.

Alex thought nothing else and directly walked into the Alchemy Hall.

Chapter 261: 3 Different Pills

The light green building looked big, at least from the front. Alex walked into the building's registration hall and asked for a room for one of the many people waiting to help the customers.

"Do you have an Alchemist rank?" the man at the registration asked.

"Umm... I can make Common Rank Earth grade pills, so Common Earth Rank I guess," Alex said. He was really confused. Neither the Hong Wu sect nor the Tiger sect ever asked for what grade pills he could make before letting him take a room.

'Is the capital different somehow?' he wondered.

"Please take out your badge then," the man said.

"My... Badge?" Alex asked in confusion.

"You do not have a badge?" the man asked.

"No, sorry. I have no idea what this badge is," Alex said.

"Ah, you must be new to the city. Gaining a badge based on your achievement from the Alchemy guild can gain you certain discounts in the Alchemy Hall. If you haven't ranked yourself yet, we will have to charge you for the full price," the man said.

"Can I know what the cost will be for 5 hours?" Alex asked.

"5 hours... at 12... will be 60 spirit stones. Are you ok with that?" the man asked.

"Ah, yes. Of course," Alex said and handed 60 spirit stones to the man.

The man led Alex to one of the rooms and let him go inside before locking the door from outside. "The door is now impossible to open from the outside, and can only open from the inside."

"You can leave before the 5 hours are up or we will come to escort you out once the 5 hours are over," the man said.

"Thank you," Alex said and turned around to look at the room. The room seemed way better than the muddy-looking rooms back in the Alchemy hall of the Hong Wu sect.

He sat in front of the brilliantly glowing fire and took out his Golden jade cauldron and placed it on top of the fire. He smoothly cleared away any dirt and debris that were remaining behind them since the last time he made pills nearly a week ago.

He let the cauldron heat up while he started thinking of what pills to make.

'I only want to sell these pills for the money, so I should make something that is on-demand or hard to acquire,' he thought.

He went through the list of pill recipes in his head, but only the ones that he learned in the sect. He didn't want to introduce the ones he learned from the corpse to the market just yet.

He needed to be stronger before he could freely do that.

He thought for a bit and ended up thinking of exactly 3 different pills he could make.

The first was a pill called the Fat Converting pill. It rapidly burned the fat of the person who ate the pill and gave them extra power for the duration of the fat conversion.

The second pill was called the Element Negating Pill. This was a pill that increased the natural resistance of your body and Qi to the different elements and protected you from taking too much damage.

The third and last pill was called the Rubber Body pill. This was a pill that made your entire body as flexible as rubber. It didn't make it elastic, but the flexibility alone was something many would want. It was especially good because you could control which parts you wanted to make flexible.

Given the circumstances, people would find a lot of usage for it.

So, Alex prepared the ingredients and started making the pills. This was the first time he was making these pills. The Fat Converting pill was a Fire elemental pill, the Element Negating Pill was a neutral elemental pill, and the Rubber Body pill was a wood elemental pill.

None of the three pills were of Metal elemental variety, so Alex was a little sad that he couldn't guarantee a Heaven grade pill amongst these all. That would've sold for a lot.

Still, he had some chance at making them, so he didn't give up hope.

He started with the Fat Converting pill and put the first ingredients into the cauldron. Alex started doing what the recipe told him to do.

2nd ingredient, move it around, release energy, wait for the two ingredients to react to each other, put in the next ingredient repeat.

That was the formula to making all of the pills. In the middle of making the pill, Alex''s mind started thinking of something else.

'What if I put in two ingredients at once? If I put the first and the third ingredients at the start, and somehow be able to keep them from interacting with each other, or better yet, they don't react at all, I can easily put in the second ingredient and make them react at once,' Alex thought.

However, now was not the time to test this theory out. He quickly threw this thought to the back of his mind for when he had the time and brought his attention back to the pill at hand.

He put in another ingredient and continued. By the end of 15 minutes, he was nearly done making the pill. Alex quickly started forming the pill and thankfully, the pill-splitting Qi did not appear at this moment.

The pill was successfully made and he looked at it.

Fat Converting Pill - 47%

He was so close, and yet so far. 'I should be able to make a Heaven-grade pill soon,' he thought. He stored the pill into a pill bottle and moved on to the next pill.

For the next hour and a half, he performed alchemy exactly, 6 more times and managed to make 9 different pills. The double pill rate truly was 50% for those 6 times.

As for the harmony of the pills, the worst one was a 42% pill he made in pair with another pill, and the best one was a 53% Heaven grade pill.

Chapter 262: Leaving the hall

Once he was done with the Fan Converting pill, Alex moved on to the next pill on the list, the Element Negating pill.

The Element Negating pill was perhaps easier than the Fat Converting pill. At least, the ingredients were easier to acquire, but still, the effect of the pill was so good that having more than a few with oneself at all times wasn't a bad idea at all.

He cleaned the cauldron and put in the first ingredient. Soon a second one and a third one. Before he knew it, he had put in all the different ingredients and they were all powder by now.

Finally, when it was time to form the pill, he started moving the powder and turning it into a ball shape. Suddenly, the pill-splitting qi appeared from within him.

The pills were separated into two portions as two vortexes appeared above them and started sucking in the excess energy that was in the air.

Very soon, all the energy was gone and the pills were formed. Alex took out the two pills and looked at them.

One of the pills had 43% harmony and the other one had 44% harmony. Alex nodded to himself in satisfaction.

'I wonder if it was possible to an 87% pill if I somehow collected all the energy there and put it into the pill,' Alex wondered. That would be a genuine achievement if he could ever do any.

The higher the harmony, the harder it was to improve. Going from the beginning of heaven grade to a level of harmony to which he didn't even know the name of was truly a dream he wanted to be true.

Alas, a dream was a dream.
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He brought out another set of ingredients and continued to make the pills. He made exactly 7 pills in the next hour and a half.

Every pill after the first one was better and the best one was a 51% harmony Heaven grade pill. He stored the 9 pills into the pill bottles and moved on to the final pill.

The Rubber Body pill. He didn't have a lot of ingredients for this one, so the remaining hour and a half he had in this room didn't seem as necessary.

He swiftly started making the pill.

He focused his mind on the pill for the next hour and a half and managed to make exactly 8 pills out of the 5 sets of ingredients he owned.

The worst pill he made was a 38% harmony pill. He wasn't used to making the pill and was just starting to he ended up making some minor mistakes for the first one which lead to such a bad result.

Of course, that was when compared to what he was capable of. If anyone else heard him call this pill bad, they would start searching for a shovel to dig a big enough hole on the ground that could not only fit his body but also his ego.

The best Rubber Body pill he managed to make was actually the best pill he made today. It was a 55% harmony pill. A Heaven-grade pill with such high harmony would certainly earn him quite a few spirit stones.

Finally, after making all the pills, he rested a bit. He looked at the time and saw that there were only a few more minutes before he had to leave.

He decided to go on his own, instead of someone else's asking. He quickly stored everything away properly and opened the door.

He walked out to the registration desk and let the person know he was leaving. Once he got out of the Alchemy hall, he now had to decide if he wanted to go to the hotel or find some auction house to put up the 27 new pills he made in the last 5 hours.

'I wonder if that is enough to place me in the speed competition that will take place tomorrow,' he wondered. But he was sure his master wouldn't let him take part in those.

'Are the others faster than me? Maybe that is why,' he thought. It would make sense that other people who have been making pills for nearly a decade would be much better than him.

'Sigh, whatever,' he thought and looked at the time. It was 5:23 pm. 'Doesn't look like there is enough time to make it to an auction house and back to the hotel. I guess I will just go back,' he thought and left the place.

He still had quite a little time so he slowly walked amidst the festival-like city and bought a few more things with what little money he had. However, he was relieved by the fact that he now had pills, especially for this reason.

A few minutes before it was 6 pm, he made it back to the hotel and went to his room. Wan Li was still there, studying the new notes he had written.

'I wonder what level I would be at if I put in the same amount of work,' he wondered. No matter how much he wanted to believe that he was hardworking, he could always tell that the game was aiding him in some way.

He could already recognize all the ingredients in the world with a single glance. The recipes, no matter how convoluted, would immediately go into his head the moment he looked at them. And then, there were the double pills he could make once in every two pills.

Those were all skills that boosted his starting points by a lot. While he did put in work after that, it would never be to the same level as others who had to work their way to even reach his starting point.

'Whatever, just because I didn't have to do that, doesn't mean I will have to look down on my hard work. While I might not have put in as much as everyone else, I did put in quite a lot,' he thought.

Thinking so made him feel quite a bit better.

KNOCK KNOCK

Someone was at the door once more.

"Sect Leader had called everyone for another debrief."

Chapter 263: Royal Family

Alex and the rest were gathered in Ma Rong's room.

"Everyone, great job in today's competition. We have managed to get exactly 210 points for the sect today. If we just manage to get 313 more, we will be easily entering the 1st-grade list," Ma Rong said.

"So, tomorrow's competition is based on speed. We can't guarantee that there will be 2 competitions tomorrow as well just like today, so the group for tomorrow will be decided on the spot as well. But, it will definitely include you Fanfan, so be prepared."

"Depending on the situation, I might or might not include Wan Li and Meimei," Ma Rong said. She didn't even say anything about Alex, so he believed that he definitely didn't have any chance at all.

Ma Rong spoke a little longer and dismissed the group. Alex walked back to his room and logged out. He walked to the kitchen and found his cousin hungrily gulping down food.

"You seem like you haven't eaten anything in days," Alex said.

Hannah simply looked at him with a guilty face. Alex was stunned, "You didn't eat anything since the party?"? he asked.

"I didn't have to. The capsule stopped all my hunger all day. I'm only eating right now because I know that my body needs it. It is so scary. You might get lost in the game for days on end now, and it won't even be that bad since your body will conserve energy," Hannah said.

Alex couldn't help but shake his head in the thought that he might end up being the same when his capsule arrived.
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"Oh, that's right. Sister, can you get up in the morning to accept my capsule at around 8 am? I will be in the coliseum looking at the competition at the time. I will log out around 12 pm and then we can take it to my room," Alex said.

"Sure. That reminds me, how was the competition today? Did you take part in any?" she asked.

"Of course, and your brother got first place," Alex said with a thumbs up. He quickly ate his food and returned back to the game.

It was nearly 8 pm now, so the only thing he could do right now was cultivated. He sneakily took out Pearl and hid him in his robes. Soon, there was slight golden light spilling out from his robes and his body was full of cuts. He was body cultivating.

He didn't immediately go and start cultivating his Qi, however. He instead brought out the Spirit Cleansing Lily. He hadn't used one for a while since he hadn't cultivated his Qi properly in a while.

'Last time I did it I failed for some reason,' he thought as he remembered to when the flower was intact with him even after he was done cultivating.

'Will the same thing happen again? Or will the spiritual sea increase this time?' Alex wondered and finally started cultivating.

It took him a while to get into the groove of ignoring the pain while trying to meditate. After a while, he succeeded, and soon, he fell into a trance and fell unconscious.

Alex woke up early in the morning. His body was still full of cuts so he stopped Pearl from cultivating and checked his hand.

The flower was still there. He was now sure that there was either something wrong with his body, or there was something wrong with the flower.

'Or many neither. Maybe I have just reached the limits of the flower usage and can't use any more raw ones,' he thought. That seemed to be the most logical answer.

'I should go to the library with master and check today or tomorrow,' he thought. He pets Pearl from outside his robes and checked his status.

[White Cat (Child) - Bonded

Name: Pearl

Cultivation Base: Bone Tempering 8th Realm

Evolution Chance: 40%

Cultivation Method: ????? ?????'s Dominating Body (Shared)

]

'It's taking so long now,' Alex thought. 'I should be fine giving him a monster core, right?' He quickly took out a monster core for a Bone Tempering 9th realm beast. He didn't dare give him one for an organ realm beast as he wasn't sure if Pearl could fight the mental battle that started randomly appearing after the Organ Tempering realm.

He quickly sent Pearl back into the tattoo and looked at the time. '6:30 am huh? It should be right abo— '

KNOCK KNOCK

"It's time to leave." Someone at the door said and left to speak to more people.

Alex stood up and left the room along with Wan Li. Outside, the group of people was all ready to leave. Once everyone was out, they walked down the stairs and left the hotel.

It took them around 20 minutes to reach the Coliseum on the east side of the city.

The second Elder slowly walked next to Ma Rong and asked, "Sect Leader, did you see the royal family yesterday?"

"No, I didn't. Maybe they aren't planning on coming for the first 4 days and will only arrive to watch the final combat section? After all, that is what most of the people are here for," Ma Rong said.

"That sounds about right. Sigh, I guess we won't be showing off to them at all," the second Elder said.

Alex was a little curious. So he got close to Ma Rong and asked, "Master, isn't Fu Zhen part of the royal family too?"

According to Ma Rong previously, the surname Fu belonged to the royal family, and seeing that he was part of the Royal Fu Academy that managed the competition, he was surprised that the second elder still asked for another member of the royal family.

"Although I don't know the relation, Fu Zhen is definitely related to the royal family. But he isn't considered a part of the royal family itself."

"To be considered as part of the royal family you must be born as siblings to the Emperor, or cousin to the prince and princess. Any more and you aren't considered as part of one."

Chapter 264: Can Hide No Longer

"Do you know how many royal family members there are?" Alex asked

"Hmm... The emperor has 3 siblings as far as I know, and 3 children. As for the sibling's children, I am not sure. Although, the youngest one isn't even married despite being very old by now. I heard he is... " Ma Rong stopped.

"He is what?" Alex asked.

"Shh. We can't talk about these things in the open, Disciple Yu," the second elder said. "You never know whose eyes and ears are focused on us. It's better to take caution and not say anything."

Alex was a little surprised. But from the reaction, he could guess that whatever his master was going to say about the little brother of the emperor, it definitely wasn't going to be anything good.

'So the emperor's brother is a bum or something?' Alex wondered.

Soon, they reached the arena in the coliseum and Fu Zhen was there to explain to them about the different competitions that would take place today too.

The Alchemy competition for today was the fastest pill making. There was only a single one, so Ma Rong made Fan Ruogang, Zhou Mei, and Wan Li take part in the competition.

With the top 3 of the sect taking part in the competition, they could be pretty sure that they were going to win at least some points.

Alex and the rest of the group went to their seating area while Ma Rong took the three to get registered.

"Ah, Yu Ming. There you are." Alex heard someone call his name. From the sound, he knew who the person calling him was, but he wasn't sure if he should turn around to say something or not.

'I'll get beat if I don't say anything,' he thought and turned around. "Hello, sister," he said.? The one whole called out to him was none other than Luo Mei.

"I saw your competition yesterday. Congratulations on the first place," Luo Mei said.

"Thank you, sister," Alex said.

There were people behind both Luo Mei and Alex, and they were all surprised. The people couldn't understand why they were acting so close.

Du Yuhan was right there too and he was paying attention to the two of them talking.

"Senior Luo, do you know this guy? He was part of our sect but then he defected to Hong Wu sect," the girl named Su spoke from behind. "He was the guy that beat Huo Tu in a fight."

Sounds of gasps and surprise appeared from the Tiger sect side of the group. They all knew about Huo Tu losing to an inner sect disciple, but they never expected him to be part of the Hong Wu sect.

People started murmuring to themselves, wondering if Alex left the sect because he was scared of Huo Tu's retaliation.

Luo Mei frowned a little and said, "He did no such thing. Don't try to bring down my junior brother's name," Luo Mei said.

The girl named Su was a little surprised at Luo Mei's reaction. "Your... junior brother?" she asked.

Just then, the rest of the Tiger group returned from the registration place. Wen Cheng was followed by a few disciples, one of which was Meng Yun.

"Hmm... Yu Ming, what are you doing here? What is this crowd?" Wen Cheng asked.

Alex fell into a dilemma. 'Should I say it or not?' he thought. Wen Cheng seemed to understand his thoughts quite well, so he said, "it's okay. I was going to tell them soon either way."

"Ah, that is good then, Master," Alex said.

"Huh? Master?"

"Did he just say, master?"

"He called the Tiger Sect's sect leader his master."

"Is he defecting to Tiger Sect now?"

People on neither side of the group could understand what was going on. Wen Cheng decided to take the opportunity to explain.

"This is my direct disciple, Yu Ming. He is also the direct disciple of the Hong Wu Sect's sect leader Ma Rong," Wen Cheng announced.

The amount of noise because of the confusion only increased.

Ma Rong returned with the registered disciples and saw the crowd. "What's happening here?" she asked.

"Haha, Sect Leader, it seems Sect Leader Wen doesn't plan on hiding your disciple's relationship any longer. He's openly explained everything," the Second Elder said. He had known about Alex's situation since the start and had been silently looking at the situation unfold.

She quickly understood the situation and decided to explain the situation. She quickly told the group how Alex was trained in part by both of them and was actually a disciple of both of the two sects.

"He will return back to the Tiger sect for 2 weeks after the competition ends," Ma Rong said.

"Junior brother, are you not taking part in any competitions today?" Luo Mei asked. She had seen him not with the group that was registered so she was sure of it.

"No," Alex said.

"Then, why don't you come to sit with us for today? You should see how the sect does at least once in the competition," Luo Mei said.

"I—" Alex didn't know what to say. He was part of Hong Wu Sect right now, so leaving the group was not something he was thinking of.

"You can go with them for today. Just remember to return before we leave," Ma Rong said. Alex didn't have anything to do for the day, so he was free to do what he wanted.

"Alright, you guys have seen the drama for long enough. Go back to your own seats," Ma Rong scolded the group of people as she took them to the seating area.

Alex watched them leave and turned around to go back to the seating area of the Tiger sect. He sat down next to Luo Mei who herself was seated next to Meng Yun. Wen Cheng and the rest of the elders were sitting on the seats behind and above them.

The rest of the disciples were sitting on the seats that were on the same level or one step lower than the rest of them.

Chapter 265: Sister

The girl named Su was staring daggers at Alex. Now that it was revealed that he was the direct disciple of the sect leader, he was another obstacle most people would have to fight against once Luo Mei graduated from her Prime Disciple spot.

Du Yuhan on the other hand didn't seem to care about that for some reason. According to his perspective, he was going to be the next prime disciple regardless.

"Hey, brother, what's your name?" A guy sitting below Alex turned and asked Alex.

Alex didn't know who the disciple was, but he still answered nonetheless. "I am Yu Ming," he said.

"Hmm... I see. My name is Yang Ma. Nice to meet you, brother Yu," he said. The guy had a square face with no facial hair and a head full of slightly red hair. He wasn't as tall as everyone around him and seemed quite short.

Alex didn't know what to say to the guy, but then he remembered the rankings from the Tiger sect. 'Yang Ma... that's the third rank holder in the sect,' he thought.

He quickly checked the man's cultivation base and found that he was in the 2nd Mind Tempering realm. Based on combat alone, he was probably stronger than Wan Li.

"So, Brother Yu, how did you beat that fatty Huo? You made him unconscious for 3 days from what I hear," Yang Ma asked.

"I..."

"Screw off, Yang. My junior brother doesn't need to answer you anything," Luo Mei said from the side. Alex was a little surprised, but he decided to remain quiet.

Yang Ma's face twisted for a split second before becoming full of smiles and said, "Ah, if sister Luo doesn't want her junior brother to have new friends, then I can't do anything." He turned back and focused on the arena in front of him.

'That's one fake person. He can't even hide what he is thinking,' Alex thought. It might have taken him a little more to realize without Luo Mei's help, but given how blatantly hypocritical the man was, Alex would sooner or later know not to trust him or be friends with him.

He turned his attention back to the arena as well and looked at the different competition floors that were getting ready.

There were 3 competitions being held for the 8 am slot. An artifact-making competition, a talisman-making competition, and a formation escaping competition.

Out of those 3, only the formation competition seemed to be the one that had nothing to do with production itself. That would come later on.

"Make sure to pay attention to the competitions. You will a lot more from these than you can from just reading about it in some books," Luo Mei said.

"Ah, I should have paid attention yesterday too then. I was too focused on my upcoming competition, and don't really remember what happened in most of the other ones," Alex said.

"Nah, yesterday was ingredients themed, so there was no reason for you to remember what happened there," Luo Mei said. Alex nodded after listening to that.

"Hmm... she is taking place in today's too?" Luo Mei said softly, but Alex managed to hear it. He looked to where she was looking and saw a bunch of people walking out of the coliseum gate towards the Formation arena.

Alex saw a man from the Hong Wu sect and another lady from the Tiger sect. But the one he looked at curiously, and also seemed to be Luo Mei's target of attention was the girl that Alex found familiar.

"Do you know the girl in the red robes, sister?" Alex curiously asked.

"Yes," Luo Mei said. "She is my sister."

Alex thought he heard wrong for a second. But once enough time passed and his brain comprehended what he had just heard, he asked, "Huh? Your sister? Now that I think about it, she really does look like you."

'No wonder I found her so familiar,' Alex thought.

"But why is she in a different sect and not Tiger sect? Also, I don't remember you mentioning anything about a sister before," Alex said.

"Our father won't let us go to the same sect so that we both can independently grow. And since our father doesn't have a son, whoever ends up being the strongest will take over the family once he retires from the head position," Luo Mei said.

"So you will be the head of the family once your father leaves the position?" Alex asked in surprise. In his eyes, Luo Mei was a million times better and stronger than her sister.

"Although, why not do it by seniority. Whoever amongst you two is old could just become the family head," Alex said.

"Can't do that. We are both of the same age, and were born on the same day," Luo Mei said.

"Woah, are you guys twins?" Alex asked.

"No," Luo Mei said as she shook her head. Alex was a little confused. Luo Mei smiled and continued, "She is my half-sister. We both have different mothers."

"Ah, I see," Alex said. He wanted to ask some more but Luo Mei didn't answer anything. So, he instead just watched the formation exam that was beginning.

There were 10 different formation flags around the stage and the slight fog was gathering on the surface of the stage. The host explained that the purpose of the competition was to leave the stage without lifting the formation or destroying it.

The formation reminded Alex of the Qi gathering formation back in the special alchemy garden place, but it was nothing like that.

According to the host, the stage was going to be massively expanded on their location alone, and the contestants were all going to be randomly allocated inside.

Then the Illusion formation would be started and the contestants would have to find a way to stop getting confused by the illusion formation. They would then have to leave the formation as fast as possible without getting in the way of any other participants or messing with any of the formation flags.

The fastest person to escape won.

Chapter 266: The Different Competitions

From the audience, Alex and the rest could see the different people in the Illusory Formation randomly staring around in different directions.

"Do they perhaps see something different from what we do?" Alex asked. The name Illusory told him that there would be illusions, just not what.

"It's a common rank formation, so I doubt it's anything that impressive. It's probably just a bunch of fog messing with their sense of direction," Luo Mei said.

Alex kept watching the competition, but at some point, it started to get boring seeing the people at the same place, unmoving.

Alex diverted his attention to the other competitions. The artifact-making competition was somehow the most familiar to Alex. It had a large cauldron on top of the fire, and the participants were putting in ingredients one after another.

The aim of the competition was to make an artifact from the given blueprint as fast as possible. Anything above certain criteria would qualify as having been completed.

The cauldrons the participants used to make artifacts were a lot larger than normal pill cauldrons as the number of materials required in making a simple artifact was must more space-consuming than the ones for simple pills.

The artifact they were making was a simple shield. To make the shield, they needed to make a metal shield itself and a leather strap.

Soon, some of the disciples took the molten metals and started pouring them onto a shield-shaped mold.? The metal cooled down, and it took the shape of the shield.

"Woah, is that how they normally make artifacts? That looks quite easy," Alex said.

"Nah, normally it's better. They use manual, physical methods to shape the molten metals. But since this is a speed test, they are willing to take the easy route out. After all, they only need to get an Earth Grade shield out of it.

The people quickly finished putting on the strap and the shield was ready. They went to go show it to the host. Alex lost a little interest after learning that that was not the proper method for the artifact-making process.

He changed his attention to the Talisman competition now. The talisman competition was a little different from all the rest.

The disciples were on the ground, continuously mixing various ingredients on a stone slab. The creation was slowly flowing onto a small area where it was getting pooled.

That was what the people were going to use as Ink for the different drawings they made.

Once the inks were ready, they all took out a brush and paper and slowly started drawing onto it.

"So, it's the fastest person to make the talisman who wins right? I wonder who will draw the rune first," someone in front of Alex asked.

"Hey idiot, just cheer for your fellow disciple who is taking part," someone else asked.

"To be fair, they have the Royal Fu Sect, and Little Dawn sect to fight against. I doubt anyone other than those two is going to win the top 3," another person said.

"Oh god, look at him. He hasn't even finished making the ink yet. I doubt we are going to win at all," Someone else said.

Alex looked at the disciple wearing the Tiger Sect's robes and saw how slow he was.

The various other disciples dipped their brush in the newly made ink and started making the runes in the paper they had. They needed to be very slow with it, or they would end up messing the entire paper and would have to start again.

Also, the better the ink, the more volatile it usually was. So one needed to be extra careful when making the talismans.

Disciples were soon starting to finish and one by one, they handed in their work to the host.

The talisman they were made to make was one that create a burst of water when it landed on something. And the only way to show the audience who won was to use up all the different talismans.

They could've just tested it using a talisman formation, but visual showings sit better with the onlookers. So, the host started throwing the talismans one after another towards a wooden target.

As soon as the talisman landed on the wooden target, a column of water would burst out. The larger the burst, the stronger the talisman.

In the end, the winner was as expected, Little Dawn sect and Royal Fu Academy. Alex could also see a few Grand Void sect names quite a bit up in the final rankings.

On the Artifact side, they were on the final testing too. The shields were made to strike with continuously increasing damage and would stop once the shield couldn't block anymore.

The highest damage block that they encountered was a shield that could block normal attacks from the 3rd Organ Tempering realm. For a competition that focused on being fast, that was an excellent result for the shield.

Soon the results came out for them too. As expected, the Royal Fu Academy was victorious on this field as well. The other two sects with good results were the Tranquil Union sect and the Southern Sanctuary sect.

Once the two competitions were done, finally did the participants from the formation test come out as well. One after another, the disciples started walking out.

Surprisingly, Luo Mei's sister was in the top 3 this time. She seemed to be from the sect called Earth path sect. They were a famous formation sect. For her to be part of the examination while being part of a formation sect, she must've been very good.

The other winners for the formation competitions were out as well. As expected, one of them was the Royal Fu Academy. While the other one was called the Sky Soaring sect.

Soon, the host laid out the rankings and the list of the winners was for everyone to see. Alex read his senior sister's half-sister's listing.

'Luo Xing, so that's her name, huh?' Alex thought.

Chapter 267: Music

Alex was watching a bunch of participants makes poison on the stage. The task wasn't a very visual task as everyone tried their best to hide their methods from the audience.

All they did was mix a bunch of ingredients with each other and soon the poison would be completed.

"That guy from your group is quite fast, junior brother," Luo Mei said.

Alex looked at a man currently finishing the preparation of the poison. "Ah, yes. What was his name again? Tang Bao, I think. He is ranked 8th in our sect if I remember correctly. He seems to be quite adept at poison," Alex said.

He hadn't known the person's name before today and had only learned when Ma Rong had chosen him during the registration.

"He should make it into the top ten," Luo Mei said.

Alex silently nodded. As expected, he finished in the 7th position. That was more than what anyone from the Hong Wu sect was expecting from a competition that was not about Alchemy.

As the poison competition was ending, Meng Yun stood up and walked away with an elder. "Is sister Meng taking part in a competition too?" Alex asked.

"Yes. Meng Yun is quite good with the tunes, so she is taking part in the music competition," Luo Mei said.

"I see," Alex said and went back to watching the competition. There was another competition going on, one that he had never seen before, a puppet competition.

The competition holders provided the puppets and the participant's job was to refine the puppet and make it theirs the fastest.

The puppets were just small mechanical rats so the competition holders didn't lose much by handing them out. The winner of the puppet competition was someone from a sect called the Thousand Hands sect.

After the puppet competition and the poison competitions were over, it was time for the music competition.

Meng Yun and a bunch of other disciples got onto the state and the host started explaining the rules.

As the competition was themed Speed, the participants had to play a certain piece at a fast speed while staying above a certain threshold of errors.

Everyone was made to take out their instruments. Some took out drums, some took out zithers, some took out guitar-like stringed instruments. Meng Yun took out her flute that he had used against Alex's fight.

When they were given the go, everyone instantly started playing the music piece that was floating in front of them. Alex couldn't understand what the bunch of lines floating midair meant, but it seemed the participants fully understood them.

As soon as they started playing, a graph of sorts appeared on top of each of the participant's heads letting the audience know how correct they were.

Everyone aside from a few kept on fluctuating up and down on the accuracy scale, but never dropped below a threshold marked by 25%.

Only a few could consistently keep it at around 40%. Meng Yun was one of them. She was very good at playing the piece as if she had learned it all her life and her average level seemed to be around 42%.

"Oh wow, Mengmeng is so close to becoming a Heaven Grade musician," Luo Mei said from the side.

"Heaven grade is at 50%?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, it's always the same for any profession that can check its quality in percentage. 10% is the mortal threshold, 25 is the Earth, and 50 is the Heaven. Honestly, if Mengmeng spent just a bit more time practicing her craft instead of trying to serve me, she would definitely be Heaven grade by now," Luo Mei said.

"S- Serve you?" Alex was a little confused. 'Isn't Meng Yun a player? Why would she serve senior sister?' he thought.

"Oh yeah, didn't I mention it yet? Mengmeng is my maid. My family sent her to the sect with me to take care of me. Although it turned out that her talent was quite good, so master agreed to make her a disciple of the sect. However, she still tried to take care of me and follows me around," Luo Mei said while shaking her head.

"Oh," Alex said, unable to articulate any more words. His entire view of Meng Yun came crumbling down. 'Wait, so she isn't a player, but is just a talented NPC?' he thought.

Meng Yun was on the stage currently finishing up her piece. She was quite fast, even when compared to participants who came from genuine music sects.

Finally, she finished and ended up being the first to do so. Her highest melody was around 45% and her lowest was at 38%. On average, she stayed at around 42% melody.

She had passed without question. Other participants also started finishing one by one. A few of them actually had a higher melody than her, but they weren't as fast, so they failed to get into the top 3 rankings all the same.

Once the results were out, Meng Yun happily returned back to the seating area.

"Congratulations Mengmeng," Luo Mei said as she stood up and went to hug her.

"Good job. You got us 100 points where we weren't expecting any," Wen Cheng said.

"Congrats, sister Meng," Alex said.

Other people started congratulating her too. Soon, Meng Yun was red as a beet from all the attention and quickly went to hide near Luo Mei.

Alex looked back onto the stage. He had nearly missed the formation setting competition, but even after watching it, he didn't realize what was happening.

He couldn't understand the logic as to why the participants threw their flags at the place they did. Soon, that competition was over too without Alex really knowing what took place.

'It seems watching a formation-making competition without the slightest idea on formation making is not a good idea,' he thought.

Finally, he looked back towards the Hong Wu sect's seating area and saw that Ma Rong was missing. So were the three disciples.

It was time for the pill-making competition.

Chapter 268: Talent

Wan Li, Zhou Mei, and Fan Ruogang all walked out of the barrier and went into the arena. Inside was a section separated entirely for pill-making.

It was a similar place to the artifact-making section, and thus had small openings on the ground from where the fire was constantly burning.

They walked up to their place and were given an empty storage bag. They were made to keep the pill's ingredients in the storage bag and give all their storage bags away except the one they had provided.

Everyone took their one storage bag and walked up to a random seating area. Not a single one of them was provided a pill cauldron as at this level they were all expected to have one of their own.

All 3 of the disciples took out their own pill cauldrons as expected. It was hard to tell a cauldron's grade just from looking at the visual information, but each of them at the very least held a Common Heaven grade cauldron.

The information from this morning had a bit of info to get the participants ready, but the host needed to explain it in detail and to the audience.

The host was the one from Alex's last competition and he started speaking.

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Fastest pill-making competition. Without delay, I will explain how this competition will work."

"You each have chosen to make a pill of your own choice and have thus prepared your own ingredients. You will get one shot, one opportunity to make the pill."

"You are considered to have completed the task if you make a pill and quickly run up front and put it inside any one of the pill testers that will be laid out soon."

"If the harmony crosses over 25%, you will have completed the task. If not, you will have failed and will not be in the final ranking," the host said.

"You will be disqualified if your ingredients burn or your cauldron explodes. You will be disqualified if you intentionally create disturbances for the other participants."

"You will be disqualified if we find out that you cheated during the pill making process in any way. That is all," the host said.

"Now prepare," he said.

Everyone started heating their cauldron and got ready. The competition would begin the moment they put in their first ingredients.

Once everyone was ready, The host gave the go. "Start."

Immediately, the entire group of participants poured in their first ingredient and started constantly stirring it. Wan Li, Zhou Mei, and Fan Ruogang did the same.

They now had 5 more ingredients to go.

One of the methods to making a pill fast was choosing a recipe that didn't have a lot of ingredients. The lesser ingredients there were, the faster one could complete making the pills. That was obvious.

As such, all the participants had chosen a pill that required ridiculously few ingredients. The recipe that the Hong Wu sect disciples chose was a simple pill called Gorilla strength pill.

It did what it was named, and gave a person the strength of a gorilla for a short burst of time. It didn't last long and honestly wasn't a very good pill.

Most alchemists wouldn't make this pill if possible, but this was a perfect pill for the competition.

Already, people were on their second ingredients, controlling the energy coming out of it. These alchemists didn't have spiritual sense, so they couldn't really feel the energy, but thanks to their experience they knew it was there.

Wan Li was the first to put in the third ingredient, followed by Fan Ruogang and then Zhou Mei amongst the group from Hong Wu sect.

As for the other ones, the Royal Alchemist's disciple wasn't here, so instead there were other disciples from Royal Fu Academy, and a few disciples from the Spirit Song sect who started putting in the third ingredient.

Alex was in the seating area with the Tiger sect, completely flabbergasted as to how the competition was going.

"Are they good, junior brother?" Luo Mei asked. Ever since learning that Alex made Heaven-grade pills, her respect towards him and his credibility as an alchemist had shot up high in her mind.

"They-they are good. Very good. Much better than me actually," Alex said, still in awe at what he was seeing.

"What? They are better than you," Luo Mei said in surprise. Then she slowly came close and whispered, "but you can make Heaven grade pills are they still better than you?" she asked.

"No. This is a different kind of better," he said. Luo Mei was a bit confused so Alex explained.

"What do you think is easier sister, making a pill with high Harmony, or low harmony?" Alex asked.

"Of course, it's high harmony," Luo Mei said. That was an obvious choice.

"Yes, but that is very hard to do without proper focus and time. You need to be careful of your mistakes every single step of the way," Alex said.

"That makes sense," Luo Mei said.

"However, they are doing something else. They are... deliberately making mistakes," Alex said.

"Huh, Mistakes?" even Wen Cheng was curious now.

"Yes, master. They are doing the best they can while constantly making small mistakes in their pill making that would either let them speed up some steps or skip it entirely."

"Making a lot of mistakes would ruin your pills, that obvious. However, their objective isn't to make the best pill, it is to make the fastest. As long as they can make a pill in Earth grade, they are safe. So they are deliberately making mistakes that will help them get a faster time, while still staying above 25% harmony by the end of the process."

"Just the fact that they know what to do is amazing enough, but the ability to do so is something else. What they are doing requires years and years of practice, something I could not hope to replicate in the near future. As such, each and every single alchemist on that stage right now are much better than me."

Chapter 269: Speed Results

Listening to Alex acknowledge the alchemists on the stage made everyone in the seating area focus back on them. Alex did so too. He checked back on the competition.

Wan Li was still the fastest. He had practiced pill-making so many times that he knew by instinct what he could do to save up on some time. Add onto that fact that he read up on it every single day, he was a beast of an alchemist.

Zhou Mei was quite good as well. Her years of practice weren't in vain either. She was proving her worth as the 2nd best disciple in the Hong Wu sect in front of everyone.

Fan Ruogang was having a hard time keeping up. She was mostly used to making pills slowly while having fun. She didn't like the competition aspect of pill-making. Still, since this was one, she didn't want to lose either.

The 3 disciples from the Spring Song sect seemed to be keeping up quite well as well.

Soon the competition was on the last stretch as well. Everyone started putting in their final ingredients and started making the pill.

The entire audience that was focused on the competition watched with bated breaths. The different sects taking part in the competition prayed that theirs be the first person to stand up.

Alex watched with plenty of anticipation as well.

Suddenly, there was movement. Wan Li stood up from his seat while pulling along a pill with his cauldron and ran to the pill tester.

No sooner had he reached the pill tester, 3 other participants stood up at nearly the same time. They were Zhou Mei, a disciple from Royal Fu Academy and another from the eSpirit Song sect.

They were all a step behind Wan Li, however, as Wan Li's pill crossed the 25% threshold without a problem and only stopped moving once the fog on the pill tester reached 29%.

The other 3 dropped in their pills on the pill tester as well and waited. Everyone had successfully managed to cross 25%, yet they didn't realize who crossed first. They would've to wait for the host to give them the result.

Fan Ruogang was a little late and was the third group of participants to stand up. However, she was sure that she wouldn't get into the top 3 now. She was quite sad.

Still, she hurriedly put her pill onto a pill tester and watched it go up to 26%. She had barely survived.

The other participants stood up one by one and started filling the lineup of pill testers as well. Surprisingly, around 20% of them had failed to produce an Earth-grade pill.

They seemed to have made a bit too many mistakes than they should have. After a while, all of them had submitted the pills and it was time to reveal the results.

The host walked up to a small podium and started speaking.

"Congratulations to all of you who passed. That was an amazing show of skill that I know anyone with the most simple of alchemy knowledge can appreciate."

"Unfortunately, skill alone won't help you win the competition. What will is speed, and here we have the list for the top 3 winners."

" On the 3rd place, we have, from Hong Wu Sect, Zhou Mei." A round of applause appeared as Zhou Mei herself was surprised that she managed to win the competition.

"On the 2nd place, we have, from Spirit Song sect, Han Long." Another applause sounded as Han Long smiled. He seemed pretty confident about the second place even before getting it.

"And in the 1st place, the winner is from Hong Wu Sect, Wan Li," The host shouted. Sounds of shouts and applause surprised Wan Li very much. He wasn't used to having too much attention and was starting to get a little nervous.

Fan Ruogang took the opportunity to jump on both Wan Li and Zhou Mei and hugged them as she congratulated those two.

"Damn it. I wish I could be in the top 3 too, then all three of us would be in the top 3," she said.

Soon they started walking back to the seating area.

"I will go back now too, master," Alex said. The competition was over and their sect members would be leaving soon.

"Alright. We will talk next time. You will take part in tomorrow's competition, right? We will watch that," Wen Cheng said.

"Take care, Junior brother," Luo Mei said. Alex said his goodbyes and left. Even as he left, he could see the stares from the girl named Su, and the guy called Yang Ma.

Alex ignored them and walked to the Hong Wu sect's seating.

"Ah, you are back, disciple Yu. How was your time? You did watch the competition instead of talking all the time, right?" the second Elder said.

The third elder snickered from the side. "Yes, second elder. I managed to see every competition quite well," Alex said.

"Good. This is a very good opportunity to view all forms of production and fighting methods using by cultivators in one place. We shouldn't miss it at all," the second elder said.

Alex could see the truths in those statements.

Soon, Ma Rong returned with the 3 disciples. Everyone congratulated the three of them as soon as they returned. While Wan Li had acquired 100 points, and Zhou Mei had gotten 33 points, Fan Ruogang had also managed to come at 5th place with 20 points.

Together with Tang Bao who earned 14 points, they had earned a total of 167 points from simply 2 different competitions.

They were now at 377 points and were 146 points away from entering the 1st grade. They all celebrated for a while. Afterward, since there was no more competition taking place, the group decided to leave first just like yesterday.

Alex wasn't against this idea at all, as he was looking forward to returning back to the hotel and logging out. His cousin should have already taken the capsule by now and he couldn't wait to try it out himself.

Chapter 270: New Capsule

Not every one of the group decided to return to the hotel. Most of the disciples didn't have anything to do, so they instead decided to split away from the sect and do their own thing for the rest of the day.

The others who took part in the competitions, however, were very tired and just wanted to go back to the hotel and take some rest.

As such, they walked for 15 minutes or so and returned back to the sect.

Alex wasn't tired like the others, but he was very excited, so he went to his room and immediately went to the bed. He didn't even wait for Wan Li to enter before he simply logged out.

As soon as he woke up, however, his excitement disappeared as he realized just how hungry he was. "Ah, that's right. I haven't eaten anything since yesterday night," he thought.

He quickly freshened up and walked out of the room.

There it was, in the living room, a large cuboid cardboard box. "My capsule!" Alex said in awe.

"Look at you. You look like a kid who just walked into a candy shop," Hannah said from the side. She had been staying there waiting for him to log out before they could go set up the capsule.

"I feel like one," Alex said.

"You want to set it up right now?" Hannah asked. Ning was about to nod when his stomach growled.

He made an embarrassed smile and said, "Can I eat something first? I am famished."

"Haha, alright. Come, I will get you something," She said ad prepared a meal for him.

Alex ate the food like there was no tomorrow. " I really shouldn't have skipped my meal today. This is a horrible feeling to log out to," he said.

"Well, good for you, you won't feel it anymore," Hannah said.

"Ah right, the capsule," Alex said. He quickly finished his meal and walked out to the living room along with Hannah.

Instead of unpacking in the living room like last time, they decided to take the whole thing to Alex's room. His room was on the lower floor, so it was fine.

They took the capsule in and started unboxing it. The capsule was the same in design with blue streaks in a while body.

Alex put on the suction cups at the bottom of the capsule and set them against the wall on the far side of the room. Once everything was set up, he plugged the cables into the wall and opened the capsule.

"Alright sister. You can go to your own game now. Thanks for taking this for me," Alex said.

"Alright, be careful. The permanent focus mode is quite hard to get used to. Don't panic if you can't get used to it," Hannah said.

Alex nodded and got into the capsule before closing the door. The space was quite spacious inside even though it looked very small from the outside. With his body completely free, he let it all loose and slowly let his mind drift.

Before he knew it, he had logged in.

He slowly stood up from his bed. The same intense senses attacking from all around him. This time, however, he was ready for it and took a deep breath before taking it all in.

He let the different information attack him and simply soaked it in like a sponge. The loud sounds, the bright light, the intense smell, the weird flavor of his own saliva, the robes brushing along his skin, the slow passing of time; he let it all enter him.

He closed his eyes and slowly let go of the breath. He then took in another breath and let it go as well. He started doing it over and over again.

With each breath of air, he was slowly getting used to the feeling and it was starting to feel like it was going away. However, he knew what was happening was that he was getting saturated with the different information and was learning to ignore it.

He learned to ignore the bright lights, he ignored the loud sounds, he ignored the smell and the taste, he ignore the feeling of the heat and the clothes in his body.

The one thing he couldn't ignore immediately was the perception of time. Human beings weren't designed to sense such a sudden change in the speed of time and it was going to take him a while.

He didn't know how long passed in real-time, but from his internal clock, he felt like it took him half an hour before time was back to normal as well.

He had managed to ignore that as well. He looked around and suddenly thought of something. Immediately, the information that he was ignoring came rushing in.

The focus mode was going to be there all the time now. He was just going to have to ignore it.

He listened to the sounds and movements of the staff around him. He had a hard time right now, but he felt like if he mastered it, he could instinctively choose what to ignore and what to allow in the long run. Although, that would take a long while of training.

Wan Li was reading his book as usual and writing stuff to it. Alex could see that the time was normal around him once more. So, he decided to leave for now.

He walked out and thought of something. 'Do I go to the auction house? Or do I go to the library to learn more?' he thought.

He went to Ma Rong's room to see if she would be willing to visit the library with him, but she told him that she was busy and could only visit the library tomorrow.

So, he decided to skip the library for today. He would now go to the auction house to sell his new pills. He walked down the 17 flight of stairs and got out of the hotel.

As soon as he walked out onto the street, he was bombarded with a ton of information and he could keep a handle on the focus mode anymore.

Chapter 271: A Group of Girls

Large amounts of slow information started bombarding his brain. Thankfully, he had the spiritual sea, so he could handle this amount of information.

The quantity of information alone broke through the focus mode he thought was under control. Out in the streets, he had to practice it again.

It took him only a few minutes now, but he managed to tone down his sense. The first thing he got a handle on was Time. Once that was under his control, the others would slowly come down as well.

The next two were the visual sense and the auditory sense. Being able to see and hear less was a blessing for him right now.

He then took care of the feelings, taste, and smell. After that, he was back to being a regular human once again.

Well, that was a lie. Even after ignoring all the senses, there was still information that would skip to him from time to time. Like the time suddenly slowing down, or sense of his skin suddenly feeling very hot under the sun.

His cousin had told him it would take a while, and it looked like it was certainly going to take that long.

Finally, once the focus mode was under control, Alex walked onto the street. The first thing he did was get a map of the city. It only cost him a few silver coins, and it told him the list of all the major buildings in the city.

He scoured through the map and saw exactly where the auction house was. The auction house he was looking for was on the southern side of the town, a few hundred meters outside of the royal palace's gate.

'That's a little far away,' he thought but still decided to go. It took him around the same time to go to as it did the coliseum. Due to the Royal palace being at the center of the city, he had to take a roundabout path.

Along the way, he practiced controlling his focus mode a bit more. He was still suffering from lapses of control but was getting good overall.

As he was walking through the city, he had another one of such lapses. Time suddenly slowed down, and he saw everything way too clearly down to a minute level.

A group of girls, clearly gathered around the most pretty one were walking down the road. The most pretty girl was wearing a light blue robe that was thin around her snow-white arm.

She had a skinny yet tall body and her short face made her look very cute. The girls around her were quite pretty too, but none could compare to her beauty.

However, that was not what Alex noticed the most. The thing he noticed was actually way behind the group of girls. There was a dark shadow that would flash by from time to time, constantly following the girls.

'A stalker?' Alex thought in surprise. The person was very fast, to the point that Alex couldn't even see them properly, yet they were clearly stalking the group of girls.

Alex felt that he needed to let the girls know. However, the person stalking was clearly very strong, so he couldn't directly let them know, or the stalker might decide to take revenge on him.

So, Alex took out the map from before and walked up to the group of girls.

"Excuse me, can you help me find a place," he said.

The girls seemed to want to immediately want to send him away, but the main girl spoke up first. "What is it, little brother? Where do you want to go?" she said.

"Can you tell me where this place is?" he asked while randomly pointing to a place on the map.

"Oh that is... " the girl properly explained the direction to the location Alex had pointed to.

"Ah thank you," Alex said and in the same sentence, but with a lower voice he whispered, "I just wanted to let you know that you have someone in black following you guys from behind, be careful," he said and immediately walked away.

The other girls looked around in confusion trying to see who would dare follow them, but the girl in blue simply stared at? Alex's leaving figure with a hint of surprise in her eyes.

A black figure suddenly dashed up next to the girl. The one who had just arrived was actually an older lady in her late 20s, who was wearing the signature black robe of the Royal Fu academy.

"Your highness, are you alright? I saw that boy say something to you," the new arriver said.

"Yeah, Fumi, I am alright. It's... just that boy just now actually told me that you were following me. How did he manage to see you?" the girl asked.

"A boy... saw me? That is impossible your highness. I am one of the fastest guards among your guards. The young boy could not have seen me," the woman named Fumi said.

"I don't think he saw you exactly, but just your silhouette, but that too was quite surprising. Do you know who that boy is?" the girl asked.

"Hmm... he must be quite good if he managed to do that. As for who he is, I do not know your highness. The competition has a lot of different people come to the city. He is probably one of them. Do you want me to check on him?" the woman named Fumi said.

"It's alright. Forget about it. You can go back now," the girl said. The guard immediately disappeared and the girl went back to mingling with the other girls and going around the city.

Alex had no idea what had just happened as he had finally reached the place he wanted to come to. He looked around the place and was surprised just how many auction houses there were, but for various reasons, this was the one he had chosen.

He looked up at the giant nameplate on the front of the auction house that said, "Pink Cloud Auction House."

Chapter 272: Han Jing

The Pink Cloud Auction House was the main headquarters of the auction house of the same name back in Scarlet city. He was used to doing business with them, so he naturally came here as well.

He walked up to the auction house and was stopped at the gate.

"I'm sorry customer, the auction is already ongoing, we can not let you enter right now," a lady in front of the gate said.

"An auction is going on already? But it's only Monday. Don't you have auctions only on Saturday?" Alex asked.

"Normally yes. But due to the annual competition and the high number of people in the capital, the auction house performs an auction every single day for this week," the lady said.

"I see. Well, I am not here for some auctions though. I am here to sell some items of my own. Am I not allowed to do that?" Alex asked.

"Ah, of course, you are. Please come with me," the lady immediately took Alex with her inside the auction house. The interior of the auction house was painted pink as per its name and was uncannily the same as the one in Scarlet city.

'Did they purposefully made the auction house to be the same everywhere around?' Alex wondered.

"Please sit here, I will call someone," the lady left him in a familiar yet completely new room and went to get someone.

A middle-aged man with a short, gray stubble on his face walked in. He was a little surprised to see Alex's young face but refrained from making any hasty judgment.

"This one is called Han Jing, may I know what I can call fellow Daoist?" Han Jing asked.

Alex was about to give his name but refrained from it. Instead, he said, "You may refer to me as the White wolf."

"May I ask what fellow Daoist is here to sell?" the person asked.

Alex reached into his bag and brought out a few pill bottles that in total contained 27 pills. These were the same 3 types of pills he had made yesterday.

The group consisted of a Fan Converting pill, an Energy Negating Pill, and a Rubber Body pill. Alex explained what pills he had and what they did in brief just in case the man didn't know about it.

Han Jing however was used to such pills and was made to remember them all. Still, he didn't interrupt Alex during his explanation and simply nodded.

"I hope you don't mind if I check the pills, fellow Daoist," Han Jing said.

"Sure, go ahead," Alex said.

Han Jing brought out a pill tester and started testing the pills.

42%, 48%, 51%, 49%, 45%, 43%, 50%, ...47%, 44%, 46%, 55%

After each pill he tested, Han Jing's eyes went wider and wider, showing no signs of returning back to normal. He couldn't believe that he was handling so many pills with above 40% harmony.

There were even 5 pills with over 50% harmony, meaning they were all in the Heaven grade. This was a really high-profile customer and had he known this, he would've simply let Yu Fan take care of it like she always did.

"F-Fellow Daoist, did you make all of these pills?" Han Jing asked.

Normally, Alex would simply say yes. However, he now knew better than to trust just about anyone with such information, so he instead said, "Of course not. These pills were made by my master. She asked me to come to sell them to the auction house."

"I-I see. Do you have any request or demand as to how we should sell these pills?" Han Jing asked.

"Hmm... Master didn't say anything so I will leave it to Mr. Han to do with it what he likes," Alex said.

"Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Let me prepare the contract," Han Jing said and immediately prepared a contract that said that the auction house was in possession of 27 pills with their individual name and harmony listed out. The contract said that the auction house would sell the pills by tomorrow and return 90% of the earnings back to 'White Wolf'.

Both Alex and Han jing signed on it, and Alex walked out with the contract.

Han Jing was very polite even until he reached the door and saw Alex out. As soon as Alex walked out, however, he immediately started jumping up and down.

"Woohoo, I did it," he screamed.

The ladies near the gate were curious and asked, "What happened brother Han? Why are you so excited?"

Han Jing immediately told them about the items he had acquired which brought a round of gasps from the surrounding females.

"How come someone is selling so many pills at once, of such high quality too? Was that person someone the Royal Alchemist sent?" A girl asked.

"Stop talking nonsense. Those pills are trash for the Royal Alchemist. Must be some elder from one of the sects in the capital right now," Another girl said.

"Still, I wonder how they made so many pills. It can't be they made it for the simple purpose of auctioning it right?"

"No way, that would be stupid. You could get much more money from taking commissions on a daily basis," another girl said.

"Alright guys, enough talking. I am going to register these pills for tomorrow's auction, and also I want to see Yu Fan's face when she sees that I got such a good item today," Han Jing said.

"Ah, brother Han, you better not. Sister Yu is used to getting way better items. You will only end up embarrassing yourself," the girls said.

Han Jing got a little depressed when he heard that but quickly shook his head and walked in. He needed to quickly register the pills for the auction taking place tomorrow.

Alex didn't know what to do anymore for the day. So, he decided to just not do anything else for the day today and go back to the hotel to better adjust to the new focus mode and hopefully, master it.

Chapter 273: Not Hungry

Alex used the rest of the day to try and get a better grasp of the new enhanced Focus Mode. In a place with not as much information being sent to his mind, he could easily get used to it.

But he knew that was wrong, so he walked up to the window and looked at the streets down below and took in the information.

Slowly, over the course of the, he managed to finally get used to it. Now if he went down to the streets, he would still be bombarded with the same amount of information, but his mind was capable of ignoring all other information except for the relevant ones.

He was still getting the same amounts of information, he was only processing it differently.

As such, he could now have the Focus mode turned on 24/7 and not worry about it. As a result, his overall senses had gotten a lot more acute.

Alex went back into the hotel and kept on practicing it more until he and Wan Li were called for the meeting in Ma Rong's room once more.

"Good job guys. You really did great in today's competition as well. If we can keep this up for a few more matches, we will definitely enter the 1st grade," Ma Rong said, leading to a bunch of people clapping.

"You three did a great job today, so for tomorrow's competition, you guys can rest if you want to. You can take part in Wednesday's competition for the Learning theme," Ma Rong said.

"Sect Leader, I am not really that good at learning immediately so I think I will take part in tomorrow's match. I can make a really strong pill for sure," Wan Li said from the side.

"Hmm, sure. So, Meimei and Fanfan will skip tomorrow to take part in Wednesday's competition," Ma Rong said.

Both the girls nodded in agreement.

"Alright, that settles it then. For tomorrow's competition, we will have Wan Li, Yu Ming and one of you guys take place. Anyone of you wants to?" Ma Rong asked. A few raised their hands, and Ma Rong chose a girl who was 9th in the Alchemy Achievement ranking in the sect.

"We are 146 points away, so I need the rest of you to join random competitions tomorrow. Even if you don't get in the top 10, getting a few points here and there will be a lot of help," Ma Rong said.

Everyone nodded, and then they were dismissed.

Alex had seen Tiger sect's point gathering system today. They had a lot of disciples that took part in every competition and got points here and there.

Hong Wu Sect's disciples weren't that broadly gifted, so they couldn't take part in every competition they came across. Still, Ma Rong seemed to be going for that approach just in case.

'If the disciples can take part in a few non-alchemy competitions and take the load off our back, that would be a lot of help,' Alex thought.

Everyone returned back to their own room and started cultivating.

Alex too went back to his room and decided to log out. He opened his eyes and instinctively reached for the helmet, but stopped when he realized his arms couldn't come to his head.

'Oh yeah, capsule,' he thought and instead pushed open the lid on top. The door opened and Alex finally walked out.

He looked at the time and realized that it was 7 pm. It had been about 7 hours since he had eaten anything, and yet he was nowhere near hungry.

'Damn, this is really good. I can't feel like I lost energy while in the game at all,' he thought. Normally, when he got out of the game, he would either feel hungry or would need to go to the bathroom. But now, he could feel neither.

This was a truly advanced technology that he didn't dare try to understand.

Alex went to the bathroom to freshen up a bit and then went to the kitchen. Hannah was already there with little food on her plate.

"Get yourself some food," she said and continued eating.

Alex went ahead and got himself a load of food but realized that he wasn't feeling hungry at all. 'Is this the aftereffect of the capsule usage?' he wondered and served himself very little.

It took him no time to finish eating the food, but not before Hannah was done with hers. They washed the dishes together and Alex finally returned back to the game.

He went back to the capsule and opened the lid before getting back into it. He laid inside and closed his eyes and before he knew it, he was logged back in.

Logging in this time was very smooth compared to the last two. While he was bombarded with the different enhanced senses, he was already used to them and could thus handle himself better.

He looked around and saw that Wan Li was already focused back on his books. Alex thought about asking for something to read but decided against it. Using other people's research to learn didn't seem like a good idea on a topic as experimental as this.

Who knew, maybe he could come up with different answers, and reading Wan Li's notes would only stop him from taking a different approach with his experiments.

Instead, he decided to simply cultivate and prepare for tomorrow's competition. Tomorrow was the Perfect themed competition. Perhaps the most important one of all.

So, he decided to waste no time. He called out Pearl and kept him in his robes. With a single word, Pearl started cultivating and numerous cuts appeared along Alex's body.

It hurt a lot more than yesterday. 'Is it because the cuts are more severe or because of my new senses?' Alex wondered, but couldn't come up with an answer.

He then took out the Spirit Cleansing Lily. It hadn't worked the last few times, but he wasn't going to give up now. As such, he held the flower and slowly started cultivating.

And before he knew it, he was deep asleep.

Chapter 274: Third Day

Alex woke up early in the morning. As soon as he was even a little awake, the several painful cuts along his body woke him up immediately. He was jolted awake and he asked Pearl to stop cultivating.

Pearl let out a small 'meow' and got up from his cultivation. By now, pearl must've been very strong as well. He checked Pearl's status and saw that as expected, he was now in Bone Tempering 9th realm in cultivation.

Pearl was one step away from reaching the Organ Tempering realm as well.

'Does that mean my body cultivation is at Bone Tempering 9th realm as well?' Alex wondered. He seriously thought of going to check it at someplace in the capital today, but then remembered that he had to go to the library with his master today.

That was much more important as there were a lot of things he needed to check in the library.

He put Pearl back into the tattoo and looked at the time. It was 6:15 am. He then looked at his hands again and saw that the Spirit Cleansing Lily was still in his hands.

'Why can I not use it anymore?' he wondered. This was the third time that he had cultivated with a Spirit Cleansing lily and it hadn't worked at all.

He didn't know what was happening, so he just sighed and put the lily back into his storage bag, and logged out.

He got out from the capsule and realized once more that he was neither hungry nor was he in need of the bathroom.

'Ah, this capsule is seriously going to mess with my physiology,' he thought. He still went to the bathroom to freshen up and forced himself to each a few pieces of bread for breakfast.

After that, he returned back to his game 15 minutes later. He woke up back on his bed and got up. He walked over to Wan Li who was focused on his book and told him it was time to leave.

As expected, someone came to knock on the door to let them know just that.

Alex smiled towards Wan Li and they both walked out of the room. After a few minutes, everyone was ready and they went down the staircase.

Along the way, they met the group of Spirit Song sect, who were also going down the stair.

"You guys in a hurry to go somewhere? To lose maybe?" the fatty Xu said as he showed an annoying smile towards Ma Rong.

Ma Rong didn't have any funny or clever comeback to the fatty's words and so she simply said, "Just watch us." The fatty didn't seem to like the serious answer and scoffed towards her but said nothing else.

There was rivalry between the two groups, not animosity, and he wanted to keep it that way.

The two sects were together on their way to the coliseum, and along the way, one of the? Spring Song disciples came up to Wan Li and tried to strike up a conversation.

Alex saw the disciple and saw that he was the second place holder for yesterday's speed pill-making competition. 'If I remember correctly, his name was Han Long I believe,' Alex thought.

Han Long tried to talk with Wan Li, trying to ask him if he was going to participate today and if so what pill he was going to make today.

Wan Li was naturally very shy and thus didn't answer any questions at all, which the boy thought was rude. He didn't realize that Wan Li was simply like this and he wasn't trying to intentionally be rude towards him.

He then moved on to Zhou Mei and tried to strike up a conversation, but she was naturally coded to everyone aside from the elders, Wan Li, and Fan Ruogang.

Seeing that they weren't responding, Han Long returned back to his group.

"Hey, why didn't he try to talk with me? Rude. Does he not know that I am the third-best in the sect?" Fan Ruogang said acting as if she was insulted.

Everyone in the group laughed a little, including Ma Rong. "You can show them how good you are tomorrow, Fanfan," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, Sect Leader," Fan Ruogang said and was back to her cheery self.

Soon, they reached the coliseum and entered it. As a sect, they could directly skip the queue to enter and could go to the arena to look at today's competitions.

The host, Fu Zhen was there once more to tell them about today's theme, Perfection. He let them know the criteria based on what the results would be set and what being perfect meant in general.

In simple terms, the higher the grade of the produced product was, the better. He then showed a list of competitions for today.

As expected, Alchemy's competition was the Highest Harmony pill making. Ma Rong made a few more people take up different other competitions. While she didn't expect much from them, she still hoped to get a few stray points here and there.

However, her hope for today's competition was still with Alex and Wan Li.

"Alright, let's go register you lot," she said and took the disciples that had taken part in some of the competition, while the rest of them went to their predetermined seating area.

Along the way, he was the Tiger sect too, but the only one he knew from that group was Meng Yun, and she was too far away to strike up a conversation.

Once Wan Li's turn was done, he walked forward to the metal ball and picked it up before infusing some Qi into it.

They made the participants do it every day to keep track of their turns, as well as to see if there were some random jumps in cultivation which would mean that someone was probably doing something illegal.

Alex told her his name and that he was going to take part in the alchemy competition at 10 o'clock. Once everyone was registered, the group returned back to the seating area.

Chapter 275: [Bonus Chapter]Artifacts Grading

The first set of competitions was for Artifact making, poison making, and dancing.

Alex watched from the seating area as the group of participants put in metals and different materials inside the giant cauldron and started melting them.

However, unlike last time, they didn't put all the ingredients in and instead just the bare minimum of them. Instead, once the cauldron had melted what they had put in, the participants took out the molten object and started beating them with giant hammers as they were cooling.

From time to time, they would put in other ingredients and hammer it away. Once the new object was cooled, they would put it back in the cauldron and melt it once more.

Then, they would take it out and start beating it with a hammer once more. As such, through a back and forth method, they used up all the materials they owned and made the perfect artifact they could.

Everyone started giving their resulting product to the host, and Alex realized it would take them some time to test out the effectiveness.

So, he diverted his attention to the poison-making.

Poison making was very simple to grade. All the host had to do was check the effectiveness of the poisons by mixing them with a predetermined solution and the winner would be easily determined.

Within a few minutes, the result was up. The winner was a disciple from a sect called the Heaven Poisoning sect, beating another participant from the Dark Forest sect by a small margin.

Royal Fu academy wasn't even in the top 5 this time around, which was surprising. Alex then looked towards the Dancing competition, however, that was over already.

It was the first one to have been completed and he had missed it. So, he went back to looking at the artifact competition.

The way to determine whether an artifact was good or not was a little different from grading a pill or formation or poison.

Pill grades were based on the harmony of said pill, poison on the effectiveness of the poison, and formation on the efficiency of the formation.

They all could have had different ranks, but that was what the grades were based on.

For artifacts, however, the things were rather arbitrary. An artifact didn't have a specific grading system and instead lied at the whims of its maker.

Still, they had to follow some sort of sense because the rest of the world had the ability to set its grade as well.

The creators mostly set the grade based on what the artifacts could do and how well they could do it.

For example, a simple sword made using the True rank recipe. No matter how well it could be made, would still only remain a normal sword.

As such, it had anything more than a mortal grade was hard to justify. Unless it could somehow suddenly cut through metals like paper, it would always have a mortal grade.

In comparison, a pill cauldron made using the finest of golden jade, one that could transfer heat very well could be an Earth-grade artifact without a problem. If it was very well made, it could also be a heaven-grade artifact.

As such, the grade was there to just show the value of the artifact based on its purpose.

The rankings for the artifacts currently were being checked as exactly that. The artifacts were being based on their usefulness.

A weapon would be graded based on how strong it was, an armor was based on how much damage it could stop, a necklace was based on what effects it had, a storage bag was based on how much storage it had, and so on.

Alex simply watched the host of the artifact competition do a bunch of testing with the different artifacts, and in the end come up with the rankings.

The third place was someone from the Royal Fu Academy, the second place was from the Southern Sanctuary sect, and the first place was from the Tranquil Union sect.

The next set of competitions were Formation and Music.

The formations were simple. Whoever could set up the highest efficiency formation would win. As for music, whoever could keep up the overall melody would win.

Alex watched the different disciples take part in the competitions. The formations required quite a lot of space so the competition holders only held a single other competition concurrently.

Alex watched Luo Mei's sister, Luo Xing take part in the formation competition and watched it as he wondered how she would do.

At the same time, he also saw Meng Yun taking part in the music competition.

While the formation competition participants started laying down the formation flags carefully, the music group started playing their instruments.

Meng Yun didn't have to rush through her piece like last time, so she played it very slowly. The green line on top of her head never dropped below 40%, while it went to over 50% quite a lot.

The other participants were playing their piece quite well as well. A lot of them were around Meng Yun's level, some even higher.

Alex switched his attention to Luo Xing and saw that she had finished preparing her flags. After that, she placed a few spirit stones around the area and suddenly closed her eyes to do something.

At once, the formation came to life and a purple barrier appeared around Luo Xing. The other disciples finished theirs as well, and the host decided the rankings.

Surprisingly, Luo Xing got second place in the formation competition.

On Meng Yun's side, they were finished as well. Everyone's information on the piece they performed was clearly floating on top of them.

Meng Yun was good, but she only managed to get 3rd place with an average melody of 46%. The second place got an average melody of 47%, and the winner got an average melody of 49%.

None of them managed to reach Heaven grade, but reaching what they did was already was amazing. After that, the group left the arena to make room for the next set of competitions.

Chapter 276: Beginning of the third Competition

It was time for the next set of competitions.

Alex leaned next to Ma Rong and asked, "Master, how well should I do in the next competition?"

Ma Rong made a weird face and said, "What do you mean how well? You should do your best."

"But that would mean using Spiritual sense. You told me not to," he whispered.

"Hmm... I did say that. But... you will be so far away from the audience, and there is no one in the competition staff that can use Spiritual sense, so you will be fine," Ma Rong said.

"How do you know that master?" he asked.

"You still don't understand how lucrative and rare spiritual sense really is. If any one of those people had spiritual sense, they wouldn't be working as a staff. So, just feel free to use it in the arena. As long as you keep it to a moderate amount, you should be fine," Ma Rong said.

Then, Alex, Wan Li, and the girl in the 9th ranking stood up and walked to the gate below.

"You guys have your ingredients ready?" Ma Rong asked.

"""Yes""" they all replied.

"Good. What pills are you making?" she asked.

"I am thinking of making the Face Changing Pill. I am used to making those and I think I will be good at it," the girl said.

"I have had the most success with a Hundred Poison Antidote, so I think I will make that pill, Sect leader," Wan Li said.

"As for me, I will make a Bronze Tiger Rage. That is the one I had the most success with yet," Alex said as he named a pill with Metal energy as the resulting energy.

"Very well. Since you guys are confident, I won't say anything else. Good Luck," she said. They reached the place with the barrier and one by one, the participants started to leave for the competition.

Alex walked in as well and felt the barrier touch into his Qi and tried to check him. After knowing that he was a participant, it let him be.

Along with Wan Li and the girl, Alex reached the location of the competition. The arena was quite big, even bigger than the one from yesterday.

'Are there more disciples taking part today?' Alex wondered and looked around. Surprisingly, there were a lot of familiar faces.

There was Han Long and his two fellow sect disciples that Alex had seen during the last 2 competitions. There were a few other disciples that were either with him during the last ingredient finding test, or one that he saw in yesterday's Fastest pill-making competition.

Aside from them, there was also the 4th place winner of yesterday's competition, the guy from the Royal Fu sect.

And finally, with an air of Elegance, sitting in front of one of the fire pits was perhaps the best alchemist amongst the competitors here today. He was Huang Fu, the Royal Alchemist's disciple.

Alex hadn't seen him properly the first time as he had only heard the person's name and caught a glimpse of him while he was leaving the arena.

Today, he got to see him very well. Huang Fu was a moderately tall man that seemed to be not even 20 years old. He had a slim face with a pointed nose and sharp eyes.

Huang Fu seemed to notice Alex's eyes and turned towards him before giving a small nod in greeting. Alex reciprocated with a nod as well.

Everyone else was randomly seated around the place. No two sect disciples were allowed to sit with each other.

A new female host walked up this time and stood on top of a small podium and started talking.

"Welcome everyone, to the Best Pill-making competition. I hope you guys are doing well and are well prepared. You guys probably went through this already but please take these storage bags and keep your required ingredients in there. Everything else, please put it in the box," the female host said.

A group of staff members walked forward handing everyone a box and storage bag. Alex took them both and stored everything aside from the required ingredients into the box.

He locked the box with his Qi and handed it to the staff. He looked at the ingredients in the storage bag. He had kept two sets of ingredients just in case.

'Ah, hopefully, the double pills won't happen this time,' he hoped. Even if the pill splitting Qi did appear, he was sure that he could reach at least 42% harmony level.

However, that wasn't enough to win the competition. The best of the best were gathered here. Even if they couldn't reach Heaven grade, which he wasn't sure about, they would definitely make better pills than 42% harmony.

So, he was prepared just a bit. Now, all he could do was wish he didn't need to.

The host saw that the storage bag situation was taken care of, so she started to speak again.

"As every one of you knows, this is the competition where you rank based on the best pill you can make. So you will be given an hour exactly to make the pill."

"The competition will rank you based on the best pill you make, so you are allowed to make multiple ones. In fact, we urge you to make multiple pills," the host said.

All the participants seem to have expected that and were ready with the extra ingredients just like Alex.

"There are also rules that you will have to follow. If you are unable to follow them, you will be disqualified."

"If you don't have a pill by the end of the hour, you will be disqualified. If your cauldron explodes, you will be disqualified. If you disrupt others intentionally, you will be disqualified."

"If you are found guilty of having cheated during any of the parts in the competition, you are disqualified. Those are the rules, everything else, you are free to do what you like. Good luck."

Chapter 277: First batch of Pills

The host got off the podium and waited for everyone to prepare. Alex and the other few participants all brought out their cauldron at the same time and placed it on top of the fire.

As they waited for the cauldron to heat up, the host started the competition. A massive timer floating in a blue panel in the sky started counting down.

No one rushed, however. This was a competition that selected winners based on the best. So, everyone would be the most patient self of themselves they could ever be.

Alex took in long, deep breaths while waiting for the competition to start. He had a lot better sense than before and he looked at the timer in the sky to see if his timing was accurate.

After getting the capsule and gaining the permanent Focus Mode, he had managed to control everything, including the slowed downtime.

However, unlike the other senses, Time was never something that bombarded him with the information. So, it was impossible to say if he was back to normal or if it was just a little off still.

So, he decided to check it before he started making the pills as time was a really important factor in making pills.

For the first 10 or so minutes, everyone waited for their cauldron to fully heat up normally. After that, they started to put in ingredients one by one.

Wan Li put in his, so did Han Long and so did Huang Fu. Alex was among the last of the people to finally start making the pills.

Alex's ingredients had a total of 13 components to them and he needed to make sure every single one of them was in the perfect condition it could be.

So, he took the first ingredient and placed it inside the cauldron. However, unlike everyone else, he immediately closed the cauldron.

The staff members and the host were a little surprised at a participant doing something so bizarre but said nothing.

Alex followed the recipe and waited for the first ingredient to turn into powder. Once it was powder and the energy had escaped into the cauldron, he quickly took off the lid and put in the 2nd ingredient.

He wasn't faster than the other participants, nor was he slower. He was about the same speed as everyone else, and that was a little comforting for him.

He had always wondered if he was slower than the other people at making pills, and it seemed he was not.

Once the sect ingredient's energy mixed with the first one and created a new energy, he put in the third ingredient.

Seeing him close the lid once again, the staff members got a little confused once again.

"Senior, do you think he is cheating?" one of the staff members asked.

"I don't think so. There doesn't seem to be a reason as to why he is doing that. Maybe it's a technique?" the host said.

The other staff member got quiet after that as there didn't seem to be a problem anymore. So, they just waited for the different participants to finish.

Few more minutes passed and the participants got to the end of their pill-making process. The staff hurried up and placed a load of pill testers in front of the group.

Alex was on the last leg of the pill-making as well. He put in the final ingredient and the energy of the final ingredient escapes from the burning ingredient and mixed with the already dense ingredient inside the cauldron.

Once those two energies reacted with each other, the final resulting energy of the pill became metal energy, just what Alex wanted.

Alex then proceeded to move the powder around a little more before it was time to form the pills. He used Elemental Guidance to move the energy around and force it towards the power to make it stick in there.

However, even though it was Metal energy, he couldn't control the energy perfectly, and more than half of the energy escaped back into the open air in the cauldron.

However, that alone was very good. Alex then started to form the powder into a pill.

However, just then the thing he didn't want the most to happen, happened. Suddenly, a stream of Qi moved around his whole body and escaped out of his palms before moving into the cauldron.

He wanted to curse right now, but disturbing the other disciples would get him disqualified, so he simply endured it.

However, on the inside, he had pretty much given up on the pill becoming any good now. Still, he wasn't going to not perform his best now.

The stream of Qi slowly go into his forming pill and separated it into two. After that, the two vortexes he was waiting for appeared and started sucking in the energy from the environment.

Slowly the two pills started forming.

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eyes, he saw two people simultaneously get up and walk to the lined-up pill testers at the front.

Alex was a little surprised and he kept his eyes on them while his two pills were forming. The two contestants put their pills into the pill testers.

He watched the two pill testers slowly grow fog outside of it that reached above 30% in harmony. Soon, one of the pill testers stopped at 34%, while the other one stopped at 38%.

The one with the 34% got a little sad, while the other guy was happy. However, they were both going to try it once again, so they returned back to their place and started preparing.

Soon, more and more people started standing up from their seats to test their pills. Some were good, some were bad. However, both the sad and happy people went back to their places to make the pills once more.

Alex looked away from the people and looked down on his own pills. His two pills were finally prepared. So, he took off the lid and put his hands in to take out the pills.

Chapter 278: Next Batch

"Woah, the participants are quite good this time around, aren't they?" one of the staff members said.

"Yeah, look at that fellow, his pills just showed 42% harmony. Wow, is that the highest yet?" the other staff members asked.

"No, the highest one belongs to that one guy in green. His pill had a 43% harmony," another one of the staff said.

"Let's wait for our Huang to do his best. He will probably win this competition," they said.

"Oh look, here he comes."

Huang Fu stood up from his spot and walked up. Alex too stood up, only 1 step behind. His pills hadn't shown the harmony level he had desired, so he had taken the best of the two and left the other one inside. He would take care of it later.

Huang Fu walked up and put his pill inside the tester. By the time Alex reached his, the pill tester slowly fogged up and started going up.

Alex put his pill inside the tester too to show his harmony level. He, just as everyone around right now, looked at Huang Fu's pill tester rise up.

Soon it crossed 30% and kept ongoing. Alex's own pill tester was above 20%, but he didn't care about it as he already knew the result.

Huang Fu's harmony level kept on increasing and increasing until it stopped right before it reached Heaven grade. His pill's harmony was 49%.

Sounds of gasps appeared from everywhere as people realized how great his pill was. Alex turned around and looked at his own 43% pill and shook his head.

'If the pill splitting Qi appears once more, I'm as good as having lost the competition,' he thought. He took his pill and went back to his area.

The other pill inside the cauldron was at 42% harmony. So in total, he had lost about 15% of the energy either due to the ingredients being bad, him making a mistake, or the energy just escaping from the cauldron.

He couldn't do anything else, so he simply just crushed the extra pill inside the cauldron and removed all the powders outside.

And then, he was ready for another batch of ingredients. He looked at the time and realized that he still had a little over half an hour to make his pill.

So, he could take his time. He looked around and saw that a few of the participants had beads of sweat on their faces.

'Huh? I remember master saying that normal people can't make pills for too long, but is it really this bad? They are only done with a single pill though,' Alex thought.

He looked around and saw that it was only a few of the participants. The good ones weren't really tired and could probably go on for a few more rounds.

However, unlike Alex, they couldn't last for a whole day of pill-making. 'That's because of how robust my qi is right?' he thought.

Finally, he stopped distracting himself and put in the first ingredient once again. He slowly moved it around the cauldron. He wasn't in a hurry, so he followed the recipe as well as he could.

Once the ingredient was down to powder and all the energy had escaped from it, Alex put in the second ingredient.

The lid was still on the cauldron, but by now the staff members had pretty much ignored it. They were still talking in low voice about how the Royal Alchemist's direct disciple had nearly made a heaven rank pill.

Alex continued making his pill but was definitely taking his time. He looked up at the clock from time to time and by the time he put in the 5th ingredient, only 15 minutes were remaining.

He continued making the pill and put in ingredients every minute or so as per the recipe's instruction. After 10 or so minutes, he finally finished putting in all the ingredients.

The metal energy was now fully covering the inside of the cauldron. Just at this time, a contestant stood up and went to get her pills tested.

Alex continued his task while keeping an eye on the contestant's harmony. Unfortunately, the contestant got 41%. She had lost.

A few more contestants started standing, while Alex decided to focus back on his pill-making. He used Elemental guidance to force the energy to flow into the powder to make the energy in it more concentrated. He needed as high a harmony level as possible.

Thanks to the resulting energy being Metal in nature, controlling it wasn't as hard as with the other energies.

Finally, it was time to form the pill. He slowly got the powder together and started forming the pill. He kept on using Elemental guidance to help the energy go into the powder, but it didn't do as well as he could have hoped for it.

Suddenly, he heard gasps throughout the surrounding, most of it coming from the staff members. He wondered if Huang Fu did something good again, but he wasn't there this time.

Instead, he saw a familiar green-robed figure standing in front of the pill tester. Alex saw that Han Long was there too with his dropped jaw.

Alex noticed that he had a 47% harmony pill, yet he was flabbergasted by Wan Li's performance.

Alex turned his attention back to Wan Li and saw that the fog in the pill tester had reached unusually high. He slowly looked at the number and was surprised himself too at how great the harmony was.

The pill he made had 49% harmony. That was the same as the harmony level of Huang Fu.

Most of the contestants stood up and went to check their pill's harmony level, and only 2 were remaining. One was Alex and the other was Huang Fu.

With 1 minute left on the clock, Huang Fu stood up from his seat and took the pill out of the cauldron before walking upfront to the pill tester.

It was time for him to check.

Chapter 279: Huang Fu's Pill Harmony

Alex finally finished making the pill.

Fortunately, He didn't involuntarily release the Pill Splitting Qi and managed to make a single pill. With 30 seconds left on the clock, he took the finally prepared pill out of the cauldron and walked to the front.

He stood up and walked behind Huang Fu to register his new pill.

Many other participants were just done checking their pills yet none of them had done better than Huang Fu or Wan Li with their 49%. That was still the best harmony in this competition.

However, Huang Fu had another pill, and people were expecting more from him the second time around.

The various participants silently waited for him to put in his pill. Huang Fu didn't care about the onlookers and walked up to the pill testers before putting in his pill.

As soon as the pill touched the base of the pill tester, fog started rising up the side of the tester. It slowly rose and crossed 10%, however, it wasn't stopping right now.

It showed no signs of slowing down even as it reached 20%. Alex came over to watch just at that time and watched the pill tester work instead of putting in his own.

The fog slowly rose past 25% and reached 30%. However, there was still some distance for the fog to move up. 31, 32, 33%. The speed of the fog slowed down a little, but not a lot.

It was still going up at an acceptable rate. Soon it crossed 40%, and people got more attentive. They doubted that the pill would stop in the early 40s, but you never knew.

41, 42… 45%. The fog still rose and was now reaching the high ranking harmony level. Up until now, the third place was held by Han Long, who had made a pill with 48% harmony.

While the second and first place was shared by Wan Li and Huang Fu with 49%. However, that would soon change.

46%, 47%, 48%… 49%. The pill's harmony level reached the same level as the one with the highest rank right now.

However, there was something else about the number 49%. This was the highest harmony one's pill could have while it was in the Earth grade. A single percentage higher, and the pill would be in Heaven grade.

50%

Everyone gasped when they saw Huang Fu's pill cross the threshold and jump into the Heaven grade category. Han Long sighed when he saw that. He was already sad about making a pill that was 1% away from the winning rank, but now it was 2% away.

Wan Li felt sad too. He was the winner of the competition along with Huang Fu, but now, he jumped one step ahead, leaving him behind in 2nd place.

However, Huang Fu's pill wasn't done yet. Just as everyone was surprised about seeing the pill in the Heaven grade, the pill tester had the fog rise a single percentage more.

51%

The different viewers whether they be the other participants, staff or the audience realized, the pill wasn't done yet. There was more harmony that the pill had to show still.

52%

This brought out more reactions from the crowd. Huang Fu had 3% higher harmony than the person in the 2nd rank. While the number seemed small, it was a very hard number to achieve.

However, that wasn't the end.

53%

Finally, the fog stopped moving and stayed still. The final harmony of Huang Fu's pill was 53%. He was a clear-cut winner of the competition now.

Huang Fu smiled after seeing the result and went ahead to grab his pill. At the same time, Alex moved forward as well, but he was going to put in his pill.

He put in the Bronze Tiger's Rage and watched the fog slowly build up around the pill tester. His first pill was 43% in harmony level due to it being one of the double pills, so, most people had ended up ignoring him.

The only person who was watching Alex's pill tester were the staffs who were obligated to do so, Wan Li who wanted to see how his fellow disciple was doing, the girl from his sect and Alex himself.

Everyone else already believed that the winner of the competition was revealed and had gone to congratulate Huang Fu.

Slowly the fog build-up reached 10% and climbed up at a high speed. In front of the onlookers' eyes, it climbed up to 20%.

In the audience, all the Hong Wu sect members and some of the Tiger sect members were looking at Alex's pill tester's numbers go up.

Ma Rong especially, who knew just how good Alex was, was looking at his pills with great attention. The others had praised her for raising a good disciple when he showed a pill with 43% harmony when he hadn't been in the sect for long, however, he had been disappointed.

Now that it was his second pill, she expected greater results.

The pill tester soon reached 30% mark but showed no sign of slowing down. It caught the attention of a few more people, but wasn't enough to cause a commotion yet.

32%, 34%, 36%.

Alex watched as the harmony level soon reached 40% right in front of everyone. However, it still wasn't showing any sign of slowing down.

41%, 42%, 43%.

The harmony level gradually got higher and crossed his previous pill's 43% to reach 44%. The people from his sect commended him for doing better than last time, however, Ma Rong expected more and wanted more.

So, as she watched, the harmony level reached 45%.

It started to catch the attention of more people as it went up one more level and reached 46%. People were now starting to curiously watch his pill.

47%

The fog around the pill tester went up once more and people started looking with wide eyes. Han Long's eyes were especially wide as he wished for the pill tester to stop raising.

But things rarely happened as one wanted. And so, the Harmony level increased one more step and reached 48%.

Chapter 280: Alex's Pill Harmony

Han Long felt a load of shock when he saw that the person he wasn't expecting suddenly reached the same harmony level as him.

He looked at Alex, who also looked back at him and smiled.

It was then Han Long realized something was wrong.

49%

The fog increased by one more level. Gasps of shock sounded from around the place. Wan Li looked at Alex with shock in his eyes, let alone Han Long who had just been beaten. The amount of shock he was feeling right now was unreal.

Even Huang Fu seemed to be interested right now and looked at the pill tester which was the center of attention amongst everyone on stage and a lot of audience in the coliseum.

"Woah, Mingming just got 2nd place? Was he always that good sect leader?" Fan Ruogang asked. The rest of the disciples were also in shock, dumbfounded at the harmony his pill had reached.

Recognizing ingredients was one thing, but making a good pill required a different set of skills.

However, Ma Rong didn't recognize this current result and simply said, "Just watch."

50%

Another Heaven Grade pill appeared on the stage. Han Long, Wan Li, Huang Fu, the staff, the host, and the audience, all of them were shocked.

"A-Another Heaven-grade pill?" someone said in shock.

"T-That's the second place holder now," another person said.

"This participant didn't have such a result on the first pill right?" One of the staff asked.

"Nope, he only had a 43% harmony pill," another staff member said.

"Am I… really out of the third-place?" Han Long muttered to himself.

However, that wasn't the end.

51%

The pill tester hadn't stopped and the fog was still rising. Now, even Huang Fu started getting anxious. His pill was just 2% lower than Alex's. While that was a massive hurdle to pass, it didn't seem like Alex's pill tester was going to stop right now.

Unfortunately for Huang Fu, however, he was right.

52%

Now Alex's pill was 1 step away from having the same amount of harmony as Huang Fu's. He was starting to sweat. He walked a little closer to check the pill tester more clearly and in doing so he caught Alex's eyes who had just looked to the side.

From his perspective, Alex had no sort of tension in his eyes, almost like he didn't care what harmony his pills would get.

No. He realized that wasn't the case. It wasn't that he didn't care what the harmony his pill was going to be, it was more like He knew what it was going to be.

A strange premonition sprung up inside Huang Fu's mind and at the same time, it happened.

53%

The harmony level in the pill tester increased once more. Now, Alex was the first place holder of the competition along with Huang Fu. There were going to be two winners.

"Wow, a random disciple nearly beat the Royal Alchemist's direct disciple?" a staff member said in shock.

"What sect is he from? Can you guys check?" the host said.

"He seems to be from the Hong Wu sect. Ah, no wonder. They are well known for being great in alchemy," one of the staff members said.

"What happens to the rewards? Do we give out 100 points to both of them?" another staff member asked.

"If both of them get the same harmony then they both get the same points," the host said.

"Oh. But what do you mean… if?"

54%

Everyone talking suddenly stopped doing so. A pin-drop silence spread throughout the stage as the people's jaws dropped in shock.

A new champion was here.

Huang Fu was genuinely surprised that he lost to a participant that wasn't even that well known. He didn't want to believe that he had lost.

But he couldn't deny it at all after seeing the fog reach 55% in the pill tester.

"Huh? 55?" he looked in shock.

Everyone else did the same and was then dumbfounded. The harmony level of the pill had grown by another point.

"Wait, it is up to 55% now. That's like a professional Alchemist right there," someone said.

"Forget about that. How many Heaven Grade alchemists have you seen that are still a disciple?" another person asked.

"He would have to make a few more Heaven grade pills to be considered one, but if he can make 55% pills consistently, it wouldn't be wrong to consider him one," someone else answered.

"Umm… why are we talking about 55% as if that is the final harmony?" a timid voice among the bunch asked, prompting everyone to stop and look back at the pill tester.

Within 3 seconds of them watching, the harmony increased once more.

56%

Gasps rang out this time around, but nobody said anything. The staffs were already shocked beyond belief. The participants were equally shocked at someone making such a high-grade pill.

Han Long had long since accepted his fate. Wan Li was surprised at how talented Alex was, and Huang Fu could do nothing but look at the pill tester in shock.

56% was a lot of things. But what it was not, was the end.

57%

The harmony increased once more. The audience thought that they were jaded to it by now, but that wasn't true. They were still shocked. Whispers ran about the coliseum but none of it reached the stage.

Everyone expected it to stop now, but the pill tester seemed to have its own mind.

58%.

This was an unprecedented event for everyone in this competition. This was something that had never happened before and was likely never going to happen again.

While everyone was in shock, Alex was smiling, for he knew, this was not the end either.

59%

Alex's pill had now beat Huang Fu's pill by 6% of harmony difference. While everyone thought Huang Fu's pill beating Wan Li's pill by 4% was already amazing, having a 6% higher than his was something they couldn't comprehend.

Everyone turned to look at Alex and see the face of the winner. But Alex wasn't happy or excited. He was simply smiling looking at the pill tester in front of him.

At the same instant, the harmony level increased by 1 more.

60%.

Chapter 281: Up-Grade

60%, that was the harmony level of the pill that was the center of attention right now.

The pill tester had finally stopped working and the final result was 60%. Alex walked up front and picked up his pill before putting it into his storage bag.

He didn't have a bottle right now and had to resort to keeping pills in the storage bag.

Although externally, he didn't act like what had just happened was a big deal, that was only because he was already done celebrating internally when he had found out the pill's harmony level before he had even brought it.

He waited for the staff and host to get on with announcing the results, but no one was saying anything.

He looked around and realized that everyone was still looking at him. Alex felt a little anxious with so many eyes on him and turned to the host.

"Umm... what about the result?" he asked.

"Ah, yes. Sorry about that. Everyone, please get your stuff, we will prepare the results right now," the host said and went to consult with the staff members.

"What's your name?" Huang Fu walked up to him and asked.

"Yu Ming," Alex said while looking straight at Huang Fu's eyes.

"Yu Ming..." Huang Fu murmured, "I will remember it. Congratulations."

"Haha, you too," Alex said.

"Brother Yu, that was amazing. Since when can you make such amazing pills," Wan Li asked.

"Ah, I got a little lucky with this one. It was only because I made the Bronze Tiger's Rage that I was able to get such a result. Had I tried any other pills, I doubt I could've gotten the same results," Alex said.

"I see, still, that was amazing. Although...." Wan Li trailed off as he thought of something and asked, "Are you an elder now?"

"Ah!" Alex had forgotten about the Elder rule where if one made a Heaven grade pill, they would be upgraded to an elder.

"I shouldn't right?" Alex said. "After all, I am not registering this pill."

"That makes sense," Wan Li said.

"Everyone, gather around. The results are set," the host said.

"Congratulations to everyone who managed to make the pills. I have good news for you lot and your sects. Thanks to so many people getting such close results, a lot of you will get the same ranking, and thus a high point from this competition in general."

"As for the winners, we already? know who the Top 3 are, but let me still announce them so everyone in the audience who didn't catch the incredible event can learn it as well."

"In the third place is Wan Li from Hong Wu sect who made a Hundred Poison Antidote with an incredible harmony of 49%."

"In the second place is Huang Fu from Royal Fu Academy, who made an Ulterior Bones pill with an incredible harmony of 53%."

"And now, in the first place, the star of this competition, and perhaps the entirety of Alchemy competitions for this year's competition in whole, is Yu Ming from Hong Wu sect, who managed to make a Bronze Tiger's Rage with a beyond amazing harmony of 60%," the host said.

Everyone started applauding and the rest of the results showed up on the ranking board behind the group. The girl from the Hong Wu sect managed to get 41% of harmony in her pill, making her 7th in the ranking.

There were more than 9 people in the same ranking as her, but that didn't deduct from the fact that her 41% harmony pill was considered to have ranked in the 7th place.

The young men and women took their items and returned back out of the arena, and went straight to the seating area.

As soon as the sect members saw the 3 of them come back, everyone started congratulating them.

"As expected of the set leader's disciple, that was great"

"You can make Heaven-grade pills?"

"Wan Li you did great too."

Heaps of praises rained down from both the elders and fellow disciples. Alex nodded towards everyone thanking them for their congratulations.

Fan Ruogang and Zhou Mei congratulated the 3 too.

"Good job you kids. That was amazing. That was much better than I could've expected of you guys. I doubt Fanfan or my Meimei could've done that good," the second elder said.

"True, true," the third elder said.

"You guys come take some rest. You deserve it," Ma Rong said.

Everyone went back to their seats and looked at the next competitions starting soon.

"Is that the best pill you've made till now?" Ma Rong asked Alex slowly.

"Yes. If I remember correctly, the last one that I made was 59% in harmony. So this beats it by a little," Alex said.

"Good. You've improved a lot. Thankfully, the metal energy pills are great for you. We will go see why those are the only ones that work in the library today," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded. He was looking forward to going to the library since he had a lot of things to read up on. Things that pertained to both himself and the things he had.

Alex thought about something and asked his master, "Master, are we in the 1st grade now?" he didn't lower his voice so everyone heard it loud and clear.

Suddenly, everyone started counting. The girl got 14 points, Wan Li got 33 points and Alex got 100 points. Altogether, they needed 146 points to advance onto the next grade and they managed to get... 147.

"We... we got 524 points in total. We-We did it right?" the second elder said.

"We got more than that. The others got a few points here and there too. Woohoo, we finally did it," Fan Ruogang said.

Suddenly, everyone celebrated. Even Ma Rong smiled when she realized that she had succeeded in what she came to accomplish.

"Master!" Alex called, jolting her out of her happiness.

"What is it?" she asked.

"You see... since we succeeded in becoming a 1st-grade sect... can I not take part in tomorrow's competition?"

Chapter 282: Request Fulfilled

Ma Rong was a little surprised at the sudden request.

"But tomorrow is the last day of alchemy competitions. If you don't take part tomorrow, you won't get to take part at all," Ma Rong said.

"That's the thing master. There are other competitions on Friday too right? Aside from the battle ones of course," Alex asked.

"Hmm... yes there is but... you can't be thinking of taking part in those right? First of all, we don't even know what competitions there will be, and second of all, your cultivation base is still quite low. You are still only at the 5th realm of the Organ Tempering realm. That is not enough to be able to do anything," Ma Rong said.

"How about I just wait for a suitable competition. If there is one on Friday, I will take part in it, if not, I won't," Alex said.

Ma Rong was about to refuse when suddenly someone else spoke.

"Sect leader, can I not join in tomorrow's competition as well?" surprisingly, the person who spoke just now was Wan Li.

The other sect members had been listening to the Master-Disciple talk and hadn't said anything, so they were quite surprised when they saw Wan Li speak up.

"Why do you not want to take part in tomorrow's competition? Don't you want to earn points for the sect?" Ma Rong asked.

"I do, but you know me, Sect leader. I am very bad at learning anything quickly, so I will need a lot of practice tomorrow if I want to get a decent rank. I doubt that will be possible with how quick they will want us to be. Besides, while Brother Yu might not have the cultivation for fighting, I do. I can take part in the fighting competitions, right?" Wan Li said.

Ma Rong fell into contemplation. Wan Li was correct. His cultivation base was quite high. Even she was surprised when she saw his cultivation base last time during registration.

"Please master. I want to take part in a competition other than alchemy. I feel like it is a waste if I spend half my time in the tiger sect and still don't take part in a non-production competition," Alex said.

"Sigh, okay okay. You kids win. I will let you take part in those competitions. But only if it is suitable for you," Ma Rong said as she gave up on refusing any further.

She didn't want to deny the disciples what they wanted just for the sake of the sect.

"Sigh, what about you two girls? You have any such aspirations too?" Ma Rong asked Fan Ruogang and Zhou Mei.

"Haha, No way sect leader. I'm too weak to want to do anything. I'm fine with tomorrow's competition," Fan Ruogang said in her usual cheery self.

"I am looking forward to tomorrow's competition actually. I feel like I haven't done very well in this competition," Zhou Mei said.

"What? You've done pretty well MeiMei. Don't be down on yourself. Hehe, maybe with WanWan and Mingming not taking part in tomorrow's competition, you will be the best? Oh, of course, that's if that Huang Fu guy doesn't join. Tsk, Now I feel anxious thinking about tomorrow," Fan Ruogang said.

Everyone simply smiled seeing her talk so much.

"Alright. We will talk about this more during tonight's meeting. For now, just enjoy the competition," Ma Rong said. So everyone focused back on the competition.

The contestants in front of them were having a Talisman competition. According to the rules of the competition, it was to check who could make the best talisman.

Everyone was given an hour to make the best talisman they could, and the competition was coming to a close. They had to create their own ink before making the runes for the talisman so it took them quite a lot of time to make the talisman.

So, compared to alchemy, they didn't have enough time to create multiple ones and had to stick with a single one.

One tested the talisman was not by its effects or usage, but by the stability of the runes and the accuracy of the ink. Any slight inconsistencies in the ink mixture or irregularity in the talisman runes affected the output of the talisman.

Have the problems be big and you end up with a talisman that is not usable as all.

There were formations to check the inks and runes, just like pill testers. So, one by one, the contestants put their talismans face down on the talisman tester that was just a flat metal surface with a rectangular indent on it.

The talisman tester checked both the ink and the runes, and the balance between them. The higher the balance, the better the talisman.

Slowly, the results started coming in one by one. It didn't take long to realize who the winners were for the talisman competition.

As expected from the sects focused on talismans, like the Grand Void sect and the Little Dawn sect, they took first and second place respectively.

As for the third place, those were taken by none other than the Royal Fu Academy. No matter what the competition was, they were always there to take part in and most of the time ended up in the top 3.

Finally, there were no more competitions for the day, so Ma Rong stood up.

"Let's leave," she said and started walking. All the sect members followed her as well. Along the way, they saw the Spring Song sect standing up to leave as well.

Ma Rong didn't make any snarky remarks at all. However, she did simply just smile at them as she left. The fatty started fuming in the ears, but couldn't do anything since he had undoubtedly lost today's competition.

Ma Rong felt a sort of relief at what had just happened. The shame from losing last year was finally cleared in her mind.

Once again, everyone was allowed to do whatever they wanted, while the rest of them returned back to the hotel to rest.

Chapter 283: Good Reviews

As soon as the group returned back to their hotel, Alex went directly to his room.

"Yu Ming, we leave for the library in an hour. You lot as well. Come meet me in an hour if you want to visit the library," Ma Rong said just before everyone went back to their room.

Everyone kept that in mind and went to their room.

"Oh wow. I wonder how many alchemy books there will be in the library. I can't wait to go there at all," Wan Li said as he followed Alex behind to the room.

"Should be a lot," Alex said and went back to his bed.

"Brother Yu, why do you always sleep for small periods of time. Is something wrong with your body?" Wan Li asked as he cocked his head. He had been curious about that for quite a while but had kept to himself.

"Oh, I… ah… I am just taking a power nap. I feel refreshed after napping for half an hour or so every day," Alex said.

"Oh, I see. Maybe I should do that as well," Wan Li said.

"Umm… you probably don't have to. Just spend your time how you are doing right now," Alex said and sneakily acted like he was sleeping before logging out.

He opened his eyes inside the capsule and pushed it open. As he walked out, he felt like he was really dull somehow. As if he had lost all senses and feelings.

"Damn, spending too much time in the game through the capsule seems like a bad idea. I hope it won't harm me physically," Alex thought.

He was still feeling no hunger at all and that was a little concerning as well. 'Should I switch to the helmet from time to time?' he wondered.

Surprisingly, even after so long, he didn't need to go to the bathroom as well. 'They are really messing with my body,' Alex thought and started to get scared.

He grabbed his phone and walked out. He went to the kitchen to get some food, despite not being hungry at all. He needed to force down a bit of food.

So he served himself some and went onto the forums to check about the capsule.

Surprisingly, there was nothing but praise regarding the capsule. There were obviously people concerned about their physical health, but surprisingly there were no posts about the grave consequences of long-term capsule usage.

Alex clicked on a post and read about some doctors and scientists doing experiments on people who used capsules. Aside from the slight disorientation due to the change in senses they felt when coming out of the capsule, there was nothing else wrong with the person.

Their physical strength was the same, motor coordination was the same and even their metabolism rate was the same once the player left the capsule.

Unlike the helmet, which had apparently failed to keep that during the early phases of the game's release, the capsule was miles better.

So both doctors and scientists were urging the player to keep on using the capsule as much as possible as opposed to the helmet.

'Huh, so it's okay?' Alex wondered.

He decided to check other sites and sources as well. But no matter where he looked at, they sang nothing but praises regarding the capsule.

As long as the player was being a responsible human being and didn't play unnecessarily long, they would be fine. Finally feeling some sort of relief, Alex quickly finished his food and went to his room.

He climbed into the capsule without fear and covered the lid. He slowly let his consciousness wander and before he knew it, he was inside the game once again.

He slowly got up from the bed and took a long, deep breath to bring his suddenly flared-up senses under control. Once he was done, he looked around and saw Wan Li writing something.

"What are you writing, brother Wan?" Alex asked.

"Oh, you are up, brother Yu. It's nothing much, just what I realized from the competition today. I had a few enlightenment during the competitions and I was writing them down before I forgot them"

"I believe that if I use this new knowledge of mine properly… I can reach the Heaven grade with my pills too," Wan Li said.

Alex looked at Wan Li very attentively. Despite being the number one disciple of the sect, he seemed to be the most hard-working of them all.

Or maybe that was the wrong way to look at it. He was most likely the number one disciple BECAUSE he was hard working.

However, despite being so hardworking, he still had to struggle through his learning process because his brain couldn't pick up on things instinctively and he had to write everything down.

That surely slowed down his progress a lot. However, Alex wondered, if he perhaps didn't have to bother with writing each time, and could easily remember everything… how great of an alchemist would he be?

Alex's mind went to the 3 Spirit Cleansing lilies he still had on him. Unfortunately, the lilies seemed to be useless by themselves to him. And unless he could find a pill recipe that included the Spirit Cleansing lilies as an ingredient, it was probably going to remain useless for a long time.

However, if he could just give the flower to Wan Li… that would help him a lot and secure his sect's future as well.

'Should I even do that?' Alex wondered. 'What if he isn't as good as he shows himself to be on the outside. I can never judge a person by how they look or act. Anyone is capable of sudden changes. I… I can't trust a person just based on what I feel of them,' he thought.

He had been traumatized by the events in the forbidden fields and didn't want to repeat the same mistake again. For now, the only people he could truly trust were his two masters and his senior brother and sister.

Everyone else, he would have to judge on a case-by-case basis, and he wasn't sure his judgment was refined enough to do that.

Chapter 284: Cardinal Library

Alex walked out of the room a little early and went to talk with Ma Rong.

"Master, are you there?" he asked as he knocked on the door. He didn't dare use his spiritual sense to check inside as that would be intrusive to his master's personal space and a stupid move in general.

"Come in," she said and called him in.

Alex walked in through the automatically unlocked door and saw Ma Rong cultivating on top of her bed.

"What's wrong? You need something?" she asked.

"It's... I'm actually here to talk about Wan Li," he said.

"Wan Li? What about him?" Ma Rong asked with a weird face.

"Wan Li looks like he is really hardworking and genuinely interested in alchemy. But he seems to be held back by his bad memory. I was wondering if I should give him a Spirit cleansing lily or not," Alex said.

"You have more? I thought you used up all?" Ma Rong asked with surprise.

"I was planning to use them up, but for some reason, I can no longer use them. I was going to check about that in today's visit to the library though," Alex said.

"Hmm... Wan Li is a good boy. He will definitely benefit from the lily if he got one," Ma Rong said. "However, those lilies are something you got. You don't need to hand them over to people just because you feel sorry for them. Keep them to yourself. Just because it's not working right now doesn't mean it won't work forever."

"Maybe you just need to break through to make it work again," Ma Rong said.

Alex got to thinking. "I hadn't thought of that. Of course, maybe I need to be in a higher realm and then it will work," he said.

"Okay, I shall do that master," he said.

"Alright. Are you ready to leave? People should be gathering by now," Ma Rong said.

"Hm..." Alex checked the time and saw that an hour had passed. It was time to leave for the library. He and Ma Rong walked out of the room and saw a few disciples were waiting outside the door.

Wan Li had also come out at some point and was waiting with Fan Ruogang and Zhou Mei.

Ma Rong decided to wait for a few more minutes and started walking down the stairs. Soon, the entire group was out of the hotel.

Alex took out the map he had bought the other day and gave it to his master, but she already seemed to be in the know about the location of the library.

"Haha, disciple Yu, you seem to forget that we come here every year. We are more or less familiar with the layout of the entire capital," the second elder said.

Alex felt a little bashful but didn't let it show on his face.

The Library was located right on the South East side of the capital, about 500 meters away from the Royal Palace. Since it was exactly opposite to where they were in the capital, they had a walk a long while before they finally reached the Library.

"Woah," the disciples said when they finally saw the library. Fan Ruogang and Zhou Mei had come before so they didn't show any intense reactions, but others, including Wan Li were very surprised by the sheer scale of the building in front of them.

The library was a 20 story tall building with about 600 square meters of area. The building itself was painted in reddish-brown and had a design aspect that felt both modern and traditional at the same time.

It looked like it was a pagoda-like building, but it didn't have the traditional slopes of the pagoda on each floor.

"The library itself is free and maintained by the Royal Fu Academy on the behest of the Royal Family. You can read whatever you want as long as you follow those rules written on that wall," Ma Rong said as she pointed to a bunch of texts written along the side of the wall.

The disciple walked forward to better see the rules amongst the crowd that was already gathered in front of it to read it.

Alex walked in close as well and started reading it along with the others.

-Welcome to the Cardinal Library-

-Please feel free to read any book, on any floor as it is public knowledge-

- Please be mindful of the other readers and be as silent as you can most of the time.-

-Please do not fight with the other readers on books you might want to read. We suggest you take a first come first serve approach. However, we have multiple books so that shouldn't be a problem.-

-Please do not destroy any books-

-Please do not steal any books-

-Failure to comply with any of these rules will be an indefinite ban from the library, and in worse cases, a punishment from the local law enforcement-

Alex read all of it and was quite surprised at how serious they were with the library. 'It must contain a lot of knowledge in there for them to be this careful,' he thought.

Once everyone had read the books, they walked in. One by one, the disciples entered the library from the front door and looked around in a weird manner each time they did so.

Alex was curious why they acted as they did, but he soon realized why that was. On the gate of the Library was an invisible barrier that constantly checked the Qi of everyone entering the library.

That was probably something to do with checking if the people were violating the rules written outside.

As soon as Alex entered, he looked around and was a little surprised at the sheer number of readers as well as shelves upon shelves of books scattered everywhere.

There were boards hanging from the ceiling that let the readers know the category of the book they contained.

Ma Rong said in a low voice, "Go ahead and do what you want, but be mindful of the rules." She then left on her own towards a staircase as well.

Chapter 285: Lower Floors

Alex was a little surprised that his master didn't call for him to follow her since their original plan was to come and check the books to see if there was some knowledge about anything they had trouble understanding.

But after seeing everyone else basically start to look for books, he decided to look for them on his own too.

He looked up and checked the names hanging from the ceiling and searched for any that caught his interest. The first thing his eyes naturally went to was Alchemy.

'Do I check alchemy? I don't think there can be anything there— Ah, the pill made from Spirit Cleansing Lily. Maybe there is some information about that,' he thought and went over to the area.

He saw quite a few disciples from his sect hanging around the shelves. As one would expect, this was where the disciples from an Alchemy sect would hang out at.

Alex looked through the shelves at the titles of books and tried to search for any that he would want to read. A few books caught his attention, but when he read them, he was disappointed.

They contained knowledge that he already knew or wasn't very helpful to him. He looked through more books but they weren't very good.

'Perhaps the first floor is too low level for me,' Alex thought and left them there. Disciples like Wan Li and the others who had been learning Alchemy for half their life also didn't need this information, so they decided to go up the floor.

Alex didn't immediately go up, however. His books of interest in the library weren't alchemy books necessarily. He wanted to learn about the Lilies and his body.

He looked around the lower floor and came across the formation section. For the last few days, he had been really curious about the formation and had wanted to learn it.

There was also the formation that gathered Qi that he had acquired the tools for from the place in the southern forest. They had been sitting in his storage bags, doing nothing and he wanted to desperately make use of them.

If possible, he wanted to learn formations and swiftly recreate the formation in the Hong Wu sect's alchemy garden.

'Arghh, I need to focus on Alchemy. Practicing two different veins of production might slow me down on both of them,' he thought. However, the curiosity still remained in his heart and he couldn't throw it away.

So, he opened some of the formation books from the shelves and started reading them. He didn't bother understanding what the books said. He only concentrated on remembering everything he was looking at and reading.

He couldn't send his Spiritual Sense to swiftly look through all of it, so he had to manually flip through the book to read it.

He read through a few of the basic knowledge books and stopped. There was nothing significant he had to read here. He stopped searching through the first floor at all and moved up a floor.

There were a lot more people on the 2nd floor than there were on the first floor. Perhaps the first floor was really beginner level for these people to bother with them.

Alex chuckled softly and shook his head. He was not even a beginner in formations, so it was okay for him to waste his time there.

He swiftly found his way around the floor and went to the alchemy section. There wasn't a lot here and it seemed most of his fellow disciples had already gone up a floor again.

'This must be too easy for them too,' Alex thought.

He didn't bother reading these books at all. He instead started searching for any slightest hints of Spirit Cleansing lily in the books.

Unfortunately, there weren't any here either. He found some mentions of Spirit Cleansing Lily, but they more so talked about what it looked like more than anything else.

Those information were useless for Alex. He then went around searching for any other places that could mention the lilies such as cultivation. After all, one could unlock the Spiritual sea when cultivating with one of them.

Unfortunately, there weren't any.

He searched for information on bodies at the same time too, but he could find none for it as well.

'Damn, how high must I go to find any relevant information at all?' he wondered. Thankfully, the formations were new ground for him and any information was relevant information.

He read them for a few minutes, basically cramming anything and everything into his brain without trying to understand it.

Once he was done, he left that floor as well.

He went to the third floor and looked through the alchemy section once more. He once again found mentions of the lily, but none of the information was new to him, so he reluctantly went to search for other things.

He started looking for books on the different bodies, but something else caught his eye. It was a book in the artifact section that talked about different materials.

'Maybe…' Alex wondered as he had a small premonition.

Alex quickly opened the book and started looking through it. It took him a dozen or so seconds, but his eyes caught it. The thing he was looking for in the book.

'Yang Jades,' he read it. He found information about Yang Jades.

There wasn't much information on it,? only that they were jades with Yang energy in them. However, there was something in them that intrigued Alex way too much for the book to not be worth it.

According to the book, Yang Jades were actually not naturally occurring jades, but something that was a result of something else. The book didn't say anything else but that alone was worth it.

He now knew where he could search for more information. Alex spend a few more minutes looking through the different books in the Formations section of the floor, and once he was done, he went up a floor again.

Chapter 286: History

'How many floors was it again? From the outside, it looked like it was 20 stories tall. But from the inside, the ceiling seems much higher than what one would expect.'

'Is it 2 stories for a single floor? The size seems to match that. Hmm... so there must only be 10 floors in total, and I? am on the 4th floor already,' Alex thought as he walked up the staircase to the 4th floor.

He immediately walked over to the Artifact section since it was the closest and started looking through books, searching for information on Yang Jades once more.

It took him a while, but he successfully found it.

'Ah here it is, let's see. Yang Jades are originally just normal jades with no Qi in them. However, when those normal jades come in contact with the incredibly dense source of Yang energy, they start getting affected by the Yang energy and turn to Yang jades.'

'Yang jades are very rare as places with extreme yang energy is... nearly impossible to find... what? How can it be rare? There is literally slew of yang jades in the forbidden fields,' Alex thought.

The book was giving information that didn't seem to match with what he knew about the yang jades.

'That means... the book is wrong... or the other possible scenario, the Forbidden Fields is just that unique. But according to the book, the Yang Jades are only made when they stay around in the extreme yang spots and swallow some of the yangs to themselves.'

'However, if the forbidden fields had Yang energy, shouldn't my body react to it-No wait, it did react, in the desert. That thing... that reaction my body showed towards the place in the north of desert... Was that the extreme yang spot? If so... then how are the Yang Jades so scattered away from them.'

'None of this makes sense,' Alex thought. He didn't know if his hypothesis was right or not, so he tried to look for information on eating Yang Jades. As he had expected, there were none.

He left the book and went to the alchemy section to look for Spirit Cleansing lily, but there was nothing about it. So, he moved to the cultivation section where he searched both about the lily and the different bodies.

However, he was disappointed when he found out there was no information about them here.

'Sigh, I will have to go up a floor,' he thought and moved away from that section. He went to the formation section to read for a few more minutes before he went up a floor.

He walked up the staircase and now he was on the 5th floor.? He directly went to the artifact section of the floor and read up on yang jades again to see if there was any additional information.

There was, but it only talked about how Yang Jades would lose their energy over a few months if one didn't use it at all or kept it in yang concentrated place.

'A few months? Didn't master say it lost energy very quickly? Was she wrong?' he wondered. Seeing that there was no more information, he left that section and went to the alchemy section.

He looked through the books and searched for information on Lilies again. Finally, he found some relevant information.

The book talked about using the lilies to cultivate and unlock the spiritual sea. That wasn't anything new to him, but it was a good start. He now knew that he would be able to perhaps find more information if he went up the floor.

He went to the cultivation section and searched for bodies. There was some information but none of it was what he wanted to learn.

He decided to leave the floor once more after remembering the formation books of this floor.

He walked up to the 6th floor and searched around for any information he could find. He went to the artifact section for the yang jades but there were none anymore.

The alchemy section didn't have much for Spirit Cleansing Lilies either. At least, the information they did have was useless to him.

He was a little excited on the lower floor, but it seemed he would have to look around some more. He wanted to go to the cultivation section to look for more information on the lily and bodies but instead stopped, because of what he saw in one of the other sections.

The section he stopped at was History and the book that caught his attention was The Entire History of the Crimson Empire.

'Oh, history of this empire, huh? I'm quite curious,' he thought and started reading.

Before the Crimson Empire was formed, the place was called the Shattered Kingdoms. There were multiple small countries that ruled their own lands and were in constant war with each other.

Each of these kingdoms had their own king that tried to fight against other kingdoms to add those lands to their own country.

The kings were obviously a cultivator, so the mortals remained in fear every day, hoping this wasn't the day that they were randomly attacked and killed.

The different cultivators showed no mercy to anyone they met and freely killed people in the name of their kings. The war-trodden times were a time of terror and fear.

Each of the kings wanted to rule over the entire land, but they were all equal in strength so they couldn't do anything to each other. The king's armies weren't very strong either when compared to the others.

So, this caused a lot of small skirmishes and battles that simply showed aggression for the sake of aggression. None of the kings could win against the other kings and they knew it.

That, however, lasted for not so long. A person appeared out of nowhere and became the king of a small land near the southern forest called the Cardinal Kingdom.

The name of this illustrious person who was going to change the stability amongst the different kingdoms was Fu Qiong.

Chapter 287: Maximum

Fu Qiong, according to the book, appeared out of nowhere and swiftly defeated the gang leader of a bandit group that was taking residence in the Cardinal Kingdom.

He then slowly defeated everyone and turned the Cardinal Kingdom into his own land. He then slowly started declaring wars against the rest of the kingdoms and one by one defeated them.

It took him 8 years to fully destroy all the 18 different kingdoms that were available at the time and took them all under his own rule.

Once the land was too large to keep calling it a kingdom, he took the chance to call his land an empire and named it the Crimson Empire. Then he named himself an Emperor as well.

Fu Qiong ruled as the first Emperor of the Crimson empire for nearly 6 decades before he retired and passed along his throne to his first son.

The son of the emperor was also talented as well as being very strong. He successfully took over his father's work and continued to keep the empire united.

Thus came the rule of the Fu family. All of that happened nearly 1200 years ago.

Alex was a little stunned as he read all of this. 'It's not different from when our real world was separated and people fought over land. I guess they really did take inspiration from real-life stories to make up this game world,' Alex thought.

He then read the final page of the book.

'It was later revealed that the first Emperor...was not a resident of the Shattered Kingdoms but someone that came from... beyond the Southern Forest.' Alex's eyes went wide when he read that.

'Another person from beyond the southern forest. How does one traverse the giant forest?' Alex wondered. Just as he was wondering that someone tapped on his shoulder.

He was jolted awake from his stupor and quickly turned around. Behind him was Ma Rong who had at some point appeared on the 6th floor.

He looked at the book he was holding and said nothing. Instead, she just gestured for him to follow her. He was curious as to what she had found, so he quickly closed the book and put it away before following her.

Ma Rong climbed the staircase and went up floors without stopping anywhere.

7th floor, 8th floor, finally 9th floor. Only after reaching the 9th floor did she stop climbing the stairs and walked towards the books.

Alex expected her to walk towards the Alchemy section, but instead, she walked towards the Cultivation section. She picked up a book as soon as she reached there as if she knew exactly which one to pick up and turned the page.

Once she reached a certain page, she handed the book to Alex.

Alex curiously looked at the page and was surprised to see the information about the Spirit Cleansing Lily that he had been looking for all this time.

'Finally. No wonder I couldn't find it on the lower floors. It's so high up,' Alex thought. He quickly read the chapter of the lily and learned the thing he had been so desperate to learn for the last 10 days.

'Spirit Cleansing Lily can help unlock the Spiritual Sea of a cultivator before they even reach Saint realm. Simply cultivating with a lily allows one to unlock a spiritual sea.'

'Spirit Cleansing Lily in its raw form is useless for Saint Realm cultivators.'

'Self Tempering or True realm cultivators with unlocked Spiritual sea can use Spirit Cleansing lily to expand their Spiritual sea.'

'A cultivator can only use 3 Spirit Cleansing Lilies in their lifetime...? So that's what it was. I used up all of my available lily turns. So I guess I can no longer use the lilies huh. That would be quite a waste of these flowers,' Alex thought.

He looked through the book to look for more information, but that was it. There was no information about any pills or items that could be made using the lily as an ingredient.

He was disappointed that he couldn't learn any more information, but what he got was enough to satisfy his thirst for learning what was up with the lilies.

He turned towards Ma Rong who was looking at the book behind his back and thanked her.

Ma Rong nodded and left, basically leaving him to do what he wanted. He decided to look at the book about bodies that were right next to him.

The book recorded information about different bodies but it wasn't extensive enough to be of any use to Alex. In fact, it didn't even have any information about his body.

Alex had to reconcile with the fact that it was pretty much impossible for him to learn anything about his body through the books.

'Maybe there are NPCs out there that know about my body,' Alex hoped.

Once he was done with that section, he went to the Alchemy section but realized that it had information about True Pill making processes.

From what he could read, it wasn't any different from what he was doing, other than the fact that the book was teaching him to use something called Qi sense. He didn't really know what it was so he decided not to bother with it until he was in the True realms.

He tried to search about Yang Jades in the artifact section, but unfortunately, there was none. He could find 0 information about the yang jades.

Alex was a little disappointed regarding that and went to the formation section and started reading those books. He had directly jumped to the 9th floor, so he didn't even know what he was reading right now.

Thankfully, he could recall later on once he was freer and look over the different information he had gotten right now. Still, he didn't want the gaps to exist in his knowledge, so he went down the staircases to the 6th floor once more and started reading everything before going up.

He was going to grind for a little while more.

Chapter 288: Earnings

Alex searched a bit more about the different bodies. He found some information about few bodies, but nothing concrete. He didn't find the thing he was especially looking for, the Sun God's Divine Yang body.

He searched through the 6th, the 7th, the 8th, and the 9th floor and couldn't find any. He wanted to go search on the 10th floor, but unfortunately, it seemed that he was wrong.

There was no 10th floor and 9th was the highest. Once he realized there was no information that could help him at all, he was a little disappointed.

He instead read everything he could about the formation and put them in his mind. He also looked for some information on True pills as well on the alchemy section.

According to the books, True Pills required True Qi to make. This was something he already knew but what he didn't know was that one didn't necessarily have to be in the True realms to make the True Pills.

'Anyone who has True Qi... meaning when I start converting my common Qi to True Qi, I can start making those pills that soon,' he thought. His hypothesis was proven correct by the information in the book.

Another thing about True Pills was that they were highly volatile during the process of making them. The energy they produced during preparation was a lot more prone to instability than when making the common pills.

'Is this why master told me to wait until learning about True pills? Because they are very violent and didn't want me to get hurt?' he wondered.

It had been a few hours since he had come to the library. The elders were all gathering the disciples who were willing to leave and started leaving the library.

Alex wanted to join them but decided not to. He stayed in the library for another hour reading up on different things and finally left it.

The reason he didn't leave with the group earlier was that he wanted to take a different route and go get his spirit stones from the Auction house on the southern side of the city.

It was only a few minutes walks away from here, so he walked towards there as soon as he left the library.

Along the way, he tried to process the information about the formations as much as he could, but he didn't know the first thing about formations, so it was impossible to learn about them on the fly.

So along the way, he simply gave up on it. He instead focused on the Alchemy knowledge he had learned today, but unfortunately, none of them were revelatory enough for him to dwell on it for long.

So, he gave up on it too. Fortunately, the auction house was quite close so he reached it before he would have to think about something else.

The attendant at the door of the auction house tried to stop Alex, but he just showed her the contract and was quickly taken in.

The familiar hallway was way too familiar and he felt a little uncomfortable, knowing that he wasn't in the place that his brain was telling him he was.

Alex was taken to one of the waiting rooms where he sat down and waited for the person in charge to return soon.

After a few minutes, the door opened and Han Jing walked in with a face full of wide smiles.

"Greetings fellow Daoist, I hope you didn't have to wait too long for this unworthy attendant to arrive," he said.

Alex was a little taken aback when he heard Han Jing call himself unworthy. 'What's going on?' he wondered but didn't ask.

"Is today's auction over?" he asked.

"Yes, fellow Daoist. Today's auction ended nearly 3 hours ago. Thanks to your pills, it was a smashing success. At least for my part, it was, hehe," Han Jing said while showing his teeth.

Alex didn't say anything else and instead asked about the thing he was here for. "So, how much did I earn?" he asked.

"Fellow Daoist, your pills were extraordinary. Even for being a common rank pill, Heaven grade ones are rarely seen so freely on the market. Not to mention you brought so many great pills at once."

"Those sales were a smashing success. So much so to the point that the audience nearly rioted trying to ask for the alchemist that made those pills. So... would it be possible for you to reveal who your master is?" he asked.

"I am afraid my master does not wish to be named. Which was also why he sent me to sell his pills, instead of coming on his own. Now that it is clear, can we get onto the part about my pills being sold?" Alex asked.

"Ah yes, yes. Of course. Your 23 pills sold for a total of... 66 True spirit stones. The Fat Converting pill earned you 16 True Spirit stones, the Rubber Body pill earned you 18 True spirit stones. And most surprisingly, the Energy Negating pill earned you 32 True spirit stones," Han Jing said.

Alex nearly asked Han Jing to repeat those numbers again, because of how unbelievable they were.

'But I only got 29 True spirit stones when I sold 21 pills back 2 weeks ago. Suddenly, it's doubled now? Wow, I must be still underestimating how lucrative the Heaven grade pills are,' Alex thought.

"Those stones... they are after the 10% tax right?" Alex asked.

"Oh, yes of course. We have already taken our part, and these are yours," Han Jing said. He handed a storage bag over to Alex, who took it and started looking inside.

He couldn't freely use Spiritual sense, so he would have to use normal means. He checked the spirit stones and was once again surprised to see so many at once.

If he converted them, he would get around 55 thousand dollars, but that was not the reason he sold those pills. He looked at Han Jing and asked,

"When is the next auction?"

Chapter 289: Next Auction

"Sorry?" Han Jing was caught off guard a little and immediately started running his little minds regarding the different scenarios that might come true.

'Does he have more pills to sell? I got a 3% commission from everything I sold today. Since he was the highest, I got above 2 True spirit stones from his alone. If he is willing to sell more of those pills then..' His mind started running wild.

"Um... fellow Daoist?" Alex called.

"Uh. Uh... yes?" Han Jing answered.

"About the next auction, can you tell me a little about it," Alex asked.

"Um... Fellow Daoist, do you have more pills to sell?" Han Jing asked.

"Sorry? No, I don't. I was just thinking of taking part in the next auction. So I was wondering, is it still taking place every day? When will it take place tomorrow?" Alex asked.

"Oh, fellow Daoist, you meant to ask that," Han Jing said in a dejected voice. He could practically hear his wild daydreams shatter around him. Still, he was professional and answered professionally.

"No, we do not have any auctions planned for tomorrow. Since Thursday is a break from the competition, the auction house is organizing an auction as big as the bi-annual auctions it has every 6 months. That will be the final auction for a few days," Han Jing said.

"Thus, if you wish to take part in the auction, I suggest you either take part in Thursday's auction at 10 am, or the one that takes place right after the competition ends," Han Jing said.

"After the competition ends? When is that?" Alex asked.

"Umm... we have no idea fellow Daoist. You must know too that the final competitions can sometimes last for days. So, the very next day after the end of the competition will be another auction held by the auction house. However, that is too far away, so I suggest you join the auction for the day after tomorrow," Han Jing replied.

Alex thought for a second and said, "Very well. Thank you for the information. I will take my leave now."

"Umm... Fellow Daoist, Should I save a VIP room for you?" Han Jing asked.

Alex thought for a bit and agreed. He knew there were VVIP rooms as well, but since he was a single person a VIP room alone would suffice him.

Alex thanked Han Jing and left the auction house. He looked at the time and realized that it was around 5 pm, so he didn't dilly dally and went straight back to the hotel.

He reached the hotel 15 minutes later and returned back to his room.

"Oh, brother Yu, you are back," Wan Li said, while constantly writing on a new book. He had probably learned a lot of new things and he was trying to write them down before he would forget them.

Alex really wanted to give him a flower right away but was still a little hesitant. It was going to take him a while to trust anyone on the same level in the game again.

"Yes, I'm back. You guys returned quite early," Alex said.

"Well, I didn't see any point, hehe. It's not like I could remember anything by just staying there. So I decided to come as quickly as I could and start writing the stuff down," Wan Li said.

"I see. Then continue writing Brother Wan, I will try to recall what I read as well," Alex said and went to sit on the bed.

Finally, he was free enough to revise everything he learned today.

One couldn't use more than 3 Spirit Cleansing lilies at once. That meant the remaining 3 of his lilies would be useless until he found other usages for it.

The Yang jades were just simple jades that found a concentrated spot of Yang energy and absorbed it. That didn't explain why they were available in the grassland of the forbidden fields, but Alex would find the answer later on. Especially, regarding the thing that attracted him to the north of the desert.

Perhaps the information he wasn't expecting to learn was about how Fu Qiong conquered the Shattered Kingdoms and combined them to form the Crimson Empire. Also, the fact that he was from beyond the Southern Forest was something Alex was still curious about.

He wanted to know how one could traverse in and out of the crimson empire. If he could do that, then maybe he could go out and see the true continent.

The outside world knew the secrets to the saint realm, he could perhaps learn those too.

'That guy was from outside the Crimson Empire too, wasn't he?' Alex thought as he took out the one talisman he had acquired from the guy.

There were a few things that he had never revealed to even his masters, to who he revealed everything. One of those things was the Ebony Corundum Stiletto.

Another thing was this talisman that he got from the man. The sword he had hidden before they even took him as a disciple so he never revealed it to them afterward, especially because he wasn't sure they would let him keep such a strong sword.

The talisman, however, he wasn't sure why he was hiding it. Still, he had kept it and tried to understand what it was but was still unable to.

'Maybe I will know what this is after I reach the other side,' he thought.

He was still a little disappointed that he didn't learn anything regarding his body, but he would probably have to leave the crimson empire for that too.

At least the trip to the library was partially successful, so he was quite happy. He went on to recollect what else he had learned from his trip to the library and tried to learn it.

He didn't bother with the formation stuff for now as that would take truly too long for him. He learned everything else he could for the next 30 minutes or so until there was a knock on his door.

It was time for the next meeting.

Chapter 290: Natural Law of the Body

Alex and Wan Li walked over to Ma Rong's room and joined the meeting.

"Alright, everyone is here right?" Ma Rong asked as she looked around and nodded to herself seeing everyone there.

"First of all, let us celebrate us reaching the 1st grade as a sect. Congratulations to everyone who helped make it happen," Ma Rong said and started clapping.

Everyone followed and soon there were smiles and cheers amongst the disciples. Now that they were a 1st-grade sect, they had a better reputation in the land and more young folks would decide to join the Hong Wu sect leading to them joining the sect.

"We needed 523 points to enter the first grade, and from what I calculated... we have actually reached 594 points as of today. The alchemy competitions helped, but the rest of you who took poison, formations, and talisman competitions also helped quite a bit."

"So, thank you to everyone who took part and helped us go a level higher as a sect," Ma Rong said. Everyone was smiling at her mentions. Ma Rong let them celebrate for a little while before continuing.

"Now, on to the second part of today's meeting. Since Yu Ming and Wan Li decided to skip out on tomorrow's competition, who wants to enter as the third person along with Meimei and Fanfan?" Ma Rong asked.

A few people raised their hands and Ma Rong chose a male disciple who was good at learning as that was tomorrow's theme.

She then asked what other people wanted to do. She got a few answers but in the end, everyone decided to wait until they saw tomorrow's competition before agreeing.

Ma Rong thought that was for the best and dismissed the group.

Alex and Wan Li returned back to their room and Alex immediately went to log out.

'Sigh, tomorrow's going to be kind of boring,' he thought. There wasn't anything really happening in tomorrow's competition that he was either taking part in or looked forward to.

So, nothing about tomorrow's events attracted him.

He got out of the capsule and commented to himself how he was still not feeling any hunger or need to go to the bathroom.

'That is really weird. I really hope it's okay and the doctors and scientists didn't mess up the tests,' he thought.

He went to the bathroom to freshen up a bit but that was useless. Inside the capsule, there was the perfect temperature and was hidden to the outer environment, so he never sweat or got dirt on him.

Still, he freshened himself and got out. He wanted to go eat something but he just wasn't hungry.

'Sigh, let me check if it's really okay,' he thought and went online to check again just to be sure there weren't any bad complaints.

There were complaints as one would expect. People just weren't getting hungry, but nothing was physically wrong with people.

And the only suggestion for them was... don't play. That was not something people were going to do. Still, some people were really happy regarding what was happening.

They could go on for nearly 2 days with a single meal. That was a lot of money saved for people who needed to spend quite a lot on food.

Alex wondered if he should go eat, but didn't want to feel uncomfortable, so he simply decided to skip today's dinner. However, he did decide on one thing.

He was going to use the helmet for today. He wasn't sure if it was necessarily a good idea or not, but he decided that he wanted his hunger back, so he went to his bed, put on the helmet, and logged in.

Alex opened his eyes inside the game and nearly thought he was still in the real world because of how dull everything was.

He immediately activated focus mode and felt like he finally got his senses back. It was a little harder to control for some reason, but he very quickly got used to this focus mode as well.

'That... feels a little more... natural,' Alex thought. Even after the senses were amplified, it wasn't to the same level as the one from the capsule and honestly, it just felt like something he was able to use on a normal day even in the real world.

'The capsule one is a little too... amplified. This one is way better,' Alex thought. Still, he couldn't argue that the capsule one probably was more useful than this one.

He looked around and saw that Wan Li was back to writing as usual, totally focused on himself.

So, Alex also decided to focus on himself. He sneakily called out Pearl and hid him in his robes before starting to cultivate.

Before long, he was asleep.

Alex opened his eyes early in the morning. He looked around and saw that Wan Li was cultivating. 'That's new,' Alex thought. He had only ever seen him read and write.

'Maybe he cultivates during the night,' he thought.

He sent Pearl back to the tattoo and realized something was different. 'It's still night?' he thought as he looked outside.

He could see the sky light up a bit, but the sun had still yet to rise. 'Oh, I woke up earlier today,' he thought and looked at the time. It was 5:48 am in morning.

'Whatever, let's leave,' he thought and logged.

As soon as Alex logged out, he wasn't greeted with the usual dull sense like when he did from the capsule. Instead, he was greeted by 3 new senses, that he had honestly missed for the last 3 days.

He felt hunger and need to go to the bathroom for both number 1 and number 2. "Oh sh*t," he thought and quickly sprinted to the bathroom to relieve himself.

Once he was done, he went to the kitchen to eat something. He was really hungry, so he ended up eating two bowls of cereals by himself.

Once he was done, he went back to his room and got into the capsule. After that, he logged back in.

Chapter 291: Fourth Day

Alex was greeted by the now-familiar Focus Mode. He very quickly adjusted to the amplified sense and looked around. The sun was up by now and the room was lit.

'What's the time?' he thought and looked. It was 6:42 PM. 'Oh, I took quite a while today to log back in,' he thought.

Had he not woken up early, he might have missed today's competition start.

Very soon,? there was someone calling them by knocking on their door, and in a usual fashion, Alex and Wan Li walked out.

"Everyone is here. Let's leave," Ma Rong said and walked down the stairs with the whole group. In 15 or so minutes, the group reached the coliseum and entered it.

They went to the stage along with the other dozens of sects looked at the competition for now. For the Alchemy competition, the competition was that they would learn a new pill recipe, made specifically for the competition by the Royal Alchemist and the participants would have to follow it to make the best pill in under an hour.

This required a lot of knowledge regarding the different pills and how ingredients interacted as well as being able to remember every single movement from the pill-making process, including the timing, the flame temperature, the order of ingredients as well as the movement they had to make in the cauldron.

The competition asked for a lot, and only those that could deliver on it could win.

Alex was sure he would do quite well in the competition but still didn't want to take part in it. He wanted to experience the combat or specialized competition at least once.

Ma Rong took the ones that wanted to participate and took them to register, while the rest of them went to the seating area.

Alex saw the Tiger sect and greeted his master and his senior sister, but didn't go join them. Luo Mei insisted on it so he promised he would do that the next day.

Once she agreed, he went back to the Hong Wu sect seating area.

"I don't think I've said this before but I am really surprised that you are the disciple of the sect leader of Tiger sect as well," Wan Li said.

"Haha, that sorta just happened. I can't believe it myself as well," Alex said.

"Learning both Alchemy and battle at the same time, I'm very envious of you, Brother Yu," Wan Li said while making a weird face.

'Huh?' Alex was a little surprised but Wan Li focused back on the stage, so Alex let go of it.

The first few competitions started and Alex looked at them. He felt very unenthusiastic towards the whole competition as a whole today.

People were learning before doing anything, so they made a lot of mistakes and not many intense competitions took place.

Even the formation ones that kept his attentions usually didn't manage to grab his interest. 'Sigh, this is boring,' he thought and looked around the coliseum.

It seemed a lot of people held the same sentiment as him. Some of the audience members even left their seats and left the coliseum entirely.

"Sigh, the Royal Fu Academy should have made the learning competitions on the 2nd day or the third day and kept yesterday's competition for today. That would've made the competitions much more exciting," The second elder said.

"Yes, I feel the same way dear. They screwed up really bad this time. Well at least the alchemy competition starts at 9, so we can leave early if we want to," the third elder said.

Alex nodded when he realized that. Soon the competition on the stage ended and the girls walked onto the stage for the alchemy competition.

Nobody really expected the male disciple to show any amazing performance and only Fan Ruogang and Zhou Mei were what the rest of the sect were focused on.

Alex looked at the stage and saw all the top 3 disciples from the Spring song sect as well as the Twin harmony sect, which was another well-known alchemy sect.

Only the Hong Wu sect didn't send out their A team for today's competition.

"Oh wow, even that guy is there," someone commented.

Alex looked at the stage and saw Huang Fu, who seemed to be looking around the stage for someone. He walked up to Fan Ruogang and asked something, who replied back.

Huang Fu immediately turned towards the audience and looked at Alex and shook his head in disappointment. 'He must've been looking forward to winning against me today. That's a shame, I would've probably taken part if I could take part in the combat ones as well,' Alex thought.

The competition soon started and the host relayed the basic rules.

The rules were the same as the ones for the other competitions. The only difference this time was that everyone got the ingredients from the staff themselves.

So no one had to bring any on their own.

The regular rules applied and everyone was handed a recipe. Then, the timer started. Each one of them had exactly 60 minutes to learn the recipe and make the pills.

The audience could do nothing but watch them just read the recipe for nearly half an hour, if not more. They needed to memorize every movement, every step before they could hope to make the pill.

The timer was running out, so everyone started making the pills immediately. There wasn't enough time to make multiple pills so they had to rely on this one pill.

The audience was a little surprised when a pill cauldron actually exploded while the person was making their pill. Thankfully, the staff member immediately went and stopped the explosion and sound from spreading.

Slowly, one by one the participants started finishing the pills and started walking to the front to show off their creations.

Fan Ruogang, Zhou Mei, Han Long, and Huang Fu too walked to the front of the stage and started putting their pills into the pill tester one by one.

Chapter 292: Unexpected Result

Fan Ruogang was the first one to put hers in, so her result was the first to come up. Up until now, the best result belonged to a random participant for 22% harmony.

That looked bad in comparison to what everyone was used to making the previous days, but one had to remember that this was the first time they had made this pill. So, it was actually a very good result for them to be able to make a near Earth grade pill on the first try.

As for Fan Ruogang's result, it was the best as of yet. She managed to make a pill with exactly 28% harmony, making it the best until now.

Han Long was second and his result was actually better. Fan Ruogang humphed quite audibly when she saw Han Long's pill harmony reached 29%. He had won over her result with a single percentage.

Huang Fu was next and his result stunned the entire stage and competitors. He surprisingly managed to reach a high harmony of 41% on a pill he had never seen or made before. That just went to show the terrifying level of ability this man held regarding Alchemy.

Zhou Mei was next and honestly, no one was expecting anything from her. She wasn't a well-remembered figure from the previous matches as her only notable achievement was getting third place in the speed pill-making competition.

In fact, even she herself was doubtful of what she had made, but when the result came back that she had actually managed to make a pill with 35% harmony, she was exhilarated.

A big smile came upon her face as she learned that she had won 2nd place.

The people from the Hong Wu sect cheered when they saw that, and Fan Ruogang went to give her a big hug for winning.

The host announced the results to the audience and the sect accepted her with open arms.

"Great job you girls. Ah, you did not bad yourself, disciple Song. 11th place is not bad at all, " the second elder said.

The male disciple felt a little better after hearing that.

The rest of the sect members congratulated them when they came to the seating area. The group quietened down for a few minutes when the second elder said something.

"Sect leader, there is nothing interesting happening today, so can't we simply leave?" he said.

Ma Rong didn't immediately say anything and looked at the other's reaction. It seemed everyone was really bored today.

"Sigh, alright. There is nothing worth watching, so we will leave for today," Ma Rong said and stood up to leave.

Alex stood up as well and looked towards the Tiger sect to say goodbye if they saw him, but surprisingly, they had already left.

'Well, I can't fault them for that,' Alex thought. He left the coliseum and as usual, Ma Rong asked if anyone wanted to leave on their own instead of returning to the hotel.

Alex thought for a bit and realized that he didn't need to return to the hotel since he didn't have to leave the capsule at all. Since he wouldn't feel hungry for nearly 2 more days, he was free to stay inside the game for just that amount of time.

"I will leave today, master," Alex said and said his goodbyes. Surprisingly, Zhou Mei also decided to take a leave and walked in the same direction as Alex.

Alex was taking the road to the Alchemy hall when he noticed Zhou Mei following behind him. So he slowed down for her to catch up to him.

"Do you need something?" Alex asked when she finally caught up to him.

Zhou Mei fidgeted a bit and finally spoke up. "Yes, I... I want to say something," she said.

"Very well, please speak," Alex said.

"I... " Zhou Mei stopped for something and continued, "I'm sorry. I apologize for all the hurtful things I said to you before. I had thought that you were given everything for free before, and advanced to where you were at the time because of it."

"But I never realized how wrong I was. There is no way a person can make such an amazing pill as the one you made yesterday simply by being given everything."

"So, now I've come to respect your talent and want to apologize for holding a grudge against you," she said.

Alex was very surprised to hear all of this. Honestly, he held a negative view of her until today. He felt that she was petty and couldn't see things from any other perspective than her own. But it seemed that he was wrong and that she was more than just a hateful person.

You really couldn't understand a person just by looking at them or even meeting them for a while. Everyone was different on the inside, it just took some time for their real self to show themselves.

Thus, Alex smiled and decided to forgive her. "It's okay. I can see where you were coming from. I accept your apology," he said.

Zhou Mei seemed to have a massive load taken off her head as she sighed in relief and bowed toward Alex. "Thank you for forgiving me," she said.

Alex was a little taken aback. He already forgave her, so he wasn't sure what more he could say. "Uh... we are in the middle of the street. Please get up." He hurriedly went forward to grab her by her shoulders and get her up.

"Aww... that was so sweet. I didn't know you had a grudge against Mingming, Meimiei. At least you apologized and that is what is important," Fan Ruogang spoke from the side of the road.

"Fanfan, what are you doing here?" Zhou Mei's face immediately went red with shame when she saw her standing there.

"Hehe, you guys left, so I also wanted to join you guys. Thus I came here. Look, I brought him too," she said as she pulled out Wen Li who was hiding behind her.

"So, now that you are done apologizing, where are we going?"

Chapter 293: Beast Attracting Pill

Alex smiled and asked, "Do you guys have ingredients to make pills?"

"Of course, we are alchemists. We always have different ingredients on us," Fan Ruogang said proudly.

"Haha, Yes we do, brother Yu," Wan Li said with a nervous smile.

Zhou Mei nodded as well.

"Well, if you guys do have them, then let's go to the Alchemy hall to take some pills. You guys are probably agitated from not being able to make pills for the last few days," Alex said.

Zhou Mei and Wan Li's eyes shined when they heard they could go somewhere where they could make pills. Fan Ruogang however made a weird face.

"Ahh... I don' really care about pills, but whatever. Let's go make one. Actually, let's go by the market once. I want to try making today's pills. I want to beat the harmony level of that Huang Fu guy. He probably already learned about that pill from his master before me, and simply flaunted his knowledge today," she said.

"Ah, Fanfan, that's not possible. For the sake of competition, he isn't allowed to do that. Sect Leader said so herself," Wan Li said.

"Oh, did she? Well, whatever. I still want to beat him," she declared.

Alex smiled and asked, "Why don't we make a competition out of this then. We will all learn the recipe and... in 6 hours after entering the Alchemy hall, whoever makes the best pill is the winner," Alex said.

Fan Ruogang's eyes lit up abnormally when she heard that it was going to be a competition.

"Alright, here you guys take the recipe," she said as she gave her recipe to Wan Li. Zhou Mei took hers out and gave hers to Alex.

Alex looked at the recipe just once and immediately learned it.

The recipe was for a pill called Beast Attracting pill. The pill was made using a bunch of beast parts that were used to make a pill that spread a very strong fragrance when it interacted with Qi. The pill then attracted various beats depending on its harmony level.

Mortal grade pills attracted Skin tempering and Muscle tempering realm monsters.

Earth Grade pills attracted Bone tempering and Organ Tempering realm monsters.

Heaven Grade pills attracted Meridian Tempering and Mind Tempering realm monsters.

The purpose for pills with a higher level of harmony was not written. Probably, not even the Royal alchemist was capable of making pills with 75% harmony, even if it was a common rank pill.

He had already learned the pill recipe but giving it back immediately was a bit suspicious, so he asked Wan Li to write the recipe down for the both of them and took it.

They then took a detour to a place that sold the different ingredients. Since the ingredients were mostly beast parts, Alex, unfortunately, didn't have them.

So he had to end up buying a lot of those. Thankfully, he was loaded with money right now and didn't have to worry about the cost.

Once they got their ingredients, Alex showed them the way to the Alchemy Hall. At the register, he asked for a room for 6 hours and paid upfront. He and the other 3 were then taken to 4 different alchemy rooms at the back of the hall.

After the door was closed, Alex sat on the seat with the Golden Jade cauldron in front of him and got ready to make his pills.

"This is the first time I'm making an all monster ingredient pill right?" he thought. Monster corpses usually had one or two parts that could be used as ingredients.

But he had never come across a pill recipe that used only them. 'I wonder how the Royal Alchemist came up with the recipe,' he thought.

The cauldron had heated up and it was time for him to put in the ingredients. The recipe appeared in his mind as he knew what to do next.

He took out the first ingredient and put it in. He slowly swirled it around until it became powder and the energy was all released.

Once the first ingredient was done, he put in the second one which released more energy that mixed with the already existing energy.

Then third, and fourth. He kept doing that until he finally put in the last ingredient.

'Oh, so the final energy is wood, huh,' he thought. He quickly started compressing the powder, and a minute later, he had a pill with him.

He quickly pulled out the pill and held it in his hand.

Beast Attracting pill - 38%

'Hmm... not bad. I could've probably done better if I had focused more on the pill making,' he thought and started making another one.

The first one had taken him only 20 and the following ones took even less. In an hour, he ended up making 3 pills. However, every hour after that, he ended up making 4 pills each.

Sometimes, he made more due to making 2 pills at once.

By the end of the 6 hours mark, he had managed to make exactly 28 pills. He looked at the time and realized he only had 3 minutes left.

So he cleaned his cauldron, put everything back into his storage bags, and left the room.

Fan Ruogang was already outside, constantly tapping her foot, annoyed about something. Alex walked up to her and asked, "What's wrong?"

"I've been waiting here for nearly half an hour, that's what's wrong," she said in an annoyed voice.

Alex was a little surprised and asked, "Why did you leave half an hour earlier then?"

Fan Ruogang's face suddenly turned all red and said, "I didn't know how long it had been while I was making the pills and unknowingly left too early."

PFFTT

Alex started laughing. "Hey don't laugh. I didn't have a clock with me okay. That's why I left so early," Fan Ruogang said with a red face.

Alex couldn't stop laughing for a few more minutes and only stopped laughing when the other two arrived.

Fan Ruogang seemed still mad so she said, "Alright, let's just see who won and get it over with."

Chapter 294: Unknown Figure

"Wait we just got here. Why was he laughing? Why are you red?" Zhou Mei started asking.

"Doesn't matter. Show me your best pills," Fan Ruogang practically ordered.

"Well, this is mine. A 43% pill," Zhou Mei said as she took out a pill.

"No, I don't believe you. Use a pill tester," she said.

"Right here? Okay," Zhou Mei said and brought out a pill tester. Wan Li and Fan Ruogang also brought out their pill tester.

Seeing them all take those out, Alex also brought out his spare pill tester, one he kept just for consistency with the other alchemists.

If there ever came a day where he was asked for a pill tester and he didn't own one, that would start making people think of him as weird.

Once he took it out, he also brought out one of the pills with him. He didn't want to embarrass them or make them feel bad about their alchemy achievements, so he brought out a high-grade pill, but not the highest he made.

He put his pill into the pill tester and looked at the others.

Zhou Mei was the first to put the pill first, so hers was the one that moved up the first. As she had said, her pill harmony reached up to 43% and stopped moving any further.

"Sigh, this is the best I could do. What about you guys?" she said and looked at Wan Li's pill tester which was the second one to be used.

The fog slowly rose up and soon caught up to the 43% mark as Zhou Mei's eyes got dejected. She had lost again. At least it was to the first ranking disciple of the sect.

The fog soon rose up to 46% and stopped.

"Wow, you actually managed to make such a great pill," she said.

"Haha, yeah. I got to research a lot for this pill in the last 6 hours and managed to make this amount," he said.

"Wow, Wanwan. Your pill is only 3% lower than what you made for the competition yesterday," Fan Ruogang said.

"Haha, yeah. I was a little surprised myself too," he said. "Although, if I had taken part in today's competition, I would've failed for sure. My first pill was only 22% in harmony."

"Geez, whatever. You won in the end, so be happy. Look at me, my pill is so bad," Fan Ruogang said as she showed the pill tester with 41% harmony."

"Fanfan, you are more focused on the ingredients than pills. You need to give some effort into making pills too. Once I start teaching Mimi better, she will make better pills than you very soon," Zhou Mei said.

"What? Do you think your sister can make better pills than me? ... is she really that talented?" Fan Ruogang asked with a little nervous voice.

"Sigh, no. It will take her some time. She is still young," Zhou Mei said.

"Umm... is she as young as Mingming?" Fan Ruogang asked.

"Umm... no. She is older," Zhou Mei said while shaking her head.

"Oh, it crossed 40%," Wan Li said. He was the only one of the three focusing on Alex's pill tester.

"Huh?" Fan Ruogang turned around to catch the fog go above 41%. "No! I am at the last place," she said.

Soon the fog crossed 43% as well. "Sigh, as expected," Zhou Mei said. Soon the fog rose up and reached 45% and acted stayed there for a few seconds, giving the illusion of stopping, but it increased once more to reach 46%.

"Aii, you are too good, Brother Yu," Wan Li said.

Just then, the percentage went up once more to 47%. Wan Li and the rest knew better than to assume this was the end, so they silently waited for it to go up.

The fog did rise up twice and the final result was 49%.

"Sigh, you have my respect brother Yu. This is truly amazing," Wan Li said.

"Oh wow, Mingming, you nearly made a Heaven grade pill from something you learned just today?" Fan Ruogang said excitedly.

"Haha, that is a really interesting thing I am seeing right now," A voice came from behind Alex. The four of them turned around to see a man in his late 20s staring at them.

He wore a simple grayish robe with black linings. He was wearing a small hat, but Alex could see his handsome face clearly.

The man walked forward stood next to Alex. He was nearly 3 finger-widths taller than Alex.

"Young man, can I take a look at your pill?" the man asked.

"Umm... " Alex wasn't sure what to say. A random person coming up to him and asking to look at his pill was something he had never experienced or prepared for before.

"Thank you," the man said, taking Alex's non-responsiveness as agreement.

He took the pill tester and dropped a pill out. He brought it close to his face and looked at it. He frowned a little and brought out another pill from his bag and immediately ate it without hesitation.

He shook his head as if electricity coursed through his body, and the next time he opened his eyes, the pupils were wide open.

He looked at the pill once more and now he started nodding at it. "Good, good. The composition of the powders is a little flawed, but the overall structure is good. You also managed to get the timing correct a lot of the time-No, almost all the time."

"Temperature control was good, but it could be better if you acquire a better cauldron. Hmm... aside from that... you just need better ingredients and you can easily make Heaven-grade pills," the man said while nodding to himself.

He seemed to be fascinated with the pill, more so than any other person Alex had seen in his life.

He finally looked up from the pill and stared at Alex and asked, "What's your name, little brother?"

Alex could tell that this man was a pill-making genius or at least one that could analyze as greatly, so he decided to answer, "My name is Yu Ming."

Chapter 295: He is...

The man was a little taken aback by the name and suddenly smiled, "haha, Yu Ming. You are the person that make a 60% pill on the competition yesterday, aren't you?" the man asked.

"Yes, I am," Alex said without a hint of arrogance on his face.

The man looked at his face with a slight smirk and said, "You are quite talented, aren't you? What sect are you from?"

"We are from the Hong Wu sect," Alex said.

"Hong Wu?" the man dropped his head into a thinking face and said, "Ah, Little Ma's sect right? No wonder you guys are so talented."

"You took a recipe and learned it in a single day to this level. That's worthy of compliments. Especially you little brother, I don't think even my disciple can do what you did in a single day," the man said.

Alex and the rest felt a little awkward listening to his compliments. They didn't know how to react to a random man, albeit a great alchemist, complementing them.

"Ah, I am a little late now, so I must leave. I hope our paths cross in the future," the man said as he handed the pill back and nodded to the group.

The four of them also bowed a little to show respect.

He started walking away, but as soon as he reached a little further away, he stopped. "Oh, and another thing, a suggestion. Cut the Fire lizard's tail into 4 equal pieces before putting them in one after another with a 1-second interval and follow the rest of the recipe. "

"I just discovered that a few days ago and didn't get to give the academy guys the updated recipe. Haha, my bad. Do that and you guys will have a much better pill come out. Goodbye," the man said and quickly walked in.

The guy at the register saw him and quickly stood up to greet him with a deep bow. He did not stop the man at all.

Fan Ruogang was the first to come out of her shock as she said, "D— Did that man just say he couldn't give the updated recipe?"

"Doesn't that mean— " Zhou Mei didn't speak any further and waited for confirmation from the others.

"Yes," Alex said. "It seems… we just had our first meeting with the Royal Alchemist." Even as the words came out of his mouth, he couldn't believe it. He had been hearing how good the man was and how talented he was, but never in his life did he expect him to look so… young.

"He looks younger than Master, doesn't he?" he asked.

"Yes," Wan Li said. "I— I wonder if it's some sort of pill or… his cultivation base is just that high." The only way someone could stay young despite being old was if their cultivation base was high or if they ate some sort of heavenly ingredients or pills that gave that effect.

Alex was still in thought when he checked the top right of his vision and saw that it was already 5:45 pm.

"Oh no. It's late. We need to hurry back," he said and immediately walked out of the Alchemy hall, with the rest following quickly behind.

They tried hurrying back to get before 6, but the streets were crowded in the evening, and they couldn't fly over the people. So, they ended up being a little late.

They quickly went up the stairs, but there were Ma Rong and the other elders with a frowning faces, waiting for them.

"Where did you guys go? You were gone for the entire day. You guys didn't even come back once, and now you turn up late. Did you know how worried we were?" Ma Rong said with an angry face.

"Master, we can explain," Alex said.

"Go on, explain why you were gone for so long," Ma Rong said

"Umm… the thing is… " Alex went on to explain how they went to the alchemy hall to make new pills.

"So, you didn't think to leave on time?" Ma Rong asked.

"No, we did leave on time Sect leader, but then he appeared out of nowhere and we couldn't leave sooner," Fan Ruogang said.

"He? Who is he?" the second elder.

"Umm… we think he was… the Royal Alchemist," Zhou Mei replied.

Suddenly, everyone's eyes perked up and they looked at the 4.

"You guys met the Royal Alchemist?" Ma Rong asked.

"We're not sure. We think so from the comments he made," Alex said.

"How did he look? Why was he there? What comments did he make? Explain everything," Ma Rong said.

Alex proceeded to explain everything he remembered from the comments about the composition and structure of the pill to his height, so him calling Ma Rong 'Little Ma' and etc.

Ma Rong was a little surprised. "Sigh, it seems you really did meet him. Alright, I will excuse you guys for today. If you don't want to be punished, you better keep track of your time from tomorrow onwards. I can't have the best disciples of my sect disappearing on my watch," she said.

"Yes, Master" "Yes, Sect Leader," the 4 of them said at once.

"Good, now you can go," she said and let them pass on. The 4 of them went to their own rooms and closed the door.

The Third Elder looked at Ma Rong and said, "I can't believe the kids got lucky enough to meet with the Royal Alchemist himself. Even I have never seen him."

"Yeah, it's hard to spot him. He likes to change his appearance from time to time, so it's impossible to recognize him by his looks. It seems he is opting for a young face this time," Ma Rong said.

"Haha, they got to learn something from the Royal Alchemist himself. It's not every day that happens. They really did get lucky," the Second Elder said.

The other elders also talked in small voices surprised about the disciples meeting the Royal Alchemist.

"Alright, let's forget about this. Call everyone to my room. It's time for the meeting."

Chapter 296: Breakthrough

Alex opened his eyes early in the morning at 7 am. There was no competition today and the only thing he had to do was go to the auction house later on.

"You can stop now Pearl," he told Pearl who was inside his robe currently cultivating. "Meow," Pearl meowed lightly and stopped.

The minor cuts around his body all healed and he was back to being fine.

"Have you broken through yet?" he wondered and asked Pearl before opening the status page. Unfortunately, he was still in the Bone Tempering 9th realm.

"Do I really have to give you a monster core? I am afraid the same thing that happens to me will happen to you as well. Not to mention, I don't have that many anymore. Only a couple more. I will soon have to go to the jungle to fight the beasts some more," Alex said softly.

"Meow," Pearl meowed.

"Sigh, I will think of someway. Come enter," he said and let Pearl go back into his arm.

"Hmm... I should be fine to breakthrough now right?" he wondered and opened his status page. He looked at it and thought, 'Oh, I'm a few hundred thousand Qi less than the required amount.'

So, he took out an Organ Tempering 7th realm monster's core and sneakily ate it so that Wan Li couldn't see what he did.

Suddenly, his consciousness disappeared.

When he reappeared inside the Spiritual sea, he could see the vast, turbulent water in there. "I guess it won't increase or get stronger until I reach the mind tempering realm huh? Thankfully, I can eat a few pills in the True realm to increase my mental strength," Alex thought.

He looked around and quickly found a red stork with a golden beak hovering in the air without moving its wings.

'This should be easy,' he thought and started attacking the beast with everything he had. The metal techniques especially were very strong and he could easily defeat the stork.

It did take him nearly 10 minutes though due to him not having the physical strength to close the gap as he did outside the spiritual sea.

The beast died and as usual, the yellow mist appeared from a small shadow at the surface of the lake and quickly devoured the both of them.

When Alex came on the outside, he was bombarded with the notification about gaining Qi. Once the notifications subsided, he clicked on breakthrough and immediately went to 6th Realm of Organ Tempering. It wasn't the strongest in the competition by a long shot, but it was progress for Alex who had to focus on Alchemy too.

'Just 4 more, and I can reach Meridian Tempering realm,' he thought.

He finally decided to log out of the game. He slowly opened the capsule lid as the lack of intense senses made his entire world very dull.

It took him a few seconds to get used to it, but that few seconds, he hated every time he had to experience it.

"Ah, I'm a little hungry today," he thought. He had stayed inside the game for nearly a day and missed all food since the cereal yesterday morning, so when he felt hunger, he got happy.

It meant that just staying in the capsule didn't mean that he wouldn't have to ever eat. It also meant that his body's functionality was normal, albeit a little slow.

Alex walked out to the kitchen and saw Hannah in the kitchen. "Hey, sister. Are you eating?" he asked.

"Yes, come eat... or don't. If you don't feel hungry, you don't have to force yourself," Hannah said.

"Oh, it's fine. I haven't logged out in over a day, so I am a bit hungry," Alex said.

"Hmm... try not to stay in the game for that long. We still don't know if it's good or bad," Hannah said.

"It's fine, or at least the scientists and doctors say so," Alex said.

"They do? Well then, I guess it's fine. I will look at it later. You eat right now," Hannah made him get his food.

Alex nodded and ate what food they had. "I need to grocery shop. If we both end up playing the game, we won't have food anymore," Hannah said.

"Hmm... I don't think I have free time today. Well maybe in the evening. I can go with you then," Alex said.

"No need. I will just order online," Hannah said.

"Oh right. I keep forgetting that this is a city and people can do that," Alex said while shaking his head.

"Alright, I'm going back to the game, see you later... or tomorrow. Whenever our timing matches," Hannah said and left.

Alex too quickly ate his food and went back to his room. He looked at the time and saw that there was a lot of time left before the auction, he decided to do a few things he had been ignoring until now.

He called his parent and talked with them for a bit. Apparently, his father had paid the money for the tractor and had used some of the remaining ones for building a better shed and stable for the animals.

He also showed off a new phone he had bought for himself and Alex's mom. Alex smiled seeing them happy and said his goodbyes.

He then went on the internet to check a few different things. The library didn't have the information he was looking for, but maybe the internet did.

So, he started searching for Sun God's Divine Yang Body and the Spirit Cleansing Lilies.? There were very few mentions of the lilies as they were not easily acquirable.

As for the body, no matter how deep he searched, even going as far as to look at the second page of the search results, he couldn't find any.

Alas, he had to accept the fact that there wasn't any information and give up on finding it.

Once he was done with all of it, he went back to the capsule and logged in.

Chapter 297: Auction day

Alex logged back into the game at around 9 pm. He stood up from his bed and saw that Wan Li was already gone from his room.

'Where could he have gone?' Alex wondered but didn't really give much thought to his disappearance.

He walked out and saw a few people from his sect walking up and down the stairs. He saw a few elders leave as well.

Suddenly, his master walked out of her room as well and saw him standing.

"Oh there you are, I was about to go look for you," Ma Rong said.

"What's going on master?" he asked.

"Oh, there are auctions taking place in the capital today, really big ones. One of the auction houses saved a VIP seat for us. Do you want to come?" she asked.

"Is it the Pink Cloud auction house?" he asked.

"No. It's a different one. Why? You wanted to go to that one?" Ma Rong asked.

"I have a VIP room in that auction house for today. I will be going soon too," Alex said.

"Hmm... Who will you be going with?" Ma Rong asked.

"I'm going there alone, I guess," Alex said.

"Hm, be careful out there. Don't try to get into a bidding contest with others. If they really want it, just let them have it. You are very weak in the grand scheme of things, so it's better if you don't make enemies, okay?" Ma Rong said with concern in her voice.

Alex nodded and said, "I understand master."

"Alright, you need some spirit stones? What are you looking for today?" she asked.

"I don't need spirit stones. I sold a few pills some days before and have enough for today. As for what I want to buy, I'm thinking of getting armor for myself. As you said, I am weak and need better protection," Alex said.

"As for the other things, I will see what I like," Alex said.

"Alright, take care. I'm already late so I will leave now," Ma Rong said and left down the stairs.

Alex looked around and the other ones had left as well. 'Damn, everyone is gone somewhere huh. Well, it is a free day after all.'

'I should leave as well,' he thought. However, before that, he decided to change his robes to something more normal like the Blueish-gray robes his master had given him when he went to the Tiger sect.

So he changed into those before walking out of the room and going into the southern side of the capital city.

The roads were particularly lively today since most of the people weren't in the coliseum and instead of enjoying the free day from the competition.

Alex weaved through the crowd of bypassers and made his way to the auction house.

There were more than a few auction houses at the same spot, so the crowd was very huge today. Alex squished through the people to reach the auction door, but that too seemed impossible.

Thankfully, he was able to make his way to the door and a staff member who recognized him accepted him and took him inside. As for those that didn't have a VIP room registered to themselves, they would have to wait until it was time for the auction.

The staff took him to a VIP room that was much smaller than the one he was in back in Scarlet City. However, that was a VVIP room and this was a VIP room, so that was to be expected.

Alex walked over to the window and looked down on the hall. This was something that was completely different from the auction house back in the Scarlet City, however.

The hall was beyond massive and could easily house over 2000 people. Alex then looked to the side and saw other similar rooms lined up all over the wall of the hall.

There were about 200 rooms counting both the VIP and the VVIP rooms. The VIP rooms were lower while the VVIP ones were higher.

'So that means there will be someone above me, huh?' Alex thought. He turned around and saw the staff member standing by the door, the same as the last time.

"Umm... you can come to sit here if you want. I'm not so important that you have to stand there," he said.

"It is our job and we are used to it. Respected guest does not need to be concerned about this lady," the staff politely said.

"Are you sure? Cause you are welcome to sit," Alex said.

The lady just shook her head, and Alex left it at that. He went to sit on the chair and waited for the auction to start.

More and more VIP and VVIP rooms were filled but he couldn't see who was near him. He wasn't going to randomly use his Spiritual sense in a place like this, especially when there would be so many high-level people in the auction.

As more and more people entered, it seemed that it was time for the regular folks to enter, so the doors were opened and the people started entering in droves.

Alex watched as the lower hall managed to be filled in practically minutes.

Once the entire hall was full, including the VIP and VVIP rooms, the lighting in the hall changed and soon a spotlight appeared on the curtain that hid the stage away.

The curtains opened in a single unstopping motion and revealed a lady behind them. The lady was around 25 years old with a face that had fair skin and hair redder than the empire itself.

She was wearing a pink dress with cloud patterns on it, just as the name of the auction house itself.

The crowd full of people was mesmerized at her beauty as this was the first time most of them had even seen her.

The lady smiled at them and finally spoke, " Welcome to the Pink Cloud Auction House. I am your auctioneer and host for the day, Yu Min."

Chapter 298: First Few Item Sales

" Welcome to the Pink Cloud Auction House. I am your auctioneer and host for the day, Yu Min," the lady in pink spoke on top of the stage.

"I hope all of you are doing good on this fine day. We have a massive catalog of items we have on sale today. For those who already know what is coming up, you must be excited."

"For those who haven't, please bear with me, everything will be revealed in due time," the lady named Yu Min said with a smile.

She turned to the side and nodded. A group of staff members walked onto the stage with item covers in pink cloth. The audience tried to figure out what it was, but it was in the shape of a box and was thus impossible to tell.

Yu Min walked up to the item and pulled away the pink cloth to reveal the box. No one could really see what it was, so they waited for the lady to start speaking.

The lady slowly reached into the box and brought out a small bottle.

"Pill?" Alex thought, but it couldn't be. The bottle was just too big for it. The crowd started murmuring and the lady decided to speak.

"The first item being auctioned today is this Spirit Wine, made by one of the greatest winemakers of the Cardinal City if not the entire Crimson Empire."

"This spirit wine is said to be able to heal minor injuries and even give you some advancement in cultivation as well."

"It can also get a True realm expert drunk in just 3 sips. If you've ever disliked the fact that you couldn't get drunk anymore, here is your chance."

"The bid will start at 80 spirit stones and the minimum bid can only be 1 spirit stone. Please start," Yu Min said.

"81 spirit stone."

"83 spirit stone."

"84 spirit stone."

People started bidding in droves. It was only the people at the lower hall that bid, and none of the people.

Alex was in his room a little surprised at how much the people were bidding for the wine.

"Is it because it can help them in cultivation and healing... or because it can get them drunk?" he asked himself and looked down at the crowd.

"Yeah totally because it can get them drunk," he thought and laughed to himself.

The bid went for a little longer until the man at one of the VIP rooms bid 3 True spirit stones and no one outbid it. It seemed the wine was nice, but not worth that much to most people.

"The spirit wine goes to the guest at room N5 for 300 spirit stones," the lady said and hit a wooden board with a gavel she had taken out at some point.

The staff came forward and took away the item as another group brought along another item. This time it was another item covered in a cloth, but it wasn't a box.

Instead, the item looked slightly circular in feature. The lady Yu Min walked forward and pulled up the cloth revealing a white egg with small black splotches on its shell.

"This is the egg of an Emerald Winged Lizard. As many of you might know, the Emerald Winged Lizard is a very rare beast to find even in the southern forest."

"It has very high chance of reaching the True Realms and very, very tiny chances of reaching the Saint realm. Since it's an egg, you can get it attached to you and very easily bond with it."

"So, we are starting the bid at 100 spirit stones with the minimum bid being at least 1 spirit stone. Begin," Yu Min said as he hit her hammer.

"Another beast huh? Those seem to be quite popular in these auction houses. Although, I can't complain. They really are quite great," Alex thought as he remembered how strong Pearl was.

However, he also knew that Pearl was an exception to all of these and probably had a guaranteed chance to enter the saint realm, just like his mother. "I just need to find a way to speed up his cultivation," Alex said.

The bid for the egg continued at a high rate. Anyone with a brain would bid for a beast that could easily reach the True realm.

In the end, the people had to stop bidding cause the bid was getting too high. Yu Min did the countdown and ended the auction for the egg.

" The final bid is 600 spirit stones. The egg will go to the guest in room D4," Yu Min announced.

Once again the staff members swapped the items.

"D4?... isn't that directly above mine?" Alex thought. He looked at the other rooms outside of his windows and could see the names.

His own room was N4. Since there was 20 lettered room each with 10 individual names to themselves, D4 was directly above N4.

'I wonder who is staying there? Some kind of sect leader or elder?' Alex wondered.

The next item on the list was announced. It was a Common Heaven-grade sword that had decent sharpness and weight to it. It could be used by any sword user without any drawbacks.

The sword was auctioned for 110 spirit stones and it went up until a man in room J7 won it for 250 spirit stones. Unfortunately for the auctioneers, this one didn't go as high as they wanted it to.

The next item being sold on the list was a cultivation method. Alex wasn't interested in it first, but when Yu Min said that it was a Cultivation Method for a true realm user, his interest was caught.

'Should I get it?' he wondered. However, he wasn't in the True realm yet and this would be like putting the carts before the horse.

'I need to reach the True realm first before I worry about Cultivation methods. Besides, this is an Earth-grade one. Maybe the Tiger sect has a higher one,' Alex thought. In the end, he decided to give up on it.

The Cultivation method was sold to a person from the hall down below for 360 spirit stones.

Chapter 299: The Man from D4

A bunch of more ingredients was being sold and the auction wasn't close to being halfway done. The prices were barely at around 4 to 6 True Spirit stones. There were items with a lot more value being sold later on for sure.

Alex was getting lazy when suddenly a feeling appeared inside him. It was very, very, very minute, but he caught it and thought, 'An alchemy ingredient?'

Yu Min pulled the cloth and revealed a box with a small flower inside of it. Yu Min pulled out the flower to show to everyone and said, "This is an Umbra Lotus, a flower with incredible Yin Qi. "

"It can be used to make pills with Yin energy or be used in poisons. There are also Yin bases formations and artifacts that can possibly use this flower as it's incredibly versatile."

"The bid for the Umbra Lotus will start at 280 spirit stones and can only be increased by a minimum of 5 spirit stones," Yu Min declared.

The audience was a little taken aback. The minimum bid price had suddenly increased. Meaning, everything from now on was going to be way more expensive with each bid.

"You may now begin," Yu Min said as she banged the gavel on the wood.

The bid amount had increased but that wasn't a deterrent to any of the people with money. As soon as they were allowed, they immediately started to bid.

The bid increased 5 spirit stones at a time and soon the bid was at 400 spirit stones.

'Should I get in on it too?' Alex thought. An alchemy ingredient, especially one that had the higher energy Yin as well.

'Why not? Not like I'm going to lose anything whether I get it or not,' Alex thought and started bidding.

"500 spirit stones," he bid. However, his bid was immediately outbid by someone else. Even though many people wanted it, Alex could head that the guy in D4 really tried his best to outbid everyone.

'Does this guy want everything?' Alex wondered.

"580 spirit stones," Alex tried to bid again.

"600 spirit stones," the man immediately outbid him again. A few other people tried to bid against him but people couldn't really outbid the man.

"Ahem," a voice came from the same room where the bid was happening. The voice was quite low, however, and only Alex and a few others near the room could hear it.

'Did they accidentally leave the mic on?' Alex wondered.

"Uncle, let the other people get the flower. You don't really need it right?" A young voice appeared from the room in contrast with the old man's voice.

"630 spirit stones," the man bid loudly and addressed the young man's queries. "Uhh... Nah. I'll just get it cause I can," the man said.

"Sigh, uncle. What will you even do with that flower?" the young voice asked.

"I don't know. I will let the alchemists and formation masters figure it out," the older voice said and continued bidding.

Alex was beyond dumbfounded by what he was hearing. 'Get something just because he can? Just how rich is this guy. Could it be he is the son of a rich merchant?' Alex wondered.

The man reminded him of Huo Tu. He also was used to throwing around money to get what he wanted, even when fighting, and didn't really care about others.

'I hate these types of men,' Alex thought. Unfortunately, the world loved these people. The man managed to outbid every single person in the Umbra Lotus big and successfully won it.

"The Umbra Lotus has been won by the guest in D4 for 740 spirit stones," Yu Min announced.

Not many people clapped at the announcement as they did earlier on. It seemed the people had already started hating the man on D4.

Yu Min didn't pay attention to the people's sentiment and proceeded with the auction. The next item was a Fan artifact that sent out gusts of wind which could disrupt the balance as well as the focus of anyone below the True Lord realm.

The bid started at 300 spirit stones and went up 5 spirit stones at a time.

As soon as Yu Min hit the gavel, people started bidding immediately. People started outbidding each other, but the man from D4 never joined the bidding war.

450, 500, 550.

The bid quickly reached 600 around which the bid started slowing down. There were still a few dedicated bidders who really wanted it, but the others had stopped by now.

"760 spirit stone," a man from VVIP room I5 bid.

He waited for the other woman that was currently on a bidding war with him to bid, but she never bid again. It seemed the bid was finalized.

Yu Min waited for a few minutes and asked, "Any more bids?" seeing no one answer, she started hitting the gavel.

"760 spirit stones going once."

"760 spirit stones going twice."

"760 spirit stones go-"

"770 spirit stones" A familiar, but equally hated voice spoke at the last moment. The people in the hall looked up with hateful eyes at room D4. Although they couldn't see anyone that was inside, they could still let the person know that they hated it.

"What? Do you guys want the fan too? Then why don't you bid it?" the man said. The audience got a little angry and a person decided to bid.

"775 spiri-"

"780 spirit stones." Before the other man could even finish, the man from D4 outbid him.

"785-"

"790 spirit stones," the man bid again.

"800 spiri—"

"810 spirit stones." The man who had been bidding all this time tried to join the bidding war as well, but he was immediately outbid.

In the end, the man couldn't continue and gave up the fan to the man in D4. Yu Min waited a bit more and counted. However, there was no one that was going to stop the gavel now.

"Congratulations to the guest in D4 for buying the Millennium Feathered Fan for 810 spirit stones."

Chapter 300: True Mortal Grade Armor

The auction continued. It had been half an hour now and around 8 items had been sold until now. 6 out of those 8 items however had been won by the man in D4.

People were extremely angry at the man right now. Normally, one would only be jealous or envious of seeing a man with so much money.

But the man from D4 was not only showing off his money, he was ruining the auction for the rest of the people here. Not only did he bid for items immediately after someone else bid for it, from time to time he would tell them to bid for it if they could.

That was a level of arrogance that people did not like.

The latest item sold was a pill cauldron of True Earth grade, exactly the same in grade as Alex's Golden Jade cauldron. The cauldron was sold to a person from room F8 for 950 spirit stones. It seemed the man from D4 was not interested in alchemy at all.

Another tray of items appeared and Yu Min pulled off the cloth from atop it revealing a thin, black shirt.

"Huh?" Alex thought. "Why is a T-shirt being sold here. How did the design even come into the game? Is this an... what is it called?? easter egg? or are the players already influencing the game world enough?" Alex wondered.

Whatever the case, he was looking forward to why a t-shirt would be in an auction this late.

Yu Min picked up the T-shirt and showed it to the audience. "This is an armor, crafted by an elder of Tranquil Union sect and recently brought here to be sold. It is a True Mortal grade armor that can block the physical attacks from anyone below True Master realm."

"Let us show you," she said and brought out two different people. One was in the self tempering realm, while the other one was in the True Disciple realm.

The weaker man wore the armor and withdrew all cultivation base until he looked like nothing more than a mortal.

Alex had seen this before and as he expected, the True realm man hit the Self tempering realm man and he was not hurt at all.

'Wow, this is much better than blue armor Huo Tu was wearing. I must get this,' he thought.

"As you can see, the armor is truly amazing, especially for those still in the Self Tempering realm. Best of all, the armor needs no refining to work properly and is 100% usable from the very start."

"The bid will start at 800 spirit stones and increase by 10 spirit stones at a minimum. Please begin," Yu Min said and hit the wood with her gavel.

The armor was very valuable and thus everyone jumped on the bid. Alex wanted to join too but decided to wait for just a little longer until the number of people bidding was lower.

Soon the bid reached 1000 spirit stones. Everything was fine, and people were bidding happily, but then the man from D4 decided to join the bidding war as well.

"1040 spirit stones," he bid. As soon as he joined, the rest of the crowd grew quiet.

"1050 spirit stones," someone else tried to bid while everyone was silent but was immediately shut down when the man bid once more.

Someone else tried to join in but they were shut down as well.

Alex looked at the situation and frowned. He really wanted the armor and was an amazing one too since it was so thin and wouldn't be seen as one. But he didn't want to go against this man.

'F*ck. I need to get braver and take my chances,' he thought to himself and decided to join in.

"1100 spirit stones," he bid, but he knew another bid was coming.

"1110 spirit stones," the man in D4 bid, but Alex didn't let him get away with it.

"1120 spirit stones," he immediately bid back.

"1130 spirit stones," the man bid back too.

"1140 spirit stones," Alex wasn't backing down either.

The back and forth was intense and lasted for a little while until it reached 2000 spirit stones. 20? True spirit stones were considered a bit too much even for an item like this, but Alex didn't care. He needed armor and had the money, so he would spend it as he saw fit.

The man was about to make another bid when suddenly a small voice only a few rooms in the vicinity could hear appeared once more.

"Uncle, why are you fighting for an armor like this? I can't understand you. You have a galore of armors much better than this," the young man spoke once more.

The staff lady in Alex's room suddenly walked up to him and said, "Please excuse me for a moment, dear guest." Then she left the room. Alex didn't know what she was doing but he didn't bother her.

"Haha, but it's fun though," the older man from D4 replied and bid back, "2010 spirit stones."

Alex didn't want to give up just now, "2020 spirit stones."

"It seems the fellow from below us really wants it, Uncle, why don't you stop this?" the young man said.

"Haha, his voice sounds so young, it must be a kid younger than you, Nephew. Let me see," the man said.

Alex didn't understand what the man was saying but suddenly, his heart dropped. He could feel something washing over him. Over his body, over his cloth, and over his face.

'Spiritual Sense,' Alex thought in shock. It was good that he didn't send out spiritual sense to check the different people in his vicinity, or he would've revealed himself by now. He tried to not show his shock and stayed as calm as possible.

"Oh, this young fellow... hahaha...you are right Nephew, I should let this young man take the armor. It might—" the man suddenly stopped as another much smalled and barely audible voice appeared from the room.

"Dear guest, you are pressing the button for the speaker and your words have been broadcasting to the nearby vicinity."

Chapter 301: Spirit Stone Cave

Alex could hear his staff member's voice from the room above. 'So that's where she went. To let them know what was wrong,' he thought.

"Hmm..." the young man said, "oh, my bad." After that, no more sound leaked from the room. But the spiritual sense was still on Alex and it didn't leave him a bit.

The man didn't bid a spirit stone more and most of the others were already too disheartened to continue bidding.

Yu Min saw that there was no more bid and asked, "Does anyone have a bid higher than 2020 spirit stones?"

No one dared bid anymore.

"2020 spirit stones going once."

"2020 spirit stones going twice."

"2020 spirit stones going thrice. Sold," Yu Min said as she hit the surface with her gavel.

"The armor has been sold to the guest on N4 for 2020 spirit stones," she announced and proceeded to start preparing another item to sell.

Alex should have been incredibly happy to get his hands on the armor, but he couldn't right now. In fact, the emotion he was feeling right now could be in a way considered the exact opposite.

Fear

He was terrified out of his mind that he was being monitored by a person with a spiritual sense. The spiritual sense was hard to come by as barely anyone could get their hands on the Spirit Cleansing Lilies due to their difficulty in harvesting them.? That meant that...

'This man most likely has a saint realm cultivation,' Alex thought.

Ma Rong had told him that Saint Realm folks were available in the Crimson Empire and that they liked to hide, but Alex never thought that he would actually meet one.

Not only meet but get targeted by one. Alex had a perfectly calm face, in fact, he even had a small smile on his face, but on the inside, he was freaking out.

'What does he want? Is he after something I own? Did he notice my spiritual sense by some chance? Did he notice my talent and body? Is he after my body? Is he a pervert? Was he there in the coliseum when I made the 60% pill? Does he have good intentions or malicious ones? Why is he keeping his spirituals sense on me for so long?'

Hundreds of thoughts ran across Ning's head, but none he could answer.

The auction went along normally, and the people as well as the Saint Realm man bid on the different items. But Alex could not focus on any of it.

All of his focus was on not making a single wrong move that could tip off the man that he had spiritual sense and that he could sense him too.

The man already seemed interested in him, he didn't want to give any more reason.

After half an hour or so, Alex started to feel less nervous as he got used to the constant supervision. He finally started paying attention to the auction.

"The deed of the land in Cardinal City has been sold to the gentlemen at I9 for 4500 spirit stones," Yu Min announced.

The land sold just now was on the outskirts of the town and away from the market and other business places. Even then the land was sold for 45 True spirit stones.

Alex was surprised how far people would go to get a piece of land in the capital city.

The auction continued and more and more amazing items started getting auctioned off. An armor that could stop any attacks below the True Lord realm, a pair of communication talismans that worked up to a thousand kilometers distance, a poison that could kill anyone under the True King realm if they did not get an antidote in the next 5 minutes.

The things being sold in the auction were amazing and something that Alex had never seen before in his life.

He even saw an Earth grade Thousand Poisons Antidote, a True rank version of Hundred Poison Antidote,? with a harmony of 42% be sold for nearly 50 True Spirit stones.

"We are onto the final 2 items of the day. The 2nd most valuable item of today's auction is this," Yu Min said as she revealed a piece of paper.

People started wondering what it was and waited for her to start speaking. "This is a contract that allows you to claim ownership to the newly discovered spirit stone cave in Cochineal city."

"The bid will start at 50 True spirit stones and go up 50 spirit stones at minimum, begin." The gavel hit the table.

This was a very expensive item and not many people could afford it.

'Oh wow, a deed to a spirit stone cave. Anyone who manages to get it would be incredibly rich,' Alex thought.

Spirit stone caves were where the spirit stones were mined. Spirit stones were normal stones in caves that mutated after absorbing all the energy of a spirit vine and running it dry.

If a spirit vine was of Common rank, the spirit stones that formed would be normal spirit stones.

If a spirit vine was of True rank, the spirit stones that formed would be True spirit stones.

The spirit stones always formed in a cuboid structure but were incredibly hard to break off from the walls. Not only that, but they were also very delicate and could easily lose all Qi in it if one were to accidentally damage it too hard.

So anyone that owned spirit stone caves would also have to hire talented and strong workers so that the harvest would be done with minimum damage to the spirit stones.

Still, anyone that owned a spirit stone cave was bound to get rich, given that they didn't mess up really bad at acquiring quality workers.

Alex saw that most of the people really wanted it but not many could bid for its immense price. Thankfully for everyone else, the man at D4 did not get in on the bidding war.

People kept on bidding and the bid soon reached 70 spirit stones. That was more than the cost entire 23 pills he sold 2 days ago. It still didn't stop increasing.

In the end, the spirit stone cave's ownership was sold to the guest in room B10.

Chapter 302: Spirit Disorienting Formation

"The ownership of the spirit stone cave is sold to the guest at B10 for a price of 89 True Spirit stone," Yu Min announced to the crowd.

The rest of the people sighed in disappointment that they did not get to acquire such an amazing item, but looked forward to the next item as it was the best in the auction.

Alex was also curious as to what the best item in the auction was going to be. If the second last item was a spirit stone cave, then what was the final one going to be?

Even though he was constantly being monitored by the man at D4 for some reason, he had given up on trying to worry about it. As long as the man with a possible cultivation base in the saint realm was looking at him, he doubted he was going to get free so easily.

After the auction, he decided to confront the guy. 'There is a high chance I might end up dying, so I should send out my money as soon as I can,' he thought and started cautiously making gestures in the air.

He made sure to not making it obvious that he was doing something as the man above was watching him. He quickly sent 40 True Spirit stones back to his bank account and kept the 26 True spirit stones for himself as he would need them to buy the armor.

The final item of the auction appeared on the stage and Yu Min walked up to it. She stayed there for a few seconds letting the audience's expectations reach sky high and finally revealed the item.

On the tray in front of Yu Min were a bunch of metal poles with cloth attached to the top.

'Formation flags?' Alex was a little surprised. He did not expect the item being auctioned off at the final was actually going to be a formation flag.

"These are the formation flags for the formation called Spirit Disorienting Formation. It's a True Rank formation that can be used to trap anyone inside of it."

"As long as the one being trapped is not in the Saint realm, you can trap anyone in it for a very long time."

"With a Mortal grade formation placement, you can trap someone for up to 2 days."

"With an Earth Grade formation placement, you can trap someone for up to 20 days."

"With a Heaven grade formation placement, you can trap someone for up to 50 days."

"The formation traps the enemies by disorienting them, and not letting them know where the exit is. It also spins the space inside from time to time to keep the enemies trapped for a long time."

"The instruction to the usage and setup is all written on this paper that you can acquire along with the formation flags."

"The price to start the formation is 2 True Spirit stone every time. So, the starting bid for the formation flags is 60 True Spirit stones and will only allow an increment of 1 True spirit stone at a minimum. Begin," Yu Min said.

The people lost their cool as soon as the bids were allowed and before anyone could even comprehend what the other person was speaking, the bid jumped up to 80 True spirit stones.

"81 True Spirit stones," someone bid.

"82 True Spirit stones," another person bid.

The bid continued and soon it had grown to 100 True spirit stones. There were still 10 or more people who kept on bidding on the formation flags.

As things started to die down and the competition wasn't as intense anymore, someone else finally joined in on the fun.

"112 True Spirit stones," the Saint realm man from room D4 bid.

"113 True Spirit stones," another man tried to bid, but he knew he was simply throwing a stone at the ocean, barely making a splash.

"115 True spirit stones," the man bid. People couldn't help but wonder what the person did as a job to earn so much money. He had nearly spent over 1000 True spirit stones today alone.

Even if he was rich, he was incredibly frivolous. Other people tried their hand at bidding once more, but that didn't work.

They would be easily outbid by the man in a single second. In the end, a few tried to screw with him by giving him a higher price for the item, but he didn't back down.

At some point, he simply stayed quiet. People started getting scared that they would have to pay the amount they had bid, but thankfully the man continued.

Once people learned how easy it was to destroy their own lives by overbidding in exchange for a moment of happiness, they stopped.

"140 True spirit stones," the man bid, still confident to take on anyone joining, but no one would bid anymore. They couldn't even bid even if they wanted to.

Yu Min checked the atmosphere and asked, "Does anyone have a bid higher than 140?", but nobody answered.

"140 True Spirit stones? going once."

"140 True Spirit stones going twice."

"140 True spirit stone going thrice. Sold." She hit the gavel.

"The formation flags and instructions have been bought by the guest at room D4 for 140 True spirit stones," Yu Min declared. The staff arrived and took the trolley away.

"This marks the end of the auction. Thank you all for coming and making this auction as successful as it was. For those that have bought or sold something today, please follow the staff to where they take you."

"As for everyone else, you may leave as you like. Thank you." Yu Min bowed to the crowd and the curtains closed in on her, hiding her away.

"Please follow me dear guest," the staff member that was standing with Alex the entire time spoke and brought him along to a room down the hall on the outside of the auction hall.

Even as he left, however, the spiritual sense of the man loomed over him, making him fear every single second of being here.

Chapter 303: Run

Alex was brought to a room where the armor artifact was already on the table with another man sitting on the couch beyond it.

As soon as Alex walked in, he stood up and greeted.

Alex returned the greeting too, but it was a bit awkward. He was still very tense from the constant monitoring of the man in the spiritual realm.

However, all of a sudden, it stopped. Alex could no longer feel any spiritual sense in him. 'He stopped after I entered the room? Did he just want to check where the armor was? Or is he just not interested anymore?' Alex wondered.

'Or was I just paranoid and the man was just sending out his spiritual sense everywhere and not just at me?' Alex thought and almost called himself stupid. He sighed in massive relief.

That was the most possible explanation and he felt dumb that he didn't think of that. However, in his defense, he felt the spiritual sense of a Saint Realm cultivator and couldn't think straight due to his fear.

'Yeah, what would a Saint Realm cultivator even want from a Self Tempering realm brat like me? Sigh, at least that is over,' he thought.

"Dear guest here is your armor," the man said as he presented the armor to Alex. Alex walked up and checked it as he stroked the surface.

He could see a name pop up with not much information to it.

[Onyx Skin Armor

Grade - Mortal]

Alex nodded and took out 20 True spirit stones as well as 20 spirit stones and handed them to the man. The man bowed and gestured for Alex to take it.

"May I wear this right now?" he asked.

"Whatever you wish, dear guest," the man said.

Alex thanked him and took off his upper robe. His incredibly well-built body was on full display. His muscles were really toned and he didn't look much strong. But one could tell that those small muscles carried incredible strength.

Alex already had a good-looking body from when he randomly chose one when starting the game, but after body cultivating for over a month, it was even more incredible.

The staff lady blushed a little when she saw him. Alex did not care about them and wore the T-shirt armor.

"Woah," he was surprised. It felt like the cloth was hugging his body and he could no longer feel any air or temperature from the outside.

"I can't feel it despite my focus mode being perpetually active?" Ning thought in surprise. He hit his chest a bit, but couldn't feel anything.

"Well, it doesn't cover my whole body, but simply having some protection on my vital organs should be good," he thought.

Once he was done checking everything, he nodded farewell to the person and walked out of the room. The staff lady accompanied him to the door where he left her and walked into the busy streets.

The normal guests were leaving the auction house just now as well as the many other auction house guests. So the crowd on the street was quite a lot.

Alex could see the disciples from many other sects too and wondered what items the other auction houses sold.

Having nothing else to do, he decided to leave. He started walking east to reach a crossroad from where he could take north and reach his hotel.

He walked at a normal pace, slightly happy about finally getting armor. Just as he reached the intersection, however, something happened.

A spiritual sense washed over him, nearly stopping him in his tracks.

'No, it's probably not for me. The man must be just randomly sending it out,' he tried to hope for the best. Still, he knew that he had to prepare for the worst, so he went south instead of north.

He kept walking south and suddenly turned east. The spiritual sense did not leave him a single moment. The feeling of fear that had left him started returning.

After walking for a little while, he turned north. The spiritual sense was still on him. He walked further for a bit and turned west and continued walking.

The spiritual sense did not leave him at all. Finally, he reached back to the crossroad he was at before and yet the spiritual sense was still on him.

He was absolutely sure now; He was being followed by the Saint realm man. 'F*ck it," Alex thought and immediately started sprinting, but the street up north and west was crowded, so he was forced to run towards the west.

He wanted to run as fast as he could and walk out of the range of the spiritual sense. He ran as fast as his body allowed him to and soon, he was out of the range.

But the man was in Saint realm, so Alex knew he wasn't getting away at all.

Alex went into an alley and disappeared. He went invisible and contained all of his aura to make him untraceable. However, just as he was about to teleport to somewhere close, an aura descended upon him, letting him know that the man was here.

The man landed in the middle of the dark alley and used both his cultivation base and spiritual sense to check for Alex nearby.

"Oh, there you are," he said when he saw Alex hidden away near him.

Unfortunately for Alex, he couldn't escape the spiritual sense even when his aura and image had disappeared. "That's an interesting technique you have there. Seems quite useful too. I will think if I want it or not later though," he said.

Alex was trapped in the place due to the cultivation base and couldn't move. The pressure was somehow stopping him from moving his Qi altogether.

The veil disappeared and Alex appeared in normal light. He looked at the man in front of him.

The man looked like he was in his early 40s. He still had his black hairs but looked like they would go gray at any moment. His face was a little square-ish and the beards on them were short and rough.

The man was wearing a red robe and was about the same height as Alex.

Out of all of this, however, there was only one thing that really surprised him.

The man was not in Saint realm.

Chapter 304: Devouring Earth

'How could it be? He is weaker than Master,' Alex thought. He was under the assumption that the man was in the Saint realm, but seeing that he was around True lord or maybe even True Master realm, Alex was really surprised.

Still, the difference in cultivation was so high that Alex couldn't do anything to the suppression.

'Does that mean that he used a Spirit Cleansing lily? I shouldn't be surprised. I might not be the only one capable of picking one in the entire game,' Alex thought. The pressure on him was starting to get bad, but he could only struggle.

However, at that moment, a warm flow of hot energy burst out from deep within him. It relieved a lot of pressure from him, but he still couldn't move or use his Qi.

"Haha, little brother, don't struggle. I'm not going to hurt you," the man said with a smile on his face, but he didn't bother lifting the pressure at all.

Alex had learned his lesson before and didn't trust the man at all. He glared at him with eyes that would harm if they could.

"Haha, don't look at me like that, it's true. I only want to know a little something from you brother. You see, I am still not sure that it is you who I am looking for," the man said.

"What do you want?" Alex asked. "My armor? Did you come here for that?" Alex asked.

"Armor? I don't need that crappy armor. I have many fine armors back at home. I am here for something else," the man said.

"What do you want then? Do you want my money? My life?" Alex started shouting at the man, but it was all a ruse. He was secretly preparing something.

He needed a split second, that was all he needed. For that, he could use his heaven's impact and create an opening. That was when he was going to run away from the man.

The Flickering Shadow technique had a maximum range of 10 meters and the man had a much higher range with his spirit stone alone, so he couldn't just teleport out of here now.

He needed a different strategy. Thankfully, he had one.

"You see kid, a week or two ago, I was in an auction where I managed to buy-" the man suddenly lost consciousness.

Alex had used the opportunity of the man talking to sneakily launch Heaven's impact. As soon as one was launched, he launched another one as well.

The man had barely come back to himself when Heaven's Impact landed on him once more making him unconscious once more.

When he finally opened his eyes in the next moment, Alex was gone.

"Damn, where did he go?" the man frantically searched for Alex with his spiritual sense reaching a distance of nearly 100 meters, he couldn't find his anywhere.

He tried to remember back to the moment just now when he was attacked.

"That was... Spiritual energy, wasn't it?" the man asked himself.

"Ha- Haha-hahaha, So it really is him. I was right, I finally found him," the man started laughing with immense pleasure for some reason.

"I must search him once more and thank him personally. I must thank him for auctioning that Spirit Cleansing Lily and allowing me to acquire this Spiritual Sense," the man said.

"Now I must find him and know how he acquired them."

Now that Alex was no longer in there, the man walked out of the alleyway. His clothing caught the attention of many who immediately bowed towards him once and started walking away.

The man seemed to be used to it and didn't mind any of it. He took simply walked away from that place.

********

Far away, somewhere unknown, Alex opened his eyes and quickly wiped away the dirt on his face. He used his Qi to quickly get rid of the red of the dirt.

'Where am I?' he wondered as he looked around. It seemed to be an old abandoned warehouse or something.

Alex quickly went out and looked around, only to see that he was in the residential area of the city, and sighed in relief. His third Immortal grade technique worked just as it claimed.

Alex had gotten 7 techniques from Wen Cheng aside from the Elusive Heavenly Sword. Of them 3 were attack techniques, 2 were defense, 1 was movement and the final one was an escape technique.

Of them, all of them were at Heaven grade, except for the escape technique, which was called Devouring Earth Escape.

The Devouring Earth Escape technique was an Immortal grade technique.

The technique devoured the user with the land underneath them and pumped them out of a different place. It wasn't a teleportation ability as the earth delivered him to the destination on its own.

When one used the technique, the earth would open up below them and carry them through the ground to a different location on its own.

Alex had used the technique at the perfect time when the 2nd Heaven's impact had hit the man and he managed to run away at the same time.

"This really is a cool technique," Alex said. Still, the technique had its flaws as well.

First of all, the user could never set the destination. He would have to use the technique and hope for a good direction to go at.

Second of all, the distance was based on the user's Qi density. The higher the density, the further the man would go. The user could choose to go lower than the maximum distance, but never higher. So the low-level cultivators couldn't use it very well.

However, to Alex whose Qi was very dense, this wasn't a very big problem.

Alex looked to the surroundings and hoped that the man in red didn't see him. 'Just who was that?' Alex wondered.

Once the vicinity was a little bit quieter, he took out a pill and ate it. Suddenly, A veil of light appeared from his body that was using Qi to create the veil.

After that, his face changed.

Chapter 305: I Sold It

The Great Illusion pill used the person's Qi to create a face and continued staying there as long as the Qi was supplied. The higher the harmony of the pill, the lower the qi requirement.

Alex walked into the road with a different face. It took him a while to realize that he was in the south west part of the city.

He now had to walk all the way diagonal to the other side of the city to reach his hotel. Thankfully, it was only 3 PM and he wouldn't get scolded like the other day.

It took him a little over half an hour to reach his hotel. Even though he tried to walk very fast, the crowd just didn't let him.

Finally, after reaching the hotel, he walked directly up to his room. He opened the door and walked in.

Wan Li was already inside, looking at some sort of map or something when he noticed Alex. He hurriedly hid everything and brought out a small dagger.

"Wh-Who are you?" he asked while pointing the dagger at Alex. A strong pressure emanated from Wan Li that nearly suffocated Alex.

Alex immediately undid his face change and said, "Brother Wan, it's me. Please stop." The 3rd Mind Tempering realm Wan Li was a little too strong for Alex, even with his body cultivation.

"Oh," Wan Li said when Alex's veil came off and his real face was shown. "It's you, brother Yu. I thought you were a thief or something. You should have changed your face before entering the room," he said.

"Sorry, I needed to make sure nobody could see me coming here," he said.

Wan Li tried asking a few questions but Alex didn't say anything. "I will just go rest for a while, Brother Wan. It's been a long day for me," Alex said and went to his bed.

Wan Li went back to his papers and didn't bother with Alex anymore.

Once on the bed, Alex logged out.

Alex was now out of the game, but he couldn't stop wondering why the man was after him.

'How did he get a lily to begin with? Even the book in the library said its incredibly difficult. Are there others like me who can see the names?' Alex wondered.

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that there were probably others with a skill like Alchemy God's Knowledge. That would mean that there were others who could recognize the ingredients as well.

He tried remembering what the man had tried to say, but his memory wasn't as good outside of the game. 'Sigh, my mind is probably connected to some sort of server for me to be able to remember everything in the game, but not outside of it,' Alex thought.

He took his phone and walked out to the Kitchen. Hannah was there already, eating some food herself.

"Oh, you're here? Aren't you going to spend the whole day in the game?" she asked.

"I could, but I didn't want to today. Anyway, what are you looking at? Shouldn't you be focusing on your meal instead of your phone?" Alex asked.

"Oh, look," Hannah said as she showed him her phone.

-$238,400 has been transferred to your account XXXXXXXXXXX87-

"My hubby gave me a few more spirit stones today to cultivate with. Shame I can't really use them since I don't have a technique. Still, I can't believe he loves me so much. For an NPC, he feels so real," Hannah said.

"Oh, that reminds me," Alex thought and immediately checked his phone. As expected 36,000 dollars had been added to his bank account as well.

"Well, it's not as much as yours, but I earned it on my own," Alex said as he showed her the phone.

"Oh wow, that's amazing. I probably couldn't even make half of what you are making if it weren't for my hubby," she said.

Alex couldn't help but smile a little hearing her call a game character 'Hubby'. He looked at the date and time while eating and lamented at the fact that the 1-week break was going to end soon.

'I hope the competition lasts no more than until Sunday. I don't want to waste too much of my classes in case I am stuck there,' he thought.

Once he finished eating he went back into the game. He didn't have anything else to do, so he spent his time understanding the alchemy knowledge he had acquired in the library.

Finally, it was time for the meeting. Last night's meeting had nothing happen in it, so he wasn't expecting much from this day's meeting as well.

Just as he thought, the meeting had nothing happening in it today as well. The production-based events were over, so there wasn't much effort on Ma Rong's side to keep these meetings interesting.

She simply told them that they could do whatever they wanted and spoke a few words of encouragement and the meeting was over.

"Master," Alex walked up front while everyone else left.

"What do you need?" Ma Rong asked.

"Actually..." he explained everything regarding today's event and told her how someone with a spiritual sense followed him.

Ma Rong was immediately concerned and asked more questions, but Alex didn't have answers either. "I thought it was for the armor I won against him, but it was more like he allowed me to win it. I do not know what is going on," he said.

"That is weird. Someone with a spiritual sense-That would mean that he used a lily right?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, I wonder if he found a lily or bought-" Alex stopped mid-thought. Now that he was back in the game, his Eidetic memory was back as well.

"Oh no," he said as the color drained from his face.

"What's wrong?" Ma Rong asked.

"He-When I was about to escape, he said he bought something a few weeks ago. If what he bought was the lily then... He is after me because I am the one who sold it."

Chapter 306: Face Change again

"What did you say? You sold a lily?" Ma Rong said in surprise.

Alex's face still had shock written all over it. "Yes, i-I thought it was a good idea at the time to sell a single lily since it would bring me so many spirit stones," Alex said.

"How could you be so stupid to sell a precious item like that?" Ma Rong scolded.

"I-I hadn't realized how terrible this world was at the time and ended up foolishly selling the flower away," Alex said.

"Lord and this man is the one that bought it?" she asked.

"I assume so. I think he was trying to capture me to get some more, but I managed to escape, so I couldn't fully understand his intentions at the time, but that must be it," Alex said as he started thinking more.

Ma Rong asked more questions regarding the sales of the flower and Alex told her everything he knew. She fell into deep thought for a while and Alex waited for her to speak.

"But how could he have gotten your face?" Ma Rong asked.

"How? The auction house probably gave it, right? Everyone there seems to know the guest's face" Alex asked.

"That's not possible. Especially since your face alone isn't enough. The staff doesn't know what you are there for, they only know that you are important. Your actual information would only be circulated amongst the innermost staff, and that too would be nearly impossible in this case since your sale was remote," Ma Rong said.

"That means that there are likely only 3 people in the auction house that could possibly know your information, but even they wouldn't do something shady like that. The reputation of their entire auction house is on the line if they ever see inside information, especially of a guess as expensive as you," Ma Rong said.

"Then how could it have happened?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. Tell me about the man once again?" Ma Rong asked. Alex described his face the best he could.

"That is too generic of a face. What about his cloth?" she asked.

"He was wearing a red robe," Alex said.

"Red... that too is generic. There are dozens of sects in the competition with a red robe. It is likely an elder from one of these sects," Ma Rong asked.

"I figured that too master, so I was thinking of changing my face for the rest of the competition," Alex said.

"Hmm... That might be a good idea," Ma Rong said.

"The committee won't say anything about that right? What if they don't allow me?" Alex asked.

"Don't worry. There are too many disciples in the competition, and no one remembers your face. So as long as your Qi remains the same, you won't be in any trouble," Ma Rong said.

"I see. Thank you, master," Alex said.

"Do you need Face Changing pills?" Ma Rong asked.

"I've got these, they might work," Alex said and showed his pills. He hadn't made any new Face Changing pill recently, so the highest one lasted for 42 hours.

"That won't do. Take this," Ma Rong said and handed him a Face Changing pill with 58% harmony. The pill would last 58 hours too.

"Thank you, master." With nothing else to say, he bid Ma Rong a good night and left the room.

He returned back to the room and go onto his bed. Wan Li was still reading his paper, so Alex didn't bother him and directly started cultivating.

He called out Pearl and kept him in his robes. Once Pearl started cultivating, he too started body cultivating. After that, he started cultivating normally, and soon, he fell into a trance and lost consciousness.

Alex opened his eyes at 6:00 in the morning. He stopped Pearl and sent him back to the left arm.

'Today is going to be a long day,' he thought. Unlike the other 4 days, today was supposed to last for a really long time. He was told that today would last until the competition ended, but that would take a long time, so he wasn't sure how long 'today' was going to last.

Since he didn't have much time in the day to eat, he decided to log out now and eat.

Alex opened the lid to the capsule and walked out. He went to the bathroom to freshen up and then went to the kitchen to eat some light meal.

He made a light milkshake with some fruits and drank it before returning back to his room to disappear back into the game world.

He opened his eyes back in the game and looked at the time on the right-hand corner of his screen. It was about time to leave. However, before that, he needed to do something.

He reached into his storage bag and pulled out a Face Changing pill. Unlike yesterday's pill, this was irreversible and he would get access to his face back only after the duration was over.

The one he had in his hand was a 58% harmony pill. That was enough for him to have a different face the entirety of today, tomorrow, and partially into Sunday as well; and finally, get his face back around the nighttime.

So, without thinking, he popped the pill in his mouth and swallowed it. Energy started releasing from the pill as it coursed into his bones, his muscles, and his skin.

Although the pill was called a Face-changing pill, it changed everything about a person's body, making them practically a new person.

'Imagine having this pill, but a permanently working one, I wonder how much that would sell for,' Alex wondered.

He knew what to do here, so he simply thought of a face, one that he saw in the mirror all the time. The bones and muscle remained the same as he wished for them to be so, but the face slowly started morphing and changing until he was no longer recognizable.

Chapter 307: Combat Competitions

The hair receded back into his head as his eyes changed colors and went back to being brown. His facial structure also moved a little and he was back to looking like his real-life self.

"Brother Wan, I've changed face once more, please don't freak out," he told Wan Li. Wan Li seemed pretty trigger happy last time so as to caution he let him know beforehand.

Wan Li looked up from his papers and said, "Oh, you look... different. Why did you change? Aren't you going to take part in the competition?"

"I needed to change my face a little, and master said I can take part despite having a different face, so I did," he said.

"Okay. As long as it is allowed," Wan Li said and no longer bothered him with questions regarding his face.

A knock landed on their door and both of them left the room. Once he walked outside, the various people looked at him weirdly for a second, until he explained to them what was going on.

Ma Rong left her room and asked, "Is everyone here?"

"Yes, we are ready to leave," an elder said.

"Hm, where is-Oh, you changed face already. I didn't recognize you. Let's leave," she said and started walking downstairs.

Down at the ground floor, they met Fatty Xu once more, but this time, he didn't have any remarks for them. Instead, he said, "Congratulations. You guys beat us fair and square," and left with his group.

Han Long was in the group and turned to the few and waved to them. He looked for Alex for a few seconds and left after not finding him.

Ma Rong also took her group and left.

Along the way, Ma Rong called Alex forward and silently asked, "I don't remember seeing anyone in the sect or the Scarlet city with a face like that. Is that a face belonging to someone from the Tiger sect?"

"Uhh... no. You have never seen this person before," Alex said.

"Oh, where is this person from?" Ma Rong asked.

"Uhh, it's my brother's face," Alex said.

"Your brother?" Ma Rong looked at him with a confused face. "I thought you had no siblings," Ma Rong said.

"Um... I have, but he was a mortal, and before I left my village, uh... he died," Alex lied.

Ma Rong looked at him with shock on her face. He controlled herself and said, "I see. It's a good-looking face." Ma Rong no longer asked any question and left him be.

Fan Ruogang then started pestering Alex for more information on why he changed his face and even Zhou Mei started asking some questions.

But these were questions that Alex could not answer so he just gave a random explanation and satiated their curiosity.

Around 7 pm, they finally reached the Coliseum and went straight to the arena where the majority of the sect was gathered.

"Woah," Alex said as he looked at the various sects. "There seem to be a lot more people here today. What's going on?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, there's nearly double. Did new sects get added at the last moment?" Wan Li asked.

"Pfft. You guys are letting your newbie-ness spill out right now," Fan Ruogang said while holding back her laughter.

Alex and Wan Li looked at each other in confusion. "Haha, you do know what today is right?" the Second Elder asked.

"Of course, the combat section of the competition," Alex said.

"And who takes part in the combat section?" the Second Elder asked.

"Who? Isn't it everyone?" Alex asked, but then immediately realized. "Ohhh, I see. So people skipped out on the initial part of the competition because they weren't here for the Production segment of the competition," Alex said.

"Yes, but now that it's combat, everyone including those that took part in combat is here to take part now," the Second Elder said.

"I see. No wonder there are so many people here right now," Alex said.

Fu Zhen walked into a small podium and started speaking.

"Fellow Daoists, welcome back to the competition. Today starts the combat portion of the competition. There is no theme to this competition, but we have set various different competitions, so you can take part in any of it," he said.

"However, the majority of the competition is going to be our main attraction, the single battles. Please send the best of the best from your sect to take part in those. As for the rest, please choose as you want," Fu Zhen said.

Suddenly, a massive blue screen appeared behind him. One that was larger than any of the ones that opened up before in any of the other days.

Alex looked at the competition page and was surprised by the list.

"What? Why is the setup of the competitions like that?" Alex asked.

As Fu Zhen had said, the main attraction of the competition was the single battles. So, the Single battles were what took the majority of the competition.

Surprisingly aside from the very first competition, none of the rest had any time assigned to them. All they had was an order, and the competition would last as long as it possibly could.

Alex started reading some of the competition through the top. The first competition was called the Damage test. It was part of the Single battle apparently and those who took part in that competition had to go through this.

Then came a race between the cultivators using only movement technique, race between the different beasts, race of the cultivators using only artifacts, race with both beasts and cultivators together.

Then the first main event of the day started the Singles battles. After that was over, there were other various competitions.

Then there would be another Singles battle than another competition, then other singles, then another set of battles, and finally another Singles battle would end the competition.

"That is a really weird way to set up a competition," Wan Li made the same comment Alex was about to.

Chapter 308: Final Registration

"This actually makes very good sense. They had it the same way back a year ago too and this worked perfectly," Zhou Mei said.

"Why though?" Alex asked. "If the singles battles are the main attraction then, why not have it all be done at the last, instead of spreading it thought like this?"

"It's mostly to keep the competition interesting. If the audience knew that the Singles battle was at the end of the day, they would just leave for the day and come back when the singles battle starts," the Second Elder said.

"Yes, if they do it like this, they can retain a lot more audience. Also, this helps the participants something other than just fighting continuously," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded when he heard those. "By the way, are those 4 races going to take place at the same time? Isn't that a little disadvantageous for the Beast taming sects?" Alex asked.

"No, all the competitions you see in the list will take place one after another," Ma Rong said.

"Alright, quickly look at what you want to take part in. I will call out the competitions and you raise your hands. Aside from the Singles which will take 4, every other competition is still going to only take 3," Ma Rong said.

"Singles take 4?" Alex said with surprise. There was nothing about that in the announcement or the list.

"Yeah, its an information the competition holders don't reveal, but you can have 4 competitors in the singles competition. That usually gets thinned by the first competition," Ma Rong said.

"Isn't that unfair? How are the new sects supposed to know that?" Alex asked.

"The world is not fair. If they are worth the 4 spots, they will find out on their own," Ma Rong said.

"Alright choose now, Singles," Ma Rong asked.

Wan Li and two others raised their hands. One was a girl with a 6th Meridian Tempering realm cultivation base and a man with an 8th Meridian Tempering realm cultivation base.

Anywhere else, these two would be a core disciple for sure. But in the Hong Wu sect where they measured achievement in terms of Alchemy, these two could only remain inner sect disciples.

"We can do 4. Anyone else?" Ma Rong said and looked around the group, but soon realized that they didn't have a very high cultivation base.

"Never mind, you guys won't even pass through the damage test," she said and moved on to the next competition.

"The normal race one?" she asked.

2 disciples raised their hands. One of them was the man from just now. He hadn't taken part a single time the last 4 days, so he had all of his 3 chances still.

He also raised his hand in another competition.

"The Maze run?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex immediately raised his hand, so did the other girl. This was the competition Alex was looking forward to joining after seeing its name on the list. Mazes were intriguing, to say the least, and Alex was more interested in it since it was a race as well.

To him, this was much better than the normal races.

Ma Rong asked for a few more competitions, but no one really wanted to take part in them. "Alright, Second Elder, go take them to their seats, I will get them registered," Ma Rong said and walked towards the registration place with the few of them including Alex and Wan Li.

Once in the registration place, they waited around for the others to free up spaces before it was their turn.

Alex looked around while waiting and tried to find a sect that had red robes like the man from yesterday. He found a few red robes, but none of them matched the shade of red the man was wearing.

'Is his sect not here?' Alex wondered. He looked to another sect, that wore red robes too. It was the sect belonging to Luo Xing, Luo Mei's half-sister.

Ma Rong noticed him looking at them and softly asked, "Is it them?"

"No, the shade of red doesn't match," Alex said.

"Yu Ming?" suddenly someone called from the side. He hadn't been using his spiritual sense, so he didn't sense anyone coming.

He looked to the right and saw that it was Wen Cheng.

"Master, Good morning," Alex said.

"You changed your face? Is something wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing's....uh, well something's wrong, but I can't explain here," Alex said.

"How did you recognize him?" Ma Rong asked curiously.

"Oh, he's used this same face before when I took him to... uh somewhere," Wen Cheng stopped himself at the last moment.

"To that alchemy place? You take my disciple into your sect and hope to still keep secrets?" Ma Rong said with a smirk. She seemed to be thinking of something but didn't let it show on her face.

"Tsk. I should've known with how loose his mouth is," Wen cheng said.

"Anyway, are you taking a part in the Singles battle? You can win against anyone below Mind Tempering realm, but you can't go past the first competition to even get to the actual battles," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, no. I am taking part in the Maze run," Alex said.

"Ah, that's... that's going to suit you. You might actually be too good for that," Wen Cheng said as he fell into thought.

Luo Mei arrived and greeted Ma Rong before turning to Wen Cheng and said, "Master, We are done."

"Oh, ok. Before that, this is your Junior brother, remember his face," Wen Cheng said.

"Huh? Yu Ming? Why is your face changed?" she asked. Alex gave the same question.

"Alright, we will leave. Looks like it's time for you to register as well," Wen Cheng said.

Alex nodded and walked forward with the other disciples to get registered. The others registered for their own one and Alex registered for the Maze run.

Once that was completed, the group returned back to their seat and waited for the competition to start.

Chapter 309: Royal Family

Alex walked back to the seating area with his master and the other disciples and sat along with the rest of the group.

"Master, why didn't we left the 3 back there, their competition should start anytime now, right?" Alex asked. He wasn't sure why Ma Rong brought Wan Li and the rest back to the seating area.

"Oh, it won't start right away. Since this is the fun part of the competition, we will have more audience now, as well as special guests soon," Ma Rong said.

Alex found it a little disappointing that what he loved doing, and what many loved doing wasn't fun to watch for many other people. More than half the audience only liked watching the fights.

To be fair, that was where the cultivators shined the most, but it still stung a little knowing that production competition was a little more niche.

"Oh" "ah" "Woah" "oh lord" "they're here

Multiple small murmurs appeared from the crowd. Alex wasn't sure what was happening when suddenly Ma Rong poked him.

"What's wrong Master?" he asked.

"You-You said that the guy who tried to capture you wore red right?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex felt that this was a weird time to ask the question, but he still answered, "Yes, Master. Red robes, why are you asking me this?"

"Are you absolutely sure it was just a simple red robe?" she asked.

"Yes Master, I'm sure. I saw it with my own eyes," Alex said.

Then, Ma Rong slowly pointed her fingers to somewhere in the sky before turning towards Alex and asked, "Are you sure the robe was not Crimson?"

Alex could see a little bit of fear in his Master's eyes. He slowly turned his head to look to the sky where her finger was pointed and saw a bunch of people flying in the sky.

Despite the city being a no-fly zone, there were people flying there. However, more importantly than that, the people were all wearing red robes-Crimson, to be exact.

"Th-That's the man Master. The one at the second last," Alex said seeing the man with the spiritual sense. His face seemed like he was bored but still needed to come here.

Seeing the people's reaction, their color of robes, and their freedom of flight, even Alex could guess who these people were.

"They are-" Alex turned to Ma Rong in shock who simply just nodded and said, "The Royal Family."

Alex felt shocked and looked back at the flying group of people. There were around 6 people in the group of flying people.

Surprisingly, he knew more than just one person flying right now. That was the girl behind the couple at the front.

'It's her,' Alex thought, remembering back to the time he helped the few female girls.

"Master, who are they exactly?" He asked.

"You see the person at the front? That is the emperor of the Crimson Empire, Fu Zexian," Ma Rong said. Alex looked at the man, and he looked like he was in his 30s.

"So, the one behind him is Gao Xia, the empress?" he asked. He remembered reading about the royal family. But reading about someone and knowing it from seeing was completely different.

"Yes, and the one behind them is the princess, Fu Wuying. Followed by the second prince, Fu Yuhan. The last two are the High Princes, the Emperor's little brothers. The one on the front is Fu Zemin, and the one behind him, the one that wanted to capture you is the notorious third brother of the Emperor, Fu Zexi," Ma Rong said.

Alex looked at the man with cold eyes. If Alex hadn't been quick on his head, he would've probably been dead right now and was reincarnated to a random location.

'Sigh, whatever. Let's just forget about it. Once I return back, I won't have to worry about him anymore,' Alex thought.

The Royal family landed on a platform at the highest spot on the south end of the coliseum, where the sun would be behind them most of the time.

Alex looked towards them and saw a bunch of people below them as well, with almost the same height, but not quite.

"Who are those people, Master?" he asked curiously.

Ma Rong looked to the side and said, " Oh, those are the nobles. The Dukes, Marquess, Earl, Viscount, and Barons of the empire. There might also be the ministers, but I don't really know them."

" I see," Alex said.

Fu Zhen walked up to the stage and bowed towards the royal family before speaking.

"Good Morning ladies and gentlemen, fellow Daoist. Let me welcome all of you to this wonderful day where we will have the battle competitions of this year's Annual sect Competitions."

"Besides just the battles, we also have many short and long competitions set up for today and the following days. All of which is very much fun."

"So without any further speech, let me bring on the competitors for today's competition. Everyone, please come on to the stage," Fu Zhe shouted.

"I will take the disciples, sect Master," the Second Elder said and stood up before taking the three disciples to the arena.

The audience waited for a bit before the participants finally walked out. Alex and the rest looked at the ground before the hoard of disciples finally arrived at the stage.

Just the sheer number of participants for the single battles was staggering. Alex wanted to count the number of participants, but it was so many that he just didn't bother.

"Finally, here we have all the participants for the Single battles," Fu Zhen spoke. "However, as you all can see, there are just too many to have a single's battle."

"There are exactly 317 people taking part in the singles battle, which as you can see is not an even number. So, to fix that issue and bring the number of participants down to a manageable number, we will now start the prelude to the Singles battles, The Damage test."

Chapter 310: Damage Test

Alex looked at the different people on the stage and saw that he recognized a few. He obviously recognized his senior sister as well as Wan Li and the other 2 participants of his own sect.

But he also saw Du Yuhan, as well as the guy his senior sister seemed to hate for some reason, Yang Ma. He tried searching for other people, but he couldn't recognize any of the other participants aside from their robes, which wasn't very helpful.

Just as he was looking at them, 3 Metal puppets appeared on the stage out of nowhere and stood there just waiting to get hit.

Fu Zhem walked to the puppets and said, "I will now explain the rules of this competition."

"The Damage test, as its name suggests, will be looking at your ability to deal damage to these puppets. The puppets have zero defense and no resistance, so you can attack without any worries," Fu Zhen said.

3 screens appeared in the air above the puppets, as well as 3 others high in the air for the audience to see what was happening.

Each of the small screens was blank for now, while the screen in the air showed everything that was happening around the wooden puppets, including the smaller screen.

"Alright, this screen up here will show your damage on the wooden puppet," Fu Zhen said as he flicked the head of the puppet.

<True Disciple - 5th realm>

The word appeared on the black screen. "As you can see, this is my physical damage."

Fu Zhen then moved to another puppet and flicked it, "As you can see, the screen doesn't pop on this one. That's because this one only accepts elemental damage," Fu Zhen said as he threw a small Qi attack towards it.

Suddenly, the screen lit up and it showed the words <True Master - 3rd Realm>

"Lastly, this is a special puppet as it only takes damage from mental attacks. Close your ears," Fu Zhen said as he called for someone. A young female walked up and suddenly screamed.

The nearby people thankfully had their ears plugged, so didn't take any damage.

<Mind Tempering- 3rd Realm>

"As you can see, if you have a strong mental attack, you can use that here as well," Fu Zhen said.

"I will call out your names one by one, please come forward and attack the puppet of your choice. You will get 3 attacks and may use any weapons. The top 256 people with the highest damage will move on to the next round."

"First of all, From the Undying sect, Tian Hao. Please come forward," Fu Zhen spoke.

A strong-looking young man walked out of the group and walked to the puppet that took physical damage.

"Alright, attack," Fu Zhen said.

The man nodded and took out a blade from his storage bag. He took a deep breath and the blade started glowing red. He immediately dashed forward and swung the sword right at the chest of the puppet.

CLANG

There was not a single scratch on the puppet, but words did appear on the screen.

<Meridian Tempering - 6th Realm>

"Good, you have 2 more chances. Do you want to use it?" Fu Zhen asked. Tian Hao thought for a few seconds and nodded. He attacked the puppet twice more, but the result was the same.

"Okay. Tian Hao from the Undying sect. The highest attack is at Meridian Tempering - 6th Realm," Fu Zhen announced.

"Next up is Hua Mexin from Hanging Fruit sect," Fu Zhen announced.

Alex watched from the seating area and was a little confused, "Is... is it going to be just this for the next 300 or so turns?" he asked.

"Yes. This will work as an introduction for the audience to the various people fighting in the competition. Besides, it won't take just as long as the first one. Since the others know what to do, they won't take much time," Ma Rong said.

"Alright," Alex said and looked back at the stage.

The elemental damage-taking puppet had a <Meridian Tempering 9th realm> hovering on the screen above it. The lady who just attacked, however, decided to not attack twice, and it was time for the next contestant.

"Oh, she must be confident in her skill huh. Is the peak of Meridian tempering really that strong?" Alex asked.

"It should get you to the Top 50 in terms of strength with just that," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, then the overall strength must no-" Suddenly, gasps rang out from the people. Alex turned around to see that the physical puppet had 4 words hovering over it.

Seeing those words made him stop speaking and rethink what he was going to say.

<Mind Tempering -4th Realm>

"Who is that guy?" Alex asked as he looked down below. The guy was wearing a white robe and had a smug smile on his face.

"Tsk. I want to punch that face."

Alex looked to the side with surprise when he heard Ma Rong speak that sentence. "What?" He asked in confusion.

"Sigh, never mind. I just hate that robe," Ma Rong said.

Alex looked back and focused on that robe and realized where he had seen it before. "Ah, it's that guy's sect," Alex said as he remembered Sect Leader Li of the Golden Eagle sect who tried to flirt with Ma Rong.

No wonder she was getting annoyed.

"Did they never take part in the production competitions?" Alex asked.

"Probably not. Their sect is a normal one like the Tiger sect, so a few might have taken part in different competitions. But none were good enough to stand out.

"I see," Alex said.

The Damage test actually went far faster than Alex would've thought it would. Every minute new people were being tested, sometimes 2 or even 3.

In half an hour, nearly 50 people were already tested.

Amongst those people, only 3 people managed to go beyond the Mind Tempering realm. Alex soon realized how hard it was to find a Mind Tempering expert in the Crimson Empire that was also below 25 years of age.

Chapter 311: Damage Tests - Finale

"Yang Ma from Tiger sect," Fu Zhen called out.

By now, an hour had passed and around 100 disciples were done with their tests. Amongst the latter 50, only 2 had been a mind tempering realm expert. In total, there had been around 5 right now.

The red-haired, 3rd ranking disciple of the Tiger sect walked out. Alex knew that he had a 2nd Mind Tempering realm so he expected his damage output to be around the same as well.

He walked up to the Elemental puppet and threw a fireball at it. Words soon popped up on top of it.

Alex looked at it too but was a little surprised. "Huh?"

The words on the puppet were <Mind Tempering - 1st Realm>

"That's not right," Alex said. He thought for a moment and finally realized what was happening. "These guys are trying to hide their strength," Alex said as a peculiar smile appeared on his face.

"That means... the previous 5 that only had 1st Mind Tempering realm... might actually be way higher in cultivation," he thought.

People kept attacking the puppets and their damage information was recorded. The two disciples from the Hong Wu sect didn't have the luxury to hide their cultivation base as they weren't very strong in the first place.

"Hmm... He will probably get accepted, but she is still debatable," Ma Rong said looking at the two disciple's results.

Everyone else who had a high enough cultivation base was hiding their cultivation so Alex couldn't tell just how high their cultivation base was from the screen.

Finally, Wan Li was called forth. Wan Li took out a simple sword as he walked forward and stood in front of the puppet. Once he was given the go, he slashed the puppet right on the chest.

<Mind Tempering - 2nd Realm>

He didn't hold back as much as the others did. "Is brother Wan talented in cultivation as well?" Alex asked.

"Hmm... He isn't... or rather he wasn't. After his parent's death last year, he seemed to have not only taken Alchemy, but also cultivation as a method of coping."

"Before any of us knew, he went up a minor realm and even crossed 3 realms," Ma Rong said.

Alex looked back at the competitions. There were more Mind tempering realm cultivators appearing now.

One of the Mind Tempering results came from a participant that wasn't even the person themselves. They had let their tamed beast attack the puppet.

There were other folks who used their puppets to attack the puppet. That too apparently counted since they were considered weapons just as any sword and spear.

Alex was really surprised when he learned that. 'I wonder if next year around I can have Pearl fight for me as well,' he thought. But he also thought how it would probably be too late for him since he at this rate,? he would reach the True realms in just a few months.

There were about 50 more people left when Fu Zhen finally called someone he had been waiting to see for the last 3 hours.

" Tiger sect, Luo Mei," he called.

Luo Mei walked forward in the yellow robes with red linings. As soon as she came up to the elemental puppet, she swirled her hand around a few times. Blue Qi escapes from her hands as they quickly turned into a blob of water.

Without much thought, she threw the water at the puppet and go a reading that said <Mind Tempering - 2nd realm>

That was a very simple attack, and yet it got such a high result. 'I wonder how far her cultivation has advanced,' he wondered.

More people came and went after her; Few were in the mind tempering realm, most close to it. Some were quite low as well.

The remaining participants were thinning very fast until only a few remained. Finally, the last member of the Tiger sect was called forth.

"Du Yuhan of Tiger sect," Fu Zhen spoke out loud.

Du Yuhan walked forth with a sword in his hand. He was holding it with his left arm and it was sheathed at the moment.

He walked up to the physical puppet and took a deep breath. In a single sweep, he pulled the sword out of the sheath and hit the puppet. It happened so fast that Alex could barely see it at all.

<Mind Tempering -2nd Realm>

"Woah," Alex thought. A simple attack from all 3 of the top-ranking members in the Tiger sect had amazing results.

"How come all the disciples from Tiger Sect are so strong and yet they haven't even reached the 1st grade yet," Alex asked.

"They've always been strong due to the intense inner competition of the sect, but this batch has been astoundingly fierce."

"I knew Luo Mei and Du Yuhan were good, but it seems even the Yang Ma fellow is good as well. I didn't see him last year," Ma Rong said

"As for the reason why they didn't reach the 1st grade yet is that most of the years, they didn't bother taking part in the production segment of the competition. Even in the battle segment, there weren't that many taking part due to the 3 per competition constraint."

"However, they will surely reach the 1st grade this time. That is as long as the 3 do well... and they don't have to fight against the Royal Fu Academy early on. That would be a disaster for them," Ma Rong said.

"Are... they that good?" Alex was a little surprised.

"Perhaps better," Ma Rong said as not even she really knew how strong the disciples from the Royal Fu Academy were.

Alex wondered if his senior sister could perhaps have a chance at winning. But for that, he would have to know just how strong these Royal Fu Academy folks were.

The rest of the participants delivered their attacks the test ended. Fu Zhen revealed the results after a few minutes. All 3 members of the Hong Wu sect had surprisingly passed. Even the female disciple passed at around 230th rank amongst the 256 people that passed.

Chapter 312: Race

"5 spirit stones on the red robe guy with the horse."

"Cheapskate put in more. 62 spirit stones on the blue-robed girl with the red bird."

"I'm going 70 spirit stones on the green-robed girl with the jaguar. You guys are picking some stupid monsters really. Jaguars are very fast. Ah, MeiMei, Wanwan, you guys come to put in spirit stones too."

"You skipped out on the last one, but not this one," Fan Ruogang shouted at the 3 who were staying away from gambling away their money.

"I... don't really know who will win Fanfan, So I will stay out of it. I don't want to lose my money," Zhou Mei said.

"I-I don't like gambling," Wan Li said.

"I am low on money, sister Fan. So I will stay out of it," Alex said when he was called to gamble.

"What? You all are cowards. Elders, you guys wanna bet?" she asked the elders to bid on the winning beast for the Beast race.

"Fanfan, stop being so rowdy. It doesn't reflect well on the sect," Ma Rong scolded her for standing out too much in the audience.

"Oh, sorry sect leader," she said and tried to get quiet when the race started. "Oh, it has begun," she immediately started screaming again.

"Go Jaguar," she cried out.

The bird, the jaguar, and the horse were the main 3 beasts that everyone expected to win. However, when the beasts did reach the other side, a result that nobody expected occurred.

The winner for the beast's race was actually a tiny little squirrel.

"What? I lost again" Fan Ruogang couldn't believe it. She had lost during the cultivator's race just before this as well.? The rest of the disciples who bet were also disappointed. The lucky guy who started the bid now took all of their money.

"Hey, don't keep that yet. The next race is happening right now," Ma Rong said as she pointed the various disciple who came out with their own artifacts.

Ning simply shook his head and looked at the stage. 'I wonder how well I would've done on the cultivator's race,' he thought. His cultivation wasn't very high, so he couldn't really tell how good he was compared to them, but if he had taken part in the race, he would've lost without a doubt.

'Those guys were so fast,' he thought and subconsciously looked towards the southern side of the coliseum where the big shot was staying. Suddenly, his eyes got cold and a hint of anger appeared in them.

But then he controlled himself and looked away from them. The artifact race was starting. Everyone sat on some kind of a small boat and once the horn was blown, they flew away. The stage was expanded to be around a kilometer long in length, but it was no time for the participants.

In a matter of seconds, they all crossed that distance. "Woah, that is so fast," Alex said. Ma Rong's boat was a little faster, but that was because she was in the True Realm. These Self Tempering realm cultivators reaching close to her speed was already very amazing.

More races occurred after that some of which were the Beast and Cultivator riding race, Puppet race, and a flying race where the cultivators had to fly the whole way through.

Once this competition ended, it was around 2 pm in the day.

"This is taking a lot longer than I had expected. How long does it usually last, Master?" he asked.

"Hmm... they should end it by 5 pm, regardless of if the competition ends or not. Either way, this is the last event of the day," Ma Rong said as she stood up.

"Come with me," she said as she walked away from the seating area. Alex didn't understand what was going on, so he followed her.

Surprisingly, she had taken him to the seating area of the Tiger sect.

Wen noticed Ma Rong walking and looked back. "Why are you guys here?" he asked.

"You are better at the upcoming stuff. Teach him," Ma Rong said and pushed Alex forward. "Learn something," she said and turned back.

"Come, sit Yu Ming," Wen Cheng said and made him sit beside him.

"Where's senior sister? Did she leave for the competition already?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, the 3 of them already went down," Wen Cheng said. "By the way, why did you change your face?" he asked.

Alex thought for a second and decided to tell Wen Cheng the whole story. "What? You will be staying with me now. I will see what that troublemaker can do after this," Wen Cheng said.

Alex smiled and said, "It's a fine master. With my face changed he shouldn't be able to recognize me."

"Yeah I guess that is true," Wen Cheng said.

Fu Zhen walked onto the stage and started speaking.

"We will now begin Single Battles. There are a few rules the contestants have to follow before taking part in this competition."

"First of all, you cannot use anything that is above the Common Rank. No weapons, armors, artifacts, formations, nothing."

"Secondly, you are considered to have lost the battle in 3 scenarios. Either if you forfeit the battle, if you faint, or you get thrown out of the stage, you will lose the battle."

"If you fail to show up to the battle in the first place within 2 minutes of me calling, you will automatically fail as well."

"So, please everyone come down up to the stage, we will choose your opponents now," Fu Zhen said.

Everyone walked up to the stage and was made to draw numbers from a box in secret.

"Keep that number with you. That will be what chooses who you are going to fight. There are 2 pairs of the same card for a total of 128 pairs."

"For the first match, we will start with numbers 1 through 4. Everyone else, please return back to the waiting room," Fu Zhen said and made the others leave.

"Come, the stage will be set for you soon."

Chapter 313: The Royal Family

High in the coliseum, on the southern side, were the royal family of the Crimson Empire.

"Urghh... this is so boring," a voice rang out in the group. Nobody even had to look to know who was speaking right now. "Why don't they make those in the True realm fight. What's so fun about watching these kids fight?"

"I told you, Uncle, it was going to be boring. It's not like we didn't warn you," the second prince, Fu Yuhan said. He was a thin man with short hair and a clean-shaven face.

"That's right, Brother. We told you the competition wasn't for you, why did you even come? You never came before," Fu Zemin, the second brother of the Emperor said. He looked the eldest of the bunch, despite being the second brother due to his lack of talent in cultivation. Still, he had managed to get where he was thanks to all the resources that came with being a prince to an empire.

"I-I have something to do," Fu Zexi, the third brother of the Emperor said.

"Well, you can't blame anyone else then," the second prince said.

"Tsk. I wish the battles get a little bit better, otherwise, I will die of boredom," Fu Zexi said.

"Zexi, those down below are the future of this empire. We are not here to watch normal battles. We are here to search for talents that can go on to be the pillar of the empire. So either leave or shut up and watch," An authoritative voice came from the center.

The Emperor, Fu Zexian had finally decided to speak after listening to his younger brother babble on forever. The Emperor was a man with a cultivation base high enough so that despite being nearly a hundred years old, he looked like he was in his 30s.

His build was the same as his third brother; he had broad shoulders and big muscles. But he did not have a scruffy face and instead had a clean-shaven one. His hair was still all black surprisingly.

"So-sorry brother," Zexi said in a meek voice.

"Ah, Dear Husband, don't scold brother-in-law, after spending days in the illegal fighting den for days on end, obviously this would look boring in comparison," the empress said.

The Empress looked older than the Emperor in general, but even the Empress looked like she was in her 30s at most. Adding on to the fact that she had no wrinkles and could generally be considered a beauty, she was a perfect match for the Emperor.

"Pfft" a few people laughed after seeing the empress not so subtly call out the third brother of the Emperor.

"Tsk. Even sister-in-law is starting to tease me now," Zexi said.

"Xiaxia, you are hurting Zexi's feelings now," the Emperor said.

"Huh? And your scolding doesn't hurt his feelings?" the Empress asked.

"Uhh... that's different. He is used to my scolding since he was a child, so it's fine," the Emperor said.

"Hmph, you scolding him is fine, but me teasing him is not? Why do I feel like you are choosing your brother over me," the Empress said.

"How can you say that, Xiaxia. You know I love you very dearly. I even refused all those concubines for you," the Emperor said.

"Right kids. Tell your mother how much I love her," the Emperor asked his children.

"Yes, Father. You love mother very dearly," the second prince said in a monotone voice as if that was a daily thing for him.

"Wuying? Are you not going to say anything?" the Emperor asked.

The princess was currently focused down below, but her eyes didn't seem to match the direction of the fights.

"Where are you looking, Wuying?" the Emperor asked, but the princess did not respond. She didn't even hear the question.

"Wuying?" he called to her once more.

The second prince nudged his little sister a bit to catch her attention. "What?" she looked at the second prince who just pointed at his father.

The princess turned around and asked, "What is it, father?"

"Where is your head at? Weren't you listening to anything?" the Emperor asked.

"Uhh... I found someone interesting a few days ago who I think is a disciple of a sect participating in this competition. Except, I can't find him anywhere," Wuying said.

"You found someone interesting?" the Empress asked curiously.

"Yes. It was a boy who noticed one of my shadow guards," Wuying said.

"Someone found your shadow guard? That too a disciple? Impossible. They are the best at hiding. Even I would have a hard time finding them if I wasn't looking for them," the Emperor said.

"But that is the truth, Father. Which is why I am searching for him right now," Wuying said.

"Tell us more about this boy," the Empress said, and Wuying fully explained everything. They all listened curiously and nodded.

'Long hair, clean face, moderately tall build... they all match, except for the robe. The one he was wearing looked really bland, so it probably wasn't even his real robes,' Zexi thought when he heard the descriptions.

The Emperor made the rest of them search for such a boy, he started searching too. There were a few ones along the way he found, but none matched.

"That robe looks correct," Wuying said.

"Hm... that's Hong Wu sect, an Alchemy focused sect. I doubt someone like that is from them. Let's keep searching," the emperor said.

'Alchemy?' Zexi thought. 'Alchemy... Spirit Cleansing Lily... it would make sense if he was from there but... the flower showed up in an auction in the capital. Did he leave-where is the Hong Wu sect again? Scarlet City?' His eyes went wide.

'Scarlet city has a branch of Pink Cloud auction house as well,' he thought and immediately started looking through the disciples of Hong Wu sect but couldn't find any.

Just as he was about to look away, however, he noticed something peculiar. 'Why is that one disciple staying away from the group?'

Chapter 314: Teaching

"I can't find him,' Wuying said after searching for about 5 minutes.

"Maybe he is not here. I can get the guards to search for him if you want," the Emperor said.

"No, need. Maybe he already left the capital," Wuying said while sounding a little disappointed.

"Big brother, I will leave now. I need to go check on my wife," Zemin said as he stood up to leave.

"How is she by the way? Any improvements?" the Emperor asked.

"No, not really. Lai Qing is still trying to find new pills that might work for her, but nothing is really happening. It seems not even he has any idea what to do in this situation," Zemin said with a sad face.

"Sigh, I will do something to search for people that might have some idea. Don't lose hope," the Emperor said and watched his brother leave. He then looked at Zexi and asked, "Don't you want to leave too?"

Zexi looked outside the arena with a curious smile and said, "No, No I don't think I will."

*******

CLANG

Swords clashed on the stage as both of the fighters pushed each other back. One of them threw out a golden slash towards the other, while the other one parried it to hit a barrier behind him.

Alex and the rest of the tiger sect were upon the seating area watching the fights.

"Sigh, I guess we won't see interesting fights until around 64 people remain. Two more rounds of Single Battles to go, I guess," Wen Cheng said.

"Are people doing nothing but hiding their abilities to not give away their advantage?" Alex asked.

"Yes. So the battles are very straightforward and easy to get bored of," Wen Cheng said. "Still, you should learn a few things from today's battles."

"First of all, as you can see, cultivation base isn't everything. Look at that guy named.... Macks? Maks?"

"Max," Alex helped Wen Cheng with the pronunciation.

"Yes, that guy. His cultivation base is at 9th Meridian Tempering realm, Yet he is barely keeping up with his opponent that has 8th Meridian Tempering realm."

"From that name, I can tell he's one of the new cultivators that have popped up recently around the empire. He has so much cultivation base, but because he rushed to where he is now, it's not properly stabilized, and thus he can't use the full capabilities of his cultivation base."

"Sigh, I don't know what sort of idiot let that guy into the competition," Wen Cheng said.

Alex knew these things already, but he had never seen a rushed cultivation base be this bad. It was like the player couldn't even release all of the Qi in his body at once.

'Well, I'm glad I didn't rush,' Alex thought.

Max was throwing out attacks, but none of it were landing on the opponent. Soon, he was overwhelmed by his enemy's attack and got defeated.

As soon as one match was over, they immediately called out the other 2 pairs. With 4 pairs fighting at once, the competition holders could continuously have multiple battles going on without any downtime.

"Oh, it's brother Wan," Alex said looking at the stage. It turned out Wan Li had the number 9, the next pair going to the stage.

His opponent was someone who Alex remembered had gotten 9th Meridian Tempering in the Elemental puppet.

"Brother Wan doesn't have time to learn how to fight, so he shouldn't have much fighting experience. I wonder how he will fare up against his opponent. He should be fine through just his raw strength right?" Alex asked.

The referee made the two stay on the opposite side of the stage. Wan Li took out a sword while the opponent took out a quarterstaff.

"Begin," the referee said.

ZZZZOOOMM

A red-colored attack immediately flew off of Wan Li's sword the moment the competition began.

"Wha-" the opponent couldn't even say anything as the attack hit him directly in the chest and threw him out of the stage.

"Match Over," the referee said and gave Wan Li one of the 9 paper slips that he had taken from both of them.

"That was fast," Alex thought.

"Your first ranking disciple is not bad when it comes to fighting I see. Much better than when you came to me," Wen Cheng said.

"Shame we didn't get to see his actual fighting style," Wen Cheng said. "Guess, we will have to wait for tomorrow."

"How many competitions will take place tomorrow?" Alex asked.

"Hmm... Given that we end on the Singles battle, tomorrow's might also start with a Singles battle, since that is what they want. After that another set of competitions, followed by another Singles battle that should bring the number down to 32," Wen Cheng said.

The fights weren't very fun to watch, but Alex didn't have a problem with that. Wen Cheng was steadily explaining anything and everything he thought Alex should be aware of in combat.

When he saw puppets or beasts, he explained how one should fight against multiple opponents at once.

"Always go for the weaker one first. If you don't they will end up being annoying, and hamper your battle a lot. If you ever come across a beast or a puppet that is weaker than its master, beat it first."

"However, if it's the master that is weaker, then you have an easier chance to victory. As long as you defeat the master into unconsciousness, unless the beast is very intelligent, the puppet will be unresponsive and the beast will just be a normal monster," Wen Cheng explained.

Alex nodded when he heard this information and kept them in his mind.

"Your best chances at fighting users with long-ranged attacks like that guy with the bow with to get in so close that he can't use his weapon anymore. See, that's what his opponent did just there," Wen Cheng explained while looking at the fight between two people end.

"Oh, the next contestants are both focused on elemental techniques if I remember correctly. This should help me explain something important that I didn't have the time to previously," Wen Cheng said.

Chapter 315: Elemental Theory

The two new fighters got onto the stage and stayed on either side of the stage. Once the referee gave the go, the man immediately made a fireball in his hand and threw it towards the other man.

The other man created a veil of a large amount of water that worked as a barrier. The fireball was snuffed out by the water. He then sent a blast of wind towards the other man.

Up on the seating area, Wen Cheng started talking to Alex.

"You know the elemental theory, right?" Wen Cheng asked.

"The elemental theory?" Alex asked in confusion. "The same one as the one in Alchemy?" he asked.

"Oh right, you know Alchemy, so you must understand it easily. When two people that use elemental abilities instead of physical fight, if their skill and cultivation base is the same, the one that wins will mostly depend on their element of use."

Alex felt like he could understand what he was saying but was still generally confused.

"Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me explain from the beginning. Remember when I told you about the spiritual roots, and how one is? compared to the other?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Yes. The ones with lesser elemental roots are perceived as better," Alex said.

"Yes, exactly. Perceived as better, not are better. As I explained last time, The lesser the spiritual root, the stronger the effect of the spiritual root becomes. However, the more the spiritual roots, the more elemental affinity one has."

"So, keeping this in mind, I want you to tell me. Who is stronger of the two, A cultivator with Metal and Water roots, or A cultivator with Wood and Fire roots?" Wen Cheng asked.

This was a very strange question Ning had never encountered before. He tried to think but he wasn't used to elements interacting with one another.

Even during alchemy, he only did what the recipe said, and never truly learned the elements themselves. That was one of the reasons why Ma Rong wanted him to buy disposable cauldrons and learn the interaction between elements alone.

With no choice, he thought back to the first lesson with Ma Rong where she taught him the elements.

'Metal and Water, Fire and Wood,' he thought.

"Um, if they have the same cultivation base then the one with Wood can Weaken water, and Ruin Metal. Even with Fire, he can Ruin Water and, and Control as well as Overwhelm Metal."

"I think the man with the Fire and Woo—? wait, But Metal can Ruin Fire as well and Control as well as Overwhelm Wood, while Water can Control and Overwhelm Fire."

Ale looked up to Wen Cheng and said, "I am very confused right now, Master." It was very hard for him to make sense of what he was learning.

"Don't be. I asked that question especially to make you confused," Wen Cheng said. "The reason you are confused is that you know what Elements the two cultivators are using, but you don't know anything else."

"There are 3 things aside from elements alone that influence a fight between cultivators of the same cultivation base," Wen Cheng said.

"The first is the Elemental Strength. This all depends on what type of spiritual roots you have. The lower the spiritual roots, the stronger the Elemental Strength gets."

"The second is Qi amount. This is how much Qi the cultivators use during an attack. As you might imagine, the more Qi one uses, the more damage they can deal."

"The third is Qi density. The denser your Qi is, the more power you can pack behind it."

"Their order of importance would be Element, followed by Elemental Strength, followed by Qi Density, followed by Qi Amount."

"So, every elemental attack has these 4 things that will influence the result," Wen Cheng continued explaining.

Alex was fully engrossed in the explanation. He felt like he was seeing stuff he knew with a completely different eye.

"Now, each Element interacts with other elements in one of the 5 ways. They can Empower, Control, Overwhelm, Weaken or Ruin the elements."

"The thing you need to learn is not what element interacts with what elements. You already know that from your alchemy probably. The thing you need to learn is how one of those 5 interactions can occur," Wen Cheng said.

Wen Cheng started explaining a very lengthy topic about elemental interaction. Elemental Strength, Qi Amount and Qi Density, when all of these things were combined, whoever had the better one would be the winner.

Say a man had wood spiritual root, and another man had metal spiritual root, regardless of whatever else spiritual roots they had, and they both attacked each other with an elemental attack.

If the man with the wood spiritual root had a better combination of Elemental strength, Qi density, and Qi amount than the man with the Metal Qi, then the Wood attack would destroy the metal attack thus inducing Ruin.

However, if the man with the Metal spiritual roots had a better combination, then the Metal attack would either control the wood attack or overwhelm it.

If Control was induced, the controlling element would regulate the other element and stop it from advancing.

If Overwhelm was induced, the overwhelming element would rip apart the other element and go past it.

If Weaken was induced, the element being weakened would slowly exhaust until it was no more.

If Ruin was induced, the winning element would violently destroy the other element, most of the time leading to explosions.

Empower was a weird one and normally wasn't induced. The only way to induce it was when helping an ally attack by adding the element and Qi to the forming attack.

One of the 5 was always induced in one way or another, except on a single case. That was when both the opponents had the same element.

In that case, it would be a pushing battle, and whoever had the stronger combination of the other three aspects, won.

Chapter 316: Proposition

The fights went on, but none of it were much interesting. The ones that were interesting somehow didn't entice the audience since they knew the ones fighting weren't strong fighters and would likely get stomped next match.

Still, it was fun to watch, and people enjoyed it. Everyone watched it, except Alex. He tried to watch it, but he couldn't do anything but analyze what Wen Cheng had said and quickly learn it.

"Oh yeah, what about the 2 elements, Yin and Yang?" Alex asked.

"Those? Yin and Yang are always better than the other 5, but due to the fact that they don't induce any of the 5 effects, they will interact in the same way as when 2 of the same elements interact. Whichever one is stronger overall, wins," Wen Cheng said.

Alex fell into another deep thought as his one query was answered. But he couldn't keep that for long as Yang Ma took the stage, followed by Du Yuhan in a few more minutes and finally Luo Mei.

The three of them had easy opponents and couldn't show off their full strength. Yang Ma simply showed off his aura to make his opponent get scared into forfeiting.

Du Yuhan attacked the opponent with his sword and made him faint without cutting him.

While Luo Mei fought like a normal weaker girl and found like one before winning in a few minutes. She was still hiding her abilities, everyone was.

Once more of the matches ended, Alex stood up and bid farewell to Wen Cheng before leaving.

"Oh, you are back. I was about to ask someone to get you," Ma Rong said. "So, how was it? Did he teach anything regarding the fights?"

"Uh... Yes? No? I don't know," Alex said.

"Hmm? What do you mean?" Ma Rong said.

"He taught me the Elemental theory during a fight between elemental users," Alex said.

"Ah, that! That was what I wanted you to learn by yourself through trial and error, but it seems he already taught you that. Well, whatever, it was barely going to help you what ingredients to put in and what not to. Not that it matters since you will have to understand how that affects the usage of a pill," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded. The elemental knowledge was still weighing heavily on his mind. "Let's leave", Ma Rong said once Wan Li and the rest had come back.

Unfortunately, the girl had lost in the 1st round, but everyone still consoled her for trying. They also congratulated Wan Li and the other guy for winning their matches.

"Alright, let's leave," Ma Rong said and took her sect's people with her. It was a long day, and it was nearly 5 pm. So no one really wanted to do anything but simply go back to the hotel and rest.

After reaching the hotel each of them went back to their rooms. Alex went straight to his bed and sat down to think about what he had learned today.

He tried thinking of each scenario and started devising what the result would be. He analyzed as much as he could before and after the meeting at 7 pm.

Even halfway through the night, he kept on learning about it. Only after then did he think that he truly learned everything.

Overnight, he cultivated with Pearl but it was not a lot of time. In the morning, he woke up at 6 am. He quickly logged out and went to get something to eat.

Surprisingly, Hannah was up this early as well.

"What's going on sister? Why are you awake so early?" he asked.

Hannah stopped drinking her coffee and looked at him. "Oh, I... uh got a message from Sarah and Emily this morning. It's regarding their moving into our place," Hannah said.

"Oh," slight nervousness entered Alex's heart. "What did they say?" Alex asked.

"They... it seems that Emily really can't pay any bill for the house, so she couldn't join at all," Hannah said.

"Oh," Alex was disappointed this time.

"Then I made a proposition," Hannah said.

"A proposition? What sort?" he asked.

"I told her, that we could split the bill in 3 ways so that us 3 could pay her part as well," Hannah said.

Alex was a little taken aback. "Why do that sister? Isn't that profitable for us?" Alex asked.

"Yes, but we gotta take the loss somehow," Hannah said. Alex got a little confused. "Why?" he asked.

"For you, silly. You like her right? I'm trying to set you two up. Can't you understand that?" Hannah said. "And guess what? They said yes. Apparently, their friends were thinking of changing rooms soon too, so when they brought up the idea of moving, their roommates found one too," Hannah said.

"... oh." Alex was so dumbfounded that that was all he could say. His heartbeat rose a few dozen and his stomach started feeling funny.

Hannah saw his face and asked, "Aren't you happy?"

"Oh, uh... Umm... I am. I was just not expecting that," Alex said.

"Whatever. They will move in after a week or so. Don't worry about it now, focus on your game and earning money. We have no idea how long the game will last for. It's entirely possible that the game's money will collapse within the month. So, it's better to earn as much as we can right now," Hannah said.

Alex nodded and sat down to eat. Their conversation had taken a little longer than expected, so he chomped through his breakfast and quickly returned back to his room.

Then, he logged back into the game. He opened his eyes as Wan Li was shaking him.

"Huh? What's going on?" he asked as he stopped Wan Li from shaking him even more.

"Brother Yu, why were you so asleep? It's time for us to leave," Wan Li said while pointing at the door. It seemed everyone was ready for the day.

So, Alex and Wan Li quickly walked out and joined the group.

"All here? Let's move."

Chapter 317: More Clarification

Alex was once again sitting with Wen Cheng. It was a little while before the competition started, so everyone was there.

"Maser, I had some questions regarding yesterday's teaching, as well as some things I want you to clear up for me," Alex said.

"Sure, ask," Wen Cheng said.

"You said that Elemental Strength, Qi amount, and Qi density affect the fight between two elemental users right? But that was only if their cultivation base was the same. What about when they don't have the same cultivation base? I had some thoughts regarding this, " Alex asked.

Wen Cheng smiled and said, "Let's hear it."

"Elemental strength never changes regardless of one's cultivation base since it's related to the spiritual roots. The only thing that does is the Qi Density and amount."

"So here was my confusion. Qi Density increases as one reaches higher realm, but since Qi amount affects a battle as well, can't a lower realm cultivator just pump out more Qi and win against a higher realm cultivator's attack?" he asked.

"Hmm... technically, yes. You are correct. However, there is more than just theory in a fight. A higher realm cultivator doesn't just have a denser Qi, they also have a higher Qi quantity. So, when it comes to pumping out Qi, they won't ever lose."

"On the case, they don't pump out more Qi to fight than required, there is also the condition of Qi density being much more important to an attack than just Qi amount. So the lower realm cultivator would have to use an abnormal amount of Qi to overpower their opponent's attack," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh right," Alex said as he understood more and more.

"So, a person with a 5 elemental root like me doesn't necessarily have bad spiritual roots, right?" Alex asked.

Wen Cheng's face changed a little as he hesitatingly said, "uhh... I guess? They have an easier time fighting off the different opponents, but you have to remember, the most important aspect of an elemental battle aside from the elements themselves is the Elemental Strength. So those who had lesser elemental roots usually fare better."

'Yes, but we can offset that with Qi density. And my Qi density is one of the highest, isn't it?' Alex thought. Because of that, Alex now had an advantage against everyone fighting as long as they were around the safe cultivation realm as him. He just needed to know what element to use on the go.

"There is something else you should know," Wen Cheng suddenly spoke. "We talked about all of this yet I didn't mention one thing. That is, Not every attack is imbued with elements."

"An attack is usually either entirely an element, entirely Qi, or mostly in between. It's considered an elemental attack as long as it has the slightest hint of the element in the Qi."

"Your spiritual root is capable of changing Qi into elements, usually at not a very high amount. But when you use techniques, you can go as far as completely change Qi into a different element."

"However, at the end of the day, every person is different and every technique is different. You can never guess what attacks they may have or what spiritual roots they may have. So, having a 5 elemental does help one in adapting to every fight."

"But no matter how many hand tricks you know, a person with a strong arm can always punch you right in the face."

"Just look at your senior sister for example. She has a superior water elemental root. From what we learned, you would assume that she would be weak to Wood, clash with Fire, unresponsive to Metal and be strong against Earth elemental attacks. But at the end of the day, because she has the stronger elemental strength and a strong cultivation base, nobody can match up to her." Wen Cheng said.

Alex contemplated for a second. 'So at the end of the day, strength is what matters, huh. Just like Du Yuhan said, As long as I am strong, nothing else matters,' Alex thought.

"Thank you, Master," he thanked him.

"Haha, don't thank me. It's my job to teach you those things," Wen Cheng said.

The competition finally started. The Royal family had already come back today to watch the fights and Fu Zhen called for all the contestants to arrive onto the stage.

They were once more made to collect pieces of papers from a box. Everyone picked their and Fu Zhen said, "Number 1 and 2 pair, stay back. Everyone else can leave,"

The Singles battles were now going to reduce 128 contestants down to 64, so only 2 stages were prepared to have 32 different matches on a single stage.

"Oh, it's little Ma's turn first. His opponent isn't that strong, so it should be fine," Wen Cheng said. Alex looked down to see the red-haired Yang Ma get ready to fight with a big smile.

His opponent had around 9th Meridian Tempering realm from what he had revealed in the damage test.

Alex could suddenly see the opponent shiver slightly and his grip on his quarterstaff loosen a bit. 'Is he using his cultivation base aura again?' Alex wondered.

Yang Ma must have expected his opponent to give up and forfeit the match like his last one, but this one had more heart to him than that.

The opponent immediately tightened his grip and got into a stance with his quarterstaff. Yang Ma's smile faded for a second when he saw this before a wider one replaced it. He was happy to fight.

The opponent was a close combat fighter, so he suddenly dashed forward and slammed his staff at Yang Ma. However, just when he was about to reach him, Yang Ma suddenly threw out a fire blast that sent his opponent flying to the barrier on the other side before he plopped down on the floor.

Yang Ma had won the match and he advanced to the top 64.

A few more fighters came up to the stage and fought. Alex watched them all and saw how their attacks reacted to each other. Just from that information, he was now able to tell who probably had a higher cultivation base or a single spiritual root.

The more elements they used, the more accurate Alex's guess would become.

Chapter 318: A Few More Competitions

After 10 or so different matches, Wan Li finally came onto the stage. His fight was very simple. He would throw out energy blasts of red colors to the opponent and did so until he won.

His opponent had a water elemental root too from what Alex could see, but since he was weaker, Wan Li's fire element attacks easily won against him.

After a few matches, Luo Mei walked up to the stage.

Alex wasn't worried about his senior sister. That was until Wen Cheng said, "Sh*t." Alex didn't understand why he said that. Her opponent was a man with a violet robe with white linings.

"Is he strong," Alex asked.

"His sect is. It's called the Lesser Immortal sect. It's one of the first 5 sects to reach the 1st grade. Hopefully, this opponent isn't a problem for her," Wen Cheng said.

Her opponent was a tall man that took out a bow. The bow looked expensive and was probably a Common Heaven rank item.

Seeing her opponent, Luo Mei brought out her blue, rapier-like sword as well.

"Begin."

As soon as the words left the referee's mouth, the man pulled back his bow, and a brown arrow formed on his bow. He released it and the arrow immediately flew towards Luo Mei.

Luo Mei wasn't any slower either. She made a simple slash and blue energy flew forth and hit the arrow.

BOOM

A violent explosion rang out that shook both of them.

Alex's body jerked a little from the surprise of the explosion. When the dust settled, a brown barrier could be seen in front of the man.

"Ah, so we have nothing to worry about, right master? Her water attack destroyed his earth attack," Alex said.

"Yes. It seems that she has an upper hand. Thank god, he must be one of the weaker ones to join the singles battle," Wen Cheng said. Alex concurred.

Luo Mei's and the other person's fight lasted a little longer, but Luo Mei had no real trouble winning.

Few more matches took place after that. Du Yuhan's match ended in a single blow. The other remaining guy from the Hong Wu sect unfortunately matched up with a disciple from the Myriad beast sect. He had to fight against both man and beast in the 1st Mind Tempering realm, which was impossible for him.

By the end of the competition, only 64 disciples remained and the audience was starting to realize what sect they had to keep an eye on.

Some of these sects were Tiger Sect, Royal Fu Academy, Golden Eagle sect, Honor sect, Thousand Hands sect, Cloud Valley sect, Myriad Beasts sect, True Wisdom sect, and Lesser Immortal sect.

Thousand Hands sect was a sect that dealt with puppets, and the Cloud Valley sect, as well as the Myriad Beasts sect, dealt with beast taming.

These three sects were considered the most annoying to fight due to having to fight multiple fighters at once.

Unfortunately, the Little Dawn sect and Spirit Song sect didn't make it to the top 64 despite their explosive talismans and pills.

Once the Single Battles were done, it was time for the next set of competitions.

The first one was a flying competition. Everyone started by hovering 1 meter off of the ground. Once they were told to start, the contestants had to fly as high as they could in 10 seconds. Then they had to stay flying for another 10 seconds. The final position was regarded as the highest height one flew to.

The second one was a weight-carrying competition. A person had to hold a weight in midair above a meter in height. The host would slowly add more and more weight until the participants caved under the weight and couldn't hold it above the meter line. The one that could carry the most weight for more than 10 seconds won.

The third competition was the Multiple Attention competition. The competitors had to carry objects, in this case, small balls, one by one and keep them hovering in the air at least half a meter distance apart from each other. This forced them to use individual Qi connections to carry objects instead of collective. The one who could hold the most midair without dropping any or having them get closer than half a meter won.

The fourth competition checked the total quantity of one's Qi. This was naturally skewed towards those in the higher realm. The contestants were made to pour in as much Qi as they could in a metal ball that changed color based on the amount. It started from being a black sphere and got whiter as the Qi was poured in. The one whose ball was the most white won.

The fifth competition checked the Qi density of one's Qi. This too was naturally skewed towards those in the higher realm. The contestants were once more made to pour in Qi, but not a lot this time. The black sphere that took in their Qi and get whiter the denser it was. The person whose ball was the most white at the end won.

These 5 competitions took around 3 hours to end. Those that took part in the competitions were given a single spirit stone and allowed to cultivate inside a Qi Gathering formation as well as given a Qi restoration pill to get them back on their feet in case they had another fight competition coming up next.

Alex watched all of these competitions and wondered if he could do well in these competitions. The one about Qi amount was a no for him due to his cultivation base. But the other ones he was quite hopeful about.

He had a good Qi density, he could fly pretty high, he hadn't checked how much he could carry, but that should be a lot as well, and he was very confident in winning the multiple attention competition.

'I wonder what cultivation base my Qi density compares to,' he thought.

Once all the five competitions were over. It was time for the final competition of the day. The Singles Battle between the top 64 contestants.

Chapter 319: Top 64 starts

"Now, for the final event of the day. The battle between the Top 64 strongest cultivators amongst the current generation will now begin," Fu Zhen announced.

"This time, the participants won't get to randomly choose their opponents. Instead, we have made a placement chart for you to see who you will all be fighting against. Here it is."

The moment Fu Zhen stopped speaking, a massive chart with the fighting brackets appeared in the sky.

There were 4 different groups in the chart. There were 2 groups on each side and each group had 16 participants.

"As you can see, we have separated the participants based on a few different secret criteria. The one we can reveal is that we made the brackets so that no two participants of the same sect will ever have to fight prior to the semi-finals."

"Please look at the brackets for a while. In the meanwhile, Group A, please gather down below. The matches will start very soon," Fu Zhen said.

"I'm leaving junior brother, I will come back later," Luo Mei said and left the seating area.

"Good Luck sister," Alex said and looked back at the brackets. Luo Mei was 5th on the list. Thankfully, Wan Li wasn't in that group. He was in group 3 with Yang Ma.

'At least he won't lose immediately,' Alex thought.

"Arghh, this is bad," Wen Cheng started to worry about something.

"What's wrong, Master?" Alex asked.

"Group 2 is bad. Group 2 is horrible. So many strong participants are in group 2. Yuhan, you think you will be fine?" Wen Cheng asked.

Du Yuhan looked up at the brackets once more and looked down. "It doesn't matter, sect leader. I will try my best," he said.

"Sigh, I know you will. Little Ma doesn't have it any easy either. I guess none of the groups are easy anymore. There are so few participants now that every battle you fight might be your last," Wen Cheng said.

The first battle was starting between a cultivator wearing a golden robe and another cultivator wearing a dark blue robe.

"Oh, the first one is a disciple from the Honor sect. Against a random sect, they should win easily," Wen Cheng said.

"So the golden robe what Honor sect wears, huh. Honor sect... where did I hear the name before? Hmn...Ah right, their sect leader came to the bi-annual auction a month ago," Alex said.

"Huh? Lu Chun was in the auction? How do you know?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Oh, Master told me when she noticed him," Alex said. "Is it weird?"

"No, I'm just surprised he was even there in the first place. Since they are a 1st-grade sect, they usually don't enter a sect without another first-grade sect," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, so then why did he?" Alex asked.

"Probably because the city is close and he had free time. Rosewood city is just 3 to 4 hours of flight for him, you know," Wen Cheng said.

"Ah, yes," Alex said as he recalled the map of the empire.

The golden-robed man started the attack. He suddenly placed his arms on the ground and various spikes made up of earth appeared on the other side of the stage.

The other man sent out a golden slash, but the man from the Honor sect brought forth a wall of earth from the ground. It easily blocked the attack.

"He...is using pure elements to fight, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, he is mostly just using elements without the Qi. Still, it is so strong that the other kid's metal Qi can't weaken it at all," Wen Cheng said.

Quickly, the man from the Honor sect finished the match by sending a barrage of fist-sized stones towards his opponent.

The next match was between a disciple from the Myriad Beast sect and a disciple from another normal sect. The competition holders had made sure that the strong never met at the start.

This was an easy battle for the Myriad beast sect disciple.

The next one up was Luo Mei. Her opponent was a disciple from a random sect she didn't know at all. Her match was pretty simple as well.

All she did was throw gushes of water at her opponent until they couldn't handle it anymore and gave up.

The next match was between two relatively unknown sects. The fight was between a woman with a sword and a man with a spear.

In the end, the woman with the sword won after a long, intense battle. She was heavily wounded at the end of it, but a single pill from the referee helped her heal a lot.

The next few matches were relatively fun to watch, but still very simple.

The winner for the 5th match was a disciple from the Lesser Immortal sect. The winner for the 6th match was the True Wisdom sect. The winner for the 7th match was the Golden Eagle sect. And finally, the winner for the 8th match was a disciple from Royal Fu Academy.

This concluded the matches of Group A.

The next one was Group B. Once called, Du Yuhan and 15 other people walked to the waiting area. Luo Mei returned back to her seat.

"Congratulations, sister. You did great out there," Alex said.

"Thank you, but there is a lot more to be done. Master, I'm really worried about that guy from the Royal Fu Academy," Luo Mei said.

"Sigh, I know. Thankfully, neither you nor Yuhan will meet your opponents from Royal Fu academy until the final match of your group, which will be the top 8," Wen Cheng said.

"Yes. Hopefully, the others aren't surprisingly strong and have more up their sleeves. I really don't want to reveal everything I have until the final match," Luo Mei said.

"I wish the same for all three of you," Wen Cheng said.

Finally, Fu Zhen called for the first pair of Group B.

Du Yuhan walked out from the second area, along with his opponent from a random sect. It was his turn to fight next.

Chapter 320: Intent

Du Yuhan walked onto the stage, along with his opponent from a random sect. Du Yuhan still held a sheathed blade in his left hand as he walked to his spot at the other side of the stage.

"Begin," the referee shouted.

Du Yuhan didn't do anything but stayed there. His opponent on the other hand started using his techniques to send out attacks. The first one was a spiraling ball of metal energy.

The opponent shot it out towards Du Yuhan. However, due to the small size of the energy, he easily dodged it.

Seeing that small attacks didn't work, his opponent sent out a ball of fire instead that was too big to dodge. In response, Du Yuhan swiped his hand in front of him creating an illusory barrier of multicolored lights.

Once the ball of fire landed on the barrier, it suddenly got incredibly smaller which didn't pose any threat to Du Yuhan at all.

"What?" Alex was surprised up in the seating area. "That's... that's the Heaven's Five Barrier technique. How does he know that too?"

"Does that mean that he..." Alex looked at Wen Cheng with a questioning look.

"Yes, just like you, Yuhan is also a person with 5 Elemental Spiritual roots," Wen Cheng said. "So, just like you, he too has learned the Heaven's Five Barrier technique."

Heaven's Five Barrier technique was a technique that allowed users to create a 5 colored barrier that blocked all attacks, reducing their elements by a certain amount depending on the cultivator's cultivation base.

This was the 2nd defensive technique that Alex had learned in the Tiger sect.

"He has 5 Elemental Spiritual roots and yet he is the 2nd ranking disciple of the sect. That is quite a great feat," Alex said.

"No, his spiritual root has nothing to do with his success," Wen Cheng suddenly spoke. "Once he learned that his Spiritual roots weren't very helpful, he gave up on learning different techniques and started learning the sword. Every achievement he has had until now is due to that sword. His spiritual roots have nothing to do with them."

"Oh, does that mean... he doesn't use any techniques?" Alex asked.

"He uses a few here and there, but his techniques aren't very strong due to his spiritual roots, so he only uses them when the technique compliments him. Otherwise, he sticks to simply swordsmanship," Wen Cheng said.

Du Yuhan finally unsheathed his sword and his entire aura changed. He went from a dull person that looked uninterested in the fight to a person that would kill at the slightest movement.

His opponent felt fear like never before.

Du Yuhan took a deep breath and suddenly swung forward. A white slash escaped his sword and flew towards his opponent.

His opponent brought out a metal barrier but before the sword attack could even reach the barrier, another sword attack landed on it from the side destroying it completely.

The opponent looked at the side and saw that the referee had taken out his sword to attack.

The referee looked at Du Yuhan and said "You win."

Du Yuhan bowed and little and sheathed his sword before walking away.

"Wh-What? But the attack never reached me. I could've blocked that attack," the opponent told the referee.

The referee instead just shook his head. "If this were a real battle and I didn't stop him, You would die right now." The opponent shook a little when he heard that.

"Tsk. He's still so strong," Luo Mei said from the seating area.

"That white slash... is that not an elemental attack?" Alex asked.

"No. That's just pure Qi he released from his sword," Wen Cheng said. "However, it also had something else mixed into it that made it so strong."

"A sword intent," Luo Mei said from the side.

"What is a sword intent?" Alex asked. He was never taught anything about them or read anything that mentioned it.

"It's... very high attainment of the sword. After practicing the sword for years, or being attuned to it, you end up slowly becoming one with it. The sword just becomes another part of your body and it follows your intent. In return, your body also becomes just another part of a sword, deadly and sharp."

"Due to practicing with the sword for so long and not training the other techniques as much, Yuhan has managed to do that same thing," Wen Cheng said.

"Hmm... what about spears? Or bows? Or any other weapons. Do they have intents too?" Alex asked.

"Of course. Every weapon has an intent. However, since Sword, Sabers, and Spears are the most used weapons, you will usually only find weapon intents of these 3," Wen Cheng said.

"I wonder if there are other intent users in this competition," Alex asked.

"There are. There definitely are. However, they are keeping this card close to their chest until the last moment to surprise their opponent. Yuhan just revealed his only card to everyone. I hope he knows what he is doing," Wen Cheng said.

The next match started and ended just as quickly. The opponent of the man in a light blue robe with cloud robes immediately gave up when he saw the man bring out a Tiger beast companion.

The 11th match was won by a disciple of the Golden Eagle sect. The 12th match was won by a 3 humanoid puppet user from the Thousand Hands sect. The 13th match was won by a disciple of the Honor sect.

The 14 match was between two random sects. The fight was quite intense, but in the end, one of them managed to beat the other without being too injured.

The 15th match was between a random sect and a disciple from the Lesser Immortal sect. The disciple of the Lesser Immortal sect had an easy victory.

Finally, the final battle was between a disciple of the Royal Fu Academy and a random disciple of the other sect. The Royal Fu Academy's disciple didn't even have a hard time winning against the other one.

And as such, Group B's single battles were over as well

Chapter 321: Final Day

Yang Ma stood up and walked away as Du Yuhan walked back in.

"Good job, Yuhan, but did you really need to show your hand in the battle just now? You could've done that later on," Wen Cheng said.

"I'm sorry, sect leader. I did what I thought was the fastest method to win," Du Yuhan said.

"Sigh, alright. You did well nonetheless," Wen Cheng said and looked back at the stage.

The 17th match started between a disciple from a lesser-known sect against a disciple from the True Wisdom sect. The disciple from the True Wisdom sect had an easy time winning with his Wood elemental attacks.

The 18th match was? Yang Ma's. He too easily won against his opponents by throwing out a barrage of his fire attacks.

Wan Li got lucky with his opponent in the 19th match and easily won against him after a few attacks.

The 20th match was won by a disciple of a sect knows as Violet Garden.? The 21st match was won by a disciple of the Honor sect. The 22nd match was won by a beast tamer from the Cloud Valley sect.

The 23rd match was won by a spear user from a lesser-known sect. Finally, the 24th match was won by a disciple from the Royal Fu Academy.

Thus the Group C's matches ended.

The group D's matches ended in almost the same amount of time.

From 25th through 32nd matches, the matches were won by a disciple from Thousand Hands sect, True Wisdom Sect, Hunting Masters sect, Golden Eagle sect, Cloud Valey sect, Myriad beasts sect, Lesser Immortal sect, and Royal Fu sect.

"All right junior brother, take care. I will see you tomorrow," Luo Mei said as she and the rest of the Tiger sect left the coliseum.

Alex walked up to the Hong Wu sect and congratulated Wan Li. Everyone was very surprised with Wan Li making it into the top 32.

"Seriously Wanwan, tell me how you became so strong? I want to do so too," Fan Ruogang shouted.

"Fanfan, not the time. Let's leave," Ma Rong said and everyone left for the hotel.

Once again, it was very late, so when they all reached back to their hotel, they immediately went to their room to rest. Ma Rong called them for a meeting, and the only thing she did was congratulate Wan Li for making this far.

They didn't have many expectations for him, but he managed to reach the top 32.

"Do your best for tomorrow as well, that is all we ask. You don't even have to win. You've already made us proud by reaching where you are right now," Ma Rong said.

"I will win, sect leader," Wan Li said with determination. After coming to the competition, his timid nature was slowly being stripped away and a confident cultivator was being born.

"Yu Ming, your competition is the final one tomorrow. I don't know if they will set up the singles battle before yours or not but be prepared regardless. It's a single competition, but it may take a long time to complete," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, Master," Alex replied.

Once everything was said, Ma Rong dismissed them all and they went back to their room.

Alex and Wan Li returned to their room and went to their bed. "You should rest for tomorrow's battle, brother Wan. You don't need to read for today," Alex said.

"It's alright, I'm used to it. You should rest too, brother Yu. You have a match coming up tomorrow as well," Wan Li said.

"Very well then, Good Night brother Wan," Alex said and went to his bed before logging out.

He went to freshen up himself and then went to the kitchen to eat something light. Once he was done with that he went back to the game and cultivated overnight with Pearl.

Early in the morning he woke up once again and logged out once more to eat some food.

"Damn, I'm not even hungry. And yet I have to eat?" Alex didn't know what to do. He didn't exercise, his diet was in shambles and now he was eating even when he wasn't hungry.

'I might just gain a dozen or so kilograms at this rate,' he thought.

Once he was done eating, he returned back to his room. Just as he was about to enter the capsule, he stopped.

'Should I use the helmet today? That might be good for my body," he thought. 'No, what am I thinking? I have a competition today. I can do it later if needed.'

He quickly opened the lid of the capsule and entered.

He opened his eyes in the game and saw that it was nearly time to leave. He still wondered if he should use the helmet after his competition was done.

He waited for the knock on the door and walked outside with Wan Li once he heard it.

"Let's leave," Ma Rong said and walked down the stairs.

Along the way, Alex realized something that he had been ignoring all this time. 'Oh no. My classes start tomorrow,' he thought.

"Master, will the competition end today?" Alex suddenly asked.

"Hmm... most likely. There are about 64 single battles and your maze run remaining until the end. Once that is done, the competition will be over," Ma Rong said.

"Will we return back to the sect immediately or...?" Alex asked.

"We will stay for a few days. At least until the rewards are passed along," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, right, rewards. I forgot there was one too. How do they choose it? I don't suppose everyone who won in a competition gets one," Alex said.

"No, not really. The winners of the Single battles will get a specific reward, but everyone else won't get any. Instead, the sects will be what get the reward."

"Depending on the ranking, we can get anything we want from the Royal Treasure vault that we will be allowed to enter," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, I see. I will look forward to it then," Alex said.

Soon, the lot was in the coliseum and everyone went to sit in the seating area.

Chapter 322: Top 32 - Begin

"Do you want to go to the Tiger sect today as well?" Ma Rong asked.

"Oh, can I, Master? I really learn a lot there," Alex said.

"Okay, sure. Go, but come back when it's time for your match," Ma Rong said.

"Thank you, Master. Brother Wan, good luck on your battle," Alex said and left.

Fu Zhen had let them know that the next match was going to be the Top 32's battle, So Alex had some time to spare before his Maze run.

"Good Morning Master, Sister," Alex greeted Wen Cheng and Luo Mei when he got to the Tiger sect's seating area.

"Oh, you are finally here, junior brother. I thought you wouldn't come since you had a competition today," Luo Mei said.

"Oh right, you are taking part in the same match as little Ma aren't you? The Maze run," Wen Cheng asked.

"Oh, brother Ma is taking part in Maze run too?" Alex asked as he looked towards the red-haired Yang Ma.

"That's a funny coincidence. Don't worry, bother Yu Ming. I will help you in the competition," Yang Ma said.

Luo Mei's eyes got serious for a second as she stared towards Yang Ma. Yang Ma in return got a little timid and slouched back.

"Good Morning ladies and gentlemen, on this fine day that might end up becoming the final day of the competition. I, your host Fu Zhen, am back to tell you about today's competition."

"We will first have the Single Battles between the Top 32 followed by a Maze escaping competition and finally ending with the remaining Single battles."

"Here are the remaining fighters in the Top 32. To improve your experience of the fight, we have now decided to give you something else aside from the name and sect alone," Fu Zhen spoke.

Suddenly, a massive screen with the Top 32 names in the brackets appeared on the screen. It was all the same as yesterday since they were all separated into four groups. However, as Fu Zhen said, there was something else there this time.

"I guess that is to be expected. They did the same thing last year too," Wen Cheng said.

"In fact, I was surprised they didn't do it last time," Luo Mei said.

Alex looked at the screen with the 32 different names. Under each name was the name of the sect they belonged to, as well as their cultivation base.

'Luo Mei, Tiger sect, 6th Mind Tempering realm,' Alex read the words written for his senior sister.

Du Yuhan was in the 3rd realm and Yang Ma was in the 2nd realm. In fact, everyone was in the Mind tempering realm. From what Alex could see, the highest one was the 7th Mind Tempering realm. It belonged to a disciple called Chu Xiang of the Royal Fu academy.

"Thankfully the strongest one is in the Group D. Our disciples would have been in trouble otherwise," One of the elder said from the side.

"Yes. Luo Mei, your opponent should be an easy one. Take care of them quickly and return," Wen Cheng said.

Alex looked back at the brackets and saw that Luo Mei's opponent was a disciple of a sect called the Blue Rose sect. The disciple's cultivation base was only at the 1st realm of Mind Tempering. This would be an easy victory for Luo Mei.

And so the battles started.

The first match was between the Earth element using disciple of the Honor sect who was in 2nd Realm of Mind Tempering, and the disciple from the Myriad sect who herself was in the 2nd realm of Mind Tempering not to mention her beasts who were also in the same realm.

A lizard-like tattoo on her forehead glowed and a crocodile came out of it. The 2v1 battle went on for a while with the Honor Sect disciple attacking with as much earth element as he could, but he was never able to harm the crocodile, let alone pierce its skin.

As such, the Myriad Beast disciple won easily.

Luo Mei's match wasn't even a match. Her opponent, the sword-wielding girl didn't have any chance against her and quickly lost.

Between the 3rd Mind Tempering realm disciple of the Lesser Immortal sect and the third Mind Tempering realm disciple of the True Wisdom sect, the battle was the most fun yet. They were both elemental users and neither could get the upper hand.

In the end, the disciple of the Lesser Immortal sect had to use what looked t be his strongest skill and won the match.

The next match was between the Golden Eagle sect and Royal Fu Academy. The disciple of the Golden Eagle sect was at a respectable 3rd Mind Tempering realm, but the disciple of the Royal Fu Academy was at the 5th realm of Mind Tempering realm.

The disciple from the Royal Fu Academy didn't even have to use much of his strength before winning against his opponent.

With that, the fights of Group A were complete. Without any delay, the fights of Group B were started.

"Oh god, this is going to be a problem," Wen Cheng said as he looked at the bracket hovering mid-air. It brightly glowed the 4 people who had won previously and showed that they moved on to the Top 16.

"Cloud Valley sect... that's the beast taming sect, right? The one Elder Xian was from," Alex asked.

"Yes. Poor Yuhan is going to have a hard time. All of his opponents are in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm, not to mention the 4th Mind Tempering realm the disciple from the Royal Fu Academy. I wouldn't be surprised if he lost now," Wen Cheng said.

Alex looked at the match-up and saw Du Yuhan walk onto the stage along with the light blue robe wearing Cloud Valley disciple.

Alex remembered what Du Yuhan said and remembered his determination at the time. He remembered his will to be the strongest. Such a man losing so early on-Alex just couldn't see that happening at all.

Chapter 323: Empower

Du Yuhan walked onto the stage. His opponent was a disciple from the Cloud Valley sect with a cultivation base of the 3rd Mind tempering realm.

The moment they got onto the stage, the disciple from the Cloud Valley sect brought out a Tiger beast. Just like everyone from that sect, he was a beast tamer as well.

He also lookout a half a meter-long spider as well.

"Begin"

Du Yuhan stayed where he was with his sheathed sword, while his opponent was also a little nervous given that he knew about the sword intent from the last match.

For a few seconds, Du Yuhan did nothing, and neither did his opponent. However, seeing that they couldn't keep it up any longer, the beast tamer decided to move.

"Go," he immediately sent out the tiger. The tiger ran with incredible speed and arrived right in front of Du Yuhan. Instead of using his sword, Du Yuhan simply dodged while keeping an eye on his opponent.

The tiger turned around to attack Du Yuhan, however, he had already gotten his chance.

Du Yuhan suddenly dashed forward towards his opponent. When the opponent saw that, he immediately had the spider make spider webs to block Yuhan, but that didn't work.

Just before he reached the webs, he stopped himself and transferred all of his mommentum into one single attack.

SLASH

Death flashed from beyond the webs. The beast tamer was scared for his life when he saw a white slash cut through the nets and fly directly towards him.

Suddenly, a barrier appeared in front of him, and the referee was right by his side. The Referee looked at Du Yuhan and said, "You Win."

Du Yuhan bowed a little towards the referee and left.

The audience was a little surprised. Up until now,? he had won in a single strike every single match. Even the audience was now catching onto the fact that he had Sword intent in his attacks.

"See? That's how you deal with the beast tamers. Go for the cultivator himself. They are usually the weakest link," Wen Cheng said. Alex now nodded in approval after seeing what he did.

The next match was between a girl from the Golden Eagle sect and a man from the Thousand Hands sect. The Thousand hand sect disciple had 3 puppets all at the 3rd Mind Tempering realm fighting for him, so he had an easy time winning against the Golden Eagle sect disciple who couldn't use many attacks.

The next match was between a disciple from the Honor sect disciple, who was fighting against the disciple of a sect called the Purple Flag sect.

Despite having the same cultivation base of the 3rd Mind Tempering realm, the disciple from the Honor sect had a much better understanding of fighting and abilities, so after an intense fight, he won without much injury.

The final match of Group B was between a disciple from the Lesser Immortal sect against a sword user from Royal Fu Academy.

The sword user was a realm higher in cultivation base. So when the two of them fought, the disciple from the Royal Fu academy had a much easier time winning.

Next up was group C.

Yang Ma walked onto the stage with his opponent from the True Wisdom sect who had a cultivation base of the 2nd Mind Tempering realm, the same as Yang Ma's.

"Begin"

Yang Ma immediately created a fireball and sent it towards his opponent. His opponent created a fireball too and sent it flying at the incoming fireball.

The class of the two fireballs created a little bit of an explosion.

Yang Ma was surprised.

Not only Yang Ma, Alex, and Luo Mei were surprised on the seating area as well.

"He... he had a wood root last time right?" Alex asked just to make sure.

"Yes, he did," Luo Mei replied.

"Then how is his fireball stronger than brother Ma's? If I remember correctly, Brother Ma's spiritual root is the Superior Fire Spiritual roots, right?" Alex asked.

"Ohoho, It seems you will learn something interesting now," Wen Cheng said. "Yes, you are correct. He does seem to have two spiritual roots. In fact, they are the same as mine. However, his attacks are still as strong as that of a single elemental root user."

Wen Cheng looked towards Alex and asked, "Can you tell me why?"

Alex fell into thought, "Let's see, there are 4 aspects to an Elemental attack. The Element, the Elemental strength, Qi Density and Qi Amount."

"The element is fire, so same. Yang Ma wins in the Elemental strength. Qi destiny... the opponent doesn't seem to have a very dense Qi. As for Qi amount... there wasn't enough time for him."

"So, that means... something else is going on. The elements... fire and wood. Fire..... And " Alex's eyes slowly widened up.

"Empowering. That guy is using Wood Qi to empower his fire elemental attack," Alex said as if he discovered something amazing.

"Haha, yes. Took you longer than I imagined. Maybe I was keeping unreal expectations. Anyway, the man is using Wood Qi directly into the fire elemental attacks he is using to empower his attacks. So, despite having an inferior spiritual root, he is standing his ground," Wen Cheng complimented.

The fight on the group kept ongoing. Both of them sent attacks after attacks at each other. Yang Ma was having a not-so-fun time anymore.

Suddenly, he threw a massive attack and took out a spear to fight. The other guy tried to dodge a bunch, but Yang Ma seemed to be trained in Spear art as well.

He suddenly started swinging it around while also sending out normal elemental attacks. The opponent was getting attacked by both weapons and strong elemental attacks.

He got easily overwhelmed. In the end, One of Yang Ma's attacks wasn't seen by the opponent and a referee had to stop the fight and declare Yang Ma the winner.

Yang Ma returned back to the waiting area tiredly, and from inside walked out a determined Wan Li.

Chapter 324: Top 32 - End

Wan Li's opponent was a man from the Violet Garden sect, a relatively lesser-known sect. Wan Li was in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm, while his opponent was in the 2nd Mind Tempering realm.

Wan Li was sure he would win. He took out his sword and started attacking red energy slashes the moment the match began.

His opponent also tried attacking as much as he could, but Wan Li was overwhelming him.

A barrier appeared around his opponent in a sphere as he blocked one of Wan Li's attacks. The man placed his palms on the ground and suddenly spikes appeared from inside of it.

Wan Li placed his right foot in front of him and caused a fissure ahead that stopped the man's spikes from moving forward.

He then proceeded to start throwing more and more red slashes towards his opponent. Finally, the opponent caved into the pressure and gave up.

Wan Li won the match.

The next battle was between a girl in the 2nd Mind Tempering realm and a man in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm. Everyone surprisingly expected the girl to win in this case since she was from the Cloud Valley sect and had monsters with her that were stronger than herself.

However, the man from the Honor sect surprised everyone by using attacks imbued with Spear's intent. Another one of the Weapon intent users was forced to show himself.

His attacks were much stronger than the attacks of a normal spear user and thus the girl's beasts couldn't fight him at all. In the end, the referee had to step in and block some of the flying spear attacks to save the girl.

The last match was between Group C was between a disciple from a lower known sect with 2nd Mind Tempering realm and a disciple of the Royal Fu Academy with 6th Mind Tempering realm cultivation base.

It was obvious who would win. Thus, the battles of Group C came to an end as well.

For the first match of Group D, a disciple of the Thousand Hand sect fought with a disciple of the True Wisdom sect. The disciple of the True Wisdom sect was forced to show his Sword intent even though it wasn't properly established.

Thus, he wasn't as powerful as the other ones who had an established Weapon intent and unfortunately lost.

The next battle was between a disciple from a not-so-well-known sect called the Hunting Master's sect and a disciple of the Golden Eagle sect.

The man from the Hunting Master's sect was surprisingly very strong. He was in the 4th Mind Tempering realm and his opponent was a girl in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm.

However, knowledge and heritage could not be beaten so easily. The girl from the Golden Eagle sect revealed her Saber Intent and after a fierce back and forth with the man, won the fight.

The next battle was a very interesting one. It was between two beast tamers. One was a man in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm from the Cloud Valley sect, and another was in the 2nd Mind Tempering realm from the Myriad Beast sect.

However, their cultivation base would have nothing to do with the battle. The man from the Cloud Valley sect brought out two monsters, a brown bear-sized wolf, and an Ox with 3 horns.

The man from Myriad beast also brought out two monsters, one was a massive black boar, while the other one was a red-feathered Crow-like bird.

Their match was probably the most fun to watch as it was a 3v3. The audience never knew who was going to get the upper hand.

In the end, the disciple from Cloud Valley couldn't handle the aerial attacks and thus succumbed to defeat. Thus, the Myriad Sect disciple moved on to the next round.

Finally, the Lesser Immortal sect's disciple was truly unfortunate. There was no way he was going to win a fight against Chu Xiang, the strongest participant of the Top 32.

As such, the Top 32's fights came to a close as well.

Once the fights were done, the competition holders started changing the stage.

Suddenly, a large opaque barrier appeared around the stage and Fu Zhen's voice sounded from inside of it.

"Please bear with us while we prepare the stage for the next competition."

Alex stood up and said, "I will return later after my match." He then walked to the Hong Wu sect's seating area and sat next to his master.

"Mingming, good luck on your match. Go beat them a-- wait, it's not a fighting match. It's a Maze Run so... yes, Beat them all still makes sense. Hehe," Fan Ruogang said from the side.

"Sure, Sister Fan, I will do my best," Alex said.

"Are you truly prepared?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes Master," Alex spoke with confidence in his voice.

"What are you prepared to do to win?" She asked.

Alex thought for a moment and said," Anything."

"Good, but you can't just do anything," Ma Rong said as she looked towards the northern end of the coliseum. "Unfortunately, there will be some things you will have to hide."

Alex knew exactly what she meant. "I know master, I will try my best to win without those techniques," he said.

"Good. When you went to the Tiger sect, I told you to hide your abilities because you were too weak back then to show off your skills. To be honest, you are still too weak, but you have come far enough that not everyone will be a problem to you."

"So, go ahead and do whatever you want and whatever you can. I am lifting the restrictions. No need to hide anything," Ma Rong said.

Alex felt himself get lighter as if something had been lifted from his shoulders. He smiled and said, "Yes, master."

"Participants for the Maze Run. Please gather in the waiting room," Fu Zhen's voice appeared from inside the opaque barrier.

"I'm going now," Alex said and left towards the waiting area all alone.

Chapter 325: Maze Rules

Alex reached the waiting room and stood around looking at his opponents he would have to fight against.

Honor Sect, Golden Eagle sect, Royal Fu Academy; All the different big sects as well as the small ones had sent in some people to take part in the competition.

Alex was the only one from the Hong Wu sect to come here.

'Maze Run... it can't just be a simple maze clearing game right? Even mortals can do that. The most cultivators would be able to speed up the game. There has to be some other twists to the game,' Alex thought.

"Oh, Brother Yu, you are here too," A voice came from behind him. Alex turned around to see Yang Ma and 2 other disciples of the Tiger sect. Judging from the orange linings on their yellow robe, they were core disciples too.

"I guess we are going to be opponents for now," Alex said.

"Don't be like that, Brother Yu. Just ask us for help if you need it; we will give it to you," Yang Ma said.

"Sure," Alex said.

"Everyone, please gather in front of the stage," Fu Zhen's voice sounded from outside.

One by one, everyone started leaving the waiting room. Alex passed the familiar barrier that checked his participation in the entrance. Once out of it, he stopped where everyone had stopped outside of the stage's opaque barrier.

He thought he would have to wait around a lot, but as soon as the participants gathered, a little space in the barrier opened and Fu Zhen walked out of there.

"Green?" Alex thought when he saw a glimpse of the color behind Fu Zhen.

"Welcome everyone to the Maze run. As this is the final non battle competition, we will try to make it the most fun."

"Before I show you or the audience the maze, I will now relay some of the rules of the competition," Fu Zhen said. A group of people walked from either side of Fu Zhen and made their way towards the participants.

"Please lock away all of your storage bags inside the boxes. You will not be allowed anything other than your clothes inside the stage," Fu Zhen said.

Alex was used to it so he brought out his storage bags and locked them away without hesitation. Within half a minutes, everyone was done locking away their bags.

"The staff will now place 3 talismans on your back. Please do not take them off," Fu Zhen siad.

PAT PAT PAT PAT

Sounds appeared from all over the area as the staff members started slapping on talismans behind their back. Alex also felt 3 light slaps on his back. He reached behind to feel his back and found 3 talismans exposed for the world to see.

Then the staff members handed them another talisman. While the ones on the back were yellowish brown in color, the one they were handed were red talismans.

Everyone was confused.

"The purpose of the competition is to enter the maze and come out of the other side the fastest you can. You are not allowed to fight inside the maze or use your cultivation and abilities to make it hard for others to move. "

"If you attack another competitor, one of your talismans on the back will burn away. If you lose all 3 talismans, you will be disqualified."

Everyone got a little anxious. If a competitor was disqualified based on the talismans lost, then... one could simply steal away other's talismans.

"You are not allowed to touch the talismans of other people. Each talisman you touch will result in the same number of talismans burning on your back."

A lot of people sighed in relief when they heard this.

"However, that is where the red talisman comes in. Any talisman that you touch with the red talisman will fall from the other person's back. At that moment, you can take it. After that, the red talisman will not work for a minute," Fu Zhen said.

"Each talisman you have at the end of the match will result in a 10 second reduction in the final time. There are other random talismans inside the maze that will have up to 1 minutes result time reduced."

Everyone was agitated. If stealing talismans were just to screw with the other person's run they wouldn't worry about it except for a few people that didn't want others to have fun. However, now that it was revealed that stealing would actually help you, everyone was going to do that.

Thus, everyone was your enemy now.

" A few more rules. Flying above 1 meter off of the surface is not allowed. If you don't move for over a minute, you are disqualified."

"Touching another person is allowed only if they've given you permission."

"Also, you can choose one of these Common Mortal grade weapons and armors. Choose wisely," Fu Zhen said.

'Weapon? But we're not allowed to attack others... So why?' Alex wondered.

Everyone else chose something that they liked; Alex chose a sword.

"Alright, now that you are done with this, please come and choose a number from this box. It will help choose the order you will enter in," Fu Zhen said.

Everyone walked up and grabbed a paper. Alex looked at his and saw the number 124; there were around 170 people in this competition.

"Number 1 through 10, please come forward and stand at the marked locations," Fu Zhen said, gathering the 10 people ahead of the opaque barrier.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we will now hold the Maze run. However, before that, please lay your eyes on the magnificent Maze we've created," Fu Zhen shouted as he pointed towards the stage.

Suddenly, the barrier slowly got undone and what was inside was finally visible.

Tall green grass walls were staring directly at Alex and the rest. The walls were nearly 10 meters tall and about half a meter thick.

There were 10 paths of entry on the green wall, each for a single participant to enter.

Fu Zhen looked at them and shouted, "Go."

Chapter 326: Maze Run - Start

In the seating area.

"What the hell? I... I thought it was going to be a normal Maze run. Dear Lord, look at the size of it," Luo Mei exclaimed.

"It certainly is ... unique. I hope little Ma and the rest, as well as Yu Ming, will be fine in this," Wen Cheng said. Even Du Yuhan at the side was a little surprised.

Fan Ruogang stood up from her seat. "Sect Leader, what the hell is that? That wasn't what it looked like last time. It was just a simple maze back then. What is going on?" she asked.

"I don't know, Fanfan. It seemed the boredom of last year's Maze run forced them to make this one more... interesting," Ma Rong said.

"Master, is Yu Ming going to be alright? That looks a little dangerous," Zhou Mei said to her masters.

The Third Elder pat her back and said, "I'm sure he will be okay. Look, the staff is already flying above the Maze. They are ready to save the participants when they need it," she said.

Ma Rong looked at the maze once more and got a little worried. This was not what she had expected when she sent him there.

*******

"Oh, This is interesting," Emperor Zexian said when he saw the Maze finally show itself from the barrier. "It wasn't like this last time, was it?" he asked.

"I don't think so. I remember being very bored last year during this maze run and couldn't help but want the battles to begin," the Empress said.

"It's actually all second brother's idea for them to change it. He remembered how boring it was too," the princess said.

"I did... but, not even I could've expected them to make this many changes," the second prince said.

"Oh look, the first batch of 10 went in. This is going to be a little more interesting for sure," The Empress said with a curious smile.

* * * * *

"30 seconds later. The next group will leave. Number 11 to 20, please come forward," Fu Zhen called the next group forward.

'30 seconds per 10 people. So me at 124... that's 6 minutes later. I will start 6 minutes later than the rest. I hope that doesn't make that much of a difference,' Alex thought.

More and more participants of the Maze run went in, and finally, after over 5 minutes, Alex walked forward when his name was called.

Fu Zhen waited for the 30 seconds to pass and said, "Go."

Alex immediately walked through the 4th of the 10 openings in the maze that belonged to him. He was now inside narrow walls of tall plants. He took the path straight ahead and walked.

At the same time, he started thinking.

'Remember what are the rules. What am I not allowed to do?' he thought.

'I can't attack another player. I can't touch the talisman of another player without this red talisman. I can't obstruct another player's path, and finally... I cannot stop moving,' Alex thought and kept on walking.

When he came upon a fork in the road, he had no idea where he was supposed to go. "Screw it," he thought and walked straight ahead.

After a minute or so, he came across a dead end. This was not the correct path.

"F*ck"

He turned around and walked back to the intersection once more. However, this time, there was a woman there contemplating where to move.

When she saw Alex walking towards him, she suddenly took out a bow and arrow and aimed at Alex. Alex could tell that the woman was at least in the Meridian tempering realm, thus he was not her match.

"You will get disqualified if you attack me. Why don't you choose a path a go first? I won't stop you," Alex said. He slowly started circling around the woman.

The woman was frightened even more as she couldn't see Alex's cultivation base and kept the bow and arrow at him at all times.

"You-You just want to get behind me and steal my talisman, don't you? You think I'm stupid. Why don't you go first?" she said.

"I'm afraid I can't do that. You will steal my talisman," Alex said. "I guess we are both in the same dilemma then."

Alex was desperately trying to come up with things to say. "First of all, please just put the bow down. You know obstructing me from leaving this place will get you disqualified, right?" he asked.

"I'm not obstructing you at all. You can leave if you want," the girls said. "Besides, you keep telling me to drop my bow, yet you still hold your sword. You're quite a hypocrite, aren't you?

Alex slowly looked at the sword on his right hand and sighed. "You are right," he said before throwing away his sword.? "Happy?" he asked.

The girl finally accepted that he wasn't after her and decided to lower the bow for now. Just then, Alex walked forward and grabbed his sword once again.

The girl immediately pulled her bow back and targeted him as she asked, "What are you doing?"

Alex simply looked at her and smiled, "Time's up."

"What?" the woman didn't understand what he meant when suddenly, she felt her body lift without her volition. She looked up to see that the staff was pulling her out of the maze field.

"You are disqualified for not moving for a minute."

Alex immediately started walking down the path once more. He didn't want to be the next one disqualified. He walked on and found another intersection.

This time, however, he seemed to have chosen the right path as he didn't encounter any dead ends.

However, he did encounter it next. Free, dead-end, dead-end, free.

After walking on for nearly 10 minutes, he finally came across a long stretch of thin walls that seemed to lead... outside.

"That can't be true. It's too soon," Alex thought.

Still, he had to try, so Alex took a step forward. Suddenly, something grabbed his foot.

Chapter 327: Stolen

Something suddenly grabbed Alex's leg. "What?" he looked down to see that it was a vine expending from the bottom of the right wall.

SLASH

He didn't waste any time and cut it immediately before walking forward. However, in the next step, there were two vines. One that grabbed his left leg and another that grabbed his right arm.

Alex pulled out the vine on his arm and cut away the one on his legs. However, after moving one-step move, 3 vines grabbed him.

Then 4, then 5. No matter how much he pulled, every next step, there was another vine added to the pile that pulled at him. Thankfully, he had a strong body and a sword, so he cut all the vines as he moved forward.

*****

A man with a spear saw that his leg was grabbed by a vine. He stabbed the spear in the vine and cut it away. But then, he took another step, and 2 more vines appeared.

The space was narrow and he couldn't move his spear. He used his left hand to use the spear and cut the vine, and then used it to cut the vine on his right hand.

As he walked more, the harder it was to move. At some point, 7 vines appeared. 1 for each of his legs, 2 for each of his arms, and 1 for his spear.

He couldn't move anymore, but he struggled. He used his entire cultivation base and managed to tear away the vines on his left leg before moving forward.

STEP

8 more vines suddenly appeared, grabbing the man at every location. The man tried to move, but 14 vines were too much for him. After 1 minute, the staff flew down and cleared the vines before declaring that he was disqualified.

*****

"Burn, B*tch, Burn," Yang Ma cried as he burned everything around him. The walls were surprisingly fireproof and didn't take any damage, however the vines were plenty charred.

*****

A girl moved water as a rotating blade on either of her sides which cut away all the vines.

*****

Another participant realized that it was stepping that caused the vines to appear, so he stopped stepping and flew the rest of the way.

*****

Different people found their own way to complete the pathway full of vines.

Alex finally escaped the Vine nightmare. Now he was staring at another nightmare that was probably just as nightmarish.

Ahead of his was wetlands that he would have to walk in. There were wires hanging from everywhere that seemed to be tied to some sort of mechanism that he didn't dare invoke.

He stepped forward and put his feet into the wetlands. At first, he didn't feel anything, but then, his feet sunk very quickly.

"Sh*t, Quicksands," Alex realized. "Why the F*ck is there quicksand in a Maze run? Isn't this supposed to be a normal Maze run," Alex asked. He tried to move his legs out and barely got it out after a lot of force. He stumbled backward and fell on his butt.

'Sh*t. So I can't walk, and I can't fly?' Alex thought as he looked at the hundreds of hanging threads. He absolutely didn't dare to touch them.

'I'm on a quicksand. Think fast, Alex,' he said to himself. "The only way to not get dragged into quicksand is to flop down on your back. In that way, your body has enough surface area to not drown."

"Can I flop down here?" Alex thought, but the answer was no. "Wait, what if I imitate it instead of actually flopping down."

Alex slowly got down on his knees and took a deep breath. Then suddenly, he placed one of his arms on the surface. Surprisingly, it felt like solid ground to him.

He placed another arm and it too was very solid.

"Yes! Fluctuating Friction Dance works. Increasing my friction does help me from drowning," he thought.

PING

Suddenly, he heard something. He heard it from his backside. Alex quickly turned around to see a lady catching the talisman that was falling off his body.
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Somebody had managed to sneak up to him while he was distracted and stole his talisman from his back. The girl immediately started running sideways, but Alex wouldn't let her.

He immediately disappeared from where he stood and appeared right behind the lady and he used his own red talisman to touch one of her talismans.

PING

The woman had a horrified face when she realized what had happened. Alex caught the falling talisman and jumped into the quicksand. Only this time, he had the proper techniques ready.

He crawled on his hands and knees and tried his best to stay lower than the bells.

"Stop," the lady cried and followed after him, but as soon as she jumped in and saw her palms disappeared inside the ground. She too realized what it was.

"What? Quicksand? Why?" she couldn't understand. She tried to pull her arm out but that was very hard. As she tried to pull her arm out, more and more of her body was swallowed by the quicksand.

"What's going on? Help!" she cried out, but nobody came to help. Alex looked right at her but decided to do nothing.

She was halfway deep into the quicksand when a staff flew down and brought her out of it. "You are disqualified for not moving for more than 1 minute."

The girl tried to beg, but the staff heard none of it. Alex turned his head from her to the other ones who were crossing this part of the maze.

The people were far away and he couldn't see what was happening very clearly, but he could see almost all of them flying without any delay.

Alex could finally focus on his quicksand crossing right now. Once again, he got onto his arms and knees and followed the way out.

This time, he didn't have any disturbances to account for his distraction, so he easily crossed the entire section of the quicksand by himself.

Chapter 328: Am I Pretty?

The quicksands were open and thus after Alex came out of the other side, he stood up and finally saw how long the width of the maze actually was.

'That's almost 500 meters long,' he thought as he looked from left to right.

Just as he was looking at the length, he saw a person accidentally hit one of the strings above the quicksand.

TIRRRRING

Suddenly, mud from either side of him flew up and fell on top of him, dragging him to the surface. The man got stuck, but he was able to think quickly and started using some technique to pump out water from all around him, very soon the quicksand diluted into nothing but a mud lake around him and he started flying once more.

Somewhere else, a disciple created a bridge made up of rocks and walked on top of it. Some other person made a bridge with vines and leaves.

Yang Ma burned the quicksand until it was hard enough to walk.

People came up with their own methods to cross, but most of them simply chose to fly. It had its risks but was the easiest of all.

After each of the participants crossed, the staff came down to reset the ground so that the next one would have to make way using their own idea.

Alex looked at the nearly hundreds of openings in the tall bushy walls. These ones were a little thicker than the ones he walked through last time.

He couldn't waste time here so he randomly chose one and walked in. Thankfully, there were no more vines blocking his path here. He kept on walking through the maze, reaching dead ends multiple times.

He had his senses on max right now and was even going as far as to release his spiritual sense in a very small area. Just as he was walking, he heard a sound.

PING

Someone just had their talisman stolen. Alex walked a little forward and saw a girl in an orange robe picking a talisman that fell off of the back of a person in red robes.

Alex walked a little forward to see that the person in red robes was on the ground.

'Did she force him there? How is she not disqualified yet?' he wondered. He couldn't make heads or tails of the situation.

"Move back," the lady said and the man in the red robe stood up a little before moving to the right. They seemed to be in cahoots or something and didn't want to get disqualified.

Alex didn't know if the two of them would gang up on him to steal his talisman or what, so he moved slowly and cautiously. He also kept an eye on his back at all times. He did not want a repeat of the previous times.

Ping

The girl touched the man's talisman once more, making it fall off. Now the man only had a single one remaining.

Alex didn't know what was happening, but he wasn't going to waste time here. She has just used her Red talisman and it was going to be in cooldown for a minute.

He immediately disappeared when he got close to 10 meters and touched the girl's talisman

Ping

Alex immediately caught it and moved back. The girl was surprised and looked back as well.

She finally realized that her talisman had been stolen as well. "How did you get so close without me noticing?" She asked with curiosity in her eyes. But after seeing Alex not answer at all, her curiosity died.

"Move back," she said and moved a little towards Alex. Alex in turn moved a little back as well. The man in the red robe scooted a little back as well.

However, even with Alex taking his friend's talisman, he didn't turn around.

"You look rather young. Why doesn't the handsome little brother just hand senior sister her talisman," the girl said.

"No way," Alex said with a dry chuckle.

The girl was surprised and a little taken aback. She placed a finger on her cheek and tilted her head a little before asking, "Aren't I really pretty, little brother?"

'The hell?' Alex thought.

"So what if you are?" Alex asked.

"So why won't little brother hand me my talisman?" she asked.

"I already said No," Alex said.

The girl tilted her head once more. This time her face had a very confused look. "What's going on? You are not very strong, so why won't it work?" she asked.

"The hell are you talking about la--"

"GIVE ME BACK MY TALISMAN," The girl said with a furious but calculated voice.

Alex felt his mind grow a little numb. It felt like he was severely sleep-deprived and wanted to sleep. However, a second later he lost all of that feeling and got awake.

He moved a little back and checked his behind as well.

"Mental attacks." He looked at the red-robed man that was standing on the ground. "No wonder he isn't moving. You charmed him, didn't you?" he asked.

"What's going on? How are you so weak and yet have such a strong mind. You not only resisted my charm but also my directed attack.

Suddenly, a staff dropped from the sky and said, "You are disqualified by obstructing another participant's progress."

The staff took her and flew out.

"What? So, charm is accepted, but mental attacks are considered obstruction huh? Thank god I didn't use heaven's impact on her," Alex thought.

He looked at the red-robed man and saw that he was starting to get his wits back now that the woman was gone. Alex looked down onto his Red talisman. The 1-minute cooldown was up.

"Sorry dude, everyone looks out for themselves," he said and walked up to his back before touching his last talisman with the paper.

Ping

A staff dropped down from the sky and spoke to the guy just as he recovered his wits. "You have been disqualified for losing all of your talismans, "

The guy started crying about not knowing what was happening, but nothing could be done. Alex just walked forward without looking back.

Chapter 329: Snow Field

Alex encountered a few people but usually went in a different direction, so he didn't interact with them. Sometimes, a few of them followed him to steal his talisman, but he simply teleported behind and stole theirs instead before running away.

As he was walking forward, he started noticing slight whiteness on the leaves of the plant making the wall. He went close to it and checked, "Frost?" he said in surprise.

The further he walked, the more snow there was. During intersections, there was usually a patch that had more frosts than the other one. Alex chose that and never encountered any dead ends.

Finally, he came across a small, but frozen land. "So much ice," he said in surprise. Snow was a very rare occurrence for him even in his home that was towards the north. There were a few mountains where it snowed, but they were far from his house.

"What do I do now?" he thought. The moment he moved and stepped into the frozen land, a gust of wind appeared and his face directly. He instinctively closed his eyes and very soon his eyes were shut from the snow.

He forcefully opened his eyes and removed the frost that had got it to shut. He needed to see to walk upfront, but the gust with the snow wasn't helping it.

He took a deep breath and moved his Qi until it enveloped his whole body and moved forward. The gust made ice stick to him, but they simply melted when they touched his hot Yang Qi.

Now, all that remained was for him to have a way to see where he was actually going on. 'Should I do it?" Alex thought. He was already doing it on small scale, but he didn't want to tip any of the staff off just in case.

'Argh, f*ck it,' Alex thought and sent out his Spiritual Sense in a 20 meters area horizontally. He acted like he was using his eyes to see, but really he just used his Spiritual sense.

'There's someone there,' Alex thought and walked towards the person. The man was trying to walk forward in the snow with near 0 visibility. With their Qi, no one had to worry about the snow, but visibility was still a problem.

PING

Suddenly, he heard something and looked back. However, he couldn't see anything. He didn't know what had happened, so he kept moving forward. After a while, another PING sounded.

"What's going on?" the man asked while turning back, but still couldn't see anything. In the end, he turned around and kept on walking.

PING

He heard it once more and wanted to turn around but he was suddenly pulled up and got out of the snowfield.

The staff who pulled him up looked at him and said, " You have been disqualified for losing all of your talismans."

PING PING PING

Alex walked around searching for people to steal their talismans off of. At some point, he stopped.

"What the hell am I doing?" these talismans barely take 10 seconds off and I am wasting a minute for this. He was lost in the allure of the talismans and forgot the main purpose of the competition.

He immediately started walking in the correct direction, when he sensed something.

A talisman was floating through the air a few meters away from him on the right. He walked in that direction and caught the talisman.

'Is this?' he thought and read it.

-50 seconds subtracted from the result-

"Oh, that's nice," Alex thought and kept it before walking towards the front. He finally crossed it and came across another plant maze.

'Is there a pattern? Maze, followed by a difficult place to trek?' Alex thought.

He walked through it once more. He still had no idea how to navigate it properly and came coming across dead ends. 'There must be something. Otherwise, it will all just be a game of luck for the most part,' Alex thought.

Suddenly, he came across a disciple wearing a light blue robe with a cloud pattern on it. He wasn't moving at all and was looking at Alex with a slight smile.

'What is he up to?' Alex thought. Just then, he saw something behind him. He suddenly turned around and slashed his sword behind him.

CLANG

The sword hit the talons of an eagle beast. On its talon was a red talisman stuck to it. 'Smart,' Alex thought. He then immediately rolled away from the bird and disappeared.

"Huh? Where did he-" the man spoke a single word when heard a sound.

PING

He turned around just in time to see Alex catch his talisman and run away. "Stop," he shouted, but Alex wasn't going to listen to him. By the time he got to an intersection, Alex had disappeared in one of the two, and he couldn't find Alex at all.

The Flickering Shadows technique was truly amazing and useful in this competition. He could easily steal the talismans of an unguarded person.

Alex ran into a few dead ends again and finally found his way into another location. He looked at the part in front of him and said, "Swimming pool?"

A large patch of the land in front of him was water. It was still 500 meters long and the distance was also about 100 meters wide.

He could see the various disciple taking part in the competition. They were all flying over the water as expected. That was after all the correct choice.

"But that seems wrong," Alex thought. It couldn't be that the competition holders made such a massive piece of the lake just to have the participants fly over it.

A few other disciples also seem to have the same idea and they jumped inside the lake. Alex too jumped in without hesitation.

During the quicksand part, he had used Fluctuating Friction dance to increase friction and stay above the wetlands, but now, he was using it in the opposite way to reduce friction and easily maneuver in the water.

Chapter 330: Sleep

The Qi was being used up much faster than normal inside the water, but he was okay with that. As long as he knew what was inside the water, he would be fine.

He ran around at full speed with his spiritual sense looking at everything.

After a few seconds, he saw something ahead of him. He walked forward hoping it was a talisman, but instead it turned out to be a key.

It looked very new and looked slightly blue underwater. He quickly kept it with him and search around a bit more. He found 2 extra talismans.

One gave him a 40-second reduction, and another gave him a 24-second reduction.

Finally, he brought back friction and swam up before flying out of the lake. He took a deep breath and immediately flew to the other side without any delay.

He then entered another maze. He was walking forward when he suddenly met Yang Ma returning back from another pathway of the intersection.

"Oh Brother Yu, I can't believe we meet here,"? Yang Ma said.

"Hello, brother Ma. Did you come from a dead end?" Alex asked.

"Oh yeah, that direction is a no-go. Let's go here," Yang Ma said.

Alex nodded and started walking. As he passed by, Yang Me made a smirk that seemed to match his face. He slowly walked forward and got directly behind Alex.

He took out his red talisman and quietly brought it next to Alex's talisman. However, Alex disappeared. In the next second, Yang Ma heard a PING from behind him and saw Alex catch his falling talisman.

"You really aren't a very good person, are you? Sister was right about stopping me from interacting with you," Alex said.

Yang Ma smiled and said, "there is nothing good or bad. There is no fairness in this game. I do what I can to win."

"Well, I can't argue with that. Keep doing what you are doing then. See you later," Alex said and immediately disappeared.

Yang Ma looked around and couldn't find him.

Alex was now 10 meters away from his original place on a completely different part of the maze. He had appeared right next to a girl who was frightened out of her wits and immediately got into defense position.

Alex saw that and thought nothing. Without caring about the girl, he immediately ran towards an intersection and chose a path. He made his way through many intersections, stealing a few talismans along the way, and finally made it out of the maze.

"What?" he thought when he finally saw what was in front of him.

"A flower field?" he thought as he looked at the land filled with yellow flowers and green grasses all around. "What are they?" he thought and went forward to check.

[Soothing Orchid]

[Dreaming Thorns]

"I have never come across these flowers have I?" Alex thought. He checked his memories and found that they were used in a few pills in the True rank that helped with insomnia and anxiety.

"What the hell is this place?" he thought and started walking through it. The plants were nearly a meter and a half tall and flying didn't make sense.

As he kept on walking, he really did feel himself soothing. It was like all worries in his mind had been stripped away. He felt calm. He felt really tired and just wanted to rest.

However, that feeling disappeared very quickly and he was left gasping for breaths. "What was that? I-I nearly fell asleep," Alex thought.

He quickly stepped back from the yellow flowers.

"Ow," he screamed. He looked back to see that the Dreaming Thorns had stabbed him. 'But I'm a body cultivator,' Alex thought. Then, his body started getting lethargic, as if he was ready to sleep.

<Toxic Substance detected>

<Sun God's Divine Yang body disintegrates everything>

<Toxins have been destroyed>

<You have received 20,000 Qi>

Alex immediately got awake. "What... happened?" he said with fear in his eyes. "What do these things do?" he thought.

'Damn, I really need information on what each ingredient does by themselves and not just what they make,' he thought.

He sent out his spiritual sense and tried to search for the talismans he could find. Unfortunately, he did not, but that also meant he didn't have to stop anywhere.

He quickly reached the walls on the other side and saw something written on top of the entrances.

- Once you choose an Entrance, you cannot choose another—

"Okay," Alex thought and entered one of the 10 openings. Once he was inside and had gone past a few intersections, he met some people. Only this time, Alex was sure they were a group.

They were 2 men and 1 woman standing on either side of the wall with their backs to it. They were holding their red talismans in their hand.

'Sh*t,' Alex knew what was happening.

The 3 looked at him with sinister smiles. Alex frowned. He wanted to teleport to the other routes but wasn't sure if that was allowed or not. After all, the rules said, you could not change the entrance after choosing once.

He thought for a few seconds and immediately ran away leaving the 3 in laughter. But after a minute or two, he returned, and in his hands were a bunch of flowers and thorns.

"Wh-What are you doing?" the girl asked.

Alex smiled and dropped it all near their feet. Without touching, the thorns didn't do anything, but the flower surely did.

With so many at the same place, they all started getting sleepy. The man handled himself and slapped himself to keep himself awake.

But while he was doing that, Alex ran past him. The man's body was too lethargic to stop him. After failing to get Alex, he decided to get his comrades and switch places.

At the same time, he heard a sound.

PING

He didn't even have to look back to know that his talisman had just been stolen away by Alex.

Chapter 331: A Feeling

Alex ran away with the man's talisman and read it. He had noticed a few talismans in that there were writings on the talismans that belonged to the participants.

He had come to notice two different sets of writing.

One said [CCHASTWDPH] and another one said [ETWLFEONT].

Alex tried to make sense of the 2 types of talismans and didn't notice anything. His own 2 remaining talismans were of the first variety.

'Is this something random to f*ck with me?' he thought. He gave up on thinking about it for the moment.

Alex ran through some intersections, redoing his runs multiple times cause he ran into dead ends. Finally, he was done with that section of the maze and walked out of it.

"What the?" he thought as he saw the scene ahead.

Unlike the previous times, there wasn't an open space to walk through like the previous times. Instead, in front of him was... himself.

Or more accurately, a reflection of himself. As he walked forward, he saw the walls move as well. When he finally entered that section of the maze, he realized, the walls were mirrors.

He walked ahead slowly and suddenly slammed on a wall that was placed at a 45-degree angle. 'Sh*t, this is going to be hard,' he thought.

He tried walking in another direction and could see nothing but himself in all the walls. So he carefully moved. Dead ends were much harder to return from since he didn't know where the intersections were anymore. He couldn't remember the places like he could for the other mazes.

So he had to rely on intuition now. Thankfully, he had his spiritual sense fully working, so he didn't have to worry about accidentally hitting a wall anymore.

Finally, after nearly 15 minutes of scurrying around like a headless chicken, he managed to get out of there. However, it was simply him getting out of the fire pan and into the fire.

The place in front of him was nothing but fog. He carefully placed a foot inside expecting the whole land to cave in, or some sort of attack to just at him.

However, there was nothing. He carefully walked a bit more and there truly wasn't anything. 'Hmm, so there really isn't anything,' Alex thought as he freely started walking forward.

As he walked more and more, he couldn't help but get the feeling that this was familiar. 'Isn't this just like...' suddenly, his eyes went wide.

He suddenly started to look around with anxiety and confusion in his eyes. He turned his head around to check but no matter where he looked, he couldn't make sense of it.

"Where am I supposed to walk towards?"

He was stuck in a formation, and this was one that took away his sense of direction.

Alex wandered for a bit but he was still stuck inside the formation. "What do I do?" he thought. Even his spiritual sense didn't help as there was nothing to look at in the vicinity.

"Screw it," he thought and came up with an idea. He took his sword and threw it ahead of him, but only a small distance away. He slowly walked towards the sword and stopped with both of his feet stuck together.

He then picked up the sword and without looking anywhere, threw it straight ahead of him. While getting to his sword, his body would try to make him move in another direction, but with the spiritual sense, he knew where he was supposed to walk to.

He found a person in the fog once but didn't dare break his direction as he would probably get lost if he did that. Finally, after repeating that a few dozen times, he hit a wall.

He quickly walked to the sword and realized that he had hit a wall. When he saw where he was, he frowned. He was back in the mirror maze.

Meaning he would have to repeat the same thing for an entire length of the maze. "F*ck," he couldn't hate but shout.

He was about to throw the sword when suddenly, he felt a... weird sense that something was calling to him. He couldn't tell what it was, or where it was. What he could tell was the direction it was coming from.

It was behind him. He couldn't tell what this feeling was as it wasn't anything like when the alchemy ingredients called to him, or when his body reacted to materials it wanted.

This was something different, something that felt more... home. 'What's going on?' he thought. He knew for sure this had nothing to do with his knowledge of alchemy or his body, but there was nothing else to him but that.

'Whatever at least it will help me now,' Alex thought and ran straight ahead. He didn't bother with directions or people, as long as the feeling was coming from behind him, he knew where to go.

In under a minute, he reached the other side of the fog and looked at the top. It once again said that he couldn't change his choice of entrance later on.

So he carefully, but in the end randomly, chose an entrance and walked in. When he saw the maze, he couldn't help but be surprised.

"Is this real?" he asked himself. Ahead of him was a straight line for nearly 200 meters. There were no split paths, no intersection, or anything.

From start to finish he could see everything. "What's the catch?" he thought and slowly placed a foot in. He was expecting vines like the first time to pop out and lock him in place, but nothing happened.

Second foot, third foot. He walked more and more, but nothing happened. "Haha! There's nothing?" he thought and started running.

He hadn't taken 10 steps into the run when—

BAM

He hit something and fell on his butt. "Ouch," he said as he stood up and looked in front of him, but there was nothing there.

"What did I hit?"

Chapter 332: Illusory

Alex rubbed his head a little and carefully looked ahead. He could still clearly see the end of the path, but he had just hit something.

He slowly extended his arm forward until his arm touched something. "A barrier?" he wondered and felt it a little more. The more he felt it, however, the surer he was that this was not a barrier.

He closed his eyes and tried to understand what he was feeling. "This feels like the walls of the maze," he thought as he felt the tiny leaves and branches.

He suddenly backed up and looked at the whole thing again. Only this time, he used his Spiritual sense.

"There truly is a wall," he thought as he saw the wall finally. To the right of him was an opening. He opened his eyes and looked at the opening. He could see a wall there.

He slowly moved to the right while extending his arms like a blind man finding his path. Soon he reached the wall and tried to touch it, but there was nothing there.

He walked straight in and the whole environment changed. It was like he was on the other side of the wall. However, he could go back if he wanted to.

"Illusions," he finally understood what was happening.

He sent out his spiritual sense and found his way ahead. Thankfully, there were no intersections with the illusions, they were just hard to find paths.

He 'felt' his way through the rest of the maze and walked out. The scenery changed once more, and he knew he was out of the illusion. During the entire illusion maze, he actually found nobody.

'Am I ahead or behind? Or did people just choose a different route?' he wondered. Ahead of him was an obstacle course, that didn't seem very hard.

'Even a mortal can complete that,' he thought. However, he knew there was going to be something weird about this place.

He walked forward into the empty landscape and suddenly felt a force attack him. This force reminded him of the force in the Forbidden Fields. However, it only attacked his Qi and not his spiritual sense.

Furthermore, Alex could feel that he could push back this force if he wanted to. The only problem was, he would have to expend a lot of Qi to sustain that push.

"Well, not like I need it," he thought and immediately ran forward. With his nearly Organ Tempering realm body cultivation, he didn't need to worry about anything.

He jumped through all the obstacles and crossed them in no time like it was child's play for him.

He finally reached the other side where the force disappeared and he regained his Qi. It felt good. Ahead of him was nothing but a very long stretch of land that inclined the further along it went.

However, he didn't trek on it as there were words floating in front of Alex that said 'Jump in the Hole'. Alex stepped forward and saw a hole in front of where he was. He wasn't allowed to cross the empty land but had to go through the hole.

"Ah, F*ck!" he was annoyed at how long the Maze was going on. It had been over an hour, even close to 2 hours, and yet the maze still didn't show an end.

However, he couldn't waste any time and directly jumped into the hole.

The inside was dark and he could only see anything thanks to the light that was coming from the hole. However, the further along he went the less light he got. Even if he was a cultivator, he couldn't see in places with truly no light.

So, he used his spiritual sense for guidance. Just as he sent it out, he felt someone waiting in the darkness on the other side.

Alex could see him with his eyes closed, listening to his footsteps. 'He wants to steal my talisman,' Alex thought. However, there was no way the man could do that here in a place with no light.

The darkness was Alex's domain.

Alex immediately disappeared and appeared next to the man.

PING

He swiftly grabbed the falling talisman and disappeared. The man had been listening to sound for echolocation to determine where Alex was, but he never expected Alex to simply disappear and steal away his talisman.

By the time the man looked behind, Alex had disappeared again. Alex didn't bother walking at all. He kept on using the teleportation technique as that was the fastest way to leave this place of darkness.

After not even 5 minutes, he reached the end of the underground tunnels and climbed a steady incline to walk out of it. When he finally came out, he was surprised.

"What?" he shouted out as he saw the most ridiculous field yet. In front of him, was a field full of nothing but monsters. He looked at the sword he was holding and thought, 'Am I supposed to fight them?'

However, just as quickly he shook his head. "No, at the end of the day, this is a race. I am supposed to walk out of here as soon as I can," he said to himself.

He decided to skip the monster, and just as he wished, the texts floating in the air also gave him an easy route out.

- The restriction of '1-meter flight' is lifted just for this one course. It will start the moment you enter the maze walls on the other side.-

"I can fly?" he thought happily. He could now easily skip the hundreds of monsters down below. He was about to fly and leave, but then he stopped.

He looked up and looked at the words again. "Why?" he asked himself. Why would the competition holders lift a restriction for just this one land?

Was it because it was dangerous? Was it because it was time-consuming? If one could simply skip it, why even have this be a part of the Maze run?

That was when Alex noticed something amongst the many monsters and thought, "I see. No wonder."

Chapter 333: Blue Gorilla

Alex looked at the massive amounts of beasts down on the ground from his elevated land.

He also noticed a few people fighting the beasts. "It seems they noticed too," he thought.

On top of many of the beasts, there was a small line going across their bodies, which came to their underbelly that held a small box.

'That box must be the reason,' Alex thought and immediately started flying. However, after getting close to the monsters, he realized another problem he hadn't thought of yet.

They were all in the Meridian realm, and every single one of them could seriously injure him in a single strike.

If his body had the same cultivation base as his Qi, he might have some ease, however, with how he was now, he had no chance.

'I need to think of another way,' Alex thought. He looked for a monster that was very weak and had the weakest cultivation base of them all.

A blue-haired gorilla beast with 1st Meridian Tempering realm had the misfortune of being his target.

Alex could either try to fight the beast head-on and win the box from it, or he could sneak in and steal it.

He didn't have much time to waste and fight it, so he decided to steal it. He flew up to the highest vantage point and waited for the perfect moment.

Suddenly, he disappeared. He emerged right below the gorilla, slightly disoriented, but with enough wits to grasp the box and pull it.

However, not everything was as easy as it looked. No matter how hard he pulled the box, the ropes just wouldn't let go.

The gorilla smashed down with its giant arms, but Alex easily rolled out of its way and once again tried to pull. It didn't work.

He immediately flew away from the attack range of the blue gorilla and frowned as he looked at the others. Many other people were struggling with their beast of choice as well, and Alex realized that the other beasts were ignoring everyone else.

'Are the beasts under a trance so that they don't realize what is happening around them?' Alex wondered.

Just then, he saw a man kill the beast he was fighting. Alex was about to turn back, but he saw something interesting. After the beast dropped, the top on its rope lit up a bit and fell in two directions.

The man took the box still attached to the open ropes and left.

'So I have to kill the beasts?' Alex thought and looked towards the blue gorilla. The blue gorilla was already doing its own thing after Alex left it.

'Sigh, and here I expected to not have to fight at all,' he thought. 'Whatever, I just hope the sword lasts through it,' he thought and started moving.

As soon as he got close to the gorilla, the gorilla too got aware of his existence and started moving. It tried to walk towards him, but Alex gave no chance, he was in a hurry.

His sword shined golden and he disappeared. When he appeared, he was already below the gorilla, and he accurately hit the waist of the gorilla where the rope was.

He wanted to give one last try to see if the rope was unbreakable; it was. 'Fine then, I will kill it,' he thought and started attacking it.

Alex dashed sideways at incredible speed and slashed the gorilla on the leg. There was a slight cut on the gorilla's leg, but that was all it was.

'I'm going to have to use more than just Smiting Blade.'

The gorilla tried to smash him with its fist, but Alex had a full vision of everything that was happening around him. He immediately disappeared once again and arrived behind the gorilla where he launched the Fist attack and the Palm attack.
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His body already looked like jade from using his defensive technique and he was leaving nothing unguarded by fully using his spiritual sense.

He bombarded the gorilla with attacks. The gorilla tried to swing at him with its giant hands, but Alex simply used that to jump backward.

Without wait, he put 2 fingers forward and they started to glow a little yellow. He then swiped those fingers along the side of his blade and moved the glowing sword above his head in a circular pattern.

Five glowing after images of the swords were left behind that quickly turned towards the gorilla. The gorilla showed a little fear when it saw this.

"HAH!"

Alex shouted as he let them loose. 5 energy blades blitzed their way to the blue gorilla.

BANG

Dust flew everywhere and Alex had to block them with his Qi. However, even with the dust flying, he knew, that didn't work.

An ice-clad blue gorilla appeared from the dust. 'Sh*t. It has water elemental powers,' Alex thought. The gorilla was strong than him and had probably a better water element than him. So, the ice armor, which was a sub-type of water, was capable of weakening his Penta Blade attack that was a metal-type attack.

'However, it's still hurt. Meaning, it's not that much stronger than me if I put my Qi density into account. I just need a better element,' Alex thought.

'Got it.'

He could use the Fire element to Ruin the gorilla's ice armor, but Alex didn't have any fire elemental attacks. He could use Earth Elemental attacks to Overwhelm, or at the very least, control the ice armor, but Alex didn't have that either. So, the only thing he could use was Wood Elemental attacks.

Instead of golden-yellow, his sword changed colors and it started glowing green. Alex disappeared once more and appeared right below the gorilla once more. The gorilla was prepared, but it was still too fast for it to react.

Alex swung directly into the ice armor. The ice practically broke apart at the touch of his attack and the attack itself landed on the gorilla's body.

The gorilla cried in pain and grabbed the right side of its gut where a relatively big cut had appeared.

Alex smiled and thought, 'I can kill it.'

Chapter 334: The Box

He had just launched the 2nd strike of the Elusive Heavenly sword at close range to deal the damage with great precision.

Once again, his sword glowed green, but suddenly he noticed the gorilla form two sharp icicles and smash it towards him. Alex disappeared once again, but the gorilla seemed to be prepared this time.

It searched for him and attacked him within a second after he reappeared. 'Sh*t,' he thought and disappeared again.

Thankfully, after the mortal cleansing, his movement of Qi had become very quick with almost zero resistance. Thanks to that, he could continuously disappear right after he reappeared as much as he wanted.

However, his mind was a different problem. After the 3rd instant teleport, he was starting to lose information about where he was and which direction he was turning towards.

The gorilla slammed again and he disappeared once again. On the 4th reappearance, he threw his sword outside of the gorilla's area of attack.

He then disappeared again. When he reappeared, he was about 8 meters away from the gorilla and held his sword in his hand. It took him a second to get his head together and he stepped back once more.

HUFF HUFF

He breathed heavily. The blue gorilla suddenly threw one of its icicles towards him. Alex easily dodged it, but in that time the gorilla had blown the ground with the cold air from it's lungs.

Almost magically, ice formed on the surface of the ground and so did an ice armor form on its body once more. There was so much reflection between the two that the amount of shadows had been reduced by nearly 2 thirds.

Alex could no longer use the same techniques as before.

'Screw it, you want long ranged attacks? You will get it,' he thought and put wood Qi into his blade once more.

With a single slash, he sent out the 2nd strike of the Elusive Heavenly sword once more. The gorilla knew it couldn't dodge, so it tried to block the attack with its icicles and armors.

The green slash easily cut through the two, but has in turn lost a lot of its energy and was thus so weak that it only left a slight cut on the skin. The ice armor grew back and so did the icicles. The gorilla could fight again.

However, Alex wasn't dejected. He instead smiled and said, "Let's see if your Qi will last longer or mine." Once again, he threw out the 2nd strike which the gorilla blocked.

He threw it once again, and again, and again. The gorilla blocked the first few, but as it started losing its Qi, the ice wasn't as strong as before.

Suddenly, Alex put it more Qi into the sword and made the sword glow even greener. He was using the 3rd strike. The 3rd strike was truly useful for people that had superior wood roots, but it slightly increased the damage of attacks on people with inferior roots like Alex as well.

With one last breath remaining on the gorilla, he wanted to finish it off with the strongest attack he could use against it right now.

He raised his sword diagonal to the right and slashed.

A very green slash of energy flew towards the now bloody gorilla. It tried to move a little out of the way, but it was too wounded to do so.

The slash directly landed on its chest and cut in deep enough to damage its internals. Within seconds, the gorilla died.

"Hoooo," Alex took a deep breath and walked towards the corpse. The robe around the gorilla's waist glowed a little and it fell off.

He went ahead and grabbed it. Suddenly, the feeling that had been with him since the foggy area increased a little. It wasn't enough to make him really think anything of it, but was just enough that he noticed the increase.

He didn't know what it was, so he decided to ignore what it was and keep going with the competition. He was about to fly when he noticed something.

The many beasts that were in a trance earlier suddenly got out of their trance and looked at him. "Wh-What?" he tried to slowly back away, but their eyes never left him. They even started to move forward.

The further Alex moved, the more the beasts came closer to him. "What's happening?" he shouted out loud. The beasts heard the shout and ran towards him in a rush.

Just then, an aura erupted from the sky and a few staff members in the True realm got down. Their aura suppressed the beasts and one of them said, "You can leave to the other side."

Alex nodded and flew up and away. He didn't want to do anything with these beasts so he stayed very high in the sky. "What was that?" he wondered.

He suddenly looked at his hands and realized what he was holding. "Oh right, I nearly forgot," he said and dropped down near the maze walls.

-The Final Maze; Choose wisely-

That was all it said. 'The final maze, so if I cross it, the run is over, right?' Alex thought. The final maze was actually made up of solid wooden walls instead of the bushes like most of the other ones.

"Let's check what's inside here first," he said as he pulled the box up along with the rope. The rope seemed to be attacked to the top of the box, while the box itself was totally without any design, aside from the single seam running across it that seemed to be where it opened from.

"Let's see what is inside of you," Alex thought and pushed the lid open. It didn't open.

"Huh?" he put more force into it, but it wouldn't open at all. 'What is this box made up of?' he wondered and tried some more, but it didn't work.

He even used spiritual sense to check what was inside, but for some reason, there was a seal on the box itself that stopped him from seeing it.

He was extremely befuddled as what exactly to do next.

Chapter 335: Wooden Walls

BANG, CLANG

Alex slammed his sword right on top of the box, but nothing happened. Instead, his sword broke in two. "What the? What am I supposed to do then?" he asked in frustration.

He kicked, punched, threw it at the wall, and tried to use different techniques on the box, but it didn't open.

"ARGHHH" in frustration, he grabbed the box by the end of the ropes and started slamming it everywhere. He didn't let go and kept on beating it around.

Suddenly, he felt the load lighten. "Huh?" he looked up and checked. The box was a good 20 meters away from him near the wall of the maze. He looked at his hand and only the rope remained.

"Oh, it came off," he said and walked to the box. He picked it up and saw its pristine condition. "Damn, still no damage. Just how strong is thi—" he stopped.

He could now see something on the box that he couldn't before. There was a hole in it.

"Huh? How did it— Oh, it was covered by the rope. I should have ripped it off as the first thing I did," he said and looked at the hole.

For a few seconds, he didn't know what the hole did, but then he saw something. Inside the hole… was another hole. His eyes started shining when he saw that.

"A keyhole," he said in surprised. He quickly searched into his robes among the dozens or more talismans and brought out a key. This was the same key he had found deep in the swimming pool like course.

He inserted the key and twisted it.

CLACK.

The box opened. With slightly nervous hands, he opened the box and saw what was inside. When he finally laid his eyes on the reward he had been trying this hard to get, he was disappointed.

"Just a bunch of talismans?" he nearly shouted in angers. He calmed himself and said, "This might be good, don't lose hope Alex."

He checked the first one.

-15 seconds reduction from the result-

"That's just the first one," he said to himself.

-52 seconds reduction from the result-

"That's… not bad," he tried to deceive himself.

- 34 seconds reduction from the result-

This wasn't good, but he still didn't lose hope.

-16 seconds…-

This was bad.

-28 seconds…-

This was bad too.

-10 seconds…-

This one was especially bad.

-22 seconds…-

"Sigh, I wasted so much time." He quickly read through the other 5 remaining talismans.

"Huh?" when he got to the last of the talismans, he noticed something. There was something etched onto the wood on the end.

"What's this?" he thought and read it.

-Here lies the final one of the 3 -

-HKELOHOEA-

"Wait… this is!" Alex quickly took out the two types of talsman out that had a similar string of words written on them.

[CCHASTWDPH], [ETWLFEONT], and [HKELOHOEA]. If the information on the box was correct, he now had all the pieces of the puzzle. But Alex couldn't think of how they would fit.

"Hm, no matter what order I stack them in, it doesn't work," he thought. Putting the words in a straight line didn't seem to be the way to go.

"Are these abbreviations then? Probably not. These would be too long," he thought.

"Reverse then?" he checked but that didn't work either.

"Hmm, one is 10 letters long, while the other 2 are 9 letters long. How do I do this?" He spent a good 5 minutes trying to think of ways to orient them.

"Hmm, that is… I might as well try it," Alex thought after coming up with an idea. He took the broken sword and started writing the words on the ground.
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He was still cautious the entire time about someone getting behind him while he etched the words onto the ground. Instead of writing them horizontally however, he wrote them vertically, side by side.

"Let's see what they read," he thought and tried reading in one way.

"CEHCTKHWE— Nah that doesn't make sense." He read it the other way this time.

"HECKTCEWH— Nah, not this one either. Am I even doing the right thing?" he wondered and read the final way.

"CHECKTHEWALLS— Wait… it's working. Check the walls… lemme read the rest," he thought and started reading it from start to the end. When he finished reading it, a massive smile appeared on his face.

The three talisman together read 'Check The Walls Of The Wooden Path'.

"So I have to check these walls?" he said as he looked at the wooden path that lied ahead of him. Without hesitation, he dug a little hole and buried the box before moving on.

As soon as he walked in, he started looking at the walls, but everything looked the same.

"What am I supposed to check here? Is there a hidden door or something?" Alex wondered. "If it's a hidden door then I should be able to open it by pushing on one of these walls, right?" he said to himself.

He ran his hands across the walls constantly pushing them. He also knocked on them to see what they sounded like. He did this for a few seconds when…

KNOCK KNOCK

He knocked on one of the walls and it sounded weird. He knocked again, and as he had expected, it was hollow. He tried pushing that part of the wall in, but nothing happened.

"Hmm… then should I pull instead?" he thought and searched for a something to grasp. After finding nothing, he used his Qi to pull the wall.

A drawer like box fell off from the wall and he saw a talisman inside. He picked up the talisman and saw read it.

-1 minute reduced from the final result-

"This is nice," Alex said, but it wasn't really worth wasting his time around. "How many even are there?" he said and sent out his spiritual sense to check the walls.

His eyes suddenly went wide in shock as he could only speak out only two words, "So many…"

Chapter 336: Leaving the Maze

"What is he doing there? Mingming, you idiot, just run. Don't stand there," Fan Ruogang was the most enthusiastic of the competition viewers when it came to being Alex's fan. So, when she saw him move through the final end of the maze at a very slow pace, she got angry.

"Don't get so agitated Fanfan, he must have a reason. Look, he seems to be getting something from those walls," Zhou Mei said as she pointed to the huge screen that showed the entire maze from start to finish.

The participants knew it was big, but only the audience could really see the true scale of the maze. The maze was about 500 to 600 meters in width and nearly 3 kilometers in length.

With so many normal mazes and obstacles, this was truly a grand scenery to behold. The space inside the stage was so big now that it was impossible for the audience to truly see what was going on inside the maze.

So, they could only rely on the large projection in the sky.

"But Meimei, I bet 400 spirit stones in Mingming's name. If he doesn't win, I am going to lose 4 true spirit stones in this bid," Fan Ruogang said, revealing the true reason for her agitation.

"Don't worry Fanfan, brother Yu knows that delaying is a bad idea, so he must know something. Look, those 4 are doing the same thing brother Yu is doing. There must be something to those walls," Wan Li said while pointing to the screen overhead.

Indeed, about 4 people had stopped by the final maze and were checking through the wooden walls.

"Sect leader, you think disciple Yu noticed something?" the first elder asked.

"Must have, otherwise he wouldn't have stopped in the final maze for this long. It's been nearly 20 minutes since he entered, and he is not one to waste time," Ma Rong said.

******

"What was Yang Ma's time?" Luo Mei asked.

"They should announce it all together, but from what I estimate, it should be around 2 hours and 10 minutes, without the reduction," Wen Cheng said.

"And the others were much late right?" she asked.

"Yes, they were around 30 minutes later. Their time is around 2 hours 40 minutes," Wen Cheng.

"So, junior brother is going to take more time than that, right?" Luo Mei asked. "Just what is he doing there?" she was getting a little annoyed.

"I don't know. Hopefully, he isn't stalling for no reason. Although, a few of the others are doing so too," Wen Cheng said.

Of the original 170 people in the competition, around 80 people had been disqualified due to not moving, around 10 due to attacking another participant,? 30 due to having all of their talisman stolen.

There were only 50 people remaining, and of them, 43 had already passed the maze. Of the remaining 7, 5 were in the last maze, while the other 2 were still someone in the catacombs, lost due to the lack of light.

"Oh look, one of the guys gave up on his own. He touched his own talismans," an elder said from the side.

Indeed, there was 1 less participant in the maze. A guy in the catacombs had given up.

Slowly, one after another, the 5 people in the final maze started making their way out as well. During that time, the second person lost in the catacombs finally made his way out and flew to the wooden walls as well.

Even that person made it outside before Alex and one other person. The other person made it out about 5 minutes after that, and around 10 minutes after that, Alex finally got out.

With the last person out of the maze, the Maze run was finally over.

DING

A large ranking board appeared in the sky. It showed the maze clear time of everyone. The person that left first was the winner and the person that came last, Alex, was the worst of all.

Fu Zhen then started speaking. "These are the raw results of the game today. As you can see, the fastest time was 1 hour, 34 minutes, and 46 seconds, while the lowest time was 3 hours, 22 minutes, and 33 seconds long."

"However, we have yet to add the time reduction talisman they might have gathered. Let us start with the first person," Fu Zhen said and called forth the first person on the list.

The person walked forth and provided 6 talismans to a staff. The staff put them in a box and the time on the ranking board started dropping.

The final score was reduced by a minute and 24 seconds, to make it 1 hour, 33 minutes, and 12 seconds.

The second person was called forth, and then the third and the fourth. There were really only 52 people in total that passed and it wouldn't take a long time for their numbers to be rechecked.

The rankings never really changed a lot. The most reduction one got was as of yet was Yang Ma who managed to get a 5 minutes reduction in the result time and got about 2 hours as the actual result.

However, that all changed when the last of the 5 people went forward. The first person gave nearly 50 talismans to the staff, garnering a lot of attention from the others.

His result was originally 2 hours, 58 minutes, and 55 seconds. After submitting the talismans, his result went down to 2 hours, 23 minutes, and 34 seconds. That was a whopping 35-minute reduction in finishing time.

Everyone was shocked at how much reduced, however, that wasn't able to get him anywhere. The next 3 people also managed to reduce anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour in their result, but that wasn't enough to get them even in the top 10.

The second last person was the guy lost in the catacombs, so he really didn't have much and only reduced his time by 3 minutes at most.

Finally, it was time for the final person in the ranking, Alex to give him talismans.

Chapter 337: Negative

Alex's original time was 3 hours, 22 minutes, and 33 seconds. That was the worst time out of everyone yet, but that was the raw time. He still needed to get it reduced.

So, he slowly walked to the staff. Along the way, he could see Yang Ma's terrible smirk. He rejoiced about the fact that Alex got so much less score.

'God, he really is horrible,' Alex thought. He reached the staff and pulled out a stack of papers from his robes. In his stack, there were at least 50 talismans.

He dropped it on the staff's table and the staff started to calculate. As the staff was calculating, Alex reached back into his robe and pulled out another stack of the talismans.

He placed it on the staff's desk with a little sound.

The first 50 weren't surprising to anyone. The last 4 of the 5 people had around that amount. However, Alex had just nearly doubled that.

"What the-how does he have so much?" the participants started questioning.

"Brother Xi, how did you get 50, and why does he have so many?" a disciple asked his senior brother who was one of the final 5.

"The final maze had talismans hidden in the walls. I spent all my time searching for them. He must've probably spent longer than me to search for them," the man named Xi answered.

He spoke quite openly, so everyone in the area heard that. Murmurs started among the crowd and people started guessing how much Alex reduced his numbers by.

Some guessed 40 minutes, some guessed an hour. Some even guessed an hour and a half. However, most people were sure that it would be a ridiculous amount.

The staff counted all the nearly hundred talismans and was finally being done with it. Just then, Alex reached into his robes, took out another stack, and dropped it on the staff's desk once more with a gentle smile.

The staff's eyes were so wide that he forgot to count and only stared at the stack for a solid 5 seconds.

"Ahemm!" After a gentle reminder from Fu Zhen, the staff went back to calculating. Fu Zhen looked at Alex and said, "If you have more, drop them all at once," he said.

"Sure," Alex said and reached into his pockets to bring out another stack that was double of what he normally took out. Even Fu Zhen was surprised this time.

The participants had their eyes out for a while now, and this time it nearly fell off.

The staff did his best to count as fast as he could and when he got the result, he was both confused and surprised. He called Fu Zhen close and whispered something into his ears.

When Fu Zhen heard this, he was surprised and confused as well. He thought for a second and turned to Alex. "Junior, how did you get so many talismans," he asked.

"From the walls in the wooden maze," Alex replied.

"Yes, but how did you get so many of them," Fu Zhen asked.

Alex smiled and said, "I just did. If you are worried about me cheating, you can ask your staff member who was looking after me. He was up there all the time and saw everything I did."

Fu Zhen turned to one of the staff members still in the air, and that person shook his head indicating no foul practice.

"Hah~" Fu Zhen sighed and looked at the staff in charge of counting the results and said, "Do it." The staff member nodded and applied the reduction.

The group watched the numbers in Alex's result lower. From over 3 hours, it dropped to just 3 hours. With the change in number, it also started climbing the ranks.

Slowly, it climbed higher and higher as the time was reduced more and more, and before anyone knew it, the result reached 2 hours. With just a little more reduction, he jumped past Yang Ma.

Yang Ma's face got a little dark when he saw that. The result was still climbing, however. Without stopping, it climbed higher and higher until it was in 1st place.

Alex had dropped his result by nearly 2 hours now. However, that was still not the end.

The result reduced even more and soon it crossed the 1-hour mark.

"What's going on? How is it so low?" some of the disciples started to complain. But since they had seen the result take place in front of them, they couldn't keep complaining about it for long.

The result dropped lower until it was at the half an hour mark and still kept on dropping. After what felt like an eternity, everyone saw the result reach 0.

However, it still didn't end there. Even after reaching 0, it went down into negative. It kept on lowering for a few more seconds until it finally stopped.

The final result of Alex's maze run turned out to be Negative 45 minutes, and 26 seconds.

Fu Zhen started speaking to the crowd and announced the top 3 winners. The audience was way too far from Alex's eyes so he couldn't tell their reactions, but he knew in his heart that his masters must have been proud.

"Please follow us," a staff said and called everyone with them. The group of staff took them to a room with 120 of the rest of the participants.

They handed everyone a spirit stone, a Qi recovering pill, and told them to stay inside the Qi gathering formation until the next turn.

Alex found a relatively quiet place and ate the pill. Immediately, his body started working and directly gave him energy. Alex didn't have much use for the spirit stones, but he still kept them.

He was returned back his box with all his bags in it. Once everything was settled down and was quiet, Alex started feeling uncomfortable. The feeling was still there, haunting him apparently.

'Just what is it? Could it be a bug of some sort?' Alex wondered. So, he decided to log out and log back in to check.

Chapter 338: Attack

Alex opened his eyes in the capsule. He waited for a few more seconds to make sure he was properly logged out and then decided to go back in.

"Wait," he said to himself. "It might be better if I use that helmet instead. It will also help me with my body," he thought and opened the lid.

He then laid down on his comfy bed and put on the helmet. After that, he logged back in.

Alex was still in the Qi gathering formation and nobody had disturbed him. However…

"Tsk. It's still here," he said when he felt that the feeling didn't leave him. He was very curious as to what it was. However, just then, it disappeared.

"Oh, it's gone," he thought.

With nothing else to do, he stood up and left the formation. He couldn't even absorb Qi actively, so there was no point in staying here in the first place.

Besides, he had barely lost anything. The most he lost was in the fight against the gorilla and that by no means was a lot.

He made his way over to the Hong Wu sect. Suddenly, someone attacked him. Alex immediately got ready to fight but stopped when he saw what attacked him was a pair of hands.

It immediately wrapped around him and confined him. It was a hug.

"Aah! I'm so happy Mingming, thank you so much. Thank you." It was Fan Ruogang who had decided to hug him out of nowhere.

MWAH

Not only was Alex surprise attacked with a hug, but with a kiss on the cheek as well. His face got a little red and he started blushing a little.

"Wh— why did you suddenly hug me? I nearly thought you were an enemy and hit you," he said bashfully.

"Fanfan, you can't jump on him like that just because you made 200 True spirit stones," Zhou Mei said.

"What?" Alex's red face slowly went back to being a little less colorful, and just showed a general confusion towards the situation.

"Sigh, when the match started, Mingming went around gathering people for bidding on the winner. She bid 400 spirit stones on you and got a 50 times higher return from it and made 200 True spirit stones," Zhou Mei explained, with a hint of envy in her eyes.

"Haha, you wish you bid along with me, don't you? Look how much I made," Fan Ruogang teased Zhou Mei by showing the handful of True Spirit stones. Even Alex got a little jealous when he saw that.

"Good work, brother Yu."

"Great job, junior."

"That was an outstanding result. How did you do that?"

Alex briefly explained what had happened. Multiple compliments rained down as he made his way through the sect members to go sit next to Ma Rong.

"Congratulations on the first place, Brother Yu. You now officially have 300 points, the highest possible in this competition," Wan Li said.

"Oh, I didn't realize that," Alex said with a gentle smile. "Thank you, Brother Li."

He then looked towards his master and waited for her to speak. Ma Rong kept quiet for a few seconds and then finally spoke.

"Were you using your sense a lot?" she practically whispered.

"Yes," Alex said and nodded.

"I thought that was what was happening. If not for me especially looking for you, I wouldn't have noticed at all."

"Good job. You did great," she finally smiled and said. Alex smiled too.

"Thank you, master," he replied.

"Alright, now leave," she said.

"Huh?… oh, right. Ok, I will see you guys later after this competition ends," Alex said and went to the front of the seating area where the Tiger sect was located.

"Hey, good job, Yu-Ming. I am proud of you," Wen Cheng said the moment he reached there.

"I am honestly so surprised at the result, Junior brother. What happened out there?" Luo Mei asked.

Alex thanked them and explained everything.

"Oh, I see. So everyone who flew over the beasts got doomed huh?" Luo Mei said.

"Not really, as that second-ranked, you could just be fast. But I think, Yu Ming is genuinely an extreme case in this competition," Wen Cheng said.

"That is true too," Luo Mei said.

"Sister, aren't you going to leave now?" Alex asked. The top 16 was going to start soon and it was time for her to leave.

"I will go down after the stage is fixed," she said as she gestured towards the stage.

The opaque barrier had returned and Alex could tell that they were destroying the stage inside there. He had a pretty good guess that most of them were just formations, but he was still surprised how well it was.

So, while the stage was getting ready, they all waited.

******

"Did you like that, father?" the second price asked.

"Yes, Yes, that was very fun to watch. It's truly amazing how the last person flipped the points around so much that it went below zero. This is truly the first time I have seen something like this happen," the Emperor said.

"Truly well said, dear. It was the most fun I have had watching a competition in a long time. Not only were the different Maze fun to watch them go through, but the final result was also equally as fun to see," the Empress said.

"That was great of you, dear Nephew. I enjoyed it very much too," Zexi said with a burst of loud laughter.

The rest of the four looked at him with surprise. "You liked it?" the second prince asked.

"Of course, it was very entertaining to watch," Zexi said with a smile.

"You know what daddy," the Princess intervened, "that's actually the same robe as the boy I met," she said.

"Is it?" the Emperor asked in surprise.

"Yes, but that wasn't him. The one I met had long hair," the Princess said.

"Well, that's very unfortunate," the Emperor said.

Zexi had a smirk on his face as he looked down at the seating areas of the different sects and said, "Truly unfortunate, indeed."New n0vel chapters are published on

Chapter 339: Top 16 - Begins

Luo Mei stood up and said, "I will see you guys after I win it all," and left. Du Yuhan and Yang Ma stood up and followed her as well.

Tiger sect was the only sect with 3 participants in the top 16 aside from Royal Fu Academy who had all 4 in there.

Alex and the rest wished them 'Good Luck!', but given how serious they were right now, nobody replied anything.

Alex looked down on the stage and saw the perfect stage already ready for them to fight in. The maze had disappeared as if it never existed and the formation that messed with the space inside the stage was turned off.

So now the stage was the same size as it always was. Fu Zhen walked up to the stage and announced out loud.

"Fellow Daoists and everyone, welcome to the Top 16 of the Singles Battle. Here are our remaining contestants," he said and showed a massive screen with the names of the 16 participants and their sect as well as their cultivation base.

Royal Fu Academy beat all of the other contestants in everything from Cultivation base to a number of participants.

The first match was between Luo Mei and the crocodile beast tamer girl from the Myriad Beasts sect.

Luo Mei walked onto the stage with no worries at all as her opponent was in the 2nd Mind Tempering realm. The moment the girl appeared on the stage, her forehead lit up and the crocodile appeared on the stage.

It also had the same cultivation base as the girl but it had a much better physical defense too.

"Begin!" the referee announced.

Luo Mei didn't attack with her sword, instead, she created a large ball of water on her left hand and threw it directly at the crocodile. She was testing waters to start off the match with.

The ball landed on the crocodile, yet it did nothing. As expected of a reptile that could live both on land and water. It probably had both elements.

Luo Mei decided to get serious. She immediately swung her sword and sent a blue slash flying towards the opponent. The Crocodile moved on its own and blocked the attack.

The slash hurt it a bit but did not manage to penetrate the skin.

'Is the beast's skin that strong? Probably not. It's most likely using a technique,' Luo Mei thought and started spamming her attacks.

One after another, her attacks landed on the crocodile, and with each attack, it took more damage. Luo Mei was about to make another attack, but she instead pushed herself back to the end of the stage.

BANG

A massive sound rang out from where she had just been standing on. When the dust settled, a giant green frog showed itself.

This was another beast of her that the opponent had been hiding all this time.

Luo Mei frowned. Not only was her another beast a water element using beast, but it was also in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm. It was stronger than its master.

She frowned. There were too many targets for her to fight and they were all in some ways immune to her water attacks. However, instead of reducing the water element in her attacks, she decided to increase it.

Luo Mei kept in her sword and put her hands forward. Suddenly, water sprouted out of her hands and filled the stage. She kept pumping until the water was about 2 meters tall and had swallowed everything.

The frog, crocodile, and the girl tried to swing in it and rose to the surface. Just then, Luo Mei moved her arms, and out of nowhere, 3 vortexes formed on the surface of the water.

These vortexes were so strong that the girl or her beast couldn't move at all. The vortex that had the girl started moving. The girl tried to stop it, but Luo Mei's control of it was much higher than her strength to destroy it.

Finally, she appeared right in front of Luo Mei who took out her sword again and placed it on her neck.

"I give up!" the girl immediately screamed. Luo Mei nodded and kept her sword back before leaving the stage. The 2-meter high flood finally stopped and all the water fell to the side of the stage.

The girl and her beasts were left there trying to catch their breath when they heard the referee announce the result.

The next match was between the Lesser Immortal sect's elemental user and the Black Fu Academy's 5th Mind Tempering realm cultivator.

His opponent was 2 realms lower than him but had managed to make his way up here. So, to win against him without wasting a lot of time, the Royal Fu Academy's disciple decided to reveal sword intent as well.

With that, he easily won against his opponent.

The next match was between Du Yuhan who was at the 3rd Mind Tempering realm and his opponent who was also at the 3rd Mind tempering realm, but in addition to that also had 3 puppets of the same strength.

Du Yuhan stood at one corner of the stage, while his opponent on the other end of the stage took out the 3 puppets. It was going to be a 4 v 1 fight.

"He should be fine as long as he can reach the puppetmaster as soon as he can, right?" Ning asked.

"Yes, but this is going to be hard. The Thousand Hand sect's disciple has 3 puppets of which one acts like an attacker, another a defender, and the final one that could change into any when it is required to be one. So, it's a very hard combination to fight against," Wen Cheng replied.

Du Yuhan grabbed his sword by the handle and the scabbard with his other hand. His eyes darted left and right as he imagined what puppet to attack first. He took a deep breath and exhaled.

Seeing that both sides were ready, the referee wasted no more time and screamed at the top of his lungs, "Begin".

Chapter 340: Du Yuhan VS Puppets

The puppets stood in front of the disciple from the Thousand Hand sect. They were about 3 meters tall and had long slender arms and legs and a head that was just a massive oval with no feature.

They were made up of wood but were reinforced by metal on the joints.

The first puppet held two short swords in its two arms. The 2nd puppet wore blue armor and also held a bronze shield on its left arm.

The final one held both a shield and a short sword.

Once the disciple from Thousand Sect heard the match start, he immediately controlled the puppets and made the two with the sword jump forward.

Du Yuhan slashed as he pulled the sword from the sheath and launched a flying attack towards the puppet with two swords.

The puppet attacked with its two swords and dissipated most of the incoming attack, and what remained wasn't enough to harm it at all.

Seeing that he didn't stop the puppet's momentum at all, Du Yuhan suddenly started swinging his sword in an infinity shape pattern.

Dozens of minor slashes rained down on all 4 of his opponents. While they weren't very strong on their own, the disciple didn't dare dismiss these attacks as they came from a person that knew sword intent.

The defensive puppet got in front of the disciple and put the shield up. The other puppet with a shield also got in front of the puppet with the swords and blocked most of the attacks.

The puppet landed in front of him and both of them attacked him. However, the attacks were very simple and Du Yuhan easily dodged them. They had lost their previous ferocity.

The disciple hiding behind the defensive puppets peeked and looked at where Du Yuhan was. At that moment, the ferocity returned and they started making more varied attacks that Du Yuhan couldn't easily escape from.

However, even then, the blades of the puppets couldn't touch him at all. He weaved and moved through every attack.

"Oh, he knows it too?" Alex looked at Wen Cheng with an inquisitive look.

Wen Cheng just shrugged and said, "What can I say? After learning that you had a 5 Elemental root, I immediately thought of Yuhan, so when I needed to give you books, I gave you the ones that had helped him."

"Oh, so he's still hiding a lot then?" Alex asked.

"No, not really. Somehow you can make great use of your abilities despite having a poor spiritual root, but Yuhan can't do that. So he only knows a few of the techniques you know, and even then he can't use it all that well," Wen Cheng said.

Du Yuhan kept dodging and launching attacks whenever he got the chance. If he could take out the master, the puppets would follow suit as well.

So, he had been continuously attacking the cultivator as well. After doing that for a while, he had come to realize that the puppets didn't function as well when his opponent couldn't see the battlefield.

He needed to know what was happening to give accurate commands. Otherwise, it was just 'Hit him' or 'stab him' most of the time.

Du Yuhan immediately launched another attack towards his opponent and just as the opponent hid again, he slid behind the sword puppet and started barraging its back with attacks.

The puppet took some damage, but it still turned around to hit him, however, by that time Du Yuhan was far away and was readying his next attack. His sword suddenly started glowing green and the next second, he launched the attack.

The green slash flew through the air towards the damaged sword puppet. Suddenly, the defensive puppet jumped forward and got in front of the sword puppet to take the damage in its place.

BANG

The shield on its left arm got cut in half and it even lost its arm. There was also a deep gash on its chest, but it managed to survive thanks to its armor.

Du Yuhan ignored it and sent a white slash towards the unguarded master, but the third sword and shield puppet jumped forward and blocked him. Since the attack wasn't as strong as before, he only left a little mark on the shield, amongst the dozens he had left already.

For the first time since he started fighting in the competition, Du Yuhan frowned. He had expected the Top 16 fight to be hard, but not this troublesome. The puppets were genuinely no joke.

"Sigh," he let out a sound and suddenly took in a deep breath. The air around him started distorting the image around him as his Sword Intent reached to the extreme. The sword he was holding started collected Qi and turned pure white.

"Oh no. ATTACK HIM!" he ordered all three of his puppets. The three puppets left their place and converged on Du Yuhan.

Du Yuhan didn't send out an attack either. This time, he himself launched forward.

SLASH

Du Yuhan landed in front of his opponents, while the puppets landed behind him. Du Yuhan raised his sword again and his opponent got scared.

"Come back," the opponent ordered his puppets. He was scared that he was going to get attacked without any defense.

However, Du Yuhan didn't attack him. He instead looked at his sword and saw that it was all chipped and unusable now. So, he put the sword back into his sheath.

CLACK

Just as the sound of the sword entering the sheath rang out, the three torsos of the puppets behind him slid down from the waist. They had been cut in half.

Even their weapons and shields had been destroyed, as well as their arms. There was not a single part of their body that came in contact with the slash and survived.

Du Yuhan stared directly into his opponent's eyes and waited.

"I-I give up," the opponent didn't hesitate any more and forfeited the match then and there. The referee announced the results and Du Yuhan walked out of the stage.

During all that, not a single sound escaped from the audience as they were all shocked to speak after such a spectacle.

Chapter 341: Yang Ma vs Wan Li

The disciple from the Royal Fu academy that had the next match after Du Yuhan wasn't very happy seeing him take the limelight. So, when he fought against his Honor sect opponent, He showed off his impressive 4th Mind Tempering realm cultivation base, as well as revealing the fact that he too had Sword Intent as well.

Seeing this, the audience was beyond excited to see a match between two weapon intent user in just the Quarter Finals.

After the Royal Fu Academy disciple won, it was time for the next match.

Yang Ma and Wan Li came out of the waiting area and entered the stage. They both went to the opposite ends and waited for the match to start.

Wan Li took out his sword in preparation, while Yang Ma took out his spear. They were both planning on giving it their all from the start.
New n0vel chapters are published on

"Who do you think will win?" Wen Cheng asked Alex.

Alex wasn't expecting such a question so he thought for a little bit. Both the fighters were his fellow sect members, but it was clear who Alex liked more.

"Brother Wan Li has a higher cultivation base, but Brother Ma should have more fighting experience amongst the two. Brother Ma also has superior Fire elemental roots, so as much as I like brother Wan Li, I will have to go with Brother Ma," Alex said.

"Good analysis. Now, let's see how close your theory stacks up with the actual thing," Wen Cheng said and looked back on the stage.

"BEGIN!"

Wan Li let no time go wasted and immediately launched a fire slash towards Yang Ma. Yang Ma sent a red slash of his own to stop the attack.

A small explosion rang out as the attacks collided and destroyed each other. Wan Li had the better Qi Density and amount, but Yang Ma had the higher Elemental strength, so the damage they dealt was almost equal.

Yang Ma smiled when he saw that. 'An alchemist wants to win against me? Keep wishing,' he thought and sent out a fireball towards Wan Li.

Wan Li also threw out a fireball of his own.

BOOM

Smoke filled the stage from the collision of these two fireballs and Yang Ma took the opportunity to throw in more fireballs and red slashes towards Wan Li.

Multiple explosions rang out in succession. More dust and smoke rose up covering the whole stage in it. Yang Ma relaxed and said, "It should be over right?"

Just then, a stone flew directly at him and nearly hit his head. Yang Ma managed to react in time and hit the stone away with his spear.

"What the hell?" he looked towards the settling dust and smoke. Behind it, he could see a silhouette of something square. When it finally became clear, Yang Ma saw a large wall that was charred black because of his attacks.

"The hell? An earth wall?" he thought. Just then another stone flew towards his head from the center of the wall. He blocked that, but another came as well. And another and another.

Wan Li had opened a small hole and started sending out a barrage of stones while he himself hid behind the wall.

Yang Ma's face contorted when he realized he hadn't managed to deal any damage to him. "Stop hiding and come fight me," he shouted and suddenly sent out a massive flame attack into the sky.

The fire, as if getting sentience, suddenly manifested into a massive snake and flew down towards Wan Li. Wan Li could tell that this was a strong attack, so he didn't hesitate any further either.

He dropped the sword and placed both of his hands on the ground and out of nowhere, the ground started melting. Wan Li was putting so much fire Qi into the earth that it started turning into lava.

He then controlled the lava and threw it at the sky, towards the incoming flame snake. Not only did the lava manage to destroy the flame snake, but it was also so strong that it wasn't phased at all and made its way towards Yang Ma.

Yang Ma looked at the incoming lava and fear showed in his eyes. "Sh*t, he has a Fire-Earth spiritual root," he said. Without a moment's delay, he used his movement technique and went sideways to escape the lava.

When the lava fell onto the ground, instead of freezing, it melted the ground making a pool of lava on the ground.

Huff Huff

Wan Li was a bit out of breath. Pushing so much fire Qi into the earth has left him breathless. However, when he saw Yang Ma dodge, he immediately picked up his sword and got back into the fight.

Yang Ma sent forth a red slash to catch Wan Li off guard, but Wan Li was ready. His sword started glowing brown and he slashed as well.

The energy turned into the shape of a hammer as it flew towards the incoming slash. Yang Ma expected it to cause another explosion, but instead, the hammer destroyed his slash and kept moving forth.

Yang Ma's eyes went wide. The Earth attack was empowered by Fire Qi. Yang Ma dodged the attack once again and moved to the side.

"Why the hell do I have to keep fighting people with complimenting dual elemental roots," he complained. Suddenly, he saw another brown attack flying towards him.

He knew he couldn't beat it, so he started dodging and moving sideways to get out of the way of the attack. 'Keep throwing out attacks and get tired. Then I will beat you,' he thought.

His plan was working perfectly fine for a minute or so, but then he realized something. At some point, Wan Li had started targeting the land instead of him.

Yang Ma stopped and looked around. When he finally saw what had happened, he was shocked. All of those attacks he thought he had dodged, had actually formed lava on the ground all around him.

"Oh no."

Wan Li suddenly gestured both of his arms upwards and the lava followed suit and devoured Yang Ma.

The referee had to interfere and stop the lava before it actually hit Yang Ma, or the result would have been disastrous. He then looked at Wan Li and announced, "You Win."

Chapter 342: Top 8 - Luo Mei

"That-That was incredible. I did not expect brother Wan Li to be that strong," Alex said in shock. He was simply blindsided by this win.

"That kid-He hid his abilities quite well. Just the fact that he had to compliment dual spiritual roots, those are actually just as strong as Superior roots if used correctly. He definitely deserved this win," Wen Cheng said with approval. While his own sect's disciple had lost, he couldn't help but compliment Wan Li.

"Do you know who taught him how to fight?" Wen Cheng asked.

"No. I don't think anyone taught him that," Alex said. "He... probably learned that on his own."

"I see. I could tell he didn't have much experience with actual fights. If he was, he could have ended the fight long ago," Wen Cheng said.

The next battle on the stage was starting. It was between the 3rd Mind Tempering realm disciple of the Honor sect who could use Spear Intent, and the 6th Mind Tempering realm disciple of Royal Fu Academy.

Spear Intent was strong and could help the disciple from the Honor sect produce attacks that could damage a 4th Mind Tempering realm cultivator. However, it wasn't enough to fight this opponent.

The Royal Fu Academy's disciple overwhelmed the Honor Sect disciple with his massive Metal attacks with his superior Metal elemental roots behind it.

The next match was between the Thousand Hand sect disciple and the girl with the saber intent. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to show the same level of prowess as Du Yuhan did and in the end succumbed to the barrage of attacks from the multiple puppets.

The next match involved the Myriad sect disciple with the crow. However, his opponent was Chu Xiang, the strongest participant in terms of cultivation base.

No matter what attack the master or the beast threw at him, nothing was able to phase him and in the end, he had an overwhelming victory.

And thus, the Top 16 battles came to an end as well.

However, it was already close to 3 PM, so Fu Zhen wasted no time and started the Top 8. The quarterfinals were now beginning.

Alex looked at the match-ups and frowned a little. The next match was between his senior sister and the disciple from Royal Fu Academy who had the 5th Mind Tempering realm cultivation base. It was not his cultivation that worried him, however; it was the fact that he could use Sword Intent as well.

In fact, even Du Yuhan would have to face against a sword Intent user in the next match. Wen Cheng was worried about this very much too.

Luo Mei walked up to the stage with her blue rapier-like sword and looked at her opponent who was standing on the other side.

His sword look quite fancy and she guessed it was at least a Common Earth grade, if not Heaven grade sword. 'This is going to be troublesome,' she thought.

"Begin!"

Luo Mei suddenly attacked her opponent with a blue slash. The man didn't seem phased and attacked with his own slash as well.

The man's attack had Sword Intent behind it, so he was able to match up with her attacks. Luo Mei sent out more attacks, but each of them was stopped by the man.

She frowned. It seemed long-range attacks weren't the way to go. In a battle of the sword, he would lose for sure. She kept her sword in her storage bag and started fighting with water instead.

Water pooled around her feet and tendrils started forming from it. With her command, the tendrils of water started shooting out sharp slashes of water.

Her opponent did his best to block the attacks and was able to. But when the attacks started pouring out from multiple directions. His sword alone wasn't able to stop it.

He used his movement technique and disappeared from where he stood and appeared a dozen meters to the side. The water attacks ended up landing on an empty spot.

Before Luo Mei could even turn her head to check where he had gone, the man used his movement technique another few times and appeared behind her.

With her not knowing where he was, he could attack her freely. His sword glowed bright yellow as he prepared a metal attack with Sword Intent behind it.

However, before he could launch the attack, all of the tendrils of water suddenly attacked him. Multiple water slashes left the tendrils.

The man decided to stop his attack and move away, but it was then he realized that his feet couldn't move anymore. At some point, water had caught up to him and had frozen his legs.

"How?" he couldn't understand what was happening. He had managed to appear on his opponent's blind spot, but the one at a disadvantage was him.

He made the instant decision to go forward with his attack and used the most Sword Intent he could to slash directly at the incoming attacks.

BOOM

A massive explosion sent the water flying everywhere. The man had managed to block most of the damage, but not all of it. He lied on the ground as his frozen feet did not let him get pushed back.

He tried to stand up, but suddenly, he felt weightless. When he realized what was happening, he was already inside a massive ball of water and was floating in the air.

He tried to attack and destroy the ball of water or swim out of it, but Luo Mei kept on adding more water and controlling it to move in the direction he tried to move.

Given the fact that he did not get to take a breath before he was put inside the ball, he was going to be out of breath in a very short time and drown.

He struggled and struggled, but Luo Mei's proficiency with water was too high for him to possibly escape his current situation.

Slowly, the ball of water started to freeze and he could no longer move.

CRACK

The ball of ice fell onto the ground in a million pieces and the man fell out of it and started gasping for breath.

Huff Huff

He quickly searched and reached out for the sword he had just dropped to take advantage of Luo Mei's mistake. Just as he was about to grab it, he saw a foot that did not belong to Luo Mei in front of him.

He looked up to see a dark-robed individual standing in front of him. "Oh," he said and stopped reaching for the sword.

It was the referee that had helped him escape from the ball of ice, not Luo Mei's incompetence. He understood what had happened and fully accepted his loss. His opponent had fully beat him without question.

The referee looked towards Luo Mei and said, "You Win."

Luo Mei bowed a little towards the referee and walked out of the stage. She had managed to enter the Semi-Finals.

Du Yuhan walked out from the waiting area and walked to the stage that was being cleared quickly and didn't even look at her.

He went straight to the end of the stage and waited for his opponent to arrive.

Chapter 343: Sword Intent vs Sword Intent

The Royal Fu Academy disciple with the 4th Mind Tempering realm cultivation base arrived a little after Du Yuhan did.

He stood on the opposite side of the stage and spoke, "I saw your fight earlier. You broke your sword, didn't you?"

Du Yuhan stood there emotionless without a single response.

"No worries, I will beat you very quickly so that you don't have to worry about that, to begin with," the opponent said with a smile.

"BEGIN!"

The opponent brought out his sword and made a massive slash, sending it towards Du Yuhan. Suddenly, a sheathed blade appeared in Du Yuhan's hand out of nowhere and he attacked the incoming slash just as it reached him, sending it to the side.

BANG

The slash ended up hitting the barrier on the side.

"What the-" the man was a little surprised when he saw that Du Yuhan had an undamaged sword. "Huh? But I'm sure the sword was cracked at that time. I even confirmed it with the disciple from the Thousand Hand sect," he screamed.

Du Yuhan said nothing. Now that his sword was out of its sheath, his aura had changed and he was deadly. If he was to say anything, the words would be coming out of his blade.

His sword glowed white and he immediately sent out a sword slash. The opponent immediately moved to block the attack. He also sent out a slash of his own that met at the middle.

BOOM

The sounds the collision of their attacks made were much louder than the other fighters until now. A yellow glow appeared on the opponent's sword as he let it fly towards Du Yuhan.

Du Yuhan could only use wood elements which were bad against metal, so he stuck to normal Qi attacks. The attacks ended out causing another boom.

Neither of them wasted time thinking and sent out multiple slashes that all struck each other and brought them to a standstill.

Alex was quite engrossed in the fight as it apparently wasn't every day you got to see two Weapon Intent users but something distracted him suddenly.

'It's back,' he thought and looked towards the direction the feeling was coming from. 'Is it from the crowds? Or further away?' he wondered.

Just then, he saw Wen Cheng's legs constantly shaking as if he was really anxious about the fight.

"What's wrong, master? You seem a little scared," Alex asked.

"Hahaha," Wen Cheng gave nervous laughter and said, "That's because I am scared, about the match that is," he said.

"Oh. Is there something to be scared about? It seems an even match to me," Alex said as he looked at the stage once again. They were still sending out slashes and neither of them could beat the other.

"That's only because they are sending out those Qi attacks. Sooner or later, a sword fight will get physical, and that is when we will see their cultivation base make more of an effect on their attacks," Wen Cheng said.

"Also, if I am not wrong, then Yuhan's opponent has a Heaven grade sword, the impact of which will only be truly seen when the swords clash. I am afraid... Yuhan won't have much of a chance to win after that," Wen Cheng said.

Alex finally understood where Wen Cheng's fear lied. The main battle between the two had yet to begin, and when it did was when we would finally see the disparity between their power.

Du Yuhan sent out many small slashes at once using his infinity attack again. His opponent used a barrier technique and blocked most of it. The ones he missed, he simply parried with his sword.

Both of them stopped attacking. They both understood that such a fight was going to bring them nowhere.

The opponent smiled. He showed a huge grin and became the first of the two to proceed forth with the attack. He closed the gap very quickly and also managed to parry another slash that Du Yuhan had sent after he launched himself.

When he landed, he sent an overhead slash with all of his momentum behind him.

DING

Du Yuhan blocked the sword with his own, but his sword got a nick in return. When the opponent saw that, he smiled. He was winning.

He pulled back his sword and slashed down once again.

DING

Another nick appeared in Du Yuhan's sword. This time even Du Yuhan knew what the problem was. His sword wasn't measuring up to his opponent's.

This time, the both of them pulled back to attack. Both of their strikes had the additional strength of their intent behind them.

DING

Du Yuhan was forced back a little. His physical strength was not matching up with his opponent's who had a higher cultivation base.

DING DING DING

Strike after strike, his opponent sent in relentless attacks that kept on nicking his sword until it was too dull to fight. Du Yuhan concentrated hard and raised his intent to the extreme. His sword glowed white and one could even see the white Qi fill the gaps in the edge.

His opponent smiled as well. He too sent in Qi into his sword, only his sword glowed Yellow due to the inclusion of Metal Qi instead of normal ones.

Once their swords were pearl white with glow, they slashed.

BANG

A large explosion occurred right were their swords collided and created an explosion that sent them flying backward, away from each other.

His opponent stood up the moment he landed and started laughing maniacally. "Haha, I could feel it. Tell me I am correct," he shouted.

Du Yuhan took a little longer, but he stood up as well. He looked at the sword in his hand and sighed. The sword was broken in half.

He only held the sword hilt and had no idea where the upper half had disappeared to. He looked towards the laughing opponent and looked at his sword. That sword had no damage at all.

That was a high-grade sword and wouldn't take damage that easily.

"You are very strong," Du Yuhan spoke for the first time in this match. It was so out of nowhere that even his opponent was surprised.

"Haha, you only realized now? Of course, I am strong," his opponent said.

Chapter 344: Sword-Shaped

CLACK

Du Yuhan put the half-sword back into its sheath and then the whole sheath disappeared into his storage bag. His opponent smiled and asked, "You got another sword in there?"

Du Yuhan didn't speak and instead nodded to affirm his suspicion. His opponent was a little surprised.

Suddenly, the same sheath came out of the storage bag once again. "Huh?" his opponent responded in confusion. "Are you going to fight with a broken sword?" he asked.

CHING

Du Yuhan pulled a brand new sword from inside the sheath and surprised him. His opponent looked at the sheath more carefully and realized it was slightly different than the first one.

"You have multiple of the same sword?" he asked. Du Yuhan nodded once again.

"No wonder you had another sword ready after the last battle. But what's the point of having multiple trash swords when a single high-grade sword can last much longer than any of them?" his opponent asked.

Du Yuhan thought for a moment and asked, "Tell me, who suffers more hardship? A man with a good sword or a man with a bad one?"

The opponent was confused why he was asking that but still decided to answer. "Obviously it's the man with the bad sword," he said.

Du Yuhan smiled and then asked, " Now tell me, what person grows the most? The one who has it easy, or the one facing hardship?"

Once again the opponent decided to answer. "Of course it the man who—" he stopped and got angry. "Are you trying to say I haven't improved because I used a good sword?" he asked.

Du Yuhan shook his head and said, "I'm just saying I have improved a lot since I decided to only use Common Mortal grade swords."

"That's a load of bullcrap. One can improve no matter the circumstances. As long as we have the will, we can do it," the opponent said.

"I can not tell you whether you are right or wrong, as I too am barely a beginner in the ways of the sword," Du Yuhan said. "However, let this beginner show you what he has learned ever since he started using the so-called trash swords."

Du Yuhan looked at his sword once before putting it back into his sheathe. He then got into the same stance that destroyed the 3 puppets in the last battle.

Air started getting slowly distorted around Du Yuhan. His opponent was just as surprised as when he saw this in the last match.

'Why is he pushing forth so much Sword Intent?' he wondered. He immediately got into his best stance to deliver the strongest attack as well.

Suddenly, something flashed in front of Du Yuhan. It was white in color and it went from the upper right of Du Yuhan's face to the lower left. It then disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

'What was that?' his opponent wondered but didn't care about it enough to think for long, however.

Another one flashed once again. This time it appeared near his torso and flew up and went behind him.

His opponent got alert and decided to see what the white thing was. Another one appeared just as he thought that, and he finally managed to see what it was.

When he realized it, his eyes nearly fell out of his sockets. "That's—" he couldn't formulate any words. 4th, 5th, 6th… 10th… 20th…40, 50.

Hundreds of such small white light appeared and disappeared around Du Yuhan very fast. They were incredibly small in size, so anyone who was looking from the audience couldn't really see what the shape of the white thing was.

However, anyone who knew anything about swords would immediately recognize what it was.

"That's…"

"No way…"

"He's so young…"

"How did he train to this level?"

Multiple questions appeared amongst the crowd. Wen Cheng who had been shaking his legs all this time stopped and immediately stood up.

"How is he…" he screamed and stood up abruptly.

Alex was really surprised by everyone's reaction. He couldn't see what those white lights were so he asked Wen Cheng.

"Master, what is that? Is that not Sword Intent?" Alex asked.

"No, that… that is a level higher than Sword Intent," Wen Cheng said with absolute shock.

"A level… higher?" Alex was confused.

"Yes. You see, when you get good with the sword, you create your own Intent of it. However, when you keep on improving with it, along with yourself, you Qi follows along and becomes a sword itself." Wen Cheng said.

"We call that…"

"Sword Qi!" the opponent said with terror in his voice. "Ho— How do you have Sword Qi already at such a young age."

Du Yuhan no longer answered. He was concentrating to the fullest. The Sword-shaped Qi that was flying around him slowly converged on his blade.
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Then he opened his eyes and he launched forward. His opponent couldn't keep his calm with what he was seeing in front of him and didn't even set up a defense for himself.

When Du Yuhan reached him, he slashed.

PING

Du Yuhan's sword once again broke and flew off into the distance. However, this time, the one that blocked it was the referee. He had decided to intervene and save the opponent.

He had stopped the attack, but even then he was pushed back 3 steps. That was how strong this single attack of Du Yuhan was.

Du Yuhan stood up straight and put his broken sword back into the sheathe, and when he stopped holding the sword, his arm slowly trembled.

This was the first time he had truly attacked with the Sword Qi, and the one he attacked had ended up being someone in the true realm.

It took the referee a moment to realize that he had to reveal the results, so he quickly shouted out towards him, "You Win."

Du Yuhan clenched his fist to stop it from trembling any longer and bowed towards the referee before walking away. Once again, the crowd was in absolute silence as he left.

Chapter 345: Coward

"Sect Leader, did my brother truly gain Sword Qi?" Su Min asked from the side. She had seen the event unfold and had thus listened to what Wen Cheng had said.

"I... don't know. He can definitely use it, but it doesn't seem to be at a level where it is consistent," Wen Cheng said. "Still, just the fact that he reached there means that he will be able to freely use Sword Qi sooner or later."

Su Min smiled when she heard that. She really liked her senior brother being strong and was looking forward to when he became the prime disciple.

Wen Cheng suddenly smiled and then started laughing like an idiot.

"Master? What's wrong?"

"Are you okay, sect leader?"

Various voices of concern started ringing from either side.

"Hahaha, you guys. Don't you realize what just happened? Little Mei will be fighting Yuhan in the next battle," he said.

The people didn't understand what was so funny about that.

"Don't you see?" he asked, "We have a guaranteed spot in the final round."

" Oh... OH!," they finally realized what that meant.

"We... We are going to be 2nd in the competition," they rejoiced.

Alex looked at them all happy and smiled. Suddenly, the feeling vanished once more. 'What is that?' he thought.

He suddenly turned to the stage and saw Wan Li on the stage along with his opponent. Alex couldn't help but sigh.

Wan Li's opponent was a person in the 6th Mind Tempering realm and used Metal Qi. Both Earth and Fire were either Weakened or Ruined by Metal Qi.

As such, Alex didn't even want to watch the match. However, he watched it for the single reason that it was Wan Li. Wan Li put up an excellent fight, but there was just no way he could win.

Even with the lava attacks, the metal Qi took care of them like it was nothing. In the end, it didn't even take 2 minutes for Wan Li to lose.

However, nobody was disappointed in him for losing here. In fact, everyone was genuinely surprised and amazed at the fact that an alchemist was able to make it this far without relying on pills as a form of combat.

The next match was even worse. Since it was between Chu Xiang and the disciple from the Thousand Hand sect, it was obvious who would win.

Chu Xiang used a single palm attack and destroyed a puppet entirely. The opponent gave up before his other puppets were destroyed as well.

So, the Top 8 competitions came to a close as well.

The stage was prepared as the audience waited listened to Fu Zhen speak about the competition. Once everything was prepared, Luo Mei and Du Yuhan walked up to the stage.

They both went to either side of the stage.

Anticipation rose in the air as everyone wanted to see their fight. One was a fighter that overwhelmed the other with water arts, and another was a fighter that could release Sword Qi. Adding onto the fact that people knew they were from the same sect, they naturally looked forward to it.

The people who looked forward to it most were still the tiger sect disciples. The Core disciples rarely ever fought in the fighter hall as they had a tacit understanding of each other's strength.

So when they got to see their top 2 fight, they were naturally excited... except for Wen Cheng. His face was solemn as he looked at the stage with a serious face.

"Are you worried about sister losing, Master?" Alex asked. Wen Cheng would likely lose his status as the sect leader if that were to happen.

Wen Cheng shook his head in denial.

"Then... are you worried about brother Yuhan losing?" Alex thought that wasn't possible but still asked.

"Yes," Wen Cheng said as he nodded. That surprised Alex. Wen Cheng would have to step down if Du Yuhan won, and yet he was worried about the opposition losing.

"Why?" Alex asked.

"Well, it's not so much about Yuhan losing, but rather... how he loses," Wen Cheng said.

'Is he worried that sister will defeat him so badly that he will lose all motivation to advance? That doesn't seem like his character,' Alex thought.

"BEGIN," the referee shouted.

Luo Mei immediately brought out her sword and prepared an attack when she saw that Du Yuhan had prepared no sword. She could tell something was wrong. She started to feel a little annoyed when she realized what was going to happen.

Du Yuhan didn't take out his swords. Instead, he opened his mouth and said," I concede."

Luo Mei was stunned for a moment. It wasn't until Du Yuhan turned around to leave that she realized what had happened. She immediately started shouting, "What are you doing? Why are you refusing to fight me?"

Du Yuhan ignored her and started walking away. The referee looked at Luo Mei and said," You Win." She didn't want that.

"Stop walking away you coward, and come fight me," she screamed. Her annoyance turned to full-on anger and she started gritting her teeth.

"Come back right now and fight me, you coward. Stop walking away," she continued screaming. However, Du Yuhan made no such attempt to stop at any point.

In fact, he didn't even bother going to the waiting area and directly walked towards the seating area for the Tiger sect.

Luo Mei kept on screaming, and that was the noise anyone heard for a while. The tiger sect's disciples and elders were both surprised and disappointed by the outcome of their match.

'Why would he do that? Did he know he was not her match?' Alex wondered.

"Why did senior brother give up?" Su Min said with a hint of sadness to her voice.

Everyone asked some variation of the same question. The only one who didn't look surprised was Wen Cheng.

"Sigh, I knew this would happen." He started shaking his head.

Du Yuhan returned to his seat and looked down on the empty stage, ignoring all the questions he was asked. The man who said he would become the greatest... gave up.

Chapter 346: Plea

Alex tried to think about something else when suddenly, the feeling he had been feeling disappeared once again, completely derailing any semblance of a thought he had beforehand.

'What is going on?' he wondered, yet the answer was just as unknown as any other time. His body, his talent, his spiritual roots, his pets, most of the things surrounding his in-game life were a mystery.

So this was just another mystery to add to the pile.

Two black-robed men walked onto the stage. They were the second pair who were going to fight now. One of them was the 6th Mind Tempering realm cultivator who most likely had a superior Metal spiritual root.

The other was the 7th Mind Tempering realm cultivator that went by the name of Chu Xiang, the strongest cultivator in the game. Unlike the previous match, neither of them was going to back down right now.

"BEGIN"

Both of them started attacking the moment the match started. Chu Xiang was an elemental attacker that had a superior wood element.

The guy with the Superior Metal elemental roots took out a sword to combat him.

The fight was intense and it went on for a while. Alex watched intently, but he found there was nothing new to be learned from this fight. It was a very typical fight between two strong people.

As such, it also had a typical result as well. Chu Xiang, through a little more than normal expended effort, managed to win the fight in the end.

The two left the stage and Fu Zhen arrived on the scene. He gave a little speech, giving time for Chu Xiang to recover his strength before the final fight.

People started opening up bets in the meantime. Alex was pretty sure his sister was going to lose but didn't want to bet against her, so he didn't bet at all.

Finally, at around 4 pm, Fu Zhen finally called the two finalists onto the stage.

Alex watched as Luo Mei and Chu Xiang walked up to the stage and stood on either edge of the stage. He waited for the match to begin when suddenly, the feeling came. Not only had it came back, but it had also come back stronger than others.

It was so strong that it managed to flinch, Alex, a little. "Ah!," he said as the feeling suddenly hit him.

"What's wrong?" Wen Cheng asked.

At the same time, Fu Zhen started his main speech.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, it's here. There match we all have been waiting for. We will now begin the final match of the competition." Very loud applause sounded from the audience.

Fu Zhen nodded to the referee to start the match, but suddenly, a large TING sound came from outside the arena. Everyone stopped cheering when they heard of it. People started looking around curiously, trying to figure out what that was.

TING

Another sound came. Fu Zhen told the referee to stop for now. He was about to ask someone to go check what the sound was when he saw someone fly in the sky.

It was the Emperor.

TING

Another sound came, this time at a closer interval. People started having a sinking suspicion that something was wrong. They could see the Emperor's face slowly go from curiosity to confusion, to slight fear.

TING

TING

TING TING TING TING TING TING TING

The bell started sounding continuous, without stop, and it even managed to make Alex look towards it. The sound of the bells was surprisingly coming from the same direction the feeling was coming from.

'The south,' Alex thought.

"Everyone, please listen to me," A voice came from up above. The Emperor had started addressing not only the crowd in the arena but also everyone in the city.

"Those we are weak, below the Organ Tempering Realm, please leave the southern side of the city right now in a calm and collected fashion. Everyone else, please follow me to the southern side. The guards have conducted a small check, and it turns out, there is a hoard of beasts coming to the Cardinal City from the southern forest," The Emperor said.

"This is a plea and an order from your Emperor. Everybody, move now."

As soon as the Emperor stopped talking, people started scrambling to run away from the coliseum. The civilians and weak ones as well as the cowards ran towards the northern side, while the ones that were going to fight started to fly up.

Both Luo Mei and Chu Xiang immediately flew up and went towards the south.

"Yu Ming, You go back. It's okay, you don't have to fight. Stay safe," Wen Cheng said and turned towards his sect members to choose people that shouldn't fight.

"I'm sorry master, but I have to go on this one. I-I feel like there is something out there calling to me and the beast hoard has something to do with this," Alex said with a solemn voice.

"What's that supposed to mean, Yu Ming?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I don't know myself, but I will like to find out. Don't worry master, I will take the most care. I also have the escape techniques, so you don't have to worry about me," Alex said.

TING TING TING TING

The plea for help was still ringing.

"Fine, but you have to be careful," Wen Cheng said. He and the elders as well as most of the disciples started flying to the sky, along with Alex.

Thousands of other people flew up to the sky towards the southern wall, but when they saw the southern wall, they were shocked. A small portion of the wall was completely torn down.

Hundreds of monsters started pouring into the city and started scattering throughout the city. They were wreaking havoc all over the city.

Dust and smoke reigned everywhere on the southern side and beastly shouts rang out from them.

Alex looked at them as well. However, it was then he realized, the feeling he had wasn't coming from the beasts nearby. It was coming from deep within somewhere in the southern forest.

Chapter 347: Disaster

Alex swung his sword at the beast in front of him. He hit the beast in the skull and managed to kill it in a single blow. He got a notification about the beast cores, but he ignored those for now.

He immediately entered a house next to it and checked. There was a women who was hiding in a corner with her child. He immediately rushed and picked her up.

He wasted no time explaining and immediately got out of the house and started running towards the northern part of the city.

There were hundreds of beasts around him, but he ignored them and ran past them. There were others that would do the fighting while he rescued the two.

Along the way, he nearly slipped on a pool of blood that had appeared after someone had? died. Alex's heartbeat was rising from what he was seeing around him, but when he saw other people run past him while carrying people, he got over his fears and started running too.

The cultivators had decided to switch into two groups. The ones in the True realms decided to be the main fighting force that would push the beasts back outside the city, and those not at that realm yet would be the search and rescue team.

Once Alex got the two to a safe location, he handed them to others and ran back.

There were hundreds of thousands of beasts that were attacking city right now, and for some reason, the feeling Alex had was still there.

'Is my intuition telling me that there was going a beast attack today?' He was thinking of random explanations that would fit the situation.

SLASH

He cut down a Muscle Tempering realm beast along the way.

The beasts varied from normal Skin Tempering realm beasts all the way up to True Emperor realm beasts. They were really fortunate that the beast attack had happened when the competition was taking place and so there were a lot of strong people here to help.

Alex suddenly stopped running and looked in fear in front of him. There was a fox beasts in front of him looking at him with its blood red eyes. Worst of all, it's cultivation was somewhere in the early True Realms from the aura it was giving forth.

'Sh*t,' Alex thought. Alex could get rid of his Aura and go invisible, but the beasts had really good nose and could immediately tell where he was.

The fox jumped at him with incredible speed. Alex had been fully utilizing Focus mode to the best he could, and still the fox's jump was incredibly fast to him.

Alex wasted no time and immediately teleported to a house next to him. He checked if the fox was gone with his spiritual sense and walked out.

Then, he went to search for more people to save. The beasts were getting weeded out and in just 15 minutes after the invasion, they had managed to get the beasts from spreading further.

Now it was time to push them back out. By that time, everyone that could be saved was saved as well, so everyone was focusing on defeating the beasts now.

Alex came face to face with a moose like beast that had massive antlers.

"2nd Meridian Tempering realm? This is going to be tough," he thought. The moose immediately ran up to him to attack. Alex teleported behind the moose and cut it from behind. His Smiting Blade was sharp enough to cut the hide of the moose. However, that was the most his blade his now.

The moose immediately turned and tried to slam at him with hits antlers, however Alex teleported again. Thankfully, it was 5 pm, so he had a lot of shadows to play around with right now, unlike when he fought that gorilla today.

Alex frowned when he remembered that. 'I'm not at full Qi right now,' he thought. He couldn't cultivate inside the Qi gathering formation, so he wasn't as refreshed as everyone else was.

He cut the beast once more, but this time, the Moose directly slammed at him with its hooves. Alex blocked with his sword and was pushed back quite far away.

'Sh*t,' he thought when he realized the moose was already at him. He teleported once more and attacked the moose's behind. The moose also knew what was happening, so it also hit him with its back legs once more.

The sword and the hooves clashed and the sword managed to crack the hooves a little. Alex pulled back and jumped backwards. He then used Iron Fist punch and Palm of the Sun in quick succession.

The beast got attacked head on and faltered a bit. Just as it got its footing again, a green slash landed on it directly on its forehead.

Blood Spurted out as the beast's skull was broken through a little. 'Damn, that was my strongest attack and it survived?' Ning thought in shock. He wanted to breakthrough but he didn't have enough Qi.

He still required over millions of Qi to go to 7th Organ Tempering realm.

'Screw it, it probably can't survive now,' Alex thought and teleported next to it. He started cutting it left and right with the Smiting Blade, and finally managed to defeat it.

Alex felt his strength a bit and thought, ' That was about 5 realms higher, and I managed to defeat the beast. Is this the power of having Body and Qi cultivation together as well as the mortal cleansing and the dense Qi?'

He put the moose's body back into his storage bags and ran forward.

After running for a dozen or so seconds, he stopped once more. There was another fox like beast in front of him again with True realm cultivation. Unfortunately, there weren't places he could teleport to hide this time.

He was worried what would happen to him. However, just then, a large green python appeared out of nowhere and attacked the fox. It had the fox's body in its wrap within seconds.

Chapter 348: Disappear [Bonus Chapter]

The fox tried to fidget to get out of the green python's constriction, but it was unable to. From what Alex could understand, the snake was many realms higher than the fox's cultivation base.

The fox was dead within seconds after the constriction, and the snake directly swallowed its body. The snake then saw Alex standing there and slowly moved its head towards him.

'What do I do now?' Alex started to doubt if he even had any chances.

"Get back, Little Green," A voice came from the sound. This voice was all too familiar to Alex.

"Master,' he said as he looked towards the sound.

Ma Rong walked up to the green snake and patted its head. "Go, fight with those other beasts," she ordered it. She then turned to look at Alex and asked, "What are you doing trying to fight with a True Realm beast. Just run."

"I was about to, Master. I would've used Heaven's impact or my escape technique as a last resort if normal escape was impossible," Alex said.

"You should flare out your spiritua—"

GRRRR

A tiger beast appeared from the side and directly jumped on Ma Rong. Ma Rong waved her hands and cold energy was released from it. Signs of frosting appeared on the fur of the tiger. The green snake appeared from the side with a dead bull and immediately left it to run after the tiger.

"Go," Ma Rong's voice appeared inside Alex's head and he went to help the others.

He saw a 1st Meridian Tempering realm monster and started fighting it. It was a snake beast with a brown body and had abnormally hard skin. Alex had more problems fighting it than the 2nd Meridian Tempering realm moose.

The snake jumped at him with its open mouth, and Alex took the golden opportunity to put his sword into its mouth and cut it from the inside. Thankfully, its inside wasn't as strong and once the skin ripped from the side,? it ripped all the way through.

Alex huffed after he finished fighting. But then, he realized there were two more beasts in front of him. One was in the 9th Organ Tempering realm, which wasn't hard for him to fight against, but the other one was at the 2nd Meridian Tempering realm.

He had avoided strong beasts until now, so he didn't have to confront them, but this one felt doable, although very risky. He couldn't tell if running away was a good choice here or not.

Suddenly, the beasts that were also contemplating attacking him, had a change in expression. Their faces turned from serious to delight at a very fast rate.

'What's happening?' Alex wondered.

Then, the beasts turned around and back towards the broken gate. In fact, they ran out of it. Not only them, but Alex could also see almost all the beasts that were in the self Tempering realm run out of the city.

Only those in the True realm were showing any signs of not moving. Alex decided to follow behind them to see what the cause was.

He walked to the city gates, the same as everyone else, and saw them gathered around a certain spot outside the forest looking for something.

"Brother Yu, What is going on?" Wan Li came up to him from the side. He was bloody from head to foot from killing a lot of beasts.

"I don't know, Brother Wan," Alex said as he looked around to see that there were no more beasts inside the city at all. It was as if it was a miracle.

"I think I know," Wan Li spoke. Alex turned his head around to see him pointing in a certain direction upwards. Alex looked in the direction and saw a certain man flying up there.

It was a relatively young-looking man, amongst the hoard of other people and beasts fighting, yet Alex could clearly tell who he was and why he was the cause of whatever was happening.

"The Royal Alchemist? He came to fight as well?" Alex said in surprise. "He must've used the beast attracting pill to pull all the beasts out of the city."

"Everyone, the Royal Alchemist has managed to bring all the beasts out of the city. Please do not let them enter again. Fight!" The Emperor's voice was heard from somewhere despite not being visible anywhere.

The people were riled up and charged out of the city to fight with the beasts that were gathered there. Alex and Wan Li did the same.

For nearly 15 minutes, Alex fought a bloody battle against more than a dozen beasts. Some weak, some strong. The humans were overwhelmingly winning the fight, although a few did die in front of Alex's eyes.

However, the number of beasts killed was far too many compared to the few humans they had lost instead.

Huff Huff

Alex was getting tired by now. He had been continuously helping and then fighting for nearly an hour now. The sun was going down and the evening was approaching.

He lifted his sword and took deep breaths before being ready to fight the beast in front of him. Suddenly, something happened. The feeling that Alex had been feeling disappeared. He looked to the south and realized that he could no longer tell exactly which direction the feeling had been coming from.

Another weird thing happened almost simultaneously. As soon as the feeling disappeared, the beasts stopped fighting and ran back into the forest.

Every beast including the ones at the True realm ran back into the forest leaving Alex and the rest with nothing but corpses behind them.

Alex slumped back into the ground in exhaustion and started catching his breath. He looked at the mountain of corpses that had appeared around him and realized that he could no longer see anyone anywhere. The corpses were blocking his view.

'Are all the beasts gone?' Alex wondered and sent out his spiritual sense. Just then, he saw something move at incredible speed.

Alex tried to quickly teleport, but he was struck on the back of his head, and he lost consciousness.

Chapter 349: Trapped

"Argh," Alex slowly opened his eyes. His head was dizzy and he could feel a bit of pain on the back of his head. He sat up while rubbing his head.

"What hit me?" he couldn't help but ask out loud. He looked at his hand and was relieved that he wasn't bleeding at the very least.

'Did my armor save me?' he wondered. He could tell he had fainted due to the attack and was a little surprised.

'In the first place, why did I even faint? Isn't the capsule supposed to automatically log us out when we faint?' he questioned. He immediately remembered why.

"Ah right, I changed to the helmet after the maze run. How long have I even been asleep for?'. He checked the corner of his vision and saw that it was half-past 6.

'I've been out for about an hour huh?' he thought.

He looked around and tried to see where exactly he was. He remembered being around the mountain of monster corpses, but now there was nothing.

In fact, rather than saying there was nothing, he was more accurate to say that he could see nothing. He was inside fog and the visibility was less than 3 meters in front of him.

He tried to send out his spiritual sense, but for some reason that didn't work. After around 5 meters of distance, he could no longer tell what he was sensing or even tell what direction that sense was in.

"What the hell is happening?" He started to get worried. He frantically looked around, but there was truly not a single hint out there.

Alex started running away from where he was so that he could get out of the fog, but the moment he started walking, he would get a little dizzy. It was like the whole world around him was moving with him in the center.

It was all very... disorienting.

Since he was having a hard time going around due to the disorienting sense, he decided to simply walk while blocking all sense. He started walking in a single direction and didn't stop. He walked on for nearly 10 minutes when he finally opened his eyes to check.

He was still inside the fog.

"What the hell?" he was surprised. "What sort of place am I at? Is this a formation?" he worried.

"Oh, you catch on very fast," a voice came from somewhere.

"Who?" Alex immediately turned around towards the direction of the voice, but then realized he couldn't tell what the direction was.

'That voice...' he thought and frowned. "High Prince Zexi," he said.

"Oh, you know who I am now, huh?" Zexi spoke right next to his ears. Alex flustered and walked away from the man.

"Wh-What do you mean, High Prince? Why did you bring me here?" Alex tried to act. He knew for a fact that Zexi couldn't see past his disguise unless he gave it away.

"Oh, you seem confused, little guy. Check your hair," Zexi said.

'My hair?' Alex thought with surprise and felt his hair. Suddenly, he realized that his hair was long. He left his hair and went on to check his face with both his hands and the spiritual sense.

"Oh no," he thought in fear. The 58 hours for the Face Change Pill he had eaten had already expired. He was back to having his own face.

'I forgot to take another pill today.'

"Not bad, for an Organ Tempering realm individual. You are quite rich," Zexi said as he held a few storage bags in his arms. "Thankfully, you won't escape from me this time."

"Those are my storage bags?" Alex thought and quickly checked his robes. He didn't have a single storage bag anymore.

"I see you have quite a few ingredients for alchemy. Makes sense since you are an alchemist," Zexi said. "Although, do tell me, how exactly did you get the Spirit Cleansing Lilies? As far as I know, while the flowers themselves are not uncommon, they are incredibly hard to pick since only one of them is a real one. Is that not true?" he asked.

Alex didn't answer. "Give me back my storage bag," he demanded.

"Oh no, that's not happening this time. I was fair to you last time, but you don't get that opportunity this time. This time, I will get the information out of you myself," Zexi said.

The moment he said that his eyes turned upwards and he lost consciousness. At the same time, Alex teleported right next to him and hit him with a second dose of Heaven's impact.

He then immediately stole back his storage bags and used the Earth Devour technique to leave once more. The moment he activated his technique, the earth beneath his body opened up and Alex was devoured inside. He was then taken away by the earth.

He could feel himself moving at incredible speed through the earth as he—

BANG

Suddenly, he hit something inside the earth and was ejected outside once again.

"What?" he thought as he quickly sent out his spiritual sense. In front of him, he could see and sense the same fogs that hindered his sense of direction.

While behind him was a perfectly normal forest that had not a single bit of fog.

Alex tried to walk towards it and hit something again. "Ow," he screamed as he rubbed his forehead. He placed his arms forward and realized that there was an invisible barrier disrupting his entry and exit.

"Another formation?" Alex said in shock.

"Oh, it works," Zexi spoke from behind him. " I was hoping it would when I set up that formation. Your disappearance trick was a little bit of a problem for me you know."

"So I had to set up both formations, just for you. The barrier formation to keep you from leaving, and the Spirit Disorienting formation to keep you inside at all times," Zexi said.

"Since I was good enough to set it up as a mid-Earth Grade formation, we have anywhere from 30-40 days of time with each other.

"I hope I get to learn a lot about you."

Chapter 350: Questions

The Spirit Disorienting formation was a True rank formation that was the most valuable item that was sold in the most recent auction Alex had gone to. He remembered what the auctioneer had said when she had described the formation.

It disoriented the person's sense of surrounding and trapped them forever inside by not letting them realize where the exit was. Alex didn't really need to know the direction of the exit to leave it, but unfortunately, Zexi had thought of that as well and put up another formation that put a barrier around the edge of the Spirit Disorienting formation.

Alex looked at the man and feared what was about to happen next. There was no way he was going to let him go from this without getting what he wanted to get, but he would also not let him go after he got what he wanted.

Besides, it was not like Alex could just say 'I just know' and the man would be happy with the answer.

'Should I just log out and act as if I have fainted again?' Alex thought but immediately dismissed the option. There was no way the man was going to let him go just because he had fainted. Besides, as the man said, they were trapped in here for over a month. Alex couldn't simply faint every single day.

'Besides, it would be terrible for me if he killed me. My next body likely won't have the same talent this one has and I will lose my source of income.

'What should I do?' Alex tried to think of something, but couldn't come up with any ideas.

"What are you thinking so deeply?" Zexi asked with a terrible smile.

Alex tried to back away, but the barrier stopped him. Zexi then said, "Let's keep the talk about the flowers for later, shall we? I want to ask you about a few of the different things you have in there."

As soon as he said that, all of Alex's storage bags were ripped out of his robes, back into the man's hands. "Let's see, you have so many high-level ingredients here, where did you find them?" he asked.

Alex didn't know what to answer. The truth? It wouldn't be bad to try it out if he could survive. That was the only option he had right now.

"I found them in the southern forest," Alex said.

"You found them.... In the southern forest? Hahahaha, Nice joke. Tell me, really, where did you find them? Did you rob the treasury of your sect? Or did you rob the treasury of a different sect?'" Zexi asked.

Alex replied the same answer, "I'm telling you, I found them in the southern forest."

"Tsk. So you're going to keep lying about it huh? Very well then, let's move on with the questions then. What does this do?" Zexi asked as he brought forth a yellow talisman.

Alex looked at it and was a little surprised to even see what it was. It was a yellow talisman that normally he would simply forget about since he never really learned much about it.

All he knew was that the talisman was meant to do something when activated, and he wasn't brave enough to use the talisman of a man who was very likely in the saint realm.

That could backfire very badly on him.

"I don't know. I just found it somewhere," Alex said.

"You found it somewhere? You really want me to believe that you found a True rank talisman somewhere randomly?" Zexi simply shook his head.

SLAP

Without any warning, he slapped Alex with the back of his hand. Alex skidded along the barrier and stopped someplace far away.

Nothing was broken, but he was hurt a lot. He quickly ignored the burning cheek and looked around to find Zexi, but that was no longer possible. He didn't even know which direction he was just slapped from.

The formation was messing with him too much. Suddenly, the only thing he could see, the barrier, disappeared as well. He looked around confused as to what had just happened, and tried to make sense of it.

'Sh*t,' he thought. He had realized what had just happened. The Spirit Disorienting formation not only made him bad with his whereabouts inside the formation but it also, from time to time, shift space itself to further disorient the person inside.

Alex was perplexed and had no idea what he could even do. Suddenly, a crushing sensation appeared and pushed him onto the ground.

"Alright, then. If you won't tell me about the ingredients or the talisman, then you can at least tell me about this right?"

BANG

Something landed right next to Alex's head. Alex slowly turned his head to see what it was and came face to face with a dark blade.

'My saint grade sword,' he thought in fear. That was one of the most important secrets he had been holding, and it had come to light in front of this man.

"How does a normal, nobody like you come in contact with a sword like this? I feel stupid even asking this, but this is a saint-grade sword, isn't it?

"Who are you? And why are you in possession of so many of these things?" Zexi didn't even ask it as a question. It was almost as if he didn't want any answers from Alex.

"I—"

"No need to speak. I can see that you don't really want to answer me about any of this. This brings me back to the initial reason I got you here in the first place, the Spirit Cleansing Lily. Whether you like it or not, you are now going to tell me the answer to everything."

"I will make you do it," Zexi said as he kneeled onto the ground and placed his palm on Alex's head.

"Don't bother resisting. Not even a True Master realm cultivator from the auction house was able to resist this move. You are just an organ realm cultivator. This will end in the blink of an eye."

Chapter 351: Battle in the Spiritual Sea

Zexi closed his eyes and concentrated. Suddenly, spiritual energy released from him and started entering Alex's head.

Pain was all that Alex could feel. It was as if someone had cut open his skull, taken out his brain, and put it on a blender at the highest setting.

"ARRRGHHHHHH," he screamed as loud as he could. He was both losing consciousness and getting awoken from it at the same time.

"Sh*t, why the hell does this kid have so much spiritual energy. This is nothing like back when I used this on that guy from the auction hall," Zexi thought.

It was not only Alex who felt pain, Zexi did too, although on a far minor scale. Penetrating another person's spiritual sea was not an easy task for him.

Zexi had a True Lord cultivation realm, as well as a Spirit Cleansing Lily's worth of Spiritual sea, so he had high-quality spiritual sense, but in low amount.

On the other hand, Alex's spiritual sense wasn't worth much due to his low quality, but he had 3 times as much as Zexi's in terms of amount.

So, Zexi trying to enter Alex's Spiritual sea was basically a battle between Quality vs Quantity.

Alex kept screaming as the pain was far beyond anything he had felt yet. The first day of body cultivation was nothing compared to having someone tear open your head and try to take a look inside of it.

After many minutes of fighting, Zexi finally managed to enter Alex's head. His body then slumped onto the ground and both he and Alex were as silent as 2 dead men.

Inside Alex's spiritual sea, Zexi flew in the sky above the, more than half-dried, spiritual sea. He looked around and couldn't help but nod in approval.

Huff Huff

"This is... not all that.... bad at all. Huff, the kid... must've... used all 3... Spirit Cleansing Lilies already?" he asked while continuously catching his breath. Getting in here was not an easy deal for him as well.

"Now, where is that kid?" he said and started searching down below him.

Alex looked around and started fearing a little.

The man was now inside his Spiritual sea, but why? He had said he would get the answers on his own, but that didn't make any sense to Alex.

In the first place, how did he even enter his spiritual sea? Was that a skill, or just something people could do with their spiritual sense?

Spiritual sense, and especially, Spiritual sea was a topic he didn't know a lot about.

'could the man maybe be weak now? like all the other beasts that enter my spiritual sea?' Alex wondered. He didn't have many attacks in his arsenal, but he decided to use them anyway.

He immediately threw an Iron Fist punch towards Zexi. Surprisingly, it accurately hit on the back.

"Arghh," Zexi cried and turned back. "What the hell? Why the hell ... are you flying there?"

the last time he had entered another person's mind, he had found the person unconscious on the dried-up sea.

Zexi seemed genuinely confused when he saw Alex up in the sky. "Could it be? People... who have spiritual sense... can stay awake inside their own spiritual sea?" Zexi seemed to understand what was happening.

"Since the last guy I tried this on didn't have a properly formed spiritual sea, he could only stay on the ground I guess," Zexi said.

Alex didn't bother saying anything to him. He had always been in the sky every time he had to fight a beast here. So it was likely that Zexi's assumption of requiring a fully formed spiritual sea to be awake inside your own spiritual sea was correct.

Alex wasted no more time and started spamming out attacks after attacks. He didn't have many attacks he could do. The only ones he knew were the Iron Fist punch and palm of the sun. Every other one either required a sword or wasn't attack-focused.

Zexi frowned. He had spent a lot of spiritual energy just to get here and didn't want to waste anymore. He still needed some to read Alex's memories and then some to leave this place.

He still sent out attacks of his own to stop the incoming attacks. He looked at the attacks he was blocking and frowned a little.

'Why does this kid's attack have elemental affinity in them? We are inside his damn spiritual sea. He shouldn't be able to use any energy,' Zexi thought.

"Just stop it, kid... Huff... do you really... want to dry your sea... until nothing is left? Do you know... how dangerous that is?" Zexi tried to stop Alex's recklessness.

Alex didn't say anything but kept on attacking.

"Look at your sea kid... you are not using Qi... you are using the sea to power your energy... are you going to be so reckless?" he said.

"What?" Alex finally stopped. He looked down at the turbulent sea and realized that it really had sunk down quite a bit. Until now,? he had assumed that attacking inside the spiritual sea used Qi, like the outside, but now he had realized that that was not the case.

However, he also knew that he couldn't afford to stop right now. If this was a fight of Spiritual senses and seas, then he was going to fight as long as a single drop of the sea was left.

He sent on more barrages of his attacks. Zexi was starting to get scared as well. 'Sh*t, I can't let that happen. If he depletes my spiritual sea completely, I really might just die here,' he thought. His spiritual sense was down to less than 10% of the original amount and that was dangerously low for where he was right now.

He started using dodging maneuvers rather than straight-up trying to fight the incoming attacks. He kept tabs on Alex's spiritual sea and watched it slowly drain away.

Finally, when there was almost nothing, he attacked. Alex tried to send out another attack but nothing left his arms. It was then he realized, his spiritual sea had all but completely dried up and his life was now in the hands of the person before him.

Chapter 352: Memories

Huff Huff

Both Alex and Zexi were huffing very heavily at this point. Alex's mind was starting to be hazy and there were times when he wouldn't be thinking of anything.

He was on the edge of falling into unconsciousness, and he did not want that to happen. He tried to hold on for as long as possible.

"You are quite tough... for someone... not in the True Realm," Zexi said. "You... have shown so many... amazing things... to me that... even I am curious... how you got... all of this."

He flew directly up to Alex and finally laid his hands on Alex's head. "Let's see what you have hidden in here," he said.

Alex suddenly felt something rip into his head once again. Only this time, it wasn't as painful as before. This time I felt like someone was placing some sleeping gas on him, and he was slowly falling to sleep.

"There it is... the memories. Time to see what you know." Alex could hear Zexi speak even as he started to lose his mind.

"N—no..." he said weakly.

"Kid, you are awake, right? Alright, time for you to listen to me. LISTEN TO WHAT I SAY!!" Zexi spoke. "How do you find the Spirit Cleansing Lilies?" he asked.

Alex's mind immediately went to the times he found the Spirit Cleansing Lilies. He remembered the feelings he got when he was close to the lilies.

"What? Do you really just know which one to choose? That's certainly unexpected," Zexi said while huffing in between. "That doesn't help me. Alright, next question. Where did you find the many ingredients for alchemy?"

Alex tried to not think about the stuff, but that was hard. Hearing the questions, his mind wandered to the answers, and Zexi saw all of it.

Wen Cheng, the group of elders, flying to the southern forest, a formation full of different ingredients, a bunch of Spirit Cleansing lilies, the underground tunnel, the dead corpse on the side of the tunnel, the storage bags with the bunch of ingredients for Saint Rank pills.

Zexi saw every single one of the images that Alex's mind produced.

"Damn, this kid wasn't lying at all. He really did find them in the southern forest. What incredible luck," Zexi thought. "What about the talisman?"

Zexi saw the images of the corpse and the talisman inside flash through his mind. He thought it was quite interesting, but didn't think much of it

"Now... what about the sword?" he asked.

Alex thought of the time he had to kill the Cat Monster and how it had thanked him and asked him to take care of her son.

"What the hell? Th-That was a Saint Realm beast. There is a saint realm beast in the southern forest? Who killed it? Why is a sword stuck there?" Zexi flustered for the first time when he saw that.

"What happened to its child?" he asked.

Alex tried his best, but couldn't stop himself from thinking about Pearl. "Y-You actually bonded with him. You bonded with the child of a Saint realm beast. This is big news. If I can get brother to take your beast, or... if I can take your beast... I can become the emperor instead."

Suddenly, the memories that were flowing into him had something weird in them. "What's that?" he thought and looked at it more carefully. "What is that blue thing?" he asked.

Alex frowned when he heard that. He had just thought of logging out to show no more information and had decided that was a bad idea. Therefore, he had already lost his train of thought and was back to thinking about something else.

"No, kid. Go back to that. What was that blue thing?" Zexi asked.

Alex tried his best, but his mind still went to what he was thinking about. Forcing himself not to think about something only made him think about that thing more.

"What is this?" Zexi asked when he saw the thing more clearly. It was like a blue glass hovering in the air and Alex was touching on it.

"Se... tting? What is that?" Zexi looked at more memories. "What can you do with it?"

Memories started flooding Alex's own thoughts. Zexi looked at every single one of them and was getting stunned.

"This... what is this? this person in the mirror... he looks just like what you did in the competition today. Are these your memories from today? No, can't be. what are those things you are thinking of? those head armors and those coffins. what are those metal bricks with images?" Zexi shouted.

"Are you from outside the Crimson Empire? Whose memories are these? game? real life? what are you thinking about?"

Even as he was halfway fainting, he could hear every single word coming out of Zexi's mouth very clearly. 'He... can see my memories from real life... inside the game?'

"What are those buildings made of? What is that design? What are those metal birds, or those giant metal snakes? Why are there so many metal carriages?"

Alex's mind wandered and showed more images.

Zexi couldn't comprehend what was happening in most of the memories he saw. He immediately lifted his arms and flew back.

"Wh—? What are you? Is-is this a clone? Are you controlling this clone from somewhere else?" Zexi asked. Alex was starting to have trouble thinking anymore.

Now that Zexi left his head, it was getting a little too comfortable, and he was losing himself to sleep. He tried to keep his eyes open, but his eyelids were very hard to keep open.

Huff Huff

Zexi was breathing really heavily now. He had used nearly all of his spiritual sense when he looked at Alex's memories. Now, he barely had any left, and was thus extremely tired, just like Alex.

"It seems you might be too dangerous to keep alive," Zexi said and prepared to leave Alex. Once he left, he would surely kill him with his real body.

Alex needed to stop him somehow. But at the condition he was in, that was simply impossible. He couldn't even think properly at the moment, let alone act on any plans.

'N—no...' Alex couldn't even voice his thought anymore. His eyes got blurry, and everything in front of him looked like a hazy mess. He could barely tell Zexi apart from the surrounding.

'I'm going to die, aren't I?' he thought. The last bit of the spiritual sea finally dried up completely.

Just then, something happened. A shadow at the bottom of the dried lake suddenly moved and appeared right next to Zexi.

Zexi was surprised and was too slow to dodge. Something landed on his chest and he slowly looked at what it was.

"W-What's going on? How can—" Before he could finish speaking, a yellow fog suddenly burst out from around the shadow-like figure and engulfed Zexi. Zexi cried at the top of his lungs, but he couldn't stop the shadow-like figure at all.

His consciousness was hanging by a thread, and now the thread was devoured by this yellow fog.

Alex's head barely registered what had happened in front of his. His hazy eyes couldn't make up the details of what had just taken place. All he could see was something fuzzy followed by yellow light.

'Wha-' he tried to speak, but he couldn't. He watched as the yellow light vanished from in front of him and he could no longer see any figure of Zexi anywhere.

The shadow then moved a little towards him. Yellow fog appeared once more and this time, it devoured Alex as well.

Chapter 353: Real

It was in the middle of the night when Alex finally regained his consciousness. He looked at the dark sky, but he couldn't see anything but fog in front of him.

He slowly got up and looked around him. There was nothing but fog on either side as well. He couldn't see anything else. The space had shifted once again.

He felt his head, but it wasn't hurting as much as it was last time. The headache and dizziness he was feeling were bearable. Then, he slowly started remembering the events of the things that took place in the spiritual sea.

Alex remembered the shadowy figure, but couldn't remember what it looked like. It was a barely dark figure that didn't even seem like it was a silhouette. His vision was just that hazy at the time.

Fear started creeping upon him. "W-What was that?" he thought. Yet no matter what he thought of, he didn't have an answer to that question.

It was then he remembered what Zexi had started shouting after seeing his images.

"How could he see my memories from my real life? How does a game-No, how can anything look at my memories in my real life?" Alex couldn't understand. Does Eternal Cultivation have some method of hacking into one's brain?

"In the first place, this game is a weird one," he thought. "None of the other VR games taught in the classes ever have this much information, this many people with this many emotions."

"Zexi said... that I was a clone and that I am controlling this body from somewhere else... could that be true?" Alex thought. From what he remembered about clones, you could be far away from it and still control it if your mind was connected to it, similar to the person who was controlling Song Zun.

Even as he spoke the next few words, he couldn't believe he was even thinking it.

"Is this... not a game?"

Alex couldn't wrap his head around the much information that he was provided. "Is this not a game? Is this world real? Are these people real? AM I REAL?" his eyes darted around as he asked himself those questions.

"No, how is that even possible in the first place? How can such a world exist? No, it can't be real," he tried to tell himself. While some things made sense, some didn't at all.

"No, don't think about it right now. Focus on getting out of here," he tried to distract himself. He got up and started walking around aimlessly.

However, no matter what he did, his thoughts came back to the same thing. Is this a game?

He couldn't find Zexi anywhere. He didn't know if he was still hanging around somewhere waiting to sneak attack him or had left the formation already, but he knew that he had taken a bit of damage for sure. Even if it was simply mental damage.

Losing most of your mind inside another person's head couldn't really be good for you.

He wandered around with many thoughts in his mind until he hit something and fell down. "What's that?" he stood up to check. He sent out his divine sense, and when he finally saw it, he couldn't help but suck in a large amount of air.

In front of him, on the ground, was the unconscious Zexi.

"What should I do? Should I... Yes, I-I should kill him," Alex made up his mind when he saw Zexi lay down there. He send out his spiritual sense to make sure he wasn't awake and faking it.

He tried to check the rhythm of his breathing to see if that would give away anything, but there was nothing. No breathing, no rhythm.

"He-He's dead."

Alex didn't know what to do with that information. The person that had given him so much trouble, was dead in front of him. He didn't feel sad for him, or happy as one would expect, only confusion.

He was certainly relieved that he wouldn't have to worry about him anymore, yet he couldn't understand how he could possibly die.

"Could it be... that yellow light?" Alex thought. Every time he ate a monster core and was sent to his spiritual sea to fight the monster, there was always that yellow fog that appeared and consumed the monster once it died.

"Could it be... that fog consumed him... and killed him as well?" Alex was flabbergasted when he came up with that conclusion.

"So... in a way, I killed him," he thought. He slumped onto the ground unable to think of anything else. There was too much information being thrown his way today.

'I should... just log out.'

Alex opened his eyes back in his room. It was the middle of the night, and his light was on. He stood up and walked up to the mirror. He looked at his face and touched the mirror.

'This feels the same as in the game... is it really not a game?' Alex thought.

After using the helmet for an entire day, he needs to go use the bathroom. Even in the bathroom, he couldn't stop the thoughts from pouring out into his mind.

Was it a game? Was it real? If it was a game, how were his memories accessed? If it was real.... How?

He got out of the bathroom and looked at the helmet. "Everything will be answered if I can look at what is inside of it," Alex thought and went out to get a bunch of tools to open the thing.

He got some screwdrivers, a hammer, a plier, few scissors, and a knife, and started prying it open. He opened a video on his laptop and learned how to do it.

After half an hour and prying, he finally got the helmet to open up. However, he wasn't happy when he realized what the parts inside the helmets were.

Nothing there made sense to him at all. He picked up the chip that was hidden inside the helmet and looked at it carefully.

Suddenly, he noticed something on the chip that made his eyes go wide.

Chapter 354: Chip

"My dear wife, do you want me to ask the servants to bring you anything else?" A young man who was in a lotus position asked the girl next to him.

"Longlong, don't call 'dear wife', just say, dear or wife. I feel embarrassed when you say the whole thing.

"Also, I don't need anything, I'm done cultivating for the night. I will go take a nap. You go do whatever it is that you do that help you make so much money," the girl said.

"Haha, don't worry dear. I will tell you where the money comes from in due time. I just hope you won't be surprised at that time," the man said.

The girl walked up to him and gave him a deep kiss before walking away, leaving behind a fragrant smell of her perfume. The man looked at his wife with loving eyes before standing up and walking the other way, out of the room.

The girl got onto the best and closed her eyes.

KADAK

The doors to the capsule opened and out walked Hannah. She freshened up a bit and went outside to eat her only meal of the day nowadays, breakfast.

".... So, when these lines form, they must be at equal angles from each other. The closer they are to each other, the better they will perform."

Hannah could hear a voice coming from the kitchen. 'A man?' she thought and walked into the kitchen only to find Alex very intensely watching a video on his phone.

"What are you doing watching videos so early in the morning? Are you that excited about going to your classes today?" Hannah asked.

"My... what?" Alex paused the video and looked at Hannah in surprise.

"Your classes. You do remember they start from today right?" Hannah reminded him.

"Huh? What's today?" he quickly checked his phone and realized that it was Monday today. "Urghh... I haven't slept since I woke up at 2 pm. So, I might have to skip today's school," he said.

"What? Why did you wake up at 2 pm? Why didn't you just sleep?" Hannah asked. She then saw something on the table and picked it up.

She looked at the green object with golden lines on it. "Is this an electronic chip?" she asked. "Where did you get it?"

"Does it look like a chip to you, sister?" he asked.

"Yes. Isn't it a chip?" she asked.

"I don't know. It came from the VR helmet. I opened it up and saw this inside," Alex said.

"You broke open your helmet? Why?" Hannah asked.

"I wanted to see what was inside-No, I needed to see what was inside," Alex said. He took the chip from Hannah's hands and flipped it around to show her something.

"Check this out, sister. Do you see anything here?" he asked.

"Umm... I don't know what I am looking for. I just see a bunch of lines, that's it. You should know I don't have much talent in electronics," Hannah said.

"Not electronics sister. Imagine you find it inside the game, what will you think of it?" Alex asked.

Hannah took the chip once more and looked at the lines. Still, she couldn't tell anything. Alex decided to help here.

"Look here, sister." He traced his finger along a golden line in the chip such that it made a symmetrical figure as a whole. "Doesn't it look like a formation to you?" he asked.

"A formation? Like in the game? I'm sorry, I don't really know much about these things. I spend my days in the game doing normal cultivation and training," Hannah said. "Also, aren't you an alchemist? Why do you know about formations?"

"I... don't really know about formations. I've only seen a few blueprints and this one looks like a formation," Alex said.

"Don't tell me you broke your helmet to look at an easter egg," Hannah said in surprise.

"What? Of course not. I was trying to find out if..." Alex stopped.

"Find out if what?" Hannah asked.

"You will laugh at me," Alex said.

"No I won't, just tell me," Hannah said.

"I was just trying to find out if the game... was actually real," Alex said.

"Pfft. Hahaha, you sound like one of those crazy conspiracy theorists. Did they catch your attention too?" Hannah asked.

"Conspiracy theorists? There are people who believe that the game is real?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, there have been people like that ever since the game started," Hannah said and looked at Alex weirdly. "Did you not learn from them?"

"No. Something happened in the game that made me think... that it might be more than just a game," Alex said.

"What happened?" Hannah asked seriously.

"An enemy of mine read my memories... and saw the real world for some reason," he said. "So... I am starting to believe that helmet could either read our memories or the world we go to in the game is real."

Hannah looked at him for a second and shook her head. "You said you were awake since 2 pm right? You need sleep."

Alex thought of explaining it to her more, but then he saw her disapproving face. 'She doesn't believe me. Hah, I wouldn't believe myself too,' he thought.

"Alright, I will go sleep. See you later." Alex stood up and walked away. Hannah simply shook her head once again and sighed.

Soon she forgot about what they were talking about and got herself a breakfast.

Alex went to his room and fell onto the bed. The broken pieces of the helmet were on the side of the bed, and he didn't know how to fix it back.

He tried to sleep, but more and more questions popped into his head. "If I were to believe that that was a formation, then the helmet should be something like part of a larger formation, or a separate artifact, right?" he thought.

"Formations-I need to learn about them more to figure out what that is about," he thought. "I can't sleep right now. I need to know more."

He got up from the bed and walked into the capsule before logging back in.

Chapter 355: Serene Earth Qi Absorption Method

Alex opened his eyes back in the foggy area. He sat up and immediately all the information he never had in the real world was there for him to use.

'This is really weird,' he thought. He was starting to question the things that he had been ignoring as part of the game.

"Wait, maybe I am getting ahead of myself. What if the developers just learned how to access memories of mine. That sounds a lot more plausible than there existing another world that I was being sent to," Alex thought.

Despite firmly believing in his idea about this being a real world, he wanted to make sure there weren't any other pieces of information that he had been unknowingly ignoring.

"That chip... could it be what looked into my memories?" he wondered. That didn't sound wrong to him. Maybe the developers of the helmet and the capsule were just that bright that they managed to do what no one else had been able to replicate since.

"It did have formation-like patterns. Maybe there is a formation out there that can look into memo-Wait, no. What am I thinking? If it only looked into my memories, then formations as a thing should not exist out of the game."

"So, there should have been some other methods in which they are accessing my memories," Alex thought.

"Let's forget about them accessing my memories; how am I accessing my memories from the game? How come I only remember these when I play the game?" he thought.

"Nothing makes sense if I compare these things to what I have been told about Virtual Reality as a concept... that is if I believe this to just be virtual reality or a game.

If I were to think of this as a real-world... then the formation in my world must be sending me to this body and I am accessing the memories of this body," Alex thought.

Clones were a thing he didn't know much about, but he had seen cases of it. Song Zun's body was being used by someone else. Maybe, that was the same with him.

"I did log in to the game for the first time inside a forest. Was there a corpse in there just ready for me to steal?" he wondered. "Aside from that, what about the talents of the body? Were they the talents of the owner of this body and I just got lucky?" Alex thought.

Alex sent his spiritual sense all over his body, but there was not a single sign that he was a walking corpse.

"Wait no, that wouldn't make sense. I... I made this body. While I used random preferences, there should be others whose body matches how they look like in real life. There is no way they were a corpse before that... right?"

"Or maybe I am just that unknown about clones and there are other ways to change them as a corpse," Alex thought. He was getting contradicting answers from himself.

One thought he had would pretty much prove to him that this all was real, and then in the next moment he would have thoughts that told him that there was a much simpler explanation for all these that didn't include this all being real.

"Urghh... I might get a headache at this rate. Sigh, let's stop thinking about those things for now. Let me see what formations there are that matches the design in the chip," Alex thought.

He then sat down and started looking through all the blueprints to understand the design and what the designs were meant for. He not only wanted to find similar-looking formations but also check what it was that the formation did.

Unfortunately, of the formation blueprints he had, not a single one of them looked anything like the pattern from the chip. He really tried to find similarities that might have been hidden in the formations, but not one of them matched at all.

"Well, that was a failure. Am I really wrong?" he wondered. Alex was starting to doubt himself when he thought of something. "Haha, that should help me put a nail in the coffin."

Alex stood up and shouted, "Cultivation Method."

Suddenly, a blue panel appeared in front of him. It had been ages since he had opened this panel. There was a single book in this panel and he quickly opened it.

The Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method.

He had learned this on the first day of playing the game and had not checked it ever since. He clicked on the book and tried to see if there was anything there so that he could reread that book.

Unfortunately, he couldn't. "Wait a second," he thought. "Maybe there is a cultivation method on the outside," Alex thought.

He immediately logged out and looked for a cultivation method. It took him a while, but he managed to find an earth-grade cultivation method, the entire thing.

However, it was mostly just squiggly lines from Alex's perspective. He could understand a few words, but not everything. "It seems they copied the original thing without translating it," he thought He knew

He took his laptop next to the capsule and logged in. As soon as he was in, Alex tried to learn the language of the cultivation world, rather than try to translate the book one by one.

Once he felt like he knew a lot, he got out and translated as much as he could. Once he was done with the first iterations, he remembered what he missed and went back to learn some more.

He repeated it for nearly 3 hours until he fully learned a new language in the real world.

"That should definitely not be possible, "Alex thought. This just went to add more evidence to his theory.? After another hour or so, he was finally done fully translating the whole book.

The cultivation method was called the Serene Earth Qi Absorption technique. It was around 5 thousand words long and could be read by Alex in under 10 minutes.

Alex sat on his bed with the cultivation method in his hand. "Let's do this."

Chapter 356: Formations

Alex started reading the translated book. As he read on, he realized that it wasn't as easy as he had expected it to be. He didn't have the same talent as the in-game character and thus failed to remember much of the 5000 words the first time through.

Once he was done, he once again started to read the book from the start. He had to read it over and over to understand what was being told throughout the book.

"No wonder the people would rather just click the 'Learn' button. If your talent is like this, I assume it will take forever for them to learn anything," Alex thought.

After 7 or 8 times of fully reading the book, did he finally understand what the book was trying to say? It spoke of a way to pull in Qi from the surroundings and introduce it to your body.

He sat cross-legged in a lotus position and couldn't wait to start cultivating. Unlike in the game, he couldn't just start to breathe slowly and hope the method worked. He would have to actively do.

"Here goes nothing," he thought and took a deep breath. Then, he started to do what he felt was moving something along his 'meridians'. He felt a tingling sensation in his body, but couldn't tell if that was because he felt excited or he was genuinely taking in Qi.

After a while, he thought he felt something weird with his body. He happily thought he had succeeded, but turned out it was just a placebo effect.

Just because he wanted it to be true, he saw results in places there were none. He 'cultivated' for another 15 to 20 minutes, only to realize how stupid he was being.

"Is it really possible that I am overthinking it all and this is all a coincidence?" Alex wondered. Nothing he did was working. There was 0 evidence proving his claims.

"Oh, Sister said something about those conspiracy theorists. I should check it out," he thought and opened his laptop.

He searched through the internet to find information about these people that believed the game to be a real word. Unfortunately, it really turned out to be a bunch of conspiracy theorists.

They barely gave any evidence towards their claims and all they kept on saying was stuff like 'don't believe them' or 'stop being a sheep', and also the most repeated one of all, 'think for yourself.'

Alex was severely disappointed. He was back to square one where he had a theory of the game being real, but no way to prove it. He had minor evidence, but nothing concrete that could explain anything in full.

The only thing that could possibly explain was—

"The chip," His eyes shined as he thought of it. "I didn't find any information regarding similar formations, but that doesn't mean I won't be able to find information if I read about formations themselves."

He immediately went back into the capsule and logged in to the game. The fog was still the same and would likely stay that way until the formation was broken or it naturally ended.

With nothing else to do, he sat down in a lotus position and started thinking of the various stuff he read about formations till now.

He started to understand how formations worked. Until now, he had read many books about formations but hadn't stopped a single moment to try and understand what they meant. Today was going to be his first major step towards learning about formations.

There were 3 things required when making a formation. The design of the formation, the metal that is used to make the design, and the source of energy to run the formation.

The design of the formation was the actual image of the formation, made using lines that could do different things depending on what the metal used to carve was made out of, and what sort of energy was being passed along.

The designs themselves were simple lines that were connected to each other using the different points at which they met. For example,? one could use 5 formation flags and have a formation where the shape was a pentagon and have its function be something.

The same formation flags could be used to make a pentagram, and its function would be something else.

Of course, formations were not this simple. You couldn't change how it looked and have it function in a certain manner. It also needed an appropriate formation flag or a metal plate on top of which it would be drawn.

These were things that were made by artifact masters. Depending on the metal in use, there would be different results.

Lastly, the thing required to run the whole thing was the energy. Most of the time, it was just a simple spirit stone, but other times, it could be rare materials or monster cores.

"A metal plate, with the formation lines carved on it. The first two requirements certainly are there," Alex thought when he remembered the chip.

"As for the energy... could it be the connection to the wall that we have to plug the helmet too?" he wondered. After all, as long as an energy source was there, a formation should be able to function quite properly.

"Am I... right?" he started thinking.

In the end, no matter what he thought, he couldn't deny the fact that there were just too many coincidences for him to ignore.

Still, he decided to ignore it all for now. Ning learned what he could about the formations until it was dark again and logged out.

He had classes tomorrow, so he decided to make sure he had done all of his homework and stuff. Also, he had been working the whole day today, so he was incredibly hungry and needed to eat as well.

So, he went to the kitchen and prepared a delicious meal for himself. Hannah wasn't going to wake up until tomorrow morning, so he only prepared it for himself.

After that, he logged back into the game.

Chapter 357: Post Battle Haul

Alex logged back into the game, and the first thing he told himself was to forget about everything.

"Forget about the game being real, forget about formations, forget about everything for now. The first thing I should be doing is finding myself a way out of this formation," Alex spoke out loud.

Suddenly, the earth opened up and devoured him. He exited out of it when he hit the barrier underground. He was once again on the edge of the formation.

"Where are the formation flags?" Alex wondered. He tried searching for it, but it was incredibly well hidden. Alex even sent out his spiritual sense to search for it in near trees but there were none.

With no choice, he started hitting the wall. He hit it with every power he had, but no matter how strong Alex was, the barrier didn't stop working at all. In fact, it didn't even fluctuate.

"This must be a True rank barrier as well. Damn that Zexi, why did he set up such a strong barrier?" Alex wondered. "Speaking of which, where did his body go. I need to get back my stuff."

Alex started running around aimlessly in the fog. However, unlike yesterday, he couldn't find the corpse as fast as he wanted to.

It took him nearly half an hour of wandering aimlessly did he finally find the corpse. The skin looked incredibly pale and a strange scent was starting to rise from Zexi's body.

"Sh*t, it is already decomposing. I need to bury it," Alex thought. He took all of the storage bags from Zexi's body and took out his steel sword before stabbing it onto the ground to dig it.

He stabbed the ground a few times before he took out the dirt with his own hands. After doing that for 10 minutes, he now had a large enough hole to fully bury Zexi.

Once he was done burying Zexi, he looked at his own storage bags first. Everything he owned was there, with nothing being used, except for a single thing.

"Hmm... the Ebony Corundum Stiletto is missing," Alex thought. Last he remembered, Zexi had stabbed it on the ground and hadn't bothered retaking it at the time. "He was more focused on looking at my memories," Alex thought.

"Sigh, I guess I will have to find it later on.? For now, let's see what a High Prince owns," Alex thought and took out his storage bags.

When Alex checked inside, the first thing he noticed was the tens of hundreds of True Spirit Stones. "I-I'm rich," Alex shouted out in excitement. There were close to half a million dollars in the form of True Spirit stones in there.

The more he looked through the more stuff he found. Different weapons, armors, artifacts. There was even a boat inside of it. If he sold these, he could also gain a lot of money from them.

He then came across a piece of paper. When he checked inside it, he realized it was an instruction on house to set up the Spirit Disorienting formation.

"What? 50 meters? That's absurd," Alex thought when he read it. The formation was told to be set such that the formation flags were each 50 meters away from where the formation actually started. Also, the True spirit stones required to power these things were also around these formation flags.

"Urgh... so they aren't next to the formation huh? Does that mean I will have to wait here for another 30 days?" Alex questioned himself. The thought of this was quite terrifying. Being in the formation for over a month was not something he wanted to do.

"Maybe master will come to find me once they realize I am missing. Maybe they are already searching for me. I hope I am not very far away from them," Alex hoped.

"I wonder if senior sister went back to fight that guy. I hope she won if she did. Although, maybe they stopped the competition after such a tragedy that happened," he thought.

He sighed and went back to checking the storage bags of Zexi. The other things he found in there were some pills and talismans that were mostly useless for Alex aside from a few of them.

"Ugh... I doubt I can even reveal any of these items in public. They will probably kill me if they found out their High Prince is missing and I have his items," Alex thought.

"I hope he didn't have a fami-wait, the Royal family is his family. Well, I hope he didn't have a wife a child," Alex thought. He hated Zexi, but he wasn't heartless enough to wish badly for his family too.

"Although I remember master saying that the third brother of the emperor wasn't married. That's good," Alex thought and went back to searching the bag.

The next thing he found was a white, oval ball. He took it out and held it. It didn't take him very long to realize that it was an egg. A notification popped up over the egg to tell him what the egg was of, but even without it, he would've known.

The black splotches on its shell were a dead giveaway. "The Emerald Lizard's egg. I remember the auctioneer saying that the lizard has a high chance of entering the True realm and a minor chance of reaching the Saint realm."

"This is a good find," Alex thought. He didn't require a beast for himself, but he could certainly give this to somebody else he cared about.

He put that aside and started searching for more stuff until he found something that was interesting.

"Oh, what's this?" Alex thought and took out a woodblock. Then his eyes started shining brightly. "Hahaha, No way!" he thought. He remembered the auction event very clearly and remembered every single item that was sold there.

This was something he had wanted, perhaps just as much as his armor right now, but had failed to get it because Zexi had outbid him without any hesitation.

The woodblock was actually a wooden box that housed alchemy ingredients. Alex quickly opened it and looked inside.

Just as he had expected, there it was. Inside was a dark-blue flower that was shaped like a lotus. Alex's eyes shined and he spoke in excitement.

"The Umbra Lotus."

Chapter 358: No Fire

Alex quickly searched through his mind to look through his memories and see if there was any information on Umbra Lotus aside from the auction house.

And there was, but nothing explicit. He had actually learned the same thing from the auction as well. From what he had learned in the library, the Umbra Lotus was a rare flower with extremely high Yin content.

Due to the amount of Yin in it, it could be used for Alchemy, Artifacts, Formations, and many other places. Alex happily kept it inside his storage bag.

He checked the rest of the bag and found nothing important other than a bunch of raw materials for artifacts and formations.

With nothing else to look for anymore, he decided to cultivate for the rest of the night.

"Come out Pearl," he said and brought Pear out of the tattoo. In a white flash of light, Pearl appeared in front of him. Alex immediately grabbed Pearl in fear that he would lose him in this formation.

"Alright, stay inside my robe and we will cultivate, okay?" Alex said.

"Meow," Pearl meowed back in agreement. And so, the human-beast duo cultivated throughout the night. The night was peaceful. The space changed multiple times, but they were never separated. Not only that, nothing entered the formation either.

As such, this was one of the best places to cultivate throughout the night.

Alex woke up early in the morning around 7 am. Once he woke up, he asked Pearl to go back into the tattoo. Alex then decided to learn about formations about an hour longer before he logged out of the game.

He freshened up and went out to have his meal. Hannah was out already as well.

"Hey, Alex. Come sit. I need to talk to you about something," she said.

"Oh, what is it?" she asked.

"You see, I was thinking of getting a car for ourselves and I am going to go sign up for some driving lessons. Do you want to come to learn as well?" Hannah asked.

Alex thought for a moment and remembered he didn't have anything to do for the next month inside the game. "What time is it at?" he asked.

"From 4 pm to 6 pm. It's at a driving range outside the city," Hannah said.

"Sure, count me in then," Alex replied.

After having their breakfast, they left the house and walked out to the front to meet Sarah and Emily who were waiting for them in Sarah's car.

"Took you guys long enough. Come quick, or we'll be late," Sarah said.

"Geez, it's only half-past 10. We still have 30 minutes," Hannah said as she got into the car.

Alex got into the car as well and greeted the two girls.

"I heard you guys accepted our offer. When do you plan on moving in?" Alex asked.

"Upcoming... Saturday maybe? Sunday?" Sarah gave some guesses.

"It will be Sunday," Emily said. "After our other two roommates leave on Saturday, we will then take care of the rest of the things and move in on Sunday," Emily said.

"Good! Good!" Hannah said.

They quickly reached the school and got off. Each of them made their way to their own classes.

"Alex, I will message you around 3 pm. We will have to go together to sign up," Hannah said.

"Sure, sister," Alex said and went to his classes. It felt weird for him to go back to classes after so many days of holidays. Even the friends he had made in his classes were showing the same symptoms.

He looked around his class in surprise. There were barely 30 people in a class that should have had 100 people in it. It seemed people didn't plan on returning for a while.

The professor walked in and sighed when she saw the class, but still taught what she had come to teach. After all 3 of his classes were done, Alex walked out.

His phone vibrated with Hannah's message and he quickly found her on the west gate of the university. They got into a cab and went out of the city to the driving range to learn.

For the next 2 hours, they registered themselves and took a small lesson about the various things they needed to learn before they even got into a car.

After 2 hours had passed, both Hannah and Alex went to a small restaurant to eat some food and caught a cab back home.

"I don't need to make anything for today right?" Hannah asked.

"I doubt so. I'm full right now. Given that I will spend the next 12 hours in the capsule, I probably won't even need to eat tomorrow morning," Alex said.

"Very well then. I will see you tomorrow. Good Night," Hannah said and went to her room.

"Good Night sister."

Alex went back to his room and logged back into the game.

Inside the game, he once again remembered he had literally nothing to do. "Urghh... I want to make some pills," Alex thought.

However, there was no fire in here to help him at all, and he himself couldn't make fires either. There was no tree around him either. For some reason, the inside of the barrier was an open space.

Alex even wondered if there were more than just two formations used here. Once could be a formation that expanded the size of where he was.

He had an idea. He could use some of the wooden boxes and rub them together to make a fire. That would totally work. But then, he saw the problem with that.

"I can't sustain the fire at all. I will need to keep adding boxes to keep the fire going. Keeping it lit with Qi is just not a viable option. I will need to worry about the fire more than I do about the pills," Alex thought.

"Sigh, are there other ways to make fires?" he wondered. It was then he remembered something. Something he hadn't interacted with for a long time.

"Hmm... that could work."

Chapter 359: Making Formations

SCRATCH SCRATCH

Alex used part of his sword to carve away the land underneath him. There were 5 formation flags stuck on 5 different locations next to him.

With the formation flags, the formation would work just fine. However, Alex wasn't used to making formations, so he wanted to make sure the flags were in the correct place by carving away a physical path and see how straight his lines were.

As expected, the resulting path was very crooked. The formation wasn't as symmetric as he wanted to make it. So, once he was done. He removed the formation flags from their original location and replaced them on the ground a little left of it.

He did the same with 2 other flags and once he was done, he started carving away the ground once more. All the while, he had his Qi on the flags, and would something happen, he would immediately pull back the flags towards himself.

He was really worried about space shifting on him while he was trying this out and losing his formation flags.

The formation was a simple Qi Gathering formation that required 5 spirit stones to function and would gather Qi from the surrounding and the spirit stones into the formation.

He had bought it back in the capital on his first day and hadn't had the chance to check it out until now.

Alex didn't want to use it to get more Qi during his cultivation, although he wouldn't reject that. He simply just wanted to see if he could have a formation work.

Once he was sure the formation flags were at the best place he could manage, for now, he placed a spirit stone each next to the 5 formation flags and walked into the middle.

"So, what do I do to activate it?" he thought and checked the instructions. "Once I am done preparing the formation, just pour Qi into one of the formation flags. I see."

Alex put away the instruction and sent out Qi towards one of the flags. The Qi entered the flag and suddenly, the flag started buzzing. The spirit stone next to it lit up slightly as well.

As soon as that happened, the rest of the flags started buzzing and the spirit stones started glowing as well. Alex could feel a slight disturbance in the Qi around him as the density of it started getting higher.

"It's working," he said in both shock and amazement. He had failed his first alchemy but somehow managed to make a formation work on the first time.

'Sigh, that's probably because I am using flags instead of making my own formation,' Ning thought to himself. He wasn't sure how sects taught formation, but it was unlikely they taught the students to use flags from the get-go.

It was like maths. You didn't teach a kid to use a calculator at the start. They had to start with learning the numbers and adding them up in their fingers.

"I guess I will have to meet some people with actual formation knowledge and ask them these questions," he thought.

Suddenly, the space twisted, and he was in someplace else.

"Sigh, I was afraid this would happen. At least I was done with it," Alex thought.

Now that he knew he could make formations work, it was time for him to do the actual thing he was planning on doing. He was going to carve away metal plates so that he could make a formation it and convert it into a fire lantern, just like the one he used to practice within the outer sect mountain of Hong Wu Sect.

There were too many problems and too many hopes with this endeavor of his.

First of all, he didn't know if the shape of the carvings he remembered was all that it was to the formation. He didn't have any blueprints on common rank fire formations that only he could activate with his Common Qi. Thus, he had no way of telling what was important and what was not.

Secondly, different metals were required for different formations. He had a few metal plates in his storage bag thanks to Zexi, but none of them were carved and he didn't know if they were the right metals.

Lastly, Alex had no idea what it used as an energy source.

Still, he had hoped. He remembered the shape of the carvings quite clearly, so if that was all there was to it, he could successfully carve it onto the metal plate.

He also remembered the color of the metal plate and thus was quite confident that this was the same metal. From his information, this metal was used in a lot of formations, so he was quite hopeful because of that too.

Finally, he remembered that the formation in the lanterns was powered by the sect running formation, which was powered by the spirit vein underneath the Hong Wu Sect.

Since Spirit Veins were what eventually became spirit stone caves, he was pretty sure he could substitute the energy source with spirit stone.

Once he thought of all of this, he brought out a metal plate and started cutting it. He placed his steel sword in between in feet and started using it to cut the plate into a circular shape.

The plate came out to be with rough edges which he smoothed out as much as he could. After that, he picked up the sword and used it as a carving pen. He slowly started etching in the pattern.

He didn't have the same error-finding ability that he had with alchemy one he had a recipe with him. Heck, he didn't even have a blueprint for what he was doing, so he never knew if he had made a mistake.

Also, there was no way of undoing erroneous carvings with the metal plates, unlike the flags which he could just reposition.

Still, he kept on carving away and in the end, it came out looking fine. He placed it on top of two spirit stones, and once everything was ready, he poured Qi into it.

Chapter 360: The Pattern for Fire

The plate surprisingly accepted his Qi. "It's working," he said excitedly. Although he had done the best he could, he still knew that it was far from being decent.

He waited for the fire to light up, but for some reason, nothing happened. No spark, no shine, or any other sign aside from the fact that it graciously accepted his Qi.

"Did something go wrong?" Alex wondered. "It's working for sure... but it's not producing fire. Is the efficiency too low?"

But that didn't make sense. From what he understood regarding formations, even when they had terrible efficiency, they would at the very least work, albeit horribly.

"Then does that mean the formation was never meant to light a fire? No, it did make fire," Alex thought. "Am I missing something?"

He started thinking. The formation plate looked like a worse version of the plate in the sect. It had too many rough edges and the circle wasn't very good looking either. But none of those should have ever been a problem.

After a few minutes of thinking, he remembered something that he had overlooked in his initial assumption. "This formation doesn't just light fire, it communicates to the sect running? formation on when to light up and when to shut down."

"Meaning, there is a sort of message receiving formation etched on here as well," Alex thought. "That means the fire-producing formation? is only part of it, and I need to find it."

Of the 20 or so formation blueprint he had with him, only one of them had anything to do with communications. There was also another one that produced fire amongst other things.

They were True Rank formations, so it was useless for him right now. However, he could cross-check these two to figure out what pattern helped in creating fire and what helped in communicating.

So, he got to work. He spent the next dozens of minutes thinking about how those two formations worked. He made a mental image of the patterns and tried to see what lines overlapped and wrote that into a new piece of paper.

He found a part of a pattern from the communication formation that matched part of this formation, and he also found a part of a pattern from the fire formation that matched part of this formation.

When he put those two patterns side by side, they were completely different. When put together, they made 95% of the original pattern. There were some additional lines here and there to make the pattern work together.

"So, if I just take this portion of the formation, it can work?" he wondered.

He brought out another plate of the same kind and started cutting it with his sword to make it a circle. The space shifted, but he didn't let that bother him.

After a few minutes, he managed to make the plate a much better circle than the previous one. He then started carving out the new pattern. It took him a while, but he managed to make a somewhat decent pattern with his sword.

"Phew! I hope this one works."

He put the plate on top of two-spirit stones and took a deep breath before sending in some Qi to activate it. He could tell that his Qi was filling the gap made due to the pattern and once all of the gaps were filled, a spark appeared.

Suddenly, the spark changed into a small ember which turned bigger and bigger until it was a massive ball of flame around the size of a baseball.

The light from the fire reflected in his eyes, but it couldn't outshine the happiness that was gleaming in his eyes.

"YES! I did it! Hahaha. I did it," he started shouting into the night.

Not only had he make a working formation, he actually made it by understanding patterns and extrapolating information from other formations.

There was no way he wouldn't be very happy after that.

"I wonder how good it is. High Mortal Grade? Mid Earth Grade? I can't believe I actually made it, Haha," he jumped up and down with giddiness.

Finally, he calmed down and looked at the flame. Did nothing but wait now. Around 2 hours went by and finally, the flame started dying, before completely extinguishing in a couple of minutes.

"Hmm... so it's 1 hour per spirit stone?" Alex wondered. He picked up the plate and looked at the dull spirit stones underneath. They were completely empty.

"Let's try making a pill now," Alex thought. That was the entire reason he made that formation in the first place. He dug up a small hole and placed some spirit stones on it.

Then, he placed the plate on top of it. Finally, he put the cauldron on top of the hole. Once everything was set, he put Qi into the formation and started it.

The formation started burning at a steady rate. Although the fire wasn't the hottest he had seen, Alex could work with that. He decided to make a simple pill that replenished one's Qi.

Once the cauldron was hot and ready, he put in the ingredients and started making the pill. Just as he put the first ingredient, the space shifted.

"Oh No!" he thought. However, for some reason, the cauldron and the fire didn't disappear. It was as if instead of him, that specific land was shifted.

He wanted to learn why but had no time right now. He focused on the pill and added the required ingredients. After 20 or so minutes, he finished making the pill.

When the pill came out, he was happy to see that he had successfully managed to make a 41% pill with neutral energy despite the current situation.

"Once I get used to the place, I should be able to make better pills," he thought and got cooking.

Over the course of the night, he switched the spirit stones twice before he was done making pills and it was time to log out to go to his classes.

Chapter 361: Training

"Arghh! Finally done," Alex thought as he put away the cauldron and the formation plate. The spirit stone behind the formation plate had gone dull after losing all of its Qi.

He picked it up and threw it away after realizing it was worthless to him now.

Suddenly, the space shifted around once more. This time, the hole he had been standing on top of was gone. "What the?" Alex thought. "Why is the hole gone? It was there with me the whole night through multiple space shifts."

He wondered if he missed anything and took out the instruction to the formation he had inside his storage. After reading more than what he had last time, he noticed something that he had overlooked that time.

"Oh, no wonder. It targets Qi signature rather than actual people caught inside. So anything with my Qi signature and a little more around them all gets teleported around randomly."

"So that's why the hole went around with us. The formation holds my Qi signature even after releasing it huh?" Alex thought.

He looked at his bag with a bit of happiness when he realized that he had successfully managed to make nearly 40 pills, all of which hovered around high Earth Grade and some of which even crossed the Heaven Grade threshold.

"Now that I know alchemy works, I should start learning how pills actually work. I need to learn about alchemy on a fundamental level," he thought.

He decided to try and understand formations and pills for a while longer before logging out to get his food.

Afterward, he went to his university and learned whatever the teacher taught them with barely any students. There were more than yesterday, but still half of them were missing.

Even the teacher was flabbergasted when he saw this. "What are your friends doing? Are they still at home playing the game? Do they think they can make a living by just playing that game?" he said angrily.

"Not to mention, there is a field trip coming up very soon for your first years. Tell your friends to come back to classes so that they don't miss it," the teacher said.

"Professor, Where are we going?" a student asked.

"I don't know. There are still a few more days before the faculty will decide on the location. Just look out for it," the professor replied.

'A field trip huh? I should be able to make it,' Alex thought.

After the classes ended, he and Hannah went to the driving range. Along the way, he told her about the field trip he had coming up soon.

"Oh, yeah, we had those too. I hated that we had to wait until halfway through the second semester to even go through," Hannah said.

"Oh, why?" he asked.

"I don't know? Maybe they don't like setting field trips every 6 months, so they do it every year," Hannah said.

"Where did you guys go?" Alex asked.

"Umm... I think it was... Ember wood city? Wait no, that was the second year. First-year we went to a crappy museum out in Evergreen city in the east," Hannah said.

"You guys should be different. Maybe they will take you someplace quite fun," Hannah said.

Alex was hopeful. Although it would be a lie to say he hadn't experience going to another city with other similar-aged people, that was only in the game.

It would be the first time for him.

"Urghh... why is the university still open right now? Nobody is coming," Hannah complained.

"You got missing students too, sister? My class has more than half missing too," Alex said.

"More than half? That's nothing. We have over 90 students absent in a class with 110 students. It's practically a ghost town in there," Hannah said.

"Woah, is the game causing that much problem for your guys?" Alex asked.

"Yes, and no. Did you know my university class will end in 3 weeks?" Hannah asked.

"In 3 weeks? I knew it was getting close, but not so close," Alex said.

"Yeah. And since there are only 3 weeks left and all of our assignments are complete, we just want the classes to end already," Hannah said.

They talked the rest of the way through and got to learn how to drive a car for the next 2 hours. After that, they had dinner nearby and caught a cab home.

After returning back, they both went to their respective room and logged back into the game.

After Alex appeared back in the game at around 7 pm, he didn't immediately start to make pills or learn about formations. There was another thing he had been neglecting for a while now.

That was cultivation.

"Come out, Pearl."

Pearl came out in a flash of white light. "Meow!"

Alex took in a deep breath and sucked in all of his cultivation base to only have his body cultivation left.

"Let's fight," he said.

Pearl was confused for a second, but followed his order immediately and started attacking. Alex didn't do anything else and just fought for the next 3 to 4 hours.

Pearl hadn't fought for over 2 weeks, so he was very happy to get to fight right now. Without his cultivation, Alex's strength was pretty much the same as Pearl's.

After cultivating for a while, Alex's body strength would always match the same as Pearl's. So, if he ever wanted to know how strong his physical body was, he could just check Pearl's status page for the most part.

Alex felt like he could break through once more since he had enough days for his cultivation base to be stable again. So, he brought out a monster core and ate it.

Surprisingly, there was nothing for him to fight and he easily got all of the Qi.

"That was convenient. If only that happened every time, I could have Pearl start eating the monster cores too," Alex thought.

"Here, eat this for now," Alex said and tossed a bone tempering realm monster core to Pearl.

Pearl jumped and caught the core in his mouth, and at that exact moment, space shifted again.

Chapter 362: Alchemy Elemental Interaction

"No!" Alex screamed. "Pearl! Pearl!," he shouted out loud. The space shifted on him too soon and he couldn't grab onto Pearl on time.

"Meow!" a sound came from somewhere. Alex couldn't tell what direction it was from or what distance away it was either.? However, hearing the sound, he got relieved.

"Hah! I overreacted," he said out loud. Once he calmed down, he decided to search for Pearl. He wondered which direction he should start with when he realized that he could feel a certain connection with Pearl that transcended the disorientation of the formation.

'I can fell him through our bond,' he thought.

He closed his eyes, hearing and other senses as well as took back his spiritual sense. After that, he started walking in the direction of Pearl.

Before he knew it, he could hear a rather loud 'Meow' coming from right next to him.

"Hey, buddy. I thought you would be lost for a while. It seems we can find each other with our bond," Alex said.

"Meow," Pearl replied.

"Did you get the core?" he asked.

"Meow," Pearl nodded.

"Good," Alex said. "Alright, time to break through."

He opened up his status page and clicked on breakthrough. He felt his cultivation base elevate as he entered the 7th realm of Organ Tempering.

'Just a little more. If I train rigorously for the next week or two, I should be able to enter the Meridian tempering realm,' he thought.

He then dug a hole and put his formation plage and spirit stones inside it. After providing some Qi to activate it, a fire started burning on top of the formation.

Alex took out a cauldron, but it was not his Golden Jade cauldron. Instead, he took out one of the black, disposable cauldrons. He wasn't going to make pills today.

Instead, he was going to learn interactions between the ingredients and based on that, make a new pill of his own. He didn't know how long that was going to take for him to learn, but he was going to try it for as long as it was required.

He didn't immediately start adding in random ingredients. He started with some pills whose recipe he was very familiar with.

The first thing he did was recall every single thing he could about those ingredients. It wasn't very long before he learned that he actually didn't know much about the ingredients themselves, but knew quite a lot about the pills they made.

So, he decided to start with making the pills. He put in the first ingredient and waited for its energy to release.? Once the energy was released, Alex used his spiritual sense to try to sense the energy. He learned that the first ingredient produced Fire energy.

He then put in the second ingredient and tried to sense what energy was being released. "Hmm... this is... earth right? Yeah, this is earth," Alex thought as he felt a new energy.

He could tell that the Earth energy wasn't as strong as the fire energy, but... he had a feeling he knew what was going to happen.

"Earth is going to get stronger, isn't it?" he thought. It was like he half knew the answer and the other half guessed it. The earth energy should have been not as strong considering how strong the fire energy was.

However, instead of the fire energy messing with the earth energy, it helped it grow, and soon all that was left was very strong earth energy.

Alex's eyes shined when he realized what had happened. "The fire energy empowered the earth energy. So I CAN use the elemental theory from the fights while making pills as well," he thought.

The next ingredient he put in produced wood energy. He sensed the energy it output and guessed what would happen. "Hmm, the earth energy is so strong, so it should destroy the wood energy right?" he thought.

He was correct. The Earth energy did in fact soon destroy all of the wood energy. However, in doing so, it was also reduced by a fair bit in amount.

"Hmm... I can understand the wood energy is gone, but where exactly did it go? How is the energy disappearing? It's not like they should cancel each other, right? Even if they did, there shouldn't be a net loss in energy" he thought.

He was a bit confused but decided to follow the pill recipe. Everything went exactly how he planned it to, but the energies would randomly increase in amount or decrease in an amount from time to time, which confused him a lot.

Finally, he finished making the pill and the harmony came out to be around 25%.

"Eh, that's not bad since I'm making on a disposable cauldron," Alex thought. For the rest of the night, he decided to continue making pills in a similar way.

He wanted to learn exactly how the energy interacted, and most of all, why the energy was randomly disappearing and reappearing.

He tried to find answers throughout the night, and it wasn't until 3 am when he finally realized something.

"I see... so the energy isn't disappearing when they get weakened or ruined, but instead they go into a state of balance with the other energies, and the elements are no longer given off their aura."

"But when I put in another ingredient that can control or overwhelm the weaker element of the two, or empower the stronger one, the initial energy comes back and it gives off the impression of energies randomly appearing," he thought.

That felt like the right explanation to him. "So, I not only have to keep track of what energy is currently in the cauldron but also every single other energy that I put in before it," he thought.

"Well, I at least have to keep track of the ones that vanished." He continued making the pills and learning more and more as he went along.

He tried multiple recipes and understood the things that took place inside the cauldron. Finally, he stopped only when daybreak arrived.

Chapter 363: Routine

Alex tried to learn whatever was being taught in the class, but couldn't keep much focus at all. He was way too excited at the prospect of learning alchemy tonight.

After learning how alchemy ingredients interacted, at least to a basic level, he was going to start making his own pill tonight. Or, at least try to.

He wasn't really confident that he could make a pill today or within the next week. He was pretty much sure he would fail a lot. But what mattered was not that he failed,? but that he learned from his failure.

After the classes ended, he went to the driving range with Hannah. Today was the third day of driving, and he felt like he was getting good at it.

Still, he was a little sad he wasn't going to learn it as fast as he did with his bicycle back at home. "Sigh, I guess a car really is different," he thought.

Once the driving lessons ended, he and Hannah directly came back home. They ate something from the fridge and both went back to their room. After which, Alex excitedly logged back into the game.

Opening his eyes, Alex didn't even have to look around. He immediately got to the daily routine he had set to learn starting today.

From the moment he logged back into the game, he would train for about 3 hours. He had the perfect training ground, so he was free to temper himself however he wanted to.

Then, he would train physically with Pearl for the next 3 or so hours. After that was done, he would practice alchemy until an hour before it was time for him to log out. At which point, he would try to revise everything he learned that night.

He took out a cheap sword, one of the many he had bought in the Cardinal City, and started practicing. He send out attacks without restraint as there was nothing there for him to hurt at all.

Sword slashes, palm attacks, fist attacks, kicks, punches-he did whatever he wanted to and trained in it. Space shifted around, but he didn't care. He simply kept on training.

After 3 hours were over, he finally stopped. He was breathless, but he wasn't Qi-less. Even with all the training, he managed to end with a little less than half of his Qi left. Which should go back to being relatively full by the time he was done training with Pearl.

Pearl came out with a hearty 'Meow'. It seemed his instinct to fight as a monster made him really excited about the training.

The both of them didn't hold back when fighting. That was because when Alex suppressed his Qi, his body had the same cultivation base as Pearl. However, Pearl had both Qi and Body cultivation with him.

So, in a sense, he was stronger than Alex at the time. Despite that, the reason they didn't hold back was because of the armor that Alex was wearing.

It could block attacks from an early True realm expert, attacks from a little cat in the Organ Tempering realm were nothing to him.

Still, it would hurt him if Pearl attacked his head, so he had spiritual sense running on full throughout the training session. In between the training, they would sometimes be separated by the space shifting around inside the formation, but within a few seconds, they were able to find each other again.

The training ended 3 hours later with both of them rather tired. However, Alex didn't really care much about it. He took a 5-minute rest and got to setting his furnace with the metal formation plate.

Once everything was set, he put down a disposable cauldron and started making his pills. He had already planned a set of ingredients that didn't adhere to any recipe he knew, but based on the elemental theory should technically work. That was of course assuming he perfectly knew the elemental theory of alchemy.

Once the cauldron was hot enough, he put in his first ingredient. The moment he put in that ingredient, he realized something and immediately pulled the ingredient back out.

"Sh*t," he thought. "I have to worry about this too now?" he thought. He realized that he was so excited about the elemental aspect of the pill making, that he forgot the most fundamental ones-The fire, the motion, and the timings.

A regular recipe of a pill consisted of a few things.

First of all, was the list of the ingredients required. The second was the order of those ingredients. The third was the temperature in which the ingredients were to be burned, the fourth was the motion in which you had to move the ingredients around the cauldron, and finally, the timing at which it was appropriate for the next ingredient to be added.

Alex realized that he knew only 2 of the 5 requirements of a recipe. He thought about what was the correct thing to do and finally realized his mistake. It wasn't that he had to be more prepared, but rather...

"I shouldn't have prepared at all," he thought. Making a list of ingredients basically forced him down a path of pill-making that wasn't flexible at all. While some would argue that it made the discovery of new pills easier, some would also argue that the alchemist should change what is required, when it is required based on the alchemist's wishes.

So, Alex dumped the list and randomly took out an ingredient, and dropped it into the cauldron with no hesitation. He tried to move it around to release energy. While what he randomly tried did produce energy, it was only in a small amount.

He needed to change the approach and be fast about it, or he would end up burning the ingredient. He tried a few different variations and in the end found one that he thought fit him, but by then the ingredient had started charring and it was unusable.

He had somehow managed to fail before he had even started with making the pills.

Chapter 364: First Success

Alex's forehead was full of sweat. He was on his 4th start of the night and he had already burned 3 of the same ingredient. Although they were easily acquirable ingredients, his heart still bled a little when he thought of them getting ruined.

But that was the life of an Alchemist. He was lucky enough to get the Alchemy God's Knowledge, however, the other Alchemists didn't get such an opportunity. So, they had to work hard to get these ingredients and then burn them while trying to learn something from them.

An alchemist that was successful had more burnt ingredients and more exploded cauldrons than one that failed.

So, Alex suck it up and started the process a fourth time. Fortunately, the last 3 tries weren't wasted at all. Thanks to them, he had come to learn of the correct temperature and the correct movement required to extract the most energy from the ingredients without burning it.

So, once the cauldron had heated enough, he put in the first ingredient. He knew what to do this time, so he followed what he learned and moved the ingredient around to extract the most energy possible.

Once the ingredient had released almost all of its energy, it started burning and turning to powder. Once that happened, Alex knew it was time to put in the next ingredient.

He chose the next ingredient based on what ingredient was on the cauldron right now. Since the energy released right now was a low amount of Water energy, he decided to use a wood energy ingredient that would absorb the water energy and grow.

He knew that he was very much likely going to burn this ingredient, but he still bit his tongue and put it in. The ingredient was something he had just used last night, so he was quite used to it and knew exactly what it released.

Suddenly, a thought came to him. "Do I need to create an entirely new temperature and movement for the ingredients, or can I just follow the recipes?" he wondered.

He tried following the instruction for that exact ingredient from other recipes. The same movement at the same temperature, and it worked. He was quite happy when he learned that. So, he chose the next ingredient after that one.

He decided to go for an earth energy ingredient that he could control with the wood energy in the cauldron and thus lower the overall wood energy a bit

Following the previous recipes had worked for the wood energy ingredient, so he decided to do the same for this one as well. However, when he did the same thing for this ingredient, he didn't get his desired result at all.

When he put in the ingredient, everything was fine. But then, he started moving the ingredient around and it violently released its energy. The amount of earth energy that was released was very large in a very short amount of time.

The same thing happened in the other pill recipe as well, and it was helpful there as it was required to rein in the high fire energy, but in the current one where the existing energy was wood, the violent release of energy sought to ruin all of the wood energy in the cauldron.

As soon as that happened, Alex was sure what was going to happen next. He quickly used his Qi to grasp the entire cauldron and threw it as far away as he possibly could.

BOOM

A massive explosion rang out from everywhere around him. Due to the formation disorienting him, he couldn't even tell that the explosion was coming from one direction.

He quickly wiped his sweat and sat back down. 'I will need to think more regarding the ingredients,' he thought. He decided to see if there were other variations of movement and temperature for that exact ingredient in his list of recipes he knew.

He couldn't find another recipe where this one was used in a different way, so he decided to change the ingredient for a different ingredient that produced earth energy and restarted the whole process once more.

He took out another disposable cauldron and started practicing once more. He redid the first two ingredients and when he got to the third one, he put in a different one that didn't violently release its energy.

This time, what he had expected happened. The earth energy from the third ingredient was released slow enough that the existing wood energy could overwhelm it and thus decrease itself overall.

Alex sighed in relief when he realized that he had succeeded this far. He just had to do this a few more times and he would probably have enough energy and powder to make a pill.

He tried a fourth ingredient, and it ended in failure. He had to toss away that batch as the ingredient caused another violent reaction and nearly exploded on his face again.

He changed that ingredient and tried once more. This ingredient didn't work either and this too exploded. He decided to use an ingredient that produced entirely different energy.

This one he successfully mixed in with the energy. He chose his 5th ingredient carefully and also managed to mix it with the rest of the ingredients.

On the 7th one, however, it was getting harder and harder to expect what would happen when one put in the ingredient. There were multiple hidden energies that he couldn't sense at all and they could all immediately show themselves when he put in this ingredient.

And that was exactly what happened, so he had to throw that cauldron away as well.

On the 5th try did he find the right ingredient for the 7th one, and it took him 8 times to find the right ingredient for the 8th one.

Once he realized that the energies had come to a good enough state, he decided to turn them into a pill. He used elemental guidance to have the powder absorb the energy and then formed the powder into a ball.

Once it was ready, he finally brought it out onto his palm. He had succeeded in making a pill of his own.

Chapter 365: Unimaginably Rich

"That was hard," Alex said as he laid down on his back. He didn't know how many hours he had spent just making this one pill, but this one pill was his absolute masterpiece as of yet.

He looked at the time and was surprised that it was already 5 am. "Damn, it took me 5 hours of non-stop pill making to make just a single pill?" he exclaimed.

If any experienced alchemist were here, they would cough up so much blood that they could probably make a blade with the amount of iron in it and cut Alex's head off.

"Let's see what I made," he thought and checked the pill.

[???????????? - 14%]

"Huh? So I made a pill that doesn't exist? Did I make something that is not in the game, or just one they had no records of?" Alex thought. His 'real world' senses were tingling once again.

"Sigh, whatever. I need to know what this pill does," he thought. There were two things he could do. First, feed a person. Since the only person here was himself, he couldn't do that.

Second, feed a pill swine. Since there wasn't any around. He couldn't do that either. Reluctantly, he took out a pill bottle and stored it in. He felt sad that he managed to make his first pill and couldn't even tell what the pill was about.

Alex rested for a while and at the same time recalled exactly what he did. He tried to think of things that he thought he did right, things he thought could be omitted, things he thought could be improved, etc.

Once he gathered all those information, he got to making the pills once again.

This time, there was no problem at all during the process. In fact, it was much better than the other times. He made the pill once more, and it came out as 18% this time.

He tried to understand what he could improve once again and went on to redo it once again. However, this time, he used his own cauldron instead. Since he knew that the recipe was getting closer and closer to being perfect, he took out his actual cauldron.

He redid his pill 3 more times until he couldn't improve it any more. Once that happened, he took out an empty talisman and started writing the recipe.

He wrote everything he could think of in this talisman and stored it away. Light started shining through the fog and he realized that morning had arrived.

He took away everything and closed his eyes. He started absorbing all the knowledge he had acquired today. He spent the next half an hour doing so, and once that was done, he decided to learn about formations a little more.

Only after that did he log out.

He freshened up and walked out of his room to meet Hannah in the kitchen.

"What are you doing here?" Hannah asked curiously.

"Umm... breakfast?" Alex answered.

"Yeah, but why this early?" Hannah asked.

"For university of co-Oh!" Alex said after he finally remembered that it was Friday today and he didn't have any classes today.

"Urghh... the days are all jumbled up right now," Alex said. "I can't tell what is when at all."

"Fair enough. Come sit down. You can go back and play once you finish eating," Hannah said and served him breakfast.

Alex ate gratefully and helped Hannah with the dishes before going back to his room. He wanted to log right back into the game, but somehow also felt a little burnt out. It was like his creative juice had all gone out of the window.

He sat on the bed and saw himself in the mirror. "Urghh... how long has it been since I exercised again?" he wondered. Without much thinking, he got down on the floor and started doing some push-ups.

It didn't take him long to realize just how out of shape he was. A farmer's son being this weak, despite doing physical works his whole life was a little unacceptable.

He did various exercises for the next hour or so and finally logged back into the game.

He sat down and thought of what he could do next. He wanted to make formations, but that was nearly impossible as he didn't have the right metals or blueprints for Common rank formations.

The only one he did know was the fire and communication one, and even then, he didn't know how the communication one really worked. So, he really did only know the formation for lantern fire.

"I already made the one for fire. I guess all I can learn is really just theory at this point. Whatever, I will learn the blueprints once I get out of there," he thought.

"Speaking of which, I probably don't need all of these spirit stones right? I should convert some to money and send it to my account," he thought.

He checked his storage bags to see how many spirit stones he had and was once again surprised despite knowing the number.

"Damn, 2067 True spirit stones really is a lot. And that Zexi carried this around AFTER buying all of those things," Alex thought. He was shocked at the absolute fortune that Zexi walked around every day with.

Alex opened his setting panel and got ready to transfer his money.

<Do you want to send '180,000 Spirit stones ($1,800,000) to XXXXXXXXXX343?>

Alex hadn't calculated how much money that amount was and when he saw it, he was shocked. despite taking away 200 true spirit stones from 2000 he was sending, the number was still ridiculous.

"W-Wait a second. Ones, tens, hundreds.... A hundred thousand..." his eyes went wide as he saw the final position of 1. "Millions," he exclaimed. "Am I? Wait... am I really a millionaire now?" he couldn't believe it.

Even as he was in disbelief, he clicked yes. The spirit stones disappeared from his inventory, and he too hastily logged out.

He excitedly waited for a moment and nearly jumped to his phone when he heard the notification.

He quickly opened his phone to see a message on it.

<$1,800,000 has been successfully credited to your account>

Chapter 366: Snarl

Alex felt like he was on cloud nine right now with the notification in front of him. He quickly opened his bank account and was more than surprised when he realized he had a total of 2.3 Million dollars in the bank now.

Alex's mind stopped functioning as he didn't know what he could do with that money. That was just too much money for him.

He quickly went online and started looking up what to do with a lot of money. He quickly found a trustworthy blog post that told him exactly what he could do with the amount of money he was getting.

The first thing he did was create a retirement account with a high interest rate in a well-respected bank. He had to do it online, so he got his documents and started uploading them to the website. Once that was done, he had to speak with someone and answer a few questions before the bank account was opened.

Once it was, he transferred a total of 2 million dollars to that account and kept the 300 thousand dollars for use. That too was way too much for him, but he had different things in mind for this one.

Once the retirement part was done, he started looking for different stocks to invest in. Thanks to his business classes he knew what to look out for and what to absolutely ignore.

The most obvious one was Deva corp. They were the biggest names right now, so he bought 3 shares of theirs for nearly 100 thousand dollars. The rest he invested into lesser-known, but promising brands.

Once that was done, he was left with only 80,000 dollars. He needed to keep some for himself, but he also wanted to help his parents, so he sent them 20 thousand dollars without them knowing.

The remaining 60 thousand dollars was what he planned on actually using for daily use.

Once all that was done, he finally returned back to the game. He was surprised when he realized it was already 10 am. "I spent nearly 3 hours doing all of that huh?" he thought.

He didn't have a plan for the days when he didn't have classes, so he decided to just fight against Pearl. He called Pearl out and got to fighting.

Pearl was very happy to fight with him every time. Alex was happy too since that was a training Pearl as well. After fighting for a while, he realized that he wasn't really helping Pearl train for the different techniques that he could have had.

"Beasts are supposed to inherit abilities from their parents right? I wonder if you have some as well or I should get some techniques for you from a store," Alex thought.

All of a sudden, he released his cultivation base and started to seriously fight Pearl. He brought out a common sword he had and started attacking.

"Come on, fight back. Hit harder, use some techniques," Alex cried out as he swung towards Pearl. Pearl was barely dodging these attacks and was getting a little confused as to why Alex was so aggressive.

However, it was getting harder and harder to dodge, so suddenly his whole body glowed yellow and he let the sword land on him. Alex felt a jolt of fear when he saw his attack actually connect.

"Oh no! Pearl are? y—"

Suddenly, Pearl jumped at him. Alex was both happy and surprised. His paws glowed goldenly and it directly hit Alex's chest.

Despite wearing the armor, he could feel the impact of the attack and was quite surprised. At the same time, Pearl jumped back at him and tried to bite him.

Alex didn't want that, so he kicked the flying Pearl and sent him away. Pearl was lost in the fog, but he could sense where Alex was and came running back towards him.

When he appeared, he could see a small change in Pearl. On his forehead that was usually white, there was a small golden line that was starting to form.

'Did I hurt him?' Alex's heart sank when he thought that. Pearl seemed to have lost all sense of self and was still trying to attack him.

"Pearl Stop!" he ordered, but Pearl was still coming at him. "Stop! Stop!" he had to say it multiple times before Pearl stopped running and snarled at him.

Alex walked forward and grabbed him in a hug. "It's okay, It's okay. I'm sorry, buddy. I didn't mean to push you so far," Alex apologized.

The snarls stopped coming from Pearl and what came out next was a cute "Meow!". Alex looked at him and he was back to being normal. No splits on his forehead, no angry snarls on his face.

"Are you okay, buddy?" he asked.

"Meow!" Pearl replied to confirm that he was okay now.

"Alright. No more fighting. I am happy that you knew those techniques. Do you know some more?" he asked.

"Meow! Meow! Meow! Meow!" Pearl meowed to confirm, but he also said that he didn't know how to use it.

"I'm surprised I understood that at all," Alex thought. While he didn't understand what Pearl said, he understood the intent behind his words and could grasp the meaning that way.

"Alright. Do you want to go back? Stay? Keep fighting?" Alex asked.

"Meow!" Pearl said that he wanted to stay.

"Very well. Do what you want. Here, have some food even," Alex said and tossed him a corpse of a monster he had killed a few days ago. It was still pretty fresh.

Pearl started chomping on it, and Alex went on to practice his techniques. He didn't recklessly attack everywhere as he might hit Pearl, so he only trained with swords and attacked where he knew Pearl wasn't at.

After a few more hours of training, he sent Pearl away and told him not to come towards where he was at. After that, he prepared his makeshift furnace once more and got ready to make some pills of his own.

Chapter 367: Direction of Motion

"Hm... how do I start this?" Alex wondered. He had made too many mistakes the day before to simply just go back to trying to make a new pill. He wanted to take a different approach this time.

"Let's see... since the motion, temperature, and the rate at which the energy is released matters, I should start by learning how that works," Alex thought.

He went through his storage bags and brought out a bunch of common ingredients that he had an excess of. He was planning on first understanding how Motion affected the rate of energy released.

"So... since I am planning on testing just the motion, I need to set the temperature constant," he thought. He set the temperature at around 300 degrees and waited for his Golden Jade Cauldron to be hot enough.

Since he was only using single ingredients, he didn't have to worry about them blowing at all. Once the cauldron was hot, he put in his first ingredient.

The first ingredient was a normal Silver Grass that could be found just about anywhere. He put a single strand of the grass and started moving it clockwise such that it took him exactly 2 seconds to make a complete rotation.

When he finished one rotation, a bit of metal energy was released. He made the clockwise rotation again, and a bit more of the energy was released.

He had to do 4 complete rotations for all the energy in the grass to be released and the grass to finally crumble down to powdered form.

Once that was done, Alex brought everything out and threw it away. For the second turn, he kept the temperature the same and the speed of rotation the same as well, but he changed the direction in which the ingredient moved.

Surprisingly, there was no change in the rate of energy release at all. That confused Alex a little. "If it doesn't change the rate or messes up an ingredient, why do the recipes bother explaining the direction of the motion?" he wondered.

He brought out a set of ingredients for a normal pill and decided to try his theory on it. He first made a normal pill following the recipe that he knew and ended up making a pill with a Harmony of 52%.

It was a very good result, considering the pill's final energy wasn't Metal aligned.

He then took out another set of the same ingredients, only this time he was going to follow the recipe all the same except for the directions in which the ingredients were moved in.

He started with the first ingredient and moved it clockwise, despite the recipe stating that he had to move it counterclockwise. Once that was done, he proceeded with the next ingredient and moved it clockwise as well.

As he had expected, the energy released was the same as last time and they interacted the same way as well. Then the third, the fourth, the fifth... every subsequent ingredient he put into the cauldron, he moved it in a clockwise motion.

What kept on surprising him was that the energy mixed together exactly how they were supposed to. The motion didn't at all affect the rate of release or the quality of the energy released.

"What's going on? Does the motion have no effect on the pill?" he wondered. It felt wrong given how all the recipes continuously focused on the motion of the ingredient so much.

It couldn't be that no one before him tried to do what he was doing, and yet the recipe still remained the same. "I must be missing some information," Alex thought.

He continued putting in more and more ingredients and continued on moving it clockwise regardless of what the recipe spoke. Finally, he had put in all the required ingredients and turned it into powder.

"The resulting energy is still wood. It really made no difference that I changed all the direction of the motion for the ingredients," he said. Then, he moved on to form the pill.

He first tried to pass the energy in the air, into the powder. He used elemental guidance to move the energy and passed it through where the powder was.

"What?" Alex was shocked when he saw what happened next. When the energy passed through the powder, as if the powder rejected the energy or the energy rejected the powder, the energy passed through the powder and came out on the other side with almost 90% of it still remaining.

"That's weird," Alex thought and used Elemental Guidance once more, but it didn't really affect much. "What's wrong? Was it because of what I changed?" Alex wondered.

He tried Elemental Guidance once more for the third and last time, and it didn't have any effect at all. He couldn't keep using it any longer, or his powder would end up burning.

So he started forming a pill. Suddenly, his pill-splitting Qi was released from his body which moved onto the cauldron and turned the powder into two separate spheres.

Two strong vortexes appeared from inside both of those spheres and started sucking in the energy from the surrounding. The energy that the Elemental Guidance couldn't push into the powder, was now being sucked by the vortex.

Alex waited for the vortex to be over. Finally, all the elements in the surroundings were gone, all devoured by the two newly formed pills.

He decided to take them out, but just then, as soon as the vortex was gone, the two pills suddenly spewed out a lot of energy that had just been sucked back into the cauldron.

They couldn't handle it all. Alex opened the cauldron and checked the two-pill inside. One of those pills was at 14% harmony, and the other one was at 12% harmony.

Even if they were together, the pill would barely be an Earth-grade pill. Compared to the Heaven Grade pill he made before this, the current pills were complete garbage.

"And that was all just because I changed the direction of the motion, wasn't it?" Alex thought. "I still don't know how it affects anything at all."

Chapter 368: Speed and Temperature

Alex thought for minutes on end through the different things he had read regarding the alchemy books, but all he found was the books saying that the direction of the motion was important.

Every single one of the books failed to mention why. He wondered what he should do, and decided to log out.

He went onto his computers and started searching about alchemy on the internet. Unfortunately, there wasn't much information regarding alchemy on there. He knew more than what was available on there.

"Is no one that far ahead on alchemy? Or are the talented ones just reluctant to share information?" Alex wondered. It would make sense that just like him, there were others that didn't like sharing any information they gain onto the internet.

"Sigh, I guess I will just have to ask the master. Hopefully, she knows the answer," Alex said and went back into the game.

He set everything back up and decided to continue his experiment. Now that he was done testing the direction of the motion, he was now going to check the speed of the motion.

He decided to use the Silver Grass again. Once the cauldron was at the same temperature as last time, he put it in the grass and started moving it in a clockwise direction.

At first, he moved it at a speed of half a rotation every second, which took him 4 whole rotations to fully turn it into powder.? Then he went a little faster.

This time, he moved it at 1 rotation every second speed. He thought that it would still take it 8 seconds in total, but surprisingly, it far exceeded his expectations and actually took 16 seconds.

"Hmm, what if I went slower?" he thought and decided to go so slow that it would take him 4 seconds per full rotation. He tried it and as he expected, the ingredient turned into powder in just 1 rotation, or 4 seconds.

"Hmm... if I go even slower, will it turn to powder faster?" he wondered. That would surely help him cut down on the time a lot.

He decided to take 8 seconds per rotation this time and dropped in the Silver Grass. He started to slowly move the ingredient around, but not 2 seconds in Alex stopped.

He couldn't help but facepalm himself when he realize what had just happened.

"Of course, If I take too long to move it, it will obviously burn," Alex thought and laughed to himself. He cleared the cauldron of the burnt Silver grass and tried a few different variations.

After a while, he had a grasp of how much the speed slowed down or sped up the energy release process as well as the powder forming process.

'The temperature probably plays a big role as well, but I will have to wait until then,' he thought. Now that he was a little more knowledgeable in this, he decided to make the same pill as before, only this time he would change the speed entirely to have it release energy at the fastest rate possible.

He made the pills and ended up finishing making the pill in under 7 minutes. However, he could see that most of the energy had been rejected by the powder.

So, he ended up really just making pills with 9% harmony. It was a total failure.

"Hmm... so it had something to do with the powder and not the energy, huh?" he thought. "I always thought that energy was where it was all at, but it seems that even the powder is an important part of the process."

He tried one more time, but this time, he simply used the fastest rotation speed for every ingredient possible. The energy in turn was produced at a very slow rate.

This time he made a pill with 13% harmony. While it was a usable pill, to Alex, it was also a failure.

"Okay, so I can't really make a pill if the motion of the ingredients isn't correct. Let's move onto the temperature," he thought and took out Silver Grass once more.

This time, he was going to try using the ingredients at different temperatures. After testing for a while, he realized that the temperature was pretty simple.

The hotter the cauldron was, the less time it required for the ingredient to turn to powder.

'That's quite easy to remember. However, now I will have to check how they interact with one another and find out what the correct combination of 3 is for each ingredient in each pill,' Ning thought.

He was starting to get overwhelmed a little. If he had to remember it all, it would take him years upon years, and then he would finally be able to learn just the ingredients for common rank pills.

"Oh god, what did I get myself into?" he started to worry. Only now did he truly start to see the true vastness of Alchemy.

"Wait wait wait, don't panic. Surely the Alchemy God's Knowledge skill will help me when it grows. I will probably get more benefit from it, surely," Alex thought. He didn't know when a growth-type skill would actually grow.

He was hoping for it to be when he reached True realms, but it could have a different set of requirements as well.

"No, I can't put my hopes on an 'if'. I need to learn what I can right now," he thought. "It doesn't matter how long it will take, as long as I learn it, surely I can learn it all one day," he thought.

"Besides, it will help me in the long run, so it can't be a waste of time," Alex thought and continued.

He started testing the rate at which the energy was released and the powder was formed for each combination of temperature, the direction of motion, and speed of motion, for the Silver Grass.

It took him the entire day to try every single feasible combination he would try on a normal pill-making process. Only when he felt that he had done everything did he stop.

Chapter 369: Training

Once he finished testing the different combinations, he decided to stop for the day. He was exhausted and needed to go for the driving training.

He left and only returned after It was 7 pm. Once he was back, he trained his skills for a little bit and exhausted his remaining Qi as well.

After that, he decided to just cultivate for the night.

He called Pearl back who was wandering the fog the whole time Alex was training. As soon as he came back, Alex asked him to start cultivating.

"Meow," Pearl said and started cultivating. Numerous cuts started appearing all over Alex's body.

"Hmm... it hurts a bit more than the previous days," he thought. "Did you by any chance... breakthrough?" Ning thought and opened Pearl's status page.

[White Cat (Child) - Bonded

Name: Pearl

Cultivation Base: Organ Tempering 1st realm

Evolution Chance: 40%

Cultivation Method: ????? ?????'s Dominating Body (Shared)

]

"Oh wow! You are already at Organ Tempering 1st realm. That means.... Sigh, I will need to start feeding you Organ Tempering realm beasts," Alex said.

"Hmm... maybe as a monster you can eat the cores without fighting whatever that mental projection is that I have to fight each time, but I still feel a little scared to feed them to you," Alex said.

Pearl was still a child, so he wasn't very strong mentally to fight against the monsters. Or at least that's what Alex believed. "Whatever, let's just cultivate quietly."

Very soon, Alex fell into a trance and fell unconscious.

Early in the morning, he woke up. His body wasn't feeling as much pain and he felt like he had advanced in body cultivation as well.

"My body probably matches Pearl's cultivation base. If only it was like Pearl's and my body and Qi cultivation was the same," Alex hoped.

He told Pearl to stop and let him go roam around. As for himself, he logged out.

He walked out of the capsule a little tired, but fine overall. He wasn't really hungry but could eat a little if need be. So, he freshened up and went to get breakfast.

Hannah was there as well, ready to eat breakfast. The two cousins were starting to have a timetable for eating in the morning.

They both got themselves some food and ate.

Alex returned back to his room and logged into the game. The routine still stood. He trained with Pearl for a little while where he used his hands, legs, and swords to fight.

Once that was done, he got back to practicing alchemy.

"Hmm... what ingredient should I go for next?" Ning thought. There were way too many choices and he didn't know where to start with first.

"Ah, I should start with my pill's ingredients. Who knows, maybe the reason I have such little harmony in my pill is that I am using the wrong set of motion and temperature," he thought. Even after he had done his best, his highest was barely above Earth grade. So, it was pretty apparent that he hadn't made a good recipe.

So, he took out the first ingredient of his pill and started testing. He did numerous tests for the next 3? or 4 hours and finally tested every possible scenario.

Now that he didn't have to make a pill every time he came up with a new discovery, he was much faster. After he was done with the first ingredient, he moved on to the second one.

He had fortunately decided to use ingredients that he had a lot of, so he could do this testing for all the ingredients for his pill.

"Damn, I wonder how they perfected recipes for pills that require very rare ingredients. They probably didn't test the ingredients just like I am, right?" Alex wondered.

"I should ask master how they do that once I get out," he thought.

"Speaking of which, why is nobody here yet? Did they stop searching for me? ... or did they just never start?" Alex wondered. "A massive fog in the middle of the southern forest shouldn't be that hard to find right?"

He remembered how uniquely visible the 5 elemental fog was back when Wen Cheng took him to the alchemy garden. "I hope they didn't stop, but... why can't they find me?" Alex started feeling a little sad.

SLAP

"Stop thinking about that. Both masters are good people. There are also others that care for me. They won't stop searching for me," Alex thought. He stopped thinking negatively and started practicing once more.

He tried the next pill ingredient and practiced with it for the next 3-4 hours. Once he was done with that, he trained in his techniques a bit more.

Afterward, he ate an Organ Tempering 9th realm monster's core.

Suddenly, he was transported to his spiritual sea. He felt a little scared when he realized that he had been fighting these monsters using his spiritual sense and that if he had ever mistakenly eaten one where his spiritual sea was nearly gone, he would have probably died.

"Did the spiritual sea get bigger?" he thought. He could swear that the size of the spiritual sea much about half a Spirit Cleansing Lily's worth bigger, but he didn't know why. He decided to ignore that for now.

He looked at the beast in front of him, an owl-like bird monster, and got ready to fight. As soon as the bird moved, he started sending dozens of palms and fist attacks towards the monster.

Within 5 minutes, it died.

"Hm... were my attacks stronger as well? Or am I just thinking that because they didn't do much against Zexi?" he thought.

Now that the bird was dead, he knew what was going to happen next. He looked down at the sea surface and waited for the yellow fog to rise up.

As he expected, the yellow fog did rise up from around a small shadow on the surface of the sea. Alex kept staring at the shadow not knowing what it was. Soon, the fog devoured the bird as well as him, and he disappeared.

Chapter 370: The Move In

Now that he was out of the spiritual sea, he decided to cultivate. He called back Pearl and asked him to cultivate as well. Once the cuts started appearing all over his body, he cultivated himself as well.

Soon, he fell into a trance and fell asleep.

He woke up in the morning and logged out. He freshened up and went to the kitchen to get some food. Hannah was up as well and was about to get her breakfast as well.

"Any information on when they get here?" Alex asked.

"10 am. They will leave after sorting some stuff out with their landlord," Hannah said.

Today was Sunday. Today was the day Sarah and Emily were planning to move in with them. Alex had been a little nervous over the weekend while at the same time looking forward to them moving in.

"Alright, are you planning on any welcome party or something?" Alex asked.

Hannah stopped eating and suddenly hit her forehead. "Ah, Sh*t! I was planning to do that, but then I kept on playing the game and completely forgot."

She ran to her room and came back with a phone in her hand. "What are you doing?" Alex asked.

"Ordering some groceries. Ever since the capsules arrived, all the raw food in the house has gone bad. We need more," Hannah said.

"Oh, so we are going to cook now? I can help you. I have free time," Alex said.

"Yes, thank you. That will be very helpful."

Within half an hour, a delivery guy was at their door with the groceries. Alex brought the groceries to the kitchen and Hannah started prepping the ingredients.

Alex helped her cut some vegetables. He worked at it slowly, trying not to cut himself and make an entire joke out of him again. He still felt a little bad about it when he cut himself last time.

For someone like him who was brought up on the farm and was used to cooking on days when his parents were out on the field, that was unacceptable.

This time, he managed to do it perfectly. He passed along the ingredients to Hannah and watched it closely as she cooked it.

By the time they were done with cooking the food, Emily and Sarah also arrived with their stuff. They had brought a moving crew to help with the move.

Alex showed the crew to Sarah and Emily's room. Sarah was going to take the room upstairs, while Emily was going to take the room opposite to the hall from Alex's.

Alex helped set up their furniture and capsules once they were put into the room.

"Ahh! This is so nice. The view is so good from the balcony as well," Sarah said as she lay on the couch. "I must say, although it's expensive, it's really worth it."

"I really like it too," Emily said. " Just the view from my new room is so much better than my old room."

"Urgh, I feel like only I missed out on windows. My room doesn't have any," Alex said.

"Yeah... well, that's my bad honestly. But it's not like you can appreciate a good view anyway. You spend all your time playing," Hannah said and chuckled a little.

"Umm... isn't it true for all 3 of you though?" Alex asked.

"Ahem, let's not talk about that. Come, the food will get cold soon," Hannah quickly changed the topic making the other 3 laughs out loud.

They ate the delicious lunch until their stomach was about to burst open.

"Ugh, with this much food, I doubt I will have to eat anything for the next 3 days," Sarah said. "I might go on a 2 day-long gaming session. I should be able to earn a few thousand dollars easily by then."

'2 days of the gaming session and only a few thousand dollars? That's... too little for someone in the upper true realms right?' Alex thought.

"Do you have any profession in-game, Sarah?" Alex asked. "Or are you just a normal cultivator?"

"Well, I don't have any profession, but I wouldn't call myself a normal cultivator at all. I am a well-known elder of a well-known sect in the Eastern Continent. My only problem right now is that I cultivated too fast, damn it."

"Now I have to do what not to fix my cultivation base. I've spent so much spirit stones on just ingredients and pills that can help me make my cultivation base stable again," Sarah said and turned to Hannah.

"What about you Hannah? Are you fixing your cultivation base?" Sarah asked

"Kind of. I've just stopped advancing further, and that's worked for now. I think my body might be good enough that it doesn't require additional help to fix my cultivation base," Hannah said.

"What? That's so broken. God, I'm jealous," Sarah said.

"Well, many people would be jealous of you too," Hannah said. "Look at where you are."

"I know... but I still can't help but be jealous, you know?" Sarah said. "By the way, do you have good talent and body to Alex?"

Alex thought for a second about what to answer. 'Since sister's body in the game is so good, mine can't be better than her at all. So...'

"Yes, I do," Alex said.

Sarah and Emily were a little surprised. Sarah hadn't expected him to say yes. "Oh, what grade?" she asked.

"My body is at Divine grade, and my talent is at God grade," Alex said.

"Woah! God-grade talent? That's like super rare," Sarah said.

"Wait, you got so lucky too? I thought you were just earning money because of Alchemy," Hannah said. She was surprised as well as this was her first time hearing about any of this.

"I mean, it hasn't really played any part in making money yet I guess, so I never spoke of it. Besides, I thought you knew because you never asked me about it," Alex said.

Sarah asked a few more questions and Alex answered as truthfully as he could. He had never talked about this stuff in-game or out of it, and it felt really good talking about it so freely for once.

Chapter 371: Thursday

After the lunch was over, the 4 of them stayed in the living room couches for half an hour or so before going back to their room to rest and go back into the game.

Alex returned back to the game at around 12. "Alright,? back to training."

He spent the next 3 hours testing the different combinations of motion and temperature for the third ingredient of his pill.

Once that was done, he proceeded with the fourth one. That took him 4 hours to fully remember every single one of the combinations.

0nce night fell and he was mentally exhausted, he mindlessly trained in his techniques. He could feel that he was getting better at using his techniques. They were starting to feel more natural to him, almost as if they were muscle memory to him.

"Ah yeah, my body feels great," he thought. He shot out some palm attacks and felt his body again. "The cultivation base seems very stable as well. Maybe I can do it once more," he thought and opened up his status page.

He contemplated for a second on whether he was ready or not. "I am so far behind the others. It's now or never."

CLICK

He broke through once more. He was now in the 8th Organ Tempering realm. Just 2 more realms and he would enter the Meridian Tempering realm.

"Although the book did say I can't use the Spirit Cleansing Lily after using it 3 times, maybe entering the Meridian Tempering realm will change it a bit," he thought.

Once he felt he was settled, he called Pearl back and started cultivating. Soon, he was unconscious as every other day.

Early morning, he woke up and logged out. He spent some time mulling over the things he learned yesterday and after an hour or so, logged out.

He went to the kitchen at the designated time of breakfast, and everyone was there. They had their breakfast and Alex and Emily got ready to go to their classes.

"Come, I will drop you guys," Sarah said and went to get her car from the building's parking space underground.

Alex and Emily went down the elevator and waited for Sarah outside the building.

"Oh, by the way Emily, is your class going on this upcoming Field trip as well?" Alex asked.

"Mhmm," Emily nodded. "We had to wait over 9 months for this. You are honestly lucky that you get to go in just after 3 months."

'Oh, do you know where we are going?" he asked.

"No, but they should announce it today," she said.

Sarah came to the front in her car and took the two to the university. Once they reached, they got off, and Sarah returned back home.

Alex went his own way to his classes.

The classes were just as empty once again if not more. 'It's almost like they are seeing that the others are absent and are leaving themselves,' Alex thought.

'Hmm... should I not come as well?' he thought. He was honestly contemplating it. Just then, the professor walked in and saw the classroom. He frowned once more.

"Sigh, it's going to be like this for a while now, isn't it?" he asked. The students couldn't really answer.

"Whatever, here is new information for you people that do care. Your upcoming field trip is on Thursday. Get ready for then," he said.

"Where are we going professor?" a student asked.

"Oh, yes. You guys will be going to Pinewood city. I heard the Archaic National Museum over there has been getting a lot of visitors recently. So, the university will take you there as well."

'Pinewood city,' Alex thought. 'What was there again?' he tried to think for a second. He could tell he had heard the name of long ago for some reason.

'Was it the one where the Connor guy was from? No. Oh yeah, the historical texts they used to make the game,' Alex thought.

"Hm... this will be a good time to check whether or not they really did gain the ideas for the game from there," Alex thought. He was now excited to go on this field trip.

Once the classes were over, he went to the driving range with Hannah who had come to the university in the car with Sarah who was here to take back Emily.

After returning from the driving range, Hannah and Alex ate the meal prepared by Emily. When Hannah and Alex told her that she didn't need to do that, she really insisted on making food for them.

'She must feel guilty about staying here for free,' Alex thought and let her do what she wanted. Once they were done, they all went back to their rooms to get back into the game.

Alex logged back into the game and sighed a little when he remembered that he basically had the same routine for the next 3 days.

He did nothing but test the different remaining ingredients for his pill. He had 4 remaining and he barely finished it on Thursday morning.

It had taken him a long while to learn all of these and it would take him more. "I wish there were more hours in the day so I could earn more of this," he thought.

He was damn near ready to stop going to the university classes altogether. 'Maybe I should just... drop for a semester or two, while I collect enough money from the game to make my life easy,' he thought.

However, he didn't want to make such a decision without the consent of his parents, so he shut off that portion of his brain for a few more days.

The next thing he did in the last 3 days reached the 9th realm of Organ Tempering. Just a step further and he would be in the Meridian tempering realm.

Alex smiled and looked towards the time at the corner of the screen. It was 6 am in the morning, and since today was the day they went to the museum, he logged out of the game.

Chapter 372: Field Trip

Alex got out of the capsule early in the morning and went to the bathroom to freshen up. He then packed some light clothes for the trip.

'Pinewood city is in the south right? So I won't be needing any sweaters and such,' he thought. Once he was set, he grabbed his phone and walked out.

"Are you ready already?" Sarah asked.

"Yes, they called us by 8, so I have to be, right?" he asked.

"Well, if someone else had the same mentality as you, I wouldn't have to wait so long," Sarah said.

Emily walked out of her room, and said, "Stop badmouthing about me behind my back. Your voice is so loud I can hear it all the way from my room."

"Hehe, she's out," Sarah said.

Alex turned around to look at Emily who was just walking into the living room. She had a long white trouser-like pants and a yellow t-shirt that was full of frills and open at the shoulders.

"You look pretty," Alex said as that was the first thing that came to his mind.

Emily blushed a little and said, "Thank you. You look great too."

"Stop complimenting each other; I need to go back to the game. I have some grinding to do, remember?" Sarah said.

"Alright, let me get that."

Alex took Emily's small luggage and they walked out. Sarah took her car out of the underground parking spot and gave them a lift to the train station where everyone was supposed to gather.

"How's your driving lessons going on Alex?" Sarah asked.

"Umm… its taking longer than I had expected it to," Alex said. " I should be able to do it in the next 2 weeks though."

"That's quite fast. Emily, you should learn how to drive as well," Sarah said.

"I will do it later. Seeing how everything is going, I might end up having to take a break in between," Emily said.

"Woah, you too Emily? I was thinking about that too," Alex said.

"What? Why do you guys wanna take a break?" Sarah asked.

"The game has totally ruined the college atmosphere. The professor doesn't focus on teaching anymore, the students aren't focused, and now that the capsule is out, people aren't even returning back to classes."

"After my exam next month, I think I will drop out for a year," Emily said. "You feel the same thing, Alex?"
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Alex was put into a spot. "Uhh… I was just thinking of earning more money honestly," he said.

"Can you even earn a lot?" Emily asked.

"Of course. If I really try it, I can make a couple hundred thousand dollars a day," Alex said.

"What? You can make that much with Alchemy?" Sarah asked in shock. Emily's eyes were very wide as well.

"Yeah. Of course, you need to have ingredients and people willing to buy the pills. I usually sell once every 2 weeks or so. Selling daily would be really exhausting," Alex said.

"I see. By the way, how good are you at making pills? Can you make True pills yet?" Sarah asked.

"No, I haven't even entered Meridian Tempering realm, remember?" he asked.

"Ah right, why are you so slow though?" she asked.

"I was told to slow down early on, so I've been focusing of training more than cultivating," Alex said.

"I see, I see. Argh, I might have to transfer a bit more money into the game today. If I can just breakthrough once more, I can grind faster," Sarah said.

Alex was surprised that she was even thinking of that, but soon remembered that there were these sort of people. That was one of the reasons Deva Corp continued to make money despite giving out so much.

There were millions of people willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in the game so that they could progress through it faster.

Sarah soon dropped them at the station and returned. Alex and Emily walked to the front of the station where the teachers and the other students were gathered.

They both showed their ID cards and got into the group.

Emily looked around and sighed. "It seems none of my friends came after all. I doubt they even learned about the trip in the first place," Emily said.

"None of the people I usually interact in my classes came either" Alex said as he looked around. He searched for Matt, Eric and Logan, but none of the 3 were there.

"I guess I'm going to be alone for this trip," Emily said.

"No, you won't. You have me," Alex said.

Emily blushed a little and nodded. Soon, they boarded the train and had 2 compartments all for themselves. Alex chose a seat next to a huge window and sat down. Emily sat right next to him in the only seat available.

The train started moving, and soon they were out of the station. A teacher walked to the center of the train and started speaking.

"Is everyone of you fine? We will be on this train for the next 5 hours, so let me know if you guys find anything uncomfortable right now," the teacher said.

Alex was quite surprised. 'I didn't think it would take so long,' he thought.

"Since we will be passing through 3 entire cities along the way, you will have plenty to sight see. We will reach the Pinewood City at around 1 pm, and should be settled into the hotel by 2 pm."

"As for the rest of the schedule for today, you guys have these things to look forward to today."

"From 2-3, we will have your lunch, from 3-5 we will be playing a bunch of board games amongst ourselves in the hotel. From 5-8, you guys are free to roam around the city as much as you want."

"Finally at 8 pm you will get your dinner, at which point your day will end for today."

"For tomorrow's schedule, We will let you know it tomorrow. For now, do whatever you want, just make sure to be in your best behavior," the teacher said and went to the front and sat back down."

Alex looked out of the window and enjoyed the view he saw outside.

Chapter 373: Pine Wood City

The view from the window was truly very refreshing. The green land outside reminded him a lot of home, so much so that he started to get a little homesick.

"By the way Emily, I don't think I've ever asked you, but where are you from?" Alex asked.

"Oh, I'm from Cherrywind city," Emily said. "How about yours?"

"I'm from a village north of Mapleleaf city. My parents own farmland there," he said.

"Oh, you're from the countryside? I didn't know that?" Emily said.

"Yes. I was also homeschooled, so I am unaware of a lot of different things a boy my age should know by now," he said in a melancholic voice.

"Homeschooled? Why?" Emily asked curiously.

"Oh, the school was just too far, so my mother decided to teach me everything instead," Alex said.

"Even high school stuff?" Emily asked.

"Yeah. My mother is kind of a genius. She just has to learn something once and she will understand it. She takes care of the financial aspect of the farm and overlooks the entire production, while my father works in the fields tirelessly for hours on end," Alex said.

"Wow. My parents just own a small store in the town. Fortunately, it sells well enough for us to make a living. I had planned on earning from the game, but it seems I won't be able to anymore. The reincarnation really screwed with me," Emily said with a sad voice.

Alex didn't know what to do; he had never been around crying girls.

"Umm... let's not talk about those. Just studying and finding a good job should earn you much more than what the majority are earning from the game," Alex said.

"Yes, I just have to keep fighting, or should I say-I have to keep grinding," Emily said with a chuckle.

Alex's heart skipped a beat when he saw her smile. "Umm... are you bored? You wanna watch a movie?" Alex asked.

"Sure, what's it about?" Emily asked.

"I'm not sure myself, but I heard it's really good," Alex said and put on a movie on his phone. He put an earphone in and put one of the buds on each of their ears.

Alex scooted a little closer to Emily, who also came a little closer and watched the movie.

The movie was apparently a remake of a very old movie of unknown origin. In the movie, the main character was a normal man who thought his life was normal as well. However, one day, after gaining a red pill from another man, he realizes that he was inside a simulation and that the real world was out there all along.

Alex was entranced in the movie and so was Emily. By the time the movie ended, both of them were beyond surprised by how fun it was.

"Woah, that was a good movie," Alex said.

"Yeah, it was fun. I can see why they would remake it now," Emily said.

"Huh? What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"You know, the whole going into computer software and making your life their kind of thing. Don't you think that's very apt for the current times?" Emily asked.

"Oh, yes. I can see it now. It's the same as our current world, except everyone who is in the real world knows the game is..." Alex stopped.

"Yeah, they know the game is fake," Emily finished his sentence.

Alex fell started thinking about how that might not be actually true. There was more to the game than meeting the eye.

The teacher came by in a few minutes and passed along a few snacks to the students. Although there were only a hundred or so students in total, they were taking proper care of each and every single one of them.

In fact, the teacher actually seemed to be happy that he didn't need to look after so many students at once.

Alex spent the rest of the journey talking with Emily, getting to know her better. Emily also got more and more open with him and talked without any hesitance.

"Oh look, is that the city?" Emily asked as she pointed outside the window.

Alex looked outside the window and saw the skyline of Pinewood City. It had a very unique skyline compared to the other cities.

While it was mostly similar in that it also had many tall buildings, one of the buildings actually had a massive spherical metal ball on top of it.

"Ah, it seems we are here," Alex said.

The train soon stopped in the station and everyone walked out of it.

"Urghh! My back hurts from sitting for so long. I'm so used to just sleeping in the bed or inside the capsule while playing the game."

The people started complaining left and right. Alex also stretched a little as he also had a similar problem.

The teachers then made the students walk a few minutes away from the station to the hotel they were staying at. The girls and boys were separated and made to stay in different floors.

Alex was put together with 3 other boys he had no idea about. He introduced himself to them, and that was the most of it.

The teachers called them to have lunch and all the students gathered in the dining hall of the hotel. The food prepared wasn't particularly good or bad, but Alex ate it with no problem.

Once the students were done eating, the teachers took them to a lounge area where they were allowed to play any tabletop games there.

Alex walked up to Emily and went around playing a lot of different things. Some card games, some dice games, etc. There were many games and everyone there played them all.

"Come, and take these cards," the teacher said, and everyone went around to take a card each. Alex looked at what he had got. "Eh?"

They were going to play bingo.

The teacher started saying numbers and Alex started cutting them off on his card. He needed 5 lines, and he had 4 of them already.

"Damn, just a little more, and-"

"BINGO" someone won before him.

He looked to the side only to see Emily with a wide smile and her hand raised straight.

Chapter 374: Date

"Congratulations, young lady. Come on up to get your prize," the teacher said. Emily smiled and walked to the front.

The teacher put up something in the air and said, "This is a ticket that contains 1000 points. You can use it to—"

"Ahem" another teacher coughed from the side.

"Oh, right. Haha, it's a secret for now. Nearly forgot about that. What it is used for, we will let you know tomorrow. For now, you guys can go do whatever you want. Just return here by 8 pm."

"Anyone who doesn't return by 8 will have credits deducted from their finals," the teacher threatened.

Emily walked back while curiously looking at the ticket she had in her hand. "Do you know what this is?" she asked as she handed him the ticket.

Alex looked at the ticket and his eyes shined a little. A smile appeared on his face that even turned a little mischievous. "They have it here too? It seems tomorrow will be a lot of fun," Alex said mysteriously.

"What? Do you know what this is?" she asked expectantly.

"Yes, but as the teacher said, I think it's better to not tell you until it's time. You might like the surprise more," Alex said.

"Hmm... so this is good?" she asked.

"Yeah. If the price isn't different here, then it should cost like 50 dollars," Alex said.

"Oh, then it's not that bad. But I don't think I will enjoy whatever this is alone. Do you want to come with me?" she asked.

Alex decided to tease her and said, "Miss Emily, that sounds like an awful lot like you are asking me out on a date for tomorrow."

Emily blushed a little when she heard that. "Andwhatifiam?"

"Sorry, what was that?" Alex asked.

"And what if I am?" she said.

It was Alex's turn to blush. He gathered all the confidence he could and said, "then I am very much obliged. In return, since we have 3 hours to ourselves, will you allow me to take you out on a date as well?"

Emily smiled. "Yes, I will."

The two went out and looked around the city. It was starting to get dark, and the city was starting to light up. Alex and Emily went around the city looking at the different things.

They tried out some small snacks, went around malls to go shopping, and even stood around a street performance and enjoyed it. Alex dropped a 20$ bill before leaving.

"We should return now, or we will be late," Alex said.

"Yes, let's go back," Emily complied.

"Open your eyes!" A man suddenly started shouting a bit far away from both of them. "Look. Look and you will see the truth. They lied to us. People, Just look."

The man screamed at every passerby. "Just look for once. I promise you, I am not going mad. Just look," the man shouted as he kept pointing towards Alex's location.

However, Alex could tell that he wasn't pointed at him, but rather behind him. While the buildings were blocking his views, he could tell just what was a few hundred meters behind these buildings.

If he walked in the direction the man was pointing at, within 10 minutes, he would reach a forest. This was the barrier that stopped him from falling into the void.

"Let's leave Alex." Emily grabbed his arm and started pulling him away. She seemed to be freaked out by the man.

"Alright," Alex said and decided to leave.

"They are trying to hide something. Don't believe them ever. Just look when the sun shines the brightest and you will see," the man kept on shouting even as Alex and Emily walked far away.

Emily walked away quickly, but Alex was left thinking about what the man was saying for a little while. In the end, his words sounded like the speakings of a conspiracy theorist, so he stopped thinking about it.

Emily didn't leave his arm even after she was far away. Instead, she slowly brought it down and grasped his hand in her hand.

Alex also clasped his hand tightly. They walked around for a few more minutes before returning back to the hotel. Alex took the luggage that contained everything they bought today and went to keep it in his room.

After that, he returned back to Emily to have their dinner at the hotel's dining room.

The meal this time was a little better than the afternoon. Alex and Emily ate side by side and went to the hotel's lounge area to rest for a while.

"Are you not bored?" Emily asked.

"Why would I be bored?" Alex asked.

"Don't you miss your game? I heard a few people saying that they should have rather stayed back at home. Apparently, this hotel doesn't have places for the helmet connections, so they are quite mad about it," Emily said.

"Oh, are they? Well, I'm not bored," Alex said.

"Really?" Emily asked.

Alex looked at her and smiled as he said, "How could I be bored when I'm with you?"

Emily blushed a little and punched him lightly on his shoulders. "Why are you so confident today? You even asked me out on a date on your own," she said.

"Wait, no. You asked me out first. You can't blame me for returning the favor," Alex said.

Emily chucked a little and said, "Stop speaking nonsense and just tell the truth."

"Well, I would be lying if I said I didn't want to do it earlier. It's just that... the opportunity never seemed to come up. Now that I finally had the time, I decided... why the hell not?" Alex said.

Emily was about to say something when the teacher came to the lounge and asked everyone to go to their room in 15 minutes. They all had to be ready by 8 am as the museum would open at 9.

"You were about to say something?" Alex asked Emily.

Emily shook her head. "It's nothing. I'll see you tomorrow morning. Good night," she said and hurriedly left.

Chapter 375: 600 Years Old

"Alright everyone, I'm going to take a quick attendance, get ready," one of the teachers said and started calling out the student's name.

Soon, she called out everyone's name. Alex responded to his own when he was called, and once everyone responded, they got onto the tour bus.

It was a double-decker bus with 60 seats per deck. So, all 100+ students and teachers fit inside easily. Alex and Emily sat on a seat towards the back on the lower deck.

Just after 15 minutes of getting on the bus, they had to leave again. They had reached their destination.

Alex walked down and saw the massive building that was in front of him. 'So this is where the museum is,' he thought as he looked as high as he could. The building was at least 200 meters tall if not more.

At the top of the building was a massive golden sphere that shined in the sunlight. It had some sort of pattern or drawing that he couldn't make out from this far below.

As he brought the vision a little below, he saw a name for the building.

"How do you say that word? Gol- no, Gl-"

"Global, right?" Emily said from the side.

"Yes, Global. So the building is called The Global Building huh. Wonder if that's the owner's name," Alex said.

"Might be," Emily replied.

A lady wearing professional clothing walked from inside the building and shook her hands with the teachers.

"Hello, You guys must be from Oakleaf University. I will be your tour guide for the day. Welcome to the Archaic National Museum."

"Please follow me," the lady walked inside. The crowd followed her and soon, they were all inside the building. The inside hall was grandiose in its size and color. The chandelier hanging from high up in the ceiling looked very expensive and made the students a little apprehensive about where they were.

The lady took them up the stairs to the actual museum.

They all walked in and were surprised by how crowded the place was. Everywhere they turned to, there was nothing but people. They couldn't even see anything that was inside the museum.

"Haha, don't mind the crowd. It's been like that ever since that one TV special a few weeks ago where they talked about the museum. Now, everyone thinks the content in our museum influenced the game, Eternal Cultivation, and visit here," the lady said.

"Is there any truth to that claim?" a professor asked.

"Um... Kind of. While the game certainly seems to be inspired by the contents, there are also things in here that... uh you may call the ancestors stupid for even thinking about," the lady said.

This statement only made the students and teachers more curious. The reason most of the students had even come to this field trip was for this exact reason.

Alex was also looking forward to once and for all clearing his confusion about the game being real.

The lady took them along and showed them the first exhibition of the museum, A car.

This was a simple car that was rusted in many places and was encased in some sort of resin to stop it from rusting any further.

'What significance would a rusting car have?' Alex wondered.

The lady looked to the group and said, "As everyone can see, this is a car. However, the reason this is being kept in a museum is that...this car is over 600 years old."

"What?" everyone was shocked at the revelation.

"No way, miss. Didn't cars only come to existence a little over a hundred years ago?" a student asked.

"Yes. The first car was indeed made 112 years ago, and it was also inspired by this car too. However, the car we currently have and this car is completely different, " the lady said.

"We aren't sure how this car works or where the electricity is stored. We don't even think it uses electricity. According to the records we have, it used something called 'Petrol' and 'Diesel', but there is no proof that such a thing even exists."

"Even if they did, they aren't here anymore," the lady said.

The lady let them look at the car for a little longer and took them to another exhibition, A smartphone.

"Once again, the current smartphones were copied from these phones as well. They couldn't immediately make these, so they had to go through other creations first, but in the end, they managed to reach and surpass what existed 600 years ago."

"These clothes used to be worn by people over 600 years ago."

"These are metal utensils made over 600 years ago."

"They used to have plastics over 600 years ago when plastic was only able to mass manufacture some 50 years after the war ended."

The lady kept on walking and showing one exhibition after another.

"Look at this, do you know what these are?" she asked the crowd who turned to look at the next items. Alex looked at the items and frowned.

They were circular plates made up of something that looked like glass and had a hole punched through the middle. 'I know these things. What were they called again?' he tried to remember what he was taught in the computer science class.

"That's a CD, right? They are supposed to store data," somebody said. "They lasted for maybe 4 months after they were made."

The lady smiled and said, "Yes, that's true. However, they didn't make CDs for it to last long. They made it so that they could see what was inside these things."

"Don't tell me... " one of the teachers said.

"Yes. These CDs were made 600 years ago as well," the lady said. "Most of these had lost all of its information. However, we managed to salvage a few."

"These CDs ended up containing movies made 600 years ago. Here is a clip from a movie," the lady said and pointed to the screen.

The movie scene played was a normal one about a man walking in the city. However, the thing that surprised everyone was the world around the man.

It looked just like the current world. They watched the scene until it ended and the lady spoke.

"That was from 600 years ago. Either, the people from 600 years ago were good at guessing what the future looked like, or... the more possible reason, the world 600 years ago was very advanced."

Chapter 376: Globe

Alex was stunned when he saw the movie scene. 'The world from 600 years ago... looks just like now? How?' he couldn't help but ask himself.

The lady continued speaking. "There is only one way the world from 600 years ago could possibly be that advanced. That is... right around 600 years ago, something happened that destroyed everything and humanity had to start over."

"They had to restart civilization all over again, and build themselves until where we are now," the lady said.

The things she said sounded so outlandish, and yet, not a single person there could counter her with all the evidence there.

"Let's move on," she said and walked on.

"These are all helmets and armors worn by warriors when the 17 cities were still countries ruled by different factions. The war at that time destroyed a lot of things that should have been kept safe."

"From what we were able to find out, the experts made an educated guess that the reason more of these cars and vehicles, as well as the other items, doesn't exist, aside from being destroyed in time, is that they were all melted and used during the war," the lady said.

"Once the war ended, they finally started to mine new metals, and the old ones got discarded."

"Um... Miss, why aren't these things public knowledge? Why do we have to come all the way to a museum to learn about these things?" a person asked.

"These are public knowledge. It's just that it's too old, and people don't like reading through history. If you dig deep, you can find these all on the internet," the lady said.

"Now, come along. We have more things to see," she said and took them along. The tour had already been going on for nearly half an hour, and the woman took them for another 15 minutes tour, explaining the various things.

Alex was surprised to see that history less than 600 years ago was quite neatly recorded. Yet the ones beforehand were not.

'That is very surprising,' he thought. While he did hear that the war was one of the major reasons they had lost most of the history, he still wondered why there weren't other things.

'What about the various landscapes that the developer of the game allegedly learned through here? Where are those texts?' Alex wondered. He did hear about some texts that were in the museum and couldn't wait to see them.

"Here we are. This is perhaps the most important piece of the exhibition in the museum, that was the reason for the deaths of hundreds of people," the lady said.

Alex looked in front of him and was a little surprised to see what was in front of him. 'Is that...?'

"Isn't that what is at the top of this building?" a student asked curiously.

"Yes," the lady said. "This is what is called a globe."

The lady spun the globe around and showed it to everyone. "This is supposed to depict how the world of the old people looked like. However, despite how advanced they were at the time; it seems that they believed that the world was round.

"Look at that screen. They even made a map that is totally flat, and yet they turned it into a sphere on the globe. For some reason, they couldn't change their views at all. This continued even after an apocalypse that we assume took place 600 years ago."

"There were many hints to the world being flat. For example, the sun rose and set at the same time everywhere, and yet the old folks never stopped believing. They tried to venture out onto what they believed was the real world," the lady said.

Alex looked at the map of the world that was put up on the screen. There were around 7 large pieces of land on the map, all of which Alex knew were continents.

Unfortunately, there were no names on the map. Suddenly, the map changed, and now the screen had a person in it.

The person on the screen was a middle-aged man.

He had no beard or mustache on his face and his long hair was tied in a ponytail behind him. He looked a little weak, almost as if he hadn't gotten sleep for some days.

Below him was a name that read "Neil Ambers".

"It wasn't until the Neil Ambers proved, through his various experiments, to the world that the world was flat in shape instead of a sphere that they stopped. He proposed the idea that there was a void beyond the forest, and anyone who went there fell through the void to their death."

"The later tests with unmanned planes and drones proved his point," the lady explained and moved a little to the side.

"Over here are old books that contain knowledge, some that are clearly fictions, but some that are hard to know what the intentions of the writers were. You can read snippets of the book on the screen," the lady said and the man's image changed to pieces of text.

Alex read them, but nothing understandable could be found from there. The lady took them to a few more exhibitions, but none of them were as interesting. With that, the tour was over, and the students were sent out of the museum.

"Alright, let's go to the viewing spot on the top of the building now," the teacher said and took the students to a lift.

Even as Alex walked, he kept on thinking.

'So what happened 600 years ago? Did some catastrophic event take place that destroyed the civilization at that time to the point where it needed to restart?' he wondered.

'Also, the current map looks nothing like the old one they used with the continent. So, in a way, I can conclude that it's fake. Then, does that mean that the map from the game is fake too?'

'Which would mean that the game is just a game, right?'? he thought.

Only questions were piled on top of him after coming to the museum instead of them getting answered.

Finally, the door of the lift opened up and Alex saw a massive open space outside. They were at the viewing station on top of the building.

Chapter 377: Festival

"Woah!" Alex thought as everything he had been thinking until now vanished. The sight of the beautiful city line from this high up was a sight that one didn't see every day.

He walked up to the glass and looked down.

"Woah, we are so far up," Alex said.

Emily got curious and walked to the front to see as well. "Aaahh!" she shouted immediately grabbing onto Alex's left hand and didn't let go. People looked at her curiously and laughed it off to go back to their own thing.

She buried her face on his shoulders due to the fear of height and the embarrassment she was facing.

"Hey, it's okay. Look, we can't see anything anymore," Alex said.

Emily slowly opened her eyes and only saw the skyline. She was fine with that. Alex let her keep holding onto his hands and walked around the room, looking at the different things far away.

The buildings were great and all, but the people from the city didn't seem to like it very much. So, when Emily saw that the skyline changed to the trees from the forest that lead to the void, she got excited.

"Look, Alex, it's the trees. I wonder what the void looks like," she said excitedly as she looked at the horizon.

The trees were taller than the buildings before them and continued for forever. As they went further, the visibility got hazy, and at some point, you could no longer see anything.

"Isn't that exciting?" she asked Alex.

Alex smiled and said, "Yes. Very." He didn't have the heart to tell her that he saw the trees on a daily basis since his farm was right next to the forest. Although he didn't see it from above, he still had seen the forest regularly.

Still, this was a new perspective, so he enjoyed it for a bit. He looked around and suddenly saw something before the trees, but behind the buildings.

'I was right,' he thought and smiled. He couldn't wait for tonight.

"Huh? What's that?" Emily asked in a curious manner.

"Hm… what?" Alex asked as he stopped looking at what he was looking at and turned to Emily.

"I… I think I saw…the haze go away for a second there," she said.

"What?" Alex said with a questioning voice. He looked back towards the forest, but it was the same. There was nothing to be seen beyond the haze.

"There's nothing there though," Alex said.

"I… I could've sworn I saw the haze clear up for just a split second. Maybe I saw wrong?" Emily said.
New n0vel chapters are published on

"What did you see beyond the haze?" Alex asked.

"Um… More trees, I think?" she said.

Alex shook his head. "Let's go check the other things," he said and took her around the entire room.

The viewing place was cylindrical in shape, so one could see the whole cityscape from the tower. After 15 or so minutes of viewing, the teachers herded the students back to the elevator and got them back on the double-decker bus.

Then, they went back to the hotel. It was around 11 am when they returned, so the teachers took the students to the dining area for lunch.

After lunch, the students rested in the lounge area. Some got on their phone, some chatted, some played the games from yesterday.

Once all of the students were rested, the teachers took all of them to see a 3-hour long theater show. Alex didn't think the theater show could be fun at all at first, but once he saw it, he was surprised at how good it was.

"Look, Alex, it says that this was one of the stories they recovered from the old texts,"? Emily said as she showed Ning the pamphlet they were given when they entered the theater.

It included information about the cast, a synopsis of the story, and its origin.

"R-Romeo and Juliet, huh? Those old people really knew how to write stories. I wonder how many good stories were lost during the supposed catastrophe 600 years ago," Alex said.

"I really wish I could see what those times were like," Emily said.

Alex didn't say anything. They came out of the theater at around 4 in the afternoon. The teachers took them back to the hotel to have some snacks.

After they finished their snacks, the teacher spoke once again.

"From 5 till 8, you have free time once again today. I suggest you go to the festival taking place near the forest," the teacher said.

Alex smiled. He already knew this. He had seen part of the festival setup from the tower's viewing spot today.

"Miss Emily," the teacher called her.

"Yes?" she said a little surprised. She didn't know why a teacher would call her directly.

"Remember the thing you won yesterday? Be sure to use it in the festival today," the teacher said with a smile.

"Oh, ok," she said. She then leaned next to Alex and whispered, "How do I use points in a festival? I've never been to one."

Alex chuckled a little and said, "You'll see."

Once it was 5, Alex took Emily and walked out of the hotel. The other students were going to the festival too, so everyone just followed each other and went there.

The festival was about 10 minutes away from where the hotel was, so it was really close. The closer they walked to the edge of the city, the smaller the buildings got.

Finally, they came upon a vast open space that was almost untouched by humanity. That would perhaps be considered true if there wasn't a massive festival set up in this open space.

"Woah," Emily said when she saw the colorful lights strung all around the gate and inside of the festival. "They even have a Ferris wheel. This looks more like an amusement park honestly,"

"Uh… you'll see how they are different once you enter inside," Alex said. "Shall we?"

Emily grabbed the hand Alex put forth with a smile on her face and said, "Yes."

Chapter 378: Games

"Wow, this is really beautiful," Emily said as she entered the festival area. "Look at all of those lights. It kind of reminds me of my first sect before I died."

"Doesn't it? When I first entered my sect and it lit up just like this, I was reminded of the festival we had near our village too," Alex said.

"Oh, so you are used to going to festivals like this?" Emily asked.

"Oh yes. They take place once every 3 months or so during the change of every season," Alex said. "My father sets up a stall every time to sell some of the homegrown products or find potential customers for a business deal."

"I see. Then you must be quite used to these festivals. What should we do first?" she asked.

"Umm… let's just walk around and see what the stalls have," Alex said and looked through the stalls from the start.

The stalls sold various different things from food to clothes to toys to anything. They came across a stall selling cotton candy.

"Do you want some?" he asked.

"Sure," Emily said. Who didn't like cotton candy?

Alex paid for two large cotton candies and handed one to Emily. She took the blue one and left Alex with the pink one. They walked along with more stalls and tried different foods.

There was candy apple, some dumplings, sweets, fried noodles and many more.

"At this rate, I won't even need to eat anything later tonight," Emily said.

"Me too," Alex said and continued touring.

In another stall, Emily saw a bunch of different types of masks and wanted one. Alex got her a simple mask with a bunny face and ears. For himself, he got a mask that was fully white on the outside with no other design, but he could take it off and wear it inside out.

Once inside out, it would become a fully black mask. Essentially, he was wearing two masks at once. Thankfully, neither his nor Emily's mask obstructed any vision. He looked ahead and saw something that caught his eyes.

"Oh, those are up next," he said.

"Hmm… what are those? People seem to be playing there. Are those games?" Emily asked.

"Yes," Alex confirmed it.

"Oh wow, they have games too? Can we go play there?" Emily asked.

"Let's go somewhere first," he grabbed Emily's hand and pulled her through the crowd. Alex had to search for it for a few moments before he found it. He came up to a machine that had a line of people standing in front of it.

Alex got on the line along with Emily.

When it was finally their turn, Alex said, "Put your ticket in there."

"Hmm… oh, ok," she said and put in the ticket she got from winning bingo. Suddenly, the machine started spitting out small, connected papers, one after another.

"Wait, why are there so many?" she got a little overwhelmed.

"Didn't you get a 1000 points ticket? It will now shoot out 1000 points now," Alex said. He helped her in gathering all those that had dropped on the ground.

"Isn't this too many?" she asked.
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"If you aren't very good at the games, it will end before you even know it," Alex said. "Let me get some too."

He put a 10$ bill into the machine and it spat out 200 points.

"Are you fine with that amount?' Emily asked. Compared to hers, Alex didn't have that many points.

"I'll be fine. In fact, even this amount might be too many," he said. "I'm used to the games in the festivals and don't need many turns to win in it."

"Oh, let's see how good you are then," Emily said and walked toward the game stalls with Alex.

The first game she visited was a basketball one where they had to dunk one small-sized basketball after another.

"What do I do now?" Emily asked.

"Oh, just put one end of the ticket in that machine there and it will take in… let's see, 20 tickets per turn, " Alex said.

Emily fed in 60 tickets and started playing herself.? A person required 60 points in 40 baskets in 60 seconds to win a minor prize and required 60 points in 60 seconds to win a major prize.

Emily tried all 3 times and the maximum she could score was 23.

"Urghh, I'm really bad at it," she said. "Are you good at it?" she turned to Alex.

"I used to play this at every festival, so I can say that I'm good at it," Alex said. He stood in front of the machine and started throwing the baskets.

The basket was about 5 meters away, and Alex was accurately scoring 3 out of every 4th turn. Emily watched from the size and was awed at the result.

49 points in 60 seconds.

She went to the man handing out prizes and took a small palm-sized teddy bear. "You really are good at these games. You more than doubled my result," she said.

Alex gave an awkward smile and said, "Ah, Y-yes."

Internally, he was very confused. 'What's going on? I should have easily done 60. Why did my aim suffer so much?' he wondered.

Back at home, he played these games at every festival. His family was poor, so he couldn't play a lot, but the times he did play, he won them very easily.

'Damn, sleeping in the bed first, and now the capsule all the time seems to have ruined my body. I should really exercise more,' he thought.

"Alex, you coming?" Emily asked. She was ready to move on to the rest of the games.

"Yes," Alex got out of his stupor and followed her. The rest of the evening, the two people went through almost all of the game stalls.

They played the shooting games, the dart games, the dice games, placing rings around prizes, etc. Any game they came across, they would play it.

Emily had a lot of points and she played a lot. Once Alex's points ended, she gave some of hers to him. By the end, Emily had so many prizes that she had to get a bag to hold them all.

Chapter 379: Under the Moonlight and Fireworks

"There are so many," Emily complained as she held the large plastic bags full of toys she won as prizes from the games. Almost all of it had been won by Alex.

It didn't have a single major prize, however.

"I keep telling you to let me carry it. Why are you being so stubborn?" Alex asked.

"But these are so cute. I don't want to let go of them yet," Emily said in a childish manner. She was acting more and more freely around Alex now.

Alex was the same. He had lost a lot of awkwardness he had around her when they had first started being friends.

"How about this? Let's both carry it then," Alex said and reached for her hand holding the prizes. Emily's hand tightened for a second before letting loose. She opened it enough that Alex could slip his fingers through her hand and grabbed it.

Now they were both carrying the prizes.

"How many tickets do you have?" Alex asked.

Emily quickly checked and said, "Around 300."

"Hmm, let's go check out the concert then," Alex said and took her around. Thankfully, the festival area was set in a similar way to the one from his village, so he knew the general direction of where he should go to.

There was also the loud music that helped navigate directly to the concert.

The people singing in the concert were local singers and bands that came onto the stage one after another. Alex found a clean place on the ground and sat there with Emily.

They tried to talk a few times, but the sounds were too loud to speak to each other. So, they just stopped talking and enjoyed the show.

By the time they left the concert, it was very dark and was past evening.

"We have half an hour left before we need to return back to the hotel," Emily said as she checked her watch.

"Oh, let's go to the Ferris Wheel then," Alex said.

"Mhmm," Emily nodded.

The lights looked much brighter now that the sun was down and darkness reigned all around. The number of people had also significantly increased.

They finally reached the Ferris Wheel only to find a long line of people waiting for their turn.

"Damn, how long do we have to wait for?" Emily asked. They only had maybe another 20 minutes before they had to start returning back.

Alex looked at the Ferris wheel. "It seems like a 2 person Ferris wheel. We might have to wait for another 10 minutes considering how many people there are," he said.

The Ferris Wheel was quite large and had around 30 compartments. So, in total it held 60 people every ride. It spun around for 5 minutes per person, so Alex deduced that the 100-ish people in front of him would be gone in 10 minutes.

The Ferris Wheel came to a stop and more people got it before it started spinning. It was quite fast for the first 2 minutes then slowed down to replace a few compartments at a time.
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"Oh wow, that looks quite scary," Emily said.

"Yeah, I only got on a similarly large Ferris Wheel in the amusement park in the city. Otherwise, I'm only used to small ones that have maybe 10 compartments in them.

"This will be my first time getting on such a large one too," Emily said.

Finally, after 10 minutes, they got to get on the Ferris Wheel. Alex and Emily sat side by side as the staff locked them securely.

They felt a jerk as the Ferris wheel slowly started moving. As it went up, it was slow too from adding all the different people below them.

It took them nearly a minute to start, and by that time, Alex and Emily were high up in the air.

"Woah! We are at least 150 meters high, aren't we? Urgh, I'm regretting it now. I can't look down," Emily said as she closed her eyes.

"Why did you even insist on coming here then?" Alex asked.

"I- I like the feeling of freefall when we go down," Emily said with her eyes closed and her hands holding the bar in front of them really hard.

Alex placed his hands on top and said, "It's okay, just lookup. Look at the moon."

Emily nodded and slowly opened her eyes and looked up. "Oh, it's a full moon today," she said as she finally paid attention to it now.

The Ferris Wheel suddenly sped up, and the two were pulled back in free fall.

"Aaaah!" Emily cried out loud. Alex laughed out loud too. Their screams and laughers were lost in the dozens of others that screamed and laughed too.

The wheel reached the top at the same speed and dropped once more. This happened a few times more and then it slowed down again.

People were starting to leave behind Alex's compartment.

He and Emily on the other hand were going to go for a full slow climb and fall before they had to leave for the others.

"This is quite fun," Alex said.

Emily looked towards him and nodded.

BTOOM BTOOM BTOOM

Both of them looked towards the distant sky and smiled. The fireworks were being set off in the distance.

"Such perfect timing," Alex said.

"Yes, we couldn't have gotten a better viewing spot," Emily said.

The sky got bright from all the fireworks and the lights illuminated their faces in the night sky. The multicolored fireworks were a sight to behold.

While Emily had all of her attention on the fireworks, Alex fell into thought.

'It's now or never.'

He lightly squeezed Emily's hand to get her attention. "Emily," he called out.

"Yes?" she said as she turned around.

"Will you go out with me?" he dropped the question.

Emily's face changed emotions like a chameleon. At one moment she looked stunned, at another moment she was surprised, then she was skeptical, and then nervous and happy. Finally, she blushed and said, "Yes."

Alex was elated. He was really happy to hear her accept his proposal. He looked at her blushing face and decided to go for it as well.

Under the moonlight and fireworks, he leaned in towards her. Emily saw him coming too and got nervous, so she closed her eyes.

While Emily had her eyes closed, Alex kept his open. As he got closer, Alex could see the shape of her eyelashes, could see the shade of her skin, could smell the fragrance of her perfume, could feel her breath on his face, and could see her soft lips.

He placed his lips on top of those very lips, and he kissed her.

Chapter 380: Back to the Game

Alex and Emily walked out of the train station at around 2 pm in the afternoon on a Saturday. Alex had a new suitcase with him that he had bought to carry all the prizes and souvenirs he had got from the trip.

Sarah was waiting outside the station for the two of them. When she saw the two of them coming, she walked up to them.

However, before she got close, she stopped. Alex and Emily saw her and walked up to her.

"Hey! did you have to wait for long?" Emily asked.

Sarah didn't answer and instead said, "Something feels wrong. Did something happen on the trip?"

Emily blushed a little but also excitedly said, "Alex asked me out."

Sarah's eyes went wide. "What?" she turned towards Alex, who nodded.

"And you accepted?" Sarah asked.

"Of course," Emily said.

"Wow, finally. Congratulations to you both. Let's get a cake or something for a little celebration," Sarah said with exaggerated expressions.

"Alright, no need to overreact. Let's just go back home. I'm really tired," Emily said. They got in the car and went back.

Hannah was pretty stoked to find out about the news too. She prepared some lunch for the two of them which they ate quite happily.

Once they were done, Alex went to the room to freshen up. Once he got out, he decided to log back into the game.

He opened his eyes back in the formation that was still active. According to Zexi, the formation would last for somewhere between 30 and 40 days, so he still had about 3 weeks of time he had to spend in the formation.

'Did no one really come to find me?' he wondered.

Pearl appeared next to him. After seeing him not move for 3 whole days, he was happy to finally see him walk around again.

"Hey, little guy. Were you bored?"

Alex squatted and started rubbing Pearl's neck with both of his hands. Pearl meowed multiple times in response to Alex's questions.

"You wanna fight?" he asked and started hiding his cultivation base. Then, the two of them fought.

Pearl was getting really good at fighting and so was Alex. He was already good when fighting with techniques, but normal attacks were still a little awkward.

However, the constant fighting without techniques was helping him improve at a tremendous rate.

"Alright, let's stop," he said after 3 hours of constant fighting. He sent Pearl away to do whatever he wanted to. Alex on the other hand fell into thought.

'It's been 4 days since I broke through. Normally, I would've broken through once again, but can I do that now?' he wondered. He hadn't practiced or fought in 3 days so he decided to wait a day more before he broke through to the Meridian Realm.

For now, he would just practice.

"Hm..." he thought. Once the cultivation base came back, he realized that there wasn't any discomfort from his cultivation.

"Now that I think about it, my body is good enough to do a lot of things. It can digest all sorts of Qi, can digest monster cores, and can even digest poisons. So is it really possible that such a body would have the same faults as the other bodies have?" he wondered.

He had been spending time in between breakthroughs because that was what he was taught. However, his masters didn't know about his body.

"Hmm... I do remember being significantly weaker during the time when I had to fight that one snake. Didn't I break through like crazy then? I was in a higher realm than the snake, but we were at the same strength."

"So the thing about stable cultivation base needing to have a high level of strength is true... but would it apply for a single breakthrough though?" he wondered.

He wanted to open up his status page and hit breakthrough to check, but before he even opened the status page, he stopped.

"Wait, I can't mess around at such an important breakthrough. What if I do something that negatively impacts my meridians. Let's wait after I do a normal breakthrough this turn," Alex said.

He took out a sword and started practicing. He sent out attacks everywhere and was very well trained in the different techniques.

It came to the point that he was having diminishing returns from the training.

'The techniques have reached the highest they can without noticeable improvements coming forward. So, I should do something else for now,' he thought.

He looked at the sword in his hand and remembered how good Du Yuhan was with it. The Sword Intent and Sword Qi that he used had blown away Alex.

'Can I be like him?' he wondered. 'I might not have had the time to learn all of that... but maybe I can cheat a little with my talent.'

So, starting today, he decided to simply learn the sword without any techniques. He didn't know how to start with learning about Intents, so he blindly swung his sword around.

After realizing that was fruitless, he stopped and thought of what his master had told him.

'Sword Intent appears when you master the sword to such a high level, that you start imagining the sword as part of your body,' Alex thought.

'Part of my body, huh? That means I need to know just by intuition where the sword is at all times, how fast it is moving, how sharp it is, how much force I'm putting into it, and such.'

He closed his eyes and started moving the sword in his hand. He tried to feel the balance of the sword by measuring its height and weight using his mind as a scale.

He took back any and all Qi and spiritual sense and solely focused his normal 5 senses on the sword. He felt the weight of the sword through the hilt he was holding, he felt the changes in the air every time the sword moved around.

He heard the air being sliced apart by the sword, the minute hint of air whistling past the sharp edge.

He was starting to get attuned to the sword.

Chapter 381: Back to Training

Alex was certainly not very good at using the sword as just a sword. He needed to use the various techniques, regardless of if they used Qi or not, to properly fight with a sword.

The one he used most of the time was Elusive Heavenly Sword. While it had 3 Qi-based attacks, its main purpose was that it was a style of sword fighting that mostly focused on the elusiveness of the fighter, rather than focusing on doing the most damage.

This certainly helped Alex a lot, but following simply this was also not a very good idea for him who wanted to learn Sword Intent.

So, he was going back to the basics once more. He logged out and looked online on how he could learn as a beginner in sword fighting.

The people online gave some instructions that Alex decided to follow.

To get used to the sword's weight, they had him simply try to hold the sword out straight in front of him without shaking it a lot. This not only helped in increasing the person's understanding of the sword, but it also helped him increase his wrist strength.

The wrist strength was something Alex didn't need to care about, but learning the weight was something that helped him a lot.

The second part that the internet suggested was to strike empty air in front of him. He would stand on one spot and swing directly in front of him.

He had to do that for hours and hours on end for days on end.

The final thing that the internet told him was to fight an imaginary opponent. Make someone in your mind, and fight them until you are sure you could.

This was like the famous shadow boxing, but for swords.

Once Alex was done doing these three things, he stopped for the day. It was around 8 pm when he decided to make his pills. He had a routine and he would stick to it.

Alex took out a few spirit stones and the fire furnace he had created. He dug a hole and started the fire. He then took out a black cauldron.

He was going to do test creations, so he couldn't use his normal cauldron.

While that was going on, he revised what he had learned so far.

'The direction of the motion of the ingredients inside the cauldron can, for some reason, play a huge role in how much energy a pill can hold.'

'The speed of the motion of the ingredients inside the cauldron can help in regulated heat transfer, so it plays a role in the speed of energy release. Also, same as the direction, it can also affect the amount of energy a pill can hold.'

'Finally, the temperature the ingredients are burned in also matters. Each ingredient burns at a certain temperature, so it is necessary one knew the exact burning temperature of every ingredient if they want to create a new pill,' he thought.

Normal alchemists that only followed recipes didn't have to worry about these things. However, if one wanted to create their own pill, they had to certainly learn this by heart.

That was why being an alchemist took such a long time. One had to go through and remember every scenario for every pill.

Or at least, that was what Alex thought. He still believed that there was a technique to forming pills that didn't require so much manual learning, but he would have to wait until he returned.

When he saw the cauldron was hot enough, he dropped the first ingredient. The first ingredient didn't really matter in how violently the energy was released from the cauldron. As long as there wasn't an explosion, they would be perfectly fine.

Still, Alex decided to follow through with the recipe he had made on his own.

As he did, he couldn't help but cringe at the many mistakes that were littered throughout the recipe. He could see many opportunities that could be improved a lot.

Since this was a test, he was going to have to do this multiple times. He remembered how the energy release rate was really good when he had done a single thing.

So he was going to follow exactly that. He restarted the process once again once the resulting pill was at 21% harmony.

Once the cauldron was hot enough again, he put in the first ingredient. The first ingredient turned to powder quickly and it was time for the 2nd ingredient.

When Alex remembered the different experiments he had done with this one, he chose from a small list of experiments that resulted in a rate of release of energy that didn't make it look like it would cause an explosion.

He did the 3rd and 4th. He was constantly changing things recipes with what he felt was proper. On the 5th one, he threw in the 5th ingredient.

However, by this time he could think of ways to use the 5th ingredient, he had already made the mistake of making too many changes without realizing what was going to happen again.

'Urghh, I forgot the energy isn't always what it seems," he thought. While the cauldron only showed a single or two energy output, it was hard to remember by just looking and feeling that there were other energies mixed into the resulting energy.

The cauldrons showed signs of unstableness, so Alex didn't hesitate at all and threw the cauldron far away.

An explosion ran in the distance. Alex was relieved that he was able to make such a quick decision.

"Urghh... I need to make small changes, one at a time, rather than all at once," Alex said. So, he got down on the ground, put out more ingredients, and continued making pills.

Only this time, he made a single change with each pill's outcome. Unfortunately, they didn't have a huge enough change for any of the pills to be useful.

So, Alex added 2 changes per batch and continued experimenting with his recipe for the rest of the night.

Chapter 382: Composition and Structure

"Moving it clockwise had a definite better result. So, maybe I should try moving it clockwise at a slower pace but at a much lower temperature so that the rate of energy released is the same, but the powder accepts more energy in the end," Alex thought.

It was close to 5 am, and he was still testing out the different ways to improve the pill. By now, he had broken about 5 black cauldrons and finally, had managed to bring the harmony up to around 36%. Considering about 15-20% of the energy was usually lost during the process with the black cauldrons, it meant that the pill was still rejecting about 34% of the energy away.

That was too much of a waste. Even when the pill-splitting Qi appeared, he could only read a little above 30% harmony on both pills.

"Aside from that, I should increase the third ingredient's movement speed, while increasing the temperature," he thought.

One thing that he didn't need to worry about now, that he wished he realized quite early, was the rate of energy release. With how stable the energy inside the final product was, all he had to do was tweak the process such that the energy was released at the same rate, but the pill was different enough to have a change in the energy acceptance rate.

He looked into his storage bag a signed. He had a lot of ingredients when he began testing these things a week or so ago, but now it was down to less than a dozen.

In about 10 more batches, he would have no ingredients left for the pill he was making and would have to move on with a different pill altogether.

"Alright, let's forget about that for now and focus on this one pill. I will make it the best," Alex promised himself.

He started making the pill once more. Had he known that he didn't need to make so many changes that included energy change, he might have had a better result by now, but he had to fail once before he learned from it.

He cleaned the cauldron and tried once more. He had nothing to tell him if he was anything good or bad right now. All he could do was wait for the pill to be formed and he could finally see how accepting of the energy they were.

He made sure not to make a single mistake along the way and when he finally completed the pill, he was a little disappointed. The changes he had made actually made the pill worse.

Alex was a little disappointed. He contemplated what mistakes he made, but there was nothing to think about. He had nothing to compare his new pill with.

'I will just have to grind through it,' he thought and continued. He cleaned the cauldron, made a few new adjustments to the recipe, and continued.

He followed the recipe perfectly, and yet he once again made a worse pill.

"Okay, I can't continue like this. What the hell am I doing wrong?"

He was close to ripping away his hair. He took the pill out and checked. "Did I burn it somewhere I couldn't see? Are some ingredients not turning to powder? Am I really making any mistake?" he wondered and looked at the pill.

He tried to see any abnormalities with the pills, but he was too novice in the grand scheme of Alchemy to know what he was doing.

In the end, he couldn't see anything wrong. He was about to put back the pill when he remembered something. The gesture he was making right now, taking a pill up to his face to check it, was something he had seen another person do as well.

'Didn't the royal alchemist do the same thing?' he thought. He remembered back to the day when they had met him. The man had taken his pill and looked at it in just the same way.

Except... he hadn't. 'He couldn't see anything so he had to eat another pill right?' Alex thought. He remembered seeing the Royal Alchemist's eyes go wide after eating that one pill.

'Could it be that pill amplified his visions and allowed him to see something?' Alex wondered. Then, he thought back to the remark he had made.

'He talked about my temperature controls, my cauldron, and my ingredients. However, he also talked about something else,' Alex thought.

'Structure and Composition of the powder and pill.'

Alex's mind raced as he tried to make sense of those words. 'Structure? Composition? Am I supposed to know these things by now?' he wondered.

There was nothing in his lessons from his master regarding this. As for the different books in the libraries... he checked again.

"Oh, there is something," he was surprised when he did indeed find a little information. It didn't tell him anything at all, but somewhat vaguely explained what the Structure and Composition of a pill meant.

"I see... " he thought when he finished reading it all. He felt like he comprehended a new aspect of the alchemy process that he just didn't know about before today.

"So, composition refers to the ratio at which the powders from the different ingredients are mixed. The Royal Alchemist seemed to care about it, so if I manage to make pills that will use all the powder in a cauldron, or at least the proper ratio of it, then I'm guaranteed to have a much higher level of pill huh?" he thought.

It would take a long time, but if he could learn enough to tweak the ratio around, then presumably, he wouldn't even need to use all the powder to make a perfect pill, just the right amount.

"Structure on the other hand looks to be much more important. Isn't it basically telling me that the shape of the individual powder impacts how much energy I can store in it?" he wondered.

Structure referred to the shape of the minute individual particles of the powders.

"So... the direction in which the ingredient moves and the speed at which it moves must determine the structure of the powder that is formed, and that powder determines whether it can hold the resulting energy of the pill or not."

"So, if I want to make my pill better, then I will have to make sure that their powder ratio is the best, and that the structure of the powder is also the most accepting of the energy."

Chapter 383: Shapes

"Can I even check the structure on my own?" Alex wondered for a second.

"Let's try with my spiritual sense," he thought. He brought out his spiritual sense and started looking at the pill on his hand.

Normally, he would just look at the pill and forget about it, but now, he had to check it properly. So, he focused on it with his spiritual sense.

Suddenly, it was as if a new world had been opened in front of his eyes. He could see every single small detail that he couldn't otherwise on a daily alchemy procedure.

He had never focused on a pill to see how it looked. He always had just assumed the powder to be nothing more than just decorative after all.

And to be fair, it was indeed decorative. The powder itself did nothing; it was the energy within the pill that created the various effect.

However, if the powder housed the energy just as Alex had just now learned, he would now have to start focusing on it as well.

Alex felt his spiritual sense quickly diminishing when he started checking the materials on a microscopic level.

The pill on his hands looked very weird when zoomed in through his spiritual sense. Normally, the pill had a slightly pinkish hue to it. This was the color the pill took after almost every iteration.

That was just the color the ingredients burned to.

However, under zoom, he could see that the pill was not pink at all. It was actually multicolored. Some were yellow, some were green, some were blue, and some were even black. But the majority of the powder was just red and white, leading to the pink color.

Alex ignored the color for now and checked the shapes of the powder particles. There were various shapes that he just couldn't describe properly. They were also all clumped together so it was quite hard to see the shapes.

So, Alex crushed the pill and put it on top of a metal plate. Finally, with the height of the 'pill' reducing to such a low amount, he could see the shapes with much more ease.

"Oh, so different," he thought. The powders were all mostly in different shapes. Some were spherical in shape, some were crystalline with cubic or rhomboid shapes, some were cylindrical, and some were even helix shapes.

Alex was surprised by how many types of shapes he could see. He quickly stopped focusing on his spiritual sense.

"Arghh... that's not a very fun feeling," he thought. It felt like the headache he got on days he didn't get much sleep.

He thought about what he saw just now and fell into thought. The shapes were all different and not something he could really tell if they were good or bad.

"Oh, wait a second," he thought and quickly rummaged through his storage bag. He came across a pill bottle that wasn't filled with pills, but rather just powder.

Every time he had tested with these ingredients, he had thrown away most of the powders but ended up keeping some into the pill bottle.

He gently dumped the content of the bottle in a straight line from the left to right. Starting from the left was the powder he made most recently, and at the right was the powder he had made the earliest.

He remembered every single instance of powder he made, all the changes he had made, all the test criteria he had set for them, so when he checked from left to right, he knew exactly what he had to do to get that result.

He forced his spiritual sense to check these powders again and started looking through the different patterns the powders had formed into.

"Those are just minute spheres. That was when I use 500 degrees with clockwise rotation for 3 whole turns at 2 seconds per turn."

"Those are just tinier spheres, but these ones are clumped together in groups. If I remember correctly, that was when I set the temperature to 350 degrees, with clockwise rotation at 4 seconds per rotation for 2 and a half rotations."

"Those are..."

He went through all of them. He quickly realized that temperature also played an aspect in the shape of the pills, albeit indirectly.

What truly affected the shapes were the speed at which the ingredient was moved in while it turned to powder and the direction it was moving in.

Depending on the temperature, some of the ingredients were in motion for a lot longer than other ones. These affected the shape as well.

Alex took out another pill bottle and dumped its content as well. This powder belonged to a different ingredient, so Alex checked this one as well.

While the shapes of the powder weren't the same as the ones for the other powder at similar test criteria, they followed a similar direction in terms of the shape.

Just to be sure, he took another one out and laid it on the metal. He checked it too and found out that the shapes indeed follow a pattern.

Depending on the time it took for the ingredient to fully turn to powder, the shape of the powder was different.

If the ingredient turned to powder very fast, it would end up being small flakes. If it moved for longer, it would start to clump together and form a cubic shape. Then it would deform to become a rhomboid shape, which it was moved for a much longer time, would slowly lose their shapes to become irregular individual blobs.

It didn't end there, however. If the ingredient was in the cauldron for longer, it would turn to thick, cylindrical in shape, that would elongate and it went on and start turning to a helix shape, which would then clump on itself to form small spheres that were attached to itself.

Finally, if it went for much longer, the spheres would separate and end up as individual spheres that moved around separately. By that time, there would be no more energy remaining in the ingredient no matter what ingredient it was.

Chapter 384: Meridian Tempering 1st Realm

Alex left for breakfast at around 7 am after learning about the shapes and structures of the powder for nearly 2 hours. During that time, he realized a few more things.

First thing was that the direction in which the ingredients were moved affected the powders in a way that created some threading-like pattern on the powder particles, threading that was similar to a screw or the inside of a nut bolt.

When moved clockwise, the threading would be protruded like that of a screw, and when moved counterclockwise, it would become sunken like that of a nut. The threading was so small that it nearly cost Alex half of his spiritual sense to focus on that small of a level.

When he just checked the powder particles on their own, the threading was actually practically invisible aside from giving a slight bit of texture to the powder.

Once he was done with those, he started making different pills to understand how the structure and composition helped with the different pills in what way.

Before he knew it, 2 hours had passed away and he had barely learned a thing.

"What's wrong? Are you nervous about something?" Emily asked at the dinner table.

"Oi Alex, you better not be regretting asking Emily out now," Sarah teased from the side.

"What? Oh, sorry. It's nothing. It's just some things inside of the game that got me thinking mindlessly," Alex said.

"You better not be thinking about that conspiracy again. Honestly, I thought you got it out of your system," Hannah said.

"Huh? No-"

"What's this about?" Sarah cut off Alex.

Hannah explained what Alex had done with the helmet a few days ago, without missing a single piece of information.

Alex cringed a little when he heard what he had done out loud. "That's not it," he said.

"That's not what I am thinking about. It's related to alchemy," he explained.

"Oh, then that's good. You shouldn't think like those conspiracy theorists. So, what's there is an alchemy to make you think this hard?" Hannah asked. "Isn't it just putting ingredients in a pot and cooking it until a pill comes out?"

"Uhh... it's way more complex. I wouldn't expect you to understand my problems," Alex said.

"Why not search the internet then? They have everything," Hannah said.

"I've tried. There's nothing. No blog post or video. Not even the forum has a single post about anything above basic level alchemy," Alex said.

"Hmm... if there is no post about anything...then why don't you post one yourself?" Emily asked. "You can ask people what you have problems with."

"I... had never thought of that. You're right, we can do that. Huh... I'll go make a post right now," Alex said and quickly finished his meal.

He went to his room and opened the forum on his laptop. He searched for information about what he wanted once more and couldn't find anything at all.

"Sigh! Alright, let's make a new post," he thought and clicked on the 'create a new post' button.? The website led him to the login page. He needed an account to interact with the posts aside from just reading them.

"Uhh... sure," he thought and created a new account. He filled up everything that was needed and logged in. He opened a new post and started typing.

<Need help with Alchemy>

<Hello. I am an alchemist in EC and I was hoping for someone to help me if they knew anything about the Structure and Composition concept of the pills. Please comment or message me directly if you have any advanced knowledge about these concepts. Thank you.>

"Alright, that should do it," he said and clicked 'Post'. As such, his first-ever post on the internet went online. His post was now visible and so he waited for a little for people to come.

But very soon after he decided not to wait for long. He closed his laptop and logged back into the game.

Once he got back into the game, he frowned when he remembered that he had so many pills and ingredients to sort through and understand in his head.

"Ugh... I will do that later."

He called Pearl back and started training once more. Pearl was getting better at attacking and dodging as well due to the constant fighting. After 2 or 3 hours of constant training, he finally let Pearl take some rest.

Pearl went back into the fog to do who knew what. Alex on the other hand took out his sword and trained again. For now, he was focusing on getting to know the weight of the sword and the balance of it.

Then he would try swinging it so that he could make the most efficient attacks every time. He wanted to weed out any unnecessary motions during his sword fight.

As for the shadow battle, he didn't believe himself to be good enough in the ways of swords to fight anyone he thought was good enough, his primary opponent of choice obviously being Du Yuhan.

"Ahh... " he stretched and stopped practicing at around 2 pm in the afternoon. He took out a 1st Meridian Realm beast's core and ate it.

He defeated the fight with the beast very quickly and was given notifications that he had gotten quite a few Qi. He smiled and opened the status page once more.

"Ah yes. I have enough," he thought and pushed 'Breakthrough'.

Suddenly, all the extra Qi inside of him was used up and he broke through from the 9th realm of Organ Tempering realm to the 1st realm of Meridian Tempering.

The system notifications arrived, congratulating him on breaking through.

<Congratulations on breaking through to 'Meridian Tempering: 1st Realm'>

<Detecting...>

"Huh?" Alex was surprised a little. "What is it trying to detect?" he wondered. The notification didn't sound for a few more seconds, and then...

<Extreme Metal Affinity Detected>

'Extreme Metal affinity?... the blood essence from Pearl's mother?' he wondered. That was what had given him an advantage in Metal energy.

<Promoting...>

<Successfully Promoted>

<Congratulations. You now have a Supreme Metal Spiritual Root>

Chapter 385: Immortal

Alex felt something change within him.

"... Eh?" Alex was dumbfounded for a few seconds. Then, he read the notifications once more. As he read, his eyes widened when he realized what it meant.

"Wait wait wait wait wait... did I just get a Superior Metal Spiritual root? Wait, no... it says Supreme. What's that? Is it better than Superior?"

He didn't know what was going on. Only his metal root was suddenly upgraded, instead of all of them.

"Wait, did my spiritual roots change and I no longer have all 7 energy roots?" he thought and quickly opened his status page again to check. Thankfully, his spiritual root hadn't changed.

"Phew, thank god," he said. Just then, another piece of notification popped up.

<Detecting...>

"What? What the hell is detecting this time?" he cried out loud.

<Discovered: Supreme Metal Spiritual Root>

"Huh? But it should have already discov-" another Notification arrived at the same time.

<You have discovered a hidden function of [Alchemy God's Knowledge]>

Alex's eyes went wide. "Is it going to level up?" he thought with hope in his eyes.

<You can now command all free Metal energy as you wish>

His technique didn't level up, but he wasn't disappointed at all. If what he understood from this statement just now was true, then...

"Woah, isn't my alchemy going to be better?" he thought.

He waited for more notifications to appear, but nothing did. So, he took out his cauldron and decided to try what he could.

He took out ingredients for a single pill. That pill was the same pill he made for the 3rd-day competition when he created a 60% harmony pill.

That pill alone had created chaos in the crowd when he revealed it, and even the Royal Alchemist himself had praised him later on.

Now, he was going to make the same pill, but with much greater knowledge and control of the Alchemy process.

He started simply by heating up his Golden Jade Cauldron. Once it was ready, he put in the first ingredient. He followed the recipe, but also at the same time absorbed all that was happening in the cauldron.

He tried to understand why the alchemist who created this recipe made the instruction this exact one. Did he also have many failures before he was successful with this one?

Alex couldn't help but think that. 'Focus,' he told himself and made the pill.

The process was surprisingly very simple for him now that he had practiced these things so intensely. When all the ingredients were put in and the final resulting energy was metal, he started to use Elemental Guidance to pass that metal energy into the powder that was formed into a pill.

He didn't worry about the composition or structure of the pill at the moment and only focused on the energy aspect.

He guided the metal energy to the pill, and surprisingly it followed what he wanted it to do.

"Eh?" he thought. Usually, the normal energies could be at most showed the way to the pill. Whether they went there or not was another matter.

As for metal energy, he could guide them. He could show them to the pill, and whether they entered the pill or not was another matter.

However, right now, he could fully control what the pill did. He felt like he could grasp metal energy right in his hand.

'Is this what commanding metal energy means? I can make it go to the pill?' he wondered.

No pill-splitting Qi appeared, and he freely forced all the remaining energy into the pill. Once he was done, he waited for a little bit because he expected something to happen.

As expected, the pill rejected some of the metal energy due to the irregularities in the powder's structure and composition at some level.

"Well, I tried my best," he thought and took the pill out of the cauldron. The pill had absorbed quite a lot of energy, so he was very excited to see how much he had made.

He held the pill in his hand and the information popped up.

[Bronze Tiger Pill - 82%]

[Bronze Tiger Pill - 82%]

Alex had to read the pill's information twice to realize that he wasn't hallucinating.

"No way! 82%?" he freaked out when he saw that. "Woohoo... I made such a high-grade pill," he said in absolute joy.

He looked at it again and said, "Damn, it really is 82%. Is that still Heaven Grade? No, it should be up at Immortal Grade right?"

Higher-level pill harmony rarely got talked about so he wasn't sure about where the rest of the ranking lay. But he was sure that he learned somewhere that 75% was where Immortal rank started.

"I made an immortal rank pill," even as he said it, he couldn't believe it.

"Let's try once more," he thought and took out the same ingredients. Then once again, he made the pill.

This time, it came out better at 84%. Alex couldn't stop his happiness from overflowing. He jumped around screaming with joy.

After he calmed down, he made a few more pills that had metal energy as the final resulting pill.

Each of those pills he made came out to be above? 80% in harmony level. The only problem he encountered was the energy leaving the cauldron, the age of the ingredients, and the not-perfect structure and composition of the powder in the pill.

Aside from that, everything was perfect.

He decided to check his Iron Fist Punch, Smiting Blade, and Penta Blade Technique. Those were the techniques that used metal energy.

While he already had a boost in damage, he wanted to see if there was an improvement in the damage. He tested all 3 and was a little disappointed.

"I guess I already did as much damage as I could. Meridian Realm just revealed it, nothing else. Whatever, I'm still happy," Alex thought.

"My driving lessons continue from tomorrow right? What do I do now?" he thought. There was really just one answer and he knew it.

So, he sat down and started contemplating the different aspects of the pill.

Chapter 386: Success?

"Arghh... so much thinking, and I feel like I've made barely any progress," Alex thought.

It was 11 pm and Alex had decided to stop thinking about the structures and the composition of the pills. The information was way too overwhelming for him.

And in the end, he had yet to figure out how any of the shapes had to do with absorbing energy. Was a certain shape supposed to only absorb a certain amount of energy? Was a certain shape supposed to only absorb a specific kind of energy? Was the threading-like shape from the clockwise and counterclockwise motion supposed to affect the type of energy or the amount?

There were so many questions that he just couldn't answer in a short period of time. At least, not by himself. He decided to start cultivating.

He sat down and called Pearl to start cultivating. Pearl came as asked and got onto his lap and started shining a little as he started cultivating.

Numerous cuts appeared on Alex's body, but none of those hurt him anymore. He was about to close off his eyes and start cultivating when he remembered something that he had been meaning to do ever since he thought of entering the Meridian Realm.

So, he reached into his storage bag and brought out a Spirit Cleansing Lily.

"Now that I've broken through to the Meridian realm, maybe I can use it again. I'm pretty sure my spiritual sea did increase after I fought with Zexi. Which would mean that there is a possibility of it increasing further," he thought.

"Yes, I must try this," he thought. He was pretty hopeful. Even if normal people had limitations, he had a great body and talent, as well as a fascinating spiritual root that he didn't understand completely yet.

So, he hoped to get lucky.

He held the flower in his palm and started cultivating. In less than a minute, the trance took over him, and he fell asleep.

He opened his eyes early in the morning. He looked at the time and saw that it was 7 am. He was used to waking up at around this time nowadays. He wasn't complaining though; he had breakfast to eat with the ladies every day.

"Oh right, the flower," he remembered and looked at his hand. He was hoping for it to be gone, but expecting it to still be there.

"Huh?" he thought as he saw his hands. They were empty; the flower was gone.

"Wait, it works? Haha, it works!" he shouted out in joy. He accidentally woke up the cultivating Pearl and the cuts all over his body stopped.

He sent out his spiritual sense, but it barely extended to around 22 meters without exertion. That was his natural limit after his fight with Zexi.

"Oh right, stupid me. The spiritual distance won't increase. Only the spiritual quantity will," he thought and sent his spiritual sense into his spiritual sea.

"Huh?" he said in confusion. The size of the spiritual sea was unchanged.

"Wait, what's going on?" he thought. His flower was gone, yet the spiritual sea hadn't increased at all.

'Was that a defective flower?' he wondered. But it couldn't be. He clearly remembered picking up the right flower for all of the lilies. If not, the flowerbed would have turned to ruin.

"Ok, I know I did not make a mistake. Then what is go—"

Suddenly, a foreign spiritual sense washed over his body and he heard a single thing in his mind.

"Meow."

Alex looked to the side in shock. Pearl was looking at him and meowing, but the meow was something that was being sent to his mind.

"D- Did you just use spiritual sense?" Alex asked.

"Meow," Pearl really meowed this time, and the feeling of confusion was passed along to Alex. Alex didn't know what to do. Pearl didn't even know what spiritual sense was.

"Um... oh right," he said and brought out another flower. "Did you cultivate with this?" he asked.

"Meow," Pearl said.

Alex's eyes turned wider. He couldn't keep his voice under control and shouted, "YOU ATE THIS?"

Pearl got a little scared. It went into a defensive position.

"Wait, no buddy. I'm not mad. I was just surprised. Come here," he called Pearl and caressed him. Pearl stopped feeling defensive and opened up more.

"So, did you really eat that flower?" he asked.

"Meow," Pearl said as he nodded.

'Damn, eating can help him gain spiritual sense? Does it work the same for me?' Alex wondered. He had 2 more flowers left, but he was too afraid to use them like that.

"Uhh... I guess I will let pearl use them," he thought. He decided to wait until he found some more of these flowers.

Thankfully, they weren't as rare as they appeared. He was certain that if he ventured the southern forest a little more, he would surely find quite a few of these flowers.

Alex decided to teach Pearl a little about spiritual sense and spiritual sea. He wasn't really sure if he would understand anything or not, but he tried nonetheless.

'Now that he has a spiritual sense, he should be able to communicate with me in human terms right? He doesn't have to keep meowing,' he thought. He remembered back to the time when his mother spoke to him.

If Pearl could do the same then it would help him a lot. After teaching him a little about spiritual sense, he took out an Organ Tempering 1st Realm beast's core and fed it to him.

This was the first time he didn't have to worry about the battle in the spiritual realm.

"Eh?" Alex was surprised that the fight didn't even take place as Pearl never went to sleep.

'Did he get lucky?' Alex wondered. It felt like Pearl didn't have to fight any spiritual avatar of the beasts and had lucked out like he sometimes did. It was either that or Pearl was simply too strong in the spiritual sea.

"Alright, keep practicing and... cultivate if you want. I will see you later tonight," Alex said and logged out.

Chapter 387: Spicy Gourd

Alex had breakfast with the ladies and returned back to his room. Instead of going to the game again, he decided to go online and search for a few different things.

He wondered if he was just not searching hard enough, and there might have been other people with similar experiences as him that came to the same conclusion as him.

So, he looked up keywords such as 'Helmet' and 'formation' together. There were indeed many people that had a similar theory as him.

"Ooh, there's something. Finally," he thought and opened the video. The video had barely any views and is explained in detail how people 'assumed' the helmet functioned.

The helmet's infrastructure was proprietary, so people didn't have a blueprint on what was what, and had to go off of how they thought it worked. So, the assumption was all Alex could get right now.

Unfortunately, the video didn't touch on what he wanted, and the formation part was just him mentioning it looked like one. Disappointed, Alex opened another one.

This one definitely talked more about the formation, and even assumed that it was one. He didn't assume it for real-life however, he just assumed that this was a formation for something important in the game.

The person in the video said that they had tried the design with many different metals, but they could never activate it in the game, let alone know what it did.

So in conclusion, they needed to find the metal or metal combination that was needed for the formation to be made over to work it.

Alex thought that was true. The person would indeed need a formation plate that could make the carvings function.

"Aw man, I can't wait to leave that formation in 2 weeks so I can learn what the hell that formation is for," Alex thought.

He checked a few more of such videos and posts, one of which led him to the forum. He was about to close out of the forum when he saw a red dot on his profile.

"Hm... what's that?" he wondered and clicked it. It led him to his profile, where he could see his latest interactions.

"Oh, right. I forgot I had made a post yesterday," he thought and opened the post. There were a bunch of comments on his post and quite a few upvotes.

He checked through the comments and frowned a little. All of them either showed amazement at the fact that he was an alchemist or disdain in the fact that he was still making Common rank pills.?There were also people trying to show off their maximum pill harmony in the comments too. Alex ignored that.

He tried searching for the ones he needed, but all he could find was confusion as to what Structure and Composition were. Not a single one of them, however, seemed to know anything about the topic. That was really weird.

He felt disappointed and tried to close the forum once more, and once more he stopped because there was still a red dot on his profile.

"Huh?" he thought and opened it. On the messages section, there was a red dot as well. He clicked it and it lead him to the messages he had received.

A member that went by the name of Spicy_Gourd had messaged him and the message said,

-Spicy_Gourd: Who are you? Where are you in the game?-

Alex was a little surprised that someone asked him something like that so suddenly. He messaged back.

-White_Wolf: I'm from the Crimson Empire, in the Western Continent. -

He didn't answer the first question as that was not something he was okay with sharing with a random stranger. He was about to close the laptop when he got a message back.

-Spicy_Gourd: Then how do you know about Structure and Composition? No one is supposed to know about it.-

Alex was even more confused now. 'What does he mean no one is supposed to know?' Alex wondered.

-White_Wolf: I learned it from a book in a library.-

-Spicy_Gourd: There are books that teach you about that? Is the Crimson Empire advanced in Alchemy?-

-White_Wolf: I wouldn't know. I don't know the alchemy level in the other continents. -

-Spicy_Gourd: What's the highest pill you've seen?"-

Alex thought through his memories, most of which he couldn't 'access' since he was not in the game right now. So, he had to go off of what he remembered.

-White_Wolf: It's a 48% harmony True Pill made by my sect's leader. She is considered one of the best alchemists in the empire. Not the greatest though.-

Alex waited for a while and only got a response after a few minutes.

-Spicy_Gourd: What? That's so bad. What about a Saint Rank pill?-

-White_Wolf: We have barely any Saint realm cultivators, and most of those are hidden experts. So, we don't have any that can make Saint rank pills even if there was a recipe. The most I've heard someone can make is a pseudo-Saint Rank pill-

-Spicy_Gourd: Damn, you must live in some backwater empire. How do you not even have Saint Realm experts?-

Alex was feeling weird now. 'I knew there were saint realm experts everywhere else, but are they really so readily available?' Alex wondered.

-White_Wolf: We don't have a connection to other parts of the continent, so the empire has stagnated.-

-Spicy_Gourd: whatever. Anyway, I don't really know much about Structure and Composition yet. I'm still learning about it. I'll try to let you know if I learn anything. Let me know if you find anything else.-

Alex said okay to his offer and closed the conversation. He came out of the conversation not learning about Alchemy, but a bit about the world. Adding onto that, he had another question now.

"How does this empire have knowledge about something that is apparently so rare that the outer world doesn't even know about it, but at the same time is one of the least developed societies in EC?" he wondered.

He had an answer to the 2nd question, but the first one still puzzled him. He decided to forget about it and got ready to go to his classes.

Chapter 388: License

It had been 3 weeks since Alex started learning how to drive a car and today was the day he proved it wasn't for waste.

Hannah was also getting her driving license today, so she was taking the test as well.

An instructor got into their car and made them drive onto a populated road that the testers manufactured themselves. It was supposed to mimic similar scenarios as those that would be found in an actual road on a daily basis.

Both Hannah and Alex showed excellent skills and successfully passed the test.

They came out with a big smile.

"Wow, you guys did it? Congratulations," Sarah said. "It took me twice to get my license."

"Yeah, this was much easier than I thought," Hannah said.

"I didn't have such an easy time though," Alex said with a slight chuckle.

"Well, that's only because you didn't spend as many days as me during the lessons. The fact that you passed is already good enough," Hannah said.

"Alright, let's go back home," Sarah said.

"Hey, let me drive," Hannah said, but Sarah didn't agree. It was a highway back home, and she didn't want to let a newbie endanger her. She would get her chance once they were back around their home.

"So, we go back home straight right?" Sarah said.

"No, let's go to a dealership. I want to buy a car right now," Hannah said.

"What? Today?" Sarah exclaimed. She knew the hassle of buying a car and didn't want to go through it again.

"It'll be fine. I brought all the necessary documents with me. It will be quick," she said.

"Fine," Sarah gave up and took them to a dealership.

Alex didn't want to buy a car just yet so he skipped out on it for today. Hannah on the other hand was very excited. After 2 hours of searching, selecting, and buying, she bought a car worth around 70 thousand dollars.

Once all the documents were ready, she drove it back to the house herself. Alex was a little scared while Hannah was driving but she was good enough to drive on the busy road.

While on the road, Hannah's phone started ringing.

"Hey, can you get that for me?" Hannah said.

Alex took the phone from her purse's pocket and looked who it was and answered it.

"Hey Aunt Liz," he spoke to the other person on the phone.

"Oh hey, Alex. Where's your sister?"

Hannah's mother spoke from the other side.

"Oh, she's driving the car right now," Alex said.

"Huh? Your tests haven't ended yet?" she asked.

"Oh, we're done already. Sister just bought a new car and is now driving it back home," Alex said.

"What? That reckless girl. I'll set her straight when she comes back home," his aunt started getting a little angry.

"I can hear you, Mom. Stop getting angry. I told you I can afford it now; you don't have to worry about the money," Hannah said.

"So you passed the test?" she asked.

"Of course. Why else would I buy one? Anyway, is that why you called? I need to focus back on the road," Hannah said.
New n0vel chapters are published on

"Sigh, I will speak with Alex, you drive," she said. "Oh yeah, Alex, do you have some free time within the next week or two?" she asked.

"Free time? Umm… I usually have Fridays through Sundays free. I don't have classes those days," Alex said.

"Oh, perfect. I haven't gone back home in a long time and was missing it. So, I made plans for going there this weekend, can you come by with Hannah around that time?" she asked.

"Next week, huh? Yeah, I can manage that," Alex said.

"Perfect. I will let big brother know. Alright, have fun you two. Bye." She ended the call after hearing both of them say their goodbyes.

"Going to the countryside huh? It has been a while, to say the least. I guess it will be fun," Hannah said.

They soon reached home. Sarah was behind them at all times, making sure they didn't get into an accident or anything. When she saw the car enter the parking lot and safely park there, she finally sighed in relief.

They went up the elevator to their apartment. As soon as they opened the door, an amazing smell hit their faces, immediately changing their faces to delight.

"Oh, you guys are back. How did the test go?" Emily walked out of the kitchen and asked. She had started feeling guilty about not paying anything, so she had started working on the household chores instead to make up for it.

"We both passed," Alex said with a smile.

"Ah, congratulations. I knew you guys could do it. I prepared some dishes for the celebration. Go and get changed, I will get them ready," Emily said and went back to the kitchen.

All 3 of them went back to their rooms and freshened up before coming back to the kitchen. Emily's meals were delicious and everyone complimented her on her cooking. Alex hadn't eaten such a hearty meal in quite a while and happily ate it all.

By the time Alex was done with the meal, it was 1 pm on a Friday. He had plans to go on a date with Emily tomorrow, so he decided to go back into the game for today and practice as he always did.

As soon as he logged in, he saw Pearl in front of him. "How have you been, buddy? You bored?" he asked.

"Meow," Pearl meowed in affirmation, but at the same time, Alex also heard a child's voice in his head. "Yes." After giving all 3 of those Spirit Cleansing lilies to Pearl, he had greatly increased his spiritual sense and was now starting to learn minor words.

Alex was surprised, but not as much since he had heard his mother speak as well.

"You ready for a fight?" he asked. Pearl's ears perked up and answered "yes" in his mind again. Without any hesitation, they started fighting once again.

Chapter 389: Mapleleaf City

It hadn't taken Alex very long to realize that understanding the composition and structure of pills was not an endeavor he could take on alone. He absolutely needed help from his master.

So, he started focusing his time on other things such as finding new pill recipes using energy alone. Most people would take ages to do this, but thanks to his Spiritual sense, Alex could easily recognize the strength and type of the energy and thus quite easily predict what would happen with the energy.

Still, the energy got harder and harder to predict as more and more energy was added on and he definitely broke quite a few cauldrons.

That didn't stop him from progressing in his journey as an alchemist very fast. By the time he would leave this formation, he would easily become a Common Heaven grade alchemist.

Alex fought with Pearl who was now in the 7th realm of the Organ tempering realm. That also meant that Alex himself was in the Organ Tempering realm as a body cultivator.

Once Pearl's cultivation realm increased, the pain that he had almost forgotten from the body cultivation also returned. The only reason that the pain had been manageable was that his body was in the same realm as Pearl. Once that changed, the intensity of the pain changed along with that.

His own cultivation had also increased by quite a lot in nearly 2 weeks after entering the Meridian realm. He had already reached the 5th realm of Meridian Tempering realm.

The only reason he wasn't higher than that was that he was completely out of monster cores to eat, and normal pills didn't give him a lot of Qi.

Still, after a few more days of making pills and eating them, he would likely enter the 6th realm of Meridian Tempering. At that point, he would be as strong as an expert in the 1st Realm of Mind Tempering.

The one thing that disappointed Alex more than it should have was that his training in sword did not give him the same amount of improvement as he would've wished for it too.

The training was good and all, but he needed actual opponents if he wanted to improve at using swords. As such he needed to wait until the formations opened for him to see visible improvement in swords now.

That wasn't to say that he was at it. In fact, he was most likely better than a lot of cultivators that used swords. However, when comparing that to actual cultivators that had lived their lives by their weapon and now had intent and Qi, he fell short.

"I need to go away for a few days, take care of yourself, okay buddy?" Alex said.

"Meow," Pearl said as the word 'understand' sounded inside Alex's head. Pearl was getting close at using the correct words, he just needed a little more training.

"Goodbye," Alex said and logged out.

He got out of his capsule and went to the kitchen early in the morning to eat. As usual, the girls were there already and they started eating their meal.

Once done, Alex and Hannah went back to their rooms to get ready. Today was the day Alex was going back to his home for the first time in over 3 months.

He quickly got ready and walked out with a bag. Hannah too got down from her room with a suitcase.

"Take care of the house while we're gone. We'll bring you back something from the farm on Sunday," Hannah said and waved.

"See you later," Alex said and turned around.

"Wait," Emily said and walked up to Alex before giving him a kiss on the cheeks. "Now you can go."

"Hey, where's mine?" Hannah asked with a voice that sounded like she was extremely wronged.

"Take me out on a few dates and I will maybe consider giving you one too," Emily said.

Hannah chuckled and waved before walking out of the apartment. Alex followed her and went down to the parking lot.

"Can't we just take the train?" Alex asked.

"Of course not. What's the point of having a license and a car if you're not going to drive?" Hannah said. "It's just a 4 hours ride, it'll be fine."

Alex sighed and loaded up the bags before getting in the passenger seat. Hannah pulled the car out of the parking lot and joined the road.

Hannah drove through the Oakleaf city until they were out of it and into the more suburban area. While they were out of the city, the land they were on was still called Oakleaf City.

After the warring phase, the people wanted to name places based on something that wouldn't align to any side, so they had started naming them off of what tree was found most in what area.

The land that had the Oak trees the most was called Oakleaf city. The main city that was made inside there was also called the same.

In less than an hour, they would cross the border of the city full of Oaks, and enter the city full of Maples, the Mapleleaf city, Alex's home city.

Hannah had entered the highway and was speeding through at a comfortable rate. After an hour and a half, they reached the outside of Mapleleaf city's main city which was also called Mapleleaf City.

They needed to take the outer highway to go past it as going through the inner busy roads would take them forever.

Hannah stopped at a charging station where she charged her car for 15 minutes or so until it was full again. This would give her enough juice for the next 8 hours of driving.

This time, Alex took the wheel and drove past Maple leaf city for the next two hours.

"Oh, we are here," he said and looked around. He was inside a city that was quite urban but not as much as the other cities. He drove based on the way he remembered now and made his way to a train station.

He safely parked in the shade and walked into the train station with Hannah.

Chapter 390: Home

Hannah and Alex had to wait for nearly 20 minutes before the train arrived. Quite a few people walked out of the train, but it wasn't to the same level as the ones in the big city.

Within the first few passengers, Hannah saw her parents and waved at them.

"Oh look, the kids are here already," a man in his late 40s said as he dragged a suitcase behind him. He had a clean-shaven face that showed wrinkles on his skin. His hair was short and mixed with white hair. However, the way he was suited in coat and pants made him look like he was a rich person from a rich household.

A woman that looked like she was in her early 30s walked out from behind him. She had beautiful skin and luscious golden hair that she had dyed herself to look better. She was wearing a large pair of sunglasses, and when she took them off, one could see that she had features that matched both Hannah and Alex.

"Hey!" she waved back at Hannah as soon as she saw her waving her hands. "Oh my god, Alex! Look at you, you're so big. Aww, come here and give aunt a hug," she said when she saw him.

Alex smiled and hugged his aunt. "You don't look like you've aged a day, Aunt Liz," Alex replied before greeting his Uncle-in-law.

"Oh, who taught you to speak such sweet nothings. Although it is true that I still have such young looks. My friends always ask me how a woman in her mid-40s could possibly look this young, and I don't know what to say to them, it's in the genes I guess," the aunt said with laughter in her voice.

The uncle was used to his wife is obsessed with her mysteriously young looks and shook his head. "So, when did you guys get here? And where is brother-in-law?" he asked as he checked around.

"Oh, Alex already called him this morning to tell him not to come to pick you guys up. We will be driving you guys there," Hannah said.

"What?" her mother got angry all of a sudden, "you brought your car?" she asked.

"Of course we did. What else am I supposed to do with a car?" Hannah said.

"You've only been driving for a week. It's dangerous," she exclaimed.

"I know, I was careful. Anyway, let's go. You don't plan on standing around here forever, do you?" Hannah said.

Her father said nothing and just shook his head.

They all walked to the car. When the parents saw the car their daughter had bought, even they were shocked. "Not even your father uses that sort of car," the mother said in shock.

"How much did you spend?" the father asked.

When they heard the number, they thought their heart skipped a beat. "Is that all of your money?" the father asked.

Hannah smiled and said, "you can't make me reveal my income right now."

The father chuckled a little and put his suitcase in the back. "Alright kids, get on the back seat, I'm driving from here."

Hannah wanted to drive, but her father wouldn't let her. So, in the end, Alex and Hannah got in the back seat, while her father and mother sat in the front.

They drove out of the small city they were in about an hour and entered a much smaller town. Even past that town, they drove for half an hour before the road turned into a dirt road.

They were finally starting to see the tall trees in the distance clearly. The edge of the map was approaching.

"Ooh, it's cold here. Thank god I put in some winter clothes," Hannah's mother said.

Alex was feeling excited seeing the trees, the empty lands, and the dirt road; home was close.

The number of houses reduced to almost zero as they went further along. Finally, after crossing a house, they could see another house a few hundred meters down the line.

"We're here," Hannah's father said and pulled up on an old-looking, 2 stories tall Farmhouse surrounded by open pasture and what looked to be a large stable behind them.

Hannah's mom took a deep breath of the fresh air and said, "Ahh, this smell is so nostalgic."

As the group of 4 took out their suitcases and walked towards the house, a woman walked out of it.

The woman was in her 40s and was a little bit on the chubbier end. As soon as she walked out, she gave a big smile as she saw the bunch.

"Sister Helen!"

"Liz!"

The two women hugged each other. Alex and Hannah walked to the front and Helen didn't miss the chance to hug them both.

"Aw, my sweet child, you must've missed your home so much. It's okay now, you're back," Helen said to Alex. She then turned to Hannah and said, "Look at you, you look just like your mother; so beautiful. You've really grown in the 3 years I haven't seen you," Helen said.

"You look great too, Aunt Helen," Hannah said.

"Now now, no need to lie to this old woman. I have a mirror and I see what I look like every day," Helen said with a smile.

"Sister-in-law, where his brother-in-law?" Hannah's father asked.

"He's curre-"

"Oh! Liz, Rob, you made it. Huh? Oh, the kids are here too," a man's voice came from the side. He was wearing a dirty shirt and pants with high rubber boots and was carrying a massive log on his shoulders.

He had a face that closely resembled Alex, the only difference was that he had a rough beard and hair that was uncut for many months.

He looked to be in his early 50s, but his body gave the illusion that he was a bodybuilder in his mid-30s. He dusted off his hands and welcomed his brother-in-law.

Helen then took them all inside to rest and soon called them to eat the meal that she had prepared.

Chapter 391: The farmhouse

"Mhmm, this meat is so good. As expected of sister, she's a genius at anything she puts her hand on," Liz said as she bit on the piece of chicken meat.

"Your brother prepared fresh chicken meat today since you guys were coming. That's why it's so tasty. I merely added a bit of flair," Helen said.

"I have tried cooking, but I can never get it to your level. Tell me, where did you learn it from? Were you learning culinary art before you met my brother?" Liz asked.

"Of course not. I learned it all from the cookbooks that the people gave us from those restaurants your brother sells to. You just have to follow the recipe, and you can easily make the chicken this perfect too," Helen said.

The other 4 people in the dining room ate without making any sounds, but they too couldn't deny how good the food was.

"I'm sometimes surprised how both Alex and big brother managed to stay in shape when they got to eat this delicious a meal all the time," Liz said.

"Haha, I wonder that too. I think their metabolism is just too high," Helen said.

"So, how're your classes going?" Alex's father spoke, trying to change the topic from food to something else.

"Yeah, it's good. Our assignments are coming up soon for this semester," Alex said.

"Oh, so quick. I guess that makes sense," Helen said. "What about you Hannah?"

"My classes ended 2 weeks ago. I'm just waiting for the exams and I'm done with university," Hannah said.

"Oh wow, look at you. You're not even 22 and you're already finishing University. I remember when you were here last time. You were so excited about going to the University," Helen said.

"Well, I doubt she will even need the university degree though," Alex's father said from the side.
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"What's that supposed to mean?" Helen got a little angry.

"What?" he made an innocent face. "Don't you know how much these kids make nowadays? It's highly unlikely they will ever need an actual job. At least not one where they have to spill blood and sweat," he said.

Helen still made an angry face. "What? I'm saying that as a good thing," he said. Then he turned towards Alex and Hannah, and said, "Be frugal, learn to save your money, invest it somewhere. If you do all those things correctly, you won't ever need to worry about money with how much you guys are making."

Hannah and Alex nodded. Alex had already done everything he could and had also made his cousin do the same thing. So, now they had most of their money in savings and only a little in use.

Hannah however had a regular supply of Spirit stones as opposed to Alex however, so she constantly had excess money in her bank account.

They talked for a little longer and took the conversation to the living room.

"I honestly don't understand the appeal of that video game. Why would so many people play it?" Helen asked.

"Have you tried it, sister? It's so fun," Liz said from the side.

"You play it too?" Helen asked in surprise. "Honestly, I wanted to make Alex stop from it long ago after learning about our neighbor's son's problems. Listen to this, they forgot how to work in the fields after playing those games for so long."

"I was afraid the same thing would happen to Alex too, but the money he was bringing in was too many, and I couldn't stop. Oh god, I hope I don't regret it soon," Helen said.

"It should be fine, sister. I play those and look at me, I'm quite fine. It's just a day or two of discomfort that goes away very soon once your body gets used to the sleeping state. Maybe the new capsules are even better," Liz said.

"Hmm… maybe we should get one too," Helen thought.

"NO!" Alex exclaimed in front of everyone.

"What's wrong with you? Don't you want your parents to have fun?" Helen said with a scrutinizing face.

"Uhh… no, I mean yes. Of course, I want you guys to have fun, but maybe it's too early. Maybe you guys are right and it's bad. I don't want you guys to have problems if that's true. Besides, our internet connection isn't the greatest for you guys to play," Alex said.

"Hm… I guess you are right," Helen said after thinking for a bit. "Alright, we will wait for a bit," she said.

The family talked for a little longer until it was late afternoon.

"Alright, I will go to the town for a bit. Need to make today's shipment. Come help me load up, and see the tractor that you basically bought by yourself," Alex's father said as he stood up.

"Let me help you too brother-in-law," Hannah's father stood up and walked outside, leaving the girls alone.

Alex's father walked through the farm crossing the chickens, sheep, goats, cows, followed by a large fertile land that had many different things growing in it.

"Aren't you old by now, brother-in-law? Why don't you hire a few people to take care of this and just sit back and enjoy? With more people, the production might also increase and your profit would also go up," Hannah's father said.

"Honestly, I've thought of doing that. But nobody really wants to come out to the corner of nowhere where even the closest town is an hour away. Besides, I still have a lot of energy in me to do this all by myself," Alex's father said as he showed his body.

There was a stack of vegetables that were already packaged and just needed to be put onto the back of the delivery truck.

"There she is, the beauty," Alex's father proudly showed off a large tractor that he used on a daily basis in the land to harvest or prepare it for cropping various other things.

He seemed to be really proud of it.

Chapter 392: Blink of an Eye

Alex was helping his father with hauling the ingredients into the truck. Neither he nor his Uncle was strong enough to do what his father was doing.

Alex's father was basically grabbing two packages at once and lifting them without any struggle. Alex sighed as he saw that. His father really was very strong.

"God, your father scares me sometimes," his Uncle said with a chuckle.

"Scares?" Alex asked with a hint of confusion.

"Haha, when your aunt was studying at the university and we got together, she brought me back to her house to meet with her brother and your late grandparents. At that time, when I saw a hunky bodybuilder who threatened to beat me if I ever hurt his sister, I was really scared."

"I sometimes wonder if I would've really ended up with your aunt had your father not threatened me," his Uncle said while laughing to himself.

"How many times are you going to say you are afraid of me, rob?" Alex's father asked.

"Well, you are scary, brother-in-law," his Uncle laughed out loud this time.

Alex's father shook his head and laughed as well. The three continued packing all the things up. Then, Alex's father got into the truck and drove away.

"Urgh," his uncle said as he flexed himself. "That was kind of tiring. I'm not used to manual labor," he said.

"Me neither. Father rarely let me help him," Alex said.

"Haha, I don't think he ever needs help," the Uncle said. He then turned around to look at the large, infinite forest behind him.

"That thing still scares me quite a bit. Don't beasts come here from time to time?" the uncle said.

"No, there aren't any animals in there. I think all the animals have already fallen through the void by now," Alex said. Ever since he was conscious, he had never seen any animal here at all.

"Maybe they are. That would be great. It's not very good to live in constant fear from animals around here. Anyway, let's go back," the uncle said and walked back.

Alex followed behind him.

Once Alex's father returned, they all had their dinner. Helen and Liz kept on talking hour after hour while Alex's father took rob to the patio to drink some beer with him.

Rob being a businessman was used to drinking a lot, and Alex's father just didn't get drunk enough to the level of it being a problem. So, the two brothers by law drank as much as they could.

Alex sat down and took out his laptop to check what was going on. At this point, he was slightly regretting now buying another helmet, but what he said earlier was true as well. The internet speed in his house was absolutely horrendous.

He looked at different stuff online while conversing with his mother and aunt on whatever they talked about.

"You wanna tell your parents about Emily?" Hannah came up to him and softly whispered.

"Should I?" he asked. Emily and Alex had been going out for nearly two weeks now and we're pretty sure that they wanted to get together with the other person.

As long as Alex asked her to be his girlfriend, she would gladly accept at this point. Still, Alex wanted to wait until that point to introduce her to his mother.

"It's your choice," Hannah replied to his question.

"Then I'll wait," Alex said.

Hannah nodded and walked away without saying anything.

The coldness was overbearing by 9 pm, so everyone decided to retreat to their own room. Alex went back to his old bedroom and fall onto his bed.

He couldn't help but smile at the slight stiffness of the mattress, the sunken pillows, and the heavy blanket. They were all flaws, but they were flaws he loved.

He got under the blanket and tried to sleep.

As everything around the land grew quiet, a small, but the constant sound of the wind humming could be heard in the distance. Alex was used to this sound, so he just ignored it and fell asleep.

Even when all of the worlds fell asleep, the humming sound did not stop and probably never would.

Alex woke up in the morning and helped his father with his work again. It was really cold in the morning as winter was right around the corner. Just a few more weeks and winter would officially start all over the world.

After helping his father load the vehicle again, he went to the kitchen to take a warm cup of tea and relax.

There was nothing he had to read, nothing he had to watch, nothing he had to play, and nothing he had to do. This was a freedom that he hadn't felt in a while now.

The Uncle and aunt came to the kitchen to drink tea as well. Soon his mother put on a delicious breakfast that the whole family ate, praising her cooking skill once more.

His father returned from delivering for the morning as well and ate his breakfast.

It was the countryside, so there really wasn't anything to do. Thus, they just sat around, talked, played some games, walked pictures from old times, ate when it was time, and did some work here and there.

Soon, that day came to an end as well. In the blink of an eye, the 2nd day ended as well.

On the third day morning, Hannah's family and Alex had their breakfast and got ready to leave.

"Make sure to take care of yourself okay? Hannah, take care of Alex," Helen said.

"Don't worry, aunt Helen. He is old enough to take care of himself. Still, I will make sure to keep an eye on him," Hannah said and got into the car.

Helen hugged Alex once more and said her goodbyes. Alex got a little sad that he wouldn't get to see his parents for another 3 months or so.

He got into the car, and Hannah's father drove. They were now on their way back to Oakleaf City.

Chapter 393: Gone

Hannah's father insisted on visiting her apartment, but Hannah didn't let him go there, so he had to reluctantly drive to the train station in Oakleaf city and catch a train to their home city.

Once they left, Alex and Hannah drove back to their apartment.

Emily had once more prepared a meal for them. Sarah wasn't there and was busy playing the game. They didn't get angry as they could understand her sentiment.

Once they were done eating, Hannah returned back to her room. Alex stayed around with Emily in the living room and spent the next 2 hours talking with her.

Eventually, he laid forth the idea of them becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. They liked each other and were very compatible so there was no reason to keep it dragging for any longer.

Emily was flustered for a bit, but once she settled down and thought, accepting his proposal was just a superior choice. He kissed her once again, only this time, she didn't shy away like last time.

Seeing that she was quite accepting, he kissed for far longer this time. Eventually, it was too much for Emily, so she decided to stop and made excuses to go back to her room with a red face.

Alex was very shocked himself. He couldn't believe that he had the gall to do what he had just done. However, he did not regret it in any way.

A smile appeared on his face and he made his way to his room.

"Urgh... I need to fix it if it's fixable or just throw it away," Alex thought when he saw the pile of torn-off helmet pieces on the side of his bed.

He changed his clothes to something more comfortable and got into the capsule.

He opened his eyes back in the game and sighed a little. 'So the formation is still on, huh? How long has it been? A month?' he thought.

According to Zexi, if his words were to be believed, the formation would be undone in the next few days.

So, Alex decided to follow his routine until the end. He called Pearl to train with him.

Pearl was still venturing out in the fog and came back as soon as he called for him. Pearl came running at him and as soon as he saw him, he jumped.

For a second, Alex thought Pearl was trying to attack him, but he was really just trying to get into his embrace. "Hey, are you that happy to see me talk again?" Alex said with a laugh, but then he felt slight shivering coming off from Pearl.

"Huh? What's wrong Pearl? Are you scared? Were you nervous because I left?" Alex asked.

"Meow," Pearl said, which rang in his head as 'Yes.'

"Aww, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have left you. There is no need to be nervous now; I'm here," Alex said.

Eventually, Pearl calmed down enough to train with him. After a couple of hours of training, Alex stopped and went to make some more pills of his own.

He was learning to add more than 10 ingredients now and that was incredibly hard. Not only did the entire cauldron get extremely volatile when there were more ingredients, but Alex also had a general lack of the same ingredients to compensate for his mistakes.

So, he had to be careful, and make his efforts have fruit. That was impossible when every 10th and 11th ingredient exploded the cauldron.

The most he had succeeded was a 13 ingredient recipe, and that was after nearly 30 different iterations. It was hard, and he complained a lot, but he still stuck with it at the end of the day.

For the next 4 days or so, he trained and practiced alchemy as per his routine. In this time, Pearl had grown to enter the 8th Organ Tempering realm, while he himself had entered the 6th Meridian Tempering realm.

On the 5th day, Alex was fighting with Pearl early in the morning when suddenly, something happened. While he was distracted, Pearl was able to get a hit in.

"Ow, Pearl stop," he said and looked around him. His eyes slowly changed from confusion to happiness when he realized what was happening.

"The fog is clearing up. Haha, the fog is clearing up," he said in excitement. As he watched the fog slowly started to dissipate and the open land that he was in started to shrink rapidly on itself.

As the fog disappeared, Alex could now see the barrier at it was. The fog disappeared and the space that it was occupying turned out to be nothing more than expanded space just like the one in the coliseum.

He looked down on the ground beneath his feet and found a hilt sticking out from the ground. "Finally, there you are," he said and bent down to grab it.

He wanted to see if he could pull the sword now that he was in the Meridian Establishment realm with Organ Tempering realm body.

He tried to pull hard, but it didn't budge even a little. He then pumped Qi into it in hopes of making a difference. Unlike last time when it was full of Qi, there was nothing around this time.

Even then when he pushed in the Qi, it barely stayed there for a second before it was rejected. There was no way he was going to be able to refine this sword any time soon.

So, he just poured in his Qi once more and the sword disappeared into his storage bag.

He walked over to the barrier and looked for something. He took out his True Sword and used Smiting blade to attack the barrier. The barrier was sturdy but the attack made waves that traveled along the surface of the barrier.

He kept an eye on the barrier and finally noticed something. He flew up high to a certain location on the barrier and used the Smiting blade once more.

SLAM

The barrier didn't make waves this time. This time, the barrier dissipated completely. Alex had managed to destroy the True Rank barrier formation.

Chapter 394: Caravan

From what Alex read about the barrier formations during his time in the library, he remembered there being written that one could destroy a barrier if they used a particularly strong attack on a weak point.

There were various ways to find the weak point of a barrier and what he had just done was one of them.

Barriers that were not sturdy made a lot of fluctuations on the surface when attacked and sometimes showed imperfections. One had to have really good knowledge about the barrier or barriers, in general, to be able to do this.

Alex didn't know much about formations, in general, to know about barriers, but he did have information about the barrier through Zexi's notes. According to the note, if the barrier had low efficiency, it could be destroyed in the same way Alex did.

Once the formation had disappeared, Alex immediately stretched his spiritual sense to the 35-meter distance so he could see everything just in case.

He ran around where the barrier was in a perimeter and found about 10 different formation flags planted there. He took all of them, as well as the ones for the spirit disorienting formation.

Once he was done, he decided to leave. He didn't know what direction he was supposed to go towards, but given that he was in a forest, he checked the sun and fully hid his body before speeding towards the north.

Just as he was about to leave, he felt something with his spiritual sense again. He checked what it was and saw that it was another formation flag.

Alex picked up the flag but didn't know where the others were placed, he checked for a few minutes and found another one, but nothing after that.

Whatever this formation was for, its job had ended a while ago.

"Hmm, I can't tell what material this is," he thought and put the flags into his storage bag. He walked further north. After killing many beasts and finding quite a few alchemy ingredients along the way for about 2 hours, he ended up finally seeing a roadway.

"I'm finally out," he thought. "Although, damn! Where am I?" he thought as he looked around.

There was no one to be seen around. He didn't even know which direction the capital was.

"I should ask for a direction towards the capital when I s-" suddenly, he heard a distant thumping. He wondered what it was and looked to his right.

Far away, he could see some movement on the road. He waited for it to come up to him. Even though the distance was quite far, the thing coming took quite a while.

As it got closer, he could see why that was.

It was a large merchant caravan that had a lot of merchandise. So it was moving very slowly. Alex waited for it to arrive next to him.

When it arrived, he saw that there were quite a few people there. Suddenly, pressure crashed on him from a True realm expert.

'What? Why is there someone like that here?' he thought.

"Who are you? And why are you blocking this road?" a voice came from above. Alex just looked up as a girl in a red robe descended from above.

The pressure was making him unable to move, but thanks to his body, it wasn't hurting at all.

"I'm just a lost person who needs direction," Alex shouted.

The girl didn't stop using the pressure and asked, "What direction?"

"I need to know the direction to the capital," he said.

Finally, the girl lowered her pressure a little and pointed behind her. "Capital is that way," she said.

"Oh, thank you. That means Scarlett City is that way right?" he asked as he pointed to the other direction.

The girl in the red robes was about to get angry when she took in all her anger and completely let go of her hostile aura. "Yes, it's that way," she said.

"Oh thank god. I will fly my way there," Alex said. "Thank you."

Suddenly the pressure stopped him again, only it wasn't trying to hurt him, only constrain him. "I don't know if you are a bandit or not, so I can't let you do that. You said you need to go to the Scarlet city right?" she asked.

Alex couldn't talk so he nodded. "Good, this caravan is going there too. You can take a ride in this caravan with me and my servant. That way I can keep an eye on you," the girl said.

"O-Okay!" Alex said. He had no other choice against a cultivator in the True Realm. 'I can't see her strength. It says mortal, but from the aura, it feels way weaker than the master. So, maybe she is in her first minor realm of the True realm,' Alex thought.

He was pulled and dragged into one of the caravan carriages where the woman was staying with her servants.

Alex looked to the inside and felt like it was a little too drab. Then he saw a girl who was looking at him.

'What's a mortal doing here?' he thought. It was very unlikely that someone could become a mortal and mingle with the cultivators, but here he was.

"Those two are my servant," the girl said and walked to the front.

Alex smiled and nodded towards the servant. The servant seemed to be with a woman who was sleeping. Alex couldn't see her first, but once he focused, he saw that the final woman that was also a mortal. He decided to ignore them and just enjoy the journey.

Along the way, he saw many things that he had missed when coming here the first time. He was always on the top of the deck of the flying boat, so it's almost impossible.

"Hello, are you alright? Do you want some water?" the servant asked after looking at Alex. Alex looked behind him and saw the girl with two glasses of water.

He took the glass and thanked the servant before moving along with his own job.

Chapter 395: First Invasion

Alex had nothing to do, so he just sat around watching the scenery. It really was very different.

"What's your name, mister?" the servant girl asked him from the side. Ever since Alex accepted the water, she had been staying close to him. He couldn't understand if it was because her mistress said her to do so or out of her own volition.

However, he very much preferred the company of this servant girl. She was wearing a simple white dress that contrasted the stark red her mistress wore.

While the master had a haughty appearance, the servant girl looked quite soft and amicable. It was a shame that the master had more physical beauty than her.

"Yu Ming," Alex let her know with a smile.

'I wonder if her mistress is a noble,' Alex wondered. Ever since he got here, he could feel the woman with the red robes nearby, but she never came back to check upon him.

'It's almost like they're treating me like a prisoner,' he thought. However, since he was getting a free ride to Scarlet city, so he couldn't complain. 'Although, I wish I went to capital first. I needed to buy some formation blueprints and formation flags to check with my thing,' Alex thought.

He shook his head; he could do that in the Scarlet City too.

"What's your name?" Alex asked the servant girl back.

"M-my name?" the girl got a little flustered but soon calmed down. "Sorry, nobody really asks me about my name, so I got a little surprised."

"My name is Ying Wu," she said with a smile.

"What about your mistress? What's her name?" he asked.

"Oh, I dare not say my mistress's name unless she's given me permission," Wu Ying said. Alex didn't know what to say after that; the conversation came to a stop. Wu Ying then had to change the topic to bring back the conversation.

"You look quite a strong mister Yu Ming. You are a cultivator too right?" she asked.

"Yes, I am," Alex said with a smile. "I thought people close to cultivators were always cultivators. How come you're not?"

"I- We don't have that kind of luxury. I have to look after my mistress and my mother," she said.

Alex turned around to take a look at her mother who was sleeping with a slight face of anguish. "Is she fine? She seems to be in pain," Alex said.

"No, she's not fine. Although, I doubt she feels pain, however, she's been in a coma for a few years now," Ying Wu said.

Alex looked at the mother's face closely. At first, he thought he saw a hint of resemblance in her face that he recognized, but it soon faded away. Alex turned back to look at Ying Wu and was a little surprised when he saw basically no resemblance between the two.

He didn't know if he should ask that or not. However, just from his gaze, Wu Ying seemed to have understood what he was thinking and said, "She's not my biological mother. She had just been looking after me after my real mother died from a disease back in my Mistress' manor," she said.

"Oh, my condolences," Alex said.

"Thank you. That's why I want to treat her as well; I don't want to lose two mothers." Wu Ying's face got incredibly sad when he thought that. He could genuinely feel the amount of love this girl had for the woman over there.

Regardless of if she was his mother or not, he was sure that she loved her dearly.

"Have you not gone to the doctors yet?" he asked.

"I have, but they didn't know what was wrong with her," Ying Wu said with a sad face.

"Maybe they could've helped if you stayed in the capital a little longer," Alex said.

"Maybe they could have. Unfortunately, we had to leave," she said.

Alex thought of something and asked, "Did you mistress force you to take your mother away from the capital?"

He felt that the master was quite rude to him, so it was possible she was actually a bad person in general and forced her servants away from the capital just because she wanted to move away.

"Oh no no, mistress tried her best to get my mother treated. However, we couldn't live there after the beast attacks," Ying Wu said.

"Oh, right," he said. He shook his head as he realized he was thinking negatively of the Mistress. 'Stop judging people by how they show themselves off. For all you know, it could be the mistress that's genuinely helpful, and the servant that's a disguised liar,' he told himself.

However, not everything had to be the opposite of what they seemed either. A person could be good on the outside and be good on the inside as well.

Alex refrained from making judgments for people quite quickly.

"The beast attack was really harsh, wasn't it?" Alex said while sighing to himself.

"Oh, you were there?" the girl asked.

"Yes, I was in the Annual competition a month ago. After the beasts suddenly attacked and I went to go help the people, it certainly was a bad time. So many people died, more were injured, sigh," Alex sighed once more.

Maybe that was one of the reasons his master didn't come searching for him. Maybe they thought he died during the beast attack. He hoped they didn't and kept searching for him.

However, it was impossible for them to search so far away from the city either. They wouldn't have expected him to get taken away here.

"So that's why you are moving away huh? I thought in the month's time, the city would've been built back up. It seems the Cardinal city might fall at this rate," Alex said.

"Cardinal City was the main target of the beasts, so during the first invasion, most of the beasts focused only on the Cardinal city. If it wasn't for the competition, the city would've ended in a disaster," Wu Ying said with a sad voice.

Alex suddenly stood up straight and looked her in the eyes as he asked, "What do you mean... the first invasion?"

Chapter 396: City

"What do you mean... by the first invasion?" Alex asked confused and a little worried.

"Um, what else could I mean? The first invasion, the one from a month ago. The one we were just talking about," Ying Wu said.

"Yes I understand that, but the fact that you call it 'the first invasion' implies that there was another one," Alex asked nervously.

Ying Wu made a weird look. "Don't you know? There was an invasion just a few days ago," she said.

"What?" Alex exclaimed. "There was another invasion?" He was surprised. 'Wasn't I supposed to know when the invasions occurred? Was that time just a coinci—'

"When exactly did it occur?" he asked.

"Like 5 or 6 days ago," Ying Wu said.

'Damn, It must've been during the time I went back home,' Alex thought. He couldn't know if he felt it or not, but he definitely missed it if he did.

"The sects are all back to their cities right? Is the Capital still okay?" he asked.

"Oh, no need to worry about that. Like I said, the first invasion was truly the strongest. The second one had strong beasts but not strong enough to give F-fighters any problem," she said.

"Apparently the attacks in the other cities were weak as well, so most of the cities are fine. However, due to the first strong attack on the capital, Mistress got worried that the beasts had someone intelligent amongst them and would come to attack the city with greater amount again," Ying Wu said.

"So the attacks are everywhere huh? Are the other cities doing well? " He asked.

"Oh yeah, most cities can handle the beasts even with a non-combat sect. It's the small villages around the empire that are facing the most problems. However, most of them aren't near the forest already, so it's mostly fine," Ying Wu said.

Alex started to worry a little about his sect. 'Did master not come search for me as much because she learned about what happened back in the city?' he thought.

"Yeah, so you see. It's better to take my mother out of there, despite it having some of the best doctors and Alchemist," she said.

"Oh, and where are you taking her?" he asked.

"I heard there is a good alchemy sect in Scarlet City, so we were thinking of taking her there," Ying Wu said.

"Oh, I'm from the Hong Wu sect. If you need any help, just use my name," Alex said.

The two talked for a while until night fell. However, the caravan still kept ongoing. Alex didn't dare cultivate around people that he didn't trust just yet, so all he did was think about the various things he had learned about alchemy.

Early morning, right before it was time for him to leave, he heard movements. Ying Wu opened her eyes as well, and soon there was a commotion outside the caravan.

"BEAST HOARD!" somebody shouted.

Alex immediately ran outside, but the woman with the red robe stepped in. "You don't move," she said. Alex wanted to help the people, but he didn't want to go against what the woman said.

Then he saw various cultivators walk out of different compartments of the caravan and start to fight the beasts. The beasts weren't weak, but they were easily overwhelmed by the True realm cultivator.

'I can't wait until I get that strong,' he thought. The woman in red was nothing more than a blur as she moved from left to right killing all the beasts with a single slice of her daggers.

"Wow, your mistress is so fast," Alex said.

"She's not bad," Ying Wu said with a smile.

Despite his willingness to help, it seemed that they didn't need to help at all. "YAWN.... I'm going back to sleep. What about you, mister? Oh,? cultivators don't need to sleep right? We mortals sometimes forget," Ying Wu said and went to sleep.

Alex logged out and went to eat with the girls. He quickly logged back and watched the morning scenery again. The caravan had already diverted down a path away from the southern forest, so they wouldn't have to worry about the forests again.

It was along the side of a mountain that was about as tall as the mountains in the Hong Wu sect. Once they crossed the mountain, they saw a small city. It took them 2 hours to go down the mountain to the city.

"We will stop here for the next 4 hours. Please feel free to go around the city, but do return in the next 4 hours. The caravan will leave with or without you," the owner of the caravan spoke out loud.

Alex wanted to leave and check out the town but the woman in the red dress intervened. "Where are you going?" she asked.

"Uhh... to the city?" Alex answered.

"Do you plan on returning?" she asked.

"Of course, I have to return back to my sect," Alex said.

The woman in the red dress waited for a few seconds, and then surprisingly stepped aside. "Come back in time," she said and walked into the room.

Alex was a little stunned that she allowed him to enter. However, he soon forgot about her and walked into the city to buy a few things. The first thing he did was buy formation blueprints and information on them.

He then bought a few more basic formation plates that he would need to try out on. He also bought a book that taught the most basic of formations that he could use as an anchor to learning about formations as a whole and the more advanced knowledge that was in his mind.

He also bought a pen that was a tip made up of a really sharp crystal tip. This was called an Inscription pen and was used to make cuts in a formation plate to carve the formations.

There were also various types of pens of different shapes and sizes. Alex chose the one that looked average as he was just starting to learn about formations.

Once he was done, he left that shop.

Chapter 397: Base Formations

Alex roamed the city for a few more hours before returning back to the caravan. The woman in red let him enter without questioning anything and she herself stayed outside.

"Oh, Brother Yu Ming, you're back. How was the city? Was it good?" Ying Wu asked as soon as he returned.

"It was okay; it couldn't compare to the Cardinal City, however, "he said.

"I doubt any city can compare to the Cardinal City," Ying Wu said.

Alex spoke for a bit and went to his corner before taking out a talisman. He was about to read it when it was suddenly ripped away from his hands and fell into the hands of the woman in red.

She quickly checked the talisman and returned it back.

"What was that?" he thought, but the woman would never say anything. 'Does she still think I'm a criminal and will harm the people in this caravan?' he wondered.

He forgot about it and checked the formation information in his hand. He slowly read it all and finished in about 30 minutes.

He put down the talisman and thought, 'so that's how it is. No wonder I didn't understand so much of the information,' he thought.

As he knew, formations were made run using different patterns. One could make that pattern by carving into a specific metal plate, or through connections of Qi that were made using a metal rot with a specially made cloth as a transmitter for the Qi.

Every single pattern in a formation was made up of multiple straight lines forming a symmetrical shape. Each of the single straight lines was called a stroke.

Strokes were what made the formation. You could have a formation when the strokes reached a pattern that could do something when energy was put into it.

Even if the metal plate was wrong and the formation itself didn't work, as long as the pattern was something that could be used, one would know by its absorption of their Qi.

Formations were ranked in two different ways. One was a ranking based on strokes and another was a ranking based on the number of individual patterns that were joined to create a formation.

For strokes, any formation that had less than 5 strokes wasn't even considered a proper formation.

From 5 to 10 strokes, the formation was called a Common Formations or Base Formations

From 11 to 30 strokes, the formation was called a True Formations.

From 31 to 60 strokes, the formation was called a Saint Formations.

Above 60, the formation was likely called an Immortal formation, however, no one was sure of that as making that many strokes for a formation were night impossible.

Similarly, one could use different base formations to put together a formation that brought together two formations to do something entirely different.

With 2 or 3 base formations, the formation would become a True Formation as well, and with 4, 5, or 6 base formations, the formation would become a Saint formation.

Higher ranked formations weren't known to use more than 4 patterns base formations, which were just simple base patterns.

Alex already knew the pattern for 2? base formations on his own. One was the Fire formation that he used a create fire for the alchemy. The second one was the communication formation that he discovered along with the fire formation.

He didn't know what that one did however aside from just doing some... communication.

He took out another base formation that he had just bought and started studying it. He had the Qi and energy source for activation, he had the metal plate for carving, and the pattern was a simple one that he could remember with just a single glance.

He took out the inscription pen he had bought and started carving. The caravan still hadn't moved so it was prime time to try it. The woman in red appeared right next to him but didn't disturb him.

He slowly carved the formation on the metal plate with one stroke at a time. He made sure each stroke he made was straight and without any ragged edges.

That was quite hard to do when you were not really knowing of formations but he still tried. The inscription pen was truly amazing. Instead of cutting away metal, it felt like the tip was simply removing what was already cut.

The cutting was super smooth and he didn't make a single mistake, or at least it seemed so to him. He felt like he had followed the blueprint to perfection.

He blew on it softly to throw away any remaining metal dust that was on the plate and looked at it.

This base formation had 7 strokes that were placed in a weird formation. Since the formation was done, he took out a spirit stone and placed it at the base.

He slowly breathed in and out getting ready to activate it. At the same time, the woman in the red robes walked over to the opposite side blocking his view towards Ying Wu and her mother.

"You made a formation?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"I heard you were an Alchemist though, how are you making formations?" she asked.

"Oh, I'm just starting. This is my second formation only," Alex said.

The woman looked at him with a scrutinizing eye. Then she said, "give me the information about this formation."

Alex handed it, and she read it for a few seconds. "Alright, try it out. If it does anything other than what is written in this talisman, you will have to suffer punishment," she said.

Alex sighed and ignored her. He then pointed his fingers towards the metal plate. Slowly, Qi was released from his fingers which flew all the way to the formation.

It entered the carvings and slowly filled it up. Once every single nook and corner of the pattern was filled, the Qi penetrated through the metal plate and made contact with the spirit stone on the other side.

Right in front of his and the woman's eyes, the formation activated.

Chapter 398: Copying the Chip

Alex and the woman in red robes watched as the formation activated. Suddenly, a gust of air appeared out of nowhere and blew both of their hair.

It was a steady breeze that one would appreciate on a hot summer day.

Alex smiled and said, "It works."

"Good job," the woman said and walked outside.

'This mistress is very weird; what is up with her?' Alex wondered.

"Show me! Show me!" Ying Wu came forward and looked at the formation. The continuous gust of air hit her as well when she came next to it.

"Oh wow! Formations really are such weird stuff," she said with a massive sign in her eyes.

"Are you interested in formations?" Alex asked.

"N-Not really," she answered as she got a bit flustered. "It's not like I can use it even if I was interested."

"How about you try?" Alex said and handed her the talisman with the blueprint to the formation.

Ying Wu took the talisman and was about to place it on her forehead when she stopped and made an uncomfortable smile. "Umm... mortals can't read these can they?" she asked.

Alex realized what he was doing and immediately apologized. He then just gave the formation he had made without the spirit stone attached and made her carve it.

Once he handed the inscription pen, she started.

She carefully carved with her weirdly normal hands that didn't seem to do any work. Her speed was very nonuniform and it looked like she was struggling to carve it properly.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Ughh... Y-Yeah," she said while clearly struggling to do a single stroke properly.

"Umm... You don't have to do it if you can't," Alex said.

"I'm doing it... Ugh, I just didn't realize that carving metal would be so hard," she said. She was struggling, but she didn't want his help.

Alex waited by the side. Thankfully, those plates only cost a gold coin, or he would be crying right now. Eventually, just before the caravan moved, she finished.

"Phew, I did it," she said as she handed him both of the formations back. Alex looked at the formation of his that looked close to pristine, without a single imperfection. And then he looked at hers.... And the most humane way to describe it would be a cheap imitation.

None of the strokes were of correct length neither were they straight. There were dents and scratched all over the strokes too.

The pattern was also not very accurate, but it was close enough.

"C'mon, let's try it," she said.

Alex nodded and pulled out a spirit stone before trying it on her formation. As soon as it was activated, a small gust of air appeared that surprised Alex, however, just as suddenly, it disappeared.

The formation didn't work.

"I'm afraid it wasn't good enough," Alex said.

"What? No way? But I tried so hard," Ying Wu said.

"Yeah, but sometimes hard work is not all are important. You also need skill and luck," Alex said.

Ying Wu pouted and left him alone. Alex shook his head and went back to studying formations.

Unfortunately, he couldn't do a lot this time as the caravan had started moving again, so he couldn't make any more formations at all. On the upside, it seemed that the merchants in the caravan had made a lot of sales in the last 4 hours, so the caravan itself would move at a quicker pace.

Alex remembered the rough map his master has shown him months ago and calculated that it would only take him a little more than 2 days to reach the Scarlet City.

He couldn't practice formations, so he stuck to the theoretical stuff. 'I need to get the chip formation here and try it,' thought.

He took out a talisman and closed his eyes to 'think'. At the same time, he logged out and got the chip from the table. He went back into the capsule and looked at the chip once before logging in.

He started drawing onto the talisman that he saw. Once he made as much as he could remember, he went back out again to look for more.

Logging out and logging back in. He did it nearly a dozen times; each time acting like he was thinking hard and then writing it down.

Finally, after 15 or so minutes, he finished it. He put the talisman on his forehead and checked it once more.

"Yes, it's all here," he thought. "Alright, let's see if I can really not find anything now."

He started learning the chip formation as much as he could. The very first and most surprising thing he noticed that simply blew him away was the number of strokes.

"Holy... that's 145 strokes. Huh? Is this really not a formation?" he thought. 145 was simply too big of a number for it to possibly be a formation that was possible normally.

'However, even though the chances are slim, there could be one with this many strokes. It's symmetrical, has straight strokes, and is carved on a metal plate,' Alex thought.

He started comparing the formation against many other base formations he had just bought, but it was too hard to derive information from a bunch of lines that looked like it could technically make up all the patterns in the world.

'Which ones are real, and which ones are not?' he wondered.

He continued studying the formation as long as he could. From time to time, he tried to make some formations, but unfortunately, the bumpy roads just didn't let that happen.

Ning fell and he still studied formations. Ying Wu made some liquid that she fed her mother and herself ate a very small portion.

She went to sleep next to her mother and was soon asleep. Alex wants a little disappointed that he didn't get to cultivate right now, so he focused on the formations once more.

Just as he was about to study, however, the caravan abruptly stopped, causing many people to be awakened. Then, someone cried out loud.

"BANDITS!!!"

Chapter 399: Vermin

"BANDITS!!"

Alex suddenly stood up and ran to the door of the carriage he was on. The mistress in red was already out and had a small sword on her hands.

The caravan was currently going through a large jungle that was not part of the southern forest. Thus, there weren't strong beasts here. However, that also made it the prime spot for bandits to attack.

He looked around and saw a commotion in the front; People had already started fighting. He could hear clashes of swords and spears from the front. He decided to go help them.

"Stop!" the woman in red stopped him.

Alex got a little agitated this time. Not even letting him help the people in such a time irked him the wrong way. "What?" he asked annoyed.

"Stay back here and protect the back. The front is likely just a distraction. The ones who will do the looting will come from the back," the woman said.

Just as she said that Alex could hear rustles from the tree side next to him. 'Oh, so she is not stopping me,' he thought. He was surprised.

5 people appeared on his side. The woman had already left to the other side to fight the ones that would come from the other side.

He looked at the men, a little scared, and saw that 3 of them held sabers, one of them had a bow and arrow and the final one had a spear with him.

Alex got a little worried. However, he soon realized that the bandits didn't have a very high cultivation base. 3 of them were in the Meridian tempering realm, and 2 of them were in the organ tempering realm.

This was going to be an easy fight. He took out one of the common swords and got ready to fight.

The current bandits were not very strong and couldn't harm him at all, especially with the True armor he was wearing. Thus he decided to use this opportunity as a test to see if his month-long self-training in the sword really helped him in any way.

He was still using the concealing technique, so the bandits couldn't see his cultivation base at all. Thus, they thought he was very weak.

The man with the bow shot an arrow towards him. Alex simply blocked the arrow with his sword and moved forward to attack the closest bandit that was using a saber.

He lifted the sword just a tiny amount, trying not to use excessive movements that could give openings for the bandits to attack. He immediately struck down which the bandit blocked.

Alex then slid his sword along the blade of the opponent's saber until he hit the hilt, and then twisted the sword until it was knocked out of that man's hands. The saber flew far back towards the forest.

'That's one saber dow-'

The man suddenly brought out a sword from his storage bag and attacked. Another man attacked at the same time, and Alex had to block with his sword.

He then twisted his sword again to knock them back and parried the spear attack that nearly hit his chest.

'I need to be careful. They're going for the kill,' he thought. He decided to get a little more serious.

Another arrow flew at him. He could dodge it, but there were Ying Wu and her mother behind him, so he needed to protect them.

He hit the arrow away and attacked again. He consciously made no use of any techniques and just attacked with his sword.

The bandits did soon resort to using different techniques, but from what he could see, these small-time bandits couldn't use strong skills. What they did use posed no problems to Alex.

He quickly struck down the first bandit with the flat side of his sword. He then fought the guy with the spear and incapacitated him as well.

The other two bandits tried, but they too failed against him; they just weren't strong enough. For the guy with the bow and arrow, it wasn't even a fight.

All the bandits were down on the ground unable to move.

"That wasn't so bad, but I need a stronger opponent to really see how far I've come along," he thought.

The bandits lay on the ground, grunting in pain. The commotion at the front had ended and it seemed the bandits had run away.

"What are you doing?" a voice spoke behind him. Alex was a little surprised and made some distance, but then he saw that it was only Ying Wu.

"Oh, you scared me. I thought there was somebody strong behind me and I couldn't sense them," he said. Alex hadn't dealt with a mortal ever in the game and didn't realize how sneaky they could be.

Ying Wu looked at the bandits and asked, "these are the bandits right? Didn't you defeat them?"

"Of course I did, just look at them," he said pointing at the bandits on the ground.

"Why are you outside!?" the woman in red suddenly came to their side and practically shrieked.

"I-I'm sorry. I'll go back in," Ying Wu said and left.

The woman then looked at Alex and the bandits and then asked, "You haven't dealt with them yet?"

"Huh? Yes, i—"

The woman immediately swung her sword, scaring Alex. However, he was not the target of the attack. A white light escaped from her sword and cut the bandits that were on the ground.

Right in front of Alex's eyes, all 5 bandits were killed just like that.

Alex's heart skipped a beat and he fought the urge to vomit. these people, that were possible real people in a real-world, died just like that.

He had clearly taken care of the bandits but the woman went a step further and killed them.

"Why are you soft with the bandits? They're bandits! One of them left alive is a hundred innocent dead in the future. They are the vermin of the empire. If you find them, kill them."

Chapter 400: Judgement and Morality

Alex stayed on the side of the carriage with his head drooped down. Just moments prior he had seen the corpses of the men just thrown away into the jungle.

Event the one attacking at the front had a few of themselves killed and they were thrown aside like that as well.

Kill.

He had made up his mind to kill any who could harm him. It was half made by him because he didn't want to reincarnate in the game, and half made because that was what he was told to do by his master.

He had killed 2 people by now. One was a clone, an already dead person that was being used by someone sinister to torture people from his sect.

And his death had been an accident.

The second one was somebody strong that wanted to use his power to have some things of his for himself. He went so far as to even nearly kill him to get the things he wanted.

And his death was something that technically happened as an accident as well.

Were they both bad people? Yes.

Did they deserve to die? Yes.

If he knew where their fate was going, would he have tried to change it? No.

Did he kill them? ... Maybe.

Alex still wasn't sure if the two people he did kill could even be called killing. One was a dead man walking and another was killed by something inside of him.

One could argue that neither of these men was killed by Alex. Even if argued the opposite, Alex was fine with it.

They were bad people and they deserved to die.

Were the bandits bad people who deserved to die? Yes.

"Then why am I feeling so bad?" He asked himself. "Am I feeling sympathy for them? No. I know they are bad people, but then why?"

The caravan moved along. He however still kept thinking back to the bandits that were killed.

"Is it because I now believe they are real people?" He thought.

He had hit the problem on its head. He had come to terms with killing, but that was only in the 'game'. There was no way he was ever going to kill people in real life.

Now that he believed the game to be real life as well, he was having a problem coming to terms with killing people.

Did someone really deserve to die just because they were bad?

Just moments earlier, Alex would've said yes to the question without thinking. But now that he realized what he truly believed regarding this world, his sense of judgement also followed his perception of the world.

If this world was real, then he would use his real-world morality here as well.

Did bad people deserve to die? No.

Then was he wrong in causing the death of the two that he killed?

There came the dilemma once more. He believed they deserve to die. There was not a single sense of guilt he felt for the two that he killed.

Given another chance, he would do the same. This opinion of his hadn't changed despite the fact that he was now aware of his perception of the world.

"Then how come I am okay with killing them, but can't think of myself as capable of killing the bandits? They are all bad people, so shouldn't it be the same for everyone?"

Just as he asked those questions, he realized something.

"Maybe it isn't; Maybe it doesn't have to. Why should I treat someone that treated me wrong on the same level as someone that treats other people wrong, but has never interacted with me?"

"It's natural that I hold contempt for people that have wronged me on a much personal level than the ones who did me no wrong."

"I don't have to feel bad about not killing bad people. At the same time, I don't have to feel bad about them dying as well."

"If I kill those who I think are bad, but then feel bad when others kill who they think are bad, then aren't I just a hypocrite?" He thought.

He then thought of something.

"Just because it's a real-world, should I bring my judgements based on another world? I felt bad because they were real. But that doesn't mean they didn't deserve it."

"People who do bad get killed in this world, that is the rule of this world. People who do bad get put in prison, that is the rule of my real world."

"Both of them are right in their own ways. I shouldn't let my morality that was set in another world askew my sense of judgement in another."

"If I feel like they deserve death at my hand, I'll kill them. If I feel like they don't, then I will do what I think is right at that time."

He finally looked up with a resolute face like a man who had overcome his inner demons. He would no longer be swayed into thinking one way or another based on what other people thought.

He had his own sense of morality and judgement and would act based on that. That way, he wouldn't be guilty of anything he did.

"Bandits!!" People screamed once more. Alex walked out leisurely. There were people protecting the front of the caravan, so he only had to stay around for the back.

Bandits came once again and he fought them again. These bandits were much weaker than the ones before.

So, he easily defeated them. Then, he did what his judgement told him to do.

Bring the bad people to the good people who had their own sense of judgement.

When the woman in red saw that he was dragging the beaten up bandits towards her, she frowned.

"What are you doing?" She asked.

"I don't feel strongly about them enough to do the killing. so you do it," he said and left them there before walking away.

He could hear the bandits being cut to pieces but felt nothing in his heart whatsoever.

He would no longer let the world tamper with his sense of morality. He would refine it on his own.

Chapter 401: One More Evidence

Alex sat in the carriage at nighttime slowly carving away at the metal place on his hand. His inscription pen danced along the plate as he carved strokes on it.

The woman in red looked at him with a glaring eye from the side, but said nothing.

Last night, when the bandits were all killed, She had returned to call him a coward for not killing the bandits and the conversation that followed it annoyed her.

"You are a coward," she said.

"Sure, you can call me that," Alex said paying no heed to her words.

"Don't you know how bad the bandits are? They kill, pillage, r*pe the people on the road. They are the worst people living in the empire," she exclaimed.

"I know," Alex said.

"Then why did you let them live?" she asked confused. The conversation was not going the way she had expected to. He didn't deny a single accuse of her.

"When did I let them live?" Alex asked as he looked at her. His eyes didn't show the same cowardice from the first time that led him to getting depressed for the rest of the night.

"You let them live! I had to kill them!" she said.

"Yes, and I was the one that brought them to you. You have the most authority here, so I will let you make the decisions. That was how I was raised, and it's ingrained onto me. This world will have to try harder if it wants to change me. Even then, I doubt it could ever do so," Alex said.

The woman was confused what he saw saying, so was Ying Wu who was to the side.

"Don't worry! I'm not daft enough to think letting bandits live is ever the way to go. If I'm ever alone and I encounter them, I will make sure to do what is right. I may not necessarily kill them, but I won't let them go away with their crimes either," Alex said.

The woman was very confused. She almost believed that she was talking to a different person right now. However, when she saw the resoluteness in Alex's eyes, she realized that something had changed in him.

Alex closed his eyes and started contemplating the formation from the chip to see if he could find anything from them again.

The night ended and the sun showed its face again. The caravan, however, however didn't stop moving. It wouldn't stop moving until it reached its next destination, Rosewood City.

Alex wondered if the name of this city was a coincidence or not, given that it was similar to how the cities in his own world were named.

However, he soon saw the red walls of the city from faraway and was disillusioned. Similar to how his cities in the real world were named after plants, the cities in this world— or at least this Empire— were named after the color Red.

Scarlet, Cardinal, Rosewood; Every single one of these major cities were named after a shade of red.

They finally reached the Rosewood city around late afternoon and stopped. Since this was a bigger city, they were going to stay here until tomorrow morning.

Alex hadn't expected that, but he didn't mind. The distance from Rosewood city to Scarlet city wasn't that far. If the map was accurate, at their current speed, they would reach sometime around 8 pm if they left early morning tomorrow.

Alex got out of the caravan and looked at the lush green trees of the Southern Forest. They were once more right next to the forest. He then turned around to take a look at the massive walls of the Rosewood city.

'So, this place suffered an attack as well?' Alex thought as he saw the constructions taking place around the wall. He walked up to the gate and entered.

Rosewood city had the First Grade sect called the Honor Sect, so Alex could see people wearing golden robes of their all the time. The other people seemed to be acting the same way they would always do.

'So the beasts didn't affect as much huh? That's a relief. Hopefully the Scarlet City didn't suffer much either,' he hoped as he walked amongst the streets.

The city itself was beautiful and vibrant, and he took his time exploring it to its fullest. He learned that the Honor sect was located at the southern end of the city, while a lesser known sect called the Noble Truth sect sat to the north.

The placement of the sects were surprisingly like that of the Scarlet sect. 'Was that a coincidence?' Alex thought.

He walked through the city and bought a few formation materials that he thought he would need. He also bought as many alchemy ingredients as he could.

Finally, as it got late into the night, he returned back to the caravan and got in the carriage where Ying Wu was looking after her mother.

"Oh, you're back," she said.

"Yes, I had to get a few things and lost myself to the beauty of the city," Alex said with a smile.

"Oh wow! I have never been to the Rosewood city. I wanted to come here once with my father, but he didn't bring me. I was quite mad at him at the time. But then I also asked him to take me everywhere so maybe that was the reason," Ying Wu said as she laughed.

"Your father?" Alex asked.

Ying Wu's face immediately changed. "Let's not talk about him," she said.

Alex didn't ask any more questions but secretly wondered if he was either dead or did something that made her agnostic towards him.

He quickly changed the topic and asked, "Why don't you go inside now?"

"I— I have to stay here and looked after her," she said. "Besides, I'm not allowed to leave anywhere without my— my master."

Alex sighed and was a little disappointment towards the woman in red. They talked for a little while, but then the woman in red came to tell them to rest.

Ying Wu was quickly embarrassed as she had forgotten that it was her time to sleep. She quickly said good night and went to sleep, leaving Alex with nobody else to talk to.

So, he took out a random metal plate and started carving the formation from the metal plate onto it.

He assumed that making the strokes would be quite simple and it wouldn't even take him a few minutes to completely finish it, but he hadn't realized how naive it was.

With 5 to 10 strokes, it was easy to carelessly carve onto the formation plate and make a working formation. However, with over 140 strokes, he had to be careful with each stroke.

If he made a single stroke in even the slightest wrong angle, the whole formation would start having problem. The other lines in the intersections wouldn't cross properly, the places that was supposed to leave small space would instead be covered, and in certain occasion, too many lines passing close by would have greater chances of making nicks in the formation.

So, he had to make sure to follow the pattern slowly and surely. He was very afraid to make mistakes at the start and he even did make mistakes, but over time, he gained more confidence with each failure.

Each one of the failed formations were a stepping stone towards a better, successful formation.

It took him the rest of the night to carve a pattern that was accurate to the ones on the chip. He made the final stroke and looked at it.

Aside from not using golden lines in green plate, everything else was the same. Even if the plate was different however, he should be able to tell if the formation was real or not.

He took a deep breath and passed his Qi onto the formation. He didn't need an energy source as he only wanted to tell if the formation was real or not.

The Qi went through the stroke and started filling them. Alex was looking forward to checking the formation but soon started getting scared as the strokes took forever to fill.

The more strokes there were the better the Qi they required. With his common Qi that hadn't even turned to True Qi had to work way more than what the other Qi would have.

Fortunately, his Qi was dense and robust, so he managed to fill every nook and cranny of formation. Once it was all filled, Alex looked at it with bated breaths.

For a moment, the Qi did nothing. It didn't move or show any signs of being in use, but then suddenly, it pierced through the plate to look for an energy source. It didn't find any, and so the Qi on the formation dissipated.

However, that was all Alex needed. 'It works!' he thought. He couldn't get excited or cry out about it. Instead he took it in as another piece of evidence that his theory was true.

He was all but absolutely convinced that he was currently in an actual real world. 'Now, I will just have to learn about what the formation actually does,' he thought.

There were other people who had tried this daunting task of carving a 145 stroke pattern before and Alex had seen them 'not activate' it. He was quite disappointed at the time, he had now realized that they were never going to ever activate it.

The metal and Qi quality just wasn't enough. Instead, what they should have explained that the formation was real.

'Better late than never,' Alex thought.

It was morning now and the carriage started moving as the caravan moved towards the Scarlet city. He asked the woman in red and she said that it would take about 10 hours to reach the city with their current speed.

That was more than enough to go to his classes and returned.

He took Hannah's car and drove himself and Emily to their classes. Once again, he entered to the empty classes.

The professors finally started giving out their assignments that would carry over marks for the exam. Alex couldn't keep playing games all the time now.

Once the classes were over, he went to the car with Emily and drove back home. He was very proficient in driving now and quite liked it. He even thought of buying his own car, but that felt too much of an impulsive decision right now.

He wanted to go on a little detour with Emily, but he had important things to do in the game now. Emily was understanding of that and supported him fully.

Once back, he had his lunch and immediately went back to the game.

He logged in and felt the carriage moving, they hadn't arrived yet. He stood up and walked up to the door and saw a vast expanse of meadow that reminded him of the forbidden fields.

Only these meadows didn't have grasses as tall. "Are we in the Gap?" he asked.

"Yes, We will soon reach Scarlet City, maybe even in less than an hour," she said.

The Gap was a name people gave to an opening in the southern forest that didn't have trees growing on them. According to some records, there were wars fought here before and so the land was mostly destroyed with no trees growing here anymore.

'The war from back when the Crimson Empire was shattered maybe?' he thought. That was the only explanation he had for the wars. He couldn't think of any other wars mentioned in the records.

The caravan kept on moving and soon they could see a queue of other similar caravan and carriages on the road waiting in front of a giant gate.

There were cultivators wearing mostly yellow, and sometimes green coming out of the southern forest. Alex saw all of this and smiled.

He had returned. He had finally returned to the Scarlet City after over a month.

Chapter 402: Trouble?

Alex looked at the giant wall that was under construction as well.

'So the beasts really did come here. Thankfully, the damage doesn't seem to be a lot. Even the disciples are already going back to the forest to hunt,' Alex thought as he looked around.

The caravan soon stopped and got into the queue of people. Alex looked towards the woman in red and Ying Wu, and then said, "Thank you for giving me a ride till here, I will leave now."

He then jumped out of the carriage. He was about to leave, but then he turned around and looked at Ying Wu and her mother.

"You guys will find help at the Hong Wu sect, right? Use my name, that should help a bit," Alex said.

"Sure… if we need it, we will," Ying Wu said without questioning why a disciple's name would be of use.

"By the way, do you have a place to stay? I can maybe arrange some for you, as a means of paying back the favor for bringing me here," Alex said.

Ying Wu smiled and said, "It's no need. I have a cousin who lives in the city, so we will probably take residence there."

"Oh, alright then. Goodbye for now. See you guys later," Alex said as he left the caravan and walked towards the gate.

"He… is not bad," the woman in red said as her expression relaxed after Alex left. "Seems quite genuine too."

Ying Wu smiled at the compliment from the woman in red. Not many people were able to get that. "You know…" Ying Wu said as her expression drifted off towards a pleasant imagination, "… if he was just 10 or maybe even just 8 years older, I wouldn't mind marrying him."

The woman in red showed a shocked expression. Ying Wu quickly got back to reality and her face got serious again. "Let's hurry and go meet my cousin; we need to heal her as soon as possible."

* * * * * *

Alex entered the gate and went inside. He was quite famous amongst the people of both sects now; he was the direct disciple of two first grade sect's Sect Leader after all. However, people mostly only knew him by name.

Not many people actually knew what he looked like. Only those that went to the competition did, and that was just a few amongst the thousands.

So, even though he walked through the street wearing dark green robes that caught attention left and right, nobody actually could tell who he was.

He watched around but not a single thing in the city seemed out of normal.

'Hmm… so the beasts didn't even make it past the walls? Then what happened in the capital must truly be a once-in-a-while occasion. Ying Wu did say that the second time was not as bad as the first one,' Alex thought.

Since the Tiger sect was much closer to the gate, he decided to go there. It was around 5 pm now, and the sun was starting to set. The sky was painted with a mixture of blue, purple, and orange.

He reached the small marketplace outside the Tiger sect where the various disciples were doing their daily shopping. Alex smiled when he saw this and walked past them.

He was wearing the Hong Wu Sect's clothing, but he didn't care about that right now; he needed to let the people know that he was alive.

The guards stopped him, but weren't disrespectful as from their perspective, he was a core disciple of an alchemy sect. He wasn't someone to make an enemy out of.

"Stop! Why have you come here?" one of the elders standing guard asked.

Alex didn't immediately answer and instead rummaged through his storage bag before taking out a circular badge.

"Here! I am a disciple of the Tiger sect too," Alex said as he handed them the badge. The guards didn't even have to check carefully to know that it was a legit badge, but that just made the situation more confusing.

Is he a disciple? Did someone give it to him? Did he steal it? They were unsure.

"Umm… I am the Sect Leader's Disciple. You can ask my senior brother Liu Xun to confirm it," Alex said.

When they heard the Guard Leader's name, they wasted no time and immediately called him. In mere moments, Alex felt a familiar spiritual sense pass through him.

"Junior brother?" Liu Xun looked at him with a shocked face. "You… You… you are alive?" he said, too stunned to do anything else.

"Hello Senior brother, it's been a while," Alex said.

Liu Xun immediately ran forward and started checking on him. "What? How? I thought you died; They said you died," Liu Xun said.

"Yes, stuff happened and I was in a place where I couldn't leave for a month, so I could only come now," Alex said.

"Good! Good! Thank god you survived," Liu Xun said. "Right, I should message master about it soon."

"Oh, I can message him," Alex said as he took out the communication talisman. He placed it on his forehead and tried telling his master that he was back, but the connection wasn't successful.

'Huh? What's going on?' he thought.

"Junior brother, Master isn't in the sect right now," Liu Xun then said. "He's still in the capital."

Alex was a little surprised. "Master is in the capital? Why? I thought he would return after hearing about the beast attacks," Alex said.

"Of course not! You were missing and presumed dead, so he and junior sister stayed behind to search for you," Liu Xun said.

"Oh," Alex said. 'So they didn't abandon me even after a month of going missing?' he thought. A special warmness started spreading through his chest as he realized just how much he was loved.

"So… we should contact them and let them know that I am back, right?" Alex asked.

"Y-Yes! Yes, we should do that immediately. Uhh… I will go ask the elders to message him right now. What will you do?" he asked.

"Umm… I should go back to the Hong Wu sect and let them know that I am alive too," Alex said. "Master and the rest must be worried for me."

"They sure are," Liu Xun said without thinking much, but then he froze. His expression changed to a slight bit of nervousness as he looked at Alex and asked, "So, you haven't been to the Hong Wu Sect yet?"

Alex saw the change in his emotions and wondered what that was for. "No, I just got back here on a caravan. Since Tiger sect was closer, I came here," Alex said.

"I see," Liu Xun said with a hint of hesitation.

"What's going on, senior brother? Do you want to tell me something?" he asked curiously.

Liu Xun hesitated a bit more and then spoke, "uh… you see. A week ago when the beasts attacked, we called the Hong Wu sect for help, they sent the help, but Sect Leader Ma never came."

"So, when we tried asking around a bit, the elders from the sect tried to dodge around with the question. So… I think something bad must have happened to your master," Liu Xun said.

"W-What?" Alex was surprised. 'Master is in trouble?' he thought.

His face immediately changed from confusion to resoluteness. "I shall leave, for now, senior brother. I will go and see what is wrong with my master," he said and immediately flew up.

There was a flight ban on anyone that was not the city lord, or the two sect's sect leaders. But Alex didn't care about that right now.

He suddenly hid his aura, put on the light veil to turn invisible, and removed all friction from himself to push himself to the limit.

In just a little over 5 minutes, he could see the gates of the Hong Wu sect in front of him. He didn't stop however, he was to go directly to his master.

Just as he entered the sect, an invisible aura passed through him, checking everything around him. However, it stopped when it noticed the nameplate with him.

By coincidence or by luck, Alex had forgotten the Tiger sect's badge at the hands of the two guards. If not, he would've had to face problems with the sect running formation right now.

As soon as he entered, he took out a talisman and started calling for her. He could tell that the messages were going through, but she couldn't pick them up.

He started getting more worried. He went past the sect valley and landed in front of the sect leader's house as he let the veil disappear.

He was running in when an elder walked out of the house. It was an old man with white hair, someone he didn't interact with a lot. It was the Grand Elder.

"Grandmaster," he said as he bowed deeply.

The grand elder was shocked to see someone appear out of nowhere, not to mention his grand disciple that was said to have died during a beast attack in the capital city.

"Yu- Yu Ming?! You are alive," he said with shock and happiness. "Child! You're alive."

His surprised face soon turned to a smile, then to a grin as he realized his grand disciple was really alive. "You… how?" he asked.

"No time to explain, Grandmaster. Is there something wrong with my master?" he asked.

Suddenly, the smiling face of the grand elder turned somber as he shook his head and said, "she is not in any good condition, and I do not know what is going on."

"Is— Is she inside?" he asked.

"Yes, the disciples are looking after her," he said. "Go and check for yourself."

Alex nodded and immediately sent out his spiritual sense to check inside the house. He could see inside the house clearly and saw a dozen or so female disciples gathered in a room.

That was also the room where Ma Rong was being kept on a bed with a water bath ready beside her. The female disciples were washing away any and all exposed surfaces of Ma Rong like her face and hands and legs.

Alex walked in after realizing it was okay. The female disciple was surprised at first, but then they got angry and were about to scream at him when one of the girls suddenly shouted out first.

"Mingming! You're alive!" she immediately ran up to him and hugged him.

"You— we thought you died," Zhou Mei looked in absolute horror.

Seeing the two of them act out like that, the other female disciple started getting curious as to who he was. But they didn't need anyone to tell them. Just by listening to the conversation a little more, one could easily deduce his identity.

"The sect leader's disciple?" someone asked.

"It must be. I thought he died," another person said.

"SHUT UP!" Fan Ruogang got angry. "We don't have time to gossip like this. "We need to heal Sect Leader's injuries, whatever they may be."

The women immediately started to get back on to their work and started applying the water bath. One of the women then suddenly brought out a sword.

Alex was scared that she might have had the intent to attack his master, but soon realized what she was doing. The buckets of water surrounding Ma Rong suddenly had snowflakes dropped onto them which caused them to freeze immediately.

"Is master too hot? Does she have a fever or is this something different?" he asked.

Even as he asked that the buckets of frozen water turned to regular water and the cool environment just created destroyed. Seeing the ices melt in minutes, Once could tell how much heat was radiating from her body.

"Do you know what's wrong with her? Why is she like this?" he asked.

The ladies looked at each other for a moment and then turned around to shake their heads.

Zhou Mei then spoke, "We do not know what happened to her, but it is likely something to do with where she went to recently.

"Oh," Alex said and asked, "Where did she go?"

Zhou Mei took not even a moment and answered, "The Forbidden Fields."

Chapter 403: Saving Ma Rong

"The… Forbidden Fields?" Alex was a little surprised. "But… she can't do anything there, why did she go there?" he asked.

"She… we don't know," Zhou Mei said. "We only know that one day she suddenly contacted all the elders and said that they needed to go take a look in the forbidden fields."

Alex looked back at Ma Rong who was fully unconscious. The other girl was constantly turning the water around her to the ice to maintain her body temperature, but the heat she was giving off was too much. The ice kept on melting within seconds of each time it was forming.

The floor was nothing but a puddle at this point.

"So, are the other elders in trouble too? They went with her… right?" he asked.

"No, they are all fine. They just suffered from the suppression, that's all. Sect Leader, however, got ill at first, and then the longer she stayed there, the worse she got. In the end, she couldn't even return in time when she fell to the ground, unconscious."

"The other elders had to carry her back," Fan Ruogang said from the side.

Alex thought about his time in the fields. Not for one second had he felt anything uncomfortable about the situation, aside from the suppression of course.

"What did Grand Elder just say? Does he have any hints? Can we make some pills?" Alex asked.

"No, he has nothing. Master came and checked too, but he has nothing either," Fan Ruogang said.

Alex went through the different pieces of information hidden in his brain, but he couldn't find anything. "But master should have been fine the other times she went to the forbidden fields right? How come she's only getting into problems now?" Alex asked.

Both Zhou Mei and Fan Ruogang's eyes perked up as they thought of something that the grand elder had just told them.

"Oh, that's right. Apparently, Sect Leader has never gone to the Forbidden Fields before this," Zhou Mei said.

"Oh… never?" Alex was surprised by this piece of information.

"Yeah, never. She was always a model disciple, away from controversies, so she never had the reasons to go anywhere. After becoming Elder,? and then Sect leader, she had fewer reasons to go as that was all done by the other elders," Zhou Mei said.

"That's good to know," he said. He stepped over the puddle as he walked towards Ma Rong. The other girls tried to advise against it, but he didn't listen.

As he went close, he felt something familiar, something— something was calling to him. He had to be very close to fell it.

'This… this feels like…' his eyes slowly went wide, "A Yang Jade!" he said out loud.

"What?" the girls got confused.

Alex hurried next to her, and he was sure that he was feeling the same feelings he got from the Yang Jades, albeit a little less powerful.

'Did master swallow yang jades on accident?' he wondered. He had shown what he could do to Ma Rong and now he was worried that it was his fault this was happening.

'No, don't think like that. First, see what you can do,' He thought to himself and stood next to Ma Rong. He could feel perpetual heat radiating off of Ma Rong.

It wasn't the heat of a normal fever or even that of any Fire element. This was the heat of Yang. His eyes went wide as he realized this.

'Master has yang energy inside her body?' he thought. He quickly grabbed her hands to see if he could feel anything.

"Ahh!" he suddenly left her hands and fell backward. Pain flared from his hands, so he brought it up to see that his hands were red as if he had touched something hot.

'But I'm a body cultivator; Normal heat shouldn't affect me. Also, my body eats Yang like it's nothing, so why did I get burned?' he wondered.

This time, he didn't go in blindly. He sent out his spiritual sense and felt the energy in the air— it really was Yang energy.

Before he could even think of doing something else, however, something happened that stopped him in his place. He got a notification.

<Sun God's Divine Yang Body is turning the yang energy to Yang Qi>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body>

The notification stopped there.

'That… that's the same notification I get when I eat a Yang Jade right? Only this time… I don't see any percentage,' he thought. 'So, master's body does have Yang energy in it.'

Thinking for just a moment, he realized what he needed to do. It would likely hurt him a lot, but if it saved his master, he would do it.

He quickly took out a cloth and started shoving the end of it into his mouth.

"What are you doing?"

The girls asked as they were really surprised by Alex's sudden actions. They were very hard to make sense of.

"Mingming, what are you doing?" Fan Ruogang asked.

Alex stopped and took out the cloth before answering. "I'm going to try and heal her. I can't say for sure it will work, but I might as well try," he said.

"You can heal her?" Zhou Mei's eyes widened a centimeter more than normal.

"No, it's not a guarantee," Alex said, "but I can try. It will hurt me a bit, and I might shout a lot, so I need this to keep my mouth shut."

He quickly shoved the cloth back into his mouth and walked up to Ma Rong. He was a little nervous and scared, as the pain he had just felt previously was very intense. Almost as intense as the first time he body cultivated.

He took a deep breath to deal with his nerves and caught her hand.

The moment he grabbed her hands, he interlocked it such that even with reflex, he couldn't leave it immediately. It didn't even take a moment for him to start screaming.

The screams were all muffled, but they were still loud enough to terrorize the girls around him. They backed away when they heard it.

Then, they saw the expression on his face, a face of pain beyond their wildest imagination. They were horrified at the thought of being so much in pain.

"Sh-Should we help him?" a girl asked. She looked at Alex's hands that had short yellow tendrils that were going up towards his arms. His hands that were touching Ma Rong were now charred.

"I-I will help him," another girl said. She couldn't seem to stand seeing someone so much in pain.

"No! He said he has away. Let's wait. I will help if nothing happens in a minute," Zhou Mei said. However, she too was nervous since she had never seen anyone in such pain before.

Fan Ruogang was starting to tear up on the side from seeing so much pain being expressed through Alex's face and screams.

Alex himself however was focusing on his pain the least. He let himself scream and emote as much as he could to relieve some of the pain, instead of withholding it. That should help him somewhat was what he believed.

He kept what little wit he could into feeling the power ripping away from his master's hands into his own. There was also the notification that was going off that he had to keep track of.

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body>

.

.

.

It was the same notification over and over again, without a hint as to when it was going to stop. He kept on screaming for what felt like a long time when something changed.

<Congratulation, the Yang Qi in your body has been purified and condensed>

<Yang purity at 70%>

<Purifying the Yang Qi in your body>

.

.

.

His Yang purity reached 70% and condensed once more, meaning his Qi was a little thicker and denser than before. Most of the time when he would eat a Yang Jade, the Purity part was where it all ended, but right now, it kept ongoing.

There was more Yang energy in Ma Rong than a normal Yang jade.

He prepared himself for more screams, but suddenly, he felt nothing. He found himself on the ground, along with Zhou Mei who seemed to have pulled him away as well.

"Are you alright?"

Before he could even say anything, the worried faces of the girls were up close to his face. Seeing them, he didn't have the heart to scold them for taking him away.

He pulled his cloth out of his mouth and said, "I'm fine. Sigh, you should have let me be… argh." He looked down at his hands that had the whole surface charred to black. Without question, his hands were hurting quite a bit.

Fan Ruogang quickly brought out a healing pill and fed him. The sweet scent of the pill wafted up to his nose and he quickly swallowed it.

The energy released from his stomach as it passed throughout his body, looking for anything to heal. The yellow tendrils going up his arm reduced until they were not visible anymore.

His black charred hands that were unrecognizable were healed as the flakes of his skin fell onto the ground to reveal new skin underneath. They still looked very bad, but at least they were healed to the point where one could start to see the palm lines.

"What? That was a 40% harmony pill!" she was surprised. Alex got not a single Qi as all of the healing factors from the pill had gone to his hands. She rummaged to get another one, but Alex stopped her.

"Thanks, Fanfan, I should be able to continue it a little more," Alex said.

"What? No way! Look at how to hurt you got from that just now. We won't let y—"

"Senior sister!" one of the girls interrupted her.

Fan Ruogang turned around to see the girl who just called her pointed at something. They all twisted their heads to see what it was.

"Urghh…." Ma Rong grunted a little. "W-What's… going on? It hurts…" she said.

"Master!" Alex called out.

"Sect leader!" the girls called out as well.

They all got close to her but immediately stepped back due to the intense heat. Only Alex could stay there.

"Master are you alright?" he asked, but there was no response. However, just the fact that she talked back was enough of a change that he knew what he was doing was working.

"Let me try once more."

He immediately shoved the cloth into his mouth and started grabbing his master's hands once more.

Pain shot through his body as his hands started to get back to being worse. The yellow tendrils returned as the Yang energy in Ma Rong's body was pulled into Alex.

His hands started to char once more, but not at the same speed as the first time. Even the pain was quite manageable compared to the first time.

The notifications kept appearing, but he no longer believed he would reach the 80% mark.

"Ughh…" his master grunted. He too was grunting at this point as the pain wasn't strong enough to make him scream.

Ma Rong turned and slowly opened her eyes as she saw Alex's face.

"A… A… Am I dead?" she asked with a monotone voice.

"No master, You are okay. You are fine," Alex said, but he didn't let go of her hand. What little Yang energy remained was still being dragged onto him.

"Yu Ming?"

Her eyes went wide as shock filled her face. She was about to stand up to look at him, but just then, Alex fully took away the last bit of Yang energy in her body.

However, it did not stop there. Suddenly, he absorbed something else, something cold, something dark. He immediately felt a connection between his master and himself.

Ma Rong slumped back onto the bed and Alex immediately left her hand. However, he couldn't help but look at his arms as he thought…

"What was that?"

Chapter 404: Awakened Constitution

Alex remained open-mouthed as he wondered what had just happened. He looked down on the black, charred hands once again that should have been burning with pain. Instead, he felt nothing.

Or more accurately, he felt numb, like the nerves in his hands was unable to feel anything for the moment.

It was like those times he held the ice from the freezer a little too long, and could no longer feel the flesh for a bit. It was indeed similar to those times as he could see ice forming on the surface of his palms.

The black, charred palm had a slight layer of frost on the surface. "How...?" he couldn't help but ask in surprise. That feeling he had gotten at that last moment... the connection... felt so new... yet like it was always meant to be.

Ma Rong was back on her bed, with no more heat coming off of her. Instead, cool air surrounded her.

GASP!

The ladies all around him suddenly made a gasping noise in surprise. Most of them had a hand on their mouth, unable to believe what they were seeing.

"What happened?" Alex asked, only to see them pointing below him.

He looked down at the puddle of water and found that it was frozen solid. "Ice?" he said in surprise. 'So it wasn't just my hand,' he thought.

The ice spread a little bit further than where he was standing, at which point it stopped. Beyond that, the floor remains water.

Alex quickly pulled out a pill from his bag and ate it. The cloth he had shoved in his mouth had already fallen somewhere halfway through the second time.

Unlike Fan Ruogang's pill, this was a True rank pill, so a single one of it was enough to heal his whole body, let alone only his palm. The energy of the pill passed through his entire body, a little of which was eaten by Pearl.

Once the energy passed through his palm, the charred part of his skin flaked off, and a newer skin appeared, completely healing him.

In fact, he even got 200 thousand Qi afterward as notifications flared to let him know.

Once all was done, he walked forward to wake his master up. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. "Master! Master!" he shouted. Touching her this time, however, did not trigger the connection he had felt just moments ago.

He shook her for a little while more, but she did not wake up at all. With nothing else he could do, he looked back at the girls for ideas. "What should we do now?" he asked.

Zhou Mei walked forward and checked Ma Rong a little. "It doesn't look like she's in trouble anymore. It looks like she's just resting. Let me call my master and grand elder," she said and took out a talisman. She immediately placed it on her head and called out to her master, who would then call her grandmaster.

Within minutes, Alex felt two figures appear outside. The second elder quickly walked into the room with the Grand Elder behind him and asked, "is it true? Is sect leader hea—"

His eyes went wide as well. "What?! Yu Ming-Ho-How are you here? You are alive!!" he shouted out in surprise. "Is it really you?" he asked.

"Yes, Second Elder, I am back. But let's not talk about that for now. Please check master," Alex said.

"Oh right," the Second Elder walked towards him and stopped once he reached close to Ma Rong. "What... why is it so cold in here?" he asked as he reached the point where the frost began on the surface of the room.

"What's going on? Why is sect leader so cold? Wasn't she hot earlier? Hmm... is her temperature changing in cycles? I've never heard about that happening before," the second Elder said.

"No, the second Elder, her body had a lot of Yang energy in it, so I took it away. Now she should be back to normal, only..." Alex gestured towards his master to say he didn't know what was happening.

"Yang energy? So that was the problem huh. Hmm... maybe she came in contact with one of those Yang jades she was talking about. You took away the yang energy from her body?" the Second Elder asked a little.

"Yes, I have a yang-aligned spirit root, so I can handle a bit of yang," Alex said.

"Oh, I see. Let me check what's wrong with her then."

The Second Elder went forward to check Ma Rong a little. He checked his wrist, her head, her breathing, and then her eyes.

"Hmm... that's surprising," he said with a curious face. He didn't speak anymore and kept on checking her once again to see if what he found out was real.

He didn't speak any further than that, so the rest of the people got curious too.

"Little Song, what's going on?" the Grand Elder asked from the side.

"Hmm... I-I think she's fine. I can't find a single problem from her body," the Second Elder said.

"Fine?" the Grand Elder got curious too, and at the same time confused. "How could she be fine, little song? Look at the surrounding," he said as he gestured the ice around the area.

"Yes, the surrounding is cold, Grand Elder, but her body is warm. Exactly the temperature a human body should be at. Her breathing is fine, and her eyes are responding to light in a good manner too. All I can say is her body fought hard for the last 10 days, so it is tired and needs rest."

"As long as we let her stay alone for a bit longer... she should be back to normal," the Second Elder said.

"Then what about the ice, master? What's that about?" Zhou Mei asked.

"That's a little interesting too, but before that, Junior Yu, what exactly did you do to sect leader?" he asked.

"Oh, I just caught her hands and took away the yang energy that was on her body. That was all," Alex said.

"Yes master, we saw that too. Junior Brother Ming had his hands charred fully and were in very intense pain as he stole away whatever it was that sect leader had. I even took him away from sect leader once because he seemed to be feeling a lot of pain," Zhou Mei said.

"Hmm... anything else?" the Second Elder asked.

"Anything.... Oh right, Sect Leader was awake for a split second before falling unconscious. It was at that point all the ice started forming," Zhou Mei said.

The Second Elder took what he just learned in and made no sound as he contemplated on the stuff. After a while, he suddenly started laughing.

"Hahaha!"

The people around him got curious. "What's going on, little Song? Why are you laughing?" the grand elder asked.

"I... I just had a theory, grand elder. I don't know if it is true or not, but it makes a little sense," the Second Elder said.

"A theory? Let's hear it," the Grand elder said.

The second elder nodded and turned to the girls in the room. "All of you girls, go out for a while. I will call you later," he said and sent out the girls in the room.

"You two can stay," he said to Zhou Mei and Fan Ruogang. "It will help you if you know about it."

The second elder then turned towards the grand elder and said, "Grand Elder, you know how Sect Leader has a body with Yin constitution, right?"

"Yes, that was one of the reasons I took her as my disciple, to begin with," the Grand Elder said.

'Constitution... is that the word used for bodies?' Alex wondered. He did remember Ma Rong using that word once in a while, but never explicitly when talking about the bodies.

"You see," the second elder continued, "I think sect leader's constitution might actually have been a dormant constitution that actually never showed itself. And now, for some reason, maybe due to fighting off the yang energy in her body, her constitution has become active."

"Thus we are seeing the current phenomenon. The ice and cold are just her awakened body passively giving off yin energy while she's not in control. Which also means, that she is alright now," the Second Elder said.

"What? Little Rong's dormant constitution awoke? Is such a thing possible?" the Grand Elder asked with a face full of surprise.

"Yes, I've read somewhere that people's constitution can indeed change after some fortuitous encounter. This must be one of the cases," the Second Elder said.

He then turned to Alex and said, "Good Work, Disciple Yu. Now because of you, your master will become stronger."

A rush of happiness shot up from inside as he beamed with a smile on his face. "Thank you, Elder. So, the master will be wake up soon, right?" he asked.

"Yes, yes. Let her rest a few more days. I will have the girls outside look after her for a few days. Once her body is no longer tired, she should be back," the Second Elder said.

"That is good," the Grand Elder said. "Alright, let's leave now. Also, come along Yu Ming, tell us what happened. How are you still alive," the grand elder asked.

"Yes, Grandmaster," Alex said and followed behind them.

The Second Elder told the girls to look after the Sect Leader for a few more days until she woke up. Only this time, they would just have to watch and not do anything else.

The girls nodded and got back to work.

Once the three men were away from the house, the Grand Elder asked Alex to explain what had happened.

Alex nodded and told him everything. He told him how he was captured, how he was trying to look into his memories, and how he died from trying to look at his memories.

The elders, especially the higher ones, all knew about Alex having a Spirit Cleansing lily and thus were sure about him having Spiritual sense. So, Alex had to hide almost nothing at all.

The only things he did keep to himself was that he told them that he didn't know who his kidnapper was and that the kidnapper's cultivation base was in the low True Qi realm.

"I see... so you weren't actually killed during the beast hoard, but actually were captured, huh. Who would've thought? Here we were sure you died."

"Do you know why the person kidnapped you in the first place?" the Grand Elder asked.

Alex had the explanation prepared so he just said, "He was either someone who saw my result in the Annual Sect Competitions or was someone who saw me buy this True rank Armor and wanted to get it. I believe it was the first one, but he never said anything, so I can't be sure."

Alex mixed a lot of truths with the lie, so neither of the two elders detected any flaws in his explanation. The Grand elder sighed after hearing that.

"The city was under attack from the beasts, so we had to fight them ourselves without best disciples and many elders missing. So, when Ma Rong and Wen Cheng heard that, Wen Cheng made Ma Rong return back here, or so I heard. He's still back in the capital searching for you I believe," the Grand Elder said.

"Yes, Grandmaster. I visited Tiger sect before coming here and so they already know about it all," he said. "I rushed here after learning that Master was in trouble."

"Huh? How would they know? We've completely kept it under wraps," the Second Elder said.

"Well, it was my senior brother that told me that Master was absent during the 2nd beast attack and that when asked, the elders never gave a clear answer. So he believed something was wrong and notified me," Alex said.

"Ah, I see. That would make sense," the Second Elder said and sighed as well.

"At least one of you returned back."

Chapter 405: The Courtyard

Alex cocked his head in confusion towards the last sentence that the Second Elder had just said. "One… of us? I don't understand, elder," he said.

"Sigh… After the beast invasion in the capital, when it was time to return, everyone was fine, except you. So, they spent a day searching for you before Sect Leader Wen asked the rest of the group to return back to Scarlet city with haste."

"During that time, we found information, through a letter left behind that Wan Li had decided to go find the bandits that killed his parents. So, he is now gone from the sect as well."

"He did not leave behind any information whatsoever as which direction he went to, or when he left. He might have even changed his face, so we don't really know where he is gone too. A few elders are gone… but it's hard to track down an alchemist when he really wants to stay hidden," the second elder said.

"I see…" Alex said. His eyes drifted away as he thought about how Wan Li must've felt when he learned about his parent's death. The hurt, the pain, the anger, the sorrow— he had kept them all deep inside him, never letting it show.

'He must've been thinking about revenge for a very long time,' Alex thought. He was about to think of something else when the Second Elder spoke.

"I'm leaving now. It's good to know that you are alive and well, Junior Yu. I will let the rest of the elders know about it," the Second Elder said.

"Ah, right. I was on my way to the elder's hall to notify everyone when these children called you, and you called me," The Grand Elder said as if he had forgotten to do something.

He then turned to Alex and said, "You don't have to worry about anything else, child. Its night time, and you must be tired. Go and rest. The rest will take care of your master for now."

The Grand Elder and the Second Elders turned around to leave.

"Grandmaster, wait," Alex said.

"What is it, child?" he asked.

"Do you perhaps know why Master went to the forbidden fields?" he asked. That was a question that was in his mind for a while now.

Grand Elder thought for a while and said, "You know… I don't think she ever gave us any reason to go there. The elders all learned about what happened in the Forbidden Fields and rescued the disciples from there."

"After that, once your master said there was something she needed to check there, the elders just followed her. However, just an hour or two after going there, she fell sick and had to be rushed here, at which point her sickness just got worse," the Grand Elder said.

"I see. I will ask the master directly if she had any reasons then. Good Night Grand Elder, Second Elder," Alex said as he bowed a little towards them.

"Go, child. Rest," The Grand Elder said and left with the Second elder in tow.

Alex didn't move for a while however and instead thought, 'Master must've been worried about the development in the? Forbidden Fields, so she went to check it. But the yang energy there got her ill, so she probably found nothing,' Alex thought.

'Sigh, whatever. I will think about this stuff later,' he thought and went to his home he hadn't visited in over a month.

He walked in and saw that the lanterns had already turned on for the night. He took one off and walked into the courtyard.

He placed it on the ground and took off the covering to see the flame on its own, along with the metal plate at the bottom.

"I really did remember correctly. I can't tell what metal this is, but this is the same one I drew on," Alex thought. He placed the covering back on the lantern and got up.

"Aaah," he said as he stretched. He really hadn't stretch this good in a while.

"Might as well take a bath now," He thought and took off his clothes as he jumped into the pool. The cold water washed away all the dirt and waste his body had accumulated naturally in the last month.

Without asking, he called Pearl out as well. Pearl for one hated being in the water. Every time he was called out, he got really flustered as if he was going to die anytime soon.

However, from the emotion that was transferred along to Alex, he only hated the water and found it no threat.

This time too, he started to splash around and didn't want to stay in there at all.

"Hate! Hate!" the message got sent into Alex's head as Pearl used his spiritual sense to talk. He soon swam properly without splashing around and made his way out of the water.

"You're going nowhere," Alex said as he caught Pearl once again. Pearl tried to get out of his grip, but Alex's strength when he combined his body and Qi was too much for Pearl to handle.

Pearl had to stay there in agony as Alex washed him carefully; Pearl had been out in the dirt for too long and had trained with him every day, so he really needed this bath.

Once he was done cleaning himself and Pearl, he walked out of the pond and let Pearl do whatever he wanted. The first thing Pearl did when he was let go was snarled back at Alex.

Alex found this quite amusing and thought nothing more. He quickly dried himself off and helped dry off Pearl too. After that, Pearl was no longer angry with him.

Alex wore the other core disciple robe of his and started cultivating. He got Pearl to cultivate as well and soon he was dual cultivating.

As he fell into a trance, once again like every other time, he fell asleep.

Around 6 in the morning, he woke back up. He looked at the time and thought that he had quite a few times to go before he had to go to eat breakfast and get ready for his classes.

So, he decided to go check on his master.

When he reached there, he only saw 3 girls there, the rest including Fan Ruogang and Zhou Mei had gone back to their houses in the Core Mountain.

The 3 remaining girls were still taking care of her, but it didn't seem like they had to do anything in particular. They could've left for the night and it wouldn't have mattered a bit.

Ma Rong was still unconscious and the floor was still covered with a layer of frost despite the water there being cleared away. With nothing more to be done, he thanked the girls and walked away.

He went to the disciple hall and saw if he needed to mention his return to the sect. Thankfully, he was exempt from the Contribution point stuff, or he would've been expelled by now.

He got a few spirit stones and some rather weak pills as the monthly compensation. Alex nearly laughed at the spot as to how bad they were.

'Two 30% Common Rank pill, and 50 spirit stones. Before I sold my first pill, I would've thought that this was a really expensive compensation that only core disciples got," he thought.

Now, he knew just what sort of luxury the core disciples had from being so talented in Alchemy. He checked the contribution rankings and the alchemy achievement rankings.

His name was nowhere to be found in the contribution ranking as he had no more contribution to the sect. As for his alchemy achievements, due to not passing along any pill for the last 6 or so weeks, his rankings had dropped down to the 50s.

'Should I provide some pills to up my rankings?' he wondered for a few moments. 'I don't think so. I can easily just give a heaven-grade pill and become an elder,' he thought.

Thinking that he went back to his house and logged out.

******

Elsewhere in the real world.

A car appeared outside a giant metal gate and stopped. From inside, Hao Ya walked out with a briefcase in her hand. She wore a long, sleeved black dress that ran up to her knees.

Below that, her skin was covered with stockings. She wore no jewelry except a single ring on her hand that held a large ruby-like jewel.

She didn't even wear a watch aside from the ring. Her hair was untied, but she had a sunglass pushing her bangs away from her face.

She walked up to the gate in high heels and pushed it open. She walked inside and entered the massive mansion that belonged to the man that was responsible for the game of Eternal Cultivation.

She walked to the door she had waited upon previously back when the man was just done making the capsules. She saw that the door to the room was open, so she decided to enter.

Inside was a massive room that didn't match the size seen from the outside at all. She walked in and went past a huge number of glass cylinders and searched for the man, but he wasn't there.

'Is he in the courtyard?' she wondered and walked back out.

Behind the massive mansion, was a small courtyard that was full of well-trimmed lawns and a massive pond in the middle. If one got close enough, one could see something very large moving inside that pond.

Just before the pond, the man was sitting in a lotus formation and had his eyes closed.

"You finally found your way here," he said as he opened his eyes.

Hao Ya frowned when she saw him sitting there in front of the pond. "You could've let me know you were here. I wouldn't have to walk through that room if you did," she said with a pout.

"Haha, what's the hurry. Nothing is going anywhere," he said with a laugh.

"Whatever here's your stupid data you wanted," she said as she tossed the briefcase over to the man.

The man's eyes lit up. "So, it's out already huh. I wonder how it has changed now," he said as he took the stack of paper out of the briefcase.

Once it was out, he started reading it slowly.

"Oh," he said in surprise at the very first thing he saw. "There are over 400 Million capsules sold around the 17 cities? That's a lot more than I had imagined. Wait, what was the number for the helmet again?" he asked and closed his eyes.

He thought back to the previous stack of paper he read and said, "ah right, 250 Million. So, we've had 150 million people join us on our venture huh? I hope some of them are good."

"Although I have to say, I am quite smart to realize that I would need such a large room to accommodate those stuff," he said.

"That reminds me, when is the next shipment of materials coming? The current supply is already ending," he said.

"I have brought it with me, you don't need to worry about that. Just read those data," Hao Ya said.

"Tsk, why are you so cold towards me from time to time?" he asked.

"You damn well know why," she said in an angry voice.

"Ah, yeah. Uhh… I will do something about that for sure. Don't worry about it," the man said and looked back into the records.

His eyes went over a list of data and sighed, "half of them died huh? That's really unfortunate," he said and kept on reading the pages more and more.

"Sigh… why do they keep on rushing through their cultivation so much? I thought everyone would know that's bad by now," the man said.

"Well, at least this girl with the only Ancient grade body has seemed to have slowed down a lot in her cultivation and is fixing her cultivation base right now."

"It seems not all hope is lost."

Chapter 406: Fate

"A girl is?" Hao Ya walked forward to check the information on the page. The man smiled seeing her get curious about the information.

"I can't see what her talent is, but that should be a pointless thing to think about. Especially with this body constitution," he said and looked to the side. "Jealous?" he asked with a chuckle.

"Why would I be jealous?" Hao Ya asked with a pout. "She's just at the True Realm; She still has ways to go. Besides, I would've been way better by now If you focused all the resources on me instead," she said. Her pout still remained on her face, unmoving.

"Sigh, you know I can't do that, Hao Ya. That would be like putting all my eggs in a single basket. If that basket got attacked, all my hopes would be lost at once," he said as he shook his head.

"Besides, if I focused my resources on you, there are still 2 glaring problems we need to look at. First of all, there are just too many resources with me for it all to be useful for you. You would instead just be overwhelmed a lot and couldn't do anything properly."

"Second of all, I can't be out there to help you at all, and I doubt you would be able to do it all on your own," the man said.

"Besides, look at how well this is all working. Just look at all these different body types," the man said with a light in his eyes that was similar to a child in a candy shop.

"There are so many Divine Grade bodies, even more, immortal bodies. I told you this place was a treasure trove; I did good in making this my base," the man said as he kept on checking through the name.

His eyes stopped at one name when his face suddenly turned serious. The girl lost all of her pouts when she saw him serious and got serious herself.

"What's wrong? Why are you so serious?" She asked, but the man did not respond at all. "Is there a God Grade body to make you act out like that? There should be one though, I was sure I checked everything," the girl said.

"No, there is not. The girl with the Ancient Grade body is the highest grade body as of yet," the man said, but he did not lose his seriousness at all. Soon, he fell into deep thought.

Hao Ya walked up to him and looked at the page he was looking at.

"That's… a Divine Grade body right? Why are you acting so serious? Even I have a divine grade body," Hao Ya said as she looked at the name with confusion.

"Yes, you do," the man responded. "But this is something different. I can't believe there is someone with this body out there, and that… I was the one that found him."

Hao Ya started getting a little fearful. "What is it, master? What's up with this body? Is it that good?" she asked.

"No… at least compared with Divine grade bodies, it's maybe in the upper half in terms of its ability. In fact, it could be the best, if not for a few detriments of its own," the man said.

Hao Ya's face turned curious as she asked, "Then why does your face have that weird grin?"

"I do?" the man said as he felt his own face. "Haha, I really do," he said as he fully laughed out loud.

"Stop being so mysterious and just tell me what it's about," Hao Ya demanded.

"It's not the body that is important here, but rather what it represents. This body had good abilities, but nothing to make me jealous. The thing that does make me jealous is his potential. It might only be this much for now, however…. No! I can't get my hopes up. That will only bring me to disappointment," the man said.

He quickly flipped through the pages and looked at the later contents.

"Ooh! Quite a few of them have God Grade talent. Nice! Nice! This is quite hopeful," the man said.

"Uhmm… Master," Hao Ya called the man.

"Yes?" he asked without looking up from the papers.

"Are you sure your talent measurement works at all?" she asked a bit timidly.

"Hmm? What do you mean?" the man asked. He looked up to see Hao Ya who was fidgeting a bit. "Do you want to say something? Go on, I won't mind," he said.

Hao Ya finally said, "Do you really think it's possible for there to be so many God Grade talent? I… I think your system made a mistake."

"That's…." The man mumbled, "possibly true."

"Talent is not something that is quantifiable and I don't have those massive equipments that could be used to measure them, and instead have to resort to something I made on my own. I can't say it is accurate, but…I think it's close to it," the man said.

"Is it possible that you set the bar pretty low for the God Grade at least? Just look at the numbers, the ratio between Ancient to God is quite bad. I think you made a mistake as to where the Ancient grade should be and where the God Grade should be," Hao ya said.

"Hmm…" the man thought. Talent was an unquantifiable aspect and couldn't be easily represented in terms of grades. Even the major sects had a problem doing that, and he was just a lone man.

The fact that he was able to make a system that could measure so many people's talent to a terrifyingly close amount was already great.

"Sigh, whatever. It's just talent. Ancient or God, the difference is barely noticeable most of the time. I can consider these all just Ancient Grade talents and my happiness wouldn't drop even a little bit," the man said.

"Ah, I see. Then, I must congratulate you on your good luck," Hao Ya said. "It's a shame you can't see who those talents belonged to. You could message them not to die," Hao Ya said.

"Well, isn't that something everyone knows by now? That they shouldn't die?" he asked.

"Yes, but see how many people died by now? Imagine if we told them not to die, and that death meant the end of the game. I assume people would be a lot more careful," Hao Ya said. The man nodded but said nothing more.

The man flipped through the pages.

"Sigh, Didn't you say that the public knew about taking their time with the cultivation? Why are there already some in the Saint realm? That is like one of the worst things they can do," the man got annoyed.

"They probably can't even reach Saint Foundation realm at this rate," Hao Ya said from the side as she saw the information as well.

"I think they know that there will be problems with their foundation, but they probably didn't care about it due to how much money they were gaining through the game," she said.

"Money? What is this about?" he asked.

"You know how they are earning a lot through the spirit stones in the games? Yeah, I think that is the problem. The people here care more about money than having a strong foundation."

"If I'm not wrong, these people make in a day what most people here struggle to do in a year," she said. "It's easy to see why they wouldn't want to stop getting stronger. These people can stop playing the game tomorrow and not regret it with how much money they got," Hao Ya said

"I see… I shouldn't have made the spirit stone conversion possible. Should I stop it?" he wondered. "On another thought, I don't think I will have to."

He focused back on the papers. The other people that did follow the advice and slowed down gave him a little hope.

"You folks are the best, keep doing what you're doing," the man said. "I can wait for a while."

He finally turned the page to the Spirit Roots.

"Oh right, I was looking forward to this," he said. "Last time I didn't have the results for spiritual roots so I was kind of lost when I found out that one of the techniques in the system was missing. I hope the person with that particular spiritual root is not dead right now," the man hoped as he checked it.

When he finally saw the spiritual root, he sighed in relief.

"Thank god he's alive," he thought and looked at the person to who it belonged. "Hmm… I'm sure I saw that name before," he thought and turned back to a previous page with the body constitution.

When he finally reached it, his eyes went wide. His eyes shook around as his thoughts spiraled into disarray in his head.

"Master?!" Hao Ya asked loudly, but the man was staring at the page with nervousness in his eyes.

"Master, what's wrong?" she worriedly asked. She had to shake him to awaken him from whatever deep, terrifying thought he seemed to be in.

"Hu-Huh? What?" he asked as he looked around.

"Master, what's going on with you? Are you alright?" she asked.

"Me?" the man said as he slowly looked down on the paper. "I-I'm fine," he said.

"You don't look like it. Come on, tell me what's going on," she asked.

"This… this is not something I can speak lightly," he said. Suddenly, a burst of fire appeared as he burned the papers to ash.

"This information cannot be allowed to be found out. Hao Ya, go and tell the people at the company to remove all information regarding the different people in the game. They no longer need to track anything," he said.

"Master! Why are you being so secretive? Come on, tell me?" she asked.

The man suddenly looked at her with glaring eyes. This was the very first time she had ever seen him this angry and authoritative; most of the time, he was just an easy-going person.

Hao Ya fell to the ground with fear seeing the eyes of what looked like a cold-blooded killer.

The man quickly realized what he was doing and stopped glaring. His expression returned to the caring master she knew all this time.

"Sigh! Hao Ya, please don't question me right now. These are not answers that you should know or deserve to know. If anyone found out that you knew about this information, death would be the least of your worries," the man said.

"There are things in this world that happen that cannot be explained as anything other than Fate. However, if fate truly is responsible for what has happened here, that could only mean… that fate itself worries for what it has in store for us," the man said.

"Now go! Make them delete that information now," he said.

Hao Ya finally got up and nodded. She didn't know what was going on still, but she tried to not think about it. Just as she was walking away, she stopped.

She fiddled with her hands for a bit and wiggled out her ring. "Here," she said as she threw it to him.

"Oh, thanks. I'll get on it," he said as he nodded towards her. Hao Ya nodded back as well and walked away.

The man fell into thought once more for a while. He walked close to the pond and sat down.

"I didn't think something so troublesome would arise from what I did, dear friend. I had hoped it would help me with my circumstances, but… it seems I have unknowingly brought forth a possible new age for everyone," he said as he fiddled with the ring on his hand.

"Haha, I can't tell you about it either; you can stop trying to pry me for answers. You will learn about it in due time," he said and stood up.

"Ahhh! Whatever. If fate wills it, who am I to deny it. I will just go restock the ingredients for now. Talk to you later, friend."

Chapter 407: Swine

Alex logged back into the game after returning from his classes. It was nearly 4 pm, so he had to go do what he needed to very soon since he didn't know the time frame for when it was allowed.

"I sure hope it's available all the time," he thought. He quickly walked out of his house and made his way to his master's residence.

He saw a few girls, different from the ones from this morning, taking care of her. They looked like they were slacking off quite a bit, but considering that they had nothing to do except literally just keep an eye on their sect leader.

He walked into the cold room and saw that his master's face was very comfortable and it looked like she was just sleeping.

"Hello," he greeted the girls. "Were there any changes since last night?" he asked.

The girls greeted him back and let him know that there was nothing of that sort happening. Apparently, she'd hadn't woken up a single time since she was asleep, not even a little movement.

'Her body must've really been exhausted,' he thought. Just fighting with the yang energy all day would have surely caused her very high distress.

"Are you guys giving her anything to eat?" he asked.

The girls looked at him with a weird look. "She's still unconscious. How could we give her anything to eat?" they asked.

"Ah, my bad," he said. 'I forgot this world doesn't have saline drips and such. Maybe they could give her some fluids— Or not. I guess cultivators don't follow the same rules as a normal sick person. As long as they have Qi, they should be fine,' he thought.

Now that he knew of Ma Rong's status, he decided to leave to do what he had been planning for the whole day.

"Oh right, did Zhou Mei or Fan Ruogang come here today?" he asked.

"Yes, for a while. But they left soon after," the girls said.

"Um… do you know where they are right now by any chance?" he asked. He needed at least one of their help.

"Uhh… not really. But they should be in their homes. I don't think they have anywhere else to go," the girls said.

"You guys don't have direct communications to either of them right?" Alex asked expecting nothing.

"No," all the girls said as they shook their heads.

"I see. Thank you anyway," he said as he turned around to leave.

"Oh wait," one of the girls said. "Sister Zhou's little sister should be in her house, and sister Zhou visits there a lot," she said.

Alex's eyes lit up. "Ah, that's right. Zhou Mei had a little sister. I'll ask her for her sister. Thank you," he said and left for sure this time.

He walked down the sect leader's mountain until he reached the sect valley and walked through the crowd. A few disciples turned around to look at him, but most inner sect disciples, let alone outer sect disciples, didn't even recognize him.

Only a few of them turned around to say their greeting to him at all.

Alex liked this invisibility he got despite being very popular in reality. The knowledge of him making a 60% harmony pill in the Annual Sect Competition was not something people could easily hide. Add to the fact that he was the sect leader's direct disciple, he was a direct contender with Wan Li for the most popular disciple in the sect.

He went past the sect valley and made his way to the Core mountain. The elders didn't stop him, and he easily went up the mountain.

'Oh, they already filled 2 more houses in the month I was away,' he thought as he looked through the houses. He finally reached the house that was his but gave away.

He sent his spiritual sense inside but didn't find anyone in. 'Hm… where'd he go?' he wondered, but quickly changed his thoughts and moved on to the next house.

He sent in his spiritual sense to check and smiled when he saw that all three of them were indeed there. He waited for a bit as it seemed like Zhou Mi was in an important step of the pill-making process. Once it seemed like she was over it, he finally walked up to the door.

KNOCK KNOCK

He knocked on the door and waited.

"Go and check who it is," Zhou Mei's voice could be heard from inside. Alex heard loud footsteps coming out of the house and smiled.

The door opened to reveal the large Kong Yuhan, who seemed to be a little annoyed. However, the moment he saw Alex, his face changed and he immediately got Alex into a tight hug.

"Brother Yu! You really are okay," he shouted out loud.

Alex smiled. "Yes, I am, Brother Kong. Sorry for worrying you," he said.

"It's okay. It's fine as long as you're fine. I was so afraid that you might have been really injured or something. I thought sister Mei was lying to me to give me false hope," Kong Yuhan said.

The two of them talked for a few more minutes before the Zhou sisters walked out.

"Yu Ming? Why are you here?" Zhou Mei asked as she walked out.

"Oh, I need your help a little. I can use Fanfan's help as well, but I don't know how to contact her at all," he said.

"Our help? What for? I doubt there is anything that I can teach you which you don't already know," she said.

Alex reached into his bag and brought out a pill bottle. "I need to know what this pill does," he said.

Zhou Mei instinctively took the pill bottle and opened it up to see what was inside. She took out one of the pink pills and placed it on her hands.

Alex was curious as to what she was trying to do and watched without saying anything. After a minute of checking the pill fully, she placed it back on the bottle and said, "I don't know what this pill is, so I can't help you."

Alex nearly burst out laughing when he heard that. "Uhh… I wasn't expecting you to know that," he said.

"Then? Do you know what this pill is? Maybe the name can help me," she said.

Alex shook his head and said, "I made this pill, and need your help with the testing. I wanted you to teach me how it works with the pill swine, how I'm supposed to understand what this pill does."

"Ohhh!" she said as she understood what he meant. "Wow, you made a pill of your own? Congrats, that's quite an achievement. Even Wan Li only has about 2 pills he made on his own, and neither of them came out any good. I, myself, have only made only one," she said.

Kong Yuhan and Zhou Mei were on the side, looking at him, absolutely dumbfounded.

"Br-Brother Yu, you made a new pill? How?" Kong Yuhan asked. "Just a few months ago, you didn't even know how pills were made."

"Haha," Alex gave a dry laugh. "I've had some good fortune come along my way."

Zhou Mei thought for a moment and said, "Alright, come with me. I will take you to the pill swine field to check your pills. I hope you have enough contribution points."

"Uhh… I think I'll manage," he said.

"Alright, practice what I taught you. I will return later," Zhou Mei said to her sister.

"Okay sister," she responded back.

Alex said farewell to Kong Yuhan and walked along with Zhou Mei. They quickly took a path and walked down the mountain on the other side and went to an open field behind the mountain with the alchemy garden on it.

"So that's what was behind those giant bushes," he said as he looked at the back half of the Alchemy garden.

"You've been inside there before?" she asked.

"Yeah, I used to work in the gardens at night, finding the requested ingredients," he said. "Master saw my talents at recognizing ingredients was fit for the job and gave it to me."

"Ah, I see. They haven't let us in for quite a while now, so I was a little confused as to how you even got inside. So you worked there huh?" she said as she walked.

Finally, they reached a section of the sect where a few elders were walking with many pigs behind them.

The place was massive, almost half as large as the sect valley, and all of it was filled with pill swines.

Alex got closer with Zhou Mei and they were stopped by an elder. The elder then saw who the disciples he stopped were and said, "Oh, it's you disciple Mei, did you make a new pill?"

"No, he did," Zhou Mei pointed behind her. The elder wasn't usually in the know about the disciples of the sect, so he got curious if he had ever seen Alex, but quickly stopped caring about who he saw.

"So you want to test on a pill swine huh? Do you know how it works?" he asked.

Alex shook his head.

"Alright, each pill swine you test on will cost you 500 contribution points. If the swine is fine by the end of your testing, you will get 250 contribution points back. However, If your pill ends up doing something irreversible to a pill swine, whether it be some physical or mental effects or death itself, you will not get any contribution points back. Do you understand," the elder said.

"Oh, uh…" Alex quickly took out his nameplate and asked, "Does my authority extend here too? I don't remember if master ever gave me that."

"What? What authority?" the elder asked, but still took the nameplate and checked it. His eyes quickly changed as he got serious.

"You are the Sect Leader's disciple that came back alive yesterday?" he asked.

"Oh yeah," he said.

The elder handed him back the nameplate and said, "Yes, your authority runs up to here. You can go inside and use any amount of swine as you wish. However, do try to be thoughtful of the people that work here and try not to use too many."

"I see. Thank you for advising me; I will keep that in mind," Alex said and walked past the elder.

Zhou Mei was pretty surprised when she saw what had just happened. She quickly ran behind him and asked, "What's going on? What authority were you guys talking about?"

"Oh, I have the authority to use whatever is there in this sect without requiring to pay a single contribution point," Alex said.

"Oh, right. I forgot you had that. Master never told me what it was for. He said you did something to gain all the contribution points in the world, but never what. Can you tell me?" Zhou Mei asked.

"Um…" Alex thought for a second. "It's quite a dangerous knowledge to have, so you will have to ask my master once she wakes up. She might scold me if I went around spreading sect secrets," Alex said.

"Oh, so it concerns the sect huh? Never mind then," she said and walked in front of Alex.

They reached a place where the pill swine were kept in simple, singular cages. When Alex saw them he was truly surprised. He was used to seeing pigs at his home with their pink snouts, open ears, and furry body.

However, these ones were different. These swine had no snout and instead had a human-like nose. They didn't have any fur on their body either. Only their ears were like that of a pig.

"These are creepy," Alex said as he looked at the uncanny face of the pig. If not for the cloven hooves and the ears, Alex would have certainly expected the pig to just be a really fat man in prison.

"That's what you get when you have something that is really close to a human in body composition," Zhou Mei said.

"Anyway, bring out the pills. Let's test them."

Chapter 408: Pill test on Swine

"Oh right," Alex said and quickly brought out the pink pills.

"Wait, don't we need to bring them out somewhere else? What if the pill turns out to be something like a poison that travels through the air or is contagious?" Alex asked.

"Don't worry. There is a formation carved inside each of these cages that will activate the moment they sense something enters these swine," Zhou Mei replied.

"Ah, I see," Alex said as he sent his spiritual sense behind the pill swine in the cage. There was in fact a formation etched on the metal behind the swine.

Alex looked at the formation carefully and realized that it was a True rank formation based on the number of strokes in it. Unfortunately, he couldn't really understand what base formations the True rank formation had in it.

It was not just the one as well. There were multiple formations etched on either wall of the swine as well. Alex couldn't help but wonder what each of the ingredients would be used for.

"Alright, before we feed it the pill, do you have any idea or expectations based on what it would do?" Zhou Mei asked.

"Uhh… sorry. I don't know what the ingredients I used to do at all. I was planning on asking Fanfan for help since she knows so much about the ingredients. Alas, I just hoped you would know it as well. I promise I will immediately go learn about the ingredients once I finish with this," Alex said with a dumb smile on his face.

He knew he was skipping many steps in terms of making pills, all because he had spiritual sense. But he also wanted to take the normal route sometimes so he experience what the normal alchemists experienced and hoped it would help him somehow.

"Uh… I'm not that great at knowing about ingredients either," Zhou Mei said.

"Oh, don't worry about that. I used the most basic of ingredients that any alchemist would know about. I am just skipping steps, which is why I don't know about them," Alex said and immediately started rummaging through his storage bag.

He found the talisman and handed it to her. "Here, this is the recipe," he said.

"What?! Why are you handing your recipe to me?" she suddenly shouted out loud.

"Huh? What's wrong with that?" Alex asked.

"You— You— Don't you know that Alchemists don't easily spread around their recipes. You can earn so much money if you end up making a pill that does something no other pill has done before," Zhou Mei said.

"Oh right, I did read about that, but the pill I have right now is honestly made up of very low-grade materials. So, I'm not sure it can even do anything well," Alex said.

"Besides, you are helping me with the testing, so letting you see the recipe is the least I can do," Alex said. This made Zhou Mei appreciate his honesty a little.

"Also, this variation of the recipe can only go up to 36% at best. I still need to fix the composition and structure of the pill," Alex said.

"Huh?" Zhou Mei asked with a confused face. "What's composition and structure?" she asked.

Alex made a weird face as he looked towards her. "Don't you know?" he asked.

Zhou Mei tried to think for a while and said, "I do believe I have heard my masters mention it once in a while, but I don't think they know what it means either."

Alex's face turned serious for a second. He was reminded of the Spicy_Gourd who messaged him to ask how he even knew about it. 'Is this really that bizarre of a concept?" he thought.

He decided to quickly explain what it was to Zhou Mei whose eyes widened to the point where it nearly fell out of her face.

"Th-There is such a thing like that in Alchemy? How come we never found out about that?" she asked in utter disbelief.

"I'm more surprised you didn't know. You should have noticed by now that moving the ingredients different from how it's mentioned in the recipe always changes the harmony of the pill for the worst," Alex said.

"Y-yeah, I have noticed that… but I just assumed it was just something that was obvious like how the formations just exist without anyone making them," she said.

'Just exist…' Alex repeated what she said in his head. He thought he was going somewhere with this, but soon realized he didn't understand it enough.

"Anyway, composition and structure help with the amount of harmony a pill can attain. The only problem is I can't understand what does what for the life of me," Alex said.

"Let's not focus on that right now though. I still need your help with the pill," he said as put the recipe on her hand.

"Ah, right. Let me see.." She said and started focusing on the pill recipe.

"Hmm… so you start with Black Vine Water I see. That contains the Water element if I remember correctly. Then you add a red leaf of a mulberry tree… hmm… the red leaf, so… Wood element?" she questioned herself.

"Water and Wood… I see your movement with the leaf is quite fast so the Water can only empower the newly released Wood, instead of the Wood weakening the water," Zhou Mei started figuring out the information just from reading the recipe.

Alex was quite surprised and honestly amazed by how good she was. He couldn't imagine how much labor it was required to learn all of that without using a spiritual sense like he did to witness it firsthand.

She had to go off of others' words to understand what everything did, then try on her own once more to make sure it was correct.

Not only her, the entirety of the alchemists in the crimson empire, or probably all 4 continents had to go through this labor. They needed years of practice to understand it all.

He sighed as he once again remembered how lucky he was.

Around the fourth ingredient, Zhou Mei started slowing down. There were just so many ways the energy release could go that she didn't know which one took place for the next one, and then the one after that.

By the 6th ingredient, she had already given up on understanding what the result of the recipe would be.

"Yeah, I can't really tell what goes on after that," she said with a sigh.

"It's alright," Alex said. "I know what happens." He went on to explain every little change in the elemental constitution that is resulted from each ingredient he added.

He had made the pills just too many to not know what would happen by heart by now. Zhou Mei was quite impressed with how casually Alex was explaining everything.

"You seem to know quite a lot about it," she said with a smile.

"I did make it myself after all. The pill took so many iterations to make that it would be weirder if I didn't know it," Alex said.

"Ah, of course."

"Right, now we need to find out what the main ingredient of the pill is," Zhou Mei said.

"Mist Essence grass and Tail Hair from a Mudhorse are always supporting ingredients so we can let it go. Black Vine Water… can't be it either. Fire Rat's bones are Fire aligned ingredients, while the resulting energy is Wood, so that can't be it either," Zhou Mei read through the list of ingredients once again.

"Twelve eyes of the Twelve Eyed Spiders were a possibility too, but I don't think that's it given it's a neutral item. Red Snake fang… that's Metal energy. So not that either."

"So, it's either between the Red leaf from a Mulberry tree, or the pit of a Highberry. Both of them are Wood aligned, so either could be it honestly. It's hard to tell," she said.

"Is it possible for the pill to be poisonous?" Alex asked.

"Hmm… I don't think so. The poison pills usually have Water or Fire energy as the final energy of the pill, so it's unlikely that the pill with wood energy could turn out to be a poison," Zhou Mei said.

"Then… can we just feed the swine and see what happens," Alex asked.

"I don't think we have any other choice. Wood energy usually affects the physical body, so we should keep an eye on the physical feature of the swine amongst other things," Zhou Mei said.

Alex nodded and took out a middle-of-the-pack pill in terms of Harmony before putting it in front of the swine. The moment the pill dropped to the floor of the pill swine's cage, it immediately ate it up.

Suddenly, lights shined from all around the cage as the formations activated. They had sensed that the pill swine had in fact eaten a pill. The formations weren't very advanced, but they did show the temperature, heart rate, and other information about the swine.

Alex looked at the numbers that came up. Aside from a few changes that took place here and there, Alex couldn't really see any concrete difference as time went on.

The pill wasn't actually doing anything to the pig internally. Alex sighed in relief as he realized the pill wasn't doing anything bad either.

He then tried to look at the uncanny face of the pig to see if there were any changes, then he moved to the shoulders and the other parts of the body.

"There! Look," Zhou Mei shouted

Alex followed her fingers and his vision was directed towards the pig's feet. More accurately, it's hooves. As Alex watched, the front hooves of the pig got longer and longer and only stopped after it was twice as long.

"So… my pill makes its hooves longer?" Alex asked.

"Seems so…" Zhou Mei trailed off as she checked the pig's vitality once more. "Okay, it seems all is fine with the pig," she said as she did something on the cage.

As Alex watched, yellow lighting appeared on the interior of the cage. "What's that for?" Alex asked.

"Oh, it's to tell the elders and other disciples working here that we've just fed this swine a pill. Green light for nothing changed, Yellow for some outer change, Orange for some inner change, and Red for dead," she explained.

"So, now the elders can come back and see that only the outer physical aspect of the swine changed and can either fix it themselves or leave it to fix itself in a few days," Zhou Mei said and got up to leave.

"Wait, that's it?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, we got everything we came here to find," Zhou Mei said.

"Um… what about the other aspects of the pill? Like how long it lasts, or how strong the nails are?" Alex asked. He didn't want to leave without learning it.

"Oh, that. We already found that the pill only changes the swine physically and that it wasn't dangerous at all. So, you can now test it on yourself."

"Eat 2 different harmony pills at least a day apart and see how much it affects the changes in the pills. Check the duration of the effect, check the strength of the nail, and even check if the pill works on just humans or beasts as well."

"Finally, once you've realized that the pill is good enough to be wanted by the other people, you can sell it in auctions. Or just ditch that and start making a new one if that doesn't work," Zhou Mei said with a chuckle.

"Ah," Alex felt like he had a revelation about something that was always there. "Right, now that I know what it is, I can test this out on myself. Thank you for the help."

Zhou Mei simply shook her arm saying thank you wasn't necessary.

They both returned back to the Core mountain where Alex spent his time until it was dark and went back to his house to test the pill on himself.

Chapter 409: Different Tests

Alex was handed a book about the different ingredients that he could end up using soon. The book didn't have that many ingredients, however, as such books were expensive to get.

"If only the ingredients book in the library explained the energies and effect of the ingredients just as this book did. Although, knowing how they looked and where they were usually found isn't that bad of information to know either," he thought.

He reached back to his home, and by that time he was done reading the book. He could've done that right in front of Zhou Mei and returned her the book, but that would be showing off way too much.

He went to his master's home to check on her and saw that she was still sleeping.

So, he returned back to his home and decided to test his pills. He sat down in his courtyard and took out the pink pills. There were way more than 20 of them, and honestly, he did not know what to even do with them.

He quickly checked the harmony of all the pills and recorded it in his mind. He took out one of the pills that was exactly 20% in harmony and waited as he took a short breath.

Although he was sure it wasn't poisonous, he still got a little scared about using the pills on himself as they weren't something he could guarantee wouldn't hard him.

"Dammit, I need to stop being scared so much. I'm pretty sure my body will destroy anything it deems toxic," he thought. He looked at the time and waited, waiting for the perfect opportunity.

The time was currently 6:34, so he waited. Then, it became 6:35.

He ate the pill. Suddenly, the energy from the pill spread through his body, and the nails in his fingers started to grow. They grew until they were about 2 centimeters longer than before and stopped.

"Damn, that's really long," Alex mused to himself. He didn't know the exact length, so he took out a piece of paper to mark the exact length.

"Now… do I just wait?" he thought. There really wasn't much to do other than wait and test how long the nails lasted.

"Wait, I do need to check their strength too," he thought and decided to test the nails of his left hand. He thought for a few minutes about how best to test the strength of the nails.

Finally, he came up with something. He looked through his storage bags and pulled out a few things to set up a little contraption for the testing.

He dug a little and stuck block of wood that was flat on top. Then he took a really strong string and tied it to one of the black cauldrons and tied the other end of that string to the nail on his pinky finger.

He pulled up the pinky finger until it was placed on the flat top of the wooden block. After that, he made sure only the part that needed to break was the only part that was part that was exposed from the wood's surface.

Meaning, he only kept the newly grown 2 centimeters of nail out of the surface. Once that was done and the cauldron freely hanging, he started to bring out the empty pill bottles he had.

He dunked them in the lake and put the filled bottle into the cauldron. One after another, he added one by one.

No matter how many he put in it though, the nail just didn't seem to break. He kept on putting in more, and that was when he started wondering, 'Does me being a body cultivator influence the strength of my nail at all?'
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He had just thought that when the flexing nail snapped in half. Thankfully, he had secured his finger in place, so it didn't hurt a single bit.

"Finally," he said as he picked up the fingernail and weighed the cauldron with all of the bottles in it. Even with his body cultivation, he could feel a slight weight to it.

"That… should be around 30 kilos hung from a single fingernail at the very front. Not bad," he thought to himself.

He kept back all the stuff into his storage bag and decided on the next thing he had to do. He was already testing the duration and had tested the durability. So, it was time to test the limitations of the pill and see if it affected anything other than a human being.

So, he called out Pearl.

"Meow!" Pearl called out, finally free once more.

"Brother!" Alex heard in his mind; he smiled. That was what he had been teaching Pearl to call him for the last few days in the formation and he finally did.

'I probably shouldn't have thrown him in the water the moment we returned. He might have called me that yesterday,' Alex thought.

"Hey, little brother," he started calling him now. "Do you want to eat something?" he asked.

"Eat?" Pearl's voice came into his mind, followed by an intense emotion of want. "Meow!" He shouted in elation.

Alex felt bad that the thing he was going to be eating was actually a pill. In addition to that, he wasn't sure of the effect of the pills on animals, so he couldn't really bring himself to force pearl to eat it right away.

"Sigh, I should at least test once on an actual beast," Alex thought and walked out of the house with Pearl behind him. He quickly took out a piece of meat and gave it to him for now.

"You want to hunt? I'm going out to hunt," Alex said as he walked through the evening sect valley and went up the outer sect mountain. However, he didn't go down to the gate. Instead, he hid Pearl in his robes and flew west from where he was currently. With him activating invisibility and completely killing away any aura, it was impossible anyone witnessed him leaving at all.

The walls of the Hong Wu sect entrance were actually the wall of the Scarlet City, so Alex could be outside the gates of the city from the very start and didn't need to leave through the city.

He could have asked the elders before he left, but he didn't know if he would ever get approval that way from them considering his worth to the sect.

He flew at top speed, but still took a little over 10 minutes to reach the forests outside of the walls. From there on, he wanted to rush inside, but he needed to scour the forest for what little ingredients he could find.

He dropped down and walked through the forest. His spiritual sense spread the full 22 meters it could and looked at everything. He took Pearl out, who was walking beside him to let him know of any dangers if he wasn't fast enough to catch any.

He felt another spiritual sense being spread out from right next to him that didn't intrude with his own and did its own thing. Alex smiled as he saw Pearl freely using his spiritual sense.

"Don't overextend it, okay? Keeping it within range lets you expend it at the same rate it regenerates," Alex taught him.

Alex started focusing back on his own thing. As his aura extended, his Qi extended as well, and one after another, he picked up any ingredients that he recognized, which was everything.

Some of the ingredients were abundant, while some were rare, but Alex made no discrimination and took all of them in.

"Ooh, that's rare," he thought as he saw something.

"I have enough of that… but taking more shouldn't hurt me at all. I can use it later," he thought as he saw something else.

"Finally, I needed that too," he thought as he saw something else.

He was like a kid in a toy shop, with all the money in the world in his pockets. One after another, he picked all the ingredients in the area as he walked deeper inside.

"What's the time now?" he thought as he checked the clock. It was around 8 o'clock. "Alright, let's search for a cat-like beast. Maybe a leopard or a lion," he said.

It took them another 15 minutes of walking to find such a beast. During this time, Pearl was the only one fighting and he ended each attack with a single punch.

Perhaps due to his child-like intelligence, he didn't know when to hold back and always hit everything at near full strength.

'I will need to teach him how to stay low,' Alex thought.

Finally, they found a jaguar beast that had a cultivation base at the beginning of the Bone Tempering realm.

"I guess this will work," Alex thought.

"Don't attack this one, okay Pearl?" Alex said.

"Not Attack?" Pearl sent back in confusion.

"Yeah, don't attack. I need to do something to it," he said and walked forward. The beast tried to attack Alex seeing that he did not have very high cultivation.

However, before its paws could even land on him, Alex grabbed it. He saw the nearly an inch-long claw coming out from within the fingers of the jaguar.

Alex then pulled out the pill and fed it to the beast. He used his Qi to force it down the jaguar's throat and just waited.

For the first few seconds, it didn't seem like anything was going to happen at all, however, Alex didn't lose hope. Then, the fingers on the jaguar started to wiggle a little.

Alex was still holding the paw next to his face, so he saw the nail claw of the jaguar increase by nearly 2 centimeters once again.

'So it does work on beasts. Not only that, but it also has almost the exact same effect,' he thought. He then let go of the Jaguar's hand and waited.

The jaguar was scared, but it still couldn't see any cultivation base coming off of Alex, unlike Pearl who was way back and had the aura of an 8th Organ Tempering realm beast.

The jaguar decided that it was not worth fighting Alex and decided to run away.

"Well, that is disappointing," Alex said. "Come on Pearl, hit him," Alex said.

Seeing that he was given the go, Pearl immediately dashed forwards and stuck the Jaguar directly on its back with his paws.

A massive cracking sound rang out a Pearl not only broke the poor jaguar's back but also split it in half. He heard the notification that said that his bonded beast killed something and that he got the materials from that.

However, the material he got wasn't the claw or the nails, so he drooped down to check on it himself. He first separated the hind leg's fingers to pry out the claws hidden in there and broke them out.

Then, he pried out the claws hidden in the forelegs and broke them out, but with a much higher difficulty. He then put the two together and started testing.

He did a few random tests like comparing durability and sharpness. Surprising, but perhaps not, the longer claw won every single comparison.

So, Alex came to the conclusion that his new pill helps animals gain better claws. He still needed to check the duration and the length of the nail that would change with each increase in the harmony of the pill.

But he could safely say that not only did eating the pill harmer neither human nor beasts, but in some cases, it enhanced their fighting techniques too.

"Well, that was a successful test. Wouldn't you say that Pearl?" he asked back. Pearl didn't know what was going on, so it just meowed in confusion, not speaking a single word in response.

Alex just shook his head and brought out another pill before placing it before Pearl.

"Eat this and we can go forward," he said.

Hearing that, Pearl gulped the pill down with no hesitation.

Chapter 410: Battle against the Lionesses

Pearl ate the pill and meowed, making an 'ew' sound in Alex's mind.

"Haha, you don't like the taste?" he asked as he smiled seeing Pearl's disgusted face.

"No," a sound came back to his mind. Alex waited for a few seconds and just as he thought, sharp claws appeared from inside Pearl's fingers that were about 2 centimeters long.

'20% gives 2 centimeter long nails, 16% gives 2 centimeter long nails and now 26% gives 2 centimeter long nails as well. Does that mean that the 2-centimeter increase in the pill is a constant regardless of the increase in harmony?' Alex wondered.

'No, I don't know if there is a difference in the pill's effectiveness between humans and beasts, so I can't make any conclusions right now. I need to wait until my nails go away so I can take another one. After that, I need to test if taking in 2 pills back to back causes anything. For that I might need to go find the swine again since that is too dangerous to check on my own,' he thought.

"Meow!" Pearl said from the side to urge him to keep on moving.

"Alright, Alright, let's go," he said and followed the path once again.

He walked for another half an hour and was starting to doubt if there was something wrong with his luck, or something was wrong with this place in general.

"There are just too few beasts in the forest for some reason. Did the rest die during the 2 previous invasions?" Alex wondered. Not only that, there weren't any disciples in the forest from either of the 2 sects that he came across.

"Damn, is there a curfew I didn't know about? That would make sense considering that the beast attacks happened twice already," he wondered. Still, he was out already, so there was no point in thinking about this problem.

He searched through the forest and found a lot more alchemy ingredients than he would have imagined. While their potency and number weren't to the same level as the ingredients from that one place in the southern forest, they were still better than what he had gotten the last time he had come to this place.

This time was especially better since he had nearly 45 meters of distance covered every second he moved. So, his harvest was a lot higher than before.

The ingredients he got started to refill the larger storage bags he had gotten in the cardinal city, while Pearl fought off the few beasts they came across.

They were now at the precipice of where the Organ tempering realm beasts started showing up. Only once they went deeper and deeper did the number of beasts start to increase once again.

So, Pearl got plenty of chances to fight the beasts and won almost all battles in a single attack. Only a few beasts needed more than a single paw attack to kill.

The beast corpses and ingredients were also now slowly filling his storage bag as well. They walked for an hour collecting both dead plants and animals as they made their way deeper into the forest.

Alex looked at his right finger once again. It had been nearly 4 hours since he ate the pill and it still didn't show any signs of changing. It didn't elongate, shorter, get weaker, or just fall off.

'This lasts for quite a significantly long time,' Alex thought. Since he knew the pill worked and make the nails stronger at least, he was starting to think of names to call it.

This was a pill he discovered, and he had full intention of naming it himself.

"Nail Elongating pill?... probably not. That sounds boring. Long Nail Pill... is also bad. Strong nail pi—" Suddenly, something entered Alex's area of Spiritual sense.

"Oh!" Alex sensed and slowed down a little. About 20 meters in front of him was a lioness-like beast that seemed quite strong. Alex smiled a little when he saw its cultivation base.

[Cloverstung Lioness - Meridian Tempering 1st Realm]

They were now at the Meridian Tempering realm. That was the perfect realm for someone to be Pearl's opponent.

Sensing the high cultivation realm, Pearl got wary too, but he was still confident in his own strength and walked forward to challenge the lioness.

The lioness got confused for a second watching the kitten walk out to fight, but soon discovered that Pearl wasn't as simple as he looked.

She got into a stance, ready to fight and so did Pearl. Suddenly, both of them clashed against each other and started hitting each other.

Pearl's 8th Organ Tempering realm Qi and Body cultivation based were just as strong as the Lioness' 1st Meridian Tempering realm, if not more.

They both slammed their claws at each other, but Pearl's body was smaller, so he was more nimble at dodging, while the Lioness got hurt by each strike.

Her patch of skin on the back that looked like a giant clover, the origin of her name, was starting to bleed. Alex could see that Pearl was doing quite a lot of damage, most of which he could associate with the new pill due to the long gashes in the lioness' back.

Slowly, but surely, the lioness started to get weaker and more fatigued, while the small Pearl was just as energetic as ever.

'He really is stronger than a 1st Meridian Tempering realm beast, albeit not by much. I guess he can be compared to a 2nd Meridian Tempering realm beast in terms of strength. Now I wonder what would happen if we put elements into the mix. It doesn't look like that lioness has any elemental attacks though,' he thought.

It didn't take much longer for Pearl to fully defeat her and finally the fight ended.

Suddenly, Alex heard movements. Another Lioness appeared in his spiritual sense, this one a little stronger. Alex was about to tell Pearl to get ready for the next fight when a much stronger lioness appeared once more.

He frowned a little. Pearl couldn't fight this one at all. After that, another appeared, then another, then another. Soon, there were around 10 lionesses standing in a group about a few meters away from them.

Alex hadn't managed to keep the body inside the storage as Pearl had just finished fighting, so the pride of lionesses saw the dead body of their companion and started to get angry.

"Pearl, come back here," Alex said as he noticed that even the weakest of them were at 1st Meridian Tempering realm, while the strongest was around 6th, the same as him.

So, he didn't think Pearl could fight them at all this time. Pearl quickly returned and jumped into his place in the tattoo. Now that Pearl was out of harm's way, Alex was free to fight by himself.

He took out a simple Common rank sword and got ready to fight.

One of the lionesses jumped at him and he simply cut towards it without moving an inch. The sword didn't cut very deep, but it did manage to send the lioness flying back.

"Tsk. That's not it. I need to make my blade sharper. Make it one with me," he thought and took a deep breath. He needed to forget about techniques and skills, and just focus on fighting with a sword. Only that way could he possibly get better as a sword fighter.

Once he felt like he understood what he needed to do, he dashed into the midst of the pride and slashed at one of the lionesses.

The lioness tried to go back but it wasn't fast enough.

THUD

The sword didn't cut enough of the lioness' head and instead just caused a massive open would. If he had used Smiting Blade, the damage would've been much higher, maybe even a one-hit kill.

The lionesses on the side jumped at him, and he twisted his body just enough to dodge most of the attack. Still, some of the attacks landed on him, and his clothes tore up.

However, the lionesses weren't strong enough to make him bleed, especially with the armor inside of him.

'This won't work,' he thought. He quickly took off the armor and stored it in, he then did something that most people would call idiotic, but he felt was necessary if he wanted to improve.

He took in all the Qi around his body and took away hid his cultivation base. He was now going to fight these strong beasts with nothing but his body cultivation.

Despite the chances of his being fatally injured right now being zero, he was in quite a lot of danger of being hurt badly. However, that was exactly what he wanted.

It was only at the depths of despair that one's talent truly shined.

Alex jumped back into the fight and started attacking the closest lioness. He slammed the sword on one of the lionesses and then twisted to jump over it before attacking another one.

He pushed that lioness back and blocked the attack from another one. He then twist his body to dodge the 4th one and sent back the one he was using his sword to block before attacking the one he just dodged.

He then kicked the ground before jumping backward to dodge two of the beasts. As soon as he landed, he immediately stepped back in to attack the two that were attacking him.

But midway through, he twisted his body to block the attack of the 6th realm beasts. He heard a crack as the sword he used to block the attack just now was broken.

"Tsk."

He clicked his tongue as he took out another one. He had many such swords in his storage and he would fight with every single one of these.

Then, he jumped back in once again. The 10 lionesses couldn't all fight at once and only 4 or 5 could really attack him at once realistically. He took advantage of that to jump into places where it didn't look like they could fight properly.

He ducked as he dodged one of the paw strikes and instead rammed the sword directly at the lioness. It took a bit of effort, but he managed to ram the whole thing inside the lioness.

The beast coughed up blood as it was half dead. Alex tried to take back his sword, but that was stuck on the beast and wasn't coming out at all.

He immediately let go of the handle and jumped backward to dodge to paw attack. He then ducked and rolled to dodge another one as he took out a sword.

'This isn't working at all. I need intent. I need the intent to wield a sword, the intent to fight with a sword, the intent to kill with one,' he thought.

He tried to feel the length of the sword without seeing it. He wanted to know where it was at all times without seeing it. He needed to know that.

He needed to know what part of the sword was cutting at the beasts, how long that part was, how far away that part was. And he needed to know it all instinctively.

He jumped back in to fight. He spun to the right to dodge as the first lioness attacked him, and stopped to slash at its neck. The attack cut more than a chunk of the neck and the lioness was starting to bleed profusely.

He turned around to parry away the paw of another lioness and cut the stomach of this one. It wasn't a deep cut, but it still would make them bleed a lot.

Alex felt like he was going somewhere. He felt like he was in the zone and the sword that he wielded was something he had with him all the time.

He suddenly dashed forward, dodging the attacks of multiple lionesses before he appeared next to the one that was breathing slowly on the ground, waiting to die.

"I shall make it quick for you."

In a flash, Alex brought up his sword and slashed it at the neck of the dying lioness. The slash cleanly separated the lioness' head from the body in one clean sweep, easily killing it.

Chapter 411: Intentional Attacks

Alex looked at the dead Lioness and huffed a little.

"That's one down," he said and carefully looked at the other nine. The other lionesses were also a little wary now that he had successfully killed one of them despite not having a cultivation base at all from what they could sense.

"Dammit! It's still not really working. I need to do something else if I want to truly fight without any assistance," he thought. Although he had stopped everything, he was still using his spiritual sense to check around him in case the beasts sneak attacked him.

He needed to be on guard at all times and Spiritual sense was absolutely necessary for it. However, he also thought that it was stifling his sense of danger and made his actions inhibited.

"No, not yet. It's suicidal if I stop my spiritual sense now," he thought. He wanted to fight at the worst position he could and come out on top, but he also knew his limits.

The beasts got hold of their fear and started making their way towards him slowly.

Alex looked at the three that had bad cuts on their head and necks and decided to go for them next. He jumped in once again to attack the one closest to him.

The Lionesses paw blocked the sword from hitting its head, but at the same time, it was also sent flying back a bit. Alex immediately used the sword to block another attack and used the momentum to turn around and hit the lioness on the back of the head.

He saw another lioness targeting his head from behind and immediately flipped his blade to stab backward. The sword stabbed through the neck of the midair lioness and killed it on the spot.

He was about to twist the blade to let it loose, but another beast attacked him from behind, so he had to let it go and roll away.

At the same time, another beast attacked once more. One after another, he kept dodging every single attack as the 8 lionesses attacked him one after another, not giving him a single moment of rest.

'Sh*t! They're trying to stop me from taking another sword out,' he thought. He was starting to get annoyed at that.

Another one of the lionesses jumped at him, but he didn't run away this time. Instead, he met the paw of the lioness head-on and punched it back. With his other hand, he punched the lioness on the now open head.

A large sound rang out as the lioness got punched with enough strength to the head get dizzy for a few seconds. Alex finally got enough time to take out the sword as the other lionesses couldn't attack with their friend on the way.

Just as the lioness was coming out of its dizziness, Alex swung the sword down on its shoulders. He barely managed to cut two inches deep when the sword got stuck in the lioness' shoulder.

Another lioness attacked from behind at the same time. He twisted through the air as he grabbed the handle of the sword and swung at one of the lionesses with the entire lioness on the sword.

The lioness got released from the sword and went flying into another lioness. Alex quickly looked to the side and saw the lioness with a large cut on its head.

He immediately made his way up to it and dodged its attack before delivering a massive strike on the already wounded head. This time, the strike went past the skull and actually hit the brain, killing the beast in one strike.

"7 more," he said as he looked around. He kept track of where the two lionesses that were slowly losing all blood through their neck were. Any minutes now, they would die, but Alex wanted to make it just a little bit quicker.

He dodged another attack and slipped through the many lionesses like a slippery snake as he made his way to the one with the bleeding neck and killed it.

Similarly, he went through them, losing a sword in the process, and killed the other one too.

Now, only 5 were left.

'Is this low enough?' he thought. He was wondering if she should drop the spiritual sense at this point but decided not to. The lioness with the 6th Meridian Tempering cultivation was too scary for him in his current situation.

So, he went back into the fight again. After another few minutes of struggle, he managed to kill 3 more lionesses. The remaining two were really angry now.

Alex was huffing a lot as using just physical ability to fight was very taxing. It was especially worrying to him that the remaining beasts were at the 4th and 6th realm of Meridian Tempering realm. However, with only 2 remainings, it would become easy to fight now.

Finally, he felt like it was okay to let go of his worries and took in his spiritual sense as well. He was purely going to use his sword fighting techniques to fight the two beasts.

With no more spiritual sense, he could kiss goodbye his perfect guard, but he needed to do that to improve.

"Come!" he shouted at the two beasts.

He didn't wait for the two of them to come and jumped at them himself. His sword wasn't strong enough to harm them at once, and his body wasn't strong enough to survive multiple of their hits, but he still ran towards them.

He struck the weaker lioness and dodged when the stronger one attacked. He fought the two beasts and the more he did it the more he frowned.

'This is not what master mentioned. I'm still not thinking of the sword as part of me, and me as part of the sword. I let the sword have intent, and the sword gives me its sharpness,' he thought.

He felt like he was understanding something that was right in front of him but was just out of reach.

'Intent, I should let the sword know my intent. No, the sword is me, I am the sword. I don't want the sword to cut. No, I... want me to cut the lioness.'

'CUT'

He let himself know of his intent, and let the sword do its own thing. As long as he and the sword were one, it would understand.

He went forward and slashed.

He didn't know if he was hallucinating it or not, but he felt like his sword has a simple white outline to it. However, it was too faint to know if it was really there because it was, or because he wanted there to be one.

He sliced at the weaker lioness who barely managed to dodge it. However, even as it dodged the attack, a thin amount of hair fell from the lioness' neck.

'I did it?' his eyes brightened as he thought that.

To him, that was definitely a success, however small it was. He was starting to figure out the concept behind the intents and he was so happy that he wanted to celebrate. All of a sudden, he tried to move to the side, but...

BANG

He was suddenly hit from the side due to a moment of carelessness. He flew through the air until he hit a tree and broke it in half.

"Ughh!" he said as he stood up. As soon as he opened his eyes, he saw one of the lionesses attacking him, so he rolled over to dodge.

'I can't focus elsewhere right now,' he thought and quickly got up despite the pain on his right ribs. He truly believed that some of the ribs had to have been broken for sure.

Still, he would have to be beaten up a few more times to be dangerously injured.

He stopped thinking about what just happened and prepared to attack once more.

'I am the sword. I want to cut. I need to cut. CUT!' he thought once more and dashed forward to slash at the weaker lioness who tried to block his attack.

However, as if the sword had gained a new life and increased sharpness, it cut through the paw-like it was a piece of butter.

"RAWR!!" the lioness screamed in pain and jumped back. Alex was surprised once more.

'T-that's way too high damage. That's at least in the middle of Meridian Tempering realm,' Alex thought. Up until now, he had been hacking and slashing really hard to cleave through the neck of the lionesses, but the attack just now didn't have as much force behind it.

Due to his focus behind the intent, his attack hadn't had as much intensity behind it, and it still managed to do quite a lot of damage.

'Do intents not follow a person's cultivation base and all have their own damage?' he wondered. He thought back to the competition in which Du Yuhan fought 3 similar strength puppets and overpowered them by just increasing the intent.

Then he won against that guy from his own group by revealing the Sword Qi, which was the next stage after Sword Intent. Even though his opponent's cultivation base was clearly higher, Du Yuhan even managed to beat him.

In fact, Du Yuhan had even managed to push back a True Realm cultivator.

"Does that mean..." He quickly stopped. This was simply too early to be making conclusions and he needed to keep on fighting.

He quickly dodged and rolled aside when the stronger lioness attacked. The lioness didn't let him take any rest and came back to attack every time he dodged.

Alex jumped back, rolled to the side, and dashed sideways so many times that he was starting to get dizzy. 'This isn't going anywhere,' he thought and quickly started calling back his intent.

He needed focus as the intent was in no way natural to him yet if he could even call it that at the level it was at. However, the lioness kept on attacking without stopping.

Alex was starting to get a little tired as well. He couldn't keep it going and needed to finish it soon. Suddenly, he stopped dodging.

The weaker lioness had decided to join the attack, and he welcomed it with open arms. He got hit on the sword, but at the same time, jumped backward to lessen the blow. He was using the momentum from the lioness' attack to get away.

'Finally,' he thought. The lionesses ran towards him, but he didn't need to worry about them as he had ample time to prepare now.

'Cut... cut... CUT!!' he thought to himself. The white light that tethered on the edge of visibility and invisibility appeared once more as it covered the entirety of his sword.

The stronger lioness attacked him right then. He rolled forward to dodge the paw and came face to face with the weaker one. The weaker lioness used its left paw to attack him, while he used his sword in return.

"CUT!"

His sword passed through the left paw and well and went halfway into the skull. He couldn't fully cleave the skull, but that wasn't necessary as he had already damaged the brain and the beast was dead.

He pulled the sword out and turned around to fight the final opponent.

Both of them wasted no time and ran towards each other. Alex's sword was still glowing a little from the intent he had set up.

'CUT!'

He kept reminding himself as he fought the beast. Somehow, his sword wasn't strong enough to cut through the body of the stronger lioness as he did with the weaker one.

'So that's the extent of my sword intent's damage?' he wondered. Still, the sword cut the skin and flesh of the lioness pretty easily and after a minute of continuous fighting, he managed to put so much wound on the lioness that it was simply too much for the lioness to continue fighting.

Alex struck aside the paw and took the opportunity to drive the sword through the left eye of the lioness, killing it finally.

Chapter 412: Visit

Alex immediately let go of his restraints on the spiritual sense and his cultivation. He also brought out a healing pill and ate it as he sighed.

'Only 3 more remaining huh? Should I ask the master for more once she wakes up or should I make my own?' he thought.

The energy of the pill entered his body and quickly healed the wounds on his rib cage. The bruise slowly disappeared and he stopped feeling pain.

'Common Rank pills can't do it that fast right? You really do want a True Rank pill. I wonder when I will be able to make those,' he thought. 'First I need to convert my common Qi to True Qi.'

He checked his surroundings and made sure there was nothing that could sneak attack him right now. He took out the Onyx armor and wore it again. Now that he had the slightest bit of knowledge on how Intents worked, he no longer needed to force himself into such situations.

He looked down at his hands and chuckled a little. Somehow, during all of those minutes he spend fighting, his long nails had somehow not broken despite the heated battle.

'Well, they are durable, I can give them that,' he thought. He looked at the dense forest and wondered if it was at all a good idea to bring out Pearl now.

'Hm… since Meridian Tempering realm beasts are starting to be common now, I should just fight on my own. No need to bring Pearl out and put him in danger,' he decided. He quickly changed the torn robe as well and walked deeper into the forest.

He didn't forget to pick up the alchemy ingredients growing in the forest during the entire time.

'Wasn't it around this deep when senior sister found the Spirit Cleansing lily? Maybe there are some here too,' he thought with optimism in his head.

Every time he came across a beast, he only fought it using his newly founded, still terrible sword intent. It didn't take long for him to realize that his sword intent was about as strong as the 3rd Meridian Tempering realm in terms of damage. It was because of his physical body that its damage during the fight had increased to 5th Meridian Tempering.

'I wonder… if I fully master this, will my damage go higher than it already is?' Alex thought. He thought that was a little too strong and started wondering why everyone didn't try to learn intents from the very start.

If people knew that intent could make your attacks stronger, he didn't doubt they would flock to it. He also didn't doubt that the people who cultivated didn't all know about intent.

'Then, why do they choose not to?' he thought.
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He got his answer very soon. It was during his fight with a bird in the 9th Meridian Tempering realm when he started feeling his body getting unusually fatigued.

Not only that, it felt like he needed sleep very soon, or else he would fall down in the forest.

'I see,' he thought. 'No wonder they don't learn it. It's so taxing on the body and mind.'

The body wasn't as bad as a little bit of resting could help him get back on track, but the mind was a different thing. It wasn't easy to refresh a fatigued mind.

And after forcing the way one thought every time one thought, one's mind really did get fatigued.

'I can probably do much better once I find it easier to use Intent. Still, my mind will probably get fatigued then too,' he thought.

Seeing that he was dangerously close to falling asleep, he quickly concealed his cultivation fully and put on the invisible veil. Then, he started walking back, but while taking a different path.

Once again, he had all the ingredients he could want right there. 'I should do this more often,' he thought. After an hour of walking, he brought out Pearl and let him walk next to him.

It was now safe for Pearl to come out again. Pearl happily fought all the beasts they came across and killed them all. It was still shocking to Alex to see this little fluffball kill so many giant beasts like they were nothing.

Soon they were out of the forest. Alex quickly put Pearl back into the tattoo and flew back to the sect. He quietly landed in the outer sect and walked his way back to his house.

Once inside, he finally laid on the grass in the courtyard as the fatigue caught up to him. 'Yeah, I'm not going to use Intent so freely again,' he thought.

Thankfully, he could log out now and not have to worry about this mental fatigue for now.

Before that, he went to his master's house to check if she was alright. The girls were there, but these were different from the ones yesterday.

"Has there been any change?" he asked.

The girls shook their heads. "No, junior brother. Sect Leader has still been sound asleep ever since we took over last night," the girl at the front said.

"I see. Thank you for looking after my master," he said.

"No, no. She's our sect leader too. We are doing this because we want to," the girls said.

Alex nodded and left. He went back to his house and looked at the time. '6 AM huh? Should I leave?' he wondered and quickly decided he should.

After all, he had his assignments to do.

So, he logged out. For the next 4 hours before classes, aside from eating breakfast with the girls, he spent most of the time focused on his assignments.

The assignments for the first years were quite easy, so he could easily finish them in about 4 hours for each. He just needed to do this a little more after returning from the classes and he would finish the assignment for one of the subjects.

He didn't spend all of his time doing assignments, however. Midway through, he would get bored so he went on the internet for quick 5 minute breaks.

During one of those breaks, he went to the forum to check on his post about Structure and Composition. Surprisingly enough, the post was decently popular.

It wasn't popular enough to be on the first page of the forum, but just enough that people who browsed it for longer than 20 minutes easily found it.

One of the things that surprised him the most was the increasing number of negative comments on the post. Most of the people were calling his decision to become an alchemist stupid, as that would take forever to become good at.

He simply laughed at these people and forgot about them. Before getting back to his assignments, he noticed that he had received another message.

Once again, Spicy_Gourd was asking him if he found anything else. Alex quickly replied no, and got back to the assignments.

He went to his classes and returned back before finishing the last bit of assignment he had left for this one subject. Afterward, he logged back into the game.

The first thing he did after entering the game was checked his nails.

"Damn, it's been nearly a day and they still haven't fallen off," he thought. He was starting to believe that his hypothesis about the nails being permanent was close to being true.

He had a few more tests to do with the pill, however. Aside from the duration of the nails, he still needed to learn about the durability of the nails and the length of the nails with the different Harmony pills.

He also needed to know if eating a pill after already consuming one had any extra effects. If it did, he needed to know what.

With all of these things to do, he decided to go to the place with the swine once more.

Just then, his nameplate vibrated inside his storage bag.

'Hmm?' he took it out and scanned it with his spiritual sense. There was a message for him on the nameplate to go to the elder's hall and find the Grand Elder as soon as possible.

'GrandMaster wants to see me? Why?' he wondered and quickly went down the sect leader's mountain. He made his way through the sect valley as he reached the Elder's Hall.

'Where's grand m— Oh, there he is,' he thought and quickly walked up to the grand elder who had been standing in front of the doorway.

"Good Afternoon, Grandmaster," Alex greeted the Grand Elder.

"Oh, you are fina— What's wrong with your hands?" he asked, seeing the 9 long nails on his hands.

"Oh, it's a new pill I'm testing. It grows your nail and makes them harder," he explained.

"You made a new pill?" the Grand Elder said in surprise. The elders around them also stopped to see why the Grand Elder had just exclaimed.

"Ahem, tell me about that later. For now, come with me," He said and brought Alex back in. They walked through the hallways past a few doors. "There, go into the room," he said.

Alex nodded and opened the door. Just as he did that, Spiritual sense suddenly went past him, making him stand on the spot. He was too scared to open the door now.

However, his willingness didn't seem to be a factor, as the person on the other side opened the door without waiting for him to do so.

Immediately, a wave of fragrant perfume hit his nose as two slender hands wrapped around his neck. "Junior brother, you are alive!!"

Luo Mei hugged Alex the moment she saw him and didn't let go. Alex looked past her and saw that Wen Cheng was standing a few meters behind her.

"Master! Sister! You guys returned?" he said in surprise.

"Haha, that's all you can say after terrifying us to death?" Wen Cheng asked with a dry laugh.

"Umm… I wasn't at fault though, Master. Someone kidnapped me," Alex said. He then turned towards Luo Mei who was crying while hugging him and said, "It's okay, sister. I'm alive and fine. I was just stuck in the formation that disoriented me, and I could leave it."

"Sniff Sniff! I'm just glad you're okay," Luo Mei said with watery, red eyes.

"Yes, I did hear it from Elder Chang that you were kidnapped by someone that you didn't recognize?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Oh, that…" Alex quickly checked his surroundings with his spiritual sense and then sent it to Wen Cheng. A few words appeared in his mind that completely shook Wen Cheng to the very core.

"So that did happen! We were right," Wen Cheng said.

"You guys guessed it?" Alex asked in surprise. Luo Mei looked at the two in confusion as she couldn't pick up any hints from the conversation.

"We knew he was after you, so once he went missing, it wasn't very hard to guess. Still, we couldn't make any accusations without evidence, so we had to sit around doing nothing but hope you were alive," Wen Cheng said.

"About him, by the way," Wen Cheng continued, "did he…?"

Alex nodded.

"How?" Wen Cheng asked.

"He overexerted his mental strength in my spiritual sea and died," Alex said. He didn't mention anything about the dark shape he saw or the yellow fog.

"I see… serves him right," Wen Cheng said as he gritted his teeth. "I'm just angry I didn't get to kill him on my own," he said.

Luo Mei couldn't continue listening to the cryptic conversation and asked who they were talking about, but Wen Cheng replied with the "it's better if you don't know it" reply.

"By the way, where were you?" Wen Cheng asked.

Alex quickly calculated where he should have been based on how long the caravan took to reach that one city and answered.

"That brings up the question I've been wanting to ask for a while, Master," Alex said.

"Did you guys not search for me very hard?"

Chapter 413: Mocking Swine

"Huh? What do you mean?" Luo Mei asked.

"We've been searching for you all this time. Even when we learned about your arrival, we were deep in the southern forest, looking for you," Wen Cheng said.

"Huh?" Alex was confused now. "But I should have been visible. There was a massive fog created by the formation and there was a barrier too, so that should have been visible at least. Or maybe you heard some explosions. I was constantly exploding cauldrons many times throughout the night too."

"Huh?" Luo Mei said in confusion. "We definitely flew through that part of the forest multiple times. We did it at night too. I can swear that it was so silent in the forest, if a single wolf howled, we would've heard it from far away. However, we didn't hear a single explosion any time, ever."

"Yes. We definitely looked through that place. Are you sure you're not getting the location of your imprisonment wrong?" Wen Cheng asked.

It was Alex's turn to get confused now. He was absolutely sure that he had gotten the location correct. 'Then why did they nev— Ah!' he thought.

He suddenly rummaged through his bad and brought out the paper that explained the Spirit Disorienting formation and made sure he knew what the formation did.

'3 base formations - Fog, Disorientation, and Space bending,' he read the description again. That wasn't it. He then took out the information about barrier formation.

'2 base formation - Barrier, and space expansion,' he read. He remembered how the space inside the barrier was expanded.

"Hmm… neither of them have anything to do with hiding noise though," Alex said as he showed them the two formation rods. Just as he said that he remembered.

"Ah! Wait a second," he said as he brought out another 2 rods. These were the same rods and Alex quickly presented them to his master.

"There was this rod outside the formation too. However, I never got around to learning what it is or if it is even part of a formation," Alex said. "Maybe this was it?"

"Hmm… I will take these and get them tested," Wen Cheng said and took the rods.

The three talked for a little while longer and caught up.

"Alright, we will return now. I've been ignoring sect work for the last month and need to urgently get back to it. The first elder is good at handling the sect in my absence, but I shouldn't rely on him too much. My change in power won't be smooth once your sister breaks through if I neglect it any further," Wen Cheng said.

"When do you plan on returning to the sect?" Luo Mei asked.

"Umm… I don't know. I made a lot of pills during the last month and need to get them tested. So, maybe after 10 days. Hopefully, I can test all of my pills during that time," Alex said.

"Alright. Come whenever you are ready," Wen Cheng said. "We'll leave for now. Take care of yourself."

"Goodbye Master, Sister." Alex saw them off.

Once the two of them left, Alex looked around for the grand elder, but the old man seemed to have gone somewhere, so he went to the core mountain, and through there, he went to the location of the swine farm once again.

Alex greeted the Elder on guard and went in. He went to the location where the swine were locked up and took out the pill that increased the nail once again.

He quickly fed the swine and watched the hoof grow out a little more. It grew about 2 centimeters again. He broke off the hoof of the right leg and kept it.

He then fed the swine another pill and watched. This was something he was curious about so he was making sure every step was recorded.

The hoof on the right leg of the swine grew to about 2 centimeters, but the one on the left grew only 1 centimeter.

"Oh, so another pill does help in growing the nail more, but it reduces effectiveness," he concluded. He cut the hooves once again to bring the swine back to its original form.

He fed another pill and watched the hoof grow 2 centimeters again. This pretty much confirmed that if someone didn't have long nails, to begin with, they would grow about 2 centimeters of it.

He then checked the durability of the hooves he had and found that the strength in the nail did in fact increase as the number of Harmony in the pill increased.

An increased number of pills however had decreased effectiveness, so taking more than one pill at a time was unnecessary.

The only thing he still couldn't figure out was the duration these nails lasted, but he was pretty certain they didn't expire and that this was a permanent effect.

'That's one pill done,' he thought and sent his spiritual sense through his storage space to look at the 8 other pills he had made while stuck in the formation.

After the first pill, he had come to an understanding that increasing the Harmony of the pill was not necessary at all. He needed the pill to just enter Mortal grade so he could test it out. He could perfect the recipe once he learned that it was a good pill.

He went through the swine to test the rest of the 8 pills. 2 of those pills turned out to be pills that just gave Qi, which was useless to him so he crossed them off of his list.

1 of the pills made the swine's heart beat faster, almost as if it was doping the swine, but to a much weaker level when compared to actual doping pills that existed, so he ignored that as well.

1 of the pills made the right hind leg of the swine slightly longer than the left one. Alex shook his head when he saw that effect. He doubted anyone would ever need such a pill, but still decided to sell it since that was the only thing he could do.

2 of the pills healed at a different rate but were both not as good as the other healing pills out there.

1 of the pills opened up the sweat glands of the pig and made it sweat far faster than normal.

The last pill, however, was something he hadn't expected, or rather, didn't dare expect. When he fed the last pill to the pig, he looked at the information the formation was giving him regarding the swine's vitals and other things.

He looked at the vitals and back at the pig. He was expecting the current pill to have something to do with the non-physical aspect since the main ingredient of this pill didn't have any physical effect.

The ingredient was a type of grass that he hadn't found in the alchemy garden of the Hong Wu Sect. He could only find it in the southern forest or by buying it through the stores.

The ingredient was called the Bright Soul Grass. According to the book Zhou Mei had given him, the grass was supposed to help the soul of anyone that ate the grass to be more profound.

Alex didn't understand what it meant, but he still expected to see some non-physical. He waited for a few seconds for the pill to do its work, but nothing happened at all. He didn't even feel any Qi movement in the swine's body.

The swine started turning left and right, up and down, and even tried to turn around at one point, but nothing more happened at all.

'What?' he was confused. He waited a bit longer, but there was nothing. The light in the enclosure had lit up from the swine eating the pill but there was definitely something wrong here as he didn't have the slightest hint of where the energy affected.

He went against his instincts and fed the swine another pill. The swine didn't immediately eat the pill and instead looked at Alex with its clear human-like eyes.

'What does it want?' Alex wondered as he looked at the pill and pushed the pill towards its mouth. The swine hesitated for a bit, but still ate the pill in the end.

Alex carefully looked for the pill's energy in the stomach now. The energy appeared for a split second before dissolving into the bloodstream. After that, he had no idea where the blood took the energy.

He waited for something to change in the vital signs information to the right. Aside from a slightly faster-beating heart, everything else was fine.

He looked at the final pill he had of this type as it wasn't really necessary to have a lot to test it.

"Sigh, am I really gonna feed this pill and not know what it did?" he thought. Still, he needed to learn, so he brought the pill in front of the pig again.

Instead of trying to eat the pill, the swine instead turned its head sideways so as it didn't have to. It went so far as to tilt its head and not give Alex any attention.

"The hell is wrong with this swine?" he thought and waited for it to eat the pill. However, the swine didn't eat the pill at all.

"Sigh, it must be a really bad pill if even a swine refuses to eat it any further," he believed. So, he pulled back the pill and turned around to feed it to another pill if he could find anything.

Just as he was going to do that, the swine turned to him and stuck its tongue out to mock him.

"What?" Alex was really surprised now. "Why is the swine teasing me? Are the swines supposed to be this intelligent? I thought they were a dull creature with no mind for themselves," he thought. He couldn't understand what was happening here, so he decided to call the elder.

However, just then he stopped. 'Could it be?' he wondered and walked towards the swine once more. It looked a little afraid now that he had suddenly returned.

"Do you want to go free?" Alex suddenly asked. The swine looked at him with a confused stare. 'So it doesn't understand what I'm saying, but is smart enough to understand that I'm trying to communicate,' Alex thought.

'Did my pill make it intelligent?' he wondered. He needed to stop experiments on this swine as it had gained enough sentience.

'Do I test if I'm correct though?' he thought and turned to another swine that was just a normal pill swine with no emotions on its face. Alex walked up to it and handed it the last pill he had left.

The swine made no fuss and ate the pill without hesitation. Within a few seconds, Alex looked at the swine's face and saw that it was starting to look up and down as if it had just noticed that it was in a cage.

It then looked left and right and saw that it was inside a cage. Finally, it turned around to see that it had no place to go at all and had a face of acceptance.

Alex sighed when he saw that face. Seeing a swine have emotions made him sympathetic towards the swine.

However, the biggest surprise he got here was definitely going to be the pill he had made. If he was not wrong, the pill increased the mental ability of someone. Meaning, it increased their mental strength.

If the pill did what he thought it did, then he could definitely use it to increase the density of the spiritual sea and thus better his spiritual sense by a lot.

He would have to work hard to make the pill with a very high harmony, but that was acceptable for him if he truly could somehow improve his spiritual sea in any way.

Once he was done with the swine, he didn't know what to mark them and called an elder for help. The elder took the swine away after seeing their change and Alex was free to return home to do what he wanted to do.

Chapter 414: Improving The Recipe

Alex returned back to his house learning a great many things about his pills. Among the 9 new pills he had, he already got rid of 5 of them and had only kept the remaining 4 as a choice for improving.

Even amongst them, there were really just 2 that he cared about.

The pill for the nail was something he really liked, especially when considering that the beasts could use it to have stronger and longer claws. It was basically like adding weapons to their claws. If he improved on that pill, he could surely sell it to people that had beasts and would love for them to get stronger.

The next pill he cared about was obviously the pill that gave the swines intelligence. The fact that it increased the mental capabilities of the swine, he fully expected it to increase the strength of the water in his spiritual sea as well. He was now hopeful about increasing the reach of his spiritual sense and couldn't wait to acquire the pill.

As for the pill that made someone sweat faster and the pill that increased a person's heartbeat, basically doping them, he was still on the fence about them being useful at all.

"Whatever, I need to worry about this mental pill alone," Alex thought. "How many Bright Soul grasses did I get yesterday?" he quickly rummaged through his storage bag to check.

In total, after nearly 8 hours of scouring the forest, he had acquired about 32 Bright Soul Grasses. While that number sounded quite high, it wouldn't last him through the whole night if he tried to experiment with the pill to improve it.

"I don't know if there is reduced effect with each pill use like how most of the permanent pills have, so I need to make sure I only eat the best of the best pill," Alex thought.

Nodding to himself, he went to check on his master again. After learning that she was sound asleep, he went to the Southern Forest once more.

He called out Pearl who came out of the tattoo saying "Meow". Alex heard 'Brother' in his mind again and smiled.

He then quickly checked Pearl's nails and saw that the claws were still sticking out of his paws. 'So it doesn't disappear after staying in the beast space either huh?' he thought.

"Do you want to fight again?" he asked.

"YES!" Pearl's voice resounded in his mind.

They went through the forest once more, finding many different Alchemy ingredients and high-level monsters. Alex could now easily fight anything that was below the Mind Tempering realm. With beasts in the 1st realm of Mind Tempering, his victory chances went down by a lot as that was a whole Minor Realm above his own.

Also, beasts got way more intelligent in the Mind Tempering realm and most of the time just ran away when they saw that they couldn't win.

So, the most Alex could do was test his sword Intent here and there on beasts that were willing to fight against him. He felt like he got a little bit stronger with his Intent, but not much.

He needed that feeling of fighting with someone strong once again to hone it better.

Pearl on the other hand was having the time of his life. The only thing he was angry about was that after killing each beast, he wanted to eat their core, but the core would automatically get transported to one of Alex's storage bags at random, and he would be left with nothing.

Quite a few times, he caused ruckus like the little child he was for not getting the core. His instinct told him to eat whatever was inside, but once he didn't find anything, he no longer knew what to do.

'I will have to teach him that he won't get a core to eat through his killing as long as he is with me,' Alex thought. But then, he thought of something else.

'Wait, how does the core even get transported to me?' he thought. That led him to question how the names of things floating on top of them worked, which led to an entire can of worms opening that made him question how every single 'game' aspect of this world worked.

"Other people don't get that. So why only the players?" Alex wondered. "Whatever, I will worry about that later. I should finish this quick and return," he thought.

So, he spent the next two hours the other way around and got as many ingredients as he could. By the time he had left the forest, he had gathered about 40 more of the Bright Soul Grasses and that was enough for him to do some experiments to improve some of the aspects of it.

He quickly returned back to the sect and went to his house. He looked at the time and realized he had about 3 more hours of time to test the pill.

He deliberated for a moment on whether to use his actual cauldron or use a black cauldron. After a few minutes of thinking, he decided to go with the black one.

Once the cauldron heated enough, he put in the first ingredient. He decided to follow the best recipe he had at the moment since he didn't have another pill with him to check the differences.

Since he had to test out the heating speed, and energy release rate at every level, he had destroyed quite a few of these ingredients.

Bright Soul grass was quite expensive in comparison to the other basic ingredients he used and he was even deliberating on changing the ingredients. However, that was something he would test later, or ask other people.

He didn't know how the pill changed just because one ingredient was changed, and he didn't want to take that risk right now. He had something good in his hand, he wasn't going to want to change it for anything else.

Besides, it was a simple pill with around 10 ingredients. He didn't need to try really hard to get something right with how many times he was going to try.

He stuck to the recipe and successfully made the first pill. The pill had a slightly blue hue to an overall light brown pill. He checked the Harmony of the pill and without much surprise, it was around 16%.

That was all he had done back in the forest before he had moved onto a different pill once he made the third set of changes.

Now, he was going to continue from where he left off. Without hesitation, he half-crushed the pill and checked the Structure and Composition again.

"I still don't get any information from this," he thought and started making another pill. This time, he remembered the different variations of energy release and used a different one for the first ingredient.

The pill came out a little worse than the one before.

"Ok, again," he thought and changed the second ingredient's variation. This one came out a little better than the first one.

"Alright, this is the norm now," he thought and kept the 2nd ingredient's instruction the same, and changed the one for the third ingredient.

Similarly, he tried for a dozen or so times before he made a pill with the highest harmony as of yet, 29%. That was the best he could do in the 3 hours he had.

"Time to leave," he thought. Before that, however, he went to check on his master one more time. As he expected, she was still asleep.

"Second elder said it was only going to take a short while. Why is it taking so long?" he wondered.

He quickly logged out and started his next assignment. This one was a little hard, but he had the next 3 days after today free, so he was in no hurry.

He went to his classes and returned back. Then, without wasting a lot of time in real life, he went directly back into the game.

Once he was in, he went directly to check on his master. After returning, he directly entered his alchemy room and started doing what he was doing this morning.

He had changed the recipe so much that it was unrecognizable, aside from the ingredients themselves. He continued changing from that again.

He changed the direction the 4th ingredient moved in, then he changed the 5th ingredient's speed at which it moved inside the cauldron. Once he saw that the 2nd change resulted in a worse pill, he reverted and changed something else.

Since he didn't know much about the structure of the powder, he was going to wing it until he got lucky.

As for the composition, he did his best and made the pill using every single speck of powder that was inside the cauldron, whether it was freely available or hidden in some nook and corner. He went through the cauldron thoroughly and made sure to not miss a single bit of any ingredient.

That had really helped him in making the pill have higher Harmony. Still, he didn't know how much improvement was the composition, and how much of it was the structure of the powder particles.

He had no choice but to leave everything up to luck. At least until his master woke up and explained it to him.

"I hope master knows it at least. She did act like she understood what the Royal Alchemist meant when I told her about what he had said," Alex thought.

However, while he was hopeful, he was fully expecting her to not know either. If she knew about it, then there would be no reason why the Second Elder shouldn't know about it. But clearly, as Zhou Mei had said, even her Master didn't know about them.

"I can't do anything but just try," he thought and grind until midnight. After midnight, he felt his body just did not have enough Qi to make the pills anymore. He might have been able to make pills for a much longer time had he taken it slow.

But, since it was just making the same pill over and over again with only a slight change each time, he couldn't stop himself from doing it at the speed he did.

By midnight, he had around 8 hours of pill-making under him of the day, with over 60 pills made during the time. About 15 of those pills were made by the pill splitting into two.

'How can a pill that can not hold all the energy within it, hold it all when it is split into two?' Alex questioned. He had been questioning this for quite a while, but now that he learned more, he decided to see if he knew anything new.

He decided to check the pill with his spiritual sense. When he focused on the pill with high concentration to see minute particles, he was shocked.

"Hollow?" he thought in surprise. Hollow was perhaps not the correct term, but the pill was definitely not as packed as when it was just a single pill.

He tried to understand it, but he was just too fatigued at this point. "Sigh, let me just cultivate for the night," he thought.

He called out Pearl and asked him to cultivate. However, before that, he popped a monster core into his mouth and fought the monster in the spiritual sea.

Once the beast was dead and the yellow fog swallowed it all, he gained quite a bit of Qi. Using that, he broke through to the 7th Meridian tempering realm.

He felt that the speed was quite fast, but when compared to the other players, it was slow.

He asked Pearl to start, and soon, he too started and fell into a deep trance before going unconscious.

Early in the morning, he finally woke up again. He thought he heard someone speaking close to him and slowly opened up his eyes.

In front of him was a figure sitting in a lotus position, watching over him.

"Oh, Did you wake up?"

Alex's eyes immediately went wide in full joy and happiness.

"Master!"

Chapter 415: Terror

"Master!" Alex exclaimed in absolute joy as he looked up to the person in front of him. Ma Rong was sitting ahead of him wearing a dark green robe.

"Master, you're awake," he said with a large smile on his face.

Ma Rong's face which was initially a melancholic smile soon turned into a genuine, happy smile. "I see you've made it back alive. I believed you would," she said.

"Yes, Master. I got back a few days ago," Alex said.

"I heard. I woke up about 4 hours ago, and the elders told me everything," Ma Rong said. "Still, give me your own recollections of what happened," she asked.

"Oh, about that…" Alex explained everything that he could remember. There was not a single thing he left on the table, except for the figure in his spiritual sea that spewed out the yellow fog.

"I see, so it was him." Ma Rong's cold voice sounded almost ethereal. The grass she was sitting on slowly started to stop moving as they froze solid and the ones a little further away, started getting frost on them.

"Master, are you okay?" Alex asked as he stood up and walked towards Ma Rong. Suddenly, as soon as he got close to her, an intense feeling from deep within him came to the surface making him stop then and there.

His legs refused to move a single more step as his body started shaking without any hints of stopping. His eyes were wide with fear in them like he had never felt before.

To him, this felt like his world would collapse at any moment, and that he would no longer be able to live in it.

Ma Rong's eyes flashed a hint of worry when she saw him frozen in fear. She immediately controlled the anger she was feeling towards Zexi and the cold aura around her disappeared.

The frost on the surface of the grass blades disappeared and the frozen patches of grass started moving again. Finally, Alex could grab hold of himself and move.

While he knew that there was no danger, his heart still betrayed him as a deep sense of terror appeared in his mind when he saw Ma Rong a little in front of him. This wasn't to the same level as just moments before, but it was still very fearsome.

'What just happened? Why did I fear Master of all people? And why did my body not respond to the fear at all? I thought it did so with every suppression,' he thought.

"I'm sorry. I still haven't reigned in my unlocked Constitution yet so you had to feel that. It must especially be bad for you considering your body is a yang-type constitution," Ma Rong explained.

"Is… that so?" Alex thought. He felt like someone just dumped a bucket of ice-cold water on him. His body he was starting to get so confident in was actually so inferior to his master's that it froze at the slightest hint of terror from her.

'I guess that settles it then. My body is in fact only divine grade,' he thought.

"It's okay now," Ma Rong said as she walked towards him. Alex instinctively put one foot back to move but stopped himself.

'I can't get scared of my master,' he thought. Ma Rong smiled and placed her hands on his head to teach pat his head.

The moment she touched him, it felt like he had lost all control of his body and dropped to the ground. For a second, he felt his vision blur and he nearly lost everything in sight.

"W-What's wrong?" Ma Rong asked while all flustered. "Wh-What's happening to you?"

Alex finally got back to his feet and huffed. "Ma-Master, I think your body's Yin is suppressing me way too much. It might be better if you don't touch me now. Just standing near you is making me terrified," he said.

Ma Rong's hands stopped where they were and slowly folded back as a sad face appeared on her face.

Alex stood up to see tears in her eyes and realized how what he had just said came off as. "It's okay master. You will just have to learn to hold your aura in and I will be fine. Or I can just enter the True realms soon and can maybe not be so useless against your aura, haha."

Alex tried to think of ways to stop Ma Rong from feeling bad about him. "Uhh… oh yeah, Master, why did you go to the Forbidden Fields? I heard that you took a hoard of elders there too," Alex asked.

"That was… I was worried about the desert encroaching on our lands and wanted to see how much closer they had come," Ma Rong said.

"Huh? Can't you just check from afar? You should be able to see if you fly up high, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, but I had only ever seen it from far away and thought that I would get a much better understanding of the situation if I saw what was going on up close," Ma Rong said. "Unfortunately, it turns out I should not have gone there. That place nearly put me in a coma."

"Well, it also made you quite strong now. If not from it, I don't think your body would've unlocked its constitution," Alex said.

"Sigh, I guess so," Ma Rong said and simply shook her head. "Alright, continue what you were saying about your life inside that formation."

"Ah right, so…" Alex told her that with nothing else to do inside the formation, he made a small furnace and tested the different ingredients just like she had said.

Ma Rong's eyes shone in surprise when she heard that. "So, you did learn it just like we first intended. Good," Ma Rong said as she praised him.

"How much did you learn?" she asked.

"I experimented with the different ingredients everyday master and made 9 different types of pills," he said with a proud face.

"9?" Ma Rong said in surprise. "How many of them worked?" she asked.

"Uh, 5 of them turned out to be quite a trash, 2 of them are pills I am not sure if it's worth investing my time in, and finally the last 2 are the one that's really fantastic," Alex said.

He quickly showed his nails and started explaining what the pill did. He continued explaining how many experiments he did, and what he had concluded.

"Hmm… Not bad. I think your assessment is correct. Especially about it being a permanent type pill. Besides, it seems it will benefit beasts more than it will us. We might be able to establish a business with the various beast sects to provide this pill," Ma Rong said.

Alex was surprised that she was already seeing so far into the future and was thinking of selling the pills to beast sects, while his mind was on auction still.

"What about the second one?" she asked.

Alex didn't understand the second pill fully even by himself, and definitely required Ma Rong's help in this. So, he explained everything to her as well as he could.

"Hmm… intelligence, that's a very delicate subject. I will have to check this by myself. Come," she said and flew into the air as she flew towards the swine place. Alex flew and followed right behind her.

They soon reached the swine place and Ma Rong walked to one of the swine before feeding it a pill without hesitation. The swine ate the pill with no emotion on its face.

Slowly, as Ma Rong watched, the emotion of confusion appeared in the swine's eyes. As all the different beasts gained intelligence, it looked around to see what was caging him.

"That's… I've never seen a Common Rank pill do that," Ma Rong said in surprise.

"Right, master?" Alex asked. "I was thinking the same thing. I was hoping I could increase my spiritual sea's thickness and thus increase the range of my spiritual sense. That would work right?"

Ma Rong thought for a second. "Yes, it should. In fact, the True rank pill that increases your mental energy also has Bright Soul Grass as a side ingredient. I think you accidentally found a weaker version of the pill," Ma Rong said.

"Oh wow. Really? That's quite lucky," Alex said.

"How did you learn to make new pills this easily?" Ma Rong suddenly asked.

Alex just looked at her and answered, "it's easy once you get to know the element each of the ingredients has. Then you learn the rate at which they release their energy and then you make the pills. You just put them in order and go with what would be necessary according to the state inside the cauldron,"

"Of course, you would need quite a few variations of the pill to get the harmony high, but that's it," Alex said.

Ma Rong was stunned at the level of non-nonchalance Alex had when he mentioned it all. "So, you used a lot of ingredients to experiment with and then used spiritual sense to do the rest?" Ma Rong asked.

She fell into thought as she started to realize what other opportunity the opening of her spiritual sense had brought her. 'Maybe I should go back into a few weeks' worths of secluded cultivation and try to make some new pills,' she thought.

However, now was not the time. She had just come back to being awake and couldn't immediately disappear once again. In a sense, both of Alex's masters had the same problem right now.

"You really used your advantage to its most, huh?" she said with a chuckle.

"Of course Master. If I have the things necessary to boost me in my path to become a better alchemist and I don't take it, then I would just be an idiot," he said. "I don't want to be called that again."

Ma Rong sighed. "Yeah, I guess that works for you. Just keep in check your habit of overusing ingredients as you seem to have learned. That's not really a ve— "

Ma Rong felt something in her storage vibrate just the tiniest bit. "Hm?" he thought and took out her talisman. She looked into the talisman with a spiritual sense and opened her eyes in confusion.

"What's wrong, master?" Alex asked. He wondered who contacted her this soon after her recovery just a few hours ago.

"It's Master. I don't know why though; he says there is someone there to meet me," Ma Rong said. "Come, he is asking for you too."

This time, it was Alex's turn to get confused. "Why me?" he asked.

"I don't know, but it seems to be quite important from the tone of his voice. Let's go and see," Ma Rong said and walked out of the swine hall and flew back towards the Elder's Hall.

Alex followed her close by, but a little behind since he was afraid of randomly falling from the great height if he ever came in contact with her.

They both landed in front of the Elder's Hall and walked in to find the Grand Elder waiting for them. Next to Grand Elder was an old man in a purple robe.

Ma Rong stopped and immediately bowed a little when she saw the man. "Butler Kang, it's good to see you again," Ma Rong said politely.

"Ah, Sect Leader Ma doesn't have to bow in front of this lowly me," the man in the purple robes bowed even lower than Ma Rong.

Alex looked at the interaction of the two with a hint of curiosity.

"Butler Kang has been looking for you for the past 3 days and had to be sent back due to you not being available at the time. However, since you are here now, I decided to let him talk to you," the Grand Elder said.

"I see," Ma Rong said. "I'm sorry for the inconvenience I might have caused you with my absence, Butler Kang. Please let me know why you were looking for me. I will do my best to be of help to you."

Chapter 416: Surprise

"Sect Leader Ma is still very kind. This old man doesn't need anything himself, it's the young lord that is in need of your assistance," Butler Kang said.

Both Ma Rong and the Grand Elder's eyes immediately flashed with caution and worry. "Is… there something wrong with the lord?" Ma Rong asked.

"Ah, no no, the lord is fine and so is the mistress. The one in need is someone important to the lord. I can't reveal any more information right now. The Lord has asked that the matter not be spread very far," Butler Kang said.

"I see," Ma Rong said. "I will leave right now then."

"Yes, and um…" Butler Kang stopped her for a second before looking at Alex next to her. "Is this young man the one called Yu Ming?" he asked.

"Yes, this is my disciple Yu Ming," Ma Rong introduced. She then turned to Alex and introduced the Butler to him.

"This senior is Butler Kang. He is the head butler of City Lord Fu himself," Ma Rong explained.

Alex finally understood why the two of them held the man in such high regard. Being the head butler to the city lord himself, the butler would have an unnaturally high status in the city.

"Greetings, senior," Alex immediately bowed and greeted.

"Greetings, my child." Butler Kang turned towards Ma Rong and said, "You've got yourself a very good disciple, Sect Leader Ma."

"Yes, I do," Ma Rong said with a smile.

"Young Lord has asked that we bring your disciple with us too," Butler Kang said.

Ma Rong looked a little concerned. "Has he said why?" she asked.

"I'm afraid not. Bringing back your disciple was more of a passing remark by the young lord. I did not dare question why," Butler Kang said.

"I see… then we should move," Ma Rong said and started walking out. Alex followed behind her, followed by Butler Kang at the back.

As soon as they reached out of the hall, they all flew away. From the Hong Wu sect, the City Lord's manor was merely a few minutes of flight away.

Alex flew comfortably, keeping up with both Butler Kang and Ma Rong. Butler Kang looked back multiple times surprised how well a youngster was at keeping up with the two of them.

'The young man must be using some incredible technique to hide his cultivation base so well. I can barely see that he is in the Meridian realm, even then that's because of my own cultivation base. How is he flying so well with such little cultivation?' he wondered.

"We are here," Ma Rong told Alex and slowly dropped to the ground.

Alex looked at the massive house with a large garden in front and even a large backyard behind. He had always seen this place from far away when he was flying, but this was the first time he actually visited this place.

He too followed behind Ma Rong but didn't forget to keep his distance from her. He didn't want to accidentally fall to the ground in such a place. Together, he and Ma Rong went up to the gate.

With Butler Kang behind them, the gate opened without any questions and let the two of them go inside. There were dozens of people working on the front garden that stopped to look at the new arrivals. Once they saw who it was, they went back to their work.

Even inside the manor, there were people who were working that would check who came sneakily.

The old butler took them to a waiting room and let them wait there while he went to inform the city lord about their arrival.

"Ah, you are finally here, Sect Leader Ma," A female voice appeared from the side.

Ma Rong immediately stood up to greet the woman who just walked in. "Greetings, Lady Mo."

"Hello," Alex greeted her as well.

"Hm, do I know you?" Lady Mo said with a hint of confusion on her face for a second before recognizing him. "Ah, the young man from that time. How are you, junior? It must be fun being the direct disciple of two sect leaders, right?"

"It's… quite amazing actually," Alex said with a smile towards Lady Mo.

Lady Mo still wore the purple robes she did from back when Alex had first seen her. Her beauty didn't seem to have aged a day either.

Alex could almost promise that she was from a noble family that married the city lord from her manners and elegance and how she handled herself.

"Lady Mo, do you know why we are called here?" Ma Rong asked.

"Ah… it's… I think it's better if I let my dear husband speak about it himself," Lady Mo said.

Ma Rong didn't say anything and waited. Alex looked around the house and was generally amazed by it all. The house was fully white all around and was filled with different art pieces that were purple and red in color.

"Sect Leader Ma," Butler Kang came and spoke from the side. "Please come, the young lord is waiting."

"Um, Butler Kang, what about my disciple?" she asked.

"Haha, he is being specially requested in there as well," butler Kang said with a smile.

The old butler took them through a corridor to the other side of the manor that seemed to have not as many people. In fact, there was barely any person in these parts.

Finally, they came across a door that had two people standing in front of it. One of them was a black-robed female that seemed to be a guard of some sort, and the other one was a handsome, young man in his late 20s.

With his purple garment and a smile on his face, he seemed to exude confidence and elegance in everything he did.

"I've brought them, Young Lord," old man Kang said.

"Thank you, old Kang. You may leave for now," the young man said.

"Greetings, City Lord Fu," Ma Rong said as she bowed a little towards the man. Alex greeted him almost immediately as well. He bowed a little to show some respect.

"You are finally here, Sect Leader Ma. You cannot understand the frustration I went through by not having you available for the last 3 days," City Lord Fu, Fu Wen said.

"My apologies. I, myself was sick for the last 3 days, so I couldn't be of any help to city lord," Ma Rong spoke as respectfully as she could. She was so respectful that Alex started to wonder if the lord really even deserve that.

Just because he had the blood of the Royal Fu flowing through him, it didn't mean that he was in any way closely related to the current emperor or even the previous one.

That led Alex to believe that that was not the case, and he was in fact close to the current emperor.

'He's not the emperor's son, that's for sure,' Alex thought as he remembered the names of the only 2 princes of the country, and he had seen the second prince already.

There was no way the crown prince was going to become the city lord of a city so far away.

"Oh, you were sick? An Alchemist becoming sick, now that's concerning. Should we be worried in any way?" Fu Wen asked.

"Oh, not at all. It was something only relating to me. There are no reasons to worry," Ma Rong said.

"That's fortunate," Fu Wen said. He then turned to Alex and said, "Junior brother, long time no see. How are adapting to being in two sects at once? Are you okay?"

"I'm very much fine, City Lord. Thank you for asking," Alex said.

"Haha, I had to. You must have done quite a few exceptional things to be noticed like that. I see your cultivation base has jumped quite high too," he said.

'What?' Alex's face was full of confusion. ' Is his cultivation base high enough to counter my Immortal Concealment technique?' he wondered.

'Also, is he talking about me getting that alchemy win? That shouldn't have been so noticeable," he thought. As he thought, his eyes started to wander and it accidentally fell on the eyes of the dark-robed guard standing far behind Fu Wen.

Alex suddenly lost all thought process as he kept looking at those eyes. The guard quickly brought down her eyes, but Alex's eidetic memory didn't let him forget it.

He kept on thinking about those eyes and tried to sift through the many memories of his to find the person with those eyes. It took a while, but he finally did it.

"It's you," Alex suddenly blurted out loud. Both Ma Rong and Fu Wen were a little surprised at the outburst.

"Ah, I'm sorry for speaking so abruptly like that," Alex immediately apologized when he realized what he had done just now. However, his eyes still showed the shock he had felt just now.

'Guard? But how?' he couldn't help but ask himself.

"What's wrong, Yu Ming. Why did you shout?" Ma Rong asked.

"Um, the guard over there… I think I know her," Alex said. "However, when I saw her she wasn't a guard. Instead, she was the daughter of a noble household."

"Huh?" Ma Rong was confused for a moment, but then remembered Alex's story about how he came back in a caravan due to a lady from a noble family thinking of him as a bandit.

"City Lord Fu, may I request that you ask that guard over there to drop her mask. I would like to know if my disciple is correct," Ma Rong said.

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Sect Leader Ma," Fu Wen said with an awkward smile. Ma Rong got even curious about the whole thing.

"You can't?" she asked with a slight hint of confusion.

"Haha, I wouldn't deny a request of yours for no reason, Sect leader Ma. Especially when I brought you here with a request of my own. The truth is… I do not have the authority to command her to do anything at all," Fu Wen Said.

"Oh," Ma Rong got more curious and asked, "Then who does?"

"Did I hear Yu Ming's voice out there?" a voice came from behind the locked door. Clicks and clacks could be heard as the person slowly opened the door and walked out.

The first thing Alex saw was slender, white arms through see-through blue clothes, followed by a person in a light blue robe.

Alex recognized that voice from somewhere and looked at the person once she fully emerged. Alex looked in shock as he saw who it was.

Immediately, Ma Rong bowed down. Her bow this time was much deeper and more respectful than when she did it to Fu Wen.

"My greetings, your royal highness," Ma Rong said.

The person standing in front of them was the princess of the Crimson Empire, Fu Wuying.

"Yu Ming, bow in front of the Royal princess," Ma Rong whispered to him quite sternly.

Alex woke out of his daze and bowed down as well, saying the same greeting as Ma Rong.

"Haha," the princes smiled. "There's no need for that. Junior brother Yu Ming and I have been quite well acquainted during our few days in the caravan. We should be beyond such formality by now."

Alex was confused for a second as to what she meant, but once he saw the guard behind her, everything clicked together.

Fu Wuying... Ying Wu… they were the same person all along. Alex's shock hit harder when he realized that he had been with the royal princess for nearly 3 days and he didn't even know it.

Ma Rong was shocked as well, as she had put 2 and 2 together as well. "I apologize on my disciple's behalf if he did anything to offend you, your highness," Ma Rong said.

"You don't need to apologize at all, sect leader Ma. Your disciple was in no way disrespectful," Fu Wuying said with a smile.

Fu Wen turned towards Fu Wuying and said, "Um… dear cousin. Can you cut the chitchat for later, and get to the task at hand?"

Chapter 417: Halfway Mortal Cleansing

"Ah, I'm sorry," the princess immediately apologized. "Let's go in quick."

She opened the door and entered. Fu Wen smiled and showed Ma Rong and Alex the way inside. Even as they went inside, Alex looked towards the guard, but the guard wouldn't turn to look at him at all.

Comparing her to the woman in red robes— the difference was truly immense.

Alex ignored her for the moment and walked in. The people in front of him stepped aside and went around a bed to show a woman with very black skin on the bed.

Alex knew that woman quite well. After all, he had spent the 3 days in a caravan in the same carriage as her. 'The princess' mother? No… that was probably a lie too. This woman is not the empress I saw that day,' Alex thought.

"Sect leader Ma, this is my mother," Fu Wen said, lifting up the veil of confusion from Alex's mind. "It has been a few months since she has been in this condition and I was hoping you would know something about it."

"Um… City Lord Fu, if this is your mother then… you should have already asked senior Lai, right?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, we did. But he couldn't come up with anything either," Fu Wen said as he shook his head.

"Then, I'm afraid I might not be able to do much either," Ma Rong said.

"To be honest, we aren't expecting any result from letting you check up on her, Sect Leader Ma," the princess said. "Our expectations will be very low from the very beginning, so freely check her without any worries."

The princess moved to the side and let Ma Rong check her.

Ma Rong went up to the sleeping woman and was slightly shocked at how black her skin was. There was nobody so black in the entirety of the Crimson Empire. She checked her wrist, temperature, breathing, eye responses, and anything else she could.

She checked for quite a while and noticed two things that were very unusual to a human body.

First, her skin was fully black. While Ma Rong had heard about such people existing, she knew for sure that the Emperor's sister-in-law was not one with such skin. So, the black in her skin was fully unnatural.

Secondly, her body was very hot, to the point that Ma Rong thought she had a fever.

She continued checking to learn more about her.

"Hm, she isn't exuding any cultivation aura at all. Do any of you know what her cultivation base is?" Ma Rong asked.

"Hm. Wuying, do you remember?" Fu Wen asked.

"Um, I think it should be somewhere between the 2nd True Emperor realm and 4th True Emperor realm. Aunt had already reached that stage when she went on the expedition to the southern forest a few years ago," Fu Wuying said.

True Emperor realm— Alex was shocked to hear that. Even his master was in True King realm. 'How talented must she have been to reach True Emperor realm at such a young age,' he thought as he looked at her face.

"Senior Lai already figured out this part right?" Ma Rong said.

Fu Wen's eyebrows suddenly perked up. "Yes, we sort of know the cause of her problem already. I was just wondering if you could find it out as well so that we know if you two are figuring out the same thing," he said.

"I think I have an idea as to what is happening," Ma Rong said. "Her body was for some reason stuck in the middle of mortal cleansing, wasn't it? The filth that should have been removed fully was stuck halfway on her skin and thus turning it black. Her filth from the meridians must also be stuck inside it since it was only removed halfway."

Fu Wen was surprised when he heard her explanation and said with wide eyes, "Yes. That's exactly the reasoning the Royal Alchemist gave too," he said with a smile.

Ma Rong nodded when she heard that. "Well, Senior Lai must've been faster than me though," Ma Rong said.

"Don't sell yourself short, Sect Leader Ma," Fu Wen said. "So, do you know what we can do?"

"Before that, how did she go through Mortal Cleansing, but only halfway? Did she… find a Divine Devil's fruit?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, She did," the princess answered. "When returning from her expedition to the southern forest, she apparently found a Divine Devil's fruit. Only… it wasn't ripe, and would need another few hundred years to fully ripen."

"I guess… she believed she didn't have to wait that long and ate it right there."

Ma Rong shook her head. "The only way I can think of healing her is to continue her Mortal Cleansing," Ma Rong said. "But that is impossible."

"Sigh, you're right. Senior Lai said the same thing," the princess said. "He is constantly searching for ways to make pills that can induce Mortal Cleansing, but as you said, that's impossible."

"Still, can you give it a try, Sect Leader Ma?" Fu Wen asked.

"I… I will see what I can do," Ma Rong said.

"Master…" Alex called her from behind. "Will getting the black stuff off of her skin help at all?"

"Hmm… I don't know. It would certainly be a good idea to start with that," Ma Rong said. "However, the main problem should be the filth stuck around her brain and meridians."

Alex thought for a second and took out a pill before handing it to Ma Rong. "Master, what about this pill?" he asked. He successively handed her the recipe for the pill as well.

"Sweating pill? You made this?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yeah, it's one of the more useful, but still useless pills I made. It opens the sweat glands on your skin and makes you sweat buckets load of sweat. I wondered that if we fed this to her, won't she sweat away all the filth?" he asked.

"Hmm… that's… not a bad idea. It just might work," Ma Rong thought. She then turned towards the princess and asked, "Your highness, did Senior Lai ever try to make pills that made her sweat?"

"Um, I'm pretty sure he did try to make them, but I don't think he ever succeeded in making ones that could open up her skin big enough or make her sweat enough to force the black filth out of her body."

"That's fine. My disciple's pill here can do that. I just need to improve it," Ma Rong said.

"Improve it?" the princess asked. "Can't you just feed that pill to her?"

"I'm afraid not, your highness. This is a common pill; we will need a True pill to be able to heal her to a level similar to what this pill will do to anybody below the True realms."

"Fear not, however. Since we have this recipe, it shouldn't be very hard to recreate this pill. Please send this recipe to Senior Lai as well so that he could help us as well," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, we shall do that," Fu Wen said as he took the recipe with some sense of joy. While he didn't get a cure for her mother's problem, he got hope.

"Thank you, Sect Leader Ma," he said.

"It's my pleasure to be of assistance, City Lord Fu," Ma Rong said.

"Thank you to you too, junior brother," Fu Wen said to Alex.

"Oh, you're welcome, senior," Alex said.

"If there is nothing else to do, we shall take our leave," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, let me show you the way," Fu Wen said as he went to the door and unlocked it.

"How's your formation training going on?" the princess asked from the side as she moved towards Alex.

"I… haven't had the time to continue with it, your highness," Alex replied.

"Oh, that's a shame. You seemed to be quite good at making formations too," the princess said. "Also, you don't have to call me that. Just call me Sister Wuying."

"That's…" Alex hesitated. Calling a princess his sister would imply that he was of Royal blood too, and that would be disastrous if someone found out.

"Haha, if you can't, then just call me princess. No need for the Your highness," the princess said.

Alex smiled and said, "I will do that then, princess."

"Good, let's go now," she said and walked towards the door.

Alex instinctively shot an eye towards the guard who was still looking elsewhere. The princess saw this and chuckled.

"Don't blame her for how she acted during the journey. She was under orders to be strict towards anyone that came close to me and was to keep me and Aunt under constant supervision."

"Also, she was ordered to act high and mighty so that people would not notice the lowly servant by her side as she would hog all the attention. It sort of worked," the princes said with a smile.

"I see," Alex said.

"Well, she was also quite annoyed when I told her that you noticed her that one time in the capital. She really prides herself on her ability to stay out of sight with her speed. So when you saw her that time, she was really angry."

"That was also the reason I let you get in the same carriage as me. You did something that was close to impossible," Wuying said.

"Oh," Alex said. 'That… that accident was what made her notice me? I can't even do that again even if I wanted to.'

"I wanted to know more about you during the tournament, but I never found you. Especially since I didn't know your name at the time, it was impossible to find you," the princess said.

"Plus, you changed your face for the final result, so there was no way for me to find you. If you hadn't, maybe my father would have been interested in you too," the princess said with a smile.

"The Emperor?" Alex asked in shock. 'I was that close to meeting the emperor. I don't know if that is a good idea though,' he thought.

The princess said goodbye and didn't leave the corridor. She promptly returned back to the room and would stay in that corner of the manor, away from the prying eyes of the servants.

Fu Wen brought the two of them all the way outside to see them off.

"Thank you again, Sect Leader Ma, junior brother," Fu Wen. "At least one of the problems on us is going to go away very soon," he said.

"One problem?" Ma Rong asked with confusion.

"Oh, it's nothing. It's just that Uncle has gone somewhere without notifying anyone and hasn't returned in over a month, so people back home are worried," Fu Wen said.

"I see. If it's the High prince then who would dare do anything to him," Ma Rong said. "Anyway, We will leave now, City Lord Fu. Farewell."

With that, both Alex and Ma Rong flew back towards the Hong Wu Sect.

Chapter 418: Lost Skill

Ma Rong flew through the air, and Alex maintained his distance. Along the way back, she did not speak a single word and kept to herself.

Only when they reached the sect did she speak and say, "Come to my place." Alex nodded and followed behind her quietly.

Once they were inside, Alex felt a rush of spiritual sense go past him as Ma Rong checked the surrounding. Alex did the same and noticed that the girls that were looking after his master were all gone.

He then noticed Ma Rong's serious face and asked, "What's wrong, master? You seem worried."

"That's because I am," Ma Rong said. "They are already suspecting malpractice against their uncle. What did you do with the body? Did you destroy it?"

"Uh… no. I buried it underground, inside the formation," Alex said. He started getting worried too now. "Can they find the dead body?"

"I don't know. There are beasts with a sense of smell so good that they can smell the other person's aura on you. Hmm…" Ma Rong thought and quickly pulled out a pill.

"Here, eat this now," she said.

Alex quickly ate the pill without hesitation and felt his entire body suddenly convulse. It then released back to normal as an inordinate amount of Qi from his body was forced out from every single pore in his body.

This was a painful experience to most people, but thanks to the Mortal Cleansing that Alex went through, there was no filth to stop the sudden release of Qi and they all went out in record time.

"That was faster than I had expected," she said with a face full of surprise.

"Aura Removal pill…" Alex said mindlessly.

"You've seen this pill before?" Ma Rong asked.

"Uh… no. I just remember the recipe," Alex hastily made up an answer.

"I see. Well, that pill should have removed whatever aura Zexi left on you," Ma Rong said. "Thankfully, the princess was too busy making herself hidden to search for you. Or maybe they don't expect him to have truly gone missing yet."

"However, once they realize a High Prince is missing, they will truly try to find him. Hopefully, his body decomposes by then," Ma Rong said.

"It should be fine master; It has already been over a month. His body should be at least halfway decomposed," Alex said.

Ma Rong shook her head. "No, Cultivator's bodies take much longer to decompose. Sigh, we can only hope the beast invasion keeps everyone on constant alert and not enough time to go search for him," Ma Rong said.

"Alright, we should get to making the pills now. You need to improve on it as well," Ma Rong said. She then took out her nameplate and notified the elders that she would be busy for a few hours.

She then walked into the alchemy room and sat down to make the pill. Alex sat down opposite her and waited.

"Show me all the pills that you did make," Ma Rong asked. "Maybe there are some useful ones."

"Okay," Alex said and gave her all the different recipes that he had.

"Hmm… this is useless, this does nothing basically,… you said this one increases heartbeat?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes," Alex replied.

"That might be useful somewhere, especially for mass-producing given how low cost the materials are," Ma Rong said. She continued looking through the other pills and found nothing useful.

"I guess the 4 of these are the only good ones," Ma Rong said. "Still, it's not a bad idea to have those other 4 work as cheap alternatives to most pills that the outer sect disciples will use."

"We can end up using less expensive materials to train them," Ma Rong said.

"Ah, I didn't even think about that. Of course! Using these pill recipes as training pills is a great idea," Alex said.

"Okay, I will show you the method to improve pill recipes. Do you have any questions before we start?" Ma Rong asked.

"Uh, yeah. I have quite a lot actually," Alex said.

Ma Rong's eyes perked a bit. "A lot? Ok then, ask," she said.

"What exactly are Composition and Structure?" he asked. "I tried understanding on my own, but I got nowhere."

Ma Rong's face got a little shock on it. "Where did you learn about it?" she asked.

"Um, in the library back in the capital, and also the Royal Alchemist said something about my pill's composition and structure needing work," Alex said.

"I understood a little, but I feel like I got nowhere close to what is required to understand it all," Alex said.

"Sigh, the truth is, I too don't know anything about it at all. The only one who knows about it, as far as I know, is senior Lai," Ma Rong said.

"The Royal Alchemist? He is the only one?" Alex said in surprise. He was hoping that his master would know about it. "So, am I not going to understand it at all?"

"I have asked senior Lai myself too. All he says is that it has something to do with the shapes of the pill and powders and how they are mixed together."

"I see, I guess I will learn it myself once I learn more," Alex said.

Alex asked a few more questions that he had come across while making pills back in the formation. One of the most common questions he kept asking himself was how people practiced with ingredients that were rare.

"Well, there are 2 assumptions you're making that a normal alchemist just wouldn't make with rare ingredients," Ma Rong said.

"First of all, you assume someone else hasn't used the ingredient before. Most of the time, you can find recipes that already have the ingredients in use. You can just read that recipe and understand the rate at which the energy is released through that."

"You can also understand what energy is released through it most of the time."

"The second assumption you make is that just because something is rare, you have to protect it. Just because something is rare, doesn't mean it has value. You can destroy that ingredient and take the opportunity to learn from it."

"Most of the time, Ingredients aren't both important and unknown. As long as the ingredient is either one of it, you can easily learn about it," Ma Rong said.

"On the off chance, however, when you come across an ingredient that is blatantly important yet you've never seen before, don't use it."

"Spend time learning about it as much as you can. Learn its weight, its size, its density. Try and see how much liquid it holds, if any at all. Try and see if there are parts that would be hard to destroy with fire."

"Most alchemists in the True realm use Qi sense to do that, however, since you have Spiritual sense, it must be easier," Ma Rong said.

"Basically, learn about the ingredient as much as I can before it even goes into the cauldron, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Ma Rong said with a smile.

"I see, that does make sense," Alex said. He then asked a few more minor questions which Ma Rong easily answered. After a while, Alex was finally out of questions with almost all of them answered.

'Now I just need to learn about Composition and Structure from somewhere else,' he thought. 'Maybe I should meet with the Royal Alchemist sometime soon,' he thought.

"Okay, if you have nothing else, I will start making pills now. Watch and learn how I improve on it," Ma Rong said. "Let's look at the ingredients first."

She looked at the recipe and said, "These are quite easy to get ingredients as well. Its True rank counterpart might be a little hard though. Let me try making this pill alone first."

"Do you have the ingredients?" she asked.

"Yes master, right here," Alex said and took out the ingredients for the sweating pill from his storage bag. Ma Rong put on her cauldron in the fire and got ready.

Once the cauldron was heated enough, he put in the first ingredient. Alex looked at the ingredient with his spiritual sense and followed it closely.

He waited for his master to do 3 turns with the ingredient in a clockwise direction with a flame temperature of 560 degrees. With his spiritual sense, he could see that that was exactly what she did.

The temperature was no higher or lower than 560 degrees, the ingredient was indeed moving in a clockwise direction and lastly, Ma Rong did exactly 3 rounds with the ingredient in the cauldron.

However, unlike Alex's expectations, the ingredient did not get turned into powder.

"Huh?" he was surprised. It took Ma Rong a few more turns to finally turn the ingredient into powder.

"Did you write the wrong recipe?" Ma Rong asked. "Did you not double-check it?"

"I… don't think so… did I?" Alex questioned himself. He hadn't spent much time trying to perfect this pill, so there weren't many recipes to go through.

He quickly checked what he did with what was on the recipe and it was the exact same.

"The recipe is correct, master. In fact, I know all the timings to release the energy too," Alex said.

"Then why didn't it work?" Ma Rong asked.

"I- I don't know, Master," Alex said.

Thankfully, the first ingredient's only job other than the shape of the powder was to release energy. It did not matter what rate it was released at, or how much. As long as all the energy of the ingredient successfully came out with the powder of the ingredient in the cauldron, that was a success.

So, Ma Rong matched the timing with the ingredient and put the second ingredient in.

'1120 degrees, 5 rotations, and in a counterclockwise direction,' Alex thought to himself and waited. With the slow release of energy, the two energy in the cauldron would be able to counter each other at just enough speed so that one of the ingredients didn't get ruined.

Ma Rong upped the temperature and was about to put in her second ingredient. Just as she did that, Alex stopped the ingredient midair.

"Master, up the temperature, it's not enough," he said.

Ma Rong checked the temperature and was surprised that it was indeed not enough. She poured in more Qi to increase the temperature, but that was nearly not as effective.

"What's going on, Master? Just increase the temperature," Alex said.

"I'm trying… "Ma Rong grunted, and barely got the temperature to 1120 degrees. Finally, Alex put in the 2nd ingredient and let Ma Rong control it.

'Hopefully, that little time lost isn't enough to totally ruin the whole operation,' Alex thought.

Ma Rong proceeded to follow the recipe. She did exactly what the ingredient said and realized that the energy wasn't releasing fast enough and that soon, the first energy would ruin each other, leaving up the potential for a hefty explosion.

Ma Rong immediately opened the lid of the cauldron and used Elemental Guidance to quickly shift all the energy outwards. Doing so, she prevented herself, Alex, and her cauldron from a nasty case of exploding cauldrons.

She huffed a bit after having to do that and her thoughts went into disarray. Her eyes started darting around as she tried to search for things in her own mind.

Alex watched in worry, not really knowing what was happening.

Ma Rong quickly slapped her storage bag and brought out a bunch of ingredients. Alex looked at the ingredients and realized it was one of the common rank pills from the library.

The recipe was very simple, and Ma Rong started following it. Alex looked as well, curious what she was trying to do.

However, it became very apparent what she was trying to do, and even Alex started to get afraid.

"M-Master," he said with shock in his voice.

"I-I…" Ma Rong had a blank look on her face as she stared at the ruined ingredients, and with quivering lips, she said out the next sentence.

"I've lost my skills as an Alchemist."

Chapter 419: Null

"Huh?" Alex exclaimed. "What do you mean, master? How could you lose your skills?"

"I don't know… but I think it has something to do with my newly awakened constitution. The Qi is messing up with my instinct and the recipe. I can't seem to get stuff hot enough to do anything," Ma Rong said.

She tried controlling the fire once more. While she was successful at it, it wasn't at a speed that would help an Alchemist or an amount that was natural.

"What… should we do now, master?" Alex asked. He felt like whatever was happening was really important and didn't want his master to go through that.

"I… don't know. I might have to pour out more Qi to get used to it or see if I can somehow change my Qi back to normal before bringing it out of my body. Either way, I will need to train a lot from now on to get back to where I was, and I'm not even sure if I can ever get there," Ma Rong said.

"I would like to help too, master. Let me know if there is anything I can—"

"There's nothing you can do. Just go and practice improving the pills," Ma Rong said sternly.

"Yes, Master," Alex said immediately and walked out.

He walked down the mountain to his house and went into a private room. Finally, he logged out.

It had been hours since when he should have logged out. However, between Ma Rong's sudden waking up and going to the city lord's house, he finally got to log out at around 12 pm.

'Can I help master at all?' he wondered. Unable to come up with any sort of viable answer, he just shook his head.

He quickly freshened up and ate what he wanted. Once he felt full, he went back to the game to continue improving the mental ability pill.

He put aside his worries regarding his master's situation and fully focused on improving the pill. The trials were quite taxing and took a long time, but he improved it quite a bit.

The pill was now around 48% in harmony. While that was a lot, Alex still needed to improve to get the pill to as high as he could.

He also needed to check if the pill worked on beasts or not, so he went to the forest at night and tested them on some beasts.

Surprisingly, every beast he gave the pill to ran away within 10 seconds of eating the pill.

'So they do gain intelligence,' Alex thought when he saw that. Once he confirmed it, he fought the beasts for a while and returned.

He tried to keep up with what his master was doing during this time, but she never told him anything about what was going on.

His master was already so worried about everything, and now there was another worry placed upon her.

'I wish I could help master somehow,' he thought. However, as a self tempering realm disciple, he couldn't do anything. He wanted to just go and hand over a Heaven-grade pill, but then he wouldn't keep the freedom he currently had.

With nothing to do, he kept on improving the pill.

Over the course of the next week, he made many improvements on the pill and also worked with the nail pill on the side to improve it a little as well.

By now, the nail pill was at 52% harmony at the highest and the mental energy pill was at 51% harmony at the highest. However, he couldn't be sure at all if this was the actual harmony possible from the pill or it was just him being unable to draw out more.

Without handing the recipe over to someone better than him, it was impossible for him to tell if the problem was with the alchemist or with the recipe.

Given that both of his pills were his own made, he couldn't readily hand the recipe over to just about anyone else.

He couldn't hand it over to his master as she wasn't really any good at alchemy now. He couldn't hand it over to his friend since they weren't as good in alchemy. He couldn't hand it to the other elders just because he didn't want to hand over the recipe.

He only had 2 candidates remaining for this. One was the Grand Elder. He could ask his grandmaster to help him figure this out.

However, when he asked him for this, the grandmaster said that he wasn't free at all. With his master spending most of her time recuperating, the burden of the sect had fallen on to him and the First Elder.

So, he wasn't of much help to Alex.

So, Alex decided to go with his second choice, his Martial Uncle. However, his Martial Uncle wasn't in the sect right now. Along with the 3rd Elder and a few other elders, Lang Shun had gone to the different cities of the Crimson Empire to look for Wan Li who was still missing.

So, he wasn't of much help to Alex either.

"Sigh, I guess I can only improve by myself," Alex thought with a sigh. Heaven grade was very good, even exceptional for such pills. However, due to him making Immortal grade pills, he just didn't see them as that impressive anymore.

"I guess I will have to wait a little longer before I consume this pill then," he thought.

Finally, he no longer had to improve the pills at all and could simply focus on other things that he wanted to, namely formations.

At the end of the week, he went to meet his master in her house.

"Master, are you at home?" he called in the communication talisman. However, he got no response at all. He decided to wait for a while and only after 5 minutes did he finally get a message back.

"Yes, why?" she asked.

"I need to speak to you about something," Alex said. "Can I come over?"

"Yes."

After getting the affirmation, Alex went over to his master's house. He sent out his spiritual sense and didn't immediately find his master.

'Huh? Where is she?' he thought.

"I'm right here," Ma Rong's voice appeared from somewhere. Alex sent his spiritual sense in that direction and still couldn't see anything.

It was then he realized that he couldn't see a certain spot in the room at all. He quickly opened the door and walked in. As he has expected, Ma Rong was sitting crosslegged in that exact spot.

"Woah, master. Why can't I see you with my spiritual sense?" Alex asked.

"As I thought," Ma Rong said with a sigh. "My body constitution is getting more and more potent." Ma Rong looked at her own snow-white palms and shook her head.

"Throw an attack towards me," she said.

"Pardon? Attack?" Alex asked.

"Yes, use an attack on me," she said.

"Um… okay," Alex said. His master was super strong so he wasn't worried about hurting her. "Physical, Elemental, or Mental?"

"Do all three," Ma Rong said.

"Okay," Alex said and took out a common sword before lighting it up yellow as he filled it with metal Qi. Once it was fully glowing, he cautioned his master.

Once Ma Rong was ready, He walked close to her, and slashed his sword at her.

The sword moved down fast, but as it got close to her, it lost its energy rapidly. By the time the sword hit her, it was nothing but metal, encased in frost, falling due to the effects of gravity, and not Alex's.

"What?" Alex said in shock.

"Now try an Elemental attack," Ma Rong said.

Without hesitation, Alex punched at her using the Iron Fist punch. The yellow fist of metal energy flew at her, but as it got close to her, it started slowing down.

When it finally reached her, the energy had all but dissipated into thin air. What hit her was nothing more than a puff of air.

"That's… are you freezing the energy around you?" Alex asked.

"More accurately, my body is," Ma Rong said. "Hit me with Heaven's impact."

Alex nodded and immediately sent out an attack using his spiritual sense. His spiritual sea churned as a hefty amount of it escaped from the sea and formed a fist shape that flew towards Ma Rong.

Even as his spiritual attack flew towards her, it slowly lost its energy and in the end, nothing remained when it touched her body.

Alex was shocked that his Master's body was so strong that he couldn't even damage it at all. "You are way too strong, Master. You can easily win against anyone in a fight," he said.

"No. It's only easy against you because I'm stronger. When people around my own strength fight me, I will only have a better stance than them, not become invincible like right now."

"I don't think my body will be able to stop their attacks fast enough to be of very good use. That's just speculation though. In the end, it could certainly be that my body is strong enough to nullify attacks, but that's for later," Ma Rong said.

Alex thought for a second and said, "Oh, wait master. Can I attack once more?"

Ma Rong looked at him weirdly and said, "Sure, go ahead."

Alex firmed up his resolve and sent out a palm attack. Suddenly, yellow energy escaped out from his palm as it formed the shape of the palm itself.

It flew towards Ma Rong with great energy, but like everything else, it slowed down. However, for some reason, despite being slow, it had enough force to fly in all the way and hit Ma Rong.

Ma Rong was strong enough to handle that attack, but she was still surprised that the attack even managed to hit her. "What…" she was shocked.

She then checked the residual energy in the air that was rapidly going away. "Yang?" she asked.

"Ah yes, I thought it would work," Alex said. "Since your body is Yin, it might easily stop everything else, but I doubted it would be fast enough to stop Yang energy. Turns out I was correct."

"I also want to see how Yin energy would interact with you, but unfortunately, I don't have any yin attack skills," Alex said.

"Ah, I see. That does make sense. Good to know," Ma Rong said.

"Anyway, why did you come here in the first place?"

"Ah right," Alex said and pulled out a few pill bottles. "These are all the pills I made during the last week or two, Master. I want to sell them, so I was coming here to ask if I should sell it in the sect's alchemy shop or in the auction house," Alex asked.

"Show them to me," Ma Rong asked and checked the pills. "Hmm… are these the claw and mental ones? Sell anything less than 40% harmony in the sect and the higher ones in the auction house."

"I see," Alex said and checked his pills again. There were about 200 or so usable pills and of them, about 30 were over 40% in harmony.

'I guess that works for me,' he thought.

"Is that all?" Ma Rong asked.

"No master, there is something else I need to talk about with you," Alex said.

"Hmm… What is it?" Ma Rong asked.

"You see," Alex said. "It's been around 2 weeks since I've been in the sect, and I think it's about time I leave for Tiger sect."

"Oh, that. Right, you should do that. When will you leave?" Ma Rong asked.

"I was thinking of leaving right now actually," he said.

Ma Rong thought for a second and said, "Alright, go."

"Thank you, Master. And take care of yourself," he said. "Don't fret much if you cannot make pills again. You gained a boon and a curse at the same time."

"If you cannot make the pills, I will make them for you. I will get stronger and learn more soon, I promise, master."

Alex bowed towards Ma Rong once and walked out. Ma Rong looked towards where he went and simply smiled.

She then stood up and walked out too— she had work to do in the sect.

Chapter 420: Back to Tiger Sect

Alex didn't need to pack anything, so he simply walked down the mountain to go over to the Elder's Hall to let his grandmaster know that he was leaving.

He walked over to the core mountain and met with Kong Yuhan, Zhou Mi, and Zhou Mei. He let them know about him going to the Tiger sect and found it funny when he saw the shock on their face.

"You guys knew by now, right? Why are you getting surprised?" Alex asked.

"Uhh, yeah. But I didn't think you could go to the Tiger sect this easily. I assumed you were a disciple in name alone," Zhou Mei said.

"No, I'm an actual disciple. Although, I've only been there for 2 weeks," Alex said. "This is my second time going there. Alright, see you guys in 2 weeks."

"See you later, Brother Yu," Kong Yuhan said goodbye too.

Alex mentioned his departure at the Disciple Hall too and left the sect. He walked out of the front game under the afternoon sun and made his way to the sect's Alchemy shop.

Alex had only seen this place once before, so he wasn't sure how business was done here, but he was sure that the shop sold pills and ingredients mostly.

He walked into the quite massive shop and looked around to see a few elders and a lot of inner sect disciples working tirelessly.

He walked over to one of the elders and said, "Good afternoon, Elder. I wish to put a few pills on sale here."

The elder looked at Alex and saw that he was a core disciple, so she took on a much gentler face. "Sure child, what is it that you want to sell?" she asked.

Alex brought out about 85 pill bottles and handed them to her. "There are 2 types of pill here. These 43 bottles contain pills that I call the Strong Claw pill. These pills will increase nails, talons, and claws of anyone by 2 centimeters and make it extremely durable depending on the Harmony of the pill."

"And these 42 bottles contain pills that I call the Soul Nourishing Pill. It increases the mental strength of anyone that takes the pill, including beasts. These will be helpful to increase your resistance against mental attacks or increase your beast's intelligence very early on."

Alex explained a few more details about the pills while the Elder looked at him dumbfounded. Only when Alex was done did the Elder finally speak.

"Um… Child, I've never heard of such pills. Where did you get the recipe?" she asked.

"Oh, I made it myself," Alex said.

"I… see. I thought so," the elder said. "Alright, place your information on that board along with your nameplate. I will input some things into your nameplate," the elder said.

Alex was a little confused as to how the sect running formation would even run out here, but he still did what he was asked to do. He placed his nameplate and started writing on the board what he had brought in today in full detail.

He had to go through the number of pill bottles, to the number of pills in each individual bottle to the harmony of each individual pills.

It was a lot of work and took him about 15 minutes to write it all down. During that time, the elder tested all the pills in a pill tester and dunked the pills all onto a large pill bottle that could easily hold over thousands of pills.

Once it was all done, the elder checked the contents of what she had found against the contents that were written and approved of it.

"Alright, child. It's done. You will be notified in a few days to come to get your earnings," the elder said.

"Thank you, Elder," Alex said and was about to walk out when he stopped and turned around to ask. "By the way, in case I am not in the sect when you notify me, can I request that you send the earnings to my master?" he asked.

"Uhh… sure. Which elder should I send it to?" the elder asked.

"Ah good. Then please send it to the sect leader," Alex said and walked away.

"Okay, the sect lead— The Sect LEADER?" the elder suddenly went wide-eyed. "Yu… Ming! Of course, how did I forget it? That was the sect leader's disciple."

"So young, and he already made 2 pills on his own. I wonder how many hands the sect leader had in these two pills. Should have been a lot. But still, to be able to make 40% pills, that's quite amazing," the elder thought.

Alex wasn't there to hear any of what the elder had said and was already on his way to the auction house. The Pink Cloud auction house was something he was used to, so he came here directly.

Although at first, he had thought that he was betrayed by the auction house and that his information about selling the Spirit Cleansing Lily was leaked, after listening to Zexi and experiencing what he did, Alex understood that one of the employees that knew his information had their mind read.

Alex wasn't going to hold grudge against someone who was attacked. If anything, he now knew how vulnerable even the most tight-lipped information could be, so he was going to be extra careful when dealing with important items now.

"Hello, I am here to auction off some pills. Is miss Cai Ping inside?" Alex asked.

"Yes, please come," one of the girls at the front of the auction house took him inside the auction house and to the familiar room.

Alex sat on the sofa, waiting for Cai Ping to arrive. Before the door even opened, Alex knew that she was here and smiled.

"Good Afternoon, Fellow Daoist Yu. I see that you have been well," Cai Ping said.

"I'm indeed doing very well, miss Cai. How about you?" Alex kept the conversation going.

"I'm doing well too. Ah right, congratulations on making a 60% harmony pill in the alchemy competition. When I heard you won that, I couldn't believe it at all."

"All this time, I believed it was your master who made the pills, but it turned out, it was you," Cai Ping said.

"Well, that was just a stroke of luck in the competition. I haven't been able to reach that level after the competition," Alex said.

"I see. Anyway, what do you wish to auction off this time, Daoist Yu? There are people out there desperate for some pills from the White wolf. They like the fact that you sell many pills at once and they don't have to find the ingredients themselves," Cai Ping said.

"Haha, well… I have some pills," Alex said and brought out a few random pills that he started explaining to Cai Ping about.

At first, Cai Ping was excited, but then she got a little disappointed when she saw how low the pills were. She really wished that he brought out some more pills.

As if hearing her inner thoughts, Alex brought out 6 more pill bottles. He then began to explain about the pills.

"These pill bottles have pills that I like to call the Strong Claw pill, it can…"

"And these pill bottles have pills that I like to call the Soul Nourishing Pill. It can…"

Alex explained in detail what the two different pills did. Cai Ping didn't know as much about pills as the elder did, and didn't realize that such pills hadn't been auctioned off before this.

Alex told her exactly which pills to focus on the most and the price that he believed they should be sold at. Once that was done, Cai Ping set up a contract quickly and signed it.

"Will these pills be sold in tomorrow's auction or should I come sometime next week?" Alex asked.

"It should be sold tomorrow," Cai Ping said.

"Alright, see you tomorrow then, Miss Cai," Alex said and stood up to leave. Cai Ping bade him a farewell, and Alex left. It was about time for him to go to the Tiger sect.

He was still wearing the Hong Wu Sect's clothes, but he didn't let it bother him at all. Without any hesitation, he made his way straight to the sect.

He was once again stopped at the gate by the guards. These were not the same guards from last time, so Alex had to explain to them how he was also a disciple of the Tiger Sect, which the elders found hard to believe.

Only when he told them that he was the sect leader's disciple did they call his senior brother to check.

"Oh, junior brother, are you here to meet master or to stay?" Liu Xun asked.

"To stay, senior brother. I am here for the next 2 weeks," Alex said.

"Ah, good good. Hey, you guys, that's my junior brother, let him in," Liu Xun said.

"Yes, Leader," the guards quickly let Alex in. Alex walked inside and was taken to Liu Xun's room where they talked for a while. During that time, Liu Xun notified Wen Cheng and Luo Mei that Alex had returned to the sect.

They were both happy and called Alex to Wen Cheng's manor on the top of the mountain. It was close to being Night time, so Alex leisurely made his way up the familiar mountain.

'This place sure is easier to navigate than the Hong Wu Sect,' Alex thought. He saw the many yellow-robed disciples go up and down the mountain.

Alex had already changed his clothes, so all the other disciples saw now was an Inner sect disciple-making his way up the mountain.

It was a straight path to the top, so Alex didn't have to spend any time searching for his way. He also didn't need to hide his identity anymore, so he didn't need to use the invisibility technique anymore.

In about 10 minutes, he finally made his way to the top of the mountain. His master's manor was just a few meters away when suddenly someone stepped in front of him.

"Good Evening, Disciple Yu Ming."

A familiar voice sounded from the man who just stepped in front of him. Alex slowly looked up to see a bald man with no facial hair looking at him. He had a soft smile on his face and his overall posture was very gentle.

Alex knew this person quite well. After all, he was the master of Du Yuhan and Su Min.

"Good Evening, First Elder. How are you? It has been a while since we last spoke," Alex said.

"I've been quite well. What about you? I heard you died during the beast invasion in the capital, but then you came back. What's up with that?" the first elder asked.

"Oh, don't mind that nonsense, First Elder. The reports of my deaths were greatly exaggerated," Alex said with a smile.

The first elder didn't lose his smile either. "I was quite surprised you know when I first got the information that you were the sect leader's direct disciple. I thought I missed my chance at another great disciple. Well, I guess it's the sect leader's luck that he found you before I did," the First Elder said.

"I was quite lucky to have found him as my master as well," Alex said with a smile.

"Anyway, I'm happy to see that our sect didn't lose a mighty pillar for the future. Welcome back, disciple Yu," the first elder said.

"Thank you, First elder. Now, if you may excuse me, I need to go meet my master for now. I will see you later, First Elder," Alex said and walked past him.

The first elder did nothing to stop him and just turned around to watch him leave. He then walked back towards his residence while keeping his smile on him all the time. He truly was happy to see Alex return.

Chapter 421: 2144

Alex finally made his way to his master's manor and entered it.

"Ah, you're here," Wen Cheng said out loud when he saw Alex come inside. Luo Mei and Meng Yun were right behind him, waiting to welcome him back.

They talked for an hour or two. Wen Cheng had a lot of questions that he couldn't exactly ask Alex back when he had visited him in the Hong Wu Sect and could only feel okay to ask him that in the privacy of his own house.

Alex answered as many questions as he comfortably could. In the end, Wen Cheng was satisfied with what he had learned.

"By the way, what's up with your cultivation base, junior brother? I can't sense it at all," Luo Mei said.

"Hmm… even I am having trouble pinpointing what your cultivation base is right now," Wen Cheng said as he tried to feel the aura coming off of Alex.

"Oh, right. I probably shouldn't keep it hidden now. It will only make people more suspicious," Alex said and started letting out his cultivation base to a higher realm. When he reached the Meridian Tempering 1st realm, he stopped.

"This should be fine," he said.

"Woah! Junior brother, you've reached Meridian Realm already? How are you so fast? You are like one of those new people that come to the sect," Luo Mei said out loud.

Meng Yun's eyes were wide open in shock. During their battle 2 months ago, Alex wasn't even in the Organ Tempering realm, and yet in just 2 months, he not only entered the Organ Tempering realm, but also the Meridian Tempering realm.

Wen Cheng's eyes were wide too, but not for the same reason as the other two. "You are hiding your cultivation still?" he asked Alex directly in his mind.

Alex smiled and replied, "I just thought that it would be too much of a shock if I didn't do this. It was either this or tell people that I was hiding my cultivation base previously."

"I see, that makes sense," Wen Cheng said.

"Wait, that means junior brother is a Core disciple now, right?" Luo Mei asked excitedly. "Woah, you climbed the ladder so fast."

"Huh? Oh right, I forgot about that," Alex said. "Where should I register myself as a Core disciple? The Disciple hall, right?"

"Yeah, that's where you should go. Come, I will take you right now" Luo Mei said.

"You don't need to do that for today," Wen Cheng said from the side, stopping Luo Mei. "Little Mei, just go back to your home for the night, I'm sure your junior brother wants to rest too."

"Ah, okay. He can go in the morning then," Luo Mei said. She then checked her clock artifact and exclaimed, "What? It's already close to 9 pm? That's so late," she said.

"I need to properly cultivate today. Goodbye," she said and took off. Meng Yun too bowed towards the two of them and left behind Luo Mei.

Wen Cheng shook his head and sighed. "What would that girl do if she ever really became in charge of something," Wen Cheng said.

"Well, she did do quite well in the competition, so I don't doubt people would mind having her be in charge of something," Alex said with a chuckle.

"Oh right, master, what happened to the rewards? Did the finale ever happen?" Alex asked.

"Sigh, it was supposed to, but it never happened," Wen Cheng said. "After learning about your disappearance, your sister basically forfeited the match to search for you."

"Well, not that it mattered. The tragedy at the capital was too big for anyone to demand they get their prize at such a time. It could've been asked for in the next month or two, but given how the beasts have started to attack in unison as opposed to the random attack they did around the forest, I don't think the competition holders will even think about prizes anytime soon," Wen Cheng said.

"Well, we at least got the points, right? We should be a first grade sect now," Alex asked.

"Haha, of course. No one can deny us of our legitimacy as a first grade sect. In fact, the sect has been steadily growing for the last month, ever since we made our name," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, and what about the new cultivators that popped up out of nowhere? Has any such people come to the sect in the last month?" Alex asked.

"Of course, many did and many left," Wen Cheng said. "Only a few truly stay behind though. There is this Trevor guy that joined a week or so before the competition, a few days after you had left actually, and he's been steadily increasing his rank in the sect."

"In less than a month, he went from being a Muscle tempering realm cultivator to a Meridian tempering realm cultivator. Even while I was outside, Liu Xun would send me a message about how quickly this guy is rising through the ranks," Wen Cheng said.

"What rank is he at now?" Alex asked.

"Uh, I don't know. After he beat a disciple at the 43rd rank, he was recruited by the Fifth Elder, and ever since then, he has stopped showing off. It seems the Fifth elder has recruited him and told him to properly train to become strong."

"Although, these new people are hard to tame. So, I am sure he will break through soon and go challenge someone high up soon," Wen Cheng said.

"Anyway, it's time for you to go rest soon too. Do you want to train to start tomorrow, or do you want to wait a few more days?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Um, tomorrow should be fine. Although, it will have to be normal training, since I will have to body cultivate overnight most of the time," Alex said.

"Hmm, why don't you do it during the day?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Uh… it's a little inconvenient for me to do it during the day," Alex said.

"Why?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Well, the cultivation method I use is very effective at night only and completely ineffective during the day, so I can only cultivate at night," Alex said.

"Ah, I see. You have one of those cultivation methods huh. I guess you can only cultivate during the night then," Wen Cheng said. "Alright, leave now and go back to your room. We will start training tomorrow night."

"Good night, Master," Alex said and walked away from the manor. He started walking down the mountain under the moonlight when he suddenly realized something.

"Oh right, what's my rank right now?" he wondered. The rank was what decided your status, house, and a lot of things in the sect. Since he had left the sect for nearly 2 months and without the authority of the sect at that, his rank was surely to be towards the bottom.

He took out the badge and looked at the number that was written on it and nearly laughed out loud.

He was currently an outer sect disciple and would have to stay in a house ranked just that. Not only that, but since the lower-ranked houses held multiple disciples, he was going to be staying a night in house number 2144 with 4 other people.

'Sigh, whatever. I will fight someone tomorrow,' Alex thought and walked all the way down to the foot of the mountain. He sent out his spiritual sense and finally found the house numbered 2144.

'Last time the rank I got was 20- something right? Does that mean around 500 new disciples joined by now?' Alex wondered.

He went to the very cheap-looking house and placed his badge on the room to open the door. He walked in and closed the door behind him only to see 5 compact rooms with a main room where the screen was kept.

A door opened and a young girl walked out. Alex looked at her cultivation base and saw that he was a Skin Tempering 3rd realm disciple who must've only just entered the sect.

At first, she didn't see any cultivation base coming off of Alex, so she thought he was a newbie as well, but then she saw the blue lining in his robe and gasped with her palm to her mouth.

She quickly ran over to another room and knocked on the door. "What?" someone's voice came from inside. The door opened and a man walked out.

He looked towards the girl who was pointing towards Alex and then turned to look at Alex. His eyes suddenly got serious.

"Are you the disciple that beat Core Disciple Huo Tu?" the man suddenly asked.

"Oh, I'm surprised you know about that. How do you know?" Alex asked. He was truly surprised. He wondered if it was his face, or if someone else let this disciple know.

"Well…" the man answered. "That's because this number belongs to the disciple who beat Huo Tu. Ever since you beat him, he's been looking for your return, so he made everyone remember about the man who won't fight."

"Oh, yeah. I was out of the sect for quite a while, so it's obvious my rank will fall down. Still, I'm shocked that people still remember that," Alex said with a smile.

"But… that was only 2 months ago. Even core disciple Huo Tu himself only regained consciousness a little over a month ago, so it's obvious everyone would keep track of this number," the man said.

"I see, well, you won't have to worry about me. I will leave this place tomorrow morning. Good night," Alex said and entered the empty room next to him, leaving the little girl and the man dumbfounded in the hallway.

Chapter 422: Attack & Weapon

Alex walked into the only empty room and sat on the empty bed. He then called Pearl out, but immediately told him to not make any noise.

"Why?" Pearl asked.

"Send your spiritual sense out and you'll understand why," Alex said. Pearl did as he was asked and quickly saw the people that were around him.

"Alright, let's start cultivating," Alex said to Pearl. Pearl's skin started glowing a bit and soon there were cuts all over Alex's body too.

Alex closed his eyes and started breathing in and out calmly. Before he even knew it, he had fallen into a trance that led him to fall unconscious.

Early in the morning, he woke up from his sleep and opened his eyes. He quickly sent out his spiritual sense and saw that the man from yesterday was absent.

Alex had a general idea where he might have gone to, but he didn't care much about it. He stopped Pearl from cultivating any more and logged out.

He had some breakfast with the ladies and returned back to the game. He logged into the room at around 8 am and started planning for the day.

"What's my plan for today?" he thought.

"I… need to get registered as a Core disciple of the sect, then I will have to challenge someone at rank 50 to get their house, and then I should spend the day learning formations. I can then practice with master afterward," Alex thought to himself.

So, he got out of the room and walked out of the house without letting anyone know. He walked towards the left side of the mountain, instead of going to the right and walking up the mountain.

The road going left also curved and went up the mountain too before finally reaching a road where every horizontal road ended up. The road would then follow the curve of the crater to reach directly into the crater.

Alex looked at the many disciples and elders that were already working on their day. Some were going to the library, while some were going to the production hall.

'The Fighting Hall should open up in about half an hour. Since today is a limitless challenges day, there should be a lot of people that plan to fight. I should be ready,' Alex thought.

Alex went to the disciple hall that was just a simple building. Although it was called a disciple hall, it was also the Elder hall of the sect. The elders mostly worked out of buildings so the sect had never bothered creating a hall for them.

Similarly, since this was the Elder Hall, there were no disciples working in this place, and all the tasks were handled by the disciples themselves.

Alex got into one of the many queues and waited for the people to move on. After a few minutes, he finally came face to face with the elder working there.

The elder was a man that looked to be in his 50s. Perhaps due to his old age, the elder decided to take on this desk job rather than being a referee for the fighting stages which was a way more active job.

"Badge!" the elder said without even caring about how he looked. He seemed to be too tired by the monotonous job while not wanting to do anything different.

Alex took out his badge with the number 2144 and handed it to the elder.

The elder took the badge and looked at the number written on it. He then looked at the disciple in front of him, and then back to the badge.

There was a level of cognitive dissonance happening in his mind right now by 3 different sets of information that were clashing with each other.

He was currently looking at a Meridian tempering 1st realm cultivator, who was normally what the sect called the core disciple, wearing a robe that belonged to an inner disciple, bringing a badge that belonged to an outer sect disciple.

After processing the information for more than 5 seconds, the elder came to a single conclusion.

"Is this a joke? Are you messing with me?" he started to get angry.

"Sorry?" Alex asked. He was confused by the sudden outburst of the elder too.

"Where is your core disciple robe? Where is your actual badge?" the elder asked. "Don't you know that stealing someone else's badge is a crime punishable by expelling?"

Alex finally understood what the problem was. "Ah, no elder. I did not steal any badges. This is my badge, and this is my robes. I was out of the sect for a little while without the sect's authority, so my rank declined while I was out."

"At the same time, I also broke through to the Meridian Tempering realm. So I came here today to get my new robes. As for my badge, I will go fight someone in the 50th rank as soon as the Fighting hall opens up," Alex said.

The elder thought for a while and found that what the disciple was saying was indeed possible and that he had gotten angry a bit too early.

"That is a sound excuse, however, I still do not know if what you are saying is true. Do you have any elders or other trustworthy disciples that can vouch for you?" the elder asked.

Alex chuckled a little and said, "Yes, I do. I don't know if you have heard of it or not, elder, but I am the sect leader's new disciple."

"You can ask him, or my senior sister, Luo Mei, or my senior brother, the Guard leader, Liu Xun," Alex said.

The elder's eyes suddenly went wide. He had indeed heard about the Sect Leader's elder coming back. "I see, wait a second for me to confirm," the elder said and pulled out a talisman to send and receive messages.

The elder talked in the talisman for a few moments and made a weird face as he put it down. "Did you beat any core disciples before today?" he asked.

"Oh yes, I beat Huo Tu about 2 months ago. He was… 18th rank at that time if I remember correctly," Alex said.

"I see. I have confirmed it is you, disciple Yu. Welcome back," the elder said as he brought out a set of robes and a few other talismans that told him about the rules and regulations the core disciples had to follow.

"Thank you, Elder," Alex said and walked away. He put the robes into his storage bags and made his way to the fighting hall.

As he was walking there, he stopped and turned left.

Just as he remembered, it stood there in all of its glory and magnificence. It was still unknown to everyone what it was, but Alex knew that most probably, this was the most important thing in the entire Tiger sect.

The Black Stele.

The Black Stele stood there in the middle of the crater as if it was the one that caused it. Looking at the shape of the crater, it most likely did.

The Black Stele didn't have anything guarding it or any perimeter around it to stop the disciples from walking in. Alex slowly walked up to the stele and placed his hands on it.

The last time he was here, he had hastily used his spiritual sense to read it and was traumatized when his spiritual sense had been nearly depleted. After that, he had always been afraid of the stele and stayed away from it.

But now, he was a different person. Not only had he learned more about the world and was more mature than he was last time, his spiritual sense was also at least 3 times more in quantity and a bit stronger than last time.

He also had the added benefit of knowing what would happen if he didn't put his spiritual sense under control.

"Oh, it's not metal," Alex thought as he touched the black stele. Although it did look like stone, Alex still believed that the black stele was totally made out of metal due to the iridescent colors that the letters in it shined in.

"What sort of rock it this?" Alex thought as he knocked on it. He didn't have much knowledge about stones so he was totally blank on the answer.

"Should I test it once more?" he thought. He still had some lingering fear from last time, but he was confident he wouldn't lose all of his spiritual sense this time.

"Here goes nothing," he thought and spread out his spiritual sense. Slowly, he approached the text on the stone and started reading it.

Immediately, as if retaliating, something grabbed onto his spiritual sense and followed the thread back to attack his spiritual sea.

Alex read as much as he could and immediately stopped his connection to that thread of spiritual sense. When he was done and safe, he quickly checked his spiritual sea and saw that nearly half of it had been destroyed.

'Damn, that's truly terrifying. If I had spent a second longer reading, I would have lost it all again,' he thought. Spending all of his spiritual sense while he was outside of this spiritual sea wasn't dangerous at all.

However, it still hurt like a god damn b*tch.

He didn't dare try it again and tried to remember what he had just read. "… weapon?" Alex thought. He didn't know what words meant, so he could only go off of what information his mind got.

Most of the words seemed normal everyday words, but two of them gave an idea of what the thing is written on the stele was about.

One of them said 'weapon' and another one said 'attack'.

"So, it's an offensive technique that requires you to use a weapon?" Alex thought and was a little disappointed. Similar to Heaven's Impact, he also wanted this technique to be a spiritual technique.

Alas, it wasn't. "I shouldn't have got my hopes up so much. At least, since this language came from the Immortals or whatever, this should be a pretty good technique, right?" Alex thought.

"Whatever, I will think about this once again when I eat those mental pills and enter or maybe even exceed the Mind tempering realm. My spiritual sense should get a little stronger after that," Alex thought.

He left the black stele and went towards the Fighting hall. By now, the fighting hall had fully opened up and so Alex got in line.

He didn't bother changing his robes as he would do that after the fight. The queue was already long so he had to wait for a few minutes before he could register a fight.

Finally, it was his turn and so he spoke to the elder.

"Good Morning, Elder. I would like to register a fight with the disciple at rank 50.

Chapter 423: Rank 50

The elder looked at Alex with a bit of a surprise.

"Disciple, did you say 50?" he asked.

"Yes, Elder," Alex said and handed the elder his badge preemptively. The elder took the badge and looked at it.

'2144? What's going on?' the elder wondered. He was having the same problem as the elder from the disciple hall. However, since fights required cultivation base and not a robe's color, the elder didn't say anything as he could clearly see Alex's cultivation base.

"Alright, go to stage 12," the Elder said. Alex took his badge and walked away.

Even though it was early in the morning, since this was the last day of the week with unlimited fights, people were pretty excited and were already here to fight.

Alex went to the stage that was numbered 12 and waited. He watched the fights that took place on the stages with a hint of curiosity in his eyes.

He was trying to predict what happened in the fight based on the usage of the elements and the fighters' cultivation base, but in the end, there were simply too many variables for him to keep track of.

The fight ended, and Alex's number was called, but the fighter wasn't here yet. So, Alex had to wait for another fight to end.

That fight ended, and his number was called again, but his opponent didn't come. Alex had to wait for nearly 1 hour with his number being called all the time.

Alex wasn't really worried about his opponent showing up or not, as not showing up for 1 hour simply forfeited the battle in the favor of the one that did show up.

However, Alex was worried that he would have to wait until the end of the day before he got his own house when the elders kicked the disciples that didn't leave.

Fortunately, his opponent did show up in time.

"Number 50 and Number 2144," the referee elder called out.

Alex raised his hand and walked up onto the stage. From the other side of the stage, a brown-haired girl with a frowning face walked up onto the stage.

When Alex laid eyes on her, he was genuinely surprised. 'Meridian Tempering 3rd Realm? What?' he thought. He had mistakenly assumed that the core disciples ranking also consisted of inner sect disciples in his mind. Not many people could possibly have such a high cultivation base in the Hong Wu sect, so he assumed the same for the Tiger sect too.

'Well, should I show my strength a little or try to stay a little lowkey?' he wondered for a bit, but then soon realized that it wouldn't be lowkey if he beat the girl with a lower cultivation base than her.

He slowly increased his cultivation base aura such that it matched the same as the girl's. The referee asked the two of them to move to the opposite ends of the stage, and as he did, he heard the girl say something under her breath.

"God damn NPCs and their rules. I should just leave this shitty sect and go elsewhere soon," the girl said.

'NPC? A player?' Alex thought curiously. Wen Cheng talked about the Trevor guy, but he also said there were quite a few players that decided to stay behind.

'She must be one of those players. Her name is probably randomly generated too, so most people here don't realize it,' Alex thought.

He brought out a common sword for this fight and waited for the girl to bring out something. However, she did nothing. Instead, she just rolled up her sleeves and got into a boxing stance.

'Is she gonna fight me… barehanded?' Alex couldn't help but get a fond sense of curiosity when he saw that.

"FIGHT!" the elder shouted.

The girl dashed forward. She prepared a punch that suddenly came alight as if it was burning with fire.

'Physical and Elemental?' Alex thought and attacked her with his sword. The sword hit the right hand of the girl stopping her in her place. However, the left hand of hers attacked without stopping and flew towards Alex.

Alex dodged to the right and hit her overextended hands with the common sword. Since he hadn't used any Qi at all, most of the strength that hit her came from his body, and that wasn't strong enough to put a cut on her.

But it was surely enough to hurt her. "Ow!" the girl cried out and jumped back.

Alex looked at her and thought, 'she isn't used to fighting very much, is she?' Even though he himself was a beginner to fighting styles, he had just enough training to know what one should and should not do during a fight.

When fighting against a person with a sword, the woman should have been keeping in mind the reach a sword had compared to her hands.

With that in mind, she should have only gone in on an attack like that when Alex's sword was not so freely sticking right next to her left hand.

The girl looked at the red on the skin of her left arm and got angry. Alex didn't smile or make any signs of provocation and just waited for her to attack again.

As expected, the girl jumped at him again. She punched him with her right arm again. Alex could guess where this was going but decided to indulge in this.

He hit her hands with his sword once again, however, this time, instead of hitting the sword, she decided to catch it in her grasp. Taking the opportunity, she threw her left punch once again.

Seeing all of this coming from a distance away, Alex dodged to the left as her arm flew past his right ear, and then hit her square on the stomach.

He didn't hit hard enough to hurt her extremely, but just enough so that she would loosen her grip on the sword and start catching her own stomach.

Alex took the opportunity and struck towards the girl again. The girl quickly used her arms to try and block the incoming attack, but in the last second, Alex switched to the flat side of the blade and hit her on the arm like hitting the ball with a bat.

The girl was sent flying away and landed outside of the stage. This fight was an easy victory for Alex.

"You Win!" The referee said as he pointed towards Alex. Alex walked up to the referee to take his new badge and bowed.

After that, he left the fighting stage. The disciples that were watching weren't very surprised when they saw the match but still talked about it as Alex walked away.

'Finally, a good house,' he thought and left the area. He walked back up the right side of the crater and walked towards his new house.

He reached the upper area of the side of the mountain and searched for his house. He finally saw the number 50 and opened the door.

There was still a female scent in the room as if it was occupied by the girl for quite a while, but Alex didn't let it bother him. He quickly entered and looked around.

Since this was a core disciple's home, this was different from the other two houses he had been to. The outer sect houses 5 people in a single house and people had to share the living room.

The inner sect houses had a single room, but it was big and spacious.

Now, the core disciple house seemed much better than the other two. This house had 4 rooms in total. The living room itself was as large as the inner sect house and there was a backyard as well.

While it didn't measure with the backyard he had back in the Hong Wu Sect, it was still quite good to have. The best thing of all in this house was that there was a damn pond in the backyard where people could bathe.

The entire area was warded off with high walls, so people couldn't enter easily, and Alex didn't doubt that there were many other sorts of formations in the house.

He went back inside the house to one of the empty rooms and sat down. It was finally time for him to not worry about his master, his sect, and his pills and fully focus only on the formations that he was so desperate to learn about.

He had already learned all the basic formations he could and was only waiting to learn to make the best he could with it. He brought out the formation plates and inscription pen and started carving.

The most important thing about the formations was the stroke. Alex needed to make sure the formation strokes were perfectly straight, and smooth, as well as make sure they didn't stray far from the angles that were in the formations.

As long as he did that, he was sure he could come up with a high-efficiency formation. He was sure that it wouldn't come up to be of the most possible efficiency however just because the metal he held had most likely some impurities, and the inscription pen didn't carve the smoothest.

Thankfully, he had something the other formation masters didn't. Spiritual sense.

Using Spiritual sense, he could perfectly keep track of the strokes' perfections and imperfections. Thanks to it, he immediately knew when he was making a mistake as keeping track of everything was very easy.

He wondered how long it would have taken him if he did not have spiritual sense.

"Even then, this is a little too easy, right? I wonder if they consider the formation flag the real formation," he thought. "Wait, how do you make formation flags again? It's by employing an artifact maker, right?"

The artifact maker would make flags and metal poles into shapes that the formation master wanted, and then the formation master would have to carve on it on their own. After that, the user of the formation had to set the formation up themselves.

So, there were three chances of mistakes during all of this. The artifact maker could make mistakes, the formation master could make mistakes, and the user could make mistakes.

This was one of the reasons why formation flags weren't pushed towards the beginners for learning even though it was the most versatile method of setting up formations and most certainly the better one.

"I should go pick up some formation flag poles and try to make my own formation too," Alex thought. But that was for later on. Right now, he needed to keep on making formations to improve his carving ability.

For the next 3 or 4 hours, he ended up using the majority of the formation plates he had previously bought. He looked at the fire breathing, water condensing, Qi gathering, wind blowing, heat emitting, loud buzzing, fog making, and other types of base formations.

He was quite happy with the results he came up with but was unsure how good they were. He could check this on his own by getting a formation tester, however, unlike pill testers, those cost quite expensive.

"Let's just finish these remaining plates," Alex thought and continued. He could tell that he was gradually improving at his carving ability and was sure that he was making better formations, but he just wasn't sure how good it was.

For that, he really would have to go check his formation in the shop.

He put the final stroke on the final plate he was carving. Once it was fully done, he put a spirit stone under it and used his Qi to activate it.

Once it was activated, slight frost appeared on the surface of the plate, and soon the temperature of the room went down a few degrees lower.

Alex smiled; he had successfully created a Temperature Lowering formation. Finally, the last of his formation making for the day was done.

Chapter 424: Selling Formations

Alex walked out of his new house and went down the mountain. It was around late in the afternoon right now, so the sun was getting low.

Just a few more hours, and it would be totally dark. He had come out to buy the new formations, but he didn't have any spirit stones with him at all. Most of what he had was spent buying the same formation plates in those other two cities.

Alex had thought of selling those formations to get the money first, but he had a better source for it right now. So, he went to the auction house.

"You are here, Fellow Daoist Yu," Cai Ping said as he walked in through the door. He seemed quite happy today, meaning the sales must have been great.

"I assume the auction went well today?" Alex said.

"Of course. It went great. Hardly any alchemist sells pills through us unless it's a major auction. So when we do get pills, the customers get quite happy and buy a lot of them," Cai Ping said.

"I see. I'm sorry but I need to be somewhere else today, Miss Cai. Can we hurry this up?" Alex said.

"Ah, yes, here," Cai Ping said and handed him a storage bag. Alex checked the storage bag and saw 82 True Spirit stones. That was quite a lot, but given that he had exclusively sold pills over 40% in harmony, the earning was a given.

"Thank you, Miss Cai. I will take my leave now," Alex said and stood up to walk away. Cai Ping nodded and bade him farewell.

Alex walked back to the sect in less than half an hour and reached the mini-market that was outside of the sect. This market was run by the sect, so he didn't have to worry a lot about getting screwed up on his sales.

He walked into the shop that dealt with formations. Inside was an Elder and a disciple working in the shop. The elder seemed to be busy with the other customers in the shop, so he walked up to the disciple who had their backs turned.

"Excuse me," Alex called out to the disciple.

"Yes, what is— Aah! It's you," the disciple called out.

Alex was quite surprised to see her here too. "Oh, I didn't expect to see you here, hello sister Su," Alex said. The person working in the shop was the direct disciple of the First Elder, Su Min.

"You really are alive. I thought master had gone mad when he said you returned," she said. "What are you doing here?"

"Oh, I'm here to sell some formations. What are you doing here?" he asked back.

"I work here. Also, what? Do you want to sell formations? Why does an alchemist want to sell formations?" she asked.

"Well, because I have nothing to do with it, I guess?" he said and brought out a few plates. "Can you tell me how much these will sell for?"

Su Min looked at the formations Alex had just dropped and got a little curious. So, she picked up one of them and checked it out.

Suddenly, she squinted her eyes and looked at it more closely. "Who made this?" she asked.

"I did," Alex said with a smile.

She looked up and frowned. "Stop lying, and just say who made these. These are quite good," she said.

"Haha, I'm not lying. I made them myself. Just a few hours ago too actually," Ning said with a smile.

"Whatever, if you don't want to say, then don't say," she said and took the formation plate with her to a giant machine-like artifact behind her.

The machine had a massive metal base and four metal rods popping out of each side. 'That's the formation efficiency tester, right?' Alex thought.

He hadn't seen it closely from the coliseum seating area, so he wasn't absolutely sure, but it did look just like the machines they used there.

Su Min placed the formation upside down and waited for something to happen. Suddenly, light sprung forth from the lowest part of one of the metal rods. It glowed yellow and started climbing up it in chunks.

Alex waited as watched as more and more of the rod glowed fully. '25 chunks of light for one rod?' Alex thought.

"It's at least an Earth grade formation; that I was confident on," Su Min said from the side. Then, the next rod started glowing. It too glowed in chunks and had 25 different parts that could glow.

'So, there are 25 chunks to each rod, making up 100 for the efficiency measurement?' Alex wondered. That did seem to be the case from how Su Min was speaking.

The rods glowed more and more and the 2nd rod fully glowed as well.

"Oh, it's a Heaven Grade formation. Not bad," Su Min said. Alex was a little surprised when he heard that.

'Not bad? That's a Heaven Grade formation,' he thought. "Um, is a Heaven Grade formation easy to come by?" he asked.

"The base formations, yes. Those are easy to make. We really only consider someone as talented in formations when they can inscribe the formation onto metal rods," Su Min said.

"That or when they start making True formations plates," she said.

"You guys can make True Formations? Don't you need True Qi for that?" Alex asked.

"That's just for the activation. Just making the formation itself is just a lot of accurate carving. As long as you can do that, you can even make a saint formation," she said. "However, the metals the formations are carved in get stronger and stronger, so you do need quite a high cultivation base if you want to make the higher formations."

Alex nodded when he understood that. "So, setting up a formation doesn't count towards one being a formation master right?"

"Yeah, since anybody can set a formation. You are only considered a formation master if you can make one," Su Min said.

The third rod glowed to about 12 more chunks and stopped. 62% was the final efficiency of the metal formation.

"Hmm, not bad. Let me check the others too," Su Min said and started checking through all the formation plates he had made.

The lowest efficiency he got was 38% on one of the first ones he had made, and the highest efficiency he got was 79%. Surprisingly, he had created another Immortal grade item so quickly. Only, this one didn't hold as much value as the other immortal grades.

"These formation plates are actually quite good. I can give you… hmm… 62 True spirit stones for these," she said.

Alex was about to thank her for a moment when he stopped. "Wait, I spend 80 True Spirit stones myself just to buy these materials, and then I carved the thing myself too. Are you trying to rip me off right now?" He asked.

"W-What? Why would you say that?" she suddenly started getting flustered.

"Um, should I ask the elder for his input then?" Alex asked.

"Tsk. Damn, you're annoying. Here, 112 True Spirit stones, that's all you will get," Su Min said as she handed him the money. That was quite a return for him and he was pretty happy with it.

"Can I buy some formation plates? Since you said True formations can be made, maybe I should try it out too," Alex said. "Actually, do you have…"

Alex listed off a few metal names and waited for Su Min to find them. She only found 3 of the metals he named and brought them to him.

"Yeah, I don't think you can find those alloys here. You will have to ask an artifact maker to make them if you know the composition," she said.

"Oh, at least there are 3 here," Alex said. He then went ahead and bought a lot of True Rank formation blueprints. Once he was done, he paid the price of the blueprints and left.

Su Min still seemed annoyed at him, but he couldn't do anything about her misplaced anger. 'She really must like her master quite a lot to hate me for rejecting him,' he thought.

He walked past the gate, and as soon as he did, his badge went off.

"Hmm?" he thought and brought out the badge to see something written on it.

-You have been challenged by badge 52-

-You have 18 minutes remaining to go to Stage 3.-

"Oh, someone challenged me? 52… that's quite high. I wonder what cultivation realm this person is at. Must be Meridian Tempering too right?" Alex wondered and walked towards the crater.

He was still quite far away, so it was going to take him quite a while to reach there. That didn't bother him very much and he leisurely walked from the right side of the crater.

It took him about 15 minutes before he reached the Fighting hall and walked over to Stage 3. The fight on top of the stage was ongoing, meaning his fight would be next.

In a few minutes, the fight ended and the referee announced the victor. After the two fighters left, the referee called out the two numbers.

"Number 50 and Number 52," he said.

Alex walked up the stage and as he was doing so, he saw a few people looking at him from the corner of his eyes. "They are…" he thought and finally realized what was happening.

Only when he reached on top of the stage did he fully notice the number of disciples that were hanging around this one particular stage.

There were even elders standing far away to look at the fight.

"Finally, I can clear up my name by beating you today," a voice came from the side. Alex turned around to look at the person.

As expected, it was Huo Tu.

Chapter 425: Golden Fist

Alex cringed a little when he heard his voice. This was the one person he probably hated the most in all of the sects.

'He must've let everyone know about the battle happening right now. No wonder all of these people are here,' Alex thought and looked at the crowd.

He walked up to the elder and handed him his badge and walked back. Huo Tu did the same thing as he kept an angry eye on Alex the entire time.

The elder working as the referee was also interested to see the fight happen. Not just him, all the elders watching the fight were interested.

The one thing that had puzzled them until this day was how an Organ Tempering 3rd realm cultivator could have possibly beat a Meridian Tempering 3rd realm cultivator.

When the news had spread, everyone had wanted to see how Alex had done that, but a few days later, Alex disappeared from the sect.

It wasn't until the competition that they finally saw him again and realized the truth about him. The son of the 3rd wealthiest merchant in all of the Crimson Empire and the direct disciple of the Sect Leader of the Tiger sect.

This was a match that the people just didn't want to miss. Alex was currently giving off an aura that said he was a Meridian Tempering 3rd realm cultivator, while Huo Tu had only improved a single time and had reached the 4th realm of Meridian Temperature.

Even if that was Alex's original cultivation base, winning against Huo Tu would be a breeze, however, he needed to worry just how great he wanted his performance to be.

He looked around and noticed a few elders that were clearly high-ranked. One of them was the First Elder too. Even his senior sister was looking at him from far away, with slight concerns in her eyes.

He walked to the other end of the stage and weighed his options. 'Should I hide my abilities and use Heaven's impact once again to finish the match mysteriously like last time?' he wondered.

However, the elders were all focused on him right now. Using Heaven's impact here was basically inviting them to see that he had a mental attack. With how long it took for Huo Tu to wake up last time, they were probably already suspecting that.

'Sword Intent then?' he wondered. That was an option too. After all, during the last week or so, he had improved his sword intent to the level that he could surely beat Huo Tu right now.

"You have some sort of mental skill, don't you?" Huo Tu asked.

Alex was surprised, but at the same time, not really. Huo Tu might look and act like an idiot, but he was also a Meridian Tempering realm disciple. One did not reach that high with simply money.

'Or maybe they did. Isn't that what all of those players are doing basically?' Alex thought. So, he couldn't put it past Huo Tu to have learned about this from somewhere else.

'Isn't his master like an elder? 7th elder or something?' Alex thought.

"You don't have to answer. I already know you use mental attacks. This time, however, you won't win," Huo Tu said and opened his robe a little to show the medallion he had on his neck.

"This is an artifact that can stop all-metal attacks from hurting me. Adding onto the fact that my armor still remains one of the best in the sect, You have no chance of beating me."

"Fall down on your knees and beg for mercy. I might end up taking you in as my lackey then," Huo Tu said.

The Elder waited for Alex to respond, but Alex remained unspeaking. Alex sighed when he heard Huo Tu. He doubted he had even heard such disrespect towards him even from Song Zun or Zexi.

Seeing that Alex wasn't going to speak anytime soon, the elder decided to start the match. "Fight!"

Immediately, black lines appeared all over Huo Tu's body as if it were a jade's pattern stamped onto his body. He was using the jade-skin technique. With this, his defense was one grade higher than normal.

Immediately, he brought out a handful of pills and a handful of talismans from his storage bag. Although he wasn't going to immediately fight with them, it was better to keep it handy.

"What? Aren't you going to attack me?" Huo Tu asked out loud.

"Very well," Alex said, finally speaking after staying silent for a while. "If it is a fight you want, then I shall give it to you."

Suddenly, the aura around Alex started to shift. Both the elders and the disciples alive suddenly got alert at the sudden change of it. Little by little, Alex's cultivation base started to grow larger and larger.

The First Elder as well as the various other elders that were watching Alex had their eyes go wide. Luo Mei couldn't help but block her mouth with her hand as it opened in surprise.

The disciples that were watching the fight were also surprised as well as terrified.

Even so, the aura kept increasing and increasing.

"You! You have been hiding your ability all this time. Y-You…" Huo Tu could speak anymore as Alex's cultivation base stopped at a stable level for everyone to see.

Meridian Tempering 8th Realm.

He was strong, and there was no reason to hide it. Since there was no reason to hide it, he might as well show it for everyone to see so that they didn't have the naive idea of challenging him to waste his time.

Alex looked at the cowering Huo Tu and said, "Come, let's fight."

"Die!" Huo Tu shouted and threw a pill towards Alex. This was one of the exploding pills that Alex had a hard time dealing with last time.

However, this time, before the pill was even half the distance away from Huo Tu, it struck an invisible wall made up of Alex's Qi and exploded.

The force of the explosion did nothing to Alex, but the shockwaves did shake Huo Tu a little. He started to get scared.

One of the reasons he had ranked 18 previously, despite being a Meridian Tempering 3rd realm cultivator was the fact that he had many of these pills and talismans, and that nobody could really stop them.

While they weren't enough to trouble the Mind Tempering realm disciples, the Meridian Tempering realm disciples had a hard time standing up against it.

Combined with the fact that his defense was one of the best in the sect, he was a walking tank that could bulldoze his way through his opponents.

However, now that he had run into a mountain that he could not bulldoze his way through, he was starting to get scared.

"Die! Die! Die!" he shouted and threw in more and more talismans and pills. However, they all exploded before they even reached Alex.

Huo Tu sent a talisman towards Alex and at the same time sent a pill hidden behind it. Alex stopped the talisman with his Qi, but the pill used the opening in the Qi made by the explosion to pass through and reach Alex.

BOOM

A massive explosion rang out as the pill directly hit Alex in the face.

"Haha! How's that!" Huo Tu shouted out loud. The referee started moving in to check that Alex was okay. The elders and the disciples were a little surprised at the sudden turn of the battle.

They were about to start talking when suddenly, they saw a silhouette moving inside the smoke and dust.

"Congrats!" a voice came from inside the smoke. A figure appeared from inside and stood in the light. "You managed to rip my new clothes a bit."

"Wh-What?!" Huo Tu said in surprise. Alex was fine. Despite taking an explosion to the face, the most that had happened to him was his robe was a bit destroyed.

Alex dusted himself a little and wondered how well he could've survived the damage if it was not for the last moment's use of the Jade-skin technique.

"How are you okay?" Huo Tu asked, but Alex didn't answer.

Alex looked at the surroundings and once again saw the many people looking at him. "Time to end this farce."

He suddenly dashed towards Huo Tu. Huo Tu who wasn't expecting him to move so quickly tried his best to use the Jade-Skin technique and put on a layer of defense on his body, other than the armor.

BOOM

The sound of Alex's fist hitting the armor alone was enough to scare the surrounding people. Even though the Armor could stop a physical attack from anyone that wasn't Mind Tempering 7th realm or above, it was still unable to stop the momentum and Huo Tu was pushed back.

Luckily for him, the armor had stopped most of the momentum and he was sent back only a little bit. Still, that was a very scary experience for him.

"Hmm, I will have to put on a bit more damage behind my attacks huh?" Alex said and dashed forward once again. Huo Tu threw the talisman and pill in his hands, all of which directly landed on Alex.

However, that wasn't able to stop Alex. He flew past the explosion and landed another strong punch towards Huo Tu's face. Huo Tu managed to twist his body in time so that the armor was the thing that took the hit, not his body.

"Tsk," Alex said and started relentlessly punching at Huo Tu. Huo Tu tried to block as much as he could, but from time to time, he would mess up and Alex would end up hitting his exposed body parts. Still, till the end, he managed to block all of the hits coming to his head.

"You are lucky. You will be the first to witness the technique I am working on," Alex said. Suddenly, a golden aura sprang forth from his body, blinding the audience that was watching.

Suddenly, the light converged as it stuck around his right arm as if they were a metal glove for his hand. Alex had come up with this simple technique after he was able to freely control the metal Qi and energy whenever he wanted, so long as it did not have someone else controlling it already.

He had based his technique on what Pearl did with his golden paw, and also the Sword Qi that Du Yuhan used in the competition.

"I don't have a name for it yet, but here it is anyway," Alex said and suddenly sprang forth towards Huo Tu.

Huo Tu's skins were as marbled as they could possibly get and he crossed his fists in front of his to block the attack.

Alex reached right next to Huo Tu and punched directly onto the arms. Huo Tu's arms broke upon contact and were immediately thrown outwards, however, they were barely able to stop Alex's momentum at all.

The first landed on his armor next and that was able to block most of the damage from Alex's fist. The little momentum that was remaining would send Huo Tu flying back, but not by much.

However, just then, the golden aura on his fist exploded out as it created an attack on its own and immediately struck both the armor and the man.

The little momentum that the armor was struggling with suddenly grew to an exponential amount and Huo Tu was sent flying away, out of the stage.

Alex stood up straight as he watch Huo Tu land almost 2 stages over and smiled. His new technique was acceptable.

Everyone was shocked at what had just happened. Nobody made a single sound and kept on looking at Alex at the stage.

"Elder?" Alex looked and the referee and reminded him.

"Ahem, You Win!" the referee shouted.

Alex walked up to the referee and took his badge before walking down the stage amidst the gazes of everyone there.

Chapter 426: Training with Luo Mei

Alex walked down the stairs under the gazes of the hundreds of disciples and elders that were gathered there. He made no effort to change his aura and let the people see and feel it clearly. Only then would the small fries leave him alone.

However, this would also mean that he was now a viable target from anyone in the higher ranks that were threatened by him.

'Let them come. I doubt I will lose to anyone other than the top 3 now,' Alex thought and kept walking.

He looked at Huo Tu's lackeys who were looking at him with horror in their eyes. Alex couldn't help but sigh. He rummaged into his storage bag and brought out a pill.

He suddenly tossed it towards them. The lackeys who had been watching the match quite intently mistook the pill for an explosive and stumbled backward in horror only for it to land on their body without anything happening to them.

"It's a healing pill for your boss. Give it to him, and tell him never to bother me again. I won't be as lenient next time."

The lackeys immediately started nodding like crazy and ran to where Huo Tu was. Alex shook his head and walked towards his senior sister.

"You… have become quite strong. Just like those new people," Luo Mei said with a sad smile on her face.

"Yes, well, I guess I count as one of them," he said.

Luo Mei's face got even sadder when she heard that. "Does that mean you will leave us when you get what you want?" she asked.

"What? Of course not. I will stay in the sect as long as the sect welcomes me. The Hong Wu sect and Tiger sect are like my home now," Alex said.

This refreshed Luo Mei's mood a little and smiled. "Alright, let's go to Master's place. I want you to tell me how you got so strong," she said and started walking.

Alex followed behind her too. With the Prime Disciple taking way Alex, no one dared bother him anymore. Event he First Elder who was looking from the side didn't do anything but keep smiling.

Through the right part of the crater, they walked back up to the front side of the mountain.

"By the way, Sister, how did you know to be there?" Alex asked.

"Oh, Huo Tu made quite a noise about how he was going to beat the person that underhandedly beat him and get his honor back," Luo Mei said.

"Oh, he must've made quite a noise for so many people to wait for him there," Alex said.

The two of them soon reached his master's manor and entered. Seeing that there was no one there, Luo Mei took Alex to the training hall behind the manor and entered.

She then sent a message to her master. "Alright, master will be here soon. Come on, tell me then, how did you become so strong in such little time," she asked.

"Well, like everyone else that cultivates fast," Alex said.

Luo Mei thought for a second and asked, "Pill?"

"Yeah, I made and ate a lot of pills during my month-long entrapment. I had nothing to do but train and cultivate, so I got strong quite fast," he said.

"That's… bad you know?" she said.

"I know. I made sure to put in training between each breakthrough. If not for waiting, I could've probably reached the True Realms by now," Alex said.

"Woah, I knew you were fast, but this is just…" Luo Mei didn't know what to say.

"I can't be as fast anymore though, with each increasing realm, the time I need to wait in between to stabilize my foundation is increasing. "

"It wasn't until 5 or so days of hunting in the jungle that I felt comfortable breaking through to my current realm from the last one," Alex said.

"5 days to breakthrough… if the others heard you, they would flay your skin to see what you are made up of," Luo Mei said with a chuckle.

Suddenly, Luo Mei looked to the side. "Master is here," she said.

After 2 seconds, Alex too felt him fly towards the Training hall through his spiritual sense. 'Sister's spiritual sense must be quite strong. I will need to give her that pill too," Alex thought.

"Yu Ming, are you okay?" Wen Cheng asked the moment he entered the training hall.

"I'm fine, master," Alex said.

"Oh, I see. I heard you gave quite a beating to— Woah, that's your true cultivation base?" Wen Cheng asked. He could finally see his cultivation base clearly thanks to Alex not hiding anything.

"Yes, master," Alex said.

"Ah, I see. I had nothing to worry about then," Wen Cheng said. "Alright, I have a little task that will take me an hour. You two stay by yourself for that time okay?"

Wen Cheng left before they could even say anything. "What do you want to do?" Luo Mei asked.

"I want to fight you, sister," Alex said with a voice full of determination.

"Fight me? You aren't satiated from fighting with Huo Tu?" Luo Mei asked with a smile.

"No. That wasn't even enough to make me really use anything. I want to have a real fight against you. I have been training for a while now, and I want to know if I made any mistakes while training by myself," he said.

"Very well then. If that is what you wish," Luo Mei said and brought out a blue rapier-like sword. Alex brought a normal sword as well.

"Huh? Didn't you have another better sword?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yes, but I'm trying to learn swordsmanship with this common sword. Just like how Du Yuhan learns," Alex said.

"Tsk, don't say his name," Luo Mei got annoyed when she heard his name.

'She must still be angry from the time when he refused to fight her in the competition,' Alex thought.

"I have a True Mortal Armor, sister. So you can attack my body without reservation," Alex said.

"Very well," Luo Mei said and immediately disappeared. If it was not for focus mode, he wouldn't have noticed when she arrived right next to him.

Alex brought up his sword as fast as he could and blocked the sword strike. The next moment, another sword hit from his left side.

Alex couldn't keep track of Luo Mei when she moved, and only noticed her when she stopped to attack him.

'Dammit, she is way too fast for me. Is this because of her cultivation base?' Alex thought. He returned the sword back to block that strike as fast as he could with the least effort put into it.

Luo Mei disappeared again. Suddenly, he got hit on the back and was sent flying forward until he hit the wall and was stopped.

"Argh! You are too strong, sister," he said as he looked towards Luo Mei who was smiling.

"You are the one who said he wanted a serious fight. Do you want me to slow down?" she asked.

"No, keep it going," he said and ran forward. He felt himself dash forward with very high momentum, but just as he reached Luo Mei, she suddenly moved and disappeared from his view once more.

If not for this spiritual sense, he would be a sitting duck right now. He sent his sword backward to stop her sword and they clashed, but Luo Mei didn't stop there.

She disappeared once again and appeared in front of him, swinging her sword at his chest.

'Stop her' he thought and swung his sword forward. The two swords hit each other, and both of them were pushed back. Alex nearly flew the entire room's width, while Luo Mei only stumbled back a few steps.

Alex got up immediately to attack, but then he saw Luo Mei stop in her tracks, with her eyes wide and her mouth open.

"Sword Intent!" she said in shock. "You used Sword Intent!"

"A version of it, yeah," Alex said. "I've been trying to learn it for a month now, ever since I saw it being used in the Annual Sect Competition. However, even though I take pride in my ability to learn anything, this thing has taken me way too long."

"Even after a month of training, I can only use it to a rudimentary level," Alex said.

"That's… impossible. Didn't you only start to cultivate a few months ago? You hadn't even touched a sword before that. How did you learn the Intent so fast," she asked.

"I… can't answer that. I just learned it while fighting a few beasts in the forest," Alex said.

"Come, attack me. I want to see how strong your Sword Intent is," Luo Mei said.

"Okay," Alex said and rushed forward. The moment he arrived in front of Luo Mei, he struck down.

'HIT'

Another force, much stronger than the last time, hit Luo Mei sending her back more than just a few steps.

"That's… strong, but how much of it is just your strength, and how much of it is the Intent?" Luo Mei asked.

"How do we determine that?" Alex asked.

"Hmm…" Luo Mei suddenly moved her arm and blue light shined from it. The blue light then condensed to become an Ice Armor around her.

"Try to break this with your normal attack," she said.

Alex nodded and attacked. He expected a strong rebound from the sword, but it cut through the ice like it was butter. "What? I told you not to use intent yet," Luo Mei said.

"I'm not, sister," Alex said.

"Uhh, but this ice should be able to stop any Meridian Tempering 9th realm cultivator's attack. Are you stronger than that?" she asked.

"Yes, sister. My body cultivation alone is at the 5th realm of Organ Tempering and I can output damage equal to 1st Mind Tempering realm just with those two alone. If I use skills, I should be able to output about 3rd realm of Mind Tempering in terms of damage," Alex said.

"I-Is that so?" Luo Mei said with an awkward smile. "Very well," she said as he made a must more robust sheet of ice. "This will block 4th Mind tempering Realm cultivator's attack," she said. "Now attack."

Alex nodded and poured golden Qi into the sword he was holding. The common sword glowed yellow suddenly and Alex struck the ice.

BENG

His sword hit the ice at an acute angle and entered about a few centimeters in. After that, however, it was stopped.

"I see. So, 4th Mind Tempering realm is the strongest attack you can make right now," Luo Mei said. She moved her hands once more and the ice healed again.

"Try it again, but this time, use your Intent," Luo Mei said.

Alex nodded and propped up his sword to attack. He then took a deep breath and released it.

'CUT'

He swung it down.

BENG

Once again, a strong sound rose from his sword hitting the ice, but this time, his sword managed to reach all the way to the other side of the thick ice sheet.

"I see. Your sword Intent makes you stronger by a single realm," Luo Mei said. "Unlike the others who have their damage increased by at least 3 realms," Luo Mei said.

"Their damage increases by 3 realms?" Alex asked in surprise.

"Yes. That's what you get when you have a proper sword Intent. It's something I could never hope to achieve. It's something even master could never hope to achieve," Luo Mei said.

"But you have a chance to reach where we couldn't. You will have to now practice this every day, refine it. When master returns, we can ask him to teach you all about it."

"Even though he doesn't have it, he should know a bit," Luo Mei said.

Alex nodded. A fire started burning inside of him with the desire to achieve more in the realm of Weapon mastery. He promised himself, he would master Sword Intent one way or another.

Chapter 427: Sect Matters

"What about the merchants? Have their numbers really dropped that badly over the course of the month?" Wen Cheng asked the group of elders in front of him.

He was currently in the Disciple's Hall which was also the Elder's hall of the Tiger sect. In front of him were many elders ranging from ones that were in charge of security, and fights, to elders that were in charge of disciples, and rules to elders that were in charge of sales and finances of the sect.

They were all gathered together for the weekly meeting at the end of the week before they took their one day of a break on Sunday.

"Yes, Sect Leader. Ever since the beast hoard attack 3 weeks ago, the merchants have been scared that it will be a repeated thing and have decided to stop selling anywhere for a while."

"It is taking us way too much to convince them to go to other cities with their goods," an elder who was in charge of finance said.

"Sigh, so I guess that the disciples haven't been earning as much then?" Wen Cheng asked.

"No, Sect Leader. Compared to last week, we have seen a slight increase in earnings, but it's still nowhere compared to what it was before the Beast attacks," the elder said.

"What about other sources? Are the sales going well in the market?" Wen Cheng asked.

"It's not bad, I guess, but it's certainly not good either. Due to the lack of new people coming into the town, the overall growth has stagnated for the market too," the elder said. "If this continues on for even two months, we will have to start selling sect treasures to keep our businesses afloat or deny entry for new disciples."

"Sigh, I'm sure something good will happen," Wen Cheng said. "Elder Xuan, you are the person that knows the most about beasts amongst us. Do you have any idea what is possibly going on with these beast hoard attacks?"

Elder Xuan simply shook his head. "There are many possibilities, sect leader. I can't tell exactly what is causing these beasts to act the way they are," he said.

"Possibilities? Like…?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Well, there are 2 big possibilities in my mind, "Elder Xuan said. "First is that there is a hidden danger in the Southern Forest, and it's driving the beasts out of their home and into our lands."

"Another possibility is that there is something in the Crimson Empire that they desperately want, so they are gathering strength and launching attacks periodically," Elder Xuan said.

"Wait… Periodically? Do you mean that there is a chance that they will attack again?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Yes, Sect Leader. If I'm not wrong, then there is another attack coming in very soon. We need to prepare," Elder Xuan said.

A small fear started brewing inside of Wen Cheng's heart. "Elder Jiang, Please go to the Hong Wu sect and send them a message from me telling them that there might be another Beast hoard attack soon. We need them to be as prepared as we will be," Wen Cheng said.

"Yes, Sect Leader," An Elder stood up and walked out.

"Sigh, let's just hope the beasts don't amount to the same as back in the Cardinal City. That was a truly horrific sight to behold," Wen Cheng said as he shook his head.

"That's all for today. You can return back to what you were doing," Wen Cheng said as he dismissed the elders.

The elders started leaving one by one, and in the end, only 2 remained. One of them was the First elder who Alex was familiar with on a basic level.

The other person was a fat man with short hair and a small stubble on his chin. He wasn't too fat, but his short height made him look overweight.

"I guess congratulations are in order, Mister Sect Leader. Your disciple put on quite a show today," the First Elder said.

"Hehe, I bet you wish you would have gotten him, don't you?" Wen Cheng said with a chuckle.

"Of course, who wouldn't?" the First Elder said with a smile.

"Seriously though, I watched the fight and I was surprised too, " The fat man said. "Very soon, he might beat my disciple and I might end up as the fourth elder," he said.

"Don't joke around, Dong Chen. Little Ma is still very strong. If not for Yuhan and little Mei having unnatural strength, I have no doubts he would have become the Prime Disciple by now," Wen Cheng said.

"Alas, those two do have quite the unnatural strength, don't they? One's spiritual root is so strong that she can control water as if she commands them, and the other has such deep respect for swords that he has already touched onto the realm of Sword Qi."

"Seriously, what sort of monsters did you two raise?" he asked.

"Alright, let's talk about this later. I'm late to train my disciple," Wen Cheng said and walked out. The other elders decided to leave as well.

Wen Cheng walked onto the lantern-filled sect crater in the evening with stars glittering all over the sky. The white moon shone quite brilliantly tonight.

He looked around for a bit to see how everything was and flew away. That was the quickest way to return back to his manor on top of the mountain.

As he reached the mountain, he released his spiritual sense to look inside the training hall and saw both Luo Mei and Alex training.

Just as he was walking in, he noticed something with his spiritual sense. Every time Alex attacked, there was a slight hint of light that unstably formed on his sword that would disappear as soon as he attacked.

"No way!" Wen Cheng thought in amazement. He immediately walked in and indeed saw the same thing happen once again in front of his eyes.

The two of them stopped fighting when they saw Wen Cheng enter the room. "Oh master, you're back," Luo Mei said.

"Yo-You… that was Sword Intent. I saw Sword Intent just now, didn't I?" Wen Cheng asked, fully flustered.

"Yes, Master. Junior brother has started to learn about Sword Intent. He was waiting for you to return and teach him what you can," Luo Mei said.

"Uhh, You know I don't know have Sword Intent, right?" Wen Cheng awkwardly said.

"You don't have to have it. Just teach him what you can," Luo Mei said sternly.

"Oh, right, Of course, I'm going to do that. Come here, Yu Ming, tell me how you got it," Wen Cheng asked.

Alex explained everything he could to Wen Cheng and told him how he acquired his current low-level Sword Intent. Unfortunately for Alex, Wen Cheng didn't know a lot about how Intents worked, only how it was acquired.

So, for the next 2 hours, he made Alex fight with him using solely a sword and nothing else. It was similar to his fight with the lionesses, except he didn't have his life in danger.

Still, Wen Cheng didn't hold back when he hit him. Every single strike, he put in enough force to leave Alex gasping for breaths. Alex needed to learn Intent, and simple training wasn't going to achieve that.

Finally, Wen Cheng stopped after seeing Alex have a hard time even standing up. "Alright, let's stop here for today. We will continue it tomorrow," he said.

"Arghh…" Alex grunted as he stood up. "Okay master," he said.

"Sigh, I'm sorry I can't teach you anymore. I don't know Sword Intent myself," Wen Cheng said.

"It's okay, Master. I can learn it myself," Alex said. "I will leave for now."

"Alright, go and cultivate. Since it's Sunday tomorrow, you can take the day off too," Wen Cheng said.

"No, I will come back, master. I need to learn," Alex said.

"Sigh, do what you must. I will be here if you need me," Wen Cheng said.

Alex nodded and left. It was close to 10 pm the night, and the air was getting chilly too. 'It's starting to get cold here too, huh?' Alex thought.

His body hurt quite a bit, but it was slowly healing itself. So long as his body didn't have broken bones or really bad wounds, his normal Qi would heal itself up.

Still, he had quite a few internal wounds this time and he couldn't just wait for it to get healed while he kept hurting all the time. So, he brought out a pill and ate it.

Soon, the energy from the pill washed over his entire body and healed him from inside out. "Ahh, that feels better," he said.

"Sword Intent… so, master can't teach me much about it, huh?"Alex thought. "I guess I can still learn it on my own."

He returned back to his room and started cultivating with Pearl. Before he knew it, as every single time, he fell asleep.

He woke up in the morning and stopped cultivating. He logged out to have breakfast with the ladies and returned soon enough.

"Should I continue trying to improve the pills?" He wondered for a few moments before choosing not to. Any improvements he could make now would be minuscule in comparison to what he would learn if he learned the formations.

"I should try and make the True formations in the formation plates I bought. Although, I will need master's help to test them later on," Alex thought.

So, he left his room and went to the Production hall. There was quite a large number of people who had decided to make stuff on their free day.

Alex walked up to the elder and got a formation making room for the entirety of the day to try and learn his formation carving skills.

The formation-making room was just a simple room with a Formation tester inside. Aside from that, it was just a sturdy room where Alex didn't have to worry about making formations of any kind

He first started with the common formations and made those. Once he felt like he was ready, he moved on to the True rank formation plates.

The True rank formation plates were definitely must stronger to carve on than the common rank ones.

"It seems I will have to take it slow or I will make too many mistakes," he thought and took his time with every single stroke he made.

By the end of the day, he only made 3 True rank formations that ranged from 36% to 51%. He stopped there and walked out of the room at around 4 pm.

"Do I go train next?" he wondered. He wanted to go directly to his Master's manor and start training again, but he realized that might not be the best choice.

He had someplace else in mind that he thought was the best choice to go right now.

Chapter 428: Challenge

Alex walked up the mountain towards his master's manor but didn't go there. Instead, when he reached the top of the mountain, he took a left.

He searched for the house and didn't take long to notice it. This house looked remarkably better than the one he was living in, almost to the same level as his senior sister.

He walked up to the door and knocked on it.

KNOCK KNOCK

He waited for a while and finally heard the door click open. Slowly, the door opened and a young man stepped out of the house. He had a lean and stoic body with a handsome face that was underused thanks to his usual emotionless face.

"Hello bother Yuhan, do you have some time?" Alex asked.

Du Yuhan looked at Alex with a weird look on his face. "I heard you were alive. Congrats," he said. "Say quickly what do you want?"

Alex gave an awkward smile when he saw how on point Du Yuhan's conversations were. He really wasn't one for the small talks.

"I was hoping you could teach me the ways of the sword," Alex said.

"… Just ask your teacher," Du Yuhan said and closed the door, leaving Alex alone.

KNOCK KNOCK

He knocked on the door again, and Du Yuhan opened it again. "What?" he asked.

"Master can't help me. I need to learn about the Sword Intent," Alex said. "You are the only person I know that is farthest in their understanding of the sword," Alex said.

"… you want to learn Sword Intent?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"What makes you think you can learn it?" he asked.

"I already have some achievement in it, but it's at a rudimentary level," Alex said.

This caught Du Yuhan's attention for sure. "You know Sword Intent?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said happily. It seemed he was about to get what he wanted.

"Then you are already on your way. Learn on your own," Du Yuhan closed the door once again and disappeared. This time, no matter how much Alex knocked, he did not open the door.

In the end, Alex had to leave with no result. He went to his master and trained for another 3 to 4 hours. Even Pearl joined in on this fight.

His skills which he improved over the course of the month-long entrapment were definitely getting refined so that they didn't have glaring problems he might have missed here and there, but his Sword Intent wasn't getting improved at all.

Wen Cheng tried his best, but he didn't know Sword Intent like people who had grasped it did.

Alex really did need Du Yuhan's help. So, he decided to ask for it tomorrow.

He left for the night and cultivated the entire night. He also gave Pearl a monster core to break through fast and help him get a stronger body.

When Alex woke up in the morning, he saw that the plan was working. Pearl was now at Organ Tempering 6th realm in cultivation base, which meant his body cultivation was the same too.

He smiled and logged out. He had breakfast with the ladies and went to his classes with Emily. His assignments were done, so he only had to wait for the exams now. After that, he would move on to the 2nd semester of the 1st year.

Alex returned back home and had his afternoon lunch with Emily. They talked for a while and decided to go to the amusement park soon on a romantic outing.

Alex was glad that his obsession with the game hadn't hindered his budding relationship with Emily. He was super grateful for her to be so understanding of him.

After lunch, he returned back to the game and logged in. Once he was up, he decided to go ask Du Yuhan once again.

He trekked up the mountain again and reached the place with Du Yuhan's house. He walked up to it and knocked on it.

Du Yuhan opened the door and frowned when he saw that it was Alex.

"Stop bothering me," he said.

"Teach me about Sword Intent and I won't bother you again," Alex said.

"Go learn on your own. I'm not teaching you," Du Yuhan said and closed the door. Alex tried knocking again, but it didn't work.

"Sigh, do I really have to do that?" Alex said lightly and walked away from the house. Instead of going back to his home or up to his master's house, he walked to the crater.

Once he reached there, he walked over to the fighting hall and got in the queue. People were surprised when they saw him there. By now, his name was one of the most popular amongst the disciples.

Alex waited until it was his turn and debated whether he should do this or not. However, he couldn't think of any other way, so when it was his turn to register the fight, he made up his mind.

"I would like to register a fight with Du Yuhan, Rank 2," Alex said.

The elder that was about to register the fight stopped. He looked back up towards Alex and asked, "Did you just say Du Yuhan?" he asked.

"Yes, Du Yuhan Rank 2," he said as he handed his badge up to the elder.

"Disciple I want to confirm one last time, do you really mean the 2nd ranked disciple, the direct disciple of the first elder, that Du Yuhan?" the elder asked.

"Yes, Elder," Alex said.

The elder didn't say anything else, but his eyes said everything that needed to be said. He certainly thought that Alex might have gone crazy after his win against Huo Tu.

Alex took his badge and went over to Stage 1 to wait for the battle to finish, and Du Yuhan to come. Alex waited for a while and a few matches went by, but Du Yuhan didn't show up.

However, Alex wasn't worried. If Du Yuhan didn't come here by 9 pm, he would lose his status as the 2nd Ranked disciple. And while he might not care much about it, his Master would lose his status as the 2nd in command of the sect, and he certainly wouldn't let that happen.

So, after an hour and a half of waiting, Du Yuhan came to the sect crater.

"Number 2 and Number 50," the elder himself was very surprised when he announced the number on the stage.

Alex walked up to the stage and so did Du Yuhan, only he looked considerably pissed off. It seemed he didn't like being called to battle so suddenly.

Alex and Du Yuhan walked to the opposite end of the stage and waited for the referee to signal the start.

"Begin!" the elder shouted.

Du Yuhan slowly brought out the garbage-looking common sword. As if copying him, Alex brought out his too. "Please help me learn," Alex said and bowed to Du Yuhan.

Then, he dashed forward and slashed horizontally. Du Yuhan casually brought up his sword to block the attack, but when he felt the impact travel to his arm, he realized that Alex didn't have the same strength as what he was showing.

'He's still hiding his strength?' Du Yuhan thought. The damage he felt was nowhere near the 8th Realm of Meridian Tempering.

Alex on the other hand cursed at himself. Due to being too excited to learn, he couldn't control himself enough to use his Sword Intent.

'This time I will do it,' he thought and attacked vertically this time.

'CUT'

Du Yuhan brought up his sword to block the attack. He knew exactly what damage he was going to get, so he didn't strengthen his hands any further. However, when he saw the slight light on Alex's sword, he immediately got alert and increased his guard.

CLANG

A loud sound was released from the two's clash that did not seem to match the current cultivation base of Alex.

"You really do know Sword Intent," Du Yuhan finally spoke, a little amazement in his eyes. "However, that won't mean I will teach you. It only means that I now have one more rival to fight in the sect."

Immediately, Du Yuhan's sword started lighting up as he slashed towards Alex. Alex dashed backward, but that wasn't enough. As he left, a white slash escaped Du Yuhan's sword and flew towards Alex.

Alex wanted to use only Sword Intent to fight, but that wasn't possible right now. Immediately, his sword turned golden as the metal Qi was pushed into the sword.

"HAH!" he shouted as he used the Smiting blade on the incoming slash.

BOOM

A massive explosion rang out, along with an audible sound of metal dropping to the ground. When the visibility returned, everyone could see Alex on the ground his half of his sword missing.

'Dammit, that was too strong. His attacks are nearly as strong as senior sister's,' Alex thought. He tried to stand up, but suddenly a cold feeling appeared from his neck.

He looked up to see Du Yuhan standing in front of him and his sword on his neck. "You lose," Du Yuhan said. "Don't bother me now."

" I will challenge you when I improve a little," Alex promised.

Du Yuhan stopped for a moment and said, "I felt your strength, and it's not bad. If you want to learn from me, come find me once you reach a similar rank as mine."

"I-I understand," Alex said with a grunt. Du Yuhan took his badge and left. Alex was left there on the ground looking at the crowd awkwardly.

He stood up and walked over to the elder to get his badge. However, he didn't return back to his house once he got it. Instead, he went over to the Fighting hall.

Since Du Yuhan had promised him to teach him once he reached a similar rank as him, Alex now had a clear goal in mind. 'I will need to beat Yang Ma as soon as possible,' he thought.

Alex remembered the red-haired disciple that was the third ranked disciple of this sect and had a Superior Fire spirit root. After losing to Wan Li, his pride had taken quite a hit, and Alex was sure that he would do anything to win against a Hong Wu sect disciple.

So, he would have to fight him sooner or later. Alex hoped it would be sooner since he wanted to learn from Du Yuhan. 'That means, I will have to now rank up like crazy,' he thought.

Alex walked over to the elder in charge of the registration for the fight looked at Alex weirdly and asked, "You want to fight him again? You should know repeat challenges daily are not allowed."

"No, this time I want the person at rank 45," Alex said.

The elder nodded and quickly registered the fight. Alex took his badge and went to stage 15 to wait. After about 20 minutes, a man wearing a core disciple robe appeared.

Alex looked at the man and his cultivation base and snickered a little. There wasn't going to be a problem for a while now.

Once their number was called, Alex and the other disciple walked up to the stage and handed the elder their badges.

The disciple seemed a little scared right now when he saw who his opponent was. The number of disciples that saw his match against Huo Tu wasn't small.

So, by now, everyone knew to avoid Alex if they saw him. The two of them walked over to the opposite side of the stage.

"Begin!" the elder said.

Not missing a beat, the other disciple spoke loudly as well. "I concede."

Alex was a little surprised that there wasn't any fight, but he understood what had happened. He took back the new badge and walked over to the Fighting hall to queue up once again.

As long as he had any energy in his body, he would continue fighting the higher-ranked disciples.

Chapter 429: Shan Ling

Alex placed his badge on the wooden block next to his door to open it. A simple light flashed from inside the block that illuminated the number 13 on the badge.

That was the rank he had reached in the last 4 days Of fighting.

He didn't increase his rank very quickly as he was afraid the elders would retaliate in some ways. Unfortunately for him, they did.

Ever since he reached rank 20, the elders made their lower-ranked disciples target him consistently. During the entire 5 hours he had yesterday, he could only increase his rank by 7, and that was after directly challenging the person at rank 13.

He walked out of his house with his badge vibrating nonstop. He was already challenged by someone just to waste his. However, that was not going to stop him.

He made a commitment to get rank 3 to learn Sword Intent from Du Yuhan and he would see to it.

There was one benefit to all of this constant fighting, however. Thanks to it, he was now one realm higher in his cultivation base and was one realm away from entering the Mind Tempering realm.

He reached the sect crater at around 4 pm and spent the next hour defeating the low-rank disciples sent at him by the elders.

Once that was done, he walked over to the Fighting Hall and recorded a fight with the person at Rank 10. The elder recording the fights was used to Alex challenging high-ranked disciples by now, so he registered it without a peep.

Now that he was done challenging, Alex went to the production hall to make some formations. Since the elders wanted to minimize the 'casualties', their disciples were made to go to the fighting stage as late as possible.

There was also the chance of Alex not being there when the disciples came to fight, but if that happened, he would simply challenge someone else.

For the next 3 hours, he made as well of a formation as he could. Even when making True Rank formation plates, he was used to consistently making ones above 50% Efficiency.

"The real test is when I carve the formation onto the metal rod. That's what really matters in the formation," Alex thought to himself.

Once he was done, he walked outside. He left the building and walked towards the fighting stage. The sky was fully dark by now and the stars were already out.

The moon wasn't full, but the light still shined brightly. However, it couldn't hope to outshine the lanterns that were hung around the sect.

Alex was reminded of the festive atmosphere for a second before he saw all the fighting happening on the different stages and immediately lost all feelings. It was a good reminder of where he was at.

He walked over to the first stage and waited for his name to be called out. It was nearly 9 pm, and he got no message about himself losing the match, so his opponent had to come here any moment now.

"Number 10 and Number 13," the referee elder on the stage called.

Alex raised his hands and walked up. At the same time, another disciple raised their hands and walked up to the stage.

Alex saw a girl with blonde hair walk up to the stage. 'Oh, a player?' Alex wondered. While hairs with color weren't impossible to come across, they were still quite rare.

So, when he saw the blonde hair, his first instinct was to assume that the girl was a player. Alex remembered back to the list of names for the board and tried to remember the person at the 10th rank on the board.

'Shan Ling? That sounds… normal. Is she not a player, but a normal person from here?' Alex wondered. He could see that she had a cultivation base of Mind Tempering 1st realm, 1 realm above him, and wondered how easily he could win against her.

Still, it was quite surprising that the top 10 were already in the Mind Tempering realm. 'The sect seriously didn't bother taking any other disciples than the top 3 for the combat-related competition huh?' Alex thought.

"I see… so you are the new kid that's going up in ranks quite quickly. Unfortunately, you met me, kid," Shan Ling said.

"Aren't you like 23? Why are you calling me a kid?" Alex asked curiously.

"Well, you are not completely wrong… but I am quite old mentally," the girl said.

"I see," Alex said. 'Yep, that's a player. I wonder if she got a young corpse to be her clone, or if she was able to hide her age somehow,' Alex thought.

He walked over to the edge of the stage and got ready for the referee. He brought out a common sword and watched the girl see if she would bring out something.

Surprisingly, he saw nothing being brought out. However, since the girl's sleeves were quite long, they were already hiding her hands, so Alex didn't know if she was holding a weapon, to begin with.

'Should I check?' he wondered but decided not to. He was trying to temper himself through the fighting, so it would be better if he learned to survive against an unknown fighting style.

'She's probably an Elemental attack user,' he thought.

"Begin!" the elder shouted.

Immediately, Alex dashed forward to close the gap between them. That was the best way to fight against an Elemental fighter. Invade their space and take away their freedom of using skills by sending a barrage of physical attacks.

However, just as he started to dash forward, Shan Ling did the same thing and dashed forward too. She suddenly brought out her hands from inside the sleeves and revealed something long in her hands.

'Weapon?' Alex wondered. However, he soon realized what it was. 'Long nails!' he thought in surprise. He wasn't in the correct stance when he reached her, but he still chose to swing the sword.

His strike wasn't as strong as it should have been, but it still had a considerable force behind it.

CLANG

The sword was stuck in its place. "Urgh!" Shan Ling grunted a bit under the sword's force but was able to stop it.

"Damn, you're strong kid. But you won't beat my nails," she said and suddenly pushed his sword back. Then, she lunged forward and tried to claw him with her incredibly durable nails.

'It can't be, right?' Alex thought as he blocked attacks.

CLANG CLANG CLANG

He was slowly getting pushed back due to her attack, and he needed to use one of his own. However, since he was forcing himself to stick with the sword, it was quite hard to find an opening.

'What will happen to her hands if I use Sword Intent? Will I cut through it?' Alex worried. That was one of the reasons he was getting pushed back so hard. Since the lady didn't seem to have any armors from what he could see, any attack could be fatal, and from what he could see, the referee wasn't close by at all.

'Screw it,' he thought and decided to attack. He immediately focused on his own will to cut and created Sword Intent out of it.

He brought the sword up above his head and slashed down. An almost visible white line appeared around the sword as it flew downwards.

The woman brought her fingers up to block it, but this time she was going against the force of both Alex and his Sword Intent.

Without a single mistake, Alex cut through 8 of her nails in one clean sweep. Shan Ling was surprised and immediately ran backward, but Alex wasn't going to let her.

He followed her and started attacking. He swung his sword left and right at her, but somehow she was dodging it way too well. 'Damn, did she get lucky and get a fantastic movement technique?' Alex wondered.

Suddenly, Shan Ling blew out air in the middle of him chasing and brought out something from her storage bag. Alex tried to see what it was, but suddenly, he started getting a little dizzy.

'What?' he thought as he saw Shan Ling put something in her mouth through his double vision.

'Am I drunk?' he thought for a second before realizing. 'No, I'm poisoned.'

The moment he thought that, Shan Ling jumped towards him again. However, at the same time, he also got a set of notifications.

<Toxic Substance detected>

<Sun God's Divine Yang body disintegrates everything>

<Toxins have been destroyed>

<No Qi found>

The poison in his system was destroyed and he immediately got his vision back.

Shan Ling was just upon him with her broken fingernails and slashed towards him once again. Alex was too late to block with his sword and was forced to protect himself with his elbow.

Just then, the broken fingernails of Shan Ling immediately grew out until it was the same length as before and sliced at him. The fingernails were strong enough to put a scratch on even him, although they weren't enough to make his elbow bleed.

"What?" Shan Ling said with surprise. But it didn't look like she cared about actually cutting him.

Alex felt himself get dizzy again and started to lose his vision. He got the set of notifications that said his poison was removed, but just then, Shan Ling scratched him again.

And it all started all over again.

Poisoned, Cured. Poisoned, Cured. That was what continued for nearly a minute as Alex refused to step back or stumble onto the ground. Now that he knew her nails couldn't truly harm him, he was standing his ground.

Shan Ling frowned too. Even though her nails were strong, they were somehow losing to Alex's body, which she couldn't understand. As she scratched more and more, her nails started to wear down and ground down to about half the length of what they originally were.

'Do I need to eat it once more?' she thought. She remembered the auctioneer saying that eating twice only gave half the effect for the second pill, so it would be a waste for her to eat it right now.

'Damn it, how is his body healing so fast from these scratches?' she wondered. 'Also, how the hell is he not unconscious yet? Is my poison not entering his body?'

Finally, her nails were ground up so much that she definitely needed another pill. She reached into her bag to get it out, but that was when she realized she had made a mistake.

She had given Alex an opening.

Alex immediately flew backward and kept his distance. Then, he readied his sword. He put his sword sideways as it started to glow green. He was about to use the 2nd strike of the Elusive Heavenly Sword, but it looked a little different from all the other times he had used it.

Other than the light green glow in his sword, there was a bright white outline that appeared but then dimmed. It was bright for another moment and dim one again.

The referee realized what was happening immediately. But Shan Ling didn't seem to know anything.

Alex breathed out and cut the air in front of him with a sole intent in his mind.

'CUT'

A green slash with a moderately white outline flew through the air towards Shan Ling. She who was bringing out a pill tried to dodge, but the slash was way too fast for her.

"Argh!" she shouted in fear, but nothing hit her. The referee had come in time to stop the attack.

The referee's eyes were quite open when he felt the true damage of Alex's attack. 'He's halfway there already,' he thought.

Being the referee of the First stage, he was used to seeing Du Yuhan use Sword Intent from time to time, and the attack he blocked was starting to get there too.

"You Win," the referee said to Alex.

Alex bowed to the elder and took his new badge before leaving behind a stunning stage and audience. He looked at the new badge in his hand and smiled when he saw the number on it.

He was now ranked Top 10 in the sect.

Chapter 430: Problem

"Woohoo Brother Yu, good job."

"Brother Yu, you are amazing."

"I can't wait to see you reach the Top 3, brother Yu."

"Stop showing off you bastard."

"How dare you beat lady Shan like that!"

Both love and hate were thrown towards Alex's way as he walked down the stage and left the area. He flipped his torn robe to see his clear skin with no scars or scratches.

They were all healed by the time he left the stage. He smiled and went towards his Master's manor under the guise of the night.

'Finally, top 10.' He thought. 'I'm sure things will get only harder from here on. But I should be mostly fine as long as I don't come across some uniquely talented individual,' Alex thought.

He had a lot of things about challenging people and such in his mind. He was both looking forward to and not looking forward to tomorrow since there would be limitless challenges for him and he would have to accept each one in under an hour or he would lose his rank again.

Furthermore, he was sure there would be people ready to register to fight against him the moment he finished one, so he couldn't even register another one.

His only chance was making sure he was early to the Fighting hall and registering a match on his own first.

'Yeah, I should do that. I should skip breakfast if I have to,' he thought and walked directly to his Master's manor. He entered the manor and went to the training hall, but no one was there.

"Huh? Is Master not here yet?" he wondered and waited for a few minutes, but he still didn't come.

"Uh, I will just go and spend some time in sister's house," he thought and walked back out of the training hall. He went back into the manor and was about to exit it outside when he heard muffled voices coming from somewhere.

'People are here?' Alex was surprised and sent out his spiritual sense. He then saw his senior sister and Master in a room, talking to each other.

'Oh, the master is already here. And sister hasn't left yet?' Alex was surprised and walked towards the room. As he got closer, he could hear clearer sounds of the two of them speaking.

"…ter is still quite vague, but I'm scared, master." Alex could hear Luo Mei's voice coming from a room nearby.

"But I still don't think if it's a good idea. Especially, given the current situation of the empire," Wen Cheng said. "With all the beast invasion happening, I don't know if I'm okay with you going on your own."

"I'm not going to be alone. Mengmeng will be with me," Luo Mei said.

"She needs your protection rather than you ne— Oh, little Yu, you are here," Wen Cheng said as he looked towards the door.

Alex slowly opened the door and walked in. Wen Cheng looked quite serious sitting on the sofa. He then looked towards his senior sister and nearly felt his heart drop when he saw her red eyes with tears filled to the brim.

"Wh-What's wrong, sister? Why are you crying?" Alex asked.

"Sigh, you don't have to worry about it. Just go back to the training hall, or rather just go back to your house. There won't be any training today," Wen Cheng said.

"It's okay, master. Let him stay," Luo Mei said.

"Sigh, alright. Come here and sit little Yu," Wen Cheng said.

Alex went next to Wen Cheng and sat down. "So, what's going on? Are you in any trouble, sister?" he asked.

"I just got a message from my father. It said that he has been ill for a little while and they can't find any cure. If nothing improves then he— then he—"

Luo Mei covered her face with her hands and started crying. Alex understood what was happening. 'Sister's father is dying?' he thought to himself in surprise.

"Wait, can we not do anything? What about the doctors? Are there none?" Alex asked.

"Due to the beast attacks, no alchemist is moving around the empire at all. So, we can't even check to see what is wrong with him," Wen Cheng said.

"I'm leaving right now, master. I need to go check on my father," Luo Mei said.

"As I said, it's dangerous for you to go alone. Wait until the morning and I will get you registered on a caravan that's going out. That way, we can get some people who protect the caravan to protect you too," Wen Cheng said.

"But Mast—"

"No buts! It's not just the beasts I'm worried about. There are bandits out there too. You think I won't be worried?" Wen Cheng said.

"If it were any other time, I would've gone along with you to see my dear friend. However, I have too many responsibilities to do so right now. The beasts could attack any minute now, the sect's finances are in shambles, and we are one step away from having to take drastic measures."

"So, just do what I say and leave tomorrow morning. It will only take 2 days to reach Rubyroad City anyway," Wen Cheng said.

Luo Mei wanted to argue more, but in the end she nodded and agreed.

"Should I go as well, Master?" Alex asked suddenly.

"What? Why would you go?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I can be of support to sister. Also, didn't you say they were lacking alchemists? I can help with that," Alex said.

"Huh? Can you diagnose people too?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Uhh, no, not yet. But with my memories, I can just go read the books in the library and be done with. I can also go make simple pills if need be," Alex said.

"What about your rank in the sect?" Wen Cheng asked.

"That can pause for a while. Besides, all I do is fight fodders 10 times before fighting a single strong person. It's getting a bit boring now," Alex said.

"Sigh! Alright, Fine." Wen Cheng gave up. "I will go set it all up. You go and rest for now," Wen Cheng said to Luo Mei.

"I will go to the library right now," Alex said and stood up. He quickly said his goodbye and went towards the library.

He could read the books that weren't techniques for free thanks to his divine sense, so he did that without any hesitation. He wasn't going to spend so many spirit stones for the records.

'Not that I think about it, I do need a few techniques too,' Alex thought and walked around, looking for techniques while he studied the medical books in the library. The knowledge in them didn't seem very extensive, but he was planning on buying the better ones in big cities anyway.

The techniques however were pretty useful for the current him. He got all the skills that he could get and left with them after he finished reading through the medical knowledge.

"I want to rent these books," he said to the elder.

The elder looked at the pile of books on his hand and asked, "You do know that you can only rent books for a week, right? And you don't get any discount for the techniques,"

"Yes, I'm aware," Alex said.

"And you still want to rent it all?" he asked.

"Yes" Alex nodded.

"Very well," the elder said as he took the pills and calculated the price. "Its 8 True Spirit stones," he said.

Alex nodded as he looked through the books he had. Only one book amongst these book was even worth any money in his opinion, but he needed to all if he wanted to improve himself at all. So, he paid the money and walked out.

He went back to his house which was just a house lane below Luo Mei's house and walked in.

It was dead in the night by now, so he had two choices. He could either go through his memories to understand the concept behind the procedure for diagnosis for his medicinal knowledge, or he could learn the techniques he had just brought back.

When he thought about it, only the techniques made the most sense to him. So, he poured out the techniques from his storage bags and started reading through them all.

These books were all simple techniques that were either Mortal Grade or Earth Grade in strength. He had strong techniques, and that wasn't what he was looking for.

He separated one book from the pile and called out Pearl.

"You need to practice this technique, okay?" he said.

"Meow?" Pearl questioned.

"No, I will read it to you. Just remember while you are in your space, okay?" he asked.

"Meow!" Pearl said with a bright smile. Alex smiled too and started reading the book to Pearl. Pearl had the comprehension level of a child, but thanks to his Spiritual sea opening, he should have been able to remember it all.

Once he comprehended what all of the words Alex had just said were, it would depend on his talent to understand it.

'The technique is metal aligned, so it should work for Pearl right?' Alex thought. Once he was done, he sent Pearl back into his beast space and continued reading the rest of the book.

The simple books took barely any time to read and learn thanks to his God Grade talent. Once he was all done, he close the books and started practicing what he could.

Once it was morning, he stopped. It was time to leave with his sister.

Chapter 431: Remember What You Never Learned

Alex and Luo Mei along with Meng Yun were seated around the middle of the moving merchant caravan.

The caravan belonged to Heaven's Path merchant group, the 2nd richest merchant group in the whole empire, only behind the official royal merchant group called the Royal Fu merchant group.

"Don't worry sect leader Wen, I have other cultivators employed as well. They will certainly not be in any trouble," said a man from behind Wen Cheng.

He was Zhang Xie, the current head merchant of the caravan, nephew to the owner of the merchant group.

"Thank you, brother Zhang. I will leave these kids in your care," Wen Cheng.

"Haha, don't worry about them, sect Leader Wen. They are old enough to take care of themselves," Zhang Xie said as he chuckled a bit.

Wen Cheng still couldn't help but worry.

"We'll be fine, master. I will take care of senior sister," Alex said.

"Alright, Good. Take care on your journey, I will tell Ma Rong about this later," Wen Cheng said. "Sigh, she's going to get angry for sure."

"Well… I will leave that to you, master," Alex said with a chuckle.

"Remember, I have only marked you absent for 15 days. If not, I will have problems of my own in the sect," Wen Cheng said.

"Since you will reach Rubyroad city by Sunday morning, the merchants may stay there until the next Friday. Remember to get back by that time," Wen Cheng said.

"We understand, master," Alex said.

The caravan started moving and soon they were on the way out of the western gate of the Scarlet City. There were cities to the west, but none were big enough for the caravan to stop.

They tirelessly walked day and night until they reached Rubyroad city in 2 days. Alex was happy that he wouldn't need to wait a very long time to reach the destination, unlike last time.

He looked out of the window of the carriage he was in and looked behind them at the Scarlet City that was moving further and further away from them.

The city gates barely managed to block the sun that was rising from the east as well.

"Well, I guess I will be gone for a week now," he thought.

He put his neck back inside and looked at the two ladies with him.

Meng Yun had changed in a simple commoner's clothes. Alex remembered seeing similar clothes worn by the servants back in the City Lord's manor.

Luo Mei on the other hand still was wearing the Tiger Sect's yellow robes, similar to Alex, and had her head down with a blank expression on her face.

He always remembered seeing his senior sister with a warm smile, or in some cases anger too, but never nothing. This made him feel a little sad for her.

"Are you okay, sister? Are you comfortable?" he asked.

"I'm… I'm fine. You don't have to worry about me. I'm just lost in thought," Luo Mei said.

"Don't worry, young miss. I'm sure the master is fine," Meng Yun said. Now that she was out of the sect, she had started addressing Luo Mei how she originally did.

Luo Mei did nothing to correct her, so Alex believed that she was used to it.

Alex tried to speak a few times on different occasions, but Luo Mei didn't seem like she wanted to participate in any conversation, so he stopped.

Instead, he decided to focus on understanding what medical knowledge he gained the other day.

He quickly sat down cross-legged and started understanding the information he had. For some reason, it was incredibly easy to learn, despite him never learning any part of it before.

He would process the information from the memory and it would implant itself onto his brain like metal to a magnet.

'Is this because of my talent? Can't be. The formation information took way too long to comprehend, and I still need to understand it all. This on the other hand is coming to me like instinct,' he thought.

From what Alex could tell, if normal information was akin to writing on a blank piece of paper, then what was happening to him right now was akin to him ripping off the blank sheet of paper in different places and revealing the information that was already inside.

"Could it be…?" he wondered and kept learning the knowledge more and more. The more he tried to comprehend the knowledge, the more he realized how unnecessary it was.

As long as he even began to try and understand what he had read, information regarding the same subject would pop up in his brain.

Rather than learning something, Alex felt like he was remembering something he had long forgotten.

However, that was impossible since he had never learned it at all. This could only mean,

"This has something to do with the Alchemy God's Knowledge?" he wondered. This made him question more about the 'Alchemy God' in the name of the skill.

Was that a real person? If so, was that person still alive? Or was it just a name made up by the person who had a large enough knowledge about Alchemy.

Also, just how much of this was skill, and just how much of it was the information? If information was a vital part of this skill, then where did the information end?

He still had to unlock at least a single level, if not more. When he did that, what knowledge would he gain next? What skill would he gain next?

Finally, one thing he really cared about and made him think about it all was what was currently happening to him.

"If Alchemists are the doctors of this world… then it's a given that a knowledge about Alchemy would have medical knowledge too."

"Is that what is happening to me right now? Am I unlocking information that is already in my brain?" he wondered.

"If that is true… then why do I need to read it all in the first place? I never felt any of this with information regarding alchemy. Do only medical information do that… or are there other alchemy related, but not strictly alchemy focused information out there that will do this too?' he wondered.

He couldn't help but be excited about what was to come in the future.

He swiftly learned all the information that was on the books from last night and was done with it for the day.

By the time he was done, the sun was reaching the mid sky and the heat of the day was slowly making its way into the carriage.

"Uh, I should go eat something before I start training on the techniques," Alex thought and quickly logged out while he was still in his meditative position.

He freshened up and went out to eat. His part of the meal was kept in the refrigerator, so he simply heated it back up and ate it.

Once he was done, he returned back to what he was doing.

"Sigh, I can only practice half of the techniques, right?" he thought as he remembered through what he had learned.

"Whatever, let's start," he said to himself and started circulating his Qi. Since the technique wasn't a strong one and didn't require a lot of Qi, the Qi it did require traveled through his body at an incredible rate.

Finally, when it reached his hands, it release onto the air. The Qi was of the fire element, but it did not produce fire. Instead, it just dissipated into the air.

To anyone looking from the outside, they would think that this was a failure, however, to Alex he had succeeded.

He had managed to produce Fire Qi and would continue to do so from now on. Fire Qi on its own was pointless as it didn't do anything, however, if he were to mix it together with Wood Qi, that was where the magic would happen.

He could finally empower the wood element he had. That was the entire reason he had learned this technique.

It wasn't just this technique that he had learned. He had also learned to produce Wood, Water, and Earth Qi from his body. He didn't learn any for Metal Qi as he had full control over it and could produce it anytime he wanted without a technique.

He quickly learned all 3 of the remaining ones and practiced producing them. Once they all worked, he was very happy.

There was still one problem to all of this however that he hadn't thought about and that was because he hadn't been able to test it yet.

He was worried that his Metal Qi couldn't be empowered by the Earth Qi and would instead weaken the Earth QI. But he didn't know if that would be the case as Empowering was quite different from the other 4 results of two elements mixing.

"I should try empowering a few attacks of mine when I reach sister's house," Alex thought.

These weren't the only attacks he had learned. He half also learned bare-handed and sword techniques for each of the elements he didn't have one of.

They were all normal projectiles that could fly through the air and hit the opponent. Unfortunately, he had yet to test them either.

"So many things to do. Thankfully, the medical information didn't take that long to understand," he thought and started sifting through the information to fundamentally understand how medical stuff with alchemy worked.

He had nothing else to do, so he did that for the next 3 hours. That was when something happened that suddenly stopped him from doing anything.

"Oh no! Master was right," he silently said as sweats formed on his forehead and palm out of fear.

He was starting to feel the feeling once more. He was starting to feel the advent of the beast invasion.

Chapter 432: Spreading Awareness

Alex started fearing; he knew what this feeling meant for not just him, but the empire itself.

He looked outside. This time, the feeling felt like it came from the southeast rather than just the south.

'What's there to give me this feeling? It's completely different from the one from the desert, and yet I feel it so clearly,' he thought.

'No, now is not the time to ponder on these things. I need to hurry up and do something or else the beasts will attack the caravan.'

He immediately took out his talisman that was meant to message his master. He hoped it was close enough for him to reach, but unfortunately, it didn't. He had come too far away for the low-range communication talisman to function.

He looked towards his senior sister who was still emotionless except for the tinge of sadness in her eyes.

"Sister, I need your help." Alex stood up and walked over next to her.

"Go away, Yu Ming. I am not in the mood to talk right now," Luo Mei said in a low voice.

"Sister, please. Now is not the time for you to be depressed," Alex said.

"Just leave me alone," she said. "I want to be depressed right now."

"Stop acting like your father is dead!" Alex shouted. "He's not dead, okay? Aren't we going there to heal him in the first place? Or have you already killed him off in your heart?"

"Do you have that little faith in your brother that you don't think I will be able to save him at all?" Alex asked.

Luo Mei finally looked up with tears in her eyes. "I can't lose him, Yu Ming. I already lost my mother, I can't lose my father too," she said as tears started dripping down her cheeks.

"Don't worry about your father right now, sister. Worry about yourself. With what's happening right now, we might end up dead before we even reach your father," Alex said.

"What?" that caught Luo Mei's attention for sure. She immediately spread out her spiritual sense to see if there was any problem, but she couldn't find any.

"What are you talking about, little brother? What danger? I can't see anything," Luo Mei said.

"Beast Invasion," Alex said. "Not the second one either. One similar to the first one in the capital. That beast invasion is coming for this caravan right now.

"Wha—?" Luo Mei immediately lost any hint of sadness from her face as she got both confused and scared.

"The beasts will attack at any moment all around the empire. We need to let the master know so he can protect the city," Alex said. "My communication talisman is too low leveled to work. Do you have any that works?"

"Uh… yeah, mine is a higher grade one. As long as we haven't left 1000 Kilometers away from Scarlet City, it will work," Luo Mei said.

Alex frowned. While the caravan wasn't fast by any means, it was much faster than the average car in his real life. Given that they had been on the road for a whole day with no stopping in between, he worried if they had left the range already.

"Try communicating, or rather let me talk," Alex said.

"No, only I can operate it," Luo Mei said and brought it out before sending a message through it.

After a few moments, the talisman glowed a little and made a small noise to let them know there was a message back.

Luo Mei quickly read it and said, "Master wants to know how you know about that. Also, are you absolutely sure?"

"Uh… Tell him I have a similar feeling to the one I had before the first one. I told him about it when the invasion started in Capital too," Alex said.

"As for whether I'm sure or not, I don't think that should matter right now. Just the fact that there is a chance of the invasion should mean that master should get to take precautions," Alex said.

"Yes, you are right," Luo Mei said and quickly sent the message back to her master. After a few more moments, they got a message back again.

"Alright, Master is going to start preparing for the attack. He has also taken it upon himself to send messages to the other cities to let them know," Luo Mei said.

"Alright, if others will be fine, then it's time for us to worry about ourselves," Alex said.

"Huh? Oh right, the caravan," Luo Mei said and tried to walk out of the carriage.

"Not the caravan, sister. Me! The beasts follow me. I'm sure they are on their way here right now for me. Imagine the entirely of the beasts that attacked the Capital coming for this one small caravan," Alex said.

Luo Mei's face immediately went pale. Even Meng Yun got scared.

"N-n-no, that can't be. You will die, You will die for sure," Luo Mei suddenly got unreasonably afraid.

"Um, we still have time sister, I can run away," Alex said.

"No, You can't. They will catch you. Oh no, and then they will kill us too," Luo Mei said.

"Um, I'm sure I can go far away so that not even the True realm beasts can catch us," Alex said.

"I'm not scared about the True beasts," Luo Mei said.

"Huh? Then what?" Alex asked.

"The Saint beast," Luo Mei said.

Alex's eyes went wide. "Sister, what do you mean by saint beast?" he asked. "Are you saying there is a beast out there with Saint Realm cultivation base?"

"Yes. There was a Saint Beast, a black Jaguar-type beast, during the first attack. The Emperor himself fought it, but couldn't beat it off. He said that if the beasts hadn't returned back on their own during that time, he would have surely died there," Luo Mei said.

Alex was shocked to hear these 2 new pieces of information.

'So there is another saint beast out there, and the Emperor himself is in the Saint realm too, huh?' Alex thought.

"Alright, let's not waste any more time. If last time is anything to go by, we have mere hours, but it's better if we don't rely on that. It's better to act like we could be under attack at any moment now," Alex said.

"Yes, let's go," Luo Mei said and immediately searched for Zhang Xie with her spiritual sense. Once she found him, she opened the carriage and walked into the evening light.

"Senior Zhang, it's an emergency," Luo Mei said.

"Huh? Little Miss, what's wrong?" Zhang Xie said as he opened the door to his carriage.

"Senior Zhang, I just got a message from my master. He said that there is another Beast Invasion coming and that we need to get away from this path right now and get as far away from the forest as possible," Luo Mei said.

"Miss, this… you aren't joking right?" Zhang Xie said. He had always been afraid of the beast invasion, but despite his uncle's opposition for him to go on a caravan, he had insisted that he would be safe.

And now…

"Senior Zhang," Alex called out. "Take this."

Alex brought out two pills and handed them to Zhang Xie. Zhang Xie looked at the pills for a while, but couldn't understand what they were.

"What are these pills, young man?" he asked.

"These are called the Beast Attracting Pills. When you pour in a little Qi and throw it away, it will attract every beast below True realm to its place. If the situation is dire, use these," Alex said.

"This pill… I've never heard of this," Zhang Xie said.

"I wouldn't doubt you have, but you must have heard about the Royal Alchemist saving the day in the capital during the first wave of Beast invasion," Alex said.

Zhang Xie's eyes shined widely as hope appeared in them. "You mean—"

"Yes, they may be a little worse since I was the one that made them, but they are the same pills as the Royal Alchemist's," Alex said.

Zhang Xie immediately pocketed it with a smile, but then stopped. "Why aren't you keeping it? You can use it if the situation is dire, young man," he said.

"I have some myself. As an Alchemist, I have a lot of such pills," Alex said. "As for why I'm giving it to you is because… I will need to go somewhere else."

"Huh? Where do you plan on going?" Zhang Xie asked.

"I'm going to lure the beasts from here and go perpendicular to the forests. You guys go diagonally towards the Northwest side and get as far away from here as possible. It's a shame you can't go directly towards the north due to the terrain," Alex said as he looked at the uneven hills to the north.

"I can't let you do that, young man. You are my responsibility. I promised sect leader Wen. I can't let you go anywhere," Zhang Xie.

"You don't have a choice, senior Zhang. I'm leaving with or without your approval. Please take care of my Senior sister in my stead," Alex said.

"Huh? No, I'm coming with you," Luo Mei said.

"No, sister. It will be dangerous. You need to go with the caravan," Alex said. "I will lure them away and since I have that escape technique, I will surely be fine."

Secretly, he sent spiritual sense to Luo Mei to say something else.

"Go with them. Since the beasts are following me, you will be in more danger. I also happen to have a boat artifact that I've somewhat managed to learn to use and will get as far away from here as possible."

"Adding onto that my ability to conceal myself and go invisible, the beasts won't find me so easily," Alex said.

"That's…" Luo Mei was torn. She was already sad about losing her father, and now she had to see her newly made brother throw away his life to save theirs.

"Don't worry, sister. I will find the caravan as soon as the beasts return back," Alex said. "Take care."

Alex suddenly stopped moving and watched the caravan and Luo Mei go along with the caravan.

Alex stayed there for a minute or two watch as the caravan changed its course and started heading Northwest where they would most likely encounter any beasts as most would be coming for this area.

The ones that did go there would have to fight the True cultivators in that caravan.

Alex didn't know how many there were, but there should have been enough to fight off a random bandit army.

Once the caravan was no longer in view, he took out a boat from his storage space.

"Alright, time to leave."

Chapter 433: Jaguar

In front of Alex was a small flying boat that could house preferably only one person at a time, but could fit 3 people if needed. The boat was white in color with a slight purple hue along the outlines.

The design of the boat itself was quite simple.

It was about a meter wide, 2 meters long, and barely half a meter high. It had a small compartment on the front where one could place True Spirit stones inside it to make it run on its own.

The boat was something Alex had gotten after Zexi's death. It was one of the things inside Zexi's storage bag along with everything else he gained.

Being a True rank artifact, Alex couldn't really refine it at all. However, he had noticed that even without refining, the boat flew way faster than if he did normally.

He couldn't imagine how fast the boat would be if he really did manage to refine it once he reached the True realms, however, that would be something he would think about when the time came.

He quickly jumped onto the hovering boat and checked the True spirit stones in the front compartment. Once he made sure the spirit stones had Qi in them, he closed the compartment and sat on the boat.

The boat didn't have any control equipment and entirely relied on the user to control it through their Qi.

Alex put his Qi into the compartment and suddenly, the boat activated and started moving forward.

The boat did nothing but go forward, and since the boat was angled a little off from the north, it started speeding towards there.

"Not there," Alex thought as he slightly pushed the front of the boat from the side using his Qi to straighten its path.

The boat was incredibly fast and moved through the air faster than the sect's giant ship or Ma Rong's own flying artifact.

"I guess you really can't argue that a royal has some of the best stuff," Alex thought. He wouldn't argue if someone came and said that this was a Heaven-grade artifact, even though he knew it was just an earth-grade artifact.

The feeling Alex felt had disappeared by now. But that didn't do anything to make him feel better. In fact, that was the exact same thing that happened last time as well.

The feelings would disappear for a few minutes, then come back up stronger. It would repeat a few times and increase to the point that it would be physically uncomfortable for Alex.

He felt like it was halfway there by now. He flew up the hill and went past another set of the small jungle as he made his way as far north as he could.

Even then, he couldn't get rid of that feeling.

In the veil of the night, he flew for nearly 3 hours when the feeling reached its peak.

By now he was very far away, but that wasn't consoling at all. The beast side had a Saint Beast. If it wanted, it could probably reach him in a third of the time it took him to fly this far away.

He had crossed villages by now, but his fear did not drop in the slightest.

And that was not without reason as he soon felt an enormous aura from many kilometers away. Even at a distance so far away, he could feel the aura of the saint realm.

"Shit! Saint realm is truly terrifying. But… why do I sense two different auras?"

* * * * *

Half an hour earlier.

A massive nearly 3 meters tall and 5 meters long Jaguar flew through the night sky, fully hidden under its darkness.

The black jaguar was flying at incredible speed and headed north while the minor beasts started searching for things to attack mindlessly.

Most of them had all followed behind it. Where ever the Jaguar went, they went as well.

"Just when will these mindless children grow? Just when will the wound upon this land heal?" the beast asked itself as it flew towards Alex's location.

"I already failed the first time when those humans stood in my way. If I could kill them, I would have already found him by now," the Jaguar lamented.

"And the second time did not bore any fruit as I couldn't locate him, to begin with."

"This time, however, I will make sure to get him and return back," the Jaguar said.

As one of the faster types of beasts, it wouldn't even take half an hour to reach where Alex had already gone to.

It flew without stops for the next half an hour and finally felt that the target was within grasp. It was excited.

"Friend, would you mind stopping for a little bit," A voice suddenly appeared in the Jaguar's mind.

"Yes, friend. We would like it if you could stop for a little chat," Another voice said.

The Jaguar suddenly stopped. The voices had just spoken inside his head, which meant the speaker must have a Saint Realm cultivation base.

The Jaguar suddenly sent out its own Spiritual sense and noticed the two people about a few kilometers away.

"It's you two. How are you two here?" the Jaguar asked.

"Oh, how can we say? I guess we can call it fate," one of the people said.

"Fate… hah! What utter crap," the Jaguar said and immediately sent his spiritual sense all over himself.

"I see… I didn't realize that there was an imprint on me. My age must be catching up to me. I guess I will need to hurry up or I won't get a proper chance to enter the Immortal Realm," the Jaguar said to itself.

The imprint on its body immediately disappeared as if it was never there. The two men standing a kilometer away frowned.

"This seems… troublesome, brother Feng," a red-haired male with short hair and a clean face said. He had an ordinary-looking body and attire, but his attitude and ability were anything but ordinary.

"Truly does seem that way, brother Yang. Unfortunately, we don't have the highness to help us this day," the man named Feng said. Feng had long jet black hair and a thin face which was contrasted by his fat mustache.

"Guess we will have to give our all then," the man named Yang said and flared out his cultivation base, getting ready to fight.

"I guess we do," Fend said and flared out his cultivation base too.

Together, their cultivation base was enough to scare anyone in the entire empire. However, the Jaguar wasn't fazed at all.

The only thing on its face was a frown from not being able to go to where Alex was.

"Humans, I don't wish to harm you, so please let me go do my duty," the Jaguar said.

"We followed you all the way from the capital, friend. We can't leave empty-handed. At the very least we need answers," Yang said with a menacing smile on his face.

"Sigh, I guess being a pacifist really does hurt one from time to time," Jaguar said and suddenly released its cultivation base too.

The two men frowned at first seeing the Jaguar release its cultivation base. They believed the Jaguar was getting ready to fight. However, the Jaguar didn't stop.

Its cultivation base kept on growing more and more, and the frown on the two men's faces slowly turned into fear. Soon, the fear disappeared too and it changed into despair.

Finally, the Jaguar stopped releasing its cultivation base and slowly walked towards the two men with its overwhelming aura.

"Do you still wish to stop me, humans?" it asked.

The two men started fearing for their life now. For all of their nearly thousand-year-long life, they hadn't met anyone or anything with this high of a cultivation base.

"N-no, no," the Yang named man started blurting out on his own. The man named Feng couldn't even speak.

"Leave!" the Jaguar ordered.

"Y-Yes, senior," Yang said and disappeared from there. Feng too disappeared within a second after Yang.

"Finally, no more disturbances," the Jaguar said and was about to follow Alex when it realized it could no longer locate him at all.

"NO! It can't be over already," it said. It looked back and saw the hundreds of thousands of beasts rushing back into the forest.

"I'm sure he's around somewhere ahead of me. I just need to search for him," it said and flew further ahead searching for Alex, but no matter how hard it did, it would never locate something it hadn't seen before. It saw thousands of humans and beasts alike, but it couldn't see the target at all.

"Shit! Today was a failure too. I will have to wait another month again," the Jaguar said.

"I hope that damned puma had more luck than me," the Jaguar said and turned around.

Once again, it had failed. It hated the humans for stopping it on both times it could locate its target.

It lamented the fact that it could not find its target this month, but next month, it promised on its master's grave to find him for sure.

* * * * * *

The aura of the two human cultivators that Alex had mistaken as the aura of the Jaguar had disappeared far away behind him.

He had moved too far away to feel that aura at all now.

In the next 2 minutes, the feelings he was feeling disappeared too. 'Is it okay now?' he wondered and flew towards a spot of light in the night.

It turned out to be a small village in the mountains. Alex dropped near there and took in his boat. Then he walked into the village and meshed with the people there.

He acted like he was a cultivator from far away and was only resting. He gave the villagers a few pills in exchange for letting him stay with them for a bit.

A spiritual sense came and went, and Alex was left in sweats. Thankfully the owner of that sense never came looking for him.

So, he stayed in the village for half an hour more and finally felt like it was time to leave.

"Thank you for your hospitality, senior. I will leave now," Alex said to the village chief.

"No, no, lord Cultivator. It is our village's honor that a person such as you came here at all," the chief said.

Alex thanked them again and walked out of the village. It was dead in the night and the sky was cloudy.

'Is it going to rain?' he wondered. He wouldn't mind a bit of rain. Rather, he wanted some.

He quickly got on the boat and started flying towards where he assumed his sister and the caravan would be by now.

He didn't have an accurate map of the land, so he could only base where he was on some crude information he had about the general area of the lands.

"So… that direction?" he guessed as he looked towards a certain direction and flew away in his boat.

Chapter 434: Huang and Xing

Alex didn't have a compass, nor did he have the night sky to help him know exactly which direction he was going towards.

'How do I tell the direction exactly?' he thought. He had been flying for an hour towards where he assumed was the caravan, but he saw nothing.

"Hmm… what should I do?" he wondered. "Compass… something that can tell me the direction… Ah, maybe I can find those," he thought and immediately lowered his boat down towards the ground.

He then spread out his spiritual sense on the forest below, looking for something.

At first, it didn't seem like he would find it any time soon, but then after a dozen or so minutes, he found one and quickly released his Qi from the boat and stopped it.

"Well, I wanted a sunflower, but that helps too I guess," he thought and jumped down from the boat.

Alex landed next to a small patch of grass where he saw a few yellow flowers blooming.

These flowers were yellow in color and were called Yinful Daisy. These plants contained trace amounts of Yin Qi in them, and always looked towards the Sun for their Yang.

Even at the night, they followed the path of the sun and looked at them. As long as one knew the time of the night, one could infer the direction from these flowers.

"Since it's facing towards me, and it's 2 am in the morning, then west must be—"

Alex stopped. Something was weird here. "Wait, why is it facing towards me? The sun should be below us right now?" he said.

He quickly thought about the flower once more. "Ah, well… I didn't expect to see it attracted towards my Yang Qi. That's… problematic," he thought.

Alex immediately stood up and went far away from the flower. Until a certain distance, the flower looked towards him, but once he was away, it dropped down towards the ground and looked in a certain direction.

"That… should be east, right?" Alex thought. He quickly sent out his spiritual sense around the flower to see if there were any other plants or minerals with yang energy.

Only when he couldn't find it at all did he accept that west was behind the flower.

"Nice. I should go left to the left from West so that I can catch up with Sister and others right? I should at least reach the Southern forest so that I can reach Rubyroad just in case," Alex thought and flew away.

In the next 3 hours, he finally reached the Southern Forest, but he couldn't find any signs of the Caravan. Even if there were any, it was impossible with the beasts destroying almost everything outside of the forest.

Thankfully, there were no villages there, or it would have been disastrous for them.

'I guess beast attacks happen from time to time. Any villages that still stood would have disappeared by now,' Alex thought solemnly.

He then moved again, looking for the Caravan. 'Do I go diagonally too? Or have to change their course back to their original route?' Alex wondered.

He regretted not making plans on how to meet once they were separated. But to be fair to Alex, the only thing on his mind at that time was survival.

Now that he had survived, he would certainly do something about finding the caravan.

"Let's just go through what route I assume they would go through. Even if I don't find them, I can just go to Rubyroad city directly."

So, he changed courses towards the path the caravan might be moving towards.

Time passed and the sun came up, but Alex didn't find the caravan still. He saw a few other types of carriages and caravans, but not belonging to the Heavens Path merchant group.

At some point, he needed to log out so that he could eat, so he flew into a small patch of trees and sat down on a branch.

After making sure he wouldn't fall at all, he used his concealing and invisibility techniques. He didn't know why, but he knew these clones would continue to use these techniques even when he was logged out.

At least, that was what it did back inside the alchemy garden inside the Southern Forest.

He logged out and went to have his breakfast.

"Hey, what happened yesterday. You didn't come out," Emily asked.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I had to go out on a Caravan journey in the game, so I couldn't log out in time. But I did come out later around noon and ate the food. As always, it was delicious," Alex said.

"Thank you," Emily said while blushing a little.

"Urghh! It's too early in the morning for us to hear you being lovey-dovey. Just sit down and have your breakfast," Sarah cried from the dinner table.

Alex chuckled and said, "Maybe you should get a boyfriend too, Sarah."

Sarah then looked at him and said, "Who said I liked boys?"

Alex was a little surprised. Emily chuckled from the side and so did Hannah. "You guys knew?" he asked.

"Of course I knew. She's my friend," Emily said.

"It was quite obvious actually," Hannah said.

"Uhh, alright, I will just eat and go. I'm in a hurry anyway," Alex said and quickly finished his breakfast.

Then, he went back to his room and logged in.

When he opened his eyes, he found himself upon the tree, still fully concealed.

"Haha! It still works," he thought and flew up. He then took out his boat and checked the True spirit stones in the front compartment.

"Wow, this thing is expensive to run. Just half a day and I've already wasted nearly 5 True Spirit stones. Makes me wonder how expensive the sect's ship is to run," Alex thought.

He quickly replaced the true spirit stones and used his Qi to activate the boat. After that, all he had to do for the day was looking for the caravan.

He flew for hours on end but did not manage to find the caravan at all.

"They must have taken a different route. Whatever, I will directly go to the city then," he thought and took a direct route to the west, instead of trying to follow the route.

However, just as he was about to stray from the path, he heard something. Alex looked towards the front and could see some sort of smoke coming out.

He moved his boats in that direction and could finally hear a larger amount of shouting from that area.

"Is that a caravan?" Alex thought when he saw that. There really was a caravan under attack, but it wasn't the caravan he was looking for.

"Bandits!" Alex said when he finally saw what was happening.

He quickly sped up to help the caravan. When he got close, he jumped out of the boat and quickly took it into his storage bag before concealing himself and getting closer to them.

"Damn those bandits. Why are there so many across the empire? I should help those people in the— huh?" Alex was surprised when he finally reached the location of the caravan.

He lifted his concealment and got closer to watch what was happening.

The caravan was indeed under attack and one of the carriages was burning with smokes plumes coming out without stop.

However, the countless shouts didn't belong to the members of the caravan at all.

It was in fact the Bandits. The bandits were currently inside a barrier and were surrounded by green smoke that seemed to hurt them.

Alex looked down towards the members of the caravan and saw them looking at the bandits in horror.

Everyone seemed to be unaccustomed to what was happening, except for 2 people who seemed to be the cause of it all.

Alex looked at their red robes and recognized them, or at least he recognized the sect.

The red-robed man looked towards the Sky to where Alex was and got ready to fight. But then when he saw the Yellow robe on his body, he stopped.

"Xing'er, that man is from Tiger sect, right?" he asked the girl next to him.

The girl turned towards the Sky and saw Alex too. "Yes, I believe so, Elder brother," she said.

Alex was surprised that they met each other in such away. He dropped down to the ground and took another look at the men in the barrier.

They were now starting to claw out their faces from all the pain they were suffering. It was a truly inhumane way to kill someone.

But he did not feel any pity, as bandits were known to do such horrible things.

"Fellow Daoist, may I know who you are?" the man said.

"Greetings, my name is Yu Ming. I came to help, but… it seems you don't need my help," Alex said.

"Ah, these were just minor bandits that thought they could take their chances while the stronger ones were hiding due to the beast attacks."

"Even if we didn't help, this little caravan could have successfully fought them off. But since we saw them, we decided to help," the man said. "Oh right, My name is Xiao Huang. This is my senior sister, Luo Xing."

"Hello," Luo Xing said.

"Ah, yes. I recognize sister Xing. I assume you are going back to Rubyroad as well, right?" Alex asked.

"How… do you know that?" she asked, suddenly getting suspicious. The man named Xiao Huang suddenly flared up his cultivation base as well.

'True Realm cultivator? He did look quite old,' Alex thought.

"Please forgive me for not properly introducing myself. I am a Junior apprentice-brother to sister Luo Mei. She is on a caravan ride to Rubyroad city as well. However, during the beast hoard attack, I got separated from them."

"I was trying to search for the caravan when I spotted this one," Alex said.

"You are Mei'er's junior brother?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "It's good to finally meet you, Sister Xing. I wanted to speak during the Annual competition, but didn't get the chance."

"Didn't get the chance? Or did Mei'er just not bother?" Luo Xing asked.

"Uhh…" Alex didn't know what to say.

"Whatever, I need to leave soon, senior brother," Luo Xing said.

"Ah right. I will finish them off now," Xiao Huang said and suddenly upped his Qi input in the 10-meter wide barrier.

The speed at which the men died increased by a lot and within a dozen seconds, they were all dead.

Xiao Huang swiped his hands in a gesture and 6 formation flags came flying towards him.

"Let's go," he said. The Caravan people tried to thank him, but he didn't accept any of it. Instead, he even let those people take the bandit's storage bag.

Just as the two of them were about to leave, Alex called out to them.

"Um, Sister Xing," Alex called out. "Would you mind if I go the remainder of your journey with you guys?"

Chapter 435: Helping

"It should be fine. What say you, senior brother?" Xing asked.

"Well, if Xing'er is fine with it, then okay," Xiao Huang said and took out a large, red-colored ship.

The design of the ship was similar to the one Alex had, but was larger and could probably house up to 6 people easily.

"Come, little brother. Sit next to me," Xiao Huang said as he sat towards the front.

Alex nodded and jumped onto the ship. He sat down next to Xiao Huang while Luo Xing sat behind them both.

They quickly said goodbye to the people from the caravan and started moving.

"We should reach Ruby road city around midnight. Don't worry, Xing'er" Xiao Huang said.

"I'm not really worried about father. I'm more worried about how Mei'er is holding up. After stepmother's death 10 years ago, she would get depressed whenever something bad happened to anyone."

"Hehe, there was this one time when mother got food poisoning a year before we left for our sects, and she spent the entire night with mother, crying that she too shouldn't die on her."

"I probably shouldn't be laughing, but it's quite a sweet memory actually," Luo Xing said as she thought about the past.

"Oh, how is she holding by the way?" she asked.

"Well, she was indeed a little depressed when we started the journey, but halfway through when we heard information about the beast attack, she stopped worrying about everything else."

"After that, we were separated as I took the task of luring the beasts away from the caravan so I don't know how she is holding up."

"However, since Meng Yun is with her, she should be fine," Alex said.

"Oh, Mengmeng is coming too? I probably should have brought Fei'er too. At least one pair of sisters would be happy to see each other in our household," Luo Xing said with sadness in her voice.

Alex was about to ask something when Xiao Huang asked him another question instead.

"Little brother, what do you mean by you took the task of luring the beasts?" he asked.

"Oh, since we thought the caravan couldn't handle the onslaught of the beasts, I took the task of luring the beasts away from them with this," Alex said as he brought out a pill.

"This is the same pill that the Royal Alchemist used to lure away the beasts from the capital. Using these, I could lure the beasts away."

"I also happened to have a flying artifact that I used to escape away from them," Alex said as he mixed truth and lies.

"Oh, I heard about that. How did you get your hands on the pills? Did the Royal Alchemists sell them?" Xiao Huang asked.

"Oh no, I made them. The recipe was handed to the participants of the new pill-making competition on the 4th day, and my friends gave it to me," Alex said.

"Oh, little brother, you're an alchemist?" Xiao Huang asked.

"Ah, yes. One of the reasons I was going with Sister to see her father was to possibly heal him if I can."

"Since most alchemists are not moving from their cities, I was hoping to at least diagnose him even if we have to roam the empire, looking for clues."

"After all, finding what is wrong is the first step to solving it," Alex said.

"Y-You… came here to find out what's wrong with father?" Xing asked with wide eyes.

"Yes, sister. At least, I hope to help a bit in these desperate times," Alex said.

"Haha! I like you, junior brother. Come, tell us more," Xiao Huang said and started asking questions.

Alex hid as much as he could but eventually let it be known that he was part of the Hong Wu Sect as well.

The two of them got a little surprised but said nothing about it.

Alex asked them a few questions too.

Xiao Huang and Luo Xing were direct disciples of the 2nd Elder of the Heaven's Barrier sect, a popular formation-focused sect of the east.

Luo Xing was one of the best formation makers amongst the students, while Xiao Huang was already an elder thanks to his age and cultivation base.

Luo Keng, the father of Luo Mei and Luo Xing was good friends with both Wen Cheng and the 2nd Elder of the Heaven's Barrier sect, so when it came time to send his daughters to study and enter a sect, he sent them both to two of his friends to grow separately.

Now that he was dying, they were both returning back from their sects as fast as they could.

It was soon nighttime, but the three of them didn't stop at all. It was then around midnight that Luo Xing spoke out.

"We're here," she said.

Alex looked ahead and could see a massive city, around the same size as Scarlet city.

Even though it was midnight, the city was full of light.

"They must be rebuilding after the beast attack," Xiao Huang said. He could see that people were rebuilding parts of the walls that had broken during the attack.

"It… doesn't look that bad, does it?" Luo Xing asked while surprised.

"They must have learned about the beasts attacking like I was let know," Alex said.

"Must be. I wonder how they learned this time? They must have left sentries in the forest or something," Xiao Huang said.

Once they got closer, a few people flew up to see who it was. However, one of the people, an elderly man with a white beard spoke out.

"Young Lady, you're back!" he said.

Xiao Huang stopped the boat and Luo Xing flew out. "Senior Jin, are you out here helping the walls?" Luo Xing asked.

"Ah, yes. Since the lord is unable to, I was tasked with helping them rebuild. We were hoping to finish early, but we don't have much manpower. Most people got hurt during the attack."

"The casualty was quite high this time. However, thanks to the warning we got, the fatalities were none," The old man named Jin said.

"Oh, I hope those men that got hurt are well. You should treat them fast and get them to help with the walls. We can't leave it destroyed like this," Luo Xing said.

"Sigh, I wish we could do that too. But due to the lack of proper healers, we are suffering a bit. We've used all the pills available here, but there are more wounded people here."

"We've sent a few people over to the next city to buy some pills, but… we don't see much hope. Those people must be suffering just like we are," Old man Jin said.

"Excuse me, senior," Alex suddenly spoke from the back.

"Yes, young man," old man Jin said.

"Um, what cultivation base do the wounded have? If they are not in the True realm, I can help a bit," Alex said.

"Umm… you are?" the old man asked curiously.

"He is Mei'er's junior brother in the sect and an Alchemist. If little brother wishes to help, take him with you. Certainly, he will be of much help," Luo Xing said.

"Oh," old man Jin's eyes opened wide. "You are Young lady Mei's junior brother? Welcome to the Rubyroad City, young lord," Old man jin said.

"If you truly wish to help, we can use some. Please come with me," old man Jin said.

"I will go to the house and go see the father. Little brother Ming is here to diagnose father's illness as well, so be sure to give him the utmost respect, senior Jin," Luo Xing said.

"Young Lord is here to check up on the lord? Oh my, please forgive me if I have been rude," Senior Jin said.

"Alright, I will leave now. Come to the house when you are done. Senior Jin will bring you there," Luo Xing said and left with Xiao Huang following behind her.

Alex nodded and followed behind senior Jin to a massive camp laid out outside the walls.

"Here are the injured. We have some people with some medical knowledge trying to keep them alive, but their knowledge isn't extensive enough to heal them," old man Jin said.

"I see… let me see," Alex said and opened the tent.

Suddenly, he was bombarded with a heavy smell of blood. Even when he was doused in the blood of the monsters he killed, the smell didn't seem so heavy.

"How many people are here?" Alex asked.

"Hmm… around 200 I would say," old man Jin said. "There were about 250 originally, but we managed to use what remaining pills we had after the last battle and saved the most injured ones.

"These less injured ones are the ones that suffer the most."

Alex looked around and asked, "I thought having knowledge of the attack would let you guys survive more, but even after that there were still 250 injured? How many were injured last time?"

"Last time should have been around 180 injured," senior Jin said.

"Huh? It was worse this time?" Alex asked.

"No, it was better this time, much better. While the injured may have been more this time, it's unlike last time when about a hundred different people died," Jin said.

'Ah right. I nearly had Survivorship bias,' Alex thought.

Alex walked to one of the injured people and looked through his wounds. He quickly thought of what was wrong with him.

'Shoulder Blade has been pierced through. Even the best common pill won't help with that. However, just healing the rest of the wounds and not moving the shoulder for a month should fully heal him,' Alex thought.

However, he didn't immediately bring out a pill to help him. Instead, he stood up and moved to another patient, and checked him.

Once he figured out what was wrong with that person, he moved to another one.

Senior Jin watched as Alex moved from one bed to the next and checked all the people one by one. Finally, after an hour, he was done with every single one of the 200 patients.

There were other people tending to the wounded that too looked at Alex weirdly. Alex closed his eyes to think for a moment as he sent out his spiritual sense into his bag to check for the pills.

'Shit! I only have 60,' he thought.

He quickly took out the pills and decided to give them to the ones that were most wounded amongst them all.

He went towards the most injured ones one by one and gave them the pills. Once they ate the pill, the people slowly stopped grunting in pain and had a calm face once more.

"Thank you, brother," they said with a sigh of relief. They were on the verge of death, and Alex had saved them.

Alex said nothing and went through everyone he could and saved all of the 60 people he could. They weren't fully healed, as common pills just didn't have that much ability, but they were good enough that they could use their own natural healing to heal themselves now.

Once he was done with them, Alex then took out a blank talisman and brought it to senior Jin.

"Senior, I have a list of ingredients here. If you can help me find a lot of these, I can help around a hundred of these people," Alex said.

"The rest of the 40 people are True Realm cultivators and I don't have the capability to help them currently," Alex said.

"You-You really can help them?" Senior Jin said in surprise. He didn't expect a single alchemist to reduce their problems by so much.

"Yes, you can ask those people that are going over to the next town over to only bring back True pills," Alex said.

"Yes, yes, I will get on it," senior Jin said and left. The people working inside the tent finally saw hope for the patients and smiled.

They and the ones that were healed thanked Alex once more.

"It's too early to thank me. I still have a lot to do."

Chapter 436: Lie

"Can you guys help me find an Alchemy room somewhere? I have some ingredients of my own that I can immediately turn into pills that can save these people," Alex told the healers there.

"Uhh, there is one a little north of the city center. Oi, Bingbing, come show senior here a way to the alchemy hall," the woman said.

"Oh, okay. Come with me mister," a little girl, who didn't seem phased by the people dying around her, took Alex towards the city.

They were stopped by the guard when the little girl said, "Mister is an alchemist. He is going to make pills to heal the people."

"Oh, the one Senior Jin was talking about? Please come," the guards immediately let them in.

Alex suddenly grabbed the girl and started flying. "We don't have time to waste," he said.

The girl screamed with joy when she was high in the air. "You are strong, mister. You can fly so high," she said.

"Where to?"Alex asked.

The girl pointed towards a direction and Alex flew to the Alchemy hall. Once he reached there, he immediately told the people what he was here for and they let him enter the empty alchemy hall without any problem.

The girl left them, and Alex was taken in by a young man. "Are there seriously no alchemists here?" Alex asked.

"No good ones," the man said. "The ones we have can't even make Earth-grade pills. The good ones saw the danger the city could face in case of another beast attack, and left in fear."

"Can't say I blame them though. I would have probably done the same. We are after all one of the weaker cities that barely even has a sect," the man said.

"I see. Well, I should hurry. Have someone stationed here so I can easily pass along the pills as I make them," Alex said and entered the room.

He quickly opened his storage bag and realized he had about 25 sets of ingredients all together to make pills that could help those people.

He probably would have had more if he could make True Pills as well, but since he couldn't, he had to stick with what he had.

He quickly sat against the fire and took out his cauldron before putting it on top of the fire.

Then he hurried with making his pills. In the first hour, he made 7 pills. He handed those pills to the man stationed outside.

In the second hour, he learned to cut back on unnecessary parts and made 9 pills.

In the third hour, he refined his pill-making process more for the night and made 10 pills.

By the fifth hour, he was done with all 25 sets of ingredients he had and made about 35 pills.

When he walked out to hand over the 5th set of pills, instead of a random guard, it was senior Jin who had been standing outside.

"Young lord, here," old man jin brought back a storage bag from somewhere.

Alex quickly looked at the storage bag and saw that it had about 45 sets of ingredients in total.

'That's enough for 45 people; 68 if I get lucky. I already have 35 pills of my own… let's hope that's all that is needed,' Alex thought.

"Um… Young lord, I heard you've been in there for 5 hours. Don't you… need to rest?" old man Jin asked.

"No, senior Jin. There are still people I can save. Don't worry about me, I'm young. I can do this all night," Alex said and handed him the remaining pills before walking in.

Senior Jin looked at the pill blankly and said, "But… it's already day."

Alex lost sense of time as he made pills after pills after pills. In fact, he even lost count at some point.

Everywhere he looked, he could see the shape of the ingredients, or the color of the fire, or sphere shapes like the pill. He even started seeing them whenever he closed his eyes.

He had made a lot of pills but never had he forced himself to make this many pills, under such a small span of time, while being under pressure to do the best.

"I can do it," he thought and did the best he could. It took him 7 hours to finish all of the 45 sets of ingredients and managed to make 70 pills out of them.

He had given his best, and fate had taken his side. He walked out with the last 9 pills and instead of handing them to anyone, flew directly to the outside of the walls.

He went over to the tent where people were coming out of one by one. When he walked in, there were only about 45 people left.

Alex walked over to the last remaining 5 self tempering realm people and gave them the pill.

Soon, they too started to get healed and rejoiced as they could make a full recovery.

Everyone got emotional and started crying. The patients and the healers started thanking Alex.

Alex was happy he could help. He was happy that the little knowledge of the medicine he had learned had helped him.

He walked outside of the tent and was about to take a deep sigh when he saw someone up front.

"Sister," Alex called out.

Luo Mei immediately ran forward and hugged Alex. "Thank god. I thought you were dead again," she said and started crying.

"Young lord, I am happy that you are okay," Meng Yun said.

"I'm fine. I tried to find my way back to the caravan and didn't know which way you guys went after the beasts stopped moving," Alex said.

"I stopped the caravan to wait for you to catch up, but you never came, so I thought… thank god you're okay. Old Jin told me that you were here and helping the people since midnight yesterday."

"How did you even get back here so quickly?" Luo Mei asked.

"Well, I told you I had a boat right? So I took half the journey in the boat, and the other half, I met sister Xing on the road and came here with her," Alex said.

"You met Luo Xing?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yes. She's back already," Alex said.

"Damn, old Jin. He didn't tell me that," Luo Mei said.

"Grandfather knows about your irrational hate towards Young Miss Xing, so he likely kept it to himself," Meng Yun said.

"It's not irrational. It's… whatever let's just go," Luo Mei said.

"One moment, sister. I need to speak to senior JIn about something," Alex said and ran over to old man JIn and told him about everything.

When the people there learned that majority of the injured had been healed, they were extremely happy.

Alex then suggested what else could be done in regards to extending the remaining injured people's lives until the others brought back the True rank healing pills from the city over.

"Alright let's go," Alex said and the 3 walked towards the gate. When the people saw Luo Mei, they all greeted her. Luo Mei too greeted them back as politely as she could.

"By the way, how long did you guys wait for me outside the tent?" he asked.

"Hmm… we had just arrived, so maybe 10 minutes?" Luo Mei said.

"Oh, then you haven't gone to meet your father yet?" Alex asked.

Luo Mei's face suddenly lost all colors as she was reminded once more why she was here.

"It's okay, sister. I am here. I will definitely do something," Alex said, seeing her blank face.

Luo Mei shook her head to get back her thoughts. "Yes, it will be fine," she said.

The Rubyroad city was not very different from the Scarlet city. Only, it had a single 2nd Grade sect that had just upgraded a few years ago, and as such, it wasn't that populated.

The city was also ruled by a distant member of the Royal Fu family, but the ones with more position in the city were the heads of House Luo and House Tian.

Both of these houses belonged to a noble of the empire, so they had quite a bit of backing too.

The Luo household was southwest of the city center, while the Tian household was to the northeast. These two houses had quite a good relationship with each other as well.

The 3 walked through the street as Alex finally started to feel the fatigue from 12 hours long, fast-paced Alchemy session.

"Are you okay?" Luo Mei asked a little worried.

"I'm fine. I'm… just tired after making the pills," Alex said.

"You should rest after we reach back home," Luo Mei said.

Finally, Alex could see a massive house, smaller only to the City Lord's house back in Scarlet city.

"Woah!" Alex said.

Luo Mei smiled when she saw her home. "It's been a while since I've been back," she said.

She walked over to the gate and the guards immediately opened the door. "Welcome back, young miss," they said.

"Huh? Young miss, did you not take a carriage?" a woman who saw her said.

"Oh, young miss, you are back," another woman said.

"Oh, Mengmeng is back too. Welcome back, you guys."

The servants seemed quite used to talking with Luo Mei, and Luo Mei herself was quite fond of talking with the servants.

Luo Mei walked through the main door and was about to ask where her father was when he heard loud laughter from the house.

She was surprised and followed the sound of the laughter, while Alex and Meng Yun followed her.

"Haha, it's just a small white lie to get them here. It won't hurt anyone. Besides, our household merging together is a really great news," A loud man said.

"Hahaha, right? Ask your two daughters and see what they say. I will leave, for now, you damn old fart," another man said.

"Haha, see you later old fart," the loud man said.

A hawkish-faced man with a beard walked out of a room just as Luo Mei was getting close to it.

"Oh, little Mei, you're back?" the man said.

"Yes, uncle Tian. How are you?" she said.

"Haha, I'm fine, I'm fine. I will take my leave for now. Please talk to your father about my proposal I just put forth inside," the man said and left.

Luo Mei stood still for a moment and then walked towards the room. When she saw what was inside, she started to grow angry.

Inside was a middle-aged man with black hair and beard, drinking wine from a wine glass as if he had no care in the world.

"What was that just now?" Luo Mei asked in anger.

The man nearly spilled his wine when he heard her. "Oh, Meimei, you're back," he said happily.

"Don't 'meimei' me. Did you lie to bring us back? Do you know how worried I was about you dying? Do you know that we nearly were attacked by the beasts when I came here?"

"I nearly lost my junior brother on my way here, and all for what? Just so you can make arrangements of marriage with the Tians?" he asked angrily.

"Oh, you heard that?" the man's smile dropped a little. "I was just—"

"Why would you lie about dying? Is this a game to you? Did you even help the people out there?"

The man tried to speak, "No, I was just—"

Luo Mei continued harassing her father with her words while the man couldn't find openings to talk back. He started getting more and more agitated as he started feeling uncomfortable.

Suddenly, he started vomiting all the wine and food he had just ate, along with some amount of blood.

He took a cloth from the side and wiped his mouth. "That finally shut you up?" he asked.

"What?" Luo Mei was confused.

The man then wiped a layer of makeup from his face and showed his pale and sunken face.

"I didn't lie, Meimei. I really am dying."

Chapter 437: Hannah's Question

"What?" Luo Mei lost her train of thought and immediately sprinted forward. "No, no, no, no, no, no. Father, what's going on? What is happening to you?"

"I don't know, my child. I've been asking myself that as well. Unfortunately, COUGH COUGH something is really wrong with me," her father said.

"Then what were you talking about with him?" Luo Mei asked.

"Oh, he heard about me being sick from somewhere, so he acted like he came to check up on me."

"But that bastard was really just trying to ask your hands in marriage. That bastard, he thinks he can get my lovely daughters just because I'm sick? I will be dead and still not hand you guys over to that bastard," her father said.

"Oh," Luo Mei said. "I'm sorry. I got overly emotional, father."

"Haha, it's alright, COUGH COUGH. Let's go somewhere else, this place is dirty now," he said and walked out.

"Oh, Mengmeng, you came back too. Go meet your mother, Meimei is fine now," he said to Meng Yun who swiftly took her leave.

"And… are you Meimei's junior brother that Xingxing told me about? Wen Cheng's youngest disciple, right?" he asked.

"Yes, senior. I am Yu Ming," Alex introduced himself.

"Oh, good to see you, young man. Since you are Meimei's disciple brother… you can call me Uncle Keng," Luo Keng said.

"Yes, Uncle Keng," Alex said.

"Did little Xun not come? It's been a while since I've met him too," Luo Keng said.

"Senior brother is the leader of the guards. He can't leave whenever he wants," Luo Mei said.

"Well, at least your junior brother is free to go around as he likes. Haha, COUGH COUGH," Luo Keng said.

"He is not that free, he came here with a purpose father," Luo Mei said.

"He did? Oh, right. Xingxing told me about that," Luo Keng said.

"I just saw Meng Yun leave. Is Mei'er back?" A woman's voice came from the hallway. Luo Mei immediately walked out and hugged a middle-aged woman.

"Mother, I'm back," she said.

"Oh, my sweet child. You must be tired from your journey," the woman said.

The woman was wearing a refined, violet robe. She had a fair face and had her hair braided down the side.

She looked nothing like Luo Mei, but did have features belonging to Luo Xing.

"Oh, and who's this young man?" She asked when she saw Alex.

"This is Meimei's junior apprentice-brother who came with her, Yu Ming. And as far as I can tell, he's going to be my doctor for the next few days," Luo Keng.

"Ah, the boy Xing'er was talking about. I am Shi Nangong, Mei'er's stepmother. Welcome to the house, young man. Think of this as your own home," the woman said.

"Mother!" Luo Mei screamed in annoyance.

"Haha, yes yes. Mother, not stepmother. Mei'er hates when I say otherwise," Shi Nangong said.

"Mother, show little brother to the guest room, please. He's been making pills non-stop for the people injured in the beast hoard attack. He is extremely tired," Luo Mei said.

"What?" Luo Keng said. "You've been helping the people all night long. You must be extremely tired. My bad young man for keeping you here."

"Honey, show him to our guest room," Luo Keng said.

Shi Nangong took Alex through the house to an area where the guests stayed at. There were multiple rooms there, and all of them were for the guests.

A door suddenly opened as a young man walked out.

"Oh good afternoon Auntie. Huh? Junior brother, did you just come?" Xiao Huang asked as he saw them.

"Yes, I just arrived with my sister," Alex said.

"Oh, so your sister made it back safely? She wasn't attacked by the beasts or anything right?" Xiao Huang asked.

"Oh no. Mei'er is fine. Little Yu here on the other hand is particularly tired from helping everyone overnight. I was bringing him to his room to rest," Shi Nangong said.

"Ah, yes of course, Auntie. Sorry for stopping you, junior brother," Xiao Huang said and left.

"This is your room. If you need anything, just ask any servant in the house. I will leave you alone now," Shi Nangong said and left.

Alex entered the yellow-colored room and walked up to the bed. He felt how soft the bed was and just fell on top of it.

"Arghh, that feels… good." He felt himself losing his mind to sleep but made no effort whatsoever to stop it.

The moment he fell asleep, his eyes opened up. He was inside of his capsule once more.

"Oh right, people automatically log out when they fall asleep in the capsule," Alex said and pushed open the lid.

Alex got out of the capsule and went to go get fresh. After that, he went to the kitchen to get his meal.

There he saw Hannah heating her food in the microwave.

"YAWN, good afternoon, sister," Alex said.

"You woke up late too?" Hannah asked.

"Yeah, I ended up making pills from midnight until noon. 12 hours of nonstop pill making. I'm feeling mentally fatigued out of the game too," Alex said.

"Oh, take care of your body then," Hannah said.

"Yeah, I need to exercise more often," Alex said. "What about you? Why'd you wake up so late?"

"Oh, uh… I just cultivated for a little too long I guess," Hannah said.

"Huh? I thought you didn't need to cultivate," Alex asked.

"Whatever, it's my matter. You don't need to know. Here, heat your food too," Hannah said.

"Why are you getting angry all of a sudden?" Alex asked as he put his bowl in the microwave.

"Let's change the topic. Actually, I wanted to ask you about something," Hannah said.

"I'm all ears," Alex said.

"Sigh, do you still believe that the game is real?" Hannah asked.

"Huh? Why are you asking this?" Alex asked.

"Recently… I've started… experiencing stuff that feels way too real to be fake. When I thought about it, I remembered you saying that the game is real. Do you… still believe that?" Hannah asked.

"More than ever actually," Alex said. "Someone in the game looked into my memories of real life. That sort of thing shouldn't be possible normally. Not to mention, I've… recreated the formation in the chip and it… works."

"The plate I made it on was wrong so it did nothing, but it was the right formation. From what I could tell, it's a super high-level formation, one that is not possible in the world of Eternal Cultivation," Alex said.

"What about you tell me it's just an easter egg?" Hannah asked.

"Maybe. But given everything else that has happened. All the senses, all the information of how taking over a dead body as a clone works to how the people are all so real. Even the language is different in each place. Those sort of thing is hard to make, especially by people that don't have a strong company behind them," Alex said.

"So believe what you want, but I will believe it's real. That was why I stopped mom and dad from playing too," Alex said. "I didn't want them to live in such a world of murder and violence. They would be traumatized if they ever found out it was all real."

"I…see," Hannah said. "You truly thought quite far ahead. I guess you're not the little Alex I knew after all."

"I… guess," Alex said. He himself felt like he had been hardened as a person after living in the world of Eternal Cultivation. It was a gradual process, and there was never an immediate change, but he surely felt it now that he thought about it.

"Alright, we'll talk about this some other time. I need to go back soon," Hannah said and quickly finished her meal.

Alex slowly ate as he had nothing to look forward to in the game for at least 6 hours.

'If I remember correctly, I can't log in while I am asleep right? Or was it only when I fainted?' Alex wondered. 'Whatever, I will just stay outside.'

Alex finished his meal and went to watch some TV. The house was silent with the only sound coming out of the TV. Alex spent the next 6 houses just relaxing, doing nothing.

Finally, once night fell, he went back to his room and got into the game. It was finally time to go see what the hell was wrong with Luo Mei's father.

Chapter 438: Diagnosis

Alex logged into the game and slowly woke up from his sleep. He felt well-rested even after just 6 hours of sleep.

'I probably could've just cultivated… but then I wouldn't get to choose when I wake up,' he thought.

He opened the door and walked out. It was evening time and the hallway was lit up with normal lanterns.

'Are normal lanterns expensive?' he wondered. He didn't know a lot about formations yet so he assumed there was a reason for all of these.

He walked into the main hall of the manor and found a servant.

"Excuse me, miss. Do you know where sister Luo Mei is?" he asked.

"Please come with me, young lord," the servant said and took him over to a room.

"Young Lady Mei, you have a visitor," she said from outside the door. The door soon opened and Luo Mei looked out.

"Oh, you're awake. Are you fully rested?" she asked. Alex saw the blue-colored room inside that was bigger than his guest room.

"Ah, yeah, I'm fine. I was thinking of going to check Uncle Keng," Alex said.

"You're ready to check father?" Luo Mei asked with surprise. "I thought you still needed to read some more?"

"I can read later," Alex said. "The learning part after reading takes time, so I wanted to see what I can get from Uncle's illness as fast as I could."

"I can always read afterward and try again if I can't," Alex said.

"Oh, okay," Luo Mei said and walked out.

"I was actually hoping you would go find some medical books for me while I check up on Uncle," Alex said.

"No, need. I will just have some servant do that. I can't go out and look for medical books anyway. That's like telling the Tians that my father is ill and I'm looking into whatever I can to heal him," Luo Mei said.

"Those vultures will come to eat us alive before we can even heal father."

Alex was surprised at the tension between the two families. "Aren't the two families supposed to have a good relationship?" Alex asked.

"On the surface, yeah. Even most servants in the house would think so. But underneath, there is a lot of envy and jealousy between the two houses."

"You can imagine what money does to people. The old man Tian came to ask our hands in marriage because he knows father doesn't have sons, so our entire fortune is in the hands of me and my sister."

"He wants to intervene in fast enough to get that fortune. Fuck that guy! He should see how ugly his sons are first," Luo Mei said angrily.

"Anyway, let's go."

Alex followed Luo Mei along the inner hall and walked to the backyard.

"Oh, Young lord Ming seems to have rested already," old man Jin walked from the side.

"Oh, hello again, senior Jin," Alex said.

"Grandpa Jin, I have a job for you," Luo Mei said.

"Anything, young lady," old man Jin said.

Luo Mei quickly tasked him with finding every medical book in the city as well as getting the ones in the library.

"I will do it as quickly as I can," old man Jin said and left.

"Come," Luo Mei then walked up next to a big pond where Luo Keng and Shi Nangong were spending their time together.

Right next to them were Xiao Huang and Luo Xing talking with them as well.

"Oh, you guys are here," Luo Keng said. "Are you rested, nephew Ming?"

"Yes, uncle," Alex said.

"Father, Yu Ming wants to examine you," Luo Mei said.

"Oh… right now?" Luo Keng was surprised. "Very well. What do I do?"

"Well, you can start by answering some questions," Alex said. "For starters, when did you notice you were ill?"

"Hmm… when was it, honey? About a month and a half ago?" Luo Keng asked.

"Yes, about that time," Shi Nangong said.

"What are the symptoms?" Alex asked.

"I… feel generally weaker. I vomit blood from time to time. Nothing I eat stays in my stomach for long either. There are times when I feel piercing pain in my stomach."

"I send in my Qi to use Qi sense and see what is wrong, but it doesn't work as it should," Luo Keng said.

"Other than that… I'm fine. Ah right, cultivating no longer works. I can cultivate, but I only get weaker instead of growing stronger."

Alex mused on the information he was given. The symptoms seemed to match with a few of the things that were in his mind, but he needed to learn a bit more.

"Can I check your pulse?" Alex asked.

"Sure," Luo Keng said. "Do whatever you have to."

Alex walked up and pulled up Luo Keng's sleeves to show his not so muscular arms.

Luo Mei's eyes started tearing up when she saw her father's weak body. She knew he was dying but didn't expect the situation to be so bad.

Alex placed his two fingers in Luo Keng's wrist and took a deep breath. He felt the generally slower pulse that Luo Keng had but knew that it was the result of whatever was happening, not what started it.

He hesitated a little. He knew what he had to do now; the process was etched onto his mind. However, he had never done it, so he was a little nervous.

'No, I can do it,' he said to himself and slowly released Qi into his blood system.

Luo Keng felt something hot enter his veins through his wrist. It felt like a small section of his blood was boiling, but he endured it.

'What the hell is this kid's Qi? Why is it so hot?' he wondered. But he didn't let it show on his face.

Alex closed his eyes and tried to feel where the Qi was moving. The Qi was connected to his fingers through a fine line of Qi, so he could monitor where it went.

Alex knew the human body's veins and arteries inside out after learning it from the book so he carefully navigated to see what he could find.

When he reached the stomach area, he found that his Qi didn't go ahead as he had expected. Instead, he tried to move through the side.

'What? There shouldn't be any path there. Is he injured in that spot?' Alex wondered.

Suddenly, his Qi disappeared and the connection broke.

"What?" Alex said in surprise.

"What's wrong?" Shi Nangong asked in fear.

"I… have a general idea of what is wrong, but nothing absolute. The Qi I was using to check inside disappeared before I could see what the problem was for real. Although the problem is right around his stomach," Alex said.

"You say you have an idea of what it is," Luo Xing said. "Can you tell us what you think?"

"Um, before I say this, you have to understand that I am not 100 percent sure about this. But I am at least 80% sure," Alex said.

Everyone there nodded and waited for him to speak.

"Uncle… did you eat a beast's meat anytime before you were ill?" Alex asked.

"Beast's meat? Of course, I did. After we fought off the beasts in the first beast invasion, we feasted on the corpses of the dead beasts," Luo Keng said.

"And… who cooked the meat? Or rather, how was it cooked?" Alex asked.

"We all cooked it. We're not cooks, so we just put it on a stick and lit a fire beneath it," Luo Keng said as if he was remembering some glorious moment.

"Is that what is causing him so much problem? Uncooked meat?" Shi Nangong asked.

Alex shook his head. "It's not the meat, but rather what was inside of it. One that he ate along with the meat."

"So, I think there is a type of worm or parasite inside Uncle's stomach. One that feeds off of Qi. I think that is what ate my Qi just now, and what eats Uncle's Qi every time he cultivates," Alex said.

"If… if that is true then… how dangerous is it?" Luo Mei asked.

"Well, you see how Uncle can't cultivate right? And if what he says is true and the food won't remain in his stomach, then at some point… he will stop having enough energy for his organs to function… after that…" Alex spoke no longer.

"Is there a cure?" Luo Mei asked hastily.

"I… don't know. I don't even know if what I think is correct. I will first have to verify the existence of whatever is inside, but if my Qi disappears, I can never know," Alex said.

Suddenly, Luo Mei's voice drifted onto his mind. "If Qi disappears, then… why not try spiritual sense?" she asked.

"Of course," Alex said as he face palmed himself. He had been so tunnel-visioned on his medical knowledge, that he forgot about the other tools in his arsenal.

"Uncle, let me try one more time," Alex said.

"Sure, go ahead," Luo Keng said. Alex once again held his wrist and sent in Qi, but along with that, he also sent his Spiritual sense.

The spiritual sense couldn't look inside a human or beast's body so easily. There was a sort of veil on a human body that wasn't easy to navigate using spiritual sense unless that body was one's own.

Alex had tried it multiple times, and it hadn't worked. However, now that he had his Qi to help him navigate, along with the medical knowledge, he looked through the inside of Luo Keng's body.

He saw the blood in the veins and the red walls. He saw the Qi flow through the blood until it reached the stomach. There he saw what the problem with his stomach was.

'Damn, that's a giant hole,' he thought. Suddenly, the yellow blob of Qi he had was devoured by something, and he clearly saw what it was.

'A parasite. I was right,' he thought. But then came another problem.

"Um… I have located the parasite; there is in fact one," he said.

"Oh, that's… good news, right?" Luo Keng asked.

"Depends on the next bit of information I will give to you," Alex said.

Luo Keng and the rest got silent and listened carefully.

"So the first minor thing is that the parasite is something that I do not recognize. But that most likely has something to do with my lack of medical knowledge rather than the parasite itself being rare," Alex said.

"I also have both the recipe and the ingredients to the pill that should cure you," Alex said.

The others smiled a little but still waited for Alex to finish speaking.

Alex sighed a little and said, "but… here comes the main problem."

Chapter 439: Hundred Lives Parasite

"What's the problem?" Luo Keng asked softly waiting to hear the main concerns.

"Well, the first problem is that the pill recipe I have is not something that others have. It's called a Parasite Erasing Pill. The pill basically kills the parasite in your body without harming you."

"One of the ingredients to the Parasite Erasing pill is the root of a small herb known as Lavender Bloodweed, and I only have a single one of that ingredient."

"I will need to know the grade of the parasite after a few more examinations to know exactly how strong of a True Rank parasite it is. But, normally, the pill will need to be at least Earth grande to be successful," Alex said.

"So… we only have a single chance at making the pill?" Shi Nangong asked.

Alex nodded in affirmation. Both Luo Xing and Luo Mei gasped in horror when they learned that.

"How long do you think I can survive like this?" Luo Keng asked.

"From what I can tell… you will start having problems moving around in a week or so, and soon after that lose functions of your organs one after another. After that, it's only a matter of time before…" Alex stopped.

Luo Xing started sniffing as tears streamed down her face. Luo Mei was still in disbelief.

"C-Can't you wait until you know more before you make such conclusions?" Luo Mei asked.

"You're not wrong, but the fact still remains that we need to make an Earth Grade True Pill. That alone is clear to me. I will let you know if there are other methods," Alex said.

"An alchemist who can make True rank pills with Earth grade Harmony on the very first try… that is going to be troublesome," Luo Keng said silently.

"The number of people that can possibly do that can be counted on a single hand," Xiao Huang said from the side.

"Oh right, can't your master help father?" Luo Mei asked. "We can take him back and you get get your master to make him a pill."

The surrounding people were confused about who Luo Mei referred to as master when they should be disciple siblings themselves.

"Master… should be unavailable at the moment," Alex said. He didn't want to reveal that Ma Rong could no longer make pills like she used to. She had received a boon and a curse after her constitution awakened.

"Then… then… then the Royal Alchemist? He should be available. Let's go to the capital," Luo Mei said.

"Isn't the Royal Alchemist impossible to be found or recognized? He changes his face every time he moves around. Unless you have direct communication with him, you can't find him at all," Xiao Huang said.

"I've heard the same," Shi Nangong said.

"Then…" Luo Mei tried to think of other possible ideas.

"Meimei, enough," Luo Keng said. He then turned around to Alex and said, "I can't really move around a lot, so travel itself should be out of the question. Nephew Ming should try and see if there are other ways to heal me."

"Don't worry, Uncle. I will do my best," Alex said.

Luo Keng looked over to his girls and said, "Don't cry. At least I got diagnosed. Just a day earlier even that seemed impossible. Surely something better will happen in the coming days."

Old man Jin return a few moments later and stayed away from the group. Alex saw him standing at the side and walked up to him.

"Senior Jin, did you get it?" he asked.

"Yes, young lord. It's quite a few books though, I don't know how you will finish these," Old man Jin said as he took out about 30 books from his storage bag and handed it to Alex.

"Oh wow, there's so many," Alex said in surprise. He quickly took it into his storage bags and thanked the old man Jin.

"Uncle, Auntie, I just got some medical books so I will go and try to find out more if I can," Alex said.

"Sure Nephew, go," Luo Keng said.

Alex nodded and left them there. He went back to his room and looked at the time.

"8 pm huh? This… will take me a while," he thought and took out the books and started reading them one by one.

Since he was just reading and nothing else, he used his focus mode to the max to read the books as fast as he could. In fact, he didn't even read the books properly but simply just looked at them and moved on to another page.

When he tried to recall the information, he would simply just think back to this page and then could read it all properly at that time.

In such a way, he finished reading through all of the books in just 2 hours. However, at the end of the reading, he felt very mentally fatigued once more.

"Wow, using Focus mode to the fullest for so long is so problematic," he thought. He quickly tossed the books back into his storage bag and got into a lotus position to start learning about the books.

Memories of something he had never learned before started returning to him as he thought about the information one by one.

He still couldn't believe how weird it felt. 'I am easily allowed knowledge of all plants, but medical knowledge I have to read to get,' he thought.

The more he read, the more he remembered. The entire night passed by before he knew it and it was the morning.

Still, he was a little more than halfway done learning everything. Alex stopped after that.

He looked back at how much he had learned. Unfortunately, even though he learned about 20 books of content, a lot of them were content from books he had already read so most of it turned out to be a waste of time.

Still, he learned about 13 books worth of content, so he was quite happy. He looked through his understandings and at some points he got a little confused.

'Did I read that somewhere?' he wondered when he looked into the memories of the books. But from what he could see, he never read it anywhere.

It was minor information that he could've easily skipped, but he caught it, and now it was making him really curious.

"Wait, am I remembering more than I read?" he thought. If that was true then it would be glorious for him.

He tried to experiment with it a little and started remembering just one more book. There was information in the book that he had already acquired back in the Tiger sect, but most of it was new.

As he read the book, he realized that during some of the information he tried to understand, a few more information would be released in his mind.

"Are these… extra information, or just more accurate information?" he wondered and continued learning.

After a few more times it happened, he compared the results and saw that it was both. Sometimes the information would be something a little different from what he learned, and sometimes it would be a little more than what he learned.

It was never entirely new or entirely different. It was just extra.

Alex felt a little happy learning all that and logged out. He went on with his daily life for the rest of the day.

He went to get his breakfast, studied a little, checked the internet to see what was happening, went to his classes, and finally returned back to his game.

Once he was back in the guest room, he decided to finish learning the rest of the books. It took him quite a bit of time before he did so.

Only around 10 pm did he finally finish learning everything.

'That's a lot of information to keep track of. Thankfully, my mind does it for me. Alchemy God's Knowledge really is great,' he thought.

It was finally time to see if he could find some more problems or solutions for Luo Mei's father.

So he started searching for answers. As soon as he started looking for them, answers started flooding his mind like they were hungry dogs seeing meat.

"This…" he thought as he looked at what answers to the problems were.

The first thing he figured out was the name of the parasite. He had seen the parasite using his spiritual sense yesterday, so when he thought about it, a parasite with a similar description came to his mind.

Long and thin worm-like organism, with a gaping hole for its mouth. The parasite had giant wing-like flaps with spiky carapaces next to its tail to firmly attach itself to the host.

The overall color of the parasite was white but looked red in most parts due to the blood it was in. It had fine black circular lines across its body and would consume any Qi thrown towards it.

If it came across something that did not have anything to do with Qi or Blood, it would force the host's body to throw it away.

"A Hundred Lives Parasite, huh? Let's see…" he thought as he checked through the information. At first, it was normal stuff he read that all parasites could do, but when he reached the part about curing the host of the parasite, his eyes went wide and he smiled.

"This… this can be done. We don't need the pill or an alchemist. But…" Alex looked at the only problem there was for curing Luo Keng.

"I hope this helps a little," he thought and opened his status page.

Then, he clicked Breakthrough.

Chapter 440: Mind Tempering 1st Realm

Notifications started appearing in front of Alex's eyes. But none of them were as captivating as what was happening inside his own body.

Most of the time, when he broke through to a realm, his Qi would get just a bit denser and increase just a little more in amount.

During minor realms, those increased by quite a bit more, but not a lot.

Aside from that, the main change came in the body being tempered a little more to gather more Qi during the self-tempering realm.

That was what happened every single time Alex broke through without question. However, this time was a little different.

Along with his Qi and body changing slightly, he felt a hot rush of Qi that flew up through his body and entered the brain. They stayed there for a few seconds without any discomfort and left.

When they did, he felt his mind grow cool and just a little bit stronger.

Finally, he opened his eyes and looked at the notification in front of him. When he saw it, he smiled.

<Congratulations! You have broken through to the Mind Tempering 1st Realm>

'Finally, I'm on the last stretch of realms before I enter the True realms,' he thought.

He felt a lot fresher now that he had broken through. 'Did reaching the Mind tempering realm really help my spiritual sense?' he wondered and released it.

"Woah!" he was surprised when his spiritual sense immediately reached 25 meters.

"It increased by around 3 meters," Alex mused to himself. He tried stretching his spiritual sense and it nearly reached 40 meters mark.

He quickly brought back the spiritual sense and entered his spiritual sea to see how it had changed.

"Oh!" he was surprised. He was expecting to see denser water, but surprisingly, the water was vaster as well.

"Wait, not only did it increase in density, but it also increased in amount?" Alex thought in pure happiness.

"And this is just the first realm. Will I have nearly 50 meters of spiritual sense by the time I reach the True realms?" he thought.

He quickly stopped and got up. However, he decided not to leave now. It was already late night, so there was no point in leaving right now.

'But, I will have to see him very early tomorrow morning to explain what is wrong,' Alex thought and went back to his bed.

It had been a while, so he decided to cultivate. He called out Pearl and gave him a monster core.

Pearl meowed as he ate the core.

"How are you feeling today, Pearl?" Alex asked. He was hoping for some sort of complex answer.

"Happy" however was all he got.

'Well, I guess it will take some time before he can fluently speak,' Alex thought and asked Pearl to start cultivating.

Cuts started appearing around his body but the pain wasn't as high as it should have been.

'Sigh, Pearl is falling behind once more,' Alex thought. He shook his head and started cultivating as well.

Soon, sleepiness overcame him and he could no longer keep his consciousness up.

When he woke up once again, he realized that it was 6 AM the morning. He stopped Pearl from cultivating any further and asked him to go back to his space.

Once the cuts disappeared and Pearl was gone, Alex got up to leave, but then… he felt something weird about his body.

'Huh? What's going on?' he thought. In just a single part of his meridian, he could feel just the slightest hint of something strong.

That single small part has a stronger aura than his entire cultivation base.

'Is this…?' he wondered as he tried to send his Spiritual sense to check inside. When he reached that part of his meridian, he could see a viscous bright yellow Qi that outshined the other Qi around him.

Alex's eyes went wide in both shock and surprise.

"True Qi!"

He didn't know what to think for a while as his thoughts ran array in a million directions. He quickly gathered them all and tried to think about it all.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! How do I have True Qi? Isn't that something I can only gain after I reach halfway through the Mind Tempering realm?" he wondered.

He thought back to the information he had already read, and it only confirmed what he already knew.

"Yeah, around 5th or 6th Mind Tempering realm, the common Qi gets condensed so much that I turned from Qi to True Qi. It doesn't normally happen before that. So why is it happening to me?" Alex thought.

The Qi was really way too small to be of any use to him, but it showed that he could easily jump up to the True Realm when the time came.

"Wait, how well can it work?" Alex thought. He wanted to try out a technique using this True Qi, but he couldn't think of a single technique that could be of use inside a room.

"Ah, let's try the fire," he thought and quickly reached into his storage bag before bringing out the Fire formation.

He did have a fire palm technique that could produce fire, but he wasn't sure he could control that fire fast enough to stop it from hitting the wall, and he didn't want to damage the house at all.

So, he quickly set up the formation on the floor and watched as fire appeared on top of it.

He tried to normally control the fire as he would with his Common Qi and it was very easy. He was very used to it so there was no problem.

Then, he started to do the same thing with the one strand of True Qi that was running around his meridian.

He slowly brought it from all over his body to his hands and released it into the fire.

He didn't know what could go wrong if he tried to change the size or temperature, so he decided to go with changing its shape for now.

He wished to turn the fire from the normal shape it was right now, to a cube.

He had just visualized a cubic fire when the fire swiftly changed into it.

"What? That was so smooth," Alex said in surprise. "He tried to change it to something else and it change into that too very quickly."

He then tried to turn it into a sphere, but that took about 3 times as much time. That was still very fast to normal eyes, but to Alex, it felt abnormally slow.

"Ah, my True Qi vanished," Alex said with a sigh. "I guess I will have to make more. I… just have to cultivate like everyone else right? I wonder if leveling up will give me more True Qi."

From what he had read, cultivating condensed the common Qi that was already very condensed to an extreme level and the Qi changed its very essence to something higher.

That was what happened to normal people. His body, however, was anything but normal. So, anything could happen and he would just have to wait to know.

"Hmm, maybe I am getting True Qi faster because I have denser common QI than everyone else," Alex thought.

"I wonder what will happen if I reach 100% yang Qi purity," he wondered, but that was something he would have to think about later.

For now, it was time to give the Luo family a semblance of good news in these dark times.

He didn't ask anyone this time and directly walked to his sister's room and knocked.

Luo Mei came out of her room in white robes. "Oh, you're finally out, brother. What's going on?" she asked.

"Sister," he said excitedly, "I found another way to heal Uncle."

Luo Mei's eyes went wide. "You found it? Oh… OH! We-We needs to go find father," Luo Mei immediately sprinted to a room a long while down the hall.

She then knocked on it loudly. "Father! Father!"

The door opened and Shi Nangong walked out. "What's going on, Mei'er? Your father is cultivating. It's not a good time to stop him," she said.

"Oh, junior brother found another cure for father's illness," Luo Mei said loudly.

"What?!" Shi Nangong was surprised too. "Oh dear, maybe I should wake your father up."

"What happening? COUGH COUGH. What's the noise about?" Luo Keng walked out too.

"Uncle, I've found another way to cure you. It… is quite hard to do, but it's definitely easier than finding an Alchemist to make the pill," Alex said.

"Oh, if there is a chance then I will take it. Tell me what needs to be done," Luo Keng asked excitedly while he coughed.

"So, I learned that the parasite inside your body is called a Hundred Lives parasite. It's a type of worm beast that eats your Qi to get stronger," Alex said.

"The reason it's called Hundred Lives is that it can eat up to 100 people's worth of Qi before it dies. So, if we can feed it 100 people's worth of True Qi, it will be fine," Alex said.

"So… that's it? 100 people's Qi and it's done?" Luo Keng asked. That seemed… too easy for him.

"Yes, but of course, there are some problems," Alex said.

"Ok, tell me, I'm ready," he said.

"First of all, we don't have much time. At the rate your body is deteriorating, we have maybe 2 weeks at most before we kill the parasite, maybe less."

"Also… um, how many days have you cultivated since 2 months ago, after the beast invasion?" Alex asked.

"I… don't remember. Maybe a few times before I found out I was ill. After that, I have maybe missed a week at most," Luo Keng said.

"So, on a low estimate, we can say you've cultivated for 40 days, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, that number sounds about right," Luo Keng said.

"Since the parasite releases all of the Qi it ate when changing host, the parasite must've eaten only those 40 day's worth of Qi, so about 40 people's True Qi by now."

"So, in the next 14 days, we need to feed you 60 people's worth of True Qi, maybe even more just to be safe," Alex said.

"…and how will we do that?" Luo Keng asked.

"You will have to gather people to give you their Qi so that we can send it to the parasite to eat. Once it eats it all, it will give birth to more parasites and die," Alex said.

"Wait, more parasite? No, but won't that be bad?" Luo Mei suddenly said.

"Let me finish sister. The new parasites will be common ranked at best, so I can make some Common pills to remove parasites from your body. In fact, you might even be able to remove it with your True Qi as well, Uncle," Alex said.

"Okay, so let me get this straight… I need to gather around 5 true realm people to give me Qi to feed the parasite for about 12-15 days, right?" Luo Keng asked.

"Yes," Alex nodded.

"Hmm, if we could ask random people, it would be fast, but… those people need to be trusted too," Luo Keng said to himself.

"By the way, how will you pour in the Qi? Through my mouth?" Luo Keng asked.

"Um, since the parasite is stuck next to a blood vessel, it's best to send it through the closest blood vessel. That way, in case there is some problem in the Qi, we can stop it from affecting your important organs in the chest," Alex said.

"Also there is another important thing that I haven't mentioned. You definitely need a medically talented person to navigate the blood vessel using their Qi. Otherwise, the problems that come from the random movement of Qi inside your body would be no different from going into Qi deviation," Alex said.

"But don't worry… I have an idea for who can help us with that."

Chapter 441: Traversing the Body

"No, no, no, no, no. I can't do it. I-I don't know how to do it. I'm not so talented like you," Luo Mei said as she walked into her room.

"Sister!" Alex called out, making Luo Mei turn around. "You have True Qi right?"

"Y-Yes," Luo Mei said.

"How much?" he asked.

"Uh... About 30 percent I would say," she said.

"Then you have to do it," Alex said.

"Bu-But why can't you do it?" Luo Mei asked.

"I don't have True Qi," Alex said. "Common Qi won't be able to handle 5 people's True Qi by itself. So it has to be True Qi that shows the way."

"If it could, I wouldn't make you do it," Alex said.

"But… I don't know the human body as you do. Will I be able to know how blood vessels are even placed in the human body? In the first place, are blood vessels the same as Meridians?" Luo Mei asked.

"They overlap in most of the places but there are a few places they vastly differ," Alex said.

"For example, the origin and end of blood vessels is the heart, while the meridians don't have an origin or ending as far as I can tell. Although, there is something weird in the naval area, but I don't know what that is exactly," Alex said.

"So how can I who knows nothing about blood vessels help navigate them then?" Luo Mei asked.

"Don't worry, I will teach you," Alex said.

"Sit down, I will show you by sending some in through your own body. You can use your Qi and spiritual sense to check it out," Alex said.

"O-okay," Luo Mei said and sat down.

"Alright, give me your hand," Alex said.

Luo Mei put forth her hand, but then questioned, "Aren't we doing it from the back for father?"

"For uncle's treatment, the back is the only thing that makes sense. But for now, since you are learning, we will start with the easiest way, the wrist," Alex said.

"To start with, you need a clear idea of where the blood vessel is. You cannot just prick your Qi into anywhere you want. So, places that had more of an exposed blood vessel like the wrist is the easiest one to start with."

"For uncle's back, we will have to spend a few minutes searching for one that is the closest to the parasite," Alex said.

"Alright, do what you want," Luo Mei said.

"Okay, releases your Qi around my fingers with your left hand. I will take them inside," Alex said.

Luo Mei nodded and released an almost cool feeling Qi onto Alex's hand.

Alex nodded too and released his own vibrant yellow Qi. The yellow Qi was definitely influenced by his Yang; there was no question about that. But he sometimes wondered if his Supreme Metal root also influenced its yellow color. After all, Metal Qi was golden in color.

"Phew," Alex softly released his breath and said, "Here I go."

He slowly started grabbing onto the Qi next to his hand with his own Qi and started dragging it. He could suddenly feel a lot of weight on his Qi, but it was nothing his robust Qi couldn't handle.

In fact, he felt like he could carry about 10 of such Qi before his connection with the Qi thread broke. He didn't know how accurate his assumption was though.

"Watch with your spiritual sense," Alex said without looking at her and slowly pierced through the wrist's blood vessel.

The moment it entered, he started sending his Qi up her hand. However…

"AH! AH! Ouch! Stop, Stop, Stop, Stop STOP!!!" Luo Mei started crying out. Alex's attention was broken and he immediately released his Qi which faded into her body.

"What's wrong, sister?" he asked.

"Ouch," Luo Mei cried as she held her hands. "What the hell was that? Why did it burn my hand so much? Is it supposed to hurt like that?"

"Hurt?" Alex was surprised for a moment. "Wait, no, you said burned right? Hmm… is my Qi too hot for your body then?" Alex wondered.

"What was that about?" Luo Mei asked.

"Ah, I think my Qi might be… um, too Yangful for you," Alex said.

"It has too much yang? You have a yang-focused spiritual root?" Luo Mei asked as she massaged her wrist. "Thank god I have a water attribute Qi so I can cool my burnings. Imagine you do it on someone with spiritual roots that could not handle it."

Luo Mei had just said it when she remembered, "Ah! Father. You must've hurt father too."

"Shouldn't be," Alex said. "Uncle is in True Realm, he should be able to handle common yang Qi."

"I see. Well… what do we do now? Our plans flopped though. What do we do now?" Luo Mei asked.

"Hmm… ah right," Alex thought as he brought out a book. "This book has the stuff about blood vessels. Try to read it and just understand a general level of knowledge on it."

"You really just need to remember how they are arranged. Once you do that, I will give myself up as a guinea pig for you to try on. Or, you can test on yourself as well."

"For now, I think I will just go and get some rest. I spent all night thinking about Uncle's problem," Alex lied.

"Oh, okay. I will read it by the time you are rested," Luo Mei said.

Alex said his goodbyes and walked out of her room before making his way into his own room. Finally, he logged out of the game.

The day did not differ from any other day aside from the fact that Hannah took away some of his money to pay rent.

He didn't care about it much though. He had enough retirement funds and could earn some more money from the games if need be.

Besides, his stock in the Deva Corp shares was growing every day, along with the other ones.

He logged back into the game after he returned home and went directly to Luo Mei's room.

Luo Mei had read all she could and was gaining a bit of confidence.

"Come here quick. I think I can do it," Luo Mei said happily.

"Sure," Alex walked up to her. "Do it slowly though, or I might have problems."

"Of course I'm going to take care. I'm not going to ruin my talented junior brother's cultivation. Don't worry, just give me your hands," Luo Mei said.

"Very well. I will also check to see if you are doing it right. I will forcefully stop you if something goes wrong," Alex said and put front his wrist.

Luo Mei took a deep breath to calm herself and started pouring in her Qi. Alex used his spiritual sense to look at where she was going, but she didn't make any mistake at the beginning.

'Oh, she knows a little,' he thought. As it went on for more and more, he realized that she truly had learned a lot.

'She didn't slack off after all. Makes sense given her father's life is on the line,' Alex thought.

Luo Mei carefully navigated through his blood vessels. She looked like she would stumble at some places and Alex was ready to destroy her Qi inside of his body, but she found her footings and fully revolved her Qi before it came back to the wrist once more and left.

"Yes! I did it. Haha, see?" Luo Mei proclaimed loudly.

"Congratulations, sister," Alex said.

"Hehe," Luo Mei was really happy. "Wait, does this mean I can become a medical examiner too?"

"No," Alex said as he shook his head. "Learning how to send in your Qi is to check for the problems. You need to know what you are looking for, what you are not looking for, other forms of diagnosis, as well as general knowledge of alchemy to cure someone's illness."

"Oh… then I won't be able to reach your level even if I have spiritual sense huh? That sucks. Whatever, let's proceed with your back then," Luo Mei said.

"Urghh… sure," Alex said and laid on the bed on his chest.

"Um, you are sleeping?" Luo Mei asked.

"It's better if I don't move, so I laid down. You should have uncle do the same thing when you do it as well," Alex said.

"Alright… I just have to reach the stomach right? How do I know what's the stomach? Do I use spiritual sense?" she asked.

"You don't know what blood vessel is connected to what organ, do you?" Alex asked.

Luo Mei shook her head.

"Sigh, alright. You just start and use your spiritual sense to follow around. Unlike the wrist, you might not be able to immediately tell where you are starting from," Alex said.

"Okay," Luo Mei said and lifted Alex's robes. His pristinely smooth back showed itself to Luo Mei for the first time, and she immediately got to searching for the blood vessel."

"I think this is it," Luo Mei said.

"Can you tell me what you think it is?" Alex asked.

"It's the vessel that immediately goes towards the intestines and from there I take a branch to the stomach," Luo Mei said.

"Um… just try a little bit. I will tell you if you are correct," Alex said.

"Okay, here it goes," Luo Mei said and started using her Qi to enter Alex's body. She had just touched onto Alex's blood vessel when he immediately shouted.

"Stop! Stop!"

Luo Mei stopped pouring in Qi and dispersed what remaining there was. "What? Was I wrong?" she asked.

"Yeah. That's the vessel that goes directly to my heart," Alex said. "Try again."

"Hmm… how about this one?" Luo Mei asked and chose another blood vessel around the same area.

"That one goes to my legs," Alex said.

"This?"

"That one goes to the stomach, but it first goes through the lungs," Alex said.

"What about this one?"

"Legs."

"Damn, why are there so many blood vessels in one small place?" she got angry.

"I told you, sister. That's why we use the wrist," Alex said.

"Sigh, what about this one?" she asked.

"Oh, right that's it," Alex said. "You got it."

"Did I? Okay I will start now," Luo Mei said and sent in her Qi. This time, however, she sent in her spiritual sense as well.

"Woah! Why are your meridians so multicolored? What's this… like 6 colors?" she asked.

"7, the yellow and gold colors are hard to differentiate at a glance, but they are there," Alex said.

"Woah, is this what all meridians look like? Mine is just one single deep blue color," Luo Mei said.

"That's because you have the Superior Water roots, sister," Alex said. "Mine is many, meaning it's not that good of a spiritual root."

"Ah, I see," Luo Mei said.

"Anyway, sister. Focus! I don't want you messing up my innards okay?" he said.

"Stop worrying so much. I can split my attention quite easily," Luo Mei said.

She proceeded to send her Qi to the intestine and from there found a blood vessel she could travel up to the stomach.

"That's it," Alex said. "That's right around where you will find your Qi disappearing."

"So, that's where the parasite is stuck?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

She immediately stopped all of her Qi from moving anymore and dispersed it. "Okay, let me try once more," she said.

Alex sighed and nodded. She practiced on him for a little longer before deciding to leave and find her father.

She wanted to practice on his body for a while so she could be comfortable when it was her time to bring the True Qi from the other people up to the parasite.

Alex left too and thought about what he needed to do. "Hmm… I should go find sister Xing. She might be able to help me understand more about formations."

Chapter 442: Irrational Hate

Alex found Luo Xing outside near the pond with Xiao Huang.

"Sister Xing, brother Huang" Alex called out.

"Oh, little brother, what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be with sister Mei?" Xiao Huang asked. "She just took away Uncle to practice on him."

"It should be fine. I'm in the same spot as her with what needs to be done next," Alex said.

"Did Mei'er really learn it all in a single day? That just seems unbelievable," Luo Xing said.

"Haha, your sister is quite talented," Alex said.

"So, what did you come here for?" Luo Xing asked.

"Oh, you see. About a month or two ago, I started having interests in formations and even started learning them. I learned how to make base formations on plates and can even make Heaven grade True ranked formations on plates. But I couldn't understand how to proceed with the formation flags."

"What should I do? How do I get them made? How I should carve them? Those sorts of things. So, I was hoping you could teach me a little," Alex asked.

"Oh little brother, you're talented in formations too? Do you have any you've made?" Xiao Huang asked.

"Uh, yeah. I made a few. Here's one of the better ones I've made," Alex said as he brought out his True ranked formation plate.

"It's a—"

"A light barrier formation?" Xiao Huang said in a bit of surprise and took it from Alex's hands.

He carefully looked at the strokes and the angles the strokes were in.

"What Efficiency is this formation at?" he asked.

"56%," Alex said. He had in fact made better ones, but those were formations that he found through the dead man in the Southern Forest, so he couldn't bring it out.

"Hmm… although I can see some errors, it's really not bad for a newbie. The bigger problem is either in the depth of the strokes or the impurity in the metal plates."

"Still, the fact that you made such a high-level formation, even if it's just on a plate is quite amazing. Congratulations brother," Xiao Huang said.

"Haha, it's the product of 2 months worth of effort. Also, I learned a lot about focus and persistence thanks to making pills, so I could make these," Alex said.

"Let me test it," Xiao Huang said and attached two True Spirit stones onto the plate and threw it on the ground just as he filled it all up.

Suddenly, a barrier burst forth from the plate and surrounded the people there. Alex was a little surprised as he wasn't expecting Xiao Huang to suddenly test his formation plates.

He looked around and saw the bright light surrounding him. He walked up to the barrier and placed his hands on it.

Xiao Huang did the same and said, "Hmm… that's not a bad barrier. That should be able to stop at least True Master realm attacks."

"Of course you can destroy the plate as well. Deforming a True ranked metal plate might be hard, but you can surely just remove it from the energy source that is the True Spirit stones," Xiao Huang said and went up to the plate to do just that.

"Let that be a lesson, little brother. Never use a plate formation in a fight. With a formation made through formation rods, you can set the distance from how far away they can activate. That way you can properly fight without worrying about people taking off your formations," Xiao Huang said.

"I see," Alex said. He did remember how the Spirit Disorienting formation was set about 50 meters out of where it actually started.

'Oh, that reminds me,' Alex thought.

"Um, can you tell what this formation flag does?" Alex said as he brought out two formation rods.

"I could only find two of these, so I'm not sure if you can learn anything, but I hope you will at least try."

Xiao Huang nodded and took the rods. "Hmm… it's hard to tell how the formations would go, but I can make some guess," he said and looked further.

"Hmm… the metal alloy itself is not very much used, so the formation should be either some sort of illusory formation, Cloud making formation, or concealment formation," Xiao Huang said.

"Concealment formation?" Alex's eyes perked up.

"Yeah, the kind that stops light, sound, and even aura from escaping," he said.

'That must be it. No wonder master and sister couldn't find me at all,' Alex thought.

The rod he had taken out was the same rod he found when he was stuck in the Southern Forest. If it truly was a concealment formation, then it would have been impossible for them to come to find him.

"Alright, come sit down. We will teach you what we can," Xiao Huang said.

Luo Xing sat right by and taught him too.

For the next 2 hours, they cleared most if not all of his confusions about making formations using formation flags.

Apparently, when making a formation flag, you did not make the full strokes. Instead, you only carved the beginning of it.

If a formation blueprint had 6 corners also known as origins, then there would have to be 6 formation flags.

Each of the rods of the formation flags would have to have one of the origins carved onto them. Since the rods were usually cylindrical, getting a curved carving that was straight was very hard to achieve.

Once one was done with that, there was also the case of the cloth part of the flag itself.

The cloth was just there to hold the spirit stones and transfer the Qi through the air. Apparently, it was made up of beast hides for fluid energy transfer.

The better the cloth was, the further apart the formation flags could be.

Alex was quite happy when he learned that he didn't have to worry about making the cloth and only needed to worry about carving the formation.

'Thank god, I just need the formation blueprint,' Alex thought.

"Nephew Huang, can you come with me for a second," Shi Nangong called Xiao Huang and he left. Alex could guess why that was.

'Uncle must be looking at brother Huang as one of the people to transfer Qi,' Alex thought.

"Do you want to continue?" Luo Xing asked.

"Um… sure, but don't you want to go look if Uncle is fine?" Alex asked.

Luo Xing smiled and shook her head. "Mei'er wouldn't want me there most likely. She still hates me quite a bit," she said.

"Um… can I ask why? if you don't mind," Alex said.

"Uh... sure, it's stupid really. Most would say she's in the wrong here, but I think it's okay for her to be angry at me," Luo Xing said.

"When I was little… I was contracted with a rather fatal illness. It…was horrible, but the illness didn't affect children as fast, so I was still mostly okay."

"Mothers took care of me one after another, day after night, and reared me. They did it so much so that… Mei'er couldn't even see mothers for most of the days."

"Father brought in doctors to check what was wrong, and they found the problem rather easily. Except, the cure wasn't so easy to come by."

"It needed a special ingredient… hah, I don't even remember the name of it anymore," Luo Xing said as she shook her head.

"The ingredient was rather rare and hard to find, so father took some men and went into the Southern forest to search for it."

"He spent days in there looking for the ingredients. He was motivated to save me. Unfortunately, one day… mother, Mei'er's mother contracted the illness too," Luo Xing's eyes were starting to fill with tears.

"When father came back, happy with the single ingredient, after many days, he returned home to see both mother and me on the deathbed."

"The illness…" Luo Xing's tears started dripping down her cheeks. Her lips quivered as she forced herself to speak. "Mother looked so frail back then. I… I wished she had used the pill on herself."

"But she chose…" Luo Xing started crying. "She chose to give the single pill to me."

"I was cured, but mother…"

Luo Xing didn't continue and just sobbed. Alex could feel the sadness in her voice.

Just as Luo Mei loved Shi Nangong, Luo Xing loved Luo Mei's mother too. However, there was no way a child could love a mother more than the mother could love her child.

"I'm sure she was happy when you got the pill," Alex said.

"She was, I don't doubt it. She told it to me herself. But…" Luo Xing said. "But it hurts when I remember back that… that the reason mother died was because of me."

Alex sat quietly while Luo Xing sobbed. "But that doesn't mean that Sister should hate you," he said.

Luo Xing sniffed while wiping her tears. "Since mother and I were kept in the same room, most people stopped visiting us in fear of contracting the illness."

"Mei'er, who was already having little time with mother, stopped getting to meet her after she fell ill."

"Even when… when mother died, even then she couldn't meet her in fear of contracting the illness."

"Really the only time she saw mother after I got ill was… perhaps her covered body in the funeral."

"Even then… Mei'er couldn't go close to her. I got ill, and mother got ill. We both went into a single room for containment and when I came out okay, mother did not."

"To the young Mei'er, when the adults tried explaining what was happening, she started blaming me for taking away mother."

"At least… I got to say goodbye to mother before she died. Mei'er, however, didn't even get that."

"So, while I think the hate is completely irrational and I don't deserve it… I also think that she's not in the wrong with hating me," Luo Xing said.

"Perhaps… one day she might choose to call me sister again. But until then… I will just have to wait," Luo Xing said with a sad smile.

"I'm… sorry for making you remember that," Alex said.

"Don't be," Luo Xing smiled meekly. "It had been a while since I thought of mother again. It's… good to know that I still have memories of her."

"You know what they say, a person is not gone as long as you can remember them," Luo Xing said; her mood getting better. She wiped away whatever remaining tears she had.

"Since you helped me remember mother and are helping father right now, I will leave you with one information about Formations that you likely won't find from any books," Luo Xing said as she looked around.

Alex immediately sent out his spiritual sense to see if anyone was listening.

"It's kind of a secret… so I hope you don't tell it to anyone," Luo Xing said and came close to whisper.

"You don't need a metal base to make a formation."

Chapter 443: Remuneration and Job

Luo Xing explained that she herself didn't know what it meant and that it was only something she had happened to learn in her sect.

She then proceeded to teach the remainder of what she knew about formations without really giving away any secrets.

The information that Alex already had in his brain finally started to make sense as to what it meant.

'So I was just missing the core that connected it all,' he thought. He would still need to practice a bit, but this alone was enough for him to learn formations on his own now.

Once the training was over, he went to check on Luo Keng. When he reached the room, he found the door open and a few people inside there

There were Luo Keng himself, Shi Nangong, Luo Mei, Old man Jin, Xiao Huang, and another old man he did not recognize.

Luo Mei was apparently doing the task right now 4 people other than herself and Luo Keng gave her their Qi.

'Considering Uncle will cultivate the next 2 weeks, 4 people should be enough,' Alex thought.

Luo Mei put 100 percent of her concentration into sending her Qi to the stomach area and from what Alex could see, her Qi was getting eaten.

Every time the Qi was eaten, she would have to carry the remaining Qi outside with her all the way inside.

Finally, after 20 minutes, she stopped.

'That's… a bit of a problem,' Alex thought. 'I should make some pills for her.'

"I… I can't do it. I just don't have enough True Qi to carry all of yours," she said as she huffed.

"It's okay, Meimei. Take your time," Luo Keng said.

"Uncle is right, sister." Alex walked into the room. "You can cultivate shortly and start again. I will make some pills to help with that, and brother Huang should have some formations for assisting too."

"Ah, Nephew Ming, you are finally back," Luo Keng said while he wan on the bed. "You somehow taught my daughter how to navigate the human body's blood vessels. I'm truly amazed. Honestly, I didn't know her brain could hold anything but cultivation."

"Oh, who's this?" the new man in the room said.

"Brother Hong, this is the young man you were looking for," Old Man Jin said.

"Oh, this is the junior Yu Ming?" the old man named Hong asked.

"Uh…yes, I am Yu Ming. Senior is?" Alex asked.

"You can call me old man Hong. I am the city lord's butler and was sent here to reward you for helping all of the different people. If not for you, we don't know how many we would've lost," the city lord said.

"Reward? I don't need any reward, senior. I was happy to help with what I could," Alex said. "Besides, senior Jin helped me gather so many ingredients in such little time. So he should be the one you should be thanking really."

"Ah, I like a humble young man. Still, the Lord sent me with the reward and I can't return without giving it to you," the old man Hong said and took out a small bag. "Here you go, young man."

Alex looked through the bag and realized that there were nearly 500 True spirit stones in there.

"Senior, this is too much. I just made a few dozen pills; they don't cost this much," he said.

"Keep it, young man. You can't put a price on life, and you saved many that day. This is the least we can do," old man Hong said.

Alex didn't know what else to say, so he kept it and thanked the old man Hong.

"Actually, there is something else the Lord wanted me to ask of you, young man," old man Hong said. He pulled out another storage bag and handed it to Alex.

"Here we have a few ingredients and recipes, all for Common rank pills since that's all you can make from what we've heard."

"We were hoping we could employ you to make as many as you can," old man Hong said.

Alex thought for a moment and tried to think of what jobs he had for the next few days. There was only 1 thing he needed to do.

'I just need to make pills for sister and uncle.'

"Yeah, I can do that," Alex said.

"Great, here you go." Old man Hong gave the ingredients. Since Luo Mei was tired, and this was just a test, Luo Keng decided to dismiss everyone.

"I can do with a little more people, father. Although I don't know if your body can handle it," She said.

"I felt no discomfort. If you can handle it, I will try to find a few more people," Luo Keng said.

Alex checked Luo Keng once more to make absolutely sure that it was in fact the parasite, but that was pretty much proven at this point.

He thought of going back to his room to cultivate but instead decided to go to the Alchemy hall to make some pills.

Before that he needed to find Old man Jin for a small task.

"Senior Jin, here are the books you gave me. I'm done with them," Alex said as he handed them back.

"You're done reading them? Don't you want more?" he asked.

"No, it's fine. There wasn't a lot of new information on it, but just enough to find Uncle's cure," Alex said.

"Oh, that's great then," old man Jin said.

"Also, can you do a small task for me for tomorrow morning?" he asked.

"Sure, young lord. Anything you ask," he said.

"The merchant group that sister came with, it should be leaving in a day or two, can you find out when that is?" Alex asked.

"Uh… sure," old man Jin said. "But, won't you stay a little longer?" he asked.

Alex shook his head. "Sister might have to stay, but I will need to go back. There are still a few things I need to do back in the sect," Alex said.

"Sigh, I will find that information for you then, young lord," he said.

"Thank you. I will be in the Alchemy hall, so… come find me around evening time tomorrow," Alex said.

"As you wish."

Alex left and went towards the alchemy hall. It seemed the people in the hall were let know about his arrival, so he was taken to one of the Alchemy rooms.

"You don't need to wait on me. I will be here for at least 2 days," Alex said.

Afterward, he entered and sat down on the floor next to the fire. He brought out the ingredients bag to check once more.

"Hm… damn, that's close to 100 sets of ingredients. Even when I do 4 an hour… It should take close to…25 hours. If I speed up and exhaust myself, I should be able to do it in around 18 hours."

"That's still quite a lot," he thought as he sighed. He looked at the recipes and realized that he knew all of them.

'Nothing new here either I guess. Although, I don't think I've made this one pill before,' he thought.

It was around 10 pm, so he started making the pills. At first, he started slow with 3 pills an hour, but once he got the hang of it, he started doing 4, or even 5 pills an hour.

However, he never forced himself to make 6 pills an hour.

'Damn, it's hard trying to cram the recipe when I need to do spend the same amount of time per ingredient. It's only the in between time that I can eliminate to make things faster,' he thought.

He slowly made pills, resulting in about 2 pills every 45% of the time. It wasn't 50% like he was promised, but that was just how probability worked.

In the next 10 hours, he did 45 sets of ingredients and got about 65 pills. Since it was 8 am in the morning, he decided to log out. He wanted to bring out Pearl and have him cultivate, but he wasn't sure if that was a good idea since he couldn't control what happened during that time.

He went to get his breakfast and then went to school. Exams were getting close and he hadn't properly studied, so he decided to study in the morning.

After he returned back from school, he went into the game to continue it all over once again.

Fortunately, he didn't have the fatigue from making pills for an entire night and could restart once again.

For the next 3 hours, he made the pills again and stopped.

He stood up and walked out of the room to see old man Jin standing there.

"Senior Jin, I must have made you wait. Apologies," he said.

"Ah, no need to apologize young lord. I have got the information," he said.

"Oh, please tell me. When is it?" he asked.

"The Caravan will start moving tomorrow around 3 pm. It seems they were ready for you, so they have you registered," Old man jin said.

"Hm… I should finish making these pills by the morning. So, I will meet with my sister and Uncle for the day and leave in the afternoon. Thank you, senior Jin. Please let Sister know about this too," Alex said.

"My pleasure, young lord," Old man Jin said and left.

Alex went back inside and made some more pills. Since he had such a long time, he took it slow and did it without gathering much mental fatigue.

When he was done, he had made around 140 pills using the 100 or so ingredients.

Chapter 444: Goodbye

It was 4 in the morning when Alex was done making the 100+ pills for the city lord.

Finally, he could proceed onto some pills of his own. The first thing he made was some Qi Renewal pills for his sister. She needed a desperate amount of them, so in the next hour, he made as many as he could.

Then he made two sets of common parasite removal pills. It came out to be 3, so he was quite happy with it.

He made other miscellaneous pills that he thought his sister's family would need and was finally done around 8 in the morning.

"Ahhh…" he stretched as he stood up. Sitting down on the same spot for over a day and a half in a row with minimal movement was very hard for him.

'How do people go on months like this? Is closed cultivation that easy?' he wondered. 'Maybe it gets easier the more I get used to this.'

He sorted out the pills and kept 40 for himself. He didn't want to do it, but he also didn't want to reveal that he could make more pills with a single ingredient.

So, he reluctantly hid those pills away.

He walked out of the alchemy hall and walked towards his sister's house. The city was bustling in the morning and was very different from the midnight or noon he walked around.

'People return to daily life so easily, huh?' he thought.

Once he reached his sister's house, he went directly to her room and knocked.

Luo Mei opened the door and beamed. "You're back," she said.

"Yeah, and I brought the pills for you," Alex said.

"Oh, come in," she said and took him inside.

Alex walked in and took out some pill bottles. "Here! These are the pills for fast cultivation. These are for a breakthrough, these are for Uncle after he is done with the parasites, these are normal healing pills for you and your sister, these are for smooth breakthroughs… and these are pills to improve your spiritual sense."

Alex handed out multiple pill bottles and Luo Mei was a little overwhelmed.

"Wait! Wait! Wait! There are so many. Aren't these expensive?" she asked.

"Umm… each one should be about 2-3 True spirit stones in cost," Alex said as he wondered if he was right. He had never really such good pills outside of auctions.

"I can't take that!" Luo Mei said.

"Well, you have to whether you like it or not. Especially this one," he said as he pointed to the one he had created himself.

"It's a recipe I came up with on my own. Well, that might be a little untrue… it's more like I stumbled on it by accident, but it's my own recipe nonetheless. It greatly increases your spiritual sense, so it should help you a bit," Alex said.

"But—"

"Just eat it, sister. Are you going to say no to your brother?" he asked.

"Sigh, okay. But I'm asking father to give you something too. You can't say no to your sister either," Luo Mei said.

"Uh… sure," Alex said.

"So… do I cultivate after eating this?" she asked.

"I don't think you need to," Alex said.

"Alright then, here it goes," she said and took one of the new pills out and ate it.

"Ah, it's so… warm," she said as she shook her head a little.

"D0 you feel any changes?" he asked.

"Let me check."

Alex felt a wave of spiritual energy wash over him as Luo Mei sent out her spiritual sense to the extreme without stretching it beyond her normal level.

"Wow!" she cried out.

"It increased by nearly 5 meters. That's amazing," she said. "My spiritual sense is now up to 40 meters."

"Was it 35 only before?" he asked.

"Yeah. I started with what was it… 32 I think? And got to 35 when I broke through to the 6th realm. I think it will increase when I breakthrough more," she said. "Oh, how many should I eat?"

"I don't really know. Just to be safe, don't eat more than 3. Give the rest of sister Xing," Alex said.

Luo Mei's face soured when she heard that. "You give it," she said.

"Sister, there is no bad blood between you two. You should also know how unreasonable you are being towards her. Imagine what she must be feeling like with her only sister hating her for something that was not her fault."

"Just go and make up with her. Say sorry! You are the one in the wrong here from what I understand," Alex said.

"But I…" Luo Mei couldn't come up with any argument so she just crossed her arms. "She told you about it? Or did mother?"

"She did. I asked first though," he said.

"Sigh… I will see what I can do," she said.

"It's okay. Just start slowly. You don't need to make up in a single day. Slowly build back the connections you've lost," Alex said. "As long as you come out of it being closer than when you started, you will have succeeded."

"I hope to hear news about you two sisters being sisterly again when you return back to Scarlet City," he said.

"Oh right, that reminds me. You are leaving today?" she asked.

"In the afternoon, yes," he said.

"Hmm… this might be troublesome for master now," she said softly.

"Huh? Why?" he asked.

"I won't be returning for another 2 weeks. So by that time, my spot will have changed. Someone else will take that place," she said.

"Um… does master immediately leave his position when someone else takes the Prime Disciple spot? No right?" he asked.

"No, he stays as the sect leader for another 6 months to figure out what is going to happen next."

"When senior brother left his spot, it was only after 5 months that I finally managed to securely make my place on the first spot after defeating Du Yuhan."

"That was about 3 years ago. The stronger disciples just happened to be older than 25, and I got insanely lucky," Luo Mei said.

"Oh, then we have nothing to worry about. Just return back to the sect and you can take back your spot," Alex said.

"No. If Du Yuhan takes my spot, I can't force it back from him," she said.

Alex was surprised. "You can't win against him? You have a 3 realm advantage," he said.

"And he has Sword Qi," Luo Mei said. "I haven't fought him since 3 years ago. All this time, I thought he didn't bother since he was weak, but as we saw in the Annual Competition, he is insanely strong."

"If I'm not wrong, at his best, he can dish out a True Disciple level attack. That's not something the current me can handle," She said.

"That's… shit! That's a problem for sure," Alex said.

"Sigh, I will continuously try and take back the 1st rank, but I'm not sure if I can. We will have to see after I've returned," she said.

"Thanks for the pills."

Alex nodded and walked out to find Senior Jin. "Oh, senior Hong is here?" he said in surprise and went to find the old man.

"Senior, here are the pills," Alex said and handed the 100 pills to them.

The old man's eyes went wide when he saw the 100 pills. "You managed to make 100 pills?" he asked.

"Uh… you did give me 100 sets of ingredients, right?" he asked.

"Yes, that's why I'm surprised. You didn't make a single mistake?" he asked in surprise.

"Ah, I may not look it, but I'm one of the most talented alchemists amongst my sect disciples, senior," Alex said.

"I don't doubt it. Still, I've seen way too many alchemists that require 3 sets of ingredients to make a single decent pill and call themself talented. Compared to them, you are miles better," he said.

"Haha, you jest me, senior. Please check the pills," Alex said.

Old man Hong checked the pills and was about to thank Alex to end the conversation when he remembered.

"Oh right… uhh, a 100 so… here," Old man Hong handed him a storage bag.

Alex looked inside and saw about 300 spirit stones. 'That's about the right price. Plus I ended up with about 40% more pills so I profit quite a bit here,' Alex thought.

"Thank you, senior," Alex said.

"No, no, no. It's me who should be thanking you. I didn't know you could make so many pills. I thought we would only have around 40 or so pills. I will immediately bring it to my lord," the old man said and left.

Alex went to meet with Luo Keng and talked for a bit. Both him and Shi Nangong were very kind to him and reminded him of his own mother and father.

He met up with Luo Xing and gave her a few mental strength pills to thank her for helping him with the formation studies.

Since she wasn't in the Mind Tempering realm yet, she could thankfully make use of the pills.

Xiao Huang on the other hand couldn't get anything. Alex apologized and promised he would make him any pills he needed for free once he reached the True realms.

Xiao Huang laughed and said there was no need. They conversed for a bit and soon it was noon.

Alex went back to his sister and talked to her for a while longer. This time, Meng Yun was with her too.

She was rarely with Luo Mei inside the house since she was pardoned from serving Luo Mei for the entirety of their stay back home.

She would only resume her work once they left back again. Still, Meng Yun liked spending time with Luo Mei and came to visit her from time to time.

"Meimei, uncle Jin, please go see young nephew Ming to the caravan. I would do so myself, but unfortunately, I am unable to," Luo Keng said when it was time for Alex to leave.

"Take care, Young Man," Shi Nangong said.

"Goodbye little brother," Xiao Huang said.

Luo Xing silently nodded and waved her hand.

Alex said his goodbyes and went to the caravan with Luo Mei and old man Jin. The afternoon city wasn't as loud as the morning's but it was still pretty crowded.

Old man Jin had found a carriage for them, and the three of them rode on it to the outside of the city

It was close to 3, so the sun wasn't as hot and the days were also slightly cold.

"That's the caravan," old man Jin said as he showed them the way.

"hmm, little brother. You are okay?" Zhang Xie was surprised when he saw Alex return.

"Hello, senior Zhang. Yes, I'm okay," Alex said.

"I was told you were okay, but… it's still impossible to believe something like that after seeing those beast hoards," he said.

"The beasts didn't reach the caravan this time, right?" Alex asked. That was what Luo Mei had told him.

"Oh no, I'm talking about last month's. Actually, I also saw the month before that. Weird…" Zhang Xie thought of something. "Why are the attacks exactly a month apart?"

"Anyway, come you two, I have the carriage prepared for you," he said.

"Oh no, senior. I'm not going back. Only junior brother is," Luo Mei said.

"He is? Oh right, my men must-have set for him alone then. Come," he said and took him to a carriage.

Alex walked up to the carriage and looked inside. He could see about 4 different people in there. 2 of them were young men nearing 30 years of age. There was one woman that looked like she was 25, but who really knew.

The three of them were wearing similar clothing and had a cultivation base in the True realms.

And the final man in the carriage was actually an old man that seemed to be in his mid-50s.

Chapter 445: More Bandits

"These 3 are part of the guards I hired. There are 18 guards for this trip. Usually, it would be around 10, but since the beast attacks, all merchants have increased the guard count," Zhang Xie said.

"There are 5 in the front carriage and 10 in the final 2 carriages. Since this is the 2nd carriage, you should be relatively safe, little brother. Although I hope you will fight when the time comes," he said.

"Don't worry, senior Xie. I won't be a freeloader," Alex said.

"You hear that old man?" Zhang Xie said. "You can't be a freeloader either. You've promised to fight beasts and bandits in case we are attacked, we will leave you behind if you coward out of the fight."

The old man simply glared at Zhang Xie and Alex for a while and nodded in affirmation. The old man had gray hair and a mostly hobo look from what Alex could tell. His clothes were pretty dirty and it looked like he was out of money.

'No wonder needs to ride the caravan like that,' Alex thought. He got up and introduced himself to the group in the caravan.

The men and woman smiled but didn't seem to be in a mood for conversation. The old man glared at Alex and tried to avert his eyes when he was greeted.

Alex understood that he didn't want to talk either. The caravan was ready to move, so Luo Mei came next to the window.

"Have a safe journey, junior brother. Also, don't worry about the Prime disciple problem once you go back. It's my burden to bear, not yours. You just have fun, you'll get there someday," Luo Mei said.

Alex nodded and said his final goodbye before the caravan left for the east. It was going to take about 2 days before he reached Scarlet city, and seeing as though nobody wanted to talk, he felt like it was going to be a very boring time.

The 3 men and women spoke to each other, but Alex didn't get into the conversation. He could tell that they were good friends, so it didn't feel right to butt in.

The old man also kept looking towards him from time to time, and Alex wondered if he wanted to talk or something. But since the old man never said anything, Alex didn't talk either.

Seeing as though he had nothing more to do, he decided to close his eyes and think about the different kinds of stuff.

One of the things he had always wanted to see is if he could make recipes for pills using the ingredients he was familiar with. He was sure he would likely never reach the same level of accuracy as when he did it practically, but he had time to waste, and from the looks of it, he couldn't go anywhere for now.

The sun went down and the night started doing its job. However, it was not at all quiet. The people in the caravan sang and danced along the way as the group moved forward.

"Hey you two, get ready. The bandits will be here any moment," the woman told Alex and the old man.

The old man say anything and simply nodded with an eye that burned with anticipation.

"Do bandits usually attack this area?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, and nighttime is what they like the most. The bandits move all over the southern forest, so we can't tell exactly where they will show up, but given how loud these people are, they will know where we are and will attack us," the lady said.

Alex nodded. "I keep wondering, why do bandits even attack? They should know by now that the merchants hire strong guards. It sort of doesn't make sense," Alex said.

"Not all merchants can afford us. Most can barely get self-tempering realm cultivators, people weaker than you. So, they attack, hoping they got the right one," the woman said.

"It must be terrible for those merchants. I can only imagine how many people die to those horrible people," Alex said.

"Most of the time, the bandits aren't really bad. They are just thieves that want your possessions. As long as you hand it over, they won't hurt you."

"But once in a while when the merchant struggles or a particularly bad character turns into a bandit, there are problems."

"Still, bandits don't attack that many times. Maybe once in a week, some even once in a month. However, recently since the beast attacks, they are terrified of coming out of their caves for while"

"Also given that most merchants have stopped traveling, their supplies must be ending. So… I assume we will meet a lot of bandits this trip," the woman said.

Alex nodded as he thought of something and asked, "how strong are the bandits?"

"Some are weaker than you. No, most are weaker than you. Some are close to you in strength and very few come close to us in strength. However, that doesn't mean that there are people stronger than us."

"Don't worry. The strong ones hate doing the work themselves so even if their groups do come, it's usually the lower-level thugs. We should be fine with those," the woman said.

The group went along without any hitch for a few more hours until it was midnight. Alex wondered if anything was going to even happen, and that was when he heard the shout.

"BANDITS!"

"Let's go!" the woman shouted. But before she could even stand up, the old man had already opened the carriage door on his side and walked out.

Alex quickly opened the door on his side after hearing the woman and walked out as he took out his steel sword too.

'Try not to use Sword Intent,' he told himself. He didn't want to reveal something like that in front of the strangers here.

"Haah!" a bandit shouted as he charged towards him. He held a sword in his hands and swung it directly at Alex.

'So weak,' Alex thought when he saw the man's high Organ Tempering realm cultivation base.

Alex didn't even dodge and directly hit the incoming sword. The bandit's sword bent in half and flew out of the bandit's arms. The bandit himself fell onto the ground with fear creeping up in his eyes.

He tried to get back up, but his hands kept slipping on the dried leaves on the ground. Finally, he got a grip and managed to turn around and run back into the forest.

Alex looked around and saw that the bandits were being beaten up left and right. This was a very weak bandit group and was definitely out of luck.

On the other side of the caravan, Alex could hear shouted of agony as screams rang out from time to time.

Another man jumped at Alex, but he was kicked directly on the ribs and sent flying away.

Alex then looked around and saw that there were no other bandits here.

He looked at the two men who had the bandits with broken limbs, laid sprawling on the ground.

"Do we leave them like this?" Alex asked.

"What? You want to help them?" they asked mockingly.

Alex didn't say anything and looked at the bandits with a little shocked expression.

'The ones from the princess' caravan always killed people no matter what though,' he thought.

The caravan was starting to move so he got onto the carriage. As soon as he entered, he was assaulted with a heavy smell of blood.

He looked at the old man, whose body was mostly covered in blood.

"Damn it old man, You don't need to kill them. You could've just broken their bones and left them. Why did you have to go on a bloody massacre?" the woman asked while incredibly annoyed.

"Hmph," the old man said and minded his own business.

"Dammit," the woman turned around, not wanting to face the bloody old man.

"Sigh, you didn't go psycho on the bandits, right?" she asked Alex.

"No," Alex said as he shook his head. "But I'm quite surprised that you guys leave the bandits alive. The caravan I was in about a month ago didn't do that. Every bandit group they came across, they would kill them all," Alex said.

"Killing all bandits? That must be either the Royal Fu merchant group who don't hire anybody and instead uses national guards as their guard."

"Or it could be the Victorious Snow merchant group. They are known to have ruthless guards all the time," the woman said.

"We on the other hand don't do that. For one, we don't like killing people a lot. Secondly, you don't want to be known as the bandit-killing merchant group."

"That only draws out the worst in every bandit you meet and they end up attacking you with the intention to kill even when you can't fight them," she said.

"I see," Alex said. "The merchant group came from the capital so it must have been the Royal Fu merchant group. Yeah, they killed every single one of the bandits."

"Alright, let me know if you are injured. If you're not, rest up. There will be more of such fights throughout the night," the woman said.

Alex nodded and closed his eyes to wait for the time to pass. He desperately wished that he could log out and go get something to eat, but it didn't seem like he could get any chance now.

He just had to wait until he was back in the city.

A few hours passed, and the people shouted outside once more.

"BANDITS!"

Chapter 446: Black Venom Bandit Group

Sun had come up and Alex was not the least bit exhausted. The two men next to him were pretty jovial and were talking to each other, while the woman in front of him made a slightly disgusted face from time to time.

The old man next to her was drenched in blood by now and had done nothing about it. Thankfully, he hadn't attacked a single ally during the 3 different bandit attacks last night.

The woman had told Alex that 3 attacks were surprisingly very low for the night.

"After 3 beast attacks in a row, anyone would be scared. Especially if they lived in the forest," the woman had said.

Alex looked around and realized that nobody really cared about his existence, and it didn't look like they were going to get attacked any time soon.

So, he decided to log out real quick and get his breakfast. He closed his eyes and got into a meditative position for a bit to see how they reacted, and after realizing that the people didn't care, he left.

He quickly did his business in the bathroom and went to eat. He gorged down the food while telling the people how precarious of a position he was in and how he could not really leave.

Then, he returned back to the game and found himself perfectly fine. Still, it was quite scary to leave his body alone like that.

The day passed by and Alex was bored with nothing to do. He tried sleeping but even that didn't really work since he wasn't tired at all.

Back when he was with the princess, he at least had a friend to talk with. If not that, he could spend his time learning about the different formations.

Now, he couldn't even do that.

'Making pills in my mind is boring and hard,' he thought. 'And there's really nothing else I can do.'

He was seated on the left side of the carriage, so when he stuck his face out to get fresh air, he couldn't even see any of the southern forests.

Instead, he saw the farmland to the south. The cool breeze of the upcoming winter hit his face and reminded him of the changing seasons.

He started spending the rest of his time doing just that, looking at the different lands to the north, instead of focusing on the south.

'That's where the ocean is right?' he thought. 'I wonder when I will get to see that and just how far it is.'

The day passed by and night fell once more. The bandits would soon attack once more.

Alex could hear the gasps of people from all around him. Even one of the men sitting towards the right window gasped.

At first, he thought it was the bandits again, but there wasn't any shout.

"Just look at that. So much damage," the man mumbled under his breath.

Alex looked over on his side and saw that massive, almost wave of destruction all around him.

Lands were torn to shred, trees missing all around, and even the Souther forest was in a mess.

'Oh, are we back around the place where I left?' he wondered. 'This must be where that saint realm beast showed up through with its entire beast army.'

"This is seriously getting too dangerous. We can't keep risking our lives for this small sum of money," the man said.

"Sigh, we will quit after this job and wait until the beast attacks settle down. No need to die for a little money," the woman said.

"Ssh! Did you hear that?" the other man said.

Everyone got quiet and tried to listen to what was going on. They heard the trees rustling and then someone shouted.

"BANDITS!"

Alex was used to this by now and opened his side of the door before walking out.

The bandits surprisingly didn't charge at them, and instead slowly appeared from what remaining bushes there were and lined up against the caravan.

Alex was surprised why they were not attacking, but then he saw the woman's face.

She was worried. She wasn't scared or horrified, but she was definitely worried. Alex looked at the other members of her team as well, and they seemed worried as well.

'This one is not going to be so easy, is it?' Alex thought. He realized that the only reason the guards could be worried is if they didn't have the ability to protect their employers.

"Damn it, it's the Black Venom bandit group," one of the men said.

Alex didn't know bandit names, but he could see where the name came from. All of the bandits had black robes and had long black hair.

'That explains the black part… so, is the venom part that they use something venomous?' Alex wondered.

"Surrender your items now, and we will let you go along just fine," the man with a thick mustache spoke. From the looks of it, the 20 or so bandits seemed to follow him as if he were the leader.

"Don't worry guys, this is not the Black Venom Bandits. At least… not the real one," the woman said.

"What are you? An off-shoot of the main bandit group? You certainly have to be related to have this much strength, but I know who the leader of Black Venom bandit group is, and you are not it," the woman said confidently.

"Hah, just because I lead the weaker members of our group doesn't mean that we are not part of the group. Anyway, enough talking, will you give us the items or not?" the man asked.

Alex looked at the group of bandits and saw that most of the people, including the leader had a cultivation base in the True Realm. They were very weak in the True realms, but it was the True realms nonetheless.

Only about 3 people were in the self tempering realm, but it was still quite high.

"Sister, let's fight them. We've got the force to beat them to a pulp," one of the men said.

The old man looked at the bandit group with furious eyes. Even when he couldn't fight them, it seemed like he hated the bandits too much to care.

"I'm not worried about them. They couldn't hope to hurt us with how overconfident they are. I'm just worried what will happen if the Black venom himself learned about this."

"He is not someone we can mess with," the woman said.

"Miss Gong, you must protect us," Zhang Xie said from behind them.

"Tsk. It seems you all don't really care. Whatever boys, kill them," the leader of the bandit group shouted.

"It seems we have no choice. Listen up, if they live we will be in trouble. So, make sure to kill them no matter what," the woman shouted.

Alex went for one of the weakest of the bandits, a 4th Mind Tempering realm cultivator.

The bandit seemed to use two axes, so he came running towards him with just that.

The bandit swung the right ax towards Alex which he blocked with his sword.

At the same time, the bandit attacked him on his right shoulders with his left ax.

Alex lifted his right hand so that the target was no longer the shoulder but the chest.

CLANG

The sound of the ax hitting something hard rang loud and Alex smiled. His True Mortal T-shirt armor was working just fine.

Without hesitation, he started attacking the bandit. Left and right, front and dow, he tried the attack everywhere the bandit couldn't block in time and immediately change position if he did.

The bandit had one of the best close combat fighting weapons, so Alex had to be extra careful with how he approached the fight.

Alex slowly started having trouble when the bandit started using techniques of his own. First of all, the movement technique of the bandit was too hard to understand for Alex.

Secondly, there was a weird green glow that shot out from the ax every time he blocked it and hit him. Fortunately, they weren't strong enough to truly hurt him, and only pricked him a bit.

Finally, the man started using some defensive techniques of his own and Alex had a hard time penetrating through that defense without using something unusual in his arsenal.

He tried to fight it out normally for as long as he could, however. He wanted to take it slow, but then he heard someone shout in pain and anger.

Alex looked to the side and saw the burning flesh of one of the weaker bandits. However, the shout was not coming from one of the bandit's allies.

Alex immediately turned around to block the attack of the bandit and used Heaven's impact on him.

The bandit lost consciousness and Alex hit him with the side of his blade to send him next to the woman who had just finished her opponent.

She cut the incoming bandit without worry and looked at Alex. But Alex no longer cared about it.

Alex was now looking at the person crying in anger and pain near the burning bandit, the old man.

Except, the voice coming from the old man wasn't old… it was young.

The old man looked towards Alex by sheer coincidence and Alex saw the look of pain, anger, and now quickly building shame in his eyes.

Alex's heart started racing when he realized he recognized those eyes. "You…" he said.

"Go away," the old man shouted in a young man's voice. By this time, most the of bandits were dead and the leader of the group was injured in his fight against the people.

He hadn't realized how much of a mistake he had made in underestimating the caravan.

"No!" he shouted and suddenly ran away.

"Stop him. We can't let him report back," the woman said and ran in.

The old man ran behind the leader too.

"Brother Li!" Alex shouted as he ran behind the old man.

The old man stopped for just the tiniest fraction of a second before running behind the running leader

The leader was mostly injured, so he couldn't fly or run at his fastest speed, so everyone followed him. Letting the man return back alive and report who killed him was not a choice.

The leader, however, knew the jungle more than the guards could ever hope to.

Even Alex who had tried to keep track of him using his spiritual sense missed him. However, the old man kept running into the forest.

Ale changed his direction and ran towards the old man, getting closer and closer until he was right next to him.

"Brother Li, stop!" he shouted, and the old man finally stopped.

He looked back at Alex and said, "Please go back, brother Yu. I don't want to involve you with this petty revenge of mine."

Wan Li finally decided to speak up to Alex.

Chapter 447: Wan Li's Revenge

"What are you doing here, brother? Are you looking to avenge your parents? Please don't risk your lives and come back to the sect," Alex said.

"You… won't understand," Wan Li said softly and ran further in.

'Where is he going? Does he know the way?' Alex wondered as he followed Wan Li.

"Oi kid, leave the old man behind. You don't have to follow him," the woman and 3 other men were following behind but stopped.

"Kid, we are leaving with or without you. The bandit is gone and we need to leave before he informs his boss," the woman said, but Alex didn't listen.

He continued following behind Wan Li as he went deeper into the forest.

"Senior, what do we do now?" one of the men asked.

"Let's go back. We need to move soon or the Black Venom himself will come to find us," the woman said.

"And that kid?" another man asked.

"Forget about that kid or even the old man. If they went in deep, they are sure to die. We need to save our hide for now," the woman said and started running backward.

The men followed her and they soon reached the road again.

"You guys are back," Zhang Xie said and looked around. "Where's the little brother? And that old man?"

"They followed deep after the man; they didn't want to come back," the woman said.

"Oh no, we need to get them," Zhang Xie said.

"No, we can't. We need to leave now before the Black Venom realizes we've killed his people," the woman said.

"But… but the little brother, we need to get him at least," Zhang Xie said.

"Do you want to risk the lives of everyone here for a feisty kid that won't listen to us and goes in looking for danger?" the woman asked.

"But—"

"Mister! If we don't leave now, you will die," the woman said.

Zhang Xie finally came to his sense and softly said, "I'm sorry brother Wen, your disciple brought this on himself."

"Alright people," he then loudly shouted. "Move! We need to leave this area right now," he said.

The caravan started back up and the carriages moved hastily. They left the area as fast as they could and moved along.

* * * * *

The leader ran through the forest at incredible speed while going through thick trees using his movement technique that worked best in the trees.

He used his wood-related movement techniques to quickly lose the guards behind, but he was losing a ton of blood.

'I… I need to find the boss soon,' he thought. 'Those bastards need to die. They dare kill members of our group?'

He huffed and puffed and made his way further in. Finally, after finding a relatively secure place in the forest, he placed his spear on the tree and sat down.

He quietened down and listened to the people, trying to feel the people's aura.

"I should be safe. Ugh… that bastard cut through my waist. Shit!" the man said to himself.

His vision was starting to get hazy and he could feel himself falling unconscious.

He tried to reach his storage bag, but his left arm was hurt too. Still, he looked for his storage bag to take out a pill to heal himself now that he was relatively safe.

"Huh? Where's my storage bag?" he worriedly checked his cloth, but it wasn't there.

'Shit, did it fall out of my robes?' he wondered.

He patted himself left and right with his right hand, but couldn't find the storage bag anywhere.

"Shit! Where the fuck did I drop my storage bag? this wound is so big and I need medication. I hope I don't die not even 2 months into the—"

Suddenly a fireball flew right to his head and smacked him across the face.

"Fuck!" he got scared and stood up to run, but he realized the fireball barely stung.

He looked around and checked the person who just attacked him.

"Mind Tempering realm? Fuck you man, why the fuck are you scaring me for nothing?" he shouted.

Wan Li had made it up to him and had attacked. He took out his sword and started sending out fire slashes towards the man.

"Goddammit! Die," he shouted and tried to jump forward to hit, but his feet just wouldn't move like they needed to.

He still took out his spear and slashed around, sending out attacks. They were very dangerous for Wan Li, but the man was wounded and slow, so he could dodge pretty easily.

The man suddenly placed his hands on the ground and roots started propping out from the ground.

They were very fast and were closing in on Wan Li.

Wan Li too dropped down and touched the ground to quickly turn it into lava and sent it forward to stop the roots.

The roots were mostly elemental with little Qi, so no matter how strong they were, they couldn't survive the lava.

"Shit! man, just go back or I will kill you," he said.

"15 months ago, a caravan ride passed through here. It was the caravan of the merchant group Night Soul. You were the ones that killed them, weren't you?" Wan Li demanded.

"Fuck you, kid. Just die," the man slashed the spear with both of his hands and grunted at the pain from his right hand.

Wan Li pulled up the part of the earth in front of him and blocked the attack. But mere rocks couldn't stop the attack of a True realm cultivator.

The impact tore apart the rocks and threw Wan Li flying back as well.

"Ughh…" Wan Li said as he felt the pain.

"You think a mere Mind Tempering realm cultivator can beat me? I'm already at True Disciple 3rd realm. I can beat you with half my body dead," the man said.

'Fuck those bastards who said this was a good way to earn money. There's nothing easy about this. I really hope I don't die. Let me kill this kid first and see if he has any loot,' he thought.

The man walked forward towards Wan Li and was about to slash when he suddenly lost his consciousness.

The spear he had propped up to attack nearly dropped out of his hands as he too fell along with it.

"Brother Li, what are you doing? Come on! He'll wake up soon, we need to leave. We can't fight a True realm cultivator right now," Alex said.

"Ugh, my chest," Wan Li said.

Alex quickly took out a healing pill and shoved it into Wan Li's mouth. Wan Li immediately felt better and stood up.

Then, he saw the unconscious body of the man. "I can kill him," he thought with red eyes and propped up his sword to swing.

Just then, the man woke up and dodged the sword just as the swing was coming down.

"Shit! What happened? Why was I out?" he asked. "Oh shit! Mental attacks."

The man suddenly started using a cultivation technique. White light appeared around his body as his whole body started glowing slightly.

He then tightly held his spear and stabbed it towards Wan Li. The attack was fast and Wan Li couldn't dodge it in time.

Suddenly, Alex appeared between the two and took the attack to the chest. His armor blocked the damage, but the force still sent him flying backward with Wan Li.

Alex quickly got his footing and looked up only to see the man right about to stab him with the spear.

Just then, Alex disappeared once again and appeared a little behind. His spiritual sense churned as he let out another Heaven's impact while the man hit empty land.

The man lost consciousness for a second but immediately woke up.

"What? Why is he not affected like the last time?" Alex thought.

The man turned around and looked towards Alex's silhouette. With most of his vision running hazy due to his lack of blood, he couldn't see Wan Li who was hidden a little further away from him.

"Damn you!" he shouted and ran towards Alex and swung his spear around. The spear was fast, but as long as Alex teleported someplace else, he couldn't touch him.

Alex tried luring the man away from Wan Li, while Wan Li healed and ran away. At least, he was hoping that was the case.

However, just after Wan Li stood up, he came back charging.

Alex could probably play around with this weak True Realm cultivator, but not if Wan Li kept intruding.

The man heard Wan li approaching and turned around to slash towards him. The sword and the spear clashed, making a rather loud ringing sound.

The man suddenly sprouted roots from the ground and caught Wan Li. However, Wan Li too started creating lava under his feet. Since the Lava was made up of mostly Earth energy that was empowered using Fire energy, it was particularly powerful.

The roots started crushing Wan Li's legs but they were also getting destroyed. But since Wan li wasn't resistant to heat, he was starting to take damage from the lava too.

Alex teleported right next to him and hacked away the roots before pulling him out. He pulled out another pill to feed Wan Li, but the man hit his arm and the pill flew into the forest.

"Ouch!" Alex cried out. There was a long gash from the bottom of his thumb to his little finger. Alex teleported away and took out another pill before eating it.

He then took out another pill and saw Wan Li rolling around to dodge the attack.

Alex teleported right next to the man and used Heaven's impact to harm him before swinging right at him.

However, he didn't feel the same force as he had imagined. 'Shit, his glow also stops physical attacks,' he thought.

He teleported out and dragged Wan Li back before giving him the pill. "Stop being so stubborn, Brother Li. We need to leave," Alex said.

Wan Li however looked at the man with nothing but anger and hatred in his eyes. "My parents were killed by the Black Venom bandits. I've been searching for them ever since they died. Now that I have finally found them, I can't leave, brother Yu. I must avenge my parents," he said.

"What? He was responsible for your parent's death?" Alex asked in surprise.

"Yes, that's why I want to kill him," Wan Li said. "Don't try to stop me. Either he dies today and I get my revenge. Or I die today and the circle of violence ends with me."

Alex tried to stop him but he couldn't.

"I have met True Disciple bandits that were stronger than you, you weakling!" Wan Li taunted. Alex got ready behind him, if Wan Li wasn't going to leave, then he would have to help him.

Alex took a deep breath. If he was to fight, he would fight with his full strength.

Chapter 448: Thank you

The man clutched his stomach and tried to stop the bleeding, but the blood just kept flowing out.

'I will die anytime now if I don't find any medication,' he thought. 'How are these kids not hurt after taking so much damage. Did I not hit them? I'm sure I did. Then… do they have medicine?'

The man started to get greedy. "Yes, that must be it," he said. "I will kill you and find medicine for myself."

"Get ready," Wan Li shouted.

The man suddenly leaped forward and swung down the spear. However, midway through, he lost his consciousness once more.

However, the very next second, it was back once more. He was getting used to this happening and immediately focused back on heating.

Wan Li had thankfully stepped out of the way and hit the man to the face with his sword.

The man grunted at the pain, but there was not even a cut. The damage was akin to being hit on the wrist with a ruler.

It hurt just enough to make him make a sound. "Dammit, which one of you keeps attacking my mind, I can't even see you move," the man said.

"Come here and give me your storage bags. I need the pills," he shouted and ran towards Wan Li once again.

Alex needed to keep his spiritual sea at least mostly full, so he could check for danger.

He ran forward and teleported in at the right time to block one of the attacks and was thrown away.

Wan Li attacked the man with rocks and also sent out slashes. The man took everything head-on, but grunted in pain.

Alex quickly got up and teleported in to take another attack with his sword this time.

"Urghh!" he grunted at the force. It was quite a strong force, but—

'It's nowhere near the level of what a True Realm cultivator should be. This feels more like he's in the upper realm of Mind Tempering realm,' Alex thought.

'I can do this!'

He fought against the man for a little longer and was steadily realizing that his strength really wasn't very high.

'Is it because he's injured?' he thought, but he couldn't get any answers.

The man was slowly starting to lose it. "No! I don't want to die. Give me a pill! I don't want to lose my talent!" he shouted.

"What?" Alex was surprised. 'A player?' he thought.

"AAARGGH! Give me a pill!" he shouted and started waving around the spear with no rhyme or reason. Alex teleported out, but Wan Li was hell-bent on fighting, so he didn't leave.

The two clashes weapons, but it was very clear who was going to win here.

"Goddammit! Brother Li, why aren't you leaving? You will only die," Alex shouted.

"No, I will kill him, and then I will leave," Wan Li said.

Alex wanted to leave, but not while Wan Li's stubborn ass was still fighting.

"Shit!" he screamed and teleported back in to fight. Neither of their hits was dealing much damage.

Alex used different slashes, Penta Sword techniques, Iron Fist punch, Palm of the sun, and even tried using his fire to attack, but they didn't work.

His damage was high, but not high enough to penetrate through that white film of light covering the man's body.

They both got into close combat and started hitting the man who was just wildly swinging around his spear.

Alex was about to go in for another attack when he noticed something behind him.

Suddenly, massive roots sprung out from the ground and attacked both Alex and Wan Li. Alex could see the attack through his spiritual sense, so he dodged, but Wan Li was struck on the back of his head.

The roots were massive, and they suddenly started constricting Wan Li's body like they were snakes wrapping around their prey.

Wan Li tried to use fire to burn the roots, but they just didn't take any damage. He was about to try and use lava, but he lost consciousness.

Wan Li was out, but the roots did not stop moving. Alex could start hearing Wan Li's body getting wrapped tighter and tighter.

"Die! You goddamn NPC. Give me your loot," the man shouted maniacally.

"Stop!" Alex shouted and went in to attack, but the man didn't stop.

"You die too!" he shouted and roots started wrapping around Alex as well.

"Dammit," Alex shouted and teleported out.

"Fuck! How do you keep teleporting? Do you have a skill? Give it to me," he shouted and started swinging at Alex.

At the same time, Wan Li was getting crushed slowly. 'Shit! I will have to make him stop,' Alex thought and launched another Heaven's impact but it did no damage basically aside from giving him a headache.

"Damn you! So you were the one with the mental skill. I will kill you and get that too," he shouted.

Alex felt like he was trapped. His opponent wasn't going easy on him, and he couldn't leave either due to his friend's life being in danger.

"Fuck!" he said. Suddenly, his dull sword started to glow slightly white and Alex attacked.

TING

The man felt a far greater force from his opponent now. "What?" he was surprised.

Alex calmed his mind as much as he could with only a single thought being there.

'CUT'

He dashed and slashed at the man and nearly ripped the sword out of his hands.

He kept attacking and the man could feel more and more pain as the attacks landed on him.

"What's going on? How are you so strong suddenly? Fuck! Did you break through? Screw it, I will do it too," he said and pressed something in midair.

Suddenly, Alex felt his opponents' cultivation elevate a realm higher and frowned. 'Did he breakthrough just now?'

He was horrified. He had never come across a fight where his opponent broke through in his cultivation mid-fight.

'This is going to be annoying,' he thought and started attacking once more.

The man too started attacking once more to quickly kill Alex and find some pills. He couldn't even leave without the pill even if he wanted to now.

The attacks were hard and Alex was having a hard time damaging the man. He could wait it out and the man would surely die due to the blood loss, but Wan Li would die sooner if he waited.

His sword was glowing bright yellow by now with a hue of white light around it as he weaved through the man's attacks and hit him all over.

Still, he wasn't hurting the man enough to even make him scream out. 'That untimely breakthrough made him stronger, shit!" he thought.

He needed to up his power too, but unfortunately, he didn't have enough Qi to breakthrough right now.

He continued fighting but he was slowly losing the fight now.

Just then, he heard soft cracks from the side. He looked towards Wan Li and realized his bones were starting to crack.

'No, I need to hurry. I can't just fight him; I need to beat him. I need to…' Alex's heart started beating when he realized what he had to do.

'I… I need to kill him,' he thought. He was horrified that he even came to the conclusion, but he had to do it.

'If I want to save Wan Li, I can't just beat him, I need to kill him.' His resolve got stronger and his intention towards the battle got clearer to him.

'KILL'

His sword shined brighter as it flew towards the man.

'No, I can't kill people. I can't be a murderer,' he thought. The sword slammed at the man's spear, but couldn't do much damage.

Alex's resolve had faltered at the last second.

CRACK

However, the bones of his friend behind him reminded him of what he was fighting for.

'No, this is different. I'm in a different place. I'm at a place where he isn't hesitating to kill me or my friend for his own gain. So, I shouldn't be hesitating either.'

'If I need to be a murderer to protect me and my friends, then I should gladly become one,' he thought.

'I will gladly become one. I will gladly kill him.'

'KILL'

His clear resolve brought back the shine his sword has lost and attacked the man once more.

The sword clashed with the spear, but the spear wasn't able to stop the sword and was pushed aside.

"WHAT?!" the man was surprised. Then he saw something bright golden swing towards his waist again.

Alex felt the hardness of the white light he had just hit and the sword didn't go in much further. But, it had gone in just enough to cut the man's skin and harm him.

'I can do it. I can kill him.'

'KILL'

He swung once more. The man's confidence was faltering and he tried to block with his hands now that his spear was gone.

However, that was a really bad idea for him as the sword cut halfway into both of his arms.

Even though he was cut, his blood didn't escape from his arms. All of the blood had already left his body. The man was solely surviving on QI alone now.

If Alex hit him enough, then that too would end and Wan Li would become free.

'KILL'

Alex brought back his sword and slashed it once more. The man tried to dodge but moving aside only made Alex's strike land on his arm.

In a single slash, his arm was cleanly cut off.

"ARGGHH" the man shouted in a hoarse voice. He started shouting "Log out! Log out!"

But he didn't leave immediately. The system didn't let him log out while he was in danger and gave him a warning instead so he knew what was at risk if he did.

However, before he could agree to the condition, a golden blade slid past the warning notification and drilled into his heart.

The man's eyes lost color and he fell to the ground. His body started convulsing before a hoarse voice escaped from his body.

"T-Thank you."

Then, the man died.

<Congratulations. You have killed 'Honey_Truth29'>

No more notification arrived after that. No rewards, no punishment. The game only told him what he had done.

He had killed the person. He had killed people before, but never had it been this directly. Never had it been intentionally.

Seeing the bloody body on the ground with white eyes and a blank look, Alex felt like vomiting. Thankfully, he contained himself and forced himself to come to terms with what he had done.

Alex felt horrible for killing the man, but what was more horrible was hearing the last words of the man.

'Thank… you? Why did he thank me?' Alex thought.

"Urghh" he heard Wan Li take a deep breath. He immediately forgot about killing the person and turned around to go see Wan Li.

Wan Li's body was pale and he could see blood dripping from all over his body from the bones that stuck out.

"Oh no no no-no. Hang on for a second, brother Li," Alex said and searched amongst the few True pills he had.

"Ah, here it is. The Bone Restructuring pill. This will help you," he said and slowly put it onto Wan Li's mouth.

The pill slid down his throat and soon Alex could see the effects of the pill.

Within seconds, Wan Li's bones returned back to how they needed to be, and he was all but fully healed.

"Brother Yu… you saved me?" he asked as his consciousness returned back to him.

"Yes. Are you fine?" Alex asked.

"Is he dead?" Wan Li asked.

Alex sighed and said, "Yes. Yes, he's dead."

"Good. One of my parent's killers is dead," Wan Li said. "But… the rest of the Black Venom group is still alive, especially Black Venom himself. He must be the main person who killed my parents."

"I will make sure that he and the rest of them find salvation for my parent's dead through their death as well. I won't stop until the lot of them are dead."

"But… I'm too weak right now. I will need to get stronger," Wan Li said as he gritted his teeth. "I couldn't even kill a weakling of the group and needed your help, Brother Yu."

"Let's go back to the sect, brother Li," Alex said.

" No," Wan Li said. "Not until I have found my revenge." Suddenly Wan Li punched Alex.

Alex blocked the punch but was still sent flying back. When he got back up, Wan Li was gone.

Wan Li was nowhere to be seen even with Alex's Spiritual sense. "He's… gone," Alex said in surprise. 'Did he use an escaping technique, or did he… fully learn the invisibility and Concealment techniques?'

Alex stretched his spiritual sense to the fullest and looked around, but no matter what he couldn't find Wan Li at all.

"Sigh, I guess I should leave," he thought and reached into his storage bag to pull out the boat.

But suddenly, a massive pressure landed on him and dropped him onto the ground.

Someone strong had arrived in the forest.

Chapter 449: Black Venom

Alex was down on the ground as pressure crashed all over him. This pressure was way stronger than the person he had just fought before.

In fact, it was stronger than that time Zexi had him pinned on the ground in the alleyway too.

'No way! Someone in True Lord realm? Or maybe even higher,' he thought. The aura was less than his masters', but he wasn't sure by how much.

He tried to use his Qi to escape but no matter what he did, his Qi just wouldn't move. The pressure was too much for him to use any technique.

Warm energy rushed from within him that lowered the pressure on the inside, but he was still unable to use his techniques.

"So, someone is indeed here," A voice came from behind Alex. He quickly sent out his spiritual sense and noticed a lot of people around him.

'Shit!' he thought.

"What's that?"

"It's a corpse. Hey isn't this that new guy Phillip or whatever his name was?"

"I think so. Boss, someone killed your arrogant new star."

"Wait, didn't he have a small group of his own cause he wanted to act like a leader? Where are they?"

"Probably dead like him, right? Hahaha"

People started laughing all around Alex. Finally, a person landed in front of him.

"Is he alive, boss?" someone asked.

Alex could see a fully black-robed person with a black mask that had a single design that made it look like a snake's tongue was coming out of it.

Other than that, there were 2 holes through which amber-colored eyes were staring at him.

"You look young. Did you kill my person?" A hoarse voice escaped from behind the mask that made the boss sound like he had lost his voice after speaking for hours.

Alex didn't answer. He was too busy checking how much trouble he was in.

His spiritual sense could now clearly see the nearly 3 dozen people surrounding him.

Each and every single one of them was wearing a black robe and a rather tight-fitting black mask on just on their mouth and nose.

"Are you conscious kid? The boss is asking you a question," a man said. However, he didn't come close to Alex and stayed far away.

"He's conscious; just look at him fidgeting," the boss said.

Suddenly a force pulled Alex off of the ground and he was face to face with the boss. The pressure crashing on him lowered and he could finally move his body around.

He could also use techniques with the pressure mostly gone, but now that he was away from the ground, he had lost his chance to escape too.

He wanted to turn invisible, but just a single burst of aura would make him unable to stay that way. He wanted to conceal his aura, but it wouldn't work against someone at a higher Major realm than his.

He wanted to simply teleport away, but everywhere was surrounded by the goons. Teleporting would still leave him within the encirclement, in range of the boss' intense pressure.

So, he really only had one choice, and he did it.

His Spiritual sea churned as a massive vortex appeared that quickly turned into mist and flew to the sky. They gathered there to form the shape of a fist and it escaped away from that place.

Heaven's impact flew directly at the boss, but just before it hit the boss, the mask glowed a shiny white and his spiritual attack was stopped.

"Oh, you just used a mental skill on me? How? I didn't see you use any techniques," the boss said with a chuckle in his voice.

Alex was horrified. His one plan that should have worked, didn't.

'How?' he thought. 'Mental protection items are so rare. How does the boss of a bandit group have those?'

'It's the mask. I need to get rid of it,' he thought. His sword was still on the side of his hand, dangling beside him.

From what he could see, the boss still believed him to be unable to move. He didn't know that thanks to his inner warmth, he could now move.

'I need to take this opportunity carefully,' he thought.

"Yeah, I'm sure he killed him. That is truly a surprise. A Mind Tempering realm kid killing a True realm cultivator. Hmm…" the boss looked around.

"He must've gotten help from what I can see. Someone else was here and they ditched him."

"Were you betrayed? Do you want to take revenge on the person that left you behind?" the boss asked.

"I… I want to," Alex said. "I want to kill him. He ruined my life."

"Hehehe, do you hate society like every one of us here?" the boss asked.

"Yes!…" 'I need to fight.' "… I do." 'Soon.'

"Hehe, but then you will have to—"

Alex suddenly swung his golden-white sword across the boss's face and cut the mask in half.

Alex was still hanging in the air, but he saw the boss's mask drop from his face.

"A woman?" he asked in surprise.

"You!" the boss's normal, female voice was revealed once the mask disappeared.

Alex was about to use his Heaven's Impact, but he suddenly felt that he was in a state of euphoria. He almost couldn't do anything.

It felt like his mind, body and spirit became one. However, just then he felt his mind get hot and that woke him up.

He woke up just in time to see the notifications about the toxins being destroyed from his body.

He looked up front and saw the woman's face anger up. He then saw her taking out another mask from her storage bag and was about to put it on.

"Oh no!" he thought and immediately sent out another Heaven's impact. This one managed to barely slip through and hit the boss just before she put on the mask again.

Just as she put on the mask, she lost consciousness too. Her control over Alex dropped and he fell to the ground. He immediately started his Earth Devour techniques.

His Qi traveled across his body at incredible speed and came out from under him to open the ground. But, even as that happened, he could see the boss's eyes coming back to life.

He didn't know if Heaven's impact wasn't as strong due to her putting on the mask, or if the mask had mental healing properties, but she had recovered from her unconsciousness and he was in trouble.

The ground below him had barely opened when the boss stopped herself from falling and immediately sent a palm attack towards him.

Alex felt like he had lost his control over the Focus mode and time was back to moving slow.

He could see the slow opening of the ground and the palm attack flying towards him at incredible speed.

He knew for sure if the palm hit him, he was dead. And… it seemed it would reach him before he escaped.

He was doomed.

He started worrying about what to do. Whether to teleport or to use an attack of his own, but that was impossible.

His body was still sending out Qi for the ground below him, and he couldn't use it right now. Even if he could, it wouldn't be fast enough to dodge the palm attack that was right in front of his face.

'Am I dead?' he thought.

Suddenly, something flew out of his robe and stood between him and the palm attack.

Bright yellow light shined from it and a golden barrier appeared in front of him just in time to block the attack.

Alex looked at what it was and was thoroughly surprised. "Master's talisman!" he shouted.

The talisman managed to stop the attack and both of them disappeared.

The ground opened up fully and swallowed Alex while the rest of the people there couldn't see what had happened at the last moment.

"That… That bastard saw my face!" the Boss's hoarse sound appeared once more. "Find out where he went! I want him dead."

The boss spread out her aura all around her and suffocated her followers, but couldn't find any sign of Alex.

The other bandits were shocked to see their boss rage like that and didn't dare make another peep.

"Go find him, you bastards!" the boss shouted.

"Yes, boss." Immediately, everyone jumped out of their place and went around the forest to search.

* * * * * *

Alex was released from the ground and he quickly stood and immediately went invisible and hid all of his aura.

He then cleaned himself of all dirt and looked around.

'Am I far away? I hope I didn't go closer into towards the inner forest,' he thought. He slowly flew up above the forest and looked around.

'Where do I go now?' he wondered. He flew up even higher, but all he could see was the forest. He had come in way too deep.

'Do I leave or do I stay around until the morning arrives?' he thought.

He looked around more to make sense of anything, but his eyes could see nothing for the forests and trees. There was not a single thing around him to tell him of his location.

"Sigh, I guess I will wait until the morning then," he thought and went down to the ground.

Instead of staying in one place, however, he decided to keep moving and find some alchemy ingredients throughout the night.

So, he chose a route he thought was correct and started moving. The night had just started and there was a lot of time still remaining for the sun to come up.

So, he did all he could and moved forward.

Chapter 450: Sect Leader Position In Trouble

Alex started contemplating what had happened tonight. He had met his sect's top disciple that was supposed to have disappeared and lost him.

Also for the first time, he had intentionally killed a person.

He didn't know how to feel about that. He certainly felt bad about killing someone, even going as far as to call it horrible. but there was also a sense of freedom to it as well.

He always knew that it was inevitable for him to kill someone himself. But, he didn't want to do it— for he knew that killing one person would lead to killing many.

However, he also knew that it was impossible to survive in this world without the resolve to do what was required, even if it meant killing someone.

He felt absolutely horrible about killing someone, but he also felt a sense of relief. Now that he was over this hurdle, it wouldn't be hard to gather his resolve to do what needed to be done.

Throughout the night, Alex walked around and found many ingredients that had grown all over the Southern Forest.

He was scared that he might come across more bandits or stronger beasts, but thankfully, the strongest beasts he came across were only at the Meridian realm.

The night felt slow, but even so, it passed by, and right before dawn, Alex could see the sky start to light up.

"So that's East," he thought and brought out his boat before flying in that direction.

Along the way, he drifted more and more to the left to come out of the forest. Finally, after an hour or so of flying, the boat came out of the forest and Alex finally saw the road.

'The caravan must've gone way further ahead,' Alex thought and sped up. He didn't plan on going back to the caravan, however. That was just something he had to do for the sect.

He could later lie to the caravan people that he was saved by someone. For now, he just flew.

'Did they take a detour to escape the bandit's way?' Alex thought when he couldn't find the caravan even after hours.

'Or maybe I missed them?' he thought when he saw the number of caravans start to be more and more.

'I'm getting closer,' Alex thought. Soon enough, he saw a figure of a wall very far away.

"I'm here," Alex said excitedly. He was finally back to the Scarlet City. Once he was close, he dropped somewhere in the forest and walked out of it.

He walked over to the gate and entered after showing his Tiger sect's badge.

He walked through the crowd of the noon and made his way to the sect. He entered through the front gate and met with his elder brother.

After talking with him for a few minutes, he made his way towards his master's manor.

Wen Cheng had already been informed of his arrival, so he was waiting for him at the manor.

"You guys are back quite early. I didn't think you would've returned until tomorrow morning," Wen Cheng said. "Where's your sister though? Did she go to her house first?."

"Sister did not return, master," Alex said. He went on to explain what had happened in the Rubyroad city, followed by what happened on the way back.

"You met the Black Venom bandit group?" Wen Cheng was truly surprised.

"Yes, master. I was in quite a lot of danger too, but I was able to escape thanks to the talisman you gave," Alex said.

"Oh, that talisman came in handy huh? Thank god. I'm surprised it didn't come in handy during your encounter with Zexi. Although, he was too weak to activate it, or your life was never in danger when he got you," Wen Cheng said.

"That was really dangerous. I was correct in being scolded so badly."

"Anyway, let's forget about that. So, your sister won't be back for another 2 weeks huh? That's… going to be a slight problem," Wen Cheng thought.

"Sister says she will take care of it all when she comes back," Alex said.

"Sigh, I don't know if she can. Little Yuhan really is very strong. I might just have to give up my spot as the Sect Leader now," Wen Cheng said.

"Don't worry about that, Master. You have 6 months. I will surely help you get back the spot for you," Alex said.

"It's fine, the sect master's spot was meant to be ever-changing in the Tiger sect. That's why only the disciples under True realm and less than 25 years of age count," Wen Cheng said.

"Forget about it, for now, you have something else to worry about," Wen Cheng said.

"Huh? What?" Alex asked.

"I… may or may not have gotten scolded for letting you go to a different city during these dangerous times without consulting Ma Rong," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, uhh…. I think I will return back to the Hong Wu sect then. Damn, I really wanted to go a few ranks higher. I managed to enter the Mind Tempering realm too," Alex said.

"Oh, you did? Congrats! It was only a matter of time I guess," Wen Cheng said. "Alright, go get your return registered in the Disciple hall and go back to Ma Rong.

"Yes, master. Goodbye," Alex said and left. He walked across the right side of the crater and entered the city crater before he lined up for the disciple hall.

Since it was Sunday, there weren't that many students, and he wasn't recognized as much.

He let the elder working there know that he was back and left. He walked back under the gazing eyes of many and went directly to the gate at the front.

After saying goodbye to his elder brother, he left.

The afternoon sun was hot, and it was much hotter than what should have been really. Alex looked around and realized that the people weren't really wearing anything thick.

'How come it's not cold here?' he wondered.

The busy marketplace slowed down his speed quite a lot as people walked past him multiple times, but he still reached the sect in under half an hour.

He was initially stopped at the gate, but once he showed his nameplate, he was let in.

"Master, I'm back," Alex left a message on his talisman and walked ahead.

Alex looked at the outer sect disciples that had joined the sect. He wondered how many, if any, of these were players.

While he wasn't sure about it, he was confident that there would be other Alchemy-related skills similar to the Alchemy God's Knowledge that would help the people join the alchemy sect.

Whether or not they were lucky enough to join the western continent in the first place was a different question altogether.

All throughout the outer sect mountain, Alex was the center of attention thanks to his yellow robes.

These disciples knew nothing about him, so they were curious why a Tiger Sect disciple was here in the first place.

Alex smiled and walked past them down to the sect market. Even there he was looked upon by many people. Some even went ahead to tell the elders.

An elder soon came to see what was happening and smiled when he saw it was Alex.

"Martial nephew, you're back," the elder said.

Alex looked at the elder and his eyes went wide in surprise. "Martial Uncle, you are back too," he said.

Alex was quite happy to see Lang Shun back in the sect. "When did you return?" Alex asked.

"Uhh, a few days ago," Lang Shun said disappointedly. "My mission was a failure, so I was quite sad. At least I got happy when I heard you were still alive. That was a relief."

"Mission?" Alex thought for a second and went, "Ah, brother Li? I found him," Alex said.

Lang Shun didn't comprehend what Alex said at first and was going to say "oh, good for you."

But once his thinking mind took control and he finally realized what was just said, he immediately ran forward and grabbed Alex's shoulders.

"You found Wan Li?" Lang Shun asked.

"Yeah, I was coincidentally on the same caravan as him and happened to meet him," Alex said.

Lang Shun looked around and put his arms around Alex before dragging him ahead. "Let's go talk somewhere quieter," he said.

"Ah, then let's go to master's place. I can give you two the information at once," Alex said.

"Uhh, that might be a bad idea," Lang Shun said.

"Huh? Why?" Alex asked.

"Things in the sect are… delicate right now. Sister is in closed cultivation currently and isn't coming out for anybody. Not even the sect's matters. So the elders are a little concerned and angry towards Sister's actions. Some are even going as far as to say that she needs to be removed from the Sect leader position," Lang Shun said.

"Master isn't responding? But I thought she talked with Master Wen Cheng a week before," Alex asked.

"That's the thing. I don't actually think she's in closed cultivation and is actually just faking it. However, that isn't proven yet. So, while the elders are angry, they can't do anything."

"However, if you were to go meet her and she came out, they will start calling her selfish and might lose their trust in her," Lang Shun.

"I see, then where should we go?" Alex asked.

"Um, let's just go to the—"

BUZZ BUZZ

Alex's storage bags buzzed and he took out the talisman from inside.

<Come to my place>

That was all that was written in the talisman.

"Master is calling me," Alex said.

Lang Shun looked a little annoyed. "Dammit, I knew it. She's not in closed cultivation. So why is she not coming to handle sect matters?" he asked.

Alex thought for a second and asked, "Umm, have you seen her after she awakened her constitution?"

"Awaken her constitution? Oh right, master said something about that. But what does that have to do with sister not leaving her home?" Lang Shun asked.

"Umm, you should come with me and see," Alex said.

Lang Shun shrugged his shoulders and agreed. Both him and Alex walked up the mountain and soon came before Ma Rong's house.

"Sister, I've brought nephew with me," Lang Shun shouted as he walked in. "God, why is this place so cold? Did she start making ice sculptures or what?" Lang Shun asked.

Alex could feel the tiniest hint of a fear building inside of him when he felt this coldness. 'Did master's body get stronger again?' he asked in surprise.

It was quite easy to find where Ma Rong was. They just had to follow the coldest place in the house and they would reach her.

"What the hell?" Lang Shun shouted when he finally saw Ma Rong. "Sister, why the hell is there so much ice around you?"

"Oh, you came as well?" Ma Rong said. "Shut up for a little, I'm trying to concentrate."

Ma Rong's body was constantly leaking mist that flew down to the ground like what one would see happen on a frozen bottle of liquid.

Lang Shun couldn't comprehend what was happening and looked at Ma Rong with her jaws dropped, while Alex tried to make sure he didn't let the fear get to him.

The mist leaking off of Ma Rong's body started to settle down and stopped forming around her. Soon enough, they completely stopped.

When they did, Alex noticed that his fear had also subsided.

"Sigh, it takes me quite a while to rein in my body's aura. Otherwise, everything around me gets frozen," Ma Rong said and slowly stood up.

Crackling sounds appeared from all around her as her frozen clothes started snapping as she stood up.

"Sigh, even the clothes freeze. I will need to do something about it all soon," she said softly.

"So, what's going on? I only called my disciple here. Why did you come along?" Ma Rong asked.

"Oh, that's right," Lang Shun said as he remembered. "Apparently, martial nephew has some information on Wan Li."

Chapter 451: Elder's Meeting

Ma Rong's demeanor quickly changed. "You know about Wan Li?"

"Yes, master." Alex went on to explain everything regarding what happened in the forest, aside from the last part about nearly dying to Black Venom herself.

"Sigh, he's going around killing bandits huh? That damn Black Venom bandits. We tried to find them previously, but we couldn't find them at all. They always work away from the capital, and never in the same place."

"Wan Li knows that, so he might try to move again. You said he was wearing the face of an old man, right?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, master," Alex said.

"Sigh, then it will be more so impossible to find him," Ma Rong thought. "How many elders are still out looking for him?"

"All but the 3rd Elder returned. 3rd elder said that she won't return until she finds him."

Ma Rong nodded when she heard that. "Alright, go and tell the Second Elder to send a message to 3rd Elder to— No, wait. I will do it myself," Ma Rong said.

"No, sister. You can't go out right now," Lang Shun said.

"Huh why?" Ma Rong asked.

"What do you mean why? You stayed cooped up in your house for nearly 2 weeks for closed cultivation and didn't respond to the sect's problem once."

"Did you realize that since you were ill, it has been over a month and a half in which you haven't done your job as the sect leader?"

"Since the sect upgraded to the 1st grade, our student intake has increased. We are transitioning to a better phase, but our sect leader is missing to make the transition easy."

"Of course the elders will start to hate you after that happened. They think you are dodging responsibilities."

"The only reason they aren't taking any actions is that they think you are truly in closed cultivation and not ignoring them. If they find out that not to be the case, then there will surely be some mutiny," Lang Shun said.

"Are they actively talking about this?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes. It's a daily conversation about how you've been missing for so long and don't care about the sect for so long," Lang Shun said.

Ma Rong's face turned slightly cold as she fell into thought. "Very well, I will do something about it," she said and pulled out a medallion.

Without a single hesitation, she sent a message to all the numbered elders in the sect.

Lang Shun got a message in his sect medallion as well and pulled it out before checking it.

"What? Did you call a meeting right now? You are just doing what they think they are doing," Lang Shun said. "Are you thinking straight, sister?"

"I know you worry about me, but you don't have to. Just go to the Elder's hall, I'll be there soon," Ma Rong said.

"Uhh… if you say so, Sister," Lang Shun said and left.

"Did you break through?" Ma Rong asked.

"Huh? Oh yeah," Alex answered.

"You should have let me know before you were leaving," she said.

"Uhh… sister's father was ill so we had to leave in a hurry. I couldn't send a message," Alex said.

"Sigh, I guess that's a valid excuse. Also, I heard there was a beast invasion around the same time, were you safe?" Ma Rong asked.

"Uhh… not really, but it wasn't due to me traveling at all," Alex said as he wondered how he should explain what happened to Ma Rong.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Um, did you hear about the black Jaguar that fought the emperor in the capital?" Alex asked.

"The new saint beast? Yeah, that beast was something I heard about after returning," Ma Rong said.

"Yeah… so I think that beast is after me. Even a week ago, during the invasion, I could feel it coming towards me. I could feel the aura of a saint realm cultivation base," Alex said.

Ma Rong's eyes went wide with shock and fear. "A-A Saint Beast is following you? That's… " Ma Rong couldn't understand what she was to do in this situation.

What was she to do as a master? What could she do against a Saint beast? Not even the ancestors inside the mountain could help her in this situation.

"I… I don't know what to do," Ma Rong said almost apologetically. For the first time, she felt like she couldn't help her disciple even when she knew he was in trouble.

"It's okay, Master. I ran from it once, I will do so again," Alex said. "On a positive note, I can now make True Qi."

Ma Rong got confused for a second. "Wait, you said True Qi? What's your cultivation base right now? Are you hiding it?" she asked.

"No, it's what I'm showing right now, but thanks to my Qi already being dense from the very start, I think it's starting to happen sooner than other people," Alex said. "I can only make a single strand of True Qi for now, but I'm sure I will soon make more after I cultivate a lot."

"Hmm," Ma Rong mulled over the info for a second. "Theoretically, it does make sense that you can make True Qi already. Hmm…"

Ma Rong thought for a second and spoke, "Are we looking at your cultivation base in the wrong way? Are you actually a Mind Tempering 5th realm cultivator, with a really weak aura instead?"

Alex felt like that could be true, but then he thought, 'No, the game's system says I'm at Mind Tempering 1st realm. Also the number of times I have broken through doesn't match up, and there was no way I started with the strength of a Skin Tempering 5th realm cultivator, so I should still count as a Mind Tempering 1st realm cultivator,' Alex thought.

"I guess it doesn't really matter in the end. It actually helps you better since most people underestimate you," Ma Rong said.

"Haha, they sure do," Alex said. "There had been many fighters in Tiger sect that couldn't fathom how strong he was after seeing his cultivation base."

"Alright, go back to your home and rest. I need to go to this meeting now," Ma Rong said.

"Okay, master. I will go and try improving some pills of mine," he said. "Oh right, that reminds me. What happened to the sweating pill? Did you improve it?"

Ma Rong sighed and shooked her head. "The way I am currently, I don't think there is any chance of me showing any improvement in anything Alchemy for a while now," Ma Rong said with a downtrodden face.

"Thankfully, Senior Lai also got the recipe and is improving upon it now. He will either send the improved recipe to me, or the princess will take her aunt back to the capital to have her healed," Ma Rong said.

"I see," Alex said.

"Okay, go now. I will be late otherwise," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, master. Good luck on today's meeting," Alex said and left the room.

Ma Rong stayed in the room for a little longer and finally sighed as she thought forward to what she would have to face in the meeting.

However, she had been away from the elders for quite a while now and at least owed the elders this much.

So, she walked out of her house and flew down.

* * * * * *

"Is sect leader finally leaving her closed cultivation?" an elder asked in the meeting hall.

"That seems to be the case. I don't think she would call a meeting for some other reason," another elder said.

"Was the sect leader really is closed cultivation though? She came out quite immediately after her disciple came back. Seems kinda fishy to me," another elder said.

"Sigh, if sect leader doesn't want to deal with the sect's problems anymore, she should just choose to resign from the position. I'm sure she would still garner the same about of respect as an alchemist either way," another elder said.

"Honestly, I think we should go forth and request a new sect leader," another elder said what they were all thinking on the inside.

"Settle down, guys," the 5th elder said. "Stop making decisions in a rush. Let's hear what the sect leader has to say. Maybe she does have legitimate reasons to ignore the sect's status for 2 weeks."

"Yeah, 5th elder is correct. Let's just have some patience," another elder said.

Lang Shun stayed at the side, a little angry at the elders, but he couldn't do anything as he knew his sister was at fault here.

'Sigh, why did that idiot sis have to leave now?' he thought angrily.

A pair of footsteps rang out as a person walked in. "Oh, thank god I'm not late," the second Elder said as he walked in.

"Haha, Second Elder. Did you lose track of time after spending hours talking with your wife or what?" someone teased.

"You sound pretty jealous, 9th elder. Maybe it's about time you found someone for yourself too," the Second Elder said.

"Sigh, no matter who I find, I doubt I will ever be as lovey-dovey as you and the Third elder," the 9th Elder said.

The Second elder laughed and walked up to his spot before sitting down.

More footsteps sounded from the door and Ma Rong walked in along with the First Elder and the Great Elder.

They walked up to their seats at the front and sat down. Ma Rong had a rather cold demeanor to her now and looked like an ice queen.

She looked at the lot of them and waited for them to quiet down.

"So, I hear you guys have some complaints."

Chapter 452: My Problems

The elders looked around at each other, not expecting a direct confrontation from the sect leader.

They didn't know how to respond and waited for someone to speak.

"Sect leader," the Fifth elder spoke. "You were ill for a while before you were healed. Are you alright now?"

"Yes, I'm mostly fine, Fifth Elder. There have been some… complications, but it has nothing to do with my health thankfully," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, complications? Is that why you went into closed cultivation? To deal with it?" the Fifth Elder asked again.

"Yes, that was the reason," Ma Rong said.

"So, was it such a bad complication that you had to ignore the sect handling?" the elder asked.

"Can we learn what sort of complication it was, and if you've solved it," another elder asked.

"Oh right! I heard the Sect Leader awaken her constitution. Is that what the complications were about?" another elder asked.

"Yes," Ma Rong said. "Do to my awakened constitutions, I had some problems. It still persists however and I will need a lot more training to solve it."

"Huh? What sort of constitutions require so long to fix? What sort of constitutions create problems in the first place?" an elder asked.

"That right. Aren't constitutions supposed to be just something a body automatically has? It's not like a poison that tries to kill a body, right?" another elder asked.

"How much longer would you say you need to control it all?" an elder asked.

The First elder looked at Ma Rong and sighed. The sect leader was showing too much indifference to the questions and he was worried she would start to give answers without much thought.

The Great elder was also worried but for a different reason. He had decided to keep the awakened constitution a secret, but it seemed it was leaked around somehow. He had also later learned about Ma Rong's inability to make pills anymore and was worried the elders would find out.

If they did, he had no doubts that they would try to throw her away from the sect leader's spot. After all, most of them were around when Ma Rong was named the next sect leader by the previous sect leader and the elders were mostly against it.

They were all looking for a reason to throw Ma Rong away from that spot, and they were just about to get that opportunity.

Ma Rong looked at the lot of them and said, "I will still need many months if I want to properly deal with my new constitution."

"What?"

"A few months?"

"A sect leader can't disappear for that long. We need guidance."

"The sect needs guidance from its leader. We can't have someone who won't deal with the sect for so long keep on becoming the sect leader," the elders shouted.

The Great Elder was shocked at Ma Rong's answer. "Little Ma, what are you doing?" he asked softly.

"It's fine, Master," Ma Rong said from the side.

"Sect leader, we… we can't go on with our sect leader missing for so long. Is there no other way?" the seventh elder asked.

"When did I say I was going to disappear for so long?" Ma Rong asked. "I just said that I need many months to deal with my condition, that's all."

The few elders that were genuinely concerned about the sect breathed a sigh of relief, while the ones that were looking forward to her removal frowned.

"Can you guarantee that you will be available from now on, sect leader?" one of the elders asked.

"No," Ma Rong said. "But that was always the case, wasn't it? There have been times before I've gone on closed cultivation. I understand the sect is growing now, but it's not that different yet, is it?"

"Right, you should take care of yourself, sect leader. We will take care of the sect if you are absent sometimes," the seventh elder said.

The few elders were getting desperate after seeing how well the meeting was going in Ma Rong's favor.

"I heard disciple Yu Ming returned to the sect today, is that true?" one of the elders asked.

"Yes, he did," Ma Rong said.

"Did you meet him, sect leader?" the elders asked.

"Yes, just before this," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, okay. Wait, weren't you in closed cultivation? How did he contact you?" an elder asked.

"Oh, sect leader must've just finished her cultivation when her disciple returned. Although… that's quite a coincidence," another elder asked.

"Sect leader, I hope you're not only caring for your people and not caring about the sect. That would be horrible for us," an elder directly said.

Ma Rong sighed and stood up. The elders were surprised at the sect leader suddenly standing up from the seat. They wondered if she was going to cancel the meeting right here so that she wouldn't have to answer anymore.

"So," she started speaking. "About my constitution. After returning ill from the Forbidden Fields, I was healed and somehow my constitution awoke."

"Now, some of you think I may be lying when I say it's hard to deal with. You think what constitution could there ever be that would create problems for the person."

"And you would be right," Ma Rong said as he kept on walking forward, surprising the elders. "My constitution creates no problems for myself."

"So… you were lying?" an elder asked in confusion.

"Obviously not," Ma Rong said. "I only said it was problematic and hard to deal with. I never said the problem was for myself."

Suddenly, the air around Ma Rong chilled. Mists started forming around her body as they slowly dropped down to the ground.

The elder closest to her could feel the temperature of the air rapidly going down. When she looked down at Ma Rong's feet, she could see Ice forming on the ground.

Ma Rong took a single step forward, and suddenly the ground where she stepped was frosted as it slowly spread further out the longer it went on for.

The elders around her immediately started using their cultivation base to stop the frost from getting to them, but even then it was cold. They couldn't understand, how something could be so cold as to make them shiver with their whole cultivation base running.

Ma Rong took another step forward and more elders started feeling the chill. With another step, the elders further at the back felt the child.

Soon, the entire room was like a freezer with the ground fully frosted and signs of frost appearing on the chairs.

"S-Sect leader! What is the meaning of this?" someone finally asked.

"This? This is the problem I was dealing with. Without me forcefully controlling my body, you will all freeze solid with just me standing around. Do you still want me to be there for every single minor thing the sect has to do?"

"Because if you really need me, just let me know. I will come right over to where you are and will help you," Ma Rong said with a smile and drew in her naturally flowing Yin Qi.

The elders finally felt some warmth return back to them after Ma Rong returned to her seat. They were scared for a while, but then an elder gathered up his courage and spoke.

"If- if you have a hard time being around the elders, then shouldn't you not be a sect leader? A sect leader is needed in every situation," the elder said.

Ma Rong stopped right before her seat and turned around.

"Are you all so incompetent that you will need a sect leader for everything?" Ma Rong asked. "Of course I will be there when I need to make decisions for things, but I doubt you will need me every single day instead of letting me solve my own problem right?" Ma Rong asked.

"However, if you think I am wrong, then go ahead and vote me out. If you don't want me as a sect leader then I won't stay as one," Ma Rong said.

The elders looked around at the chance and one of the elders raised his hands.

"If the sect leader won't be around to care about the sect, then I say that she doesn't need to remain a sect leader at all," he said.

The other elders looked around. The few who wanted her to go away immediately raised their hands. Of the 18 elders in the room, 7 had raised their hands.

The elders who were concerned about the sect started mulling over the problem too. It was true that the sect leader should get some time of her own to deal with the problems, but not many months.

If there was going to be a problem, then it would be better she didn't remain there and someone more appropriate took her place.

Two of the elders raised their hands as they were concerned about it all.

Ma Rong looked at the 9 people who raised their hands and said nothing. Since it was half of the elders, just a single more hand and Ma Rong would have to leave her spot.

"Sigh, who do you guys want as your new sect leader after I leave anyway?" Ma Rong asked.

"Uh… The first elder would be a good choice," someone said.

"I'm getting old and I am planning on retiring soon, so I won't be a sect leader," the First elder said.

"Oh… uh, then what about Second Elder? He's should be great. He's been handling the sect for a while himself anyway" another person said.

The Second Elder looked towards the person who just spoke and smiled before turning over to Ma Rong as he opened his mouth to speak.

Chapter 453: Plans

The Second elder looked at Ma Rong and spoke, "Sect Leader, I know you are angry that people didn't let you take some much-needed break, but please don't leave your position just because of that."

"No one in this room right now is more capable than you in handling the sect. I'm doing fine, but I'm nowhere close to you in maintaining all the stuff. If you really leave the sect leader position, it will certainly be the sect's loss without question."

"And when that happens, I will be the first to leave the sect and never look back," the Second Elder said.

"That's… a little too extreme, don't you think?" Ma Rong asked a little surprised that the Second Elder wasn't using this opportunity to elevate his position in the sect.

"No, I truly believe that the sect has improved the most under you. If you leave then there will be nobody in the sect to do the job at the same level," the Second Elder said.

"Now that I think about it, I think the Second Elder is right," one of the elders with the hands up slowly lowered their hand. "If Sect Leader truly doesn't want to leave, then it's a pleasure to keep having her."

"You're right. I was blinded in my hope to do better for the sect. I don't want the sect leader to leave either," another elder said and lowered her hand as well.

"Anyone else wants to raise your hands?" the Grand Elder spoke. The remaining elders looked at each other and started shaking their heads. They were fine with Ma Rong staying at the Sect Leader.

"That settles it then. Sect leader will not be leaving her post," the Grand Elder said.

"Alright, listen up. I may not be around most of the time, but I will still be handling the sect business. I will workaround for a few hours a day for now. If you have anything that needs urgent attention, you may find Grand Elder, the Second Elder, or my disciple to send me a message."

"I will only consider those as urgent," Ma Rong said.

"Eh? What about the Eighteenth Elder?" the First Elder looked at Ma Rong weirdly when she left out his son, her junior disciple brother from the list.

"Elder Shun will soon be returning back to his search for Wan Li. Oh right, Second Elder, tell the Third Elder to look for recent information on the Black Venom group. Wan Li seems to be hanging around in caravans looking for a chance to meet those groups," Ma Rong said.

"I will get on it, Sect leader," Second Elder said as he bowed.

Ma Rong made a few more commands for the other elders. Finally, once she was done, she dismissed the room.

The elders left one by one and finally, only 5 people remained.

"That was quite dangerous, Sect Leader. A single wrong word out of my mouth and you would've lost the seat," the Second Elder said.

"Heh, I knew First elder didn't want the hassle at the old age, and I was counting on you not wanting the seat as well," Ma Rong said.

"What made you guess that?" the Second Elder asked.

"If you were a Sect Leader, you would be separated from your wife for most of the time. Given how lovey-dovey you are, I doubt you would want that," Ma Rong said.

"Isn't it obvious for me to love my wife? She's the best thing that has happened to me, sect leader. She's talented and beautiful, all a man can ask for. Hehehe, I'm really lucky in that matter," the Second Elder said with a sheepish smile.

Ma Rong chuckled as well.

"So, do I leave now?" Lang Shun asked.

"No, in a few days. Rest for now. The second Elder should call the Third Elder to rest as well. She's been out for way too long," Ma Rong said.

"She loves doing that. I did ask her to return this time, but she's probably gone to some other city by now in search of Wan Li. Well, I will just send this information to her and hopefully, she'll bring back Wan Li soon," the Second Elder said and left.

Lang Shun and his father bowed and walked away as well.

"Little Ma, please stop doing such a stunt next time okay? You nearly gave your master a heart attack," the Great Elder said.

"It's fine master. I was ready to lose my position, so it wasn't really a stunt. I'm still trying to fit into my position with this new disability I have right now," Ma Rong said.

"I was secretly hoping they would let me go so I wouldn't have to feel guilty about it all."

The Great Elder sighed when he heard this. "It's fine, little Ma. You will be able to make pills once again. You only need a little bit of getting used to," he said.

"I hope so, master. I really do."

* * * * * * *

Alex walked out of the pond with Pearl after cleaning up. He wore his clothes and started planning out his next 2 weeks in the sect.

The first thing he needed to do was make some more pills for himself since he had spent most of it in the Rubyroad city and the fight with the bandits.

One of those pills was the mind pill that would give him a much better Spiritual sea.

Since he decided on it, he went into his Alchemy room and started making pills.

Over the course of the day and halfway into the night, he made a lot of pills. He would have to make some more before he could actually have a few stocks with him.

"Hmm, should I make more?" he wondered for a second. "Although, I do desperately want to see how much True Qi I can make with my cultivation base."

Ning quickly decided to cultivate, so he called out Pearl and started cultivating inside the Alchemy room.

Soon, he had fallen asleep.

Alex woke up in the morning to feel a buzz on his storage bag. He instinctively took out his talisman and checked it.

His sleepiness ran away and he looked at the time on the top right. "Master is calling me this early?" he thought and stood up.

"Ow!" he screamed when the soles of his feet hurt a lot from the cuts being crushed.

"Pearl, you can stop now," he said, and Pearl finally stopped with a 'Meow'. "Come here," Alex called and soon sent him into his beast space.

"Woah!" Alex was surprised when he noticed 3 distinct strands of Qi floating in his meridians. He started smiling when he realized that he had more True Qi now.

"Oh wait, so is cultivating the only way to make True Qi?" he wondered. If that were true, then it would take him an incredibly long time for his cultivation base to improve.

At 3-5 strands a day, it would take him forever to convert all the Qi into True Qi.

"Oh wait," he facepalmed himself when he realized where he was wrong. "I can just break through to make my Qi thicker and I won't need to worry about speed."

"Alright, let's go to master's," he thought and walked out. He soon flew over to his master's house and sent in his spiritual sense. The whole house looked empty from his perspective aside from a single spot in there that he couldn't see at all.

He quickly went to that place and greeted Ma Rong.

"Sit down," Ma Rong said.

Alex went ahead and sat down. Ma Rong got into her bag and took out a lot of True Spirit stones, at least 50 of them.

"What's this?" he asked.

"Your payment, from the sect's shop," Ma Rong said. "They said you asked for it to be sent to me."

"Oh right, I forgot about those," Alex said. "Thank you, master."

"Don't thank me, it's your hard work's result after all. There are still a few pills that have yet to be sold. You will get that money once you sell them," Ma Rong said.

"I understand," Alex said. 50 True spirit stones were 5000 spirit stones which were equivalent to 50 thousand dollars in real life. That was a lot of money for anyone.

He had other True spirit stones on him too that he could send back to himself soon.

"Another thing, since you've already understood the fundamentals about making pills by yourself, I will soon start your True pill-making classes. Although, it should take no longer than a single class for you to learn everything."

"The others will just be me looking at you try to make pills. Hmm… given your cultivation base, that might be a problem too. Whatever, I will teach you first, the rest we will do something about it," Ma Rong said.

"Go and practice for now."

"Ok master," Alex said and was about to leave when he remembered something.

"Oh right, I had a few plans for the upcoming few days… I was hoping to get your approval on them," Alex said.

Ma Rong made a weird face. "What bizarre thing are you going to do that requires your master's approval?" Ma Rong asked.

"I don't need my master's approval; I need to sect leader's approval. Having master's approval would be quite nice too," Alex said.

"Alright say what you want," Ma Rong said.

Alex listed out the 3 things he wanted to do and Ma Rong's eyes went wide with each thing he said.

Her eyes started darting around as she forced herself to ask. "Do you really want to go back there again?"

Chapter 454: Storm

Alex walked through a tunnel.

For the last 4 days, he had spent his entire time either making pills or learning to craft formations on formation rods.

He started off slow and only carved formations with a lower amount of strokes. He was slowly learning how to make the formations on the rod.

During the nighttime, he also went to the Southern Forest for a few hours of fighting. He had his boat with him, which would help him reach the Mind Tempering realm beasts a lot faster.

Thanks to that, he had managed to gather quite a lot of Mind Tempering realm cores. He also killed as many Meridian Tempering beasts as he could to get cores for Pearl as well.

Finally, the last thing he did was send close to 700,000 dollars to his account once more, which he immediately distributed amongst his retirement fund, different shares, and his current account.

Once that was all done and it was the morning of the Friday, he came here, the tunnel to the Forbidden Fields.

It took Alex a bit of explaining to make Ma Rong let him go to this place. However, he finally managed to when he said that he was close to something and only needed a few more Yang Jades.

He wasn't lying when he said that. He was indeed more than 70% done with his Yang Purity and would technically need about 3 Yang jades to reach 100%.

He finally walked out of the cave and looked at the vast grassland as well as the desert further away. There was something far away over there that he wanted, and he was going to get it.

The place was completely abandoned now as this was no longer a punishment place. Thus the elders guarding this place were removed as well.

Alex brought out a single thing before walking down the slope. The thing he got out was a common sword. He didn't bring out his Steel Sword but kept it at an accessible distance in his storage bags as he could take it out later.

He also made sure some foods and pills were at an accessible distance over the other storage bags too. Once he felt like he was ready, he ran.

He took massive steps as he quickly ran down the mountain slope. As he got lower and lower, he could start feeling the force of the outside pushing in his cultivation base and spiritual sense.

Alex tried his best to push it all back using his cultivation base and spiritual sense, but he couldn't.

His spiritual sense could barely push it away a little bit, but his cultivation base was completely useless. Not even True Realm cultivators could use their cultivation base here, so he had no chance.

Alex ran through the grassland and within 10 minutes, he reached the riverside. However, he didn't stop. After all, his destination lied beyond.

Alex jumped when he reached the bank of the river and flew through the air, guaranteed to reach the other side.

However, just as he was landing, he saw a scorpion shake itself out of the sand on the shore. The scorpion immediately targetted Alex who was midair with its tail ready to attack him.

However, Alex wasn't worried in the slightest. There were two things different about him from the last time he had come here.

The first thing was that he knew now that toxins, or at least, all poisons and venoms he had come across to at this point, including the scorpion's venom were useless against him.

The second thing was that he now had a body cultivation base at Meridian Tempering 1st realm, which was a lot different than what he had last time.

So, the scorpion was no threat to him.

He brought up his sword as he reached the other shore and slashed it down before him. The scorpion's tail was cut in a single slice.

With the next strike, he cut the scorpion's head off. Once the scorpion was head, he slashed his sword in midair to throw away any blood that was on it and started walking.

He had about 3 days to go somewhere and return, so he started searching for yang jades along the shore.

He decided to go around in a zigzag way so he could cover the most area while not missing a single yang jade along the way.

He walked for a few hours while constantly fighting the beasts. The beasts around here were mainly around Muscle Tempering, so he didn't have to worry at all.

Alex grabbed the giant snake's lower jaw and pierced his sword from the bottom before cutting open the snake's skull.

He didn't even get out of breath when he killed the snake. It was all too easy for him. At least, for now.

"Damn, why are there no yang jades around at all?" he wondered. He took out a piece of food from his storage bag and ate it.

He was till not getting any sense from his body at all about the yang jades, which was very weird. He walked on for a few more hours and there was still no sign.

Soon, night fell and chilly air started running through the desert, or at least he expected it too, but there wasn't any chill in the air.

"Why does it not get cold in here? Why does it not rain? Why do clouds never stay in the sky long enough?" Alex asked, but there was no answer.

So, he shook his head and walked further along. "Damn this is slow. I wonder if the boat works here," Alex thought and forcefully brought out the massive boat.

Alex could barely cover the entire boat with his spiritual sense, so it was to pull it out under the suppression. Even then, he did it and it fell with a thud.

It didn't float up in the air like it should have so Alex went to the front compartment and checked the True Spirit stones there.

"I see," Alex said when he realized all the spirit stones had grown dull. They has lost their slight glow and were simply a normal stone now.

"Wait, I'm sure I changed these a little while before I came back to the Scarlet city. So, it must be the environment. Well, it at least proves my hypothesis of artifacts not working here, I guess," Alex thought and put the boat back into the storage bag.

He then looked back and realized that he could barely see the silhouette of the cliffs now. They were so far away.

"How far have I come? 2 kilometers? 3 kilometers?" Alex wondered. The distance from the river shouldn't have been that far away when he really thought about it.

"If logic were to work in this place, given the way the Crimson Empire is set up, there should be an ocean at the top of the map, which is where I'm headed. But…" Alex thought as he looked further ahead.

"It should take me days to fully traverse the whole place. Given the average width of the crimson empire based on the maps, it's about a little longer than the distance between Scarlet city and the Cardinal city."

"So, if I wanted to see the ocean… I would have to walk straight for days. But who knows how dangerous the beasts get as I go forward," Alex thought.

"Whatever, let's just find whatever it is I am attracted to and retu—"

Suddenly, Alex felt a very low level of vibrations from the sand below him. He looked around and saw that the sands slowly slide down from the small dunes around him.

"An earthquake?" Alex thought but it wasn't. The low-level vibration persisted for a while and instead of going away, it got bigger and bigger.

Alex didn't dare move as he was unsure of what was happening and just looked around carefully. Finally, he saw what was causing the vibration.

'A storm?' he thought at first when he saw the clouds, but soon he realized that the storm was made up of yellowish-brown particles.

"A storm of sand," Alex cried out in surprise. He looked around for places to shelter himself, but couldn't see anything aside from the dunes of sand.

He then once more looked at the storm and decided to handle it himself. He braced for the impact and took the full brunt of the storm's attack.

Surprisingly, it was very easy. It looked like the storm wall would be quite dangerous, but there wasn't any damage.

"Oh, it's quite f— COUGH COUGH-COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH" unknowingly, he breathed in a lot of sands in the air and started coughing very loudly.

Without hesitation, he took off his upper robes and hid his face with them. He started breathing through the cloth as he coughed out the sands he had just taken in.

He got onto his knees and hid his face in his laps while breathing through the cloth. He was currently a mortal. A very strong body cultivator, but a mortal nonetheless.

If he couldn't breathe for a few minutes, he would easily succumb to death.

Alex did nothing but keep his face hidden from the storm as the storm raged on for another 10 or so minutes. But these 10 minutes seemed t last an eternity for him.

He waited and waited and waited, and finally, the storm was over. He could finally let go of his cloth.

Alex tried to lift his head up to see if it was alright but soon realized that there was a lot of sand on top of him.

He quickly jumped out of the sand and dusted himself. He started spitting out sand and even took out some water to cleanse his mouth before drinking some.

"God! What was that? I don't want to experience that ever again," Alex thought. He looked around and realized that the general location he was in just now was totally changed.

Nothing around him looked like what it used to just a few minutes earlier. 'That storm changed everything here?' he thought in surprise. He really didn't know a lot about deserts so he was surprised to see this happen.

"Huh? That's weird," Alex thought and spit on his finger before lifting his finger up high. "There was just a storm, why is there no wind anymore?"

This confused him quite a bit, but no matter what he did, he couldn't feel any wind. ' That's not how storms work, right?' he thought trying to remember if the calm after the storm was ever a thing.

Just as he was thinking that he heard something move in the sand. Alex immediately turned back and saw a worm wriggle its way out of the sand.

Alex looked at it and suddenly noticed another one wriggle out, then another and another. Soon, there were nearly 15 worms that came out of the sand at the same spot.

"That's quite unusual. Why didn't your guys come out before the storm? I'm sure I was making more noise before that. Or was it the storm that woke you up," Alex asked and gripped his sword?

Without a single hesitation, he ran towards the closest worm there was. The worm saw Alex approach it and opened its mouth to attack, but a single slash from Alex killed it immediately.

Then, the other worms started making their way towards him too. One after another, Alex killed every single one of the worms.

He chopped in half the final worm and finally sighed. "Damn, that was hard. These were either very high Bone Tempering realm, or low Organ tempering real beasts."

"How are they even here? Aren't there only supposed to be weaker bone tempering beasts here? Or am I mistaken?" Alex wondered.

He looked at the corpses around him but had no way of finding an answer. So, he just cleaned his sword and started walking in his original direction once more.

Chapter 455: The Bigger Storm

It was the evening of the 2nd day now, and Alex had gone through 5 more of the same sandstorms as the previous night, each one stronger than the last one.

By now, he had learned his lesson and would immediately cover his face with his robe and wait out the storm. Each time he did that, he would be covered in sand, followed by storm beasts coming out of the sand.

Alex fought those beasts quite easily, but he was still wondering how they were even here at all.

Going in a zigzag pattern, he was barely 20 kilometers off the shore of the river and needed to go on for a lot longer. He was barely starting to feel whatever was on the other side after all.

He took out a yang jade from his storage bag and tried to feel it. His body barely responded enough for him to even tell he was holding the stone in his hands.

He kept it back in and started walking ahead to find some more. "I hope it won't be so hard to find them or going any further would be a waste of time," Alex thought.

It had already been a day and a half since he was searching for the jades, and it didn't seem like he could make it whatever was on the other side that was calling him.

Suddenly, Alex started feeling another set of vibrations. 'Another storm of sands?' he wondered and looked in the direction. But no matter where he looked, there was no storm.

'Where is the vibration coming from then?' Alex wondered.

He walked some more and finally felt another yang jade close by, although it was very faint. Alex ran towards the location, but the stone moved as well.

Alex got apprehensive. "A beast?" he wondered and got his guards up. The faint vibrations still kept up, so he couldn't tell where the beast would pop out of.

Suddenly, a giant, wide snake popped its head from underneath the sand and angrily opened its mouth to hiss at him. Alex held his sword with a strong grip and got ready.

The snake suddenly lunged towards him and Alex stepped aside. He suddenly got up to realize the snake had already followed up its attack using its tail.

Alex was about to put up his hands to block but stopped mid-action. Instead, he took the attack with his chest.

BAM

Alex was hurled back and hit a dune of sand a few dozen meters behind him. He quickly walked out of the sand just in time to dodge another lunge from the beast.

Alex was perfectly fine thanks to the armor he was wearing and took almost no damage.

He slashed his blade at the snake's body and barely managed to make a small cut in it.

'That's a strong snake. Is it close to the Meridian Tempering realm? This is going to be tough,' Alex thought and kept fighting.

Fighting the snake was hard. Despite being so big, its head and tail were very agile and kept jumping at Alex to hit him.

Alex on the other hand constantly tried to cut the snake, but mostly he was doing was simple cuts. "Should I take out the steel sword?" he thought for a second.

"No, I should try that first," he thought and jumped back. He looked for an opening and took a deep breath.

'KILL'

He suddenly jumped towards the snake's body and slashed at it. White light appeared around his blade as he targetted the snake and Alex cleanly cut through half the snake's body.

The snake hissed as loud as it could and sent its tail directly at Alex. Alex brought back his sword in time and directly slashed at the incoming tail.

His Sword Intent was getting way better now and he could deal a lot of damage. So, in a single slash, he cut the tail in half.

The snake cried out even more while Alex felt the force of the tail on his hands. The rebounded energy made his palms sting a little.

The snake started twisting on the sand in pain as blood spilled out of its two major wounds. Alex took the opportunity to jump at its head and pierce through its head.

The snake twisted around a few more times before stopping. It was dead.

Alex took a deep breath and got a little happy when he realized that his sword intent worked in this place.

'So sword intent isn't actual Qi related, huh?' he thought. He knew this already, but he was still surprised to finally have it be proven to him.

Alex was about to go up to the snake's corpse when he felt even more vibrations than before. 'Wait, so it really was not the snake's doing?' he thought.

Still, he needed to get the Yang jade first so he focused on that. He looked through the snake's corpse and finally reached a place where the yang jade could be vaguely felt.

He started cutting through the snake's body and before long, he got the yang jade.

"I got 2," he thought with happiness. He just needed one more and he could happily go back.

Just then, he lost his footing and nearly slipped in the sand. The vibration was very strong this time, on the level of an earthquake.

"Just what is going—"

Finally, he saw it. He had looked for it before, but it wasn't there. However, it seemed to have arrived during his fight with the snake.

The storm.

However, something was different this time. For once, the storm was really, really fast. Secondly, he could see something yellow and black all over the storm.

"What's that?" he thought and looked closely at the storm still far away.

Slowly, a feeling appeared inside him and his eyes went wide. "Those…are yang jades?" he thought as he looked at the thousands of yellow sparks in the sand.

"Then the black—"

He recognized those wriggling and movements in the air too. Those were all the beasts of the desert.

Alex got terrified. The incoming storm was strong enough to send yang jades and beasts flying. If that was anything to go by… he needed to run.

Without hesitation, he put the yang jade in his storage and ran.

Chapter 456: The Storm That Shook The Empire

Alex ran as he had never run before. Seeing such massive beasts being carried around like toys in the storm scared him. What was worse than it was scary fast, and he would definitely not outrun it.

Soon, he realized that he had to stop. Running was not the way.

'What do I do? Where do I hide?" he thought and looked around, only to see nothing but the dunes of sand.

'Underneath?" he thought for a moment. "I have no choice," he thought and quickly took off his robes to use it as a mask. He then dug a hole as fast as he could and jumped in before covering himself with sand.

He hoped that this would keep him safe from the storm. It didn't.

Massive winds ripped the very sand from underneath Alex as they sent him tumbling away with them.

He barely opened his eyes to see the beasts and yang jades floating around. However, he didn't focus on either of them.

The thing he was most fascinated by was actually the yellow energy inside the storm that he hadn't noticed before. It was bright and strong, and it slowly dying down.

He closed his eyes as the sand started hitting his eyes. Thankfully, the storm wasn't strong enough to harm him at all. It was only fast and not strong at all.

Alex decided to wait out the storm which was already slowing down.

Sometime later, Alex realized that he was just flying through the air by the initial force of the push, the winds were no longer carrying him and he was falling down back to the ground.

He looked around and saw that the beasts and the yang jades were also falling down around the same place as him.

He then looked at the yellow energy and realized, the energy had barely slowed down at all. Even though the wind was gone, the energy stayed.

Alex and the rest of the objects in the air fell on the other side of the river, but the yellow energy kept on going forward.

* * * * * *

Ma Rong was in her room trying to practice her control over her Yin Qi. She let go of all control and white mist started appearing around her body that slowly drifted downwards.

Ma Rong could feel the Yin Qi leaving her body as the ground slowly started frosting over.

Immediately, she breathed in and all the Yin Qi that was floating around her was sucked into her body through the various pores and organs.

Not a single Yin Qi remained outside.

Ma Rong, however, struggled to keep them in for very long. She soon had to slowly let it escape out, although at a very low amount.

She sighed and smiled. She had improved a little at least.

"Finally, I can go about 10 minutes without leaking any Qi. Although, I should find other ways to do this. This one method isn't working," she thought.

She tried coming out with ideas to somehow keep leaking her Qi without it interfering with anything else.

She even thought of using artifacts that could story Yin Qi, which she could later either throw away or maybe even sell for quite a profit.

She thought of expelling every single yin Qi in her house before leaving for anything,

She even thought about practicing some yang-based cultivation method to counteract the yin in her body.

However, none of those ideas was something she could use right now, so she had to wait and think a little longer before she did that.

"Alright, let's continue," she thought and started once more.

She started spilling out her yin Qi into the air and soon her whole room was filled with it. The amount of frost had increased by a lot and the overall temperature of the house was starting to get colder than the Northern Continent.

"Now, to take in," she thought and took a deep breath.

Suddenly, she felt something go past her. Something… warm but at the same time burning.

The Yin Qi in the room disappeared like water on a piping hot metal. The room immediately defrosted, and it was just a puddle of water now.

Ma Rong herself felt that she had completely run out of Yin Qi.

"What… just happened?"

* * * * *

"Alright, the meeting is adjourned," Wen Cheng said as he sent the elders away. It was past evening, so it was time for him to return to his house too.

However, he soon realized that one of the elders had stayed behind. Wen Cheng was quite surprised.

"What's going on, elder Jung?" he asked.

Elder Jung was one of the main elders that were in charge of the disciples. He was the de-facto leader amongst the group of elders responsible for working in the Disciple hall.

"Um, sect leader, I had a little something to speak to you in private," Elder Jung said.

"Please say it. We are as alone as we can get," Wen Cheng said, very curious as to what this elder who rarely wanted to talk with him had to say.

"Uhh, this is about disciple Mei. Do you happen to know where she is?" the elder asked.

"Of course. She's currently back home. Her father is a little ill, and he's looking after him," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, I see," elder Jung said, fidgeting a little.

"Elder Jung, if you have something to say, please freely say it," Wen Cheng said.

Elder Jung sighed. "Sect leader, did you know that disciple Mei took a 2-week break before leaving?" he asked.

"Yes, I was the one that took the leave for her," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, that makes it a little easier to explain then. You see, sect elder, Disciple Mei's official leave ended yesterday. I thought that was an error and decided to wait today for her to return, but she didn't."

"Still, I left her as absent on leave for today as well. However, if she truly isn't back by tomorrow, I can't keep her absent on leave on Monday," Elder Jung said.

"Sigh, so that's what you wanted to talk about," Wen Cheng said. "You can put her on Absent without notice, elder Jung. You can also make her rank available for grab. If any disciple chooses to take it, they may. You do not need to feel guilty about this."

"Ah, I see. You've already thought of the consequences. I shall do that tomorrow then. That is all, sect le—"

"Sect Leader!" someone came running into the room. The elder who had just walked in was a younger one, and Wen Cheng frowned when he saw that.

He was about to scold the elder for barging in without notice, but then he saw the horror and confusion on the elder's face.

"What happened?" Wen Cheng asked inquisitively.

"The… The Treasury room, sect leader, " the elder spoke. "Something is happening in the treasury room."

* * * * *

"Do you really think we can't kill the Jaguar at all? The 3 of us together?" Fu Zexian asked.

He was currently in a large, white room with crimson furniture, drapes, and carpets. He was sitting on a large chair with two other chairs in front of him, facing towards himself.

On one of the chairs was an ordinary-looking man wearing simple attire. But this was heavily contrasted by his clean-shaven face and stark red hair. He also had a very haughty attitude that made him stand out more than the Emperor he was before.

On the other chair was a thin man with long jet black hair. He was quite good-looking, but he had a rather fat mustache that didn't seem to match with his face.

These were the two Saint realm cultivator named Yang and Feng.

"You didn't feel what we felt, brother Zexian. That beast… that monster, it was on a different league of its own," the long black-haired Feng said with fear in his mind at just the thought of the jaguar again. "Tell him, brother Yang."

"It's true, brother Zexian. We keep telling you, but you don't believe us. That beast is truly very strong," the red-haired Yang said.

"I understood that it's strong. But this time you will have me too. Last time, I was alone in the fight, and you two joined very late, which was why the Jaguar ran away at that time," Zexian said.

"And then two weeks ago, you two went chasing it and lost."

"But this time, if we meet it, we can all fight together from the very start. There is no way the beast could survive us at that time, right?" Zexian asked. He truly didn't like thinking that there was a beast out there that could destroy half of his empire before he even realized it was attacking.

"Brother Zexian, brother Feng and I barely entered the Saint Foundation realm a few decades ago. You have been in the Saint Foundation realm for almost a century now, so there is no way I doubt your strength, brother."

"However, please believe me when I tell you this, that beast… its cultivation base should be beyond the Saint Foundation realm. It's definitely in the Saint Core realm," Yang said.

"What? No way," Zexian said in surprise. "If it truly is in the Saint Core realm then why hasn't it attacked us already? I see no reason for it to return every time it attacks."

"In fact," Feng spoke from the side. "I wouldn't be surprised if it were in the Saint Soul realm either. We are just assuming at this point because it showed us a level of power we had never seen before. Not from you, not from the old man."

"Yes," Yang said. "As for why it doesn't attack us… I do have an idea. I think the beast isn't really intent on harming us at all. You said it spoke about it wanting something right?"

"Yes, it said something about duty to acquire something. I didn't listen pay much attention at the time," Zexian said.

"Yes. It said the same thing when fighting us too. It seems to not want to resort to violence unless necessary, so when we fought, it didn't harm us. Instead, it asked to let way to get something," Feng said.

"You think if we give what it wants to it, it will leave us alone?" the Emperor asked. He was willing to let go of something if it was for his empire.

"Unfortunately, we have to clue," Yang said.

"No, we do," Feng suddenly said. "You remember the flying boat?"

"What flying bo— Oh, the one you talked about. You should know my eyes aren't as good as yours, brother Feng. I couldn't see anything at that time," Yang said.

"What's this about a flying boat?" Zexian asked.

"You see there was this weird little boat flying away in the direction the jaguar was going towards, just moments before we arrived. I barely managed to see its shape from far away," Feng said.

"You think that boat had what the beast wanted?" Zexian asked.

"Yeah. Although we don't know what it was, so searching would be troublesome," Feng said.

"That is tru—"

Suddenly, the 3 of them stood up and looked towards the west. They were all frowning and slowly starting to sweat.

"What was that?" Yang asked.

"I don't know, but it felt… strong," Feng said.

"That's… not a person. Neither is that a beast. Just what was that energy," Zexian asked.

"That felt… dangerous too," Yang said.

Zexian suddenly took out a talisman that was slowly glowing and spoke into it. "Yes father, I felt it too. I will look into it," he said.

Zexian felt defeated.

"First the beasts attack, then Zexi disappears and now this. Just what is happening in this empire," he frowned.

"Finding a way to deal with the beasts should be our number one priority, brother Zexian," Feng reminded.

"Yes, I know. But the other two can't be ignored either," Zexian said. "You two don't need to worry, I will find an answer to it all. For now, I will send a small unit to find out any information they can in the west."

Chapter 457: The Storm That Keeps On Shaking

"What do we do now, father?" a person asked.

"Don't worry, child. My time will come. Be like me, look how many years I've waited for my chance."

"It was taken away from me, yes, but I still have a chance. Especially now that I've realized where the sect treasure is," an old man said.

The two father-child were inside a cave in the Southern Forest. All around them were dead bodies of what seemed like bandits.

The younger person was wearing a hooded figure while the father was out in the open seemingly unworried about people recognizing him.

"Sigh, if only you have figured it out earlier, I could have helped you. Then, you wouldn't have to have your clone die to that bitch's disciple's hand. How did he even do that? Weren't you guys' cultivation base suppressed there?" the hooded figure asked.

"Yes, it was. But that kid was also a body cultivator. If I had a few more Yang Jade, then I would have won against him. Unfortunately, most of the yang jade on this side of the river was gone," the old man said.

"So, what will we do now? How will you sneak there this time?" the hooded figure asked.

"I'm… still thinking. I'm thinking of finding the boy while he is alone and taking his body to use as a clone. But I can't harm him that much. It's such a strong body, it will definitely help me in my ambition," the old man said.

"Just kill him. We can find another," the hooded figure said.

"No!" the old man shouted. "I told you. You need to learn patience. As I said, I will do something. You don't need to worry about anything."

"Sigh, I understand, father," the hooded figure said.

"We might need some help. You got information about those ban—"

Suddenly, the old man stopped speaking. His body convulsed a little and his eyes went wide. The hooded figure showed no response and was instead confused by their father's unusual behavior.

"Father?" the hooded figure asked.

"It's matured," the old man said.

"What? What are you talking about father?" the figure asked.

"It's… it's matured."

Horror filled the old man's face as he spoke softly. "I wasn't expecting that. This is… sooner than I thought. My calculations were wrong?" the old man contemplated for a second.

"Father? What matured?" the hooded figure asked.

"No, no. It hasn't matured… yet. There's still time, but just a few months of it. Maybe 2, maybe 4. Definitely not more than a year though," the old man said.

"Father, please explain what is happening," the hooded figure asked.

"Didn't you listen to me?" the old man said as he whipped his face towards the hooded figure, with his eyes shining brightly.

"It matured."

"What did?" the hooded figure asked.

"The Sect Treasure."

* * * * *

"Is he dead yet?" a voice asked.

"No, he's holding by a thread. But I don't think he can stay for much longer," another voice said.

"Sigh, another failure," the voice said.

"We might have found him already if you came with me, instead of going out searching on your own," the second voice said loudly. Its voice shook the very white marble they were standing around.

"Stop shouting," the first voice said.

"Oh? And what will you do?" the second voice said again. The both of them started snarling at each other.

Suddenly, something else ran into the hall the two of them were in. The two of them stopped bickering and turned to look at the newcomer.

"What?" the angry voice asked.

"Senior, the child is dead," the newcomer said.

Both of the two of them suddenly grew quiet. "You made sure?" the first voice asked.

"Yes, senior," the newcomer said.

"Sigh, another dead," the second voice said.

"How many is that now? 9?" the first voice asked.

"Yes, just over the course of 4 different instances too," the second voice said.

"Sigh, I should have not doubted the feeling at that time and immediately ran. We were searching for so long, and the first hope we see, I screwed it all up," the first voice said.

"Just forget about that backwater empire, and come follow me next time. The Luminance empire has weaker blood there, but it's a lot of it. We will surely find some for sure," the second voice said.

"No, this one is the one we need. I can promise you. I've never felt someone feel the bloodline this clearly before," the first voice said.

"Urghhh! Fine, do what you want. Hey, you," the second voice shouted.

"Yes, senior," the newcomer spoke.

"How many more drops of blood can the fountain make, go find out," the second voice shouted.

"Yes, senior," the newcomer left.

"You're worried?" the first voice asked.

"Yes, I don't think we have that many left. Maybe 4 at best," the second voice said.

"I'm sure this on from the Crimson Empire will be successful," the first voice spoke.

"As I said, do what yo—"

Suddenly, both of their faces changed.

"What was that?" the first voice asked.

"It came from the north," the second voice said.

"That… that aura reminded me of master's majesty, it's… what is that?" the first voice said.

"Whatever it is. It doesn't belong here," the second voice said.

Both of them showed slight fearful expressions as they kept staring towards the north to feel more.

"Senior, I've come with bad news," the newcomer had come once again. Only this time, he was huffing like he had sprinted at the top of his lungs to reach here.

The two of them finally got out of their stupor and looked at the newcomer.

"Bad news?" the first voice was surprised.

"What's wrong?" the second voice asked.

"It's… its the fountain. Lady… Lady Ren checked the fountain again, and she doesn't know if its because of the excessive use lately or not, but… but it- it seems to be not working as well," the newcomer said.

"Boy speak more clearly. What's wrong?" the first voice said.

"Get to the point," the second voice ordered.

"Yes," the newcomer gulped and said. "The fountain can only produce a single more drop of blood. Any more, and the fountain will turn useless."

"What?" the both of them were surprised this time.

"A single more use?" the first voice said in shock.

"Brother, I see that we may not have as many chances as I had first thought of. Are you really sure the one you found is the one?" the second voice asked.

"Yes, absolutely," the first voice said.

"Very well," the second voice said with determination in its voice. "I will help you out this time. We'll go together."

* * * * *

An old man was in closed cultivation, fully focused on improving his cultivation. Suddenly, his eyes opened and he turned around to look at the wall behind him.

However, he was seeing much further than that. He took out a talisman and called someone. Soon, he got an answer back and started contemplating.

"Is it opening up again?" the old man thought. He still remembered the last time the secret realm opened up, nearly 1200 years ago.

He had lost his elder brother that day, along with all the talented kids that had entered the secret realm that time.

Ever since then, all the seven families of the Luminance Empire had stopped sending their kids to the secret realm.

"However, is it time again? Has enough time passed such that it's desperately calling us back again?" the old man thought. "It must be the secret realm too that is sending these monster hoards at us. We must answer back."

He then took out the talisman and contacted someone. Soon, he would contact every one and would get the youngsters to go back to the secret realm once more.

* * * * *

Alex skidded along the shore of the river and was thrown into the grasses. However, he didn't spend a single moment in the grass and immediately stood up.

Without a single hesitation, he threw away the sword in his hand and picked up his storage bag to bring out the Steel sword.

Just as the Steel Sword left his bag, he dashed backward and rolled under a giant scorpion. His sword suddenly glowed white and he slashed its belly from underneath.

Both and guts fell from the scorpion which he quickly dodged. He jumped out of the way of a snake's tail and landed on top of the scorpion's tail.

He immediately cut the tail of the scorpion corpse and jammed it onto the snake just as it attacked him. The snake fell to the ground in pain and Alex cut its head off to relieve it.

He caught the snake's giant head and opened its lower jaw. He then stabbed his sword through its mouth right where the venom sack would be.

Purple venom flew down the sword until it was completely coated in it. Alex finally pulled out the sword and looked all around him.

Alex could clearly feel all of the many Yang Jades that were on the ground near him. His body was getting overwhelmed with happiness, but he calmed himself down. He had one more problem to deal with.

Dozens of snakes, scorpions, centipedes, worms, and lizards were starting to surround him. However, Alex showed no fear. He held his sword tight and carefully scouted out the strong beasts.

His eyes skitted around looking for any sudden movements from the many beasts. These were all beasts thrown away by storm from way far away.

So, there was no way any of these were weak by any extent of the imagination. Still, Alex took one final breath and went into battle.

Chapter 458: Something Shiny

Alex cut the head of the final snake and emerged victoriously. There were cuts all over his body, his left arm was fully broken and there was a large hole on his shoulder plate from a scorpion managing to sneak attack him.

Blood had stopped flowing by now thanks to the intense healing capabilities of his body, but still, the pain was all over him.

He huffed as he barely stood over the corpse of the snake he had just cut. Alex's legs slipped on the snake in the water, and he fell in the river too.

Thankfully, he was on the shore, so he didn't drown.

The clean water slowly took away all the blood and grime on top of him, as well as the venom and poison on his body and the blade.

Alex was thirsty, but he was too tired to take out his water from the storage bag, so he simply opened his mouth and drank the clear water that was flowing above him.

A few minutes passed as he let his body heal as much as it could and finally stood up. He looked at the many beasts that he had cut up.

Most of them were at the Organ Tempering realm with some being in the Meridian tempering realm. If it wasn't for his Sword Intent, he would have likely had to run away from this battle.

"Arghh!" he cried out from the pain and accidentally saw something yellow glowing on the ground.

"Oh, right. The yang jades," Alex thought and started limping along the shore to start gathering yang jades.

There were hundreds of them around him, and all of them were giving him the feeling of attraction he always felt towards them.

He went around the field, navigating through the blood and filth, trying to find all the jades left and right.

It took him more than 10 minutes to get through all the Yang jades in the field. When he was done, he had nearly 300 yang jades. The number alone made his mind go crazy.

He wanted to immediately grab a handful of them and eat them, but he controlled himself and stored them in his storage bags.

Finally, he looked back at the massacre he had committed and was surprised at just how cruel and vicious it all looked. Yet, he felt nothing towards it all since most of them were trying to kill him too.

That was after all how life was in this world that may or may not be a game.

'Sigh, I just need to learn to be more decisive when it comes to fighting other humans,' Alex thought.

He was about to turn around to return when he saw something glint in the night light. The moonlight reflected off of something shiny and immediately caught his attention.

"Huh? Did I miss a yang jade?" Alex wondered and went towards the object that glittered. Even when he reached there he couldn't clearly see what it was.

The shiny object was crushed under a broken statue of some sort. Alex pushed away from the half statue of what looked like a lion's back, though it was nearly impossible to tell what it really was with the amount of destruction it had suffered.

Once the statue was off, Alex finally saw what the shiny object was.

"A ring?" he looked at the shiny object with a hint of surprise and confusion. The ring looked to be of the perfect size to fit his finger.

It was mostly made out of gold except for an extremely shiny large ruby on top of it. The ruby was of an oval shape with a 2-centimeter length and 1 centimeter of width.

'This isn't bad looking,' Alex thought and looked at it a bit more. There was nothing on the ring except that made it look anything extraordinary aside from the ruby, however.

"Yu Ming!" someone cried out loud.

Alex suddenly turned around and saw people not very far away. He could clearly see them all, but they couldn't see him at all in the night with their cultivation suppressed.

"Disciple Yu!"

"Yu Ming!"

Multiple people had come looking for him.

'Why are they here?' Alex wondered.

"I'm here!" he still shouted and called the elders that had come looking for him.

"He's here, everyone," someone cried out and everyone started to converge towards Alex.

Alex decided to hide the ring for now and stored it in his storage bag. Except… the ring didn't go in at all.

'Huh?' Alex was surprised. He tried once again to send it back in, but no matter what he did, he couldn't send it back in at all.

"What's going on?" he was surprised. He tried some more but to no avail.

In the end, the elders were right about to see him, so he quickly hid the ring on the inside of the pants and walked forward to meet the elder.

"I'm here, elder," he said as he limped forward.

"What? Disciple Yu, what is up with all of these wounds?" the elders started asking.

The elders were focused on him, and Alex could see that they couldn't see the many bodies behind him.

'That's for the good maybe,' he thought. He told them that he fought some beasts and was injured as a result.

The elders helped him walk properly, but they were slower than he would be if he skipped on a single leg all the way. Still, he decided to just take the help and didn't complain.

They walked up the cliff and soon Alex could see Ma Rong's figure at the top. She seemed to be there with the Grandmaster, the First Elders, and many other prominent figures of the sect.

Ma Rong could not only see her disciple wounded and limping, but she could also see the many beast corpses far away near the river as well as the desert that seemed to have now extended well beyond the river.

"Did he do that?" Grandmaster asked from the side.

"You saw those beasts die yourself didn't you?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yeah, but it was so small that I couldn't even tell them apart," Grandmaster said.

"I guess that's true. But yeah, as a body cultivator, he should be able to kill the weaker beasts close to the grassland," Ma Rong said.

Finally, Alex and the elders arrived up at the clifftop. Ma Rong immediately took out a pill and handed it to him.

"Thank you, master," Alex said and quickly ate that pill. All the wounds in his body, the broken left arm, and the gaping hole in his shoulder plate were all healed subsequently.

"Are you okay? I saw you fight with quite a few beasts," Ma Rong said.

"Oh yeah, I'm fine," Alex said. "Why are you guys here though?"

"Sect master said there were some disturbances in the Forbidden Fields and called us. We were worried about you, so we sent out elders," the First Elder said.

"Oh right, there were the desert storms. But I thought the storm ended at the riverside. I didn't know it moved forward too," Alex said.

"There were storms in the desert?" his Grandmaster asked.

"Yeah, I was deep into the desert, but then the storm threw me back," Alex said.

"We will talk about this later. You should rest for now. You've been in the desert for 2 days," Ma Rong said.

"I'm fine. Although, I will take some rest," Alex said.

"Thank you, elders, you can all return now," Ma Rong said. Alex bowed towards them as well. Then, all of them left.

Ma Rong took Alex to her house and walked inside. The Grand Elder and the First Elder walked in as well.

"What actually happened? Tell me," Ma Rong said.

"Umm… I already did, master," Alex said. "There was a storm and I was sent flying away by the storm."

"What about the beasts? I don't see why there should be so many beasts on the shore of the desert. That was an ungodly amount," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, those were also sent flying by the storm," Alex said.

"Ah, I see," Ma Rong said, but her eyes showed a certain amount of shock.

"I see, tell me more about this storm then. Go into as much detail as you can," Ma Rong asked.

Alex told her what he could. He told her it was a storm that only carried sand, that it was really strong, and that It came from somewhere in the north.

"Nothing else?" Ma Rong asked.

"Umm… no master," Alex said.

"I see," Ma Rong said. "Thank you for your time, First Elder, master."

"It's alright. I'm just glad to see my grand disciple doing fine," the Grand Elder said.

"I will take my leave then, sect leader," the First Elder said and left along with the Grand Elder.

"So, were you successful on your venture?" Ma Rong asked.

"Ah, right," Alex thought as he brought out a few Yang Jades and showed them. "See? I found so—"

Just as he brought it out, the bright yellow color of the jade faded to light yellow, before fully fading. All that was remaining now was a simple white jade.

"Huh? What's going on?" Alex was surprised for a second. "Wait, is this?"

"Oh no!" Ma Rong gasped. "I'm so sorry, I didn't know they would fade away like that," Ma Rong said. She seemed very sorry about what had just happened.

'I see,' Alex thought. ' No wonder master's Yang Jades faded so fast before too. She has a yin constitution so it's obvious.'

"It's fine, master," Alex said. "I've got hundreds."

Chapter 459: 100%

"Hundreds? So many?" Ma Rong asked in surprise.

"Yes, the storm flew many of the yang jades in the desert over to the riverside. Thankfully, the storm was mostly concentrated in one area, so they all dropped at the same time. But that meant that I had to fight will all of those strong beasts too," Alex said.

"Right, I meant to ask you this before," Ma Rong said. " Those beasts… they weren't weak, were they?"

"No. I would say they were around Organ Tempering realm to Meridian Tempering realm in strength," Alex said.

"I see… so you are that strong now, huh?" Ma Rong said. "Alright, go back home and rest for now. I will see you tomorrow to teach you Alchemy as I promised."

"Oh, about the procedure to make True pills? Nice. I was waiting for that all week. Alright then, see you, tomorrow master, "Alex said and left.

Ma Rong watched Alex walk away and sighed as a sad face took over her. "Just when will he catch a break?" she thought.

Alex went into his house and jumped into the pond to wash once more. When he was done, he looked at the time and saw that it was only 10 pm right now.

It was still too early for him to just start cultivating, so he wondered if he should eat those Yang Jades right now.

He took one out and his body hungered for him to eat it. Suddenly, Alex remembered something.

"Oh no," he thought and immediately logged out of the game. When he was out, he felt an intense need to use the bathroom as soon as possible.

He hadn't been out of the game in over 2 days. Just under 2 days was the recommended number of hours the doctors said was good for your body, and Alex crossed it by quite a few hours easily.

Once he was out of the room, he felt hunger like he hadn't felt in a while now. He made his way to the kitchen and ate all of the leftovers that Emily cooked for him every day.

Not only that, but he also prepared some food for himself and ate those as well. Only then was his hunger finally satiated.

Once he was done, he returned back to his room and entered the game again.

Alex opened his eyes back on the courtyard where he had logged out. He once again took out a Yang Jade and looked at it.

Since his body hungered for one still, he put the yang jade in his mouth and swallowed it.

Suddenly, he felt the hot Yang Jade melt in his tongue and flow down his throat. Then, he could start seeing the notifications once more.

The numbers surprisingly started from a random point in the middle and counted upwards. Soon, his yang Purity reached 80% and stopped.

He could feel the remaining Yang in his body whittling away for some reason after it reached 80%. The Qi in his meridian got a little denser and the reduction of quantity was filled by the remaining yang Qi in the Yang Jade that he didn't get to consume.

"Just 2 more and I can reach 100%. I wonder what sort of improvement I will see when I reach 100%," Alex thought.

So, he took out another yang jade and ate it. Soon, he was once again seeing the different notifications that said that his body was purifying the Yang Qi.

After a few more minutes of pain, his Yang purity reached 90%. No extra Qi was remaining, so he could tell that he was missing some Qi that he could probably cultivate back.

Alex couldn't wait, so he took the final piece of the yang jade he needed and ate it. Immediately, he could feel the pain once again, but he was used to it now.

1%, 2%, 3%…

He patiently waited and watched as the number went up steadily.

51%, 52%, 53%…

Alex was really excited to reach 100%. He waited and waited and waited for a long time. Finally, it was coming to a close.

97%, 98%, 99%…

"Just one more," Alex thought.

«Congratulations, your Yang purity had reached a 100%»

Alex felt his meridians suddenly have less Qi in them, but way more compared to previous times, but not a lot.

From what he could tell, his Qi was compressed to the amount that he could probably compete to a Mind Tempering 7th realm, or maybe even 8th realm cultivator in terms of pure Qi density.

Those cultivators still had a lot more Qi, but Alex certainly had about the same density for sure. If he was to fight the others only on Qi-based attacks, he was sure to survive easily for quite a while.

This game is quite a strong advantage in his fights against others in the Tiger sect, or even in real fights. Although, real battles had more variables than just Qi.

He waited for more notifications to pop up, but none did. He waited some more but nothing happened?

"Wait, that's it?" he thought. "But I reached 100%. Isn't something supposed to happen now?" Alex wondered. But no matter what he thought, he didn't get any answer.

"Whatever, let me try another one," he thought and pulled out another Yang Jade from his storage bag. Without hesitation, he put it in his mouth and swallowed.

Then, he just waited for the notifications. As expected, they appeared.

«Sun God's Divine Yang body disintegrates everything»

«' Yang Jade' has been consumed»

«You've gained 21,254,666 Qi»

"What?" Alex was surprised. The Yang Jade only gave him Qi, instead of giving him more Yang purity. Also, the number of Qi wasn't even that high. In the Mind Tempering realm, the number of Qi required to breakthrough was in the hundred million.

He tried eating one once more and realized that it gave a similar amount of Qi once more.

"What's going on? Am I really done with Yang purity?" Alex wondered. He was extremely disappointed by the current way things were going.

"Even as a Qi resource, this is too low of a Qi number. I can get way better results by just eating a single Mind Tempering 1st realm monster core," Alex thought.

He was utterly disappointed by the yang jades. "And here I had nearly 300 of them. What the hell did I fight such a hard battle for?" Alex started wondering.

He sighed and just sat down. "What do I do now? I was so excited even," he thought. He felt like his head would start hurting at any moment now.

Suddenly, he remembered something.

"Wait for a second… didn't…" he tried remembering as well as he could, and he could clearly remember it.

"Song Zun did use the Yang Jades to improve just his skins. Maybe I can do that too. Didn't he use a formation or something?" Alex wondered and thought back as well as he could.

"Huh?" he suddenly thought. "Wait… didn't Song Zun make a formation on the ground? He didn't use a metal plate or metal rods. He just simply made a formation on the ground."

"How did he know that? Didn't sister Xing tell me that it was a big secret that formations without metals were possible?" Alex thought.

He was getting more and more suspicious about who the person was that the Clone Song Zun belonged to. Not only did he have some strong techniques like the illusion technique, or the Concealment technique. He also had the knowledge to make formations without Qi or metal.

That was really something Alex found curious. He tried to remember what the formation looked like. From what he could remember, the formation had a certain design.

He quickly took out a random metal plate and started making strokes on it to form the formation he remembered. When he was finally done with the formation, he looked at it.

What he was looking at was definitely a True formation, but whether it was a realm formation or if he made a mistake, Alex sent out his Qi on the formation to check.

Surprisingly, despite seeing it a single time, he was able to properly recreate the formation on the metal plate, and a working one at that.

'Well, I don't know what it does, or what I should draw it on,' Alex thought. He took his chance and drew the formation on the ground as Song Zun did. He even dropped Yang jades in the middle, in almost the same way as he had found it.

Still, nothing happened. In the end, he was left with nothing but a desire to find out more. He quickly took back all the Yang jades.

"Sigh, I should just cultivate for the night now," he thought and sat on the grass. He called out Pearl and talked with him for a bit before starting cultivation.

Soon, Alex was once again feeling pain all over his body. He then closed his eyes and soon he fell asleep once more.

When he woke up, it was early in the morning, and the sun had just come up from the east.

Alex felt his storage bag vibrate a little. He stopped Pearl from cultivating any further and sent him back into his beast space.

Suddenly, Alex could feel something that he couldn't before at all. His eyes widened as he experienced this feeling in his body for the first time.

"Holy Shit!" he called out in absolute shock. After all, he hadn't been expecting this at all.

"Nearly 5% of my total Qi has fully turned to True QI."

Chapter 460: True Pill training

Alex checked his Qi once more but there was no doubt that about 5% of it was True Qi. He was only in the 1st Mind Tempering realm and was already 5% of the way into getting ready for the True realms.

He stood up and checked his aura, but he realized that there wasn't any difference in it.

"Hmm… so it's only because I have such a thick Qi that I got to make so many Qi into True Qi huh?" he thought. "I wonder if I will get more True Qi when I log out."

He couldn't know that until he tried, so he forgot about it for the moment. He took out the talisman from the storage bag and looked at it.

"Oh, she's teaching me in her house? I thought she'd come here," Alex thought with a surprise. Since it was time for his alchemy lessons, he left.

He went to his master and sent out his spiritual sense to find her. Surprisingly, she was already in the Alchemy room practicing her own Alchemy.

Alex walked up to the alchemy room and stayed outside, waiting for him to finish. He could see her struggling to control the fire.

'Why did this happen to her?' Alex couldn't help but feel bad every time he thought about his master losing her alchemy skills.

He kept watching until she was barely able to make a pill. She pulled the pill out of the cauldron and put it in the pill tester.

34%.

That was the harmony the pill tester showed the pill had. An alchemy master that could make Heaven grade True pills was now struggling to make a decent Earth grade one. In Alex's eyes, that was one of the cruelest tragedies life had played on anyone.

'Still, 34% is quite a progress,' Alex thought.

"Oh, you are here? Come sit down," Ma Rong said.

Alex walked forward and sat in front of her with the cauldron in between the two of them. Ma Rong took back her cauldron. She caught Alex's gaze at her pill tester.

"Sigh, yes. Your master has indeed fallen into such a dire state. I can barely make such pills," she said, half-mocking herself.

"I-It's fine, master. 34% is still 34%. I'm sure you will be able to increase that up to 50% and make Heaven grade True pills once more," Alex said.

Ma Rong flinched a little when she heard that and her face twisted to show a hint of agony and sadness she was hiding inside.

"Is something wrong, master?" he asked.

Ma Rong took out the pill she had just made and threw it to Alex. Alex caught the pill and looked at the pill trying to understand what was wrong with it.

He checked the color and smell of the pill as well as he could, and that was when he realized.

"This is a common pill!" he said in surprise.

"Yes. Your master has become so incompetent that she can't even make a Heaven-grade common pill now," she said.

"But… But just because your Qi turned into Yin Qi shouldn't mean suddenly losing so much ability, right? As far as I can understand it should only affect the temperature," Alex said.

"No, it's different. My Qi affects the temperature, yes, but it also affects the energy. Do you remember about the attacks that my body stopped so easily?" Ma Rong asked. " Similarly, it also stops all energy that comes close to my body. So, if I stay close by, the ingredient's energy in the cauldron starts suffering too."

"That's why its so hard. If even the energy of the cauldron starts being hampered with due to my body, it's impossible for me to do anything," Ma Rong said.

"That's… there much be some way to control it, or maybe even suppress the constitution altogether right?" Alex asked.

"I… don't know, but it's not your problem to think about. For now, focus on yourself. It's not like your own body doesn't have mysteries that need some explanation either," Ma Rong said. "You are just as unique of a person as me, perhaps even more so."

"Okay," Alex said after seeing Ma Rong not wanting to talk about it at all.

He took out his cauldron and kept it on top of the fire. While the cauldron started heating up, Ma Rong started explaining.

"Do you know the theory behind making True pills?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, just the theory," Alex said.

"Tell me," Ma Rong asked.

"Uh, making True pills is the same as making common pills. The only difference is that True pills have a few ingredients in them that are of True rank, which requires one to be in the True realm to use," Alex said.

"Hmm… the fundamentals are at least there," Ma Rong said. "Do you know any more?"

"Umm, I know a lot of miscellaneous information, but nothing concrete regarding just the True pills," Alex said.

"That's understandable. Alchemy is not something someone just randomly writes about for someone else to learn for free. Most of the people out there want to use it to earn money."

"Given how expensive ingredients can get if they want to improve upon their Alchemy knowledge, they have to use their information to finance themselves. Even then most won't give out everything they know since that could bring up potential alchemists that could surpass them," Ma Rong said.

"So, it's better not to fully rely on those books as everything there is to about alchemy. Most of the important information is always kept close to the chest."

"For example, you don't need to be in the True realms to make True Pills, you just have to have True Qi. I believe I've told you this before," Ma Rong said.

Alex thought for a second and said, "Yeah, you did say something to that effect. It was so long ago that I completely forgot."

"That happens. Anyway let's start the lesson," Ma Rong said. " Do you know the recipe for the Chromatic Disillusionment pill?"

"Yeah, I believe so. It's the pill that makes people see the colors perfectly such that they can separate even the most similar shades of the same color, right?" he asked.

"That's the one. Do you have the ingredients for it?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex looked into his storage bag for a minute, and then finally answered, "Yes, I've got about 8 sets in total."

"Alright, it's not the most important pill so we can waste it for training," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded and took out all 8 of the ingredients set.

"Thankfully you have some True Qi, or It would all just be us talking for today," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, you can see my Qi? It's about 5$ of the way to True realm now, "Alex said.

"Yes, I wouldn't have let you make any pills today otherwise," Ma Rong said. "Okay now, do you know which one of the ingredients is the main ingredient in the pill?"

Alex looked through the list of ingredients as well as what they did and finally answered. "The Rainbow Peacock's feathers?"

"Yes. Those are the main ingredients. There are other 2 ingredients that are semi-important, but those come at the final end of the pill-making portion, but we won't reach there today," she said.

"We won't?" Alex asked in confusion.

"Start!" Ma Rong commanded without explaining anything.

Alex put his first ingredient inside of the hot cauldron and started moving it almost instinctively.

'Oh, should I switch to True Qi for this?" he wondered. He thought for a second, but since he was making True Pill, he needed to switch for sure. So, he started moving his True Qi around his body and started bringing it—

"Don't use True Qi. Keep using your normal Qi," Ma Rong said as he kept track of everything that was going around her.

Alex nodded and stopped using True Qi. If his master said he didn't need it, then he truly didn't need it. He continued moving the ingredient around until it was all powder and all of its energy had escaped.

Without asking his master for further instruction, he immediately put in the 2nd ingredient too. The energy from the ingredient escaped out faster due to his taking it slow and the heat getting to move onto the ingredient at a fast rate.

The energy from the second ingredient mixed with the energy from the first ingredient, and soon resulted in another energy.

Alex looked at it all with a very confused look. 'This just feels like a normal pill-making process to me,' he thought.

"Focus," Ma Rong said as she noticed his change of expression. Alex nodded and put in the third ingredient too.

Ma Rong felt the third ingredient disappear into powder soon and felt the energy settle in the cauldron.

"Use your True Qi for the next ingredient," Ma Rong said.

"Okay," he said and nodded. He took out the fourth ingredient and put it in. Alex could see that the fourth ingredient was the Rainbow Peacock's feather.

He moved his Qi around and brought out his True Qi. The True Qi felt weird, almost not belonging to him. But he could perfectly control it, so he knew it was his.

He used the True Qi and followed the recipe. He moved the ingredient around inside the cauldron and could feel quite a strong energy being released from it.

This energy was of a level that he had never before felt. His eyes went wide as he sensed the strength of the energy compared to the other energy that was released before.

"So that's what a True rank ingredient feels like, huh?"

Chapter 461: Final Lesson

Alex was shocked after sensing the sheer difference in the quality of the energy as well as the density of it. The overall strength of the True rank ingredient's energy was starting to easily overwhelm the energy that already existed in the cauldron.

He also sensed his Qi during that time and saw that with almost half of the ingredient's energy released, he had also done about 30% of his own True Qi.

He was confident in fully turning the ingredient into power and mixing it with the other ingredients, but then he wondered what he was going to do with the other 2 ingredients that came towards the end of the recipe.

'Hmm… master did tell me not to worry about it,' Alex thought.

"Switch to normal Qi," Ma Rong suddenly said.

"Sorry?" Alex was taken off-guard by the command. He even thought he heard wrong.

"I said, stop using True Qi, and just use your normal Qi now," Ma Rong ordered.

"But master, there is still a bit of the ingredient left. It's still releasing energy," Alex said.

"I know. Just do it," Ma Rong said.

Alex was still confused a little but decided to do what she said. His flow of True Qi stopped and his normal Qi once more started releasing from his hands.

The remaining True Qi he had already sent out did what they could towards the end of the ingredient's energy-releasing process.

Everything worked fine with True Qi. But once it ended, and the normal Qi touched the ingredient, the still releasing energy of the ingredient suddenly fought with his normal Qi.

Alex's Qi was dense enough to Turn into True Qi, but they weren't as strong as True Qi themselves. So, while he struggled against releasing energy to control the ingredient, inevitably, he lost.

Suddenly, he lost his connection with his Qi, and the whole Alchemy process came to a staggering half.

Alex panicked. He immediately sent back more of his normal Qi, but the hot ingredient was constantly releasing the energy, and his normal Qi couldn't fight against it.

The energy inside the cauldron started going into instability. Alex realized what could happen next, so he immediately sent out his True Qi to control the situation.

However, it was all too late. Even with sending in his True Qi, the energy was reaching the limit of instability and was moments away from disaster.

Just then, cold energy flowed towards the cauldron. It entered the fire, the cauldron, and the energy inside of it. Suddenly, all of the energy that acted agitated inside, had calmed down to a level that Alex couldn't even believe.

The cauldron was now as good as unused, even though it had been sitting on the fire for the last few minutes.

"Thank you, master," Alex said.

"You realized what the difference between True Qi and normal Qi has when it comes to making True rank pills?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes. The energy in the True rank ingredients of True rank pills are hard to control, and without True Qi, I shouldn't even try. Only the True Qi can fully control the energy from True rank ingredients," Alex said.

"Yes, you've understood the most important part. Taking that logic, can you guess why a True realm person might not find a common rank pill very useful?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "is that because their True Qi naturally suppresses the energy in the common pill, so it becomes not very useful?"

"Uhh, you're not wrong, but you're not right either," Ma Rong said. "A True realm person does in fact show those signs, but what about if the True realm cultivator has suppressed his cultivation base? What then?"

Alex fell into thought again, only this time the answer was taking longer and longer to find out.

"Don't think so hard. The answer is actually much simpler than you think," Ma Rong said.

"Uh… it's not because their body is used to True Qi, so anything lesser doesn't affect them, right?" Alex asked. That was the first answer he had thought of but disregarded it because it sounded… simple.

"That's exactly it. Due to cultivation day in and day out, a normal True Realm Cultivator's body is used to having True Qi in his body. So even when the True Qi leaves his body, he cannot fully make use of the common pills anymore."

"If you truly want to give a pill to such a person, then make sure it's a True pill. Of course, if you have Saint pills or higher, they also work very easily," Ma Rong said.

"I see," Alex said.

Ma Rong went on to teach him about making True Pills for a little while longer. Alex attentively started listening to everything Ma Rong said.

The amount of information was honestly not even a fraction of what he had learned from the books in the capital and other libraries. However, none of them ever gave such important information directly for free.

After an hour or two of teaching, Alex's Alchemy lessons were finally over.

"That's it. That's all I can teach you today… or maybe even forever," Ma Rong said. "Come find me if you have trouble. Aside from that… I don't think I have anything else to teach you that you don't already know," Ma Rong said.

"Don't say that master. No matter if we don't have lessons anymore or if I ever get better than you, you will still be my master," Alex said.

Ma Rong smiled. "That's all I needed to hear," she said. "Sigh, alright, you can go now."

"Okay master," Alex said and got up to leave.

"Oh yeah, wait," Ma Rong said.

"Yes?" Alex stayed behind and waited for her to continue speaking.

"Your other two requests. You can go do them both today," Ma Rong said.

Alex's eyes immediately went wide. "Thank you, master. You've no idea how long I've waited for this," Alex said.

"Are you confident though?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yeah, quite a lot. I had less confidence for the second one, but with you around, it should be successful too," Alex said.

"Alright," Ma Rong said. "I will let the elders know. You can take their help if you want later on."

"Thank you, master," Alex said. "By the way, which mountain did you decide to give up on?"

Ma Rong shook her head and said, "I couldn't decide, so I went to discuss it with master. He said that it would be better to use the one on the right."

"Any specific reason?" Alex asked.

"Yes. The mountain on the left is surrounding by the Elder's quarters in between that mountain and ours, Pill testing Swine stable to the back of it, and Core disciple mountain to the other side."

"I cannot sacrifice a mountain that has such a great amount of life around there. If something goes wrong, we will need those elders and students and swine to have their home," Ma Rong said.

"I see, that's understandable. Since the one on the left is next to only Inner mountain, but that too is very far away. So, even if something goes wrong on that end, it will be safe for the others," Alex said.

"Ok then, I will go clear it out later on just in case. Goodbye, master."

Alex left. He went back to his home and after spending a bit of time understanding what he was taught, he logged out.

He was out of the game at around 9 pm. He wasn't hungry at all from the massive dinner he ate last night, so he returned back to the game after a very light breakfast.

Alex debated on whether to do what he needed to do right now or not but thought that it would be better to do it in the veil of the night when most of the disciples would be back in their houses, unknowing of what he was doing.

"Alright, let's prepare for now," he thought and brought out some formation flags and started messing with them. He checked if they had any imperfections or anything that was out of place in those flags.

Once he was absolutely sure nothing was wrong, he moved on to different things to pass his time. He made some more pills during this time.

He now had 3 Mind Elating pills, the pills he had created that gave someone increased intelligence. He had decided on naming them Mind Elating pills on a whim.

These 3 pills were some of his best works amongst his self-made pills. Two of the pills were of 54% Harmony, while the third one was of 57% harmony.

He had practically given up after that. Unless he fundamentally improved his understandings of how pills worked, he didn't think he could rely on anything other than luck to improve the pill now.

He spent the next portion of his day making different formation plates and formation flags that he still had. By the time he was done, he had a few more formations he could sell.

He even tried a few with his remaining True Qi and was very surprised with how well they worked.

Once night came around, he finally left his home and walked down the mountain to the sect valley.

The valley was as festive as ever with the people happily going about their night. Alex looked around and decided to go towards the right.

He soon found someone elders and spoke to them.

"Good evening, elders. Master must've told you what I'm here for, right?"

Chapter 462: The Two Tasks

Alex was handed many empty storage bags at once by the elders.

"Sect Leader told us you would need these too," one of the elders said.

Alex took the bags and nodded. "I will need these for sure," Alex said. "Alright, then. I will get on with the work."

He walked into the Alchemy garden on the side of the inner sect mountain and immediately started picking up all the ingredients that were ready.

That was the only thing he needed to do now. One after another, he picked up every ingredient he could see. Whether they were roots, leaves, fruits, flowers, branch, stem, or any part of a plant that could be used in alchemy, Alex picked it.

The elders kept watching on the outside, while he worked tirelessly on the other side. It took him about an hour and a half to pick up every single ingredient in here and make sure that there were none here that could be harmed needlessly from what he was going to do.

Once he saw that there wasn't anything left, he was finally ready. He walked up to the top of the mountain at the very peak and looked around him. He looked at the sect valley in front of him down below.

He saw the sect leader's mountain on the left and the inner sect disciple's mountain on the right side.

He then slowly turned around and saw nothing but jungle for a long distance until it ended and there were no trees behind there.

'So the desert goes on for quite a long time, huh?' Alex thought. He stopped looking around and checked for a suitable spot.

'Hm, maybe master knows which spot would be better. It might be better to call her,' he thought. So, he took out his talisman and sent a message to her.

He tried to look around and figure out in the meantime, no matter what he did, he couldn't find out at all which would be a good location.

After 10 minutes, Ma Rong came to the top of the mountain, next to Alex.

"You picked up all of the ingredients already?" she asked.

"Yes, master," Alex said. "I need your help a little right now."

"Regarding?" Ma Rong asked.

"I wanted to know if you have any idea which spot would be better. I think we can put it in any place, but maybe you know more," Alex said.

Ma Rong kept quiet and looked around to search for a spot. "I don't see anything special around this place, so we might have to go with anything we want," Ma Rong said.

"If… if there is no special spot, then we should make one," Alex said.

"How will you do that?" Ma Rong asked curiously.

"With this," Alex said as he brought out something from his storage.

Ma Rong saw her disciple pull out a wooden box and slowly open it up. Inside it was a small flower that had 5 petals, all of which were bluish-black in color.

The center of the flower was a little white, but that was the only light color in the entire flower. The moment the flower showed up, Ma Rong felt the familiar aura that was about the same as her, but far more stable and reserved.

Her mind started churning out information until she was left with a single answer that widened her eyes in surprise.

"An Umbra Lotus. Those are incredibly rare. Where did you get one?" Ma Rong asked.

"This was one of the items auctioned off in the Pink Cloud Auction house during the break day in the competition," Alex said.

"You bought this? This should've been quite expensive," Ma Rong said.

"Oh no. I tried to buy this, but I couldn't. Zexi kept on outbidding me. But… in the end, it still came back to me," Alex said.

"I see. So, what do you think we should do? Wrap using the flower?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yeah, I think so," Alex said.

"Very well, let's try," Ma Rong said as he reached into her storage bag. There she brought out a small wooden box as well, and slowly opened it.

Alex could see a pill on the inside of the box. Only, it was not a pill. 'Finally, after so many months of waiting,' he thought.

"I hope we can do it," Ma Rong said as she stared at the seed in her hands. This was the seed to the Yin Gathering tree. It was a very hard seed to find, and even harder to grow.

Ma Rong has spend quite a lot during the first auction Alex had gone to with her to get it. The only reason she hadn't spent a lot more was due to the Yin Gathering Tree not having a great chance at germinating.

But, with the Umbra Lotus, it would now have a really high chance since it would have a head start in the quality of the Yin Qi from the very beginning.

"A seed that is rarer than the Spirit Cleansing lily, eh?" Alex thought. "I hope this works out."

"I hope so too," Ma Rong said. She slowly lifted the Umbra Lotus towards herself and wrapped all 5 of its' petal around the seed. The flower wasn't very big, to begin with, so it could only barely wrap the seed in it.

Ma Rong then lowered them both onto a small hole on the ground she had prepared and buried it. Then, she released some of her own Yin Qi and scattered it around on the soil so that the tree could have an easier time finding Yin Qi when it started.

"Do we have to keep the place away from the sun?" Alex asked.

"No, the dirt will do that for us. Once the seed has started germinating, at that point there will be no need to keep it away from outside Yang energy so it will all be okay," Ma Rong said.

"I see," Alex said. "So we're done here?"

"I believe so. I will come back once a week or maybe more frequently to cultivate here. While I try to practice containing my Yin Qi, the tree will get benefits from me doing that at least," Ma Rong said.

"Okay, since we're done. Let's go to the next one," he said.

Ma Rong nodded and flew down to the gate. Due to the formations around both of the Alchemy gardens, they couldn't just fly away.

Alex and Ma Rong then quickly went to the other side of the sect to the second Alchemy garden.

Alex stopped out of the gate and looked at the formation that was set out of the Alchemy garden. "We should set it on the inside, right?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, that's better. Although, are you sure we shouldn't call someone that actually knows about formations to set them?" Ma Rong asked.

"Do you not trust your disciple with setting a formation?" Alex asked jokingly. "Besides, it's not a formation we can reveal to someone so easily. You will understand once it has been set, master."

With that, Alex went in. Ma Rong followed behind and went on to see what he was doing but all Alex did was walk around. He reached the very peak of the mountain and looked down.

"What are you looking for?" Ma Rong asked.

"For locations," Alex said. "I need to make sure the nodes are perfectly aligned on the same altitude, or the same orientation if they're on different altitudes."

"I will have to set 3 different formations for it to work as effectively as it did back there," Alex said.

He stopped speaking and looked around to find the most suitable placements. Once he thought he had it, he walked over to the places.

He took out a formation rod and started digging a bit of the ground. The more inside the formation was in the ground, the better it would be for the Alchemy garden. After all, many of the trees and plants got their nutrients from the root.

So, if he could make the soil they grew on rich with Qi as well, then it would be a great success.

Ma Rong stayed up on top of the mountain and watched her disciple put in one after another formation flags.

She was surprised how well he was handling the task he had put upon himself. 'So he really knows how to make and set formations, huh?' he thought with surprise. 'I wonder who taught it all to him.'

Not only was he getting great in alchemy, but his formation skills were also above average too. And that was considering he was making and setting True formations.

Alex went around the mountain to place down the formation flags in the night and occasionally went back to the peak of the mountain to check if his angles were correct. Once he made sure they were, he went back down to plant some more flags.

It took him nearly 3 hours to just plant those 24 formation flags. He might have finished it earlier if he didn't have to dig for all of them. Unfortunately, he didn't have any convenient earth technique that could move aside the ground for him.

Once they were all ready, he flew back to the peak of the mountain and looked down. "That… looks symmetrical to me," Alex said. "Don't you think so master?"

"Yes, it does seem that way, but I'm not sure how well it will work," Ma Rong said.

"I guess we will have to find out," Alex said. "To start with, why don't you go and pour in some True Qi on that node."

Chapter 463: Formation Se

"Which one? Any?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex looked down and pointed at 3 different nodes and said, "Those 3 nodes. As long as the Origins in those nodes are filled, and assuming I set everything properly, it should work."

Ma Rong nodded and flew down to one of the nodes Alex had pointed at. She released her True Qi onto the node and started pouring it out as much as she could.

Alex watched from above and waited for the formation to start. As for Ma Rong, she struggled to activate the node. No matter how much she tried, she just couldn't get the formation to start.

In the end, she couldn't help but be sure that she couldn't do it. "It's not working," she said.

Alex frowned. "That shouldn't be the case. These nodes seem perfectly fine," he said as he flew down next to her.

He then checked the nodes to see what the problem was and realized that the node was unusually cold, even frosted at places.

"Ah, it's your Qi, master. I think the Yin Qi is stopping the formation from running as well as it should," Alex said.

"That… so my body is at fault again?" Ma Rong softly spoke and stopped pouring in Qi. "Just how much trouble is it going to give me?"

"It's okay, master. Take your time getting used to your constitution. It shouldn't take that long now," Alex said.

"Sigh, I know," Ma Rong said. "Anyway, what should we do now?"

"Hmm… maybe we should call some other elder. We need someone to pour in more tru—"

Alex stopped speaking. He suddenly looked back and felt the air. The node had defrosted a little and Alex could start feeling the Qi in the air.

"It's working," he said under his breath.

"What?" Ma Rong asked.

"It's working," he shouted. "Haha, it's working, master. You did it."

Ma Rong looked around, but she couldn't tell anything. Everything including Qi and air came to a complete standstill when they were near her, and the only thing she could possibly feel now was auras.

She tried to feel the air, but nothing happened. "What's supposed to happen?" she asked.

"It's Qi, master. Qi is gathering in this area," Alex said. "I hope this means the other formations will work too. Let's go, master."

Alex then flew over to the next node with Ma Rong following right behind him. Once he reacher there, he let Ma Rong work on it again.

Ma Rong wasn't sure what happened to the last node, but her disciple said that it was working so that was all she needed.

He put aside her hesitation and started pouring her Qi into the node and waited for it to work. But once again, despite her constant pouring of Qi, it didn't show any signs of working at all.

Alex waited for a few moments and said, "Master, can you stop for a moment?"

Ma Rong nodded and stopped pouring in Qi. She was about to be disappointed about it not working when she saw her disciples concentrated face. She waited for a moment and saw his face put on a smile.

"It's working," he said.

Ma Rong couldn't help but sigh. She still couldn't tell anything. Somehow, even her spiritual sense was cold, so she couldn't even use them to feel most of the time unless she focused on keeping her Yin Qi inside.

"I can't even tell if they work. Let's just go to the next one," she said.

"Uh… but you can, master," Alex said. "Look behind you."

Ma Rong didn't know what he was referring to and turned around. Suddenly, her eyes went wide as she visibly saw Qi and energy start gathering on the mountain.

The 5 colored Qi was moving all in front of her face, going left and right as it flowed with the wind.

"How?" she asked.

"I think I understood what is happening, master," Alex said.

Ma Rong turned to look at him inquisitively and waited for him to tell her what she had figured out.

"So, just as how all energy and attack lose momentum near you, the Qi you pour out onto the formation also suppress the formation from doing anything at all."

"However, the moment you stop using it and the Yin Qi gain their freedom, they go back to functioning normally and the formation starts working."

"Or at least that's what I think is happening," Alex said.

"I see. That… makes some sense," she said. There was still a lot of mystery surrounding her new body, but at least she was learning something.

Her eyebrows got together when she squinted a bit and started thinking. She suddenly released a lot of energy from herself and stopped her connection.

She couldn't watch the Qi in the air, but she could see the small wave of condensation in the air. The Yin Qi that wasn't under her control exhibited no similar properties to what they did when they were inside her.

She suddenly had an idea. "-ster."

"Master," Alex called repeatedly.

"What?" Ma Rong asked after waking up from her stupor.

"I said we should go to the final node and get it done with," he said.

"Oh right, let's go," Ma Rong said and moved. Alex flew behind and finally, they were at the final node.

Ma Rong was a lot more confident this time and didn't hesitate at all as she poured in her True Qi onto the final node. She poured it for quite a while before she stopped.

She looked at the slightly foggy mountain with the five-colored Qi and waited. As she did, more and more of the same Qi started appearing around them. She smiled as she watched the mountain fill with a very dense Qi.

"This is amazing," Alex said as he looked at the fog. "It's not on the same level as the one from the southern forest, but this alone is amazing."

"This is not similar to that place?" Ma Rong asked in surprise.

"Oh no, it is. It's just that since the formation there had been going on for years, there is no chance a formation created just minutes ago would compare to that. We will have to wait for a few years," Alex said.

"Oh, and how much Qi do these formations take? I hope they don't steal a lot from the True Spirit vine down below. That would be horrible," she said.

"Huh? Oh, did I not mention it yet? This is all the energy this formation needs. There is no more requirement," Alex said.

"Huh?" Ma Rong asked in confusion. "I thought all formations needed a power source, which is always either spirit stones, spirit vine, or some other ingredients that are very rich in Qi," she said.

"You are not alone in thinking that, master," Alex said. "However, the fact is different. While you do require a power source, it already has one."

"You see there are 3 different formations in this place. 2 of them are Element Convergence formations, while the last one is a True Qi Delivering formation."

Alex then pointed behind him at the multicolored fog and said, "that which you can see is the work of the 2 Element convergence formations. Its job is to gather different energy from the surrounding that belonged to one of the 5 common energies."

"It converges Yang and Yin energy as well, but just as night comes along, the Yang Qi disappears, and just as the day comes along, the Yin qi disappears, so it's not possible to see them getting gathered," Alex said.

"Not like they are that freely available out in the open without certain circumstances."

Ma Rong looked at the fog. Now that she was looking for it, she did in fact notice certain bluish-black Qi floating in the air. 'So Yin Qi is there, huh?' she thought.

"Oh right, what about the single formation? What's its job?" she asked.

Alex sighed and shook his head. "This is one of the reasons I was so vehemently against getting formation setters, master. This is one of the main reasons," Alex said.

Ma Rong started getting curious. "What does this one do?" she asked.

Alex took a deep breath and said, "It's a True Qi Dellivewring formation. It gathers True Qi from the air and uses it to sustain whatever formation is created inside of it.

"The formation this formation makes is a little different from the rest. Instead of spanning across a large amount of land, it only works in a certain… circle," Alex said.

"Or maybe saying just around the outer circumference would be better. Since that's all where it works. It gathers True qi just on the circumference."

"If you happen to have a formation working in that circle. It works as the power source for that formation," Alex said.

"Wait, so it's a formation that powers other formations?" Ma Rong asked in surprise.

"Yeah, and that's not even the best part," Alex said. "Normally, if you use this, you would have to constantly put in more True spirit stones to keep them working."

"However, there is a neat little trick that one can do," Alex said. "If you make it so that the formation's outer circumference is the same path is where the formation itself is, then you can keep the formation running forever."

"That is what is happening here right now. I've set the 3 formations in the same circle and set the formation to work in that circle as well."

"So, not only will it automatically fuel the other two formations, but it will also fuel itself for eternity."

Chapter 464: Improvemen

"So, it's a self-sustaining formation that will also sustain the other 2 formations forever?" Ma Rong asked with her eyes wide open. She was in absolute shock from the information she had just received.

She tried making sense of what her disciple said, and while it did make sense, she still had a hard time believing it.

"It's one of those 20 formations then?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, master," Alex said. "You can see why I tried to do it all by myself, right?"

"Yeah, this would've led to a lot of serious question and answer if other people found out we knew about this," Ma Rong said.

She turned back to look at the formation and took a deep breath. "I will have to remake a few rules regarding the Alchemy gardens," Ma Rong said as she started contemplating a bit.

Alex flew back to the top of the mountain and looked down, but he couldn't see anything clearly. The fog was starting to reduce his visibility by a lot. Still, he could tell how rich the Qi in the air was and knew for sure that most of these ingredients would grow with a lot better output rate.

He then tried to think of everything he'd done and anything that he had missed. Once he made sure that there were no problems with the formations, he happily flew down next to his master.

He waited for a few moments before Ma Rong was done talking into her medallion.

"Master, I believe we are done here," Alex said.

"Oh, let's go back then."

Alex nodded and walked out of the gate of the formation. There were a few people curious about the fog in the alchemy garden and were gathered around.

Alex turned one last time to check the garden and started feeling pride in what he had done. The level of ingredients that they would have now would be amazing.

He beamed with happiness as he turned around and went back to his house. Now that both of the Alchemy gardens were fitted with different things, given that the seeds they put in the right first alchemy garden grew, the Hong Wu sect would have a better grade of disciples.

He walked back into the courtyard and sat down, thinking what he had to do next. He had 4 tasks in his mind when he first went to Ma Rong.

He wanted to help her germinate the Yin Gathering tree using the Umbra Lotus that he had.

He then wanted to use the formation flags that had been in his storage forever.

He wanted to make the Mind Elating pills and eat them soon enough, and finally, he wanted to reach 100% with his Yang Purity.

Now that he thought about it, he had mostly done all of it. The only thing remaining was to eat the Mind Elating pills.

Alex brought out the 3 pills and looked at them. "I currently have a 25-meter wide spiritual sense. If the same increment is to be had, then my next 8 breakthroughs will increase me by about 24 meters, bringing me to 50 meters."

"Woah, isn't that equal to what master has right now?" he thought. "So if I eat these pills, my final spiritual sense will go farther than master's."

He still deliberated if he should eat the pills right away or not. He didn't know if it was better to eat them now, or later.

In the end, he decided to separate them by 3 realms. Every 3rd Mind Tempering realm, he would eat one.

So, he kept back the pills into his storage and stopped thinking about them for now. He looked at his storage bags and saw the many ingredients he still had.

'I need to make some more pills. Should I directly go for True pills now? For that I will have to have more than just 5% True Qi,' he thought.

So, he decided to cultivate for the few coming days and focus less on everything else. However, before that, he had something he needed to do.

Alex opened his status page and looked at it. Since it had been a while, he already had quite a few Qi he could use.

He was about to click the button when he stopped. 'Can I not breakthrough on my own?' he wondered.

He had thought about it for a while but always stopped thinking about it. Now that he had come to this spot, he finally tried wondering about it himself.

"How do people break through again? By cultivating was it?" Alex thought. That was something impossible for him. Even if he knew how one broke through during cultivation, that was not something he could do himself.

'What is wrong with me?' he wondered. 'Everyone in the real world can cultivate without falling asleep, except me.'

He had tried finding the answer to that, but no one else suffered the same thing as he did.

"Whatever," he thought and hit the button.

Suddenly, his body convulsed as a massive amount of Qi went through his body, improving it all at once. Some of the Qi also went through his brain to improve his mental ability.

He was now on Mind Tempering 2nd realm.

"If I couldn't compete with Mind Tempering 7th realm now, I can be called nothing but a waste," Alex thought.

He could tell that he should be quite close to Mind Tempering 8th realm in terms of fighting ability too. After all, his Qi density was definitely there.

Alex then sent out his spiritual sense and saw that it was between 28 and 29 meters in terms of the distance he had. 'One more realm and I will eat that pill,' he thought.

He was not starting to think about focusing solely on cultivation for the next few days.

At the same time, Ma Rong was also in her home improving herself. After starting the formations successfully, she had gotten a new sense of motivation as well as some ideas on what she could do next.

Chapter 465: True Pill Making

Ma Rong had realized that it was not her Qi that was the problem, but rather her connection with the Qi. Yin Qi was naturally cold and dark, but never to the level as what Ma Rong was showing.

Which meant that the main problem lied with her body and not her Qi. So, instead of reeling in her Qi and not letting it overflow, she should be trying to reel in what her body did.

Meaning, she had to find a way to suppress her body enough to keep it on the same level as when she had it unawakened.

There were ways she could do that, but none of them felt as good as the most dangerous one she could think of.

Ma Rong sighed and looked back towards the Forbidden Fields, for that was the only thing that could truly suppress her.

******

A week had passed in the blink of an eye and Alex opened his eyes after cultivating for the entirety of the night. He now had around 20% of his total Qi as True Qi.

He had also learned that after 20%, his Qi wouldn't change to True Qi no matter what. Meaning, that even if he cultivated forever, his Qi wouldn't turn to True Qi if it was already there.

The next thing he had learned was that if he did not cultivate, and instead let his body gather Qi passively, then he wouldn't get True Qi at all.

So, if he ever spent all the 20% of the True Qi he had, he would have to go back and cultivate all over again to gather it. And given how he was using it, he definitely needed to do that.

For the last week, aside from cultivation, he had also started making True pills. While he wasn't really good at it due to having not as much True Qi, or due to energy in the pills being too strong to control with his barely formed True Qi.

Alex stood up and went back to the alchemy room to make the pills once more.

He put the cauldron down and started putting in his ingredients. He started with pills that had recipes where barely any of the ingredients were in the True rank so that he didn't have to worry about it much.

He put in his first ingredient and started stirring it. Since it was a common rank ingredient, he didn't have to worry much for now.

He did the same thing for the second ingredient, which was also a common rank ingredient, and soon the energies from those two ingredients were started to mix with each other, resulting in another energy.

The third ingredient was the one Alex needed to care about. It was the first True rank ingredient of the bunch.

Alex put it in and immediately sent out his True Qi to control it. Since he wasn't even in the True realm yet, the amount of True Qi he had could be considered to be barely any.

And that was enough to maybe make 2 pills with it all. So, Alex had to be extra careful not to overuse it.

He started moving the ingredient around and soon it released its energy. He continued moving it around until it released all of its energy, and only then did he finally get to go back to common Qi.

Once the energy was released, it very quickly overwhelmed the rest of the energy in the cauldron and dominated them to become the final resulting energy in the cauldron.

Alex then went on to put the rest of the ingredients. The next 3 ingredients were normal ones and only required his common Qi. So, he easily finished turning them all to powder and the energy released from them mixed together with the energy in the cauldron.

The 7th ingredient was also a True rank ingredient, so once more he had to use his True Qi to make a powder out of it. The 7th ingredient has particularly strong energy, so he had to fight it to not let it use up all of his True Qi while making sure he didn't lose control of them either.

He could feel his True Qi drain at an abnormally fast speed and by the time he was finished with this ingredient, almost 8% of his original 20% true Qi was gone.

The energy from the 7th ingredient was the one that gave the current energy in the cauldron the most change. The two energy collided with each other and threatened to destroy the cauldron.

To stop them from being so volatile, he had to use his True Qi once more to control them. With that over half of his True Qi was gone.

Alex sighed thinking just how much True Qi was required to make a single pill. However, once he remembered he wasn't even in the True Realm yet, he got happy again.

So, he focused back on making the pills.

Fortunately, there were only 4 more ingredients remaining and every single one of them was common ingredients.

So, Alex quickly turned them all into powder and the energy released from them mixed together with the other energy and quickly formed final energy that would go onto the pill.

Alex formed the pill using his normal Qi but then used his True Qi once more to use Elemental Guidance. Elemental Guidance using his normal Qi wouldn't be able to move the energy at all.

Suddenly, his pill-splitting Qi escaped from his body started splitting the pill into two. Once they were done, a vortex appeared from the pills and started devouring the energy.

Unfortunately, since they used common Qi, they couldn't devour the energy at all. So Alex had to keep using his Elemental guidance to keep making the pills.

Once he was certain that he couldn't force any more Qi into the pills, he sighed and stopped.

He barely had 5% of his True Qi remaining how, so he simply sighed and shook his head.

Chapter 466: Elder

The cauldron lid opened and Alex pulled out 2 different pills and looked at them.

[Skin Smoothing pill: 14%]

[Skin Smoothing pill: 15%]

Alex chuckled a little when he saw that. Even when he tried so hard and did everything right, he could barely make Mortal grade pill. Even if the pills did not split, he doubted he could reach above 20%.

"Sigh, I have a lot of ways to go with making True pills," he thought. Since he was practically out of Qi, it was time to stop.

So, he took back his cauldron and properly stored his pill. Then, he logged out.

It was early in the morning of a Sunday, and he had nothing to do today. The only thing he planned on doing was going to the Tiger sect today since it had already been 2 weeks since he came back.

He went out to get his breakfast and met with the other girls. Since he didn't have much else to do that day, he decided to go on a date with Emily.

They went to a theater to watch a new movie and watched whatever movie was out at the time. The movie they watched wasn't as good as they had hoped it would be, but the time they shared was fun for both of them.

They went to a cafe next and spent some time there too. Then they went around the city just roaming, having a fun time.

Around 3 pm, they returned back home and Alex went back to his room to log into the game.

Once he was back, he stood up from the alchemy room and went over to Ma Rong. He sent out his spiritual sense to check for her, but couldn't find her anywhere.

"Master?" he called out, wondering if he missed her somewhere since it wasn't like he could see her with his spiritual sense.

He got no response, so he turned around to leave. Just then, he saw his master walking up to the house.

She looked tired and not very well. Her face was pale, and the stride in her feet gave away her fatigue.

"Master, are you alright?" he asked as he ran up to her. He grabbed her by the arm and helped her walk.

"Yes, I'm fine. I'm just a little tired," Ma Rong said. She continued walking to her house, and Alex brought her there.

During the entire time, there was just one thing that Alex couldn't understand at all. 'Why am I not feeling scared?' he thought.

Ever since Ma Rong awakened her constitution, Alex couldn't help but feel scared around her, but now, he didn't feel anything.

In fact, he really didn't feel anything.

"Master, what happened to your cultivation base?" Alex asked worriedly. To him, she was nothing but a mortal right now.

"Don't worry about it. It will be back in just a few minutes," Ma Rong said. After Alex took her to her room, he could finally not feel cold in this place.

Ma Rong sat down and immediately started cultivating. Soon, tiny bits of Qi left her body, followed by a rush of Yin Qi escaping through.

The feeling of fear immediately returned back to Alex, so he once again stepped back so as to not get affected by it.

Ma Rong took a deep breath as all of her tiredness and fatigue disappeared as well. Her cultivation was back with full force and she could finally feel at peace again.

Then, she took another breath, and all the Yin Qi that came out rushing went back inside her.

Alex could still feel her aura, but it wasn't to the same level as when she wasn't in control of her constitution.

"Master, you started getting better at it?" Alex asked in awe.

"Yes," Ma Rong said. "Or at least I'm getting there. Which is working."

"So, you can make pills again now?" Alex asked.

Ma Rong put on a sad smile and shook her head. "Not yet, but I'll get there," she said. "It's just a matter of time."

Alex put on a sad smile too. 'I'm not sure we have any,' he thought. There was still one thing on his mind that was nagging him at the back of his head, but he wasn't concerned about it since he hadn't taken the time to think it through.

"So, why did you want to find me?" she asked.

"Oh, right. I was coming to let you know that I'm going to the Tiger sect now," Alex said.

"Oh, it's time, huh?" Ma Rong said. "Although, before you go, I had something to discuss with you."

"Sure, master. What is it about?" he asked.

"Since you are already so good at making pills, and are already in the Mind Tempering 2nd realm, it's nothing but a few weeks before you reach the True realms."

"At that time, whether you want to or not, you will have to become an elder, or graduate from the sect and leave," Ma Rong said.

"What? Leave? I don't want to, master," Alex said.

"Yeah, I guessed that," Ma Rong said. "So, I had a suggestion for you."

"What is it?" Alex asked and waited for her to continue speaking.

"Do you want to just cut the line and become an elder now?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex was surprised. "Right now?" he asked.

"Yeah, what do you think?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex fell into contemplation. He would just have to hand over a single Heaven grade common pill and he would become an elder just like that.

However, he wasn't sure if he wanted to do that right now. 'But what else do I have left to do here?' he wondered.

'Besides becoming an elder, I really do have nothing. But then the responsibilities…' he started worrying.

"How about this, master?" Alex said. "I will think about it after I return from the Tiger sect."

Ma Rong smiled. "I didn't want to make you an elder right now either. Go and come back. We will have plenty of time to talk about this."

Chapter 467: Back again

"Ok master," Alex said and stood up.

"See you in 2 weeks."

With that, Alex left her home. He went back to his house and changed his clothes to wear the Tiger sect's robes. After that, he left the mountain.

He went down to meet the other elders and disciples before he left the sect.

He didn't immediately go to the Tiger sect, however, and instead went to the sect's pill store. He found an elder and handed him some pills he had made over the course of the past few days and told him to sell them.

The earnings were once more going back to Ma Rong for stay. When the elder realized who he was speaking with, he finally understood why there were such amazing pills being sold by a random disciple he hadn't seen before.

After confirming everything, Alex left the store as well and walked away. Finally, he reached the small market outside the gates with tiger statues on it.

He was back in Tiger sect.

Alex walked in and asked a guard to call his elder brother. However, it turned out that he wasn't there.

"Did he go somewhere?" Alex asked.

"No, he's posted on the wall, like almost everyone else," the guard said.

Alex didn't understand what he meant, so he left there. It had been 2 weeks since he left so he started wondering just how low he was sent by the people here.

So, he took out his badge and looked at it.

"Oh, 177 huh? That's not too bad. That… makes me an inner sect disciple, but I can live with that, I guess," he thought. The disciples along the way kept on staring at him, understanding who he was.

They pointed fingers towards him, surprised that he was finally back.

"Right, I've been gone for over 3 weeks now. I forgot about that. I did cause a commotion and then disappeared so it's only right that they are surprised," Alex thought.

Then, a smile crept up on his face. "Should I target someone tomorrow?" he thought. However, then he remembered that he was very strong and there were maybe two people in the sect that were his genuine match.

First was his sister who should have been back by now, and second was the strongest young person he had ever seen, Du Yuhan.

"Is sister even back yet?" Alex wondered. She was supposed to have stayed in Rubyroad city for 2 weeks after he left, but the two weeks had already passed. So he wasn't sure if she had time to leave and return in time.

Alex walked up the mountain and at the same time messaged his master that he was back.

Wen Cheng replied back saying he was a little busy and that Alex should wait around in his house for a bit before he returned.

Alex felt that was okay, so he walked all the way up. He was about to reach his master's manor when he stopped.

"Oh, if sister is back then she will get angry if I don't tell her I've returned," Alex thought. But then he remembered about the problem they faced.

'Is Du Yuhan the prime disciple now?' he wondered. Since his sister was available for target when she couldn't defend her rank, he could only think how many vultures would jump at that.

And no one was stronger or more troublesome than Du Yuhan. 'Oh god, I hope he isn't one yet. I don't know how Sister will ever beat him,' Alex thought.

So, to check if he was or not, Alex went to the house for the 2nd ranked disciple of the sect. He walked up the steps and took a deep breath before he knocked on the door.

The seconds when the door didn't open felt like eternity for him.

'Is he gone?'

'Did he really take the first spot?'

'Is sister not back?'

'Who's in this house then?'

'Is this empty?'

Many questions ran through his mind. He was starting to accept their worst case scenario as true when he heard a clack on the door.

His eyes widened as he watched the door slowly open. 'Who is inside?' Alex thought and watched as a figure slowly walked out.

The figure was surprisingly a female and it wasn't his sister. It took him a moment to recognize the figure and when he did, he couldn't help but be confused about why she was here.

"Huh? You're back? What are you doing here?" the girl asked.

Alex woke from his stupor and asked, "What are you doing here?" he couldn't believe for a second that she was the 2nd strongest disciple in the sect right now.

"What? I'm in my senior brother's house. Why are you here?" she asked.

Just then another person walked from behind her and came out. Alex finally understood what was happening when he saw Du Yuhan with her.

'Ah, right. I forgot Su Min was Du Yuhan's junior sister. Stupid me, thinking she was the 2nd strongest,' he thought. 'Then that means he didn't take sister's spot, or that she took it back.'

"Hello," Alex said. "I'm back from learning Alchemy, I hope you will teach me this time."

"It's good that you are back, but can you stop bothering me, I told you to find me when you are in the 3rd rank, didn't I? Little Su, let's go in. He's a maniac who will drag me into battle if we talk too long," Du Yuhan said and walked in.

"Eh?" Su Min looked back and forth between her brother and Alex and slowly closed the door. As she did, Alex could hear the words, "But it's Sunday."

Alex almost laughed out loud seeing Du Yuhan go back in a hurry. 'So that means our worries were for nothing, thank god,' he thought.

After learning that Du Yuhan was still the 2nd place, Alex was really surprised how his sister managed to even secure her place back.

'Did 2 weeks of handling other people's Qi increase her own ability somehow?' Alex wondered. He couldn't see how else she could beat Du Yuhan with his True realm equivalent of Sword Qi.

Chapter 468: First Rank

Alex's mood was a lot better after learning that his master wouldn't have to leave his spot for a while now. At least 5 months from what Luo Mei had told him would take her to become a True realm expert.

'I will enter True realm way earlier than her though,' Alex thought. He soon reached her house and knocked on the door.

"Sister, I'm back," he said out loud. However, nobody answered. He knocked a few more times, but his sister didn't open the door at all.

'Huh?" Alex thought. "Why is she not opening the door? Is she not back by some chance? Maybe she's gone somewhere. Master will let her know later I guess."

"Searching for your senior sister, are we?" a voice came from behind him. Alex felt that the voice was familiar, so he turned around.

Behind him was a young man in a yellow robe with a red outline. The robe looked great on him since the outline matched his red hair a lot.

Alex could feel a cultivation base of the 3rd Mind tempering realm, close to the 4th Mind Tempering realm from this person.

He started to have a sour feeling in his heart when he saw him but didn't let him show on his face.

"Maybe, what are you doing here in my sister's house," Alex asked Yang Ma.

"Haha, your greetings lack a bit of respect, brother Yu," Yang Ma said. "You shouldn't talk like that to a prime disciple now, should you?"

"What?" Alex was surprised when he heard then. Only then did he realize that he was staring at a Yellow robe with a red outline, the robe of a Prime disciple.

"How did you…" Alex's confusion was at an all-time high.

"Get the first rank? It's quite easy actually," Yang Ma said. "Since sister Luo Mei isn't back yet, and Du Yuhan didn't show any attempts to make it his, I decided to take it for myself for now."

"Sister Luo Mei will probably ask it back when she returns, but I can have some fun as rank 1 until then," Yang Ma said. "Who knows, maybe you will fight me to take it back too."

Alex was still surprised, but his confusion was going away. "Oh, I see. So sister isn't back yet, huh. No wonder you got it, brother Ma. Don't worry, I won't come for your rank. Rank 1 doesn't appeal to me as well as rank 3 does," Alex said.

Yang Ma immediately showed signs of anger in his face, as if Alex had just said something that offended him.

Alex didn't understand what was wrong with what he had said, however, he could see through Yang Ma's expression that it struck a bone for sure.

"Anyway, I'm leaving. Have fun with your 1st rank" Alex said and walked away. If Du Yuhan didn't want the 1st rank then Alex had nothing to worry about. When Luo Mei did come back, she would have an easy time getting back her rank.

"I wonder why Du Yuahn didn't take the spot though?" he wondered. That reminded him of the semi-finals in the Annual competition too.

'Hmm… he didn't fight sister at that time either. Could it be…?' he was just thinking that when another thought struck his head.

"Oh, so that was why he suddenly got angry, haha," Alex thought as he chuckled remembering Yang Ma's reaction when he said he would get the 3rd rank.

Alex said that because he was looking forward to having Du Yuhan teach him about sword intent and such.

However, to Yang Ma, it sounded completely different. Ever since the maze run when Alex took his talisman, Yang Ma had thought of Alex as someone he needed to put in his place.

He was just an Organ Tempering realm cultivator that managed to win the whole thing when he himself barely got any points there. Not to mention, Wan Li beating his so bad in the competition stung him a little too.

Two alchemists got the better of the grandson of a Saint realm expert. That had made Yang Ma unreasonably angry.

Now that Alex said that he was going to take the 3rd rank, that meant that when Luo Mei did return and easily took back her place, Yang Ma would then have to challenge Alex to take back his original spot.

And that felt like an open invitation of duel to him, which he didn't like.

Alex didn't care about Yang Ma enough to worry about him attacking him. For now, he was simply going to focus on himself getting stronger.

'Should I go to 3rd Mind Tempering realm today?' Alex wondered. 'Although, I do want to learn from Du Yuhan as well as I can.'

Alex contemplated for a bit and decided to wait on it. It had only been a week since he broke through to the 2nd realm and he definitely needed some more time to stabilize that cultivation base.

The bigger the realm he would go to, the longer they required to stabilize. He sighed and made his way to Wen Cheng's manor.

He stayed there for a few minutes before Wen Cheng returned.

"You're back, huh? Good. What do you plan on doing now? I don't really have anything left to teach you. Maybe a couple of fighting techniques but that's it," Wen Cheng said.

"It's alright, master. I can take care of myself now," Alex said. "Oh right, did Sister not return yet?"

"No," Wen Cheng said. "I can't communicate that far away so I don't really have any information. But, she should be returning at anytime soon now. Didn't you say she had to stay there for 2 weeks?"

"Yes," Alex said. "If they were successful, it should be right about now. Although, she may choose to stay around for a little while with her father."

"No, he will send her here for sure," Wen Cheng said.

"Huh? But it should have been a while since she was back there. Why would he send her back immediately?" Alex asked. He didn't think Luo Keng was a heartless father at all.

"Because it's dangerous there," Wen Cheng said with a serious face.

Chapter 469: Plan to Evade the Saint Beas

Alex got serious too when he heard that. "What do you mean master?" Alex asked. As far as he remembered, Rubyroad city didn't look that different from Scarlet City, other than being maybe a step down in quality.

"The beast hoard," Wen Cheng said. "They can't handle the beast hoards that well, and Luo Keng would never keep his daughters around during something so dangerous."

"So… you think he'll send them back to they have the safety of the sect behind them?" Alex asked.

"Yes. That only makes sense given how he is," Wen Cheng said, reminiscing the past.

"Oh right, I heard that senior brother was at the backside of the sect too. What's up with that? Is that because of the beast hoards too?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Wen Cheng said. "Did you realize by now that they attack every month? It may be off by a day or two, but every attack has been with a month of interval."

"So, since the last attack was 3 weeks earlier…"

"… They will be attacking in a week from now," Alex finished the sentence and the dread he had in his heart for a while was brought forth.

He had been worrying about it in the back of his mind but had never consciously thought about it. Now that it was brought forth, he didn't know what to do.

"How do you know the beasts are attacking, Yu Ming?" Wen Cheng asked out of nowhere. He had been thinking about this for a while now. He remembered Alex saying something to that effect the first time, but the beasts had already attacked by then.

The second time around, they believed he was dead.

However, the third time, Alex accurately let them know that the beast hoard was coming and that was what saved a lot of people from unexpected death.

"I don't know, master," Alex said. "It's like a feeling I have. Every time they come for me, I have this feeling like something is calling me towards the south. That was how I was able to know they were coming for me."

"Nothing more?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I do know that every time there is a beast hoard, a Saint beast comes after me," Alex said.

Wen Cheng's face went pale. "That's right. There was a Saint beast in the capital too," he said.

"Yes, and there was one that followed me during the last beast hoard attack as well. I don't know why it stopped though," Alex said. "I did feel it come to search for me a little later, but by then the feeling was gone."

Wen Cheng didn't know what to think. "This… this is quite dangerous. What do we do when they come by again?" Wen Cheng thought.

"I don't know, master. But we will surely think of something. I have a fast boat that I can maybe run away in like I did last time," Alex said.

"Alright, I guess that should work if it did last time," Wen Cheng said.

"Is that why the security at the front is so bad? All of them are posted at the back?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, we have to do something," Wen Cheng said.

"What about the sect activities? Any changes?" Alex asked.

"Nope, no changes there. You will probably get 10 different challenges tomorrow so get ready," Wen Cheng said.

Alex nodded and stood up. "I will go back and rest for now master," Alex said.

"Alright, go back," Wen Cheng said.

Alex bowed and left the manor. He had said words of confidence to Wen Cheng, but he himself was worrying a lot.

'Where do I run off to though?' he thought. The entire northern section of this area was nothing but the forbidden fields where Qi didn't work. The only reason more people didn't know was due to the massive mountains that blocked the view of the desert.

Going east or west didn't work either since the Saint beast would catch him in no time. Obviously, going south wasn't a choice anyway.

'What should I do?' he started worrying. 'Should I run away from the sect so that I can keep them safe?'

Many thoughts ran across Alex, but no place seemed any safe. "Oh wait," Alex thought. "The Saint beast didn't come for me during the second time right?"

"I was even helpless during that time since I was back at home. Why didn't it?" Alex wondered. After a few moments, he thought he had the answer.

"Did the Spirit Disorienting formation and the Barrier formation that made new space block my aura?" Alex wondered. "God, I hope it wasn't the one that blocked Images and sounds."

"That's my only hope, I guess," Alex thought. Finally, he had a plan. He would now open a formation and trap himself in so that the beast wouldn't find him.

He thought the plan was perfect. All he needed to do was make a formation, hide in it for a while, and once the feeling went away, he could come back.

Hopefully, the Saint beast wouldn't find him in there and leave this place alone. The people in the Scarlet City could certainly handle a normal beast hoard.

Thinking that he had a perfect plan, he happily walked to his house numbered 177.

It was nighttime, and he had nothing to do, so he decided to make a few bits of formations with what little formation plates he had. After that, he would go back to cultivate.

It didn't take him very long to finish what little formation plates he had remaining. He would have to go sell those in the market tomorrow morning.

For the next hour or two, he tried to understand how the formation that Song Zun made on dirt even worked. He couldn't understand it no matter how much he thought about it.

"Sigh, do I really have to find an expert on this?" He wondered. "I wish I could talk with sister Xing once more. Maybe she could help me with that." After that, he called out Pearl to cultivate together.

Chapter 470: Going For 3

Once more before cultivating, Alex wondered if he really shouldn't just go to Mind Tempering 3rd realm. "Better be cautious," he said and closed the panel.

It was all ready, so he could go anytime he wanted either way. "I will see how well my battles tomorrow are. Based on that, I may break through tomorrow," he thought.

He took out a beast core and flicked it towards Pearl who jumped in the air and caught it with his mouth. He immediately munched on it and started getting sleepy.

"Come, cultivate," Alex said.

"Meow," Pearl cried out and got on his lap before finding himself a perfect place to lie down on.

Alex chuckled and shook his head as he got ready to cultivate once more. He took a deep breath and soon the world around him turned silent as he slowly drifted into a trance and fell asleep.

Early in the morning, Alex opened his eyes and looked at the time, it was 6 am in morning. He told pearl to stop cultivating and soon sent him back to his beast space.

He was in the Tiger sect and couldn't spare to show Pearl to anyone for even a single moment.

Alex logged out and went to the kitchen to find that Emily was already awake and cooking their breakfast.

She had a crappy body and talent in the game, so she didn't have a very fun time in the game at all. She could barely remain as an outer sect disciple of some mid-tier sect.

So, she liked spending her time in the real world, rather than the game. Alex stayed with her and talked for a bit as she finished preparing breakfast. Once she was done, Sarah and Hannah arrived as well and ate their breakfast.

Once they were done, Alex returned back to his room and logged in to sell his formation real quick before getting ready for his classes.

He walked over to the marketplace and got his formations checked out. It turned out that his recent formation flags that he had been purchasing himself and carving the origins onto them were actually barely Earth grade at best.

He couldn't help but chuckle when he realized how bad he was at making the formation flags.

Some of that problem definitely lied with the metal he carved them on, but most of the problem was definitely with the angle he carved the formation on. His strokes were probably not straight either with how the formation rods were curved.

Still, he managed to at least make back what he spent on them, so he was quite happy.

Once he returned back, he logged in and got ready for his classes.

"Are you going to keep using my car? Why not buy one for yourself?" Emily asked.

"Eh? But sister has one, so I'm fine for now," Alex said as he drove towards his classes. "Besides, I won't really be needing them for a while after I drop out from university."

"Huh? You're going to drop out?" Emily asked with a concerned face.

"Yeah, I'm not really getting out of the university. Still, on the off chance that I need to go back, I will at least finish the first semester," Alex said.

"Sigh, I guess I can understand what you mean, but it's still sad that you won't continue it. I guess I will have to start considering the idea of going back to university classes alone," she said.

"It's not all that bad. I will try to make some time for us," Alex said. However, he didn't let go of the idea of dropping out of his classes.

His exams would start in just 2 weeks, and after that, he would drop out of college to focus on earning more money.

The two of them started talking about other things as they went to their classes. After their classes were over, they returned back to their home.

He was quite happy to learn that his classes for the semester were ending after this week. 'I will have a lot of free time for the game,' he thought. The game was all he could really think about at the moment.

After he went back to the game, Alex felt a vibration in his storage bag and realized that he had been challenged.

'Are they really that desperate that they think I will go high so fast?' he thought. He wondered if he wanted to go up or not, but in the end, thought...

"Maybe I should just go for the 3rd rank right now' he thought. If he got the 3rd rank he could immediately start with his Sword Intent training. That way, maybe he could reach the realm of what a proper Sword Intent was like.

Alex walked out of his house and went along the side of the sect crater to go towards the fighting stages.

He checked his badge and went to stage number 15 where his first match was. His number was soon called out, and he went up.

His opponent was a young man that seemed terrified of him. He was most likely simply fighting him because he was told to.

Alex shook his head and quickly beat this man before moving on to the next one. He was still keeping his cultivation base hidden, so people didn't really realize how high his cultivation base was improved.

They kept on coming for him regardless and regardless of who they were Alex beat them.

His final opponent was a man in rank 163 who was using water abilities against him. Since the water wasn't as deadly of an element in the hands of someone so weak compared to him, Alex didn't need to worry about it at all.

He dashed forward, going in a zig-zag pattern dodging all of the attacks. Once he was next to the man, he lightly pushed him with an open palm. The opponent flew through the air and fell out of the stage.

Alex was finally done with all 10 of his challenges. Next up was his own challenge.

Chapter 471: Bing Li

Alex walked up to the registering area and queued up. He waited for a while before it was his turn.

"Hello elder, is the 3rd rank still Bing Li?" he asked.

The elder was a little surprised, but when he saw who was asking, he understood. "Yes, it's her. Don't tell me you want to directly go for Bing Li?" he asked.

Alex smiled and nodded. The elder just shook his head and registered the fight. Bing Li was the 4th ranked disciple of the sect, and after Luo Mei's absence, she rose up the rank of 3rd by simply challenging the empty rank of 3rd.

Now, Alex was going to take that rank from her and then go to Du Yuhan to learn about sword intents.

He wasn't sure how long he would have to wait, so he went around the sect crater looking through the different kinds of stuff.

On his walk, he once again came across the Black stele. The rock didn't shine with any light as the sun was starting to set and there wasn't enough light around him. Still, it looked as majestic as ever.

'Should I try once more?' he thought. He was after all in the mind tempering realm now and that meant his mind was a little stronger than before, as well as having a little larger spiritual sea.

'Let's try,' he thought as he got ready and sent out his spiritual sense once again. Just as the spiritual sense reached the text on the black stele, something crept up his connection with the spiritual sense and tried to enter his mind again.

Alex quickly shut off his connection once again before even half of his spiritual sea was empty.

"Damn," he thought. "Still no other information. I will need to have a stronger mind."

He left the place and went back to stage 1 to wait for his opponent to arrive. He had to wait around for nearly 2 hours before someone other than him responded to him being called.

He walked up the stage and saw a white-haired girl climb up on the other side. She was a little shorter than Alex and had a cold expression on her face.

The moment she reached the stage, she gave an angry look towards Alex and got ready to fight. From her storage bags, she pulled out a white rod of some sort.

'Does she fight with a staff by some chance?' Alex thought while he prepared himself. He realized that his opponent's cultivation base was in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm, just like Yang Ma, but she was most likely weaker than him.

Alex couldn't decide if he should fight bare-handed or use his sword, so he took out a common sword just in case. He didn't know what the rod could do, so he had to stay ready.

"FIGHT!"

The moment the elder gave the go, Bing Li started pouring her Qi into the rod. Alex could see a light blue outline creeping up and from the center of the rod where she held it.

Suddenly, the rod started deforming and started getting flatter and more flexible. A line separated from the middle and soon Alex realized what it actually was.

'A bow?' he was surprised. He was getting ready for close combat between a sword and a staff, but it turned out that it was going to be different.

Immediately, the girl pulled the string of the bow, and light coalesced on her bow as it soon turned to a light blue arrow.

She immediately let it loose and the elemental arrow flew towards Alex. Alex struck the arrow with his sword to stop it, however, instead of being blocked like a normal arrow, the light blue arrow simply disappeared in a burst of light that sprinkled all over Alex.

Bing Li made a fist and suddenly the floating motes of blue light converged towards Alex and started freezing him.

Alex tried to move away, but the lights quickly followed him and soon fully froze him over. He looked like an ice statue completely.

The girl looked at the fight and made a 'hmph' sound, thinking he got what he deserved for looking down on her.

She was about to celebrate her victory when the ice cracked all over and Alex walked out.

"That's a really interesting ability," Alex said as he was completely unphased by the attack. He even had a smile on his face.

The girl immediately picked up her bow again and pulled the string once more to shoot the same shot.

Alex knew he couldn't stop it, so he dodged the attack. However, just as it was going past him, she once again made a fist and the arrow burst into lights of motes once again and converged on him.

Alex created some fire and started burning everything around him. The fire quickly took care of the light.

Without even turning back, he hit the incoming arrow with his sword and then drowned the with fire.

"So you have an ice-type mutated spiritual root huh?" Alex asked. He was surprised to see something so different here.

"Why would you care? Just fight," Bing Li said.

"Sure," Alex said, and immediately his sword started burning red.

Bing Li understood what was going to happen so she quickly moved her hands and light blue Qi released from them to quickly form an ice barrier in front of her as well as ice armor on herself.

Ice was a sub-type of Water, so if Alex used his most certainly weaker Fire elemental attack, he would definitely not succeed in this confrontation… was what Bing Li believed.

However, she had no idea how dense his Qi was.

Alex slashed his sword without hesitation and it flew right up to the barrier and crushed it at once. It blocked most of the attack but the remainder that reached her armor also managed to put some sort of damage on the armor.

She was so surprised by the turn of events that she didn't even realize that a sword had already appeared next to her throat.

She looked up in fear and barely managed to say, "I concede."

Chapter 472: Fifth Elder“s Disciple

It was late at night, but the smile on Alex's face was as bright as ever. He looked at the badge on his hand and the rank 3 written on it.

He was excited like a little child whose parents just bought him his favorite new toy he had seen on TV.

'Yes! Finally, the damn rank is mine,' he thought. He would've certainly got this rank a few weeks ago, but then he suddenly had to take a detour and go heal his sister's father.

However now, he finally got to fight as he wished and got the rank he wanted.

He didn't even waste time walking as he ran up the side of the crater and very quickly reached Du Yuhan's house.

He walked up to the door and knocked on it. He waited for a while and Du Yuhan finally showed up, slowly opening the door.

Du Yuhan put on an annoyed face when he saw Alex's face once again.

"Why is it always you? Can't you leave me al—"

His words were cut short when Alex simply put up the badge close to his face. Du Yuhan saw the number 3 on the badge and shut up.

His annoyed face immediately turned serious as he looked at Alex and asked, "You really got it?"

"Yes," Alex said with a sense of pride.

Du Yuhan was still a little skeptical, so he took out a talisman and communicated with someone through it. He soon got an answer and his skepticism vanished, leaving only a surprised expression on his face.

"You really did beat little Bing? That's quite surprising," he said. "However, If you can defeat Bing Li, then you should be close to Yang Ma too. Why don't you go for him as well?"

Alex shook his head. "That's my sister's rank, I don't need to take it back for her, she can do it herself. I only needed to take the 3rd spot so you can teach me Sword Intent," Alex said. "So, are you ready to teach me now?"

Du Yuhan sighed and said, "Yeah, I promised, so I won't be going back on my word. However, it's already nighttime, do we really have to practice right now?"

"I usually like to practice at night. If that's not okay with you then we can change it to morning or evening," Alex said.

"No, the time is fine, but what about training ground? You know we can't make much noise when others are cultivating right?" Du Yuhan said.

"Oh, don't worry about that," Alex said. "I know a place."

* * * * * *

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

A young man had his eyes closed inside a room in a core disciple's house.

The young man was tall and had a very well-built body. He had short, spiky green hair which a face that couldn't be called anything but handsome.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

The knocks kept coming from the door. Not only that, his storage bag was buzzing too. However, he didn't move at all.

After a few minutes, the young man finally opened his eyes and sighed. "I shouldn't play this game for so long. I nearly died of hunger," he thought.

He then realized his talisman was buzzing. "Hm… who's calling me?" he wondered and picked up the talisman.

Just then his door was knocked on once more.

"Who's outside?" he wondered and stood up while looking at his talisman. The message was from his master who told him to come and meet him as soon as he could.

'That idiot is calling me? He never calls me anymore after telling me to hide from the public eye as much as I can,' he thought.

He took out his badge and put it on the wooden block next to the door. The door opened and suddenly someone pushed it open from outside to walk in.

"Huh? O— Master, what are you doing here?" he was surprised to see his master, the 5th elder here. "I thought you wanted me to meet you at your place."

"That was over an hour ago," the fifth elder said in an annoyed voice.

'The hell is wrong with this idiot?' the disciple thought.

"Are you aware of what has happened in the sect?" the fifth elder asked.

"Uh… no, I was cultivating," he said.

"The Sect Leader's disciple is back and took the 3rd rank. He defeated someone in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm," the fifth elder said.

"So? That's not hard at all," the disciple said.

"Tha- that's not hard?" the elder said with an astounding face. "How high is your cultivation base to—"

Finally, he checked his disciple's cultivation base and suddenly shut up. "S-so high?" he said in surprise.

"Of course it is," the disciple said. "You told me to cultivate in secret. This is what I've been doing all this time."

"Bu-But you were just at the start of Meridian Tempering realm not 2 months ago," the elder said.

'Yeah, well I would've been much higher if my parents let me play it as much as I wanted. Now that I've got my own place, I was able to finally cultivate without all the nagging,' he thought.

"So, what are you doing here, master? It can't be that you want me to take down this sect leader's disciple right?" he asked.

"What? Yes, that's what i—"

The fifth elder lost his train of thought again as he checked his disciple's cultivation base once again. 'How is this possible?' he couldn't help but think.

The disciple scoffed at his master's dumbfounded face and said, "So you want me to go challenge him tomorrow?"

The fifth elder was still a little distracted, but he quickly gathered his thoughts and looked back towards his disciple.

"I did come here to see if you could challenge him but turns out you are far stronger now than I had imagined. So… change of plans," the fifth elder said.

"You have someone else to challenge."

The disciple got curious as well.

"Who?"

Chapter 473: Learning about Sword Inten

Alex and Du Yuhan walked into the training hall behind Wen Cheng's manor. Alex had asked Wen Cheng for permission to use this building and Wen Cheng had allowed him to use it without a second thought.

"There was something like this here all the time?" Du Yuhan asked in surprise. He had been training in the Training hall where he would have to pay an hourly fee. Even though it was mostly discounted for him due to him being at Rank 2, it still cost him quite a few in total.

"Yes, this is where I've been practicing for a while now," Alex said.

Du Yuhan didn't speak after that and simply looked around. "You don't have to worry about breaking the walls or making too much noise. The walls can handle even True realm attacks and the whole hall is sound-proof, so no one will hear us train outside," Alex said.

Du Yuhan nodded and brought out a common sword. Alex smiled seeing that he was ready and brought out his own common sword.

Du Yuhan stopped and asked, "Don't you have a better sword?"

Alex was confused and said, "I do. Why?"

"Then take it out. It can't be that you want to fight with that right?" he asked.

"Huh, but that's what you are doing," Alex said.

"Don't try to copy me; You are not me. Every person is different, every intent is different. Someone might have more intentions about attacking, some might have more intentions about defending. Everyone is different, and their weapon intent manifests differently."

"It's quite unnoticeable at Sword Intent, but when Sword Qi appears, you can start seeing your own personality into the Qi. My intent is to cut down everything and make my way to the top, and so my Sword Qi manifests to defeat everyone. Yours might be different than mine."

"So you should stop copying and try to find some on your own," Du Yuhan said.

"So… I have to find my own form of Sword Intent?" Alex asked.

"Something like that," Du Yuhan said. "First of all, stop using the bad swords. The first part of having a sword intent is to have the sword and the person be one. If you use different swords each time, how can you ever truly become one?"

"The fact that you can use sword intent means that you already have the correct mindset. Now you just need the correct sword to go along with it," Du Yuhan said.

Alex felt enlightened about something he hadn't thought of before. But then he thought of something else.

"Wait, then that means that… you have a proper sword too," Alex said.

"Of course. But it's a little different for me. I put in twice the effort as anyone would need to. I first put in all my effort to learn the sword with a common sword, and then move on to my proper one and learn it all over again."

"That way, I can not only put in more practice for the same thing, I can also slowly understand my own sword better and better," Du Yuhan said.

"Then the reason you never pulled out your true sword in the competition was that?" Alex asked.

"Those people in the competition were not worth me putting in that much effort. If I could win against them at my worst, then I saw no reason to do my best in front of them," he said.

Alex's eyes went wide when he realized that he was most likely looking at the strongest person in the empire that was not in the True realms. He could only imagine what sort of name Du Yuhan would make for himself once he truly got to shine.

"Take out your sword," he said.

Alex nodded and kept away his common sword before taking out his Steel sword.

Du Yuhan looked at the sword and nodded. "Good sword," he said. "Let's start."

"Wait," Alex said. "One moment."

Du Yuhan looked with a confused face as Alex took a deep breath and started taking in all of his cultivation bases.

Finally, once no more aura remained, Alex got into his fighting stance and said, "Ready."

"What? No. Why did you take in your cultivation base when we are just going to start our training?" Du Yuhan asked.

"Eh? You won't use Sword Qi, right?" Alex asked instead.

"Of course not. That is dangerous," he said.

"Yeah," Alex said. "Same thing. If I use my cultivation base, then it's dangerous for you. Don't mind it though, It won't be a detriment in our fight at all."

Alex got into position and his sword slowly started glowing white.

"Well, if you have a death wish then I can't help you there," he said as he held his sheathed blade next to him. "However, it does seem you've improved quite well on your own as well."

"Thanks," Alex said and immediately charged forward. He slashed straight in front of him and tried to hit Du Yuhan.

CLANG

A sound appeared out of nowhere when Du Yuhan's sword clashed with Alex's, blocking his sword on the spot.

Alex was beyond surprised when he realized that he couldn't see Du Yuhan unsheathe his sword. The single motion of pulling out his blade, swinging at Alex, and hitting his sword was so smooth that it didn't even register in his mind.

At the same time, Du Yuhan was quite surprised as well. Given that Alex had no cultivation base at the moment, he expected the sword to escape from his hands and fly away. Yet, the sword remained right where it was in his hand, and Alex didn't even look the least bit hurt.

Du Yuhan started getting confused before a possible answer started appearing in his mind. "You're a body cultivator?" he asked.

Alex had no reason to hide that anymore as anyone who had seen him fight in the fighting hall would have made such a guess by now.

"Yes," he said.

"Interesting," Du Yuhan said, finally showing a curious face. "It seems that you really weren't lying when you said you were stronger than me with your cultivation."

"Finally I feel more interested in teaching you."

Chapter 474: Surprise

Alex already knew how to use Sword Intent. All that was left was fine-tuning what he did know to the extreme to make the most use of it.

After that, he could finally start thinking about Sword Qi, which even he had to accept was quite far away.

According to Du Yuhan, it had taken him just 6 months of constant sword use to learn Sword Intent. That was after putting his all into the sword for all of those 6 months.

As for the Sword Qi, it had been 6 years since then, and he could barely form it enough for a single attack.

That was enough for Alex to know just how long he would have to persist to learn Sword Qi. Plus, he needed to find his own path before he could even attempt to form the Sword Qi.

After a full night of practice, Du Yuhan left in the morning. However, it wasn't over. Alex needed more training, and given how strong he was, Du Yuhan finally felt like he found someone he could compete with.

Alex went back to his house to do what he needed to for the day. He got some breakfast, went to his classes, and returned back.

He had decided to continue the practice after 5 pm the night, so Alex wanted to go to the fighting hall to take care of his challenges.

However, surprisingly there were no challenges. 'Did they give up now that I'm at Rank 3?' he wondered.

Since he still had some time before the practice started, he decided to do something. He went behind his master's manor and started bringing out some formation flags before putting them all over the open land.

He carefully placed the formation, making sure where they all went and how they were oriented.

Once it was all done, he simply needed to turn it on. Except, he couldn't. He didn't have enough True Qi to sufficiently power the formation for sure.

For now, he was just making sure to remember the spots he should put the formation flags when the time came.

He pulled them all out and put them back on the ground at the exact same position, with the exact same orientation.

Once he was sure that he remembered it all and could easily reproduce the formation, he kept them all back.

At the same time, Du Yuhan returned back and the two of them started their training all over again.

Time slowly passed while the two of them trained, and before they even knew it, nearly 4 hours of training had gone by.

"Let's take some rest. We will start again in 20 minutes," Du Yuhan said as he huffed from the lack of breath.

Alex wasn't nearly as out of breath and that surprised Du Yuhan a lot. As a body cultivator, Alex just didn't get breathless as easily as the others did.

Still, he sat down and rested for a bit. 'I should breakthrough after this,' he thought.

Suddenly, Du Yuhan felt his storage bag vibrate. He took out a talisman from his bag and read the message.

BANG

At the same time, the door to the training hall fully opened and a Wen Cheng with very shocked emotions walked into the room.

Alex was surprised to see that. "What's going on, master?" he asked.

"It's changed," Wen Cheng said.

"What's changed?" Alex asked.

"The rank. The number 1 rank changed again," Wen Cheng said. "We have a new prime disciple."

"What?!" Alex said in surprise. "You mean someone other than Yang Ma?"

"Yes," Wen Cheng said. "Yang Ma was just beaten by—"

"Trevor," Du Yuhan said from the side as he put down his talisman with a bit of surprise on his face too.

"Yes," Wen Cheng said. "You got the message, I see. Trevor just challenged Yang Ma to a battle and won against him."

Alex was still surprised and then he thought of something. "Wait, isn't Trevor that one guy that stopped going up in the rankings?" he asked.

From what he remembered Wen Cheng talking about him, the player should have become a disciple of the Fifth Elder.

"Yes, that's him," Wen Cheng said. "He came back after a more than a month-long hiatus, and he came back strong."

"…how strong?" Alex questioned.

Wen Cheng shook his head when he said, "his fight against Yang Ma… wasn't even a fight. It was way too one-sided to be called a fight. That little guy came back way stronger than I would've imagined him to get."

"He's so very faster than you too at cultivating," Wen Cheng said.

Alex and Du Yuhan were both shocked when they heard that. Du Yuhan's ambition was to become the strongest. So, when he heard someone getting called Strong made him want to fight this fellow named Trevor.

"How strong is he, sect leader?" Du Yuhan asked. "You said he easily beat Yang Ma. As far as I remember, Yang Ma was in his 3rd Mind Tempering realm, right?"

"Yes," Wen Cheng said.

"Then… is Trevor in the 5th realm?" Du Yuhan asked. Du Yuhan himself was in the 4th Mind Tempering realm. Adding on the fact that he had a very mediocre spiritual root when it came to learning strong abilities, if he didn't know Sword Intent, he would most likely lose to this guy too."

"No, he is much higher from what I've heard," Wen Cheng said.

"Higher than 5th realm? 6th?" Du Yuhan asked.

"No, this person can breakthrough very easily without cultivation. I'm sure he's in the 7th realm, if not 8th," Alex said.

"How do you know that?" Du Yuhan asked.

"He's… similar to me in how fast he can cultivate," Alex said.

"You know something?" Du Yuhan asked curiously.

"I-I'll tell you some other times," Alex said.

"Still, he can't be in the 8th realm, right? I haven't even heard of his name before, so he shouldn't have been that strong," Du Yuhan said.

"It's just a hunch. In fact, he could even be in the 9th realm," Alex said.

"There is no way that is true," Du Yuhan said.

"That is true," When Cheng said from the side, stopping the both of them from talking any further.

"What?" Du Yuhan exclaimed. "He's in the 9th Mind Tempering realm?"

"Yes," Wen Cheng said. "I'm worried poor little Mei will never be able to take back her spot."

Du Yuhan felt the same. Only Alex was a little less concerned about that.

"That's… not necessarily true, master," Alex said. "You see, I don't think-- no, I know his cultivation base isn't stabilized at all. At best, it could be equivalent to 7th or at best, 8th Mind Tempering realm at best."

Wen Cheng's eyes shined as he finally remembered. "Right. Meaning that if they fight, little Mei will have a slight chance at victory if she can play her cards right," Wen Cheng said.

"Right," Alex said with a smile. "Also… if Sister can't take her down then… I might go and do it myself."

Wen Cheng was surprised at the level of conviction he could hear in Alex's voice.

"Are you sure about that?" he asked.

"I believe I have a very high chance of beating him after I breakthrough once more," Alex said. "And if I use everything in my arsenal, I can beat him with 100% guarantee."

"I might not be as strong as brother Yuhan here, but I'm sure I can at least do that much," Alex said.

Wen Cheng nodded when he thought about how strong his disciple really was.

"Little Yuhan, are you sure you don't want the spot?" he asked.

Du Yuhan simply shook his head.

"I see," Wen Cheng said. "Alright, you guys keep practicing. I will go back to my tasks."

Wen Cheng turned around to leave. However, just as he opened the door, he remembered something and turned around.

"Oh, right. Yu Ming, make sure to go easy on him. His pride has been broken, so… be a little cautious how you go about the fight tomorrow, okay?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Tomorrow?" Alex said with surprise and thought about it. "Ah, right. I will make sure to make it look like I barely won, master."

"Actually, no. That would make him feel worse. Just show that you are strong and that you were hiding it all this time. Once he sees the difference, the loss won't hit him as hard as it will if you acted weaker," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, okay," Alex said. He still needed to learn a bit about understanding how others thought and felt.

"Do you still want to train?" Du Yuhan asked.

"Yes," Alex said and got back up. Even though it hadn't been 20 minutes yet, they both felt like they were totally rested after hearing the news.

They could only imagine what the entire sect would be feeling like right now after hearing that the second strongest person they knew of in the sect right now lost to a newcomer in the sect.

Alex could only imagine the news it must've made. While the many elders focused on him and stopped him from going up in ranks, they were clearly blindsided from the surprise 1st rank from this disciple that went into hiding for over a month.

Now that he was nearly in the True realms, he was sure to make some changes in the rankings. Or at least, they thought so.

After training for a bit longer, Alex and Du Yuhan both decided to stop the training there for the night and went back to their home.

Tomorrow was going to be a hectic day.

Chapter 475: Improvement and Worry

Alex was in his room, looking at his status. It had been over a week since he had broken through, and although it was probably a little too fast to break through once again, it just felt right to him.

His cultivation base was fully stabilized thanks to the two sessions of intense training he had gone over with Du Yuhan. Not only was his cultivation base stabilizing, but even his Sword Intent was also starting to be stable as well.

There had been moments where his Sword Intent came to be during the fights even when he wasn't consciously minding his intentions.

If he could proceed to do everything subconsciously without ever having to make sure his intentions were on point while using the sword, he would advance to the rank of Weapon Intent users as the ones he saw in the competition in 2 months ago.

His face was unable to stop a smile from forming the same way he was unable to keep his excitement under check.

He took a deep breath and brought his hands forward to click on the button.

The moment he touched the button, he felt a rush of Qi swarm his body, going through all the meridians without stopping and finally into this mind. Once there, the Qi then rushed back down through his body once more, decreasing in amount the whole time.

By the time the Qi was gone, he could feel his cultivation base increase to a level he had never before felt.

He broke through.

"Woah!" he thought as he remembered the experience. He was surprised how well he could feel the Qi during his breakthrough nowadays. And it was only getting more and more pronounced.

'Did it always originate from my lower stomach when I broke through in the earlier realms as well?' he wondered. The only reason he even knew it originated there, despite not feeling it was because he knew for a fact that his Qi was stored in that area back from when he ate those pears in the Forbidden Fields.

"I wonder if there is a reason why only I think that? There doesn't seem to be any public information regarding this knowledge," he thought.

Alex was sure that he was correct about it though. There was no doubt. It wasn't only what he felt in the Forbidden Forest though, it was as if knowing that single piece of knowledge unlocked another part of the information in his brain regarding some medical knowledge.

Alex soon forgot about that since it had nothing to do with what he was doing right now. Since he had broken through, he started feeling his Qi.

His Qi was much denser once more and he could feel his strength reach quite high. "8th mind tempering realm?" he assumed. It was quite hard to quantify his increase in strength to a single cultivation realm.

He had never seen or fought anyone in that realm, so whatever he thought his strength was, that would have some amount of falsehood to them.

"Should be enough," he thought and went on to check the other few things. The one thing he was mostly looking forward to was to see the increase in his spiritual sea.

He released his spiritual sense and stretched it as far as he could without straining himself.

"Wait, over 34 meters?" He looked at his divine sense in shock. He thought of something and tried remembering.

The first increase when he entered the Mind Tempering 1st realm was from 22 meters to 25 meters, which was 3 meters increase.

Then it went from that to 28-29 meters, which was a bit more than 4 meters in increment. While it had increased, he hadn't thought about anything at the time.

However, now that it went from that to over 34 meters with an increase of over 5 meters at once, he started to get confused. "Why is it increasing so much?" he thought.

He now had about the same distance of spiritual sense as he did when originally had it and stretched to the fullest.

Now, if he stretched as much as he could, he could surely reach more than 55 meters in distance.

Alex was happy, very much in fact. However, he soon reeled in his happiness for there was something else he needed to do right now.

Alex reached into his bag and brought out a single pill bottle. He removed the stopper from the top and dropped a single pill onto his hands.

This was the Mind Elating pill, a pill of his creation. He knew this pill would increase his mental ability again, but wasn't sure by what amount.

He looked at the 54% harmony pill on his hands, one of the 3 he had prepared to eat, and without any hesitation, popped it into his mouth.

Even as he swallowed the pill, he could feel nothing, truly nothing. There was no information about him eating a pill, nor was there anything he could feel was happening in his stomach.

"A dud?" he wondered for a second. Abruptly, a rush of Qi, similar to when he broke through ran up to his mind and started rushing through all over it.

Alex could only feel a cool sensation around his skull, and some sudden bursts of heat. Neither of which hurt him at all.

He endured the happenings in his head for a while and soon they disappeared.

'Is it over?' he wondered. Just to be safe, he decided to wait for a few more minutes more. Once he was sure it was all over, he released his spiritual sense once more.

It slowly spread outwards and soon reached a point that made Alex's eyes go wide in surprise.

"So far," he thought and immediately reeled back his sense. His eyes were still stunned as he muttered a single word. "40."

40 meters was what his spiritual sense had extended to. At best, he had expected it to extend to around 37 or 38 meters, but he had never expected it been reached such a high 40 meters mark.

"Is this pill supposed to be this good?" he wondered. That could only be the explanation to the current happenings, for the other explanation of there being something different about him was not something he was looking forward to hearing.

"Okay, good. I got 40 meters mark, that's great. Let's cultivate now," he said. He wanted to quickly move away from whatever he was thinking of at the moment and called out Pearl.

He sat him down next to him and soon the two of them started cultivating. Alex too started breathing in and out slowly and before he realized it, he had fallen asleep.

******

Alex logged back into the game after returning from his second last day at the university. He now only needed to go to his classes for a single more day before his exams would start.

After that, he was going to drop out of the university for sure. He was still thinking about how to break the news to his parents.

While he was surely earning a lot of money, he was also missing out on learning stuff that would be helpful in his life. As long as he could persuade them that he could easily learn later, but not earn as easily, he could likely get away with dropping out.

His storage bag was buzzing a lot, but he ignored that entirely. The thing that took his attention immediately event though he had already felt it already was his True Qi.

"50%," he said quietly. That was the percentage of Qi in his meridians that hard turned to True Qi.

This was happening way too fast for him right now. From 5% to 20% to now 50%, the amount at which his True Qi was increasing per breakthrough was astounding.

However, this also came with a simple worry for him. If he kept on going like this, by 5th Mind tempering realm, he was likely to turn all 100% of his Qi into True Qi. What would he do after that?

As far as normal cultivation progress went, once someone converted all 100% of their Qi to True Qi, and were left with not a single hint of Common Qi, they could then, and only then, breakthrough to the True realms.

"Does that mean that when I get 100% True Qi at 5th Mind Tempering realm, then I too would directly go to the True realms?" he wondered. He just couldn't see how else it would work.

He worried that his advantage of having a high cultivation strength while having a low cultivation base was soon going to disappear.

"Urghh! Why did it have to be like this?" he worried. He moved around his hands in frustration, not sure if punch something or pull out his hair.

Finally, he managed to calm down and took a deep breath. He took a few more deep breaths and opened his eyes to look at his storage bag that was relentlessly buzzing for the last few minutes.

"What is it?" he thought and opened his bag to take out the thing that was buzzing. It was his badge.

"Oh, did they decide to come back—"

He suddenly stopped when he remembered. So many things had happened with his cultivation base and his spiritual sense that he forgot about the reason he had broken through in the first place.

He looked at the badge and saw what was written on it. Alex couldn't help but snicker at the words.

-Number 45 has challenged Number 3-

Chapter 476: One Sided

Alex walked around the crater's side and then down the road until he reached the fighting hall.

He walked up to the stage he was called to and waited. Even as he waited, he could see his opponent on the other side who was looking at him too.

Alex send back a polite smile, implying that he was looking forward to the fight. His opponent scoffed and made a snicker.

The battle on top of the stage was starting to end and before they knew it, the battle ended. The winner took their badge and walked off the stage. However, no one was looking at him.

The surprisingly few people in the crowd around the stage were currently looking at just two different people. One of them was Alex since he was the 3rd Ranked disciple of the sect, and the other person was Yang Ma, who had come back after his one-sided defeat to make some of his names back.

Unfortunately for him, Alex wasn't going to let him.

"Number 45 and Number 3," the elder on top of the stage called out. Alex looked to the side at Yang Ma and walked up the stage while staring at him the whole time.

He had a little smug smile on his face, but it was barely noticeable to anyone who was looking for it.

"I'm sorry you had your fun as a 3rd rank for just 2 days before I came back to attack you," Yang Ma said with an ingenuine smile.

Alex copied the same smile and said," Don't be, I'm going to stay as one for a while now."

Yang Ma scoffed. "We will see about that," he said.

The two of them separated and moved back to either side of the stage and waited for the referee to give them the go.

Alex shook his head and took out the Steel sword. This was most definitely overkill, but since Du Yuhan had made him see the ways of the sword, he was going to only use this one from now on.

At least until he could finally weird that heavy sword that no one else seemed to be able to pick. It was a wonder how the person who wielded it could even pick it up in the first place.

Yang Ma took his sword red-colored sword out and got ready to fight. Alex could see red light shine from the sword even though the sun hadn't gone down yet.

"BEGIN!"

The moment the referee said that, Alex immediately started his Jade Skin technique. A bunch of marble-like patterns appeared in his skin, increasing his overall defense by a realm or two.

At the same time, he waved his hands and a five-colored barrier appeared in front of him.

A fire-red slash struck the barrier and tried to go past it. Alex was ready to block the remainder of the attack with his own body, but…

BOOM

A massive explosion rang out from the barrier that pushed both Alex and Yang Ma backward. Alex was barely moved a foot backward, and the same was true for Yang Ma.

However, given how far they were from the explosion, it was easy to see who had the upper hand here.

"What happened?" Alex was surprised. He truly hadn't expected an explosion to occur like that. What he had expected was the fire element to significantly reduce and thus make the attack no longer a threat for him.

However, what happened was different.

'Heaven's Five Barrier is focused on controlling the element and lowering it, then why di—'

Just as Alex was thinking about it, he finally remembered. 'Ah right. My metal root. It's now way too strong for his fire, and is thus Ruining it when it comes into contact,' Alex thought.

'Does that mean… I'm invincible against him since my Supreme root is a direct competitor against his?' he wondered.

Yang Ma didn't know what had happened, but he was more than happy to send out another shot at Alex.

This time, Alex didn't use Heaven's Five barriers. Instead, he simply freely controlled the Qi in his body to form a metal Qi and brought it out forward to form a barrier on its own.

The slash struck the metal barrier and once more exploded the same way it did just before.

"What's happening?" Yang Ma couldn't help but shout. "What are you doing to my attacks?"

"Hey! You can't blame me just because you're weak," Alex said and readied his sword.

Yang Ma sent out another slash, and Alex did the same. Only his was golden, compared to Yang Ma's red slash.

BOOM

Another massive explosion rang on the stage. Only, this time, there wasn't just one slash to disappear.

A remaining golden slash flew towards Yang Ma who barely dodged it by using his movement technique.

"Damn you!" he shouted and immediately took a deep breath before blowing it all out from his mouth.

Along with his break came out a bird of red and blue. The reds slowly disappeared and soon it was only left with blue, a fire that was much, much hotter.

Alex had never seen this technique or this bird. However, even as clueless as he was, he knew what a phoenix was.

'That's quite extra,' he thought. He couldn't imagine how strong this technique was, but seeing flames of a different color, he got cautious.

"DIE!" Yang Ma shouted and made the flames fly down on him. Alex wanted to send out a slash, but then he remembered his master telling him to beat him with all he got.

"Very well," Alex thought and let go of his sword.

Immediately, he brought both of his hands in front of him and started releasing Qi from it. It was the same Qi that he usually used when he had to control fire for alchemy, except with a key difference.

He was using True Qi.

The bluebird stopped right in front of him as he immediately gained control of it. Yang Ma tried to move the bird, but it was no longer under his control. He had lost connection with it.

His eyes went wide in surprise as he looked at Alex in horror.

"Do you want it back?" Alex asked with a sly smile. Without waiting for Yang Ma's answer, he sent the bird flying back towards him.

The bird flew at a speed that was impossible to Yang Ma's eyes. Yang Ma tried to dodge, but that wasn't going to happen at all.

Even the elder felt like he was going to be a step late to protecting Yang Ma.

However, right before the bird struck him, it stopped. It flew, and moved around in an obviously fake manner, going around Yang Ma's head, horrifying at the thought of it hitting him at any time.

"Give up," Alex said.

"N- NO!" Yang Ma shouted.

"If you say so," Alex said and dropped the bird on him. The bird wasn't as fast anymore when it dropped towards Yang Ma.

Yang Ma immediately tried to form an attack to block the bird, but he had lost sight of his main threat right now.

Suddenly, he felt a fist land on his stomach. Even as his mind realized what was happening, his body couldn't react. So, despite not wanting it to happen, his body flew out of the stage and into the crowd.

The few members in the crowd that was looking, looked in silence at another one-sided victory that lead to Yang Ma's defeat.

The dropping bird immediately stopped and perched upon Alex's shoulders in a manner Pearl never could.

"I wouldn't mind having a bonded bird beast sometimes," he thought.

The elder announced his victory and Alex smiled and took back his badge.

'Still, using True Qi in battle is not as efficient, huh?' he thought. He hadn't even used much True Qi to handle the bird, but he already lost 5% of it.

'It will only to truly viable to use True Qi when I can start getting it passively. And that would only be in the True realms,' he thought. Finally, he looked back at the bird and wondered, "how strong are you?"

He ordered the bird to attack the ground in the middle, and it left his shoulder to go attack.

The bird was incredibly fast and it struck the ground at the perfect angle.

BOOM

A massive sound rang out, followed by a bunch of small rocks falling on top of him. When the dust settled, Alex's jaw dropped to make a similarly large hole as he had at the center of the stage.

The stage for stronger disciples was made with very strong stones that wouldn't break easily even under intense battles. However, seeing the massive hole on the ground made him understand the strength of the True Qi.

However, True Qi alone couldn't possibly make this much of a mess. That was when he realized how terribly strong the attack Yang Ma was using on him.

'Where the hell did he get such a strong technique?' Alex wondered.

The elder came to scold him, and Alex made a small lie saying his bird was starting to go unstable, which was why he had to throw it out.

The elder was convinced after seeing the disaster, so Alex was able to get out without getting into trouble.

He walked down the stairs and heard someone shout "Junior brother" towards him.

"Huh?" he thought and looked aside to see someone in there that he would have never thought to see in this place before.

"Brother Xiao?" he called in surprise.

Xiao Huang was in the crowd, below the stage right now.

"Hey, junior brother, Good job on the fight just now. You did amazing," Xiao Huang said with a massive smile.

Alex looked to the side, expecting to see Luo Xing, but she wasn't there.

"What are you doing here, brother Xiao? I thought you would still be in Rubyroad city," he said.

"Oh, no. We came back today," he said.

"We?" Alex asked with a gasp. "Does that mean sister is back too?"

"Yeah, both of them are," Xiao Huang said while pointing towards a crowd in the distance with his head. The crowd on that side was infinitely larger than what it was for him and Yang Ma.

Alex looked towards there and saw a red-robed woman, standing out in the midst of many yellow-robed disciples. She wasn't looking in Alex's direction at all and was instead staring at the stage in front of her.

Alex turned his head towards the stage and saw a massive Iceball floating in the air, with a person inside flapping about, trying to breathe.

Beneath the ice ball, was a single woman with both of her arms up, controlling the ice.

Luo Mei was back.

Chapter 477: Favor

"Sister is back?" he asked in surprise. He looked inside the ball of ice that was floating in the air and saw something yellow inside with occasional hints of green.

The elder that was refereeing the match suddenly stepped in and stopped Luo Mei. The ball of ice that was floating midair crashed onto the ground and the disciple that was inside fell out, unconscious.

Luo Mei was quickly pronounced victorious and the crowds of disciples looked around in awe. Luo Mei walked down from the stage and continued huffing. Alex ran up.

"Sister!" he shouted. "You're back."

Luo Mei turned around and chuckled. "It seems you're finally out of your room. Honestly, were you sleeping? I called you out so many times," she said.

"Oh, you did?" Alex asked shyly. It must've been when he was still logged out, so he couldn't have heard her call him out.

"Wait, if you're here. That means… Uncle is okay?" Alex asked.

"Yes, all thanks to you," Luo Mei said softly. "Thank you, junior brother. Taking you on my journey back home was the best thing I ever did."

"Aw, you don't have to say that. But you're welcome. I will always help you if you need it again," Alex said.

"No, seriously, Junior brother. Thank you for what you did," Luo Xing came from the side and said. "Do not hesitate if there is anything you need help with. Call us, and we will be there."

"Oh, thank you. Actually, I do have a small favor to ask of you," Ning said. "Let's talk about that later though."

"Anyway, who were you fighting, sister? Did you decide to beat someone because you saw your badge number was low?" Alex asked with a chuckle.

"No, I just took my rank back," Luo Mei said with a smile.

"Wait…" it took a moment for Alex to comprehend what she had just said. He immediately stretched his neck to look at the green-haired disciple that was no longer there.

"You beat Trevor? He was quite strong from what I heard," Alex said.

"I saw. He was strong, much stronger than I imagined. However, his abilities hadn't matured. He doesn't have any skill at fighting at all, and his knowledge wasn't that good either," Luo Mei said.

"I saw that too," Xiao Huang said from the side. "Like what sort of idiot continues fighting against Water with Metal and Earth? That kid needs to learn a lot before he advances to the True realms."

"He's one of those stupid, but talented ones that have been appearing lately I believe," Luo Xing said.

"Anyway, let's go back. Please tell me what happened after I left," Alex said.

The four of them walked back up the mountain. Luo Mei explained everything that had happened in Rubyroad city for the last few days.

She explained how her father was healed and how eating the pill that Alex left him helped get rid of the rest of the parasites.

Luo Keng was now starting to show signs of recovery. His pale face was starting to show color once again. He then ate pills that healed him and were now on his way to making a swift recovery.

Luo Mei also explained how the Mind Elating pills that Alex left her had helped her.

"I knew little brother was an alchemist and a healer, but I didn't know he was such an experienced fighter too," Xiao Huang said.

"Oh, you fought today? When?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yeah," Alex said. "It was right around the same time as when you fought, so you didn't realize."

"Oh, someone dared challenge you even after reaching the 3rd rank, huh?" Luo Mei said. "They must've lost their mind."

"It was Yang Ma," Alex said.

"What?" Luo Mei asked.

"It was Yang Ma who challenged me," Alex said.

"And you won?" Luo Mei asked.

Alex smiled. "Yeah, easily. I'm strong now too sister," he said.

"Nice. Good one. I always like it when I get to see his sour face," Luo Mei said.

"You really do hate him, don't you?" Alex asked. "Did he try to go for the 1st rank before too?"

"No, it's his arrogance. He comes from an aristocratic family, not unlike our own, but really likes to show it. Just because his family apparently has a Saint realm expert, he used to act like he owned the whole world."

"He's way more refined now compared to how he was back then. But still, I can't help but remember his arrogant looks and hate him," Luo Mei said.

"I see," Alex said.

The four of them reached Luo Mei's house and entered.

"Oh, hey Meng Yun, good to see you again," Alex said.

"Hello," Meng Yun greeted him back. She sneakily checked his aura and realized how much further and further behind she was getting compared to him.

"Are you and sister Xing staying in the city for the night, brother Huang?" Alex asked.

"Yes. The Beast horde will be attacking any day now, so we will have to stay here just to be safe," Xiao Huang said.

"I see. That's not a bad idea," Alex said. "Are you staying somewhere nearby?"

"Uhh… we were thinking of getting a lodging outside the sect," Xiao Huang said.

"Nonsense, we have so many rooms. Just stay with us," Alex said. "Sister Xing can stay here, and you will stay with me, brother Huang."

"Haha, if you invite me like that, then I can't refuse, little brother," Xiao Huang said.

The four of them continued talking for a while. Alex was also consumed by the conversations and forgot about the passage of time.

Suddenly he remembered something. "Oh no!" he shouted.

"What? What's wrong?" Luo Mei asked.

"Uhh," Alex made a wry smile and said, "Nothing. Everything is fine. I just forgot something. I will take my leave for now."

"Little brother, what about your favor? What did you want to ask me?" Luo Xing said.

"Uh… I don't know if I can ask that out here," Alex said. "Can you come into this room real quick?"

"Is it something we can't hear?" Luo Mei asked.

"I can't be the judge of that," Alex said. "I will tell sister Xing, and if she deems it okay to share, I will share."

"Very well, go on in then," Luo Mei said and the two of them entered the room.

"What is it, little brother? What do you need help on?" Luo Xing asked.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense to make sure no one was listening, especially Xiao Huang. At the same time, he took out a talisman and handed it to Luo Xing.

Luo Xing took the talisman and read what was inside. She saw a formation blueprint inside that didn't depict many things that a normal formation blueprint should.

Instead, it only had the rough drawing of the formation.

"What's this?" Luo Xing asked with confusion.

"It's something I need help on, sister," Alex said. "I didn't know who to ask. Fortunately, you came here."

"What's this formation? Where did you get this? I've never seen one like this before. I can't even tell what base formations make up this formation," Luo Xing said.

"Also, there are so many strokes. This almost looks like a Saint formation too," she said.

"I know, sister. This is a formation I got from a man I… from the clone of a man I killed. He had this formation carved onto the ground, and he was making use of it."

"You told me formations without metal were possible… can you tell me how I can get that one to work?" Alex asked.

Luo Xing looked at the formation and contemplated. "Did he really not use any metal?" she asked.

"No," Alex said. "In fact… he didn't even use any Qi to start it."

"Huh? How is that possible?" Luo Xing asked.

"Also, he used this as a power source instead of a regular spirit stone," Alex said as he brought out a Yang jade.

"What's this?" Luo Xing asked.

"It's jade with yang energy in it. You can find a few from time to time behind our sect," Alex said. "He was making use of it to use that formation to strengthen himself. Can you figure out how?"

"I… I don't know. I will have to ask brother Huang," Luo Xing said.

"Is that alright? I thought that bringing up information about the metalless formation was against the sect rules of yours," Alex said.

"I can explain to him that you brought it up first," Luo Xing said. "Either that or I can be truthful. That should work too. Don't worry, he's my senior brother. Besides, this formation could be the key to figuring out how those things work."

"Well, if you are confident about it, then sure," Alex said. He handed her the yang jade and left it all up to her.

"I will have to go now. I made a promise to someone and I'm already late," Alex said.

He walked out of the room and saw the curious faces of Luo Mei and Xiao Huang. He chuckled and said, "if you want to learn more about what it is, ask her."

He then tossed his badge to Xiao Huang and said, "you can use this badge to enter my house. Just take any room you like and make yourself home in there. I will see you guys later."

Alex said his goodbyes and walked out of the house. He checked the house next over and quickly ran up to his master's manor.

"Brother Yuhan, I'm sorry I was late," he said as he walked into the training room while apologizing for his tardiness, but when he went inside, there was nobody.

Chapter 478: Forfei

The training room was completely empty with no signs of anyone, anywhere.

'Did he leave because I was late?' Alex wondered. But he quickly gave up on that thought. After all, he was only an hour late, and even if he left, Alex had already searched his home before coming here, and he was absent from it.

"He left his home, but didn't come here? Maybe he was called by his master," Alex thought. He decided to wait and see if he would return. If he didn't, Alex would tell his master to send a message to Du Yuhan saying to cancel today's lesson.

So, he waited for an hour. It was getting closer to 7 pm now, and if Du Yuhan still didn't return, then Alex was going to leave.

Thankfully, at the nick of time, Du Yuhan entered the hall.

"Oh, you're here huh. You were running a little late," Du Yuhan said.

"Yes," Alex replied. "Sister returned so I went to speak with her to talk for a few minutes, but it ended up being over an hour," Alex said.

"I see. I did hear Luo Mei was back," Du Yuhan said. "I also heard she fought with Trevor too. How is she?"

"She's alright," Alex said. "In fact, much better than how she was previously. Given how easily she won against Trevor, I would say that she is doing perfectly fine."

"She won against him easily?" Du Yuhan said with a hint of surprise in his voice. "Even I had a bit of a problem with him."

"Oh," Alex said almost mechanically. But then he understood what Du Yuhan was saying and asked, "Wait, you fought him too?"

"Yeah," Du Yuhan said. "He challenged me just now."

"He challenged you? Already? He only just lost like less than 2 hours ago," Alex said.

"Ah, that makes sense," Du Yuhan said after realizing something. "I was wondering how he had such a low rank. He must have gotten Luo Mei's previous rank and came to fight with me with that."

"I remember him being unconscious," Alex said. "Did he come back to target you the moment he woke up?"

"Maybe, who knows. Although, I must say he was quite strong. I'm genuinely surprised Luo Mei won against him. Her cultivation base must have improved again." Du Yuhan said.

Alex remembered Luo Mei saying that she was using True Qi to fight most of the time, so that was probably the reason why she won so easily.

"Did you use Sword Qi?" Alex asked.

"I had to," Du Yuhan said. "There is no other way for me to beat him if I didn't use it. Although, once I did, I did realize how much of an overkill it was. Sigh, that's Sword Qi for you, I'm weak if I don't use it, and I'm too strong if I do."

Alex smiled when he heard that. Du Yuhan was normally quiet and liked to keep to himself, or at least that was what Alex had thought his nature was. However, after getting close to him, he had realized that he just didn't have people to talk with and did talk quite a lot when he got the chance.

'Maybe he just needed a friend,' Alex thought.

"So, are you tired from the fight and want to rest for a few minutes?" Alex asked.

"No, it was hardly a fight. I just struggled because I tried to see how strong I could be without Sword Qi," Du Yuhan said. "Once I did, I won. So, we can start now."

"Okay," Alex said with a smile and the two of them started training once more.

The fight between the two of them was getting more and more unhinged as Alex's skill level in using Sword Intent was getting closer and closer to perfection.

The clinks and clangs of the two's swords rang about inside the training for over an hour. At some points, the two of them had started using techniques too. Slashes with sword intent flew about, with Alex's sword intent barely losing to Du Yuhan's.

Du Yuhan was a little shocked at how terrifyingly good Alex was at learning stuff. 'Just two days and he's learned what would've taken me a month to learn with the same level of training,' he thought.

Alex didn't hold back in the least and started sending around attacks left and right. At some points, he was close to running out of Qi, so he asked, "I'm going to use True Qi now, please use Sword Qi. I want to see how I would fare."

Du Yuhan was a little surprised to hear that. "Use it once and let me see if it can handle the sword Qi," he said.

Alex nodded and used a simple fire slash, but it was formed using True Qi. The heat the sword gave off with the Fire Qi inside of it was unlike any he had felt before.

Once he slashed, the slash directly flew towards Du Yuhan who looked at it with surprise. Without spending a single another moment in hesitation, he dodged to the side and the attack flew directly to the wall behind him.

"Eh?" Alex said with surprise. "Why didn't you block it with Sword Qi? It can't be that it's stronger, right?"

"No, it's weaker, at least by a small amount," Du Yuhan said. "Much weaker if I use True Qi too, but… I need some time to prepare Sword Qi for attacks. It doesn't come naturally as it does with Sword Intent."

"Oh right, I remember seeing that in the competition," Alex said. "So that means I can use True Qi right?"

"I mean… yeah, but how much True Qi do you even have? In fact, I'm surprised you even have any," Du Yuhan said.

"Oh, don't worry. My cultivation method allows me to have True Qi way earlier than normal people. Which is why I'm stronger than normal," Alex said.

"I see, then go ahead and use it," Du Yuhan said as he got ready to fight. Motes of lights flickered around him as they started moving around him and condensed into his sword, forming Sword Qi.

'Damn that looks awesome no matter how many times I see it,' he thought.

Alex got ready too and used True Qi along with his sword intent to fight against Du Yuhan. Du Yuhan made the first attack and the fight began.

The two of them fought as if they were mortal enemies, fighting to get the other's head. If someone else saw from outside, they would surely believe that some sort of illegal fight was going on inside.

Alex only used normal slashes and True Qi along with Sword Intent and didn't use any other techniques, while Du Yuhan stuck to just Sword Qi. And yet, the sword Qi was easily beating his triple combination attacks like it was nothing.

They continued fighting until Alex couldn't keep up anymore and all of his Qi had ended.

"Wait, wait, I'm done," Alex said as he huffed and puffed. Du Yuhan too was out of breath and full of sweats.

"That was one of the most intense training sessions I've had in a long time. Thank you for that," Du Yuhan said.

"No problem. I really like this session too," Alex said. He took long breaths after being out of it, and just then, he noticed someone opening the door.

"Oh, someone's calling me?" he wondered and sent in his spiritual sense to see that it was actually his sister that was calling him.

"I'll have to leave, for now, brother Yuhan," he said. "My sister is calling me for some reason."

"Oh, okay. I will leave too," Du Yuhan said and walked out with Alex.

Alex walked down, past his home towards his sister's, and saw that his sister and others were standing around outside.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"You idiot," Luo Mei said loudly, surprising both him and Du Yuhan. "You should respond to messages quicker."

"Um, I was busy training with brother Yuhan," Alex said.

"Training?" Luo Mei looked at Du Yuhan with surprise, who looked aside, not being able to meet her eyes. "Anyway, you've been challenged," Luo Mei said, handing him his badge back.

Alex looked at his badge in surprise.

'Can't be, right?' he thought. The badge said that he was challenged by someone in the 15th rank.

'15… that was sister's right?' Alex thought. "Brother Yuhan, what number was Trevor ranked as?"

"Umm… 15, I think. Why?" he asked and saw Alex holding onto his badge. "No way, you didn't get—"

Alex gave a sad smile. "I did," he said. Alex looked at the time and saw that there were only about 15 minutes left before it was 9 pm and the fightings would be over.

"But you don't have any Qi," Du Yuhan said. "You won't be able to win."

"I know, but if I don't go over now, I forfeit the match anyway," Alex said.

"You're out of Qi?" Luo Mei asked with surprise.

"Yeah, I was training very intensely," Alex said with a sigh. With zero Qi in him at the moment, there was no way for him to fight against Trevor, let alone win. So, there was no choice but to give up right now.

"Sigh, I won't go then," he said. "I will give up on the rank."

"Are you really giving up?" Luo Mei asked with concern.

"Yes. I should have noticed when you messaged me, sister. I'm sorry," Alex said. "But I don't think there's a cause for any worries. I will just challenge him tomorrow and take back my rank."

Chapter 479: Challenging Trevor

Alex wasn’t as concerned about losing his rank as he thought he would be. The only thing that changed was that he would have to live in a slightly less nice-looking house for the night, but he was never concerned about the aesthetics of the place he lived in anyway.

Once he went to the new place, he gave Xiao Huang his own room and went on to cultivate for the night.

Once he was inside of a room, he didn’t need to worry about Xiao Huang seeing Pearl, so he was free to cultivate. He only wished that Xiao Huang did not call to ask him for something, as he wouldn’t be conscious for the night.

With that thought, he started cultivating. With his body cultivation reaching the 3rd realm of Meridian Tempering realm, he was getting closer and closer to his own cultivation base. So, the pain he was feeling was also growing more and more.

It took him a few seconds to adjust to the new pain and be able to focus on cultivating. Once he did, he soon fell asleep.

Alex woke up on the morning of Thursday. The moment he woke up, the pain he felt had increased once more. Pearl had once again broken through and was now in the 4th Meridian Tempering realm.

‘Are such fast breakthroughs okay?’ he wondered. Beasts were different from humans in how they were cultivated, and how they broke through. But, it was still weird to see that Pearl was breaking through so quickly even at higher realms.

‘He hasn’t trained much ever since we came back to the Tiger sect, so maybe I should stop him from training as fast as he is. I should definitely stop feeding him so many beast cores,’ Alex thought.

He needed to leave, so he found Xiao Huang and told him he was going to spend the whole day studying something and let him get out of the room.

Xiao Huang was also eager to go roam the city today, so he left early to find Luo Xing as well. However, before he left, he asked Alex to let them know when he was challenged by Trevor.

Alex nodded and went back to his room to log out.

He walked out of the capsule and finally had a moment to think. ‘My parents sent me to study, and yet here I am playing games. And somehow it worked. I wonder what they’ll think once they learn I’ve left university for good?’ he thought.

Today was the last day before exams which due to the assignments he already had, didn’t carry much credit. He simply had to attend all of the exams to pass at this point.

He sighed when he thought of all this and put it out of his mind. After that, he went to have his breakfast.

* * * * * *

It was late in the afternoon and the green-haired Trevor was in his master’s room, looking at his frustrated face.

“Where the hell do you go all day long? I called you so many times. Can’t you at least respond if you can’t come?” the Fifth Elder shouted angrily.

“I told you, master, I need to be somewhere else during the day, so I can’t do anything for that time,” Trevor said, with a hint of anger in his voice as well.

“Don’t run your mouth in front of me. I thought you were a talented young individual but turned out you were trash who couldn’t even win against someone who is weaker than you,” the Fifth Elder shouted.

“I could understand if it was with Du Yuhan, I heard he had Sword Qi, so it’s understandable if you lost to him. But how the hell did you manage to lose to a girl that’s 2 realms weaker than you?” he continued shouting.

Trevor showed signs of frustration as he himself was thinking about the same point. There was no reason for him to lose there, but he somehow managed to lose anyhow.

“Her attacks were way stronger than any I’m used to,” Trevor said. “Also, my attacks were weirdly ineffective against her.”

“That’s because you tried to fight her Superior Water spiritual roots with your Dual Earth-Metal roots. No matter how strong your attacks were, they would lose a bit of strength against her. I taught you this, and yet you kept using those skills against her.”

“Even an idiot would realize that at some point he needs to change his tactic and start fighting physically,” the Fifth Elder said.

‘This fucker! If it weren’t for him giving me stuff for free, does he think I would stay around, facing such humiliations?’ Trevor thought.

“You know what? You will go to the Fighting Hall right now and fight Luo Mei again. You need to beat her and become the first rank disciple no matter what,” the Fifth Elder said.

Trevor tried not to show the anger in his voice and spoke, “What if the Du Yuhan guy comes to take the rank away from me if I win, what do I do then?”

“No, he won’t. He didn’t take it when Luo Mei was missing, so it seems he doesn’t really want the rank for himself. Either that or the First Elder isn’t pressuring him at all. That disciple is an idiot too, not taking the opportunity to win.”

“Sigh, why are there so many idiots in our sect,” the Fifth Elder sighed.

“Okay, I will go and challenge the gir—” Trevor stopped speaking when his badge started buzzing in his storage bag.

“What’s wrong?” the Fifth Elder asked after he stopped mid-speech.

“I don’t know. Let me check,” he said as he took out his badge and saw the challenge being issued.

“That’s... the guy from yesterday; the one whose position I took,” Trevor said.

“What? Did the Sect Leader’s other disciple challenge you?” the Fifth Elder asked in surprise.

“Yeah, it’s him. Should I wait, or go right now?” Trevor asked.

“That guy is an idiot too. How is he so confident to challenge you after you beat him yesterday?” the Fifth Elder asked.

“I... didn’t,” Trevor said. “He didn’t show up to the fight, so I got the rank by forfeit. He must be coming to take back his rank.”

“I see. No need to wait at all. Just go and beat him. As far as I know, he should be hiding his strength and is around the 5th Mind Tempering realm. But you’ll surely win. Go!” the Fifth Elder said.

Trevor nodded and walked out of the room. He didn’t waste any time as he walked over to the fighting hall and went to the stage to wait for his number to be called out.

After their numbers were called out the first time, there were people that had started gathering around the stage, waiting to see the fight. Everyone knew who the 3rd ranking disciple was and who was coming to take his title back.

So, they were ready for a show to begin.

The fight that was taking place on top of the stage right now was coming to a close. The Elder refereeing the match stepped in to stop one of the fighter’s attacks and pronounced him the winner.

Then, he called to Alex and Trevor. Both of them were ready for the fight, so they showed themselves and walked up to the stage.

The Elder nodded when he saw them and took away their badge.

Alex looked at Trevor and was a little surprised at how different he looked from the normal person. Green hair didn’t look as natural as red or light bluish hairs did, even though their existence didn’t seem that different.

Alex hadn’t asked how Trevor fought at all, as he wanted to learn to fight him by fighting him. When he saw Trevor take out a sword, he sighed; there wasn’t going to be many challenges from a technical perspective.

Now, he could only hope that Trevor had some unique techniques up his sleeves so that he had some fun in the fights.

Alex was also thinking about how much ability of his he should use for some moment. Soon, he finalized on only using Common Qi, followed by not using spiritual sense at all.

Even though that was one of his strongest strengths, he wanted to keep that for unless he needed it. As for his other techniques such as invisibility and teleportation, he didn’t want to use it as it wouldn’t be much fun to use them in a simple fight.

Alex then took out his sword as well and got into a fighting stance. ‘Earth and Metal, right? I wonder what other spiritual roots he has,’ Alex thought.

“FIGHT!” the elder shouted.

Trevor’s sword immediately started glowing with brown color as he sent the slash flying towards Alex. This was the attack of a 9th Mind Tempering realm cultivator, so no matter how confident Alex was with his own body, he wasn’t going to risk it at all.

So, he dodged to the side and sent a glowing brown slash of his own to see how Trevor would react.

Instead of dodging, Trevor directly hit the slash aside. He felt the strength of the slash he had just felt and scoffed at it; it was too weak to be effective against him.

Alex smiled a little as well. His scouting attack had been misjudged as an actual attack. He could have some fun with this.

Without stopping, Alex sent out 4 other slashes, each the same strength as the last one, except for wood slash, which he attacked using the 2nd strike of the Elusive Heavenly Sword technique.

Since that was the only slash not from a mortal grade technique, Trevor mistook that to be Alex’s strongest attack.

He was starting to get overconfident now. All he thought now was that Alex was weak.

Trevor’s sword started to glow with yellow color, and at the same time, his feet were starting to release some unnoticeable brown lightly. He then brought his foot upwards and slammed it onto the ground. With the same momentum, he slashed his sword too.

A flying yellow slash that targeted Alex came his way. Alex wanted to dodge, but he didn’t notice the brown light underneath the slash that was faster than the slash itself.

Before Alex could do anything, the brown light reached his feet and suddenly rocks started spiking out of the grounds, immediately interlocking his feet. Alex couldn’t move anymore.

The metal slash still flew towards him, and there was no way for him to dodge anymore.

‘Screw it,’ Alex thought. Playtime was over, and it was time for him to fight seriously.

His sword started lighting up with yellow light as well; he was using mental energy too. Only, everyone could see that Alex’s yellow was much more vivid and close to golden color compared to Trevor’s.

Without much wait, Alex slashed and a yellow slash flew directly towards Trevor’s slash and struck it.

Chapter 480: Alex Vs Trevor

Alex swung his sword, and the golden slash flew towards the incoming yellow slash. The two slashes collided a few meters away from Alex.

BOOM

A loud explosion rang out on the stage that sent shockwaves to the audience themselves. Most of the ones standing on the inner edge, close to the stage were pushed back a little.

Even Trevor who was a little far away was pushed back by the explosion. He looked in shock at the force he just felt. There was no way in hell the force he felt had come from a person in the 5th Mind Tempering realm.

The force felt like his opponent was at his level, or at least close to his level in terms of strength. ‘How is that possible?’ he thought.

Alex took the majority of the force of the explosion stood right where he was. He hasn’t pushed back even a single step, but he couldn’t take the credit for that. After all, his feet were still stuck on the ground thanks to the earth spikes that made it impossible to remove.

Alex struck the earth around his feet and got himself free. The front side of his body felt numb from the shockwave from the explosion, but thanks to his body cultivation, he wasn’t harmed one bit.

Trevor got out of his stupor when he saw Alex getting free. He didn’t waste a single moment and sent a brown slash towards Alex.

Alex barely managed to break free from the constriction and dodged to the side. ‘I can’t fight him with ranged attacks. His normal attacks are as good as the best I can use without Sword Intent, and I do not know what other attacks he has,’ he thought.

So, without any hesitation, Alex dashed into close quarters and swung his sword. He didn’t put any Sword Intent into the attack, but the force of his normal physical attack was still quite strong.

One of Trevor’s feet nearly slipped by the unexpected force. ‘How is he so strong? I can’t even see any element in his attack,’ he thought.

Trevor once again used the constriction technique, but Alex was cautious about it so he clearly dodged it.

With the range, Trevor sent out another slash towards Alex. Alex dodged it in time and sent out a slash of his own.

The slash flew towards Trevor who hastily opened a massive bronze-colored barrier that was a combination of both Metal and Earth elements.

When the slash struck the elemental shield, Alex realized how strong the shield actually was. ‘That’s formed through Earth empowering Metal, isn’t it? Damn, that’s strong,’ he thought.

Normal attacks were one thing, but empowered attacks were going to be a problem for Alex. That was unless he started to use more techniques.

By now, his movement techniques were mostly being used with 0 friction on his body aside from the soles of his feet.

Alex tried to dash back in, but Trevor had started causing spikes of the earth to pop out of the ground everywhere around him.

“Shit!” Alex shouted and jumped up to fly. He was far away from the spikes, but he was now being openly targeted.

Many rocks started popping out from the ground that was then thrown towards the flying Alex in a barrage.

Alex flew to the side, and at the same time, his body started marbling as he used the Jade Skin technique to defend himself.

He managed to dodge most of the barrage, but the few that still hit him weren’t enough to do much damage.

Trevor started to get angry seeing none of his attacks working on Alex. He was happy that Alex couldn’t attack him, not much.

He felt like he really needed to do something to take care of it all. He had about 2 or 3 techniques he hadn’t shown yet that would probably put the match in his favor, but he decided to wait for a perfect chance to use them.

Alex saw that Trevor wasn’t attacking at all, so rushed in and swung his sword. Trevor’s sword glowed brown and he swung his sword as well.

Alex’s hands felt a little numb on impact, while Trevor clearly felt the pain. In fact, there was even a chink in Trevor’s sword. It was a very high-grade common sword, but it couldn’t hold up against Alex’s sword.

Trevor however didn’t panic. He had already learned his lesson from panicking about the last two fights he had.

Instead, he found the perfect time to make use of one of his techniques. With a single slam of his feet, numerous yellow energy started appearing from underneath the ground.

Alex was surprised to see them come out so fact. He dashed back to escape, but the energy didn’t let him. No matter where he went, they followed, and they were faster.

When they finally converged on him, the yellow light formed into a cage with bars on them with no opening for him to enter.

Trevor didn’t waste a moment and took a deep breath, and waved his hands in the air. Many weapons started forming in the sky.

Alex could see the amount of strain Trevor was putting on himself with the technique, but the thing that took away his attention were the dozens of swords, spears, axes, and arrows in the sky.

And they were all turning towards him.

Alex wasted no time and sent out a Palm of the Sun, but the Metal cage seemed to have been empowered by the Earth energy, so it didn’t break at all.

There were some cracks and he could probably escape the cage, but Alex didn’t have that sort of time or luxury. The weapons were about to fall on him.

Trevor didn’t waste any time with the theatrics and waved his hand. The many weapons flew towards Alex in the cage and would definitely hit him.

The Elder was ready to jump in the protect him, but at the last second, he stopped.

The many weapons crashed onto the cage, destroying it in an instant, as well as anything inside of it. Dush rose from the point of impact that threatened to cover the entire stage.

However, no one was looking at it anymore. They watched towards Trevor, who sensed something and immediately turned behind, only to see a sword coming towards him.

Even though he knew he shouldn’t panic, he couldn’t help it on such short notice. He flailed his arms trying to attack Alex with his sword.

Alex on the other hand was ready for it. His sword started shining golden with a clearly visible white light on the outline.

He intended to cut down the incoming blade, and so did his sword.

CHING

As easily as he could cut down a stationary apple, Alex cut down Trevor’s sword too. The broken blade flew out towards the crowd and someone managed to catch it and stop it.

People understood how dangerous the fight was and started stepping back. Only the strong ones stayed on the front to watch it clearly.

Alex then followed through with his attack and swung the sword down on Trevor. Trevor let go of his current sword and crossed his hands on his head to stop the attack.

When the sword landed on Trevor’s, Alex could hear a distinct metallic sound coming from it. The yellow robe was torn on the right hand of Trevor, and Alex could clearly see the slightly red metal that made his protective bracers.

“I see,” Alex said. “I guess it’s understandable that you have such items. It would be weirder if you didn’t.”

‘How did he appear behind me? He was in the cage? Does that mean he dodged all of my attacks?’ Trevor though.

Trevor’s hands were numb from the impact he withstood with his arms. A slight fear rose in his heart and immediately took out another sword.

This one was a bit weaker than the first one, but he had to use what he had. In fear, he started sending out slashes after slashes of metal attacks with earth empowering it.

Trevor was clearly fatigued from the burst of attacks he had done since he made that cage, but he wasn’t going to go down so easily.

Alex on the other hand had started using Sword Intent, so there was no reason for him to lose now.

He also sent out slashes after slashes of golden color towards Trevor’s slashes to combat them.

Out of the corner of his eyes, Alex saw a small brown light passing through the earth underneath him. He wanted to dodge out of the way, but he didn’t. Instead, he smiled as a small idea arose in him.

As the slashes landed on each other, the explosion that caused shockwaves was so strong that both of them could barely fight through them to balance themselves.

Finally, the brown light reached Alex once again, and the rock spiked up to constrict him.

Trevor smiled and rose his sword in the sky to create a giant sword that was at least a dozen times bigger than the one he was holding.

Even Alex was surprised by it.

Without hesitation, Trevor sent it flying towards Alex. Alex sent a slash of his own, but it could barely put a stop to it.

Even though he had elemental superiority, the amount of Qi Trevor put into the attack was not small.

However, Alex wasn’t worried. Just as the attack landed once again, he disappeared behind Trevor.

Trevor seemed to be ready for it, so he blocked with his bracers again. Only, there wasn’t a sword coming towards him, but rather a fist.

The golden-colored fist was going to become the reason for his defeat.

Chapter 481: Surprise Guests

The instant the giant sword had fallen on top of Alex, he teleported out of the earth constriction, and behind Trevor where his shadow was. The moment he appeared from the shadow, he immediately made a fist and started punching Trevor.

Mid punch, the golden lights appeared around him that converged onto his hands, causing it to glow the same color as well.

Trevor seemed to have noticed him and turned around to block it with his arms crossed as well.

The first landed perfectly on his bracelet, and Trevor felt the push from Alex’s punch. It was way stronger than his slash without any Qi, but that wouldn’t be enough to beat him.

However, just then, the golden light exploded as a burst of energy came forth from the punch. What felt like a strong attack at first, now seemed like an unstoppable force.

Trevor couldn’t keep his hands crossed anymore and the punch moved forward to land on his body. His entire being was thrown away from the stage as he flew out into the audience.

The entire audience was shocked beyond belief to see someone at Mind Tempering 9th realm being tossed aside like that.

Alex heard Trevor’s body dropping onto the ground far away and checked his own knuckles. Where his fist had met the bracers, the skins were split open from the impact.

‘I hit too hard,’ he thought. If it wasn’t for Trevor being unable to keep his hands to himself, he might’ve broken some bones as well.

The Elder immediately rushed to check Trevor, but his master got there before him. Trevor meekly stood up with only a look of horror on his face and a strong sensation of pain on his arm and chest.

He had lost. And it had been to someone that his master said was in the 5th Mind Tempering realm.

“How...” he asked, failing to understand the cause of his defeat.

The Fifth elder saw that he was okay and simply shook his head before leaving the place. His master did not care for him at all.

Alex didn’t stop to see that, however. Once he got his badge, he left the stage.

Luo Mei and the rest were down in the audience, looking at Alex with an awe.

“You... You didn’t use True Qi, did you?” Luo Mei asked in surprise.

“True Qi? No that was just common Qi,” Alex said.

“What?” Luo Mei cried in surprise. “Then how were your attacks so strong?”

“Don’t you remember how strong my attacks were previously? And I broke through a couple of times, so it’s much stronger. Well, there is also the fact that Trevor is weaker than any 9th Mind Tempering realm cultivator, so that’s mostly the reason why,” Alex said.

The stunned crowd let him and the others walk away.

Alex shared his victory with his sister and the other 2 for a little while before leaving for his training.

Du Yuhan was waiting for him, but it hadn’t been that long. “I heard you challenged Trevor, you won right?” he asked.

“Of course,” Alex said. “It was quite easy.”

“I thought so,” Du Yuhan said and the two of them started training. Alex was just a step away from fully learning how to use Sword Intent, and he wanted to learn it soon.

The two of them trained until late at night, and Alex finally returned back to his room. He cultivated for the rest of the night and finally stopped in the morning.

He wondered if it was okay for him to break through once more, but since he had done it just a few days ago, he decided not to.

It was a Friday, and the fighting hall gave unlimited challenges to everyone, but no one challenged Alex at all. Even Yang Ma, who he thought would come to challenge him out of stubbornness didn’t do anything at all.

So, he decided to spend the rest of the day learning more about formations. He started carving the newly bought blank formation rods and created new formations.

He had planned on doing it for the entire day. However, his day didn’t go as he planned. Around noon, he got a message from his master. Only it wasn’t from Wen Cheng, but rather Ma Rong.

It said ‘Come to the City lord’s manor right now. They want to see you again.’

“Huh? The city lord wants to see me?” Alex thought with surprise. He wouldn’t have expected the City lord to give much care to him, but it made sense since he was partly responsible for coming up with the inferior pill that would eventually lead to making a better pill for his mother’s treatment.

“Okay,” he told his master and left the house. He walked out of the sect and walked his way to the manor. The manor wasn’t very far away from the sect, so he reached there in about 10 minutes of walking distance.

Ma Rong was waiting for him outside, so she called him when she saw him.

Alex walked up to her and was a little surprised at how much her cold aura had disappeared. It was like she could fully control her constitution to do what it did as she wished.

“You’re finally here,” she said.

“Yes, master,” he replied. “Do you know why we’re being called?”

“I don’t know, but senior Kang specifically called for both you and me, so I called you,” Ma Rong said.

“Oh, okay,” Alex said.

The gate opened and the old man showed up. “Oh, the young man is here. Are you ready to come in, sect leader Ma?” old man Kang asked.

“Yes, senior,” Ma Rong said and walked in behind the old man. Alex walked in closely too.

They walked through the pathway in between the front lawn and made their way into the house.

Inside were a few people. 4 to be exact. Alex couldn’t see the princess or her guard, but the City lord and lady Mo were there.

Next to them was a middle-aged man with a lean body, sitting comfortably in the lounge area.

The middle-aged man had short hair that was parted on the left and had a clean-shaven face. His face had a fair complexion that stood out to his black robes.

‘Someone from the Royal Fu Academy?’ Alex wondered and finally laid his eyes on the young man that was sitting beside him.

The young man was a little on the chubbier side, but not very much, and his height made it look even less obvious.

He was wearing the same black robe as the other man, meaning that he was from the Royal Fu Academy as well.

However, when Alex saw the face, he was surprised to see that he recognized him. Even Ma Rong showed a hint of surprise when she saw him.

“Brother Huang?” Alex called out.

“Oh, brother Yu? Good to see you again,” Huang Fu said with a face of surprise. He hadn’t expected to see Alex there.

“Ah, it’s good to see you t—”

“Greetings, senior Lai. I hope you’re doing good,” Ma Rong said with a respectful bow, cutting into Alex’s conversation with the young man.

“Oh, hey Little Ma, you’re finally here,” the middle-aged man said with a jovial tone to his voice that did not suit his age at all.

‘Senior... Lai?’ Alex’s brain immediately churned out an answer and he also bowed quickly.

“Greetings, senior,” he said.

The middle-aged man looked at him with a hint of curiosity. “Hmm, I have seen you before, haven’t I?” he said with a tilt of his head.

“Master, he is Yu Ming. The one who beat me in the competition,” Huang Fu said with a hint of embarrassment on his face.

“OH! It’s you. You were the one that I met in the Alchemy hall in the capital, weren’t you?” the middle-aged man asked.

“Yes senior,” Alex said. “I’m happy that you remembered me.”

“Nonsense, there’s no way I would forget someone as talented as you,” the middle-aged man said. “Yu... Ming... so, you were the one who created the recipe for the sweating pill I got. Not bad.”

“I can’t be said to have created the pill senior, I more so stumbled onto it,” Alex said.

“All alchemy is just people stumbling on to things. If the first people didn’t stumble onto learning different plants and animals did different things, we wouldn’t have alchemy.”

“Besides, if it were so easy to stumble onto, people would’ve already stumbled onto that recipe. You deserve credit where credit is due, boy,” the middle-aged man said.

“Thank you, senior,” Alex said.

“Anyway, little Ma, come sit. I haven’t spoken to you in such a long time. It feels like I’m meeting an old friend right now,” the middle-aged man said.

“I had expected to see you in the capital 2 months ago, but you must’ve been very busy then,” Ma Rong said.

“Sigh, that’s true. Along with teaching this young disciple of mine, I also had to look into ways to cure little Wen’s mother.”

“If it weren’t for your disciple finding that pill, I would’ve no idea where to look into to do what. I was trying everything I learned from that-anyway, it’s good that your disciple got the recipe for that pill, even if he ‘stumbled’ on it,” the middle-aged man said with a smile.

Alex felt a bit bashful, seeing the Royal Alchemist tease him. He saw that the Royal Alchemist had started talking with Ma Rong, and she sat down to speak with him too.

So, he sat down beside her and started speaking with Huang Fu. He didn’t know if there was more to this for his visit today, but Alex didn’t care much for now.

Chapter 482: Questions Unanswered

“By the way, young man, how did you come up with the recipe? Did you have any information that helped you in finding that pill?” the Royal alchemist asked.

“No, senior. As I had said earlier, I really did stumble upon the pill. I was trying to make pills using the knowledge of ingredients I previously had and how they interacted with each other,” Alex said.

“I had a lot of time in my hands, so I tried every single combination I could find before I made one that didn’t threaten to blow up my cauldron. That one ended up being the pill and I made a recipe from there.”

“I tried to improve the recipe a bit, but the most I could do was a few tries to improve the process to no avail. I was throwing rocks in the dark and hoping to hit something.”

“Hmm,” the Royal Alchemist said. “What’s the best harmony you made?” he asked.

“Um, I believe it was around 28%,” Alex said.

“28… that was the same thing I got. Meaning, you were definitely giving your best when improving the pill. Only you didn’t have proper knowledge,” the Royal alchemist said.

Alex remembered something and felt like this was the time to ask that. However, he wasn’t sure if asking the question was rude or not, but he tried to go a different route.

“I did try my best. I even tried to use different combinations of rotations, speed, and temperature to change the structure and composition of the powder, but I was too naive to think I would learn anything about them by trying a few tests,” Alex said.

Huang Fu’s eyes went wide with shock, while the Royal Alchemist’s eyes went wide in surprise and a glee appeared on his face.

“You know about Structure and Composition?” he asked. “Did you master already start teaching you this?”

Ma Rong who was sitting next to the royal alchemist shook her head. “I taught him nothing about it. I myself don’t know anything about it to explain it to you,” Ma Rong said.

“Then how?” the Royal Alchemist asked confusedly.

“Is something wrong, senior Lai?” Fu Wen asked.

“Not wrong, just… odd. He knows something that he shouldn’t know at this point in his career,” the Royal Alchemist said.

“I learned it from the book,” Alex said hurriedly. He didn’t want the Royal Alchemist to misunderstand him. “I learned it from a book from the higher floors from the library in the capital,” he said.

“Book?” the Royal Alchemist said in surprise. “Written by who?”

“Uh…” Alex started thinking of a name he read in those books. ‘Who was it written by again? Think! Think! It was written by… Lai Q—”

“It was written by you,” Alex said. His face had shock written all over it as the realization had surprised him.

“I did?” the Royal Alchemist asked in confusion and suddenly his eyes lit up. He couldn’t help but bring his palm to his face in annoyance.

“Tsk. It was probably during that one time in my youth when I was very young before I got my title from the emperor. The royal ministers approached me and asked me to write a book for Alchemy given how outstanding they saw my knowledge then to be.”

“In my foolishness, I must have written everything I had learned up to that point. It seems I put in there things that shouldn’t be so easily public as it would only add a layer of confusion to the new alchemists,” the Royal Alchemist said.

“Do you remember what is written in those books exactly?” the Royal Alchemist asked.

“Uh…” Alex remembered the book word for word, but he changed it up a little and explained the writings of the book.

“I see,” the Royal Alchemist said. “That does make me relieved that I did not give out the most important thing.”

“Which is?” Alex asked curiously.

The Royal alchemist smiled, “I don’t fall for those easily now, young man. You can give up,” he said.

“Huh?” Alex thought before realizing what had just happened. “I’m sorry senior, I did not mean to pry for answers. I was just curious,” he said.

“It’s good that you are curious. As for learning about Structure and constitution, you are honestly too new to alchemy as a whole to teach you. Even little Ma who’s been making pills forever will have difficulty understanding the exact concept behind the structure and compositions of powders and pills,” the Royal Alchemist said.

“So you can forget about them for now.” The Royal alchemist seemed hell-bent on not answering anything about it. Alex sighed and got a little dejected learning that the answers were in his grasp, but it slipped right under him.

“However,” the Royal alchemist added after seeing Alex’s face. “If you still wish to learn about it, find me once you successfully make a Heaven Grade True Pill. At that point, you should be eligible to learn about it.”

“Heaven’s grade?” Alex thought with a bit of contemplation. Given how fast he was learning alchemy, it was only a matter of time before he could make Heaven-grade pills.

“I understand, senior,” Alex said. “I will strive to make a Heaven Grade True Pill,” he said.

“Good luck,” the Royal alchemist said. “You will need it, considering how awfully unrefined most True pill recipes are.”

“Eh?” Alex said. “You mean to say that most pills can’t reach 50% harmony just because I have the recipes?”

“Sort of,” Ma Rong said from the side. “If everything from ingredients to pill making went perfectly then you can easily reach the 50% harmony mark with ease. However, it’s hard to do so perfectly, so it doesn’t usually end up reaching 50% harmony.”

“Oh,” Alex said. “Then… can’t we just refine the pills as much as we can ourselves,” Alex asked.

“Yes, you can,” the Royal Alchemist said. “In fact, that is exactly what you do with the recipes you get. If the ingredients are abundant, you go through a period of trial and errors to see if you can improve the pill.”

“Many alchemists do end up improving most publicly released pills, but they don’t share it with the general audience. So, the ones you get will mostly have problems with it,” the Royal Alchemist said.

Alex felt like he was learning a little more about the alchemy world from the Royal alchemist. His master taught him as much as she could, but even she would forget to bring up such topics as they never naturally came up during any learning periods or other such conversations.

“Anyway,” the Royal Alchemist said. “I called you here for something else than just have a good ol’ chat.”

Ma Rong and Alex’s faces grew curious.

The Royal Alchemist smiled and said, “You’ll be happy to hear that your little contribution really did work.”

“My… contribution…” his eyes went wide. “It worked?” he asked in surprise. “So the sweating pill helped her through the Mortal Cleansing?”

“Yes,” the Royal Alchemist did. “All of the outer filth was removed, and her body is back to being well enough for the body itself to do the rest of the work.”

“I have given her some pill to help with it, but even without our won help, she will be okay now,” the Royal Alchemist said.

“Thank god it worked,” Alex said.

“No, thank YOU,” the City lord said. “It was all thanks to you that my mother was healed, young man. Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.”

“I don’t need anything, City lord. I’m just happy to help,” Alex said.

“Well, even if you say that the emperor already knows of what you did and has asked me to give you some compensation,” the Royal alchemist said.

“We can’t really put a price on someone’s life, but with how much you’ve helped, I hope this much is enough.”

The Royal Alchemist handed him a bag. Alex didn’t know what was inside, so he curiously checked inside.

When he saw what was inside, his eyes went wide. There were only 2 types of things inside, but there were a lot of them.

Alex could see about 4 to 5 thousand different True Spirit stones, as well as hundreds upon hundreds of different alchemy ingredients.

“The Emperor wanted to give you some proper rewards other than just money, but you will have to make do with that. The empire is in a bit of trouble right now, and I don’t think he has enough free time to care much for anything else,” the City lord said.

“No, senior. This is enough. This is more than enough. In fact, I think I’ve been compensated for more than I deserve,” Alex said.

“Nonsense. Do you think that little of my mother’s life? Take it. I added a portion of my own in there to give it to you for saving my mother’s life. Even though senior Lai made the pill, it is you who came up with it, so you deserve a lot of credit,” the City lord said.

“I… I understand,” Alex said. He was still baffled by the amount he saw in the bag and a small bud of happiness grew in him.

The bud of happiness was about to grow some more, but it was stumped on by something else. A feeling, that had appeared out of nowhere.

Every single piece of emotion Alex was feeling at the moment was washed away as a single feeling of dread remained.

The beast horde for the month was coming.

Chapter 483: Get in the Formation, Alex

Alex could sense it once more. The feeling was budding in him and it would take a few hours for it all to actually happen, but the beast horde was in fact coming.

‘Dammit, the timing matches too,’ he thought. His previously happy face was now nowhere to be seen.

The city lord and others saw the change too.

“Do you not like this gift now?” the City Lord asked. “I can get something else for you if you want me to.”

“NO!” Alex shouted. “I mean, no, this is fine. It’s better than fine. It’s just...” he didn’t know what to do. The beast horde was coming and he needed to let the people know, he needed to let the entire empire know.

“I need to leave,” Alex said. “I’m so sorry, but I need to go right now.”

“Did we offend you by any chance?” Lady Mo who hadn’t spoken a lot in the conversations asked.

“Not at all. It was an honor to come here. It was an honor to talk with senior Lai too,” Alex said. “But I really need to go right now.”

“Is everything alright?” Ma Rong asked. She had never seen her disciple this distressed.

“No,” Alex said. “Something is wrong.”

“It seems I will have to take my leave too then. I will come some time again, City Lord,” She said. She then turned to the Royal Alchemist and said, “Senior Lai, please come to the sect once. Let us treat you a bit.”

“Sure, sure,” the Royal Alchemist said.

“Let’s go,” Ma Rong said and walked out. Alex hurriedly walked next to her.

Once they reached outside, Alex immediately started to fly without waiting to be outside of the manor.

Ma Rong also flew behind him.

“Master, it’s—”

“Is the beast horde coming?” she asked.

“Y-yes,” Alex said with surprise. “How did you know?”

“I guessed. It’s about the same time as it always comes, and you are the only one who knows it,” Ma Rong said. “Still, it’s quite weird how only you can know it. Is there something you are hiding from me?”

“Absolutely not,” Alex said.

“Alright, go and tell Wen Cheng. I will go prepare the elders to defend,” Ma Rong said.

“Okay, master,” Alex said and flew to the Tiger sect. He wanted to enter while flying, but a few guards stopped him. They were angry at him for flying in a banned area, but they didn’t immediately do anything to him. After all, they recognized who it was.

“Please complain about this to my master later. There is no time right now,” Alex said and flew back again.

He brought out his talisman and messaged Wen Cheng.

“Master, the beast horde is coming. We need to prepare and caution the other cities too,” Alex said into the talisman.

He kept flying and got near the peak of the Tiger sect’s mountain. Where he was around the 50th ranked house, he dropped to the ground and sprinted up.

‘I need to caution sister too,’ he thought and ran to her house. When he reached her house, he started knocking on it.

“Sister! Open up,” he said.

It took a few seconds for him to hear a ‘wait’ from inside and the door opened up. The one who opened it was Luo Xing.

“Oh, hey little brother. What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’m looking for you guys. Is sister inside?” he asked.

“Yeah, come on in,” she said and brought him in. “Oh right, here,” she said and handed him something.

Alex took what she had given him and realized that it was a talisman. “What’s this?” he asked.

“That’s the formation you wanted to make. I tried my best and came up with that. Try and see if it works,” she said.

“Later,” Alex said and put it in his storage bag

“Yu Ming, what’s going on? It sounded like you were in a hurry,” Luo Mei said.

“Sister, another beast horde is coming. You guys need to get ready,” Alex said.

“What?” Luo Mei said in surprise. “Oh no, did you tell master?”

“Yeah, I sent him a message, but I’m not sure if he’s seen it or not though,” Alex said.

“Let’s go and make sure he knows it,” Luo Mei said.

“No, you go. I’ve got some place to be,” Alex said.

“What’s going on?” Luo Xing was a bit confused. She couldn’t follow the conversation at all, but she could see that something was wrong.

“The beast horde is coming and I need to report to master,” Luo Mei said to her sister. “Let’s go.”

She took Luo Xing and walked out. Alex walked out as well and ran up towards his master’s manor.

Now that Luo Mei knew about it, he could depend on her to release the news to everyone. As for him, he needed to find a way to block the feeling he was getting so that the beasts couldn’t target him.

If they did, he would most likely die, along with the entire city. It wasn’t just a massive beast horde the likes of which he only saw in the capital, that would come for him.

It was going to actually be a saint realm beast that was targeting him as well.

He still didn’t know the reason behind why he was targeted. Maybe it was his body, maybe he had taken something from the forest that the beasts wanted, or maybe it was because of his spiritual roots.

Whatever the case may be, all that he was sure of was that the beasts were after him and he needed to hide.

He reached his master’s manor and without stopping, ran to the back of the house. There were the formation rods for the formations that had helped him stay out of the beasts’ senses that one time.

He banked his entire hope on it.

Once he reached the place, he started pouring in his Qi to one of the nodes. As required, he was using True Qi since that was the only one that would work the formation.

His 50% True Qi started to quickly deplete as it required a lot from him to run the formation. As a self-tempering realm cultivator, using True Qi wasn’t common at all, but he did.

His True Qi quantity and quality would certainly increase by a lot when he reached the True realms, but for now, he had to deal with it.

It took him a total of about 20% of the total True Qi to activate the barrier first. The barrier opened and Alex could see a small barrier pop up at the middle with about 1-meter diameter in size.

However, that was only what he saw from the outside. Inside, the size was totally different. The barrier formation could not only stop people from leaving or entering, but it could also increase the space inside the barrier to make it quite massive.

Alex then started pouring in his True Qi into the 2nd formation. This one took a little more out of him as this was a higher quality of formation. So, when it would run, it would run at a much better efficiency than the barrier.

It also had more strokes in general, so it would require more Qi.

This was the Spirit Disorienting formation. Anyone stuck in there would be stuck for almost a full month. The time would be less if Alex set the formation incorrectly, and more if he set it up correctly.

However, Alex didn’t care about that. He only needed the formation to work for today only. Afterward, he would remove the formation until next month again.

The Spirit Disorienting formation could make people’s senses unable to tell direction once they were inside the fog. Also, they would randomly be teleported around, not sure where they would end up.

That was the problem anyone who was trapped in the formation would face. However, Alex was not a victim of the formation like he was last time. He was now the owner of it.

He lost another 25% of True Qi, and the Spirit Disorienting formation was set up as well. Without hesitation, he walked in.

“Nice. So it really does work,” he thought when he sensed that the disorienting aspect of the formation was no longer working on him.

Not just that, he had much clearer visibility of the surroundings as well. While he couldn’t exactly see everything, he could see the barrier on the other side with some haze in between. That was the most he could do in this foggy formation, but that was way more than what any victims could do.

Since he was the one who set the formation, his Qi was running across the formation nodes, constantly being used as a pathway to make the pattern of the formation on the air using Qi alone.

Because of that, the formation regarded him as the master and didn’t work on him. That was one of the instructions written on the piece of paper that came along with the formation.

Alex was happy for a little while realizing that he was free in the formation and could walk out of it and the barrier with ease.

However, his happiness soon dwindled away when he realized what he was feeling.

The feeling of the beast horde, was still there. Even though he was inside the formation that was supposed to be hiding him, it was not working at all.

“Oh no! Is it perhaps that one concealment formation that did it? But that can’t be,” Alex thought. His own immortal grade concealment technique didn’t work, so it was unlikely that one that was focused on hiding sound and images was responsible for hiding him.

Alex’s fear crept upon him as he realized that his one last trick up his sleeve didn’t work at all, and now he was going to be the cause of a tragedy that would result in everyone he knew and cared for dying.

Chapter 484: Preparation for Battle

Alex started getting worried more and more. He ran around inside the formation wondering if there was any special place, hoping even that there was one. However, no matter what he did, the feeling just wouldn't go away.

Instead, it grew more and more, and soon the beasts would come here. He had an hour or two at most, maybe even less.

"No, no, no, no. I have to do something. I need to run away from here, or this place will turn to hell," Alex thought.

His masters, his senior brother and sister, his friends, and everyone else he ever cared about in this game, in this world, they were all here. If the reason they were hurt ever turned out to be him, he would never forgive himself.

"What should I do?" he started thinking. The only thing he could think of was to go ask the Royal Alchemist for help.

However, the best he could do was keep away the other beasts. The Saint beast would still be a problem. Given the aura he felt from the Royal Alchemist today, he wouldn't even be a match for him.

The man wasn't that high even in the True realm, and so none of the pills he could make would ever do anything to the Saint beast.

The next thing he thought of was flying away on his boat as far away from the city as he could.

The beasts were coming from the south, so that was a no-go. The east and the west too wasn't far away from the beast horde attack and he would be found within minutes.

As for the north, that was where he had flown last time to get away from the beasts and it had worked. However, this time, going north meant going towards the forbidden field, and there was no way for him to run away there.

Even if he did, he would maybe escape from the saint beast, but the thousands upon thousands of other beasts would surely destroy the entire city, killing everyone there.

Neither of the 2 ideas he had could save the ones he cared about in this place. There was only a single thing that he could think of that could save them.

He started deliberating on whether to do that or not.

* * * * *

Wen Cheng was in a meeting and hadn't had time to check the talisman that kept on buzzing in his storage bag.

He would be done with the meeting in just a few minutes so he decided to check it later.

"When do we go back to a normal schedule, sect leader? We've been doing this for a week now," an elder said.

"Just a few more days. There should be a beast attack happening soon. As soon as that takes place, we will go back to our normal schedule. The routines will go back to normal too," Wen Cheng said.

"Is there really a beast attac—"

SLAM

A door suddenly opened surprising everyone. Wen Cheng was about to scold the person coming in so rudely when he saw that it was his own disciple.

Luo Mei rushed inside, amidst the eyes of the many elders, who were dissatisfied with her behavior.

"Master, did you get the message?" she asked.

"What message? Why did you barge in like that? We have a meeting going on in here," Wen Cheng said.

"The Beast Horde, it's coming. You should have gotten a message," Luo Mei said.

"What?" Wen Cheng said in surprise and took out the talisman to read it. As she had said, there indeed was a message from Alex letting him know the beast horde was coming.

"Elders, the time is here. Get everyone ready; we will be going to battle with the beasts," Wen Cheng said.

The elders looked around in surprise.

"Hurry!" Wen Cheng shouted.

The elders didn't dare delay anymore. As everyone was walking out, Wen Cheng called out to an elder.

"Get me the communication talisman to the capital," he said. The elder nodded and quickly ran away to get the communication talisman.

"Where's your junior brother?" he asked.

"He just left my house, saying he had something to do," Luo Mei said.

"Alright. Go to him, and see if you can get any more information from him. Any little information can help us a lot," Wen Cheng said.

"Yes master," Luo Mei said and ran away.

The elder returned with the communication talisman which Wen Cheng immediately used.

"Warning! I am Wen Cheng, sect leader of The first grade Tiger sect. The Beast Horde is coming. Please transfer the messages to all cities in the empire," Wen Cheng said.

He repeated the message two more times before stopping. If they didn't get the message by then, there was nothing else he could do.

He then left the building and went up to the mountain to find Alex, but he wasn't there. He found Luo Mei close by and asked, "Where's Yu Ming?"

"I don't know master. He isn't here and isn't responding to my messages either," Luo Mei said.

"What?" Wen Cheng said. "Where did he go?"

* * * * *

Ma Rong had returned back to the sect and started giving out orders. Every one of the elders was to fight in the upcoming battle.

"Sect leader, how do we know the beast horde is coming? Was there some message?" the Second Elder asked.

"Not yet, but it's coming. Believe me," Ma Rong said.

"I do, but…" the Second Elder said, " but if what you said is true then, my wife will be in danger. I don't know where she is right now, but I don't think she will be able to handle the beasts if they ever come her way."

"She's always been an alchemist and was never a fighter. I-I'm worried, sect leader," the Second Elder said.

"Don't worry, she'll be fine. Even if she's not a fighter, the Third Elder is pretty capable of saving herself," the Grand Elder said. "However, I do understand your worry. My disciple is out too, and I have no way of contacting him."

"Alright, that's enough time wasted. We should go to the city wall now and prepare for the beasts," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, sect leader," Everyone said in unison.

"Alright, you guys go ahead. I will go and see if we can get a little help," Ma Rong said and flew away.

She flew until she reached the place she had left from just a few minutes ago, the City Lord's house.

She went in, barging even until she found the royal alchemist who was still sitting and talking with the city lord.

"Little Ma, did you return for something?" he asked.

"Yes, senior Lai. The beast horde is coming, and I was hoping you could help us," she said.

"The… the beast horde?" the City lord asked in surprise. "How do y—" suddenly his storage bag started buzzing.

Fu Wen reached into his bag and took out a talisman before reading the message. "She's right, senior Lai. A beast horde is indeed coming. I just got the message too," he said. "Can you help us?"

"Beast horde? Hmm… I should be able to control the beasts a bit, but that's the most I could do. I don't have the means to fight them," the Royal alchemist said.

"I'm pretty sure the Saint beast is coming too," Ma Rong said. "Can you help us with that?"

"The saint beast?" a trace of fear appeared in the Royal Alchemist's face. "I'm afraid I can't help with that at all little Ma. Anything in the Saint realm is out of my league."

"Then please help us the most you can, senior," Ma Rong said and left them there to do anything they wanted.

"Get the men and guards to prepare for battle," the City lord said to his wife, lady Mo who was sitting right by.

"Right away," she said and walked away to give orders to the leaders of the guards and soldiers.

"Senior Lai, please come with me," he said. "Even if you can stay there as just a healer, that would be a lot of help."

"Yes, I shall do that," Lai Qing, the Royal Alchemist stood up to leave for this battle against the beasts. He did not know how useful he would be, but he would try his best.

Ma Rong flew towards the Tiger sect. Given that the City lord got a message, the talisman back at their sect should also have gotten a similar message.

She landed outside of the Tiger Sect and called out to Alex using her communication talisman. She was worried for him since the beasts would always come for him, so she wanted to do something to hide him.

She didn't know what, but she had to start with him anyway, so she came to get him.

However, no matter how many times she messaged him, he wouldn't respond to her messages at all.

"What's going on?" she wondered and walked into the Tiger sect.

The entire sect was mostly empty. Even the front of the Tiger sect was kept open with only a few guards keeping watch.

They didn't dare stop Ma Rong after recognizing who she was, especially in this time of crisis.

Ma Rong flew towards the top of the mountain to find Wen Cheng and see if he knew anything about where Alex was.

Just as she was thinking of it, she noticed Wen Cheng walking along with Luo Mei, as if he was in a hurry to go somewhere.

"Wen Cheng," she said while coming down. "Where's Yu Ming? He's not answering my messages."

"Ma Rong?" Wen Cheng said in surprise. "Yu Ming, he… he's not answering my messages either, and I can't find him anywhere in the sect. It's like… he's gone."

Chapter 485: The Emperor“s Search

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng started searching for Alex, but he was nowhere to be found. He didn't respond to any sort of message at all.

Alex was the only one the Saint beasts were after, so after not finding him for nearly 15 minutes, they started to get worried that he might have already been found by the beast and maybe even be killed.

With no choice, Wen Cheng let out a sect-wide message, asking if anyone knew anything about where Alex was. That was the only way he could think of finding him.

* * * * *

3 men were inside an inn in Rosewood City.

"Any news yet?" one of them asked.

"No," the other one said. "I tried searching around, but it seems most people didn't feel anything. I have called the bald guy here. He didn't want to give me an answer, but I doubt he will want to do the same to you."

"Alright then, let's wait," one of the others said.

So, they waited. The inn was empty for the most part, but the three didn't seem to care.

"They should be fine right?" one of them asked.

"It should be mostly fine. I'm ready to fly back should they ask for our help again," one of them said.

"Look, he's here."

The door opened and a man walked in.

"I told you, old Yang, I don't want to talk with you bastard. I don't care who you are with, I don't want anything to do with you," the bald man said as he walked in.

"What? Not even me?" one of the men said as they lifted their hood.

"Y-Your majesty? Why are you here?" the bald man said with surprise.

"Am I not allowed in a city of my own empire? Is the Honor sect so big that they can question why I am anywhere?" the Emperor who was staying hidden until now said.

"Your highness, you are always welcome. Whatever I said, please don't mind it. They were all directed towards that bastard," the bald man said as he gestured towards the red-haired Yang.

"Whatever, I don't have time for your grievances. I'm here for some information and will leave as soon as I get it. There is a beast horde incoming and I don't want to stay here for much longer either," the Emperor said.

"Yes, please, ask whatever you want. If I know of it, I will tell you," he said.

"Okay, 2 weeks ago we felt a wave of an aura pass through the capital. It turned out only us 3 sensed it in there, and none of the others did. After we left searching for more information, we realized that there were very few people who managed to sense it."

"We are searching for the source of that aura and came to ask if you know something about it. I know of a fact that it came from this general direction. It was maybe even released from this very city," the Emperor said.

The bald man's eyes brightened. "2 weeks ago? I knew I wasn't going mad. I told the sect elders to see what was up, but none of them felt anything and instead thought I was just talking nonsense. Damn those fools, they think I'm going senile with old age," the bald man said.

"I mean, they're not wrong," the red-haired Yang chipped from the side.

"Stop talking," the Emperor ordered. "So you did feel it. Where was it from?"

"That… it's weird. I felt the aura come from somewhere up northwest, but you should know what's there, right your highness?" the bald man said.

"The desert? I've heard of it in the records. I've never been there myself," the Emperor said.

"Right, that desert. I felt the energy come from the desert area," the bald man said.

"That can't be true," the Emperor said. "From what I know of, there shouldn't be any Qi in that area. Even people with a cultivation base lose all of it when they go there. How can something with such a profound aura originate from there," the Emperor said.

"Besides, the desert is so big that it will be impossible to find anything in it at all," the red-haired Yang said. "I once went there when I was still in the True realm when there was a sect in the desert. I had immediately lost all of my Qi and didn't want to stay there any longer."

"But the desert is massive right?" Feng who had been staying quiet this whole time said. "Even if we know it's there, it will be impossible to find it, assuming he's not lying in the first place."

"I promise on my longevity, your highness. The aura definitely originated from the desert," the bald man said.

"Hmm… the desert. How do we enter there again?" Feng asked.

"If I remember correctly, it should be through the mountains in the Scarlet City," the Emperor said as he recalled the map in his head.

"Isn't there a sect there? I remember my grandson mentioning it a few months ago," the red-haired Yang said.

"Hmm, maybe we should go there. My daughter and nephew are there looking after my sister-in-law. I heard she was also healed recently. It might be a good idea to go there," the Emperor said.

"Wait," the old man Feng said. "Didn't the information for the beast horde come from there too? I thought it said Tiger sect."

"Right, it did," the old man Yang said. "Hmm… maybe it is a good idea to go and see how they find out about the beast horde. They predicted it last time correctly, so there must be something important there."

"Now I'm curious too. Let's leave. Thank you for your help, sect leader," the Emperor said.

"Uh, I haven't been the sect leader for ages— I mean, its my honor, your majesty," the bald man said.

The three of them left the inn and flew up into the air above the Rosewood City. The entire city was empty with the only people visible being a crowd on the city walls, ready to fight.

"How far is Scarlet City again?" the old man Feng asked.

"About 20 minutes away for us," the red-haired Yang said

"Let's go," the Emperor said and put on his hood again before flying.

The 3 of them flew at an incredible speed that no flying artifact could ever hope to achieve. Their speed was just something most True realm cultivators could even imagine.

They flew on top of the road that would usually be filled with peddlers and merchants and caravans. But, now, it was empty. There was not a single soul in sight for the longest time.

The 3 Saint Realm cultivators couldn't even sense any bandits outside. With the Beast Horde incoming, there was not a single sight of anything.

"It's coming," Feng said as he looked to his left. Far away in the southern forest, he could see the trees moving.

"God damn, they really can predict the beast horde's timing," the red-haired Yang said.

"That will maybe take 15 more minutes, let's hurry up," the Emperor said and was about to increase his speed when he sensed something.

"Fuck!" the red-haired Yang said as he sensed it too.

Feng's face went white with fear as he sensed it too.

The Saint Beast was amongst the ones coming in the direction of the Scarlet city.

"How are we so unlucky to meet that damned thing? He's way too strong for us," the red-haired Yang said.

"Do we retreat, your highness?" Feng asked.

"We shou—" the Emperor was about to answer when suddenly his face twisted. Not only him, Yang and Feng too had massive changes in their faces all of a sudden. And none of them were for the better.

From what their senses were telling them, there wasn't just a single Saint Beast coming their way, there were 2.

"Your highness, this is bad. We already lost to a single beast. If a second one decides to fight us then we are done for," Yang said with a worried face.

"Your highness, I seriously suggest that we retreat back," Feng said.

"NO!" the Emperor said. There was a hint of a tremor in his voice, but he spoke with as much determination as he could muster. "My daughter is in that city. I cannot abandon her," he said.

"Shit!" the red-haired Yang said. "My grandson is there too. Fuck! I hope we don't have to fight them."

"Let's go," the Emperor said and all 3 of their flying speeds increased drastically.

"How much further?" the Emperor asked after a few minutes.

"We should be close to the Gap soon. After that, it's at most 5 minutes. We will surely make it before the beasts do," Yang said.

"That's for the best. As long as my daugt—" the Emperor suddenly stopped talking and looked down at the road next to the gap.

Feng also saw what was on the road and was a little surprised.

"What's that idiot doing there? Does he not realize a beast horde is coming?" Yang said.

The emperor didn't speak and instead flew down from the sky. The other 2 followed suit.

"Young man, there is a beast horde incoming, you should quickly run away from here," the Emperor said.

The young man turned to look at them. When he did, the other 3 could see nothing but fear in his eyes. And even then, the young man spoke up and said, "I know. The beasts are here for me, and if I let them have me, I will probably be able to save the people I care about."

Chapter 486: More arrivals

"You 3 seniors should run away quickly. The beasts should be here at any moment," Alex said. "You should go help out the others in the city that will have to fight the other beasts."

The 3 saint realm figures couldn't believe what they were hearing.

"Junior, are you alright in the head? What makes you think the beasts are after you?" the red-haired Yang said.

"I… I just know. You should hurry away instead of staying here. It will be very dangerous here very fast," Alex said.

"Haha, what makes you think that we can't handle a bunch of beasts?" Feng said.

"I don't doubt you guys can fight the beasts normally but are you sure you guys can fight the saint beast coming over here?" Alex asked.

"What? Why would the saint beast be com— Shit!" the red-haired Yang said.

"What?" Feng asked.

Yang's face twisted as he realized something. "Kid, where were you during the last beast horde attack?" Yang asked.

"I was running away last time," Alex said. "However I have nowhere to go now. You guys really shouldn't be staying here, talking with me. Leave already."

The one named Feng seemed to have realized as well.

"Brother Zexian, I think he might be the one running away from the Jaguar last month. He is certainly telling the truth," Feng whispered into the Emperor's head.

"I can see that," the Emperor said. "Besides, I would have figured it out eventually it seems." The Emperor turned his head towards the south as a twisted expression appeared on his face.

The 2 Saint beasts weren't going towards the Scarlet City from what he could sense. They were coming right where they were, apparently attracted to the kid in front of them.

The Emperor then turned towards Alex and asked, "What do you have that they want?"

"I don't know," Alex said without hesitation. He truly had no idea. He could come up with a bunch of reasons such as his body constitution or his talents or even his spiritual roots. However, none of them made any sense to be attractive to a beast, one at the Saint realm at that.

"Stop lying, young man. If you tell us, then we might be able to save you," Feng said.

"I seriously don't know. If I knew what it was by now, I would have either discarded it or handed it to someone stronger," Alex said.

"We are strong. If you do know of it, this is your last chance to save yourself," the Emperor said as he got rid of his hood and showed his face.

Alex was a little confused for a second as he felt the face was familiar. However, in the next moment, he realized who he was looking at.

"Your majesty," Alex said as he bowed a little.

"Oh," the Emperor said with a bit of surprise. "I didn't know my vessels recognized my face so easily."

"I was there during the competition in the capital when the beasts came for me there too," Alex said. "I remember you from then."

"I see," the Emperor said. "It seems they truly are after you. In fact, they should be here any moment now."

"Well, we have company before that," Yang said as he looked up in the air. Alex looked up and his heart skipped a beat when he saw who was there.

In the air were 3 people, 2 ladies and one man in a small boat that flew towards their location.

Alex could see both his master and senior sister there and immediately started panicking.

"You guys, what are you doing here?" he asked in a worried tone.

Ma Rong flew down from the boat and landed in front of him.

"You stupid disciple, what were you trying to do?" she asked as soon as she was before him. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

Alex could see the worry in Ma Rong's eyes and didn't know what to say. "I—"

"Ma Rong," Wen Cheng called from behind as he came down with Luo Mei. "Your Majesty," he bowed towards the Emperor. Luo Mei did the same.

Ma Rong finally realized that she was in front of the emperor. "Your Majesty,"she said as she bowed towards him as well.

"Who are you people?" the Emperor asked, not recognizing the two sect leaders, but then his eyes fell onto Luo Mei.

"Oh, it's you, little girl. You were the one that nearly won the Annual competition, weren't you?" he asked. "What's your name again?"

"It's Luo Mei, your majesty," Luo Mei said.

"I am Ma Rong, sect leader of the Hong Wu sect," Ma Rong introduced herself.

"I am Wen Cheng, sect leader of the Tiger sect," Wen Cheng said.

The Emperor's eyes brightened. "The Tiger sect? You were the one that messaged about the Beast Horde, weren't you? How did you kn— Ah, I see," the Emperor said as a mystery opened up to him as he looked at Alex in front of him.

"No wonder you always knew when the beasts were coming. He told you, huh?" the Emperor said. He then turned to Ma Rong and asked, "You said Hong Wu sect right? So it must be one of your people that found the recipe to the pill that helped by younger brother's family."

"Yes, your highness," Ma Rong said. "In fact, it was my disciple who found it."

The Emperor's eyes brightened even more. "You did?" he turned to ask Alex.

"Yes, your highness," Alex said, but he turned around in worry once more. "Master, please go back. The beasts will be here any moment. You can't fight them at all."

"And you can?" Wen Cheng asked. "What did you plan on doing here? Giving your life to protect us? Do you even know if that will work? Did you ever stop to think what we would feel like when we found out that you died for us? What would we do as masters who couldn't even help their disciples?"

Wen Cheng seemed calm, but there was anger hidden in each of his words.

"Let's go back quickly, junior brother. We will think of something for the beasts. I'm sure we can fight them off this time. Look, even the Emperor is here. He will surely save us," Luo Mei said as she turned towards the Emperor.

The Emperor just shook his head. "I'm afraid that's impossible," he said. "If I could defeat the beast, I would've done so ages ago."

"Your majesty, if you can't defeat the beast then you should go to the city as well. Please take my masters and senior sister too," Alex said.

"I…" the Emperor stopped for a moment and said," I would happily do that considering what you've done for my brother and sister-in-law. However… I'm afraid we've run out of time."

Suddenly, a massive aura erupted from the forest as a horde of beasts, in amounts that exceeded the one from the capital appeared in the Gap.

The Gap was created previously during the wars when the empire was still shattered. No beasts could be seen venturing this open part of the Southern forest, but now it did.

Alex could feel the overwhelming aura that gave him nothing but a sense of hopelessness. Adding on to that the feeling of tragedy that he had caused when he saw that his masters and sister were here, he couldn't feel anything but the worst right now.

The many beasts ran through the open grass and flew through the air, all coming directly towards the 7 people that were there.

However, just before they reached Alex and the rest. 3 distinct aura appeared from behind Alex that seemed to suffocate the entirety of the beasts, and also the 4 non Saint realm folks that were there.

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng's faces changed when they saw that the two other people with the emperor were also Saint realm in cultivation.

Even Alex was surprised.

The beasts all stopped right where they were and started cowering in fear and they tried to crawl on top of each other to find a way back.

Sounds of whimpers and hisses and howls all sounded from the group of beasts that were hurting from the pain they were feeling.

"Stop harming them."

A voice came from behind the beast that rung around the entire forest, followed by a massive aura that seemed to snuff out the Emperor and the other two's aura as if they were nothing.

"So, it's true," the Emperor said as he realized the difference between him and the opponent.

The black Jaguar showed itself, with its purple eyes that seemed to look directly into a person's soul.

Alex saw the beast and immediately recognized it without even having ever seen it.

"How are you humans always there where I am?" the Jaguar asked.

"Haha, well, this one is just a coincidence," the Emperor said. "Why don't you introduce our new friend? I don't see why he had to remain hidden."

"Who says I'm hiding?" a voice came from behind the Jaguar as a puma with white furs and black-tipped ears and paws showed itself.

The puma was very bulky and looked almost twice as wide as the jaguar who itself was quite large already. "I'm only in the sideline for today, so you humans don't need to worry," the puma said.

The Jaguar looked down at the group of humans and said, "Finally, I managed to track you down after 4 months. It's time I take— huh?" the Jaguar stopped speaking.

"This can't be," it said as it looked at Alex. "But you're a human."

Chapter 487: Ruler

Alex and the rest were both scared and confused when they heard the black jaguar.

"You… you are a human. This can't be true. What is going on?" the jaguar asked as it was itself confused as well.

Suddenly, a fearsome aura spread out from the jaguar making even the Emperor himself cower in fear. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead as he finally realized just how wrong he was even after figuring out that the jaguar was stronger than him.

'This is like nothing I've sensed before. Not even grandfather ever lived enough to be this strong,' he thought.

It didn't need to be mentioned just how badly the others were suffering.

"Did you do something to deceive me, human? Speak up or I will kill you right now," the jaguar said.

The Emperor and the other two turned to look at the jaguar only to see a truly angry face of his.

The puma who said that he was just an observer in this event, slowly came forward. A wave of similar anger appeared on its face as well.

"Let's kill them all," he said, striking fear in the heart of all 7 that were there.

"No, we need to make sure we are wrong first," the jaguar said. He then turned around to the 7 and asked, "Speak up, what is going on here?"

The emperor didn't exactly know why the jaguar was angry, but seeing how it didn't seem to be here for a human, he asked, "are you not after this child?"

The jaguar turned to look at Alex properly once more and a bit of hesitation arose in his heart. "I don't know. Who is this and why did you bring him here?"

"I didn't bring him," the Emperor said.

"I came here on my own," Alex said, with a really pale face. "You are here for me, so take me and leave them alone."

The Emperor and the other 2 saint realm experts looked back in shock to see Alex even able to speak. It was hard for even the emperor to speak given how much suppression they were under due to the jaguar's aura. And yet, a kid that wasn't even in the True realms could speak up under such conditions.

The jaguar and the puma were certainly surprised as well. The jaguar slowly looked up and down at Alex, with the thousands of beasts that were cowering in fear behind him as well.

"The one I'm looking for does appear to be you. But this has to be a mistake because we aren't looking for any sort of humans. We want nothing to do with your kind," the jaguar said.

"Then what are you here for if not me?" Alex asked.

"For our own kind. I'm here to take back the one who has our lord's bloodline. I do not know why it appeared on you human. However, It seems I must take you back to see what is happening." The jaguar said.

"If it appears to be deception on your part, I will come back to destroy your entire empire," the puma threatened from behind.

"There is no deception here," Alex said. "I came here because I could sense the feeling of something calling me towards the south. Every time this feeling appeared, the beasts appeared along with it."

"To protect the ones I cared about, I chose to give myself up," Alex said.

The jaguar and the puma's face suddenly changed. The puma disappeared from where he stood and appeared right next to Alex, smelling him a little.

"Where is the feeling coming from? Show me," the Puma asked.

"I can't move," Alex said.

The puma released his own aura and countered the jaguar's aura, allowing Alex and the rest to move again.

"Show me," he said.

Alex nodded and pointed towards the southeast direction. "That's where the feeling is coming from," Alex said.

Puma looked in shock and went back to the jaguar. "What's going on? That human child is accurately locating the palace," the puma asked.

"I do not know. Is there something wrong with the fountain perhaps?" the jaguar asked.

"No way," the puma said. "Every single one I found was accurate. There is nothing wrong with the fountain. Besides, this is our last chance. The fountain won't work after today."

The jaguar's face soured when he heard that. Lady Ren had indeed given such an assessment, which was the reason the two of them had decided to team up together for this time.

"So we take him back, right?" the jaguar asked.

"We have to. If the fountain isn't wrong, then he has the bloodline of our Lord," puma said.

"Can it really be that this human was born to be the king of our people?" the jaguar asked.

The two of them were speaking softly, but they were in no way quiet. Alex could clearly hear them say the words 'bloodline', 'lord', and 'king', and a distinct feeling rose in him.

'It can't be!' he thought as he felt a sense of clearance in his mind. He seemed to have finally realized that they weren't here for him.

They were here for Pearl.

'These feline beasts are here for Pearl? But why? Are they his family? Are they taking him back?' Alex wondered and looked back up to listen to the beast's talk.

However, they weren't talking anymore. Instead, they were staring directly at him.

'Shit!' Alex thought when he realized that his shocked expression had given away that he knew something.

"Speak up, or we won't be very merciful," the puma said.

"No, I won't," Alex said. There was no way Alex was going to let them learn about Pearl without first learning their intentions properly.

"I might have an idea as to who you are looking for, but you will have to tell me what you want with him," Alex asked.

"You know who we want?" the jaguar asked with surprise. "Spill it."

"Right after you," Alex said, not budging a bit. The Emperor and the rest were clearly surprised to see Alex stand up to a battle of words against the saint beasts.

"Yu Ming, stand down," Ma Rong whispered to him from the side. Her heart was leaping out of her ribcage when she saw her disciple speak with a saint beast like that. It wouldn't even require the beasts to make a move if they wanted to kill him at any point.

"Human child, you have no room to order us around. Tell us what you know, or we will kill all 7 of you," the puma said.

"I know you can," Alex said. "But I just heard that this is your last chance. If you don't want your last chance to be a failure, then tell me who you beasts are and what you want with him."

Anger flared in the puma's eyes and he decided to kill them all. However, just then, a voice appeared out of nowhere.

"STOP!"

A third saint realm aura appeared from beyond the two beasts as a white beast appeared from behind them.

Alex looked behind and saw another feline beast appear, only this time, Alex couldn't help but be surprised by her appearance.

'A White Cat, just like Pearl,' he thought as he looked at the female cat appearing in front of them.

"Did your fathers never tell you how much the lord cared for his people?" the White Cat asked the two beasts.

The two male saint beasts were much stronger than the female saint beast, and yet they still lowered their head when they saw her approach.

"Lady Ren, why are you here? You shouldn't be out of your chambers," the two of them said.

"A day or two out won't hurt me," Lady Ren said. She then turned to Alex and looked at him.

"Hm… this certainly is weird. Why do you have my husband's aura on you? Are you perhaps someone from outside?" she asked.

Alex's heart skipped a beat when he heard that. 'She knows about the real world? Is she a player? Or is she someone with knowledge of a world existing aside from this one?' Alex wondered.

"No, you can't be from the outside," Lady Ren answered herself. "Your cultivation isn't high enough to make those sort of travel. This certainly adds to the mystery of why you have my husband's aura then."

"It's someone else you guys want, but I won't tell you the location until I know what you're up to," Alex asked.

"Oh, so you not only know that we are looking for a beast, but also know that beast's location? Adding onto the fact that you have the aura on you… am I correct in assuming that you've bonded with the beast?" Lady Ren asked.

Alex's face paled when he realized that he had given away his hand. He looked left and right, trying to think of a way to avoid any sort of tragedy.

"Don't fear, child. We aren't here to harm you. We are just here for the beast, and once we get the beast, we will leave," Lady Ren said.

"How can I believe you?" Alex asked, still fearing.

"Young man, we have no other choice," the Emperor said. "We are in their palm now. Whether they want to squeeze us, or gently lay us down on a bed of flower, it's their choice now."

"However, if it's any consolation, that Jaguar said the same thing to me on the first day they arrived in the capital too," the Emperor said.

"Why do you want him then?" Alex asked.

"This continent has been without its ruler for a long time now. If your friend is worthy, he shall be the next king of the entire Western Continent."

Chapter 488: Taken Away

"A… king?" Alex was surprised when he heard that.

"Yes, of the Continent," Lady Ren said. "Or Queen, whatever your friend can be. But I do remember you saying 'him', so he must be a male beast."

"This continent is lacking because it doesn't have a ruler, and so it desperately needs one. Please show us the beast so we can see if he's worthy to become what this continent needs," Lady Ren said.

Wen Cheng, Ma Rong, and Luo Mei's eyes were wide with shock since they had realized what the beasts were after. The two sect leaders who knew the origins of the little cat were especially surprised that there was such a big history behind him.

Alex still didn't trust the beasts fully, but he was more so inclined to do what they said after listening to them and seeing the type of beast Lady Ren was.

"Come out, Pearl," Alex said. A bright white light appeared as a small White Cat appeared from inside of the beast space.

The three beasts saw Pearl after the shine disappeared. The moment they did, their faces changed.

"That's…" the jaguar looked at Pearl in surprise.

"Another White Cat?" the puma asked as well. "That shouldn't be possible."

Lady Ren was very surprised as well to see another one of her kind after so long. "Child, come here," Lady Ren said when she saw the White Cat.

"Meow?" Pearl cowered a little in fear around the new people and beasts. He jumped onto Alex's arms and tried to snuggle in there. He then looked around at the new figures.

He could only recognize Alex's masters and sister since he had interacted with them and they had been nice to him.

He then turned around towards the other 3 humans with no recollection as to who they were.

Finally, he looked at the beasts. At first, he thought he was fighting them, but once he felt their aura, he cowered even more.

Then, out of nowhere, the aura from a few months ago started calling to him to the distant place, and once again, the same fear from when he was inside the formation started appearing.

"It's alright, I'm here," Alex said as he caressed Pearl slowly.

The jaguar and puma seemed to have realized something. "Lady Ren, what's going on?" they asked.

"What do you mean?" Lady Ren asked.

"Our senses, we can't lock on anyone anymore. Neither the child nor the human," The puma said.

"That can't be. I can perfectly sense—" Lady Ren stopped as her eyes went wide again.

"What's wrong?" the jaguar asked.

"I can sense the human and the child," Lady Ren said.

"Hm, I wonder if we lack the lord's bloodli— wait, did you say you can sense the human too?" the jaguar asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said with clear confusion on her face. "I don't know what's happening now. The human… he has the bloodline of our King too."

"That's impossible," the puma cried out. "How could a human possibly have our lord's bloodline."

"I do not know. None of the knowledge I have told me anything about a human having the bloodline of the 4 great families," Lady Ren said. "The fountain's aura should be ending soon. If we want to find out more… then we will have to take them back."

"No!" Ma Rong shouted. "He's my disciple. You can't take him anywhere."

Ma Rong stepped in front of Alex. Wen Cheng wanted to get there too, but he realized that the atmosphere had changed. The warm air had turned incredibly cold all of a sudden and the grass below them frosted.

The three saint realm humans were surprised too when they sensed the sheer chill around Ma Rong.

"Interesting," Lady Ren said. "I didn't know there were still humans with such great body constitution. But little girl, you can't do anything to us. Especially, to me."

"I can try," Ma Rong said stubbornly.

Alex was behind her and he wanted to say something. However, he could not stop his body from trembling in fear at the aura his master was releasing. This one was far more potent than any of the other times.

It seemed that not only had she gotten good at controlling her constitution, she could also make it stronger now.

"MA RONG!" Wen Cheng shouted. "Can't you see what you're doing to your disciple?"

Ma Rong lost focus on the beasts and turned around to see Alex nearly on the ground. Her heart skipped a beat when she remembered what her aura did to her disciple.

"I'm sorry," she said and hurried to catch him before he completely fell. Once her cold aura disappeared, Alex began to retain his senses and could think without feeling fear for his life.

"Are you his Master, little girl?" Lady Ren asked.

"Yes," Ma Rong said.

"I see," Lady Ren said. "I can see why you are defensive then. But I can promise you that we mean no harm for your disciple. We will just be taking him back to the palace and we will learn why he has the bloodline that he does."

"Give us the child, human boy," the puma said.

"No need," Lady Ren said. "He seems scared around us unfamiliar faces. Let him stay with the human until he's back in the palace."

"Lady Ren," the jaguar whispered. "What do we do about the bond? Can someone who submitted himself to a human truly be our king?"

"Hah," Lady Ren said. "You guys need to grow up quickly and learn more. You can easily tell that the child hasn't submitted to anyone. They have the Bond of equals and thus none is below is the other."

"Oh," the jaguar and puma said as they turned back to look at Alex and Pearl.

"I see," the jaguar said. "Thank you for enlightening me, Lady Ren."

"Alright, enough time has been wasted already. We need to return back and not miss the optimal timing for the baptism," Lady Ren said.

"Yes, Lady Ren," the two beasts bowed their head.

Alex suddenly felt his body move on its own as he was lifted into the air and put on top of the black Jaguar.

"Carry him," Lady Ren said.

"Wait, you can't take him," Wen Cheng cried out.

"Don't take my little brother," Luo Mei shouted as well.

Ma Rong was starting to pour out her yin qi again, but she was a little apprehensive about how much she did it.

"Worry not, this human will be back very quickly," Lady Ren said, not allowing any of their words to reach her. "You will be able to see him again in less than a decade."

"A… decade?" Ma Rong questioned with surprise.

"Let's move," Lady Ren said.

"No, let me go. I don't want to be away for a decade," Alex shouted, but he couldn't struggle against the constraints of a saint realm's aura.

"Yes, Lady Ren," the two beasts said and started moving.

"Let me go," Alex shouted but could do nothing aside from that.

"No!" his masters and sister started shouting.

Seeing that he was not going to be able to get away from them, he resorted to the only thing he could do. He shouted.

"Don't worry about me. I will be back one way or another. Just wait for me."

* * * * *

The sun had set and the battle was over. The Scarlet city remained victorious against the beasts with very few casualties. The people celebrated in happiness and the ones hiding finally came out to celebrate as well.

Outside the walls, the people who were dealing with the aftermath remained.

"Are the beasts always this low in number?" the Royal Alchemist asked after seeing the pile of beast corpses.

"No," the City lord said. "Maybe continuously attacking for months led to them being low in number?"

"I don't feel like that's true," the Royal Alchemist said. "If anything, there should be more beasts out there than there are humans. I don't think you realize just how massive the southern forest is."

"Then only God knows why their numbers are low," the city lord said.

The Royal Alchemist looked at the corpses once more and looked around immediately searching for someone.

"What's little Ma?" he asked.

The city lord looked around and shook his head. "I don't know. I haven't seen her for a while," the city lord said.

"What is that girl doing? She should be getting her sect members to butcher these beasts and take out the alchemy ingredients before they turn bad," he said.

"I will go look for her," the city lord said.

"No need, she's here," a voice said. The city lord and the Royal Alchemist book looked up to see 4 people on a boat.

"Your majesty. What are you doing here?" the Royal alchemist asked.

"Stuff happened, Lai Qing," the Emperor said. "How are you doing, nephew?"

"Uncle, it's good to see you," the City lord said with a bow.

"We would like to be dismissed, your majesty," the miserable-looking Wen Cheng said to the Emperor.

"Sure, go. I have some questions for you, especially your sect leader Ma, but those can wait for later. I will stay in the city for a week," the Emperor said.

"Surely, your Majesty," Wen Cheng said and shook Luo Mei and Ma Rong who were even more miserable than him.

"Go and rest, Ma Rong. It's been a long day today," Wen Cheng said. "We will do the same."

Ma Rong nodded and flew away, speaking to not a single person along the way, knowing completely that she had lost her disciple for good.

Chapter 489: Questions

Alex was holding dearly to Pearl, ever so vigilant of his current situation. He still didn't trust the beasts completely, and the only reason he didn't struggle to fight back was that somewhere in the back of his head, he was curious to see what was going to happen.

On the slightest hint of anything bad happening to him or Pearl, he would do his best to get himself out of there.

"I know you are worried, young human and nothing we will ever say will get you to trust us right now. So, just trust on the fact that despite us being so strong, you are alive right now," the White Cat said.

Alex looked around at the forest underneath them. They were moving so fast that almost everything looked like a blur to them. He decided to use focus mode to see what was underneath them.

"What are you doing?" the White Cat asked Alex suddenly.

"What?" Alex asked, controlling the focus mode back.

The White Cat scrutinized him with her golden eyes for a few moments before taking them off. "Nothing," she said.

'Can she sense it when I use focus mode?' Alex wondered and stopped doing that.

"Who are you, uhh… miss?" Alex asked.

"I am Ren," Lady Ren said. "You can call me Lady Ren, human. And as for you my child, you can call me grandma."

She gave a sweet smile towards Pearl with no hint of malice at all.

"Grandma? Are you very old?" Alex asked.

"Boy, speak respectfully to Lady Ren," the Jaguar said.

"Let's just kill this human," the puma said.

Alex immediately cowered as the saint beasts started releasing their aura once more.

"STOP IT!" Lady Ren shouted. As soon as they did, the two beasts stopped using their aura on Alex and he could finally feel free again.

"I told you two to stop this hatred you have, and you still keep it up?" she asked.

"Forgive us, lady Ren," the jaguar said.

"But lady Ren, it was the humans that—"

"Not another word. It doesn't matter what the humans did. You can't use the crime of a few to hate on the many," lady Ren said.

"I-I'm sorry," the puma said.

Alex looked at them curiously. "What did the humans do that you hate us so much?" Alex asked.

"It's because of humans that this continent is as bad as it is," lady Ren said with a sigh.

"Why? What did they do?" Alex asked.

"Haha, no need to ask so many questions right now. Why don't you answer my question first," lady Ren asked.

"Uhh… If I can answer it, then sure," Alex said.

"How did you come upon that child?" she asked.

Alex was surprised that was the first thing she wanted to know. "Pearl? I found him by chance I should say," Alex said.

"His name is Pearl?" Lady Ren asked with amusement. "That's a nice name." She then went close to Alex and looked at Pearl with a smile again and said, "Nice to meet you, Pearl."

"Meow?" Pearl looked back at Alex to find out if he should answer at all or not.

"Go ahead," he said. This wasn't the time to hide what he knew or could do. The more he showed off himself, the higher his chances at survival would become. There was also the chance of them wanting him so much that they wouldn't let go of him, but that at least meant that he would live.

As for leaving, given how fast he could cultivate, it wouldn't take a lot of time. At least not the 'nearly a decade' that Lady Ren predicted.

Pearl looked back towards lady Ren after getting the permission and said, "Nice to meet you too." Only, he didn't say it out loud but used his spiritual sense to speak.

Just as Alex expected, a face full of shock appeared on her face. "How did you? How does he have spiritual sense?" she asked.

"I gave him a Spirit Cleansing Lily," Alex said.

"A… Spirit Cleansing Lily? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with flowers. Can you tell me what it does?" she asked.

"Sure," Alex said. "It unlocks one Spiritual Sense without needing to enter the Saint realm."

"Hmm, do all humans have spiritual sense then?" she asked.

"Are you planning on just asking questions and not answering any?" Alex asked.

"Oh, my bad. Go on ask what you want," she said.

"Who are you exactly to these two? You are much weaker than them, but they respect you very much. I thought the beasts followed a hierarchy of power," Alex said.

The other two didn't seem offended at the question and instead started giggling.

"Oh, they do follow the hierarchy of power," Lady Ren said with a chuckle as well. "The fact that you call me weak just means that you are weak yourself. Cultivate for a few hundred years, and if you are lucky, maybe you will start finding inkling of my strength then."

Alex was surprised when he heard that. "Are you very strong?" he asked.

"There are only a handful of beings stronger than me on this floating piece of rock," she said.

The way she said it, Alex couldn't help but believe her. "Are you at the peak of the Saint realm?" he asked.

Lady Ren gave a mysterious smile and said, "it's my turn to ask the questions."

"Oh, sorry," Alex said. "Please ask."

"Regarding Pearl, can you tell me more about the circumstances you found him under?" she asked.

"Uh, I was in the forest one day, and he and his mother crashed into the forest. She was very heavily wounded and couldn't even fight a common beast. When I helped her fend off a wolf, she asked me to take care of pearl, and… she died," he said.

"I see," Lady Ren said with slight tears in her eyes. "So my granddaughter died just like that huh?"

"Yea— wait, your granddaughter?" Alex asked with shock on his face.

"What? You think I want to be called grandma by just any other beast?" Lady Ren said.

"Are you telling me Pearl is your…?"

"Great-Grandson, yes," she said. "Or at least I think he is. There shouldn't be another White Cat beside me in this realm, and the only ones that have been was my daughter."

"Where is she now?" Alex asked.

"We married her off to a beast in the Eastern Continent," she said. "So I think the White Cat you met might have been my granddaughter. Although, she could have been my great-granddaughter as well. Sigh, I can't tell how much time has passed in the outer world."

"It should have been about 5000 years since the Princess' marriage, Lady Ren," the jaguar said.

"Has it only been 5000 years? I thought more time would've passed already," she said.

'Only… 5000? How old is she?' Alex wondered.

"So you aren't certain that Pearl is your descendant, right?" Alex asked.

"No, of that we are absolutely certain," the puma said. "After all, we had his mother's body brought to us a few months ago."

"… wait, Pearl's mother's body went to you guys? Why?" Alex asked.

"It was someone who recognized her kind and brought the dead body to us and left without letting us know. We wanted to find more out, but we couldn't at the time. But it seems we now have the answer," the jaguar said.

"Wait, wait, wait," Alex said as something didn't make sense to him. "You said you married your daughter to the Eastern continent, right? Then why were Pearl and his mother here?" he asked.

"That…" Lady Ren stopped for a second as the same confusion Alex had appeared on her face as well. "You're right, how was she here? You said she was wounded too, right? Then there was no way she flew across the Blue."

"Well, how did you marry off your daughter to the Eastern Continent in the first place? Did they fly all the way there too?" he asked.

"Don't be silly, human. The ocean is not something one dares to cross even at the higher realms of the Saint Realm. There are many beasts in the ocean that will kill you before you even know what is happening," the Puma said.

"Then how?" Alex asked.

"She teleported there," Lady Ren said.

"Teleported?" Alex asked. "You can teleport between continents? Isn't that very far away? How many resources would that use?"

"It is far," lady Ren said. "That was why they were teleported twice instead of once."

"Twice?" Alex asked.

"People would first teleport to the Central Continent, and then to the other continent. Since the central continent is at the center, it was used as a mid-point to go to before going to your desired continent," Lady Ren said.

"Central Continent?" Alex asked with confusion. "You mean the 5th continent that people can't enter?"

"Oh, you know about that?" Lady Ren asked with surprise. "I'm surprised humans have this much knowledge of the world. I assumed that after the teleportation formation stopped working, they wouldn't be able to get any more information about the outside world. It seems I was wrong."

Alex didn't say anything and let her believe what she thought of it. "so the teleportation formation is not working anymore?"

"No. Humans found it useless after they stopped working due to the central continent no longer being accessible and destroyed it. they plundered the resources keeping it alive, and thus is no longer usable," Lady Ren said.

"I see... What happened in the central continent making it unable to go to?" he asked.

Chapter 490: Blood Blessed by the Gods

[A/N: A small change was made to the last chapter. Lady Ren's daughter has married 5000* years ago.]

Lady Ren sighed as she remembered the incident with the Central Continent.

"Stuff happened there, making it start gathering Qi from all over the realm, and destroyed everything there as before," Lady Ren said.

"It used to be a continent with barely any Qi in it, so the only ones that lived there were common beasts and mortals. Due to that, no one wanted anything to do with the continent, and most of it was barren."

"Later on, everyone got tired of using way too many resources to teleport between continents, and so the four rulers of the other 4 continents got together to establish teleportation formations on the Central Continent itself. They used resources from the continents to make it a transition point during teleportations," Lady Ren said.

"But one day, it suddenly started showing unusual behavior. When people couldn't access the teleportation formation, all 4 of the rulers went to check, but… sigh, forget about it. It's not a memory I would like to remember," she said.

"Oh, the other continents have rulers too?" Alex asked with surprise. He didn't remember anything about them in the myriad of information that was floating on the internet.

"Of course they do," Lady Ren said. "Only the Central Continent didn't have one, and that was for obvious reasons."

"Oh, is any one of the humans?" Alex asked.

"No, little human. The rulers are chosen from the 4 Great Families. No human would ever have a chance of obtaining that honor," Lady Ren said.

"The 4 great families? I don't think I have ever heard of something like that," Alex said.

"I would be rather surprised if you knew who they were," Lady Ren said. "Can I ask my questions now?"

Alex nodded. '4 Great Family huh? I will have to ask my sister and see if she knows something about it tomorrow morning. If not, I hope the internet has some answers,' he thought.

"Can you tell me truthfully how you came to acquire the bloodline of one of the 4 Great Families?" Lady Ren asked.

"Huh? I have something like that?" Alex asked with surprise. But then when he thought about it, the ruler of this continent was from the 4 great families, and Lady Ren did say that he had the blood of the ruler.

"You very clearly do. In fact… you have just as much as this child does from what I am sensing," Lady Ren said.

"Uhh… I think I know the reason for that," Alex said. "Wait a second. Pearl, can you go back inside?"

"Meow!" he said and agreed. He would rather go back to his beast space than stay out here amongst these unfamiliar faces, flying so fast in the sky.

"Why'd you send him inside?" Lady Ren asked.

"It has to do with his mother's death, so I would rather not talk about it in front of him," Alex said.

"Go on then," Lady Ren asked.

Alex nodded and explained it all as much as he could and told them how he acquired a blood essence from her. He didn't go into detail about how the blood essence came to be and just said that she handed it to him.

"And then?" she asked.

"Then one day when I was just messing around, I brought out the bead that was the blood essence. It was so strong that I was nearly choked to death, but Pearl ate it up like it was nothing," Alex said.

"After that, he absorbed it, but not all. After a few minutes, he spit out some blood that he couldn't absorb, and… somehow, my body attracted it. I don't know what happened afterward, but when I woke up, I had absorbed it too," he said.

Suddenly, the jaguar stopped flying, and so did the puma. Lady Ren stopped too, but the shock in her face made it look like she wasn't paying attention to anything.

"You absorbed the blood essence?" the jaguar asked.

"That's not possible. Even we can't do that," the puma said.

"When you say your body attracted it, what do you mean?" Lady Ren asked.

"The blood, it was floating in the air and my body craved it and took it in directly through my forehead," Alex said. "I fainted afterward, and since then my Metal roots have significantly improved."

"Your metal roots? My god, you really did absorb it. You not only absorbed blood blessed by the gods, but you absorbed the blood essence itself. That's… that's not something I have ever heard of happening," the White Cat said with a face full of confusion.

"Does the library not have anything on it, lady Ren?" the jaguar asked.

"No, we might have to go back to the lord's ancestral home if we want to learn anything about it at all," Lady Ren said.

"Is it that unusual?" Alex asked. 'My body is divine grade, so there should be a few bodies above mine that can do that as well, right?' he wondered.

"I admittedly don't have all the knowledge as I am but a lowly concubine to the lord, but… I have never in all of my life heard of a human absorbing the bloodline of any of the 4 Great Families. The bloodline blessed by the gods is not so easily acquired by just about anyone."

"Most of them can't even reproduce in all of their lifetimes. It's one of the downsides of having just a godly bloodline," Lady Ren said. "Even when they do manage to reproduce, the child may not fully acquire the bloodline and only part of it."

"It's similar to what is happening to your right now. You are part of whatever your parent's bloodline was and part the bloodline of blood essence you absorbed," Lady Ren said with an amused face. "Suddenly, you have started to become more interesting than I would have previously imagined."

Alex couldn't understand the benefits of having such a bloodline, but he has already experienced some of it. Just having his metal roots be improved was beneficial enough.

"Are there any more benefits of having this bloodline than just improved Metal roots?" Alex asked.

"Um… there are, but I am not sure if they will manifest on a human. Your physiology doesn't exactly match that of those that usually have this bloodline," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said. "Then, can I ask what this bloodline is called?"

"You'll learn soon enough," Lady Ren said. "Let's hurry back."

"Yes, lady Ren," the jaguar and puma said.

They immediately flew through the night sky once more at blisteringly fast speed.

'Dammit,' Alex thought as he was carried away. 'They gave so many answers, but not a single concrete one. I can't even demand that they answer more clearly.'

Alex once again looked around at the incredible speed they were flying at and wondered just how far he was. The surroundings all looked the same to him and he had no map of anything outside of the Crimson empire to even make an educated guess.

Finally, after an hour, the there of them came to stop. It seemed they had reached their destination.

Chapter 491: The Palace

The land below them was a massive forest, denser than anything Alex had ever seen before. The trees have mostly turned red as if autumn had arrived.

Alex looked around and he could only see trees as far as he could see. The southern forest was truly endless.

"How long does this forest go on for?" Alex asked.

"This forest takes over nearly a third of the entire continent," the jaguar replied.

"And there are strong beasts in the forest all over here?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the jaguar said. Lady Ren flew down onto the ground and so did the other two. Alex couldn't help but be confused exactly where he was being taken to.

'They said we were returning to the previous king's palace, right?' Alex wondered. 'But I don't see any sort of buildings. Do they just live in the forest, out in the open?'

He didn't think that was possible, but who really knew about the beasts.

When they finally landed, Alex still couldn't see any buildings, but there was something here that wouldn't normally exist in a forest.

In the middle of the forest was a 10 meter wide, circular stone platform that didn't match the scenery at all. It was fully white and Alex could make out some designs in it, but not all of it.

Even when he was starting to, he had another problem he had to take care of. Because of where he was and how untouched this location was from humanity, the alchemy ingredients that grew here were of very high rank, with most being True rank ingredients and some even being Saint rank.

His senses kept on telling him to pick them up, but he wasn't in a situation to do so.

"What is that stone platform?" he asked, trying to suppress the urge to go out and grab every single flower and leaves that were in the vicinity.

He saw the three beasts walk upon and did the same. "Is this—"

Alex was about to ask something when suddenly light started shining from underneath him. All 4 of them were now basking in the artificial-looking blue light that was coming from underneath them.

Just then, Alex felt something coming upon him from the stone platform that started to mess with his body. His vision blurred as a bright white light suddenly engulfed them all.

When the light went away, Alex realized that he was still standing on the stone platform, except it wasn't the same one. He looked around and saw that the area had changed as well.

He was now inside what looked like a cave. There were buckets next to the stone platform on the right, with 2 feline beasts waiting in guard on the opposite side.

The cave itself seemed to mostly be made up of a gigantic white marble that was carved to make a cave, and there were crystal stalactites hanging from above him that seemed to glow on their own and gave light to the entire cave.

The only place the stalactites weren't available was right above the stone platform. He nervously looked back and realized that a massive wall was right behind him.

"Did we… just teleport?" Alex asked.

The two beasts looked at him with a weird expression, while Lady Ren seemed a little worried. "Was that your first experience with teleportation?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I do have a similar skill, but I've never really teleported with a formation."

"Well, are you alright?" Lady Ren asked.

"Am I alright?" Alex asked back. "I think so. Is something wrong?"

"Well if you are okay, then it's fine. Most beasts and humans that have come through previously tend to have an urge to vomit the first few times. If you feel like it, we have buckets over there for you," Lady Ren said.

"No need, I'm fine," Alex said.

"Very well, come. We are here," she said and walked on. The two feline beasts bowed their head at the presence of Lady Ren and the two beasts.

The jaguar and puma were well respected, but Lady Ren's respect was on a level that would put the emperor to shame.

'And she said she was just a concubine, right?' he thought. Alex walked behind Lady Ren, and the two beasts walked behind him to keep watch.

Alex looked through the cave in amazement as it was something he had never seen before. "I don't know much about and rocks and stuff, but are there rocks that glow like that? It almost looks like its a crystal or something," he asked.

"That's… not an ordinary piece of rock," Lady Ren said.

"Oh, then what is it?" he asked.

"That's a spirit vein," Lady Ren said. "A low grade one, but it helps keep the place running and also helps mask our aura in here so that we don't get found."

Alex stopped for a second and asked, "found by who? People from another continent?"

"Found by… you're too young to understand. Just get stronger and you will find the answer on your own," Lady Ren said.

"Okay," Alex said. He didn't like that she never fully answered anything, but he wasn't in a situation to demand anything so he kept quiet for a bit.

He still looked at the glowing, mystical-looking ceiling. "Do all spirit veins glow like this? I wonder if the one beneath our sect glows the same way," he said, talking to himself. "I never thought I would see spirit veins out in the open. I remembered hearing that this was what made spirit stones after it remained unused for quite a while."

"Not necessarily," the jaguar said. "Spirit veins do turn to spirit stones if unused, but there are times when the Qi in the area is so strong that instead of turning to a spirit stone cave, they instead get upgraded to a higher grade of spirit vein."

"For example, this one used to be a True grade spirit vein a couple of hundred years ago, but we brought another True grade spirit vein from someplace else, and stashed it above here. This one slowly stole away the energy from the other vein and was upgraded to a Saint grade spirit vein," the jaguar said.

"Huh?" Alex stopped in shock. "This is Saint Grade spirit vein? But I thought Lady Ren said it was a low grade one."

"Oh," Lady Ren said when she realized her mistake. "I'm sorry. I forgot that you haven't seen higher grade Spirit vein. Hopefully, you will see them someday."

"Some of them are a sight to behold. Especially the metal one in th— never mind," Lady Ren stopped speaking and got a little sad. She sighed and moved forward.

Alex didn't ask any more questions and the group walked in silence. There were a few guards along the way that bowed their heads towards them and from what Alex could see not a single one even saw him.

'They don't dare to put their head up, huh?' he thought.

Soon, they came upon a massive golden door. The door was an arched door that was nearly 10 meters tall and 6 meters wide.

Lady Ren stopped and waited for the guards to push the door open. In the meantime, Alex noticed a sort of drawing on the wall.

From what Alex could see, it looked like a face that stared deep into his soul. The face looked like a feline beast, but before Alex could even notice what it really was, a crack appeared in the middle of the face and the door opened to show the inside of it.

The door lead to a massive hall with many seats carved directly from the marble that made the cave. So, everything in the cave was white.

There were about 20 seats on each side, and each seat was at least 4 meters in length and height. At the end of the hall was an elevated pedestal with a massive seat and two smaller seats next to them.

The two smaller seats were of the same size as any of the other seats, but one of them had a blue cloth on them with golden embroidery on iy, and the other one had a red cloth on it with golden embroidery as well.

The seat at the center, however, didn't seem to be carved from stone at all. In fact, it seemed to be fully made up of gold from top to bottom with a white cloth hanging from either side of it that too had golden embroidery on it.

The carpets on the ground were yellow in color, almost as if they were meant to be golden. There was some white in the carpets but mostly it was just golden.

There were chandeliers hanging from the glowing stalactites that were all golden as well.

It was as if the maker of this place didn't want any other color to be used aside from white or golden.

There also seemed to be murals along the walls, but Alex couldn't really see them from outside.

Lady Ren walked into the room and stared directly at the golden seat at the center. "Can you bring out the child?" she asked.

"Uh, yes," Alex said and quickly called out Pearl.

"Meow!" Pearl said when he was out. He looked around at the bright lights and showed a stunned expression.

"This shall be your new home from now on child," Lady Ren said to Pearl. She then looked at Alex as well and spoke.

"Welcome to the Palace of the White Tiger."

Chapter 492: Four Great Families

Alex stepped into the hall and the door closed behind him. "The previous king was a white tiger?" Alex asked. "I don't think I've seen his kind anywhere in the forest before."

"Pfft!" Lady Ren laughed. "You won't see one of the 4 great families randomly in the jungle."

"Oh, right," Alex said. He thought for a bit and asked, "So I have the blood of the white tiger?"

"The Blood Essence, yes. Basically, you have the bloodline of the White Tiger," Lady Ren said. "Don't go out saying that though. As much as people respect the 4 Great families, there are ones out there that are jealous of their bloodline and would do anything to get it, and you would be a very good target."

Lady Ren then started to take a deep breath and shook her entire body. "Ah, finally," she said as a very strong aura appeared from inside of her.

Immediately, the entire hall became deathly still as not a single one inside could make even a peep.

The aura wasn't suffocating, or suppressing at all. In fact, Alex could do everything perfectly as he wanted. However, it was so strong that a fear popped up inside of him on an instinctive level.

"Lady Ren, you are scaring the child," the jaguar said.

"Oh," Lady Ren said as she immediately stopped letting her aura run free. "I'm sorry, little one. I am not used to having such weak— doesn't matter. I will try to stop from now on.

"Meow!" Pearl said.

Lady Ren was about to say something when she noticed something. She walked towards Alex and brought her face right next to his face.

"Are you… a clone?" she asked.

Alex's heart skipped a beat when he heard it. "What makes you say that?" Alex asked, concentrating so as to not miss a single of her words.

"It's because…" she stopped. "No, that can't be right. Am I seeing it wrong?"

Lady Ren seemed to be as confused as Alex was curious.

"I'm sorry," she said in the end. "I seemed to have made a mistake. I thought you were a clone because your soul and body didn't absolutely mesh together. But, they aren't so far apart that I can guarantee that your body is a clone."

"The only other idea would be that you are a saint realm cultivator who died and housed another person's body, but that sounds completely wrong, to be honest," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, it's fine. I'm sure there is a reason for all of this."

"I'm sure there is," Lady Ren said. "Although, I must ask. Are you really not a high-level cultivator that is somehow housing the body of a young person?"

"Uhh… no," Alex said. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, that's because you have something that most people in True realm or Saint realm wouldn't even recognize here," Lady Ren said.

"I have— sorry, what do I have?" Alex asked.

"That ring," Lady Ren said. "Can I see it?"

"Ring?" Alex wondered and looked down at his own finger. On his ring finger on the right hand, he had a golden ring with a large red ruby on it. This was the ring he found in the Forbidden Fields.

"Oh, right. I forgot I was wearing this. Is this ring of some significance?" Alex asked.

Lady Ren looked at him with a weird face. "You are joking, right?" she asked.

"Umm… no," Alex said. "Should I know what this ring is?"

"Lady Ren, this is most certainly weird," the jaguar said. "I don't think anyone on this continent has ever seen these rings, let alone own one."

"Is it that rare?" Lady Ren asked. "We should have some right?"

"No, Lady Ren. Her Majesty took everything of value with her when she left, so we don't have anything," the jaguar said.

"Sigh, right," she said. "Young human, you said you can use spiritual sense right?"

"Yes, I can," Alex said.

"Right, try using your spiritual sense on the ring. Especially the ruby," Lady Ren said.

"My spiritual sense? I'm sure I've done that before, but okay," Alex said and tried using his spiritual sense on the ring. However, like every other time, he didn't get anything from it.

It was just a normal ring.

"Nothing," Alex said as he shrugged off.

"No way, let me see," Lady Ren said and used her own spiritual sense on the ring and immediately frowned.

"See, it's just a normal ring, right?" Alex said.

"No," Lady Ren said. "It's a storage ring. Similar to storage bags, you can put items in this ring, only the size of the ring is incomparably large to those of storage bags."

"Oh, is it?" Alex asked with a surprised face. "I'm learning many new things today. But then why can't I access the storage if it has one?"

"Because it's not yours," Lady Ren said.

"Not… mine?" Alex asked. He thought for a moment and his eyes shined with understanding. "Oh, you mean it belongs to someone else? Like someone has refined it."

"Exactly," Lady Ren said. "Unless you can get rid of their ownership, you won't be able to use it."

"Umm… how do I do that?" Alex asked.

"Just refine it yourself. The ownership will be transferred over to you," Lady Ren said. "Although, I'm not sure if that is possible given how weak you are."

"Will it take me a long time?" Alex asked.

"It will take at least a decade for even me to erase the previous owner's ownership of this ring. For you, I'm afraid you will be an old man by the time you get to see the contents of this ring," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, I will keep trying then."

Lady Ren nodded and turned around to keep moving forward. Alex also slowly walked behind her and looked around at the walls where the murals were.

The mural to his left had 5 beasts on it, with their arms spread forward, nearly touching each other.

Alex recognized the White Tiger, but the other 4 beasts were a little too vague to exactly tell what they were.

"What's this mural about?" Alex asked.

"Hmm?" Lady Ren talked around. "Oh, this. My husband didn't like reading so he needed to stuff read out to him or drawn for him. To remind himself of what had taken place in the past, my husband decided to have this drawn in here."

"It is called the Pact of the 4 Heavenly Beasts. It was when the 4 Great Families decided to send candidates to look after places that needed looking after. My husband was such a candidate as well," Lady Ren said.

"Four beasts?" Alex asked with a confused expression. "But I count five."

"Haha, I can see where you are mistaken," she said.

"You have one of the heavenly beast, the White Tiger. The second one is this aerial beast known as the Vermillion Bird. The third one is the Azure Dragon.

"And finally, the fourth one is the Black Tortoise. However, the black tortoise is actually two beasts entwined together through fate. The tortoise and snake are fated to live and die together, and they always stay together. So, they are considered as one beast and are together called the black tortoise."

A fog seemed to have lifted from Alex's mind as he finally learned the names of the four Great families.

"So, the four rulers are these beasts?" Alex asked.

"Yes, these are them," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said and turned to the other mural on the opposite wall.

This one had more drawings on it, almost a bit too many. Alex looked at the thing, but he couldn't understand what exactly was going on in this mural.

Going from the left, Alex could see the five beasts that made up the four Heavenly beasts once more. Only this time, they were extremely tiny.

After that, the mural represented a humanoid figure that he couldn't assign a gender to. The figure had something circular behind his head and had his palm facing the 5 beasts.

After that, there were hundreds of different pieces of something randomly drawn in clusters.

After that was a giant circle that seemed to have cracks all over it. After that giant circle was another humanoid figure. From the looks of the circle behind his head, it seemed to be the same figure from before.

He didn't seem to be doing anything at the moment. After the man was finally another circle, but this one didn't have any cracks in it.

The entire sequence of drawings was very confusing to Alex since he didn't have the slightest idea of what it was all about.

"Lady Ren, can you explain this mural to me?" he asked.

Lady Ren shook her head. "I'm afraid not, little human. I myself do not know what that mural is about. Only my husband knew what it was. Even amongst the family, I assume not many know what it is about. My senior sister might have known a little about it, but unfortunately, she left over 4 thousand years ago."

"Oh, it's okay if you don't know about it. I will be okay without knowing a thing or two," he said.

He then stopped looking at either side of the walls and stared straight in the front.

"That golden seat, is that the throne?" he asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "That is where my husband used to sit, and that is where this child, my descendant will now sit. He will have to go through a bit of a test before that, however. I hope he doesn't fail."

Chapter 493: Bai Jingshen

"A test?" Alex asked curiously. "You didn't mention any test before."

"It's… less of a test exactly, and more of a ritual. At least, it's a ritual for people from the family that have part of the bloodline of the Original White Tiger but not fully. The ritual is carried out so that they can improve their bloodline, and maybe even evolve to become a white tiger," Lady Ren said.

"Evolve?" Alex's eyes went wide. Finally, someone spoke about something he had been searching for for a long time.

Pearl's evolution chance was still at 40%, and Alex had been wondering what it was for all of this time. However, nothing in or out of the game had ever mentioned anything about evolutions.

The most he could find was other players wondering what their newly tamed beast's evolution was about.

"Pearl has a chance to… become a white Tiger?" Alex asked. "Does that mean he will stop looking like a cat, and start looking like a tiger?"

"Maybe, maybe not," Lady Ren said. "I don't really understand how it works, but not everyone that has evolved has turned into a white tiger. Sometimes, they keep their original appearance while acquiring the abilities of their evolved self."

"If Pearl evolves and doesn't produce black stripes, then he would likely still show the other characteristics of a white tiger. Honestly, we can't guess it at all. All I know is that Evolution is definitely good for him," she said.

Alex then looked around the entire hall once more and asked, "who are all of these seats for? And why are they all empty?"

Lady Ren sighed when he heard him ask that. "Those are seats belonging to the subordinates of my husband. Namely people of the palace that served the King. These two's parents used to be one of them. However, they lost their lives during the many battles the followed after the death of the king."

"The only ones that still remain are hidden away in their own chambers, waiting for the next king to arrive," Lady Ren said.

"Is that so?" Alex then looked at the golden seat once more. "What about the two seats next to the throne?" he asked.

"That would be the seats of the Queen and the crown prince. The one with the red leather if for the queen and the one with the blue one is for the prince," Lady Ren said.

"Oh," Alex said and a question popped up in his head. "If there is a place for a prince, why is there no king yet? Did the prince not want to take the throne?"

"There was no prince," Lady Ren said. "Unfortunately, amongst the children born to the king, none of the male heirs had the necessary bloodline to become the king."

"Also, senior sister didn't manage to conceive a child in the time the king was alive, so the king never had a direct heir to the throne regardless."

Alex thought for a second and said, "if the king was gone, why didn't the queen rule? Surely she had the authority to do so, right?"

"She did, to a certain extent. Even if she would eventually be dethroned, she could rule until the next king arrived."

"However, my sisters were never here for the land, they were here for our husband. So, when he was gone, they all decided to leave and go back to the family. Senior sister also had to report his death to the family, so she left as well," Lady Ren said.

"And left you behind?" Alex asked.

"Haha, no. I was just stubborn and decided to stay behind, hoping my husband would come back someday. Sigh, if only my stupid delusions could be erased at that time," Lady Ren said.

"Anyway, come one. Let me take you to someplace else," she said and walked on. She entered a door to the left side of the hall and continued walking.

Alex followed behind and entered the door to see a white corridor.

He looked behind him and realized that the other two beasts were already gone. He, Pearl, and Lady Ren were the only ones remaining.

The stalactites in the ceiling shined everything stark white and there was not a single other color to accent all the white color in there.

"The king really did like the color white, didn't he?" Alex asked.

"Haha, he did. White and Gold were his favorite colors since birth. Which was probably a bias he learned from his family that favors the two colors as well," Lady Ren said.

"May I ask how you met the king?" Alex asked.

"How did I meet him? Let's see, I was the lady of a very minor house whose elders were desperately looking for connections. So, they set arranged my marriage with my husband back then. I remember being quite angry at the time, but over the course of many years, I learned to love him as everyone else did."

"When he was sent here to rule as a king, I chose to come with him," Lady Ren said.

Alex nodded and stayed quiet as he followed her. Finally, they reached a place that seemed to have an opening on the roof that let him see the night sky.

The spirit vein ended right around here and there was no longer much light for them to work with.

"It's just ahead of us," Lady Ren spoke as she walked forward. At the center of it all, underneath the open sky, were many stones stuck on the ground all over the open space.

Alex looked at it all and was a little surprised. "Are these… graves?" he asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "We bury here those that we have lost over the years. Not many get to be buried here, but even so… the numbers have reached quite high over the years."

Lady Ren was starting to sound a little sad by now. She slowly sat down in front of a gravestone and said, "I may have found your successor, dear husband."

Alex looked at the white piece of rectangular marble that was stuck on the ground. The headstone had some words carved onto it in a language he couldn't read at all.

He wanted to try using his spiritual sense to see if he could read it, but now was not the place to do something like that. It would be incredibly disrespectful, and he didn't want to create unnecessary problems.

"What does that headstone say?" Alex decided to directly ask instead.

"It reads 'In memory of A King, a Husband, and a Father, Bai Jingshen," Lady Ren read.

"Bai Jingshen… was that the name of the king?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "Bai is the surname of the White Tiger family. If he succeeds, this little child will inherit that surname as well."

"Meow?" Pearl asked.

"No, you can keep your current name. We will just give you a secondary name that you will have to use officially," Lady Ren said.

"Meow," Pearl said.

"Haha, sure, sure. I will be sure to choose one of the best ones for you," Lady Ren said with a smile.

"That grave… it's empty right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "We couldn't get back anybody from when he died in the central continent, so we had to give him an empty burial."

"Then… how are you sure that he really is dead?" Alex asked.

"Because the other three Kings themselves came to give us the news. They saw him die while trying to save this realm," Lady Ren said. "Only the stupid humans didn't realize that and thought he was trying to attack them. In retaliation, they took everything they could get their hands on from this land."

"Now, a normal beast can't even grow enough to enter the saint realm," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said. "I do remember hearing something about beasts fighting in the central continent long ago, so that was a lie, right?"

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "The 4 great families have rivalries, but it ends there. There is no enmity between them and thus they have no reason to fight. Besides, there really is nothing worth fighting for here."

"So the other people were misinformed and attacked you? Why didn't the other kings try to clarify that misinformation?" Alex asked.

"I don't think they know there is misinformation being shared. From what I know, they were gravely hurt during whatever happened in the central continent, and so they have likely gone into secluded cultivation to heal up. It wouldn't be surprising if they started healing up all those years ago and are still healing," Lady Ren said.

"It's likely the only time we will ever see them is either when this kid becomes the king, or another king arrives," Lady Ren said.

"Sorry… another king?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "Since my husband died nearly 5 thousand years ago, the family will take about that long of a time to choose the next candidate to be sent over. So, in less than a century, someone will come to see if we already have a king or not."

"If we do, they will verify whether the king deserves to be one. If they can't, they will send over the next candidate."

"However, most of the new generation of the great family have nothing but arrogance, and I do not want to see them destroy what my husband worked so hard to build," Lady Ren said.

"For that, we will need to turn this little child into a full-fledged King in less than a hundred years."

Chapter 494: One Way Conversation

"Wait, there will be someone else coming in the next 100 years to take over?" Alex asked with surprise.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "The one to see if there is a king already, and if the king is fit will come here first, but the actual king will come soon after if they deem one necessary."

"And why aren't we letting them take the throne again?" Alex asked. "Wouldn't that be the easier choice?"

"It would, but it would also mean that a lot of people will suffer. Which will include people that you will care about too," lady Ren said.

"Just imagine, you come from a very big family, having lived like everything belongs to you, and then you come here to find almost everything has been stolen by the humans on the other continents that do not belong to you. What will you do?" Lady Ren asked.

"Ah," Alex said. "So, you fear that the next king will try to get back what was stolen."

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "And in doing so, wage war that will destroy the whole world. I don't want that. My husband was empathetic from the beginning and even after that he mellowed out when he came here."

"He wouldn't have died if he didn't care about the people of this world. However, the next king is very much possibly not going to be like that, so we have to take the throne away before he even has a chance," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said. "Guess, you will have to grow up fast, buddy."

"Meow!" Pearl cried out.

"Don't worry, you have time," Lady Ren said with a smile. "By the way, how old is this child? Do you know?"

"Um… about 6 months I think. He's not that old," Alex said.

"Dear god, 6 months?" lady Ren said in shock. "Oh no, we can't put someone like this into the fountain. I guess we will have to wait until he is in the True realms at least before we try to put him through the ritual."

Lady Ren shook her head and sighed.

"Alright, come," Lady Ren said. "Let's go see the real reason why I brought you here."

Alex nodded and followed lady Ren to a very inconspicuous grave at the very outer edge of the graveyard.

Another headstone lied there with another set of words written on it. Only this time, the words weren't that many.

"What is written on it?" Alex asked.

"It says 'Descendant of Bai Jingshen and Ren Xiao'," Lady Ren said. "Come here child, this is your mother."

"Meow?" Pearl asked with confusion. Alex on the other hand was stunned.

"Right, I forgot you said you found the body," Alex said. "So this is where you buried her."

"Yes," lady Ren said.

Alex walked forward and sat in front of the grave. He was still holding Pearl in his hand, but there he let him down.

"You can talk to your mother here, Pearl," Alex said.

"Meow?" Pearl still didn't understand what that meant. He still hadn't fully grasped the concept of life and death, so he asked where his mother actually was.

"Meow!"

'Where' he asked. Alex didn't know what to say.

"Just talk," Lady Ren said. "She will listen to you. Say 'hi' to her."

"Meow," Pearl said and turned around to the grave and meowed again.

"She says hello," Lady Ren said. "She's asking how you're doing."

"Meooow!"

"She says that is great. You should be having fun," Lady Ren said. "She asks if you miss her."

"Meow," Pearl said as he shook his head.

"Oh, why not? She asks," Lady Ren said.

"Meeeeow" Pearl replied.

Lady Ren turned to look at Alex and chuckled a little. "You've really created quite a bond with the little guy, so much so that he doesn't even miss his own mother," Lady Ren said.

Alex didn't know if he should feel happy or sad because of that. If possible, he would want Pearl to be with his mother, but if that wasn't possible, then at least he was happy with him.

They stayed there, watching Pearl talk in front of his mother's grave and Lady Ren 'translating' what she said in return. They stayed there for a few minutes before it was time to leave.

"Say goodbye to your mother for now," Lady Ren said. "We can come back next time if you want to see her again."

"Meow!"

"Alright, let's leave," Lady Ren said and took him back to the hall. Once in the hall, she called some servants over.

"It's been a long day, so you can go and rest. Whatever needs to be done with either you or this child, we will do so tomorrow," Lady Ren said.

"Okay," Alex said and left the hall with the servants. He was taken through another corridor that lead the many rooms and was finally made to enter a certain one.

The beast servants opened the door for him and said something to him. Alex couldn't understand what they were saying, but thankfully Pearl could somewhat translate it.

"Oh, so they have rooms for humans too huh?" Alex thought as he entered the room.

The room was fully white with a bed in the middle and a table by its side, carved entirely of what the wall was made up of as well.

Alex sat down on the bench and took a deep breath. "It's really been a long day today, hasn't it?" Alex asked.

He started the day normally, but many things happened that almost made it seem like it was forever ago.

He met the Royal Alchemist again today, and while he didn't learn much, he was at least assured that he was moving in the right direction.

He then prepared for the beast hoard, and when he realized he couldn't stop them, he chose to give himself up.

He then met 3 saint realm cultivators, one of which was the emperor. He then met another 2 saint realm beasts, followed by Lady Ren, who seemed to be at the peak of Saint Realm.

He feared that today would be his last day on this game with his current body, but it turned out to be the exact opposite. Then he was taken here, where he came to learn a lot about the world and the hidden workings behind it.

"I wonder which continent the four great families are from. Maybe they all take over one of each? But then why would the head of the family not be the king of the continent? Does he not think that is worth his time?" Alex wondered.

"Bloodline of the White Tiger huh? They said it was blood blessed by the gods. There are gods in this world?" Alex wondered. "Or maybe that has something to do with the grades and not a real god."

"They realized what Pearl is and what his role is, right? So what am I doing here?" Alex wondered. "They said they wanted to check my bloodline right? But I already told them everything. What else is there to know?"

"Sigh, I will think about it tomorrow. I'm too tired for it today," he thought. "God, when did I last log out again? I forgot."

"Let me go see if I'm fine," he thought and logged out.

He slowly opened the lid of the capsule and walked out. He stretched a bit before going to the bathroom and then went to the kitchen.

He wasn't feeling very hungry, but he wasn't sure if he would have time to leave the game tomorrow on account of where he was right now, so he decided to eat something just in case.

Emily had some food made and stored in the fridge already so he just had to heat it up.

As he ate the food, he remembered something. "Oh right, I have to transfer the spirit stones I got today. How much was that again? 5000 True spirit stones?" he thought.

He silently calculated it in his mind and suddenly his eyes went wide. "That's… that's 4.5 Million dollars, isn't it? Holy… I won't have to ever work or go to university again."

"Damn, I might as well drop before I take the exam," Alex started to get excited. He happily returned back to the room and decided to check his phone to see if there was some message for him.

However, what he saw on the screen when he opened it, really confused him.

Chapter 495: Time, Preparation, and Languages

He looked at the screen once more so that he was sure he didn't misread what he saw.

"No… that can't be right," he said to himself and went into the settings to fix what seem to have been broken. However, no matter how much he searched, he couldn't find anything that was wrong with his phone.

He closed the phone and checked his laptop instead, but then his laptop said the same thing.

Now he was starting to get really confused. "No, what about online?" he wondered and checked. He found the same answer online as well.

"What the hell is going on?" He couldn't help but scratch his head in confusion. All the emotions he had about earning a lot of money seemed to have vanished and left him with just confusion.

"No way it's the same in the game right?" he wondered and went back into the capsule. He logged into the game and opened his eyes in the room he was staying in.

Finally, he looked up and to the right of his vision to check the time. Just as he had hopelessly expected, the time said 4 AM as well.

"How the hell is it 4 AM already?" he couldn't help but ask himself. "It was barely a few hours ago when I was taken away during twilight. There is no way it has been 8 hours already."

"No, it wasn't even midnight when we entered the palace, I remember," he thought. "Then why is the time already 4 AM?"

He wondered if he had lost some memory from the past few hours, but that wasn't possible. He then wondered if took hours on end to go from the game to logging out of it. That was possible but still unlikely.

The possibility of that happening just on the day so many things happened didn't feel correct to him. "Maybe it has to do with this place then?" he wondered. "I wonder if time is moving fast here."

He decided to wait and see. However, the time on his vision didn't seem to move at any different speed than normal. "Alright, I give up. I will just ask Lady Ren tomorrow," he thought.

He wanted to cultivate for the remaining 2 or so hours before sunrise, but he wasn't sure if he could wake up after falling asleep during cultivation. If the beasts took that as an offense, that would be bad for him.

So, he decided to do something else in the meanwhile.

"Oh right, the money," he thought and quickly took out the storage bag he had with him to check.

He counted the spirit stones he had and counted about 4500 True spirit stones in there. "The emperor really cares for his family, huh? I will have to make sure he doesn't ever find out that his brother died while fighting me," Alex thought.

He transferred as much money as he assumed wasn't needed for him here. Which turned out to be a little over 4 Million dollars. With that, he wouldn't have to worry about money, ever.

Once he was done, he just lied there on the bed with Pearl next to him. Pearl didn't seem to want to sleep either, so they just waited for the time to pass.

Alex checked his time once again and it was indeed working normally this time. "I hope I'm not going mad from all of this gaming," he thought.

Soon, it was 6 AM and the sun would rise anytime now. However, since he was inside a room underground, he likely wouldn't see the sun for a while now.

"They said they were going to keep me here for a decade? I wonder why that is for. Since Pearl will have to go through the ritual soon, do they intend to keep me until the ritual is all over?" Alex wondered.

"Sigh, they were pretty clear about their intentions with Pearl, but they never let me know about what they wanted to do with me at all. Depending on whether they treat me as a guest or as a prisoner, I might have to leave this place just a little bit sooner," Alex thought.

He started wondering how he could possibly even do that, considering he was underground and the only way out seemed to be through the teleportation formation.

"Hmm.. What about the open hole in the middle? Although I didn't see any stars or moon last night. So… maybe it's quite different," Alex thought.

He would have to learn more about this place before he decided to do anything stupid.

Someone knocked on his door and said, "come out Boy."

Alex opened the door and saw the puma standing in the hallway. "Senior, what are you doing here?" he asked.

"You don't expect to sleep all the time, do you?" he asked.

'I didn't have time to sleep even if I wanted to,' Alex internally grumbled.

"Let's go, Lady Ren wishes for me to see if the child is ready for the ritual. It's really the jaguar's job, but he's a little busy right now," the puma said.

"Oh, okay," Alex said and walked outside, along with the puma. They walked through the pathway and arrived in a room.

The doors were closed, so he couldn't see anything inside, and didn't dare use his spiritual sense in the presence of genuine saint realm cultivators.

"Yao Jia," the puma shouted.

Alex heard a roar from someplace close and suddenly, a black jaguar appeared in front of him. Except, this one wasn't the jaguar he had seen before.

The hairs on this jaguar looked slicker and the body was way smaller and lean in general.

"Look after this human while I test the child," the puma said.

ROAR

"Speak in the human tongue," the puma said. "You will be taking care of a human after all."

"Oh, right," the jaguar named Yao Jia said. "What's your name human?" Yao Jia asked.

"Uh… it's Yu Ming," Alex said.

"Yu Ming huh? Is that a good name for a human? I heard you came here yesterday. Is it true that you—"

"Yao Jia!" the puma said sternly.

"Ah, sorry. I spoke out of place," she said. "Come on, let's go. I will show you the entire place."

"Huh? Wait I won't get to stay with Pearl?" Alex asked.

"No, only the candidate gets to enter, no one else," the puma said. "Just go away. I will call you when we are done."

The puma entered the room and closed the door behind him, leaving Alex without even a chance to respond. "What the hell? I feel like I have no say in any of this," Alex said.

"Hehe, no you don't. If you want to be heard around here, you either need to be strong or know someone who is strong. Come, let me show you around," Yao Jia said.

Alex wanted to say something, but he stopped. She was right. He was in the world of beasts right now and would have to work by their laws if he wanted anything for himself.

He sighed at his weakness and promised himself that he would grow strong very soon.

The jaguar named Yao Jia took him around the palace, telling him what was what. She took him to the King's hall, then to a training room, and then to the dining hall.

"What about the library? I heard there was one," Alex said.

"Yeah, that's where lady Ren and father are right now. They are probably looking for something there, so we cannot disturb them. Besides, I don't think you're allowed there. There is information in that room that your small brain cannot comprehend yet. Even I am not allowed in there," Yao Jia said.

"Tsk, and here I was looking forward to it," Alex said. "By the way, I can understand how saint beasts can talk, but how can you?"

"Why would I not be able to talk? It's just a language that one has to learn. I now just need to learn how to speak the other one," Yao Jia said.

"The other one? The mortal ones and the cultivator ones speak the same language you know?" Alex asked.

"Haha, no silly. Mortal language changes too quickly. There is no point in learning them. I'm talking about the two different cultivator languages. Have you not read any books or what?" Yao Jia asked.

Alex's eyes went wide as a thought entered his mind. "You mean the language of normal cultivators and the so-called immortals?" Alex asked.

"Uhh… no?" Yao Jia said, unsure of her own answer, as she cocked her head in slight confusion as to what Alex was asking. "Everyone speaks in one of the two languages, be it normal beasts or immortal ones," she said. "It's just different based on the place."

"So that writing that is on the gravestones, that's one of it, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Yao Jia said.

Alex then took out some random books from his storage bags and showed them to her. "And this one is the other one?" he asked.

"Yes! Yes! So you do know," she said. "Why did you act so stupid?"

"I was just unsure," Alex said. "So, it's possible that the other continents speak in another language?"

Even as Alex asked that he knew the answer was no. If the language was different, the information would be up on the internet by now.

"You don't have to answer that," he said.

"You sure? okay then," Yao Jia said. "Come, let me show you the garden."

Chapter 496: Garden

"There is a garden in this cave?" Alex asked in surprise. It didn't seem like the place for those sorts of things.

"No, it's outside," Yao Jia said. "Why would there be a garden inside the cave? You, humans, are such a silly creature."

"Oh, there is an 'outside' in this place?' Alex asked with surprise. "I thought everything was underground."

"No," Yao Jai said. "Only the palace is underground, everything else is outside."

"Now I'm really curious," Alex said and followed Yao Jia. They walked through a maze corridor and came to the end of the tunnel where the spirit vein in the ceiling stopped.

Beyond that point was a door with beasts staying on guard in it. Under Yao Jia's order, they opened the door which led to a flight of stairs.

The two of them started climbing the stairs and finally reached aboveground where they came out of a well-maintained gateway at the opening of the cave.

Alex walked out of it and could see a beautiful garden with flowers all around and a beautiful meadow to go along with it.

There were small beasts in the garden that were playing with each other, and adult beasts that were looking after them. Alex felt a sense of guilt when he remembered the many beasts he had killed up until now.

He had never once felt bad for killing a beast before, unlike how he felt when he killed humans. However, that was only because he was used to seeing beasts killed back at home.

However, now that he was starting to realize that beasts were also quite intelligent and were capable of the same things humans were, guilt started to manifest.

Beyond the garden was a wall made up of vines and thorns. And beyond that seemed to be a lot of trees. He wondered how close this place was from the stone platform he teleported through when coming here.

"It's nice, right?" Yao Jia asked.

"Yes, it's beautiful," Alex said as he turned back to look at the garden again. His face suddenly changed and he walked towards the garden. Yao Jia followed him to show him more of the garden.

"You know, if you like this, it makes me really happy. After all, I was the one— Hey! Are you even listening?" she asked when she realized that Alex seemed to be lost in his own world as he walked towards the garden.

He walked towards a flower bed and crouched down to pick up a flower.

"Hey! Don't touch those. Those flowers turn bad when they—"

The words stuck in Yao Jia's throat when she saw Alex pick up the flower without destroying any of the rest.

"Huh? What's going on? Every time I tried it, the flowers wilted and disappeared," she said.

"That's because you were picking the wrong flower. Amongst these entire flower beds, there is only one flower that you can pick without destroying the flower bed," Alex said.

"That way, you can keep these flowers and make use of this most important one," Alex said.

"Oh, you know a lot about flowers?' Yao Jia asked.

"I know a lot about plants in general, and a little about beasts, but mostly about plants. I'm an alchemist after all," Alex said.

"An alchemist? Oh, you make pills right? I've read about you guys," Yao Jia said. "There's no beast here that can make pills, so I don't really know much about it."

"What do you do when you get injured or catch some sort of illness?" Alex asked.

"Oh, we have a senior who can treat the unhealthy, but it mostly extends to illness and minor injuries. I heard pills can even regrow limbs, is that true?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Although they are a little hard to make since the ingredients they require is very demanding and also very rare," Alex said.

Alex then turned around and looked at the area he had come from. The cave opening he thought he had walked out of actually turned out to be a massive mansion.

"What's that mansion for?" Alex asked.

"That's the secondary palace on top of the real palace. That is where the King's family and other important figures are kept," Yao Jia said. "Although, it's mostly empty now with only servants keeping that place alive."

"Oh, I must've not been as important then if they didn't bother to keep me there," Alex said with a deprecating laugh.

"Of course, you're not. At least, not yet," Yao Jia said. "Maybe you will be more important if they find out something regarding you today."

"Something regarding me? Like?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. Father and Lady Ren went into the library to find stuff on you, I think. You seemed to have made them very curious about you. If they end up finding some importance in you, your status in this place will significantly increase," Yao Jia said.

"Hmm… you guys need an alchemist?" he asked.

"I mean, maybe," Yao Jia said. "But are you a good one?"

"Of course, I'm a—" Alex stopped. He was talking with True realm beast and most beasts he had seen here were of similar cultivation base or higher. So, if he said that he was a good one for them, that would be incorrect.

"I can make pills for common beasts, although I'm in the process of learning how to make pills for True realm cultivators," Alex said.

"Oh, let me know once you do. I will tell my father, and you can probably find some work around here," she said. "By the way, what does that flower do? You gonna make some pills with them?"

"Uhh… no," Alex said. "Can I take some more of them? I can explain later what I can do with them."

"Umm, they won't wilt, right? If you can promise that you can get them without them wilting then you can take them," Yao Jia said.

"Thank you," Alex said and got into plucking the few Spirit Cleansing Lily that was growing in the garden.

There were about 5 in total by the time he was done with them. "Are there more of them around here?" Alex asked.

"Uh, I don't really leave this place that often so I don't know," Yao Jia said. "But there should be a few in the forest."

"How did you grow them here by the way?" Alex asked.

"Oh, no I didn't," Yao Jia said. "I just ordered some men to bring anything that looks beautiful from the outside and they brought all of them. We directly brought the whole thing instead of growing them on our own."

"Right, that works too, I guess," Alex said. He started walking around the garden, looking around to see if he could find anything else that was precious.

He found a few more ingredients, but none of them were worth picking, so he let them be to keep the aesthetic of the garden.

He walked on the soft grass, amidst the watchful eyes of the many beasts that were looking at him suspiciously. However, after seeing Yao Jia behind him, they got on with their own business.

"What are all of these beasts doing here?" he asked.

"They just like to come around here and pay their respect to the family. Also, this garden is one of the only places in this area that beasts can come to enjoy the sunlight."

"All the other places are filled with trees to the brim and sunlight barely ever passes through," Yao Jia said.

"I see," Alex said and he looked at the relaxing beasts. There weren't just feline beasts anymore, but beasts of all shapes and forms. Deer, Rhino, Elephant, Boars, every species of beasts would be found here.

Alex then looked at the wall surrounding them and saw that beyond the vines and thorns, there was an actual solid metallic wall inside.

"What's beyond these walls exactly? Just a forest?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Yao Jia said.

"Hmm, can you tell me how far this place is from the stone platform on which we teleported here?" Alex asked.

"How far? Well… that is a hard question to answer really," Yao Jia said.

"Why? Has no one measured the distance before?" Alex asked.

"Um, no," Yao Jia said. "It's kind of impossible to measure after all."

"Is it? I mean you can just fly and see how far the distance is, can't you?" Alex asked.

"Oh," Yao Jia said as she realized something. "You don't know, do you? Father and the others must've been occupied with learning about the child and forgot to tell you."

"Tell me what?" Alex asked.

"That we're not in the forest anymore," Yao Jia said.

Alex was a little confused. He looked around and could still see the forest very clearly. "What do you mean? We're still in the forest."

"No, silly. I meant the actual big forest that takes over a third of this continent," Yao Jia said.

"Oh, you mean the Southern Forest," Alex finally understood what she meant.

"Yeah, southern forest as you call it, northern forest as the others call it; same thing. We're not there anymore," she said and stopped to correct again. "Well… technically we still are… but also not."

This just confused Alex even more. "Um, can you explain a bit more? I don't think I understand what you're trying to say."

"Well, basically what I'm trying to say is that we are currently in a Secret realm inside of the big forest," Yao Jia said. "So, while we're still in the forest, we also aren't in it."

"Get it?"

Chapter 497: Reason for being Isolated

"Uh… no, I don't get it," Alex said. "What's a secret realm?" He had never heard of something like that during the last 5 or so months he had been in the game.

"Huh? You don't know? Wow, the humans really don't know much, huh?" Yao Jia asked. "And here father said that humans were superior in most cases because they are closer to the gods."

"Hmm… what was that?" Alex asked. Yao Jia said something that piqued his interest.

"I'm saying you guys are stupid. How do you not know about secret realms?" Yao Jia said.

"So… are you going to keep insulting me and not explain?" Alex asked.

"It's just a hidden space inside normal space. You know how storage bags work right?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "If I remember correctly, they use some sort of formation to squeeze space into those bags."

"Exactly," Yao Jia said. "Secret realms are similar. It's just a massive space, except it's hidden in normal space by squeezing it to the point where it no longer visibly exists on the outside."

"So just imagine staying inside a storage bag, only it's massive and life can flourish inside," Yao Jia said.

"Oh," Alex said. "I didn't think one could squeeze space this much. The person who made this place must've been really powerful."

"Eh? No! This one was made naturally. This sort of stuff just happen on their own from time to time. Although finding one is very hard since you can't exactly enter these places from the outside under normal circumstances," Yao Jia said.

"How do you enter these places then?" Alex asked.

"The same way you came in. Teleportation formation," Yao Jia said. "That, or under the right conditions, the secret realms open on their own for a brief period of time."

"This one opens that way too?" Alex asked.

"Yes, but you can't enter that way," Yao Jia said. "This one can only be entered through the teleportation formation. Any other method of entry has been dealt with."

"Sorry… dealt with? As in…" Alex asked.

"We have formations that stop this place from acting up. In addition to that, there are formations outside of this place that puts anyone who comes close into an illusion and sends them back the way they came from," Yao Jia said.

"What if it's a saint realm human or beast that approaches?" Alex asked.

"Why would the illusory formation care if one is saint realm? Of course, it will send them back too," Yao Jia said.

"You have such powerful formations?" Alex asked in surprise.

"You are in the palace of the White Tiger. Having such measly formations around is a given," Yao Jia said.

"I see," Alex said. "Sent back the way they came from… huh? Is that why no humans have crossed the Southern forest before?"

"Well, given that the secret realm goes from one edge of the continent to the other, I would say it's safe to assume that no humans have crossed the forest before. They would all likely have been sent back," Yao Jia said.

"No wonder," Alex thought. "So that's the reason why we are isolated. Not only is the continent itself isolated, but we are also isolated from the rest of the continent too. That would obviously lead to us growing weaker as time went on. Especially since the people from other continents took away all of our resources."

"So, how many points of entry are there? Is the teleportation platform I came through the only one?" Alex asked.

"For your side? Yes. There is another one for the Luminance empire's side. Although, the places you can enter from there are many throughout the secret realm," Yao Jia said.

"I remember seeing no one around the stone platform when we were coming in. Does no one guard those spots? Can someone come in uninvited?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Yao Jia said. "If they know how to activate the formation, they can easily enter. Although they won't be able to enter the palace directly and will only enter some other place."

"Wait, you allow people to come in? I thought you were trying to keep people away given how you placed illusory formations around the outside," Alex asked.

"Oh, that's just to protect the secret realm from the outside, not what's in it. We just don't want someone to come in and mess up with the secret realms. There are way too many lives inside to allow someone to hamper it," Yao Jia said.

"Other than that, everyone is free to come," Yao Jia said. "As long as they can behave accordingly that is."

"You humans love killing beasts. So I wouldn't be surprised if people came in with the intention to kill us. In those cases, most of them are dealt with," Yao Jia said.

"What if someone strong comes in with the wrong intentions?" Alex asked.

"Oh, yeah I forgot to say. Only those under the Saint realm can enter this place. Otherwise, they will need to wait for us to go pick them up," Yao Jia said. "Or at least I think that's what they do. I don't really know. After all, I was only born a few hundred years ago. There are still many things around this place that I don't know about."

Alex nodded when he heard that, but then got confused. "Wait, you are a few hundred years old?" he asked with a surprised expression.

"Yes," she said nonchalantly. "How old are you?"

"I will be 19 in a few months," Alex said, still holding his surprise.

This time it was Yao Jia's turn to be surprised. "Oh wow, then I am at least 400 years older than you. Haha," she said.

"Don't most peak True realm beasts live up to around 1000 years old? For someone in your cultivation base which seems to be not that far into the True realm, you should have a life expectancy of around 700 years."

"How are you still so young after nearly half of your life has gone by?" Alex asked. He wondered if she was using some techniques to make her voice sound younger or if she was changing the way she looked.

"Oh that, it's because while I am 400 years old, I've only lived for about 60 years. So I am very young physically," she said.

This just confused Alex even more. "You are 400 years old, but you've only lived for 60 years? What happened to the other 340 years? Did you hibernate or what?" he asked.

"Us cats don't hibernate silly," Yao Jia said. "It's just because of the time difference in the place I usually stay at."

"Since most of the important parts of the palace are under a time dilation, while I was born 400 years ago, I've only lived for 60 years," she said.

Alex's eyes went wide with surprise. "You can change the speed of time here? How do you do that? Formations?" he asked.

"Of course. It's quite easy actually," she said. "Well… it's easy if you have the resources, but I don't know if you can find them in this continent."

"I see," Alex said. "Do you know what the resources are?"

"Nope," Yao Jia said. "You will have to ask my father to ask the senior Zebra that made those formations."

"Sigh, alright. We'll talk about those later," Alex said. He turned towards the wall and followed it to the side with his eyes until he saw an open gate in the front.

"Can we go out there?" he asked.

"I'm afraid not," Yao Jia said. "You are both a guest and a prisoner here, so you will have to stay inside until the seniors can decide what to do with you."

"Tsk, alright," Alex said and went back to the meadows to sit on the ground. He didn't know what else to do, so he just sat around, waiting for Pearl to come out.

"You guys don't have any alchemy room right?" Alex asked.

"What's an alchemy room? We have some free rooms if you want to turn it to that," she said.

"Alchemy room is a room with the formation in it that perpetually keeps a furnace active in it. It's also quite sturdy so that if a cauldron full of ingredients ever explodes, it can handle the explosion," Alex explained.

"Hmm… we should be able to make one," Yao Jia said. "Although, you will have to ask my father later on."

"Okay," Alex said. "At least I can distract myself that way."

He planned on practicing Alchemy and formation for the little time he was stuck around here. He wondered what other things he could do in the meantime and cultivating was the only answer he got from himself.

'Although that will require many high-level monster core, and I don't have that many,' he thought. 'How will I get them?'

"Can I ask you a question? I don't know how rude this question is though," Alex said.

"Uhh… you can ask it. I will try not to get offended if it is in fact very rude," she said.

"There must be quite a lot of deaths happening around here, right?" he asked. "What do you do with the monster core of the beasts that die?"

"Well, if it's a spoil of victory, we let the winner take it. If it's not, then the one who finds it keeps it," Yao Jia said. "Why do you ask?"

"Umm… you see, I am in need of a few monster cores myself, and was wondering if there was a way to get them around here," Alex said.

Chapter 498: Planning

"Hmm," Yao Jia thought. "Why do you want it?"

"I… need it for some pills I might be making," Alex lied.

"Hmm, maybe you can trade for it? I really don't know if anyone would be willing to part with it though since they can all use monster cores in some manner for themselves," Yao Jia said.

"Hmm… trade huh? I should be able to work with that," he thought. "Alright, I will think of something. I will probably have to sell some pills for sure."

"Okay, do that," Yao Jia said. She didn't really know much about pills and was quite interested in it as well.

"Oh, uncle Teng is out," she said and got up from the meadow. "Let's go."

"Umm… Uncle Teng is… senior Puma?" Alex asked.

"Yes. Let's hurry, he gets annoyed if he is made to wait too long," Yao Jia said.

"I heard that," the Puma's voice sounded inside both of their heads.

"Why do you think I spoke out loud?" Yao Jia asked jokingly.

"Hurry up. I don't think this child likes me very much," he said.

They walked back into the underground palace and made their way back to the room where they had left behind Pearl.

As soon as they reached, the door opened and Pearl came flying out. "Meow!" he complained that he was left here for so long without Alex being nearby.

"Did he do something that hurt you?" Alex asked.

"MEOW!!" Pearl complained.

A confused look appeared on Alex's face. "You… made him fight you? Were you testing his strength?"

"No, I was testing how close he was to awakening his bloodline, and from what I can see, he's quite close. Still, he is just a child so it will take a while without putting some direct pressure on him," the Puma said.

"I won't let you do that," Alex said as he held Pearl in his arms defensively.

"Relax, little human. I have no intentions of providing any stress to someone who might end up being my king. That would be a stupid way to get on the wrong side of the future King. Especially one that is this young, so he will grow to hate me for sure," the puma said.

"So, what's the verdict, uncle? Is he ready for the ritual?" Yao Jia asked.

"Hmm… not yet. He is both too young and too weak right now. We will have to wait until he is either at least 10 years old, or in the True realms, whichever comes first," the puma said. "But given his speed, it might be the True realms that come first. The lord's bloodline surely is amazing at how fast it can help him cultivate."

"What do we do now then?" Alex asked.

"Nothing. You can go back to your room or go roam where you are allowed. As long as you don't bother anyone or try to run away, you will be fine," the puma said.

"I see. Okay," Alex said and walked away. Yao Jia followed behind him and asked," You want to go somewhere else?"

"No, I will go back to my room and wait around for a bit," he said. "Let's see what your father and Lady Ren find from their visit to the library."

"Not a bad idea," Yao Jia said. "Let me show you back to your room."

"It's alright, I know the way," Alex said and left. He walked along with Pearl in his hands and went to his room to wait.

"Sigh, what do I do now?" he wondered.

"Oh right," he thought and looked at the ring he was wearing. "So this is a storage artifact huh? I wonder how much space they pushed into this gem," he wondered.

"Hmm, so how do I refine it again? I should try with my Qi right?" he thought and started pouring in his Qi to see if something would happen. Unfortunately, nothing did.

"Should I try my True Qi, then?" he wondered. He tried to pour in what remaining True Qi he had and failed to refine it even a little bit. In the first place, He didn't have much true Qi since he spent most of it, if not all, opening the formation to hide from the beasts back in the Tiger Sect.

"Sigh, nothing I can do about it right now. Let me arrange my storage bags then," he thought and brought out stuff from his storage bags.

He started with the alchemy bags and separated items by importance. He put the important ones into the wooden boxes and left the unimportant ones without any.

After he was done with them, he moved on to other things he had in his storage bags.

"Right, I will have to ask them if they can help me maybe refine this sword," he thought as he looked at the heavy, black sword in his storage bag.

He had only used this sword two times to kill two different people. One of them was intentional, and the other one was Song Zun.

"Maybe I can even trade it for something from this place?" he wondered. "No, they won't care about swords. What would beasts need swords for?"

He shook his head and put aside the bag with the sword and moved on to something else. He then sorted out the talismans he had and noticed one that he didn't remember seeing before.

"Hmm… what's this?" he thought and looked into it. It turned out to be just another formation blueprint that he might have missed reading. Or at least, that's what he thought at first.

However, the more he read it, the more confusing it got for him as the talisman didn't follow the normal pattern of a formation blueprint.

He directly looked at the design and his eyes went wide as he finally realized what it was.

"Did she perfect it?" Alex wondered as he properly read it this time around.

Luo Xing had improved upon the formation that Alex had acquired from Song Zun. The formation only had the drawing and nothing else, and the only other thing Alex even knew about this formation was that it didn't depend on anyone to activate it since Song Zun had used it in the Forbidden Fields.

Alex quickly read up on the information and started understanding what he had been doing wrong all this time.

As it turned out, to run the formation without any help from the setter, the ingredients that would be used to run it needed to be set up in a certain way as well.

Also, the energy that was going to be used as the pattern of the formations also needed to be uniform in size everywhere. That meant that places with too many strokes in the nodes needed to have more of that energy source as compared to ones that had less of it.

Unfortunately, that was all Luo Xing had figured out. And that was after conferring with Xiao Huang as well. Their information on how a metal-less formation was started exactly was still missing.

"If I don't have that, then I can't do much, can I?" Alex thought. However, then he remembered something.

"Right, the zebra, I should ask him," he thought. "Maybe he knows given the company he lives with here."

He would need to later request the jaguar or Lady Ren herself to ask for help from the zebra. That was now another task he had added onto himself.

"So I need to get cultivate to get stronger, make pills so I can get better at alchemy, hopefully, trade some monster cores, and finally learn a bit about formations from the zebra," he thought. "I will also have to ask about the black sword."

"Finally, I will have to request some duels so that I can train while I get stronger," he thought. "Since I have a lot of free time in coming, I will have to make the best use of it."

Once he planned all of this, he finished taking care of the storage bags. He took a look at that one talisman he still had no idea what it did.

"Yeah, I will have to ask them about this as well."

Once he was all done, he was about to log out since he had nothing else to do when suddenly he heard a voice in his head.

"Come to the Palace Hall," Lady Ren's voice sounded in his head. "And bring the child with you."

Chapter 499: White Tiger“s Dominating Body

Alex walked along the newly familiar corridor with Pearl in his arms. The bright white walls and the glowing ceiling gave the area a different atmosphere compared to the outside he had been in not long ago.

He reached the door to the palace hall and was greeted by two feline beasts that were waiting for him and opened the doors for him as well.

"Meow!" Pearl thanked them as Alex nodded as well and walked in.

"Good afternoon, seniors," he said when he saw Lady Ren and the other 2 beasts standing next to her.

"Meow!" Pearl called out.

"Hello, my child. How are you feeling?" Lady Ren asked.

Alex kept quiet as the question was very clearly directed at Pearl. "Meow Meow!" Pearl once more found the opportunity to complain about having been forced to fight with the puma.

"He did that? I will make sure to punish him later, okay?" Lady Ren said.

"Meow!" Pearl finally got happy and smiled smugly towards the puma. The puma looked around not sure what to think. He had unintentionally made Pearl dislike him.

He grumbled how the testing was originally the jaguar's job and he wasn't even supposed to be part of any of it.

"You guys didn't spend very long in the library, did you?" Alex asked. "It's only been a few hours. Did you find anything?"

"Oh, it's only been a few hours for you, but for us, it has been days now," Lady Ren said. "Unfortunately, we were unable to find anything regarding your situation."

"There has been no precedent of humans with the bloodline of the Four legendary beasts. Many have tried, and some have even succeeded in integrating the bloodline for brief moments, but almost all of those have died," Lady Ren said.

"Those that still lived could never cultivate again as their body was mostly destroyed from inside out. However… you have somehow taken in not the blood, but the blood essence and survived it."

"You… are a mystery to which I don't have any answer," Lady Ren said. "Can I take a look at you more closely?"

"Uhh… Sure," Alex said and walked up close. Lady Ren closed her eyes and a wave of spiritual energy washed all over him.

"Hmm…" she said after a while. "I knew I wasn't being stupid when I said that your spirit and body are not aligned. But it's way too similar for it to not belong to each other. This is so weird."

She looked some more and said, "so much Yang energy. It's like your whole body is made up of Yang. Also, it's a shame your spiritual roots are 5 Elemental and Yang aligned. If it were less, you could have done better."

"However, your spiritual sea is quite massive for someone who hasn't even entered the true realm yet, and quite dense too. I'm looking forward to seeing how strong it will be when you enter the saint realm. That will be a sight to beh—"

Lady Ren suddenly stopped speaking and remained silent, looking at him with her spiritual sense once more.

After not speaking for a while, Alex started to get worried. "Is something wro—"

"SSHH! I'm concentrating," Lady Ren said as she continued looking for nearly a minute. Finally, she sighed and said, "dammit, I thought I saw something, but it's not there anymore."

Alex was a little confused and surprised. "What did you see?" he asked.

"I don't really know. It was some sort of texture or pattern. I thought I saw it for a split second, but I couldn't find it anymore," Lady Ren said.

"What sort of textures?" Alex asked.

"Some sort of lines. I think I only saw a part of it, but of even that I'm not sure now," Lady Ren said. "Are you hiding something?"

"No, no," Alex said. "How could I even hide anything from a Saint realm expert like you?"

"That is true, but… arghh! Just what is wrong with your body? The only thing I can even think of doing right now is taking the blood essence in you and giving it to the child so that he has a much higher chance of awakening his bloodline," Lady Ren said.

"You can do that?" Alex asked. "Is there any threat to my life if we do that?"

"This has never been done before, so I don't know," Lady Ren said. "All I know is that despite having the bloodlines of the White Tiger, you haven't awakened any skills the bloodline comes with, so we may be safe."

Alex nodded when he heard that but then stopped as he remembered something. "Um… actually, there is something I haven't mentioned before. I wasn't hiding or anything, I just forgot to mention something very important," Alex said.

The beasts got curious and looked at him curiously. "What is it?" Lady Ren asked.

"You see, whenever Pearl cultivates, I am forcefully made to cultivate the same thing with him as well," Alex said.

"Forcefully made to cultivate?" Lady Ren seemed confused.

"Um, let me just show you," Alex said and sat on the ground and pet Pearl as he told him to start cultivating.

Pearl sat on his lap and closed his eyes as white light shined around him. The white light soon turned to yellow, which then turned to golden. He had started cultivating.

As soon as that happened, numerous cuts appeared all around Alex, which hurt him quite a lot, but not enough to make him lose his attention from the current situation.

"See? This is what i— What's wrong with you guys?" Alex asked when he saw all of their eyes wide open and their pupils enlarged.

"It can't be," the jaguar said.

"He hasn't even awakened his bloodline yet," the Puma said.

"The White Tiger's Dominating Body technique. How… does he have the technique? Those should be memories lost to him for a very long time," Lady Ren said.

"Memories?" Alex asked.

"Yes, Memories of the first White Tiger," Lady Ren said. "When the first 4 beasts were blessed by the gods, they all received some sorts of skills, each different from each other."

"In the case of the White Tiger, the progenitor got a few different techniques that were later named White Tiger's Golden Claw, White Tiger's Roar, White Tiger's Steps, and a few others."

"These skills were skills ingrained onto the bloodline itself, and whoever acquired the bloodline, acquired the memory of these skills as well. The first children of the progenitor White Tiger could all use these skills pretty well."

"However, as the White Tiger's bloodline extended and started to get diluted, the number of skills they acquired also started to dilute. If they did retain the memories, it would only be some of them, not all."

"My husband had the knowledge of White Tiger's Steps and White Tiger's Golden Claw, just like many of his brothers and sisters. However, only very few White Tigers ever acquired the memories of the White Tiger's Dominating Body technique."

"To think I would get to see such a fabled skill on this child; I did not expect that," Lady Ren said. "This child is no longer important to us alone. If the family learns about him, they might just take him there to rear him."

Alex was about to argue after hearing that when Lady Ren herself spoke once again.

"No!" she said, surprising the lot. "He is too young right now. He will either grow up to be a pawn or die before getting any strong at all. So, the best choice is to keep him here until he is old enough to know better and fend for himself."

As she said that, she turned to look at Alex who still had cuts appearing all over him. "Does it not hurt, little human? All of these wounds," she asked.

"Huh? Oh yes, it hurts. But I'm used to it. Do you know why this is happening?" he asked.

"I'm not really certain, but I believe that because of your 'Bond of Equal' and you also have the same bloodline, you can cultivate what this child does. However, because of your lack of a similar physique to the White Tiger, your body cannot handle the cultivation method," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said, even though he had already guessed that much.

"Do you have anything else to ask?" Lady Ren asked.

"Yes, a bunch."

Chapter 500: Answers about the Sword

"I have a few unrelated questions and requests that I was hoping you could help me with," Alex said.

Lady Ren looked at him curiously with an amused look on her face. "Requests? I didn't think you would be bold enough for that. But still, go ahead. If it's something I can give easily, I will. Don't try to push your luck though," she said.

"I promise, I won't," Alex said. He quickly brought out a storage bag and stopped. "Um, is there someplace where you wouldn't mind having your floors destroyed?"

The jaguar and puma looked at Alex weirdly, while Lady Ren still had her amused face with her. It even looked like she was enjoying it all.

"If you can put a single dent on this marble, I will fulfill whatever these requests of yours are," Lady Ren said.

"Oh, are these floors very strong then? I guess it's fine then," Alex said and brought out the sword from inside of his storage bag. The brown-ish black sword flew out of the storage bag and immediately fell onto the floor.

It made a very large 'clank' sound and even clattered on the floor for a while, but there seemed to be no signs of a dent on the floor. Just some minor scratches.

Alex was really surprised to see that the sword that could dig through the ground if just kept on it was actually so effortlessly kept away from damaging the marble.

"Woah, is this some sort of special marble? I have never seen something like this," he said in surprise. "That makes me even more curious how you guys managed to carve it to such perfection in the first place. The craftsmen must've been really strong," Alex said. He still couldn't believe that the sword that killed Pearl's mother couldn't even do anything against this marble.

"That's… just an ordinary marble," Lady Ren's voice came from in front of him.

"Is it?" Alex asked as he looked up and saw genuine surprise from all of their faces. "What's wrong? Why do you guys look like that?" Alex asked.

"Where did you find this sword?" Lady Ren asked. Her face was a shade of fascination he hadn't seen before.

"Uhh… this is the sword that was stuck in Pearl's mother, the one I told you guys about," Alex said. He bent down to pick it up and tried to move it, but even with his incredible power, he couldn't do anything.

Lady Ren's face immediately changed from fascination to anger when she heard that. "This is the sword that killed my descendant?" she asked in a solemn voice.

"Yes," Alex said. He was starting to get a little scared when he saw her angry face. He did not want to face the anger of someone this strong.

"Let me see," the jaguar said, intervening to stop Lady Ren from ruining her own mood. "You said you couldn't pick it up, right? Let me check."

The jaguar grabbed the sword by the hilt as well as he could with his paws and tried to pull it up.

He was doing it with one hand and he could barely lift the handle off of the ground, with the tip still touching the ground. He tried with both of his paws the second time and barely got the sword to go up higher than a meter before dropping it as well.

The jaguar was full of sweat in just a few seconds of trying to pick up the sword. Alex watched in surprise as he realized that not even the jaguar could do anything.

'Not even a Saint realm expert could pick this sword up? Is it a very high-grade sword by some chance?' he thought before immediately remembering that was incorrect. 'No, it's an earth-grade sword. It says so in the description. Then the rank must be very high then. What sort of person could use such a heavy sword in this world though?' he wondered.

"Sigh, as expected on the sword that made scratches on the marble. Even without being used it nearly broke our formation," the jaguar said.

"Formation?" Alex asked.

"Yes. This hall has a formation on all of its walls and floor such that even a Saint realm expert couldn't easily destroy it. Yet, this sword is able to do such a thing. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a Saint rank sword," the jaguar said.

"It's not a saint rank sword? Then… can it be an Immortal rank sword?" Alex asked.

"You know about the immortal rank? That's unexpected," the jaguar said. The puma walked up and he too couldn't pick the sword up very well. He too had to drop it in the end.

"Lady Ren, this sword really is very unique," the Puma said. "This reminds me of that other sword for some reason too."

"You 3 have got me very curious. Let me try as well," Lady Ren said and walked up to the sword.

Alex waited for her to pick up the sword, but she didn't. Instead, the light started shining from all around her so bright that Alex and the others had to guard their eyes against the light.

As the light faded away, Alex finally put down his hand and was very shocked to see what he did.

In front of him was a middle-aged woman with thick white hair flowing up to her waist. Her skin was very fair as well, and she saw wearing a white robe with hints of yellow here and there.

Her human face looked very familiar to Alex too. "Lady Ren?" he questioned as to her facial features somewhat matched to that of her cat form.

The woman said nothing and simply got low to pick up the sword. "Careful, it's hea—" Alex's voice stuck in his face as he watched Lady Ren simply pick up the sword with no problem whatsoever.

She moved the sword left and right. "Hmm, I see what's going on. This is definitely not an Immortal ranked, but just a Saint ranked sword. There is no doubt about that," she said.

"Huh? Lady Ren, but then why is it so heavy? A saint-ranked expert couldn't possibly fight with that sword," the jaguar said.

"That's because it's not meant to be used by just any saint-ranked expert. It can only be used by the one it accepts as its user," Lady Ren said.

"Oh," the jaguar said as his eyes shined with understanding. "This sword has an artifact spirit?" he asked.

"Yes, a very rudimentary one, but there is one nonetheless. All it can do is choose whether or not it wants the person carrying it to use it. If it allows, the weight becomes insignificant."

"If it doesn't, you will have to bear the weight while carrying you. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be advanced enough to completely stop you from using it," Lady Ren said.

The jaguar and the puma nodded in understanding, while Alex stood there dumbly, not understanding a thing.

"Um, what is an artifact spirit?" he asked them.

"You don't know?" Lady Ren asked.

"No," Alex said. "And I would also like to know how you look like a human right now."

"Oh, never mind this," Lady Ren said. "You will learn about transformations later on. For now, all you need to know is that I, as well as a few others in this world, can transform as one."

"As for an Artifact spirit, when an artifact is made up of incredibly high ranked material or crafted to perfection, there is a chance that it will grow a spirit of its own that has consciousness," she said.

"I have never seen a saint realm artifact have a spirit before, but it seems they aren't quite impossible. Its users must've left it alone to take in a lot of energy and refine itself a consciousness. That is also another way artifact spirits can be born," Lady Ren said.

"No wonder I thought they were similar. This one also has a spirit in it, huh?" the puma said.

"Well, at least we won't have to worry about this one," Lady Ren said. "The spirit in this one is not as bad as the black o—"

Suddenly, Lady Ren noticed something on the surface of the sword and stopped. She brought it up and looked at it through the shine of the ceiling at a certain angle. Her face suddenly turned all serious and even a little bit worried.

"Why would they attack her?" she mumbled to herself.

"Lady Ren? Are you okay?" the jaguar and puma got worried.

"Yes, I'm fine," Lady Ren said.

"What did you find?" Alex asked.

"Nothing of import to you," Lady Ren said and handed the sword back. Alex let it fall to the ground and then went to pick it up.

He wondered what she saw and he too tried to look at the sword-like she did. At a certain angle, through the light's shine, he could see a sword with something wrapped around it.

"A sword with a snake wrapped around it?" Alex asked in confusion.

"A snake?" the jaguar looked confused.

"That is no snake. That's a dragon," Lady Ren said. "A Dragon wrapped around a sword, that is the crest of the Azure Imperium. Blessed by the Azure dragon himself, they rule the eastern continent in his stead."

"If that sword can bear their crest, then it has to belong to someone important in the Imperium. Whoever killed my descendant belonged to the Azure Imperium," Lady Ren said.

"The only question left to answer now is why?"

Chapter 501: More Questions

Alex stood around quietly, trying to understand the information he was just given. "So she was indeed from the eastern continent then. How did she get here? With no way to travel in between continents—"

"Lady Ren, could it be that the Azure dragon helped her? After all, he does have the ability to teleport," the jaguar asked.

"No, that would not make any sense," Lady Ren said. She was already back to her beast form and looked incredibly annoyed because of the information she had just learned.

"Yeah, why would the imperium attack her if the Azure Dragon wishes for her to be well. Besides, the Azure dragon should still be in closed cultivation right?" the puma asked.

"Hmm, that's true. I didn't think of that. God, this makes no sense," the jaguar said.

"That's enough. Leave that sword here, young man. We will keep it. You can't use it for now anyway. Also, we can't let something this important go around with a weakling like you," Lady Ren said.

"Huh? But that's my sword. Why should I give it to you guys?" Alex asked.

"It's not your sword. This sword belongs to the Azure Imperium. Do you know how many people would kill you to have that sword? If a single person ever learns that you have that sword, your life would be the least of your worries," Lady Ren said.

Alex feared a little when he heard that. It was true that the sword wasn't the best weapon for him since he couldn't even use it. And if people did really learn about the sword's origin, he didn't know how much trouble he would be in.

So, he reluctantly agreed to have the sword being taken away.

"Don't be sad. If you ever become strong enough to handle it, we will give it back to you. We have no use for this sword," Lady Ren said.

"I see. Thank you," Alex said, but his mood was clearly soured by now. He couldn't help but sigh at what the situation had come to be.

"So, do you have any more questions? I thought you had a lot," Lady Ren said.

"Oh, yes," Alex said as he hurriedly brought out a talisman. "Can you tell me what this talisman is? I tried checking, but I just can't figure it out at all."

"Hmm, a talisman?"

The talisman in Alex's hands started floating and they went up to Lady Ren's face. She looked at it for a bit and her eyes went wide.

"Young man, how do you always have such good stuff on you? Your luck is out of this world," Lady Ren said.

"Umm, so I can assume the talisman is good?" he asked.

"Yes, it's great," Lady Ren said as she gave back the talisman. "It's a teleportation talisman. Although it's dormant right now, you will have to wait for a bit before you can use it."

"Oh, a teleportation talisman?" Alex's eyes went wide. "I can teleport around with it?'

"Not so fast. I said you will have to wait, right?" Lady Ren said. "It will take a while before you can use this talisman I suppose. From what I can see, it requires a lot of Water Qi fed to it before it can be used. If you know of someplace like that, you can make it active right now."

"Or, you can just wait… I don't know, 10 more years? You can do it then as well," Lady Ren said.

"10 years? Is there no other way?" Alex asked.

"Nope. You either find the Water Qi, or you wait. And you will need a lot of Water Qi. I genuinely have no idea if there even is such a place in the Western Continent," she said.

"Sigh, alright. I guess I will have to wait then," Alex said. "Thank you for explaining what it is. I wouldn't have known about it at all if it weren't for you."

"It's fine. But, can you tell me how you came to acquire it?" Lady Ren asked.

"I got it from a corpse in the Southern— the forest outside. It was with a man that was hidden below a massive garden full of alchemy ingredients. I still wonder what he was doing there," Alex said.

"I see, then we have no information. You were just lucky," Lady Ren said. "If he wasn't from your empire, then he must've teleported there. You sure you don't have any other information?"

"No," Alex said.

"Alright, let's end the topic here then. Do you have anything else to ask?" Lady Ren said.

"No, but I have 2 requests," Alex said.

"Requests? Right, you did say that. Let's hear it then," Lady Ren said.

"Okay, my first request is that I get a room built with a furnace in it. I would like to practice my alchemy a bit. It will also help the beasts since I can help them get some pills that might come to be of use," Alex said.

"Pills huh? We don't have any that make those, so those would be quite useful. But are you sure you can make some for all of us?" Lady Ren asked.

"I am slowly improving, and soon I will be able to perfectly create True rank pills. When I do, the importance of my alchemy in this place will go up by a lot," Alex said.

"Hmm, I hope you are successful then," Lady Ren said. "Little Yao, see to it, okay?"

"Yes, lady Ren," the jaguar replied.

"As for my second request, I heard that there is a senior who makes the formations around here? I would like to ask him to help me with understanding a few things," Alex said.

"Uhh… that will be a little hard. Little Chen is the type of person who does what he can. I will get you a meeting with him. Whether he will teach you or not will lie on your hand. Is that okay?" lady Ren asked.

"Yes, thank you, Lady Ren," Alex said.

"Alright, if there is nothing more, you can go back now. Take care of the child for a while before he is ready," Lady Ren said. "I will see you around."

"Thank you, seniors," Alex said and bowed before leaving the hall.

Chapter 502: Dropping Out for good.

Alex walked out of the palace hall and walked along the white corridor with the new information running through his mind.

The sword that he was unable to use for the longest time belonged to the royal family of the Eastern Continent, the royal family being antagonistic towards Pearl and his mother for some reason, and the fact that he had a teleportation talisman that could help him leave so long as it was active again.

These were all information that he wasn't sure how he felt about it. At least, they were information about stuff that was way out of his reach for him right now.

"Sigh, I should just go back and wait for the alchemy room to be made. There really is nothing to do around here, isn't it? I can't even visit the library," Alex thought.

"Well, since it's still afternoon, I should just go and— Huh?" Alex was surprised when he noticed something.

"It happened again?" he said with a face full of shock. He looked at the time on the right and had noticed that it was now 4 in the afternoon.

"But it was barely noon when I entered that room. How did the time— oh right, the Palace Hall did have time dilation formation in it," Alex thought as he remembered. "Damn, is it always like this? I should be careful where I go then."

Alex was still in shock at the time changing, so he quickly went back to the room that was assigned to him, and logged out.

He went out of the capsule and checked the time. As expected, it was indeed 4 pm. "Wow, how did the change in time in the game affect me in the real world as well?" he wondered.

He wasn't hungry or needed to use the bathroom, so he quickly went back into the capsule and logged in.

While the change in time had surprised him once more, he decided to do something else to take his mind off of them.

He brought out a monster core, one belonging to that of a Mind Tempering 4th realm beast, and consumed it.

After reaching Mind Tempering, the beasts seemed to always have a soul in the cores regardless of which ones he had.

Still, Alex's own spiritual sea was far stronger than what the Mind Tempering beasts could really be, so he had no difficulty in killing it.

The spiritual sea beneath him was so vast and dense, that he could keep on using techniques after techniques and it wouldn't deplete in the slightest.

After killing the beast in his spiritual sea, the yellow fog once more consumed both him and the beast, and he got the Qi from the beast.

"I finally have enough to break through to the next realm huh?" he thought. "Although, it wasn't very long ago that I did breakthrough, so I probably should wait a little longer."

Alex decided to keep the breakthrough aside for now, and checked his storage bags. There was 1 more 4th Mind Tempering realm beast's core, and another one belonging to a 5th Mind Tempering realm beast.

Since he had gone to the forest for hunting when he only had Mind Tempering 1st realm cultivation base, he couldn't kill anything stronger than those at the time. Thus, these were the highest cores he had for now.

"Sigh, these should help me get to the 5th Mind Tempering realm, but after that, I will be in trouble," Alex thought. "Collecting Qi through normal cultivation will take me months. Even with using pills to assist in it. Sigh, no wonder the everyday cultivators cultivate so slow."

The normal cultivators could do the exact same thing the players did. That was to sell what they can gather through trade or hunting, and buy themselves pills that increased their Qi.

Alex couldn't help but wonder why they didn't do that. There must be a reason why only players could increase their cultivation base so fast, despite the normal cultivators having a headstart.

"Is using pills to get stronger considered wrong? It couldn't be that they just never thought about it, right?" Alex thought. "I should have asked the master what would happen if people only consumed pills to breakthrough."

"Now that I think about it, I might have to do the same thing, won't I?" he thought. However, he immediately thought otherwise. "No, as a Mind Tempering realm cultivator, pills won't help me as monster cores will. I will still have to stick to the cores, I guess."

With nothing else to do, Alex called out Pearl and got onto his bed. He let Pearl start cultivating, and slowly, he too started doing it.

Before he knew it, he had fallen into a trance and fell unconscious.

Slowly, his consciousness returned back to him as he woke up from sleep. He looked up at the time and realized that it was 6 am in morning.

His True Qi had returned to him at 50% once more and he could feel himself getting just a little bit stronger.

"I should go train a bit so that I can breakthrough again," he thought.

"Ah right, if someone comes, open the door and tell them I am cultivating, okay? If the person who came is any of the 4 from yesterday, then you can leave with them," Alex said to Pearl.

He didn't take Pearl back into the beast space since no one was possibly going to harm him in this place. Then, sat in his cultivating position and logged out.

He got out of the capsule and freshened up before going out to the kitchen. Emily was already up, preparing breakfast for them all.

"You know you don't have to wake up this early to make us breakfast right? We can just have cereals," Alex said.

"Nonsense! Cereals are bad for you. It's better to have bread and eggs," she said.

"Yeah, but you could play the game for a little longer. No need to leave, what is it, 6 in the morning. You need more sleep," Alex said.

Emily stopped after putting the bread in the toaster and sighed. "I have nothing to do in the game, unfortunately," she said.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

She turned around and said, "well, since I have a really bad body and talent and almost unusable spiritual root, I can't really cultivate at all. Despite it being months, I'm still in the Bone Tempering realm."

"Wow, that is really slow. Is your cultivation method not very good?" he asked. As far as he knew, even with bad talents, one could cultivate fast if they landed a very good cultivation method.

"Uh, it's not bad I guess," Emily said. "It's heaven grade, so I really can't call it anything but good. However, due to me not having any talent, most of the Qi I collect gets wasted during my breakthroughs."

"Like the last time I went from Bone Tempering 3rd realm to Bone Tempering 4th realm, it took me 3 different tries. I only had a 65% success rate. From 4th to 5th, I have around 62% success rate, so it will take me another long while."

"Sigh, don't do what I did, and never die in-game. It just ruins everything. I might actually end up not playing the game anymore," she said. "But… the holidays are coming and I have nothing else to do for now. I think I will stop playing the game when the classes come back a month later."

"If they do come, right?" Alex asked. "Wasn't there that rumor of the university going to close for 2 to 3 months due to the game? I wonder if that is true."

"I hope not. Otherwise, I would have nothing else to do for the entirety of the winter vacation," she said.

"Oh, you won't have to worry about that. Given where I am, I might actually end up not playing the game a whole lot in the future either," Alex said.

"Oh, what happened?" she asked.

"Well, I'm in this jungle with beasts that say they will keep me there for 10 years, so I think this is it for me too. Unless I manage to find a way back or convince them to let me go back," Alex said.

"That's awful. You were doing so well in the game too," Emily said. "Well, I guess you will now have time to focus on your studies, instead of the game."

"Uhh… about that," Alex said. "I am going to drop out of University."

"Drop out? Why?" Emily asked.

Alex shrugged. "You know why. I don't really need the classes," he said.

"Huh? What did I just hear?" Sarah said as she walked into the kitchen. "You're going to drop out? You must be earning a lot of money then."

Alex got a little embarrassed to talk about his money, but still said, "something like that."

"Woah," Sarah said. "I was kind of joking. Are you really earning a lot? How much do you earn?"

"Sarah, that's not something you should be asking so openly," Emily said from the side.

"What? You're siding with him now? Does our years-long friendship mean nothing to you now?" Sarah exaggerated.

"Haha, it's not bad. Let's just say that," Alex asked.

"Oh, must be in the high hundred thousand then. How much do you end up returning though?" Sarah asked.

"Returning?" Alex questioned.

"You know, putting back into the game. Returning the money," she said.

"Umm, why would I give money back to the game?" Alex asked.

"Uh, you know. To buy stuff, get spirit stones for cultivation. Wait, have you not put the money back into the game yet?" she asked.

"Of course not. I'm self-sufficient in-game," Alex said.

"Tsk, no wonder you make so much. I always end up giving back half of what I make because I always need it," Sarah said.

"You should be like me, Sarah. Get yourself a husband in-game who can give you stuff for free," Hannah entered and jokingly said.

"Damn, why is your timing so right? Also, your brother is dropping out of college. Say something to him," Sarah said.

"Oh, you're dropping out? You lasted quite a while longer than I imagined," Hannah said.

"Huh? You expected me to drop out earlier?" Alex asked.

"Yeah. I only stayed cause it was my final semester. You had barely just started, so I thought you would simply leave. Especially given that you have no money involved in it," Hannah said.

"Hm, I guess that's fair," Sarah said from the side.

"Alright, let's stop the discussion here. I might have something to do in the game soon, so I should return quickly for now," Alex said and started eating faster.

The rest of them did the same thing and left the kitchen to go back to their room.

Chapter 503: Training Partners

Alex logged back into the game and found that Pearl was still with him. It seemed that he wasn't required anywhere else for today.

Seeing that he didn't seem to have anything else to do, Alex started getting a little bored. "Should I just make some formations?" he thought.

He took out the few spare metal plates and the inscription pen from his storage bag and started making strokes on the metal plate.

Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing the efficiency of the formations he was making without the tool that was available in the Tiger sect. So, all he could do was make the formations, try to run it, and see how it worked.

'Urgh, I wish I had more formation rods. I could practice those too,' he thought. After a few hours, he was done making the formations. Once he was done, he started feeling incredibly bored.

"Wanna go out and train?" Alex asked.

"Meow!" Pearl cried out and happily jumped onto his shoulders before pointing at the door. It seemed that Pearl too was incredibly bored with nothing to do.

It was still a few hours till noon, but the sun was shining brightly and the garden meadow already had a lot of beasts in it.

The ones that hadn't seen him looked at him with a weird gaze since a human's presence wasn't common at all.

Some growled and roared at him, while others just kept watch of what he was doing. Some even threatened to come to attack him from the way they were staring at him.

Alex felt incredibly uncomfortable amongst these stranger beasts. "I wish I had gotten Yao Jia to come with me. She would've helped me not feel so afraid at least," he said to Pearl.

"You called me?" a beast jumped towards him from the side.

Alex reflexively jumped backward and got in an attacking stance. When he finally saw who it was, he let down his guard.

"Geez, you scared me," Alex said. "What are you doing here?"

"Basking in the sun. Also, I told you I am in charge of this garden right? I look after this place," she said. "Did you come to stay in the sun too?"

"Sun? No. I came here to train. I need to become stronger," Alex said.

"Ooh, can I watch? I'm really interested in how humans train," Yao Jia said with a curious face.

"Uh, sure. I doubt it's different from beasts though," Alex said.

"Oh, you guys get the memory of your parents where you learn how to fight and use techniques too?" Yao Jia asked.

"Uh… no. I see, I guess we are different," Alex said. "My training style is different. I learn the techniques on my own, then practice them while fighting with someone else."

"Ooh, we do the second part too. Practice sure is important," Yao Jia said. "However, you don't have any partner to fight against right? Do you want me to find someone?"

"No, I'm good. I'll train with Pearl," Alex said.

Yao Jia's curious face slowly turned into a confused face as she asked, " you're going to fight the little child?"

"Uh, yes. It's just practice after all," Alex said.

"But, he's more than a realm weaker than you," Yao Jia said, still sort of confused.

"Oh it's fine, I will lower my cultivation base to become equal to him in strength," Alex said.

"Still, isn't he only 6 months old? You're going to fight an infant?" Yao Jia asked.

"Uhh… when you put it like that, I don't know what to say," Alex said.

"Also, will lowering your ability to that of someone weaker than you, will it help you become stronger at all? Isn't that just wasting your time mostly?" Yao Jia asked. "If you want to become strong, then you need to push yourself to the limit. Fight someone on equal footing as you. Only then will you become stronger."

Alex stopped to contemplate. "What you said is true… but who will I even fight against here? I only have Pearl."

"Oh don't worry about that. If you really are interested in fighting, I can find many beasts who will be more than happy to beat a human, hehe," Yao Jia said while giggling.

"It sounds like you want me to suffer more than anything," Alex said.

"What? Of course not. I will let them know not to be too heavy-handed when they fight you. Don't worry, I will stay watch too. As I said, I am interested in watching a human train," Yao Jia said.

Alex thought for a moment and nodded. "Thank you. I will be happy to take this offer then. Also, if you can, can you find someone for Pearl to train with? I don't want him to be idle too."

"No Problem," Yao Jia said and made a loud growling noise. Suddenly, 2 beasts ran up to her. One of them was a jackal, and the other one was a hyena. They bowed in front of her, and he spoke to them in some sort of beast language.

Alex couldn't understand what she said, but he could tell that she was ordering them to go find fighters for him.

"Oh right, make sure the beasts I fight are 8th Mind Tempering realm or above. Otherwise, it won't be a fight at all," Alex said.

"Huh? Aren't you 3rd Mind Tempering realm?" Yao Jia asked as she checked through his cultivation base.

"Yes, but I can fight people stronger than me. Also, the same thing for Pearl. Find someone 2 to 3 realms higher than him," Alex said.

"Are you sure?" Yao Jia asked as she looked concernedly at Pearl.

"MEOW!" Pearl meowed, letting her know that it was okay.

'I will need to ask her to teach him how to speak as well,' Alex thought when he heard Pearl meow. Pearl already knew a few words and could speak to him through his mind. But his mouth wasn't able to articulate the words at all, and he always ended up meowing his sentences.

"Okay, I will find a strong one for you, but the child is too important to throw into a strong match-up. He will have to start with someone in his own realm," Yao Jia said.

"That's fair, I guess. Please do what you think is right," Alex said.

Yao Jia nodded and let the 2 beasts know, who ran away to find fighters for him and Pearl.

When they returned, they came back with 3 beasts, all of whom looked quite excited to fight.

From what Alex could see, only 1 of these beasts was for Alex to fight. The other two were for Pearl. One of those beasts, a snake, was at the same cultivation realm as Pearl, and the other one a deer was 2 realms higher than him.

As for Alex's opponent, a Rhino, was in the 8th Mind Tempering realm, just as he requested. Given that it was a beast, the rhino's strength would be similar to that of a normal 9th Mind Tempering realm human, which for Alex would be quite an ordeal.

However, that was just what he needed to become stronger and he was all the happier for it.

"Will they work?" Yao Jia asked as she turned towards Alex.

"Yes, very much," Alex said.

"Alright," Yao Jia said as she turned around to speak to the 3 beasts. The 3 beasts kept glancing at Alex sneakily while nodding to whatever Yao Jia was telling them.

"Alright, come. Let's not disturb the peace here with your training. I also don't want to deal with the destruction of my garden," Yao Jia said.

"Where will we go?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, I can't take you outside since you are not allowed to. And the underground is off limit for training, so I guess there is only one place remaining. We'll go to the palace," Yao Jia said.

"The palace?" Alex asked as he turned to look at the castle that had remained unused for a lot of years. "What about the backyard? Is there no space there?"

"There is a giant hole in the backyard and inside is where the cemetery lies, so it's considered rude to go there for anything other than praying for the dead. Don't worry, there are giant empty rooms in there that will be perfect for you guys," Yao Jia said.

"I see, let's go then," Alex said.

The palace was a giant white mansion with at least 3 stories to it. From the outside, Alex couldn't tell how big it was, but it was more than 100 meters in width alone.

If the palace was really built on top of the entire spirit vine, then it would be the largest building Alex had seen to date. Even larger than buildings he had seen in his city in real life.

The way to the underground was on the right side of the palace while the gate outside was in front of it. So, Alex and the others had to go towards the front of the palace before climbing up the stairs to enter the palace.

As soon as he entered, Alex could feel the emptiness. He could hear the sounds of beasts working inside, could see the palace being well-kept through the years, but he could still sense that the warmth that was once in this building was lost.

With the queen and the other wives and concubines, as well as the descendants, leaving the place to go back to the family ground, the palace no longer had any residents in it, and it showed in the emptiness Alex felt.

"This way, the rooms are right here," Yao Jia said as she walked through the corridor in the palace.

Chapter 504: Training with the Rhino

Yao Jia walked through the halls with a sprint on her steps. Along the way, Alex saw many beasts that seemed to be working there, and Yao Jia found 2 very strong ones among them to come along with her.

From Alex's senses, they were all in the upper True realms, all stronger than him and the 3 others that came with him by a lot. He wondered why they were called but didn't question it.

She growled something in her beastly language that Alex couldn't understand and the other two beasts nodded.

"What's going on?" Alex asked.

"Oh, I'm just getting these two to watch over the child as he trains. We don't want him to get injured, right?" Yao Jia said.

Alex nodded and agreed. She growled towards the beasts once more and pointed towards one of the rooms. The 4 of the beasts that were with them nodded and walked to the room. Ning assumed that was the training room and walked towards it as well.

"That's not the room you'll be going to," Yao Jia said. "That's where the child will train. You will have to train in another separate room."

"Oh, okay. Pearl, go and train with these guys okay? I will go to another room to train," he said.

"Meow?" Pearl said, not wanting to be left with the strangers.

"Don't worry, I will be close by. If you need me, just call me," Alex said. Pearl reluctantly agreed and went into the room.

"Alright, they will train there for at least an hour. You will be training in that room," Yao Jia said as she pointed at one of the rooms down the hallway.

"These are just normal rooms, right? Not rooms made specifically for training?" Alex asked.

"Yes, they're just rooms where the family lived. But even so, it all has formation in it that makes it damn near impossible for even me to do anything," Yao Jia said.

The door opened, and the three of them entered. The door was big enough for even the bulky Rhino to enter, and the room was just as equally large.

The room was totally empty aside from a set of curtains on the window. The room had been empty for so long that Alex couldn't even tell where everything was kept since the start.

Alex walked to the center of the room and recognized how wide it was. Although it wasn't the same size as the training hall back at his master's manor, it was still more than half of its size.

That was big enough for him to train freely.

"Whose room did this use to be? This is quite big," Alex said.

"Hmm, I don't know. No one has lived here for the last 5000 years, so I can't know. But it's more than likely it was either one of the King's partners or his children. Definitely one of those two. Although, it could also be a guest room. I don't know," Yao Jia said.

"So, are you ready? I want to see you train," she said with a jovial tone in her voice.

"Yes, I'm ready," Alex said. He walked away from the center and to one side of the room. He took out his sword and waited for the Rhino to get to the other side.

"Hey, Hey, Hey! What are you doing? Why are you bringing out a weapon?" Yao Jia asked.

"This is how I fight though," Alex said.

"But this isn't a fight. It's a training session. What if he gets hurt," Yao Jia said as he pointed towards the Rhino.

"Uh, I'm sure he had a tough hide. Also, I will try not to hit too hard," Alex said.

"No, if he gets injured from this fight, that will be on me. Can't you train with just normal techniques?" she asked.

"Um," Alex thought about it for a bit. He wanted to learn the sword to improve his Sword Intent, but it would be a bit too hard to train the intent itself under the current situation since his training partner wasn't that much stronger.

"Alright, I will fight without any weapons," Alex said in the end as he kept back his sword.

"Good, start when you want. I'm just here for the show," Yao Jia said.

Alex nodded and looked towards the Rhino before nodding towards him as well. "Alright, I'll begin then.

He said and lightly jumped towards the Rhino with his hands in a fist. The Rhino was plenty intelligent being in the Mind Tempering realm and immediately knew what to do.

It twisted its neck a little to the left with a smug look on its face, dodging the punch and bringing it back like a snapping rubber band, hitting Alex's upper body with the side of its head.

Alex lost balance as he was sent aside by the simple attack. "Alright," he said and stood up before going back to punch once more.

The Rhino made a scoffing noise as it thought that Alex was doing the same thing again and dodge once more. However, this time Alex didn't move a step further and immediately came to a halt after the Rhino moved its head.

His other fist came from the side and punched the Rhino directly on the nose below its horn. Once the Rhino was hit, Alex returned back to his spot, preparing to attack once more.

The Rhino shook its head as a slight stinging pain emanated from its nose. Despite the difference in cultivation, it had taken damage from Alex. It got a little irritated and decided to attack seriously now.

Alex dashed forward once more, but the Rhino didn't bother dodging at all. Instead, it also dashed forward at an incredible speed as its horn started glowing green in color.

Alex could see a barrier appear around the front of the Rhino, like a shield protecting the front side. However, the Rhino was using that shield to attack.

With the rhino already being massive, and the shield being even bigger than it, Alex didn't have much space to maneuver in. He wanted to teleport out, but the amount of light in the room wasn't enough to make any distinct shadows for him to teleport to.

So, with no other choice, he quickly started both of his defensive techniques. His skin started showing a marbled pattern, and a barrier made up of multicolored light appeared in front of him.

As the Rhino's barrier passed his own, the Rhino's barrier lost the majority of its green light and what slammed at Ning was only part of it.

A rather loud sound emerged from the two of them colliding, but neither of them was at an advantage during the clash.

The Rhino came to a full stop and Alex himself didn't move a bit.

"Ooh! That was nice. You use so many techniques all at once. I saw like 3. Those aren't memories of your parents right?" Yao Jia asked from the side.

"No, this is what we learn after training," Alex said. "We never get anything from the start."

Yao Jia thought for a bit and asked, "Can you teach me?"

"Um… I don't think so. I know there are techniques that you can learn, but I don't have any. I had looked through a few to teach Pearl, but all of them looked terrible. Maybe there are good ones in the sects that primarily focus on beast taming," Alex said.

"Sigh, that's unfortunate. Continue your training," Yao Jia said.

Alex nodded and got back to his training. Throughout the next half an hour, he showed many of the abilities he had that didn't require the use of a sword.

This also helped him realize that he was way too reliant on the sword itself. In the case, if he ever had to fight without a sword, his survival rate would go down by a lot.

'I need to become stronger even when I'm not using the sword,' he thought.

The training was hard, but Alex was also not using all of his abilities, so that could be improved upon.

The Rhino sent a gale of air flying towards him, which he dodged by moving around it with seemingly no resistance in the air.

He then very quickly went behind the Rhino and kicked at it. The Rhino bulked up until its body and got extra sturdy such that Alex's attack didn't do much damage to it at all.

Alex was about to go for another attack when Yao Jia suddenly spoke up. "Alright, that's enough," she said.

Alex stopped and turned around with a confused face. "But it's only been half an hour," he said. "Can't we do this for a little longer?"

"Oh, I'm not stopping the training session," Yao Jia said. "I'm just changing your partner."

"Changing my partner?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, I didn't expect his lack of maneuverability to be a factor in this training, but it seems you are getting a lot of hits off just because he isn't as flexible as you," Yao Jia said as she gestured towards the Rhino.

The Rhino said something in return while bowing his head, and Yao Jia replied in the same language that Alex couldn't understand.

She said something, to which the Rhino bowed once more and left out of the room.

"What did you say to him?" Alex asked.

"Oh, I just told him he was no longer needed here," Yao Jia said.

"I see," Alex said. "Should we go check on Pearl while we wait for my next partner then?" Alex asked.

"Oh, you don't need to worry about that. Your training partner is already here," Yao Jia said with a big smile.

Alex slowly turned his head towards her as a thought came to his mind. "Uhh… by my training partner, you don't mean… you, right?" he asked.

"Of course I mean myself. Who else could I be referring to?" she asked with a laugh.

"But you're so strong. Will this even be a training?" Alex asked.

"Oh, don't worry. I won't fight back at all," she said. "I'm way too eager to see how you fare against someone clearly out of your range."

Alex thought for a moment and said, "That's not a bad idea, honestly. I would love to fight someone strong so that I know where I'm failing. Also, I should be able to use my abilities without holding back at all"

"Right? You can also use your sword if you want. I can take those hits without a problem," Yao Jia said smugly.

"I would rather not use my sword right now. I would like to fight the best I can without any weapons," he said.

Yao Jia smiled and said, "Suit yourself. now come, let's train."

Chapter 505: White Tiger“s Golden Claw

For the entirety of the next 3 hours, Alex and Yao Jia trained for as long as they could. It was an intense training session for Alex, but to Yao Jia, it was just a simple bout, as if she was playing with a child.

No matter how much speed, strength, or surprise he put into his attacks, there was nothing that she could do that wasn't better in all aspects.

Alex was sure that the only thing that could bring the slightest bit of result in this training was Heaven's Impact. However, that wasn't a skill suitable for training practices.

He kept to with his normal skills, but even his teleportation skills were being bested by her with her speed. He couldn't even sneak attack.

His fist and palm attacks were doing nothing, so he decided to use the one technique he had come upon his own.

Yellow light floated in the air as it slowly came together on his arms and coated it golden. Yao Jia's eyes shined when she saw this.

Alex dashed through the air and punched towards her. She casually brought forth her paw and stopped it. Even as she thought it did, the yellow light exploded, attacking her paw once more.

"Woah, Woah, Woah, stop!" she said. "What was that?"

"What? My skill?" Alex asked.

"Yes! That was like… where did you learn it?" she asked.

"Nowhere. I came up with it on my own," Alex said.

"On your own. Wow! That technique is so close to one that the White Tigers have too. It's called the White Tiger's Golden Claw. The King had it, and it was one of his strongest attacks I was told," Yao Jia said.

"White Tiger's Golden Claw huh?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it was one of his strongest skills. Honestly, your skill is very lacking compared to his, but that's understandable. However, since you said you came up with this on your own, maybe you can improve on it," Yao Jia said.

"Improve my skill? How do you suggest I do that?" Alex asked. Golden light flickered around him once more as they slowly coalesced on his right arm to form a golden fist.

He kept it there for a bit and listened to what Yao Jia had to say.

"There's an obvious answer, honestly," she said. "Instead of a fist, make it a claw. Make it sharp so that it can cut through things. That will deal a lot more damage than just regular punch, don't you think?"

"Hm… claws. I can't have nails coming from out between my fingers, so I guess this is my only choice," Alex said. Slowly, he opened his golden fist and loosened his hand.

Then, more golden light appeared around his that started converging on his hand once more. Only this time, they were sticking to his fingers, making each one of them sharp like claws.

He turned his hand around and looked at it. He was genuinely impressed with what he had come up with.

'I can't use it the same way I use the punch though, right?' he thought. 'The punch is meant to be a one-hit attack, but this one will have to last me several bouts. So, they must be quite durable.'

"Hey, that's pretty good," Yao Jia said from the front. "But you know what's better than one claw?"

Alex chuckled. "Two claws, huh?" he said and formed a golden fist on his left hand that also soon changed to claws.

"That looks much better," Yao Jia said. "But you know what's better than two claws?"

"I'm not making claws out of my feet," Alex said as he laughed.

"Whatever, that's your loss," Yao Jia said. "Okay, come attack me. Let's see how well they perform."

Alex didn't really have any claw technique to fall back on, so he had to go in on the attack blindly. He dashed forward the same way he would during normal punches and started slashing when he got close.

The attack procedure felt incredibly inefficient as his claws didn't really hit the targets properly. Yao Jia was also quick and dodged most of his attack.

The only time he genuinely got to test the claws was when she would use barrier skills and he would get to freely attack them

For now, he had realized that his claws weren't durable at all, but he had some idea on how to fix that. If he could give them a base to form upon, for example, long nails, then they would surely be more durable.

'Although I won't be able to rely on pill always. I will need to make them stronger just as is. Maybe I should use True Qi. Those would certainly be stronger,' he thought.

He let go of his golden claw and reformed it while using True Qi this time. It looked far more brilliant in color than it did with common Qi and felt a lot stronger as well.

He checked the claws for a few seconds and remembered something from a few months ago that had given him the idea for his golden fist in the first place.

He seemed to recall a skill to the same effect as what he had now being used by Pearl back when they were stuck in that formation.

"Now that I think about it, part of the reason I came up with the golden fist technique was that I saw Pearl use it actually. He used it against me during one of our training. After seeing that, I came up with the idea to use it for myself as well," Alex said.

Yao Jia who was getting ready for the next round of fights stopped as her eyes went wide.

"What?" she asked. "The child can use that already? Dear lord, I must let the elders know about this."

"Wait, what's wrong with him using it? It's a White Tiger's skill right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, but the child hasn't been through the ritual yet. His being able to use skills before the ritual is not something I know is possible. I must let the elders know to see if this means anything. Come, we can end the training here."

Alex nodded. "Yes, let's end it here. I'm quite tired too," he said.

Yao Jia briskly walked out of the room with Alex following behind her quietly. He wondered if he had made a mistake by telling her that Pearl knew the technique.

The older folks already knew that Pearl knew the White Tiger's Dominating Body. If they now knew that he also knew White Tiger's Golden Claw skill, they would put more importance on Pearl, which would always mean a good thing for him.

However, it was also possible that they would force Pearl to go through the ritual before he was even ready to make him the King of this place as soon as possible.

That was the reason he did not feel like revealing that Pearl had also used another skill back during their training, one that he used to block Alex's sword completely with no damage.

Pearl was done with his training in the other room and jumped onto Alex's embrace as soon as he saw him.

"You okay, buddy? How was your training?" Alex asked.

"MEOW!" Pearl once more complained about being left with strangers, made to fight.

Alex chuckled a little and said, "I'm sorry that keeps happening, buddy. But you will have to do that if you want to get stronger. Also, I will stay with you, for now, so cheer up."

Alex bowed a little towards the snake and the deer that were training with Pearl. From what Alex could see, the snake didn't even seem to have fought that long. As for the deer, it was in an absolutely disheveled state.

Pearl surely made some work out of him.

"Let's go back," Alex said. While Yao Jia went to report on her findings today, Alex took Pearl back to his room to rest.

Once again, there was nothing for him to do so he went back to his room to wait around.

"Well, the training session itself was quite intense, wasn't it?" he asked. "I think I should ask her to help me train tomorrow as well. What do you say, buddy?"

"MEOW!" Pearl refused.

"You will come around to it, surely," he said. "Right then, I think it's time."

Alex then opened up his status and clicked breakthrough.

Chapter 506: A Month Later

"AAAAAAAA-AHAHAHHA~"

Emily screamed from the top of her lungs as the rollercoaster went downhill. Alex could also feel the rush of the moment, but it wasn't scary at all to him for some reason.

Even until the end, he never once screamed like the other people on the roller coaster.

"Gosh, you're no fun. You've become too used to heights in-game, haven't you?" Emily asked.

"I can't help it if I know how to fly, can I?" Alex asked.

"Sigh, at least one of us is having fun in the game," Emily said. "Come on, let's go. I want to have some crepe."

"Oh, don't you want to go on that ride before that?" Alex asked as he pointed to a fun-looking amusement park ride.

"Arghh, I do. But I'm also feeling a little hungry. Are you not hungry right now? We both haven't eaten anything since breakfast," she said.

"I guess I am. Alright, let's go eat something, and we can continue having fun afterward," Alex said and went to a food stall in the amusement park.

They ordered some crepes for themselves and found a place to sit down to eat.

"I haven't had this much fun in a long while," Emily said. "Also, it's nice having someone to talk to. Being alone all the time wasn't very fun, I must say."

"I'm sorry. If I knew you had completely stopped playing already, I would've made more time to spend with you. God knows I have a lot of free time right now," Alex said.

"No, no, don't be sorry. It has nothing to do with you anyway," Emily said. "It's my fault that started all of that problem. Now I can't even go past being an outer sect disciple. The game is not worth it for me at all."

"Besides, it helped me find time for my parent's store when I went back home. They were surprised to see that I wasn't addicted to the game like everyone else.

"What will you do with your capsule then?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. Maybe I will sell it, but maybe I will want to go back and play. I will keep it for now at least," Emily said.

"That's not a bad idea," Alex said. "I wonder how many people end up selling their gears after they die and the game isn't fun anymore. Should be a lot of people right?"

"I would assume so. As far as I know, there is not a single person that managed to get a good roll on their body, and talent after reincarnating," Emily said.

"Hmm, maybe I should pull out my shares from the Deva corp's stocks. It feels really flimsy right now," Alex thought.

"By the way, you never talk about your game. Is there a reason why you are so free right now? Don't you have to work hard to earn money?" Emily asked.

"Uh, I only have 2 things to do all day in-game. Train, and make pills. Training takes 2-4 hours at most and making pills takes at most 2 hours too, so I have a lot of time free on my hand," Alex said.

"Hmm… and you make money from these pills right?" Emily asked.

"Yeeee…. Actually, not right now. I can't sell my pills, but when I can, yes. Pills are what make me money the most," Alex said.

"I probably should have taken some sort of profession when I started too. Then I probably wouldn't have died on that mission in the snow," Emily said.

"Alright, enough of this depressing talk. Let's finish and go ride some more of those rides," Alex said as he started chomping on his crepe.

Emily giggled and rushed to finish her crepe as well. After 2 more hours of having fun in the amusement park, they finally returned back home.

Both Hannah and Sarah were in the game, so they never even realized that the two had gone out at all.

"Do you want me to keep you company out there?" Alex asked.

"No, no. Go back to the game. You don't have to stop doing something you enjoy just because I don't," Emily said.

"Thank you," Alex said and left the living room. He went to his room and freshened up before going back into the capsule and logging in.

He woke up in his room and looked at the bed he was sitting on. Pearl wasn't anywhere to be seen.

"He must be training," Alex thought and walked out. He walked along the white underground hallways and made his way to a special place designated for him and him alone.

It was the alchemy room that was created for him. The beasts had worked extra hard to make sure the room was ready the day after he had asked for it.

Since then, he had been making pills daily, and his experience with making True pills had increased a lot.

By now, he was successfully creating Earth-grade True pills without any issue. The pills he made were on the easier side amongst the recipes he knew, but that was still an achievement for him who wasn't in the True realms yet.

That was all because of his Qi. Thanks to his Qi becoming increasingly denser and more profound as he broke through, by the time he was in the 5th Mind Tempering realm, all of his Common Qi would turn into True Qi after a night of cultivation.

When that had happened the first time, he had wondered if he had reached the True realm by some chance and skipped a couple of realms. However, the status on him still said that he was in the Mind Tempering realm, so he knew what realm he was in.

As for after that realm, every subsequent realm, his Qi had gotten more and more dense. Now, even his common Qi was so dense that he could almost handle True rank ingredient while making pills.

He himself was surprised at how well he had done at making the pills with just his normal Qi. With True Qi, he could easily form most True pills that weren't complex in recipes.

Alex entered his alchemy room and sat in front of the furnace. He brought out his cauldron and put it on the fire before taking a deep breath to regulate his 8th Mind Tempering realm cultivation base.

That was the realm he had reached after a month of being in this place, and he was very close to the 9th as well. Just a few more days of training, and he could surely be there.

After that, it was just a matter of time before he reached the True realm.

Alex was giddy with happiness every time he remembered this. Still, he calmed down his excitement and started making pills once more.

He put in the ingredients one by one and started moving them as the recipe asked for. If Alex had made this pill a month ago, he would have to be cautious enough to change his common Qi to True Qi 3 different times so as to not get attacked by the energy of the ingredient.

However, now he didn't need to worry about that at all since all of his Qi was True Qi, to begin with. In just 10 more minutes, Alex managed to form the pill.

The pill-splitting Qi still didn't release when making True Pills for some reason, so Alex was at least happy about that.

When he finally finished the pill, he looked at the harmony and realized that it was at 32%. For a True pill made by someone that hadn't even entered the True realms yet, this was not a bad harmony at all.

Alex nodded to himself when he saw this and put it in a bottle. He then brought out more ingredients and started making more pills.

Unfortunately, despite being True Qi, his True Qi wasn't dense enough to last very long. So just after 2 hours, he had to stop making pills.

Still, Alex was satisfied with the 6 pills he managed to make, with breaks in between them.

Once done, he stood up and left the room to go outside. He walked through the bright hallway and came up to the stairs that led to the garden on the right side of the palace.

Alex was allowed to freely go around this place, so he walked up to the aboveground with no hesitation.

When he finally walked out of the door, he could see quite a few beasts standing around. When they saw him, however, they started jumping and screaming before making their way to in front of him.

"Please, stay behind. I have 6 pills for today," Alex said. "I can sell them to you based on what you have."

The beasts didn't understand what Alex had said at all, but that was when Yao Jia came in handy. She had been waiting for this to start in her garden outside, and as soon as Alex spoke, she translated what he said to the beasts.

It had taken him a bit, but Alex had managed to show that his pills were effective to the beasts. Especially the ones that healed and helped in cultivation. In these peaceful times, the ones that made them temporarily powerful didn't receive as much attention, but they were also loved by the beasts quite a bit.

Alex's intentions at the start had only been to exchange the pills with monster cores, and he still wanted them, but after seeing what else the beasts could give in exchange, he was more than happy to accept them.

That was how Alex had set up this small auction of his own, and it was going to start right now.

Chapter 507: 9th Mind Tempering realm

The 'auction' went just as it always did. The beasts had brought Spirit stones, monster cores, and plants that they considered rare.

Alex would look through them as always, and if he ever found something interesting, he would exchange them for a pill he had.

Today, he managed to get 2 rare Saint-rank alchemy ingredients, 2 9th Mind Tempering realm monster core, and finally quite a lot of spirit stones.

They were common spirit stones, so they weren't worth as much as True spirit stones, but there wasn't anything else he found useful amongst the bunch of things the beasts had brought for him, so he took those instead.

Still, this made up to a few ten thousand dollars a day, so he couldn't get mad about it. Once he was done for the day, he told Yao Jia to tell them to go away and come back tomorrow at the same time.

Yao Jia did as Alex said and sent the beasts away.

"It's amazing to see how quickly they changed their stance on getting your pills once they saw how well it did," She said.

"Well, it's only right that you don't accept things from strangers. Especially things that you eat. Human children are taught this from a very young age," Alex said.

He looked at the 2 cores in his hands and smiled. He could now finally break through to the 9th Mind Tempering realm. After that… it was just one more step to the True Realm.

"Oh right, what's happening with my requests? I haven't heard about anything," Alex said

"Well… it's under consideration. We don't really know about alchemy, so the elders are a little hesitant to let you go out to pick ingredients. Who knows what you can make with your pills," Yao Jia said.

"As for the other one… senior Chen himself keeps saying later, so there is nothing we can do. You will just have to wait for him to get tired enough to accept your request," Yao Jia said.

"Can't lady Ren order him or something? It's just for a really small thing that I wanted clarifications on," Alex said.

"No," Yao Jia said. "He is really stubborn and also very old. Most of the time, he just wants to sit in his home and sleep all the time. He can get real grumpy if we force him to work more than he wants."

Alex couldn't help but sigh when he heard that. It had been a month since he wanted to use the yang jades in his storage bag that were just lying there doing nothing. But it seemed that they would have to stay there for much longer once again.

"Sigh, I guess I will wait then," Alex said and brought out a pill. "Here, this one is for you. Thank you for helping me with everything."

"Oh, a pill?" Yao Jia's eyes shined. "What pill is this? Can I eat it?"

"Uhh, don't eat it. It's a healing pill. If you ever get hurt, you can eat it then to get better. It works for True rank cultivators, so don't bother giving it to your father if he ever needs one," Alex said.

"So, it's for only me huh? I like it," she said.

Alex smiled and waved her goodbye to return back to his room. He had missed today's training, but that was only because he had already planned to go to the amusement park beforehand.

He walked into his room and saw Pearl sitting on top of the bed.

"Oh, hey Pearl. You returned?" Alex asked. "How was training?"

"MEOW!" Pearl said, implying that it was the same as always, which was fun.

"Oh, nice. Can you say that in the human tongue?" Alex asked. " Yao Jia is teaching you to speak right?"

Pearl stared at him for a few seconds and said, "Meow Meow Meow."

Alex snickered when he heard that. Despite his intelligence and cultivation, Pearl was still a child. And it seemed that his vocal cords just weren't developed enough at such an early age.

He would have to wait for a bit longer before he could speak in the human tongue. "Alright, don't force it," Alex said.

Alex then brought out an 8th Mind Tempering realm beast's monster core and ate it. He slowly closed his eyes and drifted into his spiritual sea where he was attacked by the spirit of the beast in the core and had to defeat it before gaining the Qi from it.

He opened up the status page and saw that it was enough to break through, so without thinking much, he broke through once more.

The Qi in his body got considerably thicker to the point that he was having a hard time differentiating it from True Qi. He didn't doubt that his current common Qi was way denser than most True Realm cultivators starting Qi.

"Just a few more days now," he thought. He had the 2 cores he got from today, so he had no reason to worry about anything anymore.

It was evening time, so he decided to start cultivating once more.

He called Pearl to sit down in front of him and opened up Pearl's status page as well.

"Hm, 2nd realm of Mind Tempering huh. You're doing not bad as well. If you keep this up, you should be able to enter True Realm in about a month as well," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl said that he could make it faster if he got monster cores too.

"I told you, didn't I? Cultivation is always better than any other form of Qi acquisition. I have to do it because normally gathering Qi just isn't worth it for me anymore. But for you with your cultivation method, it's super-fast, so you should keep with it," Alex said.

"Come on, let's cultivate now."

Pearl sat down on his lap and started closing his eyes to cultivate. He slowly started glowing, and random cuts started appearing all around Alex.

"Let me start as well," Alex said and slowly breathed in and out. He got into a routine of inhaling and exhaling, and before he even realized it, he had fallen asleep.

Alex woke up early in the morning and noticed that his True Qi had also gotten much, much denser.

"With this much True Qi, can I perhaps fight against someone in 3rd True Disciple realm?" he wondered. His training partner as of yet had only been Yao Jia, but her cultivation base was in the True King realm. It was likely that she was just as, if not stronger, than both of his masters.

"I really wonder how strong I've gotten," he thought. He stopped Pearl who was still cultivating and logged out to go get some food.

Once he returned, he went out of the underground with Pearl to train once more. He made his way to the palace aboveground and fought with Yao Jia for nearly 3 hours this time.

He tried to keep himself from using True Qi as much as he could, but from time to time, he would end up using it in his training.

'I probably won't need to worry about keeping True Qi as much now,' he thought. 'After all, my normal Qi is capable of making True rank pills too.'

Once the training ended, he left the palace and went out to the garden to rest in the sun.

After resting for a few hours, he went to the alchemy room. He took a few minutes to decide on what pills to make and in the end, decided upon the pills that he could cure beasts once again.

Alex didn't really know what the beasts needed, after all, he couldn't go outside to check on their daily life. However, he was sure that no matter if it was peaceful or not, healing pills were always asked for.

So, he mostly made healing pills, with a few pills that helped in faster cultivation speed for a set amount of time.

It took him nearly 3 hours to finish 10 pills. Thankfully, his common Qi could also help him in making True Pills now, although he had to use more of them to compensate.

Once he was done, he went outside to auction them off once more. This time, he took no monster cores, and only spirit stones and herbs.

"That was a good sale for you," Yao Jia said.

"Thanks, you helped a lot too," Alex replied.

"Don't thank me yet. I have good news for you," she said.

Alex got curious and listened attentively.

"Your request to go outside has been accepted."

Chapter 508: Going Outside

Alex got into stance as golden light turned both of his hands into sharp animal-like claws. The tips of his fingers were now so sharp that he could dig them into stones and crush them from the inside.

Once both of the claws were set, he attacked Yao Jia. He dashed forward and got close to her. However, just before he reached her, he stopped and simply swiped high claws diagonally at her.

Yao Jia jumped backward to dodge the attack and then jumped forward to attack with her own claw. Alex brought his other hand from the side and attacked her claw with his own.

Yao Jia wasn't serious about the fight, so he could stop her attack without much effort. He then attacked with his other claw.

Yellow light flickered in front of him as a barrier appeared and blocked his attack. Alex didn't let that stop him, however. He retaliated with a barrage of claws that hit the barrier one after another, threatening to destroy it.

Yao Jia got rid of the barrier to emulate Alex breaking through it and continued the training.

Alex was starting to learn more and more about fighting with claws after training with someone who could use nothing but claws to attack most of the time.

He had come to learn of a few things that helped him understand more about using claws.

First of all, claws were different from punches. A normal punch, if strong, would usually send a person flying backward, in which case the attacker couldn't attack more than once. so most of the time the attacker would put their all into the punch.

However, claws couldn't do that. No matter how strong the claw attack was, it couldn't create a gap between the attacker and the target. So, with claws, it usually became a battle of attrition.

You had to stand your ground and attack multiple times before the opponent was so wounded that they couldn't fight back. At the same time, you also had to be strong enough to take a couple of hits or be fast enough to dodge the attacks using the least movement possible.

Alex was starting to get used to fighting with claws by now. To him, it wasn't just a fighting style, but an entirely new weapon in and of itself. It was a weapon he could use in case he ever couldn't use his sword.

He trained his claws for an hour before he decided to switch to the sword. While using claws and training was fun and engaging, he didn't forget about Sword Intent. He needed to improve upon it as well, so he trained with it on a daily basis.

He was now very proficient at using Sword Intent, and thanks to using his True sword every single day, he didn't have to worry about his Sword Intent having problems.

"How do your attacks keep getting stronger every day?" Yao Jia asked. "Did you breakthrough again?"

Alex stopped and the glow in his sword disappeared. "Ah, yes. Just yesterday I broke through to the final realm of Mind Tempering actually," he said.

"Woah! That is so fast. Does that mean you will enter True realm in a month?" she asked.

"Probably just a week actually. We humans can use pills and stuff to improve our cultivation bases, you know," he said.

"Dang it, and here I spend over 3 years just to go up a realm," Yao Jia said. "I wish I could have the same speed as humans."

"Um, I'm not sure if human speed is really a good idea. Besides, humans too have people that take forever to breakthrough. It's only a few that have learned how to breakthrough fast," Alex said.

"All they do is eat a bunch of pills and grow stronger. They don't know how to fight, how to use skills, and their cultivation base is really bad too. So in the end, it's you who comes out on top with your diligent cultivation," Alex said.

"Really? Oh, I guess I shouldn't get jealous then," Yao Jia said.

"Okay, can we end the training here? I'm way too excited to train anymore," Alex said as he was unable to hide his smile from deep within him.

"Sure. We can leave in a few minutes. Do you want to bring the child too?" Yao Jia asked.

"Oh yes. Let me go get him," Alex said. He left the palace room and went to the other room where Pearl was.

Pearl was currently fighting against a wolf who was nearly 5 times as big as him. Still, they were on equal ground as Pearl's strength was the same as the Wolf's.

Alex watched the back and forth for a few minutes before deciding to end the match.

"You can stop now, Pearl. We are going outside now," Alex said from the doorway.

Pearl who was fighting stopped and looked towards him. "Meow?" he asked.

"No, we're not fighting anyone. We are just going to go get some ingredients from the forest. And some Spirit stones if we can find them, but mostly just ingredients," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl was a little disappointed. He didn't really care about alchemy or spirit stones, and just wanted to keep training.

"Are you saying you don't want to see what it's like outside, and just want to stay here fighting?" Alex asked.

"Meow!" Pearl cried out loud saying that he did want to go outside. He was getting annoyed staying in this one place all the time.

"Alright, let's go then."

Alex and Pearl went out to the garden and waited for a few minutes. Yao Jia arrived not soon after with a few beasts to look after them.

"Do you really need this many beasts just for me? I won't run away, you know?" Alex said.

"They are not for you. They are here to look after the child. If anything were to happen to him, we would be in trouble," Yao Jia said.

"Oh, so you don't care if I run away?" He asked.

"We do. But I am more than enough to keep you in check," Yao Jia said.

"Sigh, I see. Can we leave now?" he asked.

"Okay, let's go."

The group then started walking out. A beast led the way as it walked in front of Pearl and the remaining walked behind him. Yao Jia was next to Alex who was holding Pearl in his embrace.

As soon as he walked out of the gate, Alex could see a massive forest that was so dense that the ground was nothing but shadows.

The shade made the surrounding considerably cooler and with it being the winter right now, Alex could feel the chill in the air.

Thankfully, as a cultivator, and even more so a body cultivator, the cold didn't bother him as much as it would a normal person.

He hadn't even walked past a few trees when his Alchemy senses started tingling, giving him the feeling that there were ingredients nearby.

Alex turned around and looked at the spots where he felt the ingredients from. "Oh, a Vengeful Elderberry. Those are so rare," Alex said as he walked up to pick it up. But suddenly, Yao Jia put her paw in front of him and stopped him.

Alex was surprised and confused. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"You were going to pick up something?" she asked.

"Yes, that fruit over there," he said as he pointed at the single reddish-purple berry hanging from a small bush.

"I see," she said and growled in a low voice. The beast at the very front walked away from the group and went up to the berry and smelled it.

Alex was still confused as to what was happening until the beast growled back.

"Alright, you can pick it up," she said.

"You lied, didn't you?" he asked as he looked at Yao Jia in shock. "You said they were here for Pearl, but they are actually here to keep me in check."

Yao Jia made a sad face and said, "Sorry. It wasn't my idea. Father forced me to bring them. That was one of the criteria for letting you go outside."

"But why? Are they afraid that I will poison everyone?" he asked.

"Hey! We don't have anyone who knows about alchemy, okay? All we can do is make sure you don't get anything poisonous. They are here just to make sure that happens. Other than that, you are free to get what you want," she said.

Alex didn't say anything for a few moments and shook his head. "Fine, do what you want," he said and went on to find more ingredients.

"That fruit, those green leaves, that one fruit that is different from the rest, that flower over there that has white petals, roots of those plants, the bark of that tree…"

Alex started naming one thing after another and the beasts had to run around trying to check everything he said.

That was his way of revenge. Every single ingredient he saw, he would let them know and the beasts would have to run around trying to figure out if it was poisonous or not.

Only once or twice did the beasts say the ingredient was poisonous, but most of the time, it was just a normal plant that didn't have any poison on its own.

After the third round of going around, smelling every single leaf, flower, and fruit, the beasts started to get annoyed.

"Alright, stop. You don't have to name anything. Just go pick them up," Yao Jia said with no other choice.

Alex's felt proud of himself for getting rid of his problems in his own way. After that, he freely went around gathering ingredients as much as his heart desired.

Chapter 509: Spirit Stone Cave

Alex could see many beasts roaming the jungle that was the land of this kingless kingdom.

Very few beasts bothered making any sort of shelter at all, and almost all of them lived out in the open.

Alex tried not to take ingredients from places where the beasts considered their home. The beasts however didn't seem to care about it as much as he did.

Some of those beasts bowed when they saw him. They recognized the healer that had started living in the palace a month ago.

After nearly 2 hours of picking up ingredients, Alex felt that he had enough of the ingredients for now. Most of the ingredients he had found couldn't even be used right now since they could only make Saint rank pills.

Once he felt he was done, he turned to look at Yao Jia and asked, "is there any way we can go to a spirit stone cave?"

"Spirit stone cave? Hmm, let's see. There should be one close by as far as I know. I can take you there," she said.

"Thank you," Alex said and followed her. Along the way, Alex saw more beasts that were all in the True Realm. The only beasts not in the True realm were either young beasts or beasts that were incredibly close to being in the True Realm.

Since beasts started cultivating from a very young age, it was a hard task to find a beast that was both an adult and not in the True realms.

Finally, after a few minutes of walk, Yao Jia stopped in front of a cave at the foot of a mountain. Alex was even surprised to see a mountain in this place. His image of this place had been nothing but forests.

"How many mountains are there in this kingdom?" he asked.

"I don't know, hundreds maybe," Yao Jia asked.

"And are there anything else here? Like a desert, a sea, and what not?" he asked.

"No," Yao Jia said. "Although there are a few large lakes, but not sea. As for a desert, you won't find that in the Western Continent. You will have to go to the southern continent."

"Huh?" Alex stopped and put on a confused face. "What do you mean there aren't any deserts in the Western Continent?" he asked with a chuckle. "There's one right behind where I stay."

"Eh?" Yao Jia stopped too. "There is a desert in this continent? Can't be. I've read every record, and there is nothing about a desert in this continent."

"No, there is one to the north," Alex said. "It's a rather large desert too. Furthermore, you can't use cultivation base there at all."

"Huh?" Yao Jia was fully confused now. "No way. Wait for a second," she said and thought about something. She started drawing a map on the ground right in front of the cave opening.

The map depicted a land that was wide at the top and thin at the bottom. It was also pretty long vertically as well.

"What is this?" Alex asked as he had never seen such a land structure before.

"This is the Western Continent," she said.

"Oh," Alex's eyes widened as he looked at the drawing of the continent. "Which way is north?" he asked.

"This wider section," she said.

Alex tried to think about the map of the empire and superimposed the image in his mind with the image in front of him.

"So, this is the Crimson empire," he said as he drew on top of the map. "And this is where I live. The desert is right above me, here."

"No way. The books say that it's just a bunch of mountains," Yao Jia said.

"No, your books are wrong. It's nothing but desert up there," Alex said.

"Really?" Yao Jia asked in a troubled manner. "Oh god, I wonder what other information is wrong in that book then."

"How old is that book anyway?" Alex asked. "You must not have updated the information in that book for hundreds of years right?"

"Thousands," Yao Jia said. "Wow, I shouldn't accept all information there as facts."

"Can we go in now?" he asked.

"Ah yes, let's go," Yao Jia took him through the opening.

As soon as Alex entered, he could feel a different level of Qi in the air. The amount of Qi in the surrounding had doubled, if not tripled in just the first five meters of the cave.

Light started to disappear the further they went in. Darkness was taking over. But, at some point, light returned once again, but it had a slightly blue hue to it.

Alex started seeing crystals along the sides of the wall deep in the cave. The further in he went, the more such crystals he could see.

The crystals were naturally formed into perfect cuboid shapes that with just a little effort could be broken into many pieces.

"Woah, so this is how people get spirit stones huh?" he asked. He walked up to a clump of it and hit it slightly with his fist.

The clump of spirit stones broke down into about 20-30 different spirit stones, which Alex pocketed. He stood up and looked at the cave. Just in his vicinity, he could see hundreds of such clumps.

"So many," he thought. He felt like he had hit a jackpot.

Without any other thought, he started picking the spirit stones up. He would take clumps and easily crush them to turn them into spirit stones.

"Such a shame that these are just common Spirit stones. It would be amazing if these were True spirit stones," Alex said.

"If they weren't common spirit stones, they likely wouldn't be spirit stones, would they?" Yao Jia said.

"Sorry? What do you mean?" Alex asked.

Yao Jia stopped from breaking apart the clumps and looked at him. "Do you know how this cave is formed?" she asked.

"Sort of, yes," he said. "When a common spirit vein remains stagnant for long, it turns to a spirit stone cave."

"You are a little wrong there," Yao Jia said.

"Which part?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, alright let me ask this. How do you think True spirit veins are formed?" she asked.

Alex fell into thought. "Uhh… they don't form naturally?" he asked.

"They do, but they are also a matured form of Common Spirit veins. Without a common spirit vein, you wouldn't have a True spirit vein," Yao Jia said.

"Wait, so both spirit stone cave and a higher rank spirit vein are formed from the same spirit vein? How does that work?" he asked.

"When you have a spirit vein, it tried to absorb the energy from the surrounding. If left alone and it successfully gathers as much energy as it wants from the surrounding, it evolves to a higher rank Spirit vein."

"But, if it is left alone, but cannot gather the required energy, the spirit vein slowly dies, and the crystal breaks apart to become the spirit stones. So, you can either have a lower rank spirit stone cave, or a higher rank spirit vein."

"If you want a higher rank spirit stone cave, that will take a very, very long time since it will have to fail as ascending to a higher grade," Yao Jia explained.

"Ah, I see," Alex said. "Are there any True rank spirit stone caves in here?" he asked.

"Um, I think there are a few. But they're quite far away from here. Even father would take an hour or so," she said.

"Can we go there someday?" Alex asked. "I have a boat artifact that can help us travel fast. If it takes your father an hour, we can do it in about 3 to 4 hours with my boat."

"Hmm, I will ask him if he allows it," she said.

"Thanks."

They went on with the rest of the time doing the same thing over and over again, collecting as many spirit stones as possible for Alex.

Finally, once they were done, they left the cave, with it almost barren now. "What will you do with so many spirit stones," she asked.

"Uhh… cultivate," Alex said.

They walked back towards the palace and in just a short few minutes returned. They walked past the gate and entered the garden.

The amount of sunlight that struck them in just that moment was more than their entire journey through the forest.

Yao Jia sent the other beasts on their way and turned around towards Alex. "That should have satisfied you for a few days right?" she asked.

"Ah yes, thank you," Alex said.

"Good. Now please make some more pills so that I can breakthrough faster as well," She said.

"Haha, I will try. I have a recipe for a p—"

Suddenly, a bright light followed by a loud 'hmm' appeared from far away. Alex shielded his eyes and looked in the direction the sound had come from.

But to his surprise, it felt like it was everywhere in front of him. "What's going on?" he asked.

When the light finally went away, he turned around to ask Yao Jia, but her face was in the most utter shock he had seen yet.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Intruders," she said. "Someone opened the formation and entered the secret realm. From the sound of it, there were many that entered."

"What? Someone got into the secret realm?" Alex asked in surprise.

"I'm sorry. I will talk to you later. I need to inform the elder," She said and immediately left the garden.

Alex stood where he did and looked towards the direction the light had appeared from and thought, "Who came to the secret realm?"

Chapter 510: Meeting Senior Chen

Alex woke up in the morning from his cultivation and logged out to get some food. When he returned, he immediately went out to the garden with Pearl.

After yesterday's sudden departure, he hadn't seen Yao Jia yet and was wondering what was up with the intruders that had come to the secret realm.

"Ah, there you are. I was searching for you everywhere," he said when he found her tending to the flowers in the garden.

"Oh, you came out early. Do you want to start training this soon?" Yao Jia asked while looking towards the sun that had barely come up past the horizon.

"Sorry, no. I'm not here for training. We can do that later. I'm here to ask what you learned about the intruders. Are they bad people? Should we be worried? What's going on?" he asked.

"Oh, you were worried about that? There's nothing to be concerned about. I went to report to my father and uncle but turned out they already knew about it. They got reports from the other part of the kingdom that at the various entrances, humans had entered," she said.

"Humans? The intruders are human?" Alex asked. Suddenly his eyes widened with fright and asked, "It can't be those people from the other continent right?"

"Oh no, these are just some kids from the Luminance Empire. Father said that they did the same thing some 1000 years ago too," she said.

"Oh, so we don't have to worry about it, it seems. What's going to happen to them?" he asked.

"Nothing. At least, nothing if they don't make any trouble. I hear that almost all of the humans from last time died because they offended beasts in the kingdom they shouldn't have. Hopefully, they are smart enough not to this time," she said.

"All of them died? Isn't that too cruel?" Alex asked.

"Not if what you did is try to steal some beast's children, or destroy their home by attacking them. Also, not all of them died. One of them managed to escape out to the north I heard," she said.

"I see," Alex said. Suddenly, he felt like he had heard something similar before. He tried to rack his brain and immediately realized what it was.

"OH!" he exclaimed. "1200 years ago, the founding emperor of the Crimson Empire, Fu Qing came from the southern forest. We knew he came from the south but never knew how. So this was how, huh?"

"Oh did something like that happen? Good for him," Yao Jia said.

"Anyway, there won't be any Saint realm expert amongst the humans, right? You did say that saint realm experts were denied entry except under special cases," Alex said.

"Yes. Those who entered are all in the True realms," Yao Jia said. "Do you want to go help them perhaps?"

"No," Alex said. "I don't really feel any closeness towards strangers. I see no reason why I would help them unless I was feeling generous."

"You are not that different from a beast in that regard then," Yao Jia said. "Alright, I will go tend to the garden for a while. We can train later."

Alex nodded and Yao Jia left the area. He sat down on the grass and felt the sun hit his face as it proceeded to get higher and higher into the sky.

He felt at peace with his current state of being. But then, he started thinking about his sect and friends once more.

'I wonder how master is doing. Is her constitution still harming her alchemy ability?' he wondered. 'Is sister doing well? I hope master hasn't lost his spot as master yet.'

'Since I will be entering the True realms soon, I can't even help him keep his spot,' he thought. He chuckled a little when he thought about his other friends.

'Is Kong Yuhan still trying to get together with Zhou Mei's sister, or are they together by now? I hope she doesn't mind them being together. Is Fanfan doing well? She wasn't as cheerful after Wan Li left. I hope she's doing better now.'

'I hope Wan Li is doing better too. Hopefully, Martial uncle and 3rd elder found him by now and brought him back to the sect already,' he thought.

The morning slowly passed as Alex's homesickness slowly came and went away. Once the sun was higher in the sky, he went looking for Yao Jia and trained for a little longer.

And then, his usual schedule started once more. He rested in the sun for a while and went to his alchemy room to make some pills. He made as many as he could, and sold just a few to the beasts while keeping the rest for himself.

He did so for a few days when he finally got to hear a piece of incredibly good news.

"Senior Chen has accepted your request. You can come with me right now to ask what you want to him," Yao Jia said.

"REALLY?!" he asked in surprise. "That's amazing. Let's go."

Alex was forced to leave Pearl behind since he was going out of the palace, but he didn't mind it at all.

"I'll be back in an hour or two, okay buddy?" he said and left with Yao Jia. They walked out of the palace and Yao Jia took him through the forest to an area with a lot of zebras.

It was a small open area with a meadow in the middle, but the trees still put a shade in the place. Some of the zebras were resting while the younger ones were running around in the field.

Surprisingly, on the other side of the field, there were houses made up of wood and leaves that had zebras going in and out of.

"Let's go," Yao Jia said and walked through the field to reach the biggest house amongst them.

The zebras looked at Alex as he walked in between them, just behind Yao Jia.

"Senior Chen, we are here," she shouted from the outside. "Careful, there should be a lot of formation around this area."

"Oh, I'll keep that in mind," Alex said.

They waited for a bit, but no answer came from inside. Yao Jia was about to call him again when a zebra came from the side.

"Calling him won't work, you know. There is a sound barrier set up around this place. You will have to knock on the door to let him know you're here," the zebra said.

Alex was a little surprised to hear the zebra speak. There hadn't been any beasts out of the palace that had spoken in a human tongue yet.

"Oh, okay," Yao Jia said and walked up to the door to knock on it. She waited for a few minutes and the door finally opened.

An old, wrinkly-skinned zebra walked out on all fours with a sour look on his face. He looked at Yao Jia and then at Alex and asked, "Is he the one that requested the meeting?"

"Yes," Yao Jia said. "He said he has some questions about formations that he wants you to clear him on."

"Goddammit. Ruining my free time just to ask a bunch of questions anyone could probably answer. If it weren't lady Ren's request, I would've killed him right now," the zebra grumbled.

"I'm sorry for intruding upon your rest, senior Chen, but I really needed to know the answers to these questions," he said.

"The questions better be worth my time. Ask, what is it?" the zebra said.

'He isn't even going to let us in first?' Alex thought as he brought out the talisman with the formation on it.

"Can you tell me how I can set up this formation on the ground so that it starts on its own?" he asked as he handed the zebra the talisman.

The zebra took the talisman and started reading it with an annoyed face. However, just as suddenly, his annoyed face changed to that of incredibly surprised.

"How did you find this?" the zebra asked with wide eyes.

"From an enemy of mine," Alex said. "That person used it to improve his physical durability. Can you teach me how I can do that too?"

"You got this from a human? What cultivation base is he in?" the Zebra asked.

"Uh, I don't remember. Something like Meridian Tempering realm, maybe. But that shouldn't matter since he used this formation to strengthen himself in a place devoid of any Qi," Alex said.

"A self tempering realm human? That can't be true," the Zebra said. "How the hell would a self tempering realm human get his hands on an Immortal rank formation blueprint?"

Alex's eyes shined. 'I was right then,' he thought. Given the number of strokes, he had already guessed that, but still hearing the confirmation from someone who really knew about formations made it happy.

"I don't know how he got it, senior. Can you tell me what the formation does and how I can use it? Preferably with it activating on its own since that is what he did," Alex said.

"This formation…" the Zebra looked through the Blueprint and said, "from what I can see, this is a formation that is meant to temper just one aspect of the body. The intensity of the tempering depends on the ingredients and amount, I suppose."

"As for what part it tempers, let me see," the Zebra looked through the formation and tried to find his answers.

"Ah, here it is. This formation can help you temper the skin, and skin alone. Depending on what you use as the energy source, you can get your skin to be very durable after using this formation."

Chapter 511: Level Up

"Tempering skin, huh?" Alex asked. He remembered that it was only the skin of Song Zun that was tough. Once he broke through that with the Ebony sword, the rest of Song Zun wasn't so tough.

"So I can use it to make my skin more durable too? Can you teach me how?" Alex asked.

"Do you have knowledge of formations?" the zebra asked.

"A little, yes," Alex said. "I'm an alchemist by profession, but I dabble in formations too."

"If you can understand the terminologies, then I can teach you," the Zebra said.

"Every formation has nodes where the different strokes meet up at. For example, this formation has 10 separate nodes. What you will have to do to make it work automatically is put your energy source around the ingredient."

"However, you cannot just put it just randomly. Each node must have the same ratio of energy as the strokes in the nodes. Also, depending on the distance between each of the adjacent nodes, you may or may not have to add even more energy to the nodes."

"Once you are done, and it is perfect, the energy will start to flow on its own, and the formation will automatically start. At that point, the formation will last for as long as the energy remains," the Zebra said.

"Oh, so I don't need to worry about making a mistake right? Since the formation won't even start if I made a mistake," Alex asked.

"Yes. You can make as many changes as you want. You can even stumble upon the correct answer by just trying. Just hope that there aren't other formations that work with the same energy source but have a slightly different formation design," the Zebra said.

Alex nodded when he heard that. "Can I use other formations without metal as well?" he asked.

"I mean, you can, but I don't see why you would. Using formations without metals, especially at the Saint rank and below is a lot less efficient than using metal as support."

"Not only is the efficiency bad, but you also can't even keep the formation continuously running since the energy in it will die. Then you will have to use another batch of energy source and put them in the same pattern all over again."

"There is no reason people in the saint realm or below should even try to make anything other metal-based formation plates and rods," the Zebra said.

"I see," Alex said. "Thank you, sir. That was all I wanted to ask."

"This enemy of yours you got this formation from… be careful of him. He might be in league with some very strong individuals to be able to get such fearsome formations," the Zebra said and walked back in.

Alex didn't even get to say anything else before the Zebra was gone back to his hut-like home.

"Was that the answer you were looking for?" Yao Jia asked.

"Yes, that was exactly what I needed to know," Alex said.

"Good for you. Let's return now."

They returned back to the palace and separated. Just before they went their ways, Alex asked for permission to use some area to make formations for himself.

Yao Jia told him he could use one of the empty rooms right by his room and left. Alex smiled and excitedly went back underground.

The more he went in, the more excited he got. The formation was something to be excited about, but that was not the reason why he was so excited right now.

There was something he needed to do before he could use the formation. He went back to his room and found Pearl on the bed.

He meowed when he saw Alex walk in and welcome him back.

"Today's an exciting day, isn't it buddy?" he asked with giddiness in his voice

"Meow?" Pearl asked, not understanding what was so exciting about this mundane day.

"You will find out soon enough," Alex said and got onto the bed. He sat cross-legged and took a deep breath.

"Status," he called out before a blue screen appeared in front of him. The screen had information written on it that made him feel the excitement he was feeling right now.

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Mind Tempering 9th Realm (1,000,000,000 Qi : 100%)

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry-Sky Cultivation Method

Qi: 1,128,383,384

]

The breakthrough button was bright green, and everything was set. Alex felt his heart start to beat faster as his hands refused to follow his orders. Finally, he controlled himself and slowly reached for the button.

And he pressed Breakthrough.

Alex felt it happen. All the Qi that was hiding all over his body started moving in unison. It was different from any feeling he had felt while breaking through up until now.

The Qi started following a certain path around his body through the meridians, which Alex had never seen them do. He had no clue why his Qi was even taking that path, but for some reason, his body seemed to be familiar with that path and it allowed the Qi to do its own thing.

Alex thought about it for a second and his eyes went wide. "No way, is this the cultivation route my Qi takes every day?" he asked himself.

He had always fallen asleep when cultivating, so he never knew what happened during those moments. This was the only time he could see and feel the cultivation happening in real-time without falling asleep.

The Qi in his body slowly started to get denser and denser by the second and soon all of it had turned denser to the point where it was basically the True Qi his body made every time after cultivation.

He was simply watching it happen in real-time right now. Once all of the Qi in his body turned to True Qi, including the ones that were hidden most of the time, he felt a slightly muffled boom coursed through his entire body.

He had broken through. Notifications started appearing, congratulating him for successfully breaking through.

"Nice," Alex said as he felt his own cultivation base. What he was feeling now was many times stronger than what he was feeling just moments ago.

Breaking through to the True realms had increased his strength by a lot. He was about to get up from bed to check himself properly when another set of notifications arrived, notifications that made his eyes pop out in surprise.

«Your Spiritual Roots and Talent satisfy the conditions»

«[Alchemy God's Knowledge] has successfully leveled up»

[Alchemy God's Manual:

Grade: Earth (Growth)

Level 1:

Unlocked: You have knowledge of all alchemy material.

Unlocked: Can learn any alchemy recipe instantly.

Unlocked: +50% chance to produce an extra pill during alchemy.

Level 2:

Unlocked: You can tell the age of Alchemy materials

Unlocked: You can tell the elemental alignments of all materials

Unlocked: You have a chance to improve Common rank recipes

Level 3 is required to Unlock more

]

Alex was really very shocked when he saw that. He had expected to see something like this long ago but had long since lost his hope for it.

So, when he finally saw the notifications, he was really surprised. "So those levels really do come every major realm," he thought.

He was about to look through the newly unlocked skills of his Alchemy God's Knowledge when suddenly more notifications came his way.

«Your Spiritual Roots and Talent satisfy the conditions»

«[Flame Mastery Scripture] has successfully Leveled up»

[Flame Mastery Scripture

Grade: Earth (Growth)

Level 1:

Unlocked: Can freely control existing fire and influence its temperature

Level 2:

Unlocked: Can create fire and influence it with greater control.

Unlocked: Fire Energy deal reduced damage to you

Level 3 is required to Unlock more

]

"Oh god, I forgot this was even a thing. That's right, this too was a growth ability, wasn't it?" he thought. He was a little disappointed with the new unlocks since he had already found himself other ways to create fire, but it was still better than nothing.

Also, the technique wasn't really an Earth grade technique and only was written that since it could grow. It was the growth attribute of the skill that was more important than the grade itself.

And somehow, neither of this two skills had the 'MAXED' attribute to them which was a cause for celebration in and of itself.

Alex opened the Flame Mastery Scripture's information and read it again to make sure he didn't miss anything. From what he could see, there was nothing he could miss even if he wanted to.

He then opened up the Alchemy God's Knowledge and read up on the new unlocks.

"Hmm, knowing the age of an ingredient will be super useful, won't it?" he thought. "That's like having one of those instruments that vaguely checks the age of ingredients."

"As for being able to tell what energy an ingredient is, I can always tell them after I am done with them. I guess it will be useful for new ingredients I have no clue about, but at that point, I'm not sure how useful that information could be," he thought. "Anyway, it's always good to have more information I guess."

Alex read up on the final unlock and fell into thought. "Being able to improve common pills… how exactly does it work?" he wondered. His eyes shined with a hint of anticipation.

"I guess I will have to check it right now."

Chapter 512: Missing Elements

Alex felt very excited. He didn't even care that he had just broken through to the True realm and might need some time to get used to his new cultivation base.

No. He wanted to try out the new unlocked skills of his Alchemy skill.

"I'll be back in a bit, okay?" he told Pearl and left the room. He walked over to the alchemy room and sat down in front of the furnace.

He brought out his cauldron and let it heat up while he tried to think of the perfect pill to test out his new unlocks with.

"Hm, let's try out the Nail Elongating pill," he thought. Up until now, the best harmony he could create for the said pill was 52%. So, he wanted to try and see if he could improve on it.

"I wonder how the improvements will happen. Will it be similar to the pill splitting Qi that comes out randomly?" he wondered.

He brought out the first ingredient for the pill and immediately 2 distinct thoughts came to his mind. It wasn't a notification or a panel that popped up at all. It was just a simple thought.

The first thought was about the age of the ingredient in his hand. Without even doing anything, he had a distinct idea that the ingredient in his hand was about 2 years and 5 months old.

That age however did not include the time since the ingredient was picked up and only how long it had grown before it was picked up.

The thought about age was a simple one, and so was the next thought about the energy of the ingredient.

However, that one thought alone made him feel like a whole new path of alchemy had been opened up to him.

The first ingredient was Black Vine Water. It wasn't a liquid ingredient, but a vine that held water elements in it. At least, that was what Alex had come to learn about the ingredient up until now.

However, the information he was getting in his mind now was different. The thought that had randomly popped up was that the Black Vine Water he held in his hands contained all 7 of the different energies and not just water.

Only thing was that the Water energy it held was in far superior number than any of the rest.

"An ingredient can have all the energies in it. How does that not mess up an alchemy session?" Alex wondered. "Also, is this a one-time thing or what?"

He brought out the next ingredient on the list which was a Red leaf from the Mulberry tree. It was supposed to be a Wood Element ingredient, however, the information he was getting was once again very different.

Similar to the Black Vine Water, the Red Leaf too had all 7 elements in it, and only the Wood element was in high number.

"Wait, so it's all of the ingredients that have it all?" he wondered and started bringing out every ingredient he had for that recipe.

Every single one of the ingredients was as suspected. They all had the 7 different energies in them, with only a single one that was very high in number.

"That's not true, right? How is that possible?" Alex thought. His basic understanding of Elements and Elemental theories was starting to have tears in them. He was starting to have doubts that what he knew was even true at all.

"No, wait. The theories perfectly work when making pills. So maybe these energies don't really have much effect when we use them. That should be it," Alex thought.

He then casually brought out a True rank ingredient to see if the information held true for those as well.

"Hmm," Alex was a little surprised when the information for the True rank ingredient came to his mind.

As expected, the information about age was similar. The ingredient was about 7 years old. However, the information about Energy was slightly different.

The ingredient he had gotten should have had high Fire energy with the rest 6 being very low in amount.

However, what it actually was was that the ingredient had high Fire Energy with only 5 other energies being in low amounts.

One of the energies from the list was missing. It didn't take very long for Alex to realize that the Earth energy was missing.

He brought out another few True Rank ingredients and checked them out as well. As expected, each one of that ingredients had one energy missing from the list of 7.

"Hmm… is it True rank because an energy is missing? Or is the energy missing because it's True rank?" Alex wondered.

Alex wanted to know if it was the missing of energy that made the Primary energy so strong, or if the energy was missing because the Primary energy was so strong.

"Wait, is there even a logic to what energy is missing?" he wondered. He picked back up the first ingredient with the Fire energy that had the Earth energy missing.

He kept that in mind and brought out another of the same ingredient. That too had Earth energy missing.

Alex then went ahead and looked through the other ingredients and noted which ones were missing.

With that information in hand, it didn't take long for him to realize what energy would be missing from each of the ingredients.

"It's the energy that Weakens it," Alex said out loud. Looking at the first ingredient, the ingredient had Fire energy.

Water that Controlled Fire was there. Metal that Ruined Fire was there. And finally, Wood that Empowered Fire was also there.

However, Earth that Weakened Fire was no longer there.

The other ingredients followed the same rule as well. Any energy that weakened the primary energy was missing from the ingredient.

"So, I can freely say that True rank ingredients always have 1 missing element, that being the one that weakens right?" he thought.

"If I were to guess that the weakening Energy not being there was the reason why an ingredient became True rank, then I would be wrong. That wouldn't explain why the primary energy is what it is. Also, that wouldn't answer why some other energy didn't leave first."

"So, the correct assumption would be that it was the primary energy that got rid of the energy that weakened it," Alex thought.

He was happy to learn something new today when suddenly he remembered something. "Wait, what about Saint rank ingredients?" he thought.

He had never really used Saint Rank ingredients, so he didn't even know what ingredient had what energy.

However, thanks to the unlocked skill, he could do so without having to waste the ingredients now.

Alex brought out a wooden box with the ingredient inside and opened it up. As he looked at it, all 3 information entered his mind.

The ingredient was called a Demon Moon Grass, and it was about 26 years old. The first two pieces of information were normal and he was expecting them, albeit they too were a little intriguing.

However, the third piece of information took him by surprise once more. The Demon Moon Grass was an ingredient with Earth as the primary energy. The thing that was surprising however was the fact that the ingredient not only had an element missing but it had 2 elements missing.

Alex could see that the Demon Moon Grass had Metal and Water energy missing from the list. This was likely due to the Earth energy being very strong to the point that only Saint Qi could control it.

However, Alex was once more stuck with finding logic behind the missing ingredients.

"If I go by last time's logic, then Metal which Weakens Earth should be missing, and it is. Then, since Water is also missing from an ingredient with Earth primary element, can I assume that the second energy missing is something that Ruins the primary element?" Alex wondered.

He brought out the other Saint rank ingredients he had and weighed their information against his new theory.

"I was right," he thought with a massive smile. He put the ingredients back into his storage bag and started wondering about the reason why it was all happening.

Unfortunately, he couldn't see any logic behind why only Weakening and Ruining elements were disappearing.

Unable to understand anything, he decided to give up for now. "Let's just forget about that for now. I should start making the Nail elongating pill."

Chapter 513: Improving a Recipe

Alex had a recipe for the Nail Elongating pill. It was a recipe he had made himself and he was quite proud of it.

However, he was never able to improve it past making 52% harmony pills and that bugged him a lot. There were too many permutations and combinations he could do with the speed of the ingredients in the cauldron, the rate at which they were heated, and the direction in which they were moved in.

All of these things were very important to making the pill, but they were too many for him to properly know which to change to improve the pill.

Now that he had his new skill unlocked, he was hoping that would automatically tell him what to do.

The cauldron was hot enough, so Alex put in the first ingredient. He followed the recipe and did what was needed, but on the back of his head, he waited for something to happen.

He vigilantly checked for anything that was happening on its own. However, nothing of that sort happened. Everything was going normally as it would.

"Hmm, that's weird," he thought and continued. The True Qi was making it extremely easy to control the ingredient and the energy in the cauldron.

Somehow he felt like if he used Elemental guidance now, he could easily guide the energy without missing the tiniest amount.

He put in the second ingredient and moved it around. He waited for something to happen, but nothing did once again.

"Do I have bad luck or is this not how it's supposed to go?" Alex wondered.

He tried with the next two ingredients once more, but unfortunately, nothing happened. "Maybe I'm doing something wrong," he thought.

He continued normally with the remaining ingredients and soon was close to being done with it. Right before he was finished, the pill-splitting Qi, which he hadn't seen for a very long time came out from within him and separated the powder to form two different pills.

The vortex appeared once again above it that pulled in the energy from the cauldron and the two pills were ready.

Alex pulled out the pills and saw that the harmony in them was 25% and 26% respectively. '1% less than ideal. Something must've been wrong with the ingredients,' he thought.

He stored the pills in a ceramic bottle and into his plastic bag. Then he started thinking. "What's going on? What was there no improvement?" he wondered. "Am I missing something?"

Alex was confused, so he opened up the description about Alchemy God's Knowledge and read up on it again.

"Unlocked: You have a chance to improve common rank recipes," he read the main part he was concerned about. Suddenly, his eyes squinted as he read it again.

"Wait… chance? Is that… for every single ingredient I put in? Or for every single pill I make?" he wondered. "If it's for the ingredients, then the chance must be egregiously low, but if it's for each pill then… oh god, how many pills will I have to make before I see any improvements?"

Either way, he would have to make pills for hours on end to see any improvements at all. Now, all he could hope for was that the improvements were so good that he didn't need to make it that many times.

Alex brought another set of ingredients and made the pills once more. While he waited for something to happen, he was realizing an interesting fact about himself at the moment.

Thanks to the common grade pills required not as much Qi during its making, Alex could easily replenish the True Qi he lost while making the pills.

Meaning, if Alex chose to make only common grade pills, then he could likely go for as long as he could mentally handle.

Given that he had gone through the mind tempering realm and had eaten all 3 of the mind improving pill, it was probably going to be multiple days.

Alex put in the 2nd ingredient and continued making the pill. During the whole time once more nothing happened. No extra Qi from in him, no feeling, nothing.

Alex was starting to doubt if something was even going to happen. If it was meant to, it would have happened already.

He was dejected and disappointed at the 52% harmony pill that formed in the end. Still, he didn't let that beat him down and tried once again.

His expectations were at an all-time low, but he kept his hopes up. He brought out another set of ingredients and tried again.

He put in the first ingredient. Nothing Happened.

He put in the second ingredient. Nothing Happened.

He put in the third ingredient. Nothing Happened.

Alex was damn near sure that this one was a failure as well. Then, he put in the fourth ingredient. That was when something happened.

When he put the fourth ingredient in, he was supposed to move the ingredient clockwise about 5 times with each rotation taking about 3 seconds.

The heat at the moment was supposed to be really low to compensate for the rather slow-moving speed of the ingredient.

But, for some reason, when Alex put in the ingredient this time. He didn't want to do that. He could tell that while that would bring out a result, there was another way to bring out a better result.

It was a piece of knowledge rather than a feeling that came from deep in his mind. It felt like a thought that he hadn't thought of himself, so it was a weird experience for Alex.

He let the knowledge move him and instead of going clockwise, he went counterclockwise. The only difference between being clockwise and counter-clockwise was the shape of the ingredient when it was powdered would turn out to be different.

He moved the ingredient at the same speed, with the same temperature, and followed the rest of the recipe.

Not a single piece of information came to his mind after that, but that one information alone left a mark in his mind.

Alex waited for the pill to be made and in the end, the pill-splitting Qi came out to make it into two.

"Dammit, not now," Alex said with a sigh. He wanted to see what results would happen after what he just went through, but the stupid pill-splitting Qi messed it all up.

"Sigh, I hope it's good still," he thought and pulled out the pills. He looked at the first pill and suddenly his eyes went wide.

"31%?" he exclaimed. He couldn't believe how high that one pill was. "Then what about…?" he pulled out the other pill and read its harmony too.

"33%?" he shrieked.

"Huh? Wait, huh? 64% in total? Just by reversing the direction of one ingredient? Is that what I was missing?" Alex was seriously taken aback. He questioned how he could've missed something so simple, however, there was no way for him to know that something like this would've happened.

"I need to try it once again," he thought and took out another set of ingredients. He followed the recipe once more, but this time, he changed what he did for the fourth ingredient to what he did in the last batch.

When he was done with the ingredients, it was time to form the pill. He prayed that the pill-splitting Qi didn't come out, and somehow his prayer was answered.

He managed to make the pill without splitting it into two. "Nice," he said to himself. He pulled out the pill from the cauldron and looked at it.

"58%?" he cocked his head to the side in confusion. 58% was obviously better than the 52% he was making previously, but it was nowhere as good as the 64% he was getting from the two pills.

"What's going on?" he wondered. He decided to try once more.

He went through the whole ordeal of making the pill once more to end up with the pill splitting Qi forming two separate pills.

"No, that's fine. No need to be mad. Let's check this again," he thought and pulled out the two pills.

31% and 32%. He had managed to make two pills with 63% total harmony. That went in line with the other two pills that made 64%.

"I did nothing different though. Why do these end up with 63% and 64% total harmony, while the single one ends up with 58%? Am I doing something differently?" Alex wondered.

He quickly came to the conclusion that something was indeed being done differently, and it was quite obvious at a simple glance.

The pill-splitting Qi formed the pills on their own, while Alex had to make the pills by himself.

"There must be something unique about the formation technique with which the two pills are formed. Maybe there is a secret behind it that allows for the highest amount of energy to be stored in the pills?" Alex thought.

That would make sense since it was something that belonged to the Alchemy God's Knowledge skill. Anything named 'Alchemy God' must be a very high-tier skill after all.

"Maybe I should learn how it works even. It would be great if I learned something from it that improved my pill-making process," he thought.

He put the pill back into a ceramic bottle and started making the same pill once more.

Over and Over, he continued making the pill for an entire night. He didn't waste a single moment and made over 100 pills.

By the time he was done in the morning, he had managed to improve the recipe to a point that he could now consistently make a 70% harmony pill if the pill didn't split into two.

For the first time, Alex was getting close to making an Immortal grade pill whose final energy wasn't Metal.

Chapter 515: Intense Hea

The light that was shining started getting brighter and brighter now. "Oh shit! What do I do now?" he thought.

He quickly ran to the center of the formation and sat down. "What happens now?" he wondered.

Soon he was starting to feel the heat coming off of the yang jades. "Is this it?" he wondered. The heat wasn't strong at all.

"No way this is it," he thought. That small of heat would do nothing for him. Just then, he felt the intensity of the heat grow a little bit.

"Oh, it's going up," he thought and waited. A few moments later, it got even higher. The heat was so high that it was starting to get a little uncomfortable now.

A few moments later, Alex couldn't stand staying in the center of the formation anymore. It was way too hot.

"No, I must persevere," he thought. He took off his upper robe and threw it towards a corner. He also threw away his storage bags and his ring and sat there with his well-built body.

Beads of sweat formed all over his body as the heat got higher and higher. The uncomfortableness soon disappeared, and all that was remaining was pain.

Alex felt like he was being cooked from all around him. The heat was just way too high.

"Oh no. I got way too hasty," he thought. Just eating a single yang jade would give him quite a pain while it was being digested.

And right now, he was suffering the direct influence of nearly 300 yang jades. He hadn't thought of the consequences when he started this.

"Dammit! Because Song Zun did it, I thought I would have an easy time. That bastard must've used not many yang jades then," Alex thought.

It was either that, or he was very bad at making formations and thus couldn't bring out the same intensity as Alex did. If not, there was no way someone with a mortal body could have survived such a harsh formation.

The pain just kept ramping up as the heat around him got hotter and hotter. Alex tried his best to hang on, but the pain was way too intense.

"Aargh!" he started grunting. He was in more pain than he had been during his cultivation with Pearl in a long while. The only other times he had likely felt more pain was during the first times when his body cultivated.

And yet, the heat was still increasing. The pain was reaching a point where all Alex could do was struggle to keep his wits about everything.

"No! I won't give up. I will survive through it all," he cried out and stayed in there.

The heat he was suffering wasn't normal heat. It was the heat of Yang itself. Even though his body and spiritual roots had yang affinity to it, somehow this Yang was far more potent than either could handle.

So, the pain was all Alex could feel.

Alex's body convulsed as his skin started getting red from the heat. The pain reached a staggeringly high level as splits started appearing on his skin as well.

The hot skin was starting to dry to the point that it was stretching on itself to tear at places. Marks of burnt skin could also be seen all over his body.

Fortunately, that was the extent of the damage. The heat was for some reason not entering his body and he felt nothing on his muscles and organs. It was just the skin that was hurting.

Alex wasn't conscious enough to know that at the moment, however. All of his senses were being fully focused to stop himself from going mad over the pain he was feeling.

The event went on forever, or just an instant. Maybe it was an hour or 10 hours. Was Alex even feeling anything? Why was he feeling so much pain?

Did it stop? Why would it not stop?

Alex couldn't keep his thoughts straight and his mind wandered everywhere. He had lost track of everything and at some point, he even lost track of the pain.

Even then, somehow, he didn't log out. He never lost consciousness during the whole event, so he never logged out.

After some unknown time, Alex could feel the pain once more. His wits were returning to him as he could gather his thoughts to himself to realize what was happening.

He tried his best to ignore the pain and soon the pain itself started growing dull. No, it wasn't growing dull. Rather, the heat was lowering.

Alex had his eyes shut, so he couldn't see anything that was happening outside. He tried to open them, but they wouldn't follow his orders.

He released his spiritual sense to see that all of his body was in ruin. His crusted skin was starting to flake away as new skin was showing up underneath many of them.

Even his eyelids had crusted away and refused to open up. He then looked outside of himself and saw that the lights coming out of the formation were already very low.

The yellow yang jades were looking very pale, and almost white as well.

He struggled for a few more moments and soon it was over. He stood up from the place and felt his entire body make a crackling sound as flakes of dead skin fell onto the floor.

"Ouch!" he said as the pain still existed somewhat. He still couldn't open his eyes, so spiritual sense was all he could use to navigate the room for now.

He took one of the lightless yang jades and saw that it had turned to just jade.

"So, I was successful, right?" he thought. He wanted to test it out, but his skin was hurting way too much to try right now.

"Later," he thought and got his clothes. He cleaned up everything and went back to his room.

"Meow!" Pearl cried out. He wanted to know Alex had been all these hours and why he left him all alone once again.

"Eh? How long was I out?" Alex asked and looked out of the corner of his eyes. "Holy! 2 AM? I was out for over 12 hours?"

He didn't know that such a lot of time had passed while he was in pain. "No wonder I look so bad right now. A night of cultivation should… uh, maybe I shouldn't get pearl to cultivate. It might aggravate my wounds more," he thought.

"Pearl, can you not cultivate today? I'm in pain and I don't want to be in pain anymore," he said.

"Meow!" Pearl said that he wanted to get stronger.

"Just for today. For me. Please?" he asked.

"Meeow~" Pearl accepted his request.

"Thank you," Alex said and got on the bed.

"Meow?" Pearl asked why his eyes were closed.

"Yeah, I'm hurt. So I can't open my eyes. After I cultivate overnight, I will eat a pill tomorrow morning and see how much it helps," he said.

"Meow!" Pearl said.

"Thanks. I hope I get well soon too," Alex said. He picked up Pearl and caught him in his lap. Then, he slowly started breathing in and out, and waited for himself to soon fall asleep.

Chapter 516: Cannot Cultivate

It had just been 2 minutes since he started cultivating, but Alex realized that he couldn't fall asleep at all.

"Huh? What's happening?" he thought. Nothing was happening inside him as well. No Qi movement, nothing.

"Damn, did the formation screw up with my body?" Alex wondered. "That can't be. The heat shouldn't have affected my meridians," Alex thought.

"What's going on then?" he wondered and started breathing once more. A few more minutes passed and he realized that it was just not happening.

"Something's wrong," Alex thought. He put Pearl aside and got up. "Is something wrong with me?"

He used his spiritual sense to check everything inside of him. However, he could see that everything was perfectly fine.

"Huh? Is it because I'm hurt?" he wondered. He decided not to wait at all, and brought out a pill from his storage. It was a True rank healing pill that he had made himself and he immediately ate it.

The moment he swallowed the pill, a cool sensation passed through his entire body. The energy rushed through his entire body and soon arrived at his skin.

The cool feeling got rid of the slight heat and pain that he was still feeling and healed the parts where he was hurt. It helped his new skin grow faster and his old skin flaked off of his body.

By the time Alex was done, there was a bunch of old skin on the ground in front of him. He was truly surprised to see such a large amount of skin fall beneath him.

His eyes finally opened and he was a little happy about that. "Sigh, will this help me now?" he thought and sat back on his bed.

He then closed his and slowly breathed in and out. Unfortunately, nothing of what was supposed to happen was happening at all.

"The hell is going on?" he wondered. "Can I not cultivate at all? Is True realm just that—"

He suddenly stopped speaking as a thought occurred in his mind. "Status!" he shouted and a blue panel with his player information appeared in front of him.

His eyes slowly widened as he finally learned what the problem was. "So that's what was happening," he thought.

His eyes fell onto the part on the screen that said that he no longer had a Cultivation method. The Starry Sky cultivation method he had been using all this time was no longer usable at all since he was now in the True Realm.

Now, he had to find a new cultivation method of his own to use. "Damn, where the hell am I supposed to find a cultivation method in this place?" Alex wondered.

Alex sighed seeing no hope and closed the panel in front of him. He then told Pearl that he could cultivate if he wanted to.

Pearl meowed happily and started cultivating. Surprisingly, there seemed to be almost no cut on his skin due to it being way too strong for the cultivation Pearl was in right now.

Still, the inside of his body was in pain. He meditated to keep the pain in check and waited out the cultivation.

Before he knew it, it was early morning and time for breakfast. He logged out and got his breakfast before returning back to the game.

With no way to improve himself, Alex was looking ahead at days that were mundane and monotonous.

* * * * * * *

In the middle of the forest was a massive tree with a hollow trunk. Inside the hollowed-out tree was a girl who was crouched on the floor holding her knees to her chest.

One could see signs of fear in her eyes as she couldn't manage to stop herself from shaking in terror.

The girl looked to be in her mid-20s, and was wearing a lime green robe that was dirty all over.

She jerked in fear when she heard a noise coming from next to her, but felt relieved when she saw that it was the man returning.

The man's age was in the late 20s, or at least that was how he looked physically. With his cultivation base in the True Realm, it wasn't easy to tell exactly what his age was.

He was quite tall and well build, and had a clean-shaven face to make him look younger. He was wearing a red robe with golden embroidery on it.

"Brother Tao, you are back," the girl said with a happy face.

The man looked at her and smiled, but hidden in that smile was a sense of loss.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"I just… I just saw a beast kill someone from the Shen family," he said.

The fear in the girl's eyes increased as tears started flowing from it. "I knew it. We are all going to die. We shouldn't have come here at all. We made a mistake," she started crying out loud.

"Sshh, the beasts will hear us," the man said softly.

The girl immediately quietened as much as she physically could. Despite being a cultivator, fear was not something she could easily get rid of.

"Wh-what do we do?" she asked.

"I don't know. But, I think we should try to get away from here for now," he said. "Damn those old foggies. They said it would be a simple adventure, going in and out. They didn't even tell us there were such strong beasts in here."

The girl ignores the complaints. She had them too, but they wouldn't help them live right now. "Where do we even go? I don't even know the way back," the girl said.

"Sigh, me neither. This stupid jungle is way too dense. I can't even see the direction the sun rises up from. Anyway, it isn't wise to stay around here, we need to keep moving so that the beasts won't find us," the man said.

"And do what? There is no place to leave at all," the girl said. "Didn't you listen to the elders? They won't open up the formations until after a full 30 days goes by. There is still nearly half a month left before that happens."

"We will be dead by then," the man said. There was no doubt in his voice. Every single beast they had met until now was not something they could mess around with.

"Come on, there is one hope of survival, and we have to take it," the man said.

The girl wiped away her tears and curiously asked, "What hope do we even have, brother Tao?"

The man took a deep breath and said, "I know the way to open up the formation. If we can get to the platform we entered from, I can get us out."

* * * * * * * *

Deep in a forest, but not a very dense one, there was a cave by the side of a small hill. The cave was well hidden amongst the flora of the surroundings and was easy to miss if you weren't looking for it.

Inside the cave were a few people gathered around. A lantern-lit upon the side of the cave wall, and nearly 3 dozen people were surrounding a lone elderly man.

Every single one of the 3 dozen people wore black robes and had long black hair. At the center of them was an important figure that wore a similar robe and had a cultivation base that was much higher than theirs.

The figure wore a black mask with which only the amber-colored eyes were visible and they were staring directly at the old man the group was surrounding.

The old man wore dirty green robes and had thin gray hairs on his head. He showed no fear of being in the midst of the bandit group at all.

"We've heard a lot about you, bandit killer," the boss said in a hoarse voice. "Have you come here to try and kill us too?"

"Depends on how you respond to my proposal," the old man said.

"Your… proposal?" the boss asked. "You came here to make a proposal? For what?"

"There's something I need in a place protected by many. I need your group to act as a diversion while I get it," the old man said.

The boss didn't say anything and kept listening.

"So?" the old man asked.

"So? So what?" the boss asked in reply. "No way, that was not your proposal right?"

"Of course it was. Now answer me, do you agree?" he asked.

"Are you shitting me, old man? That proposal had almost no information in it. Give us something more," the boss said.

"Little girl, that is the most you will get for now. Accept the proposal and you will obviously learn more about your task," the old man said.

"Little girl?" the boss asked in surprise. "It seems you did not come here without doing some homework."

"It's not that hard to guess that the boss of the Black Venom bandit group is a girl. I would be food if I didn't know that by now. So, do you accept or not?"

The boss turned to look at her men who had no mind of joining with the person that was known to mercilessly kill bandits for the last few months.

"What if we don't accept?" the boss asked. Sounds of weapons being pulled out of their sheaths rang out everywhere.

The old man looked around and saw the many weapons being pointed at him. Sword, saber, spears, bows. Every conceivable spear was being pointed at him right now.

He scoffed at them all with a mocking smile.

"Well, then you will force me to keep my Bandit Killer title for a little longer, I'm afraid," the old man said and started pouring out his cultivation base.

The boss' eyes widened in fear when she realized that the old man in front of her was stronger than her, far stronger.

"You are no easy man to deal with, huh?" she said.

She immediately took off her mask to use her voice on him, but the old man suddenly moved and caught her by the throat, refusing to let her talk.

"You can't use your tricks on me, little girl. Now choose. Do you want to work for me? Or do you want to die?'

The girl felt fear like never before. A single misstep and she would surely die at this place. She put her hand forth to stop her men from attacking. Then, she nodded vigorously to let the man know that she and her bandit group would follow them.

"Great. We will go to work in a week. I want every single one of your men on the job that day."

The old man left as freely as he came, but in his wake, he left his terror all around him.

Chapter 517: Previous Candidates

Alex woke up early in the morning to the sound of his alarm. He got up from his bed and put aside his blanket.

He went to the bathroom to freshen up and then made his way to the kitchen.

"Good morning," he said to the three girls that were already having breakfast. He got himself a plate as well and sat down.

He mindlessly ate the food on the plate as he made small talk with the girls.

"Why do you look so tired?" Hannah asked, watching him yawn all the time while eating.

"I do?" Alex asked. "That's probably cause I am."

"What's wrong?" Hannah asked.

"Well, I've been sleeping in my bed this last week, and I've learned that my sleep schedule had been horrible. So I can't go to sleep on time, and end up waking earlier than I should."

"So, I've been feeling a little tired for this past week," Alex said.

"What happened to sleeping in the capsule?" Hannah asked. "Is your capsule broken?"

"No, it's not," Alex said. "But I currently can't cultivate in the game, so I have no point in staying overnight in the game."

"What's wrong?" Sarah asked.

"I broke through to the True Realm," Alex said.

"Oh, congratulations. That's a big step," Hannah said. "So, what's the problem?"

"Well, I don't have any cultivation method to continue cultivating at night. Thus, I've resorted to not spending the night in the game," Alex said.

"Oh," Hannah said. "Have you tried taking one from the internet? You said you learned one a while ago right?"

"I did," Alex said. "But I could only find Earth grade ones, and for some reason, they were impossible to remember all the way through. So I just gave up."

"I would rather find a proper one once I leave where I am," Alex said.

"Okay, you do you," Hannah said and got back to eating her breakfast.

Alex finished his not long after and returned back to his room. He entered the capsule and returned back to the game.

He opened his eyes and immediately felt the pain coarse through all of his body. "Argh! Pearl, can you stop please?" he asked.

"Meow!" Pearl heard him speak and immediately stopped. "Meow?"

"Yeah, I just got done cultivating," Alex lied. Ever since he entered the True realm, he had let Pearl cultivate alone while he left the game to sleep on his own bed.

He looked at the time and saw that it was around 7 am. "Let's go to the garden," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl said. He was excited to go fight once more. By now, his cultivation base had reached Mind Tempering 5th Realm, and soon, he too would enter the True realm just like Alex.

'Damn, if I don't improve by then, my body will hurt a lot more, won't it?' Alex thought.

The two of them walked out of the room and went to the garden. Alex stayed in the sun for a while and simply felt too bored to even do anything anymore.

Yao Jia came up to him and said, "Let's go."

"Can we delay the training a little bit? I'm not really improving a lot, so I would rather have some peace for now," Alex said.

"MEOW!!" Pearl cried out that he wanted to train right then.

"Uh, no. You can go, buddy. I was only talking about myself," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl said as he smugly nodded to himself and walked away.

"Have fun. I'll see you later," Alex said as he watched Pearl leave.

"Is something wrong?" Yao Jia asked.

"Not really. It's just that I don't have any cultivation method to cultivate, so training isn't as efficient as it used to be," Alex said.

"Ah, I see. Unfortunately, this place doesn't have any cultivation methods for humans," she said.

"It's okay. I will get it somehow," Alex said.

Yao Jia stopped speaking and laid down by his side, basking the sun in peace. They stayed there for a while before Yao Jia remembered something.

"Ah, I have some bad news for you," she said.

"Eh, bad news?" Alex got a little scared. "What is it?"

"Almost half of the people who entered the secret realm have died by now," she said.

"Huh?! Ah, you're talking about the humans?" Alex said.

"Of course," Yao Jia said.

"It's fine. I don't really feel anything for them," Alex said.

"Weird. I thought you would show more emotions towards your own species," Yao Jia said.

"I said it before right? I don't really feel anything for people I don't really know about. I mean, it's not like I don't think it's sad that they're dying, but… it's not really bad news for me. It's just news," Alex said.

"I see, so you don't care about them because they are from the Luminance empire, huh?" she asked.

"Kind of, yes," Alex said. He wondered how different those people must've been. He said he didn't feel anything for them, but there was a sour feeling growing in his heart when he heard that news.

He would've wanted to help them if he could. They must've had families waiting for them to return as well.

"Have you ever been to the Luminance empire?" he asked.

"Ah, no. I haven't left this place ever in my life," Yao Jia said.

"I have always wanted to leave the Crimson Empire and go to the other locations in the world to see how they are. The first location on that would be the Luminance Empire for me. I wonder how it is compared to the Crimson Empire," Alex wondered.

"Ah, you can ask uncle. He's been to the Luminance empire," Yao Jia said.

"Oh no, it's fine. I wanted to know about the more recent stuff. They must only have knowledge about the stuff from years ago," Alex said.

"No, no. Uncle went to the Luminance empire just a couple of months ago. Multiple times at that too," Yao Jia said.

"Eh? He did? I should ask him about that when I see him again," Alex said. "Was there a reason why he went there?"

"Oh, you know, to get a candidate for the throne. When the fountain called out to the bloodline, while my father went to the Crimson Empire, Uncle went to the Luminance empire," Yao Jia said.

"I see," Alex said. "It must've sucked for him then."

"Hmm, why would you say that?" Yao Jia asked.

"I mean, how many times did the fountain call for us again? 4?" Alex asked.

"Uh, I believe 5. But they didn't leave the first time, I think," Yao Jia said.

"Yeah, 4 times. Imagine getting a reaction 4 times to leave and go find candidates only to return empty-handed each time. It must've sucked for him," Alex said.

Yao Jia chuckled a little. "Who said he returned empty-handed?" she asked.

"Huh? He didn't?" Alex asked.

"No, he returned with candidates each time he went out there," she said.

"Oh," Alex was surprised. He wasn't expecting there to have been candidates to be the ruler of this continent before Pearl.

"So Pearl isn't the first one?" he asked.

"No, silly. We've had candidates before," she said.

"I see," He said. "What happened to them? Did they not have enough bloodline or something?"

"Something like that, I would say," Yao Jia said. "All of them failed the ritual."

"So, they weren't successful, huh? Poor guys, they lost their chance at making it big in the future," Alex said. "Are they still in the palace? Can I talk to them?"

"What?" Yao Jia's expression changed when she heard that. "Why would you want to talk to them?"

"Oh, it's nothing. Pearl is getting stronger and stronger each day and soon enough he will enter the True realm. After that, it shouldn't be long before he is made to go through the ritual."

"I don't know much about the ritual, so I wanted to ask them if their experience with it was good or bad. I really don't want Pearl to go through pain if he can," Alex said.

Yao Jia looked at him dumbly without uttering a single word back.

Alex looked at her confusedly and asked, "Are they not here? Can I not talk to the candidates?"

Yao Jia continued looking at him dumbly and finally uttered a sentence.

"You cannot talk to any of them. All of the candidates that went through the ritual are already dead."

Chapter 518: Confrontation

"What?" Alex asked with a stunned face. After spending nearly 2 months in this place, this was the first time he was learning of this information.

"They died? All the candidates did?" he asked.

"Yes, every single one of them," Yao Jia said softly.

Alex had already thought of the worst possible scenario that could've happened to them, so he deluded himself to thinking maybe that was not the case.

"Did they suffer from some sort of injury during the ritual that killed them later on?" he asked.

"No," Yao Jia said. "There was no injury or anything. They just couldn't handle the ritual and died before they even finished it."

Alex suddenly stood up, his face pale with fear. "And you guys want to let Pearl go through that?" he asked.

Yao Jia shrunk a little. "We have to, I think. That is the only way to find a successor now that the fountain won't form any more drops of blood for a long time," she said.

"No way. I won't allow it. Where are your father and uncle? I want to talk to them," Alex demanded.

"I don't know if they will—"

"I don't care for their permission. I won't be sitting still while they want to play with my Pearl's life," Alex said with a furious face. "If you won't tell me then fine, I will go find them myself."

Yao Jia tried to say something, but Alex ignored her. Pearl's safety was the most important thing for him, and so he ignored everything that didn't concern that point at the moment.

He suddenly turned around and left for the underground palace. That was the only place any of the 3 could even be in at the moment.

It was either the Palace hall, the training room where the Puma trained Pearl, or the library. It was already daytime, so he cut off their living quarters from the list of places they could be at.

There was also the fountain where the ritual would take place, but he doubted they would be there.

Still, there were chances they could be elsewhere as well, so the moment he entered the underground corridor, he immediately spread out his spiritual sense in all 4 directions.

Having gone through the Mind Tempering realm and eating the 3 pills that improved his mind, he now had a spiritual sense that spread nearly 80 meters in all directions.

When stretched to the extreme, Alex could spread it up to 120 meters. With this, he could easily search the underground palace without any worries of missing anything.

He walked around the underground while looking through every corner of it, and for the first time realized that there were so many metal rods hidden amongst the ceiling.

He did not understand what the metal rods were for, nor did he care. He simply walked around searching for any of the 3 saint realm beasts he could find.

"Boy, what insolence is this?" A voice entered his mind that belonged to the Puma. He had noticed Alex using spiritual sense in the hallway before Alex's spiritual sense had even reached him.

"Where are you, Senior? I want to talk to you," Alex said.

"I don't have the time, boy. Go away," the puma said with a bored voice.

"No, you will have to speak to me. I am not going to let you guys make Pearl go through the ritual," Alex said.

"What?" A threatening voice entered Alex's mind. Suddenly, a gust of wind struck him as the Puma stood before him.

"What sort of nonsense are you spouting?" the puma asked with a snarling face.

"As I said, I will not let Pearl go through the ritual. I just learned that there have been many before that died when going through the ritual. Knowing this, you guys still want to make him go through it?" Alex asked in an angry voice.

"We don't like it either, but we have to do what we have to do. Besides the child has a higher chance of surviving thanks to his bloodline," the Puma said.

"That still means that there is a chance that he will die, right? I won't let you make him do it then," Alex said.

The puma scoffed when he heard that. "Are you forgetting who you are speaking to, boy? I don't hear any respect in your voice. You won't let us do what we want? You think you can stop us?"

Suddenly, a massive aura appeared around the puma, as he used his cultivation base to threaten Alex.

"Young human, don't think that just because we let you do what you want in this place that you are a guest. No, your identity here had always been that of a prisoner."

"You do what we say here, not the other way around. Without our permission, you won't even be able to talk so much as a word," the puma said.

Alex felt the pressure crush on him worse than it ever had. The puma was really using the full force of his cultivation base to threaten him, something he hadn't even done when facing the 3 human saints.

Still, that wasn't enough to keep Alex quiet. A warm feeling rushed from inside of Alex that alleviated some of the pressure, allowing him to at the very least speak.

"I won't let you," Alex said in a grunting voice.

The puma looked surprised. He hadn't expected Alex to be able to talk at all. "How can you talk?" the puma asked.

"Not even the White Tiger's blood essence could make me shut up. Do you believe yourself to be stronger than that?" Alex asked.

The puma's eyes widened even more. "It seems you are not an ordinary human after all. I should have known. After all, you are the very first human to have acquired and integrated the White Tiger's bloodline into you," the puma said.

Alex felt the intense aura around him leave. Just then, he saw a paw moving towards him.

Alex was hit square in the face and sent flying at the wall. "However, that does not mean that you get to be insolent in front of me. You are still under our rule. You will do what we tell you to do."

"If I tell you to die, you will die," the puma said.

Alex felt a stream of warm blood flow from the side of his face. He still stood up and glared at the Puma through his blurry vision.

"You may as well kill me then because that is the only way I will ever let you make Pearl go through the ritual," Alex said.

"Hmph, You talk big for a tiny human," the puma scoffed. It was very angry right now. "If only you didn't have the White Tiger's bloodline, I would've killed you right now. However, that doesn't mean I don't have other ways to take you out of the picture."

The puma suddenly picked up Alex with his aura and sent him hurling inside an empty room. Alex struck the wall and fell to the ground.

By the time he stood up, the door was locked. Alex went up to the door and tried to open it, but he couldn't open it. He punched at the door and walls as hard as he could, but he couldn't damage it at all.

Anyone in his place right now would've started to despair, but Alex didn't. He kept calm and immediately sent out his spiritual sense to see the outside.

"Keep that thing to yourself," A voice came from outside, and he felt his spiritual sense being pushed back into his head. It hurt quite a bit, but Alex had the information he needed.

He suddenly disappeared from inside the room and appeared outside, right in front of the puma. He then suddenly turned around and started running away.

"I see. You won't be so easy to confine huh? Teleportation skill… that is not something so easily found in this realm," the puma said.

He then stopped Alex mid-sprint and pulled him back. "You were trying to get to the little child huh? You must've thought that if you put him back into the bonded space, we wouldn't be able to get to him."

"And you would be right. Without your permission, we would never be able to get to him. However, you should've thought of this before you came to confront us."

"The child is currently training in the upper palace, and you won't get to him at all now," The puma said.

Alex cursed himself for thinking that these beasts would ever give a thought about his concerns. 'Fuck! I spent so much time here and forgot the most integral part about them. They are beasts, and that is how they will always act,' Alex thought.

"I can't kill you, I can't confine. I can't even force you to stay quiet, huh? If you won't follow our orders and let the child go through the ritual, then there is really only one thing left that I can do," the Puma said.

Alex tried to understand what he was going to do and anxiously waited.

"You see, we brought you here because you had the White Tiger's bloodline. A human with that bloodline was unique, and we thought you would turn out to be something amazing."

"However, after days of research, we didn't find anything about humans with the bloodline blessed by the gods. Furthermore, we can't even extract the bloodline from you given how well it had integrated."

"Also, since you are a human, you can't even go through the ritual to awaken it. So, considering all of this information, we came to the conclusion that… there was absolutely no reason to keep you here anymore,' the puma said.

"However, lady Ren let you stay here since you would be an emotional support for the child while he grew up."

"We've been monitoring you, and we know that the child doesn't rely on you as much anymore."

"So, the only reason you had of staying in this place is also gone," the puma said.

"What?" Alex asked with a shocked face. He understood where this conversation was going.

Suddenly, he felt himself being moved at an incredible speed. When the blurry surrounding disappeared, he found himself in the same place he had been in when he had first arrived in this place.

The Teleportation formation platform.

The puma brought out a medallion of sort from someplace and started using it. "Goodbye, little human. I hope I never see you again," he said.

The formation platform lit up with no prior warning. "NO!" Alex shouted, but his cry was cut off midway through as the light enveloped him completely.

When the light died down, Alex was gone.

Chapter 519: No Way Back

When the light disappeared, Alex found himself on top of the stone platform out in the middle of the forest.

"No! NO!" he shouted. He had realized what had happened. The puma, in his attempt to keep Alex away from Pearl, had decided to send Alex out of the secret realm, with no way back.

"NO!! Let me in," he shouted. He looked around, trying to look for a way to go back into the secret realm. But no matter where he looked, all he could see was just a bunch of withered trees.

"What do I do?" Alex put his hands on his head as he started suffering from an anxiety attack. He crouched on the floor, trying to control his fear.

However, no matter how he looked at it, he had no way of going back. And if he didn't go back, they would kill Pearl.

A few minutes passed, but Alex couldn't calm down at all. The worry he felt for Pearl was making it too hard for him to think of anything other than his upcoming death.

Alex decided to wait around, hoping, foolishly for someone to come get him. He hoped that maybe the puma had a change of heart. He hoped that Yao Jia spoke some sense into him. He hoped that Lady Ren would see how important Alex was to Pearl's life and make them come get him.

He foolishly waited for almost the entire day. In the end, nobody arrived. That was when Alex truly understood just how worthless he was to the beasts.

Maybe the ones that benefited from his pills cared somewhat for him, but the saint beasts didn't.

"I understand," he said calmly. "They think they can step all over me just because I'm weak, huh? Just wait, I will come to get my revenge."

Alex's face twisted with anger and determination. Separating him from Pearl was the worst thing the beasts could have done to themselves.

He placed his palm on the formation and softly spoke. "Wait around, Pearl. I will come to get you for sure," he said.

He then took out the boat from his storage bag and flew away.

He had been flying for just a minute or two when he suddenly saw the formation light up again from far away.

Alex's hopes grew high. "Did they really come to get me?" he thought and flew back.

However, when he reached there, there was nobody. Alex couldn't see or feel a single soul around.

"What the hell?" he thought and waited around for a bit longer. However, at some point, he assumed that he must've been mistaken and flew away once more.

* * * * * * *

A man and woman were running away from the platform they had just arrived in. They were afraid of the beasts coming after them, so they concealed themselves and hid on a tree while they waited to see if any beasts would come.

"Phew, it seems we are finally out, brother Tao. We are safe," the green-robed girl said after a few minutes of noticing no light from the direction of the platform they had just left from.

"Yes, but… are we really out? Why are we still in the middle of the forest?" the red-robed man asked.

"Who knows? Maybe there was another formation platform in the northern forest that we never knew about" the girl said. She then brought out a curious-looking artifact and looked at it.

"Which way?" the man asked.

"It says… that way," the girl pointed.

"Alright, let's go. I hope we get out of this forest soon," the man said and brought out a flying boat. He and the girl got on it and started flying south, deeper into the forest.

* * * * * * *

A man was sitting in front of a group of similarly dressed people, listening to one of them speak.

"Compared to last month, our earnings have increased by a total of 12%. If this goes on, we should be earning a similar amount as before the beast invasion by next month. This is a really good improvement, sect master," The elder in charge of finances excitedly said.

However, the news brought no excitement to the sect master's face, just more sorrow.

The elder quickly hid his excitement and bowed to go away. Another elder came up and gave another statistic that the sect leader needed to care about, but just couldn't.

He would get especially depressed when they talked about how much better it had gotten compared to the past few months when the beasts attacked every month.

"Since more and more merchants and travelers are going around the empire, the demand for guards has helped the disciples get a way to earn money once more," the elder said. "Our missions boards are also starting to get filled the way they used to before…" the elder trailed off.

"Anyway, if we go on like this for just the next month, we will be back on track," the elder said. He too bowed and walked away.

The sect leader waited for someone else to come up and say something to remind him all over again of the day he lost his disciple, but no one else came up.

"Sect Leader," a thin man called him.

"Hmm," the sect leader looked at him.

"The meeting is over. Please dismiss it,' the man said.

"Oh, uhh, the meeting is over. You may leave now," the sect leader said unenthusiastically.

The elder sighed and started to leave one by one. All of them left except for the thin elder that had spoken up earlier.

"You need to get a hold of yourself. Is this what a sect leader should be like?" the elder scolded.

"Okay," the sect leader said.

"Hey! Are you even listening to me? You are just ignoring me again, aren't you?" the elder asked.

"What the hell do you want me to do? My disciple is gone, and I as his master couldn't do a damn thing to save him. All I could do was stand around and watch the beasts take my disciple."

"Do you how it feels to have your disciple taken away from you? What would you do if it was your little Yuhan, or little Su that was taken away, huh?" the sect leader shouted his words at the thin man.

The thin man kept quiet and just shook his head.

"I… I'm sorry. I shouldn't be shouting at you when all you are doing is trying to help me. I promise I will get a hold of myself. Just… let me be a mess for a little longer," the sect leader said.

The thin man sighed. "Wasn't little Mei there too? Have you talked with her? Is she okay?" the man asked.

"I… I have talked with her, but all I can do is lie to her that everything will be okay. I'm sure that even she knows that I'm lying," the sect leader said.

"It doesn't matter. Lie to her even more. She lost her younger brother too. The both of you need each other more than anything right now," the thin elder said.

He then sighed again and said, "at least you have each other to pick you up when you fall down. I wonder how much of a mess sect leader Ma has been these last months."

"She is surely the worst of us. I hope she finds someone to rely on too. She definitely needs it," the sect leader said.

"Alright, go to your disciple and help her. Fortunately, your other disciple is doing better and doesn't need your help," he said.

"He wasn't there. He doesn't understand the despair and helplessness we felt," the sect leader said. "Alright, I will leave now. Thanks for the talk."

"Anytime," the thin elder said and left.

The sect leader also walked out of the room to the evening lights in the crater of the sect. He made his way to his disciple's house and knocked on it.

The door opened and a girl walked out. However, this wasn't his disciple. "Little Xing, how is your sister holding up?" he asked.

"She's fine, uncle. Come on in. She's doing much better than before once she started focusing on training. I think the bad thoughts have gone away now," she said.

The sect leader walked in and knocked on a door on the inside. "Little Mei, can I talk to you?" he asked.

He waited for a moment and the door opened up. "Master, what are you doing here?" she asked.

"I was just here to check up on you. How are you doing, lately? Do you need something?" he asked.

"No, I'm fine, master. How are you though? You don't talk about yourself," she said.

"Don't worry about an adult. That's not your job. Just worry about yourself. How is the training coming? Do you feel like you're getting stronger now?" he asked.

"It's okay, master. Du Yuhan is a good training partner. Although… I feel like he's hiding his strength from me," she said.

"Oh, why would you say that?" the sect leader asked.

"Well, you see, Every time I push myself to the extreme and bring out something stronger than before, he always has the strength to handle it. I think he's toying with me," she said.

"No way. It's probably just a coincidence. Are you going to go train now?" he asked.

"In a few minutes, yes," she said.

"Good. Take c—"

Suddenly, he felt a vibration from his storage bag and he brought out the talisman. However, when he saw which talisman he brought out, his eyes went wide with shock.

His hands trembled as he brought the talisman close to his head and read the content inside.

It said "Master! I'm back."

Chapter 520: Return

"Master!" Alex shouted as he looked away from his older brother and towards Wen Cheng.

"Y-Yu Ming?" Wen Cheng couldn't believe his eyes at all. He ran up to Alex and grabbed him by the shoulders. "Are you really here? I can't believe this!" Wen Cheng said.

"It's me, master. I really am back," Alex said with slight tears in his eyes as well.

"Junior brother!" Luo Mei didn't even wait to find out if he was real or not, and immediately stole him from Wen Cheng and hugged him.

Alex felt warmth in his heart that slightly lessened the pain of losing Pearl. He could feel tears that were not his drenching his robes. Luo Mei really couldn't handle loss very well.

Losing her mother at an early age, she thought the worst of every event. She was worried about her father before she even returned to see how bad his health was.

When Alex was taken away, she fully believed him to be dead and turned into a mess. If it wasn't for her sister looking after her, she would be in a lot worse state than she currently was.

"I'm so glad you're back," She cried out. Liu Xun walked up and hugged the two of them as well.

"Welcome back, junior brother," he said.

Wen Cheng smiled as he realized how close his 3 disciples were. The hug lasted for a few moments before Wen Cheng separated them to ask Alex some questions.

"How are you, Yu Ming? Are you okay? How did the beasts treat you? Are you hurt somewhere?" Wen Cheng asked with concern.

"Right! Are you alright, junior brother?" Luo Mei asked as her face suddenly turned concerned as well.

"I… I am fine, but…" Alex stopped. Tears filled his eyes which made the other two believe something bad must've happened to him.

"What's wrong, Junior brother?" Liu Xun asked.

"The beasts… they took Pearl. They are going to make Pearl go through a ritual where none of the other beasts that have gone through it before have survived. I tried to complain to them that I won't let them do it, but… they threw me out of the secret realm."

"Now Pearl is there alone, and I have no way of returning to him," Alex said. His voice choked a few times as the tears made it hard to speak.

Luo Mei's eyes turned watery as she felt the sorrow Alex was feeling and hugged him again. "It will be okay. We will get Pearl back, don't worry," she said. It was all a lie, there was no way she or anyone in the empire could do any of that. However, it was a lie that Alex needed to hear right now.

"Come, let's go to my place. You must be tired and need to rest," Wen Cheng said.

"No, master. I need to go to the Hong Wu sect before that. I will need to let them know that I am back as well," Alex said.

"Right, you should," Wen Cheng said as he realized. "Ma Rong is a mess. Let's get you to her quick."

"I will bring him there, you guys go back for now," Wen Cheng said to the other 2.

"Okay master," Luo Mei said and turned to Alex. "It's really good to have you back, Junior brother."

"It's good to be back, sister," Alex said. Wen Cheng flew high and Alex followed. Just as they flew a bit in the sky, Wen Cheng noticed something unusual.

"What happened to your cultivation base? I can't feel a single thing," he said. He was looking directly at Alex, but he realized there was no aura coming off of him. If not for his spiritual sense, he would actually believe that he was hallucinating Alex right now.

"Oh," Alex said as he looked at himself. "I had to fly through the forest, so I concealed myself. I forgot to remove the concealment."

Alex then let go of the concealment technique that hid all of his aurae, and soon his mortal and cultivation aura both returned to him.

As they did, Wen Cheng's eyes started to widen more and more. He was dealt such a shock that he had to stop flying and look at Alex with a gawking face.

"Y-y-you! You entered the True Realms?" He asked in surprise.

"Ah, yes. I did so a week ago," Alex said

"But wait, didn't you enter the Mind Tempering realm just 2 months ago? How are you so quick?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Umm… I am one of the new cultivators that can cultivate very fast, master," Alex said.

"Is… is there a reason why you are so fast?" Wen Cheng asked. He had always knew or at least suspected his disciple to be one of the new cultivators that could cultivate fast. But he never expected to see him be this fast.

"Reason… not really. You can also cultivate fast, but I would suggest you don't. There are a few other minor reasons, but… I will tell you about them someday, master. You will learn the truth behind it all," Alex said.

"Okay," Wen Cheng didn't pry anymore. "I will wait for the day when you will tell me more."

Alex thanked his master for not asking for more information and kept on flying.

The sky had turned fully dark, and the stars were visible, some brighter than others. Finally, the two of them reached the Hong Wu Sect and dropped in front of the sect gate.

The elder standing in front of the gate suddenly stood upright when he noticed people flying down from the sky. Not anyone could fly inside the city, so whoever it was must be a big figure.

When the two people came into the light, he realized that one of them was Sect Master Wen Cheng from the Tiger sect.

Beside him, the elder saw someone else from the tiger sect, going by the yellow robe. However, when he looked closely at the face, he couldn't believe his eyes at all.

"Disciple Yu Ming?" he questioned. The face, it was the same face he had seen with the sect master so many times, but… he was supposed to be dead.

Alex didn't recognize this elder at all. There were many elders that he didn't care for and didn't keep in mind, so he was surprised that he was even able to recognize him back.

"Hello Elder," Alex said and bowed a little. He then walked past the elder and entered.

The elder wanted to stop him to confirm if it was him, but with Wen Cheng's presence, it was hard to even doubt if it was him.

Alex entered the mountain and flew again. He brought out a talisman from his bag and talked into it.

"Master, I have returned," he sent a message.

Deep in her manor, surrounded by iced-up walls, Ma Rong's sickly thin body was breathing in and out as she cultivated.

When the deep vibration of the talisman came from her storage bag, she stopped to see who it was as she had told the elders to not message her unless it was urgent.

However, her eyes went wide when she read the message in the talisman. Her lips quivered in shock at who had sent her the message.

She couldn't help but mutter softly to herself.

"Alex?"

Chapter 521: Choose

Ma Rong cried. A lot. Not even Luo Mei had cried for Alex this much. She was a sobbing mess as she hugged Alex and started thanking the gods for his return.

Alex didn't know what to say. However, the warmth he felt from them all was making him slightly happy that he returned, which in turn was making him more guilty about the fact that he left behind Pearl.

Ma Rong's body was quite skinny. It seemed she wasn't taking care of herself properly. It's my fault, Alex thought.

It wasn't really his fault. He did what he could to save them and was taken away by the beasts. There was nothing he could do in that situation.

Now he needed to go save Pearl, and yet once again, there was nothing he could do.

Alex met with the other elders who welcomed him back. His Grandmaster grew emotional when he saw him as well. The second Elder sighed with relief when he saw him as well. Even the third Elder seemed happy to see him, despite not having much connection with him.

Alex saw his Martial uncle as well. He seemed to have returned from his mission in the past 2 months. He said he was successful. Alex couldn't wait to go and visit Wan Li, who they said was being heavily guarded so he didn't escape again.

Ironically, for an alchemist who made many different pills to hide from the ones searching for him, he was found out exactly thanks to the heavy alchemical scent on him.

Zhou Mei, Zhou Mi, Fan Ruogang, Kong Yuhan— some of the only people in the sect he could call his friend— came to meet him as well.

They were all truly happy to see him back. Alex was happy to see them as well. He was particularly happy to see Fan Ruogang, who had her cheerful personality back thanks to having both Wan Li and Alex back in the sect.

They stayed around for a few hours before leaving him alone with his masters.

With Wen Cheng present with them, Alex started telling the both of them what he had been up to for the last 2 months. He told them how the beasts treated him, how he trained, what they were planning to do with Pearl, and how— if they could enter the secret realm— they could go out of the Empire.

Wen Cheng and Ma Rong were surprised to even learn that there was an Empire outside of the Crimson Empire. It was just speculation they had that there was civilization outside of the Crimson Empire, which they never expected to be an Empire that was larger than their own.

Alex took the time to explain to them about the 5 continents as well as he could. That was another thing that surprised them the most.

Learning that they were an isolated bunch with no access to outside resources, in a continent that itself was low on resources, and was thus the weakest one of all, was perhaps the biggest shock they had received their entire life.

"We should tell the emperor about this. He will be happy to learn as well," Wen Cheng said.

"I don't think you have to," Alex said. "They probably already know."

Wen Cheng looked at Alex with a weird face. "How do you know that they know?" he asked.

"The Emperor's grandfather, Fu Qing, the First Emperor, was from the Luminance empire. He was someone that entered the secret realm from the other side, and escaped through this side when everyone else he had come with died."

"I suspect he would at least tell his family about something so important. I also suspect the only reason they never dared to make it public is because of how difficult it would be to go through a secret realm full of beasts," Alex said.

"Hmm, you might be correct. But, there is a chance they really don't know and the first emperor just never bothered to tell them because of how dangerous it is," Wen Cheng said.

"Somehow I doubt that," Ma Rong said from the side. Her tears had dried away completely, and she was no longer red in the face from all the crying. She also no longer choked on her tears while speaking.

"Why do you say that?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Did you know that the Emperor's sister-in-law was sick?" Ma Rong asked. "The city lord's mother, she was brought here in the Scarlet city for me to treat."

"Eh? They brought someone so important here? Why not let her stay in the capital?" Wen Cheng asked.

"That's because they didn't feel the capital safe because of the beast attack. Also, senior Lai— Ah, the Royal alchemist, he couldn't find any treatment for her, so they brought her here to see if I could treat them," Ma Rong said.

"Did you?" Wen Cheng asked curiously.

"Yes, thanks to a pill Alex came up with. He came up with the pill and the Royal Alchemist improved upon it. She was starting to heal before the final Beast invasion, and I heard she left a month ago, fully healed," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, she's healed? That's good for her," Alex said.

"Yes, that is good, but I don't see the point of this information," Wen Cheng said.

"Well, the point is that the reason she was sick was that she ate a Divine Devil fruit, a rather raw one with not enough age to it, and was stuck halfway in Mortal Cleansing."

"That fruit, she had found on one of her expedition to the south, which I highly doubt was just a random expedition. I have been wondering why they would ever go to the south, I suspect this is the reason," Ma Rong said.

"Ah, I see," Wen Cheng said. "Still, just for formality's sake, I will report what I've learned today."

"That should be okay," Ma Rong said.

It was quite late into the night, so Wen Cheng decided it was time that he left.

"When do you plan to come to the sect?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I don't know master," Alex said. "I'm not a disciple of the sect anymore, am I?"

"What do y— Ah, I hadn't thought about that," Wen Cheng said as he fell into thought. "Right, now that you are in the True realm, you are supposed to be graduated from the sect."

"So, I can either leave the sect or stay as an elder, right?" Alex asked.

"That's right, but…" Wen Cheng fell silent.

"I doubt I can be elder in two different sects, can I?" Alex asked. "Besides, I'm too young to be an elder too."

"This…" Ma Rong fell silent too. "You will have to stay an elder here," She said after thinking for a while. "Your alchemy skills are too great to waste your days doing normal elder stuff."

"That's very selfish of you, Ma Rong. Don't forget, our disciple's cultivation talents aren't that weak either. I sometimes even think that it might be better than his alchemy talents," Wen Cheng said.

"I can argue otherwise," Ma Rong said. "But that's not the point right now."

"I can't join both sects as an elder, can I?" he asked.

"No, the amount of information and responsibility an elder holds in a sect is just too big to share between the two sects without any supervision. Even if you don't mean any harm for the two sects, even if the two of us agree, the other elders will stand up against it, so it's just not possible," Ma Rong said.

"What should I do then?" Alex asked.

"We can't tell you that," Wen Cheng said. "You will have to choose this time, and you can not choose both."

"Normal Cultivation, or Alchemy, the choice will be easy for you once you understand what your heart desires, but at the same time, it will be the most important choice you have made in your life until now."

"What you choose will shape your future from here on out," Ma Rong said.

Alex fell silent. He didn't want to choose. As much as he liked Alchemy, he liked the normal cultivation stuff too. He liked the training, learning new skills, breaking through to the other realms.

He liked formations, to make them, to carve them. He wanted to learn about talisman creation and artifact forging too if given the chance.

There were way too many things he wanted to do to be tied down by a single decision he was forced to make right now.

"I… I will have to think about it," Alex said with a solemn face.

Wen Cheng pointed at Alex's chest and said, "Don't choose with your head, choose with your heart. Don't choose what you think is right for you. Choose what you FEEL is right for you."

"Don't worry. Regardless of what you choose, regardless of where you will be, we will always be your master, and you will always be our disciple. Nothing in the world will ever change that," Ma Rong said.

"We just recruited elders a week ago, so the next one is about 3 weeks away. When is yours?" Wen Cheng asked Ma Rong.

"We have one coming up this week. After that, it will be next month," Ma Rong said.

"Ah, yours is closer that. Sigh, I don't want to force you, but if possible, try to choose one of the two sects by the end of this week, okay?" Wen Cheng said.

"I will leave now. Come to the sect whenever you feel like it," Wen Cheng said and waved goodbye.

"Rest, you have a long week ahead of you," Ma Rong said and she walked out as well.

Alex remained in his house, alone with his thoughts, many thoughts, thinking what he should be doing.

The thoughts conflicted with each other, the feelings contradicted each other. Choose with your heart, Wen Cheng had said. But how was he to do that, when his heart wanted different things?

He felt a close connection with the Hong Wu sect, much more than what he felt with the Tiger sect. That in turn made him guilty towards the Tiger sect and made him want to do something right for them as well.

There was also the feeling of guilt he felt towards Pearl as he didn't think about him all the time, which he felt was what he should have been doing.

Too many things. His mind and heart, a jumbled mess of thoughts and feelings. Alex sighed. He really could not choose at all.

He decided to put it all aside for now. The night was late, and he had nothing to do anymore now that he was back.

So, he logged out of the game, got out of the capsule, and jumped into his bed. The thoughts and feelings slowly disappeared as he fell asleep.

Chapter 522: Spirit Reed pill

Alex logged back into the game. He was still unsure of what he was to do, what he was to choose. So, he didn't choose at all, at least not right now.

He walked out of his room and went into the courtyard. He looked at the water and remembered that he hadn't taken a bath in a while.

Cultivators didn't need to eat, drink, or take a bath. However, Alex was a human too in the real world. Sweat and dirt always made him take a bath there. That was the same here as well.

Instinct and habit were hard to change when you continued doing the thing you needed to change.

Alex took off his robes and jumped into the water, going deep underwater. He opened his eyes and sat on the bottom of the pond. He felt at peace.

If I never leave, I will never have to make that choice, Alex thought. He really didn't want to make the choice. It just wasn't fair to him.

But that was life and he understood it. Nothing was fair in life. Sometimes, you just had to push yourself through the unfairness and come out on the other side, hopefully not losing yourself in the process.

Alex walked out of the pond after feeling cleaner than he was and used his aura to dry off the rest of the water.

He redressed and felt something buzzing.

"Hmm."

He felt the storage pouch in his robe and saw that one of them was buzzing. He looked into it and found out that he was being messaged by his master.

Come to my place when you're done cultivating, she said.

Alex chuckled a little. He couldn't cultivate even if he wanted to. "I should ask if she had any good cultivation methods. She uses one too, right?" Alex thought.

He made his way out of his house and went to his master's place. He let go of his spiritual sense and was surprised to find his master in the alchemy room.

He wasn't surprised that she was in the alchemy room, but rather that he was able to find her at all.

"Weird," he thought as he made his way to the alchemy room.

He entered through the doorway and found his master making some pills at the moment. He decided to wait. A few minutes later, Ma Rong was finally done with the pill and removed it from her cauldron.

She placed the pill in a pill tester and waited. 41%.

Alex hadn't seen the ingredients, so he didn't know what pill she had made. But, whatever it was, 41% was a good harmony for a pill.

"What pill was that master?" he asked as he finally went in and sat on the other side of the cauldron.

"It's a Spirit Reed pill," Ma Rong said.

"A Spirit Reed pill? What's does it do?" he asked.

"It helps a True realm cultivator improve their Qi output by a significant amount. With this one being 41%, this should help increase their Qi output by… something like 10% I guess," she said.

"Woah, if people can increase the amount of Qi they can produce at once, then they would be quite strong for a limited time, won't they?" Alex asked.

"That's the point of the pill," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded. His own mortal cleansing worked somehow like that. It made the movement of the Qi in his body faster and thus he could bring more of them out at once.

That was one of the reasons why he could fight people with higher cultivation realm compared to him. It was just one of the reasons, but a reason nonetheless.

Suddenly Alex realized something. "Wait, Master did you get a handle on your constitution already?" Alex asked. The fact that she could create a true pill at such a high harmony, when the last time he saw her, she was much worse at even creating Common pills.

This meant that between the time he had gone and come back, she had already fixed, or at the very least improved her situation.

"Yes, I have got a hold of my constitution," Ma Rong said with a smile. "It took a bit of effort, but it wasn't in vain."

"Great!" Alex exclaimed. He was truly happy for his master. "How did you achieve that? As far as I know, your Yin energy was truly very strong. Even stronger than my yang energy."

"I did what I thought was right. Since my Yin was going out of control, I used the Yang to help me suppress it," she said.

"You used… yang to suppress it?" Alex said with a confused face. "How does that work? I took away all the Yang stones, so where did you get the Yang from?"

"Did you forget that the whole of the Forbidden Fields is covered in Yang energy? I went there every morning to calm my Yin energy so that I could learn to control it using external force," she said.

"What?" Alex's face grew pale. "Master, that's so dangerous. What if something like last time happened and you fell unconscious for days?"

"I… I worried about that too, but I had to do what I did. That was the only way to control my constitution. Fortunately, it worked," she said.

"Thank god, it did. What would we do if you fainted again," Alex said worriedly. "Just seeing you unconscious last time was so worrying. Please don't do something so reckless again."

Ma Rong smiled when she heard that. To hear her own disciple be worried about her, She felt accomplished as a master.

"Alright, stop talking about that. That's not what I called you here for," Ma Rong said.

"Right, what did you call me here for?" Alex asked.

"I want to see how you've improved. I know I have already taught you the most I can, but there may still be something left to teach, depending on how you do today," she said.

"Alright," Alex said. "What do you want me to make?"

Ma Rong thought for a moment and brought out a pill recipe. Alex took the recipe and read it.

In an instant, the knowledge was imprinted onto his mind, and with the slightest recall, he could tell the recipe by heart and instinct.

"You want me to make the Spirit Reed pill?" He asked. He cocked his head as he read through the ingredients and cross-referenced them with what he had.

"Take your time, learn the recipe and see how you handle it," she said.

"It's fine," Alex said. "But I'm missing the False Indigo flower petals, Feather Reed grassroots, and Crested Iris's leaves."

"Oh, don't worry about the ingredients, I have 3 sets," she said and brought one of the sets.

Alex took the set and looked at it. As he did, information such as name, age, and energy constitution flowed out of his mind. It was honestly surreal how the information he had never learned before kept popping up in his head.

Ma Rong took away her cauldron and Alex put his cauldron upon the fire. After a significant time had passed, he started making the pill.

He started with the Snapdragon tendrils and worked with them in the cauldron. Once the powder was formed and the Earth energy released, he put in the second ingredient, the Crested Iris's leaves.

Yarrow seeds, Jade Horse's tail hair, Flame lizard's teeth, Feather Reed grassroots, Verbena thorns, False Indigo flower petals, and finally Million Gold leaves.

Alex put in the ingredients in that order and followed the recipe he had just learned the best he could. He made some mistakes here and there, he could tell what they were.

However, he was confident that the mistakes weren't big enough to have much impact on the pill that was created.

What worried Alex the most however was that his Qi wasn't strong enough to completely handle these energies.

He was still only in the 1st True disciple realm. While his Qi might be equivalent to someone in the 4th True disciple realm, that was still not strong enough to fully handle the pill's energy, or at least handle it enough to completely guide it into the pill he was going to form soon.

He did his best and thankfully, the pill-splitting Qi did not escape out of him. He struggled and guided the energy back into his newly formed powder sphere and waited for as much of it to seep into it.

It was the same all the time. The True pill's energy refused to go in without much 'persuasion'.

The pill finally formed and Alex picked it out. Ma Rong presented him with the pill tester to put the pill in it.

Alex didn't need it, but he still put it in there for her sake. He waited for the pill tester to reveal the result.

31%

Ma Rong's eyes went wide in shock. She was so stunned that she nearly dropped the pill tester. Alex caught her trembling hands before she could do any damage.

"Master?" Alex called her.

"31%… how did you?" she asked. "Have you learned this recipe before? Have you made this pill before?" she was started to get suspicious.

"No, Master. It's thanks to my eidetic memory, that's all," Alex tried to lie.

Ma Rong didn't buy it at all. After all, she had the same thing too, and she couldn't make such great pills on the first try. However, there just wasn't any other explanation.

In the end, she had to accept that her disciple was gifted in ways she was not and that he made the pill on his first try.

This was very scary for her. Soon, she thought, he wouldn't even need her anymore.

Chapter 523: Winter Moon Cultivation Method

"Master, is everything okay?" Alex asked after seeing Ma Rong not speak for a while as she stared at the pill in her hand.

"Yeah, yeah. Everything is fine," She said, but her eyes painted a different picture. She kept staring at the pill in her hand and said nothing else.

"31%, that's good right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it's very good," Ma Rong said. "You don't need any more learning at all after this. You just need to keep practicing making the different pills, and you will get a lot better soon."

Alex nodded, but he didn't believe her. There were many different ways to improve even right now. He could learn how to improve the recipes to make a higher harmony pill. He could learn what the mysterious Structure and Compositions truly were. He could learn, even before trying, what ingredients could mix up to be used in any pill.

He knew he needed a lot more training, perhaps from someone, perhaps just himself, but he knew he needed them.

He didn't tell his master this, however. He didn't want her to think she wasn't teaching him enough.

'Once I find out more about these things, I will let her know about them,' Alex thought.

"You made a few mistakes, right?" Ma Rong asked.

"Huh? Ah, yes. I felt there were a few things I missed here and there because it was my first time," Alex said.

"Hmm, that means you should really be making some better pill. Maybe closer to 35% or more," Ma Rong thought out loud. "Here, take these 2 remaining sets and keep practicing. I will go deal with the sect matters I have neglected for a while."

Alex nodded. He was about to leave when he remembered something. "Ah right, master. I don't have any cultivation method. Do you know what I should do?" he asked.

"You don't have any?" Ma Rong asked, and remembered that he had just entered the True realms.

She fell into thought for a bit, not letting any of her inner voice out. After a while, she finally spoke.

"There are some True realm cultivation methods in the library, but I doubt you would want them," she said. "They are all either Mortal or Earth grade methods and given how fast you cultivate, you would want something better, I'm sure."

Mortal and Earth grade, those truly were terrible in his eyes. If possible he wanted his methods to be at least Heaven grade.

"I have a heaven grade technique I use that my master gifted me when I graduated. Maybe I can gift it to you since you have graduated too," Ma Rong said.

She brought out an old book from her storage bag and handed it to Alex. "Take care of this book, okay? Grandmaster paid a lot for this book," she said.

Alex took the book and looked at it. The book was old, decrepit, and the outer cover was torn at places. He flipped the book and fortunately the inside of the book was fine.

"Winter Moon Cultivation method?" Alex read the title. "I will check it out later. Thank you, master."

Alex left her place. He went back to his house and sat down for half an hour to make the Spirt Weed Pills once again.

He made 3 different pills this time. 2 were split up, 1 was full. The harmony came out to be 22% and 23% for the 2 pills, which told Alex that he had a lot more potential in the pill which he could refine once he had better cultivation.

The 2nd pill was 36%, which also let him know that he really needed a higher density Qi to work with the True pills.

"Fortunately, I have a cultivation method now," Alex thought and brought out the new book.

He had no intention of destroying the book as it was a gift from his master, so he started reading it, rather than using the game's system.

The cultivation method, despite looking very difficult and cryptic was actually pretty simple. All it did was mention a route in his meridians through which he was to circulate his Qi every time he cultivated.

That would help the surrounding Qi to converge onto him and increase his cultivation slowly.

Alex kept on reading and understanding more and more about the technique. He felt like he could start cultivating now without just meditating and waiting for it to automatically start.

Now that he knew what to do, he was confident that he could start it whenever he wanted. That made him a little happy.

He kept on reading and everything else about the book was normal. However, when he reached the end, he read something that troubled him a bit.

"Best used by a person with high affinity to Yin?" Alex was surprised to read. His master was a person with a high affinity to Yin. It was very high.

'Was that why grandmaster paid a lot to buy this book? Because master had good affinity with Yin?' he thought. He felt like he could understand his grandmaster's thought process.

"Master had a Yin constitution from the start, so he must've gone far and wide to find this method for her since it matched her perfectly," Alex thought. "But… will this work for me?"

High affinity to Yin was not exactly how he would describe himself. Having a body that was focused on Yang, he was sure that he couldn't really learn the method.

"But it says affinity to Yin, not Yin focused body. I do have a Yin spiritual root, which does make me have an affinity to Yin. I wouldn't be able to properly learn the Flickering Shadows technique if not for that."

"So… it should work?" Alex wasn't sure, but he was hopeful. He continued reading the method and right after he finished, he got a notification.

«Congratulations on learning 'Winter Moon Cultivation Method'»

"Aw, yes!" he exclaimed. His hope didn't betray him. "Great! This works," he said with a wide smile. Somehow, he had learned a Yin affinity cultivation method.

"Alright, I should have trained enough back in the secret realm to breakthrough right now, right?" Alex thought.

He brought out a healing true pill and ate it without hesitation. He had no wounds, so the pill instead turned fully into Qi, giving him the required amount to break through to the next realm.

Alex opened up the status page and without any sort of hesitation, hit the breakthrough button.

The Qi that was inside him started moving around his meridians. Surprisingly, the route they took was the same as his new cultivation method.

Alex waited for it to quickly complete moving completely, however, the Qi wasn't moving quickly at all. In fact, it was struggling to move through his body.

"What's going o—"

Before he could finish his sentence, the Qi in his meridians all vanished as they left his meridians and his body, giving him a feeling of backlash from the sudden release of Qi.

Had it been more Qi, Alex surely would have suffered some damage to the meridians. Had his meridians not been through body cultivation, he could've suffered some damage too.

Fortunately, none of that happened, but what did happen was worrying. He didn't feel his strength increase at all.

He had failed to break through at all.

Chapter 524: Problems

"Did I just fail?" Alex asked himself with slight confusion. This had never happened before.

"What's going on?" he wondered. The problem was obviously the new cultivation method, but why did it have a problem? It wasn't that it didn't suit him, right? He clearly learned it.

"Wait, does just learning it not mean that it suits me?" he wondered. He decided to check the status page.

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: True Disciple Realm (1,000,000 True Qi : 53%)

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Winter Moon Cultivation Method

True Qi: 1,345,224

]

There was the problem. 53%. He only had a 53% chance to break through, and he had failed this time. He hadn't checked it before he pressed the button, but the chance was probably the same that time as well.

"Sigh, so this isn't really a good cultivation method for me, is it?" he thought. With only half a chance to breakthrough each time, his rate of cultivation would be pretty much halved.

He was pretty sure that he had lost a significant amount of Qi during the previous breakthrough, perhaps all of the 1 million True Qi as the status said was required to breakthrough.

"What do I do now?" Alex thought. He clearly needed to break through as he had already set his mind.

"Sigh, surely I won't fail twice," he thought and pressed the breakthrough button once more.

The Qi inside of him started moving through the same route once more. They moved around the meridians and when they reached the starting point, Alex felt a small 'boom' go off inside of him.

He had successfully broken through. "Phew! Thank god," he thought. He didn't have to waste more pills just to break through as he was dreading.

"Oh right, is the percentage the same or did it go higher?" Alex wondered and opened his status again. His heart sank when he saw it.

52%.

It didn't remain the same or go higher as he expected, instead, the percentage had gone down. 'Is it going to go down every single breakthrough?' he thought.

At a 1% reduction per breakthrough, he was going to lose about 45% of success chance throughout the entirety of True Realms. That would be horrible.

Having only a 7% chance to break through to the Saint realm, where one single mistake could put you on a Qi deviation and ruin your entire cultivation… Alex needed to get rid of this method soon.

However, it was a gift from his master, a graduation gift not to mention. He felt guilty at the thought of changing it.

"It's fine," he thought to himself. "I can keep using it for a little longer. At least the True disciple realm. I can change it after that."

It wasn't like he could change to any random cultivation method either since most mortal and earth grade cultivation methods would also have the same horrible chance at breakthrough.

His only hope was to find some random heaven or higher grade cultivation rank in an auction.

"Oh right, it's been 6 months since the Pink Cloud Auction halls bi-annual auction. Surely they will have something good like that, right? I will wait until then," Alex thought.

He still remembered the auction where he sold his pills and got his first big money. It was the same auction where he learned about beast handling, about Heaven's Impact skill, about the Yin Gathering tree.

"Hopefully I will find something good in that auction," Alex thought.

Once he was done, he stood up and left his house. He walked down the mountain and went to check the right alchemy garden where the Yin Gathering tree was planted on.

He greeted the elders he knew there and was allowed entry to the garden based on not his identity, but the authority he had from the time when he became Ma Rong's disciple.

He walked up the mountain, looking at the different plants that weren't destroyed at all. He had picked up all the alchemy ingredients 2 months ago, leaving only the immature ones, and somehow they were still growing.

'So the tree will take a while to grow, huh?' he thought if it even grew at all. After all, the Yin gathering tree was a hard tree to grow. It was a tree that rarely grew fruits and the fruits rarely had seeds in them.

It wasn't just anywhere that the tree could grow either, it needed an appropriate environment with plenty of Yin Qi to grow. Which, to be fair, he had provided with the Umbra flower he buried along with the seed.

When Alex reached the top of the mountain, he saw a small budding tree about half a meter in height. It had really small leaves and only a few branches. This was definitely the Yin Gathering tree, however…

"Oh no!" Alex said as he saw how malnourished the tree looked. The branches looked weak and dangled downwards, the leaves were started to grow yellow, even the newly grown ones. It looked like it could fall at any moment.

The tree wasn't growing as well as he had hoped it would. "What's going on?" he wondered. He got close to check it.

"Eh? Yu Ming?" A voice called him from the side.

Alex looked to the side to see his master flying down from above. "Master? What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I came for this little guy," she said, pointing at the small tree.

"It looks quite bad," Alex said.

"It is," Ma Rong said. "We didn't think much about what we were doing, and now this little guy is suffering the consequences." Ma Rong landed next to the plant and slowly touched it.

"What do you mean?" Alex asked. He couldn't understand what he was supposed to think about. They had a seed, he had an extreme Yin flower, so he planted it.

Was there really anything else left to consider?

"A Yin Gathering Tree requires a Yin environment to grow," Ma Rong said. "This place isn't one."

"What do—" Alex stopped and looked to the north. "The Forbidden Fields?" he asked in surprise.

"Yes," Ma Rong said. "It has been getting larger and larger for a while. Its influence has already crossed the river and come way over on this side."

"What? Such drastic changes took place in the Forbidden Fields? How? When?" Alex asked in surprise.

"I don't know when exactly it started, but it was after you went in there last time. I remember a wave of energy coming from the north at that moment. It must've knocked away most of the Yin energy in the surrounding."

"If not for the Umbra flower, and me coming here to pour in my Yin Qi every day, I doubt this little guy could even grow up at all. Even this almost dead-looking plant is already a miracle," Ma Rong said.

She touched the ground around the stem of the plant and closed her eyes. Slowly, Alex could see the white mist escaping from all over her body, but mostly from her hands that were touching the ground.

The fear that Alex had already forgotten about reappeared when he saw his master use her body constitution. He still didn't know why it was happening, all he knew was that he was instinctively scared.

Ma Rong finished putting her Yin on the ground and got up. Just as fast as she released her Yin Qi, she constrained it as well.

"So the Yang from the Forbidden Fields is leaking here as well?" Alex asked. "That's… that's dangerous. That means pretty soon no one will be able to cultivate here, will they?"

"I'm afraid so. If the Forbidden Field's suppression reaches here as well, soon Scarlet City would cease to exist. Even if it did, it would be a place only mortals would live in. That is assuming it's not overrun by the beasts in the Forbidden Fields," Ma Rong said.

"Do you have any solution to this problem?" Alex asked.

"None as of yet," Ma Rong said. "I'm planning to inform the Emperor about it soon and see what they offer. "Worst case scenario… we might have to leave this place and relocate to someplace else."

"That's terrible," Alex said, however, he had no idea what could possibly be done as well. 'Hopefully, the storm from last time doesn't come again,' he thought.

Ma Rong left soon after and went to deal with the different things. Alex left too and went to check on the next alchemy garden.

Before he even entered the other Alchemy garden, he could already see the thick fog from outside.

Going in only made him happier. The formation was working just as it was supposed to. The multicolored Qi that the fog was made up of was helping the ingredients grow at a much faster rate, as well as allowing for the high tier of ingredients to grow as well.

"This is pretty good," Alex thought. Soon, he was sure that even saint-rank ingredients would take root here and grow properly.

"Who knows, maybe this will help cultivate a Saint realm cultivator as well," Alex thought optimistically. Although his optimism immediately washed away, like cotton candy in water, when he realized that this place would probably not last very long now given what was happening to the Forbidden Fields.

"Sigh, I hope everything turns out fine somehow," he thought. This was in regards to all the problems going on around him lately.

Pearl, his cultivation method, the choice between the Hong Wu sect and Tiger sect, and now this problem with the Forbidden Fields.

Nothing seemed to be going properly for Alex right now.

He shook his head and let the bad thoughts disappear. Then, he walked away from the alchemy garden and went to the Core disciples mountain.

Chapter 525: Visits

Alex's mood got a little better once he met up with Kong Yuhan and the rest. Talking with his friends made him forget about the problems, at least for now.

Kong Yuhan seemed to be doing good right now. He had gotten together with Zhou Mi and was quite far ahead into his cultivation base as well.

He was in the 8th Meridian Tempering realm right now. 6-7 months ago when Alex had met him for the first time, he was 9th Organ tempering realm.

'He must've focused on Alchemy more than cultivation,' Alex thought. After a bit of conversation with them, he went on to the house at the peak of the Core disciples mountain. He had never been here before, but he had heard a lot about it.

Alex saw 2 green-robed elders standing guard in front of the house. Both of those elders seemed fearsome too as Alex could tell just how strong they were.

'They are truly worried that he will leave again, huh?' Alex thought as he greeted the elders.

"Can I go meet him inside?" Alex asked.

The elders seemed to have no problem with this. Apparently, they seemed to be used to this even. Alex thanked the elders and walked in.

Surprisingly, the house was in a much better condition than Alex would've expected it to be. The tables, beds, chairs— They were all clean and properly maintained.

'How did they keep an empty ho— ah, it must've been her,' Alex thought. Fan Ruogang, she must've taken care of the place in his absence, Alex thought.

The door opened ahead of Alex and a young man walked out. Behind him, Alex could see fire coming out of a pit in the room. 'He must've been making some pills,' Alex thought.

"Hello, brother Wan. How are y—" Alex's eyes turned wide as it took a moment for his brain to process what he was feeling.

"Brother Wan, you… how are you in True Master realm?" Alex asked in surprise. The aura the youth was giving was not that of a mere Self-tempering realm cultivator, but rather a True realm expert.

"Oh, brother Yu Ming, I heard you had returned. Good for you," he said in the most unenthusiastic way possible. Then his face changed, as a wave of seething anger appeared on it.

"You must've let them know about me, right? Why did you do it? I was so close to finding my parent's murderers," Wan Li said.

"Brother Wan," Alex wanted to say something, but he felt like he could understand him just a little. Alex wanted to get back to secret realms to stop them from basically sending Pearl to a death sentence as well.

He didn't know what he would do if he truly did die. He had come to love his little buddy a lot.

However, he still understood why this was bad. Revenge, Alex thought, was not really fine, but understandable given what a person was going through.

But revenge in this condition when victory was basically impossible, Wan Li was just throwing his life away.

"Brother Wan, I won't tell you what to do or not to do. I just want to ask you, do you think your parents would be happy with what you're doing? Do you think they would feel proud of watching you give up what they loved the most?"

"I can't really give you much advice but… just take care of yourself okay? Your parents would want you to be happy," Alex said.

Wan Li looked angry, but there were tears forming in his eyes. Alex understood that Wan Li had already thought of this stuff.

'The pain he feels must be terrible. I pray no one else has to feel it,' Alex thought. Seeing that Wa Li didn't really want to talk with him, Alex left the place.

He went to the Elder's Hall and met up with his Grandmaster and Martial uncle. From there he learned how they had been dealing with the sect matter the last 2 months.

With Alex taken away by the beasts, Ma Rong had been depressed to the point that nothing in the sect was getting done. Fortunately, the grand elder and Second elder helped a lot.

After talking with them, Alex met up with his master and let her know that he was going to the Tiger sect.

He wanted to spend some time there as well before he made any choice.

"I really want you to choose to stay with us, but I won't force you. Do what you want," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded and left. He went out of the sect and walked around the city before making his way to the Tiger sect.

His senior brother was still the guard's leader so he talked with him for a bit, explaining what he had been doing and the choice that he was going to have to make.

After talking for a while, he went up the mountain.

It was mid-day, so a lot of disciples were out in the sect, simply walking around. Alex walked amidst them, looking at the easy-going life.

He took out his badge to check what his rank was now, but it seemed that they had truly considered him dead as he had fallen to the lowest rank possible.

Alex chuckled a little and shook his head before he continued walking.

He made his way to the top and walked towards his sister's house. He wondered if she knew about the choice he had to make. He wondered if she even knew what his cultivation base was.

Just as he walked towards her house, the doors to another house opened and a person walked out.

"Brother Yuhan, how're you doing?" Alex asked when he saw Du Yuhan walk out of his house. Du Yuhan stared at him with a confused and surprised face for a while before speaking.

"Wow! They didn't lie, huh? You really did come back from the dead twice," Du Yuhan said.

"Back from the dead huh? I guess you could call it that. Although, I was nowhere near as much in danger either of the time," Alex said.

"Either way, it's good to have you back. You're going to take your 3rd rank back now, right?" Du Yuhan asked.

"Uh, I'm afraid I cannot," Alex said and pulsed his aura a bit before hiding it once more.

Du Yuhan's eyes went wide when he felt what he did.

"True realm?" he asked, to which Alex nodded.

"Dear God, that is so fast. You were barely at the beginning phase of the Mind Tempering realm just 2 months ago. How are you progressing so fast?" he asked.

"I can't really explain it right now. Maybe later on," Alex said. "I'll see you around, brother Du."

Alex left and went to his sister's house. He knocked on the door and waited. The door opened to reveal that it was Meng Yun.

"Oh, hello sister Meng, how are you?" Alex asked.

"Oh, it's you. Welcome back. I heard you came back yesterday. Are you okay?" she asked worriedly.

"Oh, I'm fine. Nothing to worry about," Alex said. He walked in and went to the living room to meet with Luo Mei.

He found his sister cultivating normally, and she opened her eyes when she heard her come in.

"You're back already?" she said with a confused face.

"Haha, why? Do you not want me to?" Alex asked with a chuckle.

"No, I thought you would stay there for 2 weeks before you returned," Luo Mei said.

"Oh," Alex's smile disappeared. "So, master didn't tell you huh?"

Luo Mei's face changed. "Tell me what?"

"I have unofficially graduated from the sect," Alex said as he sent out his True realm aura. Luo Mei's eyes went wide when she felt that.

"You reached the True realm? What? How? Why?" she was having a hard time comprehending it.

"I reached it a bit more than a week ago," Alex said. "Since I'm in the True realms, it means I've graduated, and am no longer a disciple of the sect."

"Oh, so you are going to become an elder faster than me huh? I'm kind of jealous. I still have 2 more realms to go through," Luo Mei said.

Alex's face changed. "That's something I wanted to talk to you about, sister," he said. "I… I don't know if I will be an elder."

"Huh? Then what? You can't stay a disciple, you know," she said.

"I know. What I meant is… I will have to either choose between becoming an elder here or becoming an elder in the Hong Wu sect. I talked with both masters and they want me to make a choice by the end of the week," Alex said. "I was hoping you could help me with it a bit."

"What? Of course, you have to choose Tiger sect then," Luo Mei said without even thinking.

Alex laughed a little. There was no point in asking for help in a choice from someone that was biased to one of the choices.

He really had to come up with it on his own.

"Let's forget about that for now. I will think about it more later on," Alex said. Then he looked around the room and didn't notice someone.

"Where is sister Xing?" he asked. He had seen her yesterday.

"Oh, she left for her sect this morning. She had been staying here for way too long and needed to return back desperately, so I sent her today," Luo Mei said.

"Is that so?" Alex said. "I needed to thank her for the formation blueprint she fixed. I guess I will do so later."

Chapter 526: Interrupted Cultivation

Alex stayed with his sister until evening and explained everything he had been through to her. Once it was time for his master's tasks to be done, he left his sister's home to go to his master's manor.

Alex looked at the sky as he walked. It was an open sky and the moon, as well as the stars, were shining brilliantly, some more than others.

The days were supposed to be cold. They were cold everywhere else but here. 'Is that because of the yang in the area as well?' he thought.

He remembered that it never rained, the clouds that covered the sun never stayed in the sky for long, and it didn't get cold, even in winter. Alex couldn't think of the cause to be anything else than the Yang leaking in the Forbidden Fields.

'That means it must've been leaking for a while now, and only recently did it accelerate. I wonder what is happening there,' he thought.

Alex reached his master's manor and waited a few minutes for him to return.

"Oh, you're here. Did you make a choice already?" Wen Cheng asked as soon as he walked in and saw Alex sitting on a chair.

"No Master, I will still need some time," Alex said. He didn't want to be reminded of the choice he had to make.

"Alright, take your time. But I would be really happy if you chose the Tiger sect. You have a lot of potential to be wasted hiding in a room making pills," Wen Cheng said.

Alex sighed internally. None of the people around him could hide their biases. He wasn't going to listen to any of them, so it didn't really matter.

"I wanted to ask, master. What is going to happen now? There should be official graduation or something like that right?" Alex asked.

"Oh yes, there will be one. As for when it will be… umm… I think it will be fine to do it once you make your choice. By then, whether you choose the Tiger sect or the Hong Wu sect, you can graduate without worry," Wen Cheng said.

"I see, that would be great then," Alex said. "By the way, I heard that Sister was just 2 realms away from promoting to the True realms as well. Do you have any plans for after she breaks through?"

"Sigh, I have no plan. If anything, I think I will just have to give up on being the sect leader now. I've been one for 5 years straight now, and that should be enough," Wen Cheng said.

"Who do you think will be the sect leader next then?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. It probably won't be the First elder, since little Yuhan should also be breaking through soon. The Second elder might become one, but he won't be able to stay as one for very long either," Wen Cheng said.

"So, in the end, I think it will be the Third Elder. Disciple Bing Li should be the prime disciple after a while," Wen Cheng said. "She's young and her cultivation is low, so she should be able to hold the spot for a long time."

"I see," Alex said. " I assume Trevor already left the sect?"

"He didn't stick around a day after entering the True realm," Wen Cheng chuckled. "He had so much hope, but that disciple of his didn't really seem to care about his master's reputation."

"After the humiliation he suffered, he probably didn't want to stay in the sect," Alex said. Wen Cheng agreed. They stayed around to talk for a little longer before Alex decided it was time to leave.

He returned back from his master's place and went over to his sister's place.

Luo Mei didn't want him to go stay in the outer sect houses, so she left him to stay there.

They talked for some more and returned to their respective room late at night.

Alex walked into his room and sat down on the bed. There was no pill to make, no formations to be made, and no training to be done. So, he planned on logging out.

But then he remembered that he did already have a new cultivation method today. It didn't work as well as his previous one so he was sure to change it, but using it for just a few more days was fine.

"Let's start," he thought. He sat cross-legged on the bed and closed his eyes to put all of his focus on his meridians. There were Qi in the meridians already, and he slowly gathered the Qi at one specific location.

Once enough Qi had gathered there, he started moving the Qi through the predetermined route in his meridian.

He breathed in and out as the Qi started moving. Just as it did, something happened inside of him that he could feel for the first time.

It was a feeling of freedom he hadn't felt before. It was like finally breathing through a clogged-up nose after a long time.

The feeling was amazing, but it lasted just a split second. Or rather, he lasted just a split second. Before he could even feel it anymore, he slowly fell asleep. Once again, even at the True realm, he couldn't stay awake when cultivating.

Suddenly, Alex opened his eyes as a violent thrumming went on in his body. He felt cold, unnaturally cold from the inside out. Wisps of bluish-white Qi released from all over his body, not unlike his master.

He was hurting. 'What's happening?' he thought. After the months of body cultivation, this much pain was something he could easily handle. However, the fact that he was hurt made him worry.

In just a few seconds, the bluish-white Qi stopped releasing from his body as he felt the heat returning back to his body. This was a truly weird experience for him.

"What was that?" he wondered. He glanced around him and saw that the lantern was still burning.

"What's the time?" he thought and looked to the top right corner of his vision.

10:43

It had only been merely half an hour or so since he started cultivating. He felt quite surprised.

'I have never woken up this early before. Is my new cultivation method being a problem?' Alex wondered.

He decided to try once more. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let the Qi gather in one spot.

He let the breath he held go and started moving the Qi. Once more, he felt that amazing feeling, and just as last time, he fell asleep.

The violent thrumming returned as Alex was forced out of his sleep. Once again, bluish-white wisps of Qi were being expelled from all over his body like steam coming off of someone after a warm shower on a cold day.

The wisps disappeared once again after a few seconds, but the experience was weird. Alex was ready for what was going to happen this time, so the moment he was out, he paid attention to what was happening to his body this time.

The cold, the heat, and the repelling, he felt it all. Alex realized that what was coming out of his body was Yin Qi.

Somehow, due to the cultivation method, during his cultivation, the Qi in his body was slowly changed to Yin Qi. Due to him having a Yin Elemental Spiritual root, he was perfectly capable of changing normal Qi to Yin Qi.

However, just because he was capable of changing it didn't mean that his body was okay with it. Being a Yang affinity body, the Yin Qi was definitely not welcomed in his body.

So, after a while when the Qi was fully transformed to Yin Qi after numerous circulation in the Meridian, his body forced it out. Which, in turn, made him jump out of his sleeping state since the cultivation was abruptly stopped.

'Dammit, so I can't even cultivate with this method?' Alex was starting to really not like this technique. It didn't matter that his master had given it to him as a gift. He was definitely going to change it the next chance he got.

"Fine, I will log out for now," he thought. Just as he was about to, he felt his badge vibrate in his storage bag.

"Hmm? Did someone challenge me in the middle of the night?" Alex thought and opened his badge only to read one sentence written on the badge.

"Scarlet City is under attack. Stay in your room and do not leave."

Chapter 527: Another Invasion

"What the hell?" Alex thought. He thought he read it wrong for a second and reread it, but it said the same thing as the first time.

Scarlet City was under attack and the disciples were to stay inside.

Alex's heart started beating fast. 'Did the beasts come back?' he feared. He took a deep breath to calm himself and see if there was the feeling he got when the beasts were agitated.

There wasn't any.

If the beasts were back, they were either not here for him, or he couldn't feel the feeling anymore now that he wasn't with Pearl.

Alex feared it was the latter. That was the only option he could come up with.

Alex swiftly walked out of the room. Luo Mei left at the same time as well. "Yu Ming, what's going on?" she asked.

"I don't know, Sister, but I think the beasts are back," Alex said.

"What? Why would they make us stay back then? They will need our help, let's go," Luo Mei said and went towards the front door.

Alex got a weird feeling when he heard that. Yes, it was weird that they didn't want the help of the disciples to fight off the beasts when in the previous days, they used all the help they could get.

Was he wrong about the situation then?

"Sister, stop!" Alex said.

"What? Why?" Luo Mei asked with a confused face. She was already at the door and had opened it already. "They need our urgent help."

"Maybe they don't want our help," Alex said as he walked towards her. "Look" he pointed to the words on the badge, "they specifically asked for the disciples to stay in their room. This must mean that the beasts that are attacking the Scarlet City must be way stronger than any of the disciples."

"But…"

"You must trust them, sister. Don't leave the house," Alex said as he pulled her inside.

Luo Mei sighed. "Okay, I guess you're right." She walked away from the door. Alex let her walk inside and grabbed the door.

Instead of walking in, however, he walked out. Luo Mei noticed him walking out and was taken aback. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"I'm going to check what is happening out there," Alex said.

"What? You just said we needed to stay inside," Luo Mei said.

"No, I said the disciples needed to stay inside," Alex said. He tossed her the badge he was holding and smiled. "Unfortunately, I'm not a disciple anymore."

"Don't go! It really could be dangerous," Luo Mei said.

"Don't worry sister," Alex said as he lost all of his aurae and slowly faded into the darkness until nothing of him was visible anymore. "I will be fine."

Luo Mei had to use her spiritual sense to even locate Alex in front of her. She wanted to tell him that it was dangerous again, but… she couldn't argue that Alex would be very safe as long as he was careful.

"Alright, but if it's too dangerous, return immediately. The elders must be fighting outside the wall, so approach there slowly," Luo Mei said.

Alex nodded and closed the door. He immediately run away from the house and started going uphill towards his master's manor.

His objective wasn't to find his master or look for something in the manor. It was just that the manor was at the peak of the mountain, and Alex could see where outside the wall the beasts were attacking.

He had activated his movement technique and could barely feel the air hitting his face. There was absolutely no air resistance and he was moving at almost supersonic speed.

The houses became a blur as in just a single moment he reached the manor. He ran behind the house to the open yard and from there looked out towards the wall.

With the southern forest being there, there should've been some people watching around, some guards keeping security, or just maybe some noise.

However, it was all silent. Alex looked down at the crater beneath him and saw the many lights that were still on. However, he couldn't see a single soul.

The entire sect crater was empty. Something was weird. Alex had never known for the sect crater to be empty. Even at night, there would be some disciples walking to and from the training hall or the library.

However, this was all silent. If there was a fight outside the wall, there should have been people gathered here to help with the beast attack.

That was when Alex heard something. A loud rumbling came from somewhere far away. Alex could tell the location of the sound— it was behind him.

He turned around and walked to the front of the manor. That was when he saw it.

Beyond the small patches of trees and walls of the sect, in the different locations of the city, Alex could see bright locations in the night as well as a lot of loud coherent noises.

Alex focused and listened to the sound carefully. Crackling of fire cries, shouts of people, weapons clashing, and a general sound of destruction.

The attack he had assumed was happening outside was instead already in the city. Alex feared the worst was currently happening— The beasts had invaded the city.

Without a single thought, Alex immediately flew from the mountain and went straight towards the invasion. He was still hiding in his concealment, so he wasn't really worried about anyone seeing him, but he still sent out his spiritual sense just so he could avoid any stray attacks coming his way.

The closer Alex got towards the front of the sect, the more he realized how bad the situation was.

There were fires breaking out everywhere, many people were terrified, and there were even fights playing out in the sky.

Alex was horrified because of what he was probably going to witness. Scenes of human flesh strewn around as beasts munched on them, that was his prime expectation, something he wasn't looking forward to.

Still, he had to check and see if he could help.

He soon reached outside the wall and looked around. He could see many people, running around haphazardly, with blinding fires behind them.

Alex looked around, but he didn't see what he was expecting. There was a lot of terror and destruction, but… not a lot of deaths.

There were barely any human bodies that were clearly dead.

However, what surprised Alex the most about the situation was…

"Where are the beasts?" he looked around in confusion. The many buildings and houses were on fire, people were fighting, but there were no beasts.

All the clashes and the clankings of weapons… it was all coming from the people, with not a single beast involved.

That was when Alex realized he had made a grave mistake in his assumption. This wasn't a beast attack.

This was a human attack.

The city wasn't under attack from strong beasts, but rather fellow cultivators themselves.

"What's going on?" Alex spoke solemnly. He could see the humans attacking each other, some of the soldiers belonged to the City Lord, some of them from the tiger sect, and some, most likely the attackers, were people he didn't recognize.

Still, he didn't see a reason for them to attack other humans. The war in this empire was over nearly a millennia ago. The empire was at peace and people were living freely.

So… why was there an attack happening on the city right now? Who would be so bad as to attack other human beings?

Just as the questions formed in his brain, Alex got an answer. Coincidentally, he saw one of the attackers nearby attacking one of the city guards.

The attacker was wearing a black robe from top to bottom, fully tight fitted to their body, and their hair long enough to reach their back.

"Black Venom bandit group," Alex said quietly. He finally understood clearly what was happening. The city was under attack from the bandits.

This was weird and stupid, but it was happening so Alex couldn't deny it.

Usually, a city would have stronger fighters and guards than just a normal merchant group, so Alex was a little confused as to what was happening.

If anything, with the bandits daring to leave the forest, their light should've been snuffed by now.

Alex didn't know exactly how strong the Black Venom bandit group was, but he had met their leader who was presumably the strongest, and even she was merely at the True Lord realm.

With his master and many others being at a higher realm than her, Alex couldn't understand why they would dare attack the city on their own. This was beyond stupid.

Granted that since the bandits were all in the True realms, only the elders would be able to fight against them, but even then it was surely a failure without how many True realm experts the two sects plus the city lord had.

Just as Alex was thinking that he noticed something. An elder from the Tiger sect was currently fighting against another man in the sky. From what Alex could see, the man was wearing a bluish-gray robe and was fighting on equal footing with the elder.

That made Alex pause for a second. "Wait a minute… that guy is not from the Black venom group," Alex thought. Suddenly, he realized something and turned around to look at the rest of the people fighting.

It wasn't just black robes he saw that were fighting. Alex could see many different people from presumably many different factions.

That was when his confusion turned into fear as he realized what was happening.

Multiple people, presumably bandit groups, had joined together to attack the city.

Chapter 528: A Significantly Insignificant Battle

Multiple bandits, many people who Alex had never met, seen, or even heard of. Given the bandits' guts to dare attack a city, it was obvious that they were at least certain of their victory on some level.

Alex just wasn't sure how confident they were of their victory. "What even is the point of attacking a city? That's just asking the empire to fight back," Alex thought.

He looked down and saw a fight breaking out. A man in an orange-colored robe was starting to attack an elder of the Tiger sect.

Alex saw that the elder for the Tiger sect was a younger man, who by his age, Alex guessed must've become an elder just a year or two ago.

He was merely at the 2nd realm of True Disciple realm, so he was considered weak. His opponent on the other hand was someone in the 5th realm of the True Disciple realm.

If they fought right now, the Tiger sect elder would lose for sure. Alex knew that the bandit knew that, and even the elder himself knew that.

* * * * * *

The elder was terrified of being confronted by the bandit. The spear he held showed obvious signs of shaking. Still, he stood his ground as behind him there were a few mortals that he was saving from the wreckage of their houses.

The bandit looked at the elder and the spear he held. The spear was of some quality from the way the blade shined in the firelight.

"Stay away from me," the elder shouted.

The bandit gave a sinister smile and said, "that's quite a nice spear you have there. I bet it costs a lot."

"Wh-What?" the elder was taken aback.

"That spear… I want it," the bandit said as he slowly made his way towards the elder.

The elder took a step back in fear and looked around, but there was no help for him. He heard the whimpers of a child behind him, who was being practically suffocated by their parents in an attempt to stop them from making any noise that would attract the attention of the attackers.

The elder could only see one way out.

"I-If I give you my spear, will you leave?" he asked.

The bandit stopped. He wasn't expecting the elder to say that, but given how scared he was, the bandit decided to give it a thought.

"Sure. Give me the spear, and I will leave right now," he said. The bandit lowered the sword he was holding a little to appear less threatening.

The elder mulled over his decision for a while, but this was the only direction he could see for himself right now.

"Here!" the elder threw the spear at the bandit's feet. "Now leave."

The bandit bent down and grabbed the spear. He picked it up and looked at the slightly rugged texture on the handle, the pristine blade with barely any scratches on it. The craftsmanship of the spear was on another level.

"Not bad," he said as his eyes revealed that despite being a bandit, it wasn't every day that he got to see something like this every day.

"Such a good spear. You must be pretty rich to afford something like this," the bandit said as he played with the spear. He swung it, spun it on his hands, checked its balance, and finally stopped when he was in a stance to begin fighting.

And then his eyes turned sinister again as he said, "Makes me wonder what else you might have on you."

"What?" the elder looked at the bandit with a pale face full of fear.

"I think you have stuff on you that is better than this spear, and I want it. Oh, I want it so fucking bad," the bandit said and immediately dashed forward.

The elder wasn't ready for this change of pace at all. He knew most bandits were trash, but he was hoping for this one to leave him alone after getting the spear.

Unfortunately, he put his hopes on a trash bandit, and that was going to be the reason for his death. The bandit had arrived right next to him with the spear, and at the next moment, he was going to—

Suddenly, a flash of golden light shined as it arched right in front of him between him and the bandit. When the light disappeared, he saw a torrent of blood flow in front of him.

The elder sucked in a deep breath as he heard the spear drop right in front of him, along with a pair of hands that were still grabbing it.

The bandit that was attacking the elder now stood still and looked at the spear and the arm on the floor. It took a moment for it to click before he looked at his own arms and realized they were not there.

That was when the pain arrived.

"AHHHHH!" the bandit shouted as he looked at his amputated limbs of his.

The elder looked in shock. He didn't know what happened, or how the bandit lost his arms, but regardless, he was presented with an opportunity… and he took it.

The elder immediately pried his spear off of the cut arms and thrust it into the skull of the bandit who, for some reason, had his eyes turned white and his whole body limped to the floor.

The spear pierced the skull and came out on the other side. The elder pulled the spear back out and made a downward thrust to pierce the heart of the bandit just to make sure he was dead.

The elder fell on his butt as the realization of the fact that he was just moments away from death dawned on him. His body trembled with the thought that he could've died just now, but didn't.

He then remembered why he was fighting for and immediately stood up and controlled his fear before confronting the family he was protecting behind him.

"Are you guys, okay?" he asked, trying to sound as calm as he could while failing miserably.

"Come, I will take you someplace safe."

Chapter 529: Another Killing

Alex looked back at the elder who ran away with the family. He then looked at the corpse on the ground that belonged to the bandit.

He was dead.

Alex wasn't fond of killing people, especially the people that were from this world. He had never intentionally killed anyone from this world after all.

The last person he had killed was a player who would be alive on the other side, so he hadn't really thought much about killing at the time.

But someone from this world… taking away their life— Alex was still hesitant about it. That was why he subconsciously went for the hands and not the head of the bandit.

He didn't feel bad about the dead bandit. He deserved what he got. What Alex did feel bad about was that even after all this time, he still didn't have the courage to do it himself.

He wasn't a pacifist who refused to kill. He was just someone who feared the permanence of death he would put someone else under by killing them.

'Now is not the time to worry about this. I will kill if I need to,' he told himself. He looked at the corpse one last time and threw a massive fireball at it, burning it. Then, he flew up.

He was still invisible and being concealed all the way through, no one would really see him at all. So, he could help all he wanted without worry.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense to look for people to help. Immediately, multiple pieces of information about people attacking each other entered his mind. There was too much information coming to him from all directions, and the chaos was hard to understand.

It took him a moment to realize what was happening. He found someone who looked like they needed a lot of help and went there.

Two bandits, both in the True Master realm were fighting against a city guard in the sky. Beneath them was a house burning and the smokes rose up between the fighters.

The guard held a sword in his hand and was cautiously looking at the two bandits, while the bandits held onto a massive shield and a bow.

The guard himself was at True Master realm as well, and maybe even as strong as the bandits if he were fighting them individually.

However, together the bandits were a problem for him. The guard could run away at any time as he had no one to protect at the moment. However, what sort of guard would he be if he ran away from mere bandits.

His pride made him stay there. He charged up an attack and sent it flying towards the bandit with the bow and arrow. The green slash flew through the sky and threatened to cut down the bandit.

However, at the last moment, the other bandit stepped in with the massive shield and blocked the attack without a problem.

"Tsk!" the guard said. There were no trees around him and they were flying in the air, so half of his skills related to woods and trees were practically useless up in the air.

Still, he fought how he could. He charged up another attack and sent it flying out once again.

The bandits were ready for the attack once more with the shield, but just then, Alex arrived at the scene.

He was still invisible and concealed when he appeared, and immediately looked at the bandit with the shield.

His spiritual sea churned as a massive amount of the spiritual energy in his changed into the shape of an invisible fist and flew towards the bandit.

The moment the spiritual fist hit the bandit, his vision went black, and lost all control of his body. He could no longer keep himself afloat and started falling downward.

As he did, the other bandit was left exposed.

"Huh?"

The green slashed slammed onto him, destroying the bow and arrow, and going further to cut into the bandit's body. He had dropped all of his guards with his friend blocking the attacks for him, so when the attack landed, it did the most damage it could.

Blood gushed out of the bandit's chest and felt it hard to breathe. He heard something from in front of him and looked to find a sword right in front of him.

In the next moment, the sword cut his neck and his head fell, along with the rest of the body.

Alex wanted to help the guard a bit, and leave, but when he saw what his help had resulted in it, he was forced to stay.

The bandit that he had used Heaven's impact on, had fallen onto the burning wooden building below them and was still unconscious when he started burning as well.

Alex saw the fire raging harder. He could see the bandit's clothes burn away and his skin start to blacken as the surface charred. Even so, he wasn't waking up.

Alex's mental prowess was so strong that normal cultivators couldn't stop him. They needed either skills or artifacts that stopped mental attacks, neither of which the bandit had.

So, he burned. Alex started feeling horrified. Seeing the slow killing of a bandit wasn't exactly the thing he had hoped to see when he made up his resolutions to kill bandits. He hadn't even intended to kill this one.

And yet, the bandit was dying in such a horrible way. The bandit was nearly halfway burned to death when he started screaming.

The bandit had returned back to consciousness and was crying out in pain. The fire had already destroyed most of him, and he was no longer thinking straight to do what he could do to save himself.

Alex knew the feeling. He had lost his wits many times when the pain was too much to handle. He could only start thinking of something properly when the pain was enough to handle

Alex could hear the torture and pain through the bandit's voice. Did a bandit deserve this pain? Probably. But Alex felt that not even a bandit deserved to die like this.

He walked forward, as quickly as he could, put away the fire around him, and raised his sword. He instinctively looked away when he saw the burnt body of the bandit but forced himself to look back.

Then, he left the sword swing. He didn't attack the torso or the limbs. He went directly for the neck.

The cries of pain stopped as the head rolled a little to the side, the eyelids already burnt to char, but the hollow eyes still looking outwards.

The rest of the body was in no safe condition either. There were ruptures all over the skin, blood flew out of them relentlessly causing the rest of the body to not char all over, and only at a certain parts.

Alex nearly threw up when he saw that. He controlled himself and stood up to walk away. The bandit was dead and he had killed him. However, he couldn't focus on that or give it any attention.

Surprisingly, despite worrying so much, he didn't feel bad after killing someone. Perhaps it was because the person was a bandit, or perhaps because he felt what he was doing was helping rather than hurting.

Or maybe he was just used to killing people after having already killed 3 before now. Nevertheless, he didn't feel any remorse over the death of the bandit.

'Am I growing numb to deaths?' he thought. That must've been the reason, Alex thought.

He left the location, leaving the guard high above confused as to why the bandit that suspiciously fell was now beheaded.

He didn't understand what had happened, but he took the opportunity to go help the others, just as Alex did.

Alex went around the field helping others. Fortunately, there was no longer a situation where he had to kill anyone.

While concealed, all he had to do was use Heaven's Impact, and that would change the trajectory of the battle very quickly. With one side unconscious, it was obvious the other one was going to win.

Heaven's impact didn't do as much damage to True Realm cultivators as it did to Self-tempering realm cultivators before they went through the Mind Tempering realm.

When impacted, they would only lose consciousness for maybe a minute at most. At a higher level, it had a lower impact on the opponent's mind.

Still, a minute of free attacks was enough to change the tide of battles, and that was exactly what Alex was doing right now.

Chapter 530: The Sect Targeted

Sparks flew in the air.

Two swords clashed against each other in mid-air, away from most of the other fights.

Wen Cheng looked at a middle-aged man of similar height to him, wearing a brown robe. The man had streaks of silver hair on his head that made him stand out quite a lot amidst the other bandits.

Wen Cheng didn't know the man, but he was familiar with the title. He was one of the most ruthless bandits in the east.

The Silver Bandit.

Despite his streaks of silver hair, he didn't have any natural gray hairs at all, as he was still a youth in terms of a cultivator's age. The silver hairs were something he apparently dyed on himself.

Every time he killed someone, he would dye a small patch of his hair. Judging by the amount of silver hair on his head, he had killed hundreds.

Wen Cheng could feel the True King realm cultivation base of the enemy, the same cultivation base as him.

It was going to be difficult. He dashed forward once again and slashed at the Silver bandit.

The silver bandit returned the blow back with his own sword and the sparks flew in the air once again.

Wen Cheng was very concerned about this fight. Fighting against someone so similar in strength to him, there was a definite chance that he could suffer some damage, if not lose.

He had to be extra careful.

'What the hell is going on?' he thought. 'Why are the bandits here?'

He tried making sense of the situation, but this was one of those times when the more you thought the more confusing things became.

He had sent someone to let the Hong Wu sect know of the invasion, but he wasn't sure if they knew about it or not. The messenger he sent could very well be in the midst of a fight just like him.

'Not the time to think,' Wen Cheng told himself and got back to fighting. Red Qi flowed into his sword which he slashed towards the Silver bandit.

The bandit too charged his sword with brown light and slashed towards Wen Cheng.

The two energy clashed in the middle, making a deafening blast between them.

Wen Cheng took the moment to look around him and saw that he was being pushed back towards the sect.

"No, it will be dangerous if the disciples get caught up in the battles," he thought and went on the offensive.

He got close to the bandit and started fighting again. With his Elusive Heavenly sword, he could attack while constantly dodging the attacks of the bandit.

Still, it was hard to consistently dodge someone that was so strong, so he had to back away a few times. Right now, he just wanted to force the bandit to back away as well.

After a minute or so of fighting, the bandit was getting pushed back thanks to Wen Cheng's relentless attack.

The bandit looked around and realized so as well. Then, once again he started attacking Wen Cheng more and more to force himself back.

Wen Cheng's eyes widened when he realized what his foe was doing. 'Shit! Is he intentionally pushing me towards the sect? Is their target the Tiger sect?' he thought.

He sent out the third strike of the Elusive Heavenly sword, which was a bright green slash that went flying towards the enemy.

The slash was much stronger than anything Alex could ever muster up even if he had the same strength as Wen Cheng due to Wen Cheng's superior Wood spiritual root.

At the same time, he took out a talisman and sent a message onto it.

"Everyone, beware! The assailant's target might be the sect. Protect the sect at any cost," he sent the message.

Everyone from elders to disciples received the message. Alex did too.

Alex opened his badge and got confused when he saw that message. 'Why would bandits care about the Tiger sect? Is there something there that they want?' he wondered.

He had been helping the other people all this time and had managed to turn the situation around to favor the guards and the elders.

Now that he was needed less around this place, he decided to go back to the sect to see if it was safe there.

He flew towards the sect and reached the gate. He was about to fly in when he saw some people on the ground.

He flew down and saw that there were elders on the ground. 'Are they dead?' Alex feared and quickly rushed to them.

However, when he reached there, he saw that they were actually just knocked out, at least that was what he thought when he saw the weird smile on their face as they lay there unconscious.

"Elder?" he called out to them but they didn't hear him. He shook them up a little and they finally opened their eyes.

"Wh-what happened?" one of the elders asked.

Alex was fully visible by now, so they looked at him to ask.

"I don't know, Elder. You should tell me instead. The entire city is under attack, what are you guys doing here?" he asked.

"I— I don't know," the elder said. "I remember… I just remember feeling happy, happiness like never before, and the next thing I know, I'm here on the floor."

"Happiness?" Alex asked with a confused look.

"Oh no, someone was here," the elder finally remembered. "We need to go save the disciples. Someone infiltrated the sect."

Alex's heart skipped a beat. He immediately turned around and flew off, no longer caring for the elders as they could take care of themselves.

When he reached the outer sect disciple's houses, he could see a few of them destroyed, along with corpses of those disciples buried in the rubble.

There were at least a dozen such houses destroyed, and he could hear another one being destroyed as well.

Alex turned around and saw a figure in black destroying the houses. When he saw the face, he realized who it was.

"Black Venom!"

Seeing the female bandit called Black Venom killing his fellow disciples, especially ones that could not fight back, Alex's anger reached sky-high.

He lost all sense of reasoning and his will to kill flared up like never before. He immediately went invisible and rushed at her with his sword in hand.

Golden light flared from his sword, along with a pure white outline around it. That was something he was unable to hide at all.

Black Venom was about to destroy another house when she saw something glint from the side of her eyes.

Just as she turned around, the sword came to strike at her neck. With her impressive reflex, Black Venom managed to put up her hands just in time to block the sword.

Still, she felt herself being pushed back a step. Her long sleeves now had cut in them, revealing a bronze-colored bracer on them.

The light had died after she was attacked, so she couldn't see who had attacked her and that only made her more vigilant.

She turned around, her amber eyes glowing in the dark, as she used an eyes skill to look for hidden auras but she couldn't see anything.

Unable to find anyone, she was forced to speak.

"Who is there?"

A beautiful melody escaped her mouth as she asked that question. The melody sounded like she had the voice of gods, and anyone who heard it was blessed by them.

Ecstasy was all Alex could feel as he heard her beautiful voice. A smile rose on his face as he slowly drifted onto the ground and lay there in happiness.

He had never felt happiness like this before.

Alex's two skills he was using right now were the Invisibility skill and the concealment skill. The concealment skill was an immortal grade technique that didn't require him to do anything for it to work.

Rather, he had to do something to stop it from constantly working, which was how he kept it most of the time.

On the other hand, he had to consciously keep up the invisibility technique. If he ever lost control of himself, the invisibility would also go away.

Which was exactly what happened when he lost himself to euphoria after listening to Black Venom's heavenly voice.

He fell on the ground, with a smile on his face, and his whole body perfectly visible to Black Venom.

Black Venom was initially surprised to see that someone was in fact hiding that even her eye technique couldn't locate.

However, when she saw the person, her vision turned dark as her facial expression changed to one of anger.

She remembered Alex from back then and had been searching for him for a very long time.

"So this is where you were hiding huh? You bastard," she said. "Good! I'm glad I get to kill you by myself."

She took out a weapon from her storage bag, a sickle, and walked towards Alex as fast as she could.

"Now you die," she said and got ready to strike at him. Just then, Alex's face changed from one of ecstasy to one of dread.

His body had once more gotten rid of whatever was causing him to lose consciousness, and he opened his eyes just in time to see the attack coming.

Without even thinking, he suddenly used Heavenly Impact on her. Alex then used that moment to slip away from under her and ran to the side.

Now, it was Black Venom who was on the ground, and he was the one who could attack her while she was down.

Chapter 531: Keeping the Black Venom in check

Alex propped up his sword and got ready to strike. He wanted to kill, he needed to kill. He looked around at the death and destruction. Death was what she deserved.

The Black Venom was defenseless right now, and the thought did cross his mind that he couldn't kill someone defenseless, but the situation wasn't what it seemed.

The only reason she was defenseless was that Alex had knocked her out. This was the perfect opportunity.

His sword glowed yellow with a white outline on it, and he rushed forward to kill her.

He went for her neck as that was the only way he had ever known of killing anything, man or animal. The sword made an arc in the air as it fell directly on her defenseless neck.

TWANG!

A rather unfamiliar sound emerged when his sword reached her neck. A white glow appeared around her body as a golden amulet emerged from her chest.

It was well hidden in her clothes, and not easily visible, but when she was in danger, it came out to protect her.

At the same time, the large sound and force woke her up. Her head still hurt from Heaven's impact, but it wasn't so bad that she couldn't handle a mere True Disciple.

Without hesitation, she reached into her storage bag and brought out a mask. Alex's eyes went wide when he saw that. He remembered the mask from the last time.

It was a mask that blocked all mental attacks. Such a precious mask wasn't even available in any stores. If one wanted such things, they would either have to get lucky in an auction house or specifically visit a high-grade artifact maker and ask him to make one.

Alex knew that she had multiple such masks, at least she was able to replace one when the first one broke last time. He couldn't help but wonder how a bandit could ever come across something so good, and so many of them too.

He wondered if she had connections on the outside with people in high places.

"Shit! Not the time to think about that," he thought to himself and immediately used Heaven's Impact once more to knock her out.

Unfortunately, he couldn't match up with the speed of a True Lord realm expert. She had put on her mask as if it was second nature to her, and the spiritual fist dissipated when it hit the mask.

Alex frowned. He was too late.

Without a second thought, he turned invisible and concealed himself. Black Venom looked around, and once again, she couldn't locate him at all.

The both of them had come to a standstill of a sort.

Alex couldn't fight her as she was too strong for him, and the only skill of his that worked on her was blocked by her mask.

As for Black Venom, she couldn't find Alex to kill him like she wanted to, and the only way she could, which was her voice, wouldn't work on him since it was also blocked by her mask.

Neither of the parties could use their mental attacks on each other, and the match had come to a standstill.

"Come out of hiding, you coward!" Black Venom started to taunt Alex. Her voice sounded like that of a man, very hoarse and deep. "You are a weakling if all you can do is hide. And you dare call yourself a man? If you call yourself one, then fight me like one, you bastard!"

She started shouting curses at him that Alex hadn't even heard of before. Alex started thinking about what he should do as well.

"If you won't come out, then I will just do what I came here to do in the first place," she said and walked over to one of the houses that were still fine.

All the houses in the sect had soundproofing done to them, so even if Alex shouted them to run away, they wouldn't be able to. The best he could do was knock on their doors and then explain to them what to do when they came out.

That wasn't an option right now.

His sword glowed goldenly. He arched it over his head from left to right, and the sword left behind 5 phantom images of itself, all glowing golden.

The phantom swords then turned as they faced Black Venom and shot at her.

Black Venom could see the glowing swords, even if she couldn't see Alex himself. So, when the attack landed on her, all she had to do was use her defensive technique, and not a scratch appeared on her.

Alex was just too weak to do anything to her.

Just then, he saw something golden in front of him as well. He just happened to see Black Venom coat her sickle in golden light as well that she shot towards him.

Alex immediately dodged the attack and jumped to the side. He was surprised that she could see him but later realized that she had just attacked where his attack had launched from and gotten lucky.

"I can't stand around. I need to keep moving," he thought.

Black Venom went on to destroy the house, and that was when Alex struck at her once more. This time, it was a golden fist that flew towards her.

The moment he attacked he left the place and watched Black Venom attack where he had been standing before.

His attack was like a child hitting an adult. It barely did anything at all. With the adult fighting back at full strength, the child had no chance of victory.

'I need help,' he thought. "Fuck, where did those elders go?"

He spread his spiritual sense to the furthest he could and saw a bunch of elders sleeping on the ground with happy expressions once again.

"Fuck!" he thought. Black Venom had unintentionally affected them as well when she was talking to Alex. He definitely needed some immediate help right now.

He couldn't leave to wake those elders up as she would destroy the houses and kill the other disciples, so all he could do was call people for help.

Alex's first choice of contact was his master. He sent his master a message saying that there was an intruder in the sect and that he needed help.

Once he sent the message, he went back to stopping Black Venom. After a few seconds, Alex realized that his master was probably out there fighting someone, so he couldn't come even if he wanted to.

So, he messaged his second choice of contact, his Senior brother. He sent the same message as his master, but once again, he got no response.

'Dammit! He must be busy too,' Alex thought. Alex went back to fighting with Black Venom.

It was less of a fight, and more of an annoyance for Black Venom as an invisible fly kept buzzing around her while she tried to do some work.

After a few moments of conflict, Alex pulled out his communication talisman once again. He had called his Master and his senior brother, but neither were responding.

He decided to call the next strongest person for help. So, he called his senior sister. He sent a short message and immediately put it away, and went back to annoying Black Venom.

"God Dammit! You keep buzzing around. Come out and fight me, you bastard!" she shouted. Alex didn't respond. He just had to stall as much as he could until help arrived.

He stopped fighting from away and got close. The moment he was close enough to her, he disappeared. He appeared behind her and slashed at her neck once more.

However, a white barrier appeared once more that blocked the attack with a 'twang' sound like before.

Black Venom's eyes went wide when she realized that she could've died right now if not for her amulet.

Just as she was thinking that another 'twang' sound appeared. She was attacked at her neck once again.

She turned around to look at her assailant and that was when another of the same sound appeared. She was horrified now.

She knew how good her amulet was. It was one of the best artifacts her father had created, but still, it too had a limit of how much damage it could take without reducing in durability.

She couldn't have it taking so much damage that it became completely useless or worse was destroyed. She couldn't have it be that, as it was one of the only things her father had left her with when he died.

This was what she used to remember him.

She stopped targeting the houses and flew up. When she did, she realized that the attacks stopped as well.

Alex could no longer teleport around now that she was in the sky.

Black Venom waited for another attack to appear, but it didn't. She looked around carefully for any disturbances on the ground or in the air, but she noticed nothing.

"What? Are you done? You got scared that you can't beat me? Then come out and let me kill you!" her hoarse voice rang throughout the sect.

She got no response, so she decided to bait him out. "Very well, if you won't' come out, then say goodbye to your fellow disciples," she shouted and charged up her sickle in yellow light.

As soon as the light peaked in maximum brightness, she attacked. However, at the same time, a sword appeared in front of her and struck her sickle right towards the end of its swing.

The flying slash of the sickle's path was changed just enough that it struck the empty land at the side of the house and not the house itself.

Alex had managed to save his fellow disciples. However, as a result, he had come right in front of the enemy.

Chapter 532: Qi Sense

Alex wanted to fly away, as he was still invisible and concealed, and if he got far away, he could escape from her.

However, he was afraid that she would once again start to attack the houses when he tried to run away.

Just as he was thinking that he felt something pass around him and wrap him up.

"I finally found you, you bastard," she shouted.

Alex's heart skipped a beat when he realized what had just happened. He immediately turned around to run away, but the invisible force wrapping around him solidified into something stronger and stopped him from doing anything.

He was trapped.

Black Venom turned towards him with a face full of hatred. Her eyes couldn't hold still as they drifted slightly on his position as there was nothing in the air for her eyes to lock onto, but with her Qi sense, she could tell that Alex was there.

Qi Sense.

That was something Alex had never bothered learning about when he reached the True realm. To normal cultivators, learning Qi sense was something that was pretty mandatory to do if they wanted to get better at fighting or producing stuff.

But, for someone like Alex who had spiritual sense, Qi sense was pretty much useless. After all, Qi sense was nothing but a worse mimicry of Spiritual sense.

True realm cultivators were more sensitive to changes in their Qi compared to self-tempering cultivators. So, when they sent out their Qi in a massive volume, they could feel the physical objects based on the QI that they displaced.

It helped them in situations when vision wasn't really helpful. That was Qi sense.

Qi sense was only useful in situations when the thing you wanted to locate or keep track of was a small distance away from you. For example, Alchemists used Qi sense to keep track of the ingredients in the cauldron, which was much easier to do than normal Qi manipulation.

Since Alex had been using ranged attacks for the majority of the fight, Black Venom couldn't locate him at all. However, now that he was right in front of her Qi sense finally came in handy.

Alex struggled to move in mid-air, trying to fly off, but he could feel the Qi wrapped around his torso that stopped him from doing that.

Fortunately, despite the difference in cultivation, Black Venom couldn't suppress Alex as she did a long time ago. Unlike last time, Alex could move his hands and feet, however, that didn't help him a lot right now.

Black Venom held her sickle in reverse as it started glowing in yellow light. Alex had realized by now from the lack of other colors that Black Venom probably had a Superior Metal Spirit root.

"Die!" she swung the blade as fast as she could and struck at Alex.

Alex wasted no time and used every single skill he knew that could help him right now. A barrier of multicolored lights appeared in front of him to defend him. His skin shined with slight brown light and was full of marble patterns on him, making him look like jade.

At the same time, Golden lights appeared on his hands as well as his sword which he struck at the sickle as hard as he could.

At the same time, he made full use of his Supreme Metal spirit roots to push away the energy in her sickle as much as he could.

He knew that he couldn't control metal energy that belonged to someone else, but he was desperate and needed to try it in this situation.

A slight tinge of happiness arose in his heart when he realized that he could in fact push some of the stray metal energy around her sickle to fight back with the other energy.

It may be stopped some 5 percent of the total damage, but that too was a big enough number to make some difference right now.

At the same time, his Heaven's Five barriers too blocked some of the energy coming towards him.

Just then his sword struck her sickle with full force, and he expected the sword to stop some of the damage too, however, he misunderstood just how much force she was carrying.

The sword rebounded when it hit the sickle and flew back towards him. It came back to hit him with additional force, destroying the armor he wore inside. it then went on and destroyed his right collar bone as well as a few ribs.

Neither his Jade Skin technique nor his exceptionally strong skin was able to stop him from taking the damage from his own sword. The rest of the force behind his own attack at him made him fly backward towards the ground.

At the last moment, just before he was thrown back too far away, the sickle struck him. He was far enough back that his body was safe from the sickle, but his elbows that were extended from him hitting himself in the chest were not.

The sickle hit his left arm, and in a single swing, sliced it in half. Alex struck the ground with a very loud thud and sent rocks flying everywhere.

He coughed up blood as it started leaking from his mouth, his chest and now the cut-off left arm. Alex's vision darkened as he could barely see anything from all the pain. He was also starting to feel lightheaded from blood loss.

'I need to… I need to do something,' he thought with what little consciousness he had left.

He wheezed loudly trying to take a breath, but he couldn't. It turned out that his lungs had also been pierced with his own sword and was now starting to get filled with his own blood.

It was also starting to fill up his other lung. He needed to do something quickly, or he would die for certain.

He sent out his spiritual sense into his robes to locate his storage bags so he could find a healing pill from there.

Just as he did, his vision returned slightly, just enough for him to notice Black Venom drifting towards him.

"So you are still alive huh?" she asked. "However, it won't be for long."

She slashed down with her sickle, bothering to use no skill at all, and struck at Alex.

Alex looked at the falling sickle with terror in his eyes. This was it. He was going to die.

He closed his eyes, bracing for the pain.

CLANG

Alex felt something sharp cut his cheeks and some other things rain down on him as well. However, none of them felt like it was an attack belonging to that of a True Lord expert.

He opened his eyes and saw a familiar face standing in front of him. The person had serious eyes with slight hints of anger in them. Alex tilted his head to the right to see Black Venom somewhere a bit far away, looking at the new figure in shock.

"Oh no! Junior brother," a voice came from someone close by. Luo Mei ran up to him and looked down to see him in such a horrible situation.

She looked down to see his bloody wounds and missing limb and was immediately horrified.

Alex however felt relief at her sight and the other person in front of him. Finally, at least one of the person he called for had arrived.

He took the opportunity to pull out a pill from his storage bag and ate it. It was difficult swallowing when all his body wanted to do was breathe, but Alex controlled himself for long enough to swallow it.

Immediately the energy from the pill started spreading from his stomach and reached to the different locations of his body. His lung which was punctured was healed. His bones which were shattered, rejoined.

Even the cuts on his cheeks and other various scratches all over his body were healed. However, his left arm that was sliced off wasn't healed at all.

The pill he had just eaten could heal pretty much anything in his body, but limbs that were torn off were beyond it. It was beyond any of the recipes to true pills he knew.

In fact, at the moment, the pill he knew that could help him was a Saint-ranked pill, and that was impossible for him to obtain.

"Shit!" he thought. Once the pain was gone, and the need to breathe started reaching the peak, he stood up and forced his lungs to push out all the blood that was inside of it.

Black Venom looked cautiously at the new arrivals. From what she could tell, the two that had just arrived had a cultivation base of the Mind Tempering realm. However, she couldn't tell if that was correct or not.

After all, the young man that had attacked her had strength far beyond that of what a Mind Tempering realm should have.

In fact, the strength he put out could rival that of True Disciple master. She didn't know if he was hiding his cultivation base or what, so she decided to stay back for now.

She watched Alex stand up and was shocked. 'How did he heal so fast?' she wondered. She didn't see anyone of them offering him a pill, so she was very confused.

Alex, which his arm still dripping blood, looked at the man next to him and bowed a little. "Thank you for saving me, brother Yuhan. If you hadn't arrived on time, I would've died for sure," he said.

"If I had known something like this was happening, I would've come sooner, brother Ning," Du Yuhan answered while maintaining his serious face.

"However, I don't know if my coming here will be of much help to you. After all, I don't think I have the strength to fight against a True Lord expert."

Chapter 533: Triple-Defense

"You don't have to worry about beating her," Alex said. "There are a few elders there. All we have to do is hold out until they wake back up."

Du Yuhan looked to the right and saw that there were in fact some yellow-robed figures on the ground that were barely visible in what little light there was.

"What's wrong with them?" Luo Mei asked as she got close. She worriedly looked at Alex's arm and saw that his left elbow had turned into a stub. He would now forever be missing an arm.

She then looked around at the destruction and the deaths of the many disciples, and she too started feeling the rage.

"They are sleeping," he said. "Her voice puts them in a sort of hypnosis where all they can feel is happiness and lose their mind in it."

Du Yuhan's face got a little confused. "Her voice? Is it a sort of skill?" he asked.

"I don't think so," Alex said. "She doesn't seem to have any control, so I would say it's more of a unique body constitution she was born with. As long as she wears the mask, she won't be able to hypnotize us, but… at True Lord realm, I doubt that would be necessary."

"Why isn't she taking off her mask then? Won't that make it easier for her?" Du Yuhan asked with a confused face.

"Because if she does, she will be the one that loses the match," Alex said. Alex looked down at his leg to search for his sword. That was when he found it still attached to the chopped-off arm.

"Are you okay? Does it hurt?" Luo Mei asked from behind.

"No, it doesn't hurt," Alex replied, but he only answered the second half of the question as he too was unsure about that first half.

Was he okay? He had just lost his arm, something that would normally be considered extremely important to anyone. However, it was just a game. Losing an arm meant nothing really. But was it really that simple though?

He really wasn't sure what to think right now. He looked for answers deep within him, but they just weren't there.

He took the left arm and sighed when he realized there was no use of it anymore. He had spent so much resources and time improving his body, and it got cut just like that.

The higher realm cultivators truly were very scary.

He then looked at his stub and sighed in relief when he saw that it was cut beneath the beast space where Pearl used to stay.

'Thank god!' he thought. If that part of his arm had been lost, he would definitely have lost his bond with Pearl.

He quickly looked towards Black Venom, wondering why she hadn't been attacking all this time. When he did, he stared right into her amber eyes that were very confused at the situation.

She was still wary, but her sickle was in her hand, ready for combat at any moment.

"Should we attack?" Du Yuhan asked.

"I don't think we have a chance of victory if we do," Alex said. "So, it's better to wait for now. Let's see how long we can stall."

It turned out, it wasn't very long. Just half a minute later, Black Venom started cursing, asking who the hell the new arrivals were.

After not getting any answer from them, she got angry. Her sickle glowed bright yellow as she got ready to attack.

"Sister, you should leave from this place," Alex said.

"I'm not leaving," she said.

"Sister, you have no chance of survival, please just leave," Alex said, but Luo Mei didn't listen. She stubbornly stayed as her rage was making her not think straight. She wanted revenge and she wanted it now. That only made Alex more anxious about the situation.

Black Venom sent off an attack, and immediately Alex put out all the defenses he could. Du Yuhan and Luo Mei wasted no time and put up their own barriers as well.

It was like adding another layer of thin glass in front of an oncoming cannon, but that thin glass was better than nothing.

They could've easily dodged the incoming attack. However, if they did, the house behind them would be destroyed and the disciples in them would then die. They didn't want to let that happen.

Alex marbled his skin and used everything he could to push off the stray metal energy back. Since the slash was flying through the air, rather than being attached to a weapon, there was a lot more stray energy than last time which helped him quite a bit.

Alex brought forth his sword and used it to strike at it once again. Only, this time he used the flat side of it since he didn't want the blade to strike him again.

Alex wasn't sure if he could stop the attack at all with just one hand, but he had to try.

Just then, he saw something white glow from right next to him. Even without looking, he could tell that Du Yuhan was going to attack as well.

Motes of white light circled around him before coming to his sword and glowing it fully white.

On the other side, Luo Mei was using some sort of water skill.

When the yellow slash appeared next to them, all 3 of them launched their attack at the same time as well.

A massive explosion rang out from where they struck the slash. All 3 of them were sent crashing into the buildings behind them.

Alex took the brunt of the damage as he was the closest to them, but thanks to that the other two were relatively safe.

Alex's whole body hurt as he stood up from the rubble. The disciples inside the house looked at him with a terrified face after seeing him burst in.

They had no idea what was going on outside, so this was way too sudden for them.

Alex checked himself and found that his knee was dislocated. He held the sword with his hurting palm and used the hilt of it to hammer the knee back to its place.

He wobbled a little when he finally fixed it and stood up. He hurriedly walked out to check Du Yuhan and his sister, but it seemed that they were fine as well.

"Not dead yet, huh? I thought you new brats might have been a hidden genius or something. Looks like you are just slightly stronger than your peers, not enough to trouble me at all," Black Venom said. Her sickle glowed yellow once again.

Alex felt his heart skip a beat when he realized that they were spread too far apart. They wouldn't get back together in time to protect themselves if Black Venom decided to target any of the three.

"Oh no!" Alex thought. He was in the middle so he had to run towards someone. Du Yuhan was to his left and Luo Mei to his right.

Before he could even make a choice, Du Yuhan shouted at him. "Save her," he said.

Alex lost all hesitation at that moment and ran towards his sister. He didn't care about Du Yuhan, he couldn't. He had his priorities… and so did Du Yuhan.

However, Black Venom's target was never the two anyway. Since the beginning, it had always been Alex.

When she saw him running towards Luo Mei, she realized that he cared about her and was going to protect her.

So, she decided to kill both of them at once. She brought up her sickle and threw the attack.

Another golden slash flew through the air, targetting both Alex and Luo Mei. Both of them were a bit hurt from the last attack so they couldn't muster up their full strength.

Still, they did their best to give it all they had to stop the attack.

Alex could feel that this attack was way too strong, and doubted if he could stop it at all. Still, he had to give it his all, after all, once more there were disciples behind them they had to protect.

He put all his strength into his sword and sent out an attack at the incoming slash. His attack disappeared like snow in a raging fire. It was useless. He was going to die.

The barriers they had put up crumbled like it was nothing and the slash came flying towards them, barely losing any strength at all.

Just then, something fell from the sky at blisteringly fast speed and crashed in front of the two of them.

The force of the slash striking whatever had dropped created a big enough shockwave that the two of them were sent flying back, but this time they didn't suffer any damage at all.

Alex immediately stood up to look at what had appeared in front of them and saw the backside of a shield.

"I'm sorry I arrived so late," A voice came from high above as the figure slowly drifted down. "I was busy dealing with the bandits outside, so I couldn't read your message soon enough."

The figure looked around the sect's destruction with a hint of sadness behind his eyes. "If I did, I probably would've been able to save some of them," he said.

Alex and Luo Mei's eyes started to shine as happiness and relief returned back to them.

"Are you guys alright?" the figure finally landed and brought out his shield from the ground before turning towards the two of them.

"Senior brother!" the two of them shouted at the same time. Liu Xun had arrived just in time to save his Junior disciple siblings.

Chapter 534: Liu Xun VS Black Venom

Liu Xun looked around at the destruction of the sect. The dead disciples, the broken buildings, his own junior brother in such a horrible condition.

Rage built up inside him as his face changed pretty quickly.

"I will kill you!" he turned to look at Black Venom. A sword appeared in his hand, bloody and chipped at parts from the fight he had before coming here.

He held the shield back up. The shield was made up of wood with metal on the outer edge as well as two strips of metal making a + sign in the middle.

The shield itself was a kite-shield with 3 pointy edges on the top and 1 at the bottom. The wood was colored red, and the metal, silver.

Liu Xun got into a stance with his shield and sword and dashed into the fight.

Black Venom wasn't expecting a newcomer, and even less she was expecting him to attack her the moment he arrived.

She tried to back away, but suddenly vines grew from Liu Xun's shield that wrapped around her, keeping her from moving away.

She immediately used her sickle to cut off the vines and barely made an escape when Liu Xun's sword reached her.

She retaliated by jumping forward at him and struck with a golden sickle, but Liu Xun put up his shield that blocked the attack.

Liu Xun was pushed back a few steps but he took no damage. He pushed himself forward once more and slashed towards her again.

Black Venom couldn't run away in time, so he used her bracers to protect herself. The sword landed directly on the bracers, and she was sent back a dozen or so meters.

Her eyes narrowed when she realized that she wasn't taking much damage. Finally, she focused on the man attacking her and realized that he was weak. Much weaker than him.

While she was in the 4th True Lord realm, the man was only around the 6th realm of the True Master realm. There was no way he could ever deal enough damage to her unless she was careless.

She looked behind him and noticed only 2 of the 3 youngsters. One of them was gone. Alex was missing.

'Dammit,' she thought. She was angry that she didn't get to kill Alex like she had wanted to.

She used a movement technique and immediately sped up. Liu Xun did the same. The violent clashes between the two were sending shockwaves all around them.

Luo Mei was worried for her senior brother, while Du Yuhan was just engrossed in the fight. Liu Xun was someone he had never seen give his all in fights. Even during the challenges when he was still a disciple many years ago, Du Yuhan remembered him having it easy for the fights.

Now, watching him finally bring out his fullest, he could see just how good he was at battle.

Liu Xun weaved left and right. The Elusive Heavenly Sword technique that he had learned as well as helped him dodge most of the simple attacks. The stronger ones, he simply used his shield to block.

Black Venom was starting to lose her mind with anger watching the way Liu Xun fought. She was so much stronger than him, and yet she could do nothing to him.

She could also tell that on a technical level, his skills were far better than her own. After all, she was never a fighter, nor was she trained as one.

But the anger only grew and she started attacking recklessly. She nearly took damage a few times even. That only served to get her more reckless.

Her fit of anger disappeared when she heard a 'twang' noise from behind her. 'That bastard,' she thought and turned around to grab Alex. However, the person who had attacked her was someone else.

She didn't recognize the person at all, nor did she have the time to since behind the man were other men, all running towards her.

Her heart skipped a beat and she immediately flew away from the fight. She instinctively reached to grab her mask on her face but stopped.

'That bastard is still hiding around somewhere,' she thought. She deliberated for a moment, but now was not the time for that. There were too many opponents for her to remain safe.

She immediately opened her mask and shouted, "GET AWAY!"

It wasn't a normal shout since the sound was quite extreme. She was definitely using a skill to amplify her voice.

Alex wanted to launch his own attack at her, but she had been careful. After she spoke, she immediately put her mask back on, not letting the Heaven's Impact that Alex did launch at her affect her.

Everyone around her fell unconscious at the same time, with faces of bliss on them. She wanted to kill them right away, now that they were all down.

However, when she started getting close, she could see 2 of the bodies start moving a little.

Alex was the first to open his eyes and look towards her. Seeing that others would be waking up at any moment as well, Black Venom decided to leave.

Alex walked her leave without a way to stop.

A few moments after she left, Liu Xun got up as well. He looked around but was unable to find her.

"She's gone, brother," Alex said. "She ran away."

"Dammit!" Liu Xun shouted. "I couldn't kill her at all."

"It's okay… for now. At least we managed to protect the others," Alex said as he looked back. Some of the houses had been destroyed with quite a few disciples dead, but at least they had been able to save a lot of them.

Alex curiously turned around at Liu Xun and asked, "do you have a mental protection artifact on you?"

"Hm, yes," Liu Xun said as he brought out a necklace from his robe. "Why?"

"Her voice is a mental attack. I was just surprised to see you wake up so fast after she knocked you out," Alex said.

"You woke up sooner than me though," he said and looked towards Alex's arm. "Will you be alright?"

Alex grabbed his left arm and put on a solemn face. "I will be alright," he said.

Liu Xun then turned around at the elders who were asleep again. "Good thinking waking them. While I could've held her back for a while, eventually, I would have ended up losing due to me not having more Qi than her," he said.

"I will go wake them up. The city should still be in danger," Alex said, and Liu Xun nodded.

After the elders woke up, they all went out back to fight. Alex helped Luo Mei and Du Yuhan wake up and sent them to take care of the disciples.

Soon enough, they were knocking on every door, making the disciple leave towards the back of the mountain to hide them.

Alex on the other hand didn't stay with them. He too wanted to go help out in the city. He didn't know how much help he would be with a single arm, but he would give it his all to protect the sect and the city.

Chapter 535: Black Venom defeated?

Fu Wen took a few minutes, but he managed to kill off a leader of a bandit group called the Yellow Devils. The leader was in the early True King realm, but Fu Wen was still able to kill him.

He flew down from the sky towards the many soldiers of his that were still fighting, and shouted, "Protect the mortals. That's your primary task. Protect them however you can."

"Yes, Lord," the soldiers shouted. Fu Wen then flew over to where Mo An, his wife was fighting and helped her defeat the bandit too.

"Have you figured out why they are attacking us yet?" she asked, wiping the blood off of her face.

"No, maybe the sect leaders had more luck," he said. Mo An nodded. Then, the two of them flew off to help the others, while trying to find answers to the reason behind this disaster.

* * * * * * *

Wen Cheng was struggling to win his fight against the Silver bandit, but so was the Silver bandit. Neither of them could get an upper hand at each other, nor could escape away either.

The Silver bandit couldn't leave because he was being attacked by Wen Cheng relentlessly, and Wen Cheng couldn't leave because he was sure that if he left, the Silver bandit would go attack the sect.

Wen Cheng had tried taunting the Silver bandit into explaining their motive, no matter how much he was taunted, the Silver bandit just smiled and said nothing.

The battle was going nowhere, and Wen Cheng was still worried about that message he had received from Alex.

'They have already reached the sect. What the hell am I still doing here? I need to go save them,' he thought. But he couldn't move. The Silver bandit wouldn't let him either.

Their bout lasted longer than it was meant to. Wen Cheng was starting to get frustrated from the battle. His worries reached high enough that his will to kill the bandit started increasing in intensity as well.

They clashed and clashed and clashed. The Silver bandit was smiling during the entire time, but slowly, his smiles started to fade away.

'He's getting stronger somehow,' he thought. The clashes were becoming more violent and he was being forced backward a lot.

He was surprised and couldn't help but wonder what was happening. During one of the clashes, he noticed something.

Every once in a while, a flash of white light would shine from the otherwise red or green flashes of Wen Cheng's sword.

"No way," the Silver bandit got scared. "How did he learn it? Dammit, did I help him hone it?"

Wen Cheng himself was surprised. He thought he didn't have talent. He thought he would never be able to. He was sure that he had already peaked in cultivation and there was no way for him to improve.

But here it was. A white outline in his otherwise mundane-looking sword. Wen Cheng gave a bright smile.

He had acquired Sword Intent.

In the midst of battle, in the midst of danger, in the midst of his will to go protect others, and in the midst of his will to kill the one standing between him and his sect, he had manifested Sword Intent.

The Silver bandit watched in horror. Sword Intent wasn't easy to come by. Even if it was in the early stage, it would still make Wen Cheng's attacks stronger by at least a realm. That alone would be enough to defeat him, which would probably lead to his death.

"No, I can't die here. Screw this mission," the Silver bandit cried out and tried to run away. But suddenly, in his moment of carelessness, he was attacked from the side.

Something flew right at him and wrapped around him. Wen Cheng was surprised and got ready to fight back, but when he saw what it was, he calmed down.

He recognized the beast that was constricting the Silver bandit's movements.

"Now you die, bandit," Wen Cheng said. In an instant, a very intense green slash left his sword as it flew towards the Silver bandit.

"No! Let me go! Let me—"

The Silver bandit's jaw dropped, while whatever was supposed to be above it was no longer there.

Half of the bandit's head, along with his signature hair fell off from the sky. The constrictions around the bandit loosened, and his body fell from the sky.

Wen Cheng took quick breaths to calm himself and looked at the beast in front of him with a smile. "So she finally decided to come out, huh?"

* * * * * * *

Black Venom flew away as far as she could away from the sect. "Dammit!" she shouted out loud. "How the hell is there someone who can deal so much mental damage while at the same time not taking much in return? Does he have some supreme artifacts as well?"

She was speaking out loud, and along the way, everyone who tried to come to fight her kept on falling to the ground before they could even reach her.

Her mask was off her face as she no longer needed it anymore. Rather, she needed her voice right now to put everyone in a lull while she ran away.

'He's probably not chasing me right now. I should be able to make it out,' she thought.

She kept flying, moving towards the western side of the city. She had already seen corpses of her men and felt saddened about it, but her survival was more important than any of the others.

"Move away," she shouted at the people that came to attack her. Without exception, all of them fell to the ground with a large thud.

She flew some more and closer to the city walls when she saw practically no light coming from the city below her.

Something felt wrong. Something was missing. Her eyes widened when she realized what it was. "The fire… it's all gone?" she asked herself in surprise.

She hadn't expected them to put out all the fires already. 'What happened to the fighting. Did they win?' she thought.

She knew she was getting close to the wall as the chillness in the air increased. It was only this city that was warm, while the rest of the empire was living in winter.

She didn't understand why not that she cared. She smiled as the air got chillier. The freedom was right around the corner.

However, the more she moved, the more chilly it got. It was getting to the point where it was abnormally cold.

Still, she flew, not minding the cold. Up ahead, she saw a woman flying in the air, alone.

"Move, you bitch!" Black Venom shouted.

The woman turned her head towards her. Once she saw her, she then turned her whole body towards her.

"What?" Black Venom looked at her with a confused expression. "Move!" she shouted once more. That only served to make the woman angrier.

'What's going on?' Black Venom got worried. She instinctively put her hand on her face to check if the mask was perhaps still there. It wasn't.

The green-robed woman moved forward towards her.

"Get away from me!" Black Venom shouted. She couldn't tell how strong the woman was. For some reason, the person standing in front of her wasn't giving auras that a normal cultivator would.

"I SAID MOVE!" she shouted, but that did nothing to the woman. Black Venom was scared at the prospect of the woman perhaps being stronger than her.

Immediately, she brought out her sickle which started glowing yellow without a single second wasted.

"DIE!" she shouted and sent a slash flying towards the woman. However, something incredible happened.

When the slash got closer to the woman, it started slowing down. It got slower and slower, while at the same time getting dimmer and dimmer. In the end, right before it reached the woman, it vanished as it had never existed before.

"What?" Black Venom looked in horror. She didn't understand what happened. She sent another slash flying and the same thing happened once again.

"Wh-what's going on?" she freaked out.

Ma Rong was looking at Black Venom with both a curious as well as an angry face. She was angry not because of the words she had said, but rather the clothes she wore.

She was a bandit, and she deserved to be killed. As for curiosity, it stemmed from whatever mental attack she had been doing for the last couple of times. It was similar, yet more frequent than Alex's Heaven's Impact. This made her really surprised.

Still, as a bandit, Ma Rong would rather kill her than have her curiosity fulfilled.

Black Venom dashed at her with her sickle in hand and directly hit Ma Rong with the weapon.

However, when it got close to Ma Rong, the color faded, and frost started appearing on the sickle. As she got closer, Black Venom could feel her momentum fade as well.

Her body grew stiffer and the cold was getting to her. When she did reach close to Ma Rong, she was completely frozen.

Without even doing anything, Ma Rong had defeated her. Black Venom tried to move, but her body wouldn't listen to her. It remained where it was, waiting for Ma Rong to kill her.

"I was quite interested in learning how your mental attacks work, but unfortunately, you will have to die," Ma Rong said as she brought out a sword of her own and got ready to slash at Black Venom.

Black Venom could see her death approaching, but just then someone else appeared.

"Wait, don't kill her."

Chapter 536: Hei Dan

Ma Rong heard the cry to not kill, but her sword didn't stop. It directly fell on Black Venom's neck.

A bright white light appeared from her neck as the amulet sprung forth to stop Ma Rong's attack. But even that was unable to stop Ma Rong.

The white light dimmed and the barrier shattered. The amulet itself cracked into pieces, unable to block Ma Rong's attack at all. However, what it did manage to do was deviate Ma Rong's sword just slightly that it changed direction.

Ma Rong's sword slanted upward and cut through Black Venom's cheeks while cutting her left eye, leaving a massive wound on the left side of her face.

Black Venom groaned in pain as she wasn't even able to move her mouth to speak with Ma Rong's aura freezing her in place. The pain was too much for her to handle.

Not only had she just lost an eye, she had also lost one of the objects that she used to remember her father with. Both the physical and the emotional hurt was bearing down on her as she lost all hope for life

Ma Rong was slightly surprised to see that her attack was blocked by the amulet. But now that it was destroyed, she would be able to kill her.

Ma Rong brought back her sword and slashed it again.

Just then, Alex appeared right in front of Ma Rong. "Master, stop!" he shouted.

Ma Rong's heart skipped a beat as the sword stopped mere inches away from his throat.

Alex breathed heavily, both from the fear of nearly dying and the aura Ma Rong was giving off at the moment.

"What the hell are you doing?" Ma Rong shouted. She asked with fury in her eyes. Alex could feel the fury and be even somewhat scared deep inside.

"Don't kill her master," Alex said.

Ma Rong frowned when she heard that. "Why are you protecting a bandit?" Ma Rong asked. She angrily looked at Alex, wondering if he was a fake, but the complete lack of aura he gave off was impossible to hide.

She was just wondering why he was doing that when she saw his left arm. Her eyes went wide as she gasped in shock.

"Where is your arm?" she shouted.

Alex held his left arm and sighed. "She cut it off," Alex said, pointing behind him.

Ma Rong's fury burned hotter than the sun itself. "You dare hurt my disciple!!" she shouted. "Move away, I will kill this bitch."

"No, master. We need her," Alex said. "She's no ordinary bandit. She's a leader of one of the groups. She's Black Venom."

Ma Rong's anger was still high, but she also felt surprised. "She's… the one that killed off Wan Li's parents?" Ma Rong asked.

"I'm afraid so," Alex said. "But let's not talk about that for now, master. We don't know why the bandits are attacking the city, and since she is a leader, I thought she might have some answers."

"Trust me, master. I wouldn't have suggested this if I didn't see you handle her so easily," Alex said.

Ma Rong heaved heavily and tried to calm down. She was still angry about her disciple's cut arm, but the information was more important right now.

Ma Rong suddenly looked to the side and a green snake flew up to her. "You're back, little green," she said as the snake disappeared onto her beast space in her neck.

Wen Cheng flew up close to her, following the green snake that came to its master.

"Thanks for sending the snake to me. I probably couldn't have killed the Silver bandit if not for that," Wen Cheng said.

Black Venom's eyes went wide when she heard that. The Silver bandit was stronger than her, and even he was dead.

"What are you doing here with this bandit?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Trying to find out the reason behind this whole thing," Ma Rong said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a pill.

Alex looked at it and recognized it. It had been a long time since he had seen it again.

"The Truth-Seeking pill?" he asked.

"Yes," Ma Rong said. "Only then will we know she is truly speaking the truth." Ma Rong got close and fed Black Venom the pill.

Black Venom couldn't resist getting fed and had to eat it despite not wanting to.

Alex turned towards Wen Cheng and said, "You should leave master. Once she starts speaking, we will start falling out the air like flies."

"No you won't," Ma Rong said, chilly white mist appearing from her arms around Black Venom's face. "Her mental attacks won't land on you now."

"Let's start."

* * * * * *

Hei Dan came from a small family in the town of Lionspring. It was a small town that barely ever appeared on the official maps of the Crimson Empire.

It was located in the northwest region of the empire, never close enough to any of the big cities.

COUGH! COUGH!

A man violently coughed from a room filled with metals and leather and other various materials. There was a furnace in front of him, one that forever burned with very hot fire.

The man seemed to be in his 40s but was somewhat ill. He coughed for a while and only stopped when the blood in his lungs was coughed out.

He watched the blood on his hand, sighed, and got back to work.

"Father?" Hei Dan was barely 14 years old at that moment. She walked into the workshop, as always wearing a simple black mask on her face.

"What are you doing father?" she asked with worry in her amber eyes. "I told you, you are sick. Please don't work on these useless artifacts, you can't even sell them," she said.

In front of her, her father was in the midst of making some sort of necklace.

The man coughed once again and looked back at his daughter's face with a small smile.

"I'm not making these to sell, my gem. I'm making these for you," he said. He brought out bronze-colored bracers and handed them to her.

"How is it? It's not my best work, but definitely high above," he said as he started to cough once more.

"It's good, father. But you need to stop," Hei Dan said with tears forming in her eyes. Her father coughed once more and blood pooled in his hands again.

Hei Dan felt a chill go down her spine when she saw that. "Father, please stop!" she said. "If you won't, I will go ahead and accept his offer."

"NO YOU WON'T!" her father violently turned around. "I will not let that bastard lay a single hand on my daughter. I would rather kill him myself before he can have you."

"Then please, stop working on these, and take care of your health father," Hei Dan begged.

The Hei family was a long lineage of artifact crafters. They weren't the best at it, but they could get by fine with the artifacts they learned to make.

Hei Dan's father was the most genius artifact crafter that had yet been born to the family. However, due to the lack of resources, as well as just being in a poor town, he could never learn much in his early years.

So, throughout his life, he had to struggle by himself to even get by daily. Fortunately, what he made sold well in the town, and he had a good business going.

He fell in love with a girl and had a child. However, not long after Hei Dan was born, her mother passed away.

It didn't take long for her father to know that she was special. Every time she cried as an infant, her father would have a headache.

As she got bigger, the headaches became more potent. So, her father used what resources he had left to try and refine something that could help her.

It took him a few years, but he managed to come up with a blueprint for a mask-type artifact that blocked mental attacks on his own.

He crafted multiple of those artifacts and made Hei Dan wear them since then. As such, almost no one in the town had ever seen Hei Dan's face.

She and her father had lied about the mask, saying she was disfigured behind the mask due to an accident, and while many accepted that reasoning, there were a few that didn't.

The town lord's son, who was in his early 20s, could see her every day in her shop, and despite the mask, he was attracted to her.

He believed, based on her body and her eyes, that the father-daughter duo was spreading lies and telling them she was ugly, when in fact, she was really pretty.

The son proposed to her right away in her shop one day, and when she refused him using the excuse that she was ugly and not fit to be married to him, he had left saying, "Your lies won't work on me. I know you are very beautiful behind the mask. I will wait for you to accept my offer."

When her father learned about this, he himself went to the town lord's manor to refuse the proposal. Not only did he not want her daughter to marry this bastard whose reputation was one of the worst, but there also had an age gap of nearly 10 years.

When the son heard all of this, he had made the guards beat him up, resulting in his current illness.

The town lord had then made the town not interact with them, and forced the Hei family to have no income. They also were made to not help them at all.

Fearing the town lord's fury, the town had started to shun the father and daughter since that day.

The town lord had also told the guards to not let them leave the city. Unless they accepted the marriage proposal, her father would likely die from his injuries.

Hei Dan was worried about her father's injuries. Every day, it was getting worse, and he was getting no medicine.

Despite being in the True realms, her father was getting closer and closer to dying.

"Leave me be, my gem. Go tend to the shop for now. Maybe someone will come," her father said.

Seeing her stubborn father, Hei Dan sighed. "Please don't overexert yourself, father," she said and left the workspace.

She walked to the front of the house where the shop was and went in, waiting for people to come to buy something, knowing on the inside that no one would.

As if to betray her expectations, someone finally arrived at her shop, after nearly 2 months.

"Welc—" her words stopped when she saw the customer.

"Since you refuse to come to me by yourself, I decided to come to you." The town lord's son had arrived in front of her once again.

Chapter 537: Hei Dan 2

Hei Dan feared the men in front of her. She was only at Muscle tempering realm at the moment, so even if it was the trash son of the town lord, he could easily overpower her.

"Young lord, why are you here?" she asked with a serious face.

The lord's son looked at her mask and could see the eyes behind them, making him elate at the prospect that he was likely going to take her as his wife today.

He put on the most amiable smile he could, which still made him look like a creep, and said, "I came here for you, of course. I still haven't gotten your answer."

Hei Dan was starting to get angry just seeing his face. This was the man who got her family to where they were now, the person who hurt her father, the reason why her father couldn't seek medical treatment.

Feeling emerged deep inside of her that she herself didn't know she had. The anger, the rage, all of it was telling her to just kill the man standing in front of her.

However, when she saw the two guards behind him in bulky armor with spears on their hands and a wildly stronger cultivation base, she lost all courage to do so.

"Young lord, I told you. I am ugly behind this mask. You do not want me," Hei Dan said. Her voice was particularly loud in the hope to gather the people in the town so that the lord's son couldn't do something publically.

People quickly gathered around, wanting to see what the commotion was about. Hei Dan got happy when she saw them.

"Young lord, please… my facial scars have distorted my face. You really don't want me," Hei Dan insisted.

"No, I don't believe you," the young lord said. "If it is as ugly as you say, then just take it off and prove it."

"What?" she got anxious. There was no way she could open her mask, especially given how much of a problem it gave caused to everyone around her.

It would've been fine if it was the headache that happened when she spoke as a child. But lately, especially after starting cultivation, it was like her constitution had awakened, and it started making things more problematic.

The lord's son got a little irritated. "Will you die if you just show me your face? Are you trying to defy me?" he asked.

"What, no young lor—"

"That's right, girl. Just take off your mask."

"Show us your ugly face then."

"The young lord is right. If your face is just ugly then you have nothing to hide."

The townsfolk started speaking against her. The people she had gathered for her safety were now speaking up against her.

"Enough!" the town lord's son shouted. "Guards, take her mask off."

"What? No, please no!" she cried out. Even as she did, the two guards went into her shop and started manhandling her.

She tried to run away, but they were too strong. "Please, no! Father, help me," she cried out with tears flowing down her eyes.

One of the guards grabbed the side of her mask and tried to take it off. Just then, a sickle appeared out of nowhere, chopping off his arm in half.

When the other guard looked up to see what was happening, another sickle entered his head through the opening in his helmet.

"Young lord, run away," the guard with his arm cut off ran out of the store. Hei Dan's father walked out of the store too, with two bloody sickles in his hands.

"I will kill you today," he said.

The lord's son was scared, so he let the remaining guard delay her father while he ran away.

Hei Dan's father was already weak from the illness. Exerting so much strength to fight the guard only made him weaker.

Hei Dan walked out, trembling from what she had just gone through. "Father, don't leave me," she cried out, but her father wasn't there anymore. He had run after the lord's son to kill him.

She struggled to keep herself standing with how much she was trembling. The other townsfolk that were watching everything had already run after her father to see what he would do.

Hei Dan prayed that her father was safe and slowly made her way forward, following the path her father took.

It didn't take her long to reach the location where her father was, but when she did, she saw a big crowd of people, surrounding a smaller crowd of guards, all of whom were fighting her weak father who was all alone.

The lord's son was protected behind some guard with nothing but a mere cut in his cheeks. He demanded death, shouting at the guards who were fighting.

"Don't hurt my father, please. I beg you. I will go with you, stop!" she shouted, but the sounds of the clashes were just too loud for her voice to make any impact.

The lord's son saw her amongst the crowd. With her black mask, it was pretty easy to spot her in a crowd.

The lord's son made the other guards go grab her and bring her to him. Hei Dan didn't resist.

"Please, young lord. Forgive my father. He… he was just trying to protect me," she said.

"No, there is no saving your father now. He cut my beautiful face. All you can do now is say goodbye to your old man and be my wife," the young lord said.

"No, please," she started to beg again.

"Before that, however, let's see your face. After all, I can't take you in as my wife if you aren't beautiful," he said and moved towards her.

Hei Dan turned around and tried to run away, but two guards grabbed her. She was now directly watching her father barely manage to hold himself with so many wounds on him.

The sickle on his left hand was broken, and he was forced to use his right one only to fight.

When he saw the bastard come up to his daughter from behind and grab her mask, his rage flared as if someone poured oil on the fire.

In his rage, he put his guards down. Someone attacked him from behind.

Hei Dan couldn't hear anything anymore. The young lord's hands crept on her mask, but she couldn't feel it either.

All she could do was feel her heartbreak into a million pieces as she watched a sword getting pushed through her father's back.

Her father vomited a mouthful of blood and fell onto the ground. He shakily put his arms forth, trying to reach for his daughter, but before he could do so, another sword dug into him.

He breathed his last breath.

At the same time, the lord's son ripped off her mask.

"NO!!!!" the harshest and most painful scream she had ever screamed came out of her. She felt the clutches of the guards loosen, and she ran up to her father.

She immediately got on her knees and grabbed her father's hand, calling him to answer her. But he wasn't there anymore.

She held her father in her embrace and looked up to the sky as she cried. The loudest, most hurtful screams escaped her mouth.

As she sat there in the pool of her father's blood, crying her eyes out, everyone else in the surrounding was on the floor, smiling from one ear to another, happy, like they were seeing the best of dreams.

She cried for hours. Anyone who heard her would fall onto the ground, asleep with a smile on their face, so she was able to cry for as long as she wanted.

After a while, she finally stopped crying, and instead of tears, there was rage building up in her eyes.

She looked around her. As tragedy befell her, the people around her were smiling as if it were a comedy to them.

She grabbed her father's remaining sickle and gritted her teeth as she stood up. The first thing she did was walk up to the young lord.

Seeing him with a happy face only served to fuel her rage. In one swift motion, her sickle separated his head from his body. Once that was done, she then went on to cut off his arms and his legs.

When that was done, she then stabbed every single inch of his body with the sickle. Still, the fury in her wasn't gone in the slightest. No, it was only beginning.

She looked at the guards, the townsfolk, all of whom did nothing but only acted against her and her father. Her fury targeted them next.

Man, woman, child. She saw nothing but enemies in front of her. In a matter of minutes, every single person in the crowd was dead, in their own blood. Most of them held their smile even as they died.

Once she was done and there was no one else to divert her anger to, the anger was replaced by the horrifying realization of what she had done.

She had never ever even hurt a single soul, and yet today, she had killed so many. "No! These monsters deserved it," she told herself.

She carried her father's body back to the house, making everyone who saw her fall asleep on the ground. Every time she saw their happy face, the rage would return again.

She killed who she could to satisfy her vengeance, but she couldn't ever satisfy it.

She buried her father behind their house, along with her mother. Then, she understood that she couldn't remain in the town anymore.

She started packing stuff to leave. The items from the store were just too many and she was forced to leave those behind.

She looked for what else she could pack and as she did, she entered her father's workplace.

It was there on the table. Her father had finished making it. The amulet. His last gift for her.

Before she even knew it, Hei Dan had the amulet around her neck. As she realized that this was the final keepsake of her father, she clutched it against her chest and cried again.

She became a sobbing mess once again and cried for hours. Only around the dead of night did she finally stop.

She took her stuff and escaped the city while death created the commotion.

She moved town, went to a different city. But the rumors of a girl with a mask killing everyone in a town started floating around.

She couldn't stay there anymore and changed cities once again. However, no matter where she went, the news followed her like the ghost of the young lord she killed.

With no other choice, she was forced to go into the forest to protect herself. There, she met other bandits, who took her in and accepted her.

Slowly, she built up a reputation for herself, known primarily for her black mask, and became the well-known bandit she was today.

Black Venom

Chapter 538: Distraction

As Ma Rong asked questions, Black Venom told them everything. She told them everything without hiding anything.

Alex and Wen Cheng who heard just parts of her story couldn't help but feel bad for her. However, that poor, tragic girl was no more. She was already changed, twisted to what she had become now.

"Why did the bandits attack the city? What do they want?" Ma Rong asked.

"Survival," Black Venom answered, as she gritted her teeth. The coldness she felt had gone away considerably, and she could finally emote again.

He could no longer feel her father's amulet on her chest. The pain she felt inside was enormous, coupled with the fact that she couldn't herself from speaking the truth, which only served to make her feel worse.

Once again people were forcing her to do something she did not want to.

"Survival?" All 3 of them looked at her in surprise. Someone came from a little away at the same time. When they looked at the person, they saw the City lord approaching.

The City lord came to the group with a weird look on his face. "What are you guys doing here?" he asked. Behind her was his wife, Mo An, who was also curious to see them.

"Kill the bandit already, you guys need to go help the others," the City lord said.

"Not yet, city lord," Ma Rong said, her eyes not leaving Black Venom. "She is a captain and we are questioning her reasons to come here."

"Oh?" the City lord was finally attentive. "Let's hear it then."

"Explain. What did you mean by you came here for survival?" Ma Rong asked.

"We were threatened to do it. If we didn't do what he said, we would've been killed," Black Venom explained while she kept grinding her teeth.

"Threatened? By who?" the City Lord asked.

"He's known as the Bandit killer. He's been killing bandits for the past couple of months. They were all the bandits who refused to do what he wanted," Black Venom said.

"Bandit Killer? I've never heard of someone like that. What's his name?" the city lord asked.

"He never gave us his name, nor does he use anything to call himself," Black Venom tried to keep as much information to herself as she could, but her body spoke on its own and she had no control over it.

"This bandit killer, why did he tell you to attack the city?" the city lord asked.

"For distraction," Black Venom said.

Immediately, all of them frowned. "For distraction? What is he distracting us from?" Wen Cheng asked.

Everyone's heart started beating faster. If such a massive attack on the city was just a distraction, then what was that person's actual purpose.

Did he want to steal someone important or something important? Did he want to kill someone? Destroy someone? They had no way of knowing.

"Wait, was your attack on the Tiger sect a distraction too?" Alex asked. Wen Cheng's eyes widened when he heard that.

"She attacked the Tiger Sect?" he asked.

Alex's face grew serious as he answered, "Yes master. And she killed a few disciples as well."

"You bitch!" Wen Cheng brought out his sword to attack, but just then, he felt all the energy in his body disappear as he started feeling cold.

"Control yourself, Wen Cheng, we are still questioning her," Ma Rong said.

Wen Cheng looked at Ma Rong with a face of awe and fear. He had never known this was how strong she was and couldn't help but keep away his sword after that.

"Our attack on the Tiger sect was a direct order from the Bandit killer. Only us leaders got the order, and we were told to destroy the sect as much as we could," she said.

Wen Cheng was angry, so was Alex. But the others didn't care about the Tiger sect enough to let their confusion be clouded by their anger.

"Was it a distraction or the actual purpose?" the City lord asked, not to Black Venom but rather to everyone around him.

"This Bandit Killer," Mo An spoke. "He should also be doing something on his own right?"

"What could he be doing though? We have no idea," the City lord said.

"I understand that. What I mean is, if he were to be doing something and it was in the Tiger sect, I don't believe why he would send the bandits to destroy it since it would cause people to go there."

"The last thing he would want is to distract us with the bandits outside the sect and then bring attention back to the sect, right?" she asked.

"Hmm, Lady Mo isn't wrong about this," Ma Rong said. She then turned to look at Black Venom and asked, "Do you know anything else about all of this?"

"No," Black Venom said.

"Very well. You have no more use then," Ma Rong brought out her sword again to attack.

"Wait, master," Alex said.

"What is it now?" Ma Rong asked.

"She's the one who killed Wan Li's parents. I believe he would want to learn more about it," Alex said.

"We don't have time for that anymore," Ma Rong said, and tried to kill her again, but she found herself unable to swing the blade.

She understood that Wan Li would never go back to his old self without learning about his parent's death.

"Dammit! Alright, let's bring her to him. He should still be in his home under house arrest," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded. He looked around the city and found that the city no longer had many fights. The bandits had brought on a lot of destruction to the city, but even after that, they didn't win. They never had a chance.

"You should go manage the city, city lord. Us 3 will take care of this bandit later," Ma Rong said.

"Okay," Fu Wen said. "I will talk to you guys later."

He and his wife left the area and went towards where their soldiers were heavily concentrated.

Ma Rong, Alex, and Wen Cheng went together towards the center of the city where the elders of both the sect should have been gathered for now.

Black Venom saw the bodies on the ground, all scattered throughout the city, reminding her of the day when she killed all those people in her town.

She hadn't regretted it then, but now, there were her men, her people that had given her food, clothes, and shelter. To see them all die, she couldn't help but cry once again.

As they got closer to the city center, Alex got a weird feeling like someone was watching him. He turned around to see if anyone was there but saw no one.

Not only that, but he also got a feeling that something was off with the city. "What is it?" he asked himself, but he just couldn't find an answer.

The closer they got to the elders, the greater the feeling got. However, he quickly ignored the feeling when he saw the elders in front of him.

All of them were wounded, bloody from all the cuts they had received. Some of them even had multiple lost limbs, making Alex look fine in that regard.

"Are there elders in the sect?" Wen Cheng asked his men.

"Yes, sect leader. We have already sent half of the elders to protect the sect in case we got attacked again," someone answered.

"Is there no bandit left now?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, sect leader. We have already gone through the whole city. After you defeated them, there weren't many left. Those who were, we already got rid of them," the elders from the Hong Wu Sect said.

"Go back to the sect," Wen Cheng ordered his people.

"Yes, Sect leader," the elders replied and left.

"Sigh," Wen Cheng finally took a sigh of relief. "So much tragedy, but at least, it's over, finally."

"No it's not," Alex said from beside them.

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng turned around to look at him. Alex was frantically looking around him.

"What's wrong, Yu Ming?" Wen Cheng asked with a serious face.

"Look around us, master," he said. Wen Cheng looked around, but he wasn't sure what he was supposed to be looking at.

"What are we supposed to be looking at?" Ma Rong asked.

"The city. Look how much damage the southern half of the city suffered, yet the northern half barely seems to have suffered any damage," Alex said.

"That's obvious. The bandits started from the southern half, and probably couldn't get very far," Wen Cheng said.

"Exactly, master. They started from the southern half, which we now know, thanks to her, was a distraction."

"What if that bandit killer's target was north, so he sent the bandits to the south?" Alex asked.

Ma Rong's heart skipped a bit as a deep chill went down her spine. "The sect must be in danger," she said.

"Lang Shun!" she cried.

"Yes, sister?" Ma Rong's junior brother appeared from the group, his leg missing. Alex felt a tinge of sadness looking at his Martial Uncle look like that.

Lang Shun felt the same way seeing his Martial Nephew like that.

Ma Rong took Black Venom's storage bag and took out 2 masks from it. She also took out a pill and fed it to her. Black Venom slowly fell into a lull and fell unconscious.

"Wear this. Her voice is a mental attack and only this mask will protect you. Don't interact with her without the mask."

"Keep her with you for now. I will ask her questions later," Ma Rong said. After that, Ma Rong flew off to go look at the sect and see what sort of danger it was in.

The elders followed, along with Wen Cheng and Alex as well.

When they reached the sect, they found nothing abnormal happening there at all. Alex looked around and was equally surprised and glad to see nothing happening there.

The second elder and third elder flew up to them and asked, "is it over?"

"Yes," Ma Rong said seeing that nothing was wrong with the sect. "It's over."

The elders flew off towards their place to take care of themselves, while Ma Rong flew towards her own as well. Alex and Wen Cheng followed her, and so did the second elder and the third elder.

"Did you learn anything, sect leader?" the second elder asked as they flew towards the sect leader's mountain.

"Not really, only that this was meant to be a distraction," Ma Rong said.

"Distraction from what?" the third elder asked.

"We… we don't know," Ma Rong said.

They landed on the mountain in front of Ma Rong's house. They were about to walk in when Alex got the feeling that someone was watching him again.

Without wasting any time, Alex spread out his Spiritual sense as far as he could, and suddenly, he noticed someone flying high in the sky.

"Who's there?"

Chapter 539: The Name

120 meters away from him, at the very edge of his spiritual sense, there was something… someone floating high in the sky above them.

The only reason Alex even noticed the person was due to the nothingness of everything around him. If he had been on the ground, he doubted he could've caught him.

The man had been looking at him this whole time, which was where Alex had gotten a strange feeling.

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng immediately turned around at Alex's call and searched for people around them.

"What's wrong?" the 2nd elder asked, searching for around him as well.

"There, someone is there," Alex pointed up in the sky. The moment he did so, the person in his spiritual sense disappeared.

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng obviously couldn't see someone that was so far away. Wen Cheng only had some 50 meters of spiritual sense range, while Ma Rong had about 70 meters now after her constitution awakening.

Still, with that, they were nowhere close to seeing what Alex had seen.

"What did you see?" Ma Rong asked.

"There was someone in the sky above us. He just walked out of my sensing range," Alex said.

"Are you sure?" Ma Rong asked.

"I… I think so. It had a humanoid shape for sure, but… I'm not sure if it was a person or not exactly," Alex said. "It didn't really have any aura to it."

"Is it possible you were seeing things?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I definitely wasn't seeing things, Master," Alex said. "But… I might have been a little too—"

Suddenly, Alex sensed something flying towards him at an incredible speed. He had no time to put any strength into his legs to jump away, so he did what he could in the split second he had.

His Qi moved and his vision changed. He started seeing the world in patches of white and black. The white parts represented the shadows on the ground, while the black part represented the light.

He chose one in his mind and at that moment, he disappeared.

Ma Rong noticed something enter her spiritual sense as well and immediately turned around to catch it. But even she was too slow to stop it.

A loud explosion rang out at the thing crashed onto right where Alex was, throwing up a cloud of stone and dust.

Wen Cheng only managed to bring out his sword after the thing had already landed.

Alex reappeared next to Wen Cheng. At the same time, Ma Rong pushed out her Yin towards the thing that landed to keep it there.

When the dust settled, there was nothing there at all. The second elder looked at the empty space and was surprised. "What the hell did this?"

"No, he's still there," Alex said. Wen Cheng had his sword glowing red and ready to attack, while Ma Rong was keeping the thing there with her Qi.

Slowly, a layer of front appeared in the air around the crash location that made a humanoid shape.

The second elder looked with wide eyes when he realized that the person was actually invisible.

"I've got him," Ma Rong said with a serious face that has hints of anger behind the cold eyes. She brought out a sword and was about to strike when suddenly her layer of ice melted and the person ran away from her.

Ma Rong looked at him with wide eyes, clearly surprised that someone actually managed to get away from her coldness.

"Tsk. I knew you got a Yin-type body, but I never realized how potent it was," a voice appeared from the air, as a figure appeared from inside of it. The figure was a brown-robed old man with gray hair and some gray beard flowing beneath the mask he was wearing.

"That's… Black Venom's mask," Alex said from the side.

"I know about your mental attacks, boy. I'm not going to let myself be caught off guard," the old man said.

"Are you the bandit Killer?" Ma Rong asked him, pointing her sword straight towards him. She couldn't tell the old man's cultivation base at all, but from what she could tell, he was very strong.

"Yes, I believe that's what the bandits call me," the old man said.

"How are you here?" Ma Rong asked. Alex and Wen Cheng were a little confused at the question, but the 2nd and 3rd Elder understood what she meant.

"Why am I here? Hehe, well that would be because of this of course," the old man quickly took out a nameplate belonging to the sect and put it back inside.

Ma Rong's eyes went wide. "Where did you get the nameplate from, intruder," the 2nd Elder asked from the side. He brought out his sword and pointed at him too. He wasn't much of a fighter, but he still could fight at a basic level to protect himself.

"That's not very important right now," the old man said. "What's important is that you guys die."

The old man dashed towards Ma Rong at incredible speed and slashed at her with a thin, black sword.

Ma Rong's yin aura released to stop his attack, but even as she did, she realized that it wouldn't stop it. The slash went through the aura, cutting it in half and even almost reaching Ma Rong herself.

"What?" Alex looked surprised from a little away from her. He couldn't understand how his master could possibly not be able to stop him at all. After all, Ma Rong was able to stop all forms of energy around her.

"All forms of… no," he thought. Ma Rong couldn't stop all energy. There was one element she had trouble stopping.

"Master, be careful," he shouted from the side. "He is using Yang Qi."

It had taken until the second attack, but Ma Rong had understood that as well. The old man in front of her was using Yang Qi, which was why he was able to cut through and escape her Yin aura.

Even Alex when he was only in the Meridian Tempering realm could send out attacks that reached her if they were Yang elemental attacks, so it was obvious that Yang attacks would be the only thing that can fight against her so effortlessly.

"You can't win against me at all, little girl," the old man said. His blade glowed yellow as he dashed ahead once again.

"We'll see about that." Suddenly, Ma Rong let go of anything she was holding back. The amount of Yin Qi that flowed out of her body was incredible.

The whole front yard of her house started to get frosty, while the rest of the 4 people there were starting to feel the cold.

The old man also frowned behind his mask. "Shit! I didn't know this bitch could produce such strong Yin Qi," he thought.

Ma Rong put her sword for and an illusory snake came out of her sword, making its way towards the old man.

The old man suddenly spun his sword in his hand, sending out circular blades of Yang Qi to cut the Yin snakes.

However, things didn't go as the old man expected. His Yang blades quite dissipated when they struck the snakes. The snakes also lost a lot of their energy, but that told him that if the two of them clashed directly now, Ma Rong would definitely win.

"Screw this, I'm not here for her anyway," the old man thought and dashed away. Everyone saw that he was going for Alex.

The second elder and Wen Cheng got their swords ready, while Alex got his teleportation ready to dodge. However, suddenly Ma Rong appeared in front of all of them.

She had teleported in front of them as well and sent out a Yin slash. The old man was surprised when he saw her appear out of nowhere and immediately switched his direction to get out of the way of the attack.

Ma Rong was about to go attack him when she felt something behind her. She turned around to see Alex completely white-eyed, falling to the ground.

Her Yin Qi was just too much for him to remain conscious. The fear was something she understood and could give an explanation for, albeit a really poor one.

Alex had a yang body that was worse than her Yin body. So, whenever she was around and openly using her constitution, Alex would feel a bit scared.

However, this was not something she understood. How could her Yin possibly make him faint, when everyone else around her was perfectly fine?

Ma Rong stepped away from Alex and he finally got back up. He couldn't tell what had happened as his vision had just gone in and out of focus, but he could feel a sense of fear from deep within him.

Ma Rong had now moved away from in front of him.

The Bandit Killer was also looking at them with a hint of confusion in his eyes. He didn't understand what was happening, but as long as the kid was fine, he was fine with it too.

Ma Rong looked forward, toward the old man, as she asked, "What do you want with my disciple?"

"You don't have to know," the old man said. Without even seeing his face, they could all tell how smug he was inside of his mask.

"This man is after you Yu Ming, Leave while we keep him here," Ma Rong said.

"No, master, I can help," Alex said.

She suddenly turned around with an angry face and shouted, "Alex, LEAVE!"

Alex was about to say something when he realized what he had just heard.

"How… how do you know that name?"

Chapter 540: Father's Name

Alex's eyes were wide open at the moment. He looked at his master with a look of confusion and surprise.

"Master, how do you know my name?" he asked.

"Now's not the time. Run away," Ma Rong said. As she dashed forward. She started fighting with the old man who couldn't really fight against her directly, so he started kiting her.

He would attack her a little and run away before attacking her again. He kept her from getting too close to him as it would be near impossible to fight her with how strong she was.

'Dammit! We have practically the same cultivation base, and yet thanks to her superior body constitution, I am being forced to take the coward's role in the fight,' he thought.

He looked to the side and saw Wen Cheng grabbing Alex.

"Yu Ming, let's go. That old man seems to be here for you. We need to leave while Ma Rong is holding him off," Wen Cheng said.

He knew he couldn't really add much to the fight unless Ma Rong dropped her aura, in which case, she would likely get very injured.

The best way to help her was to not help her right now.

Alex was stubborn, but he understood it as well. He wanted answers as to why Ma Rong knew his name that he had never spoken in the game, not even by mistake, but that could wait until she defeated the old man.

"We need to leave," Wen Cheng turned to the 2nd and 3rd Elders too, who started running towards Alex to protect him.

Seeing Wen Cheng hold Alex to take him away, the old man started getting restless. He was here for Alex and if he was taken away, all the planning he did for the last 6 months, all the bandits he had to kill to make them accept the offer. It would've all been in vain.

He wasn't going to let that happen. He couldn't let that happen. It would seem that he needed to use his hidden knife right now.

"Stop him from getting away!" the old man cried out.

Suddenly, of the two pairs of legs that were running towards Alex, one of them sped up.

Wen Cheng reacted to the change and brought out his sword, but he was a little too late. A bright light flashed right where he was and the sword he was holding fell to the ground.

Two streams of blood gushed out of Wen Cheng. Both of which came from either of his arms. He looked down to see that his right arm and 2 of his 5 fingers on his left hand had been severed off.

"Wha-?" he looked dumbfounded as the reality of what had just happened didn't settle in his mind immediately.

The attacker turned around and went for Wen Cheng again, but the other person arrived just in time and stopped the person's sword mere inches from Wen Cheng's neck.

Alex watched the Second and Third elder clash with a pale face that was stunned.

Ma Rong noticed what had happened, and she too had to stop fighting with the old man to look back.

The Second Elder gritted his teeth with a face full of anger and shouted, "SuSu! What the hell are you doing?"

The third elder moved a little back and got into a stance. "Go away dear, you don't have to fight me," she said.

"Answer me, SuSu! What are you doing? Where are you attacking sect leader Wen?" the Second Elder pointed his sword towards his wife as he screamed in anger.

"What do you mean?" the third elder asked as if she had done nothing wrong. Her left hand went behind her back as she pulled out a black mask. "It is my responsibility as a daughter to obey my father, isn't it?"

All 4 of them watched as the third elder put on the mask in horror as they realized what was happening.

They were betrayed.

"Your… father?" the Second Elder was stupefied. The revelation rang in his ears like a thunderclap.

"You… you told me your parents died of a disease when you were little. How can he be your father?" the second elder asked.

"Easy," the third elder said. "I lied."

"You lied?" Anger flared back in his eyes. "You lied all this time? What's was your purpose in getting close to me?"

"My purpose?" this time it was the third elder who was surprised. "Why would I have any reason to get close to you? I only needed to infiltrate the sect and get it ready for when my father arrived, that's all. Falling in love with you was… a happy coincidence."

Wen Cheng grunted as the shock faded away and the pain came flaring back. Alex turned towards him and saw a pool of blood beneath him.

He quickly brought out a healing pill from his storage bag and gave it to Wen Cheng. Wen Cheng quickly ate it and his wounds closed up, but just like Alex, his cuts too ended on a stub.

Wen Cheng was now without his right arm a few centimeters down from his shoulder and was missing his little and ring fingers off of his left hand.

He gritted his teeth and pried his sword off of his fallen hands and grabbed them with his three fingers. His grip was weak, that too on his off-hand that he rarely used his sword with, but he took it and got ready to fight.

"Yu Ming, run away from here," Wen Cheng said.

"Master, you need to leave too. We all need to leave," Alex said. "Let's call in reinforcement."

"You go call them," Wen Cheng said. "I will kill this bitch."

Alex looked one last time towards them and turned around to leave.

"You're not leaving anywhere," the old man shouted. Immediately he took out a formation plate and threw it below him.

Suddenly, a massive formation sprung forth passing through everyone and reaching a size of about 50 meters in diameter.

It encompassed the entirety of Ma Rong's residence as well as part of the land outside of it.

Alex could see the barrier surrounding them, but he hoped that he could still escape. The earth opened up beneath him, and he fell through. He then involuntarily traveled through the earth until he hit something and came back out.

When he was out, he saw a slightly yellow barrier in front of him. "Tsk!" he thought. He really couldn't escape now after all.

"YHAAA!" Wen Cheng shouted as he ran forward to attack the third Elder. However, before he could reach her, another sword arrived in front of Wen Cheng and stopped his attack."

"What the hell are you doing, Song Heng!" Wen Cheng shouted.

"I can't let you kill her, sect leader Wen. She's my wife, the person I love," the Second Elder said. Despite being weaker than Wen Cheng, he could easily stop Wen Cheng's strike.

"Look at her! She's not the person you knew. She was acting this whole time. She's a traitor and has been using you this whole time," Wen Cheng said.

Song Heng felt a tinge of pain in his heart as he knew that was very likely the truth. Still, he held on to the hope that it was all a lie and that he was likely dreaming.

The Third Elder jumped at them with the sword glowing brown and slashed towards Wen Cheng.

The second elder pushed back Wen Cheng in time and blocked her attack.

"How dare you say that?!" she shouted towards Wen Cheng, trying to force her way to him. "How dare you say my love is fake? There is no truer love than what I feel for him."

The Second elder didn't know what to do. All the things she said... it sounded so good, so true, and yet… could it really be true?

"I'm not lying honey," the third elder turned towards him. "I really do love you." She said.

The Second elder could only see her eyes, but in those eyes, he could see the truth. It was true. She really did love him.

"I loved you so much that when my father asked for a fake name, I even suggested him your family name," she said with a fervent glee in her eyes.

"You did… what?" the Second Elder was confused. "What fake name?"

"My father, when he was here, he needed a name, so I took your family name, Song, and made him a name."

Everyone was confused, but Alex's eyes went wide. Before the third elder even spoke, he already knew who she was talking about

The first person he truly fought to the death, the person that had infiltrated their sect.

"Song Zun!"

Chapter 541: Stopping the Formation

"What?" Ma Rong and the Second Elder turned towards Alex when he shouted out that name.

"Song Zun, that's him. That's the original body of Song Zun who was just a clone. He's after the thing in the Forbidden Fields," Alex shouted as the understanding of what was happening came to him.

He gasped as he understood more. "Master, he wants my body to make me his clone. That is the only way he can survive in the Forbidden Fields. That's why he is after me," Alex shouted.

The old man's eyes showed annoyance through the mask. "Tsk, you idiot. Why are you going around giving out information?" he scolded the Third Elder.

The Third Elder's eyes changed from glee to fear. "I'm sorry father," she said.

"Whatever, just kill them so we can be done with. The formation won't last very long," he said.

"Bu-But father, he's my—"

"Screw your husband. If I tell you to kill, you kill," the old man shouted.

"Y-Yes, father," she said and turned towards the Second Elder. "I'm sorry, dear. It seems you lost your chance to leave."

A tear flowed down the Second Elder's face while his face grew resolute. "No, don't be. I was stupid to fall in love with you in the first place."

He held up his sword, pointing directly at her, and said, "I won't make the same mistake again."

Wen Cheng walked up to his side and got into an awkward stance with his sword pointed at her as well.

The Third Elder still looked at the Second Elder and said, "I promise! I will make your death as painless as possible."

"Tsk. So much talki—"

The old man was halfway through speaking when he was attacked by Ma Rong. The cold air reached him before even she did.

The old man immediately employed his movement technique, putting in physical force and Qi into his legs to create one snappy jump that would send him elsewhere in an instant.

He didn't really have control over his body when he did this, but it was the fastest he could be, so he always employed this technique.

Ma Rong saw him run away and went after him. She wouldn't let the old man get close to her disciple at all.

The Second Elder and Wen Cheng started fighting as well against the Third Elder.

Wen Cheng sent a green slash flying towards the Third Elder, who sent a brown slash of her own to block the slash. Her attack turned out to be slightly stronger and went past the green slash to attack Wen Cheng.

The Second Elder appeared in between and hit the slash away with his own sword. He placed his palm against the flat side of his sword and wiped it until his hand ran off the sword.

A burst of blue flame erupted from where he touched, making his sword burn with fire that was truly at a very high temperature.

He dashed forward and swung the sword at his wife. The Third Elder saw the attack coming and brought up an earthen wall in front of her.

The Second Elder easily destroyed the wall, but there was no one on the other side. His wife had already left the place and went to Wen Cheng to kill him first.

Wen Cheng saw her coming and used his Elusive Heavenly sword to dodge the close-ranged attacks. He also retaliated with his own attacks, but due to the lack of grip and strength from his off-hand, they didn't do much.

The Second Elder returned, attacking her from behind, but the Third Elder was too agile. She immediately turned, parrying his sword, and used her feet to produce an earth spike that directly targeted his chest.

The Second Elder managed to block it, but he was pushed away. At the same time, multiple rocks were sent hurling towards Wen Cheng, who barely managed to stop them with his sword.

Right when he blocked the final rock, he realized that the woman was missing. A chill went down his spine when he sensed her behind him with her sword nearly reaching his neck.

He was going to die.

HISS

A snake appeared out of nowhere and attacked her, forcing her to stop her attack and dodge away.

Wen Cheng turned towards her and got into his stance again. 'This woman is dangerous,' he thought. The Second Elder appeared next to him and got into stance as well. He too had realized that his wife had been hiding her skills from him all along.

Little green, Ma Rong's snake, appeared next to them and got ready to fight under the orders of its master.

Immediately, the 3 of them rushed forward, fighting against a sole woman who was finally showing struggle as there were too many fighters against her.

Ma Rong was still chasing after the old man who did nothing but kite her to tire her. She knew that and was letting him do that.

The more he thought he was winning, the better it would be for her when she sneak-attacked him. For now, she had to keep attacking without her attacks doing anything to the old man.

Alex was left alone, doing nothing. The battle around him was way too high level for him. It wasn't like when he fought Black Venom where he was confident that he could dodge her.

These people were a realm higher than her, and the difference was very apparent. If not for his spiritual sense and focus mode, Alex couldn't even keep track of half the attacks that were happening around him.

He understood that he couldn't help them at all right now. The only help he could do was bring someone from outside to aid the others in battle.

However, the barrier was tough and Alex couldn't destroy it all. "Master should be able to shut it off at a moment's notice if she used her Yin Qi to stop the energy of the formation plate," he thought. However, his master was busy.

If she stopped for even a moment, the old man would definitely come for her. Alex went invisible and concealed his aura to disappear. This way, his master could probably stop the formation at once.

However, just as he went invisible, a wave of spiritual energy went past him. 'Dammit!' he thought. The old man had spiritual sense too.

Alex didn't know how or where he acquired the spiritual sense, but he did and that was terrible for him. Now, his master couldn't leave the old man to stop the formation.

"I will have to do it," he thought. He didn't let go of his invisibility or his concealment and ran towards the formation plate before standing in front of it.

"What do I do now?" he thought. As far as he knew, there were 3 normal ways to shut down a formation plate.

First, you could destroy the formation plate, however, that required a lot of strength since the metal was made to withstand the attacks of very high leveled True realm cultivators.

Alex knew without even trying that there was no way he could break the formation. Still, he needed to try it, just to be sure.

Alex took out his sword and brought it up way overhead. The sword started glowing golden with metal Qi with a bright white outline around it thanks to his Sword Intent.

He took a deep breath and brought it down very hard at the formation plate. He expected the sword to hit the formation plate, yet not leave single damage.

However, what happened instead surprised him even more. Before his sword could even touch the formation plate, a barrier appeared around the plate.

His sword rebounded off of the barrier, sending his hurtling back.

"What?" he cried out loud. The formation plate that produced a barrier, had a barrier protecting it as well.

'Shit! That's ingenious,' Alex thought. Usually, a True rank formation could only do 2 or 3 things at once.

Most barrier formations used it to create a barrier, then used the other 1 or 2 base formations to either stop sound and images from leaking outside or put a disorienting formation to mess with their opponent.

However, the old man's formation did none of that. Alex couldn't tell if it had a 3rd function or not, but the 2 function of the True grade formation in front of him was to create a barrier to stop the enemy from leaving and then another barrier to stop them from tampering with the formation plate.

Alex had never even thought of doing something like that before.

"Dammit! This means the other 2 methods won't work either," he thought.

Aside from destroying the plate, the other two methods for stopping a formation were to remove the energy source from the plate.

If Alex had removed the energy source, the formation would end on its own.

The final way was a bit more dangerous. What one could do was tamper with the formation strokes themselves and make it so that the formation no longer did what it was supposed to.

99 times out of 100, the formation would just stop working. However, there was a chance that the formation would end up turning volatile and end up as a make-shift bomb.

Alex wondered what he could do since neither of the 3 methods was doable due to the barrier.

That was when he noticed something. He noticed the number of strokes on the formation plate.

As expected, this formation did 3 things, not 2.

"What's the third effect of this formation?" Alex thought. He needed to find out.

Chapter 542: That Face

There was a third base formation in the formation plate. Meaning, there was one more thing the formation did that hadn't been apparent to anyone yet.

What was it? Was it an illusory formation? Maybe disorienting? It didn't look like the old man was very worried about sound when he started attacking, so it was likely that wasn't it.

Alex looked at the formation diagram and understood that he had never seen that formation before. So there really was nothing in his mind to immediately give him an answer.

The only way to tell what it did was to separate the 3 Base formations in the diagram as well as the extra strokes that connected them.

This was gonna take some time. He didn't know if he had any.

"Please hold on for a little longer," he softly begged his masters and immediately created a fire in mid-air. The fire immediately changed shape as it twisted and elongated to make a circle.

Alex then started putting in the strokes of the formation.

The reason for him creating an image of the formation rather than just looking at the one on the plate was so that he could erase and add the strokes as he likes.

Having a physical, visual diagram he could interact with made it all easier. He could've done it on the ground, but with his grown Flame Mastery Scripture, it was very much easier to just use fire instead.

Very quickly, Alex drew one stroke after another nearly finishing the formation. People had seen him draw the formation on the air, but no one had time to ask him what he was doing.

'A single line through the middle,' Alex thought and put in the final strokes of the formation.

Suddenly, a low humming sound was released from the diagram, as if he had just put the final piece of the puzzle. The hum lasted for maybe a second before it went away.

'What was that?' Alex thought, but he didn't have the time to think about it. He immediately started tinkering with the diagram.

They kept on going on the other side. Ma Rong kept her eyes on Alex at all times, not letting the old man ever get close to him.

The other fight however was at a standstill. Wen Cheng was all bloodied up at the moment. Due to many mistakes he had made during the fight, he had cuts all over his body, making it harder for him to fight.

He could easily tell that they were at a disadvantage against the woman, however, every time she got close to killing him, the Second Elder would interfere and she would get away.

It seemed she was still hesitant about killing him, despite what she proclaimed earlier.

Little green was helpful, perhaps the most of the three, but even the green snake couldn't withstand the strength of the woman. She had always been a fighter it seemed, and she had kept it hidden very well.

Ma Rong's fight against the old man wasn't going much better either. However, since she was stronger, she wasn't bloodied up like Wen Cheng was. It had been nearly 15 minutes since she started fighting, but she wasn't making much progress.

She was still waiting for that one moment when he wasn't attentive. That moment when he wasn't on guard. That one moment where she could hit him.

Suddenly, Alex shouted from behind her.

"Master, you need to defeat him quickly," Alex said. In front of him were 3 different formation diagrams. Of them, two looked identical, while the last one was different.

These first two were the barrier diagram, while the last one was…

"The formation is helping him recover his Qi he lost while fighting. As long as he is in the formation, he likely won't run out of Qi," he said. "You can't keep this chase going forever or you will lose."

The old man heard it and looked towards Alex in surprise. "Tsk, he figured it o—"

That one moment was here.

Ma Rong teleported for the first time since she was seriously fighting the old man. She appeared behind him and slashed her sword at his neck.

Unfortunately, the old man seemed to have more awareness than Ma Rong expected him to. He moved to the right, without employing any movement technique, to escape from the sword.

However, the cold aura slowed him down by a considerable amount. The sword hit the side of the old man's face, putting a crack on the mask he was wearing.

The old man was sent flying and he crashed into the walls of the house as the house came caving in on him.

Ma Rong got ready to attack when she noticed him come out of the rubble.

"Tsk. That was sneaky of you— What? What are you looking at?" the old man asked her daughter who had stopped fighting and was staring at her father. He then saw Wen Cheng, Ma Rong and Alex stare at him with wide eyes.

"Hmm?" he suddenly brought his hands onto his face and realized his mask was missing. He immediately brought out another mask and wore it again.

Alex was so stunned that he didn't even realize the man's mask was down.

"You…." He said. "You are that old man, from that beast attack," he said remembering the night when it rained for the first time in the game.

They had been on their way to the tournament when they stopped to help some people getting attacked by the beasts. After saving them, Ma Rong refused to take them with them saying that he was likely a fraud.

This old man had the same face.

Ma Rong didn't speak at all and instead started wondering just how far back this whole thing went. Still, it was clear to see that she was pretty shocked too.

However, neither of their shocks could match up to the shock Wen Cheng was feeling at the moment.

"Su Chen!" Wen Cheng said with eyes so wide that one could look into his soul to see how unreal the moment was feeling to him.

"Hmm… you actually recognize me, boy? Were you around back then?" the old man asked with a hint of intrigue.

"Yes," Wen Cheng said with a serious voice. "I was there. I was there to see the destruction you brought forth. The cries you evoked. The tears you made them bleed."

"I was there to watch the sect nearly get extinct on that day, the day the sect leader died and the day you were supposed to have died in your exile, Second elder," he said.

Alex's eyes went wide once more when he realized who the old man was. 'That old man that incited the Tiger Sect war back then? Wasn't he supposed to be dead?' he thought.

"Haha, you really were there. Since so many people died, I didn't think many would remember," the old man said. "They were stupid, weren't they? Thinking I would die just because they threw me out while I was wounded. Those cowards couldn't even kill me correctly."

"Wen Cheng, who is he?" Ma Rong asked.

"This is the Tiger sect's second elder, Su Chen, from over 50 years ago. He started a war with the sect leader of that time due to his greed for the sect leader position, leading to infighting that nearly wiped out the entire sect."

"Barely a few elders and disciples remained alive at the time," Wen Cheng said. He had his eyes on the old man the whole time, not taking them off even for a bit.

"How did you survive? You were near death back then," Wen Cheng asked.

"With my expertise and knowledge, it's easy for me to survive," the old man said. "Albeit, I had to destroy my cultivation base at the time and had to remain as a mortal for a few years before my meridians were all set back. However, it helped me rebuild my foundation and made me stronger than I would have been with my previous cultivation method."

"Why are you targeting my disciple now? Are you trying to take revenge for the past?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Tsk, another idiot. Did you not hear the boy say I was here for his body?" the old man asked in an annoyed voice. " I don't really care about the Tiger sect enough at the moment to take a revenge for the past. A single instruction to the bandit leaders was enough for it."

"Then what's your purpose?" Wen Cheng asked. "What do you want with my disciple's body?"

"Same thing I have wanted since I learned about it in the sect records way back then," the old man said. "That stupid Tian Chengong, I told him I was right about it, and that we could not let this new sect take over our ancestral grounds, and yet he never listened to me."

"Look at how they took it for their own, not a hint of the old Tiger sect left in this place," the old man said as he looked around.

"The…old tiger sect?" Wen Cheng and Ma Rong were both surprised. Wen Cheng looked around. "Was Tiger sect previously located in this place?" he asked with a hint of a shock to his voice.

For years, he had taken the incomplete information about the Tiger sect having relocated from someplace else. He went above and beyond trying to find that place, yet he never did. "So the Hong Wu sect took over where the Tiger Sect was previously?"

Chapter 543: Stalling for Time

"My house used to be there, on that mountain, yet it's nothing but fog now. I used to fight against my fellow disciples at the valley down below, yet not a single fighting ground exists there anymore," the old man said with melancholy to his voice.

"I don't blame you though, little girl. The only one I blame is Tian Chengong. We could've stopped you from moving here, but he didn't want to let go of the new location of Tiger sect, all because he found that black stone pretty."

The old man turned to Wen Cheng and spoke, "You see, there is something wrong in your story about the past. You called me a jealous man, a greedy man who wanted all for himself. You said I attacked the sect leader because I wanted his position."

"Truthfully, you would not be wrong. Yes, I did attack Tian Chengong because I wanted his position, but it wasn't because I was drawn to its power. No, I had no other choice at that time since only a Sect leader had enough power to do what I needed to do."

"I had gathered a significant amount of people to come transfer back to this place, but I also didn't want to split the Tiger sect at the time. I insisted Tian Chengong to move the sect back."

"But no," the old man said. "That coward would always use the emperor's orders as a means to persuade the rest to stay where he was. Everyone knew he was just attached to that black stone too much to let go of it. Since it was impossible to move, he didn't want to leave that place."

"That was why I decided to attack him when he returned wounded from the adventure. It was the perfect time for me to get rid of him and take charge of the sect to bring us back here, bring us back to glory, bring us close to the location that helped the Tiger sect reach the height it had back then."

Wen Cheng felt like everything he had known about the past was a lie. It seemed what was written on the records wasn't entirely true and missing a lot of the information.

Only a few high elders from back then had survived and merely 2 of them remained at the current time and were inclosed cultivation for a long time to hopefully extend their life.

The Second Elder was still holding off the third elder, while the rest of them were at standstill. Even Ma Rong wasn't sure what to do right now as whatever the old man was telling her seemed really important.

Tiger sect? In this place? She couldn't wrap her head around it. She had only come to this sect some 30 years ago and by that time the sect had already been established for over 15 years.

Also, the elders of that time mentioned nothing about it.

Wen Cheng was reeling in his shock when he realized something. Something he read in the few remaining records, they mentioned something that he hadn't thought about at the moment.

"The records," he spoke out, his eyes darting everywhere. "The records spoke of the sacred land, the holy land of Tiger sect to be close to the original location. Does that mean…?"

"Hmm? You're close, but a little wrong," the old man said. "While this was the previous location of Tiger sect, this too was a place we had moved to since we couldn't stay in the other place any longer. At least, that's what I read in the records."

"The original place where the Tiger Sect was originated was there," the old man said while pointing behind him.

"The Forbidden Fields?" Alex asked in surprise. He remembered the record he had read in the library. It stated that the sacred land was a place the sect members didn't dare enter.

Wen Cheng, and with his influence, Alex had come to assume that the sacred land was in some ways Holy to them, which was why they wouldn't dare step on it.

However, now that he realized it was the Forbidden Fields, he realized that it wasn't that they wouldn't step in the sacred land, but rather they couldn't. At least, not without losing their cultivation base for the moment and having to fight with dangerous beasts as a mortal.

"Wait," Wen Cheng shouted. "The records mentioned a massive blue landscape where the previous location of Tiger sect was, but… there is no such thing back there."

Alex nodded. If anything, with all the yellow sand, the writer of the record would call it a yellow landscape.

"You stupid idiot, what did I just tell you? We moved from the other place," the old man said. "We came from the north. What do you think you will reach if you went all the way up north?"

Wen Cheng's eyes opened wide as he realized how far the original location of the Tiger sect was located. Up north, over a thousand kilometers away, a location that would take even True realm experts nearly half a day to reach, at the edge of the Crimson Empire, one could see…

"The ocean," Wen Cheng realized. The blue landscape wasn't a large river or a lake as he had previously imagined. It was the ocean.

"What… is there," Wen Cheng asked the old man.

Even through the mask, people could see him smile as he said, "the Sect's Treasure."

"The… sect treasure?" Wen Cheng was both surprised and confused.

"Yes, the sect treasure. The treasure around which the Tiger sect came into existence. It was at its initial phase at the time and would take years to grow according to the records."

"The time has come. The treasure has grown and is a step away from maturing. Any day now, it will mature. Do you want to know what the treasure is?" the old man asked.

"Yes," Wen Cheng nodded his head without even knowing.

"Then hand over that kid to me. With his body, I can traverse the desert, and find the treas—"

The moment the talking turned back around to being about Alex, Ma Rong attacked the old man. The old man had been consciously waiting for one of them to attack the whole time.

He talked all this time so that he could gather up the Qi he had lost. Using the formation, the amount he would get back would be a lot and could last longer in the fight against Ma Rong.

Ma Rong turned to look at Wen Cheng who was still dumbfounded about the whole thing.

"Wen Cheng, stop daydreaming and go help them," she shouted.

The whole time the old man was stalling for time, the second Elder and the third elder were fighting each other.

The Second elder had been protecting Wen Cheng by putting his own life on the line which the Third Elder refused to take.

Even the old man had noticed this and had been annoyed for a while, but he didn't want to bring attention to their fight.

However, now that Ma Rong was attacking him again, he was starting to feel the pressure once more and needed his daughter to help him out a bit.

"Dammit," he cried out. "Kill that bastard and come help me already, or are you useless just like your mother?"

The Third Elder shuddered and her eyes grew cold. "I'm sorry, father. I will deal with this quickly," she said.

She slammed her feet down and a bunch of rock spikes appeared from the ground around her.

The Second Elder used his flaming sword to cut the stones around him, little green just twisted his body to dodge the spikes, and Wen Cheng jumped back entirely to escape it all.

However, right as he was landing, another few rock spikes appeared beneath him and pierced his right leg's calf. Wen Cheng couldn't keep his balance and fell to the ground. With his already numerous cut, he was having a hard time with the battle.

"Master," Alex shouted and brought out a pill to feed him. He was about to walk towards his master when a wall appeared between him and Wen Cheng.

Alex tried to go around it, but Wen Cheng spoke, "stay back, it's dangerous."

Alex wanted to help, but it was indeed too dangerous. He watched the fight and quickly realized how serious the Third Elder was at the moment. Her attacks were no longer holding back and she was using techniques she hadn't shown before.

Just like her father, she too used a movement technique that gave her a burst of speed. Wen Cheng was barely holding on, especially with one of his feet not holding his weight properly.

The Third Elder launched herself towards Wen Cheng to stab him with the sword, but the Second Elder appeared in front of her once more, hoping to stop her like he had been all this time.

He was gravely mistaken. The brown blade pierced through his chest and came out on the other side.

Alex gasped in shock when he realized that the Second elder had been stabbed through the heart.

A single tear escaped the Third Elder's eyes as she said in a small voice, "I'm sorry."

The Second Elder looked at the sword in shock. He couldn't believe that he was actually stabbed. Was he going to die? Is this how he was going to die?

The loss of blood to his brain was slowly making his vision got darker by the second. He only had a few more breaths left.

'I won't go out like this,' he thought. He did his best to pull up his dangling arm and wrapped it around his wife, hugging her as tight as he could, pushing the sword deeper into him until his body was fully touching her.

He rested his head on her shoulders as tears started streaming down his cheeks as well, and said softly, "I'm sorry too."

He used the last of his breaths to scream. "DO IT NOW!"

Little green immediately rushed forward.

"No!" the Third Elder cried out but she couldn't move her husband's arms from herself in time. Or… maybe she could, but she didn't want to. Maybe she thought she deserved what was coming.

The snake wrapped around the both of them, keeping the Third elder steady in one place, giving Wen Cheng the perfect shot.

Wen Cheng stood on his left leg, held the sword with his 3 fingers on the left hand, and used the best technique he had at the moment.

His Sword Intent.

His sword glowed white around the edges, and he used an explosive speed to dash forward. When he reached right next to the two of them, he slashed his sword on the Third Elder targetting her neck.

Chapter 544: Yin and Yang

THUD

The Third Elder's head rolled on the floor. Little green let go of the constriction and the two bodies stuck together also fell on the ground.

The Second Elder's eyes were wide with tears rolling down them. "I… I'm… sorry," he spoke one last time and breathed his last breath.

He was dead.

Wen Cheng slumped on the floor, his body giving upon him. The right calf was hurting him incredibly along with the other cuts in his body.

Alex rushed over and stopped for a second when he saw the Second Elder's blank eyes. He felt a tinge of sadness seeing someone he was quite close to in the sect die like this.

To die by the hands of someone he loved, what greater tragedy could there be in this world?

Alex knelt in front of him and put his hands on his eyes. "Rest in peace, Second Elder," he said and brushed down his eyelids to close his eyes.

Alex then made his way to his master and brought out a pill. Wen Cheng ate the pill and felt the energy in it healing him. In mere moments, all of his wounds had disappeared.

"Thank you," he said and tried to stand up but…

"Woah!" he felt dizzy and fell back down to the ground.

"Don't move too quick, master. You've lost a lot of blood. The pill I gave you only healed you, but it did nothing for your blood. With your lack of blood, you will have blurred vision and dizziness for a while," Alex said.

"Urghh!" Wen Cheng grabbed his head. "Don't you have any pills for giving me blood?"

"Unfortunately not, Master," Alex said. "I will get one for y—"

"Look out!" Wen Cheng shouted and pushed Alex away. A yellow palm hit Wen Cheng directly on his chest, throwing him into the barrier.

Wen Cheng coughed up blood as he hit the floor and stopped moving.

"No!" Alex shouted and looked back to where the attack had come from. It was the old man.

His eyes were red with fury, his body glowing yellow as he used every bit of Yang energy in his body to bypass Ma Rong's attacks to send out his own attack towards them.

"I will kill you bastards!" he shouted.

Ma Rong immediately teleported in front of him and struck at him. The old man swung his sword to get rid of Ma Rong and go after Wen Cheng, but he couldn't.

"Get away from me!" he shouted, but Ma Rong wasn't going to let go of him. She too was angry at the fact that the Second Elder died.

The Second Elder was one of the best elders in the sect. Perhaps even better than her when it came to handling the sect matters.

When she was unconscious due to the Yang energy in her body, or when she was stuck indoors due to her newly awakened constitution. Or even when she stayed in her room neglecting the sect work due to the pain of probably having lost a disciple.

The Second Elder helped her in all of those situations by taking on the workload all on himself, and now he was dead. The person who killed him was also dead, so the only person she could go after was the old man.

Being the person who started it all, and being the person who wanted to kill her disciple, Ma Rong finally started feeling fury like she had never before.

Just like the old man, she too was angry.

Ma Rong and the old man went into what looked to be the final stage of their battle. Both of them were giving their all to end it as quickly as possible.

Alex ran back to his master and saw him on the floor choking on choking on his own blood. Alex immediately pushed him on his side and used his Qi to help him release all the blood in his lungs and esophagus.

'Master has already lost so much blood. If he loses some more, he will probably retain some permanent damage,' Alex thought.

He brought out another pill and slowly pushed it down Wen Cheng's throat. Alex sent his Qi through Wen Cheng's veins and checked if the inside was now fine or not.

It took a while, but he fully checked Wen Cheng all over and sighed in relief that he was okay. The blood loss had made him fall unconscious, but he was breathing fine. He would make it out alive and well.

Alex took out his sword and held it in his right arm, he was going to protect Wen Cheng from any attacks that came his way now.

However, it didn't seem like he would be needing to do that anymore. Ma Rong was continuously getting the upper hand.

For a good chunk of time now, she had been fully expelling Yin from her body to stop the old man, and Alex was worried she wouldn't be able to keep it up for very long.

The old man was fully flaring his Qi too, but he had the formation to support him. Alex was really worried as he watched the two of them fight.

But it seemed that was the right choice as he saw parts of the old man's body having ice on it. Ma Rong's hit was getting in.

"Hang in there a little longer, master," Alex said. It was unclear which master he was talking about, but it was very much likely to be the both of them.

Ma Rong sent out a ball of frozen water at the old man. With his movements delayed, the old man couldn't dodge in time and ended up taking the hit on the left shoulder.

Frost built up at the place where he was hit, but he ignored it. A handful of fire gathered in front of him, which he blew on to create a massive spray of flames that attacked Ma Rong.

Ma Rong swung her blade in front of her and immediately the fire was cut in half, but it wasn't destroyed. She was a little surprised to notice that the fire had Yang energy in it.

The two halves of the fire hit either side of her but did nothing to her. In the chaos, the old man tried to run away, but he couldn't. Ma Rong's spiritual sense was on him the whole time.

She immediately teleported next to him and sent two Yin snakes at him. The old man reacted in time and slashed the two Yin snakes, but a third one, hidden behind the two suddenly appeared in front of him and directly bit him on the shoulders.

"AHH!" he shouted as the right half of his body started freezing over. Finally, he was hit with something he couldn't deflect.

He flared his Yang Qi, but the freezing wouldn't stop. Ma Rong's Yin was of a higher grade than his Yang.

His arm, including his fist which was still wrapped around his sword, also froze, making it impossible for him to do anything with his sword.

He tried to move back, but he realized that his back was up against the house rubbles again. He could feel the stiffness in his legs as well. He could no longer move very well either.

"No," the old man said. "This can't be it! I can't die like this!"

"You deserve this death," Ma Rong shouted and dashed towards the old man. The old man tried to run, but he was unable to.

"NO!" he cried out.

'No, I can't die like this. I still have yet to find the treasure,' he thought.

Suddenly, he heard something crack behind him. The crack was loud and following it, he felt a massive amount of energy passing past him.

It was Yang energy.

Ma Rong's sword that was coming straight for his heart deviated just slightly enough that it missed his heart and instead stabbed just a few centimeters above it.

Due to how thin Ma Rong's sword was, he was fine.

The frost in his arms and body started to melt away. The Yin Qi that Ma Rong's sword had, that would've otherwise frozen his heart and killed him, never actually came. He had lived.

His eyes went wide at the thing he had just experienced. He was happy at first, but after he understood what had happened, his eyes changed. It wasn't just a surprise in his eyes anymore, but rather fear too.

'No! It's too early,' he thought. 'I am not ready yet. I can't turn that kid into my clone in just mere 3 days.'

The treasure he had been so looking forward to had matured, and it would only remain that way for 3 more days before getting ruined forever.

He forgot all the pain he was feeling and angrily looked at Ma Rong only to be surprised at what he was seeing.

Ma Rong had no Yin Qi coming out of her. In fact, she had no aura. The old man tried to flare his cultivation base when he realized that he was being suppressed by the Yang energy.

He couldn't use his cultivation base at the moment. However, he didn't need to.

He suddenly swung his sword in front of him, cutting off Ma Rong's right hand which was still holding the sword that was deep inside of him.

Ma Rong was surprised, but she couldn't do anything. She couldn't even move. The Yang energy was especially suppressing her in more ways than just her cultivation base.

The old man took the opportunity and jumped towards her, sword at the ready, and directly stabbed through her stomach.

Chapter 545: Poison

Alex watched as Ma Rong got the upper hand. The old man's right arm was frozen and she was getting ready to stab him.

"Yes!" he said softly to himself.

'Finally, tonight's tragedy is over,' he thought.

Suddenly, he saw the massive barrier behind them crack open and fade as a giant wave of yellow energy flew their way.

Alex put his hands up to stop the light from hitting his eyes. While his hands were up, he heard a thud coming from in front of him.

He lowered his hands and…

"Eh?" the scene wasn't what he had expected. His master had been ready to kill him and yet..."Eh?" he watched blood flow down the missing arm, and a sword stabbed through the abdomen. Only, the victim was his master.

"Eh?"

He couldn't understand what had happened just now. His master was totally winning the battler. She had even stabbed the bastard through the heart. But then… why was she on the ground and that bastard standing.

The old man looked at his chest, then at his sword that was in Ma Rong, and pulled it out as fast as he could. He then looked towards Alex for a moment and started running up the mountain with his master's blade still stuck in his chest.

Why? Alex didn't understand again.

Finally, the urgency of the situation went through to him and he realized what had happened.

"Master!" he cried out and immediately ran forward. She was missing an arm just like his other master, but that was fine.

As for the stab wound in her abdomen, she could be fully healed with just a pill. There was nothing to worry about.

However, just as he was running, he realized something he hadn't realized due to the shock.

He had no cultivation base at the moment.

"What?" he cried out in surprise, but he made his way to his master regardless.

Ma Rong had gone into shock from the missing arm and getting stabbed in the abdomen. Her eyes darted around not understanding what was happening.

He grabbed Ma Rong's head and placed it on his lap to let her breathe easier. "Wait for a second master, I will get you a healing pill," Alex said. He brought out his storage bag with the pills in it, but then remembered that he had no Qi right now.

'No…' he thought. He quickly tried to use his spiritual energy, but he couldn't use that either.

"NO!" he shouted. He looked down at Ma Rong and the blood she was losing. He quickly tore off his already torn robe and wrapped it around her cut arm.

He then started wrapping the rest of the cloth around her abdomen. He picked her up a little and passed the cloth underneath, and that was when he noticed something.

The cut… the skin around the cut was starting to turn purple with red veins popping up in it. Alex didn't even have to guess to know what that was.

"Poison!" he thought.

His emotions were turning chaotic, his thinking all over the place.

"What do I do?" He was starting to panic. "Who can save her?"

Who could save someone that was poisoned by a cultivator's sword? His first instinct was to go to a doctor. However, did this city even have doctors? Alex didn't know.

'Maybe not all the place is Qi-less. Maybe I can use it elsewhere,' Alex thought and tried to carry her, but Ma Rong groaned in pain.

"Hang on, master. I will save you," he said and picked her up with his one arm before running out of the place. He ran past the two corpses and the unconscious master before leaving the sect master's front yard.

He then ran past his house and went down. However, before he could make it very far down, Ma Rong shouted once more.

"Master, hang on. Just a little l—"

Alex looked down to console her only to see her entire body starting to become the same as the cut which was still bleeding.

The red veins were starting to show. "No no no no no no no… master? Master! Can you hear me?" he asked.

Ma Rong slowly opened her weak eyes and looked at Alex. "Is that you… Alex?" she asked.

"Y-Yes master, it's me, Alex. Hang on," he said and started running down but Ma Rong cried once again.

Alex was starting to get scared as well. No matter how far away he went, he couldn't feel the Qi at all.

"Al… Alex... put me down," Ma Rong said.

"No, master. Just a little longer—"

"It's likely a saint rank poison," Ma Rong said weakly.

"What?" Alex's eyes went wide. "Wha-what do you mean it's a saint rank poison?"

"No-normal poisons don't work on my body. Th-there is no antidote to the poison in the sect," Ma Rong said with bated breath.

"I can tell. My body is trying its best… but it can't stop it," she said weakly.

Alex's face turned fully pale. "No way, that can't be true," Alex said.

"Alex?" Ma Rong called him again.

"Yes?" Alex asked with tears in his eyes.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Master? Master, I'm right in front of—" Alex stopped speaking. The red veins had made it up her body and reached her eyes. She could no longer see.

"Where are you Alex?" she asked.

"Master, I'm here. I'm right here," he said as he put her down and held her left hand with his right hand.

"Alex? Where's do you go? Why aren't you speaking?" she asked.

"Master, I'm speaking. I'm right here," he said as he squeezed her hands. However, it didn't look like she could feel it. The red veins had also reached her ears, making her unable to listen to anything anymore.

"Is anyone still here?" she asked. "Master? Shun'er? I… I think I'm dying. Am I dying? I don't want to die."

Ma Rong moved her right arm, trying to get a hold of something, anything— completely unaware that she had lost it.

"I don't know if you're listening or not right now. I don't even know if I'm talking or not. But, if I am… I'm sorry," Ma Rong said. Tears streamed down her eyes with a mixture of blood in them.

"I'm sorry I couldn't keep my promise, Alex," she said. "I'm sorry I couldn't keep my promise. I promised you, I promised that I would… ack…ack…"

The veins stopped her from speaking as well. "Master? MASTER! Please speak! Master!" Alex started crying. Ma Rong didn't respond at all as her breathing started to get heavier.

"No, no," he cried, tears streaming down his face. He picked her up once again and ran down the mountain.

She was starting to cough up blood by the time he reached the sect valley. "Help! Please help!" he shouted as he made his way through the valley to the Elder hall, crying all the way through.

The already tragic atmosphere got more tragic when they saw the deathly state of their sect leader.

The elders were already out after Qi was missing.

"Grand Elder! Martial Uncle! Anyone— Please help master," Alex shouted in front of the Elder's Hall.

"Little Ma?" the Grand Elder walked up to Alex with a pale face.

"Sister!" Lang Shun jumped with some other elder as a support due to his missing leg.

"Wh-What happened?" they asked as Alex laid Ma Rong down on the ground.

The elders started gathering around Ma Rong. Soon the disciples came to see what was happening when they saw Ma Rong.

Her body hadn't turned purple, but the red veins had crept all over her body. Tears were still streaming down her eyes, but at this point, they were so bloody that it was impossible to tell if it was even tear anymore.

Despite the redness, one could see how pale her skin had gotten already from the lack of blood. She had been bleeding this whole time.

Grand Elder cried as he struck the ground, angry at his helplessness. Lang Shun was angry too, but only towards the person who did this to his sister.

Alex cried at his helplessness as well. 'It should've been me,' he thought.

Ma Rong struggled with the poison for some more time while the people gathered around helplessly.

Only after minutes did she stop struggling.

That was when Ma Rong, the sect leader of the Hong Wu Sect, one of the most proficient Alchemy experts of the Crimson Empire, master of Alex, in the midst of all of her loved ones, passed away.

Chapter 546: Funeral

Alex couldn't accept that his master was dead. He just couldn't. He believed it all to be a dream, but the reality was often disappointing.

He cried along with the other elders for some time after she passed away.

Afterward, he explained what had happened. He told everyone how the attack on the city was a distraction for the old man to enter the sect and look for him.

If not for him being in the Tiger sect instead of here, he would've likely died at the start of the night.

The elders went up the mountain and saw the bloody scene of the stabbed Second elder and the beheaded Third elder, lying dead on the floor together.

The tragedy felt unending for them.

Wen Cheng too was quite bloody, but he would survive. The elders immediately got to treating him under Alex's request.

Alex had stopped crying by now, but then the tears started falling once more when he heard someone else crying.

Zhou Mei was down on the ground, next to both of her master's dead bodies. Alex had only lost a single master tonight, but she had lost two.

Even more so, she had been with her masters for a long time longer than Alex had. Surely, she was in much more pain than he was. Still, he couldn't imagine anyone feeling as much pain as he was.

Was it even possible to feel this much pain?

He would rather go through Body cultivation all over again, have his skin burned alive by the formation, or eat a thousand yang jades and feel his stomach burn to cinders than feel what he was feeling at the moment.

The elders ran up the mountain to check for the old man, but apparently, he wasn't there any longer.

'He must've gone to the Forbidden Fields,' Alex thought. After all, that was what he had been saying the whole time.

"Dammit! I could've got him if I had run after him!" Alex said as he slammed his own thighs. The regret was starting to get to him.

"Don't beat yourself up for what happened, Nephew. None of this was your fault, and you did the best you could," Lang Shun said with red eyes. "Be thankful that your master at least got to see you during the last few moments."

"If you had run after him, sister would've likely been alone during the last moments, with no one else by her side," he said.

Alex couldn't help but start crying when he heard that.

The elders started preparations for the funeral. It wasn't just Ma Rong or the Second elder who had died tonight. There were other elders too that had perished in the fight against the bandits.

They needed a funeral as well. Just as they were planning for the funeral, Alex made a request to them.

....

An hour passed since Ma Rong's death and finally, people could feel a hint of Qi in the air again.

Alex tried to use his spiritual sense and saw that he could spread it up to about 5 meters now. If only he could do that an hour earlier. Would that have helped his master in any way?

The yang in the air was subsiding, and Alex could feel the chill return back to the air.

He was standing on top of the alchemy mountain where the Yin gathering Tree was planted. Next to him were a few other elders, all of whom had come for his Master's funeral.

He had requested that she be buried here, given how much she cared for the plant. Surprisingly, none of the elders protested, as it seemed that they knew it too.

They dug a hole next to the decrepit tree. Alex and Lang Shun helped carry her corpse into the hole.

Once that was done, everyone started walking forward, throwing something of theirs into the grave.

"What is everyone doing?" Alex asked.

"They say after someone dies, they go to the afterlife. We are sending her anything that could be of help to her there to live a happy life after death," Grand Elder said with tears streaming down his eyes.

Alex felt sad. There was nothing of value he could give her.

The Grand Elder noticed this and added, "You don't really have to put in anything. I'm sure just seeing you stand here is already making her afterlife easier."

Everyone put in something, most of them putting in some spirit stones. When it was time for Alex, he took out a single pill.

He looked at the pill for a moment and tossed it down below.

"What is that?" Lang Shun asked.

"It's a pill I made," Alex said. "I never got to tell master how much progress I had made for the last 2 months. I hope she learns about it in the afterlife and knows that she does not have to worry about me."

"What pill was that? I didn't recognize it," Lang Shun asked.

"It's a common ranked pill, but it's one I came up with on my own," Alex said.

"I see," Lang Shun said. "Sister will be happy certainly. I remember when she said that just a few months after reaching the True realms, you will beat me in Alchemy."

Lang Shun chuckled when he remembered that day as tears pooled up in his eyes again. He wiped the tears and said, "I hope to see you reach that level someday."

The elders started pouring the dirt back onto the grave and filling it. Once they were done, they said a small prayer and moved on to the other funerals.

The rest of the funerals were taking place somewhere else. They went behind the elder residence area and to a graveyard that Alex didn't know about previously.

There weren't many gravestones in the place anyway. With only having been formed 50 or so years ago, the Hong Wu sect didn't really have many deaths that required burying here.

They buried the Second Elder and also the third Elder. Despite being a traitor, she was also an elder and had helped them quite a lot.

Alex once more saw Zhou Mei crying with her sister and Fan Ruogang consoling her. Kong Yuhan walked up to him and gave him his condolences.

The other elders were buried as well and the same ritual of passing something along took place once more.

Alex dropped his other best common pill he had been holding onto the second elder's grave. If not for him, he would have likely lost his life as well as his other master in the mountain tonight.

He thanked him for everything he did and walked away.

By the time the funeral was over, the Qi had returned a great amount. By thing time, Alex could feel himself having a cultivation base equivalent to that of a Muscle Tempering realm.

While the suppression was still there, it wasn't as bad as the ones in the Forbidden Fields.

He wondered why the yang in the air was going away, and where.

After everything was done, the Grand Elder told everyone, including Alex to go and get some rest. It had been a truly long and tragic night, and people needed their rest.

Chapter 547: Promise

Alex went to check up on Wen Cheng. After seeing him breathing a bit more easily, he sighed in relief. 'A few days to recover,' he assessed.

He walked out of the Elder's hall and looked at the surrounding. The sect valley that would always be cheerful, even at nighttime with disciples running all around, trying to perform alchemy was totally empty tonight.

The bright streets of the valley looked gloomy from the lack of any human in it.

Alex looked up at the sky, stars gleaming in the nighttime, some brighter than others. The moon seemed a little paler tonight as if the moon itself grieved over the tragedy it witness from the sky.

So many things had happened today and yet… it has still only been 5 hours at most. The time wasn't even 4 am in the night.

Everyone was ordered to go back to their homes to rest, so Alex returned too. He went back to his home and went into a room.

His cultivation base was close to the Bone Tempering realm by now. The yang energy was slowly dissipating from the surrounding. It would still take until morning if not more for it to completely disappear.

Alex decided not to dwell on it anymore and logged out. He opened the capsule and walked out. In the middle of the night, the world was silent.

He got onto his bed, but he couldn't sleep. His eyes were wide open as the feeling started to overwhelm him.

He didn't feel hungry. He didn't feel sleepy. He didn't feel tired. The only thing he could feel was pain. A deep pain that was etched into his soul itself.

The grief, the pain of the loss— it had followed him across bodies, across worlds.

Once again, Alex cried. This body hadn't cried prior to this, so when he cried, the tears flooded his face. Snot dripped down his nose, but he couldn't care any less.

He cried like he had never before. It was close to 4 am in the morning and the rooms had good noise cancellation, so nobody could hear him cry.

Alex wanted to rest, but the tears wouldn't let him. He didn't even feel like he could cry himself to sleep.

No one was there to console him for his loss. Alex felt alone in this place. So, he got back onto the capsule and logged into the game once again.

The grief once more transcended space and came over in his new body, but he had already cried enough and there were no more tears.

He was told to rest, but he didn't think that was possible for him at the moment. He walked out of the room and left the house.

He went up the mountain and walked over to his master's house.

The front yard was fully destroyed, the house turned to rubble. Alex walked past the large patch of blood that was the result of the Third Elder's death.

He then walked up to the other smaller patch of blood that belonged to his master.

He touched the blood on the ground that felt like his tear ducts, completely dry. Even as he looked at the blood on the ground, he didn't feel like crying. He was emotionally exhausted from crying already, numb to the pain.

He felt sad, but that was it.

He then looked ahead of him, a little further away from where the blood was. That was the place where the bastard had fallen over to the ground.

He looked at the ground, and it was clean. Not a single hint of blood was on the ground at all.

Alex was confused at first, but then he remembered what had happened. Due to his master freezing him with all of the attacks, the bastard had never really suffered any wound that made him bleed.

Even the one wound in his chest where the sword had stabbed, the bastard hadn't taken the sword out and was thus not bleeding.

The lack of any emotion other than sadness was slowly changing.

"My master bled so much, and yet he doesn't even bleed a single drop of blood?" the emotion in his heart grew stronger.

"My master was poisoned, and yet he walks away so easily," the emotion continued to grow stronger.

"My master died, and yet he lives." His emotions reached a crescendo.

Rage.

The rage of a thousand suns burned in him when he thought of the unfairness. That bastard lived while his master died.

He gritted his teeth as his eyes narrowed with hatred like never before. His face was a tempest of fury.

He looked up towards the top of the mountain where the bastard had gone towards and left there himself.

Alex understood clearly, more than anyone where the bastard had gone to. So, he decided to go there as well.

He would go there and find that bastard. Then, he would enact his revenge by delivering pain unto him a thousand times more than what his master suffered.

He promised that in his heart.

Alex started walking. He walked up the mountain until he reached the peak. There were 2 elders standing guard there, but he didn't care to stop when they told him to.

They barely had any strength to stop him anyway. He looked down from the massive cliff and jumped.

* * * * * *

A figure appeared outside the city walls. As he got closer to the city, he felt his cultivation base disappearing.

At first, he was incredibly scared. However, after realizing that he was just being suppressed, he sighed in relief.

Still, his cultivation base was in the upper True realms, so he could easily fly over the walls.

The guards were in a terrified state, so when they saw someone fly over, they immediately got to arm. However, in their current state, they couldn't fight the person at all.

The figure looked at the destruction around the city and frowned. He flew down to one of the guards and spoke, "You! What happened here?"

The guard was fearfully putting his spears towards the man, but when he realized who the person was, he immediately put his spear down and bowed.

"Greetings, your majesty!" he shouted. The other soldiers and guards heard him and immediately stood up to bow towards him.

The new figure who had come to the city was the emperor.

"What's going on here?" the Emperor asked again.

"Your Majesty, we-we suffered a bandit attack," the guard said.

"Multiple bandit groups had joined together and attacked the city, Your Majesty," another soldier said. "But we fought them off."

"Where's the city lord?" the Emperor asked.

"He is in his manor, your majesty," the guards said.

"Alright, keep up the good work," the Emperor said and went towards the city lord's manor.

He entered the manor and had the city lord explain to him in detail.

"I see," the emperor said after understanding the current situation. "And what is this suppressing aura around here?"

"That I am baffled by myself, Uncle," the city lord said. "Fortunately, it's slowly dissipating. Anyway, what are you doing here?"

"Sigh, I came here because I heard that kid was back from the beasts' territory. There are some people that want to meet him."

Chapter 548: Pursuit

Alex ran across the tall grasses that were filled with sand. He held the sword in his right hand, ready to fight any beasts that came his way.

The Forbidden Fields had so much sand now that it wouldn't have been a mistake to stop calling it a field now.

Alex walked over dried grass near the river and easily ran through the river with how shallow the water was.

The sands were a little harder to run through. There wasn't enough solid land under his feet to run, so he decided to use his boat artifact to fly through the desert.

This wouldn't have been possible previously, but now that the Qi had somehow returned to the desert as well, Alex thought it was possible.

His cultivation base was still heavily suppressed at around Muscle Tempering realm, so he wasn't really sure if the boat would fly, but he had to try it.

He couldn't keep running through the entire desert when he knew how far away the ocean was.

It would take him days to reach there and by that time, that bastard would've already taken whatever it was and run away.

He couldn't let that happen. He needed to find him and kill him.

He jumped on top of the boat and put some True spirit stones in it before flying off. The speed wasn't very fast, unfortunately, but it was still better than simply running.

The sun came up pretty soon and the heat was along with it. At the same time, Alex felt the suppression around him growing as well.

He was now back to being at the early stages of the Skin Tempering realm. The boat had also slowed down to barely moving.

"Dammit!" he cried out and jumped off of it and took back his ship before running. He would have to run now that the suppression was high again.

Along the way, he saw something and stopped. It was a big snake, simply laying there doing nothing. Ning got his sword ready and charged to attack it.

However, when he got close, he realized that it wasn't moving at all. It wasn't even breathing. The snake was dead.

Alex looked at the snake, but he couldn't see any signs as to why it had died. He got close to it, the snake's head almost as large as him.

He nudged the snake with his sword, but after seeing it not moving, he proceeded to check the snake's body.

He flipped the snake around and saw a wet spot in the sands. Ning got close to it and saw a small cut in the snake.

He realized something and quickly ran up to the snake's head again and pulled its eyelids apart.

He startled himself when he saw the red, veiny eyes of the snake. It had been poisoned by the same poison as his master.

Ning gritted his teeth in anger when he realized that his master's murderer was close by.

By now, the feeling of the thing with extreme yang was already pulling him towards a certain place far away.

He didn't even have to look to know what direction he needed to be moving. His body was doing it all on its own.

He started running again. With his body cultivation, he could run for days and not be tired at all.

The speed at which he ran was obviously slower than his boat previously, but with the suppression, he was being the most efficient he could be.

'Fuck!' he thought. 'That bastard must have a flying artifact as well. One that is faster than my even.'

Alex kept running and encountered a number of beasts along the way. Some tried to fight him, but they were too weak and easily died to his attacks.

Others were already dead and were simply a trail leading him towards the bastard that had a headstart of a few hours.

Alex kept running for hours, but he never seemed to be able to find the old man. Just then, he noticed something about himself again.

His cultivation base had returned to about Bone Tempering realm. He hadn't noticed it before due to being way too focused on simply running and fighting, but now that he noticed it, he was confused.

'What's going on? How do I have this high cultivation base in the middle of the desert? Having a cultivation base itself was weird, but I thought it would be in a radius of that extreme yang. But somehow I am getting stronger the closer I am to the source?' Alex thought. Just the prospect of it didn't make sense to Alex.

"No something else must be happening," he thought. He remembered back to when the yang energy had come in and broke the barrier. After that, no one could use their cultivation bases anymore.

However, an hour or 2 later, their cultivation bases were returning to them. Alex remembered, he already had Bone Tempering realm back in the sect. He had only lost it when he entered the Forbidden Fields.

'The yang energy in the sect dissipated, and we got out cultivation partly back. The yang energy in here is somehow also dissipating and I am gaining my cultivation back again, is that it?' he thought.

If that were true, where did the yang energy go to? It wouldn't have simply disappeared into the sky. Alex couldn't understand why at one place it was dissipating faster than another.

Was it because it was closer to the source that it was dissipating slower? That too couldn't be right. He had been running towards the source this whole time, and he remembered it dissipating slower previously than it was now, even when he was getting closer.

"Unless… it's not dissipating," Alex thought. He immediately closed his eyes and sent out his spiritual sense into the surrounding. He focused on the energy in the air and could feel the Yang energy that was suppressing him even now.

He could've perhaps used his cultivation base if it were Qi, but since it was only energy, he couldn't do anything.

Just then, he noticed something unusual. The Yang energy in the area was all moving in the same direction.

Alex opened his eyes in surprise and looked in the direction they were moving towards.

The source of the Extreme Yang.

"I see," Alex thought. "So I was wrong in assuming that the Yang is dissipating from the area. It is not. Instead, it is moving back towards the source."

Alex couldn't imagine why that was the case, but it was. Whatever the source was, it was attracting the Yang energy it had spread around all this time.

"The old man spoke something about the sect treasure, right? The Tiger sect's treasure. So, is the source the Tiger sect's treasure?" he thought.

He stopped caring about those things and brought out his boat once again. Since the suppression had disappeared quite a bit, the boat was now faster than ever in this place and he flew off.

He saw many beasts along the way, some still fidgeting from being stabbed with the poison sword.

Alex understood when he looked at them. The old man was getting close, and so was the time of his revenge.

Chapter 549: Confrontation

Alex started to struggle the closer he got to the old man. The intense feeling of 'want' and 'need' he was feeling was enough to drive him crazy.

However, the feeling of needing to kill, to get his revenge— that overshadowed everything else in his heart.

He could finally empathize with Wan Li. He now understood what it felt like to lose someone, to want to take revenge when someone killed your loved one.

He looked up straight ahead and accelerated his ship as much as he could.

The sun had just gone down and the night was approaching. And yet, somehow, far away in the north, Alex could see a bright light hidden behind the high sand dunes.

'Is that the source?' Alex wondered. His body at the very least thought it was. He was looking at the light when he noticed something.

A small black figure in the distance crossed over the dune that was blocking the light and went downwards.

Alex's rage came back flooding all over again. He had finally found him.

Alex dropped from his boat as the speed was really low at the moment. With how much suppression was around him, it was better to just run.

Which he did. He ran for nearly 15 minutes before he reached the dune he had seen from the distance and looked down.

The light far away was still blocked by many other dunes, however, it also lit up the desert enough for Ning to see down.

That bastard was currently running in the sand due to the suppression as well. He held a sword in his hand, ready to fight the beasts. However, there were none.

Alex had noticed that too. The more he went to the source, the less the beasts became. By now, it was rare to even find a beast.

Alex ran down the dune to follow after the old man. Considering the suppression he was facing, the old man shouldn't be doing very well either.

Since Alex was starting to reach Muscle Tempering, he assumed the old man to be around Organ or maybe Meridian tempering realm. If that was true, Alex could easily kill him with his superior body cultivation.

The old man was running slower than Alex, so in the next 20 minutes, Alex finally reached close enough so that he could barely hear the old man's footsteps in the sand.

In the next 10 minutes, he got close enough that even the old man could hear him, despite the low cultivation base he had.

The old man turned around, expecting a beast he would have to fight. However, when he saw Alex, he was shocked.

"You followed me?" he asked as his eyes narrowed in suspicion. Then, he saw the anger in Alex's face and suddenly started laughing.

"Hahaha! That bitch died, didn't she? Great!" the old man exclaimed. "Good riddance."

Alex continued running towards him, his face unchanging.

"Hmph! You must be here for revenge. Let me do you a favor and send you along with your master. That will be my gift to you," the old man said and got ready to fight with his sword as well.

Alex looked at him and noticed not a single hint of wounds. Even the stab in his chest was healed, and his master's sword gone.

He then looked at the old man's sword. Despite being in a fit of fury, he hadn't lost enough of himself yet to not be careful of the sword.

That was the sword that was laced with the poison that killed his master. If even his master's superior body couldn't erase the poison, then there was no doubt that he himself would lose to it.

The other poisons his body had managed to cure were usually normal poisons and toxins that were relatively low in grade. However, if the poison that man had was indeed Saint grade, or god forbid, a higher one— there was no doubt he would die.

The first thing he needed to do in this fight was figure out what the old man's current cultivation base was.

With his own 5th Mind Tempering realm body cultivation, he needed to be careful if the old man had a higher or lower cultivation base.

Even if it was lower, having access to abilities he didn't at the moment would make the battle much more difficult than normal.

He could guess based on the difference in their cultivation base what the old man's cultivation base probably was, but he didn't want to trust his instincts right now.

The old man held too many secrets that were enough to make even the emperor jealous. Immortal ranked concealment art, Invisibility technique, and Saint grade poison were a few of the things he had.

Alex wondered what else he could be hiding if any.

Alex dashed forward at the old man, his only hand holding his sword. The old man saw him coming and got ready. He immediately went to the side and sent a flying yellow slash towards Alex.

Alex put up a barrier in front of him, but with his cultivation base, it was way too weak to do anything.

The attack easily destroyed the barrier and came towards him. The attack was slower than when the old man had fought his master, so Alex could easily dodge it. Still, Alex didn't move and let the attack hit him.

Alex was sent flying a few meters and landed on the hot hand. He slowly stood up and dusted himself off.

"Somewhere in the upper Mind Tempering realms, huh? This shouldn't take very long then," Alex said.

The old man freaked out when he saw Alex perfectly fine. 'How is he fine? His body should be close to a mortal's in comparison to me,' the old man thought.

Suddenly, his eyes went wide as he realized something. "You brat. How did you cultivate your body to that level? Did the beasts help you or something?" he asked.

Alex didn't reply. Now that he knew he didn't have any dangers from the old man, aside from the sword of his, he was ready to fight seriously.

He immediately dashed forward and swung at the old man. The old man struck back with his sword too and felt Alex's force in his attack.

Although it was strong, it wasn't something he couldn't handle at all. Realizing this, the old man struck back as well.

He pushed back Alex's sword and went for a straight thrust. Alex parried the blade and swung it at the old man's neck.

The old man suddenly employed a movement skill to walk out of Alex's sword range.

However, Alex dashed at the same moment and reached the old man. He slashed at the old man again, who barely brought back his sword to protect himself at the last moment.

However, that didn't help him a lot. Alex's sword, which was glowing slightly white, managed to hit the old man on his left arm. However, the old man was sent flying before Alex could properly hit him.

The old man slammed into the sand, sending them flying in the air. He stood up and looked at Alex with a hint of anger on his face.

"You are quite strong even with just a single-arm, huh?" he said. He held his left arm as it was bleeding profusely. He brought out a bottle and poured out something slimy before applying it on his arm.

'A medicinal paste?' Alex thought. Alex had heard about them but had never seen them. In other parts of the world, people used these pastes in place of pills since they were much cheaper.

'How does he know how to make one?' Alex wondered.

The old man tightened his fist as his wound burned in pain. The paste was working. Then, he looked at Alex.

"Hmph! You really are quite talented. Not only do you cultivate very fast, but you also have body cultivation. And I heard you are quite talented in alchemy too. Combined with the Sword Intent you showed just now, you really can't be underestimated, huh?" the old man said with a snarl on his face.

Alex didn't care enough to listen to him and started preparing to go on the offensive again.

Just then, the old man said, "You must be a player as well then."

Alex stopped. "How do you—"

"Know about players? Hehe, I've tortured a few to learn how you all cultivate so fast. To think it was so easy as just chucking in a few pills, or using spirit stones all the time. How wasteful."

"Not only wasteful of resources but of your own cultivation as well. Destroying your chance at reaching the heavens just for a few moments of glory. So stupid," the old man said.

"Not only that, but you all are also stupid enough to believe this world is fake as well," the old man said.

"Are you sure you want your last words to be those?" Alex asked, preparing to attack.

"Hmph! Do you think you can kill me, boy? Let's see how you handle it when I actually try a little," the old man said.

Suddenly, he went invisible. Alex looked around, but he had no aura either. 'Shit!' Alex thought. He had momentarily forgotten about his hiding skills.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense around him, even pushing it to its limit, but the furthest he could sense was 15 meters.

Under a normal situation, Alex wouldn't mind having 15 meters worth of sense. However, against the old man with his incredibly quick movement speed, and a sword that was sure to kill him if it ever hit him, Alex started to fear a little.

Chapter 550: Visionless Fight

Alex tried to use the invisibility skill himself to hide just like that old man did, but due to his low cultivation base, he couldn't successfully employ it.

The light that cover him would break open at places randomly, allowing others to see him through invisibility.

'What do I do?' he thought. He needed a bit higher cultivation base to properly go invisible.

The old man was invisible, but it was impossible for his movements to do the same as well. No matter how good he was, his footsteps would leave a mark on the dune.

Alex looked at the sand around him to look for the old man. Just then, he saw a bunch of indentations on the sand. The old man was moving.

Alex waited for a bit and sensed the old man entering his spiritual sense range. He immediately slashed at the incoming old man and blocked his thrust attack.

Alex used the momentum to back off and looked at the sand again. Suddenly, something hit Alex from the front and sent him flying.

Alex immediately stood up, the attack doing almost negligible damage to him. The old man came with a straight thrust once more and Alex blocked him just in time. He had managed to see the footsteps in the sand in time.

"Tsk!" Alex could hear the old man getting annoyed by him blocking his attacks.

"Congratulations! You can see my footsteps and predict my attack. Let's increase the difficulty then, shall we?" the old man shouted from in front of Alex.

He saw the old man's footsteps in the sand and got ready to block once more, however, no attack or the old man came towards him.

Instead, they started moving around him. The old man sped up quicker and quicker, and soon the sand started flying all around him.

"Shit!" Alex cried out. He had realized what was happening. The old man, in his plan to make his footsteps invisible, had started throwing the sand in the air.

That way, no matter where he looked, Alex had no way of seeing the old man… or so the old man thought.

Realizing that he couldn't rely on his vision or sound or touch for that matter, he understood that the only thing he could rely on was his spiritual sense.

However, given how fast the old man was, he couldn't reliably depend on his mere 15 meters spiritual sense to tell him when the old man would arrive next to him.

So, the next thing he needed to do was give himself more time to react to the old man entering his spiritual sense's range.

Alex smirked. He had the perfect way to do that.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Suddenly, time slowed down, and all of his senses were amplified.

The sound of the sand blowing around him got louder. He could hear the old man's footsteps cooking up a storm around him.

He could feel the dryness of his mouth, his chapped lips. He could feel the hot air hitting his face, slightly cooling him by taking away his sweat.

He could feel the minute grains on sands hitting his skin. They hit his hands, his face, and his legs.

He could smell the scent of hot sand, as well as some iron in the air from the crusted blood on his own lower pants.

He could feel the weight of his sword, slightly imbalanced on his single hand when it was meant to be held with two.

Finally, he could sense the slowness of everything around him. He could feel the sand flying through the air, and in then, the old man running at him with the sword at the ready.

Alex's own movements were incredibly slow, however, that was enough to do what he needed to do.

Alex struck away from the sword thrust and used the same momentum to hit his neck. The sword barely managed to graze the old man, but that was enough to make him bleed.

The old man jumped backward and looked at the close-eyed Alex in fear. 'How the hell is he seeing me? How the hell is he fighting back?' the old man wondered.

Alex hadn't used Focus mode in a long time. Once he stopped controlling the Focus mode like he had come to do by muscle memory, he once again realized just how effective it was.

Focus mode was something only players could use, so the old man had no idea how Alex was doing any of it.

Alex nodded to himself when he realized that it was just as effective as he wanted it to be and smiled. The fight would be a lot easier now.

The old man kicked up a dust storm once more and ran around Alex to juke him. Then, he thrust his sword from behind Alex.

Alex could feel the sword coming towards him in slowed downtime and moved just out of the way of the attack. Then, he slashed at the old man's legs.

The attack reached deep and he felt like he struck the bones. However, he couldn't go beyond that.

"ARGH!" the old man cried out in pain. Alex pulled his sword back and struck at the old man again, but the old man ran away.

Alex waited for the old man to come to him once again, so he could attack him. 'Just a little more and I can go invisible too,' Alex thought.

With the Yang energy around him slowly disappearing, he would soon be able to properly use his technique. That way, even though the old man would get stronger as well, he wouldn't have to worry about him.

Alex waited for a bit longer, but he didn't hear the old man moving at all. The sand in the air was also starting to settle down.

When all the sand fell to the ground, Alex realized— the old man wasn't there anymore. 'Fuck! Did he run away?' Alex thought.

He looked around him and saw no indentation in the sand anymore. 'I was so close,' Alex thought and ran behind him.

The old man was likely to stay invisible the entire time, so he remained careful as well. He kept his eyes open for any change in the sands in front of him or any incoming attack.

Alex felt his cultivation base lowering once more as he got closer to the source. He would have loved it if he had no cultivation base at all and the old man had barely any. That way, defeating the old man would be pretty easy.

However, that was just a hopeful thought. Given how strong Alex was, it was likely that the old man wasn't going to go somewhere where his cultivation base dropped below the threshold of a Mind Tempering realm, so Alex had to be extra careful when his own cultivation base dropped to the lower realm of Muscle tempering realm.

Very soon, Alex saw the footsteps again. The old man had indeed not made it very far, be it intentionally or not. He was still invisible, but his footsteps movement showed Alex that he was moving.

'Wait!' Alex thought. There was something wrong with those footsteps. By now, the old man should have heard and even seen Alex running up to him, but not once did the footsteps slow down to turn and see, or speed up to run faster.

Also, the indentation they made on the sand was too uniform. There was no sand spilling over the foot as it was happening to his own foot.

'It's a trap!' Alex thought and immediately got ready for an attack. He closed his eyes to solely rely on his spiritual sense to see.

Just as he was thinking, he felt a movement over him. Not front, or back, up above. The old man had been flying this whole time.

The sword entered his spiritual sense, followed by the old man's hand, head, and the rest of the body. His neck and foot would be gone by now, likely healed by the same paste as earlier.

Alex rolled to the side and dashed to go on the offensive. The old man saw him coming and sent out a palm strike at him. The attack did no damage, but it halted his movement for just a bit. The old man took the moment to get out of his spiritual range.

The old man knew Alex was using his spiritual sense, he could sense it too. However, his spiritual sense barely went anywhere past 8 meters, so he was inwardly surprised at how large Alex's spiritual sense was.

He remembered back in the mountain where the brat had sensed him so high up in the sky, despite having never put out any aura at the time.

The old man hadn't thought about it at the moment, but that had been quite weird at the time too. He shook his head to forget about it for now and proceeded to attack once more.

He just needed to stab him once and this miracle poison of his that he had stolen from the sect treasury when he started a coup 50 years ago would certainly kill the brat.

He waited around for a bit for more of his Qi to return to him, and when it did, the old man dashed forward at a speed that was his fastest yet to kill Alex.

Alex noticed the old man come into his spiritual sense range, but his speed was too fast. He hit the sword to parry it, however, at the last moment, the old man used the momentum of the parry to spin around and hit Alex on his right shoulder.

Alex felt pain in his right arm as he saw the poison sword cut into it.

Chapter 551: Broken Sword

Alex felt a chill go down his spine. He looked at the sword on his right arm that had barely gone past the skin. The wound wasn't anywhere close to being worrisome. The poison, however…

"Tsk!" the old man said when he saw the cut. For some reason, his face was frowning with annoyance.

Alex hit the sword again to push it off his arm and immediately went on the offensive. He knew now that he was struck with the poison sword, he didn't have much longer.

So, even if it was the last thing he would do in this world, he would kill this man. A slash, a stab, a swing— Alex used whatever he could to make the old man stay on guard so that he couldn't leave his range of spiritual sense.

The old man was trying to hit him back, but Alex was just overwhelming him. He needed to find a moment to run away.

The chance came when Alex swung his sword right at his chest. The old man brought forth his sword to black the strike, however, he underestimated Alex's strength at this moment.

Alex had used every part of his strength, including his Qi into this strike and struck at the old man's chest. Their sword made a massive clang sound as the old man was hit in the chest.

Despite using his own sword to block, the force behind Alex had still managed to hit his chest. The old man used this momentum to leave Alex's range of senses, but the damage he took wasn't a tiny amount.

He coughed up visible blood onto the ground and had a hard time breathing for a moment. When he saw Alex coming towards him, he forgot about everything and ran away.

Alex saw the disorderly footprints in the sand and realized that the old man had ran away once again.

He started chasing after the old man, but his movement technique was not something he could hope to catch up to immediately. He needed to chase for a bit until the Qi in the area was more suppressed, and the old man's speed was slowed down.

Along the way, Alex kept checking his wound for it to turn purple and red veins to start. However, even after a while, nothing happened.

"What?" he thought. "Am I not poisoned?" he was sure that he was poisoned. After all the sword had poisoned his master and many of the beasts along the way.

'Could it be I am immune to the poison?' he thought. But that too felt impossible as his master who had a better constitution than him also had been poisoned.

Then the only possible answer was that… he hadn't been poisoned. 'Does the sword no longer have any poison on it… or,' his eyes shined with understanding.

The poison was just on the tip of the sword, not the sides. 'Was that why the old man frowned? Because he knew he didn't get me?' Alex thought.

The old man had always tried to stab him ever since he started fighting. Not a single time did he go for a swing until the last time when he managed to hit him.

"Now that I think about it, master's cut arm didn't have the purple area either, only the stab wound did," Alex thought. He was now fully sure that his assumption was accurate.

He ran for close to 3 hours before reaching the old man again.

"Goddammit! Stop following me. Because of you, I will be too late to get it," the old man cried out.

"The only thing you'll be getting is this sword through your head," Alex shouted at the old man. The old man went invisible once more and they started fighting.

Alex made sure to never get hit by the old man's sword tip and fought the best he could. However, the fight kept getting dragged out due to the old man running away once again.

Alex chased and fought for nearly the whole day and half of the night once more. The night wasn't as dark as he would wish it to be.

The light coming from the north made him believe there was a new sun in the northern horizon.

He reached the old man once again, however this time it was going to go differently. He had a plan to win.

The old man's fury was quite high at the moment. There was barely a day remaining before the treasure would go past its maturation point and lose its quality, and from his understanding, there was still about 3 hours' worth of journey left. But with Alex's interference, the time kept on increasing.

"Fine, I won't leave before I kill you then," the old man cried and started fighting again.

The two of them were already familiar with their fighting style, so the battle fell into a stalemate once more. Alex was doing fine at the start but as the Qi suppression kept on lifting, the old man got his strength back.

The old man was happy to see that his attacks were having an effect on Alex and kept hitting him with more. He also stopped relying on his sword and used ranged attacks to hurt Alex.

Fortunately, the increase in Qi meant Alex could too use his spiritual sense to a higher range and easily dodged the attacks. He ran towards where the attacks originated and found the old man flying in the air.

He closed his eyes and threw his sword at the old man. The old man was surprised at first and moved aside to dodge the word. However, just as the sword passed him, Alex appeared out of nowhere next to the sword and grabbed it with his only hand.

He then put out his other hand which was only up to the elbow. However, from the elbow emerged an illusory hand made with metal Qi.

He used that arm to hit the old man in the stomach. The old man felt the claw like hand try to rip his stomach and flew backwards. Alex fell to the ground and turned to look towards the old man's direction with a snarl on his face.

He let go of his metal Qi and the hand disappeared. When it did, the things that were in his hands fell to the ground. When the old man saw what Alex had, his eyes went wide.

"You!" he shouted when he saw his storage bags on the ground. Alex took the storage bag and kept it in his own robe before getting ready to fight once more.

Since his cultivation base had returned by quite a fair amount, he too could now fight just like the old man. Alex immediately went invisible and started flying.

His bone tempering realm cultivation base would surely struggle against the man's True disciple realm cultivation base, but Alex was sure he could do it.

The old man tried to run when he saw this, but Alex wouldn't let him. He kept bombarding the old man with all the attacks he could.

He sent slashes filled with Sword Intent to increase their effectiveness. Then, he got close and went into a sword fight.

The two sword clashed again and again. Slowly, both of their sword started showing signs of damage, but Alex didn't care. He kept hitting the man, the fury he had forgotten for the past few hours returning to him.

The old man blocked as well as he could, but the maniac like fighting Alex was putting up was barely giving him any chance to retaliate.

As the old man's strength increased, so did Alex's. Again and again, Alex hit the old man's sword, putting both their swords on the verge of destruction.

Finally, Alex swung one last time, as hard as he could, and shattered the old man's sword. The old man looked in fear when that happened.

He immediately let go his sword handle and used his hands to send a yang slash towards Alex. Alex blocked with his sword, but his sword was barely durable as well. When the slash hit his sword, the sword broke in two.

Alex watched as the top half of his sword flew right past him in slowed time. His eyes moved to look at it, and so did his left arm.

His Qi left his body at the last moment and caught the piece of metal, before pulling it back towards him and driving it down at the old man.

The sword entered the old man's abdomen, right around the area where he had stabbed his master. However, it wasn't deep enough.

Just then, Alex let go of his sword and used his golden fist to punch at the sword. The sword drove though the man's stomach and came out of the other side.

The old man gasped in horror as he felt his abdomen get stabbed. At the same time, he lost his ability to fly or remain invisible.

The old man fell to the sands below him. He tried to move, but Alex jumped on top of him with his sword in his hand. The old man spurt out some blood from his mouth from the strike.

He tried to send out an attack, but his body held no strength at all. He had lost all of his Qi.

"Wh-What's happening?" he shouted.

"I told you old man. You die today," Alex said. He looked at the panicked old man. He had for some reason lost his cultivation base.

Alex looked at where he had stabbed him in surprise. 'That's the place where all Qi goes to. Is it responsible for his cultivation base as well?' he thought as he saw blood pouring out from the old man's naval region.

The old man tried to scramble away, but but Alex's rage wouldn't let him. Alex pulled up his half broken sword to strike at him. In a last ditch effort, he moved his arms around on the ground to save himself.

Just as Alex was about to swing down on him, The old punched Alex using his right arm. Alex was faster than the old man and stabbed him through the abdomen again.

The old man's hand continued the punch, but Alex casually put out his left arm to stop it.

He had no hand of course, but he used his Qi to stop the old man's attack. However, at the same time, Alex felt something else prick his right leg.

When he turned around, he saw the old man's left arm next to his leg. The old man's hands opened to show a purple wound in it, next to which was a broken piece of the sword.

Suddenly, a bunch of notifications appeared in front of him. He was poisoned.

Chapter 552: The Source

<Toxic substance detected>

<Sun God's Divine Yang body is attempting to disintegrate the toxin>

<Disintegration unsuccessful>

<Trying again>

Alex looked at the notification in front of him with a shock on his face. He had thought he won, but it seemed to be at the cost of his own life now.

"Shit!" he cried out. His anger reached sky-high as he pulled the broken sword out of the old man's body and immediately cut off his left arm all the way up in the shoulder. He wanted to stop the old man's poison from reaching his body so soon.

"Don't you dare think you'll be dying so easily," Alex said. He pulled out a healing pill and ate it to heal himself as much as he could and looked down towards the old man.

That was when he noticed the many broken pieces of metal all around him. The old man had fallen on top of his own broken sword and somehow managed to find the tip that held the poison. Likely due to it cutting himself and poisoning him.

The old man was bleeding out of his abdomen would as well as the giant gaping wound on his left shoulder.

"J-Just kill… me," the old man spoke in between spurts of blood escaping from his mouth.

"Your death won't be so simple," Alex said. "I promised you will feel the pain my master felt a thousand times over."

"I had to watch my master die, and I cried. Now I will do the same for you and watch you die. Only this time, there will be nothing but a smile on my face as I do so," Alex said. A deep-seated hatred flared from within him, telling him, urging him to torture the man as much as he could.

Alex dropped the sword as it was no longer necessary for the next thing he was going to do.

Alex put up his palm and a small fire appeared on top of it. He pushed it down at the old man's stomach and left arm, and burnt it as badly as he could.

The old man cried miserably, but Alex only smiled when he heard that. "Now that your wound has been cauterized, you won't die of blood loss," he said.

He then turned the flame into a sharp, arrow-head-like shape. "Let's begin." He brought the flame close to the old man's eyes.

"D—"

Before he could even say anything, Alex put the flame into the old man's eyes and burned it from the inside.

"ARGHH!" the old man cried out loud.

"Shut up!" Alex said. "We're only beginning." He brought out the flame, the old man's wound never bleeding due to it being cauterized on the way out.

He then put the flame onto the other eye of the old man and burned it as well. Both of those times, he made sure not to touch the nerves so that the old man could feel it.

"My master lost her eyesight first," Alex said, remembering Ma Rong's question of if he was there.

"After that, she lost her hearing."

The old man understood what was coming. He tried to cry to stop Alex, but Alex never did. He burned both of the old man's ears.

"Then, she lost her sense of touch," Alex said and stood up before he started burning the old man's body. He made sure that the fire had as low of a temperature as possible so that the old man would suffer much longer.

"She couldn't speak after that," Alex said and got rid of his fire before turning his hands into a golden claw. He grabbed the old man's neck and ripped out his vocal cords.

The old man could no longer cry out and started gasping for air. Alex moved to the side as he watched the old man burn and choke on his own blood.

For nearly 10 minutes he struggled to find a way to live before his lungs were filled with blood and he could no longer keep breathing.

The old man drowned in his own blood, feeling the hot flames on his skin the entire time as he died.

Alex breathed heavily, huffing very quickly as the anger in his heart slowly started calming down.

"Did you see that, master? I killed him. I hope this helps you find peace," Alex said. He walked upto the old man and used his broken sword to stab him through the head one last time to fully make sure he was dead.

He then increased the flame's temperature and watched the old man burn to cinders.

Now that his strong emotions of rage and motivation were gone, the other emotions in him finally started taking over him.

The yang source was still calling for him, and Alex wanted to go find what that is. Now that he was poisoned, he at least wanted to see what it was that drove this man to kill so many people just to get to it.

The Qi in the area was considerably stronger than previously, so Alex brought out his boat and flew away on it.

He had lost many things in the past few days. His arm, his master, and now he lost the sword that had been with him since the very first day.

Still, he had one more thing he was going to lose today. That was himself. With how hard his body was trying to get rid of the poison and still failing, Alex was sure he would die very soon.

He would likely never be able to return back to the game ever again, back to this world. That was why he wanted to see it. He wanted to see what was so attractive to the old man, and to him for the last time before he disappeared from this world.

The boat kept on flying, while Alex saw the red veins creep upon his body. It wasn't as fast as with his master, however, and Alex couldn't figure out why.

He had a few hypotheses. The first was that the poison didn't work very well against people with Yang-type energy and was slow to take effect.

That seemed plausible in his eyes. Another was that it just took a slower time to take effect on body cultivators.

Another reason could also be that his master didn't have any Qi at the time to fight off her poison, while he currently had some.

He noted the speed at which the red veins grew and made an estimate that the poison would kill him in about 3 hours. He hoped that was enough to reach the source.

Alex flew for an hour before he started noticing the symptoms of the poison. His body started going into a fever to fight the poison. He felt hot, despite the winter dawn.

He couldn't handle the heat, even as a cultivator, and started taking off his robes. He took the outer robes off, then the inner.

A little later, he also dropped the lower pants as well, until he was fully naked. Even then he felt it burning.

He knew the burning was good, it was his body fighting the poison, but the discomfort of it all made him annoyed.

By the next hour, however, Alex had stopped feeling hot, and instead, he stopped feeling most things his body was starting to go numb as the red veins crept up close to his neck.

Alex sighed and shook his head. 'Just a little more,' he thought. The boat slowed down considerably on the last foot of the journey, so Alex jumped off of it.

He left the boat where it was as it wouldn't be necessary for him anymore. He left his possessions there as well, wishing the best of luck to the next person that found him, hoping it would help on their cultivation journey. That was all Alex could do at the moment.

He looked up ahead and saw a massive dune he would have to climb. After that, he could feel the source of the Yang being just behind this dune.

He slowly climbed up the dune. The sand threatened to slide down, but Alex used what little Qi he could use to keep the sand in place as he walked up.

He looked the east along the way and saw the sun just about to come up over the horizon, and looked at the top of the dune, seeing another sun about to rise up the horizon as well.

He sensed the red veins crawling up his neck as well. Very soon, he would lose vision for sure. 'Not so fast,' he thought and sped up his climb.

He reached the top of the dune and look beyond it. Down below, A bright white light shined with the shine of a burning sun. The light made him feel like he was looking directly into one.

He took a step forward while blocking his eyes and suddenly, slipped. He rolled from the top of the dune all the way to the bottom.

He didn't feel it anything at all thought. He rolled for nearly a minute before he reached the ground.

He felt disoriented and even a little nauseous from all the rolls. "Argh!" he shook his head as he stood up. He was starting to hear some sounds that he had never heard before.

His heart skipped a beat when he realized what he was. He looked in front of him and saw the source of the bright light. However, it was just too bright to understand what it was.

Alex put his hand in front of his eyes, and he could somehow see the veins light up in his palm.

He squinted his eyes as well as he could and watched not the source, but rather what was beyond it.

Dark, blue, and murky waters. Splashes that came up the shore. Unending to the furthest horizon he could see.

"The ocean!" he said softly. That was something he had wanted to see all this time, and right before he was about to die, he got to see it.

The ocean was huge, and it covered his entire vision. He turned his head from left to the right, and besides the light and the shore, he could see nothing but the ocean.

He felt a bit of melancholy as he realized that he would likely never get to see this sight again.

Tears started rolling down his cheeks. He too didn't want to die. But he couldn't stop the inevitable at all.

He watched the ocean through his blurry vision. It looked so beautiful. He wanted to see so much more of this world, but he wouldn't be able to. Just as he thought that the image in front of him was gone.

He lost vision in his eyes and could only hear the splashes of the giant body of water. Before he knew it, even that was gone.

Alex could neither see nor hear anything. He soon realized that he had fully lost his sense of touch as well.

All of his senses were gone. If not for his body cultivation, he would've likely lost all ability to move as well.

He felt pain and regret in his heart. Pain that he was going to die, and regret that he didn't make more of his time.

However, those weren't the only feelings in him at the moment. There was also the intense attraction he was feeling towards the source.

Since there was no point at all, Alex let go of all restraints and started walking towards the source.

The source got closer and closer. He assumed he was burning at the moment, but he felt nothing.

When he felt he reached the location of the source, he put his hands forth. Even though he couldn't feel it, he felt the source appear on his palm.

Alex felt the intense urge to eat the thing. Since he had already let go of all restraints, he decided to not restrain himself on this one either.

He opened his mouth as wide as he could and put the source inside of it.

Immediately, everything went dark and Alex opened his eyes. He had logged out.

Chapter 553: The End

Alex opened his eyes inside his capsule. He could see some lights around him, he could hear himself moving, feel the softness beneath him.

'I logged out?' he thought with a solemn expression on his face. The memory of the sea was still clear in his mind. 'Did I die?'

He tried to log back in. Instead of going back to his body in the game, or the other world as he had come to believe, he got a single message in his ears.

Alex sighed. "I really did die, huh?" he said softly. He didn't want to make any such decisions at the moment, so he declined the capsule's offer.

He opened the lid and walked out.

Suddenly, he felt a wave of nausea and hunger hit him as he nearly stumbled onto the ground.

His stomach cried really loudly. "What's—" he remembered that he hadn't eaten anything in nearly 3 days now due to the events of the game.

He remembered feeling really happy when he got to take his revenge, but now he didn't know how to feel anymore.

Revenge wasn't going to bring his master back. It even made him die in the process. Because of his impulsive action, he was now unable to go save Pearl as well.

Alex sighed once again. He had let revenge destroy who he was and what he had left. He shook his head and forgot about it for now.

He got up and left to eat. He didn't even bother going to the bathroom as he was too hungry to do that.

He ate as he had never before, surprising all 3 of the girls who had come down to eat as well.

"Slow down, or you will choke," Hannah told him.

Alex nodded, but didn't speak and continued eating. Once done, he left the kitchen and went back to his room.

He went back into his room and went to take a shower. He thought about what he would do next in the shower.

He knew he was going to get a bad body like everyone else, so he didn't really look forward to going into the game. Even if he did, he likely wouldn't spend such a long time in there.

He had surely lost his alchemy skills so there was no way he could remain an alchemist either. Without his body, he didn't see himself getting strong quickly as well.

The only reason he even wanted to go back was to rescue Pearl, but would he even be able to? Pearl was no longer bonded with him now that he was dead as well.

"Will I even spawn in the Western Continent? People usually don't spawn there, right?" Alex thought.

He started worrying a little more. Still, he needed to take the chance. For Pearl.

Once he got out of the bathroom, he immediately went back to the capsule. He opened the lid, got in, and logged in.

He waited for the capsule to ask the question again… but it never came.

"Huh?" he wondered. "Why is nothing happening?" He tried to log in once more, but again, there was nothing but silence.

'The hell?' he thought. "No way that question from before was a one-time thing, right? Just because I rejected it once, that shouldn't mean I don't get to enter at all."

Alex started to get worried. Did he lose his one chance to 'reincarnate' in the game?

Suddenly, he heard a knock on the door. He walked out of the capsule and opened the door.

Outside the door, was a confused Hannah. Before he could even say anything, she quickly shoved him aside and jumped into his capsule.

'What the hell?' Alex thought. 'What is she doing?'

He waited for a minute or so, and Hannah walked out of the capsule. The confusion was ever so high in her eyes.

"Did your capsule break before today?" she asked.

"What? No, I logged out this morning after I died in the game," Alex said. "After that, I haven't been able to log in."

She then opened her phone she had brought along and went on to check the news.

"Hey guys, is your capsule working?" Sarah shouted through the house.

Alex and Hannah walked outside to find a confused Sarah in the living room with her laptop in her hand.

"It's not just us," Hannah said while looking at something on her screen. "The entire world is suffering this. Everyone was simultaneously logged out while we were eating, it seems."

"What's going on? Is this a maintenance break? Is there anything on the internet about this?" Sarah asked.

"No, but people are asking questions," Hannah said.

"Let's wait for it to get fixed then," Alex said.

And so they waited for an hour. Then two hours. 4. 8. A day. 2 days. 5 days. 10 days.

However, there was no information about the game. Deva Corp had a fire lit under them from all the harassment they suffered from the players.

However, even though they owned the game, they weren't the ones who were responsible for maintaining it. But, they didn't know who was, and could never get into contact with the developer.

After many days, people simply lost all hope. They started a lawsuit against the Deva corp. Their stocks dropped from sky high, all the way to the ground.

The people understood that they could no longer go back to the game, so people started going on with their life.

Alex had already sold his stock of Deva corp when he had come to understand that the reincarnation aspect of the game would one day ruin it for everyone. And while he was wrong about the reason, he had luckily sold it while it was at its peak.

With the game not existing anymore, and him having no way to sustain himself, Alex decided to go back to University. He took classes that would help him in business this time so that he could help his father back home.

They changed apartments too as this one was too costly to sustain and got themselves a more affordable one.

Alex's relationship with Emily steadily progressed as well. As for Hannah, it didn't seem like she could find someone to love anything soon.

After a few months, she left Oakleaf city and went back to her hometown to help her father with their business.

Alex studied in the university for a bit longer before returning back home to improve his father's agriculture.

He helped him gather new workers and added facilities to house them. His father insisted on doing everything alone, but Alex didn't let him.

He then expanded his farm by a lot and started working on it himself. His business knowledge, as well as his father's agricultural knowledge, helped them create one of the biggest and most well-known farms in the entire city of Mapleleaf.

A year or so later, at the age of 25, Alex married Emily. Their wedding wasn't very big, but both of their family were happy with a small wedding.

A year or two later, Hannah also got married to a man she had fallen in love with at work.

They hadn't forgotten about the game. Eternal Cultivation may have been short-lived, but it had made a very large impact on their lives.

Alex still remembered his master who had died. He prayed his other master who lived was well now. He remembered his senior sister, senior brother, his friends, and he missed them all.

Most of all, however, he missed Pearl. If he had any regrets regarding the game, it was that he couldn't save him. All he could do was pray that Pearl passed the ritual without dying.

Hannah still loved her husband from the game, and would sometimes tell Alex how much she missed him. However, she didn't let that ruin her current relationship with her husband.

The world remembered the game, they remembered it very well. But they had also moved on from it.

A few years later, Alex had a child with Emily. A daughter. He named her Maron, after his late master, Ma Rong.

That was the only child he had, and he loved her dearly.

Life went on, and many years passed. Alex was now in his 40s. He had retired now and lived happily on his farm with his wife.

And he wouldn't want it to be any other way.

[The End of Volume 1: Inside the Game]

* * * *

--Extra from Alex's LIfe--

A certain day.

Alex couldn't sleep at all during the night with the back pain that kept him awake. While he was awake, he heard a loud bang coming from somewhere behind his house.

He walked out in the midsummer night, with a flashlight in his hands.

The sound had come from the forest behind his house. There were no workers at the moment due to the summer festival they had gone to set up close to the city.

"What's going on?" he asked himself. He walked into the woods without any fear. There were no beasts in there after all. The only thing he needed to worry about was falling off of the edge.

However, he didn't need to worry about that as they were very far away from where he was.

He walked slowly as his old bones hurt a lot during the night. He walked about 5 minutes into the forest when he noticed something.

There was some sound coming from up ahead. 'I hope it's not dangerous,' he thought.

If there was danger ahead of him, he wouldn't be able to run away. Still, it was too late to turn around as he saw what had made the noise in the forest.

His eyes narrowed when he saw the source of the sound.

Chapter 554: Finally Free

Sounds of water splashing close by rang all around.

"Urgh…" Alex cried out as he slowly came to consciousness. He struggled to push himself against the crusty, hot ground to stand up. His left arm never touched the ground.

'Right, I don't have it anymore,' he thought. He slowly stood up to feel the cold wind blow past him. He saw vague light in front of him, but nothing else.

He used his spiritual sense to look around him. He was on top of hard ground, close to where the water entered his spiritual range.

He saw his own body. Fully black from burning from whatever the source was. Fortunately, it hadn't gone past his skin.

He had a memory of being poisoned, but the red veins he remembered were not on him anymore.

He stood there for a moment before he realized, he wasn't cultivating at all. "Huh?" he wondered.

He checked with his spiritual sense and he really wasn't cultivating at all.

"How… am I here when he's not cultivating?" Alex thought for a moment before he thought of an answer.

He wanted to believe it was true, but… the hope it gave was too much for him if it were not.

He took a single step forward. He moved… and nothing happened. He stepped again. Nothing happened once more.

"Is this true?" he wanted to cry, but no tears came out of his eyes. Even his eyelids were fully burnt from the heat of the source.

He slowly reached to his crusty eyelids and peeled them open to see in front of him.

There is was, with all of its greatness, and all of its terror. The ocean.

He remembered seeing this scenery with a lot of light around it, however, this was the first time he actually experienced it himself.

He felt the Qi in the air. There was not a single hint of Yang energy in it.

He looked around. He moved around. It was true. Somehow… it was true.

Finally, tears started flooding down his face.

"I'm Free! I'm finally free!" he cried out. It had been ages since he could control his own body.

He wiped the tears off, ignoring the pain he felt when he did so. In fact, the pain made him feel happy. Finally, he could do something on his own after so many months.

The winter air was cold, but the sun in the sky helped him feel the warmth.

Alex loved it all.

He took a deep breath. The smell of salt was in the air all around him. He slowly walked ahead and jumped into the ocean.

"Hahaha-hahaha!" he started laughing while tears streamed down his face again. The cold ocean water made him feel alive. Finally, after so many months.

"So he's really gone? Forever?" he wondered.

After a few minutes, he stood up and walked away from the ocean. Just as he was leaving, he saw something out of the corner of his eyes.

To the side, he had missed something by being too tunnel-visioned on his freedom. He had missed a giant tree about 10 meters tall, with a yellow trunk, yellow branches, and yellow leaves.

He slowly walked up to it, he felt like it belonged to him for some reason. He placed his hands on the trunk and closed his eyes.

He could tell, the tree had lost all of its yang energy and it had died.

"So, was this… the treasure?" he wondered. A memory came to him, something he hadn't experienced himself, but the other guy did.

It was the memory of reading a book, a record of the Tiger sect.

The words flowed through his mouth as he looked around him. "Where the fiery earth embraces the yin like water," he looked at the tree next to him and continued, "A golden wood of Yang emerges."

He looked at the rock-hard ground that was likely molten before from the heat. The Fiery Earth.

He looked at the ocean whose coldness knew no bounds. The Yin-like Water.

Finally, he turned back to the tree once more. Golden Wood of Yang.

"So this is the place that record was talking about, huh?" he wondered.

This was the birthplace of the Tiger sect. Their Sacred land.

He looked up at the tree and saw something missing on one of the branches. "I see," Alex said. "So the source… it was your fruit, wasn't it? No wonder that old man was so scared about you losing your maturity."

Alex felt like the tree had a soul, so he kept talking to it. "You're dying, aren't you? I can't save you."

The tree suddenly moved. The branches dropped to the ground, tearing up the land beneath them before the branches brought out something.

"A seed?" Alex asked in surprise. "Is this your seed?" he asked.

The tree moved in acknowledgment.

"Do you want me to sow it somewhere?" he asked.

The tree moved once again.

Alex looked at the yellow seed about the size of his thumb and said, "You were the reason I got my life back. I will do everything in my power, to get one for your child as well."

The tree moved again, and as a gesture of thank, 3 leaves fell from the very top of the tree.

Alex grabbed the leaves and looked at the shiny, golden leaves. "You don't have to thank m—"

Before he could even finish speaking, the tree lit up all over, and as if winds could carry light, the motes of light slowly flew away, before the entire tree vanished from his sight.

"Thank you," Alex said and bowed towards the tree. He looked towards the ocean again and smiled. He smiled because he was happy he lived. He smiled because he was free.

Then, he turned around and left. He flew up the massive dune of sand and slowly floated down on the other side.

He saw a sand-covered boat just sitting there. He walked up to it and looked at his items.

Were they even his items? He never did anything to get them. It was the other guy who got them after all.

He took… his... storage bag and pulled out a few pills. He needed quite a few healing pills to bring him back to looking like normal.

That meant healing the innards, healing the skin, and even growing out the hair all over his body.

When his body did heal, Alex used his spiritual sense to check if there was something wrong with it still.

He checked his whole body, and finally moved on to his face. At first, he saw nothing wrong, but when he realized what he was looking at, his eyes went wide.

"My… My face! It's back?" he shouted out loud. Alex's face looked exactly the same as his real face back in his homeworld.

His… Alex wasn't sure if he could call that world his at the moment. From what he understood, he was just a clone, trapped in his own body, while the real soul drove it.

Now that the real soul had gone, he could finally surface and use it as his own.

'Am I really a clone?' he wondered. The last thing he remembered doing by himself was putting on that helmet for the first time, getting ready to log in.

That was the last time he ever did anything by himself. Ever since then… he was suppressed in his own body.

"No," Alex thought. That was not the only time he did something on his own.

He remembered the other time, when his real soul fought with Zexi, while he watched from beneath the water in his spiritual sea.

He was in a stasis, unable to do anything. However, when his other soul had lost all control, at the last moment, he had gotten his control back and had then killed Zexi.

Alex looked down at the boat and with a wave of a hand cleared the sand. There were his dirty clothes and his other storage bags.

He recalled another memory, not his but the other soul's memory.

The other soul had left all of his possessions here, wishing luck to the next person who found it. He had hoped this would help them on their cultivation journey.

Alex looked at them and said in a soft voice, "Thank you for giving me all of this. I promise I will put them to good use."

Alex quickly put on a new set of robes. The robe was neither green nor yellow, but rather a neutral gray color.

He then stored the golden leaves and seed into a storage bag, before putting all of the storage bags into his robes and got on the boat to fly back towards the Hong Wu sect.

'How many days has it been since the attack? How many days was I out?' he wondered.

The sun was in the sky, but that gave no information of how many days had passed.

"Will I ever be able to go back home?" he wondered. He also wondered if that other world was his home.

The speed at which he had flown was very fast now that the suppression in the desert no longer existed.

Within a matter of hours, Alex could see the giant cliffs of the Hong Wu sect.

He didn't know how to feel about the sect yet, as it was never his sect, but the other guys. However, the memory of the other Alex told him just how much he cared about it.

Just before he reached the sect, however, he saw something shine next to the river.

He slowed down to check what it was. When he did finally see it, his eyes went wide.

He immediately took back the boat and jumped down to the object. It was half-buried in the sand around the grasses, but the half that did stand up made it very clear what it was.

The short blue handle, the light blue cross guard, the thin blade with the blue hue.

That was his master's sword. He slowly pulled it out and looked at it, half of it bloody from the old man's stab wound.

The memories this sword evoked, they weren't something he wanted to feel at the moment, but he couldn't help it.

Tears streamed down his face as he remembered Ma Rong, his master, and her promise.

He walked up to the river and washed away the blood from her sword. He couldn't let the filth's wound desecrate it like that.

He looked at the sword again. His master's sword. Not the other guy's master. HIS master.

This evoked another memory of his. This one, however, didn't belong to the other guy. This was a memory of his own.

The memory he had from the time he talked to Ma Rong.

Chapter 555: Master

Many months ago, back on the ship to the Cardinal City.

"You see… I still fall asleep when I cultivate and… I don't know when I stop doing it," Alex said to Ma Rong.

"What? You haven't fixed that yet?" Ma Rong asked.

"I don't know how to master. I keep falling asleep. At first, I thought that was normal, but it seems that it is not. I don't know what to do," Alex said.

"You should have let me know that way earlier," Ma Rong said. "Alright, Cultivate right now and I'll try to see what the problem is."

Alex had closed his eyes to cultivate and started breathing slowly. The Qi in his body started moving to the rhythm of his breathes and soon, and slowly Alex started falling asleep.

As one Alex fell asleep, the other one finally came to the control of the body once again.

'He started cultivating?' Alex thought as he assumed control of his body once again. He circulated the Qi around his body to cultivate.

That was what he did. The other guy would always think cultivation was something that happened on its own. But he was wrong. It was him doing all the work while the other guy fell asleep.

He had always hated the other him. The him that got to do what he wanted, the him that was always free. The him that got to go back to the other side.

However, despite hating him, he never did a single thing that would harm him. For he knew that the other him was not responsible for whatever he was going through.

They both shared the same memory before they came to the game, the same experience. It was only after jumping into the game that they separated.

And while the other him got to experience both worlds, he was stuck on this side, fated to forever hide beneath him.

Alex sighed on the inside. He continued cultivating as that was the only time he wasn't suppressed and could actually think for himself.

If he stopped cultivating, he would immediately go back to being suppressed, so he had no choice.

"Does he have school tomorrow? What time does he need to wake up at?" Alex wondered and looked through the memory he had that he never experienced.

This was what he always did. He looked through the other Alex's memory and cultivated until it was time for him to leave, be it if it was for his classes, or just to have breakfast.

There were times when he just wanted to keep on cultivating forever, so that the other Alex could never assume control, but he never did any of that.

After all, the other him was the only way he could know how his parents were doing on the other side.

'Hmm? Oh, he got on a ship to the capital for competition?' Alex thought while he looked at the memories. He saw the top 3 disciples of the Hong Wu sect.

He saw the 2nd and 3rd elder and saw an old man who the other guy's master said was a fraud.

Following that, he finally recalled the memories of when he was to wake up. He was to do so when Ma Rong told him to.

'Does that mean…' Alex was about to send out his spiritual sense when he noticed Ma Rong's spiritual sense on his own body.

Ma Rong could see that Alex had indeed fallen asleep, but she couldn't figure out what was wrong with him.

So, she had decided to check if he wasn't cultivating properly by some chance. She used her spiritual sense on him, but she couldn't find any problems at all.

She was very confused as to what she should do now.

"Yu Ming! Yu Ming!" she started calling him out. However, she got no answer.

"Yu Ming!" she called out again, but she still got no answer.

"Yu Ming!" the last time, she called him directly with a spiritual sense. "Wake up."

Alex could hear it all, but he didn't know what to do. She kept on calling for the other guy. So… should he just stop cultivating?

He couldn't see what was happening outside, so he sent out his own spiritual sense.

"Ah, so you are awake. Why didn't you say so?" Ma Rong asked the moment she sensed the spiritual sense.

Alex panicked a little and nearly stopped cultivating. However, when he stopped to think about it, he realized that maybe… just maybe, she could help him.

So, once again, he sent out his spiritual sense towards her, and this time he actually spoke to her.

"H-Hello!" he said.

"Ah, you are awake. How did it go? Did you learn how to not fall asleep?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex didn't know how to ask for help. What was he to say? How should he form the questions?

"Yu Ming?" Ma Rong asked when he didn't reply.

"Um… I'm not Yu Ming," Alex replied. "Your disciple is still asleep."

Ma Rong's face narrowed in confusion. "What are you saying, Yu Ming?" she asked.

"My name is not Yu Ming. My name is Alex," Alex replied a little scaredly.

Ma Rong's eyes went wide. "Did you take over my disciple's body?" she immediately got angry.

"No! No! No!" Alex was still replying with his spiritual sense. "He took over mine."

Ma Rong's serious face showed confusion again. "What do you mean… he took over?" she asked.

"I mean… I'm not sure, but I think he took over mine. I have been stuck in this body for nearly a month and a half now. The only time I gain control is when he cultivates," Alex said.

Ma Rong got even more confused. Alex thought for a moment and decided to tell her everything from the very start.

He told her about his life, where he came from, the other world, how this was a game to them, however since the start he had been suppressed in this body.

Ma Rong's shock was great and understandable.

"Are you saying that… you are not from this world, but another?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I don't know how any of this works, but… yes, I, we are from another world."

"Hmm…" Ma Rong thought. The shock had been truly great for her and needed some time to process.

"So… you are a clone of his?" Ma Rong asked.

"Um, I think so," Alex said. "I think our souls were sent here to find a random dead body and take over it."

"I may have just been a contingency plan in case something happened to his soul," Alex said.

"No, that's not possible," Ma Rong said.

"Huh?" Alex asked.

"There are two methods of making clones," Ma Rong said. "First is using a dead body and putting in a bit of your soul to control it. Making clones that way takes weeks since the soul will need time to integrate with the dead body."

"You said you appeared in a forest right? If it were just you, it would be possible, but you said there are millions of people just like you here, right?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex nodded. "Yes, you won't find so many dead bodies just lying around, especially ones that have no damage to them."

"Then?" Alex asked.

"Then, the body you have now was created somehow, and you were the soul grown along with it," Ma Rong said as his eyes went wide in just the thought of what she was saying.

"To think someone is out there that can clone bodies in an instant, that too of such high caliber. I couldn't even begin to imagine the resources that would be needed for your body alone, let alone the other millions of people."

Ma Rong's breath got heavy. She understood the gravity of the situation. The only ones who could possibly do these sorts of things were definitely immortals.

"Does… does that mean… this body is mine?" Alex asked.

"Yes, that… that should be your body which is being controlled by your original soul," Ma Rong said.

Alex felt stunned. He didn't know what to say. Slowly, as he processed the information, a question appeared in his mind.

"Does… does that mean that I will never get to go back home? That… I do not belong there anymore?" he asked. He felt like crying, but he couldn't. Any unnecessary movement could stop him from cultivating, sending him back to the dark corner in his mind.

Ma Rong stayed quiet for a while and watched the sun come up the horizon. She sighed, and finally said, "yes. Yes, I believe you are stuck here forever."

A few elders appeared from the side. "Sect leader, we've arrived," they said.

Ma Rong looked out of the boat and saw the capital. "Let the 2nd elder take control for now. Tell him to take you all to the hotel. I will leave later."

"Yes," the elder said and left.

Alex's emotions could be vaguely seen on his face. Pain, despair, agony, sadness. He was feeling a multitude of emotions at once.

"That means I will never get to see my mother again? Never get to meet my father? I had only just left the countryside for the first time. Will I never get to see the city like I wanted to?" he asked himself.

Ma Rong quietly listened to his complaints while everyone else left the boat.

She looked around and saw that no one was onboard anymore. "We should leave soon too," Ma Rong said. "Can you…" She felt guilty asking him to surrender control of his own body to the other soul.

"Do I have to? Do I have to give control of my body, even after knowing it's my own body? Why should I? Why doesn't he leave instead?" Alex's voice started getting louder in her mind. She could hear the anguish in hiss voice as well.

"Why does he get to have everything while I stay trapped in my own body? Why do I have to suffer through all of this?" Alex cried out.

"Am I not worthy of a life just because I'm a clone? Do I not deserve freedom?" he asked.

Ma Rong started tearing up when she heard him. "You do, you deserve it," she said.

"Then why? Why don't i—"

"I will help you. I will help you find a way to get back your freedom," Ma Rong said.

Alex stopped shouting and asked, "You will?"

"Yes," Ma Rong said with tears in her eyes.

"I… I can have my freedom back?" he asked. "Please don't give me false hope."

"No, it's not false. I promise, I will do everything I can to find a way to help you," Ma Rong said.

"Even if that means getting rid of his soul?" Alex asked.

"No, I will find a way so that neither of you gets hurt, and both of you get to live your life just as you want," Ma Rong said. "Trust your master."

"Mas..ter," Alex said slowly. "I can call you, master?"

"Of course," Ma Rong said as she wiped her tears. "I am your master, and you are my disciple."

Alex started crying on the inside. "Thank you, master. Thank you" he cried. At the same time, Ma Rong started crying again.

"Now, can you please let him come out? We need to leave," Ma Rong said.

"Yes," Alex said. "Thank you."

Slowly, his cultivation cycle slowed down, and he felt the suppression come back to push him back to the depth once again.

The other Alex came out and saw Ma Rong, with tears in her eyes, and asked, "What's wrong, Master? Why are you crying?"

* * * *

Alex looked at his Master's sword as tears flowed down his face again. He had just recalled his memories of the first time he talked to his master.

He then remembered the last memory he had of his master, her dying in his arm, regretting that she never got to keep her promise.

He brought the sword to his chest and hugged it as he cried, "You didn't fail master. You did it. You kept your promise."

"Thank's to you, I'm finally free."

Chapter 556: Returning to the Sect

Alex stood up and dusted off the sand from his pants. He had washed his face with the river water and no longer did he have the tear on his face.

He suddenly sensed someone moving behind him as he sensed their Qi in the air. He spread out his spiritual sense and saw 2 elders walking towards him.

"My head suddenly hurts," one elder said.

"Yeah, mine too," the other one replied.

They had noticed Alex from far away already, so the moment they appeared, they put their swords towards him as if he were a bad guy here.

"Who are you?!" they shouted at him.

Alex looked at himself. He no longer looked like 'Yu Ming' at all, so it was obvious they wouldn't recognize him.

"Senior, I am Yu Ming." Alex said. "I have changed my appearance, but it is me."

The two of the elders looked at him with confusion in their face for a moment, before the confusion turned into anger and disdain.

"How dare you lie to us using the late Sect leader's dead disciple's name?" they shouted at him and got ready to attack.

"Eh?" Alex was surprised.

'They think he's dead? Well, they're not wrong in a sense,' Alex thought. Suddenly, he lost all aura of his, and similarly, even his image disappeared.

"Huh? Where did he go?" the elders shouted.

Alex didn't want to do this, but he didn't know how he could explain to them that it was indeed him, and not some random person faking being him.

He left the elders concerned and in full combat mode, and he back towards the sect.

With all of the suppression gone from the Forbidden Fields, one could easily fly in and out of it.

It had now changed to perhaps one of the better places in the sect. Maybe someday the elders would establish some other things here.

He would love to see a combat section established here. Not that he was sure he would be here to see that happen.

He flew up the mountain and landed in front of his master's house. It seemed to have been repaired by now, although he could see that the repair was pretty new.

'How long was I really out?' he wondered again.

The other guy had learned a lot from this place, so Alex felt that he owed this place at least a bow.

Once done, he left and went to his own house and walked in for a bit. He knew each and every corner of this house.

After all, there wasn't many things he could do while cultivating aside from sending out his spiritual sense to check this place.

He smiled a little as he looked through all of the place and walked out.

He walked down the mountain, now fully visible, and was starting to attract glances from everyone.

He smiled towards everyone and made his way to the Elder's hall. As soon as he reached the place, he sent out his spiritual sense to find someone that he could talk to.

The Grand Elder was in room along with the First elder and his Martial uncle, talking about something.

"Grandmaster, are you free to speak right now?" he asked him through the spiritual sense.

The old man's eyes went wide and he suddenly turned.

"Yu Ming?" he called.

"Yes, Grandmaster," Alex replied through his spiritual sense.

"What's wrong, master?" Lang Shun asked.

"Y-Yu Ming, he's back," the Grand Elder said.

Alex walked into the hall and opened the door to the room.

The moment they saw him, instead of elation, they felt confusion. "Who… who are you?" they asked.

Alex chuckled a little. "Grandmaster, Martial Uncle, it's me," Alex said. Despite his face being different, his voice was the same, so they easily recognized him.

"Yu Ming? You're alive?" they asked in surprise.

"Yes, Grandmaster," Alex said. "I'm… I'm sorry for my reckless and impulsive action. I must've worried you all."

"Worried us? Hell, we thought you died," Lang Shun shouted.

"Eh? Died? Uh, I was close to it for sure, but as you can see, I'm not dead," Alex said.

"How did you survive? Where did you even go? We scoured the desert after you left, but we never found you," the Grand Elder said.

"Um, did you go towards the ocean?" Alex asked.

"Ocean? That's so far north. There is no way we could go there with all the suppression on our cultivation base," the Grand Elder said. "Did you really go there?"

"Yes, I did," Alex said with a solemn face. "And I killed master's killer too."

All 3 of their eyes went wide. "You killed sister's killer? Are you sure?" Lang Shun asked.

"Yes, Martial uncle," Alex said. "He's dead. I killed him with my own hands."

Lang Shun immediately walked upto him and embraced him. "Good! Good!" he said as tears spilled down his face.

The Grand Elder's eyes were tearing as well. Alex simply smiled with a sad face.

"How did you kill him? He should have been stronger than you, right?" Lang Shun asked.

"He was, but the suppression helped me. With my physical strength, under the right circumstances, beating him was easy," Alex said.

"Oh right," Alex remembered his burning question. "How many days was I gone for?"

"Do you not know?" the Grand Elder asked.

"No, I was unconscious after the battle," Alex said.

"Sigh, it's been 7 days since the invasion," Lang Shun said. "I'm surprised you survived in the desert with so many beasts for 7 days."

"There weren't any beasts there. They were probably hiding due to the intense suppression that happened out of nowhere. Also, you guys should know, the Qi has returned to the desert. The Yang Qi is fully gone now," Alex said.

"What?" all 3 of them shouted in the room, including the rarely speaking first elder.

"Right, did master wake up?" Alex asked. It felt a little weird calling Wen Cheng, master, but when Alex thought about it, all the combat knowledge he had in his mind came from him. So it was only right to call him that.

"Sect leader Wen Cheng was fully healed 3 days ago and has went back to the Tiger sect. Although, he does have an arm and a few fingers missing, not unlike you," Lang Shun said.

"Are you alright? Do you want to contact an artifact creator to make a fake arm for you?" the Grand Elder asked.

"Right, you can make a fake puppet arm which wouldn't be weaker than your normal one," the First elder said.

"That's… tempting, but I'll pass. I would rather have my own arm," Alex said.

"How will you do that?" Grand Elder asked curiously.

"Umm, do you guys have master's spiritual bag?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the Grand Elder said.

"Then you will find a bunch of talisman inside them, all recording recipes for different pills, including many True pills and Saint pills. Amongst those saint pill is a pill that can help me regrow my arm," Alex said.

"A Saint pill? That's impossible to make," Lang Shun said.

"Yes," Alex said. "That's why I plan to convert the saint pill to a True pill by using similar ingredients."

"Woah!" Lang Shun said after listening to his idea. "You think it'll work?"

"Yes," Alex said. "Although I do not know how, yet. The Royal Alchemist successfully upgraded my Common rank pill recipe to a True rank pill recipe. Going by that logic, downgrading should be similar as well, right?"

"I wouldn't say it's similar," the Grand Elder said. "Upgrading is easy from Common rank to True rank because the one doing the changes is usually familiar with both the ingredients."

"However, it will be impossible for you to be familiar with a saint rank ingredient. Heck, it's impossible to even find one," the Grand elder said.

"It's alright, Grandmaster. I will do it," Alex said.

"I hope you do, Martial Nephew. I will need such a pill for my leg too," Lang Shun joked.

"Of course, Martial uncle," Alex said with a smile. "By the way, what's the situation of the sect leader status now? Did you already choose one?"

"No," Grand Elder said. "First elder is currently the acting sect leader until we can decide on something else. But… it's likely going to be the 4th Elder."

'4th Elder huh?' Alex thought. A memory of a short and thin man with a relatively thick mustache came to his mind. He had never really interacted with the man, so Alex didn't knew much about him.

"Also," Alex spoke up to ask something, but the question stuck on his throat.

"Yes?" the Grand Elder asked.

Alex forced himself to speak and said, "when… can you hold my graduation?"

"Hmm, it will be a week in the earliest," the Grand Elder said.

"I see," Alex said. "I will wait for the day then."

"Have you… made any plans for after your graduations?" the Grand Elder asked.

Alex nodded and said, "I plan to leave the sect."

"What? Wh—" Lang Shun spoke up in surprise, but the Grand Elder stopped him from speaking any further.

"I see," he said. "I hope you've thought of this choice for a bit before you made it."

"Yes, Grandmaster," Alex said.

The Grand Elder nodded. "Very well then. I will have them set your graduation soon."

"Thank you," Alex said. "I will go for now."

"Wait," the Grand Elder said. "Before I forget. There was someone from the City Lord's house here to look for you. We sent them back telling you were dead, but you might want to visit and let them know you are still alive."

"I see. I will do that," Alex said. "Goodbye."

He turned around and left the Elder's hall.

Chapter 557: The City Lord's Task

A girl in her mid-20s appeared on the outskirts of the Scarlet City. She had long flowing dark hair and wore a black robe made up of silk.

She had a frown on her face as if she didn't want to do what she was here to do.

She flew up to the city walls and saw a few soldiers. "Who is in charge of your city?" she asked.

The guards suddenly fell into a lull of sort and answered her without any thoughts.

'A city lord huh? Let's go see him,' the girl thought and flew through the city to the city lord's manor.

When she reached there, she sent out her spiritual sense to find the city lord.

"Come out!" she ordered directly into his mind.

Fu Wen was surprised when he heard the girl's voice in his mind. He immediately knew that it was a Saint realm expert who had arrived.

He walked out of the manor, and directly went outside. When he saw the person that had called him out, his eyes went wide.

'So young!' he thought as he looked at her. however, she was way too strong to trust her looks to be a direct representation of her age. For all he knew, she could be an old grandma.

"How may I help you, miss?" he asked as politely as possible. He really didn't want to anger this expert.

"I need your help with something," she said. "I need you to get your soldiers to gather some people."

"Some… people?" Fu Wen asked curiously. "May I know who I am to gather?"

"Yes," the girl said. "Go and gather the cultivators that will identify themselves as a player."

* * * * *

After leaving the Elder's hall, Alex left for the alchemy garden to the right. The place where his master was buried.

There were elders staying guard there, and surprisingly one of them even recognized him.

When he asked how he recognized him, the elder said, "I remember, that was the face you used for nearly 3 days in the competition back in the capital city."

'That's right,' Alex thought. The other Alex had indeed used his face to hide from Zexi.

After knowing that it was Alex, they let him enter the place without any hesitation.

Alex walked up the mountain to the place where his master was buried.

Her grave was right next to the Yin Gathering tree, which was starting to look a lot healthy now that the Yang energy from the city was gone.

"Hello, Master," Alex said. "We haven't talked in a long while, have we?"

Alex had a sad smile on his face while tears started building up in his eyes. He wiped the tears and continued speaking.

"I hope you are doing well… in your afterlife. You can rest assured about your killer, he's dead already," Alex said. "Although, I'm sure you wouldn't be happy learning that your disciple died in the process."

"It's just happened on its own, and now I'm free."

Alex then took out her sword from his storage bag. "Here," he said as he stabbed the sword next to her headstone.

"They say we can give you some things to make your afterlife easy. I hope this sword is of use to you in the afterlife, just like it was here."

Alex talked to Ma Rong for a while. After that, he decided to leave. Just as he was standing to leave, he heard something rustle a bit further away from him.

When he sent his spiritual sense to the place, he was a little surprised.

"Senior Green," Alex called out the snake that was hiding in the bushes. The green snake slowly appeared out of the bushes and looked at Alex.

After Ma Rong's funeral, the snake had decided to stay closer to her, to protect her and the tree she so very loved.

"Are you looking after Master?" Alex asked. The snake hissed while nodding its head.

"I see. Thank you for doing that," Alex said. "Please continue looking after her, and this tree."

Alex then looked into his storage bag and brought out something. "Here, I hope this helps you in your task," he said and handed the snake a Spirit Cleansing Lily.

The snake took the lily and nodded to Alex in thanks.

Alex thanked the snake once again and left the garden. He walked away from the place and went to visit the core disciple's mountain.

He met up with his friends that had somehow by now learned of his survival.

"I should have known. You are not the type to die," Kong Yuhan had said, giving Alex a little chuckle.

He talked to Zhou Mei and Fan Ruogang. Zhou Mei was in a very depressed state. She was still in denial that her beloved masters had killed each other.

All of a sudden, she felt like she was alone. Her sister and Fan Ruogang were taking care of her, but it would take a little longer for her inner wound to heal.

Alex handed them a Spirit Cleansing Lily as well. He had quite a few, so he wouldn't mind giving them to these people who treated him as a friend.

Even though he never experienced their friendship, the memory and emotions were still with him.

Alex also met Wan Li.

"My condolences for what has happened. It is truly a great loss for the sect to lose not only the two elders but also the sect master," Wan Li said.

Alex nodded but kept a solemn face. It seemed after the invasion, Wan Li had somehow lost all of his aggression. There weren't even guards looking after him now.

"Thank you," Wan Li said all of a sudden.

"Hmm? For what?" Alex asked.

"For capturing Black Venom alive, so I could interrogate her," Wan li said.

"Black Venom?" Alex remembered the memory. "Oh right, What happened to her? Is she imprisoned somewhere?"

Wan Li shook his head. "I killed her," he said.

Alex felt stunned for a moment, but in the next moment, he understood. "Did you at least get the information you needed?"

"Yes, I got what I want," Wan Li said. "It turned out that it was the Victorious Snow merchant group that paid her to kill my parents. My parents were starting to get successful, and it was impeding on their business."

"Victorious Snow…" Alex thought for a moment and a memory surfaced once more. "Ah, that fat guy. Huo Tu's father."

Alex remembered the old man from the first-ever auction he visited.

"Do you plan to take revenge against him as well?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Wan Li said as his face overcame with rage, but he calmed himself a bit. "But I can't do it right now. I will need to be stronger."

Alex nodded. "I heard Huo Zemin's first son is quite capable. Not to mention the mercenaries his money could buy. You really have to be very careful, brother Li," he said.

Alex looked at Wan Li's cultivation base which was close to True Lord now.

"Take care of your cultivation base, brother Li. If you cultivate too fast without consolidating your foundation, you will suffer later on," Alex said.

"I know," Wan Li said. "I'm slowing down now."

"I see," Alex said. "Here." He handed him another Lily and told him what to do. after that, he left.

He gave Wan Li all the advice and help he could. the rest was something Wan Li would have to do on his own.

Alex left the core disciple area and walked out of the sect. He wanted to go directly to the Tiger sect, but since the city lord's manor was on the way, he decided to go there first.

He looked around the city. He hadn't been able to experience it before, but now he did.

Should he be happy about it? He would certainly be happier if he was back at home. However, if he was to remain in this world now, he would certainly make the most of it.

'Hmm, what's up with all of these soldiers running around the city today?' he wondered. They were saying something, but Alex was lost in his own world, so he didn't listen.

He reached the City lord's manor, and let them know of his arrival.

He could hear a bit of commotion not far away from the lord's manor and wondered what it was.

The guards relayed the message to the City Lord and soon the city lord himself came running out.

He looked at the youth in front of him with confusion on his face. He was missing an arm, but his face looked different. "You are not him," he said.

"No, it is me, City lord. I just look different," Alex said. "I heard you wanted to see me."

Fu Wen still didn't trust that it was him, so Alex brought out a pill from his storage bag.

"It's the pill that makes someone sweat a lot," Alex said. "Is this proof enough?"

"Oh, it is you," the city lord finally accepted. "Why did you change your look?"

"I just… felt like it," Alex said.

"Come on in, let's talk inside," Fu Wen said and the two of them went into the manor.

"First of all, let me give you my condolences. Ma Rong's death is a tragedy for the whole empire," Fu Wen said. "It is truly a big loss for all of us."

"Thank you, City Lord," Alex said. He could tell that the City Lord truly felt of his master's death as a loss.

"So, let me get to the point. My uncle came here a week ago looking for you. He heard that you were back from where you were taken and wanted to talk to you," Fu Wen said.

"The Emperor wants to talk to me?" Alex asked. "Is he still around?"

"No," Fu Wen said. "After he learned you most likely died in the desert, he returned back."

"I see. May I know what he wanted to talk about?" Alex asked.

"Well…" Fu Wen hesitated a bit before finally saying, "he has two guests from outside the empire that came through the beast's land."

"Hmm," Alex was surprised. "Humans came out of the beast land? Ah, it must've been one of the ones that entered from the Luminance empire."

"You know about the Luminance empire?" Fu Wen asked in surprise.

"I learned a bit about it from the beasts," Alex said.

"Oh great," Fu Wen said. "The two that came out want to go back, but they're scared. You somehow survived there, so they want you to tell them how to survive in there."

"Oh, they want to get back? Wait, so they know how to enter?" Alex stood up suddenly and asked.

"Uhh… I believe so? They said they escaped on their own," Fu Wen said.

Alex's eyes moved around in surprise and a sense of happiness. He finally found a way to go save Pearl.

"I will do it," he said. "Please inform the Emperor of my survival as well as the fact that I will go to the capital a week or 2."

"Are you sure?" Fu Wen asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I will graduate from my sects in a few days. After that, I will leave."

"Ok," Fu Wen said with a smile. "I will let my Uncle know.

"How's the city doing?" Alex asked. "I hope it's back to being a bit more normal."

"Yes," Fu Wen said. "We finished the repair a few days ago, so it's as normal as it can be after a bandit attack."

"I see," Alex said. "I saw many soldiers outside. You must've upped the security a lot."

"Hmm? Oh no, those aren't for securities," Fu Wen said. "I am just using my soldiers and guards to gather people for someone."

"Gather people?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Fu Wen said. "Someone came and asked me to help them gather cultivators that would call themselves Players."

Alex's eyes went wide all of a sudden. "Players?"

Chapter 558: You are the Reason

Alex walked out of the City Lord's manor after saying his goodbye. The City Lord told him that he would relay the information to the Emperor about him being alive.

Alex would need to quickly graduate and go to the capital so he could save Pearl. Also, he wanted to meet up with the Royal Alchemist to see if he had any ideas to regrow his arm.

He was looking forward to that, but for now, there was something else that had grabbed his interest.

"Who's gathering players?" he wondered. He had learned that the commotion outside that he heard before getting in was actually the place of gathering.

So, he decided to make his way there before he went to the Tiger sect.

Walking there, Alex saw a lot of people along the way. All of them had the same sad, confused, and somewhat hopeful look on their faces.

'They must really not want to stay here, huh?' he thought. 'Understandable.'

He saw a building next to the group of people where the soldiers were governing the players. One by one, the players would enter the building and walk out less than a minute later.

'What's the purpose here?' Alex wondered. Initially, his thought was that someone had started a therapy group for people that were now likely depressed and anxious.

But… this seemed nothing like it. 'Do they perhaps have some malicious intent?' Alex thought. If they had, Alex decided to help these poor folks a little.

He waited in line as more and more of the players entered and walked out.

He didn't know how long it had been going on, but from what he could tell, there were about 600 players in total in the Scarlet city.

He would've never thought of there being this many.

He looked to the western sky and saw the sun. It would set in merely 2 more hours. 'I hope this hurries up,' he thought.

As he waited for his turn, he spoke with a few of the players that were on the line.

At first, he thought everyone was just a normal person, who was busy playing their game. However, it didn't take him long to realize that just like him, they were the old souls stuck here too.

'Why did I think this only happened to me?' he wondered. He started asking questions.

However, when he continued listening to their anguish, he realized that these people had zero ideas about what was happening.

The last thing they remembered was, just like him, putting on the helmets. Aside from that, there were some thoughts and memories that popped up into their mind of the time when the other soul controlled their body, but aside from that, they remembered nothing.

Alex was really surprised to hear that. He asked if they had ever been conscious after coming to the game world, but it seemed they hadn't.

Some of them did say that they thought they were awake the first couple of days, but it was a memory from so long ago that they couldn't trust themselves with it.

'Wait, was I the only one who remembered it all?' he thought. 'How is that possible?'

He tried thinking of answers to the question and after a while, came up with 2 answers.

Firstly, he had something that they didn't, which was the eidetic memory. Having spiritual sense, he could remember every memory, every detail to perfection.

Even after so much time had passed, he could remember everything since the day he cultivated with a Spirit Cleansing Lily.

Since these people didn't have that luxury, after months on end, they couldn't remember most of the memory they had made.

Another answer was that it was all because he came up to the surface everything the other Alex cultivated. He still had no idea why that was, but from talking to these players, it seemed that it was only him that did that.

'Right,' he thought. 'He was the only anomaly in the other world who would sleep during cultivation. Did that help me somehow?'

Alex guessed that while both of these answers were equally true, the second one held more importance.

'There must be something wrong, or rather right with my body for me to wake up when cultivating, unlike them,' he thought.

He had a Divine Grade body, a God-grade talent, and… a seemingly very powerful spirit roots.

'It could be any of these things,' he said. Finally, a little before the sun was to go down the horizon, his turn came up.

Under the watch of the soldiers, he saw a woman walk away, and he entered the building.

The building seemed to be a sort of warehouse, now that he could see it more clearly from the inside.

The room was open and there was a girl with a notepad in her hand, seemingly writing down something.

"What's your name?" she asked without even looking at him as she clicked the pen and started writing down what he was going to say.

"Alex Benton. I assume you wanted my real-world name," Alex said.

The girl looked at him with narrowed eyes and continued writing. 'She's quite pretty,' Alex thought.

He sent out his spiritual sense to see what he was writing but suddenly felt a backlash when the girl sent her own spiritual sense to attack his.

"Stay in your place," she told him angrily.

Alex felt a little scared of what she had just done. 'How is she so strong?' he wondered. Her age barely made her look a few years older than him, so this came to him as a genuine surprise.

Just when he was thinking that, he noticed something that was so obvious that he couldn't believe he missed it.

He immediately put up his only hand as he pointed at the thing that was on her hand.

"A PEN!" he shouted in surprise. A body made up of plastic, with ink in it that was topped off by a small layer of gel. That was a pen that was impossible to be found in this world.

"You! How do you have that pen?" he asked.

"Hoh! You are the first one to ask me about this pen. The others just asked me about what was going on. It seems you are not as concerned about it," the girl said.

"Now, put your arm down or I will cut that one off as w—" suddenly the smirk in her face disappeared, and her eyes went wide.

"That ring!" she shouted when she saw the golden ring with a ruby in Alex's hand. "Where did you get that ring?"

"This ring?" Alex showed a confused face, but on the inside, he was surprised that she noticed the ring at all.

"I found it in the de—"

His voice stopped as well when he noticed a similar ring on her fingers as well. It wasn't the same design, but it was similar enough that Alex knew for sure that it was a storage ring as well.

"Where did you find it?" the girl asked again.

"Why don't you tell me where you found yours?" Alex asked.

"You don't need to know that," the girl said.

"Then I guess, you don't need to know this as well," Alex said. Despite nearly answering it already, he decided to hold off the information.

"How about this?" Alex said. "If you tell me how you got the pen, I will tell you where I found this as well."

The girl thought for a while and answered, "I got it from where you think I got it from."

Alex's eyes went wide. "From the other world? For our homeworld?" Alex asked.

A curiously little smile came upon the girl's face. "You could say that I guess," she said.

"How did you get it? Where did you get it from?" he asked.

"You don't need to know anything else. Just tell me where you found the ring. I have a few more questions after that and you can leave," the girl said.

Alex really wanted to know about them, but he couldn't force the girl considering how strong she was.

"I found them in the desert north of here," Alex said. He didn't give her any hints as to the fact that he knew what they were.

"Can I see them?" the girl asked.

"No thanks. I would like to keep it myself. It looks pretty on me," he said.

The girl's eyes narrowed. She really wanted to take the ring, but her master would scold her if he learned that she hit him. After all, she was told to be as diplomatic as possible.

"Alright, let's forget about it then," she said. Alex was surprised she didn't insist further given how strong she was.

He kept looking at the pen and notepad, and they were definitely from his home-world. 'How did she get them here?' he wondered.

"Do you know how long you've been here?" she asked.

"About 7 or so months," Alex said.

The girl's eyes changed when she heard that. He was just a month off from the correct answer after all.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I started a month later than everyone else, so it's been 7 months."

"What?" she suddenly exclaimed. "You know that too?"

"Uh, yes," Alex said. "Unlike the ones out there, I was conscious some of the time and have full control over my memories."

"Woah!" the girl said, actually impressed, or at least surprised. "Maybe you are the only one that can help me then."

"I can?" Alex looked at her in surprise. "What do you want the help with?"

"I wonder if you remember anything important happening here 5 days ago," she asked.

"May I ask what it is for?" Alex asked.

"5 days ago, something happened that caused all the players to revert back to their original state. I have come to learn that the cause of that problem was from this area," she said. "So, I'm looking for information on it. if you have any, it's better you give us so we can do something to fix it."

"5 days ago, huh?" Alex said. He wasn't sure if he should be giving out this information, but if it meant learning a way back home, he would be ready to give out every single secret he held.

"Let's see… 7 days ago there was a bandit invasion on this city. Many people died… including people I cared about."

Alex's face turned solemn as he remembered the night once more.

"And? That's it?" she asked with a disappointed look.

"What? No, of course not. Uhh… north of here there was a source of Yang that suppressed cultivation in the entire desert. That night, the Yang energy reached a climax."

"What?" the girl cried out. "Yang?" the girl stood up once again in surprise as her eyes that had gone done to being a normal size had widened again.

"Uh… yeah," Alex said, slightly surprised at such a reaction from her.

"Sorry, please continue," the girl sat back down and carefully noted everything, not wasting a single word of his.

"And?" she asked.

"Well, I had a fight with someone who poisoned me. So, in my near-dead state, I went to check what it was."

"When I found it… I ate the source," Alex said.

The girl suddenly stopped writing. "You ate the source?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Wait, I must have heard it wrong. You said… you ate the yang source?" she asked once again.

"Well… technically the other guy that was in my body did. The real player," Alex said.

The girl's hands started shaking and with a snap, the pen broke in two.

Alex stepped back a few steps when he saw the rage build up in her face.

"YOU IDIOT!" she cried out.

"Wh-what's wrong?" he asked.

"WHAT'S WRONG? What's not wrong?" she exclaimed. "You ate the Yang source!"

"Uhh… so?" he asked, still unable to understand what was happening.

"It was your fault, you idiot," the girl cried out.

"You are the reason the system broke, and now everyone is stuck here!"

Chapter 559: Home World

Alex looked a little stunned. "I was the reason? Wait, what? How can that be?" Alex asked.

"Tell me exactly when you ate the Yang source," the girl demanded. She seemed furious, but it didn't look like she was going to harm him.

"Uhh… it was early in the morning 5 days ago," Alex said.

"It is you, then," the girl said. "You ruined everything!"

"No," Alex said. "Why would I ruin everything by simply eating something? That doesn't make sense. Also, what did you mean by destroying a system? I don't understand."

"Goddammit! This was why I told him not to get mortals to do it," she said in a soft voice.

"How did you even survive eating that Yang source? It was so powerful that it traveled back through your connection and destroyed all of our systems," the girl said.

"I… just did. Wait, did you say YOUR system?" Alex asked, his eyes narrowing in suspicions.

"Yes, our system," the girl said.

Alex had a thought occur in his mind that he wasn't sure if he wanted to be true. Still, he decided to ask.

"Were… were you the one that sent us to this game?" he asked.

"No," the girl said. "That's my master. He's the one responsible for all of the artifacts and formation. My job is just being his voice for the mortals."

"Wait, wait, wait. Artifacts? Formations?" Alex asked in surprise. "You don't mean in our homeworld, do you?"

"Obviously I'm talking about that. What else would I be talking about?" the girl said.

"Huh?" Alex exclaimed in surprise. "But our homeworld is a world without Qi. Even if someone managed to gain the knowledge to make artifacts and formations, there is no way they could run it without Qi."

The girl stared at him for a bit before rolling her eyes and saying, "Your home is not without Qi. It's just lacking Qi."

Alex looked at her without a single change in expression. "That's the same thing I said," he said.

"A little different. Saying your home is without Qi is wrong because that insinuates that it never had Qi. But that is wrong. It used to have Qi long ago, but it no longer does due to a terrible battle," she said. "Since it once had Qi, it's easy to use Qi if you get a hold of it."

Alex looked surprised. He couldn't believe what he was hearing. 'There was Qi in our homeworld previously? So why is it absent now?' he thought.

He then remembered a certain piece of information that was tucked away in his brain.

His eyes went wide as he asked, "does it have anything to do with the apocalypse our homeworld went through 600 years ago?"

"What?" the girl asked. "Of course not. Your home hasn't been without Qi for over a few millennia."

"Oh, so I was wrong," Alex said. "Wait, getting back on topic. So our home-world is still without Qi. So how would artifacts and formations even work?"

The girl looked at him with a face that said that it was obvious. "You can't think of anything?" she asked.

Alex shook his head in response. He couldn't figure out where his home-world would even get Qi from.

"Have you earned money from the game?" the girl suddenly asked.

"Yes, I've earned a few," Alex said, a little proud of himself, even though it wasn't really him that earned it.

"What did you sell to get the money?" she asked.

"That's obviously the—" finally, the realization hit his mind as his eyes went wide.

"The spirit stones," he said. "The spirit stones that we sell are sent to our homeworld?"

Alex's eyes were full of surprise with this thought. He never thought that something as simple as selling spirit stones in the game was what was actually running the system back in his homeworld.

"Yes, we use the spirit stones that you players send back to us. That is the only way to keep the formations running," the girl said.

"Wait, does that mean I could've cultivated back in our homeworld if I ever got spirit stones?" he asked.

"Yes, that's possible," the girl said. "Also, please stop calling it your 'homeworld' that makes it sound so distant. Just call it home."

Alex was confused again. "What do you mean? It is distant."

"I mean, yeah it's far. But it's not that far," she said. "It's just an ocean's flight away."

Alex's heart started beating as he looked at her with more confusion and suspicion. "Umm… what are you trying to say?"

The girl looked at him with a bit of confusion as well. "Oh, right. You don't know," she said. "You home, or as you call it, your homeworld is just a small land hidden inside the Central continent."

"WHAT!" Alex exclaimed with surprise and shock very much apparent in his voice.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait! A-are you s-saying… that the central continent that is said to be devoid of life… is actually our homeworld?" he asked.

"Devoid of life?" the girl's eyes flashed with a shine. "Have you learned something about the Central continent? Not many should know this information."

"I-I learned it from the White Tiger's palace. Apparently, the white tiger died there in a battle some 5000 years ago," Alex said.

"But let's forget about that for now," he said. "Are you sure the central continent is my home?"

Alex was starting to get teary-eyed now. If what she was saying was true then there may actually be a way back home.

"You've been to the White Tiger's palace?" the girl looked at him with surprise. "That is truly surprising."

Alex wasn't listening to her, however. The thoughts in his mind were chaotic at the moment. He was trying to process everything he was hearing.

He quickly wiped off his tears as questions flooded his mind again. "Wait, what about the void around our world? Does the central continent have that void?"

"Void? What void?" the girl asked. "Ah, I remember. That's a lie my master told you to keep you all from killing yourself trying to find out what's outside your small Qi-less safe land. It's actually just an all-destroying chaotic Qi which will turn metals to shred in a matter of seconds."

The girl sighed when she said that. "Sigh, I finally found the culprit and it didn't even seem like he knows what he did."

"I'll go and let my master know what I've learned here today. You go and tell the rest of the people that it's over."

"Wait," Alex said. "What do you mean you're leaving? When do we get to leave?"

"Didn't you hear me?" the girl asked. "The system is broken. We can't take you back even if we wanted to."

Alex's eyes ran around trying to find ways to convince her. "Wait, wait. Your master, he's the one that made the system right?" he asked.

"Yes," the girl said with a suspicious face.

"T-tell him about the teleportation formations that lie in the central continent. It used to exist as a hub to teleport people around the other conti—"

The girl put up her hands to stop him from speaking. "I'm genuinely surprised that you know about the teleportation formation in the central continent."

"However, let me ask you this," the girl said. "What did you think the system you destroyed was?"

Alex's jaws dropped. "No way… you're lying," he said.

"Nope, you destroyed the thousands of years old teleportation formations that we used to send you all throughout the other continents," the girl said.

She brought out a talisman and started using it.

"What's that?" Alex asked.

"A one-time use teleportation talisman. I'm going back to master," she said.

"Take me along!" he asked.

"Can't do. It's a one-man teleportation talisman," the girl said.

"Then give me one of them too," Alex said.

"There were only two with me. I already used one to get here. This is the only one remaining until my master makes some more," The girl said.

"Then how do I get back? How do any of us get back?" he asked. His home… it was so close, and yet, he couldn't reach it at all.

"Hmm," the girl seriously thought about his question. "With the system destroyed, it will take master a while to finish repairing the formations. Just wait until then, and we will get you all back."

"Oh," Alex said. Waiting a little longer… he could do that. After all, he had already waited 7 months.

"Will it be done in a few weeks?" he asked. He was planning on going to save Pearl. So he hoped that it was later than that.

"Week?" the girl nearly scoffed at his question. "It's going to take decades. At minimum 3 decades, and at maximum... never."

"What?" Alex lost all hope he had gained in the past few seconds. "I can't wait for 3 decades."

"Unfortunately, you will have to," the girl said and continued using her talisman. She caught him glancing at her as if he wanted it for himself.

"Don't try to do anything unneces—"

Suddenly, Alex dashed forward at an incredible speed that surprised himself. He put his only arms forward to grab the talisman from her hands.

However, at the last moment, a massive aura erupted from her, pushing him down on the ground.

Alex could feel the floor crack beneath him. He knew the girl was likely in the saint realm, but this was too much. She was likely as strong as the two saint beasts.

'Dammit!' he thought. His one chance at returning back home didn't seem to go as he wanted it to. He tried to fight the aura that was pressing him down.

"You really did it huh? You think you can walk away after you've tried to steal from me?"

The girl had gotten angry.

Chapter 560: Celestial Grade

Pressure crashed on Alex like a rock being tossed over him. He felt his knees buckle as he was pushed to the ground.

He gritted his teeth as he kept his bones from cracking under the pressure.

Suddenly, something warm appeared from deep within him. No, this wasn't warm. This was hot. It was undoubtedly hot.

Once the heat traveled all over his body, the pressure on him subsided by a lot. Alex no longer felt the pressure pushing him to the ground and stood up perfectly fine.

The girl's eyes shined in surprise when she saw him stand up. She noticed something and let go of her aura.

Alex took the chance to attack her again. He rushed towards her, with his arm glowing golden.

"Hey don—" the girl had decided to stop fighting, but Alex attacked her anyway.

Just then, something very fantastical happened. Right when Alex's punch was about to reach her, her body turned illusory, like she was a ghost.

Alex's punch went through her without even touching her. Even the talisman she held in her hand had turned illusory.

"What the hell?" Alex thought in surprise. However, he didn't let the surprise hold him back. He immediately turned around and sent out a palm attack.

A yellow palm flew towards the girl.

"You should know by now your attacks won't harm me," the girl said as the palm reached her. She expected the palm to go past her, but instead of doing that, it actually pushed her back a little bit even in her illusory form.

'What?' her eyes went wide in surprise. 'How did he manage to do anything to me in my Ethereal form?'

Just as she was thinking that another attack landed on her. A mental attack.

Suddenly, she felt her mind burn in slight pain. "Aah!" she cried out, momentarily coming out of her illusory form.

Alex noticed that and smiled. He could steal it now. However, he extremely over-expected how long his Heaven's impact would work on her.

In a fraction of a second, the girl got rid of her headache and sent her her own mental attack at him.

Alex felt a brain-splitting headache and fell to the ground in pain. "AAHHH!" he cried out in pain. This was the first time he had ever suffered mental damage in all of his memory.

The girl looked at him in surprise, maybe even a bit of terror. 'How the hell is he still okay after taking the spiritual attack of a Saint Core cultivator?' she wondered.

She also started wondering as to why his mental attack even burned her. Not only that, the yellow palm, it had done some negligible damage to her too.

'That can only mean that his Yang is just that pure,' she thought. 'Does his body still hold the yang from the source he ate perhaps?'

She remembered how terrible the Yang energy that transferred to her master's mansion was. It was continuously being transferred for nearly 3 days, wrecking everything they had worked hard for the past few decades creating.

Not only that, her master actually wasn't able to stop that Yang at all. It had stopped on its own. All her master could do was try his hardest to free the suppressed soul of the players that were sent to the other world while removing the formations he had set on them.

About a minute later, Alex started recovering. His headache had become a lot more manageable.

The girl looked at her talisman and saw that there was merely half a minute before she disappeared.

'He's recovered already? So fast,' she thought. All the things that had happened with him had surprised her quite a bit.

She suddenly thought of something and asked, "Do you have a unique body?"

"What?" Alex asked, trying to stand up.

"I don't have time. Do you have a unique body? The system must have given it a name right?" she asked.

"Ughh! It was Sun God's Divine Yang body," Alex said. Nobody really knew or had even heard of this body from what Alex remembered.

"I knew it," the girl silently said to herself. "So it's you, huh?"

"What?" Alex looked up at her in confusion only to see her hand in front of him, asking for a shake.

Alex hesitated for a second, but after seeing her not retaliate despite him attacking her, he decided to reciprocate and shook her hands.

"My name is Hao Ya. You can call me sister Hao," the girl said.

"Sister Hao?" Alex asked.

"Yes, and congratulations," she said with a smile on her face as she understood something.

"For what?" Alex asked.

"Your body… it's evolved. That yang source you ate, while it destroyed the system, it also helped you evolve," Hao Ya said.

"My body… evolved?" Alex asked.

Hao Ya sensed the Qi gathering around her, just ready to teleport away.

"Wait around for 3 or 4 decades, please. Just cultivate and wait. You don't need to worry about your family and friends either. You have the other copy in there in your place," She said. A silver glow started appearing around her.

Alex sensed the energy coming off of the silver glow. Surprisingly, it was not energy he knew of.

'It's not one of the 7 elements?' he thought.

"I hope to see you doing well in a few decades, younger brother. Until then, just sit tight and cultivate," she said. The light consumed her and she started disappearing.

Just as she was gone, she said one last thing. "Please don't die. You are one of the only ones we can depend on." And she vanished.

Alex looked at the place where Hao Ya had previously been in with a surprised and confused expression. The information he got in the last half a minute was just too much for him to comprehend at once.

'Wait, what did she mean by depending on me? What am I supposed to do?' Alex thought.

He played back the things that had happened in this place as he walked out of the warehouse. His had been the longest time spent inside, so people started asking questions.

Alex gave them as clear of an answer as he could. He told them that if they stuck around for another 30 or more years, they would get a chance to go back to their home.

People got disappointed and even sad. That was expected. Alex himself felt similar feelings too. But just the information he had gotten about the 5th continent being his home-world, and that his body had evolved was enough to make him feel a little happy.

As for going back home, he just had to wait.

* * * * *

Hao Ya appeared in the mansion of her master. She went back to the courtyard to find him.

"Oh, you're back quite early, Hao Ya," the thin man with a ponytail looked at her as she appeared. He was sitting next to the small lake behind his house.

"Yes, master," she said.

The man looked at his clock and asked, "this was quite early though. I thought you would stay there for a few more days to gather information. Don't tell me you already gathered it."

"I did more than that actually," she said. "I found the culprit behind this."

"Oh," the man looked surprised. "There was a culprit?"

"Yes," she said. "Your guess of it happening on its own was wrong. The culprit, this kid named Alex, had eaten a yang source at the northern shore of the western continent."

"He ate a yang source? Such powerful yang should have incinerated him in an instant."

"That's what I thought too, but he was alive and well, aside from missing an arm. But then, I had this thought and I asked him to confirm this."

The man listened intently.

"The person that ruined all of this was the same person you had put so much of your expectations on," she said.

"I… did?" the man asked.

"It's the player that had the Sun God's Divine Yang body," she said. "And what's more, it's evolved."

"WHAT?" the man suddenly stood up and reached in front of her in an instant.

He grabbed her shoulders and looked at her with only seriousness in his eyes. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"Y-yes, master," she said. "He used a yang attack on me and managed to interact with me even when I was in my ethereal self. Also, his mental attacks have yang affinity to them."

The man sat back down on the ground.

"Oh yeah, there was also this weird thing. He had a storage ring with him, just like this one, but as far as you've told me, there shouldn't be any in the Western Continent, right?" she asked. "What more, he said he found it in the desert."

"A ring?" the man looked confused for a second before his eyes went wide. A memory from so long ago flooded back to his mind.

"THE RING!" he shouted. "The plant! That plant! He found the plant. Oh my god! It all makes sense now. No wonder our formations were destroyed. He found the plant!."

"Master?" Hao Ya looked a little scared seeing her master acting this crazy.

"Haha! I'm not even mad now. If having our systems being ruined means him evolving his body to a Celestial grade, then I'm all up for it," he said. [A/N: Ancient will now be replaced with Celestial]

"Aren't you too happy right now, master? Last time when you learned he had the Sun God's body, you were a little more serious, angry even," she said.

"Ah right, but that was only because I didn't know what sort of person he was. It would be a really bad thing if he wanted to do the wrong thing instead of the right."

"We would have to nip this in the bud if it were that," the man said. "So, how was he? Does he seem nice?"

"Well… he's impulsive, but that's probably because he saw the teleportation talisman in my hand and wanted to come back here. But, I don't think he's really a bad guy. He seemed polite enough, I guess," she said.

"Well, as long as he is not bad, I'm fine with that," the man said. He happily turned towards the lake and said, "you heard that old friend? I might just have done it this time."

The lake's water moved a little as a response.

"Right, what else happened? Tell me from the start," the man asked. Hao Ya recited everything about him, including the fact that he was aware of the game even when he should have been suppressed at the time.

"Hmm, maybe I made some mistake there," he said. "Also, you said he had an arm missing?"

"Yes," Hao Ya said.

"Poor kid," the man shook his head. "You gave him a pill to heal him, right?"

Hao Ya stopped talking as a feeling of embarrassment came over her. She scratched her head a little and said, "Ah… oops."

Chapter 561: Meteor Shower

Alex walked towards the Tiger Sect with many thoughts running in his mind. The main thought obviously was the fact that his home was in the same world as the game.

'So it was never 2 different worlds. We were just… isolated,' he thought. It was not that dissimilar to the situation of the Crimson Empire itself.

'Isolation from the rest of the world, huh? I wonder how we turned out so differently compared to the Crimson Empire. The technological improvement we have had for years is better than anything the mortals of the Crimson Empire could ever make,' he thought.

He wanted to know what his future was like now. Hao Ya had told him to wait for 30 years. He was told to just sit tight and cultivate.

So what if he did that? Would waiting 30 or 40 years to go back home even be worth it? What would he even do at that time? What would any of them even do at that time?

The world would have moved on by then. Their friends and families would have moved on.

What would even be left for him to go back to? Alex started feeling very anxious.

He couldn't wait to go back home right now because it had been months since he was stuck here. However, if he could only go back 30 or 40 years from now… there was no point to going back.

Especially now that he knew that his other soul was back at home, fulfilling his duties and responsibilities.

He no longer saw a reason to just wait around to go back home. Yes, he still wanted to go back home and see everything he had missed.

But, he no longer viewed it as very important. The priority of having to go back home plummeted to the very bottom.

He reached the Tiger Sect's gate and called his master as well as his senior brother to tell them he was there.

He also made sure to let them know that his face had changed.

Surprisingly, all 3 of them came to see him at the gate.

"I knew it. You wouldn't go die by yourself," Wen Cheng said with a proud face.

"Are you okay, little brother?" Luo Mei asked.

"He's fine. Look at him," Liu Xun said.

They took him back to Wen Cheng's manor and have him sit down to talk. They started asking how he was, and how he was feeling now that Ma Rong was gone.

He told them the truth that he was still sad but was working through his grief quite well. It had especially helped since he managed to kill the man that killed her.

Alex decided not to drop the burden on them of knowing that he wasn't the one they were waiting for.

At least, he didn't want to let his sister know that. He didn't want them to act differently towards him after knowing the truth.

However, he did want to tell his Wen Cheng. He already considered him his master, so he was ready to tell him everything.

After an hour of talking, Liu Xun left to go back to his duty. While Alex asked Luo Mei to leave as well since he had something to talk to Wen Cheng privately.

"You really killed the second elder?" Wen Cheng asked in surprise.

"That's… what I wanted to talk to you about, master," Alex said. "You see… it wasn't me who killed him."

Wen Cheng was confused at first, but once Alex explained everything his eyes went wide.

"From another continent?" Wen Cheng asked in surprise.

"Yes, the real me was from that continent, but now he's gone back, leaving me behind with all the skills and memories," Alex said.

"So… what does that mean? Are you not the Yu Ming we know?" Wen Cheng asked.

Alex struggled to come up with an answer and sighed. "I don't know, master. I still have the same memory, and the feelings I have towards you are the same as well."

"The only way I'm different is that I never got to experience the things that evoke these feelings and memories. I don't know if that makes me a different person or not. In the end, I believe we are the same person, with different souls," Alex said.

Wen Cheng put his hands on Alex's shoulders. "If you have the same memory and feelings, then I will consider you the same person. Don't think too much about it," he said.

Alex's felt a little relieved in his mind. "Thank you, master."

"Alright, go rest. You must be quite tired," he said.

"Not now, master," Alex said. "We have something more important to discuss."

"Something important?" Wen Cheng looked at him with a curious look. "What's more important?" he asked.

"Along the way back from the desert. I looked into the second elder's bag. He didn't have many things, but he did hold a talisman with him regarding information about the sect that was previously lost to you all," Alex said.

He took out the storage bag of the old man. It didn't have anything Alex would consider important aside from a set of ingredients and formation plates, but the talisman with the information was one that he would consider truly important.

Alex handed the talisman over to Wen Cheng who started reading it. As he did, his eyes went wider and wider in shock and surprise. He had never expected the origins of the Tiger sect to be… this incredible.

Nearly a thousand years ago, a group of people saw a meteor shower in the night sky. Some of the meteors landed nearby, so they when to check it.

When they did, they found a small, growing tree about 2 meters tall at the northern shore of the empire.

The golden tree put them in awe and they decided to live around it in hopes that it would bring good luck to them. And good luck it brought them.

Not far away from them, they started finding other various materials. Some spirit stones, some books, some pills, some weapons, some artifacts, and many other things.

The people of that time used these materials to start a small sect. Within a few years, they finished using the spirit stones.

They used the pills, weapons, and artifacts to make themselves stronger as well and improved their sect until it was big enough to become a well-known sect at the time.

The books, however, were useless to them. Aside from maybe 10 or so books, the rest of them were written in a language that wasn't legible to them.

So, the tiger sect could only use some of the books. The rest, they kept them safe for a time when they would understand the language.

During this time, something incredible happened. The tree that they set their sect around started growing hotter and hotter until the ground beneath them melted.

Now other trees in the vicinity were starting to die, and no other plants were growing there.

So, the sect had to move further away and made the location of the tree be known as a sacred land that no one could step in.

As time went by, the tree grew more and more, forcing the sect all the way back to the scarlet city.

Then, 150 years ago, the Emperor ordered all capable sects to set their base closer to the southern forest just to have them protect the civilians.

When they did swap the location, they came across the Black Stele. A stone stele that was written in the same language as the other unreadable books they currently held.

The sect leader was truly fascinated with this stele and didn't want to return back to their original heritage, while the second elder wanted to slowly return back to the place with the tree.

The records mentioned after all that the tree would bear fruit, an incredible treasure in about 50 years.

Seeing that the sect leader was still not agreeing to go back, the second elder tried to become the leader himself.

However, things didn't go as he wanted. The fight that broke out was way too big and many people died.

That was when the second elder realized that in this chaos he could be the only one to learn about this stuff and have the treasure for himself.

So, he either destroyed or stole all the books and records for himself. He also stole some weapons, but was caught in the end and was exiled out of the sect, left to die.

Wen Cheng didn't really care about reading the Second Elder's life after that. While it did mention something about living as a mortal for a few years, having a daughter, Wen Cheng quickly skipped over it and stopped reading.

"They found so many treasures huh?" Wen Cheng said softly. "They were quite lucky."

"Yes," Alex said. "Although it's a shame that so many of the books that were in another language were destroyed or stolen. He probably destroyed what he took too."

"You may be right," Wen Cheng said.

Alex took out two books from his storage bag, something his master had returned to him not long ago.

"Here," he said. "I believe these belong to the Tiger sect."

Wen Cheng took out two books and handed them to Wen Cheng. The first was the Veiled Light technique, and the second one was the Immortal Concealment technique.

"I got these from the old man, which he must've stolen from here," Alex said. He finally knew why some random old man was walking around with an Immortal Grade technique.

These were likely some things that came with the meteor shower. There were various other things that Alex could say came with the meteor shower.

For one, the Black Stele in the Tiger sect was definitely something that came down in the form of a meteor. If it didn't, it wouldn't have made such a massive crater in the sect.

Alex remembered his Heaven's Impact technique was the other thing written in a language that did not belong to them. The person who sold it had claimed that the ones who gave his ancestor the book were immortals that came down from heaven.

'Is this the language of the immortals?' Alex wondered. That also made him question if all of these other things also came down with an immortal.

The ring he was wearing was certainly not something that could be found in the empire, or even the Western Continent itself. Did it come down in a meteor shower as well?

Alex went so far as to think that the Flickering Shadows technique that the Hong Wu sect had was also a skill that came down in a meteor shower.

He wondered what else could have come down in that meteor, and who else had gotten anything from it. That was a question he really wanted the answer to, but he couldn't get it for now.

So, he asked Wen Cheng if he could leave and went back to his sister's place to spend the night there.

Chapter 562: The Skill in the Stele

Alex returned back to his sister's room to talk for a while before going to the other room to rest.

Once again, he had no cultivation method he could use, so he was forced to not cultivate at all. He was fine with that. He had too much on his mind to cultivate right now.

Now that he was finally free, he tried the things he was too preoccupied with to try.

"Status!" he said. However, nothing appeared. That was expected. Everything game-related was gone already after all.

He looked to the top right, the time had disappeared as well. He thought of other things that might have been game-related.

He brought out pills and could no longer see their name or harmony floating around them, but he could tell what the harmony was.

'This pill has 45%,' he thought. It was somewhat simple to tell the harmony. He tried with other pills and even used a pill tester to test it.

As expected he was right about it all. 'Maybe it was never the system that helped me know it, but the Alchemy God's Knowledge,' he thought.

The skill he had gotten at the start was one of the most unique skills he had encountered to date.

Even after having the entire book in his mind, he couldn't read it all. It was like the words themselves had a seal on it that could only be opened once one's cultivation base reached a certain realm and changed their entire Qi.

However, there was something Alex could tell about the book. Surprisingly, it only had 3 more layers to unlock. As for Flame Mastery Scripture, it only had 1 more layer.

Alex took a deep breath and started shuffling through the rest of the skills in his mind, but there was nothing different about them.

"Hmm, what about the focus mode?" he wondered and tried it out. He knew it was a player-only skill, but… he was optimistic.

He shouldn't have been. As expected for it too, there was no more focus mode.

Alex slumped back on the bed. Too many things had changed, and it would take him some time to get used to it.

A smile crept upon his face, a small smile. 'My body evolved huh?' he thought. 'Does that mean it's in the Celestial grade now? I wonder if anything's changed.'

'Wait, does that mean master's body was a Celestial grade body as well?' he thought. 'That should be correct given how strong her body was compared to mine.'

Thinking about his master once more, he started getting sad again. Many things had happened today, major things, but that did not take away the pain he still felt when thinking about his master.

He decided to stop caring about whatever the game elements or himself for now and went to sleep.

Cultivators didn't necessarily need sleep, they didn't even need to care about the day and night cycle, mostly. Having been a mortal merely 7 months ago, the habit of sleeping at night time was still hard to let go of.

Alex slept for as long as he wanted. When he woke up, he couldn't help but feel rejuvenated.

He got up, leaving a bed that looked as good as if it were ironed, and walked out of the door.

His sister was already gone, possibly to train with Du Yuhan. They were after all starting to feel like they were too weak to help when someone they cared about was in danger.

Alex went to find Wen Cheng and asked him about the graduation.

"It's still set to be in 2 weeks, but I can move it forward by a week if you want me to," Wen Cheng said.

Then, he put on a saddened face and asked, "then I will assume you chose Alchemy over normal cultivation?"

Alex shook his head. "No, master. I am choosing to go with neither. I will go do my own thing for now. I… think I found a way to get Pearl back. There are some people in the capital that can maybe take me into the beast's realm."

"After there, I will likely go to the other side to the Luminance empire and find out if there is a way to heal my arm."

"If I can do that, I will come back and help you with yours as well," Alex said.

"I see," Wen Cheng said. "I would rather you don't put yourself in such a precarious position for us. However, I'm proud of knowing that you want to go out and venture into the world on your own. You have my approval."

Wen Cheng smiled towards Alex and patted him on his shoulders. "Thank you, master," he said and turned around to leave.

"Are you okay?" Wen Cheng asked, just as he was about to leave.

"Hmm… I'm fine," Alex said.

"Oh, okay," Wen Cheng said and watched Alex leave. He then slowly looked at his left arm and thought to himself, 'it didn't look like he had a fever or anything.'

He quickly forgot about it and went to do his own thing.

Alex went down to the sect crater. He planned on checking his strength this morning. During yesterday's short scuffle, he had realized that he had gotten stronger, but without the system, he was a little unsure of what realm he had reached in either his body or his cultivation.

He walked past the group of disciples that were fighting in the stages. None of them recognized him at all, which was understandable.

He was making his way to the Training Hall, when he saw something that caught his eyes.

"Ah, the stele," he thought. He hadn't been here in a long time. The last time he remembered being here was around the time when he was in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm.

That was over 2 months ago. Now, he was an entire realm higher. However, there was one problem now.

He no longer had the game system in him to translate the writing for him. Previously, he remembered the other soul reading the writing on it with his spiritual sense, which would give him a general idea of what was written on it, but that was only due to the system.

Would it even make sense to read it now that he was not a player anymore?

'It won't hurt to try right?' he thought and walked towards the Black Stele.

In the morning light, the Stele shined with iridescent glory, which could only be viewed at a certain angle.

Alex took a deep breath. He was both nervous and excited as he thought of using his spiritual sense on the stele once more.

"My spiritual sense has grown a lot. It will definitely not be able to attack me back this time, right?" he thought and opened his eyes to pour out his spiritual sense.

However, just as he was about to, he noticed something.

He could understand the words. He couldn't read them, just like previously with the other Alex, but he could understand them. Unlike the other him, he didn't even have to use his spiritual sense.

He felt exhilarated. 'So it had nothing to do with the system? Then what?' he wondered.

He looked back at the Stele and started reading it with a happy face. However, just as he was doing that, he started feeling a load on his mind.

Just reading the word was hurting him a bit. "Dammit! Is it attacking me for just reading too? How the hell does it realize I am reading it?" Alex thought.

Still, he forced himself to read the Stele.

After reading for a while, understanding the meanings behind those words, he stopped after reading the last word.

His head ached a lot, but it was manageable. 'Holy shit! That was so hard,' he thought.

He rubbed his head and waited for it to hurt a little less. "Is this a sort of security preventing people from reading the stele? I thought it was only supposed to hurt me when I used my spiritual sense," he thought.

After the pain died down a little, he started gathering the information he had learned.

Previously when he had read it, he had learned just two words from it, Attack and Weapon. At that time, he thought it was just a simple physical skill that used a weapon.

However, now he had come to learn it was not.

"Change the shape of my spiritual sense, and turn it into a weapon shape to attack? That sounds amazing," he thought.

Turning spiritual sense into a weapon. He could already change it into a fist and attack, but having a weapon with you that you could use endlessly was pretty amazing.

'I assume this is a mental attack too, right?' he thought. He wasn't sure, and wouldn't be until he could use it.

He decided to test it out and went to the Training Hall.

He asked for a room that would usually be asked by elders. Since the disciple's training room would no longer be strong enough to stop against him, he went with the stronger ones.

He first decided to test out his physical strength. He closed his eyes and took in his cultivation until he felt as nothing but a mortal.

Once that was complete, he looked at the puppet in front of him and dashed towards it.

He had no sword or any sort of weapons on him, so he could only use his fist to strike.

The punch landed on the puppet and a message popped up on it to tell him his strength.

-True Lord 3rd Realm-

Chapter 563: Testing and Training

-True Lord 3rd Realm-

"Oh, I got a little stronger huh? 1 step above my cultivation realm," Alex thought at first, his mind unable to comprehend the increase in strength his body had shown through the puppet.

However, when he did, he had to look back once again to make sure he read it right.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. True Lord? What the… how did I reach True Lord already? That's like 3 minor realms higher," Alex thought.

He was about 5th Mind Tempering realm in body cultivation when he fought the old man, and now he was at 3rd True lord realm.

'Did I get stronger due to my body surviving the poison… or? No, it's gotta be the fruit of the tree, right?' he thought.

If the tree alone was able to make the ground molten lava, then surely he was burned really bad by it as well. He couldn't imagine how much pain he must've gone through at that time.

He silently thanked the poison for damaging his pain receptors at the time.

"Then what about my cultivation base?" he wondered. He couldn't use his body to hit the puppet due to his body cultivation interfering with the result, so he needed to use a ranged attack.

'Hmm… I only have 3 attacks I can use,' he thought. He had a Supreme Metal root, so it would give a wrong assessment as well. So, the Iron Fist punch was out of the question as well.

He decided to use Palm of the Sun in the end. Alex pulled back his hand and sent out a palm-shaped vibrant yellow attack forward.

The flying palm hit the wooden puppet and showed another piece of information.

-True Disciple 9th realm-

"Wait what?" he exclaimed. That was 7 realms higher than his cultivation was at before. Considering he could always fight 4 realms higher in the self-tempering realm, which would become 3 realms higher in True realms, this meant that his cultivation base was now at True Disciple 6th realm.

'I broke through 4 times without knowing?' Alex thought in surprise. He wondered how he even broke through while his body was busy evolving into a higher grade one.

"Oh wait!" he thought. "Since my body's grade went up, my Qi must've improved along with it as well. That would make sense why I got so strong, instead of it being me breaking through."

"Still, it got strong enough to make my strength go up by a whole 7 realms? That's busted," he thought. Just as he was thinking that another thought came to his mind and a sneaky smile appeared on his face.

"Wait, does that mean I can put out True Master 1st realm attack if I use my metal skill?" he thought.

Alex got into stance once more and punched towards the wooden block. A fist-shaped golden attack flew through the air and struck the wooden puppet again.

Alex waited to see the result, and when it popped up… he got confused.

-True Disciple 9th realm-

"Hmm… wait, what?"

Both of his attacks returned the same damage. This was super confusing to him since he was expecting his metal attacks to deal damage a step higher than his yang attack.

Suddenly, a thought came to Alex.

"No way," he thought. Without thinking, he created a ball of fire, turning it into the shape of an arrow and shot it directly at the wooden puppet.

-True Disciple 8th realm-

"Woah!" Alex thought. His disbelief slowly cleared away as his excitement started reaching sky high.

Without hesitation, Alex put up his palm and tried to create yang Qi from it.

Yellow Qi escaped from his arm and moved in the air, all according to his will. It changed shape, increased in density, and even went back to his body.

"YES!" Alex shouted out loud.

His Yang spiritual root had evolved to become a Supreme Yang Spiritual Root.

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" Alex jumped around excitedly. "I can't believe I forgot about root promoting. After encountering such a rare Yang treasure, obviously, it would've evolved."

He smiled happily and said to himself, "2 down, 5 to go."

Alex continued his testing for a while and understood that those two elements were indeed anomalies. Other elements as expected gave him an attack equivalent to that of a True Disciple 8th realm cultivator.

Still, all of this wasn't really necessary since his physical body alone was stronger than half the elders in this sect.

He was now a little more confident that he could save Pearl easily.

Once he was done testing his strength, Alex felt annoyed that he still couldn't tell his own cultivation base at all. He was way too used to having the system tell him what his cultivation base was that he himself couldn't tell it anymore.

'Dammit, I will have to learn that all over again. For now, let's forget about it. I will ask master later when I see him,' he thought.

He finally stopped testing and started training. He started training.

The training was simple. He just had to follow what the technique in the stele had instructed him to do.

Alex took a deep breath and started by releasing his spiritual energy. Unlike the spiritual sense, the energy came directly from the spiritual sea itself.

Alex could see the slight yellow liquid changing to a slight yellow mist as it appeared in front of him.

"Release a bit of the spiritual sea," he said to himself. He continued with the instruction and said, "condense the energy as dense as you—"

The mist dissipated before he could even move on to the next step. "I need to concentrate more," he told himself and restarted.

He released a bit of the spiritual sea which came out of his mind in the form of a mist and landed on top of his palm.

He then concentrated hard on slightly yellow mist to condense it as well as he could. He concentrated for minutes as he condensed the mist as well as he could, and then released more to condense that onto the condensed mist as well.

Soon, the mist was starting to take a pale yellow, ethereal form that was slowly taking the shape of a sword. The sword he had chosen was the Steel sword he had now lost.

Alex concentrated to keep it in that shape. He couldn't focus on anything else.

Finally, the sword took form and Alex tried to grasp it. However, when he did, his hands passed through the hilt, giving him a bit of a surprise.

In his surprise, he lost a bit of his focus, and the whole sword came unraveling into wisps of mist once again and disappeared.

Alex sighed. He hadn't assumed this would be an easy task, but he hadn't expected it to be this difficult either.

He focused once more and tried to recreate it. It took a while, but he successfully made it again.

He then tried to grasp it again, and same as last time, his hands went through the hilt of the sword.

"Hmm… how am I supposed to use this if I can't even hold it?" he thought. Just keeping the shape in the form of a sword alone was taking all the concentration he could afford.

If he wanted to use this ability, then he would likely need to be more proficient in making the sword.

Chapter 564: The Same Thing

Alex trained for a couple of hours. He wanted to use the sword of Spiritual energy he had finally managed to create, but he was still having a hard time understanding how to grasp it.

Or maybe he didn't grasp it at all. He didn't understand what he was supposed to do. For some reason, that part of the skill wasn't written on the stele.

'I wonder why?' he thought. By the time he left the Training hall, he could at least say that he could easily form a spiritual sword while also concentrating on one other thing… half the time.

The task was so hard that he felt pride in just the slight bit of success itself.

'It's quite demanding of my spiritual sea though,' he thought. If he could make as many swords as he wanted at the same time, he was sure that he would only be able to make about 20 swords.

It was because he had to take time to create each one that his spiritual sea would replenish in time for another sword.

'I don't have anything to do tonight, so I guess I will train with it,' he thought.

He looked at the sky outside and figured it was a little past noon right now.

'What do I do now?' he thought. 'Ah, I should go make some pills.'

He had used up quite a few pills, so he needed to create some healing pills as well as some more that he could use to buy himself a cultivation method for himself.

'Let's go to the production hall then,' Alex thought and walked away from the Training Hall.

Alex got himself an alchemy room in the Production Hall, one that cost him full price because of his absurdly low badge number.

He chuckled to himself when he had heard the price. He shook his head and brought out his cauldron before placing it down on the furnace.

He thought to himself what he was going to make and what ingredients he would be needing for it. If he were to be honest to himself, he was feeling a little nervous about what he was going to do.

He hadn't by himself made any pills yet, so he was both anxious about it, and looking forward to it at the same time.

"No, I can do this. I know what to do. I just have to take a deep breath, and follow the recipe," Alex thought.

He waited for the cauldron to heat up to the appropriate temperature and dropped the first ingredient in.

'8 times— Counterclockwise— 4 seconds per rotation,' Alex knew what he had to do. He sent out his Qi and started moving the ingredient.

He followed the recipe as well as he could, even though it felt incredibly awkward to him to be taking pills.

After half a minute or so, when the ingredient finally turned to powder, all the energy in the ingredient seeped out of it.

Alex felt something wrong with what he was sensing. 'Is that… correct?' he thought. The energy was… just a tad bit stronger than it was supposed to be.

He thought he followed the recipe very well, but it seemed he was still making some mistake somewhere.

'Where did I go wrong?' he wondered while preparing his next ingredient.

He had to now drop the temperature to about 520 degrees before dropping the second ingredient, and he needed to do that in less than 5 seconds, or the powder would start burning.

He controlled the flame with his Flame Mastery Scripture and lowered the temperature to his desired temperature. However, it didn't go down as fast as he wanted it to.

Alex panicked a little and dropped the temperature all the way down to 500 very quickly and brought it back up to 520 degrees right around the time he was to drop the 2nd ingredient.

'I'm… safe right?' he asked himself. He dropped in the 2nd ingredient and followed the recipe.

As for the 3rd ingredient, he had to increase the temperature once again. He thought he was following his instinct and his muscle memory, but once again, he timed it wrong.

He increased it way too fast and had to work to bring it down a little, but it wasn't as smooth as last time, so he knew he screwed up, even if just a little bit.

'Am I really that bad without my real soul to help make the pills?' Alex worried. He knew he just needed a bit more training to get back into business, but it made him feel that everything his body was put through with the other soul was in some ways useless if he had to do it all over again.

He continued with the pill making and after about 15 or so minutes, it was time to form the pill.

He was surprised to notice something. He knew what he needed to do to form the pill in a single one, or if he wanted to, split the pill into two.

"I didn't know I had that knowledge," he said to himself and continued with forming a single pill since this was his first one.

When the pill was out, he had ended up forming a 29% Harmony pill. That… wasn't so bad for a first try, however, he was still disappointed. His other soul would've probably reached about 34% easily.

'How are we the same soul and yet so different?' he thought to himself and proceeded to continue improving.

He closed his eyes and thought of the mistakes he made.

'Spent a bit too much time on lowering that temperature. That temperature went high abruptly. That temperature…'

As Alex continued revising what he had done, he came to get to the conclusion that all the major mistakes he had done… had something to do with the temperature.

"Wait a second," he thought. "That's so weird. Why is only the temperature being affec—"

Alex's face changed when he got the inkling of what was happening. It had happened before… with his master the day she got her new body constitution.

"Am I going through the same thing as Master did?"

Chapter 565: Controlling Constitution

The fire burned silently under the cauldron, preparing it for the next set of ingredients that wouldn't come for a while.

Alex was like the fire too, silent and hot. He didn't know what to think now that he had realized the reason for being worse at alchemy than his other soul.

His Yang energy was building up in his body. It was the same as his master, whose Yin energy built up so much that she couldn't perform alchemy for a long time.

'I must be producing heat around me like Master produced coldness,' Alex thought. It had only been a day since he had gotten the Celestial grade body, so it was understandable that he wouldn't know how to control it yet.

However, he still felt like it sucked since he was intended to make so many healing pills. He didn't want to waste more time trying to relearn alchemy for his new body when he needed to go save Pearl as soon as he could.

He tried to think of ways to counter his heat for now. 'I should be able to contain it for now right?' he thought.

Even his master who would freeze everything around and her make him fear could contain it, so he should be able to as well.

He took a deep breath and tried to contain any aura he was sending out of him right now. He slowly felt the yang energy with his body and willed it to come back to his body.

Surprisingly, it didn't take any more persuading for the Yang energy to enter his body and go deep within him. Within seconds, the yang energy emanating from his body vanished without a single sign.

'That… is weird,' he thought. He remembered his master still having a cold aura around her even when she had completely taken in everything she could.

"Am I doing better because of my Supreme Yang Root?" Alex wondered. That was the only answer that made sense.

He nodded to himself once he was fully done with controlling his aura. Then, he proceeded to make more pills.

This time, there were no mistakes. At least, there were no mistakes that he made by not being able to control the flames like before.

There were still many mistakes, many mysteries to creating pills themselves that Alex probably had no clue about.

He continued making the same pill as before and in the next 10 minutes, turning all of the ingredients into powder.

Next up, was the time to form the pill. As before, he understood that he could split the pill if he wanted to, but he decided not to do that again.

Since he was making a healing pill, it was better to have a single good pill, than 2 mediocre ones.

So, he formed the powder into a single compact pill that could hold more of the energy.

Once the pill formed, Alex brought it out and looked at it. "Hmm… 34%, that's actually pretty good," he thought.

It was only his second try at making pills, and he had already reached a level that would take others over 10 years to reach with common pills.

This rejuvenated Alex's motivation to make more pills. So, he continued making healing pills for the next 2 hours.

Over the course of the 2 hours, on multiple occasions, his yang energy escaped from his body while he was focused on the pills and disturbed his process again.

They weren't as bad as the first time, but his pills still came out worse than desired during those moments.

However, the times he did have them in check, the pills came out quite well. In fact, one of the pills even reached 40% harmony, despite Alex didn't really do anything different.

He was quite happy about that. Unfortunately, he couldn't continue to make the healing pills since his ingredients were finished.

'I ran out so fast,' he thought. There was a pile of ingredients in his own bag that were of no use to him just because he didn't know what pills they could make.

Alex would have to do some tests with them once he was more comfortable with making True pills.

After the healing pills were made, Alex decided to make some other pills he could use to sell for money or use to gather more Qi to breakthrough.

He prepared his ingredients, made sure his Yang energy was in check and started making pills once more.

As he continued making the pill, and the pill was finally ready to be formed, something in him told him that he should try to make this one into two.

Not only would he be able to contain more of the energy using the two pills, it would also be a test on how the thing exactly worked.

Since the other Alex never figured it out, he was going to find out what was happening.

One thing he knew that the other Alex didn't was that, the 'pill-splitting Qi' as he called it was actually a technique, most likely created by the Alchemy god himself, that could be used to separate the pill into two parts.

Similar to what the previous Alex encountered, the technique was mostly automatic in that it formed the pills on its own and even forced energy into them. The only difference now was, Alex had the ability to dictate when to use it.

He no longer had to worry about the pills accidentally splitting when he needed a single, better pill.

Alex employed the technique, and the Qi in his body started moving. They went around his body in a certain pattern and released it in front of him to carve a divide in the powder and slowly form them into two separate spheres of the same size as what the original pill would have looked like.

Alex watched curiously as the vortex started once more that sucked in the energy from the cauldron into the pills.

Once the pills formed, Alex brought them out and checked them.

'24% and 25% harmony, huh?' he thought. 'Meaning, I could have done about 49% if I knew what the technique did.'

He tested the pills and bit and noticed that the two pills were quite hollow, compared to what a normal pill could be. After all, the two pills were formed from the powder that should have formed a single pill.

'Hmm,' Alex thought. 'Since a single pill is supposed to have all the energy in the powder, I guess it makes sense that half the powder can only store half the energy.'

'But that still doesn't answer why the two pills have collectively more energy than what a single pill would have,' Alex wondered. This was something the previous Alex had wondered as well without any luck.

'I should focus on finding this answer,' Alex thought. 'Also, how does pill tester work? How are they able to tell how much harmony a pill has? Isn't Percentage supposed to be relative to the pill? That would make this 25% make no sense.'

He wondered what criteria the tester considered when it formed its assessment. Whatever it was, Alex didn't know. There was not a single piece of information in his brain about the pill testers themselves aside from how to make one.

'So… we only know the blueprint to the testing system itself huh?' Alex thought.

He shook his head and forgot about the questions for now and continued making the pills. Over the course of the next few hours, he made quite a lot of pills.

The highest of which reached 48% on a pill with Metal energy as the final energy. He was so happy to see that he was getting so close to making Heaven-grade True pills.

After he was done, Alex left the production hall. The sun had just gone down, and the lanterns around the sect crater were starting to burn to illuminate the area.

Shouts of fighting still rang from where the fighting stage was. Alex walked the opposite way went back to his sister's house.

When he arrived, he noticed that the door was locked, so he went to find his sister.

As expected, she was training along with Du Yuhan in their Master's training room.

Alex went in and watched as his sister attacked with all her might, sending out slashes, and ice spears at Du Yuhan.

Du Yuhan on the other hand was focused on using Sword Intent as well as his more polished Sword Qi to block the attacks and even force some back towards Luo Mei.

Alex watched the two of them fight for a while before the two decided to stop.

"Do you want to fight too, brother Yu?" Du Yuhan asked.

"It's fine," Alex said. "You guys can fight."

Du Yuhan looked at him with a weird face and asked, "Won't you need to train some more now that you only have one arm to use? Surely you don't think fighting will be the same with a single-arm compared to two right?"

"Hmm, you aren't wrong in that," Alex said. "It would be good to learn how to use sword in ways that benefit me, but unfortunately I don't have my sword now. I broke it in the fight a week ago."

"Excuses," Du Yuhan said. "You can get comfortable with a sword you get later on. For now, use a common sword as I do."

"Come, let's fight."

Alex thought for a bit. He really didn't want to fight as he didn't believe there was any way for Du Yuhan to win against him. However…

"Sure," Alex said with a smile. The temptation to fight was too much for him.

Chapter 566: Graduation

Alex left the training hall with his sister, leaving behind a shocked Du Yuhan.

That hadn't even been a fight. Alex had casually blocked all of Du Yuhan's attack and used an attack of his own to bring Du Yuhan down to his knees.

Even when Du Yuhan used his Sword Qi, Alex could easily overpower it. Alex was excited about the fight, but this wasn't it.

He returned back to his sister's house and went back to his room.

'What am I to do now?' he wondered. Once again, there wasn't anything to do, so he decided to sleep.

The next couple of days went in a similar fashion. Alex spent the majority of the day making something or training his new technique, the one whose name he didn't know of.

Occasionally, he went to the Hong Wu sect to see what was happening.

Finally, his graduation days were fixed. It would take place in the Hong Wu sect first, and then in the Tiger sect the next day.

Alex felt anxious. He had never expected to have to leave this place one day permanently, but that didn't mean he wouldn't have to.

He wished for the auction to take place earlier since he needed a new cultivation method, but it didn't seem like there would be one.

The bi-annual auction seemed to have been canceled after the attack on the city that happened nearly 2 weeks ago.

Alex spoke with Wen Cheng too, but it seemed the sect only had Earth grade cultivation method as well. Most Heaven Grade cultivation methods were in private hands that Alex couldn't have.

Wen Cheng gave Alex his own cultivation method, but it was a Wood affiliated cultivation method, which Alex didn't find very helpful.

Since his wood root was quite bad, he decided not to use it.

"It will be better if I find one with no affinity, metal affinity, or Yang affinity since my roots favor them the most," Alex thought.

Something else had been happening over the course of the last few days. Alex had been slowly and slowly growing hotter, just like his master had.

It wasn't hot enough that he had to stay inside and isolate himself, but it was still causing him some major problems during alchemy.

Worst of all, it wasn't stopping at all. Fortunately, however, he had the yang roots that could control all free yang, so he could contain the yang in him much easier than his master could contain her yin.

For now, he had nothing to worry about. He only feared that there would come a day when he too would have to get holed up in a room somewhere, heating up everything around him.

Alex woke up early the next day and went over to the Hong Wu sect. Today was the day of graduation.

Surprisingly, it wasn't just him graduating. It seemed Wan Li had decided to use the day to graduate as well.

The ceremony was simple. It was held in the Elders hall, where only the elders could view it. The First elder who was acting as the interim sect leader officiated the ceremony.

He gave a small speech, congratulating the alchemists that were graduating and offering them good wishes on things that were to come in the future.

He then called them out by the name, as one by one, they went up to get their graduation award.

The award was simple. Before the ceremony, they had been asked for their nameplate. Now, their award was their nameplate, but it had an 'Alumnus' carved onto it.

Alex got his nameplate back and shook the first elder's hands. He walked away and stood by Wan Li who had already gotten his award.

Alex looked at the word 'Alumnus' and started feeling a little emotional. He had spent so many nights and days in this place that he couldn't help but feel sad, but also, he was sad that his master wasn't here to see him graduate.

She had planned for so long for him to graduate to become an elder, and yet, things never happened the way she wanted to.

The graduation ceremony changed to become an Elder recruitment ceremony.

Wan Li and a few others walked up to say their vows and get recruited as the elder of the sect.

'So… Zhou Mei is the number 1 disciple now, huh?' he thought. It wouldn't take very long for her to graduate either.

The ceremony ended not long after, and the elders congratulated all of them.

"I know you have made up your mind, but there is still time. You can still be an el—"

"Lang Shun!" the Grand Elder shouted. "He's already made up his mind. Don't try to dissuade him now."

The Grand elder then turned to Alex and said. "Congratulations on graduating. I hope you continue to do well and make us all proud."

"Thank you, grandmaster," Alex bowed towards him.

Grand Elder started tearing up a little. "If only your master was here to see you. She would be so proud of you," the Grand Elder said.

Alex talked to the two for a while before leaving outside. Outside the Elders hall, a few disciples were waiting for the rest to come out.

Wan Li had already appeared outside, and the group was done congratulating him.

After Alex walked out, most people didn't recognize who he was at all. Only a select few congratulated him and started asking what his plans were next, which Alex answered without hesitation.

"Mingming, are you really leaving the sect?" Fan Ruogang asked with a somber voice.

"Yes, I am," Alex said.

"Will you ever come back?" she asked.

"Of course," Alex said. "I will come back a lot, but you shouldn't expect me to be around a lot."

"I can't believe it, brother Yu. It feels like a week ago I asked you to help me by being an aid. Now you've graduated as one of the best students. This is just mind-blowing," Kong Yuhan said.

"You're not very far away from graduating as well, brother Yuhan. Keep working hard," Alex said.

"I will," Kong Yuhan said. "Especially now that I have used the flower you gave me, It will be much easier, I suppose."

"It will. Trust me," Alex said.

Zhou Mei was mostly quiet, so Alex didn't bother to say much except wish her good luck on her graduations as well.

Afterward, Alex left the group and went to the alchemy garden to see his master. He reached the top and sighed a little when he saw the plant slowly try to distance itself from him.

"Hey, Master. Were you lonely? I hope senior green has been keeping you company," Alex said, sensing the snake close by. "I came here to let you know that I graduated today. I know you wanted to see me do it very badly, but it seems fate had other plans."

"I miss you master, and I will continue missing you. This is probably going to be my last visit for a long while. I don't know when I will return, but when I do, I promise you that I will be someone you can be proud of."

After a few minutes, Alex left the garden and went out of the gates of the sect. He turned one last time to look at the sect he called home.

This was going to be the last time he got to see the sect for many, many years.

Chapter 567: Sect Treasury

Alex returned back to the Tiger sect late afternoon. He wanted to go practice his spiritual weapon technique.

By now, he was able to somewhat effortlessly create a sword, but using the sword was still a problem for him. As he couldn't hold it in his hands, and since Qi didn't work on it, he needed to think of something else.

However, before he could go anywhere, he got a message on his communication talisman telling him to go to the Disciple's hall as soon as possible.

Alex wondered what the reason was and walked to the sect crater before making his way to the Disciple hall.

The Disciple's hall was also the Elder's hall, so when he reached there, he sent a message to his master, telling him he was there.

He waited a few minutes before Wen Cheng walked out with the First Elder. Alex greeted them both, hiding his curious expression as he wondered why the first elder was with them.

"Come," Wen Cheng called him and took him along away from the sect crater. However, they weren't walking towards the wall or either path that lead to the crater.

Rather, they were walking towards the back half of the mountain, the one that was half gone when the crater formed.

"I've never been to this part of the sect before," Alex said as they walked up the side of the mountain.

There was a staircase that lead a bit up the side and was quite indistinguishable from far away, so Alex was seeing something new today.

"Let's go," Wen Cheng said and walked up.

Alex followed behind and looked up. There were a few elders standing guard in front of a couple of houses built into the walls.

Alex knew this was where the elders that weren't numbered stayed, but this was his first time seeing this.

However, Wen Cheng and the First elder didn't seem to be bringing him to an Elder's house.

Instead, they walked past the houses and went to a massive stone door. There were 2 more elders standing guard in front of the door.

They bowed towards Wen Cheng the moment they saw him and stepped to the side.

Alex curiously looked at the patterns on the door. At first, he thought it was a normal stone door, but it didn't take him very long to realize that it actually had a formation carved onto it.

'It's a seal,' he thought.

Wen Cheng brought out a circular metal plate that had the word 'Leader' written behind it, and placed it onto the stone door.

Suddenly, the door lit up and opened inwards, revealing a dark cavern that was dug into the mountain itself.

Alex could see no light coming from inside the room so it was as dark as he expected it to be.

"Let's go inside," Wen Cheng said and walked in, followed by the First elder and finally, the curious Alex.

"What is this place, master? I didn't even know a place like this existed before," Alex said.

Alex heard a slam just then and turned his head to look behind him. The stone doors had shut themselves and the metal plate flew past him back to Wen Cheng's hand.

When Alex turned back to the front, he suddenly saw light flickering all around him.

Before he knew it, the lanterns that were present in the wall started glowing all around him, illuminating the place like they did the crater in the nighttime.

"This is the sect treasury. Everything the sect has ever owned is stored in this place," Wen Cheng said.

"Sect treasury?" Alex couldn't help but make a shocked face. He looked around in awe as he saw the glistening armors, the stacks of books, and the various other treasures in the room.

"This is your first time here right?" The first elder asked with a smile.

"Yes," Alex said. "What are we doing here?"

"I explained your deeds to the other elders. They know what you did for the sect. Not only did you save the various disciples while nearly dying on your own, but they also know that you killed the Second Elder, Su Chen who was a dark spot in the sect's history."

"So, to reward you for this I persuaded the elders to let you have something from the treasury. This… is my graduation gift to you," Wen Cheng said.

Alex looked around the treasury in shock once more and turned back to Wen Cheng to ask, "I can take a thing from this place?"

"No," the first elder said, killing Alex's excitement in one go.

"You can get 2 things," he said.

Alex's excitement came back in full swing. "Two things? Are you sure?"

"Yes, see what you like, and choose two of the. We will sit here," Wen Cheng said.

"Thank you, master," Alex said and walked forward to see what he could find that he would like.

The treasury room was long and narrow. To his right was a wall full of armor and shield. To his left were formation plates, kept in a stack.

Adjacent to the formation plates were some talismans, and opposite to them was a group of weapons, adjacent to the armors.

Going further up, there was a stack of various different things, including books that were kept in a very orderly manner as well as a few pills.

Alex walked forward and started checking the various things that were on the shelves.

He started with the armors and shields. They looked shiny in the lantern light, and some looked very strong, but… for some reason they didn't appeal to him.

Shields would be useless for a one-handed man like him, but the armors also felt useless once he thought about the fact that he was a body cultivator with a True Lord 3rd realm of body cultivation.

'Yeah, I will have to skip these,' he thought. He went past the armors and looked at the weapons. There were spears, sabers, axes, and even hammers, but barely any swords.

Any sword that was there made him feel like they just weren't for him. 'They just don't seem as good as the steel sword,' he thought.

"Sorry about the swords. Those are some of the things that get taken away the most when we do reward students and elders. After hundreds of years, those are the only ones that have managed to get left behind," Wen Cheng shouted from the back.

"I see," Alex said. 'So in a sense, these are the bad bunch, huh? Better not choose it then.'

Alex turned around towards the formation and talisman shelves and looked around. He picked up a few and noticed that the formations were mostly True ranked formations. Which meant… he could easily make it too.

He wasn't sure what grade he could make, but as long as he was given the blueprint and a metal plate, he could easily recreate them for himself.

As for the Saint ranked formations… he didn't have Saint Qi, so it would be impossible to use it anyway.

He looked towards the talismans and… yeah, they were impossible to decipher for him. The runes required to make the talismans were not something he had knowledge of at the moment, so he couldn't choose amongst them.

Alex shook his head and walked forward to look at the final giant shelf on the wall at the end.

He looked through the various things, hoping to have something here that he would like to keep.

"Do you not like anything?" Wen Cheng asked from behind while Alex was still looking.

"Not yet, but I have yet to look at the books. Hopefully, they have something," Alex said.

He randomly picked up a book and tried to dust it, however, no dust came off of it.

"Oh, these are quite clean," Alex said. He turned around to look at the items that he had walked past, and they were equally clean.

"Do people come here often?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, no. Maybe once a few years," Wen Cheng said, a little confused why Alex was asking.

"Oh, I'm surprised this place managed to gather no dust with barely any visitors in years," Alex said.

"Ah," Wen Cheng understood. "No, it was opened 3 months ago. That was when we cleaned it. Otherwise, it gathers quite the dust."

"Oh," Alex was curious now. " 3 months ago… wasn't I still here at that time? I didn't know someone did something to be rewarded," Alex said.

"I believe you were in the Hong Wu sect at the time. And no, nobody got any reward. We opened the place because there was some commotion inside here," Wen Cheng said.

"Ahem, brother Wen, you are a little wrong about that," the First Elder said from the side.

"Hmm? I'm wrong?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Yes," the First Elder said. "There was another commotion not two weeks ago. It happened the night after the bandits were defeated."

"Oh," Wen Cheng said. "I didn't know something like that happened."

"Yes," First Elder said. "It was quite problematic timing too since the commotion happened right as we all lost the ability to use the Qi. It was only later we got to come in to check when I assumed the sect leader role for a few days."

"Commotion right as the Qi disappeared?" Alex asked. He thought of something and started recalling the days in his mind.

3 months ago… that was about a week or two before he was taken to the Beast's realm. If the two commotions were to be caused by the same thing, then there was something that connected them.

'That was the same day as the sand storm in the desert, wasn't it?' Alex realized.

Chapter 568: Silver Stone

Two times, the tree had sent out a wave of Yang energy, and two times there was commotion here. 'That is no coincidence,' he thought.

"What do you mean by commotion exactly, master?" Alex asked.

"Well, there are some books that fall down, along with some of these armors and formations, but that's it. The commotion is usually these armors making noises. They are quite loud," Wen Cheng said.

"Armors?" Alex walked back to the armor and checked them again carefully. Except, this time he used his spiritual sense as well.

'Yang energy,' he thought when he felt the slightest hint of yang energy on those armors.

'Shame I don't need them,' he thought. He then turned back around to the books and thought, 'some of those reacted to the yang energy too right?'

He went on to check them as well. He spread out his spiritual sense and found that they still had some lingering yang Qi in them.

'Hmm… will they…'

Suddenly, Alex let go of the restraint he was constantly putting on himself and let his Yang energy flow around freely.

He kept tabs on the books with the lingering yang, and suddenly they responded with slight vibrations. It wasn't much, but Alex caught the vibration with his spiritual sense.

There were 3 that showed the most response. Alex took back the yang before either of the other 2 noticed what he was doing and checked the books.

He pulled all 3 of them out and tried to read them. He started with the lowest one and when he opened it, he realized it was in a language he couldn't read but could understand.

'Hmm…' he read the introduction section of the book and as expected, he could understand what the words meant even if he couldn't read it.

The first book was a defensive yang art that created a defensive barrier that could withstand strong attacks.

From what Alex could tell, the technique was a heavens grade technique, and maybe even an immortal grade one.

'That's quite good,' he thought. He continued to the second book and read about it.

This technique was one that helped create a false clone that could be used as a method of confusion and distraction for the enemy. While it didn't have any offensive capabilities, Alex reckoned it could be quite good if used properly.

Finally, he read the one that gave the most reaction when it came into contact with Yang energy.

As he kept reading it, his eyes went wide. 'No way!' he thought.

It was decided, he was going to take this book. "This is my first one, master," Alex said.

"Oh, you chose one?" Wen Cheng looked curiously at the book Alex chose. From what he could remember, he had no way of reading it.

"What about the second one?" Wen Cheng asked.

Alex looked at the doppelganger book that could be useful, but its use cases were so… limited that he didn't want to choose it right away.

'Is there anything else I can take?' Alex wondered and look to the side. There were some pills, some stones, some books, and various other trinkets.

Alex looked at them and couldn't really tell what he could want from them. 'Maybe they have yang aura too,' he thought and released his spiritual sense to check through all of those.

As he did that, he sensed something weird. Rather, he didn't sense it at all.

Alex moved to the object and picked it up. It was a silver-colored rock, about the size of a human head, and weighed practically nothing.

If not for Alex holding the stone, he would have assumed that it was not there at all.

Even his spiritual sense told him there was nothing in his hand. That was perhaps the weirdest thing he had ever sensed.

Even his master who was a void in his spiritual sense could still be told that she was there just based on the dead spot in his senses.

This stone, however, was as if his spiritual sense just passed through it.

'No?' Alex thought when he realized he was a little wrong. He had been limiting his senses to just sense the rock so he didn't notice it, but when he increased the range of his spiritual sense, he realized that the stone was acting as a sort of absorbent that swallowed all of his Spiritual sense.

No matter how far he released his spiritual sense, the stone would swallow all the spiritual sense that he was putting on it.

'This is incredible. Is this a sort of rock that can be used against mental attacks?' Alex wondered.

"Master, do you know what this is?" he asked, showing the silver rock to Wen Cheng.

Wen Cheng walked up to Alex and looked at the rock. "No," Wen Cheng said. "I have seen this here for a long time, but still to this day, I have no idea what it is. All I can guess is it's a special artifact material."

"I guessed so too," Alex said. He was truly fascinated by the stone now. However, since he didn't know what it did, he didn't want to choose it either.

He fell into a dilemma. 'What should I do?' he wondered. No matter what he thought, the doppelganger skill was definitely more useful for him, but… this silver stone that could make spiritual sense useless was also quite useful if he could use it right.

'Uhh…' he was having a really hard time choosing. 'Should I just read that book right here?' he wondered.

He took the book and started flipping through it.

"Disciple Yu Ming, are you choosing that book?" the First Elder asked.

"Uh… no, first elder. I am just trying to see if it is even useful to me since it's impossible to read, you know," he lied and continued reading.

Finally, after a few minutes, he finished the book and closed it. "This language really is similar to the one in the stele, isn't it? Have you managed to figure out what it is?" Alex asked.

Wen Cheng looked at him weirdly. He knew Alex could read the book and was even sure that Alex was reading it right now. The only reason he let him be was that he was his disciple.

"No," the first elder replied. "I don't think anyone has managed to crack the language yet."

"That's unfortunate. Then I guess I will take the stone," Alex said and put back the book.

"What about the other book? Why are you taking it if you don't understand it?" the first Elder asked.

"Um, since I'm going to the capital tomorrow, I will try and see if there is anyone out there that knows this language. It might be a lost cause, but I will try," Alex said.

The First elder could find no faults in his words, so he let him be and accepted it.

"Let's leave," Wen Cheng said and the lot started walking outwards.

Alex looked at the book and put it back into his storage bag, he would use it later tonight, and then he looked at the silver stone too and kept it in his storage. Only…

"Huh?" Alex exclaimed in surprise. The rock wouldn't go into his storage bag at all.

Chapter 569: Five Yang Divine Path

Alex panicked a little. 'Huh? What's happening?'

Alex tried to force the silver stone into the storage bag, but no matter what, it wouldn't go in there at all.

"What's wrong?" Wen Cheng asked, having already opened the door in front of him.

"I don't know, master. I can't put this rock into my storage bag at all," he said, still trying to use his Qi to force it in.

"Is that so?" Wen Cheng asked with a weird face and returned to help Alex, but he too couldn't force the rock into any storage bag.

"That is weird," he said, with his hands rubbing his chin in confusion.

"Do I take it out like this?" Alex asked.

"I don't know," Wen Cheng said. "Maybe swap it for something else?"

Alex thought about it but shook his head in the end. "I want to take it," he said.

It was an amazing rock that blocked spiritual sense. If he could make an artifact out of this rock, he wouldn't even have to worry about Saint realm cultivators finding him.

'I would rather carry it around in a backpack. Not like it's going to weigh me down or anything,' he thought and walked out with it in hand.

The three of them dropped down from the place. Alex took his leave and left to go to his sister's house. He couldn't wait to try out a few things.

As soon as he reached there, he quickly made up an excuse and went into his room.

As soon as he went in, he set aside the silver stone on the bed. The stone was definitely something fascinating, but there was something else that fascinated Alex even more.

'No way I read it correctly, right?' he asked himself as he brought out the book he had acquired from the treasury. It was the thing with the most yang aura around it and definitely something incredible.

He was more sure when he read the introduction of the book, but that… that was simply unbelievable.

He read it once more just to be sure, and as expected, no matter how many times he read it, it still said the same thing.

"Five Yang Divine Path," he read the name with nothing but awe in his eyes. Using a cultivation technique to cultivate the yang and use it to reach the Divine realm.

Alex continued reading it as he had finally found a cultivation technique that suit him the best.

He continued reading it and soon, his eyes went wide. He had underestimated the book.

He had truly underestimated what he had come to acquire. His hands shook while he read the book and the content of it was poured into his brains.

'No way!' he thought. 'Even if this book came down in the meteor shower, there is no way something this good can exist, right?'

Five Yang Divine Path was a cultivation method that contained 5 different cultivation methods that were similar in most ways except for a few which made one better than the other.

The five cultivation methods all ranged from Common grade all the way to Divine grade, and one could only use those cultivation techniques when their Yang Qi was of a certain strength.

This meant that while you had to start with a not-so-great cultivation technique if you persisted and continuously broke through a couple of realms, you could reach a level where you could start using Immortal grade and even Divine grade techniques.

Alex couldn't wait to try this technique. If it worked, he could finally breakthrough from his current True Disciple 2nd realm and continue on his cultivation journey.

He could use the same technique all the way to the divine realm too, so that made him lose the problem of having to find cultivation methods again.

Alex finished reading the cultivation method and decided to try it out. He knew all 5 of the methods but wasn't sure how well his body could handle them. So, he decided to start with the Common grade one.

He sat down on his bed and started cultivating. Within minutes, he realized that it was too easy.

The Yang in his body moved in a very swift manner, and he could feel himself barely collecting any Qi at all.

'No, I have to use the Earth grade one,' he thought and changed his cultivation method.

When he used this method, he felt like it fit him perfectly. The speed of the yang Qi in his meridian wasn't overly fast, and he was collecting a decent amount of Qi too.

However, he felt like he could go a step beyond. So, he changed his method one last time and started cultivating using the Heaven grade method.

He took a deep breath and started moving the Qi in his body in accordance with the technique.

As he did, he found it a bit uncomfortable to his body. It was like his Qi was trying to burst out of his meridians. Fortunately, as a body cultivator, Alex could handle it without any problem.

So, All in all, he could afford to use this method well, however, he didn't dare go a step higher with using the next method in line. He didn't know if his Qi was thick enough to use it or not, but his body was definitely not strong enough.

'It's likely meant to be used by a normal Immortal realm cultivator from the heavens,' Alex thought.

As he cultivated, he could feel the Qi around him converge on him, and soon he became an eye of the vortex.

In the vortex, Alex found serenity. He fell into a deep trance, not the kind where he fell asleep, but the kind where he knew nothing but the fact that he was cultivating.

The serene feeling was something he had never felt before. It was as if he was finally reunited with something he had lost for a long time.

Seconds passed, minutes passed, and hours passed. But Alex knew not how long passed. Alex could no longer feel the time pass.

Just as he was cultivating, Alex heard a large knock on his door. He slowly stopped cultivating and felt disappointed. It was just getting good too.

He shook his head and walked up to the door and opened it.

"What the hell are you doing? Are you okay?" Luo Mei quickly walked into the room and looked around.

Alex looked around with her and didn't notice anything at all. "What's wrong, sister?" he asked.

Luo Mei looked at Alex and frowned. "Are you the cause of it?" she asked.

"The cause of what?" Alex asked.

"This heat. Why the hell is it so hot in this house? I can't even cultivate cause of it," she said in an annoyed tone.

'Heat?' Alex immediately sent out his spiritual sense and realized that there was nothing but Yang Qi in the surrounding.

"Ah, sorry sister. This must've been because of my new cultivation method," Alex said.

"Your cultivation method?" Luo Mei asked in a strange tone. "How is a cultivation method producing this much heat? I couldn't use my spiritual sense to check what was happening, since it kept getting destroyed."

"I'm sorry. I will take care of it," Alex said and took a deep breath to pull back all the Yang energy his body had defused into the air.

Within minutes, the house was back to being cool again, but Alex felt a little uncomfortable this time.

This was just too much yang Qi for even him to hold back. He needed to release it somewhere, but he didn't know where.

Luo Mei shut down the door and left. Alex sat down on the bed with the new problem in hand.

'What the hell do I do now?' he wondered.

If cultivating for just a little while caused this much problem, there would be more problems if he cultivated it for days.

'I need to find a fix to my body constitution problem before it gets any worse,' Alex thought. 'Master managed to do it, so I should be able to as well.'

Alex was very sure that it was possible. He just didn't know how.

'How did master fix her problem again?' he tried to think. Soon a memory surfaced in his mind with a weird feeling attached to it.

He could almost feel that this memory belonged to him, that he was the one that experienced it, even though he was never the one to have experienced this.

The feeling was weird for sure, but not very important at the moment. What was important was the memory he had just found.

He had asked the master how she got rid of the Yin Qi that her body was constantly diffusing and she had given him the answer.

'Since my Yin Qi was getting out of control, I used Yang Qi to contain it,' she had told him.

"Right!" he thought as he finally remembered it. "If she used Yang Qi, I can use Yin Qi. Now where can I f—"

Alex's eyes shined as he realized that he already had the ability to create Yin as much as he wanted.

He sat back down on his bed and started cultivating once more. Only, this time he wouldn't use the Five Yang Divine Path cultivation method. Instead, he would use the final gift his master had given to him.

Her own cultivation method, the Winter Moon Cultivation method.

Alex took a deep breath and started employing the technique and soon the Qi in his body, which was yang, was slowly being turned into Yin thanks to his Yin spiritual roots.

And very soon, things were starting to happen in his body that he had never experienced before.

Chapter 570: Mountain

The last time Alex, or rather the other Alex had tried out this cultivation method, the yin forming in his body had been contested by the Yang in his body and quickly pushed out of him.

This was what Alex had assumed would happen this time as well, and he was hoping to use that removed yin Qi to surround him and contain his Yang Qi.

However, something different happened. Something he hadn't been expecting at all.

The Yin Qi that had barely formed in his meridian were immediately attacked by the excess Yang Qi that was all over his body and meridian.

Within seconds, the Yang destroyed the Yin. However, in the process, the Yang that destroyed the yin got just that bit weaker.

It wasn't what Alex had expected would happen, but it was working.

Alex closed his eyes and started cultivating. He put all of his focus into his body and started producing as much Yin as he could to fight off the Yang Qi.

'I can't believe it,' he thought. 'I finally manage to get a cultivation method that is incredible and suits me perfectly, and yet I'm stuck here cultivating the wrong type of Qi.'

He couldn't help but sigh. 'At least there is a silver lining to all of this,' he thought. 'With this, I can finally cultivate the method my master left me with.'

Time passed, neither fast nor slow. When it came to be morning, Alex finally stopped cultivating. He had been cultivating for nearly 5 hours now, and all he did was convert Yang Qi to Yin Qi and then use the Yin Qi to fight off the other Yang Qi.

Somehow, this one technique had turned out to be more effective than just him containing the Yang aura within him.

In just 5 hours, he was back to being around the same level in yang aura as the first day he left the desert.

The better part about this cultivation method was also that when the Yang and the Yin destroyed each other, Alex would get pure Qi, which due to alchemy he knew was just Yang and Yin linked together in harmony.

'Well, there is the problem that I can't collect any outside Qi, but using a day to clear up 6 days worth of yang in a week might not be a bad idea when I actually start to cultivate,' he thought.

Finally, he got out of bed and stretched. Today was the day. Today was when he graduated from this sect as well.

Alex felt melancholic and shook his head. He turned his head around and saw the silver stone simply laying there on the bed next to him.

Without realizing, he had cultivate next to it all night. 'Right, I forgot about this thing,' he thought and picked it up.

As usual, Alex was a little startled to feel it's weightlessness. 'This surely is a very unique rock,' he thought and checked it again.

Alex put used his spiritual sense again and just as he felt yesterday, it absorbed all of it.

'I wonder if it works the same for Qi as well,' he thought and poured in his Yang Qi.

To his surprise, it did. No matter how much Yang Qi he poured in it, it continued to get filled.

'Wait, can't I use it to keep my excess Yang aura?' Alex thought. As if realizing something incredible, Alex increased the output of his Yang Qi and poured in as much as he could.

A tumultuous amount of Qi was poured into the silver rock and it absorbed every single one of the Qi.

This only made Alex pour in more. 'Just what is this thing? How is it so incredible?' he thought.

Just as he was thinking that, something weird happened. The silver rock suddenly glowed a little with bright silver color and disappeared.

"Wh-What?" Alex was surprised. "Where did it go?"

He looked at himself, his surrounding and even his storage bags. Yet, the stone was nowhere to be found.

'What happened? Did I over do it and break it?' he wondered. That would be bad. If he had known something like this would have happened, he would have never poured in so much of his Qi.

'But it looked to incredible. I didn't know its durability was so low,' he thought and brought out his spiritual sense to search for its fragments

However, just as he did that, he found the rock. The rock was floating.

It wasn't floating in the room, or his storage bag, or anywhere physical either.

It was floating above his spiritual sea in his mind. 'What the hell?' Alex thought.

He immediately put himself into his spiritual sea and appeared on the surface of the water. He looked up high in the air and saw the rock that was about the size of a mountain in his mind, a mountain that was 5 kilometers tall and 5 kilometers wide.

Alex didn't even know his spiritual sea could stretch this far.

'What the hell is this?' he thought. He slowly flew up and touched the silver mountain with his palm. He could feel the texture of the mountain, yet the weight was still missing.

Suddenly, he noticed something. Right where he had touched it, a single silver hair-like strand separated itself from the mountain.

It flew it the air, hovering just like the mountain next to it. Alex had never been this confused before.

In all of his knowledge he had acquired in the past 8 months, nothing came close to describing what was happening.

He tried to grab the silver strand that floated away from the rock and when he did, the strand vanished.

Alex felt like he absorbed it for some reason, even though he wasn't sure about it.

'Can I absorb it? What does it do? Surely not increase my mental strength right?' Alex was excited at the concept of absorbing it.

He placed his palm back on the mountain, and with just a thought, a massive amount of Yellow fog erupted from around him. It quickly enveloped the entire mountain, and Alex started absorbing it.

However, no matter how much he tried, he couldn't absorb it at all. He soon realized that there was no change to the mountain.

'What the hell?' he thought and removed his hand. When he did, another strand of silver hair floated away from the mountain.

'No way,' he thought. 'Am I going to have to absorb this entire mountain one hair-like strand at a time?'

This was an ordeal that he couldn't complete in a single day. If he were to go strand by strand, it would take him an eternity to completely absorb the entire mountain.

'I guess I have that long of a time to spare now,' he thought. He escaped out of his spiritual sense.

That was quite dangerous as in that situation, he usually had no idea what was happening outside.

He made sure everything was in order, and walked out of the room to go see his master, sister, brother, and anyone else he might want to.

After all, today was the day he would graduate from the Tiger sect and leave.

Chapter 571: The Palace

Luo Mei teared up once again, as she always did. However, she was not the only one to cry this time.

Wen Cheng and Alex teared up as well. Only Liu Xun stood stoic in the group, but he too saw suppressing the tears in his eyes.

The graduation was over and Alex had received a badge that said 'Alumnus' similar to the nameplate that he had gotten from the Hong Wu sect.

"Will you really be alright?" Luo Mei asked in between her tears. She had considered him guaranteed to leave by this point, so she didn't bother trying to make him stay.

"I will be fine, sister. You have nothing to worry about," Alex said.

"Yes you will," Liu Xun said. "Next time we see each other, you might even be stronger than me or master."

"Even if I am, I will still be your younger brother and Master's disciple," Alex said with a small smile.

"Alright, take care. Go get your beast back," Wen Cheng said.

"Yes, master," Alex responded.

The 3 of them hugged Alex and Alex waved them goodbye before leaving the sect. He wiped his tears away and walked onward with a face full of determination.

* * * * * *

A day later, Alex arrived at the Cardinal city once more. He had already kept away his flying boat nearly an hour earlier just to be safe and not be seen by anyone.

Since then, he had been flying normally all the way to the capital.

He got into the queue of people waiting to get in. He remembered having to do something similar when he first came to the scarlet city.

'Hmm… are these my memories?' Alex got a little confused. It sure felt like it.

Alex brought out some money to pay the guards, but they stopped him and showed him the way to another group of guards who were with other cultivators.

Alex didn't understand what was going on, but he obeyed.

"May we ask who you are and what your purpose of visit to the city is?" the guards asked him when he reached next to them. "We're sorry. There has been a bandit attack on a city to the west, so we've been asking everyone that has any worthy cultivation base."

"Ah," Alex understood. "Yes, my name is Yu Ming, from Scarlet City. I am here to meet the emperor."

The guards were about to note down the information when they stopped. "Brother, please don't joke around. Give us the correct answer," they said.

"That's the truth," Alex said. "I was invited by the Emperor. You can call the palace and check up if you don't believe me."

"Take him aside and keep him in the room for a while," a guard ordered another guard, who complied easily.

"This way," the guard took Alex. The guard was neither polite, nor rude in his treatment of Alex, and when he reached the room, Alex sat on a chair that was inside.

"Please wait while we confirm your words," the guard said.

"Yes, please do," Alex said with a smile toward the guard.

The guard sent some information through a talisman and waited for a while. After a few minutes, a message came back in the talisman.

"Sorry brother, but what did you say your name was?" the guard asked.

"Yu Ming," Alex said. It felt a little weird using that name, but it would be one he would keep for a while.

"What sect are you from?" the guard asked.

"From the Hong Wu sect and Tiger sect of Scarlet City," Alex replied.

"Ah, I see. It seems you were the right person. Please come with me; I've been assigned to bring you to the palace," the guard said.

"Yes, let's go," Alex stood up from the chair and walked with the guard.

Alex saw the many people of the city going about their days in the city. It wasn't as crowded as when the competition had taken place, but it was still plenty crowded.

The colorful atmosphere of the city reminded him of the festival back in the countryside.

"You don't look very strong, brother," the guard asked as he looked at Alex.

"Haha, not when compared to you," Alex said, looking at the guard whose cultivation base should have been between True Master 7th and 9th realm. Alex still had a slight problem telling cultivation apart.

His own cultivation was still at the 2nd realm of True Disciple, so he was really weak comparatively. Of course, that was without counting his body cultivation.

"So you must have some other features than just being a cultivator right?" the guard asked.

"I'm an alchemist," Alex said.

"Oh, an alchemist?" the guard asked with a surprised look. "You must be a genius in alchemy to be called by the emperor at such a young age."

"I… do fine for myself," Alex said. He didn't bother explaining that he wasn't here for alchemy purposes.

The guard was a curious one who kept the conversation going by asking quite a few questions, most of which Alex answered without any hesitation.

The 2 of them walked through the city going in the southern direction.

Alex had come from the northern gate, so he would have to walk for a while to reach the palace.

The palace occupied a large area of land at the center of the city and was surrounded by large walls about 20 meters high. They weren't as tall as city walls which were close to 50 meters high.

The palace had a single gate that was facing to the north. So, Alex and the guard had to completely walk around the walls to reach the palace.

"Here we are," the guard said as they finally reached the palace.

An old man stood at the front of the gate and looked at Alex who was next to the guard.

"Are you sir Yu Ming?" the old man asked.

"Yes, I am," Alex said. "But you don't have to call me sir."

"Hmm… your appearance doesn't match what I was told you would look like. Also, I wasn't told that you had a missing arm," the old man said.

"I lost my arm in the city against the bandits. As for the appearance, I can't help it. I've changed since then," Alex said.

"This puts me in a bit of tro—"

"Yu Ming? You are finally here?" A voice came from behind the old man as a woman walked up to them. She wore a blue, translucent robe that seemed to have been made from the lightest silk out there.

Her hair was braided behind her in such a fancy way that Alex was sure it took 5 different maids to tame that.

"My greetings, princess," Alex said.

"Why are you hiding your face? Did you make an enemy or something?" she asked.

"Your highness, you recognize this sir? The information I was given doesn't match—"

"Oh, don't worry, old Han. He's the right person. I saw him with this face in the competition the day of the invasion," she said.

"Ah, then that settles it," the old man said.

"You go in, I will take him in," the princess said.

"Princess, I can't let you do that," the old man said.

"Alright, then follow us," she said and turned to Alex. "Come in. Father has been waiting for you for a long time."

Chapter 572: Discussion

"I heard your master passed away, my condolences," The princess said as they walked in.

"Thank you, princess," Alex said. He looked around the outer gardens of the palace that was nearly 3 times as large as the City lord's manor.

There were trees and flowers of many kinds and Alex could recognize quite of few of them as being rare ones.

The servants in the garden and the walkway to the palace wore two different kinds of clothing. One was a simple peasant robe of very light red color.

The other was a black robe that Alex recognized to belong to the Royal Fu Academy.

"Do the graduates of the Royal Fu Academy come to work in the palace?" Alex asked.

"Some do," the princess said. "Most do their own thing. We don't bind them to work for us only."

"I see," Alex said. Ahead of the path came the massive palace that looked to be completely made up of white limestone. However, given how well it had handled its weight, Alex doubted if it really was that.

The princess didn't ask him a lot of questions and directly brought him to her father's place deep in the palace.

Along the way, Alex could see that the whole palace was made up of grayish-white color with a few red pieces of furniture that worked as accent pieces for the palace.

When Alex entered the room that belonged to the Emperor, he was immediately met with a bright white room with furniture that could only be called crimson in color.

Not only the furniture, even the curtains, and drapes as well as the carpet was crimson in color.

There were a few chairs in the room, all grandiose in nature, and had a few people sitting on them.

"Come on in. This is my father's study room," the princess said bringing him in to meet the people.

The Emperor was sat in the center of the group. His face showed confusion when he saw Alex walk in.

"He's here, father," the princess told the emperor.

"That's not…"

"Greetings, your Majesty, your highnesses, and seniors," Alex bowed towards the entire group.

"This is him," the princess said. "I think he might be one of those players too."

"Ah, that makes sense," the emperor said. "Welcome to the palace, young man. I'm glad to see you have survived the beasts somehow."

'Eh? Do they know I'm a player? Has the news about players spread this far?' he wondered.

"Come on, sit down. Let me introduce you to these people," the emperor beckoned Alex to sit on the seat next to him.

Alex nodded and walked over.

"Where am I going to sit?" the princess asked in an annoyed voice.

"Eh? You want to sit with us, Wuying?" the Emperor asked.

"Of course," the princess said. "I haven't asked him any questions just because I wanted to get him here quickly."

"Alright," the emperor pointed to the corner of the room and a chair floated right next to them.

The princess smiled and sat on it next to Alex.

"Let me introduce you to everyone, young man," the emperor said. "You already know these two old men Yang and Feng from last time, right? Feng Xuan and Yang Fei are both heads of the Feng and Yang family and are some of the only Saint realm cultivators of the Crimson Empire."

Alex bowed towards both of them.

The emperor then moved on to the two men next to them who looked young but showed signs of aging.

"These are my 2 sons, Fuxian is the older one and will succeed me, and Yuhan is the younger one," the Emperor said.

The two sons looked just like their father but lacked broad shoulders as well as rough beards.

Alex bowed to the two of them as well.

Finally, there were two people on the last chair. One man, one woman.

Neither of them looked like they belonged here, and judging by the message Alex had received, he believed these two to be the outside.

"Fellow Daoist, my name is Fu Tao," the man said as he cupped his fists towards Alex. He wore a red robe and looked quite young for someone with a cultivation base that Alex couldn't quite figure out.

'Is he in the upper True Lord realm? Maybe even lower True King realm,' Alex thought.

The man had a well-built body and a clean-shaven face. His red robe with the golden embroidery made him look like someone of royalty as well.

"This here is Lu Yan," the man introduced the woman next to her. She wore a green robe that covered her whole body, including a veil that hid her face.

From what Alex could see, he assumed the girl wasn't very old either, and she still exuded aura close to the upper True lord realm.

"Greetings, brother Tao, Sister Yan," Alex greeted them back as well. "If I may be so rude, may I know how old brother Tao is this year?"

"Oh, it's fine," the man said. "I'm 27 years old."

"Wow, my master who is nearly triple your age is only a few realms higher than you, brother Tao. You must be really talented," Alex said.

"Haha, I am alright," the man said, but he was feeling a little proud of himself at the moment.

"Now that introductions are over, young man, why don't you tell us about your days in the Beasts' realm? How did you survive there?" The emperor asked.

Alex nodded and got to explain as much as he could without giving away the specifics. He told them that he was kept as a prisoner, but had enough freedom to go out to the gardens. He told them how he spend most of the days simply cultivating and doing nothing.

He told them that his beast had been taken away as well. Aside from that, he gave information about the secret realm spanning continent-wide, making it impossible to directly go to the other side without going through the beast's realm or taking a detour through the ocean first. The two outsiders listened to him and frowned.

"You can't go to the ocean," the Emperor said. "It's a death trap. The beasts there are so strong that they will make me look like a weakling."

Alex was surprised to hear that. 'The ocean has such strong beasts? Thank god nothing attacked me when I was on the shore,' he thought.

"Those beasts can't come up to the land, so there's no need to worry about that area. As for actual information, Do you have anything that will help us survive in the realm?" the man named Tao asked.

"I have a piece of information that may be able to help you," Alex said. "It was around the time when I saw the flash of light inside the secret realm. I had asked a beast at the time, and she had told me that it was you guys entering the realm."

"When I asked if you were safe, she said that you would be safe as long as you didn't go around looking for trouble yourself," Alex said.

"Although, I must warn you. The humans were the ones that destroyed the western continent after their king died, so most of the beasts have an improperly driven hatred for even humans of this continent itself."

Chapter 573: Teach Me

Alex explained to them a few more things regarding the secret realms that he had come to learn through simply hearsay.

The man and woman, namely Fu Tao and Lu Yan, were still scared of returning even after learning what they had learned.

"Cousin Tao, I'm sure you will be alright. If what young Yu Ming has said is accurate, you will just have to not try to provoke the beasts," the emperor said.

'Cousin?' Alex wondered why the emperor was calling him that. 'Is this Fu family the same as the royal Fu family?'

"I understand, cousin," Fu Tao said. "But my fear still remains. I watched a lot of the people who entered with me get torn to shreds by the strong beasts."

"Although I believe they were the first ones to provoke the beasts, it still causes me quite a bit of discomfort knowing that they can kill us at any time."

"Given that we have to travel for nearly a week's worth of time without stopping anywhere, it will be hard to stay unnoticed," the man said.

"So we will have to sneak in quietly," the girl said.

"Sneaking is just impossible. Entrance through the teleportation platforms shines a bright light in all directions on top of making a noise. Also, the palace will immediately learn about the intruders the moment we enter."

"Our process should not be to sneak in, rather enter politely. If you sneak, they might consider you to have a bad intention," Ning said.

The man nodded when he heard that, but then he rose his eyebrows. "We? Are you planning to go in there again, young brother?" Fu Tao asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "As I mentioned, my beast is still in there. I intend to take him back."

"Uhh… isn't the cat in the palace with the saints?" the emperor asked.

"What? If that is so then we can't take you with us, young brother," Fu Tao said.

"I don't expect you to help me save my cat. I only ask you that you let me get in with you," Alex said.

"I… don't know, that still sounds quite dangerous. We are afraid of the trouble coming back to us," the man said.

Alex sighed. That was understandable. He would have perhaps done the same thing in the man's situation as well.

"Then how about this," Alex said. "Can you teach me how to open the teleportation platform? I will go in a week after you guys. By then, you should have already left the realm, right?"

The man fell into thought. "Yeah, that should be possible," he said. "If you are willing to wait at least a week, then I am willing to teach you the method to open the formation as well."

Alex's eyes shined. "Thank you, brother Tao," he said.

"Alright, that should be enough for today. Will you leave tomorrow then, cousin Tao?" the Emperor asked.

"Yes, I want to go back as soon as possible," the man said.

The two of them left, and so did the princess. Only the princess and the Emperor remained.

"I didn't think you would be wanting to go there too," the emperor said.

"I need to," Alex said.

"Alright, Wuying will show you to a guest room. Since you will be likely staying for an entire week, make yourself at home," the emperor said.

"Yes," Alex said. "By the way, your majesty. I… have a small request."

"Request? Go on, if it is possible, I will grant it," he said.

"Will it be possible for you to ask senior Lai to meet me?" Alex asked.

"Lai Qing?" the emperor asked curiously.

"Yes," Alex said. "I want to know if he has any knowledge about pills that would help regrow my arm."

"Ah, yes. You should be concerned about that as well. I will send him a message. As for when he will come, I don't know myself," the Emperor said.

"As long as you send him a message, I am fine with that," Alex said.

"Alright, I will do so," The emperor said.

Alex left with the princess and went along with her to his guest room. However, it didn't seem like the princess intended to bring him there as she brought him someplace else.

Alex looked around awkwardly as the passing maids and servants looked at him curiously.

'Where are we going?' he wondered.

They went past a set of hallways before reaching a section of the palace that seemed to not have that many people working there.

The Princess walked up to a room that was guarded by 2 black-robed figures and asked that she be let in.

The guards opened the door and she walked in with Alex in tow.

"Aunt Mixie, look who is here," she said in a loud voice as she walked in.

"Little Wuying, you need to stop shouting while inside," A man said as he walked out of the inner section of the massive room.

"Second Uncle, where is aunt?" she asked.

"I'm here, child. I heard you the first time," a woman that looked to be in her late 20s arrived in front of them. She wore a red dress with long flowing hair.

Alex looked at the woman. Although her skin color had changed quite a lot, her face still remained the same.

"Aunt Mixie, I brought him to meet you," the princess said.

The husband-wife looked at Alex, but they wouldn't recognize him no matter what.

"Who is this young man? Certainly not your…" the uncle said.

"Stop thinking stupid things uncle. He is the one that helped cure Aunt," the princess said.

"Oh, OH," the two of them finally realized who they were looking at.

"Young man, you must be Yu Ming then. I am Fu Zemin, the second High prince of the empire," the man introduced himself.

"Greetings, your highness," Alex bowed towards the both of them.

"You need not bow towards us, child. You saved my life. I, Rei Mixie, bow towards you," the woman bowed slightly towards Alex.

"Ah, you don't have to do that, your highness," Alex said. "I am just glad to see that you are doing fine."

Seeing a person, whose cultivation base was in the True Emperor realm bowing in front of him made Alex feel quite awkward.

The two couples happily asked questions to Alex, who answered as well as he could. They showed a genuine smile towards him and were really kind people.

Alex couldn't help but wonder how such a family could produce someone like Zexi.

After a while, the princess finally took him to his guest room. Alex went into the grand guest room that would make anyone feel jealous regarding the royals.

Alex closed the door and went on to cultivate. He decided to not cultivate his yang technique while he was in the palace and instead went with the Yin technique to reduce the yang his body was naturally producing.

After a whole night of cultivation, Alex woke up in the morning. He went out and met up with the people that were ready to leave.

"You're here, young brother," Fu Tao said. "Let us go then. Finally, we can return back home."

Chapter 574: Equilibrium

After nearly 4 hours of flying, the group of 6 arrived at the location for the teleportation platform.

Alex's face turned cold when he saw that location. Just one more step and he would be on his way to save Pearl.

However, Alex couldn't do that right now. He needed to wait like he had promised. If he tried to force himself in, he could very well be attacked by them for trying to ruin their chances of survival.

He looked at the group of 6, of which Fu Zemin and Rei Mixie were the most surprising ones.

It seemed that they were going to leave the Crimson Empire to go roam the rest of the continent together. They already had no responsibilities whether it be to their children, to the family or to the empire.

They were free spirits, bored out of their minds, which was one of the reason why Rei Mixie had went out exploring so long ago and had found the raw Divine Devil fruit that made her unconscious for months.

"So this is the platform huh?" she said. "Last time during the expedition, I had gone way further from here. If only we knew at the time that there was a saint grade formation laid around that place."

"At least we know now," Fu Zemin said.

"Are you two absolutely sure you want to go?" The Emperor asked.

"Yes, brother," Fu Zemin said.

"You guys really don't want to wait for your grandchildren to be born?" the Emperor asked.

The couple hesitated for a moment and then shook their head. "I'm sure we will be back soon to meet our grandchildren," Rei Mixie said.

"If you say so, sister-in-law," the Emperor said.

"Young brother, come here. I will show you how its done," Fu Tao said as he called Alex to the formation.

Alex went up to him and looked at the formation. He still wasn't sure how one was supposed to run this formation without it having a metal base.

Alex looked at the formation and based on the number of strokes, it seemed to be a simple True rank formation.

"You've used normal formations, right?" Fu Tao asked.

"Yes, I have," Alex said.

"Good, then it will be a little easier to explain. You see, in normal formations, there is always a metal plate in it. In a metal, we can pour however much Qi we want and it will bring it to an equilibrium once all of these dividends are filled."

"However, this one is different. Since there is no metal plate to bring your energy to an equilibrium, if you want to run such a formation, you need to bring equilibrium to it yourself," Fu Tai said.

'Equilibrium…' Alex thought. He understood this idea quite well.

Fu Tao walked on top of the formation bringing Alex with him. "You see these end points where all the lines gather? What you need to do is give a specific amount of Qi into it. Then, you immediately give the next one a different amount of Qi, followed by the next one and so on until all the end points have energy in them."

"As for how much energy you have to put in, take a moderate amount, and multiply that by the number of lines per end point," Fu Tao said.

Alex didn't need to hear Fu Tao anymore. He already understood the concept and was surprised that it was so easy. Especially since he had already used the same concept last time to improve his skin alone.

'Right, equilibrium. That formation was based on the Yang jades, which defused the energy onto the formation, instead of a user. Maybe I could've done it too if I had the same level of yang Qi,' Alex thought.

'So, while that formation used the yang jades as an energy source, I can use myself as one for this one. In a similar concept, all the nodes need to have the same amount of energy so that they spread through the stroke at an equal rate.'

Alex felt enlightened. It was such an easy concept he had already put to use, but he was only understanding how it worked. 'So metals automatically bring energy to equilibrium, huh?' he thought.

As he continued contemplating on the matter, a curious case of confusion came before him.

"Brother Tao, do these formations not need an energy source?" he asked.

"No," Fu Tao shook his head. "Since it is a one-time use formation, it doesn't need an energy source, only enough energy to run it once."

"Ah," Alex understood. 'Right, once they're teleported, the formation would have no use if it keeps on running. I never thought about that.'

"You are quite talented in the matters of formation," Alex said while thinking, 'even though you can't use words like stroke and nodes.'

"Haha, it's not me who is smart. It's just that my grandfather is a formation expert. It was him who came up with the knowledge to run this formation," Fu Tao proudly said.

"Ah, I see. Are there many people in the Luminance empire with such high knowledge?" Alex asked.

He was quite surprised to think that he had never learned about such things from the internet.

"No," Fu Tao said. "Only my grandfather knows of it. Which is why only my Granduncle knew how to open it, and why now only I know how to open it."

"Ah I see," Alex said. "He must be an exceptional genius in the ways of formations then."

"Haha, not really. He just found a book that talked about formations from the meteor shower," Fu Tao said with a slight smile.

"Meteor shower?" Alex's eyes suddenly narrowed. "Um, brother, can you tell me a little more about this Meteor shower?"

"Um… sure," Fu Tao said. "About 1200 or so years ago, there was a meteor shower that dropped quite a few things onto the western continent. Some got spirit stones, some got weapons, some got unreadable techniques."

"My grandfather got a book that taught about formations. I don't know how many of those there are out there, but my grandfather is certainly one of the luckier ones since his book could be read."

"I see," Alex said. "Thank you for teaching me all of that."

"It's alright. You've been quite a bit of help for us too," Fu Tao said.

"Are we ready to go?" Lu Yan came up to him and asked.

"Yes," Fu Tao turned around. "Cousins, come. We should leave now."

"Yes," Fu Zemin and Rei Mixie walked up to the formation platform, while Alex got off it.

"Say your goodbyes now," Fu Tao said while releasing his energy to the different nodes at the same time.

"Goodbye brother," Fu Zemin said.

"Go, and don't worry about your children. They are already old enough to take care of themselves," the Emperor said.

"Good luck on getting your cat, young man," lady Rei said to Alex.

"Thank you," Alex responded.

Soon, the energy on the platform reached an equilibrium and everything started shining in bright white light.

Alex closed his eyes as the light got very bright at once point, and then it disappeared.

When he reopened his eyes, the 4 people on top of the platform were gone.

Chapter 575: Burnt Book

A few more days, that was all Alex had to wait. It had been 4 days since Fu Tao and the group had teleported into the beast's realm.

For the last 4 days, he had been doing nothing but staying in the palace or going out to the city with the princess.

The princess' guard was always with her, but she never came out to speak with Alex. It seemed that she was still shy from the last time.

Alex had already gone through all the markets buying everything he wanted from ingredients to recipes to formations to even swords.

The one he got was a weak one even compared to his own previous sword. At least, it would be easier to refine.

The rest of the time he would spend in Alchemy hall in the city where he could make as many pills as he could.

On the 2nd day, he had made a particularly good harvest.

After returning from walking around the city, Alex had gone back to his room to rest.

However, just then someone knocked on the door to his guest room. Alex left his bed and opened the door to see a maid outside.

"His Majesty calls you to his study room," she said.

"The emperor is calling for me?" Alex asked and left the room. The maid showed the way to the study room and stopped a bit before reaching the place.

"Your Majesty, you called for me?" Alex asked as he entered the door.

"Ah, you are here. Come, come," the Emperor beckoned him in.

Alex walked in to see that the Emperor was not alone. He was instead with a feminine-looking man of thin building, luscious flowing black hair, and eyes that would make men question their likes and dislikes.

The man looked weak, but his cultivation base aura said otherwise. The man was as least a True Emperor realm expert. That was all he could tell from the aura.

'Who is this person?' Alex wondered.

He walked up to the emperor and took a seat next to him, waiting for him to introduce the man.

"Alright, I will leave you two to talk," the Emperor said standing up to leave.

'Huh? Talk? What?' Alex was extremely confused, but before he could even say anything, the emperor left.

Alex didn't know what to do now. He felt extremely awkward in front of this person he had never seen before.

"Greetings!" Alex still decided to greet the man.

The man bowed a little towards Alex and said, "I only recently came to learn about little Ma's passing. My Condolences."

"T-thank you," Alex said before his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

'Little Ma?' he thought. 'Aside from Grandmaster, I have only ever heard one person…'

"Ah, I'm sorry, senior Lai. I recognized you too late," Alex said. The man in front of him was Lai Qing, the Royal Alchemist.

"Haha, I'm surprised you recognized me at all. I usually have to talk with people for a while before they figure out who I am," the Royal alchemist said.

"Thankfully, I recognized you, or our conversation might have been incredibly awkward," Alex said. "Still, I have seen you 3 times now, and each time you have a different face on. Is there a reason?"

"No particular reason, really," the royal alchemist said. "I was a young man when I got into alchemy and spent nearly 2 centuries trying to hone my skills as an alchemist."

"By the time I was big enough to be given the title of the Royal Alchemist, I realized that I had spent all of my youth tucked away in a room with a fire and a cauldron."

"I felt a little regret for losing my youth, so I try to bring it back in any way possible," the Royal Alchemist said.

"Centuries?" Alex was a little surprised. "How old are you?"

"Me? I… don't know," the Royal Alchemist said. "I should be a little more than 400 years now."

Alex was stunned. He had met old people, but none that were this old as a True realm cultivator.

"That's not what you brought me here to speak about, is it?" he asked.

"No," Alex said. "I requested your audience so that you could teach me about the Structure and Compositions as you promised."

"Sigh, I told you to give up last time, didn't I? It's a difficult concept to understand that even Ma Rong would have a hard time understanding."

"As I said last time, come back to me when you've made a Heaven Grade Tr—"

Alex suddenly put forth a pill bottle next to the Royal Alchemist, stopping him mid-speech.

The royal alchemists sniffed the aroma that was coming off of the pill bottle even though it had a stopper on it.

His eyes widened as he took it. "What pill is this?" he asked.

"A Two-fold Qi Absorption pill," Alex said. That was a pill that doubled the speed of cultivation under normal circumstances.

The Royal Alchemist knew pretty well about this pill. It was a commonly found recipe that almost all True realm alchemists knew.

However, that was not the reason he was so surprised. He opened the stopper and took the pill out and looked at it.

It was a light lime-colored pill with uneven spots of red dots all around it.

The Royal Alchemist said nothing and pulled out a Pill Tester and immediately put in the pill.

Fog appeared around the glass of the tester and slowly went up. The Royal Alchemist had a guess about the pill, but no matter how he looked at it, this should not have been real.

However, it was.

The fog stopped moving and the tester gave the result he was expecting.

51%

This was a Heaven Grade True pill.

"You made this?" the Royal Alchemist asked with wide eyes.

"You said that I would be eligible to learn about Structure and Composition once I was able to make a Heaven Grade True Pill, right?" Alex asked.

"Here it is. Now, please teach me."

The Royal alchemist looked in absolute shock. He had been nearly a hundred years old when he had reached this level.

However, this kid that was in front of him, that wasn't even 20 years old could somehow make such an amazing pill. The Royal alchemist couldn't believe it.

"Did you really make this?" he asked.

"Yes, only 2 days ago," Alex said. "I was hoping you would be okay with this 48% pill I had managed to do about a week ago, but fortunately, I happened to make this 51% pill too."

The Royal Alchemist heard this and his eyes changed and got serious. "It seems you were serious about learning it. I guess you have the right to."

He reached into his storage bag and pulled out a small book that looked old and almost torn in places. The outer cover looked new, but everything else did not.

"What is that?" Alex asked.

"It is the book that gave me the knowledge I have today. Everything I am came from this book right here," the Royal Alchemist said.

"Everything I am about to tell you is something I learned from this book," he said.

He put it forth in front of him, and Alex slowly moved his hands towards it, thinking he was presenting it to him.

"NO!" The Royal Alchemist pulled back his hands, his eyes glaring at him fiercely. It took him a second to realize what he was doing.

He calmed down, the look in his eyes disappearing, and said, "Sorry about that. This is my holy scripture, and I cannot let anyone else touch it."

"Holy scripture?" Alex asked. "Does that book contain information about Alchemy?"

"Yes," the Royal Alchemist said. "I was but a normal cultivator at the start. I was a poor, rogue cultivator that lived his day-to-day life by hunting beasts and selling it."

"If I hadn't accidentally come across this book during one of my hunts, I would have never been able to reach the heights I have reached today," the royal Alchemist said.

"What is it called?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. The outer cover was burned off, so I could never learn its name," the Royal Alchemist said.

'Outer cover was burned?' Alex thought. There was something in his mind that told him why the outer cover could have possibly been burned.

'Could it be…' he thought, 'that this book too… came down in the meteor shower?'

Chapter 576: Symmetry

Lai Qing was just a young man that had been sent down the path of cultivation without any wishes of his own.

He wasn't the best at it and had to try his hardest to even reach Bone Tempering realm.

One day, in the forests that were still present where the desert had formed, he was hunting for weak beasts as he should and found the book that contained information about alchemy.

He dismissed it at first but was soon intrigued by the information and decided to check it out.

That was at the age of 29.

He didn't join any Alchemy sects, or take any teachers and simply tried on his own.

He bought books about ingredients and recipes with what little information he had and used the superior information of the coverless book to augment his understanding of Alchemy.

He spent decades upon decades trying to learn alchemy. When he realized that the book was truly incredible, he started showing it off as well.

Soon, people started noticing him. Some called him to teach them alchemy, some called him to lecture in theirs.

Even the ministers called him to write an alchemy book for the royal library. Afterward, he was given the title, the Royal Alchemist of Crimson Empire, making him someone with a status that was only lower than the Royal family themselves.

Now, he was one of the most well-respected people in the entire Crimson Empire.

And it all happened because of the colorless book he was holding at the moment in front of Alex.

"How much do you know about Structure and Composition again?" the Royal Alchemist asked.

"As much as you've written in your book. I know that Composition has to do with the ratio of the powders in the final product so that it can absorb the most energy."

"As for Structure… I'm a little confused about that. It has to do with the shape of the powder's particles themselves which I will be honest, I don't understand much of," Alex said.

The royal Alchemist nodded his head when he heard it. "You are not far off on Composition."

"Every time you make a pill, you put in the ingredients and turn it into powder right? Forget about the temperature and movements. The most fundamental truth of making pills is that you have to turn an ingredient into powder."

"Do you know why we do that?" the Royal Alchemist asked.

"Yes, to release the energy within the ingredient," he said.

"Yes, but then why is there a focus on keeping the powder in there? Can't you just put in other powders you had maybe prepared beforehand? Why do alchemists insist on keeping the powder of the ingredient the energy came from?" the Royal Alchemist asked.

Alex cocked his head in thinking. He had never given this aspect of alchemy much thought.

"That's because only that ingredient's powder can be used in absorbing the final resulting energy?" he asked.

"Close," the Royal Alchemist said. "You seem to have a very fundamental misunderstanding of the Alchemy process. You seem to believe that energies disappear when you mix ingredients, but that is not so."

Alex knew that already, but he kept quiet and let the Royal Alchemist speak as he listened with full attention.

"When you mix the energies, they interact with each other, and out comes a single type of energy from the two. However, even though you only see one type of energy, there is in fact both of those previous energies in that resulting energy."

"They are only hiding because the weaker of the energy interacts with some of the stronger energy and brings it into equilibrium, thus leaving only one type of the energy to be seen by the observer."

"Also, if an energy comes from one ingredient, only its powder can hold that energy in the end."

"So, if you make a pill with 14 different ingredients, even though the final resulting energy will be of one type, they will still have all the 14 original energy. They are only hidden because they are in harmony."

"Since you have 14 types of energy, you still need 14 types of powder to hold it. This is why you cannot throw away the original powder. That is where Composition comes in."

"If you lose even the tiniest bit of powder, it cannot hold energy that belonged to it. And since all energy is in a harmony, if there is no room for one, there is no room for any."

"This is one of the major reasons why alchemists end up making low harmony pills," the Royal Alchemist said.

Alex nodded. He had truly come to learn something. 'So the best course of action is to start with the appropriate amount of ingredient, and never lose any bits of powder,' Alex thought.

"I believe I understand, senior Lai," Alex said.

"Good," the Royal Alchemist said. "Now let's move on to Structure."

Alex waited for him to start speaking, but the Royal Alchemist didn't speak at all.

"Senior?" he called out.

"Ah, sorry. Structure… is a difficult concept to explain," he said. "You see there are more than one ways to turn an ingredient into powder while releasing the same rate of energy."

"Ah, yes. I know about that," Alex said. "I came to know a lot about it when I made my own pills."

"Yes, so when you do the things differently, you end up creating the different shapes of powder. It is those powders that you put together in such a way that there is no gap in between the powders," he said.

"Sorry, gap?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the Royal Alchemist said. "Having gaps in your pill is one of the worst things you can do. Well, it's less of a gap between the powders being the problem but more of the chaos gaps can bring to the overall structure of the pill."

"Let's take the 14 ingredient pill from before as the example. When you finish making the pill, you will need all 14 of those different powders to form a clump such that there are as less gaps as possible."

"Since you can't individually make them, you will have to rely on shapes that more or less fit together perfectly. That way, you get rid of the gaps in the pill."

"So what you are actually doing with structure is removing the gap as much as possible. A compact pill is always a better pill," The Royal Alchemist said.

Alex was very confused. He understood why having more powder helped gather more energy, but how did gaps have anything to do with it?

"Shouldn't just having all the powders be enough? That should do it even if there are gaps, right?" he asked.

The Royal Alchemist smiled. "You would think that, wouldn't you. Logically it makes sense for pills to contain energy like that. Except, it turns out that isn't the case."

"After all, our world is way more magical and mystical than even what we've come to learn," the Royal alchemist said.

"I've told you about composition and structure, but those two are merely two parts that come together to make the most important aspect of a pill's formation," the Royal Alchemist said. "That is… the Symmetry."

"Symmetry?" Alex looked confused. "Symmetry of…?"

"The powder in the pill. Depending on how symmetrical the structure of the powder in the overall pill is, the amount of energy it can store is the same as well," the Royal Alchemist said.

"This is why you don't want gaps. Having solid clumps of powder make it easier for a pill to be symmetrical," the royal Alchemist shape.

Alex was still a little confused. "What does symmetry have anything to do with it though?" he asked.

"I don't know," the Royal Alchemist said. "But that's what this book tells me to do, and ever since I did, it's been working for me. So, it should work for you too."

'Symmetry? How does that help a pill with keeping more energy in it?' he wondered.

As he thought that, he remembered something else. Something that felt so obvious to him by now that he didn't even think of it the first time he heard it.

"Symmetry… formations have that too. When you make a formation, you have to make straight strokes at correct angles so that the overall formation comes out symmetrical. The better the symmetry, the better the formation's efficiency," Alex said as he remembered about it.

"Ah yes, I've heard about that too," The Royal Alchemist said. "Not only that, for Talismans, all the runes are symmetrical and the final drawn bigger run has to be in symmetry too."

"Similarly, Artifacts that usually have skills in them need to have symmetrical Qi lines too," the Royal Alchemist said.

"What is this fascination with Symmetry for all production skills?" Alex asked.

"Don't ask me, that's just how things are. I don't make the rules, I just follow them," the Royal Alchemist said.

"I see," Alex said. "I guess I understand everything you said today. Although, I might have to dwell on them for a bit."

"Take as much time as you need. These… are not simple concepts that you can understand in a sitting. Even if you do understand what they mean, putting them into work will take years," the Royal Alchemist said.

"Yes, I will try my best," Alex said.

"So, was that all you wanted to ask?" the Royal Alchemist asked.

"No, actually. There is one more thing I wanted to ask," Alex said as he pulled up his robe's sleeve to show the stub of his left arm and asked, "Can you help me with this?"

Chapter 577: Conversion

"Oh, you lost your arm?" The Royal Alchemist asked with a bit of surprise as he seemed to have finally noticed it.

"When did you lose it?" he asked.

"Um, about nearly 3 weeks ago now," Alex said.

"Ah, I'm sorry then," the Royal Alchemist said. "I could help you reattach it if it was a few hours or at most a day. But, over 2 weeks, I cannot help you with that."

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "Then, can you help me in downgrading a Saint Rank recipe to a True rank?"

The royal alchemist's eyes changed. "You have a saint rank recipe?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Can I see it?" he asked.

Alex shook his head. "I only remember the recipe. I don't carry it around," he said.

"Alright then, write it down for me," he said.

Alex hesitated for a bit before remembering what the person in front of him had done for him by teaching him today. So, he decided to repay it back through the recipe.

He wrote it all down on a Talisman and handed it to the Royal Alchemist.

The Royal Alchemist read the talisman as his face appeared to be full of shock. "These are ingredients that I have only read about in this book. I have never seen them before myself," he said.

"Do you know how I can possibly downgrade these ingredients to a True rank alternative so that I can make a pill for myself?" he asked.

"Downgrade? That's… hard," he said. "Wait a second." The royal alchemist opened his book and flipped it for a good while before reaching a page.

"Ah, here it is! Note this down," he said.

Alex wasn't sure what he was about to say, but he waited for the ingredient list.

"Thorny Bugloss for Winevein Poppy, Silverstring Diascia for Trileaved Periwinkle Leaf, and… Auburn Rue's seeds instead of Dried Torenia flower," the Royal Alchemist read it out loud.

"These are the only conversion I have at the moment. Unfortunately, I have more Common and True rank conversion instead of the higher ones," the Royal Alchemist said.

Alex thought for a bit. The Saint Body Regeneration pill had about 12 ingredients to it. Of them, the Royal Alchemist had just given him 3 of the ingredients that would be used for the True rank version of the pill.

'That doesn't help me a lot at all,' Alex thought.

"Um, Senior Lai, can you teach me the concept behind upgrading or downgrading an ingredient? Even if it is just for the Common and True rank ingredients?" he asked.

"I suppose I can do that," the Royal Alchemist said.

"First of all, you have to understand that even though 2 ingredients might have the same energy, its actually different in subtle ways. You can never swap the metal energy of one ingredient for metal energy of another ingredient."

"So, the first thing you do is find out what this aspect of the ingredient is that makes it different."

"Usually you figure this out by looking at what the ingredient does, rather than the energy itself. If you want to upgrade or downgrade an ingredient that helps in closing up wounds, then the ingredient you want will likely do that same thing but just better or worse."

"So you start there," the Royal alchemist said.

He went on to explain as much as he could about the concept and Alex soaked it in like a dry sponge left out in the rain.

For nearly 20 minutes, the royal alchemist spoke on this topic, finally ending it with, "in the end, it's just trial and error. Once you have the ingredients, you just have to try and make a pill that works."

"I see," Alex said. "So, I will have to keep trying it for a long while, huh?"

"Unfortunately, yes," the Royal Alchemist said.

"Thank you for your teaching, Senior Lai," Alex bowed towards him a little.

"It's alright. My visit hasn't been all a waste of time either," the Royal Alchemist said as he waved the talisman in his hands.

He stood up to leave, and as he did, he said, "From what I understand, Little Ma had a lot of expectations on you. I hope you smash through every single one of them and reach heights neither she nor I have ever imagined."

Then, he left.

Alex remained in the room for a while longer contemplating on the information he had just received.

There was no secret technique, there was no book. He would have to do everything on his own from the ground up.

Now, Alex felt himself to have 2 choices.

First, he could try his best and convert all the Saint rank ingredients to their True rank equivalent, and then make a pill to heal himself.

Or, the perhaps easier option, rush through the True realm to reach the Saint realm and directly make the saint rank pill.

Finding Saint rank ingredients was perhaps going to be a bit too difficult of a task for him, but in either case, sitting on his ass wasn't going to help him.

No one was going to come to help him. If he wanted help, he would either need to go out on his own and find it or be strong enough so that he no longer needed the help.

Alex didn't do anything for the next 3 days aside from staying in his room and cultivating. While he did that, he contemplated on the things regarding the things he had learned.

Composition, Structure, Symmetry, and finally, Conversion. Suddenly learning more about these things had opened up a lot of ways for him to improve on his pills.

He couldn't wait to put all of this knowledge into making pills. However, now was not the time. Right now, he needed to focus on rescuing Pearl.

The Beasts' realm was not such an easy place to infiltrate that he could go in and out without having to worry for his life.

As far as he knew, this could possibly be the final days of his life. Still, Alex didn't let that stop him.

He wouldn't be able to live with himself if he let Pearl go through the ritual knowing that all the previous candidates had died. Either way, he was very close to death.

And for some reason, that did not scare him at all.

'Is that because I'm a clone? Because there is already the realm me living back in home?' he wondered.

Alex took out a pill and ate it. He let the energy of the pill dissipate in his stomach and instead of doing what it needed to do, he made the pill's energy convert into Qi in his body.

Next, it was time to breakthrough.

Using the Heaven grade technique of the Five Yang Divine Path, Alex started moving the Qi in his body in a certain path through his meridian.

The Qi originated from his naval area and would move through his entire body before coming back to his naval area.

He did that two or three more times when he heard an 'oomph' sound coming from deep within him.

He had broken through. While it wasn't as fast as pressing the breakthrough button, it was still very fast as it only took a bit less than a minute to breakthrough.

As far as he had come to learn, breaking through usually taken from a few minutes up to a few hours for most people, and that was in the self-tempering realm.

Alex felt a small increase in his Qi density, meaning his strength had likely increased as well.

He cultivated for half an hour to stabilize his cultivation base for the moment and stopped so he could train something else.

There were 2 things he could do aside from cultivating. The first was using his spiritual energy to form a weapon.

Alex did that for an hour or so. By now, he was extremely proficient in making the weapon itself. However, the weapon still had no physical properties, so it couldn't be held or influenced by Qi.

He suspected that it had something to do with Spiritual energy as well, but he couldn't figure it out at the moment.

'Is the information in the stele really not complete?' he thought.

Alex then stopped and went on to his next training. He wasn't sure if this was training or not, but he liked to call it one.

He closed his eyes and soon found himself floating on top of the Spiritual sea, looking at a bunch of floating threads of silver light around the Mountain.

After a week or so of having this, Alex had come to learn just a bit more about the silver mountain.

Every day, a certain amount of such silver threads would come off of the mountain. If he wanted to accelerate the process, he just had to keep on touching the mountain, but then he would start losing Spiritual energy to it.

Alex spent the next 5 minutes, going around, gathering the floating threads of silver light.

There were hundreds of them, but it didn't look like it affected the mountain in any way at all. It really would take him forever to completely dismantle the mountain into threads.

But then, what would he do with the threads? He hoped he would have an answer by then.

After he finished with that, Alex left his spiritual sea and started cultivating again. He cultivated the Yin technique for the entire night to keep his Yang in check.

He had to do that. After all, tomorrow was the day he infiltrated the beasts' realm.

Chapter 578: Re-Entering the Beasts' Realm

Early in the morning, Alex said bade farewell to the royal family and flew off to the southern forest.

The location, the formation platform was about 4 hours away from where he was, so once he was sufficiently far enough, he took out his boat and sped up.

Along the way, as the journey started getting monotonous, Alex fell into a lull and soon started thinking of what he was going to do inside.

As soon as he entered, he would fly in the direction of the palace. With the guards there, he would have to use his skills situationally to hide from them and get into the underground palace.

After that, it was just a matter of time before he found Pearl. After he found Pearl he would…

"What will I do?" he asked himself. He started doubting himself. 'Will Pearl even come with me? I… am not the person he bonded with, right?'

'I'm just a clone of a real person that's no longer here. Do I have the right to take away Pearl?' he thought.

These thoughts had been playing in his head for a while now, but he had never let it surface. He had been keeping them hidden deep below.

However, now that he was getting close to Pearl, the doubts and feeling of impostor only got louder, and even when he didn't want to hear it, he could hear it clearly.

'No,' Alex told himself. 'I still have the scar. If Pearl wasn't bonded with me, the scar would've never been there.'

"Yes, he's still bonded to me. I will teleport into the forest and make myself to the palace. Hopefully, I can see it if I go above the tree-line," Alex thought.

He still had doubts in the back of his mind, but he stored them away as he needed to focus on this mission.

Any wrong move and he would be caught by the beast, and likely killed by them for trying to steal their future king.

'I can't afford to make any mistakes,' Alex thought.

He reached the location and landed near the platform. He slowly stepped on it and took a deep breath before remembering what Fu Tao had done.

"They will know when I enter. I will have to immediately hide in the forest," he thought and opened his eyes.

He looked at the nodes where he was supposed to put in the energy and counted the strokes per node. Then, he released his energy.

He didn't immediately pour his Qi into the nodes, however, and instead kept it hovering in front of him.

As far as he remembered, he was supposed to put his energy at all nodes at once, so he decided to do it the best way he could.

In just a couple of seconds, a massive amount of Qi was released from his hands and it floated in front of him.

Since it was all Yang Qi, he could freely manipulate them in mid-air. He then separated the gathered energy into multiple, equal amounts and hovered them over the nodes as they would require.

He added more energy where he thought was needed and took away where he thought was too much.

If there was excess energy, he simply threw it away. Finally, once he believed he was ready, he let the energy fall onto the nodes.

The moment the yellow blobs of light touched the node, they immediately started filling the nodes at an incredible speed that shocked Alex himself.

'Isn't this too fast? Is something wrong?' he thought. Blue light shined in between the yellow light that slowly turned brighter and lighter until it turned white.

Once the white light encapsulated him completely, he felt the lurching feeling in the pits of his stomach that told him, he had teleported.

When he reappeared, the bright light lingered in his eyes for a while. While it did, he thought of what he needed to do next.

As the light around him died down, he made the decision that he was going to have to hide in some trees in the forest before making his way to the palace.

He needed to be extra careful so that he wasn't seen by an—

Alex looked around him. He wasn't in a forest at all.

He was now inside a massive cave with white walls made up of marble. The area shined from the light of the glowing crystal-like stalactites hanging from the ceiling.

He stood on top of a white formation platform, and in front of him were two beasts in True realms that were curiously looking at him to understand who had just teleported in.

"Fuck!" Alex thought. He had somehow teleported into the palace.

The two guards noticed something was wrong. Alex noticed them notice it as well.

Without even thinking, he shot out two back-to-back Heaven's Impact on the two beasts. Both of their eyes turned white and they slumped onto the ground.

Alex breathed heavily as he realized that was too close. He, fortunately, had enough reflex in him to attack the Lion and Leopard beasts as soon as he saw them.

Had he waited even a little more, they might have somehow notified the saint beasts.

Alex shook his head. 'Who knows, they might've done it already,' he thought.

Light gathered around him and soon he couldn't be seen at all. After going invisible, he reigned in his aura, and soon it couldn't be felt as well.

"Just how the hell did I come in here? Don't I need a sort of medallion or badge of the beasts to use this line of teleportation?" he thought to himself.

Using the concealment technique, Alex was sure that he could easily go past the other True beasts that would be roaming around in the palace, but what about the Saint realm beasts?

Even with this, their Spiritual senses could easily find him if they even just sent it in his way.

He couldn't worry about that for now. 'I need to go find pearl and leave as soon as I can,' he thought.

Alex ran through the hallway, as silent as he could be towards the room that was previously his room. When he reached it, he pushed it open, only to find nobody in there.

'Of course,' he thought. 'They won't let their future king live in such a place now that the prisoner is gone.'

He needed to start looking some place else, but he wasn't allowed to go to very many places as he had been a prisoner that was simply treated like a guest.

'Where can he be?' he thought. The place was way too big to randomly go around looking for Pearl, and thinking alone wasn't going to cut it.

He needed something more, something else. Whatever he was thinking of doing wasn't going to help him at all.

So, Alex stopped thinking. He suddenly stopped all thoughts and closed his eyes.

If his brain wasn't going to help, he needed to listen to his heart. If he couldn't think it, he needed to feel it.

As his thoughts slowly disappeared, a feeling appeared deep within him. It was a very mild feeling, but it was there. He could feel it, the connection.

The connection between him and Pearl.

He opened his eyes, and— "that way"— knew where to go.

Chapter 579: Family

Pearl felt lonely.

Ever since his only family, Alex, decided to leave him, he had felt lonely. When he had asked why Alex had left him, they told him that this was not his world and that he left for his.

His world was with the humans and they were his family, so he had to go back to his family. Pearl thought he was his family.

Was he not his family then?

The big puma was quite scary, and while the jaguar tried to not act scary, he still was. The jaguar sister made him feel loved, but she couldn't be with him all the time.

He liked the training and the cultivation during the start because Alex was there was to praise him. But now it just felt like a chore.

He no longer got the free time to simply stay around being a normal little cat, like he wished to do so these days.

He missed the days when he could just endlessly sleep in Alex's beast space. He didn't have to fight, cultivate, or learn to speak. He missed that.

He wished the grandmother cat would tell them all to leave him alone and let him do what he wanted to, but she didn't do that. She was rarely ever around these days.

She had told him she was his family. Then why was she not here for him? Did she lie to him?

Was he not her family as well?

Pearl felt lonely. And, in his loneliness, there was only one person he could go to meet.

Somebody who would never stop being his family. His mother.

By now, he had remembered the way to the open area of the cave where his mother stayed in. Or so they said, but she never really talked back.

Were they lying? Where was his mother even?

He had a vague memory of a smile on the face of a big cat that licked him while he was hurting all over the body.

That was, from what his memories told him when he met Alex the first time. He had no recollection of a time before that.

Was that cat his mother? He liked to believe so.

He reached the big stone stuck onto the ground that had something written on it. Writing, the jaguar sister had taught him a little about it.

But he couldn't read this language. This was not the writing he had been taught. Would she teach him this next? He didn't mind if it meant spending some time with her.

He did like her quite a lot.

Pearl crouched in front of the big stone and started meowing. He told his mother about how boring the training this morning was.

There wasn't anyone in the palace that could fight him now, so they had brought in stronger people. But they never fought seriously, and would always win against him.

He already didn't like fighting, and fighting someone that didn't fight seriously was very boring.

Pearl told her mother that he was bored and didn't want to go cultivate after this.

He waited for her to answer, but he could never hear her. The old Grandmother cat could hear his mother speak, then why couldn't he?

She probably spoke, but I just wasn't able to hear it, was what Pearl thought every time he listened to the silence.

He continued speaking with his mother, occasionally stopping for her to reply.

One of these times, she would speak, and he would hear her. He was sure about it.

So, he spoke to her again. He told her he felt lonely. He just wanted someone to be with him, call him by his name.

He just wanted to be with his family.

He waited for his mother to speak, but as always, she never di—

"Pearl!"

Someone suddenly called out his name. Pearl looked up with a surprised look on his face, trying to find his mother who had just called out his name. However, she wasn't there.

He then turned around and looked behind him to see a man standing there.

Did this man just call him? How did he know his name? He didn't think he had met the man before.

After all, when did he meet a man with short hair that was missing an arm? Never.

But, this feeling he was having. This was familiar.

"Pearl!" the man spoke with slight tears in his eyes.

Pearl decided to give in to the feeling and ask. "Meow!"

Alex smiled. "Yes, yes it's me," he said. "I came to save you."

"Meow!" Pearl got happy when he realized it was Alex but then cocked his head. Save me? He asked. Save me from what?

"Meow?" he asked.

"Save you from these beasts. They are trying to hurt you, so I came to take you away," he said.

"Tyek Mi?" Pearl tried to speak in human language, but he just couldn't speak it properly yet.

"Yes, I came to take you," Alex smiled with tears when he heard him speak.

"MEOW!" Pearl meowed harshly. Lies, he said. These beasts had never done anything to hurt him. They always treated him like he was the best. The only one who hurt him was in fact Alex himself, by leaving him.

"Meow!" Pearl told him. You left me, why did you leave me? He asked.

"I didn't leave you. They kicked me out of this place, and I couldn't find my way back," Alex said.

Pearl stopped talking and cocked his head again. "Riallee?" he asked.

"Yes, of course," Alex said. "Did they tell you that I left?"

"Yes," Pearl said, finally pronouncing something correctly.

"They lied. You are my family, I would never leave you," Alex said as he walked ahead and knelt next to Pearl before taking him in his arm in a one-handed hug.

"Meow?" Family? He asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl hugged him too as he let him know that he missed him.

Alex felt tears flowing down his eyes as he finally managed to reach Pearl. "Come, we need to leave now, or they will separate us again," he said.

"Meow," Pearl agreed. He wasn't sure why they were trying to kick out Alex, but whatever the reasoning was, Pearl wouldn't question it.

However… "Meow~" he asked. He wanted to know what would happen to this place after he left. As far as he remembered, this place needed him. Or so they told him.

"We don't need to worry about that for now. We don't have the time to," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl was ready to leave as well.

Alex stood up and turned around to leave, but suddenly, he felt a wave of spiritual sense go past him, most of which seemed to have been destroyed somehow.

In the next moment, a gust of air rose in front of Alex as three figures appeared.

There was the puma, the jaguar, and surprisingly a cheetah beast that Alex hadn't seen before.

However, given that it was giving off the aura of a Saint realm, he didn't dare underestimate him.

"Who are you?" they all got angry at once seeing Pearl in his hands. "Leave him at once!"

A wave of pressure came crashing onto Alex that only tried to crush him while keeping Pearl safe.

Alex however didn't fumble in this pressure. Instead, he simply stared back at them, with anger in his eyes.

Chapter 580: Confronting the Beasts

The Saint realm aura of the 3 beasts pressured over Alex to bring him down to the ground, but he stood still.

Their aura was unable to stop him from moving around as most people would be during such a situation.

The beast's aura was strong, but his body was perhaps stronger, simply based on their quality, so even though he couldn't do anything to fight against the beasts themselves, he could fight against their suppression.

He had been suppressed before about 2 weeks ago. The woman named Hao Ya had suppressed him, and even then he had been able to move around and even attack.

Compared to her who felt so very strong, these 3 beasts, they were just…

"Weak!" Alex said with a mocking smile on his face. These beasts weren't as strong as her.

"Who are you?" the jaguar asked. He had been ready to attack the intruder, but he didn't. With their next king on his hands, he needed to be absolutely sure about his attack before he sent it forth.

Given how the enemy wasn't being suppressed at all even though his cultivation base was only at True realms, they held a suspicion that the enemy was hiding his cultivation base.

Alex continued smiling with his lips, while his eyes showed no such emotion.

"Answer us, Who are you?!" the puma shouted at him.

"Eh? It hasn't even been a month and you've already forgotten me, huh?" Alex asked.

The two beasts turned to look at the puma, wondering if he knew anything about the human.

"Don't look at me. I've never met this human," the puma said while trying to remember if he was forgetting anything.

Less than a month ago… the only human he had seen in this time period was…

Alex's sleeves folded onto his arm, revealing the stub of his left elbow. However, that wasn't what he was showing.

The sleeves folded a little higher, revealing the cat paw on his upper arm. "Pearl, go inside."

"Meow!" Pearl said, immediately changing into a bunch of light, disappearing into his beast space.

"You!" the puma finally recognized.

"Young human, it's you?" the jaguar asked in surprise. He couldn't fathom that the little human that had been thrown out by the puma in a fit of rage was back.

"Yes, it's me," Alex said. "What? You didn't think I'll come back for my brother?"

"No, no, we wanted you to come back, young human. Brother puma sent you out wrongfully," the Jaguar said with a tone full of remorse.

The leopard just listened to the conversation as it seemed the two others knew the human in front of him.

He had been cultivating in his room until a few moments ago. It had been a couple of years for him since he started cultivating, and maybe a few dozen or maybe even a hundred years on the outside.

He normally wouldn't wake up as that wasn't his job, but recently, he heard too many noises of someone entering the realm, so he had gotten up to check.

Now that he looked at what was happening, he realized he had likely missed a lot of crucial things that he would have to ask about later.

"You wanted me to come back?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the jaguar said. "You're like a brother to the child, and have the White Tiger's blood in you. Of course, we wanted you to come back after the puma's impulsive decision."

The leopard looked to his right in shock. A human with their lord's blood? He really had to ask them next.

"Ho? You wanted me to return? Then did you go out looking for me? You should have known that I could not enter on my own right? You could've easily flown to my city to get me," Alex said as rage built up in his eyes.

"If you did, maybe my master would've still been alive. Did you come?" Alex asked.

"I—" the jaguar didn't know what to say. It was true that they thought that the puma was in the wrong after learning of the situation, but none of them cared enough about the human to fix the wronging.

They had basically decided to forget about it.

The puma started getting angry, as the blame was going to fall on him once again. So, decided to speak.

"Y—"

"Cease this at once, young human," a voice came from deep within the palace.

The 3 of the beasts immediately stopped speaking a bowed a little. "Lady Ren," they said.

Alex got a little apprehensive as well. After all, Lady Ren was one of the few beings whose upper limit he didn't know yet. He had thought of her to be at the peak of Saint realm when he had first arrived here, however, since then his world had been widened quite a bit.

By now, he was starting to believe that she might not actually be in the saint realm, but a realm further above it. He didn't voice it however as he didn't have any concrete evidence towards it.

"Are you going to stop me from saving Pearl, lady Ren?" Alex asked.

"Saving? He is in no danger here, young human. We are his friends and family, we would do nothing to hurt him," lady Ren said. She wasn't present at the moment, but her voice still carried the majesty that came with having a high cultivation base.

"Oh, then what about the ritual?" Alex asked.

"The ritual is something necessary to bring forth all the latent talent hidden inside the child's bloodline," Lady Ren said.

"What about the fact that the ritual has killed everyone in it? It has killed all of the candidates up until now?" Alex asked.

"That is unfortunate, but that won't happen with Pearl. He has some of the purest bloodlines of the White Tiger. He will surely survive the ritual," Lady Ren said. "I'm his great-grandmother, don't you think that I am worried too? Trust me, he will survive."

"Are you absolutely sure about that? Or is that just your hopes and expectations?" Alex questioned. "Are you absolutely sure that there is no chance Pearl will suffer any fatal damage in there? That just like the other candidates, he too won't die in there? Can you make me a genuine promise of that?"

Alex asked the questions, but he got nothing but silence in response.

That was the answer he was expecting to hear.

"You call yourself family, but you won't even come out face to face to get your great-grandson back," Alex said.

"I- I am not in a situation where I can come out as I wish to," Lady Ren said.

"I don't need to listen to nonsense anymore. I am leaving now," Alex said.

"No you aren't," the three beasts said at once. While Lady Ren was speaking, they respectfully waited for her to finish speaking.

Now that it looked like she did, and that Alex was about to leave, they finally sprung onto action.

The three beasts were very strong for Alex. A single hit and he would likely die. After all, what was a mere True disciple realm cultivator against Saint beasts?

Just because he could stand against their cultivation aura, didn't mean that he was immediately strong.

So, even as the beasts started to move, Alex started moving before them. He was sure that once he announced to leave, they would come attacking him, so he prepared for it.

Multiple Heaven's impacts flew off from his head towards the saint beasts. Each one of them was hit at least 3 times before Alex stopped.

The three beasts felt a headache coming as soon as they were hit with the mental energy that seemed to give them the sensation that they were burning on the inside.

The disorientation lasted for a couple of seconds, but that was all Alex needed. When they refocused their eyes, they could see the end phase of the ground closing under where Alex previously stood.

'What the hell just happened? What was that burning mental attack?' they all wondered.

They looked around trying to figure out where he had gone to, so they sent out their spiritual sense.

Before they could even locate Alex, a voice floated into their head.

"Go! Quickly!" it was an urgent-sounding voice belonging to Lady Ren.

"What's wrong, lady Ren?" the Jaguar asked. He had never heard a more worried voice of her.

"That human, he's found the treasury," she said. Immediately everyone realized what had happened as worry started forming in their hearts as well.

They weren't worried that the human found the treasury and would somehow steal the treasures inside.

No, they were worried that the human had found the treasury and would now die trying to steal the treasure inside.

They weren't worried for Alex, but rather Pearl that was inside his beast space. If Alex were to die, as a bonded beast, Pearl would die with him as well if he was inside him.

They needed to save him fast.

* * * * *

Alex had used the Earth Devouring technique to escape the place. The technique sent you very far away, depending on the density of the user's Qi.

With Alex's Qi being so dense now, he should have been sent at least a dozen kilometers away, but somehow he was still inside the palace.

Not only that, he was in a dead-end section of the palace with a door blocking his way.

Alex saw a bunch of formations on the door and realized that it was likely a seal.

'What is this place?' he wondered.

Chapter 581: The Sword

Alex felt a wave of spiritual sense coming from the other side of the corridor that ended at the room with the door, which was the dead end.

'Dammit! How did I stop such little way?' he wondered. 'Is there a seal in this place that won't let me leave using my techniques?'

If that were to be the case, he needed to think of something quick. Concealing himself wasn't going to help him against the spiritual senses, so he needed to do something else.

He sent out his own spiritual sense around him while thinking of what he could do.

Just then, he realized that his spiritual sense wasn't working beyond the door behind him.

'I can hide there,' he thought. He needed to find a way to get inside. From what he remembered of seals from all of these memories, he needed some sort of key to open it.

The key was usually physical, but would sometimes be Qi-related as well. After all, a seal was simply an incomplete locking formation that would be complete after placing the key in.

Alex looked at the seal and realized that it had no place for something physical to attach to. Meaning, the answer to the seal was in the seal itself.

Basically, instead of the door having a padlock with a physical key, it was a lock that would open by a combination on the lock itself.

Alex wasn't that good at formations that he could fix it. He needed other ways.

He thought of teleporting to the other side of the seal, but the seal somehow stopped that too.

"Dammit!" he thought. The beasts were probably going to be close any second now.

Alex started panicking and then started punching, kicking, and using attacks on the door.

None of them did anything to the seal at all, but when he used the Palm attack on in, something happened.

The formations on the seals started moving on their own and reached a correct position. Then, the door opened.

Alex was elated. He quickly ran inside and locked the door, before the seal remade itself.

Alex breathed heavily as that was close. He was confused as to how the seal opened by itself as he didn't really do anything.

The confusion only grew on him as he realized this was the second time such a thing had happened now.

First, he somehow entered the palace using the teleportation formation even though that couldn't have been possible without permission.

And this time, he had opened the seal, even though he did nothing.

'What's the connection between these two things?' Alex thought. Since he had never experienced something like this happening before coming to this place, he wondered if it was something exclusive to this place.

'Is it the White Tiger's blood essence within me?' Alex wondered. That felt like astute guesswork on his part.

"Yeah, that's likely it," Alex thought.

BANG! BANG!

He suddenly heard the sounds of something banging coming through the other side of the door. Either, the beasts had just arrived outside or they had already arrived and were now trying to open it.

Reflexively, he sent out his spiritual sense to see what was happening on the outside. Surprisingly, he could see beyond the seal and it wouldn't stop him like it did the other way around.

He saw the beasts hastily trying to solve the puzzle that was the seal and get in.

Alex felt scared. He had trapped himself in this room with the only way out surrounded by the beasts.

"Is there an—" suddenly he realized that his spiritual sense was looking at things that he hadn't noticed before.

He turned around, facing the room.

The room was mostly empty, with all but 2 things inside it. Alex looked at the first thing in there.

A slender long blade of ebony color with a big hilt laid in the middle of a room. The blade had an imprint on it that depicted a dragon wrapping a sword.

'The Saint rank sword,' Alex thought. This was the Ebony Corundum Stilleto. A sword that held the crest of the Azure Imperium, the sword that killed Pearl's mother.

This was the Saint rank sword that the beasts took away from him by telling that it was too dangerous to be in his possession. And Alex still trusted that they were right, however, he didn't care enough to leave it here with them.

He would take the sword and find the person who owned it before helping Pearl get back his revenge. He would kill that man.

That was what he had thought when he saw the sword. As the dark thoughts moved around in his head, something else sensed the darkness.

Something else took notice of Alex.

"You want to kill someone?" It asked, startling Alex as he had believed himself to be the only person in the room.

"Who's there?" he asked, spreading his spiritual sense to the fullest, yet he still failed to notice anyone.

"If it's killing you want, I can help you," the voice spoke again. This time, Alex saw where the voice had come from.

However, that shouldn't have been possible.

Alex walked forwards and reached the Ebony sword… and went past it.

Behind the sword was another sword. It was stuck on a large piece of stone that was completely black.

From what it looked like, someone had dug around the sword and brought it here.

As Alex got near, he heard the voice more clearly.

"Good, good, come to me," it said. Alex was surprised. That sword was definitely talking to him. Was it directly talking into his mind? That's what it felt like, but he could hear it on the outside as well.

Alex saw the door being nearly opened by the saint beasts. They were very close to solving the puzzle that was the seal.

"Take me, and I can help you defeat them all. I can help you become the strongest."

As he got closer, Alex finally saw the sword. It was a thin sword with a black-colored blade that only had a single edge, instead of the normal two edges that were found everywhere.

The crossguard and the hilt of the sword were completely black as well. There was even a black miasma falling onto the ground.

Something about the sword was very attractive to him. He felt there was some truth in the sword. All he had to do was take the sword and he would become strong.

The temptation was getting to him. Alex slowly reached out his hand towards the sword.

Suddenly, the door opened and the beasts entered the room.

"TAKE ME!" the sword cried out.

"Boy, do—"

Before the beasts could even speak, Alex grabbed the sword and in one quick motion, pulled it out of the stone.

He turned towards the beasts, with the sword in front of him and that was when he noticed it.

The sword no longer looked black at all. It was a silver-colored blade with some signs of damage to the side.

He then noticed the crossguard losing color as well. The black crossguard changed to a bronze-like color.

Soon, the hilt lost the black color as well, revealing the clear white color of the hilt.

All of the blacks that had left the sword was now crawling up Alex's arm.

"Drop it now, human, or you will die!" the beasts shouted. Alex's pupils dilated in fear and tried to let go of the sword. However, he couldn't move his hand at all.

He couldn't even feel it.

As the black miasma moved up Alex's hand, it left behind blackened veins in its wake. Alex could feel himself losing more and more of the control.

He really had screwed up badly.

Alex tried to use his legs to try and get his hand to drop the sword, and he succeeded.

After a couple of hits with his legs, his grip loosened enough for the sword to slip out. However, that made no difference.

The black miasma was already on him now. Soon it reached his neck and started spreading across his whole body.

Alex could only stand there and watch in horror as darkness enveloped him completely.

The beasts watched in horror as well.

Alex then reached downwards to the ground and picked up the sword he had just dropped and looked towards the beasts.

His eyes were now fully blackened, with black veins all over his body, and there was a maniacal smile on his face.

"Hehehe! Go tell them," A voice merged with Alex's voice came out of his mouth.

"GodSlayer has returned."

Chapter 582: Black Slash

Black smoke curled around Alex as it floated down to the ground. His black eyes and skin made him look like he wasn't a human anymore.

Alex's face smiled from ear to ear with an eerie grin, but that wasn't Alex anymore.

It was something else. It called itself 'Godslayer'. The beasts didn't know what that was, only that it was something that had originally been trapped into the metal sword and had been specially kept in this place.

Standing in front of that thing, the beasts felt true fear for their lives for a long time. They were truly scared

The aura the person in front of them was giving off wasn't human anymore either. Alex's aura was nowhere to be felt, only the inhuman aura could be.

And that rang all the bells in the Beasts' head.

Immediately, they turned around and ran away. They knew there was no way they could fight it at all, so instead, they chose to run away.

Not only that, fighting in such a location was not a very good idea either. Not just for themselves, but for Lady Ren's sake as well.

"Hey! Hey! Where do you think you all are going?" It, the Godslayer, asked as it watched the beasts run away.

In the next moment, it launched forward with the sword in hand. It moved at such an incredible speed that it put the saint beasts to shame.

In a split second, it arrived behind the beasts and struck at the puma directly on its back.

The puma went crashing onto the side of the ground along the corridor. He had a giant cut along the side of his back, but he couldn't care about it for now.

"This kid wanted to kill you, so you are going to die now," It spoke.

The Jaguar sent out an attack towards It, which It easily blocked. At the same time, the Leopard helped the puma escape the place.

It stayed where it was, instead of following the beasts, to check upon its new body.

"Tsk, this kid is only at True realms. I will need to find a suitable body soon," It thought.

It was starting to enter Alex's spiritual sea as well as a glob of black goo.

As soon as it entered, the black goo started spreading black mists, slowly corrupting the spiritual sea as well.

It could see Alex, half-conscious, standing on top of the sea with a black look on his face.

"I'm surprised this kid even managed to get a spiritual sea in such a backwater place. Not bad kid, unfortunately, you will die soon," It said.

It was pushing Alex's body beyond his natural limit to bring out so much damage. Soon, it would wreck Alex's body from the inside and force him to die without a doubt.

At that moment, It would have to find a new body.

It was about to go kill the puma again when it noticed something to its right. It turned around and saw the massive mountain floating atop Alex's spiritual sea.

"Hey, hey! What the hell is this?" It got curious and looked at the gigantic mountain.

When it noticed the silver color of the mountain, it suddenly got apprehensive.

"What the hell? No way, this can't be true right?" It thought. It knew of such silver rocks that people could use, but it had never heard of one the size of the mountain.

The largest it had heard of was perhaps the size of a boulder and that alone was quite impressive because of what the silver rock did.

"This kid has such a great potential to make it as someone big. Unfortunately, like most talented youths, he too will die before maturing," the black glob said.

The glob spoke of it as something remorseful, but it wasn't remorseful at all. Instead, it started giggling to itself.

"Hehehe, killing such a talented youth, I can't wait to drain him of his life," It thought. "Hahaha! This kid shall be my stepping stone as I make my return and slay all the gods."

"The first one in my renewed path of killing shall be the beasts!"

Even while the black glob remained in the spiritual sea, it could use Alex's body outside.

It moved through the hallway, looking for the beasts. The black goo couldn't use spiritual sense, so it had to go around looking for the beasts on its own.

It, however, could feel the aura left behind by the beasts and followed it.

Soon, it came outside and in another step appeared behind the beasts that were fleeing from the scene. They were already above the trees, taking the thing away from the palace with them.

"You shall die now," It said as it slashed its blade.

A black slash came out of the sword that held the power to destroyed anything along the way.

The beasts dodged at the last second, and the slash flew in between them before hitting a tree.

The moment the black slash hit the tree, the tree seemed to lose all moisture at once as it crumbled to dust.

The 3 beasts felt scared. Just what the hell was sealed in that sword?

"Hehehe!" It continued grinning as if it was seeing the funniest thing in the world.

It raised the sword towards the sky, getting ready to attack once more. It raised Alex's left arm, as well as a black hand made up of nothing but goo and smoke, appeared from it, holding onto the sword.

"Hehehe. DIE!" Its black eyes opened wide with glee on its face as it used a very strong attack towards the puma.

This attack was similar to the black slash from before, but this time it was incredibly large and incredibly fast.

The puma knew that if the attack hit him, he would die. And yet, there was not a single thing in the world he could do to protect himself.

Suddenly, a brilliant white light exploded in front of the puma that swallowed the black slash. When the light disappeared, the black slash was nowhere to be seen either.

The puma looked in front of him, with its stupidly scared face, and saw someone standing in front of him.

"Lady Ren!" the three of them said at the same time.

The white cat had finally decided to show herself. "Are you 3 alright?" she asked.

"Yes, lady Ren," they said, finally a little relieved to see her come out. However, when they realized what would happen, they got scared.

"Lady Ren, you…" the Jaguar asked.

"Now's not the time to dwell on it. You guys need me and that child needs me," she said. The beasts said nothing further.

Lady Ren turned towards the thing that was now Alex. "Get out of that child now," she said in a low voice. Her face turned to that of an angry cat with her canines showing towards It.

"Ooh, I'm so scared. How will fight against such a strong cat?" It started mocking Lady Ren.

Lady Ren didn't let the mocking register to herself and instead started thinking of how she could save Alex. If she didn't save Alex, she could forget about saving her great-grandchild.

There was also the fact that Alex could absorb the bloodline of the White Tiger without dying. There was definitely something unique to him, and she didn't want someone so unique to die because of this.

"Let go of him or I will kill you," she said.

"Hah! Kill me? Even the old bastard up there couldn't kill me. What can a little cat-like you from a backwater place do to me?" It asked, perfectly certain that it could win.

"Very well, I will have to incapacitate you then," Lady Ren said. Suddenly, her body glowed white and it started condensing down to her limbs and finally her claws.

The one that called itself 'Godslayer' on the other hand simple put the sword at an angle as it got ready to fight as well.

The sword glowed black and it initiated the attack. It slashed at Lady Ren, who dodged it easily and attacked it with her claw.

The Godslayer took the hit but remained standing with an eerie smile on its face. This was not its body, the damage wouldn't stop it.

Lady Ren got a little apprehensive as well. She realized that fighting it normally wasn't the way at all. She needed to stall for time so that she could think of a way to remove this thing from Alex's body.

However, she couldn't take very long either as Alex's body would be overexerted very soon, killing him.

This task felt impossible for her.

* * * * *

Alex jolted awake as the pain in his body flared. He could feel the attack he received on the outside.

He wasn't sure where he was or what he was doing. He only knew that time had passed.

He remembered grabbing the sword, and… something crawling up the sword. What happened after that? He couldn't remember.

He then looked around and realized that he was in the spiritual sea. Just like he always was when the other Alex was with him.

'Has he returned?' Alex got a depressing feeling when he thought that. He looked up to see if he was there, but no, there was something else.

'That blackness,' he thought as he looked at the black goop that was sending out billows of black smoke all over his spiritual sea.

Alex felt anger like never before. "I finally got my body back, and you think you can take it from me?" he shouted at the goop which hadn't noticed him yet.

"My body is not something you can take as you wish. You will suffer my wrath for it."

Chapter 583: Taking Back his Body

Determination flared in Alex's eyes. He had had enough of others using his body, leaving him to be destitute.

The black fog that was taking over his spiritual sea only served to get him angrier.

Now that he had got somewhat of his mind back, Alex decided to take back his body from whatever that black goop was.

So, he jumped off of the surface of the spiritual sea and flew up to the sky.

* * * * *

Lady Ren blocked the black slash. While Godslayer's black slashes could easily destroy most things, the white glow her paws shined in was somehow able to stop them.

This got Godslayer really confused. It wasn't that he had never met anyone that could block this attack. In fact, it was the opposite.

Every single one it had fought could at some level block the black slashes. That was even true when It had its actual body to fight in.

So, being blocked wasn't anything new. Rather, the thing that was surprising and confusing was the fact that there was someone out here in the middle of nowhere that could stop it.

"You have gained my respect little missy. I don't know what you are using with that white glow, but the fact that you can block my attacks means that you are quite strong."

"How about you let me take over your body? I can bring you to places you have never been to before. I can show you the strength you can't even begin to imagine," the Godslayer said.

"Hmph!" Lady Ren sneered towards it. "I am the wife of a White Tiger. What can you do that my husband already couldn't?"

Godslayer stopped. "White Tiger?" he looked suspiciously.

It looked around and finally noticed that they were all feline beasts. It spent some precious moments thinking about what he had just learned before coming to a conclusion.

"So this is one of the lands the four beasts sent their folks to, huh?" it asked. "I had heard about them doing these things.

White Tiger. They were fearsome creatures that everyone learned to keep away from because of how strong they were.

They were one of the 4 beasts that were blessed by the first of the 2 gods.

Blessed by the God, they were like gods themselves.

Godslayer smirked. It was born to kill them.

"I will really enjoy killing you all now."

* * * * *

Alex flew right beneath the black fog. He could feel a deep sense of fear, but his anger and determination overpowered it.

He stretched his hands into the fog, both of them. Being in his spiritual world, he had both of his arms with him at the moment.

Just because he lost his arms outside didn't mean that he now saw himself as an armless man.

He felt a sharp mental pain when he touched the black fog like it was trying to consume him. However, he wasn't going to let that happen.

"AAAHHH!!" he shouted as brilliant yellow light exploded all around him. Vast amounts of yellow fog appeared around him bringing splendid illumination to the darkened environment.

The yellow fog started getting denser around Alex as it fought the black fog directly.

Soon, Alex was so covered in the yellow fog that he too started looking like he was made up of fog itself.

No, he was the fog itself. Alex lost his physical form and fully transformed into the yellow fog to fight the black fog.

As soon as the black fog came into contact with the yellow fog, it immediately was destroyed.

Alex got more confident. It would only take him a few minutes to clear it all.

The black goop noticed it and was not very happy about it. However, it could not go defend itself at the moment, as there was another fight it was fighting on the outside.

* * * *

Godslayer frowned. For the first time since it had escaped from the sword, it lost its smile.

'How the hell is this kid destroying me? What is that yellow fog? And how is it so strong?' it thought. It was definitely going to lose to Alex if it did not do something quickly.

A layer of black miasma floated in front of it, creating a sort of barrier in front of Alex.

A paw strike landed on the black barrier, destroying it. However, Godslayer that was behind it was perfectly fine.

Lady Ren frowned. The attacks she was sending out were enough to turn the area around them into dust. However, the thing that had taken over Alex was easily stopping the attacks.

It went on to show just how powerful the black entity was, but also, it went onto show just how strong Alex was.

The Godslayer couldn't become this strong if it wasn't drawing the potential from within Alex to fuel its power.

If not for that, the Godslayer would never be strong enough to fight her in her current condition.

She thought of going the extra step to deal with it once and for all, but every time she thought so, a deep fear sprung up in her heart, stopping her.

Godslayer started going on the offensive. It sent out multiple slashes at once towards Lady Ren. It was drawing incredible power from deep within Alex, leaving him a little weak at the moment.

All of the 4 beasts on the outside could see how thin Alex's body had already gotten.

Any more and Alex likely wouldn't be able to survive even if the thing left his body.

Godslayer was incredibly angry at the moment. Alex had already destroyed half of the black fog it had been using to slowly take over his mind.

By now, half of the blackness in his eyes was gone, revealing the white part of the eyes.

It didn't know how the boy's spiritual sea was so strong, but it needed to send out some sort of retaliation right now.

For that, it needed to get rid of the beast in front of him first. 'This will put me in a severe situation, but… I have no choice,' it thought before raising the sword towards the sky.

A vortex appeared on the sword as all the air in the surroundings moved towards it. All of the beasts could see wisps of blacklight moving into the sword as well.

Lady Ren's eyes went wide as she saw the aura piling up. This was bad. The attack was starting to go beyond the realm of what was possible in this world.

This was incredibly bad.

Godslayer cared none for what he was doing and simply slashed down towards the white cat. At the same time, it focused on its find in the spiritual sea.

The 3 saint beasts got terrified. This was an attack beyond their level as well.

Lady Ren saw the massive black slash that destroyed air itself as it flew towards her. If she let that attack hit her, she would surely die.

If she dodged it, it would surely destroy half of their realm, and kill almost everything it touched.

Neither of the choices was something she was willing to make. So, she decided to block the sword slash.

A fantastic aura exploded from deep within her. As the aura released, her cultivation base reached sky high and even seemed to go beyond that.

She released her Immortal Realm cultivation base.

The 3 saint beasts couldn't help but bow before her in reverence.

Lady Ren used her newly brought forth power and roared into the black slash.

A powerful sound erupted that could be heard from all over the secret realm, and even a little further beyond. Her sound turned into an attack that traveled to the black slash completely destroying it.

The task had been as easy as beating a True realm cultivator as a Saint realm cultivator.

However, the thing that frightened her the most had yet to come.

She looked up to the sky with terror in her eyes as dark clouds quickly filled the sky.

It was coming.

Heavenly Judgement.

* * * * *

The more black fog Alex destroyed, the easier it got to destroy the rest of the fog. By the time Godslayer had turned his focus back onto the spiritual sea, his influence on the mind was nearly gone.

"You damn, human," it shouted.

Alex turned towards it. The yellow fogs condensed to become Alex once again.

"You are ruining everything," Godslayer shouted and jumped towards Alex. As soon as it reached Alex, it covered his whole mental avatar and tried to destroy it.

However, Alex didn't worry about it. He had already realized how strong his mental strength was.

With a simple thought, yellow fog exploded from him, destroying the black goop he was touching.

The black goop started to get destroyed under the yellow fog and soon it dwindled to almost nothingness.

When all the fog and goop disappeared, all that was remained was a crystal ball the size of his fists. He tried to use the yellow fog to destroy it as well, but he realized he couldn't.

The crystal was something he couldn't destroy at all. He could feel the thing still alive inside of it, however, he didn't need to worry as it no longer held any strength at all.

Alex finally sighed in relief as he got his body back. He then left his spiritual sea and immediately felt the pain all over his body.

The thing had wrecked his body more than he had thought. He could barely even feel his Qi.

At the same time, something else took his attention. He looked in front of him to see the beasts looking at the sky.

Alex looked up as well and his jaw dropped.

A massive vortex of energy was gathering in the sky. One that was stronger than anything he had ever seen.

Chapter 584: Clone?

Ren Xiao looked up to the sky with a grim look on her face. 'I screwed up,' she thought.

She had been fighting with suppressed strength against the thing that took over Alex exactly because she was afraid this would happen.

She looked up at the sky, her aura barely something that could be sensed. She figured she may have a bit of time to prepare herself.

However, how was she to prepare herself? Revealing the tiniest bit of her true aura would cause the judgement to come down sooner, and surely destroy her.

He looked at the swirling clouds of different color that seemed to gather together to get darker and darker.

'If I had known this would happen, I would've just used my real cultivation base to deal with the thing,' she thought.

She regretted that she didn't get rid of the thing and now, her descendant would have to die, alongside the—

She stopped. She saw Alex, floating in the air in front of her. He was completely shrunken in body mass as if he hadn't eaten anything in months.

The thin bones gave his body a skeletal outline, making him look ghostly. His eyes were shrunken, his body a shade of red that looked closer to purple.

She could only begin to imagine what sort of pain he must've been suffering. Not that different from what she would feel if she was fortunate enough to survive the next few minutes.

She then carefully looked at his body, his sword, his eyes. Not a single shred of blackness from before was there anymore.

'How is that possible? I didn't do anything to it,' she thought.

"Are you… yourself?" she asked softly.

"Yes, I am me," Alex said as he too had looked down from the sky. He looked at the sword in his hand. Now that the black surface was gone, it looked like a pretty decent sword.

Actually, this was very much likely a great sword, given what it had been housing.

Lady Ren gasped when she heard Alex's voice. It was no longer merged with the other voice, making it sound normal.

"Where is it?" she asked, which Alex easily understood to be referring to the black goop in his spiritual sea.

"I destroyed most of it," he said. "It still remains, but it no longer has the power to fight against me."

'Dear god of the beasts! How in the world did this child defeat it?' she wondered. She herself hadn't been able to think of any way to defeat it as she didn't know what it was.

She had found it over a thousand years ago, stuck to the earth. It had come down in a meteor shower, or so her people told her when she went to check what had caused a crater to the east of them.

When she reached the sword, she realized that she was being tempted by the sword. When she touched the sword, the black thing in it had attacked her, and was siphoning off her life to fuel itself.

Ren Xiao had panicked, but the sword had been weak at the time and her mental strength was not its match. She had gotten rid of it before it could fully take over her, and she had realized how dangerous of a sword it was.

So, she had taken it away, along with the land it was stuck on, not daring to touch the sword itself again.

She had locked it away in the empty treasury room, for almost a millenia now. When Alex went to it, she was sure the sword would tempt him, and as she had expected, it did.

She regretted not leaving her room at the time to stop him. She believed shedding off her natural aura to be a more important task for her so as to not incur the heaven's wrath by being outside.

Alex had been taken over, and got most of his life siphoned off of him by the thing, but somehow, he made it back.

'What does that mean?' she wondered. Did it mean he had an impressive mental strength to fight off the temptation? But then where was the thing?

Alex had said he was destroyed most of it. Not got rid of. Destroyed.

He had? But how? It was certainly not his cultivation base. Then perhaps… his body?

Ren Xaio narrowed her eyes. Alex's body surely held a lot of mysteries that she couldn't even begin to understand. Not only was he strong and seemed to have almost infinite potential, he could also absorb the blood essence of a White Tiger.

Just what was his body?

She looked at him with her narrowed eyes when she suddenly noticed something that she hadn't in shock of the black thing disappearing.

Something was different.

"You are whole?" she asked, almost surprised.

Alex looked at himself. He didn't understand what she meant. He was clearly still missing his left arm. Not to mention the horrible situation of his where everything was numb and painful at the same time.

How exactly could this even be considered whole?

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Your body… it used to always be a sliver away from fusing with your soul completely, but now, it seems you have done something to completely fuse it," she said.

Alex understood what she meant. She was referring to the time when she saw through the other soul being in his body.

This wom— beast had impressive senses.

"Yes," Alex said. "That was my original soul controlling this clone body. I have now gotten my body back."

Lady Ren squinted her eyes at him and looked through him again.

"Why are you lying?" she asked.

"What do you mean?" Alex said. Was his story not believable? Well, not like he could help it. After all, that was the truth.

"You are no clone," Lady Ren said.

"No… I am one," Alex said. "My real body is in the Central continent right now. He used to send his soul into my body to control it, while I remained suppressed in my own mind."

Lady Ren frowned this time. "That's not true. I may believe that there was another soul in your body. That explains why your body and soul weren't united. However, not for a single second do I believe this body is a clone."

"Creating clones is difficult enough. Creating one that can take in the blood essence of the White Tiger and live? Impossible."

"Not even the Divinities and the Celestials can do such a thing, let alone someone from this land with its limited resources. You can refine this entire world, and not be able to create a body such as yours," Lady Ren said.

Alex's eyes went wide. Many thoughts roamed in his head at once, making it hard for him to understand what he was thinking.

"Are you saying that…" he couldn't continue his thoughts. That couldn't possibly be true.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "Your body is not a clone. Its a real body, one you were born with."

Alex was stunned beyond belief. He lost all sense of the pain and numbness for a brief moment.

"Is it really true?" he thought. "Am I… not the clone?"

Chapter 585: Heavenly Judgemeent

There were two ways one could make clones.

The first method was where you refined a dead body to become your clone using a piece of your soul.

One's soul couldn't become united with the dead body completely, since that wasn't your body, Alex knew he wasn't that.

Which was why he believed himself to be the second type of clone. One that was made using various resources, that had a soul grown in it, even without using the owner's soul.

This made controlling the new clone very hard, but not impossible.

However, Lady Ren was saying that it was impossible for him to be the second type of clone as well because of the resources that would require to make his body.

Then… was it really true? Was he really… not a clone?

If Lady Ren had exaggerated the requirement for a body such as his by hundreds of thousands of times, it would still fall short of the number of players that would have to be cloned in this world.

And most of them had great talent, constitutions, and spiritual roots.

"Then… am I not a clone?" Alex thought. If he wasn't a clone and was in fact the real Alex, that would mean that everything he got from the start was not luck, but rather something he was born with.

The body, the talent, the spirit roots, everything he thought he was handed without having to work for it, was something he was born with.

Had he really had such an amazing body even when he was on the farm?

He remembered his father's incredible physical body that could easily work on the farm even at his age. He remembered his mother's incredible intelligence and talent at everything she did from being an accountant for his father to cooking every food to perfection to teaching him everything when he was homeschooled.

His aunt, his father's sister, also had a body that remained youthful even when she was as old as his father.

Not to mention his cousin, who had a Celestial grade body to begin with, the only one to ever have it in the game.

'That wasn't all a coincidence, was it?' Alex started to realize and finally believe it. 'This is my real body.'

He looked down on himself with awe at the fact that he had been wrong for the past many months.

He wasn't the clone at all. The other guy was the clone.

'Since he is a clone, his body mustn't be very good, wo—'

Alex suddenly thought of something. His eyes went wide as the piece fell into place from a simple change of thought.

When a player died in the 'game', they would be able to log in once more, but this time they would get a different body from the one that died.

The players called it 'reincarnating' as it was a second chance at life. The players that reincarnated would always be stuck with something very much worse than the last one they had.

But what if that was not it? What if it was simply the real body dying, so the creator was forced to create a clone of them.

However, since he didn't have great resources, all of the reincarnated players would get a really bad body with garbage talents and constitution, sometimes even missing spiritual roots.

If the creator really did make the body Alex currently had, then there was no reason why he would not make a good body for the reincarnators.

Realization enlightened him like dawn's first light after a particularly dark night.

"It's true then," Alex finally came to the understanding, as a swell of emotions stirred within him, causing his drought eyes to moisten up a bit.

"I am not a clone, but the real Alex."

Suddenly, Alex heard a thunderclap. Was it just something he heard because of what he had come to understand? The truth certainly hit him like a thunderbolt.

However, this thunderclap felt a little more… real. Actually, it felt more than just real— it felt terrifying.

Alex slowly looked up, and as expected there really was a thunderstorm here, one that he had momentarily forgotten about.

However, he shouldn't have forgotten about this. This was perhaps one of the most terrifying things he had seen in all the time he had been a cultivator.

In fact, the knowledge he had just gained seemed so minuscule in front of the massive vortex of black cloud with the occasional lightning sparking within it.

The colorful clouds had come together and were just about to do something that scared Alex.

Lady Ren started to wonder at her chance of survival. She wondered how many bolts would fall down from heaven.

One she could survive. Two she could probably survive as well. Three would surely put her on the verge of death, so she couldn't tell whether she would die or not.

Four, she would surely die.

She prayed that it was no more than 2, or at the very least, no more than 3.

"Go take everyone away from here," she ordered the beasts. While she knew that it would only target her, she couldn't take the chances of the force destroying everything around her.

The beasts immediately ran away to save the common beasts around this place.

"It will come down at any moment now," Lady Ren said softly. She started preparing.

"Boy, please do not take Pearl away. This place needs a king, and there is no better choice than Pearl," Lady Ren said.

"And let him die?" Alex asked. "No, I won't do that."

"I understand that there is a chance of him dying. But the chances are low. Besides, if he doesn't go through the ritual, he will never have a chance to reach his full potential," Lady Ren said.

"No, thanks. I would rather have a weak Pearl with me, than a possibly dead one," Alex said.

Lady Ren was feeling irritated. She wanted to simply grab Alex and keep him there.

However, the thing above her head was stopping her from getting close to him.

It wasn't just that she was afraid the bolts would harm him if it came down while she was close, but it was also the fact that it would see him as an accomplice and become stronger when it came down.

At that time, she doubted she would survive even 2 of the bolts.

"Please, don't take Pea—"

Suddenly, a bolt of white lightning dropped from the sky, directly hitting Ren Xiao. The bolt itself was wider than that white cat was, and had a really destructive property to it.

No matter how much preparation she did, it still overwhelmed her.

Alex, who had been moderately far away, still felt the force of the lightning bolt. The immediate force stripped away some of his skin, while the remaining force sent him flying away at a speed that he could never move at with his current cultivation base.

It took him a while to even realize that he was in the air.

As he felt himself tumbling through the sky, he immediately employed his movement technique, making the friction around him more powerful, and quickly came to a stop.

When he finally stopped, he felt the blood drip from all over his body where his skin had been lacerated.

Alex immediately brought out a pill and ate it. He felt the wounds close up and he was no longer battered from the lightning bolt. However, the 'wounds' he had suffered from the black thing weren't healed at all.

His body still remained a stick-like figure with his skeletal figure seen through his body.

He breathed heavily ignoring the pain, as fear appeared in his heart. He had never felt fear like this before.

'What the hell was that?' he thought. He had expected the lightning to be strong, but not this strong.

It had nearly killed him even when he was a distance away. He didn't even begin to wonder if Lady Ren was alive or not. With such a force attacking her directly, she should have died.

"I should leave," he thought.

Suddenly, he saw another lightning bolt drop down far away in the distance, sending roaring sounds throughout the entire secret realm while at the same time sending out a gust of wind that pushed Alex quite a bit.

Alex finally realized just how far he had been thrown away. He was hundreds of kilometers away from the location of the original lightning bolt.

Even at this distance, he could tell how much force the lightning bolt had produced.

Not a single Saint realm expert had ever made him feel such helplessness against pure power. Even Lady Ren herself failed to make him fear as much.

'I can't stay here any longer,' he thought and immediately turned around to run away.

As he flew he realized that he wasn't able to fly very quickly. It wasn't just his body, but rather his cultivation base itself that had been harmed by that black thing.

He would have to cultivate for a while to heal himself.

As he flew, he heard another lightning bolt. For some reason, it felt… weaker. Maybe it was because he was very far away now, or maybe because there was no target anymore since Lady Ren was likely dead.

Alex continued flying. Very soon, he saw something white shine through the forest, while beyond it was a shimmering white wall of nothingness.

He had arrived at the border of the secret realm.

He landed on the formation platform and immediately got to open it. He was afraid the saint beasts would come for him, but with how destructive the lightning bolt was, they probably wouldn't.

He fought through the pain in and out of his body to produce the Yang Qi and concentrated through his fatigue to pour it onto the nodes of the formation.

Once it was done, the formation glowed with white light, and with that, Alex vanished from the secret realm.

Chapter 586: Damaged

When Alex reappeared outside of the formation, he stumbled a little thanks to the many aching parts all over his body.

'I need to get away from here,' he thought. He needed to leave this area before the saint beasts came looking for him.

He looked around, in the direction that was supposed to lead him back to the Cardinal City, however, that was when he realized the location was different.

"What?" he looked confused for a moment before realizing what had likely happened.

He didn't know what to think after coming to the conclusion that…

"I have come to the Luminance Empire, haven't I?" he thought. He wasn't sure where he was when he had found himself in the middle of the forest with Lady Ren in front of him.

The things that the black goop witnessed weren't in his memories, like how the real Alex's soul had left behind.

'No,' he thought. 'I am the Real Alex.'

He didn't know how to feel regarding that knowledge. Should he be happy that he was the real one? Or should he be angry that the real him had been suppressed for so many months?

He felt both emotions and he quickly tossed those emotions aside. Now was not the time to get emotional.

He slowly stood up, the momentary rest making his pain flare higher than he had been feeling until now.

His muscles, if there were even any, felt sore and hard to walk with. His meridians refused to move his Qi.

Only his spiritual sense was fine.

He stepped away from the platform, not knowing where to go to. This deep into the forest, he was sure there would be many beasts here.

Most of them would likely be in the True Realm. Although, he was sure he would have a hard time fighting a Mind Tempering realm beasts too.

He took out a sword. The sword that had been lodged in the stone. Without the black goop, it looked like a normal sword, albeit it was likely anything less than normal.

He slightly regretted not taking the other sword when he had the chance, but mistakes happened.

Alex then slowly breathed in and out, trying to muster as much of his cultivation base as possible to conceal his aura and go invisible.

Once he was sure he couldn't be seen by anything around him unless they had Spiritual sense, he started walking.

He dragged his body through the forest, not sure where he was supposed to go to, hoping that he could find a city up ahead soon.

* * * * * *

Alex walked for 3 days, but he still couldn't leave the forest. 'Am I walking in the wrong direction?' he thought.

He remembered learning about the disorientation formations set up around the secret realm to stop outsiders from getting close to the source of the secret realm. However, that was only when he tried to get closer to it, not further away.

Then, there could only be one of 2 reasons, if not both. The forest was big… and he was slow.

Alex didn't know how large the southern end of the southern forest, which he now believed would be known as the northern forest, was. This was something he didn't even think of discussing with Fu Tao as the size of the forest didn't really make a difference for a cultivator.

However, now that he had the slow pace of a mortal, it was certainly important.

Alex's body ached a lot, and it was a pain that a pill couldn't take away. At least, it was a pain that his pills couldn't take away.

This was the pain of your entire body being sucked dry to fight against saint beasts and an Immortal beast.

Alex was even surprised he had such powers.

For the last 3 days, he had continuously been running since he was sure the beasts would come after him to take back Pearl. But it had been 3 days. Where were they?

Were they really not coming?

Alex soon felt that he couldn't care about them. He needed to cultivate, one way or other.

'Should I really bring out Pearl?' he thought. He hadn't brought out Pearl despite his condition due to the fact that Pearl couldn't conceal himself.

However, he didn't need concealment now that he was in an area where he rarely saw any True beasts.

Pearl was only at the last realm of Mind Tempering, but he was sure he would be sufficient to protect him.

So, he called out Pearl.

Pearl came out in white light and landed in front of him. "Meow!" it meowed towards Alex with a wide smile, but it immediately disappeared when he saw Alex's current situation.

"MEOW!" it shouted with a worried look.

"I'm… I'm alright for now," he said. "I just need to cultivate, and I will be fine."

"Meow?" Pearl asked.

"Yes, I'm telling the truth," Alex said.

Pearl finally stopped worrying a little. He then looked around and started wondering where he was.

"Meow?" he asked.

"Yes, I came out 3 days ago," Alex said. "Do you… miss them?" He asked.

"Meow," Pearl said in a somber tone. He missed them a bit, but he missed his mother the most.

"Don't worry. We will come back here someday and you can meet your mother," Alex said.

Pearl nodded.

Alex then looked around for a tree that fit what he had in his mind. A tall tree, with dense leaves that had a large enough crown where he could hide while cultivating.

In such a dense forest, it didn't take him even a second to see multiple of such trees.

"Help me get up there," Alex said and walked towards the tree. With the help of what little cultivation base he could produce at the moment and Pearl, he climbed up the tree to the crown and sat cross-legged there.

"I will start cultivating now, so stand around to guard me okay?" Alex said.

"Meow," Pearl accepted.

"Also, don't cultivate if you get bored. I… I don't know how weak my body is at the moment, so I should better not take risks.

"Meow!" Pearl agreed to that as well.

Once Alex was assured he would be fine, he closed his eyes and sent out his spiritual sense to check up on the damage.

His skin, muscle, tendons, veins, blood. Almost everything aside from bone had been dried to the worst condition they could be in.

Alex could barely differentiate where his skin ended and where his muscles increased. His tendons were very weak, and there was barely any pulse on his weak-looking veins.

Not only that, but Alex also noticed a significant loss in blood as well.

He then checks on his meridians. As expected… they were in a bad condition too. They had shrunken up to a third of their original size.

'No wonder I was having such a hard time using Qi,' he thought. He needed to heal them.

He slowly started moving his Qi around according to the Five Yang Divine Path method, which he struggled a lot to do so.

After a revolution or two, Alex finally got into the hang of cultivating and soon lost himself in it.

Chapter 587: Godslayer

Time passed, but Alex couldn't tell how much. His perception of time had been muddled as he fully focused on bringing himself back to his proper condition.

Slowly cultivating, he had come to understand just how bad the possession had left him with.

Torn muscles, splintered tendons, and even fractured bones seemed to have been a side effect of the possession. Fortunately, he had solved most of the immediate problems with his pills.

However, the latent problem of his body being drained out of itself wasn't something he could fix immediately.

As he cultivated, his meridians slowly started healing. From being a third of the original size, they opened to be half the original size.

If he continued, he would surely bring them back to their proper size in no time.

'I will have to cultivate for a long while now,' he thought.

Once he was well enough that he didn't have to focus on cultivating itself, he decided to go and check the other problem he might have missed in his spiritual sea.

With a thought, he appeared inside his spiritual sea, floating atop the sea, looking at the massive mountain that floated in front of him.

The minute threads of silver light floated all around him, giving him a bit of a shock.

"So many," he thought. "This much amount… has it already been 2 days since I started cultivating? Maybe more?"

Hundreds of such threads floated aimlessly around the giant silver mountain which didn't seem to have lost any of itself at all.

'Just how many threads can this thing even produce?' Alex thought. He was used to absorbing anything in this place to gain more mental strength, but somehow this was the only thing he couldn't absorb at all.

He had to wait for the wisps of light to float away from the mountain before he could absorb it.

"Well, that's not the only thing I can't absorb now," Alex thought and made his way towards the floating piece of spherical crystal that was not far away from the mountain.

Alex went up to it and grabbed it.

He felt something viscous black goop coming out of it, coloring it black again.

He willed a little bit of yellow fog to appear on his hands and burned it away.

Finally, the crystal was clear once again.

Alex hadn't had the time to look at it previously, so he brought it up to his eyes and looked at it.

The crystal was mostly colorless aside from the slight bluish hue to its body. At around the size of his fist, maybe a little larger, the crystal ball looked completely normal.

However, Alex knew it was anything but.

He could feel life inside of it, which was something he hadn't sensed since Zexi had tried to look at the… clone's memories.

'I'm still having trouble coming to terms with it,' he thought. For nearly 7 months now, he had slowly come to terms with the knowledge that he was a clone.

And yet, suddenly learning that he wasn't one and was actually the real Alex was… certainly confusing.

Just then, he noticed something inside the crystal that he hadn't seen earlier.

At the center of the crystal was a small black… flame?

Alex couldn't tell what it was at all. Sometimes it looked like a flame, but then it would change to liquid. Not long after it would turn solid and then suddenly vanish, making it seem like there was nothing in there to begin with.

That… was very weird.

"I can make you strong, boy," a voice came from deep within the crystal ball.

Alex was a little surprised to hear it. He didn't think it was still conscious enough to talk.

"So you are alive," Alex said, after realizing he was correct.

"I can make you strong. Stronger than anything you can think of," the crystal ball said again.

"Don't bother. Your temptation only worked because I was in a desperate situation. Now that I am free, it won't work on me."

"Still, thank you for saving me from that situation," Alex said.

The Crystal ball didn't speak for a while. Alex waited for a while and it finally said, "you really are unique. Your… soul is quite strong. Who are you?"

"Just a normal person on the path of cultivation," Alex said.

"Hah! You are anything but normal," the crystal said.

"Who are you, then?" Alex asked.

"I am GODSLAYER!" the crystal spoke with a really loud sound.

Alex frowned a little. That name was… he didn't like it for some reason. Probably because his constitution contained the word 'God'.

He then asked, "What are you?"

"Hmph! Filthy backwater mortals. They can't even tell what they're looking at," Godslayer said.

Alex suddenly brought out the yellow fog and started burning the crystal again, hoping it would work this time.

It did work… for a few seconds before the black flame-liquid thingy returned to the middle of the crystal.

"HAHAHA! You can't kill me. I'm immortal. All the gods will die before I ever do," the crystal spoke.

Alex was surprised at this. He didn't know if it was because he was currently weak or if the crystal was speaking the truth, but… it really didn't seem like it would die.

"Tell me clearly, what are you?" Alex asked.

"Tsk, you backwater folk won't even know what I am even if I tell you," the crystal said.

"Are you an Artifact Spirit?" Alex asked suddenly.

"What?" the Crystal sounded surprised. "How do you know about that?"

"I guessed," Alex said. He had remembered a conversation with Lady Ren where she talked about the Artifact spirit inside the Ebony sword that belonged to the Eastern Continent.

At that time, one of the saint beasts had asked if that sword was similar to the other one.

Given that this was the only other sword Alex had seen in the storage room, he guessed as such.

"So, Artifact spirits can actually talk and even take over people, huh?" Alex asked.

"Of course not," the Crystal sounded offended. "Only I can do that. I, alone am the greatest Artifact and artifact spirit ever created. I was crafted by the best to slay gods. What other spirit could stand up to me."

Alex narrowed his eyes listening to the crystal. "You call yourself Godslayer, but have you really killed any gods?"

"Of course," the crystal spoke. "I've killed many."

"I killed the Artifact god, the Spear god, the Fire God, the Alchemy god. I even killed the Swift god, although killing him was pretty hard with how fast he moved."

"It was only because the Sword G—"

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! You killed… the Alchemy god?" Alex asked with wide eyes. This was the first time he had even heard someone else use the name 'Alchemy god' aside from the manual he had gotten.

"Of course. Killing him was very hard, but I did it," the artifact spirit said.

Alex's mind started swirling with thoughts he couldn't put together. "Who… was the Alchemy god?" he asked.

"One of the vermin that shouldn't have been alive in the first place," the Crystal said.

"Answer me properly," Alex demanded.

"I don't know who he was. Do you think I care about his name? I just fought with him and killed him because he dared to call himself a God."

Chapter 588: False Gods

Alex took a while to come to terms with the fact that Alchemy god was very much likely dead if what this spirit said was true.

He was a little saddened that he would never get to meet him in this life. He was the one whose knowledge was helping Alex so much after all.

'I should have known,' he thought. 'Why else would I get someone's book if they were still writing it.'

"Did you have some sort of bad blood with the Alchemy god?" Alex asked.

"Of course, why else would I kill him? He was a really bad guy," the artifact spirit said.

"Alchemy God… was a bad guy?" Alex asked. He wanted to learn more about him, and it seemed this spirit was the only thing in the world that would tell him.

"Yes," it said. "Very bad."

Alex felt slightly surprised. He had never expected a god to be a bad guy. 'Did the spirit mean Evil… or?'

"So, he did something evil?" Alex asked, trying to pry an answer.

"Yes, of course," the spirit said, sounding rather haughty at the moment. However, it didn't explain any further than that.

Alex suppressed his anger and asked, "what deeds did the Alchemy God do to call him evil?"

Alex could think of a few things that an Alchemist would do. Maybe he needed the body parts of some beasts, so he went around hunting many beasts who by then would be sentient.

Even trees would be sentient by then. He knew it as he had seen a sentient tree that had given him its leaves and seed by the beach far up north.

"He called himself a God," the artifact spirit said.

Alex waited for more information, but none came. He suppressed his anger once more and asked, "What other evil did he do?"

"I don't know. He probably did something bad when I wasn't around," it said.

"But you said he did something evil," Alex said.

"Yes, he called himself God," the spirit replied.

Alex paused for a moment as a thought came to his mind. "Are you saying that the Alchemy god was a bad guy because he called himself a god?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the spirit said.

Alex took a deep breath. He understood that it wasn't that the Alchemy god was evil, but rather the spirit's skewed understanding of what was good and evil.

"So, did you fight and kill the Alchemy god because he called himself a god?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the spirit said.

This was a disaster. The spirit seemed to kill everything that was named a god.

"Do you know about any Sun God?" Alex asked.

"Sun God? Never heard of him. But if I find him, I will kill him too," the spirit proclaimed.

'Another one that hasn't heard of Sun God at all. I will have to ask Sister Hao's master then. He will likely be the only one who knows,' Alex thought.

"So you really hate gods, huh?" Alex asked.

"Yes, with all my heart," the spirit said and then paused. "Hmm, I don't have a heart."

"Is there a reason?" Alex asked.

"Why would I need a reason to kill gods?" the spirit asked. The little black flaming liquid in the center of the crystal grew slightly bigger.

"So you kill them because they are gods. No other reason, huh? How did you come about to hate them like that? What could the gods have possibly done?" Alex asked.

"Aren't you listening, boy? They called themselves a god," the spirit said as if it was very obvious.

Alex was stunned. He didn't know what to think of it. The spirit had no reason to hate gods at all, but it still did.

'Hmmm… maybe…' Alex thought of something.

"You are an Artifact spirit, right? So, I assume you were originally an artifact of some sort?" Alex asked.

"Of course. I am a sword, the deadliest one out there," the spirit said.

"The sword you were in before, that's not your body, right?" he asked.

"Of course. My real body is somewhere. Probably with the Sword God. That bitch must have taken away my body when she used the other gods' help to separate my spirit from my body," it said.

Alex was shocked, to say the least. 'So many gods,' he thought. The spirit kept on talking about gods like they were nothing.

Alex couldn't help but ask, "how many gods are there?"

"5? Maybe 100? I don't know. They keep popping up even after I kill them," the spirit said.

"They keep popping up?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "Do the gods reincarnate every time they die?"

"What? No! Someone else just claims themselves to be a god, and people accept it," the spirit said.

Alex had a hard time understanding what the spirit was talking about. It was like he skipped a few steps during the explanation.

"Are gods not almighty beings? How can one just claim to be a god?" Alex asked.

"Hmph! Most of these so-called gods are just false gods. Just because they reached a certain height in their understanding of something, they dare call themselves a god. As far as I know, there are only two True gods."

"One that blessed the 4 Heavenly beasts, and the other that blessed the 3 Demonic Plants."

"And one day, I will kill those gods as well, no matter who they are and where they are," the spirit proclaimed.

Alex finally came to understand that the Alchemy god wasn't a god at all. It was just a normal cultivator whose understanding had reached the peak of what was possible.

'Is that why the technique stops at level 5, in the Divine realm?' he thought.

"What was the Alchemy god's cultivation realm when you killed him?" Alex asked.

"Divine? Maybe Celestial?" the sword spirit thought. "I couldn't really tell at the time. My vessel at the time was quite strong, so I was able to draw out quite a bit of his strength."

"Your vessel? What's that? The sword?" Alex asked.

"What? Obviously not. Why would the sword be my vessel when I am the sword?" the spirit asked. "I am talking about the human I was using."

"The human you were using…" Alex came to an understanding. Just like he was being used through his temptation, the sword likely got someone like that too.

"How were you able to tempt someone so strong to work for you?" he asked.

"It was very easy. I was very strong," the spirit said.

"You… don't seem very strong," Alex said.

"That's only because you are weird," the spirit said. "Also, I was weakened when I was taken away from my body and sealed onto that sword. Not to mention… I am being somewhat suppressed in this place."

"I see," Alex said. "But… you said you killed many gods right?"

"Yes, quite a few. Some I even killed multiple times because they kept coming back," the sword spirit said.

"If you were that dangerous then… why didn't the Sword God kill you when she defeated you?" Alex asked.

"She didn't defeat me. THEY defeated me. She had help," the spirit made sure to let that be known. "Also, they can't kill me. Unlike them, I am immortal in both body and spirit."

"I see," Alex said as he looked at the crystal on his hands. "Who can make something like you that is so strong?"

"I—" the spirit stopped. It waited for a few seconds before saying, "I don't remember. I don't need to remember. It's fine as long as I kill gods."

It shouted like Alex had hit a nerve. "Now leave me alone," it shouted and stopped talking.

Alex waited for it to return back to talk, but it didn't. After a while, he understood that he had likely talked about a sore topic. Alex checked his surroundings one last time and left his spiritual sea.

He continued focusing on his body to heal it better, while constantly thinking of the things that he had learned.

Gods were just normal cultivators. There was no majesty to them in the way Alex had imagined until now.

Furthermore, they could be killed. And within him was something that had killed multiple of them.

Only now did Alex come to realize how scary the situation was.

'I will need to get rid of him when I can,' he thought. For now, he would have to regularly go into his spiritual sea to remove the black goo from around it in hope of containing the temptation.

After thinking that, he got back into cultivating. He needed to heal his body as fast as he could.

Chapter 589: Azure Silverbeak

Alex continued cultivating with the same sense of time as he had before, which was none.

How many days had it been? 3, maybe 4? He had never cultivated for this long before, but he knew that this was something common amongst the cultivators. So, he should start doing this more often as well.

Some cultivated for weeks on end, maybe even months. His cultivating for a few days was nothing.

However, there was one problem with his cultivation that took him a while to figure out.

Since he was so focused on healing himself, the cultivation hadn't really helped towards his cultivation base.

At least, his healing had been better. By now, everything that was torn or broken was healed. His meridians were three-fourths of the way back to normal.

The only problem was he was still very skinny, almost skeletal. It seemed his muscle mass wouldn't return from simply cultivating.

If it did, he would have to do it for a really long time. So, Alex went on to continue cultivating for a while longer.

* * * * *

5 men and women walked into the forest, a hint of hurried walking in their footsteps. They wore reddish-brown robes, tied in the waist by a yellow sash.

"Brother Yun," one of the 3 men called the other man that looked like the leader of this small group.

"What is it?" the man asked.

"That," the man pointed to something in the trees.

The leader and the rest of the group looked in the direction he pointed at and saw something up in the tree.

It was a bird. Not a simple one either. It was an Azure Silverbeak. Silverbeaks came about in many colors that ranged from red to purple. However, one with pigment that looked blue was rather hard to find.

"Woah! Good job, little brother, you found a fortune for us today," the leader said and propped up his ax to fight.

He had a cultivation base of the 1st True disciple realm, the strongest of the group.

2 of the other men held swords in their hands and had a cultivation base around the 8th Mind Tempering realm.

The 2 girls held a bow and a saber with them, and have a cultivation base of 7th and 9th Mind Tempering realm.

"Alright, slowly fan out, and get your nets ready. Make sure not to hurt it too bad. We don't want to spend money on pills to heal the bird," the leader said.

The rest of them nodded and slowly moved around the bird. Once they were in position, they got their nets ready.

The four of them looked towards the leader for the sign, and as they did, the leader nodded.

At once, all 5 of them threw their nets at the bird on top of the tree. The nets flew through the air, reaching the bird.

However, just then, the bird dived down from the tree and escaped the nets.

"Follow it!" the leader said, and the 5 of them started running towards it.

The Azure Silverbeak was a Mind Tempering realm beast, likely in the 8th or 9th realm. However, due to the fact that it wasn't very good at fighting, it had instead come to become very fast at flying.

The bird zipped through the air at such a speed that only the leader could even keep track of where it was going.

Even then, the leader was slowly falling behind.

The bird flew in between the trees, zigzagging its way through the branches high above.

The leader started to worry that he would lose it. The bird would fetch him at least 20 True spirit stones, if not more.

That, spread among the 5 of them, would mean he would get at least 5 True spirit stones.

5 True Spirit stones a week was far more than anything the 5 of them had earned in the last months.

He couldn't let that bird get away. He decided to employ his speed to the highest, maybe even using his blood essence for it.

However, just as he was about to do that, he saw something white flash from ahead of the bird and move towards it.

As the leader kept watching it, the bird flew down to the ground, with something else on top of it.

The leader stopped when he got close and saw the thing that was atop the bird.

A little white cat was licking its paw, while the other paw held the Azure Silverbeak to the ground. The bird was still alive, but it seemed to have something broken in it from the attack.

'What the hell?' the leader thought. The other 4 members of his group arrived not long after to see the scene as well and were equally shocked.

"Oh my god! So cute," the two girls said the moment they saw the little white cat.

The other two men didn't say it, but they nodded it as well.

The leader kept on looking at it with a confused look. "Have you guys ever seen a cat beast before?" he asked.

The group looked confused as well and realized that they had indeed never seen one before.

"Maybe it's a mutant feline beast. It should be very rare," one of the men said.

"It's a little kitten too. The rich folks would pay a fortune for it if we can get it. Not to mention it's so cute," one of the girls said.

"9th Mind Tempering realm… we should be able to," the leader said. "Alright, get your nets ready."

The group got into their stance, ready to capture the cat in front of them.

Pearl looked at the 5 people with a confused look on his face. Just moments ago, he had been sitting comfortably —well, maybe not very comfortably, given how hot it was— on top of the tree branch, when suddenly a bird flew its way.

He knew that Alex couldn't be distracted right now as he had been ordered to protect him, so Pearl took down the bird.

However, now these 5 humans had appeared out of nowhere.

Humans, they are good people, right? He thought. He had only known humans that loved him and cared for him, so he assumed they were the same.

However, when he saw them get into a fighting stance with weapons and other things in their hand, he couldn't help but cock his head in confusion.

"ENIMI?" he asked, pronouncing the word as well as he could.

The group of 5 froze. They looked in awe and surprised, at Pearl and then at each other.

"IT TALKED!" one of the men whispered as loudly as possible in a slow cadence.

"HOLY SHIT! We will be so rich if we get it," one of the girls said excitedly.

The leader looked towards Pearl and numerous thoughts ran through his mind.

"Alright, let's hurry and capture it. We will be in trouble if someone stronger comes here," the leader said.

The group nodded and got ready.

Seeing that they were really trying to fight him, Pearl understood that they were his enemy.

Claws slowly came out of all 4 of Pearl's paws as he too got ready to fight.

Chapter 590

"Now!" the leader shouted.

Aside from the leader and the woman with the saber, everyone else threw their nets at Pearl.

Pearl understood what was happening and immediately jumped backward such that not a single net landed on him.

The Azure Silverbeak tried to stand up and leave when Pearl let go of it, but it was instead caught in the nets the Pearl dodged.

"He's quick," one of the men said, readying his sword. But then, he dropped it a little.

He couldn't harm a product. What was he thinking?

Now, he was confused. He could sense the kitten's aura, and it told him that it was just as strong as he was, maybe even stronger.

This was going to be a tough battle. They might even have to use a few more resources than normal. The cat was worth it.

Suddenly, an arrow flew through the air, hurling behind it a wave of green energy.

Pearl moved to the side and let it fly past him, but when the arrow struck the ground, it exploded in a gust of air that pushed him towards the woman with the saber.

The woman had kept her net, while the other three had thrown it, so when she saw Pearl helpless mid-air, she threw it to capture him.

However, Pearl suddenly moved to the right, dodging the net once again.

"It can fly?" the girl shouted in surprise. Mind Tempering beasts that flew weren't rare, but they weren't readily available either.

Also, the girl had only seen older beasts that were able to fly. Not this cute little kitten that looked like it was born yesterday.

One of the men with the sword ran forward with his sword and slashed at Pearl.

Pearl also swung his paw at the same time, hitting the sword as it dropped.

The other's heart skipped a beat when they saw that, but when they then saw the kitten not only block the sword but actually push it back without any injury, they were shocked.

"You could've hurt it!" the girl with the bow screamed at the man who just attacked.

In response, the man simply looked back at her and said, "it's nearly a True realm beast. It's not a clay vase that will break into a million pieces if you hit it. Stop letting the cuteness distract you from its strength."

The three of the others aside from the leader finally woke up from their image of the cat they had put in their mind.

This wasn't a house cat. It was a beast, and they couldn't be too careful with a beast.

"Also, be careful. It's really strong," the man said. The rebound he felt from the attack just now was abnormal for him.

Pearl was angry this time and he got on the offensive. He jumped towards the people, but the girl with the bow shot her arrow once again.

Pearl knew not to dodge it this time, so he sought to destroy it. However, right before it touched him, roots sprouted from the arrow that wrapped around Pearl.

At the same time, the other men and woman jumped at Pearl, hacking at him with their sword and saber.

They didn't put as much strength as they could muster, just enough to hurt him a bit.

Suddenly, Pearl's body turned golden as the weapons landed on him. It was a direct hit, yet Pearl didn't feel anything.

The White Tiger's Golden body was a very strong defensive technique that normal people wouldn't be able to break past within the same realm as Pearl.

Pearl then swiped at the roots around him, destroying them. He then turned towards the man on the right and swung at him.

The man put the flat side of his sword in front of him to stop the attack, but he underestimated Pearl's strength.

He felt the pressure of the attack at his body was lurched backward and was sent flying through the air until it hit a tree in the back.

The man fell to the ground and coughed up blood. He had been badly hit.

The remaining men and women looked in shock. Pearl was too strong.

"Brother Yun, are you ready or not?" the remaining man asked.

"I need just 1 more minute," he said.

Pearl was about to turn around to attack the woman to his right, but just then, another arrow came flying his way.

This time, he neither hit it nor dodged it. Instead, he took one step back, took a deep breath, and roared.

A deafening sound was released from Pearl that didn't seem like it belonged to him.

Before the arrow could come anywhere close, it was sent flying back, all the energy in it disappearing as it did so.

At the same time, Pearl ran towards her. He realized that he needed to take out this archer before he concentrated on the other enemies.

Golden light glowed in a flickering pattern as he started running forward.

The girl readied an arrow once again to target Pearl, but suddenly something interesting happened.

The Pearl that was running towards her suddenly flickered once more and 1 Pearl… turned into 2.

The girl was surprised when she saw the 2 Pearls coming towards her at the same time.

She looked at the two Pearls and didn't understand which one was real. She hesitated for a bit and chose the one on the right.

She chose wrong.

The one the arrow hit flickered into a bunch of golden light and disappeared.

The Pearl on the left jumped on her and threw a paw attack at her.

"AAH!" the girl screamed and brought out a talisman to protect herself.

The reddish-yellow talisman burned up and an illusory barrier of the same bronze-like color appeared in front of her.

Pearl's attack shattered the barrier in a thousand pieces, but it still managed to kill a lot of his power and when his paw hit her, it wasn't strong enough to hurt her a lot.

Just enough to send her flying backward and tumble multiple times on the ground.

The girl felt scared. If she hadn't produced that talisman, she would've likely been fatally hurt there.

Pearl saw her slowly stand up and was about to go for her when he noticed the girl with the saber attack him from behind.

Pearl jumped to the side to dodge her, but the girl expected that and suddenly blasted a massive fire attack at him.

Her eyes went wide when she saw Pearl not dodge that attack. She was worried that Pearl was hurt, but then Pearl flew through the fire, directly at her.

Not a single hair on his body was hurt.

The swordsman appeared out of nowhere, slashing towards Pearl.

As if there were a footing below Pearl, he suddenly changed direction upwards to dodged the incoming attack, then again pushed the air above him to jump downwards and swung his paw towards the newly arrived man.

The man was caught off guard and would die if he did not move. However, he couldn't change his position at the moment, and the girl couldn't help him either.

Suddenly, an ax came flying through the air that slammed into Pearl who was sent flying back towards the tree.

Pearl flipped midair and landed on the side of the tree with all 4 legs before looking straight towards the leader of the group.

He had finally entered the battle.

The leader put his hands forward, and the ax came flying back to his hands.

"Leave it to me. You are not its match," the leader said.

The 2 of them nodded and went to get the other man that was hurt beneath the tree.

The leader watched as his juniors got away to the side and then finally stared at Pearl.

"Do you understand my words, beast?" he asked in a solemn voice.

"Meow!" Pearl meowed, but the leader got no information from it at all.

"We don't plan on hurting you. Just come with us quietly," the leader said.

"MEOW!" Pearl meowed loudly as he dig the ground slightly with his paws as if he was getting ready to attack.

The leader saw that and frowned. He really didn't want to hurt the cat since that would cost him more to heal it later.

However, with how strong the cat was currently, he couldn't catch it without hurting it a bit.

So, he put up his ax and got ready to fight.

Chapter 591: Pearl vs Leader

The leader swung his ax at Pearl.

The ax was a two-handed ax, with a meter-long wooden shaft that was so polished that the wood grains were no longer visible, and an ax head that was in a circular shape of half a meter in diameter.

The leader was still a good 20 meters away from Pearl, but the swinging of the ax sent out an earthen-colored illusory ax of the same shape as his own.

Pearl understood this was a strong attack, but he didn't back away. Instead, his right paw glowed goldenly and he swung at the ax-shaped energy.

The energy dissipated as soon as Pearl hit it, with Pearl taking barely any damage himself.

Pearl was a little surprised. Was the human in front of him not strong?

The leader frowned as well. He had clearly sent out an attack that had the power of a 9th Mind Tempering realm cultivator, but somehow the cat had easily stopped it.

It looked like he couldn't hold back at all.

Suddenly, Pearl started running towards the leader. His feet flickered with golden light and before the leader could see it, he split into two.

It was impossible to tell which one was real.

He remembered that it was the left one that was real last time when it had attacked the girl with the arrow, so, he targeted it.

An earth spike rose from the ground right underneath where Pearl was. It struck through Pearl, but then Pearl disappeared into many golden motes of light.

He had chosen wrong.

The Pearl on the right jumped at the leader and attacked with his paw.

The leader didn't move away, however. Instead, his body turned brown and he used it to block Pearl's attack.

Pearl swung his paw onto the Leader's right biceps. The leader was sent back a couple of meters and looked in shock.

There were thin cuts on his arm where the robe had been torn open and he was bleeding slightly.

'I was fully defending it too,' he thought. He was finally starting to feel scared for the fight. It was a good idea he sent the others away. Had they stayed, he realized they would've likely died.

'Good thing I sent them away. Now I will have to fight properly,' he thought.

The ground shuddered around his feet and Pearl sensed it. Immediately, Pearl backed away in caution.

The earth climbed up around the leader's feet and started covering part of his body like it were armor.

He now had an extra layer of security that would also increase his strength.

So, he rushed up ahead and started attacking Pearl.

The 4 of the others looked at the battle from the side.

"Is… brother holding back?" the girl with the saber asked.

"I don't think so," the man that was heavily injured said. He had taken a healing pill by now and was healed enough to stand up. There were still cuts and bruises all over him, but that wasn't something he cared about for now.

The girl with the bow and arrow looked around and asked, "why is it taking so long?"

The other man looked around and asked, "Did brother Yun not set it up properly?"

"He must have," the girl with the saber said.

The 4 of them continued watching the battle unfold for another 5 minutes. Both the kitten and their brother seemed to be fighting with full strength, and somehow neither was winning.

They never expected the kitten to lose, but seeing their brother have a hard time winning, was the most shocking aspect of the fight.

Pearl's body flickered into two as both Pearls ran towards the leader.

The leader had already tried hitting either of the Pearls during the multiple times Pearl had used this technique. So, he didn't choose either of the Pearl this time.

Instead, he sent out multiple earth spikes towards both of the Pearl.

The attack reached the Pearl on the right who vanished into golden motes of light. When it reached the Pearl on the left, Pearl's body glowed a bit, but he a step late and the earth spike hit him.

It didn't manage to pierce him or anything, not even cut him a little, but Pearl still took some damage.

He landed on his feet a looked at the leader. How was the late just now? He was fully prepared to block the attack.

Just then, he felt a sense of weightlessness. As if his brain floated in nothingness before suddenly experiencing gravity.

Pearl stumbled a little to the right and shook his head.

The leader smiled. The formation he had set up while the other 4 kept Pearl busy was finally working.

Usually, the formation would work in just a minute or two for low-level True beasts, but even after 5 minutes, this beast wasn't down.

The leader couldn't help but feel happy about their luck in finding the beast.

He fought for a few more minutes, but it was soon apparent that the beast couldn't keep up for much longer.

Pearl huffed heavily as whatever was happening to him made it really hard to focus. He couldn't even see the enemy properly as his vision twisted into 3 separate images for everything around him.

Even when using his Spiritual Sense, he couldn't keep the direction in check.

The leader threw a net at him and it landed on Pearl. But he easily destroyed the net with his claws.

"Tsk," the leader felt annoyed. He needed to quickly catch the beast before his precious True spirit stones lost their energy in the formation flags.

He had to finish this quickly, and the only way he saw was to knock the beast out.

The Leader dashed forward towards Pearl, with his ax glowing with bright earth color, and swung it onto Pearl.

Suddenly, a flash of gray moved in front of him as his ax came to a halting stop.

Not only did the ax stop, the leader felt pain in his hands from the rebound as well as the skin between his thumb and index finger nearly splitting with the force.

When he looked up to see what had appeared, he saw an almost skeletal man in a grayish robe stand in front of him with a gentle-looking smile on his face.

The leader followed his ax to see how it had been stopped when he nearly lost his eyes when they popped out of his socket with pure shock.

1 finger.

The man in front of him had stopped one of his strongest attacks with a single finger, and there was not a single scratch on him.

"May I ask why you are attacking my brother?" Alex asked.

The leader felt his heart sink to the bottom of his stomach. He immediately let go of the ax, and before it could even fall to the ground, he did.

The leader slammed his head onto the ground and started screaming. "Forgiveness, senior. I— I didn't know the cat belonged to you," the leader said.

"He doesn't belong to me. He is my brother. He belongs to no one," Alex said.

The leader sunk deeper into his fear, not understanding what he should do now.

Chapter 592: Pearl's refusal

The 4 others to the side looked at Alex with a massive shock, as well as a hint of confusion.

They were shocked because to their eyes, Alex had appeared out of nowhere. They were also a little confused as to where he had been before this.

However, as soon as they heard what Alex said, their shock and confusion soon all turned to pure, unadulterated fear.

Not only was Alex strong, but he was also so unbelievably strong that they couldn't even feel his cultivation base at all.

This meant he had a really high cultivation base. Not to mention, given how scraggly he looked, they feared that he cultivated an unorthodox cultivation method.

If it happened to be one that required the blood and bones of young men and women, they would all be in trouble.

"Senior, please forgive me. I really didn't know i— he was with you. Had I known, I would've never thought of kidnapping him," the leader said, his head still pressed to the ground.

Alex looked at him and then at Pearl who was on the ground. He then kicked a stone that was on the ground, sending it hurtling towards one of the trees.

The stone accurately hit a formation flag, knocking it off of the tree. Suddenly, Pearl could see clearly again.

The formation had come undone.

The leader couldn't help but feel awe when he saw that. He had made sure to set up the flags in such a manner that it would be impossible to find in a short time, but somehow the expert in front of him had done exactly that.

This only caused to increase his fear even more.

"Why were you trying to kidnap him?" Alex asked.

The leader couldn't answer. It was not an answer he could give to the brother of an expert like him.

"Answer me," Alex said, his voice booming, shaking the leader to his core.

"We-we were going to sell him to a rich person from the other cities," the leader said.

Alex nodded when he heard this.

He knew these people weren't evil and were definitely not looking to harm Pearl. At least that he had noticed from the very start.

When Pearl had slammed one of those people into the tree he was cultivating on, Alex had already woken up by then.

When he saw Pearl fighting, he was ready to come down to help. However, he also noticed that they likely weren't a threat to Pearl at all.

So, he stayed up, watching him fight. It had been a while, so he wanted to see how much he had grown.

When he used skills like White Tiger's Golden Claw or White Tiger's Golden Body, Alex felt a little proud of how frequently he could use those skills.

When he used White Tiger's roar, Alex had realized that Pearl had another skill up his sieve that belonged to the white tiger bloodline.

Then, Pearl gave him another shock when he used the White Tiger's steps. The movement technique was meant for short bursts of motion, but… it was so strong.

When Pearl had split into two, even he had trouble finding out which one was the real one despite using spiritual sense.

It was only when he saw Pearl in trouble that he finally decided to come down to help.

Alex looked at the leader still on the ground. "Stand up," he said.

These people were good, but he couldn't let the fact that they tried to steal Pearl slide.

"I will give you one chance. My brother will hit you once. If you can survive, you can all leave," Alex said. "You can even take that… bird over there."

Alex felt a weird sensation. It felt really weird not having the game system tell him the name of things. Without it, he couldn't even tell what the bird's name was.

It looked like he had a lot more to learn.

The leader's eyes narrowed. He didn't believe he could get away so… easily.

"Is that true?" he couldn't help but ask.

"Are you saying I'm lying?" Alex asked.

"No, senior. Forgive me," the leader said again as he bowed towards Alex.

"Get up and take the hit. I don't have much time to waste on you," he said.

The leader looked up and nodded. He got up and moved a little back to get into a stance.

"I'm ready, senior," he said.

"Pearl, go give him your best attack," Alex said.

However, Pearl shook his head. Alex curiously turned around.

"What's wrong? Do you not want to hit him?" he asked.

"Meow!" Pearl meowed. The opponent had used assistance from formations, but he had still won fairly. So, he didn't like the fact that he needed Alex's help in beating the man.

Alex couldn't help but chuckle a little when he heard that, and at some level, even felt a little proud.

Pearl had lost, and he had accepted the loss without looking for help in getting back.

"Alright, since my brother has decided to not attack you, you will have to do something else for me," Alex said.

"Anything, senior," the man said.

"Show me the way out of this place," Alex said.

The leader looked surprised, and a little suspicious too. He looked to the side of the other 4 who looked relieved and sighed.

"Yes, senior," the leader said.

"Take your bird. We're leaving," Alex said.

The leader nodded and walked over to the bird. When he removed the nets, he realized the bird was unconscious. It seemed the bird couldn't handle the nauseating mental stress from the disorienting formation.

Meanwhile, Pearl jumped onto Alex's shoulder and slumped down and purred lightly.

"You fought to protect me, right? Thank you," Alex said softly.

Pearl meowed but didn't say anything else. It looked like he was still a little annoyed that he lost to the leader.

"I saw you fight. You were very strong," Alex said. "If not for the formation, the leader would've never won against you. Also, you are not even in the True realm, and yet you are contending someone on True realm in equal strength. I think that is amazing."

Pearl's face turned a little smug when he heard that. He was indeed great.

"By the way, the techniques you used. Did they teach you that?" Alex asked.

"No," Pearl said.

'I thought so,' Alex thought. This would get problematic soon. Pearl now had about 5 skills that not even a true White Tiger born to the White Tiger family could have.

At most, they would have 2 or 3 according to what Yao Jia had told him.

"Did you use these skills while training?" Alex then asked.

"Yess!" Pearl said.

'That's problematic,' Alex thought. ' I don't think they will stop looking for Pearl then. It's already impressive that they haven't looked for me in the last few days since I left the secret realm.'

'Maybe they are preoccupied with what happened to Lady Rem,' Alex thought. 'They will come soon then. I hope they can't find me here'

"Senior, we are ready," the leader said.

Alex looked to the side and said, "Alright, show the way out."

Chapter 593: Riverweed Town

Alex sent out his spiritual sense to the max to check out the forest while the group of 5 showed him the path out of the forest.

As he looked, he realized that there had been a lot of trees cut around that area. The feeling in his body regarding the ingredients was also a lot more tamer.

It was almost like the area around him was devoid of ingredients aside from a few uncommon ones.

As he walked, Ning slowly plucked the remaining ingredients from all around him as he brought them towards himself. He used this as an opportunity to make sure his Qi worked properly.

'Although I'm not back to my best yet, it's close enough,' he thought. He just needed to cultivate for a month or 2 casually, and he would be back to peak form. Maybe even better.

"What's your name?" Alex asked the leader.

"It's Yun Jiang, senior," the leader said.

"Yun Jiang," Alex said softly as if to see how well he could pronounce it. "So, what are you guys doing here?" Alex asked.

The leader shuddered and slowly turned around to say, "It's the last day of the week, senior."

He didn't explain any further as if that information alone was supposed to be enough of an explanation.

"I… am not from around here. Can you explain a bit more?" Alex asked.

"Oh," the leader looked at him with shock. However, even with shock, he didn't dare get slow in his explanation.

"Every end of the week, the cultivators from the Riverweed town are allowed to enter the northern forest to harvest what they can. Ores, plants,… beasts, we are allowed to take these things back with us once a week," the leader said. "That's our only source of money."

"So you were planning to sell Pearl," Alex said. Pearl purred a little from atop Alex's thin shoulders.

Alex caught Pearl and put him in his robes such that only his head was sticking out. This was likely more comfortable for him than the shoulders.

The leader showed an embarrassed face and said, "y-yes, senior."

Alex turned to the left. Far away, he could see a few other groups of people as well, wearing bluish robes with a white sash around the waist.

"How many sects do you have in the town?" he asked.

"3, senior," the leader said. "Our Thousand Papers sect, Fire Spirit sect, and a Metal Jade sect."

"Those men, which sect are they?" Alex asked.

The leader looked to the side and only then saw a group of blue-robed figures far away.

"Those are the Metal Jade sect disciples, senior. They are an artifact sect, so they must be searching for materials for themselves," the leader said.

"And your sect?" Alex asked.

"Our Thousand Paper sect is mostly focused on the talisman, senior," he said. "Similarly, the Fire Spirit sect focuses on alchemy."

Alex's eyebrows raised a bit when he heard 'Alchemy' but he didn't let the surprise linger for much longer.

"How good would you say your town's sects are compared to others?" Alex asked.

"There is no comparison, senior," the leader said. "Our sect is at the outer edge of the empire, so our knowledge and skill are quite lacking compared to those at the center of the empire."

"But you guys still stay here," Alex said. "Is it because of the forest?"

"Yes senior," he said. "The forest is large and gives us a lot of ingredients. So while we aren't as big or strong as the sects at the center of the empire, we are still doing quite well for ourselves."

"I see," Alex said as he nodded. "What was the last good thing that came out of this place?"

"Last good thing, hmm," the leader thought. "There was a rumor about a True Heaven grade artifact being sold. But, it was done in secret by the Metal Jade sect, so we aren't sure."

The girl with the bow and arrow moved over to the leader and whispered something into his ears.

Alex heard it clearly, but he still waited for the leader to say. "It also seems that not so long ago, one of the elders at the Fire Spirit sect made a 42% Harmony pill. The name of the pill wasn't promoted, but the news of the pill's quality still got out."

"42% huh?" Alex realized that this place wasn't as great as he would've expected. It was just slightly better than an average alchemy sect back in the crimson empire.

'I will likely have to go deeper into the empire to find more,' Alex thought.

As they walked, Alex started noticing more and more. There were so many people wearing so many colors that it became hard to keep track of the different people.

'He did say that cultivators only get to enter at the end of the week,' Alex thought.

"Do your sects control this area of the forest? Or do you have a town lord?" Alex asked.

"We have a town lord senior, but our sects also have a say in what happens in the town," the leader said.

"So the thing about cultivators only being allowed to enter once a week, who set that rule?" he asked.

"Oh, it was a joint rule, senior. At first, there was no restriction, so very soon, the forest started to die so fast that there would barely be any resources in a few years. So, to preserve that, the elders came together and made the rule."

Alex nodded when he heard that. 'No wonder there is barely anything around here,' he thought.

"Are you an elder?" he asked.

"No, senior. This one hasn't reached 30 years of age yet," the leader said with a hint of pride on his face.

"I see. Not bad," Alex said. He realized by the context that one had to likely reach 30 years of age to become an elder in this place.

'It seems cultivation base doesn't matter to them. Or… at least True Disciple realm cultivation base doesn't matter,' Alex thought.

After a while, the group arrived at an open area. They had finally left the forest at last.

In front of Alex, he could see a massive city with newly built walls around it. There were houses outside of the walls too, and they looked newly built as well.

The stone walls let people walk in and out of the city.

'Such a big city and they still call it a town?' Alex thought. He wondered how big the cities of this empire would be then.

"Alright, you guys can leave now. I pardon your offense of trying to attack my brother," Alex said.

The leader and the other 4 looked elated. They quickly bowed and gave their thanks before scurrying away.

Alex looked at the 5 of them walk away and smiled a little.

"It's quite fun acting like an expert, isn't it?" he said while patting Pearl on his head.

"Meow!!" Pearl meowed from his clothes, asking him to pet him more.

"Alright, Alright," Alex said and pet him a bit more.

He then looked at his frail body and said, "I need to put some food in me to gain back my muscles. Without it, I will be stared at by everyone."

With that, Alex walked towards the Riverweed town and walked in through the gate.

The town looked not very different from the cities back in the crimson empire. It was almost as big as the Scarlet city and had sects in it that would qualify to compete against The Tiger sect or the Hong Wu sect.

Alex was surprised that even a town at the edge of the empire was almost as good as one of the better cities in the Crimson Empire.

That just went to show how great the Luminance empire was. Not to mention, this was supposed to be the weakened continent.

Alex couldn't wait to see the other continents. 'I'm getting ahead of myself,' he thought and walked through the town.

The houses, buildings, shops, all looked similar in design to ones from back in the Crimson Empire. Maybe even a little more outdated.

Alex was surprised. He knew that cultivators didn't like changes and liked to keep things as they were, but… did that really put them further behind than an isolated empire?

A True realm cultivator could live up to 400 years normally, and 500 years if he forced it.

A Saint realm cultivator could live up to 1000 years normally, and almost 2000 if they forced it.

With the number of people alive in this continent likely having been born before most of the people in the Crimson empire, he could see why the development was held back.

He walked through the busy street and came across a looking building that caught his eyes. The building itself was normal, but it was the name that caught his eyes.

Riverweed Branch of the Alchemy Guild.

'They have an Alchemy guild here as well?' Alex thought. He remembered the Alchemy guild in the Crimson Empire, but he never really took part in it.

However, this time, it might actually be a good idea to find himself a place since no one else would back him here.

But first, Alex needed food. Thinking that he left the place. He would come back here later.

Alex walked through the streets, ignoring the curious looks of the people who saw his skinny body.

Finally, he came across a rather grand-looking restaurant called the Three Faction Alliance Restaurant.

Alex smiled and walked in.

Chapter 594: Three Faction Alliance

The Three Factions Alliance was the alliance formed between the three sects in the Riverweed town.

Not only did they have a restaurant that Alex was currently standing in front of, but they also had many other places such as Auction houses, stores, libraries, and security personnel for guarding the town.

Alex walked up the few stairs to go into the restaurant. After he walked in, he finally saw how large the restaurant was.

This was a bustling restaurant with nearly hundreds of people inside.

There were almost 50 different tables in front of Alex, and that was just on the first floor.

Alex could see a staircase at the center of the room that one could use to go up to an open floor above as well.

He wanted to check what it was like up there with his spiritual sense but decided not to on the off chance there was someone that could sense his spiritual sense.

He looked around, but he couldn't find any free tables. So, he was forced to go sit at a table that already had a single person eating his food.

"I hope you won't mind me sitting here," Alex said as he pulled the chair and sat down in front of the middle-aged man.

The middle-aged man suddenly looked like he had seen a ghost and quickly wiped his mouth to say, "Certainly not, esteemed senior."

'Senior?' Alex thought. 'Do I look that old right now?' he thought. He was certainly not giving off a cultivation aura for the man to think he was a senior, so it had to be the face Alex assumed.

Still, he didn't think he looked that old. Maybe 25 years old at best.

Just as he was thinking, a waiter walked up to him. Alex noticed him and took a look at the menu in front of him.

However, before he could even make an order, the waiter asked, "Sir, are you a cultivator."

Alex looked towards the waiter. 'What a weird thing to ask in this place,' he thought. 'Maybe I should release my aura a little.'

"Yes," Alex said, releasing an aura close to Mind Tempering 1st realm.

"Would you mind changing seats then, sir?" the waiter asked. "Cultivators usually eat on the 2nd floor."

"Oh," Alex said and finally looked around. Due to the many people, he hadn't released his spiritual sense and had thus not realized that almost everyone that was sitting on the first floor was all mortals.

"The mortals can go to the second floor, so most are forced to wait even though we have tables empty," the waiter explained as respectfully as he could.

"Oh, I didn't know that," Alex said as he stood up. "I'm sorry to have bothered you." He told the middle-aged man and walked up to the second floor.

Finally, as he walked up the stairs, he saw and felt a cultivation aura from the people around him.

Most of them were in self tempering realm, but a few older folks were in the True realm as well.

However, he couldn't find anyone that either had a high cultivation base or young folks with the True cultivation realm.

He looked towards the left after reaching the 2nd floor and asked the waiter behind him, "what does that set of stairs lead to?"

"That leads to the 3rd floor, senior. Only VIP members and people they invited can go up there," the waiter said.

"Oh, so I can't go just because I want to, huh?" he asked.

"I'm afraid not, sir," the waiter said.

Alex nodded and made his way to an empty seat. On the 2nd floor, there were many.

The seat lied at the corner of the room, unfortunately away from any windows, but he wasn't here for the scenery anyway.

He looked at the menu and quickly ordered some food. He didn't know which was good, but he knew he needed nutrients, so he mostly ordered meat dishes along with a sort of vegetables.

He looked at the names of the dishes and was a little surprised.

'Common rank and True ranks? Foods have ranks too?' he thought. Crimson Empire didn't have it, and the players never really bothered with food as cultivators didn't require it.

He never cared about food enough to go around searching about it.

He looked at the prices and checked his storage bag. He never really had a lot of spirit stones after the other guy kept sending it back home.

He had managed to gather about 1000 True Spirit stones before he left, and he had already spent close to 400 True spirit stones in the capital for the various ingredients and formation materials.

Of the 600 he had remaining, he looked down and the menu and realized, about 50 would be gone today if he wanted to eat the best thing on it.

Alex sighed, but he had ways to earn his money back. So, without hesitation, he ordered 5 dishes that in total cost him 58 True Spirit stones.

The waiter nodded and left.

"I know, I know. Some of it is for you too," Alex said to Pearl in his robes who quietly sent him a message through the spiritual sense that said he wanted to eat some as well.

Alex felt a few watchful gaze falling on him, but they were all simply curious about his sunken physique and his missing arm.

He didn't show attention to these gazes and simply waited for the waiter to return with his food.

It took him about 20 minutes, but the waiter returned with his food. He put down all of the food and bowed a little before leaving.

Alex was left with the 5 different dishes he had ordered. Pearl poked his head out of the robe and looked at the food at the table.

"MEOW!" he said as he pointed towards one of the plates.

Alex took the chopsticks and tried the food Pearl pointed to. "Oh wow, it's good," he said.

"MOEW!" Pearl got angry. He wanted to try the food first.

"Haha, sorry. You can try the rest first," he said and brought out Pearl to place him on the table.

Even though he had grown in the many month since he had been with Alex, Pearl was still less than a foot in length.

His white body disappeared onto the white sheets that were on the table, but people still noticed.

Some were disgusted that a beast was eating on a table meant for humans, but those were in the minority.

Most people didn't care.

As Pearl started eating, Alex did too. The food was incredibly delicious and he could even feel the energy from it directly being absorbed by his body.

Some were certainly turning into Qi like all foods did for him. There was also a certain healing factor in the food, although it couldn't reach the same level as healing as a healing paste or an actual healing pill could provide.

In less than 10 minutes, Alex ate all of the food that was brought to him. Pearl certainly ate a lot, but that couldn't be considered to the amount Alex had ate.

Once he finished, he closed his eyes and looked into his body once more. As he did, he noticed that there was no food left in his stomach at all, and he had indeed gained some muscle mass.

It was a very low amount, but it was certainly something. 'I will have to eat a bit more maybe,' he thought.

He was certain there were pills that could immediately give him muscles, but he wasn't certain how well those would work with his body that had went through body cultivation.

Eating food so that his body could absorb as much energy needed to give him muscle over the course of a few days seemed like a better choice than a single pill that would instantly restore his muscle, but likely not the strength in them.

Alex put Pearl inside his robes and decided to leave. His stomach was empty and he could eat it all twice over, but he didn't think that was a good idea.

Certainly, it wasn't good for his pockets. 'I should take it slow. It's not like I have anywhere else to be immediately,' he thought.

He left the table and went on to pay. As he went down the stairs, he saw a bunch of people walk up past him.

He didn't look in their direction, but he caught an information about an auction taking place in the near future.

Alex thought back to his low spirit stones, and thought that it would be a good idea to get some from here.

As he paid for his meals, the staff couldn't help but look at the cost with wide eyes. Who in their right mind would eat over 50 True Spirit stones worth of food in one sitting? Was this the son of a successful merchant.

She looked towards the skinny Alex and didn't think that was true at all.

"Do you know any place around here where I can learn about the city and everything else?" he asked.

"Learning? Umm… there is a library about 50 paces right from outside the restaurant. You won't miss the building," she said.

"Thank you," Alex said and walked out.

As he was told, he took a right and walked down 50 paces until he saw something and nearly laughed out loud.

'She wasn't lying when she said I won't miss it,' he thought looked at a building across the street whose front wall looked like the cover of a book half opened, with a bookmark hanging from the top left.

The cover had a title written on it which read 'Three Faction Alliance library.'

Alex had guessed what the 'Three faction' meant, but he still wanted to learn more. So, he walked in.

Chapter 595: Geography of Luminance Empire

Alex walked up to the door of the library. The door looked like a small tear on the cover of a book, which was used as a handle.

Alex opened it up and walked in.

As soon as he walked in, Alex realized the building was much large than he had imagined. He didn't know if the outer section gave the illusion of being small or if the inner space was somewhat stretched using formations, but it was a lot larger for him.

Alex looked straight ahead. The main room of the library was circular. It looked like the inside of a tower as he finally saw the library go up to 20 meters high.

There was a space manipulation going on here with some formation.

The circular room had walls that were stuck with shelves that were filled to the brim with books. There were some ladders along the side to climb up to grab the books, but most people simply flew to get them.

Surrounded by the bookshelves were reading tables all laid out in a circular pattern.

And at the center of the room was a circular reception table sort of location where men and women of green, red, and blue stayed.

Those were the colors of the 3 factions, so Alex guessed they were the disciples of the 3 factions working as a librarian.

He truly realized how large the place was when he finally went past the corridor and into the center of the circular room.

He looked at the few people in the air, searching for their books, and so he decided to do that as well.

Searching for anything related to the world, leaving alchemy and formations for later, Alex flew towards a section of the library that was filled with books about the world.

Some taught about geography, some that taught about plants and animals, some that taught about the history of the world, some that taught about famous peoples, and some that even taught about famous sects and locations.

Alex wanted to learn about geography, so he took out one related to it and flipped it.

However, when he did so, he realized that aside from the cover of the book, there was nothing else written in the whole book.

"What?" Alex spoke a little too loudly and got a lot of 'Shhh' directed as him.

"Sorry," he whispered as quietly as he could. He picked out some of the other books on the shelf and looked at them.

They were blank on the inside too. 'So the first book wasn't a mistake, huh?' he thought.

He kept back the other books and looked at the geography book again. He sent in his spiritual sense to see what it was, and that was when he noticed a seal on it.

A faint, white formation was placed on the book. Judging from the seal, Alex deduced that it was part of a bigger formation that was constantly giving the book's seal the power to continue working.

Very likely, it was the same formation that expanded the space in this building.

'They have quite a bit more knowledge about formations than I would've thought,' Alex said to himself and slowly floated down to the ground.

If there was a seal, that meant he would have to get it opened.

Alex walked to the center of the room towards where the librarians were and quietly asked, "excuse me, how do I get the seal removed from this book?"

The girl took the book from Alex's hands while looking at his robes and said, "it will cost you 150 spirit stones."

"Sorry… cost?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "It costs money?"

"Of course, sir," The girl said. "Books in here cost somewhere from 1 True spirit stones to 10, depending on the book."

Alex was stunned. Maybe because he was getting a little used to the books in the Capital's library being completely free, he didn't expect to have to pay here.

"I see," Alex said. Just then, a man walked up next to him and handed the same woman the book.

The girl removed the seal and noted something in a talisman that was inside the book before replacing the talisman and giving it back to the man.

The man walked away without paying at all.

"He didn't pay," Alex said, pointing to the man that just left.

"If you are a member of the Three Faction alliance, you do not need to pay," she said. "If you are, you can bring out an identity talisman, and you too can take a book a week for free."

"I see," he said and took out 2 True spirit stones. He handed them to the lady who handed him back 50 spirit stones.

She then released the seal and said, "You also can only read the book inside the library. Please don't try to take it outside."

Alex was a little surprised about that too, but he didn't let it show on his face. He understood that it was likely only the disciples and elders from the 3 sects that could take the books away.

Even though the number of people in the library was quite sparse —may it be because of today being the last day of the week, or libraries just not being that popular— Alex still went on to find a relatively less crowded section of the library.

Alex didn't use his spiritual sense to quickly read the book. He had nowhere to go, no need to log out, no need to go eat food or practice alchemy.

He had all the time in the world, so he used it to read and digest the book as he did.

He had paid for the book, and he would read end to end no matter how long it would take.

It took him about 25 minutes to read the whole book. However slow he may want to read the book, he was still a cultivator, one with exceptional mental strength and capacity.

Since there was no 'comprehension' required for the knowledge, he could simply read it all and learn it. And that only took him 25 minutes.

Alex was quite surprised at the information he gained from this one single book.

Alex first saw the map of the Luminance empire. It was about the same as what Yao Jia had shown him, but this was more clear than the hasty drawing on the dirt she had made.

The Luminance Empire was cone-shaped, its northern border nearly 3 times as large as its southern border. There were a lot of islands that floated around the empire too, some that were part of the empire, some that were not.

The land was about 60% plane, while the rest 40% were mountainous. The mountains were clustered mostly along the eastern side of the empire, leaving the western half to be the plane that was home to the experts of the land.

The Radiant City, the capital city of the Luminance empire was located about 400 kilometers away from the western shore, and 2000 kilometers away from the southern shore.

Considering the Luminance empire was over 10 thousand kilometers in length and width, the capital was firmly located in the southwestern portion of the center of the city.

There were other many cities located around the empire, but most were located at the center or western side of the empire.

The eastern side of the mountain didn't seem to have a lot of cultivators willing to go there to settle.

The book read it was partly because of the many dangerous locations on the mountains that spanned from mountains with nothing but True beasts, to poisonous swamps that would even threaten to kill the True realm experts in the True emperor realm.

Alex also read about some mountain peaks that were so cold that most people couldn't even go near them without proper preparation.

Aside from those, there were also other various dangerous spots along those mountains known as the 'Dreaded Mountain range'.

That one book alone gave Alex a lot of information about this land that he would've likely never gained if he were to skip it for the internet if he still had access to it.

He nodded to himself at the information he learned and went back to the librarian to get it resealed and get another book to read after that.

Chapter 596: Fever

Alex continued reading some more books. After Geography, he went for History to learn not just about the land, but also the people that lived in it, the stories that took place in it.

He learned about how the Wei family, the current royal family of the Luminance empire came into existence, how their patriarch at the time used his exceptional poison art to win a war against other factions to become the emperor some 5000 years ago.

It also said that the patriarch then died fighting off invaders from other continents, although records of those fights were rather sparse.

It mentioned how the Families of the 7 colors came into existence. Alex read the name of the 7 great families and recognized 2 of them.

Fu family, a family that mostly used Fire techniques was the same Fu family as the one Fu Tao had been from.

They represented the Red color in the 7 colors, which consisted of Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Brown, Black, and White.

The royal Wei family donned the color purple, and could also be considered a pseudo-member of the Family of the 7 Colors, but they were far above the others in reputation, so only a few considered it.

Alex went on to read about the other historical events, one of which caught his eyes.

Nearly 1300 years ago, the western continent was shone bright with light from a meteor shower.

People from all over the empire said stories of the meteor striking close to them, and from those crash sites, people had discovered a lot of different types of weapons, artifacts, techniques, and many other things.

Alex reckoned that most consumables such as talismans and pills should have been destroyed by now, but the techniques and artifacts, as well as formations flags, should have been usable.

There were at least 3000 different instances of meteor strikes that were accounted for, and like more that weren't.

Alex wondered if there were some that he would be able to find as well, but he doubted that given how long it had been.

However, he did then read about secret realms popping up out of nowhere around most crash sites, especially in places that had a lot of different items in them, so he still had hope.

He then went on to read about the history of different sects and people that had appeared in the world. Most of the sect information only gave a vague description about the sects and Alex would likely have to find information about them from someplace else.

A few of the historical figures caught his eyes, but aside from them, there weren't a lot of extraordinary figures.

He continued reading for a little longer until the book ended up at the history of about a hundred years ago. Information about the last century would just be considered information and not history.

Alex wondered what he should read next and decided to go with a book that gave information on the various plants and beasts.

He knew most about the plants, but he read it with the hope that it would have more information than what he could find in the Crimson Empire.

As for beasts, with the lack of a game system to help guide him, every single piece of information would be vital for him.

He spent the next 4 hours learning about the plants and animals. After he was finished, he put those books back and decided to leave the library.

In total, he had spent about 22 True Spirit stones on those 4 books. While the one with geography didn't cost must, the others cost him somewhere between 5 and 8 True spirit stones.

Alex had also noticed a bunch of techniques in the library that he could learn from, but he decided not to get them and left.

When Alex walked out of the library, he was a little shocked.

"It's already night?" he thought as he looked around. The daylight had already disappeared, and darkness had taken its place.

The moon reigned high in the sky where the sun previously hung. It wasn't just evening, but actual night.

Alex wouldn't doubt it if someone told him it was close to midnight.

Still, it didn't look like it mattered that it was night. The city still roared and shouted like the lack of sunlight couldn't stop it.

Shops and services still were available everywhere Alex looked towards.

And for some reason, everyone else looked towards him as well. He couldn't walk 5 paces without someone turning their heads towards him.

They wouldn't linger on him for much longer, but he was starting to wonder why they were doing so.

'Am I that skinny looking?' he wondered as he checked his right hand. Indeed, he was skinny as a skeleton, but that should not bring this much attention back towards him.

'I should go cultivate more,' he thought, becoming more self-conscious towards his skinny body.

He could have gone to the Alchemy guild as he had wanted to, but he decided to go look for a tavern instead.

Avoiding the gazes of the people as much as possible, Alex located a place that said he could rent a place to stay.

It didn't look like a tavern, but Alex still went inside.

The moment he entered, the clerk looked towards him with his eyes narrowed.

"How may I help you, Fellow Daoist?" the man spoke.

"I'm looking for a place to stay," Alex said.

"We have places that cost 10 True spirit stones a month to places that cost 100 True Spirit stones a day. Which one would you like, Fellow Daoist?" the man asked.

Alex was a little surprised. The price difference was so much.

"What is the reason for such difference, if I may ask," Alex said.

"It's the facilities, fellow Daoist. As may be required, we have houses with training halls, Alchemy room, formation rooms, and other various rooms all fitted with top of the notch formations for your smooth rests and cultivation," the man said.

"Oh," Alex finally understood. He thought for a moment and realized he didn't need any of the facilities. He was going to spend most of the time outside of his house anyway and was also going to leave this town very soon anyway.

Still, he didn't want one that was completely worthless. So, he asked, "Is there one that costs about 10 spirit stones a week?"

"Of course, fellow Daoist," the man said as he handed Alex a talisman to look over.

When Alex looked at it, he was a little surprised. He hadn't expected the places he was going to rent to be actual houses on the outskirts of the town.

He had just expected them to be rooms in a tavern somewhere.

He looked through the list and chose one. "This," he said and told the man.

The man looked at it and nodded. "How many weeks would you like to stay, sir?" he asked.

Alex thought for a moment and asked a question of his own. "I heard there was an auction that was going to take place here soon. May I know when that is?"

"Yes, the Three Faction's auction will take place in 2 weeks," the man said.

"Then 2 weeks," Alex said and brought out 20 True spirit stones.

Once Alex got the talisman that acted as the key to the house, he was about to leave.

However, just as he turned around the man spoke once again.

"Fellow Daoist, do you want me to send a physician to your place as well? Our Three Faction alliance has the best physicians in town," the man said.

"Sorry?" Alex looked confused. "I don't need any physician."

The man's eyes widened. "My apologies. I didn't realize you were using a technique then. I assumed you had a fever. Please have a lovely stay."

Alex walked out of the location and frowned. Immediately, he drove his senses into his body to look for something he seemed to have completely skipped over.

Yang.

His body was radiating Yang like a man radiating heat when he had a fever. His body was giving of yang a lot more than previously either.

'I thought I had it under control,' he thought, but he had thought wrong. He realized that due to the last many days of constant cultivation, his constitution had gone out of control again.

'I need to go cultivate Yin,' he thought and left towards the new house he had rented.

Chapter 597: Ingredients

The people had stared at him because they thought he had a fever from the head he was radiating.

Had Alex realized that sooner, he would've found himself a place sooner than… midnight? Alex wasn't sure about the time either.

Without the time continuously blinking on the top right corner of his vision, Alex found it hard to gauge time.

'I should learn how to tell the time based on the position of the moon or stars,' he thought. 'Or maybe there were other ways people just knew.'

Alex sat down in a 4 by 4 meters room that was next to an alchemy room of the same size.

The house he had chosen came with 2 rooms, and the one he was in had a Qi Gathering formation that would be great for even someone in the True lord realm, let alone him with his True Disciple realm.

Although, it would be pretty useless since he would never be able to make a full rotation to gather any Qi in the area. The Yin Qi would likely dissolve into element-less Qi after coming into contact with Yang Qi.

Before starting his cultivation cycles, he looked at his body once more to see how much Yang he had been sending out.

Checking for the Yang was a weird sensation for Alex. Unless he was looking for it, Alex couldn't find the Yang anywhere at all on his body.

It felt normal for him like his body had no affinity at all. Fortunately, with his Supreme Yang spiritual root, he had some level of ability to sense his Yang.

'This is getting bad. I can't even tell when I'm releasing it a lot,' Alex thought. He feared that, just like his master, he too would have to spend months on end in closed cultivation to get his body constitution under control.

Hopefully, he was wrong about that.

He started cultivating, and very soon, he could feel the cold Qi lowering his body temperature to what was normal.

The first few cycles, he had to concentrate on it so that it didn't stop, but soon, he could do it without even thinking about it.

It became a muscle memory to him now. Still, he kept an eye on it so that he didn't accidentally start using the Five Yang Divine Path technique, which too had become muscle memory for him.

Once he was sure everything was going to go normally, he started thinking about the things he had to do.

The very first, most urgent thing that Alex needed to do was find a way to heal his arm.

The Saint Body Regeneration pill that could do so had 12 ingredients to it.

Winevein Poppy, Trileaved Periwinkle Leaf, Dried Torenia flower, Saint Blueflame Monkey's blood, Saint Hotfeather Eagle's tail feather, Ghostbane leaf, Two-headed Hydra's poison, Steelfur Rabbit's tendons, Seeking Mouse's whiskers, Blood Spirit ginseng, Azure Thimble twinflower, and finally, Three-colored Poison Lily.

His first task towards healing his arm without having to wait until he reached Saint realm and maybe find some ingredients here and there was to downgrade each of the ingredients to its True rank equivalent.

Thorny Bugloss, Silverstring Diascia, and Auburn Rue's seeds were 3 ingredients that were already downgraded for him by the Royal Alchemist thanks to his book.

For the rest, he was given some idea on how to.

For beast-related ingredients, Alex didn't have to worry much. For beasts that were named Saint before their ingredient, he could just use the True beasts of the same name.

For example, Saint BlueFlame Monkey's blood could be replaced with the blood of a Blueflame Monkey in the True Realm.

Similarly, Saint Hotfeather Eagle's Tail feather could also be replaced with one from a True Hotfeather Eagle.

As for the other two beasts in the list, those being the Two-Headed Hydra, and Steelfur rabbit, they were already in True realms, so Alex could downgrade them to Common realm, but it was better to keep them in the true realm.

Of the remaining 5 ingredients, as far as Alex knew, Ghostbane leaf and Azure Thimble twinflower weren't saint rank ingredients but True rank ingredients.

So, he wouldn't have to convert those either.

That left Seeking Mouse's whiskers, Blood spirit Ginseng, and Three-Colored Poison lily.

Alex had never heard of these three ingredients before today. Meaning, after today, he knew what they were.

Seeking mouse was as he had expected, a beast. But, it wasn't the type of beast he had expected. The thing with Seeking Mouse was that it didn't have a cultivation base and was just a normal mouse.

That wasn't to say its body contained no Qi at all. It wouldn't be an ingredient without any Qi or energy in it.

Seeking mouse, while not rare, were primarily used by people to scout places for them, seeking ruins, tombs, and other treacherous places.

So, they were usually in high demand and cost a lot. Alex was sure he would be able to get them, but, he would have to either go out searching for them on his own, or fight tooth and nail against someone in an auction to bid for it.

Three-colored Poison Lily was a poison flower that bloomed in the poisonous swamps of the Dreaded mountain range.

The number of colors in the flower denoted its potency and rank as well. Three colors meant it was a saint rank ingredient. So, for a true rank equivalent, he would just have to find a Two-Colored Poison Lily to be a True rank equivalent.

Finally, the Blood Spirit ginseng. This one Alex was most stuck on. He had, quite frankly, no idea what it even was. He had read about it in the books, but they weren't very helpful aside from what it was and what it did.

Its main usage was in restoring blood from what the book said. Aside from that, it mentioned nothing of where it could be found or how it could be found.

Alex would have to rely on his luck to find it. And then, he would have to somehow find an equivalent of that.

That was going to be very hard.

He had heard of Spirit ginseng, which was a Common rank ingredient, so it couldn't likely be the equivalent True rank ingredient.

He had also heard of Revitalizing Ginseng, which was supposed to make a Psuedo-Saint pill. While that was likely a True rank ingredient, there was a very high chance that was not the ingredient he was going to need.

Alex sent his spiritual sense into the storage bag to look through his ingredients.

Aside from dried Torenia flowers, he would have to find all the other 11 ingredients on his own.

That meant, he would have to go visit the Alchemy guild tomorrow morning.

He continued cultivating until he could feel a lot of his yang going down. After a full night of cultivation, his body's aura had died down by a significant amount.

It didn't help him heal his meridians though, as that could only be done using his other cultivation technique.

One saw the sunrise up outside with his spiritual sense, he did the final thing he had trained himself to do each day.

That was to go into his mind and collect all the floating silver threads. He wasn't sure why he was doing this, or if it was even of any use.

But, he still did it regardless of if he cultivated that day or not.

After he finished collecting the hundreds of floating threads in the air, that did nothing whatsoever to reduce the size of the silver mountain in his spiritual sea, he moved over to the crystal ball floating next to him.

Tiny amounts of black sludge floated around the crystal, making it opaque. As usual, Ning cleared the black sludge just in case that was what gave the Godslayer his tempting power.

Once he was done, he left his spiritual sea to train for a bit.

His training only involved using his spiritual sense to form a weapon and then try to use it.

He put forth his right hand as an illusory, misty white sword appeared on it that was almost transparent.

Alex looked at the sword and tried to grab it with his hands again, but as usual, that was impossible.

"What is going on? Am I not supposed to grab it?" he thought. The technique he read told nothing about how difficult it would be to grab this sword.

By now, Alex had come to realize that the technique was very much incomplete.

After an hour of training, doing nothing but making spiritual weapons of various other shapes, Alex left his new house and walked towards the Alchemy guild.

The town looked a little busier in the day today. Perhaps because most people had left for the Northern forest yesterday, Alex hadn't seen as many people.

As he walked past the fresh-smelling food, the chatter of the people, and the calls of the salesmen trying to sell others their goods and services, Ning came across a group of people with particularly boisterous voices.

"Fellow Daoists, please donate some spirit stones if you can. It will only go to the mentally challenged cultivators," they shouted.

'Mentally challenged?' Alex was surprised. He didn't know that was even possible for a cultivator who could heal from everything with the right ingredients.

"Please sir, would you like to donate?" the person saw Alex looking at them and directly asked him.

With no choice, Alex walked up to them and asked, "when you say mentally challenged, what are you talking about exactly?"

"Oh, sir must not know. There have been recently a group of people that suddenly forgot who they were and claim to have come here from another world."

"Most of them had integrated into the society, but some just can't work well at all. We are hoping to help them," the man said.

"Ah," Alex understood. They were trying to help the players.

Chapter 598: Hopeless Players

"Ah, are these the people that call themselves players?" Alex asked curiously. It had to be.

"Yes," the man said. "Would you like to help, fellow Daoist?"

"Yes, yes," Alex said, bringing out some True spirit stones. He handed them to the man who looked at him with a hint of shock in his eyes.

People usually didn't donate 40 True spirit stones for their causes.

"Thank you," the man said.

"It's alright. I'm a player myself, so I can understand what they are going through," Alex said.

"Ah, you were one of them as well?" the man asked with a raised eyebrow. "I'm happy to see that you are doing fine."

"Yes," Alex said. "Do most people not deal properly with this?"

The man shook his head. "Breaking down and crying all day long is one of the better scenarios. Given how fast these people breakthrough, it's always a positive if they don't decide to go on a rampage out of their minds."

"They say they just want to go home. Some… even end up killing themselves to do so," the man said.

Alex felt terrible. Knowing that he was the reason for this, albeit unintentionally, wasn't a very good feeling.

"Is it possible for me to visit these people? I just want to speak to them," Alex said.

The man looked towards the lady who was busy calling other people for donations and looked back to say, "sure, fellow Daoist. Come with me," the man said and took him to a giant building behind him.

Alex followed the man and entered the house. Before even entering, he had sent his spiritual sense inside and saw a lot of people, with various levels of cultivation base, ranging from people in Muscle Tempering to people in the True King realm.

Alex entered the house and saw the group of people, huddled around together, all life lost from their eyes.

He wondered if that would have been him as well had he not retained the memories.

The people looked at him, but there was no curiosity in their eyes. They didn't care who he was or why he was here. They just wanted to go home.

"Can I speak to them in private, brother?" Alex asked.

The man hesitated for a bit, not sure if he should let him.

"Please, I'm someone like them and understand their problem. I just want to help them," he said.

The man still hesitated, but gave up in the end and walked outside. However, Alex could sense him listening through the door.

Alex smiled. He brought out a metal plate from his storage and threw it onto the ground, creating a sound barrier around him and the other players.

Finally, the players looked concerned and got defensive.

"Don't worry, I'm not here to hurt you," Alex said. "I'm a player as well, and I want to help you all."

"A player?" the men and women finally stirred curiously.

"Yes, and I am here to bring you… a little information," Alex said. He was about to say hope, but… he wasn't sure the information he was about to give could even give them any hope.

After all, he was going to have to omit the part of the information that did give hope.

"The day you guys regained your control and realized you were in the Luminance empire, a person comes to the city I was to speak to us," Alex said.

The people listened intently, wondering what he was going to say.

"That person was a close acquaintance of the creator of the game," Alex continued. Curiously peaked to levels previously that could be thought impossible amidst these people.

"She gave me a bit of information that I have already spread in the home city, and I am going to give you that same information."

"There is no way back home right now," Alex said, immediately pouring water on everyone that had become somewhat hopeful.

"But there will be one in about 40 years," Alex said. "But in 40 years, the world back home won't be the one you left behind. It would have moved on."

"Home… is not what you should be seeking right now. What you should be seeking is survival."

"You can either stay around for 40 years and go back home, or you can make a new life right here, right now."

"Either way, you will have to get up and get to work. You can't live off of others forever," Alex said.

"Also, do not worry about your family. While… you were stuck here, the person that was previously controlling your body, a clone of yours is back at home, taking care of everyone," Alex said.

"Are you… telling the truth?" the people asked.

"Did the empire send you perhaps?" some other people asked him.

"Nobody sent me. My name is Alex Benton, from Mapleleaf city, currently living in Oakleaf city to study at the Oakleaf university. I have a mother and father who didn't play the game, so like most of you, I worry about them too."

"But then, I remember that a version of me is out there, looking after them, so my worries fade away. I hope yours do too," Alex said.

"Brother," one man said. "I… I have a wife. She plays the game too. So, she should be stuck in the game as well, right?"

"Ah," Alex thought. "What continent was she in?"

"She said it was the Northern Continent," the man said.

"If you want to see your wife, your children, your friends, and families that might be in the other continents, then you will have to get out of here and cultivate to get stronger. If you reach the highest highs of cultivation, you can easily go search for your family members," Alex said. "Do you not want to?"

"Yes, I do," one man said.

"I do too," another woman said.

"Can we reach the peak of cultivation? I… don't think I even understand what cultivation even is really," a young lady about the age of Alex said.

"That I cannot help you in," Alex said. "Everyone had their own path to forge. I have my own. But, you are not alone. Like the people outside, there will be many that will help you on your path."

"Accept the help you receive and help each other. That way, you will surely reach the peak of cultivation," Alex said.

The group started speaking in murmurs and soon one person stood up. "I still have a bit of doubt about your words, but you are right, sitting around doing nothing is not the way to go."

"That's right," another person stood up.

A few people stood up after them, but the majority still stayed down, unsure what they wanted to do.

"No need to rush. You can take your time," Alex said. 'You have so much of it anyway.'

He then picked up the formation plate from below him and got rid of his connection to it.

Suddenly, the sound barrier was destroyed and the person outside finally heard sounds. He realized something had been wrong and immediately walked in.

When he did, he saw the group of people on their feet, their eyes shining with motivation.

"What did you do," the man asked.

"Told them the thing they needed to hear," Alex said and turned towards them once again. "Make sure to spread those words elsewhere too. There should be many people that need it."

Alex left. The working man followed him outside.

"Thank you for what you're doing," Alex said.

"No… the problem," the man was still a little confused as to what had just happened in there. "It's the Royal decree after all."

"Oh, is it?" Alex was a little surprised. "Then can I expect a lot of people to be helped similarly in other cities too?"

"Yes," the man said.

"I see. Still, you have my thanks," Alex said and left. He had helped the players as much as he could while keeping some information to himself.

He didn't tell them that their home was in this world. If the news spread that the fifth continent had people living, who knew what the people from the other continents would do.

He felt it necessary to keep just that piece of information hidden.

Alex walked through the busy streets and finally reached the Alchemy guild that he had meant to come here since yesterday.

He walked into an open hall of people walking in and out of it. There was a reception at the center with 4 to 5 people working on it with a queue on each of those lines like people waiting for their turns at a bank.

Two giant, circular pillars held the ceiling that was nearly 10 meters high. Alex saw two doors on either side of the reception that led to… somewhere.

Alex got into a queue and waited for his turn.

"How many I help you, Fellow Daoist?" the lady at the reception asked him when it was his turn.

Alex handed her a talisman and said, "I'm looking to buy any of these ingredients."

The receptionist looked at the list and compared it to something else she read through using a metal plate that didn't look so different from the nameplate that the Hong Wu sect used.

"We have Winevein Poppy and Hotfeather Eagle's tail feather," the lady said.

Alex smiled. That was 2 more ingredients down.

"I would like to buy them please," Alex said.

"Yes," the receptionist said. "These will be 12 True Spirit Stones in total. You can get some discounts if you have an Alchemist's badge."

"A… discount?"

Chapter 599: Alchemist Guild

"I can get a discount?" Alex asked curiously. While he had enough money, for now, to buy the ingredients 10 times over and not worry about it, he wasn't going to go around spending the most for it.

Every single spirit stone he didn't have to pay, was a spirit stone he could use to buy something else. Perhaps, something more important.

"Yes, Fellow Daoist. If you have an Alchemist badge, you can get a discount," the woman said.

"Oh," Alex's hopes got crushed. "I'm afraid I have nothing like that."

He brought out the 12 spirit stones as asked for and handed them to the woman.

The woman looked into her metal plate again, and suddenly, on top of the counter where Alex hadn't noticed a formation before, two wooden boxes appeared out of nowhere.

"Here you go, Fellow Daoist," she said.

Alex took the box and looked into it to see 3 sets of each of the two ingredients. The poppy and the feather made the same names pop up in his head as well as the age of the ingredients.

The poppy was about 49 years old, while the feather was about 88 years old. They had most likely come from the same plant and bird.

Alex fell into thought as he saw that information. He knew that ingredients with greater age had a higher potency, but he wasn't sure how useful age was in Alchemy beyond that.

He would have to look up information on that later.

"Do you need anything else, Fellow Daoist?" the lady asked.

"Um, yes. Can you please explain to me about this… Alchemist badge?" Alex asked.

The lady nodded and got to explain.

The alchemist badge was something an alchemist would gain after joining the Alchemist guild. With it, the Alchemists would gain a lot of different benefits that a normal Alchemist would just dream of.

For one, Alchemists could forget about gathering ingredients, worrying about finding customers or finding a place to sell their pills.

It would all be handled by the guild. All an alchemist would have to do is take on missions and make the pills.

The other benefit that alchemists would get was less price while buying ingredients. Since the Alchemist guild was the main source of ingredients, aside from the occasional auctions. Alchemists benefited from this a lot.

There was also the factor of security. Hurting or offending one alchemist usually meant offending all alchemists in the guild. If an Alchemist complained about a customer, it was likely that the customer could never get another pill made from any alchemist that was part of the guild.

Alex found all of these benefits to be quite amazing. But…

"I'm planning on leaving this place soon. Will that… create problems at all?" he asked.

"Oh, no Fellow Daoist. Alchemist guild is available in all regions of the land. Where ever there is a city or town, we are available."

Alex nodded. "I see."

'So it's like a bank huh? I won't have to worry about being stuck to a single alchemist guild then,' he thought.

"I would like to become an Alchemist of the Alchemist guild then," he said.

The lady nodded and brought out a talisman for him to fill. "It will cost you 20 True spirit stones," the lady said.

"I have to pay, huh?" he thought and casually brought out another 20 True spirit stones. The benefits of getting in were enough for the price.

Alex took it talisman and moved to the side. He put his spiritual sense to fill the first thing and…

Name.

Alex froze. The first thing it had asked for was a name. What name should he give?

If it was right after he had gained freedom, he would've put in the name Alex without any hesitation.

However, now he wasn't sure if giving out his real name to the world, announcing that he was a player was a good idea or not.

Players were supposed to have lost knowledge of who they were, knowing nothing of cultivation to an extent. If he suddenly showed up like an alchemist that could make high-grade pills, the people would get really suspicious.

He couldn't imagine how many people would come to talk to him. Some may even try to kidnap him if they realize that a lot of the players had above-average body and spirit roots.

"No, I can not put in Alex," he thought and put in 'Yu Ming' as his name. The better he hid, the better his chances of survival.

Besides, he was already used to the name.

He then went on to the rest of the information. It was normal information the guild wanted, like your age, your cultivation base, your affiliations, and your highest pill level.

Alex filled almost everything truthfully. He put 19 for age, True Disciple 3rd realm for cultivation base, and None for affiliations.

However, for the highest pill, he decided to go with a safer choice. While he had made a heaven-grade True pill before, it was more luck than anything.

Still, the best would be above 40%. For a young man that didn't even hit 20, this would likely be an amazing feat even in the Luminance empire.

So, he went with 27% harmony. He would have to make some intentional mistakes, but that would be necessary to stay under the radar.

Once Alex was done with the talisman, he returned back to the reception and handed it over to the lady, along with the payment.

The lady scanned it and showed a hint of surprise on her face. She reached into her storage bag and brought out another talisman.

"This will be the pill you will have to make in the test, senior. You will be given 3 sets to make the pills. Please memorize it by 3 days when the test takes place," the lady said.

'Senior?' Alex was a little surprised to see the lady go from 'fellow Daoist to 'senior'.

'Did she not realize my cultivation base before this?' he chuckled a little.

Once he got what he wanted from the Alchemy guild, he took off towards the Library once more, where he would learn about various other things.

Three days later, on the morning of the day when his Alchemist guild's test was to take place, Alex sat in his room, having just been done with absorbing the threads in his spiritual sea and clearing the black sludge around the crystal.

Once he was done, he went onto the final part of his cultivation, which was the training part.

Pearl was moving around the room, having finally started cultivating with Alex after his Yang energy had significantly died down.

Alex focused on his right hand as energy slowly released from his mind as a formless misty white substance that was only visible to him.

It had taken him a while to realize that the only reason he could even see it was because he was using his spiritual sense to control it.

Pearl had asked him what he was doing the other day, and that was what had led him to this discovery. At the same time, he had also discovered that others could see this energy if they used their spiritual sense as well.

Alex took a deep breath and concentrated. Within a matter of seconds, the formless misty-white energy took the shape of the steel sword he used to own.

He looked at the sword with a wry smile on his face. He had tried to grab it again, but as usual, it wouldn't work.

He tried with Qi as well, but that didn't work either. He was still stumped on how to get it to—

"Wait," he thought as he thought of something. "No way it's that easy."

If it were, he would be a fool to not have thought of it before today.

Alex slowly closed his hand around the handle of the newly made sword, but he made no effort to grab it.

Instead, he moved his hand as if he were holding a real sword. At the same time, he imagined the sword moving along with his hand.

His hand moved away towards the right, while the sword remained where it was. However, as if it was lagging a bit, the sword moved as well and arrived at the place where his hands had come to just a second later.

"Holy Shit! I'm an idiot!" Alex cursed himself. All this time, he had tried using physical and elemental effort to move the sword, but not a single time had he thought of moving it with his mind.

He had been expecting it to be an actual weapon, but he should have known.

He tried moving the sword around for a few minutes, but it was hard. His body wasn't used to thinking of moving something instead of actually doing it.

His hands always ended up moving before the sword did. He tried moving it without using his hands, but that was beyond hard.

Not having something like his hand to guide the sword, he had a hard time visualizing the sword's movement.

Finally, after failing at it for a while, he resorted to using his hand to guide again.

Then, he stopped.

It was about time to go back to the Alchemist guild for his test today. He vaguely remembered the time he had taken the test for the Hong Wu sect.

Was that him or the other guy? The memories had started to become so vivid that it was hard to tell now.

He felt like it was still him for a day or two during the early days. So, he might have been the one that actually took the test there.

A smile appeared on Alex's face. He was looking forward to this examination.

Chapter 600: Alarm

Alex appeared in the Alchemist guild early in the morning. He sat on the chairs laid around the corner of the guildhall, next to a massive board with moving letters on it, reminding him of the ranking stone, and Contribution hall back in the Hong Wu sect.

Next to him were a few people gathered there as well, all of whom either wore a green robe, marking the, from the Fire Spirit sect or wore either an Iron or a Bronze colored badge around their chest that Alex had come to know to be the Alchemist badge.

Because of this, Alex doubted they were all here for the same thing.

Of the 13 present, including himself, some were here to enter the guild like him but as a Common Rank alchemist, while he was to become a True rank Alchemist.

Others were here to take a test to show their advancements to show that they had advanced enough to make a higher grade pill.

Alex wondered if there were any True-Earth Alchemists that were trying to ascend to become True Heaven Alchemists.

Although, in such a small town, that would likely be impossible. Still, he couldn't deny that this small town would likely be one of the better cities in the Crimson Empire.

He slowly scanned everyone's badge with his spiritual sense and noticed one person with an elderly face that had a silver badge around his chest with the word 'True' written on it.

Iron badges were for Mortal grade alchemists, while Bronze badges were for Earth grade alchemists. Going by the same logic, Alex figured Silver badges would be for Heaven grade alchemists, and Gold for Immortal grade alchemists.

Immortal grade… did those alchemists even exist? Alex thought they had to. After all, he had been one when he was a Common Rank alchemist.

Suddenly, he heard footsteps and stirred. The other men and women that had been there stirred a little as well.

Alex saw two people walk out of the door to the left of the reception.

Of the two, the male wore a green robe with a silver badge hung around his neck that said the word 'Common', while the female wore a light blue robe that didn't seem to belong to any factions.

She wore a necklace of bronze color, that said the word 'True'.

The man staggered a step behind the woman and stopped to let her move forward.

Alex glanced at them and got a general estimate of their cultivation base.

The man that looked to be a bit over 25 years old was in the Mind Tempering 6th realm, while the woman who seem to be of the same age was at True Master 9th realm.

Although, Alex was likely wrong on the woman's cultivation base as he wasn't used to sensing the cultivation base of people whose cultivation base was so high above his own.

The woman took out a list and then turned her head to look at them.

"I am Han Sha, and this is Jin Tiangshen. We will be your examiner for today."

"Those taking the Common Alchemist test, please follow him. Those who are taking the True Alchemist test. Please follow me."

The woman said nothing else and took off towards the right doorway of the reception.

Alex, along with 3 other people followed the woman to an open area.

Once she stopped, she turned around and looked at the only figure among the group of four, without a badge.

"You, is this your first time?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said, a little surprised that she cared. From how little she spoke until now, he was sure she was only here because it was her duty.

"I'm sorry, but you will have to take a little different test," she said.

"Eh? Why am I being singled out?" Alex asked at the unfairness.

"Since we don't know if you are truly an alchemist, we will have to test you by having you make a common pill first," she said. "We would rather not have you destroy True rank ingredients just in case."

"I see," Alex said. He was a little irritated, but he understood the logic behind it.

4 people walked in front of the side, all of them around the Bone Tempering realm of cultivation base.

Each of them held a box in their hands with a formation carved on the metal lid.

Alex understood what it was. He sighed and brought out his storage bags. At the same time, the other 3 who had been through this process already, brought out their storage bags as well.

A young man appeared in front of Alex and took his storage bags.

"Please use your Qi to lock the box," the woman said. The 4 of them did as they were said.

"These 4 will be your aid in today's test, as well as the invigilators," the woman said. "They already have the ingredients for your test, so you three may go take the test right now."

The 3 of the other examinees left.

Alex stood there and waited for his turn. "Do you have any pill you would like to make?" she asked.

"Any is fine really," Alex said. It was a common rank pill, so he didn't have to worry about it at all.

"Okay, then choose one," she said.

Alex thought of a random pill and said, "Purple Dream Pill".

Han Sha nodded and took out her talisman to call for someone. Moments later, a man rushed to her with a storage bag.

Han Sha took the storage bag and handed it to the aid, rather than him. Alex took notice of that.

"You may go in," she said.

Alex nodded and turned towards one of the rooms on the side of the hall they were in, which was an Alchemy room.

He walked up to the door and saw that it needed a key, which his aid produced from somewhere, and placed it there.

Then, Alex walked in.

RING RING RING

Suddenly, as if alarms going off, a red light flashed in the room he was about to enter while releasing a loud ringing sound.

"Huh?" Alex stepped back. To say he wasn't surprised would be to lie.

"What's this?" he asked.

"Are you hiding a storage bag on you?" Han Sha said with a frowning face. She had already sent her Qi sense to sense his outer body and had sensed no storage bag, so she only got angrier.

"What? No, I don't have any," Alex said, which he was telling the truth.

"No way, you are hiding it somewhere," the woman claimed. "That formation there is meant to find a storage bag."

"But I really don't have—" Alex stopped, but he still finished his sentence, "—any."

He had right at the end of his sentence remembered the golden ring with the large ruby-like gemstone attached to it.

According to Lady Ren, and an implication from Hao Ya, he had learned that the ring was a storage ring.

Was that what had caused the ringing? He was surprised that the formation in the room could sense something even his spiritual sense hadn't noticed when he was in the Mind Tempering realm.

As a True Disciple realm cultivator, all he could notice was 'something fishy' about the ring at best. He felt like commending the formation maker but now was not the time.

"Then why did the alarms go off?" Han Sha demanded.

"I don't know," Alex said. "Look," he said as he stripped the upper robe and placed it on the ground next to him, revealing his skinny body with a missing left arm.

"See? I don't have anything," he said, showing his empty body and empty hands.

The woman looked closely and even used her Qi sense more aggressively to look through his entire body. However, she couldn't find anything and looked confused.

"You really don't have any?" she said.

"Yes," Alex said, picking up robes again. The lady had already scanned the robe, but she didn't find anything there either. Aside from the randomly thrown ring inside of it, that is.

But, that ring gave her no suspicion at all.

"Okay," she said, giving them permission to go back to the room.

Alex nodded and returned back to the room, but once again, the alarms went off.

"See?" Alex said.

Han Sha frowned, but she wasn't able to tell what was wrong.

"I should wear this," Alex said and wore his robe, but didn't put on his ring.

"By the way, Can I open that box for once, brother?" Alex said as he opened the box before the man could say anything.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Oh, I forgot to take out my cauldron," Alex said.

"You won't be needing it. You will be using a normal cauldron, like everyone else," she said.

Alex already knew that. He had sensed the cauldron in the other room and knew that was how the test was going to be taken.

"Very well," he said, closing the box. At the same time, he slipped his ring into the box.

"Let's go. I don't have all the time in the world," Alex said and went towards the door.

Without his storage ring, there wouldn't be any probl—

RING RING RING

"What the hell?" Alex was very surprised now. At first, he had it was his storage ring that was causing the alarm.

But now he knew what the cause was.

"This is a broken formation, isn't it?" he asked out loud.

Han Sha's frown deepened. She was an alchemist, not a formation expert, so she couldn't respond to his claims.

She looked at the other rooms and her frown only got deeper. Because there were 4 participants in today's exam, they had only bothered to activate 4 of the Alchemy rooms' exam formation.

She couldn't go and ask them to activate another one as that would take some time. She didn't have much.

She wasn't going to spend more than 2 hours on this exam, and waiting for that would have would cause it to get longer.

In the end, she sighed. "Give me your key," she said to the young man holding the body.

The young man took out his key from around his neck and handed it to Han Sha. Han Sha then handed it to Alex and said, "get it."

Alex wore the metal key around his neck and walked in. This time, the formation made no alarming sound, giving him some relief.

He looked at the small alchemy room with a… surprisingly above average cauldron in the center.

He walked up to the cauldron as he heard the door shut behind him. He sat down and looked to the side, and his face changed a little.

"What are you doing?" he asked Han Sha who held his box and a few storage bags.

Han Sha sat down next to him and said, "To ensure that you do not cheat, I will be working as your aid and invigilator today."

Chapter 601: Pass

Alex was a little surprised, but he shrugged his shoulders and let her do whatever she wanted.

He looked at the iron cauldron in front of him, way better than the black cauldrons that he would find in the Crimson Empire.

He looked around and saw the lid propped against the wall not far from him. With a thought, the lid flew towards him and stayed to the side.

Then, he got to cleaning the cauldron. Who knew what sort of pills were made in this cauldron, so the first thing he needed to do was remove the powders that may be stuck on the inside of the cauldron.

Han Sha looked at him weirdly but didn't say anything. Every alchemist had their own thing that they would do before making a pill.

"So I should start with the common pill right?" he asked her.

Han Sha nodded and handed him the storage bag that had the ingredients for the common pill.

Alex increased the fire beneath the cauldron to prepare to make the Purple dream pill.

Han Sha's face suddenly turned weird. 'Why is he putting on the lid?' she asked himself. Not a single one of the different alchemists she knew would ever close the lid.

Alex ignored her and put in the first ingredient. He used his spiritual sense to look at what was happening inside and moved it around.

'Oh…' Alex thought as he moved the ingredients. He realized that information of the ingredient, the shape of it to be exact, was being sent to Alex.

The shape was quite important for the structure of the pill, but he wasn't sure why he was getting that information. Did he get that information before?

Only then did he come to realize that this was the first time he made a common pill. All the other times he made a common pill, the memories he had weren't his own.

The experience felt so much like his own that he had mistaken it.

He would have to be extra careful now.

Just slightly off the timing, Alex put in the second ingredient. He hoped that was good enough to make enough mistakes that he didn't accidentally create an Immortal grade pill.

The information of this ingredient's shape was also getting back to him through his spiritual sense. In the back of his head, he was almost sure that if he slowed down the motion of the 2nd ingredient while lowering the heat at the same time, the shape of the powder would be a different shape.

This continued for all the different ingredients that he put in after that. The shape and a mild hint of what could be if he tweaked the recipe around floated into his head.

When he was done in the end, he took out the pill from the cauldron and gave it to Han Sha.

At the same time, he closed his eyes and started thinking of what had happened.

'The shapes… if I can change it… will I be able to better fit them together?' Alex wondered.

No-Gap. He remembered what the Royal Alchemist had told him. If he could remove the gap from a pill, its harmony would shoot up.

'I see,' he thought. His ability to improve a common pill that he thought was automatic was not. It was all based on his instinct and knowledge that he would have to use to make a recipe whose powders would fall into the perfect shape.

"67%!" Han Sha said with a bit of a shock. "You are not a bad Alchemist," she said.

Her record for a common pill was around 70% after reaching the True realm. On a normal day, however, it would be around 50-55%.

Seeing Alex casually make such a high-grade pill so casually hit her pride a little. 'And here I made an implication that he wasn't an Alchemist.'

She waited for Alex to start, but he kept his eyes closed. She wondered what he was doing, but then he opened his eyes.

He seemed to have a bit of understanding about something. 'Did he go through an enlightening? No way, that was too quick,' she thought.

"Will you continue?" she asked.

"Ah yes," Alex said and cleared the cauldron again before asking for the ingredients.

Han Sha handed it to him and waited for him to start.

Alex thought back to the recipe of the new pill called Clear Eyes0 Pill. According to the recipe, it was a pill that would help magnify the vision in one's eyes to see everything around them more clearly.

Alex had remembered the Royal Alchemist using a similar pill and had wondered if it was the same pill.

It was a useless pill to anyone with a spiritual sense, but to a normal cultivator, it could come in quite handy.

Alex waited for the cauldron to reach the appropriate temperature before putting in the first ingredient.

As he moved the ingredients around, Alex nodded to himself internally when no information of the shape appeared in his mind despite looking at the shape directly with his strained spiritual sense.

He understood that the Alchemy God's Knowledge technique was also responsible for what happened during common pill making aside from just his instincts.

Or, it would be better to say that the technique was honing his instinct to realize what he did.

He put away those thoughts for now and focused on making the Clear Eyes pill.

As Alex put the 2nd ingredient in, he wondered where he should make the mistake. It was certain that he didn't want to get a Silver badge, but he also didn't want to make enough mistakes to not even reach the Earth grade.

So, he only made a small mistake every 2 ingredients. He decided to make the rest of the mistake later on.

As the combination of powders swirled around inside the cauldron, finally it was time to gather them all and make the pill.

The pill forming process went normally, but when it came time for the Elemental Guidance technique to move the energy through the pill, he slackened off a bit.

Instead of giving his 100%, he gave 85%. With the mistakes he had made before, he was sure that he would get a good harmony that would fit where he wanted to be.

So, he opened the lid and pulled out the pill. When the pill fell on his hand, he smiled.

Perfect.

He gave it to Han Sha, who was about to snatch it from his hands if he didn't and put it in the Pill tester.

The pill tester looked a little different from what it would in the Crimson Empire, its shape was more cylindrical, rather than conical, it still had the same metal plate on the bottom, making it more or less the same item.

The fog rose on this one as well as it quickly crossed 10%. Han Sha watched as the fog rose until it passed 20% as well.

When it went past 25%, she looked shocked. Finally, it stopped at 30%.

She put down the pill tester and cupped her fist and bowed towards him a little. "Congratulations on becoming a True Earth Alchemist," she said.

"Thank you," Alex said as he stood up from the spot.

Han Sha looked a little surprised. "Are you not going to make the other 2 pills?" she asked.

"No need, I got what I wanted," Alex said and walked away.

He took back his storage bags and ring and walked out of the room with Han Sha.

"Thank you for your time, sister Han," Alex said with a little bow.

Han Sha nodded a little and looked to the side. One of the participants seems to have been done already.

"Please wait around, we will start the ceremony after all the tests are complete," she said.

Alex nodded and waited. Of the remaining girl and old man, the girl seemed to have failed as she walked out dejectedly, while the old man looked happy as though he had passed.

Once they were all there, a small ceremony took place to mark their entrance or ascension in rank in the Alchemist Guild.

Alex was given a Bronze badge that said 'True' at the front. He sent his spiritual sense into the badge and as expected, it worked exactly like a nameplate did, marking his name, age, current mission, and…

"Contribution point?" Alex looked surprised. He didn't know he would have to contribute to the guild, but on second thought, it made sense.

Han Sha gave a brief explanation of what they could and could not do.

One thing that caught his ears that made him intrigued was that most clients would give about 2 or 3 sets of ingredients per pill they wanted to get made.

If you could make the pill in one set at the harmony they demanded, you could keep the rest of the ingredients.

'That's quite nifty,' he thought.

Once the explanation was over, they all left. Alex decided to immediately get to work with making the pills for the various missions.

He went out to the reception hall, his new bronze badge on his chest. People who saw him now looked at him with an eye of respect all because of the badge.

Alex walked towards the board on the right of the hall with the various moving letters on it.

He attached his badged onto an engraving on the wooden wall, and suddenly he was aware of all the different missions he could take on.

The board only showed missions he was eligible to make, so he could choose any he wanted to.

When he chose a mission, his connection with the mission board suddenly vanished.

Chapter 602: Big Pearl

Alex tried to reconnect, but only a single piece of information came back to him.

-Please complete the current mission-

"Ah right, it's one mission at a time," Alex thought. He walked to an alchemy room that was free for anyone with a badge to use and sat down.

In less than a minute, a girl walked in with a storage bag. "Do you need an air, sir alchemist?" the girl asked.

"It's fine, you can leave," Alex said. The girl bowed and left. Alex closed the door and looked at the storage bag.

Inside the storage bag were 4 different types of items.

Ingredients, Recipe, Pill Tester, and Pill bottle.

Alex didn't necessarily have to use it all from this bag, but the guild gave it to him for convenience's sake.

Alex took out the recipe first of all and read the recipe. As soon as he glanced at it, the information was firmly lodged into his mind.

Then, he looked through the ingredients and made sure they were all good.

Finally, he looked into his badge again.

[

Name: Yu Ming

Age: 19

Rank: True Earth Alchemist

Contribution: 0

Current Mission: Prepare a Soul Lifting pill of 25% or higher.

]

25% or higher. Alex had 3 chances to get that level of pill given that there were 3 sets of ingredients in the storage bag.

Most people would likely try to make some pill that was higher in harmony, but Alex didn't care for that.

The only reason you would make a very high harmony pill when not required was to make a name for yourself amongst the civilians.

The clients could always request a specific alchemist to make a pill. For those times, you wanted yourself to have a reputation.

Alex wasn't going to be staying here for much longer. Gaining a reputation thus was the least of his worries.

He brought out his Golden Jade cauldron and started making the Soul Lifting pill.

In 1 hour, he ended up making all of the 3 pills with 3 different harmonies of 32%, 36%, and 37%.

For a pill whose recipe he had only seen just now, he had made the quite good quality of pills. If he continued with it, he would likely reach 40% very soon, but he didn't have the ingredients for that.

Alex took the 36% and 37% pills for himself and put the 32% pill in the pill bottle.

He went to the staff that worked like the reception, but only for the alchemists, and handed them the bag and his badge.

Once they confirmed that the mission was complete, they rewarded him for the mission.

36 True spirit stones. The reward was originally meant to be 40 spirit stones, but the guild took 10% of it.

Considering how much ease it was to find the job, Alex had no complaints whatsoever.

He kept the spirit stones into this bag and went to the board outside to take another mission.

It was barely in the early afternoon when he finished 3 missions, and amassed an extra 5 pills for himself.

After resting for a bit, he went for his 4th mission of the day. By the end of the day, he had easily made over 200 True Spirit stones amidst the various prices on each of the pills he made.

Even the staff members were very shocked to see him make so many pills in a single day.

Alex got away from the questioning by lying to them that he didn't need to make more than a single pill. That was still above average for most cases, but it wasn't as outrageous as making 20 True rank pills in 8 hours.

From a minor investigation, he had come to find out that most alchemists around his level usually did about 2 or 3 missions a day, which would have them make 6 to 9 pills a day most of the time.

After that, they wouldn't be able to make a single pill. Not only would they be mentally exhausted, but their Qi would also dry out as well. Especially if they were in the early True realms.

Alex wondered if his Qi reserve was larger than the average cultivator. He knew it was dense, but he had never thought if it was a greater amount as well.

'That must be it,' he thought.

Once he went back home, Alex continued cultivating. This time, he called out Pearl and had him cultivate alongside him.

Cuts appeared all over his body, but he didn't feel any pain. It was hard to feel any pain as the gap between the two of them was not only a major realm but also an entire 2 realms within it.

Alex wanted Pearl to immediately break through to the True realm, but he didn't have any monster cores on him to feed Pearl.

He would have to go to the forest for that, but he didn't want to. He felt it would be better for Pearl to break through with his cultivation rather than outside help for this important step.

So, Alex forced Pearl to cultivate day and night with an occasional spar to energize his body and help recycle his Qi.

On the 6th day, while Alex was focused on removing the Yang from his body that had accumulated over the past couple of days, he felt something stir aside from him.

So, he stopped and turned around to check Pearl. When he did, he saw that Pearl was starting to break through.

Immediately, Alex pulled in all the Yang that he was emanating, no matter how little he was.

Then, he stepped to the side and waited for Pearl to be done.

After an hour more, he felt something change in Pearl and suddenly, a bright golden light exploded from him.

The light turned into golden motes that hung in the air as it slowly drifted downwards like it were confetti celebrating Pearl's advancement to the True Realm.

"Haha, Pearl you did it. You—" suddenly he stopped. Alex's eyes went wide as a silhouette of a beast appeared behind Pearl.

It was about 2 meters tall and 3 meters long. It looked somewhat like Pearl, but not entirely. The face of the beast didn't look cat-like which Pearl had.

Also, the main difference was the fact that the beast's white body had black stripes all over it.

'The White Tiger!' Alex looked at the heavenly beast's silhouette with absolute shock.

The silhouette moved a little as it drooped down to touch Pearl with his nose, and suddenly, it turned into a bright light that converged back onto Pearl.

Then… Pearl changed. His body glowed white and his size started to increase. He got bigger and bigger until he stopped.

If his original size was a little smaller than a house cat, his new size came to be about twice what a normal house cat would be.

If this continued, Alex suspected by Saint rank, Pearl's body would reach the size of his mother. After that, his body would reach the size of Lady Ren.

Finally, Pearl opened his eyes. Bright golden pupils stared directly at Alex as Pearl opened his mouth to speak.

"Breakthrough successful?" he asked in almost perfect pronunciation.

"Yes, yes, you did it," Alex said as he walked up to him and hugged him. Alex swiped his hands on Pearl's back, feeling his new, strong body.

"Wow, you are so big now," he said, still a little unsure if he liked the change or not.

"Brother not like change?" Pearl asked.

"Oh no, it's—"

"Pearl change," Pearl said and immediately his body shone with white light as his body shrunk down to the size of what he originally was, perhaps even a finger or two smaller.

"What? You can change? How?" Alex asked with nothing but surprise in his voice. He had read so many books about beasts, spent 2 months with nothing but beasts, and somehow there was no information about beasts being able to change size.

"Pearl just knows how," Pearl said. The information that he could do came from the memories he inherited from his parents.

"Can you change back?" Alex asked.

Pearl nodded and changed back to become a bigger cat that had lost its childlike features.

"And again?"

Pearl changed back to his childlike self.

Alex smiled. "Great, thankfully you haven't lost your cuteness," he said as he rubbed Pearl's little head.

"Alright, get bigger. Let's see how you can fight with a bigger body."

The room was small, and would most likely take damage if the two of them seriously fought, so Alex put on a barrier formation before fighting.

The barrier wasn't strong enough to stop the two of them, but it would be fine as long as it blocked a single attack.

Alex fought Pearl multiple times throughout the day. He even skipped going to the guild for the day and just fought Pearl all day long.

He had Pearl fight as small Pearl, or as big Pearl, or have him change in and out to confuse the opponent.

Alex didn't want to see how strong Pearl had gotten or teach him how to fight. All he wanted to do was have him get used to his new body.

Once night came, he finally stopped and cultivated overnight. The next morning, they trained for a little while before Alex left to the guild once more.

He wanted to make as much money as he could. At first, he was incredibly happy that he could make so much money in such little time.

But when he realized that he needed to make pills of his own to sell, and would have to thus buy ingredients like everyone else, he got dejected.

No matter how much he earned, it was never enough.

Chapter 603: Riverweed Auction

2 days later, it was the day of the Auction. Alex kept the tiny Pearl, who was smaller than normal in his robes, with just his head poking out, and walked towards the auction house.

The Three Faction auction house was apparently the biggest auction house in the Riverweed town and the surrounding other 3 towns that were 3 hours carriage journey from here.

On the day of the auction, major sects and families from all over the 4 towns came to gather in the Three Factions Alliance auction house.

Many people expected a lot of great things to be found in the auction house today, but Alex didn't. He just hoped to find one of the 10 remaining ingredients of the True rank healing pill that he was to make.

Not that he would mind coming across a special weapon or artifacts.

The auction house had already opened by the time he arrived, so he quickly entered it.

He likely could've gotten a better seating if he used his True Earth alchemist badge to show off a little, but he didn't need it.

He was here truly just to see how his pills would sell. After all, he really needed the money to make more pills.

Since he was going to be away from the Northern forest, he needed money to buy ingredients to practice alchemy.

For the first time, he was going to have to suffer in his alchemy progress in terms of ingredients.

Hopefully, not by much.

The auction hall was rather large, with a sound-dampening formation carved onto all the metal walls on the sides.

The stage was bright with light from all directions being produced by some sort of light-producing artifact, different from the lanterns he was used to.

Alex could see about 30 rows of seats along nearly 50 columns. Aside from that, there were more than 100 seats for the rich and famous up above.

Aside from the elders from the many nearby sects, and merchants, Alex wondered who else would be eligible to sit there.

Alex found himself a seat at the lower back corner of the hall and waited for it all to start.

As he expected, an attractive girl in a beautiful red robe walked to the front and introduced herself as the auctioneer for the day.

Alex sighed. It was always a beautiful girl who ran the auction. That, or an old man who would give the guests a sense of trust in the items that were being auctioned.

This was certainly working, as a group of men got unusually excited when they saw the girl walk out onto the stage.

A few minutes more and the girl started introducing items one by one.

A formation plate that could capture any beast under the Meridian Tempering realm.

A talisman that exploded with the power of True Master 2nd realm expert.

A pill that could make a woman's body more bountiful and even help increase fertility for up to 3 days.

A puppet that had strength equivalent to that of a Mind Tempering 1st realm, but the defense of a True Disciple 1st realm.

An armor that used water energy to freeze the attacker's weapons and fists.

A flute that could make anyone under the 1st True Disciple realm fall asleep.

A set of 2 talismans that could be used to communicate over 2000 kilometers away.

An Azure Silverbeak that was no more than 2 years old, and could be made into a bonded beast.

One after another, the girl at the stage announced the item she was auctioning, and in just a couple of bids, the amount would reach dozens of True Spirit stones.

The latest item, a pair of daggers, suitable for someone whose cultivation method was Metal aligned, sold for over 50 True Spirit stones.

Being a True Earth grade artifact, Alex was surprised it didn't sell for more. It must've been the fact that not many people used daggers at all to make the bids go high.

Finally, the pills he gave to the Alchemist Guild to pass along to the auction house were being sold.

From 20, all the way to 60 True Spirit stones. The 50 True-Earth grade pills he gave amassed him about 2500 coins in just an hour.

He wished he could give the other 80 or so pills he was ready to sell too, but that would be gaining too much attention.

He currently had no backing aside from the Alchemist guild, and if someone from the alchemist guild came to hurt him, he couldn't save himself.

Most of the pills he sold were ones that he had no use for. They included pills that helped in cultivation, changed faces, or increased one's resistance or immunity to poison.

There were also other miscellaneous pills, but not a single one of those included pills that would be used in healing.

He had already come to understand how significantly important it was to stock up on pills that healed, rather than pills that did any other thing.

Once his pills were sold, the other alchemist's pills were also sold.

A few of those Alchemists did sell healing pills, unlike Alex, but it was understandable. Not everyone had the same experience as him and prioritized the same thing.

He was starting to get bored and looked around a bit when he heard two men behind him bid for the healing pills.

"53 True spirit stones."

Alex sent his spiritual sense behind him to gently touch the man's aura and recognized that he was a True Disciple realm cultivator of slightly higher cultivation than him.

Going past that, he checked the person and saw that he was injured on his left shoulder, and likely needed the healing pill.

At 66 True Spirit stones, the man finally had to step down to some other person in the lower area and took the loss.

"It's okay, senior brother. We can have the alchemists make one for you," a woman spoke softly from next to him.

"Yes, I know, but it would cost a lot," the man said with as little emotion as he could muster, but Alex could hear the pain in his voice. 66 True spirit stones seemed to be a figure he wasn't able to bring out quite as easily.

Having to have an alchemist make one would likely cost him about the same price, if not higher.

"Once you get healed, you can go back to the northern forest at the end of the week and earn a lot more," the girl said.

The man gave a heavy sigh and nodded. "Yes, I can't let this depress me," he said. "If only we were in the capital, I'm sure the princess of the Shen clan could've healed me with a simple gesture."

'Shen clan?' Alex thought. 'Isn't that one of the 7 colors clan? Shen should be the Blue one, right?'

"If you really want that much luck, why don't you go meet the Royal princess and have her use the healing orb on you? That could heal you in no time," the girl said.

"Sure it could. But I w—"

Suddenly, Alex turned around, making the two of them stop speaking.

"I'm so sorry, but I couldn't help but overhear your talk about this Healing orb. Would you mind explaining a bit more about it?" he asked.

He really didn't want to interfere and let them know he was listening, but the talk about the Shen girl being able to heal and the Wei family princess with the healing orb was too tempting of a talk.

"Who are you?" the man's eyes darkened. No one really liked being eavesdropped upon. The man was especially angry that it was done by someone with less age and cultivation than him.

"Forgiveness, brother," Alex said. "I'm just a man in need of healing." He finally showed his stump to the man.

The man's eyes got less dangerous, but he still held a bit of anger in them.

Alex suddenly pulled out a pill bottle and offered it to the man. "I am really sorry for listening in on your conversation, but I really need to know. Please take this 22% Flesh Reverting pill as a token of sincerity."

The blue-dotted, white ceramic bottle suddenly looked very tempting to the man. It wasn't a 32% Swift Healing pill that was just sold, but it would be enough for him.

"Is this really a healing pill?" the man asked suspiciously.

Chapter 604: New Destination

Alex could see the man's eyes looking suspiciously at the pill he had taken from his hand. He was looking inside the pill bottle, wondering if he was being duped somehow.

Alex sighed. "I have no reason to lie, brother," he said as he pulled out the badge he had been hiding in his robes.

Pearl shuffled a little in his robes to let the badge pass through, and it came out easily, which Alex hid in his palm, only visible to the man and woman.

A bronze badge with leaves carved around the edges, and the words 'True' written on it in the center.

A True Earth Alchemist badge.

The man's eyes instantly went wide, and he dropped all sense of hostility from his body and eyes.

Instead, he immediately cupped his hands in greeting, wincing a little when the pain in his left shoulder plate flared a bit, but he didn't let it sound through him.

"Forgive me for my rudeness, sir alchemist. I will answer every question you have," the man said, while at the time, putting the pill into his storage bag, fearing Alex would ask it back.

Alex ignored that. A 22% pill was just above trash in his eyes. Still, if it could help him gain some information that could help him, it would be more worth it than if he had just sold it instead.

The man went on to explain.

The Shen family was one of the 7 great families of the empire, whose members usually had roots that mostly aligned with the water element. One of the skills they had was a water skill that could heal someone's wound with just a gesture of their hands.

"Do you know if they can heal a cut-off limb like mine?" he asked.

The man looked towards the woman for a bit who shook her head. "I don't believe that is possible anymore, sir alchemist," he said.

"Anymore?" Alex looked at him with a curious look. "What happened that caused the healing to not be possible now?"

"You must not have heard, sir Alchemist. About 2 months or so ago, the 7 families gathered their best, along with some other talented individuals from the empire, and had them enter a True realm."

"However, tragedy struck, and not a single one of them returned," the man said.

'Ah! Those men that entered the beast realm while I was in there. Right, Fu Tao did say that.' Alex remembered.

"So, the person who could heal was sent there too?" Alex asked.

"Unfortunately, yes," the man said. "I've heard the news the sister of the Shen young lady also has learned the same skill, but her proficiency certainly wouldn't have reached the same level, so I do not know if healing a stump like yours is possible or not."

"I see," Alex said. That was a bit of bad luck.

"What about this healing orb? You said the Wei family has it?" Alex asked.

"Ah, yes," the man nodded. "Everyone knows about it, so it's no secret. The royal family has a healing orb that is handed down to the princess every generation, I hear."

"Oh, and can it heal my stump?" Alex asked.

"Uh… that I'm not knowledgeable on, sir alchemist," the man said. "After all, the only ones that are allowed to get a use of that orb is someone who is a Lightsworn."

Lightsworn. Alex had read about them not long ago. They were a group of individuals, directly under the royal emperor who performed missions and kept peace in the land.

They were more than just a police force, however. Being under the emperor himself, they were the Judge, jury, and executioner in most cases.

Fortunately, they had to say an oath to the heavens, promising to never go against what was kind and just, to always protect the people of the empire.

After swearing an oath to the Luminance empire, the person would become a Lightsworn.

"So, I will have to ask a Lightsworn himself, huh?" he asked.

"I'm afraid you will have to do at least that," the man said.

Alex thought for a bit. It seemed he would have to get rid of his plans to travel to a city close by and instead directly go to the capital itself.

With both the Shen girl there and this healing orb there, he wanted to weigh upon his luck to get his arm back.

Not only that, he was certain that the capital would have a lot of ingredients for him to buy, and a lot more information for him to learn from.

The auction lasted for a while longer as better and better items started getting auctioned.

One of the items being auctioned was even a True Heaven grade cauldron that made him want to buy it, but he stopped himself.

For now, the one his master gave him would suffice.

In the end, he didn't buy anything. The auction ended, and Alex walked out with a newfound plan.

Go to Radiant City, the capital of the Luminance empire.

Instead of going anywhere else, Alex directly went to the southwestern section of the town where the caravans lined up in front of the river that gave the town its name, Riverweed.

He confirmed that there was a caravan that would leave around 3 pm in the afternoon. The caravan would only go about 2 cities over, but Alex was prepared for that.

The road to the capital was long and would take him multiple days. He would take it slow for now.

He returned back to his home for a bit before going back to the place where he rented the place almost 2 weeks ago.

He returned back the key and then made his way to the Alchemist Guild.

He walked past the Formation guild that was close to the Alchemist Guild. He had seen it before, along with the other 2 major guilds.

He wanted to get in here but had later decided not to split his attention across multiple things when all he needed to focus on right now was getting strong and getting his arm back.

The search for getting his arm wasn't just for himself. It was for his master, and his martial uncle, as well as the many that would walk around limbless just because there wasn't a cure for it at the moment.

He shook his head and went to the alchemist guild. He took the 2500 coins he got from the auction and asked to make sure he could leave anywhere else he wanted to.

The receptionist had only smiled and said yes.

Alex nodded and left the guild. There was only two places he needed to go to before going back to the caravan.

First, he entered the restaurant and had the most extravagant meal they had prepared.

Having focused on making pills for the last week or so, he had forgotten about coming here to eat.

His physique had improved a lot, but he still looked quite weak when judged simply visually.

After he finished eating it, he left the restaurant and walked to the place where the players were staying.

He wanted to make sure they were all fine, so he went to check on them. The man from before had been there and was surprised when he saw Alex walk there.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense to the house and saw that there were nearly half of the players missing.

He smiled. He took out 50 True spirit stones and handed them to the man. "For them," he said, and then brought out 10 more spirit stones which he handed to the man and woman, as thanks for looking after the players.

The two of them rejected the spirit stones, but Alex simply waved his hands and left.

Now that there was nothing else to do in this city, Alex went to the caravan.

With 15 minutes to spare, he got onto one of the carriages where only a few people could stay.

Alex saw a man and a woman with their less than 5-year-old daughter sit on one end of the carriage, while Alex sat alone on the other end, looking at the empty seat in front of him.

After nearly 10 minutes, the door of the carriage opened, sending light into the rather dark inside.

A young man jumped in and settled onto the seat in front of Alex, swiping his hair around.

He looked around and gave an embarrassed smile as he said, "I hope I wasn't the one that made the caravan wait."

Chapter 605: Shen Jing

Alex looked at the young man in front of him with a slight curiosity in his eyes.

The man who had just appeared wore a stark white robe with almost robe with no other colors.

Two golden earrings hung from the side of his ears that had a circular shape with some spikes appearing out of it. Calling it a golden ball with spikes would be enough to describe the jewelry to someone.

His blonde hair cascaded down below his shoulders and ended on black tips as if that part alone was dyed for some reason.

He was most likely two-finger taller than Alex, but for some reason, Alex felt the height to be actually larger.

His fair body skin had no blemishes at all, and his constantly smiling face made him look gentle as well.

However, the most curious thing about him was that he had no cultivation base at all. Almost as if he were a mortal.

Alex's first thought was that this man was an immortal, someone whose cultivation base was so high he couldn't sense it at all.

However, he immediately felt like slapping himself on the face. He had just learned that immortals couldn't walk out in the open freely not long ago.

The skies would split open to punish them if they even showed themselves. Lady Ren was only surviving by staying hidden underneath a massive Saint Spirit vein line in addition to a bunch of formations to keep her aura hidden.

The man in front of him was likely using a cultivation technique to hide his aura. His technique must have been one of the good ones to make him hide his aura so easily.

The man noticed Alex staring at him and smiled at him.

"Greetings little brother, where are you headed to?" the man asked.

"To Silverlead city for now," Alex said, not elaborating any further to the stranger.

The carriage started moving and soon the caravan was on its way to the next town.

The blonde-haired man's smile remained on his face, not leaving it once. That gave Ning a bit of a weird feeling like he should avoid this man.

The carriage rattled around for about 5 minutes, and the man finally stopped looking toward Alex and instead turned to a family of 3 to the side.

"What's your name, little girl?" he asked the girl that was maybe 4 years old.

"Shu Xue," the girl said softly, her parents encouraging her from the side to ask the man's name.

"What is your name, mister?" she asked.

"My name? It's… Shen Jing," the man said.

Alex's eyes immediately narrowed as a thought crossed his head. 'Shen Jing? SHEN! As in the Shen clan? The same one I'm going towards?' he thought.

There was no way things could be this coincidental, but he couldn't tell that for sure. After all, he had quite a bit of luck from everything he had gotten until now.

"Little Xue, ask this brother what his name is?" the young man named Shen said.

"Big brother, what is your name?" the little girl asked.

Alex couldn't help but put on a smile as he turned toward the young girl. "Little sister, my name is Yu Ming," he said.

"Yu… Ming…" the girl said to herself as if trying to try out the name on her tongue.

"And what's in Silverlead city for little brother Yu Ming?" Shen Jing asked.

"For now, it's just a midpoint in my journey," Alex said. "Where is senior brother Shen headed to?"

"Me? I don't know. I'm just going where fate takes me, I guess," The man said.

"I have a question to ask of you, brother Shen," Alex said, unable to contain his curiosity.

"How about you ask me one and I'll ask you one?" Shen Jing said.

Alex took a deep breath and nodded. "Are you from the Shen family?" he asked.

"Uhh… obviously. My family is Shen, isn't it?" the man asked with a raised eyebrow.

"So you are from the great Shen family," Alex shouted. He couldn't believe his luck.

Shen Jing looked at him with an innocent eye and asked, "Great Shen family? What's that?"

"Eh? Are you not from the Great Shen family?" Alex repeated the question.

"I think there is a misunderstanding here. I am from a Shen family, while you seem to be asking about a family that is more popular," Shen Jing said.

"So… you're not from the Shen family? One of the 7 colors of the Empire?" Alex asked.

"Oh, no. You seem to really be talking about an actual Shen family that's quite popular. Unfortunately, I'm not from that family," he said.

"I see," Alex said, his hopes sinking back a little. "I'm surprised you don't know about that family. It's quite popular in the empire."

"I don't really know much about the empire," Shen Jing said.

'A player?' Alex suspected now. The only person who wouldn't know about the Luminance empire would be someone that came from outside of it.

Given how the beast realm blocked the Crimson Empire from entering, and the other continents had no way of coming here, only a player could have possibly been someone that would not know about the empire at this point.

"You should read some books, brother Shen. Learning about the empire will help you a bit," Alex said.

Shen Jing immediately put up an irritated face. "No, I hate reading," he said.

Alex was about to ask something when Shen Jing started speaking. "Since I've answered a question of yours, you should answer one of mine," he said.

Alex nodded and waited for the question.

Shen Jing pointed at Alex's stump and asked, "What's the story behind that?"

Alex unconsciously grabbed his left arm and said, "it got cut during a fight in my city. Bandits attacked us, and I ended up having to fight a particularly strong one."

"Hah, you mean you were just weak, right?" Shen Jing said. That hit a nerve in Alex, but he took a deep breath to control his anger.

"If you are a man, you will have to be strong. Well, you have to be strong if you are a woman too, but since you're a man this works for you," Shen Jing said.

"Otherwise, how else are you going to protect your family? Your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters, your friends, disciples, master."

Alex felt coldness pass through him when he said the last word. If only he had indeed been stronger, Ma Rong would have still been alive. Wen Cheng's arms would've still been okay.

If only he had been stronger.

"With how weak you are, will you even be able to protect that cat of yours?" Shen Jing asked.

"HuH? How do you know about that?" Alex immediately got defensive. Out of nowhere, the man had suddenly known about Pearl. Alex wondered if this was—

Alex saw the man pointing at his chest. Alex looked down and saw Pearl poking his head through the robes.

'Ah,' he thought.

Shen Jing waved his hands towards Pearl.

"Meow!" Pearl greeted Shen Jing out of nowhere.

"Meow to you too, little fella. What's your name?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex's eyes started going wide. 'Pearl don't ans—' he tried to tell Pearl, however, he was a step too late.

"Pearl!" Pearl said out loud, shocking the family of 3 on the side. They had never seen a beast talk before in their life, and seeing one now in such a confined corner scared them.

"Come here," Shen Jing said as he opened his palm.

For some reason, as if hypnotized, Pearl suddenly jumped out of Alex's robes and onto the man's hands.

Alex couldn't even stop him at all. He started worrying. What was he to do now? Should he fight the man to keep the knowledge about Pearl a secret? What about the family?

Pearl smiled as the man rubbed his head and back. "You are amazing, Pearl," he said.

"Meow!" Pearl said happily. A small thought floated into Alex's mind.

"He's not a bad human, brother," Pearl told him in his mind directly. Alex didn't know if he should trust Pearl at the moment or not.

Shen Jing turned his head to the side and saw the family still cowering a little. Except for the little girl who was simply fascinated by a talking cat.

Shen Jing gave a reassuring smile to the family, and said, "don't worry. He's just a talented little cat. He won't hurt anyone."

He then called over the little girl, who ran off towards him.

"Put your hands forward," Shen Jing said, and the girl followed. He then placed Pearl on top of her hands. Pearl barely had any place to step on hands and jumped to her shoulders which were a little broader.

"Can you help teach my little friend a few more words?" Shen Jing asked.

The girl nodded. "Alright, go ask your father and mother for help as well," Shen Jing said and the girl left to her corner with Pearl.

He then turned around to Alex and chuckled a little. "No need to panic, little brother. I won't hurt you guys," he said. Alex could hear all the implications in his words.

It wasn't that he couldn't hurt him, but that he wouldn't. Alex needed to be absolutely sure to do nothing that would antagonize this man.

"So? Are you going to heal that arm or not?" Shen Jing asked suddenly.

"I'm going to," Alex said.

Shen Jing made a weird face and asked, "Well, aren't you an Alchemist? You should have already healed your arm by now."

Chapter 606: Fun

Alex's eyes narrowed once again. 'How does he know I'm an alchemist?' he wondered.

He looked down upon himself to see if there was anything that could give it away when he saw the Alchemist badge popping out of his robes.

'Pearl must've pulled it out when he jumped,' He thought as he looked to the side at Pearl. He was having fun with the little girl.

Alex had already told him not to hurt the little girl, so there was nothing to worry about with Pearl.

"Uhm, just because I'm an Alchemist, it doesn't mean I can heal myself," Alex said.

"Is that so? I thought Alchemists could do anything they wanted, similar to formation makers, Talisman creators, and Artifact crafter," Shen Jing said.

"It's true that they have a lot of potentials to do anything, but that doesn't mean every alchemist can make whatever they want," Alex said.

"Yes, I know that, but with a bit of time and practice, it should be possible right?" Shen Jing said.

"Not really," Alex said. "Those will help, but having knowledge of what you are doing is more important if you want to do something quickly."

"If I were looking for the knowledge, I doubt anything would help me learn better than self-study with a bit of outside help. But if what I want is my arm back, it's better for me to rely on outside helpfully," Alex said.

"You mean a recipe?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes," Alex nodded.

"So you don't have any recipe to heal yourself?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex shook his head. "Not at the moment. I do have one, but making that is out of my league for now. The actual recipe that will help me right now is incomplete," he said.

"Does no one else have that sort of pill?" Shen Jing asked.

"Maybe," Alex said. "I didn't find much in that town, but that was a backwater town. Which is why I'm going to the capital to see if such pills already exist."

"If they don't exist, I also have the Shen great family which could heal me, and the royal princess who also could. But for that I will have to be a Lightsworn apparently," Alex said.

"Ooh, what's a Lightsworn?" Shen Jing asked curiously.

"Protectors and guards of the empire, I hear," Alex said.

"Do you admire them?" Shen Jing asked.

"Haha, no," Alex said. "I only just learned about them today. I plan on joining them, however. That might be one way to heal my arm."

"Hmm… Lightsworn. Sounds fun. I will join too," Shen Jing said.

The carriage rattled as the sounds of people walking on the side of the caravan sounded.

"Oh, what does that say?" Shen Jing suddenly asked.

Alex turned outside the window and saw a wooden sign on the side of the road with some words on it.

"Bullfly town 30 kilometers away. Firecrest town, 103 kilometers away. Silverleaf City, 302 kilometers away.

Shen Jing nodded as he looked outside. "We will likely reach the town by sundown, then Harecrest town by tomorrow, and Silverleaf City 3 days later," Shen Jing said.

"How far away is the capital?" he asked.

Alex made some simple estimation in his head based on the map and the sizes there before saying, "About 9000 kilometers."

"Oh wow, that's far, isn't it? Don't you think it will be faster to just fly there? I'm sure you can reach the capital in 3 days if you do," Shen Jing said.

Alex didn't doubt it. He had even thought of it, but he shook his head.

"I am a bit new to this place. I want to learn a bit more about the land and its culture before I arrive at the capital. I know what being a naive, village boy does to one in unfamiliar places," he said.

"That's not a bad idea," Shen Jing said with his hands on his chin. "I think I'm starting to like you, little brother. You know what? Forget about getting strong and just focus on getting your arm back."

Shen Jing said what could only be taken as sarcastic, but for some reason, he sounded sincere. Alex wondered why he was saying that. Was there a good enough reason for him to stop proceeding with his cultivation?

Alex shook his head and forgot about it. He wasn't going to suddenly stop getting strong. In fact, Shen Jing was the weird one for even suggesting it.

'One moment he mocks me for being weak, and another moment he says I don't need to get strong. Does he have something wrong with his head or what?' Alex thought.

The carriage rattled as it went along for a bit more, and darkness soon veiled the world.

Not long after, they reached the Bullfly town, where they stopped for an hour or two before leaving.

The horses pulling the carriage were spirit beasts, so they didn't need to rest at all, and could pull as long as they had Qi.

Shen Jing suddenly pushed open the door and jumped out. Alex looked at him in surprise. He hadn't said anything for a while now, simply sleeping in the carriage with his eyes shut, and now he suddenly jumped out.

"Aah, it's not very good to sit in one place continuously," he said. "Little brother, come on out, or you will start getting backaches too."

Alex looked at him with narrowed eyes. "I'm fine," he said.

"Come on! Stretch your legs a bit. No need to sit inside forever," Shen Jing said. "Also, you might find something fun up ahead."

Alex's eyes changed again.

Fun.

Shen Jing had some sort of implication on that word that he didn't immediately catch.

His voice got a little cold as he asked, "What's up ahead?"

Shen Jing knew he had caught Ning's attention and smiled, "that's a surprise for you."

Alex hesitated for a bit. Was this some sort of trap? Was Shen Jing going to kill him up ahead?

"Don't worry!" Shen Jing said, seeing Alex's eyes full of hesitation. Then, his voice changed such that Alex could feel some sort of energy behind it.

"You know I could've killed you anytime if I wanted to by now," Shen Jing said.

Alex jumped out. He wasn't sure what Shen Jing wanted of him, but he was sure about one thing now. Shen Jing didn't want to kill him.

"Pearl, stay here okay? Your brother and I will go ahead for a little while," Shen Jing said, his jovial voice returning to him.

The two of them suddenly flew away. Alex flew as fast as he could, but Shen Jing seemed to be casually cruising through the air.

This man… he was either a very high True realm cultivator, or more likely, a Saint realm cultivator.

Alex had to be careful of him.

"Down there," Shen Jing pointed, and Alex looked below. He saw a bunch of people grouped up below him, and the group of people saw him too.

Alex's eyes went wide.

"Bandits?" he said out loud.

"Yes, and they see you now," Shen Jing's voice drifted in his ear, but his body was nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly, the bandits flew up towards him.

Alex got angry. "You bastard! You really did bring me here to kill me."

Chapter 607: Using the Sword

Alex sent his spiritual sense around, but Shen Jing was nowhere near to be seen. So, he sent them downward, towards the group of bandits flying towards him.

Without even checking at them, he could tell they were strong. Much stronger than the ones that you could find in the routes of Crimson Empire.

They were very much possibly on the same level as the bandits that invaded the Scarlet city.

His wave of spiritual sense went past them and it confirmed it. Of the 30 flying bandits, the weakest one was at True Disciple 5th realm, and the strongest one of them… was at True Lord 7th realm.

This was very bad.

His main priority was to survive. Shen Jing had brought him here to kill him, so Alex thought of instead going back to the caravan.

'No, they will follow me there,' he thought. If they did, not only would they kill him, they would likely hurt everyone in there.

Alex had already done a scan of the caravan and had known that the strongest protector in there was a True Master 3rd realm girl, along with a few of her colleagues.

Those would surely not win against these bandits. Alex was the strongest person in that caravan and now, he was separated.

"Was that what Shen Jing wanted? To separate me from the group so they can deal with me alone?" Alex wondered.

He stopped. He had no more time to give to thoughts. Since the bandits were bringing a fight to him, he would bring a fight to them.

Light flashed as a sword appeared in his right hand.

It was a meter and a half long sword, with about 30 centimeters long hilt. The blade itself was about the size of his 2 fingers, that curved a little at the front.

The edge on the blade was so sharp that Alex wouldn't doubt if someone said that light itself could be cut with it.

Alex put the sword in front of him. The silver blade pointed at the bandits, his hand on the stark white hilt, stopped by the bronze, circular cross guard.

Then, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

HAH~

Suddenly, light flared behind him illuminating everything in the night. He had released so much Yang energy behind him that it looked like a sun had appeared out of nowhere.

The bandits looked at him in the sky, the sun hidden only by his shadow. And then, the shadow moved.

The bandits saw nothing for a moment. The man had disappeared from the sky, leaving the blinding light in the sky for 3 seconds before it disappeared.

At that time, they heard multiple sounds of people gasping, but no one screamed.

When their visions came back to them a second later, they realized why there had been no scream.

As bodies fell to the ground in pieces more than one, they realized that their comrades had been cut through before they could even make a noise.

It was very much likely that they didn't even see their deaths coming.

Alex huffed a little far away. He had released a bit too much energy at once and over-exerted himself to kill 8 of the bandits at once.

Still, his eyes flashed with a cold light as they constantly looked at the bandits for an opening.

It had been a while since he fought. In fact, now that he thought about it, this was the first time he was actually fighting. So, he was a little rusty, but the experience in his mind made the fighting easy.

He used bright light to blind his enemies for a few seconds, while using his shadow formed from the light behind him to teleport onto it.

With one last breath, he looked at the remaining 22 members and got ready.

Multiple attacks came flying toward him at once, all of which Alex had to dodge.

He could likely just stand in front of most of these attacks and not get a single scratch, but some of these bandits were too strong to underestimate them like that.

A woman with a fast movement technique flew right next to him and delivered a strong fist to his head.

With his spiritual sense, Alex had already seen it coming. As soon as she got close, Alex sent out Heaven's impact, making the woman immediately lose consciousness.

As she started falling, he struck her with her sword. The sword carved her body like a hot knife on butter. It slid through her body with no resistance at all, and her two halves fell to the ground down below.

Alex made a quick slash with his sword to get rid of the blood, but there was no need, to begin with. The sword repelled blood off of it like oil repelled water.

Suddenly he ducked as a slash flew over him. 2 men came dashing towards him, with a few more not far behind him.

The 2 men that arrived next to him each had a cultivation base that was too great for his own cultivation. So, he had to rely on his body.

Alex wanted to send out slashes, but he couldn't, for the love of God, put his Qi into the sword at all.

It was not like the Ebony sword, which actively refused to take in his Qi because of the primitive artifact spirit in there. It was more akin to his steel sword not accepting Qi as quickly because they weren't bonded yet.

Only, this sword didn't take Qi slowly. It didn't take Qi at all. So, all of Alex's skills that had him sending out slashes or pouring Qi into the sword were useless to him.

Still, this sword was way too good to replace with at the moment. Just its ability to cut things with such ease was reason enough.

Suddenly, fire erupted from around his fist. Alex couldn't send Qi into the sword, but he surely could use it around the sword.

Alex used the Flame Scripture technique to quickly turn the fire into the shape of a sword, consuming the real sword in it.

Fire flared around him with each swing. The two men that were right upon him tried to use their techniques on him, but they just didn't have enough strength to harm him at all.

After all, his physical strength was close to True Lord 1st realm, and there were only 3 people here that were higher than that.

One of the sword slashes sent fire into one of the man's eyes, blinding him momentarily. Alex took the opportunity to hit the other man who was driving his sword at him.

Alex was right about to cut the man's hands when his focus wavered and his sword hit empty air.

The man's sword hit him and sent him flying downwards.

Alex caught himself midair and shook himself awake. 'What was that drowsiness just now,' he thought and sent his spiritual sense to search for the source.

That was when he noticed the man holding a square lantern with a flickering light inside of it.

Whenever that light flickered towards Alex, he felt a wave of sleepiness hit him as if he hadn't slept for days.

'Dammit! Is that an artifact that induces drowsiness?' he thought.

Alex's body could cure a lot of things, but it never prevented most things at all. That was one thing he hated about his body.

Be it poison, toxins, or mental attacks. Alex's body always dealt with it after the fact, instead of before. He really wished it were otherwise, but it wasn't.

So, he had to deal with it.

He let the sword hover by his side for a split second as he sent a palm-shaped yellow light flying towards the man with the lantern.

While the man panicked, Alex took his sword and got back to fighting.

He had to deal with the man at some time, but right now, there were at least 5 people in between them. He needed to take care of them first.

Friction disappeared around Alex and he burst into speed as if he pushed on something solid even while in mid-air.

The man who hit him hadn't expected such a quick burst of speed and tried to bring back his sword, but Alex appeared right next to him.

He slashed toward the man who was trying to put up his sword to block, but Alex's sword cut it and the man together.

The fire appeared behind Alex in no particular shape and flew towards 4 of the different incoming men, while Alex himself went for the man whose eyes he had burned previously.

The man put his all into his next attack to try and hurt Alex, but Alex suffered it all and still slashed at him.

He felt the man get cut behind those colorful techniques, as his sword cut through it all. His lifeless body fell to the ground in 2 separate halves.

In just less than a minute, Alex had killed 11 of the 30 bandits, leaving them with nothing but shame.

The bandit leader hadn't taken part in the fight because it was only a single enemy, but it seemed waiting would only get more of his men killed.

So, he took out his spear and got ready to attack as well.

Alex huffed and looked at them. This was hard. Fighting a group of people in similar strength to his own, with only one hand that was occupied with a sword that wouldn't take in Qi at all.

The sword was great, but if he wanted to win, he needed to use his Qi no matter what.

So, he put away his sword as golden light filled the emptiness in his hand that soon turned into claws.

"Let's see how good this is in a fight."

Chapter 608: Hurt Meridians

19 bandits remained. Of them, 3 had a cultivation base higher than that of Alex's body cultivation.

True Lord 7th, True lord 4th, and True lord 2nd realm.

Alex stared at the man with True Lord 7th realm, a small with a big build, wearing an earthen colored robe.

Alex was certain that was the leader of the bandits, he had to be. Unless they were okay with someone else weaker than him being the leader, then this man was definitely it.

And he was staring back at Alex.

'I either need to get rid of the 16 others and fight the 3 with more freedom, or kill the 3 as soon as I can and fight the other with more freedom,' he thought.

Alex was sure. As long as the 3 of them weren't present, and no one had a hidden treasure that could deal damage equal to or above that of True Lord 1st realm, he was fine.

He couldn't take that risk at all. He had to think of every person having some sort of special attack that could deal with him.

"So it's the 16 that die first then," he said softly.

The leader spun his silver spear in the air as he sent a worm-shaped tempest flying towards him.

Alex had no way of fighting that. So, he instead burned another bright sun behind him, a fusion of fire and yang, mixed together to produce light enough to illuminate the world like a real sun.

Then, once the shadow was in the right place on the Leader's robes, he vanished.

Multiple sounds of clangs as well as buzzing sounds appeared in the blink of an eye.

Alex's hands blitzed through the air as he tried to rip out the throat and organs of everyone he came across.

He had targeted the leader, but that was just a test. The leader had indeed some sort of defensive treasure to protect himself.

So, using the lingering light, he teleported to the other weaker people and had attacked them. Most of them had defensive treasure which clanged with each attack, but they were way too weak to stop Alex's golden claw which was a mimic of the White Tiger's Golden claw.

At the same time, he sent out other attacks too. He sent palm of the sun, and Iron Fist punch towards the weaker opponents. They wouldn't die to these attacks, but certainly take so much damage that they wouldn't be able to recover in just a few minutes of time unless they also had equally good pills.

However, the thing that concerned him was the buzzing sounds. He had sent multiple Heaven's Impact towards the enemies, but only a few of them were dropping to the ground.

Most of the others had buzzing sounds coming from their artifacts that seemed to be made to stop mental attacks.

The artifacts weren't strong enough to stop them completely, but just enough so that they only felt slight mental pain, instead of straight-up fainting.

It would have been so much easier if they all fell to Heaven's Impact.

Alex's hand went through the glass and then through the man's chest, ripping out his heart back through the broken glasses.

Wisps of light flew into the air as the lantern artifact that was making him dizzy broke into a dozen pieces as it fell along with the man.

Alex felt horrible holding onto a person's heart, but he was getting used to it. He tossed the heart away and flew backward, breathing heavily.

'Dammit! Have my meridians not fully opened yet?' he thought. He was feeling general numbness all over his body. He couldn't tell if it was because his meridians were still to heal completely, or his body was just not back to its full potential due to the missing muscles.

Or maybe it was because he used too many spells in succession, killing 6 more men, injuring 3, and fainting 3 more.

With 12 of the 19 out of battle, only 7 remained. Alex huffed, but this wasn't the time.

He flew back like a serpent of blue flashed next to him with golden fangs. At the same time, a flaming bird flew towards him with its wings outstretched.

Alex enlarged his golden claws and crushed the firebird, turning it into motes of fire Qi, which he quickly controlled to send flying at the serpent of blue that was surrounding him.

The fire Qi and Water Qi destroyed themselves, while the metal Qi floated with no control.

Alex control the metal Qi to form into a sword of bright golden color and threw it back towards one of the men who attacked him.

Just then something black flashed next to him that Alex only caught using his Spiritual sense. If not for that, he would've completely missed it.

A spear attack flashed towards the right side of Alex, completely cutting off his escape. So, grabbed the black thing and tried to crush it.

Just as he crushed it, it burst out into a bunch of vines and roots that wrapped around him. At the same time, the woman with the 2nd True lord realm cultivation base drew an arrow, getting ready to attack.

"Shit!" Alex thought and tried to strain himself out of the entrapment. The vines came loose, but not fast enough.

A massive explosion hit Alex heat first as he was sent tumbling backward.

"Nice!" the girl said as she thought that she killed Alex.

Suddenly, the night turned into day once again and when it turned back to night, the girl's head was off of her neck.

Alex huffed, his right hand holding his sword once again as that was the only thing that could likely cut someone like her.

His forehead was bloody, but he would survive. The blood trickled down to his blade, and he almost hoped it would be refined.

However, he hadn't reached that part yet. He wasn't even able to send Qi into it, let alone be able to refine.

It would take some time.

Alex felt a bit of pain from the charred flesh on his chest, but it was nothing compared to what he felt every day cultivating with Pearl.

He gritted his teeth, which instead looked like a bloody smile as he got back to fighting.

It hurt. His face, his chest, even his right arm. But nothing hurt as much as his meridians.

He had not once, not twice, but three times forced so much Qi out of him at once to create the small sun. Not only were his meridians in constant pain, even his naval area felt a little strained.

As a person with medical knowledge, he knew that if he went any further, that would be extremely bad.

A man sent out a formation plate, which quickly deployed into some sort of formation with a barrier. Alex didn't realize what the formation did at first, but soon, he got it.

It was a vision-impairing formation. Inside the formation, only he was likely trapped in the shroud of darkness unable to see what was outside.

He could fly out, but there was a one-way barrier there. Fortunately, these bandits didn't know about Spiritual sense.

Alex sent him out to the fullest as he sensed 3 spear-shaped green lights flash towards him.

At the same time, a talisman flew towards him from the side. If he knew to do anything, it would be to get as far away from that talisman.

He suddenly stopped flying, and his body fell through the sky. The spear turned mid-flight and turned towards him.

Alex had his blade shine a little as a layer of white light appeared around it. He used the Sword Intent to add power to his slashes as he barely destroyed the 3 green spears.

At the same time, he pulled his hands back and threw his sword upwards to the talisman that was diving toward him.

As soon as the sword struck it, the talisman exploded into so much light that even Alex could see it through the black shroud.

He landed on the ground, did a roll, and grabbed the sword that came flying down like a bullet let go from a barrel.

He changed the sword's trajectory a bit, and the sword slammed onto the ground, hitting the formation plate perfectly, cutting it in half.

The barrier and the black shroud disappeared, and he could see the stunned looks of the bandits.

It was fortunate that they didn't know how to fight together, or he would've likely gotten attacked way more than just that right now.

Alex looked at them from the ground and sighed. He was going to have to hurt his meridians once more, wasn't he?

A ball of fire appeared behind him, enhanced by yang Qi to look like a small sun.

The 6 of them immediately got into defensive stances, even going so far as to bring out their treasures to protect themselves.

They looked at Alex get his sword ready, then… he vanished.

Instantly, the 6 of them used their defensive techniques and waited for the attacks to land. However, no attacks did come their way.

Instead, the light only got dimmer but didn't go out. When they looked below to see what had happened, their eyes went wide.

Their comrades, the ones that were fainted or just wounded were now burning with the same fire as the sun.

However, there was no sign of Alex at all.

"Brother, where did he—"

The man who put down the formation had his words cut short as his head rolled from his body.

Even then, the 5 of them had no idea where Alex had disappeared to.

Chapter 609: Mists

"AH!" another girl shouted, as her arm was cut at the elbows. But the glowing orange shield protected her chest.

At the same time, another man felt a clang on his barrier that threatened to shatter even when he didn't see anyone attack it.

The leader and the rest immediately sent out their Qi sense and sensed something… someone moving without being seen.

"He's invisible!" the leader shouted. Immediately, everyone started using Qi sense.

Qi sense would help them see or feel. It only gave them a vague shape of what existed wherever their Qi went through, but that was enough to catch Alex trying to attack them.

The 5 of remaining ones realized that fighting alone was not the way here. The opponent was way too tricky with his skills, so they needed to fight together, at once.

Alex huffed far away. The burning feeling in his meridians hurt him way more than he wanted to admit. Using the sun technique 3 times was already bad enough, but 4 times nearly destroyed his meridians.

If he were to do it one more time, it was very much likely that he would lose his meridians.

He had already taken a healing pill, and while his burnt skin and cut flesh had healed, the meridians remained mostly untouched.

That meant the burning feeling didn't come from his meridians being damaged, but something else.

'Did my yang and fire Qi burn through them? Can't be, they're not damaged,' he thought.

He continued keeping his attention on the 5 people flying through the air as he sensed their Qi moving towards him to sense him.

This far away, they shouldn't have been able to sense him at all, however, with nothing else in the direction, the slightest hint of something in the air would certainly make Alex be noticed to them.

'What the hell do I do?' Alex thought. 'I'm already struggling with my meridians to pump out Qi to keep flying and staying invisible. If I try to use any other skill, I will die.'

He wanted to fly far away, but the caravan was ahead in the distance. If he did, the bandits would certainly go attack them as revenge.

So, he let the Qi pass through him.

The 4 bandits and their leader rushed towards Alex with all of their skills flaring at full power.

Alex stood in the air with no other choice but to fight. He gripped his sword and looked at the figures ahead of him.

2 of them were stronger than his body cultivation by more than 2 realms, 3 of them stronger than his Qi cultivation by more than a minor realm.

Any of their attacks would hurt him. If hit properly, all of them could kill.

Still, Alex couldn't back down. He breathed deeper and deeper until his sword started glowing white, the only thing he could do. And then…

~SILENCE~

Weapons clattered down below on the ground a few seconds later.

Alex's fist that was strongly gripping his sword loosened a bit as pure terror appeared on his face.

Mists. That was all Alex could see in front of him. Red and bloody mist.

There were 5 people on their way towards him just moments ago, and now… not a single one of them remained.

"You nearly killed yourself," a voice drifted to his ear as someone appeared from the air, making himself visible.

Shen Jing reappeared.

Alex's face changed. He gritted his teeth and gripped his sword again, even harder this time.

Shen Jing chuckled a little as he waved his hands, clearing the bloody mist in front of him.

"YOU!" Alex said, with hatred in his voice. What was he up to? He had just brought Alex here to die, and yet… was he the one who just saved Alex?

As if to clear up Alex's doubts, Shen Jing said, "You're not bad when it comes to fighting. I thought I would have to save you long ago."

Shen Jing looked below at the burning flesh of the bandits.

"You said you lost your arms to bandits in your hometown. Were they much stronger than these men?" he asked.

Alex wasn't sure what was happening right now. So he was helping him?

"They weren't stronger. Only I was very much weaker," Alex said with a cold voice.

"I see," Shen Jing said. Suddenly, a wave of Qi surrounded Alex, gripping him like a fist.

"Stop flying. Stop concealing. In fact, stop doing anything that has to do with QI," Shen Jing said.

Alex tried to struggle free, but the Qi grasp was way too strong.

"Stop struggling. You will only make this worse," Shen Jing said.

"Why are you doing this? What's your purpose?" Alex asked. "Were you with the bandits?"

"Pfft! Hahaha," Shen Jing suddenly started laughing as if he had never heard of a more funny joke before. "Why would you possibly think I was with the bandits?"

"Because you brought me here for them to kill me," Alex said.

"No. I brought YOU here to kill THEM. I was testing you, a little," Shen Jing said.

"This… this is 'a little'?" Alex asked, pointing to the burning bodies to the side.

"I was planning it to be. I was expecting you to kill 2 or 3 people, maybe even 5 before you needed my saving. However, while I noticed your particularly dense Qi, I somehow didn't notice your body."

"Had I known, I might have removed the 2 stronger ones and let you fight the rest of the 28. But then, you might have easily killed them too," Shen Jing said with his hands on his chin.

"You know what? Now that I think about it, these bandits at the edge of the empire are probably not that good of a test. They didn't have weapons or items that a normal cultivator in the more established sections of the empire would have," he said.

"Either way, you did well. You should rest after we return," Shen Jing said and suddenly dragged Alex behind him.

The speed was so fast that everything looked like a blur to him. 'Yes, that's the speed of a Saint Realm alright,' Alex thought.

He couldn't help but wonder what the hell a saint realm was doing in this remote place.

"Argh!" Alex grumbled softly, but Shen Jing still caught it.

"Don't try to use Qi. The only Qi you should be using now is during cultivation. Any other will hurt you for a while," Shen Jing said.

"Dammit, what's happening to me? Am I hurt? Is this Qi deviation" Alex asked.

"Haha, nothing like that. You did go overboard a little with that little sun stunt, but nothing enough to harm your cultivation," Shun Jing said.

"What did I do?" Alex asked.

"Basically, you made too much Qi flow through your meridians at once. Too much flow caused your meridians to stretch to a point that was way beyond what it could normally handle."

"A normal person would've likely reached your current condition on the first time, maybe second time if they are lucky," Shen Jing said.

"To have created that sun for 5 times in a row, while using so many skills in between. You, little brother, are truly amazing."

Chapter 610: Not What We Want

Alex sat in the rattling carriage that slowly moved towards its destination, Silverleaf city.

Pearl was still to the side, making quite the friendship with the little girl named Xue.

He sat cross-legged on his seat, sending all of his focus onto his meridians. They… they were almost twice as wide as what his meridians would normally be.

Considering it was smaller than normal already due to it not properly healing, this was actually quite massive.

"Will it really heal?" Alex asked.

"Yes, yes, you don't have to worry. Everyone had to go through it once in a while to understand the pain of overinflated meridians. Only then do they realize that it's something bad that one shouldn't do" Shen Jing said.

By now, Alex had come to accept the fact that Shen Jing wasn't really a bad guy. The way he had killed the 5 men without Alex feeling a trace of his power… Shen Jing had no need for these petty tricks.

'Unless he likes tricks,' Alex thought but didn't say it out loud.

"It's like a little curious cubs touching Yin-fire for the first time. Once they do, they will know not to do it again," Shen Jing said looking outside the carriage.

"Yin-fire? What's that?" Alex asked. His curiosity was piqued.

"A type of fire," Shen Jing said. "But you don't have to worry about that for now."

Alex wanted to learn more, but he didn't dare ask and simply nodded. "How long do you think it will take me to heal the meridians?" he asked.

"Hmm… hard to say really," Shen Jing said. "Everyone is different. That is especially true for you. Given your body cultivation… I will give about a month of time before they can return to normal."

"Another month?" Alex exclaimed. He had already spent nearly 3 weeks trying to heal it back to normal, and yet, the time increased by another 4 weeks once again.

4 weeks of continuous cultivation.

"It would take a month… if that is what we wanted to do," Shen Jing said.

"Huh?" Alex got confused. "What do you mean by that? Should I not heal my meridians?"

"No," Shen Jing said. "You should keep them as it is."

"I don't understand," Alex said.

Shen Jing suddenly lost his casual stance and leaned forward towards Alex.

"Your Meridians are different from everyone else. When people body-cultivate, most of the time, they only manage to improve 3 things. Skin, muscles, and bones."

"Only rarely do people improve their organs. Improving Meridians? You would be luckier finding a Phoenix that can't regenerate."

"So, you are in a unique position where your Meridians are very strong. Strong enough to handle your recklessness multiple times."

"If you keep up the recklessness, they will certainly be destroyed. However, if you were to do it in a controlled environment. That is, widening your meridian from time to time. Slowly, but surely, they will start healing themselves to that size."

"Then, you will have meridians so widely open that you can pump out a lot of Qi in a very little time. I don't know if that is useful to an Alchemist or not, but to a cultivator, one couldn't ask for something better," Shen Jing said.

Alex's eyes went wide as he understood the implication. If he could do what he did yesterday, and create suns like that without breaking a sweat, he could use stronger attacks that require more wind-up time very easily.

The amount of time it took to pour his Qi into swords, or formations would halve. Creating fire entities would be very quick as well.

There were a lot of benefits and Alex couldn't even think about them yet.

"That sounds amazing," he said. "When do I start?"

"Let's wait until it stops hurting as much. 2 days should be fine. Cultivate until then," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded and cultivated. Time passed slowly, and Alex cultivated both the Five Yang Divine Path and the Winter Moon technique interchangeably.

Whenever his body started to heat up a bit, he would change to the Yin technique to cool it down. The Yin also felt cool on his meridians and gave a comforting feeling.

During this time, Shen Jing went out twice for a few hours before returning. Who knew where he went during this time.

On the second time, Alex decided to ask.

"Where do you go for hours?" he asked.

"I'm searching for places," he said.

"Places? Are you out here searching for something?" he asked. He thought he was finally seeing why Shen Jing was in this remote corner of the continent at all.

By now, his theory about him being a player had already disappeared. There was no way someone could reach the saint realm and have this much knowledge on cultivation as a player.

"No, I'm not looking for something out here. You can stop trying to guess who I am and what I am doing here. The world is way too vast and you haven't even seen the smallest of them to figure out who I am," Shen Jing said.

That shut up Alex. So, he went back to cultivating.

On the second day, Shen Jing brought Alex far away from the caravan to do his Sun trick again.

Alex prepared himself and instantly drew out a massive amount of Qi from his body that passed through the meridians, making them look like they were bulging at the seams.

The sun formed in front of Alex, the dazzling red and orange it that shined just like the sun above him.

It was about a meter in diameter and was fully constructed with Qi.

Any more heat and he would likely die from burning himself. Alex felt a bit of fear, wondering if he would injure himself using this sun.

The sun itself wasn't as dangerous as Alex. Since it was produced from his own cultivation base, the damage it could deal was the same as his cultivation base too.

However, for some reason, its aura gave off an aura that made it look more dangerous than it was.

From what Alex could see even Shen Jing was having a hard time keeping his chilled personality in front of the sun.

He breathed in and out heavily, more so than Alex. 'Is he…scared?' Alex wondered.

Shen Jing wasn't scared. In fact, he was the exact opposite. He was excited.

The sun in front of him gave him a sense of excitement and nervousness, something he had actually felt not so long ago.

Actually, that event was much more exciting… or rather fearsome than this small sun. That event he went through a few months ago, now that was something else.

But still, seeing the sun gave him a sense of need to bow down in front of it, which he resisted.

"It truly is incredible what you can do," he said. "Although, stop it or you will hurt your meridians."

Alex nodded and quickly stopped the sun. The sun lasted for a few more seconds without his constant Qi input and disappeared.

"If you were to give that a percentage, how much Qi would you say you have used to make this sun?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex felt his own Qi reserve and gave a rough estimate of 10%.

"10%? That's so much better than what I would've expected of you. And here I thought I was already overestimating you with 15%."

"So if the fight lasted longer and your meridian were fine, you could've kept going, right?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes, I still had enough to fight," Alex said.

"Great! Absolutely great. Hahaha, I'm so glad I found you," Shen Jing said.

"How did you find me?" Alex asked. "I'm still curious. What about me attracted you towards me?"

Shen Jing smiled and shook his fingers. "You are not going to be able to make me answer like that. Why I decided to help you, you will find soon enough, hopefully."

Alex shook his head. They always said that. Get stronger, and I will tell you, or it's not time for you to learn about it yet.

Couldn't they just give him the information straight on? What was the reason behind all of this secrecy?

"Are you not hurt? Your meridians should be feeling like they will burst at any moment now," Shen Jing asked.

"It does, but I've learned to live with the pain," Alex said and walked back to the carriage, ignoring the curious look of Shen Jing.

Once he reached the carriage, Alex started cultivating once more, using the two different methods alternatively.

Shen Jing looked at this point with a bit of surprise too. He wanted to ask what Alex was doing, but he believed he had a very good idea of what was happening.

'Well, since he already has a solution, he probably doesn't need mine,' Shen Jing thought and decided to keep quiet.

Alex cultivated for an entire day and only opened his eyes when he felt the carriage stop.

"What's going on?" he asked, opening his eyes for the first time in hours.

Shen Jing opened the door and jumped out.

"Come on out, we are here," he said.

"Here?" Alex asked for a second before realizing what he meant. "Oh, we already arrived in Silverleaf city, huh?"

He got out as well and looked at the city. Surprisingly, the city had no defensive walls like all the cities of the Crimson Empire had. Or even the Riverweed city from not long ago.

"How much further is your destination again?" Shen Jing asked as if to remind him.

Alex couldn't help but chuckle when he remembered that he was barely 3% of the way done with his journey.

Chapter 611: Light

"Do we go find another caravan now?" Shen Jing asked.

"No, I want to stay here a day or two, see if there is any information I can find to heal my wound," Alex said.

"Won't it be better to just go to the capital and see if the— actually, never mind. Go do what you want to," Shen Jing said. "I will return in a day or two."

"Where are you going?" Alex asked curiously.

"Just to look upon someone, to see if they need my help. Then I will go find the place I've been meaning to for two days now," Shen Jing said.

"Okay, I will wait for you," Alex said. Shen Jing nodded and flew up into the air. Before Alex could even realize it, he vanished.

"Damn, must be fun being a Saint realm cultivator. I wish I could reach there quickly too," Alex thought to himself.

Suddenly, something jumped on his left shoulder, and even without looking at it, Alex pet the cat.

"Did you have fun?" he asked.

"Had fun," Pearl answered. Alex sent out his spiritual sense and saw that the little girl was sad as she left Pearl, but that was life.

"Do you feel sad?" Alex asked.

"No," Pearl replied.

"Why?" Alex asked.

"Pearl has brother," Pearl answered.

"Alright, you rascal. You don't need to make me feel good," Alex said and grabbed Pearl before putting him into his robes.

"Ah right, if someone talks to you from now on, don't speak in human language, okay? Just meow at them," Alex told Pearl before walking into the city.

While Silverleaf city didn't have walls, it still had gates and guards protecting it from all sides.

The guards wore normal clothes, greenish-brown robes to be precise, and didn't stand out amongst the many people walking in and out of the city.

Alex got into the line as well, to soon enter the city. As he looked around, he suddenly heard gasps and exclamations from the gates.

When he turned around, he saw the two guards at the gate bowing toward two people that had just walked out.

One of them was a girl around the age of 26, and another a man of similar age. They were likely older folks, but they looked pretty young.

The woman had long flowing hair and wore a robe of green, no blue color. Wait, that wasn't right? The color was actually red.

No, that too was wrong. The color was purple.

As if they were a bunch of illusions stacked on top of each other, the colors of the robe the girl wore changed depending on how she turned. Not only that, each part of her robe was of different color depending on how the light hit her robes.

Basically, it was a robe of many colors, and thus, had no color of its own. On the left chest of the robe, there was an embroidery in white, that was perfectly visible no matter what color the robe seemed to be in.

The embroidery said 'Light'.

The man was the same. He wore a similarly colorful and yet colorless robe, with an embroidery of the word 'Light' on the left chest of the robe.

"Ah!" Alex thought as he realized who these people were. They were the Lightsworns, the ones that vowed to protect the empire and the royal family.

"Oh, it's the Lightsworns."

"Really? This is my first time seeing them."

"I don't doubt it. They never really come to this section of the empire unless they are needed."

"I wonder what has happened here for them to come."

Many of the people around Alex started speaking in a hushed tone. They all had the same thoughts and questions Alex did.

The girl Lightsworn walked forward and let them know why they were there.

"The newly arrived caravan, did you guys get attacked by bandits?" she asked.

The group of people that had come with Alex looked at each other for confirmation and then shook their heads.

"There were no bandits," one of them shouted.

The girl frowned. "Are you sure?" she asked.

"Yes," the same man spoke. The girl waited for someone to contradict him, but when they didn't, she sighed. It seemed he wasn't lying.

"What do we do now, sister?" the man asked from the side.

"We still have to go find them. It's an order after all," the girl said.

"Sigh, why do we have to be the ones to deal with such weak bandits," the man complained.

"I don't think they are weak. From the reports, they are likely to have True Lords amongst them," the girl said.

"You trust those reports? They came from such weak people. They were likely exaggerating," the man said.

"Still, it's better to be cautious. Let's go check it all out," she said and flew off. The man shook his head and flew off behind her.

As they flew, their clothes once again changed from red to purple to blue to cyan to green to yellow all the way back until they reached red again.

"That's what I'm going to wear one day, aren't I? I wonder how they make them," Alex wondered.

He looked at the two of them fly away and wondered if it was a good idea to hide the information he had.

Certainly, telling them would've ended their work at once, but then that would open a can of worms he wasn't willing to deal with.

How many were there? How did you kill them? How are you alive? How does not a single one of your traveling friends know about this event?

Questions like that would bring more suspicions toward him. So much so that they might think of him to be spreading false information on purpose.

He didn't want that.

The line moved forward, and Alex got to enter with his Alchemist badge. The guards were quite respectable when they saw that.

Alex was really happy with how useful this badge was. Paying a fee in every single town or city he visited would have been troublesome.

Alex wanted to visit the library and the Alchemists Guild in this city. However, the first place he went to was actually the restaurant.

While the restaurant in this town wasn't as fancy-looking as the three-factions restaurant, the food here was still great.

He had the most amazing meal that this restaurant made. He didn't even blink an eye when he paid 70 True Spirit stones for that food.

It was nourishing, and he needed that. After that, Alex was reminded of something by the food, so he went around the city, finding this one place.

The charity for the players.

Once again, Alex decided to go in and explain to the players that were there what was going on.

Similar to last time, he went to help, this time simply slipping through instead of asking for permission.

He told the players what they needed to do, he gave them hope, and once enough people were motivated to change their life, he walked out.

"Here, sister, some spirit stones," Alex said as he handed her a bunch and left.

The girl's face stared in awe when she saw the 60 True Spirit stones fall on her hands just like that.

Chapter 612: Locating the Ingredients

Alex wondered if he should find a place to stay, but it didn't seem necessary to him. Since he was only going to be here for merely 2 or so days, he could spend those times in either the Alchemy hall or the library in this city.

"Huh? This city has no library?" Alex asked a man with surprise. He had been asking for directions to the library when he learned about that.

"No, Fellow Daoist. But I hear the next city has one," the man told Alex.

"Next city? The Raingoard city?" Alex asked.

"Yes, that's the one. It's only a hundred or so kilometers away," the man said.

"Thank you," Alex said and left. That took away one of the things he wanted to do.

'Does this town seriously not have a library?' he thought. Well, now that he thought about it, not every town had a library.

Even the city he considered his home now, the Scarlet city didn't have a library.

'Well, I guess I will have to go read some alchemy book in the Alchemists guild now,' he thought. He wanted to learn more about the land, but it seemed it would have to wait until a while longer.

So, Alex walked towards the Alchemists guild that which he knew the direction of.

-Silverleaf Branch of Alchemists guild-

'They do have a branch in every city, don't they?' he thought. He turned around and looked at the formation guild too, but that one would have to come later.

He walked into the Alchemists guild and walked directly to the left side of the guild. Fortunately, the interior of the guild was the same as the one in the last city.

He arrived next to another Alchemist who was also looking at the board.

He ignored that person and placed his badge on the carving. Soon, a whole load of information entered his brain, regarding the many missions.

Alex looked for a good one and chose it before walking away. He didn't try to look for anyone and only focused on himself.

Once again, he started making pills for as long as he could. Each mission gave him 2 or 3 sets of ingredients, and Alex spent the whole time turning all the ingredients into pills.

In total, he made about 10 different pills by the time it was evening. He could've certainly gone for a lot more of them, but unfortunately, his swollen meridians didn't let him do that.

Once it was evening, he decided to take a bit of break and went to the front of the guild for the receptions.

"Hello, can you tell me if there are any of these ingredients available for me to purchase?" Alex asked.

The girl looked through the list and crosschecked it. "We have Hotfeather Eagle's tail feathers, sir Alchemist," the girl said.

"The tail feathers? Only?" Alex asked. He had just bought that last time too.

"Unfortunately yes," the girl said.

Alex scratched his head. 'Was finding ingredients this hard normally? Have I been terribly spoiled by the northern forest?' he wondered.

"Would you like me to look if there are any places with these ingredients?" she asked.

"Eh? You mean through the other cities, with the other guilds?" Alex asked.

"Yes, sir Alchemist. However… it will cost you 2 True spirit stones per ingredient sear—"

"Do it!" Alex said aggressively. "Sorry about that. Can you please do it?"

"Of course," the girl said and started searching for the ingredients throughout the entire empire.

At the same time, Alex took the opportunity to write some more ingredients, which were the Saint rank versions of the untranslated ones.

The girl searched for those as well.

In the end, she came up with a lot of information, which she transferred onto a talisman and handed to Alex.

Alex paid the 28 or so True Spirit stones, after discount, that had cost him to search the ingredients, and went to a seat on the side of the hall to look through it.

As he went through the locations, the names of the cities, as well as their placement of them on the map, popped up in his head.

He could find almost every ingredient somewhere throughout the entire empire. Most concentrated of them was the capital, which had almost all of the ingredients, including the Blood Spirit Ginger.

"So it's all in the capital huh?" he thought. He wanted to leave immediately, but the capital was about 8700 kilometers away. That was not something he could reach by rushing there.

'Damn, how exactly do people travel such long distances in this empire?' he wondered.

He decided he would use the boat he had with him. If he handed it to Shen Jing, with his Saint realm Qi, it would certainly fly at the speed of light.

He went back up to the lady at the reception to ask if it was possible to purchase the ginseng from here and receive it at the Alchemist guild in the capital.

"Are you sure, sir Alchemist?" the girl asked him with a weird look. Alex couldn't understand what was so weird about that.

"Of course," Alex said.

The girl still seemed to have her doubt as she didn't immediately turn toward the system in front of her.

Instead, she said, "Sir Alchemist, you do know this is a Saint rank alchemy ingredient right?"

"Yes," Alex said as a sense of foreboding fell upon him. He thought for a second and asked, "What's the price of the Blood Spirit Ginseng?"

"It's 3400 True Spirit stones or 34 Saint spirit stones," the girl said with a wry face.

"What?!" Alex burst out in dumbfoundedness. Never in his life would he had imagined a Saint rank ingredient to cost so much money.

However, when he thought about it, it was a Saint rank ingredient. Slowly his thoughts returned to the ingredients he had in his storage bag.

There were at least 20 different Saint ingredients in there. He could make a lot of money if he sold those ingredients, wouldn't he? They would be enough to buy this Blood Spirit ginseng many times over.

'NO!' Alex thought and shook his head. "I guess I won't be buying it then. Thank you."

He had already learned his lesson regarding selling something he owned that was out of his league.

Zexi had nearly killed him last time when he was only a True Master realm cultivator. If Alex sold Saint rank ingredients, he would bring the wrath of Saint realm cultivators from all over the empire.

'Until I have entered the Saint realm, I cannot touch these ingredients or reveal it to the world,' he thought.

After that, Alex took a job that required him to make a bulk of pills at 25% and went back to the alchemy room.

For the next 8 hours, he stayed inside, doing nothing but making pills. Or so, he wanted people to think.

What he really did was make pills for 2 hours, and spent the rest of the 6 hours simply cultivating.

Alex went as far as splitting the pills to increase his speed at making the pills since they were only 25%.

After finishing making the pill, he kept the ingredients and instead cultivated for 6 hours, interchanging between the two methods every hour.

By the time it was time to leave, he felt his meridians swell a little less. After he went through this a few more times, he would probably have to remake the sun again to inflate it once more.

Alex went back to making some more pills for the missions and after morning arrived, he went to the back half of the guild where a small library was kept.

Alex entered the room and saw that it wasn't even a full shelf. Even then, he was at least getting something to learn.

'I wonder if the knowledge regarding alchemy in this empire is any different,' Alex wondered.

He tried to pick out a book, but there was some sort of seal here as well. 'Do I have to pay?' he thought. He wouldn't have expected to have to pay for something as simple as a book called 'Basics of Alchemy.'

After a minute or two of trying to pay, Alex couldn't figure out how to go about it.

That was when a person came by and placed his medallion in the air in front of the shelf, and the shelf opened up to allow a book to be taken.

Alex nearly slapped himself in annoyance for not figuring out something so simple.

He took out the basic alchemy book and got to reading. It wasn't long before he realized that the book truly was for the basics of basics regarding Alchemy.

'Why the hell is something so simple in an Alchemists guild?' he wondered. 'Do newbies need to continuously refer to this book to see if they forgot something?'

That felt correct in his mind, so he went on to take out another book.

The books available were on different subjects. Such as Energy theory, the importance of a cauldron, the difference in types of energy released based on the speed of the ingredient, and such.

Alex didn't feel these information to be extremely important to him, so he kept searching for some book he might not have knowledge of.

That was when he came across 3 books with interesting titles, about something he had never thought about before.

Alex looked at the first of the book and used his medallion to bring it out.

Once it was in his hand, he read the title of the book.

"Side Effects of Consuming too many pills."

Chapter 613: Toxins and Poisons

"Side effects of eating too many pills? There's something like that?" he wondered and sat down to read the book.

At first, Alex didn't give much thought to the book as the title felt more of an attention grabber than something that was actually true.

It was like those clickbait titles he would find on the internet all the time. However, as he kept on reading, his eyes narrowed as things that he hadn't thought of before but were clearly important were mentioned in the book.

According to the book, when one consumed a pill, the pill needed time to take effect. Even after the pill did take, there would be some lingering effects that would take time to leave.

This was theorized to be likely due to the powder of the pill getting stuck on the walls of the meridians as they are sucked in through the bloodstream when the body is trying to absorb the energy.

Alex knew that the bloodstreams of a person did mix with the person's meridians in some places, so there was merit to the information.

But was it really correct? Alex for one had never faced this problem even though there were a few times when he consumed pills consecutively.

'Actually,' he thought. 'Now that I think about it, I never really did eat a pill normally, did I?'

'Aside from the few times when I needed to heal, all the pills I ate would usually turn to Qi, with my body destroying the powder too, wouldn't it?' he thought.

Alex quickly realized that he had no understanding of how pills actually worked. Until now, he had simply gone along with the fact that they worked.

"I see, so it must be true. Pill toxins… they must be quite serious then," he thought. That got him to thinking just how many toxins a normal player's body must have amassed from eating all the pills they did to improve their bodies so far.

'Was that one of the reasons why their cultivation base was so bad?' Alex wondered. That certainly had to be true in some part.

Some of those pill powders themselves could be harmful too, and while one's body could probably fight against such minor harmful substances, ingesting a lot of them could lead to serious problems.

Alex went on to read more of the book and came across sections that talked about remedies if one had a lot of pill toxins.

One of the methods was surprising to eat a pill that dealt with the toxins. Pills made of ingredients that would break down the power that jammed one's meridians and help with the proper flow of Qi.

Another method was to get an expert physician to use their Qi to push the powders through some crack in the blood vessels.

These were the cures of the pill toxins. The book also went on to explain the methods of preventing pill toxins.

The most obvious one was to limit the consumption of pills as much as possible. The less pill you ate, the lesser the chance of pill powder being stuck in your meridians.

The other, more difficult way was to consume pills with very high harmony. Unfortunately for Alex, the book didn't mention why that helped, only that it did.

That was the end of the book, so Alex closed it and fell into thought.

'What's the difference between high harmony pill and a low harmony pill?' Alex thought. It was obviously the difference in harmony.

'Or more accurate, the difference in the amount of energy each pill has taken in,' Alex thought.

From his understanding of the Structure and Composition of a pill, he understood that the more amount of perfectly clumped together the mixture of the powder was in a pill, the better the harmony would be.

'So, does that mean that the powder of the pill that does hold the energy gets easily absorbed and even breaks down into individual pieces of powder, while the one without energy in it simply stays clumped up?' Alex wondered.

If that were true, he could see why pills with high harmony would result in fewer pill toxins, and vice versa.

Alex mulled on the information for a while, taking in everything he learned about pill toxins.

In the end, all he needed to care about were not eating too many pills, and that better pills were always better.

'I can see why pills with higher harmony would be sought after more. It was not just the effectiveness of the energy, was it?' he thought.

Alex went back to the shelf and put back the book, before taking out the 2nd of the 3 unique books.

He read the title of the book to himself.

"Poison pills are almost as important as healing pills."

Unfortunately, the second book wasn't as interesting as he had hoped it to be.

The book about poison simply spoke about how important poison was to an alchemist. It spoke about the minute differences poison could have that not all healing pills could cure.

As such, people needed to learn about poison so as to be prepared against them. Knowing about poisons would help someone create antidotes way easier than not knowing about the poison.

All the book did was make Alex remember to learn how to make poisons. He had been meaning to do that for a long while, but he had forgotten about it due to the events he had been through in the crimson empire.

Alex stopped. 'I have been through?' he thought. That was wrong. He had never been through anything. It was his clone soul that went through everything in his body.

'Why do I think of the events as something I did?' he thought. He had noticed this a while ago, but now it had become way more prominent.

No longer did he think of what his clone soul did as 'someone else's work'. For some reason, it had become his own in his mind.

The distinctions between what he did and what his clone did were slowly but surely vanishing from his mind.

At this point, it wouldn't be wrong to call the current him and the one that was controlled by his clone soul the same person.

'Am I getting used to my body after being suppressed? What is happening?' Alex thought.

Alex didn't have a clear understanding of what had happened outside of the game. Those memories were still very vague to him.

However, the memories inside the game were now as good as his.

He shook his head and focused back on the poison book he was reading. The book didn't really have anything interesting for him to read further, especially since he wasn't used to making poisons at all.

He would revisit it once he had at least delved into making poisons. Now that he had learned about the poisonous swamps to the east of the empire which he would have to visit for the purpose of getting the Two Colored, or Three colored Poison Lily, he would certainly get into it soon enough.

Alex then took out the final book that had piqued his interest among the many on the shelf.

A book named 'Simple Usage of formations in Alchemy'.

Chapter 614: Formations in Alchemy

Formations for alchemy. Alex had always learned these two things separately, yet now, the book was saying that there were ways to use formations for alchemy.

"I wonder how it would work," he thought as he opened the book and started reading it.

As he read it, Alex soon understood that there was nothing simple about this knowledge. Every single page contained a bit of information that would help everyone a lot.

Use formations to help your pill-making. If people in the Crimson Empire were to be told this, they would certainly be amazed.

There were a few things you could do with your formations that would be considered simple usage.

First of all, was something that many cultivators struggled with even after reaching a high cultivation base.

That was flame control. If someone was born without fire-related spiritual roots then those people would have to usually put in more effort during cultivation.

That was to say that they would have something else to worry about while keeping track of the pill and all.

There were also outside influences that would make it hard to control the flame sometimes. Alex remembered how hard it was for his master to control the fire after she had just awakened her Yin Constitution.

He too struggled while making a few pills when he had just awakened his body as well.

If at that time he had a flame-controlling formation that assisted him in changing the temperature of the flame, it would have been a lot of help.

Another thing formations could help was pill forming. Sometimes, one didn't even have to make the pills themselves. Once they reached the last portion of the pill-making process where all that was remaining was to put the powders together to make a pill, a formation could be used to automate that process.

When Alex read that, he wondered how much that could really help him. After all, pills needed to be crafted carefully to reach a high percentage of harmony.

Of course, he didn't doubt that one could reach a certain harmony level with formations. It may have been immortal grade. It may even be divine grade.

But what about after that? At some point, the powders wouldn't clump together so nicely that they allowed energy to be held. Also, formations surely wouldn't bring out every single speck of the powdered ingredient like a human's spiritual sense would.

Not to mention about the thing the Royal Alchemist had told him.

Symmetry.

If he wanted symmetry in a pill, he would likely have to do it himself and not rely on a formation.

There were still other things a formation could help with. There was one that Alex didn't find useful to himself, but would definitely help a lot of the others.

That was using defensive formations while making pills. Using defensive formations, if the alchemist was ever in a situation where the cauldron's energy destabilized to the point that it exploded the cauldron, the defensive formation would save them.

Aside from that, there were many other simple usages such as Qi gathering formation to keep you making pills for longer, or Soul Cooling formation to help you with the mental fatigue of making pills.

Given what formations could do, these truly were the simple ones of the bunch.

Alex put the book back on the shelf and went back to his task of making pills again.

When he entered the pill formation this time, he asked the aid if there were formations here to help him.

"Sir Alchemist, you can use your badge to activate any formations you may need in here. However, please know that using formation will cost you some charge based on how long you use it for," the aid said.

Alex nodded and started making pills once more. This time, however, he decided to use the Flame controlling formation to see how much it would help.

It cost him 1 True Spirit stone every 10 minutes of the formation's usage. If it worked as advertised, Alex wouldn't mind paying that every day.

He started the formation and increased the temperature to what was needed for the first ingredient.

"Hmm?" Alex had to stop putting in Qi as soon as he started. The moment he used his Qi to even increase the fire's temperature to any level, it immediately shot up the temperature.

He required what he believed to be 30% of his originally required Qi to reach the same effect, and the time it took for the fire to get hot was a bit faster as well.

Considering he had the Flame Mastery scripture which helped him control fire at a level not many could, he could see how this formation would help the other alchemists.

Alex needed to get used to the formation, so for the first few minutes, he kept track of how quickly the formation increased and decreased his time.

Once he practiced a few ingredients, he started getting used to the sped-up creation process and made the pill in just under 10 minutes.

The pill came out to be at 43%, despite him having a slightly hard time towards the start due to the change in speed.

Now that he got used to it, he would make the better and better pill.

For the next 6 hours, Alex continued making pills, spending close to 30 True spirit stones using the formation alone.

While he certainly could work without the formation, it did speed up his process by just that bit.

So, he had continued using it.

Around late afternoon, Alex left the guild to go out and visit the city. For the next 3 hours, he did nothing but roam the city.

He saw the many people going about their own life, each one as real as the next one.

He couldn't believe that at one point he had thought these to be fake people.

Not just him, millions upon millions of people from his homeworld, the fifth continent.

'I wonder if they know this world is real or not? My clone did, but maybe after not finding a way back, he already forgot about it,' Alex thought.

After all, that was what he would do.

'He most likely doesn't know he is the clone. Poor guy, living a life with a bad body, it will be tough for him,' Alex thought.

Along the way, he saw many different guards patrolling the city. Yet he didn't see the guards that had colorful clothes. The Lightsworns.

'Hopefully, they found the corpses and weapons on the ground and learned about their deaths already,' Alex thought.

Alex walked to another restaurant and sat inside, ordering some of the most nourishing food on the menu.

He also brought Pearl out to feed him a bit. Now that Pearl was a True beast, he could also devour a lot.

Not long after, the food appeared and nearly filled the entire table he was sitting on.

Some of the men and women turned their heads to watch him eat so much. A few of them even had shining eyes, as if they found something captivating.

Alex enjoyed his meal as slowly as he could and left the restaurant. When he did, it was already evening outside, and the sun had just gone down.

Lanterns, as well as light artifacts, started shining all over Silverleaf city, giving a lively appearance to the city.

Alex smiled when he saw all that, reminding him of the Hong Wu sect.

He started walking back towards the guild. Along the way, however, he had to stop.

"Would you fellows mind telling me what you are doing following a man like me in this nighttime?" Alex asked, turning around to look at 3 thugs who were trying to discreet in their following.

"I would suggest you follow a girl instead of a man like me, but that might be bad since I don't think your intentions are very good, are they?" Alex asked.

In the middle of the street, saying such a thing with such loudness had obviously started to make the crowd of people focus on them.

The three thugs immediately looked flustered. "Brother, what are you saying? We are just walking along minding our own business. We aren't following you," one of the men said.

"Oh," Alex said, giving them a light smile. "I'm sorry to have stopped you like that. Then I suppose you wouldn't mind going on your way then."

Alex didn't want to bother with these men, so he left them a way out. With their Bone Tempering realm cultivation base, it would only be bullying to do anything stupid like bait them into attacking him after going into an alleyway.

However, when Alex did give them a way out, they didn't leave at all. Instead, they started at him with their eyes wide.

It wasn't just them, even the crowd behind them had started to stare at him with wide eyes.

'What's going on?' Alex thought and looked the crowd at the side. That was when he realized that they weren't staring at him, but rather behind him.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense behind him and nearly yelped in surprise when he realized who was standing there.

He immediately turned around, and the colorful lights reflected in his light. Even at the night, those robes changed colors like a rainbow twisting itself as it moved through the sky.

The Lightsworns that he had thought had already left the city were standing in front of him and the crowd.

And for some reason, they were staring directly at him.

Chapter 615: Mosquito

'Are they staring at me?' Alex thought with a surprised look on his face. That was when he saw a talisman floating in front of the man and woman, blinking with a soft light as it slowly flew towards him.

Alex thought of moving back, but there was no threat from the talisman at all. He caught the talisman before it could touch him, and when he did, it turned bright and burst into a million lights, all of which started coating him.

The girl canceled the talisman's locater since they had already found the person they wanted to find.

"Fellow Daoist, would you mind coming with us?" the girl asked.

Alex looked at them with a weird look on his face. "May I ask why I am being called?" he asked.

"It is regarding a certain bandit group that you have been in contact with recently," the girl said.

"Why are we wasting our time talking, sister? Let's just grab him and leave," the man next to her said.

The girl shook her head and gestured to Alex as she said, "the situation is a little more complex than you think."

The man turned towards Alex to see what she meant by complicated when he noticed something peeking out of his chest.

'Was that… an Alchemist badge?' he thought. If it really was an alchemist badge then they couldn't be hasty with doing anything.

Offending an Alchemist was the same as offending the guild. The consequences would be too extreme. Not to mention, the kid in front of him was a True Earth alchemist.

"Brother, we can talk in the alchemist's guild if that is where you wish to converse with us," the man said, now understanding the situation.

The girl was a little surprised that her partner even had a brain that could think anything other than fighting and resting.

"Very well," Alex said and left with the two. The two of them moved to either side of Alex as he walked back toward the Alchemist guild.

The three thugs nearly pissed their pants that they had nearly gone ahead with their plan of looting someone that was about to be escorted by the Lightsworns.

Had they arrived at the wrong moment, they would've become mincemeat at the hands of the Lightsworns. They quickly thanked lady luck and made their way back to their homes.

After a few minutes, Alex arrived at the Alchemist's guild and walked towards the corner away from the customers.

The customers and receptionists looked with surprised expressions when they saw Lightsworns enter the guild.

When they saw an Alchemist with them, they were even more surprised.

One of the receptionists immediately stood up and walked toward them. When she reached the Lightsworns, she bowed towards them in greeting but ignored them afterward.

"Sir Alchemist, do you require any assistance?" she asked.

"There's no need," Alex said. "If there is, I will let you know."

The receptionist nodded and went back to the reception.

Alex was surprised that she came to help him so fast. Likely all the receptionists were trained in such a way to help the alchemists in whatever problem they encountered.

'She was likely going to find me a lawyer equivalent, wasn't she?' he thought. He was liking the guild more and more now.

"Can we ask you some questions now?" the girl asked.

"Yes, go ahead," Alex said. There was nothing he could really do now aside from answering their question.

"What's your name?" the girl asked.

"Yu Ming," Alex said.

"Where are you from, brother Ming?"

"Riverweed city," Alex said.

The girl quickly took out a map to see where the city lied and when they realized that it was on the same path as the bandit's location, she put it back in.

"What is your affiliation with the bandits?" the girl asked.

"Affiliations? I don't have any affiliations," Alex said.

"That's a damn lie," the man said from the side. "The talisman that tracked you down had the bandit's aura in it. It was an Aura tracking talisman, and it led us right to you."

"Oh," Alex said. "That's because I killed them partially."

The two Lightsworns immediately frowned. "You killed them?" they asked. The man and woman instantly judged Alex's cultivation base again, only to find out it was still in True Disciple 3rd realm.

That couldn't have killed anyone at all.

The girl suddenly moved her hand, and Alex thought she was about to attack him. However, she was just reaching her storage bag.

The girl then brought out a talisman and suddenly placed it on Alex's forehead before he could say anything.

Alex felt a rush of non-harming energy pass through his body and a moment later, the talisman fell.

-True Disciple 3rd realm-

That was written on the talisman. "Why did you do that?" Alex frowned.

"Sorry, we needed to find out if you were perhaps lying," the girl said as she picked up the talisman. "However, it doesn't look like you are."

"Of course, I'm not," Alex said.

"Then why were you lying?" the girl asked.

Alex was confused. "What? When did I lie?" he asked.

"You said you killed them. With your cultivation base, that's not possible at all. Also, to gain this much aura, you couldn't have killed them using any other method than direct fighting," the girl said.

Alex took a deep breath and reigned in his anger. "Partially. I said I killed them partially. I only killed the ones I could. I can't kill them all obviously," Alex said.

"Huh? Oh," the girl only then understood. "Who else was with you?"

"Uh, it was one man called Shen Jing, that's all," Alex said.

"Where is this man now?" the girl demanded.

"Behind you." A voice floated from behind the girl and boy, scaring them. They immediately took out their swords and pointed their swords at him, fully scared of him.

'What the hell? How did I not sense him approaching?' the girl wondered. 'He's hiding his cultivation base as well.'

"Are you… Shen Jing?" the girl asked, looking at the newly arrived Shen Jing up and down.

"Yes, I am," he said. "Who might you be?"

"We are the Lightsworns, sent to investigate the case of a bandit group terrorizing local merchants and caravans," she said.

"Oh, those bandits are dead now," Shen Jing said.

"And you killed them?" the girl asked.

"Haha, partially," he said, repeating Alex's words.

'How long has he been here?' Alex wondered. It wouldn't surprise him if Shen Jing had been here the entire time waiting for the perfect time to enter.

The girl frowned. She took out another talisman and watched it move. Once again, it drifted towards Alex and turned into a bust of light.

"You have no aura of the bandits on you," the girl said with a cold look in her eyes as if she had found someone in the midst of lying.

"Why would I have their aura?" Shen Jing asked as if ignorant.

"If you killed them, then their aura would be on you," she said as if that were obvious.

Shen Jing simply shook his head. "They were too weak to place their aura on me," he said.

"No matter how weak, their death should have placed an aura on you," the girl said with an annoyed look. She really didn't like how Shen Jing spoke.

"Girl, does your cloth drench in blood when you kill a mosquito?" Shen Jing asked.

The girl's eyes narrowed with more annoyance in her eyes. "Are you comparing late True Lord realms as akin to mosquitoes?" she asked.

Shen Jing gave a foolish look. "Haha, I suppose it's a little inaccurate. But I don't know any bugs that are weaker than mosquitoes, but just as annoying," he said.

"HAH! Weaker than mosquitoes. That's quite arrogant of you. You think we will believe whatever your mouth shits ou—"

Suddenly, the floor below the girl cracked as she fell to her knees. Her entire body tried to crumble in on itself as sounds of cracking bones were heard from all over her body.

Shen Jing's entire demeanor suddenly changed. "Mind your attitude girl. Just because I like talking to you as equal doesn't mean you get to disrespect me," he said.

Blood veins popped up all over her body, threatening to burst at any moment. Her organs felt like they would burst out of her stomach, which her heart tried to give in at every other moment.

Her brain tried to shut down to protect her, but for some reason, she could clearly use all of her senses.

And that only made the situation worse for her.

Her face soon became blue from the pressure as blood started trickling down her nose. Then her mouth. Then her ears. Finally her eyes.

The man behind her wanted to help, but he wasn't in the condition to help either. While the pressure he felt wasn't hurting him, it was stopping him from doing anything else.

Only Alex there felt no pressure, as that was how Shen Jing intended it to be.

The girl's robes had already lost their color and were instead mostly black from the blood pouring out of the random tears in her skin from the pressure.

"Brother Jing, you should stop. If she dies, we will be in trouble," Alex said.

Shen Jing was about to say something but shook his head instead of as he kept the information to himself.

Finally, he released the pressure. The girl fell to the ground, taking deep breaths and then coughing out blood.

Shen Jing got on one knee and looked at her. "Do you believe me now, mosquito?" he asked.

The girl couldn't answer from the pain and fear she was feeling.

A smile crept back on Shen Jing's face. "Well, don't worry about your injuries. As luck would have it, you are in the one place where you can trust you will get healed."

Chapter 616: Place to Get Strong

The Lightsworn man took the girl away and fed her some pills to heal her. She would likely be in pain even after eating the pills but that was the best they could do for now.

"Did you really have to go that far?" Alex asked. He wasn't sure what to think of Shen Jing anymore. He stopped looking like a gentle elder brother, and instead looked like a sociopath who would kill him without a second thought.

'Are all Saint realm cultivators this eccentric?' Alex wondered.

"You're right. I went a little too far. But I always feel anger brewing over me when someone disrespects me. My pride doesn't allow that," Shen Jing said.

Then, a smile came upon his face. "Anyway, I came to get you. we should leave now," he said.

"Right now? Is there a caravan leaving this late at night?" Alex asked.

"Oh, we won't be using a caravan. Not that you can find a caravan go to where we're going," Shen Jing said.

"Ok, let me deal with some things here. I will be ready in a few minutes," Alex said.

"Sure, take your time," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded and took out a talisman and read it. It was the list of ingredients and where one could find them.

Alex knew he could find most of them in the capital, but since they would visit some other cities along the way, he thought it would be best if he kept a mental note of what the cities were.

It would always be better to get something early than late.

"What are you reading?" Shen Jing asked curiously.

"It's a list of ingredients for my healing pill and where I can find them," Alex said.

"Oh, what does it say?" he asked.

Alex handed the talisman over to Shen Jing. Shen Jing just took it with a weird look on his face and asked, "Does it have pictures? I love looking at pictures."

Alex sighed. "You can't read, can you?" he asked.

"Nope!" Shen Jing said, a little proud even.

"Are you a player?" Alex finally asked. He had been meaning to ask this question, but the last couple of events dissuaded him from this fact.

However, now that he found out that Shen Jing couldn't read, which was true of Players due to the changed language in the outer world, he was sure that Shen Jing had to definitely be a player.

"What's a player?" Shen Jing asked, immediately killing Alex's theory.

Alex wanted to ask if he was from the Central Continent, but he wasn't sure if he should. That was practically giving away the fact that Players came from the Central continent.

"Which continent are you from?" Alex asked.

"That's a stupid question," Shen Jing said. "You should know by now that the teleportation formation to the Western Continent has been destroyed by the outsiders."

"That doesn't answer my question," Alex said.

Shen Jing smiled. "It doesn't, does it? Well, this should then. I am from the Western Continent," he said.

"Were you born here?" Alex asked.

"No, but I've been here long enough that I can be considered belonging to this place," Shen Jing said.

"So you're really not a player?" Alex asked.

"Player… hmm, I feel like I heard this word before, but I forgot where," Shen Jing said.

Suddenly, his face changed as if he remembered. "Ah, right! In the Central continent. That senior who said he made a game. You guys were called players, right?" Shen Jing said.

Alex's eyes suddenly went wide. "You've met the creator?" Alex asked with very wide eyes.

"Oh yes," Shen Jing said. "Not very long ago either. He was really troubled about the fact that someone destroyed his game."

"YOU KNOW THE CREATOR!" Alex shouted.

Shen Jing scratched his head under his golden hair and said, "Yeah, I think I said that. Although, I just met him there by chance. I was actually trying to meet a friend who stayed with him," Shen Jing said.

'Is he talking about sister Hao Ya? Makes sense since they are both Saint realm,' Alex thought.

"How did you travel between the two continents?" Alex asked.

"I have my ways," Shen Jing said.

"C—"

"No, I cannot take you there," Shen Jing said before Alex could say anything. "I'm not trying to keep you here, but I genuinely cannot take you there."

"Even if I were to take you, you would die on the way there. That continent now has a terrible Qi storm surrounding it that will kill you before you can even enter it," Shen Jing said.

That went in line with what Hao Ya had told Alex. "You don't have any teleportation talismans?" Alex asked.

He had his own, but it was an unreliable one. It would take another 10 years before it was usable at all, even then, its randomness would make it a bad device to use as aim to enter the continent.

"Unfortunately, I am not so rich at the moment. I am what you would call broke," Shen Jing said.

Alex doubted it, but he still nodded. "I see," Alex said. "Can you tell me more about the creator then?"

"I promise I will give you some information about him from time to time," Shen Jing said with an annoyed face. "Can we leave now?"

"One second," Alex ran up to the receptionists and took out nearly 200 pills that he had made since he had become an Alchemist for the guild.

These didn't include the healing pills and other sets of pills he would likely need along the way. It only included normal pills that helped in cultivation or helped remove bottlenecks slightly so one could breakthrough.

The receptionist was shocked, but she didn't show it on her face. She quickly took it and had a formation check it all within a minute.

She got a list of the pill names as well as their harmony level. When she saw pills with nothing but 35-45% of harmony, she couldn't help contain her shock. Some of these pills were even at around 48%.

This was a man on the verge of being a True Heaven Alchemist, and he was so young.

Alex had made exactly 4 pills that went 50% or 51% in harmony in the last 10 or so days but decided to keep it under wraps so as to keep some aces up his sleeve.

Once the receptionist said that the task was done, Alex thanked her and moved to the two Lightsworns that were staying by the side.

"I'm sorry for what the senior did to you earlier. Please take this healing pill as an apology," Alex said and handed the girl a 40% healing pill before leaving.

He really didn't want bad blood with the Lightsworns as that might end up becoming his only way to heal his arm in the end.

If for some reason he was barred from becoming a Lightsworn, that would be terrible.

After realizing all that he needed to do was done, he went back to Shen Jing, and together they left the guild.

Shen Jing quickly brought Alex outside the city, which made Alex very confused.

"What are we doing on the eastern side of the city? We should go to the western side. That is where we can go towards the next city," Alex said.

"Who said we're going towards any city?" Shen Jing asked with a smiling face.

"Eh? If we're not going to a city, then where are we going?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing looked at Alex and asked, "Remember a few days ago when I told you to stop focusing on getting strong, and just focus on getting your arm back?"

Alex looked at him with a confused look but nodded. "Yes, although I don't understand why you would want me to stop becoming strong," Alex said.

"I never said that you should stop becoming strong. I only said that you should stop focusing on it," Shen Jing said.

"Huh?" Alex was still confused.

"That was because I was going to focus on making you strong. And today, I've found the place where I can make you strong," Shen Jing said.

"Oh," Alex's confusion still remained, but curiosity took over his emotion. "Where are we going?" he asked.

"That's a secret for now," Shen Jing said. "Pearl, come out."

Pearl poked his head out of Alex's robe and meowed with his tiny little mouth. Then, without any hesitation, he pushed his little legs on Alex's chest and shot out of the robes, before arriving at Shen Jing's palm.

Alex couldn't help but wonder why Pearl so easily accepted Shen Jing's every word. He had said that Shen Jing was friendly, but was he being truthful?

Or maybe Shen Jing had used some sort of technique on him. Or maybe, Shen Jing had a body constitution that made one friendly towards him, but it didn't work on Alex because of his body constitution.

Either way, Alex didn't fully believe that Pearl was being entirely truthful. There had to be something here that Pearl wasn't able to understand.

Shen Jing then put Pearl inside his own robes and grabbed Alex by his. Then, he shot off.

The speed. Holy shit, the speed.

That was all Alex could think off when he felt his body rip the air apart him.

Immediately, he used his movement technique to clear the friction around his body, but the speed was so fast that his own Qi wasn't keeping up with all the friction that was being removed.

If Alex didn't have extra-wide meridians at the moment to pump out enough Qi, he was sure the air would rip his body apart.

Chapter 617: Training Location

Alex didn't know how much time had passed as all of his focus was gathered on the fact that he had to stay alive.

Then, it all vanished. As if he came to a lurching halt, Alex felt his innards move along with the previous momentum, while his outer body had already stopped.

If not for the body cultivation, his organs might have popped out in different places.

"We're here," Shen Jing said and threw Alex down.

Alex quickly balanced himself in mid-air and flew. When he looked down, he could see nothing but massive forest that grew on flatlands and hills.

"Where are we?" Alex asked.

"This is the eastern forest," Shen Jing said. "It's a piece of untouched land that only the bravest of humans dare to come."

The Dreaded Mountain range. Alex had read about it. People wanted others to know how terrifying this place was, so they named it such.

True beasts were common in many of the mountains, with existence of Saint Beasts not being very rare either.

'I am to train in such a place?' Alex thought.

Suddenly, pressure gathered around Alex. Alex could barely ignore the aura and keep flying, but that was very hard for him.

"Not bad," Shen Jing said from above him.

Then, A beast showed up below him. It was a massive bird that had red feathers and an Eagle's head. Alex looked at the bird in fear and surprise.

Saint realm. This bird was definitely in the saint realm. It was only afterward that he got back enough of his wit to recognize the beast's species.

'A Hotfeather Eagle?' he thought in surprise. 'Is this a coincidence, or did he know there was this beast here.'

"Pipe down," Shen Jing said, putting out his own aura that suppressed the bird.

"You have barely entered the saint realm. Don't show off just because of that," Shen Jing said in a soft voice, but that sounded like a booming voice to the eagle.

It quickly kept away its aura and waited for Shen Jing's words.

"This child will train in your mountain. You are not to interfere with his training," Shen Jing said.

"Yes, senior," the eagle spoke.

"Go, I won't bother you," Shen Jing said.

Seeing the opportunity, the eagle quickly flew back to where it had come from, leaving a gust of wind in its wake.

"I am to train here?" Alex thought, looking down at the massive mountain range. He could see the roaming beasts both in the air and on the ground.

Even from high up, he could tell they were strong. Very strong.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "You will have to survive in the forest, all alone."

Alex nodded. That was expected from where he was. "Can you tell me why you're helping me?" Alex asked. "Did the creator put you up to this?"

Shen Jing cocked his head to the side. "No. Why would the creator put me up to this? Are you important to him somehow?" he asked.

"Never mind then," Alex said.

"Alright, come here," Shen Jing called him. Alex flew back up to where Shen Jing was.

Suddenly, Shen Jing attacked. The attack was so fast that Alex couldn't see it coming.

When it struck him on the face, Alex tumbled backward for a few dozen meters before coming to a halt.

The attack wasn't very hurtful, but it did burn him a little on his face. Alex quickly turned towards Shen Jing and asked, "Why did you hit me so sud—"

He stopped. Something was wrong. He saw a golden light in front of him. What was that? Was he surrounded by a golden barrier?

Alex put his hands forwards to touch the golden barrier, but he couldn't see his hands at all.

'What's going on? And why is my face in so much pain?' he thought. He tried to touch his face, but still, he couldn't see his arms.

Alex blinked, and that did nothing to block the yellow light. Understanding of what was happening dawned on Alex as he quickly put his hands on his eyes, to cover the outside light.

He could still see the golden light.

There was no golden fog or barrier blocking his view outside. No, it was in his own vision.

Alex quickly sent out his spiritual sense and as expected, there was nothing outside. He then sent his spiritual sense into his eyes, and he could see a wall of Qi erected inside either of his eye sockets.

"What did you do to me?" Alex asked, horrified.

"You are going to train without your eyesight. With something so great as Spiritual sense, I can't have you only occasionally using it. You should be constantly using it, and this is going to teach you regarding that."

"Also, this is to make you stop relying on your mental attack to solve anything and everything. People have mental defense a lot more than you might think. It's about time you start looking for other ways to defeat your opponents," Shen Jing said. "Don't worry about your eyes, I just have to remove my Qi and they will work normally again."

Before Alex could even say anything, he felt something rip away from him. He put his hand out in horror, but before he could even grab onto them, his storage bags were ripped free from him.

Shen Jing grabbed the 8 or so storage bags Alex had, juggling them in his hand. "So many storage bags. You should learn to only take a couple of them with you. Not all of them," Shen Jing said as he started looking into the storage bags.

Alex feared for what he may find, all those saint-rank ingredients. Was he going to get jealous of Alex and kill him to take them all? Was he going to take the sword instead? What about the books he had?

Just as he was thinking that, Shen Jing brought out the sword. He held it in his hand, his eyes shining with surprise.

"Damn, this is a good sword. Perfect craftsmanship," he said as he looked at the edges of the sword. "It might actually cut me too," he said jokingly, but that didn't sound like a lie.

"This sword is a piece of art, and I love it. As such, you will not get to use this sword in this training," he said and brought out another sword.

It was a True Mortal grade sword, with a black hilt, straight, golden crossguard, and a silvery blade about a meter long.

It was shorter than the Steel Sword he was so used to, but it was better than nothing. Actually, since it was a True Mortal sword, it was better than many things.

Unfortunately, however, it couldn't compare to the nameless sword that Shen Jing had taken.

"Take this," he threw the True Mortal sword towards Alex and looked back into his storage bag. After a while, he brought out the cauldron and threw it at Alex.

"I suppose an Alchemist must have his cauldron with him at most times, right?" he said and continued looking through his storage bags.

Then, he brought out a variety of different pill bottles. "Choose 3," he said.

"What? Only 3?" Alex asked in surprise.

"Yes, now choose," Shen Jing said.

Alex didn't understand why he was only getting 3, but he chose 3 healing pills, each and every single one of them above 50% in harmony.

"Good," Shen Jing said, passing along the 3 bottles while keeping the rest back in his storage space.

He brought out formations from the storage bag next, and this time Alex got to choose only 2. Shen Jing then finally gave him 20 True Spirit stones.

"Alright, time for you to go down and train," Shen Jing said.

"Eh?" Alex looked at him with surprise and confusion as the sword, cauldron, 3 pills, and 2 formation plates hovered around him along with the 20 spirit stones.

"Can I get a storage bag to keep all of this?" he asked. There was no way Shen Jing was going to send him down to the beasts with all of these things floating around him, right?

"But I already did," Shen Jing said with a smiling face, as the storage bags in his hands suddenly disappeared somewhere.

Alex checked himself and said, "I don't have it on me though."

"Then what's that on your finger?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex looked at his finger and saw the golden ring with ruby on it. "The storage ring? I can't access it yet. It's apparently from someone really powerful, and it had his imprint on it."

"Breaking through this would take me ages," Alex said.

"Yes, but you have to start somewhere, right?" Shen Jing asked. "Well, it's about time you start using it then. Unlock whatever small part of this you can access and store your items in there."

"Now then, go on," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded. "Come on Pearl, let's go," he said.

However, Shen Jing put his hand on Pearl, keeping him in his robes. "You will train alone. I will help train pearl myself," he said.

"What? Alone? For how long?" he asked.

"Until your body and Qi are equal," Shen Jing said.

"Body and Qi are equal… that means until my cultivation base reaches True Lord 1st realm?" Alex asked.

"Yes, or more if you want. Also, you are not allowed to hide your cultivation base down there. If you hide your cultivation to sneak around the beasts, then I will come to beat you myself," Shen Jing said, making Alex shudder a little.

Alex nodded. "Okay," He said and turned around to look at the forest down below. For the foreseeable future, he was going to have to live here.

No, live was not the correct word. He would have to survive here.

Chapter 618: Trouble Before the Training Starts

Alex placed all of his items inside his cauldron and flew down towards the forest with fear in his heart.

There were so many beasts down there. Was he going to be fine at all?

He only had 3 healing pills, so until he made some more by finding ingredients in the forest, he would have to be extremely careful of everything.

Fortunately, he had brought a fire-making formation plate with him that could work for a while, but he wasn't sure how long it could sustain him.

Just as he was thinking that a voice drifted into Alex's ears. "You don't have to stay in one place. You can move around if you want to," Shen Jing's voice said.

Alex sent his senses towards the sky, but he couldn't see Shen Jing at all. He was more than the 100 meters distance Alex could view at the moment.

Alex thought of flaring his spiritual sense to see, but destroying your only sense of sight seemed an idiot to him.

'He took Pearl away. Is Pearl going to be okay?' he wondered. He trusted Shen Jing with everything he was about to do, and yet he didn't trust him with Pearl.

'Do I care about Pearl more than myself?' he wondered. 'I can't afford to do that. I need to care for myself right now."

Suddenly, something flew up to him from his right side. It entered his senses way too quickly, and Alex could barely react in time.

He instantly used his teleportation skill, but in mid-air, there was only 2 place he could teleport to.

That was either his shadow on the ground or the shadow on the underside of the beast that entered.

Since he couldn't see the ground at the moment, he felt better just teleporting underneath the beast.

With a flicker, he disappeared from where he was and appeared under the bird. Then, his sword lit up with golden light that was surrounded by a prominent white outline.

With a slash, Alex put a long gash underneath the unsuspecting beasts, but the damage wasn't deep enough.

He then heard the beast smash onto something as it disappeared out of his view.

'No!' Alex thought as he realized what had just happened. The beast had struck his flying cauldron, and now it was gone out of his senses.

"Where did it go?" Alex cried out, but he couldn't see the exact direction it went.

Just then, the beast entered his senses once more and Alex finally cared managed to see what it was.

It was a giant flying bat of green color. If Alex remembered correctly, this was an Emerald Wildbat.

'True Lord 3rd Realm?' Alex thought as he sensed its cultivation base. This fight was going to be tough for him. Especially without the amazing sword, but hopefully, the mixture of his cultivation and body helped him a bit.

'It should,' he thought. 'The bat is already bleeding.'

SCREEEECH!!

Suddenly, the bat let out a loud screeching sound that made Alex's head hurt, however, since he was looking through his senses, to begin with, he did not have any problem keeping track of what the bird was doing.

As the bird flew towards him, Alex once again flickered behind the bat's shadow and made another cut.

The bat was truly furious this time around. It was used to its prey not fighting back after they heard its voice, but Alex didn't falter at all. Instead, he fought back and hurt him.

'Dammit! The bat is acting cautiously,' Alex thought. The bat was no longer charging without thought. Instead, he was constantly spinning in mid-air, trying to look out for Alex who was somehow appearing behind him each time.

Alex gripped his sword tighter and poured his Qi into it, turning it golden again. With all the metal Qi in it, he was sure that one good attack would kill the bat.

So, once he was fully prepared, he burst into speed towards the bat. All of his concentration was on the bat, while the bat was concentrating both on Alex, and the position behind him where Alex might appear.

Suddenly, Alex disappeared from the bat's view. So, the bat turned around, expecting Alex to appear there, but he didn't.

Instead, it felt Alex's aura arrive behind it. It had fallen for Alex's trap.

Alex swung his sword, as hard as he could with a single hand and cut the bat's right-wing in half.

Then, while the bat was flustered, he swiftly teleported behind it and hit the bat on the neck.

The sword only went in half as deep, not managing to cut the bat's head off entirely, but that alone was enough.

The bat's eyes went wide as it died and started falling to the ground.

Alex huffed in mid-air, taking a small break while checking on himself. 'I can fight up to True Lord 3rd realm if I combine my body cultivation, Qi cultivation, and Sword intent,' he thought.

He hadn't realized this last time around when he fought the bandits. He felt his meridians hurt quite a bit, and also felt his Qi deplete a lot.

He needed to cultivate to replenish this, but where was he to go. He flared his spiritual sense for a bit, but he couldn't see a single thing around him as he was still in mid-air.

'Dammit! Where the hell did my cauldron fall off to?' he wondered. During the battle, he had lost track of which direction it had fallen in as all directions looked the same to him.

He also felt something weird about the battle just now. As if something was missing. Something that woul—

'Ah! The system notifications. It's missing,' he thought. 'Does that mean I won't get the cores and ingredients automatically now?'

He hadn't fought a beast since then to realize that this was how things happened. Now that he did, he frowned.

'So I have to carve the things out myself, huh?' he thought. That meant he needed to fly down right now and find that bat's corpse.

Since the bat had fallen through the sky, to fall along the same trajectory, he decided to free fall as well.

As he let gravity take control of him, Alex fell through the sky, the wind whipping past him as he put all of his focus into seeing anything enter his spiritual sense.

When he saw a tree enter his vision, he slowed down and slowly descended to the ground. Just as he saw the ground, he found the bat's corpse as well.

And alongside it, many hungry beasts with a cultivation base in the True realms.

'Shit!' Alex thought and immediately flew away from there before any of the beasts could see him as a threat.

Some of the beasts there were just as, if not stronger than Alex himself. This was truly a terrifying place and Alex was running low on Qi.

'I need to find a place to cultivate very fast,' he thought and expanded his spiritual sense to the furthest reaches he could.

After a while, he sensed a giant tree with a snake living on it. Thankfully, the snake wasn't very strong. It was likely guarding the fruit on the tree from what Alex could see.

'Fivefold pear, huh? I can make a healing pill with it. Although, I will need a lot of the other materials.'

Alex fought the snake, but it wasn't even a fight. He wanted to simply fight off the beast and send it away as he was invading its home, but the snake seemed to want to fight to the death.

So, Alex fulfilled its dream and cut it in two. He then cut the snake, along its lower section and pulled out a core from inside of it.

He looked at the rest of the snake and sighed. While the snake could be used as an ingredient in some pills, he currently had no place to keep it, so he threw the corpse away.

He hoped that would attract other beasts away from this location.

Then, he jumped into the crown of the tree and finally relaxed. He could see a few beasts inside his senses, but they weren't focusing on him at all.

Once he realized that he was relatively safe, he turned invisible for the extra safety and started cultivating the Five Yang Divine Path.

Chapter 619: Night Lynx

Alex put as little concentration as he could afford into the cultivation itself while keeping everything else on the outside.

He kept track of the beasts that walked into his spiritual sense's range, and those that walked out of it.

At the same time, he started thinking of what he needed to do next. He hadn't even got to think about anything previously before the bat attacked him.

Now, he finally had some time.

'First of all, I need to go find my cauldron. If everything is fine, It will still have its lid on it. Otherwise, the items may have been scattered. At that point, I can forget about finding anything,' he thought.

'Still, I need to find the cauldron if nothing else,' he thought. He was glad that he had his sword in his hand at the time, or he would have to survive in this forest without a sword. That would have been terrifying.

He then focused on the beast's core in his hand. That was a True Disciple 8th realm core. Did he dare eat it? What would happen if he ate something that was so far above his own cultivation base?

He didn't know yet, but he needed to at some point, so why not now? However, he stopped himself from putting the core in his mouth like he was popping a pill.

There were two dangers to that at the moment. The first was a minor one. That was just him not wanting to show Shen Jing, who was probably watching him right now that he could do that.

Second and most importantly, it was guaranteed that he would have to go into his spiritual sea to fight the remnant of that snake that was in the core.

If at that time something attacked him, he would die without knowing for sure. So, he decided to not risk such an important decision.

Since it was nighttime, many nocturnal beasts were out, so Alex hit as well as he could while following Shen Jing's order. Given how eccentric he was, Alex didn't doubt he would beat him if he did anything wrong.

Just going invisible was already pushing it in Alex's eyes.

With a similar state of mind, Alex cultivated non-stop for the entire night and quickly replenished his Qi.

Just as he was done, a voice drifted into his ears.

'Don't forget about the sun,' it said. Shen Jing had come to remind him of the thing Alex had to do every 2 or 3 days.

Alex got out of the tree and flew up to an open location. Once he made sure there was nothing out there, he strained his meridian to push all the Qi he could to bring out a small sun in front of him.

Once it was out, he cut the connection to his Qi, and after a few seconds, it disappeared.

"Argh!" he thought at the slight prickling pain he was feeling all over his meridians. 10% of his Qi was gone once again, with only 90% remaining.

He would have to survive with that.

Alex went back to the tree and did something he should have done a long time ago, but he gave up very easily each time around. That was to use his Qi and spiritual sense to erase the markings of the previous owner of the storage ring on his hand.

Alex jumped back into the crown of the tree with the Fivefold Pear and sat down to use his spiritual sense on the ring.

He started off with the Qi. As he poured the Qi onto the ring, the same thing happened that would always happen. The ring did not accept any Qi as if it weren't meant to.

However, Alex had gotten too many confirmations for that to be wrong. So, he tried again. He failed once again.

He tried again, but he failed then too. And again. And again. He kept trying for as long as he could. While he understood that he couldn't break whatever barrier he was facing by simply punching at it, again and again, he hoped that it would weaken it a little.

Once he felt tired of doing that, he started using his spiritual sense. Alex felt a force repelling his spiritual sense as if the ring didn't belong to it.

Usually, he would give up at this stage, but now, he fought. At a time when his spiritual energy was the most important resource to him, he fought back.

He had to. Without the storage ring, he would miss out on a lot of different things that he wouldn't want to.

The number of resources on these mountains was too great for him to skip out on them, and have his heart bleed.

So, he tried. Once again, and again. He tried and tried until… something slammed onto him from the left.

Alex felt a pain travel up his shoulder as he immediately sent out his spiritual sense around him. A cat-like creature with the fur of black stood on top of the tree crown, staring directly at him.

"Dammit! I lost focus on my surrounding," he thought. He had put all of his spiritual sense towards breaking into the ring and he had forgotten about the dangers surrounding him.

The cat-like creature jumped towards him. Alex was still on the ground and was about to swing the sword in his hands when he sensed another of the same beast coming from behind him.

'Dammit! How many Night Lynx are there in this place?' he thought. He twisted from his location, dodging the first Lynx, and used his sword to block the 2nd Lynx's attack.

From his senses, he could tell that they were both in the True Master 3rd realm and True Master 5th realm, respectively.

Alex could easily win against them. He just needed to land his attack on the two Lynxes.

The first one came for him again, and Alex ducked while at the same time swinging his sword above him.

The sword was about to cut the Lynx, but then the Lynx suddenly turned into a black liquid and managed to slip away.

"What?!" Alex thought. They had some defensive skills that seemed to make them hard to kill.

'I should have read some books that were more thorough on each of the beast's abilities,' he thought. Although each beast usually learned something different, so it might not have been as useful as he hoped it to be.

Alex teleported suddenly, appearing behind the 2nd Lynx and cutting it too. But once again, it turned into some sort of ink-black liquid and reformed a bit further away.

'Can I not kill them?' Alex thought, but he could see the Lynx be a little tired despite not fighting for very long.

'The skill must take a toll on their body then,' he thought and went on the offensive again.

Since both the beasts were in the True Master realm, long-range attacks, despite being a combination of Qi and Sword Intent, would not work on them.

Suddenly, one of the Lynxes roared loudly, making Alex a bit dizzy. Just then, the 2nd one dashed towards him and slammed its claw on his chest.

Alex was thrown back and slammed onto a tree, from which two monkeys jumped down to attack him.

Alex swung his sword and the weak monkeys died without knowing what had killed them. With barely True Disciple cultivation, they should have known not to interfere at this point.

After all, beyond the Mind Tempering realm, all beasts gained a certain level of intelligence.

Alex ignored the monkey's corpses and put his focus back on the battle with the Lynx. While the monkey's corpse was enticing for its loot, he needed to fight the Lynx quickly before another beast heard their battle and came to fight him afterward.

The 2nd Lynx ran towards him and Alex ran towards it too. The first Lynx roared again, sending Alex's mind into chaos, but he quickly grabbed onto his little sanity following which his body healed him from the mental pain.

He then slashed onto the 2nd Lynx which once again turned into an ink-black liquid that moved a little further away to reform itself.

When it did, Alex was already on top of it. He slashed at the Lynx once more, and the tired Lynx's body automatically turned itself into ink-black liquid once again.

However, Alex followed it once again. The First Lynx tried to help, but Alex ignored it completely. For as long as he knew where the Lynx was, he didn't need to worry about it.

After 2 more turns of changing itself into the black liquid, the Lynx's body finally gave up and couldn't change any longer.

That was when Alex struck and chopped its body in half. Seeing this, the first Lynx tried to run away, but that was the beast that started it all, so Alex wasn't going to let it get away under any condition.

He teleported close to it and cut it a few times, by which its body gave away too, and Alex killed it.

Alex let go of the sword and turned his hand into a golden claw that dug into the corpse of the beast and pulled out the core.

Since he couldn't keep the other parts anyway, there was no need in being careful about how he took out the core.

He then moved to the other Lynx's body as well as the monkey's bodies and took their cores out too.

Then, he looked around at the dead bodies of the beasts and understood that if he stayed here, he would have to fight more beasts that came to eat these corpses.

So, he grabbed his sword and walked away.

Chapter 620: Escape

Alex walked down the mountain, finally after figuring out he was on top of one. That had been a difficult thing to figure out as it turned out, he had actually landed on a plateau.

He wasn't sure if going downhill was the best idea or not, since he didn't know if stronger beats liked the peak or not.

However, he assumed they did, based on the fact that the density of Qi would always be higher on the peak than in the valley.

Which was why most sects' hierarchy was based around who got to live higher on a mountain.

Other than that, he thought it was a good assumption to think that the cauldron of his, if it had fallen down on the mountain, would have likely rolled downhill.

So, he wanted to wrap around the mountain range and see if he could find it at all.

As he walked down the mountain, in the span of about 30 minutes, he saw about 3 different beasts fight and kill another one, eating their cores.

'How the hell are there still so many beasts here?' he wondered. With day-to-day violence like that, most beasts should have died by now.

It was another hour and a half down the mountain later than he realized why that was.

There were too many beasts in the mountains. They liked to mate as much as they fought, giving birth to more beasts than was appropriate.

Them fighting themselves was simply their way of population control.

Finally, Alex managed to reach a patch of land that wasn't sloped at all. He hadn't walked down too quickly, but it had still been relatively fast, so he was surprised when he didn't get her sooner.

'Finally, the valley,' he thought. There were multiple beasts in his senses, someone ignorant of him, some eying him as food.

Alex ignored all of them. 'Let's go find the cauldron,' he thought and started walking towards his left, hoping he was on the right path to wrap around the mountain.

Just then, a beast entered his vision, a lizard the size of a crocodile. Its body texture was rough with a dull brown color to it. However, when looking closely, one would see that it wasn't a brown color, but rather a group of many, many vibrant colors, mixing together to become muddy.

'Colorful… venomous?' Alex thought. That was something he had been taught in his home. If something out in the open was colorful, it was likely venomous and one should stay away from it.

Alex tried to go around it, but it looked like it was staring directly at him.

'True King realm, dammit I cannot fight it yet,' he thought and tried to back away, instead of going the other way around the mountain.

However, the beast started following him. 'Why the hell is it following me? I'm just a puny True Disciple 3rd realm,' Alex thought.

It would make sense for other True Disciple and True Master, even True lords to see him as an easy target and attack. But this was a True King beast. No way in hell would his 'monster core' ever be useful to it.

Just then, he noticed two True Lord beasts slowly make their way towards him as well. They seemed to want to eat him right now, but they didn't.

Alex wondered if there were actually more beasts in the valley than at the mountain top and started frowning at the fact that he might have guessed wrong.

Then 3 more beasts came from his backside, 3 vulture beasts. Then, a pack of wolves with cultivation in the True Master realm.

Now that this many beasts had gathered, Alex couldn't help but wonder if there was something else going on here that he wasn't aware of.

It surely wasn't possible that all of these beasts had come to him just because of the aura of a True Disciple 3rd realm, right?

That was when a thought struck Alex. 'What if they aren't here for me?' he thought and looked in his robes.

The 5 monster cores lay there hidden inside. But while the cores were hidden, their aura certainly was not. And with 5 of them together at once, it must have looked like a buffet to the beasts.

Alex frowned. He cursed himself for not eating the cores, but they were too high level at the time, and he didn't want to risk fighting such strong beasts' mental image in his mind when his mind was all he had for now to survive.

And now, it had come back to bite him. 'I guess it was true when they said a treasure in a weak's hands is a crime,' he thought.

Now, the only way to escape this situation in his eyes was to get rid of the treasure.

He was willing to depart with it quite easily as the treasure weren't very valuable ones, to begin with.

Now, the only thing to understand was who exactly to give the treasure to.

The lizard was clearly the strongest, but if he did send all the cores towards it, the others would like a hound of him to get something for the trouble they went through.

So, Alex brought out the cores and put all four of them into one hand. Then, with not much force to it at all, he threw the cores about 20 meters into the air.

Immediately, the beasts saw what was happening and jumped forward towards the four monster cores in the air.

At the same time, Alex tried to wrap around the lizard and run away.

The lizard saw that and even saw through the fact that Alex had hidden away one of the cores in his robes.

It raised its head up in the air, ready to shoot out its tongue. Just then, Alex threw at it Heaven's Impact.

The lizard lost its consciousness and started falling down on him. At the same time, other beasts also started noticing him.

Using the lizard as a divide between them, Alex ran away from the group of beasts. However, just a bit further, he could see other beasts making their way toward him as well.

At the same time, he noticed the lizard behind him wake up from its unconsciousness.

'So fast? Does it have a defensive mental skill or what?' Alex thought. Now there was nowhere to run.

So, he was forced to do something he really didn't want to at all. That was to use the Earth Devour technique and run away.

As he employed the technique, the ground opened up beneath him. Just as Alex was falling through a crack. Something shot at him from behind.

He turned around in time to block with his sword, but something else sprayed afterward.

The lizard had shot out its tongue at Alex, and its saliva was now all over him.

Just as he fell inside the crack, pain flared all over him. Even as he moved through the ground, and he appeared somewhere else, he felt the pain burn right through him.

The venom of the lizard was getting to him. He could feel his body actively fighting it, but without his help, the body would take some time.

The pain lowered a bit when he reappeared, but suddenly he started drowning too. He had appeared in a body of water and it was washing away some of the acidic nature of the venom that was harming his skin.

Still, very quickly his body finished taking care of the venom that had gotten into him, while the outer one was washed away by water.

However, while the pain was gone, the danger was not. Even though he was in pain, Alex did not lose track of his surrounding.

And in this new surrounding, he felt many more beasts. The water had more beasts than the land. Snakes, fishes, crocodiles, and many other aquatic and amphibians beasts roamed the water.

Alex shot off in the direction he thought was up, towards the place where he could no longer feel the water.

As he shot up, he got closer and closer to the surface. However, just as he was about to go further up, he sensed something like a ceiling above him.

Still, there were no beasts there so he felt okay going there. Once he was out, he looked around with his senses and could see actual rocky ceilings above him, as if he were inside a cave.

'A cave above a pond?' Alex thought. He flew a little further and noticed the walls surrounding the pond and also the dry land he could go down on.

There were surprisingly no beasts here at all. 'What is this place?' he thought and roamed around.

When he reached a wall in the cave, he started walking around the cave while remaining close to the wall to see if he missed something.

When he made a full round of the cave, he frowned. There was no way out. His spiritual sense reached far and wide, but it still couldn't see the outside. Just a bunch of rock and dirt.

'I must be under a mountain,' he thought. 'I wonder how this pocket came to be formed then.'

The cave was about 200 or so meters wide in diameter, with more than half of it being taken over by the large pond in the center.

In total, there really was just about 40 or so meters of actual land to occupy for oneself.

Still, that was enough for Alex. 'I will rest here for a few days and train,' he thought. 'This can also be the place where I go into closed cultivation from now on.'

Chapter 621: Closed Cultivation

After making sure that there was nothing in the cave once more, and even going so far as to plunge into the pond once more to look if there was any strong beast in there, Alex finally sat at the edge of the cave to cultivate.

The Qi in the room was as low as not much had been able to permeate through the mountain and enter here.

Still, that didn't really matter to Alex all that much. He had never really needed Qi to breakthrough.

He then reached into his pocket and brought out the silvery-white beast core that was tainted a little red with the blood of the snake.

Alex wondered why he kept this core and not another one. Was it because he had been thinking of eating this for so long that he somehow didn't want to let go of it?

He wondered if he could keep the other beast cores when he traveled through the ground, but more than likely the same scenario would have happened again.

'I need to get rid of this core now,' he thought. He cleaned the core and prepared himself. Then, he ate it.

Alex didn't immediately get sent into his spiritual world, but he could sense the snake had appeared there and was about the wreck havoc.

'Oh, do I have to do it manually now?' he wondered. Maybe it was because he was the original soul of the body and not the clone's soul that was just controlling it, it seemed he had more control over himself than he initially thought.

He felt the slight numbness in his mind, while his body was already breaking down the core, giving him Qi.

When he sent his spiritual sense through his body, he could also sense that his Qi was being accumulated around the naval region.

The numbness though was more annoying than anything. He could likely go on for a long time, but Alex could feel his spiritual energy draining.

With vision, he could allow this. But now, he had no choice but to get rid of the snake.

So, he quickly jumped into his own Spiritual sea and looked around in awe as he saw the massive amount of floating silver threads in the air.

"What the hell?" he thought. "I know I haven't been here in about a week, but… no way there should have been so much gathered in that period of time right?"

Then, he looked around to attack the snake. However, there was no snake. "Huh? Where did it go?" he thought. He could still feel the numbness… was that not the snake?

"Thanks for the meal, kid!" a voice said to him from next to the mountain. Alex turned towards the voice to see a ball of black goo, what should have been a clear crystal, floating in mid-air.

'Dammit! Just a few days and it's already regenerated that much black goo?' he thought. Alex flew up to it and asked, "did you eat the snake that was here?"

"Of course," the spirit said. "You sent it here for me right?"

"Why the hell would I send something to you?" Alex asked with an annoyed look. He certainly hadn't lost anything by letting the spirit eat the snake's spirit, but for some reason, it made Alex angry.

"Eh?" the spirit was surprised. "Were you not trying to mend our relationship so that I can help you kill a god?"

"There is no god to kill here," Alex said. "Also, you shouldn't kill gods just because they are one."

"Huh? But they're gods. What do I, Godslayer, do if not slay gods?" it asked confusedly.

"Alright, I don't have the time to deal with you," Alex said and grabbed the floating ball with both hands before a yellow fog appeared around him, devouring the black goo, leaving behind the clean crystal ball again.

"Hey! Oi! What the hell are you doing? Why would you give me food, just to take my strength away?" the spirit shouted, but Alex ignored it.

He looked at the flying threads that originated from the silver mountain. It was to gather these too.

Alex wasn't sure why exactly he was doing this or if it was even beneficial at all. After all, after so many days, he hadn't even begun to see anything manifest in him to suggest it was working.

Still, he kept at it. Just in case that mountain was a parasite, like the Artifact spirit, he needed to keep his mind clean.

Once he was done absorbing all the threads, Alex left.

When he reappeared on the outside, he immediately shot out his spiritual sense to the furthest he could. Once he saw that no beast had walked out of the pond, he drew it back.

However, along the way, he couldn't help but wonder… did his spiritual sense grow in strength again?

It had grown once before this, by quite a massive amount too. It had been after the incident on the beach which gave him his freedom.

His 80-meter spiritual sense had become 100 meters, but Alex simply attributed this to his real soul finally being in control, which he still believed to be true.

However, this time it was different. 'Why did it happen?' he wondered. It surely couldn't just be him having secrets that he still didn't know, could it?

Alex shook his head and got rid of such useless thoughts for now. Right now, he needed to breakthrough.

Qi gathered around him as he used the Five Yang Divine Path to cultivate his Qi and put it through his body to seamlessly break through to the next realm.

It had been so easy that he felt he could do it in his sleep. 'This really is an amazing technique, isn't it?' he thought as he continued using it.

He needed to stabilize his cultivation base before he could do anything else.

From time to time, he stopped himself from cultivating any further and instead spent the rest of the time focusing on the ring at hand.

He felt like he was about to crack open some part of it, but that might have just been his illusion for all he could tell.

Then, at other times, Alex took his sword and practiced his swordsmanship, using it to hit the cave wall a few times before realizing that was not a very good idea. He shouldn't train in here as there was the chance of the place caving in on itself.

He wouldn't mind being buried, he could easily get out. But the problem would be that losing such a good cultivation spot would be unfortunate.

He also jumped into the water a couple of times. He couldn't possibly stay here forever, so he went into the water from time to time to see if there was a way out of this place.

Unfortunately for him, the underground pond was way more massive than he could have imagined. So, he couldn't roam all the location without some beast coming to attack him.

'The beasts must come from somewhere, so there definitely is a route,' he thought, but as of yet, he didn't find any.

So, instead of finding a way out of this place, he decided to carve one. Every single day, he turned his hand into a claw and took out a chunk of the land in a direction.

Since even 150 meters away he couldn't see any sight outside, he knew he would have to go at it for a long, long time.

In between cultivation, finding ownership of the ring, training, carving a pathway out, and finally, refining his new sword, Alex's days passed pretty quickly.

Before he even knew it, a month had passed.

During the month, Alex's cultivation base hadn't improved at all, but his meridians were now amazing in his eyes.

They kept their wide shape without it hurting much at all, but he would have to practice making the sun for much longer to be absolutely sure it became permanent.

He had also gotten close to making a pathway out. He could see the outside world just on the edge of his senses and knew that in just a week or so, he would be able to reach there.

And finally, as a reward for all of his hard work, the ring on his hand had become weaker at fighting back, and now Alex was able to open a small space in it, just enough to store his sword.

'Nice!' he thought as he tried to pull in and out his sword with just a thought. The ring was much easier than using his storage bag as his senses perfectly saw everything inside at once, whereas in storage bags, he would have to search for each item individually.

After hearing that the ring might have items that he could obtain if he tried to remove the ownership from it, Alex had been expectant of getting something valuable. But unfortunately, his wishes didn't come true.

"I shouldn't mind at all," he thought. "This is merely a small space. There is likely a thousand times bigger space inside, if not more. Surely I will find some things."

Then, he started his routine all over again. Cultivation, training, and making the path. Alex focused on just these three things for now.

And after a bit more than a week, he had arrived right at the edge of the mountain without having made an opening.

So, knowing that he would now have to leave and go train through real fights, he sat down one last time, employed his cultivation method once again, and broke through.

Chapter 622: BlueFlame Monkey

Alex could feel that his body was starting to get a little out of control, even for him, but a long period of cultivation with the Yin art controlled it to an extent where he could be fine.

Not for very long though. After cultivating for more than a month with the Five Yang Divine Path, he knew that sooner or later, he would end up having the same problem his master did, and a mere cultivation technique would not be able to stop it.

However, that wasn't right now. Right now, Alex needed to go out and train. So, he walked into the newly carved path through the mountain and appeared on the edge of it.

There was still a good 10 meters of distance to carve out of the ground, but Alex had stopped here. This was his way of hiding his entrance. To get out of here, he simply needed to do one thing. And he did it.

Alex teleported.

Once Alex was outside the cave, out in the forest, he marked the entrance to the cave with a few slashes from his sword.

Now, he was going to have to do 2 things. First, go find his cauldron. It was imperative that he found it.

2nd, fight a strong beast. There would be no point in coming to this place if he didn't find and fight a strong beast.

He wouldn't overreach and look for True King beasts, but True Lord 5th realm beasts were what he believed to be the perfect ones for him to fight.

Currently, together his strength should have been a little less than True Lord 5th realm, but he still needed that challenge to get stronger.

It turned out, he was right about being below a mountain. When he came out, he appeared in the valley. So, the beasts were plenty for him to fight.

To start off the training, he ducked. A bird about the same size as Pearl, when he was small, went flying past where Alex's head was.

That little bird was going for the kill. Alex recognized the bird as a Red Silverbeak. It was a more common variance of the exceedingly rare Azure Silverbeak that Pearl had beaten in the Riverweed city.

This one, however, wasn't as weak as that one. It was a True Master 8th realm beast. To it, Alex must've looked like a tasty little prey.

Alex sighed. He didn't want to kill such cute little beasts, but if it was going to attack him, he wasn't going to not fight back.

As the Silverbeak flew back towards Alex, his sword shined with white light and he flicked it, making an arch with his sword.

The next moment, the Silverbeak fell onto the ground, its body cut in two. Alex simply shook his head at the beast. So many were going to fight him because he was an easy target, only to come up dead not so long after.

He walked over to the bird and removed his core. This time, He had a place to keep it.

Alex then continued his journey. Since he was planning on only keeping cores in there, he skipped the bird's body, but he didn't skip out on the small alchemy ingredients he found growing around him.

He had enough space for now anyway. Alex didn't want to leave very far away, but it seemed he had to as there weren't many beasts nearby for him to fight.

So, he left the area. But, every couple of meters, he left a mark on the trees around him the direction he needed to return to the cave.

As he kept on walking, Alex fought 3 more beasts, but none of them were very strong. They were more of a hassle than a challenge.

Alex started to frown. 'Will I not find a good beast to fight against?' he thought. But just then, he saw something at the edge of his senses.

There was a beast sitting on top of a tree with its tail dangling beneath it. It seemed to be enjoying its time in the wind as it had its eyes closed and seemed quite relaxed.

Alex stopped. What should he do? Should he fight the beast? Or run away? He couldn't decide at all.

On one hand, the beast had a True Lord 6th realm cultivation base, with Alex's standards just a bit too strong for him. He didn't see any chances of winning on his side at all.

However, on the other hand, it was a Blueflame Monkey, one of the beasts that held the ingredient to his pill to regrow his limb.

Alex fell into a dilemma. Did he value his life more, or his limb?

"Don't be a coward now," Alex said to himself. "It's just a bit strong of a challenge. Nothing to run away from."

Thinking that, Alex gripped his sword tightly and ran towards the monkey, consciously letting it know he was coming.

The Blueflame Monkey was surprisingly red in color. The name Blueflame came from the little fire that burned at the end of its tail that was fully blue in color.

The monkey looked at the shouting Alex and frowned. It didn't know why such a weakling was coming toward it, but it didn't care.

It jumped down from the massive tree it called its home. There were many other stronger beasts nearby, yet the monkey was able to keep it for itself.

Alex noticed the tree it was sitting in as well as the massive fruits that grew in it.

His running slowed down as his breathing got heavier.

"Enlightening Mango!" Alex thought in surprise. The giant mangoes were said to have the capability to help someone gain some understanding in their cultivation path.

Alex didn't know what that meant or did, but the mangoes were really coveted and thus he wanted them too.

The monkey and the fruit were two things he wanted at the same location. Alex couldn't help but be extremely happy.

The monkey noticed that Alex wanted the tree and suddenly got angry. With a growl, the monkey jumped at Alex.

Alex was surprised at how quickly the monkey decided to attack, but he had been ready. So, as soon as it arrived, he brought out his gleaming, golden sword with white outlines around it, and tried to slice its hand.

The hand that struck the sword bled a little under the strike, but it was Alex who felt more of the damage.

His legs skid a few steps back before coming to a stop. 'Damn, this monkey sure is strong. I need to be careful,' he thought.

The monkey realized that it was the superior figure in this battle, so it started teasing Alex by showing its behinds.

It worked. Alex got mad. His sword moved in an arc in front of him, leaving behind 5 distinct phantom swords of the same sword he held, all of which were golden in color.

The swords slowly tilted until they were targeting the monkey, and flew off. The damage the Penta Sword Skill did was negligible to the monkey, but it was the visual Alex needed.

Once the 5 swords flew toward the monkey, the monkey got a little concerned, but still more or so careless about its situation.

The monkey punched in mid-air, sending a flying blue flame towards the swords, which when hit created a massive explosion that nearly knocked Alex off of his feet.

Alex stood his ground, however, and sent Heaven's Impact at the monkey. Right now, its blood was more valuable to him than the fight.

The monkey seemed to somehow notice the incoming mental attack and suddenly spun around. As it did, the blue flames in its burning tail lit up brightly, leaving a blue light where it passed through which created a barrier around it.

Heaven's impact landed on the firewall and destroyed it, not before being mostly destroyed itself.

"Tsk," Alex said as his only chance at victory was stripped away so easily. "How come the beasts are so good at blocking my mental attacks? Or am I just unconsciously drawn towards those that can block my attack?" he thought.

The Monkey had likely eaten the fruit and gained a lot of mental prowess as well since the remaining mental attack did nothing.

'Dammit, I don't think this beast is beatable right now,' he thought. So, Alex changed his target.

Instead of trying to go for the monkey, he decided to steal the fruit behind it.

Alex needed a distraction. Slowly, a yellow light glowed from Alex for a second, confusing the monkey.

Then the light down and nothing had changed. Alex was still there. He then took his sword in his right hand and ran towards the monkey with all of its speed.

The monkey ran faster. Far faster than Alex could've realized it was possible. However, he didn't let that distract him.

He still did what he was supposed to and ran. When he was right next to the monkey, he didn't stop and still ran. The monkey ran past him too, towards the 'Alex' that was running at it with his sword high in the air.

The monkey once again gave a punch, it didn't feel anything from its fist. It was like hitting a ghost.

The Alex disappeared into a burst of yellow lights, telling the monkey that it had been fooled.

The real Alex was on top of the tree, with his hand on one of the fruit. Just then, the monkey cried out and ran towards Alex.

Alex jumped away from the tree to avoid the monkey, but the monkey twisted in midair, sending a tiny blue ball of fire that struck Alex directly on his chest.

BOOM

Chapter 623: Explosion

As the blue ball of fire landed on Alex, it opened like a blossoming flower into a massive fireball that only grew larger to cause a great explosion.

Alex was sent flying away into the distance with terrible pain in his chest. When he landed on the ground, all he could do was writhe in pain.

He placed his hand on his chest and all he felt was head and blood. This was a terrible wound.

It didn't end there. His arm, face, and legs had been scorched as well. His hairs were singed all over his body. His clothes were still burning with the terrible blue flame, which he quickly tore off and threw to the side despite the pain.

When he stood up, all he could do was limp. Fortunately, he hadn't suffered anything permanent, but he had taken a lot of damage.

The wound, the pain, the fire, it all told him one thing that he couldn't believe at all.

"That monkey is not an ordinary True Lord 6th realm beast at all. No way something like that could have done this much damage even when I was fully defending myself," he thought.

He coughed a bit in pain and felt a salty taste enter his mouth. 'Dammit! I'm bleeding internally too,' he thought.

Alex looked around and brought out the sword he had kept in his ring. He felt some sort of happiness in this tragedy when he saw the marks on the tree.

While constantly being aware of ambushes and attacks, Alex wrapped the remaining bit of cloth around his waist to hide his naked body.

Then, he walked— nay, limped back towards the cave.

Once he was inside the cave, Alex slumped to the ground and immediately started cultivating. That was the only way to heal himself right now.

While healing pills would've been instant, cultivating was also a good way of doing so. The only problem was that it took quite a long time to heal a non-serious injury this way.

Alex cultivated continuously for a whole day so that he wouldn't die from his injuries. While he wasn't healed a lot, he was healed to the point where the proper movement was possible.

On the end of the 2nd day when his wounds were healed to a point where cultivation needn't be his only focus, he brought out a giant, orange mango from his storage ring.

At the very last moment, he had been able to snatch this fruit and drag it into his storage ring.

'Dammit! There were so many of them, and I only got one,' Alex thought. However, this one fruit alone was quite coveted by many humans too.

So, Alex didn't beat himself over it. Not wanting to waste any part of the fruit, Alex took a bite out of it with the skin and all.

Suddenly, all sense of fatigue and sleepiness he had been feeling from the pain and days-long cultivation was immediately gone. Alex felt as if he had woken up from a 12-hour sleep, fully alert and ready.

His mind processed things so quickly, that everything started feeling like they were moving in slow motion.

At the same time, the pain became quite intolerable under his fully awake mind as well.

So, Alex's mind decided to switch to something else. Whether it was because he was hating his defeat, or because the pain reminded him of the event, the final scenes of his fight with the monkey ran past his head.

Unconsciously, Alex took another bite of the mango, and the vision seemed as real as if it was happening right at the moment.

He watched the tiny blue ball of fire slowly open up, expanding itself… no that was wrong. It was a shrunken ball of fire, so it was returning to its original size.

At least, that was what Alex thought at the moment. However, his next moments of thoughts were plagued by his panic and skill employment.

He didn't see what happened to the fire next.

He took another bite of the fruit as he mulled on why that tiny ball of fire had done so much damage. He thought he understood it while he replayed the event in his mind, but that didn't really work once he didn't have it in front of him.

Also, the main part of the attack, the part where the blue fire actually attacks him was missing from his memory. Without it, Alex doubted he would never understand why.

'Why am I so fascinated by this?' he wondered t himself while taking another bite of the mango. The mango slid directly into his stomach, turning into cool energy that flowed up to his brain.

His thinking churned again. Even though he couldn't understand why the attack did as much damage as it did, he still wanted to learn about the first half of the attack where the ball of fire was small.

That felt like a sneaky little attack on him. A fireball that looked innocent but suddenly turned large in front of the enemy could take them by surprise.

So, Alex thought about it while eating the remaining mango. He felt like he was getting somewhere with his thought process when he tried to take another bite of the mango, and nothing entered his mouth.

When he looked at it, there was only a pit remaining in his hands. Then he wondered, could he perhaps grow it?

He had no idea, but he could try it sometimes after leaving this place. So, he kept the pit in his storage ring and continued thinking about the fireball.

Without the mango, it was hard, but Alex still struggled to understand what was done and how it was done.

He felt like he was on the verge of understanding, but then his thoughts would go astray. When he felt like he was in a zone, his pains would bring him out of it.

This happened so often that he decided to not care about learning anything for now and concentrated on healing himself.

About a week later, he finally left the cave once more. He had been fully healed, his body ready to go fight back and kill the monkey.

However, Alex didn't want that. He only wanted two things for now. To steal a mango, and get attacked by the monkey so he could understand how that happened.

So, he went towards it.

Half an hour later, Alex returned back to the cave, without any fruit. He had been attacked not soon after the fighting started.

After a week of healing, he went back once again. An hour later, he returned back again.

This time, he had nearly lost an arm, but hadn't. Also, he had managed to snatch two mangos.

He hoped this was enough to do what he wanted. Alex focused a week on healing and then ate the fruit.

Once again, as if diving into a cool pool, formless energy went up to his mind, getting him fully awake.

Once Alex was awake and alert, he started thinking about the attack. This time, he had been ready, so he saw what happened when the monkey attacked him.

Alex was positively happy to realize that the small ball of fire had indeed been condensed before leaving the monkey's tail.

When Alex took the hit, the small fire got big, as if unfolding to its original size, and then, as if suddenly heating the air around it to a million-degree, the air was what expanded around the fire, before the fire even arrived.

Alex hadn't realized that while he was learning this, he had fallen into a trance, forgetting to eat his mango at all.

'The ball of fire unfolding is just to hide the amount of fire the monkey put into the attack. It has no other purpose at all,' Alex understood.

'The true damage arrives when the fire is suddenly increased in temperature to a very high degree, causing air itself to act as an attack.'

'When temperature changes, air expands. When air expands, it hits everything around it. Not just the air either, the sound waves and the flying debris do a lot of damage too.'

'Explosion… is the rapid destruction of everything around it. I see.'

As such, for the next 2 days, Alex remained in a trance of Enlightenment. When he woke up, his eyes shined with understanding.

He hadn't known it yet, but he had done something that most people would need to reach the Saint realm to even hope to do.

He had learned one of the many worldly Daos. The Dao of Explosion.

Chapter 624: A Tongue of Fire

A large, yellow snake slid on the ground, ready to pounce at its target, oblivious that its target was simply acting unaware of its arrival.

The snake was at True Disciple 4th realm, not bad for a beast that was so far away from the mountain range, and in the grassland.

Once it was ready, the snake suddenly jumped and bit its target. However, when it did, its target disappeared into a bunch of golden light.

Out of the tall grasses, the real target emerged. Revealing itself to not be a target, but the prey all along.

The snake slammed its tail at its target, but Pearl was ready for it. His body shined with golden light, and when the tail hit him, it did practically nothing.

At the same time, Pearl's claws extended forward, his paw starting to shine with golden lights as well.

The snake opened its mouth, sending a ball of fire toward Pearl, but Pearl simply ignored it. The fireball directly hit him, but Pearl emerged from it mostly unhurt.

The snake got scared when it saw that and tried to dig its way down the earth, but Pearl wouldn't let it.

Along the way, Pearl roared with a loud voice that could be heard from miles over, and at the same time, the snake's vision dimmed as it forgot what it was about to do.

The mental attack from Pearl was not very weak either. It was only weaker than Alex's.

Pearl finally reached the beast and hit it with his shining paw. The snake was sent sliding across the grass, all bloody, with a massive chunk of its body missing.

Pearl then followed it, not wanting to let it go anywhere, and once again attacked it near the same location.

The snake tried to fight back, using skills related to fire, earth, and in between, but nothing stopped Pearl.

He quickly killed the snake, and finally slumped on the ground to rest.

Shen Jing flew high in the air, watching the fight between Pearl and the snake with pure awe in his eyes.

A cat that hadn't even reached the peak of its potential was easily handling a snake that was 2 realms above it.

He didn't remember if he could do that when he was young or not, and couldn't help but compare himself to Pearl.

"Even if I had all of those skills, I still wouldn't have been able to fight that snake and win so easily," Shen Jing thought. Pearl's body was definitely better than normal, and his talent at fighting was not something to scoff at either.

However, he frowned. While skills and talents could get you so far, he didn't see him reaching very high with his cultivation base. The natural limitations of an unevolved beast would soon show themselves.

Unless the potential in Pearl was tapped, he would die being mediocre forever.

'While he does have those skills, they are quite basic,' Shen Jing thought. 'I should teach the little guy somethi—'

He stopped. An aura flared from deep within the mountains. Shen Jing could feel the Dao around the world gather at a certain location in the mountain.

"Dao Enlightenment? Is a Saint beast breaking through?" he thought. "Not bad, it must be a lucky one to have understood a Dao. These beasts usually don't have the intelligence for it."

While thinking that, Shen Jing sent his senses to the far lands of the mountain ranges, trying to see what was trying to breakthrough. He followed the traces of the natural worldly laws and quickly found a cave inside a mountain.

And in there, he found Alex.

Shen Jing's smile dropped, replaced with awe. He watched Alex open his eyes and look at himself for the new understanding he had just gained.

'Did that kid… just learn a Dao?' Shen Jing felt it unfathomable even as he said that. Dao… was not something someone could learn randomly.

He saw Alex look at the mango in his hand, and while that mango should have certainly helped him focus and concentrate on what he was trying to learn, there was no way it was what directly helped him learn the thing.

If a person had the ability to learn something, he would need nothing to learn it. If he didn't, all the heavenly treasures and divine elixirs wouldn't be able to help him comprehend it.

"And that kid somehow learned it, huh?" Shen Jing thought. "How long has it been since I have heard of someone understanding a Dao before reaching the Saint realm?"

"I had done it too, but I was in the True King realm at the time, while this kid is only just starting the path of the True Realm. How many more will he learn before he breaks through to the saint realm?" he wondered.

His eyes went wide as he thought, "how many more will he then learn before…" Shen Jing didn't even want to think about the possibilities.

Shen Jing shook his head. "It could also be that he only learns this one. Best not to think about it much longer," he thought.

Then, another thought came to him. Something that should have been the first, but the shock had derailed his thought process.

'What Dao did he learn though?' he wondered. Worldly laws always descended together, and without an expert with an understanding of the many different Daos, it was impossible to discern which one someone was learning.

'True Disciple realm… will he even be able to handle the power of his own Dao?' he wondered. Dao added strength to one's use of that Dao. Which would normally be impossible for someone.

At the same time, it also cost the person using said Dao a lot of Qi.

However, that was not what Shen Jing was worried about. He was worried about the fact that the strength of Dao attacks was sometimes so strong that low leveled cultivators wouldn't be able to survive their own attacks.

"Well, I hope he didn't learn some offensive Dao. Once he is done with his training, I will teach him about Dao," Shen Jing thought. "For now, he should go and find his cauldron already. Sigh, I even went through the hassle of getting it so close to him, but he never went there."

Shen Jing shook his head and looked back towards Pearl. "Right, back to teaching this kid again," he chuckled a bit himself and remembered a technique from his mind.

"Yes, that should suit him," he thought and flew down towards Pearl who had eaten the Yellow snake's core and had started cultivating.

If he successfully broke through, he would be a True Disciple 3rd realm now.

* * * * *

Alex felt weirdly… relaxed at the moment. His mind felt serene as his understanding of explosions made him feel like he had learned something that no one else taught him.

No, he did learn something no one else taught him. His mother would have been proud if she heard that her son was now learning things on his own without her having to teach him.

His mother… he missed his mother. And his father. And… and someone else. His memories were vague. Was that a silhouette of a girl? Why was he missing a girl?

He wondered if his clone actually made a girlfriend back in his homeworld. "No way, who would want to be together with a farm boy like me?" he wondered and stopped thinking about it all.

"Right, now that I have learned a bit about explosions, I should try it out," he thought. He was about to compress fire Qi onto his hand and do what the BlueFlame monkey did, but for some reason, he felt that unnecessary.

At least, it was unnecessary to create explosions.

"Right, not inside the cave," he remembered in time and walked out of it. Once he was outside, he put his hand forward and a tongue of fire bloomed in front of him.

For some reason… he knew what to do next. He sent the fire a little ahead of him, and thought, 'Explode.'

Within a fraction of a second, he felt Qi being driven out of his body at a tremendous rate. At the same time, fire Qi in the surrounding was being pulled towards the tongue of fire.

That was something Alex had never seen happening before.

A fraction of a second later, it exploded.

A massive boom rang from the surroundings as Alex himself had been pushed back from where he stood and crashed into the mountain with a heavy slam.

He fell to the ground and tried to bring himself up as he gasped for breaths. He wheezed, trying to breathe as the pain in his body was tremendous.

He wasn't hurt like when the monkey had burned him, but this explosion, the destruction it carried was almost as terrifying.

And it had been him who had tried to make the explosion happen.

A minute later, Alex was finally able to stand up. His body was still in pain, but he was able to ignore that to a certain extent.

He looked at his surroundings and realized that trees in a 10-meter radius had been uprooted.

Alex couldn't help but be surprised when he realized that this amount of destruction had been done with just a tongue of fire.

Had he made a bigger fire, or perhaps used the compressed fire as that monkey did, the damage would have been a lot higher than he could imagine.

'But if I do that, I will certainly be dead for sure,' Alex thought. As of yet, he wasn't strong enough for his own skill.

Chapter 625: Continuous Training

Alex went back to the cave and sat down inside, trying to think about what he had just learned.

A tongue of fire exploding had caused about True Lord 3rd or 4th realm equivalent damage to him.

A single tongue of fire.

Alex found that a little unbelievable, but he had been the one to do it, so he had to believe.

Next, he thought about what had happened with the tongue of fire. When he wanted it to explode, his body had involuntarily surrendered Qi to it.

At the same time, Qi from the atmosphere had gathered into the fire, as if the world was following Alex's orders. His wish seemed to be their command.

Only Fire Qi had gathered onto the flame, but that was all that was needed. Then, as per his understanding of the explosion, the flame had reached a very high temperature, creating destruction of such a scale around him.

Unrooting trees or turning them to smithereens within the 10 meters range, and destroying a lot up to 20 meters distance. That was a lot of damage.

Alex looked at himself and saw that he wasn't really burned at all. In fact, the single piece of cloth he now wrapped around his wait had visibly taken no fire damage.

The trees were the same as well. Not a single one of them had burned, unlike when he was hit by the monkey's exploding fireballs.

Alex nodded his head as he understood why. Explosions… only used fire to start themselves. The real damage came from the destructive force of the air around it.

Surely there could be fire in the explosion too, but a tongue of flame wasn't enough for it.

For that, he would have to make more fire before exploding them. However, that destruction would certainly kill him if the massive Qi being pulled from within himself didn't do it first.

'Let's think about that,' he thought. Qi had been involuntarily drawn from him, and a fraction of a second later, the fire had exploded.

There were a few things he wanted to know. How much Qi did it take? Did it have to be his Qi? Did the speed matter?

There were other questions that he cared about too like the size of the fire, the shape of fire, and the damage it did.

So, for the next two days, he did nothing but simply practice that.

By now, Alex understood how much fire he could use to explode. Even if a lot of fire was burning, he could choose to explode just part of it as well.

The distance, however, needed to be short. Beyond a certain range, it was as if the connection he had with the fire that was forged by the world itself was destroyed.

While he could freely control the fire, he couldn't explode it beyond a certain range. For now, that range was somewhere between 4 and 5 meters.

That meant, Alex had to be extra careful how much fire he wanted to explode without hurting himself. This also meant, that as long as his body wasn't hurt, he could create an explosion that consumed all the QI in his body. That damage would be massive.

Other than that, Alex understood that the speed of his Qi also mattered as well as the quantity of how much Qi was taken by the explosion.

The faster he released his Qi to the fire, the faster it would gather Qi from the world and explode. Delaying or stopping the transfer of his Qi only did the same to the explosion.

Alex thanked Shen Jing for helping him widen his Meridians. By now, it had completely become twice as big and was even becoming a bit larger at times, although that hurt Alex quite a bit.

However, he didn't doubt that he could expand it more if he cultivated his body with Pearl which also included tempering meridians.

After understanding all of that, Alex went out to train. Every day, he would go into the forest, marking every tree he came across on the way to show a way back to the cave.

He forgot about the BlueFlame monkey for now. It was too strong for him, and he would only likely kill himself if he kept on going for it.

So, he fought other monsters, weaker ones, and trained his explosion skills. At the same time, he also practiced his other skills.

He hadn't been able to practice the spiritual sword for a while, so that was something he decided to learn later on.

He wasn't worried about running out of time at all. After all, if he did what Shen Jing said and reached True Lord 1st realm with his cultivation base, going normally, it would take him another 15 months for sure.

That was almost double the time he had been in this world. It would be certainly enough to practice everything.

Days passed by in a flash, and soon months passed by as well.

3 months later, Alex was surveying a gazelle beast drinking water from a river he had come across on his path around the mountain.

This location was about a few kilometers away from his cave, but that didn't bother him.

Since he knew the way back, he simply had to fly there and he would reach there within a few minutes.

His spiritual sense reached 120 meters ahead of him without any forced extension. By now, Alex had realized that just as absorbing a monster core gave him Qi, absorbing their spiritual body in his mind also gave him some increase in his spiritual strength.

It was only because common beasts didn't have good spiritual strength for him to steal, so he had never realized that. However, after the Mind Tempering realm, they sufficiently gave him 2 to 3 meters of spiritual sense for everything he ate those beasts.

Unfortunately, he couldn't keep on eating the same strength of beasts, or the return would be diminishing. He needed to continuously find better and better beasts to consume.

Today, Alex wasn't here for that. He was here for a simple fight.

The gazelle sensed something and tried to run away, but a massive crocodile jumped out of the river and ate it whole.

The dark purple-skinned crocodile had the size of a school bus and strength in True Lord 4th realm. That was perfect for Alex's training.

He walked out of the trees, not intending to hide from the crocodile at all.

The Crystalscale Crocodile saw him and got curious at first, but once it saw his strength, only disdain could be seen in its eyes.

'Intelligence? It must have a good enough mind to stop my heaven's impact then,' Alex thought and tried it out.

The Crocodile's eyes suddenly rolled upwards and its giant head slammed onto the ground. However, a moment later, it stood up and shook its head again.

As expected, it had some level of mental defense. 'I should really get one after I leave this place,' he thought and flared his True Disciple 8th realm cultivation base, letting the beast know he was on his way.

Alex dashed forward, leaving sand flying behind him. The sword in his hand gleamed golden, something that he supposed was visible currently as well.

Alex couldn't tell what time of the day was with his spiritual sense alone as the light was not something he could see through it. However, stuff like heat to his senses and the number of shadows from his teleportation techniques always told him what time of the day it was.

The Crystalscale Crocodile opened its jaw, the inside red with the dead gazelle, trying to devour Alex whole.

'Idiot!' Alex thought and stopped his attack. The beast still wasn't taking him seriously, giving away its vulnerable parts for Alex to attack.

Unlike the outside, the inside of the crocodile had no scales. So, if Alex had attacked just now, he could've killed the Crocodile in one hit.

However, that wasn't what he was here for at all. He didn't want to kill it; he wanted a challenge, to push himself to grow stronger.

He wanted an experience that he couldn't get otherwise. How was he to get that if the crocodile easily let him kill it?

Alex created a tongue of fire, floating it a bit ahead of him, and exploded it instantly. The damage the fire produced just now was equivalent to True Masters 8th realm.

It was well within the range of what his body could handle.

The crocodile wasn't damaged either, but it finally understood that Alex wasn't someone it could so easily ignore.

Chapter 626: Gold and Green

The purple crocodile's scales glowed brightly as the textures on them changed. The crocodile was using Qi to harden its scales, so Alex could notice it with his sense.

He smiled and dashed forwards once again.

The crocodile, this time fully aware of Alex's strength, decided to use its tail to attack him. Its hardened tail had scales growing in all directions like thorns on a flower stalk.

Alex realized that this could be deadly and immediately poured all his metal Qi into his sword and slashed at the tail.

The tail and the sword clashed, and as expected, Alex was thrown back into the sand.

Alex quickly stood up from the flying sand everywhere and noticed something. The scales on the tail of the crocodile, which was growing in all directions, were now all facing him, and they started shaking a little.

Alex frowned. He could guess what was going to happen. Just as the tail's scales started shooting out like bullets, he dashed to the side, dodging the volley of scales.

The crocodile pulled its tail back. Its scales would take a bit to grow back before it could use again.

Alex then dashed back at the crocodile again. The crocodile's mouth opened up as if wanting to eat him.

'Did this beast not understand already that I—' just as Alex was thinking that, he saw a giant illusory crocodile, made up of entirely blue color appeared on top of the crocodile.

The illusory crocodile's lower jaw was missing, and its upper jaw was now coming down, slamming onto him.

This was the attack of a True lord 4th realm beast. Alex couldn't underestimate it at all.

A wall of 5 colors appeared in front of him that contained the five elements. This was a technique that could stop a lot of the incoming attacks.

At the same time, he strengthened his body with the Jade Skin technique as marbled texture appeared all over his body.

Then, finally, his hand glowed with yellow light and he sent out a palm strike to stop as much of the damage as he could.

Then, the crocodile's upper jaw slammed on him. A cloud of sand blew into the wind, causing a giant sound that reached far into the forest and deep into the river.

The crocodile harrumphed, thinking it had won. However, not very long after, when the sand settled down, he saw Alex still standing there, with no damage to him at all.

When the remaining power of the illusory crocodile hit him, it felt like he was hit by a truck. With a True Lord 1st realm level body, he could handle a truck.

Alex ran after the crocodile again, with his sword glowing green this time.

The Crystalscale Crocodile was a beast with Water and Earth elements to it. To even negate some of the effects of both of those elements, Alex needed to use an appropriate technique of his own.

Since he had to use a sword for the additional damage of the Sword Intent, Alex could only rely on sword techniques. While he had sword techniques for all 5 elements, the only ones that were strong were the Elusive Heavenly Sword with its Wood Element, the Penta Sword technique as well as the Smiting blade with the Metal Element.

The Metal element could weaken the Earth element, but it did nothing against the water element, instead of acting just like a non-Elemental attack against it.

Meanwhile, Wood Element could both weaken the Water Element and control the Earth element, so he decided to use that instead.

As he reached the crocodile, Alex appeared right underneath its jaw and slammed his sword into it, releasing the green slash at point-blank range.

The crocodile was sent flying upwards into the air. Seeing the school-bus-sized crocodile flying was quite a sight.

The crocodile slammed into the water, making a giant wave in the river. The beast that was close by quickly ran away.

Alex saw this and smiled. Then, he got his sword ready once again. That attack just now would have hurt the crocodile quite a bit, but it would have done nothing to harm it at all.

It only worked to make it angry.

The crocodile swam out of the river in a surprising speed and looked at Alex with disdain in its eyes, then it slammed its legs.

Alex wondered what was happening when suddenly, his feet started sinking into the ground. He tried to pull it out, but his feet wouldn't accept that. Instead, the more he moved, the more he was getting pulled under.

'Dammit! The crocodile used a quicksand technique,' he thought. Then, he looked up and saw the crocodile preparing to do something.

He could feel Qi being gathered in front of its mouth. It was going to attack something soon.

Alex saw a blue ball of water spiral in front of it, and then, it let it loose. A massive stream of water shot out of the crocodile's mouth towards Alex who was still stuck to the ground.

Then, the stream hit him… and Alex's body tore into a thousand pieces.

The crocodile was surprised at how easy it was, and he saw the pieces fall to the ground. Then, the pieces vanished in a bunch of yellow light.

BAM!

Something struck him underbelly with so much strength that the crocodile was once again sent out flying. However, Alex didn't stop this time.

He hit the crocodile again in mid-air, throwing it further away. The crocodile tried to turn itself in mid-air, but Alex kept hitting it and sending it further and further down the river.

When Alex was about to hit it again, the crocodile this time enforced its scale in time and managed to swing its tail around.

Alex tried to block it, but that was not all he needed to do. The crystals on the tail's end were already turning towards him.

He would die if he let that hit.

Suddenly, a tongue of fire appeared in front of him, while he enforced himself with his Jade Skin technique, then he thought of a single word.

'Explode!'

A massive boom rang in between him and the crocodile, sending the crocodile slamming down into the water, while he was sent flying away and landed in the river as well a good 100 meters down the line.

Alex's body hurt a bit, but that was the price of survival. 'The crocodile is coming for me,' he thought and prepared to fight when he saw something not far from him that shocked him beyond belief.

Deep in the river, about 70 meters away from him in the opposite direction of the crocodile was a golden ball of light. This was something that shouldn't have existed in nature and was definitely man-made.

However, that was not what had shocked him at all. No, the thing that shocked him more was what was within this ball of golden light.

Floating within the ball of golden light was something made up of mostly green and gold. Alex smiled when he saw this, and his eyes gleamed with joy.

"My Cauldron!" he shouted in happiness. He had finally found the Golden Jade Cauldron.

He wanted to go get it, but he didn't yet have enough space to keep his cauldron in his ring. Not unless he wanted to throw away the stuff that he had gathered until now.

So, he was forced to leave it be just for now. 'I'll get it back soon,' he thought and turned around to the approaching angry crocodile. 'Right after I kill it.'

Alex stepped on the surface of the water, and it solidified underneath him as if he were stepping on stone. Then, he shot off, leaving a massive explosion of water.

The crocodile saw this and jumped up to attack him. Alex's sword shined with a green light which he sent flying before even arriving close to the crocodile.

He knew it wouldn't damage it at all. He just wanted to distract it a little. The crocodile slammed the green slash with its tail, only to realize that it did no damage.

When Alex arrived, it wasn't ready to attack with its tail again. So, it instead roared, sending columns of water flying out of the river to disrupt Alex.

Alex, however, only said a single sentence. "I'm sorry, but I don't have time to keep playing." Then, he disappeared.

When he reappeared, he was right below the crocodile, its underside fully vulnerable to him with no scales.

Alex swung his hand, but there was no sword in it. He had already stored the sword.

Instead, a sword formed on its own made up of misty white color with a slight hue of yellow. A sword only he could see.

The sword lagged just a bit as his hand swung, but not enough to make a difference. Then, it stuck the crocodile's body.

The illusory sword passed through the crocodile's stomach, and the crocodile fell into the water.

The crocodile felt nothing wrong with itself at all, so it suddenly turned around towards Alex and tried to send out a water blast.

A column of water shot out from its mouth but it was very weak. The damage it did was almost negligible to Ning.

Ning smiled. "I told you, I am done playing."

Then, 3 Heaven's Impact hit the crocodile one after another. With its scales not working properly, it couldn't block the damage at all.

Alex got close to the unconscious crocodile and opened its mouth. He then created a tongue of fire and sent it inside the crocodile's mouth and closed it.

As it did, he spoke a single word again.

"Explode!"

Chapter 627: Alchemy Training

Alex pulled the cauldron out of the water and looked at it with a happy expression. He felt like hugging it, but he didn't do so.

He had already taken care of the Crystalscale Crocodile's core and would use it sometime later when his cultivation base reached a close enough level.

He had also taken some of the crocodile's crystal scales and had hoped of making some mental defense artifacts with them.

Alex didn't have to open the cauldron to see that everything inside was as it should be.

A fire formation, A barrier formation, 3 healing pills, and 20 True spirit stones. All right there inside with no damage.

'That golden light… it must have been Shen Jing who put it here, right?' he thought. That was the only thing that made sense.

Then, Alex took the cauldron and went up the river to the location where he fought the crocodile first. Then, he found his way back to the cave.

At first, Alex was a little worried that he wouldn't be able to take the cauldron into the cave given that it wouldn't fit in his storage ring at all.

However, when he did try to, he could somehow teleport inside with his cauldron in hand.

'That does make sense since it is an item I refined. If I can teleport with the sword, I should be able to teleport with the cauldron,' he thought.

Alex sat down when he reached the inner cave and rested for a few moments before he started cultivating. He ignored the cauldron for now as he wanted to be at his peak before he tried anything.

He cultivated for a full day before his lost Qi had returned to him. At the same time, he tried to calm the Yang aura that was desperately trying to get out of him.

After he was done with that, he opened his eyes and got ready to practice some alchemy.

Alex dug out a little piece of land, using the True spirit stone to run the fire formation plate. With a single spirit stone, Alex was sure the fire would burn for almost 5 days nonstop.

With 20, he could practice for 100 days. That was more than enough to gain some insight into what he was going to practice, or so he hoped.

During the last 3 months, Alex had gathered a lot of ingredients. They were still dwarfed by the number of ingredients he used to hold in his storage bags back in Crimson Empire, but this one was quite great as well since almost all of the ingredients he had acquired were for True pills.

Alex had found many ingredients but ignored most that he couldn't make pills with.

He could try to make new pills as he did back in the barrier after he had killed Zexi, but that was not his intention at the moment.

At the moment, he was just trying to practice making pills with structure and composition in mind.

When his cauldron was hot, he put the first ingredient into it. Alex had a recipe to follow, and he did, turning the first ingredient into powder not long after.

Then, he stopped. Instead of putting in the next ingredient, Alex took the powder out and set it aside. He made sure to not leave a single speck behind in the cauldron.

Then, he did the same thing for the 2nd ingredient. He put it in, did what the recipe told him to do, and pulled it out.

He did the same for the third, the fourth, all the way to the last ingredient.

Doing so obviously removed all energy into the air, but Alex didn't care for that at the moment. He was more so focused on the powder as that was where structure and composition came in.

Once all the ingredients were powdered, he pulled up a single speck of all the ingredients and put it in his hand.

Then, Alex took a deep breath and enhanced the vision in his mind. Is it looking through a microscope, the specks of powder magnified in his spiritual sense to the point that he could see what they all looked like?

Somehow, Alex didn't feel as much strain as the last time he had done it when his mental strength was nearly 6 times as weak as now. Well, that was to be expected.

Once he saw the shapes of the powder, he tried to fit them together. The powder shapes acted like puzzle pieces that came together to form a larger puzzle piece.

Unfortunately for Alex, he didn't know if these puzzle pieces were working puzzle pieces or not.

His brilliant mind worked to look through the specks of powder, trying to find an orientation in which they would all fall together with no gap inside.

Alas, he couldn't find any. No matter the changes he made, the highest he could go in his estimation was 80%.

80% sounded incredible, and it was, but only on paper. In reality, there were a lot of aspects to pill-making that would bring this down quite a bunch.

The ones he knew of were the age of an ingredient before it was taken, time passed after it was taken, mistakes while following the recipe, grade of a cauldron, and of course, the ability of the alchemist himself.

These things would surely bring the harmony down by a lot. So, Alex needed to increase the theoretical potential to as high as possible so that even when he made those mistakes, he still ended up with a high-grade pill.

Alex thought of changing the recipe a little. Alex wondered what he could change and saw that if he used the portion of the 4th ingredient twice, he could cover quite a large gap in the structure, which could surely increase the potential by about another 5-8%.

Alex took another speck of the 4th ingredient and tried. As expected, it fell into place, giving him quite a bit of joy.

"Hah, if I just use twice the amount of the 4th ingredient, I can do it," he thought, but then stopped and frowned.

"No, that won't do," he thought. Having a little less energy in an ingredient, or a little more didn't really affect a pill-making process to a high level.

At best, they would just cause to pill to lose of a bit of harmony by not having all the combined energy having a place to inhabit.

However, if Alex really did double an ingredient, the increased amount of energy from that one ingredient would change the structure of the entire pill, making the later incoming ingredients interact differently with the massive energy of the 4th ingredient.

So, increasing the ingredient amount was not the way to go, unless he wanted to end up with an entirely different pill instead.

What Alex really needed to do, was change the structure of the powder by changing the speed, rotation, and temperature with which he interacted with the energy.

And that was something he had no idea about and couldn't figure out by thinking. For that, he needed to sit down and burn those ingredients to see how the powder came out.

Alex spent half a day on a single ingredient, trying to form every type of shape he could while keeping the same rate of release of the energy.

Then, he moved on to the next one. He spent 2 consecutive days learning with just 4 ingredients. Then when the mental fatigue hit, he stopped cultivating.

After going back and forth between practice and cultivation, Alex finally managed to make almost every single shape of every single ingredient for his pill.

Then he closed his eyes and sank his thought into his memories. From all the different memories, he searched for the shapes that would fit together the best.

Because he had spent the last week preparing, it didn't take him very long to find a solution to the puzzle.

He quickly compiled a recipe based on that combination and finally, for the first time in nearly 5 months, proceeded to make a pill.

The pill he was going to make, the one he had been practicing was called the Disciple's Ascension pill. Unlike its grand name, it was just a pill that helped the True Disciple realm cultivator have a higher chance during breakthrough to the True Master realm.

It was one of the easiest pills to make, not because the process was easy, but rather because of how readily available the ingredients were. They were True rank ingredients but grew like a weed in most places where humans didn't step in.

If cared for, these ingredients would grow even more easily. In a forest as dense as these lands, there were more than enough ingredients here to occupy Alex's time for almost a decade.

After a decade, there would be enough growth to occupy another decade.

Alex prepared the cauldron and recalled the recipe one more time to be sure, and started making the pill.

Alex put the first ingredient in and put all of his focus on the task at hand. Since he had made so many powders of the same ingredient, he didn't want his muscle memory taking over and ruining this attempt.

Once he was focused, the process became easy. He took out the 2nd ingredient as well and tried that as well. That too was converted into powder rather easily.

The 3rd, 4th, 5th, all the way to the last ingredient, it all easily turned into powder with the shape he wanted.

With that, the easy part was over, and next came the hard part.

Now, Alex had to conjoin each individual speck of powder into a group like puzzle pieces.

Chapter 628: Tries and Failure

Alex focused on his spiritual sense, using it to magnify into the powder in the cauldron, but there were too many to focus on.

He couldn't possibly join all of those powders right now. At least, not with the level of spiritual sense he had right now.

He could focus on multiple of these at once, so he decided to start with that. No matter how impossible it looked, he had to try.

So, he started doing it. He went around the cauldron, trying to find the individual specks of powder and brought them together. He moved them, twisted them, slid them into places, and finally managed to make a clump of the powders that perfectly fitted together.

His eyes beamed with joy, but then immediately dulled as he saw the other many individual specks he had to get to.

He sighed and got onto it. He split his concentration, putting all of his focus into the cauldron, and started fitting the other pieces together.

Once he had done the first one, the rest became easy. However, when he was just 10% of the way through, his physical body twitched and he immediately pulled his senses back.

That was when he realized that the aura inside the cauldron was extremely turbulent and was moments away from bursting open.

Alex immediately opened the lid and used Elemental Guidance to move the energy out of the cauldron.

The energy soon dissipated in the air, and the threat was subdued.

Then, he sighed again.

'I can't lose focus of the energy while making the powder,' he thought.

He cleared the cauldron and tried again.

This time, once he was done until the point before he had to form the pill, he split half his attention of the energy, moving it around, stopping it from going out of control.

While the other half of the attention formed the powder. The speed was half as slow. But, it was working.

The energy wasn't going turbulent and he was halfway done with making the po—

Alex noticed something. When he looked for more specks, amongst the colorful specks of powder, he started seeing black specks.

When he focused on it, he realized that they were burnt powder. When Alex looked over the entirety of the cauldron, he noticed that a lot of the powders had been burned.

He sighed. Another failure.

Alex tried again and again, and each time he failed.

When he turned off the fire to not burn the powder, the powders wouldn't stick together anymore to form the pill.

When he tried to hurry up, he would make mistakes.

When he tried to slow down, the energy would start breaking down with the constant heat put into them.

When he was done with the last pieces of the powder, he noticed that many of the fire pieces had fallen into individual pieces.

When he tried and tried and tried for days on end, after nearly 3 weeks, he finally managed to make a pill with no mistakes made at all.

Its harmony came out to be 60%.

60%. 3 weeks of effort, so many ingredients wasted to get a 60%. 60% was amazing, but that was not what he wished after such long period of effort.

When he wondered why that had happened, he intensely started searching for the answer.

He recalled the recipe, there was no mistake.

He recalled the structure and composition, he had done the best he could.

He checked for the gap, there were some in the pill itself as not everything had fit tightly snug together, but that was clearly not responsible for merely 60%.

Alex thought of the abstract concept of symmetry the Royal Alchemist had told him about, but it shouldn't have been as important.

Then, the only problem could have been that Alex let the powders and energy remain in the cauldron for too long and they lost their potency.

Alex leaned backward, slamming his back onto the ground.

"I give up!" he said out loud. "I don't want to do this." After having tried the same thing over and over for the last week or so, he felt like he would rather take the BlueFlame Monkey's exploding flower to the face than do this.

As he lay on the ground, a thought came to him. 'Shit!' he thought. He was getting motivated again for no goddamn reason.

'I really do love Alchemy, don't I?' he thought.

He breathed in and out for a while and got back up to make the pill again. This time, he wanted to try something he hadn't tried in the last 3 weeks yet.

This time, he wanted to try nothing.

Every single time, he had ruined the ingredients trying to do something and failed. He now wanted to see how the recipe fared when he did nothing.

He followed the recipe with 0 mistakes, and when it came to the pill making turn, he moved the powder randomly, clumping it into a ball and letting the energy pass through it to collect as much as it could.

When the pill floated into his hand, Alex wanted to cry.

66%.

For something he had done randomly, he got 66%. But for something he had tried for 3 weeks straight, he got 60%.

Alex concentrated on the newly formed pill and noticed that about 70% of the pill had automatically done what he had been trying to do for the last 3 weeks.

The gap and symmetry were quite bad in the new pill as well, so he knew that had never been the problem.

'So I really need to finish it fast, huh?' he thought.

He tried it once again to see if this one had been a fluke and came out with 67% harmony instead. No, that could not have been a fluke.

Alex started thinking. He needed to do something that would capitalize on the positives of both of these different methods of following the same pill.

He needed the 100% puzzle completion aspect of the manual pill-making process, while he needed the speed of the random pill-making process.

If he combined these two, he had no doubt he could reach the Immortal grade with his pill.

'How do I do that though?' he thought. How in this godforsaken mountain range was he supposed to find a way to make perfect symmetrical, 100% energy-absorbing pills as quick as possib—

Alex jumped onto his feet. That couldn't be it, could it? He had a thought come to him, but he wasn't sure if he was being stupid or extremely intelligent at the moment.

He quickly calmed himself and thought if there was any way it would work at all.

"I won't know if I don't try," he thought and brought out another set of ingredients.

With the cauldron hot, he put the ingredients into the cauldron one by one until he reached the moment when the ingredients had turned into powder, and he simply needed to form the pill.

Alex didn't enhance his senses to join the individual specks together, nor did he randomly start moving the powder together for another pill.

Instead, he looked into himself and thought, 'come!'.

Qi stirred in his naval region and started moving automatically through his meridians. With how large his meridians were at the moment, they took no time until they reached his arms.

Then, out of both his right hand and his stump, the Qi moved out on its own until it reached the cauldron.

Alex didn't need to guide the Qi or make sure it didn't do anything it didn't need to. The Qi worked like it had a brain of its own.

It went into the cauldron, moved the powders together, brought it to a single clump, and then as if a knife had cut through that clump, it broke into two halves.

The Qi separated as well, moving into the two smaller clumps of powder and starting doing its magic.

Alex couldn't tell how they did it, but they quickly formed the two halves into normal-sized pills with a lot of gaps in them, and a vortex formed above them that sucked in all the energy of the cauldron.

In less than a moment, the pills were done.

Alex pulled out the two-pill and looked at the two with absolute surprise.

46% and 46%.

Alex's jaw dropped and there was only one thought in his mind.

"I need to learn this technique."

Chapter 629: Intent

Alex was excited when he decided to see how the Pill Splitting Qi worked. So, he made more pills, using it each time to split the pill into 2 and see the result.

2 weeks later, his excitement turned to disappointment. He couldn't be more disappointed at the fact that he couldn't extrapolate any information from the technique at all.

He had focused on the skill from the movement of Qi, to the formation of pills, and yet, he understood nothing.

In fact, halfway through the process, he could already see the problem with himself.

He didn't know how techniques worked at all. How did they function? How did moving your Qi in certain ways through your body do something when it came outside?

Those skill books he read all talked about the path through the meridians the Qi should move in, the requirements for that technique, and what the technique did.

Sometimes, they also talked about how one could improve on the technique as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the technique.

However, never did they talk about HOW the technique worked at all. How did moving your Qi through your body in certain ways produce a unique result at all?

Did it even actually produce a result? Alex decided to try it out.

He remade the pill all over again, and instead of using the technique this time, he instead just manually did the entire thing himself.

From the moment the Qi in his body stirred to the moment they arrived and left his hands, it was all done by him, manually. However, when the Qi appeared outside of his body, it simply dissipated into the air.

'What?' he thought with surprise. 'But I followed the way perfectly,' he thought.

He quickly had the real pill splitting Qi come out and make the two pills, each with 44% harmony.

Then, he started thinking once again about what had just happened or rather didn't happen.

'Did I make a mistake anywhere?' he thought and reviewed what he did, but he saw that he made no mistakes. That or, he made mistakes he couldn't see.

Once again, he had to wonder what was going on.

"Hmm…" he started thinking, but he wasn't making progress. So, he decided to go and get some of those mangoes that helped him focus and understand more.

After all, they had helped him understand how explosions worked. So, he hoped they helped him understand how this thing worked as well.

Alex returned 2 hours later, all bloody and battered. This time, he had thought he would win, but the BlueFlame monkey's explosion was still very strong. Way stronger than his explosion.

And worst of all, the monkey could explode it at a distance from itself, causing the damage to mostly falling on Alex.

'Is my understanding incomplete perhaps?' he thought. Maybe there was more to explosions than he thought.

'Later,' he thought and tried to forget about the explosions, but the thought still lingered in his mind.

He cultivated for a few days, bringing himself back to the top condition before proceeding with his meditation.

He made one more pill, trying to do the exact same thing he did earlier, and failed.

Once he fully understood his failure, he took a bite of the mango. The cool energy from the mango flowed to his brain and washed it like a cold splash of water to the face on a hot, sunny day.

Alex's mind was alert and awake, and he put all the focus on the problem and started thinking about it.

He immediately understood another problem with what he was trying to do as well that he hadn't even thought of because he hadn't reached that part of the problem yet.

The Pill Splitting Qi was essentially 3 minor techniques, fused together. So, the Qi path he followed would have no use whatsoever.

Alex realized, that he needed to learn 2 of the 3 minor techniques, which to be more accurate were equal to 2 of the 5 minor techniques.

He needed to learn the technique that formed the pill. This was the most important one right now to him.

The other thing he needed to learn was the technique to create the vortex that pulled in the Qi.

Alex could forget about the vortex for now as Elemental Guidance did the same thing it did, just worse. However, he really did need to learn the technique to form the pill.

It was not just forming the pill either. It was forming the pill with almost no gap in between the individual specks when they stuck together and had perfect symmetry in between them.

After checking the two pills that formed from the pills, he had learned that despite having a lot of gaps, having perfect symmetry made the pills devour as much energy as they could.

As he thought about it, his thoughts went towards the moment when he failed to even use the pill splitting Qi manually. That was what he had sat down to learn in the first place.

As he thought about it, he frowned a little. He quickly compared the Qi that was released from his hands when he let his body do the work, compared to when he manually cycled the Qi.

They were obviously the same. So what was different?

As Alex took another bite of the mango, he was reminded of the explosion he suffered to get this fruit.

The explosion was bad, but he tried to shake the thought away for now. As he did, he was reminded of his own understanding of explosion, and how with a single thought, he could make a tongue of fire explode.

A single thought.

A thought.

Alex immediately stopped cultivating as he activated the fire Formation again and heated his cauldron. Then, he proceeded to turn the ingredients into powder.

He had done this part so many times, that he thought he could do it with a complete lack of vision inside the cauldron.

He wasn't going to be stupid right now.

Once all the ingredients were powdered, with a thought, he pulled out the Qi from his naval area.

As the Qi passed through his meridians, with him consciously moving them, he thought about why he was doing it in the first place.

He thought of splitting the Qi, forming the pill, and finally collecting the energy in the cauldron down to the pills.

As his Qi escaped his hands, exactly what he had thought of happened. The powders were split into two portions, each portion formed into balls, and a vortex appeared to collect the energy.

He successfully made the two pills.

Then, he the pills another 2 times. The first time, he moved the Qi around his body through the same route, however, with only intended to form the pill, and not split or collect energy.

He failed.

Then, he tried it a second time, this time moving the Qi in a different route, one he created himself, intending to only form the pill once again.

He failed this time as well.

Alex then stopped making pills altogether and went outside the cave. He thought he was learning something, so he decided to try what he was thinking with the other techniques he knew of.

The Iron Fist Punch technique was the first one he tried with. He moved the Qi through his body, which his body did on its own as it had become muscle memory at this point.

When it reached his hands, he let it out in the shape of a first. The technique struck down a tree in the distance.

Alex took a deep breath and moved the Qi once more. This time, only moving it around and not focusing on the attack itself. When the Qi came out of his body, it dissipated as if nothing.

Next, he tried a different route but wanted to throw a fist. The energy he released did take the shape of a fist, but it dissipated not long after.

Alex tried the same thing with several of his other techniques, and finally realized something.

"You need both the proper path for the Qi and the proper intent of the action to use a technique," he said to himself and went back into the cave, not thinking about it any longer.

Out in the distance, Shen Jing looked towards Alex's location with a horrified look on his face. The worldly laws had stirred for a moment, catching his attention, before calming down again.

'That kid,' he thought with nothing but shock on his face. 'He was so close to learning another Dao.'

Chapter 630: True Master

After realizing that there was no way for him to extrapolate just one aspect of a technique without having any knowledge of how techniques functioned in the first place, Alex removed any thoughts of creating the pill-forming technique while he was here.

Alex also thus gave up on trying to create the perfect pill. Until he had the pill forming technique ready, he would have to give up on increasing his pill-making ability.

That wasn't to say he had made no improvements at all. Just being able to make pills with more than 60% harmony was already good enough for the little training he had done.

Also, it was only hard to learn about structure and composition the first few times. Once he got a hang of it, he could improve the pill without even thinking about it.

Alex couldn't wait for that time when he could simply look at an ingredient and tell what he needed to do to get the best variation of the recipe.

For now, however, he had to simply grind at it. A few more months passed with less time focused on cultivation and more focused on simply alchemy.

As such, he didn't advance on his cultivation base and was stuck at the 9th True Disciple realm… until today.

The final of Alex's spirit stones stopped working and now he was left with 20 dull stones with no Qi in it. He sighed.

'Well, there was no point in bringing a barrier formation with me,' he thought. Without spirit stones, the formation would be useless.

Or so Alex thought until he put his Qi into the formation just to check and a ball of fire lit up suddenly.

He then used his Qi again, and a barrier appeared around him with the 2nd formation. They, however, disappeared the moment he let go of his Qi.

Alex looked surprised. 'Did they always work like that?' he thought. That… should not have been possible, or so he thought.

If simple Qi could activate a formation then it would be news in the Crimson Empire. And no, not a single bit of information about formations he had learned in there had ever mentioned formations working on their own.

'That's weird,' he thought but was just happy that he could use them if he ever needed them.

Then, he put everything he owned into his storage ring, which had about 10-meter squares of space by now. It was enough to store his cauldron, pills, ingredients, and entire corpses of at least 2 beasts.

Alex smiled and closed his eyes. With a thought, the Qi in his body started moving, following a familiar path they took every single day.

After a circulation or two, Alex felt a loud drum-like sound in his head like an exaggerated heartbeat.

With that, he broke through to the True Master realm.

'How long has it been since I broke through to the True realm? How long did it take me to go up a single minor realm?' he thought to himself, but it was impossible to tell.

He had first broken through to the True realm in the Beasts' realm which he stayed in for a month or so due to not having any cultivation method to breakthrough.

After that, it had taken him a few weeks before reaching 3rd realm. Then, he reached the 4th realm after coming to this mountain. In fact, he had broken through from the 4th True Disciple realm to the 1st True Master realm all right in this dark cave.

Day and night were the same to Alex who's vision was just a haze of gold and a sense that could see no light or shade.

Still, based on the somewhat reliable perception of time he had in his body, he could tell that he had spent nearly least three-fourths of a year in this place.

Most of the time for the last few months, he had spent on nothing but Alchemy, putting less focus on his martial training.

'This cave has given me safety and a place to stay, but it has also made me have no not fight at all,' he thought.

'It's time I leave this place. I cannot grow if I don't face danger,' he thought and walked out of the cave.

Once he was out, he took out his sword from his ring and walked in a certain direction.

While he was ready to leave this place, there was still one more place he needed to visit.

* * * * *

The sound of two beasts fighting rang through the air, or so it sounded. When looked at, it was clearly a young body fighting the monkey.

The BlueFlame monkey swiped its tail at Alex from far away, sending a spinning wheel of fire flying towards him.

Alex dodged the flying wheel of fire, not daring to fight it directly. He couldn't be sure if the explosive ability of this monkey was something it learned to like him from the many mangoes it might have eaten, or it was just that, an ability it inherited from its bloodline.

Alex hoped it was the latter, but he had to fight assuming it was the former. If he assumed that any fire anywhere would explode at any second, it made him that more alert.

Alex sent a flying water slash, that should do nothing to the monkey, but he hoped it would distract it. It did not.

The monkey came crashing down on Alex, but at the last second, rotated while in midair and punched to its right side.

An invisible Alex showed up with his sword striking the monkey. The Alex that was on the ground vanished into motes of light, revealing that it was a fake.

'Dammit! This monkey has seen all of my techniques already,' Alex thought. Then, the monkey swiped its tail again, the tail releasing a small blue ball of fire that flew towards Alex.

Every single cell in Alex's body screamed at him to dodge. Alex trusted his instincts with all of his heart.

As the small ball of fire unfolded, Alex vanished. The space where he had been shaking with the strength of many bombs. Alex was meant to have appeared behind a tree, but somehow he appeared a little left to it.

He took part of the explosion's hit, but it was far enough that it didn't hurt him. He quickly moved to the side, and let the uprooted tree beside him fall to the ground.

Alex checked at the monkey and saw that it was breathing a little heavily.

'Of course,' Alex thought. 'Such a strong technique should have taken a lot out of it.'

He decided to go force a bit more of it out of the monkey. Alex dashed from behind the fallen tree, surprising the monkey who didn't expect Alex at all.

The previous times it had fought him, he would always leave after taking the explosion to the chest. But now, he had come to fight back.

The monkey panicked a little. Blue flames erupted from its body, like armor made up of pure fire.

Alex struck its body with his sword, but he could barely force it in at all. He sent out Heaven's Impact, but as expected, the fiery body soaked up the mental attack, leaving not much for the monkey to handle.

Alex frowned. If Heaven's impact didn't go through, then his Spiritual sword wouldn't either.

He needed to make an opening to have his spiritual sense enter the monkey's body. That was the only way for him to win.

Alex's cultivation base flared and he put all of it into his movement technique. Alex then burst into speed that the monkey hadn't seen before.

A hit to the back. A slice to the neck. A cut to the tail. A Heaven's impact on the mind.

Alex slipped and slid through the monkey's surroundings, attacking it from various angles, which the monkey couldn't see.

From time to time, he would slow down and let the monkey 'catch his off-guard', in which case it would throw out an explosive fireball, that Alex could dodge with his teleportation skill.

Alex appeared to the side of the tree, or high in the air behind it. Sometimes, he would even appear in front of it.

Sometimes, the range wouldn't work as well as it should. Alex frowned at the teleportation technique that refused to work properly, but he couldn't worry about it now.

The monkey was starting to heave loudly, with nearly all of its Qi disappearing with the explosive balls of fire.

The armor on its body dimmed a lot. Alex jumped back at the monkey and started cutting it again, but no matter how hard he tried, his blades couldn't penetrate at all.

He wasn't breaking through the armor to cut its body. He needed a better sword intent. He needed Sword Qi.

It wouldn't come to him right now.

A Heaven's Impact flew at the tired monkey, and a hole opened in its armor.

Alex's eyes shined. He put his sword back into his ring and an illusory, misty white sword which only he could see appeared on his hand.

He rushed at the monkey, sending 3 more Heaven's impacts at it. The three impacts opened a big enough hole in the monkey's armor, and Alex put his sword through its back.

He then slid it down and cut it through the tail.

The monkey felt nothing happening aside from its vision going in and out for a few moments. Then, it turned around to see Alex standing behind it.

It moved its tail to send out a ball of fire that started unfolding in front of Alex, but Alex showed no fear towards that.

He simply grabbed the fire with his empty hand and snuffed it out.

Chapter 631: Advancements in Sword

The Spiritual Sword, from Alex's observation, did just one thing. It disrupted the flow of Qi through one's meridians.

Alex couldn't tell if it slowed down the movement of Qi or made the meridians squeeze together so that not much Qi to move through it, but it always made what came out in the end vastly weaker than what the opponent was capable of.

This only lasted for a few seconds or so before they usually got back their ability to fight, but that was enough to take care of most enemies.

Alex took out his sword and send a barrage of attacks at the monkey who couldn't put up any defense. Despite the fiery armor, it was still hard to cut the monkey with his strength.

But slowly as more and more Qi was lost, it became easier to cut. The monkey, despite getting back its strength, couldn't produce any of the explosives balls of fire anymore.

A few minutes later, it finally died.

Alex breathed in and out, trying to get rid of the fatigue. He had to use his entire strength to kill a monkey that could barely protect itself, and it still took so long.

He felt a little angry at himself even. He quickly ignored the thought and pulled out some spirit stones.

The spirit stones were all dull and without energy, and were nothing more than simple translucent rocks.

Alex used his golden claws to carve a chunk out of the spirit stones and used that to store the blood of the BlueFlame monkey for now.

Since he had no vials, he had to make do with what he could. Then, he cut the monkey into many pieces, doing a not so good a job in it, and took whatever he could.

Once he took all of the mangoes, he looked at the surroundings and all the destroyed trees.

'There were some ingredients there. Well, it's all destroyed now,' he thought.

Alex put everything into his storage ring aside from his sword. His sword he stared at for a minute.

From being a young man who had never even seen a sword, to being someone who could beat a True Lord 6th realm beast, he had obviously come a long way.

In his journey, he had gone from learning how to use his sword to learning how to use his intent.

However, the journey wasn't over yet. No, it was only beginning. For the next phase of his journey, he would have to advance his sword skill to the point where he could use Sword Qi.

For that, he would have to live and die by the sword.

* * * * * * *

A long time passed. As for how long, Alex wasn't sure. A week would sometimes feel like 2 days. A day would sometime feel like 2 weeks.

A fight would end as soon as it started, or it would drag on forever to make him feel completely unable to grasp the passing of time.

Not to mention, cultivation alone would make him lose his sense of time, almost all the time.

During these times, he had done nothing but fight with his sword. He would use his sword to solve any and every problem.

If a fight was easy, he would beat it with his sword. If it was hard, he would run away.

Even when there were times he could easily defeat a beast were he to simply use his Explosion skills or his mental attacks, he still chose to use his sword and make it hard for himself.

If he couldn't beat it, he would then just run away and come back later.

If he couldn't run away, he let the world devour himself and send him somewhere else.

He had to use this technique more than once, and more than once he had ended up in more trouble than not.

One time, he had even entered the lair of a Saint realm snake. Alex was sure he would die at that time, but fortunately, the snake didn't attack him.

It only told him to leave and never go back there again.

'Shen Jing must have given them instruction,' he had thought.

At first, he had been surprised that Shen Jing's words even held value to these beasts given that they were both in the Saint Realm. However, when he realized that the Saint realm, just like the True realm and Self-Tempering realm, must have multiple minor realms as well, he understood why they would do that.

After all, even the Saint realm Emperor had been scared of the Saint realm beasts from the Beasts' realm. So, he didn't think about them for long.

It wasn't the Saint beast he had to worry about, then. It was the True King and True Emperor realm beast. Fortunately, they were just as rare to come by as well.

In the past however many months he had been here, he had seen about 2 dozen or so True King beasts, most of which didn't bother him, and he didn't bother them either.

As for True Emperor beasts, he could count them in his one remaining hand.

During this time, his strength had also grown by a large amount. Since he was only focused on fighting and cultivating, his cultivation had grown to True Master 5th realm.

However, that wasn't what had made Alex happy. The thing that got him happier was his advancement with the sword.

He hadn't yet reached Sword Qi, as that was still elusive to him, but he could feel himself getting closer and closer.

From time to time, while fighting, he could see a sword-shaped Qi or two split off from his white Sword Intent outline. From what Alex remembered, there had to be many more such sword-shaped Qi to be around him for it to be considered having learned Sword Qi.

Also, Du Yuhan had said something about Sword Qi having the personality of the user. Du Yuhan wanted to cut down everything in front of him with his sword, and that had manifested a sword Qi that gave him unimaginable cutting power.

'What is my own personality then?' Alex wondered. He couldn't be sure. If he had to before, he would call himself kind and gentle.

Could that be used to explain the person he had become now? Obviously not. The amount of blood on his hand was not something someone kind and gentle would have.

He was… different. He had changed.

Alex sighed. 'There's no point in thinking about it now, is there?' he thought. He would soon learn it on his own.

Alex opened his eyes on top of a tree crown. He looked around to see the wilted leaves and slightly darkened wood beneath him.

He couldn't help but sigh. Last few months, his body had gotten worse and worse, to the point where his Yang energy couldn't be contained any longer with the Yin technique.

Unless he decided to sit down and cultivate the Yin technique for days on end, there was no way to control his yang body now.

It was also troublesome with how helpful his Yang body was. Most of the beasts below the True Master realm scurried away whenever he came close to them.

True Lord beasts and above were the only ones who seemed to not be afraid of him now. That was helpful. True Master beasts were no match for him after all.

At True Master 5th realm, his attacks dealt about the same damage as his body, if not higher.

As for his sword, it was close to dealing damage about the same as his body too. Very soon, his body would start falling behind.

'Sigh, if only I knew of a way to increase my body's strength too,' he thought.

His master hadn't lied at all when he had told him that most body cultivators abandoned their path after a certain point because cultivating the body became too hard and resource-intensive.

Alex wished he knew what resources could even do such a thing.

As he walked along the side of the mountain, no beasts came up to him thanks to his yang aura.

When he reached the top, the wind blew at him, bringing a sour and pungent smell along with it.

'What is that smell?' he wondered. He couldn't see anything ahead with his spiritual sense that would produce such a smell, so he decided to go ahead and check it out himself.

Just as he was about to walk ahead, a voice drifted to his mind and said, "STOP!"

Chapter 632: Poison

Alex didn't move a step forward when he heard Shen Jing's voice in his head. A moment later, he felt a gust of wind.

Alex turned around, simply out of instinct, to see if Shen Jing had come. However, no one was there.

"That's not the direction you want to go towards," Shen Jing said from right next to him, but Alex couldn't see him at all.

He strained his senses as far as he could to find him, however, the next set of words came from so near him that he felt the breath on his ears.

"I'm right here."

Alex jumped a little, looking in the direction where the sound came from but saw no human standing there. It wasn't until Shen Jing got rid of some sort of technique that Alex finally saw him.

'What was that?' he wondered.

Alex checked his connection with Pearl and felt him someplace far away. "Where's Pearl?" he asked.

"Cultivating someplace else," Shen Jing said.

"Is he safe?" Alex asked as a sense of panic ran through him.

"With me around, there's nothing on this continent that can threaten him. You need not worry about his survival at the moment. You should worry about yours," Shen Jing said.

Alex sent his senses to the slopes of the mountain, wondering if there was some sort of beast down there.

"It's poison," Shen Jing replied, letting Alex know.

"Poison?" Alex asked with surprise, but he couldn't sense it yet. Even after his spiritual sense had grown to about 150 meters in radius, he couldn't see any signs of poison.

"Can you not smell it?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex took a deep breath and a familiar smell of sour and pungent air filled his senses.

"Ah, this was the poison's smell drifting to me, huh?" Alex asked.

"Poisons, Venoms, and Toxins of every kind," Shen Jing let him know.

"So many?" Alex couldn't help but let out a surprise in his voice. Then, a thought came to him.

"Am I… close to the Poison Swamps of the Dreaded Mountain range?" he asked.

"Oh, you know about this place huh?" Shen Jing asked. "Yes, you are correct. It is exactly the site you are thinking of. Down this mountain, there is nothing but plants and animals that will kill you with a single touch."

"Although your physical body might be able to protect you a bit, without antidotes, I suggest you do not go back there," Shen Jing said.

Alex thought to himself. 'Will the poison really hurt me?' he thought. His body was after all evolved from the version that could already destroy most poison.

He had also seen poisons being destroyed by his body during the fights in the last year or so.

Still, there had also been a time when his body hadn't been able to protect himself from the poison.

'That saint realm poison still nearly killed my previous body,' he thought. He couldn't be sure if his current body could save him or not, but his master surely couldn't protect herself.

And she had a body at the same level as his right now.

Alex didn't know what to do.

"You seem to be lost in some thoughts," Shen Jing said, looking at his lost look.

Alex was startled back to reality and bowed a little. "My apologies. I was just thinking about something."

"About what?" Shen Jing asked. "Ask me, and maybe I can help you."

Alex frowned and thought for a moment. 'Should I tell him?' he wondered. He wanted to keep it a secret, but he couldn't be sure if that was the right path to take here.

Shen Jing was an incredible human, with knowledge and experience that far surpassed him. Keeping information to oneself when he could be using it to advance himself really did feel like the wrong approach here.

So, he took a deep breath and told him… some of the information. "Brother Shen Jing," he called him, feeling a little weird calling a Saint realm human his brother.

"It's like this. My body can destroy most poison I come across, but I'm still unsure of the limit of my body. So, I thought it might be a good idea for me to go into that swamp and test it out myself," Alex said.

Shen Jing looked at him with a curious look. "I knew you could gather Qi through beast cores, but I never knew you could survive poison too. Do you have some sort of a rare, heaven-defying bloodline or what?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex flinched. He did have one, but he wasn't born with it, and neither could he use it at all. The only time he did use it was to improve his Metal spiritual root, so… that likely didn't count.

"I'm joking, I'm joking," Shen Jing said. "I don't care if you were the son of God himself. Actually yes, I would care but I wouldn't be jealous or envy you. Actually no, I would be jealous and envy you, but I would never hurt you for it."

Alex didn't know how to respond to that.

"Anyway, are you sure your body can handle poisons?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes," Alex nodded.

"Have you never been poisoned with something that your body couldn't handle?" Shen Jing asked as if he knew things he shouldn't have.

"I have," Alex said. "But it was a Saint rank poison."

Shen JIng's eyes turned suspicious. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," Alex said. "It came down in the meteor shower some thousand years ago."

Shen Jing's face narrowed with a confused look. "What meteor shower?" he asked.

Alex didn't know what to say. This should have been well known even throughout the Luminance empire. Even the Crimson Empire had some documented events of it happening, but since it was back when the empire didn't exist and everything was the Shattered Kingdoms, most information was lost.

So, Alex went ahead and swiftly explained everything he had learned about the shower until now.

Shen Jing nodded his head in surprise as if this was the first time he was hearing all of this. 'Was he not supposed to have been lived his entire life here?' Alex thought.

"How old are you?" Alex blurted out, before even thinking about it.

"Very old," Shen Jing said, not giving an accurate answer as he thought about the meteor shower.

"How did you not know about this until now then?" Alex asked.

"I only just recently returned back to the continent, so it's obvious I missed it right?" Shen Jing said.

"But you said you've lived here your whole life," Alex said, finding the contradiction in his words.

"Ah, but you see, someone like me can live for a long time. So for me, a thousand years is nothing much," he said.

Alex's face frowned. "Are you an immortal then?" he asked, knowing that was impossible since immortals needed to remain hidden lest the Heavenly Judgment tears them apart.

"What makes you say that?" Shen Jing asked with a curious face.

"Because a Saint realm can only live up to 2000 years at best," Alex said.

"Those saint realm artists are weak. Most saint realms I know can live 10,000 years. I've even met some folks who've been alive for 20,000 years, but those people mostly depend on elixirs and spirit foods, not to mention tons and tons of pills," Shen Jing said.

"Oh," Alex said, fully surprised. He hadn't known that. Was the information in those books incomplete? Maybe the lack of Saint Qi in the air had made the saint realms of this continent weak.

"I have a question of my own actually," Shen Jing said and asked, "how do you know the poison that nearly killed you was saint rank?"

"Because… " Alex searched his brain for a proper answer, but aside from 'my master told me,' and 'what else could it be?', he found no other answer.

His eyes widened. 'Was I wrong about the poison then?' he thought. 'Was the poison I was struck with not saint rank?'.

"You see the problem right? How can you mere mortals judge something that fell from the heavens if it did not have a label to it?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex was about to say something, but Shen Jing put up his hands to stop it.

"Actually, there is a better method to find out," he said. Shen Jing became a blur in Alex's senses and he moved out of the range of his vision in a fraction of a second and reappeared back in it a second later.

This time, he wasn't alone. Next to him was a confused-looking snake with 3 heads instead of one, each a different shade of purple.

It hissed and tried to attack Alex, but a golden barrier blocked it. Only then did the beast calm down and started looking around in caution.

"Are you going to act properly? Or should I kill you?" Shen Jing said with a smiling face, but the pressure he created made the poor snake nearly frighten to death.

The snake kept hissing and quickly nodded.

"Do you have an antidote for your poison?" Shen Jing asked the snake.

The snake looked confused, but it nodded.

Shen Jing's face widened into a glorious smile. "Good!" he said. "I want you to go poison that young man."

The snake still looked confused, but it nodded. It looked like it understood words, but couldn't speak properly.

'He's worse than Pea—'

As Alex was thinking, the golden barrier blocking off the snake was removed, and suddenly, in came a terrifying aura that nearly got Alex down to his knees.

This snake was a Saint beast.

Chapter 633: Poison Testing

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!" Alex said, seeing the snake slide, and not slide at the same time towards him.

The Saint realm aura was making Alex very scared. There was no pressure, but it was the incoming poison that scared Alex.

"It's fine, little Brother. He has an antidote," Shen Jing said, and the snake nodded.

Alex gulped down and looked at the snake. It was only now that he was properly taking a look at the snake.

The snake had dark blue scales all over its body until its heads split into three two-thirds of the way into its body.

Each head had about a meter-long neck before the head arrived. It looked like despite having 3 heads, the snake was a single thinking organism.

Spiritual senses escaped from the snake, scanning Alex and a voice drifted into his mind.

"Choose one head," it said.

"What?" Alex asked. He looked at the snake with a bit of confusion.

"My three heads have different poisons. Choose one," the snake said.

'Is this a game?' Alex thought with shock. Still, he didn't dare defy the snake and slowly moved his hand and said, "The middle one."

The snake hissed. "Bad choice."

It moved in a blur, enough to catch Alex off guard and the middle head sprayed purple fog directly at his face.

Alex unconsciously took in a breath, and suddenly his body froze up. Then, he fell to the ground with his entire body writhing in pain.

"AAAARRRGHHHH!!!" He shouted so loud that Shen Jing had to create a barrier with his Qi to keep in the sound.

It burned. Not his body, not his mind, but his meridians. All the intricate channels in his body swelled as poison dared to break them.

His body tried to get rid of the poison, but the poison was in his meridians. Aside from having some influence, the body couldn't really do anything for the poison. Still, it devoured his Qi, trying to heal what was hurt, rather than get rid of the poison.

His body would run out of Qi before all of it could be healed. Even though his reserves were of massive amounts, this was a saint beast's poison. His body couldn't heal faster than the poison could damage it.

The snake hissed at Shen Jing, saying something and after a minute of listening to the scream, he finally spoke.

"Yes, go cure him," he said.

"NO!" Alex shouted. "I can do it."

Shen Jing was surprised. He didn't think Alex had enough wits at the moment to see what was happening on the outside.

"You will destroy your meridians if you become stubborn here, you know," Shen Jing said.

"I know!" Alex shouted. "But I can get rid of it."

He pushed himself up with a single hand and got into a cultivating position. He took a deep breath, and with a thought, his Qi started moving through his meridians.

The Five Yang Divine Path taught him how to move his Qi through his meridians and he followed it.

As the Yang Qi moved through his meridians, it destroyed the poison on its path, leaving just a slightly swollen meridian along the way.

As it passed through more and more of his meridian, the poison was more and more destroyed.

In the next two minutes, as Alex cultivated, all of the poison in his body was completely destroyed.

Alex opened his eyes and heaved a sigh. For some reason, it felt like his Qi had increased a bit as well.

The snake's eyes were wide open in shock, but it wasn't limited to the snake alone. Even Shen Jing was a little shocked.

He went close to Alex and checked. "If I hadn't seen it for myself, I would have likely never believed it," he said with awe.

'Just how many secrets does this young man have?' Shen Jing thought.

"I'm surprised myself," Alex said. The snake hissed something at him in shock, not even remembering to use spiritual sense to talk.

"That was its strongest poison designed to disrupt the opponent's meridians, it says," Shen Jing somehow translated.

"Forgive me senior, but can you use your other poisons on me too?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing raised an eyebrow in surprise and turned around to nod at the snake.

The snake slid up to Alex and bit him on his leg. Intense pain flared in Alex's body as his blood vessels swelled and became purple in response to the poison.

Alex immediately started using his Five Yang Divine Path and as if it never existed, the poison vanished.

It didn't even take two seconds. The snake was beyond surprised at this point, and Alex too was fairly surprised.

'So cultivating helps quite a lot while removing poison, huh?' he thought. He had never cultivated while he was poisoned, but seeing that it could remove Saint rank poison too, he would make sure to do so from now on.

"The last one, senior," Alex said.

The snake said something to Shen Jing and Shen Jing fell into thought. "The last one is a mental poison. Are you—"

"Please do it," Alex said, getting ready.

The snake had no choice, so it used the technique it had only learned after growing the third head to its left.

A mental attack.

Spiritual energy that was purple in Alex's senses gathered in front of the snake and shot at Alex at a speed that he couldn't even register.

When it entered his mind, he felt another intense pain from his spiritual sea. With a thought, he appeared inside his spiritual sea to see a massive gathering of purple clouds that were starting to corrupt some of the water in the sea.

"Oi, kid! What is happening? You're not dying, right? If you're dying, please send me out first. I don't want to die with you."

The artifact spirit, Godslayer spoke hurriedly from the side, but Alex ignored him.

Alex then flew to the top of the mountain and put both of his hands to the side. With a thought, a massive fog of yellow light emerged from his hands and started spreading towards the purple fog.

It looked like there would be a fight between the two patches of fog for a moment, but a moment later the yellow fog started devouring the entire purple fog.

When all the poison disappeared, Alex brought back his fog into him, leaving a pristine but stormy sky with threads of silver light flying through the air.

He never really could consume those silver threads with anything but his hands themselves.

Once all the poison was gone, Alex ignored the thankful cries of the Godslayer and teleported out.

When he came outside, Shen Jing looked in awe and so did the snake.

Alex got up from his position and bowed toward the snake. "Thank you for letting me test the limits of my body with your poison," He said.

The snake hissed to say something and only later realized that the human couldn't understand it. Then, it repeated the same words again in his mind.

"It's fine."

The snake was too shaken by what had happened to say anything else.

"I am surprised that you managed to survive the Three-headed Hydra's poison too. I never thought it would be possible, but you really did it," Shen Jing said.

'Three-headed Hydra?' Alex thought with surprise and he spoke up.

"Senior, I have a request."

Chapter 634: Coincident?

The snake hissed after hearing Alex. "What's your request?" it asked directly into his mind.

"I need the poison of a Two-headed Hydra for my left arm's recovery. Can you perhaps help me with that?" he asked.

"I can," the snake hissed.

"Alright, that settles it then," Shen Jing. "You can go and happily roam the poison valley where everyone else would die with a single breath."

Alex looked at him with a weird face. "That's very morbid of you," he said.

"Haha, I'm kidding. Most people that come here will know to bring a poison repelling artifact that will repel poison in the air. They will also come with tons and tons of antidotes. So it's unlikely anyone would actually die."

"Unless they end up beating beasts like him," Shen Jing said while pointing to the hydra who hissed.

"I see," Alex said. He didn't know such artifacts existed, but now that he thought of it, he didn't know what sort of artifacts existed exactly.

He was used to seeing weapons, armors, necklaces, and such only, but after coming to the Luminance empire, he had seen a few weird artifacts like the lantern that hurt him mentally.

"You guys should go now," Shen Jing said. "I won't waste any more of your time."

"Brother Shen, wait," Alex said before Shen Jing could leave.

"What is it?" Shen Jing asked.

"Can I get empty vials and wooden boxes from my storage bag? I need them to keep the valuable ingredients from losing energy," Alex said.

"Hmm… Okay," Shen Jing said and brought out 5 of his storage bag at once from somewhere. Then, he looked through them all, and within moments he found all of the empty containers.

It looked like his face lingered for a split second at something, but it quickly changed, making Alex wonder if he was even seeing it right.

At the same time, he also gave Alex a few pairs of clothes to change. The hide of some furred beast he was wearing at the moment could barely be called clothes right now.

Once Alex took the items, he bowed toward Shen Jing and turned to walk away with the Hydra.

Shen Jing turned around to leave, but just as he was about to, he remembered something and his voice drifted towards Alex.

"In less than a year, a demon realm is going to open. Be prepared as I will come to take you there," Shen Jing said and disappeared.

At the same time, the snake got instructed to not help Alex beyond what he had requested.

The snake nodded and continued slithering.

Alex was confused now. "Demons? There are demons here?" he asked out loud, but Shen Jing was nowhere to be seen.

In Alex's mind, demons were horrific beings that were meant to scare children to send them to sleep. 'Certainly, he means something else by demons, right?' Alex thought.

The sour and pungent smell drifted into Alex's nose which he breathed again, but aside from the smell, there was nothing bad about the poison in the air at all.

He actually wondered if his body was cleansing the poison while he was consuming it. 'That must be the case,' Alex thought.

The saint realm snake could probably go back to its habitat immediately if it wanted to, but for some reason, it chose to slowly walk along with Alex.

Alex's senses were still spread out and he could see several plants and animals all roaming throughout the field.

Just as he was looking around, he couldn't believe he found something so easily.

"A Two-colored Poison Lily!" Alex shouted and immediately ran towards it, but as soon as he stepped forward, his feet sank to the ground and he nearly stumbled upfront.

He caught himself while in the process of falling and got back up, this time hovering a few inches above the ground.

'What the hell?' he thought to himself. He slowly let his Qi disappear and drifted back down, sinking both his feet into the wetland down below.

"Oh right," He said after finally realizing what was going on. "It's a swampland. I forgot."

Now that he sent his senses beneath what he thought was the land, he could see it clearly went a bit lower before there was any hard surface.

The poison swamp it seemed was aptly named.

Alex slowly flew towards the Poison Lily and felt a nauseating smell come from just being close to it. Alex didn't know if it was just the flower or the entire swamp, but he could feel that the poison in the air here was more than what his body could handle for the moment.

He was about to use his cultivation technique to make it easier on himself, but then he remembered something about himself that had been keeping away normal beasts.

He wondered if it worked the same for poison in the air too, and decided to give it a go.

With a thought, yang energy spread out of his body, creating a small area around him where poison in the air ignited to nothingness.

'Oh, it worked,' Alex thought with a surprise. His nausea immediately cleared and before even having to cultivate, he was perfectly fine.

Then, he sensed something moving in the water.

Alex immediately reached into his ring and brought out his sword. Despite being in the swamp, he was going to fight with his sword, and sword alone.

When he finally saw the beast waiting to attack should he move forward, he frowned. This… was just too coincidental, wasn't it?

In front of Alex was a dark blue beast with 2 purple heads of different shades, hissing at him with both of the heads.

No matter how Alex looked at it, it was a Two-Headed Hydra. Did he fight it now? Or ask the Saint beast next to him for help?

The Hydra was in the True Lord 4th realm, so Alex could easily win it, but he didn't want to offend the senior next to him by attacking a beast of his kind.

"Is this… your relative, senior?" Alex asked.

The snake looked offended at that question actually. It hissed back at Alex, and a question carried by the snake's spiritual sense entered his mind.

"Is every human in this world your relative?" it asked.

"No," Alex said and turned around towards the snake. "Then, please don't mind if I fight a little here."

"The head that is more red than blue," the snake's voice drifted into Alex's mind.

"Sorry?" he asked. 'Head that is more red than blue?' Alex wondered. He could see that the Saint realm Hydra was referring to the head on the left, but Alex didn't understand why.

Was that perhaps a weak spot in the snake? Or was the second head where the monster core lie?

"You said you wanted our poison right?" the Snake asked. "The head that is bluer has poison fog that harms the meridians. You cannot carry that back."

"Then, it is very easily the 2nd head with our fangs," the saint beast said.

"I see," Alex said, finally understanding what the snake was trying to tell him. He hadn't even thought that the two heads would be a thing of confusion for him.

He usually left such concerns for after the fight was done and his life was safe.

Once Alex got the information he needed, he moved forward. As if waiting for this, the Two-Headed Hydra lunged forward at Alex.

It hadn't noticed the tiny Three-Headed hydra slithering in the swamp at all and thus thought of only Alex as the enemy.

No. From the looks of it, it thought of Alex as food.

'Let's see which one gets eaten first,' Alex thought as a bright white outline appeared around his sword.

'Who am I?' he asked himself before proceeding to fight. Ever since he thought of the sword Qi following his personality, he had been asking that question himself.

Who was he? What was he doing? Such questions drifted in his mind for a split second, and when he realized he still didn't know, he ignored the two flickers of white light that jumped out from his sword and launched forward.

He met the snake in mid-air and hit it on its right head with a blow that rang its brain as if it had just hit a mountain.

Had Alex put in his Qi for this attack, the snake would have likely died with just this one attack.

His Sword Intent surely had improved. And it wanted to improve it even further.

Alex jumped back, following the snake that was sent flying away. The yang energy from his body stopped all Qi from entering his body.

The snake caught itself from going any further and looked back at Alex who looked more like a beast here than it did.

A layer of purple liquid seeped out of the snake's body, solidifying to become armor of some sort.

Alex's sword hit it again, but the snake managed to hold itself with just one of its heads.

With its other head, it sprayed gaseous poison onto Alex's face. Without even Alex breathing it in, the poison entered his body, immediately starting to attack his meridians.

Alex took a step back and immediately circulated his Five Yang Divine Path technique and within moments, the poison vanished from his system.

It was so fast that both of the snakes around him looked at him like they were looking at their natural enemy.

Once the poison was gone, Alex jumped back to his fight.

Chapter 635: Poison Swamp

Since the snake was no problem to Alex, after a few minutes of battle, he easily subdued it. Killing it would've taken longer, but in front of the Three-headed Hydra, he didn't want to do so.

Alex grabbed the snake's left head and forced its fangs out, making it pour poison into an empty glass vial.

When the purple, viscous poison barely slid down the vial, making Alex wonder if it was perhaps more solid than liquid.

Alex put the Two-Headed Hydra back on the ground and plucked the Two-Colored Poison Lily flower as well. He then kept both of them in his ring and took out another empty vial before turning around.

"Senior, you've helped me so much, but I would like to request you one more thing," he said.

The snake looked at Alex then at the vial and understood. "You want my poison too?" the snake asked.

"Just a little, if it is not much trouble," Alex said.

"It isn't," the snake said and slid forward to Alex, immediately pouring poison into his vial.

"My task of looking after you ends here. I will take my leave now," the snake said and moved away with such a speed that Alex could barely tell the direction it moved in.

He couldn't even find the time to say his thanks to the snake.

Alex looked back at the even more viscous poison in the vial and couldn't help but be amazed that his body was able to clear such a terrifying poison in just 2 seconds.

That just gave him more proof that the poison he had been struck with back in the Forbidden Fields, the same poison that killed his master had actually been an Immortal grade or higher poison.

Alex wondered if he could have cured the poison in his body back then if he had sat down and cultivated. Even if it did not fully cure, it should have been able to slow down the poison's advance.

Then, his face fell as he realized that his master could've likely survived too had she cultivated during that time.

'But there was no Qi. We were suppressed,' he thought. He couldn't help but feel horrible at the thought that his master would have likely survived the battle with that old man had she only been able to cultivate after being poisoned.

The wounds wouldn't have stopped her at all since she had a lot of pills. It was all because they were suppressed.

Alex's face turned gloomy and his eyes welled up. But he quickly wiped it away and shook his head with a sigh.

"What's done is done. I can only live my life and keep moving forward like my master wanted me to," he thought and walked away from that location.

The swampland, for now, was a valley where every single plant and animal was either poisonous, venomous, or simply toxic.

Everything else that lived here could either survive toxicity or was simply too strong to care about poisons.

Alex kept walking… or floating. He stepped on the water, but his feet never sunk below it.

His yang aura was still flared out to the fullest and he was starting to wonder if that was a good idea or not.

It was helping him keep away the poison in the air, but it was also forcing him to make such yang being flared normality.

He knew he would suffer from this if he kept it for a long time. He was already suffering its effect as his Flickering Shadow technique was starting to perform worse and worse now.

Every time he teleported, he would appear close to where he wanted to, but not exactly where he chose to.

It had taken Alex not long to realize the problem. His body had a Yang constitution, with his Qi having heavy Yang properties. When he tried to create Yin with his body, it was hampered by his yang, and not all of it was made to the technique.

So, when he teleported, he fell short each time.

That was one problem his body was causing, but there were also others. Another problem he suffered was when he made pills. Every time he sat down to make pills, he would have to cultivate his yin cultivation technique for a long time to get rid of as much Yang as he could before starting.

Otherwise, he had a hard time even making pills most of the time if he didn't do that.

'I need to find some yin treasures and consume them. That should be able to help me balance it a bit more,' Alex thought.

With many of the poisons having yin attributes, he was sure he wouldn't have a hard time finding such treasures.

So, Alex went around the swamp, freely as there was nothing that could hurt him or surprise him, and roamed the land.

Every day, he found new plants or beasts that he recognized to be alchemy ingredients and took them. He fought monsters left and right with nothing but his sword.

Most of the time, he would be poisoned, but he didn't need to worry about that. A single circling of his cultivation removed all poison from his body.

Alex was surprised to see that plants here were more toxic than the animals. Most of the time, the animal was just cultivating the toxins the plant gave off, capturing them into their own body.

He was learning more and more about poison and venoms every day.

A few times, Alex even sat down to use the ingredients he had gathered to make some poison pills.

One of the pills he made, a Heart Wrenching Poison pill, even came out to be around 56%. He would have likely gotten more out of the other pills too, but splitting his concentration into igniting a flame under the cauldron without using his formation plates held Alex back quite a bit.

In the months that passed since Alex entered the poison swamp, he had gone nearly 30 kilometers into the heart of the swamp, or so he believed.

A few times, he even saw humans in the poison swamp, walking around with artifacts and talismans hovering in front of them to block the poison. The first time he had seen them, he was surprised. But once he realized that it was a normal occurrence for people to come here and gather ingredients for themselves, he relaxed.

No one really wanted to fight another person for no reason in a place where a breath of the air could likely kill you.

Alex also never tried to talk with those people either. Most left only an hour or two after getting there.

With only about 150 meters of range on his senses, he was sure there were many more humans that came to this place, but he only got to see these ones.

Alex's Sword Intent progressed quite a bit and he could now cut a normal True Lord 3rd realm beast in half without even using his Qi.

If he did use Qi, it would reach True lord's 5th realm.

"Can I even progress any further?" he thought, standing next to the corpse of a red-skinned lizard.

Its head and tail were cut in half, and half the scales on its body were gone, likely to Alex's ring.

Alex watched his sword and wondered if he had reached a bottleneck. His progress fell stagnant and while he felt like he could progress, there just wasn't any.

'Maybe I'm supposed to take a break and try again,' he thought, but that didn't feel right. It was like he was reaching the limit of his Intent and was having trouble understanding what he should have done next.

'Dammit! If I had some more time in the library, I would have learned about swords. Now, I'm stuck with doing what Du Yuhan told me to do,' he thought.

Finding your personality and putting it into your own Sword Intent. That was how Du Yuhan told him sword Qi was born.

"I really need to learn who I am," Alex thought. That was the only way forward.

Alex walked forward and reached the tree behind the dead lizard. There hung a fruit on the tree that was shaped like a litchee but was the size of Alex's head.

Even as Alex walked close, he could feel the familiar coldness that his master used to produce. This fruit had a Yin attribute to it.

Alex plucked the fruit from the tree and sat down beneath it to eat it. He opened one of the fruits and tore off a giant piece to eat it at once.

When it reached his stomach, he didn't immediately let his body get rid of it. Instead, he slowly permeated the fruit's energy throughout his body. Wherever the poison reached, the existing yang aura would come to get rid of it.

By the time he ate the entire fruit, it felt like Alex had cultivated his yin technique for a month continuously.

Alex put back the other 2 fruits into his ring as he would use those when the Yang flared back again.

During the next few months, Alex roamed around more of the poison swamp, stealing as many ingredients as he could find.

After nearly a year of being in this place, Alex was starting to get fed up. He wanted to leave, but he knew Shen Jing would be coming any time now, so he didn't leave.

As expected, not many days after, while Alex was fighting with a giant insect, a voice drifted to his ear.

Shen Jing was here.

Chapter 636: Dao of Techniques

"You ready to go?" Shen Jing's voice drifted into Alex's ear. That meant he was close by. However, even with his nearly 170 meters wide spiritual sense, he couldn't pinpoint Shen Jing at all.

"Just after I'm done with this," Alex said as he dodged a poison shot from the insect in front of him.

Alex wasn't even sure if the insect was the right term to be used here. The beast in front of him was a 3 meters tall ant-like beast with a rather thin, circular body, with 8 spider-like legs coming out of it.

Its dark-brown skin with a furry body made it look nothing like any insects Alex knew of. Not to mention the many dozens of small eyes on its head and the straw-like mouth which it used to spit poison at him.

Alex didn't dodge because of the poison, but rather the force behind each shot of the poison.

The insect's exoskeleton was strong enough to handle most attacks, and its poison shots were enough to scrape off his outer skin which gave him a burning sensation that he didn't like.

Alex's sword glowed white, with no hint of any other Qi, and occasionally strayed out white flickers of light as if someone were hammering on a hot piece of iron.

Alex dodged past the incoming poison shot and dashed beneath the insect's massive legs to strike at one of its legs.

However, as if steel hitting steel, his sword only rang in his hands and did nothing whatsoever to the beast.

Its hide was way too strong. "Of course, it would be," Alex thought. "It is a True Lord 7th Realm beast after all."

Alex fought for a few minutes more, trying to find some way to beat the insect, which was clearly a defensive beast when he heard Shen Jing's voice again.

"You might miss the opening if you don't leave now," he said.

Alex started. He didn't know what this Demon realm was but if Shen Jing was talking about it, then he definitely didn't want to miss it.

Aura flared around him as the originally white blade started glowing golden as well.

Alex then zipped past the insect and hit the insect through its underbelly. As if opening a zipper on a jacket, a long gash appeared on the insect's body that opened fully and the entrails of the beast flopped out.

Just like that, the beast was dead. Shen Jing appeared next to him and said, "Not bad."

Alex could finally see him through his senses and turned to face Shen Jing. "How much of a hurry are we in? Do I have time to get some of this beast's parts?" he asked.

"Hahaha, I was joking. Do what you want. There is still a day before the realm opens," Shen Jing said.

Alex was about to frown, but he stopped his face from showing any changes. Instead, he just nodded and started carving out the eyes, heart, and the monster core of the insect.

The eyes alone took him about 15 minutes to carve out as he had to be careful not to pop them.

Shen Jing looked at Alex as used his golden claw to carve the core out and said, "That's quite a bad technique, you know."

Alex turned around with his monster core and asked, "Sorry?"

"What you're doing right now. That's bad," Shen Jing said. "Always find a meridian path for your technique for maximum efficiency."

"Is that so?" Alex said. "It's a technique I created, so I just randomly bring out my Qi," he said.

"I can see that," Shen Jing said. "Attack me with that claw."

Alex raised an eyebrow with curiosity, but asked no question and instead simply attacked.

As his golden claw scratched against what was clearly flesh, the claws disappeared as if they were made up of sand.

"See? It's weak. Also, I bet it takes quite a lot of Qi to use that," Shen Jing said. "I know you are just making this technique, but try to find a correct path for it and you will find the efficiency increase by a lot."

"Same for your Sun-making technique. I didn't say anything as I needed something to strain your meridians at the time, but now that they seem very wide and flexible, you can try out different paths for it as well," he said.

Alex thought to himself. 'Hm, so that means there is not just one way to form a technique huh? Just like there is not just one recipe for the same pill.'

'However, with each variation, it can be improved upon. A proper path and a proper intent, with these two things, any techniques can be strengthened,' Alex thought.

Shen Jing had a wry look on his face as he looked at the sky. The Worldly laws had stirred again.

"You are in the right direction, but you are mistaken about something it seems," Shen Jing suddenly said.

"Sorry?" Alex asked.

"The thing you were thinking about just now. Whatever you were thinking of, you are making a mistake somewhere," Shen Jing said.

'He can read my minds?' Alex thought with surprise. He didn't know there was such a skill.

"What am I mistaken about, brother Shen?" he asked.

"I don't know," Shen Jing said. "What did you learn just now, tell me."

Alex frowned but still told him what he had just learned about path and intent.

"Ah! I see," Shen Jing said. "So that's what you were learning about. Well, I can see where you are mistaken there."

"Oh," Alex looked surprised. "Where am I mistaken?"

Shen Jing shook his head. "I can't tell you," he said. "I will only be harming your future prospects if I tell you right now."

Alex was confused now. "How would you be harming my future by teaching me something I don't know?" he asked. The words coming out of Shen Jing contradicted themselves.

Shen Jing sighed. "Let's leave, I will tell you on the way."

The two of them started flying, but Shen Jing didn't speed up at all and went along at Alex's pace.

"What you are trying to learn, or actually have already learned, is called a Dao."

"A Dao is a fundamental law of the world that anyone can learn if they contemplate on it enough. However, you also need to have the talent for it."

"The Dao of techniques is what you were trying to learn just now. It's certainly one of the weaker Dao that won't even help you in battle. But if you were to look into making techniques, this would certainly help you," Shen Jing said.

"Dao…" Alex softly said to himself. "I've learned a Dao before?"

"Your explosions. You learned how to do it yourself right? Even the world helps you perform it," Shen Jing said.

"Ah!" Alex realized. "That's a Dao?"

"Yes, and see how strong it is," Shen Jing said.

"So, why can you not teach me about the Dao of techniques? You said I was mistaken right?" Alex asked.

"A Dao only comes down from the heaven when you are enlightened about a technique. The more information you get about a Dao from someone else, the less likely you are to obtain that Dao because you did not earn it yourself."

"Which is why I don't want to explain to you anything. Certainly, there is a chance that you have enough knowledge and understanding of this Dao yourself that my help isn't accounted for much, but if there is the slightest chance that you may falter because of me, I think it's better I just shut up," Shen Jing said.

This was a massive bit of information for Alex. He thought to himself as he flew for a few minutes, letting Shen Jing do the navigating when a question flowed into his mind.

"You said that the Dao of techniques was one of the weaker Daos right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "Anything that doesn't directly influence a battle is usually considered a minor Dao. But it's a ranking that humans gave so you will have to see for yourself how worth it is to have that Dao."

Alex mulled over this information, but his original question still remained in his head, so he decided to ask it.

"If this Dao of techniques is considered a minor Dao, then certainly it's not very useful during the battle itself. Then… does it matter if you teach me the Dao or not?" Alex asked.

"I can see that my Explosion Dao is very strong. So strong that I myself have to fear it, and I doubt I could have learned something this great by simply learning about it from someone else," he said.

"But, the Dao of Techniques doesn't seem like that. If, as you said, it helps me come up with techniques, then won't simply learning have a similar effect?"

"Even if the effect is worse, won't learning about it right now help me way more than learning about the Dao myself many years later?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing couldn't immediately answer this question. "Your words have truth and they do make sense. But you are lacking one bit of information," Shen Jing said.

Alex curiously looked at Shen Jing, waiting for him to speak.

"While a Dao may or may not be useful to now, or learning the information may be more useful than gaining the dao, there is something else a Dao is helpful for," Shen Jing said.

"The more Daos you have acquired by the time you reach the peak of Saint realm, the better your chances of breaking through to the Immortal Realm becomes."

Chapter 638: Demons

Alex slowly drifts down to the grassy land and stands some distance away from the majority of the crowd.

Seeing so many young men and women accompanied by the many Saint realm was very surprising to Alex.

"I thought reaching the saint realm was a hard task for cultivators in the Western Continent," Alex said. "But there are so many of them here."

Alex started counting and he found nearly 20 different Saint realm experts here.

20… that was nearly 7 times more than what he had seen in the Crimson Empire. Given how many more must have been hidden, Alex couldn't help but show shock on his face.

"Only 20," Shen Jing said. "Such a sad fate for the Western Continent."

"It's still 20 you know," Alex said from the side.

"Do you understand how bad of a number that is?" Shen Jing asked. "There should be close to 15 billion humans living on the Western Continent alone."

"Even if 150 of them end up entering the Saint realm, that is still 1 in a 100 Million entering the Saint realm. Do you think that is many?" Shen Jing asked.

When put like that, no, that was not that many.

"By comparison, the northern and southern continent would have around 1 in 10 Million people enter the Saint realm. As for the Eastern Continent with their better Spirit veins and resources, I wouldn't be surprised if there were 1 Saint realm in every Million people."

"Do you still think these measly 20 is a lot?" he asked. There was a sense of sadness and disappointment in his voice that Alex couldn't understand.

"It's all because of the other continents, right? They stole the resources," Alex asked.

"That is correct. From what I hear, all of the saint rank spirit veins were taken away for themselves, lowering the chances of any Saint realm cultivator to improve in this continent," Shen Jing said, shaking his head from side to side.

That got Alex thinking. "If they took away all the spirit veins, then how come there are Saint realm cultivators here now?" Alex asked.

"Ah, they took all, but more appeared." Shen Jing said.

Alex looked curious. "Can spirit veins simply appear?" he asked.

"Well, some appeared from the remaining True spirit veins upgrading to Saint spirit veins," Shen Jing said. "But that was rare."

"When I say more appeared, I am referring to that," Shen Jing said as his fingers pointed somewhere.

Alex followed the point and saw the large, nearly 10 meters tall, yellow column with words written on it.

"That monument?" Alex asked, wondering how a monument could have created spirit veins.

"No, not the monument itself, but what's inside of it," Shen Jing said.

"What's inside?" Alex asked with a confused look. But a moment later he realized what Shen Jing must have been talking about.

"The demon realm?" Alex's eyes changed.

"Yes," Shen Jing said.

"So it is a secret realm?" he asked.

"It's a pocket space created by the demons to hide themselves during the… Eternal War for Dominance," Shen Jing said, slowing himself down on the last words. He seemed to be contemplating if he should be saying those words or not.

"Eternal War for Dominance?" Alex's curiosity was piqued. "What is that?"

"It's… a war of forgotten times. It was so long ago that it doesn't matter anymore," Shen Jing said. "It was a pointless war."

Alex saw that Shen Jing didn't want to say anything about it, so he didn't push any further.

"What's a demon then?" Alex asked.

"Demons are just humans with two small red horns, weird colored eyes, and a slightly better physical body," Shen Jing said.

Alex frowned. "That's it?" he asked. Just two horns and weird eyes… that was enough to get yourself to be called a demon?

"Yes, that's it," Shen Jing said.

"That's not enough to have an entirely different word for you," Alex said.

"Tell that to the people who started that war so many years ago. If you can see how pointless this distinction is, you can likely understand how pointless that war back then was too," Shen Jing said.

"Well that's what I heard at least," Shen Jing said. "I wasn't alive or anything during that time to know exactly how pointless it was."

"What was the war for?" Alex couldn't help but ask.

"What all wars are for," Shen Jing replied. "Land and resources. However, neither the humans nor the demons had ever lacked land for themselves."

"So you can see what I mean when I say it was pointless right?" he asked.

Alex nodded. He understood… to a certain extent. But there had to be something more to it.

Alex changed the topic back to the secret realm. "So that demon's realm, that provided the western continent with Saint rank spirit veins to help produce Saint realm cultivators?" he asked.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "They never cared for this tiny realm when the Western continent was just as good as the rest of the world, but once it was no longer as good, they all hounded on it until nothing of worth remained to them."

Alex's face narrowed. "If there is nothing of worth there then why am I here?" he asked.

Shen Jing gave a bright smile. "What is not of worth to a Saint realm cultivator is usually treasure to a True realm cultivator," he said.

"Besides, it's been 5000 years or so since the saint realm experts robbed this place. Since then, they have only sent in True realm cultivators to train them, have them cultivate in the rich environment and find what treasures were left behind," Shen Jing explained.

Excitement swelled up in Alex's heart when he heard all of this and looked at the many young men and women that were gathered in the area.

They were all here to train themselves and find treasures as well.

"Wait a second," Alex said. "It's been 5 thousand years since the secret realm opened and people have been going inside all the time. Are we sure that there is even anything worth taking in there?"

"Oh, you don't need to doubt that at all," Shen Jing said. "The realm opens once in every 10 years, so there will certainly be quite a few resources still in there."

"Also… the secret realm is covered in seals all over that are so powerful that even Saint realm experts can't break through them."

"And… it's been so long that every few decades, a few of the seals end up dimming and whatever is behind it opens up. Do you want to guess what the demons were hiding in there with seals that made Saint realm expert return?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex's heart started beating faster and faster as he heard that. He looked back at the monument, unable to wait for it to open up.

However, since there was still some time, according to Shen Jing, he had to wait.

More and more figures came to the island with a cool breeze flowing from the south. Alex could hear the splashing of the ocean against the island from quite far away.

Shen Jing handed Alex back his storage bags, which Alex checked and found that not a single thing in them was missing.

He transferred all the valuables in those storage bags into his ring in a way that only Shen Jing could see, and he noticed Shen Jing's eyes flash for a split second when he put one of the items into his storage ring.

'What was it?' Alex wondered, but he had too many important items to realize.

In the next 6 hours, as the sun began to fall, and everyone started setting up their own tents and stations, Alex had sat down to cultivate with Shen Jing protecting him.

Pearl wanted to cultivate as well, but Alex didn't want to show the wounds that would appear on him to the outside world right now, so he stopped Pearl from doing anything.

Alex circulated a poison flower of yin element in his body as he got rid of the Yang energy that was building up because of his body.

After a round of cultivation that lasted somewhere until midnight, Alex stopped once his Qi was full again. That was when he looked around the humans that were spread throughout the island, and wondered if more Saint realm experts had appeared.

As if on cure, Shen Jing told him that there were 27 Saint realm experts on the island now.

Shen Jing also told him that there were likely going to be about 200 or so, maybe even more young people that would enter the secret realm from what he could sense.

Alex didn't dare release his spiritual sense amongst these crowd of Saint realms. It was scary enough doing that with just a few around.

"Oh, interesting," Shen Jing said.

"What's going on?" Alex asked, curiously.

"I am just surprised that a lot of the disciples here are quite talented. I have found at least 5 people other than you that have unlocked their spiritual sense," Shen Jing said.

"Although, it seems that they unlocked it later than you, so their senses are much weaker than your own," he said.

"Woah!" Alex thought. He was surprised, but he shouldn't have been.

Compared to the Luminance Empire, the Crimson Empire was like a children's playground. A beginner's town for users in a game to level up before they went out to venture into the real world.

Alex had come to this real world, and he was starting to see just how terrifyingly difficult the real world was going to be.

Chapter 639: Runes

The sun rose back again, and according to Shen Jing, there was still a couple of hours before the realm would start.

So, everyone was just staying there, waiting for it to be open.

So, Alex was quite bored and decided to ask Shen Jing something that had been in his mind for a while.

"Brother Shen, what happened to the demons?" he asked. If there was a demon realm here, then there had to be demons living on this continent, or more likely all 5 continents.

Why was there no information about demons anymore in this world?

"Oh, nothing bad," Shen Jing said with a glowing smile. "Once the war was over, they left the secret realm and went out to live with humans in harmony, happily ever after."

Alex stopped his face from frowning. "Please be serious, brother Shen," he said.

"Oh but I am serious," Shen Jing said. "When the war ended, the demons had no longer any reason to stay in that realm, so they left it and went on to live on the main continent with the humans that had now occupied most of the land."

"And where are these demons now?" Alex asked, half expecting Shen Jing to make up something else to continue his lie, and half hoping that he was telling the truth and that there really were demons, but he simply had not seen them.

"Well… there are no demons exactly so to speak," Shen Jing said. "Since the war, I am talking about happened so long ago that records of it are hard to find, the demons that lived together with the humans started really living together."

"As in they got into relationships and even had children of their own. Those children had their children and those children had their children."

"Slowly, the pure demon bloodline diluted to the point that it is nowhere, and yet everywhere."

Shen Jing looked at everyone in-crowd and slowly said, "Each of these humans here has some level of demon blood in them. But it is so diluted that their physical properties, like the horn, eyes and superior body usually don't manifest at all."

"I see," he said. "So… in a sense, we are all at some part demons too huh?"

Shen Jing looked at Alex with a smile that looked like it was keeping a chuckle from showing through.

"Everyone, please gather here for a quick meeting," a man with no hair called out to the people in the crowd.

He wore a white robe that had burnt edges that were fully black. Next to him, stood 2 other people.

One of them wore a white robe that was nearly filled with red all over as if the man stood on in a blood rain while wearing white.

The other one, a woman, wore a fully purple robe with multicolor linings on the inside.

Of the 3, only the bald one had spoken.

"Let's go see what it is," Alex said to Shen Jing, who half-heartedly stood up and walked to the crowd.

Finally, as Alex got closer, he was able to sense more and more cultivation base of the people that were on the island.

Even while they tried to suppress their aura, the Saint realms could still be sensed from a kilometer away.

But these True realm cultivators were harder to sense from where Alex was, at least without sending out his spiritual sense.

So, now that he was sensing them, he looked surprised. 'So strong,' he thought.

These normal-looking disciples ranged from the True Master realm, all the way up to the True King realm. Amongst them, Alex ranked somewhere in the middle, he thought.

"You will have a hard time in the secret realm, but it's also a good opportunity to see where your training has brought you," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded. It wasn't a competition that he needed to be afraid of True King participants. All he needed to do was walk aside when they were around.

As Alex was looking through the crowd, watching the Myriad people in there, his eyes fell on a young man —well, young for his cultivation base— standing next to two elder figures wearing the same fully red, almost crimson robe.

His eyes flashed as if to sense someone watching him, and he turned around towards Alex and looked at him.

Alex gave a smile and a nod to this young man, confusing him if he had even seen Alex before.

However, as he searched through his mind, he quickly remembered where he had seen him before.

"Brother Yu Ming?" a shocked voice entered his mind, surprising Alex. 'Spiritual sense? He didn't have it last time,' Alex thought.

The young man rushed towards Alex, while the rest of the crowd was focused on the older men that were still in the process of gathering everyone.

"Sorry for startling you like that with my spiritual sense," the young man said.

"It was a pleasant surprise, brother Fu Tao," Alex said, bowing a little in greeting.

"My surprise on the other hand is undeniably shocking, brother Yu," Fu Tao said. "You really did come to the Luminance Empire."

"I did, and it was all thanks to you," Alex said.

"Right, right, don't worry about that. I remember you talking about wanting to save someone, right? Did…you…" Fu Tao slowly asked.

"Yes," Alex said, pushing Pearl a little until his head popped out of his robes.

"Meow!" Pearl greeted. After Alex's insistence that he only meows from now on to strangers, Pearl remembered not to say 'Hello' even if he wanted to.

"Oh, it was a cat huh?" Fu Tao said, with almost all of his interest in the conversation disappearing slowly.

He turned to the side and looked towards the older bald man and said, "Something seems to be happening, we can talk later."

Then, he walked back to where he had been before.

"True King 7th realm?" Alex softly asked.

"8th," Shen Jing replied while staring at Fu Tao. "He sure doesn't know how to hide his disinterest, does he?"

"I think he's a good guy, but I wouldn't trust myself to judge a person," Alex said.

"Better to be careful," Shen Jing said.

Alex turned around to look at the front where the people were gathering and by coincidence looked at the monument to the side of them.

The monument was rectangular in shape and had something carved onto one of the faces that Alex couldn't see from where he had been before this.

'Are those… writings?' he thought. He read the word 'Demons' at the very top of the monument, but other than that, he could read nothing else.

It didn't even look like the other languages that the beasts and immortals used.

"Brother Shen, what does that say?" he asked, looking at the carving.

Shen Jing looked at Alex, then turned to the monument, then looked back at Alex, then turned to the monument and looked back at Alex for the final time.

"You do remember that I cannot read, right?" he asked.

Alex stopped his urge to laugh out loud. He really had forgotten. "I'm sorry. I read the word Demon at the top, but other than that, I couldn't read anything," he said.

Shen Jing turned around to look at the monument once again and said, "Ah, I do know what those are."

Alex looked at him with narrowed eyes.

Shen Jing gave a bright smile back. "I do," he said. "Did you forget that I've been here before? I simply remembered what they are."

Alex's suspicions disappeared and he asked, "So, what do they say?"

"Nothing," Shen Jing said, keeping his bright smile to himself.

"Brother Shen, please don't joke around," Alex said.

Shen Jing chuckled a little and said, "I'm really not joking. That thing might say demon at the top, but other than that, it's all just runes carved into the block."

"Runes?" Alex asked with a confused look.

"Yes, runes," Shen Jing said.

Alex frowned. He looked at the monument once again and carefully looked through each of these 'runes.'

'Oh my god,' he thought.

"They really are runes," Alex said out loud.

"See? I told you I wouldn't lie," Shen Jing said.

Alex was genuinely surprised to see runes carved on the monument's wall. After all, as far as he knew, runes were only used in talismans.

"Why are there runes on the wall?" Alex asked as he looked at the monument again.

The perfectly carved runes flowed artistically in all sorts of geometrical figures as well as curves, making designs in the monument that was intrinsic, artistic, and most of all… Symmetric.

Alex couldn't help but wonder what all of these runes did or meant. He desperately wished to know anything about talismans right now.

But, he didn't, so he had no idea.

"Of course, you would find runes here. It's a demon's realm after all," Shen Jing said.

Alex turned his head to look at him. "What does that have to do with anything?" he asked.

Shen Jing gave him a curious look and asked, "Do you not know?" only to immediately say, "Ah right, you only learned about Demons today after all."

Alex's curiosity was obviously piqued by this statement.

"What do I not know?" Alex asked.

"That it was the demons who created the runes in the first place," Shen Jing said.

"What?" Alex asked in surprise.

"Well, created is a wrong word. Discovered is more like it," he said. "While the humans discovered pills and formations, it was the demons who discovered runes and medicinal pastes."

Chapter 640: Right of Strength

Alex was a little surprised, but it didn't last long. He instead thought to himself about what he had just learned.

"So these runes do something even when carved on rocks, but no one knows how it works now, huh? I assume so since I haven't seen it being used anywhere in this place," Alex said.

"Yeah… well, over time things change a lot. Some information disappears, while others get adopted," Shen Jing said.

"The demons forget how to use the runes on anything other than talisman after mixing together with the humans, while humans forget their own language," Shen Jing said with a sigh.

"Their own language?" Alex narrowed his eyes. "The language we use currently is demon language?"

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "Although I can not read, I am told that the language used currently is the demon language, while the human language is now very hard to find."

Alex felt shocked to his core. 'Those two languages,' he thought, referring to the language he could read, and the one he simply understood. 'Those languages are the Demon language and the Human language?'

Alex couldn't believe that he had learned a language belonging to the demons this entire time. Although, that didn't matter much anymore after learning that he was in some part a demon himself.

Everyone in this world was.

'I guess humans with no demon influence must live in the heavens then,' he thought. 'They must be the immortals.'

Shen Jing said nothing further as he stared forward towards the old man in the white robe with burnt-up sleeves.

By now, the majority of the people here had already gathered around the old man, so he started speaking.

"Thank you for coming here to listen to me," he started. "As many of you might have learned, 2 years ago, our empire suffered an incomparable damage in the form of losing almost all of our disciples and young talents inside the secret realm to the north."

"So, we currently need to find ways of major improvements for the young generations. Thus, along with brother Song and sister Wei here, we have planned to put a limit on the number of people that can enter," the bald man said.

Immediately, people started whispering amongst themselves. Many saint realm folks looked around themselves, saying nothing. But from what Alex could see, it looked like they were communicating amongst each other but only using their spiritual sense.

"What do you propose exactly, Zhou RenKong?" one of the Crimson-robed elders from next to Fu Tao spoke.

"It is simple, Fu Shun. Those from the big Clans and Sects get to send in 3 disciples each. Those from the small ones get to send 1 disciple each."

"And unfortunately, those without any affiliations, we will have to stop you from entering this time around. Please wait until the demon realm opens in 10 years for your next chance," the bald man finished speaking.

Not a moment passed, and chaos erupted on the island.

"What do you mean we only get to send one?"

"I have waited 15 years for this event."

"I need to find a rare ingredient inside to save my sister. You cannot stop me.'

As expected, people immediately protested. The only ones who didn't protest were those of the big clans and sects that were happy with getting 3 spots each.

"I for one think that is an excellent idea," one of the female saints experts in golden robes with a sword hovering next to her spoke.

"I think that's a brilliant idea too," Another man in green robes with stitches that looked like leaves spoke as well.

People once again erupted into voices of anger and unfairness. They claimed that neither the Jin clan nor the Lu clan suffered from these rules, which was why they were accepting it in the first place.

In the people's protest, Alex heard the names of all of the 8 great clans in the Luminance empire, as well as some big sects.

He heard names such as Broken Ravine sect, Heaven's Peak school, Falling Lotus sect, and Glory's Edge sect amongst many other names of sects and schools.

Alex tried to look around to recognize who was who, but with how little information he had about the status of the Luminance empire, it became hard to tell.

Still, he looked at the faces of those who approved this and saw no sign of surprise or amazement. 'They must have planned it all from the start, even before coming here,' he thought.

Alex counted the number of people that looked satisfied and it was easy to tell how many of them would get to send 3 disciples inside.

From Alex's count, it was about 15 of them. Meaning 45 spots for entry was already set.

If 1 from the remaining sects and clans were to enter, and even if that number happened to be a massive 50, that would still be less than half of the True realm cultivators that had come here today.

A man wearing dirty brown robes walked forward. From what Alex could sense, the man's cultivation base was weak. He realized that it must have been a rogue cultivator that reached this current realm on his own.

"I beg your pardon, Elder, but what gives your the right to block me and my fellow peers from entering the realm? We might be rogue cultivators, but we are still hardworking people. Do we not deserve the chance to enter?" he asked.

The bald man's face twitched a little when he heard the young man speak.

"It was a collective decision between us three and since so many have already agreed today, it only makes this rule even stronger," the bald man said.

"I have eyes, elder," the man said. "We all do. You don't have to lie and say that you just happened to come up with the idea and others happened to agree."

"We can all see that this was your idea from before you even came to this place. It can't be that you all happened to bring only 3 disciples each, right?" the man asked.

"So, I still ask you. What gives you the right to—"

Before the rogue cultivator could finish speaking, a tremendous aura appeared around him that made him kneel to the ground, with his knees buckling.

The man strained to speak, but he couldn't even breathe at the moment.

"What right you say?" the bald man's furious eyes looked at the rogue cultivator.

"Strength! My strength is what gives me the right to do whatever I want to," he said.

"You, a mere rogue cultivator, dares to talk back to me? The only reason you are even alive at this point is that killing you is beneath me," the bald man said.

The other Saint realm cultivators from the big sects and clans simply shook their heads, not in disdain towards the bald elder, but in pity towards the rogue cultivator.

The saint realm experts, who were likely patriarchs and sect leaders of other smaller sects and clans were frowning and protecting their disciples from the bald man's aura.

As for the rogue cultivators, while they weren't the direct targets of the bald man's aura, they were still struggling to keep themselves up.

Alex too was feeling the aura of the old man press on him, but mere aura no longer worked to stop him in his place.

He stared at the old man with hidden disapproval. However, he couldn't do anything about it at all. If the saint realm cultivator wanted to do something, what could he, a mere True realm cultivator do?

"Do any of you have any more complaints?" the bald man asked with heavy disdain in his voice.

None of the crowd moved as they didn't want the full fury of a saint realm elder from a massive clan. They were all too scared to even think o—

Suddenly, a hand went up. Everyone looked around in shock as if they were looking at a dead man.

The young man who raised his hands walked a little forward so everyone could see him.

The young man had blonde hair that ended in black and came down to his shoulders. He wore a white robe with no other colors and held a brilliant smile on his face.

Alex sighed as the young man who had walked forward was obviously Shen Jing.

"Dear brother, do you think it is fair to stop all of these young men from gaining a chance to improve themselves?" Shen Jing asked.

The bald man gave a strange look at Shen Jing as if surprised that he was able to stand his aura.

"Of course It is fair. If I decide that is fair, then it is," the old man said.

"I see, you did say that your strength gives you such right," Shen Jing said.

"Of cour—" the old man was about to say when Shen Jing continued.

"Then, I say it is only fair that none of your disciples get to enter as well," Shen Jing said.

"What did you say?" the old man was about to walk forward when a cut appeared on his cheeks out of nowhere.

Then, he buckled onto the floor, his right leg twisting towards the side, clearly broken.

At the same time, massive pressure landed on the whole island, targeting only the Saint realm cultivators.

Even amongst them, only those from the big clans and sects felt the real, horrifying pressure.

Their eyes opened wide in horror at sensing a pressure that only their sect leaders and patriarch could likely summon.

Shen Jing smiled looking at the crumpled Saint realms and said, "Since I hold the strength now, I suppose it's only right and fair that I make a new rule."

Chapter 641: Demon Realm Opens

The pressure was terrifying, and nauseating as if they were being pushed down onto the ground by a massive block of metal.

The saint realm experts quickly broke into a sweat when they felt the aura of the newly arrived young man.

Saint Soul realm.

They were sure that the young man in front of them had reached the Saint Soul realm at a very young age. The implication of that thought terrified them more than the pressure they felt at the moment.

The young man may kill them right now, and that was in fact scary. But if they really did anger him and he did go to find justice with their clans and sects, that would lead to almost all the sects being destroyed.

In a split second, they all immediately understood. They could not anger this young man at all.

"Let's see," Shen Jing walked around, as the True realm cultivators looked at him in surprise. Even a few of the saint realms that were not from the major clan and sect only felt slight, uncomfortable pressure, nothing scary.

However, seeing the reaction of the other cultivators bigger than them, they understood that they were only feeling slight pressure because he wasn't focused on them.

"Uh-huh! I know. None of you can enter the demon realm aside from the younger brother I came with," he said.

Alex didn't like the attention of so many people in the crowd, but fortunately, Shen Jing didn't turn to him and thus nobody realized who he was talking about.

"Fellow Daoist, that is unfair," one of the saint realm cultivators forced out a few words.

"Unfair?" Shen Jing gave the most exaggerated chuckle when he heard that. "Unfair you say. Why didn't you say so when the other unfair rule was put forth?"

"I—" the person didn't know what to say. "I apologize Fellow Daoist. I was only thinking about myself."

"Fellow Daoist, I'm sure we can talk this through," the other saint realm cultivators started speaking.

One after another, suddenly everyone wanted to talk peacefully. Shen Jing snorted at them and lifted the pressure on them.

They all took a collective breath, some taking in more than normal, and immediately thanked Shen Jing for taking mercy on them.

"So, what do you want to talk about?" he asked.

"Fellow Daoist, would you please give us your name?" one of the men asked.

"Shen Jing," Shen Jing replied quickly as if he had been expecting this question.

The man who asked the question quickly turned his head towards a man wearing bluish-gray robes with moving water depicted on them.

The blue-robed man looked towards Shen Jing in confusion as well. "Forgive this junior brother, but I don't recognize you at all, senior brother," the blue-robed man said.

"Oh?" Shen Jing looked curious. "Who are you?"

"This one's name is Shen Liwei, senior brother Jing," the blue-robed man said.

"Ah, I understand the confusion," Shen Jing said. "I'm not from your clan."

"So, let's get on to the point. Why did you guys want to talk to me?" Shen Jing asked

"Daoist Shen Jing, please do not stop our disciples from entering that secret realm. As you must know, we lost a great number of talented young people 2 years ago, and we desperately need to retrain more disciples to replace the ones we lost," the elders said.

"Yes, fellow Daoist. Even if you do not fear our sects and clans coming after you, please do it for the fear of the empire not growing as fast," another elder said.

Shen Jing made a thinking face again, but before he could say anything, the ground shuddered a bit.

Then, a bright light shined from the monument as the runes flared to life.

Shen Jing smiled when he saw that. The Demon Realm was open.

The elders started scampering, wondering what to do now. The other rogue cultivators and smaller sect members wanted to enter, but since Shen Jing said he only wanted one person to enter, they had to look at frustration.

Just when they thought the predator had gone down, a different, bigger predator had come to eat their future.

"Daoist Shen, we cannot wait any longer," one of the elders said frantically.

"There are only 10 days available, Fellow Daoist, please do not waste any more time," another elder said.

Shen Jing's smile hadn't left for a single moment.

"Then I will leave you to make a choice," Shen Jing said. "Either 1 person will enter, or all of them will. What do you choose?"

There was not a single shred of hesitation as everyone immediately chose the 2nd option.

"Good," Shen Jing turned around and walked away. "You may send in your disciples now."

As soon as they got the approval, the elders turned around and made their disciples run toward the monument.

Alex watched as they placed their hands on it and disappeared.

Shen Jing walked up to Alex and said, "you should go inside as well. You will only have 10 days to stay in there, so it might be better to go around searching for natural and material treasures rather than cultivating somewhere."

"Yes," Alex said. "I will leave right now."

"Wait a moment," Shen Jing said and placed his hand on Alex's shoulders. Alex felt warm energy enter his body and disappear somewhere.

"While most of the kids from the big families who went in there won't die. There is still a chance that you will. I don't have any treasures on me that will bring you out when you are about to die, so the best I can do is give you the protection that will save you one time."

"If you ever don't want it to be used, just think of it not working, and you will take the damage."

"However, the moment you take any damage greater than True Lord realm, this protection I put on you will work."

"When that happens, run away," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded. "Thank you," he said. While he knew that having a treasure that would directly bring you out of the demon realm in case of a fatal threat was better, he also knew that Shen Jing had nothing on him at the moment.

So, this was, for him, better than nothing.

It wasn't like he was planning to antagonize anyone, so he didn't worry much about facing any real threat in there.

"Go now," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded and left. The rogue cultivators, now incredibly happy, were turning to Shen Jing to thank him before placing their hands on the monument.

Some disappeared immediately, while some took a while.

Alex placed his hands and waited to be teleported as well, but it didn't happen. Then, he noticed the young man next to him pour Qi into the monument.

Alex followed suit and poured in his Qi as well. As soon as he did, he felt the familiar feeling of teleportation take over him.

Alex gave in to the feeling and watched the silvery-white light envelop him. Then, he disappeared.

When Alex reappeared, he found himself on top of a mountain somewhere.

"Where the hell am I?"

Chapter 642: Trekking down the Mountain

Alex was on top of a mountain filled to the brim with trees. In fact, he could see trees as far as he could see.

Although, at a certain point, some sort of chromatic haze stopped him from seeing any further.

'That must be the outer wall of this secret realm,' Alex thought. This was the first time he was seeing a wall for a secret realm. Usually, he was at the center of it all in the beast's realm, so he got to see nothing there.

The overgrown trees stopped him from seeing everything but the other giant mountains that were equally covered in trees.

There were about 6 in total including the one Alex was in. Other than that, the massive secret realm was simply plain ground.

Alex closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. The salty air of the island was gone now that he was in here.

And the Qi… it was so dense in here. A normal person's cultivation speed would surely increase by a couple of times if they were to cultivate here.

Alex was tempted to just sit down and cultivate, but he didn't see the point for himself. He was already capable of gaining as much Qi as he wanted by simply consuming pills and monster cores.

He could even eat spirit stones to gain Qi, but the one time he had done it, he hadn't liked it afterward.

Alex had to reach into his stomach with his Qi and pull out the dull stone. Unlike pills and cores, the stones didn't dissolve.

Besides, spirit stones for him were more helpful in other instances than simply cultivation.

Alex looked around from his mountain top to see where he could go. If possible, he would have wanted to go find the alchemy ingredients immediately.

However, due to the massive forests everywhere that seemed to have grown over the last thousands of years, there was no way for him to recognize any places.

He could see open spots in some places, but they were too far to make out exactly what they were.

"Guess, I will have to go down and see," Alex thought.

"Meow!" Pearl wanted to come out too. Alex didn't want to bring him out, but now that he thought about it, he didn't need to worry about Pearl, did he?

"Alright, you can walk along with me," Alex said, bringing Pearl out of his robes and letting him go around on his own.

"Try to hide your cultivation base, okay? I don't want people attacking you before they attack me," Alex said.

"Okay!" Pearl answered.

"Since we have 10 days to spare, let's start with looking around this very mountain," Alex said and flew off.

Pearl was a step late behind him and was about to fly when he saw Alex drop to the ground face-first in front of him.

"Brother?" Pearl asked, wondering why Alex jumped down like that. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," Alex said as he stood up and dusted off his robes. He fixed his long hair and looked towards the air.

"Was that a barrier?" he questioned himself. He felt like he had hit something just now that sent him flying down.

He wanted to see what it was and slowly flew again. After reaching a certain height, he suddenly felt an instance of suppression on his body and he was pushed back down.

"Dammit!" Alex thought. "Flying seems to be banned here."

He was a little annoyed that he didn't receive this information before coming here. But, he hadn't received any information, so he should have known to be careful.

But this wasn't something one thought about. 'No wonder I don't see anybody flying in the air aside from the birds,' he thought. It didn't take a genius to realize that only flight using Qi was banned here… somehow.

"Sigh, let's go walking then," he said and walked down the mountain with Pearl.

Of the 6 mountains, Alex wondered if they held something important. From what his senses were telling him, there was nothing important here at all.

The forest had some common Alchemy ingredients and a few True rank ingredients, but they were so readily available even outside that Alex didn't even bother picking them.

Only occasionally when he came across something slightly uncommon did he bother to take it with him.

Alex met a variety of beasts when trekking down the mountain, but those too were very weak.

Even with Pearl in his child form, most were steering away from him. Alex could only imagine what would happen if he were to let his yang energy leak out like he normally did back in the eastern mountain ranges.

As he was about to reach the base of the mountain, Alex saw what he thought was a building of some sort.

It looked like the mountain grew around this building, or as if it was carved onto the mountain itself.

The outer walls were rough, broken at places, and looked like they would crumble at any moment. The walls seemed to be made out of some sort of polished stone, but over time, the polish had vanished all but completely.

Alex looked at the giant opening that he knew was the entrance to this building and walked up to it. There was no door here at all, and everything was open.

However, he could see signs of hinges here, so it was obvious that there used to be one before this.

Meaning… "Someone has been here before us," Alex said to Pearl by his side.

He had already sent his spiritual sense inside and noticed a beast sitting in an open room. It was a True Disciple 2nd realm beast so Alex didn't even bother getting ready to fight.

Instead, he walked up to the door and saw that dirt had filled the cracks on something that was over the arch.

Alex sent out his Qi and got rid of the dirt clumped upon it.

'Library' was what was written on there.

Alex sighed. "So this was originally a library huh?" he thought. He wondered if there had been normal books or cultivation books in there.

Whatever it was, it was no longer there at all. Everything in there had been raided already.

Alex sighed. He shook his head and told Pearl that there was nothing in there at all. Pearl sent out his own spiritual sense which extended to about 50 meters ahead of him and nodded to Alex.

"Let's go somewhere else," he said and went down to the foot of the mountain.

'Since this mountain has nothing, maybe I should check the other 5 mountains as well,' he thought.

From what Alex could tell, the mountains were quite far away from where he was. The closest mountain was to his left, around 10 kilometers away.

If he could fly, it wouldn't even take a few minutes to reach there. But now that he was slowly walking, that would take half a day for sure.

"I could get there faster if I run, but that way I might miss something along the way. There is no guarantee that there is something in the mountains in the first place.

Even this mountain only happened to have a single library that was already looted by the previous comers.

As Alex was thinking that, he saw a woman enter his senses. His sense only extended to about 160 to 170 meters at the moment, and such a short distance was easy for True Realm cultivators to see with their own eyes.

So, the Bluish-gray robe that Alex was wearing was standing out in the woman's eyes which were staring directly at her.

Alex acted like he couldn't see her at all, but the woman was definitely looking at him, and even made her way toward him.

'A True Master 4th realm, huh?' Alex thought and acted like he had sensed someone coming.

He turned around to look at her, with a sword that suddenly appeared in his hand.

'Pearl, get behind me and do nothing,' he said.

"Oh thank god! I finally found someone," the girl said as she sprinted towards Alex.

Alex still wasn't sure if this girl was here to rob him or was genuinely looking for help. He decided to play it safe.

"D-don't come near me," Alex said with his single sword pointed at the girl.

The girl was slightly shorter than Alex and had relatively short black hair that fell to her breasts. She wore a green robe with nothing fancy designed into it.

Her face didn't strike him as anything worth caring about. Her age though… he couldn't be sure if she was so young or if her cultivation base was aiding her.

He looked her all over and even sent his spiritual sense, but he found no weapons or talisman on her. Although, she did have armor beneath her robe, and a few storage bags as well.

'That reminds me. I need an armor myself,' he thought.

The girl frowned for a split second when she saw Alex, but changed it back to a smile as she thought, 'A True Disciple? Judging by his clothes, he must be a rogue cultivator. Not to mention he's lost an arm before this.'

'Can he even protect me?' she thought. She was starting to believe that approaching this young man was a mistake and that she would be better off alone.

But now that she was here, she couldn't back away.

"Fear not little brother, I am not here to hurt you," she said with her palms together in greeting.

"My name is Jiang Zhilan, a disciple of the Spear Stream sect. Will you allow me to journey together with you?"

Chapter 643: The Mountains

Jiang Zhilan was one of the best disciples of the Spear Stream sect. Having learned the Spear Stream technique from a young age, she managed to advance until she had become the top 3 core disciples of her sect.

At the age of 28, she had managed to enter the True Master realm. Now 2 years later, she was at the 4th True Master realm.

She knew that there were strong young men and women out there, but surely they couldn't be stronger than her right? Not unless they were older than her as well.

That thought lasted as long as it took for her to reach the island this morning with her sect master and her two male fellow disciples of the sect.

That was when she met young men and women that were younger than her with a cultivation base that vastly outstripped her own.

She had managed to count nearly 54 True Lord realm disciples and 6 True King realm, and not a single one of them was as old as she was.

'I can't survive in the realm,' she thought as her fear had overtaken her.

She felt guilty when she realized she was happy when they only allowed her sect to only bring 1 disciple with them. If that were the case, she was not going to be their first choice.

Then, that monster appeared out of nowhere. He was so young, younger than her even to her eyes. And yet, his cultivation base was the greatest thing she had ever witnessed.

He was like a tiger standing in front of little rabbits, and that sent deep dread into her heart.

By the time she realized that she was allowed to enter the secret realm, she had only one thought in her mind.

Find someone and have them help her.

* * * * *

Alex looked at the woman in front of him with a confused face, but he didn't forget to keep a hint of fear on his face.

He hoped that she wasn't smart enough to see through him immediately.

"You want my help, senior Sister?" he asked.

"Yes, would you please help me?" she asked.

"But you are so much stronger than me. What help could this little brother possibly give to you?" he said.

Jiang Zhilan was unsure of what to say to this question. If possible, she wanted to leave him behind. She even thought that she should do just that.

But if she were to come across someone strong then… No, she couldn't leave him. Even if just as a scapegoat, she had to bring him along.

"I'm mostly worried about being overwhelmed by beasts on the way to the Cultivation rooms. If more than a few beasts show up at the same time, it would be better for us to stick together, right?" she asked.

Alex's eyes flashed with an imperceptible shine when he heard that. 'Cultivation rooms?' he thought. It sounded like she knew this place. That could certainly come in handy.

"We can also share the resources we come across. I will give you something if I happened to find it too," she said, seeing that he was still not answering.

"I see. Given how strong sister is, seeing that you haven't attacked me yet, I will choose to believe you," Alex said with a slight bow.

"Good, good!" Jiang Zhilan said, sighing to herself in secret. She was now going to be stuck with a weakling. 'Well, at least I will be a little safer,' she thought.

Then, she noticed Pearl next to Alex's feet. "Oh my god, where did you find this beast?" she asked.

"This is my tamed beast, sister. His name is Pearl," Alex introduced her to Pearl.

"Can I hold him?" she asked, and before Alex could even do anything, she squatted down to grab him.

Alex told Pearl to go with her, and Pearl let her grab him. Neither of them was worried. If a True Master 4th realm woman could hurt Pearl who was in True Lord 5th realm, then there was nothing Alex could possibly do to save him.

"Which way should we go, sister? Please be the guide," Alex said.

"Little brother, I suspect that you want to cultivate right? Then we should head towards the mountain at the center of it all. That mountain has the cultivation rooms. I suspect many of them have gone there already and taken their rooms."

"If we don't hurry, we will miss it," she said and started walking in a certain direction.

They couldn't see any mountain from the dense forest they were in, and yet the girl was walking directly towards the third mountain from what he could see.

So, Alex concluded that she either had been on the mountain top from where she saw the mountain, or she had an artifact on her that told her the direction.

"Sister must know a lot about this secret realm to know about the cultivation rooms," Alex said.

"Eh? No, I just know what is written in our sect records," she said.

"Ah, makes sense," Alex said. "I wish I were from a sect too. I've been a rogue cultivator for quite a while, so I don't know much about the secret realm."

The girl nodded. "Yes, having a knowledge of what is going on and where we are going certainly helps," she said.

The girl took out an interesting-looking circular artifact that looked like a clock. However, it had a single hand, which spun quickly and stopped while pointed at a certain location.

"Yes, we are in the right direction," she said and continued walking.

'That was a compass?' Alex wondered. If it was, then it was quite weird to require Qi to be poured in. 'Perhaps it uses no magnet,' he thought.

Along the way, Alex brought up small talk with the girl, trying to bring out as much information about the world as he could.

He then learned that the 3rd mountain, the one with the cultivation rooms was the mountain at the center of the secret realm.

So, whenever someone entered the secret realm, they would check the direction of the mountain at the center of the realm, and suddenly, the whole map they had with them that was created from previous entries made sense to them.

The Spear Stream sect, being a smaller sect hadn't existed for long enough to have a detailed map and only located a few of the locations on the map.

From what it said, the 2nd mountain that Alex had been heading towards was actually an open training ground with training puppets and such.

Alex did want to check his strength after the training, but he immediately lost interest as soon as he learned what was on the 4th and 5th mountains.

The 4th mountain was a land with plants and beasts of all kinds. Although it was overrun with trees too, apparently there were runes beneath those mountains that gathered a lot more Qi there and thus the beasts and plants could grow to be high ranks.

Alex practically prayed that there was a Blood Spirit Ginseng in that mountain.

He had cursed at himself for so long in the eastern mountains when he had realized that after spending a year there at the very least, there was a chance he could likely lose the Blood Spirit Ginseng that he was looking forward to.

Now that it had been 2 years and some months, he was absolutely sure that the Blood Spirit Ginseng was gone.

He had all but 2 ingredients, and that drove him mad. He didn't want to remain one-handed forever.

The 5th mountain was the one around where the people used to stay, or demons rather.

There were apparently houses all over the mountain and even around it. And most of them had runes around them blocking entry from what Alex heard.

Although that was something he had heard from Shen Jing, who as he had gathered was missing from the Western Continent for the past thousand years. That made trusting his words a little harder due to his lack of credibility.

What if in between that time all the runes had failed and everything had been taken away?

This secret realm was starting to feel more and more useless to him by the moment.

Still, he kept hope in him.

With Pearl in her hands, Jiang Zhilan lead the way forward and Alex followed behind her, waiting for her to lead him to the more interesting locations.

Chapter 644: Change in Direction

The travel to the 3rd mountain took a long time for the two of them.

The mountain itself was about 35 kilometers from where they were, so even when sprinting, it would take them about an hour.

However, Jiang Zhilan was too scared to run away. What if a strong beast was ahead of her and she didn't notice it before it was too late?

What if she met one of those strong disciples from the major clans and sects, and they deemed her an eyesore?

She needed to be careful.

As for Alex, he was torn between wanting to run away and taking his time.

As much as he loved the idea of finding treasures in the houses at the 5th mountain, his attention was primarily on the 4th mountain, which stood behind the 3rd mountain.

If he could enter the mountain and find a Blood Spirit Ginseng…

"No, I can't get my expectations up. That will only lead to disappointment," he thought. "Besides, I might find other treasures while taking my time as well."

Still, he hoped to be a tad bit faster. At the rate they were going, it would take them almost 8 hours to reach the 3rd mountain.

That was just a bit too slow for him.

Just as he was about to ask Jiang Zhilan to speed up, he noticed something in his spiritual sense.

There was a man about 160 meters away from them who was walking in his own direction. His cultivation base was veiled as well as he could and it was hard to tell what his cultivation was exactly.

The man hadn't noticed them, and Jiang Zhilan hadn't noticed him either. But that would change any moment now as the man was walking in a direction that would pass them eventually.

As expected, at about 50 meters away, both the man and the woman noticed each other.

Alex fully revealed his True Disciple realm cultivation base that would be a threat to nobody. The man showed no expression when he saw him.

However, when he sensed Zhilan, his eyes changed a bit.

'He's that weak, huh?' Alex thought. If he was scared of True Master 4th realm then he certainly couldn't be very strong.

The man and Zhilan stared off for a few seconds before Zhilan asked, "Wanna join our group?"

The man shook his head and walked away from the two of them.

Alex was surprised at how easily this was gone. The man didn't want to fight Zhilan right now it seemed.

"Don't worry, little Brother," Zhilan said. "We've only come to the secret realm, so they know we don't have anything valuable on us at the moment. The looting will only begin on the 2nd or 3rd day."

Alex nodded. He understood that. But it was still surprising to see the man not even try. Did he not expect them to have valuable treasures from the outside world?

It was only a few minutes later that a thought came to Alex. They really couldn't take away the items the people in here had.

After all, when they left, they would be outside and at the mercy of the Saints that waited outside.

Unless someone was definitely a rogue cultivator with no backer, no one was going to steal someone else's property.

The treasures from this world, however, that was up to anyone to grasp. So, even if you steal that, no one could say anything at all.

After all, you didn't own it in the first place.

As they continued moving, Zhilan herself brought the idea of moving faster, and Alex nodded.

Zhilan found a weird-looking bird that Alex didn't recognize and wanted to tame.

She brought out a black spear with a green blade on it. As soon as she started using it, her black spear moved like a river while the green blade tried to carve a path out for the river.

Water splashed around with every strike and hurt the bird she was fighting. Her spear art was good. Better than all that he had seen back in the Crimson Empire.

But those were kids with spears, and this was a True expert. The difference in speed and control was vast.

Even if those others had discovered their Spear Intent, seeing actual damage done by a spear was different.

If those kids reached the same cultivation base as her, it was likely they would do so much better than her. But it would take them a long time to do so.

After a couple of minutes of the fight, she realized that it was only different in terms of looks, but was no different than any of the birds that were outside.

As such, she lost interest in the bird and told him to continue moving.

Throughout the journey, Alex went around gathering the uncommon ingredients that he came across.

Zhilan showed some slight suspicions to see if he was lying and doing something else instead. But once he showed her his bronze badge that was in his storage bag, she immediately dropped all suspicions.

In fact, her attitude started changing quite a bit too. The words that sounded fake and hollow were now starting to sound full-on weight and enthusiasm.

"I can't believe you got a bronze badge at such a young age, little brother. You must be a prodigy in alchemy. How does one get better in alchemy as a rogue cultivator? It must be very expensive to you right?"

"Oh, I forgot. You're an alchemist. You folks don't really have a problem with money, do you? You, those formation makers, talisman makers…"

The woman kept on talking about things that basically boiled down to "I'm so jealous of you."

As she spoke, she changed her topic towards the information that she hadn't broken through in nearly 7 months.

Alex frowned. He knew where this topic was going.

"Oh my god, that's right. Little brother, can you make me a pill so that I have an easier way to advance my cultivation base? I would be really happy."

"Oh, and I'm not asking you to do it for free or anything, okay? I'm going to pay you fairly. Let's change our direction and go to the 2nd mountain. There are some artifact forging rooms there, but you should be able to use them the same as Alchemy rooms right?" she asked.

Alex nodded absentmindedly as a thought crossed him. 'Artifact forging rooms?' he thought. She hadn't mentioned that before.

That meant that this woman was keeping more information than he thought.

Also, Alex didn't want to go to the 2nd mountain at all. That would only add time to his travel to the 4th mountain.

That was his main priority right now.

"Sister, I don't have the ingredients to make a pill for you right now," he said. " But if we go to the 4th mountain where there are many plants, I might find some ingredients there."

The girl frowned. It wasn't because of what Alex said, but because if she went to the 4th mountain, then that meant not going to the 3rd mountain, which housed the cultivation rooms.

She desperately wanted to go there. But if she did have a pill before she entered, she would have a great chance at advancing to the next realm.

After all, a single day in those cultivation rooms lasted almost a month.

"Alright, let's go to the 4th mountain," she said, bringing joy to Alex's heart.

From Zhilan, Alex learned that the 4th mountain was about 10 kilometers away from the 3rd mountain. From where they were, at their current speed, it would take them 3 more hours.

Alex was more than happy with this speed.

As the two of them continued walking, in an opening at the front, Alex noticed 2 young women and 1 man fighting against a beast that was double their size.

This beast was an armadillo with a red shell and yellow body. The red shells had spikes growing out of them and it was seriously fighting against the man with the sword.

One of the wounded girls behind her held another wounded girl in her arms.

Ning scanned their cultivation base and it was obvious that they were either from a small sect or normal rogue cultivators.

Aside from the man who was in his True Master 5th realm, the other two girls were in the late True Disciple realm.

Seeing the man fight against an equally strong beast that was focused on defense, Alex knew this match could not be won unless the man had better attacks up his sleeve.

From how bloody he was, it was obvious that he didn't.

However, Alex didn't keep focusing on that. He focused on the three behind those two with fruits that bore strong Earth energy.

One of those fruits almost felt like a Saint Rank fruit.

Zhilan's footsteps slowed down as she heard the sounds of battle. If those that were fighting there were stronger than her, then she definitely didn't need to interfere.

Alex frowned when he saw her cowardice. As if not noticing, he kept walking forward towards the sound.

"What are you doing?" the girl shrieked.

"What? I'm going to see what the sound is all about," he said.

"Are you crazy, what if they are strong?" she asked.

"I mean, I'm just looking. If they are strong, I will run in the opposite direction," he said.

That made sense to Zhilan. So, after a bit of contemplation, she went along as well.

Finally, they reached the opening in the forest where the tree rose and the fight took place below it.

As soon as Zhilan saw that there was nothing to be afraid of here, she smiled and walked ahead.

Alex sighed, but he too walked ahead. However, unlike her, his eyes were only focused on the fruits that littered the tree.

Chapter 645: The 4th Mountain

'The Houndbear Berry,' Alex thought as he looked at the fruit that hung on the 3rd branch from the left of the tree.

All the other fruits in this tree didn't seem mature to him at all. He wondered how that fruit remained up there.

However, it didn't take him long to realize that he could only see and sense the fruit because of his talents. With his eyes, that fruit was nowhere to be seen.

'Was it forgotten here and left to grow as big as it could?' Alex wondered.

The girl that was taking care of the other one noticed the two of them coming and let the man know. The man who was fighting to keep them both safe only had more and more stress on him.

At some point, he was going to make a mistake, and all three of them were going to die. If he tried to fight the newcomer and the beast by himself, that was going to be one of the mistakes.

So, he chose not to make it.

"Run!" he shouted and immediately, the girl who had been prepared, carried the other wounded girl and ran away with the man.

Alex commended them on their lack of hesitation to leave the place.

Since the man and the two women were gone, the armadillo turned towards Zhilan and Alex.

Looking at the bloody body of the beast, Zhilan was exhilarated. This beast's body and cores would sell for a lot. Since it was wounded, it would be easier for her to fight it as well.

Alex, who stood to the side and saw her facial expressions, couldn't help but wonder if this girl by his side even realized that the blood on the beast didn't belong to itself.

Its shell was too strong to be bleeding like that. Before Alex could say anything, she tossed Pearl back to him and dashed towards the beast.

In mere seconds, a fight between the two of them took place.

Alex sighed. He didn't care for this fight. He simply wanted the fruit on top of the tree.

So, leaving behind a duplicate of himself, the hidden Alex freely walked to the tree, got the fruit, and walked back to his place.

Then, he leisurely returned back to his spot, at which moment the duplicate disappeared.

He waited for a few minutes to see the two in front of his fight. Zhilan was one realm lower than the beast, but her spear art made up for the gap.

As such, the two of them were on even standings.

Alex sighed at the fact that it was going to take way longer than he imagined, so he decided to interfere.

An imperceptible Heaven's Impact landed on the armadillo right as it was about to roll up again. Instead of rolling up, it fell to the ground in a simple motion.

When Zhilan's spear strike it its head, the force of the stream behind her strike blasted the armadillo's head open.

The girl looked in shock. She didn't expect to win this easily at all.

"Wow, sister. You are so strong," Alex said from the side.

The girl immediately got rid of her shock and looked behind. "Aren't I?" she asked as she slammed the butt of the staff on the ground.

She quickly dismantled the beast, well… more butchered than dismantled, and gave some of it to Alex once he told her he could use some of those bone marrows and tendons as Alchemy ingredients.

He didn't ask for the beast core, however. That would be practically useless to them.

After they split the fruits 50:50, which Alex thought was her trying to get on his good side now that she knew he was an Alchemist, they walked on.

Very soon, Alex could hear a number of people spar in the distance. 'That must be the training grounds of the 2nd mountain,' he thought. Seeing how the sounds came directly from his left, Alex was sure this was the point where they crossed the 2nd mountain.

Zhilan looked a little to the right as they walked along, worried that if she didn't go to the 3rd mountain now, she wouldn't get the chance again at all.

The weaker people that entered this realm would never even think of gaining anything from here, so they would immediately head to the cultivation rooms to improve their cultivation bases.

As for the stronger people, they would go around and search for the treasures. Only after spending a few days in the 4th and 5th mountains, gathering as many treasures as they could would they return.

Since one could only stay there for a day in total during their visit, it was very much possible for her to find the chance to enter on the 2nd day, even if it were already filled.

If she instead waited for Alex to make her a pill, which she wasn't even sure he could make.

She didn't want to take the chances.

"I'm sorry, little brother, but I really need to cultivate. So you will have to go on alone," she said and turned to dash away.

Before Alex could even say anything, the girl was out of his spiritual range. 'Well that was abrupt,' he thought. But he liked this better anyway.

"Shall we head over to the 4th mountain then?" Alex asked.

"Meow!" Pearl gave a response back affirmatively.

Alex smiled at him and the two of them walked on ahead.

Along the way, Alex met a lot of different people. Now that he was getting close to the center of the realm where everything was, he could see more and more people.

Fortunately, no one was stupid enough to steal from him this early on. Although, a few of them did look at Pearl curiously.

Alex frowned, but he didn't take Pearl back. In fact, he dared those people to come and attack him.

Finally, after another hour of walking, he finally came across a mountain that glowed in many colors. Beasts and plants of every type could be found here.

As if sirens blared in his mind, his ingredients feeling gave him an idea of just how amazing this place must be.

Even as he got closer to the Qi the air got thicker and thicker, making Alex wonder why people didn't just come here to cultivate. Surely the cultivation rooms couldn't be better than this place, right?

Alex saw at least 5 people in his vicinity and got a little scared. There were some here that had spiritual senses. Alex didn't want to give away that knowledge so easily.

So, he pulled back his senses and left normally.

As he felt the pull from the different ingredients, Alex walked towards the mountain with a single thing in mind.

Find a Blood Spirit Ginseng.

Most of the ingredients in this location were True rank ingredients, with some even being Saint rank ingredients.

Alex was surprised that Saint rank ingredients were even available here in the first place, but it didn't take him long to realize why that was.

Alex watched a young girl dash along the mountain and reach a tree with a shining fruit on it.

There was nothing protecting this True rank spirit fruit, so she simply jumped up, grabbed the fruit, and stored it in her storage bag.

With a satisfied expression, she walked away.

Alex looked at her with a stunned expression as she left. He went closer to the tree and sighed.

He reached out his hand and an orange leaf that hung at the top of the tree was plucked from the air and drifted down to Alex's hands.

A Saint Rank ingredient.

Unlike flowers and fruits, leaves, barks, thorns, vines, etc never gave off much energy, so people who passed by could never tell how amazing these ingredients were.

Alex couldn't help but chuckle at that thought. That meant that unless a proficient alchemist with great knowledge of ingredients entered this realm, no one would likely take the less noticeable ingredients from this mountain.

Alex had a chance. So, starting at that moment, he went around the entire mountain searching for the best of the best ingredients that were left behind by the ones that came before him.

Most people who saw him carve out barks or cut vines from a tree gave a weird expression, but some of them couldn't help but show shock at his ability to recognize ingredients.

Alex ignored such gazes and focused on finding the Blood Spirit Ginseng.

Pearl followed beside him as well and from time to time, some beasts would come out to fight Alex, but as soon as they got near, Pearl would fight the beast back.

A few times, Pearl would simply roar, and the beast would run with its tail between its legs.

Alex pat Pearl after every fight, and Pearl wanted to show off his power more and more, so he went around finding stronger and stronger opponents.

Night fell into the land, but that stopped no one from searching for treasures. Even at night, sounds of battle rang from all over the mountain.

Pearl sensed someone and Alex sent out his spiritual sense to see who it was.

It wasn't a who, but a what. A Fox the height of Alex and the length of two Alex slept under a very old tree with not a single leaf on it.

Alex didn't want to bother with the Fox, but Pearl seemed to have sensed his cultivation base and really wanted to fight him.

"Are you sure?" Alex asked, to which Pearl furiously nodded.

"Ok, then let's go."

Chapter 646: Sneak Attack

When Alex arrived next to the tree on the slope, he focused more on the tree itself rather than the fox that slept underneath it.

From what Alex could sense, the fox was around True Lord 7th realm. While that was something that would be hard for him to fight against using only Sword Intent and his physical body, if he added Qi, he would easily win against that beast.

So, he ignored the fox and looked at the tree. The tree looked like a hurricane had passed through here and had stripped it of its leaves.

However, Alex could tell from how smooth the branches were that there were no leaves here in the first place.

What fascinated Alex about this tree were its roots. From what he could tell, they were incredible Saint rank treasures of Wood and Earth energy.

His senses told him it was also an Alchemy ingredient, but without any recipes, these roots would be useless to him in that aspect. As a treasure, however, they would be priceless.

Pearl strolled forward in his tiny form, but as he got closer to the fox, his size grew.

He was now half the size of the fox and ready to fight.

The fox opened its eyes as well and sensed Pearl's cultivation base. At 2 realms below its own, the fox should have thought it would win, but it still stood up to give its all to this fight.

At double the size of Pearl, the fox towered over him, but Pearl looked straight at it with no fear in its eyes.

The fox had fur brown and white.

"Meow!" Pearl cried towards the fox.

"Awooo!" the fox cried in the night.

With not a single second wasted, the two started fighting each other.

The fox tried to bite Pearl who knocked its head aside with a single paw attack. The fox returned a paw attack of its own that landed on Pearl, but with a golden light on its body, it took the attack without moving an inch.

The fox's eyes shined brown in the night as it jumped towards Pearl. Pearl tried to move aside, but for some reason, his movement got rather sluggish all of a sudden.

Alex's heart skipped a beat, thinking Pearl was in danger, but Pearl took the second attack with his golden body. With how much defense it provided, there was likely nothing the fox did that Pearl could take damage from.

'What was that before,' Alex thought about the time when Pearl had gotten sluggish. He had never seen this type of beast on the outside, so he couldn't know what it was either.

It was likely a beast that had grown to become something else by now, or the attack it had just done didn't pass along with the bloodline.

Maybe that was a power it came up on its own as well.

Alex couldn't be sure, but he would have to ask Pearl after this. He spread out his spiritual sense once more to see if the fox would use that technique again, but instead, he noticed someone approaching him from behind.

The man who was coming made no sound at all, giving Alex the understanding that he wasn't here for a good cause.

When Alex sensed his cultivation base, he frowned. True Lord 4th realm.

This was one of the stronger people he had met until now. What was someone like this doing here? Sneaking no less.

Still, True Lord 4th realm wasn't that special to him. He sighed as he grasped his left arm which was just a stump.

2 years ago, he had lost this to that woman whose cultivation base was about the same as his now. Had they waited to attack for 2 more years, Alex would have likely been the one to kill her instead.

He put the thought aside to watch Pearl's match while keeping an eye on the man that had stopped now to watch the fight as well.

Pearl fought hard, but not very hard. Even though the Fox was strong it couldn't produce enough force to hurt Pearl at all.

Pearl still fumbled from time to time when the sluggishness returned, but aside from that, there was nothing that could stop Pearl.

Towards the end of the fight, the fox realized that it couldn't beat Pearl no matter what, so it chose to escape away.

Pearl tried to go after it, but a message from Alex stopped him in his tracks.

'Act like you are tired.'

Pearl didn't know why that was as he had been very focused on his battle, so he decided to sit down and take a few breaths. He was actually a little tired, so this wasn't all that bad.

As expected, after the battle finished, the man rushed out of the shadows and swung a hammer at Alex's head.

Alex saw the attack coming, so he jumped ahead and landed a distance away.

"Tsk, I was hoping to kill you right there while your beast was tired," the new man said.

Alex's eyes raged with hidden fury. He hadn't thought that the man would be so vicious as to sneak behind him with a fatal attack.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Let's forget about introductions, shall we? I'll get straight to the point. I like your beast, so give it to me," the man said.

Alex stared at the man more intently. His cultivation base suggested that he was one of the better younger generation members. The red and green robe with the emblem of a bird perched on top of a deer's antler suggested he was likely from a sect.

Now the only thing Alex wondered was if that sect was big or not. If he attacked him here, would he bring back stronger people?

'Not if he dies first,' Alex thought. He gave no answer to the man's question and instead brought out the normal True rank sword that he had been using for more than 2 years in the forest.

He was used to that sword and could bring out the best Sword Intent with that. After all, the closer you were to a sword, the better your Sword Intent was.

"I see that is your choice," the man said. "But don't think your single beast will be able to defeat me or anything."

The back of his hand, his chest, and the right side of his stomach all shone at once as 3 beasts appeared in front of him.

A Golden Armed Ape of True Lord 5th realm cultivation base.

A Silver String spider of True Lord 6th realm cultivation base.

And finally, a Blue Scaled Lizard of True Lord 6th realm cultivation base.

Along with the man, the 4 of them looked quite terrifying to fight against. If someone normal were here in Alex's place, they would likely run away.

But this was Alex, he yearned for this fight more than he feared it.

"Meow!" Pearl said he wanted to help, but Alex shook his head.

"This is my fight."

Seeing Alex slowly walk ahead with his sword in hand, the young man frowned. He had been sure that Alex would give up on his beast after seeing his beasts, but to think that he would instead come after him.

The man frowned with discernible anger as he shouted, "If you want to die, then Die!"

The Golden Armed ape jumped at Alex from its high ground with both of its hands in the air.

As it fell, it slammed its hands on top of Alex. Alex dashed to the right as the Ape fell and after it slammed the empty ground, he dashed back towards the Ape with his legs that were clad with golden light.

With a single kick, Alex hit the beast so hard that he rattled its brain. The Ape fell to the side, completely unconscious.

"What?" the man cried out in shock.

The spider sent out a white projectile that opened to become a fully formed spider web that would trap him.

A small tongue of fire appeared in front of Alex that exploded with just enough damage to not hurt him. The force of the explosion instead knocked the spider web off its path to elsewhere.

Alex took the opportunity to appear behind the Blue Scaled Lizard and before it could even use any poison on him, Alex kicked the beast with his gold-clad legs.

The lizard flew towards the spider, giving it no opening to attack Alex.

Then, Alex turned toward the man.

In mere seconds since the battle had started, the man had learned that he chose the wrong opponent.

"Y-You… why are you so strong?" the man shouted.

Alex didn't bother giving a reply. His sword shone with a white outline that sprayed white ember from time to time.

Golden light filled the sword in no time as well. Once it was done, he dashed towards the man.

When Alex's sword landed on the man, Alex realized with a shock that he had been blocked.

But it wasn't the man who had blocked him, but rather a barrier that appeared from a talisman.

"No!" the man cried out, but even as he did a silver-white light engulfed him all over.

Alex went back for a second attack to kill this man for sure when he noticed the barrier disappearing, but even as he did, the man vanished in thin air.

Alex looked around in shock as he found no sign of that man anymore.

"Did he… get teleported nearby… or was he sent out of the secret realm without his beasts?"

Chapter 647: Journey to the 5th Mountain

Once Alex dug out some of the roots from the tree, letting the majority be, he left to find better ingredients in the mountain.

The 3 beasts of the man looked awkward and restless as they ran around the mountain like headless chickens.

Alex still couldn't tell from their behavior if the young man was sent outside or not.

Even if he was sent outside, did it really matter? Wouldn't using the monument just send you back inside?

Well, that was one safety net that Alex didn't have, so he had to be careful.

"Do you want their cores?" he asked Pearl.

"Meow!" Pearl said, telling him that they were too weak to be his food and that he wouldn't eat something that he didn't win himself anymore.

Seeing how lacking in will the 3 beasts were, Alex only felt sympathy in his heart and let them be.

As he searched the massive mountain, the sun rose again through the horizon. The chromatic wall to the distance made it hard to see the sun exactly, but the rays of light still scattered throughout the secret realm.

Once it was higher in the sky, it would become clearer.

Alex roamed the mountain throughout the next day as well. He saw more and more people coming to the mountain, so he hid Pearl in his clothes.

He was lucky that a weakling met him last night. Had it been a strong enemy, he would have likely had to flee away.

There weren't any saint realm beasts or even any True King realm beasts in the mountain either, despite the dense qi in this place.

"It seems that after opening every 10 years, not many beasts get to advance fast enough, huh? They get targeted every time," Alex thought.

After plucking a few fruits that others seemed to have missed, Alex sighed to himself.

Night had fallen again, and yet he hadn't managed to find the Blood Spirit Ginseng at all.

At this point, Alex was sure that even if there was one, it was already taken away by someone else.

With a sigh, he decided to leave the mountain. He had spent over 24 hours here already and had gathered everything he could, or everything he was able to.

The third day of the 10 days was approaching and Alex couldn't waste any more time here.

So, he left the mountain and headed northeast.

From what Alex could when he was up on the mountain, the 6th mountain was far to the north, while the 5th was towards the northeast at about 20 kilometers away.

"Let's go see if we can find something interesting there," Alex said. If he didn't, this trip would surely end up becoming a waste of time.

'Although I did get quite a few ingredients for myself so I shouldn't complain,' he thought. 'Also, only 2 days have passed. Who knows what the remaining 8 days will provide me.'

As he walked forward, Alex thought he heard something. Immediately, he extended the spiritual sense he had been keeping hidden for fear of bringing the gaze of the truly strong and noticed three people, a woman and 2 men walking towards him.

From their mismatched robes and lack of a good cultivation base, Alex reckoned those were rogue cultivators that were walking together.

'No, WORKING together,' Alex thought when he noticed their eyes on him. '2 days have passed, people must be going around looting now,' he thought.

Before he could think of anything else, the three of them rushed towards Alex. With their True realm cultivation base, they crossed the 150 meters or so distance in mere seconds.

Surprisingly, they didn't sneak attack. Rogue, they may be, they still held enough honor in them to not attack secretly.

A sword in one of the man's hands, and a spear in the woman's hands pointed at Alex, while the man without a weapon stood behind him, getting one of his attacks ready.

Not a single one of them was a threat to Alex.

"You were quite amazing in the mountain, little brother. I see that you have quite a bit of knowledge about the plants," the man with the sword said.

"I do in fact know quite a bit about plants," Alex said, not moving his eyes from the man while his senses took note of everything else.

The spiritual sense wasn't an omniscient ability. While Alex could see everything around him, without paying attention to the things he could see, not everything would register in his mind.

After the 2 years of constantly using his spiritual sense alone to see, however, paying attention to multiple things at once had become a child's play.

Alex could now pay attention to up to 15 things at once without breaking a sweat, but if he tried to go higher, that drained quite a bit of spiritual energy for some reason.

Just 3 people weaker than him? Paying attention to them was something he could do in his sleep. It was as easy as it came.

"Would you like to share your prizes with us, little brother?" the girl with the spear asked.

Alex smiled. "Do you want to look for yourself, sister?" he asked. As he did, his veil over his cultivation base dropped and the True Master 9th realm cultivation base's aura spread around them like a raging storm.

"Tr-True Lord!" the man behind Alex shouted. That was incorrect, but Alex wasn't going to correct him.

A second later, the aura disappeared, and Alex veiled his cultivation base again. His eyes kept staring at the woman as he said, "You didn't answer me, sister."

The woman immediately dropped to her knees, tossing the spear aside. "Forgive me, senior," she shouted.

The other two men followed suit as well. Alex smirked at them and ordered them, "Get out of my sight."

"Thank you," all three of them said at once and immediately ran away. Within seconds, they were out of his senses.

Alex thought to himself over what had just happened. "Well, that was easy," he said out loud. He wondered if he should show his cultivation base more often. It really stopped a lot of problems.

But then he would lose one of his advantages. Underestimation was one of the best tools he could use against the strong.

In this place filled with the strong, he needed every advantage he could get.

Alex continued walking through the massive forest while talking to Pearl. He asked him how he was trained if Shen Jing took care of him properly and the sort.

Pearl was happy enough to answer everything, and from what Alex understood, Shen Jing had treated Pearl very well. Too well, in fact.

Alex wondered why he didn't treat him like that. Was it because he thought highly of his talents? Why did he even think highly of his talents in the first place?

How exactly did Shen Jing know about his talents? It didn't seem like the creator had told him anything about him.

Alex could only scratch his head in confusion and hope Shen Jing answered his questions after he left the secret realm.

But… Alex had a feeling he simply wouldn't.

He shook his head and continued onwards. Along the way, he met a snake that breathed fire, a lake with pulsing smooth water that healed, a metallic tree with leaves as razor-sharp as any blade.

Pearl easily defeated the snake, eating its core with no hesitation as that was a prize of victory.

Both Alex and Pearl dipped in the water and felt the water smooth out any roughness on him. There were other people in the lake, but most were focused on cleansing themselves.

The water was only capable of healing minor cuts and wounds, but Alex still used it.

As for the metallic tree, Alex trained his sword against it for a while, hoping it would give him some insight on advancing his own sword, but he had been expecting too much of the sword.

Alex took a few of the leaves from the tree and went towards 5th mountain.

Even as he got closer to the 5th mountain, Alex noticed an abundance of people in this place. He wondered if, in the previous 2 days, the number of people in the realm had perhaps increased.

If what he assumed about the secret realm being permanently open for the next 8 days was true, then he could only assume that more and more cultivators might have entered the realm.

In a sense, the big clans and sects that had made the plan to bring only 3 of their disciples had actually shot themselves in the foot with their plan.

As he strolled past a few trees, Alex saw a man enter and come out of a small stone house. As he walked further, he saw more of such houses that were completely open.

Not a minute later, Alex saw the whole mountain that was filled to the top with nothing but houses.

Most of these houses had been open already, and as he would expect, they were empty. Not even pots and pans were left behind.

As Alex moved through the place, he saw more and more people in this location, going up and down the mountain.

He heard the sound of some distance bangs like drums, but he ignored that. For now, he simply went around the place with his spiritual sense completely withdrawn.

As he saw more and more empty houses on the land around the mountain, he could only assume that the ones that hadn't been raided yet had been up the mountain.

So, following the distant banging sound, Alex climbed the mountain.

Chapter 648: House of the Undying

As the distant banging sound got closer, Alex finally started seeing houses that weren't closed at all.

He got curious and went up to one of them, but before he could, another woman came out of nowhere and walked towards it.

Alex didn't stop her at all and simply stopped to see what she would do. As he watched, the girl placed her palm on one of the doors and poured her Qi into it.

The rune on top of the door that looked like a mix of numbers 6 and 2 shined with slightly blue light, and a barrier shone for a split second like a thin film covering the whole house.

Seeing that it didn't work, the girl then took out an Axe from her storage bag and slammed it onto the wall again, creating a loud banging noise.

'Is this what is creating all the banging noise,' Alex thought.

The girl did whatever she could to open the stone door, but she couldn't. So, in the end, she had to leave.

Once she did, Alex finally walked forward to check up on it.

The house looked so poor. The wall didn't look very smooth, instead of like flat stones piled on top of each other. The door to the house was a solid flat rock, that Alex wasn't sure would swing at all.

'Now that I think about it, the other houses were fully open. Did you perhaps have to break it open once the rune stopped working?' he thought.

He was curious how runes worked in the first place, but since no one here had any idea, Alex would have to give up on the door.

'Wouldn't hurt to try,' he thought and placed his palm on the rune that looked like the mix of 6 and 2.

With a thought, he poured in his Qi and the rune glowed yellow.

'Yellow? Not blue?' Alex thought with surprise. He thought something would happen, but after a second, nothing did. The yellow light disappeared and everything returned to normal.

Alex couldn't help but wonder why there was such a difference in the color of the rune between him and the girl. Was it because of his Yang Qi?

That would mean that the girl from before was likely someone proficient in Water Qi.

Alex punched a few times, hoping his physical body would be strong enough, but as expected, something that even the Saint realm cultivators couldn't open, he wouldn't be able to open it either.

He left that house and walked away. The distant banging was getting closer, but it was still a good few hundred meters away. However, by now, he could feel the aura of the people gathering at that location.

"Something big must be going on there for so many people to gather," he thought to himself.

There was some empty house along the way that Alex wanted to check, but without even looking, he could tell that not a single thing inside had been left there when they were raided.

With the closed houses, not budging an inch, Alex had no choice but to go to the very top of the mountain where over a hundred different people were gathered.

The top of the mountain was a plateau with a single house that looked massive compared to the other locations.

The design too looked better than most of the houses he had seen. The stones that made up the walls were uniform and slick. There were wooden frames around the house that had clearly stood the test of time.

And at the center was a stone door with a complicated script that Alex couldn't understand at all.

With not a single tree around them, Alex was surprised at how well kept this place was despite being thousands of years old.

Alex saw disciples of various sects and clans that he didn't recognize as well as rogue cultivators that were curious about the house as well.

As he got closer, he could finally make up the words that were written just above the stone door.

Since it was written in the demon language, Alex could easily read it.

House of the Undying.

'Undying…' Alex thought to himself. He wondered what that was. Was that the name of a person or perhaps an attribute of his? Name of the demons that lived in this realm? A clan? Maybe a sect?

He also wondered if there was perhaps a person inside the house, that hadn't died until now despite how many years had passed. That would truly make them Undying for sure.

As he slowly pushed the sea of cultivators, he reached a location towards the front, from where he could more or less see what was happening in front of the house.

Alex saw about 3 people standing in front of the door while a smaller, but equally important group of nearly 20 people stood behind them.

Of the ones that were going to attack the door, there was a woman with a strong physical body. She wore brown robes and held a large hammer in her hands as if it were weightless.

She ran forward with the hammer and slammed onto the door. A blue film appeared around the door, absorbing all of the damage. Even as it did, it flickered a little, never solid like the ones in the other houses in the mountain.

"Not me either," the girl said and moved away from the door and back to the group of nearly 20 people, standing next to people that wore very

A man stepped forward with golden robes that had a criss-cross pattern all over them. A black sword appeared in his hands which glowed with golden light.

Even as it did, Alex could see white light appear on his sword. Not an outline, but the entire sword was clad in the white light.

Alex couldn't help but feel a sense of envy when he saw that. 'Sword Qi,' he thought to himself.

The man slashed and the golden-white light struck the door. Once again, a blue barrier shined around the place and absorbed all of the damage.

However, still, it flickered a bit like an unhealthy barrier that was just about to end.

The man shook his head. "I told you guys it was useless," he said and went back to the group again.

Finally, the last man moved forward with no weapon in his hands. He wore a red and white robe as if it was originally a white robe that had been ruined by a red rain.

As Alex watched him, the man brought out a vial from his storage bag and undid the stopper. Then, he poured the contents of it out onto his hands.

As the smell of iron drifted across the wind, Alex knew what this was.

Blood.

'The hell?' Alex thought. He couldn't tell why the man was pouring out blood onto his hands. Then, the blood slowly moved out of his palm and floated in the air.

The young man pinched the blood with his thumb and the side of his index finger and pulled on it as he used the index finger of his other hand to aim it at the door.

He stretched it as far as he could, and soon the blood looked like it was taking the shape of an arrow.

With a snap, he let go of the blood arrow, that flew through the air like a normal arrow and struck at the door.

As everyone expected, the blue barrier appeared to block the attack. But also as everyone expected, the barrier still flickered.

"Alright I give up," the young man said and returned back to the group. As the group of 20 or so gathered there Alex couldn't help but look at them in sheer astonishment.

These were the descendants and disciples that defined the young generation of the Luminance empire. These were the strongest of them all.

Alex looked at the big lady with the hammer, the short-haired man with the sword, and finally, the man that used blood.

Every single of these three was in the True King realm. If the target of any of these attacks hadn't been the door, but rather Alex and the others standing here, he had no doubt that the 3 of them could win against them all.

Fear crept up in Alex's heart but quickly overshadowing it was another feeling.

Excitement.

He was excited when he thought of the future when he could reach the same level as these people and fight with them on the same level.

Chapter 649: The Elites

Xu Meirong twisted the pink side of her robe in frustration, leaving the green side be. Her small height would usually be a problem in the crowd, but she had been allowed to stand at the front with the two dozen youths, so she could see the house in front of her without a problem.

Only, she couldn't help but frown when she saw the stone door still unbudging.

House of the Undying was a well-known location in the sect records of the Falling Lotus sect. So, when she heard that its runes were giving up, she couldn't help but come here to reap some benefit.

Now that she was here, she saw that despite everyone attacking the barrier one after another, no one could break through the barrier.

Even the True Kings couldn't break through the barrier, so she, a True Lord 8th realm individual had no chance at all.

She only wished that she could leave and go back to the Life mountain where she could search for alchemy ingredients. She was sure with her knowledge of the plants and beasts, she could make a lot more profit there than what she could make here.

"If no one is able to break through the door then I shall leave," a ghostly sharp-eyed youth of a lanky physique spoke with a deathly voice and started turning around.

"Brother Guo Chiang, you don't have to leave so fast, right? Surely the Broken Ravine sect couldn't have a better place to be than this," Another youth spoke from the side.

"I will be honest, Zhou Ren. I don't like you, so stop calling me brother. As for the rest of you, good luck," the young man said. Then, he turned around and left, his blue and green robes fluttering in the wind.

"Tsk!" the white-robed young man whose sleeves and helms looked like they were burnt with fire said silently.

"He's not really patient, is he?" Song Shing spoke, his blood-stained robes staying eerily still in the midst of the wind.

A girl slammed the butt of her spear on the ground to gather the attention of the group. "I for one, agree with him," she spoke. "There is no way we are opening this door at all. Not in the next 8 days at least," she said.

"Liang Qiu, please stay. You are one of the strongest here, so we would really appreciate your help," Fu Tao spoke from the side.

Fu Tao was in fact the strongest of the people here, but that was only in terms of cultivation base. While cultivation base did help you a bit, in a real fight, he was sure that at least 3 people in here would give him a lot of trouble.

Especially with their unlocked spiritual sense. Since his main attacks were mental attacks, these people would last long enough to fight him.

"And do what?" Liang Qiu asked. "My Heaven's Peak school counts on me to break through to True King 5th realm during these 10 days. If I don't do that, I will have disappointed them."

"I can understand your intention here, sister Liang," He Liwei spoke from the side, his gold and brown robes somehow not catching more attention. "I too am in the same situation and am in a hurry to leave. But let's wait until someone comes soon."

"I believe sister Shen Huan should be bringing him soon," he said.

Liang Qi's eyes shone. "Who's coming?" she asked.

"Tian Ye," Song Shing spoke from the side. Liang Qi frowned when she saw this person. Strong he may be, but she still didn't like how he looked like he would drink blood if given the opportunity.

Still, if Tian Ye was coming, then she would wait.

Suddenly, a loud bang rang the surrounding, and everyone turned to look towards the door. A pale blue light flickered in front of it as it blocked the attack.

Han Daiyu turned around with her giant hammer hefted on her shoulders with her half-sleeved robes showing her big muscles.

She looked to the group who had just turned around and asked, "What? I got bored of waiting. If you guys want to help keep me company, then come along."

"Sister Daiyu… that's… never mind," someone from the Han family wanted to speak up towards their senior sister, but they knew how much she loved challenges.

Keeping her distracted with the door was likely better lest she went around the crowd, randomly looking for challenges herself.

Lu Yan stood in the small group with a green veil on her face and she softly spoke with a man with purple robes.

The purple in the robe started with dark purple at the bottom and as it went up, it lost its saturation, slowly changing to softer and softer purple until it was fully white.

There were 2 other young folks behind this young man but those two were surprisingly acting like guards who protected this young man rather than be his peers.

From time to time, Lu Yan would bow a little as she spoke to this young man.

Fu Tao frowned a little when he saw her speak to the young man, but he couldn't do anything at all. Despite being in the True Lord realm, that man was still a prince of the empire. So, he had the greatest saying in all of this place.

Alex looked at all of this with a keep eye while he waited for whoever this Tian Ye fellow was.

He took what he heard into memory and remembered the names of the ones that were the best of the young generation.

He recognized Fu Tao and Lu Yan from the time they were in Crimson Empire. Aside from them, he only learned the name of the other people.

Song Shing, from the Song clan, with the blood technique.

Shen Huan, from the Shen clan, who was absent at the moment.

Jin Tengfei, from the Jin clan, with the Sword Qi that Alex wanted too.

Han Daiyu with her large hammer from the Han Clan.

Zhou Ren with the white burnt robes from the Zhou clan.

Together with Fu Tao from the Fu clan, and Lu Yan from the Lu clan, these were some of the best descendants of the 7 great families of the Luminance empire.

The 8th honorary great family of colors, the Wei clan was the Royal family of the empire. If Alex had to guess, given their association with the color purple, it was likely the man speaking with Lu Yan.

He also learned a bit about the other sects as well.

The ghostly youth that left at the beginning was from the Broken Ravine sect.

The girl with the spear was from Heaven's Peak school.

The girl in pink and green was from the Falling Lotus sect.

And finally, the guy He Liwei was from the Glory's Edge sect.

Aside from that, there were other sect disciples or disciples of those same sects and clans as well, and Alex put their information in his head as well.

However, he didn't bother giving much thought to their information.

Even as everyone waited, instead of the crowd dispersing, more and more added to it.

Soon, there were nearly 200 of them here. Alex even saw disciples from the big sects and clans in the group now, but they didn't dare to go mix in with the elites at the front.

'Did those saint elders from the elite sects and clans go to get more of their disciples?' he wondered. That had to be it. If everyone was getting a chance to enter, they would be stupid to let this opportunity go by only sending 3 each.

Just as he was thinking that the crowd parted as two figures walked ahead.

The elite group turned their head around and suddenly relief appeared on their faces.

The woman that strolled upfront was wearing a blue robe that looked like water splashing across each other. She had a casual expression as she walked back to the elite group.

Behind her, a young man walked with a thunderous roar on every step. It felt like the ground shuddered as he appeared.

Alex looked in shock as he watched the young man in cyan robes walk forward and join the elite group.

Even as he did, a single question ran through Alex's mind.

'How the hell can a cultivator be this fat?'

Chapter 650: Test at the Door

Alex looked at the fat young man walking up to the front crowd. The young man in the cyan robes was about 170 cm tall but looked like he weighed nearly 120 kg.

He was unquestionably fat, which for a cultivator was a hard task given that most didn't have to eat at all after entering just the Organ Tempering realm.

The Qi they cultivated on a daily basis alone was able to sustain them.

So, Alex couldn't help but wonder why this young man was fat at all.

Tian Ye's round, chubby face stared at the lot in front of him. "Have you all been waiting for me?" he asked.

Alex was surprised to see that he was able to be so direct, despite only being in the True lord 5th realm. 'What gives him such confidence?' he wondered.

"Brother Tian, you're here," He Liwei said from the side and went out to greet Tian Ye.

Tian Ye gave a slight nod to everyone and didn't say anything. The only one he gave a more than a passing glance was the young man in the purple robes.

To the one who Alex suspected was from the Royal family, he gave a deep bow.

"Fellow Daoists," Tian Ye spoke. "I'm sorry, but I have some other tasks to perform, so let's hurry this up okay?"

He then brought out 3 talismans from his storage bag and turned to the crowd.

"I need someone to help me hit the—"

Before he could say anything, a loud bang appeared from behind him. He slowly turned his head to see Han Daiyu's hammer resting on her shoulder and a blue shield on the surface of the door.

"Aah! I needed to record that," he shouted suddenly. "Sister Daiyu, can you hit it again?"

"What?" Han Daiyu had not been paying attention to Tain Ye at all.

"Can you hit the door again?" he asked.

"Oh, you didn't have to ask me. I was already going to do it again," she said and raised her hammer before slamming it onto the door at full force.

At the same time, the young fat man used the talisman as if he had done this a million times.

The talisman took in his Qi and flew to the wall right where the hammer hit it.

The talisman did nothing to stop the attack at all. At the same time, the young fat man once again sent out his second talisman to the wall of the barrier a little far away from where it had been hit.

Finally, he used the last talisman in his hands to record the visual of what he had seen.

"Sister Daiyu, step back please," Tian Ye said. He knew how she was. Everyone did. If left alone, she would try to hit the barrier again.

Being a body cultivator, she thought of every physically taxing task as training and kept doing it as long as he could.

"Why do you want me to stop?" she asked.

"For test purposes, sister," Tian Ye said.

He quickly grabbed the two talismans on the wall and looked at them. These were one-time-use talismans that noted the strength of one's attacks, and the strength of a barrier.

He didn't do more than look at it once though. For now, they were very useless as there was nothing to base this reading off of.

It was hard for him to stop Han Daiyu from attacking the door again, but with the help of others, he did.

Han Daiyu grumbled a little as slowly an hour passed.

Finally, Tian Ye stirred up. He took out 3 other talismans and sent one flying to the door, another to the side, and finally kept one for recording.

"Sister Daiyu, can you do exactly the same attack you did last time?" he asked.

The girl nodded and attacked. Once again the blue barrier flickered.

Tian Ye immediately grabbed the two talismans and compared their reading with the previous ones.

From what he could see, the strength of Daiyu's attack was practically the same.

However, the strength of the barrier… was very different. He looked at the reading between the two and did some mental calculations.

"Woah!" he said out loud, catching the attention of everyone here.

"What is it?" Liang Qiu asked from the side. Her attention was entirely on him.

"If… if my calculations are not wrong… then this barrier will open in 10, at most 11 days," he said. "The barrier is continuously weakening even as time goes on and surely in the next 10 days, it will be gone."

Instead of being happy, every single one on the plateau frowned. 10 days… they didn't have 10 days.

The third day was already half done. At most, they had maybe a bit more than 6 days.

"Can we not weaken it ourselves?" Jin Tengfei asked.

"I don't know. That's what I'm going to test now," he said and turned around to Han Daiyu.

"Sister Daiyu, can you do me the favor of hitting that door the same way for 60 times in the next hour?" he asked.

"One attack every minute?" she asked. "I can do that."

She held her hammer tight in her grip, and once again attacked the door again.

As the blue light flickered and died down, she held it up again and was about to attack.

"Sister Daiyu, wait. Not right now. Spare a minute or so in between," Tian Ye said.

"What? I can't do it all at once?" she asked.

"I want a close to normal environment of how it would go if we were to need to do this," he said.

"Sigh, alright," she said and let her hammer fall to the floor. With a small bang, the hammer sent off dust into the air. Only then did Alex realize just how heavy the hammer was.

'I should be able to carry it, right?' he thought.

As they waited for the hour to pass while Han Daiyu hit the wall once every minute, Alex wondered if he was wasting time here.

But since he was so close to getting more answers from this Tian Ye guy, he decided to wait the extra hour. If there was something that would help him enter this place and get some sort of benefit, then it was better to wait.

The hour finally passed and they did the test one more time. This time, after being beaten with the hammer for an hour continuously, Tian Ye wanted to see how much worse the barrier had become.

"Hmm…" he said as he looked at the readings.

The whole crowd looked quietly as Tian Ye closed his eyes and calculated the reading.

"The attacks do have an effect on it," Tian Ye said as a passing remark. However, everyone who heard it suddenly had their breathing come to a halt.

"It… it helps?" Fu Tao asked suspiciously.

"Yes," Tian Ye said. "It does."

"By how much?" Xu Meirong asked curiously.

"If… if we were to do what Sister Daiyu just did for as long as we can, then we can likely get the stone door to open in 4, if not 5 days," Tian Ye said.

"5 days?" everyone was immediately shocked.

That was a lot better than the 11-day estimate that had come prior to this.

Immediately, everyone started getting happy. The Elite group cheered loudly, and the emotions passed to the rest of the crowd as well who quickly cheered.

"Stop, stop, stop," Zhou Ren shouted and the entire celebration came to a staggering halt.

"What's wrong, Zhou Ren?" Liang Qiu asked.

"I had one question that I hope brother Tain Ye can help settle," he said.

"Uh, sure. Ask," Tian Ye said.

"You said that it will get weaker as the time goes on, right?" Zhou Ren asked.

"Yes, I did," Tian Ye said. "Ah, I see where you are going with this question. You want to ask me if I calculated the weakness of the barrier as a factor of the days required, don't you?"

A collective gasp rang through the crowd as not many had thought of this in their immediate celebration.

"Ah, that is exactly it, brother Tian. You are incredible to have thought that far," Zhou Ren said. "So, does that mean you calculated it, or should we expect a faster time for the opening?"

Everyone from the group looked intently at Tian Ye, waiting for the answer.

"I didn't calculate that into the estimate I gave just now," Tian Ye said. He immediately added, "Not because I forgot, but rather because it's useless."

"I'm not sure how runes exactly work as they are still a mystery when not used through a talisman paper, but as far as I know, it works similarly to a formation."

"Meaning, these runes on the door are directly connected to a power source, which I believe is a miniature Saint rank spirit vein underneath it."

"That means the barrier itself is at Saint rank. So, no matter how much it takes hits, you are never going to affect it with your current cultivation base," Tian Ye said.

"What is actually happening to the runes right now is that since it's not properly maintained, the runes' connection to the spirit vein is slowly decaying."

"It's already on its last leg, but if you do continue to hit it, you can make the gradual decay faster, thus opening the door in about 5 days," Tian Ye finished.

Han Daiyu looked at the door and said, "So… I just need to keep hitting it right?"

Chapter 651: The North Mountain

The elite group started deciding on who would attack the door and who would go around doing their own thing, but Alex didn't bother to wait around to see their plan.

The moment he learned that he had the next 4 days free, he decided to go around the Demon Realm and see the places he hadn't visited yet.

The current location he was heading towards was the 6th mountain to the north. For some reason, he could only see rogue cultivators on his way to the 6th mountain.

As he walked along, he couldn't help but wonder what the purpose of the 6th mountain was.

The 1st mountain to the south was a library that likely held books and techniques for the demons that lived here.

The 2nd mountain from there was the Training and Crafting mountain. It was a location where people could go to train their techniques or create artifacts from what he could understand.

Since the demons weren't known for making pills or formations, Alex suspected there was no such room there at all.

The 3rd mountain was the Cultivation mountain. From what he had heard, it had rooms there for people to cultivate. He had heard people saying that time slowed down in those rooms, but he wanted to see that for himself before believing it.

The 4th mountain was the Resource mountain. It was where the different plants and animals were reared and given a dense Qi environment to grow properly.

Finally, the 5th mountain was where the demons lived. Those demons had to be strong as each of the houses was protected with Saint rank runes.

Now, Alex couldn't help but frown as he thought of what was possibly left for a hiding clan to have.

They had enough resources to do whatever they wanted here. Had places to live and cultivate, as well as train and craft. They even had an entire mountain dedicated to just a single library that wasn't even very large.

'The leader's mountain? But the house from back there looked like that would be it. Then… a place to pray? I can't think of anything,' he thought.

He decided to stop thinking about it as he would learn very soon.

When he reached the peak, he would know for sure.

As he went further along, he saw the disappointed looks of the people returning.

Someone even told him not to bother going there and that the door was locked.

That only increased Alex's curiosity. He quickened his pace and reached the mountain in just the next hour.

There weren't many people here, just a few rogue cultivators who were returning down from the mountain.

Even from where he was, Alex could see a small stone door halfway up the mountain which was where these people had likely been too.

Alex walked up the mountain, ignoring the other people's disappointed looks, not letting it bother him at all.

When he reached halfway up the mountain and saw the stone door, he stayed back and let the young man there do what he wanted.

The stone door was a single stone slab, that seemed to be placed right where the room was carved into the mountain itself.

It was about 4 meters tall and 2 meters wide, with a bunch of runes on it that were a little more complex than the ones he saw on the houses back in the 5th mountain.

The young man placed his palm on the door and blue light filled the rune. Then, the young man struck it with a sword, in which case the blue barrier appeared around the door.

This barrier was nothing like the flickering barrier from the House of the Undying. This one was perfectly healthy and would continue to be so for days to come.

Once the young man left, and Alex realized he was alone, he walked up to the door and placed his hands on the rune just like that young man did.

Then, he passed along his Qi into the rune, and it glowed yellow.

'Why is it glowing yellow, if it glowed blue for that young man?' he thought.

He would have assumed that it was because the young man had a Water attribute to his Qi just like he did with the young woman who had tried to open a door, but Alex had gone beyond that thinking.

Now that he realized that the barrier itself was blue, he gave up on the thought of it being related to the person's Qi, but to something about the rune itself.

'Why is it shining Yellow though?' he thought. He decided to see if the barrier was blue when he hit it too. So, he punched the door with his only hand.

As expected, a blue barrier spread around the door.

"Wait, so it is blue? What?" None of this was making sense to Alex at all.

He sent out his spiritual sense but it was blocked by the barrier. He had expected as much.

He thought for a moment and decided to test what happened if he hit the door while it glowed yellow.

As he placed his only hand on the door and poured in his Qi, he struck the stone door as hard as he could with his feet.

BANG!

"Argh!" Alex fell to the floor as he clutched his foot with his only hand as he writhed in pain.

When he looked down, he saw blood spilling through his shoes. He quickly took it off and checked his feet.

The toes on his right foot were completely mangled.

"Meow?" Pearl cried out from his robes in worry. "Are you okay?" drifted onto Alex's mind.

"Yes, I'm fine," Alex said while he gritted his teeth. He hadn't expected to feel such sudden pain.

He then quickly took a healing pill and the toes on his foot immediately healed, relieving him of the pain.

Then, he looked back at the door in shock.

The barrier on the door had not appeared at all, and there was a dirty smudge on the door itself where Alex had hit it.

He had made direct contact with the stone even when he was trying to hit it.

His eyes went wide. Did the barrier not work because he was pouring in his Qi?

He decided to try once again. This time, he hit a little less hard.

As his foot hit the stone door, he could tell that it was working. He was at the very least getting rid of the barrier.

However, the stone door itself was super strong, to the point that he couldn't imagine breaking the door until his body reached Saint realm.

'Just what sort of stone is it made up of?' he thought as he hit the stone again.

Dirt fell on Alex's head, which he cleared from his hair. Then, he looked up to where the dirt had fallen from.

There was writing on the top of the stone door that Alex hadn't noticed before. he tried to remove it with his hands, but a barrier appeared.

Alex was confused. He placed his hands on the door, but no barrier appeared there. But when he tried to touch outside, the barrier popped up to stop him.

It didn't take Alex very long to go around testing how far the barrier extended to, before realizing that it was a barrier that covered the entire upper half of the mountain.

He didn't have evidence to support his theory, but he was sure that if he were to dig through the ground towards the bottom of the mountain, he would surely find a barrier halfway through as well.

This mountain… it was likely more important to the entire realm than any other, even the House of the Undying.

Alex circled back to the stone door and placed his hand on the barrier, then started hitting the door continuously.

Since he couldn't touch through the barrier, he wanted to use the vibrations of the kicks to dislodge some of the dirt in the writing to make it clear.

'If only I could use my spiritual sense,' he thought.

As the dirt was more and more dislodged, Alex could finally make out the outlines of the word.

'North' it read.

"North?" Alex looked at the name weirdly. He looked around the word and saw if he missed something.

"Did they really just name the mountain in the north, North?" Alex thought. "They could have at least named it after what its purpose is."

"Hmm… or was this on purpose and they wanted to hide the purpose of the mountain?" he thought.

That certainly seemed plausible. If the Library mountain's door was named 'South', people wouldn't be able to tell what it was for until it opened up.

'They must have been prepared to have intruders then,' Alex thought.

'I wonder what they were trying to hide here,' he thought. 'I wish I could see insi—'

"Oh wait, maybe I can," he thought and quickly placed his hand on the door. Once the rune glowed yellow, he tried to send his spiritual sense inside.

To his disbelief, it did. His spiritual sense entered the door and into the room.

From what he saw with his sense, it was a long and wide hallway that led all the way to... Somewhere.

The hallway was longer than his senses could reach, unfortunately. In the end, Alex was forced to stop as it yielded no result.

He waited around the mountain for a little longer, but nothing seemed to be working anymore.

However, he did gain some ideas on what he could do in the houses back in the 5th mountain.

So, with renewed vigor, he walked back and left the North mountain.

Chapter 652: Diary

Alex walked back to the 5th mountain. By the time he was there, the sun had set already and night had fallen.

The open sky was filled with dozens o bright stars and many more that twinkled. The bright half-moon hung in the sky, illuminating the far reaches of the Demon realm.

Even though night had fallen, the demon realm was still restless. The sound of distant bangs told Alex that there were people at the top of the mountain, still attacking the door with everything they had.

'Well, keep on working guys. I'll see if I can reap some benefit from you,' he thought to himself and went up the mountain to find a house that wasn't opened yet.

There were still a few cultivators here and most of the elite ones were likely just around too, so Alex didn't dare use his spiritual sense to search for anything.

Not even halfway up the mountain, Alex found a decently large house with its door intact.

When he lightly punched the door, a solid blue barrier appeared like a film around the house to protect it.

Since those barriers could withstand attacks from the Saint realm, Alex didn't even think of attacking it twice.

He slowly turned around to see if anyone was looking at him. Once he was absolutely sure that no one was looking at him, he placed his palm on the door and poured in his Qi.

Once again, the rune of the door glowed yellow. Alex sent out his spiritual sense and bypassed the door to slowly peep inside the house.

The house, was as he had expected just a single room. There was nothing of value in there from what he could see. Even if it was, Alex doubted it could have lasted so many years.

There was a bed, a table, a chair, and a bookshelf from what he saw. There was a metal sword to the side of the shelf, but from his senses, he could see that it was just a light tap away from crumbling.

It didn't seem like a weapon that was meant to last. Even if it was, it was likely not a very good one then.

The bed was messy, with part of the wood rotting all the way through. The chair and the table were the same as well.

The shelf to the side seemed to have lasted a little longer, but it too seemed to be rotting at the sides too.

Alex couldn't tell if the rotting speed was slow or fast. For one thing, it was only rotting halfway despite being here for so many years.

For another, it was likely a strong wood from one of the better trees in that forest that wouldn't succumb to rot so easily.

'That doesn't help me at all,' he thought and looked through the other things. He checked the bed, pillow, table, and chair but found nothing. There were many items on top of them, but time had taken everything.

On the shelf, however, there was still a book in it. For some reason, Alex couldn't read it at all.

'A book that my spiritual sense won't bypass?' he thought. Now he really wanted to check it.

"What do I do?" he thought for a moment. Then, an idea struck him.

'No way a random home can have the same strength as a door that leads to the entire mountain right?' he hoped and prepared to hit the door.

He looked around to make sure there was no one there. There were likely people around and would hear him if he hit it too hard, so he needed to time the kick right.

He waited for the banging noise from the top of the mountain to fall into a rhythm for him to learn.

Then, timing it perfectly, he hit the stone door at the same time someone attacked it on top of the mountain.

~CRACK~

The stone cracked and Alex didn't feel any hint of pain. This was not a very strong stone from what he could see.

Although, it would surely still be considered a treasure to not get destroyed by a True Lord 1st realm cultivator's attack.

Alex hit the door twice again and only then did the stone crumble and fell down. When the run was destroyed, the barrier disappeared as well.

Before anyone could realize what had happened, Alex rushed in, grabbed the book, and rushed out.

He also grabbed one of the pieces of stone from the door and walked away from the location. Not long after, a few rogue cultivators came to see what had happened.

Despite timing the hits with the attack from the top of the mountain, they were still not fooled at all.

'Thank god I walked out,' he thought.

People immediately started shouting and telling people that someone broke open a door that was previously locked.

Some called Alex lucky, while some just believed that the barrier was on its last leg.

Still, a lot of people were motivated to see if they too would get lucky like him.

"Tsk!" Alex thought to himself. With this many people occupying the mountain and more likely being called here, he wouldn't be able to try out the same thing here again.

"I will have to do it some other time after the people here realize that they won't be able to do it on their own," he thought and left to go see what was happening at the plateau.

When he saw Han Daiyu, Fu Tao, Lu Yan, and a few others still attacking the door one after another, Alex understood that he had some time to spare.

He felt the Qi in his body start to pile up a bit and thought, "it's about time I breakthrough."

So, he left the mountain and walked towards the 3rd mountain, the Cultivation mountain.

Along the way, Alex took out the stone piece from his storage ring and looked at it.

"This certainly isn't an ordinary stone," he thought to himself. "Since a rune was carved onto it, I wonder if stones are to runes what metals are to formations."

"No, that wouldn't make sense," he immediately thought. "Formations can be carved onto stones too."

"Hmm, then maybe the reason is just to have a sturdy door," he thought and tossed away the piece of stone.

Then, he took out the book from his ring.

The front of the book was stuck to the rotting side of the shelf, so a few of the front pages were rotted away as well. Using his spiritual sense, Alex realized that there was no seal or anything in the book. It was the material itself that stopped him from doing so.

The remaining part of the book was legible, so Alex flipped it to read in the moonlight.

[My eyes still haven't healed. I know I was lucky to be chosen for this and everyone expects great things from me, but I don't know how much help I can be until I can actually see.]

"It's a diary?" Alex looked with a surprised face.

The demon language was easy for Alex to read as it was the normal language of this world. So, he continued reading.

It looked like the diary of a demon who lived inside this realm. There were a few unimportant information like when the person broke through or how long he cultivated that day.

So, Alex focused on the important ones only.

[I hear the war outside is reaching an end soon, mostly since we are losing. I don't want to die, but we might be exterminated.]

[I killed a human today. I vividly remember as his blood melted the snow beneath his dead body. I can't believe I had it in me.]

[I hear the young lord nearly died when he was ambushed by 4 humans on the outside today. Thankfully, he is Undying.]

[My eyes reached the next level today, and I'm really happy about it.]

[I hear the lord is taking in a lot of those little fellas into his house. I wonder what he's doing with them.]

[News says that we are reaching the humans for some sort of truce. I hope it happens. I have fought the humans too many times and I hate fighting again and again endlessly.]

[I lost my left leg in the fight today. The enemy hid under the frozen lake and sneak attacked me. I'm a little saddened.]

[Good news. The young lord might be passing on his techniques to one of us. I will have to try extra hard to get it.]

[The young lord took heavy damage to his spirit today. He has gone to closed cultivation and likely won't come out until he has broken through to the next realm. He says that is the only way for him to live.]

[Truce seems to have been met, and we demons are definitely on the losing side of it. But since we get to live, I don't really mind. I just hope these new rulers aren't evil humans that hate the demons.]

[We are leaving today. The young lord still hasn't left the timeless palace. I hope he successfully breaks through.]

Alex turned the page, but there was nothing else written besides that. That was the end of the book.

Who was this person? What happened after he left? Who was the young lord? Did the young lord ever survive?

Many questions moved around in his head, but there wasn't nearly any information in the diary as he had expected.

Still, he got to hear the thoughts of someone who was present during the war between the demons and the humans. So, Alex considered that a win.

With a sigh, he put the book back into his ring and continued on his way to the 3rd mountain.

Chapter 653: Waiting for a spot

Alex slowly walked through the forest with Pearl by his side. With Pearl's insistence, he went around searching for a worthy enemy for Pearl and watched as Pearl annihilated his enemy.

"Yeah, you need someone stronger than that. Or at least someone with better skill and intelligence to use them," Alex said to Pearl who was busy chewing on his victory prize.

"Meow!" Pearl sent information to Alex's mind that shocked him a little. "You can break through again? When was the last time you did it?" he asked.

"A month ago," Pearl replied.

"Hmm… that is a little fast. I'm not su— oh wait, the 3rd mountain's training room each last for a month. If we can get a place there, you can break through towards the end of it," Alex said.

Pearl nodded happily.

'Geez, only 3 years old, and already close to True Lord 6th realm. He might end up being unstoppable in the future soon,' Alex thought. Then, they continued walking at their leisurely pace.

The 4th mountain had been stripped empty, and the 5th mountain was stolen from already.

Since the 2nd mountain was a training mountain that most cultivators didn't care about, almost all of them were present in the 3rd mountain and it was filled to the brim.

Alex arrived here as the sun rose from the east, and he couldn't help but be surprised at just how many people there were in this place.

And they were all gathered by the foot of the mountain too. A few people did go up, but from what Alex could see, there wasn't anything up there.

At least, the diary didn't mention it. It did mention the cultivation mountain and how the owner of the diary went there once a week to cultivate in the mountain.

Alex was sure after reading that line that the cultivation rooms were likely carved into the mountain itself.

From what he could see now, that was correct.

"Are the rooms all occupied?" he wondered when he saw the many people just sitting around, not even looking towards the opening.

Alex himself only then looked towards the opening and saw a group of people sitting by the opening.

2 young men wore a white robe that seemed to be burnt at the edges. A young girl and a young man wore blue robes that looked like they had waves crashing in on them. Another young woman wore a robe that seemed to be fully doused in blood.

A young man wore gold and brown robes of the Glory's Edge sect. 2 women wore the black and red robe of the Heaven's Peak school. A man and a woman wore the green and pink rose of the Falling Lotus sect.

There were other people there too, and Alex recognized them all as members of the great clans and sects. Not a single one of these were the members of the elite group that was gathered at the mountain plateau yesterday.

"Fellow Daoist, are we not allowed to enter the mountain?" he asked.

The woman he asked the question turned her head towards him and answered, "You can, but you will have to pay a price at the gate and wait for your turn."

"Price?" Alex asked with a confused look.

"Yes," she said. "It's about 20 True Spirit stones. Not many are willing to pay at all since that's not a small price for most of us."

"You should sit here like us. They can't protect that place forever anyway," the woman said.

Alex couldn't help but see the disciples of the great clan in a more negative light.

Still, he wanted to try the cultivation room out, and 20 spirit stones were nothing for him. So, he walked to the front where a woman in a green robe was standing.

"I want a spot in there," Alex said. "When is the latest I can get?"

The girl looked at him carefully for a bit and looked into her talisman. "There will be a spot empty around tomorrow noon," she said.

Alex frowned a bit. 'A day and a half? I will have to wait that long?' he thought.

He shook his head and said, "Fine. I want it."

The woman's lips turned to a grin. "Great! Give me 20 True Spirit stones."

Alex took out some spirit stones and handed them to her. The girl took it and handed him a small piece of paper with "Stamp of the 7 colors" written at the top. Next to it was the number 155.

"Be sure to be here tomorrow when I call your number," she said.

Alex nodded and walked back. As he left, he heard someone walking out of the opening and looked back. Alex didn't recognize the person, but it was someone from the Shen clan.

The girl then called out the number 102.

'102?' Alex thought. 'That means there should be around 40 to 50 functioning rooms in there, right?' he thought.

When Alex saw the person who was walking in, he couldn't help but show a hint of surprise on his face.

It was the beast tamer from the first night in the secret realm.

"So he really did come back," Alex thought. His face turned into a smirk when he saw the anger flaring in the other guy's face when he saw him too.

'Good! I can properly kill you this time around,' Alex thought.

Once the man went into the mountain, Alex turned around, not giving him any thought anymore.

'Well, let's go check the 2nd mountain. I'm curious how it looks,' he thought.

As he walked away from the mountain, he found a few people following him. 'Surely they're not following me because I paid 20 spirit stones right?' he thought.

He slowed down his pace and let them catch up. When they did, as he had expected, they tried to rob him.

It took them exactly 3 seconds before they were on the ground with the newfound understanding that they had chosen the wrong target.

Alex left the few people grunting on the ground and continued thinking how stupid they were.

In the next 4 hours, he met 2 other groups of stupid people.

Alex looked at these people that were on the ground with wounds all over their bodies and thought, 'Are the rogues really that desperate that they are already stealing on the 4th day?'

He wondered if it had anything to do with not finding the chance to enter cultivation in the 3rd mountain.

Finally, after a few hours, he reached the 2nd mountain as he heard the shouting of many people who seemed to be training out in the open.

Towards the foot of the mountain, there was an open area where the trees seemed to have been cut recently.

There were a lot of different stones propped up all around the area, and while some were cracked and broken, most of them were still functioning.

From what Alex saw, almost all of them were occupied at the moment.

'Just how many people are in the realm at the moment?' he wondered. He walked over to one of the open spots and took out his sword to see how strong he was.

At the same time, Pearl propped up his head and meowed. He wanted to test too.

Chapter 654: Training and Forging mountain

Most people in the training grounds were focused on their training. They seemed to be practicing some of the new techniques that they had learned.

Alex wondered if there was a reason for that. 'Do techniques become easier to train here?' he wondered.

Unfortunately, in the last 2 years, he had trained every technique to a great level. Even his spiritual sword technique was decent enough for him.

So he only decided to check his strength at the stone wall in front of him.

Alex took out his refined sword from his ring and without any augmentation, attacked the stone.

As expected, True Lord 1st realm appeared on the stone slab. However, next to it were also the words 'Physical Damage'.

"Oh, does it tell me the difference in damage types too?" Alex thought. None of the puppets back in the Crimson empire did that. But then, that was the Crimson empire.

Next, he tried the same attack but with Sword Intent. When he struck, another reading popped up on the stone slab.

[True Lord 5th Realm - Total Damage]

[True Lord 1st Realm - Physical Damage]

[True Lord 4th Realm - Weapon Intent Damage]

"Woah!" Alex cried out in surprise.

Pearl jumped out of his robes and ran up to the stone wall to attack it. He used the White Tiger's Golden Claw technique so that when it landed, Alex got two separate values for the damage again.

[True Lord 8th Realm - Total Damage]

[True Lord 5th realm - Physical Damage]

[True Lord 7th realm - Elemental Damage]

"Oh wow, was that because of your Qi or because of your technique?" Alex asked curiously. He thought of ways to check, but Pearl didn't know any other techniques.

"Can you even learn other techniques aside from metal-related ones?" Alex wondered. "After we leave, I will find some projectile-based attacks for you so that you never have to reach close to the enemy."

"Meow!" Pearl said happily and attacked the wall multiple times, but each time the result was the same.

"Come on, get back. It's my turn next," Alex said and tested his attacks.

With normal Qi attacks from a distance, his damage reached True Lord 5th realm.

With metal and Yang Qi, his attacks from a distance yielded True Lord 6th realm in damage.

When mixed together and attacked with the sword, his damage yielded True Lord 6th realm for normal Qi and True lord 7th realm for metal Qi.

With the lack of Yang Qi skills for short-range, Alex couldn't test it at all, but he supposed it would be the same as the metal Qi.

Finally, Alex took out his sword which he couldn't pour Qi into, and attacked the stone. When it struck, Alex left a sword mark on the stone.

"Holy…" he looked at the wall in shock. He hadn't expected the sword to be so strong. Alex wondered if it could in fact cut through the rock, but Alex himself was too weak to make that happen.

'Just what sort of expert could have crafted this sword,' he wondered. 'Could I ever refine it? I will have to try.'

Alex shook his head and kept the sword back in his ring. Then, he turned around to leave.

Immediately after however, he stopped and turned back around to the stone slab.

"Hm… if it can find the difference between the 3 types of damages… can it also test the 4th type?" he wondered and strolled back towards it.

He got close to the stone and let out Heaven's Impact at it. When it hit, a few words appeared on the stone slab.

[True Emperor 9th realm - Mental Damage]

Instead of getting happy, Alex frowned. 'True Emperor 9th realm? That's the peak of the True realm,' he thought. 'Did I coincidentally happen to reach this damage amount? Or is the stone slab unable to quantify my damage? '

'Surely a Heaven's Impact would be weak against a Saint Realm who opened their own Spiritual sea and have a large amount of it, unlike me. At the same time, most True realm experts would be vulnerable to such an attack.'

'Is it trying to say that the damage I do with Heaven's Impact is enough to hurt everyone below the saint realm?' Alex thought.

Alex also tried the spiritual sword, and it gave the same result.

In the end, Alex was forced to leave with the understanding that his spiritual sense at the moment would be considered second only to those in the saint realm.

Even the ancient demons didn't have figures with a spiritual sense that could reach him if the stone slab was anything to go by.

Finally, Alex left the training ground and roamed in forging rooms in the mountain. Alex saw quite a few doors that were open and not a single hint of fire was inside.

On the ones that were closed, Alex saw two types of doors. One was with glowing runes, and another one was with closed runes.

Alex placed his palm on one of the rooms with dim runes and poured in his Qi. The door shuddered a bit and opened to reveal a person in the process of forging inside.

Alex frowned and hurriedly apologized before closing the door. 'What the hell? Why did the door open if there was someone inside?' he wondered.

"Are the dim ones supposed to represent the one with people inside?" Alex wondered and placed his palm on one with a glowing rune.

When the room opened, he realized that he was correct. He walked into the room and the door locked behind him.

There was a stone slab in the middle of the room and a heart in the corner of the room. Alex sighed, thinking that he couldn't make pills here, but when he noticed a small hole in the middle of the stone slab, he held his conclusions for now.

He looked inside and saw nothing, but there had to be something there. He sent his spiritual sense over the entire thing and noticed a small blockage that was stopping the fire from entering the stone slab.

After looking around for a bit, Alex noticed a rune to the side. He placed his palm and poured Qi into it.

Suddenly, the blockage hit away, and fire rushed into the stone slab.

"Hey! It works," he thought and brought out his cauldron.

Once he got himself comfortable, he started making some random pills to pass some time.

Over the course of the whole day, Alex did nothing but make pills in the room. As for what pill exactly, he didn't care.

His pills only came out to be around 45%, however. He needed to do extensive research with his spiritual sense to understand exactly how to improve the harmony of the pills he was making.

In the last 2 years, he had gathered the perfect recipe for about 20 or so pills. When he did make those pills, his results improved to about 65% for each pill.

Since there were many more such recipes for True pills that he had gathered through the sect, the corpse in the southern forest, and random purchases from shops he visited, there were still close to 30 pills he needed to research.

Alex wasn't worried, however since he knew how easy it would be as he continued doing this.

Somehow, Alex managed to make close to 70 pills with barely any mental fatigue.

Based on the time he wasted here, he was sure that morning would come very soon.

He sat down in the room for a few hours and cultivated to recollect his Qi. Once he was done, he left.

Sun had barely come out of the east, so Alex knew he still had some time before he had to be back in the 3rd mountain. Since it was less than 10 kilometers away, Alex could take his time.

He leisurely walked down the mountain as he watched the many others train down at the training field.

'Quite a lot of those from the elite sects and clans,' Alex thought as he saw the different robes. Those unique robes were quite easy to recognize.

Pearl walked by his side with no care in the world as the two of them made their way to the 3rd mountain.

He had his spiritual sense withdrawn out of fear of meeting those True Kings that did have spiritual sense.

As such, when he stumbled onto a crime scene, he was surprised. Two men and one woman seemed to be robbing a cultivator. However, Alex couldn't call it robbing at all. This was more of a murder scene.

The victim was so bloody, that Alex wouldn't be surprised if they were already dead.

Alex wanted to turn around and walk the other way, but the three of them had already seen him and were starting to make their way toward him while dragging their nearly dead victim.

'That robe looks familiar,' Alex thought for a moment before he saw the person's face.

And Jiang Zhilan saw his.

'I'm about to be implicated in this, aren't I?' he thought with a frown. But since they were already coming after him, maybe that didn't really matter.

"Junior brother!" Jiang Zhilan said with as much energy as she could muster.

'Here it comes,' Alex thought as he looked at the three robbers in front of him.

"RUN!" she shouted.

"Huh?" Alex froze.

"Run, quickly. They're st—" one of the men in pink robes punched her in the face mid-sentence, cutting her off.

The girl pointed a saber at him as she said, "Don't think of running away, or We will kill you."

Alex's face grew solemn as he truly hadn't expected Jiang Zhilan to be selfless when she was down.

"You know what? I was planning on running away. But… now I think I won't."

Chapter 655: Taking out Trash

"RWAMBH!" Zhilan's words came out muffled, but Alex could still understand what she was trying to say.

Run.

Even now she wanted him to run. Did she not get together with him in the first place so that she could use him when the situation got dire? Or was he wrong about that?

The girl with the saber wore a yellow robe and had a True Master 8th realm cultivation base.

The man in the pink robe that punched Zhilan had a cultivation base of True Lord 1st realm.

And finally, the other man with the sword and the most blood of them all had True Lord 3rd realm cultivation base.

They were all strong, and yet not a single one of them was a threat to him.

"Why are you doing this?" Alex asked seriously. "You guys are so strong. Is robbing the only way you guys can think of to earn in this realm?"

"This little shit has a tongue on him, doesn't he?" the girl said with a wicked grin.

"Of course, we have other ways of gaining what we want here," the man in the pink robe said.

"Then why are you—"

"What makes you think we're doing this for gaining treasures?" he asked.

"What? If not for treasures and cultivation resources, why would you rob anyone?" Alex asked.

The man grabbed Zhilan's hair and pulled her up to show her bloody face. "What part of this do you think is robbing?" he asked.

"Enough with that, let's just kill him. He's one-handed already and so weak. Torturing him won't be very fun," the man with the sword said.

Alex looked at the three in shock. "Are you doing this because you like to hurt people?" he asked.

"Exactly!" the young man said and let go of Zhilan, whose face hit the ground with a smack.

"I love when I can beat people up," he said as he kicked Zhilan in the face and sent her flying into a wall.

"Good," Alex said. "Then I won't have to feel bad about killing you."

The moment Alex said that he disappeared. The man with the sword and the woman reacted as they had been watching him, but the man in the pink robes had his head turned so he didn't see him.

When he heard the rustle behind him, he quickly turned his head around only to see a palm outstretched onto his head.

Alex enforced his body with the Jade Skin technique and a fire burned out from his palm as he grabbed the man's face.

'Explode!'

~BOOM!~

Both the man and the woman were pushed back by the force of the explosion.

When they got back up, they could only see Alex brush off chunks of red from his grayish-blue robes.

Next to him was the headless and half a torso missing corpse of their previous companion.

"Don't worry," Alex's voice rang in the silence as he brought out his blood essence refined sword. "Unlike you trash, I don't like torturing people."

As he said that, his cultivation base flared to show that he was in the True Master 9th realm.

The man's eyes narrowed in fear and confusion when another aura flared a little further away.

The small cat that they hadn't noticed had gotten big and now showed a cultivation base of True Lord 5th realm.

The man lost hope.

Before he could say anything, the girl from the other side immediately got up and ran away.

"Take care of her," Alex said softly.

"Meow!" Pearl said and ran after all. Not 3 seconds later, the man heard the terrifying scream of the woman as she was killed.

His eyes darted towards the side to see if the beast would return.

"He's not your opponent, I am," Alex said. Then, he slowly strode forward towards the man.

When the man realized that the beast wasn't returning, he gained unfounded courage to fight Alex as his cultivation wasn't strong enough to fight with him.

In his fear of Pearl, the man forgot what the young man in front of him had just done to his own companion.

With a glowing blue sword, the man slashed, sending out chunks of sharp ice toward him.

Alex still had his defensive technique running, so he ran through the ice shards and directly appeared in front of the man.

The man slashed down in a hurry, but Alex's golden sword easily parried it. Immediately in the next moment, he slashed at the man and cleanly separated his head from his neck.

The man didn't even realize what had happened as his head struck the ground. He could only stare at the sideways image of Alex who turned around and walked towards Zhilan.

Then, his vision slowly vanished and he died.

Alex quickly arrived next to near-dead Zhilan and force-fed a healing pill to her.

He waited for a few seconds as the healing pill started doing its work.

Pearl arrived next to her in his small form and nudged her a little. "Meow?" he called.

Zhilan slowly opened her eyes and looked at Alex. "Wha-What happened?" she asked.

"Nothing, I just gave you a healing pill," Alex said.

Zhilan slowly got up and tried to circulate the healing pill to make it work faster. She could feel the broken bones and cut flesh slowly fixing themselves as her pain disappeared.

With a flick of his finger, Alex got rid of all the blood that was on her. He then handed her a pill to restore the lost blood which she ate a moment later.

5 minutes later, Zhilan was perfectly healthy. Aside from the tears in her robe, it was impossible to tell that she was near death just moments ago.

Finally, she looked at the dead bodies around her and hesitatingly asked, "Did… did you do this?"

Alex nodded without hesitation.

"Then… you must be very strong," she said.

"So-so," Alex said.

"I see," she said as she lowered her eyes. Alex couldn't tell what she was thinking of at all.

After thinking for a while, he brought out a pill and handed it to her.

Zhilan thoughtlessly grabbed the pill and was about to eat it when Alex grabbed her hand. Only then did she look up with confusion.

"That's the pill to help you break through. Do you want to eat it here?" he asked.

Zhilan's eyes immediately went wide. "What?" she cried out. "Wait let me pay you." She started searching around her robes for some spirit stones.

"I don't need anything, sister Zhilan," Alex said. At the same time, Pearl returned from gathering the storage bags of the three people. In total, there were 5 of them.

Alex sent his spiritual sense through them and checked. He noticed a few alchemy ingredients, and techniques books but aside from that, he saw nothing of value to him.

He kept what he wanted and handed the rest to Zhilan. "You can take these," he said.

"I cannot accept this!" Zhilan immediately said.

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "Since I don't need them, you can throw them away."

Of course, Zhilan wasn't stupid enough to throw it away, so she helplessly kept the storage bags.

"I will take my leave now sister. You can go to the 2nd mountain and enter one of the forging rooms to cultivate to True Master 5th realm. Although the Qi there is thin compared to the 3rd and the 4th mountains, you should be able to breakthrough with the pill," Alex said.

"Junior brother, thank you," she said.

"Don't mind it, sister Zhilan. I'll leave, for now. Take care," Alex said and stood up to walk.

"Meow!" Pearl said goodbye and walked next to him.

"Wait Junior brother, what's your name?" she asked hurriedly.

Alex stopped. "Oh, have I not introduced myself yet?" he asked. "My name is Yu Ming. Goodbye, sister."

With that, he left.

Zhilan sat in a daze as she watched the pill in her hand before standing up to leave.

She grabbed the sword from the man's corpse and made her way to the 2nd mountain where she would spend her remaining time trying to breakthrough.

With the month-long cultivation in the 3rd mountain, she had nearly broken through. But now with this pill, it was practically guaranteed.

* * * *

Alex arrived at the 3rd mountain a little before noon and walked up to the midsection and waited for his name to be called out.

The number now was 149, so his turn wasn't very far away. As more and more started getting called in, Alex felt someone's gaze on him.

He didn't know how he could tell, but he was sure he was feeling something. So, he looked in the general direction of where the feeling came from and saw a man staring at him.

'This guy again. Is he so ready to die?' Alex thought as he stared back at the beast tamer. It seemed he had already left the cultivation and was now waiting for Alex.

Soon, Alex's number was called and he walked forward. After showing the paper slip, he was let inside. Alex went through the hall and just like the 2nd mountain, tried searching for a room with a glowing rune.

When he found it, he entered. As soon as the door closed behind him, a rune on the floor of the room started glowing all of a sudden, scaring Alex.

He worried that it was something dangerous, but soon felt a lot of Qi gathering in the area.

'Oh!' he thought. It was preparing the room.

So, without hesitation, Alex sat down on the floor and placed Pearl on his lap.

At his command, the both of them then started their closed cultivation that would last exactly an entire month.

Chapter 656: Obstacles

As Alex started moving his Qi around his body, Pearl started cultivating as well.

At first, Alex felt nothing. However, slowly he started feeling the familiar feeling of skin splitting from the body cultivation that happened with Pearl.

He hadn't felt this feeling for over 2 years, so he started to forget the worry he was feeling about cultivating for a whole month in one go.

He wasn't worried so much as he was anxious, after all this was the first time he was going to cultivate for so long without any alchemy or training breaks in between.

Even that was gone now that he was starting to feel the slight, tingling pain around his skin which was starting to extend to his muscles.

As his muscles started tearing up, his bones started to show signs of fractures while the cut on his skin started to grow to be longer and wider.

Next were his organs, then his meridians, and finally mind. Alex had wished that tempering his mind made him have better spiritual sense but that was expecting too much of a technique that was shared with him.

Tempering his mind during body cultivation did just that. It made his brain physically stronger.

By the time the small cuts had reached his mind, the cuts on his skin were getting so wide that drops of blood were starting to ooze out of it.

'That has never happened before,' he thought but continued with his cultivation. Anytime now, he wanted to break through and stabilize his foundation in the True Lord 1st realm.

However, even as he thought of beginning that, the cut on his skin, and his muscles started to widen even more.

Blood poured out of him like he was sweating on a particularly hot day. They gathered upon his skin and rolled down together.

Soon, there were lines of blood all over his skin from head to toe, and they kept flowing down.

Worst of all, the wound on his kept on getting bigger and bigger. As Pearl gets more comfortable in his cultivation, the worse the wound on Alex's body got.

At one point, he started thinking that this was the most pain he had ever felt in his entire life.

This was not true at all, but at the moment, Alex had a hard time thinking of a pain that was worse than this. Even when he lost his arm, that pain felt like a light tap compared to this.

Fortunately, unlike the first few times when he cultivated with Pearl, he did not lose consciousness.

Even though the pain hurt a lot, he endured it with gritted teeth and even moved his own Qi around his body to cultivate.

As the pain stopped increasing, Alex could finally be relieved, even though he had to keep gritting his teeth with the pain.

On the inside, he was only starting to realize what his mistake was.

Never in his entire life had there been a time when Pearl's cultivation base was ahead of him. Even in the time when Pearl had a cultivation base, and he had a normal body, he still had a Qi cultivation that far surpassed him.

Now that Pearl was both ahead of him on body and Qi, the real power of his Golden Tiger's Dominating body technique was starting to show itself to Alex.

Now, his body was trying to rapidly catch up to Pearl, and in the process, it was wrecking itself.

It wasn't long before Alex understood that he couldn't cultivate for quite a while until his body cultivation had grown enough to handle the wound without bleeding out.

Alex took out a pill to restore the blood he had lost and ate it. After circulating the energy of the pill throughout his body to replenish his blood, he left his body so that he wouldn't have to worry about the pain and went into his spiritual mind.

Even in there, he could feel the pain from before, but it was more muffled and so it was slightly easier for Alex now.

Alex looked at the silver threads from the silver mountain that floated throughout his spiritual world.

He looked at the spiritual sea below him and somehow none of the silver threads fell into it.

Since he hadn't been here in almost a month, the silver strings had flown far and wide. Collecting them was going to take some time.

Fortunately, Alex had many.

He leisurely flew through the sky and grabbed the silver threads as they disappeared into him.

From time to time, he kept an eye on his body outside to see if there was something wrong that happened to it from him not being there.

However, from what he could see, he was fine. Judging from the speed of blood loss he was suffering, the blood replenishing pill he had eaten should do him good for an entire day, if not more.

With that in mind, Alex went back to gathering the silver threads.

Godslayer remained quiet as he watched Alex gather the silver thread, and Alex knew it was seeing him do so.

One of the times during his 2-year training, it had, in cryptic words, told him how fortunate someone would be if they managed to find something like this, let alone manage to get it into their spiritual sea.

It didn't say anything more than that, but that was enough for Alex to continuously absorb the thread without questioning everything.

After all, Godslayer was a spirit that dealt with the gods. If it said something was good, Alex was absolutely sure that it was good.

The black goo-covered spirit didn't even say anything as Alex destroyed the black goo around him.

Alex wasn't sure if the black goo was what brought on the power of its temptation, but he wasn't going to let it grow too much and start tempting him again.

He was sure he could defy it this time, but he wasn't confident enough to test that theory. Especially not now when he wanted so many things for himself.

Alex wasn't sure if he would be able to stop himself if the spirit was strong and it promised him to go back home.

It took him many hours to collect all of the silver thread as he went in and out of his body on multiple occasions to look at what was happening outside.

When he was finally done, he left the spiritual sea.

Alex was either getting used to the pain, or his body cultivation was increasing. He couldn't tell if he had grown or not, but just getting numb to the pain, for now, was a win in his heart.

With this, he could get ready for breaking through to the next realm.

He finally started using his cultivation technique and he got his body ready for a clean breakthrough.

After some time, he started pushing his Qi through the pain as he moved it around his tattered body.

As he was doing so, Alex heard someone speaking.

He immediately stopped. He looked around and even sent out his spiritual sense to see if someone had come inside.

However, aside from him and Pearl, there was no one in the room. 'What was that?' he thought. After noticing nothing wrong, he continued with his breakthrough.

However, once again, as he was getting close to it, he heard a voice saying something incoherent.

Alex stopped once more and even checked to see if that Godslayer was doing anything. In the end, he found nothing.

So, when he started breaking through for the third time and still heard something, he ignored it and continued with his breakthrough.

After a couple of minutes, his Qi circulation reached the peak and he broke through to True Lord 1st realm.

Now that he was slightly stronger, the pain from Pearl felt less and less. So, he continued cultivating to stabilize his foundation and at the same time, improve his body cultivation.

* * * * *

The Saint realm experts on the outside were still around, waiting for their disciples to come out.

They were in meditation as there was nothing else to do.

Shen Jing simply waited around on top of a rock. He had gone back to check on the people he had left behind and came back after making sure everything was fine.

Now, it had been half a day since he came back.

Since there were still 5 more days, he wondered if he should leave and come back sometime later. However, it was only 5 days. He didn't need to do that.

As he thought that, he sensed something and looked towards the sky as his eyes narrowed.

A few seconds later, some of the stronger Saint realm elders also noticed something.

It was a dark aura that undulated above the sky, flickering for a few seconds.

It looked as if it was hesitating whether it should descend fully or not.

Shen Jing frowned. He looked around but he couldn't see a single saint realm elder missing.

"Did a Saint enter the realm while I was away?" he asked softly, but every single person there heard him.

"No, senior," the saint elders told him.

Shen Jing didn't see any reason to doubt them since their number was the same.

'Then… could it be him?' he thought. Alex was the only non-saint realm cultivator to go inside the realm who could have learned a Dao for himself.

Since he now held authority over something fundamental in the world, the world would start to slowly give him obstacles in his cultivation journey.

Sometimes, they would be mental, sometimes physical.

From the looks of the sky, Shen Jing was sure this was a mental obstacle that never fully descended. If it fully did, it would be unnoticeable. Meaning…

"That kid nearly developed an Inner Demon, huh?"

Chapter 657: Followed

The door to the cultivation room opened and Alex walked out with Pearl in his robes.

He looked warily outside, wondering if he really had stayed in that room for an entire month.

The light at the end of the hallway shined with people outside, so Alex was more sure that the 10 days had not passed.

'So it really has been only a single day huh?' he thought and slowly walked outside.

When he reached outside, he saw a massive group of people simply watching him.

"192!" the lady next to him shouted out and someone walked past Alex after showing his paper.

"What are you doing here? Leave," the lady shouted at Alex. Alex turned and looked at her. She was so weak and yet she was giving orders to everyone.

'That's the power of backing, huh?' he thought and left. In the back of his mind, he wondered if he should find a powerful organization to back him when he left this realm.

But when he thought about it, he already had the Alchemy guild. If as he had thought, he went to the formation guild and got entered there as well, he would likely improve as well.

After that, he planned on learning the runes too, which would give him extra knowledge to go around in the future.

As he left the entrance and walked back to the crowd, he couldn't help but wonder what day it was. He had spent too much time feeling nothing but pain back in that room.

Alex's mind was in so much disarray that he had to ask someone how many days it had been since the realm opened.

'Ah, it's been 6 days already huh?' he thought. Then he thought about the 3rd day. 'Wasn't that door supposed to open sometime soon? Sometime between tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, right?'

Alex needed to go back to the 'House of the Undying' and wait around for it to open up. After that… he would likely have to think about that after it was open.

He could likely open up the door right now if he had help from others, but he didn't want to show off his ability to anyone else.

So, he would just have to wait out the days.

'I wonder what I should do after the door is open?' he wondered, there didn't seem to be anything interesting going on after that in the realm.

'Well, if people start leaving early because of boredom, then I can enter the various rooms and find some treasures for myself,' he thought.

That was assuming this place even had treasures anymore.

'I hope it does,' he thought and walked down the mountain.

Pearl really wanted to go to the small lake that healed them to clean themselves.

It seemed Pearl cared more about being clean than being wet now. He still remembered the time when he hated getting into the pond with him.

'Ah~ he's growing by the day,' Alex thought.

As he walked along, with not a care in the world, he suddenly sensed something. It was a feeling that was hard to explain.

It was something negative for sure, but it more so felt like someone's gaze was on him.

Alex didn't turn around and slowly spread out his spiritual sense to see if he could find anyone with it.

'Ah, it's this guy,' he thought as memories came back to him and his eyes grew colder.

He acted like he didn't see the man, or his 2 friends that he had brought along and went deeper into the forest, away from where he needed to be going.

After nearly 20 minutes of walking, Alex thought he was far away that no one else would see him fight.

"You guys must be quite interested in me to even follow me to such an obscure location," Alex said as he turned around. "Are you not afraid something bad will happen while you aren't around people?"

The man from a few days ago, or a month ago for everyone here, showed up in front of him from behind a tree.

"You really are quite strong to have sensed us coming," he said. "However, that doesn't mean anything. Now that I have help, I will be sure to kill you and take your beast for myself."

"Let's not get hasty now," the short-haired man next to him said as he brought out a metal bowl. "If I like it, I might keep it for myself too."

"Hehe, you jest quite a lot, senior brother," the other man with a thick mustache said. "You already have 4 beasts. Any more and you will have trouble breaking through, you know?"

"You don't have to worry about my spirit, younger brother. I ate a spirit enhancing pill some time ago and I can handle 5 beasts easily," the man with the short hair said.

"Senior brother, Junior brother, I was the one who gave you the information. You can take his items, but you can't take away the beast from me," the man said.

"Hehe, how about the one with the least beasts gets that… what was it? A Cat? Right, that cat," the youngest one said.

Alex looked in surprise. 'Did he forget how close to death he was? Or is he relying on this older man with True Lord 7th realm cultivation base?' Alex wondered.

The man had improved to True Lord 6th realm, and the youngest one was still at True Lord 5th realm.

'I wonder if their beasts improved as well?' Alex thought. Even though their cultivation bases were slightly hard to quantify against his own, he knew for sure that Pearl's cultivation base in the 6th realm could easily deal 9th realm damage.

So, he saw no reason to fear.

Still, he decided not to let Pearl fight this battle. He wanted to find out how much his own ability had grown.

"Alright, stop wasting time. I don't have all day," Alex said.

"Why? You going somewhere?" the youngest one asked.

"As a matter of fact, yes. So please hurry up. I need to test my newfound strength," Alex said.

All 3 of the men immediately narrowed their eyes. "You want to test your strength against us? Keep wishing," the oldest one said.

"Junior brother, send out your beast and beat him. Make sure not to kill him. We need to wait until he brings out that cat," the old man said.

"Sure!" the youngest one said and brought out a True Lord 6th realm Steelbeaked Hawk.

The young man checked Alex's right arm to make sure there was no tattoo, and said, "Go tear off his right arm."

The hawk screeched as it flew up to the sky and came down at a very fast speed.

Just when it was about to reach him, Alex swung his empty hand above him. Even as the Hawk swooped down, an illusory sword only Alex could see passed through it.

The Hawk's body froze up, no longer as elegant, and crashed onto Alex.

After getting cut with the spiritual sword, the Hawk could no longer produce the same amount of defense as it previously could. Still, its speed never feels.

So, when it slammed onto the stone-solid Alex, its head caved in and within seconds, the beast died.

Alex swiped off the bits of blood from his robes and looked back at the men. "Are you going to die without having your beasts out?" he asked as his sword appeared in his hand.

The youngest of them cried out and brought out a yellow snake.

The oldest of them frowned and brought out a Green Bull, a Purple Pheasant, a Black Snake, and an Emerald Wolf.

Finally, the one that Alex was after brought out his Ape, Spider, and Lizard.

Each and every one of the beasts was strong, but not a single one of them was over True Lord 7th realm.

"Finally," Alex said and dashed forward.

The Ape and the Bull ran in front of all the other beasts. Alex jumped to the right of the Bull and used the Ape's incoming arm to spin himself on top of it and slashed at the same arm.

He wasn't able to cut it in two, but his sword did go in deep.

When the Pheasant sent out fire projectiles towards him that themselves were in the shape of Pheasants, Alex dashed backward and sent his own water slashes to destroy them.

Water Slash was a Mortal grade technique, but that was enough to destroy these attacks.

The ground vibrated as spikes appeared from below it. Alex could see that it was the job of the Black Snake.

Alex spun in mid-air to dodge the incoming fang-shaped metal attack of the yellow snake and created a small explosion next to him to destroy the spider's webs.

At the same time, he cut the vines that were creeping behind him and spun mid-air to kick the bull back.

Alex let the spit of the lizard land on him as the poison did nothing to him and in one fell sweep cut the wolf that was trying to swing at him.

After the wolf was cut, Alex turned around and gave the 3 men a wide grin.

The fight had only lasted a couple of seconds at best, but they understood that Alex was very strong.

Just then, they heard a groan

Even Alex was surprised as he looked in the direction of the groan.

The Ape was now down on the ground and was holding its cut arm as it fidgeted around.

'What's up with that?' Alex thought.

Chapter 658: Poison

Watching the Ape scream and roll on the ground, Alex couldn't help but be surprised.

Sure, a cut to the arm was painful, but… not that painful, right?

As he watched, suddenly he noticed something. White fizz appeared around the corner of the Ape's lips.

'What?' Alex was a little surprised.

"It's been poisoned," the oldest man of the group said with a hit of fear in his eyes.

"What?" the Ape's master looked at it and then towards Alex. A hammer appeared on his arm and he rushed forward.

"I will kill you myself," he shouted.

The other two looked at him in confusion and then terror. "Idiot! Come back, you'll die," the older one shouted, but the man didn't hear him at all.

"Good," Alex said and dashed forward.

Just as he was about to reach Alex, the man's eyes suddenly lost all hint of anger, and instead a calm but serious look took its place.

Then, the man suddenly changed his direction.

'Going towards your beast huh?' Alex thought. He inwardly commended him on putting on such an act. Alex had surely been fooled.

But, that wasn't going to stop him from defeating the man.

Instantly, he teleported next to the man and swung his sword. However, the target wasn't there at all.

"Shit!" Alex cried out. His Yang Qi was once again disrupting his ability to use the teleportation technique.

Fortunately, he wasn't more than a couple of steps away from the man, so he stepped down on the ground and took off again.

The man had noticed him already and turned his hammer around to attack him. At the same time, a lion's roar sounded from the hammer as an illusory head of a lion appeared on it.

Alex flipped his sword and caught it in an underhanded position as golden light clumped upon his hand to make up a golden claw.

~BOOM~

The Tiger influenced claw met a Lion's head and a destructive shockwave sent both of them flying in either direction.

Alex slammed onto a tree and caught himself as he fell down. At the same time, vines appeared around him to wrap him again.

Alex swung his sword twice and all the vines disappeared. Then, seeing that the man was far away, he jumped towards the other beasts.

If he wanted to protect one beast, then he should be ready to lose two.

Alex appeared in front of the spider who could only cower in fear. In a single motion, he cut 4 of the spider's legs before it could even do something and then dug his sword onto its head.

Next, he moved towards the bull. It had been trying to wrap him around with vines. As he approached, the green's body shined green and suddenly, there were 4 clones of the bull, making a total of 5.

Alex suddenly used the Penta Sword technique and controlled each one of the metal Qi to go flying towards the 5 beasts.

4 beasts were hit, and 1 of them dodged. Alex knew which to attack now. So, with a sword that nearly shone fully white, he sent out a golden slash at the bull that was too fast for it to dodge.

The bull was cleanly cut in half.

"No," the older one thought. "Come back," he suddenly ordered his two remaining beasts.

This fight had been a mistake. They were going to lose more than they could ever gain. Each of them had already lost a beast, and now he lost another one.

"No way you are going anywhere," Alex said and dashed towards him. The older man startled and quickly hefted the sword in his hand.

When their two swords clashed, a barrier suddenly appeared on the older man's body.

'So strong,' he thought, and then the feeling of horror came as the teleportation energy of the talisman that had just activated started to take him away.

"No, I haven't take—"

Before he could speak, he vanished.

"Tsk!" Alex didn't like that his enemies kept escaping from where they stood because of some goddamn talisman.

He casually used his stump to block the spearhead of the youngest one and got close to drive his own sword through his stomach.

Another barrier appeared as the young man was teleported away.

"Fuck!" Alex cried out. He hated letting them get away. However, he couldn't do anything.

When he turned around, he noticed something missing from the area. The yellow snake was gone too. That guy just now must have taken it back into its beast space.

Alex's eyes saw nothing but hateful faces of the remaining beasts and the single man who had already turned around to run away, leaving his beast behind.

Something white flashed in front of Alex as a small cat appeared. "Go after him, I will fight with them," Pearl said.

Alex nodded and ran after the man. Alex felt that it was a joke how fast he caught up to the man.

As he did, he slashed his sword at him. The man tried to dodge, but he wasn't fast enough and cut on the back.

The man then pulled up his hammer and got ready to fight. A lion's shout appeared on it again, but Alex dodged it this time. Blocking would only give the man time to run away.

At the same time, he sent out a slash back at the man, who barely used his defensive technique to block it.

Alex sent out, even more, slashes at him, but he was barely hanging on with his defense. Seeing this, Alex decided to add his sword intent to the attack as well.

As he was about to do that, the man's eyes began to shake.

Then, he fell onto one knee as his whole body started shaking. "Da-Damn you… poison… use…" the man tried to force out his words, but his throat was already closing.

He tried to look at his storage bag with shaky hands, but Alex wasn't going to let him.

In a single dash, he appeared right in front of the man. Then, in a smooth motion, expecting a barrier to appear anytime, he swung his sword.

~SWISH~

To his surprise, Alex's sword easily went through the man's neck and came out the other side.

"What?" he thought with nothing but the surprise on his face. 'Why did his talisman not activate? Did he forget to bring one back?' Alex thought.

Since he hadn't done that, he was now dead. 'That's what you get for not preparing,' Alex said as he scanned his body with his spiritual sense.

He stole away the storage bag and looked back towards Pearl to see him having an easy time with the beasts.

He could see the pheasant and the black snake wrapped up in something golden, while Pearl fought the venomous lizard from a distance.

'Good,' Alex thought after seeing Pearl's intelligence in fighting a beast that could beat him. Shen Jing had taught him better than he could have hoped for.

Then, he turned around to check on the wound the man. As expected, he was telling the truth.

'I poisoned him,' Alex thought and looked at his sword. He hadn't checked it in the time when he trained, but now that he did, he could see that his entire sword had actually been coated in the poison and venom of many different beasts and plants from the poison valley.

He couldn't tell how the poisons and venoms interacted with each other now that they had fully mixed on his blade, but whatever it was, he could kill True Lord cultivators with that poison.

"I got something good out of that fight, I see," he said to himself. "I wonder if I should make sure not to put the sword in water."

Alex returned back to Pearl, only to find that he had managed to kill the lizard by putting it on the same sort of binding the other two beasts were at.

Alex went up to them and saw that they were golden ropes forged by metal Qi. "How did you learn this?" he asked.

"Old man," Pearl said.

"Old man?" Alex looked confused. "Shen Jing?"

"Yes," Pearl nodded.

"Well, he's not really— wait, I guess he is very old," Alex thought. Sometimes, he forgot how old Shen Jing was from just seeing his young face.

"Alright, let's take care of this and leave," Alex said.

Pearl nodded and without hesitation killed the other two beasts before taking their cores to Alex.

Alex got out what body parts he could from the beasts and left with Pearl in his robes.

Pearl insisted on visiting the healing pool again, so Alex was forced to take him there.

Alex had time to waste so he didn't mind.

Once night fell, they left the pool and slowly made their way towards the 5th mountain.

With their speed, it was nearly sunrise when they reached there.

Even before reaching the plateau, Alex could tell that there were a lot of people already gathered there.

Climbing to the top of the mountain only helped to confirm this. 'So many,' Alex thought as he looked at the near 500 people in that location.

Given that it was actually supposed to be opening tomorrow, Alex was sure there would be more people coming soon.

As the sound of attacks rung throughout the mountain like a giant bell hung in the sky, Alex was relieved that the door had in fact not yet been broken through.

Now that he was here, all he had to do now was wait around.

Chapter 659: Chaos

Alex stood in a corner of the crowd, quietly watching the elites in front of them hammer away at the house.

Some of the elites turned around to look at them and showed a dissatisfied expressions.

"While we slave away here trying to weaken the barrier, they are simply waiting to get a part of the prize," He Liwei said with a frowned expression on his face.

"Why don't you invite them all to hit it then? That should solve your problem right?" a low, ghastly voice escaped from the thin and emotionless Guo Chaing.

He was the disciple from the Broken River sect that had decided to leave once he learned that attacking the door wasn't worth it.

However, after learning about Tian Ye's assessment on the matter, he seemed to have returned to get some sort of prize for himself as well.

"That's… not a bad idea," Zhou Ren said from the side, making Guo Chiang make a 'tsk' sound. Zhou Ren heard it, but he didn't comment on it.

"Stop talking and continue attacking!" Liang Qiu shouted at them, leading the three to go back to attacking.

The only ones who stayed to the side without attacking were the prince and the green-robed Lu Yan that Alex recognized.

The attacks continued for a while longer. However, with each attack, Alex could see the barrier flickering more and more unstably.

'It's any time now,' he thought and slowly stepped back from the crowd until he was behind a tree and couldn't be seen by anyone.

Then, he concealed his cultivation and went invisible. As far as he could tell, this was the best way to sneak in there and get away with stealing under supervision.

Surely Alex would be seen through the spiritual sense of the 5 or so people that were here, but that was fine. There were simply too many people here for someone to keep track of just him using their spiritual sense.

After all, despite seeing everything at once, it took them quite the mental power to perfectly keep track of everything at once.

Now fully concealed, Alex waited in silence.

The group kept on attacking one after another, and after two hours, the barrier flickered for the last time.

~BANG~

One of Han Daiyu's attacks broke a part of the house's wall and everyone looked in shock.

"Go!" someone from the crowd shouted and everyone ran forward.

Not even the elites dared to stop nearly 800 people trying to enter the house. All they could do was get in first and get what they could.

Alex was in the middle group when he walked through the door. He sensed multiple spiritual senses all around him that were slowly moving further and further away.

They were too bothered with finding treasures, so Alex was fine for now.

Books, artifacts, weapons, furniture, paintings, jewelry, metal works. The group of people that entered didn't leave a single thing behind at all.

Some even started fighting in the crowd, trying to steal each other's treasures.

Alex frowned. The scene was too chaotic and the House of the Undying was way too large for him to go around leisurely searching.

So, in an act of desperation, he opened up his spiritual sense and sent it out in every direction.

He could see the people already reaching the far corners of the house that was nearly 300 meters wide.

At the same time, Alex saw something that surprised him.

'There is an underground,' he realized. Before his spiritual sense brought attention to him, he took it back and directly teleported to the lower floor.

Alex appeared half a foot above the ground and lightly tapped on the wooden floor underneath. He could already hear people coming down, so he had to hurry.

Alex rushed towards one of the rooms to the right and saw vials lined up on a shelf. He immediately walked in and emptied the shelf.

Then, he walked out and went to another room. Even as he did, Alex could sense someone's spiritual sense upon him.

'Dammit, I'm isolated, so I'm easy to find,' he thought. He sent out his own spiritual sense, not worrying about getting caught for now, and checked the room ahead of him.

There were weapons in that room, but Alex didn't need one at the moment. 'Should I still take it?' he thought.

However, just then, he noticed another floor below him. "Let's go," he thought and teleported down to that floor.

The person that had followed him frowned when they saw that he had gone downstairs, but stayed behind to get the weapons while still keeping tabs on Alex.

Alex had already sensed the person by now and saw that it was a woman in the True Lord 9th realm cultivation base.

It would be a little hard if he were to fight her, but he could certainly escape from her. The thing that worried him more than her cultivation base was the robe she was wearing.

A crimson red robe that was hard to stare at. That girl was from the Fu family.

'Fu Tao is at the 8th True King realm. While I may be friendly to him, I can't tell if he will suddenly ask me to give him all of my belongings,' Alex thought.

So, quickly, he went around the underground, looking for anything he could find.

From what he could sense, this was the last floor, and beneath him was just dirt. He could also sense that most of the room was empty, aside from one.

At the same time, Alex heard a lot of footsteps coming down the stairs again. He needed to hurry.

He dashed towards the door and slammed through it instead of opening it. Then, he grabbed the single thing that was in this room, a storage bag, and turned to walk out not before looking at the horrifyingly black floor.

If his guess was not wrong, then all the black down there, was blood. 'How many demons and beasts had to be killed here for there to be such a carpet-like layer of blood,' he thought with horror on his face.

However, he couldn't think for long with the people coming. So, he immediately teleported to the upper floor.

When he did, a spiritual sense landed on him from not far away from him. As such, he got face to face with the lady in crimson who looked at him with gleaming eyes like a predator that had found its prey.

She ran towards him but Alex teleported again, going one floor higher.

"I see you, boy," a voice drifted into his head from the lady down below.

'Dammit!' Alex thought. He really wanted to find some more treasures but from the look of it, most of them had already been taken away by others.

Alex gave one last look with his spiritual sense and ran before another one of the spiritual sense users could find him.

"Shit! That's why I didn't want to use my spiritual sense," he thought as he ran down the mountain. "No, it wasn't the spiritual sense that got me caught. It was the teleporting ahead of everyone."

Isolating himself from the group of people had really been a bad choice, but that was what had allowed him to raid that room with a lot of vials.

Alex took out the vials and opened them to see what was inside. At first, he saw some sort of gooey substance inside and wondered if the pills that were supposed to be inside had already melted.

However, he then remembered that the demons didn't know how to make pills.

"Oh, that means these are medicinal pastes," he thought. When he checked through the many vials, he saw that there were maybe only 5 different pastes together.

'Well, that's not bad, I guess,' he thought as he walked through the forest towards the 6th mountain.

He wasn't planning to go to the 6th mountain, but rather stay away from the woman as far as he could for now.

Since it was already the 7th day's afternoon, there were only 3 more days to stay in this place. After that, he would be in the protection of Shen Jing, and he would be fine.

After coming relatively far away, Alex sat on top of a tree and took out the storage bag to see what was inside.

He slowly sent his spiritual sense inside and couldn't help but be both shocked and confused at what he saw.

Chapter 660: Spiritual Attack

"The hell?" Alex said as he saw the only thing that was inside the storage bag.

An egg.

Alex took out the egg and carefully looked at it. The surface of the egg was the same rough texture as any chicken's egg he had handled back at home.

The size was a bit bigger than a normal chicken's egg, and that confused Alex as to what it could be.

His spiritual sense didn't enter the eggshell either.

'Could it be a bird?' he thought. 'Am I going to have to raise a bird now?'

'No wait, reptiles lay egg too. So do fishes, but that's not what a fish egg looks like,' he thought.

"So it can be some sort of bird, or snakes, or lizards and such huh," he thought.

"Also, what do I do to get it to hatch? Is this egg even fertilized? Should I heat it under low-temperature flames?"

Many questions ran across Alex's mind, but not a single answer came to him.

In the end, he could only put the egg back into his ring and wait until he left and found more information about how beast eggs.

Just then, Alex heard something and turned around, only to see a woman standing not far away from him with a grin on her face.

Alex's heart skipped a beat when he saw this woman. It was the same crimson-robed girl he thought he had escaped.

Alex jumped down from the tree and stood in front of her. He then sent out his spiritual sense all around her and checked if there were more people with her.

"So strong," the girl said with genuine shock. "How did you get your spiritual sense to become this wide?"

Alex didn't notice anyone around her at all. 'Are they far away?' he wondered. Judging by the girl's cultivation base, Pearl would definitely have a hard time.

Not only Pearl, Alex himself would have a relatively hard time against her. 'Should I hide Pearl? Or should I use his help?' Alex thought.

In the end, he decided to protect Pearl for now. If he needed help, Pearl could come out whenever required.

In a flash of white light, Pearl went back to the beast space on Alex's body.

The girl in front of him frowned when she saw that. "Are you not going to answer me?" she asked with a tone that said her feelings were hurt.

"Why are you after me?" he asked.

"Because you are special," she said. "Cultivation hiding technique, invisibility technique, teleportation technique, and such a large spiritual sense."

"If I had to guess, you have a lot of treasures on you right now, don't you?" she asked.

Alex frowned. 'I can't waste any more time,' he thought and sent out Heaven's Impact at the woman.

As the fist-shaped spiritual energy was about to reach her, an illusory barrier only visible to his spiritual sense appeared in front of her that blocked Heaven's impact.

Alex frowned. 'I can't win this,' he thought. If someone with a higher cultivation base than him had ways of protecting themselves from his spiritual sense, then the only thing Alex could do was run.

And so he ran. Using every skill aside from the Earth devouring technique, Alex ran as far as he could and left the woman behind.

He ran for nearly half an hour and almost reached the edge of the realm.

He stopped after a while and panted for a few seconds. Then, he jumped up to a tree to gather the Qi he had lost.

It didn't take him very long to get back to top shape and jumped down to go somewhere else instead of staying in the corner of the world.

Just as he was thinking that he saw the woman walking through the thicket in the forest with a casual pace and a smile on her face.

"You left without answering me, so I had to come to find you," she said.

By this time, Alex was more than shocked. 'How is this woman finding me?' he thought. He had clearly run in random directions to arrive where he had, and somehow she had come directly to him.

Judging by her pace, she must've taken the most straight route as well.

'Is she tracking me somehow?' he thought. Using his spiritual sense, he tried to find out what she was using to find him, but there was nothing on his body.

No talisman or any Qi.

"How are you finding me?" Alex asked with a serious face.

"Do you think I will reveal my skills to you?" she asked with a giggle. "You know what? Maybe I will if you just tell me how to increase my spiritual sense to the same level as you?"

Alex tried probing her spiritual sense to see how strong it was, but clearly, it wasn't very strong.

The girl frowned a little. "Don't think you can win against me just because your spiritual sense is stronger than me," she said. "My treasure helps block any mental attack that did not originate from a Saint expert themselves," she said.

"Also, I doubt you would want your measly True Lord 1st realm cultivation base to use against me, right?" she asked.

Alex's heart lost another beat. 'How does she know?' he thought. He had been hiding his cultivation base as much as he could, and yet the woman had found it somehow.

"Can we leave our separate ways?" Alex asked. He didn't want to do this, but it seemed he would have to use the one way he had to escape this situation.

"I'm on good terms with brother Fu Tao. Can you let me go on that account?" Alex asked as he looked at her face for changes.

And changes he found. The initially haughty and curious face turned into surprise.

"You know Fu Tao?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I was the one that helped him return to this empire from the other side of the Northern forest."

The woman's face changed once again. This time, it went from surprised to angry and raged.

'What?' Alex thought as he looked at the face.

"You were the one who helped Fu Tao return?" she asked. "You were the one who destroyed my future as the best disciple of the family?"

'Holy shit, she's crazy,' Alex thought. It seemed he had somehow managed to find the only fuel he had and dumped it all on her silently burning anger.

Now she was raging.

Suddenly, to Alex's senses, waves like spiritual energy crashed onto him, threatening to devour his mind.

Alex sent out his own spiritual sense to counter it but despite being stronger than her spiritual sense in general, Alex had a hard time fighting it.

He felt like he was using normal Qi in his body to fight a power that was born out of a technique.

Brute force could only help him as much.

Alex sent out a Heaven's Impact, and as he expected, it quickly broke through the wave and struck the girl. However, another spiritual barrier appeared to protect her.

'I'm not going to get through to her like this,' Alex thought. He needed to do something quickly.

The poisoned sword appeared in his hands and he rushed forward. At the same time, a sword appeared in the girl's hands as well.

Fu Xiran's main expertise was in mental attacks. Given that her family's signature skills were all spiritual attacks.

From a young age, she had been trained in the arts of mental attacks and when she was able to prove herself to the family, they finally handed her a Spirit Cleansing Lily when she entered the True Realm.

This year, she was already 30 years old. A 30-year-old at True Lord 9th realm would be considered a top-class talent anywhere.

However, to the Fu Family, who had Fu Tao, a 26-year-old talent that entered the True King realm, she was nothing.

The only time in her entire life when she had heard news about Fu Tao, which was also good news for her, was when she learned of his death.

However, not a few months later, that too was destroyed by another news about his return.

She had never felt more anger and despair in her whole life. She wanted to beat him, and become the strongest in the family.

She wanted more than what she had right now. And just as she wished for it, in came a young man with a spiritual sense that dwarfed anyone in the entire group of the young generation.

After placing a spiritual mark on him, she had also come to find out about his cultivation base as well.

'Hmph, I will have to carefully disable him without activating the teleportation talisman he too may have,' she thought.

So, when the fight began, she met his sword with her own.

And then, her eyes went wide.

"What the hell is this strength?" she shouted out loud at him. The mark was clearly telling her that he was in True Lord 1st realm, and yet the strength… it was close to True Lord 7th realm.

Alex's sword glowed with golden light as well as a white light that tried to cover his sword but ended up being nothing more than an outline.

'Sword Intent as well?' the girl looked in shock. When she took that attack, she felt the strength of True Lord 8th realm.

'I need to do something quick, or I won't be able to defeat him without using my strong attacks she thought.

So, she brought out some things from her storage bag and got to work

Chapter 661: Dream

Alex saw some things come out of her storage bag, but before he could see what it was, a large spiritual wave crashed at him, forcing him to recall his spiritual sense to fight against it.

At the same time, a barrier of blue appeared around her, stopping Alex from seeing what she was doing.

Then, the barrier crumbled as many sharp icicles remained around her.

The girl grabbed one of the icicles and threw it at Alex with her full force while continuously driving down her wave of spiritual energy at him too.

Alex swung his sword and crushed the icicle coming at him.

Then, two more came. One right next to him and one quite far away. Alex easily dodged the one that was further away and broke the one that was next to him.

Even as the wave of spiritual energy crashed down on him, the girl didn't stop the barrage of icicles at him.

Alex blocked the ones he needed to, but most of them he simply dodged.

'Is this girl trying to tire me out?' he thought. She clearly wasn't planning to hurt him with the icicles, so Alex wondered if her plan was to make him use up as much Qi as he could before she completely dominated him with her own power.

'She doesn't know how much I have, and that will be her downfall,' Alex thought.

Just as he thought that the icicles around the girl ended, she showed a happy smile like a crazed maniac.

"Finally," she said as she stopped her spiritual attack and pulled back her spiritual sense.

Alex's own spiritual sense finally spread out freely with no obstruction. And when it did reach around him to see the neatly lined icicles, suspicion grew in his heart.

Then, the icicles melted, and of the nearly 30 icicles that were on the ground, out of 8 of them, black metallic rods appeared with a leather flag on top of it.

"Shit!" Alex cried out and tried to run, but it was too late.

A massive barrier of crimson light appeared all around him, blocking his escape. Worst of all, the formation rods were outside the barrier.

"I finally… got you," the girl said with a heavy strain on her voice. She hadn't done well attacking him with her spiritual sense with such persistence.

Alex attacked the barrier with any and every skill he had. Fist, Punch, slash, anything he could think of.

Alex even tried to use the Earth Devour technique to escape, but the barrier blocked it.

'Dammit!' he thought. His lack of experience when it can fighting a strong human opponent had become his downfall.

Then, he started feeling groggy. 'Disorienting formation?' he wondered, but that wasn't it. He could clearly see the woman outside eating a pill with no problem.

If he was being disoriented, then the direction or the angle of what he saw would become disoriented as well.

'Why is my head feeling so heavy?' he thought.

As if to answer him, the girl spoke. "It's a Spirit Restraining formation. Inside that formation, your spiritual sense will be restrained to a mere fraction of what you can truly use," she said.

Alex struck the formation as hard as he could. If his attack was strong enough, he could surely destroy the formation even from the inside.

If not destroyed, he could use up the spirit stones and cause that to have the formation fail.

So, he continued attacking.

Then, something happened that caused Alex to drop his sword. He looked in front of him and saw the girl use some sort of spiritual technique on him that was making him really groggy and sleepy.

Alex used his spiritual sense to fight back, but he was barely able to push it back. He didn't bother getting down to grab the sword and instead brought out the other, better sword to attack with it.

Then he continued sending out a barrage of attacks at the barrier.

The girl frowned. 'How strong is his mind? Why is the Spiritual Dream Sequence not starting already?' she thought and pushed further.

She even ate a Saint rank Mind Recovery pill to restore her lost spiritual sense in a matter of minutes as well as eat a Spiritual Enhancement pill to improve her mental strength for a few minutes.

She just needed a few minutes of him not fighting back before the formation fully suppressed his spiritual sense.

As the strength of her attack grew, Alex was unable to keep up his own attack and slowly, he succumbed to the dream she put him in.

* * * * *

Alex opened his eyes in the midst of many people, all of whom were wearing black clothes.

'Where am I?' he thought for a second before he realized there was a casket at the center of the group.

They were outside, and this was a funeral.

Alex looked to his side and saw his Aunt Liz crying her eyes out while holding a little Hannah next to the very young-looking Uncle Rob.

Aunt Liz never seemed to age after hitting her prime, but why was Uncle Rob so young?

Alex heard some sniffling behind him and turned his head to see his mother's young face, filled with tears.

He then looked around, hoping to find his father, but he wasn't there at all.

"Where is grampa, mama?" Alex was surprised to hear his own voice come out of his mouth.

Helen only cried louder, unable to answer.

'Ah!' Alex thought. 'This must be grandfather's funeral. I was… 3 at the time, right?'

Alex's grandmother had died before he was even born, and about 10 years after that, his grandfather had died as well.

'What is this? Am I back in time?' he thought. 'No, this feels more like a dream.'

'What a vivid dream,' he thought.

"Thank you all for gathering here today," a man's voice boomed even without any speaker.

'Father!' Alex thought as he looked towards the front of the funeral to see his, young but still brawny, father speak while holding back his tears.

"My father," Alex's father started and went on a speech about how good a man his father was, and how he had on his own opened a farm at the end of nowhere, and did such an amazing job raising two fantastic children.

Liz could only cry louder as she heard the speech.

"This is a grim day for us, but we will not let it stop us," Alex's father said, his voice booming with every single word.

"As my father used to say, whether you are beaten or hurt, you let that pain go through you, change you, and then you stand up and keep moving forward."

"I know my father wouldn't want us to stop here and would want us to do better, keep moving forward, and make him proud."

"So, that is exactly what we will do. You hear that, father. I won't stop! I will keep moving forward and make you proud."

Alex looked in stun as he had never heard his father say something with so much intensity and conviction.

He wanted to see more, but even as he did, the people blurred like ink drops on water, and the scene in front of him changed.

Chapter 662: Keep Moving Forward

The inks in the water moved and twisted as they settled on another dream, another scene from his past that he had forgotten.

This time, Alex was inside a small room with shelves full of books and trophies to one side, and a large window on the other.

He was sitting on top of something and could see a desk in front of him. There were pens and markers in a glass, a bunch of files to the side, and a sign that said 'headmaster' next to a lamp.

Behind the desk was a man with round glasses and a thick beard. At the very least, this man was 40 years old.

"Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. And Mrs. Benton," the man spoke. "I… I don't know what to say, honestly."

"You can start by saying why there is a bandage wrapped around my son's head for now," Alex heard his father speak.

His father was currently holding him.

'So young,' Alex thought when he saw his father. He looked almost as young as in the last dream.

Next to him, Alex saw his mother. She too was so young and so beautiful. Alex almost couldn't believe how thin she was as well.

Then, he saw her face with fury clear in her eyes. She was angry.

Alex didn't remember seeing her angry. Sure, she would get annoyed sometimes and become serious when it was time for him to get a scolding. But never had he seen her with such rage.

'What happened to make her feel this angry?' he wondered.

"I'm so sorry that this has happened. These kids aren't used to seeing someone younger in the same grade as them. We… we didn't think that little Alex would get bullied by the older students. Please don't worry, we have punished them and let their parents know as well," the headmaster said.

That was when Alex put together where he was. 'This is the school?' Alex thought. Because of how far away the school was, Alex's father had taken him out of it to home-school him. So, he never really remembered his time at school.

'I was also… just 5 years old, wasn't I?' he thought.

"We told you," his father's calm voice spoke. "We insisted that you don't send Alex up a grade and instead keep him with his own peers. But you didn't listen, did you?"

"And now my son is hurt because of you. He is bleeding from the forehead."

Despite looking calm, his father had rage in his voice too.

"I'm so sorry about that. That was our mistake. I will suspend the other children if that's what you want," the headmaster said.

"I don't care about what you do to the other kids. I simply want you to immediately transfer him back to first grade again, so he can study like a normal child," Alex's father said.

"That's… that's a little hard. Alex is too good for his class. He understands everything about his subject. Trust me, it will be better for him to skip class."

"He's already starting to show how good he is at second grade's subjec—"

"Stop it," Alex's father said. "If you won't transfer him to his appropriate class, then we will take Alex out of this school."

"And go where?" the headmaster asked. "This is the only school in the area. The nearest other one is 2 hours from here. You will have to waste 8 hours a day just to get your son to and from school."

"We don't have to take him to any school. We will home-school him. My wife used to work as a teacher in the city, so she knows how to do it well," Alex's father said and stood up.

When he did, he hulked over the Headmaster, giving him a small fright. "Let's go, dear," he said and walked out.

The entire time there, Alex's mother said nothing at all for she feared all the curses she would throw at the headmaster for letting a bunch of older students bully her 5-year-old son.

When they returned back to his father's old truck, his mother finally took him and caressed his head.

"Does it hurt, Al?" she asked softly.

"N-no," Alex once again heard his voice come out even though he didn't speak.

Alex chuckled a little as he heard the pain in his own voice. 'Why was I trying to hide my pain? Did I want to look strong like father?' he thought.

Suddenly, his father slightly pressed on his wound. "Ouch!" Alex cried out and tear filled his eyes.

"See? It hurts," he said with a slight chuckle.

"What are you doing?" his mom cried out, but his father ignored her and looked at him.

"Listen son, you don't have to act like it doesn't hurt. You can cry if you want. All you need to do is not let the pain take you down."

"As my father used to say, whether you are beaten or hurt, you let that pain go through you, change you, and then you stand up and keep moving forward," his father said.

"Keep… moving forward?" the little Alex asked.

"Yes," his father said.

"What are you telling to a 5-year-old kid?" his mother said.

"Uh… right. My bad," his father said and started the truck. "You want to get some snacks on the way, son?"

"Yes," the little Alex shouted in happiness and the small truck moved.

Even as it did, Alex was left behind as he saw the family of 3 move on without him. And soon… they disappeared once more like ink on water.

When the ink resettled once more, Alex found himself standing in the midst of a lot of people. He was maybe a couple of centimeters smaller than what he was at the moment.

'Oh, I grew,' he thought. When he looked around, he recognized the place.

'It's the train station,' he thought. If he was here then…

'This must have been the day I left for university,' he thought.

"You've got everything in your suitcase right?" his father asked.

"Yes, father," Alex said.

"And the location of the dorm? Can you go there by yourself?" he asked.

"I can, father," Alex said.

"Sigh, we sheltered you for far too long because of… never mind. Now that you are an adult, you should be able to handle yourself," his father said.

"For what?" Alex looked confused.

"Oh, here's the train. Quick, get it," his father said and Alex went in.

"Have a safe journey, son. Remember what I told you okay, no going to clubs and stuff," his father said.

"I know, father," Alex said.

"Good," his father said. "And remember, don't let anything in the city weigh you down. It will be new, unique, and probably a scary experience."

"No matter what happens, keep moving forward," his father said.

"Yes, father," Alex said.

"Goodbye son," his father said and the train left.

That was the last day Alex had seen his father. That was the last day he had been in this place. For that was the day he would enter the game and be teleported to the Western Continent.

As the train vanished like ink in water, a single thought swirled around Alex's mind.

Keep Moving Forward.

The ink changed to something else, and Alex found himself on top of a mountain in the middle of the night.

He knelt on the ground and had his master's dying body in his hand.

Alex's face got serious. This was a pain that he never wanted to experience again.

He had already been through this once. He didn't need to go through it twice.

The pain had changed him already, and he didn't let this pain weigh him down. He had already moved forward.

"No!" he said with a stern expression and the dream vanished.

* * * *

Alex opened his eyes on the outside and saw the crimson barrier still surrounding him.

"What? How are you not suppressed already?" the woman outside the barrier shouted at him.

"You…" Alex said with a heavy, but stern expression. He tightened the grip around the sword in his hand, and continued, "You cannot stop me."

"What?" the girl said.

"You cannot stop me," Alex said and dashed ahead to slash. he remembered the words his grandfather used to say, which then became his father's.

Now, it would be his.

"You can beat me, you can hurt me," Alex said as he swung back at the barrier with all he had. He hadn't noticed that he was holding the sword in which he couldn't pour in his Qi at all.

"All that will do is make the pain change me," he shouted and slashed back harder. The barrier shuddered and even the girl was surprised as to what was happening.

This was already a weak barrier because its important function was mental suppression, but physical suppression.

So, when the barrier shook, her heart shook along with it.

'No, he can't break it,' she thought.

"One the pain goes through," Alex shouted as he slashed. "I will stand up."

His strikes got exceedingly violent.

"And I will move forward," he said as he slashed the barrier and stopped. He looked ahead of him in awe as if noticing something for the first time.

"I... will move forward," he said absentmindedly as the pained expression in his eyes changed to one of happiness.

"Yes," he said as he prepared his sword with a white outline appearing on top of it.

"That is me," he said. "I am the one who moves forward no matter what."

The white outline on his sword started to grow and soon, it fully covered the entire sword.

Then, he struck the barrier.

Chapter 663: Just a Little Forward

The white light covered the entire sword as specks of light also flickered out of it like embers from a fireplace.

After 2 entire years of wanting to do it. After getting on the edge of it and being stuck, Alex had finally managed to complete it.

His own Sword Qi.

Even as he sent out a slash with his full force behind the attack, he knew for a fact that this would be the last time he saw the barrier.

When the Sword slash filled with Sword Qi struck the crimson barrier, the barrier shuddered and threatened to break.

The girl felt scared when she saw that, but a split second later her heart calmed down when she saw the barrier didn't break.

However, she then noticed the white slash that still hadn't disappeared.

Alex understood it himself. Unless his Sword Qi was destroyed, it was now a Sword Qi that kept moving forward and didn't stop at all.

So, even when it didn't break the barrier, it kept pushing on it with all of its force.

Then, a second later, there was finally a crack in the barrier.

Then, another second later, the barrier shattered into a million pieces that drifted into the wind like crimson powder that soon disappeared.

Then, the remaining power in the slash moved forward to hit one of the formation flags, and finally, the formation disappeared.

Finally, Alex felt his mind clear up like never before. The sleepiness and the grogginess disappeared just like the suppression on it.

Then he looked at the woman with pure hatred in his eyes.

"You are dead," he said and dashed forward towards her.

The girl used both Spiritual as well as physical attacks but not a single one of them stopped Alex's advancements.

While she was a step higher than him in what she could bring out from her attacks, her attacks never really were about doing physical damage.

They were always about doing mental damage.

She had ways to even beat someone who used artifacts to block mental attacks. All she would have to do was keep them busy until she was able to rip out their artifacts.

However, against someone who had none, she was helpless.

All she could do was fight back and hope she won against him.

However, it very soon became apparent just how stupid her idea was. If it was Alex from before, she could have somehow held him back, or even win against him.

However, now that he had found the inspiration for his sword Qi, she was useless.

Even if he had just learned Sword Qi, he was already sending out attacks that were in the True King realm.

Her defense couldn't stop her from more than a few True King realm attacks.

So, very soon, she found herself on the verge of death.

However, she wasn't worried about death. None of them were. All she was worried about was not being able to beat Alex and steal what made him so great.

She was worried that the treasure she tried so hard to find would be lost to her if she couldn't beat him anymore.

So, she kept fighting back, hoping he would slip, hoping he would make some mistake.

But Alex did none of those. Each one of his attacks was made to kill. If not for the girl's defensive armor, she would've died by now.

However, she couldn't hold on for long. Even an armor as strong could only block as long as it had Qi in it.

Naturally, an armor would siphon Qi from her slowly to continue working. But if she drained it too fast, she wouldn't be able to keep up with the replenishment for the armor.

Once it stopped working, she would have a hard time putting in Qi to make it work again.

And that time was coming closer and closer.

The violent slashes landed all over her body, each with the power to cleave her in half like she were a butter to his hot knife. But the armor kept on protecting her.

Until… it didn't.

Alex heard a crack in the armor, and suddenly, it stopped working. Now, all it could do was work as normal metal armor.

That did as good as being naked in front of his sword.

The girl's eyes went wide as she realized what was about to happen. She was going to lose to a kid. Not only did she lose to Fu Tao, but now she was going to lose to a kid that had barely entered into the True Lord realm.

Rage filled her eyes even as the white sword came next to her, and then…

BANG~

A barrier appeared around her to protect her from the deadly attack.

The girl was already getting wrapped in the silver-white light as she was being teleported away.

Alex felt the rebound and his sword came back to him. Once it stopped, he gripped it harder and slashed it back at her neck. Or, where he thought it would be in the light that already covered her.

His eyes were fueled with rage now. This girl had just come here and tried to kill him, and now she was leaving just like that?

Alex had already let 3 different people that tried to kill him get away all because they were being protected.

'No!' he thought. 'Not this time.'

However, even as his sword arrived next to her next, he could tell that there was some distance between him, and the girl was already being teleported away.

She had begun moving and would soon be out of here.

'No! A little more,' he thought to himself. 'Just a bit forward.'

"Move forward!" he shouted at his own sword and his own self.

Then, as if responding to his cries, his sword increased its length a bit.

No, that was wrong. The sword's length was the same as before.

Alex had moved forward a bit.

No, that was wrong as well. Alex was right where he stood from the beginning.

Then had the girl moved closer to him?

Alex didn't understand, and for now, he didn't care. His wish had been heard and the girl's neck was on his blade.

SLASH~

The white light disappeared, and the girl vanished.

Alex gathered himself as he looked at the empty space in front of him. Then, he looked at the sword in his hand.

There was not a speck of blood on it. There never was.

He didn't need the blood to tell him that he had been successful in cutting her head off. He was confident he had.

Only… he didn't understand how.

* * * * * *

The Saint realm experts were on the outside, calmly meditating in the open space.

There were still 3 more days to go until the realm closed, so they weren't in any hurry.

Just then, two silver lights flashed not far away from them and immediately spiritual sense moved to see who it was.

"Two lights at the same time, what a coincidence," someone said.

"Those kids must have fought each other and managed to land a strong hit on each other," another saint realm expert said

"Or maybe it really is just a coincidence," another elder said.

They expected one of their disciples to come out of the silvery-white light, so all of them looked with interest.

Then, the two lights disappeared at once.

On one side fell a headless corpse of a woman wearing crimson robes. On the other side fell the head of the corpse of the woman who one of the elders recognized.

"Xiran!" the crimson-robed elder shouted and went up to her. However, he was too late. The girl was dead.

"Who killed our disciple!" the old man shouted with rage and the island shuddered.

Shen Jing's eyes opened at the commotion as even he was surprised.

'How was a corpse teleported after the person was killed?' he wondered. His first thought was someone used a teleportation talisman to send the body and head separately, but that didn't make sense.

The girl herself should have had a protective talisman on her.

He checked her wound and suddenly something caught his eyes. Those cuts…

'How?' his eyes went wide in horror. 'How is someone able to do this?'

He couldn't imagine how there could even exist a True realm cultivator in this continent, nay, in this entire world that could possibly do such a thing.

If that person was to grow and learn more… even Shen Jing started to fear a little for the future of these lands.

Chapter 664: Another Door

Alex stared at his sword. With a thought, an outline formed on top of it full of white light.

This was his Sword Intent.

Then, with another thought, the outline increased to the point that it covered the whole blade and all of it glowed white this time.

This was his Sword Qi.

But then… what about when sparks flew out of the white light that surrounded a person? Alex had seen it with Du Yuhan. When he used Sword Qi, sparks would flow around him before converging on the sword to form the sword Qi.

'Am I doing it wrong? Or is my path of the sword just that different?' Alex wondered.

Du Yuhan had told him that his path had been one where he cut everything in his path. So… maybe it was different?

Alex decided to stop thinking about it now and simply rejoiced at the fact that he managed to get past the bottleneck and established his own Sword Qi.

He sat at the foot of the tree with Pearl protecting him as he cultivated to gather up his Qi once more.

By the time he was done, night had already fallen. Alex could leave, but he didn't.

Memories of the day flooded his mind and tear welled up in his eyes. His mother and father... he hadn't seen either of them in over 3 years.

Only after remembering them, seeing them care for him did he realize just how much he had missed them both.

'She did at least one thing nice before she died,' he thought and stood up.

Just like his father said, Alex wouldn't let even this pain stop him. He had to keep moving forward.

So, he stood up from the place and left. The rest of the remaining 3 days felt empty to him.

He couldn't think of what there was in this place to do. He went to the 6th mountain, but it was the same old.

He went around the forest, but aside from finding some ingredients and treasures with a lot of Qi, there was nothing more to find.

Some rogue cultivators as well as normal ones tried to rob him, but they were usually too weak for him even without his elemental Qi, or his sword Qi.

As such, the 8th day passed along as well with nothing of value happening in the land around him.

Alex had returned to the 5th mountain on this day, but there were too many people looking for some treasures, so he could sneakily open a few doors and steal what he could find.

So, he had to leave that place too.

On the 9th day, while roaming around the place, Alex returned back to the 3rd mountain that still had a host of people that looked ready to attack the cultivators belonging to sects and clans that were blocking the route.

Alex shook his head when he saw that and ignored it to go around the mountain. He walked up the side of the mountain, trekking in between the trees as he saw everything around him.

At the top of the mountain, there was another plateau. Alex half-expected a house to be there, but there was nothing there really.

All he could see were tall grasses and short trees.

"Hmm… weird," he thought for a second as he looked at the trees and something looked misplaced there.

He turned around and looked at the other areas and immediately realized what it was. "Right, the trees are too young," he thought.

The grasses and trees filled the area, but they were young.

'Why is it young?' he wondered and sent out his spiritual sense.

At first, nothing seemed abnormal. The Qi was fine and the trees were healthy.

However, it was then that he noticed something.

'My spiritual sense won't' go underground?' he thought in surprise. He tried to force it into the mountain, but he simply couldn't.

'Is there a barrier around this mountain?' he wondered and stumped his legs beneath him very hard.

Suddenly, the surroundings vibrated as a blue barrier that appeared around them pushed the entire soil and plants above it.

Alex then took out his sword and slashed using his Sword Qi. He didn't know exactly how strong his attack was at the moment, but he knew it was in the True King realm.

He would go check the damage on the next mountain after this.

When the white slash landed on the ground, the blue barrier appeared once again to block the attack, but his sword Qi wouldn't budge.

The Qi diminished by the second and until the very end, they kept attacking the barrier.

In the process, they destroyed quite an area around them as soil and plants both were ripped away from the area, revealing the true thing that lay underneath.

A giant cluster of complex runes.

Alex recognized part of the runes in the cluster as the ones he could find in any door.

'So this is a door?' Alex thought. 'Where does it lead to?'

He kept away his sword and placed his hands on the runes before pouring in his own Qi.

When the Qi flowed into the gate, Alex got his spiritual sense ready to peer into the place and see what it held.

After all, it wasn't like the gate would just op—

Suddenly, a familiar feeling took over Alex, and before he could say anything, he was teleported away.

When he reappeared, Alex found himself inside a relatively bright room that had runes that burned with bright light.

"Where the hell am I? Why did I teleport?" he immediately started freaking out. He really hadn't expected the door to suddenly teleport him.

None of the other doors had done anything like that. Why did this one do such a thing?

When he sent his spiritual sense out, he found that he couldn't bring it out at all. It was as if spiritual sense was suppressed in this room.

"What the hell?" he thought. He started looking around and soon found a complex rune of the same type outside

'Sigh, there's a way to leave,' he thought.

He relaxed a little after learning that he could leave it whenever the hell he wanted to. But he still couldn't help but wonder where the hell he was.

Alex was standing in the midst of a relatively grand hall. The walls seemed to be made up of something that looked like limestone but was harder.

The floor was made up of the same material and had bright red carpets on top of it.

He walked around the room, looking through it everything and that was when he noticed a door at the corner of the room.

'Oh, what's that?' he thought and walked towards it.

This time, the door looked incredibly simple. There were no runes on it at all. "It's a simple door?" Alex couldn't help but be surprised.

He tried to push on the door, but it seemed to have been lodged somewhere, and didn't want to be pushed.

It was either that or the door itself was very heavy. "Screw it, I will cut it," he thought and brought out his sword.

White light covered the sharp sword in his hands and he directly struck the door. When the strike landed, Alex's eyes went wide.

Somehow, even with his strongest attack at the moment, the best he could do to the door was put a small cut on it that was merely half a centimeter deep.

Alex half expected to find the sword with chinks on it, but of course not. His sword was one of the best ever.

If only it accepted Qi, that would have been awesome.

Alex tried a few more times, but all he could do was make some cuts. He sighed a stopped.

At this rate, it would take him 5 days at least to break through the door. He didn't have that sort of time.

'What the hell is this place exactly?' he thought one last time before deciding to leave. If he couldn't open the only door that could lead him to possible treasures, then he didn't need to remain here.

He walked back to the front of the room and placed his palm on the runes before pouring Qi into it.

The runes glowed bright yellow, and then… nothing happened.

"What?" Alex was confused for a second. He poured in his Qi once again, but the same thing happened once again, which was nothing.

"Oh, you can't do this to me," Alex said and he poured in more Qi and even punched it a couple of times.

However, he still couldn't teleport at all.

"What the hell is going on? Am I stuck here now?" he asked with shock. He couldn't help but start blaming the Alex from 5 minutes ago for being so stupid.

But, when he thought back to the event that took place then, he had no reason at all to suspect that such a thing could've even happened.

Even if he was twice as cautious as he was now, he would still have done the same thing.

"There's no point in bothering then," he thought and let out Pearl.

Pearl came out with a meow and asked where they were.

"You can speak freely here," Alex said. "Also, we are stuck somewhere with no way to leave."

"We're stuck? What do we do now?" Pearl asked.

"Well, I think the best thing to do now, is to do nothing," Alex said. "There are only 2 more days left for this realm to be over. All we have to do now is sit tight and wait for the world to teleport us out."

Chapter 665: The 11th Day

Outside the Demon Realm.

The many Saints had stopped meditating and were now waiting for their disciples and juniors to come out of the place.

Any minute now, the demon realm would end.

Suddenly, a bright light flashed all around them, and one by one people started popping out of the place.

Fu Tao walked toward his senior and waited for more of his juniors to leave.

Liang Qiu started looking for her juniors herself.

More and more people starting to pop out. Some rejoiced, some became sad.

Some tried to attack others claiming that their stuff was stolen, while some were dejected at the fact that they were teleported just as they were about to reach for some treasure.

Most showed one emotion or another, but all in all, most were simply glad to be out.

Of course, not everyone got to come out. Some of the elders waited, but their juniors and disciples didn't come out at all.

"Where's sister Xiran?" Fu Tao asked the saint expert next to him.

"Dead, I'm afraid," the man said with a sigh. "Have you any idea what happened?"

"Dead?" Fu Tao gave a weird look. "I haven't seen her since we entered the House of the Undying 3 days ago."

The elder shook his head when he heard that, but then he stopped. "You did what?!" he asked in surprise.

A similar reaction was popping out all over the location as the elders found out about the event that took place in the House of the Undying.

Very quickly the disciples summed up what was going on and the elders couldn't help but get more shocked.

"You were successful in getting treasures then?" he asked.

"Yes, elder. There was quite a bit of treasure in there. Although most of them have lost their effectiveness due to time, I should still call myself lucky with how many I got," Fu Tao said.

"Good, Good," the elder said with a happy face. It was as if he had forgotten the momentary sadness of losing a disciple.

They all talked for a while, and finally, as disciples stopped popping out of the monument, they started leaving.

Most of the greater clans and sects left immediately once they understood that no one else was coming out.

They had been here way too many times to be expectant about something like that.

The lower grade sects and clans too left not long after seeing the greater clans and sects leave. If they were going, they had no reason to stay behind.

Some folks stayed behind, hoping their person wasn't dead and just stuck, but life wasn't all sunshine and happiness.

Not long after, they too began to leave as they understood that they had lost someone precious to themselves or their organization.

No one waited for the rogue cultivators without a backup. After all, they were rogue.

So, by the end of the day, as the sun started to set, there was only one person that still stayed on the island.

Shen Jing

He's always smiling face held a troubled look as he kept staring at the monument. He hoped and hoped and hoped, but no matter what, Alex didn't come out.

'Did he really die?' Shen Jing wondered. That thought only made him feel worse and worse by the second.

He walked up to the monument and placed his hands on it. When he poured his Qi into the monument, the secret realm inside of it started to get unstable.

He let go.

"It really did close up, huh?" he thought, and after a long while sighed.

"Master's final grace before he left… I destroyed it all," Shen Jing sighed.

"Not to mention, now she is going to be angry with me. Ahhhh! I should have kept him back and not let him enter the realm," Shen Jing cried out.

Shen Jing had thought that with Alex's 2 year-long survival training that he would be able to walk out of any danger without a problem.

However, now it all seemed like a lie to tell himself.

"Goddammit!" he shouted in anger.

His aura shook the island as waves crashed onto it with far greater strength.

After a while, Shen Jing finally accepted the fact that both Alex and Pearl had died in the secret realm, and left the island as the sole bearer of this tragic news.

* * * * * *

The first day that Alex had been inside this special room, he had thought that he would simply wait around.

However, once Pearl got bored, they started throwing out attacks at the door in hope that it opened up in the next 2 days before the realm closed up.

'Is tomorrow the 10th day, or the beginning of it?' Alex thought. Soon, he realized that there was still another day to go before he would be sent out.

So, one more day, he continued sending out attacks at the door, hoping to get it open before the day was over.

Unfortunately, he couldn't do it in time.

As the day was ending, Alex stopped. There was no point in attacking the door. It was still only halfway done.

He would have to attack for some more days before he could get it to break open.

"Stop Pearl, there's no need now," Alex said.

"Why?" Pearl asked with a confused look.

"It's time to leave," Alex said. "You should get back for now."

Pearl nodded and jumped into his beast space. Then, all Alex had to do was wait.

As time slowly passed, he started wondering when he was going to get taken out.

When it reached the time for him to get out and he still didn't, the wonder in his heart turned to anxiety.

After that, every minute he wasn't taken out, the anxiety turned to fear.

"Oh no," he thought. "Am I stuck here? What's going on?"

He went to the runes at the front of the room and was still unable to activate it to teleport.

As more time passed, the 11th day of the realm arrived.

While he wondered if the realm had made a mistake and was going on for another day. but as more and more time passed, he started becoming more and more sure that the reason why he hadn't been teleported out was that he was in this goddamn room.

So he understood that he needed to leave this place immediately.

But how?

An answer came to him almost instantly.

"Through the door."

Alex brought out his sword and started attacking the door relentlessly. Not long after, Pearl joined in as well and continued attacking the door.

Minute after minute, slash after slash, Alex started chipping away at the door bit by bit.

With both Pearl and Alex hitting at it with the urgency they had, their power was only stronger than what they put out the last two days.

Each one of Alex's strikes was filled with the power of his Sword Qi. Each one of Pearl's attacks was the White Tiger's Golden Claw.

Slowly but surely, they managed to dig deeper and deeper into the stone door.

Once the door was on its last leg, Alex gave one last strike and the door suddenly broke into a hundred pieces.

Finally, Alex could see what was inside the room. When he did, he couldn't help but be shocked.

Chapter 666: Death

"Someone is cultivating?" Alex asked himself as he looked inside.

The room beyond the door was a small compact room that could not have been a way out of this place.

Still, Alex forgot about all of what had made him want to open up the door. For now, all he could do was be curious as to what the man was doing here.

'Is he in closed cultivation?' he wondered. 'How long has he been here?'

Covered in a black robe, the man stayed still with no sign of movement. His eyes were closed, and his body slumped.

He looked just like a normal man, maybe even a little handsome with his young look and his handsome face.

Except there was a single difference that made him not look like a normal man.

There were two, skin-colored spikes coming out of the man's forehead, which slanted the more it grew up.

Horns.

The horns were maybe 10 centimeters long at best, but that was enough for Alex to tell what the man was.

'A demon,' he thought and looked at the man in complete shock. 'How many years has this thing been here?'

"Pearl, get back in right now," Alex said, and without question, Pearl jumped back into the beast space.

Should he leave now? but how?

Then, Alex gathered up his courage and spoke, "Ex-Excuse me?"

He waited for the demon to open his eyes, but the demon gave no response.

"Sir?" Alex called out to the man, but once again, he didn't respond.

In fact, he didn't move either. And he gave no aura… and he wasn't breathing either.

'Is this man really in closed cultivation?' Alex thought and slowly stepped in.

"Senior?" he called out even as he went in just in case, but there was no response.

Alex started to get more and more suspicious. This demon… was dead, wasn't it?

As he got closer, Alex saw something curious. On the man's neck was a circular medal of sort hanging from a thin piece of thread.

In his right hand was a storage bag, simply out in the open.

Alex waited for a bit and carefully looked at the man. Only after he was absolutely sure that he was looking at a corpse did he move his hand.

Slowly, he reached out to the storage bag and lifted it off of the demon's hand. Immediately afterward, he shot backward and got into a defensive position but the demon didn't stand to attack him.

"Phew!" Alex thought and looked at the medal next. The medal looked smooth with no carvings on it.

'Is it wood or metal?' he wondered when he saw the metal. The bronze color made it impossible to tell from where he stood.

Alex reached for the medal and grabbed it to turn it around. Just as he did, something happened.

A glorious aura of death and darkness suddenly erupted from the demon's body. It was so strong that Alex fell back suddenly while still holding the medal.

When he did so, the thread ripped, and the medal came undone from the demon's neck.

At the same time, the deathly aura around him abruptly grew more dangerous as it started putting pressure on Alex.

And then, a face emerged from the cloud of black Qi in the air.

The face of the demon.

Its skin was black like it was dipped in ink. As such, even its horn was pitch black.

The only thing of color on that face was the dazzling yellow eyes. Alex couldn't help but tell himself how beautiful those eyes were.

The face's mouth opened and a booming voice emerged.

"I... SENSE... NO... BLOOD... OF...MINE... IN...YOU" the voice said in slow, methodical words. The aura suppressed Alex, and all he could do was look at the giant face in horror.

"YOU… ARE… NOT… MY… KIN!" the face continued.

Then finally, it said, "ALL... INTRUDERS… WILL… DIE!"

The black face suddenly twisted until it looked like a crescent moon on a handle, and it dropped with tremendous force towards Alex.

All Alex could do was watch the scythe fall on top of him in horror. The only aura stronger than this that he had ever witnessed was the lightning from Heavenly Judgment.

And those were meant to kill immortals.

Alex watched his death approach with not a single drop of blood remaining on his face. His body could move, but he didn't do anything.

For he knew, there was not a single thing he could do to save himself.

The scythe fell on his neck, and…

~ROAR~

Suddenly, Alex heard a roar coming from within himself. A large golden light came out of him and struck the incoming scythe.

Like a candle in a raging storm, the scythe vanished into nothingness.

Alex stayed on the ground and clutched his neck where he had scythe had nearly struck. He had, at some point, already dropped the medal on the ground.

All he could do right now was thank god that he wasn't dead.

'No,' he thought as beads of sweat rolled down all over his body. 'I need to thank Shen Jing.'

Alex remembered the single defense the Shen Jing had placed on him before he entered. Fortunately, he hadn't come across anyone strong to have a need for it to be used.

If not for that, he would've died today for sure.

Alex took a few minutes to gather his wits and finally looked back at the corpse of the demon.

Now that all the aura had left it, it looked decrepit and rotten with barely any muscle remaining. In fact, it was simply a skeleton now.

Alex wiped some of the sweat in him and quickly ran out of the room, not before picking up the medal he had dropped.

Once he was out, and hopefully safe, he got as far away from the door as he could and sat down close to a corner to look at the items in his hands.

The first one, the medal, was a bronze-colored circular stone of some kind that was colored to look like it were wood or metal.

One side of it was flat and smooth, but the other side was full of intricate carvings that Alex recognized to be runes.

As for what runes exactly, he couldn't tell. One thing he was sure of was that this medal didn't have a teleportation rune on it.

"Sigh, was all that work for nothing?" he wondered and put the medal to the side before checking what was inside the bag.

There were a few things in the storage bag, and Alex brought them out one by one.

The first one Alex brought out was a bunch of spirit stones, maybe around 20.

It had been in the storage bag for so long, and yet it hadn't lost any of its glow. It was a little surprising to think that it would have Qi even after being with the demon since it was here.

'Is there even any left?' Alex wondered and tried to cultivate his Qi when suddenly, he had to let go of it.

"Argh!" he cried out in slight pain. The right arm became numb for a few seconds before returning back to normal.

'That energy, it was so strong,' he thought and picked back the stone. 'Is this… a Saint rank spirit stone?'

He couldn't help but be shocked at the realization.

Saint spirit stones. This was not something that was so readily available in today's world. After all, a Saint rank Spirit Vine had to die for Saint Spirit stones to form from it.

Alex looked at the 20 spirit stones in awe for a while and put them into his ring.

Next, he brought out a small jar of… something. Without his spiritual sense, Alex felt really blind.

He slowly opened the jar and an intense aroma of a mix of herbs and flowers wafted out of it.

Alex looked inside and saw a magenta-colored medicinal paste of some sort. 'What is this? Is this saint rank too?' he wondered.

He got close to it to see if he could recognize the ingredients used by the scent, but all he managed to do was make his nose and throat burn for a few seconds which forced him to cough and sneeze for a little while.

Only after he recovered did he put the medicinal jar into his ring and brought out the next item in the bag.

A Talisman.

Chapter 667: The Undying God

Alex opened the talisman and saw that it had some words written on it. Since it was written in the demon language, Alex could understand it quite easily.

[The Undying God is dying. How ironic. I can sense my spirit fading. Soon, my soul will move on to the cycle.]

[I have learned the Dao, but I believe I'm not strong enough to survive the advancement. As such, I leave behind my legacy.]

[If you know me, which I hope you do, you can find it all in this exact room. Please do not let the legacy of our ancestors created since the primordial times die with me.]

Below those words was a map with a location that located the exact position of the treasure that was left behind.

'The Undying God?' Alex thought solemnly. Undying… that was the name of the house at the peak of the 5th mountain.

Alex thought back to the diary he got from one of the better houses on that mountain.

It spoke of a lord that had gone into closed cultivation because he took damage to the spirit. This was the young lord of the demon, who according to the diary was once ambushed by 4 humans and still managed to survive because he was Undying.

'So, he was the Undying God, huh?' Alex thought as looked towards the door on the other side of the corner. The demon behind that was someone that was supposed to never die.

The Undying god never got to pass on his techniques, his legacy. The owner of that diary was quite happy when he learned it was going to happen, but it seemed that being in closed cultivation stopped the demon from doing so.

'His legacy… does it mean the thing that made him undying?' Alex wondered.

He thought of another piece of information he read in the diary. The young lord of the person whose diary he got had entered the Timeless Palace. Did that mean that he was currently in the Timeless Palace?

"Does that mean that time has stopped in this place? Is that why no matter how many days have passed, I still haven't gotten out?" Alex thought.

That made him a little happier. He wished his assessment of the situation was correct and continued thinking about the talisman's information as he looked at the map.

The map showed a location with 6 mountain peaks arranged in a weird order. On one of those peaks was the marking that located the legacy.

Alex's first thought said that the location was the secret realm he was in currently. However, upon closer inspection, he realized that the order of the mountain was a bit different.

The 1st mountain was closer to the 2nd than it was to the 3rd. The 4th mountain was very much larger than most of the others which weren't correct.

The 5th mountain was very close to the 6th, which didn't make sense to him.

'Is this a map to a different secret realm?' Alex wondered. That was the only thing that made sense. After all, it was unlikely that during such an important war, there was only a single hiding location for most of the demons.

'So it's not this place huh?' Alex thought. His enthusiasm immediately disappeared once he realized there was no treasure here.

"Sigh, let's just find if there's a way out of this place," Alex thought and pulled out another one of the talismans in the bag.

This one turned out to be a recipe for a healing salve that one could apply to the wound for instant heals.

'Pills are way more useful than these,' Alex thought, but he didn't immediately discard it. Who knew when such things could come in handy.

So, Alex quickly memorized it and moved on to the other things. Most of the other talismans were also about medicinal paste.

Finally, Alex reached one that wasn't. This too had something written on it.

[After days of experimentation, I have finally come across the information that will help me turn this technique of mine into a bloodline.]

[I have found the perfect specimen for experimentation. If I am successful, we will soon be able to save heaps of our members from needlessly dying during scouting missions.]

[I was successful in turning my technique into a bloodline power, and have managed to infuse it into the beast. I have since bonded with the beast, but I've left its descendant back in my house.]

[I hope someone finds the egg.]

"The Egg?" Alex's eyes went wide. He immediately brought out the egg from his storage ring and looked at it with clear curiosity in his eyes.

'This egg holds the power of the Undying god?' Alex thought with a hint of surprise in his eyes. His smiles widened as well when he thought about the fact that he had obtained this beast.

Now, he only wondered what it was exactly.

'I will find that out after I leave this damn place,' he thought.

Alex sifted through a few more pastes and finally reached another talisman that wasn't about pastes.

[If you can read this, then I am already dead.]

[I will die any time now. Even after coming to the Timeless Palace in hope that someone out there can find a way to cure me, no one has come to help me.]

[I cannot tell how many years have passed outside. If it has been years for even me, then it must be eons for the ones outside.]

[I do not know what has happened to the war. We were losing, but I hope we didn't. Even if we did, I hope we weren't eradicated.]

[Since I am to die, I will wait here for someone that holds the demon blood to take this Medallion of authority from me.]

[As such, I have removed the authority required to enter this place. Take the medallion and leave. I hope that in being the one with the most authority over the secret realms of ours, you will do some good.]

[I failed in helping us survive, but I hope you will do our legacy proud.]

[With this, the 8th Undying God bids his farewell from this world. I hope to reach the place where valiant warriors of the demon races go to after they die glorious deaths.]

[Goodbye.]

Alex stopped reading the talisman. His eyes grew solemn after having read the final words of a man who knew he was dying.

His death was likely slow, and maybe even painful. However, he didn't seem afraid at all. In fact, he seemed to welcome death like a friend.

"Farewell, 8th Undying god," Alex said softly and bowed a little in the direction of the corpse.

He placed the talisman into his ring and took the medal back out.

"So this is a medallion that grants authority over parts of this secret realm huh? I wonder what one can do with this?" Alex wondered.

Alex tied together the threads of the medallion and put them on his neck.

The moment he did so, as if a suppression field was lifted off of him, Alex could feel his spiritual sense roam freely all around him.

Alex spread it all around to check every nook and crannies of the place. That was when he noticed something.

"What?" Alex exclaimed and moved his hand. A gust of wind followed his gesture with incredible force and it lifted the red carpet until it was clumped to the side.

Finally, Alex noticed something that was hidden beneath the carpet the entire time.

Runes.

Alex recognized part of the rune as part of another cluster of runes from something else. He had seen this part in the cultivation rooms in this very mountain.

Except they were less complex and different.

'Does this place increase time too same as the cultivation room?' Alex wondered. That would make sense given where he was.

But then, the name didn't make sense.

There was nowhere more time than the place he was at, so calling it the Timeless palace wouldn't make sense.

The only time it would make sense is if the time in this place was stopped… or slowed down.

Alex's eyes went wide and he quickly brought out the last talisman again. Then, he read one of the lines that he had simply read once without thinking much about it.

[I cannot tell how many years have passed outside. If it has been years for even me, then it must be eons for the ones outside.]

"Dammit!" Alex cursed. As it turned out, this place really was slowing down time compared to outside.

Then… if he had been here for 3 days, how many days had passed outside?

"I need to leave quickly," Alex said and went back towards the runes on the circular stone embedded in the wall.

Now that he held the medallion, he knew that he had the highest authority in this place.

With that, he poured his Qi into the runes, and as expected, familiar teleportation powers engulfed him. Before he knew it, he was back out into the mountain top.

However, the teleportation powers didn't leave him. In fact, they grew stronger as Alex felt something wrap around him from all sides.

He tried to push it back out of sheer instinct, and it even looked like he was successful for a couple of seconds.

However, that did not last long enough as the power got stronger by the second.

Very soon, the stronger teleportation power engulfed him and Alex disappeared.

When the power finally left him, Alex found himself on grassy soil with the smell of water and salt all around him.

Finally, he was out of the secret realm.

Chapter 668: SouthShore City

Alex looked at the familiar but empty island. Not a single soul could be found here at all.

"I'm finally out," he said with a sigh of relief. "Shen Jing didn't wait for me, huh? Well, I can't blame him if what I found out is true."

Now, he only needed to know how many days he'd been inside during the last 3 days he spent in the Timeless Palace.

'I have time,' Alex thought and stood up to walk over to the monument. He wanted to check if he could go inside or not.

He placed his palm on the surface of the monument and let his Qi flow in. A yellow light shined throughout the runes all over the monument and Alex felt it activate.

However, when it tried to teleport him over, he felt the space not wanting to budge, and as such he couldn't go in at all.

"Tsk!" he thought and stopped.

There was no point in trying. 'I guess I will have to wait for another 10… no, fewer years for it to open up. Then, I can go through all the houses on the 5th mountain, and probably that door on the 6th mountain as well' he thought.

Then, it was time to leave.

Alex concealed his aura fully and became invisible before flying through the sky. He even reined in his spiritual sense just in case there was something terrifying in the water.

From everything he had learned, the ocean was extremely terrifying and he did not want to find out how.

It took him a couple of minutes to cross the 10 or so kilometers distance that was between the island and the mainland.

Once he reached there, Alex continued until he saw some light.

Since he knew that he was far to the south, Alex needed to navigate his way towards the southwestern side of the central area of the empire, the place where the Radiant City was.

After flying for half an hour, Alex quickly found a city. It was starting to get dark, so the glowing lights were all over the place as hard to notice from the sky.

He flew down to the outer edge of the city, before entering on foot.

"Woah!" Alex thought with a bit of surprise when he saw that the city was quite developed.

He could sense the True realm aura from every person that walked through the street. With a bit of logic, he was sure that Saint Realm experts were hidden in the city for sure.

There was no way such a place wouldn't be a lawless zone otherwise.

Just as he thought that figures in colorful robes flew across the sky. 'Lightsworn? No wonder this place is so safe,' he thought. It also reminded him of his wish to become one soon.

He didn't really care about justice or stopping criminals. He wanted to do it for a completely selfish choice, which was to get his arm back.

'I still don't know if it will even work,' he thought. 'What should I do now?'

Suddenly, he remembered something. "The pill… I need the ingredients," he thought. Then, he remembered the Blood Spirit Ginseng that he had ignored for 2 and a half years, and then some time.

'It must've been gone by now,' Alex thought. Since the city was a big one, he was sure that an Alchemy Guild must be in this city.

After asking for directions, Alex quickly reached the center of the city where all the different guilds were located.

'Southshore City Branch of Alchemy Guild' it wrote on the front of the board.

Alex walked through the door. He saw the familiar layout of the Alchemy guild and found his way to the reception.

"Excuse me, is there a Blood Spirit Ginseng in the sale currently?" he asked.

The receptionist put on a welcoming face and looked up the information. After a few seconds, she gave him the bad news.

Alex took out two spirit stones and said, "Broaden the search to the entire empire."

The receptionist took the stones and checked. Still, she returned the same bad news.

"I'm afraid there isn't one available at the moment," she said.

"Can you tell me when the last one was sold? And to whom?" Alex asked.

"Due to our policy to protect customer's privacy, we are unable to tell you," she said.

"You can't even tell me the date?" Alex asked.

"Wait for a second," the girl checked once more and replied. "The last Blood Spirit Ginseng was sold about a year and a half ago."

Alex sighed. If only he had been in the city at that time.

"I have another question not related to any of this, which I hope you can answer me," Alex asked.

"What would you like to know, fellow Daoist?" she asked.

Daoist… he was one now, wasn't he?

"Do you know about the secret realm that everyone visits every 10 years?" he asked.

The girl nodded.

"Can you tell me when the next opening of it is?" he asked.

"Hmm, I believe the last one ended just under 3 years ago, so you will have to wait 7 years, fellow Daoist," she said.

Alex remained stunned. 3 years… really? 3 goddamn years? If he had been outside, he would have been 24 years by now.

Alex thanked the girl and went to sit at one of the chairs to the side.

'3 whole years huh? I lost 3 years just like that,' he thought. 'And in that time, I lost my chance to get back my arm as well.'

'Although, I do have some more opportunities now,' he thought. ' For one, I hope that Shen girl has gotten better with her water arts so that I can ask for her to heal my hand.'

'Secondly, the princess hopefully got learned enough with the healing crystal to get my arm back as well. Aside from that, I have nothing else to do,' he thought.

"Wait no," he thought. He abruptly stood forward and walked toward the receptionist.

"Would you happen to have an idea on how to help a beast come out of an egg?" he asked.

"Sorry?" the receptionist was surprised by the random question she was thrown at her.

Alex repeated the question, but the girl didn't know. "Hmm… then do you know if there is a library in this city that may have the information?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the receptionist said and gave him the direction.

Alex quickly walked out of the guild and turned left to go towards the library.

However, before he could do so, he heard a commotion coming on from close by.

Alex turned his head to look at a crowd trying to push itself through the small doors of a building.

Alex tilted his head up to read the words 'Southshore City Branch of Talisman guild'.

"Talisman?" he looked confused. "Why are they all trying to go inside a Talisman guild all of a sudden?"

A voice spoke loudly, but Alex couldn't hear it over the crowd at all. He did manage to hear a few words such as 'Today' and 'Winners.'

He couldn't help but wonder what that was all about.

The people started to disperse after the announcement and Alex went back into the Alchemy guild to see the receptionist again.

"There is a crowd in front of the Talisman guild, do you know why that is?" Alex asked.

"A crowd? Oh, the competition results must have come back," the girl said nonchalantly.

"Competition?" Alex asked curiously.

"Yes," the girl said. "Did you not hear that the Talisman competition was taking place this week?"

"Sorry, Talisman competition?" Alex asked.

The girl made a weird face and looked at him.

"Sister, can you simply assume that I'm a newborn child and explain to me everything?" he asked.

The girl gave an even weirder look.

"Are you one of those player people?" she asked.

"Sigh, yes. I am. It's a little embarrassing to say, but I went into deep cultivation not long ago and only came out recently. So I do not know what is going on at all," Alex said.

"I see," the girl said. "Since you are going to the library, look up information on Guild Competitions. That should give you more information than I can."

"I see, thank you," Alex said and was about to walk out when he remembered that he was a little low on spirit stones.

But there was nothing to worry about. After all, he remembered that before he went to his training, he had given a lot of pills to the Alchemy guild to sell.

However, Alex couldn't help but sigh. 'I just told her I was a player who is supposed to have lost his memory. I can't just go and tell her to bring out the money now,' he thought.

'Screw it. I will have to make do with what I already have' he thought and continued walking.

He made his way to the library that was not very far away. Once he entered, he immediately found the librarian and asked for two different sets of books.

One for hatching beasts out of eggs, and another for these so-called Guild Competitions.

Once he got the book and even paid for it, he had them unlocked and sat down somewhere to read it.

First, he opened the book about the beast eggs.

There were many things written in there, most of which Alex found boring to read. Still, he did and an hour later, he was done reading the book.

"I see," he thought. "So if I give my blood essence to the egg, it will start the hatching process huh?"

Chapter 669: Seeking

After learning the simple information as well as some more that explained the process, Alex moved on to the second book about the competitions.

After reading for a while, he understood that the 4 guilds came together to hold a competition every year for a specific production skill of cultivation.

According to the book, this was to promote the production skills to more people since they were an integral part of cultivation.

There were exactly 7 production professions that had competition take place. They were Artifacts, Painting, Talisman, Music, Formations, Spirit Foods, and finally Alchemy.

All in that order.

Each of these professions had a competition taken year after year, for a total of 7 years.

Then, there was a gap of 3 years to let something else take place that the book didn't tell him about, but Alex concluded that it must be some sort of competition as well.

So, if he were to look at it from a single profession's point of view, a competition took place every 10 years.

"I see, so today was that day for Talisman, huh? No wonder everyone was so excited there. I wonder who won," he thought and returned the book.

Then, he walked out of the library and soon left the city altogether.

He didn't go very far though and instead went to a small forest that was on the northern side of the city. There, Alex brought out Pearl to keep him safe while he worked on the egg.

He was on top of a tree when he brought the egg out. The egg with a patterned shell was making Alex quite a bit excited.

'Calm down. Don't get your hopes up,' Alex said to himself as he pressed his forehead.

A small sword Qi flashed through his fingers which cut his forehead and a drop of blood spilled out.

Alex grabbed the drop of blood and placed it on top of the egg. As soon as he did that, the egg devoured the blood like it had hungered for it all this time.

"How many times do I have to do that again? 5?" Alex remembered. Each beast required some amount of blood, but on average, it was 5.

Then, one would have to wait for months before the egg started hatc—

CRACK~!

"What?" Alex's eyes narrowed at the egg. There was a small crack on the surface. "How? I only gave a single drop."

The cracks start spreading and before Alex knew it, it was throughout the egg. Alex stopped breathing as he waited for the beast inside to come out of it.

What would it be? A bird? A reptile? Maybe even an Amphibian? Or maybe insects.

Alex had a lot of guesses, but nothing substantial as he had nothing to go by.

The shell opened on one part and a snout pushed through. Along with the snout, long and thin whiskers came out of it.

All sort of anxiety and excitement left Alex's face and only shock remained as he watched the entire beast push through.

The beast finally landed on all four and started squeaking.

"A mouse?" Alex asked him with shock and confusion. "How… did a mouse come out of the egg? What?"

Pearl jumped to the branch Alex was on and looked at the little mouse with a curious looked.

"Meow!" Pearl cried at the mouse, who turned around to see Pearl. Seeing the cat, the mouse immediately scurried along with Alex's hand and disappeared somewhere.

"What? Come back," Alex jolted out of confusion and searched for the mouse. He looked around himself, and the tree, and even the ground.

But the mouse was gone, impossible to find.

"Where did it go?" Alex thought for a second before he remembered something. A spiritual sense emerged from him and it quickly scanned his entire body.

As expected, there was a rat-shaped scar on his right shoulder plate. Alex put a little Qi into it and said, "come out."

White light emerged and the mouse appeared on his palm again.

It tried to scurry off, but Alex caught it. Finally, he brought it up to its face and said, "Don't worry, no one is going to hurt you."

As if understanding what Alex was trying to say, the mouse calmed down.

"Meow!" Pearl cried at the beast once again, saying something that Alex had completely missed.

"So weak!"

"Right, he doesn't have a cultivation base," Alex said with a weird look. "Shouldn't newly born beast have a cultivation base? Speaking of which, what beast even is this?"

Alex finally looked at the mouse carefully to try and judge the species.

Its fur was extremely short and its color was somewhere between white and silver. It had 8 extremely long whiskers that looked contracted at the moment.

Finally, its tail was very, very short.

'Hmm… those whiskers… could it be?' Alex thought to himself. The lack of cultivation base only increased his suspicions by that much.

Finally, unable to keep it to himself, he said it out loud.

"Is this… a Seeking Mouse?"

A Seeking Mouse held no combat capabilities and even couldn't cultivate at all. All it was useful for was scouting something that a cultivator himself didn't want to go to.

Its whiskers were extremely sensitive and picked up on every little Qi, aura, and scent in the atmosphere.

And, they also happened to be the only other ingredients from Blood Spirit Ginseng that Alex had to obtain.

"I got my own whiskers," he said happily, if not a little disappointedly.

He had expected some sort of powerful beast from the egg, but it turned out to be this mouse.

'I could've obtained those whiskers from somewhere else too. It's not like they are an extreme rarity,' Alex thought to himself.

Finally, he sighed to himself and decided to check what good it could do to him.

"Can you go and check north? I want to see if it is safe or not," Alex said to the mouse.

The mouse raised its head, made some squeaking noise, and then ran away from his body.

"Pearl, go keep his safe," Alex said.

"Okay," Pearl said and lightly flew away.

As Pearl left, Alex got an unusual feeling come to him. It was… coolness?

Then he got information about the living things around his location, followed by their strength.

It took him a second to realize he wasn't sensing the area from his location, but rather the mouse.

Heat, Pressure, Humidity, Qi density, Qi type, number of living things, their aura, the composition of the surrounding, and finally a view of what it looked like.

All of that information was being sent back to Alex in vivid messages as if he were standing there.

As the mouse kept moving, he saw more and more. Until he sensed something in the bushes further along.

The mouse tried to move to the side, but the snake from the bush started slithering towards him.

The mouse tried to move away but it was too slow.

Just then, the aura in the atmosphere grew as a strong beast came out of nowhere and killed the snake in a single strike.

"Pearl!" Alex said in surprise.

"Get back," he gave a mental message to both of his beasts who immediately returned back.

The mouse returned first, followed by the cat. Alex could feel the mouse's fear when seeing Pearl as if it had met its mortal foe.

"Sigh, you're not too bad," Alex said. 'If only you could cultivate.'

Alex wanted to check the Undying part of the beast too, but that would involve hurting the poor thing.

He wasn't so cruel as to torture something that had just been born. "I'll do so later," he thought to himself and sent the mouse back.

Then, he sent Pearl back as well before flying away from that location towards a different city that he knew was to the north.

He had a single goal in mind now. He would join the Lightsworns and give enough contribution until the princess was forced to meet him.

Alex flew almost all night and arrived at Brightstar city near the morning.

He was still close to 3 thousand kilometers away from the Radiant city, so he needed to take some sort of transportation here so he could be on his way there.

So, as soon as he arrived, he went to find some caravan group or such.

Chapter 670: Teleportation

Alex found a caravan that was ready to leave. He found the owner, a short man with an amicable face, and asked if he could go with them.

He even let him know that he was strong and could help him defend if it was required.

When the man heard Alex's cultivation realm, he gave a weird look.

"Sir, I don't think you want to come with us right? Surely we aren't worth your time," the owner said.

"What do you mean? You won't take me?" Alex looked at the caravan owner with a suspicious look.

"Um sir, it's not that I won't take you, but rather are you sure you want to come with us? It's a little suspicious you would even want to, you know," the caravan owner said.

Alex was a little confused. Why was the caravan owner so adamant about not letting him go with them if he did realize that he was strong.

Was he afraid that he would rob them?

"What's so suspicious about me wanting to go with you guys?" Alex asked.

"Um, why would you want to take the slow ride with us that will take half a month to reach our destination, when you can get there just like that?" he asked.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean? You know that no matter how strong of a cultivator I am, it will still take me some time, right?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm not talking about you going by yourself. I'm talking about you using the teleportation formation in the city. As a cultivator, you should be able to afford it right?" the owner asked. "Of course, if you are lacking spirit stones then I will surely accept you into the caravan."

Alex stopped in his tracks. "Teleportation formations?" he looked confused. "Are you telling me that I can directly teleport to somewhere else from this place?" Alex asked.

"Yes, of course. Brightstar had a formation made not too long ago. Sir must not have known this," the owner said.

'Tsk, my lack of knowledge about this empire is showing. Once I reach my destination, I will have to shut myself to a library and learn as much as I can,' he thought.

'I would've likely figured it out very soon if I hadn't been literally taken away from the very second city I ever visited,' he thought to himself.

"Thank's for letting me know," Alex said and went back to the city.

The sun was still on the verge of rising, and from what the people said, the teleportation formation apparently only started at around 9 in the morning.

Until then, Alex decided to learn more about the teleportation formations.

According to the book he found, the formations were placed in almost every major city in the Luminance empire.

Then, every day the formation would work once every hour to teleport about 50 people to a destination at once.

There could not be more people in the formation, and if you were too slow to join, you would have to wait until the next day.

That scared Alex a bit. He needed to go register right now then.

So, he found the location of the formation and was let know that there were more than enough openings for him to choose from.

Alex found out that he couldn't directly go to the Radiant city as it was too far away, and instead he had to go through multiple cities to reach the capital.

Alex looked at the shortest route and took it.

This would've caused him problems under normal circumstances, but since people were all leaving the capital, rather than going towards it now that the Talisman competition had ended, he had easier times.

Alex looked at the shortest route, as written on the wall for him.

From Brightstar city, he would have to go to Springmist city at 10 in the morning. From there, he would have the opportunity to take another teleportation formation to Lightborn city around noon.

Finally, around 3 in the afternoon, he would be able to go to the Radiant city.

That was the route he would take for now. If by any chance, either one of the pathways was already full, he would have to either wait for an entire day or take the other longer routes.

Alex nodded once he learned it and paid the man exactly 46 True spirit stones. He couldn't have expected that it would cost such an amount to travel about a thousand kilometers, but it was well worth it considering how instant it was.

Once it was time to leave, Alex was finally let inside the building along with 40 or so other people.

He found two teleportation platforms and from research knew that one of those was meant for sending people away, while the other one was meant for receiving people.

Having the same formation be used for both tasks would have been extra taxing to it, and would even cause problems during transportation if either of the teleports was already in use.

So, they had decided to create two.

Once everyone was ready, both teleportation formations glowed at once. Alex saw the people appear in the other formation before he was teleported away.

When he reappeared, he was standing on the receiving circle while the sending circle was empty.

He walked out of the formation and immediately went to purchase his spot for the next teleportation at noon.

Since he had the time, Alex left the place and went around the city for the next 2 hours.

He walked around the city and was starting to see more and more Lightsworns. He could only wonder how many there were in the capital.

'Right, what do I need to do to join their ranks again?' he wondered and went to the library to learn a bit about the Lightsworns.

From what he found out, he had to take some tests to be eligible to become one. Some of which included being in the True realm at a young age.

"I can do tests," he thought. All he had to hope for was that his lack of arm wasn't taken as a detriment to his ability as a cultivator.

Once the sun hit its zenith, Alex returned back to the building with the formation. It was time to leave the Springmist city and go to the Lightborn city.

Lightborn city was about the same distance away from Springmist city as Brightstar, so it once again cost him about the same price as well.

'50 True Spirit stones,' Alex thought to himself. With 50 people using the formation at once, they must earn about 2500 True spirit stones every hour under normal circumstances.

The formation started glowing bright and after a few seconds, he disappeared. When he reappeared, he was in a similar building, but a different one.

He looked to the side to see the people on the other teleportation formation disappear.

'I have 3 hours now,' Alex thought and went out.

The Lightborn city was close to the capital and was quite crowded due to it being one of the bigger cities in the empire.

According to his small research, aside from some small clans and sects, the Broken Ravine sect had its roots just outside of this city.

On the other hand, the Jin family, one of the 7 great families had their ancestral grounds in this city.

Alex remembered Jin Tengfei and his Sword Qi. He was so strong with it, and now Alex had it as well.

'I wonder if my sword Qi is just as strong as his,' Alex thought. Around the city, he heard instances of people talking about how great the Talisman competition had been. Alex heard the name Tian Ye as someone who won the competition.

Alex couldn't help but remember the fatty from the secret realm.

He roamed the city for a bit longer before returning to the building with the formations.

Finally, he was going to go to Radiant city.

Alex stood on the formation and waited for it to activate. Once the people filled it, it started to shine

Soon, Alex felt the aura of teleportation grab him and in the next moment, along with everyone else, he vanished.

When he appeared out of the formation, he once again turned to look at the other formation circle that was full of people ready to leave.

Just then, he caught sight of a lady a split second before the teleportation took her away. However, that sight alone was enough to send waves of shock and surprise through him.

After all, the lady that had just left looked exactly like...

"Mother?"

Chapter 671: Radiant City

"No… can it be? Really?" Alex was too stunned to think clearly. His mind showed him the same image over and over as he remembered the face.

That was the same.

She wore something different from the farm clothes he saw her in. Now she wore magenta robes with light blue linings on the side.

She was thinner, much thinner now, but Alex could easily reason that to be something that came from her cultivating.

Despite all that, despite all the changes she had gone through, Alex felt very certain.

That was his mother.

That only brought on more confusion. 'How? How is she here? Why is she here? Is she okay? Am I going mad?' Alex couldn't think of anything else.

"Fellow Daoist, is anything wrong?" one of the staff members came up to him when they saw him standing still inside the formation circle.

Alex jolted out of his daze and looked at the staff member.

"That group right now, what city did they teleport to?" he asked.

"The one just now? It should be the same place you came from. We only swap with a single city every time," the staff said.

"Same city? So they went to the Lightborn city?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the staff said.

"I need to go there right now. Can you teleport me there?" Alex asked.

"I'm afraid not, fellow Daoist," he said.

"I will pay for it. I will pay the price of 50 if I have to. Fellow Daoist, please, I really need to go back right now," Alex said.

The man seemed to notice Alex's troubles and shook his head. "I'm afraid that's not possible, Fellow Daoist. The formation can't work for another hour and needs to recharge before the next transfer."

"Besides, even if it was ready, we cannot teleport you anywhere without the other formation activating at the same time, and it only happens once a day for each location," the staff member said.

Alex knew that, but he still couldn't help but hope the information was wrong.

'Should I just do it?' he thought to himself. He had many tests to do with his own Qi, but one thing he knew for certain was that he could activate runes that others couldn't.

Since he had noticed similar situations for formations over the last few years, he had reasons to believe that his Qi did the same thing for formations too.

There were still many caveats to this theory of his, but he really wanted to test them out right now.

In the end, he calmed down and thought logically. 'I can't do something so radical out of nowhere,' he thought to himself and walked out of the teleportation formation.

As he did, he started thinking of how he could go back to the Lightborn city as fast as he could.

That wasn't only it. Lightborn city could be just another stop in their journey. He didn't know where his mother was actually going or who she was with.

"Can I register for tomorrow's teleportation?" Alex asked the staff member.

"To Lightborn city?" the staff thought to himself. "I don't think you can go there for another 3 days, Fellow Daoist."

"You see, due to the talisman competition, the number of people coming to the capital was quite high. So, the formations are already booked for the next 3 days," the staff member said.

"If not for normal travel taking less than 3 days for most people, I'm sure the list of people leaving using formations would have lasted for days."

Alex sighed when he heard that. The staff member wasn't lying or anything, but he still couldn't help but find the answer unpleasing.

Just as he was about to leave, the scene of him seeing his mother played in his mind once again.

Only this time, he didn't focus on her but on the other things he had missed.

There were nearly 50 people standing there. Most were random men and women who just happened to be here at the same time as his mother.

However, he could see a few figures that wore Magenta robes with a light blue lining on their robes.

'That's definitely a group of some sort, right?' Alex thought. If he found what organization that robe was from, he would certainly find where his mother was.

"Brother, do you know what organization be it clan or set wears Magenta robes with light-blue linings like the ones that just left?" Alex asked.

"Uhh… I'm afraid I'm not knowledgeable about organizations and their uniforms, fellow Daoist," the staff said.

"I see, thank you anyway," Alex said and turned to leave.

"It's my pleasure to help a customer," the staff said. Just as Alex was about to leave, the staff remembered something and said, "I don't know if it is any help, but I'm pretty sure that most of the people who left just now were here to watch the Talisman competition."

Alex thought for a second. Many people would come to watch such a competition, so that wasn't really any help. But still, he had someplace to start from.

"I see, thank you," he said and left the place.

Alex walked out of the building into a majestic city full of a million colors all around him. It was 3 pm in the afternoon, but the city looked like it radiated as brightly as other cities would in the nighttime.

The atmosphere was like a festival with people moving from left and right with no regard to anyone else causing a crowd so big that Alex was stunned that this many people could even live in a single city.

But then again, this was the capital. If many people didn't live here, who would?

Alex sighed. He couldn't enjoy these sights at all, not with his mother's situation being on his mind all the time.

'Where do I start from?' he wondered. 'I need to find someone from the competition. If there was someone amongst them that gathered information about the guests, then I will have a much higher… chance…"

Alex's words trailed off as an idea grew in his head.

"Wait, this is a competition set by the guilds, right? Doesn't that mean they are the ones who would be responsible for the guests?" Alex thought.

A glimmer of hope rose from his heart as he immediately went into the crowd to make his way towards the guilds.

After half an hour of searching and asking for directions, Alex finally made his way to the location in the capital where the 7 guilds were located in.

Unlike the other cities, the capital held all 7 of the guilds.

The very first thing that surprised him in the location, even more so than the number of customers was the amount of space each guild took.

The guilds in the capital were at least 5 times as large as any other guilds he had seen in any of the cities.

Following that, there were nearly 10 times more receptions as well. Alex could only begin to imagine just how many experts each of these guilds held.

Without hesitation, Alex entered the Talisman guild. While he wanted to go check the Alchemy guild, the Talisman guild was more important to him at the moment.

Alex found the shortest of the queues for the receptions and stood there. After about 20 minutes of waiting his turn finally came.

"Excuse me, I have an unusual problem that I hope you would help indulge me in for a few minutes," Alex said.

The receptionist in front of him looked confused. "How can I help you?" he asked.

"I need to find the identity of someone who may or may not has been at the competition grounds. You guys keep track of all the audience, right?" Alex asked.

"Uhh… if they entered the competition ground, yes," the receptionist said. "We can't tell if they didn't enter the competition ground and instead watched from outside."

"Outside?" Alex looked confused. "You had screenings set up outside the competition grounds too?"

"Yes, that's how a majority of the people watched the competitions," the staff said.

'Shit,' Alex thought. 'I don't even know if mother was here to watch the competition or not. This may just have been a complete coincidence as far as I know.'

'Shit, to begin with, I am not even absolutely sure if that is my mother, or maybe someone that just happens to look like her,' Alex thought and even started to doubt himself.

He quickly shook his head. 'No, there's no way I can't recognize my own mother. That was definitely her,' he thought.

"I don't know if they were inside the competition grounds or not. Is there anything else you can do to help me? I can tell you what their robes looked like," Alex said.

"Um," the receptionists thought for a moment and said, "Ah, there are recordings of the matches from the competition currently being sold right here. Would you like to buy them to see if the group entered?"

"I cannot guarantee if everyone was recorded or not, but you may get lucky and see them in the crowd," the receptionist said.

Alex felt the knot that was growing in his stomach softening a little. "Do you have such a thing? Please, I would like to buy one," Alex said.

"Yes," the receptionist brought out a small stack of talismans containing about 20 individual talismans.

"All of this?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it's over the course of multiple days and consists of multiple perspectives over the stage," the receptionist said.

Alex sighed. He needed them all it seemed. "How much for all of these?" he asked.

"300 True spirit stones."

Chapter 672: Hei Lin

"Thank you for your patronage," the receptionist said with a bright smile as he took the 300 True Spirit stones from Alex's hand.

Alex wanted to punch the man's face when he saw that goddamn smile.

'Such a fucking rip-off,' he thought to himself. 300 True spirit stones could buy a person a high-grade pill made by the best of the best True rank alchemists. That was including the cost of the ingredients.

And here, he was being sold the recordings of a competition that took place for only 4 separate days for 300 True spirit stones.

This wasn't even an exclusive talisman or something. It was a mass-produced talisman that was likely copied from the original with little regard to the quality of the copy.

The worst offense of these talismans in Alex's eyes was the fact that they were single-use talismans. He wouldn't even be able to sell them after looking through them once.

'Fuck,' he cursed once more and sat on a bench in the corner of the hall to view the talismans.

The talismans were ordered according to the date of the recording. So, he took the talisman for the first day and looked into it.

The moment his spiritual sense touched the talisman, it was like he had opened a floodgate of information as visions of someone else entered his mind.

He suddenly felt like he was standing in the midst of a crowd, seeing different things, but focusing on a single one.

He tried to move his eyes, but he couldn't. He was forced to see what the recorder of this talisman was watching.

'Wow,' Alex couldn't help but say. If he had known the recording would be this amazing, he likely wouldn't have cursed that poor receptionist earlier.

He immediately put all thoughts aside and started searching for his mother, or someone that was wearing a similar robe as her.

When Alex started focusing on the crowd, he was truly surprised by their sheer size. 'So many people,' he thought. The arena the recorder was staying at was larger than the coliseum from the Crimson Empire.

That was not all, the number of people was also clearly larger. And each one of them was a high-ranking cultivator.

Alex tried to keep down his shock while he searched for his mother, but it felt impossible.

The man had recorded not much from before the competition started, and once it started, he would only focus on the cultivation.

"This isn't it," Alex thought and stopped watching.

When he did so, Alex felt his vision cut off and he was staring blankly back into the real world. 'Damn, if I was anywhere else, this would've been dangerous. I shouldn't view such talismans out in the open from now on,' he thought to himself.

Since it was the guild, there would be security, so he was free to watch the talismans as much as he wanted to.

Alex was about to view the second perspective when he noticed something. The talisman in front of him was empty, as expected of a one-time use talisman.

However, the information was still in his brain. He could sense a small pocket of energy floating in his spiritual sea that he could tap into to view the information back again.

'That's pretty nifty,' he thought and moved on to the second talisman.

As soon as Alex started watching, his vision drifted to another side of the arena. While not on the complete opposite side from the first perspective, it still gave a different group of people for Alex to search from.

He was sure that there was a group of people close to him that were in his blind spot and would never notice these visions. All he could do was hope that his mother wasn't amongst the group.

Soon, he started searching for the same group again but alas he wasn't able to find her.

He sighed, but he had one last hope still in him.

Alex hadn't seen anyone young from his mother's group when they had teleported, so he had little hope, but he still held some.

'I hope her group was one of the participating groups and thus she is in a special seat somewhere and watching this all privately,' he thought.

After all, if he thought about it logically, there was no way that someone who could use the teleportation formation so early from the capital couldn't even enter the arena in the first place.

So, this time when the competition on the first day started, he didn't stop and watched the starting ceremony.

The contestants were called one after another as their information appeared in a small panel on top of them.

Alex recognized a few of the family names of the competitors that appeared on stage.

Shen, Jin, Zhou, Fu, Lu, Han, Song, and even the royal family, Wei had participants in there.

Aside from them, Alex noticed the robes of a few other disciples as belonging to the elite sects too.

A man of big stature walked onto the stage after them. He looked quite bigger than last time, horizontally that was.

The fatty Tian Ye appeared on the stage and suddenly everyone cheered.

'He won this competition, didn't he?' Alex thought. That had already been spoiled to him. He could see that he was a definite crowd favorite for sure.

Alex looked at his name on the flying screen on top of the stage.

Tian Ye - 38 years old - True King 2nd Realm - Demon Whisper sect

'Oh shit, that fatty already entered the True king's realm?' Alex felt slightly shocked.

Last he remembered, this man was in the True Lord 5th realm. In just 3 years he managed to break through 7 times to reach his current realm.

'Given how much time he must have spent on talismans, he must have worked hard to reach this realm,' Alex thought. Still, he wasn't sure if this was fast or not, but from how people reacted to hearing True King realm, he was sure this was at least better than average.

As he looked at the floating screen, the information changed to something else.

Hei Lin - 49 years old - True Lord 3rd realm - Flowing Brush sect

'49 years old? They allow such old people to take part?' Alex looked at the information with a bit of shock.

All the ones that had come before this person were at least younger than 40 years old, so Alex had assumed the age requirement to be less than 40 years old.

However, it turned out that he was wrong. 'Is this person allowed because of how weak thei—'

Alex's words stopped in his heart as he saw the person walk onto the stage.

She wore a magenta robe with light blue linings. Her gaze looked down on the stage, away from the crowd with clear nervousness visible. None of the crowd cheered for her as they did for Tian Ye, but there was still a round of applause.

Alex saw her look up after gathering enough courage on the stage. Then, he finally saw her face clearly.

This vision was much clearer than the split-second glance he had made back in the teleportation building.

There was not a single doubt in his mind now.

This was absolutely his mother.

It wasn't just the face that gave away, however. There were other hints as well. His mother had been about 43 when he had left home to go to Oakleaf city.

Now, 6 years later, she would be 49 years old. Besides that, her name was an absolute giveaway.

Hei Lin. She had either very thoughtfully named her so, or more likely, she had called herself her real name, Helen, and people here just misheard her.

Without even knowing, tears streamed down Alex's cheeks. He didn't understand how or why his mother was here. At the moment, he didn't care.

All he could care about was that his mother was here and he knew who she was.

A member of the Flowing Brush sect. With this information, Alex could easily find her no matter where the sect was.

He wiped his tears and continued looking at the competition. The competition soon started and the first day's contests were soon concluded.

His mother had done quite well, ranking in the top 10 amongst the nearly 300 participants.

Once the vision ended, Alex brought out the next one and watched it.

The competition reminded him of the Annual competition back in Crimson Empire.

Alex was nearly sure that it was these competitions that inspired those in that empire. After all, the first emperor was someone from the Fu family who would have had knowledge of such things.

The first day was about recognizing ingredients and such.

The second day was about cognitive skills and how fast one could learn something. Alex could guarantee that his mother was one of the best in this.

He had gained his talent in learning everything fast from her after all.

This time, his mother had ranked first easily.

The third day was about speed. Alex was sure his mother would struggle in this, but it seemed he was wrong. She still managed to place in the top 10 towards the lower end of it.

Finally, the last day was about putting everything to the test and creating the best talisman you could make in as little time as possible.

Alex watched that one entire competition in shock as his mother placed second in it.

His shock only deepened when the final results arrived, and his mother placed 2nd in the whole competition, only behind the fatty Tian Ye.

Chapter 673: DawnSpring City

After a quick questioning, Alex found the location of the Flowing Brush sect. It lay to the southeast of the capital, just outside of a massive city known as the Dawnspring City.

From the map, Alex could tell that the city was quite close to the eastern mountain ranges, albeit it was still a couple of hundred kilometers away.

Once he got the information, Alex left the guild. He walked out and looked in the direction of the Alchemy Guild. However, once he saw the number of people inside, he decided to skip it.

'I need to go to DawnSpring city as soon as I can," he thought and started walking away from the area where the guilds were.

He wondered if he could take the teleport formations back, but from what he had heard, it was all packed up for the next 3 days or so.

'It will be faster to just fly there,' he thought.

The distance between Radiant City and Dawnspring city was about 5,000 kilometers.

Which, if he few would take him about 3 days as well. He could stay back and then leave, but there was no guarantee that there would even be an opening after 3 days given how many people he saw in those recordings.

'Alright, that settles it,' he thought and started walking away.

As he did, his eyes fell on a group of people making their way through the road. They wore clothes that changed color based on the direction it was viewed from.

Lightsworns.

Unconsciously, Alex placed his right hand on his stump. He was finally here, in the radiant city.

And he was going to leave already?

How long had it been since he had lost his arm? And he still hadn't gotten it back.

'Do I stay… back?' he thought to himself. He couldn't imagine the help his arm would be if it grew back. He desperately wanted it back as well.

But…

'No, I need to go see mother first,' he thought to himself. 'My arm doesn't matter as much to me right now as my mother's situation.'

Once his heart grew resolute, he left the city.

* * * * * *

The talisman competition had ended just yesterday, and today the prizes had been distributed. Helen was back in her room in the Flowing Brush sect looking at the prizes in her hand.

There were a few talismans in her hand. Some recorded designs to craft certain talismans, while some contained power to block some damage.

Helen didn't really care much for them. At least, not as much as the prize on her other hand.

In her right hand, she held a brush made up of exotic bamboo as the handle, and the manes of the Soaring Lion as the soft bristles.

she stared at the brush for a while before bringing out her talisman-making station from her storage bag.

She poured some ink to the side and dipped the new brush in it.

The brush absorbed just the right amount of ink. Not too little, and not too much.

'As expected of a Saint rank artifact,' she thought to herself as she held the brush and finally placed her palm on the empty talisman paper.

Helen took a deep breath and then started making runes on the piece of paper one by one.

Helen couldn't go too fast or too slow. The slightest deviation from what was symmetrical would make the talisman go from good to unusable in a single instant.

After nearly 10 minutes of slow drawing, she finally managed to create the talisman. Her arms moved as a technique was used upon the talisman.

Within seconds, the slightly went ink on the paper dried like it had been made years ago.

"Phew!" Helen wiped her sweat and ignored the slightly throbbing head to quickly check the Alignment of the talisman.

After placing the talisman in the square-shaped tester, she learned that she had reached 72% alignment.

"Ah, so close to 75%," she thought. Still, just the fact that she was able to reach such a high alignment was monstrous, to begin with.

'I gained nearly 5% with this brush. It's quite good,' she thought and cleaned the ink from the brush using some sort of concoction.

'Good!' she told herself. 'If I can go on like this, I can become strong enough to leave this land and go look for them.'

Once she cleared everything, She sat on the mat and started to cultivate. However, before she began, she heard a knock on her door.

"Come in," she said and watched a tall, old man walk in. This man had no beard, but his mustache came down in a short thin line to his chin.

His head was bald in a circle and what remaining hair he had was tied in a ponytail.

His magenta robe seemed to shine with some slight color in the night as he slowly walked in through the door.

"Greetings, master," Helen said as the old man walked in.

"Lin'er, were you making talismans?" the old man asked.

"I was simply testing my new brush, master," she said.

"Oh, I see. Make sure to rest up. You've done a lot in the past week," he said.

"Yes, master," Helen said. She expected her master to leave after saying that, but he stuck around for a little longer.

"Is something wrong, master?" she asked.

"Um… there is a small… not really problem, but situation rather, and we need you to stay here for the next month or so. Can you do that?" the old man asked.

Helen's eyes narrowed a little. "What's the situation?" she asked.

"It doesn't matter. It will go away within a few weeks. It's just a side effect of you winning 2nd place in the competition," the old man said.

"I see, then… I guess I can stay here. I want to practice the new talisman I got the designs for today," Helen said.

"Okay, do so. I will let you know when it is safe to leave," the old man said and walked away.

He closed the door behind him and sighed. The problems for the next few days wouldn't be much for him as he wouldn't have to handle them, but he couldn't help but feel bad for the disciples that did have to.

Once he was out of her place, the old man left for his own abode while making sure to remember to leave some information for the disciples tomorrow.

* * * * * * *

"Is this the Dawnspring city?" Alex wondered as he finally arrived at the outskirts of a city with tall walls, surrounded by many other smaller city-like patches of buildings.

He stopped before entering the city and looked at the entire area from high above.

There were 3 distinct, separate locations that Alex could see from his viewpoint.

One of them was a large set of buildings not far from where he flew off.

Next, there was another separate group of buildings to a small mountain range to the south of the city.

Finally, similar to the one in the south, there was another set of building in the larger mountain ranges to the north. This place was also far larger than the other one.

"If I'm not wrong, this place on the flat land must be the Han ancestral family home," Alex thought. "Then the larger one in the mountains must be the Heaven's Peak school, and finally, this smaller one must be the Flowing Brush sect. That's where I need to go to."

Alex soon came to the ground and dropped from his boat. It felt quite good not having to sit down all day long.

He entered the city and was immediately greeted with the sight of many cultivators, all wearing different colored robes.

He saw the brown robes of the Han family, the black and red of the disciples of Heaven's Peak school, and finally the magenta of the Flowing Brush sect.

These were the main group of people, but of course, there were many others as well.

Alex ignored them all and without hesitation walked to the other side to find his way out of the city and to the mountains where the Flowing Brush sect.

Surprisingly, he found a lot of people were going there too. Some were on flying treasures, while some took carriages.

Alex on the other hand simply walked on foot. It would take him some time, but he would reach his mother sooner or later.

Chapter 674: Excuses

When Alex finally arrived at the gates of the Flowing Brush sect, he couldn't help but be surprised when he was greeted by a crowd that fully occupied the sect gate.

"The hell?" Alex looked in confusion. He looked left and right and saw people from different sects and cities who seemed to have come here.

Alex even noticed a few cultivators from the elite sects and clans in the crowd. However, they looked like they were one of the less important individuals in their given sect.

He had to line up to even get a chance to talk with the guards. So, he waited for his turn to come up as the crowd murmured on its own.

'Why are they here? Is there a celebration of some sort for my mother winning second place?' Alex wondered. If that were true, he could only wonder how much rowdier the Demon Whisper sect was.

After all, the fatty Tian Ye had won the…

Alex's thoughts wandered off as his eyes fell on the same fatty he was thinking about. That fatty too was in the crowd, waiting like everyone else.

"What?" Alex couldn't help but blurt out under his breath. 'Why is he here?'

This crowd was starting to make less sense to him now. 'Is there not a celebration then?'

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he arrived at the gate with a few young individuals who seemed to be on guard duty.

They sighed when they saw him, which surprised him as he had never seen them before. 'Is dealing with the crowd just that demanding?' he wondered.

"Hello, I'm here to meet someone," Alex said.

"Yeah, yeah. Get on with it," the guard said with clear annoyance in his voice.

Alex was surprised, but he didn't let the rudeness get to him. "I'm here to see my mother. I was hoping you could let her know," he said.

"Oh," the guard's attitude changed at once. "Your mother?"

The guard took out his medal and got ready to communicate back with the sect. "Is she an elder? A helper? What's her name?" the guard asked.

"Um, I don't know her role in the sect, but my mother's name is Hei Lin. She's the one who won second place in the Talisman competition," Alex said.

The guard's hand that was bringing the medal up to his forehead stopped as he looked at Alex with what looked like shock on his face.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"Hei Lin, that's my mother's name," Alex repeated.

The man stared at him with a completely serious face, and then… he burst out laughing.

"Hahaha! Nice one, young man. I nearly fell for it. Hey guys, we have a new excuse amongst the crowd," the guard said, calling to the other ones.

"Oh, what is it?"

"A new one? So soon?"

People gathered around making Alex feel awkward. 'What's going on?' he thought.

"This young brother says he's sister Hei's son," the guard said.

"Son? Haha, that really is a new one. Brother, thanks for the laugh," another guard said.

"Wait, does he want her to adopt him?" one of the confused guards asked.

"No, not adopt. He says he already is the son," the guard reiterated.

"Now that's a comedy," the confused guard finally said.

Alex looked at them all for a few seconds and said, "Um, can you please call my mother first before you laugh yourself unconscious?"

"He's already calling her his mother. Oh, this poor brother must have something hit his head in the last few days," the guards laughed again.

"I really am her son. Can you guys please get serious?" Alex asked.

"Oh yeah? Then everyone that's standing here should be her brothers and husbands, right?" the guards asked. "Go away, little brother. At least come up with a better excuse next time if you want to meet with sister Hei."

Alex was flabbergasted. He had come all this way from the capital to see his mother, and right when he had arrived at the door, he was stopped?

His spiritual perception landed on the 5 guards and saw that their cultivation base was in the higher end of the True Lord realm. They were likely one of the better disciples of the sect.

"Little brother, please leave. We have more meeting requests and marriage requests to deal with. Everyone here wants to meet sister Hei. We need to continue rejecting them all," the guard said.

"Can't you just give her a message and see if she comes out or not? Brother, I really am her son," Alex said.

The guard only shook his head. "Can't do that. We are on strict orders not to disturb sister Hei while she is breaking through," the guard said. "Please leave now."

'Mother is breaking through?' Alex thought for a moment and walked away. 'Was that true, or were they trying to get rid of me?'

"I am from Hiding Sword Palace and have come on behalf of my master. I'm here to visit Maiden Hei Lin. I hope you can call her out please," a man walked up to the guard after Alex moved away.

"Sorry, brother. Sister Hei is currently in closed cultivation, trying to break through. I'm afraid we cannot call her at the moment," the guard said.

"I see, that's a shame," the man said and left.

'Ah, so it really is just a lie,' Alex thought. Still, he couldn't believe so many people had come for his mother just because she won 2nd place in the competition.

'I can't believe they would go so far as to ask her hand in marriage,' Alex thought. 'What would father do if he found out?'

As his thoughts steered in that direction, Alex's heart skipped a beat. He hadn't thought about his father at all.

If his mother was here, then his father must have entered the game as well, even if it was just once.

Was he okay? Was he in the western continent? Or did he end up somewhere else?

Worry grew in Alex's heart as he looked back towards the guard, and then to the crowd. With so many people wanting to see her, Alex became increasingly sure that he wasn't going to meet her today at all.

He could sneak in, but he didn't know what sort of defenses this place had, not to mention the saint realm that could see with a single scan of their senses.

'No, I will have to come back later for sure,' he thought and left the area. People would continue to pour in and the guards would continue to make excuses.

Alex looked at the sky and saw that it had gotten darker. "I should find a place to stay soon," he thought.

"Or I could just stay in the alchemy guild like I did last time."

After thinking for a moment, he decided to not waste money on renting places when he could just stay in the guild.

So, Alex went back to the city, and by evening, he had entered the DawnSpring branch of Alchemy Guild.

Alex took out the bronze badge from his storage and hung it over his chest before going towards the mission board.

It was time to make some pills.

Chapter 675: Questions about the Sword

Alex stayed in the alchemy room sometime after finishing the product. Being in a big city, the demand for better pills was everywhere, so Alex was forced to create pills that were in the 35% or higher harmony consistently.

That wasn't hard for him, but that did mean he couldn't cheat his way with the twin pills which could get him to 25% consistently.

After finishing one of the pills, he decided to rest for a bit.

'How long has it been since I've rested?' he thought to himself.

From the 11 days in the demon realm to the 5 days it took him to go to the capital and get to Dawnspring city had wrung him dry.

He wanted to let his body stay still for a moment and finally now was the time.

He did nothing but let his mind wander as he took a deep breath.

His mind wandered from having nothing to do and soon he found himself thinking about his mother and father again.

He couldn't wait to meet her since it had been nearly 3 years for him since he had met her.

When he thought about that, he realized that she hadn't seen him in 6 years. She must've been more desperate to see him.

Alex was just happy that she didn't fall victim to the mental problems some of the players developed after their soul was suppressed.

'I hope they are starting to get back their memories of the time when they were suppressed,' he thought.

Alex fiddled with the ring on his index finger as he remembered that he still had to open it up more.

After reaching about 20 or so cubic meters in volume, the ring was getting harder to open. The Qi he put into the ring would simply disappear with no hints as to why.

So, Alex was forced to stop for now and try once his Qi was stronger. Still, 20 cubic meters was a lot of space for someone who only hoarded ingredients for pills.

He kept most in the storage bags anyway out of fear of people noticing him using the ring too much.

As he thought that, Alex brought out a jar from his storage bag. It was the big jar of spicy medicinal paste that was supposed to do… something he believed.

He wanted to test it on his body but was a little afraid about it. It would be fine if it were poison, but what if it wasn't considered something bad by the body and it still destroyed his body?

Alex kept that particular jar away as he brought out the other small vials of medicinal pastes. He had recipes for the pastes, so if he wanted to, he could make the pastes and simply compare them with the medical pastes in the vial to learn which was which.

Alex spent a few more minutes just absentmindedly going through the items in his ring when he found the talisman with the map again.

Alex looked at the map and showed a confused look. "If the demon realm opens every 10 years, the other one has to do so as well right?" he thought.

If there was another realm that opened up, he would have a way to find it. However, the demons were in hiding at the time, so he wasn't sure if they would leave the door to the demon realm in an open area.

'Wait, did they create the demon realm? Probably not. It must've been a secret realm that they refined,' he thought.

Alex put away the map for now and pulled out the thin sword from his ring. He poured in his Qi, but nothing entered the sword at all.

It wasn't like when he tried to pour Qi into the ring, or the Ebony sword where he felt something else push from the other side.

This one just felt like he was splashing water into a metal wall, and hoping it would cave in. There just didn't seem to be a chance for that to happen.

"How is a sword without a spirit keeping me from putting my Qi into it?" Alex thought to himself. "I wonder if it knows."

Alex immediately went into his mental space and saw the mess that was there. Having not come here in a week or so had caused the silver threads to fly all over the place

Alex flew up to the side of the mountain and grabbed the crystal ball as he moved around the place gathering the threads.

Alex wanted to ask the spirit first, but the spirit spoke up before him. "I sensed your spirit grow a little weaker a few days earlier, what happened?" it asked.

"Weaker?" Alex was surprised. 'Has my spirit grown weaker?'

"Were you attacked? Did you create a puppet? Did you get a beast? What did you d—"

"Ah yes, I bonded with a new beast," Alex said.

"I see. Well, it wasn't bad damage to your spirit. Also, the change wasn't very much so you should be fine," the spirit said.

"You care about my spirit?" Alex asked.

"I care about mine," the spirit said. "Whether I like it or not, I can't seem to leave this place. Since you aren't so easily tempted either, I can't do anything but remain here for eternity."

"The only escape I can find from here is death, and I don't want that. So, until I want that, you will have to remain alive," it said.

"If I die, you die?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the spirit said.

Alex looked at the spirit for a few seconds with narrowed eyes as he got curious.

"The beast I bonded a few days ago, it has a bloodline of someone," Alex asked.

"Why are you telling me this?" the spirit asked with clear confusion in its voice.

"The bloodline belongs to someone called the Undying god," Alex said.

Suddenly, the spirit seemed to change as the black goo around it jumped to life.

"God? Did you say GOD? Where is it? Let me kill it! Let me kill it right now!" it shouted.

Alex watched the spirit go berserk with absolute amazement in his eyes. "I lied," he told the spirit to calm it down.

"You did? Tsk, why would you do that?" it said.

"You sound so earnest and… normal when you are talking about normal things. Now that your arrogance and haughtiness are gone, you feel like a common spirit," Alex said. "However, the moment I bring up a God, your attitude changes entirely. Why is that?"

"It's clear isn't it?" Godslayer said. "I hate gods."

"Can you think of a reason as to why you hate gods beyond the simple 'because they are gods'?" Alex asked.

"That's… do I need another reason?" the spirit asked.

Alex couldn't think of anything to say. it seemed the hate for gods was ingrained into the spirit.

"Right, I almost forgot why I was here," Alex said as he remembered about the sword.

"That thin sword you were trapped in. Does it still hold another spirit? No right?" Alex asked.

"That sword? No," Godslayer said.

"Then can you tell me why I can't use my Qi with it? I can't seem to pour any," Alex said.

"HAHAHAHA!" the spirit suddenly laughed as if it had heard the biggest joke of all time. "You expect to be able to use that sword? Keep dreaming. No one in this world can use that sword aside from its owner."

"Although, I can make it possible, you know. All you have to do it put me back into the sword, and you will be able to pour Qi into it. I can work as a conduit to connect you to the sword," the spirit said.

"Absolutely not. I'm not letting you get out of here. I don't know what atrocities you would do if you got out," Alex said.

"Well, then good luck," the spirit said and flew out of Alex's hands as it went drifting around the mountain.

"Tsk, it didn't tell me anything in the end," Alex thought. However, he still learned that it was simply impossible to use that sword.

He wouldn't stop trying outright just because the spirit told him so, but he would find less inclination to try to do so now that he had learned what he did.

Once he finished collecting the silver threads, he looked back at the mountain with a curious look on his face.

"Is this getting small at all?" he asked himself. It looked like a few of the imperfections here and there were getting smoothed out. Other than that, there was virtually no difference.

Alex sighed and got back out of his spiritual sea. He then looked at the sword in his arm, knowing full well that he would likely never be able to use it to its fullest extent.

He sighed once more and put it back into his ring before walking out of the room. Once he delivered the pills he had created, he walked out of the alchemy guild again and quickly made his way out of the city.

Since it was late in the afternoon, people who visited the Flowing Brush sect would start to leave now.

So, it was a better time for him to go and quickly get to meet the guards. Alex wasn't sure how long they could keep the excuse of his mother breaking through, but it surely couldn't be wrong.

Sooner or later, they would have to be fed up with him and either attack him, which would cause a big enough commotion to get everyone's attention, or the better result, just send his mother a message.

Chapter 676: Guests

"Brother, you here to see your mother?" one of the guards joked as they saw Alex approaching.

Alex simply smiled. "I guess I don't have to say anything to you then," he said. "Will you please send a message this time?"

"Can't," the guard shrugged. "Sister is still in closed cultivation, trying to break through."

"It has been 5 days you know?" Alex said to the guards. "Look, I just want to see my mother, and I'm sure she wants to see me too. It's been 6 years since we saw each other, so I'm getting a little desperate here."

The guards frowned a little. "Let us for a moment believe you, okay brother? What do you want me to do exactly?" he asked.

"Simply send her a message that her son is here to see her," Alex said.

"That's the problem, brother. Sister Hei is in closed cultivation and we can't help you at all," the guard said.

"Since you call my mother you sister, I shall call you uncle. Please help this nephew of yours by getting him to meet his mother," Alex said.

The guard frowned a little. "You know, after seeing you come here, we have had a lot of other young cultivators come here jokingly, calling sister Hei their mother," the guard said.

"They have?" Alex was surprised.

"Yeah," the guards said.

"Have they been as persistent as me?" Alex asked.

"Sigh, no," the guard said.

"Then, can you help me please, uncle," Alex said.

The guard hesitated a little more and finally gave in. "Fine, but I can't send a message to sister Hei at all," he said.

"Oh, who will you be messaging then?" Alex asked.

"Her master," the guard said.

"Sect Master Qin?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the guard said. "You scared? You can give up now."

"No," Alex shouted. "In fact, that's amazing. I'm one step closer to seeing my mother. Why would I be scared?"

"Sigh, you are something, little bro— Nephew," the guard said and brought out a talisman.

"Can you tell me your name? I will need to record it and send it to sect master later," the guard said.

"Yes, my name is Yu Ming," Alex said.

"Right, do you belong somewhere? A sect or a clan? Or are you a rogue cultivator?" the guard asked.

"Uhh… I guess I'm a rogue cultivator for now," Alex said. "Unless the Alchemy guild counts as something."

"Oh, you're part of the alchemy guild? Are you a staff there?" the guard asked.

"Oh no, I'm an alchemist," Alex said.

"Alchemist? Can you prove it?" the guard asked after a moment of hesitation.

"Sure," Alex said as he brought out the badge from within his robes.

"True Earth Alchemist? Woah, that's amazing. You're so young too," the guard sounded shocked. "Why didn't you show it earlier?"

"Eh? Would this have helped me get in contact with my mother?" Alex asked.

"Uh, no. Even True Heaven would get you the same result, but it would have stopped us from laughing at you for coming here every day," the guard said.

"I'm ready to be laughed at if it means I get to meet mother," Alex said.

"Ooh, I like your determination, nephew," the guard joked. "Go back for today, I will get this information to sect master. He will do with it what he wants to do."

"Thank you, Uncle," Alex said and walked back to the alchemy guild.

One of the other guards that was done dealing with the guests came towards this guard when he saw Alex leave.

"He came once again?" the other guard asked.

"Yes, he's persistent for sure. He even called me uncle today," the guard said.

"Poor guy, I wonder if it is really true," the other guard asked.

"Don't know, but we may find out tomorrow," the guard said.

"Eh, why?" the other guard asked.

"I'm going to deliver the information to sect master tonight," the guard waved the talisman.

He ignored the other guard's complicated look and got back to work.

Once night fell and the other guards came to take their place, the guard that Alex had talked to walked back into the sect towards the sect master's abode.

He looked at the house at the feet of the mountain where their Sister Hei was cultivating at the moment and directly walked towards the top of the mountain.

Once he reached the top, he saw a few guards there and greeted them.

"I need to see sect master," the man said.

"Is it important?" the guard of the mountain asked.

"I cannot judge it for myself, which is why I'm here to seek sect master's help," the man said.

"Well, you better hope it's important," the guard said. "What is it that you need?"

The man quickly explained the situation causing the guard to frown. "That's obviously false, you idiot," the guard said.

"Are you willing to take the risk?" the man asked, causing the guard to retreat a few of his words.

"Fine, I'll get it to him," the guard grabbed the talisman and went towards the sect master's abode.

He was able to go in freely because he knew that the sect master wasn't in cultivation or anything. In fact, he had been entertaining some of the bigger guests that couldn't simply be told no to.

When the old man with the long, thin mustache felt the guard approaching, he excused himself out of the room.

"What is it? Why are you here?" the sect master asked.

"Sect master, someone who keeps claiming to be sister Hei's son keeps coming to the sect requesting to see her," the guard said.

"What?" the old man quickly took the talisman and looked over it. "Early 20s? Yu Ming? None of this sounds true."

"What should we do then?" the guard asked. "Should we punish him for lying?"

The sect master glared at the guard for even suggesting such a thing. He stared back at the talisman. While the information was wrong… a son had come.

The old man's eyes suddenly changed as he thought, 'even if this is false… this can help me.'

"Tell the guards to inform me directly when this person arrives tomorrow," the old man said.

"Yes, sect master," the guard said and ran back.

The sect master turned and returned back to the room full of individuals from great sects and clans.

"Sorry about that. Something small came up," he said as he entered the room.

"No worries, no worries," one of the men sitting in the room said.

"So, where were we?" the old man asked, and as soon as he did, he regretted it.

"Of course, we were talking about your disciple's marriage," one of the old men said. "My son is already a True King 5th realm at the mere age of 50. Your daughter and my son would make a great couple."

"What are you saying, you senile old fool. My nephew is a True Earth formation master, on the verge of becoming a True Heaven formation master. Hei Lin would do better with my son than you," another man said.

The sect master Qin started frowning again when he heard them. 'Dammit! If my disciple hadn't been so old, none of this would be happening. Just because they think she's out of her prime, they come here trying to jump at her like vultures seeing dead meat,' the sect master thought. 'Sigh, this wouldn't have been happening had I found her just 2 decades ago. At that time, she would've shocked the empire with her talent.'

One of the older men that wore a cyan robe started speaking.

"True Heaven talisman experts are hard to come by already. Even if they're on the verge of it, one cannot necessarily go above it."

"However, the difficulty gets so much larger once you try to become a True Immortal talisman expert. The amount of resources you will require is just insane."

"If you don't get that soon, I don't see your disciple advancing any further than she already has, brother Qin. Her skill is great, but skill is not all that is necessary to become an expert. You need cultivation as well."

"She isn't young and in her prime like nephew Tian Ye here. Just being able to reach second place in the competition alone is an amazing feat, but I'm afraid that's the last thing she will ever do."

"So in my eyes, the only way to improve her cultivation quickly is to get her to marry a person of great backing. You may choose the young men these two brothers have brought along, or you may choose someone of your own, but you must choose soon," the man finished talking.

'You only say that because you don't know how great my disciple is. Her talent is beyond any of you fools.'

'You think I will let such a precious disciple of mine get taken away by swine who don't deserve her at all? Keep dreaming,' the old man Qin thought to himself, which was different from what he said on the outside.

"Yes, I'm afraid I must do something like that in the end, but I also have to think of my disciple's feeling, you know. She's not mine to simply wed her away," the sect master said.

"Right, call your disciple here. You can't just keep her hidden forever, you know," one of the elders said.

"Right, sect master. I came all the way to converse with sister Hei, and I still haven't gotten the chance to," Tian Ye, the fatty spoke from the side.

"Nephew Ye, I'm afraid it's not possible right now. She's still in deep cultivation," the old man said.

"I see," the fatty said dejectedly.

'Hmm, is there perhaps a problem with her breakthrough? Is she stuck?' Tian Ye thought.

'Maybe I should go get some help for her.'

Chapter 677: Lord Clearance Pill

Alex spent the night inside the alchemy room doing nothing but cultivating. He had taken a particularly large Alchemy task that would normally take about 10 hours for a normal cultivator.

However, he had finished it in just 3 hours and had spent the remainder of the time simply cultivating.

Alex walked out of the room a bit after noon and looked outside. It was just an hour before he got to meet his mother again.

'I can do one more pill,' Alex thought and walked out from the back of the guild to the front where the mission board lay.

As he was about to place his badge on the carved spots, he heard someone shouting behind him.

"Hey, you!"

Alex continued with his task, wondering why someone would dare be rowdy in the guild.

"Can you turn around, please?" the voice continued. "I'm talking to you, the one with the missing arm."

Alex stopped and finally turned around. When he did, he came face to face with someone he didn't expect to see here at all.

Fatty Tian Ye.

"Brother, are you an alchemist?" Tian Ye asked.

"Yes," Alex said, while at the same time a little surprised at the fact that the fatty was still in the city. He would've expected him to leave already after being rejected.

"Good, good. Can you check for me if someone has taken up my order yet?" he asked.

"Uhh… sure, what's your order?" Alex asked.

"Lord Clearance Pill. 40%," the fatty said.

"Hmm… let's see," Alex placed the badge on the carving and started looking.

"Ah, found it. It's not been taken yet," Alex said as he looked at the mission. This was a simple pill that wasn't different from the Disciple Ascendance pill, only this one worked for the Lord realm cultivators.

'Why would he need one? Isn't he a True King?' Alex wondered. Still, this was a pill for him to make and he needed to pass some time.

"Alright, I've taken up the order. You will get your pill soon," Alex said.

"What? No!" the fatty shouted.

Alex stopped. "Did you not want your pill to be made?" Alex asked with a confused look.

"Of course I do! But, not by you," the fatty said.

Alex felt a tinge of anger when he heard that. "Why? What's wrong with me?" he asked.

"You… you… you're a bronze. I'm afraid you will mess up my order," Fatty said.

"Then you shouldn't have put up an order a bronze could take," Alex asked. "Don't worry. If I mess it up, I will compensate for the loss. That's guild orders. You should know that."

"I… I'm not worried about losing money or ingredients. I'm worried about losing time," the fatty said. "There's someone who needs this pill desperately right now. She's been cultivating for 6 days already, and still hasn't broken through."

Alex paused in his steps. As the pieces fell together, Alex understood who the fatty was talking about.

'He's buying this pill for my mother?' he thought curiously. 'No way he's trying to marry my mother too right? He's nearly 15 years younger.'

"Don't worry, brother. I will make your pill. Besides, I can't give back a mission I've already taken," Alex said. After that, he left the outer hall and went to the back, leaving a nervous Tian Ye waiting outside.

Once Alex was in the alchemy room, he got the ingredients. He looked at the two sets of ingredients and wondered, 'Does my mother even need pills?'

Alex still didn't know what was responsible for his very weak, almost non-existent bottlenecks. Was it his body? Or was it his spiritual roots?

Or maybe was it his talents? If it was his talents, his mother certainly didn't require the pills.

But, if it was any of the other two, he would have to do his best with the pills.

So, Alex brought himself to the best shape he could and started making a pill for his mother.

Half an hour later, he walked out with a satisfied expression.

After handing one of the pills that came out at 44%, he walked out. The fatty immediately saw him come out and jumped to his feet.

"What happened? Did you do it?" he asked.

"Yes, you can go take the pill," Alex said as he walked away from the place. He only had half an hour to arrive at the gates of the Flowing Brush sect, and it would take him just a little under that.

So, he hurried his way out of the city and went up the mountain roads all the way to the sect.

"Oh, you've come in time," the guard from yesterday said.

"About the message…?" Alex asked.

"We'll call the sect master, right now," the guards said and sent a message.

Alex had waited a few minutes for the sect master to walk out when he heard a surprised "Oh, you!" come from behind him.

He turned around to see the fatty stand not far away from him. It seemed he had come back as well.

"Hey, brother," Alex said. "Hope you like your pill."

"Yes, yes, I do," the fatty said. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm here to see my mother," Alex said with a smile.

"Your mother, huh? Is she an elder?" Fatty asked.

"No, she's—"

"Where is he?" a voice came from the gate catching everyone's attention.

"Sect master, here," the guard said and pointed towards Alex, who instantly stood up and readied himself.

The sect master walked out of the gates and saw Alex.

'Hmm… that's him?' the sect master Qin walked up to Alex.

"You are the one who's claiming to be my disciple's son?" the old man asked.

"Yes, sect master. I am he," Alex said with a bow.

"Huh? What? Son? Whose?" the Fatty was startled.

"What's your name?" the old man ignored Tian Ye and asked Alex.

"My name is Yu Ming," Alex said.

'Wrong name. That's not her son's name,' the old man thought with a bit of disappointment visible in his eyes. 'Sigh, but he looks close enough that I should be able to use him to dissuade the suitors.'

"Very well," the old man said. "Come, I will take you to your mother."

Alex's face brightened and he thanked the old man before walking forward.

"Wait, what's happening sect master Qin?" the fatty asked.

"Nephew Tian, can't you see? This young man says he's my disciple's son. I'm going to take him to meet her," the old man said.

"Sister Hei Lin has a son? And he's this old? No way. Why would you keep this information hidden?" the fatty asked.

"I did not hide anything. This is the first time I've seen her son too," the old man said as he turned towards Alex. "Let us hurry."

Alex felt an aura grab him and hoist him into the air before pulling him away.

He was moved fast, but not as fast as Shen Jing. So, he was perfectly fine.

He tried to look below, get a lay of the land. However, the excitement and nervousness were taking over him and he couldn't focus.

The Fatty was flying quite quickly as well, following the two of them.

At the same time, a spiritual sense touched Alex and a voice entered his mind.

"I know you're not my disciple's son, but I am in need of your help right now. Simply act like you're her son when you see her."

"Cry, call her mother, do what normal families would do. If you do that, I will grant any wish that may have brought you here."

Alex looked at the old man in surprise. 'He doesn't believe me?' Alex wondered.

Still, he nodded to give a yes to the old man. Finally, 2 minutes later they landed at the feet of a green mountain.

The moment Alex landed, he felt the aura of many True and saint realm experts appear in front of him.

Many seemingly high-ranking people were standing in front of him. Nearly everyone held a confused or annoyed look.

"Brother Qin, what is this? Your disciple has a son?" one of the old men and women asked.

"Why were we not let know about this beforehand?" the people started complaining. They had been staying here, hoping to rope in the old, but definitely talented Helen by using their family as leverage.

However, now that they learned that she had a son, marrying her into their family would only put a dark spot on their son's and nephew's images.

They couldn't stand that knowledge.

'Did the fatty let them know what was happening?' Alex wondered as he looked at the crowd.

"Brothers, sisters. Please calm down. I wasn't keeping this information from you at all. I too only came to learn about this right now."

"I haven't even checked this fact with my disciple yet. However, given how close this young man's features look like my disciples, I'm inclined to believe his story," the old man said.

"No, don't believe him," the fatty shouted. "He's an alchemist. He must be wearing an illusion formed by his pill."

The old man Qin's eyes hesitated for a moment. 'Dammit, is that true?' he wondered.

"We will find out after I ask my disciple," the old man said and walked to the house close to them and knocked on the door 3 times before entering.

The moment he was inside, he found Helen making a talisman under the lantern's light.

"Master?" she looked up surprised.

"Lin'er!" the old man said. "I need you to do something for me."

Chapter 678: Reunion

"Oh, what is it, master?" Helen asked.

"Outside, there is a young man claiming to be your son," the old man hadn't finished speaking when Helen's eyes went wide.

"My son?" she asked.

"Sigh, don't be excited. He's a fake," the old man said, immediately deflating Helen's excitement like a knife through a balloon.

"His name is… what was it? Yu Ming, and he's missing an arm. Go out and act like he's your son. That way, we can keep your suitors at bay," the old man said.

"Suitors?" Helen asked with a curious face.

The old man shook his head and explained everything.

"But I already have a husband and a son," Helen objected.

"I know that, but how do you expect to tell that to those old foggies? Without your son and husband here, it's hard to dissuade their interest."

"If they take a dislike to our attitude, they may even work against our sect in the future," the old man said.

"Which is why this is perfect timing. Go out and hug that young man like he were your own son. Maybe cry a little too," the old man said.

"Sigh, okay master," Helen said and stood up.

"Alright, let's go."

Outside, Alex was bombarded with questions from all sides. Someone asked him his name and origin. Others asked him if this was a ploy.

And one of the old women even went as far as to ask him if someone else paid him to disrupt her nephew's marriage.

Alex simply told them his name and that he was Hei Lin's son. As for anyone that may have tried to force him to answer him, Alex let slip the bronze Alchemist badge that was hiding in his robes.

With that, there was no way anyone would dare threaten him, lest they wanted to face the wrath of an angry guild.

Alex really liked how handy the Alchemist guild badge was.

Just as he was thinking that the door opened and the old man walked out. Then, following him, the magenta-robed Hei Lin walked out.

She had an excited look on her face, but it seemed obviously fake to many eyes.

Her eyes fell on the old men and woman before slowly moving towards the right before they fell on Alex.

Alex had long hair now and was about two fingers taller than he had been 3, or rather 6 years ago. His body was also more built up, more muscular.

And he was missing an arm.

However, the face… it was a face that Helen could never forget. She could see part of herself in that face, and part of her husband. There was also a part that was unique on its own.

Helen's leg moved forward on its own as the initial facade of excitement was immediately torn down and a face with a multitude of expressions landed on her face.

Happy, excited, nervous, scared, and even a little sad. Her face held it all, and so did Alex's.

"Mother?" he cried out, his voice nearly choking as it came out.

"Al?" Helen's voice went up 2 octaves.

"Mother!" Alex said as he slowly walked ahead, but Helen was already running.

Before Alex could also run, Helen arrived in front of him and took him in a motherly embrace.

"My Al, you're okay. You're alive," she said, tears streaming down her face without her approval.

Alex couldn't hold in his tears either. "I'm so happy to see you again mother," Alex said as he too embraced her with his only hand.

Helen somehow both cried and laughed at the same time, her face slowly became a mixture of happiness and sadness.

She quickly let go of her son and held him by the shoulders to look at him with a horrified look.

"What happened to your arm?" she cried out.

Alex gave a melancholic smile. "I… lost it during a fight," he said.

"Aw, my sweet child," Helen said as she hugged him again. Alex didn't remember the last time he had felt this loved.

He smiled.

This was nice.

The elders that were standing around showed nothing on their faces, but inwardly they cringed.

'Dammit! I nearly got my son together with someone that was already married,' one thought.

'That's a trap dodged,' another one thought. Everyone thought one thing or another as they looked at the mother-son reunion.

The only one that hadn't been thinking anything was the sect master Qin.

The old man Qin's face was riddled with surprise. The change had taken place too fast for him to understand things properly.

By now, he had already guessed that the fake son he brought for his disciple was her actual son and that only served to increase his astonishment.

'What the hell? That is actually her son?' he finally thought with shock clear on his face. 'Why the hell did he not tell me his actual name then?'

Tian Ye was about to speak, but the elder from the Demon Whisper sect stopped him. This was a family reunion that they couldn't interfere in at all.

"You seem quite shocked, brother Qin," the man sent a mental message.

"N-no, I'm just happy to see my disciple reunited with her son," the sect master sent back a mental message.

"Yeah, yeah, keep lying. Well, congratulations I guess. Now, no one will pester your disciple for marriage," the man sent.

The old man Qin couldn't help but give back a wry smile.

Helen finally let go of Alex and turned toward her master. "Master, is there any way to get my son's arm back?" she asked.

Qin turned towards her for a moment and then towards Alex's arm before shaking his head. "I don't think there is a way. Maybe if the Shen young lady improves her talent, but I hear she's got nothing on her elder sister, so your son will have to wait until he reaches Saint realm," the old man said while shaking his head.

Helen's eyes teared up as she looked back at her son and took his head in an embrace again. "It's fine. Mother is here. I will think of something."

Alex wanted to say that he had a way already, but he let it be. For now, he was just happy to have his mother back.

"Uhh… Lin'er, your son is going nowhere, but I'm afraid these guests of ours probably will. They came all the way here to meet you," the old man said.

Helen quickly bowed to all the elders in front of her with her hands cupped together.

"Hei Lin greets seniors," she said.

Alex felt a little weird seeing his mother treat the others the same way he treated them.

In terms of seniority, he and his mother could be considered from the same generation, as such they were equally respectful to the elders.

That didn't make it any less awkward for him.

The elders nodded back and congratulated her for getting her son back. Helen couldn't hide her smile or her tears.

"How only are you, young man?" one of the elders asked.

"I'm Twenty… four years old," Alex said after a bit of hesitation. It was probably better to keep his actual age a secret for fear of confusion.

"Oh, 24 and already a True Earth alchemist? You have quite the talent," one of the other elders said.

"Must take after his mother then," another one spoke.

"Young man, you are at the ample age to marry. I have a niece back at home. She is what they call city toppling beauty, do you wan—"

"Brother Huan, what are you doing? Are you seriously trying to rope in the son now that you didn't get the mother?" one of the elders asked directly.

"What? No. I'm just asking the young man what he wants," the elder said.

"Thank you, elder. But I have no such plans at the moment," Alex said.

"Hmm, if you do have such plans, let the sect master Qin know. He will message me," the man said. "Since I have seen junior Hei Lin, I will have to leave now."

"Congratulations on your performance in the competition."

Once the first man left, one after another, the people spoke some sweet words to Helen and left.

Tian Ye played with the small ceramic bottle where the pill was kept. He had brought it here to gift it to her, but it turned out the alchemist was her son.

Now, he was feeling incredibly awkward and didn't know what to do. In the end, he decided to go forward and give it to her.

"Although it's not much, Sister Hei, I hope you can accept this little gift of mine," he said as he put forth the pill.

Alex looked to the side as if not seeing what was happening in front of him, and the fatty felt grateful about it.

"Little brother Tian, you don't need to do that," Helen spoke, but the fatty didn't take the pill back.

"No, no. Just think of it as your little brother's help for you to break through without a problem," Tian Ye said. Then, he turned toward Alex and said, "Call me Uncle Tian from now on. If you ever need any help, you can use my name."

"Thank you, uncle Tian," Alex said without hesitation.

"Mmm," the fatty made a sound before saying, "I will have to return back to my sect too, so I will take my leave for now, sister Hei. Please come by the sect when you are free."

"Of course, little brother," Helen said, greeting the fatty a farewell.

Once everyone left, the sect master Qin finally turned to Alex as he said, "Inside that house. Now! I need some explanation."

Chapter 679: Helen's Story

Alex walked into his mother's single-roomed house and made his way towards the back of the room where he could see some brush, inks on a stone slab, and a talisman laid flat on a smooth metal plate.

"Were you making talismans before I came, mother?" Alex asked.

"Oh yes, I was practicing," Helen said as she walked up to the brushes to quickly clear away the place for him to stay in.

Old man Qin walked behind them, carefully watching Alex as he found a place for him to sit in.

"Quick, tell me! Where have you been all these years? Were you on a different continent? How did you get here?" Helen asked.

"I… I was in a different part of this continent before everything went wrong," Alex said. "It was only afterward that I came to this empire."

"You are from a different empire? There's a different empire in this continent?" the old man Qin showed a shocked face.

"Yes, there is one beyond the secret realm to the north. You have to go through the secret realm if you want to cross it," Alex explained.

"Is that really true?" Qin thought to himself.

Alex wanted to ask his mother some questions and give her some information of his own, but he didn't find it comfortable telling the old man next to him.

In fact, he was already annoyed that the old man knew his real name and the fact that he was a player.

"Sect master Qin, may I request some alone time with my mother?" Alex asked.

The old man nodded. "Just answer a few questions of mine and I will leave," the old man said.

Alex nodded, "go ahead, senior."

"When did you come to the empire?" he asked.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "about 5 and a half years ago."

"5 and a half years?" the old man seemed surprised. "And how long have you been cultivating?"

Alex didn't feel fine answering this, but since the old man already knew how long he had been playing the game, he sighed and gave him the answer.

"A bit more than 6 years ago I believe," Alex said.

"Hmm, 6 years to reach True Lord 2nd realm. It makes sense for your mother to be so slow, but you have cultivated for longer than her. Why are you not of higher cultivation base?" the old man asked.

'Is this kid not as talented as his mother perhaps?' the old man wondered.

"I spent most of my last 5 years training myself, so I have neglected increasing my cultivation base a little," Alex said.

"You trained, but you neglected your cultivation?" the old man looked confused.

"I trained not only in techniques but Alchemy too. Also in some parts formations," Alex said.

"Oh, you know alchemy and formations? Not bad," the old man said.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Oh, what's your…" the old man's voice trailed off as he noticed the badge hanging on Alex's neck.

"True Earth alchemist? Woah, you really do have your mother's talent," the old man said.

"And formation? What about formations?" the old man asked.

"I haven't had the chance to enter the formation guild yet. Now that I will likely settle in this city with my mother, I intend to join it not soon after," Alex said.

"Good, good. What about talisman?" the old man asked.

Alex paused for a second and said, "I haven't had the chance to learn anything about talismans, but I do plan on learning about the runes soon so I may as well learn talismans as well."

"Yes, yes," the old man nodded more aggressively. "Say, do you want to enter the sect?"

Alex didn't even have to think about this question. "I'm sorry, sect master Qin, but I don't plan on joining any sect at the moment," Alex said.

"Are you sure? You can learn from me as your mother does," he said.

"I am sure, senior," Alex said.

"Master really does know quite a lot Al. Why don't you learn from him?" Helen asked.

"I'm not opposed to being taught, mother. I'm opposed to joining a sect, any sect," Alex said. After the Hong Wu sect and the Tiger sect, his interests in sects had dwindled quite a lot.

"Are you sure?" Helen looked at him closely as she asked.

"Yes, I'm sure," Alex said.

"I think there's nothing more to say here, Master. If my son doesn't want to join, he won't have to," Helen said.

"Sigh, alright. What about joining the sect temporarily then? You can be a guest elder and stay here with your mother."

"Although you will have to do some things here. Can you make pills for the sect?" the old man Qin asked.

"I can definitely do that. Thank you for the opportunity, sect master Qin," Alex said.

"Good! I think I'm done with my questions for now. I will leave the two of you to your own," the old man said and left.

Alex chuckled a little when he felt the thin aura of spiritual sense still hanging in the air. He brought out a formation from his storage bag and placed it on the ground before pouring in some Qi into it.

Instantly, a barrier was put up around them that blocked all senses. Alex was glad he bought this formation a couple of days ago.

The moment the barrier was up, all the questions Alex was holding back came pouring out.

"Mother, why are you here? How are you here? Is dad here too? Did you play the game too? Are you okay?" Alex asked.

"Slow down," Helen said with a chuckle. "I will explain from the start."

* * * * * * *

6 years ago.

Helen was cooking some afternoon meal when a message rang on her phone. She wiped her hands on her apron and looked up the message.

-$20,000 has been credited to your account 1223#########57-

"Oh dear, he sent so much money again," Helen thought to herself with a proud look on her face.

"What are you smiling about?" Graham, Alex's father, asked as he walked through the door.

"Look," Helen said as she showed the message to Alex's father. Even almost 10 meters away, Graham showed a surprised look when he saw the message.

"Oh, he sent money again? Well, I was getting a little worried about what he would do now that he's given up on university, but I guess he's doing quite well," Graham said.

"Of course, he would. He's our son, you know? He's the best of us," Helen said with a proud smile still on her face. Then, a thought came to her mind.

"Say, should we play the game too?" Helen asked. "We don't have much to do around here, and Liz keeps pestering me to play as well."

"Do you really want to?" Graham asked. He seemed a little hesitant.

"Yes," Helen said.

"Sigh, alright. Let's go pick one of those game machines when I have to go deliver those vegetables then," Graham said.

"Yes!" Helen said excitedly.

That night, Helen bought 2 capsules. Graham told her they didn't need 2, but she insisted.

However, she didn't let Graham enter immediately, and neither did she enter.

She spent the entire night scouring the internet learning about the different parts of the game.

"Oh, it says if you die, your character gets ruined. Also, it seems you randomly start in one of the 4 different continents," Helen said excitedly, but graham was already asleep.

She spent a little longer learning about the game. She called Alex to learn a bit more, but he didn't pick up her call at all.

"Geez, he must already be in the game then," Helen thought. If that was the case, she would try tomorrow.

Tomorrow afternoon, Alex still didn't pick up. "What is this child doing?" Helen thought.

In the end, she decided to go into the game without asking him. That night, both she and Graham entered their capsules and jumped into the game.

When Helen opened her eyes, she found herself in a customization room where she could alter her appearance and name.

Helen chose to keep everything mostly the same and entered the game.

When the game finally started, she found herself standing on a slope next to a forest. When she looked down the slope, she found a massive city in the distance.

"Right, I need to get out of here and find out where I am," she thought as she walked toward human civilization.

"Right, Status!" she called out for her information to come up.

[Player Name: Helen

Cultivation: Mortal (1 Qi : 100%)

Body: Heaven Seeking Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: None

Qi: 0

]

Helen was quite satisfied with her information and checked her storage bag. She quickly went through the tutorial and opened her gift to reveal 4 different things.

She found a cultivation method, a minor talisman book, a bow, and finally a pill that improved cultivation speed.

She did what most people did and went to sell the pill. After all, she knew how simple it was to acquire Qi to start becoming a cultivator.

Once she got some money, she found herself a tavern and logged out. That was all she would do for today.

When she logged out, she found Graham already out of the capsule.

"How did it go?" she asked.

"It was okay," he said. "Did you find out where you are?"

"Ah yes," she said as she brought out her phone to check the name 'DawnSpring city.'

"According to this, " she spoke. "I'm in the Luminance Empire of the Western Continent."

Chapter 680: Mother-Son Conversation

"What about you?" Helen asked Graham.

"I… don't know. There's not a single thing growing in the parts I'm at. Nowhere to sell, not a human soul in sight," Graham said. "I tried… uh, doing what that thing said and sitting down, but nothing happened."

"You cultivated?" Helen asked.

"Yes, that. But it didn't work," Graham said.

"You should go try again," Helen said. "Let's stay the entire night this time."

"I need to sleep," Graham protested.

"You can sleep in the machine. It's designed that way. Go now," Helen chided and Graham reluctantly entered the capsule.

Helen followed him and entered the capsule as well. The next thing she knew, she was back in the tavern she had logged out from.

Helen decided to cultivate. She knew what she had to do. Focus your mind, let your thoughts go astray, and slowly breathe in and out.

As she thought that, Helen slowly fell into a lull and soon enough, she fell in a trance. A trance where the soul in her real body would be suppressed for the soul in her fake one.

Unfortunately, while she was cultivating, her soul could never be suppressed by trivial formations.

Though the system tried to, her soul would always surface when she cultivated. Not that it mattered, for this would be the last time the fake soul ever stayed in her body.

While the fake soul was logged out with a random disconnection prompt, Helen opened her eyes in the tavern with confusion clear on her face.

"How long has it been?" she wondered and looked at the time. There was no clock in her vision.

"Setting?" she cried out but no setting came. No panels appeared.

"Log out!" she demanded, but that was impossible as well, for unbeknownst to her, Alex had destroyed the system that kept everything in order.

As such, soon her life was sent into disorder.

Helen was more fortunate than the rest of the players that surfaced after the game system's disappearance. She had her wit and with her soul never fully suppressed, she knew every single moment of what she lived through in this world.

More than that, she had information about this world that she learned through the internet. When she understood her situation, she decided to give it her all to find her son and her husband.

She didn't know what continent they were in, but she promised herself she would find them.

So, she took the one simple talisman book in her storage bag and started studying.

Months would go by before she reached a high enough level in her cultivation base that she could consistently make great talismans, and someone took notice.

Qin Shan of the Flowing Brush sect was the only Saint rank Talisman maker of DawnSpring city, one of the very few in the entire empire.

When going through new recruits in the guild, he came across Helen's speed at which she was going up in her talisman.

When she went from reaching Common Earth rank to Common Heaven rank in just mere 3 months, he understood that he had someone special in this place.

So, he met up with Helen and after seeing her absorb information like a sponge, he decided to take her in as his own disciple.

He even went as far as to make an exception for her in the sect as no one above 40 was allowed to remain a student.

At first, Old man Qin thought that he would have to spend a lot to get Helen to cultivate and reach a higher level. However, he soon realized how wrong he was.

Helen needed just the bare minimum and she could breakthrough easily. In fact, her speed of breakthrough was way too fast if she only focused on it.

So as to not bring up suspicion, he made her not cultivate at all most of the time and only made her focus on making talismans.

Soon, her talent shone through that as well.

* * * * *

"And then he made you take part in the competition?" Alex asked.

"Yes, partly to improve the sect's name. Partly to help get my own name and image into the world so that you would see me if you were in this continent," Helen said. "I'm glad it worked."

Alex nodded and asked, "I suspected your talent to be high but to think you had God-grade talent as well. Not to mention, our spiritual roots are the same. Hmm… I wonder if you can take the White Tiger's blood as well?"

Alex had barely thought for a second before shaking his head. "No, you need the body more than the roots. While your body constitution sounds great on paper, if I'm not wrong, it's a Heaven Grade body," Alex said.

Helen nodded. "It was considered an above-average grade for most players," she said.

"Right, did father mention his status at all? What his body was, or what his talent was?" Alex asked.

Helen sighed and shook her head. "Your father said nothing. He couldn't even cultivate where he was," Helen said. "Honestly, I worried about him more than I worried about you. At least you were already doing good with earning so much money, but him… sigh."

Alex sighed as well. 'Place where you can't cultivate… that just sounds like…,' Alex thought of a place before another thought occurred to him.

"Do you really remember entering the game and coming back out?" he asked.

"Yes, I do," Helen said.

"I see," Alex said with a thoughtful. "So our souls must not be swapped unless we sit down and cultivate."

"Souls swapped? What do you mean?" Helen asked with a confused look.

"It's like this," Alex said and proceeded to explain everything he could think of to explain.

Partway through, his own story mixed into the things as it became impossible to explain everything without telling where he learned it all.

He told her about the book of the Alchemy God, his two masters, Pearl, Beast realm, and finally the fight he had to go through in the desert beyond the Forbidden Fields.

He tried to skip over Ma Rong's death and the empty space his heart still held, but he couldn't do that. Halfway through, his eyes became misty as he explained it all to his mother.

Helen hugged him once more and pat his head.

After a while, she let go and asked, "wait, does that mean there is another me and you back on the 5th continent?"

Alex was about to answer when he finally understood what that question meant. 'Wait, then I don't have to find my way home?' he thought to himself.

He still wanted to meet sister Hao and the creator, and learn why they did what they did. Why they risked the lives of many... No, killed so many just for a game? Was there a hidden purpose? Or was this just entertainment for a god that was easily bored?

He felt a shift in his motivation from finding a home to finding answers.

Helen saw her son go quiet and wondered if she said something to remind him of something bad. So, she quickly decided to change the conversation topic.

"You mentioned a pet, right? where is he?" she asked.

"Ah yes," Alex came out of his stupefied expression and brought out Pearl from his beast space.

In a bright white light, the tiny and cute cat jumped in front of Helen with his head held high.

He looked at Helen with a confused look and then turned back to Alex. "Pearl, meet my mother," he said.

"Meow?" Pearl said.

"Aw, come here little one," Helen said as she lay her hands flat for Pearl to jump on top of it. After Pearl climbed on top of it, she brought him up to eye level as she used one hand to rub his tiny head.

"Hello, Pearl," she said with a smile.

Alex smiled and gave a mental command to Pearl.

"Hello, mother," Pearl said with a smug smile on his face.

"What?" Helen was shocked a little when she heard the cat speak. "Wh-what? what? Is he like a parrot?" she asked.

"I'm Pearl, not a parrot, mother," Pearl said.

"Wait, can you really speak?" she looked at him with her shock fixed on her face.

"Yes, I can," Pearl said.

Only after a minute did the shock wane from her face and a look of incredulity appeared on it.

"Wow, I can't believe there is a beast out there that can speak," she said.

"There are many that can do that, mother," Alex said. "Although I've only seen 2 that can do so at True realm, all Saint realm beasts are able to speak."

"Do they learn it from somewhere?" Helen asked.

"No, they just…" Alex stopped. Wait. Where did the saint beasts learn to speak the human, no demon language?

No, that was wrong too. Both Human and Demon language was the same, just written differently. Yao Jia had told him so.

'So everyone in this world just knows how to speak one language?' he wondered. 'How did we come to learn that same language despite being isolated for so long too?'

There were a lot of questions for him to think of, but unfortunately, the other him hadn't spoken aloud a lot of things for him to remember his words. So, Alex was not privy to a lot of information that was simply in the other Alex's mind.

He remembered the other him talking about a few things and had pieced most of it together, but some information clearly still missed.

He couldn't help but wonder, 'What else do I still not remember from back home?'

Chapter 681: Sect and Clan

Alex and Helen talked with each other for the rest of the day and the entire night. Helen didn't bother to cultivate or train as she heard her son's stories.

When he learned that he had been in what was practically their backyard for 2 whole years, she was very shocked.

Although, perhaps not as shocked as when she learned that her son who she assumed was 24 years old was actually only 21 years right now.

When Alex told her that he lost 3 years in just 3 days, Helen's face made a very understandable surprised expression.

It wasn't every day you heard of someone time traveling.

Alex also showed his mother the little mouse he had, which she wasn't surprised by very much. After all, with the speaking Pearl in her hand, it was hard to bring any other beast that could surprise her.

Although, when she learned that the little mouse was born not long ago and that he needed a name, she aptly decided to call him Whiskers for his extraordinarily long whiskers. Alex thought of protesting, but he swallowed the thought in the end and let it be.

Its name wasn't very important to Alex as Pearl, at least not yet.

Alex was telling his mother how pills were made exactly when he heard a knock on the door. He quickly turned off the formation and walked to the door.

When he opened it, he saw the guard that had helped him waiting with a surprised look.

"Greetings, uncle," Alex said.

The man gave a wry smile. "To think you really were sister Hei's son. Congrats on meeting your mother finally," he said.

"Thank you," Alex replied.

"Are you done with your reunion? The sect master wants me to show you around the sect," he said.

"Oh, okay. One moment," Alex said and returned back to the room. "Mother, I'll be back in a bit. The sect master wants me to see the sect. Pearl should keep you company."

"I will stay with mother," Pearl said from the side.

"Yes, you will," Helen said with a smile as she petted Pearl.

Alex nodded and left. "Let's go," he said to the man and walked out.

"What's your name, uncle?," Alex asked the man.

"Zhou Ji," the man said.

Alex gave a surprised look. "From THE Zhou clan?" he asked, remembering the white robes with burnt edges of the young man named Zhou Ren back in the demon realm.

"More of a side branch, but yes," Zhou Ji said.

"I see," Alex said. "I didn't think a big clan like Zhou would let their juniors choose another sect instead of teaching them in the clan."

"The clan only bothers teaching people who were born with the ability to create White Fire," Zhou Ji said with a sad smile. "I never was."

"White Fire?" Alex asked with a curious look.

"Do you not know about the Zhou clan's White Fire? It's what made us famous in the first place," Zhou Ji said.

"I'm afraid I don't know much about the great clans of the Luminance empire," Alex said. "I planned on reading about it, but one thing led to another and I keep putting it off."

Then Alex thought of something and said, "Would you mind telling me what you can about the different families while we take this walk, Uncle Ji?"

"Uh, sure. I don't mind," the man said and soon Alex started learning about both the sect and the different families.

While the Flowing Brush sect was primarily a talisman-centric sect, it also had a small group of disciples that joined it simply to learn cultivation as a whole.

So, the sect was divided into two groups, which included both disciples and elders. The only difference this brought was that the small group that wasn't interested in talisman only got a small section of the sect to work with.

However, there was no difference when it came to how they were treated. According to Zhou Ji, one could only remain a student until 40 years of age. After that, they had either leave or go through a test to become an elder of the sect.

'That's not very different to how it is back in the Crimson Empire,' he thought.

The sect itself had multiple mountains, most of which were not even inhabited. It was only the few 10 to 12 mountains that were truly full of people.

The disciples lived in 5 of the 12 mountains, with only 1 belonging to those that weren't part of the talisman group.

Of the other 6, 3 of them house the Sect master, sect elders, and the guest elders as well as guests of the sect.

Finally, of the remaining 3, 2 were used for practicing talismans and 1 was used for everything else that ranged from disciple hall to Law enforcement hall of the sect.

The rest of the miscellaneous events and lectures took place in the small flat valley that lay between the mountains, directly after entering the sect.

When Alex asked what they did for the talisman ingredients, Zhou Ji told him that they either bought the ingredients or simply sent the students towards the other 16 or so uninhabited mountains to search for it.

If neither way proved successful, they would start a small expedition group to go to the eastern mountains.

Alex nodded to himself when he heard that as that seemed to be the best of ways.

After explaining about the mountain, Zhou Ji took Alex to actually see said mountains. During this time, he decided to explain what little he could about the 7 great families.

Zhou clan got famous after their progenitor developed his White Fire technique to such a level that it was ingrained into his blood essence and thus most of his descendants were born with the White Fire as a bloodline ability.

Because of this, the Zhou clan was represented with the color white.

White Fire could reach temperatures that normal fire struggled to get to with the same amount of Qi. So, the Zhou clan ended up being recognized as one of the better clans.

It was said that the progenitor gained the White Flame from the demon realm, but no one knew if there was any truth in that.

"The Han family," Zhou Ji spoke while pointing towards the west where the Han ancestral home lay and said, "they are just a bunch of people with an incredible physique."

"They are body cultivators right?" Alex asked, remembering Han Daiyu's impressive strength.

"Uh… not exactly?" Zhou Ji said. "I don't understand the difference myself but I believe theirs is a result of a technique while real body cultivators temper their body through pain and torture."

"They practiced a technique that gave their body incredible strength. What I know, their body itself isn't good at defending, just exerting a lot of strength," Zhou Ji said.

"Oh, so they are half a body cultivator in a sense," Alex asked.

"Maybe even less," Zhou Ji said. "From what I hear, their endurance is better than most people but not as good as what a real body cultivator could reach. Their healing capability is normal, and their longevity doesn't increase either, despite being of a strong body."

"Oh," Alex said. 'So in a sense, Pearl's body isn't a result of body cultivation, but is a physique huh? While mine is fully body cultivation.'

'So White Tiger's Dominating Body is the name of his physique probably,' Alex thought.

"I saw Han Daiyu using a hammer. Is the Han family's main weapon of choice that?" Alex asked.

"Uh… not necessarily. They use what they can to exert their strength. Hammer is usually the best weapon for that," Zhou Ji explained.

The Han Family's physique technique could only be used by those that had a good Earth spiritual root, so they took the color brown.

He took him to the disciple mountains next and explained about the Jin family.

The Jin Family was a family of swordsmen. They came to power after their progenitor found a sword manual during the meteor shower over a thousand years ago.

He shocked the empire back then with his strength and established the Jin family. It is said that the progenitor still lived, but no one had seen him in centuries to know if that was true or not.

The Jin family used a particularly fierce technique that employed 12 swords at once, and as such with metal being affiliated to their clan, they took the color Gold.

"The Lu family is perhaps the simplest out of everyone in the 7 different clans. Their family is simple in that they are usually born with a better wood spiritual root and as such use the powers of wood and wind," Zhou Ji said.

"While it is simple, don't misunderstand that for it being weak. The Lu ancestor is said to be able to create wind so fierce that it will rip the skin off your face before you can beg him to stop," Zhou Ji said.

"Because of that, they are also affiliated with the color Green," he said.

Alex nodded as he listened to the information.

White, Brown, Gold, and Green. Alex had initially expected them to be simple clans that were primarily focused on one of the 7 elements.

Such as White being Yang, Brown being Earth, Gold being Metal, and Green being Wood. Now, it turned out that he was only right on one account and wrong on the rest of the 3.

Zhou Ji didn't notice Alex falling into thought and continued.

"Next up is the Shen family."

Chapter 682: Qi-like Aura

The Shen family was a family that mostly used water techniques as Alex had expected. However, they also had a secret healing technique that they had apparently found in the meteor shower.

From what Zhou Ji said, Alex understood that one needed to have a very good Water spiritual root to make the most of that technique.

'So, the little sister must have worse spiritual roots than the sister that died,' Alex thought. He couldn't help but wonder how his own senior sister would do if he took that technique to her.

Thinking about it, he started missing Luo Mei and the others again.

Zhou Ji reached the guest elder's mountain and started explaining about the Fu family.

"Fu family is a family full of mental attack users. I believe it started off as a family of fire users, but slowly, over the course of millennia, they shifted to using mental attacks, especially their spiritual sense," Zhou Ji said.

"They also have some terrifying knowledge of formations that most others don't know of. That makes fighting against them hard since you don't know what they will bring out," he said.

Alex nodded when he heard that. He had fought with that girl that could in fact use both strong mental attacks and formations.

Alex didn't know why they had strong mental attacks, but that certainly lined up with what the Royal Fu family could use as well.

After all, it was Zexi who used the memory scouring skill to enter his mind. That was certainly something his grandfather brought from the Fu family of this empire.

As for formations, Fu Tao had told him that their grandfather had found a great book about formations from the meteor shower and had become a great formation maker.

Alex wanted to know what informations he had, but he didn't know how he could possibly approach that.

'So their crimson robe has nothing to do to reflect their skill or abilities, but rather something historic that they just didn't bother to change huh?' Alex thought.

"Next up, perhaps the weirdest family out there. The Song Family," Zhou Ji said.

"Yes, I saw one of them use blood. What's that about?" Alex asked.

"The Song family is known to use blood Qi," Zhou Ji said.

"Blood Qi? I've never heard of such a thing before," Alex said.

"And I wouldn't doubt that. Unless you see or hear about the Song family, you likely wouldn't hear about Blood Qi at all," Zhou Ji said.

"Is Blood Qi something born of a mutant spiritual root?" Alex asked. He wondered if it was something like people being only able to use wind or ice because that was the spiritual root they were born with.

"No, it's not Qi specifically but is more of an aura. But since it acts just like Qi, as in you can absorb it to enhance your cultivation and such, so people just call it Blood Qi for convenience's sake," Zhou Ji said.

"That's quite complicated then. I'm assuming they can't just cultivate blood Qi then like the rest of us cultivate daily," Alex asked.

"I don't think they do. They simply use blood for techniques and such that they themselves developed. Usually, it's their own blood that they can freely manipulate, but sometimes they end up using others' blood as well," Zhou Ji said.

Alex nodded to himself as he heard that.

"Honestly, I'm really not sure how this all works. Just that they have the ability to use blood," Zhou Ji said.

"If they use blood, is there a reason why they don't have the red color, and instead Fu family does?" Alex asked.

"It's just a first come first thing. Since the Fu family wore red first, the Song family that came afterward were forced to choose a different color."

"In the end, they chose black," Zhou Ji said. "Not that it matters, since they still wear red."

Zhou Ji took Alex finally to the elders' hall where he got an elders badge that gave him the authority a guest elder did.

Not that he would ever use that authority. After all, Alex was perhaps the youngest of them all here, not counting those that had yet to enter the True realms.

So, he would better just steer clear of using his authority over those that were older than him by quite a lot.

The tour was over when Alex was returned back to the sect master's mountain with a new house being built right next to Helen's house.

"Your abode should be completed by evening time. Please bear with us for now," Zhou Ji said. "I will take my leave then."

"Thank you for the tour and those explanations," Alex said as Zhou Ji left. Alex returned back to his mother at around noon.

"You took quite some time to return," she said. "Did you go around the whole sect?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Come, sit. I have so many more questions now that I had time to think about it all," Helen said.

Alex nodded with a smile and sat next to his mother as he answered her question.

They talked until the sunset and someone came to inform him of the house was ready. Alex thanked them and returned back to the room.

"I'll go to my room for now mother," Alex said.

"Eh? But I was planning to teach you about talismans tonight. Don't you want to learn about them?" she asked.

"I do," Alex said. "But not today. I have something important to attend to tomorrow, but after that is done, you can start teaching me."

"Oh, what are you doing tomorrow?" Helen asked.

"Uh, why don't I make it a surprise?" Alex said.

"Oh, you're keeping secrets from your mother now just because you've become a few years older?" Helen asked with a slight pout on her face.

"Uh… do you really want to know?" Alex asked.

"Haha, I'm joking, obviously," Helen said with a light chuckle.

"Oh," Alex said. "Alright, come on Pearl."

"Eh? You're taking Pearl? He can stay with me," Helen said.

"No, you have some things to do, so I can't really let him stay here and disturb you," Alex said.

"No, I won't disturb mother," Pearl said.

"I have nothing to do really. I just need to make some talisman for practice is all," Helen said.

"Well, then here. I give you more tasks," Alex said as he dropped two flowers of red and yellow color in her hand.

Helen looked confused for a second, "What's this?" she asked.

"It's a Spirit Cleansing Lily," Alex explained. "If you cultivate while holding that, it will open up your spiritual sea and allow you to use your spiritual sense."

"What? Spiritual sense?" Helen gave a surprised look. "Ah right, I have heard about these things. I remember now."

She looked down at the flowers in her hand. The 5 petal lily looked quite ordinary to her eyes. She couldn't believe that it was actually something that could help open her spiritual sense.

"Sh-should I tell master about this?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "Sure, but after you've used it. Just in case he doesn't take one of it away."

"Eh? Isn't using just one enough for me though?" she asked. "I hear getting just one is very difficult. I have to say I'm surprised to see 2 of them at the same time."

"It's hard for others, but not for me," Alex said. "I have that alchemy knowledge about ingredients which subtly helps when picking ingredients."

"It's like I have someone else's instinct inside of me."

"As for using two, you can actually use up to 3 of them, each giving you an equal amount of spiritual sense. It's quite unnoticeable when compared to saint rank, but for a True realm cultivator, it's plenty," Alex said.

"Honestly, I would give you three, but I only have those two with me at the moment. If in the future I ever do find some more, I will bring you back some," she said.

Helen stared at the flower and asked, "have you used it?"

"Yes, all 3," He said. "It is more helpful the lower your cultivation base is. Especially if you haven't improved past Meridian tempering realm since the Mind Tempering realm has a lot of benefits if your spiritual sea is already open."

"I will get some pills for you to improve on that aspect, but for now just cultivate," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow."

Chapter 683: Proud

Alex entered his new home and was more than surprised with how well it was for something that was prepared just moments ago.

It looked exactly the same as his mother's in that there was a single room. But that was more than enough for him.

He would've loved to have some furnace in the middle for his alchemy, but it was understandable that they couldn't set it up in just a single day.

'So, I will have to go to the guild for a while longer huh? I hope they can prepare it in time,' Alex thought to himself.

From what he heard, they had to bring a formation expert to make sure that the formation that would run the furnace was properly integrated into the formation that ran the whole sect.

'I wonder why they don't use runes instead. It's the same thing, right?' he wondered. But then again, he didn't even know the first thing about runes and how they worked, so he didn't really have any authority to speak in these matters.

When Alex really thought about it, he realized that he wasn't that knowledgeable about formations either.

He mostly just followed recipes instead of creating one himself from the knowledge he had.

The only creating he had done were those pills he made back when he was stuck in that formation for a month.

'Now that I have some more information about ingredients and such, I should be able to create new pills,' he thought. 'That should help prepare me for when a Blood Spirit Ginseng comes on the market.'

Alex had nothing better to do, so he and Pearl cultivated the entire night, waiting for the morning to arrive.

When it did, Alex left his room and went back to the city.

* * * * *

Helen opened her eyes a little later than usual. She couldn't tell why she was late waking up today, but something in her told her that she couldn't wake up very early.

She looked down at her hand and realized that the two flowers she had been holding were gone.

'Is it done?' she wondered as she looked around. 'I can't see anything different.'

The moment she thought that, as if growing eyes all around her, she noticed everything in her vicinity.

Her mind was boggled at the amount of information that she received. Seeing the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the wood, the grains in the wood, etc all felt very weird to her.

She tried moving her 'eyes' and looked elsewhere. She looked at her own clothes she was wearing. Never before had her robe seen this unsightly to her.

She noticed all the creases on it, the frayed threads that came out at different places that would not be noticeable otherwise.

She noticed her long hair and how beautiful it really was. She would see her face and all the tiny blemishes on it.

It was so much better than what she used to have before she became a cultivator. She couldn't help but admire it.

Her spiritual sense started extending outwards and soon it escaped past the boundaries of her room and nearly reached her son's place.

However, it stopped just before it touched that house. Helen made a mental measurement and thought '50 meters?'. That was the extent of what she could reach with her senses.

She tried to go further and forced her mind to follow her will. Surprisingly for her, it worked and her spiritual sense entered the room easily.

She wanted to see her son inside, but he was gone already. She felt the light mental strain from her sense and immediately pulled it back.

'I can't extend it very far?' she thought to herself.

Once she was done reveling in her level up, she started remembering all the benefits one gained from having a spiritual sense.

First, she could see and, in some ways, touch something with her spiritual sense.

Second, it increased her mental capability to the point that she no longer required artifacts to protect herself from mental attacks. She simply needed some protection techniques.

Getting those techniques was a little difficult, but not very much when compared to getting spiritual sense itself.

Third, it gave her a very good memory, which would come in very handy for someone that was trying to learn Talismans.

Lastly, she could also use mental attacks, but the fighting had never really been Helen's interest before. She was more in tune with creation than destruction.

When Helen thought about her mental strength is very high now, she decided to try out making some more Talismans to see how they helped her.

After 2 hours, Helen's eyes were properly wide when she realized she could keep going for a very long time and make as many talismans in a single day as she could in a week before.

"With this, I should be able to increase my alignment by quite a bit. Given how the brush helped me reach 72%, with my spiritual sense I should be able to reach the immortal grade now," she thought.

Immortal grade, as far as she understood, went from 75% to 100% Alignment. That was what her master had told her and what she had learned before coming to the game too.

That only made her more confused when he understood that there were grades higher than that for other things.

She quickly had come to the understanding that the other grades simply didn't exist. If you threw away the arbitrary system of giving grades to a percentage of alignment, you would remain with a simple system that graded something from 0% to 100%

That was all one needed anyway.

She excitedly brought out her Saint grade brush that she hadn't brought out for the current testing purposes and started making another talisman.

The brush dipped into the ink, and it retained a certain amount as per her wish. Then, she placed the brush on the empty paper and started drawing.

Her spiritual sense was on the paper at all times, so she could clearly see everything. She saw how many bristles of the brush actually touched the picture.

She saw the flow at which the ink left the brush and remained on the paper. She saw those tiny, almost imperceptible lines of ink that were at the very edge of those lines she drew.

As she got more and more conscious of what little mistakes she was making, she started fixing them going forward. By the end of it in 20 minutes, Helen ended up with a talisman she knew would make her master proud.

76%

That was the alignment she had reached with her new brush and her new sense.

Helen realized that even after that daunting 20 minutes, she could still make more.

So, she brought out another empty piece of talisman paper and got ready to draw.

However, just as she was about to proceed, she heard a knock on the door. Usually, she would call to ask who it was. This time, she simply sent out her spiritual sense and saw that it was her son.

Alex sensed his mother's spiritual sense and smiled.

"Congratulations, mother," he sent her a message directly into her mind.

"Woah!" Helen freaked out a little. "Right, I forgot you could do that with a spiritual sense."

"Uh… can I come in?" he asked.

"Oh right, come, come," she hurriedly called him in.

Alex opened the door and entered. As he did, Pearl also came out from his space and ran up to Helen.

"Mother, I missed you," he said as he jumped into her lap.

"Aw, I missed you too," Helen said as she started petting him.

Pearl meowed and then closed his eyes with a smile on his face.

Helen chuckled a little and looked back at her son. "Where were you gone?" she asked.

"To the city," Alex said.

"Did you do what you meant to do?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex gave her a bright smile.

"And… that's the surprise?" she gave a quizzing look as if expecting something.

"Hehe," Alex gave her a wide grin as he reached into his storage bag. "Here it is!"

Helen saw something white hanging on a piece of string. She couldn't tell what it was immediately, so she sent her spiritual sense to look at it.

Finally, she could see the silvery-white circular metal as clear as day. It hung by a thin but strong string that one could easily put around their neck.

She looked at the metal itself, silver, which was about 5 to 7 centimeters in diameter.

And then she noticed the carvings.

On one side, it said 'Alchemist Guild' in big and bold letters. On the other side, there was a simple 'True' written on it, surrounded by leaves and vines.

This had been so sudden that Helen took a second to put 2 and 2 together. When she did, her expression was priceless.

With wide eyes and mouth hung open, she stared at Alex for a good 10 seconds before she spoke, "You became a True Heaven Alchemist?"

"Surprise!" Alex said.

"Really?" she asked again.

"Yes," Alex said and walked closer. "Here."

Helen checked the badge and as expected, it was the same as her. Only, hers was from the Talisman guild.

"Come here," Helen called and Alex walked closer.

Suddenly, she grabbed his head and pulled it closer to give him a kiss on his forehead. Then she held his head for a second as she said, "I'm so proud of you son."

Alex looked with a stunned expression for a second as he had never known before how much he had needed this.

His motivation and enthusiasm practically doubled at this very moment as he gave her his bright smile again.

"Just watch mother, your son will make you prouder."

Chapter 684: Homeschooled

Qin Shan walked to his disciple's room late afternoon. He had been too busy with the tasks in the sect he had kept off from doing due to the arrival of so many guests.

Now that they were gone, he was forced to do everything.

Only now had he finished the task he started a day and a half ago.

Wondering if Alex was with his mother or not, Qin Shan knocked on the door.

Suddenly, he felt a wave of spiritual sense and heard the words, "Come in, master" from inside the room.

Qin Shan paused a moment to understand what had just happened. When he realized that his disciple had used a spiritual sense, he quickly opened the door and entered.

"Lin'er, did you just?" he hurriedly asked as he walked inside.

"Master, I can use spiritual sense now," she shouted.

"How?" the old man gave a confused look and even checked his disciple's cultivation base to make sure she hadn't broken through.

Seeing his puzzled look, Helen answered. "My son brought me the… what was it called? Spirit Cleansing Lily."

"What?" Qin Shan gave a surprised look. "Young man, you gave your mother that flower? Where did you find it?"

"My son, he—"

"I was given it by the person that trained me," Alex said, cutting off his mother.

Helen gave him a weird look and said nothing.

"Wow!" Qin Shan still had a hard time believing it. "That means your mother's talismans will become a lot better. Not only that, she will be able to make a lot of them as well."

"Yes, her spiritual sense should help her improve on the minor imperfections that is impossible without a spiritual sense," Alex said.

But then, he gave them a confused look. "Wait, what does having a spiritual sense have to do with making many talismans?" he asked.

"Opening your spiritual sea allows your mind to get stronger and last longer when doing such production tasks. Since making talisman is so draining, having a strong mind helps a lot," Qin Shan said.

"Oh," Alex said with clear surprise written on his face. "I didn't know talisman did that."

"Huh?" Qin Shan made a confused noise. "It's not just talisman. All of them are like that. Whether you make pills, formations, or artifacts, they all consume a lot of mental strength, which is why not many are able to do that one after another," Qin Shan said.

"I see," Alex said as he fell into thought. 'All this time I had thought I could make more pills than others because I had better Qi than others. Turns out it was actually my spiritual sense,' he thought.

Surely his Qi helped a bit too, but it was most likely the spiritual sense that helped him more than anything.

"Did you not know?" Qin Shan gave him a weird look.

Alex shook his head. "I've had a spiritual sense from the very moment I started making pills, so I was never able to tell the difference," he said.

"Also, I made pills alone most of the time, so it was impossible for me to learn about it from my peers," he said.

"Did you not learn about it from any alchemy books?" he asked.

Alex shook his head again. "Where I learned alchemy, Spiritual sense isn't common at all. When I had spiritual sense, I could count the number of people who also had a spiritual sense on my hands. That is consisting of the entire empire."

"Is that so?" Qin Shan gave him a surprised look. "I didn't know you were from a backwater place."

Alex gave a dry laugh.

"Anyway," Qin Shan continued. "You really gave me quite a surprise today."

"Ooh, that reminds me," Helen said and turned to her son. "Show him, Al."

Alex chuckled and brought out his medal again.

Qin Shan's eyes went wide just as Helen wanted them. "When?" he asked a single-word question.

"Today," Alex said.

"You passed that tough exam?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said, remembering the test to become a True Heaven Alchemist. It truly was difficult to say the least.

The test wasn't as simple as making a pill with 50% Harmony. They didn't accept that as proof of one having the capability to do it every time.

So, instead, they gave 10 different recipes, and the alchemist had to make 10 Heaven-grade pills.

Fortunately, they did allow 3 failed attempts for the whole thing, which Alex had to use one for a pill that came out to 48% because his Yang flared a bit mid-alchemy.

However, perhaps more frustrating than that was the fact that this time too, the test room had blared out its alarm at him even when he had put both his storage ring and storage bags into a separate box.

Alex was starting to believe that he was inadvertently using his body's Qi, which could activate everything, to activate that formation.

But then, he couldn't think of an answer as to why all the other formations didn't work for him just being there. Alex shook his head and forgot about that.

Qin Shan gave some congratulations and wholeheartedly welcomed him to the sect as a guest elder.

According to him, there was no saint-rank Alchemist in this city, so Alex was one of the three greatest alchemists of this city. If people there were to find out, surely that would cause a roar throughout the empire.

A 24-year-old True Heaven alchemist. That wasn't something you heard every day.

"You mentioned you wanted to try your hands on talismans right?" Qin Shan asked. "When do you want to start?"

Alex thought for a bit as to what he had coming up next. There was nothing.

The only urgent thing he could think of was his hand, but that too started seeming useless now. He would do his best to get it back if given the opportunity. However, with no opportunity at the moment, he didn't want to do anything.

At least not yet.

So, thinking about this all, Alex gave an answer to the sect master Qin.

"Right now."

A few minutes later, Qin Shan walked out of the room with a sigh and went up the mountain back to his abode.

Helen had refused to let him teach Alex, saying that she had taught him all this time, and she wanted to continue to do so. At least, the starting part.

Alex watched his mother with a smile as she put on the appearance of a strict teacher as she did every time he was taught something back when he was homeschooled.

This brought forth buried memories and that made him smile.

"As you already know, Talismans are simply a piece of paper with runes drawn on top of it," she started teaching him.

"Each rune does something very specific," Helen said as she brought out a blank talisman paper.

"This rune," she said as she drew on the top left corner of the paper, "it is a rune that will create heat."

She poured in some Qi into the rune and soon Alex could feel mild heat coming from the paper.

He was quite surprised to see that a talisman actually worked with most of the paper empty. He hadn't seen such a talisman in his life, so he was surprised, to say the least.

"Next, when I draw this rune for this rune," she said as she drew another rune. "It will create more heat. This new rune is the rune for 'Growth' by the way."

Alex nodded as he listened intently to his mother's explanation.

He watched her draw the two squiggly lines that were runes and then saw her draw a single straight line between the two runes.

"We call this line a Rune Bridge. It connects the 'Heat' rune to the 'Grow' rune," she said. "When connected the 'Grow' rune will aid the 'Heat' rune and help the heat grow."

"So, when I do this…" Helen said as she poured in her Qi into the talisman. Alex waited a moment, and a second later he could start feeling intense heat radiating from the talisman.

In the next second, the paper caught fire and burned off.

"…that happens," Helen said as the final remains of the talisman papers were burnt away.

"Isn't that wasteful?" Alex asked seeing her so easily destroy her creation.

"No," she said. "I'm not stupid enough to use good papers and ink when teaching. Most of these papers are very low grade that I use to practice new runes on before trying it in my actual good quality paper with my good quality ink."

"Oh," Alex said.

"Let's continue," she said and brought out another piece of paper and did the same thing that she did last time.

When the 'Heat' and 'Grow' runes were connected, she stopped and looked at Alex.

"When this talisman is used, it produces too much heat for the talisman to sustain. What do you think we can do?" Helen asked.

She knew Alex didn't know the first thing about runes, yet she still asked.

Alex thought for a moment and asked a question instead. "What's our purpose with the heat? Are we trying to use it or just make sure the paper doesn't burn?" he asked.

"Good question," Helen said. "Hmm… okay, what if we don't want the paper to burn?"

Alex thought for a moment and answered, "is there a rune for cooling?' he asked.

"There is," Helen said. "But that affects the heat from the talisman which we don't want to lower. What else can you think of?"

Alex thought for a moment. He could think of a few other ways.

Chapter 685: Talisman Learning

"Fortify the paper?" Alex asked.

"Yes, that works," Helen said. "What else?"

"Is there a rune for making something resistant to fire?" he asked.

"There is," Helen said with a smile. "But it's better if you make it resistant to heat itself. What else?"

"Make the heat release outwards faster?" he said.

"Be careful," Helen said. "Too fast and you'll make the talisman explode."

'Oh,' Alex thought in his head. He then thought for a bit longer as he remembered all the talismans he had seen being used.

However, he couldn't think of anything specific aside from those few ways. He was too uneducated about talismans.

Helen saw right through him. "Okay, what if you were to make it so that the heat releases a distance away from the talisman itself?" she asked.

"Oh, you can do that?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "Have you seen talismans that make barriers? The barriers are never next to the talisman itself. That's because they make it so that the barrier appears some distance away from where the talisman is."

While Alex nodded as he understood the reasoning, Helen drew another rune that looked like 2 runes put together.

"If your talisman has numerical information, you need to use compound runes to give all the numbers," she said. "I will teach you the numbers later, but for now, this number is saying 1 and it's compounded with the distance unit 'Chi', which is about 33 centimeters long."

"So, when I connect this distance with 'Heat'," Helen said as she drew the Rune Bridge.

"This happens."

The moment Helen put Qi into the talisman, Alex felt something warm appear around her hand. There was no high heat like before that could burn the paper.

This time, the heat was mellow.

"Is the heat being distributed?" he asked.

"Yes," Helen said. "There's only so much heat you can produce with such a bad paper and ink."

She stopped it and said, "now, can you think of a way to turn this heat into a fire that burns away from the paper?"

Alex thought for a moment. "The heat is already away from the paper, so we should just concentrate it on one point, instead of letting it spread all around."

"Yes," Helen said with a bright smile and quickly drew a rune before connecting it to 'Heat' rune.

Then when she used the talisman again, this time about 30 centimeters above the talisman, Alex saw a bright point of light which soon turned into a tongue of fire.

"It's great right?" Helen said as she excitedly looked at his son. "Look how hot it got just because we made the heat gather at a certain point."

Alex nodded as he looked at the fire. "1823 Celcius. That's quite hot," he said.

Helen gave a surprised look. "You can tell the temperature so accurately?" she asked.

Alex nodded. "It's one of the requirements of being an alchemist. Being able to tell how hot your fire is. A technique of mine helps me be hyper-specific," he said.

"So you now understand how talismans work, right? Just the basic concept at least," She asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Now, let's take the lesson a step further as I will teach you how to immediately improve upon this," she said.

Alex smiled as he waited for his mother to continue.

Helen had started his teaching of talisman at a very weird point in the study. Instead of going with theoretical knowledge first and supplementing that with practical usage, she had decided to only show him the practical stuff first and follow that with some explanation.

Alex guessed that would work in the end, but the start felt very weird nonetheless.

Helen quickly drew the same runes on another talisman and flipped it around to show it to him.

"What's wrong here?" she asked.

Alex looked at the runes and didn't see anything wrong with it really. Except for one glaring problem that he knew wasn't a problem because it had worked before.

"You've only drawn the runes on the left half of the talisman," Alex said. "Why did you leave the right half empty?"

"That's because I'm going to draw the same runes again," she said as she drew the runes right in front of him.

"Wait," Alex said. "You made a mistake, mother."

"Oh, did I?" Helen asked with a hidden chuckle in her voice before completing the talisman.

Alex was confused now. "Those runes are wrong, aren't they?" he asked when he saw the right half of the talisman. Every rune she drew on that half was the exact opposite of the other one like q was to p.

Alex stopped when he saw the bigger picture however and his mind nearly reeled in shock.

"You've created symmetry," he said. The right half of the rune was a mirror image of what was on the left half.

"Yes, and that helps us improve align—"

Helen stopped when she saw Alex move forward suddenly and look at the rune closely.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Symmetry… that's something I've learned about a while ago, but it still surprises me how well it can work," he said.

"Yes, making a symmetrical talisman makes the Alignment improve by nearly half," she said. "If a normal talisman did 50%, adding a simple mirror of it can help it reach 75%," she said.

"And how do these reverse runes work?" he asked. "Do they not do more harm than good?" he asked.

"Okay, that is something very special about runes. You can flip it, move it around, or change the location of the runes themselves. If it is there, it will work," she said.

"There's no logic to what the orientation should be?" Alex asked.

"No," Helen said. "As long as you draw it, it works."

"Oh," Alex said and looked a the paper for a bit before asking. "What if instead of making 2, you made 4?"

"Right, that's where I have a few things to teach you," she said and placed the talisman down.

"There are 3 things that determine how good a talisman is," she said.

"First, is the quality of the paper and ink you will use to draw. The paper needs to be very smooth and as few imperfections as possible."

"The ink needs to be smooth as well, with no floating chunks of the ingredients," she said.

"Second, is the uniformness of your drawing. I'm not just talking about the shapes of the runes, but rather the thickness of the ink you leave behind on the paper."

"Having a properly shaped rune is obvious. Having perfect lines through and through is obvious. These are not things I will need to explain to you."

"What most don't realize is that when they focus on making sure they haven't fumbled on the obvious, they fumble at places that are not obvious."

"Finally, the third thing that helps in improving the alignment of the talisman is the size of your runes," she said.

"The number of runes do not matter. What matters is its size. Since symmetry is so important in the talisman, we usually stay at two opposite pairs of runes," Helen finally finished.

"Oh," Alex said as he tried to comprehend what he just learned.

"Oh right, one thing," She said. "While your runes have to be absolutely perfect to make it work, your Rune Bridge however can be however you want."

"You can curve it, twist it, whatever you want to fit it into your design. Of course, straight ones are the best since it does the same thing and there is little place for error, but you have other options too," she said.

"I see," Alex said.

He couldn't help but think of how different talismans were to formations. When he learned that demons had founded runes while humans founded formations, he had half believed that those two things worked just like each other.

However, now he could see how wrong he was.

As he thought that, a question appeared in his mind.

"What determines the rank?" he asked.

In formations, it was the number of base formations used in the overall formations. If he followed that logic, then there should be a number limit for runes that changed it from one grade to another.

However, given how different they already were, Alex didn't trust his logic.

"Oh, it's the quality of the ink," Helen said, half embarrassed that it had taken her this long to tell him that which she should have explained from the beginning.

"Quality of ink?" he asked.

"Yes, depending on the ingredients used for the ink, your talisman can do some tasks better than others. Some ink are better for heat, some are better for keeping records, some are better for sending information, etc," Helen said.

"The inks that are made from common rank ingredients make Common rank Talisman. Inks made from True rank ingredients make True rank talisman, and so on," she said.

"Wait, what about the runes? Is there anything stopping me from making the same design in all ranks?" he asked.

"Nope, nothing is stopping you," she said. "Well, nothing aside from finding ingredients for the ink that is... and maybe your mental strength as higher rank inks use up a lot more mental strength than you can imagine."

'They really are very different,' he thought.

"I think you should read this book to learn a lot more," Helen said as she brought out a book called 'Ink, Paper, and Runes - A special guide to Talisman.

Alex casually flipped through the book and saw a mind-numbing amount of information in there.

He nodded with a smile. "I will learn this later tonight," he said.

"Good," Helen said. "For now, let's see you try your hand at making a talisman."

Chapter 686: Three Heaven

The first few of Alex's attempts were absolutely botched, to say the least.

For a man who hadn't held a pen in almost 4 years, holding a brush and having made it to make intrinsic design was absolutely undoable.

That being true only for the first few times at least.

His hands were sturdy like a surgeon and he could hold his brush as steadily as well. But being steady came at the cost of flexibility one was required to move their wrists dynamically as per the rune's demand.

After fumbling so bad the first 2 times where the result couldn't even be called a talisman and then the next 2 times which both resulted in less than 10% alignment, Alex finally succeeded on his 5th attempt with 14%.

Alex felt a little disappointed that he took nearly an hour to draw this simple rune that his mother drew as if she were writing a grocery list.

Still, he was at least happy to have done it.

Helen made no remark on how extraordinary this feat was. For someone who had just learned the first thing about talisman an hour ago, being able to successfully create a talisman that was acceptable by the masses was incredible.

But, Helen was used to her son doing remarkable stuff. So, this thing which would have taken even the best disciples at least a day to do, or at least 3 for normal ones, didn't surprise her very much.

As such, Alex was once again blissfully unaware of how great his speed was.

He made about 5 more of the same talisman, each with above 15% alignment. One even reached 20% towards the end, making Helen give out a short gasp.

After Alex finished making the talisman, a question came to him that he hadn't thought of asking before.

"What rank of talisman am I making?" he asked.

"True rank of course," his mother said.

Alex gave a little surprised look. "I'm already nearing True-Earth rank as a Talisman maker?" he asked suspiciously.

"Not exactly," Helen said. "Talisman creating is more than just following a set design. It's about creativity and ingenuity. You or your client will have a problem they want to solve."

"While most of the time you can follow a design someone already made, other times you will have to formulate a design based on the problem."

"Which can take a very long time," Helen said. "There was this one time a man needed a talisman that could keep cold away from him without the talisman releasing any heat."

"I was honestly stumped for a few hours since that felt impossible. The only thing I could think of was creating a barrier that kept out air, but the man needed to breathe."

"So, I had to create a talisman that not only kept out air but released some in as well. In a sense, I had to make a storage talisman mixed with a barrier," Helen said.

"There are ways to create spaces inside talisman?" Alex asked with surprise.

"Of course. You can use runes for almost anything," Helen said. "But don't expect them to keep anything of yours in it."

"It could barely even hold much air at all in the end. Fortunately, the man had a high enough cultivation base that he didn't need much," Helen said.

"Still," Alex said. "Since I might not really get into the creative sides of runes, I should probably just glee at the fact that I'm getting close to the True Earth realm."

"If I was practicing alchemy like this, without any aid of techniques, it would've probably taken much longer for me," he said.

"I don't doubt that," Helen said.

"Perhaps Alchemy and Artifacts are the only two professions where you have to do everything by yourself," Helen said.

"What do you mean?" Alex gave a confused look.

"Look, for talismans, you already have the ink prepared for you, even though that is the most important part of the talisman."

"For formations from what I hear, you already have a well-shaped and refined piece of metal for yourself to carve on."

"For the rest of the two? You have to do it all by yourself," Helen said. "Maybe that is a reason why Talisman and Formations are so much easier to learn and do than Alchemy and Artifacts."

"What about the other 3?" Alex asked. "Music, Spirit foods, and painting."

"Well, a musician doesn't have to make her own flutes and zithers. A spirit food chef needs only worry about the taste, making its nutrients a second thought, and finally, painting needs talent and practice, but similar to the talisman, the paint and paper are already handed."

"So, they could never measure up to the difficulty of Artifacts and Alchemy," Helen said.

Alex fell into thought. "Who makes the inks then?" he asked.

"There are a certain group of talisman makers that are focused on just that," Helen said. "You are taught and can learn the basics of ink making, but it is always better to have an expert make it for you."

"I see," Alex said as he stared at the ground, thinking to himself.

'Formations need artifacts, artifacts need formations, alchemy needs artifacts and formations, maybe you can carve runes on artifacts too,' Alex thought to himself. 'It's all so interconnected.'

"Alright, go back and read the book for now. Try to remember as many runes as you can, and we can continue from there," she said.

"Okay," Alex nodded and left, leaving Pearl behind with his mother to keep her company. She had really come to take a liking to the little cat and he liked that.

Over the course of the entire night, Alex remembered every single rune in that book. He also remembered everything else that was written on it.

That book wasn't a technique book at all, so Alex had to deal with the information over the course of the next couple of days.

After all, remembering something wasn't the same as knowing it. It wouldn't be hard, but it wouldn't be easy either.

Slowly, under Helen's teaching and the occasional sect master's guidance, Alex managed to reach 40% on his talisman by the end of the month.

And that was despite the fact that he also practiced Alchemy quite a lot and a bit of formation on the side.

Alex was certain that he wouldn't reach for very soon due to the limitation of the ink and the brush he held.

What he was certain was that he would surely cross True Heaven rank at the very least.

Now, all he had to worry about was making sure his creativity kept up with his talent.

'I guess I can just rely on what others have done before me and not really worry about how I would solve some problems,' Alex thought to himself.

Alex knew that right now his main focus needed to be on alchemy. Because of that, he had to begin downgrading some of the True pill recipes he had to Common pills in preparation for the pill to heal his hand.

Still, he gave some equal time to both talismans and formations, while spending the majority on alchemy.

In one month, he felt he had made a lot of advancement in both of them and could consistently create Heaven-grade talismans and formations.

So, no longer hesitating, Alex went to the Talisman guild during the second month and took an exam.

He passed with flying colors as he made every single talisman with more than 55% Alignment.

Half a month later, Alex went to the formations guild as well and became a True Heaven formation master.

Fortunately, not many people learned of this fact. And the few that did keep their mouth shut.

If anyone learned that a single young man of age less than 25 had not only learned 3 of the main professions, but was also good enough to reach True Heaven rank on all 3 of them, the city would certainly be shocked, and even figures from the capital would come to see him.

Fortunately, those that did know about it really wanted to keep him for their own guilds, and as such, no information was spread.

There was also another event that took place during the 2 months that was enough to distract the city's attention enough so that no one took notice of Alex's improvement.

After all, it wasn't always that the empire gained a new True Immortal rank Talisman maker.

Qin Shan's nose was massive with pride and glee as he watched his disciple be taken as one of the best talisman makers out there.

Even Tian Ye would barely be her match now that she had the spiritual sense to aid her.

The only thing that could possibly hold her back now were things that were out of her hands such as Ink, paper, and brush.

The quality of these things wasn't something Helen could simply change herself. Buying better ones cost a lot sometimes, so you had to make do with cost-effective stuff.

Since you had to buy paper and ink yourself, most talisman creators were only so eager to spend so much on their craft.

Fortunately, paying for your own stuff meant that, unlike the alchemy guild, you didn't have to pay some fee for screwing up your talisman.

Alex didn't know how he felt about that for in his mind the Alchemy guild's system was much better.

As such, 3 months passed by in flash. Alex had learned a lot during this time and he found every second he spent learning Alchemy or the other 2 professions was very helpful.

However, that also meant that he had neglected his own cultivation quite a bit. He needed to think of a way to get that back on track as well.

Chapter 687: Help

Alex was out in one of the uninhabited mountains of the Flowing Brush with his mother.

They had flown here because his mother insisted that she wanted to find some ingredients for some ink. Alex decided to use this opportunity to train his mother in some techniques.

Over the last month, he had scoured the depths of his mind to remember the techniques he had read back when he first got them. He had noted down most that he remembered.

While he couldn't note down the one in the Human language since he wouldn't be able to translate it for his mother, he did note down the other ones.

Most importantly, he noted down 3 particular techniques.

Immortal Concealment technique, Veiled light technique, and finally, Flickering Shadow technique.

He was a little sad that he didn't get to note down Heaven's Impact as that would have perhaps been the best of them all, but this would have to do as well.

Aside from that, he had also noted down the few defensive techniques he knew. As for offensive techniques, Alex couldn't think of many he had that his mother could use.

Most of his elemental techniques were, to put it mildly, bad. Some of them like his metal techniques and yang palm technique took advantage of his Supreme Spiritual roots which his mother did not have and could likely never have.

Unless he learned how to acquire them by himself.

He had no water technique. His fire technique was something he learned before he had established his spiritual sense, and his wood technique was a sword technique, which his mother likely couldn't use.

Alex thought it was better to give her whatever sect master Qin had in mind for her.

For now, he decided to focus on defense and evasion.

Alex looked at his mother who picked a ripe blackberry from the vine and put it in a jar of sorts.

"Come behind me," he said. As soon as she heard that, it took her 2 seconds to get everything in order and teleport right behind him where his shadow lay.

"You're getting better," Alex said. "But you should be able to do even more so."

"I know," Helen said dejectedly. "But my meridians aren't wide enough to send my Qi through it."

Alex sighed. Since his mother wasn't a fighter or dealt with something that required constant pouring of Qi like he had to with Alchemy, she hadn't used her meridians anytime aside from cultivation.

So, they weren't flexible enough to let her move her Qi.

'I could stress her meridians, but I don't have any way to heal them afterward,' he thought. They weren't tough like his own so if he by some chance ruptured her meridian, he wouldn't be able to heal her back as easily.

'I need a lot of knowledge about the human body, especially cultivator before I dare do anything risky with my mother,' he thought.

Then he thought of something else. 'Can I find the Divine Devil's fruit somewhere?' he wondered.

If he found that, he could easily get his mother to go through Mortal Cleansing, in which case her meridians would naturally become more flexible and her Qi would flow easily.

"I'll do something about that soon," He told his mother.

It required his mother to go through 3 different mountains before she found what she was looking for. During this time, he helped her train a lot.

Not just him, even Pearl helped her a lot. Alex let her know that she was ready for a breakthrough after such long training.

Alex wondered if he himself was. He knew he could easily breakthrough, but was 3 months of doing nothing helpful in any way?

At that very moment, he decided to go back to the Eastern mountain ranges sometime again to improve himself.

'I should go there within the next month, I've put off my training for far too long,' he said to himself.

Once the mother-son duo was done with their task, they returned back to the sect.

At that time, they found the sect master waiting for them outside their home.

"Master, why are you here?" she asked. "Do you need something?"

"Yes, your son," he said and turned to Alex. "Junior Yu, do you have any antidote pills?"

He had started calling Alex, Yu Ming as per his request, so that others didn't accidentally know of his name and connect that with him being a player.

While players were already largely integrated into the society, Alex still felt some paranoia about the fact. He didn't want people meddling in his business and trying to hurt him or kidnap him to use him.

His body was way too unique to go around letting everyone know of his origins.

What he feared most perhaps was someone picking his brain like Zexi did, only this time successfully. The amount of information they could learn that would destroy him and the calm 5th continent was staggering.

Alex nodded to the Sect master's question and asked, "is it for someone in the True realm?"

"No, common," the old man said.

"I see," Alex said as he quickly brought one out. "What happened?"

"Sigh, there is some poison grass growing on the mountains now. Some of the disciples get scratched by it and end up becoming poisoned from time to time," he said.

"I see," Alex said. "Still I didn't expect you to come personally for something like that."

"I wouldn't," the sect master said. "But the other elders couldn't find you, so I came down looking myself. I didn't know you had gone out."

"Yes, mother needed something," he said. "Actually, should you be wasting time on this idle conversation?"

"Right, I'll see you later," the old man said and flew off.

Alex checked his storage bag and realized he was a little low on antidotes. He also had a duty to the sect as a guest elder.

So, he decided to fulfill it by making a bunch of antidotes and healing pills for both Common realm and True realm cultivators.

He looked to the sky and realized that it was only mid-afternoon.

'Sigh, I don't have any ingredients on me for antidotes and healing pills,' he thought to himself.

"Mother, I will go to the city and make some pills for the sect. I'll see you later," Alex said and went away.

Alex arrived at the Alchemy guild some 15 minutes later. The moment he entered, the receptionists that were working bowed towards him in greeting.

They were well aware of the fact that he was one of the 3 greatest alchemists in the entire city.

Alex brought out a talisman he himself had made and note down a bunch of ingredients and amounts.

"Can you guys help me get these? Are there any that aren't in stock?" he asked.

The receptionist girl who Alex talked to looked over the ingredients with what they had and answered, "We are a little short on Bitter Thorns, we have about 10 of them. Aside from that, everything else is in stock."

"Can you help me buy them all? Use the spirit stones that are under my name," Alex said.

"Yes, Alchemist Yu," the girl said and did something with the formation in front of her, and soon he could see the storage bag in front of the receptionist fill up.

The ingredients were being transferred. Once it was done, she handed the storage bag to him and Alex checked.

Everything was in order.

"Thank you," he said and turned to leave.

"Alchemist Yu, wait," the receptionist cried out, stopping him mid-walk.

Alex turned around with a confused look. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"There's someone here to meet you," she said.

"Meet me?" Alex asked.

"Well, not exactly you, but a True Heaven alchemist. Since you are the only one here, I can only have you meet them," she said.

"I see," Alex nodded. "Who wants to see True Heaven alchemists?"

The girl pointed her finger to two figures that sat on the bench in the corner of the guild.

Alex followed the finger and was surprised to learn that he recognized both of them.

He walked off and quickly arrived in front of them.

"May I ask what sister Liang and sister Han want from this lowly alchemist?" Alex asked.

The two girls that were sitting inconspicuously, turned their heads to look at him. When they saw his badge, their eyes shined.

"We need your help."

Chapter 688: Willow's Bark

Liang Qiu, the best disciple of the Heaven's Peak school, wore the famous Black and Red robes of her school.

She had pitch-black hair as well as a tall and slender body. Her fair complexion made her quite desirable to most of her peers of the opposite gender.

However, it was likely that no one dared get close to her with how above everyone she was.

3 years ago, or 3 months ago from Alex's perspective, she had been at around the 4th True King realm.

Right now, Alex could sense something close to the 9th Realm of True King realm.

It seemed she had stopped at the doorstep of the True Emperor realm. Alex sighed to himself. He wondered if he could ever manage to catch up to her.

Han Daiyu seemed equally strong as well. She was a big muscular girl with brown, half-sleeved, cultivator robes that showed her well-defined physical body that she certainly trained in the sun for a long time to get.

Alex could see the dark tan on her face, surrounded by light-brown hair.

Alex had only seen her with her hammer back in the demon realm where she had helped Tian Ye with the experiment to get the House of the Undying open. So, he found her a little unusual when she wasn't holding one.

Her cultivation base itself was around the 7th realm of True King, but Alex knew of the Han family's physique and he wouldn't doubt that she could manage to bring out attacks close to the same level as Liang Qiu's.

The two girls stood up when they saw Alex. Liang Qiu was a step faster than Han Daiyu.

"Are you really a True Heaven alchemist?" Han Daiyu said before even giving out a greeting.

Alex saw Liang Qiu give a stern side-eye to Han Daiyu who dismissed it slightly with a shrug.

Alex tried not to laugh as he said, "Yes, I am. Please don't let my age confuse you regarding that."

"I'm sorry about her. She didn't mean anything disrespectful," Liang Qiu tried to speak up for Han Daiyu.

"It's alright. I can see why sister Han is concerned," Alex said. "So, you said you needed my help, sister Liang. May I ask what it is about?"

"We need a pill," Liang Qiu said.

Alex gave a confused look. "I don't see why you needed to meet me for that," he said. "Please don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have finally met you two after hearing so much about you, but you could have simply left a mission for us. I'm sure any of the 3 of us would have gotten to it when we checked upon it."

"No!" Liang Qiu immediately shouted. "We do need a pill, but first we need its ingredients too."

"Oh," Alex said. "Is it not available in the guild?"

She shook her head.

"Not even in the entire empire?" he asked suspiciously.

The girls still shook their heads.

"Hmm," Alex mused to himself. "May I then know why you are exactly here?"

"We have a recipe for a pill that I would want to be made for me. But I can't gather all the ingredients."

"It is just one ingredient, but I can't find records of it anywhere, let alone knowing what it looks like. I've been to many people and places, but none of them have been any help," she said.

"So, you came here hoping that one of us would be helpful?" he asked.

Liang Qiu nodded. Han Daiyu didn't do or say anything. She let Liang Qiu do all the grunt work while she simply stood watching the two of them talk.

"May I know what the ingredient is?" he asked.

"It's something called 'Corrosive Willow's bark'," she said thoughtfully.

"Corrosive Willow? I see. You couldn't find its bark in the market huh?" Alex asked.

The girls shook their heads. However, even as they did, Liang Qiu gave him a weird look.

"Do you know the tree?" she asked confusedly.

"Yes," Alex said before thinking for a moment. He did know of the tree, but not about it.

Meaning that he had seen the tree, but had read nothing about its properties or even learned what the ingredients could be used for.

Han Daiyu's eyes went a little wide when she heard a positive response. "You know of the tree? Please don't lie, sir alchemist. It's fine if you don't know about it."

Alex gave a smile. "I can promise you, I know of the tree. In fact, I know the general area of where it is too," he said.

The girls' faces were a sight to see. "You really know of the tree? Please don't lie, this is a very important pill for us," they said.

"I can promise you on my pride as an alchemist, I do know of the tree and where it is," Alex said.

"Oh, where is it?" the girls asked.

"The Poison Swamp," Alex said.

"The Poison Swamp?" the two girl's faces drained a little in color when they heard that.

"Please excuse us for a second," Liang Qiu said and took Han Daiyu to the corner to speak with her.

Meanwhile, Alex couldn't help but think to himself, 'should I just move forward with my plan to go train and go to the poison swamp then? That's not a bad training area.'

'At the same time, I should be able to get their Corrosive Willow bark as well,' he thought to himself. 'Sigh, if only I got Blood Spirit Ginseng that way too.'

'Is it safe for me though?' he thought to himself. 'Without Shen Jing to look after me, they may attack me with no one to save me.'

Alex started to hesitate a bit when he thought that.

"Um, sir Alchemist," Liang Qiu spoke to catch her attention.

"You can call me Yu Ming," Alex said with a slight smile.

"Alchemist Yu, would you mind giving us an exact location of where the tree is?" she asked. "We can give something in return, be it spirit stones or something else."

"Uh, I'm sorry," Alex said. "I don't remember the exact location aside from the fact that it was in the Poison swamp," Alex said.

That was true. He had his eyes blindfolded, so as he went around the massive swamp, he had seen many things in many locations which he couldn't connect to s specific location due to his eyes being shut all the time.

"Um, can you tell us what it looks like then?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "It's a 5-meter-tall tree, with a trunk about this big that grows into 7 different main branches that branch out, even more, to fill the tree with green leaves that…"

Alex trailed off when he saw the look on their faces. Frowns.

"I'm not giving a very good description, am I?" he asked.

"I'm sorry, I can't really visualize it properly," Liang Qiu said. "It's too…"

"Generic," Han Daiyu said from the side.

"I know," Alex said. "I'm afraid I can't help on that part. It is a generic-looking tree. That's how it had managed to hide from everyone, I suppose."

"That… makes sense," Liang Qiu said.

"What do we do now?" Han Daiyu asked from the side in a low voice, but Alex caught her words.

"I don't know," Liang Qiu said from the side.

Alex waited for a bit before saying, "If you don't need me, then I should go back to making—"

"Wait!" Liang Qiu said. "I mean, please wait, Alchemist Yu."

"Yes?" Alex waited.

The girl sighed for a moment before saying, "Would you mind accompanying us to the Poison swamp so that you can help us find the tree?"

Alex didn't answer immediately and stared at the girl for a moment. "What's in it for me?" he asked.

"Um, can't you do it for us?" Han Daiyu said, putting on a cutesy face and voice.

Alex openly chuckled in a non-disrespectful way. "I'm afraid I can't simply leave my job here at the guild without me getting something return, you know," He said.

"No, no. Of course not," Liang Qiu intervened, not before glaring at Hai Daiyu who simply laughed.

"We won't ask you to go with us for free," she said. "We can give you some compensation in return."

"Oh," Alex made an amused look. "What can you give me, sister Liang?"

"Anything that is within my capabilities, I will give it to you," Liang Qiu said with an air of pride.

"Anything?" Alex gave her a sly look that made her reconsider her words. She saw him stare at her and started getting the feeling that she should have phrased her words better.

'Anything? Stupid! What if he asks for you?' she blamed herself, but she didn't let it show on her face.

Alex chuckled. "I do know exactly what I want. In fact, I have two things I want," he said while looking at both of them.

This time, even Han Daiyu got a little uncomfortable.

Liang Qiu frowned a little and was about to speak up when Alex put up his hand.

"My apologies, I was merely having some fun. I really do need two things, however. One is armor, and another one is an artifact for stopping mental attacks. I need both of those of high rank and grades."

"You can get me either of these two things, but I would really appreciate it if you could get both of them to me," he said.

Liang Qiu thought for a moment and said, "Both of those can be arranged, so long as you will come with us to the swamp."

Chapter 689

"Great!" Alex exclaimed when he heard that. "When do we leave?"

"As soon as possible," Han Daiyu said.

"In 3 days," Liang Qiu said after a bit more thought than Daiyu. "We will need to prepare since it won't be just us."

"Oh," Alex said. "More people will come?"

"Yes," Liang Qiu nodded. "Since we are both very valuable to our sects and families, they won't let us go to a place like the Poison Swamp without some assistance, so to speak."

"I understand," Alex said. "I will make sure to get ready for that day then."

"I should be able to have a defensive mental artifact ready for you in the next 3 days. Daiyu here knows more about armors, she will be in charge of that," Liang Qiu said.

Han Daiyu nodded without saying any words. Alex was surprised they were going to help him with both of those items, and with so little thought at that.

"It seems the pill you want to be made is very important," Alex said seriously. "May I ask what sort of pill it is?"

Liang Qiu's face changed a little as she thought for a bit. "I will be very honest, Alchemist Yu. This pill is so important and… unique, that I'm not sure I'm even confident of letting you make it."

"Please do not take offense to that statement. I don't mean it to demerit your ability, it's just that the secrecy of the pill is our top priority right now," Liang Qiu said. "So, we might end up requesting senior Xue instead."

Alex nodded when he heard that. Xue Mufan was perhaps the most popular alchemist in the whole Luminance Empire.

If anyone asked who the best alchemist in the empire was, the names that would pop up were Xue Mufan of the Falling Lotus sect and Zhou Zirong of the Zhou family who made his name through his exceptional use of White Flame.

They were both Saint Earth ranked alchemists, meaning if they were to agree to do this, they could easily reach an amazing harmony.

"That makes me even more intrigued, sister Liang," Alex said. A pill that they had to request the best Alchemist in the empire to make, Alex was dying to learn what it was.

"I'm sorry, but we have to go with someone we know can create the best pills," Liang Qiu said.

Alex nodded since he understood. If the pill was as special as Liang Qiu was making it to be, then he too would suggest not wasting time on just about anyone and go straight to someone you know for sure can do it.

However, that didn't mean he was letting go of the chance to learn about said pill.

Alex thought for a moment and waved his hand to bring out two pill bottles. The two of them gave a confused look to Alex who placed one of the bottles each onto their hands.

"What is this?" Liang Qiu asked with a confused look.

"Are you trying to bribe us, Alchemist Yu?" Han Daiyu said with a gleeful smile from the side.

Alex shook his head. "I expect you to not eat these pills and return them to me… uh, where are we meeting to leave?" he asked.

"Outside our sect's gate. We will fly from there," Liang Qiu said.

"Yes, when I meet you two there, I expect you to return those pills to me," he said.

"Hmph!" Han Daiyu said. "Then why give it to us?"

Liang Qiu looked at him with an inquisitive look as well.

"Consider this my audition, a test if you will, so that I may prove that I am a good choice to make the pill for you," he said. "You won't have to go far away to meet Saint Alchemists who may not have the time to make True pills."

"You wish to sway our thoughts with these pills?" Liang Qiu asked with a smile.

"Yes," Alex answered. Then, he bowed to the two girls. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some pills to make. I shall see the both of you in the morning in 3 days."

"Thank you for your assistance, Alchemist Yu," Liang Qiu said.

"Thank you," Han Daiyu followed.

Alex gave a warm smile and a wave of his hand as he walked over to the mission board to complete some missions while he was there.

He took a few missions at once, one of the advantages of having the rank he did, and went to the alchemy room.

It wasn't until around evening that he finally left the room and handed all the pills that he made for the missions.

Then, he handed all the extra pills he made from the ingredients he got in those missions over to them as well to sell for him.

Alex knew he had close to 10 thousand True Spirit stones in the guild right now, but he never took them out. It was better to just use them to buy ingredients and so forth.

Also, with his money with the guild, if there was ever a Blood Spirit Ginseng on the market, the receptionists in the guild had his full authority to buy it at whatever the cost was.

Once Alex was done with his tasks in the guild, he went back to the sect and went directly to his room to make the pills.

Unfortunately, after his house was improved upon and more formations were added, there was also a formation to keep out spiritual sense. These formations only worked up to a certain range, but Saint realm cultivators were mostly unable to pierce them, so his mother had no hope of seeing him inside his room to check if he was back or not.

Fortunately, however, Pearl was with his mother, so he could let her know that he was back since their bond was stronger than this measly formation.

So, without any worry, he started making the pills that he was so desperate to make.

It took Alex nearly 2 days to finish all the ingredients he had bought with about 3 different breaks in between to cool off his head and go visit his mother.

In those 2 days, he made 7 different types of Healing pills, each with different strength and focusing on a different part of the body, as well as 5 different types of antidotes that worked on different types of poison, with many inter lapping with each other.

In total, he made exactly 193 pills, not bothering to separate any of the pills into two weaker pills using his splitting technique. However, he didn't give it his all for all of the pills so as to maintain his mental strength throughout the day, so only about 150 of those pills came out at Heaven grade with the highest being at 62%.

The lowest, however, didn't go below 43% either. So, all in all, this was an excellent acquirement for the sect.

Qin Shan's shock was a sight to see when Alex brought out all of those pills. It wasn't the number that shocked him of course, as he was used to having to buy pills in bulk for the sect.

No, it was the quality of those pills.

He gave a rueful smile to Alex as he said, "Junior Yu, I'm afraid the sect doesn't have enough extra budget to buy all of those pills at once."

"Oh, how much do you think these will cost?" Alex asked nonchalantly.

Qin Shan's eyes went to the pills while the rueful smile never left his face. " 24 thousand True Spirit stones for the pills alone, and likely 30 thousand if we add the cost of the ingredients too."

Alex smiled. "Close, the ingredients cost about 7 thousand, but I got them in 5 thousand since I bought in bulk and because of my rank."

"As for the pills, yes it will cost around 25 thousand, but I won't ask you to pay that."

"Pay me the 5 thousand for the ingredients and whatever extra you can manage for the pills. Consider the rest of it as me paying interest on the debt you have put me under for taking care of my mother all these years," he said.

Qin Shan's heart skipped a beat when he heard that. The thought of acquiring such impressive pills for such low cost was him coming upon a sizable fortune.

However, he didn't like the feeling of ripping off Alex's hard work as he too was a professional just like him.

"Say what, I don't have the money right now, so I will take these pills for now and pay for them later," he said.

"You don't have to do that. I really mean it when I say I don't need much," he protested.

"No, I would have a guilty conscience if I did that," Qin Shan said sternly.

Alex had to give up in the end. "Uh… fine," he said. "You can give the money to my mother."

After getting a nod from the sect master, Alex went to his mother and told her what he was planning to do for the next couple of days.

"What?" his mother freaked out a little when she heard his destination. "The Poison swamp? That's full of poison. No!"

"It's fine, mother. Don't you remember me telling you that I had been there for an entire year before? Poison doesn't affect me at all," he said.

"But still…" Helen tried to protest but Alex cut her off.

"Don't worry mother. I will be very careful. Besides, it is likely that strong figures from both Heaven's Peak school and the Han Family will go with us as well," he said.

"Sigh, if that is true then sure," she said. "But you must take good care of yourself. If something bad happens, you save yourself first and leave."

"I promise, mother," Alex said. After that, he stayed with his mother for a little longer before returning back to his room where he cultivated with Pearl for the entire night in preparation for tomorrow morning.

Once morning came, he went back to his mother and left Pearl there. Since he would be amidst unfamiliar faces, he didn't want to reveal the uniqueness that was Pearl.

"Take care, son," Helen said.

"See you later," Alex said and left the sect early.

He took out the boat artifact from his storage bag and flew off.

The Heaven's Peak school lay in the mountain ranges on the northeastern side of the Dawnspring city. It was further away from the city than the Flowing Brush sect was.

It took Alex a little longer to reach the sect to him having to take a detour around the city due to flight prohibition, but he still managed to get there before anybody.

He put away his boat and looked at the majestic gates in front of him.

"So this is the Heaven's Peak school, huh?"

Chapter 690: Meeting Big Names

Alex looked at the gate and the subsequent mountains that were full of trees, houses, and all sorts of colors.

He could see different buildings, all of the different shapes, and sizes, as well as people walking amongst them.

Even though it was early morning, he could see disciples of the Heaven's Peak school walk in and out of the sect in their black and red cultivator's robe.

There were also a few people wearing non-sect clothes that also came for their own business.

Alex walked up to a tree that grew next to the cliff and sat next to it on the grass. He looked to his left and could see the city down below quite far away.

The guards, who were likely disciples of the sect on duty, gave his curious glances, wondering who he was.

"Little brother, do you need anything?" they asked him.

"No, I'm just waiting for someone," he said.

"Someone from the sect?" they asked him.

"Yes," Alex answered, and they left him alone. Still, they kept an eye just in case he was up to something.

Alex, meanwhile, simply closed his eyes and sat, thinking about the different things he had to do up next.

He absentmindedly poured his Qi into his storage ring, which devoured it like always without showing any sign of getting larger.

He could tell there was more space inside, way more than the 20 square meters he had at the moment.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem like it was going to improve, so Alex was stuck with th 20 square meters of space. That was by no means a small space, but that was something he could easily get with 4 better storage bags.

'Well, it's not like I need any more. I can just keep the important items here,' he thought to himself.

He then thought about everything else he had to do next. For his arm alone, he needed to go be a Lightsworn, even though it didn't sound hopeful.

It was almost guaranteed that the Shen Girl wouldn't be able to help him, but he still wanted to try with her as well.

If nothing else worked, he would go around scouring the empire in search of the ginseng. Maybe even exchange it for something else with the last person that had bought it.

Other than that, he needed to find a way back to the Crimson Empire and help his own master and martial uncle to get their limbs back.

Alex sighed at the difficulty of everything that he needed to do.

Just then, he heard a commotion from upfront and he looked up to see the guards parting ways for someone, while the people outside also backed off with looks of shock on their faces.

Immediately, everyone started bowing in front of them. Some of the were a little slow to realize what was happening, but once they saw someone bow, the rest of them did as well.

Alex got up to his feet, clearly curious as to who was coming out, and felt a wave of spiritual sense pass through him.

Then, he saw Liang Qiu walk out of the gate and turned directly toward him. She put on a warm smile and started walking.

Alex felt a little shocked when he saw everyone bowing toward her, but when he saw the people, he saw that their eyes weren't focused on her at all.

Instead, it was focused on someone that slowly walked out from the gate after Liang Qiu.

Alex saw a man, who seemed to be in his mid-30s, softly nod towards everyone, beckoning them to stand up.

He was tall, perfectly handsome with clean-shaven face, and black hair that fell to his shoulders perfectly straight.

Not a single strand of hair looked out of sight, and Alex almost thought he would get cut from the hair itself.

Before Liang Qiu could even say anything, she saw him staring at the man's hair and immediately stood in front of him to block his vision.

"Don't look so intently. My master uses his spear Qi to cut his hair and thus his intent is always around him," she said.

"Sorry?" Alex asked, a little confused.

"You will cut spirit if you're not careful. My master's spear intent is very strong," she said.

"Your master?"

A name floated to Alex's head. Shangguan Quan.

When the man slowly walked up to him, Alex immediately fell into a bow. "Greetings senior," he said.

Shangguan Quan stopped right next to his disciple and looked at Alex. "Little brother must be the new True Heaven Alchemist of the Alchemy Guild," the man said.

"Yes, senior," Alex said, clearly surprised that arguably the strongest person in the Heaven's Peak school was talking with him.

Alex didn't know the internal structure of the sect, but he knew that Shangguan Quan was the 1st elder of the sect and the master of Liang Qiu, which may have been the reason for him being the first elder in the first place.

'Why is he here?' Alex wondered to himself, unable to immediately come up with an explanation of how surprised he was from seeing the man.

The crowd around them started soft murmurs of shock, surprise, and confusion. Everyone asked each other who Alex was, but not many knew him to begin with, so the chances of anyone recognizing him were impossible.

Still, some of them had caught the words 'True Heaven Alchemist' and connected that with the news from the guild to realize what was happening.

Shangguan Quan seemed to not mind the crowd at all and instead said, "little brother looks quite young for a True Heaven Alchemist. May I know what your age is?" he asked.

Alex frowned internally a little and decided to add a few numbers to his age. He was about to answer when he saw the man's smile slouch a little as his eyes wandered towards the right before his whole head turned back.

Alex followed his gaze and saw a boat that was capable of holding about 10 different people comfortably as well as having two different rooms on the inside.

As the boat got closer, Alex could see the deep brown color of the boat somehow glow brightly.

At the front of the hull, there was a word written in giant white letters.

HAN

When the boat came next to them, it hovered next to the cliff, but nobody got off it.

Instead, a burly man with arms as big as Alex's torso looked towards them and shouted, "Hey brother Quan, little girl, come on up. We should be leaving already."

Shangguan Quan didn't hide the frown on his face when he said, "You're the one who is damn late." There was no more of his earlier air of elegance.

The other man, however, took no offense to the statement and just laughed. He watched the man gesture for them to get on while Han Daiyu also waved for them from behind.

Liang Qiu was the first to move as she turned towards Alex and said, "Alchemist Yu, let us get aboard the ship."

Alex nodded softly and walked behind her. He slowly floated and landed on the ship where he got a confused look from the burly man.

"Uncle, he's Alchemist Yu!" Han Daiyu quickly said from the side, and the man's face immediately widened to a grin that looked kind of unnatural to Alex.

"Greetings, Alchemist Yu. I am Han Hongqi, this little lass's uncle," the burly man said.

'Han Hongqi… another familiar name,' Alex thought.

"Greetings senior Han," Alex bowed to greet the man.

Han Hongqi was the 3rd son of the Han Family patriarch, and one of the strongest in that family. He was a Saint realm cultivator, just like Shangguan Quan, and a very well-known person in the entire empire.

Alex was already surprised to see Shangguan Quan, but now he saw Han Hongqi as well.

Alex had expected to see Saint Realm cultivators, but not these two. They were some of the strongest figures in the empire, only second to the likes of patriarch and sect leaders of the various major sects and clans, as well as the hidden figures like Shen Jing.

Finally, Shangguan Quan also got onto the ship and glared at Han Hongqi.

Alex wondered if there was some hidden grudge between them, but then he saw Han Hongqi put an arm around Shangguan Quan's shoulders.

"Haha, Brother Quan. You really are a sly fox aren't you?" he said in a voice so loud that even the crowd outside the Heaven's Peak gate could hear them.

Shangguan Quan tried to move away from Hongqi's hand, but it was too strong for him to do so without using a bit of his Qi.

"Goddammit! Couldn't you have come a little later?" he asked with a frown.

"Tsk. Tsk. Tsk." Han Hongqi shook his head while clicking his tongue.

"Alchemist Yu," Liang Qiu said catching his attention and Alex turned around.

He greeted Han Daiyu who was full of smiles this morning.

"Here," Liang Qiu said as she handed something to Alex. Alex looked to see what it was and saw that it was the pill bottle he had given them.

He opened the lid for a split second and saw that the pill was indeed inside.

Next, Han Daiyu also gave him back his pill, which he took with a face full of smile.

He was about to say something when the ship suddenly moved, catching him off guard.

"Hold on to something. I will get us to the poison swamp in no time," Han Hongqi shouted from the side as the ship took off.

Chapter 691: Earrings, Armor, and Shield

It took them all a minute or so to get their composure back from the sudden departure.

Alex sat on the floor of the ship, copying both Han Daiyu and Liang Qiu.

Shangguan Quan was begrudgingly taken away by the ever boisterous Han Hongqi and spoke about something to the side that Alex wasn't curious enough to dare eavesdrop on.

"How have you been, Alchemist Yu?" Liang Qiu asked from the side.

"I've been fine, sister Liang," Alex said, a little surprised that she asked that, but he guessed it was just common courtesy.

He wanted to ask them about the pill but decided not to be the one that brought it forward himself.

"I didn't expect either of those two seniors to come along with us," Alex said, showing clear surprise in his voice. "I would've expected an elder or such of little responsibility to the sect and family to accompany us."

"That just goes to show to you just how important not just we are to them, but also how important this current mission is," Liang Qiu said with a smug smile.

"Right, Alchemist Yu, how did you make that pill?" Han Daiyu suddenly asked. "That pill was amazing, I nearly at it too, and only stopped because I didn't know what that pill was about."

Alex smiled. "It's amazing, isn't it? It's one of the better products," he said. "Only downside is that it takes me at least 3 weeks to be able to make those pills."

It would've taken him shorter if he had more of those mangoes from the mountains, but he had already eaten all of them. Still, he was starting to notice that he was getting better at the whole thing and as such the overall time was getting lower.

"3 weeks per pill? That's ridiculous, isn't it?" Liang Qiu asked.

"Yes, it's ridiculous," Han Daiyu said from the side as she constantly nodded at Liang Qiu's words.

Alex was confused for a second. Why would that be ridiculous? But then he realized what he had said.

"Ah, my apologies. I meant something else and said something else," he said.

"Oh, what did you mean then?" the girls asked curiously.

"When I said it takes me 3 weeks to make one pill, I wasn't talking about the number of pills I could make, but rather the time it takes me to come up with a way to make one of those pills."

"Once I make a single of those pills, I can make nearly 50 a day since I would have some recipe to follow," Alex said.

The girl's eyes went wide when they heard that.

"Are you serious? You can make so many of those pills in a single day? Will they retain the same level of quality?" they asked.

Alex thought for a bit and answered, "Saying that I can guarantee all of those pills to have such quality would be a lie as there is a chance of randomness to the process."

"However, what I can guarantee is that if I were to make 100 of a single pill that I have taken 3 or more weeks to study, I can make more than 90 of those have the same level of quality as the ones that I handed to you."

"I can also guarantee that even the rest of the pills that don't reach the same quality as the pills I gave you will still be heaven grade," Alex said.

Han Daiyu kept on her surprised look with a hand to her mouth to hide her shock, while Liang Qiu fell into a thoughtful expression.

"If it isn't so rude, may I ask alchemist Yu if you have more of such pills to prove your words?" she asked.

Alex thought for a moment. While what she was asking could certainly be taken as rude, Alex didn't think so.

Instead, he wondered why she even asked that in the first place. 'This is the part where I shock them with my talent so they give me what I want, isn't it?' he thought.

He was extremely cautious about showing off his talents to random individuals, but his curiosity got the better of him.

So, with a simple gesture, he brought out 20 different pill bottles each with a different pill and laid them in front of them.

The girls immediately showed a doubtful expression and without even missing a beat, Liang Qiu brought out a tester before realizing what she had done.

"Um… may I?" she asked half-scared that he might be offended.

"Please, how else are you going to find the legitimacy of my statement?" Alex asked.

The girls nodded and Han Daiyu picked up a pill bottle at random before handing it to Liang Qiu.

Liang Qiu slowly opened the bottle and put the pill directly into the tester.

As the fog on the tester started growing, Alex could feel 2 different sets of spiritual senses settle around them.

'The saints are watching too, huh?' he thought.

The pill easily crossed 50% and slowly went up to stop at around 67%.

Liang Qiu nodded in amazement as such a high level was not something people could possibly make without having a lot of talent.

"Another one!" Han Daiyu said and picked another pill in front of them.

72%.

This was much better than the previous pill.

"Another one!"

69%.

"And another one!"

71%.

They checked about 7 or 8 pills in total before deciding to stop.

Alex smiled and took back all the pills. He looked forward and saw a thoughtful expression on Liang Qiu's face. Even Han Daiyu wasn't her usual self.

Then, something appeared in front of Liang Qiu who looked toward Alex as she said, "Here."

Alex took whatever it was without thinking and saw that it was a pair of earrings.

There was a twisted hook on one side, followed by an amber-like gem hanging on each of the earrings.

Alex looked at the most golden ring and asked, "is this…?"

"Your payment you requested," she said.

Alex finally gave a proper look at the earrings and asked, "Defensive mental artifact?"

Liang Qiu nodded.

"But, I haven't done anything for you yet," Alex said as he handed it back to her. "I can't accept my payment without having done my part."

"No, please take it. I insist," Liang Qiu said.

Alex was about to refuse when he saw something else appear in front of him. This time, there were 2 items.

One was a regular-looking brown-colored armor that was thin enough to wear under his robes, and another one was surprisingly a circular concave shield with nowhere to hold it.

Han Daiyu was the one that brought those two items out, so she started explaining.

"This armor is capable of stopping any attacks under the True Emperor realm. For True Emperor realm, it can stop about 3 attacks before it becomes unusable," she said.

"This shield on the other hand can stop all attacks under the True Emperor realm, but will not stop any attacks over that. What it can do, however, is the ability to create a barrier around you that can stop Omni-directional attacks."

"You may choose whichever one you like," Han Daiyu said.

"Sister Daiyu, as I was explaining to sister Liang, I cannot take it since I haven't provided my services yet. Please let me take—"

"You are being annoying, young man. If they give you something, take it," Han Hongqi arrived next to him and said.

Then he slumped onto the deck and put his arm around Alex. However, to Alex, it felt like a mountain had come down upon him.

He slouched a little before managing to hold on. Han Daiyu gave a cold glare to her uncle who let go of Alex's shoulders and just laughed.

"Anyway, choose one," Han Hongqi said. "If you don't, I will take offense."

Alex sighed. "Very well," he said. "The armor then."

"Oh," Quan gave a surprised exclamation as he sat down on the other side of Alex. "Why not the shield? It can block more than just your chest, you know?"

Alex chuckled a little and lifted his left arm to make them notice it.

"So?" Hongqi asked. "You don't need to have a hand to use that shield."

"Eh? I don't?" Alex looked surprised.

"No," Hongqi pulled the shield to his hand and poured some Qi into it. Then, the shield started hovering in front of him.

"With a single thought, you can move it around you," he said.

Just then, Alex saw something white strike the shield and a brown barrier about double the size of the shield appeared in front of it.

"Or, you can fully activate it… and," as Hongqi poured in more Qi, something flashed in front of them and Hongqi was entirely covered in the shield's barrier, while the shield itself freely moved inside of it.

"If you do take a very strong attack, it's the barrier that will break, not the shield itself, which is different from the other armor which takes the damage physically," Hongqi explained.

"I suggest you take the shield, young man. Something like protecting against True Emperor or higher attacks can be done with talismans too," Shangguan Quan said from the side.

Alex nodded. "Thank you for the information, seniors. Then, if you don't mind, I will take the shield," he said.

"Haha! Good," Hongqi said and passed along the shield.

"Keep the earrings too," Shangguan Quan said and Alex nodded.

Suddenly, Alex was 2 artifacts richer than he had been moments ago.

Chapter 692: Earth Element Ingredients

Seeing how easily they were supporting him with the things he had requested, Alex got increasingly sure that whatever pill recipe they had found, it was for an incredible pill.

However, with both Shangguan Quan and Han Hongqi staying on either side of him, Alex thought it would be rude to bring up that question.

So, instead, he brought up something else to distract them and hopefully make them leave.

"Senior, shouldn't you look after where we are going?" he asked.

"Don't worry, little alchemist. My spiritual sense is at least 3 kilometers wide. I can easily catch any mistakes that can come our way, so have no worry," Han Hongqi said.

"Oh wow," Alex said while secretly wondering what realm of the saint realm one had to be at to have such a vast spiritual sense.

"It's not just him, I'm keeping an eye on things as well. So you don't have to worry about it at all," Shangguan Quan said.

"Not to mention, my spiritual sense is nearly 3.5 Kilometers wide, so I will catch things that come our way before even he does," Quan said.

"Eh? That's a lie. Your spiritual sense is barely as vast as mine," Han Hongqi said.

"Nonsense, I've always had greater spiritual sense than you," Quan said.

Seeing the two of them bickering with each other, Alex got a weird feeling that he was looking at two close friends trying to one-up each other, rather than the enigmatic Saint realm experts.

The two girls sighed and gave an embarrassed smile to Alex who smiled back at them.

After finally concluding that Quan's spiritual sense was in fact wider, but just by a few meters, the two Saint realm experts finally calmed down.

"You two," Shangguan Quan spoke to the girls. Go and prepare, we will reach the Poison Swamp in about 10 minutes.

"I don't have anything—"

"Yes, master," Liang Qiu immediately grabbed Han Daiyu and pulled her away, leaving Alex alone with the two Saint realm experts.

Surprisingly, he didn't feel any form of nervousness or fear at the fact that they were Saint realm experts.

'Perhaps I've been around a bit too many of those lately,' he thought.

The beasts, the Emperor, Shen Jing, Qin Shan, and now these two. He had perhaps been with more Saint realm experts than there were in the Crimson Empire.

'Not to mention lady Ren was an Immortal expert,' he thought to himself.

"Junior Yu, where do you stay these days?" Shangguan Quan asked suddenly.

"Sorry?" Alex gave a little confused look as he took a few minutes to realize what he had been asked. "Ah, I'm in the Flowing Brush sect right now," he replied.

"Flowing Brush sect? I see," Shangguan Quan gave a slightly disappointed look.

"Huh? Wait a minute, that's a talisman sect. How are they helping grow an alchemist like you?" Han Hongqi asked.

"Oh no, I'm not part of that sect. I'm just a guest elder. I have family there, so sect master Qin gave me the guest elder role while I stay there," Alex said truthfully.

"Oh, do you have responsibilities there?" Quan asked.

"Simple ones. I need to make pills for them which they will buy from me," Alex said.

"Oh, they treat you quite well then," Quan said.

"Who taught you how to make pills? You must have a master right?" Hongqi asked.

"I… I did," Alex said with a heavy sigh. "But she's no longer alive."

"My condolences," Quan said.

"Were you part of a sect when you learned from this master of yours?" they asked.

"I was part of a sect," Alex said. "But I left after my master's death."

"Hmm… so is it correct to assume that you do not have any sect or family you belong to at the moment?" Han Hongqi asked.

"That's…" Alex finally realized what it was all about. The two saint realm experts, the smiling faces, the upfront payment, their attitude.

'They want me to join them,' he thought to himself, half surprised and half flattered at what was happening.

"I do not have any organization I belong to aside from the Alchemy guild if you can even call it that," Alex said, immediately bringing an unhidden wide grin to the faces of the two Saint realm experts.

"Have you given any thought to what you want to do in the future? If you haven't, our Heavens' Peak school is willing to take you in as a core disciple of the sect," Shangguan Quan said.

"Core disciple? Pfft," Han Hongqi laughed before looking at Alex and saying, "Young man, our Han family, has a lot of pretty girls. If you want, we can have you marry some of them. You can choose as you want."

"In fact, you can even have a harem if you want. Plus, we will give you the secret technique that can help you cultivate the Earth Demon physique like we all do," Han Hongqi continued.

Shangguan Quan couldn't help but show an aghast expression when he heard that. "Are you willing to go so far? That's your family's physique," he said.

"And this young man will be a member of our family by then. What's wrong with letting him train in that," Han Hongqi said.

Shangguan Quan furiously thought of what he could do to come up with a better deal than that, but he couldn't think of anything.

The only thing he could think of was his disciple. If she agreed to marry him, he could possibly keep him, but that felt like he was going too far.

"I'm sorry, senior," Alex replied to the both of them. "I do not plan on joining any clan or family at the moment. Certainly not marry for sure."

"Come on, there must be something you want right? Something we can help you with or give to you in exchange for you joining our family," Han Hongqi said.

Alex thought for a moment. "I don't know about joining completely, but there is something you can do to have me join your sect and family for 10 to 15 years," Alex said.

Han Hongqi frowned a little. There was no point in keeping Alex for just 15 years if after spending their resources on him, he just gets to leave.

"What is it?" Shangguan Quan decided to ask. While he didn't like the idea just like Hognqi, he wasn't going to immediately say no to it.

"It's regarding this," Alex said as she showed them his left arm. "If within the next year, you are able to help me get my arm back, for the next 15 years, I will dedicate all my time to exclusively serving your sects and clans."

Quan frowned a little. "How old are you, junior Yu?" he asked.

"25," Alex said with a smile.

'So young,' the both of them thought and immediately changed their thoughts for a few of the things. Alex's offer looked a little better than before.

Still, getting an arm back in a year was not something they could do at all.

"Even if we get you to saint realm in a year, which is impossible, it will still take you many years to grow your arm back," Hongqi said.

"As for the ones that can heal you… can the princess help him?" Quan asked Hongqi.

"I don't know," Hongqi said. "They are so secretive with that healing crystal ball."

"And the Lightsworns will never do anything to betray the royal family, so we can't get answers out of them," Quan said.

"That's what happens when you swear an oath to the heavens," Hongqi said.

"I'm afraid I can't think of any ideas then," Quan said.

"Sigh, I was hoping seniors would know something," Alex said while putting on a sad face.

'Why the hell does no one know for sure what the healing crystal does?' he thought to himself. He simply wanted someone to tell him that the path of Lighsworns would be fruitless so that he would stop having hope.

'All I can do now is hope that I reach Saint realm soon enough,' he thought.

"Is there really nothing else to get you to join us?" they asked one last time.

After Alex said no, they decided to leave it be.

Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu returned after seeing their seniors leave.

"How did it go?" Liang Qiu asked him.

Alex smiled and said, "You should know already given that you were eavesdropping on us."

"What? Nonsense! I would never do that," she said.

Alex didn't say anything else. He looked to the side of the boat as the surrounding flew past in a blur.

This boat was at least 4 times as fast as his own boat, and it didn't even look like it was being forced to move at its top speed.

Alex remembered something and finally turned around.

"Right, I keep meaning to ask, but don't get the chance," he said. "What exactly is the pill you want to make?"

Liang Qiu hesitated a bit.

"Am I still not good enough to learn that?" he asked.

Finally, Liang Qiu gave up and brought out a talisman, and handed it to him.

Alex looked at the recipe and immediately frowned. "That's a weird recipe," he said out loud. "Most of the ingredients on this list have earth energy. I've never seen something so extreme."

"I shouldn't have doubted you to know that," Laing Qiu said. "Yes, that pill's recipe mostly consists of Earth element ingredients."

"That is because the pill that recipe is for is a pill that will significantly improve the Earth Spiritual root of a person."

Chapter 693: Importance of Spiritual Roots

"Improve the Earth Spiritual root?" Alex asked, not sure if he heard her correctly.

"Yes," Liang Qiu said. "It will improve the Earth spiritual root of a person."

"Can it turn a lesser spiritual root into a superior one?" Alex asked with a curious look on his face.

Han Daiyu chuckled a little when she heard that, while Liang Qiu simply sighed.

"It seems alchemist Yu does not know about spiritual roots then. Given your capabilities, I would have expected you to know a lot about it," Liang Qiu said.

"I'm sorry?" Alex looked confused. What was he wrong about?

"Don't be," Liang Qiu said. "It's not just you. Most of the world is also unaware of this fact. We only came to learn it about a thousand years ago from the meteor shower."

"You see, people think there are two types of people. Those who have bad spiritual roots, and those who have good spiritual roots."

"But that is wrong," Liang Qiu said. "It is instead a spectrum and you fall somewhere in between."

"Of course, someone will have perfectly amazing spiritual roots. Some will have embarrassingly bad spiritual roots. But that is not all. Some had good, but not great. Some had bad, but still usable."

"Even if two people are said to have Superior or Lesser spiritual roots, they will still have some differences in which is better or worse," Liang Qiu said.

"What we have come to learn is that, even if you were to be born with a so-called Lesser spiritual roots, there are ways to improve upon it and make it better."

"Until now, this had just been a theory for us. A piece of knowledge no one could verify. But now, we've finally found a piece of the puzzle that will prove it all."

"This recipe," she said.

Alex looked stunned. "This did not come with the meteors?" he asked.

"No," Han Daiyu shook her head. "We found it 3 years ago in the demon realm when one of the major locations inside opened up. You might have heard about it."

"House of the Undying?" Alex asked with a surprised expression.

"Yes, us two came upon the same room where this recipe was kept. I got the recipe, while she got the explanation of what it was."

"It wasn't until nearly a year later when we talked about our treasures from the demon realm that we found out we had the other half of each other's treasure."

"Since that day, we've been going around searching for the ingredients. Unfortunately, while most of the ingredients were easy to find, the Corrosive Willow's bark was impossible to find."

"That was where you came in," Liang Qiu finished.

"Do you have the talisman with the information, sister Daiyu?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Han Daiyu quickly gave it to Alex which he read. Once again, it looked like a diary of some sort.

[I have translated the words written on those papers and have come up with the recipe for their pills.]

[This pill is ingenious. It will improve a person's Earth spiritual root by a decent amount, but it has to be used while they are still under the True Emperor realm.]

[Unfortunately, I am unable to create these pills that humans make.]

Alex felt shocked, even though he felt he shouldn't have. 'This is another diary of the Undying God, isn't it?' he thought.

'This man was able to translate the Human language?' Alex thought.

He reread the talisman all over again and got a little confused.

"Sister Liang, do you practice any Earth-aligned cultivation method?" he asked.

"No," Liang Qiu said. "I do have some techniques that require earth Qi, but they're not my most important skills. My most important skills all have to do with the spear after all."

"Then why all the hassle?" Alex asked. "It doesn't say that the roots will improve significantly, just by a decent amount."

"Then why are you going so far for this?" Alex asked. "I understand that this will improve your Earth roots by a bit, but for a person that doesn't use Earth-related techniques much, this doesn't seem to demand as much effort as you're putting into it."

Liang Qiu frowned for a bit and sighed. "I know. Daiyu will benefit from it a lot more than I will," she said. "However, I'm not thinking about right now. I'm thinking about the future."

"The future?" Alex gave a confused look. "Are you planning to practice Earth techniques in the future? If so then I can see it being useful a bit. But, If your spiritual root was bad from the beginning, it could be improved only so much, right?"

"No, it's not for techniques," Liang Qiu said. "It's for something else that I'm not sure Alchemist Yu can understand at the moment."

"Please say it anyway," Alex said.

"There's this thing that Saint realm experts will sometimes learn. When you're really in tune with something fundamental of this world and understand it fully, the world will—"

"Are you talking about Dao?" Alex cut her off.

Liang Qiu gave a surprised look. "You know about Dao?" she asked.

"Yes, I have… heard of it," Alex said. He nearly fumbled away that he had learned one already.

"I see," Liang Qiu said with a sigh of relief. "That will make it much easier to explain then."

"You see, one of the ways to learn a Dao is to have a better spiritual root. The better the spiritual root, the easier the understanding of the Dao comes to you," she said.

"Is that true?" Alex asked with wide eyes. He had never heard about it, but they were in a hurry when they left for the demon realm, so Shen Jing must not have had the time to explain it all.

"So spiritual roots improve your chances of learning a Dao huh? I wasn't expecting to have such a revelation for myself when I left the sect this morning," Alex chuckled to himself a little.

"Hmm… so is it difficult for people without spiritual roots of a certain element to learn Dao relating to that element?" Alex asked.

"No," Liang Qiu said with a serious face. "It is impossible for someone without a spiritual root of an element to learn Dao relating to said element."

"That is why even if someone had lesser spiritual roots of all 5 elements, they are still considered to have a future so long as they persevere until they reach the Saint realm where they have more Dao to learn from instead of focusing on simply a few like most of the others do," she said.

"I see," Alex said as he thought about it all. "Thank you for explaining that all to me. I feel enlightened at the moment," he said.

Ignoring what other things the girls said afterward in courtesy, Alex began thinking about something.

'Why did I learn a law relating to fire before everything?' he wondered. 'I have Metal and Yang spiritual roots that have been tempered with the blood blessed by the god, and a fruit that may itself be a sun.'

'Instead of those two, I learned about fire,' he thought. While it was true that he was inspired by the explosion before he began comprehending his law, given how bad his fire root was, he was surprised he even succeeded.

'Wait,' Alex thought to himself. 'Is my Fire Spiritual root even bad?'

As far as Alex could remember, Fire had been one of the better elements that he could control. Flame Mastery Scripture was something that he learned pretty easily, and controlling fire was very easy as well.

'Does that mean I had a good Fire Spiritual root to begin with?' he thought. 'That's right, it could have always been good without ever being great. It was good enough.'

Alex thought that was correct and nothing else would make any sense for him with not just how easily, but also how early he learned the Dao of explosion.

'So, Yang and Metal first, followed by Fire, and finally the rest,' Alex thought when grading his spiritual roots.

'No, Yin at the end. My body is probably messing with that spiritual root already,' he thought to himself.

While deep in thought, Alex was immediately pulled out of it by the sudden stopping of the boat.

"We're here kids," Hongqi shouted from the back.

Alex stood up and walked to the front of the deck to look down below. Finally, he could see the Poison swamp with his own eyes.

Chapter 694: Colorful

Alex looked down below at the vibrant, prismatic fog that covered the ever so colorful valley that was the Poison swamp.

Having been blind the last time he was here, Alex barely knew what only a little of it looked like. Seeing so much of it at once made it look like a place he would want to own.

Of course, that was what most poisonous and venomous plants and animals had as their main trait: Colors that would lure someone to them and then poison them.

The ship lowered down to the top of a large mountain, and even here Alex could smell the familiar acrid smell of the valley waft up through the mountain.

A barrier appeared around the ship, protecting them from the poison down below.

"It's a miracle the plants and beasts in this region haven't escaped and started taking over the other regions of this area," Han Daiyu said.

Alex looked at the nearly 40 kilometers wide swamp and said, "the plants that grow here are ones that can only grow on a swamp. They don't do well on solid land. Since most beasts need to be near such plants, you won't see them move out of here at all."

"Alright girls, take out your protective gears," Han Hongqi said, and within a second both Han Daiyu and Liang Qiu brought out some cylindrical formation-like discs that Alex recognized to be poison evading artifacts.

They were easily available in the markets and cost just a bit more than a Heaven grade True ranked immunity pill that would keep one immune to poisons and such for about a day.

Seeing Alex eat the pill, the other two Saint experts nodded. Of course, Alex didn't eat the pill they thought he did. He just ate a random pill in his storage bag, which he then immediately turned into Qi.

His naval area felt a little fuller than it already was. 'I need to spend some of it and breakthrough,' he thought.

He had come here to train, or at least that was his plan, but from the looks of it, he wouldn't get the chance at all.

"Everyone ready?" Shangguan Quan asked.

"Yes, Master," Liang Qiu answered.

"Good, now go down. We'll look after you from up here," Quan said.

"Oh, are you not coming senior?" Alex asked, clearly surprised.

"No, it's your adventure. We are here to simply make sure you don't die. Everything else is for you to do," Quan said.

Alex's face immediately brightened when he heard that. Maybe he would get a chance to train.

All 3 of them jumped down from the ship and started trekking down the mountain. Within moments, they reached the area where the poison fog started getting more than just visible.

It started affecting them too. At the same time, a small flimsy barrier appeared around the two girls, while Alex simply walked without the need for one.

"We have to be careful," the girls said. "While the barrier may protect us from the fog, anything that touches or attacks us will cause serious trouble."

Alex nodded.

"So, Alchemist Yu. Which way?" Liang Qiu asked.

Alex stopped to look at the nearly 1300 square kilometers of expanse in front of him and gave an embarrassed look as he answered, "I don't know."

"What?" the girls asked.

"I'm sorry, I don't even remember which way I entered from the last time I was here 4 years ago, let alone where the tree is which I saw after many days of travel," Alex said.

"You came here alone?" Liang Qiu gave a puzzled look.

"No, no. I had a senior look after me, just like right now," Alex said.

The girls nodded and said, "Well I guess we should start somewhere then."

Alex nodded and took the way.

As soon as his feet touched the wetland, he started floating on top of it, instead of sinking in it. He was used to this, after all, he had spent a year in this area, and it had only been 3 months since he left.

Alex looked at the thick, colorful fog and frowned at the fact that he couldn't use his spiritual sense to see through it.

He could feel Liang Qiu's spiritual sense looking around them for sneak attacks, but that wouldn't help him look at things.

In the end, he decided to give up on one of his aces in his sleeves for an easier time.

So, without any prompting, he let go of his spiritual sense which immediately flew all around him, and started looking at things as well.

"Woah!" Liang Qiu gave a shocked expression which surprised Han Daiyu.

"What? What is it?" she asked.

Liang Qiu ignored Han Daiyu and turned to Alex to ask," Alchemist Yu, you have spiritual sense?"

"Ah, yes," Alex said nonchalantly as if he hadn't debated about showing it for a while now. "It's something I acquired a few years ago."

"Wow, you must have been really lucky then," Liang Qiu said.

"Yes, I was lucky," Alex said. "But I wouldn't call it really lucky."

"No way, you are very lucky. Look at Daiyu, she's from a big family and even she doesn't have her spiritual sense unlocked yet," Liang Qiu said.

"Uh, I guess I'm really lucky then," Alex said. "Let's go find this tree now."

Alex didn't let them ask any more questions that would lead him to talk about how he got the lily and instead started looking for the tree.

He kept his spiritual sense at 50 meters at most and did not go further than that. Liang Qiu might not find any problems if he did, but the two Saints up above would definitely notice it.

He didn't want to be questioned right now.

Suddenly, a sword appeared in his hand at the same time a spear appeared in Liang Qiu's.

Han Daiyu looked at the both of them and belatedly took out a hammer on her own.

Alex sensed the beast and found out it was a True Lord 6th realm beast. The exact same cultivation as his body.

Liang Qiu was about to attack when Alex put his hand out to stop her. "Please, let me handle this," he said as a circular shield appeared from his storage bag and started hovering around him.

"Are you sure? Your cultivation is a little…" Liang Qiu said.

"It's fine. You can help me if it looks like I won't win," Alex said and slowly walked forward.

Not even 10 meters away from him was a black salamander with yellow patches of skin all over it.

It was nearly as tall as him and almost 3 meters long without even counting its tail which was another 3 meters long.

It brought out its deep purple, forked tongue and stared at Alex with its slitted, yellow eyes.

Alex knew it had seen him as an enemy after that.

Without hesitation, he dashed forward as the best shot out its tongue at incredible speed.

Alex could dodge out of the way, but he didn't feel like it. Suddenly, the shield appeared in front of him and with a 'DENG' sound, it blocked the attack.

Alex tried to slash at the forked tongue, but the salamander was too quick at retracting it.

When Alex got close, the beast immediately scampered backward and suddenly a wave of the swamp water came toward him like an ocean wave.

Alex sent out a wind slash and cleared the water from hitting him. At the same time, he saw yellow energy light up from deep beneath him as chunks of wet rock started flying in his direction.

Alex immediately employed the shield to move all around him, carefully blocking each and every piece of rock.

Every single one of those rocks felt like a full-blown attack of a True Lord 4th realm expert. With each hit, Alex felt his Qi drain, but it was so small that he could simply get it back while he was fighting.

It would only get problematic if the beast attacked him with something more—

Alex watched as the salamander spewed out purple liquid from it's mouth directly onto him. The area it covered was so wide that Alex would get caught up in it even if he tried to run away.

What he would usually do was teleport away from this location and attack the salamander. But that didn't seem like an option right now.

Not with the girls and the saints watching him. If he teleported, that would be one more technique he would be questioned about and might even try to force him to take it out.

So, he decided to stick with something that was already established as him having it.

As the girls watched, Alex was devoured by the poison shot. Han Daiyu couldn't help but gasp in shock, but Liang Qiu could see everything, so she wasn't worried at all.

"He's fine," she said to Daiyu with a bit of annoyance in her voice. "Why are you afraid for him when you gave him the shield?"

"Uh… he's safe?" she asked and looked at Alex as the purple poison fell onto the swamp water and mixed together with the rest of the poison already on it.

When it was finally off, she saw a brown barrier appear around the shield that fully protected Alex from all the poison.

The moment the poison was gone, Alex put away the barrier and moved his shield to the side in preparation for what the beast's next attack was going to be, and what he was going to do next.

Chapter 695: A Few Friendly Faces

The remainder of the fight lasted quite a bit. Alex fought like he was weaker than he actually was, which to the others seemed normal given his cultivation base was only around True Lord 2nd Realm.

He didn't use Qi or Sword Qi during this fight and kept the attacks only to his physical body.

He did send out slashes from time to time to vent out his Qi that was stagnating, but most of those attacks never landed on the salamander. Intentionally of course.

Finally, after using his shield to block the attack and using his sword to make numerous cuts throughout the salamander, he managed to kill it while taking no damage himself.

"Phew!" Alex wiped the non-existed sweat from his brows and heaved a deep sigh in relief.

"Alchemist Yu, that was amazing," Liang Qiu said. "How did you learn to fight like that?"

"Oh, I learned it from the senior who I came here with last time," Alex said.

"You are quite strong for an alchemist," Han Daiyu said as she stared at the salamander.

"To think you managed to kill something that was 4 realms— what are you doing?" she asked suddenly.

Alex had turned around and started using his sword to carve open the black and yellow salamander.

"Oh, I'm just dismantling the corpse. These beasts are quite good as alchemy ingredients, you know?" he said.

"Is that so?" Liang Qiu asked. "What sort of pill can you make with these parts?"

"I don't know," Alex said simply.

"You… don't know? Then why are you taking these beast parts?" she asked.

"Because I'm going to find out what pills I can make with these," he said.

"So you are going to find out a recipe from these?" Han Daiyu asked.

"Precisely," Alex said and continued dismantling it all. Finally, once he got everything, he placed it in his storage bag and turned around.

"Let's get moving. We need to find the willow tree as soon as we can," Alex said and the three started moving.

As they went along, either more monsters popped up which they were forced to fight, or Alex found a rare ingredient which he was forced to fight something to get.

Either way, they fought a lot.

Alex got to fight most of the time, but there were times when the beast was so strong that he couldn't possibly win against it without showing off more of his skills which he didn't want to do.

So, instead, he let the girls do the fighting since they were stronger than him.

Han Daiyu's fighting style was rather simple. She hit things until it stopped moving. Her hammer, which was naturally heavy, was enough to kill most beasts with a single blow.

When she activated her physique, her strength would become so massive that she could probably lift 5 of such hammers without any problem.

Other than that, she would use her Earth techniques to use ranged attacks and then kill the beasts.

When Alex had seen her attack the door back in the demon realm, he was mistaken into thinking she could only attack at melee range, but now he realized how incredibly stupid he was being.

No one in their right mind would train one of their best to have such an obvious vulnerability. Han Daiyu had more in her arsenal than Alex originally believed her to have.

Liang Qiu on the other hand was closer to what Alex thought Han Daiyu would be.

Her mastery of the spear had reached well into Spear Qi and each one of her attacks sent out slashes of Spear Qi toward the enemy.

Unlike his own, Liang Qiu's spear Qi had developed to the point that each of her spear Qi was in the shape of a spearhead.

'I need to train my Sword Qi until it starts looking more like swords all the time,' he thought to himself.

Liang Qiu's mastery of the spear had left him breathless. The way she moved with it was like the spear was an extension of herself.

Each one of her attacks was precise and accurate, and it was never less nor more than what the enemy needed to die.

Unfortunately, Liang Qiu didn't use any of her other skills, so Alex didn't get to see the full ability of an elite from an elite sect.

Even after night fell, they continued searching for the tree, but it didn't seem like it was going to be anywhere near here.

Alex came across a few places that looked familiar, but he would have to go through a year's worth of memory to understand exactly what route he took to get here.

As such, directly finding the willow's location was truly very hard.

Other than that, Alex was also searching for something else in the poison swamp.

He had come here with 3 objectives in total. The first one was their collective objective of finding the willow tree.

The second one was his training to breakthrough in his cultivation.

Finally, the third one was to find ingredients with a high concentration of Yin in them.

He had already used up the ones he had taken from here and his body was starting to heat up once again.

It was still in the starting phase, but it was getting harder and harder to maintain. Soon, it would certainly reach a level where it would be impossible.

Alex feared that day more than he thought he should.

The next day went by the same as well. Since the land they had to tread was so big, they still hadn't found a willow tree at all.

Alex remembered seeing only one tree, so he was starting to fear that there really was just one tree.

Finding one single tree in a sea of toxic fog, poisonous plants, and venomous beasts was going to take longer than he had expected.

Plus, the girls were forced to stop from time to time to recharge the artifact that they had been using.

Every 6 or so hours, they needed to replace the spirit stones inside of it and that took about 15 minutes out of their day every day.

On the second night, Alex finally felt like he was ready. He had fought all day yesterday and today, and his body felt ready to breakthrough.

So, he told the girls and they agreed to it. Besides, they had been walking around for nearly 2 days now and wanted rest.

Alex sat beside a naked tree with the girls also cultivating on either side. They had set up a barrier formation around them, so they could safely cultivate inside of it.

With how long it had been since Alex had broken through and how ready his body was, it didn't even take him a full rotation of his Qi to simply break through to the next realm.

Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu who were next to him looked at him in shock as he had broken through the moment they sat down.

'So fast,' they thought and wanted to ask questions, but decided not to when they saw that he was still mid cultivation.

Half the night went quietly, but then around midnight, Alex heard something slam down on the ground.

It was so fast his spiritual sense didn't even see the object enter his senses. When the two objects finally did land, he realized that it was Shangguan Quan and Han Hongqi who had come down from the ship that was hovering in the sky.

Before either of the 3 of them could ask what was going on, Shangguan Quan's cold voice spoke to someone in front of them.

"Fellow Daoist, please go away from here. These children are under our protection," he shouted from beyond the barrier.

Han Hongqi brought out a hammer of his own as he slowly circulated his Qi, activating his physique.

"Don't mind my presence, fellow Daoists. I am not here to hurt your juniors," A voice came from far away.

Alex heard the voice and something about it gave him a familiar feeling.

"Then you won't mind going away, right?" Han Hongqi asked.

"I am here to speak to that junior there," the voice said and Alex finally remembered who it was.

Without hesitation, Alex stood up and walked past the barrier to bow into the darkness.

"Greetings senior," he said to the newly arrived figure.

Slowly, through the marsh slithered something purple with 6 bright slitted eyes. It was the Three-headed Hydra.

"I thought you had already left. I see you've returned, young human," the Hydra spoke to Alex's mind.

"Just for a few days, senior," Alex said "we're here to find something. Once we do we'll leave."

"Hmm," the Hydra stuck its tongue out. "Is senior here?"

"No, I'm afraid I haven't seen him in 3 years," Alex said.

"I see," the Hydra said. "Well, doesn't seem like you'll need him."

The Hydra looked towards the two Saints next to Alex who held curious looks on their faces.

"So, what do you want here?" the Hydra asked. "You're in my domain right now. If it is here, I will give it to you."

"I'm looking for a willow tree," Alex said and started explaining everything he knew about the tree from its looks, shape, and size, all the way to what its surrounding area was like and what beasts lived there.

"Hmm, that sounds like a location in that direction," one of the Hydra's heads turned to point in a certain direction.

"If you go there, you can find it," it said.

"Is that so, thank you for your assistance, senior," Alex said.

"Don't worry. Just give my greetings to senior," the Hydra said as it slithered away, leaving the confused group.

Alex looked back at the group with a happy expression. "It looks like we know where to go now."

Chapter 696: Bristled Spider

"What was that?" Han Daiyu asked with a surprised face.

"How do you know a beast, junior?" Shangguan Quan asked.

"Oh, we met the last time I was here with a senior," Alex said without hesitation.

"And you made a big enough impression for that beast to remember?" Quan asked.

"No, I'm afraid I don't have such capabilities. It was the senior I was with who made the impression," Alex said with a rueful smile. "The Hydra most likely came because he was scared that the senior was back here again."

"Oh, Who is this senior that would have such reputations?" Hongqi asked.

"I'm afraid I can't answer that," Alex said. "The senior's information is not mine to give."

"Not even a name?" Quan asked.

Alex simply shook his head.

"Fine, continue with what you were doing," Quan said and flew back to the ship in the air, leaving behind the 3 of them.

Alex turned around and gave an apologetic look. "I'm sorry your cultivation was disrupted because of me," he said.

"It's alright. Since we know where to go, we should leave now," Liang Qiu said.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! Let's go quickly. I can't wait to eat that pill," Han Daiyu excitedly urged them all to leave.

Alex nodded and the three of the left the area. Now that they knew the general area of where they had to go, Alex started going through all the different memories of anywhere he was around.

He didn't trace it all the way, but just enough to see where he went next or where he had come from.

The further they went along, the more Alex started regretting not taking the ship there. He forgot just how long it would take to walk through this swampland.

Even after daybreak, they were nowhere near the willow at all. Instead, they were forced to keep fighting the different beasts along the way.

It wasn't until halfway into the next day that Alex reached a place that looked familiar to a place he had been after arriving at the willow.

"We're close," he exclaimed and looked around as he started tracing the memories back to the willow.

"This way," he said and walked in a certain direction.

The closer he got, the more Alex started sprinting. The girls followed him for another 5 minutes, and finally, they reached the location where the willow was.

Just like Alex's description, the willow tree looked extremely normal with green trees and brown bark. But in a sea of abnormalities, the simple scenery of normal looked very unique.

Alex slowly walked closer to the tree and stopped.

Liang Qiu stopped as well when her spiritual sense noticed the same thing Alex did.

"What are those?" she asked curiously.

"It looks like a bunch of porcupines stuck toge— oh," Alex saw the beast slowly rise out from underwater and finally saw what it was.

"Oh," Liang Qiu finally saw it too. "A Bristled Spider."

A dark brown spider with hairy legs slowly climbed onto the willow while its 8 different colored eyes never left any of them.

Its back was full of green and red bristles which seemed like it would be ready to shoot out at any moment.

Alex's eyes shined when he saw that. "Ooh, can I fight it?" he asked excitedly.

"Uh… yeah, sure," Liang Qiu said.

"Yeah, let him fight. He's shown us he's able to handle such beasts," Han Daiyu said.

"Yeah, but this one is especially troublesome, you know," Liang Qiu said. "If it's true that each of those bristles contains a different type of poison, then he would be in trouble if he is hit by them."

"He had the shield," Han Daiyu said. Liang Qiu had no more reasons to keep him back and let him fight.

Alex felt the True Lord 6th realm cultivation base of the spider and got a little easier. He wasn't here to fight a difficult battle, but to test out his strength after he had broken through to the 3rd realm.

Alex brought out his shield and kept it floating around him. At the same time, he brought out the poison sword and charged the spider.

The moment rushed towards the spider, the spider suddenly sprayed poison out of the bristles.

Alex hadn't expected it to shoot liquid instead of the bristles themselves. However, given how far he was, he managed to dodge it easily and continued with his charge.

At the same time, he sent out a water splash toward the spider. Alex's water slash was a mortal grade technique so it was very poor in terms of damage. Had it not been Alex who used it, the damage the technique would have done was far lower than his own cultivation base.

With Alex's Qi, it easily reached the power of True Lord's 8th realm. However, Alex was clearly playing around as the water slash struck quite far from the spider.

"What are you doing? Finish it quickly," Han Daiyu said.

"I can't," Alex shouted. "I don't want to damage the tree."

Only after hearing him did Han Daiyu realize how stupid she was being. "Sorry, continue at your own pace," she said and looked away to hide her embarrassed face.

"I think he's hiding his powers from us," Liang Qiu spoke directly into Han Diayu's mind.

"What do you mean?" Han Daiyu asked aloud, before realizing she wasn't supposed to speak here.

"His sword skill feels like something one can only acquire after a long time of practice. You can tell he knows the sword very well and knows exactly how he can use it," she said.

Han Daiyu shook her head, not understanding the implications.

"Anyone who's mastered to this great level of the sword is bound to start showing signs of Sword Intent at the very least," She told her. "However, I can't find a hint of it on his sword."

"Then…" Han Daiyu murmured.

"He's hiding it," Liang Qiu said. "He's hiding his Sword Intent. He's stronger than he's making himself out to be."

"Which was already surprising, to begin with."

Liang Qiu suddenly brought out a talisman and asked her master, "is his cultivation base real? Are we being misled?"

"No," an answer came from Quan. "It really is True Lord 3rd realm."

"Hmm…" Liang Qiu thought to herself. 'Then is he perhaps using his Sword Intent from time to time to give himself a boost in damage?'

Liang Qiu wouldn't even begin to think that Alex had Sword Qi as that was not something one could acquire while so young while being a prodigy in alchemy.

Expecting him to have Sword Intent was already her given him high appraisal based on his age and profession.

Other than that, she also simply wouldn't imagine Alex to be a body cultivator either. Those usually never got stronger than self-tempering realm levels of strength due to how hard it was to cultivate one's body.

Alex's fight with the spider continued. He sent out weak slashes from time to time to get it off of the tree, and when it didn't, he started getting more and more aggressive and went into close-ranged combat.

He slashed at the back of the spider, but surprisingly it was too tough an exterior for him to breakthrough. At least, not while the bristles were still on the spider.

He needed to force it to throw them his way.

So, Alex started to become a greater threat to the spider than he originally led it to believe.

With just the slightest hint of Metal Qi poured into his sword Alex struck its back once again.

This time, there was a definite mark left behind on its back and even a few of the bristles were broken and leaking venoms.

Immediately, the bristles flared to life as the spider carelessly sprayed it all in Alex's direction.

Using the barrier on the shield, Alex was able to block all of the red and green bristles.

Each passing day, he was starting to like the shield more and more. After the bristles stopped firing, Alex put away the barrier and charged forward.

But as he did, he realized the spider had kept some bristles to itself, which it only threw out a moment later.

Alex hurriedly tried to bring back the barrier, but he was a step too late and one of the bristles suddenly hit his thigh.

Alex felt pain in his thigh as the poison in the bristles started affecting him instantly.

The girls saw this and tried to hurry over, but Alex stopped them. He pulled out the bristle, leaving a deep wound that bled a lot.

He started circulating his Qi as per the cultivation technique and brought out a pill to eat.

While his body got rid of the poison, he used the healing energy from the pill to fix his body.

Then, he stood back up and stared directly at the spider. There was no wasting any more time now.

The moment he confirmed that the spider had no more bristles, he ran directly onto it and started making deep gashes on its body.

The spider tried to fight back, but nothing it did could stop Alex whose body cultivation was the same as its own cultivation.

Finally, Alex severed its head from its body while its 8 wide eyes stared up.

Alex took a big sigh of relief and slumped to the ground. After a few seconds, he turned back to the girl to see their concerned faces.

"I'm fine," Alex said. "More importantly, you should start getting those barks."

Chapter 697: Return

Once the girls started tearing up the bark using metal tools, making sure to not touch it at all, Alex also joined in and tore up some barks on his own.

"Wait, where are your tools?" Han Daiyu asked.

"Oh, I can touch this," Alex said. "I ate an immunity pill earlier that stops all poison from affecting my body. Didn't you see?"

"Oh, okay," Han Daiyu said and continued.

Finally, they managed to turn the tree naked by taking out the entire outer cover from its trunk.

Alex wanted to take more than just the bark, but given how rare this tree was for them, he decided to leave it be and let it grow and spread.

While the bark may not grow back, he hoped more willows could be found here instead.

'If only I had some botany knowledge,' Alex thought to himself. That was another thing that was to be added to the list of information he needed to learn.

The ship lowered from the sky and everyone got on it to leave the poison swamp.

Alex looked back in a bit of disappointment. He wanted to train harder and more, but with so many people it was hard.

Also, he found maybe 2 Yin plants that could help him. Other than that, he would have to find yin plants and artifacts through the guild or some auctions that apparently took place every month in the Dawnspring city.

Those monthly auctions wouldn't have such important treasures, but he would still have to go so as to not miss them.

Once they all boarded the ship, Han Hongqi immediately moved to the hell out of that toxic place.

"You guys get all you needed?" Shangguan Quan asked as he turned around.

"Yes, master," Liang Qiu said.

The group silently returned back to the city and stopped in front of the Flowing Brush sect.

"Thank you for helping us find the plant, Alchemist Yu," Liang Qiu said.

"Yes, truly thank you," Han Daiyu said.

"It was no problem for me," Alex said. "So… what now? Do I get to make the pill or do you still want to go to senior Xue?"

Liang Qiu chuckled a bit. "We chose you the moment we decided to show you the recipe," Liang Qiu said.

"Oh, thank you for trusting in me," Alex said.

"I hope you won't break that trust," Han Daiyu said.

"I promise you, I won't," Alex said.

Liang Qiu brought out a small storage bag and gave it to Alex. "I hope I can get to see the pill very soon," she said.

Alex took the storage bag and looked at it once before shaking his head. "This won't do," Alex said.

"Huh? What's wrong?" she asked.

"The ingredients are too few. I will need a lot more," Alex said.

"Eh? That's 6 sets of ingredients. Isn't that enough for 2 people?" she asked.

"It would be if I were to only follow that recipe," Alex said. "But I won't. I will have to see if the recipe is good or not first, and if it isn't, I will have to recreate it."

"Recreate it? With different ingredients?" Shangguan Quan asked curiously.

"Oh no, just used the same ingredients a little differently," Alex said. "I try to find what is wrong with the recipe and try to fix those parts. In doing so, the recipe subtly changes."

"Okay, then I will send Qiu'er tomorrow to the Alchemy guild. Tell her if you require more ingredients or not then," Shangguan Quan said.

"Well, I guess Daiyu will have to go too then," Hongqi said.

"I'll be there," Han Daiyu said.

"Alright, go take some rest, for now, junior Yu. You deserve it," Han Hongqi said.

"Yes, senior," Alex said and left the boat. Just as he did, someone flew out of the sect and looked in surprise at the people in front of him.

"Senior Quan, Senior Hongqi, what are you doing here?" Sect Master Qin asked when he saw the two. He turned to Alex and back towards the two and asked, "Did little Yu cause some trouble?"

"Haha, sect master Qin, you have nothing to worry about. Junior Yu helped us with some task and now we've come to return him, that's all," Hongqi replied.

"It's good seeing you, sect master Qin," Shangguan Quan said and nodded. The girls greeted him as well and after a short talk, the boat left.

Qin Shan looked dumbfounded, same as all the other guards and guests that were outside the sect gates.

"What's happening?" he asked Alex.

Alex looked around and said, "Let's go inside first."

Once they entered the sect, Alex explained everything as best he could. When Qin Shan realized that Alex was going to make some important pills for Han Daiyu and Liang Qiu, he started breathing heavily in fear.

"You must make sure the pills are good. Pay extra attention to not mess up their ingredients. Also, make it as soon as you can. You can't keep people like that waiting," Qin Shan said.

"I understand, sect master," Alex said and went to his mother.

"Brother!" Pearl shouted and ran up to him, jumping directly into his embrace.

"Hey Pearl, did you look after mother?" he asked.

"Yes, I did," Pearl said proudly.

"You're back," Helen came up to him and suddenly took out a talisman. She threw it at him and suddenly, the air touching him and around him burned with brilliant light.

When the light disappeared, he looked confused. "What was that?" he asked.

"It's a talisman to get rid of the poison in the air. Since you came back from the poison swamp, I had to make sure you didn't bring back any poison of your own," Helen said.

"Oh, you didn't have to worry about that, mother. I can do that on my own," Alex said as he flexed Yang Qi.

"Whatever," Helen said. "So, how was the trip? You were with girls, right? Come tell me."

Alex chuckled a bit and started telling his mother about his visit to the poison swamp.

Chapter 698: Preparations

That night, Alex went back to his room and prepared to make the new pill.

He read the recipe and thought about it all for a few minutes. There were 16 ingredients exactly, of which 4 of them would be considered rare.

Of course, they weren't as rare as the willow they just found, but it was rare enough that only one or two of such ingredients would pop up in the market every day.

'I will have to gather them and use them towards the end,' he thought. For now, he simply had to make the pill.

'Maybe I won't even need to do anything,' Alex thought. 'Maybe this pill is already the best it can be.'

Since this was a pill recipe from the long past when humans and demons fought, Alex had more faith in the recipe than the new ones made by local alchemists.

So, once the cauldron was properly heated up, he started making the pill.

One by one, he put in the ingredients and followed the recipe as closely as he could on the first try without making any mistakes.

As time went along, he put one ingredient after another. The ingredients were all filled with either Earth energy or neutral energy. So, as more and more Earth energy mixed together, the final energy ended up becoming a very dense and strong Earth energy that was hovering on the verge of reaching Saint level.

Fortunately, it didn't and Alex managed to guide the energy into the pill.

What came out of the cauldron was a brown pill with a dirt-like smell. He could see spots of black too, and from that, he could easily tell how unsymmetrical the pill was.

It was better than most pills he had seen, but it still needed a rework.

Alex checked the Harmony and realized that it was 52%. It was decent, but not good enough. Even if he fixed the other problems like good quality ingredients, proper control of fire, or a high-quality cauldron, Alex was sure that the most he could do were reach 60% with it.

If he had a technique to perfectly form a pill, then maybe he could push it to 75% too. But he would never be able to reach 100% with what he had at the moment.

Alex went ahead and made 2 more of the pills, which came out better than the first one with 54%, and 56%.

Most alchemists would consider this an amazing Harmony, but Alex wanted more. He knew he could get more, so instead, he decided to go ahead and rewrite the formula.

Of course, he didn't have any ingredients at the moment, so it would have to wait for tomorrow.

In the meantime, Alex thought of something and brought out an ingredient to turn it into powder.

Once he was turned to powder, he studied it carefully, checking its shape and size before discarding it for another of the same thing.

For the entire night, Alex did the same thing with the same ingredients, changing only the speed of the ingredient's motion, the direction of the motion, and the heat of the fire, all in order to bring out the energy of the ingredient at the constant rate as a certain pill's recipe dictated.

For the whole night, Alex dwelled on just that one ingredient, and it wasn't even an ingredient for the pill he needed to make.

Once morning came around, he spent 2 hours practicing his talisman and formation skills before leaving to go see his mother.

"I might not return for a few days, mother," Alex said. "Keep Pearl with you, and tell him to train while he can."

"Where are you going?" Helen asked curiously. "Are you going somewhere with those girls?"

"No, mother. I will be at the guild for the next 3 days working on the pill I told you about. If I succeed, I can help you and myself improve our spiritual roots," Alex said.

"Alright, alright, no need to get defensive. I was just teasing you," Helen said. "Go, I'll take care of Pearl."

"No, I'm taking care of mother," Pearl interjected.

"Yes you are," Helen said as she rubbed his head.

"Bye," Alex said and left the sect to go to the guild.

When he arrived at the guild, it was still morning, so instead of doing anything else, he started buying as many ingredients as he could for the other pill.

Alex sweat a bit when he realized he had spent over 4000 True spirit stones on what most would consider a frivolous purchase. However, since he knew it was important, his heart, fortunately, felt no negative impact.

He waited a few minutes for Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu to come around, but it seemed it was really early for that. So, he took a few missions on a whim and went to complete them.

An hour later, Alex came out with 5 different pills and handed them to the staff who looked at him with a dumbfounded face when they realized he had taken this mission just an hour ago.

5 pills in an hour meant that he made exactly 1 pill every 12 minutes, and that was without wasting a single minute, which was impossible.

Secretly, the staff was starting to think more and more of Alex as an alchemist.

Alex went back outside and managed to find Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu waiting for him.

"Oh, sister Laing, sister Han, you finally came," Alex said as he walked towards him.

"Alchemist Yu! How could you make us wait for so long?" Han Daiyu complained.

"My apologies. I waited for a while, but you never came so I went to complete a few missions for the guild," Alex said.

"Whatever," Han Daiyu shook her hands to tell him to get over it. Then her face made the most excited smile as she asked, "Did you make it? Is it done?"

Alex shook his head. "I'm afraid I was correct," he said. "I will need at least 2 if not 3 weeks to change the recipe around. Otherwise, even if you were to take the recipe to senior Xue, you will never end up with pills above 60%."

"You tried it already then?" Liang Qiu asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I reached 54% and 56%. If you want those pills then I will hand them to you right now, but I suggest you wait for the next 3 weeks so I can improve the pill."

"Are you sure you can improve it?" Han Daiyu asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I'm confident I can. All you will have to do is wait 3 weeks."

"Alright, if you can really improve it, do it," Liang Qiu said. "I've already waited 2 years for this. I can way 20 more days."

"Thank you," Alex said. "So… uh… about the ingredients"

"How many do you need?" Liang Qiu asked.

"At least 50 each," Alex said with an embarrassed smile.

"50 each? Are you serious?" Liang Qiu asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "With that, I can increase the pill's Harmony by at least 10% if not more."

"That's tempting really," Liang Qiu said. "Alright, let me go do it right now."

Liang Qiu stood to go to the reception to buy the ingredients but stopped.

"Should I make a mission while I'm at it?" she asked.

Alex shook his head. "No need, this pill won't be under the guild's name. I assume you would want to keep it that way," Alex said.

"Yes," Liang Qiu said. "Then I will just buy the ingredients for now."

"You may not be able to find a lot of the rare ones, so leave that part to me," Alex said.

Liang Qiu nodded and went to buy.

"I was looking forward to that pill you know? Can't I just eat this one right now and take a better one later?" Han Daiyu asked.

"I don't know how helpful that would be, sister Daiyu," Alex said. "If this pill improves your roots, it won't be as much as the other pill I will make."

"So, if you were to eat this, improve your root, and eat the next pill, I'm afraid that your roots will not respond to the pill like they would have when they were weak," Alex said.

"It's like—"

"I understand," Han Daiyu said. "I was just saying what was on my mind. I can wait too."

Alex smiled back at her. "I promise you, sister Han. I will make the best pill you've ever seen," Alex said.

"Is that so? I come from a big family you know. I've seen great pills. I've even eaten Saint rank pills," she said.

"I promise you won't have seen pills like what I will make," Alex said. "Ahem, barring saint rank pills of course."

Liang Qiu returned with a bag full of ingredients and handed it to Alex. "I couldn't get some ingredients, so you will have to get them on our behalf. There are some spirit stones in that storage bag, you can use them however necessary."

"I only ask that you make our pill with it," Liang Qiu said.

Alex looked through the storage bag and saw every single ingredient. Just as he asked, there were 50 each of about 12 ingredients.

Of the last 4, there were between 2 to 10 of them. 'How much do I have to buy them?' Alex thought and looked through the spirit stones when he stopped.

"Um… isn't 10 thousand spirit stones a bit too much? I'm not sure I'll need more than 3 thousand," Alex said.

Liang Qiu smiled. "Use however many as you want. I just want the pill," she said.

Alex smiled. "Very well then," he said. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I seem to have a new task come upon me."

Alex waved the two goodbye and went back to the alchemy room to make this new pill.

Chapter 699: Spring Mist Pavilion

A week into the process, Alex decided not to rush through the whole thing and get himself burnt out.

So, after going through 10 of the ingredients. He decided to take the rest of the 2 weeks going through 1 ingredient each.

The process was as simple as it could get by now since he had done it over 20 times already.

Alex would first go through each ingredient and find out the shape of each and every iteration.

Then, once he knew in detail all the shapes of the powder, he would try to combine the different shapes in such a way that it would fit perfectly without any gap in the pill.

The combination was what held the energy once it was finalized. One such combination needed to be duplicable for the rest of the pill as well.

The less gap there was, the better the pill would store energy. So, the shape of the overall combination also needed to be able to come together to make as little gap as possible.

Alex didn't worry about the overall combination, but rather the individual ones which he would have to do manually until he figured out a way to understand the perfect technique he had in his mind.

For that, however, Alex needed to learn the Dao of Technique, which didn't seem like it was going to happen anytime soon.

So, Alex decided to do what he should have done a long time ago. He decided to go buy a Pill forming technique.

After asking a few of the staff, he came to know about a large store owned by a merchant that hosted any and all sorts of techniques.

They let him know that alchemists have also bought pill-forming techniques from there.

Alex remembered pill-forming techniques back in the library of the Hong Wu sect, but those were either Common or Earth rank techniques, something that would never enter his eyes.

Not even his master made him study those as she knew that wasn't necessary. Especially since he had a spiritual sense from the start, so there was no need to use a technique to form a pill.

Most of those techniques were simply meant to find every little bit of the powder and clump it into a ball anyway. The only difference between most would be how they found every little bit.

Alex made his way through the city towards the northwestern side which was where most people entered the city.

So, for the sake of convenience, this area was also the commercial sector of the city while the ones closer to the mountains were treated as the residential area, even though there already was one outside of the walls.

After 20 or so minutes, Alex reached the building that the staff told him about.

The Spring Mist Pavilion.

Alex looked at the tall, pagoda-like building that was equally as wide as it was tall.

It was like a supermarket to his eyes where anything and everything was sold.

Alex went in and looked around only to realize that the ground floor was for common folks that did not cultivate. It consisted of stores that sold food, drinks, clothes, furniture, and every other thing a regular person might require.

Then, Alex noticed a stairway that went to the next floor. After going atop it, Alex finally noticed a slew of cultivators all doing their own things.

The floor seemed to be divided into 6 or so different sections each with massive names hung atop each.

Artifacts and Weapons as well as Cultivation books and techniques took up nearly half the entire area. The rest of it was occupied by Pills, Formations, Talisman, and Miscellaneous.

The very first room he was greeted by was pills to his left and talismans to his right.

Alex chuckled as he realized this was not a random placement and was placed here since most people would regularly come here for these items after all.

Only rarely did anyone want to buy techniques or artifacts when compared to pills and talismans.

Alex curiously walked over to the right where the Miscellaneous store was past the Talisman store and saw that it was full of beasts, paintings, puppets, and various types of treasures that one wouldn't normally find in any of the other sections.

Alex walked past it and the artifacts section to reach the skill section that was on the complete opposite side of the stairs.

As he was walking past the artifacts, Alex saw various items and objects that piqued his interest and he stopped to check.

Swords, spears, shields, armors, amulets, masks, shoes, and various other things were laid in plain sight for everyone to see.

Alex thought of sensing what formations they were possibly using to keep it all safe while so easy to reach and steal, but decided not to.

When he was about to leave, his eyes fell on something that made him stop touch subconsciously touch his left arm.

'Should I get one?' he thought to himself when he saw the fake arm.

Alex was starting to doubt another Blood Spirit Ginseng would become available for him to purchase. The last time one was available to buy, it lasted nearly 4 whole years before someone bought it.

Given such a lack of necessity for the ingredient, it was likely no one would bother selling it. Even if they did, for the sake of speed, they would sell it in auctions.

As a normal person, he couldn't be in every auction in every place at the same time.

Aside from the pill, even the royal princess was losing his trust more and more to fix his arm.

Alex shook his head and got rid of the thoughts. "If I want one, I will get one later," he thought and went to the skill section of the store.

Alex was about to ask for a technique when he noticed something weird. He looked at the various figures standing around the section as well as the people working on it and realized that none of them were in the True realms.

'A coincidence?' he thought.

"Hi, do you have Heaven-grade techniques here?" Alex asked. Immediately, all the people turned to look at him like they had just seen a clown.

"No, dear guest. This floor is only for Common grade techniques. If you want better techniques you will have to go a rank higher," the store clerk said.

Alex said his thanks and left the place to go up a floor again. Once he reached there, he quickly asked to find out that this one was for everything Earth grade only.

Alex had to go one floor above again. Finally, reaching the 4th floor of the pagoda, Alex looked around.

As a pagoda, the pavilion's width got smaller and smaller as it went higher. So, by the time he was on the 4th floor, the total area of the stores had dropped to a third of its original size.

Alex didn't bother with the other 5 and directly went to the room with the books and techniques.

The floor got more majestic and well maintained the higher it went. On this floor, the entire floor was tiled with pristine white marble that Alex could see his reflections on.

The store was also not a mess with customers as there was more staff here than people coming to buy.

The moment Alex arrived a girl walked up to him.

"Whatever you need, honored guest, this He Yin is here to help you," the beautiful store clerk said to him.

"Hi sister Yin, I'm looking for a pill forming technique. Would you guys happen to have one?" Alex asked.

"Pill forming technique? Let me check," the girl said as she brought out a medallion and looked through it.

After a while, she opened her eyes and looked at Alex. "We have 3, honored guests. Let me get them for you," she said.

Alex nodded and watched her go. He found a sofa in the corner and sat there to wait. There were also other people already on it who too seemed to be waiting for their staff to return.

After 5 minutes, He Yin returned with 3 different books in her hand, all of which were sealed with a talisman on top.

Without breaking through the talisman, one couldn't read the book. If it was torn, they would know.

Fortunately, it allowed the buyer to read the technique's name and what it was about.

[Sublime Pill Convergence Technique]

[Earth Aligned technique that creates a small pocket of gravity to move the powder throughout the cauldron, while absorbing all the energy. Once done, it pulls all the powder in the cauldron to immediately form a pill. This technique is usable after you have properly mixed the energy.]

Alex shook his head. This wasn't it.

[Golden Star Pill Forming technique]

[Metal Aligned technique that puts extra metal energy onto the pill and then pulls it into one solid pill before destroying the metal energy. In the process, it also absorbs all the energy in the cauldron. Suitable for after the energy of the ingredients is processed.]

Alex sighed and took the third one, this was his only hope now.

[Summer Breeze Pill Forming technique]

[Wood Aligned technique that used the wind to pull ingredients…]

Alex didn't even bother finishing it when he realized it was the same thing. None of these techniques creators gave a hint of knowing what Combinations and Structures were for a pill.

"Are there any more?" Alex asked.

"I'm afraid this is it, honored guest," He Yin said.

"I see. Thank you," Alex said and turned left. This trip had been a massive waste of time.

He walked over to the stairs to go down when he noticed something he had been too focused to notice before.

There was another staircase that led to a floor above.

Chapter 700: Up the Stairs

Alex saw the stairway to the floor above and couldn't help but wonder if they sold Immortal rank items there.

Immortal rank… Alex hadn't seen anything other than skill books that had such a high rank before.

He had seen high grades for sure, but not high ranks.

Even he had made Immortal grade pills before. Making immortal rank pills, however, was just a dream.

Alex walked up the stairs and just before he reached the next floor, he was stopped by some staff.

"Sorry, fellow Daoist. You cannot go higher than this," the person said.

"I can't?" Alex felt disappointed. He had been expecting a bit too much. "I'm sorry, I thought there was more store up above."

"There is, but not for you," the staff said.

Alex was about to return when he stopped. "Pardon? Do you mean that I'm not allowed up there?" he asked.

"I mean no disrespect, Fellow Daoist, but only someone with a certain level of achievement or reputation can be allowed up there. Or, if you have some strong backing, we can take you on the merit of your backing's strength as well," the staff said.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "I'm a guest Elder at Flowing Brush sect. Does that count?"

"If you can bring back a letter of recommendation by Sect Master Qin, then we can let you enter," the man said.

"Good," Alex said, but he didn't leave. He wasn't going to waste time going back to the sect and coming back. He wanted to enter right now.

"What about Alchemy guild? Does it count as my backing?" Alex asked curiously.

"To a certain extent, yes," the man said. "But this time you will have to bring a high-ranking figure of the guild along with you."

"What counts as high ranking?" Alex asked. "Does this count?"

Alex brought out his True Heaven badge and showed it to the man. The man took a moment to see what it was, and when he did, his eyes went wide.

However, being a professional, he kept the look for maybe a second before removing it. Then, he put on a smile as he said, "Honored Guest, you should have begun with that."

Afterward, the man stepped to the side and left Alex to enter.

Alex entered the top of the stairs and looked around confusedly. There were no shops here at all. Then why did the staff say there was a store here? Alex couldn't make sense of anything.

He noticed a seating area next to a wall with a single person sitting on it. Aside from that, there was another staff guarding the door that lead to a room.

'Is that the store? A room?' Alex thought and walked up to the seating area to sit down.

He decided to wait and see what was going on for a few minutes, so he relaxed in the seating area next to the woman who didn't look like she wanted to speak at all.

After a few minutes, someone wearing Han family robes left the room and the staff by the door softly told the woman to enter.

Alex continued waiting, looking around at the mostly wooden pagoda, and started searching for a staircase.

'Seems like this is the final floor,' he thought. After waiting for maybe 5 or so minutes, the woman finally left the room.

"Honored guest, you may enter," the staff said to him. Alex nodded and entered through the door.

The interior of the room was small and cozy. There was an open window directly opposite the door. In the center of the room was a table surrounded on each side by two sofas, each of which was wide enough for 3 people to sit side to side.

The left sofa was empty, while the right one held an elderly woman with a wrinkled face and white hair.

She had a gentle smile on her face and a terrifying aura of a Saint realm expert.

Her white and blue robes were perfect with no creases at all.

"Ah, a young man. Please come and sit," she said.

Alex nodded with a smile and walked up to sit opposite her.

"May I know your name…" the woman's eyes drifted to his missing left hand and a curious look appeared on her face. "You wouldn't happen to be Yu Ming, would you? The guest elder of Flowing Brush sect, and a True Heaven Alchemist, Formation Master, and Talisman Expert."

"You know about me?" Alex asked with an unhidden tone of shock.

"It's my job to know about any and all potential customers," the woman said. "You happen to be one of the ones that are high in priority in this city."

"You flatter me a lot, senior," Alex said.

"I don't think you flatter yourself enough," the woman said. "It's not easy to do all of these things when you're not even 25."

Alex was genuinely shocked now. "You know my age too?" he asked with a serious face.

"And about your relationship with True Immortal talisman expert Hei Lin, amongst many other things," the old woman said and looked at the shocked Alex with a smile. "As I said, I need to remain informed about any potential customers."

"It seems like you went a bit overboard with that concept," Alex said.

"Don't worry, young man. Our customer's privacy is very important to us. The information we have, we won't give it to anyone," the woman said.

"You see, someone said the exact same thing to me once. A month later, I had a murder-hungry bastard kidnap me and nearly kill me in the middle of a forest. So, all your talk about privacy and protection doesn't mean shit to me," Alex said and looked at her.

The woman gave a surprised look. "I can promise our stor—"

"How did you find that information?" Alex asked, not giving her the chance to speak.

"Any information is available to buy at certain places," the woman said.

'An intelligence agency huh? Qin Shan did speak to be about those once,' he thought.

"Anyway, let's forget about all this," Alex said. "I came here because I wanted to buy something, but I don't see a store. Was I misled?"

"No you were not, honored guest," the old woman said. "I am the store."

The old woman brought out a few storage bags from her robes and placed them in front of Alex.

With just a simple look, Alex could tell that these were high-grade storage bags, capable of holding at least 10 cubic meters of space.

Some of these may even hold as much as his own storage ring, at least how much of it was available right now.

The old woman brought out two cups and started pouring some steaming, light green liquid into the cups.

"Please have some tea. It's made with the best ingredients our chefs could find," the woman said.

"Thank you," Alex said and drank the tea. As soon as the tea entered his throat, Alex could tell how amazing it was.

Within seconds, he felt like his mind was clear and awake. All the anger and annoyance he had been feeling was gone within moments and he was left with a fresh mind.

"My apologies, I forgot to ask you your name earlier," Alex said.

"It's alright. I am Ga Xueyuan," the old woman said.

"It's good to meet you, senior Ga," Alex said. "So, let's get to business please."

"Yes, what is it that you want to buy from me today?" the woman asked as she brought out some items from her bag.

"A Saint rank sword? Some talisman designs, Pill recipes, formation blueprint, maybe a prosthetic arm? What is it?" Ga Xueyuan asked as she brought forward all the different items.

The moment the items fell into Alex's eyes, they started shining with the bright light of wanting them.

"How do you have Saint rank items here? I thought that was for the floor below," Alex said.

"No, only Common and True rank items are found below. Saint experts don't like wasting time with normal store clerks you see, so I deal with them," The woman said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, you have some amazing items, but that is not what I am here for."

"I am actually looking for a recipe to form pills," Alex said.

"Pill forming recipes? I would have guessed you to already had one given your ability to create Heaven grade pills," the old woman said.

Alex shook his head. "It's a low-tier technique and is unusable now," he said. "So I was hoping you had one, hopefully, an immortal rank too."

The woman looked at him for a moment and at the different items below. Once she became sure that he wasn't buying any of them, she reluctantly reached into one of her bags and pulled out a book.

Once out, she handed the book to Alex. Alex took it and was confused.

"Why is this not sealed?" he asked.

"There's no need to," the woman said. "You will find that Immortal grade skills of any kind are quite hard to remember, let alone learn."

"I see, so you are confident I will neither be able to learn it in the period of time it's in my hand," Alex said.

"That's exactly it," the old woman said.

Alex shook his head and looked down to check the book he had gotten. The outer cover looked quite good, almost pristine.

The yellow color seemed to be a choice rather than the book being old too. Then Alex turned the page and looked at the title of the technique.

[Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations]

Chapter 701: Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations

"Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations, huh? Quite a big name it's got here," Alex said as he read the front of the book with a serious look.

Even without reading very much into it, he could tell that this was it. Still, he continued reading for a little longer until he finished the introduction.

Then, he put the book down and started thinking a bit as he drank the tea. After a minute, he looked at the old woman.

"How much for this?" he asked.

"Only 6 Saint Spirit stones," the woman said.

Alex frowned when he heard that. "6000 True Spirit stones for this?" he asked suspiciously.

"It's not just any book, you know? It's an immortal grade skill book," she said confidently.

Alex frowned a little. He was too used to getting Immortal grade books for free. Having to pay for one just didn't sit right with him.

Also, because of that, he was unaware of how much techniques even cost in the first place.

In fact, if he thought about it, books of Immortal rank should have their cost in Saint spirit stones, not True spirit stones. This was way too cheap when he gave it more than a second's thought.

But, given the lack of resources for the Western continent, maybe this was the appropriate price.

"Fine, 6000 it is," Alex said and brought out a storage bag. Before he brought out the 6000 spirit stones from it, he stopped for a moment and looked at the table.

"Can you tell me more about this?" he asked the woman while pointing at the prosthetic arm. "I assume you put it here because of my condition."

The old woman smiled. "Sure, let me explain it to you," she said and picked up the wooden arm.

"This artifact was created by Yuan Yening, an excellent artificer that works exclusively for our Spiring Mist Pavilion. As you can see, it is modeled after a real human arm, and can change its shape or size depending on your wish, although it will take some time so that won't be useful in a fight," the old woman said.

"What will be useful is the fact that it is made up of materials that are perfectly capable of conducting Qi without any resistance. And it works with each and every type of Qi, aside from the ones that aren't natural of course," the woman said. "But I suppose you won't be using Blood Qi or some such."

"What grade is this?" Alex asked.

"Saint Earth grade," the woman said.

"Then it must cost a lot," Alex asked.

"Is another 8000 True Spirit stones a lot to you?" the woman asked.

Alex smiled and handed her the 6000 spirit stones. "It seems I am capable of only buying the book for now," he said.

"You can come for the arm any other time you like. I doubt anyone will require it very soon," the old woman said.

Alex nodded and left after taking the book.

The woman sat for a while doing nothing as she knew there was no one waiting outside the door. She looked at the items in front of her and then at the teacup that Alex had drank from.

It was empty. A curious look appeared on her face as she brought out a talisman that contained Alex's information. There, she added a single piece of information.

"Has incredible mental strength and won't succumb to normal mental influence."

* * * * *

It had been 7 days since Alex had returned home, so he decided to go home for today and learn the technique in private.

Pearl and his mother welcomed him back and they talked for a while. Alex told her exactly what was going on in the guild as well as his trip to the Spring Mist Pavilion.

"Oh, you need some money? Master gave me some a few days ago. He said it was your money," she said and brought out some spirit stones that Qin Shan had handed to her for the many pills Alex had made for him before going to the poison swamp.

"It's fine. You can keep it for now," Alex said. "I'll go learn this new technique now," Alex said and left the room.

Back in his house, Alex brought out the book and started learning it.

As he started reading, he understood what it mean. He flipped through the pages as he finished reading it all in under 10 minutes and in no more than 5 more minutes comprehended it all.

Now, he just needed to practice it on some things. So, he brought out his cauldron and a few ingredients to test it out.

To begin with, he decided to make common rank pills as his priority was to get used to the technique first.

When the cauldron heated up, one by one, Alex put in the different ingredients.

Although he was testing out the technique, Alex wasn't making some random pill, however. It was one of the pills that he had changed the recipe to before he knew how it could be done.

After getting to the True realms, the Alchemy God's Knowledge skill had allowed him to have a knack for finding flaws in a recipe for common pills simply based on instincts.

He didn't need that now with how he had learned to fix the recipe on his own, but this one was much faster than the other one and required far less use of ingredients.

Alex could fix the recipe in a day and it would be nearly as good as what he could do in 2 weeks.

However, the only reason he didn't use it any longer was that it could only be used for Common pills. Also, it wouldn't be as perfect as the manual one.

Once the energy and the powder were ready to combine, Alex used the technique. As he circulated the technique, neutral Qi escaped from him and lingered in the air, waiting.

Alex nodded to himself as he knew this would happen. He then reached into the cauldron with his spiritual sense and started finding the different shapes of the powder, and used the technique to put them together.

Once he did, the technique then automatically followed what he did to as many things as possible. His Qi would go through the cauldron find the many different powders and try to make the same shape as he did.

Once the powders were combined to form as many individual combinations as possible, Alex used Elemental Guidance to move the energy in the cauldron into it.

Then, once everything was done, all Alex had to do was use the other technique in the book to form a sphere with the pre-combined powders.

That was perhaps the easiest part of the whole task. The powders underwent a revolution around the cauldron as they came together to form a single pill out of the many combined powders.

With a wave of his hand, Alex brought out the ready pill and stared at it.

"65%?" he thought as he looked at it. "Did I mess up that much? I must've left it in the cauldron for too long while I made that first combination then," he thought.

This being the first time he was using the technique, he didn't expect it to become an Immortal grade pill.

Still, he expected it to come close to it. This was far from that.

"Guess I will have to train in it a bit longer then," Alex thought and started making more of the same pills as well as the other pills.

The more he used the technique, the more familiar got with its who aspect. It didn't take him long to realize that there were ways to make the process easier on himself.

Alex made 3 types of pills in his process to train and experiment with this technique.

The first type was pills whose recipes were unaltered.

The second type was pills whose recipes he had altered but didn't know the shapes of the powder.

Last were the pills whose recipes he had altered and also knew the shapes of the pill as well as the combinations.

After experimenting with these different pills, he had come to learn quite a lot about his new technique.

First of all, it was imperative that he knew the shapes of the powder. It didn't matter how good the recipe was if he couldn't turn it into a pill fast enough and instead let the powder burn away.

Second of all, while the technique was incredible, far better than simply randomly making the powders into a pill. It couldn't hold a candle to the pill formation technique in his Pill-splitting technique, which was capable of forming the most efficient pill on its own.

Lastly was perhaps the biggest problem with this technique. It used all the powder in the cauldron. On the surface, that looked like it was working perfectly, but most of the time, you didn't want to use all the powders.

If there were excess powder in a pill that didn't have other powders to combine with, you ran the risk of creating asymmetry, which would reduce the effectiveness of the pill even if it held all the energy it could, to begin with.

So, if Alex wanted to make the perfect pill, he needed to make sure he had the perfect amount of ingredients from the start. For that, he would have to get rid of even the tiniest bit of extra material from the ingredients before they went into the pot.

Once he did that, the result Alex received were much better than earlier.

In fact, with pills of the third type, he was starting to touch on the Immortal grade.

Chapter 702: Negligence

1 week later.

Alex sat in an alchemy room in the guild and focused as well as he could while making the pill.

For the pill that improved one's Earth spiritual roots, Alex still had 4 more ingredients to gather. So, in the last week, he only had two ingredients to work with, which he did easily in a single day.

The rest of the week, he had worked on the other ingredients for the other pill he was making.

He had finished it finally last night and had spent the rest of the night thinking of the perfect combination for it.

Now, it was time to make that pill.

Remembering the combination, Alex sent his spiritual sense into the cauldron and started using his new technique to combine the individual particles.

Once his Qi knew what to do, it started working on its own. Soon, his cauldron was full of the combined powder and all that was left was putting the energy into the powder.

This was the part Alex had to be very careful with. The resulting element of this pill was very, very volatile and could explode on his face if he wasn't careful.

The balance between the elements could be disturbed by the slightest fluctuation, so he very slowly started to push the energy into the powder.

Alex found this to be one of the most frustrating pills to make all because of the volatility of the pill.

After what felt like a very long time, Alex finally managed to put all the energy into the powder without making it explode.

Then, all that was left was to use the final technique and form the pill.

Alex opened the lid and pulled out the pill from inside. However, he didn't look at the pill's quality at all. The very first thing he checked was how it worked.

He closed his eyes and used his senses to surround the pill and feel the subtle changes in the air around it.

Even as he held it, the pill was reacting to the slight yang aura that was coming out of it and making it disappear.

The fire Qi from the furnace was also slowly mixing with the constantly escaping energy of the pill and disappearing.

Alex took the pill and walked out into the hallway. The guild staff walked by, but no one bothered him at all.

Alex sensed the Qi in the surrounding suddenly change from only Fire and Yang to any and all. One by one, as they gathered around the pill, they would also disappear from it.

Alex smiled when he sensed that. "It's working," he thought and walked out to the front hall to sense the pill some more.

People watched curiously as he walked out, but Alex didn't give them any thought. His attention was only on the pill and being in a new environment to check the pill's reaction to the environment.

Slowly, the reactions started to get weaker and weaker. Alex was now watching how long it would last.

"Alchemist Yu," someone spoke from the corner of the hall, but Alex didn't hear it.

"ALCHEMIST YU!" another person shouted, jolting Alex awake. He turned around and saw Han Daiyu with her hands next to her mouth as she was ready to shout again.

Next to her was Liang Qiu. Both of them looked ever so elegant, only that Han Daiyu also had a hint of barbaric tendencies.

"Sister Han, Sister Liang, what are you two doing here? Do you need a pill?" Alex asked as he walked over.

"No, we're here to talk to you about the progress on the pill," Liang Qiu asked.

"Oh, it's going alright. I'm just waiting for the last 4 ingredients. I have about 40 each, but I should be able to start today or tomorrow for it," Alex said.

"Oh, and what's this pill?" she asked, looking at the white pill in his hand.

"Oh, it's something I made just now. It's an important pill," Alex said, not explaining much.

"Should you keep a pill out in the open like that? Won't the customer get angry at you?" she asked.

Alex's attention slowly went back to his pill to see if the energy in it was gone or not. "It's not for the customer. I made it for myself," he said.

"Then why not eat it?" she asked.

"This is the first time I made it. It took over a week to get here, so I want to see how the pill works outside," he said in an absentminded tone.

"What? You've been working on this pill for over a week? What about ours?" she asked.

"I'm working on that. Still need that 4 ingredients," he said.

"How long has it been since you worked on it?" Han Daiyu asked.

"Almost a week," Alex said without thinking much as all of his attention was on the very faint aura of the pill that was close to disappearing.

"WHAT?!" Liang Qiu shouted, garnering looks from everyone in the hall. "You haven't worked on our pills for a week? Alchemist Yu, we trusted you to make our pills," she said.

Alex's attention nearly wavered, but he kept it on the pill. "I know, but this pill is important as well," he said as he finally saw the last little aura of the pill dissipate away.

"How is your pill more important than ours?" Liang Qiu got mad. "We gave you a job, that means you do our work. Alchemist Yu, please don't neglect our work, or we will be forced to go elsewhere with the work."

Alex clutched his pill and finally looked up at the fuming face of Liang Qiu. "Sister Liang, I can assure you, I have not neglected your pill for a single moment," he said.

"Oh yeah? Then what is this pill?" she said, pointing to his palm.

"As I said, this is important," Alex said.

"Doesn't matter if it is important," Liang Qiu said. "Only thing that matters is you neglected our pill for the sake of making yours."

Alex's face frowned a little as she finally got on his nerve.

So, he reached into his storage bag and brought out a pill bottle with a single pill inside of it.

He handed the pill over to Liang Qiu and waited.

The fuming Liang Qiu looked confused now. "What is this?" she asked.

"An almost Immortal grade True pill. That's for you to eat," Alex said.

Liang Qiu opened up the stopper and looked inside. "What does it do?" she asked.

"I don't know. Can be a good pill or a bad one. Can be a healing pill or a poison pill. Can make you the most beautiful woman in the whole world, or can turn you into a man," Alex said. "Eat it and find out."

Liang Qiu hesitated, as anyone would. "I'm not eating this," she said.

"Why not?" Alex asked.

"Because I don't know what this does," she said.

"Ah, I see. Well let me make something up then," Alex said as he gave a thinking expression. "Yes, this pill helps improve your Wood Spiritual root."

Liang Qiu frowned. "Are you mocking me, Alchemist Yu?" she asked.

"No. Do you not trust me?" Alex asked.

"Of course not," she said.

Alex took one step forward. "Then why do you trust the words of a demon that lived thousands of years ago, and wanted nothing but to destroy humans? Why do you trust the words of someone that doesn't even know how pills work?" he asked.

"That… I…" Liang Qiu couldn't speak. "Are you saying the recipe is false?"

"No," Alex said. "I'm saying there's a possibility it is false. The pill does seem to do what it says it does, but if there's the slightest chance it does something else, I cannot let you or anyone else take it."

"So? What are we supposed to do? Find a scapegoat for us and feed it?" Liang Qiu asked.

"Yes," Alex said with a smile. "Except I'm not a horrible person to test a random pill on another human being."

"Then?" she asked.

"Then I am going to test it on myself," Alex said.

"What?" Han Daiyu finally spoke from the side. She had been watching Liang Qiu get angry and had let her handle it, but this tangent of the conversation made her speak up.

"You will test on yourself? Didn't you just say it was dangerous?" she asked.

"Yes, it is," Alex said. "But I have a way to make it less dangerous."

"How?" Liang Qiu asked.

"This," Alex finally opened his closed fist and showed the white pill to her again.

"What is this?" she asked.

"True Nullifying Pill. If taken immediately after eating a pill, it can revert the effects of the pill."

"Only caveat is that you must eat this pill within the first five minutes of making this. I made this nearly 7 minutes ago, so this pill is a dud now. But, I will make a better one later," he said to her.

Liang Qiu looked at him with a shocked expression. "You are going that far for the job?" she asked.

"Sister Liang, I told you from the very beginning, that the only thing holding me up is the lack of ingredients. As soon as I get them, I will make your pill."

"And for the sake of making sure the pill is in fact safe, I also worked on the True Nullifying pill," he said.

Then he looked Liang Qiu straight in the eye with a confident look in his own.

"As I said, I have not neglected your pill even once. Everything I did for the past 2 weeks, and everything I do for the next week, all of it is going to be for your pill."

Chapter 703: Heat

Once the girls apologized and left, Alex went to the reception to see if he could buy the ingredients.

Fortunately for him, there were more ingredients available for one of 4 remaining ingredients. Immediately, he bought those and waited for them to get transferred to the guild later on.

It took him exactly 3 days to gather everything he needed and two more to finish working on them.

For the next 3 days, He did nothing but study the different shapes of the powder he could produce.

Finally, after exactly 20 days, Alex had done it all. Now, all that was left was to make the pill.

To say that he was nervous was to understate it. He was scared. This was not only a very important pill, but it was also a pill that was going to make or break his relationship with one of the greatest sects and one of the greatest families of the empire.

Also, the reputation he could gain from this was so substantial that he may even be able to find a way to make them search for the ginseng.

Alex took a deep breath and began thinking about all the ways this could go wrong.

His Yang Qi could cause trouble when making the pill. Except, he had already taken care of it using what few Yin element poisons he had managed to find in the Poison Swamp from last time.

His control of heat could be a problem. With the Flame Mastery Scripture, it was amazing. It could be better, but that would mean he would have to be perfect with it.

His cauldron could be better. The Golden Jade cauldron of his that he had been using for the last 3 or so years was a True Earth artifact. Meaning, that there were many other cauldrons that he could find and they would be much better than this.

In fact, he had enough money to go buy a Saint Earth cauldron if he wanted to. But he didn't. This one held a sentimental value that no other cauldron could replace.

Unless push came to shove, he wouldn't budge from his stance of not changing the cauldron.

The ingredients could cause problems if they were bad, but Alex had made sure to use the ones with lesser age for his experimentation and kept the ones with greater age for the pills.

That way, he could guarantee that the pill would have the best of the best ingredients to work with. Also, he was going to weigh them on a formation before using them just to make sure everything is right.

He had the best technique he could use to make those pills as perfect as he could make it, so that side was taken care of too.

Finally, the problem could be the recipe itself. Only, there was no way the recipe would be a problem. After all, having spent the entire night on the recipe alone, Alex knew that it was perfection itself.

Once he was sure there was nothing that could be improved and nothing could go wrong, he began.

Once the cauldron was heated enough, Alex put in the first ingredient. Without missing a beat, he started moving it around the cauldron as per his recipe.

Once that was ready, he changed the temperature of the cauldron in an instant and put in the second one.

Then the third one, then the fourth one, all the way to the last one.

He processed the final ingredient and turned it into powder as well.

Then came the time to turn it into a pill, so Alex started by using the Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations technique to bring out his Qi.

Once it was out and hovered around the powder, Alex started to combine the ingredients to make a single particle.

Then, his technique worked on its own to combine the rest of the powder as well. Once that was done, Alex quickly used Elemental Guidance to pour the energy into the combined particles.

Afterward, he used the technique to combine the many particles into a single pill. Alex turned down the heat the moment the pill was formed and opened the lid to bring it out.

He put it in his hands and instantly knew how good the pill was.

76%.

An Immortal grade pill.

Alex frowned.

He really wanted to be happy about it. After all, this was one of the best pills anyone in this Empire had seen until now. But for some reason, he just couldn't bring himself to think of it as good.

He had made Immortal grade pills before when practicing the technique previously, so getting one again didn't bring him the same happiness as it once would.

Having done so much preparation before this, he had expected something better to come out of this.

He sighed. "It's only the first one. No need to get hopeless," he told himself and prepared the next set of ingredients.

Once ready, Alex made the pill once more, and once more, he couldn't get the result he desired.

"How can I do better?" Alex thought to himself. "Is there any way?"

The recipe was perfect. The ingredients were the best they could be. So was his technique.

His Yang Qi was under control so that wasn't the issue at all.

If anything, the only thing he could improve on was the cauldron. But how could he? That was something his master gave him. Did he really need to change it?

"No, that's not the only thing I can improve," Alex thought as he put on a strange face.

There was indeed one more thing he could improve. But could he? Could he turn what was already nigh perfect, into something perfect?

"I have to try," Alex thought and stared into the fire. Or more accurately, Alex started looking into the temperature of the fire, and its heat.

All this time that Alex had made pills, he had been content with his control of fire. After all, what better could he have asked for?

But now, he wanted more. He needed more.

But then again, how could he get more than what he already had? How could he gain better control at Heat?

Heat… what was heat exactly?

If he remembered the science lessons his mother taught him, Heat was one of the forms of energy and one of the fundamental truths of the world.

Heat was the energy stored in a body, manifesting itself as temperature.

Heat was the energy that moved from one thing to another based on the difference in their temperature.

As Alex stared more and more into the fire, he started understanding even more.

Temperature couldn't exist without the concept of heat. Hotness was just the presence of a lot of heat. Coldness was just the lack of heat.

Alex's eyes stared at the fire, but his mind was somewhere else by now.

If he wanted a fire to lower its temperature, he had to take the heat away. If he wanted to increase its temperature, he had to put energy into it.

As Alex thought more and more about it, he soon fell into a trance.

Outside the guild, energy stirred in the air as the worldly laws started to slowly descend onto the ground.

In Heaven's peak school, Shangguan Quan was standing in front of a massive rock that was carved with a spear strike.

The wound on the rock had such an intense Spear intent to it, that Quan felt like he was going to be cut to pieces by it.

Suddenly, he was forced to look to the side as the disturbance nearby caught his attention.

Han Hongqi was the only member of the family that stayed in the ancestral home for now. Most of the other members were in the capital, enjoying their life.

He was cultivating his Earth Demon physique when he too felt a disturbance in the natural law, forcing him to stop and stare outside.

Ga Xueyuan's attention flickered away from her customer as she was forced to look outside with a confused look.

'Was there another Saint realm expert in the city?' she wondered. 'Must be quite lucky to learn a new law while breaking through.'

Then she went back to speaking with her client.

Every other saint realm expert noticed the laws descending, but not a single one of them even considered the possibility of it being someone else aside from a Saint realm expert.

As such when Alex opened his eyes, fully understanding the Dao of Heat, not a single person came to bother him for the disturbances.

Chapter 704: Finishing the Pill

Alex opened his eyes and they shined brightly with enlightenment.

He slowly moved his hands forward and the fire responded to his will. With a single thought, Qi moved out of him of its own volition, and the Qi in the air moved to the fire too.

Not even a moment late, the fire grew hotter by nearly 200 degrees. This was incredible.

Usually, no matter how fast, there was a gradual increase in temperature. With Alex, it was quite a bit fast thanks to the Flame Mastery technique and also very accurate.

However, now it was instant. The amount of time it took for the temperature to change was the same amount of time it took for the Qi in his body to leave.

For a person who had gone through Mortal Cleansing and had improved his meridians through constant training for over 2 years, releasing his Qi was everything but an instant.

Unfortunately, that didn't help him in Alchemy as much as he would have wanted it to. Having an accurately hot fire was never the problem at all.

After all, the temperature of the fire was never what mattered. It was the temperature of the cauldron rather that defined how an ingredient was going to behave.

However, the Dao of Heat didn't simply extend to fire itself. It extended to everything that existed and had heat, no matter how low.

So, when Alex tried it, he realized that even without the existence of fire itself, he could heat up the cauldron to the required temperature, and he could do it instantly.

Unfortunately, he still needed the fire. Changing temperature was one thing, but keeping it constant, however, was completely different.

The amount of focus and Qi he would require to make a pill without using fire was way too high.

So, in the end, Alex still needed the fire. Still, these two things together had already made an incredible difference for his alchemy going forward.

So, once he was done learning how to manipulate heat, he started making the pills once more.

He heated up the cauldron but that took no time at all. The moment he thought about it, the cauldron was ready for the first ingredient.

Alex put in the ingredient and started processing it. Once he was done with it, he put in the second ingredient.

Before the second ingredient even finished falling through the cauldron, both the temperature of the cauldron and the fire switched to the required amount instantly and he processed the 2nd ingredient too.

Then the third and the fourth.

After all 16 ingredients had been processed with almost no time in between them, he started forming the different combinations and soon afterward finished forming the pill.

Once the pill was ready, Alex brought it back out.

80%.

"Holy shit!" he thought to himself. This was definitely one of the best pills he had ever made.

Still, for some reason, he thought he could do better.

* * * * * *

After making about 10 more of the pills, Alex finally ran out of ingredients to make any more.

He stopped and went forward to complete the next set of steps he needed to take before passing along the pill back to the two girls.

So, he started making the True Nullifying pill.

Alex needed to be very careful with this pill as it was extremely volatile. So, he took as long as it required him to make the pill.

Right when he used the technique to form the pill, Alex took out a 75% Harmony pill from the one he made before he acquired the Dao of Heat and ate it without a second thought.

Even as the pill went down his esophagus, Alex needed to make a decision. He could either convert it into Qi or have the pill take effect.

Since he was testing the pill, he let it take effect.

Just as the pill started dissolving in his stomach, the True Nullifying pill was ready.

At the same time, Alex employed the Jade Skin technique as that was the only earth technique he could use at the moment.

Alex took the True Nullifying pill and waited a few seconds before he took it.

The moment he felt his Jade Skin technique get even the slightest bit better, he immediately at the True Nullifying pill.

Instantly, he felt hollow. As if he was a bubble that had just popped.

The energy that was in fact affecting his body was immediately destroyed and what little effect it had on his roots was also eliminated.

When it all passed away, and he started feeling normal again, he had the widest smile imaginable.

He had done it. He had not only made the pill but also made sure that it was an actual pill that improved one's Spirit roots.

It was not a harmful pill at all. He could now give it safely to the two girls that had given him the recipe.

Of course, he hadn't done the testing for those two. It did help to get on their good side, but their safety was never his concern. He could simply make them the pill and be done with it.

It was not even his own safety that made him take the True Nullifying pill's approach.

It was the thought of his mother eating this pill that made him want to test it before letting her have it.

Alex knew how great his body was. Anything his body deemed harmful, it destroyed, leaving not even a trace of it.

As such, if the pill he ate did do something bad, his body could handle it. However, his mother had no such body.

Alex had been worried from the start. What if he gave her the pill and it turned out to be a bad one? He couldn't imagine the thought of giving her some pill that he didn't know about.

That was the one and only reason he decided to test the pill.

Now that he had done it, he could happily go ahead and give it to her. So finally, after who knew how long, Alex left the alchemy room and walked out.

* * * * * * *

It was early morning when Alex returned back to his home to rest. The mental fatigue of working non-stop for a week and then comprehending a dao had left him feeling tapped out.

So, he spent the next whole day simply cultivating and resting.

The morning after that, Alex opened his eyes and brought out one of the better pills to eat and improve his spiritual root.

The moment he ate the pill, he could feel the roots getting better. He didn't know if that was some sort of placebo effect or not, but once he used the Jade Skin technique, it was perfectly clear that his Earth Spiritual root had been improved, albeit not by a lot.

At least, not when compared to the Supreme Spiritual roots that his Metal and Yang roots had become.

Once he was done, Alex left his house and went over to his mother's house to give her the same pill.

They talked for a while before Alex needed to leave. He needed to visit both the Heaven's Peak school and the Han Ancestral family home to deliver the pill.

However, just to be sure that he didn't have to do that, he went to the guild, hoping to see the two girls.

To his surprise, they were in fact there. Alex was glad he came by here first.

"Sister Liang, Sister Han, I'm glad to see the both of you," Alex said.

"Alchemist Yu, where were you? You made us wait for so long," Liang Qiu said.

"My apologies, were you waiting on me for a long time?" Alex asked.

"For you to make the pill, yes. For you to come out of the room? No," Liang Qiu said. "We got some of our junior disciples to come here and stake you out. The moment you left, they let us know and we came here first thing in the morning."

"I see, well I'm glad that you came here because you are just in time," Alex said and pulled out two pill bottles from his storage bag and handed them over.

"Your pills are ready," Alex said.

The girls opened the bottle and saw the dark brown pill. "Is it safe to eat?" Liang Qiu said.

"Yes," Alex said. "It does do what it says it does."

"I see," Liang Qiu said. "Then I hope you won't mind if I check the pill's harmony."

Alex smiled back. "Go ahead."

Chapter 705: Fighter

Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu both brought out pill testers and proceeded to put their pill into them.

Alex waited as they watched the fog around their testers start to grow. Even Alex got a little curious about it.

He wanted to know if the tester was in fact accurate around higher percentages. After all, the testers themselves were formations with not a lot of Efficiency to them.

The girls watched as the fog reached 50% and continued to grow without stopping. Of course, they knew the pill was going to be better than that, so they patiently waited.

As the fog grew past 60%, they finally showed signs of nervousness. From the pills they had seen before, around 65% to 70% was the best they could hope for.

If Alex was lucky, he would have reached 75% even. They wanted him to be lucky.

Soon, the percentage grew past 65%, and with each increase after that, they watched in fear as they half-expected the fog to stop growing.

However, it wasn't going to do that. The fog continued to grow and soon went past 70%. Still, it did not stop.

The girls were stunned beyond belief. They thought they would be able to see it now, something they had never seen before.

An Immortal grade True Pill.

Finally, when the fog hit 75%, their face was a sight to see. It was fortunate that they were in the corner of the hall, very early in the morning.

Otherwise, a lot of people would've noticed their faces and would've definitely been interested in what they were seeing.

"Alchemist Yu, you… you are an Immortal rank alchemist now?" Han Daiyu asked with a shocked face.

"No," Alex said. "You need to make more than just a single type of pill to become an Immortal alchemist I believe."

"But since you made this, you should be able to make others too right?" Liang Qiu asked.

"Of course," Alex said. "But I will hope you keep this a secret for now. I don't want people coming to me expecting an Immortal grade pill. After all, you saw how time-consuming it is to make this pill."

"If that is what you want," Liang Qiu said. "Still, I can't believe you were able to make a pill that reached 75% in ha—"

Her words stuck in her mouth as her eyes widened once more when she saw the static number on the tester.

She had assumed that the tester would stop when it reached 75%, so she had begun speaking, but who would've thought it would increase so much.

Han Daiyu too quickly stared at her own tester and then at Liang Qiu's. Both of their pills had the same Harmony.

Together, they spoke in a very serious voice.

"83%".

"How?" Liang Qiu asked.

"3 weeks, sister Liang. That's how," Alex said. "Also, I had to improve on 2 other things aside from the pill recipe itself. That was how I was able to improve the pill past Immortal grade."

"This is incredible!" she said. "I don't know how I can ever repay you for this."

Alex shook his head. "You don't have to pay me anything for those two pills. Consider it my payment for bringing such an incredible pill recipe to me," he said.

"What? But we do need to pay you," Liang Qiu said.

"Ah, I believe you misheard me," Alex said. "I don't need any payment for those two pills. Yes. But I suppose you would want to buy these pills too, right?" he asked as he brought out a storage bag.

"What's that?" Liang Qiu asked as her spiritual sense slowly entered it and saw what was inside.

"There are 12 pills in there," she said with a hint of shock in her voice. "Are those all…?"

"Yes, they are the same pill. Although they aren't as good as the one I gave you, they are still Immortal Rank," Alex said. "So… will you buy them?"

"How much?" the girls didn't even need to say yes.

"Your wish," Alex gave them the reins.

5 minutes later, Alex was about 3000 True Spirit stones richer. Each one of those 12 pills was sold to the girls for at least 200 True Spirit stones, which Alex was quite happy about.

"Thank you, Alchemist Yu," the girls said. "We would like to come to you whenever we need something again."

"Sure," Alex said with a smile. "But this time you might have to go through protocol." Alex pointed to the reception.

"Of course," the girls said.

"Oh yeah, one more thing," Alex said. "I don't doubt that you will be showing these pills to your elders and they will want to rope me in. Please tell them I am not interested."

"Nothing they can give me will interest me at all to join you guys. Sure we can have a friendly relationship, but I won't be joining at all," he said.

"I see. I will pass along the message then," the girls said. "Once again, thank you, Alchemist Yu."

After that, the girls left, leaving Alex alone with the newly acquired money.

He added that money to some he got from his mother this morning and a smile crept on his face.

"Screw this," he thought. "I'm not staying armless anymore."

* * * * * *

Alex showed off his new arm to his mother and Pearl.

"It looks quite real," Helen said as she stared at his arm.

"Why are you joking, mother? It looks nothing like a real arm," Alex said as he looked at the puppet-like arm.

"Oh, I thought you wanted to hear that," she said.

"No, I'm just showing off my new arm. This should help me for the next… what? 10 years it might take me to reach Saint realm?" he said.

"It will take you 10 years to reach Saint realm?" Helen asked and started counting in her mind.

"You have to breakthrough 24 more times to reach Saint realm. If you hurry, at 1 month per breakthrough, it will only take you 2 years," Helen said.

Alex shook his head. "That's impossible. At my current cultivation base, advancing once every month is too risky. Even once every 2 months is barely acceptable."

"It has to be close to 3 months per breakthrough, that being for my current realms. As I break through more, I will need to put in more and more distance between each breakthrough," Alex said.

"Even the best of the best disciples from the great sects, who get all the resources one can find, don't go over less than 9 different in 3 years."

"Han Daiyu broke through maybe 5 times in the last 3 years, and Liang Qiu broke through a similar amount too," Alex said. "So, I know I can't rush myself through this."

"Alright, alright," Helen said. "What are you going to do now then? Wasn't your original plan to find ingredients for your arm? Now that you seem to not want an actual arm anymore, what do you want to do?"

"That's where you're wrong, mother," Alex said. "I still want my arm, and I will take opportunities if they show themselves for me to get my arm back."

"But I can't keep waiting for it to show up. I need an arm for the times when I will need them," Alex said. "Especially because I use a sword that won't take my Qi in at all, I need an extra arm to use my techniques when I fight or use another sword side by side."

"I see," Helen said solemnly. "So you really take fighting with such high regard, huh?"

"I have to, mother," Alex said with a serious face as well. "This is not the world we lived in where the law protected the weak. No, this is the world where the strong live and the weak die."

"If I can't become strong and defeat those that come after us, I can't protect you, I can't protect myself."

"I already lost someone because I was weak before… I don't want to go through that again," Alex said.

"I see," Helen said with a sad look on her face. "It took me a while to realize, but now I do. My son that left his house to go study in the university is no more."

Alex's heart stung a bit when he heard that and a single tear dropped from the edges of his eyes. "I'm sorry, mother. I have become someone you hate."

"Nonsense!" Helen shouted. "I don't hate you. I could never hate you. What I hate is this world that forced my sweet little boy to become a fighter just to protect himself. That is what is hate."

More tears streamed down Alex's eyes as he involuntarily went to hug his mother. Helen took him with open arms.

"I'm a fighter too, and a sweet little boy," Pearl said from the side, bringing a bit of chuckle into both of the human's silent cries.

"Come," Helen called Pearl and hugged him too.

After their emotions faded away, Helen asked, "What do you want to do now then? You don't need to force yourself to learn talisman, formations, or even alchemy."

"You won't be searching for a way to get your arm back either. So what do you want to do now?" Helen asked.

"I… I think I will focus on my cultivation for now," Alex said. "I will have to train a lot for that. I might need to visit the Eastern mountains a lot."

"Why the Eastern mountains?" Helen asked. "What's wrong with fighting against normal people?"

"Where would I find normal people to figh— Wow, how did I not think of that before?" he said to himself.

Helen smiled. "I will talk to master later."

Chapter 706: Training

"This is the training hall we use for disciples to train in," Qin Shan said as he gave Alex a tour of the place where he would be training.

"Does this suit you?" he asked.

Alex looked at the wide and open room with enough space for him to maneuver around as he trained.

"Yes, this will be perfect," Alex said. "But there's another problem."

"What? What's wrong with this room?" Qin Shan asked.

"Not with the room, sect master," Alex said. "With the fighters."

"What's wrong with my fighters?" Qin Shan asked.

"I feel a little awkward fighting with people that may spread rumors of my ability," Alex said.

"Do you know a lot of techniques?" Qin Shan asked

"Not techniques… exactly," Alex said. "You'll understand when you see me fight."

"Alright, how about if I make them swear to secrecy?" Qin Shan asked.

"Will that matter? How do we make sure they keep their promise?" Alex asked.

"No, we make them make an oath to the heavens. That way if they do break it, they will suffer Qi deviation at best, and lose their soul at worst," Qin Shan said.

"What?" Alex looked a little shocked. "You can do that?"

"Did you not know?" Qin Shan asked.

"I don't think anyone in the Crimson Empire knows about this. If they do, nothing is public," he said.

"Well, if you make an oath to the heavens, it forms a seal on your spirit. If you break the oath, the seal damages your spirit," Qin Shan said. "That will be enough to keep your secret right?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Alright, I will call someone who's free to train with you," Qin Shan said and brought out a talisman, but Alex instantly spoke up.

"Only those in the True King realm," he said.

"Okay, only those in the True King re— wait what?" Qin Shan turned around to give a confused look. "Did you misspeak? You mean True Lord realm right?"

Alex shook his head. "There's a reason I'm going so far as to get them to make an oath, sect master," Alex said.

Qin Shan's face quickly got serious and he whispered to Alex. "Are you saying you can fight True King realm cultivators?" he asked.

"Yes, or rather, I can beat every other True Lord realm without any problem," Alex said.

"Oh, now I'm curious how strong you are," Qin Shan said and quickly called over someone.

Not even 5 minutes later, a young man who seemed to be in his late 20s appeared in front of Alex. From what Alex could see, the young man was likely not young at all, but rather in his late 30s.

His cultivation base was at True King 2nd realm.

"Yes, sect master," the man arrived next to Qin Shan.

"Yao Bai, meet the guest elder Yu Ming," Qin Shan said.

"Ah, you must be sister Hei Lin's son. It's nice to meet you, elder Yu Ming," the man said respectfully, even though he was the elder here in terms of age.

"Hello," Alex gave a sincere greeting.

"What am I doing here, sect master?" Yao Bai asked.

"You're fighting him, a practice match," Qin Shan said.

"Uhh…" Yao Bai looked around. "Fight?"

"His idea," Qin Shan gave a shrug. "But first, you must swear an oath to the heavens that you will not reveal anything that happens in this room to anyone else."

"What? An oath?" Yao Bai was scared. "Sect master, I…"

"Relax, it's a one-way oath, and you only need to keep a secret of whatever happens here," Qin Shan said.

Alex brought out a pill from his storage bag as an incentive and threw it to Yao Bai. "Make the oath and you can get more of those pills for free," he said.

"This is?" Yao Bai opened the pill bottle.

"It will help improve your speed of cultivation by nearly 60%," Alex said.

"What?" Yao Bai looked back. "Okay, I will swear."

Yao Bai immediately stood straight and said, "I swear to the heavens that I will not reveal whatever I witness in this room today and will keep it a secret until I am given the permission by guest elder himself."

Alex felt a faint movement of Qi and air in the surroundings and felt something else move upon Yao Bai.

Yao Bai shuddered a bit and shook himself free of the feeling. "Done," he said.

"We can begin," Qin Shan said.

Alex moved over to one side of the training hall and waited for Yao Bai to do so. Once they were both in position, Qin Shan moved over to the side and waited for them to begin fighting.

The fight started when Alex sent out a simple Iron Fist punch with barely any effort in it.

It flew fast, but slow enough for Yao Bai to dodge. Only then did the fight officially begin.

Yao Bai's brought out a metal rope from his storage bag and got ready to fight.

'A metal whip?' Alex wondered when he saw that and noticed something at the end of the whip. There was a sharp dagger on the end of the whip.

'A dagger whip?' Alex thought. He had never seen a weapon like this before.

A shield appeared from Alex's storage bag and hovered around him, constantly moving around to protect him from the attacks.

Alex didn't bring out a weapon of his own. After all, this was the time for him to test his fake arm for the first time.

Yao Bai swung the metal rope and sent the dagger going his way. Magically, the rope extended and hit the side of his shield.

Alex heard a bang and knew it was time to go fight. He dashed forward to attack his opponent, but Yao Bai suddenly stepped on his expended metal rope, and the dagger attached to the end of it came flying back towards Alex.

Alex didn't give much care. The shield moved behind him in time and stopped it. At the same time, Alex dashed forward and punched the man.

The man stretched his rope and caught Alex's punch. However, he was pushed back a little as he hadn't expected him to be so strong.

His eyes went wide immediately and he sent out a long part of the rope around Alex's right side.

Then, he pulled and Alex was suddenly constricted.

"Give up!" the man said, thinking he caught Alex, but Alex only smiled.

The next instant, Alex disappeared, appearing next to the man. He then punched as hard as he could and the man took it with his body.

Alex felt something hard and knew the man was wearing armor. But still, he was sent flying back as he hadn't defended the attack at all.

The man stumbled, caught himself, and got back up just in time to see Alex jump towards him.

The man suddenly spun his rope around, creating a sort of spiral around Alex while he was flying towards him.

The next moment, the man pulled the rope to constrict Alex once again, but a barrier appeared around him, stopping the rope from touching him.

Then, Alex's left hand moved. The moment the barrier went away, his left arm caught the metal rope and pulled.

As a Saint rank artifact, it was stronger than his normal body. Since it was primarily meant to be an arm, it wasn't as strong as a weapon could be, but it was still a Saint Earth artifact.

At the very least, it had the power of a True King realm fighter.

As he pulled on the rope, suddenly, he felt the rope grow as it extended past where he pulled, but the man stood where he was.

Then, the rope shrunk and the man used the opportunity to pull himself.

Alex tried to let go immediately, but his hand wasn't as fast as his real one would be. As such, he was pulled with the rope.

Alex heard a bang even as he was pulled and knew that his shield must have protected him.

Along the way, Alex let go of the rope and landed on all fours.

As if some animal instinct suddenly kicked into him, he dashed on all fours and started fighting like an animal with his claws on both of his hands.

As a replica, the fake arm could do everything his real arm could do, and thus it could also form claws with his metal Qi.

Alex slashed at the ropes and the man's armor. Yao Bai was completely unsure how to fight this fight. After all, he had never seen a man fight like an animal.

Alex was finally using the training he got back in the beast realm where he fought hand to hand against beasts every day.

Qin Shan looked from the side with clear shock in his eyes. He was sure by now that Alex's strength far surpassed his cultivation base.

However, having the strength and being able to use it were two different things. Even seeing him fight like an animal was very surprising for him.

'How the hell did he learn to do that?' Qin Shan wondered. 'How is an Alchemist able to fight this well? That too in just 6 years?'

One could only wonder what Qin Shan's face would be if he knew 3 of those 6 years were non-existent.

Alex flipped and backed away from Yao Bai and got on his feet. He no longer continued to fight like a beast and instead, a warm, yellow aura flickered around his palm.

With a slam, Alex sent the Palm of the Sun directly at Yao Bai.

Chapter 707: Qin Shan's Unending Shock

A yellow palm strike flew towards Yao Bai which he stopped with his own palm strike that shone with golden light.

When the two palm strikes destroyed each other, with his strike barely stronger than Alex's, he started to understand why he was made to take the oath.

The fighting style was already unorthodox, to add on such a massive strength that didn't match his cultivation base— if information about him got out, any and every sect and faction would try their best to get him.

Yao Bai frowned as he thought of this. 'How is a kid so strong? How do I beat him?' he wondered.

He was sure he could beat him, given that he was a bit stronger than Alex, but his weapon was turning out to be of no use against him as the shield stopped everything.

'Best choice for me is to draw out this battle, or take advantage of when he slips,' Yao Bai thought.

Alex sent out an Iron Fist Punch as a golden fist flew through the air towards his opponent.

Yao Bai once again sent back a metal palm that stopped his attack and even pushed back a little.

'So my strength is only around True King 1st realm, huh?' Alex thought to himself.

Yao Bai threw the tied dagger towards Alex, who dodged slightly and caught onto it to pull himself closer.

When he got close, Yao Bai suddenly got uncomfortable and his eyes changed.

It wasn't just him, however. Even Qin Shan's eyes changed a little when he noticed the aura in the air move slightly.

'What's that?' he wondered. He could see it, but did not understand it. After all, Qin Shan had yet to find a Dao of his own, so he didn't know what it looked like.

"Argh!" Yao Bai shouted and let go of his rope as it was burning hot at the moment. At the same time, Alex got close to him and tongue of fire appeared between the two.

'Explode!'

BOOM!~

The explosion rung the area in between them. Alex hadn't put much energy into the explosion and wanted to only use a weaker version as this was a friendly battle.

However, he was still surprised how strong it had become.

'Explosion is fire suddenly heating up to create destruction. Did my Dao of Heat help in the heating process to make it stronger?' Alex thought.

The explosion was certainly faster than it should have been normally and just a bit stronger. But that tiny bit would go a long way in the future.

Alex stopped using his Dao after that fight as it was too strong to use without doing some tests first. So, he went back to fighting normally.

The two of them fought for a while, and slowly but surely, Yao Bai was getting the upperhand. Each conflict between them ended in his victory.

However, he was still unable to win against Alex even after the fight was drawn out.

Yao Bai huffed a little and his face grew worried. 'How is he still so full of energy?' he thought.

After fighting each other for 10 more minutes, both in close combat and ranged attacks, neither of them were on the verge of winning.

Alex was now getting more and more used to his fake hand. He was starting to understand the strength and weaknesses for his arm.

Physically, his fake arm was stronger than his real arm. That was something he couldn't deny at all as his fake arm was a Saint Earth artifact.

However, when it came to using techniques, his fake arm was unable to match his real arm.

Perhaps it was because his fake arm was modeled after a normal human, the channels through which his Qi moved wasn't wide enough to best fast and overwhelming like his real hand.

Alex looked at the tired Yao Bai and asked, "Are you okay? We can take a break if you want to."

Yao Bai felt his heart prick a bit when he heard that. "No, I can keep going," he said as he prepared his whip to fight again.

"Very well, then let us fight seriously," Alex said as he brought out a sword.

"What?" Yao Bai looked surprised. "You're a swordsman?"

"Ah, yes," Alex said. "I was testing out my new arm so I didn't use it, but now I will."

The sword he took out was the poison sword. Since he was intending to stay away from his opponent, he wouldn't have to worry about poisoning him.

Alex put the sword on his fake hand to test it too. To start with, he sent out a wind slash towards his opponent.

The mental whip moved and the dagger at the end of it struck the wind slash, destroying it in mid air.

Alex moved around his fake arm as it felt a little stiff when he used his sword. No, it wasn't the arm that was the problem. It was the fact that he hadn't used his left hand to fight in a long time.

Using it randomly to attack someone, versus using it in a sophisticated manner to send out an accurate strike, it was obvious which one would show him his shortcoming.

The sword moved once again, sending out a water strike this time. Then a fire strike, then an earth strike.

Yao Bai easily stopped all of those attacks as the techniques Alex used were common grade ones that he simply learned to be able to use specific Qi.

'Oh, the last two felt a little stronger than others,' he thought to himself.

Right now, his Fire and Earth Spiritual roots were much better than the other non-evolved spiritual roots of his.

Of course, the strongest one amongst the common elements was still his metal one.

So, when Alex sent out his Penta Sword Strike, Yao Bai had to fight harder to stop it.

Qin Shan looked from the side, his shock never leaving his face. 'Does he actually have all 5 spiritual roots? How is he able to throw out such strong attacks if he had Lesser Spiritual roots?'

Qin Shan simply couldn't understand what was happening.

As the fight between the two raged on. As time went by, Alex slowly added Sword Intent into his attack, and fortunately for him it worked even with his fake arm.

Yao Bai had it harder and harder as the attacks got stronger than ever. 'How?' he wondered.

He wanted to end it, but the battle kept on going. In the end, it was him that was starting to slowly run out of Qi.

Once Alex became aware that Yao Bai was starting to struggle, he decided to end it.

"Careful," he said and suddenly his sword which barely hand a white outline suddenly came to life with the whiteness covering it completely.

White sparks flew out of his sword catching both Yao Bai and Qin Shan off guard.

"Sword Qi!" Qin Shan shouted, confirming Yao Bai's deepest fear.

Alex viewed his own sword Qi. Only when he focused did the spark that flew out of the sword take the shape of an actual sword. Otherwise, they were just white sparks.

That made him a little happy. That meant he still had more to learn. He still had room to grow.

Without using any techniques or whatsoever, Alex simply sent out the Sword Qi.

Yao Bai quickly attacked with his own Dagger whip, but it couldn't stop Alex's attack at all.

In the end, Qin Shan had to step in and block the attack.

A water barrier appeared around him and Yao Bai, stopping Alex's attack. The attack landed with a bang, but could do nothing else against the powers of a Saint realm individual.

Qin Shan was about to stop his barrier when he noticed that the attack in front of him hadn't disappeared at all.

Instead, the cluster of sword Qi kept on attacking one after another, attempting to go past the barrier.

They got weaker the longer they clashed, but the fact that they could even do that in the first place was enough to shock Qin Shan once again.

When the bright, white light finally stopped, Qin Shan let go of the barrier and looked at Alex, who did not even break a sweat.

"Junior Yu, how are you so strong?" Qin Shan asked, completely disregarding the existence of a disciple behind him.

"I trained," Alex said, not explaining any more.

"I see," Qin Shan said, not asking for more information. He finally turned around to look at Yao Bai and asked, "Are you okay?"

"Huh? Oh yes… thank you for protecting me, sect master," he said.

"Good work, disciple Yao. You can leave if you want now, but remember your oath. Nothing that happened today is to escape this room," Qin Shan said.

"Yes, sect master," Yao Bai said. He turned to Alex and bowed a little. "Thank you for the opportunity to learn, elder Yu," he said and left.

"I can finally understand why you would want to keep this a secret," Qin Shan said. "You can easily win against anyone in the early True King realm if you were to use your sword."

"I could win even without it if I were to use my other skills," Alex said as he suddenly lost all aura and went invisible.

Qin Shan could barely sense him and even had to use his spiritual sense to find him.

"You just keep on surprising me, young man," Qin Shan said with a sigh. "Alright, I will help you find other disciples to fight against. If those don't work. I will get you elders to fight against. Of course, they will all be swearing an Oath, just like young Yao did."

And that began Alex's year long training as he made his way through his cultivation.

Chapter 708: Resonance

Time passed quickly when one did the same thing over and over for a long time.

Alex's days soon turned into a routine. 4 times a week, every other day, he trained with someone that was around Mid-True King realm in cultivation base.

He had come to find out that his Sword Qi was currently only that strong. Over the course of the 17 or so months, he improved it, but it only went 2 realms higher at most.

On the other hand, Alex himself broke through about 5 more times in the many days, reaching a cultivation base of True Lord 8th realm.

When he trained, he always gifted someone a pill he made, no matter what type it was. That made the people fighting with him happy to be a training partner.

Alex's pills were now consistently in the upper 50s when it came to harmony, and in the upper 70s, or lower 80s when the recipe was something he had come up with himself.

Or at least, that was the case whenever he cultivated with a Yin treasure. If there was no Yin treasure, the yang in his body would get so bad that even reaching lower 70s felt like a chore to him for his own recipe.

Alex desperately went around the city to find Yin treasure, but rarely did anyone have it.

In the past 15 months, he had managed to come across only 20 or so Yin treasures that had helped him calm his Yang build-up.

'I need something with so much Yin that it fully stabilizes my yang,' Alex thought. 'These little Yin treasures aren't helping at all.'

Aside from training, Alex spent 3 days a week going to the 3 different guilds in his city and completing his responsibilities there. After all, he was a True Heaven rank professional there.

Every other free time he had, he spent it all on fixing the recipes he had yet to.

Alex had already learned about the different ingredients that he needed for the pill to fix his arm. He even cut off the whiskers of his own seeking mouse to practice.

He did that partly for himself, and partly to check what the 'Undying' part of the mouse truly was.

The experiment was simple. He cut off Whisker's whiskers and waited. When nothing happened, Alex sent him back to his beast space, where he realized Whiskers grew back his whiskers in just under a week.

So, Alex had relentlessly practiced on the whiskers as well.

Now, all that was left was the ingredient that was the equivalent of Blood Spirit Ginseng. However, even in the many months that went by, there never was a Blood Spirit ginseng in the market.

Other than him, Pearl had also increased in his cultivation base. He had somehow managed to reach True King 2nd realm, which was sadly not as fast as Alex.

Soon, the two of them would catch up to each other, and Alex would once again have a better cultivation base than him.

Today, Alex was all alone in his room. He was attempting to break through to the 9th True Lord realm as he hadn't done so in the last 3 months.

As such, he had left Pearl in his mother's house.

As Alex cultivated the Five Path Divine Yang technique, a wave of Yang Qi escaped from his naval area and rushed up to his entire body.

Alex quickly circulated the Qi and in just a few more circulations, he broke through to the next realm.

If anyone found out that it only took him less than 2 minutes in between the start and the breakthrough, they would likely cry tears of blood as they remembered the hour of cultivation they had to do over the entire night as they tried to breakthrough.

Once Alex was done, he started cultivating once again to stabilize his foundations over the course of the night.

* * * * * * *

2 months later, Alex let his mother know that he was intending to leave for the Eastern mountains again.

"What? Why would you want to go there? Did someone employ you to make a pill again?" Helen asked.

"No," Alex said. "I'm going there mostly for Pearl."

"Me?" Pearl gave a confused look, which Helen gave him as well.

"Yes," Alex said. "Pearl hasn't been cultivating well, and part of that I assume is because he hasn't been training at all like me."

The real reason Alex assumed was that he had somehow stifled Pearl's cultivation base by not letting him go through the ritual back in the beast realm, but he didn't want to admit that.

He also didn't want to make Pearl go through that as that would likely result in his death.

'I would rather have Pearl slowly cultivate than let him take a risky bet,' Alex thought to himself.

"I see," Helen said. "Well, if you can't help it then I guess you should take him. But you have to be extra careful as you won't have anyone to protect you two."

"Also, take this communication talisman and constantly sent me mess— eh? I don't have any?" Helen checked through her bag and was unable to find any at the moment.

"It's fine, mother. I promise to stay out of trouble," Alex said.

"No, sit," Helen said. "I won't let you go without a communication talisman." She continued searching for them but didn't find any.

In the end, she gave up. "Fine, I'll just make one," she said and brought out two empty talisman papers and a vial of ink.

Alex sat down and watched his mother prepare to draw a talisman.

"Do you know how to create a communication talisman?" she asked him.

"Uh… yes?" he said. "I know the design."

"No, design alone won't help you," she said as she dipped her saint rank brush in the ink and drew the rune for 'Communication'.

She followed it by drawing the rune for 'Far', 'Long', 'Text', 'Memory', 'Durable', and various other little runes throughout the left half of the talisman.

Then, she drew the last rune for 'Resonance'. After that, she started drawing Rune Bridge throughout the many runes to connect them.

Once she was done, she drew a straight line through the middle to separate the left half from the right.

Then she drew the mirror opposite on the right half of the talisman as well, creating symmetry in between.

Then, she started drawing the same design on the other talisman paper as well.

Alex watched in genuine awe at how great his mother was at making talismans. He too was good, but he never gave it as much thought as his mother did.

He slowly reached one of the talismans to take it for himself, when suddenly his mother's hand snaked out to slap his own.

Alex's reflexes kicked in and he managed to dodge her, but he still gave her a weird look.

"What's wrong? Didn't you make this for me to take?" he asked.

"What's wrong? Are you really asking that? Did you never learn how to create a communication talisman?" she asked.

"Uh… as I said, I learned the design, is that not enough?" he asked.

"Did you not read that you need to create a resonance between them?" she asked.

"Resonance? I did," he said. "Didn't you already create it though? Look, there's the rune."

"No, not in rune. Resonance for real," Helen said. "Sigh, those poor staff members must have thought you were lazy when you handed them talismans that never resonated."

"Hmm, now that you say it, I did get a lot of weird looks from time to time," Alex said.

"Alright, look," She said and showed it to him. "Whenever you have two or more talismans that you need to communicate in between each other, or work with each other, you need to make sure the talismans know which ones to work with."

"For that, we need to create a resonance between them. The first part of resonance is creating the rune for it. That is what you most likely do and nothing more," Helen said.

"The next step, however, is the most important."

Helen took the two talismans and held the rune for resonance in between her thumb and her index finger.

"You need to create a link between the two runes," she said. "Then, you need to pour in your Qi into the rune and activate it."

As she said that, Alex saw the rune 'Resonance' light up. Suddenly, he heard a low buzzing sound as the talisman paper started vibrating.

"Then, you slowly and steadily continue putting in Qi," Helen said. "At some point, if your stream of Qi on both sides is the same, the two talismans will start resonating with each other."

"Meaning, that the two of them will start moving at the same frequency. At that point, all you have to do is simply let them be and watch."

Helen put down the talismans and let the two of them vibrate for a bit. Slowly, the two talismans started moving closer and closer.

In the end, like two magnets getting really close, the two talismans jumped and snapped into each other, and stayed stuck.

"And that is how you create resonance," Helen said as she took one of the talismans and peeled off the second one to Alex.

"Now, if I send a message in here," she said as she put her spiritual sense into the talisman.

Alex's talisman vibrated and he got a message.

-You will get my message there.-

"Amazing!" Alex said with wide eyes.

"Isn't it? Now, take that talisman and make sure to keep sending me messages," she said.

Chapter 709: Pearl's Training

A week passed since Alex and Pearl came out to train. Alex didn't fight most of the time, leaving Pearl to pick up the slack since he was the one they were here for.

It had been about 23 months since Alex and Pearl left the Demon Realm. When they had entered it nearly 5 years ago, Alex had been at True Master's 9th realm, and Pearl had been in True Lord 5th realm.

Now, Alex was in True Lord 9th realm, and Pearl was in True King 2nd realm. Given their comparison, Pearl really was slow.

He was still just as fast as most of those that were considered talented in the empire. Given his lack of resources, he was perhaps even faster.

However, given the fact that he used to keep up with Alex in cultivation back when they were in the common realms, Alex felt a little bad when he saw Pearl's cultivation slow down.

"We will have to train a lot," Alex said softly as he watched Pearl fight someone stronger than him.

They were currently at the foot of a giant mountain and were surrounded by trees all around. Pearl was in his big form which made him about as big as a normal tiger would.

Pearl's opponent was a blue frog in True King 4th realm. From what Alex could see, the frog used Water and Wood elements, both of which were harmful to the Metal element that Pearl used.

So, he was having a harder time than usual. Not to mention, the blue frog had poison secreted all over its body, so Pearl had to be careful when it attacked it.

His golden claw seemed to be fine for the most part, but if the splashes of poison ever got on Pearl, there would be trouble.

So, Alex held in his hands 2 different kinds of pills, both of which worked to cure the poison of the frog.

Pearl suddenly split into two, one of which was a fake Pearl, but both looked equally real. Even Alex couldn't separate which one was real using his spiritual sense.

A long, pink tongue shot out of the blue frog and hit the Pearl on the left side, before slinking back into its mouth.

The Pearl that was hit suddenly vanished into a bunch of golden light and the Pearl on the right arrived next to it with a glowing golden claw.

The claw slashed onto the blue frog's skin and tore out blood from it. Pearl immediately jumped back and slashed in front of him again.

A golden set of lines emerged from where Pearl slashed and wrapped around the frog as if it was tied up by a rope.

The frog couldn't move at all under the force of Pearl's ropes for a while, and in that time, Pearl gave another strong claw attack directly to its head.

However, even after that, the frog didn't die. Instead Pearl was forced to back away as the frog's tongue flew toward him. At the same time, the frog managed to break through the golden binding and continued fighting.

Alex watched from far away as Pearl used every ability in his arsenal. White Tiger's Golden Claw, White Tiger's Golden body, White Tiger's Dominating Body, White Tiger's steps, White Tiger's roar, and the binding technique that Alex didn't know the name of.

The frog's skill set wasn't even as big as Pearl's since it mostly relied on its poison. So, Pearl was able to easily beat the frog after a couple of minutes.

"Stop!" Alex said when Pearl was about to bite into the frog's body to retrieve the frog's monster core.

"Why?" Pearl turned around to ask.

"I told you," Alex said as he walked up to the frog. "It's got poison all over its body."

Alex tore into the frog's body with his bare hand and ripped it apart to bring out the core with his Qi. After cleaning it up for a bit, he gave it to Pearl.

"Eat," he said.

Pearl jumped at the monster's core, his body already reducing in size, and ate it.

Alex waited for a few minutes for Pearl to digest it, and once it did, it turned around toward Alex.

"I think I can break through now," he said.

"Really?" Alex asked. He had been waiting for Pearl to say that. Alex could already feel himself getting close to breaking through as well.

He was just a few weeks out if his assumption was correct.

"Alright, let's go cultivate some more."

* * * * * *

By 2 weeks later, Pearl had already broken through to the True King 3rd realm, which meant Alex's body was equally strong as well.

They were currently fighting a pack of wolves all of which were equally as strong and in the True King realm.

Alex wasn't going for the kill on any of them, just testing out his fighting. He could feel himself getting closer and closer to the time when his breakthrough would happen.

'Just a little more,' he thought as he fought. He could massacre the entire pack of wolves if he used his sword, so Alex kept it to his hands. Even then, the pack of wolves was quite weak against him.

With True King 3rd realm physical attack and True King 6th realm Elemental attacks, Alex's overall damage reached True King 7th realm.

If he added his Sword Qi, that would put his attacks a realm higher than it already was.

It was truly surprising how strong he had come to be in no time at all.

'I'm about as strong Fu Tao was before he entered the Demon realm right?' Alex thought for a moment.

Fu Tao had been True King 8th realm from what he could remember. He was most likely a True Emperor now, halfway towards becoming a Saint realm.

'I should reach what he was back then in just a few days,' he thought to himself.

Alex continued fighting the wolves with his arms and his invisible sword that he could only carry on his right hand for some reason.

When he didn't have a left arm, he believed that it was a mental block that stopped him from being able to use it with an imaginary left hand.

However, now that he had a left arm, he still couldn't use it at all. 'Do I need a real arm to fake grab it?' he wondered.

A gray-furred wolf suddenly jumped at him from behind. Alex ducked and sent out a punch with his left hand directly onto the wolf's stomach.

The wolf fell to the ground and whimpered as it was hurt. It tried to stand up and run away, but the pain was too much for it.

Another wolf came to its aid and stood in front of it, guarding it against Alex.

Alex smiled at their relationship. He wasn't here to kill them, so he let it be and waited for others to attack him.

Pearl was fighting to the side, struggling a little, but still getting by easily.

He had to be both offensive and defensive at the same time and fighting a single monster every time hadn't helped him with that.

Now, the group of wolves would give him valuable training that Alex never could

As Alex prepared to defend against another wolf that was about to attack him, the wolf stopped.

Its eyes suddenly went wide with terror and it looked to its right. Alex was surprised by this event so he quickly sent his spiritual sense to his left, where the wolf was staring towards.

He saw nothing. He even stretched it as far as he could, but he still found nothing in that direction.

'What is it—' just as he was thinking that he noticed that all the wolves in the pack had stopped fighting and were staring in the same direction.

That only made Alex scared. After all, if there was anything that could make these wolves fear this much, it would certainly be enough to kill him as well.

The wolves suddenly started running away, going away from the area in a matter of seconds. Not only them, but even the other beast in the vicinity also ran away.

Even birds flew through the air, moving in the opposite directions from where the wolf stared towards.

"Brother!" Pearl's terrified voice came from behind him.

Alex turned around and found the scared Pearl running towards him.

"Pearl, what's wrong?" he asked.

"I don't… I don't want to go back," Pearl said.

"What?" Alex asked.

Before he could say anything else, Pearl turned into a bunch of white light and disappeared into his beast space.

Then, now together with Pearl, Alex felt it too. The ever-so-familiar feeling, that usually came from the south, now came from the north.

Alex turned his horrified face towards the north as he finally realized why the beasts were so scared.

After 7 long years, the Beast realm had once again sent out its beacon to find their candidates with the White Tiger's blood.

Which meant… the saint realm beasts were going to come find Pearl anytime now.

Alex took a deep breath to calm himself down.

"No, I'm too far away. They won't be able to make it here in time before—"

Alex was going to delude himself into thinking he was safe. However, when he remembered how fast Shen Jing was as a Saint realm expert, he couldn't help but imagine the speed lady Ren could reach as an Immortal expert.

If she had survived and recovered from the Heavenly Judgment, then both him and Pearl were going to be in a lot of trouble.

Chapter 710: Take It Back

Alex stayed stunned for a moment. He looked around, trying to think of what to do. The panic he was feeling didn't help much in thinking either.

'Should I run? Should I hide? Or should I stay?' Alex thought.

He was perhaps in the best location he could be in if he didn't want people to get hurt in the process.

It wasn't just the saint beasts that were going to be a problem, but the other beasts that would come attack too.

Especially in the direction where he was in.

'I can't go back to mother. I will only implicate her in all of this,' Alex thought.

Finally, he decided to stay. Neither running, nor hiding would ever get him out of trouble if a Saint beast was dead set on finding you.

He could've escaped if the beast didn't know his face, but they clearly knew who to look for this time around.

'No running,' he thought to himself and put on a resolute face to wait for whoever came to him.

Was it going to be the jaguar? Or the puma? Or was Lady Ren really going to come out herself and put herself in danger?

Alex stood on the empty meadow and waited.

5 minutes passed. Then 10. Then 30. Soon, an hour passed.

Then 2 hours passed, and then 3 hours.

Alex simply stood where he was and waited for the beacon to lead someone toward him. However, even as 4 hours came to pass, no one came.

Finally, the beacon ended and the feeling disappeared. Alex could feel the panic in the air disappear as the beasts went from being restless to tame in a matter of seconds.

Alex on the other hand was only confused. 'Why did they not come?' he thought to himself.

He waited an hour longer just in case, but no one came for him.

'Did they not realize that I've come to the Luminance Empire and went back to check the Crimson Empire?' Alex thought. 'No, they should get a strong feeling from this side.'

Another thought came to Alex all of a sudden that was more horrifying than he would care to admit.

'Is Pearl's potential as the White Tiger's descendant destroyed?' he thought. 'Did I destroy his chance at becoming strong already? Is that why they didn't bother coming here?'

Alex's breathing got harder and harder until he had to force himself to calm down.

'No, it's not your fault. Those beasts probably made a mistake,' Alex told himself.

With a thought, he let Pearl come out, who immediately looked around to see if he was safe.

"They're gone?" Pearl asked.

"They never came," Alex said. Then he gave Pearl a curious look. "Do you not want to go back at all?"

Pearl shook his head.

"Why? Your grandmother is there, you know?" Alex said.

"But they will send you away," Pearl said. "I don't want to be away from you, brother."

Alex smiled, his troubling feelings disappearing like snow on a hot day. He got down to his knees and rubbed Pearl's tiny head.

"Come, let's go back. Mother is waiting for us," he said and the two of them went back to DawnSpring city.

* * * * * * *

Alex didn't tell his mom anything about what had happened out there. He didn't want her to worry about him more than she was already.

Besides, this was a consequence of his choice, so it was his burden to bear.

Alex went to the guild to find news of the amount of destruction the beasts had caused this time. Along the way, he couldn't help but hope his master, senior sister, and others were fine amidst all of this.

Even though seven years had already passed since the last beast horde attack, he wished they were prepared for it.

Once Alex reached the Formation guild, he asked for information about the beast horde attack to the north.

However, the receptionist told him no such thing took place at all.

"Are you sure?" Alex asked. "No such thing took place?"

"No, sir," the man said.

Alex looked confused. 'Did the beasts not attack? But they clearly were restless in the mountains.'

"Is there no big piece of news out there then?" Alex asked.

"Well, the only big news right now is the competition taking place next week," the receptionist said. "Ah, right. Are you going to take part in the competition, sir? I will have to register you if you are."

"Competition?" Alex gave a confused look for a moment before remembering about the Guild competitions that took place every 10 years.

2 years ago was the Talisman Competition where he found his mother. Now, it was the turn for the Formation competition.

Alex thought for a moment and shook his head. "No," he said. "I don't want to join it."

There was just too much trouble that he would face with joining the competition right now.

It would put him in the spotlight which he didn't want to do. It wasn't the competition itself that bothered him, but rather the information that would be out when he did take part in it.

A 23-year-old True King 1st realm was enough to make the whole world go mad.

It would also make people look into him, causing them to find out that he was a True Heaven Talisman expert and a True Heaven Alchemist.

Then they would go into his background and find out about his mother, and maybe even find out through Fu Tao and the others that he wasn't from this Empire, to begin with.

All of it would be way too troubling for a competition that wasn't even his primary profession.

The receptionist made no remark when he said no. Instead, he said, "Alright, I won't register your name, sir. Since you are a True Heaven formation master, you have the right to go watch the competition."

"If you require, we can pay for your travels, or you can go on your own," the receptionist said.

"Thank you," Alex said and left the guild.

The thoughts of the competition soon left his mind and only the news about the beasts not attacking took over it.

'Wait, so it is all fine now?' he thought. 'Why did they not attack?'

Questions he knew wouldn't get answered kept popping up in his head. So, he decided to stop thinking about it. It wasn't like thinking about something that was going to change the outcome.

Alex went to the Alchemy guild and checked if his one ingredient was on the market yet.

It was not. So, he took some missions and spent the rest of the day finishing those up.

By the end, Alex realized that he needed to go look for another Yin treasure again.

'It is getting harder and harder to find them here. Maybe I should go to the capital,' he thought to himself.

Late at night, he return back to his mother, and an hour later was back in his house.

Now, it was time for him to break through.

Alex sat on the floor of his house and started to slowly circulate. He felt that he wasn't as prepared as he would have hoped, so he needed to take a little longer when he broke through.

As he did, the Five Yang Divine Path circulated Yang Qi throughout his system. The slight pain, or rather discomfort he felt when he used the Heaven grade technique of his technique had slowly started fading over time.

Now, it was perfect for him. This couldn't help but make him wonder if soon he would be able to change the cultivation technique and go a grade higher once more.

For now, he stuck to what he had.

As Alex cultivated and prepared for the breakthrough, something weird happened. He thought he heard someone speaking.

Alex stopped and looked around. "Pearl?" he shouted as he sent his spiritual sense. No one was in the room.

He looked around once more before going back to his cultivation. As he prepared to break through once again he started hearing sounds that sounded like voices.

Alex stopped to look around once more and even stood up to go check. No one was there at all again.

Finally, after making sure no one was there at all, he started cultivating again.

As the time for him to breakthrough got closer and closer, the voices returned. This time, he didn't bother stopping to check who it was and decided to do so after he broke through.

"It's your fault," A voice spoke directly into his mind.

Alex finally stopped once more and shouted, "Who?"

He immediately stood up to look around, yet once again, no one was there. After 5 minutes of being on edge, he started cultivating once more.

"You are useless," the voice returned.

Alex almost stopped cultivating, but he continued it.

"You are the reason Pearl is so weak right now," the voice said. "Had you left Pearl alone, he would have evolved by now and would have become the ruler of the continent. You are the reason he is so weak."

Alex shook his head, trying to get rid of the thoughts. However, they just kept on coming to him.

"You think you will find your father in the southern continent? Lies. You know surely that he's already dead, and there is nothing you can do about it."

"You think you are strong, but that is not your power. Your techniques, your cultivation, your alchemy. You got it all because of me," the voice said.

"And now, I'm here to take it all back and send you to the darkness where you belong."

Chapter 711: Inner Demon

"Who are you?" Alex asked. By now, the only explanations he could think of were that someone was either using spiritual sense to talk with him or that their spiritual sense was way too strong for him to notice it.

Or… he was back. He was back and he was taking it back just like he said he was.

"You know who I am," the voice said. "You know what you took from me."

"NO!" Alex said. "It wasn't yours to begin with."

"I cultivated so hard, day and night, not you. I took all the pain, the suffering, not you. It was I who lost my arm, not you," the voices said. "It was I who had to watch my master die, not you."

"If you think you can just take over the life I created and live it out like you were the one who worked hard, then you are a bigger idiot than I would have thought you to be," the voice said.

"No!" Alex said. "You're wrong. It wasn't yours. It's mine."

"Yours? Like Pearl is yours?" the voice asked. "You already know you are ruining his cultivation by keeping him, and yet you still haven't taken him back?"

"There is a chance he will die if he goes back," Alex said.

"There is a chance he will die if he stays with you," the voice said.

"You know he will soon be very weak for you. At that time, I know you will just abandon him. I know that because I am you," the voice said.

"No, I would never abandon Pearl," Alex said.

"Never? Like you never abandoned MY master? Like you never abandoned MY senior sister? Like you never abandoned all the relationships that I created back in the Crimson empire?"

"The moment you saw a way out, you took it. Because that is what you do. You abandon people," the voice said.

Alex tried to ignore the voice, but it was getting to his head.

"A dead father, a dead master. I bet Hannah is already dead on the other continent too. Same for Aunt Liz in the Northern continent."

"Soon, there will be a dead and abandoned Pearl too."

"How many more family members do you need to lose before you realize just how weak you are," the voice said. " You are going to lose mother--"

"NOOOOO!" Alex suddenly got out of his cultivation trance in a fit of rage.

The Qi circulation he had been maintaining suddenly went haywire and Alex started feeling pain all over his body.

It wasn't a very intense pain, but it was worrying as he felt it all over his meridians and even his naval area.

Alex quickly sat back down to circulate his Qi and only after a few minutes did he get it back on track. By that time, however, the damage was done.

Alex put on a sour face as he realized that his peak True Lord 9th realm cultivation had dropped to the point where it felt like he had just broken through a month or so ago.

He had lost nearly 2 months' worth of cultivation because of a single mistake.

'I went through Qi Deviation?' Alex thought with nothing but shock on his face.

'Why? How?' he thought.

The fear and anger he had felt just minutes ago when he had been cultivating were no more.

'Was that… not real?' he thought to himself. 'It felt so real though.'

Alex felt like he had been in a dream moments ago. When in the dream, he didn't realize that it was a dream, but now that he was awake, he could tell it wasn't real.

'What happened again?' he thought to himself, but slowly he started forgetting what the events that led to him going through Qi Deviation were.

It was the same as dreams. Once awake, he forgot what the dream was about. Not even Alex's eidetic memory helped with that.

Right now, Alex only remembered the feeling he had felt. Slowly, he was starting to forget the feeling too. Soon, he would only remember that he remembered feeling fear and anger.

"So many days of cultivation wasted just like that," he thought as he checked himself.

In the end, since there was nothing else he could do, he sat down and started cultivating to start fixing what he had just broken.

* * * * * * *

A week later, Alex was standing on top of a Teleportation formation in the DawnSpring city, ready to go visit the capital to see the Formation competition.

After his failure during cultivation, he told what happened to his mother and sect master Qin, both of whom seemed to have no idea what he was talking about.

So, Alex had gone to check the library to see if there was any information there. Unfortunately, the library wasn't as useful as he would have hoped it would be.

The only other way he could think of was to either go to the Han family or Heaven's Peak school and find Han Hongqi or Shangguan Quan there to ask them what had happened to him.

However, if he did so, there was a chance they would put him in their debt and force him to join them. He didn't like the idea of that one bit.

So, he decided to go to the capital and see if there is information there. Unfortunately, due to the competition, the teleportation formations were packed and he couldn't use them at all.

Except, the Formation guild could, and he had been invited to go with them not long ago.

So, Alex took the chance to go together with them and watch the competition while at the same time trying to figure out what could have possibly happened to him during the breakthrough that made him fear and angry to the point that he went through Qi Deviation.

His mother was happy to see him go see the world after staying with her for 2 years. Now that Alex thought about it, 2 years was the longest he had ever stayed anywhere in this world.

It took the Formation guild 2 trips to reach the Capital, with them having to go through Lightborn city.

Once they reached the capital, all the guild membered were taken through the afternoon heat towards a busy street that ended on a massive hotel that would be housing them for the next week.

Alex got settled onto a room all by himself, one of the perks of being a True Heaven ranked formation master. Once he was settled, he decided to leave and go to the capital library.

Since the competition was tomorrow, he could spend the rest of the day today looking through information.

Alex quickly found the library not far away from where he was staying and started searching through books that had anything to do with problems on breakthroughs or Qi Deviation.

The books gave many reasoning such as a mismatch between one's cultivation path and cultivation technique, a deep injury to the body or the soul, lack of potential, and poisons, and yet none of the explanations matched Alex.

Alex continued searching for the information, but even until the next morning, he found nothing in the nearly five-story tall building.

Of course, had Alex known what he was searching for exactly, he would have realized how useless his search was.

Things that were only related to Saint realm experts were something that he would never find out in the open. Especially not in a public library.

Alex had yet to even know of a single Saint realm beside Saint Condensation that Qin Shan was in as there was no information out there.

There was no way he would ever find out information about Inner Demons on his own.

Finally, after realizing that his search was fruitless, Alex returned to the hotel, from where he was soon taken to the competition ground.

Over the next 7 days, for 4 different days with a break between each, Alex watched the Formation competition take place in a massive location that the guild had prepared.

From what Alex could see, the location was the exact same as the one for the Talisman competition.

It was perhaps the same location that was used for all 7 or maybe even 8 of the competitions.

The competition went smoothly throughout the entire week. There were a few twists and turns, but in the end, the winner of it was the person everyone had expected to win in the first place.

A young woman by the name of Fu Fanrou. The woman was 32 years old and had a cultivation base of about True Lord 8th realm and hailed from the Fu family, whose ancestor was a Saint rank formation master.

Her final, winning formation had been a formation with an Efficiency of 77%.

Judging by the rest of the group in the competition, Alex guessed that had he taken part, he would have most definitely come in the top 5 amongst them.

He was feeling glad he didn't take part in it. Seeing the people surrounding the woman before she could even leave the competition ground, Alex was sure the swarm he would get would not be less than this.

Once everyone started leaving after the cultivation was over, Alex too stood up and left. Tomorrow, after the rewards were distributed, they would all be taken back home.

However, along the way to the hotel, Alex saw something that gave him a feeling that he should perhaps not return.

'I've done so much already,' he thought to himself. 'I can't stop now.'

So, instead of returning with the group back to the DawnSpring city, Alex decided to stay.

He decided to stay and go join the LightSworns.

It was time to once and for all figure out if the princess could get him his arms back.

Chapter 712: Third Time is the Charm

2 days later, Alex arrived at the southern side of the capital where the evaluation for the Lightsworns was taking place.

It was a large, open ground with a lot of tents. From there, Alex could even see the purple building in the distance that was the royal palace.

Standing in line for the registration, Alex looked at the many people in colorful robes walking around them, all doing their own things.

'If things go well, I will finally be wearing that," he thought.

The first time he had thought of joining the Lightsworns, he had been sidetracked into training for over 2 years.

The second time he had thought of joining them, he had found his mother and suddenly another 2 years had passed.

Now was the third time.

"This time's the charm right?" he thought as he waited for his turn.

"There are too many of you trying to get into the Lightsworns. Do not waste our time, or we will throw you out immediately," someone shouted from the front.

Instantly, everyone got alert and looked forward. From time to time, the man repeated the same thing, putting the newcomers on edge too.

Finally, after nearly 40 minutes of waiting, it was Alex's turn.

He walked into a tent and saw a man with a talisman waiting for him in front of a stone wall.

There was a formation carved onto the wall and Alex had to place his hand on it for it to show any and all information about him that it could find.

Alex had studied about this before coming here, so he knew what he must do. So, he placed his hand without even a prompt from the person, and immediately a variety of information appeared on the screen.

The man looked at the screen, gave a split-second look of surprise, and proceeded to record the information.

23 years old - True Lord 9th Realm - Superior Metal root.

"Name?" the man asked.

"Yu Ming," Alex replied.

"Any sect or family?" he asked.

"No," Alex said as he shook his head.

That made the man give him a curious look before looking at the information on the stone. He was probably wondering how someone so young could have such talent and cultivation base yet not belong to any sect or family.

Alex was a little surprised by the information himself.

'So despite me staying 3 years in the demon realm, it only counts the time I experienced, huh?' he thought to himself.

The cultivation base wasn't anything new at all, but he was surprised that it showed his spiritual roots. Except, it was completely wrong.

'Is my Metal root so much better than the rest that their formations can't even separate the other roots?' Alex thought. 'Also, what happened to my Yang root? It's obviously just as good as the metal too.'

The only reason Alex could come up with was that the formation on the wall wasn't advanced enough to learn it all, even though it was a Saint rank formation.

Alex quickly left the place and went to another location where he was made to sit down to the side as a group of people watched someone else fight a puppet on a stage.

The person fighting was a woman with True Lord 3rd realm cultivation base, and the puppet she was fighting against had the same cultivation base as well.

A man stood to the side, recording everything that he saw on the stage. The woman fought for a while before it was clear that she was struggling against the puppet.

"Stop," the man said and the girl stopped. She knew she had failed.

After she left, another man's name was called out and he began fighting against the puppet.

Just as they started, Alex was surprised to see the puppet's cultivation base suddenly increase to True Lord 6th realm to accommodate the man's own True Lord 6th realm cultivation base.

The fight lasted for a few minutes, in which it was clear that the man was strong enough to win against the puppet.

The evaluator stopped the match and passed the man.

"You have passed both of the tests. You can now go become a Lightsworn," the evaluator said as he brought out something from his bag.

When Alex saw what it was, he was a little confused.

'A sand watch?' he thought when he saw the evaluator place it on the table and the sand started flowing.

"Here in the Lightsworns, we do not accept tardiness. So, you have until this time to go and register yourself in the other tent right," the man pointed.

"Yes," the man said and ran away.

The evaluator then turned around and called another person to fight. This lasted for a while until it was Alex's turn to go down and fight.

He walked up to the puppet and its cultivation base changed to True Lord 9th realm.

That was way too weak. Still, Alex had to fight for almost a full minute, so he started.

The puppets attacking style was a simple hand-to-hand combat, so Alex decided to go with that too.

He dashed close to the puppet and delivered a weak, but still strong enough punch directly onto its chest.

The puppet tried to move away, but it wasn't fast enough. Alex's punch landed squarely on the chest and the puppet flew away.

It quickly stood back up, but Alex was already on top of it. He kicked it to the side and dashed in the direction it flew to attack it once again.

"Stop," the Evaluator said and Alex stopped.

'So fast?' he thought, but it was obvious he was better than the puppet.

"Good, you've passed. Same as everyone, you have a minute to reach that tent over there and register yourself," the Evaluator said and flipped the now pull sand watch.

Alex nodded and immediately left the room.

The tent was far, but not very. It would take him half a minute at best to reach it if he ran the whole way.

So, he ran.

Just as he was about to reach the opening of the tent, he heard a rather loud voice coming from the side.

"Mother, come on. I will carry you back," a small body of barely 8 years old said to his mother, who looked sickly.

"I am alright, my son. You don't have to—"

Before she finished, she immediately started coughing and vomited out a bunch of blood.

Alex's eyes immediately went wide and he rushed to her without thinking.

"Are you alright miss?" he asked, but the woman simply kept on vomiting blood.

"Miss, quickly eat this," he said as he brought out a poison antidote pill and a healing pill.

He brought the pill close to her face, but she showed no reaction.

"You passed," A voice came from behind him.

"What?" Alex said as he turned around and saw a man looking at him with a talisman in his hand.

"You passed the test," he said. "Whatever you are seeing is an illusion that was created to test your empathy and compassion. You can go to that tent and register for real now."

"Oh," Alex said as he turned around to look at the woman who was still vomiting blood. "So this is fake?" he thought and tried to touch her.

While his mind told him that he was touching someone, he could feel a surreal feeling that only came with knowingly being in an illusory formation.

"I see," he said. "Thank you."

Alex turned and went to the tent to prepare for the finalization of him entering the Lightsworns.

There were a bunch of people already in the tent he went to, but not everyone that had passed the puppet test was there.

'They failed at the empathy test?' he thought.

He sat by on an empty seat and waited for the tent to fill up. 20 minutes later, it was finally full.

"We have recorded your information and have registered you into the Lightsworn. However, one more task remains for you to fully become a Lightsworn and enter our legion," the man said.

Suddenly, words appeared in the air on a floating screen that started with 'I make an oath to the heavens…'

"Once you've said this oath, you will become a Lightsworn," the man said.

Everyone clamored to start saying the Oath. Alex prepared to say it as well.

Chapter 713: Oath

I swear to the heavens to protect this empire from any threat it may face. I swear to the heavens to serve the people of this empire and keep them safe from any harm the others may cause. I swear to the heavens to be lawful and enforce the law of the empire. I swear to the heavens to above always follow and obey the Emperor.

Alex read the words that hung in the air in front of them all. The information outside only said what the oath was about, not what it exactly was.

Only now did Alex get the exact oath he was meant to say to become a Lightsworn.

I swear to the heavens to protect this empire from any threat it may face.

That part of the oath felt fine for him. After all, as Lightsworn they were meant to protect the empire.

I swear to the heavens to serve the people of this empire and keep them safe from any harm the others may cause.

This was like the job of a normal police officer back in the central continent: serve and protect. It made sense why one would make such a vow.

I swear to the heavens to be lawful and enforce the law of the empire.

That oath was fine for the most part, except if there was ever a law change. What would Alex do if they changed the law to something worse?

'It's highly unlikely that would happen,' Alex thought and finally focused on the final part.

I swear to the heavens to above all always follow and obey the Emperor.

That, to him, felt like the most suspicious part of the oath. Follow and obey the Emperor? What if the emperor told him to go kill innocent folks? What if the emperor changed and it was now some douche?

And he had to obey the Emperor above all? The previous Oaths would mean nothing if the order came from the emperor directly. That let him use the Lightsworns as his personal group of slaves.

It was probably true that the Emperor wasn't the sort of person who would do such a thing. However, it still didn't help the fact that there were possibilities.

Alex fell into a dilemma on whether to say the oaths or not. Perhaps the dilemma would have been less hard on him if there was a way to get out of the oath through a sort of time limit or someone letting him free from the oath.

However, there was no such thing.

The only way Alex saw getting out of the oath was by leaving the Empire entirely or going to the forests to live like a hermit.

"I swear to the heavens…" One of the men close to him started saying his oath and soon the others followed suit.

The people around the room that were not the newcomers kept a close watch on who said the oath and who didn't.

Soon, aside from a few including Alex, everyone said the oaths.

"If you do not want to say the oaths, we understand. You are free to leave," the man in the front of them all spoke to the remaining few.

Half of them immediately bowed and left with no hesitation. The other half, including Alex, still couldn't decide.

In the end, all of them, except Alex, made a choice. Now, only Alex remained.

He looked at the oaths once more and thought of the things he would have to do. Then, he thought of the things he would likely obtain.

His arm.

"Are you saying it or not?" the man asked Alex.

Alex took a deep breath. 'Screw it. If anything bad happens, I will just leave this Empire,' he thought and opened his mouth.

"I—"

"I wouldn't say that if I were you," a voice spoke from next to him as a hand appeared around his shoulders.

The voice felt… familiar.

Alex quickly turned around to look at the new arriver. It was a young man that wore a stark white robe and had a head full of long golden hair that ended on black tips.

He had circular earrings with wavy spikes poking out from every side, and a smile hung on his face as if it were an accessory of its own.

"Brother Shen!" Alex called out in both shock and joy. "What are you doing here?"

"You should have let me know if you were alive. Why didn't you come to find me?" he asked.

"I—"

"Hey! Who are you?" the people in the room were now staring at them.

Shen Jing slowly turned his head towards the man in front of them all and brought his hand up to his face before putting a single finger on his lips.

"Ssshh," he sounded.

Suddenly, the whole room went silent. It wasn't just silent but rather suppressed. Every single person in the room could feel a pressure on them that they had never felt before.

"I'm talking here, so it would do you good if you kept quiet for a bit," Shen Jing said and turned back around to Alex.

"So? Why didn't you come to find me?" he asked.

"Come where?" Alex asked. "Brother Shen, I don't know where you live. Hell, I don't even know who you really are."

"Ah, right," Shen Jing said as he scratched his chin. "That's a problem, isn't it? Unfortunately, it is going to have to stay that way. So? Are you okay? How's Pearl?"

"We're doing fine," Alex said. "How did you find me?"

"I found you earlier this week," Shen Jing said. "I wanted to go talk to you, but you instead teleported away to who knows where."

"I had to go around the Empire searching for you and I only found you here this morning," Shen Jing said.

"Eh? Why didn't you just ask the people where I was teleported to?" Alex asked.

"I could do that? Ahem, Let's not talk about that," Shen Jing said and looked to the screen with the oath.

"They are making you say an oath?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I will finally be a member of the Lightsworns after I finish saying the oath."

"I heard these people say the oath," Shen Jing said. "It wasn't a bad oath, but there were too many loopholes one could exploit. You are better off not saying it."

Alex gave a dejected look at that.

"What's wrong?" Shen Jing caught his sad face.

"Well, if I don't say that, I won't be a Lightsworn," Alex said.

"Why do you want to be an Empire's lapdog in the first place?" Shen Jing asked.

"I told you before, brother Shen. After becoming a Lightsworn, I will have a chance to meet with the princess and use her healing crystal to see if I can get my arm back," he said.

"Ah, right. You did say that before," Shen Jing said. "So why bother with this oath? Let's just go meet with the princess and be done with."

"Meet the princess?" Alex was shocked at the boldness.

"Yes, where is she?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex shook his head. "I don't know," he said.

"What does she look like?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex shook his head again. He really did not know anything about the princess.

Shen Jing turned his head at the man whose eyes were wide with shock and fear still. A single call for silence had left him reeling in fear.

"You! Where's the princess?" he asked.

"I…I do not know, senior," the man barely spoke up.

"Anyone here knows anything about the princess?" Shen Jing asked. However, not a single soul answered.

Shen Jing shook his head and sighed. "Well, this isn't working," he said.

"What do we do then?" Alex asked.

"Well, one person should be able to help us for sure," Shen Jing said.

"WhoooOOO…" Alex couldn't finish his words before he was picked up and taken away somewhere.

When his blurry vision became normal again, he was in the middle of a large hall with a very tall ceiling.

The entrance was behind him with large doors made of the most exquisite wood out there. The pillars and walls were also made with probably the best item one could find.

The purple accent looked quite good all around the hall with even the chairs looking majestic.

Alex was standing behind Shen Jing and couldn't see the front, but on both sides of them were people sitting on great chairs that looked at him, or rather Shen Jing with a threatening look.

"Calm down, I'm not here to hurt anyone," Shen Jing said as he looked at the people that looked like they were about to attack him.

Alex slowly walked out from behind him and saw what was in the front.

At the center of the room on the opposite side was a young man with long black hair and a clean-shaven face that wore purple and gold clothes.

Alex had a suspicion that he knew who this was, and the suspicion got answered when he saw the golden crown full of intricate gemstones on the man's head.

This was the Emperor of the Luminance empire.

"Who are you?" The Emperor asked calmly. "What are you doing in my Palace?"

"Are you the Emperor?" Shen Jing asked.

"Insolence!" a man stood up, but the Emperor put up his hand to stop him from speaking any further.

"Yes, I am the Emperor," he said. "Who are you?"

Shen Jing shook his head. "It doesn't matter to you. We're not here for you in the first place. We're here to see your daughter for a small thing. Call her here, the one with the healing crystal."

Chapter 714: The Princess

"You want me to call my daughter and yet you won't even say who you are?" the Emperor asked. "Despite who you are, I am still an Emperor. You will respect me as such."

From what Alex could tell, the Emperor was already showing signs of fear around Shen Jing, but he was still keeping his cool.

"Ohh," Shen Jing gave a smile. "Very well, I will tell you who I am."

Shen Jing then turned to the rest of them and said, "Leave!"

The different court officials and guards looked confused for a second. After all, following the orders of someone else in front of the Emperor they swore to follow and serve was unacceptable.

Shen Jing sighed when he saw that. He simply flicked his fingers and suddenly every single one of the people in the room, including the shadow guards hiding in the ceiling and walls was thrown out of the room.

Alex was astounded when he saw them all get thrown out, but he was sure they would be alright. After all, they were all cultivators, to begin with.

"You should leave for a while too," Shen Jing said to Alex.

Alex nodded and left the room. After he was gone, Shen Jing turned around to the young emperor.

"Who exactly are you, senior?" the Emperor asked with a timid face. He could already tell that Shen Jing was stronger than him. So, all he could hope for was that he wasn't an enemy.

As he waited, Shen Jing spoke up and said something to him. The Emperor's eyes widened in horror when he heard the words.

"No way…" he said.

Then, the young Emperor's face lost all color when he saw something else. Only then did he vividly remember the thing his father had told him about.

The truth that every Emperor should know about before they take the throne. That truth was here in front of him today.

* * * * * *

Alex waited for a bit outside while the many court officials and guards tried to open the door. However, the door was covered with a golden barrier that they couldn't break through it.

Many of them also looked at Alex as if they were going to hurt him, but the threat of who was inside kept them from doing so.

As Alex waited, he suddenly heard a different set of commotion coming from the other side of the crowd.

He turned around to see the servants, guards, and court officials part to give way to a young woman who walked through.

The young woman wore light-purple robes and a hair braided full of gems and ribbons. A purple veil covered her face, but even then one could see that she was beautiful.

There was a certain elegance in her steps that only came from rigorous training. Besides her, there was two purple-robed male, both very strong.

From what Alex could tell, they were both in the saint realm. As for the young woman herself, she was in the upper realms of True King.

'Is she the princess?' he wondered.

"What are you all doing out here?" the woman asked the group.

One of the court officials walked forward and explained everything that had happened.

The woman's eyes went wide. "And you let my father be with such an individual?" she asked, worry filling her voice.

She quickly walked off and stood in front of the golden wall before striking it with a blue-colored attack.

'Water Qi?' Alex thought when he saw that.

The attack landed on the barrier and suddenly the barrier disappeared.

"Woah!" people started shouting in surprise.

"When did the princess get so strong?" they asked.

However, the door opened and Shen Jing's voice came from inside.

"Little Yu, come in. Bring the young lady too," he said.

Alex walked forward and stood next to the princess. "Princess, please," he said as he led the way.

The princess didn't understand what was happening, but she had been called here by her father, so she walked in without even Alex prompting her to.

The two guards of hers tried to walk in as well, but a force stopped them from entering.

Once both Alex and the princess were inside, the door closed on its own.

"Father, what's going on?" the princess asked as she ran up to her father, barely giving a glance to Shen Jing.

The Emperor had gotten back his composure, but he seemed a little afraid of Shen Jing still, and Alex could see that.

'What did he do?' he wondered.

"Xumei, did you bring the crystal, as I asked?" the Emperor asked.

"Yes, father," the Princess said and brought out a staff. The blue staff had intricate details along the side of the shaft, and at the top of it was a half-sphere transparent crystal that shined a very light shade of blue.

"Is that the healing crystal?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes, Senior," the Emperor said before the princess could say anything. The princess looked at her father with a weird look on her face. She had never heard him call someone so young senior before.

"Come here, little girl," Shen Jing called.

The princess looked at her father who nodded to her. Only then did the princess walk over to Shen Jing.

Shen Jing stepped to the side and said, "heal his arm for me."

The princess nodded and looked at Alex, who quickly pulled up his long sleeve and proceeded to remove his fake arm.

"Wait, he isn't wounded," the princess said. "That's an amputated limb. I can only heal, not regrow."

As soon as Alex heard those words, disappointment filled every corner of his very being.

"Are you sure?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes, senior," she said. "I have tried before, but I can only heal wounds and poisons, but I can do nothing for something that isn't already there."

"Hmm… still, try it for me," he said.

The princess nodded and grabbed her staff by the sphere, rather than the shaft, and placed another palm on Alex's now bare stump.

She took a deep breath and started doing something and slowly Alex could feel the energy enter his body.

The ends of his stump felt stimulated, but other than that, nothing else happened.

The princess gave up. "See, it doesn't work," she said.

"Why did you hold your staff so weird?" Shen Jing asked.

"Oh, that's because it's the crystal that's the source of the power and I have to touch it in order to heal others," she said. "The rest of the staff is just there for decoration or a bit of convenience because of the shape of the crystal making it hard to hold."

"Oh, what shape could that be?" Shen Jing asked as his spiritual sense went into the staff and checked it thoroughly. Suddenly, his eyes narrowed when he noticed something.

"It's in the shape of a—" before she could finish Shen Jing grabbed the staff and took it away from her.

"Senior?" The Emperor spoke but Shen Jing gave him no heed. Even Alex was weirded out by what was happening.

"Brother Shen?" he called out, but Shen Jing was focused on the crystal.

He grabbed the edge of the metal that cupped the crystal and tore it away like it was made up of paper. After tearing it away from each side, he brought out the crystal.

Alex finally saw the crystal in full.

The transparent crystal with the blue hue was mostly spherical, except for one side where it looked like someone pinched it and pulled it until it was pointed.

Without any warning, Shen Jing pulled back his arm and punched the crystal as hard as he could.

"No!" the princess cried out in horror, but it was too late.

BANG!

Alex suddenly felt a shockwave in the air as it pushed him back towards the door where he struck it and fell to the ground.

He felt his brain rattle and his interior organs shuffle around for a bit. He felt like vomiting out everything in his body, but he stopped himself.

The Emperor put up a barrier to protect himself and his daughter, but even then they were scared.

"Senior?" the Emperor asked.

Shen Jing's smile was no more and instead, he had an irritated, but the concerned face on him.

"Where'd you find this?" Shen Jing asked, bringing Alex's attention back to the crystal that was perfectly fine.

"The crystal?" the Emperor asked. "That is something that had been passed down in my family for generations."

"Every single princess that can take the crystal and use it to heal our family and our warriors," the Emperor said. "That's how it has been for a thousand years."

"I didn't ask you that," Shen Jing said.

"Ac-According to the records, this crystal came down in the meteor shower over a thousand years ago, senior," The Emperor finally answered his question.

Shen Jing's face changed. "The meteor shower?" he asked. "God damn it!"

"Is something wrong, senior?" the Emperor asked.

"Yes, there is," Shen Jing said. "But you won't understand."

"Damn it!" Shen Jing said before rubbing his chin as he thought of something.

"This artifact is far too dangerous to be kept with you," he said. "I will be taking it away today."

"Senior?!"

"No, you can't!"

Both father and daughter spoke up at once as they put on aghast expressions on their face.

"I'm not trying to steal from you, little girl. I'm trying to protect you," Shen Jing said.

"You have no idea the amount of trouble you will get from keeping the Ocean God's Teardrop with you."

Chapter 715: Legacy Artifact

"Ocean God's Teardrop? Senior, you know what this is?" the Emperor asked with a face full of surprise. Ever since his grandfather found the crystal, they had been wondering as to what exactly it was.

It was by accident that they realized it could heal wounds, but aside from that, they knew nothing.

Just like every other item that dropped during the meteor shower, this one was an enigma too.

They had all wondered at times as to what the meteor shower was exactly. However, after getting no answer for millennia, they had given up.

Now that the Emperor found an answer, albeit being the name of a single thing, he wanted to know more about it.

"It would be a lie to say I know it exactly," Shen Jing said. "I have heard and have seen images of it."

"How did something like this come here?" Shen Jing softly spoke to himself.

"Who's the Ocean God?" Alex asked from behind.

"A dead guy," Shen Jing said without thinking. "He doesn't matter right now. What matters is that his Legacy Artifact is here and the people that are under him will soon come looking for it."

"And trust me when I say this, you don't want to mess with these people," Shen Jing said.

Shen Jing then turned around and tossed the crystal to Alex. "Try and heal yourself. See if you can do it," he said.

Alex nodded and poured Qi into the crystal. It was a struggle as the artifact belonged to someone else, but he succeeded.

Suddenly, cool energy released from the crystal that once again tried to heal him. However, this time the energy was weaker than when the princess did it so nothing happened.

"It's not happening, brother Shen," Alex said.

"Well, I didn't think you could," Shen Jing said.

Alex got dejected. "So, this won't help me?" he asked.

Shen Jing shook his head. "It could if we had time, or the little princess here had refined it better, but as it stands, I don't see how you will."

"This artifact demands a superior Water spirit root. The better the root, the better the results will be," Shen Jing said. "However, aside from that, they also have to refine it."

"From what I can tell, these princesses have been refining the same small part of the artifact since the very beginning and haven't made any advancement in it since then."

"This thing can heal the worst of wounds. You could lose your whole body, and if your soul survives, it can heal you."

"It could heal you from the worst of poisons out there too."

"It could even heal wounds to the spirit itself. However, since the princesses stopped refining it, they have only touched on the first part," Shen Jing said.

The rest of the 3 people stood stunned when they heard that information. The Princess knew the most about the crystal out of all the three, and yet even she was surprised.

"So… if we were to refine this, we can use it?" Alex asked. He had refined things before. The ring he was wearing once belonged to someone else. Since he had managed to refine that too, he should be able to refine the teardrop as well.

Shen Jing shook his head. "You can't," he said.

"But, I've refined such things before too," Alex said softly to him. "Remember the ring?"

"This is different," Shen Jing said. "A Legacy Artifact is not so simple to refine. That is the artifact someone spends their whole life with. It's the artifact they used every day for a long time."

"It is the artifact that they are remembered by. Do you think you can compare such an artifact to something so common as a storage ring?" Shen Jing asked and shook his head.

"The princesses must have taken decades to even reach the level they have and the reason they stopped was that refining any more became excruciatingly hard."

"If they wanted to advance, they needed a better cultivation base," Shen Jing said. "If you can wait until the princess or you have a better cultivation base, you will have already gotten your arm back by simply being in the saint realm."

"I see," Alex said as disappointment filled him again. 'I guess I really am meant to wait until I reach Saint realm then,' he thought.

"Anyway, I'm taking this now, goodbye," Shen Jing said and turned to leave.

"Senior wait," The Emperor spoke even before the Princess could voice out anything.

"What is it now?" Shen Jing gave an annoyed look that stopped the words that were going to come out of the Emperor's mouth.

"Senior, we are too reliant on that crystal. Our people expect me to heal them whenever they are wounded. If you take that away, we will…" The Princess didn't know what to say next.

Shen Jing thought for a second and sighed. "You're right," he said. "I shouldn't just take things away from others."

"You only use it for healing, right?" he asked.

The princess nodded.

"Alright, then take him in exchange," Shen Jing said as he pushed Alex forward.

"Huh? Eh? What?" Alex was surprised and panicked.

"I'm trading you for this crystal," Shen Jing said as the crystal disappeared somewhere.

"Who… is this young man?" the Emperor asked awkwardly, trying not to push any boundaries with his questions.

"He's a little guy I found in your empire. Since you need to heal your people, he will be doing what the crystal has been doing until now," Shen Jing said.

"This young man can heal people?" the princess asked suspiciously.

"Well, he's an alchemist so I hope so," Shen Jing said. "You can make healing pills right?"

Alex nodded.

"See? He will be a fine replacement," Shen Jing said.

"That's…" the princess didn't know what to say. Even the Emperor was speechless.

"Tell them how good you are. They will trust you then," Shen Jing said.

'Am I being sold off? Is this human trafficking?' Alex thought for a second. Still, in the end, he sighed and brought out his badge to show the Emperor.

"I'm a True Heaven rank Alchemist, your majesty. I can promise you that I can make the pills as required," he said.

"Oh," the Emperor gave a surprised look. He hadn't expected someone so young looking to have such a high rank as an Alchemist.

"What's your name, young man?" the Emperor asked.

"I am Yu Ming, your majesty," Alex said.

"Very well. Since Senior has given you to us, we will gracefully take you. Xumei, he will be under you from now on. Treat him like he's my guest," the Emperor said.

"Yes, father," the Princess nodded.

"Are you really selling me off, brother Shen?" Alex whispered next to him.

"Selling you? Why would I sell you?" Shen Jing asked.

"But… but you just gave me away to the Emperor," he said.

"Oh, right," Shen Jing said and turned to the emperor. "I hope you know this is just a limited-time thing. You can give him ingredients and he will make you a pill."

"However, that will go on for just 2 years. After 2 years, he will leave. Meaning, you have 2 years to switch from being reliant on this artifact to being reliant on pills and such to heal you," Shen Jing said.

"Yes, senior," the Emperor said. He wouldn't have kept Alex longer even if he wasn't told. After all, Alex really wasn't a replacement for the crystal, but rather something to aid in their transition to stop being reliant on the crystal.

"Alright, now that things are done, we're leaving," Shen Jing said. "Let's go, little Yu."

"I'm not staying here?" Alex asked.

"You'll come here tomorrow. For today, I have many questions to ask you," Shen Jing said and took Alex away.

The doors closed behind them and only the Emperor and the princess remained.

"Are we really going to let him take the crystal just like that?" the princess asked.

"Yes," the Emperor nodded.

"Why? That's ours. How can he just take it away like that?" the princess asked.

"Xumei, there are times when you have to know to back off. This is one of those times," the Emperor said.

"Is he stronger than you?" she asked.

"Many times," The Emperor said.

"Who is he?" the Princess asked.

"I can't say," the Emperor said. "You shouldn't go around trying to find his information either. That is a royal decree."

"That's… I've never seen you so serious before, father," she said.

"I know," he said. "I just… I didn't expect to meet him today."

"Who is he?" The Princess' curiosity was truly piqued.

"I told you, I can't say," the Emperor said.

"You can't say? Or you won't say?" the princess asked.

"I can't say," the Emperor repeated himself.

"Oh… wait, did you?" the princess' eyes went wide. "Did you make an oath?"

The Emperor nodded. Finally, the princess understood the severity of the situation.

'Just who the hell can force an emperor to make an Oath?' she wondered.

* * * * * *

"Are sure it was a good idea to talk to the Emperor so directly? You might be strong, but he's still the Emperor, you know?" Alex asked.

They had already left the palace and were out in the streets now.

"Of course," Shen Jing said. "Why would it matter to me? He's not my Emperor."

"Eh? Are you not from the Luminance Empire?" Alex asked.

"Is Luminance Empire the only location on this continent?" Shen Jing asked with a smile.

'Right,' Alex thought. There was the Crimson Empire and the beast realm. Aside from those two, there were also multiple islands to the west and south that were their own hegemony.

"Are you from one of the Hegemonies in the ocean?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing simply smiled, not saying anything. They soon reached a restaurant where they sat down to order some food.

"Here, I got you something," Shen Jing said as he chewed on the biggest piece of meat on the table. He reached into… somewhere and brought out something before placing it next to Alex.

Alex looked at the new item, a fruit, and gave a weird look. He had never seen it before. Even so, very quickly a name floated up to his head.

As soon as it did, his eyes went wide and his jaw dropped to the point that one could see the food inside his mouth.

Alex quickly swallowed and picked up the fruit to watch it with reverence.

"This…" he still couldn't believe what he was seeing. One of the rarest things in the world was sitting on the table in front of him.

"This is a Divine Devil's fruit."

Chapter 716: Three Demonic Plants

"Yes!" Shen Jing said as he ate another piece of the meant. "I brought it for you. Eat it later tonight."

Alex looked at the bright red and yellow pear-shaped fruit with swirls all around the outside of it.

"Um, I don't need it though," Alex said. "I've already gone through Mortal Cleansing."

"Oh, you've eaten this already?" Shen Jing asked with a bit of surprise.

"No, I've never even seen this before," Alex said. "I just went through Mortal cleansing… on my own."

Alex wasn't sure if he wanted to reveal the existence of Pearl's help in Mortal Cleansing. While he was sure that one would need to ingest the White Tiger's blood essence to do what he did, there was still the chance that Shen Jing would think Pearl would help him and take him for his own.

While the chance was very, very small, Alex didn't want to take it.

"You went through mortal cleansing without a Divine Devil's fruit? Now that's interesting," Shen Jing said. "Wait, how did you know about this fruit if you've never eaten it or seen it in the first place? There's no way there are pictures of it out there, right?"

"No, I just know the names of all alchemy ingredients out there. So while I haven't seen it before, I recognize it," Alex said.

"Huh?" Shen Jing gave a weird look, maybe even a confused one.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"This isn't an Alchemy ingredient," Shen Jing said. "Why would you think a Divine Devil's fruit is an Alchemy ingredient?"

"Huh? But it is. I know the information of all Alchemy ingredients," Alex said as he grabbed the Divine Devil's fruit.

He was about to say something when he noticed something weird about the fruit. The fruit was indeed the Divine Devil's fruit and it was about 122 years old, however, it had no energy in it at all.

Or rather, it did but the information about it that he was supposed to get wasn't there at all.

'What's going on?' he thought.

"Yeah, right. Like anyone can create pills out of Divine Devil's fruit. If they can do it, I will call myself their little brother," Shen Jing said.

Alex was still confused. "But… I know the name," he thought to himself.

"I have never even heard of anyone talking about making anything out of plants that descend from the three Demonic plants," Shen Jing said offhandedly.

"The three Demonic Plants?" Alex asked as his eyes narrowed. He had heard of that before… but where?

As he thought for a moment, an answer came to him.

"Ah! The plants blessed by one of the gods," Alex said as he remembered Godslayer's words.

'There are only two true gods in the world. One that blessed the Four Heavenly Beasts, and the other one that blessed the Three Demonic Plants.'

"Wait, are you saying the Divine Devil's fruit is one of the three Demonic Plants??" Alex asked with a shocked face.

"What? No. It's descended from one. Pretty close too," Shen Jing said.

"If you don't mind me asking, what are the Three Demonic Plants?" Alex asked.

"Well," Shen Jing mulled for a bit as he saw Alex's face. "Fine, I'll tell you."

"The Demonic plants are just normal plants that were blessed by the gods to be the best of all the plants in the world."

"There are 3 of them, each that affect one of the 3 things for a cultivator."

"Body, Qi, and Mind."

"The Divine Devil's fruit is a plant that descended from the plant that affects one's body. While the Demonic body Plant affects the body with every single part of the plant, its descendant, the Divine Devil plant, only affects the body with its fruit," Shen Jing said.

"Oh," Alex said. "Does it have a name? The Demonic body plant I mean."

Shen Jing smiled. "It's too early for you to know about them. Just learning they exist is already more than you should know."

"I see," Alex said, not asking any more questions. "I wonder why I know the name if it's not an alchemy ingredient. Maybe I just know the plant names."

Alex looked at the fruit once again and started considering what he could do with it.

"Stop acting like this is your first time seeing something like this," Shen Jing said as he continued eating his food.

"Huh? But it is my first time seeing this fruit," Alex said.

"Not the fruit, a descendant of one of the Three Demonic plants. It's not like you're looking at one of the Demonic plants itself," Shen Jing said.

Alex's face suddenly got serious. "I've seen another one? Where? When?" he asked.

"Did you forget what I said?" Shen Jing said. "The Demonic plants affect Body, Qi, and Mind."

Shen Jing pointed to his head. "Have you never seen anything that affects that?" he asked.

"I have?" Alex thought for a second and immediately his eyes went wide. "I HAVE!"

"Spirit Cleansing Lily!" he shouted.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "It's a descendant of the Demonic Mind Plant where only the flower of it actually works."

"Is that why it is not part of any pill?" Alex said. "I didn't know I was so close to the descendant of one of the Demonic plants."

He then looked at the fruit in his hand and said, "Two, now."

"Are there any more?" Alex asked.

"There are," Shen Jing said, "But most of them don't do anything. It's like when you have too good of a physical constitution, so you have a hard time having kids since Heaven doesn't want you to pass on your advantage to your offspring."

"Huh?" Alex was confused.

"Are you an only child?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex nodded.

"Point proven," Shen Jing said as he chewed his meat.

"Wait, what are you saying, brother Shen? Are you saying that my parents couldn't have more than me?" Alex asked.

"They might have wanted only one child," Shen Jing said, "but it is more than likely they wanted more, but they just couldn't."

"The heaven is really considerate about letting a person with great constitution have children. Just the fact you were born means your parents had to fight the odds for that," Shen Jing said.

"Is… is everyone like that?" Alex asked. "What if the parents are normal? Can their child not be special?"

"Oh, they can. Absolutely," Shen Jing said. "But do you think your parents are normal?"

Alex thought for a moment and shook his head.

"Yeah, the plants are similar too. Heaven just can't let a Demonic Plant's offspring be good too, so most of their offspring end up mutating. Mostly into something useless, but sometimes into these," Shen Jing said.

"Even then, it is hard to acquire them," Shen Jing said. "Not only are they rare, to begin with, but they are also hard to pick."

"For the Spirit Cleansing lily, you have to choose it from one of the many flowers that grow. It's nearly impossible unless you have a particularly strong spirit."

"As for the Divine Devil's fruit, you have to pick them up after they have become 120 years old and before they become 123 years old."

"If you eat anything that was picked outside of those 3 years, you end up causing problems for yourself," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded. He had already seen the effect of eating a raw Divine Devil's fruit on Fu Wen's mother back in the Scarlet city where she had fallen into a coma after reading halfway through Mortal Cleansing.

"Thank you, brother Shen, for explaining it all to me," Alex said.

"Yeah well, turns out you didn't need it in the end," Shen Jing said.

"About that, I have a favor to ask," Alex said. "Can I take this fruit anyway?"

"Hmm? Why?" Shen Jing asked. "You want to feed it to Pearl?"

"No, I want to feed it to my mother," Alex said. "Wait, it works on beasts too?"

"Of course," Shen Jing said.

'Right, if the Spirit Cleansing lily worked, then, of course, the Divine Devil's fruit would work as well,' Alex thought.

Now, he didn't know what to do. He had been thinking of giving this fruit to his mother for a while, but if Pearl could eat it, then he deserved it too.

Especially since his cultivation had been slowing down for a while.

'What should I do?'

Chapter 717: Insecurities

"Why do you look so down?" Shen Jing asked.

"Well, here's the thing," Alex said. "I want Pearl to eat this fruit, but I also want to give it to my mother. So, I'm not sure what I should do."

"Your mother? Did she come to this continent too?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex nodded.

"Oh, then don't worry about here," Shen Jing said as he reached somewhere and brought out another Divine Devil fruit. "I have two."

Alex was surprised. "Where did you find two? Aren't they very rare?" he asked.

"They grow in my backyard," Shen Jing said.

"In your backyard? It must be quite amazing to grow these then," Alex said.

"Where's your mother now?" Shen Jing asked.

"In the DawnSpring city. She's a disciple in the Flowing Brush sect," Alex answered.

"Alright, I will give this to her later then," he said.

"I can give it to her," Alex said.

"Well, we both will," Shen Jing said with a smile. After they finished eating, Shen Jing took Alex and flew in the direction of DawnSpring city.

A distance of around three thousand kilometers ended up taking Alex only 6 minutes at best.

Due to his increased cultivation, it seemed Shen Jing was going faster than before now.

'Geez, just how fast can he go?' he wondered.

When they stopped, Alex pointed toward the sect and they entered. Shen Jing was practically trespassing, but not a single alarm went off for some reason.

As far as the sect running formation was concerned, he wasn't even there.

Alex quickly introduced his mother to Shen Jing and gave her a Divine Devil's fruit. Then, the two of them went to his house to talk for a bit.

"That you for telling me about the Demonic plants again," Alex said. "Those sort of information are impossible to come by."

"Yeah, well you shouldn't be searching for such information in public places. Sects and families are very conscious of what they have and what they can protect.

Alex nodded to agree with the statement when he thought of something. 'Something that can't be found in public places.'

Suddenly, a question that was plaguing his mind for 2 weeks ago came flooding back.

"Brother Shen, I… am facing a problem with my cultivation right now. I was hoping you could help me," he said.

"Oh, you're facing problems with cultivation? That's weird," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded. "About 2 weeks ago, I sat down to cultivate, but I kept coming out of it. I think someone was talking to me, and I also remember feeling very angry and scared."

"Honestly I have no idea what happened, but I ended up going through Qi deviation and lost a bit of my cultivation due to that," Alex said.

Shen Jing's face suddenly got serious and he sensed Alex's cultivation base again.

"True Lord 9th realm," he said softly. "If what you say is accurate, then you must have been tormented by an Inner Demon."

"An Inner Demon? What's that?" Alex asked. "Does it have anything to do with the demons from the demon realm?"

"No, these are completely different. Inner Demons were named way before," Shen Jing said. "What an Inner Demon is, is the world forcing you to face your trauma and insecurities."

"The world?" Alex asked.

"Yes, the world. Or you may call it Heaven too. The same thing," Shen Jing said. "Remember what I said before? Heaven hates letting someone with an advantage grow. So, they try to stop them by putting obstacles in their way."

"Wait, wait, wait," Alex stopped him. "The Heaven is trying to stop me from advancing because I was born with my body and talent?"

"No," Shen Jing said. "That is something your parents faced, not you. Since they fought through it, you have nothing to worry about in that regard."

"Then what advantage do I have?" Alex asked.

"Dao," Shen Jing said. "You know the Dao of Explosion, right?"

"Yes," Alex said. "And Heat too."

"Another one?" Shen Jing raised an eyebrow.

"Yes," Alex said.

"When?" Shen Jing asked.

"2 years ago," Alex said.

"Wow, nice," he said. "Anyway. Since you now have 2 different Dao, you have power, or rather Authority over the world itself in that regard."

"You can force the world to do what you want. The world allows it, but they also put obstacles in your way to try and stop you."

"There are 2 types of obstacles that they put on you. Physical and mental," Shen Jing said.

"Physical obstacles usually come when you are about to break through between Major realms, like from True to Saint, or Saint to Immortal."

"Since you know 2 Daos, it is likely you will have to face it when you break through to the Saint realm," Shen Jing said.

"I will? What will I have to face? Will different beasts come to attack me?" Alex asked.

"No, you will have to fight something that comes from up above," Shen Jing said.

"From above?" Alex asked as he started thinking about what came from above. Then, he remembered the scene when Lady Ren's strength went past the Saint realm and crossed the border of the Immortal realms.

"Heavenly Judgment?" Alex asked with a face that was drained of any blood.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "Except, this time we call it Tribulation lightning."

He saw the scared look on Alex's face and said, "Don't worry, it won't be as strong as a Heavenly Judgment's lightning. Just a realm or two above what you are trying to break through to."

"Although, in your case, it might come down stronger given how high your strength is."

Alex's face which was about to be relaxed tightened up again with fear.

"Don't worry, you'll be fine," Shen Jing said. "Besides, we are talking about Inner Demons. That's the mental obstacle the world will put in your path to stop you from breaking through a minor realm."

"From True Lord to True King, from True King to True Emperor, from True Emperor to Saint Condensation, that sort of thing," Shen Jing said.

"We will go through it even when we break through major realms?" Alex asked.

"Of course, it's not going to stop now," Shen Jing said. "Anyway, Inner Demon is simply your trauma and your insecurities taking the form of a voice to play with your mind."

"As long as you have a solid heart, you will pass through," Shen Jing said.

"So… I need to know what my Inner Demon says so I can prepare against it?" Alex asked.

"No, you do not prepare for Inner Demon," Shen Jing said. "There is no preparing for it. No matter what, there will always be something in you that your Inner Demon will focus on to torture you."

"The worst part is you don't realize it's an Inner Demon while it's tormenting you, and you don't remember what it tormented you with afterward."

"So, the best way to prepare for an Inner Demon is to face your insecurities before you try to breakthrough. That way, you give the demon not many things to use against you."

Shen Jing slapped his thigh. "Right, bring out an empty talisman," he said.

Alex nodded and brought out one.

"Okay, now write everything that is troubling you in there. One of the ways to face your insecurities is to write it down and think through it one by one," Shen Jing said.

Alex thought for a moment, nodded, and started writing. He thought about what could be troubling him so much and noted down whatever came to mind.

"Are you done?" Shen Jing asked after seeing Alex put down the Talisman.

"I don't really know much, but I think I'm done," Alex said. "Do you want to read?"

"I can't read," Shen Jing reminded him. "Say your first point out loud."

"I worry I will never get my arm back," Alex said.

"Haha, that's a stupid one," Shen Jing said. "I told you, once you reach Saint realm, it will grow back even if you don't want it. You should throw it out of your mind now. Alright, next?"

Alex nodded.

"I worry I am ruining Pearl's potential," he said.

"Ruin his potential? How?" Shen Jing gave a weird face.

"I… Pearl was supposed to go through a ritual to evolve or something, but I stopped that from happening. I am starting to believe that is not the right thing," Alex said.

"Hmm, can you bring out Pearl?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex nodded and in bright white light, Pearl came out.

"Hmm… Old man?" Pearl asked when he saw Shen Jing.

"How are you doing, little fellow? Did you miss me?" Shen Jing asked.

"No," Pearl said.

"What?" Shen Jing made a sad face. "Here I thought you would be happy to see me again."

"I am," Pearl said, "but I didn't miss you. I have a brother and mother with me. I don't miss anyone else."

"Mother?" Shen Jing gave a weird look.

"My mother," Alex said.

"Oh," Shen Jing said. "Come here, Pearl."

Pearl jumped into his embrace and Shen Jing pet him a bit. At the same time, he checked Pearl as well.

"Yeah, he's fine. There's nothing to worry about him," Shen Jing said.

"Really? But his cultivation speed has been slowing down recently," Alex said.

"That's just how beasts are. Their cultivation speed is usually slower than humans. Plants have it worse," Shen Jing said.

"So, he's fine?" Alex asked.

"He's fine," Shen Jing said. "Of course, if he can evolve, that would probably increase his speed. But strictly speaking, he doesn't need it right now."

"As long as you get him to evolve before he reaches the Immortal realm, he will be okay."

Chapter 718: Belong

"What's next?" Shen Jing asked Alex to go through the rest of the insecurities he had.

Alex read the next one.

"I worry about my father," Alex said.

"Your father? Where is he?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex shook his head. "I don't know. That's why I worry. He was teleported to a random location along with my mom. While I think he's in the Southern continent because he said he ended up in a place with Desert, I can't be sure," Alex said.

"Well, Southern Continent is the only place that's mostly desert," Shen Jing said. "Is that the only information you have?"

"Well," Alex thought for a second. "He couldn't cultivate either."

"Yeah, that's definitely Southern Continent," Shen Jing said.

Alex couldn't believe that. "The northern section of the Western Continent is also a desert," he said.

"I know," Shen Jing said. "I went there in the last few years. Trust me, that is not where your father went to."

"How do you know?" Alex asked.

"Because Senior used the teleportation formation that was already in place," Shen Jing said. "He made sure to send people to places where they could survive."

"You ever wonder why you didn't appear inside a lake, or in the middle of a pack of beasts? That's because he made sure to put some safeguard when teleporting you all."

"Besides, it is unlikely all 3 of you ended up in the Western Continent. After all, the teleportation formation here is considerably much worse than the other continents, so fewer people got sent here anyway," Shen Jing said.

"Eh? That's the reason why Western Continent didn't get many players?" Alex asked.

"Yes. Either way, your father should be in the southern continent," Shen Jing said.

"That doesn't make me feel very good though," Alex said. "He's still in a new place and probably didn't know what to do. I worry."

"It's just the southern continent, you know," Shen Jing said. "It's not like he was sent to the ocean. Also, hasn't it been 7 or 8 years since he went there? He's probably living a good life right now. You needn't worry at all."

Alex nodded, but he couldn't get rid of the worry.

"Next up," Shen Jing said.

Alex looked at the next one. "I worry that someone will find out about my talent and try to take advantage of me while I'm still weak, maybe even kill me," he said.

"Why do I feel like this is directed at me?" Shen Jing asked.

"What? No, I'm talking about in general," Alex hurriedly explained.

"I'm joking, chill," Shen Jing said with a chuckle. "You don't need to worry about that. After all, who dares do anything to you while I'm around. Besides, I even got the Emperor to be in your favor. Do you still think you have something to worry about?"

"I guess not," Alex said.

"Any more?" Shen Jing asked.

"Well, there is a big one," Alex said as he deliberated a bit.

"What is it?" Shen Jing asked.

"You see, as soon as I became a cultivator, my masters took me in and trained me in the sect. While I was there, I thought of the sects as my home. However, after my master who taught me alchemy passed away, I realized there really isn't anything keeping me tethered to the sect."

"After I came here, I was going to roam around too. I found my mother, but while I like living with her here, I still don't see this place as my home."

Shen Jing listened. "What place do you see as your home then?" he asked.

"The Central continent. Back where my actual home is," Alex said.

"So, what's the problem? What's troubling you?" Shen Jing asked.

"I… I think of it as my home, but none of my parents are there, and everyone I cared about is scattered throughout the world. Even if I manage to go back there… do I still count it as my home?" Alex asked.

"Not only that. Ever since I became a cultivator, I feel like I was destined to cultivate and become someone big."

"If that is the case then, can I still go back to my home? Do I even belong there anymore?" Alex asked. He had been wanting to go back to the Central continent for a long time, back to his home.

However, now that no one lived there, was it still his home?

Shen Jing sighed. "That's one thing I can't help you with. You will have to figure that out yourself," he said.

Alex nodded.

"However, there is something I can tell you. It is fine not feeling like you belong somewhere but still finding happiness there," Shen Jing said.

"Besides, it's not the place you really belong to, it's the people. You don't feel like you belong to your home now because deep inside you can tell that it's no longer your home."

"Your home was a place where your father and mother lived. As soon as they moved to a different location, that location became your new home," Shen Jing said.

Alex fell into thought. Shen Jing was right. He didn't feel like he belonged there because he really didn't belong there anymore.

But that didn't matter. He didn't have to care for something just because he belonged to it, or it belonged to him. There was nothing wrong with wanting to go back to see the Central continent.

After all, it had once been his home. It wasn't anymore, but who cared? He would go because he wanted to, not because he felt like he belonged there.

Alex felt his heart grow significantly lighter after the talk.

"Thank you, brother Shen," Alex said.

"It's okay," Shen Jing said. "Are you done?"

Alex looked at the list and saw that he could figure out the rest on his own. "I'm done," he said.

"Alright, my time to ask questions then," Shen Jing said. "Tell me everything that happened back in the Demon Realm."

Alex nodded and told everything.

"Wait, you were the one that killed the girl?" Shen Jing raised an eyebrow.

"Yes," Alex said. "Why?"

Shen Jing smirked and sent his spiritual sense to thoroughly check Alex. When he reached a certain point, he couldn't help but show a shocked expression.

"What? What's wrong?" Alex asked. He hadn't sensed Shen Jing's sensing, so he didn't know what he was reacting to.

"Well, aren't you full of surprises?" Shen Jing said with a bit of chuckle in his voice.

"What? What surprise?" Alex asked.

"You will find out later on your own," Shen Jing said.

"What? No! Come on, you have to tell me," Alex said.

"Well, you did something that you weren't supposed to until you reached the immortal realm. I don't think I've ever heard of any case where someone did it even in Saint realm, and yet you've done it in True realm," Shen Jing said.

"I wonder though how this could possibly be related to how you killed that girl," Shen Jing thought to himself. "I don't see any connection, but maybe I'm just stupid."

Alex wasn't understanding anything that came out of Shen Jing's mouth. "What are you talking about?" he asked.

"Do you like a mystery?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes?" Alex said.

"Great. There's a mystery for you to solve once you reach a higher realm," Shen Jing said as he giggled. "I can't wait for you to find out on your own."

"What are you even talking about?" Alex asked. "What did I do?"

"Never mind it now, let's change topics. You learned Sword Qi?" he asked.

Alex nodded.

"Good, so you need to improve your sword intent more if you want to get better. If you do so, you should be able to create your own Sword Aura in a few dozen years," Shen Jing said.

"Sword Aura? That's the next stage?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "You're still way far away though. You still need to perfect your Sword Qi. For that, you need to perfect your intent."

"My Intent? Not my Sword Qi?" Alex asked. "I thought I would have to improve my Sword Qi to reach the next level."

"You do, but you also need to improve your Intent. Only when both your Sword Intent and Sword Qi are at the peak level will you form your Sword Aura."

"Then, for the next one, you elevate all three of them, and so on and so on," Shen Jing explained.

"I see. Thank you for explaining that," Alex said.

The two of them talked for the entire night and Alex learned a lot of things. When the sun came up, Alex went to speak to Qin Shan.

"Sect master Qin, thank you for everything you've done to me for the last 2 years," Alex said.

"Sigh, so you're really leaving, huh?" he asked.

"Mother told you?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Qin Shan said. "Well, where are you going?"

"I'm going to be an alchemist for the royal Wei Family. I'm going to be working under the princess," Alex said.

"Wait, wait, wait, what?" Qin Shan couldn't believe what he heard. "How did this happen? I thought you were going to become a Lightsworn."

"Well, things happened and I ended up becoming the person Alchemist for the princess," Alex said. He too couldn't believe how it had happened.

"Here," Alex said as he handed back his Guest Elder badge.

"No, keep it," Qin Shan said. "Use that to remind yourself while you are with the princess that this sect will forever open for you."

"Thank you, Sect Master Qin," Alex said. "And goodbye."

Chapter 719: Pearl's Cleansing

Shen Jing took Alex to the capital that very morning. He left after that but promised to come to visit frequently and even help train him.

If Alex were to fight against Shen Jing, he would need no one else to train against.

The princess stood at the front of the gate with her two male guards that were in the Saint realm.

"Your highness," Alex bowed in greeting when he saw her.

"You are called Yu Ming, right?" She asked.

"Yes, your highness," Alex replied.

"Don't call me your highness, call me Princess Xumei or you can call me Sister Xumei if you want," she said.

"I think I will stick with princess Xumei for now," Alex said.

Xumei wanted to get close to Alex just so she didn't accidentally offend him and bring the wrath of Shen Jing on her family.

"Alright, follow me," she said and walked in.

Alex walked in with her and watched the empty meadow on either side of the walkway as they went towards the Royal Palace.

The servants and workers bowed toward the princess as she walked in. Alex hadn't read up much on the royal family, but he had read enough to know that she was the most important princess in the family.

Behind only the crown prince whose name he didn't know.

As they went in, the princess carefully explained every single aspect of the palace to Alex. Where he could go, where he couldn't go, which side the royal family lived on, where the servant's quarters were etc.

Once she was done explaining, she took him to the back of the palace. The backyard of the palace lay beyond the city walls and was actually at the foot of a tall mountain facing the west.

The backyard itself was beautiful. Even as the princess explained everything, Alex was just in awe over the garden that lay there.

Different types of rare plants of all types of grades grew in there. There was also an empty area at the center with a massive pond where fishes of all types swam.

"This garden is beautiful," Alex said.

"Isn't it?" the princess said enthusiastically. "Our gardener takes good care of it."

Alex wasn't lying. The garden was indeed very beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful he had ever seen.

He didn't see much value in the plants as ingredients as no matter how rare they were, the pill they made weren't important, but aesthetically, they were marvelous.

"I would love to meet this gardener of yours and learn a few lessons of raising plants," Alex said as he remembered that he really needed to learn about botany.

As an alchemist, cultivating plants and beasts for ingredients was supposed to be one of his talents, yet he knew nothing about it.

He didn't even know where the seeds for most of the plants came from. Especially for ones that didn't bear fruit.

"Alright, let me go show you your room," the princess said and took him along. Alex saw his room and nodded to himself.

He couldn't have thought of a better-looking room out there. This was even better than the guest room back at the royal palace of the Crimson Empire.

"If you want to go anywhere else, just let me know," the princess said.

Alex nodded. "Where's the room I'll be working in?" he asked.

"Um… we don't have an alchemy room," the princess said.

"Huh? Where will I be working then, princess?" Alex asked.

"In the guild," the princess said.

"You don't have Royal alchemists or the likes?" Alex asked.

The princess shook her head. "We haven't needed an exclusive alchemist… ever," the princess said. "If we ever need a pill, we simply tell the guild. They have an exclusive agreement with us where we are prioritized if we do request for any pill."

"I see," Alex said. "So I will be working in the guild huh?"

"Well, I'm sure we can prepare a room if you truly require it," the princess said.

"I don't really require it, but it would be better if you do prepare it. After all, I suppose you will be taking in alchemists for the family after I am done here," Alex said.

"I suppose so," the princess said. "Alright, I will talk with old Huo later and tell him. For now, take this."

Alex reached out and grabbed the talisman she handed it to her. Just from looking at the runes, he could tell it was a communication talisman that worked within a few kilometers."

"I will get you a servant. Work along with him to gather ingredients and make pills. If there is anything important, you can message me directly," the princess said.

"Thank you, princess Xumei," Alex said.

"I have some work to do, so I will leave you now," she said and left.

Alex locked the door and entered the room. With a simple scan of his spiritual sense, he realized that there was a formation carved into the room that blocked off senses from outside.

"Good," he thought and spread his spiritual sense to the fullest inside the room.

The guest room he was given had 2 more rooms. One was a bathroom with a big bathtub inside. The other room was a cultivation room with a small Qi gathering formation carved in the center.

"The bathroom first," Alex thought and called out to Pearl.

"Woah, where are we, brother?" Pearl asked as he looked around the room with its massive size and beautiful white walls.

"We're in our guestroom. Make sure to behave here and never speak when you are outside this room, okay?" Alex said.

"Okay," Pearl said. "I miss mother."

"Me too, buddy, but we will go visit her from time to time," Alex said.

"I hope so," Pearl said.

"Right, I don't know when I will have to start my work here, so we should finish our little task before that," Alex said.

"What are we doing?" Pearl asked.

"YOU are doing something," Alex said as he brought out the Divine Devil's fruit.

Shen Jing had already given one to his mother, and now Pearl was getting one too.

Alex prepared a bath, and despite Pearl's insistence on not needing it, he made Pearl get in the bath and cultivate.

After Pearl was comfortable for a while, he finally made him eat the fruit. Not knowing what else he was supposed to do, he made Pearl cultivate even more.

There were numerous cuts on his body as Pearl cultivated, but Alex kept a steady eye on the little furball.

Soon, the white fur on his body was starting to stain black a little.

As he waited, the white fur got even more black in some spots.

Time passed and Pearl kept cultivating. After finally 4 hours of cultivation did the black stuff stop coming out.

Alex had to already close his nose because of the smell, but when he saw that Pearl was done going through Mortal Cleansing, he told him to stop and thoroughly cleaned him.

'That was faster than mine. It probably has to do with age,' Alex thought.

"How do you feel, buddy?" he asked.

"Amazing," Pearl said. "I feel like I can jump really high."

"Is that so?" Alex chuckled. "Alright, let's quickly test how good you are. I need to go work soon."

Chapter 720: Shurin

"Hello, I am Fang Shurin," a young girl barely 15 years old introduced herself to Alex as he walked out of the room.

Alex looked around. "Hello. Have you been waiting for me?" he asked.

"Yes, dear guest. Her Highness, the princess has given me the order to assist you in anything you need," the girl said.

"My name is Yu Ming, you can call me Brother Yu," Alex said. "How old are you, Shurin?"

"I am 18 years old," Shurin said.

"Woah, really?" Alex was surprised. "But you look so young."

"I have lived in the palace for a long time, so I started cultivating from a young age. As such, I ended up looking younger than I really am," she said.

"Hmm," Alex nodded as he heard her. He quickly sensed her cultivation base and was surprised to see that she was on the very of breaking through to the True realms.

"Is there anything you would like me to do?" the girl asked.

Alex thought for a second and quickly pulled out a talisman to write down something.

"These are a list of ingredients. Can you get me as many as you can? You can find me in the guild after you've collected them," Alex said.

"Right away, brother Yu," the girl said and left.

Alex left the palace too. He made his way towards the center of the city where the guilds were.

'Still as packed as ever,' he thought as he looked at the guild. Since it hadn't even been a week since the Formation competition, the city was still packed full of people waiting for the Teleportation platforms to be open before they could leave back.

So, at that time, they were busy roaming the streets and visiting different locations, including the guild.

Fortunately, the guild was massive, so it could easily house the many people that were there.

Alex looked around for a bit, taking in the guild's image as he would be working here for the next 2 years or so.

After checking the guild, Alex made his way to the mission board and looked around for something to make.

As he did, a new mission popped up for an interesting pill. "A pill to increase someone's libido?" he chuckled a little, but he was interested in the recipe himself. He was interested in every new recipe he came across.

Alex took the mission despite it only requiring a 30% Harmony pill and looked for other missions to take. As he searched, he found another mission regarding an antidote and decided to take it.

However, he couldn't. "Huh? I can't take two missions at once?" he was a little surprised. That hadn't been the case back in DawnSpring city.

'Is it because this is a capital? I will have to ask the staff later,' Alex thought and pulled out his badge from the mission board. As he was about to leave, a hand landed on his shoulder.

"Wait!" a voice spoke to him. Alex turned around and saw a man in his 30s with a thick beard as well as a True Earth badge.

"How may I help you, brother?" he asked.

"Did you just take a mission regarding a libido pill?" the man asked.

"Yes," Alex said, a little surprised the man noticed. 'Can other people check what mission I took?' he wondered.

"That was meant for me. Why did you take it?" the man said in an angry voice.

"It didn't have your name on it," Alex said. Usually, if someone wanted a specific alchemist to make them something, they would make sure to name the alchemist in the mission so that only he could take it.

"Well, that's… goddammit! He was supposed to put my name on it," the man said. "Can you return the mission?"

"Uhh… no, I will have to pay a fine," Alex said.

"It's just a little fine. What does it matter?" the man asked.

"Are you going to pay the fine in my stead then?" Alex asked.

"Sure, yeah, whatever," the man said.

Alex shrugged and went on to return to the mission. However, when he did, the mission board gave him a rather weird prompt.

-Forfeiting this Mission will cost you a fine of 460 True Spirit stones-

"What the hell?" Alex said as he looked at the pill. It only asked for a single pill, then why was it asking for 460 spirit stones? It wasn't like he already got the ingredients and wasted it either.

"It's asking for 460 True Spirit stones. Give it to me before I cancel it," Alex said.

"What?" the man said in an exaggerated tone. "How could it— shit! It must be… arghh!"

"So? What do you want me to do?" Alex asked.

The man deliberated for a moment but couldn't say anything. 460 was a lot of Spirit stones that he couldn't force someone to pay and couldn't bring it out himself.

"Alchemist Tang!" A relatively angry voice spoke from behind them.

Alex turned around to see a man in a purple robe look at the middle-aged man.

'That robe… is that the same one as the little girl from earlier?' Alex wondered when he saw the man.

"Why are you still out here? You should be making my pill," the man said.

"Um, brother Lu, there's been a little problem," the man said.

"What problem?" the purple-robed man asked and the man named Tang explained.

"So? Just pay the fee and make my pill," the man said. "You, forfeit the pill right now. I'm in a hurry."

"Alright, give me the spirit stones then. Besides, What are you in a hurry for with such a pill in the middle of the day?" Alex asked.

"You! Do you know who I am?" the man shouted.

"Brother, you shouldn't talk back with him," the man whispered to Alex.

Alex sighed and shook his head. "I'll just go make your pill then. It will be faster that way," he said.

"No, I don't like you. You will not be making my pill," the Lu man said.

"Dammit! Pay me the spirit stones then," Alex said angrily. He was starting to get frustrated too.

"You! You dare talk back to me, I will—"

"Brother Yu," A voice came from far away as Shurin came running towards them.

"Oh hey, what's up?" Alex asked her as she gave a weird eye towards the Lu man before running up to her.

"Here's the ingredients you requested for," Shurin Gave it to him.

"Oh? So quickly?" Alex asked as he looked through the ingredients. There were indeed a lot of the ingredients he asked for.

"It was a request by you, brother Yu. I will have to do it fast no matter how," she said.

"You don't need to be so serious about it. Think of me as a friend," Alex said and looked at their robes.

"Are you guys from the same sect or something? I thought you worked in the royal family," he asked.

"We are disciples of the Royal family," Shurin said. "That makes me wonder, Uncle Lu, what are you doing here?"

"I… I'm just…" he couldn't answer since the answer was so embarrassing.

"Oh, did the princess give you an order too?" Shurin asked with bright eyes.

"The princess… what?" the man named Lu asked.

"The princess. She didn't tell you to meet with brother Yu?" Shurin gave a confused look.

"Um… which princess are we talking about? Your mother?" the man asked.

"Princess Xuemi," Shurin said. "Did she not send you for Brother Yu? He's her guest. Or rather, he's the Emperor's guest and is working under her."

"What?" the man was shocked like he heard the name of god. "Is this… true?"

"Of course," Shurin gave a weird expression. "Did you not know? Why else would you be bothering brother Yu at this time then?"

"I… I'm sorry, brother Yu," the man suddenly fell to the ground in a bow.

"What's happening?" Shurin asked Alex. Alex explained the best he could without saying anything… unnecessary.

"What? A high fee for forfeit?" the girl's face suddenly got angry. "Uncle Lu, are you abusing the royal family's privilege in the guild?" she asked.

"I... I..." the man couldn't say anything.

"I will tell my mother about this today," Shurin said.

"Wait, no, please," the man started pleading but Alex only shook his head.

"Alright, I'm off to make pills. You guys do whatever you think is right," he said and left.

Chapter 721: Learning New Things

It was evening when Alex left the Alchemy room. During his 6 hours of Alchemy session, he managed to make about 25 high-grade healing pills.

Even without wanting to, he was starting to reach 70% with good recipes now.

'I should be able to do better if I manage to get my damn body under control,' he thought as he forced the little yang that leaked back into his body.

He walked outside and saw Shurin waiting at the side of the hall.

"Shurin? Why are you still here?" Alex asked.

"I'm waiting for you, brother Yu," she said.

"Oh, did you need something?" Alex asked.

"No, I'm just doing my job," She said.

"And waiting for me? You don't need to do that. I will let you know if I need something, but most of the time I won't need anything," Alex said.

"No, it's my job to go around with you," Shurin said. "That's the job her highness the princess gave me."

"I see," Alex said. Now that he thought about it, members of royal families went around with guards and the likes everywhere. Maybe this was a similar thing.

The two of them walked out of the guild and made their way back toward the palace.

"You're not a servant, are you?" Alex said.

"No," Shurin said. "Did you think I was?"

"Well, the princess said she would get me someone so I assumed it would be a servant," Alex said. "But then I heard what you said this afternoon about your mother being a princess, and I thought no one would make a princess a servant."

Shurin bowed her head a little in embarrassment. "I… I'm not a princess," she said.

"Eh? You are not? Then what was that about your mother being one?" Alex asked.

"My mother is a princess, but I am not one," Shurin said.

Alex was still confused, so she explained further. "Everyone that is more than 2 generations away from the main branch is not considered part of the royal family."

"My mother's grandfather was the brother of the Emperor at that time. Because of that my grandmother and my mother are considered part of the royal family, so they are princesses."

"But since I'm a third-generation, I get no such title," Shurin said. "In fact, if you see someone that wears these colors, you can consider them someone with royal bloodline, but not a royalty."

"So the guy from this afternoon, he was…"

"His great grandmother was a princess during the same era as my great grandfather," Shurin explained.

"I see, I didn't realize such a thing would happen. That would mean the royal family technically is huge," Alex said.

"You could say that," she said.

"And these robes, what are these for?" Alex asked.

"These are robes worn by disciples of the royal family," Shurin said.

"The Royal family has a sect?" Alex asked.

"No, it doesn't," Shurin said. "Well, technically it is a sect, but they don't call it that since they only accept members with the royal family's bloodline that aren't royalty anymore."

According to Shurin, there were at least a thousand different disciples in the royal family that trained every day.

The place where they trained was beyond the massive mountain behind the palace.

"Oh right," Alex said as he brought out something from his bag. "Here, I made this for you."

Shurin took what Alex gave her and looked at it. "A pill?" she asked as she opened the pill bottle. Inside was a bluish pill with a vaguely sweet smell.

"What is this?" she asked.

"It's a pill to help you easily enter the True realms," Alex said. "Just eat that before you are to break through and you will enter the True realm for sure."

"Woah, really? I've been thinking of getting something like this made," Shurin said. "How much do I need to pay you?"

"Pay me? That's a gift. You don't need to pay me," Alex said.

"A-are you sure? I can't have you give me something like this. The family will think I took advantage of being with you," Shurin said.

"Well, if you can't even get something out of an opportunity, what's the point of even getting that opportunity?" Alex asked.

Shurin thought for a moment before nodding. "Thank you," she said.

It didn't take them long to get to the palace and Shurin took off with the pills Alex had made for the others.

He was very happy with the result he got from those pills, but when he thought of the gruesome wounds those pills could heal, it felt like a huge waste letting someone with minor injuries eat those pills.

Those should be left alone for someone with more serious injuries. But what else could he do? He couldn't just cut a pill into parts and give those to people.

That would ruin a pill.

He needed to find other ways to heal a—

"That's right!" Alex thought. "I completely forgot about them."

Alex quickly returned to his room and locked the doors before throwing everything in one of his storage bags into the bed.

What came out of the bags were multiple vials and talismans. Alex quickly opened one of the vials and looked inside it.

There were medicinal pastes in there.

'It hasn't gone bad right?' he thought and started looking at the talismans that were full of recipes for the medicinal pastes.

Once he realized that he could easily gather the ingredients, he decided to venture out into the art of medicinal paste making.

'Well that alone might not help either,' Alex thought. He would have to do something concurrently to that to make it extra effective.

After a whole night of cultivation, early next morning, Alex went to find the princess.

The princess was out in the garden with another princess that Alex only saw today.

"Little brother Yu, meet my sister Xianzi," the princess said introducing the younger, but almost as pretty princess opposite to her.

"Greetings, princess Xianzi," Alex greeted her, who greeted him back.

After a few friendly conversations, Alex turned to princess Xumei and told her that he planned to stop making pills in the batch for now and wanted to try out medicinal pastes.

"What's medicinal pastes?" the princess asked.

"Oh, it's like this," Alex brought out a vial from his storage and quickly explained everything he knew about it until now.

"You don't need to eat expensive pills to heal yourself, and even the most talentless person can make them since the recipe is so simple," Alex said.

The princess was intrigued. "Anyone can make them?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Can I make them?" she asked again.

"I would think so," Alex said with a confused look. "But you're a princess. Would you want to make this?"

"I make poisons all the time," the princess said. "These are nothing."

"Poisons? Ah, right. I forgot for a second there," Alex said as he remembered that the Royal Family Wei was known for the poison arts.

"So, can you teach me?" she asked.

"I will have to practice for myself first, but I don't see why I won't be able to teach you," he said.

"Great! Tell Shurin whatever you need. She will get it to you," the princess said.

"Thank you," Alex said. "Also, I wanted something else princess."

"What do you want? Just ask me," the princess said.

"I was wondering if there were books or journals regarding medical knowledge from a physician or doctor," Alex said.

"Um, there should be some in the royal archives. Have Shurin take you there this afternoon," the princess said.

"Thank you, princess," Alex said. "I will be off then."

Alex couldn't go very far away before he found Shurin waiting for him outside the garden. He told her what he needed, and after taking him to the Royal archives, she left to get his stuff.

Alex entered the massive room in the palace that was the royal archives. It was just a single room full of books, but it had so many books that he could likely not finish reading in even a hundred years.

There were already a few people inside who gave him a weird look for his lack of guard or royal outfit. Still, since he managed to get in, no one bothered him at all, and continued with their study.

Alex started searching for the books he wanted to read about. It didn't take him long to find one about general diseases and illnesses.

He took the book out and started reading it slowly. Most of the information in the book was something he had already read before. Still, he finished it all just in case there was more information.

Once he was done, he went to find another book and read them too.

After a few hours, Alex left the library with about 3 books worth of knowledge in his mind that he needed to process for a bit.

Shurin gave him the ingredients he needed after he left, and Alex made his way to the Alchemy guild.

Alex tried telling Shurin that she didn't need to follow him all the time, but she was adamant that she follow the orders of the princess.

'I will have to talk with the princess about this,' he thought and made a mental note.

Once at the Alchemy guild, Alex made a few pills to start off and then started making some more healing pills for a few hours.

Only after that did he finally take out the ingredients he had ordered as well as the mortar and pestle he needed.

It was time to make some medicinal pastes.

Chapter 722: Medicinal Pastes

"So, I just put it all here and start mixing it?" Alex thought for a moment as he read the talisman again and started crushing the ingredients in the mortar and pestle.

Most of the ingredients were plants, but there were some that were from beasts too. However, unlike Alchemy, very few of them were from beasts.

As Alex crushed the ingredients, he started noticing the flaw of the medicinal pastes. Even as he crushed it, energy left the ingredients and flew away.

Unlike a cauldron with a lid, mortal and pestle couldn't contain the energy. Still, it wasn't like he was burning the ingredients, so not much energy left the ingredients.

Having never done this before, it took a while before the paste came to be as smooth as he wanted it to be.

'That looks like it will work,' he thought and brought out the sword from his storage ring and cut a line along the back of his arm.

"Argh!" he winced a little from the surprise at how easily the sword cut his skin. It was almost like his True King realm physical body was nothing against this sword.

'Just what the hell are you?' Alex thought for a moment before bringing his attention back to the medicinal paste.

He made another cut next to that one and immediately went for the medicinal paste.

He scooped a bit with his 2 fingers and applied it to his new cut. Within seconds of applying, the wound completely vanished, while the older one was still squirming a little, trying to heal.

Alex let it be and it took him nearly 5 minutes to fully heal a simple cut. And that was only because he was a body cultivator. A normal cultivator would require nearly half an hour to heal that wound on his own.

"Well, this works perfectly," Alex thought and looked at the medicinal paste. There were still 20 or so more scoops of what he had applied still remaining in the mortar.

Alex scooped it all up and put it in a vial. Then, he looked at the list of ingredients and compared them. If he had used these ingredients to make a pill, it would have only helped a single person.

However, with medicinal paste, it would help many of them.

Alex shook his head when he realized how easy it was. 'I should have started years ago,' he thought. But he knew how busy he was with the 3 different guilds.

Fortunately, he didn't have artifact guild on his list as well. Otherwise, he wouldn't know what to spend his time on.

For the rest of the day, Alex spent his time on the same medicinal paste and made about 3 more batches of it that came out to be around 20 vials altogether.

'I should probably get bigger vials. These pill vials won't hold much,' he thought. He remembered the jar of acrid-smelling paste in his bag that nearly burned his nose from the smell.

He needed that type of jar.

"Yeah, I should ask them that too," Alex thought.

He walked out of the Alchemy guild with Shurin who had waited for him despite his insistence.

He gave her a vial for the troubles and told her it was a medicine that would heal her minor wounds.

"How do you use it?" she asked.

"You take a little bit and apply it to your wound," Alex said.

"Oh," Shurin said. "What if I have a lot of wounds, would this one vial be enough?"

"Well, no," Alex said. "But those are cases where you eat a pill."

"What if my wound is on the inside?" Shurin asked.

"That… I think you can eat it, but I don't know how to start testing that," Alex said. "I would need a volunteer."

"I can be one," Shurin said.

"You want to get cut on the inside?" Alex asked.

"Wait, does it have to be a cut? Won't a sprain be enough?" she asked.

"Ah, right," Alex said. "I should try with broken bones too, and if I can, maybe someone with some sort of sickness or disease. Although those might need other pastes."

"I will let the princess know what you need. For now, let's just try with the sprain," Shurin said.

"Give me your hand," Alex asked.

Shurin brought out her hand and Alex immediately grabbed it and pulled on it hard.

"Argh!" Shurin cried out in pain as some tears flooded her eyes.

"Sorry," Alex said and looked at her wrist. "Yeah, that looks sprained. Eat this quick."

He had her scoop out some medicine with the other hand and eat it.

"Ew," she made a weird face before swallowing the medicine. Once she was done, she looked at the wound in her hand.

"No… wait, a little," She said. "Let me eat some more."

Shurin ate 2 more scoops of the medicine before there was some noticeable difference in the wound.

"What if I apply it directly?" Alex asked and scooped some too before applying it from the outside.

"Same difference," she said. "Maybe it's because it is the hand? It is quite far away from the stomach."

"Well, try diverting your energy to the hand with your cultivation technique," Alex said.

"Right here?" Shurin looked around in the middle of the street.

"Right, let's go back to the palace first," Alex said and they went back. Without stopping anywhere, they sat down on the front lawn and tried it all out, including broken bones. Multiple locations at that.

The only thing they couldn't test the paste against was sickness or diseases as Shurin didn't have that.

Soon, Alex came up with a small hypothesis of his own.

For a medicinal paste to work, it needed to be close to the injury. In fact, touching the injury itself was always better.

If the wound was on the outside, applying it directly to the wound was the way to go.

If it was internal, one needed to eat 2 or 3 scoops and cultivate to move the energy from the paste to the wounded section.

The medicinal pastes worked on skins, muscles, and organs, but bones were hard to treat.

A fractured bone would need at least 5 scoops to heal properly. If the bone was broken, the medicinal paste wouldn't help at all. That being said, Alex only knew about the pastes from True rank ingredients.

He couldn't help but wonder how Saint Ranked ingredients would affect physiology.

There were also multiple other types of paste that did different things, but he could tell that their influence wouldn't be any better.

For the trouble, Alex gave 5 healing pills to Shurin that were some of the best he had prepared today.

She of course didn't want it as she had been doing what she was appointed to do, but Alex didn't take no for an answer.

After she left, Alex returned back to his room and sat down to cultivate. At the same time, he started processing all that he learned today at the library.

He hadn't learned very much, but he hard started off small after all. Slowly, he would go for more difficult topics and subjects and learn more about the human body.

Alex chuckled as he wondered what his mother would think if her homeschooled son suddenly became a very talented doctor.

Chapter 723: Training with Shen Jing

1 month later. A few kilometers outside the capital to the west.

Pearl dashed from the left and used his White Tiger's Golden Claws. Alex dashed from the right and slashed with his poison sword.

Shen Jing simply put up a finger in each hand and diverted the attacks elsewhere.

Pearl used his golden threads to try and bind him. The threads wrapped around Shen Jing and it looked like it would stop him.

Shen Jing smiled and waited for Alex to attack.

Alex sent out a strong metal slash at Shen Jing with all of his power.

Shen Jing's body started shining golden all of a sudden and it spread out in a wave until it was a circular barrier around his body.

The golden threads that Pearl had wrapped him with broke apart like they were mere spiderwebs, and Alex's attack didn't even make a strong sound when it disappeared after hitting the barrier.

Even his Sword Qi which was supposed to keep attacking didn't remain for longer than a moment.

"Not bad," Shen Jing said. "You two have definitely grown better. Here's a little reward for you then."

Shen Jing put up his index finger and made a simple swipe. Suddenly, Alex had a feeling akin to the wind rustling his clothes.

He quickly looked down and saw part of his robe fall to the ground.

"What?" he exclaimed. "I didn't see your attack."

"That's because I didn't attack you," Shen Jing said. "The world did."

"Dao?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "I wanted to show you examples of some other Dao that you might want to learn about."

"Since you use a sword, you will learn it sooner or later, so I am showing you it here today."

Shen Jing swiped his fingers again and another part of Alex's robe was torn off. "This is the Dao of Sharpness. It's a Metal Dao that had its roots in Sword Dao as well."

"Since I'm not a swordsman, I can't put it into my attacks, but I can directly attack with it," Shen Jing said.

"You can't teach me that, right?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing shook his head. "That would defeat the whole purpose of learning Dao on your own, won't it?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex nodded.

"Here's another one, although not very useful in battle," Shen Jing said. "Give me your sword."

Alex threw his poison sword at Shen Jing. Shen Jing then started pouring in his Qi as the world around him put Qi as well. Slowly, Alex saw the metal deform.

It wasn't much, but his sword started getting thinner and thinner. Shen Jing stopped once it was thinner by at least a third of its original thinness.

"Phew! That really takes a lot out of me even for a True grade sword," Shen Jing said and passed the sword back to Alex.

Alex looked at his sword and was surprised at just how sharp it was now.

"Dao of Malleability," Shen Jing said. "I can make metals thin without breaking them regardless if they would break under normal circumstances or not."

"Where did the rest of the metal go?" Alex asked. The sword was thinner now, but it wasn't longer or wider.

Shen Jing smiled. "Dao of compression. I compressed your sword so that while it is sharper, it is not any less weak. I wouldn't have dared to make your sword thinner if I hadn't learned this Dao before," Shen Jing said.

"Woah, what other Dao do you know, brother Shen?" Alex asked.

"Well, there's the Dao of Ductility, Dao of Conduction, Dao of Shine, Dao of Rust, and some minor Daos that aren't very useful on their own," Shen Jing said.

"Dao of Conduction, I think I've learned that too," Alex said.

"You did? When?" Shen Jing asked.

"About a week ago," Alex said. "I was making some pills when I realized that I understood how heat went from one body to another. So, I wondered if it could go in the opposite direction too."

"After a bit of thinking, I learned a new Dao and now I can transfer heat from cold body to hot body too," Alex said.

"Great!" Shen Jing said. "That's a really good Dao, but it's not Dao of Conductivity. It's the Dao of heat Conductivity."

"To truly learn the Dao of Conductivity, you need to learn the Dao of lightning Conductivity too and mix those two Daos to learn the higher one," Shen Jing explained.

"Ah, I see," Alex said. Lightning… where was he supposed to learn about those from?

'Maybe I can use the electricity back in the Central continent. That might work,' Alex thought.

"Will Pearl ever learn some Dao?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing made a weird, hesitating face. "Yeah, I'm worried he might reach the peak of Saint realm too quickly and not learn any Dao. So when the Tribulation lightning does come eventually, he will definitely fail and remain as a false Immortal."

"What? He will fail?" Alex asked in surprise.

"If he doesn't learn a Dao. He's too young for that. Which is why I am not pushing you to get him to evolve, even though it would be faster."

"Being fast would only hurt him in this scenario. He needs to mature before grasping Daos," Shen Jing said.

"I see," Alex said. "That does make sense."

"Alright, come. Attack me some more," Shen Jing said and the three of them got to fighting again.

After an hour or so of fighting, Shen Jing finally left and Alex returned back to the Capital and went to the Palace.

In the last month, he had already made a lot of pills and medicinal pastes for the royal family. He was sure that he didn't need to do anything for them for the next 3 months or so.

He had also already learned a lot of the things he wanted to learn regarding sickness and diseases. Of course, there was a lot more to learn, but he had managed to learn most of the books in the Royal archives.

If he wanted to learn more, he would have to go out and find books of his own.

Alex checked the twenty thousand true spirit stones in his storage bag and thought to do something with them.

He had so many of those medicinal pastes, and yet they were being wasted by simply sitting in a storage bag when there were so many out there that needed its help.

The royal family, especially the princess only cared for the Lightsworns and cared that they were never hurt or injured from their missions.

If they were, they would get their treatment. Other than that, she may care for her family. She had a duty to her family and people.

However, Alex didn't. His only duty here was providing aid in their transition. Which, he had done for the next 3 months.

So, for 3 months, he was free to help those he wanted to. Thus, Alex decided to go make the medicinal pastes for those that would require them.

The common folks.

For that, he would need to become a well-known doctor. Which meant Alex needed to open up a clinic of his own.

Fortunately, he had plenty of money for that.

Chapter 724: Yu Ming’s Medicinal Clinic

Alex opened up a shop on the Northern side of the city. As it was further away from the palace, the buildings there didn't cost as much and Alex got a single room on the 2nd floor of the building for about 100 True spirit stones for a month.

At first glance, it looked like a bargain, but the location wasn't as visited by the normal visitors from everywhere, so it was actually a proper price.

Still, Alex decided to bet the popularity on his product that wasn't available anywhere.

He was sure that many of the sects and families knew about medicinal pastes, and maybe even have a few from the Demon realm. However, none of them had gotten recipes for it.

If they had, it wasn't public at all.

Today was the opening day, so Alex put up a board that simply said 'Yu Ming's Medicinal Clinic'.

As a subtitle, he wrote 'Sells medicinal pastes for all types of wounds, sickness, and diseases.'

Once that was up, he went upstairs to his empty clinic.

Inside the clinic were two rooms. One was a waiting room, while the other was the checking room.

Alex placed a sound and spiritual sense dampening formation plate on the ground and used it.

He wanted to simply carve the formation onto the wooden floor, but there was no energy source to connect it to.

Once he was inside, Alex walked up to a seat at the end of the room and sat on it. Then, since he had nothing else to do, he brought out Pearl to let him roam free.

At the same time, he took out a book on formations and started reading it.

This was an interesting topic on formations that he had been reading on. This book explained how sect running formations worked and how one could create them.

According to the book, the sect running formation was actually multiple different formations all linked together by one linking formation that took the energy from the source.

It was the communication between the formations that aided them in running without a power source.

There was more for Alex to learn there, so he simply kept on reading.

He did feel a little bad that no one came to the shop, but being a new shop and being at a weird location, he couldn't fault anyone but himself.

Still, about an hour later, a man walked through the door with a confused look on his face.

"Is… is this the clinic?" he asked after seeing the empty room with a kid and a kitten.

"Yes, it is," Alex said as he closed the book.

"Oh, I need to speak to the phy— ah, the physician," the man said, holding his stomach as he grunted in pain.

"I am the physician," Alex said. "What troubles you?"

"Uhh… are you really the physician? Aren't you a little too young for that?" he asked.

Despite his age reaching mid-20s, Alex still had the face of a teen as that was when he reached the True realm. Since then, his growth had been rather slow.

Usually, people wouldn't be surprised as the people he was around were people that were used to people looking young despite his age.

However, currently, Alex was with a person that barely had a cultivation base in the Muscle Tempering realm, and he himself had completely hidden his cultivation base so as to not scare away any customers.

Even Pearl was hiding his cultivation base using the Immortal Concealment technique that he taught him after writing it down for his mother.

"Don't judge my skills by my age," Alex said with a smile. "Tell me what is the problem?"

"I… I'm just feeling a little pain on my left side," he said. "I thought it was because of what I ate, but it doesn't seem to go away."

That did sound like food poisoning to Alex, but he needed to be sure it wasn't something else like parasites in his stomach or something else.

So, he called the man and scanned him with his spiritual sense. He then sent his Qi inside the man's body to check and didn't find anything either.

"It does seem to be a simple stomach ache from food poisoning," he told the man. Alex then brought out a simple thyme-like plant and gave it to him.

"Here, chew on this for 5 minutes and swallow the juices. If the pain still persists, tell me," Alex said.

"Ok," the man looked weirdly at the plant and wondered if he was being fooled here.

"You can sit on the bench and chew. You can pay me after you are healed," Alex said.

The man finally nodded and sat down to chew the plant. At first, he nearly gave up due to how bitter the plant was, but he forced himself to continue.

Slowly, he felt the pain in his stomach lessen bit by bit. By 5 minutes, the pain was completely gone, and the man felt like he was reborn.

"Woah, that was amazing," the man said. "It totally worked. How much do I need to pay you."

Alex smiled and said, "3 Spirit stones."

"3?" the man asked in surprise.

"Yeah, it costs that much because I have to diagnose and give you a plant," Alex explained.

"No, no, no," the man shook his hands. "I was just surprised how cheap it was. Usually, I would have to pay 10 to 20 spirit stones for a pill that would do the same thing."

"No worries," Alex said with a smile.

The man brought out the 3 spirit stones and winched a little when he was about to hand them to Alex.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"Oh, nothing. It's just some back pain," the man explained. "I might have pulled a muscle or two back there while sword fighting in the arena."

"You want me to help you with that?" Alex asked.

"Uh… no?" the man said. "I don't have that kind of money. Well, I do, but I have other things I need to spend it on."

"It will only cost you 5 spirit stones at best," Alex explained.

"What? No, that can't be right. I've talked to the Alchemy guild and they said a minor healing pill would cost me about 40 spirit stones when including the ingredients," the man said.

"Well, that's because those are pills, these are not," Alex said and brought out a medicinal paste jar.

"I will just need to apply it to you, and you will be fine. Although, if the pain still persists, I might need to apply a second one too, which will cost you another 5 spirit stones. Are you okay with that?" Alex asked.

"Okay? Are you kidding me? I would be mad if I didn't say that was okay. But are you sure I will heal?" the man asked.

"Same thing as before," Alex said. "Pay me if you get healed."

"Well, if you say so," the man said and started pulling off his robes when Alex stopped him and pointed to the room.

"Ah sorry," the man said and went into the room.

"Let me know if anyone comes," Alex whispered to Pearl who was still roaming around the room, looking at every nook and corner.

Once inside the room, Alex activated the formation and waited for the man to take off his upper robes.

"urgh," Alex made a cringing sound. "That's quite bad."

The man's right shoulder blade area was blue and black, and quite sore. "I think you did more than just pull a muscle back there."

Alex quickly scanned his back and said, "Your shoulder is a little dislocated as well. While you won't notice any problems on the outside, there are problems on the inside."

"What? Can that be healed too?" the man asked.

"Yeah, don't worry," Alex said and pulled out a scoop of the paste. He placed it on the man's back and gently rubbed it all around the wounded area.

The man's body sucked in the medicinal paste-like water on a dry sponge. Alex waited for a bit and saw the bruised shoulder go back to being skin-colored.

Still, there was more healing needed there, so he applied another scoop of the medicine.

After 2 minutes, the man's back was finally healed of the wound, but there was one more thing remaining to do.

Without telling the man anything, he grabbed his shoulder and popped it up a bit back into place.

"Argh!" the man cried out in a sudden jolt of pain, but after a few seconds, he realized how relieved he felt.

"Wow, I feel like I was never injured," the man said.

"Yes, that's what my medicine does," Alex said.

"How much is it again? 10 Spirit stones?" the man asked.

Alex nodded. "5 spirit stones per scoop of medicine," he said.

"So cheap too," the man quickly took out 10 spirit stones and stopped. "What about the last part? With the shoulder?" he asked.

"That one is one the house," Alex said with a smile and took the spirit stones.

"Thanks," the man said moving his shoulders a little. "Damn man, this place is so cheap for what it does. I would never go to the Alchemy guild if I knew this place was here before."

"Anyway, I will be sure to come by again if I need you. Thanks again," the man said and left.

Alex returned back to the empty room and was about to open up his book again when he closed it and thought.

"Right, I should put up the prices too to show how cheap this place is," he said to himself. "Only that way will more people come around."

Chapter 725: Little Trouble in Little Clinic

A week into opening the clinic, Alex's days got busy.

The first two or three days were mostly free as not many people noticed his clinic, or it hadn't gone through enough ears to be recognizable.

However, once he had treated enough cultivators, that too with comparatively very cheap medicine, his clinic got lined up from day's start to day's end.

It got so ridiculous that Alex had to decide to take a dedicated day off on the weekend or else he would be overworked.

Shurin came to help out in the clinic as well, mostly just to make sure people were staying in line.

Alex used her Royal disciple robes to gain some more popularity as well. After all, anyone who could employ a Royal disciple had to be someone notable.

And yet, when the people tried to figure out his identity, they didn't find anything notable about him.

He never learned anywhere, had not appeared in any auction, had not been part of any school, sect, or family.

The Alchemy guild didn't openly give away their alchemist's private information, and the princess made sure everything about Alex was under wraps in the palace, so no information about him could ever reach the public.

As such, Alex became an enigma that came out of nowhere and took the capital's lower-end citizens and cultivators by storm.

The rich ones would still look for pills, and the strong cultivators never trusted a mere doctor to take care of their issues.

As such, Alex was stuck to selling healing pastes made from common rank ingredients, while his True rank pastes never saw the light of day.

Shurin played around with Pearl as they waited for Alex to be done in the room inside.

This was the last customer of the day and they would leave after this.

The man who went in with a limping leg, came out all straight with a happy smile on his face.

"Thank you so much, doctor," the man said. "I can't tell you how long this leg has troubled me."

"It's my pleasure," Alex said and waved the man away.

"Phew! That's it right?" he asked.

"Yes, brother Yu," Shurin said.

"Alright, let's leave," Alex said and left with the two.

The next day was a day off for Alex, so he spent the day making pills as a way to cool off. He didn't really know what else he could do aside from that.

He wanted to fight, but then without Shen Jing, he just couldn't. Alex sighed and returned to making more pills and pastes.

A set of ingredients for a normal paste usually cost him about 20 to 30 spirit stones, whether it was Common rank or True rank.

Each paste made with these ingredients would give about 20 to 25 scoops worth of paste, meaning if Alex sold each scoop for 5 spirit stones, he would earn about 100 spirit stones, giving him nearly 4 times the profit on his investment.

He started wondering if he should lower the cost even further, but then he decided not to. At least, not right now.

The next day, Alex returned back to shop with Shurin and saw a long line of customers.

"Physician, please hurry up."

"I needed you yesterday."

"Do you still have enough pastes to sell? I want to buy some."

"Sir, I am from the Snowhill merchant group. Do you have time to talk with me?"

People spoke one after another, but Alex walked without acknowledging them. Only after he was in the front of the room did he turn around and spoke.

"I will immediately start treating you all. Don't worry about the pastes, I have plenty, but you cannot buy more than a jar each. As for merchants, I have no intention of doing any business with you all," he said and called the first person on the line before entering.

Alex treated one after another as well as sold pastes at the same time. 'Sigh, I need to get someone else to do the selling part,' he thought. He wanted to employ Shurin for that job, but she was already handling the line outside and making sure people were orderly.

'I will think about it later,' he thought.

He continued treating for half a day when an incident took place. Shurin knocked on the door while he was treating to let him know there was some problem outside that she couldn't handle.

Alex told her he would be out right away and looked at the naked lady in front of him.

The first few times he had to ask a woman to undress, he had felt bashful and couldn't help but show a bright red face. However, slowly, he started getting somewhat more used to it and could now treat them without any hesitation in his hands or mind.

He applied a scoop on his medicine around the rashes that had appeared under the lady's breasts. In a matter of seconds, the rashes disappeared and Alex breathed a sigh of relief.

He continued treating the woman in front of him for a while longer as there were more areas with rashes. Only after fully treating her did he leave.

He took a deep breath to make sure his face wasn't red yet and walked to Shurin.

"What's wrong? What is the problem?" Alex asked.

"These men cut their lines, and they won't listen to me," she said.

'Someone who wouldn't listen to a disciple of the royal family?' Alex turned with a curious look and saw a group of young men and women who were in the early True realms.

Unlike Shurin who had broken through just half a month ago, these people had been in the True realms for a few years now, so it was obvious they would be hard for her to handle.

The one that took his attention was someone that looked like he was the leader of this small group. The man looked young like he was in his teens, but given his cultivation base, he was likely as old as Alex himself, perhaps even more.

The man would've normally never grabbed Alex's attention. Neither with the True Disciple 6th realm nor with the True Earth alchemist badge.

However, what did catch his attention was the white robe with burnt edges.

'A member of the Zhou Family,' Alex realized. The Zhou family were the people with White Fire and were known to be great alchemists.

The fact that this young man already reached True-Earth as a mere True Disciple realm cultivator was perhaps one of the best performances anyone could pull off on this continent.

However, that didn't impress Alex at all. After all, the robe had only grabbed Alex's attention, not his interest.

Alex walked up to them and stood before them. Alex was shorter than the man by a couple of centimeters but he started directly at the man.

"Are you here to cause trouble?" he asked.

"Who are you?" one of the men asked.

"Hey, that's the doctor I think," one of the girls replied.

Alex quickly glanced over them and they were all alchemists too, mostly in the True Mortal rank.

If Alex was to make a bet, he would bet that these alchemists were mostly just responsible for making Common pills, as True rank ingredients would be a waste in their hands.

"Did you guys cut the line?" Alex asked.

"You must be the one in charge here," the man from the Zhou Family gave a smile. "I am Zhou Guyang. I have come upon a rare problem in my butt area, would you be willing to look at it?"

"Did you cut the line?" Alex asked again.

"What? No," the man said and turned to look at everyone else in the line who didn't dare speak up as they realized who he was.

Alex turned around to Shurin and asked, "Where did they cut the line from?"

"That man in yellow robes. They are supposed to be behind him," Shurin explained.

"So, who is next?" Alex asked.

"This woman in blue," Shurin pointed.

Alex nodded and looked at the woman. "Please come in," he said and walked towards the door.

However, when he reached the door, he realized that the woman didn't dare move at all.

'Of course,' he thought. The woman was afraid of disrespecting the alchemists and Alex couldn't blame her for that.

'It seems I will have to take care of them first then,' he thought.

Chapter 726: Demonstration

Alex looked at Zhou Guyang and sighed. "Look, I don't have time for your little games. Go back in line if you are really here for treatment or say what you have to say if you are not," Alex said.

"Hey! What's that supposed to mean?" one of the others asked.

"Brother, he's rude, let's beat him up," another one suggested.

Zhou Guyang didn't show any other emotion in his eyes and remained neutral for the most part.

Still, he couldn't avoid the engagement that Alex had forced him into, so he answered, "Very well, I am here for the people."

Alex gave him a weird look and waited for him to continue.

"You are selling something fake and claiming that you've treated people," the man said. "You sent around fake testimonies to capture the heart of these poor and oblivious citizens that have barely saved up a little money."

"Do you not feel a shred of shame at that?" the man said. "Stop this farce at once or I will destroy it myself and take you to the Lightsworns."

The man puffed his chest and waited for the civilians in the line to get doubtful of Alex. That was when he would tell them to stop bothering with pastes.

"You say my treatments are fake?" Alex asked. "Very well, why don't I prove it to all of you."

Alex flicked his finger and a sword Qi flew straight at Zhou Guyang. A long, thin line of red appeared at the center of the man's forehead.

"Argh!" Guyang shouted and clutched his bleeding forehead.

At the same time, Alex grabbed him by the hair and pulled his hands away to show the line of blood on his forehead.

"Look," he shouted. "Normally, he would have to wait a week or so before it fully settled and healed. However, with my paste, he doesn't have to wait at all."

Alex brought out a jar and brought out a single scoop of his medicine and applied it across the man's forehead.

Even as they all watched, the bleeding on the man's forehead stopped and there was no scar remaining as well.

Gasps of surprise rang around the room, some originating from the alchemists too.

Once Alex was sure that his customers had seen it clearly, he let go of Guyang's hair and finally released his aura from around him.

Finally, the man could move.

"I know why you guys are here," Alex said. "You think that because I suddenly arrived, I have taken away your customers."

"And the answer is yes. Yes, I did take away your customers, but that is only because of how terrible the rest of you are at alchemy."

"Instead of looking to blame someone for your incompetence, go and try to improve. That way, you will get jobs regardless of what I do here," Alex said.

"Now leave! I don't have time to bother with any of you," Alex said.

Guyang was the first to leave. The fear of God that Alex had put on him by basically making him immobile and being in control of his life and death was basically enough to make him run away from the room.

After he left, the others soon followed suit, and soon peace returned back in the clinic.

Alex went back to treating the rest of the patients and returned around the evening after he was done.

Back at the palace, he decided to look for people to help him sell the medicinal pastes while he was treating people.

Unfortunately, it was late and everyone had retreated back to their room, so Alex was left with nobody to talk with.

So, he decided to wait for tomorrow.

'Sigh, I should have made some friends,' Alex thought and started cultivating.

The next day, he left the palace with Shurin and went to his clinic again.

The line at the clinic was already long, especially after the stunt he had pulled yesterday. Many people, including the ones in the True realms, had come this time and the clinic was becoming quite cramped.

'No way. Do I have to search for a new location just two weeks in?' he thought.

Alex called one of the patients and entered the room. He quickly cured the person and called another one in.

The next one was here to buy the medicinal paste for True realm cultivators.

"You can get this vial with 10 scoops for 50 True spirit stones, or this Jar with 50 scoops for 250 True spirit stones," Alex said.

"I will take the jar," the man said and bought the jar. Alex was giving him two options because he didn't want to sell more than a single piece of item each time.

If he was to sell multiple vials, people would start buying in droves. Instead, selling it in a single jar was much easier.

He treated the people for the rest of the day when late afternoon, Shurin called him again saying the man from yesterday was here.

Alex sighed and left the room after finishing treating the patient.

When he walked out, he saw Zhou Guyang from yesterday. However, next to him was another man wearing the same white robe with burnt edges, but there was an air of authority about him that the other man could not carry at all.

The man had long black hair and was about as tall as the other man. As for his cultivation base, he was one step away from entering the True Emperor realm.

'It's this guy,' Alex thought when he saw him.

The man in front of him was Zhou Ren. Zhou Ren was someone he saw back in the group of elites outside the House of the Undying when he was in the Demon Realm.

This was one of the more chatting fellows in the group. He remembered another man saying that he hated him.

Alex got a little solemn when he saw him. He did not want to go against one of the strongest younger generation members, that too someone from one of the big families.

Alex was sure the princess or the Emperor could intervene on his behalf if this argument went anywhere physical, but he had hurt Guyang yesterday, so he wasn't sure if they were considered to have already crossed it.

"That's him," Guyang pointed to Alex.

Zhou Ren nodded and walked toward Alex. "Yu Ming's Medicinal Clinic, it says outside. Is brother's name Yu Ming?" the man asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Greetings, brother Yu," Zhou Ren cupped his hands. "I am Zhou Ren."

Alex felt a little uncomfortable, but he cupped his hands and greeted back. "Why is brother Zhou here?" Alex asked.

"My little brother here says you beat him yesterday and made a joke out of him. Is that true?" Zhou Ren asked.

"I am afraid he did try to ruin my business. Also, all I did was give him a minor cut on his forehead which I healed immediately," Alex said. "Are you perhaps here to take revenge for your brother?"

Zhou Ren chuckled. "Haha, no," he said. "Instead I'm here to apologize on my brother's behalf and thank you for giving him a lesson he desperately needed.

"Huh?"

Chapter 727: Overwhelmed

"Brother? What are you saying?" Guyang asked hurriedly. He had thought that his brother was here to help him take revenge, but instead, Zhou Ren had said that he needed that lesson.

"Shut up! You've already embarrassed me enough," Zhou Ren said. "Did you think that just because you are my brother that I will side with you when you are in the wrong?"

Alex looked at the two brothers with a confused expression. "So, are you not here for the revenge?"

"No," Zhou Ren said. "I'm just here to apologize for my brother's behavior."

Zhou Ren looked to the side to see Guyang's surprised look and suddenly hit him on the back of his head.

"Ow!" Guyang cried in pain. "Why did you hit me?"

"Was I the one that did the wrong thing or was it you?" Zhou Ren asked.

"I… it was me," Guyang said.

"Then why aren't you apologizing yet?" Zhou Ren shouted at his brother.

Guyang got scared and apologized to Alex for fear of being reprimanded by his brother. Alex looked at the two, unsure what he was to say.

"It's fine," Alex said. "He was already punished yesterday."

"No, he is not nearly punished," Zhou Ren said in response to Alex as a hateful look appeared on his face.

"This bastard has been using our family name all the time to force his way through places or to bully the weak. As his older brother, I can't watch him ruin himself," Zhou Ren said.

"As such, I hope to punish him even more." Zhou Ren then turned to Alex and asked, "Would you be willing to have him work in the clinic? You won't have to pay him at all and he will be like your servant."

"Brother!" Guyang tried to speak.

"Shut up! You've embarrassed us enough. You will accept this punishment," Zhou Ren said.

"I don't think that's necessary, brother Zhou," Alex said. " I don't think there is any more punishment I can give him."

"No, I insist," Zhou Ren said. "Since he dared do something so unbecoming of someone from our family, he deserves this punishment."

Alex was about to refuse as he didn't like the thought of having someone unknown working in his clinic, but he did need a worker.

So, he decided to accept the offer. "Very well, he can work as a guard in my clinic," Alex said.

"Thank you, brother Yu," Zhou Ren said. He then turned around to his brother and said, "remember, act well."

After that, Zhou Ren left the clinic, leaving his brother back with Alex.

"Shurin, I think your job will be changing from tomorrow on," Alex said. "Teach him how to do what you are doing."

Alex went on to treat the rest of the patients there while Shurin made Guyang look after the people so that they didn't cut in line as he did.

That day, the incident that took place in the clinic reached the entire capital and even more as people learned that a young elite talent like Zhou Ren had visited the clinic and even bowed his head to Alex.

That only made Alex's clinic even more popular and even more, eyes fell on him.

The next morning, as Alex and Shurin reached the clinic, they found the people in an orderly line, with Guyang making sure no one went out of line.

"Oh, he's here already," Alex said with a bit of surprise.

"Hello, brother. What do you need me to do?" Guyang asked respectfully.

"Uh… nothing really. Do what you've been doing," Alex said. He then brought out a storage bag and handed it to Shurin. "You're in charge of selling these. Do what I told you."

"Yes, brother Yu," Shurin nodded.

Alex turned around to the group of people that were lined up and shouted, "Who is here to buy the medicinal paste and want nothing to do with being treated?"

A bunch of voices rung out and hands were raised.

"Please step to your right," Alex said. Most of the people stepped away from the line, but a few of them were suspicious that they were going to be turned away, so they sat in their line.

"Please line up here in a different file. You will be buying your pastes from her and I will only be treating patients from now on," Alex said.

The people who had left the original line immediately got onto a new queue. While the one that remained regretfully went to the back of the new line.

Alex started treating the patients soon while Shurin helped sell the pastes. After that, the day went smoothly.

Guyang, despite being punished to be here, didn't shy away from the work he did and did it as well as he could. Being from a big family, he was a proud man and would masterfully do what he was made to do.

A few days passed and the clinic got more popular. Fortunately for Alex, once the people who had been walking around with their wounds for ages were healed, there were not many new patients despite the vastness of the capital.

Even if there were a good number of injured or sick that appeared every day, they would simply buy the paste instead of going to get treatment.

As such, Alex got a bit more free time during the day. During such free time, he started making more and more pastes to reach the demand of the customers.

Spirit stones gushed in like water from an open dam, but so did the stress. Every day, Alex focused his time on either treating the wounded or creating pastes.

At night, he once again used his free time to make more pastes. Soon, that became his daily routine.

His only relief came when the weekend arrived and he was finally free to do whatever he wanted.

During those days, Alex simply went to libraries and read up on new things, or stayed in his room and cultivated.

Perhaps it was because of the stress, or perhaps he was simply not getting enough time to deal with it, Alex's yang body flared once more and was getting hotter and hotter.

He needed some yin treasures to deal with it, but he had none right now. Since Yin treasures were quite rare, to begin with, he would need to send someone to an auction.

Fortunately, the Royal palace always had people go in place of others to buy items from the auction house, so Alex had the princess buy something for him too.

The next week went fine for Alex, but the stress one increasing on him.

One of these days, Shen Jing showed up for training, but Alex had no time at all.

"You became a healer, huh? Suits you quite a bit," Shen Jing said.

"Brother Shen, can we move our schedule to the week's end? I don't have the time to train at all," Alex said.

"I'm afraid I can't do that," Shen Jing said. "I'm on quite a tight schedule too. I only have today as a free day to train you for the next few weeks."

"But I can't…" Alex was a little saddened.

"No worries, I will just take Pearl. Besides, you won't make any real progress until you break through," Shen Jing said.

"Right," Alex said. "He needed to do that too."

"Well, don't kill yourself trying to take care of others. You need to take care of yourself too," Shen Jing said.

After that, he left with Pearl to train and didn't return until it was late evening.

The next few weeks went by the same, but slowly Alex started to feel more and more overwhelmed with all the work.

On one of the free days, he sat down to relax in the garden when Princess Xumei arrived by his side and sat down.

"You're a busy man, little brother," she said. "It is getting hard to get a hold of you."

"I'm sorry, I've been really busy," Alex said. "Did you want something?"

"Actually, yes," the princess said. "Have you kept any track of time at all? How long you've been here?"

Alex thought for a moment and he shook his head. The days were bleeding into each other.

"It's been over 3 months," the princess said. "You know what that means right?"

Alex thought for a second and lost the color on his face again. "You are running out of the pills and pastes, aren't you?"

Chapter 728: Get The Recipes

The princess nodded. "Yes, I am running out of it. Due to not having the healing crystal anymore, we have to make a slight adjustment to our policies so that we healed the Lightsworns every time they were injured."

"Because of how simple the pastes were, everyone started coming by to get pastes for even the simplest of cuts."

"As such, we quickly ran out of it," the princess said.

"I'm sorry," Alex said. "I should have known. I started this clinic and there were so many customers that I got overwhelmed and didn't know what to do."

"Well, if you don't have the time, you can teach me too," the princess said. "I remember someone telling me they would be willing to teach me about the pastes once they learned it."

Alex sighed and gave a small smile. "I did, didn't I?" he asked.

He thought for a moment and brought out a mortar and pestle before bringing out more ingredients to show the princess.

* * * * *

Guyang walked out of his weekly alchemy session. Due to having been sent to work for Alex, his daily alchemy session had been reduced to weekly.

In the past month, he had been with Alex, he had only had 4 such sessions. As such, there was almost 0 improvement in his Alchemy. His cultivation base was in an even worse situation.

As he was about to walk away, he saw his brother walk out of the room next to his.

"Good morning, brother," Guyang greeted his brother.

"Hey, I haven't seen you in a while," Zhou Ren said. "How is your work at the clinic going? Any progress?"

"Yes brother, I've learned to become humble now. I won't use my name or my family's name to bully the others," Guyang said with a serious face.

Zhou Ren's face went blank with surprise and confusion. "What the hell are you talking about?" he asked.

"Uhh… my progress? You wanted to know how I was doing with my punishment, right?" he asked.

"You idiot," Zhou Ren cried out so loud that the nearby house servants ran away in fear.

"Who the hell cares if you bully people or not? Who the hell cares about your punishment? I'm asking have you made any progress on getting the recipes for the pastes? How they are made?" Zhou Ren asked.

It was Guyang's turn to be confused now. "You didn't send me there to be punished?" he asked.

"Of course not, you dumbass. What do I care about how you go about your day? Do you think I would have shown up and bowed to a goddamn nobody if I didn't want something out of it?" Zhou Ren asked.

"Uhh…"

"If you don't get those recipes by tomorrow, I will break your goddamn legs myself," Zhou Ren said. "Now, leave!"

Guyang swallowed heavily and nodded before rushing away.

Zhou Ren walked away and was soon called by his father, the head of the Zhou family.

"Any information on the pastes?" Zhou Tianqiu asked. Tianqiu was a man with thin hair and short height. He didn't even reach the shoulder of his tall son.

However, the fiery demeanor he carried made everyone look up to him even when he was below them.

"I put idiot Guyang up to the task, but it seems me being subtle about it didn't help at all, father," Zhou Ren said. "I've told him that I will break his leg if he doesn't bring the paste recipe by tomorrow, so we should be seeing it soon."

"Hmm," Tianqiu said nothing for a while as Ren waited for him to speak again.

"Son, you know how important this paste is, don't you? For years, we have had pastes come out again and again from the Demon Realm, and yet not once has a recipe come out."

"Now there's someone with a recipe and we absolutely need it," Tainqiu said.

"Why aren't we just going and getting it from the man, father? He is quite young and not very strong. I could just go and beat him up to get the recipes you need," Zhou Ren said.

Tianqiu took a deep breath and asked, "Why do you think I haven't done that already?"

Zhou Ren thought for a moment. "That kid has backing?" he asked.

"That kid is a personal guest of the Emperor and is directly working under princess Xumei. Our people have noticed him going in and out of the palace. He practically lives there," Tianqiu said.

"What? Is this information public?" Zhou Ren asked.

"It's public to those that are willing to look," Tianqiu said. "The kid hasn't tried hiding it or anything."

"So force is not going to work on him," Zhou Ren said. "I understand father. We must be first before everyone else. I will make sure that little brother gets the recipes within in week without mistake."

"Good," Tianqiu said and smiled. "I know I can always depend on your son."

Zhou Ren smiled and walked away.

* * * * *

Alex returned back to the clinic the next day with a new sense of purpose.

After having a little talk with the princess the other day, he had come to a small revelation for himself that he didn't think he would so soon.

Shurin was confused at his happy mood but didn't say anything as Alex hadn't been in this mood for nearly a month now.

The patients were already lined up at about 10 different people, but the ones that were here to buy the pastes were over hundreds of people.

That was understandable. After all, Pastes were far superior to pills for most the injuries.

Guyang was already in the store and was thinking of how to approach Alex for the recipes. When he saw Alex walk in, he jumped and tried to say something, but nothing came out.

How did one ask for someone's secret that made them rich and famous?

Guyang racked his brain but the only way for him to get those recipes were either to sneak into the room and watch Alex make those pastes, or try and steal the recipes from him.

Neither of those ideas was any good in his mind. However, when he remembered that his leg would be broken today if he didn't bring back the pastes recipes, he would start having the same bad ideas again.

He felt tortured the whole day.

He watch Shurin sell the pastes in vials and jars one after another and even asked her if she knew how they were made.

However, he got no straight answer.

In the end, he was left with no choice. He had to do what he could to get those recipes.

So, when the time came for the clinic to close, and Alex walked out of the room, Guyang confronted him.

Alex looked at him weirdly. "Do you need something?" he asked.

"Yes," Guyang said. "I was wondering if you could teach me how to make those pastes as well. I really want to learn it."

"I'm sorry, I don't have the time," Alex said. "I—"

"No please, I beg you. Here, I will get on my knees," Guyang said as he really did fall on his knees. "Please teach me! I will call you my master if I have to."

Alex sighed. "I told you, I don't have the time," he said.

"Please—"

"But," Alex continued. "You don't really need me to teach you anything."

Guyang felt something touch his head, so he looked up and saw a talisman in front of him.

"Here! These are the recipes for the different pastes to heal and cure illnesses, disease, and poisons," Alex gave them to Guyang.

Guyang looked shocked, even a little bit skeptical.

"This… this is your recipe?" he asked with an untrusting voice.

"Yes," Alex said.

Guyang quickly read through the recipe, and while he couldn't tell if they were real or not, he could tell that most of these ingredients were indeed ingredients necessary for healing.

The truth matched up.

"Thank you," Guyang said and bowed again before taking off.

He didn't wait to see a single person on the street as he ran all the way to his massive house on the southern side of the capital.

He quickly entered and found his brother.

"Brother, I did it!" Guyang said proudly as he handed the talisman to his brother.

Zhou Ren quickly checked the talisman and his eyes went wide as well.

"Come on. Let us go show father this," Zhou Ren said. "He will be proud of you."

Chapter 729: Stop Making Pastes

"Father," Zhou Ren walked into the room where his father was staying.

"What's wrong?" Tainqiu asked after seeing both of his sons come together.

"I've brought it, father," Zhou Ren quickly handed over the talisman with the recipe.

"What have you brought?" Tianqiu asked, not getting his hopes up.

"The recipes, father. For the pastes," Zhou Ren said.

"Are you telling the truth?" Tainqiu asked while checking the talisman. From what he could see, it really was the recipe.

"Good job, son. I knew you could do it," Tianqiu said to Zhou Ren. Guyang looked dumbfounded that Zhou Ren was getting the reward for what he had done.

He wanted his father to be proud of him too. But if he spoke now, he was afraid his brother would get angry and may even beat him for speaking out of turn.

So, he kept quiet and watched his father and brother continue to speak.

"Have you tried and found out if this recipe is true?" Tainqiu asked.

"I just got this recipe father. I came to show you the moment I got it," Zhou Ren said. "Worry not. I've already sent someone to get the ingredients. We will find soon enough."

Not a minute later, a servant returned with Zhou Ren's ingredients and handed it over to him.

Zhou Ren didn't have a mortar and pestle, so he simply handed the ingredient over to his father who crushed them in his hands.

As a Saint realm cultivator, these mere common rank ingredients were crushed as easily as if they were made up of sand.

Soon, the familiar scent of the medicinal pastes formed and without even looking at the final product, everyone in the room could tell that this was the real stuff.

"Great!" Tainqiu should. "Now we can branch off from just pills and make pastes too."

"Yes, father," Zhou Ren. "Given how early we've gotten here, we can quickly have a monopoly on the pastes too.'

"Yes," Tainqiu said. "As for that kid who you got the pastes from, we will have to make sure he isn't around in the picture anymore."

Zhou Ren's face got serious. "We're going to kill him?" he asked. He was ready to do it, but it seemed a little too extreme in his eyes.

"No. He's the Emperor's guest. If we do anything directly to him, we will surely be in trouble," Tianqiu said. "No matter how strong my position in the family is, if I get on the emperor's bad side, everyone will join together to get rid of me as the family head. Then that bastard Zirong will take over."

"Then what do you suggest father?" Zhou Ren asked.

"Buy him off," Tianqiu said. "Promise him you'll teach him how to make pills. Getting a lesson from our family, he should be more than happy."

"Yes, father," Zhou Ren said. "I will go right away."

"No, I will go with you too. Where is he now?" Tianqiu asked.

Zhou Ren turned around and looked at his brother with a questioning look.

"He should be returning back to the palace right about now," Guyang said.

"Yes, let's go," Zhou Ren said and the father-son duo left without their youngest son. Guyang felt saddened and returned to his room feeling like the black sheep of his family.

Zhou Tianqiu and Zhou Ren reached a street near the palace and hoped Alex hadn't returned to the palace already.

Fortunately for them, Alex was running a little late today and only returned five minutes later than when they had arrived.

"Father, it's him," Zhou Ren pointed to Alex who was walking over with Shurin beside him.

Tianqiu nodded and walked ahead to stand in front of Alex.

"Excuse me," Alex said and tried to move away but Zhou Ren appeared and stood in front of him.

Alex finally noticed that they were blocking him purposefully and stopped.

He looked at Zhou Ren and the at the old man who was definitely in the Saint realm.

"Greetings senior, brother Zhou," Alex greeted the both of them.

"You can call me Ren," Zhou Ren said.

"I believe we haven't been introduced yet. I am Zhou Tianqiu, Zhou Ren's father," the man said.

'Zhou Tainqiu? The clan head of the Zhou family?' he thought to himself.

"I am Yu Ming. It's my pleasure to meet you, Clan head Zhou. May I ask what you want from this weak me?" Alex asked.

"Weak? You are younger than my younger son and already on the verge of entering the True King realm. No one is going to call you weak," Tianqiu said.

Zhou Ren gave a look of surprise. Due to Alex's concealment technique, he hadn't been able to tell how strong Alex was, but he would have never guessed he was this strong.

"You are the one with the pastes recipes, aren't you?" Tianqiu asked. "I have a proposition for you."

"What proposition would that be?" Alex asked.

"From today on, you will stop making pastes for the people," Tianqiu said. "We, the people of the Zhou Family will take over that process."

Alex was about to speak up, but Tianqiu cut him.

"I know what you are going to ask. You want to know how we got the recipe," Zhou Tianqiu said. "The truth is it doesn't matter. My son here managed to get his hands on your recipe."

"If he can do it, anyone else can too. So, I say that you stop making pastes and let us take over the business," Tianqiu said.

Alex tried to speak again, but Tianqiu didn't let him. "I'm not finished. I won't ask you to leave this business for nothing. In exchange for stopping, we will help you become an Alchemist."

"I promise you, with our resources, we can make you a True Earth Alchemist in no time," Zhou Tianqiu said with a smile.

With the lure of being an Alchemist, that too from a world-renowned family like the Zhou Family, Zhou Tianqiu was sure Alex would be surprised and excited.

However, Alex showed no such expression as the ample smile remained on his face.

Alex wanted to speak, but he waited just in case he was interrupted again. Since this was the third time he was trying to speak, he was already annoyed on the inside and decided to not say what he was going to say the first two times.

Instead, he said, "I do not need an Alchemy lesson, clan head Zhou. I am fine as I am. As for the pastes, I had already planned on not making any more pastes to sell from tomorrow on."

"Really?" Zhou Ren asked from the side, but Zhou Tianqiu cut him off.

"Nephew Yu is wise," Zhou Tianqiu said. "In case you change your mind and want to become an Alchemist, you may find my son."

After saying that, he left.

In Tianqiu's mind, What Alex had said was a roundabout way of agreeing to his demands while not asking for anything in return. Tianqiu thought Alex respected him a lot and was feeling happy with the successful venture he had set out for today.

"See? That's how you do it. From now on, our family will be the only one that sells pastes in the entire capital. No, the entire world."

Tianqiu's smile was wider than the northern half of the Luminance empire while his head was held so high he was nearly taller than his son.

Zhou Ren too was surprised at how well his father did today. "Although, I hadn't taken him for a coward," he said.

"What coward? He's a young man with a brilliant mind. He knew not to go against us and—" Zhou Tianqiu's words got lost in his mouth when something else called for his attention.

He saw a massive group of people crowding the outside of the Alchemy guild and wondered what was happening here.

"What's going on? Did they put out information about the Guild Competition already?" Zhou Ren asked excitedly. He couldn't wait to embarrass Xue Meirong in front of the entire world.

When the two walked inside, the group parted to let them in. However, along the way, they started hearing about pastes this and pastes that.

"What's going on?" Tianqiu demanded of the receptionist to explain everything.

"Senior," the receptionist bowed hurriedly. "The physician Yu Ming just came by the guild 15 minutes ago and gave away a whole bunch of paste recipes for free. He distributed it to everyone in the guild and now the recipe is spreading around the Empire like wildfire."

Tianqiu's eyes went wide with shock and anger. "He did what?"

Chapter 730: King

With the trouble of having to make pastes all the time gone from his mind, Alex was finally able to focus on what was important.

Over the course of the month, he once more made the necessary pills for the princess. With the recipe for the pastes out in the world, she didn't ask him to make them.

After all, making pastes was very easy for just about anyone.

In his free time, Alex went back to learning and training more and even made time for his practice fights with Shen Jing.

A month later, Alex felt like he was ready to break through to the next realm.

So, on one auspicious day, he locked himself into the cultivation room in the room he was living in and started cultivating.

He thoroughly examined himself as he prepared for his breakthrough.

The Yang energy in his body had flared up once more. The Yin treasure the princess found for him barely helped at all. In just a matter of weeks, their powers disappeared and his Yang energy flared up once again.

Fortunately, one thing the yang energy never did was cause problems for his cultivation.

The reason Alex was so against it was that it caused problems in Alchemy. If it weren't for Alchemy, Alex would've already taken advantage of it and tried to find out how it worked and what else he could do with it.

Since it affected his Alchemy, however, he needed to get it under control.

Alex continued checking through everything and then started thinking about the things that were causing him mental problems.

'Thank god I stopped overworking myself for the last month, or this breakthrough would've gone to trash before I even started,' he thought to himself.

After making sure every little thing was in order, Alex started his breakthrough.

At first, nothing happened. But slowly, as time progressed, Alex started hearing the voice again.

"Are you really trusting Shen Jing for all of this?" the voice asked him. "Are you going to believe whatever he tells you?"

And his inner demon got right to the point. To Alex, it felt so real, but somewhere in the back of his head, a logical brain kept saying this wasn't real and that he shouldn't be affected.

However, the logical brain was far too quiet when facing something that was formed by heaven.

"It's fine, I trust him," Alex said.

"What if just like the third elder's father, he too wants your body. You know how much people would love to get your body?" the voice asked.

"He's known about my constitution for years. If he wanted it, he would've taken it already," Alex said.

"What if he wants Pearl then? He spends an awful lot of time with him," the voice said again.

"If he wanted to take Pearl, he would have taken him already," Alex said calmly.

"Do you really trust him that much already?" the voice asked.

"No," Alex said. "There are still so many things about him that are a mystery that I worry about. However, in the last 7 years, not once has he done something that would be harmful to me."

"He even teaches me so many things that I would otherwise not find out for ages," Alex said. He realized just how much he respected Shen Jing.

"He's a wolf, fattening up the little sheep before he's ready to devour it," the voice said.

"And since there is not a single thing I can do if he decides on that, so there is no point in thinking about it," Alex said.

Alex felt something change, but he was too out of it to realize what had happened.

"Your father is most likely dead," the voice said.

"Father is a tough man. He's more hardworking and resourceful than I could ever hope to be."

"If he fell into a forest, he will make a farm out of it. If he fell into a cave, he will break the rocks until he can walk out of it."

"If he fell into a desert, I'm sure father will dig a river through the sands and make his way out."

The voice stayed quiet for a bit while Alex continued his breakthrough.

"You are stifling Pearl's cultivation," the voice said.

"I'm not," Alex said in a calm voice. "Even if I was, it doesn't matter. He will still be the Pearl I know and love."

"No, you will abandon him, as you've always done," the voice said.

"I don't abandon people," Alex said.

"What about leaving behind everyone you've know—"

"That is not me abandoning people," Alex said. "I left there to go find Pearl. I never abandoned them. One day, I will find my way back there, that I can promise."

He waited for the voice to speak again, but nothing happened. Slowly, Alex came back to being fully conscious and realized that he had been talking with his Inner Demon.

"Does that mean I passed?" Alex thought. That was when he realized that he was on the last leg of the breakthrough.

He quickly got hold of himself and continued his breakthrough. After a couple of minutes, he had successfully broken through to the True King realm.

Now, he was in the same cultivation realm his master was when she died.

"Look at how far I've reached, master," he spoke softly. "And I don't plan on stopping any time soon."

He called his mother to let her know that he had successfully broken through. His mother was perhaps happier at the fact that he even sent her a message.

After all, due to the workload, he hadn't had the time before. Once he was done talking with his mother, he put away the talisman and brought out Pearl.

After a little talk, he went on to cultivate with him in hopes that Pearl would breakthrough soon as well. After all, he watching just 2 realms below him once again.

Alex spent the next few weeks making as many pills as he could right in the palace. They had prepared a top-grade Alchemy room for him and he was going to use it as much as he could.

In those few weeks, he made all the pills that could be required by the Lightsworn for the next few months and then some more.

Once that was done, Alex returned his focus to two different things.

Perfecting the recipes in his mind that he had yet to do, and learning the process of downgrading a True rank ingredient to a common rank.

Once he was done with the second part, he would then move on to downgrading a Saint rank ingredient to a True rank. That would be the most difficult part for him.

But that was still some time away. Alex's days barely consisted of visiting the clinic. After all, with the widespread of pastes, rarely anyone needed him anymore.

His name now only came up when they talked about the source of the pastes.

Alex made his way to the garden in hopes of finding the princess. Now that he had some free time, he wanted to give learning about poisons a go too.

Since the Royal Wei family was known for their poison arts, that would be the perfect place to start from.

Chapter 731: Wei Ruoran

Alex arrived at the garden in the backyard and saw the Princess' two early Saint realm guards.

But the princess wasn't around them at all. Alex walked up to them, and only then did he notice the veiled princess in the distance.

He wanted to talk to her, but he saw her talking with an old man that limped a little as he walked.

Alex waited for the princess to finish talking with that man.

After a few minutes, the princess walked away and returned back towards the table to see Alex sitting there.

"Good morning, princess," Alex said.

"Good morning," the princess said. "What are you doing here? I thought you would be by your clinic by now."

"I can go there any time I want. There's not much pressure anymore," Alex said.

"Well, you do look quite free," the princess said.

Alex looked towards the old man who kept limping as he walked around the flowers. "Who's he?" Alex asked. "He doesn't seem like a disciple or a member of the family."

"Who? Ruoran? He's a disciple. He just doesn't bother with it, that's all," the princess said.

"I'm surprised he gets to touch the flowers," Alex said. "I thought you said the gardener was quite strict about people messing with his flowers."

The princess chuckled a bit. "Yes, aside from him, no one else is allowed to mess with the flower," the princess said.

"Then— wait, is he the gardener?" Alex asked.

The princess nodded.

"Woah!" Alex thought. He had been planning to learn about taking care of plants for a while now, but he just didn't have the time.

"Do you think he would teach me about gardening if I asked?" he asked the princess.

"Is that what you came to ask of me today?" the princess asked with a smile.

"Oh right, I nearly forgot," Alex said. "I came to ask you if you would be willing to teach me the poison arts."

"The poison arts?" the princess' voice got serious. "You do know that it is the royal family's secret right?"

"I know," Alex said hurriedly. "And I don't expect you to teach me everything. I'm just asking for a few lessons to get started, that's all."

"I see, I will think about it," the princess said.

"And at the same time, can you get him to teach me about gardening too? As an Alchemist, I really need to know more about these things," Alex said.

"Why don't you talk to him yourself?" the princess asked.

Alex thought for a moment and nodded. "You're right, I should."

He stood up and walked towards the gardener. "Greetings senior," Alex bowed a little to him.

The man was checking some of the flowers when Alex arrived, so he didn't speak for a while. Only after he was done looking through them did he finally turn around.

"Who are you?" the man asked.

"My name is Yu Ming. I am the Royal family's Alchemist," Alex said. "I was hoping to ask a favor of you."

"What is it?" the man asked in a grumpy voice.

"Would you mind teaching me about gardening?" Alex asked. "I would really appreciate it if you taught it to me."

"What use do I have for your appreciation? Go away, don't bother me," the gardener said.

"Please, senior Ruoran, I really need someone to teach me about growing plants, and who better than the royal gardener?" Alex said.

"Go away kid, I don't have the time," the man said and tried to move to the next plant.

"Ruoran, you would do good not to call his majesty's guest a 'kid'," the princes spoke as she too had walked there.

"What? His majesty's guest? Seriously?" the gardener looked to the princess in shock.

The princess nodded.

The gardener mulled for a moment and shook his head. "No, I still won't teach you," he said.

"What can I do to make you teach me?" Alex asked.

"What can you do?" the man asked.

"I'm an Alchemist so I can make pills," Alex said and the princess nodded behind him.

"I'm also a True Heaven rank Formation master, and Talisman maker," Alex said, which surprised the Princess.

"You are?" the princess asked with a look of surprise.

"Of course, did you not know?" Alex asked.

The princess shook her head.

"I thought you would have every piece of information on my background before I came here," Alex said.

"You are the Emperor's guest. I wouldn't dare do anything that would bring your ire," the princess said.

"You're an Alchemist?" the gardener asked.

"Yes," Alex said, seeing that he might be going somewhere after all.

"I am an Alchemist too," the man said. "Or… at least I was, until…"

"Until?" Alex waited for him to speak.

"He doesn't like talking about whatever happened," the princess said.

"Leave me alone," the gardener said as his mood was suddenly ruined and he walked away.

Seeing his face, Alex didn't want to talk about it anymore and let him go.

"What's wrong with him? Is he injured or something? He keeps limping," Alex said.

"He was injured because of a stupid decision," the princess said. "Sigh, if only he didn't do that."

"What did he do?" Alex asked.

The princess then started telling him about the gardener.

Wei Ruoran was born to a distant cousin of the emperor and had thus lost his royalty. However, that didn't stop him from being one of the most talented individuals in the whole empire.

A century ago, he was one of the most talented youth in the empire. In fact, most would say he was the most talented.

Ever since young, his talent for cultivation was high, but his love was for the plants. His mother, the princess, was an alchemist and as such had started a little garden in her own backyard.

Ruoran used to help his mother take care of the plants in the garden and as such, he gained his love for plantation and gardening.

Even when he grew, he became an Alchemist and spent most of the time just growing ingredients.

Most who heard that would consider him to be wasting his time with the plants, but the royal family knew different.

They could see that he had a talent for it. Any plant he was given would grow without a doubt. Any plant would blossom its flowers to him.

It was like the plants loved him and always grew whenever he took care of them.

They suspected it had something to do with his constitution, but there was no hint of it at all.

Even when he did spend his time in the garden, his cultivation speed did not drop. In just a few dozen years, he went on to reach the peak of the True Realm.

Then, one day, on a stormy night, he decided to break through.

Ruoran made his way up the mountain of the disciple's area and decided to break through in the middle of the storm.

At the peak, he was in the middle of breaking through when the lightning struck him and he went through Qi deviation.

The cultivation base he had worked so hard for was ruined, and he fell down to the True King's realm.

His leg where the lightning hit was also injured, and no matter what he did, it never healed itself.

The people only found out about it all after the incident, but everyone who cared about him was furious at his stupidity to try and break through in the middle of the storm.

Ruoran didn't speak any longer of what happened or why he went stupid. Since that day, he never broke through again.

He decided to become a gardener for the royal family and live out the rest of his life like that.

Alex heard it all and a curious expression appeared on his face. "I will go and talk to him again," he said.

"I don't think he will want to," The princess said. "He isn't the easiest person to talk to."

"I will still try," Alex said.

"What about the poison training?" the princess asked.

"Next time," Alex said as he ran away. "This one is more important."

He quickly returned back to the garden, but he found that Ruoran was on his way toward the giant mountain.

He was making his way to behind the mountain where the royal disciples stayed in.

"Senior Ruoran, stop," Alex shouted as he made his way halfway up the mountain where Ruoran was at.

He was walking up slowly so he hadn't made it very far up by the time Alex got there.

Ruoran turned around and his grumpy face turned even grumpier. "What is it now? I thought I made my intentions clear?" the man said.

"I know," Alex said. "But I just heard about your story from the princess."

"My story? So what? Did you come here to call me stupid too? Go ahead, everyone else does," the man said.

"No, I'm not going to call you stupid," Alex said with bright wide eyes.

"You still think it on the inside," Ruoran said.

"No," Alex said. "You're not stupid. There never was a storm when you went to break through, was there?"

Ruoran's face changed. "How do you know?" he asked.

"I know because you are good with plants," Alex said.

Ruoran's face changed to confusion. "What does that have to do with anything?" he asked.

"It has everything to do with the plants," Alex said. "Since young, you learned about the plants and were deeply interested in them. As you got older, you learned more and more."

"Then… one day you learned about them so much, that you learned a Dao about the plants," Alex said.

"Dao?" Ruoran's face changed.

"Yes, a Dao," Alex said. "Which is why I know that there was no storm when you went to break through to the Saint realm."

"No, instead you created one," Alex said. "The lightning that struck you was your Tribulation lightning, wasn't it?"

Chapter 732: A Path Ahead

"I am a little confused about what you are saying, but yes, it did indeed happen the way you said," Ruoran said.

"I was trying to break through to the Saint realm, so I thought I would go to a secluded location and do it. However, once I tried to, I felt like I was gone for a few hours like I had fallen asleep."

"However, it had only been a few minutes from what I could tell. Next thing I know, there's a storm brewing above me, threatening to destroy me."

"It struck not once, but twice. I defended myself the first time, but the second time, the lightning was stronger than me and I was injured," Ruoran said.

"Why didn't you tell anyone?" Alex asked.

"I tried," Ruoran said. "They thought I was making excuses."

"Do they not know about your Dao?" Alex asked.

"No," Ruoran said. "Even I only learned in the last few decades that what I had was a Dao. I don't even know much about it as information on it is hard to find."

"I understand," Alex said. Then, he looked through Ruoran's body once more. "Your leg is injured. Can it not be healed?"

"I don't know," Ruoran said. "No pills work on me for some reason."

"Weird," Alex thought. 'I will have to ask Shen Jing if getting hit by tribulation lightning results in such injuries.'

"Wait," Alex said. "Your wound shouldn't be stopping you from cultivating though. You didn't completely lose your cultivation base after all."

"I… I don't know what is going on anymore," Ruoran said. "I just can't seem to breakthrough. Every time I try, I just end up in a pool of cold sweat."

Alex thought for a while when he realized what the problem was. "Oh," he said. "Your inner demon must be incredibly hard to get through."

"Inner demon?" Ruoran asked with an inquisitive look.

"Let us settle somewhere. I will explain to you everything I can," Alex said.

Ruoran took him to a spot on the top of the mountain where an area was open with not a single tree.

"This is where I was struck with lightning. This emptiness is a constant reminder of my life now," Ruoran said.

Alex looked around and was surprised to find not a single sign of life in the 10 meter area.

There was a small hut in the center and Ruoran took Alex inside. There was a single bed, but Ruoran brought out a small chair from his storage bag and offered it to Alex.

"My apologies, people don't usually visit me," Ruoran said.

"It's fine," Alex said. "There is no point in having anything more than this as a cultivator."

"So, would you mind explaining what is happening exactly? From the start please," Ruoran said.

"I will, but in exchange, I hope you reconsider my request. I really do want you to teach me about growing plants," Alex said.

"I will," Ruoran said seriously with not a sense of grumpiness in his voice.

Alex nodded and started explaining everything he knew about Dao, Inner Demon, and Lightning Tribulation.

He told Ruoran that heaven itself was judging him every time he was going to progress. It was putting obstacles in his way to stop him from getting better.

Ruoran nodded as it all made sense.

"I was troubled with Inner Demon too and lost a bit of my cultivation base about 5 months ago. It wasn't until a while ago that I went for it after preparing and managed to break through," Alex said.

"How did you prepare against something you don't even know is there?" Ruoran asked.

"It is there, and the way to prepare for it is simple," Alex said. "You prepare for anything and everything it could use against you."

Alex wondered just what could this man's insecurity be when he realized that almost everything that happened in this man's life was probably some sort of insecurity.

A man that was born to the royal family, but was not a royal himself.

A talented cultivator that wasted his talent taking care of flowers.

One of the strongest of the younger generation member has to now watch those that were weaker than him become his senior.

A person that was deemed an idiot by everyone for a thing he didn't even do.

A man that was terrified of breaking through for the fear of losing his other normal leg and half of his cultivation base.

That were a lot of problems that Ruoran himself would have to tackle one at a time.

Alex made him do the same thing Shen Jing made him do: write a list of his problems and deal with them one by one.

Alex helped him deal with a bit of them, but Ruoran would have to tackle most of them on his own.

"I will come back on the day you return to become a True Emperor," Alex said. "After that, I hope you will teach me about growing plants."

"You believe that I can do it?" Ruoran asked.

"Of course, you can," Alex said. "Trust in yourself. That's how you're going to fight your inner demon."

"I'll let you be for now," Alex said and left Ruoran alone to mull over the conversation he just had.

Knowing what was wrong with him and knowing that there was a way to fight it rekindled a fire that was deep inside Ruoran that had been slumbering for a century now.

* * * * *

It had been a few days since Alex talked to Ruoran, but he hadn't met him after that.

Alex took up on the princess' offer to teach him about the poisons in the morning. So, every morning for one hour exactly, he learned about the different types of poisons and how to make them.

She taught him about the various different types of poisons. Some harmed the body, some harmed the mind, and some harmed the spirit itself.

There were poisons that killed someone, poisons that made people unable to use Qi, and poisons that stopped one's spiritual sense.

In a sense, anything that had a negative impact on a body was poison for it.

It didn't take long for Alex to realize how easily he could harm someone if he managed to turn the poisons into pills that were extra effective.

The training only lasted a week or so but Alex got what he had been looking for from this training.

A path ahead.

If he followed the path, even on his own, he would surely do well and get better at it.

A day or two after the training ended, Shen Jing returned for another day of training, and in that moment Alex asked him about Ruoran's injuries.

"An injury from Tribulation lightning? Those can be healed," Shen Jing said.

"But senior Ruoran says that no matter how many pills he ate, his legs never healed," Alex said.

"Well, since he was on the verge of becoming a Saint realm expert and all of his Qi has changed to Saint Qi, it will be impossible for True pills to work."

"If he wants to heal, he would need Saint rank pills. I doubt anyone would want to waste that on someone like him," Shen Jing said.

"Ah, I see," Alex said. "So he needs a pill from a higher rank, huh?"

"That or he needs to go through the tribulation again and beat it," Shen Jing said.

"Why would he need to do that?" Alex asked.

"Because he would get his leg healed that way," Shen Jing said.

"What? You can heal wounds by breaking through in a lightning tribulation?" Alex asked with surprise. If that was true then there was no need for him to try and make his healing pill.

He could just silently train until he reached Saint realm and he would get his arm back.

"No, no, no," Shen Jing quickly corrected him. "You will only get back what you lost to the tribulation. Any other problems that occurred that were not caused by the tribulation are not touched."

"Oh," Alex said as his excitement dwindled to nothing.

"Don't worry, you'll do fine," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded.

"Listen," he then suddenly said. "I need to talk to you about something."

"What is it?" Alex asked.

"I will be leaving this continent very soon," Shen Jing said. "I just wanted to tell you in case you suddenly don't see me anymore."

Chapter 733: Another Path

"You're leaving the continent? Why?" Alex asked. This was a bit too sudden from Alex's perspective.

"I… am going home," Shen Jing said.

"Home?" Alex asked curiously.

"Yes," Shen Jing said.

"I thought you said this place was your home," Alex said.

"It is, but if you remember, I told you I wasn't born here," Shen Jing said. "I'm going back to where I was born."

"Where is this home?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing put on a nostalgic smile as he remembered his family who must be missing him a lot.

"It's a place called the Land of the Blessed Sun. It's a tacky name, I know, but it fits the place," Shen Jing said.

"I kinda like the name," Alex said. After all, the place had the word 'sun' in it. "Can I visit there someday?"

"Of course," Shen Jing said. "Someday, I assume you will be invited even after I tell them about you."

"About me? Why would you tell them about me?" Alex asked worriedly.

"Because of how special you are. I doubt they won't want to see you after I gush about you."

Alex didn't know what to say, so he changed the topic. "What continent is this Land of the Blessed sun in?" Alex asked.

"I'm sure you will figure it out on your own in due time," Shen Jing said.

"Are you leaving for good or are you going to return?" Alex asked after a considerable amount of time.

"Oh no, it's going to be a short visit," Shen Jing said. However, his face twisted to show a grimacing smile as he said, "but what I consider short is usually a decade to two at least."

"Decades, huh?" Alex said. "I can't believe you would make such rushed decisions for something that would take decades. I wonder if I will feel the same sort of dissonance with time once I reach the Saint realm."

Shen Jing made a weird face. "Who said this was a rushed decision?" he asked. "In fact, it was a delayed decision."

"Delayed? You were supposed to leave earlier?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "I made plans for leaving once I thought you died in the Demon Realm. I was supposed to leave a while ago. But then I found out you didn't die there, and instead stuck around for a while longer to teach you what I could before leaving."

"When do you leave then?" Alex asked.

"Within a year," Shen Jing said.

Alex thought for a moment and asked, "if you really are going to leave then would you mind telling me what your cultivation base is?"

Alex had tried to figure out Shen Jing's cultivation base, but he still couldn't figure it out at all. He was sure it was at least in the Saint Soul based on the fact that the Emperor who was likely in Saint Core was afraid of him, but that still didn't tell Alex anything.

"How about this? Once I return, I will answer every question you could possibly have about me," Shen Jing said.

"But that would mean I will have to wait 20 years just to find out," Alex said.

"Don't worry, as you cultivate, time will go by in a flash."

The two of them trained along with Pearl for a bit longer and Shen Jing returned.

Alex went back to the palace around late afternoon and was about to go to the Alchemy room when a servant found him.

"Senior Ruoran is looking for me? Where?" Alex asked hurriedly after getting the information.

"The garden, sir alchemist," the servant said and Alex took off. Within a minute, he was back in the garden and found Ruoran by one of the flowers, checking it.

Alex walked up to him and before he could say anything, Ruoran started speaking.

"The Bluethorn Dahlia is notorious for requiring a lot of nutrients and water from the surrounding. So, where ever it is planted, you can expect an area around it where it is near impossible for anything else to grow."

"The Gripping Cactus on the other hand doesn't need as many nutrients to grow. Instead, it absorbs water from the surroundings and creates nutrients in its own body to grow."

"However, the Gripping Cactus is notorious for having thorns that release a rather foul-smelling scent. Fortunately, the Bluethorn Dahlia's flower's sweet scent perfectly masks the foul smell and even compliments it."

"As such, when you plant them side by side, neither of the plants affect each other, and both of them can become greater than the sum of their two parts," Ruoran said.

Alex smiled as he heard and said, "That sounds ingenious. Taking two non-conflicting plants and putting them together to negate the negative aspect of both of the plants using the positive aspects of another."

"Yes," Ruoran said. "Gardening, or rather, Planting is all about that. Whenever you want to grow something, you look at the positive and negative aspects of the plants."

"If you have a lot of areas, you don't really need to consider anything other than giving enough nutrients to the plant. However, when you have a small area, like the edges of a garden, or the formations for Alchemy gardens, you have to be mindful about everything, and use your knowledge of the plants to the best of your advantage."

Alex nodded as he heard that and smiled at Ruoran. "I guess congratulations are in order," he said. "Congratulations for reaching the True Emperor realm, senior Ruoran."

Ruoran smiled. "Thank you, and call me brother from now on. You have helped me way too much to call me just a senior."

"How about I call you a teacher then? For teaching me about plants?" Alex asked, but Ruoran cringed a bit. "Very well, thank you for accepting my offer to teach me, brother Ruoran."

Ruoran finally smiled and moved along. "How much do you know about the plants, about growing them?" he asked.

Alex remembered back to his days on the farm, and how his father would tend his crops. His father taught him a bit about farming, but he never gave a hands-on experience to him.

So, it wasn't too far to say that Alex was a complete novice when it came to this topic.

"I would say I do not know anything," he said to Ruoran.

"A newbie, huh? Well, then I guess I will have to start from the beginning then," Ruoran said and started teaching.

"First of all, there are different categories and subcategories of plants. Let's start with the most common ones," Ruoran said and started explaining what he knew about plants.

The whole day, he went around the garden teaching the very basics of everything while giving examples along the way.

Alex matched the knowledge with his own knowledge from back when his mother taught him about plants. There wasn't much information in his mind from back then, but it still helped quite a bit.

That night, Alex returned back to his room and sat down to cultivate while recalling everything he was taught.

What he was taught was simple knowledge, but that knowledge helped him open up another path for his future.

Another path that if he went along, he was sure he would master in no time.

Chapter 734: Spirit Foods Competition

"22 Thousand True Spirit stones, going once."

"22 Thousand True Spirit stones, going twice."

"22 Thousand True Spirit stones, going thrice."

"Sold!"

The auctioneer lady stuck the gavel and announced the product sold.

"Thank you everyone for coming. That was the last item on our auction today. There will be another auction in a month's time. Please come by again," the auctioneer lady said and waited until everyone left.

Alex left out of the auction house with a disappointed look.

His Yang body was getting worse by the day and his hopes of finding any sort of Yin treasure were getting worse and worse.

He walked by the streets of the capital and saw the influx of people that had arrived here to see the competition that was held for Spirit Foods.

'It's already been a year since the Formations competition huh?' Alex thought. 'Time really does go by quickly when one cultivates.'

In the last 7 months, Alex had broken through twice and had reached True King 3rd realm. In the next two or three months, he should be able to break through once more.

Pearl on the other hand had broken through twice too, but there was nearly 6 months gap in between each of his breakthroughs.

Part of the problem was obviously Pearl's slow cultivation speed, but part of the problem was also the fact that he hadn't managed to find any beast cores to consume, which had slowed him down.

'If only we could go to the mountains to fight and grow again,' Alex thought. However, he shook his head.

He had a job here in the capital. He was assigned to the royal family to make pills and he wouldn't return until he was done here.

'Just one more year,' he thought to himself.

He ignored the crowd of people talking about Spirit foods and made his way to the Alchemy guild.

There was a long list of lines and Alex found the shortest one to queue in.

As he waited for the line to move, a hand suddenly fell on his shoulders. Alex turned around to see who it was and saw Zhou Ren.

"Brother Ren," Alex said. "It's good to see you again."

"Brother Yu, It's been a while, hasn't it?" Zhou Ren said. "When was it I saw you last time? Oh, that's right, back when you gave away all the pastes recipes for free."

'Does he hold a grudge against me for that?' Alex wondered. Alex thought he hadn't done anything directly to the father and son, but who knew how the elites took to even the slightest damage to their pride.

"What are you doing here? Are you looking for a pill? Tell me what it is, and I will make it for you," Zhou Ren said.

"It's fine, brother Ren. I'm not looking for any pill. I'm just here to talk to the receptionist about some ingredients," Alex said.

"What ingredients?" Zhou Ren inquired.

"It's something only the staff can help me with," Alex said.

"Do you want to come with me to the back? There are people there that can do similar things too. The line in here is so long," Zhou Ren said.

Alex's eyes narrowed a bit in thought. He was friendly with the staff back in the Dawnspring city, so he could ask the ones in the back about anything.

But in the capital, where everything was so strict, he wasn't sure if he should do something out of line here.

"That's not the staff's task though," Alex said.

"They will bend a rule or two from time to time," Zhou Ren said. "Especially if I show them my True Heaven rank badge."

"Hmm… " Alex thought for a moment. "Well, if they will do that then I should do just that."

Alex walked out of the queue and started walking towards the back of the Alchemy Guild.

"Hey, not so fast. I need to show my badge to get you—" Zhou Ren's words stuck in his mouth when Alex brought out his own badge to wear.

His eyes went wide as he couldn't possibly correlate a True Heaven rank badge with someone like Alex.

"Where did you get that badge?" Zhou Ren asked. "Do you know how much trouble you could cause to the person whose badge this is?"

"Problem? This is my own badge, Brother Zhou," Alex said.

"No way," Zhou Ren said. "You're not an Alchemist."

"The badge says so," Alex said and continued walking.

"Is that really not a stolen badge?" Zhou Ren asked.

"Of course not," Alex said.

Alex walked up to the staff members that were in charge of handing the mission's ending.

"Greetings, Brother Yu," one of the staff members that recognized him greeted him quickly.

"Hello," Alex put on an amicable smile. "I needed to buy something but the line outside is very long. Would it be alright if I had you guys look something up for me?"

"Sure, Brother Yu. What would you like for us to search?" the staff member asked.

"Is there any treasure in the guild with a lot of Yin?" he asked.

The staff checked through the records and came up with a few names.

Alex mulled over the list and chose the ones that would actually affect him somewhat.

"This, this, and this," he quickly chose the ingredients. "As for the money, please take it from my account."

"Yes, brother Yu," the staff said and quickly finished the transaction.

"Thank you," Alex said and turned away.

Zhou Ren watched the whole thing with a shocked expression as he finally realized that Alex truly was a True Heaven-ranked alchemist.

"I don't understand," he said. "Why would a True Heaven alchemist ever bother with the common folks and stoop so low to treat them himself?"

"It kind of felt like it was my responsibility," Alex said. "After I got the recipes from the Demon Realm, I realized that it could treat so many people with such little resources."

"So, I started practicing and got good at it. However, since I was the only one who knew how to make it, I didn't think anyone else could do it," Alex said.

"Well, that went in a different direction very quickly, didn't it? If you and your father had asked just 20 minutes earlier that day, you would've likely gotten all the recipes," Alex said.

Zhou Ren slowly got angry as he heard Alex talk. To him, Alex's words sounded like mockery. He felt like Alex was telling him they failed.

As a member of the Zhou family, he couldn't bear being a failure.

"What's the highest Harmony pill you have ever made?" Zhou Ren asked.

"Sorry?" Alex was confused at the sudden question. "Highest harmony? Let's see. It was a 63% Body Relaxing pill." He wasn't stupid enough to answer truthfully just because he was asked.

"63% huh? That's not bad. If you take part in the Alchemy competition, you should be able to get top 5 if you reach that high," Zhou Ren said.

"I, myself, can reach 65% consistently. I even reached 67% on a pill not so long ago. Of course, the Alchemy competition is more than just making the best pill. There is so much more that goes into it," Zhou Ren said.

Alex nodded as he heard it, but there wasn't any need to hear about it at all. After all…

"I don't plan on joining the Alchemy competition," Alex said.

"What?" Zhou Ren's face sank with displeasure. "Are you getting scared? If you are a man you need to fight adversity with courage, not fear. So what if you won't come first? Or even second. It's all about standing up and taking a stance."

Alex didn't say anything. He was afraid after all. Not of the competition or coming last.

He was afraid that if whatever was going on with his body went on forever, then he wouldn't be able to make pills for a long time and would have to start all over again, just like his master did.

He would have to change his entire 8 year's worth of experience in Alchemy just so he could make a decent Common Rank pill again.

He didn't want that. So, the moment his job in the Royal family was done, he was planning on leaving the capital.

He wasn't sure where he would go, but what he was sure of was that he would do anything to get it fixed.

Even if that meant going directly to the Beast realm to see if they had any clue about what was going on.

"I'm sorry, brother Ren, but I really don't have any interest in the Alchemy competition," Alex said. "But I will wish you good luck right now."

"You still have 1 year to make your choice. Don't be too hasty," Zhou Ren said.

Alex nodded just to appease him. "I will think about it carefully then," he said.

"Good, that is the least you can do as a True Heaven rank alchemist," Zhou Ren said. "Now, if you will excuse me, I came here to find out information about the competition next year."

Alex let him be but stuck around long enough to hear about the date the competition was taking place in.

'It will be just around the time I am supposed to leave. Maybe I can spare a week?' Alex thought but quickly shook his head.

'I can't waste any time,' he thought. He looked at the 3 Yin ingredients he had been lucky enough to find and decided to go back to the palace and cultivate with them to temporarily fix his body.

Chapter 735: New Alchemists

Alex got busy with life. For the next 2 months, he focused his time on gardening and poison making.

Ruoran had given him a small area of the garden to do in it as he pleased. So, Alex had been growing some special plants that would one day give True rank ingredients for Alchemy.

Aside from that, he was continuously making pills for the Royal family, but there was less and less need for it.

Shen Jing had visited less and less as it was time for him to leave, and Alex's cultivation was getting slower once again because of it.

Thanks to his yang-filled body, his Alchemy was regressing as well. By now, he was only making 2 or 3 Immortal rank pills a day because of how hard it was for him to maintain his body.

Most of the time, even with his Heat and Heat conduction Dao, it was getting hard to exactly set the temperature of the flame straight.

His yang energy would always fluctuate, and so he couldn't even adapt to it to increase the temperature just as.

He was afraid that soon he wouldn't be able to make Immortal rank pills despite his recipes.

Treasures with Yin and Yang were just hard to get by, so Alex didn't have many options even in the capital. Not even Shen Jing had Yin treasures. Although, Shen Jing never really had anything.

He never took any flying boats, or weapons, or armors, or anything of his own and always relied on his body and cultivation.

Alex felt a little weird that a strong person like Shen Jing had nothing with him, but he figured it was just the way Shen Jing liked to live.

The princess did mention something about a snowy area in the eastern mountains way in the east towards the ocean where he could find some Yin treasures.

She had said that really great Yin treasures came from there. Alex wanted to go there, but the princess also let him know how treacherous the place was.

Apparently, it was so cold there that even breathing became hard due to the air condensing on the floor.

Only those with a really strong cultivation base like the people in the Saint realm went there. But even then, they had to be extra prepared.

Alex decided to check that place out right after he left the capital.

He didn't want Yin treasures. He wanted to fix his condition. Yin treasures were just a temporary remedy, but not the actual solution to his situation.

He wished there was a tree like the one that evolved his body but of the Yin variety. That would certainly help him a lot.

Alex continued his day normally until one day there was a knock on the door.

Alex opened the door and found Shurin standing outside.

"Hey, Shurin. I haven't seen you in a while," Alex said. After Alex returned back and secluded himself in the palace for the majority of the days, Shurin was sent back to do whatever she wanted.

She would only be called from time to time when Alex needed to buy some ingredients.

"The princess is asking you to visit her in the garden. There are some guests she wants to introduce you to," Shurin said.

"Oh, what guests?" Alex asked.

Shurin shook her head. "I don't recognize them, sorry," she said.

Alex nodded and walked along with her. When he reached the garden, Alex saw quite a few tables lined up that usually weren't in the garden.

There were quite a few princes and princesses sitting there, talking with a lot of different people he hadn't seen before.

Although, that was not necessarily true. After a few seconds, he did see a girl that he recognized.

'Xue Meirong,' he thought to himself when he saw her. This was a girl he had only seen once in the Demon realm as he had with all the others when she stood around the House of the Undying.

She was wearing the same robe back then as right now, a robe with green and pink, giving off an impression of a blossomed lotus.

That would make sense as she was part of the Falling Lotus sect. Next to her was a relatively old man with a similar robe, but his cultivation base left Alex stunned as he was in the Saint realm. Quite high at that too.

He had a suspicion as to who that was, but he didn't dare guess it right now.

"You're here," The princess said and beckoned him.

"You did call for me," Alex said as he sat down next to her on the empty seat. "What's going on? Some sort of event?"

"Yes," the princess said. "I want you to meet these people."

The princess introduced him to every single person there, and Alex greeted them all respectfully. Just as he had expected, the man by Xue Meirong was Xue Mufan, the Saint rank alchemist most well known in the empire aside from the Zhou family's Zhou Zirong.

"And this is one of the empire's current best young generation members, Xue Meirong," Princess Xumei said.

"Greetings, sister Meirong," Alex said.

"And finally, this is Yu Ming, our temporary Royal Alchemist," the princess introduced himself to the others. "The person who you will be replacing.'

Alex's ears perked up. "Replacing?" he asked softly to the princess.

"Of course," the princes said. "You didn't think we wouldn't prepare until you left, did you?"

Alex gave a rueful smile and shook his head.

"Anyway, these are your replacements, and I would like to ask you to help us choose from them," the princess said.

"Including senior Xue?" Alex asked with a bit of surprise.

"Haha, no. Senior Xue came here with his daughter. He isn't looking to replace you," the princess said.

"Young man, what rank of Alchemist are you?" Xue Mufan suddenly asked.

"I am a True Heaven alchemist, senior," Alex said and brought out his True Heaven badge.

"And you look so young," the man said with a bit of surprise in his eyes. "Are you even 30?"

"No," Alex shook his head.

"Wow, then you will be able to take part in 3 different Alchemy competitions before you aren't allowed to. I see a great life ahead of you, young man," Xue Mufan said.

"Thank you, senior," Alex said.

"Senior Xue, my father is looking for you. Shurin, show senior to the Palace hall," Xumei ordered Shurin who was nearby.

Xue Mufan gave a smile and left, not before looking towards his daughter and giving her an encouraging look.

Alex looked back at the group and was now confused as to what to do. He had always been the one being tested and had never given others some test.

He thought for a few seconds and brought out a talisman. The talisman recorded one of his improved pills, but the pill was one of the more common pills that already had a good enough recipe.

He handed it to the princess and told her to get it replicated a bunch for the test.

Without hesitation, the princess ordered someone to do it immediately. At the same time, Alex had her bring 5 sets of ingredients for the same recipe per examinee.

Then, he started speaking to the group.

"The test is simple. I have a recipe in my hand for the Disciple Ascendance pill. I'm sure you guys are all familiar with the pill and its recipe, but this one is an improved version that should be able to help you all a lot."

"In a few minutes, you will all be given 5 sets of ingredients. Whoever can make the best pill in an hour wins," Alex said.

"So simple?" the princess asked.

"This should be enough," Alex said.

Soon the ingredients were here and everyone was handed the recipe as well. Some of the people said they didn't need the recipe as they already knew the recipe by heart after making it hundreds of times.

Alex didn't bother explaining and let them do what they wanted to do.

"You have 20 minutes to read the recipe and learn it as well as prepare. After that, you will have one hour to make the pills," Alex said.

"There are Alchemy rooms over there, and you will make your pills there. If you want, you can go ahead right now and save yourself 20 minutes."

Chapter 736: Disturbance

"Is there a reason why you made the test so simple?" the princess asked while waiting for the alchemists to finish making the pill.

"Well, part of the reason is that you didn't give me time to prepare," Alex said. "Had you told me you were doing this, I could have prepared much better."

"How could you not know this was happening? This is the news of the capital right now," the princess said.

"Uhh… is it? I haven't left my room in some time now," Alex said while shaking his head.

"You need to go out some more," the princess said. "So, what's the other part of the reason?"

"The other part is that I'm looking for 3 things in the new alchemist," Alex said.

"What 3 things?" the princess asked.

"Well, I'm looking for tale—"

Alex's words stopped midspeech when he sensed something and turned his head to the right towards the palace.

The princess looked confused and looked towards the palace but she couldn't understand why she was looking there.

"What's there?" she asked, but Alex wasn't hearing anything. He was focused on the tiny pulse that he had felt just now and was wondering what it was.

He felt it once more in his chest and couldn't help but put on a serious face. 'What is happening?' he thought and continued looking in the direction as his senses told him something was up.

It wasn't just him that was having such a reaction. Both the Emperor and Xue Mufan had stopped speaking with each other and were sensing something.

"Is someone comprehending the Dao?" the Emperor asked.

"Doesn't feel like it," Mufan said and continued looking in all directions, trying to find exactly where this feeling was coming from.

Deep in the Fu family's Ancestral home, Fu Tao's grandfather was woken up from his deep cultivation once again as a feeling came to him again.

The last time this had happened was a decade ago when he had felt something from the north and had sent many of the younger generations into the Beast realm.

He had inadvertently killed the majority of the last generation of youngsters by making everyone agree to send them in the first place.

His older brother had gone to the other side and started an Empire there, so he knew one could go through now. Not only that, even his own grandson had returned with a couple from the other side.

So, he knew traversing was safe. Still, he didn't dare think about sending any more people through the Beast realm again.

'I don't know what is happening out there, but I'm staying out of it,' the old man thought and stayed secluded.

Zhou Tianqiu noticed the disturbance too, and he too couldn't tell what the cause was.

Shanggaun Quan felt his Spear Qi waver when the disturbance reached him. "What's that?" he wondered as he was unable to pinpoint the disturbance or even give it a general direction.

Han Hongqi was training his physique when he too sensed the disturbance and wondered what it was.

The Broken Ravine sect, the Glory's edge sect, the Heaven's Peak school, the Falling Lotus sect, the Lu clan, the Shen clan, the Zhou clan, the Jin clan, the Han clan, the Fu clan, and the Song clan.

Every single one of these locations had their secluded Saint realm cultivators riled up from the disturbance that was happening and no one could tell what it was.

Most of the Saint realm cultivators that were in the Saint Condensation realm didn't even notice it at all.

Those that did, did not have the perception to notice where it was happening.

The only one that was perceptive enough was Alex for some reason, and he too could only tell the direction at best, not the distance.

Alex continued staring at the sky for a while, hoping to see some visual changes in the sky. However, aside from maybe a flash of light, which he wasn't sure really happened or not, he couldn't see anything else.

A few moments later, the weird feeling of some pulse hitting him disappeared, and Alex couldn't help but wonder if he had hallucinated what had just happened.

"What are you staring at?" the princess asked once again after not getting any answer the first time.

"Sorry, I was just…" Alex looked back in that direction and wondered what he was really trying to find in that direction. "I don't know. I thought I noticed something, it might be a mistake. Where were we again?"

He quickly changed the topic and the princess noticed that he didn't want to talk about it, so she went along.

"You were telling me about the 3 things you were looking for in our new Alchemist," the Princess said.

"Right! What I'm looking for is Talent, Experience, and Ego," Alex said.

"Talent is obvious as you most likely want people that can make the best pills," Alex said. "However, just finding people that can make pills won't help you a lot."

"You also need people with enough experience," Alex said.

"I don't see how that's any relevant," the princess said. "Every single person here today is a master in their own right. They have been making pills for ages. Experience is the last thing they won't have."

Alex nodded. "While you may be right about that, it is not the type of experience I'm looking for," he said.

"Oh, what type is it then," the princess asked.

"The experience I'm talking about is knowing when something you have just received is better than what you have. If not that, then at least know that testing it won't hurt very much since I did give them 80 minutes in total to make simply one pill that triumphs it all," Alex said.

"Are you that confident in your pill recipe?" the princess asked.

"No one should be able to come up with one that is better," Alex said without hesitation.

"Alright, so what about Ego?" the princess asked.

"It's simple really," Alex said. "Those who try will know that my recipe is better. I just want to see if their ego isn't too big to stop them from using it."

"I don't think you would want an alchemist that is not willing to learn from others when the time comes," Alex said.

'I see. We wouldn't want someone like that," the princess said. "But will there be someone that is as good as you?"

Alex smiled. It wasn't a surprise that the princess knew he was a True Immortal alchemist by now. The only reason the news hadn't spread was probably that she didn't want to offend him.

That or she was afraid of Shen Jing.

Either way, the two of them had acted like the other person was not aware of anything regarding that topic.

"I will find you the best I can," Alex said.

The hour passed quickly as the two of them continued their conversation and soon people started coming out of the Alchemy room with smiles on their faces.

Most of them thought they were the best here. Alex was going to love to see how they all did.

Once they all arrived, Alex brought out a Pill tester and said, "Bring out your best pill and let me test it."

Chapter 737: Winner

Alex didn't need the Pill testers, but he still brought out 5 of them for everyone else's sake.

"Please give me your pills," Alex said to the first man to his left. While he looked through the pills and put them one by one in the 5 different testers.

As they waited for the result to come, Alex asked the man, "What did you think of the recipe I gave you?"

"It was good," the man said with no other expression on his face. Alex immediately knew he hadn't used it.

The results came and the best pill was around 56%.

Alex went on to the next one and did the same thing. This person said that he did use the recipe, but only for the last one, but it was the first time he used that recipe so he got a little confused and messed up.

The results came and his best pill was around 53%.

It went on for a while as Alex tested everyone's pills and asked the same question. Most of them didn't bother with the new recipe as 80 minutes was too fast a time for them to risk their pills.

That wasn't to say that no one used it. A couple of people had clearly heard him say that this was an improved recipe of his, so they had tried it immediately.

While the first 2 pills weren't what they wanted, soon they got a much better result.

By the end, they were making pills that were in the 60% range.

Xue Meirong came forth and handed her pills. Alex put the pills in the testers and asked her the same question.

"What did you think about the new recipe?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I didn't bother with it. I had too many things on my mind anyway."

"Okay," Alex said and waited.

The fogs rolled up in the tester and soon he saw the number 63% in one of the testers.

"Not bad," Alex said. She was the highest yet and she had done it by herself.

Although, Alex doubted she did it using the same recipe everyone else had. Her father must've improved the recipe somewhat and passed it along.

Alex moved on to the next few people and the best he got was 61% by someone who used his recipe.

"Hello," the final participant came and spoke with a nervous voice.

"Hi, your pills?" Alex asked.

"Here," she gave it nervously with a shaking hand. Alex started putting in the pills into the testers and even as he did, his eyes slightly widened at the result.

"You used my recipe?" he asked confidently.

"Yes, yes," the girl with the green and orange-colored robe said. "Can you tell me who changed that recipe? That was amazing."

"Thank you. That was me," Alex said.

"Wow, but you're so young," she said.

Alex had a favorable impression of the girl. "Sister Zhanrou isn't that old herself," he said.

"Ahem, little Yu, why are you flirting with her?" the princess asked in a low voice.

"I'm not," Alex said. "I'm just creating a favorable atmosphere between us two, considering we will have to work together for over 10 months now."

Just as he said that the crowd made a gasping sound and Alex smiled at the princess.

The princess looked to the testers and realized what had just happened.

71%.

"Congratulations, Gu Zhanrou. You are now the Royal Alchemist for the Luminance Empire," the princess said.

"Wow? Really? Yes!" Gu Zhanrou celebrated while all the other participants congratulated her.

"Wait, no! How did she get 71%? She must've cheated," Xue Meirong said.

"What? No, I didn't," Gu Zhanrou said. "You're just mad you didn't beat me."

"Zhanrou, you know yourself you're not as good as me," Xue Meirong said.

"That's arguable at best," Zhanrou said. "Besides, I won, didn't I? You might've won if you had followed his recipe instead of being stubborn."

"What's going on here? I hear my daughter shouting," Xue Mufan said as he walked over to the group.

"We chose our alchemist, senior," the princess said. "Your daughter is just angry that it wasn't her."

"Oh, she didn't win? What happened?" Mufan asked.

After getting a short primer on what had happened, Mufan laughed a bit. "Don't be a sore loser, rongrong," he said.

"But… how could she and I have such difference?" Meirong asked.

"Well, it sounds like she had a better recipe," Mufan said. "Which if I say honestly, I'm very curious about. How did you come across such an amazing recipe, Junior?"

"I came up with it myself," Alex said.

"How?" Mufan asked curiously.

Alex gave a single thin smile and said, "now senior, I'm not going to give away trade secrets just like that."

"Ah, right. My apology," Xue Mufan said. "Well, if there is nothing else, then I will leave now. Come, rongrong."

Xue Meirong gave a snort to Zhanrou and then turned to Alex before saying. "You think you're some big shot huh? I will show you how great I am in the Alchemy competition," she said.

"Well, my apologies, but I won't be attending the competition," Alex said.

"Coward!" Xue Meirong said before walking away.

Alex gave her a weird look as she and Mufan flew away. 'Why does everyone think I'm running away?' he wondered.

"We will leave now too," the different alchemists said and started leaving one by one.

Finally, only the princess, Alex, and Gu Zhanrou remained.

"Well, you two talk. I have things to do. Welcome to the palace, miss Alchemist," the princess said.

"Thank you," Zhanrou said excitedly.

After the princess left, Zhanrou and Alex sat down by the table and started talking. The two talked about themselves and got to know each other.

Alex talked a bit about him but didn't go into details for the most part, while Zhanrou couldn't stop speaking about herself.

She was one of the best disciples from the Azure Leaves school. It was an Alchemy-focused school like the Hong Wu sect was and was one of the main rivals of the Falling Lotus sect, which was more popular than it due to it having more than just Alchemy.

Because of that, since a young age, Zhanrou had come to see Meirong as her rival, and for the first time today, she had won against her.

In her nearly 36 years of living, she had finally gotten the victory she wanted.

"Her father is too good and she always ends up getting the best training resources, while I have to work for mine," Zhanrou said. "I'm sure I get better with good ingredients and recipes too."

"Ooh, can you give me some of the recipes that you changed?" she asked.

Alex thought for a moment and wondered if he should do it or not. In the end, he nodded. "I will give you a few of them," he said as he planned to give her the most basic ones that would be useful for the Royal family.

After staying here for 2 years, he wouldn't want to leave the place worse than when he joined.

"Ooh, I can't wait," Zhanrou said excitedly.

The two of them continued talking for a while before the princess came back and took her on a tour of the palace.

Alex was finally free and returned back to his room as well.

Chapter 738: Farewell

The following months went by very quickly. With nothing much to do, Alex spent most of the time just focusing on himself.

The Winter Moon cultivation technique his master gave had become practically useless long ago, but even so, that was all Alex had most of the time to contain his Yang aura.

Even though it took his 3 days of cultivating with this technique to revert 1 day's worth of change, he did it as he had no other choice.

He did find Yin treasures that affected him, but they were getting harder and harder to find. It was as if the more he used Yin treasures, the more tolerant his body was getting to it.

So, each time he had to go out and find something strong, as weaker ones only made the yang stronger.

In the final 10 months that Alex had remained in the palace, nearly 4 months of his time was spent on just fixing his body, so there wasn't much time to cultivate either.

As such, in that time, he had only managed to reach True King 5th realm. Pearl on the other hand didn't have the same problem as him, but he was still slow and only reached True King 7th realm.

He would've probably done better had he managed to go out and train, but Alex had no time to leave the palace and go all the way to the east.

He hoped Shen Jing would help him, but Shen Jing never came to train them again. Alex guessed he must've left without saying goodbye. He had said he would likely leave without telling him, but it still stung him a bit to know that he wouldn't see him for at least a decade more.

Without Shen Jing, Alex's life became that more simple once again. Whether it was a bad thing or not, he wouldn't know.

Due to the increase of his Yang aura, he had slowed down Alchemy as well. Most of the time, it was getting difficult to make pills for longer than a few hours.

Not only that, it even hampered his task to improve recipes. So, Alex stopped making pills for a while and focused on Formations, Talismans, and poisons.

Zhanrou had taken over the task of making most of the pills after Alex gave her some of the recipes.

She begged him to teach her how to improve, but he didn't feel like giving out all the advantages he had.

If everyone started having good recipes, his value would certainly lower quite a bit. While he wasn't materialistic as most other people, he still cared about his worth to people.

His time with the royal family was coming to a close and in just another day, he would be leaving.

The princess wanted to throw a big farewell party, but Alex didn't want such a thing.

So, she compromised with him and threw a small one with amazing spirit foods and quality entertainment full of the greatest musicians and dancers of the city.

The party was small and the guest lists smaller. Aside from Princess Xumei, there were a few other princes and princesses that Alex had managed to befriend.

Shurin was there with her mother who she introduced to just at that party alone. In the 2 years, she was with Alex, she had grown from Peak Mind Tempering realm cultivator to a True Disciple 6th realm cultivator.

According to the people around her, her cultivation was very fast and she would one day become one of the leading members of the next younger generation.

Ruoran had come as well to visit him. After Alex's help, Ruoran's cultivation journey had become smooth and he was now a True Emperor 3rd realm cultivator.

Alex thanked him as he would a master for teaching him everything he knew about growing and taking care of plants.

Ruoran thanked him for all the aid he provided him.

Zhanrou was both excited and sad about the farewell party as she felt her only friend in the palace was about to leave her. Sure she had other friends, but none of them had the same interest in Alchemy as Alex did.

"I'm sure we'll meet again. This isn't our final meeting," Alex said.

"Yeah, but I will feel lonely," she said. Alex could only smile at that.

The party ended not long after and everyone went their separate ways.

Alex returned back to his room and cultivated one last night before he was going to leave in the morning.

The next morning, he heard a knock on the door. Alex opened the door and found the princess standing outside.

"Come with me," the princess said. She started moving before he could even respond.

Alex followed her quickly and asked, "where are we going?"

"My father wants to see you," the princess said.

"Oh," Alex was surprised. In the 2 years, Alex had stayed here, he had never, the Emperor had never once bothered to visit him or call for him, so he was surprised he was only being called while he was about to leave.

Alex reached the Palace hall and entered with the princess.

"You're finally here," the Emperor said when he saw Alex.

"You called for me, your majesty?" Alex asked.

"Just to bid you farewell and thank you for all the things you've done for us," the Emperor said.

"That was my job, your majesty," Alex said.

"We both know you had no duty or responsibility to us and yet you still helped us. For that, I thank you," The Emperor said as he even bowed a little.

"Father?" the princess was surprised. She had never seen her father bow before any.

"Your majesty, please trust me when I say that I wouldn't have done it if I didn't enjoy it. I am sure in the future I will look back to these days of mine in the palace with nostalgia," Alex said.

"That makes me a little happy," the Emperor said. "I wouldn't want to anger someone who even he values so much."

"He?" Alex was a little confused. "You mean brother Shen Jing?"

"Yes," the Emperor said. "You call him brother? Can you tell me what your relationship is exactly?"

Alex shrugged. "I guess he's like a master to me. He treats me like a little brother. He teaches me different things and helps me out a lot."

"You are quite lucky to be treated like that by him," the Emperor said with a hint of fear and envy in his voice.

Alex got a distinct feeling in his heart and so he asked the Emperor. "Do you know his identity?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the Emperor said and finally saw Alex's curious face. "Do you not know?"

"He never tells me who he really is," Alex said. "Can you tell me?"

The Emperor hesitated a bit.

"My father made an oath to keep his identity secret. He won't even tell me," the princess said from the side.

"An oath?" Alex looked at the Emperor in shock. Just what was Shen Jing's identity to make even the Emperor say an oath just to keep his secret.

'Do the hegemony islands have that much power?' Alex wondered.

"Anyway, I didn't call you here to talk about him. I came to say thank you and goodbye," the Emperor said.

Alex quickly threw out the thoughts he was having and thanked the Emperor himself.

Once they were done, the princess and Alex left the Palace hall.

"I guess this is goodbye then," Alex said to the princess.

"You're leaving now?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I already have my farewell so I should leave now."

"Where will you go next?" she asked.

"Um, remember that chilly area you told me about in the east? I think I will go there," Alex said.

"The Icy Hell?" the princess asked. "Are you still looking for Yin Treasures?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I'm afraid I will have to keep looking for them until… nevermind. I will leave now."

"Okay, take care. Come to us if you need anything," the princess said.

"I will, thank you," Alex said. "Goodbye."

Alex turned around and left the palace. He felt a bit of melancholy in his heart for leaving a place he had been in for the last 2 years, but his need to go to the place known as the Icy Hell triumphed every other feeling.

'If what they say about the place being a frozen nightmare is true, then I will have to prepare some pills to heat me up,' Alex thought and made his way to the Alchemy guild.

While he trusted his yang body to keep him host in most situations, he would still prepare for the cold just in case his body couldn't handle it.

He walked into the guild and saw a long crowd out front. So, he walked to the back of the hall.

"Oh, hi brother Yu, did you come to register for the Alchemy competition?" one of the friendly staff that recognized him asked.

"The wha— Oh right, I forgot it was starting soon. No wonder there are so many people in the front," Alex said. "But no, I'm not here for the competition. I won't be taking part in it."

"Really?" the staff gave a disappointed look. "I would've thought you would join the competition and want to show them how good you are. Given how young you are, I'm sure you will have a lot of people try to sponsor you too."

Alex smiled, he knew what would happen if he went through the competition. Even if he didn't get the first place and just came in the Top 10, just based on his age alone, there would be a line of people that would try to take him in their group.

They had done so to his mother and she was already 49 when she got 2nd place in the talisman competition. Not to mention, she already had a sect behind her and they still came.

Given how Alex had nobody behind him, these people would be like vultures to his dead meat.

"Yeah, I'm not taking part," Alex told the staff member.

"Well, I guess it's your choice, so I can't say anything," the staff member said. "Still, given how many times you come here to find Yin treasures, I'm surprised you are going to let go of this one."

"Sorry?" Alex was a little confused.

"I was talking about the rewards for the Alchemy competition," the staff said. "Have you not seen the rewards yet?"

"No," Alex said. "It has a Yin treasure?"

"An incredible one too. Look, it's a saint rank Yin ingredient," the staff member said as he gave Alex a talisman.

Alex read the talisman which turned out to be full of information about the competition. Alex skipped all the other information and went directly to the rewards.

The rewards were quite incredible, to say the least.

The top 10 all got a True Heaven ranked artifact each along with 5 thousand True Spirit stones.

Those that entered the top 5 got a few rare True ranked ingredients, along with another 10 thousand True spirit stones.

The person that came in Third place got 1 saint ranked artifact on top of what the Top 5 got.

The person that came in Second place got 1 Saint ranked artifact and 2 Saint pill recipes on top of what the Top 5 got.

The person that came in First got 1 Saint ranked artifact, 2 Saint pill recipes, and 3 Saint ranked ingredients on top of what the Top 5 got.

Alex read the names of the 3 ingredients.

The first one was a Hammerhead Snake's venom. Alex had never heard about the venom being used in any pill, but it would work well as a venom alone.

The second ingredient was what the staff had told him about. It was a Blizzard's Rainbow core, a multicolored fruit that was filled to the brim with Yin energy. This was something that would definitely help him a lot.

Alex was already wondering if he should change his decision about not joining the competition when he laid his eyes on the third ingredient on the list.

His eyes went wide as his breathing became shallow with shock. He had done it. He had finally found it.

There it was, the final reward for the first place in the competition.

The Blood Spirit Ginseng.

Chapter 739: Competition Day

"Aww, where's my little boy?" Helen ran towards Alex and hugged him in the room he had booked.

"Mother, you don't have to call me your little boy anymore. I'm 25 already," Alex said.

"Hmph, is that how you should be speaking to your mother who you haven't seen in over a year? Besides, why do you think I'm talking about you? I'm talking about Pearl," Helen said.

Alex sighed. "Come out, Pearl," he said.

"Meow?" Pearl looked around after coming out and caught sight of Helen. "Mother!" He jumped straight into her embrace.

"There's my little boy," she said and rubbed his head.

"I missed you, mother,' Pearl said.

"I missed you too," Helen said as she hugged him gently.

"He's close to being a True Emperor soon, you won't hurt him even if you use all your strength," Alex told her.

"Wow, you're close to being a True Emperor realm cultivator. You're so great, Pearl," Helen said.

"Aren't I?" Pearl asked with a proud face.

Alex watched his mother give more love to Pearl than him and felt a sense of envy. He waited for a few moments and finally, she stopped focusing entirely on Pearl.

"So, you really did register huh?" she asked. "I guess you had to after you saw the rewards."

"Yeah, I finally found it after nearly 10 years. I can't let it go now," Alex said.

"Yeah, I can understand that," Helen said. "Are you confident in winning this?"

Alex hesitated a bit. Any other time, he might have said yes. However, right now his body was heating up more than it did regularly and that would affect his performance a lot.

"I should be as long as I find any sort of Yin treasure to revert back my Yang," Alex said. "Hopefully, the first few competitions don't require me to be at my best."

"Anyway, you came with the Alchemy guild's group, right? They let you come with them?" Alex asked.

"Of course," Helen said. "Despite how I look, I'm already a True Earth alchemist. If I continue for a few years, I will reach True Heaven surely."

"But still, I'm surprised they—"

"Well, I also told them you were my son, so they had to let me come with them," Helen said.

"I see," Alex said with a smile. He quickly changed the conversation and started talking about other things. "So, you already learned so much huh?"

"Of course. I never knew how easy it was to make pills. Especially since I have recipes to follow. Although at the start…"

The mother and son duo continued talking until midnight and only then did they both retreat to their room.

Alex soon started using the Winter Moon technique to do whatever he could to revert even the littlest yang in his body.

The technique was slow, but perhaps there was a solace here as his yang didn't increase while he was cultivating the technique.

Early next morning, the two of them left the hotel, and along with the rest of the people from the guild went to the competition ground.

Once they reached the location, Alex was surprised to see the number of people there. The previous time he came here, he was a mere audience member, so he hadn't given the scope much thought.

However, now that he was looking at it from the perspective of a participant, he could see how much pressure there would be on them to do their best.

"Oh right, before I forget," Alex said and quickly took out a bunch of storage bags and handed them to his mother.

"Keep these for me," he said and took off his ring. "These too."

His mother took them and nodded. "Good luck," she said while holding Pearl in her hands.

"I'll see you guys later," Alex said and left towards a different section of the place where the registered participants were bring brought in.

Alex was allowed to enter once he showed his Alchemist badge. He was taken to a separate, massive room where he was assigned a random number 3.

He didn't know what the number meant yet, but he took it off his mind as that would likely come later.

Alex was truly shocked when he saw the number of people that were participating. Since anyone below 50 years could join, every single person that had already entered the True realms was here.

Alex understood that Saint realms were likely allowed here, but there was no Saint realm cultivator below the age of 50 that was also an Alchemist.

Alex looked around and saw a few familiar faces. Most of them were people he had tested to join the Royal family.

Others were people he saw around the guild while he went there.

"Brother Yu, you came?" an excited voice spoke from the side as a girl approached him.

"Hi, sister Zhanrou," Alex said as he met the orange and green-robed Zhanrou.

"I thought you weren't coming," she said.

"I changed my mind after seeing the rewards," Alex said.

"Right, right, you do like the Yin treasures quite a bit, don't you?" she said. "Well, I'm glad you came. But I'm afraid the first place is gone now."

"Now you're just talking nonsense," Alex said.

He turned his head to his left and saw Xue Meirong glancing at him however after he turned around, she immediately turned her head and looked away.

"Well, she's here too," Zhanrou said. "I promise I will beat her this time around."

"Good luck," Alex said.

Suddenly, a hand fell on his shoulders and a tall man approached from behind him.

"I'm surprised to see you here. I thought you said you weren't joining," he said.

Alex turned around to see Zhou Ren standing behind him.

"I'm afraid some things came up and I had to go back on my words," Alex said. "I'm glad to see you here."

"Me too," Zhou Ren said. "I will see you at the competition. Take care sister Zhanrou."

Zhou Ren walked back to a group of disciples who all wore the white robes that belonged to the Zhou family.

"How do you know him?" Zhanrou asked him quietly.

"There's a feud between us," Alex said. "I just can't seem to figure out if it's a friendly feud or not."

"Well, if it's with him then it's most likely not friendly. He's known to be either a show-off or bully to people he deems below him. Many people don't like him at all," Zhanrou said.

"Well, he can't bully me since… well, he didn't bully me when I was a guest in the Royal family. I don't know how that will change now that I am no longer there," Alex said.

"Oh right, that reminds me. On whose behalf are you taking part in this competition?" Zhanrou asked him.

Alex was about to answer when he heard some loud but distant-sounding announcements outside. The competition had getting commenced by the host.

"I'm on no one's behalf," Alex said. "I'm on my own."

"Really? That… that will cause you trouble later, you know?" Zhanrou said.

"Compared to getting what I want, that will be a piece of cake," Alex said.

"You sure have a lot of confi—"

"Can I have your attention please?" someone spoke from upfront.

Everyone started quieting down and looked to the front and saw a woman standing before them.

"The first competition is about to start, so we would like you to get ready. You will be going out in groups of 20 and taking part in the first competition."

"I'm sure everyone was assigned a number, right? That is the group you are in for today. Everyone in group 1, please come forward," the woman said.

20 different Alchemists of all gender and age came forth.

"Please go through here and have your information set up. We will also check a few other things if you don't mind," the woman said.

Alex saw the people walk through and formation and talk about something. Then, they walked outside.

Alex heard shouts of cheers and introductions from the host before the rules were about to be explained.

Just as that time, the sounds cut off and the room was silent again.

The woman smiled at them and said, "You will not be allowed to hear about anything that happens in the competition today for the sake of fairness."

'Well, guess I'll have to wait for my turn then,' Alex thought.

Chapter 740: First Round

After 2 rounds of what felt uneventful due to the participants being unable to hear any of it, group 3 was finally called for their turn.

Alex walked up to the group of staff members who were calling for them.

"Good luck," Zhanrou said from behind and waited.

Alex reached the staff and was made to go through a formation. Since the formation was upside down, he wouldn't be able to see what it was without using his spiritual sense.

While he wouldn't mind using it during the alchemy, he didn't want to blatantly show it off right here.

"25 years?" he heard the shocked sounds of some staff members next to him.

Alex quickly turned around and realized that the formation was meant to check his age. 'No wonder they are shocked,' he thought.

He couldn't help but wonder what they would do if he was here 2 years ago when he had the same knowledge as right now and considerably more talent considering his body hadn't regressed to such a hot mess.

The staff members then took his name and affiliations and put him amidst a group of 19 other people.

Alex looked at the group and saw that there wasn't really anyone that he recognized. There was a person or two that he saw before but he didn't count them as he didn't know them at all.

As Alex waited to walk out, a wave of spiritual sense washed over him.

"Please get your storage bags checked before you walk out," a voice said and everyone got in a line to get their storage bags checked.

Alex handed it over and the saint realm cultivator checked it. Since he only had a cauldron in his storage bag, he was allowed to go out easily.

Some of the other ones had to keep back their storage bags because of the items they had.

"You can move out one at a time now," the staff said and the first person in the line moved out. As soon as he was out, Alex heard the host speak out loud and introduce the participant.

One by one, everyone started walking out, and finally, it was Alex's turn.

"Next up, we have Yu Ming. A 25 years old, True King 5th realm cultivator that is also a True Heaven Alchemist. Most of you may know him as the person who spread the recipes for medicinal pastes, but he is also the first Alchemist that was appointed by the Royal family in a long time," the host spoke up.

'Wow, he sure knows a lot,' Alex thought with a surprised look.

After a few more introductions, they were finally all on stage and the first competition for the group was underway.

The competition, as Alex had expected from the other competition, was an ingredient recognition competition.

There were exactly 100 ingredients in front of the group, but they were hidden in a bunch of wooden boxes that were meant to keep their energy intact.

"You will all get at least 5, and at most 10, chances to come up here and pick an ingredient for yourself. Your task is to name it."

"If you answer the name correctly, you get 2 points. If you don't, you lose 2 points. These points will be deducted from your overall points so be careful."

"If you happen to choose an ingredient and don't know its name, you can choose to not say anything to preserve your points."

"Okay, so let us have you lined up for the competition. For the sake of fairness, we will do it by age," the host said.

Alex didn't even have to look around to know that he was the youngest. He lined up in the front and everyone else was lined up behind him with the help of the staff members.

"Come on up," the host said. "You will have 10 seconds to answer."

Alex nodded and walked to the front to see 100 different boxes laying around. '100 boxes and 20 players. It does seem fair,' he thought and randomly chose a box.

"Box 76," the host said. "What could possibly be inside?"

Alex slowly opened up the box and saw a branch that was full of greenish-blue thorns.

"Aquamarine Bellrose's thorns," Alex said.

"Correct! 2 points," the host said and took the box. Box number 76 was now off the table.

Alex returned to the back of the group and looked up at the floating images that were meant for the audience.

Surprisingly, the ones he could see always had the ingredients hidden. The second person after him hesitated for a moment and handed back the item.

Then the third one went and answered, getting it correct. Of the 19 others, about three-quarters of them answered, while the other quarter chose not to answer.

Finally, it was Alex's turn again. He walked up to the ingredients, picked one, and answered.

"Blue Spirit Vine."

"Correct!" the host said.

Then, Alex returned back to the line again. The same thing went on one after another until Alex had gone through 5 different rotations and had answered all 5 of his ingredients.

He had gotten all 10 points that were meant for everyone to get. And yet, his 6th turn came up as there were still 18 or so ingredients remaining that people had failed to answer.

Due to the host's announcement, most people had skipped the number that others had failed to answer or in some cases even made mistakes.

Alex could've chosen those, but he needed to play the game to get as many points as possible. As such, he had left the harder ones for last so everyone would have to skip over those and not get enough points.

Alex picked his 6th ingredient and answered it nonchalantly. Getting his 12th point, he returned back to the end of the group and waited for the group to answer.

If even 3 of them didn't manage to answer or got it wrong, Alex would get to guess again and that was all he wanted.

He waited for the people to go up front and name the ingredient, but to his surprise, there weren't just 3 people that failed to name the ingredient, there were 11.

Meaning, that when Alex's turn came around for the 7th time, there were exactly 9 ingredients left.

Alex went forward and named one of the 9 remaining ingredients, getting him 14 points.

He waited for the other 8 ingredients, silently hoping the others couldn't name it.

The other 19 members went through the round again, and Alex's turn came up again. This time, there were 4 more ingredients remaining.

Alex hadn't opened up these boxes so he was curious why everyone was failing these.

He went ahead and opened one of the boxes to find a Blue rose flower that just screamed Blue Spirit Rose, and that was what Alex wanted to say. However, before he could answer it, he realized that his mind was thinking of another answer on its own.

He looked at the flower curiously and noticed something that was hard to notice if he wasn't looking for it. Underside the blue flower, there was a patch of black that would otherwise be mistaken as a shadow.

"True Wound's Rose flower," Alex answered.

"Correct!" the host shouted.

Alex smiled and went back to the group. But even as he did, he realized that even after all of this time, he was still having to rely on Alchemy God's knowledge.

'How much more do I have to learn Alchemy before I can name an ingredient accurately without the skill's help?' he wondered.

He watched the people struggle to name the remaining 3 ingredients. By the time he was back there again, 2 of the original 3 remained.

'Again huh?' he thought and walked forward. He opened one of the boxes to find a fruit that he thought was Surging Henbit Orange. However, he didn't answer and checked it more carefully.

There was an answer in his mind, but he ignored it for the sake of finding the name on his own.

He stared at the fruit for 5 seconds before realizing that the leaves were rather thin and very dark green. Not to mention, the veins on the leaves were pointed in the other direction.

'Wait, this is not Surging Henbit Orange, this has to be Thin-leaved Skunk Orange,' he thought.

When he checked it with the answer in his mind, he realized he was right.

"Thin-Leaved Skunk Orange!" Alex answered.

"Correct!" the host said.

Alex smiled and returned to the group with only 1 box remaining on the table.

He counted his points and realized he had 18 points at the moment, and if everyone failed to answer the remaining box, he would get his 10th turn.

Alex didn't think that was possible as there were 19 members in front of him.

However, to his surprise, every single one of them failed to answer the name.

'How hard could it be? People should know by now not to go with the obvious answer,' Alex thought.

When his turn finally came around, he walked ahead and picked the final box.

He opened the box and saw a piece of ginseng in there. What was perhaps more surprising was that the name of the ginseng was pretty simple.

However, when he tried to answer it, he realized that there was a certain pull on his mind from the ginseng that was disturbing his thoughts.

'No wonder they couldn't answer,' he thought. 'They couldn't even think straight.'

Fortunately, Alex's mind wasn't so weak to fall victim to such manipulation. So, he loudly answered, "Mind Swallowing Ginseng."

"Correct!"

Chapter 741: End of the First Day

Alex was taken to another location on the stage after the first round ended and was given a pill vial each.

"Now begins the second round of today's competition," the second host spoke to them.

'What? There's another one?' Alex thought. Since the room he was in previously was soundproof, he couldn't hear to know that there was another competition there. Not to mention, this one seemed more secretive than the other one.

Alex was handed a talisman paper as well and the host started explaining the rules of this competition.

"There are 3 of the same pills in there, the name of which has not been set yet."

"The pill uses exactly 10 different ingredients, and your task is to name the ingredients. You have exactly 1 hour to name it all and you may use whatever method you require to find out the name of the ingredient."

"You will not be given any other hints aside from the information that the pill is not harmful to eat."

"Points will be based off of the number of ingredients you get correct, and points will be deducted per ingredients you get wrong."

"Your 1 hour starts now."

The moment the host said that every single one of the 20 participants immediately sat down on the ground and started looking at the pills.

Alex sat down too and brought out the pill. It was a greenish pill with specks of black scattered throughout the surface.

Alex took one of the 3 pills out and looked at it. He tried to think of any pill he had made that looked the same as this one, but given how this was a new pill, there was likely no way for him to figure out the ingredients in this way.

He could tell that the pill had about 35% harmony, but other than that, he was getting no information at all.

"Smell then," he said to himself and started taking in the smell of the pill.

He got a distinct acidic, citrusy smell amongst the many other smells and wondered what it could be.

He made a mental list of all the ingredients that he could think of that made this smell when performing alchemy.

Alex then went on through the rest of the smell and one after another, he made 10 different lists of what it could be.

Once he had the list, he started going through each ingredient and seeing if they would ever cause pigmentation on the pill to cause it to become green.

He didn't toss away those that didn't, but he did pay extra attention to those that did.

Once it was all done, Alex wondered what else he could do. He put the pill between his fingers and crushed it.

He checked the powder with his eyes, and once he realized that wasn't helping, he started using his spiritual sense.

He went through the powder and found the 10 different shapes. Then, he started comparing it with the information he had in his mind through the many months of refining pill recipes.

This was a really hard task and Alex barely stumbled on 2 different ingredients that he was sure belonged to the pill.

Still, he waited before writing it down.

He took the powder of the pill and put it in his mouth. The competition holders had mentioned that there was no problem with eating the pill, so tasting it would cause no problem either.

Not that Alex had to worry about it either way.

Alex tried to isolate the multitudes of tastes he was getting. It was hard, but he managed to separate them to a certain level and figured out the 3rd ingredient.

Unfortunately, most of the flavors weren't unique enough to pinpoint them to the ingredients on the list.

"Guess there's only one thing left to do then," Alex thought and took out one of the remaining two pill. Then, without any hesitation, he popped the pill into his mouth and swallowed it.

Alex waited around for a second for the pill to take effect and realized that he could feel his cultivation base elevate a little.

'It improves your cultivation base huh?' Alex thought. That gave him some more ideas.

He felt the energy from the pill for a few moments and started going through his list one more time.

He waited for a few moments for the pill's effects to disappear and ate it one more time to see what he could find out.

There wasn't much difference between the second and the third pill, so there wasn't much Alex could figure out.

'Well, I guess I'm only doing this much then,' he thought as he looked through the 6 ingredients he had figured out.

The rest of the ingredients were hard to figure out and he didn't want to risk points for something he wasn't even sure about.

So, Alex stuck with the answer and didn't write in anymore.

'This would've been so much easier had they given us a pill that we actually knew about,' He thought.

He handed the answer over to the staff around the 50 minutes mark and waited for the hour to end.

Once the hour ended, the results were published.

Alex got 12 points with his 6 ingredients, while someone actually managed to get 7 ingredients.

Most, however, struggled with around 3 or 4 ingredients.

'I need to experiment more with the ingredients,' Alex thought.

Once the competition was over, Alex was let go to the audience. He quickly went and found his mother sitting alongside many of the people from DawnSpring's Alchemy guild.

Alex recognized a lot of them, so he sat together with them.

"That was amazing, brother Yu," they said.

"Yeah, it was fine," Alex replied.

"No, no, that was amazing. You are the first person to get 32 points in the first day's competition," they said.

"Oh, what's the highest point?" Alex asked.

"You can see up there," they said as they showed a large, hovering ranking screen where his name was on the top with 32 points.

The 2nd closest one was at 26 points, which was really surprising for him. He looked at the name and realized he didn't know the person.

"Have Zhou Ren and Xue Meirong not come out yet?" he asked.

"I don't think I've seen those names before here, so likely not," his mother said.

"Oh," Alex said. "Then I haven't yet won anything."

Alex turned around to the group that was currently transitioning from the first round to the second one and noticed Zhanrou.

"How much did Zhanrou get?" he asked his mother.

"I think she got 7 names right," his mother said.

"7 huh? So 14 points. She will need to get 6 ingredients correct in the next one to tie for 2nd place," Alex said.

The host started introducing the 5th group and that was when Zhou Ren came out.

Alex sat and watched Zhou Ren's match which ended with him taking the most points with 8 different ingredients named.

Surprisingly, there were still 5 ingredients on the table remaining by the time all 20 of the contestants had used up their 10 turns.

That meant that either the contestants had gotten the ingredients wrong or didn't choose to answer.

'Each missing ingredient name is more points for me,' Alex thought and watched.

Zhanrou seemed to have guessed only 5 of the ingredients and got 10 points, bringing her total to 24. It wasn't bad on its own, but it struggled against Alex and the 2nd place.

Nothing worth mentioning happened for the 6th group, while Zhou Ren's fifth group was done with the pill as well.

He surprisingly found 7 ingredients in the pill and got a comfortable 30 points to get to the 2nd place right behind Alex.

In the 7th group was Xue Meirong who managed to name 9 of the ingredients, but on the 10th one, she got overconfident and named it wrong. In the end, she only got 16 points from there.

In the second round, she named exactly 7 ingredients, once again showing her capabilities as an alchemist. Alex couldn't help but be surprised at how talented they were.

'Had she not answered the final ingredient, she would've been equal with me. Not just that, had she named it correctly, she would've come in the first place,' Alex thought.

The rest of the group had nothing noticeable and as such, all the 200 different participants were done for the day.

Zhou Ren and Xue Meirong tied for 2nd place while Alex got 1st place in the first day's competitions.

Chapter 742: Second Day of the Competition

Alex searched around for information on the guild competitions and found some records of older competitions.

According to them, he didn't have to worry about making pills for the 2nd day's competitions as well. It was only on the 3rd day that the competition became about making pills.

According to the records, the 2nd day's competition was most likely going to be about pills, just not making them.

Alex read up some more on the rest of the records in an open library, but no one was looking at him. After all, he had completely changed his face to come out today.

Ever since people realized that the number 1 participant, the 25 year old prodigy, Yu Ming was staying in the one particular hotel, they had been camping it day and night to meet him.

Not only that, there were many people who actually came to meet him too. What surprised Alex the most was that the guild wasn't providing any sort of security as people were openly scanning his room with their spiritual sense.

Fortunately, the room had spiritual sense blocking formation, so Alex was somewhat safe. Still, walking outside wasn't possible, so he had to teleport away from his room to his mother's room and then leave that way.

Fortunately, no one could see past his disguise, so he was fine.

After the library, he went to the alchemy guild to search for Yin treasures, but there weren't any that would help him.

Disappointed, Alex returned back to the hotel and started preparing for tomorrow's competition.

The competition was held for 4 days, over the course of 7 days. So, there was 3 days of break, one in between each.

When the 3rd day arrived, the 2nd day of the competition commenced.

Alex's disguise wore off and he made his way to the competition ground along with his mother and the rest of the people.

Because this was the competition day, no one dared block his path. Not only because they respected him enough to not bother him, but also because the Lightsworns were flying around the city, maintaining peace.

Once Alex reached the cultivation ground, he separated and went towards the contestant hall once more.

"You are number 7," a girl told him as he walked in.

"I was number 3 the other day," Alex told her.

"It changes everyday," the girl replied.

"I see," Alex said. "Thank you for letting me know." He then made his way to Zhanrou who was excited to meet him.

"You left too early the other day. I didn't even get to congratulate you," she said.

"Save your breath, it's only the first day," Alex said. "Who knows what sorts of mistake I will make the following days."

"You are too pessimistic," Zhanrou said. "What group are you today?"

"7," Alex said. "What about you?"

"2," Zhanrou said. "I'm kinda glad I don't have to go against you today."

"Me too, I guess," Alex said. "I wonder if its on purpose because of how high our points was for the first day."

"Maybe? It would make sense to separate us for the sake of entertainment," Zhanrou said.

"Congratulations on being first for the first day," Zhan Rou said. "But its only one day. You can't just be good with ingredients. You need to be good with the other aspects of cultivation as well."

"You weren't bad yourself, brother Zhou," Alex said. "I'm afraid you will do way better now that you're so motivated. I might have to step up my game."

Zhou Ren showed and hid an angry face in seconds and instead smiled. "Yes. Its a shame we're not in the same group. It would be fun to compete from the start."

He walked away, leaving the two of them to talk to each other.

After a few minutes, the staff started moving around and soon the host started starting today's competition.

Not long after, the 1st group was called upon.

Silence ensued throughout the whole room as they were once again not made privy to the contents of today's matches.

Alex sat down nearby and waited for the matches to end. Unfortunately, they weren't allowed outside to see what was happening as that would give them an advantage, so Alex had to wait for over 6 hours before it was his turn.

By the time his group was called, the only person that was still remaining that he recognized was the middle aged man in the corner of the room.

This was the man who took the 2nd place on the first day.

Alex stood up and left for the checking area before he was let outside.

Once outside, Alex saw the crowd cheer up when they saw him. Suddenly, a pressure he hadn't felt yet started forming deep inside of him.

'Am I feeling nervous?' he thought. He couldn't see why that wasn't the case. In front of so many people, having to do his best when he didn't even know what was happening, he was slightly scared.

Not to mention, his arm depended on it.

Once again, Alex and the rest were passed along empty talismans to write it, only he wondered what he was going to have to write.

Alex was then handed a storage pouch which he checked inside to see 10 different vials, all with numbers on them.

"Your job now is the check into those vials, recognize the pill, and write down the ingredients required for that pill in the order of the recipe."

"Each answer is worth 2 points. For every wrong answer, you will lose two points. For every right answer that is not in the correct order, you will lose 1 point."

"If you cannot recognize the pill, you may call the staff to help you. However, for each pill they will reveal to you, you will lose 1 point from your overall points."

"You are allowed to eat the pill if you wish. Begin!"

Alex took out the first vial and opened the stopper to see a pinkish pill.

He smelled it once and immediately recognized the pill. "Swift Fox's advancement pill," Alex thought. The moment he did, the entire recipe for the pill came into his mind.

Without hesitation, he started writing the entire list of ingredients in the order they would go in.

Once done, he opened the 2nd vial and recognized that pill too. So, he started writing down the ingredients for that pill as well.

Then the third, and the fourth. It was on the 5th pill that Alex had to slow down and figure out what the pill was.

He looked at the color and analyzed the smell. Using those two info, he went through his mind to see through all the pills he had made until now.

Since this was a test about knowing recipes, he was sure that there was no recipe that would be hard to acquire, but that still left hundreds of pills to sift through.

Finally, he found what he was looking for and wrote down the recipe.

He did the same for the sixth and the seventh pill as well. Then, he was stumped on the 8th pill.

The 8th pill was completely white with no impurities on a visual level. It had some mild smell but nothing you could smell from a normal distance.

Alex tried to go through his mind but there were just too many generic white pills that smelled like nothing, so it was hard to tell what the pill was.

In the end, he had to eat the pill to figure out what it was.

As soon as he ate the pill, Alex felt the Qi around him get pulled in even faster than normal.

'Ah!' he thought and remembered a pill he made not very long ago for a mission.

'That pill huh?' he thought and wrote down the ingredients.

The 9th pill was the same. A generic white pill with no smell. Without hesitation, Alex ate the pill and felt his face start to change.

'I see,' he thought and quickly wrote down the ingredients of the pill.

Finally, he ate the 10th pill and felt a little squirming on his left arm as if it was trying to heal it.

'Got it,' he thought and named the ingredients for that one as well.

Once all done, Alex handed over the talisman to the staff who checked it.

"All correct," the staff said. Just like that, Alex got another 20 points.

Chapter 743: Third Day of the Competition

Alex moved on to the second event of the day and soon realized it was a written exam with 20 questions, 1 point each.

They would also deduct 1 point for each question wrongly answered so it made it hard for everyone to simply guess.

Alex read the questions and surprisingly found most of them easy. The exam lasted about an hour, and Alex finished it in about 20 minutes.

He went over his answers a couple of times but nothing seemed wrong, so he gave his answers to the staff and had them evaluated.

Just as he hoped, he got the perfect 20 points.

'That went well,' he thought as he walked towards his mother's location. However, before he could get far, a staff member suddenly stopped him.

"How can I help you?" Alex asked him.

"Dear participants, as you may know, on the third day there is going to be a speed pill-making competition. We would like to know what pill you would like to make for that," the staff asked. "You can answer me right now or go to the guild before tomorrow noon and answer there."

"Oh, uh… I will make the… Purple Crane pill," Alex said.

"Thank you," the staff then went away, leaving Alex to go back to his mother and the rest.

"Good job," his mother said as he arrived. "You're still in the lead."

"Am I?" Alex turned around and saw the rankings.

He was in the first place with 72 points, and both Zhou Ren and Xue Meirong were trailing behind him at 70 points.

"It seems no one got an answer wrong today," Alex said. He looked through the ranking and as expected, most of them got the full 40 points.

He waited for a while and watched through the rest of the competition, but there was no one to do better than him so he had nothing to worry about.

"Just 2 more days of this and my son will get first place," Helen said.

Alex doubted he could keep this up for 2 more days. He was going to have to start making pills from the next competition onwards and that was going to be problematic.

After all, due to his condition, it had been nearly 2 months since he last made a pill or even dared to make one.

'I need to go practice,' he thought. He turned to his mother and asked for his items before leaving the competition ground.

He told her that she would only see him on the day of the competition itself.

Alex then went to the guild directly and got himself a room to start making pills. He brought the ingredients for the Purple Crane pill and prepared his cauldron.

Then, one after another, he put in the ingredients and began. The Purple Crane pill only had 6 ingredients, as opposed to most other pills that had at least 10 or higher normally.

As such, this was the perfect pill to choose for fast pill making. The only problem was that this was a very well-known pill and everyone else would go for it as well.

So, Alex had to use the advantages he had to become faster than everyone else.

As he moved the ingredients around, Alex realized that he was having trouble maintaining the fire's temperature despite his Dao.

If he let the fire be, its temperature would slowly creep up until it was so hot that his pill was getting ruined. Then, he would have to pull his attention away from the ingredients and fix the temperature before going back to the ingredients.

Alex trained for the whole night, but he barely saw any improvement. What little adapting he did became useless as the more Alchemy he did, the more he lost Qi, which in turn made him cultivate to gain Qi and that increased his yang once more.

Frustrated, Alex left the room multiple times to go find some yin treasures. However, each time he went to the staff, the answer was still no.

Alex trained for the entire next day as well as the night and finally left the guild on the day of the competition.

He met his mother outside the competition ground and gave her his things before going to the waiting hall.

He found Zhanrou and the rest waiting around, but he was too frustrated to make small talks.

Surprisingly, he was given group 1, which included no one from the rest of the top 10.

Then, the competition began and Alex walked out.

The cheers he heard from the audience rang full and far wide. He had come to the competition with a certain prestige and had kept it up throughout the first 2 days, even exceeding the expectations of many.

Had he done a little worse than the others, he might have been called a dark horse of the competition. But since he was doing so good, he was now considered one of the better ones in the tournament.

A lot of the people even expected him to win the whole thing with how it was going.

That just created a sense of pressure for him that he didn't need right now.

He waited for the host to start explaining about the speed competition, but contrary to his expectation, the competition that was being held currently was a different one.

"For the first round today, you will all be making a new pill you've never seen before," the host said.

Each one of them was passed along a talisman with a recipe and Alex understood where this was going.

"You will have exactly one hour to learn the recipe and make the pill," the host said. "You will be ranked from best to worst based on your pill's harmony."

"You may begin the moment you get your ingredients," the host said and immediately a group of staff members came up to them with storage bags.

Alex looked into the storage bag and was beyond surprised to see what he did.

There was only 1 set of ingredients.

'So I have to get it right on the first time for a new pill I've never seen before?' Alex worried when he saw the ingredients.

This wasn't a speed thing so he could take his time, but he still only had an hour to prepare the pill.

Alex sat down and closed his eyes to visualize what he was going to do. He thought of putting the ingredients in the correct time and order, collecting the ingredients, and finally preparing the pill.

In his mind, nothing could go wrong, but Alex knew there would come some problem.

'How am I going to make the pill in the end? Should I use the technique or just clump it all together. If I do use the technique, how am I supposed to figure out how to make the combination?' Alex thought.

Since this wasn't something he had made before, he couldn't visualize the powders before getting into the pill. Not to mention there were ingredients in there that he had never interacted with, so he didn't even know what shapes they would form when put through the recipe.

'I can only rely on my luck now,' Alex thought as he decided to not use the technique in the end.

He brought out his cauldron and started heating up the cauldron while he prepared himself.

Then, he started making the pill.

The moment the first ingredient went in, Alex started increasing the temperature to reach the required amount. Thanks to his Dao of Heat, that happened instantly, but as his focus shifted to the ingredient, the temperature slowly slipped out of control.

Alex immediately focused back on the temperature and lowed it while also moving the ingredient around.

Then he changed it once more and put in the second ingredient. The problem with the temperature kept popping up each time he put the ingredients, but he was always conscious of the temperature so he thought he could keep it in check.

A few problems appeared here and there, but mostly he thought he did a fine job with the ingredients.

Once it was all powdered, Alex pulled the energy into the powder and then formed a pill out of it without using any technique.

When the pill finally formed, he brought it out and looked at it, only to get a disappointed look on his face.

His pill barely reached 44% harmony.

Chapter 744: Struggle

44%.

'That's bad, but it is a new pill that no one has made before, so maybe I didn't do so bad,' Alex thought.

With 19 other True Heaven Alchemists here, that was a bit of hope, but that was all Alex had at the moment. He was sure he could've knocked it out of the park if he had a regular body, but he didn't, so he was stuck with the 44%.

Alex got his pill tested by the staff and waited for the rest of the people to finish making their pills. A few minutes later, most of them did.

42%. 31%. 45%.

All sorts of different numbers popped up in the tester as Alex counted only the points that numbered above him.

There were exactly 4 different people that got more points than him, making his 44% the 5th highest in his group of 20.

'16 points,' Alex thought. That was better than whatever his pessimistic self today was expecting to get.

After the first round was over, Group 1 was taken to their next round which was the speed pill making. Whoever made the pill the fastest won.

Everyone was handed their ingredients as soon as they entered and the host started explaining the competition.

As expected, the one that made the pill fasted and had it tested got the 20 points. Everyone after that got fewer and fewer points until the person in the last place got 1 point.

Alex didn't want to be that person.

'Worst case scenario, Zhou Ren and Xue Meirong get 20 points, putting them 2 points ahead of me. If I can get 20 points in this round, I can stay at a comfortable distance from them.'

'With only 2 points difference, I can easily beat them in the final competition which is all about making the highest grade pill,' Alex thought.

"You will need above 30% to have considered passed."

"Alright everyone, go to your seats," the host said and waited for everyone to sit in front of the furnace.

"Begin!"

Alex immediately brought out his cauldron and used the Dao of Heat to get the cauldron's temperature to the appropriate amount.

It should have been instant considering he had the Dao, but due to his body, he overshot a bit and had the bring the temperature down.

At the same time, he put in the first ingredient. He managed to do that before most of the other people's cauldron was even half heated.

Alex had an advantage in this regard and he was going to use it. He moved around the first ingredient when he realized the fire was going up way too fast.

Since this was a speed test, he was worried he would be slow if he spread his attention between the fire and the ingredients, but he didn't have a choice.

When the fire got hotter, he had to move away from his focus and deal with it.

Once the first ingredient was powdered, he prepared the second ingredient and readied the temperature by dropping it to the appropriate level.

However, due to him compensating for the fact that his Qi was heating up his fire, he ended up overreaching and made the fire colder than it needed to be.

So, to counteract that problem, he heated it up again. However, because he was scared of making the same mistake again, he did it in small increments until he was at the perfect temperature.

Only when the temperature was correct did the 2nd ingredient go into the cauldron. Alex moved around the ingredients like normal while constantly checking the fire to make sure he wasn't screwing it up.

When it came time for the 3rd ingredient, he slowly increased the fire and it took a few moments to reach the proper temperature.

Then he put the 3rd ingredient.

While he had a headstart, these common mistakes started dragging Alex more and more down. By the time he had the 5th ingredient ready, his headstart no longer made a difference as most of the others were starting to catch up.

'I need to be faster,' Alex thought and increased his pace to match up with the others, but it was hard, especially when he kept on making mistakes.

By the time he was done turning all ingredients to powder, everyone was basically on the same stage as he was in.

Alex hurriedly poured energy onto the pills and started forming the pill.

As he did that, from the corner of his eyes, he saw a few people stand up and move forward.

'Dammit! Faster,' Alex thought and pushed himself hard to finish forming the pill.

As soon as it was done, he pulled the pill out and rushed forward to put it into the tester.

He didn't even see how many other people were around him as he waited for his pill Harmony to go above 30%.

He shouldn't even have waited for that as it obviously would. Alex turned around the moment he reached above 30% and counted the number of people that had finished before him.

6.

6 people had finished before him and had earned the 15 through 20 points, leaving Alex with 14. Combining with the previous 16 points, Alex now had 30 points for the 3rd day of the competition.

Alex sighed and started walking away from the stage when staff stopped him again.

"What pill will you be making for the final day?" the man asked.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "Body Rebinding Pill." It was a healing pill that Alex was used to making and was one of the very first pills he ever refined the recipe for.

As such, he had the most practice with it and hoped it would be a lot easier to get his points with it.

Once the staff took the note, Alex walked back to the audience.

"Hey," he said to his mother with a sigh of dejection.

"Aw, don't be sad. You did well. You did very well," Helen said. "Come sit, I'm sure the rest of them will make a lot of mistakes too."

Alex sighed and sat down to watch the match. He looked at the stage and noticed only one person from the top 10, who was towards the bottom of the group.

He didn't really care for that person so he ignored him and looked at the 3rd group that was doing their new pill competition.

Xue Meirong was there and she was sitting around doing nothing. 'She must be reading her recipe,' Alex thought.

He looked up at the rankings and saw his name still in the first place with 102 points, but people were getting close.

And not a single one of the top 10 rankers aside from him was even done.

Alex went back to watching Xue Meirong make the pills. When ignoring the prideful side of her, one could see a really hardworking girl that was doing what she loved and had been doing it ever since she was very young.

There was nothing fantastic about her alchemy, no flourishing moves or crazy techniques. It was all simple Alchemy that anyone could do. However, even if it was simple, she worked hard to do the simple thing precisely and perfectly.

Once she was done with the pill, she had it tested and as expected, she did amazing by getting a solid 56%. That put her in a league above most of the other participants in her group.

Which also meant she got the 20 points and was now at 90 points total.

Even if she did her absolute worst and got 12 points in the next round, which she wouldn't, she would still catch up to Alex and have exactly the same points as him.

If Alex wasn't aware of how the scoring went for the final competition from all the records he read, he would've likely thought that his chances at victory over the whole tournament were over.

While Xue Meirong moved to the speed competition, Zhanrou came out to the new pill competition.

Xue Meirong scored 20 points as expected, finishing nearly a minute earlier than all of her contemporaries.

'110 points,' Alex thought with a grave face. 'I will have to get at least 8 points more than her in the final round to just catch up. If I want to win, I will have to get 9 points higher than her.'

'This is going to be hard.'

Chapter 745: Final Day

Zhanrou got 20 points in the first round and another 20 points in the 2nd round, bringing her total up to 108, 6 points higher than Alex.

More people came along as more rounds were held and they got high scores too. Soon, Alex was starting to reach the lower end of the top 10.

With 3 more rounds remaining, he was sure he would fall out of the top 10.

Zhou Ren walked out with the 8th group and sat down to make his pill. The fire that was burning red and yellow a moment ago suddenly turned white as Zhou Ren used his powers.

The white flame burned smoothly like liquid smoke and after a few minutes, Zhou Ren put in the first ingredients.

There wasn't anything fancy about the rest of the moves he did, but the white flame made it look amazing regardless.

Soon his pill was done and it came out with 58%. Without even waiting, Alex knew he had gotten the 20 points.

The white fire burned for the 2nd competition as well as Zhou Ren finished first and got another 20 points.

Another person from his group also did really well, coming in 2nd at each round and got a total of 38 points and caught up with Alex.

The rest of the 2 groups also had 3 people that ended up getting equal or above Alex in the ranking.

By the time the third day was over, Alex was in 12th place.

"Don't worry son, you'll be fine," Helen tried to console him. "Besides, you just want your arm back right? You can reach Saint realm for that."

'And cultivate behind closed doors for who knows how many years,' Alex thought.

"It's fine, mother," he said. "I'm still not out of the running. Since the final competition counts the pill's Harmony as points, I just need to make better pills than everyone else."

"Oh, okay. You can do that," Helen said.

"Hey, brother Yu," Zhou Ren spoke as he walked toward Alex. "I saw the ranking and couldn't help but be surprised. What happened? Why are you so low?"

"I was just off my game today. I will bring my best on the final day," Alex said.

"Oh, okay," Zhou Ren said. "I must have been stupid to think you were only good on the theoretical stuff and couldn't actually make pills. Well, see you later."

"I don't like that guy. Why is he so snarky?" Helen asked.

"He was born to a big family and is kind of a big deal amongst the younger generation. His ego is inflated as a result. Let's not worry about him. I'm going to the guild again to see what I can do for the next competition. You two should go back to the hotel room. I will go back to the guild and see what I can do."

Alex left the competition grounds and went to the guild once again to practice.

The entire time he was there, he did nothing but make the one pill he had told the staff members he would.

As it was a healing pill, there were plenty of ingredients available for him by the guild.

Alex started making the pills and realized he was truly getting terrible. Most of the pills he made ended up being in the high 60s, not even touching 70s.

When he did do almost everything perfectly, there was still enough mistake to cause him to get 72%.

Unless either Zhou Ren or Xue Meirong got 63% or less on the final round, he was screwed.

Alex started to get anxious but calmed himself. 'I don't know how well they can do. I just need to do better,' he thought.

Before making the next pill, he took some time to take in every yang energy he had been releasing subconsciously.

Then, he split his attention to keep his Yang in check. This made him incredibly slower than normal, but that was a trade-off he was willing to make.

Even with that, it wasn't like he wasn't making mistakes, but he did end up getting more than 75% this time around.

He tried some more and took it slow for the most part. Soon, he realized that if he wasn't being hasty, and made sure to get rid of all the yang around him and stash it within him, he could perfectly reach 78% too.

'That's good,' he thought. He didn't like the feeling of having all the yang inside of him, but he had no other choice.

Over the course of the night, Alex cultivated to get ready for the next day.

In the morning, he walked out with newfound vigor and hope in himself for the next competition.

Alex arrived at the competition ground not long after and met up with his mother.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Great," Alex said with a genuine smile. "I think I can do it."

"Good, now go," Helen sent him off.

Alex went over to the staff that took him to the waiting list and was assigned group 10.

After a few minutes, Zhanrou came in and she got group 10 as well.

"What a coincidence," Alex said.

"No, it's not," Zhanrou said. "It's the final day so they are going to make it exciting by making the highest rankers in the same group. Brings out more competitiveness."

"Oh, so that means—"

"It seems we're in the same group finally," Zhou Ren said from the side as he walked over the Alex.

"It seems so," Alex said.

"Oh, my bad. I was talking to sister Zhanrou here since she and Xue Meirong are the only ones that have a chance against me today," Zhou Ren said.

Alex didn't let his emotion waver at the blatant disrespect and instead channeled his anger into motivation.

"If you think you have a chance of beating me, you are sorely mistaken," Xue Meirong arrived to say to Zhou Ren.

"We will see who's right later," Zhou Ren said and moved away.

Xue Meirong turned away from him and Zhanrou and humphed away as well.

"Group 1 gather up!" the staff started calling for the first group. "The rest of you can leave and go watch the competition. Group 2, make sure to come here as soon as the Group 1's round is complete. If you are missing when it's time for you to go on stage, we will mark you absent."

Alex and the rest walked out of the waiting area while Group 1 left for the stage where the host was already starting the competition.

"How do you think your chances are?" Zhanrou asked.

"It's good. I should be able to get a lot of points," Alex said. "What about y—"

"What pill are you making today, young man?" the host asked out loud to the first person that entered the stage.

"Disciple Ascendancy pill," the young man answered.

Next up, a girl came up and the host asked the same question.

"Disciple Ascendancy Pill," the girl said.

Another person came up and once again the host asked the same question.

"Disciple Ascendancy pill," the third person said as well.

Alex watched curiously as of the 20 people that entered, 18 of them were making the Disciple Ascendancy pill.

"What's going on?" Alex softly asked Zhanrou.

"You don't realize?" Zhanrou asked.

Alex shook his head.

"Do you remember the test you had us take when we tried for the Royal Alchemist job?" Zhanrou asked.

"Yes, I made you make my… Disciple Ascendancy pill." Blood drained from Alex's face fasther than his mind understood what was going on.

"No way!" he said.

"I'm afraid that's the case," Zhanrou said. "You gave your recipe to so many people that over the last year, it was spread throughout the empire."

"It isn't talked about much because it is such a low-level pill, but it is the best recipe we have for in the whole empire, so everyone is going to use that recipe, including me," Zhanrou said.

"No, but if that happens then…" All forms of motivation Alex had been feeling just moments ago were gone.

Who cared if he could make 78% pill after trying really hard if others could easily reach 75%.

"It seems everyone is making your pill, brother Yu," Zhou Ren said from the side. "Seriously though, it's an amazing recipe and you should be proud of yourself for refining it to such perfect… even though you lack the ability to make good pills."

Alex was feeling so angry that he nearly punched Zhou Ren. Instead, he ignored the man and walked directly to his mother, and sat down beside her.

"What's wrong? You seem mad," Helen asked.

"I am," Alex said. "Everyone is using my recipe today and they will use that to beat me."

"Your recipe? What? But they are so much better. If they use that then…"

"They will easily close up on me and I won't get the necessary points," Alex said. "Dammit! How the hell do I get 9 points more than them when I will now barely get 3 points more if I'm lucky."

Helen started to panic as well. "How did they get your recipe?" she asked.

"I used it for a test a year ago for the royal family," Alex said. "I had no idea such a simple thing like that would come back to bite me."

Helen didn't know what to do and only watched her son become restless and panicked.

Just then, she saw a girl appear behind Alex and place a hand on his shoulders.

"Brother Yu, I finally found you," the girl said.

Chapter 746: Weight Measuring Formation

Alex turned around to see Shurin standing behind him. "Shurin? What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I've been searching for you since the day before yesterday. Where have you been?" she asked.

"I've… been in the guild, holed up, practicing," Alex said.

"Whatever, you need to come with me now. The princess wants to see you," Shurin said.

"I'll be back in a bit, mother," Alex said and left with Shurin. She took her around the stage until he reached a secluded area in a high tower.

The princess was inside, watching the competition in the comfort by herself.

"You're here," the princess turned around. "Finally. I hope I wasn't late in finding you."

"What's going on?" Alex asked,

"I saw your performance the day before, and I must say it was less than great," the princess said.

"Sigh, yeah, I feel less than great right now," Alex said.

"Does it have anything to do with you finding Yin treasures?" she asked.

"Kind of. I have a problem with me currently, the solution to which I haven't found yet. So, I use Yin treasures as a temporary cure," Alex said.

"Good thing I thought so then," the princess said and brought out a box from her storage bag. The moment the box came out, Alex thought the room's temperature dropped by nearly 5 degrees and that was before the box was even opened.

"What's that?" he asked.

"It's a royal treasure I took out from the treasury," the princess said. "Well, we call it a treasure, but really it's just a drop of water that our ancestor found that is full of Yin Qi."

"We don't know what to do with this, so it had been sitting around in the treasury for a few hundred years now," the princess said.

"And you're giving this to me?" Alex asked. "Why?"

"Because we appreciate all you've done," the princess said. "Also, you must show the world what is possible with Alchemy. Show how great one can get will pills."

"I want people to have a high bar they can work up to, and I want you to be the one that sets the bar," the princess said.

"Thank you," Alex said.

"How long do you need to… cure your problem?" she asked.

"A whole day maybe, I don't know," Alex said. "Oh no, we don't have much time."

"Alright go, we will talk later," the princess said.

"Thank you, princess Xumei," Alex said, bowed, and left. He directly ran to his mother and told her what he was going to do.

"Where are you going? The hotel?" she asked.

"No, the guild is closer," Alex said. "How's the first round going?"

"They are halfway through making the pills," Helen said. "You should hurry."

"I'll see you later," Alex said and ran off. He blitzed through the street and arrived at the guild.

Some of the staff that recognized him were surprised to see him there, but he didn't stick around to talk with any of them.

He entered one of the rooms and immediately started cultivating with the Winter Moon cultivation technique. Once he was in the zone, he brought out the box and felt the air chill again.

Then, he opened the box and the air became even colder. 'What do I do now?' he wondered as he looked at the small drop of water.

There was one thing he could do that would be the best way to work, but he wasn't sure if it was safe or not as this was a highly Yin-ish treasure.

"Oh, what the hell," Alex thought and drank the drop of crystal clear Yin water.

Immediately, a chilling cold entered his body, freezing the pathway to his stomach. Alex felt his organs start to freeze and slow down.

At that moment, without even thinking, he released all the Yang he had been holding back currently.

The Yin and the Yang started mixing with each other and started circulating his meridians while he cultivated.

Alex closed his eyes and left the two to do what they did best.

At first, the Yin and Yang became violent, seeking to destroy each other. However, soon they found harmony in each other and the violence ended.

Alex continued cultivating for who knew how long. Even the urgency he had felt was gone as the two found equilibrium and maintained each other.

After what felt like an entire day, Alex opened his eyes and stopped cultivating.

The moment he did, the equilibrium vanished. After stopping the Winter Moon cultivation technique, Alex found that his Yang was starting to overtake him again.

However, this time around, it was so little that it wouldn't even be noticeable for the most part, let alone be an inconvenience.

"The competition!" Alex finally remembered and ran out of the guild. When he arrived outside, he saw that the sun was to the west and it was way past the afternoon.

"Oh no, how long did I stay in there?" he thought and ran back to the competition grounds.

He quickly ran to the audience stands and found his mother.

"Mother! What's going on? Am I late?" he asked hurriedly.

"Oh god, you're finally here," Helen felt relieved finally.

"What's going on? What round is this?" Alex asked.

"It's the 9th round. Your turn is next. Quickly go," Helen said.

Alex nodded and gave her everything but a single storage bag and ran towards the waiting area.

Even as he was going, he could hear the results for the 9th group being announced.

65%. 67%. 63%.

Everyone was using his pill and scoring really high points. In fact, one of them even managed to get a 72%.

Alex rushed through the waiting room and arrived at the back of the room where they were being scanned before being ready to get sent to the stage.

The other 19 participants looked at him with surprise.

"You're finally here," Zhanrou shouted with relief.

The others most made a grunting noise while Zhou Ren gave a mocking smile.

"I had thought you would have given up by now. It seems you got a little kick in you just yet," Zhou Ren said.

Alex smiled back at him. "Just keep watching, you will get a little kick in you later too," he said.

He ignored his agitated face and went to get his storage bag scanned.

"Hmm?" the saint realm expert made a frowning face. "What is this? This is not allowed."

"It's a weight measurement formation," Alex said. "I need it for the ingredients."

The Saint thought for a moment and asked, "Do you really need this?"

"Yes," Alex said.

The Saint turned around to converse with his colleagues and turned around after a few seconds.

"Okay, what exactly do you plan to use it for?" he asked.

"Just checking the ingredient's weight," Alex said.

"Anything else?" he asked.

Alex shook his head.

"Okay, someone will sit by you while you use it and take it away after you're done. Understood?" he asked.

"Absolutely," Alex said.

Once everything was set, everyone was let onto the stage and introduced one by one. As they came out, everyone was once again asked the same question as to what they were going to do.

Out of all 20 of them, everyone that went ahead of Alex said the same pill's name.

Disciple Ascendancy pill.

"What pill are you making, Contestant Yu?" the host asked.

"A Body Rebinding pill," Alex said.

The crowd murmured a bit when they heard that and even the host showed a surprised expression.

"I hear you were the one that perfected the recipe for the Disciple Ascendancy pill. Mind telling us why you're not making that pill like everyone else?" the host asked.

"It's simple," Alex said. "Everyone else doesn't have choices with the recipes as I do."

"Oh, are you saying that this pill you are going to make… do you…" the host didn't have to fully answer the question for everyone else to understand what he was implying.

Alex smiled at the host and walked to his position.

"It seems we are going to get an amazing round folks. It's the time you've been waiting for all day long. For the top 20 of the competition so far to compete together for the first time and once and for all let us know who the best alchemist of the younger generation is," the host said.

Then he turned to the contestants. "Get in position," he said and waited.

Once everyone was in place, a slew of staff members came up front and handed them their ingredients.

"You have one hour to make the best pill you can ever make. Begin!"

Alex heard rustling from all around him as people started preparing their cauldron.

However, Alex didn't bring out the cauldron. Instead, he brought out the formation plate.

A staff member sat by him and watched him do what he did.

Alex took the ingredients out one by one and started weighing them against the formation.

The staff was truly surprised to see him measuring. After all, they had expected some sort of shenanigan from him to win at this competition after yesterday's unworthy showing.

Alex checked through the ingredients. 20 grams. 52 grams. 33 grams.

He used his fake arm to break away some of the ingredients as they were too heavy.

Alex then checked a tree bark that needed to be 45 grams. However, when he measured it, it was only 43 grams.

It was missing 2 grams.

2 grams didn't look like much, but that was 2 grams missing which the other ingredients would latch onto when forming the pill, thus creating a massive problem that would lower the percentage by a lot.

"Sir," he said to the staff member. "I cannot use this bark. I will require another ingredient."

Chapter 747: Multiple Immortal Grade pills

"Another ingredient? What's wrong with this one?" the staff asked softly so as to not alert the rest of the contestants who were already underway in the competition.

"This bark isn't of the right weight. I need one that is at least 45 grams, which this is not," Alex said.

"Certainly that is no problem, right? It's just a few grams," the staff said.

"Sir, I am trying to make the best pill I have ever made in my life. If you are going to deny me of that opportunity, then I would like to speak with someone else," Alex said.

"Okay, okay, I will talk with the host," the staff said and went to the host. He whispered a few words and the host walked up to Alex.

"Is it true that you need another ingredient?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"But the round has already started. I cannot delay the round for you," he said.

"It is fine. I can wait for you to bring the ingredient," Alex said. "If you cannot, I have the ingredient with me. I will just need you to ask it from my mother in the audience."

"No, if you are willing to wait, we will get it for you," the host said and ordered someone to go get one that was at least 45 grams.

Alex closed his eyes and waited, knowing certainly that the host didn't have a favorable opinion of him in this matter.

However, it was important so he was willing to disregard other people's thoughts for his own opportunity.

After 10 or so minutes, a staff member finally returned and handed him the ingredient.

Alex took the bark and weighed it. 46 grams.

He lightly scratched a bit of the bark until it was 45 grams and was finally ready to make the pill.

By the time he was starting to make the pill, the others were starting to finish their pills. Just a few minutes and they would have their pills ready.

Alex handed over the weighing formation as he promised and pulled out his cauldron and placed it on the furnace.

The moment the cauldron touched the fire, both the fire and the cauldron heated up to exactly 544 degrees as the recipe required him to.

Not a degree higher, and not a degree lower. Alex waited for a minute as he watched the flame and cauldron and there was absolutely no fluctuation on his part.

What little Yang energy his body was releasing had absolutely no effect on his alchemy today, and that gave Alex confidence he hadn't felt ever since he made those Earth spirit root enhancing pills back in DawnSpring city.

Alex took out the first ingredient and placed it into the cauldron. The moment the ingredient touched the base of the hot cauldron, Alex could hear the sizzling sound, and he started moving it around to quickly pulverize it.

After 5 and a half slow rotations, he could see the ingredient was done being refined, so he turned up the heat again.

With his Dao, the fire increased in temperature and so did the cauldron. At exactly the same time, he placed the second ingredient.

Alex was making sure to make no mistake on his part for this pill. He wasn't taking any chances by letting the previous powder stay in the cauldron far too long while he fumbled around, waiting for the next ingredient to be put inside.

While the ingredients once powdered didn't burn up like they would when they were ingredients, it was only because the other ingredients would soak up the heat.

If the powder alone was left there, it would certainly lose some of its ability to take in the energy.

In the grand scheme of Alchemy, that mattered very little. It hampered maybe a percent or two. However, right now, every single percentage counted, so Alex did his absolute best to not let any ingredient take in more heat than it already had.

As soon as the third ingredient was done being powdered, Alex instantly moved away heat from the fire and cauldron into the air and decreased its temperature.

At the same time, he put in the fourth ingredient and continued.

Alex was so into his pill that he didn't even notice the people stand up from their spot and walk up front to hand over their pills.

Some looked excited, while some looked disappointed. Some were nervous as they wondered how good their pill was, while the others were confident that this was the best pill they had ever made.

The host let them put their pills onto the 20 pills testers and had the percentages checked.

67%. 65%. 69%. 72%.

One after another, the number started popping up. As it did, the ranking in the sky kept on changing as well as the people from this group started jumping into the top 10.

Xue Meirong stood up from her spot with the pill in her hand. While she was stubborn, she still had to acknowledge just how great this recipe was.

As her father had told her that day, whoever came up with that recipe was a master of Alchemy.

She agreed with him as well. Only —she turned to look at Alex— she didn't want to believe it was him.

She searched for an open tester and walked towards it. However, before she reached it, Zhanrou appeared out of nowhere and placed her pill in it.

"Oh, didn't see you there," she said with a smirk on her face.

"Goddammit! You always like taking what's mine," she said and turned away to another tester and placed her pill in it.

The two of them acted like they were focusing on their pills alone, but their rivalry was too much to keep them from making side glances at each other's pills.

As the testers fogged up and went past 50%, they watched their result with bated breaths.

60%, 65%, 70%. It didn't stop.

71%, 72%, 73%. Around that part did the pill finally started slowing down and it looked like it would stop.

74%. And then, 75%.

The crowd was shocked, to say the least, as the first Immortal grade pill ever appeared in the competition. Two of them at once too. But it wasn't over yet.

The percentage went up to 76% and it stopped for Zhanrou. However, it didn't stop for Xue Meirong at all.

The pill went one step forward and stopped at 77%.

A happy smile appeared on Xue Meirong's face as she looked at the 77% pill.

"Congrats," Zhanrou said after losing to Xue Meirong.

Xue Meirong looked at her with surprise, forgetting for a moment what she was even doing in her happiness. "Oh, congrats to you too, I was just ahead by a single percent."

This was too happy an occasion to drown it with smugness and disdain towards others.

The ranking in the sky flickered as Gu Zhanrou appeared in the 2nd place and Xue Meirong appeared in the 1st place.

She had a definite chance of becoming the 1st place if only—

"Step aside, ladies," Zhou Ren appeared behind her. "It's my turn now."

Zhou Ren placed his pills onto the empty tester in between them and waited for the fog to rise up.

Zhou Ren was the only person waiting for his pill to work and the eyes of the contestants, the host, the staff, and everyone in the audience were on his pill now.

Zhou Tianqiu sat alongside Zhou Zirong, who was a relatively young man, and watched his son's pill from a separate building just like the princess.

"Just watch, your nephew will catch up to you in no time," Zhou Tianqiu said.

"I hope so. I expect a lot from him," Zhou Zirong said with a smile.

"He will, I assure you," Zhou Tianqiu said. "The recipe these kids have is nothing but perfection. My son will do great."

"Yes, the recipe is indeed great," Zhou Zirong said. "That's why I'm more curious about the recipe maker."

"That kid?" Tianqiu's face was angered for a split second as he remembered Alex and the night when he went to personally ask for the medicinal paste recipes.

"He's nothing. Didn't you hear about his performance on the 3rd day? The kid got 30 points in total and lost his first-place ranking. I guess he's only good when it comes to ingredients and recipes."

"When it comes to actually making pills, he's but a common man with no talent at all," Zhou Tianqiu said.

"Is that so?" Zhou Zirong asked with his smile not fading for a single second. "But I have heard different rumors."

"What rumors?" Zhou Tainqiu asked.

"Well, let's just say we might have an interesting round in our hand," Zhou Zirong said, not answering the question.

"Doesn't matter," Zhou Tainqiu said with a massive grin on his face. "Can he beat that?" He pointed to his son's result that had finally settled on the stage below them.

Back on stage, Zhou Ren's eyes went wide in shock because of his own pill. He knew he had done well, but not this well.

Zhanrou and Meirong couldn't help but be shocked when they saw the result.

Zhou Ren had outdone himself and made a pill with a Harmony of 79%, shocking everyone in the audience.

"I did it! I won!" he exclaimed, only to get shushed by the host.

"Huh?" he was confused and looked around to see a single tester empty. "Someone's not done yet?"

He turned around to the furnaces and saw Alex move his arm around in various gestures. Then he finally stopped and so did the fire.

Alex opened his eyes as the lid popped open and let out a single pill.

Chapter 748: Result

Alex held the pill in his arm and wondered what he did wrong— what mistakes did he make?

As he stood up to take the pill to the front, he couldn't help but mull over that exact thought.

What did he do wrong?

There were 3 things in his mind that were wrong with the pill he just made.

First, there was a problem with the ingredients. It wasn't the amount that was the problem, but perhaps their age, or maybe how long they had been kept without a container.

Some of the ingredients had lost a bit of energy.

Alex reached the front and placed his pill into the tester. While not many waited for his pill to show the result, there were a few that were desperate to know that result.

That included Zhou Ren, as Alex alone now stood between him and victory. He tried saying something to Alex, but Alex wasn't hearing anything. He was lost in his own thought.

He was still thinking of the things that he did wrong today.

The second thing that was wrong in today's pill-making process was his method of putting in ingredients. Every time he put an ingredient inside, he needed to lift the lid of the cauldron.

While he did use Elemental Guidance to keep the energy inside like most Alchemists used on a normal basis, there was still a chance that the energy escaped and thus brought down his pill's overall harmony by a couple of percentages.

Alex watched the fog grow on the tester as it smoothly went past 40% and crossed 50% not long after.

As it went up, he thought of the third problem that might have occurred that caused his Harmony to be lowered.

The third problem was his pill-forming technique. While he had to admit that his technique was amazing, far superior to just randomly clumping up powder to make a pill, it was still a far cry from the technique that formed his split pills.

If he had that, he would certainly not have lost a single percentage of his pill's Harmony today because of the technique.

Aside from that, Alex saw no other problem today. His ingredients were properly measured, there was no downtown between the ingredients being powdered, the temperature was being perfectly manipulated, and there wasn't a single mistake in the pill-making process.

Even his cauldron just being a True grade cauldron didn't affect him at all due to his Dao of Heat that allowed him to instantly heat stuff.

It was just the 3 problems that hampered him today.

And that was why he couldn't reach 100%.

A small smile appeared on Alex's face as other people's faces were a mixture of shock and surprise.

"Tha-that can't be true," Zhou Ren mumbled to himself.

"How…" Xue Meirong couldn't even finish her sentence.

Most of the other people were simply way too speechless to say anything. In fact, the entire crowd was silent, including the people outside the competition ground that were watching the match on the giant, floating screens.

"This has to be a mistake, right?" Even the host himself couldn't believe the result.

"That tester must be broken," Zhou Ren said. "Test it again."

"Yes," the host agreed and empties another tester before placing Alex's pill into another one.

When he did that, the whole crowd leaned in closer to see the result again.

1%, 2%, 3%, the fog quickly started covering the glass as it blitzed through the early numbers.

10%, 20%, 30%, they passed in the blink of an eye.

Before people even realized what was happening, the fog reached 50% with no sign of stopping anytime soon.

55%, 60%, 65%. Alex was already reaching the Harmony that most other people barely reached in their lifetime. As they watched, it soon reached 70% and kept climbing up.

When it touched 75%, Zhanrou and Meirong quietly watched the fog. When it rose 1%, it was the same result as Zhanrou.

When it rose 1% again, it was the same result as Meirong. When it rose 1% again, it was now better than both of their results.

When it rose 1% again, Zhou Ren's face lost color as he got the suspicion that the previous answer was correct.

When it rose 1% again and reached 80%, his pill had been beaten as well. Alex had won today's round.

However, the fog was not showing any sign of stopping. 81%, 82%… it kept on rising as everyone watched with bated breaths.

83%, 84%, 85%… that was when it finally slowed down. Slowed, but not stopped.

The princess, Zhou Tianqiu, Zhou Zirong, Xue Mufan, and even the Emperor watched the retest with a shocked expressions on their face.

When the pill crossed 86% and reached 87%, Zhou Ren realized Alex now had the exact same points as him and was tied with him for the first place in the competition.

However, that didn't last long as the pill rose again to 88%. Now, Alex had won the competition with no question.

Still, no one cared about that for now, not even the host. He just wanted to see if the result that they saw previously was true, and it was coming dangerously close to being so.

89%, and 90%, the numbers increased once again, making people truly believe that what they had seen before was not a mistake.

So, if that were true, then…

91% and finally, 92%. The fog stopped moving and the result was the same as last time.

92%.

"Holy shit it's true," the host cursed out loud for everyone else to hear. "He did it, he actually did it."

The moment the host stopped speaking, the entire crowd went into a craze at the result. Whether it was the audience, the staff, or the contestants, not a single one of them could shut their mouths as they screamed miracle.

The numbers on the ranking above them flickered as Alex jumped from a 102, getting ahead of Zhou Ren who had a 189, and reached 194 as he obtained the first place.

Alex's name solidified on the final ranking, making him the victor of the Alchemy competition.

Chapter 749: Anything You Want

"And here are your winners."

"On the third place, with 187 points, is Xue Meirong from the Falling Lotus sect," the host announced and the people cheered.

"On the second place, with 189 points, is Zhou Ren from the Zhou Family," the host announced again and the people cheered once more.

"Finally, in what can only be called an unexpected event, with 194 points, is Yu Ming. Give him a standing ovation everybody," the host shouted and everyone stood up to clap, including the staff and other contestants.

Alex took the medal he was given and thanked everyone. After that, the event ended.

"Alright, we will see you guys tomorrow at noon, great job today," the host said and left.

"Congratulations, brother Yu. That was amazing. How did you even make a 92% pill?" Zhanrou came to ask.

"Well, I've been making this pill for over 4 years now with my refined recipe, so I kind of know exactly what to do with it. Plus, the guild provided really good ingredients," Alex said.

"Is that so? I should learn from you more," Zhanrou said.

Zhou Ren walked over to him with a dark face. "You have bested me. Congratulations," he said.

"Thank you, brother Ren. You were quite close yourself," Alex said. Zhou Ren felt a sense of shame when he was told they were close.

"Congrats," Xue Meirong said just that one word and left.

The other contestants came and congratulated him. After they left the stage, even more people came to congratulate him.

It was so crowded around him that his own mother didn't get to congratulate him for nearly 15 minutes.

Even after half an hour, the group of people continued coming up to him and congratulating him while constantly telling him who they were and how he was invited to their place.

Alex smiled and nodded as most of their words entered one of his ears and exited through another.

"Brother Yu," Shurin came to him once again. "The princess wants to see you."

"Oh, okay. Let's go," Alex said and ignored the crowd to go to the princess. The crowd was a little angry but there was nothing they could do as they had heard who called Alex.

Alex was taken to a different location this time, a much larger room. When he entered, he was surprised to see that there were more than just the princess and a few servants.

Alex saw many new figures he had never seen before.

A man wore a golden robe with a criss-cross pattern all over it. A woman wore a green robe with multiple shades of green layered on it.

Another woman wore blue robes that looked like waves of water. The man with the crimson robe was one of the eldest in the room.

The bloody-robed man had a thin and short face but somehow looked fearsome. Han Hongqi stood upright in his brown robes next to an older person that seemed to share some features with him.

Zhou Tianqiu stood next to another Zhou family member with a younger-looking, amicable face.

Shangguan Quan stood next to an old woman in black and red robes that had spear Qi flicker around her even as she stood there doing nothing.

Xue Mufan sat with his arms crossed with an awkward expression.

Other than him, there were also figures from the Broken Ravine sect and the Glory's edge sect that Alex recognized from their robes alone.

At the center of it all sat the Emperor, next to whom sat the princess that had called him.

Seeing such a group of high-ranking figures that could easily determine the fate of the empire, Alex felt a little bit scared.

"Greetings, seniors, your highness," Alex bowed a little to greet them all.

"Sit," the Emperor spoke while everyone else remained silent.

Alex sat down on an empty chair in the center of the room.

"First of all, congratulations on your victory in today's competition," the Emperor said. "You have done something today that most of us wouldn't have dreamed of seeing in our lifetime."

"Thank you, your majesty," Alex said.

"No, thank you. You have done a great service to us, young brother. All of us here stand before you to grant you anything you want, so long as it is in our power," the Emperor said.

"Anything?" Alex asked and looked around the crowd while thinking to himself what he wanted. There was really just a single thing he could ever want.

"There is one thing I want," he said as his eyes fell on Xue Mufan.

"Oh, you want to become my disciple?" Mufan asked with a surprised look on his face.

"No, senior," Alex said, restraining his chuckle. "I require some assistance in refining a Saint rank ingredient."

"As I am unable to do it until I enter the saint rank, I will be requiring your help," Alex said.

"Refining a saint rank ingredient huh? Are you going to make some pill?" Mufan asked.

"No, senior. I only need to refine the ingredient alone," Alex said.

"Okay, I can help you with that," Mufan said.

"Is that all you want?" the Emperor asked, clearly surprised that Alex wasn't requesting something better given the opportunity.

"I have nothing I require more than what I have asked for," Alex said.

The Emperor nodded and ignored the many messages he was getting directly.

"By the way, young man, where did you acquire those recipes of yours?" the Emperor asked.

Alex felt a little suspicious that he was about to ask him for his recipes. "I refined them myself, your highness," Alex said.

"Oh? How did you learn to do that?" the Emperor asked.

"Brother Shen Jing gave me a book that taught me how," Alex lied.

"Is that so? Thank you for answering my questions. You may leave now. Xumei, take our little brother out," he said.

"Yes, father," the princess stood up and left her seat. She then took Alex and walked out.

As soon as the door was shut, everyone in the room suddenly turned to the emperor with a confused face.

"Your highness, what was that?" Zhou Tianqiu asked.

"Weren't we going to ask him how he improved those recipes?" Xue Mufan asked.

The various other people also chimed in and asked the emperor the same thing.

"Enough," the Emperor said. "I know what I'm doing. You heard what he said. The technique is not his, but it belongs to someone else."

"So?" the others asked.

"It belongs to someone we cannot offend in the least," the Emperor said.

"We cannot offend?" the people got confused.

"Do you know why I had to find a royal alchemist these last 2 years?" The Emperor asked.

"Uhh… there are rumors, your highness," someone said.

"What rumors?" the Emperor asked.

"The rumors say that the princess has either lost the healing crystal, had it stolen, or it just doesn't work anymore," the woman in blue said.

"None of that is true," the Emperor said. "The person in question came to the palace, took the crystal from us, and I thanked him for it. That is how much we cannot offend him."

"What?" the group was surprised beyond belief.

The Emperor didn't explain any longer and only said, "That is why I didn't force him to reveal his secrets. While the young man might be weak, he has a backing that our entire empire cannot offend."

"Not to mention, do you really want to offend a 25-year-old True Immortal alchemist that is already in the True King realm?" the Emperor asked.

The group unanimously shook their head, despite feeling angry at having to do so.

* * * * *

"You did better in today's competition than I could've ever hoped to. Were you hiding your skills when you made pills for us? The best I saw from those were at 80%," the princess said.

"Of course not, princess," Alex said. "I was just not in the right state to make pills at the time."

"Your condition that requires Yin treasure?" the princess asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "While it wasn't that bad early on as I continued finding Yin treasures, over the year I found myself developing an immunity to the Yin in most treasures. So I kept needing something better."

"Were it not for you bringing that yin water, I would've never been able to show the result I did today. In a way, you are responsible for my result today. Thank you for that," Alex said.

The princess smiled. "So, what are your plans now that you have won the competition? Do you still plan to go to the Icy Hell?" she asked.

"I do, but not just yet," Alex said. "There's a reason I took part in the competition. Now that I've won, I get to make a pill I've been waiting for a long time to make."

"Oh, what pill is it?" the princess asked.

Alex smiled. "You will know after I make it," he said.

"So what about your deal with senior Mufan? Where are you going to have him help?" she asked.

"I… don't know actually. I will think about it after we get our rewards tomorrow," Alex said.

"Why don't you come to stay in the palace?" the princess asked. "That way, you can stay away from the crowd too."

"Actually, that's not a bad idea," Alex said. "Would it be okay if I bring along my mother? She's here with me and I don't want to send her back alone."

"Of course, I don't mind," the princess said. "Besides, I would love to see just what sort of women can raise a genius like you."

Chapter 750: Rewards

"Here are your rewards."

Some of the big figures from the Alchemy guild including Xue Mufan and Zhou Zirong were present in a secluded section of the guild, along with the top 10 winners of the competition.

Everyone was handed a pile of storage bags, which included the recipes and ingredients as promised.

Alex got 15 thousand True Spirit stones, 3 Saint rank ingredients, 2 Saint rank pill recipes, a bunch of True ranked ingredients and 1 True Heaven ranked artifact.

The artifact that Alex got was a single fist-sized orb of chromatic color. Alex wondered what it was, but he didn't have to think for long as he noticed a talisman by its side that had its information.

[Poison Absorbing Pearl: Absorbs almost all poisons and venoms from the air and one's body. You can later use the orb to use the poison as an attack.]

The orb could only absorb poisons below a certain rank and it couldn't absorb a lot of it, so using it to protect yourself from the Poison swamp was useless, but it did absorb enough poison to protect you on a daily basis.

It was a useless treasure to Alex, but it would be amazingly useful for his mother so he accepted it gracefully.

Alex ignored the Hammerhead Snake's venom, and even ignored the box that contained the fruit that was the Blizzard's Rainbow core, and took out the box that contained the Blood Spirit Ginseng.

This was the ingredient he had been waiting for for a long time and finally, it was here.

Alex slowly pulled open the box and saw the ginseng. The ginseng looked like any old ginseng that one could find. It was a cylindrical body with patches of dirt that descended to multiple tendrils that looked like roots.

What made this ginseng different was its color. The ginseng was fully crimson in color.

Not only that, the moment Alex opened the box, the air smelled of iron, and everyone got alert.

Alex quickly closed the box and put it back into his storage bag. 'Holy shit!' he thought. He had never expected the ginseng to have this strong of a bloody smell.

"You can check your rewards later when you are alone," one of the elders said. "For now, the three of you, come with me."

Alex, Zhou Ren, and Xue Meirong followed the elder and went to a different room where they saw 3 items on 3 different pedestals.

One was a black and gold cauldron, another one was a crimson red whip, and finally, the last one was a giant necklace.

"These are the Saint-ranked items that you are to get. Let us start with young man Yu and see what he chooses," the elder said.

Alex nodded and looked at the reward. "May I check them?" he asked.

"Absolutely, go ahead," the elder said.

Alex walked up front and inspected the cauldron. The cauldron was sturdy and could probably be used as a blunt weapon. It was made up of a material that easily let Qi pass through and also seemed to have some sort of skill forged into it.

When Alex inquired about it, it turned out that the cauldron could keep the energy from escaping while activated.

Alex was intrigued, but he moved on to the whip. The whip was somehow extremely stiff and flexible at the same time. He poured in some Qi and suddenly the whip came to life as a fire burned all over it.

"Be careful not to burn yourself. The whip can produce an incredible amount of fire," the elder said.

"I see," Alex said and moved on.

The final item was the necklace which was a mental attack blocker for the most part, but there was also a skill that created a barrier to stop any attack below the Saint realm.

While that sounded incredible, it would be useless to Alex within a year or two, that he was sure of.

So, circling back to the whip and the cauldron, Alex thought for a moment and made his decision.

"I'll choose this," Alex said as he grabbed the item.

"The whip?" the elder was surprised. "Not the cauldron or the necklace?"

Alex shook his head. The necklace was useless to him soon anyway. As for the cauldron, while it would be useful to him, it wouldn't aid him as much since his Dao was able to cover up any shortcomings of his own cauldron.

Besides, the cauldron he had was his master's gift. He had used it for over 7 years, but he wasn't willing to give up just yet.

"I have made my choice after considerable deliberation, elder. You need not worry about my decision," Alex said.

He had decided to take the whip after realizing that he didn't have any good weapons on him other than the poison sword which wasn't very good.

The other sword was great, of course, but he couldn't use Qi in it and as such, it was pretty much useless for him when it came to real fights.

So, he had gone with the whip choice.

Zhou Ren chose the necklace as expected. Coming from an alchemy family, he had no lacking of cauldrons that he could choose from.

As such, Xue Meirong was stuck with the cauldron despite already having one of the same ranks.

Since the rewards were handed over, the competition had officially ended and they could all go on with their life now.

"Go and train for the actual competition you young folks are always excited about," the elder said as he waved them goodbye.

* * * * * *

Xue Mufan sat in front of a scarlet and green cauldron and had a serious look on his face. By his side, his daughter sat with him, watching him.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked.

Alex sat in front of him with a serious look on his face as well. He held the Blood Spirit Ginseng in his hand and learned the information that naturally flowed into his mind.

The ginseng was 216 years old, and it was a Wood elemental ingredient that was missing Fire energy and Earth Energy.

Alex remembered that, a Wood Elemental ingredient. So, the ingredient he had to find was also a Wood Elemental ingredient that was missing, from his experience, most likely the Fire energy.

Now that Alex knew it, there was another thing he needed to do. He needed to get an impression of the aura of the ginseng. Only through that could he ever learn what sort of ingredient he was supposed to search for.

He took a deep breath and nodded, knowing that whatever he was going to do was about to destroy the ingredient in his hand.

Alex took out a knife and cut the ginseng into four different parts and handed one of the parts over to Xue Mufan.

Mufan shook his head at the waste but said nothing. "Alright, watch carefully. I don't know what you are going to do, but you need to pay attention," he said.

"Yes, senior," Alex said in a monotone voice as the warning didn't register in his ear because of his concentration.

"Alright, at 2122 degrees, 18 rotations counterclockwise at half a rotation per second. Coming right up," Mufan said and tossed the ginseng into the cauldron.

Alex's heart started beating furiously as he closed his eyes and ears to the surrounding, and used his spiritual sense to look into the cauldron and felt the shift in energy.

Wood energy was released from the ginseng of a certain variety that Alex got a distinct impression of. He continued feeling the energy and tried to ignore the bloody smell in the air, but it was too strong to ignore.

Still, he managed to focus on the wood energy altogether. After a few moments, the ingredient was powdered and there was nothing for Alex to sense as the energy remained stagnant in the cauldron.

"Again, please," Alex said.

Mufan nodded and took the 2nd of the 4 ingredients and did it again. Once again, Alex was forced to power through the bloody smell and focus on the wood energy, feeling the certain parts of the wood energy that would help him find the necessary ingredient.

"Again," Alex said and the 3rd of the 4 parts were used up.

Alex did his best to feel every different aspect of the wood energy, including whatever sub-energy of wood that might be hidden in there.

When the ingredient was powdered once again, Xue Mufan looked at Alex and asked, "Again?"

"Hmm?" Alex looked up with a confused look as he didn't hear what he had just said.

"I'm asking do you want to use up the last one too?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said and was about to hand it over when he stopped. "Actually, I would rather keep this just in case I need a reminder again."

"Suit yourself," Mufan said. "So is this all you needed me to do?"

"Yes, senior," Alex said as he kept the final part of the Blood Spirit Ginseng in his storage bag. "Thank you for agreeing to do this to me."

"It's fine. You barely took any of my time at all," Xue Mufan said. "Besides, I managed to get the recipe for the Body Rebinding pill for my daughter. She's been nagging me to ask you for it forever."

"Father!" Xue Meirong tried to hide her red face but everyone saw.

"My daughter doesn't have the best of manners, but she's not a bad person. I hope you'll be friends with her," Xue Mufan said.

"Of course, senior," Alex said.

"Anyway, I will need to leave now. I've left my sect alone for nearly 2 weeks now," Xue Mufan said as she stood up. "Good luck on whatever you endeavor next."

Chapter 751: Experiments

Alex and his mother returned back from the capital a week later in disguises so no one would recognize them.

Even after Alex was back in the Flowing Brush sect, not many realized he was there. As such, Alex got the chance to miss the many people that came after him because of his newfound popularity.

While this also meant Alex didn't get a chance to find free gifts from people, his mind was way too concerned about something else to care about.

After returning back, Alex immediately went to his work in finding the final remaining ingredient of the pill that would help restore his arm.

He used the 15 thousand True Spirit stones he had acquired from the competition to buy many different true rank ingredients, all of which were Wood Element ingredients.

Once Alex got that, he started going into a secluded Alchemy session where he would refine every single ingredient and compare it to the impression he had received from the Blood Spirit Ginseng.

That began Alex's 2-month-long seclusion where he went through thousands of ingredients, sometimes multiple times through to find the ingredient.

Every day, he would go through about 50 different ingredients while also pacing himself properly so as to not overwhelm himself.

Alex recorded about a hundred different ingredients in this time that felt similar to the impression he got from the Saint rank ingredient, but none of it felt exactly the same.

Alex knew that finding the same one was impossible, but he still wanted to and so he spent all days finding the one that was it.

After the hundred different ingredients were chosen, only then did Alex leave his room to take a few days of break.

When he got out, there was stubble on his face that he would otherwise have gotten rid of had he had the time. He quickly got rid of the beard and went to his mother.

"You're finally out," his mother said. "Did you do it?"

Pearl cultivated next to his mother, while his mother was making some talismans.

Alex shook his head. "I'm just done with the first phase. I've narrowed the thousands of ingredients to just a hundred. I will have to go through again to reduce the number," he said.

"Take your time," Helen said. "There's no hurry. Are you really alright though? You're burning up."

Helen placed her palm on her son's forehead and winced a little t the heat.

"Oh, sorry," Alex said and took in the yang Qi to cool his body again. The yang never bothered him normally so he hadn't realized, but it was clear now that his yang Qi had returned.

"I thought you had it cured," Helen said.

"Not cured, just temporarily suppressed is more like it," Alex said. "Sigh, I might have to use the yin fruit again. I really didn't want to do it until it was time to make the pill."

The two of them chatted for a while and Helen let him know that the people had found out about their relationship. A few of the important families and sects in the empire had even guessed that he was living here and had sent their gifts to him.

"Anything important in there?" Alex asked.

"Uh, let's see. There are a bunch of ingredients, and I mean a bunch of them. It's like they realized you were an alchemist and thought you would need nothing else."

"Aside from that there are a few True ranked weapons and armors, but it's not really of high grade. There are some other weird artifacts too, but none seem really amazing."

"Do you need cauldrons? A few of them sent some too," Helen said.

"Sure," Alex said. "I'll take the swords, cauldrons, and ingredients. You can keep the rest."

"Okay," Helen said. "Oh right, there have been a few people that came to meet me directly and are requesting for you to teach Alchemy in public. Can you do that?"

"I don't know. I'm not really the public speaking type," Alex said. "Not to mention I won't be able to do anything until I make the pill and then visit the Icy place."

"How about this? Tell them I will give a week-long alchemy lesson within the next year," Alex said.

"Great, I will let the people know when they come the next time," Helen said.

Alex stayed around for a while longer and talked to his mother. He fought with Pearl for a few hours afterward to get back into shape and only then returned back to his room to cultivate.

Once he cultivated and was back to his finest shape, he started going through the hundred different ingredients once again.

This time around, Alex went through the ingredients in a different manner. Since he was done with the impression part of the ingredient, he needed to go through and see what the ingredients did.

So, he went through the ingredients and read up on all of them to understand what most of them did.

Unfortunately for him, that didn't help much in narrowing it down. So, he decided to send it all to hell and start making the pill.

One by one, using the 100 different ingredients, Alex started making pills that would work for him.

Of course, he didn't just test the pills with no caution. He prepared a True Nullifying pill for every single one of the pills.

Most of the pills he made surprisingly came to work as healing pills. He cut himself before every test and about 60 of the 100 pills were healing pills.

Of course, they became healing pills of different varieties and different strengths where one was obviously better than others.

10 of the remaining pills deformed his body and were obviously bad pills.

For the remaining 30, they were useless pills. All they did was when Alex ate them, they would stay in his body and create violent energy that would start to wreck his body from the inside.

If not for the True Nullifying pill, Alex wondered how many times he would have died from the pills.

Alex finished the experiments in a month and at the end of it, his arm still wasn't back at all.

'What am I doing wrong?' he wondered. This was it after all. He had narrowed down everything to a list of ingredients and somehow none of them worked.

'What do I do?' he worried. He had destroyed the Blood Spirit Ginseng. Had he not done that, he would have had an ingredient to immediately make a pill when he entered the Saint rank.

"No, I can't be wrong. I can't afford to be wrong," Alex thought and went on to make the strongest healing pills amongst the many he had just made.

It was one that used a Fragrant Ginger vine as the replacement ingredient for Blood Spirit Ginseng.

Alex made the pill once more and ate it. He could feel the healing energy squirming in his body but it never great out the bone and muscles.

'I am definitely missing something,' Alex thought. 'But what?'

After long contemplation, Alex decided to use the final piece of the Blood Spirit Ginseng to once again check what he had been doing wrong.

Chapter 752: Realization

Alex held the last piece of Blood Spirit Ginseng in his hands and then looked at the heated-up cauldron in front of him.

"What am I doing?" he thought, almost disappointed at himself. "I can't refine a saint rank ingredient by myself."

"I need help," Alex thought.

He was getting so desperate that he nearly risked not only ruining the ingredient but also hurting himself.

He remembered what happened when he was in the Mind Tempering realm and tried to refine a True rank ingredient. He had nearly caused the energy to go violent and volatile.

Saint rank ingredient would be way worse than that.

So, Alex decided to ask Qin Shan for help in this matter.

"You want me to refine an ingredient?" Qin Shan was surprised. "I'm sorry young man, but I've never performed Alchemy. I will… I don't how I could ever do it without messing it up."

"Don't worry, senior. I will train you myself. Besides, I just need your help because you have Saint Qi. I would have done it myself if I had the Qi," Alex said.

"Fine, fine," Qin Shan accepted in the end, seemingly reluctantly. On the inside, however, he couldn't help but be super excited.

After all, the whole world was trying to take a glimpse of Alex's face right now, and he was getting a one on one training for him.

Besides, it was hard to deny the words of someone who made a 92% pill.

Alex gave a personal lesson on alchemy for the whole day to Qin Shan who happily absorbed it all. Later that night, he sent him back to revise the lesson in his mind as the next day he would have to help Alex.

Come next day, he sat in front of Alex in a confident manner.

"Now listen to what I say and do exactly that," Alex said. He then started teaching Qin Shan exactly how to move the ingredients.

"Just focus on moving it, leave the fire and temperature to me," Alex said started focusing on it.

Once he was ready, he told Qin Shan to start.

Gently, Qin Shan dropped the final piece of the Blood Spirit Ginseng and Alex immediately poured all of his attention into gaining the impression of the ginseng once again.

It had been 3 months since he last got the impression, so he was hoping to be somewhat wrong so that he could go on to find other ingredients that would work.

However, unfortunately for him, it was entirely the same. The same wood energy, the same feeling. In fact, he could tell that the Fragrant Ginger Vine was the perfect ingredient to replace it if it was also a Saint rank ingredient.

A minute later, Qin Shan stopped and took some heavy breaths. "Whoo! Saint rank ingredients sure are hard to control," he said.

"Yes, the higher the rank, the harder it becomes to handle them," Alex said without any emotion on his face.

While he was capable of making small conversation, his mind was entirely focused on finding what he would do now. The last piece of Blood Spirit Ginseng was gone and he had found nothing new.

He could just wait until Saint realm to get his arms back as everyone else told him. However, no one knew why he was really doing this.

If it were only for him, he could've waited to make the pill once he reached Saint Realm and not have destroyed the Blood Spirit Ginseng.

But given how rare the ingredients were, he doubted he would get more than a single set of ingredients. What then? He would be healed, but what about his master?

Wen Cheng was back in the crimson empire without a hand and a few fingers on the other one. His Martial Uncle was without a leg, and so were the many other elders that fought on the night when his master died many years ago.

He wanted to help them too. He was sure that they would never enter the saint realm, at least without any external help. As such, if he didn't make a pill for them, he would never have them healed.

'What should I do?' he started feeling panicked and stressed. He had a few people around him but none of them could help him right now.

His mother wasn't helpful in alchemy. Shen Jing had gone home and wouldn't return for another decade or more.

Aside from these two, there were a few others he could rely on in most cases, but not this.

"You must have been in a lot of life and death battles," Qin Shan suddenly spoke, taking him back to what he was doing.

"Sorry?" Alex asked as he didn't quite hear Qin Shan.

"I said that you must have fought a lot of life and death battles, or been around a lot of deaths," Qin Shan said.

"Not really around humans, but for beasts yeah," Alex said. He had killed a lot of humans already, but compared to beasts, the number was insignificant.

"No wonder," Qin Shan said with a sigh.

"No wonder what?" Alex asked.

"No wonder you can stand this thick of a bloody stench," Qin Shan said.

"Yeah, you get used to it. You just need to ignore it and focus…" Alex trailed off as he realized something and abruptly stood up.

"Stupid!" he called out himself. "Why the hell am I ignoring the Blood Aura of an ingredient named Blood Spirit Ginseng?"

"Are… you alright?" Qin Shan asked.

"Yes, thank you, senior. You helped me realize my mistake," Alex said. "If you'll excuse me, I have to be somewhere."

Alex ate a face-changing pill and went to the guild to buy a bunch of true rank ingredients with Blood Aura in it. From what he hoped, he would pair the Ginger Vine with one of these ingredients, and hopefully, the blood aura would do its job.

So, Alex returned back to his place and started making the pill once more.

He put in the ingredients as per the recipe with a lot of mistakes along the way as his body had heated up to a point where making pills was getting hard again.

Still, he forced his way through it and prepared the pill. As he went along and was on the final step of the process, he put in the Fragrant Ginger Vine.

Once that was refined, most of the time, he would make a pill out of it. However, now he was going to put in another ingredient because of its blood aura.

Alex took out a red leaf and was ready to place it in when he stopped as a bunch of information appeared in his mind.

Fire. That was the elemental energy of the ingredient in his hand. If he were to place this ingredient in, the fire would very easily cause problems for the Water energy that was the current result.

'This will destroy the pill,' Alex thought. He switched through the other ingredients, but very easily, any one of them could ruin the pill.

Alex turned what was in the cauldron into a pill and started thinking of what other choices he had.

'I need blood aura without it having any other energy,' he thought.

Chapter 753: Blood Aura

Ingredients with blood aura usually came from a location where blood was spilled. Since blood aura wasn't natural, without death or at least heavily injured human or beast, such ingredients were impossible to obtain.

As such, many of the ingredients had mutated to the point that they were carnivorous and would kill any beasts that got close to them to improve themselves.

Blood Ginseng, a common rank ingredient was mostly vines above ground that would grab and kill any beasts that walked close by it.

Similarly, other ingredients also had evolved to kill beasts and humans for themselves.

As Alex recalled all of this, he realized the main problem he hadn't thought out before going out to buy a bunch of such ingredients.

It was the fact that any ingredient that had a blood aura was a byproduct of the death around it.

At the center of it all, the ingredient itself existed which had its own energy. As no ingredient had neutral energy, any ingredient he did put in the recipe would drastically change the final result and end up becoming a different pill from what it already was.

'I need pure blood aura and nothing else,' Alex thought. 'How can I do that?'

He started going through his mind once more to remember more about the blood aura, but he couldn't think of any ingredient that he had read about that did have only it.

As he thought more and more, Alex's mind went back to the time in the Demon realm when Song Shing attacked the door that wouldn't open.

The Song family were known as a bunch of Blood aura users whose entire arsenal revolved around fighting using blood aura.

Alex remembered the attack he did. He had brought out a vial of blood and used it to attack the door. The attack had been quite strong as well.

'Blood,' Alex thought as he realized. "Will blood work?"

He needed to try it out immediately. Alex thought about how he could find blood to use, but it would be hard to come by unless he went and killed some beasts.

However, even then it would be difficult.

"I can't use just blood," he thought. "Blood contains energy too."

He remembered the Blue Flame Monkey's blood that was also an ingredient for this part. The blood was of Fire attribute, so it was impossible for just blood to be an ingredient.

'Maybe I can keep the ginger vine in a blood overnight for it to gain blood aura?' he wondered.

With no other choice, Alex cut his palm and collected a bowl full of his own blood. He placed the ginger in the bowl, and left it aside to cultivate after eating a blood rejuvenating pill.

The whole night, he was anxious, but he managed to keep himself from getting distracted and focused on his cultivation.

The next morning, he got out of cultivation with a hopeful heart and went to check on the ginger vine.

Alex instantly took out the Ginger Vine and even without checking anything else, he knew he had passed somehow.

Having stayed in the blood overnight, the Ginger Vine was absolutely full of blood aura. While it wasn't of the same level as the Blood Spirit Ginseng, this was good enough for a True rank pill.

Alex excitedly thought of making the pill when the vine in his hand gave information about itself that immediately disappointed Alex.

The Fragrant Ginger Vine that was supposed to be a Wood Element ingredient, was now a Yang Element ingredient.

Having stayed in his blood overnight, the extreme yang from his body had messed with the ingredient.

"Dammit!" Alex cried out. He was so hopeful, and it had even worked. And yet, he still failed.

He started cursing at his own body for being so full of Yang. He needed blood from a body that was without yang.

'Wait,' Alex thought. 'No, I still have a way, don't I?''

Alex quickly brought out the Saint ingredient that was part of his rewards for winning the competition.

The Blizzard's Rainbow Core.

The fruit looked like a multicolored apple, and the moment Alex took it out, the surrounding chilled to a few degrees lower than it previously was. It wasn't the same sort of drop in temperature as the water that the princess had given him, but it was close enough.

Alex took a deep breath and started cultivating as he ate the fruit. The Yin energy from the fruit started invading Alex's meridians and fighting with the Yang energy in his body.

Very soon, Alex could feel the yang in his body lowering to a point where it was nonexistent.

It lasted an entire day and night as Alex took things slow, but somehow it felt like just a couple of hours for him.

When Alex opened his eyes the next morning, he could feel not a single bit of Yang in his body.

Using the opportunity, Alex immediately cut open his palm and gathered another bowl full of blood, and placed another Ginger into it.

Alex spent the next whole day once again cultivating and only stopped when it was time for the Ginger to be ready.

Alex took out the ginger from the bowl and was immediately surprised at the even stronger blood aura that was coming off of it. It was almost as if leaving it in the blood for a long time was helpful.

Alex took a deep breath to calm his mind as he took the Ginger out to check its properties.

"Yes!" he shouted out as he realized that the Ginger was still a Wood ingredient. Only now it was full of Blood Aura.

Alex took another deep breath as he started preparing the ingredients once more for the pill and started making it.

Without his yang body to make problems, and the perfected recipe after tons of retries, Alex had a really easy time making the pill.

There was still a lot of little fixing here and there left to do, but even with that, he managed to make an 82% pill.

Alex wanted to immediately eat it and test it, but he needed to be safe, so he continued heating the cauldron as he brought another set of different ingredients and made the True Nullifying pill.

As the pill was on its final stage, Alex started undoing the bindings on his puppet arm and it came off easily.

"I hope I do not need you anymore after today," Alex softly said as he finished the final stages on the True Nullifying pill.

As soon as the pill was formed, Alex got rid of both the fire and the heat in the cauldron.

At the same time, he brought out the healing pill and placed it in his mouth. The moment he swallowed it, Alex could feel a wave of energy pass through his body.

Alex immediately pulled out the True Nullifying pill just in case there was a problem, however, nothing bad happened yet.

As the energy moved around his body to repair what was broken, it finally reached his left arm.

Alex tried to keep away his anxiousness but that was impossible. For what felt like a long time, nothing happened, but then he felt a little itch on his stump.

Soon, the itch grew to an unstoppable degree and Alex felt like he needed to scratch it, but he held himself.

As the itch grew, Alex saw his stump wriggle as if going through a cramp. Just after that, it violently started expanding forward as bone, muscles, veins, tendons, and skins all started appearing one by one.

As if the pill had a knowledge of his genetic features, his left hand slowly grew to look exactly like the one he lost.

What was just until the elbow, grew to the wrist. Then the numerous bones of the palm started emerging as fingers grew out of it.

The bones were soon covered by muscles, which were then covered by skin. His fingers were bare for a few seconds before nails grew back on them.

Alex looked at his left arm in a daze as it grew to be exactly what it was supposed to be.

He moved his new arm a little. He grabbed stuffs. He felt the heat, the cold. He even hit it a little to feel the pain.

"I did it," he softly said to himself as it dawned on him that his arm was really back. "I really did it."

He had finally done what he had set out to do over 9 years ago.

Chapter 754: Blood Experiments

"Mother! Mother!" Alex shouted as he knocked on his mother's door.

"What is it? Is something wrong?" Helen hurriedly opened the door in worry. However, when she opened the door, she was met with a really excited Alex.

"Look!" Alex lifted his left hand with a child-like glee in his face.

Helen looked at his left arm for a few seconds before she realized what she was looking at.

"You did it?" she asked.

"I did it," Alex said excitedly.

"Oh, my sweet child. Congratulations," Helen said as she hugged her son. "Pearl, come look what your big brother did."

"Oh, what did brother do?" Pearl came out of the room.

"Look Pearl, my arm's back," Alex showed it to him.

"Your arm?" Pearl was surprised for a second. "Brother you finally got it back."

"Yes," Alex said.

The three of them celebrated Alex getting his arm back and even Qin Shan was joined in on the fun after he was notified of some loud screams from his mountain.

Throughout the entire time, he was there, Qin Shan had his mouth wide open as he couldn't believe what Alex had achieved.

"You were a big help in this happening, senior Qin," Alex said. "Had it not been for your little help, I might have been stuck around with a failed pill."

"I helped?" Qin Shan asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"So you made a pill that can restore lost limbs?" Qin Shan asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Or at least I would like to think I did. There are some concerns on whether it can heal just my injuries or everyone's."

"Why would you be concerned about that?" Qin Shan.

"The final ingredient requires me to keep it in blood for a little while so it can absorb the blood aura. Since the pill I made had my blood aura, I'm still not sure if it can work on others or not," Alex said.

"You should test it soon," Qin Shan said.

"I was already planning to," Alex said. "I have quite a few on the ingredients dipped in my blood there. I had to draw out so much blood for this that I feel kind of woozy right now."

"You deserve to rest more than you deserve this celebration, son. Go take a break," Helen said.

"Okay, mother," Alex said and returned back to his room.

Alex then cultivated for 2 whole days before he was back to being in the perfect condition.

Once he was, he took out the ingredients from the blood and started making pills with it.

As he continued making the pills, Alex started making fewer and fewer mistakes. By the time it was his 4th pill, he was reaching 85% consistently.

One of these times, he even reached 90%.

In total, Alex ended up making about 12 different pills and he needed to test them. He couldn't just have any person test it for him just in case it was bad.

So, Alex instead went to the guild to find some Pill Swines to test it on.

Alex found one that had its limb cut off due to a pill's reaction and became the perfect testing swine for him.

He fed it the pill and watched. The swine started getting irritated immediately and started rubbing its cut-off end on the ground from the intense itching sensation it was feeling.

Alex understood what was happening, so he quietly watched it get better. Within half a minute, the pig's little leg was starting to wriggle out, and within the next minute, it had a new leg.

"Yes!" Alex thought. "It works on others too."

There were a few more testing to be done, but Alex was happy that he now had a recipe in hand that could fix a lot of problems that would otherwise remain unsolved until one reached the Saint realm.

"Alright, let's get back to more testing," Alex thought.

There was one thing that he desperately needed to try. That was to use others' blood instead of his own.

Alex went around the Flowing Brush sect, requesting blood from everyone. Soon, he had a cauldron full of blood.

Alex wasn't worried about blood types causing problems in a pool of blood as cultivators never had that problem. At least not in the same way mortals did.

Alex went out of his way to make sure he didn't get blood from the individuals that had a superior Spiritual root. He couldn't risk the blood having an element.

Fortunately, there were many people in the Talisman-making profession that were there for exactly the reason of not having talents for the fighting profession.

Once his cauldron was filled from the blood of thousands of volunteers, Alex got a bunch of Fragrant Ginger Vines and dumped them in the blood, and let it rest overnight.

The next morning, Alex went to check on the vines, but there was no blood aura. So, Alex decided to let it be for a little longer.

The next day, there was still no blood aura. Alex wondered if he put in too many vines at once and took out about 3 quarters of it.

At the same time, wondering if there was some sort of mistake, he used his own blood as well to separately test if the speed was the same.

The next morning, Alex's blood created a vine with a thick blood aura, while the cauldron full of blood was barely starting to make a change.

Alex brought out more vines until there were about 5 remaining in the cauldron full of blood. Then, he decided to wait and see exactly how long it would take to reach the point of concentration as his blood did in just a single day.

While waiting for that to happen, Alex focused on other things and broke through to True King 6th realm while Pearl was still at True King 7th realm.

At the same time, he also noticed that his Yang energy was starting to come back, and now he couldn't make any more of those vines as his blood would contaminate them with his Yang.

He needed attribute-less blood after all.

It took the cauldron full of ingredients nearly 25 days to turn the 5 ingredients into having a thick blood aura.

Alex then proceeded to make 5 different pills using them and tested them too.

Afterward, Alex tested one of those pills and it worked as well as the first one did.

"So, the pill doesn't exclusively need my blood," Alex thought. "But it needs a lot of blood from ordinary folks. I can't use beast blood as they are all full of elemental energy."

"I can't use the blood of most talented folks as their blood is likely contaminated too. I would likely get a far faster result if I had Saint realm cultivator's blood but how hard is it to find one that doesn't have a superior Spiritual root."

"Even if it did work, would they be willing to draw so much blood just to cure a True realm cultivator?"

Alex started thinking about more and more things as his thought went past just the normal ways to acquire blood.

'What if I reveal this recipe and suddenly people start mass murdering mortals to gain their neutral blood? Can I handle their death on my hand?' Alex thought.

As Alex kept thinking, he soon realized that there was no way he could ever reveal the existence of this pill to anyone else. At least, not the recipe.

"Well, how the hell do I go about consistently making these pills now?" he thought. As far as he could tell, he would need the blood from someone or something with both a really strong cultivation base or bloodline, and with blood that have no attribute to them.

As far as he was concerned, there was not a single person in the empire that was just that. Not even himself.

"I guess this one is just going to have to be a secret then," Alex thought as he looked at the 15 different pill vials, all of which contained Immortal Grade True Body Regenerating pill.

He knew there were far more than that just in the Crimson Empire that needed such pills.

Alex then looked at his own body. He would be happy to give away some more blood if it meant saving someone from being without legs and arms or even other organs.

However, he couldn't, now that his blood was full of Yang again.

Alex sighed as he realized what he needed to do now.

"Time to go to the Icy Hell."

Chapter 755: Icy Hell

Alex punched a metal puppet as hard as he could and watched it say the words 'True King 7th realm'.

"Finally," Alex thought as he checked his left arm.

When his arm had come back, Alex had been too excited to worry about anything. Then, for an entire month, he went on a testing spree where he ended up figuring out that revealing the recipe was a really bad idea.

Aside from that, he had also realized that his arm that came back wasn't very high in body cultivation as the rest of his body.

While it was in the True realm in terms of strength, it was in the lower end of the True Realm. So, for another month, Alex spent his time cultivating his left arm along with Pearl.

At the same time, he also prepared for his journey to the Icy Hell by making many different pills, talismans, and formations.

When Qin Shan found out he was going there, he was beyond furious, saying that this was a very quick way to kill himself.

The Icy Hell was well known amongst the upper Echelon of the Luminance empire as being one of the more unapproachable locations on the continent.

That, and the secret realm that lied to the north. Compared to the Icy Hell, the Poison Swamp was tame to most people.

His mother started worrying after her master told her the truth and soon she started telling Alex not to leave.

It took him a rather long time to explain to her why he needed to do this. Even then, she was very worried about him.

"I will keep Pearl here then," Helen said to Alex as he got ready to leave.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

"Yes, he will tell me if something bad happens to you. If I get any sort of information as such, I will bring the whole empire to look for you," Helen said.

"Okay, if you say so," Alex said. "Alright, I will leave now mother."

"Take care, and make sure to message me from time to time," Helen said.

Alex left.

It was late afternoon when Alex flew southeast where the Icy Hell domain was.

Since he was going to fly above the eastern mountain ranges that were full of beasts that would want to attack him, Alex concealed his aura to be less noticeable.

Saint Realm beasts would find him if they were more or less alert, but since they had no reason to do so, there wasn't any need to worry for Alex.

Night fell soon and the moon rose to the sky. The bright, spotless moon shined brighter than the stars around it.

Countless mountains went past Alex, but he kept on flying. The night was mostly quiet, but he could hear roars and other beastly noises from down below from time to time.

Soon, the sun came up and he could feel the heat on his body. However, the cold air around him never left.

Even as the sun rose higher in the sky, the air was continuously colder and colder.

'I'm here, aren't I?' Alex thought as he started seeing the snowcapped mountains. He was in the region where the Icy Hell was. The Icy Hell itself however wasn't here yet.

So, Alex flew on for much longer until he started seeing snow everywhere.

At that point, it started getting so cold that his flying boat started to have ice forming all around it.

'Time to get down then,' Alex thought as he took back the ship and flew down from the sky.

As he landed on half a meter deep snow, Alex immediately spread out his nearly 200-meter wide Spiritual sense and started looking for the main thing he was here for.

Yin treasures.

According to the princess, this was where many of the Yin treasures originated from, including the drop of yin water that she had given him to temporarily get rid of the yang in his body.

In the 400-meter diameter of the circle that was his Spiritual sense, Alex didn't find any treasures, so he started walking further ahead.

Perhaps due to the lack of sun because of the forever-covered snow land, there weren't many plants in general, let alone ones that were alchemy ingredients.

Still, he had heard about Yin treasures growing here so he could only continue forward.

As he was walking, Alex felt light thumps on the ground coming from up ahead. 'What's that?' he wondered and slowly climbed up the shallow mountain.

When he was at the top, he saw a giant bear of white fur and icy blue body stand on a pool of blood-red snow and the carcass of… something.

It ate the dead body with its now bloody snout and then suddenly turned towards Alex.

Alex feared it a bit at first, but then he noticed that the bear was on the verge of entering the True Emperor realm.

'I have nothing to worry about,' he thought and ignored the bear, but the bear didn't ignore him.

Suddenly, it charged through the snow, kicking it everywhere, and lunged at Alex.

Alex suddenly made a fist with his left hand and used his Qi as well. Then, as soon as the bear was close to him, he punched it directly on the side of its snout.

The heavy bear was suddenly sent back as it skidded on the snow, revealing the barren ground underneath.

"You want more?" Alex asked as he was surprised at how strong he was even when he was holding back.

The bear looked at him with fearful eyes and suddenly ran away.

'That felt good,' Alex thought and turned around to walk deeper into the cold. Soon, the cold was starting to get to him. Not in the same way any other cultivator would feel, however. He was just getting uncomfortable.

At that point, Alex let his yang aura radiate out of him as there were no more reasons to hold it back.

Alex got deeper into the cold, but thanks to his Yang aura, he felt nothing. He continued searching for Yin ingredients but they were really hard to come by.

In the 4 hours he had been here already, he had barely managed to find a single yin flower, and that too wasn't of a very high rank.

So, he could only go deeper.

In the next 6 hours, Alex found 2 more ingredients, neither of which were particularly good.

To him, an ingredient that wasn't at least a pseudo-Saint rank was now useless. So, even as night fell once again, Alex needed to get deeper into the cold.

Around 4 hours in, Alex found a tree that was on Yin energy. While it wasn't the best quality, he decided to gather the ingredient just in case.

However, before he did so, he noticed something. Hidden below the snow under the tree was a snow fox that was waiting for him to approach.

Its body was so easily camouflaged into the snow that Alex nearly didn't notice it. Alex then sensed the beast's cultivation base and realized it was a True Emperor beast.

But of course, it wasn't very strong, so Alex was ready to fight it. He acted like he didn't notice the fox and got closer.

Suddenly, the beast lunged at him and Alex punched the fox. However, even as his fist reached the snow fox, he realized something was wrong.

Stopping mid-attack, Alex immediately jumped to the side and rolled on the snow. Where he had been previously, now there was a snow fox with its fangs baring at him.

The fox that had lunged at him was nowhere to be seen or sensed. If not for him sensing the fox's attack on his leg, he wouldn't have dodged the attack.

'What was that?' he wondered. 'A clone? No, an illusion? How did it manage to create an illusion that seemed so real to my spiritual sense as well?'

As Alex asked that, the beast suddenly split into two. Alex knew one of these two foxes was fake, but he couldn't tell which one was it.

"Two can play at this game."

Alex's body blurred for a bit as a Yang clone of his appeared next to him. He stood side by side and got ready to fight.

Since he was going to fight a beast, he decided to win at its own game and dropped to the ground.

Claws appeared from his hand as his metal energy of his went to work.

"Come!"

Alex suddenly dashed forward as a tiger did. At the same time, his yang clone did so too and the both of them looked like 2 fighters fighting against two foxes.

Alex slashed at the snow fox, but his hand passed through. At the same time, the snow fox also went through the fake Alex and realized it had been duped.

Alex quickly turned to the real fox and lunged at it, but suddenly the fox cried out loudly.

"Awoooo!'

Alex didn't understand what it was doing until he felt his earrings buzz a little. The fox was using a mental attack and his earring easily stopped it.

At the same time, Alex swung his two claws at the fox and tore off a chunk from its right side.

The beast tried to create an illusion again, but it was in too much pain to do so.

So, Alex took pity on the beast and quickly killed it to keep it from being in such pain.

Once the fox was dead, Alex collected its material and went over to the tree. There he took the Yin treasure from it and went on his way.

Chapter 756: Canyon

Hell was an apt name for this place as nothing living could ever exist here.

The area was a massive plain now as Alex had gone past the mountains and it was all plain past that point.

As far as Alex could see, which was barely more than a few meters due to the hellish blizzard that never seemed to stop, everything in the area was dead.

His spiritual sense however gave a different answer. Everything on the surface was dead. However, there were some things growing underneath the ground, but those too were rare to the point that in a day's slow travel, Alex barely found maybe 3 different items, 2 of which had nothing to do with Yin.

The Yin treasures he did find were good, but he wasn't sure how helpful it would be considering it wasn't exactly Saint rank.

It had been an entire day since he had seen beasts, so at this point, Alex didn't even know if he should feel worried about them at all.

He couldn't think of a single beast that could live here after all.

Alex suddenly stopped and looked ahead with his spiritual sense. Something was on the ground that wasn't either snow or rock.

Alex couldn't exactly tell what it was, so he got closer until he was right on top of it and moved aside the snow.

When he finally uncovered what it was, Alex felt his heart drop.

This was a corpse. Alex saw the wide sunken eyes of a female whose entire body was frozen solid, including her orange robes. Her body was encased in clumps of ice from the snow that likely melted around her before she died.

Alex didn't know how strong this woman likely was, but the fact that she had died here meant she had at least some strength.

'This would be my fate too if I didn't have the yang aura blocking the coldness for me,' Alex thought. He finally started realizing for real how treacherous his path currently was.

The wind suddenly picked up and Alex felt it try to push him back. But he fought through it for a few seconds until it stopped.

Alex looked back at the frozen lady and bowed a little in respect. "Whoever you are, may you rest in peace," he said and walked away.

The dead corpse might have scared him, but his need to find cures and solutions for his body far outweighed his concerns for his own survival.

Alex understood that this was bad, but he couldn't stop himself.

As night fell, the blizzard got even worse so Alex had to stop wandering aimlessly and take shelter.

Since there was nothing to take shelter under, he dug the snow and made a small cavity on the ground where he placed a barrier formation that also generated heat on its own.

The barrier was amazing and kept Alex safe, but due to the constant attack from the outside, he needed to continuously replace the true spirit stones in leather pouches around the formation poles.

Overnight, the blizzard died and the sun rose up. It was still cold as hell, but he would rather just have a cold than cold and strong winds.

Alex undid the formation and walked out of the hole in the snow. Once he was out, he could see the clear sky since the first time he was there.

The sun was so bright that Alex was forced to close his eyes and just look at things using his spiritual sense.

Just as Alex spread out his spiritual sense, he noticed something at the edge of his sense. However, before he could take a look at it, the thing escaped out of the range of his sense.

'What the hell?' he thought. 'What is so strong that I can't even sense it leave?'

Alex started worrying that there was a Saint Rank beast around here. 'Dammit! I knew saint realm cultivators came around here frequently. Of course, saint beasts can survive here too,' he thought. 'I should have been more prepared.'

He brought out a bunch of talismans and even revolved his Qi as he got ready to use the Earth Devour Technique to escape from the area. However, even after a few minutes, nothing came into his sense again.

Alex squinted in the bright light, but there really was nothing around there at all.

After realizing that whatever was here had likely left, Alex continued moving closer towards the coldness to find more ingredients.

'Should I leave?' Alex thought as he trekked further into the coldness. He had already bared his fangs at the Icy Hell, so he saw no point in returning without finding some good ingredients for his body.

'Is it getting colder?' Alex thought. Even as he walked forward, he felt the temperature drop noticeably. Not only that, it was so cold that even the air struggled to move.

Alex arrived at the top of a cliff that led down to a valley of some sort through a couple of hundred meters drop.

'Weird,' he thought. 'I thought I was already walking on a plain. How is it suddenly so high? Is this what they call a canyon?'

Alex looked down at the valley down the cliff and got ready to jump down there.

"Wait!" A voice suddenly called out from close by, freezing Alex in his tracks.

"Who?" Alex asked as he looked around to find whoever was speaking. He didn't need to search much longer as the figure in black clearly contrasted against the harsh whiteness of the snow.

Alex saw the figure with nothing but shock on his face and a small budding fear in his heart. His breathing got irregular and even the yang barrier that he had been creating by letting his yang energy flow out was destabilizing a bit, letting in the coldness inside.

"Se-senior, what are you doing here?" Alex asked.

The figure in black moved closer to him, walking on all fours. The yellow eyes contrasted the deep black fur on his body, making him look extra frightening.

"Don't go any further, young man. You will die," the black jaguar spoke.

After 9 years of leaving him alone, the beasts from the beast realm had finally caught up to him.

Were they going to kill him? Were they going to kidnap him back? Maybe experiment on him?

How was Pearl? Did they capture him already? Was he already taken to the ritual? Was that even a bad thing?

Numerous thoughts ran around his mind while his mind refused to settle on any one of them.

"Are you alright, young man?" the beast asked after seeing Alex not speak for a while.

"Wh-why are you here?" Alex asked. This was at least a Saint Core realm beast from what Alex could tell. Meaning, that the jaguar was stronger than many of the upper echelon of the Luminance empire.

The last time Alex was in the beast realm, he had humiliated them. So, he needed to be extra careful.

"I am here to look after you," the jaguar said. "To make sure you don't do anything stupid, like what you are about to do."

"What I am about to do?" Alex asked as he looked behind him. "Like go into that valley?"

"Yes," the jaguar said.

"Is it dangerous?" Alex couldn't help but ask. "I'm already in the Icy Hell, how much more dangerous can that be?"

"How much more dangerous? What about the fact that what the humans call Icy Hell is just the surrounding? That down there is the real Icy Hell. Is that enough of an answer?" the jaguar asked. "Or do you want me to tell you that the place down there is so cold that even Qi in your body gets sluggish to the point that they don't work?"

"What?" Alex couldn't help but get afraid.

"Come, let's go," the jaguar moved forward.

Alex hurriedly got back in fear. "Don't come near me," he said. "Tell me why are you here exactly."

"I told you, I came here to look after you," the jaguar said.

"You mean you came here to look after Pearl, right? Well, Pearl is not here," Alex said.

"I know. He's with your mother back in Dawnspring city. The leopard is looking after him. I really am here for you," the jaguar said.

"What? How do you know that? How long have you been keeping an eye on us?" Alex asked.

"Ever since 2 years ago when we found you in the mountains after doing a search, we have been keeping an eye on you," the beast said.

"2 years ago?" Alex was surprised. He remembered the beacon being activated, but he thought he was safe and they hadn't been found him after all. However, it seemed it was all a lie.

They had not only found him but also kept an eye on him ever as he went through the empire.

"Come, let's go," the jaguar said.

Alex looked back and realized he really was at the edge of the cliff. If the place was as treacherous as he was told, then it was better to leave.

"Alright, let's go," Alex said.

Just then, something happened. Alex had been standing on the edge of the cliff which was nothing but ice. When he poured out his yang energy all around him, it also affected the ice underneath him.

The result of his yang energy wasn't noticeable generally as he kept moving around. However, this time he had stood there for a long time as he talked with the jaguar.

A little too long.

The ice beneath his feet melted until it couldn't handle him. Then, Alex felt his body go into weightlessness and he started falling.

Even as he fell Alex tried to fly, but he felt his Qi move sluggishly. The more he fell, the more sluggish his Qi got, until he couldn't fly at all and fell to the ground that was many hundred meters below.

Chapter 757: The Real Hell

As Alex tumbled through the air, his body got more and more sluggish as he failed to fly and finally ended up crashing onto the ground.

The ground crumbled as Alex found himself deep underneath it.

It turned out that the ground was actually fully ice.

Even then, Alex felt pain all over his body. Not only that, he felt the cold as well.

Without hesitation, Alex pushed out as much yang as he could from his body to protect himself while he tried to climb out of the ice.

There was barely any Qi for him to use so he had to claw his way out of the ice.

When Alex finally managed to drag himself out of the ice, he realized what a horrible thing he had just done.

The ice had isolated him from the coldness that was up there, but now, he was open to the elements and was fully bombarded with the coldness.

Alex once again tried to use his Qi, but it barely worked. He barely managed to even take out a healing pill for himself.

'So cold,' Alex thought as he shivered vigorously. He looked back up to the cliff top only to see a horrified Jaguar.

"I need to climb back up," he thought to himself but he wasn't sure if he could. The cold was way too much for him.

Alex once again reached into his storage ring and difficultly pulled out some pills, talismans, and formation plates.

Immediately, he activated all of them. The formation plate landed on the ice and created a barrier. The talisman fell in front of Alex and started generating heat, and the pill also heated his body from the inside.

Alex felt a sense of relief as his body was heated. However, in just a few seconds, it all came to a stop.

"What?" Alex was shocked by the sudden cold that followed the lack of heat. He quickly checked the items and realized that they were all exhausted.

"No way!" he thought. He had barely used it for a few seconds and it was done. Only the pill that was inside his body lasted a normal amount. Unfortunately, that little heat couldn't stop him.

Alex continuously spread out his yang, but it wasn't helping much against the cold. At the same time, he spread his spiritual sense but it barely went past a dozen or so meters.

"What the hell? Not only my cultivation base is suppressed, but even my spiritual sense. This is starting to feel a lot like the Forbidden Fields," he thought.

He looked back up at the cliff and shouted, "Senior! What do I do?"

The jaguar didn't know what to answer. He was simply way too surprised that Alex had even managed to survive in a place that would likely cause trouble for even Immortals.

It was hard for him as a Saint Realm to stand in the vicinity. He couldn't imagine how a True Realm cultivator could survive at the heart of hell.

"Can you see a way to climb back up?" he shouted back at Alex.

Alex looked around and noticed nothing but cliffs. "No!" he shouted. "Let me try something."

Alex couldn't fly, so he decided to climb the cliff with his bare hands. He went up to the cliff wall and grabbed onto a piece of rock.

Immediately, he felt pain shoot through his palm and he had to let go of it. "Argh!" Alex cried as he looked at his palm and saw deep red marks as if he was burned.

'Dammit! Ice burns,' he thought. If he tried to climb this cliff without any support, by the time he was halfway done, he would lose his fingers to frostbite.

He would be willing to let that happen if that helped him reach the top, but it didn't, so he was forced to stay away from it.

"I can't climb this. It's too cold," Alex shouted back.

Then, he sat down on the ice and started cultivating. That was one way to improve his healing, and it was also a chance to see if he could produce more Yang to protect himself.

Alex barely finished a full circulation of his technique after nearly 2 minutes. The Qi in his body had slowed down to a half and it was getting hard to cultivate.

The Jaguar kept thinking of ways to get Alex out, but nothing worked.

The place down there was so cold that no matter what he tried to do, the cold would destroy it.

"Dear Lord, how am I going to answer them if I let this kid die," he worried.

Alex felt a bit better as he cultivated, but it was still quite cold. As he waited for ideas to get out of this place, he started thinking of something.

'This is definitely like the Forbidden Fields. Stagnant Qi, no spiritual sense. I'm half-surprised I can even cultivate at all,' he thought.

His mind slowly drifted to the scene of the dying tree that he promised to take care of the seed. The 3 yellow leaves were full of yang.

The object is full of Yang that he grabbed and subsequently ate.

A Treasure.

'There's a treasure here,' Alex realized as his eyes opened. 'A treasure that far surpasses what is normal.'

Alex stopped his cultivation technique for a moment and switched to the Winter Moon cultivation technique.

Not even a second later, a vast amount of Yin entered his body and started getting rid of the Yang. Alex instantly stopped, but his mind never did.

'This valley really is full of Yin,' he thought. 'No wonder there are so many Yin treasures in the surrounding. Just what sort of treasure could cause create this much Yin?'

Alex started getting excited and stood back up. He stopped cultivating a new hope that appeared in his heart.

When Ma Rong had problems with her Yin Constitution, she had gone to the Forbidden Fields to take care of it.

Which meant, if he stayed around here, he could likely have his constitution fixed as well. He wanted to cultivate the Yin the speed it up, but that was most likely a bad idea considering he would freeze to death before he could fix himself.

"Maybe I should get closer to the treasure and stick around," he thought. The valley wasn't big, maybe a couple of kilometers wide at best, so Alex was more than sure he would be able to get close to this treasure.

"Senior, I will look for other ways to get out of this place," Alex shouted and walked away from the cliff side.

Unlike with the Yang tree, Alex had no idea or feeling that led him towards a path, so he was forced to walk around the place in the freezing atmosphere.

Alex forced out as much Yang in his body as he could, which surprisingly increased even more.

It was as if all this time, his body hadn't even been trying to create yang, and only did so now because Alex needed to.

Even then, somehow the cold was getting to him. Alex shivered his way through the entire valley in search of the treasure.

After going around for hours searching with just his eyes as his senses refused to work much, Alex still didn't find anything.

Night fell soon enough, but Alex kept searching. It didn't really matter much for a cultivator if it was night or day, so he wasn't really worried.

Unfortunately for him, it mattered to his surrounding. Without the day full of the Sun's yang, the Yin in the air grew ferocious and soon Alex started feeling colder than ever.

If this continued on, Alex would freeze to death. He tried to bring out some pills to eat, but they too didn't help much at all.

'I need heat,' he thought as he shivered in the cold, but where in this frigid hell could he even find any heat?

'No,' he thought. 'Every object has heat. Even cold ones.'

Suddenly, his authority over the surrounding grew and the world moved to follow his command. The cold air around him grew colder as Alex drew heat from it.

He felt a warmth that he hadn't felt in over hours and was more than happy. However, the heat didn't last long as the colder the air got, the more difficult it became to bring out heat from it.

As such, Alex was forced to move away from this place where the air was particularly chilly than the rest.

As he moved, he started using his Dao of Heat Conduction to fight against nature to more heat from the cold surrounding to his hot body.

Alex was more than glad that he learned this Dao as he wouldn't have survived today without it.

Alex couldn't stay in one place to gather heat, so he kept moving around until he reached a location where there was barely any heat to pull from.

'Did I walk around in a circle?' he thought for a moment but he saw something that surprised him a lot.

In front of him, in what looked like a really small puddle was some liquid. He got closer and realized it was water.

"What?" Alex thought in surprise. "How the hell is there liquid water here?"

However, upon close inspection, Alex realized that it wasn't any normal water. He started feeling the cold yin aura pierce through his yang aura and Alex soon realized what he was looking at.

'A puddle of yin water?!' Alex thought in surprise.

A single drop of this water had helped him revert many months' worth of yang. He could only imagine what a puddle of it could do for him.

Chapter 758: Return

Alex opened his eyes to a gentle feeling of serenity. He looked around his surrounding at the sight of ice everywhere, but there was no cold he could feel at the moment.

The sun shined bright and the rays hit his body directly, yet he felt no heat from it.

Alex closed his eyes again and sent his senses into his body. The Yin orb and the Yang fruit were nowhere to be found again. However, he could feel pure Qi coming out of his naval area.

A Qi that was far stronger than his normal Yang Qi. Alex moved his Qi through his body, and this time there was no sluggishness, no pain, nothing.

It was as if water flowing down a clean creek.

Finally, Alex thought to himself, 'how long have I been here?'

He could tell that it had been a while, but it was quite impossible for him to tell the exact period of time he had been cultivating for.

Either way, he knew it had been quite a while since he had started cultivating, so there were surely some problems that accumulated, that he needed to take care of before they got too troublesome.

Alex took a deep breath and suddenly found himself in his spiritual space where the spiritual sea was far and wide below, while the silver mountain hung in the sky.

It had been more than 7 years since he had acquired the mountain, and finally, he saw some difference.

Had Alex not had a photographic memory, he wouldn't have noticed it at all, but there were some spots on the mountain that were visibly smaller than before.

It was negligible when compared to the entire mountain, but this at least told Alex that the mountain would disappear in the future.

He then moved his attention to the millions of silver threads that flew in the sky and went up the mountain to absorb them.

As he did, he also noticed the massive black goo that covered the artifact's spirit. Alex hurriedly devoured that too until the crystal remained.

Ignoring the spirit, he went back to gathering the silver threads, which took at least half an hour.

After he was done, Alex looked at the surroundings to see no other problem that required his help. So, he left the place and arrived back in his body.

Finally, he stood up from the frozen lake he was on and checked his body one last time. After seeing nothing wrong with it, he tried to fly.

Since his Qi was working fine now, he could also fly perfectly well. Alex flew to the top of the cliff that was closest to him, but he had no way of telling if this was the place he had fallen from.

From the regular snowfall and blizzards, the place changed daily. So, all Alex could do was try to judge the direction using the sun.

He stood on the ice for a few minutes and watched the shadow slightly shift direction. From that, he could tell which direction he needed to go in.

Before leaving, Alex changed his tattered clothes for a better ones and flew away.

He searched for the jaguar, hoping he was close by, but of course, he wasn't there. After flying a little further away, Alex took out his talisman and let his mother know that he was okay.

Helen was beyond rejoiced to hear that and asked him to quickly return back.

As Alex flew, he checked his body once more and was happy to find out that there was almost no yang coming out of his body.

Sure he could create some if he wanted to, but it never released on its own. This gave Alex some hope that it would continue to do the same from now on.

After a little while, Alex brought out the flying boat and rode it all the way back to the DawnSpring city.

When he finally reached back, he went straight to the Flowing Brush sect and then directly to his mother.

"You are alive," Helen started crying the moment she saw and hug her son.

"I'm sorry I worried you mother," Alex said. "I was forced into cultivating to save myself so I couldn't switch my attention to anything else."

"Brother, are you okay?" Pearl asked from the side.

"Yes, I am fine," Alex said. "How about y— wait, what? Pearl, how are you in True King 9th realm already?"

"Hehe, mother made me cultivate every day so I can be strong enough to protect brother one of these days," Pearl said.

Alex moved away from his shocked eyes from Pearl and looked at his mother. She too was as True King 3rd realm, which was 2 realms more than what she was when he left here.

"H-how many weeks was I gone?" he asked cautiously.

"Weeks?" Helen said incredulously. "You were gone for nearly 8 months."

"8… months?" Even in his wildest dreams Alex could never have imagined to have disappeared somewhere for 8 months.

"We tried searching for you the day you had disappeared, but we couldn't find you. What exactly happened?" Helen asked.

Alex proceeded to explain as well as he could. "After the orb entered me, I don't have many memories aside from forcing myself to cultivate. I did feel them entering my naval area, and only after that did I gain proper consciousness again," he said.

Qin Shan arrived not long after and was beyond shocked to see Alex still alive. Alex told him what had happened, but kept the important details to himself.

Alex was surprised when he found out that the empire thought he was dead now. He thought of letting them know he was back, but then he would have to fulfill his promise of the Alchemy lesson that so many of them had very much likely been waiting for.

So, he decided to keep the facade a little longer.

After speaking with his mother and reassuring her that he was alive and okay, Alex walked out of her room to go to his own house.

However, he stopped in his tracks halfway through when he realized that he was sensing something in him.

'A spiritual sense?' he thought as he spread his own spiritual sense around to find the individual. However, this spiritual sense came from way too far away for him to track down the source.

'A saint realm?' Alex thought. In just a few seconds of thinking, a thought came to his mind and he flew away from the location to the outer edge of the sect towards the empty mountains.

The spiritual sense got stronger and stronger and Alex knew he was in the right direction.

"Senior," Alex called out. "You can come out."

He waited for half a minute before a beast arrived in front of him. It looked at him up and down for a moment before opening its mouth to speak.

"You don't seem that dangerous when you don't have the spirit fighting for you," the beast said.

Alex recognized the leopard from back when he went to rescue Pearl from the beast realm. Aside from the jaguar and the puma, this leopard was the third saint realm beast he saw that day.

"Thank you senior, for looking after Pearl and my mother," Alex said.

"I was just doing as I was ordered. Besides, looking after the young lord is my honor," the leopard said.

"Can you let senior jaguar know that I'm alive now?" Alex said. "He must've thought I had died in the Icy Hell region."

"He knows you are alive. He's been going there to look after you frequently. You probably just missed him by a couple of hours. Once he realizes you aren't there, he will come here directly," the leopard said.

"I see," Alex said.

Suddenly a spiritual sense landed on Alex that was different from the Leopard's spiritual sense.

The black jaguar appeared in front of the two and looked at Alex in surprise. "You really survived?" he asked.

"I did. Thank you for looking after me, senior," Alex said.

"You don't have to thank me," he said. "I nearly killed you instead of protecting you."

"No, it was my fault mostly," Alex said.

"Since you are fine, we haven't failed at our job," the jaguar said. The jaguar turned to leave, but Alex stopped him.

"Wait senior, I need to ask you something," Alex said. "Are you planning on taking Pearl back for the ritual?"

Chapter 759: Return

Alex opened his eyes to a gentle feeling of serenity. He looked around his surrounding at the sight of ice everywhere, but there was no cold he could feel at the moment.

The sun shined bright and the rays hit his body directly, yet he felt no heat from it.

Alex closed his eyes again and sent his senses into his body. The Yin orb and the Yang fruit were nowhere to be found again. However, he could feel pure Qi coming out of his naval area.

A Qi that was far stronger than his normal Yang Qi. Alex moved his Qi through his body, and this time there was no sluggishness, no pain, nothing.

It was as if water flowing down a clean creek.

Finally, Alex thought to himself, 'how long have I been here?'

He could tell that it had been a while, but it was quite impossible for him to tell the exact period of time he had been cultivating for.

Either way, he knew it had been quite a while since he had started cultivating, so there were surely some problems that accumulated, that he needed to take care of before they got too troublesome.

Alex took a deep breath and suddenly found himself in his spiritual space where the spiritual sea was far and wide below, while the silver mountain hung in the sky.

It had been more than 7 years since he had acquired the mountain, and finally, he saw some difference.

Had Alex not had a photographic memory, he wouldn't have noticed it at all, but there were some spots on the mountain that were visibly smaller than before.

It was negligible when compared to the entire mountain, but this at least told Alex that the mountain would disappear in the future.

He then moved his attention to the millions of silver threads that flew in the sky and went up the mountain to absorb them.

As he did, he also noticed the massive black goo that covered the artifact's spirit. Alex hurriedly devoured that too until the crystal remained.

Ignoring the spirit, he went back to gathering the silver threads, which took at least half an hour.

After he was done, Alex looked at the surroundings to see no other problem that required his help. So, he left the place and arrived back in his body.

Finally, he stood up from the frozen lake he was on and checked his body one last time. After seeing nothing wrong with it, he tried to fly.

Since his Qi was working fine now, he could also fly perfectly well. Alex flew to the top of the cliff that was closest to him, but he had no way of telling if this was the place he had fallen from.

From the regular snowfall and blizzards, the place changed daily. So, all Alex could do was try to judge the direction using the sun.

He stood on the ice for a few minutes and watched the shadow slightly shift direction. From that, he could tell which direction he needed to go in.

Before leaving, Alex changed his tattered clothes for a better ones and flew away.

He searched for the jaguar, hoping he was close by, but of course, he wasn't there. After flying a little further away, Alex took out his talisman and let his mother know that he was okay.

Helen was beyond rejoiced to hear that and asked him to quickly return back.

As Alex flew, he checked his body once more and was happy to find out that there was almost no yang coming out of his body.

Sure he could create some if he wanted to, but it never released on its own. This gave Alex some hope that it would continue to do the same from now on.

After a little while, Alex brought out the flying boat and rode it all the way back to the DawnSpring city.

When he finally reached back, he went straight to the Flowing Brush sect and then directly to his mother.

"You are alive," Helen started crying the moment she saw and hug her son.

"I'm sorry I worried you mother," Alex said. "I was forced into cultivating to save myself so I couldn't switch my attention to anything else."

"Brother, are you okay?" Pearl asked from the side.

"Yes, I am fine," Alex said. "How about y— wait, what? Pearl, how are you in True King 9th realm already?"

"Hehe, mother made me cultivate every day so I can be strong enough to protect brother one of these days," Pearl said.

Alex moved away from his shocked eyes from Pearl and looked at his mother. She too was as True King 3rd realm, which was 2 realms more than what she was when he left here.

"H-how many weeks was I gone?" he asked cautiously.

"Weeks?" Helen said incredulously. "You were gone for nearly 8 months."

"8… months?" Even in his wildest dreams Alex could never have imagined to have disappeared somewhere for 8 months.

"We tried searching for you the day you had disappeared, but we couldn't find you. What exactly happened?" Helen asked.

Alex proceeded to explain as well as he could. "After the orb entered me, I don't have many memories aside from forcing myself to cultivate. I did feel them entering my naval area, and only after that did I gain proper consciousness again," he said.

Qin Shan arrived not long after and was beyond shocked to see Alex still alive. Alex told him what had happened, but kept the important details to himself.

Alex was surprised when he found out that the empire thought he was dead now. He thought of letting them know he was back, but then he would have to fulfill his promise of the Alchemy lesson that so many of them had very much likely been waiting for.

So, he decided to keep the facade a little longer.

After speaking with his mother and reassuring her that he was alive and okay, Alex walked out of her room to go to his own house.

However, he stopped in his tracks halfway through when he realized that he was sensing something in him.

'A spiritual sense?' he thought as he spread his own spiritual sense around to find the individual. However, this spiritual sense came from way too far away for him to track down the source.

'A saint realm?' Alex thought. In just a few seconds of thinking, a thought came to his mind and he flew away from the location to the outer edge of the sect towards the empty mountains.

The spiritual sense got stronger and stronger and Alex knew he was in the right direction.

"Senior," Alex called out. "You can come out."

He waited for half a minute before a beast arrived in front of him. It looked at him up and down for a moment before opening its mouth to speak.

"You don't seem that dangerous when you don't have the spirit fighting for you," the beast said.

Alex recognized the leopard from back when he went to rescue Pearl from the beast realm. Aside from the jaguar and the puma, this leopard was the third saint realm beast he saw that day.

"Thank you senior, for looking after Pearl and my mother," Alex said.

"I was just doing as I was ordered. Besides, looking after the young lord is my honor," the leopard said.

"Can you let senior jaguar know that I'm alive now?" Alex said. "He must've thought I had died in the Icy Hell region."

"He knows you are alive. He's been going there to look after you frequently. You probably just missed him by a couple of hours. Once he realizes you aren't there, he will come here directly," the leopard said.

"I see," Alex said.

Suddenly a spiritual sense landed on Alex that was different from the Leopard's spiritual sense.

The black jaguar appeared in front of the two and looked at Alex in surprise. "You really survived?" he asked.

"I did. Thank you for looking after me, senior," Alex said.

"You don't have to thank me," he said. "I nearly killed you instead of protecting you."

"No, it was my fault mostly," Alex said.

"Since you are fine, we haven't failed at our job," the jaguar said. The jaguar turned to leave, but Alex stopped him.

"Wait senior, I need to ask you something," Alex said. "Are you planning on taking Pearl back for the ritual?"

Chapter 760: Plan to Leave

"Don't worry about the young lord. He does not need to go through the ritual just yet," the jaguar said. "Perhaps we were too hasty to do what we did. He's barely over 8 years old. It wouldn't hurt for him to gain a little more emotional maturity."

"Is lady Ren fine with that? Oh actually, how is Lady Ren? Was she hurt? Is she fine?" Alex asked. The last time he saw lady Ren, she had taken the brunt of 3 different Heavenly Judgment lightning attacks.

That attack had been so strong that Alex felt fearful just being in the vicinity of it.

"Lady Ren is doing… okay," the jaguar said. "She did suffer a bit of damage from the lightning, but it's nothing a little bit of closed cultivation won't heal."

"I see," Alex said. "I'm sorry how it went the last time I was back there. I was way too focused on protecting Pearl and I ended up disrespecting and even hurting you all."

"It's… alright," the jaguar said. "It's in the past now. You can go and focus on your own thing now."

'My own thing,' Alex thought. He thought about what his thing was and realized what he needed to do now.

"Senior, I have a request," Alex said.

* * * * *

2 months passed by in the blink of an eye.

Alex stuck to his room making pills one by one. Since he was 'dead', he made his mother go and get the ingredients for the pills for him.

During this time, he refined the healing pill the best he could and found other ways to make them besides using just his own blood.

Now that his body was full of unadulterated Qi, his blood was the best resource for the pill. However, Alex found that blood from beasts that had a wood element to them also worked to a certain extent.

They were still slow in terms of transferring aura over to the ingredient, but using Beast blood was a much safer way than humans. In fact, Alex now believed that he could reveal this information to the world without fearing the unnecessary loss of life.

Of course, as his status was still unknown in the empire, he was going to keep it that way for a long while.

Alex finished making the pill and brought it out to look at it. Even without focusing on the process much, Alex was still consistently making over 85% pills now. That was just how well his body was working.

He truly felt reborn.

Alex did a logistics check on all the pills and pastes and recipes he had.

He made sure he had enough prepared and finally left his room. He walked over to his mother's place and found her ready to leave.

Qin Shan was also with her asking questions, but Helen didn't have many answers to give him.

"Young man, you're finally here," Qin Shan brought him in. "Tell me, what are you planning? You've been holed up in your room and even told your mother to get ready. Are you leaving for somewhere?"

"Yes, I am," Alex said. "You can come with us if you want to. Although I'm not sure how the sect will take it if you take a few months-long breaks."

"Where exactly are you going?" Qin Shan asked.

"A place I consider my home now. The Crimson Empire," Alex replied.

"The Crimson Empire?" Qin Shan's eyes narrowed for a bit before widening. "The place beyond the northern forest? Are you joking? You will die."

Alex smiled. "No, we won't. I can assure you that," he said.

"Why are you going there?" Qin Shan asked.

"As I said, it's my home. My master, disciple brother, sister, and many friends are there. Also, they desperately require my pills, so I need to go back there," Alex said.

"I see," Qin Shan said. "What about the competition?"

"Competition?" Alex asked. "Ah, I completely forgot about that. How long do we have?"

"Around 9 months. But you will need to go through a preliminary test around 3 months prior to even registering, so really just 6 months," Qin Shan said.

"Oh, then it's fine. We'll make it. I plan to stay there for a few months only. Maybe try and bring some of them here, but that's it," Alex said.

Qin Shan thought for a long while and asked, "How sure are you that we can go across the forest?"

Alex chuckled. "You must be worried about the dangers we will come across in the passage. Well, worry not. After all, it will be the dangers that will take us through the passage," he said.

Qin Shan couldn't understand the cryptic sentence.

"I am taking my mother through there. You can rest assured that I am not making a hasty decision," Alex said.

Qin Shan finally thought for a while and said, "Fine, I'm in. I want to see what this place is like too."

"Great," Alex said. "We leave in an hour."

"AN HOUR?" Qin Shan exclaimed. "I will have to go give some commands while I'm not here then."

Qin Shan left to handle the matter of the sect for when he wasn't around, and Alex helped with his mother's packing.

After an hour, the 3 of them along with Pearl flew to the east where the beasts waited for them.

Qin Shan couldn't help but tremble a little when he sensed the aura of the two beasts.

"Sa-Saint Core?" he couldn't believe it. He finally realized what Alex meant by 'dangers taking them'.

"Young Lord!" the two beasts bowed down towards Alex.

"Young Lord? You?" Qin Shan was surprised, but Alex only chuckled and shook his head.

Pearl jumped down from Alex's embrace and stood in front of the two. "If you try to hurt my brother or my mother, I will tell my grandmother," Pearl said.

"Of course not, young lord," the two beasts said.

"Hmph!" Pearl snorted and looked at Helen with a smirk on his face.

The jaguar ignored his young lord's show-off attitude and looked towards Alex. "We can leave whenever you are ready," he said.

Alex nodded and they left.

Helen held Pearl while sitting on top of the jaguar, while Alex sat on top of the leopard. Qin Shan was forced to fly all alone.

Due to Helen and Pearl's presence, the jaguar didn't speed up very fast, and that let Qin Shan keep up with them.

After flying for what felt like half a day, the group finally saw the forest in the north. They were getting close.

Alex looked down below and saw the nightlife of the Riverweed City, the first city he had been to in the empire.

Once they went past that, Alex patiently waited for what was to come next.

The formation platform.

Once they reached the formation platform, the ground finally got down and the jaguar brought out a medallion from its armband.

However, before he could activate it, Alex spoke up. "Senior, may I try instead?" he said.

"Try? The formation?" he asked.

"Yes, I want to try something," Alex said.

"Sure, go ahead," the jaguar said.

Alex nodded and placed his hand on the platform. Then, he forced his body to produce yang Qi which he instantly poured into the formation.

Before anyone was ready, the formation activated.

Chapter 761: Back in the Beast Realm

After coming back, Alex had done a few testing on himself.

After merging with the yin orb, he needed to know if his body was still capable of doing what it used to do before.

The first thing he tested was if he could create Yin and Yang separately now that they were coming out in a fused form.

Alex realized that he could easily pull out yang and quickly fill his whole body with it if required.

As for Yin, it wouldn't come out unless he started circulating the Winter Moon technique.

He found his yin to be much better than before, and his only Yin technique, the Flickering Shadows technique had a much wider range and accuracy.

As such, Alex was sure that his Yin root had improved much more than he could have hoped for. However, like his Metal Qi and Yang Qi, he couldn't freely control Yin Qi outside of his body.

This meant, unfortunately for him, his Yin Spiritual root hadn't reached the Supreme rank and was only stuck around what others called 'Superior.'

If anyone found out that he thought having a 'Superior Yin root' was an unfortunate event, they would call him ungrateful and try to rip it away from him.

Other tests Alex did involve trying to see if he was capable of surviving poison or not. Thankfully, that aspect of his body hadn't disappeared at all.

In fact, it might have gotten stronger as well.

Aside from that, he found his body cultivation to have improved, he found his ability to overcome many realms to have improved, and various other small bits here and there to have gotten better.

Now, Alex only wished his sword skills would get better as well.

* * * * * *

The way to open a formation that wasn't carved on metal was to spread one's Qi into an equal amount per stroke at every node.

Each formation usually had a medallion or similar object accompany the owner that did the task of splitting their Qi for them.

Alex however didn't do that. He simply pumped his yang Qi into the formation, and somehow it started on its own.

That was a test Alex had been meaning to do for a while now but didn't have any chance to.

The first time Alex had been here, he had noticed something similar happening, but he hadn't given it much thought.

However, after the demon realm, Alex was starting to know just what his Qi was capable of.

He had done a few more tests since then, which had been successful. However, nothing was as substantial as what he had done right now.

Blue light shined from the platform that soon grew white and before anyone knew it, they were all teleported away.

When the light disappeared, Alex found himself inside the cave with white walls all around the massive room with glowing crystal stalactite hanging from the ceiling.

This looked similar to the room he remembered, but something was different. The shape of the room wasn't the same as the one he had been in previously.

"Where are we? This is not the room I had been to before, is it?" Alex asked.

"This is the platform that connects to the Luminance empire," the jaguar said with an incredulous look in his eyes. "Young man, how did you bring us into the palace exactly?"

"I…" Alex didn't know what to answer. He realized he hadn't just done one thing but two.

He had not only activated the formation, but also bypassed a security aspect of the formation that always sent everyone to one of the outer formations, and instead brought them directly into the palace.

'How indeed?' Alex thought. 'I had done it last time too.'

"Isn't it obvious?" the leopard asked. "He has the blood essence right?"

"Ah, right," the Jaguar said. "That would make perfect sense."

"Senior? Can you explain to me?" he asked.

"Anyone with our lord's blood can directly enter the palace," the jaguar said.

'Ah!' Alex thought as he finally realized why it happened. 'So I came here because I had the White Tiger's blood in me,' he thought.

If not for that, he would have likely been teleported to the forest inside the realm. That didn't explain how his Qi could easily activate formations, but at least he got one answer.

"Alright, let's go," the jaguar said.

The jaguar took the path forward and showed them the way. Alex felt nostalgic as he walked through the glowing hallway.

Helen looked around curiously, wondering what crystals in the ceiling were.

Qin Shan however was way too shocked out of his mind to think of anything clearly.

He was here. The heart of the continent that over 10 years ago had taken the lives of the most gifted youths of the empire.

Due to that incident, the empire had canceled the competition last decade that was supposed to take place every 10 years.

Which was why this year's competition held so much weight and was going to be just that extravagant.

They were going to have 2 decades' worth of competition in a single year.

"It's fine," Alex calmed Qin Shan down. "Seniors might be beasts, but they aren't like the beasts you will see outside. Most of the beasts that grew up in this realm are intelligent and aren't much different from the humans."

"But… but… they killed so many talents from the last generation," Qin Shan said.

"That was a mistake on those youth's part. I was here when they came. Had they been discreet and not caused problems to the beasts, started fights, tried to steal children, and overall not been a menace, they would have still been alive," Alex said.

"We aren't savages," the jaguar said. "Our lord is the lord of this continent. Believe it or not, we are all subjects of our lord. Be it human or beast or even plant."

"Your… lord? Where is he?" Qin Shan asked.

Alex cringed a bit when he heard that. That was a touchy subject as their lord, the White Tiger that ruled this continent had died over 5 thousand years ago.

"Our Lord, he… he is not in this world anymore," the jaguar said, refusing to elaborate any further.

Alex softly explained that their lord wasn't there anymore and that Pearl was to be their new lord if he had the potential in him.

Qin Shan's mind couldn't comprehend the fact that Alex's beast had the opportunity to be the lord of the beasts that were stronger than most Saint realm cultivators of the empire.

After they walked for a while, Alex noticed that they had reached the hallway that had many guest rooms available.

"Rest here tonight, you can leave after the sun comes out," the jaguar said.

Alex and the rest nodded and went to the room to rest. The 3 humans got 3 separate rooms, but they all converged into one for most of the night to talk about various things.

In the end, the gathering became Alex mostly just answering Qin Shan's inquiries. Helen was curious about a few things too, but Alex had already told her nearly everything when they first reunited, so there wasn't much for them to talk about.

Late night, they returned to their own room and rested for a while.

Early morning, the jaguar came to take them. He took the three and Pearl through a serious of the hallway before arriving at the cave with the formation platform from where they would go to the Crimson Empire.

"Eh? Are we leaving just like that? Without meeting Lady Ren?" Alex asked.

"Lady Ren can't speak to you right now. Otherwise, she would come here to see the young lord without question," the jaguar said.

"Is… is she still injured? I thought she was okay now," Alex asked.

"No, she's fine. but she can't come to you right now," the jaguar said.

"And your daughter? Where is sister Jia?" Alex asked.

"She's currently in closed cultivation and can't come to see you either. I will make sure to have her out while you return back, so don't worry," Jaguar said.

"I see… and senior Puma?" Alex asked.

"He's too embarrassed to come to see you," the jaguar said. "Alright, stop wasting time, and let's leave."

The 5 of them walked over to the formation platform. Alex realized the leopard wasn't there, but then he also understood that he wasn't necessary as they were all going to be in one place.

The jaguar brought out the medallion with which he activated the formation. Then, the 5 of them teleported away.

Chapter 762: I'm Back

Alex and the others arrived at the formation outside of the secret realm.

"Are we here?" Qin Shan asked.

"Yes," Alex said without even looking around. Looking around wasn't going to help a lot anyway given how much change the place had been through in the last 10 years.

"What do we do now, Al?" Helen asked.

Alex brought out a compass device and checked the direction. "The place where I'm to go Scarlet City is in that direction about half a day's worth of flight on our ships."

"Or we can go to the capital first, the Cardinal city that's just an hour away in that direction," Alex said.

"Let's go to the capital first. I want to start from the place where the Fu Ancestor established his own empire," Qin Shan said.

"Very well, let's fly to the capital then," Alex said.

Qin Shan brought out his ship which could house all 3 of them and the two beasts. Then, he launched towards the direction Alex pointed to.

Alex didn't directly take them to the capital but instead towards the east side of the capital.

He didn't want to be seen coming from the south as that would cause too many questions that he didn't want to give answers to.

"The Qi here is quite weak," Qin Shan casually mentioned as he flew.

"Yes, this place was most likely hit quite hard in the war that took place 5 thousand years ago," Alex said casually as well.

"Huh? War? 5 thousand years ago? What are you talking about?" Qin Shan asked curiously.

"Uh… I will explain later," he said. "Just know that this place doesn't have many Saint rank spirit veins."

"I see," Qin Shan said as he continued looking at the scenery.

The group soon reached the eastern wall of the capital city. They landed on top of one of the mountains and then flew down to the ground.

As they walked towards the city gates, Alex noticed some things hovering near them in the sky. It wasn't him that noticed them however, everyone did.

"Does your empire like showing off their ships or what?" Qin Shan asked after seeing the massive ships that hovered outside the capital.

"Those are most likely the ships belonging to the many sects. They put it out here to show the people that they are here. It's a pride thing I guess," Alex said.

"Your capital doesn't seem that big. Does it have that many sects?" Qin Shan asked curiously.

"No, these ships are from sects all around the empire. If I'm not mistaken, there should be an annual competition taking place inside, which is why so many sects are gathered in this place," Alex said.

"Oh, a competition huh? I'm curious to see just how your competition goes," Qin Shan said.

Alex turned around to the jaguar and asked, "Senior, are you coming in with us too?"

He wanted to tell the jaguar to stay outside, but he couldn't bring himself to be this rude.

"Don't worry, unless they are in the Saint realm, their perception will pass away from me," the jaguar said.

He then activated some sort of technique that made Alex unfocused and lazy when he looked toward him. Every time he tried to pay attention to him, his eyes would drift away and look at the ground beside him.

It wasn't until he used his spiritual sense that he managed to keep track of the jaguar.

"That's… such a weird skill," Alex said.

"It's nothing compared to yours that can completely hide your aura from anyone in your own rank," the jaguar said.

The group reached the gate and quickly paid their way in. On the way, Alex asked if there was a competition going on inside. When he found out there was, he asked what day of the competition it was.

According to the guards, today was the Top 64 competition, which was going to start anytime soon now.

'Top 64,' Alex thought. Which meant if the competitions hadn't changed in the 10 years, there would be the beast competitions and the maze competition this day.

Alex made his way through the city and arrived at the coliseum not long after. Since they had come from the eastern side of the city, it barely took them any time to get there.

Alex purchased 3 tickets for themselves and walked into the coliseum. The halls weaved and wove through the coliseum before popping them out to the audience stand.

Alex turned to look towards the sects, but no one was there yet. 'They must be getting registered,' Alex thought.

After waiting for a while, the sects started coming out one after another.

Blue robes, red robes, orange robes, green robes, and all sorts of robed figures walked out onto the stands.

"The contestants are here," Alex told them.

Qin Shan gave a quizzing look as he turned towards Alex. "Am I missing something? Why are there kids in the stands when they haven't even reached the True realm yet? They are asking to die," Qin Shan said.

Alex chuckled a bit. "People here are weak compared to the Luminance Empire. So Common realm is the equivalent of True realm over there," he explained. "Lower than 25 years and not in the true realm yet, that is the requirement for participating in the competition."

Alex looked at the stands waiting for his own sect's people to come out. He half expected to see Ma Rong walk out from inside with a bunch of disciples around here and a few elders including the First elder.

Of course, that was just wishful thinking on Alex's part.

As he was lost in his own thoughts, something brought him back to reality as he sensed something land on him.

His eyes shot upwards as he saw a group of people fly into the coliseum.

The Royal family was there. Alex saw the Emperor, the Empress, the two princes, and the princess, along with another female that was likely married to one of the princes.

"Saint Foundation realm," Qin Shan said with a bit of surprise. He hadn't expected someone this strong to come here.

"The Emperor," Alex said. "He's noticed us. I should go say something."

"You can talk later," the jaguar said. "I will go speak to him now."

The jaguar disappeared from their side and arrived high in the sky in front of the Emperor. However, even then no one noticed him being there.

The jaguar returned after a few minutes of talking.

"What happened?" Alex asked.

"I told him I'm not here to cause trouble but to look after you three. He asked us to come by the palace later," the jaguar said.

"I see. We can do that," Alex said and finally moved his eyes back to the stands on the other side.

Just as he did so, his eyes landed on a thin figure that slowly walked behind a group of disciples. His posture looked resolute, but his body said otherwise.

Someone else was the leader of this group of people and Alex quickly realized who it was.

'The First Elder huh?' he thought. The bald man led the disciples to the stands and they all seemed to follow him. Which meant he was likely the sect leader of the Tiger sect now.

Alex looked at the others and didn't recognize anyone else. None of the kids there were around when Alex was part of the sect.

"I will be back soon," Alex said and walked away from the group.

Alex took the round way around the coliseum and before he even reached the other side, the competition had already started.

Top 64 was underway and people were out to fight already.

Alex ignored the fight and made his way to the sect's seating area. When he arrived at the location, there was a guard that didn't let anyone other than sect members enter.

This would cause a bit of a problem to any other person, but to Alex, this was no trouble.

His cultivation was already concealed, so all he needed to do was hide his body. At a moment's notice, his body turned invisible.

Then he teleported directly into the seating area before making his way towards the Tiger sect's seating area.

He undid his invisibility when he reached there and stood behind the weak-looking figure.

"Master?" Alex called out uncertainly.

The weak figure turned around, letting Alex see a fake right arm along with a real left arm that was missing 3 fingers.

In his face was a shadow of confusion. However, that didn't last long as he saw who had just called him and what he had just called him.

His eyes went wide as he realized who was standing in front of him at the moment. It was his disciple.

"Yu Ming?" Wen Cheng asked, unbelieving of his own eyes.

In the nearly 70 years that Wen Cheng had been alive, Alex had been in his life for just a single year, in fact even less.

However, he would never forget the face of the disciple that meant so much to him. After all, no one had ever left an impression on Wen Cheng as Alex had.

"Yes master, it's me," Alex said, his voice breaking at parts.

"Yu Ming!" Wen Cheng's shock finally made its way to his voice and soon tears started forming in his eyes.

Using both his real and fake hands, Wen Cheng hugged Alex tightly. "You're back, my disciple. You're back!"

Alex started tearing up as well as he hugged his master even more tightly.

"I'm back, master."

Chapter 763: Giving the Pill

The disciples and elders all around them were surprised at the sudden drama. The First Elder turned to look at what was going on and saw Alex.

"Young man, is that you?" he asked. He had only seen this face of Alex for a week back over 10 years ago, so he wasn't quite sure he was looking at the same person.

Alex let go of Wen Cheng and bowed towards the first elder. "Greetings senior, it's good to see you," he said.

"It's good to see you too. Where have you been all this time?" the first elder asked.

"I was over on the other side of the Southern forest," Alex said. "In a place known as the Luminance Empire."

"You were there? You weren't captured by the beasts?" Wen Cheng asked.

"No, master. After I rescued Pearl, I managed to escape, but in doing so I ended up on the other side," Alex said. "I only now managed to improve my relations with them and returned."

"Its good that you returned," Wen Cheng said. "But weren't you missing an arm? What happened?"

Alex turned around and looked at his master once more. He couldn't stand to watch how his master looked at the moment and brought out the healing pill.

"Here, master. Eat this," he said.

"What's this?" Wen Cheng asked as he took the pill.

"It will help you," Alex said.

"Okay," Wen Cheng said and ate the pill without any more questions.

"You should sit down for this," Alex said and gently placed Wen Cheng on the seat. Then, in one swift motion, he undid the latches on Wen Cheng's fake arm and pulled it off.

"What are you doing?" Wen Cheng was surprised, and even a little suspicious.

"It will start to itch really soon. Don't scratch anything," Alex said.

At the same time, Wen Cheng felt the itch around the place where his arms and finger were cut off.

As everyone else, including the many sects around them, watched, bones started growing from Wen Cheng's right arm. Then muscles, ligaments, and skin followed right behind.

People watched in shock as Wen Cheng's arm slowly came to life. His left arm which had 2 fingers, now had 5.

Wen Cheng was perhaps the most shocked when he saw this. He could feel them, his new arm, his new fingers. Tears started flowing once more as he finally felt whole again.

"How did you…?" the First elder asked.

"I spent the last many years trying to figure out this exact pill. It was only about a year ago that I really managed to find all the ingredients and made it. After my arm grew back, I knew I had to come and help master."

"Now, a year later, I'm here," Alex said.

Wen Cheng brought up his new arm and placed it on Alex's shoulders. "My disciple, you've made me proud, and you've certainly made Ma Rong proud. She would be more than happy to see how you've turned out," Wen Cheng said.

"Thank you, master," Alex said.

The commotion had reached to the guards who came to take Alex back, but the First elder sent them away saying Alex was an elder of the sect.

"So, where's Pearl?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Oh, he's there with my mother," Alex said.

"Wait, what? Your mother?" Wen Cheng asked in surprise. Despite learning that Alex was a player and someone from another continent, he was still under the initial assumption that Alex was an orphan.

So, when he heard that Alex was here with his mother, he was surprised.

"You have a mother?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I was surprised too, master. Turned out she had come here too. I found her in the empire while trying to join their military," Alex said. "Look, she's over there."

Alex pointed across the coliseum towards Helen in her purple robe, who waved back at them.

"She's with her master. I think you'll have to wait until these matches are over before you meet," Alex said.

"Yeah, my disciple should be up soon," the first elder said.

"Are you the sect leader now, senior?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the First Elder said. "I've been one for a few years now."

"I see, congratulations," Alex said. He looked around the area and was a little disappointed.

"Is the Hong Wu sect not here?" he asked.

"They didn't have fighters that made it to the top 64, so they are taking a day off I believe," Wen Cheng said. "They should be in their hotel rooms."

"I see," Alex said. He made a mental note to go visit them later.

"Did brother and sister not come?" Alex asked.

"Your brother is in charge of the security, so he cannot just leave. As for your sister, she…" Wen Cheng sighed.

"What happened? Is she okay?" Alex felt a little panicked.

"No, no, she's fine. She's just not in the sect anymore," Wen Cheng said. "She reached the True realm about half a year after you left and became an elder."

"But after 5 years, her family needed her more so she left the sect and went back to her family," Wen Cheng said.

"I see," Alex said.

"We can message her and let her know you've come," Wen Cheng said.

"No, don't. I want to surprise her," Alex said.

"Sure, if that's what you want," Wen Cheng said. He then slowly drifted away from the conversation and continued checking his new arm.

Alex let him be and talked with the sect leader while assessing the junior next to him.

"These are some good disciples, aren't they?" the sect leader asked.

"They're not bad," Alex said. Most of the disciples were in the Mind Tempering realm, which was quite surprising to Alex as that was not the case for the year when he had joined the sect.

"You must be surprised. After we became a First-grade sect, our batch of disciples continued to improve over the years. Now, we're with these," he said.

"I see," Alex said. "The sect has improved a lot in my absence then. I'm happy."

"Yeah, it has," the sect leader said. Just then, the host announced the next set of fighters and Alex heard the words 'Tiger Sect' being called.

"Oh, it's my disciple's turn," the sect leader said.

Alex switched his focus to the fight as well. He saw a short-haired individual in yellow robes walk out to the stage with a sword hanging on his hips.

His opponent was a blue-robed individual with cloud-shaped patches all over his robes. 'Cloud Valley sect?' Alex wondered and was immediately proven right as the woman brought out two different Mind Tempering 5th realm beasts.

"He's a swordsman?" Alex asked.

"Just like his elder brother," the sect leader said.

The match started and the two beasts attacked him. The young man brought out his sword and suddenly a white outline appeared on it.

"Oh, he has sword intent. Not bad," Alex said as he watched the fight. The young man's cultivation base was Mind Tempering 6th realm. Along with Sword Intent, he easily beat the fighter on the stage down below.

"You've got yourself a good disciple, senior," Alex said.

"Yeah, I'm proud of him," the sect leader said.

Chapter 764: Meeting Old Friends

Alex watched the young man walk back to the Tiger sect's seating area and everyone jumped to congratulate him.

Seeing that Alex was the only one with a different set of clothes from the rest, the young man couldn't help but wonder who he was.

"This is my disciple, Dong Duxin," the sect leader introduced.

"Hello," Alex said.

"Hello," the young man returned his greeting with a curious look.

"This is your senior. He graduated over 10 years ago," the sect leader explained. "He's the one people bring up when wanting to be part of 2 sects at once."

"Oh," the young finally realized who he was speaking to. "It's good to meet you, senior."

"Congratulations on the win," Alex said. "Brother Yuhan must be teaching you quite well."

"He's a great teacher when it comes to Sword Intent," the young man said.

"I know. He taught me how to use Sword intent too," Alex said. "Where is he, sect master?"

"He's back in the sect. He's one of the elders now," the first elder said.

"And sister Su Min? What about brother Yang Ma?" Alex asked.

"They both left the sect after graduation," the sect leader said. "Su Min is here in the capital. She's part of the formation guild, while Yang Ma returned back to his clan."

"Sigh, this really brings me back to 10 years ago," the sect leader said while shaking his head.

"You look so young, senior brother," Dong Duxin said. "How old are you?"

"Me? I am… uhh… 26 I believe," Alex said.

"26? No way," Wen Cheng and the sect leader said at the same time.

"That would make you 15 when you graduated away. That's not right, you should be more like 29," the sect leader said.

"I know I should be 29, but due to some things I went through on the other side, I'm missing 3 years of my life," Alex said. "So physically, I'm 26. That's what the formations will tell you too."

"26?" the young man couldn't help but be surprised. "You're only 2 years older than me?" he asked.

"You're 24? Then I guess yeah," Alex said.

"Right, what's your cultivation base now?" the sect leader asked.

"I…" Alex decided to remove his concealment as there was no point in hiding it at all. As the veil lifted, Wen Cheng, the sect leader, and various other people around him couldn't help but gasp.

The disciples didn't know what was going on, but the elders did.

"Tr-True King!" Wen Cheng was completely blown away by the revelation. "You already reached the True King realm?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I did so about 3 years ago."

"Your cultivation isn't that bad either, master. You're already on the verge of entering the True Emperor realm," Alex said.

Wen Cheng shook his head. "I entered the True King realm when you hadn't even begun cultivating yet. A dozen or so years later, I finally managed to reach its end. This is really slow in comparison to you," Wen Cheng said.

"Don't worry, master. I have pills that will help speed up your cultivation. If used properly, you should be able to get close to entering the Saint realm within a decade or two," Alex said.

"I… I can enter Saint realm?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I'm absolutely sure," Alex said.

The group soon forgot about the matches down below and continued talking with Alex.

Alex openly answered any question they had about his life and the life of people on the other side of the forest.

They were surprised to learn how many Saint realms there were and how True Realm cultivators were known as the younger generation.

Alex explained the reasons too. The Luminance empire had a higher concentration of Qi, not to mention they also had a lot of Spirit veins of various grades improving the cultivation process of many.

Not to mention, most of the items in the Meteor shower had dropped on that side of the map, so they were more advanced than the rest.

Had the western continent not been looted 5 thousand years ago, they would be some of the greatest powerhouses of the entire world.

After talking for over half a day, Alex decided to leave them. "I will go check up on the Hong Wu sect. Do you know what building they are staying in?" Alex asked.

"It's the same one as ours," Wen Cheng said and gave directions to the hotel.

Alex nodded. "I'll see you later, master," he said and walked back to his mother.

"When are you going to introduce us?" his mother asked.

"Soon," Alex said. "I need to go find my other sect. Apparently, they took the day off. If I don't return by the time this whole thing ends, you can follow them and reach the hotel where I'm going."

"Either that or just go to the royal palace along with senior. I will go by there later as well," Alex said.

"Alright, go do what you want to," Helen said.

"I'm coming too," Pearl said, but Alex didn't let him. If Pearl left with Alex, no one would be here to look after his mother.

While he wasn't worried about her getting hurt, he was worried about her getting lost in this new place.

Finding her then would be quite troublesome.

So, Alex left the coliseum alone and made his way west towards the hotel where the Hong Wu Sect was staying at.

The path to the hotel somehow felt familiar while also completely new at the same time. He felt like he had walked through this exact same street 10 years ago too, but most of the shops weren't the same, so he couldn't be sure.

After 20 minutes, he made his way to the hotel and requested the staff to send a message to the people from the Hong Wu sect.

Alex waited for nearly 10 minutes before someone walked down the stairs.

Alex saw the woman that walked down and was surprised to see how much she'd changed. Her childish looks no longer remained as she had a sophisticated attitude now.

Alex was surprised to see her in elder robes, but that shouldn't have been a surprise when he really thought about it.

Her eyes turned from confusion to surprise back to confusion again.

"It's good to see you, Fanfan," Alex said.

"Mingming?" Fan Ruogang asked skeptically.

"Yes, that is me," Alex said.

"Mingming! What? How?" she couldn't form proper sentences as one thought after another kept bombarding her mind.

"Greetings to you to—" before he could finish speaking, Fan Ruogang jumped onto him and gave him a tight hug. The childish happy-go-lucky girl had apparently still not disappeared.

"You're finally back, the 5th elder will be happy to see you," she said. "Wait, I need to tell Wanwan and Meimei."

"Is brother Wan Li and sister Zhou Mei here too?" Alex asked.

"No, they're back in the sect, but I'll send them a message," Fan Ruogang said.

"Brother Yu, is that you?" someone came down too.

Alex turned to look at the big and buff man that seemed to be an elder too. "Brother Kong?" Alex asked.

"So it's really you," Kong Yuhan said.

"Brother Kong, you seem to be doing quite well for yourself," Alex said after noticing his cultivation base in the True Master's realm.

"I don't doubt you are doing quite good too," Kong Yuhan said. "Way better than me, no doubt."

"I'm doing fine," Alex said.

"Come on up. Let's talk in our quarters," Kong Yuhan said and the three of them walked up the hotel floors.

Alex asked about the current situation of the sect. Apparently, the sect went through a small downfall after what had happened 10 years ago, but that only lasted a year or two before more disciples joined the sect.

Now the sect flourished as any First-grade sect would.

The current sect leader was called Song Wushen, who was previously the 8th elder during Alex's time. The 4th elder had taken over the position for a while before they decided to choose a leader for real and Song Wushen had gotten the majority of the vote.

Alex talked with Kong Yuhan and Fan Ruogong for a while as no one else he knew had come on this trip to the competition.

The conversations lasted for nearly 3 hours before Alex decided to leave, not before promising to return back to the Scarlet City along with them.

Chapter 765: Introducing the Pastes

Helen had gone along with Qin Shan and the jaguar to the palace, while Alex decided to stay back in the hotel.

Not only were the Hong Wu sect's people there, but even the Tiger Sect's folks were also there as well.

He wanted to talk with his master a bit, so that entire night he stayed there.

He told Wen Cheng almost everything regarding what he had gone through. Hearing that his disciple had gone through over two years of training as soon as he left them had surprised Wen Cheng.

Not to mention learning that his disciple basically skipped 3 years was that much more shocking.

The next day was the final competition, so they all went to watch. Unfortunately for the tiger sect, their number 1 disciple, Dong Duxin reached the top 8, but lost to the person that later came second.

Still, that was a great achievement for them so everyone was more or less happy.

The Hong Wu sect had also done quite well during the production competitions, so they were happy too.

Wen Cheng was starting to look better in just a day. He no longer seemed weak and fragile, but was now starting to gain the confidence and impact he had 10 years ago.

Now that he had received the various pills from Alex, he was sure to get back on track with his cultivation.

"I will see you guys tomorrow," Alex said as he waved goodbye to both the sect and went to the palace.

The moment he arrived, the guards welcomed him without a single delay and took him to the guest rooms where his mother and Qin Shan were staying at.

"I thought I was going to meet them today," Helen said.

"Sorry, its hard when there's so much security," Alex said. "But worry not, you will meet them tomorrow."

"Fine," Helen said.

There was a knock on the door and Alex was invited to the Emperor's study room.

"I will see you guys later," Alex said and left.

When he arrived at the Emperor's study room, he found the princes and the princess waiting for them as well.

"Greetings, your highnesses," Alex said.

"Young man, you've improved quite a lot in the years I haven't seen you. You are a whole different person now," the Emperor said.

"Thank you for the compliment, your majesty," Alex said.

"I had a few questions, I was hoping you would answer," the Emperor said.

"Sure, I can do that," Alex said.

Alex was expecting questions about the empire, how it ran, and other things, but surprisingly the emperor wanted to know about his brother and sister-in-law that had left for the other empire.

"I'm sorry, your highness. I haven't met them," Alex said. "However, given that they helped bring back one of the current strongest young generation members, their status in the clan shouldn't be low."

"I see," the Emperor said. "Also, I remember you lost your arm before, and I heard you helped bring back your master's arm recently. Are you capable of making those pills?"

"Yes, I am," Alex said. "It's a True pill so anyone below the Saint realm can get back their limps if they've lost it."

"Are you willing to sell the recipe? We can pay a hefty sum for it," the Emperor said.

Alex shook his head. "It's a special recipe so I don't want it to fall in the hands of just about anybody. I will pass it along to my sect and the elders can decide what to do with it themselves."

"Oh, okay, that works too. As long as the pill is available in the empire, I'm fine with that," the Emperor said.

"I do have something else I want to inform everyone about, so after tomorrow's ceremony, can you help gather some alchemists or doctors somewhere?" Alex asked.

"Sure," The Emperor said.

He then asked about various things relating to the beast realm and Alex's experience in the other empire.

Alex told them what he thought was okay and kept the rest for himself.

Once they were done, the Emperor left with the princess, while the princess remained behind to speak with him.

"You don't seem to have aged a day," she said.

"Neither did you, princess Wuying," Alex said.

"I will be 36 this year. If you think I haven't changed, then you should get some special eyes skills and look again," she said jokingly.

Alex simply scratched his head, not knowing what to say.

"Anyway, welcome back," she said. "Are you returning for good?"

Alex shook his head. "Just a few months. I will need to be back before long," he said.

"I see," the princess said. "I hope you enjoy what little time you have here."

Alex went back to his room and early the next morning, the there of them went to the award ceremony for the competition.

There Alex introduced his mother to his master, elders, and friends.

"Thank you all for taking care of my son while he was all alone. He didn't really have much knowledge outside of his house, so it must have been quite hard for you all," Helen said.

"No… well, yes. It was hard to take care of him as common sense didn't apply to him, but he's a quick learned," Wen Cheng said.

"Master!" Pearl spoke up, surprising everyone in the surroundings as he jumped onto Wen Cheng.

"Pearl? You can speak?" Wen Cheng was surprised. "You've grown so much."

"Uh-huh," Pearl said.

Alex ignored them and looked towards the stage as the Emperor arrived and made a special announcement now that the ceremony for the award had ended.

"We have a special guest that had something to say to you all," the Emperor said as he looked toward Alex.

Alex nodded and jumped onto the stage, surprising his mother as he hadn't told her what he was doing.

Alex looked at the crowd and didn't know how to address them exactly, so he ignored the number and started explaining what he was going to talk about as if there were a single person in front of him.

"What I am going to talk to you, and subsequently show you is known as a medicinal paste. Medicinal pastes are…" Alex started explaining everything about medicinal pastes to them.

The Emperor wasn't sure what was going to be announced but when he did hear what medicinal pastes were and how cheap they were compared to pills, and sometimes even more effective, he was flabbergasted.

Pills that regenerated one's arm were useful, but not many people needed them. Normal pills that cured minor injuries, however, were necessary every single day and would destroy so many ingredients because of the shoddy work.

Now that the medicinal pastes were a thing, the Emperor could only imagine how much improvement there would be in the health sector for his empire.

What was even more impressive was that just about anyone could make this. He could only imagine the impact this would have once it spread throughout the empire.

Alex explained in detail and promised to spread talisman with this exact information soon enough.

When he was off, he gave the talisman with the information about the pastes from how they worked to what the recipes were to the Emperor.

"I'm sorry about the pills, but I can give you this. I hope you are alright with that," Alex said.

"Alright? I'm more than happy," the Emperor said. "You could've asked me for something in return for this, but you just gave it to me for free."

"Thank you, young man," the Emperor said.

"It's fine, your majesty," Alex said. He did think of asking some sort of payment for this, but he couldn't think of anything the emperor could have that he would want.

Spirit stones weren't very useful to him and there wouldn't be many treasures here he could want.

He did have the hope of obtaining the secret technique that could read someone else's mind, but that would mean revealing the fact that he did know about that technique.

Also, the technique stemmed from the Fu clan of the luminance empire, so getting the technique from there was a much better choice.

After everything was said and done, there wasn't anything Alex needed, so he didn't ask for anything.

Once the ceremony was done, the sects started to leave one by one.

The Tiger sect and the Hong Wu sect left as well, and along with them left Alex and Helen.

Chapter 766: Returning to the Hong Wu sect

Qin Shan was here to explore the empire, so he decided to stay behind in the capital and then go visit the various other cities.

Alex and Helen on the other hand went along with the two sects back to Scarlet city.

Liu Xun looked a few years older than he did before as he stood outside where the ship landed.

Alex gave a bright smile from atop when he saw him. As soon as he disembarked, he immediately went up to Liu Xun and opened his arms for a hug.

Liu Xin gave Alex a big hug before slapping him on the back, telling him how proud he was of his little brother.

"You've already beat me in cultivation, haven't you?" Liu Xin asked.

"What are you saying, brother? I could never beat you," Alex said.

"Don't try to suck up to me. Master told me how strong you are now," Liu Xin said.

Alex's elder brother was now at True Lord 9th realm. 10 years ago when Alex left them, he was in the early realms of True Master. So he hadn't improved by much when compared normally.

Alex then met up with Du Yuhan who was an elder. Their conversation consisted of just a simple greeting followed by a look of understanding of each other's strengths.

Du Yuhan was now in the early True Lord realm, so in a few years, he would reach the True King realm too.

After they were done talking, Alex took his mother over to the Hong Wu sect.

Alex stood in front of the sect gate and looked at it with a face full of nostalgia.

Having been informed of his arrival, Lang Shun came flying over to the gate. Even after seeing him, he couldn't believe that Alex was back.

"Martial Nephew? You really are back," he said.

"Martial Uncle, I hope you're doing well," Alex said.

"So-so," Lang Shun said. "This is?"

"This is my mother, Hei Lin. Mother, this is my master's disciple brother, Lang Shun," Alex introduced them.

"Thank you for taking care of my son," Helen spoke.

"It was our pleasure, miss," Lang Shun said. He was internally surprised at how strong his mother was.

Lang Shun had by now entered the True King realm, but he had done it after a long time and had only done so a few months ago.

So, he was surprised that Alex's mother was stronger than him by a realm. 'Like son like mother,' he thought.

"Please come in," Lang Shun said and took them inside.

Alex walked through the outer disciple mountain and arrived at the sect valley. However, he was surprised at how packed it was.

"The sect really grew a lot in my absence, didn't it?" he asked.

"This is nothing," Lang Shun said. "After we started taking in normal non-alchemy disciples, the mountains weren't enough to keep them."

"Now, two of the mountains are for the outer sect, and one is for the inner sect," Lang Shun explained.

"Where are the core disciples?" Alex asked.

"We call it the Core region of the sect, but it's the Forbidden Fields. Now that Qi has returned, that area has become exceptionally amazing for the main parts of the sect," Lang Shun said.

Alex came to understand quite a bit about the changes. Similar to the Tiger sect, the sect valley had multiple stages and training grounds for normal disciples to train.

Outside of the main halls, every other location in the valley was stripped away as it was unnecessary.

Alex saw the many disciples fight and couldn't help but wonder if he would have ever joined the Tiger sect had the Hong Wu sect had this as well.

"So the new disciples aren't that great yet?" Alex asked.

"No, but they're improving. In a year or two, they should be able to prove themselves in the competitions," Lang Shun said.

The disciples greeted Lang Shun as he was one of the more important elders now. "Where's Grandmaster?" Alex asked. "I was hoping to meet him too."

"Master won't be able to see you now," Lang Shun said. "He's entered his final closed cultivation."

"Final… closed cultivation?" Alex asked with shock.

Lang Shun nodded. "After sister died, and then you left, Master forced himself to work very hard. As such, he ended up overworking himself very soon and went through Qi deviation."

"He tried to recover but there was nothing he could do as his longevity was already ending."

"As such, exactly 6 years ago, he entered his final closed cultivation to try and break through to the True Emperor realm."

"If he succeeds, he can live for just that much longer. If he doesn't… well, let's just hope he does," Lang Shun said.

"Can you visit him?" Alex asked.

"Um, we aren't allowed to unless there is an emergency," Lang Shun said.

"What if I had a pill that would help him break through to the True Emperor realm? Would you take it to him?" Alex asked.

"I don't know how much that would help. He's tried every type of pills he could find," Lang Shun said.

"Mine is a little special. It has better harmony than most of the pills he most likely ate," Alex said. "I am sure it will improve his chances by a lot."

"Well… if you say so," Lang Shun said.

Alex quickly brought out a few pills and handed them over to Lang Shun. "If grandmaster eats these 4 pills he will have a much higher chance of breaking through," Alex said.

"What about this 5th pill?" Lang Shun asked as he picked it up.

"That's for you," Alex said. "It's to regrow your leg."

"Regrow my leg?" Lang Shun looked confused. "That's not possible."

"Is it not?" Alex asked while showing his left arm.

Lang Shun didn't realize what he was doing until he remembered what he was looking at.

"Your arm! It's back?" he asked in surprise.

"Yes, thanks to that pill," Alex said. "You should eat it quickly."

"Do you have more? There are so many more elders that will need it," Lang Shun said.

"Yes, I have many," Alex said.

"Good, we should start distributing it to everyone. How much do you take for it? I will speak with the sect leader to open up the treasury," Lang Shun said.

"Martial uncle, do you really expect me to take compensation for helping you?" Alex asked. "I brought it all just for you. Take it."

"A-are you sure? Pills that can regrow limbs should be very rare," Lang Shun said.

"Don't worry. I have a recipe with me that I will share with you. Then you too will be able to make these pills," Alex said.

"I can't wait to eat this then. Come on, let's hurry," Lang Shun said and took Alex over to the Elder's hall.

Helen on the other hand walked around the sect, looking at the various things.

After entering the hall, Lang Shun quickly went to an empty room and took off his fake leg. Then, without waiting, he ate the pill.

5 minutes later, he was full of tears and had 1 more leg than he did before.

"Thank you, martial nephew," Lang Shun said. "I would have never imagined I would be able to get my leg back at all."

Chapter 767: Changes in the Hong Wu sect

Wan Li walked around with a single leg and two supports. He was in charge of teaching the disciples about the various aspects of alchemy, so today too he was giving a lecture to the core disciples in the meadow.

Zhou Mei sat close by as her lecture would start not long after Wan Li's ended.

Alex arrived at the location and sat down at the end of the open area. His grayish blue robes somehow helped him not be noticeable in the sea of green.

Still, both Zhou Mei and Wan Li looked at him with surprise.

Wan Li tried to teach the disciples, but his eyes kept darting over to Alex, and was unable to continue for much longer.

"What the hell?" Wan Li shouted as he walked over to Alex. "Am I seeing this correctly? Zhou Mei, are you seeing this?"

"It seems the sect's best disciple has returned," Zhou Mei said.

Wan Li was now much older and seemed to have lost his timid persona, while Zhou Mei now looked like a girl in her mid-20s that had just blossomed to be an adult.

"What do you mean by 'the best disciple'?" Alex asked.

"That's what most people call you after learning about the number you pulled in the competition that year," Wan Li said.

"60%? The disciples think that is amazing huh?" Alex asked.

"Are you trying to show off?" Zhou Mei asked.

"Not in the slightest," Alex said. "It's good to see you two are doing well. I mean, at least one of you is."

Alex gestured towards Wan Li's missing leg.

"Yeah, don't mind it. I'll find a puppet leg soon," he said.

"I don't remember you losing a leg the last time I left you. What happened?" Alex asked.

"Some things I don't want to talk about," Wan Li said.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "You got your revenge?" he asked.

Wan Li's eyes flashed. "Absolutely," he said.

"Doesn't help much, does it?" Alex asked.

Wan Li gritted his teeth and shook his head.

Alex shook his head too. "Revenge brings justice to the dead and only more pain to the living," he said.

He then brought out a pill and tossed it over to Wan Li. "For your leg," he said.

Wan Li caught the pill and looked confused. Alex quickly explained what it was.

"Are you serious?" Wan Li asked.

"At least you can be happy now that you didn't lose yourself in your revenge," Alex said.

"How did you find this?" Wan Li asked.

"Find? I made it myself," Alex said. "I will teach you how to make it later. Just eat it for now."

Wan Li nodded and ate the pill. A while later, he was standing on both feet without the need for the two support.

Zhou Mei was surprised and started asking Alex for the recipe, but Alex promised to give it to them altogether.

Fan Ruogang arrived there too and started telling them and bunch of things. A few other young elders came too and they introduced Alex to them.

When they realized who exactly he was, they became quite talkative. These elders had been students around the time when Ma Rong was alive, so they knew who Alex was.

They talked for a while before Zhou Mei had to go teach. At that time, Alex decided to leave and go roam the sect.

He walked through the forbidden fields that were no longer such a hard spot. There were houses carved into the side of the cliff with the fruits growing near them.

The grass field was left intact but with less grass overall. Alex went up to the river and saw that the desert had changed quite a bit.

For one, it was no longer a desert, but just a place with some grass growing here and there. In a few years, what remained of the desert would disappear and soon this too would be a massive open field just like any other place in the empire.

Alex wondered who owned this place at that time. Would it be the Hong Wu sect or perhaps the empire?

After roaming around, he met up with his mother who was with his Martial Uncle, talking about Alex's life.

"Are we leaving?" she asked.

"No, I have one more thing to do," Alex said. "Martial Uncle, can you help me get into the garden."

"Yes, let me take you there," Lang Shun said and walked on his own two feet.

"I'll be back in a bit," Alex said to his mother and walked away with Lang Shun. When they reached the Alchemy garden on the right side, Alex instantly noticed the thick Yin in the air.

Of course, this was nowhere as thick as the Icy hell, but for a place that was originally concentrated with Yang, this was almost a miracle.

"It might be a little uncomfortable now that the Yin Gathering tree had grown so much, but bear with it," Lang Shun said.

"I'm fine," Alex said. He didn't even feel anything really. It was only his closeness with Yin now that he even noticed it.

As he walked through, he was surprised to see some core disciples walking through the mountain. Almost all of them were females too.

"Are they the ones picking up the ingredients now?" Alex asked.

"Oh no, they just take care of it in exchange for being allowed to cultivate here. Given that this is a haven for most girls with even the slightest bit of Yin root, they go to great length at being here," Lang Shun said.

Alex looked around. "It doesn't look like they're taking really good care of the plants though," he said. "You should get rid of that Green Serpent's thorn vine before it messes with the Frost Bellflower. That Firemoss should be cleaned off or the Morning's Dew plant should be moved away. They will destroy each other soon."

As he went along, Alex told Lang Shun the mistakes that he saw along the way that completely shocked him.

"You know so much already?" Lang Shun asked.

"I learned it from an expert gardener in the Royal palace," Alex said. "Royal palace of the other empire I mean."

"You already got in touch with the royal family of the other empire too?" Lang Shun asked.

"Not of my own merit," Alex said. "I just got lucky."

They reached the top of the mountain where a considerably small tree stood resolute. It was maybe 5 meters tall at best, so it still had a lot of growing to do.

Still, it was something alright. Alex ignored the tree and looked next to it on the headstone that was properly cleaned and could thus read it well.

His master rested here.

"Sister, look who's back," Lang Shun spoke up first. "Your disciple has returned after over 10 years, and he's managed to beat the both of us in terms of how far he's gone."

He then turned to Alex. "I'm sure you have a lot to say, so I'll leave you alone," he said and lightly slapped Alex's back before walking away.

Alex watched Lang Shun walk away and finally sat down in front of his master's grave.

"Hey, master," he spoke. "I hope you're doing well."

Chapter 768: Revisiting the Library

Alex couldn't stop his tears from forming in his eyes as he spoke to his master.

The one-sided conversation included Alex talking about the various experiences and the knowledge Alex had gained throughout the years.

There was no one to speak back to him, but he continued talking for nearly 15 minutes.

He felt like a weight had been lifted off of him. Like he did something to help himself connect back to his roots, instead of forgetting it.

He wasn't sure why, but he felt like this would improve his chances of a breakthrough now that he had come here.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense around the grave and sensed a weak life force on the other side of the tree.

His master's beast companion, the snake was resting calmly behind the tree.

Alex smiled and stood up to leave. However, before he did so, he thought he should do something for the tree, for his master's sake.

He stood next to the tree and placed his hand on it. Then, he closed his eyes and started cultivating the Winter Moon technique.

Deep and cold Yin Qi flowed out of his naval area, nearly turning his skin blue. As it flower around his body, little by little, he poured some of it into the tree to help it.

The tree graciously accepted the Yin and Alex increased his input a bit more.

After a certain amount of time, the tree's third for Qi ended, and Alex slowed down his input until completely stopped his Qi circulation.

After that, he left the garden and arrived outside to see Lang Shun waiting for him.

"Come, the sect leader wants to meet you," he said.

Alex went to the sect leader's mountain, walking through the familiar yet different sceneries.

He saw his old house to the side, now occupied by someone based on his Spiritual sense.

He wanted to visit that house, but that was no longer his. He only just realized how much he had moved on from this place.

But that was what he was taught since childhood. To not be held back by something as fickle as emotions. No matter what, he had to keep moving forward.

Alex reached the sect master's house. This house looked completely different from what his master used to live in. After its destruction, it seemed they had decided to make some improvements.

Alex went into the house and met with the dark-haired, middle-aged man that was the new sect leader.

Alex remembered seeing this man, but he had never interacted with him, so this was in a way his first encounter.

"Greetings, fellow Daoist," the man said.

Alex greeted him back. It felt weird being greeted as equal rather than a junior. While Alex had been giving off some of his True King cultivation base's aura, he still expected to be treated like a disciple.

Seeing the sect leader refer to him as a 'fellow' took him aback a bit.

The man remembered Alex being talented, so he wanted to know how far he had come.

Alex didn't hide much, but he also didn't bother showing off much. So he simply told the man that he was a True Heaven alchemist and nothing more.

The sect leader was mostly interested in learning if Alex had new recipes and knowledge from the other empire he had gone to and wanted to know if he was willing to sell it to the sect.

Alex thought for a bit and said yes. He would sell a few of the new pill recipes he had, but instead of spirit stones, he wanted a book from the library.

"From our library? Sure," the sect leader said. No matter what book Alex got, it would never be as expensive as the recipes he would get, so he was totally up for it.

"I will pass along the recipe through some teachings I want to do for the disciples if you are okay with it," Alex said.

"Sure," the sect leader was more than happy to accept Alex's knowledge.

Once they finished talking, they walked out of the sect leader's house and walked down the mountain.

"Why did you give up so much for practically nothing?" Lang Shun asked.

Alex shook his head. "I care too much about the sect to care about giving things away for free," he said. "I was already planning to spread a few recipes here and there. Now I will get a technique in return," he said.

"What technique could possibly be worth so many new recipes?" Lang Shun asked.

"Well, there is one," Alex said as he walked towards the library. Along the way, he met up with his mother and took her along as well.

Once they reached the library, Alex was allowed free entry throughout the many floors of the library, but Alex didn't need much of it.

He quickly went to the place where they kept the Earth rank technique books and found the Mortal ranked book he was looking for.

"Here, mother. This is for you," he said.

"For me?" Helen was surprised. "What is it?"

She took hold of the old, rugged book and flipped to the first page before reading its name. "Flame Mastery Scripture? I think I've heard of this name before, haven't I?" she asked.

"It's the fire skill book I told you about that helps so much with handling flame during Alchemy," Alex said.

He poured a little Yang Qi into the book to test and as he had expected, the seal on it came undone.

Helen sat down right there and started reading it. Lang Shun was shocked to see the seal gone, but he simply assumed that Alex had learned some special techniques that worked on seals.

"She doesn't have to read it here," Lang Shun said. "She can take it back."

"No need, Martial Uncle. It won't take long," Alex said.

Helen closed the book not even a few seconds later and closed her eyes to read through her memories.

About 5 minutes later, she opened her eyes, completely learning the Flame Mastery Scripture. Or so Alex thought.

"I don't think I know the last bit of the language," she said.

"Sorry?" Alex said and took the book before reading through it himself.

The first level of the technique helped control the shape and temperature of the fire.

The second level gave more control over how fluid the shape and temperature were while allowing one to create fire on their own. This level of the technique made it an Earth rank technique, which was why this book was kept amidst the Earth rank techniques.

Looking at only the descriptions that would pop up on the screen, Alex would've never known this when he was a player.

Finally, the third and last level of the technique gave the user control over Fire Qi itself and could even help them wrestle control of it from someone else so long as their Qi was strong enough.

Furthermore, to Alex's surprise, there was a flame technique in there that slowly improved one's Fire spirit root if used for a long time. Granted, it seemed one needed to find fire treasures to do so.

The better the fire treasure was, the better it would improve one's roots.

This came as a big surprise to Alex as he had never expected something like that to be possible. However, when he thought about it, using elemental treasures was the way to improve one's spiritual roots.

Alex tried to recall the technique he just read, but he couldn't at all. It was like there was a part of his mind that was locked away from the rest of it.

'Is the technique stopping me from learning how to use it?' Alex thought. He read the book again to see what it wrote and only now did he realize that it was written in the Human language, rather than the demon language everyone was used to.

"No wonder you couldn't read the third part," Alex said. "I think there's a way to read this. I will try and ask sister Yao Jia for the language books. She should be able to help us."

"Still, you can only use the first two parts, for now, so you're not really missing anything," Alex said.

"Yes, I think I did understand the first two techniques," Helen said.

Alex looked through the book one last time before keeping it back on the shelf and walking out.

"Let us return now."

Chapter 769: Guest Elders

Alex and his mother left the Hong Wu sect and returned back to the Tiger sect.

After going in, Alex was immediately taken away to the Sect Leader's mansion where his master and the sect leader were waiting for him to arrive.

"You're finally here," Wen Cheng said, his original pride and attitude returning back to him.

"What is it, master?" Alex asked.

"I wanted to ask you something," Wen Cheng said. " You aren't back forever right?"

"No, just a month or two," Alex said. "3 at best."

"Sigh, I guessed so," Wen Cheng said. "I assume you will be staying here in the meantime, or do you want to stay in the Hong Wu sect?"

"I will be staying here," Alex said. "I will go there to teach a few things about Alchemy from time to time, but aside from that, I don't see myself spending too much time there,"

"So, here's what were were thinking," Wen Cheng said. "Since you are going to stay here, why don't you become a guest elder?"

Alex thought for a bit and said, "I can do that. Also, why don't you make my mother a guest elder at the same time?"

"Your mother? She won't have to worry about where she is staying with you being a guest elder," Wen Cheng said.

"No," Alex chuckled a bit. "I was thinking you could make her a guest elder so she can do something. Maybe give her a job in the market outside. She is a True Immortal Talisman expert, you know."

"What?" both Wen Cheng and the sect leader showed incredulous faces when they heard that.

"True Immortal? Is that even true?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Did I not mention it to you already?"

"You only told us that she was a Talisman maker," Wen Cheng said. "If she's truly as good as you say then it would be our honor to have her be our guest elder."

"Yes, yes," the sect leader added.

Alex smiled and quickly brought his mother to speak about the various things.

"I don't mind it," she said. "In fact I was worried I would be a little bored."

"Alright, that settles it then. Starting today, Sister Hei, and Young Yu will become the Tiger Sect's guest elders," the sect leader called.

The sect leader sent a message and soon Du Yuhan came to see him. He was informed on what had happened and was then sent to show them their new place of stay.

"Come with me," he said and walked out of the mansion before going behind the mountain to jump off of the cliff towards the elder's living area.

Alex remembered this place on the back of the mountain where the elders lived. This was also where the treasury was where he got the Five Yang Divine Path, the Yang clone skill, and the silver stone that later became a silver mountain in his mind.

"This will be your living quarters from now on," Du Yuhan said as he pointed to two houses there.

"You can rest if you want to. The sun is already going down so you can start tomorrow," Du Yuhan said.

"Okay," Helen said.

"Go rest, mother. I want to see a bit more of the sect for now," Alex said and left with Du Yuhan.

As the last rays of the sun left, the lanterns around the sect crater started glowing giving a familiar and nostalgic look to the entire area.

Alex heard sounds of shouting and fighting in the stage all over the sect crater.

"How's your cultivation going?" Du Yuhan made casual conversation.

"It's going fine," Alex said. "What about you?"

"Not bad I suppose," Du Yuhan said. "How's your sword Intent?"

"Great, I got Sword Qi now. Although I haven't improved upon it in a while now," Alex said.

"You have Sword Qi?" Du Yuhan asked with surprise.

"Yes," Alex said as he flicked his finger, sending out a Sword Qi into the sky.

"You really are gifted in the way of sword," Du Yuhan said.

Alex didn't say anything and soon silence fell between them.

"Oh right, what should I do if I want to become a referee for these fights?" Alex asked.

"You don't have to, but if you want to, you can come around early next morning to the Elder's Hall and register yourself," Du Yuhan said.

"I will," Alex said.

Alex continued walking around the crater, going through the different place, until he came upon the stone stele again.

Alex wanted to read it, but there was no point in reading it anymore now that he knew the content. Not only that, he didn't want the backlash he got every time he read it.

Although, it did remind him that he hadn't been training in this technique for quite a while now. 'I will not only need to train in this, but I also need to learn the language from sister Jia and translate this for my mother and the rest,' he thought.

After it truly became dark, Du Yuhan left to train his junior brother, while Alex roamed the sect on his own until he met up with his elder brother.

The two of them talked for a while and returned back to the elder's are together.

Alex returned back to his room and lay on his bed. It felt weird coming back to the sect. Over 10 years had passed, and he was but a blink in the eyes of many here.

Still, he was surprised how much they remembered him. He really had made an impact on many of the people here.

After thinking so for a while, Alex stood back up and brought out some pill bottles.

He checked the pills inside and there were exactly 7 of those.

Alex frowned a little. He needed to now make decisions on who to give the pill and who not to.

Anyone who got the pill would advance quite a lot further than those who didn't. After all, this was the pill that would massively improve their Earth Spiritual roots.

Alex started making a mental note of who he absolutely had to give the pill to.

His master, his senior brother and sister, and his Martial uncle.

After those four came the tricky part. There was Zhou Mei, Fan Ruogang, Du Yuhan, Kong Yuhan, Zhou Mi, Luo Xing, and others.

Alex didn't plan to give it to Wan Li for two reasons. One, he was already had a superior Earth Spiritual root. He was the owner of Earth and Fire spiritual roots after all.

Even if he didn't, Wan Li had now destroyed his cultivation base by reaching True Emperor too soon, and the pill didn't work on those that were in the True Emperor.

It did seem like Wan Li had started stabilizing his cultivation base now that he had gotten his revenge over the Huo family that killed his parents, so there was a chance he could still reach the Saint realm if he went on steadily.

'I should maybe check their Spiritual roots and see if they have any need for it,' Alex thought. 'Yes, that is what I should do.'

"For now, let's breakthrough."

Chapter 770: Testing Spiritual Roots again

Alex woke up early in the morning, completely revitalized after breaking through.

Pearl was still cultivating and there were cuts all over his body, but they didn't hurt him at all. After all, his body cultivation had already exceeded Pearl's own cultivation thanks to the clash of yang and yin.

"True King 7th realm," he thought to himself. "3 more breakthroughs and I enter the True Emperor realm as well."

When that happened, Alex wondered if he would be the strongest under the Saint realm.

'Probably not,' he thought. There was too much of a gap between the True Emperor realms themselves due to the existence of Saint Qi.

Alex woke Pearl up from the cultivation and went over to the Elder's hall to register himself as a referee.

He got the 9 to 3 schedule for Stage 12 and was handed a talisman that was used to keep track of the fighters.

Once it was time, disciples came in one by one to fight.

Alex called out the first fighters and watched them come aboard the stage. He then took their two badges, 332 and 1432.

That was quite a bit of a gap in numbers, but their cultivation was about equal so Alex watched the fight carefully.

As the fight started, he watched carefully so that he could intervene whenever needed. However, there wasn't any need to.

The person with the 332 badge won easily to his surprise and only then did Alex realize that the challenger had most likely increased his cultivation base too fast.

Once the match was over, he handed back the badges and commenced the next match.

Half a day went by before Alex realized how boring this task was. Watching Organ tempering realm cultivators fight didn't bring him the same excitement as when he himself was in that realm.

After his time was over, Alex promised himself to never go through that again.

As he walked away from the location, he saw Du Yuhan walk out too.

"Brother Du, wait up," he said, catching his attention and arriving next to him.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Do you have some time? I need you for something," Alex said.

"I… I have about an hour free right now. What do you need?" he asked.

"Is there any empty location we can go to? A place where people won't disturb us?" he asked.

"Uhh… we can go to my master's training hall," Du Yuhan said.

"Yes, that will work. Let's go there," Alex said.

The two of the went to the Training Hall and Alex pulled out a formation plate from his storage bag.

"What's that?" Du Yuhan asked.

"It's… you'll see," Alex said as he set up the formation.

When the formation activated, a white fog streamed out of the plate.

"What's this?" Du Yuhan asked.

"It's a formation to test your spiritual roots," Alex said. "It's much better than the ones you will find here."

"Is that so?" Du Yuhan said. "And… do you want me to test here?"

"Yes," Alex said. "Just place your palm on the plate and take in the Qi it gives you before sending it back out."

"I… I have trash roots, you know," Du Yuhan said. That was the main reason why he became a swordsman in the first place. With bad roots, there was no other option for him.

"I know," Alex said. "I'm actually kinda hoping you are correct. Let's test it just to be sure. This will show more."

"Sigh, fine," Du Yuhan said and placed his palm on the plate. Half a minute later, he finished the test.

As soon as he released the Qi he had taken in, the white fog suddenly changed color.

Red, green, blue, gold, and brown. The five colors flew about, but none were vibrant at all.

"You really do have inferior five roots," Alex said as he looked at the colors.

"I know," Du Yuhan got dejected.

"No, that's a good thing," Alex said. "That means you have a chance to improve them and gain Dao of those 5 elements."

"Dao? Improve? What do you mean?" Du Yuhan asked.

Alex brought out a pill bottle as he was certain now that Du Yuhan needed one. "Eat this pill and cultivate," he said. "I will explain everything later."

Du Yuhan hesitated for a bit, but accepted the pill in the end and ate it.

As he sat down to cultivate, Alex placed his own palm on the formation plate and closed his eyes to circulate.

Pearl's head popped up from Alex's robes as he watched the white fog curiously.

After Alex finished circulating the Qi, he sent it back to the formation plate and the fog changed colors.

Red, Green, Blue, Gold, and Brown were obviously there, but Yellow and black floated along as well.

Gold and Yellow were so vibrant that they were easily distinguishable. The Black was the most vibrant after those two, but could never reach their level.

Red and Brown were of the same vibrancy coming after the Black.

Blue and Green on the other hand were weak, almost the same as Du Yuhan's own Spiritual roots.

'I need ways to improve my Water and Wood roots,' Alex thought. He placed a hand on his chin as he started thinking about what he could do.

Could he make an all Water, or all Wood element pill and eat it? Would that work?

Or would he have to go find the Blood Essence of the legendary beasts and eat those like he did with the White Tiger's Blood Essence?

Or maybe there were some techniques like he received yesterday for the Fire roots?

Whatever it was, Alex wanted to get those soon enough.

Just as he was thinking that he noticed something golden out of the corner of his eyes. His focus wavered from his thought as he was pulled back to reality.

"What are you doing?" Alex asked Pearl who had his paw on the formation.

"Same thing as you," Pearl said.

"Are you checking your spiritual roots?" Alex asked with a bit of a chuckle in his voice.

"Yes," Pearl said.

"You don't need to," Alex explained. "You have the White Tiger's bloodline, meaning you will only have Metal—"

Alex's words stopped in his mouth as he saw something in the fog down below.

The golden fog moved around as he had expected, but out from it also moved some green. While the gold overshadowed it, the green was still very visible to Alex.

"What the hell?" Alex couldn't help but shout in surprise. "How do you have Wood spiritual roots?"

"Is that bad?" Pearl asked.

"No, no, that's great… but I can't understand why you would have it," Alex said. "All White Tigers are supposed to only have Metal roots. That's what Lady Ren told me."

Alex suddenly sent out his spiritual sense and noticed the Jaguar's senses on them. A few seconds later, the Jaguar was in the room.

"You know about this?" he asked the jaguar.

"We indeed learned about his roots back when you were gone," the jaguar said.

"How is this possible?" Alex asked. "This is different from what I was led to believe."

"We believed what you believed too. We had to see to find out as well," the jaguar said. "But we believe there is a simple explanation for this."

"What explanation?" Alex asked.

"We think he got the Wood root from his father."

Chapter 771: Reason for Leaving

"From his father?" Alex asked. Now that he thought about it, he didn't know who Pearl's father was, and whether he was alive or not.

"Yes," the jaguar said. "We have no idea who his father was. Since it couldn't have possibly come from his mother's side, we are left to believe the little Wood spiritual root is from his father."

"Are you sure it couldn't have come from his mother's side? Isn't it possible that his mother had Wood spiritual root given that she wasn't a White Tiger?" Alex asked.

The jaguar shook his head. "When the young lady married over 5 thousand years ago, she had some blood of the White Tiger in her giving her only Metal roots. As such, we made sure that her partner also didn't have any other bloodline that would conflict with her just in case."

"Given that we were unable to have the same influence over his mother's marriage, we are left to believe that she got together with someone with a Wood spiritual root and that was passed along to her," the jaguar said.

"I see," Alex said. "I guess I would've known this much earlier had I bothered to check his spiritual roots. Not only that, but I also never really bothered finding techniques for him to properly learn."

When Alex really thought about it, he himself needed some Wood techniques that weren't just usable with swords.

"Thank you for telling me this," Alex said and the jaguar left.

Du Yuhan got up from his cultivation not long after and looked at him weirdly.

"What did you do to me?" he asked.

"Test it again," Alex pointed to the formation plate.

Du Yuhan suspected what was up, but he couldn't believe it at all. Even as he placed his palm on the formation plate and started testing it, there was really just a single hope that he wouldn't be disappointed.

All his life, he had been told that his spiritual roots were trash and therefore any techniques he learned would be trash too.

He had learned the sword because it didn't require one to have good spiritual roots, but he still got jealous of others when he saw them use colorful attacks at each other.

So, when the colorful fog rose up and the brown color in it was especially vibrant, he couldn't help but tear up a little.

"My Earth spiritual root got improved?" he asked softly.

"Yes, that was what the pill does. It's still not very good and can be improved a lot more I believe, but it—"

"No, this is more than amazing already," Du Yuhan said as he stood up from the formation plate.

"Thank you," he said.

"No problem," Alex said. He then put away the formation and turned to leave.

However, Du Yuhan stopped him. "Wait, I have a request," he said.

Alex turned around. "Yes?" he asked.

"Will you fight me?" Du Yuhan asked.

"Fight you?" Alex was surprised. Du Yuhan was barely in the True Lord realm so he was still far from being Alex's match, but since he had requested…

"Sure," Alex said.

Alex let Pearl go to the corner and got ready for the fight himself.

"Use your sword. I want to see your Sword Qi," Du Yuhan said.

"Okay," Alex said and brought out a random sword he had received from the various people as gift.

"You can start," Alex said.

Du Yuhan nodded and dashed towards Alex to slash at him with his sword. He made a vertical slash that came down upon Alex.

Alex swiftly moved his sword above him and parried the sword away.

Du Yuhan let the sword come at Alex horizontally, but Alex simply put his sword to the side and blocked.

Du Yuhan then took some steps back and his sword started glowing white. He cut in front of him and a white sword slash flew toward Alex.

Alex could feel the intent behind the sword attack, the will to cut anything in its path. It was extraordinary.

The power behind the sword was equivalent to that of a mid True Lord realm. Alex sent out his own Sword Qi slash that destroyed the incoming attack and even went ahead to attack Du Yuhan with its remaining power.

Du Yuhan had to dodge away to survive the attack.

"You held back?" Alex asked Du Yuhan.

Du Yuhan nodded.

"Why don't you bring out all of your power?" Alex asked.

"My body can't handle more than a few attacks if I do so," he said. "The backlash is always way too strong."

"I see," Alex said. "Still, I hope you will show it."

The fight continued for a while longer as Alex tested Du Yuhan's skills and power while attacking back with a power that he could barely handle.

During the battle, Du Yuhan revealed his true powers which came close to being around the early True King realm.

"Let's stop," Du Yuhan said as his right arm trembled from having to use that much force.

Alex felt like he understood what was happening. 'He's too powerful for his own good,' he thought.

Similar things happened to him with his explosion if he wasn't careful in regulating how much power he put into the explosion too.

"Alright, I will leave now," Alex said and called Pearl.

"Actually, I have one more question," Du Yuhan said.

"What is it?" Alex asked.

"Are you not going to meet with Luo Mei?" he asked.

"I am," Alex said. "I was planning on going to surprise her in a couple of days. I just have a few things I need to take care of here and in the Hong Wu sect. I will leave after that."

"When you do leave… umm… can I come with you?" he asked.

"With me? Sure, I don't mind," Alex asked.

"Thank you. I really need to meet with her," he said.

"I don't see why you had to go with me if you really needed to meet her," Alex said.

Du Yuhan shook his head with a self-mocking smile. "I don't think she would ever talk with me if I went there alone," he said.

"Oh, why not?" Alex asked.

Du Yuhan hesitated a bit before asking, "Do you know why she's not in the sect anymore?"

Alex gave a curious look and said, "isn't it because she wants to help her parents and their business? That's what master told me."

"That's what she tells everyone," Du Yuhan said.

"Oh, what's the truth then?" Alex asked.

"The truth is… she left because of me," Du Yuhan said.

"Because of you?" Alex asked. "What did you do?"

"I… I asked her to marry me," Du Yuhan said.

Alex felt his mind go blank for a second before everything came back to him. "You asked her to marry you? Wait, are you guys a couple?"

Du Yuhan gave a scoff as he said, "we were until I did that. Then she just packed up and left."

"Did… did she give any reason?" Alex asked.

"She did," he said. "She said her parents wouldn't approve of this since I was an orphan."

"Well that's bullshit," Alex said.

"Exactly. Which is why I want to learn the real reason, but she won't talk to me, even when I went to meet her," Du Yuhan said. "I… I just wish she would just tell me why she left."

"Whether it was because she was already promised to someone, or if someone else caught her eyes. I am willing to not bother her if she had any valid reasons, but she never gave me a single one. Even after we were in together for nearly 3 years," Du Yuhan said.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "yes, you deserve an answer. With me along, she can't ignore you. At the very least, if she has lost her love for you, you can find some semblance of closure from this."

"Thank you," Du Yuhan said.

"Now, tell me all about how this happened. I'm curious to learn of it," Alex asked.

As it turned out, Du Yuhan had always been in love with Luo Mei since they were mere Inner sect disciples. While he was focused on his own thing, he also worked towards her love.

Once Alex was taken away to the beast's realm, Luo Mei had asked Du Yuhan for his help and since then he had managed to form a bond with her, which slowly improved into a close friendship that ended up with both of them falling in love.

Alex was surprised that he was somewhat responsible for these two finding love.

Chapter 772: Alchemy Lesson

The next day, Alex had decided to go to the Hong Wu sect to teach about Alchemy and Medicinal pastes, but he was called to the City Lord's mansion.

So, he had to take a detour before going over to the sect.

Fu Wen was curious about his parents as any child would be after not seeing them for over 10 years, but Alex had no information on them so he was a little disappointed.

He now had a 3-year-old child and desperately wanted them to meet their granddaughter.

"Are you going back?" Fu Wen asked.

"In a few months, yes," Alex said.

"Can you take us too?" Fu Wen asked.

"Um, what about the city?" Alex asked.

"My uncle will manage it. There are way too many of our family members out there for us to worry about this part," Fu Wen said.

"Uhh, sure then. You can come with us," Alex said.

"Thank you," Fu Wen said. He asked a bit more about the Empire on the other side and was happy to know that it wasn't some barbaric land his parents had gone to.

Once he was done there, Alex finally went over to the sect where everyone was already gathered as per his request.

It wasn't just the Core disciples and elders, but also the Inner disciples as well as Outer disciples, so in total there were nearly 6 thousand people gathered in the Forbidden Fields grassland.

Once Alex recognized that it was time, he started off by teaching about medicinal pastes.

The elders had already come to hear about the pastes and were curious as to what it was. So, when Alex started teaching them they were more than eager to learn about it.

In just a few minutes, Alex managed to teach them exactly what the pastes were. As for the more minute details, he had it written on a talisman for the sect to distribute on its own time.

After that, he moved on to Alchemy and started teaching them what he had learned.

Without spiritual sense, many of the concepts he taught would go over the head of almost everyone here. But if they could understand even the tiniest bit and keep it with them until they managed to acquire spiritual sense somehow, they would immediately find themselves much better than they were before.

Concepts like Combination and Structure could be hard to understand for them, but concepts, like not wasting time in between ingredients or using the proper amount of ingredient for each pill, was something they understood.

Alex continued teaching for half an hour, at the end of which he handed out a bunch of recipes, claiming they were better than the ones that were in the sect.

The sect leader accepted them and would then replicate them for the disciples.

As for the pill to heal one's missing body parts, Alex decided to teach that to only a few select groups of people.

As such, once the lecture ended, he found Lang Shun, Wan Li, Zhou Mei, Zhou Mi, Kong Yuhan and Fan Ruogang, and brought them to a secluded location.

"Can you guys first test your Spiritual roots here?" Alex asked of them all.

"Okay," they said and one by one started testing their Spiritual roots.

Alex watched carefully as he needed to select 2 more people aside from his Martial uncle.

However, to his surprise, his martial uncle didn't have an Earth spiritual root at all.

'That's a problem,' Alex thought and looked at the rest. As he had expected, Wan Li's Earth spiritual root was really vibrant, perhaps even more so than Alex's own.

Zhou Mei and Zhou Mi had weak Earth spiritual roots themselves, while Fan Ruogang had slightly better ones.

Kong Yuhan too had a strong Earth spiritual root. So, in the end, Alex gave the pills to the 3 girls and was done with it.

He explained what the pill was and why he didn't give it to the rest of them. Once that was done, the girls ate the pill and sat down to cultivate.

In the meantime, Alex answered any questions about Alchemy that the other 3 had from today's lecture.

It was obvious that they would be curious about the information Alex gave out, considering every single person aside from Zhou Mi had a spiritual sense of their own thanks to the Spirit Cleansing Lily Alex had given them.

Once the girls were done with their cultivation and had an improved Spiritual root, Alex started teaching them the recipe to make the pill that could heal everything for anyone below the Saint realm.

At first, they assumed the pill was going to have a simple recipe. However, when they realized they had to do something so drastic as keeping a single ingredient in a bucket of blood for over a month, they were surprised, to say the least.

Not only that, but hearing the constraints on the blood itself, they were truly flabbergasted.

"A bucket of blood for a single pill? How do we find that?" Lang Shun asked.

"From beasts or maybe humans. I understand it's hard, but that's exactly the reason I'm not teaching this recipe to everyone," Alex said. "Not everyone can either get the ingredients and even if they did, they would use some underhanded method to get the blood. This is why I chose you guys because I trust you."

Alex spent perhaps half a day more teaching the small group of people everything he knew and everything they could understand, including Symmetry.

Once he was sure he taught them everything he knew, Alex handed over a technique to his Martial Uncle.

"What's this?" Lang Shun asked.

"A pill forming technique I bought in the other empire. It's one of the best out there, so I hope you can make use of it," Alex said.

"Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations, huh? Sounds fancy," Lang Shun said.

"It better be," Alex said. "That's an Immortal grade technique after all."

"What?" the group looked at him in shock.

"Yeah, so keep it safe," Alex said. "I don't know how long it will take you to learn it, but pass it along once you are done reading."

Given that they had spiritual sense, they could easily remember whatever they read.

"I have taught you guys all I can, so I will leave for now. Martial Uncle, I will come tomorrow to teach about growing plants and taking care of them. Can you help me gather up anyone that is interested?" he asked. "Oh right, those girls that stay in the garden, those should absolutely be there to learn."

"Okay," Lang Shun replied, but his thoughts were still hung up on the book in his hand.

"Don't worry, we'll make sure to do it," Kong Yuhan said.

"I guess I will leave now then," Alex said. "So remember, tomorrow get the disciples and those girls for the gardening lesson."

"After that…" Alex thought to himself. "After that, I might teach you guys about something you will need to know once you enter the Saint realm."

"What? What do we need to know?" Wan Li asked as he was the closest to the Saint realm.

"It's a little something called Dao."

Chapter 773: Changes

3 days later, Alex and Du Yuhan got on a boat and left for Rubyroad.

Alex was done teaching about plants and Daos, as well as teaching about medicinal pastes for the Tiger sect.

Once he was done overall, he decided to go visit his sister. As she was the only one he had yet to meet, he was a bit too excited about it.

The ship they used flew at such incredible speed that Du Yuhan felt scared about it half the time.

"Should we really be going this fast?" he asked. "Not even the sect's grand ship flies this fast."

"It's fine," Alex said. "Those ships are meant to carry very many people, so they have to be slow in general for stability."

"This one carries 3 people at most so it can go as fast as I can make it go," Alex said.

"Still…" Du Yuhan looked around as the trees blitzed past him.

"Don't worry, we'll be fine," Alex said. "Also, just think about how fast we will reach there. In just a few hours we will be in Rubyroad city," Alex said.

"Yeah… I don't doubt you on that," Du Yuhan said. He was still a little scared about the speed but said nothing as Alex continued to steer it.

Alex felt a little happy that Du Yuhan did come with him as there would be no one else to keep him company while he was here.

Since he was forced to leave his mother alone, Alex let Pearl stay with her as well so that the jaguar would look after her just in case.

"So, this competition you mentioned," Du Yuhan asked, "it's going to have strong fighters right?"

"Yes," Alex said. "It is the biggest competition in the arena in the last 2 decades."

"How strong are these people going to be?" he asked.

"Well, it's for anyone that is below the age of 50, so anyone that counts I suppose," Alex said.

"And what's the general cultivation base of these people that are below 50 years old?" he asked.

"Well… at this time, it should be True Emperor realm," Alex said.

"What about the saint realm? Are there any?" Du Yuhan asked.

Alex shook his head. "No," he said. "There's a certain difficulty in reaching the Saint realm that one cannot do just by breaking through."

"Even if one is at the peak of True Emperor realm, they would need quite a while longer before they are able to enter the Saint realm," Alex said.

"Oh, is there an obstacle?" Du Yuhan asked.

Alex nodded. "To enter the Saint realm, you need to open up your naval area so you can freely access the energy that is stored there."

"Once it is accessed, it becomes the main essence of your cultivation, and that is very hard to achieve from what I've heard."

"So, I think it is unlikely that anyone will enter the Saint realm before this competition," Alex said.

"Oh, so you have a chance then," he said.

"Well, maybe, maybe not. It all depends on how far I can go in the next 9 months. I plan on cultivating with a lot of dedication so I can at least touch the True Emperor realm," Alex said.

"If I can do that, I will finally have a chance."

The two of them talked for a while longer as the sun reached the zenith. Finally, they saw a city far in the distance.

"We're here," Alex said.

Once they got close, the two of them dropped from the ship and walked on foot.

They lined up to enter and soon entered the city itself.

Alex remembered this city. In the city, he had to make pills overnight because there were people dying from the beast attack.

However, nothing of what he remembered remained much around here.

"I don't know if I can even navigate to my sister's house," Alex said. "We might have to ask for directions."

"Don't worry, I know the way. I've been here before remember," Du Yuhan said and took the lead.

Alex's memories returned as he went through the streets. He recognized a clothing shop that used to be a restaurant before. He recognized a blacksmithing place that had now turned into a small general store.

One of the flower shops had turned into a bakery, while the medical shop at the end of the road remained the same.

It felt really weird knowing that 10 years was barely any time for him. All he had done was train a bit, learn a few knowledge, and returned back.

And yet, in that time, so much had changed for the mortals. There was nothing more telling for him about the life he had already left behind.

And he didn't even know it himself.

After a few minutes, Alex stood in front of a familiar white manor. 'If you want something unchanged and untouched over the years, leave it to the cultivators,' he thought.

Alex saw a carriage stop by and a woman got down from it. The moment she did, Alex immediately recognized her.

"Sister Meng!" he called out.

The woman turned around and looked toward Alex before giving him a confused look. "Hello, do I know you?" she asked.

"Eh? Do you not recognize me?" Alex asked with a surprised voice. He couldn't understand how Luo Mei's sister-like maid could have possibly forgotten about him.

"It's me, Yu Ming. Remember?" he said.

However, the woman's face didn't show signs of remembering at all.

Alex felt a little shocked by that. 'Are 10 years really that long?' he wondered. 'Or have I changed that much? No way.'

He remembered giving Meng Yun a Spirit Cleansing Lily before leaving, so as far as he knew, she should have a concrete memory of him. 'Is she sick?' he wondered.

"Do you really not remember me? I'm your young lady's junior disciple brother," Alex said.

That only confused the woman even more so. "My young lady doesn't have a junior disciple brother. She only has an elder disciple brother," she said.

Alex was stunned now. 'What's going on? Was her mind wiped? Did my existence erase from her memories? Did she suffer from a Qi deviation?'

Alex's mind went everywhere when Du Yuhan placed a hand on his shoulder. "I think I get what is going on," he said. "Luo Mei had made an off-hand comment about this once."

"What do you mean?" Alex asked.

Du Yuhan ignored him and looked at the woman in front of him. "You're not Meng Yun, are you?" he asked.

The woman shook her head. "I'm her sister, Meng Fei," the woman said.

Du Yuhan pat Alex as he said, "you were speaking with her twin."

"I… see," Alex was still stunned, only now the reason had changed. "So when I said your young lady, you meant…"

"Lady Luo Xing," she said.

Alex finally realized where the problem lied and laughed a bit. "I'm sorry for the confusion. I'm sister Luo Mei's junior disciple brother. Can you let her know I am here?" he asked.

"Of course," Meng Fei said and quickly walked into the house.

Alex and Du Yuhan waited a bit before a woman in a pretty blue dress walked out of the house.

In the last 10 years, she had grown and matured, but she didn't seem to have aged a bit.

Her black hair that shined with a hint of blue was longer than he ever remembered it, and her blue eyes popped that much more due to it.

Her fair skin remained ever untarnished as she walked out into the sunlight.

When she looked to the front of the house and saw Alex standing there, her eyes visibly moistened.

"Junior brother?" she called out, just to make sure what she was looking at was real.

"Sister!" Alex called back as he was really happy to see her as well.

Luo Mei realized that he really was her junior brother so she immediately ran out and hugged him tightly.

"You're back!" she cried out as tears began flowing down her face.

"Yes, I'm back," Alex said as he hugged her back as well.

Du Yuhan remained behind as he watched the two. "I wish you would someday be that happy to see me too," he said.

Luo Mei's tears vanished when she heard him and immediately let go of Alex. Only then did she realize Du Yuhan was there as well.

"Wh-what are you doing here?" she asked with a trembling voice.

Du Yuhan could only give her a sad smile in response. "Hello, Meimei."

Chapter 774: Indecisive

Shi Nangong walked out of the manor a little after her daughter. She looked to the front to see Alex and couldn't help but be surprised.

"Mei'er, what are you doing keeping your brother at the door? Quickly bring him in," She said.

Luo Mei found the opportunity to skip out of this awkward situation with Du Yuhan, so she followed what her mother said.

"Come on in."

She let the two of them walk into the house.

"It's good to see you, Senior Nangong," Alex greeted her, and so did Du Yuhan.

"It's good to see you two too," she said. "Also, call me Aunt. No need to call me senior."

"Okay, aunt Nangong," Alex said.

"Anyway, I haven't seen you in a decade, how are you doing, young man?" she asked.

"I'm doing fine," Alex said.

"And you? The last time we saw you we had to ask you to leave. How are you doing?" she asked Du Yuhan.

"I… I'm doing alright, I guess," Du Yuhan said.

Alex looked at the two awkwardly. 'Asked to leave? What happened?' he wondered.

"Don't worry, nephew Yu. It was nothing serious. It wasn't that we didn't welcome him, but that our daughter didn't want to meet him so she asked us to ask him to leave on her behalf."

"Were it for us, we would have never asked him to leave," Shi Nangong said.

Luo Mei walked in the front, not daring to show her face when this particular subject was being talked about.

The four of them walked over to the living room where they were made to sit on the magnificent sofa that was there.

Luo Mei and Shi Nangong sat on the other side.

Alex looked around the room and asked, "where's Uncle Keng and Sister Xing?"

"My husband is on a business trip. He should return in 2 to 3 days, so if you stay you might be able to meet him."

"As for Xing'er, I'm afraid she's an elder at her sect and won't be returning for a few good years," Shi Nangong said.

"Junior brother," Luo Mei interjected. "Where were you all this time? Were you really captured by the beasts? What about Pearl? Is he alright?"

Alex laughed a little as he realized he was going to have to tell the story of the last 10 years all over again.

However, since the audience was new, he told everything all over again.

"There's an empire beyond the forest?" Shi Nangong asked with a horrified face.

"Did you not know aunt Nangong?" Alex asked.

"No. How could we?" she asked.

"Did sister not tell you?" he asked.

"I… I didn't even think it was possible for you to go to the other empire," she said. "I mean people did mention it, but how could you have escaped the Saint beasts?"

"So I never even thought of the other empire from that point forth," Luo Mei said.

"Well, at least you are back now. What do you plan on doing? You're an Alchemist, right? You can become an alchemist in the capital," Shi Nangong said.

"I… I don't plan on staying here for much," Alex said. "In just 2 or 3 months, I will be returning."

"Eh? You're going back?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I can take you along if you want."

"I…" Luo Mei glanced at Du Yuhan quickly before returning back to Alex. "I don't think I want to."

Shi Nangong sighed. "Nephew Yu, how are your medical skills? Have they improved?" she asked.

"I would say so, yes," Alex said.

"Oh great! I have had this really bad pain in my back for a few days, can you help me check it?" she said.

"Umm, sure," Alex said.

"Come, come. You can check me in the other room," Shi Nangong said and took Alex away.

As Alex walked away, he saw Luo Mei's eyes flash with panic while Du Yuhan looked thankful.

After going a little further away, Alex asked, "Are you really in need of my help, aunt Nangong?" he asked.

"Hehe, of course not. I just want the two lovebirds to talk it out," she said.

"I thought so," Alex said. "Do you know what's wrong with those two? Brother Yuhan said a bit, but I don't know if you know sister's end of the deal."

"She's just confused right now," Shi Nangong said. "Her heart is in two places and she can't decide what to do."

"In two places? Is she in love with someone else?" Alex asked.

"Not someone, something. Ever since she was young, we talked about how talented she was and how great she would be in the future."

"So, she doesn't know if she wants to focus on cultivation or love," Shi Nangong said.

"Oh," Alex said. "I honestly thought it would be more serious. So it's just that."

"Well, it's supposed to be just that, but this girl is so indecisive that she's let the young man wait for her for nearly 5 years."

"If she doesn't make a choice this time, I'm going to force her to," Shi Nangong said with a surprising amount of annoyance in her voice.

However, Alex couldn't argue against her as he did feel that way too after hearing what was going on.

'If both of them truly love each other, then they should just talk and work it out,' he thought.

"Well, since I already brought you away, want to tell me more about yourself? Do you have someone you love?" Shi Nangong asked.

"No," Alex said. There wasn't a single hesitation in him at all. As far as he understood himself, he didn't even have a crush on anyone.

"Well, you should try and find someone for yourself too. You should be 30 too right. Only a few years before you are considered adult," Shi Nangong said.

"Let's see what life has," Alex said while hiding a chuckle to himself. He didn't want to tell her what she got wrong about him since there was no way of knowing it without him telling her.

'That is true though,' he thought. 'I should be about 30 right now. At least, the other me. I wonder if he is doing fine and if he found someone to marry. 30 is very close to the time to get married.'

A woman walked up to the two of them and Alex recognized her, or so he thought.

"Oh, I heard you were back young lord," the woman bowed to greet him.

"Um… Meng Yun?" he asked. He still wasn't sure if there was a way to distinguish the two twins.

"Yes, it's me," Meng Yun said.

"Oh, hi. How are you doing? How's life?" Alex started making small conversation.

Shi Nangong took the chance to leave and go back to her own work of handling the manor and the business in the absence of her husband.

People came in one by one to ask for stuff, and she needed to be there to handle it.

As Alex and Meng Yun talked, with Meng Yun always calling him 'young lord', Alex heard someone walk towards them.

When Alex turned to see, it was Meng Fei.

"Sister," Meng Fei hurriedly came up to Meng Yun.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

Meng Fei came close to Meng Yun and whispered, "he's back."

"Who is back?" Alex asked.

"I'm sorry. No time to explain," Meng Yun said as her spiritual sense spread out in search for Luo Mei. When she found her, she sent a message directly.

"Is there a problem?" Alex asked.

"Not one you should worry about," Meng Yun said, but Alex wasn't listening. Spiritual sense spread from him like a barrier from an activated formation.

He sensed every entity that was currently in the house, and that included a man that was very audaciously entering the house.

Alex saw the face, but he had never seen him before.

Alex also saw the anger flare in his sister's eyes and knew this wasn't just some guy.

"Who's he?" Alex asked.

"He's Tian Chen, son of the Tians," Meng Yun said. "They are a rival merchant family and have been trying to join hands with the master for a while now."

"One of the ways they are trying is by asking young lady's hand in marriage. Every so often he comes to court young lady, but—"

"Does sister like him?" Alex asked.

"She hates him," Meng Yun said.

"Well, that's all I need to know."

Chapter 776: An Easier Way

Alex carried the unconscious Tian Chen through the street while people looked at him weirdly.

Those that did recognize the young master of the Tian family couldn't help but secretly run off to tell people about what they were seeing.

Alex ignored the people on the path and walked for nearly fifteen minutes before he arrived at a green manor with the word 'Tian' written on the front gate.

When Alex looked closely at the manor, he realized that the green was mostly just vines growing all throughout the walls, giving it an illusion of actually being painted green.

The men and women at the gate immediately ran to Alex to check on their young master.

"Young master, Chen? Are you okay?" they called him but he was out cold. Alex's mental strength was way too strong for him to handle right now so he would continue to remain unconscious for another half an hour unless someone used some treasure.

"What happened to our young master?" the servants asked Alex.

"He went unconscious, so I had to carry him here," Alex said.

"What? How? Why did he go unconscious? Was he poisoned?" the men and women started asking. At the same time, some of them had already left to inform the master of the house.

"No, he was being an idiot, so I made him unconscious," Alex said with a genuine smile on his face.

Meng Yun's eyes flashed with a hint of worry. She was brought all the way here and now he was saying things that were just going to make people attack him.

"You hurt our young master?" the servants asked.

"Yes, now where's your master. I didn't come all the way here to bring this bastard home. I'm here to talk to his father," Alex said as he walked through the gate.

The men tried shouting at him to stop and some even pointed spears and swords at him, but Alex simply put Tian Chen's body in front of him and walked through the weapons.

The servants hurriedly backed away, not wanting to hurt their young master.

"Where's my son?" a loud voice came from inside. A gruff, middle-aged man with the same hawkish face, but with a messy beard walked out of the manor.

"What are you doing to my son?" the man demanded.

"Nothing," Alex said as he walked straight toward the man. "I'm just here to talk to you about what your son is doing, senior. Would you mind speaking with me inside?"

Alex didn't wait for the man to respond as he walked in. Meng Yun didn't understand what was happening, but she too walked into the manor.

Tian Fuzhen was too confused about what was going on to even begin to stop Alex. Only when he realized that a stranger had entered his house did he finally follow.

Alex's spiritual sense went throughout the house looking through everything.

'As expected,' he thought. These people truly were weak. A Merchant house such as this would have True Emperor realm guards at the very least.

A bigger one would have a low-tier Saint realm employed to the job. In the Crimson Empire, the best mid-tier merchant house such as this could afford a low-tier True King at best.

"Who are you? If you don't answer right now, I will kill you," Tian Fuzhen started shouting the moment he saw Alex.

"You can try," Alex said as he dropped Tian Chen to the ground. "Did you know that your son has been going after the Luo family's girl despite her clear refusal?"

Tian Fuzhen immediately went to check on his son and was glad to find he was fine. More and more members of the Tian family were gathering at the spot, and Tian Fuzhen turned around to speak.

"So my son is trying to find himself a woman. What does that have to do with you?" Tian Fuzhen asked.

"Well, she happens to be my senior sister and she definitely does not want to be his woman. So, I'm here to tell you to keep your son in check. Next time they come by they might end up with broken bones, or at worse, dead," Alex said.

Tian Fuzhen's anger was peaking. Meng Yun saw this and didn't know what to do, but Alex's words entered her mind. 'Take a few steps back.'

She immediately did as told and backed a bit giving them some room.

"You bastard!" Tian Fuzhen brought out a spear as he slammed the butt of it onto the marble below him, cracking it into many pieces.

"You dare threaten me in my own house? You are looking to die," Tian Fuzhen said. At the same time, the people from the house surrounded Alex.

"I suggest you don't attack me," Alex said.

"Scared? I'm glad. That will be the last thing you feel before you die," Tian Fuzhen shouted as his spear started glowing red. Fire Qi entered the spear and a fire serpent moved around the spear's blade.

The old man Tian then thrust the spear directly at Alex, with all the power that he could muster with his True King 4th realm cultivation base.

BANG!

The spear struck Alex straight in the chest.

Tian Fuzhen smiled for a second before he noticed no sign of injury on Alex. Yes, his clothes had been pierced but it wasn't soaked in blood yet.

He tried to pull back the spear to see the wound he had caused. However, before he could do so, Alex directly grabbed the blade of the spear.

He didn't just grab the flat side, but everything.

"Sigh," he shook his head. "Brother Shen was right. I tried to make sense with words but sometimes it's far easier to beat someone and make them understand you."

CRACK~

The blade crumbled to pieces under Alex's clutch, he immediately struck Tian Fuzhen in the chest. Tian Fuzhen stumbled back as he clutched his chest in pain.

He barely opened his eyes enough to see that his beloved spear was now fully destroyed. This was a True Earth spear, and somehow it was… Tian Fuzhen started feeling very scared.

"Kill him!" he shouted in his pain and fear.

The men were entranced for a second, but the scream from their master brought them back to reality and they jolted into action.

Alex sighed, but there were too many to simply use Heaven's impact to knock them all out.

He used Heaven's impact on the first person that ran at him with a spear. He stepped aside for the man to drop down and at the same time dodged the second person's sword swing.

At the same time, he punched the 3rd person's incoming spear and caught the 4th person's sword with his other hand.

The sword crumbled in Alex's hand and so did the spear he punched. Alex reached behind the second man's neck as a sword appeared in his hand.

He slashed the sword through the man's neck but it didn't cut him at all. After all, it was a sword created by Alex's imagination.

Even then the man fell unconscious as if being hit by Heaven's impact. The spiritual damage the spiritual sword did as it passed through a person's spine was enormous compared to making the meridians lethargic when it went through limbs.

The sword had no one that could stop it so Alex casually dodged the attacks that were coming after him and danced through the crowd as his fake sword carved its way through the crowd.

Many swords and spears hit him, but the most they could do was cut his clothes.

Tian Fuzhen watched with wide-eyed horror as everywhere Alex moved through, people would fall to the ground as if dead. He saw no weapon in his hand, so he couldn't tell what technique he was using. Whatever it was, it was horrifying.

He looked at his son that was on the floor too and couldn't help but wonder if that was what had happened to him as well. He feared for his son's survival.

Finally, Alex was done with the many people and walked towards Tian Fuzhen.

Before Fuzhen could say anything, Alex used the spiritual sword to cut off all of his limbs so that he couldn't produce much power from his cultivation base.

Then he let go of the sword and crouched down in front of Tian Fuzhen. "So, senior, about our little talk. Please make sure your son doesn't bother my sister ever again. I won't be so kind next time."

Chapter 777: Justice

Alex returned back to the Luo family manor in a good mood.

He was really happy about getting to test how strong the Spiritual sword was on humans now.

'Well they were weak, but it's still a good test,' he thought to himself.

Meng Yun had no idea what to say the whole time she walked behind Alex and didn't plan on saying anything either.

The two of them then arrived back in the manor and walked in.

"Where were you two? We searched around everywhere," Luo Mei asked.

"I went out for a little something," Alex said.

Luo Mei's eyes narrowed. "What did he do?" she asked Meng Yun.

"Young lord threatened the Tian family to not let their son come after you again," Meng Yun said without hesitation.

"What? Did you go to those bastards? Are you okay? They didn't hurt you right?" she asked.

"I'm fine. They can't hurt me," Alex said.

"Still, they have True King realm culti—"

"I know," Alex interrupted her. "They can't hurt me." He smiled at her. "You guys finished talking right? Come on, I have a few things I need to talk to you about."

Luo Mei went along with her junior brother to the other room where they talked about more things. Luo Mei wanted to see how the little cat had grown, but unfortunately, Alex had to leave Pearl back before coming here.

Alex then tested Luo Mei's spiritual roots and was glad to find that she did indeed have some weak Earth roots. So, he handed her the pill to improve it.

That was the final pill he had, and after this, there would be no more unless he found a Corrosive Willow tree or something that had similar energy as the bark.

As the group talked with each other, night fell soon and they all retreated to their quarters.

Alex and Du Yuhan were led to their own guest room where they rested overnight.

The next morning Alex opened his eyes to come knocking on the door. He quickly unlocked the door to see Meng Yun's panicked face in front.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Old man Tian is here," she quickly told him. Alex spread his spiritual sense and saw him in the backyard, sitting opposite Luo Mei and Shi Nangong in the garden. Not only that, there was someone else next to them that he didn't think he had seen before this.

"I'll go there," Alex said and hurriedly left. Not long after he was walking out of the door into the garden.

Tian Fuzhen flinched a little when he saw Alex walk out. Due to his reaction, Shi Nangong and Luo Mei also noticed him walk out.

The final man turned his head to look at Alex. This was a younger man, around the same age as his elder disciple brother.

He had a thin line of mustache but no beard. He also had a prominent nose that stuck out beyond the normal amount.

Alex sensed his cultivation base and realized he was at the end of the True King realm.

'A strong one,' he thought. 'A guard?'

He walked up to the group and sat down on one of the empty seats. "I didn't expect to see you so soon, senior," Alex said.

"You think you won't see me after what you did?" the old man Tian sneered at Alex.

Alex ignored him and turned to the young man next to him. "And who is this senior?" Alex asked.

"This it City lord Fu," Shi Nangong introduced. "City Lord, this is my daughter's disciple brother, Yu Ming."

"So you are the young man that wreaked havoc in the Tian family yesterday?" he asked.

"Not intentionally," Alex said. "He attacked first. I only went there to talk."

"Nonsense. You hurt my son first," Tian Fuzhen shouted out loud.

"Who was being extraordinarily rude to my sister. Is that how you've taught your children to act, senior?" Alex asked.

"Young man, you went to his home and attacked him. You will need to face punishment for this," the city lord said.

"Yes, city lord. Thank you," Tian Fuzhen said. He was still afraid of Alex, but not when the city lord was around. After all, who could offend someone from the royal Fu family?

"City Lord, you can't do this. My brother was not in the wrong. It was Tian Chen that came to our house first and was rude to me and others. Why isn't he being punished here?" Luo Mei asked.

"This is not about him," Tian Fuzhen spoke up. "Its about this bastard coming to our house and—"

Alex's cultivation base suddenly exploded as it fell upon Tian Fuzhen. "Just because I call you senior doesn't mean you get to walk all over me and call me a bastard. Next time you say anything that offends me, see if I don't break your arms."

"You!" Sweat started appearing on Tian Fuzhen's forehead.

"Are you willing to talk now? " Alex asked. "Or do you still want justice?"

"Young man, you—" the city lord was just about to speak up when he suddenly felt something powerful crash upon him.

Alex had let his cultivation base fall upon him too. "I'm not talking with you." Alex didn't even look at the man as he continued staring at Tian Fuzhen.

"Make an oath to the heavens that you will never let your son interact with my sister again."

Tian Fuzhen only glared at him and did nothing as he waited for the city lord to help. However, the City Lord himself was in trouble as he couldn't move or even begin to use the power of his cultivation base despite it being so much better than Alex's.

Seeing Tian Fuzhen not speak up, Alex decided to act to make him speak. He suddenly grabbed his arm by the wrist and brought it up to his eye level.

"Say the oath that you will never let your son come close to my sister," Alex said. "Or else."

Alex didn't need to say any further. Tian Fuzhen remembered the sword from yesterday and knew what would happen if he refused.

He didn't really understand what Alex wanted, but he did it anyway.

"I swear…"

"To the heavens," Alex reminded.

"… to the heavens that I will keep my son from ever approaching you sister," he said.

Alex felt the slight disturbance in the air as Qi moved into the old man Tian.

"Good," Alex let go of the arm. "Now you can go."

Tian Fuzhen looked dumbfoundedly as he felt the subtle tightness in his chest.

"What did you do?" he shouted.

"What do you mean? I did nothing. You were the one that made an oath to the heavens," Alex said. "If you break it, the Heaven will punish you. At that time, you will either go through Qi deviation, be crippled, or worse simply die. How's that for justice?"

Tian Fuzhen remained in his seat completely horrified at what he had been just made to do. He didn't know if what Alex said was true or not, but in his heart, he could tell it was true.

Alex finally lifted his cultivation aura from the city lord and turned. "Do you have something to say?"

Chapter 778: Making Memories

The city lord froze there in fear. He was sure that tucking his tail and walking away was the logical thing to do here, but would someone of the Fu family really do that?

"I'll give you an out," Alex said after seeing the man fall into a dilemma. "As we've been telling you. This man's son has been harassing my sister, coming into the house uninvited, and has been in general very rude."

"This is your chance to do something about this situation." Alex looked at him.

The city lord gave a small self-mocking smile as he said, "you're right. I should get to the root of this problem. Thank you for showing me the way."

He then stood up and apologized to the mother and daughter duo for ruining their morning. "Let's go." He took the dazed Tian Fuzhen and left the house.

Luo Mei looked at Alex with a blank face. "What's your cultivation now?" she asked.

"True King 7th realm," Alex said nonchalantly.

Both Shi Nangong and Luo Mei gaped in surprise. "That high?" she couldn't believe it.

Alex talked to them for a bit, making them understand that their annoying rival wasn't going to cause problems.

He told them about the oaths and how they worked. That was one more thing he could teach to this empire, but he didn't want to as that would probably cause more trouble around here.

Luo Mei couldn't help but feel amazing starting that day. Her love life was fixed, the annoying childhood friend no longer came, and her junior brother who hadn't come home in over 10 years was back.

She couldn't be happier.

That day, she took both of them around the city, showing the various landscapes and scenic places around the city.

She took them to the market where the Luo family's merchant group was situated. She then took them to a small auction that was held in the open market every day.

There was nothing to be found there, but Alex did manage to find some good memories.

They returned back after traveling some more and then came the most important question that Du Yuhan had been meaning to ask after Luo Mei told him to hold off on the marriage.

"Will you come back to the sect with me?" he asked.

"The sect?" Luo Mei hesitated. "But… I left so abruptly. Will they even accept me back?"

"You forget that you are one of the best students of the sect. Not to mention I'm the sect master's disciple. They will have to accept you back," Du Yuhan said.

"Don't worry, sister," Alex told her. "If all else fails, I will just take over the sect and have you join it."

"That…" Du Yuhan didn't know how to respond to that. That was an open threat to the sect and the elders.

Alex chuckled a bit. "I'm joking. Geez, you guys think I'm some blood-thirsty demon now?"

"Sigh, I think it's time to go rest," Du Yuhan said.

"You guys go. I don't think I want to rest tonight," Alex said.

"What will you be doing?" she asked.

"Oh, you know. Ingredients gathering and such," Alex explained. "I doubt anyone has really disturbed this side of the forest, so I might find some rare plants."

"Who knows, I might even find a Spirit Cleansing lily," Alex said. "See you tomorrow."

Alex left the manor. He really did plan to go to the forest, but first, he decided to take a detour and see how things were going.

He turned invisible and flew directly over to the Tian family. Once there, his spiritual sense spread in all directions as he looked to see how the people there were acting.

Tian Fuzhen seemed to be in an incredibly bad mood, while Tian Chen was practically grounded for a while. It seemed the city lord had in fact done his job.

Alex still waited for a bit. The oath he had made Tian Fuzhen had no clause about not attacking the Luo, so Alex waited to see if they planned something like that.

Fortunately, the old man wasn't that stupid and was trying to forget his embarrassment with alcohol.

"Well, that's that then."

Alex flew over to the forest after that and spent the entire night searching for ingredients.

Since he directly went over to the area where the True realm beasts roamed, the ingredient he found were also ones that had been growing for a while, so he had a really good chance of finding rare ingredients.

To his surprise, Alex did find 3 extra Spirit Cleansing Lily in the entire night he was there.

One of those had to be for his mother, he thought. The other two, he decided not to give anyone else one as they would already have it.

'I'll keep it for the future,' Alex thought.

He found some more True rank ingredients, but he didn't find a single Saint rank ingredient.

That was to be expected. There was barely any Saint Qi on this side of the forest.

There weren't even any Saint spirit veins in this empire except for maybe one or two here and there. Those spirit veins were mostly occupied by big sects and families.

The Fu family definitely had that as no Saint rank cultivator could progress without it. As for the others, Alex wasn't sure.

All he was sure that there was no Saint rank Spirit vein in a massive radius around this place, and that meant the inexistence of anything Saint rank.

Alex returned back around 8 am in the morning and talked about his haul from the forest. They were surprised how many ingredients he got from the forest, but they weren't alchemists, so they didn't know if that was a big amount or not for a single trip.

Later that day, Luo Keng returned home to find his benefactor back.

"Nephew Yu? You're back?" the man was surprised. He wasn't told anything about any of this during his trip so it was understandable.

However, what shocked him, even more, was what his wife told him about what had happened in his absence.

"That bastard Tian dares?" Luo Keng got angry.

"It's already settled. Your nephew took care of it," Shi Nangong told her husband while trying to get him to not get worked up for nothing.

"Still, I'm surprised how strong nephew Yu has come to be. He's stronger than me right?" Luo Keng asked.

"Of course he is. He spent 10 years in a foreign empire. How could he not come back strong?" Luo Mei said.

"Yes, yes, you're proud of your junior brother, we get it," Luo Keng said, and made Luo Mei sit back down.

The group talked for a bit before Luo Keng took Du Yuhan away to talk on his own.

"You told them about leaving?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I told mother yesterday and she's okay with it. Hell, she's happy I'm not staying around doing nothing," she said.

"Great, when do you plan on leaving then?" Alex asked.

"Whenever you want," she said.

Alex looked back at Shi Nangong sipping tea alone and said, "let's stay for 2 more days then. We can leave after that."

Chapter 779: Passage of Time

After staying there for 2 more days, Alex and Du Yuhan returned back to the Tiger sect. Only this time, they also had Luo Mei with them.

The moment they landed in the Scarlet city, they immediately went to the sect to give master the good news.

"Mei'er, you're back?" Wen Cheng was surprised.

"Yes, master. And I won't be leaving for a long while," she said. The master-disciple reunion lasted for a little while.

Luo Mei then met up with Liu Xun and there was a warm welcome for her from her elder disciple brother as well.

After that , he got her paperwork and some other things done. Finally, after all that, Alex took her to meet his mother.

"Aunt Lin, it's good to finally meet you." Luo Mei showed proper respect as she bowed towards Helen.

"Oh hello. Wow, you're pretty. So you are his senior sister, huh? I've been wanting to meet you ever since I heard about you. Come tell me more about yourself." Helen instantly took a liking to Luo Mei and started a conversation with her.

Luo Mei mentioned her surprise at the fact that Alex even had a family, but when she really thought about it all and remembered about the players, it did start to make sense.

Luo Mei had never seen Alex as a player, but at some point, she too had come to accept it for the truth. It didn't make any impact on who he was now that most of the players had properly integrated into the society, but it did give a window to his past and why he was the way he was.

"Hello!" Pearl jumped up at the familiar face too.

"Oh… wow," Luo Mei's surprise was muddled with confusion. "How has he not grown in the last 10 years?" she looked to Alex.

"He has." Ale turned towards Pearl. "Pearl, show her the big you," he said.

"Okay!" Pearl instantly changed his size and grew bigger in size until he was large enough to be the size of a normal True beast.

"What the!" Luo Mei stumbled back a bit in surprise. Helen simply chuckled as she remembered being this surprised as well when Pearl had first transformed for her.

"Small Pearl is much better," she told him as she rubbed his back. So, Pearl once again changed his size to that of a kitten again.

Alex left the girls to talk and went over to the Hong Wu sect to meet up with his Martial uncle again.

He also met up with his other friends and checked what they were doing. They were all practicing alchemy just the way he had taught them so their progress was fairly visible.

Just using his recipes, they were able to consistently get heaven grade pills. If they improved on their techniques, soon they would get higher numbers until they too could make Immortal rank.

It took the first person in that group exactly 20 days to make the first Immortal grade pill.

By the end of the first month, they had all successfully made Immortal grade pills shocking everyone to their core. Making Heaven grade pills alone was considered super difficult for them, and here they were making Immortal rank pill so very easily.

They were now realizing just how much knowledge they were missing regarding alchemy. If they improved it further and could teach it to everyone in the sect, they would certainly be the best alchemy sect in the entire empire.

Around the same time, Qin Shan arrived in the Scarlet city and found his disciple. After a month of being in the sect, Helen was starting to get bored as well, so Qin Shan took her, and Pearl with him to roam the rest of the empire.

Alex diligently cultivated during this time and also helped train some of his friend. He would fight them whenever they wanted so he could help them hone their skills.

Days passed slowly and with Alex being done with teaching them everything he wanted, it was slowly approaching his time to return.

So, after 2 more months, Alex was ready to leave.

Things got emotional again as everyone gathered to say their goodbyes. Wen Cheng, Luo Mei, Liu Xun, Du Yuhan, Wan Li, Zhou Mei, Fan Ruogang, Lang Shun, Kong Yuhan, Zhou Mi, and finally, Qiu Ju, the current sect master of the Tiger sect gave them a farewell.

Alex held back his tears as he waved his hands and promised to come back soon. He promised to be back once a year at least.

Qin Shan brought out his boat and everyone boarded as they got ready to leave.

"Goodbye everyone," Alex said one last time and zoomed off into the distance.

"Are you okay?" Helen asked.

"Yes, I'm fine." Alex smiled at her.

Helen rubbed his head. "You'll be fine."

Within a few hours, around the middle of the day, the group reached back to the teleportation formation and saw a few people already there.

Fu Wen had arrived to the capital a week or so earlier with his wife and was now waiting to go with them to the other empire.

"Are you guys ready?" Alex asked the city lord and his wife.

"Yes, we've already said our goodbyes," Fu Wen said. Mo An held her little child in her hand.

"If you are ready, then we can leave soon." Alex then turned to look at the figure that was standing a little far away from the formation platform.

Alex went and greeted the Emperor.

"So you weren't here forever, huh?" he asked.

"No, your majesty. I was always going to return," Alex said.

"The other side must be quite amazing then if you are willing to leave behind your friends and families to go back," the Emperor said.

"It's not better exactly, more so challenging," Alex told him. "It helps one reach their potential much better. Although yeah, the Qi there is better too and much easier to cultivate in."

"I see. I hope I will get to go there sometime too. However, its hard when you're an emperor."

Alex nodded. "I'm sure you'll find a way, your majesty," Alex said. He gave a bow to dismiss himself and walked back on the platform.

"Senior, please activate it," Alex requested the jaguar.

The jaguar brought out a medallion from his storage armband and activated the formation. A while glow enveloped them all and in the next second, they vanished.

When the group reappeared, they found themselves in the glowing cavern.

"Where are we?" Fu Wen asked with a look of surprise on his face. "Are those…"

"Spirit Veins," Alex said. "We should keep going."

Alex felt the stark difference in Qi between the forest in the Crimson empire and inside the Beast realm.

'Its just too vast,' he thought. He couldn't help but plan on something spontaneous.

"Mother," he spoke up.

"Yes?" Helen turned around as she was about to walk away.

"I think you guys should leave on your own," Alex said.

"What do you mean on our own?" Qin Shan asked from the side.

Alex looked around and felt the grandness of where he was. "I want to stay behind and cultivate here."

Chapter 780: Training

Alex made Qin Shan take Fu Wen and his wife and child back to the DawnSpring city, from where they would take the teleportation formation to wherever the Fu family was.

After that, they would be on their own to find their parents. Alex wouldn't be responsible for them afterward, but he still hoped they made it there safe and sound. After all, they had a very young child with them.

Alex trained for a while that day and returned back to his room. 'Not yet,' he thought. It would still be a few weeks until he was ready for a breakthrough.

Still, Alex diligently cultivated, along with Pearl by his side. Alex was particularly hopeful that Pearl's breakthrough would come at any moment too.

When he did, Pearl too would enter the True Emperor realm.

As they were cultivating, someone knocked on the door.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense outside without opening his eyes and saw someone standing there. A smile rose on his face as he tapped on Pearl.

"Get up, we have a visitor."

Pearl opened his weary eyes and looked around. "Who's here?" he asked.

"Why don't you open the door?" Alex gestured him forward.

Pearl went up to the door without question and pulled on the handle.

"Sister!" Pearl's eyes went wide and his smile large when he saw the one that stood on the other side of the door.

"Pearl! I missed you." A female black jaguar said with a happy smile on her face.

"Sister Yao, I'm glad to meet you again," Alex said.

"Oh human child, you really are back? You are not still angry are you?" Yao Jia asked.

"Oh no, of course not," Alex said. "Well, maybe a little with the other senior, but not with the rest."

"With uncle Cheng? Well, you don't have to worry about him. He's gone into closed cultivation after learning you are here. He was scolded quite badly after his— what am I saying?" Yao Jia stopped abruptly. "Nevermind. Anyway, how have you been? You wanna go visit the garden?"

"Sure," Alex said and walked out with her.

Alex went out to the garden and sat around for a while. Immediately, a few of the beasts recognized him and walked over as they started roaring.

"Wha-what's going on?" Alex asked.

"Oh, they want pills. They remember you making pills and they're asking if you have some," Yao Jia said.

"Yeah, he says his father's knees are injured and would love for some pills," Pearl said. "That one says he had headaches all the time. That one said he can't breakthrough properly."

"Do they?" Alex sighed. "Fine, I will work on their pill as long as they can get me something precious."

"Should I tell them that?" Yao Jia asked, to which Alex gave a weird face. "Right, I should tell them that."

After the beasts went away, Alex and Yao Jia talked for a while. As they did, Alex brought up the question he had been meaning to ask for a while now.

"Hey, you once mentioned that you learned the human language right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Yao Jia said.

"But it was the Demon's language, was it not?"

Yao Jia shook her head. "Demon, human, same thing. You can't even tell the difference most of the time," she said.

"Yes, what I was meaning to ask you is you said you had a way to learn the Human language too right?" Alex asked.

"Oh yeah, I was planning to do that, wasn't I?" Yao Jia thought to herself. "Hmm… There should be some books in the library. Why, do you want to read it?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Alright, I will ask my father and get it to you if he agrees. What do you want to do in the meantime?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit. "Do you think your father will agree to fight with me for training?"

And so began Alex's 2 month-long training session. Every morning, he would wake up from his cultivation session with Pearl.

Then he would go to train with the Jaguar in the morning. He would fight against the Saint-ranked beast with nothing held back and truly get the most out of his training.

Then, he would spend 3 or so hours in the afternoon focused on his Alchemy session to make pills for the beast.

Then, he would spend another 3 or so hours in self-training, where he practiced his techniques and helped Pearl practice with him.

After that, he would once more have a short training with the jaguar and then go back to cultivating.

He was a little sad to hear that he couldn't read the Human language just yet, but there was a good reason for it.

Apparently, all the books in the library were written in the beast language, another language Alex just came to learn about.

It wasn't a well-known language, so Alex didn't have to bother reading it at all. Besides, only the beasts could speak it anyway.

However, because it was another language that Alex didn't understand, Yao Jia had to now work day and night and create a new book from scratch that translated the Demon language to the Human language.

Since she didn't know the human language, she also had to learn it in the process to do so.

Because of that, Alex wasn't going to get the book for a long while.

Time passed soon and it approached the end of the 2nd month. Alex passed along the pills in return for alchemy materials or spirit stones that the beasts brought.

He was working at a loss certainly, but most of the common pills would be useless to him, so he was using the opportunity to clear them away from his storage.

Late that night, he trained with the Jaguar for a while until it came to an end.

Alex huffed as he sat down to the side while clearing his sweat from his forehead.

"You're getting better, much better," the Jaguar said.

"Thank you," Alex replied.

"If we were to fight on skill alone, you would have me beat a long time ago. Now, you just need to gain the cultivation," the jaguar said.

"I'm working towards it." Alex took a deep breath. "I'm already at True King 8th realm and will soon enter True King 9th realm. So, I will get there eventually."

"Still, I didn't expect you to fall behind the young lord considering you were ahead of him in cultivation by a long while," the Jaguar said.

"Well, Alchemy took most of my time, and that nearly year-long outing on the ice." Alex shook his head. "Pearl got ahead of me, and to be honest I'm quite happy for him."

"I'm happy too," the jaguar said. "I didn't think the young lord would become a True Emperor this early."

"Wouldn't he have been faster if he had gone through the ritual?" Alex asked.

"Not necessarily. Well, at least I didn't think so. But now that I know the young lord's potential, I can't say I will be surprised anymore."

"His potential?" Alex asked. "It's not the same as before?"

"It is, but I just didn't know it at the time," the jaguar said.

"What's different? Doesn't he still have the potential to become a White Tiger?" Alex asked.

"No, it's no longer just a potential. It's a given he will become a White Tiger someday. The Ritual will help accelerate it, but he will do it even without the ritual. Only that would take a lot of time," the jaguar said.

"I'm fine with it taking time," Alex said from the side. "Right, is Lady Ren ever gonna come out from her closed cultivation?"

The jaguar hesitated for a bit. "I'm afraid you won't see her for a while," the jaguar said.

'Shit, just how wounded was she from the Heavenly Judgment?' Alex wondered.

Yao Jia arrived next to them. "You guys are still training? Isn't it time to stop it?"

"We've already stopped, honey," the jaguar said. "anyway, you should go back to your room." The jaguar turned around and left.

"Right, I should," Alex said and stood up from the fighting area as well.

He looked back at the two jaguars that walked away and wondered why they were so human-like, so intelligent.

"Well, that's a question for another time, I suppose."

Chapter 781: Bloodlines

During the next half a month of training, Alex did come to learn the answer to the question he had been wondering.

Why are the beasts in the Beast realm so much more intelligent as compared to the beasts outside it. Not only were they intelligent, but some of them could also even fluently speak the human language.

When he asked about it the Jaguar, he had answered him the exact reason for it.

Apparently, the reason for a beast's intelligence had to do with its bloodline. The better the bloodline, the better one's intelligence would be.

Since the Beast realm had beasts with mostly better bloodline, they were more intelligent in general.

That made sense for Alex, but it had also raised another question in his mind. Why did the beasts outside the secret realm not have a better bloodline? Not all, but at least some of them should be vastly more intelligent, right?

That was when he learned what determined the strength of a bloodline. The bloodline always depended on the strength of its lineage.

A child of a Saint beast would always have a better bloodline than the child of a True beast even if the two of them were of the same bloodline.

Also, the bloodline would keep diluting as it went further down the line unless one could rise up to reach the same height as their ancestors.

Which for most beasts outside the beast realm was pretty much impossible. Because of this reason, Beasts that stayed in Qi-rich areas were always more intelligent than those that didn't in the long term.

After half a month had passed and Alex had trained every day, it was time for him to leave.

"I should go now. The registration should begin at any time, and I don't want to miss it," Alex told Yao Jia and the Jaguar.

"Alright, let's leave," the Jaguar said and took Alex to the teleportation platform on the other side of the palace underground.

They stood on top of the formation platform and the jaguar brought out the badge.

"Wait, father," Yao Jia hurriedly ran up to them. "Here."

Alex took what she had handed and saw a book in his hand. Even as he flipped through it, he realized what it was.

"You finished it?" he asked excitedly.

"Yes," Yao Jia said. "It was quite hard, but I did it."

"Thank you." Alex was very genuine. "It must have been difficult to translate it all."

"Eh, don't mention it. The translation wasn't that difficult. The most difficult part of it all was just writing the words."

"Do you know how many times I had to dip my claw in ink to write? Sigh, I'm never doing it again until I reach the immortal realm and can turn to a human form," She said.

"Thank you for this, seriously. You do not know how easy this will make my life now." Alex bowed towards her.

"Alright, I accept your thanks. Now leave, you don't want to be late right?" she asked.

"Yes, I will be back soon."

The formation activated and a white glow of light covered them as they disappeared from the palace and appeared outside.

The Jaguar quickly took Alex to the Dawnspring City which took them just about half a day with the Jaguar's speed.

'So slow,' Alex thought the entire time he was with him. 'This is nothing like what brother Shen Jing could do.'

Once they reached the DawnSpring city, Alex asked whether the jaguar could speed up even more or not.

"No, that's the fastest I can go. If I want to go any faster, I would have to break through some more," he said.

'Hmm, well here is two more realms at least above where the jaguar is, so maybe that's why,' he thought.

Alex then left the jaguar and secretly entered the Flowing Brush sect to meet his mother.

There, he also let Qin Shan know he was back.

"Oh, you really are here, good. It's only 2 weeks away from now," he told Alex.

"The competition? Good thing I came early then," Alex said.

"Yes, they have already started spreading information about the upcoming competition. I grabbed on for you, here. Read it."

Qin Shan handed him a talisman which Alex quickly read.

The talisman mentioned the date and time of the competition as well as the registration event.

Apparently, according to the talisman, they were going to have 1024 different participants in this year's competition.

For that, they had 16 registration areas from where they would gather exactly 64 participants.

"The closest one is in the Han Family home?" Alex asked after looking at the map.

"Yes, it seems so." Qin Shan nodded. "That would mean everyone from the nearby area will go to this place for registration, including the Heaven's Peak school.

"I see," Alex said. "I will have to prepare until then."

Alex stayed in cultivation for the next 2 weeks in his own room, without letting anyone know he was there.

The world still believed he was dead, so he didn't want to go out and create a distraction for himself just yet.

However, when the day of the registration arrived, Alex had to get out and leave for the Han family home.

He was already late as most disciples in the sect had already gone to register, but Qin Shan had come back for him. Qin Shan prepared his boat and Alex got on it. Then, the two of them flew towards the Han Family ground.

Alex watched the mountain turn to the plain as she flew by the side of the Dawnspring city and arrived in front of the Han family grounds.

The area was a massive place filled with a lot of buildings, all belonging to the Han Family.

There was a great open area in the center for people to train in, and today, it was filled with tents and makeshift stages.

Alex jumped off from Qin Shan's ship and landed outside the giant walls that were painted brown.

The word Han hung in the massive brown metal gate that was now fully open to accept the many people that were arriving.

Alex looked at the staff that was working and realized that it wasn't just members of the Han family. Rather people from everywhere were here to make sure that there wasn't any bias when it came to choosing participants that were to be registered.

Alex followed the group of young people that were led along by the staff towards the registration hall.

Alex watched the many people, most of whom were between 30 and 50 make their way along with him. He sensed their cultivation base and realized that majority of them were in the True Lord realm with quite a few True Kings and barely any True Emperor realm cultivators.

Soon, he arrived at a location where they were registering their information, so Alex got in a line.

Qin Shan had already left him to go wait somewhere, so he was alone in a sea of strange faces.

However, seeing everyone come here for the same thing made him feel like everyone was in this together.

The queue moved forward and Alex's turn came to give his information.

"Name and affiliation," the woman asked as she prepared a talisman to record his information.

"Yu Ming, no affiliation."

Chapter 782: Registration

"Yu Ming… and Rogue cultivator," the lady wrote. "Give me some identification for this."

"Here," Alex handed her his Alchemy badge that had the information written on it.

"What? You're from the Alchemy guild?" the woman looked at him with surprise.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Why didn't you say so? I will put that as affiliation." The woman went on to change the information, but…

"Stop." Alex stopped her. "I know what I said. I don't consider myself affiliated with anything in particular."

"So you really want to leave it blank? Being affiliated will help you, you know? You won't have to fight with people in your own organization early on," she said.

"Is that so?" Alex asked. He was surprised that was the case. Although it did make sense so as to not make allies fight so early in the tournament.

"I'll still go with blank," Alex told her.

"Well, your choice," she said. "Place your whole palm on the formation."

Alex nodded and did as told. As soon as he did so, the formation crackled and a bunch of information floated on top of it.

"27… and a True King 8TH REALM?" the woman's voice increased by a few octaves and decibels as she read the information that floated in front of her.

"Anything else you want to know?" Alex asked her seeing as she was too stunned to do anything else.

"No… no," the woman shook her head.

"Ok then, I'll go ahead." Alex started walking away.

"Wait!" the woman suddenly shouted from behind him.

"Yes?" Alex turned around.

"Here, your number for now," she said and handed him a number that read 314.

'I'm the 314th person to register today? So many,' he thought. He then thanked the woman and made his way towards the center square where there would be a test for the people to finally join the tournament.

The woman got back to doing her own thing now that Alex had left, but even as she did, a weird feeling arose in her heart.

'A 27-year-old alchemist called Yu Ming? Why does that name sound so…' her eyes suddenly went wide and she turned to look at Alex. However, he had already mingled with the crowd and disappeared.

'No way,' she thought. 'I heard he died though. Can it really be him?'

'I wonder what the test entails,' Alex on the other hand wondered as he walked up to the crowd.

When he got there, he saw someone appear and stage and get tested for their cultivation base. Alex watched a girl activate a formation that read the words True King 3rd realm for her.

The staff members recorded the information and sent her along. After that, they called another person using the number they were given. 122.

"Oh, it's that far already huh?" Alex couldn't help but say.

As more and more people kept being called, Alex suddenly felt a nudge on his shoulders.

He ignored it the first time, but when the nudge got stronger the second time around, he had to turn around to see who it was.

When he did, he met the eyes of two girls that had their hands to their mouth in shock.

"Alchemist Yu, is it really you?" Liang Qiu asked with utter shock on her face.

"It has to be him. Look, it is him," Han Daiyu said from the side. Aside from there, there were a few other disciples of the Han family and Heaven's Peak school, but Alex didn't recognize the rest.

"Hello, Sister Daiyu, Sister Liang, it's been a while," Alex said as he bowed a little towards them.

"It's been a while. of course, it has," Liang Qiu said.

"6 years really," Han Daiyu said. "I haven't seen you after you made our pills. Then suddenly, two years ago I hear you died. Why did you spread the false rumors?"

"Oh, I didn't spread any rumors," Alex said. "I really was missing, so they assumed dead. I only managed to escape from where I had been half a year ago and spent the rest of the time cultivating secretly."

"You were in a dangerous place?" Liang Qiu asked curiously.

"Yes, in the Icy hell." Alex nodded at her.

"Well, I'm glad you're alive. It would've been a tragedy if the greatest alchemist the empire has ever seen were to die just like that after winning the competition." She pat his shoulders.

"Oh right, let me introduce these people." Han Daiyu started introducing Alex to the rest of the people there who were immediately friendly since they had learned who he was.

No one wanted to be enemies with someone that was an Immortal Grade alchemist.

"Are you not with the Alchemist guild?" Liang Qiu asked.

"No, how did you know?" Alex asked.

"You're not wearing their colors," she said. "Why not?"

"I just didn't want to have anyone take credit for who I am. Those who deserve it aren't here, so I won't let others take their place."

Liang Qiu smiled. "That's admirable. Anyway, what's your number?"

Alex looked at his paper. "314. Yours?" he asked.

"These here are around 270, but we two don't have any numbers," Han Daiyu said.

"You guys aren't registering?" Alex asked.

"No, we don't need to," Liang Qiu said. "We are seeded into the top 128 even without having to register. That's a benefit of the reputation we've built as some of the strongest younger generations.

"Oh, how many of you are there?" Alex asked.

"Around 16 of us I believe." Han Daiyu gave a thoughtful look. "7 great clans, 4 great sects, 1 from the Royal disciples, and 4 very strong and popular folks from everywhere else."

"I see, you're quite lucky then," Alex said.

"It's no luck. It's all hard work," Han Daiyu corrected him.

"Right, sorry."

One of the people he was introduced to was called on stage and they all watched.

The man that was called managed to receive a True Emperor 2nd Realm assessment and was sent away. The crowd buzzed with hushed discussions at the man's cultivation base.

"That's a weird reaction from the people," Alex said. Sure a True Emperor 2nd realm was great, but it wasn't anything amazing. There would be a lot more of them here today. After all, some had been waiting for 20 years just for this competition.

"Ignore them, most of them are just jealous," Han Daiyu said from the side.

"Of course, but I just don't see the need to be jealous," Alex said. "It's not like he got that cultivation base without putting in work."

"Oh no, they're not jealous of the cultivation base at all," Liang Qiu said.

"They're… not?" Alex was confused now. "Why else would they be jealous then?"

"Because he just got to skip directly to be registered," she said.

"I don't understand." Alex urged for more information.

"Do you not know?" Liang Qiu asked. "If your cultivation base is in the True Emperor realm, you basically automatically join the tournament."

"And if it's not?" Alex asked.

"Well, if it's not then, you have to sit around with these people and go through a test to see if you have what it takes to join the tournament or not. That will take you quite a long time though."

Chapter 783: Entering the Han Family Manor

"What? I don't want to do that," Alex said. Sitting around just because of his cultivation base even though he knew he was stronger than many of those that had already passed didn't sit right with him.

"Can't they just get rid of the True Lord realm and make room for the True Kings only?" Alex asked. "That would at least get the test done much faster."

"Ah, you may not have seen it yet, but they are getting rid of the True Lords already. They just don't announce it yet," Liang Qiu said.

"They are?" Alex grumbled a little on the inside. "I guess I have nothing to complain about then."

"Well, judging by your cultivation base, I don't see anything you will have to worry about," Han Daiyu said.

"I guess that's true," Alex agreed, but he still didn't like staying around for a test for such a long time.

In the end, there was nothing he could do, so he had to sit quietly and wait for his turn.

Or did he?

Alex's number was soon called after and he walked onto the stage with a curious look on his face.

"Get on up," the tester said.

"Senior, I will be fighting with my beast, so would it be alright if I got my beast tested instead?" Alex asked.

"A beast? I didn't realize there were any Beast sects around here," the person said curiously. "Yes, of course, you can."

Alex smiled. "Pearl, come out," he said.

"Meow!" Pearl roared as he appeared on the stage as a meter-tall, 2-meter-long beast of a cat.

His True Emperor realm aura radiated off of him giving the tester a bit of a surprise. He hadn't expected a beast to be this much stronger than the owner.

'Their friendship much is quite amazing for the beast to not have broken its bonds already,' he thought.

"Pearl, walk up there," Alex told him and pointed towards the formation.

Pearl didn't speak at all and instead did as he was asked. He walked over to the formation and it soon said what it should.

True Emperor 1st realm.

"Great, you can leave," the tester said.

"Come, Pearl," Alex said, and Pearl turned into a white light that disappeared into his left arm.

"Number 315" the tester called for the next person waiting.

Alex smiled as he walked back over to the group he was standing with and looked at their surprised face.

"I should be done now, right?" he asked.

"You have a True Emperor realm beast? When did you bond it?" the girls immediately asked.

"Umm… about half a year ago. This big guy was dying in the snow, so I saved him and in exchange, he agreed to become my bonded beast," Alex said.

He didn't know why he lied about Pearl, but that felt like the right approach here. Given his age and cultivation base, sooner or later, people would figure out that he couldn't have bonded with a beast that was already in the high cultivation base.

Given that, the only way for him to have a beast with a high cultivation base would be either to bond with it very early when it was weak and then help grow it or simply bond with a strong beast later on.

With the first one, Pearl's potential would immediately be out in the open, making needless enemies that would want to take him away, so Alex thought it would be better to take advantage of the second scenario.

"Congratulations, I guess. I didn't think you would pass this early," Liang Qiu spoke up.

"Thanks." Alex smiled back at her. "So… do I leave now or do I have to wait?"

"We wait until they speak up the numbers of those that pass, but I don't think it will be for a while, so we can get out of this place," Han Daiyu said.

"Where would we even go?" Alex asked.

"Are you kidding me? You are in my house, I will be treating you. Come," Han Daiyu said and started walking away.

A few of the people started following her while Alex wasn't sure if he wanted to leave. "I am fine just waiting for my num—"

"Nonsense, if you won't come, there's no point," she said.

"Huh?" Alex was confused.

"I already messaged my family that you are alive, and they want to meet you," she said.

"Hah." Alex sighed and shook his head. He should have known this would happen. No, he did know this would happen, he just didn't expect it to happen this quickly.

"Okay then, let's go." Alex wanted to get it over with as soon as he could.

Han Daiyu excitedly took Alex to her brilliant mansion that she called her home.

Alex was awestruck at how amazing the place was.

Green grass surrounded the massive mansion that was full of brilliant colors all around. Men and women in brown robes walked all throughout the place.

As Alex entered, he felt the coolness of the place that was distinctly lower than outside and realized there was a formation around the place to keep the people cool.

The inside was filled with different arts and crafts, giving the place a more lived-in vibe than even the royal palace.

Han Daiyu made them walk through the hallway until they came across a room full of sofas.

"Sit, I'll tell the elders you are here." Han Daiyu left the lot to wait and went on.

"Tsk!" Liang Qiu clicked her tongue on the side.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"I'm a little jealous of her, or rather them. Right, would you come to our sect too after this?" she asked.

"Uhh… I don't know if I have the time. I will need to prepare for the competition," Alex said.

A minute or so later, Han Daiyu arrived back. "Alchemist Yu, the elders want to see you. Come with me."

Alex nodded and walked along with Han Daiyu through the wide hallways to a massive hall where multiple men and women were waiting for him.

Even at just a glance, Alex could tell that at least half the people there were in the Saint realm.

"This is the Alchemist Yu I told you all about," Han Daiyu introduced them.

"Greetings, seniors." Alex cupped his hand and bowed a little in front of the many strong elders of the Han Family.

He scanned the room with his eyes once more and noticed two people that he did recognize.

One of them was Han Hongqi whom he was familiar with, while the other one was a man that had similar features to Han Hongqi as well as Han Daiyu.

He had seen the man back in the competition ground when the Emperor had called upon him, and if he wasn't mistaken, this was Han Haixu, the eldest son of the Han family leader.

Speaking of which, Alex turned his head towards the heavily tanned and buff man with a bald, wrinkly head and gray beard, that sat in the seat at the center of the room.

The aura he gave off was stronger than anyone else in the room and his age was also the greatest.

Without a doubt, this was most certainly the Han family leader, Han Huaxian.

Chapter 784: Han Family Leader

"Welcome to our home, Alchemist Yu. We are glad to finally get the chance to meet you," Han Haixu spoke on behalf of all the Han family members present there.

The other elders nodded and gave warm smiles to Alex, but none of them spoke as it was out of turn for them.

"Thank you for having me, senior," Alex replied back.

"Young man," Han Huaxian started speaking. "I remember hearing a report about your winning in the alchemy competition. Apparently, you created a miracle out there. I must congratulate you on that."

"Thank you, senior," Alex respectfully bowed.

"But, then we also came to hear the tragic news of your death. I hear my sons were on the expedition to search you, but they never found you and so everyone assumed you had died," Han Huaxian said. "Can you tell us what happened exactly?"

"First of all, I would like to thank seniors for going out of your way to search for this junior. I thank you for that," Alex said. "As for why I wasn't found back then, it's simple."

"No one searched far enough."

Han Hongqi and Han Haixu's faces changed instantly as their eyes narrowed. They understood the implication of Alex's tone.

"Are you saying my sons gave up too early?" Han Huaxian's eyes moved from Alex over to his sons, who immediately started getting nervous.

"Of course not, senior. I'm not blaming anyone here. Going out of their way to look for me was already enough. What I meant to say was that they searched as far as they could, but the place I was at was much further in the Icy Hell," Alex said.

"You were in a place where my Saint realm sons couldn't go?" Han Huaxian was obviously starting to get suspicious at this point.

"Yes, senior. Thanks to an artifact a senior of mine gave me, I was able to traverse more of the location in the Icy hell than anyone, including Saint realm cultivators," Alex said.

"If that is true, that does explain why they didn't find you. But what about the fact that you were gone for… what? Nearly 2 years? How did that happen? And why were you there in the first place?" the clan leader asked.

Alex sighed internally as he thought of something to say, and decided to go with something that was both absurd and yet believable.

"The senior that gave me the artifact, he also told me about a treasure in the Icy Hell that could help me. So, I went out of my way to such a dangerous place looking for that treasure exactly," Alex said.

The elders in the room got curious all of a sudden. "What treasure is this exactly?" the clan leader asked.

"It's a Saint fruit that grows in the center of the Icy hell. It's a healing spirit fruit that can heal anything and everything that is wrong with one's body," Alex said.

"Oh?" the clan leader couldn't tell if what Alex was saying was true or not. It was indeed so absurd to think that a fruit existed that could heal everything at once.

"And where exactly is this fruit?" he asked.

"I—"

"You ate it!" Han Hongqi's eyes went wide all of a sudden.

"Hongqi, what are you talking about?" the clan leader got angry.

"Father, forgive my interruption. This young alchemist had an arm missing previously and had even asked me for help." Han Hongqi turned towards Alex. "You really ate it and grew your arm back?"

"Yes, senior," Alex said with a smile. His fake story was weaving itself with the truth and making it that much harder to unravel.

"I see. Incredible," the Clan leader said. "How many fruits did you get?"

"Only 1, and that too I ate immediately," Alex said as he shook his head.

"What's wrong?" the clan leader got confused with Alex's expression.

"Nothing senior, I was just remembering my stupidity," he said. "I didn't realize how strong a Saint fruit could be for my True realm cultivation and ate the fruit. I had to cultivate over a year to consume its energy so as for it to not kill me."

"Is that why you were gone for so long?" the clan leader asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "And I only came back a few months ago and had to go into closed cultivation to fix my cultivation base."

"I see. Are you still with the Flowing Brush sect?" the clan leader asked.

"Yes, I'm a guest elder there," Alex said.

"Do they treat you well?" the clan leader asked.

"I don't have anything to complain about," Alex said.

The clan leader tried to learn more about Alex, so he asked about his age and background. He was surprised that Alex was only 27 years old, they all were.

As for his background, Alex straight up denied speaking about it, saying he wanted to keep it in the past.

"I hear you joined this day's competition. Are you joining on behalf of the Flowing Brush sect?" he asked.

"No."

"Oh, then the Alchemy guild?" the clan leader asked.

"I'm joining on behalf of no one," Alex said.

The clan leader got confused. "May I ask why?"

"I don't have anyone to thank for who I am today," Alex said. 'At least, not in the empire.'

"What about this senior of yours that gave you the information about the healing fruit?" the clan leader asked.

"I… don't know who he is, so I can't really use his name," Alex said.

"You don't know who he is?" the clan leader couldn't believe it.

Alex shook his head. "As far as I know, only the Emperor knows his identity, but I doubt he will speak," Alex said.

"So, if you do not have anyone you think you belong to, then would you like to join our family? Trust me when I say this, you will get whatever you want," the clan leader said.

"I thank you for the opportunity, but I will have to regretfully decline." Alex bowed a little.

"Are you sure? You can take your time with this," the clan leader said.

"I am sure, senior. I don't plan on joining any sect or family right now," Alex said.

"I see. Well, our family will welcome you no matter when you want to join us," the old man said.

"Thank you, senior."

"So, if you can't join us, then I'm sure you can help us make some pills right? We will pay handsomely of course," the clan leader said. "The competition is coming up and our disciples need to get stronger. Can you help us make some pills?"

"I would, senior, but I myself need to prepare for the competition, so I will not have the time. You will have to ask other alchemists, unfortunately," Alex said.

"Surely you don't need to be so hard on yourself for this competition. Especially with a cultivation base like yours," the clan leader said. "One should never reach for something they cannot grab, young man. You should do what you are good at."

"Besides, whether you are going to this competition for fame or glory or just simple money, I can promise you, you will make far more on alchemy alone," the old man said.

Alex started feeling a little annoyed. Still, he didn't lash out. "I thank you for the advice senior, but I will go with my heart for now," Alex said.

"I'm telling you, young man. Your cultivation base isn't good enough to even come in the top 100 of this year's competition. You should stop wasting your time with this—"

"Senior, please do not waste your breath. This junior already has his mind made up. As for whether my cultivation base is enough or not, time will tell," Alex said sternly. "I believe it's time for me to leave. They will be announcing the results of the registration soon enough. I should be out there when they do so."

"Thank you for inviting me into your house," Alex bowed to the elders once again.

"Uh… yes, I think we have kept you long enough. Thank you for coming along," the old man said.

Alex cupped his hand and bowed to all the elders before walking away with Han Daiyu following behind her.

"Father, I think—"

"Stop, I know. I made a mistake. Sigh, but that kid is still being so stupid. He has been given such an amazing talent and opportunity in alchemy and yet he wants to waste it in fighting," the old man said. "Well, he will find out soon enough."

The elders in the room nodded and repeated what the clan leader said like parrots.

"Right! Haixu, try to find out who this mysterious senior is and how he knows of something so incredible as a fruit to heal all injuries," the clan leader said.

"About that, father," Haixu spoke slowly. "I don't think there is a point in trying to learn about the person. Rather, I don't think we should try to learn about the person."

"Huh? Why not?" the clan leader got angry all of a sudden.

"Remember when we said that the Emperor spoke an oath to not reveal a person's identity and that the person had taken away the princess' healing crystal?" Haixu said.

The clan leader's eyes went wide. "Wait, that was this… right, I forgot this kid was the Royal alchemist for some time. I see, I nearly made a grave mistake."

The old man finally stood up from his seat. "Forget about what happened today and go focus on getting the disciples ready for the competition. We must have them bring glory to the family by winning this year's competition."

"Yes, clan leader."

Chapter 785: The Human Language

"My apologies regarding grandfather, he can tunnel-visioned from time to time. You must be wanting to fight for a while now. I can understand," Han Daiyu spoke to Alex as they walked back towards the lounge area where Liang Qiu and the others were waiting for them.

Once they reached the group, they left back out to go wait for the registration to be over.

When they arrived back at the event, they were already around 800, so after waiting just a little longer, everyone that had come had been tested.

A man walked onto the stage with a talisman. "Everyone whose name I will call out has been registered for the tournament. If your name does not get called out, you will have to wait a little longer for some tests to be accepted," the person said.

After that, one after another, the man spoke of the number and the name of the person that had passed. Alex waited for a while and his name and number came up.

Thanks to Pearl, he didn't have to go through the test at all and could directly enter the tournament.

By the time he was done, the man had called out exactly 21 people. These were the people that were guaranteed a spot in the tournament.

"Those whose name was called out, you may leave. Those whose name wasn't called out, please stick around so we may choose the remaining 42 participants from you," the person said.

'42… that means they are taking 63 in total? Wasn't it supposed to be 64? Or are they accounting for the 16 seeded participants?'

Alex assumed that was most likely the case.

"I will take my leave now," Alex said his farewell to the group he was with. Liang Qiu tried to stop him to take him to speak to her elders but Alex shook his head.

He promised to do it once the tournament was over and went to find Qin Shan. Qin Shan was here to look after his disciples, so Alex had to return on his own.

A few minutes later, he was back with his mother and told her about the registration.

"3 months later you get to fight huh?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex nodded.

"Are you going back to the White Tiger's palace to train for the remaining months?" she asked.

"No, I can train here. I'm close to breaking through again, which I should be able to do in the next 3 months. So, I don't need to go back."

Alex then brought out a book from his storage bag. "For now, I think you and I should both read this."

"What is it?" Helen asked curiously.

"It's a book that will help us learn the Human language. It's translated from the Demon language, so it should be easy for you to read," Alex told her.

"Okay." Helen took the book and flipped through it. "Oh, this is that language from the last part of the flame book you had me read."

"Yes, this should help you understand what that part said when you get to the saint realm," Alex said.

Helen looked through the book and made a confused face. "This makes no sense," She said. "This right here is the word for 'Heat' apparently, and this right here is for 'Heaven', yet the beginning of the words don't match at all."

"Really?" Alex looked at what her mother showed and was surprised.

He looked at the words and the way they were written did indeed not have anything in common at the beginning.

"Wait a second." Alex noticed something. "The last part of the word is the same. Here."

He pointed to the words again and they did indeed end on the same syllable.

"Then…" Helen quickly looked through the other syllables and found out that the end of the word did match.

It didn't take the two very long to figure out that the words in the Human language were written backward.

"No wonder," Alex thought. "I tried converting the language on my own, but it didn't make any sense. But, if it is indeed read from right to left, instead of left to right, then that would make sense why I wasn't able to translate it for my master."

"Have you not read this yet?" she asked.

"No, I will once you're done with it. I have something else to do in the meantime."

Alex left Pearl with his mother and went back to his room to start writing a book from his memory.

He had brought Heaven's Impact along with him from the Hong Wu sect since it was his. But that wasn't the only book he had read that had words in the Human language.

He also had the two Yang books with him so there wasn't any problem there.

He then thought of the final part of the Flame Mastery scripture, but his mother remembered the words there despite not understanding it, so that didn't require writing down as well.

Which meant, the only thing he needed to write was the words from the Black stele back in the Tiger sect.

Instead of writing it down on a talisman, Alex decided to make a normal book out of it and took out an empty book.

Then, he remembered the words on the stele and started noting them down.

Since he learned that the Human language was written right to left, he started in the same order with the stele as well.

Starting from the right, he copies syllable after syllable from his mind and wrote them down on paper.

'Why is remembering this so hard?' he wondered as a slight headache plagued his mind.

He remembered more of the words and as he did, his headache grew.

By the time he had written 20% of the book, his headache was growing massively, so much so that, he had a hard time even looking at paper with clear eyes.

Since writing was getting so hard for some reason, He stopped it for a moment and just focused on remembering the words of the stele.

"STOP!" someone shouted in his head.

"What?" Alex's attention wavered for a second as she stopped trying to think about the stele. The pain in his mind lowered and he could think again.

In an instant, Alex closed his eyes and went into his Spiritual sea. When he did, he was both astonished and scared.

In front of him, his Spiritual sea moved around like the sea in an earthquake. Tides rose high and low, some nearly reaching the silver mountain that hovered above it.

The silver mountain itself was shaking a bit.

"Oi! You bastard! Are you trying to suicide?" a voice spoke to his left and Alex turned his head to see the sword's artifact spirit speak up.

"What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"What were you doing? You nearly ripped open your own spiritual space," the artifact spirit shouted at him.

"I… I did? Was that why I was having such a bad headache?" he asked.

"What were you trying to do?" the spirit asked.

"Trying to remember the words of a technique I read not long ago," Alex said.

The artifact spirit audibly sighed. "Well, if the owner doesn't want you to, then maybe you should give up!"

Chapter 786: Intents

"I… I was getting a headache because I was trying to remember the words on the stele?" Alex couldn't believe such a thing was even possible. "What do you mean the owner doesn't want me to read it?"

"Sometimes when someone is particularly passionate about a technique and very good at it, if they were to write the technique down on something, they leave behind their intent."

"Sometimes this just happens, while other times it is intentional. However, it's usually only intentional if that someone is of a very high cultivation base." The artifact spirit started speaking.

The spirit was full of the black goo as Alex hadn't visited here in a white, but it still spoke clearly.

Also, since Alex's mental strength was now far better than what it was years ago when he met the spirit, he didn't have to worry about being easily tempted. Not when the spirit was this weak.

"There are such intents too?" Alex asked.

"Everything has intent. You can't do something without intent, not when it comes to cultivation and everything that surrounds it."

"Swing a sword, you need intent. Create a fire, you need intent. Even breaking through itself, you cannot do without the intent to break through. So, while it may not look like it, I promise you, everything has intent." The sword spirit was surprisingly chatty this particular day and talked quite a bit.

Alex watched the sea below start to calm down and asked, "so does that mean I cannot copy the information from my mind?"

"I don't know what you read, but the owner clearly didn't want just anyone to read it, so—" the artifact spirit stopped. "Hm… that's weird," it thought.

"What's weird?" Alex asked.

"I saw the damage just the memory of what you tried to remember did to you. If that was the case then why are you not dead when you have indeed already read the technique?" the spirit asked.

Alex thought for a moment. "What exactly constitutes as reading actually?" he asked.

"I don't know. Just reading?" the sword spirit asked.

Alex thought to himself. 'I never really did read it though, did I? I just looked through it and my mind learned it on its own.'

"What if I wanted to learn the technique, but I didn't understand what it said, would that still hurt me?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, since you did intend to learn it, it should hurt you, but since you didn't know how to read, the majority of the damage should be mitigated," the sword spirit said. "Is that what happened?"

Alex nodded. At the same time, his brows furrowed with concern. "If I were to write it down and give it to someone that can read it, will it hurt them?" he asked the spirit.

"If you're writing it, then it depends on your intent," the sword spirit said.

"So if I want just anyone to read it, I can do it?" he asked.

"Yeah, there's no problem with that. You are already fighting with someone else's intent to keep it from coming out anyway," the sword spirit said.

"I see, thank you for explaining," Alex bowed a little towards the spirit.

"That's nothing, just find me a god wannabe to kill from time to time to satiate my hunger," the spirit said.

"Uhh… I don't think anyone is dumb enough to want to be a god here," Alex said.

"Well, then let me control your body once in a while. I promise I won't use it recklessly. I'm stuck on this body you know. If you die, I die."

"Besides, you can get rid of my control whenever you want," the spirit said.

'Yeah, no,' Alex thought.

"I'll think about it," Alex said. He wasn't going to straight-up deny it, not after it helped so much right now.

He stayed behind in his mind for a bit and collected all the flying silver threads in the sky. The sword spirit had already returned to the side, doing its own thing.

Once Alex was done, he returned back outside and finally felt a calm mind that wasn't plagued with headaches.

'I should go about it slowly,' he thought.

Over the next couple of days, Alex slowly copied the words from the stele in his mind onto the page of his book. In doing so, he had to suffer from multiple migraines over the course of multiple days.

Every time it got too hard, Alex would stop and rest his mind. He would cultivate as long as it took for his mind to return to normal after fighting the behemoth of an intent that belonged to the words on the stele.

3 days later, Alex finally fully wrote everything he could remember from the stele.

Excitedly, Alex left his place and went over to his mother.

He quickly went inside and gave her all of the different books. "Since you should know the language now, you should read and learn these books. I don't know if this cultivation technique will help you or not, but you can try that too," Alex informed her.

"Okay," Helen said and took the books. At the same time, she handed back the translation book to Alex. "You should read this too."

"Okay, I will once I return," Alex said and kept the book.

He waited as his mother started reading through the books and looking at them. Meanwhile, he talked with Pearl to learn if he had any chance of breaking through any time soon.

"Alex, did you give me the wrong book?" Helen asked all of a sudden.

"Wrong book? Which one?" Alex turned to look at the books. Surprisingly, his mother had the book he wrote from the stele in her hand.

"No, that is the right book. Can you not read it?"

He wondered if perhaps the technique's owner's intent was messing up with her somehow.

"I can, but… the book isn't complete at all," she said.

"Not complete?" Alex asked.

"Look, it ends in the middle of the sentence," she said.

"That can't be." Alex took the book and read through it to remember the words on the stele. Through some headaches, he remember everything he had written was accurate.

"There's nothing wrong with the book, does it really end abruptly?" he asked.

"Yes," Helen said. "Where did you read this?"

"It's the black stele from back in the Tiger sect. Remember the one I told you not to use your spiritual sense on no matter what?" Alex said.

"Oh, that?" Helen thought as she looked at the book. "You wrote all of it?"

"Yes," Alex said. "If the technique is incomplete that would mean the technique on the stele is incomplete."

"Well, it ends abruptly. Are you sure there were more words on it?" she asked.

"Where else would the words—" Alex froze. Suddenly, he realized something he should have thought of a long time ago.

"How could I not have thought about it before?" he slapped his own forehead.

"What's wrong? What did you not think of?" Helen asked.

"That black stele, it's the cause of the crater in the Tiger sect, which I assume came along with the meteor shower," Alex said. "If it came down with such force then certainly it must have embedded itself onto the ground."

"Stupid! I should have checked below the ground too," he thought.

In Alex's defense, the stele was in fact one of the most terrifying things to use his spiritual sense around. Every time he did, the intent of the owner of the stele would come to attack him.

So, even if he had thought of there being something underneath the whole thing, he still likely wouldn't have dared to try it all.

"That bit should still help you create some technique, you should learn it," Alex told his mother. "I'll go and learn the language now."

Alex left his mother to learn the techniques and returned back to his place and brought out the book to read it.

However, before he could do it, a thought came to his mind.

"Wait, if there is more to the black stele than just this, and if knowing what I'm reading will be devastating enough to kill me when I do read it, isn't it better for me to not learn the language?" he thought.

Alex had waited many years to learn this language. However, now that he had finally had the opportunity to, he found out that it was in fact better to not learn it at all.

Chapter 787: The Tournament Approaches

"Well, that sucks."

Alex didn't know what to do now. On one hand, learning the language seemed like a more than good idea given that he had been hoping to learn it for so many years now.

On the other hand, just the partial knowledge of the technique let him create swords to cut through a person's mental fortitude. What if he learned the whole thing?

If he tried to read the Stele after learning the language, Alex was sure the Stele would definitely kill him.

"I don't need to learn the language just yet right?" he thought to himself. "I can just scan it and learn it that way. Like I've always done. My brain translates it into concepts on its own anyway."

While he did think that, it wasn't just a simple decision for him.

"Urgh! Whatever, I will think about it after the competition."

Alex put away the book and left the room. It was way in the afternoon, so he went to search for the jaguar.

Surprisingly, it wasn't the jaguar that was here this time. It was the leopard.

"Senior? Where is senior Yao?" Alex asked. The leopard was strong, and he didn't have any grievance with it, so Alex didn't mind it being the one to look after them.

But he had a closer relationship with the jaguar, and if possible, he would love to have found him.

"We take turns watching over you," the leopard explained. "What are you looking for?"

"Just to fight," Alex said. "Would you be willing to fight me? For my training of course."

The leopard thought for a moment and shrugged. "Why not? I'm bored anyway."

Both Pearl and Alex fought the leopard for a while before returning back to cultivate.

When the next day started, they did the same thing. Soon, they got into a rhythm, a schedule they would follow where they would train and cultivate, in between very few other things.

The jaguar returned after a few days and they trained with him too.

In such ways, Alex's days passed very quickly, and before he knew it nearly 3 months had already passed by and he was now one step away from the True Emperor realm.

The tournament of champions, as it was apparently called, was just a week away.

Alex reached the Radiant city on his own a week before the competition. The rest of the Flowing Brush sect members would come on their own a few days later.

For now, Alex had a task to do.

Without waiting around for anything, he directly went to the royal family.

When he notified that he wanted to meet with either the Princess or Zhanrou, the princess came out on her own to meet him.

"You're alive??… is what I would say if I didn't hear about you a few months ago," the princess said as she walked out.

"It's good to see you, princess." Alex bowed a little towards her.

"You really managed to stave off all those people by faking your own death huh? That's quite bold of you," she said.

"I didn't… whatever, I will explain to you later. For now, I came to meet with Zhanrou and give her something," Alex said.

"Oh? What is it?" the princess asked.

"You will have to wait princess," Alex said.

"Fine, let's wait in the garden. Zhanrou should be making pills at the moment and will take some time."

The princess turned around to walk on. However, she stopped and turned around. "Although my father might want to speak to you about your disappearance."

"Yes, of course. I will explain," Alex said.

"Good. I'll let him know we're coming."

The princess took Alex directly to the Emperor's hall where the many court officials were already making their way out for Alex's privacy.

As the princess and Alex walked in, the court officials saw him and talked about him in hushed voices.

'They know about me?' Alex was a little surprised.

"Good!" the Emperor exclaimed as soon as Alex walked in. "Our miracle Alchemist didn't bite the dust just yet."

"Greetings, your majesty." Alex bowed toward the Emperor.

"It's good to see that you are safe and sound, young man." The Emperor had just said that when he noticed something.

"Actually… more than just safe and sound. Did you get a realistic fake arm, or is that your actual left arm I see."

The Emperor got down from his throne to check on it closely.

"It is real, your majesty," Alex told him.

"How did… did you use the healing crystal somehow?" the Emperor asked.

"No, I… I managed to create a pill that can heal any sort of grievous wounds, including cut off limbs and organs," Alex told the Emperor truthfully. With what he was here to do, lying wouldn't make any sense to him.

"You did what?" The princess shouted in disbelief from behind. She hadn't noticed the new arm as it had been two years since she had seen him and had forgotten a few details.

However, the emperor with his spiritual sense and excellent mind saw all the changes immediately.

"You really are the miracle alchemist as the citizens call you," the Emperor said.

"Come on, tell me all about it."

Alex nodded and told him exactly how he found the pill. As for where he got the original pill recipe, he chalked it up to Shen Jing providing him with one.

As soon as the Emperor heard Shen Jing's name, he no longer asked questions in that direction and started changing subjects.

"Please don't let anyone know that it was the pill that healed my arm. Make up something like you found it tucked away in your treasury and Zhanrou managed to make one on her own, or something like that," Alex said.

"Huh? Why not? You will be famous when the people find out. In fact, way more famous than you already are," the emperor said.

"Your majesty, If I cared about fame, I wouldn't be here giving away my recipe."

The Emperor stopped what he was about to say and nodded. "Alright, we will hide that information. Now can you tell us where you have been for the last 2 years?" he asked.

Alex explained the same thing he had said to the Han family, except this time the fruit he had gone to eat was something that fixed his body from something that was wrong with it.

The emperor already knew about the problem in his body, he just didn't know what it was. When he heard that Alex had fixed the problem, he congratulated Alex.

"So, what do you plan on doing now?" the Emperor asked. "Do you want to join the royal family? I'm sure any of my daughters would—"

"Father!" Xumei shouted from behind.

"Haha, I was joking," the Emperor said as he scratched his chin. He was definitely not joking at all.

"I meant to say, do you want to become the royal Alchemist again? With you and Zhanrou, we will not have to worry about pills ever again," the Emperor said.

"Thank you for the opportunity, your majesty. But I will have to decline," Alex bowed a little. "For now, I just want to take part in the Tournament of Champions and see how well I fare against the elites of the younger generation. That has been my wish for quite a while now."

"The tournament? You registered in it?" the Princess was surprised.

"Yes, your highness," Alex replied to her.

"Well, you do have the appropriate cultivation base, but I'm not sure if you will make it any far with just this," the Emperor said. "Still, good luck. I will cheer you for your victory."

Unlike the Han family's leader, the Emperor was a bit more understanding of his sentiment and didn't try and talk down to him as a fighter.

"Thank you, your highness."

They were done with their talks and the Emperor needed to go back to talking with his officials about empire matters, so Alex and the princes left not long after.

Alex then met up with Zhanrou and handed her the recipe. He told her the difficulties and how she couldn't let anyone find out about them. Especially the part of it requiring a lot of blood.

Zhanrou was understanding, so she easily complied. Alex also met up with Wei Ruoran and spoke to him for a bit before leaving the palace altogether.

He then went back to his hotel room where he would cultivate for the next 7 days and wait for the tournament to start.

Chapter 788: Tournament Brackets

"Welcome everybody to the first Tournament of Champions in the last 20 years!"

A man stood up on a giant stage that was perhaps kilometers wide in both length and width. Only cultivators could clearly see him from that distance away.

The space on the stage was clearly expanded using formations and the real space was perhaps a fourth of what was being shown at the moment.

The host continued talking, welcoming everyone to the competition, while the rest of the people got onto their own thing.

"I can't keep Pearl?" Helen asked from the audience space.

"No, I need him for the battles. Just keep these storage bags of mine, mother," Alex said and handed over everything except for precisely what he needed.

"Alright, but make sure he doesn't take get hurt. You're stronger than him, so you need to be the one to fight," Helen said.

"Don't worry, mother. I know what I'm doing," Alex said and left the place to go over to where the contestants would be gathered.

The host started explaining the rules of the tournament.

The rules were mostly there to give no external advantage to a cultivator that they didn't gain themselves or to protect them.

Since there were no Saint realm cultivators in this tournament, the usage of Saint artifacts was banned. Anyone found using it would be immediately disqualified.

They were also allowed only 5 different items, in general, to take with them to every battle that would be checked beforehand.

That would include any not artifact items such as formation flags and talismans as well, both of which could also not be of Saint rank.

Taking pills to enhance oneself before a match was also banned, and if found out, one could be disqualified depending on what pill one ate.

For people that fought with beasts and puppets, they could not have more than 2 of those on the stage at the same time. The rules allowed for interchanging them, but up to 4 beasts or puppets at max.

Finally, there was the general rule of not harming someone deliberately, but this wasn't that intense of a rule as Saint realms would act as referees for these matches.

Alex arrived in a room that looked familiar yet different. The competition was taking place in the same place where the Alchemy competition was held, but somehow due to the changes done to the stage and room, it felt different.

He walked in and saw a bunch of people all looking around the walls at something that Alex couldn't see properly due to the many people that crowded it.

He went on to check what one of those was and saw that it was a bunch of information about who would fight who.

'It's just a bunch of numbers though,' he thought. 'Except that one.'

Guo Chiang was written on the top right of the match bracket and he would be fighting someone who was number 84.

'Guo Chiang, I've seen this guy before, haven't I?' Alex thought. He remembered back to those group of elites in front of the House of Undying, and recalled a young man with a ghostly face wearing a robe of green and blue.

He tried searching for him in the room, but it was way too crowded to find without using his Spiritual sense.

'The top disciple from the Broken Ravine sect. So he must be one of the seeded people huh? It's surprising they're letting their names be known so easily while everyone else's names are hidden behind a number.'

Alex looked around and saw there were about 16 of these things, each with 64 different numbers on them.

'Each of those must have one of the 16 seeded participants,' Alex thought. 'Which one is mine?'

Alex walked around for a bit before finding a registration-type area that was handing out numbers to the people that came up to them.

"Hello, I'm looking for my number," Alex went up to them.

The people there asked for his name and affiliation, which Alex gave them.

The man that heard his name gave a weird look. "Are you the miracle alchemist?" he asked.

"Um, I believe people are calling me that," Alex said.

"I didn't know you would be taking part in the tournament," the man said.

Alex gave a small smile and said, "Yes, I am. Can you please help me find my number?"

"Oh right," the man went back to searching for his number and soon came up with it.

"Number 746, huh? Let's see which group I'm in."

Alex walked around the room for a bit before coming across Group 12 which contained players from 705 to 768.

Before viewing anything else, his eyes immediately went to the top right of the bracket to look at the person that was seeded in his group.

"He Liwei," Alex read his name. He didn't remember this man clearly, but he did know that the Glory's Edge sect wore a black and gold robes, so that made it easier to pick him out from the elite group that imprinted onto his head.

'Is it that young man?' he thought as he recalled his memory from nearly a decade ago.

He would have to see on his own later on. Fortunately, he wasn't the one fighting against that young man. He wouldn't want to fight a seeded fighter, at least not this early in the competition.

However, given that he was on the same side of the bracket, if both he and Alex continued winning, the man would be Alex's 4th opponent.

'For now, I have nothing to do but wait huh?' he thought and walked around.

Just then, someone tapped his shoulders. Alex turned around and saw a familiar face, that he would rather not see today.

"Brother Yu, you really are here," Zhou Ren spoke to him from behind.

"Brother Zhou, it's been a while." Alex looked at his cultivation base and realized he was in the True Emperor realm. That too at quite a high place.

'True Emperor 6th realm, huh? That's not bad,' Alex thought.

"When I heard that you were not only alive but also taking part in the tournament, I thought they were playing some kind of prank on me. However, it seems they weren't lying at all," Zhou Ren said. "What group are you in?"

"12," Alex said simply.

"Great, I'm in 8. That means we won't fight until the top 16 or actually top 8," Zhou Ren said. "Although, I doubt you will make it that far. But hey, who knows right? Maybe you will end up beating that snobby little He Liwei somehow."

"Well, it will feel good to be better than you at fighting at least," Zhou Ren said as he felt great about himself.

Alex couldn't believe how self-centered this man was.

"I will go look around the place now," Alex said and turned to leave.

"Nonsense," Zhou Ren put an arm around his shoulders. "Come, since you are one of the most popular younger generation people, you should hang out with your own peers."

Zhou Ren took him over to the corner of the room where the crowd had parted giving space for the people that were hanging out there.

Alex was now going to finally meet with most of the elites of the younger generation.

Chapter 789: Meeting the Elites

"Alchemist Yu, you're here," Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu walked up to meet Alex and started talking.

"I see you've already met these two," Zhou Ren said and turned to the rest. "Everyone, over here," he called out to the group.

"Come and meet the miracle Alchemist that returned from the dead just to fight in the tournament with us. This is brother Yu Ming," Zhou Ren introduced him.

"Brother Yu, it's great to see you again. I didn't think you would make it so far so quickly." Fu Tao walked in front of them all and bowed his head.

"It's a pleasure to see you here, brother Yu," Lu Yan walked in front and cupped her hands in greeting.

"Greetings, brother Tao, sister Yan." Alex cupped his hands and greeted them back as well. 'True Emperor 9th realm, True Emperor 7th realm. Both of them got quite strong, huh?'

"Huh? You two already know him?" Zhou Ren asked.

"We met each other back when we were lost in the Beast Realm. Brother Yu here comes from the empire beyond the forest in the north," Fu Tao explained.

Alex sighed. 'The cat's out of the bag. Not that there was ever in a bag to begin with,' he thought. It was only a matter of time before people learned about this.

"I heard you were in the empire and returned a few months ago, is that true?" Fu Tao asked.

"Ah, City lord Fu must've made it there safely then. Yes, I was in the empire. After my near-death experience in Icy Hell, I decided to go see my masters and fellow disciples again," Alex said.

"I see. You must have a way through the beast realm now then," Fu Tao said.

"Somewhat, yes," Alex said.

"Enough talk you two. Brother Yu needs to meet with the others too," Zhou Ren said. Zhou Ren turned toward Xue Meirong.

"You've already met Meirong right, so no need to introduce you there," Zhou Ren said.

Alex saw Meirong subtly nod at him and he nodded back in greeting.

"This is brother Guo Chiang, from the Broken Ravine sect. One of the strongest amongst us."

Alex looked at the deathly-faced man that looked bored out of his mind. He humphed a bit when Zhou Ren spoke, but other than that showed no other reaction towards them. 'True Emperor 9th realm,' Alex read his cultivation base as well.

"This is sister Shen Hua, from the Shen family."

"Hello," the blue-haired girl cheerfully greeted Alex.

"Hello," Alex greeted her back too. 'True Emperor 5th?' She was one of the weaker ones there.

"This is brother Jin Tengfei, from the Jin family."

Alex greeted the yellow-robed man and saw surprised that his cultivation base wasn't very high for some reason.

However, now that he thought about it, he never had a strong cultivation base back in the Demon realm either. What made him strong was his Sword Qi.

Now that it had been nearly 10 years, it was bound to get stronger for sure.

"And finally, this is brother Song Shing, from the Song family," Zhou Ren introduced him.

Alex greeted the tall, long-haired man in the bloody red robe and smelt iron in the air around him.

'Such strong Blood aura,' he thought. 'On top of that, he is a True Emperor 9th realm too.'

Until now, there were only 4 different people he had seen with that cultivation base. Fu Tao, Song Shing, Guo Chiang, and Liang Qiu.

"Well, I would introduce you to the prince that is one of our seeds too, but… wait, aren't I missing someone?" Zhou Ren looked around.

"Oh hey, what are you all talking about?"

A short and thin man with a mouse-like face walked up to them from somewhere.

"Ah, here he is," Zhou Ren said.

"Brother Yu, meet He Liwei, the strongest disciple of the Glory's Edge sect," Zhou Ren explained.

"Yu? As in the Alchemist Yu?" the short man turned to Alex. "Oh, it really is you. I've seen you in those talisman recordings. It's great to meet you, miracle Alchemist."

The young man walked up to Alex and shook his hand. Alex shook his hand as well and just then he realized what he had done wrong.

"Oh, you know what this is," the man said as a smile appeared on his face. "I didn't think I would find a fellow trapped man in this tournament."

"What are you talking about?" Zhou Ren asked as he couldn't make head or tail of He Liwei's words.

"Nothing, just a secret between two men," He Liwei smiled at Alex.

Alex gave a smile back as well, but in his heart, he was cursing himself for getting caught up in the moment.

'Goddammit! He's a player. I got caught up in the moment,' he thought. 'Is it bad? Will something happen if he knows I'm from the central continent? In the first place, he shouldn't know about it.'

Alex started thinking of all the things that could go bad from others knowing that he was a player, but for the most part, he couldn't come up with anything.

'Maybe I don't have to worry about it in the first place,' he thought.

Alex checked his cultivation base and realized he had a True Emperor 6th realm cultivation base.

'That's… doable. Unless he has some tricks up his sleeve,' Alex thought.

"Well, good job on making friends with the miracle alchemist Liwei, because he's in your group," Zhou Ren said.

"He's in my… what?" He Liwei turned to look at Alex. "You're in my group?"

Alex nodded. "If all goes well, we will meet in the fourth round," he said.

"Aw, that sucks man. Well, at least you'll make it to the Top 128 if that happens. That's something for an Alchemist like you," He Liwei said.

Alex felt a hint of anger boil up in his heart, but he didn't show it on his face.

"I will try and overcome my obstacle then," Alex said.

"You don't mean me right?" He Liwei's face turned into a grin.

"Not necessarily you. I meant whoever is in my path throughout the tournament. Be it you, or something that beat you and took your place," Alex said.

"No one is doing that," He Liwei shook his head while his grin turned maniacal.

Alex turned away from him and looked toward Zhou Ren. "What about the rest of the seeded people? I don't see them," he said.

"Well, I can't help you on that end. Even I don't know who they are. I believe they've been chosen from the strongest rogue cultivators, so they must have been selected somewhere else. I saw their names, but I don't recognize any of them."

"I suspect we will know them soon," Liang Qiu spoke up. "But now, it seems we have to start moving."

She gestured towards the other side of the room where the staff was beginning to pour in to gather them up.

"Everyone please gather by your group in front of your brackets," A staff asked and everyone started walking up to them.

Alex walked along with He Liwei to make up the 64 people group that would be fighting amongst themselves until a single one remained.

"Number 705 and 706, you're up."

Chapter 790: First Fight

The fight happening outside was shown inside the room. A big screen hung over each of the groups showing them the matches from their group.

Alex watched two people fight against each other using swords and spears.

The fight went on for a while before one of them won with a close victory.

Alex saw the staff member go and switch his number forward in the bracket and called out the next two participants.

'One loss and we're gone huh?' Alex thought as he looked at the new set of fighters arriving on the stage.

One by one, the people fought their way through their opponents until it was He Liwei's turn to fight.

Alex watched the man on-screen and saw him fight casually and win against his opponent. 'That was just normal hand-to-hand combat. He didn't even need to use any techniques,' he thought.

A few more people went onto the stage to fight, and finally, it was his turn.

"Number 745 and 746," the staff member called out.

Alex walked forward towards the staff and saw a girl walk out from the same group. The pink and green colored girl belonged to the Falling Lotus sect if he wasn't mistaken.

However, given that her cultivation base was around True King 7th realm, Alex knew she wasn't anyone big in that sect.

In fact, she was weak enough that Alex wouldn't even have to worry about hiding his power yet.

The staff asked for their storage bags and checked them to make sure that everything was according to the rules.

Alex had brought exactly 5 items, so he was let go.

The two of them reached the stage, and Alex felt the referee's spiritual sense land on him.

He tried feeling the woman's cultivation base, but it was so high in the Saint rank that he couldn't properly tell.

He looked at the referee's blue robe and knew she was from the Shen family.

'Focus on the match,' Alex told himself and watched the other girl bring out a thin, rapier-like sword from her storage bag.

Alex already knew she had to be wearing armor as everyone else did, and got ready to fight. He didn't bring out any weapons, however, as he didn't find the need to.

The sun had already gone way past the afternoon phase and was only a few hours away from setting.

The referee looked at both of them to see if they were ready, and when she realized they were, she started the fight.

"Begin!"

The girl slashed a few attacks toward Alex to check on his reflexes.

Alex dodged to the side. Seeing the direction Alex was moving toward, the girl got to work.

She immediately dashed forward while stabbing her sword into the air multiple times in a single second.

Each one of those stabs created a single golden line of attack that flew towards Alex.

Alex saw the Metal attacks coming his way and immediately changed direction.

The girl landed halfway through her dash and switched her direction too, following Alex to attack him.

The rogue attacks landed on the barrier around the stage that was protecting the audience from the fighters and vice versa.

Before even coming to the stage, the girl had realized that there was likely no chance of winning against Alex, given that his cultivation was 2 realms higher than her own.

However, she needed to win this round. At the very least, she couldn't be the first person to leave her sect.

For that, she needed to not let Alex attack at all. And that was exactly what she was doing.

Alex had to immediately run in the other direction when he saw the barrage of metal attacks come his way.

"AAAARGH!" the girl shouted as she kept stabbing onto the air even as her hand ached.

She turned as she attacked since her target kept moving.

Alex was weaving through her attacks, zig-zagging around the stage while slowly closing in on her.

He could have simply knocked her out already, or teleported behind her and won. Or, he could've attacked her, which could've hit her.

However, he didn't. He needed to hide his skills, abilities, and power until the right moment. At the very least, he wanted to give He Liwei a taste of what he could do since he had openly underestimated him.

As he got closer, it became harder and harder to dodge. However, he could see that the girl was struggling, so he had a chance.

Alex suddenly stopped moving and the metal shots all landed on him.

The girl rejoiced when she saw that her attacks landed and started attacking more and more.

She sent out maybe 5 hundred of such attacks before her Qi nearly ran out and she was unable to move her arm at all.

The cloud of dust rose high where she attacked and breathed in relief. However, when she saw the referee stand there, doing nothing, she worried.

Suddenly, the dust moved as Alex flew out. Next to him was a flying shield that hovered around him.

The girl was both surprised and scared. At the same time, she moved her feet and ran backward.

The place they were fighting on was about 250 meters by 250 meters, so there were plenty of areas for them to run around in.

As Alex closed on her, the girl sent out random attacks to deter him, but the shield moved on its own to block the attacks.

The girl stopped running away and placed her palm on the ground. Suddenly, vines sprung out of the ground, trying to catch Alex.

Each one of the green vines was about the size of his arm. If they grabbed him, it would be like getting constricted by a dozen different pythons.

A golden claw appeared on his two hands at the same time as he jumped forward towards the vines and swung at them.

Like a butcher's knife through meat, the claws cleaved away all the vines until they were completely useless.

The girl was surprised to see that he could fight the vines so easily. She started preparing some other attacks, but Alex wasn't going to let her do that.

He employed his movement skill and suddenly all resistance was removed from him as his speed nearly tripled and he arrived in front of the girl.

The girl's armor lit up to protect herself, but Alex was way too strong for her.

He kept away his Qi and simply used his physical force to punch the girl.

Even then, she was sent flying into the air as she landed a few dozen meters away, and skidded along the stage until she was out of bounds.

The referee had to run to grab her before she caused problems on the other side where another match was going on.

She quickly checked the girl and found out that she was okay.

"Can you get up?" she asked the girl who looked around in a daze for a while before nodding slowly.

"Good." The referee brought her up to her feet and turned toward Alex.

"Congratulations, you win."

Alex bowed towards the referee and the girl he hit and walked away.

Chapter 791: Top 512

Alex went up to a seating area that was reserved for the 500 or so fighters that would be winning today.

He arrived and was immediately called up to sit near the seeded folks by Liang Qiu and the others.

"You did good," Liang Qiu said.

"Got an easy first match, that's all," Alex said. At the same time, his eyes fell on the purple-robed figure that he remembered seeing from time to time in the garden of the royal family.

"Your highness," Alex greeted him.

"Sir alchemist, I haven't seen you in a while," the man said. This was one of the princes of the empire, a cousin to the princess.

From what Alex remembered, this man was called Wei Taiwu. Alex sensed his cultivation base and was happy to find that he was only in the 7th True Emperor realm.

At the same time, Alex's eyes fell on 4 different people that he hadn't seen before. However, given that most of the elites were around them and were speaking to them, he could figure out who they were.

If not for that, their cultivation base alone would've given him the answer. After all, they were up in the upper True Emperor realm.

'The remaining 4 seeds, huh?' Alex thought when he saw them.

2 of them were girls while the other 2 were boys. Liang Qiu told him their names, and apparently one of the boys was quite famous for attacking a mid-grade sect on his own to take revenge for his father's death, but Alex had never heard of him so he didn't care.

Most of them simply focused on the matches that were happening 16 at a time, and so did Alex.

The competition ended a few hours later and Alex stood up to leave. However, Liang Qiu stopped him.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Back to my hotel, why?" Alex looked at her curiously.

"Do you not know that we will be staying here in the arena?" Liang Qiu's face was one crack away from full-on laughter. In fact, her eyes were already laughing.

"We stay in the arena?" Alex was surprised.

"Yeah, they will let us know very soon."

Just as they had talked, a staff member came and explained the situation to the 512 participants that were there.

To make sure that the participants got the best treatment and facility during the tournament and to make sure that none of them got in any harm, whether that be accidental or intentional by other parties trying to keep them off the tournament, they were made to stay in the arena under the supervision of the staff.

Given that the staff consisted of elders and Saints from all the different families, sects, and some even from the military, it was hard to cause problems for the participants.

"Why now? Why not from the start?" Alex asked Liang Qiu.

"Well, for one there wasn't any need to be concerned about the participants, especially from being attacked by someone else given that no one really knew who they were fighting in the first round," Liang Qiu said.

Alex nodded. That made sense.

"However, now they know, huh?" he asked.

"Yes. Since we know who we are fighting, there is a chance of misconduct, so they are trying to avoid that," she said. "Aside from that, I think the more important reason is that there just isn't that much space in the arena."

"For all the different competitions this place has seen, it has always been 512 contestants at the start. However, with what happened just before the last tournament, no one wanted to hold a tournament anymore and we had to cancel."

"That was why they decided to make it big and start with 1024 people. Which also meant, they didn't have a place to keep those people," Liang Qiu said.

"And now they do," Alex finished her sentence. "I should let my mother know."

"I don't think there's any need for that. Most already know about it. Those that don't will find out soon."

Alex looked around the place and saw a disciple from the Flowing Brush sect. 'Sect master Qin should let her know even if she doesn't,' Alex thought. 'I might've learned if I didn't leave a week earlier either.'

Alex shook his head and started following the staff as they handed a key to every person that walked through it.

Alex went to his room and sat down. He looked around the small 5 by 5 meters room that was mostly empty. However, he could feel the rich Qi environment that he was in and understood that there was a formation either in the room or over the whole building.

There was a talisman on the bed and he quickly read what was written on it.

The facility the staff had mentioned included a private or joint training area, as well as places where you could buy pills to improve your cultivation or heal yourself if you got injured.

Alex thought he didn't need that, but then he remembered he no longer had his items with him, so maybe he would need to use them.

Anyway, today wasn't the day.

Pearl came out and sat by him as they started cultivating.

Soon, time went by and the next day was here.

The staff members went around waking everyone up and took them to the watching area in the arena from where they would be viewing the matches today.

Alex was a bit surprised to learn that only Group 1 and 2 would be fighting on this day.

"Eh? It's a single match the whole way through?" Alex asked.

"That's what it is," Hand Daiyu explained.

"Who is in Groups 1 and 2?" Alex asked.

"Umm… I think it's sister Lu Yan and that Feng Xueshin girl," Liang Qiu said.

Alex nodded and watched as the first two fighters went onto the stage.

A swordsman vs a puppet master. The fight was surprisingly quick as the puppet master was nearly 3 realms higher than the swordsman.

With his strong puppets, the puppet master had no problem winning the fight at all.

The next two fighters went up and then the next two.

Alex watched the fighters with interest for a while but soon realized that there wasn't much point to learning how these people fought.

His group was so far away from these that it simply made no sense to care about these people.

At some point, he only watched for the sake of watching.

Lu Yan went up to fight at some point, and while her opponent tried to fight, there was simply no way for them to win.

Group 1's battles were over and the tournament went on a small break.

Alex went to meet his mother during this time and took back his storage bags and ring from her.

Once he returned, the 2nd half of the day's tournament began with another 16 different fights before the day concluded.

The original 512 people were now down 32 people, and the same would happen tomorrow and the day after that until all 16 groups will have 16 people each remaining.

Alex returned back to his room. Now all he could do was wait for his turn to come again.

Chapter 96: Heavens Impact

Cai Ping sold quite a few items as the dusty old book traveled from one person's arm to another's. Slowly, more than an hour had passed. Alex realized while he had probably earned the most from this auction in general if he counted individual prices, his pills came nowhere close.

The latest items were being sold at 5 True spirit stones at starting bids alone. By the end, most of them crossed 10 true spirit stones.

Cai Ping showed off the third to the last item for the auction today. She unfurled the cloth to reveal that it was a pill bottle.

"This pill is a Soul Reuniting pill, that was made by Hong Wu Sect's sect leader, Ma Rong. In case you do not know, the Soul reuniting pill is a True grade pill that can increase your chances of breakthroughs in the True realm by at least 3 fold at Mortal grade.

"At earth grade, it can increase your chances by at least 10 fold. "

"And at heaven grade, it can pretty much guarantee your success at breakthrough."

"This pill on my hand has a harmony of 48%. That means, whoever gets this pill, is guaranteed to move forward in their journey as a cultivator. For the starting bid, we will start with 20 True spirit stones, with a minimum increase of 10 common spirit stones. "

The crowd started speaking so loudly that Cai Ping didn't even manage to comprehend what the first few bids were.

"21 Spi...."

"21 spi..."

"22 spi.."

Someone would be half finished with their bids before the other one started. Alex on the other hand was just stunned at the harmony of the pill.

He turned around and said, "Master, You are more talented than me. You made a 48% harmony true grade pill."

"It's not talent. It's experience. Once you get enough experience, you will be able to do that as well." She said.

Alex simply nodded and turned around to look at the people climb over each other to bid for the pill. He finally saw how much people cared about their cultivation and how far they would go to increase it.

'Do people really have a lot of trouble for a breakthrough?' he wondered. He himself had never cared for it, as he always had a 100% chance of breaking through. In fact, he had to slow down, cause he was too good at it.

His master's pill was still being bid, and it didn't seem like it was going to stop anytime soon.

KNOCK KNOCK

The staff lady inside opened the door to let more of the staff in. Another lady appeared with a book on a tray. "Here you go, sect leader Ma," the girl spoke respectfully.

The dusty old book had finally arrived at the VVIP rooms. Ma Rong picked up the book and started reading it. At first, she had hoped to understand just a few sentences to see what the book was called and what it could do, but to her surprise, she couldn't even read a word of it.

The language was just too foreign for her. She flipped through the entire book, which was filled with words, to see if there was anything she could read. On the last page, she finally found something she could read, only to be disappointed by the fact that it was the family's message saying that it was their heirloom.

A minute had passed, so she gave back the book to the staff, who bowed and swiftly left the room.

She sighed and turned back to see how the auction for the pill was going. Suddenly, she saw Alex who was concentrating on something. He wasn't looking at the auction, that was for sure.

"Yu Ming? What's wrong? You seem serious." She asked.

Alex got out of his stupor and smiled as he said, "Oh, it's nothing master. I was just surprised that one could even use spiritual sense to attack other people. That was truly eye-opening."

"Use spiritual sense to attack other people? What do you mean? There is no way anyone can do that." Ma Rong said, wondering just where he got such an absurd idea from.

"Huh? But that's what Heaven's Impact does, right?" he said.

"Heaven's Impact? What's that?" she had never heard of such a thing. This just brought more confusion to Alex's face.

Alex smiled a little and said, "What are you talking about master? It's obviously the book we read just now."

"The book?" Ma Rong got confused for a split second before her eyes started opening wide. "Did you read the book just now?"

"Oh, was I not supposed to? I'm sorry. I only read the introduction page though, so I didn't really read it all." He said.

Ma Rong was shocked. "You read it. You can read that book?" she practically shouted at this point. Thankfully, the room was entirely soundproof other than when one was bidding.

"Of course I can, master. Can't you?" Alex was surprised now.

"No! Didn't you hear what the auctioneer said? No one can read the book?" she said.

"I mean, isn't that how all higher grade books are, master? Even you said it took you about 2 months to read the immortal technique. Maybe, the family members weren't as talented, so they took forever to read it."

Ma Rong was stupefied. Her disciple had completely misunderstood the difficulty of the situation here and done something seemingly impossible in her eyes.

"Yu Ming, Can you read that book?" she asked once more.

"Yes," Alex answered seriously, hearing the tone in her voice.

"Then you can read that language?" she asked.

"Language? What language?" he asked.

"Obviously the language the book was written in," Ma Rong started to get angry now.

Alex was surprised. "That book was written in a language? Aren't those just scribbled lines that are supposed to put information into your brain?" he asked.

"Of course not. Those are words you are meant to read and comprehend. That's how you learn a technique in the first place."

Alex was stunned. He quickly took out the Flickering Shadows book he had with him and showed it to his master. "Master, are you telling me these lines are a language too? And that you can understand them?"

Ma Rong was even more stunned as she said, "Of course that's a language. Are you telling me you learned the book without knowing the language?"

Chapter 100: Masters Lessons

Ma Rong came back at noon, exactly on the dot, and spent the next 3 hours teaching him the various things one would have to know as a cultivator. She taught him from the smallest things such as what a cultivator should and should not call each other to things such as the different cities and the powerhouses in them across the Crimson Empire.

She taught him about the Royal Fu family and Fu Tian, the King of the Crimson Empire. She taught him how the royal Fu family sent its descendants around the empire to rule as city lords and ladies.

She also gave him a map of the crimson empire to learn and memorize where all the cities were relative to one another.

She also taught him about how a cultivator fought. Some fought with weapons, some fought with their bare hands, some fought using impressive techniques, some fought using poison, some fought using beasts, some fought using bugs, some fought using formations, some fought using talismans, some fought using weird artifacts, and some even fought using pills.

She also taught him about the other production methods aside from the alchemy itself. Some made formations, some made artifacts, some made solely weapons, and some made talismans.

"The last thing, make sure to hide your true talents in front of others. Like I said before, people are envious creatures. Cultivators are no different either. They will betray you the moment they learn you have something they don't. It won't matter to them whether they can obtain it or not, if they can't have it, no one can."

"You are young and you are pure-hearted, but that heart will for sure dye in the filth of the world of cultivation. Make sure you never let that filth stick to yourself. You might get drowned in it, but you have to learn to climb over it."

"For that, you can't just be an alchemist and hope to live in the cultivation world safely. There are strong people out there with bad motivation that might force you into working for them if you aren't strong enough to defend yourself. So, you have to be strong, strong enough to fight off your enemies. I wish you never have to kill anyone, but I know you will have to, even if it's just to defend yourself and your loved ones. The only thing I can do is hope is you don't lose yourself along with your enemies."

"Alright, that's enough for today. You don't have to worry about all these things right now but keep it in mind. I taught you almost everything I could. There are many things I still haven't taught you but that's just because I am not too knowledgeable in them either. You will hopefully learn them soon."

"I'm leaving now, you do what you have to." Ma Rong left the room and walked outside. She took out a medallion and used her spiritual sense to send out a message to all the elders saying, "Starting tomorrow, all the elders who used to work on the alchemy garden are to go back to working on it."

The elders got confused why the sect leader would do that, but they accepted them anyway.

Alex on the other hand remained stunned in his home. He had learned a lot today, yet the final words of his master were what remained to playback in his mind.

'I will have to kill people.' He didn't question the statement and took that as a fact. He knew that was true. After all, this was a game and killing was just an aspect of it. Still, for some reason, killing people wasn't something he would look forward to.

He spent the next few hours absorbing the information his master had just gave him. After he was done learning everything, he left the game to get some dinner.

After dinner, he came back and went to the sect valley to work. This day, he hadn't got the time to make any pills, so he wasn't going to register any. After finishing his work, he went back to his residence and managed to make the 6 different pills throughout the night.

After today's lesson, he didn't have the mental energy to make any more so he just cultivated throughout the rest of the night. In the morning, he logged out of the game and stayed logged out to do some of his classwork.

He only returned back to the game after his classes were over. After logging in, he looked at his storage bags and realized he only had one more pill to go. He was feeling unusually fresh today, so he went on to finish the last pill.

Ma Rong came to his house at around 4 pm. She walked in and sent out her spiritual sense to find him in the middle of alchemy. She walked into the alchemy room to see his absolutely focused face carefully looking at the cauldron.

After a few minutes of intense concentration, he finally opened the lid and a pill flew out of it. As he pulled the pill out, he slumped in exhaustion.

The pill that had just formed was blood red in color and used blood ginseng as its primary ingredient. It was called the Blood Improving pill. It was a common rank pill that would instantly refill a person's blood after they have lost a lot of blood. Or if they did already have blood, it would thicken it and invigorate it with more strength.

This pill was especially important to people in their old ages or people with anemia, as it would counteract their loss of blood and give them a much-needed boost in stamina.

Alex looked at the blood-red pill in his hand and felt its aura. Just the smell alone nearly brought him out of his fatigue, while the aura was something he had never felt before.

He focused on the pill to look at its information as a small panel popped up on top of it.

[Blood Improving Pill: 50%]

He had just made his first Heaven-grade pill.

Chapter 161: Pearls First Battle

It was close to 5 pm right now. Alex walked to the gate on the southern end of the sect crater. Calling it a gate could even be considered wrong, as it was just a small opening in the giant wall that prevented monsters from the Southern Forest from entering.

He walked up to the small entrance and was stopped by the elders guarding the gate.

"Badge!" an elder asked.

Alex took out his badge and handed it to them. The elders recorded the badge number and handed it back to Alex. "You should know that since today is Friday, you won't be exempt from the matches by leaving the sect right?" the elder asked.

"Yes," Alex replied and walked out of the opening. He looked back at the wall and wondered," Is this the wall for the Scarlet City?" He watched the wall go around the outside of the forest and curve outward after reaching a bit further.

"I wonder where the wall lies on Hong Wu sect."

He walked a bit further and started running. He didn't want to mess around with weak monsters on the outer side and needed at least a late Muscle tempering realm monster for what he was about to do.

His running speed, with zero air resistance thanks to making the air frictionless, was beyond amazing. In just a few minutes, he reached what would have taken him an hour at his speed a month back.

Now that he reached this far he decided to bring out Pearl. With a bright shine, Pearl came out of his left arm. He focused and saw the new stats on Pearl after the last few days of training.

[White Cat (Child) - Bonded

Name: Pearl

Cultivation Base: Bone Tempering 6th Realm

Evolution Chance: 40%

Cultivation Method: ????? ?????'s Dominating Body (Shared)

]

"You are stronger than I was back when I came to this forest," he said with a chuckle. "Come, let's see if there are any monsters around for you to fight." He started walking in a certain direction while spreading his spiritual sense at a max distance without overstretching.

Finally, he found a small monster with a shell on its back.

[Smooth Pangolin: Bone Tempering 3rd Realm]

"Oh, that is perfect for you. You should be able to win easily, right?" Alex made Pearl go and fight the pangolin. Alex looked at the monster and deduced, "since it has a shell, it must be a defensive monster and have bad offensive ability."

Pearl didn't know what to do at first, but after Alex explained that he had to fight with the Pangolin, Pearl sped up and reached the pangolin and started purring at him.

The pangolin got surprised by the sudden incoming of Pearl and immediately got into a ball. "Meow," Pearl jumped forward and hit the ball with his paw. Like a football being hit by a professional player, the ball flew far until it hit a tree, and jolted awake a few birds.

The tree had a small dent on the trunk as the ball fell to the ground, taking no damage. The birds in the tree saw Pearl running towards the ball and started to target him.

Alex looked at the birds and realized they were in the lower realms of Bone Tempering, so he wasn't scared. Still, he ran a little behind Pearl to make sure he doesn't get swarmed by different enemies.

Seeing the birds coming towards him, Pearl jumped high into the air and swung his claws at one of the birds. In a single hit, the bird was sent flying to the ground with most of its body broken. The bird was dead, and Alex had gotten the notification for obtaining its core and feathers.

Pearl landed lightly on his feet, leaving Alex in stun behind. 'Just one hit?' he truly hadn't expected the disparity of a few levels to bring forth such a gap in strength.

'Is it perhaps because his body is also cultivated?' he wondered. Training with Pearl, Alex had realized that the cultivation technique that Pearl used was one that both cultivated his Qi and Body. Only because it wasn't compatible, Alex had to suffer through intense pain and only get rewarded with Body cultivation alone.

'At this stage, he must be as strong as a late bone tempering realm monster.' After seeing the attack just now, Alex had no doubt that he had been underestimating Pearl until this point.

Pearl ran off towards the pangolin when another bird started to swoop down and attack him with its sharp talons. The small Pearl didn't even bother protecting himself. He took the full brunt of the attack and shoved it off like it was nothing.

His body was stronger than the bird's talons, and so the talons did not even put a scratch on his beautiful, white fur. Pearl once more jumped up to reach the bird, but by this point, all of the birds had flown away.

They had some intelligence and had already realized that this was an enemy they couldn't beat. Pearl landed on the sticks and stones in the forest, disappointed.

He then ran towards the pangolin and nudged it a little. It didn't move. Pearl cocked his head and didn't know what to do. Alex had arrived at this point and he used his spiritual sense to see what was going on with the Pangolin.

"Holy..." he was astonished. The pangolin's inner body had mostly been destroyed and it was on its last breath. Alex used his Qi to crush its body a little and got the notification that it had died now.

"No need to keep it suffering," he said as he looked at Pearl in a new light. He might look like a little cute fluffy ball of goodness, but that strength was anything but cute.

"Although you have started to slow down, if you keep on getting stronger like this, I can't say how long it would take for you to overtake me," Alex said, and then with a smile added, "Actually, I will look forward to the day when you are stronger than me if it ever comes."

Chapter 195: Zhou Meis Confusion

'But how could he get his hands on the only immortal technique of the sect that costs over 50,000 contribution points, as an outer sect disciple?' Zhou Mei wondered with her eyes still wide open.

'Could the disciples be correct and he is actually a son of an elder?' she wondered. 'But even then getting your hands on the technique should be impossible, unless…' her eyes turned wide at her own speculations.

'Unless he is the sect master's own son. Besides, she is the only one that I know of that has fully learned the Flickering Shadows technique. Was she hiding him from us? Is he a secret love child with an outsider?'

Numerous thoughts ran across her mind trying to make sense of how an unknown Outer Sect disciple could become a core disciple directly, and how that person could have learned an immortal technique.

"Sister? Sister!" Zhou Mi called out trying to wake Zhou Mei out of her own thoughts.

"Yeah? What's wrong?" she asked.

"You seemed to be lost in your thought, Sister. What happened?" Zhou Mi asked.

Zhou Mei thought for a second and asked, "You people know him right?"

"Him?" Zhou Mi cocked her head to the side in confusion. Only after realizing who she was talking about did she say, "Oh you mean Brother Yu?"

"Yes, that disciple, the new Core formation disciple. You guys seem to know who he is. Do you know how he is close to the Sect Leader?" she asked.

"Close to the sect leader?" Zhou Mi was once again confused. "I have no idea sister, I have only met him once and that was during Brother Kong's ascension too. In fact, Brother Kong knows more about him," she said.

Zhou Mei turned her head towards Kong Yuhan and glared at him, waiting for him to answer. Kong Yuhan on the other hand started feeling uncomfortable under the intense gaze and said, "I've only met him a couple of times. Due to him helping me a few times I call him a brother. That's just to the extent of what I know about him," he said.

"Helped you a couple of times?" Zhou Mei got a little curious. "Explain."

Kong Yuhan proceeded to tell her how Alex had managed to help him by finding him the incredibly hard-to-find Dwarf Berry, being an Aid during the preparation of the Qi Improvement pill, and then helping him once more during the pill cauldron exploding accident.

"Explain more about the accident again," Zhou Mei asked.

Kong Yuhan proceeded to explain in more accuracy how Alex had managed to throw away the cauldron just before it had exploded during his ascension and how he also blocked the incoming shockwaves and protected him.

"You didn't realize what had happened to your cauldron yourself?" she asked with a look of disdain. Kong Yuhan knew that she hated him for liking her sister, but didn't say anything because of her sister, so he didn't say anything except shake his head.

Zhou Mei then turned to her sister and asked, "You were there too, right? You didn't do anything?"

Zhou Mi simply shook her head as well. "He moved and saved us before any of us even realized what had happened," she said.

Zhou Mei could only think of one thing after listening to the story, ' This person definitely used Elemental Guidance. Another technique that is only known by elders and high-level Core disciples. Just who is this person?' the curiosity was eating her up from the inside.

"Sister?" Zhou Mi had to wake her sister once more as she was lost in her own thoughts once more.

"Huh?" she was jolted awake again.

"Aren't we going to leave?" Zhou Mi asked.

Zhou Mei took her eyes off her sister and looked at the testing hall only to find out that nobody was inside anymore. Not even the elders.

"Right, let's leave." Zhou Mei started walking up front and the two followed behind her. The lecture was already done, so the lecture hall was empty as well. Instead of leaving towards the core disciple's mountain, however, Zhou Mei walked towards the place where the Sect Leader's mountain and the left alchemy garden met.

"Why are you going there, sister? Do you need something in the gardens?" Zhou Mi asked.

"No, I'm not going to the garden. I'm going to the Elder's quarters," she said and kept on walking.
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"But why, sister?" Zhou Mi asked in confusion.

"Just go back to the Core disciple mountain, for now, I will come by later. I have something I need to ask my masters about," She left without waiting for a reply.

"Bu— " Zhou Mi was about to say something, but her sister was already far away.

"Sigh, she's always like this." Zhou Mi simply shook her head and looked at Kong Yuhan, who was looking at her too. Kong Yuhan gulped before he said, "Sister Zhou Mi, let us go back to the core disciple mountain and wait for your sister there. In the meantime, we can set up your new home as well," he said.

Now that they were alone, Zhou Mi got a little embarrassed as well and made a simple "mmm" sound to show affirmation. Kong Yuhan smiled and showed her the way to her new residence.

Alex, on the other hand, was already back at his home in the sect leader's mountain. He had employed both the Flickering Shadows Technique and the Veiled Light technique to escape from the crowd of people.

He was late for his university classes, so he took out the communication talisman and messaged his master. "I passed, master. I am currently tired due to cultivating all night and the exam, so I am going to rest. I will see you later for the talk about the forbidden fields."

He got a simple reply back saying, "Okay, and Congratulations." He smiled when he saw that.

Once he was inside the house, he walked into a random room, sat cross-legged, and logged out.

Chapter 242: Wan Lis Past

"Is this a regular thing, or are there more people here due to the competition," Alex asked.

"There are a little more people here due to the competition, but it's mostly just like this," Ma Rong said. She too was a little affected by the festival-like environment but not nearly as much as Alex.

Soon they reached a massive building with floors in the dozens. "Woah, that's a tall building," Alex said. He knew there were taller buildings in real life, but had never seen any personally.

Even the tv station building he had gone to with his cousin wasn't as tall as this.

Ma Rong walked in with Alex behind her. The hotel clerk did nothing when they saw the robes and stayed aside. Even if they dared to, the aura Ma Rong was sending out would scare them away.

"Ah, sect leader, you are here," Second Elder was standing in the hallway with the 18 other disciples and a few more elders nearby.

"You got the room?" Ma Rong asked.

The second Elder shook his head, and said, "They say they need the talisman from the association I gave you."

"Alright," Ma Rong said and walked up to the registration and showed the talisman. The man quickly nodded and gave them a bunch of keys.

"Let's go," Ma Rong said and was about to walk to the stairs when suddenly someone spoke up.

"Oh my, Oh my. If it isn't the sect known for getting second place in the alchemy competitions last year. What a stroke of luck that we could meet them here," someone said.

Ma Rong's face turned a little cold and a general air of hostility appeared in the other elders and disciples too. Only Wan Li and Alex were looking around the place, unknown about what was going on.

"I see you successfully found the way to the hotel, Daoist Xu. It's good to know that all those explosions haven't left you blind," Ma Rong said.

"Hah, why would they blind us?" the person named Xu asked.

"Oh, it's truly a surprise that you weren't deafened either. I'm happy for you, Daoist Xu," Ma Rong said.

The person named Xu was a short, chubby, hawk-faced cultivator wearing orange robes. He was currently seething in anger, and so were the rest of his sect members.

"Ah, you must be late to go make some more explosions. I won't stop you," Ma Rong said and left up the stair. The rest of the elders and disciples did the same as well.

The Daoist Xu remained behind, fuming at the fact that he didn't get the last word in.

Alex walked up to Ma Rong and asked, "Who's that?"

"Xu Beng, sect leader of the Spring Song Sect," Ma Rong said.

"Ah, that sect that makes the explosive pills? Those were annoying to fight against," Alex said.

"Yeah, they are one of the best alchemy sects in the Crimson Empire," Ma Rong said. There was a hint of annoyance in her voice.

"What's their grade? Are they better than us too?" Alex asked.

"They are around the same level as us in terms of Alchemy achievements. But they were created before us so they are already a first-grade sect. Since we are so close to each other in prowess, we have a deep-rooted history of the rivalry."

Ma Rong didn't seem as angry when she talked about this aspect of their relationship.

"Also, they said we were the second-best in last year's exam. Does that mean that we didn't do very well?" He asked.

"We did well. It's just that they did better. However, that won't be the same case this year. This competition, we will surely win," Ma Rong said with an eye full of determination.

"What makes you say that?" Alex asked. 'It's not just because of me right?' he wondered.

"Because this time we have you and Wan Li," Ma Rong said.

"Wan Li? He wasn't there in the last competition?" Alex asked.

"No, he... we made him stay behind to grieve the loss of his parents," Ma Rong said.

Alex didn't expect such reasoning. "His parents died?" he asked.

"Yes. His parents were merchants that left their son at Hong Wu sect ever since he was 10 years old. He's worked his way up to where he is for the last 9 years."

"While he was here, his parents were away on their business. But then, one day during a normal caravan ride, they were targeted by bandits and were killed. We tried to find the bandits, but they got away," Ma Rong said.

Alex remained quiet. 'Why is there so much death and tragedy in this game? Can no one have a normal life here?' he wanted to shout.

Alex turned back to look at Wan Li who was walking up the stairs with Fan Ruogang holding his arm.

"The boy hadn't been with his parents for so long that he didn't know how to feel when he learned the news. Poor boy didn't even know how to grieve. He spent his days doing nothing but preparing for the competition, holed up in his house."

"He didn't listen to any one of us, so when the time came for leaving, I made him stay behind and made sure he took care of his emotions. His grief was too much and it was eating him away inside. He just didn't know it," Ma Rong said.

"Thankfully, after the competition, Fanfan has been there with him, making him do other things aside from just alchemy, trying to take his mind off of his feelings once he was done grieving."

"She has truly been a blessing for him," Ma Rong said.

"I see," Alex said. He couldn't have imagined that the bubbly girl that seemed to want to do nothing but play was actually just trying to help him.

Alex started seeing both of them in a new light. Finally, he stopped looking at them as just Number 1 and Number 3 and instead thought of them as actual human beings with thought.

Chapter 279: Huang Fus Pill Harmony

Alex finally finished making the pill.

Fortunately, He didn't involuntarily release the Pill Splitting Qi and managed to make a single pill. With 30 seconds left on the clock, he took the finally prepared pill out of the cauldron and walked to the front.

He stood up and walked behind Huang Fu to register his new pill.

Many other participants were just done checking their pills yet none of them had done better than Huang Fu or Wan Li with their 49%. That was still the best harmony in this competition.

However, Huang Fu had another pill, and people were expecting more from him the second time around.

The various participants silently waited for him to put in his pill. Huang Fu didn't care about the onlookers and walked up to the pill testers before putting in his pill.

As soon as the pill touched the base of the pill tester, fog started rising up the side of the tester. It slowly rose and crossed 10%, however, it wasn't stopping right now.

It showed no signs of slowing down even as it reached 20%. Alex came over to watch just at that time and watched the pill tester work instead of putting in his own.

The fog slowly rose past 25% and reached 30%. However, there was still some distance for the fog to move up. 31, 32, 33%. The speed of the fog slowed down a little, but not a lot.

It was still going up at an acceptable rate. Soon it crossed 40%, and people got more attentive. They doubted that the pill would stop in the early 40s, but you never knew.

41, 42... 45%. The fog still rose and was now reaching the high ranking harmony level. Up until now, the third place was held by Han Long, who had made a pill with 48% harmony.

While the second and first place was shared by Wan Li and Huang Fu with 49%. However, that would soon change.

46%, 47%, 48%... 49%. The pill's harmony level reached the same level as the one with the highest rank right now.

However, there was something else about the number 49%. This was the highest harmony one's pill could have while it was in the Earth grade. A single percentage higher, and the pill would be in Heaven grade.

50%

Everyone gasped when they saw Huang Fu's pill cross the threshold and jump into the Heaven grade category. Han Long sighed when he saw that. He was already sad about making a pill that was 1% away from the winning rank, but now it was 2% away.

Wan Li felt sad too. He was the winner of the competition along with Huang Fu, but now, he jumped one step ahead, leaving him behind in 2nd place.

However, Huang Fu's pill wasn't done yet. Just as everyone was surprised about seeing the pill in the Heaven grade, the pill tester had the fog rise a single percentage more.

51%

The different viewers whether they be the other participants, staff or the audience realized, the pill wasn't done yet. There was more harmony that the pill had to show still.

52%

This brought out more reactions from the crowd. Huang Fu had 3% higher harmony than the person in the 2nd rank. While the number seemed small, it was a very hard number to achieve.

However, that wasn't the end.

53%

Finally, the fog stopped moving and stayed still. The final harmony of Huang Fu's pill was 53%. He was a clear-cut winner of the competition now.

Huang Fu smiled after seeing the result and went ahead to grab his pill. At the same time, Alex moved forward as well, but he was going to put in his pill.

He put in the Bronze Tiger's Rage and watched the fog slowly build up around the pill tester. His first pill was 43% in harmony level due to it being one of the double pills, so, most people had ended up ignoring him.

The only person who was watching Alex's pill tester were the staffs who were obligated to do so, Wan Li who wanted to see how his fellow disciple was doing, the girl from his sect and Alex himself.

Everyone else already believed that the winner of the competition was revealed and had gone to congratulate Huang Fu.

Slowly the fog build-up reached 10% and climbed up at a high speed. In front of the onlookers' eyes, it climbed up to 20%.

In the audience, all the Hong Wu sect members and some of the Tiger sect members were looking at Alex's pill tester's numbers go up.

Ma Rong especially, who knew just how good Alex was, was looking at his pills with great attention. The others had praised her for raising a good disciple when he showed a pill with 43% harmony when he hadn't been in the sect for long, however, he had been disappointed.

Now that it was his second pill, she expected greater results.

The pill tester soon reached 30% mark but showed no sign of slowing down. It caught the attention of a few more people, but wasn't enough to cause a commotion yet.

32%, 34%, 36%.

Alex watched as the harmony level soon reached 40% right in front of everyone. However, it still wasn't showing any sign of slowing down.

41%, 42%, 43%.

The harmony level gradually got higher and crossed his previous pill's 43% to reach 44%. The people from his sect commended him for doing better than last time, however, Ma Rong expected more and wanted more.

So, as she watched, the harmony level reached 45%.

It started to catch the attention of more people as it went up one more level and reached 46%.? People were now starting to curiously watch his pill.

47%

The fog around the pill tester went up once more and people started looking with wide eyes. Han Long's eyes were especially wide as he wished for the pill tester to stop raising.

But things rarely happened as one wanted. And so, the Harmony level increased one more step and reached 48%.

Chapter 280: Alexs Pill Harmony

Han Long felt a load of shock when he saw that the person he wasn't expecting suddenly reached the same harmony level as him.

He looked at Alex, who also looked back at him and smiled.

It was then Han Long realized something was wrong.

49%

The fog increased by one more level. Gasps of shock sounded from around the place. Wan Li looked at Alex with shock in his eyes, let alone Han Long who had just been beaten. The amount of shock he was feeling right now was unreal.

Even Huang Fu seemed to be interested right now and looked at the pill tester which was the center of attention amongst everyone on stage and a lot of audience in the coliseum.

"Woah, Mingming just got 2nd place? Was he always that good sect leader?" Fan Ruogang asked. The rest of the disciples were also in shock, dumbfounded at the harmony his pill had reached.

Recognizing ingredients was one thing, but making a good pill required a different set of skills.

However, Ma Rong didn't recognize this current result and simply said, "Just watch."

50%

Another Heaven Grade pill appeared on the stage. Han Long, Wan Li, Huang Fu, the staff, the host, and the audience, all of them were shocked.

"A-Another Heaven-grade pill?" someone said in shock.

"T-That's the second place holder now," another person said.

"This participant didn't have such a result on the first pill right?" One of the staff asked.

"Nope, he only had a 43% harmony pill," another staff member said.

"Am I... really out of the third-place?" Han Long muttered to himself.

However, that wasn't the end.

51%

The pill tester hadn't stopped and the fog was still rising. Now, even Huang Fu started getting anxious. His pill was just 2% lower than Alex's. While that was a massive hurdle to pass, it didn't seem like Alex's pill tester was going to stop right now.

Unfortunately for Huang Fu, however, he was right.

52%

Now Alex's pill was 1 step away from having the same amount of harmony as Huang Fu's. He was starting to sweat. He walked a little closer to check the pill tester more clearly and in doing so he caught Alex's eyes who had just looked to the side.

From his perspective, Alex had no sort of tension in his eyes, almost like he didn't care what harmony his pills would get.

No. He realized that wasn't the case. It wasn't that he didn't care what the harmony his pill was going to be, it was more like He knew what it was going to be.

A strange premonition sprung up inside Huang Fu's mind and at the same time, it happened.

53%

The harmony level in the pill tester increased once more. Now, Alex was the first place holder of the competition along with Huang Fu. There were going to be two winners.

"Wow, a random disciple nearly beat the Royal Alchemist's direct disciple?" a staff member said in shock.

"What sect is he from? Can you guys check?" the host said.

"He seems to be from the Hong Wu sect. Ah, no wonder. They are well known for being great in alchemy," one of the staff members said.

"What happens to the rewards? Do we give out 100 points to both of them?" another staff member asked.

"If both of them get the same harmony then they both get the same points," the host said.

"Oh. But what do you mean... if?"

54%

Everyone talking suddenly stopped doing so. A pin-drop silence spread throughout the stage as the people's jaws dropped in shock.

A new champion was here.

Huang Fu was genuinely surprised that he lost to a participant that wasn't even that well known. He didn't want to believe that he had lost.

But he couldn't deny it at all after seeing the fog reach 55% in the pill tester.

"Huh? 55?" he looked in shock.

Everyone else did the same and was then dumbfounded. The harmony level of the pill had grown by another point.

"Wait, it is up to 55% now. That's like a professional Alchemist right there," someone said.

"Forget about that. How many Heaven Grade alchemists have you seen that are still a disciple?" another person asked.

"He would have to make a few more Heaven grade pills to be considered one, but if he can make 55% pills consistently, it wouldn't be wrong to consider him one," someone else answered.

"Umm... why are we talking about 55% as if that is the final harmony?" a timid voice among the bunch asked, prompting everyone to stop and look back at the pill tester.

Within 3 seconds of them watching, the harmony increased once more.

56%

Gasps rang out this time around, but nobody said anything. The staffs were already shocked beyond belief. The participants were equally shocked at someone making such a high-grade pill.

Han Long had long since accepted his fate. Wan Li was surprised at how talented Alex was, and Huang Fu could do nothing but look at the pill tester in shock.

56% was a lot of things. But what it was not, was the end.

57%

The harmony increased once more. The audience thought that they were jaded to it by now, but that wasn't true. They were still shocked. Whispers ran about the coliseum but none of it reached the stage.

Everyone expected it to stop now, but the pill tester seemed to have its own mind.

58%.

This was an unprecedented event for everyone in this competition. This was something that had never happened before and was likely never going to happen again.

While everyone was in shock, Alex was smiling, for he knew, this was not the end either.

59%

Alex's pill had now beat Huang Fu's pill by 6% of harmony difference. While everyone thought Huang Fu's pill beating Wan Li's pill by 4% was already amazing, having a 6% higher than his was something they couldn't comprehend.

Everyone turned to look at Alex and see the face of the winner. But Alex wasn't happy or excited. He was simply smiling looking at the pill tester in front of him.

At the same instant, the harmony level increased by 1 more.

60%.

Chapter 414 - Improving The Recipe

Alex returned back to his house learning a great many things about his pills. Among the 9 new pills he had, he already got rid of 5 of them and had only kept the remaining 4 as a choice for improving. ;

Even amongst them, there were really just 2 that he cared about. ;

The pill for the nail was something he really liked, especially when considering that the beasts could use it to have stronger and longer claws. It was basically like adding weapons to their claws. If he improved on that pill, he could surely sell it to people that had beasts and would love for them to get stronger. ;

The next pill he cared about was obviously the pill that gave the swines intelligence. The fact that it increased the mental capabilities of the swine, he fully expected it to increase the strength of the water in his spiritual sea as well. He was now hopeful about increasing the reach of his spiritual sense and couldn't wait to acquire the pill.

As for the pill that made someone sweat faster and the pill that increased a person's heartbeat, basically doping them, he was still on the fence about them being useful at all. ;

"Whatever, I need to worry about this mental pill alone," Alex thought. "How many Bright Soul grasses did I get yesterday?" he quickly rummaged through his storage bag to check. ;

In total, after nearly 8 hours of scouring the forest, he had acquired about 32 Bright Soul Grasses. While that number sounded quite high, it wouldn't last him through the whole night if he tried to experiment with the pill to improve it. ;

"I don't know if there is reduced effect with each pill use like how most of the permanent pills have, so I need to make sure I only eat the best of the best pill," Alex thought. ;

Nodding to himself, he went to check on his master again. After learning that she was sound asleep, he went to the Southern Forest once more. ;

He called out Pearl who came out of the tattoo saying "Meow". Alex heard 'Brother' in his mind again and smiled.

He then quickly checked Pearl's nails and saw that the claws were still sticking out of his paws. 'So it doesn't disappear after staying in the beast space either huh?' he thought. ;

"Do you want to fight again?" he asked. ;

"YES!" Pearl's voice resounded in his mind. ;

They went through the forest once more, finding many different Alchemy ingredients and high-level monsters. Alex could now easily fight anything that was below the Mind Tempering realm. With beasts in the 1st realm of Mind Tempering, his victory chances went down by a lot as that was a whole Minor Realm above his own.

Also, beasts got way more intelligent in the Mind Tempering realm and most of the time just ran away when they saw that they couldn't win. ;

So, the most Alex could do was test his sword Intent here and there on beasts that were willing to fight against him. He felt like he got a little bit stronger with his Intent, but not much. ;

He needed that feeling of fighting with someone strong once again to hone it better. ;

Pearl on the other hand was having the time of his life. The only thing he was angry about was that after killing each beast, he wanted to eat their core, but the core would automatically get transported to one of Alex's storage bags at random, and he would be left with nothing. ;

Quite a few times, he caused ruckus like the little child he was for not getting the core. His instinct told him to eat whatever was inside, but once he didn't find anything, he no longer knew what to do. ;

'I will have to teach him that he won't get a core to eat through his killing as long as he is with me,' Alex thought. But then, he thought of something else. ;

'Wait, how does the core even get transported to me?' he thought. That led him to question how the names of things floating on top of them worked, which led to an entire can of worms opening that made him question how every single 'game' aspect of this world worked.

"Other people don't get that. So why only the players?" Alex wondered. "Whatever, I will worry about that later. I should finish this quick and return," he thought.

So, he spent the next two hours the other way around and got as many ingredients as he could. By the time he had left the forest, he had gathered about 40 more of the Bright Soul Grasses and that was enough for him to do some experiments to improve some of the aspects of it. ;

He quickly returned back to the sect and went to his house. He looked at the time and realized he had about 3 more hours of time to test the pill.

He deliberated for a moment on whether to use his actual cauldron or use a black cauldron. After a few minutes of thinking, he decided to go with the black one. ;

Once the cauldron heated enough, he put in the first ingredient. He decided to follow the best recipe he had at the moment since he didn't have another pill with him to check the differences. ;

Since he had to test out the heating speed, and energy release rate at every level, he had destroyed quite a few of these ingredients. ;

Bright Soul grass was quite expensive in comparison to the other basic ingredients he used and he was even deliberating on changing the ingredients. However, that was something he would test later, or ask other people. ;

He didn't know how the pill changed just because one ingredient was changed, and he didn't want to take that risk right now. He had something good in his hand, he wasn't going to want to change it for anything else. ;

Besides, it was a simple pill with around 10 ingredients. He didn't need to try really hard to get something right with how many times he was going to try. ;

He stuck to the recipe and successfully made the first pill. The pill had a slightly blue hue to an overall light brown pill. He checked the Harmony of the pill and without much surprise, it was around 16%. ;

That was all he had done back in the forest before he had moved onto a different pill once he made the third set of changes. ;

Now, he was going to continue from where he left off. Without hesitation, he half-crushed the pill and checked the Structure and Composition again. ;

"I still don't get any information from this," he thought and started making another pill. This time, he remembered the different variations of energy release and used a different one for the first ingredient. ;

The pill came out a little worse than the one before. ;

"Ok, again," he thought and changed the second ingredient's variation. This one came out a little better than the first one. ;

"Alright, this is the norm now," he thought and kept the 2nd ingredient's instruction the same, and changed the one for the third ingredient.

Similarly, he tried for a dozen or so times before he made a pill with the highest harmony as of yet, 29%. That was the best he could do in the 3 hours he had. ;

"Time to leave," he thought. Before that, however, he went to check on his master one more time. As he expected, she was still asleep. ;

"Second elder said it was only going to take a short while. Why is it taking so long?" he wondered. ;

He quickly logged out and started his next assignment. This one was a little hard, but he had the next 3 days after today free, so he was in no hurry. ;

He went to his classes and returned back. Then, without wasting a lot of time in real life, he went directly back into the game. ;

Once he was in, he went directly to check on his master. After returning, he directly entered his alchemy room and started doing what he was doing this morning.

He had changed the recipe so much that it was unrecognizable, aside from the ingredients themselves. He continued changing from that again. ;

He changed the direction the 4th ingredient moved in, then he changed the 5th ingredient's speed at which it moved inside the cauldron. Once he saw that the 2nd change resulted in a worse pill, he reverted and changed something else. ;

Since he didn't know much about the structure of the powder, he was going to wing it until he got lucky.

As for the composition, he did his best and made the pill using every single speck of powder that was inside the cauldron, whether it was freely available or hidden in some nook and corner. He went through the cauldron thoroughly and made sure to not miss a single bit of any ingredient. ;

That had really helped him in making the pill have higher Harmony. Still, he didn't know how much improvement was the composition, and how much of it was the structure of the powder particles. ;

He had no choice but to leave everything up to luck. At least until his master woke up and explained it to him. ;

"I hope master knows it at least. She did act like she understood what the Royal Alchemist meant when I told her about what he had said," Alex thought. ;

However, while he was hopeful, he was fully expecting her to not know either. If she knew about it, then there would be no reason why the Second Elder shouldn't know about it. But clearly, ; as Zhou Mei had said, even her Master didn't know about them. ;

"I can't do anything but just try," he thought and grind until midnight. After midnight, he felt his body just did not have enough Qi to make the pills anymore. He might have been able to make pills for a much longer time had he taken it slow. ;

But, since it was just making the same pill over and over again with only a slight change each time, he couldn't stop himself from doing it at the speed he did. ;

By midnight, he had around 8 hours of pill-making under him of the day, with over 60 pills made during the time. About 15 of those pills were made by the pill splitting into two. ;

'How can a pill that can not hold all the energy within it, hold it all when it is split into two?' Alex questioned. He had been questioning this for quite a while, but now that he learned more, he decided to see if he knew anything new. ;

He decided to check the pill with his spiritual sense. When he focused on the pill with high concentration to see minute particles, he was shocked. ;

"Hollow?" he thought in surprise. Hollow was perhaps not the correct term, but the pill was definitely not as packed as when it was just a single pill.

He tried to understand it, but he was just too fatigued at this point. "Sigh, let me just cultivate for the night," he thought. ;

He called out Pearl and asked him to cultivate. However, before that, he popped a monster core into his mouth and fought the monster in the spiritual sea. ;

Once the beast was dead and the yellow fog swallowed it all, he gained quite a bit of Qi. Using that, he broke through to the 7th Meridian tempering realm. ;

He felt that the speed was quite fast, but when compared to the other players, it was slow. ;

He asked Pearl to start, and soon, he too started and fell into a deep trance before going unconscious. ;

Early in the morning, he finally woke up again. He thought he heard someone speaking close to him and slowly opened up his eyes. ;

In front of him was a figure sitting in a lotus position, watching over him. ;

"Oh, Did you wake up?" ;

Alex's eyes immediately went wide in full joy and happiness. ;

"Master!"

Chapter 415 - Terror

"Master!" Alex exclaimed in absolute joy as he looked up to the person in front of him. Ma Rong was sitting ahead of him wearing a dark green robe.

"Master, you're awake," he said with a large smile on his face.

Ma Rong's face which was initially a melancholic smile soon turned into a genuine, happy smile. "I see you've made it back alive. I believed you would," she said.

"Yes, Master. I got back a few days ago," Alex said.

"I heard. I woke up about 4 hours ago, and the elders told me everything," Ma Rong said. "Still, give me your own recollections of what happened," she asked.

"Oh, about that…" Alex explained everything that he could remember. There was not a single thing he left on the table, except for the figure in his spiritual sea that spewed out the yellow fog.

"I see, so it was him." Ma Rong's cold voice sounded almost ethereal. The grass she was sitting on slowly started to stop moving as they froze solid and the ones a little further away, started getting frost on them.

"Master, are you okay?" Alex asked as he stood up and walked towards Ma Rong. Suddenly, as soon as he got close to her, an intense feeling from deep within him came to the surface making him stop then and there.

His legs refused to move a single more step as his body started shaking without any hints of stopping. His eyes were wide with fear in them like he had never felt before.

To him, this felt like his world would collapse at any moment, and that he would no longer be able to live in it.

Ma Rong's eyes flashed a hint of worry when she saw him frozen in fear. She immediately controlled the anger she was feeling towards Zexi and the cold aura around her disappeared.

The frost on the surface of the grass blades disappeared and the frozen patches of grass started moving again. Finally, Alex could grab hold of himself and move.

While he knew that there was no danger, his heart still betrayed him as a deep sense of terror appeared in his mind when he saw Ma Rong a little in front of him. This wasn't to the same level as just moments before, but it was still very fearsome.

'What just happened? Why did I fear Master of all people? And why did my body not respond to the fear at all? I thought it did so with every suppression,' he thought.

"I'm sorry. I still haven't reigned in my unlocked Constitution yet so you had to feel that. It must especially be bad for you considering your body is a yang-type constitution," Ma Rong explained.

"Is… that so?" Alex thought. He felt like someone just dumped a bucket of ice-cold water on him. His body he was starting to get so confident in was actually so inferior to his master's that it froze at the slightest hint of terror from her.

'I guess that settles it then. My body is in fact only divine grade,' he thought.

"It's okay now," Ma Rong said as she walked towards him. Alex instinctively put one foot back to move but stopped himself.

'I can't get scared of my master,' he thought. Ma Rong smiled and placed her hands on his head to teach pat his head.

The moment she touched him, it felt like he had lost all control of his body and dropped to the ground. For a second, he felt his vision blur and he nearly lost everything in sight.

"W-What's wrong?" Ma Rong asked while all flustered. "Wh-What's happening to you?"

Alex finally got back to his feet and huffed. "Ma-Master, I think your body's Yin is suppressing me way too much. It might be better if you don't touch me now. Just standing near you is making me terrified," he said.

Ma Rong's hands stopped where they were and slowly folded back as a sad face appeared on her face.

Alex stood up to see tears in her eyes and realized how what he had just said came off as. "It's okay master. You will just have to learn to hold your aura in and I will be fine. Or I can just enter the True realms soon and can maybe not be so useless against your aura, haha."

Alex tried to think of ways to stop Ma Rong from feeling bad about him. "Uhh… oh yeah, Master, why did you go to the Forbidden Fields? I heard that you took a hoard of elders there too," Alex asked.

"That was… I was worried about the desert encroaching on our lands and wanted to see how much closer they had come," Ma Rong said.

"Huh? Can't you just check from afar? You should be able to see if you fly up high, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, but I had only ever seen it from far away and thought that I would get a much better understanding of the situation if I saw what was going on up close," Ma Rong said. "Unfortunately, it turns out I should not have gone there. That place nearly put me in a coma."

"Well, it also made you quite strong now. If not from it, I don't think your body would've unlocked its constitution," Alex said.

"Sigh, I guess so," Ma Rong said and simply shook her head. "Alright, continue what you were saying about your life inside that formation."

"Ah right, so…" Alex told her that with nothing else to do inside the formation, he made a small furnace and tested the different ingredients just like she had said.

Ma Rong's eyes shone in surprise when she heard that. "So, you did learn it just like we first intended. Good," Ma Rong said as she praised him.

"How much did you learn?" she asked.

"I experimented with the different ingredients everyday master and made 9 different types of pills," he said with a proud face.

"9?" Ma Rong said in surprise. "How many of them worked?" she asked.

"Uh, 5 of them turned out to be quite a trash, 2 of them are pills I am not sure if it's worth investing my time in, and finally the last 2 are the one that's really fantastic," Alex said.

He quickly showed his nails and started explaining what the pill did. He continued explaining how many experiments he did, and what he had concluded.

"Hmm… Not bad. I think your assessment is correct. Especially about it being a permanent type pill. Besides, it seems it will benefit beasts more than it will us. We might be able to establish a business with the various beast sects to provide this pill," Ma Rong said.

Alex was surprised that she was already seeing so far into the future and was thinking of selling the pills to beast sects, while his mind was on auction still.

"What about the second one?" she asked.

Alex didn't understand the second pill fully even by himself, and definitely required Ma Rong's help in this. So, he explained everything to her as well as he could.

"Hmm… intelligence, that's a very delicate subject. I will have to check this by myself. Come," she said and flew into the air as she flew towards the swine place. Alex flew and followed right behind her.

They soon reached the swine place and Ma Rong walked to one of the swine before feeding it a pill without hesitation. The swine ate the pill with no emotion on its face.

Slowly, as Ma Rong watched, the emotion of confusion appeared in the swine's eyes. As all the different beasts gained intelligence, it looked around to see what was caging him.

"That's… I've never seen a Common Rank pill do that," Ma Rong said in surprise.

"Right, master?" Alex asked. "I was thinking the same thing. I was hoping I could increase my spiritual sea's thickness and thus increase the range of my spiritual sense. That would work right?"

Ma Rong thought for a second. "Yes, it should. In fact, the True rank pill that increases your mental energy also has Bright Soul Grass as a side ingredient. I think you accidentally found a weaker version of the pill," Ma Rong said.

"Oh wow. Really? That's quite lucky," Alex said.

"How did you learn to make new pills this easily?" Ma Rong suddenly asked.

Alex just looked at her and answered, "it's easy once you get to know the element each of the ingredients has. Then you learn the rate at which they release their energy and then you make the pills. You just put them in order and go with what would be necessary according to the state inside the cauldron,"

"Of course, you would need quite a few variations of the pill to get the harmony high, but that's it," Alex said.

Ma Rong was stunned at the level of non-nonchalance Alex had when he mentioned it all. "So, you used a lot of ingredients to experiment with and then used spiritual sense to do the rest?" Ma Rong asked.

She fell into thought as she started to realize what other opportunity the opening of her spiritual sense had brought her. 'Maybe I should go back into a few weeks' worths of secluded cultivation and try to make some new pills,' she thought.

However, now was not the time. She had just come back to being awake and couldn't immediately disappear once again. In a sense, both of Alex's masters had the same problem right now.

"You really used your advantage to its most, huh?" she said with a chuckle.

"Of course Master. If I have the things necessary to boost me in my path to become a better alchemist and I don't take it, then I would just be an idiot," he said. "I don't want to be called that again."

Ma Rong sighed. "Yeah, I guess that works for you. Just keep in check your habit of overusing ingredients as you seem to have learned. That's not really a ve— "

Ma Rong felt something in her storage vibrate just the tiniest bit. "Hm?" he thought and took out her talisman. She looked into the talisman with a spiritual sense and opened her eyes in confusion.

"What's wrong, master?" Alex asked. He wondered who contacted her this soon after her recovery just a few hours ago.

"It's Master. I don't know why though; he says there is someone there to meet me," Ma Rong said. "Come, he is asking for you too."

This time, it was Alex's turn to get confused. "Why me?" he asked.

"I don't know, but it seems to be quite important from the tone of his voice. Let's go and see," Ma Rong said and walked out of the swine hall and flew back towards the Elder's Hall.

Alex followed her close by, but a little behind since he was afraid of randomly falling from the great height if he ever came in contact with her.

They both landed in front of the Elder's Hall and walked in to find the Grand Elder waiting for them. Next to Grand Elder was an old man in a purple robe.

Ma Rong stopped and immediately bowed a little when she saw the man. "Butler Kang, it's good to see you again," Ma Rong said politely.

"Ah, Sect Leader Ma doesn't have to bow in front of this lowly me," the man in the purple robes bowed even lower than Ma Rong.

Alex looked at the interaction of the two with a hint of curiosity.

"Butler Kang has been looking for you for the past 3 days and had to be sent back due to you not being available at the time. However, since you are here now, I decided to let him talk to you," the Grand Elder said.

"I see," Ma Rong said. "I'm sorry for the inconvenience I might have caused you with my absence, Butler Kang. Please let me know why you were looking for me.. I will do my best to be of help to you."

Chapter 416 - Surprise

"Sect Leader Ma is still very kind. This old man doesn't need anything himself, it's the young lord that is in need of your assistance," Butler Kang said.

Both Ma Rong and the Grand Elder's eyes immediately flashed with caution and worry. "Is… there something wrong with the lord?" Ma Rong asked.

"Ah, no no, the lord is fine and so is the mistress. The one in need is someone important to the lord. I can't reveal any more information right now. The Lord has asked that the matter not be spread very far," Butler Kang said.

"I see," Ma Rong said. "I will leave right now then."

"Yes, and um…" Butler Kang stopped her for a second before looking at Alex next to her. "Is this young man the one called Yu Ming?" he asked.

"Yes, this is my disciple Yu Ming," Ma Rong introduced. She then turned to Alex and introduced the Butler to him.

"This senior is Butler Kang. He is the head butler of City Lord Fu himself," Ma Rong explained.

Alex finally understood why the two of them held the man in such high regard. Being the head butler to the city lord himself, the butler would have an unnaturally high status in the city.

"Greetings, senior," Alex immediately bowed and greeted.

"Greetings, my child." Butler Kang turned towards Ma Rong and said, "You've got yourself a very good disciple, Sect Leader Ma."

"Yes, I do," Ma Rong said with a smile.

"Young Lord has asked that we bring your disciple with us too," Butler Kang said.

Ma Rong looked a little concerned. "Has he said why?" she asked.

"I'm afraid not. Bringing back your disciple was more of a passing remark by the young lord. I did not dare question why," Butler Kang said.

"I see… then we should move," Ma Rong said and started walking out. Alex followed behind her, followed by Butler Kang at the back.

As soon as they reached out of the hall, they all flew away. From the Hong Wu sect, the City Lord's manor was merely a few minutes of flight away.

Alex flew comfortably, keeping up with both Butler Kang and Ma Rong. Butler Kang looked back multiple times surprised how well a youngster was at keeping up with the two of them.

'The young man must be using some incredible technique to hide his cultivation base so well. I can barely see that he is in the Meridian realm, even then that's because of my own cultivation base. How is he flying so well with such little cultivation?' he wondered.

"We are here," Ma Rong told Alex and slowly dropped to the ground.

Alex looked at the massive house with a large garden in front and even a large backyard behind. He had always seen this place from far away when he was flying, but this was the first time he actually visited this place.

He too followed behind Ma Rong but didn't forget to keep his distance from her. He didn't want to accidentally fall to the ground in such a place. Together, he and Ma Rong went up to the gate.

With Butler Kang behind them, the gate opened without any questions and let the two of them go inside. There were dozens of people working on the front garden that stopped to look at the new arrivals. Once they saw who it was, they went back to their work.

Even inside the manor, there were people who were working that would check who came sneakily.

The old butler took them to a waiting room and let them wait there while he went to inform the city lord about their arrival.

"Ah, you are finally here, Sect Leader Ma," A female voice appeared from the side.

Ma Rong immediately stood up to greet the woman who just walked in. "Greetings, Lady Mo."

"Hello," Alex greeted her as well.

"Hm, do I know you?" Lady Mo said with a hint of confusion on her face for a second before recognizing him. "Ah, the young man from that time. How are you, junior? It must be fun being the direct disciple of two sect leaders, right?"

"It's… quite amazing actually," Alex said with a smile towards Lady Mo.

Lady Mo still wore the purple robes she did from back when Alex had first seen her. Her beauty didn't seem to have aged a day either.

Alex could almost promise that she was from a noble family that married the city lord from her manners and elegance and how she handled herself.

"Lady Mo, do you know why we are called here?" Ma Rong asked.

"Ah… it's… I think it's better if I let my dear husband speak about it himself," Lady Mo said.

Ma Rong didn't say anything and waited. Alex looked around the house and was generally amazed by it all. The house was fully white all around and was filled with different art pieces that were purple and red in color.

"Sect Leader Ma," Butler Kang came and spoke from the side. "Please come, the young lord is waiting."

"Um, Butler Kang, what about my disciple?" she asked.

"Haha, he is being specially requested in there as well," butler Kang said with a smile.

The old butler took them through a corridor to the other side of the manor that seemed to have not as many people. In fact, there was barely any person in these parts.

Finally, they came across a door that had two people standing in front of it. One of them was a black-robed female that seemed to be a guard of some sort, and the other one was a handsome, young man in his late 20s.

With his purple garment and a smile on his face, he seemed to exude confidence and elegance in everything he did.

"I've brought them, Young Lord," old man Kang said.

"Thank you, old Kang. You may leave for now," the young man said.

"Greetings, City Lord Fu," Ma Rong said as she bowed a little towards the man. Alex greeted him almost immediately as well. He bowed a little to show some respect.

"You are finally here, Sect Leader Ma. You cannot understand the frustration I went through by not having you available for the last 3 days," City Lord Fu, Fu Wen said.

"My apologies. I, myself was sick for the last 3 days, so I couldn't be of any help to city lord," Ma Rong spoke as respectfully as she could. She was so respectful that Alex started to wonder if the lord really even deserve that.

Just because he had the blood of the Royal Fu flowing through him, it didn't mean that he was in any way closely related to the current emperor or even the previous one.

That led Alex to believe that that was not the case, and he was in fact close to the current emperor.

'He's not the emperor's son, that's for sure,' Alex thought as he remembered the names of the only 2 princes of the country, and he had seen the second prince already.

There was no way the crown prince was going to become the city lord of a city so far away.

"Oh, you were sick? An Alchemist becoming sick, now that's concerning. Should we be worried in any way?" Fu Wen asked.

"Oh, not at all. It was something only relating to me. There are no reasons to worry," Ma Rong said.

"That's fortunate," Fu Wen said. He then turned to Alex and said, "Junior brother, long time no see. How are adapting to being in two sects at once? Are you okay?"

"I'm very much fine, City Lord. Thank you for asking," Alex said.

"Haha, I had to. You must have done quite a few exceptional things to be noticed like that. I see your cultivation base has jumped quite high too," he said.

'What?' Alex's face was full of confusion. ' Is his cultivation base high enough to counter my Immortal Concealment technique?' he wondered.

'Also, is he talking about me getting that alchemy win? That shouldn't have been so noticeable," he thought. As he thought, his eyes started to wander and it accidentally fell on the eyes of the dark-robed guard standing far behind Fu Wen.

Alex suddenly lost all thought process as he kept looking at those eyes. The guard quickly brought down her eyes, but Alex's eidetic memory didn't let him forget it.

He kept on thinking about those eyes and tried to sift through the many memories of his to find the person with those eyes. It took a while, but he finally did it.

"It's you," Alex suddenly blurted out loud. Both Ma Rong and Fu Wen were a little surprised at the outburst.

"Ah, I'm sorry for speaking so abruptly like that," Alex immediately apologized when he realized what he had done just now. However, his eyes still showed the shock he had felt just now.

'Guard? But how?' he couldn't help but ask himself.

"What's wrong, Yu Ming. Why did you shout?" Ma Rong asked.

"Um, the guard over there… I think I know her," Alex said. "However, when I saw her she wasn't a guard. Instead, she was the daughter of a noble household."

"Huh?" Ma Rong was confused for a moment, but then remembered Alex's story about how he came back in a caravan due to a lady from a noble family thinking of him as a bandit.

"City Lord Fu, may I request that you ask that guard over there to drop her mask. I would like to know if my disciple is correct," Ma Rong said.

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Sect Leader Ma," Fu Wen said with an awkward smile. Ma Rong got even curious about the whole thing.

"You can't?" she asked with a slight hint of confusion.

"Haha, I wouldn't deny a request of yours for no reason, Sect leader Ma. Especially when I brought you here with a request of my own. The truth is… I do not have the authority to command her to do anything at all," Fu Wen Said.

"Oh," Ma Rong got more curious and asked, "Then who does?"

"Did I hear Yu Ming's voice out there?" a voice came from behind the locked door. Clicks and clacks could be heard as the person slowly opened the door and walked out.

The first thing Alex saw was slender, white arms through see-through blue clothes, followed by a person in a light blue robe.

Alex recognized that voice from somewhere and looked at the person once she fully emerged. Alex looked in shock as he saw who it was.

Immediately, Ma Rong bowed down. Her bow this time was much deeper and more respectful than when she did it to Fu Wen.

"My greetings, your royal highness," Ma Rong said.

The person standing in front of them was the princess of the Crimson Empire, Fu Wuying.

"Yu Ming, bow in front of the Royal princess," Ma Rong whispered to him quite sternly.

Alex woke out of his daze and bowed down as well, saying the same greeting as Ma Rong.

"Haha," the princes smiled. "There's no need for that. Junior brother Yu Ming and I have been quite well acquainted during our few days in the caravan. We should be beyond such formality by now."

Alex was confused for a second as to what she meant, but once he saw the guard behind her, everything clicked together.

Fu Wuying... Ying Wu… they were the same person all along. Alex's shock hit harder when he realized that he had been with the royal princess for nearly 3 days and he didn't even know it.

Ma Rong was shocked as well, as she had put 2 and 2 together as well. "I apologize on my disciple's behalf if he did anything to offend you, your highness," Ma Rong said.

"You don't need to apologize at all, sect leader Ma. Your disciple was in no way disrespectful," Fu Wuying said with a smile.

Fu Wen turned towards Fu Wuying and said, "Um… dear cousin. Can you cut the chitchat for later, and get to the task at hand?"

Chapter 417 - Halfway Mortal Cleansing

"Ah, I'm sorry," the princess immediately apologized. "Let's go in quick."

She opened the door and entered. Fu Wen smiled and showed Ma Rong and Alex the way inside. Even as they went inside, Alex looked towards the guard, but the guard wouldn't turn to look at him at all.

Comparing her to the woman in red robes— the difference was truly immense.

Alex ignored her for the moment and walked in. The people in front of him stepped aside and went around a bed to show a woman with very black skin on the bed.

Alex knew that woman quite well. After all, he had spent the 3 days in a caravan in the same carriage as her. 'The princess' mother? No… that was probably a lie too. This woman is not the empress I saw that day,' Alex thought.

"Sect leader Ma, this is my mother," Fu Wen said, lifting up the veil of confusion from Alex's mind. "It has been a few months since she has been in this condition and I was hoping you would know something about it."

"Um… City Lord Fu, if this is your mother then… you should have already asked senior Lai, right?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, we did. But he couldn't come up with anything either," Fu Wen said as he shook his head.

"Then, I'm afraid I might not be able to do much either," Ma Rong said.

"To be honest, we aren't expecting any result from letting you check up on her, Sect Leader Ma," the princess said. "Our expectations will be very low from the very beginning, so freely check her without any worries."

The princess moved to the side and let Ma Rong check her.

Ma Rong went up to the sleeping woman and was slightly shocked at how black her skin was. There was nobody so black in the entirety of the Crimson Empire. She checked her wrist, temperature, breathing, eye responses, and anything else she could.

She checked for quite a while and noticed two things that were very unusual to a human body.

First, her skin was fully black. While Ma Rong had heard about such people existing, she knew for sure that the Emperor's sister-in-law was not one with such skin. So, the black in her skin was fully unnatural.

Secondly, her body was very hot, to the point that Ma Rong thought she had a fever.

She continued checking to learn more about her.

"Hm, she isn't exuding any cultivation aura at all. Do any of you know what her cultivation base is?" Ma Rong asked.

"Hm. Wuying, do you remember?" Fu Wen asked.

"Um, I think it should be somewhere between the 2nd True Emperor realm and 4th True Emperor realm. Aunt had already reached that stage when she went on the expedition to the southern forest a few years ago," Fu Wuying said.

True Emperor realm— Alex was shocked to hear that. Even his master was in True King realm. 'How talented must she have been to reach True Emperor realm at such a young age,' he thought as he looked at her face.

"Senior Lai already figured out this part right?" Ma Rong said.

Fu Wen's eyebrows suddenly perked up. "Yes, we sort of know the cause of her problem already. I was just wondering if you could find it out as well so that we know if you two are figuring out the same thing," he said.

"I think I have an idea as to what is happening," Ma Rong said. "Her body was for some reason stuck in the middle of mortal cleansing, wasn't it? The filth that should have been removed fully was stuck halfway on her skin and thus turning it black. Her filth from the meridians must also be stuck inside it since it was only removed halfway."

Fu Wen was surprised when he heard her explanation and said with wide eyes, "Yes. That's exactly the reasoning the Royal Alchemist gave too," he said with a smile.

Ma Rong nodded when she heard that. "Well, Senior Lai must've been faster than me though," Ma Rong said.

"Don't sell yourself short, Sect Leader Ma," Fu Wen said. "So, do you know what we can do?"

"Before that, how did she go through Mortal Cleansing, but only halfway? Did she… find a Divine Devil's fruit?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, She did," the princess answered. "When returning from her expedition to the southern forest, she apparently found a Divine Devil's fruit. Only… it wasn't ripe, and would need another few hundred years to fully ripen."

"I guess… she believed she didn't have to wait that long and ate it right there."

Ma Rong shook her head. "The only way I can think of healing her is to continue her Mortal Cleansing," Ma Rong said. "But that is impossible."

"Sigh, you're right. Senior Lai said the same thing," the princess said. "He is constantly searching for ways to make pills that can induce Mortal Cleansing, but as you said, that's impossible."

"Still, can you give it a try, Sect Leader Ma?" Fu Wen asked.

"I… I will see what I can do," Ma Rong said.

"Master…" Alex called her from behind. "Will getting the black stuff off of her skin help at all?"

"Hmm… I don't know. It would certainly be a good idea to start with that," Ma Rong said. "However, the main problem should be the filth stuck around her brain and meridians."

Alex thought for a second and took out a pill before handing it to Ma Rong. "Master, what about this pill?" he asked. He successively handed her the recipe for the pill as well.

"Sweating pill? You made this?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yeah, it's one of the more useful, but still useless pills I made. It opens the sweat glands on your skin and makes you sweat buckets load of sweat. I wondered that if we fed this to her, won't she sweat away all the filth?" he asked.

"Hmm… that's… not a bad idea. It just might work," Ma Rong thought. She then turned towards the princess and asked, "Your highness, did Senior Lai ever try to make pills that made her sweat?"

"Um, I'm pretty sure he did try to make them, but I don't think he ever succeeded in making ones that could open up her skin big enough or make her sweat enough to force the black filth out of her body."

"That's fine. My disciple's pill here can do that. I just need to improve it," Ma Rong said.

"Improve it?" the princess asked. "Can't you just feed that pill to her?"

"I'm afraid not, your highness. This is a common pill; we will need a True pill to be able to heal her to a level similar to what this pill will do to anybody below the True realms."

"Fear not, however. Since we have this recipe, it shouldn't be very hard to recreate this pill. Please send this recipe to Senior Lai as well so that he could help us as well," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, we shall do that," Fu Wen said as he took the recipe with some sense of joy. While he didn't get a cure for her mother's problem, he got hope.

"Thank you, Sect Leader Ma," he said.

"It's my pleasure to be of assistance, City Lord Fu," Ma Rong said.

"Thank you to you too, junior brother," Fu Wen said to Alex.

"Oh, you're welcome, senior," Alex said.

"If there is nothing else to do, we shall take our leave," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, let me show you the way," Fu Wen said as he went to the door and unlocked it.

"How's your formation training going on?" the princess asked from the side as she moved towards Alex.

"I… haven't had the time to continue with it, your highness," Alex replied.

"Oh, that's a shame. You seemed to be quite good at making formations too," the princess said. "Also, you don't have to call me that. Just call me Sister Wuying."

"That's…" Alex hesitated. Calling a princess his sister would imply that he was of Royal blood too, and that would be disastrous if someone found out.

"Haha, if you can't, then just call me princess. No need for the Your highness," the princess said.

Alex smiled and said, "I will do that then, princess."

"Good, let's go now," she said and walked towards the door.

Alex instinctively shot an eye towards the guard who was still looking elsewhere. The princess saw this and chuckled.

"Don't blame her for how she acted during the journey. She was under orders to be strict towards anyone that came close to me and was to keep me and Aunt under constant supervision."

"Also, she was ordered to act high and mighty so that people would not notice the lowly servant by her side as she would hog all the attention. It sort of worked," the princes said with a smile.

"I see," Alex said.

"Well, she was also quite annoyed when I told her that you noticed her that one time in the capital. She really prides herself on her ability to stay out of sight with her speed. So when you saw her that time, she was really angry."

"That was also the reason I let you get in the same carriage as me. You did something that was close to impossible," Wuying said.

"Oh," Alex said. 'That… that accident was what made her notice me? I can't even do that again even if I wanted to.'

"I wanted to know more about you during the tournament, but I never found you. Especially since I didn't know your name at the time, it was impossible to find you," the princess said.

"Plus, you changed your face for the final result, so there was no way for me to find you. If you hadn't, maybe my father would have been interested in you too," the princess said with a smile.

"The Emperor?" Alex asked in shock. 'I was that close to meeting the emperor. I don't know if that is a good idea though,' he thought.

The princess said goodbye and didn't leave the corridor. She promptly returned back to the room and would stay in that corner of the manor, away from the prying eyes of the servants.

Fu Wen brought the two of them all the way outside to see them off.

"Thank you again, Sect Leader Ma, junior brother," Fu Wen. "At least one of the problems on us is going to go away very soon," he said.

"One problem?" Ma Rong asked with confusion.

"Oh, it's nothing. It's just that Uncle has gone somewhere without notifying anyone and hasn't returned in over a? month, so people back home are worried," Fu Wen said.

"I see. If it's the High prince then who would dare do anything to him," Ma Rong said. "Anyway, We will leave now, City Lord Fu. Farewell."

With that, both Alex and Ma Rong flew back towards the Hong Wu Sect.

Chapter 418 - Lost Skill

Ma Rong flew through the air, and Alex maintained his distance. Along the way back, she did not speak a single word and kept to herself.

Only when they reached the sect did she speak and say, "Come to my place." Alex nodded and followed behind her quietly.

Once they were inside, Alex felt a rush of spiritual sense go past him as Ma Rong checked the surrounding. Alex did the same and noticed that the girls that were looking after his master were all gone.

He then noticed Ma Rong's serious face and asked, "What's wrong, master? You seem worried."

"That's because I am," Ma Rong said. "They are already suspecting malpractice against their uncle. What did you do with the body? Did you destroy it?"

"Uh… no. I buried it underground, inside the formation," Alex said. He started getting worried too now. "Can they find the dead body?"

"I don't know. There are beasts with a sense of smell so good that they can smell the other person's aura on you. Hmm…" Ma Rong thought and quickly pulled out a pill.

"Here, eat this now," she said.

Alex quickly ate the pill without hesitation and felt his entire body suddenly convulse. It then released back to normal as an inordinate amount of Qi from his body was forced out from every single pore in his body.

This was a painful experience to most people, but thanks to the Mortal Cleansing that Alex went through, there was no filth to stop the sudden release of Qi and they all went out in record time.

"That was faster than I had expected," she said with a face full of surprise.

"Aura Removal pill…" Alex said mindlessly.

"You've seen this pill before?" Ma Rong asked.

"Uh… no. I just remember the recipe," Alex hastily made up an answer.

"I see. Well, that pill should have removed whatever aura Zexi left on you," Ma Rong said. "Thankfully, the princess was too busy making herself hidden to search for you. Or maybe they don't expect him to have truly gone missing yet."

"However, once they realize a High Prince is missing, they will truly try to find him. Hopefully, his body decomposes by then," Ma Rong said.

"It should be fine master; It has already been over a month. His body should be at least halfway decomposed," Alex said.

Ma Rong shook her head. "No, Cultivator's bodies take much longer to decompose. Sigh, we can only hope the beast invasion keeps everyone on constant alert and not enough time to go search for him," Ma Rong said.

"Alright, we should get to making the pills now. You need to improve on it as well," Ma Rong said. She then took out her nameplate and notified the elders that she would be busy for a few hours.

She then walked into the alchemy room and sat down to make the pill. Alex sat down opposite her and waited.

"Show me all the pills that you did make," Ma Rong asked. "Maybe there are some useful ones."

"Okay," Alex said and gave her all the different recipes that he had.

"Hmm… this is useless, this does nothing basically,… you said this one increases heartbeat?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes," Alex replied.

"That might be useful somewhere, especially for mass-producing given how low cost the materials are," Ma Rong said. She continued looking through the other pills and found nothing useful.

"I guess the 4 of these are the only good ones," Ma Rong said. "Still, it's not a bad idea to have those other 4 work as cheap alternatives to most pills that the outer sect disciples will use."

"We can end up using less expensive materials to train them," Ma Rong said.

"Ah, I didn't even think about that. Of course! Using these pill recipes as training pills is a great idea," Alex said.

"Okay, I will show you the method to improve pill recipes. Do you have any questions before we start?" Ma Rong asked.

"Uh, yeah. I have quite a lot actually," Alex said.

Ma Rong's eyes perked a bit. "A lot? Ok then, ask," she said.

"What exactly are Composition and Structure?" he asked. "I tried understanding on my own, but I got nowhere."

Ma Rong's face got a little shock on it. "Where did you learn about it?" she asked.

"Um, in the library back in the capital, and also the Royal Alchemist said something about my pill's composition and structure needing work," Alex said.

"I understood a little, but I feel like I got nowhere close to what is required to understand it all," Alex said.

"Sigh, the truth is, I too don't know anything about it at all. The only one who knows about it, as far as I know, is senior Lai," Ma Rong said.

"The Royal Alchemist? He is the only one?" Alex said in surprise. He was hoping that his master would know about it. "So, am I not going to understand it at all?"

"I have asked senior Lai myself too. All he says is that it has something to do with the shapes of the pill and powders and how they are mixed together."

"I see, I guess I will learn it myself once I learn more," Alex said.

Alex asked a few more questions that he had come across while making pills back in the formation. One of the most common questions he kept asking himself was how people practiced with ingredients that were rare.

"Well, there are 2 assumptions you're making that a normal alchemist just wouldn't make with rare ingredients," Ma Rong said.

"First of all, you assume someone else hasn't used the ingredient before. Most of the time, you can find recipes that already have the ingredients in use. You can just read that recipe and understand the rate at which the energy is released through that."

"You can also understand what energy is released through it most of the time."

"The second assumption you make is that just because something is rare, you have to protect it. Just because something is rare, doesn't mean it has value. You can destroy that ingredient and take the opportunity to learn from it."

"Most of the time, Ingredients aren't both important and unknown. As long as the ingredient is either one of it, you can easily learn about it," Ma Rong said.

"On the off chance, however, when you come across an ingredient that is blatantly important yet you've never seen before, don't use it."

"Spend time learning about it as much as you can. Learn its weight, its size, its density. Try and see how much liquid it holds, if any at all. Try and see if there are parts that would be hard to destroy with fire."

"Most alchemists in the True realm use Qi sense to do that, however, since you have Spiritual sense, it must be easier," Ma Rong said.

"Basically, learn about the ingredient as much as I can before it even goes into the cauldron, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Ma Rong said with a smile.

"I see, that does make sense," Alex said. He then asked a few more minor questions which Ma Rong easily answered. After a while, Alex was finally out of questions with almost all of them answered.

'Now I just need to learn about Composition and Structure from somewhere else,' he thought. 'Maybe I should meet with the Royal Alchemist sometime soon,' he thought.

"Okay, if you have nothing else, I will start making pills now. Watch and learn how I improve on it," Ma Rong said. "Let's look at the ingredients first."

She looked at the recipe and said, "These are quite easy to get ingredients as well. Its True rank counterpart might be a little hard though. Let me try making this pill alone first."

"Do you have the ingredients?" she asked.

"Yes master, right here," Alex said and took out the ingredients for the sweating pill from his storage bag. Ma Rong put on her cauldron in the fire and got ready.

Once the cauldron was heated enough, he put in the first ingredient. Alex looked at the ingredient with his spiritual sense and followed it closely.

He waited for his master to do 3 turns with the ingredient in a clockwise direction with a flame temperature of 560 degrees. With his spiritual sense, he could see that that was exactly what she did.

The temperature was no higher or lower than 560 degrees, the ingredient was indeed moving in a clockwise direction and lastly, Ma Rong did exactly 3 rounds with the ingredient in the cauldron.

However, unlike Alex's expectations, the ingredient did not get turned into powder.

"Huh?" he was surprised. It took Ma Rong a few more turns to finally turn the ingredient into powder.

"Did you write the wrong recipe?" Ma Rong asked. "Did you not double-check it?"

"I… don't think so… did I?" Alex questioned himself. He hadn't spent much time trying to perfect this pill, so there weren't many recipes to go through.

He quickly checked what he did with what was on the recipe and it was the exact same.

"The recipe is correct, master. In fact, I know all the timings to release the energy too," Alex said.

"Then why didn't it work?" Ma Rong asked.

"I- I don't know, Master," Alex said.

Thankfully, the first ingredient's only job other than the shape of the powder was to release energy. It did not matter what rate it was released at, or how much. As long as all the energy of the ingredient successfully came out with the powder of the ingredient in the cauldron, that was a success.

So, Ma Rong matched the timing with the ingredient and put the second ingredient in.

'1120 degrees, 5 rotations, and in a counterclockwise direction,' Alex thought to himself and waited. With the slow release of energy, the two energy in the cauldron would be able to counter each other at just enough speed so that one of the ingredients didn't get ruined.

Ma Rong upped the temperature and was about to put in her second ingredient. Just as she did that, Alex stopped the ingredient midair.

"Master, up the temperature, it's not enough," he said.

Ma Rong checked the temperature and was surprised that it was indeed not enough. She poured in more Qi to increase the temperature, but that was nearly not as effective.

"What's going on, Master? Just increase the temperature," Alex said.

"I'm trying… "Ma Rong grunted, and barely got the temperature to 1120 degrees. Finally, Alex put in the 2nd ingredient and let Ma Rong control it.

'Hopefully, that little time lost isn't enough to totally ruin the whole operation,' Alex thought.
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Ma Rong proceeded to follow the recipe. She did exactly what the ingredient said and realized that the energy wasn't releasing fast enough and that soon, the first energy would ruin each other, leaving up the potential for a hefty explosion.

Ma Rong immediately opened the lid of the cauldron and used Elemental Guidance to quickly shift all the energy outwards. Doing so, she prevented herself, Alex, and her cauldron from a nasty case of exploding cauldrons.

She huffed a bit after having to do that and her thoughts went into disarray. Her eyes started darting around as she tried to search for things in her own mind.

Alex watched in worry, not really knowing what was happening.

Ma Rong quickly slapped her storage bag and brought out a bunch of ingredients. Alex looked at the ingredients and realized it was one of the common rank pills from the library.

The recipe was very simple, and Ma Rong started following it. Alex looked as well, curious what she was trying to do.

However, it became very apparent what she was trying to do, and even Alex started to get afraid.

"M-Master," he said with shock in his voice.

"I-I…" Ma Rong had a blank look on her face as she stared at the ruined ingredients, and with quivering lips, she said out the next sentence.

"I've lost my skills as an Alchemist."

Chapter 419 - Null

"Huh?" Alex exclaimed. "What do you mean, master? How could you lose your skills?"

"I don't know… but I think it has something to do with my newly awakened constitution. The Qi is messing up with my instinct and the recipe. I can't seem to get stuff hot enough to do anything," Ma Rong said.

She tried controlling the fire once more. While she was successful at it, it wasn't at a speed that would help an Alchemist or an amount that was natural.

"What… should we do now, master?" Alex asked. He felt like whatever was happening was really important and didn't want his master to go through that.

"I… don't know. I might have to pour out more Qi to get used to it or see if I can somehow change my Qi back to normal before bringing it out of my body. Either way, I will need to train a lot from now on to get back to where I was, and I'm not even sure if I can ever get there," Ma Rong said.

"I would like to help too, master. Let me know if there is anything I can—"

"There's nothing you can do. Just go and practice improving the pills," Ma Rong said sternly.

"Yes, Master," Alex said immediately and walked out.

He walked down the mountain to his house and went into a private room. Finally, he logged out.

It had been hours since when he should have logged out. However, between Ma Rong's sudden waking up and going to the city lord's house, he finally got to log out at around 12 pm.

'Can I help master at all?' he wondered. Unable to come up with any sort of viable answer, he just shook his head.

He quickly freshened up and ate what he wanted. Once he felt full, he went back to the game to continue improving the mental ability pill.

He put aside his worries regarding his master's situation and fully focused on improving the pill. The trials were quite taxing and took a long time, but he improved it quite a bit.

The pill was now around 48% in harmony. While that was a lot, Alex still needed to improve to get the pill to as high as he could.

He also needed to check if the pill worked on beasts or not, so he went to the forest at night and tested them on some beasts.

Surprisingly, every beast he gave the pill to ran away within 10 seconds of eating the pill.

'So they do gain intelligence,' Alex thought when he saw that. Once he confirmed it, he fought the beasts for a while and returned.

He tried to keep up with what his master was doing during this time, but she never told him anything about what was going on.

His master was already so worried about everything, and now there was another worry placed upon her.

'I wish I could help master somehow,' he thought. However, as a self tempering realm disciple, he couldn't do anything. He wanted to just go and hand over a Heaven-grade pill, but then he wouldn't keep the freedom he currently had.

With nothing to do, he kept on improving the pill.

Over the course of the next week, he made many improvements on the pill and also worked with the nail pill on the side to improve it a little as well.

By now, the nail pill was at 52% harmony at the highest and the mental energy pill was at 51% harmony at the highest. However, he couldn't be sure at all if this was the actual harmony possible from the pill or it was just him being unable to draw out more.

Without handing the recipe over to someone better than him, it was impossible for him to tell if the problem was with the alchemist or with the recipe.

Given that both of his pills were his own made, he couldn't readily hand the recipe over to just about anyone else.

He couldn't hand it over to his master as she wasn't really any good at alchemy now. He couldn't hand it over to his friend since they weren't as good in alchemy. He couldn't hand it to the other elders just because he didn't want to hand over the recipe.

He only had 2 candidates remaining for this. One was the Grand Elder. He could ask his grandmaster to help him figure this out.

However, when he asked him for this, the grandmaster said that he wasn't free at all. With his master spending most of her time recuperating, the burden of the sect had fallen on to him and the First Elder.

So, he wasn't of much help to Alex.

So, Alex decided to go with his second choice, his Martial Uncle. However, his Martial Uncle wasn't in the sect right now. Along with the 3rd Elder and a few other elders, Lang Shun had gone to the different cities of the Crimson Empire to look for Wan Li who was still missing.

So, he wasn't of much help to Alex either.

"Sigh, I guess I can only improve by myself," Alex thought with a sigh. Heaven grade was very good, even exceptional for such pills. However, due to him making Immortal grade pills, he just didn't see them as that impressive anymore.

"I guess I will have to wait a little longer before I consume this pill then," he thought.

Finally, he no longer had to improve the pills at all and could simply focus on other things that he wanted to, namely formations.

At the end of the week, he went to meet his master in her house.

"Master, are you at home?" he called in the communication talisman. However, he got no response at all. He decided to wait for a while and only after 5 minutes did he finally get a message back.

"Yes, why?" she asked.

"I need to speak to you about something," Alex said. "Can I come over?"

"Yes."

After getting the affirmation, Alex went over to his master's house. He sent out his spiritual sense and didn't immediately find his master.

'Huh? Where is she?' he thought.

"I'm right here," Ma Rong's voice appeared from somewhere. Alex sent his spiritual sense in that direction and still couldn't see anything.

It was then he realized that he couldn't see a certain spot in the room at all. He quickly opened the door and walked in. As he has expected, Ma Rong was sitting crosslegged in that exact spot.

"Woah, master. Why can't I see you with my spiritual sense?" Alex asked.

"As I thought," Ma Rong said with a sigh. "My body constitution is getting more and more potent." Ma Rong looked at her own snow-white palms and shook her head.

"Throw an attack towards me," she said.

"Pardon? Attack?" Alex asked.

"Yes, use an attack on me," she said.

"Um… okay," Alex said. His master was super strong so he wasn't worried about hurting her. "Physical, Elemental, or Mental?"

"Do all three," Ma Rong said.

"Okay," Alex said and took out a common sword before lighting it up yellow as he filled it with metal Qi. Once it was fully glowing, he cautioned his master.

Once Ma Rong was ready, He walked close to her, and slashed his sword at her.

The sword moved down fast, but as it got close to her, it lost its energy rapidly. By the time the sword hit her, it was nothing but metal, encased in frost, falling due to the effects of gravity, and not Alex's.

"What?" Alex said in shock.

"Now try an Elemental attack," Ma Rong said.

Without hesitation, Alex punched at her using the Iron Fist punch. The yellow fist of metal energy flew at her, but as it got close to her, it started slowing down.

When it finally reached her, the energy had all but dissipated into thin air. What hit her was nothing more than a puff of air.

"That's… are you freezing the energy around you?" Alex asked.

"More accurately, my body is," Ma Rong said. "Hit me with Heaven's impact."

Alex nodded and immediately sent out an attack using his spiritual sense. His spiritual sea churned as a hefty amount of it escaped from the sea and formed a fist shape that flew towards Ma Rong.

Even as his spiritual attack flew towards her, it slowly lost its energy and in the end, nothing remained when it touched her body.

Alex was shocked that his Master's body was so strong that he couldn't even damage it at all. "You are way too strong, Master. You can easily win against anyone in a fight," he said.

"No. It's only easy against you because I'm stronger. When people around my own strength fight me, I will only have a better stance than them, not become invincible like right now."

"I don't think my body will be able to stop their attacks fast enough to be of very good use. That's just speculation though. In the end, it could certainly be that my body is strong enough to nullify attacks, but that's for later," Ma Rong said.

Alex thought for a second and said, "Oh, wait master. Can I attack once more?"

Ma Rong looked at him weirdly and said, "Sure, go ahead."

Alex firmed up his resolve and sent out a palm attack. Suddenly, yellow energy escaped out from his palm as it formed the shape of the palm itself.

It flew towards Ma Rong with great energy, but like everything else, it slowed down. However, for some reason, despite being slow, it had enough force to fly in all the way and hit Ma Rong.

Ma Rong was strong enough to handle that attack, but she was still surprised that the attack even managed to hit her. "What…" she was shocked.

She then checked the residual energy in the air that was rapidly going away. "Yang?" she asked.

"Ah yes, I thought it would work," Alex said. "Since your body is Yin, it might easily stop everything else, but I doubted it would be fast enough to stop Yang energy. Turns out I was correct."

"I also want to see how Yin energy would interact with you, but unfortunately, I don't have any yin attack skills," Alex said.

"Ah, I see. That does make sense. Good to know," Ma Rong said.

"Anyway, why did you come here in the first place?"

"Ah right," Alex said and pulled out a few pill bottles. "These are all the pills I made during the last week or two, Master. I want to sell them, so I was coming here to ask if I should sell it in the sect's alchemy shop or in the auction house," Alex asked.

"Show them to me," Ma Rong asked and checked the pills. "Hmm… are these the claw and mental ones? Sell anything less than 40% harmony in the sect and the higher ones in the auction house."

"I see," Alex said and checked his pills again. There were about 200 or so usable pills and of them, about 30 were over 40% in harmony.

'I guess that works for me,' he thought.

"Is that all?" Ma Rong asked.

"No master, there is something else I need to talk about with you," Alex said.

"Hmm… What is it?" Ma Rong asked.

"You see," Alex said. "It's been around 2 weeks since I've been in the sect, and I think it's about time I leave for Tiger sect."

"Oh, that. Right, you should do that. When will you leave?" Ma Rong asked.

"I was thinking of leaving right now actually," he said.

Ma Rong thought for a second and said, "Alright, go."

"Thank you, Master. And take care of yourself," he said. "Don't fret much if you cannot make pills again. You gained a boon and a curse at the same time."

"If you cannot make the pills, I will make them for you. I will get stronger and learn more soon, I promise, master."

Alex bowed towards Ma Rong once and walked out. Ma Rong looked towards where he went and simply smiled.

She then stood up and walked out too— she had work to do in the sect.

Chapter 420 - Back To Tiger Sect

Alex didn't need to pack anything, so he simply walked down the mountain to go over to the Elder's Hall to let his grandmaster know that he was leaving.

He walked over to the core mountain and met with Kong Yuhan, Zhou Mi, and Zhou Mei. He let them know about him going to the Tiger sect and found it funny when he saw the shock on their face.

"You guys knew by now, right? Why are you getting surprised?" Alex asked.

"Uhh, yeah. But I didn't think you could go to the Tiger sect this easily. I assumed you were a disciple in name alone," Zhou Mei said.

"No, I'm an actual disciple. Although, I've only been there for 2 weeks," Alex said. "This is my second time going there. Alright, see you guys in 2 weeks."

"See you later, Brother Yu," Kong Yuhan said goodbye too.

Alex mentioned his departure at the Disciple Hall too and left the sect. He walked out of the front game under the afternoon sun and made his way to the sect's Alchemy shop.

Alex had only seen this place once before, so he wasn't sure how business was done here, but he was sure that the shop sold pills and ingredients mostly.

He walked into the quite massive shop and looked around to see a few elders and a lot of inner sect disciples working tirelessly.

He walked over to one of the elders and said, "Good afternoon, Elder. I wish to put a few pills on sale here."

The elder looked at Alex and saw that he was a core disciple, so she took on a much gentler face. "Sure child, what is it that you want to sell?" she asked.

Alex brought out about 85 pill bottles and handed them to her. "There are 2 types of pill here. These 43 bottles contain pills that I call the Strong Claw pill. These pills will increase nails, talons, and claws of anyone by 2 centimeters and make it extremely durable depending on the Harmony of the pill."

"And these 42 bottles contain pills that I call the Soul Nourishing Pill. It increases the mental strength of anyone that takes the pill, including beasts. These will be helpful to increase your resistance against mental attacks or increase your beast's intelligence very early on."

Alex explained a few more details about the pills while the Elder looked at him dumbfounded. Only when Alex was done did the Elder finally speak.

"Um... Child, I've never heard of such pills. Where did you get the recipe?" she asked.

"Oh, I made it myself," Alex said.

"I... see. I thought so," the elder said. "Alright, place your information on that board along with your nameplate. I will input some things into your nameplate," the elder said.

Alex was a little confused as to how the sect running formation would even run out here, but he still did what he was asked to do. He placed his nameplate and started writing on the board what he had brought in today in full detail.

He had to go through the number of pill bottles, to the number of pills in each individual bottle to the harmony of each individual pills.

It was a lot of work and took him about 15 minutes to write it all down. During that time, the elder tested all the pills in a pill tester and dunked the pills all onto a large pill bottle that could easily hold over thousands of pills.

Once it was all done, the elder checked the contents of what she had found against the contents that were written and approved of it.

"Alright, child. It's done. You will be notified in a few days to come to get your earnings," the elder said.

"Thank you, Elder," Alex said and was about to walk out when he stopped and turned around to ask. "By the way, in case I am not in the sect when you notify me, can I request that you send the earnings to my master?" he asked.

"Uhh... sure. Which elder should I send it to?" the elder asked.

"Ah good. Then please send it to the sect leader," Alex said and walked away.

"Okay, the sect lead-The Sect LEADER?" the elder suddenly went wide-eyed. "Yu... Ming! Of course, how did I forget it? That was the sect leader's disciple."

"So young, and he already made 2 pills on his own. I wonder how many hands the sect leader had in these two pills. Should have been a lot. But still, to be able to make 40% pills, that's quite amazing," the elder thought.

Alex wasn't there to hear any of what the elder had said and was already on his way to the auction house. The Pink Cloud auction house was something he was used to, so he came here directly.

Although at first, he had thought that he was betrayed by the auction house and that his information about selling the Spirit Cleansing Lily was leaked, after listening to Zexi and experiencing what he did, Alex understood that one of the employees that knew his information had their mind read.

Alex wasn't going to hold grudge against someone who was attacked. If anything, he now knew how vulnerable even the most tight-lipped information could be, so he was going to be extra careful when dealing with important items now.

"Hello, I am here to auction off some pills. Is miss Cai Ping inside?" Alex asked.

"Yes, please come," one of the girls at the front of the auction house took him inside the auction house and to the familiar room.

Alex sat on the sofa, waiting for Cai Ping to arrive. Before the door even opened, Alex knew that she was here and smiled.

"Good Afternoon, Fellow Daoist Yu. I see that you have been well," Cai Ping said.

"I'm indeed doing very well, miss Cai. How about you?" Alex kept the conversation going.

"I'm doing well too. Ah right, congratulations on making a 60% harmony pill in the alchemy competition. When I heard you won that, I couldn't believe it at all."

"All this time, I believed it was your master who made the pills, but it turned out, it was you," Cai Ping said.

"Well, that was just a stroke of luck in the competition. I haven't been able to reach that level after the competition," Alex said.

"I see. Anyway, what do you wish to auction off this time, Daoist Yu? There are people out there desperate for some pills from the White wolf. They like the fact that you sell many pills at once and they don't have to find the ingredients themselves," Cai Ping said.

"Haha, well... I have some pills," Alex said and brought out a few random pills that he started explaining to Cai Ping about.

At first, Cai Ping was excited, but then she got a little disappointed when she saw how low the pills were. She really wished that he brought out some more pills.

As if hearing her inner thoughts, Alex brought out 6 more pill bottles. He then began to explain about the pills.

"These pill bottles have pills that I like to call the Strong Claw pill, it can..."

"And these pill bottles have pills that I like to call the Soul Nourishing Pill. It can..."

Alex explained in detail what the two different pills did. Cai Ping didn't know as much about pills as the elder did, and didn't realize that such pills hadn't been auctioned off before this.

Alex told her exactly which pills to focus on the most and the price that he believed they should be sold at. Once that was done, Cai Ping set up a contract quickly and signed it.

"Will these pills be sold in tomorrow's auction or should I come sometime next week?" Alex asked.

"It should be sold tomorrow," Cai Ping said.

"Alright, see you tomorrow then, Miss Cai," Alex said and stood up to leave. Cai Ping bade him a farewell, and Alex left. It was about time for him to go to the Tiger sect.

He was still wearing the Hong Wu Sect's clothes, but he didn't let it bother him at all. Without any hesitation, he made his way straight to the sect.

He was once again stopped at the gate by the guards. These were not the same guards from last time, so Alex had to explain to them how he was also a disciple of the Tiger Sect, which the elders found hard to believe.

Only when he told them that he was the sect leader's disciple did they call his senior brother to check.

"Oh, junior brother, are you here to meet master or to stay?" Liu Xun asked.

"To stay, senior brother. I am here for the next 2 weeks," Alex said.

"Ah, good good. Hey, you guys, that's my junior brother, let him in," Liu Xun said.

"Yes, Leader," the guards quickly let Alex in. Alex walked inside and was taken to Liu Xun's room where they talked for a while. During that time, Liu Xun notified Wen Cheng and Luo Mei that Alex had returned to the sect.

They were both happy and called Alex to Wen Cheng's manor on the top of the mountain. It was close to being Night time, so Alex leisurely made his way up the familiar mountain.

'This place sure is easier to navigate than the Hong Wu Sect,' Alex thought.? He saw the many yellow-robed disciples go up and down the mountain.

Alex had already changed his clothes, so all the other disciples saw now was an Inner sect disciple-making his way up the mountain.

It was a straight path to the top, so Alex didn't have to spend any time searching for his way. He also didn't need to hide his identity anymore, so he didn't need to use the invisibility technique anymore.

In about 10 minutes, he finally made his way to the top of the mountain. His master's manor was just a few meters away when suddenly someone stepped in front of him.

"Good Evening, Disciple Yu Ming."

A familiar voice sounded from the man who just stepped in front of him. Alex slowly looked up to see a bald man with no facial hair looking at him. He had a soft smile on his face and his overall posture was very gentle.

Alex knew this person quite well. After all, he was the master of Du Yuhan and Su Min.

"Good Evening, First Elder. How are you? It has been a while since we last spoke," Alex said.

"I've been quite well. What about you? I heard you died during the beast invasion in the capital, but then you came back. What's up with that?" the first elder asked.

"Oh, don't mind that nonsense, First Elder. The reports of my deaths were greatly exaggerated," Alex said with a smile.

The first elder didn't lose his smile either. "I was quite surprised you know when I first got the information that you were the sect leader's direct disciple. I thought I missed my chance at another great disciple. Well, I guess it's the sect leader's luck that he found you before I did," the First Elder said.

"I was quite lucky to have found him as my master as well," Alex said with a smile.

"Anyway, I'm happy to see that our sect didn't lose a mighty pillar for the future. Welcome back, disciple Yu," the first elder said.

"Thank you, First elder. Now, if you may excuse me, I need to go meet my master for now. I will see you later, First Elder," Alex said and walked past him.

The first elder did nothing to stop him and just turned around to watch him leave. He then walked back towards his residence while keeping his smile on him all the time.. He truly was happy to see Alex return.

Chapter 421 - 2144

Alex finally made his way to his master's manor and entered it.

"Ah, you're here," Wen Cheng said out loud when he saw Alex come inside. Luo Mei and Meng Yun were right behind him, waiting to welcome him back.

They talked for an hour or two. Wen Cheng had a lot of questions that he couldn't exactly ask Alex back when he had visited him in the Hong Wu Sect and could only feel okay to ask him that in the privacy of his own house.

Alex answered as many questions as he comfortably could. In the end, Wen Cheng was satisfied with what he had learned.

"By the way, what's up with your cultivation base, junior brother? I can't sense it at all," Luo Mei said.

"Hmm… even I am having trouble pinpointing what your cultivation base is right now," Wen Cheng said as he tried to feel the aura coming off of Alex.

"Oh, right. I probably shouldn't keep it hidden now. It will only make people more suspicious," Alex said and started letting out his cultivation base to a higher realm. When he reached the Meridian Tempering 1st realm, he stopped.

"This should be fine," he said.

"Woah! Junior brother, you've reached Meridian Realm already? How are you so fast? You are like one of those new people that come to the sect," Luo Mei said out loud.

Meng Yun's eyes were wide open in shock. During their battle 2 months ago, Alex wasn't even in the Organ Tempering realm, and yet in just 2 months, he not only entered the Organ Tempering realm, but also the Meridian Tempering realm.

Wen Cheng's eyes were wide too, but not for the same reason as the other two. "You are hiding your cultivation still?" he asked Alex directly in his mind.

Alex smiled and replied, "I just thought that it would be too much of a shock if I didn't do this. It was either this or tell people that I was hiding my cultivation base previously."

"I see, that makes sense," Wen Cheng said.

"Wait, that means junior brother is a Core disciple now, right?" Luo Mei asked excitedly. "Woah, you climbed the ladder so fast."

"Huh? Oh right, I forgot about that," Alex said. "Where should I register myself as a Core disciple? The Disciple hall, right?"

"Yeah, that's where you should go. Come, I will take you right now" Luo Mei said.

"You don't need to do that for today," Wen Cheng said from the side, stopping Luo Mei. "Little Mei, just go back to your home for the night, I'm sure your junior brother wants to rest too."

"Ah, okay. He can go in the morning then," Luo Mei said. She then checked her clock artifact and exclaimed, "What? It's already close to 9 pm? That's so late," she said.

"I need to properly cultivate today. Goodbye," she said and took off. Meng Yun too bowed towards the two of them and left behind Luo Mei.

Wen Cheng shook his head and sighed. "What would that girl do if she ever really became in charge of something," Wen Cheng said.

"Well, she did do quite well in the competition, so I don't doubt people would mind having her be in charge of something," Alex said with a chuckle.

"Oh right, master, what happened to the rewards? Did the finale ever happen?" Alex asked.

"Sigh, it was supposed to, but it never happened," Wen Cheng said. "After learning about your disappearance, your sister basically forfeited the match to search for you."

"Well, not that it mattered. The tragedy at the capital was too big for anyone to demand they get their prize at such a time. It could've been asked for in the next month or two, but given how the beasts have started to attack in unison as opposed to the random attack they did around the forest, I don't think the competition holders will even think about prizes anytime soon," Wen Cheng said.

"Well, we at least got the points, right? We should be a first grade sect now," Alex asked.

"Haha, of course. No one can deny us of our legitimacy as a first grade sect. In fact, the sect has been steadily growing for the last month, ever since we made our name," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, and what about the new cultivators that popped up out of nowhere? Has any such people come to the sect in the last month?" Alex asked.

"Of course, many did and many left," Wen Cheng said. "Only a few truly stay behind though. There is this Trevor guy that joined a week or so before the competition, a few days after you had left actually, and he's been steadily increasing his rank in the sect."

"In less than a month, he went from being a Muscle tempering realm cultivator to a Meridian tempering realm cultivator. Even while I was outside, Liu Xun would send me a message about how quickly this guy is rising through the ranks," Wen Cheng said.

"What rank is he at now?" Alex asked.

"Uh, I don't know. After he beat a disciple at the 43rd rank, he was recruited by the Fifth Elder, and ever since then, he has stopped showing off. It seems the Fifth elder has recruited him and told him to properly train to become strong."

"Although, these new people are hard to tame. So, I am sure he will break through soon and go challenge someone high up soon," Wen Cheng said.

"Anyway, it's time for you to go rest soon too. Do you want to train to start tomorrow, or do you want to wait a few more days?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Um, tomorrow should be fine. Although, it will have to be normal training, since I will have to body cultivate overnight most of the time," Alex said.

"Hmm, why don't you do it during the day?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Uh… it's a little inconvenient for me to do it during the day," Alex said.

"Why?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Well, the cultivation method I use is very effective at night only and completely ineffective during the day, so I can only cultivate at night," Alex said.

"Ah, I see. You have one of those cultivation methods huh. I guess you can only cultivate during the night then," Wen Cheng said. "Alright, leave now and go back to your room. We will start training tomorrow night."

"Good night, Master," Alex said and walked away from the manor. He started walking down the mountain under the moonlight when he suddenly realized something.

"Oh right, what's my rank right now?" he wondered. The rank was what decided your status, house, and a lot of things in the sect. Since he had left the sect for nearly 2 months and without the authority of the sect at that, his rank was surely to be towards the bottom.

He took out the badge and looked at the number that was written on it and nearly laughed out loud.

2144

He was currently an outer sect disciple and would have to stay in a house ranked just that. Not only that, but since the lower-ranked houses held multiple disciples, he was going to be staying a night in house number 2144 with 4 other people.

'Sigh, whatever. I will fight someone tomorrow,' Alex thought and walked all the way down to the foot of the mountain. He sent out his spiritual sense and finally found the house numbered 2144.

'Last time the rank I got was 20- something right? Does that mean around 500 new disciples joined by now?' Alex wondered.

He went to the very cheap-looking house and placed his badge on the room to open the door. He walked in and closed the door behind him only to see 5 compact rooms with a main room where the screen was kept.

A door opened and a young girl walked out. Alex looked at her cultivation base and saw that he was a Skin Tempering 3rd realm disciple who must've only just entered the sect.

At first, she didn't see any cultivation base coming off of Alex, so she thought he was a newbie as well, but then she saw the blue lining in his robe and gasped with her palm to her mouth.

She quickly ran over to another room and knocked on the door. "What?" someone's voice came from inside. The door opened and a man walked out.

He looked towards the girl who was pointing towards Alex and then turned to look at Alex. His eyes suddenly got serious.

"Are you the disciple that beat Core Disciple Huo Tu?" the man suddenly asked.

"Oh, I'm surprised you know about that. How do you know?" Alex asked. He was truly surprised. He wondered if it was his face, or if someone else let this disciple know.

"Well…" the man answered. "That's because this number belongs to the disciple who beat Huo Tu. Ever since you beat him, he's been looking for your return, so he made everyone remember about the man who won't fight."

"Oh, yeah. I was out of the sect for quite a while, so it's obvious my rank will fall down. Still, I'm shocked that people still remember that," Alex said with a smile.

"But… that was only 2 months ago. Even core disciple Huo Tu himself only regained consciousness a little over a month ago, so it's obvious everyone would keep track of this number," the man said.

"I see, well, you won't have to worry about me. I will leave this place tomorrow morning.. Good night," Alex said and entered the empty room next to him, leaving the little girl and the man dumbfounded in the hallway.

Chapter 422 - Attack & Weapon

Alex walked into the only empty room and sat on the empty bed. He then called Pearl out, but immediately told him to not make any noise.

"Why?" Pearl asked.

"Send your spiritual sense out and you'll understand why," Alex said. Pearl did as he was asked and quickly saw the people that were around him.

"Alright, let's start cultivating," Alex said to Pearl. Pearl's skin started glowing a bit and soon there were cuts all over Alex's body too.

Alex closed his eyes and started breathing in and out calmly. Before he even knew it, he had fallen into a trance that led him to fall unconscious.

Early in the morning, he woke up from his sleep and opened his eyes. He quickly sent out his spiritual sense and saw that the man from yesterday was absent.

Alex had a general idea where he might have gone to, but he didn't care much about it. He stopped Pearl from cultivating any more and logged out.

He had some breakfast with the ladies and returned back to the game. He logged into the room at around 8 am and started planning for the day.

"What's my plan for today?" he thought.

"I… need to get registered as a Core disciple of the sect, then I will have to challenge someone at rank 50 to get their house, and then I should spend the day learning formations. I can then practice with master afterward," Alex thought to himself.

So, he got out of the room and walked out of the house without letting anyone know. He walked towards the left side of the mountain, instead of going to the right and walking up the mountain.

The road going left also curved and went up the mountain too before finally reaching a road where every horizontal road ended up. The road would then follow the curve of the crater to reach directly into the crater.

Alex looked at the many disciples and elders that were already working on their day. Some were going to the library, while some were going to the production hall.

'The Fighting Hall should open up in about half an hour. Since today is a limitless challenges day, there should be a lot of people that plan to fight. I should be ready,' Alex thought.

Alex went to the disciple hall that was just a simple building. Although it was called a disciple hall, it was also the Elder hall of the sect. The elders mostly worked out of buildings so the sect had never bothered creating a hall for them.

Similarly, since this was the Elder Hall, there were no disciples working in this place, and all the tasks were handled by the disciples themselves.

Alex got into one of the many queues and waited for the people to move on. After a few minutes, he finally came face to face with the elder working there.

The elder was a man that looked to be in his 50s. Perhaps due to his old age, the elder decided to take on this desk job rather than being a referee for the fighting stages which was a way more active job.

"Badge!" the elder said without even caring about how he looked. He seemed to be too tired by the monotonous job while not wanting to do anything different.

Alex took out his badge with the number 2144 and handed it to the elder.

The elder took the badge and looked at the number written on it. He then looked at the disciple in front of him, and then back to the badge.

There was a level of cognitive dissonance happening in his mind right now by 3 different sets of information that were clashing with each other.

He was currently looking at a Meridian tempering 1st realm cultivator, who was normally what the sect called the core disciple, wearing a robe that belonged to an inner disciple, bringing a badge that belonged to an outer sect disciple.

After processing the information for more than 5 seconds, the elder came to a single conclusion.

"Is this a joke? Are you messing with me?" he started to get angry.

"Sorry?" Alex asked. He was confused by the sudden outburst of the elder too.

"Where is your core disciple robe? Where is your actual badge?" the elder asked. "Don't you know that stealing someone else's badge is a crime punishable by expelling?"

Alex finally understood what the problem was. "Ah, no elder. I did not steal any badges. This is my badge, and this is my robes. I was out of the sect for a little while without the sect's authority, so my rank declined while I was out."

"At the same time, I also broke through to the Meridian Tempering realm. So I came here today to get my new robes. As for my badge, I will go fight someone in the 50th rank as soon as the Fighting hall opens up," Alex said.

The elder thought for a while and found that what the disciple was saying was indeed possible and that he had gotten angry a bit too early.

"That is a sound excuse, however, I still do not know if what you are saying is true. Do you have any elders or other trustworthy disciples that can vouch for you?" the elder asked.

Alex chuckled a little and said, "Yes, I do. I don't know if you have heard of it or not, elder, but I am the sect leader's new disciple."

"You can ask him, or my senior sister, Luo Mei, or my senior brother, the Guard leader, Liu Xun," Alex said.

The elder's eyes suddenly went wide. He had indeed heard about the Sect Leader's elder coming back. "I see, wait a second for me to confirm," the elder said and pulled out a talisman to send and receive messages.

The elder talked in the talisman for a few moments and made a weird face as he put it down. "Did you beat any core disciples before today?" he asked.

"Oh yes, I beat Huo Tu about 2 months ago. He was… 18th rank at that time if I remember correctly," Alex said.

"I see. I have confirmed it is you, disciple Yu. Welcome back," the elder said as he brought out a set of robes and a few other talismans that told him about the rules and regulations the core disciples had to follow.

"Thank you, Elder," Alex said and walked away. He put the robes into his storage bags and made his way to the fighting hall.

As he was walking there, he stopped and turned left.

Just as he remembered, it stood there in all of its glory and magnificence. It was still unknown to everyone what it was, but Alex knew that most probably, this was the most important thing in the entire Tiger sect.

The Black Stele.

The Black Stele stood there in the middle of the crater as if it was the one that caused it. Looking at the shape of the crater, it most likely did.

The Black Stele didn't have anything guarding it or any perimeter around it to stop the disciples from walking in. Alex slowly walked up to the stele and placed his hands on it.

The last time he was here, he had hastily used his spiritual sense to read it and was traumatized when his spiritual sense had been nearly depleted. After that, he had always been afraid of the stele and stayed away from it.

But now, he was a different person. Not only had he learned more about the world and was more mature than he was last time, his spiritual sense was also at least 3 times more in quantity and a bit stronger than last time.

He also had the added benefit of knowing what would happen if he didn't put his spiritual sense under control.

"Oh, it's not metal," Alex thought as he touched the black stele. Although it did look like stone, Alex still believed that the black stele was totally made out of metal due to the iridescent colors that the letters in it shined in.

"What sort of rock it this?" Alex thought as he knocked on it. He didn't have much knowledge about stones so he was totally blank on the answer.

"Should I test it once more?" he thought. He still had some lingering fear from last time, but he was confident he wouldn't lose all of his spiritual sense this time.

"Here goes nothing," he thought and spread out his spiritual sense. Slowly, he approached the text on the stone and started reading it.

Immediately, as if retaliating, something grabbed onto his spiritual sense and followed the thread back to attack his spiritual sea.

Alex read as much as he could and immediately stopped his connection to that thread of spiritual sense. When he was done and safe, he quickly checked his spiritual sea and saw that nearly half of it had been destroyed.

'Damn, that's truly terrifying. If I had spent a second longer reading, I would have lost it all again,' he thought. Spending all of his spiritual sense while he was outside of this spiritual sea wasn't dangerous at all.

However, it still hurt like a god damn b*tch.

He didn't dare try it again and tried to remember what he had just read. "… weapon?" Alex thought. He didn't know what words meant, so he could only go off of what information his mind got.

Most of the words seemed normal everyday words, but two of them gave an idea of what the thing is written on the stele was about.

One of them said 'weapon' and another one said? 'attack'.

"So, it's an offensive technique that requires you to use a weapon?" Alex thought and was a little disappointed. Similar to Heaven's Impact, he also wanted this technique to be a spiritual technique.

Alas, it wasn't. "I shouldn't have got my hopes up so much. At least, since this language came from the Immortals or whatever, this should be a pretty good technique, right?" Alex thought.

"Whatever, I will think about this once again when I eat those mental pills and enter or maybe even exceed the Mind tempering realm. My spiritual sense should get a little stronger after that," Alex thought.

He left the black stele and went towards the Fighting hall. By now, the fighting hall had fully opened up and so Alex got in line.

He didn't bother changing his robes as he would do that after the fight. The queue was already long so he had to wait for a few minutes before he could register a fight.

Finally, it was his turn and so he spoke to the elder.

"Good Morning, Elder.. I would like to register a fight with the disciple at rank 50.

Chapter 423 - Rank 50

The elder looked at Alex with a bit of a surprise.
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"Disciple, did you say 50?" he asked.

"Yes, Elder," Alex said and handed the elder his badge preemptively. The elder took the badge and looked at it.

'2144? What's going on?' the elder wondered. He was having the same problem as the elder from the disciple hall. However, since fights required cultivation base and not a robe's color, the elder didn't say anything as he could clearly see Alex's cultivation base.

"Alright, go to stage 12," the Elder said. Alex took his badge and walked away.

Even though it was early in the morning, since this was the last day of the week with unlimited fights, people were pretty excited and were already here to fight.

Alex went to the stage that was numbered 12 and waited. He watched the fights that took place on the stages with a hint of curiosity in his eyes.

He was trying to predict what happened in the fight based on the usage of the elements and the fighters' cultivation base, but in the end, there were simply too many variables for him to keep track of.

The fight ended, and Alex's number was called, but the fighter wasn't here yet. So, Alex had to wait for another fight to end.

That fight ended, and his number was called again, but his opponent didn't come. Alex had to wait for nearly 1 hour with his number being called all the time.

Alex wasn't really worried about his opponent showing up or not, as not showing up for 1 hour simply forfeited the battle in the favor of the one that did show up.

However, Alex was worried that he would have to wait until the end of the day before he got his own house when the elders kicked the disciples that didn't leave.

Fortunately, his opponent did show up in time.

"Number 50 and Number 2144," the referee elder called out.

Alex raised his hand and walked up onto the stage. From the other side of the stage, a brown-haired girl with a frowning face walked up onto the stage.

When Alex laid eyes on her, he was genuinely surprised. 'Meridian Tempering 3rd Realm? What?' he thought. He had mistakenly assumed that the core disciples ranking also consisted of inner sect disciples in his mind. Not many people could possibly have such a high cultivation base in the Hong Wu sect, so he assumed the same for the Tiger sect too.

'Well, should I show my strength a little or try to stay a little lowkey?' he wondered for a bit, but then soon realized that it wouldn't be lowkey if he beat the girl with a lower cultivation base than her.

He slowly increased his cultivation base aura such that it matched the same as the girl's. The referee asked the two of them to move to the opposite ends of the stage, and as he did, he heard the girl say something under her breath.

"God damn NPCs and their rules. I should just leave this shitty sect and go elsewhere soon," the girl said.

'NPC? A player?' Alex thought curiously. Wen Cheng talked about the Trevor guy, but he also said there were quite a few players that decided to stay behind.

'She must be one of those players. Her name is probably randomly generated too, so most people here don't realize it,' Alex thought.

He brought out a common sword for this fight and waited for the girl to bring out something. However, she did nothing. Instead, she just rolled up her sleeves and got into a boxing stance.

'Is she gonna fight me… barehanded?' Alex couldn't help but get a fond sense of curiosity when he saw that.

"FIGHT!" the elder shouted.

The girl dashed forward. She prepared a punch that suddenly came alight as if it was burning with fire.

'Physical and Elemental?' Alex thought and attacked her with his sword. The sword hit the right hand of the girl stopping her in her place. However, the left hand of hers attacked without stopping and flew towards Alex.

Alex dodged to the right and hit her overextended hands with the common sword. Since he hadn't used any Qi at all, most of the strength that hit her came from his body, and that wasn't strong enough to put a cut on her.

But it was surely enough to hurt her. "Ow!" the girl cried out and jumped back.

Alex looked at her and thought, 'she isn't used to fighting very much, is she?' Even though he himself was a beginner to fighting styles, he had just enough training to know what one should and should not do during a fight.

When fighting against a person with a sword, the woman should have been keeping in mind the reach a sword had compared to her hands.

With that in mind, she should have only gone in on an attack like that when Alex's sword was not so freely sticking right next to her left hand.

The girl looked at the red on the skin of her left arm and got angry. Alex didn't smile or make any signs of provocation and just waited for her to attack again.

As expected, the girl jumped at him again. She punched him with her right arm again. Alex could guess where this was going but decided to indulge in this.

He hit her hands with his sword once again, however, this time, instead of hitting the sword, she decided to catch it in her grasp. Taking the opportunity, she threw her left punch once again.

Seeing all of this coming from a distance away, Alex dodged to the left as her arm flew past his right ear, and then hit her square on the stomach.

He didn't hit hard enough to hurt her extremely, but just enough so that she would loosen her grip on the sword and start catching her own stomach.

Alex took the opportunity and struck towards the girl again. The girl quickly used her arms to try and block the incoming attack, but in the last second, Alex switched to the flat side of the blade and hit her on the arm like hitting the ball with a bat.

The girl was sent flying away and landed outside of the stage. This fight was an easy victory for Alex.

"You Win!" The referee said as he pointed towards Alex. Alex walked up to the referee to take his new badge and bowed.

After that, he left the fighting stage. The disciples that were watching weren't very surprised when they saw the match but still talked about it as Alex walked away.

'Finally, a good house,' he thought and left the area. He walked back up the right side of the crater and walked towards his new house.

He reached the upper area of the side of the mountain and searched for his house. He finally saw the number 50 and opened the door.

There was still a female scent in the room as if it was occupied by the girl for quite a while, but Alex didn't let it bother him. He quickly entered and looked around.

Since this was a core disciple's home, this was different from the other two houses he had been to. The outer sect houses 5 people in a single house and people had to share the living room.

The inner sect houses had a single room, but it was big and spacious.

Now, the core disciple house seemed much better than the other two. This house had 4 rooms in total. The living room itself was as large as the inner sect house and there was a backyard as well.

While it didn't measure with the backyard he had back in the Hong Wu Sect, it was still quite good to have. The best thing of all in this house was that there was a damn pond in the backyard where people could bathe.

The entire area was warded off with high walls, so people couldn't enter easily, and Alex didn't doubt that there were many other sorts of formations in the house.

He went back inside the house to one of the empty rooms and sat down. It was finally time for him to not worry about his master, his sect, and his pills and fully focus only on the formations that he was so desperate to learn about.

He had already learned all the basic formations he could and was only waiting to learn to make the best he could with it. He brought out the formation plates and inscription pen and started carving.

The most important thing about the formations was the stroke. Alex needed to make sure the formation strokes were perfectly straight, and smooth, as well as make sure they didn't stray far from the angles that were in the formations.

As long as he did that, he was sure he could come up with a high-efficiency formation. He was sure that it wouldn't come up to be of the most possible efficiency however just because the metal he held had most likely some impurities, and the inscription pen didn't carve the smoothest.

Thankfully, he had something the other formation masters didn't. Spiritual sense.

Using Spiritual sense, he could perfectly keep track of the strokes' perfections and imperfections. Thanks to it, he immediately knew when he was making a mistake as keeping track of everything was very easy.

He wondered how long it would have taken him if he did not have spiritual sense.

"Even then, this is a little too easy, right? I wonder if they consider the formation flag the real formation," he thought. "Wait, how do you make formation flags again? It's by employing an artifact maker, right?"

The artifact maker would make flags and metal poles into shapes that the formation master wanted, and then the formation master would have to carve on it on their own. After that, the user of the formation had to set the formation up themselves.

So, there were three chances of mistakes during all of this. The artifact maker could make mistakes, the formation master could make mistakes, and the user could make mistakes.

This was one of the reasons why formation flags weren't pushed towards the beginners for learning even though it was the most versatile method of setting up formations and most certainly the better one.

"I should go pick up some formation flag poles and try to make my own formation too," Alex thought. But that was for later on. Right now, he needed to keep on making formations to improve his carving ability.

For the next 3 or 4 hours, he ended up using the majority of the formation plates he had previously bought. He looked at the fire breathing, water condensing, Qi gathering, wind blowing, heat emitting, loud buzzing, fog making, and other types of base formations.

He was quite happy with the results he came up with but was unsure how good they were. He could check this on his own by getting a formation tester, however, unlike pill testers, those cost quite expensive.

"Let's just finish these remaining plates," Alex thought and continued. He could tell that he was gradually improving at his carving ability and was sure that he was making better formations, but he just wasn't sure how good it was.

For that, he really would have to go check his formation in the shop.

He put the final stroke on the final plate he was carving. Once it was fully done, he put a spirit stone under it and used his Qi to activate it.

Once it was activated, slight frost appeared on the surface of the plate, and soon the temperature of the room went down a few degrees lower.

Alex smiled; he had successfully created a Temperature Lowering formation.. Finally, the last of his formation making for the day was done.

Chapter 424 - Selling Formations

Alex walked out of his new house and went down the mountain. It was around late in the afternoon right now, so the sun was getting low.

Just a few more hours, and it would be totally dark. He had come out to buy the new formations, but he didn't have any spirit stones with him at all. Most of what he had was spent buying the same formation plates in those other two cities.

Alex had thought of selling those formations to get the money first, but he had a better source for it right now. So, he went to the auction house.

"You are here, Fellow Daoist Yu," Cai Ping said as he walked in through the door. He seemed quite happy today, meaning the sales must have been great.

"I assume the auction went well today?" Alex said.

"Of course. It went great. Hardly any alchemist sells pills through us unless it's a major auction. So when we do get pills, the customers get quite happy and buy a lot of them," Cai Ping said.

"I see. I'm sorry but I need to be somewhere else today, Miss Cai. Can we hurry this up?" Alex said.

"Ah, yes, here," Cai Ping said and handed him a storage bag. Alex checked the storage bag and saw 82 True Spirit stones. That was quite a lot, but given that he had exclusively sold pills over 40% in harmony, the earning was a given.

"Thank you, Miss Cai. I will take my leave now," Alex said and stood up to walk away. Cai Ping nodded and bade him farewell.

Alex walked back to the sect in less than half an hour and reached the mini-market that was outside of the sect. This market was run by the sect, so he didn't have to worry a lot about getting screwed up on his sales.

He walked into the shop that dealt with formations. Inside was an Elder and a disciple working in the shop. The elder seemed to be busy with the other customers in the shop, so he walked up to the disciple who had their backs turned.

"Excuse me," Alex called out to the disciple.

"Yes, what is-Aah! It's you," the disciple called out.

Alex was quite surprised to see her here too. "Oh, I didn't expect to see you here, hello sister Su," Alex said. The person working in the shop was the direct disciple of the First Elder, Su Min.

"You really are alive. I thought master had gone mad when he said you returned," she said. "What are you doing here?"

"Oh, I'm here to sell some formations. What are you doing here?" he asked back.

"I work here. Also, what? Do you want to sell formations? Why does an alchemist want to sell formations?" she asked.

"Well, because I have nothing to do with it, I guess?" he said and brought out a few plates. "Can you tell me how much these will sell for?"

Su Min looked at the formations Alex had just dropped and got a little curious. So, she picked up one of them and checked it out.

Suddenly, she squinted her eyes and looked at it more closely. "Who made this?" she asked.

"I did," Alex said with a smile.

She looked up and frowned. "Stop lying, and just say who made these. These are quite good," she said.

"Haha, I'm not lying. I made them myself. Just a few hours ago too actually," Ning said with a smile.

"Whatever, if you don't want to say, then don't say," she said and took the formation plate with her to a giant machine-like artifact behind her.

The machine had a massive metal base and four metal rods popping out of each side. 'That's the formation efficiency tester, right?' Alex thought.

He hadn't seen it closely from the coliseum seating area, so he wasn't absolutely sure, but it did look just like the machines they used there.

Su Min placed the formation upside down and waited for something to happen. Suddenly, light sprung forth from the lowest part of one of the metal rods. It glowed yellow and started climbing up it in chunks.

Alex waited as watched as more and more of the rod glowed fully.? '25 chunks of light? for one rod?' Alex thought.

"It's at least an Earth grade formation; that I was confident on," Su Min said from the side. Then, the next rod started glowing. It too glowed in chunks and had 25 different parts that could glow.

'So, there are 25 chunks to each rod, making up 100 for the efficiency measurement?' Alex wondered. That did seem to be the case from how Su Min was speaking.

The rods glowed more and more and the 2nd rod fully glowed as well.

"Oh, it's a Heaven Grade formation. Not bad," Su Min said. Alex was a little surprised when he heard that.

'Not bad? That's a Heaven Grade formation,' he thought. "Um, is a Heaven Grade formation easy to come by?" he asked.

"The base formations, yes. Those are easy to make. We really only consider someone as talented in formations when they can inscribe the formation onto metal rods," Su Min said.

"That or when they start making True formations plates," she said.

"You guys can make True Formations? Don't you need True Qi for that?" Alex asked.

"That's just for the activation. Just making the formation itself is just a lot of accurate carving. As long as you can do that, you can even make a saint formation," she said. "However, the metals the formations are carved in get stronger and stronger, so you do need quite a high cultivation base if you want to make the higher formations."

Alex nodded when he understood that. "So, setting up a formation doesn't count towards one being a formation master right?"

"Yeah, since anybody can set a formation. You are only considered a formation master if you can make one," Su Min said.

The third rod glowed to about 12 more chunks and stopped. 62% was the final efficiency of the metal formation.

"Hmm, not bad. Let me check the others too," Su Min said and started checking through all the formation plates he had made.

The lowest efficiency he got was 38% on one of the first ones he had made, and the highest efficiency he got was 79%. Surprisingly, he had created another Immortal grade item so quickly. Only, this one didn't hold as much value as the other immortal grades.

"These formation plates are actually quite good. I can give you... hmm... 62 True spirit stones for these," she said.

Alex was about to thank her for a moment when he stopped. "Wait, I spend 80 True Spirit stones myself just to buy these materials, and then I carved the thing myself too. Are you trying to rip me off right now?" He asked.

"W-What? Why would you say that?" she suddenly started getting flustered.

"Um, should I ask the elder for his input then?" Alex asked.

"Tsk. Damn, you're annoying. Here, 112 True Spirit stones, that's all you will get," Su Min said as she handed him the money. That was quite a return for him and he was pretty happy with it.

"Can I buy some formation plates? Since you said True formations can be made, maybe I should try it out too," Alex said. "Actually, do you have..."

Alex listed off a few metal names and waited for Su Min to find them. She only found 3 of the metals he named and brought them to him.

"Yeah, I don't think you can find those alloys here. You will have to ask an artifact maker to make them if you know the composition," she said.

"Oh, at least there are 3 here," Alex said. He then went ahead and bought a lot of True Rank formation blueprints. Once he was done, he paid the price of the blueprints and left.

Su Min still seemed annoyed at him, but he couldn't do anything about her misplaced anger. 'She really must like her master quite a lot to hate me for rejecting him,' he thought.

He walked past the gate, and as soon as he did, his badge went off.

"Hmm?" he thought and brought out the badge to see something written on it.

-You have been challenged by badge 52-

-You have 18 minutes remaining to go to Stage 3.-

"Oh, someone challenged me? 52... that's quite high. I wonder what cultivation realm this person is at. Must be Meridian Tempering too right?" Alex wondered and walked towards the crater.

He was still quite far away, so it was going to take him quite a while to reach there. That didn't bother him very much and he leisurely walked from the right side of the crater.

It took him about 15 minutes before he reached the Fighting hall and walked over to Stage 3. The fight on top of the stage was ongoing, meaning his fight would be next.

In a few minutes, the fight ended and the referee announced the victor. After the two fighters left, the referee called out the two numbers.

"Number 50 and Number 52," he said.

Alex walked up the stage and as he was doing so, he saw a few people looking at him from the corner of his eyes. "They are..." he thought and finally realized what was happening.

Only when he reached on top of the stage did he fully notice the number of disciples that were hanging around this one particular stage.

There were even elders standing far away to look at the fight.

"Finally, I can clear up my name by beating you today," a voice came from the side. Alex turned around to look at the person.

As expected, it was Huo Tu.

Chapter 425 - Golden Fist

Alex cringed a little when he heard his voice. This was the one person he probably hated the most in all of the sects.

'He must've let everyone know about the battle happening right now. No wonder all of these people are here,' Alex thought and looked at the crowd.

He walked up to the elder and handed him his badge and walked back. Huo Tu did the same thing as he kept an angry eye on Alex the entire time.

The elder working as the referee was also interested to see the fight happen. Not just him, all the elders watching the fight were interested.

The one thing that had puzzled them until this day was how an Organ Tempering 3rd realm cultivator could have possibly beat a Meridian Tempering 3rd realm cultivator.

When the news had spread, everyone had wanted to see how Alex had done that, but a few days later, Alex disappeared from the sect.

It wasn't until the competition that they finally saw him again and realized the truth about him. The son of the 3rd wealthiest merchant in all of the Crimson Empire and the direct disciple of the Sect Leader of the Tiger sect.

This was a match that the people just didn't want to miss. Alex was currently giving off an aura that said he was a Meridian Tempering 3rd realm cultivator, while Huo Tu had only improved a single time and had reached the 4th realm of Meridian Temperature.

Even if that was Alex's original cultivation base, winning against Huo Tu would be a breeze, however, he needed to worry just how great he wanted his performance to be.

He looked around and noticed a few elders that were clearly high-ranked. One of them was the First Elder too. Even his senior sister was looking at him from far away, with slight concerns in her eyes.

He walked to the other end of the stage and weighed his options. 'Should I hide my abilities and use Heaven's impact once again to finish the match mysteriously like last time?' he wondered.

However, the elders were all focused on him right now. Using Heaven's impact here was basically inviting them to see that he had a mental attack. With how long it took for Huo Tu to wake up last time, they were probably already suspecting that.

'Sword Intent then?' he wondered. That was an option too. After all, during the last week or so, he had improved his sword intent to the level that he could surely beat Huo Tu right now.

"You have some sort of mental skill, don't you?" Huo Tu asked.

Alex was surprised, but at the same time, not really. Huo Tu might look and act like an idiot, but he was also a Meridian Tempering realm disciple. One did not reach that high with simply money.

'Or maybe they did. Isn't that what all of those players are doing basically?' Alex thought. So, he couldn't put it past Huo Tu to have learned about this from somewhere else.

'Isn't his master like an elder? 7th elder or something?' Alex thought.

"You don't have to answer. I already know you use mental attacks. This time, however, you won't win," Huo Tu said and opened his robe a little to show the medallion he had on his neck.

"This is an artifact that can stop all-metal attacks from hurting me. Adding onto the fact that my armor still remains one of the best in the sect, You have no chance of beating me."

"Fall down on your knees and beg for mercy. I might end up taking you in as my lackey then," Huo Tu said.

The Elder waited for Alex to respond, but Alex remained unspeaking. Alex sighed when he heard Huo Tu. He doubted he had even heard such disrespect towards him even from Song Zun or Zexi.

Seeing that Alex wasn't going to speak anytime soon, the elder decided to start the match. "Fight!"

Immediately, black lines appeared all over Huo Tu's body as if it were a jade's pattern stamped onto his body. He was using the jade-skin technique. With this, his defense was one grade higher than normal.

Immediately, he brought out a handful of pills and a handful of talismans from his storage bag. Although he wasn't going to immediately fight with them, it was better to keep it handy.

"What? Aren't you going to attack me?" Huo Tu asked out loud.

"Very well," Alex said, finally speaking after staying silent for a while. "If it is a fight you want, then I shall give it to you."

Suddenly, the aura around Alex started to shift. Both the elders and the disciples alive suddenly got alert at the sudden change of it. Little by little, Alex's cultivation base started to grow larger and larger.

The First Elder as well as the various other elders that were watching Alex had their eyes go wide. Luo Mei couldn't help but block her mouth with her hand as it opened in surprise.

The disciples that were watching the fight were also surprised as well as terrified.

Even so, the aura kept increasing and increasing.

"You! You have been hiding your ability all this time. Y-You…" Huo Tu could speak anymore as Alex's cultivation base stopped at a stable level for everyone to see.

Meridian Tempering 8th Realm.

He was strong, and there was no reason to hide it. Since there was no reason to hide it, he might as well show it for everyone to see so that they didn't have the naive idea of challenging him to waste his time.

Alex looked at the cowering Huo Tu and said, "Come, let's fight."

"Die!" Huo Tu shouted and threw a pill towards Alex. This was one of the exploding pills that Alex had a hard time dealing with last time.

However, this time, before the pill was even half the distance away from Huo Tu, it struck an invisible wall made up of Alex's Qi and exploded.

The force of the explosion did nothing to Alex, but the shockwaves did shake Huo Tu a little. He started to get scared.

One of the reasons he had ranked 18 previously, despite being a Meridian Tempering 3rd realm cultivator was the fact that he had many of these pills and talismans, and that nobody could really stop them.

While they weren't enough to trouble the Mind Tempering realm disciples, the Meridian Tempering realm disciples had a hard time standing up against it.

Combined with the fact that his defense was one of the best in the sect, he was a walking tank that could bulldoze his way through his opponents.

However, now that he had run into a mountain that he could not bulldoze his way through, he was starting to get scared.

"Die! Die! Die!" he shouted and threw in more and more talismans and pills. However, they all exploded before they even reached Alex.

Huo Tu sent a talisman towards Alex and at the same time sent a pill hidden behind it. Alex stopped the talisman with his Qi, but the pill used the opening in the Qi made by the explosion to pass through and reach Alex.

BOOM

A massive explosion rang out as the pill directly hit Alex in the face.

"Haha! How's that!" Huo Tu shouted out loud. The referee started moving in to check that Alex was okay. The elders and the disciples were a little surprised at the sudden turn of the battle.

They were about to start talking when suddenly, they saw a silhouette moving inside the smoke and dust.

"Congrats!" a voice came from inside the smoke. A figure appeared from inside and stood in the light. "You managed to rip my new clothes a bit."

"Wh-What?!" Huo Tu said in surprise. Alex was fine. Despite taking an explosion to the face, the most that had happened to him was his robe was a bit destroyed.

Alex dusted himself a little and wondered how well he could've survived the damage if it was not for the last moment's use of the Jade-skin technique.

"How are you okay?" Huo Tu asked, but Alex didn't answer.

Alex looked at the surroundings and once again saw the many people looking at him. "Time to end this farce."

He suddenly dashed towards Huo Tu. Huo Tu who wasn't expecting him to move so quickly tried his best to use the Jade-Skin technique and put on a layer of defense on his body, other than the armor.

BOOM

The sound of Alex's fist hitting the armor alone was enough to scare the surrounding people. Even though the Armor could stop a physical attack from anyone that wasn't Mind Tempering 7th realm or above, it was still unable to stop the momentum and Huo Tu was pushed back.

Luckily for him, the armor had stopped most of the momentum and he was sent back only a little bit. Still, that was a very scary experience for him.

"Hmm, I will have to put on a bit more damage behind my attacks huh?" Alex said and dashed forward once again. Huo Tu threw the talisman and pill in his hands, all of which directly landed on Alex.

However, that wasn't able to stop Alex. He flew past the explosion and landed another strong punch towards Huo Tu's face. Huo Tu managed to twist his body in time so that the armor was the thing that took the hit, not his body.

"Tsk," Alex said and started relentlessly punching at Huo Tu. Huo Tu tried to block as much as he could, but from time to time, he would mess up and Alex would end up hitting his exposed body parts. Still, till the end, he managed to block all of the hits coming to his head.

"You are lucky. You will be the first to witness the technique I am working on," Alex said. Suddenly, a golden aura sprang forth from his body, blinding the audience that was watching.

Suddenly, the light converged as it stuck around his right arm as if they were a metal glove for his hand. Alex had come up with this simple technique after he was able to freely control the metal Qi and energy whenever he wanted, so long as it did not have someone else controlling it already.

He had based his technique on what Pearl did with his golden paw, and also the Sword Qi that Du Yuhan used in the competition.

"I don't have a name for it yet, but here it is anyway," Alex said and suddenly sprang forth towards Huo Tu.

Huo Tu's skins were as marbled as they could possibly get and he crossed his fists in front of his to block the attack.

Alex reached right next to Huo Tu and punched directly onto the arms. Huo Tu's arms broke upon contact and were immediately thrown outwards, however, they were barely able to stop Alex's momentum at all.

The first landed on his armor next and that was able to block most of the damage from Alex's fist. The little momentum that was remaining would send Huo Tu flying back, but not by much.

However, just then, the golden aura on his fist exploded out as it created an attack on its own and immediately struck both the armor and the man.

The little momentum that the armor was struggling with suddenly grew to an exponential amount and Huo Tu was sent flying away, out of the stage.

Alex stood up straight as he watch Huo Tu land almost 2 stages over and smiled. His new technique was acceptable.

Everyone was shocked at what had just happened. Nobody made a single sound and kept on looking at Alex at the stage.

"Elder?" Alex looked and the referee and reminded him.

"Ahem, You Win!" the referee shouted.

Alex walked up to the referee and took his badge before walking down the stage amidst the gazes of everyone there.

Chapter 426 - Training With Luo Mei

Alex walked down the stairs under the gazes of the hundreds of disciples and elders that were gathered there. He made no effort to change his aura and let the people see and feel it clearly. Only then would the small fries leave him alone.

However, this would also mean that he was now a viable target from anyone in the higher ranks that were threatened by him.

'Let them come. I doubt I will lose to anyone other than the top 3 now,' Alex thought and kept walking.

He looked at Huo Tu's lackeys who were looking at him with horror in their eyes. Alex couldn't help but sigh. He rummaged into his storage bag and brought out a pill.

He suddenly tossed it towards them. The lackeys who had been watching the match quite intently mistook the pill for an explosive and stumbled backward in horror only for it to land on their body without anything happening to them.

"It's a healing pill for your boss. Give it to him, and tell him never to bother me again. I won't be as lenient next time."

The lackeys immediately started nodding like crazy and ran to where Huo Tu was. Alex shook his head and walked towards his senior sister.

"You... have become quite strong. Just like those new people," Luo Mei said with a sad smile on her face.

"Yes, well, I guess I count as one of them," he said.

Luo Mei's face got even sadder when she heard that. "Does that mean you will leave us when you get what you want?" she asked.

"What? Of course not. I will stay in the sect as long as the sect welcomes me. The Hong Wu sect and Tiger sect are like my home now," Alex said.

This refreshed Luo Mei's mood a little and smiled. "Alright, let's go to Master's place. I want you to tell me how you got so strong," she said and started walking.

Alex followed behind her too. With the Prime Disciple taking way Alex, no one dared bother him anymore. Event he First Elder who was looking from the side didn't do anything but keep smiling.

Through the right part of the crater, they walked back up to the front side of the mountain.

"By the way, Sister, how did you know to be there?" Alex asked.

"Oh, Huo Tu made quite a noise about how he was going to beat the person that underhandedly beat him and get his honor back," Luo Mei said.

"Oh, he must've made quite a noise for so many people to wait for him there," Alex said.

The two of them soon reached his master's manor and entered. Seeing that there was no one there, Luo Mei took Alex to the training hall behind the manor and entered.

She then sent a message to her master. "Alright, master will be here soon. Come on, tell me then, how did you become so strong in such little time," she asked.

"Well, like everyone else that cultivates fast," Alex said.

Luo Mei thought for a second and asked, "Pill?"

"Yeah, I made and ate a lot of pills during my month-long entrapment. I had nothing to do but train and cultivate, so I got strong quite fast," he said.

"That's... bad you know?" she said.

"I know. I made sure to put in training between each breakthrough. If not for waiting, I could've probably reached the True Realms by now," Alex said.

"Woah, I knew you were fast, but this is just..." Luo Mei didn't know what to say.

"I can't be as fast anymore though, with each increasing realm, the time I need to wait in between to stabilize my foundation is increasing. "

"It wasn't until 5 or so days of hunting in the jungle that I felt comfortable breaking through to my current realm from the last one," Alex said.

"5 days to breakthrough... if the others heard you, they would flay your skin to see what you are made up of," Luo Mei said with a chuckle.

Suddenly, Luo Mei looked to the side. "Master is here," she said.

After 2 seconds, Alex too felt him fly towards the Training hall through his spiritual sense. 'Sister's spiritual sense must be quite strong. I will need to give her that pill too," Alex thought.

"Yu Ming, are you okay?" Wen Cheng asked the moment he entered the training hall.

"I'm fine, master," Alex said.

"Oh, I see. I heard you gave quite a beating to-Woah, that's your true cultivation base?" Wen Cheng asked. He could finally see his cultivation base clearly thanks to Alex not hiding anything.

"Yes, master," Alex said.

"Ah, I see. I had nothing to worry about then," Wen Cheng said. "Alright, I have a little task that will take me an hour. You two stay by yourself for that time okay?"

Wen Cheng left before they could even say anything. "What do you want to do?" Luo Mei asked.

"I want to fight you, sister," Alex said with a voice full of determination.

"Fight me? You aren't satiated from fighting with Huo Tu?" Luo Mei asked with a smile.

"No. That wasn't even enough to make me really use anything. I want to have a real fight against you. I have been training for a while now, and I want to know if I made any mistakes while training by myself," he said.

"Very well then. If that is what you wish," Luo Mei said and brought out a blue rapier-like sword. Alex brought a normal sword as well.

"Huh? Didn't you have another better sword?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yes, but I'm trying to learn swordsmanship with this common sword. Just like how Du Yuhan learns," Alex said.

"Tsk, don't say his name," Luo Mei got annoyed when she heard his name.

'She must still be angry from the time when he refused to fight her in the competition,' Alex thought.

"I have a True Mortal Armor, sister. So you can attack my body without reservation," Alex said.

"Very well," Luo Mei said and immediately disappeared. If it was not for focus mode, he wouldn't have noticed when she arrived right next to him.

Alex brought up his sword as fast as he could and blocked the sword strike. The next moment, another sword hit from his left side.

Alex couldn't keep track of Luo Mei when she moved, and only noticed her when she stopped to attack him.

'Dammit, she is way too fast for me. Is this because of her cultivation base?' Alex thought. He returned the sword back to block that strike as fast as he could with the least effort put into it.

Luo Mei disappeared again. Suddenly, he got hit on the back and was sent flying forward until he hit the wall and was stopped.

"Argh! You are too strong, sister," he said as he looked towards Luo Mei who was smiling.

"You are the one who said he wanted a serious fight. Do you want me to slow down?" she asked.

"No, keep it going," he said and ran forward. He felt himself dash forward with very high momentum, but just as he reached Luo Mei, she suddenly moved and disappeared from his view once more.

If not for this spiritual sense, he would be a sitting duck right now. He sent his sword backward to stop her sword and they clashed, but Luo Mei didn't stop there.

She disappeared once again and appeared in front of him, swinging her sword at his chest.

'Stop her' he thought and swung his sword forward. The two swords hit each other, and both of them were pushed back. Alex nearly flew the entire room's width, while Luo Mei only stumbled back a few steps.

Alex got up immediately to attack, but then he saw Luo Mei stop in her tracks, with her eyes wide and her mouth open.

"Sword Intent!" she said in shock. "You used Sword Intent!"

"A version of it, yeah," Alex said. "I've been trying to learn it for a month now, ever since I saw it being used in the Annual Sect Competition. However, even though I take pride in my ability to learn anything, this thing has taken me way too long."

"Even after a month of training, I can only use it to a rudimentary level," Alex said.

"That's... impossible. Didn't you only start to cultivate a few months ago? You hadn't even touched a sword before that. How did you learn the Intent so fast," she asked.

"I... can't answer that. I just learned it while fighting a few beasts in the forest," Alex said.

"Come, attack me. I want to see how strong your Sword Intent is," Luo Mei said.

"Okay," Alex said and rushed forward. The moment he arrived in front of Luo Mei, he struck down.

'HIT'

Another force, much stronger than the last time, hit Luo Mei sending her back more than just a few steps.

"That's... strong, but how much of it is just your strength, and how much of it is the Intent?" Luo Mei asked.

"How do we determine that?" Alex asked.

"Hmm..." Luo Mei suddenly moved her arm and blue light shined from it. The blue light then condensed to become an Ice Armor around her.

"Try to break this with your normal attack," she said.

Alex nodded and attacked. He expected a strong rebound from the sword, but it cut through the ice like it was butter. "What? I told you not to use intent yet," Luo Mei said.

"I'm not, sister," Alex said.

"Uhh, but this ice should be able to stop any Meridian Tempering 9th realm cultivator's attack. Are you stronger than that?" she asked.

"Yes, sister. My body cultivation alone is at the 5th realm of Organ Tempering and I can output damage equal to 1st Mind Tempering realm just with those two alone. If I use skills, I should be able to output about 3rd realm of Mind Tempering in terms of damage," Alex said.

"I-Is that so?" Luo Mei said with an awkward smile. "Very well," she said as he made a must more robust sheet of ice. "This will block 4th Mind tempering Realm cultivator's attack," she said. "Now attack."

Alex nodded and poured golden Qi into the sword he was holding. The common sword glowed yellow suddenly and Alex struck the ice.

BENG

His sword hit the ice at an acute angle and entered about a few centimeters in. After that, however, it was stopped.

"I see. So, 4th Mind Tempering realm is the strongest attack you can make right now," Luo Mei said. She moved her hands once more and the ice healed again.

"Try it again, but this time, use your Intent," Luo Mei said.

Alex nodded and propped up his sword to attack. He then took a deep breath and released it.

'CUT'

He swung it down.

BENG

Once again, a strong sound rose from his sword hitting the ice, but this time, his sword managed to reach all the way to the other side of the thick ice sheet.

"I see. Your sword Intent makes you stronger by a single realm," Luo Mei said. "Unlike the others who have their damage increased by at least 3 realms," Luo Mei said.

"Their damage increases by 3 realms?" Alex asked in surprise.

"Yes. That's what you get when you have a proper sword Intent. It's something I could never hope to achieve. It's something even master could never hope to achieve," Luo Mei said.

"But you have a chance to reach where we couldn't. You will have to now practice this every day, refine it. When master returns, we can ask him to teach you all about it."

"Even though he doesn't have it, he should know a bit," Luo Mei said.

Alex nodded. A fire started burning inside of him with the desire to achieve more in the realm of Weapon mastery.. He promised himself, he would master Sword Intent one way or another.

Chapter 427 - Sect Matters

"What about the merchants? Have their numbers really dropped that badly over the course of the month?" Wen Cheng asked the group of elders in front of him.

He was currently in the Disciple's Hall which was also the Elder's hall of the Tiger sect. In front of him were many elders ranging from ones that were in charge of security, and fights, to elders that were in charge of disciples, and rules to elders that were in charge of sales and finances of the sect.

They were all gathered together for the weekly meeting at the end of the week before they took their one day of a break on Sunday.

"Yes, Sect Leader. Ever since the beast hoard attack 3 weeks ago, the merchants have been scared that it will be a repeated thing and have decided to stop selling anywhere for a while."

"It is taking us way too much to convince them to go to other cities with their goods," an elder who was in charge of finance said.

"Sigh, so I guess that the disciples haven't been earning as much then?" Wen Cheng asked.

"No, Sect Leader. Compared to last week, we have seen a slight increase in earnings, but it's still nowhere compared to what it was before the Beast attacks," the elder said.

"What about other sources? Are the sales going well in the market?" Wen Cheng asked.

"It's not bad, I guess, but it's certainly not good either. Due to the lack of new people coming into the town, the overall growth has stagnated for the market too," the elder said. "If this continues on for even two months, we will have to start selling sect treasures to keep our businesses afloat or deny entry for new disciples."

"Sigh, I'm sure something good will happen," Wen Cheng said. "Elder Xuan, you are the person that knows the most about beasts amongst us. Do you have any idea what is possibly going on with these beast hoard attacks?"

Elder Xuan simply shook his head. "There are many possibilities, sect leader. I can't tell exactly what is causing these beasts to act the way they are," he said.

"Possibilities? Like…?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Well, there are 2 big possibilities in my mind, "Elder Xuan said. "First is that there is a hidden danger in the Southern Forest, and it's driving the beasts out of their home and into our lands."

"Another possibility is that there is something in the Crimson Empire that they desperately want, so they are gathering strength and launching attacks periodically," Elder Xuan said.

"Wait… Periodically? Do you mean that there is a chance that they will attack again?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Yes, Sect Leader. If I'm not wrong, then there is another attack coming in very soon. We need to prepare," Elder Xuan said.

A small fear started brewing inside of Wen Cheng's heart. "Elder Jiang, Please go to the Hong Wu sect and send them a message from me telling them that there might be another Beast hoard attack soon. We need them to be as prepared as we will be," Wen Cheng said.

"Yes, Sect Leader," An Elder stood up and walked out.

"Sigh, let's just hope the beasts don't amount to the same as back in the Cardinal City. That was a truly horrific sight to behold," Wen Cheng said as he shook his head.

"That's all for today. You can return back to what you were doing," Wen Cheng said as he dismissed the elders.

The elders started leaving one by one, and in the end, only 2 remained. One of them was the First elder who Alex was familiar with on a basic level.

The other person was a fat man with short hair and a small stubble on his chin. He wasn't too fat, but his short height made him look overweight.

"I guess congratulations are in order, Mister Sect Leader. Your disciple put on quite a show today," the First Elder said.

"Hehe, I bet you wish you would have gotten him, don't you?" Wen Cheng said with a chuckle.

"Of course, who wouldn't?" the First Elder said with a smile.

"Seriously though, I watched the fight and I was surprised too, " The fat man said. "Very soon, he might beat my disciple and I might end up as the fourth elder," he said.

"Don't joke around, Dong Chen. Little Ma is still very strong. If not for Yuhan and little Mei having unnatural strength, I have no doubts he would have become the Prime Disciple by now," Wen Cheng said.

"Alas, those two do have quite the unnatural strength, don't they? One's spiritual root is so strong that she can control water as if she commands them, and the other has such deep respect for swords that he has already touched onto the realm of Sword Qi."

"Seriously, what sort of monsters did you two raise?" he asked.

"Alright, let's talk about this later. I'm late to train my disciple," Wen Cheng said and walked out. The other elders decided to leave as well.

Wen Cheng walked onto the lantern-filled sect crater in the evening with stars glittering all over the sky. The white moon shone quite brilliantly tonight.

He looked around for a bit to see how everything was and flew away. That was the quickest way to return back to his manor on top of the mountain.

As he reached the mountain, he released his spiritual sense to look inside the training hall and saw both Luo Mei and Alex training.

Just as he was walking in, he noticed something with his spiritual sense. Every time Alex attacked, there was a slight hint of light that unstably formed on his sword that would disappear as soon as he attacked.

"No way!" Wen Cheng thought in amazement. He immediately walked in and indeed saw the same thing happen once again in front of his eyes.

The two of them stopped fighting when they saw Wen Cheng enter the room. "Oh master, you're back," Luo Mei said.

"Yo-You… that was Sword Intent. I saw Sword Intent just now, didn't I?" Wen Cheng asked, fully flustered.

"Yes, Master. Junior brother has started to learn about Sword Intent. He was waiting for you to return and teach him what you can," Luo Mei said.

"Uhh, You know I don't know have Sword Intent, right?" Wen Cheng awkwardly said.

"You don't have to have it. Just teach him what you can," Luo Mei said sternly.

"Oh, right, Of course, I'm going to do that. Come here, Yu Ming, tell me how you got it," Wen Cheng asked.

Alex explained everything he could to Wen Cheng and told him how he acquired his current low-level Sword Intent. Unfortunately for Alex, Wen Cheng didn't know a lot about how Intents worked, only how it was acquired.

So, for the next 2 hours, he made Alex fight with him using solely a sword and nothing else. It was similar to his fight with the lionesses, except he didn't have his life in danger.

Still, Wen Cheng didn't hold back when he hit him. Every single strike, he put in enough force to leave Alex gasping for breaths. Alex needed to learn Intent, and simple training wasn't going to achieve that.

Finally, Wen Cheng stopped after seeing Alex have a hard time even standing up. "Alright, let's stop here for today. We will continue it tomorrow," he said.

"Arghh…" Alex grunted as he stood up. "Okay master," he said.

"Sigh, I'm sorry I can't teach you anymore. I don't know Sword Intent myself," Wen Cheng said.

"It's okay, Master. I can learn it myself," Alex said. "I will leave for now."

"Alright, go and cultivate. Since it's Sunday tomorrow, you can take the day off too," Wen Cheng said.

"No, I will come back, master. I need to learn," Alex said.

"Sigh, do what you must. I will be here if you need me," Wen Cheng said.

Alex nodded and left. It was close to 10 pm the night, and the air was getting chilly too. 'It's starting to get cold here too, huh?' Alex thought.

His body hurt quite a bit, but it was slowly healing itself. So long as his body didn't have broken bones or really bad wounds, his normal Qi would heal itself up.

Still, he had quite a few internal wounds this time and he couldn't just wait for it to get healed while he kept hurting all the time. So, he brought out a pill and ate it.

Soon, the energy from the pill washed over his entire body and healed him from inside out. "Ahh, that feels better," he said.

"Sword Intent… so,? master can't teach me much about it, huh?"Alex thought. "I guess I can still learn it on my own."

He returned back to his room and started cultivating with Pearl. Before he knew it, as every single time, he fell asleep.

He woke up in the morning and stopped cultivating. He logged out to have breakfast with the ladies and returned soon enough.

"Should I continue trying to improve the pills?" He wondered for a few moments before choosing not to. Any improvements he could make now would be minuscule in comparison to what he would learn if he learned the formations.

"I should try and make the True formations in the formation plates I bought. Although, I will need master's help to test them later on," Alex thought.

So, he left his room and went to the Production hall. There was quite a large number of people who had decided to make stuff on their free day.

Alex walked up to the elder and got a formation making room for the entirety of the day to try and learn his formation carving skills.

The formation-making room was just a simple room with a Formation tester inside. Aside from that, it was just a sturdy room where Alex didn't have to worry about making formations of any kind

He first started with the common formations and made those. Once he felt like he was ready, he moved on to the True rank formation plates.

The True rank formation plates were definitely must stronger to carve on than the common rank ones.

"It seems I will have to take it slow or I will make too many mistakes," he thought and took his time with every single stroke he made.

By the end of the day, he only made 3 True rank formations that ranged from 36% to 51%. He stopped there and walked out of the room at around 4 pm.

"Do I go train next?" he wondered. He wanted to go directly to his Master's manor and start training again, but he realized that might not be the best choice.

He had someplace else in mind that he thought was the best choice to go right now.

Chapter 428 - Challenge

Alex walked up the mountain towards his master's manor but didn't go there. Instead, when he reached the top of the mountain, he took a left.

He searched for the house and didn't take long to notice it. This house looked remarkably better than the one he was living in, almost to the same level as his senior sister.

He walked up to the door and knocked on it.

KNOCK KNOCK

He waited for a while and finally heard the door click open. Slowly, the door opened and a young man stepped out of the house. He had a lean and stoic body with a handsome face that was underused thanks to his usual emotionless face.

"Hello bother Yuhan, do you have some time?" Alex asked.

Du Yuhan looked at Alex with a weird look on his face. "I heard you were alive. Congrats," he said. "Say quickly what do you want?"

Alex gave an awkward smile when he saw how on point Du Yuhan's conversations were. He really wasn't one for the small talks.

"I was hoping you could teach me the ways of the sword," Alex said.

"… Just ask your teacher," Du Yuhan said and closed the door, leaving Alex alone.

KNOCK KNOCK

He knocked on the door again, and Du Yuhan opened it again. "What?" he asked.

"Master can't help me. I need to learn about the Sword Intent," Alex said. "You are the only person I know that is farthest in their understanding of the sword," Alex said.

"… you want to learn Sword Intent?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"What makes you think you can learn it?" he asked.

"I already have some achievement in it, but it's at a rudimentary level," Alex said.

This caught Du Yuhan's attention for sure. "You know Sword Intent?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said happily. It seemed he was about to get what he wanted.

"Then you are already on your way. Learn on your own," Du Yuhan closed the door once again and disappeared. This time, no matter how much Alex knocked, he did not open the door.

In the end, Alex had to leave with no result. He went to his master and trained for another 3 to 4 hours. Even Pearl joined in on this fight.

His skills which he improved over the course of the month-long entrapment were definitely getting refined so that they didn't have glaring problems he might have missed here and there, but his Sword Intent wasn't getting improved at all.

Wen Cheng tried his best, but he didn't know Sword Intent like people who had grasped it did.

Alex really did need Du Yuhan's help. So, he decided to ask for it tomorrow.

He left for the night and cultivated the entire night. He also gave Pearl a monster core to break through fast and help him get a stronger body.

When Alex woke up in the morning, he saw that the plan was working. Pearl was now at Organ Tempering 6th realm in cultivation base, which meant his body cultivation was the same too.

He smiled and logged out. He had breakfast with the ladies and went to his classes with Emily. His assignments were done, so he only had to wait for the exams now. After that, he would move on to the 2nd semester of the 1st year.

Alex returned back home and had his afternoon lunch with Emily. They talked for a while and decided to go to the amusement park soon on a romantic outing.

Alex was glad that his obsession with the game hadn't hindered his budding relationship with Emily. He was super grateful for her to be so understanding of him.

After lunch, he returned back to the game and logged in. Once he was up, he decided to go ask Du Yuhan once again.

He trekked up the mountain again and reached the place with Du Yuhan's house. He walked up to it and knocked on it.

Du Yuhan opened the door and frowned when he saw that it was Alex.

"Stop bothering me," he said.

"Teach me about Sword Intent and I won't bother you again," Alex said.

"Go learn on your own. I'm not teaching you," Du Yuhan said and closed the door. Alex tried knocking again, but it didn't work.

"Sigh, do I really have to do that?" Alex said lightly and walked away from the house. Instead of going back to his home or up to his master's house, he walked to the crater.

Once he reached there, he walked over to the fighting hall and got in the queue. People were surprised when they saw him there. By now, his name was one of the most popular amongst the disciples.

Alex waited until it was his turn and debated whether he should do this or not. However, he couldn't think of any other way, so when it was his turn to register the fight, he made up his mind.

"I would like to register a fight with Du Yuhan, Rank 2," Alex said.

The elder that was about to register the fight stopped. He looked back up towards Alex and asked, "Did you just say Du Yuhan?" he asked.

"Yes, Du Yuhan Rank 2," he said as he handed his badge up to the elder.

"Disciple I want to confirm one last time, do you really mean the 2nd ranked disciple, the direct disciple of the first elder, that Du Yuhan?" the elder asked.

"Yes, Elder," Alex said.

The elder didn't say anything else, but his eyes said everything that needed to be said. He certainly thought that Alex might have gone crazy after his win against Huo Tu.

Alex took his badge and went over to Stage 1 to wait for the battle to finish, and Du Yuhan to come. Alex waited for a while and a few matches went by, but Du Yuhan didn't show up.

However, Alex wasn't worried. If Du Yuhan didn't come here by 9 pm, he would lose his status as the 2nd Ranked disciple. And while he might not care much about it, his Master would lose his status as the 2nd in command of the sect, and he certainly wouldn't let that happen.

So, after an hour and a half of waiting, Du Yuhan came to the sect crater.

"Number 2 and Number 50," the elder himself was very surprised when he announced the number on the stage.

Alex walked up to the stage and so did Du Yuhan, only he looked considerably pissed off. It seemed he didn't like being called to battle so suddenly.

Alex and Du Yuhan walked to the opposite end of the stage and waited for the referee to signal the start.

"Begin!" the elder shouted.

Du Yuhan slowly brought out the garbage-looking common sword. As if copying him, Alex brought out his too. "Please help me learn," Alex said and bowed to Du Yuhan.

Then, he dashed forward and slashed horizontally. Du Yuhan casually brought up his sword to block the attack, but when he felt the impact travel to his arm, he realized that Alex didn't have the same strength as what he was showing.

'He's still hiding his strength?' Du Yuhan thought. The damage he felt was nowhere near the 8th Realm of Meridian Tempering.

Alex on the other hand cursed at himself. Due to being too excited to learn, he couldn't control himself enough to use his Sword Intent.

'This time I will do it,' he thought and attacked vertically this time.

'CUT'

Du Yuhan brought up his sword to block the attack. He knew exactly what damage he was going to get, so he didn't strengthen his hands any further. However, when he saw the slight light on Alex's sword, he immediately got alert and increased his guard.

CLANG

A loud sound was released from the two's clash that did not seem to match the current cultivation base of Alex.

"You really do know Sword Intent," Du Yuhan finally spoke, a little amazement in his eyes. "However, that won't mean I will teach you. It only means that I now have one more rival to fight in the sect."

Immediately, Du Yuhan's sword started lighting up as he slashed towards Alex. Alex dashed backward, but that wasn't enough. As he left, a white slash escaped Du Yuhan's sword and flew towards Alex.

Alex wanted to use only Sword Intent to fight, but that wasn't possible right now. Immediately, his sword turned golden as the metal Qi was pushed into the sword.

"HAH!" he shouted as he used the Smiting blade on the incoming slash.

BOOM

A massive explosion rang out, along with an audible sound of metal dropping to the ground. When the visibility returned, everyone could see Alex on the ground his half of his sword missing.

'Dammit, that was too strong. His attacks are nearly as strong as senior sister's,' Alex thought. He tried to stand up, but suddenly a cold feeling appeared from his neck.

He looked up to see Du Yuhan standing in front of him and his sword on his neck. "You lose," Du Yuhan said. "Don't bother me now."

" I will challenge you when I improve a little," Alex promised.

Du Yuhan stopped for a moment and said, "I felt your strength, and it's not bad. If you want to learn from me, come find me once you reach a similar rank as mine."

"I-I understand," Alex said with a grunt. Du Yuhan took his badge and left. Alex was left there on the ground looking at the crowd awkwardly.

He stood up and walked over to the elder to get his badge. However, he didn't return back to his house once he got it. Instead, he went over to the Fighting hall.

Since Du Yuhan had promised him to teach him once he reached a similar rank as him, Alex now had a clear goal in mind. 'I will need to beat Yang Ma as soon as possible,' he thought.

Alex remembered the red-haired disciple that was the third ranked disciple of this sect and had a Superior Fire spirit root. After losing to Wan Li, his pride had taken quite a hit, and Alex was sure that he would do anything to win against a Hong Wu sect disciple.

So, he would have to fight him sooner or later. Alex hoped it would be sooner since he wanted to learn from Du Yuhan. 'That means, I will have to now rank up like crazy,' he thought.

Alex walked over to the elder in charge of the registration for the fight looked at Alex weirdly and asked, "You want to fight him again? You should know repeat challenges daily are not allowed."

"No, this time I want the person at rank 45," Alex said.

The elder nodded and quickly registered the fight. Alex took his badge and went to stage 15 to wait. After about 20 minutes, a man wearing a core disciple robe appeared.

Alex looked at the man and his cultivation base and snickered a little. There wasn't going to be a problem for a while now.

Once their number was called, Alex and the other disciple walked up to the stage and handed the elder their badges.

The disciple seemed a little scared right now when he saw who his opponent was. The number of disciples that saw his match against Huo Tu wasn't small.

So, by now, everyone knew to avoid Alex if they saw him. The two of them walked over to the opposite side of the stage.

"Begin!" the elder said.

Not missing a beat, the other disciple spoke loudly as well. "I concede."

Alex was a little surprised that there wasn't any fight, but he understood what had happened. He took back the new badge and walked over to the Fighting hall to queue up once again.

As long as he had any energy in his body, he would continue fighting the higher-ranked disciples.

Chapter 429 - Shan Ling

Alex placed his badge on the wooden block next to his door to open it. A simple light flashed from inside the block that illuminated the number 13 on the badge.

That was the rank he had reached in the last 4 days Of fighting.

He didn't increase his rank very quickly as he was afraid the elders would retaliate in some ways. Unfortunately for him, they did.

Ever since he reached rank 20, the elders made their lower-ranked disciples target him consistently. During the entire 5 hours he had yesterday, he could only increase his rank by 7, and that was after directly challenging the person at rank 13.

He walked out of his house with his badge vibrating nonstop. He was already challenged by someone just to waste his. However, that was not going to stop him.

He made a commitment to get rank 3 to learn Sword Intent from Du Yuhan and he would see to it.

There was one benefit to all of this constant fighting, however. Thanks to it, he was now one realm higher in his cultivation base and was one realm away from entering the Mind Tempering realm.

He reached the sect crater at around 4 pm and spent the next hour defeating the low-rank disciples sent at him by the elders.

Once that was done, he walked over to the Fighting Hall and recorded a fight with the person at Rank 10. The elder recording the fights was used to Alex challenging high-ranked disciples by now, so he registered it without a peep.

Now that he was done challenging, Alex went to the production hall to make some formations. Since the elders wanted to minimize the 'casualties', their disciples were made to go to the fighting stage as late as possible.

There was also the chance of Alex not being there when the disciples came to fight, but if that happened, he would simply challenge someone else.

For the next 3 hours, he made as well of a formation as he could. Even when making True Rank formation plates, he was used to consistently making ones above 50% Efficiency.

"The real test is when I carve the formation onto the metal rod. That's what really matters in the formation," Alex thought to himself.

Once he was done, he walked outside. He left the building and walked towards the fighting stage. The sky was fully dark by now and the stars were already out.

The moon wasn't full, but the light still shined brightly. However, it couldn't hope to outshine the lanterns that were hung around the sect.

Alex was reminded of the festive atmosphere for a second before he saw all the fighting happening on the different stages and immediately lost all feelings. It was a good reminder of where he was at.

He walked over to the first stage and waited for his name to be called out. It was nearly 9 pm, and he got no message about himself losing the match, so his opponent had to come here any moment now.

"Number 10 and Number 13," the referee elder on the stage called.

Alex raised his hands and walked up. At the same time, another disciple raised their hands and walked up to the stage.

Alex saw a girl with blonde hair walk up to the stage. 'Oh, a player?' Alex wondered. While hairs with color weren't impossible to come across, they were still quite rare.

So, when he saw the blonde hair, his first instinct was to assume that the girl was a player. Alex remembered back to the list of names for the board and tried to remember the person at the 10th rank on the board.

'Shan Ling? That sounds… normal. Is she not a player, but a normal person from here?' Alex wondered. He could see that she had a cultivation base of Mind Tempering 1st realm, 1 realm above him, and wondered how easily he could win against her.

Still, it was quite surprising that the top 10 were already in the Mind Tempering realm. 'The sect seriously didn't bother taking any other disciples than the top 3 for the combat-related competition huh?' Alex thought.

"I see… so you are the new kid that's going up in ranks quite quickly. Unfortunately, you met me, kid," Shan Ling said.

"Aren't you like 23? Why are you calling me a kid?" Alex asked curiously.

"Well, you are not completely wrong… but I am quite old mentally," the girl said.

"I see," Alex said. 'Yep, that's a player. I wonder if she got a young corpse to be her clone, or if she was able to hide her age somehow,' Alex thought.

He walked over to the edge of the stage and got ready for the referee. He brought out a common sword and watched the girl see if she would bring out something.

Surprisingly, he saw nothing being brought out. However, since the girl's sleeves were quite long, they were already hiding her hands, so Alex didn't know if she was holding a weapon, to begin with.

'Should I check?' he wondered but decided not to. He was trying to temper himself through the fighting, so it would be better if he learned to survive against an unknown fighting style.

'She's probably an Elemental attack user,' he thought.

"Begin!" the elder shouted.

Immediately, Alex dashed forward to close the gap between them. That was the best way to fight against an Elemental fighter. Invade their space and take away their freedom of using skills by sending a barrage of physical attacks.

However, just as he started to dash forward, Shan Ling did the same thing and dashed forward too. She suddenly brought out her hands from inside the sleeves and revealed something long in her hands.

'Weapon?' Alex wondered. However, he soon realized what it was. 'Long nails!' he thought in surprise. He wasn't in the correct stance when he reached her, but he still chose to swing the sword.

His strike wasn't as strong as it should have been, but it still had a considerable force behind it.

CLANG

The sword was stuck in its place. "Urgh!" Shan Ling grunted a bit under the sword's force but was able to stop it.

"Damn, you're strong kid. But you won't beat my nails," she said and suddenly pushed his sword back. Then, she lunged forward and tried to claw him with her incredibly durable nails.

'It can't be, right?' Alex thought as he blocked attacks.

CLANG CLANG CLANG

He was slowly getting pushed back due to her attack, and he needed to use one of his own. However, since he was forcing himself to stick with the sword, it was quite hard to find an opening.

'What will happen to her hands if I use Sword Intent? Will I cut through it?' Alex worried. That was one of the reasons he was getting pushed back so hard. Since the lady didn't seem to have any armors from what he could see, any attack could be fatal, and from what he could see, the referee wasn't close by at all.

'Screw it,' he thought and decided to attack. He immediately focused on his own will to cut and created Sword Intent out of it.

He brought the sword up above his head and slashed down. An almost visible white line appeared around the sword as it flew downwards.

The woman brought her fingers up to block it, but this time she was going against the force of both Alex and his Sword Intent.

Without a single mistake, Alex cut through 8 of her nails in one clean sweep. Shan Ling was surprised and immediately ran backward, but Alex wasn't going to let her.

He followed her and started attacking. He swung his sword left and right at her, but somehow she was dodging it way too well. 'Damn, did she get lucky and get a fantastic movement technique?' Alex wondered.

Suddenly, Shan Ling blew out air in the middle of him chasing and brought out something from her storage bag. Alex tried to see what it was, but suddenly, he started getting a little dizzy.

'What?' he thought as he saw Shan Ling put something in her mouth through his double vision.

'Am I drunk?' he thought for a second before realizing. 'No, I'm poisoned.'

The moment he thought that, Shan Ling jumped towards him again. However, at the same time, he also got a set of notifications.

<Toxic Substance detected>

<Sun God's Divine Yang body disintegrates everything>

<Toxins have been destroyed>

<No Qi found>

The poison in his system was destroyed and he immediately got his vision back.

Shan Ling was just upon him with her broken fingernails and slashed towards him once again. Alex was too late to block with his sword and was forced to protect himself with his elbow.

Just then, the broken fingernails of Shan Ling immediately grew out until it was the same length as before and sliced at him. The fingernails were strong enough to put a scratch on even him, although they weren't enough to make his elbow bleed.

"What?" Shan Ling said with surprise. But it didn't look like she cared about actually cutting him.

Alex felt himself get dizzy again and started to lose his vision. He got the set of notifications that said his poison was removed, but just then, Shan Ling scratched him again.

And it all started all over again.

Poisoned, Cured. Poisoned, Cured. That was what continued for nearly a minute as Alex refused to step back or stumble onto the ground. Now that he knew her nails couldn't truly harm him, he was standing his ground.

Shan Ling frowned too. Even though her nails were strong, they were somehow losing to Alex's body, which she couldn't understand. As she scratched more and more, her nails started to wear down and ground down to about half the length of what they originally were.

'Do I need to eat it once more?' she thought. She remembered the auctioneer saying that eating twice only gave half the effect for the second pill, so it would be a waste for her to eat it right now.

'Damn it, how is his body healing so fast from these scratches?' she wondered. 'Also, how the hell is he not unconscious yet? Is my poison not entering his body?'

Finally, her nails were ground up so much that she definitely needed another pill. She reached into her bag to get it out, but that was when she realized she had made a mistake.

She had given Alex an opening.

Alex immediately flew backward and kept his distance. Then, he readied his sword. He put his sword sideways as it started to glow green. He was about to use the 2nd strike of the Elusive Heavenly Sword, but it looked a little different from all the other times he had used it.

Other than the light green glow in his sword, there was a bright white outline that appeared but then dimmed. It was bright for another moment and dim one again.

The referee realized what was happening immediately. But Shan Ling didn't seem to know anything.

Alex breathed out and cut the air in front of him with a sole intent in his mind.

'CUT'

A green slash with a moderately white outline flew through the air towards Shan Ling. She who was bringing out a pill tried to dodge, but the slash was way too fast for her.

"Argh!" she shouted in fear, but nothing hit her. The referee had come in time to stop the attack.

The referee's eyes were quite open when he felt the true damage of Alex's attack. 'He's halfway there already,' he thought.

Being the referee of the First stage, he was used to seeing Du Yuhan use Sword Intent from time to time, and the attack he blocked was starting to get there too.

"You Win," the referee said to Alex.

Alex bowed to the elder and took his new badge before leaving behind a stunning stage and audience. He looked at the new badge in his hand and smiled when he saw the number on it.

He was now ranked Top 10 in the sect.

Chapter 430 - Problem

"Woohoo Brother Yu, good job."

"Brother Yu, you are amazing."

"I can't wait to see you reach the Top 3, brother Yu."

"Stop showing off you bastard."

"How dare you beat lady Shan like that!"

Both love and hate were thrown towards Alex's way as he walked down the stage and left the area. He flipped his torn robe to see his clear skin with no scars or scratches.

They were all healed by the time he left the stage. He smiled and went towards his Master's manor under the guise of the night.

'Finally, top 10.' He thought. 'I'm sure things will get only harder from here on. But I should be mostly fine as long as I don't come across some uniquely talented individual,' Alex thought.

He had a lot of things about challenging people and such in his mind. He was both looking forward to and not looking forward to tomorrow since there would be limitless challenges for him and he would have to accept each one in under an hour or he would lose his rank again.

Furthermore, he was sure there would be people ready to register to fight against him the moment he finished one, so he couldn't even register another one.

His only chance was making sure he was early to the Fighting hall and registering a match on his own first.

'Yeah, I should do that. I should skip breakfast if I have to,' he thought and walked directly to his Master's manor. He entered the manor and went to the training hall, but no one was there.

"Huh? Is Master not here yet?" he wondered and waited for a few minutes, but he still didn't come.

"Uh, I will just go and spend some time in sister's house," he thought and walked back out of the training hall. He went back into the manor and was about to exit it outside when he heard muffled voices coming from somewhere.

'People are here?' Alex was surprised and sent out his spiritual sense. He then saw his senior sister and Master in a room, talking to each other.

'Oh, the master is already here. And sister hasn't left yet?' Alex was surprised and walked towards the room. As he got closer, he could hear clearer sounds of the two of them speaking.

"…ter is still quite vague, but I'm scared, master." Alex could hear Luo Mei's voice coming from a room nearby.

"But I still don't think if it's a good idea. Especially, given the current situation of the empire," Wen Cheng said. "With all the beast invasion happening, I don't know if I'm okay with you going on your own."

"I'm not going to be alone. Mengmeng will be with me," Luo Mei said.

"She needs your protection rather than you ne— Oh, little Yu, you are here," Wen Cheng said as he looked towards the door.

Alex slowly opened the door and walked in. Wen Cheng looked quite serious sitting on the sofa. He then looked towards his senior sister and nearly felt his heart drop when he saw her red eyes with tears filled to the brim.

"Wh-What's wrong, sister? Why are you crying?" Alex asked.

"Sigh, you don't have to worry about it. Just go back to the training hall, or rather just go back to your house. There won't be any training today," Wen Cheng said.

"It's okay, master. Let him stay," Luo Mei said.

"Sigh, alright. Come here and sit little Yu," Wen Cheng said.

Alex went next to Wen Cheng and sat down. "So, what's going on? Are you in any trouble, sister?" he asked.

"I just got a message from my father. It said that he has been ill for a little while and they can't find any cure. If nothing improves then he—? then he—"

Luo Mei covered her face with her hands and started crying. Alex understood what was happening. 'Sister's father is dying?' he thought to himself in surprise.

"Wait, can we not do anything? What about the doctors? Are there none?" Alex asked.

"Due to the beast attacks, no alchemist is moving around the empire at all. So, we can't even check to see what is wrong with him," Wen Cheng said.

"I'm leaving right now, master. I need to go check on my father," Luo Mei said.

"As I said, it's dangerous for you to go alone. Wait until the morning and I will get you registered on a caravan that's going out. That way, we can get some people who protect the caravan to protect you too," Wen Cheng said.

"But Mast—"

"No buts! It's not just the beasts I'm worried about. There are bandits out there too. You think I won't be worried?" Wen Cheng said.

"If it were any other time, I would've gone along with you to see my dear friend. However, I have too many responsibilities to do so right now. The beasts could attack any minute now, the sect's finances are in shambles, and we are one step away from having to take drastic measures."

"So, just do what I say and leave tomorrow morning. It will only take 2 days to reach Rubyroad City anyway," Wen Cheng said.

Luo Mei wanted to argue more, but in the end she nodded and agreed.

"Should I go as well, Master?" Alex asked suddenly.

"What? Why would you go?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I can be of support to sister. Also, didn't you say they were lacking alchemists? I can help with that," Alex said.

"Huh? Can you diagnose people too?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Uhh, no, not yet. But with my memories, I can just go read the books in the library and be done with. I can also go make simple pills if need be," Alex said.

"What about your rank in the sect?" Wen Cheng asked.

"That can pause for a while. Besides, all I do is fight fodders 10 times before fighting a single strong person. It's getting a bit boring now," Alex said.

"Sigh! Alright, Fine." Wen Cheng gave up. "I will go set it all up. You go and rest for now," Wen Cheng said to Luo Mei.

"I will go to the library right now," Alex said and stood up. He quickly said his goodbye and went towards the library.

He could read the books that weren't techniques for free thanks to his divine sense, so he did that without any hesitation. He wasn't going to spend so many spirit stones for the records.

'Not that I think about it, I do need a few techniques too,' Alex thought and walked around, looking for techniques while he studied the medical books in the library. The knowledge in them didn't seem very extensive, but he was planning on buying the better ones in big cities anyway.

The techniques however were pretty useful for the current him. He got all the skills that he could get and left with them after he finished reading through the medical knowledge.

"I want to rent these books," he said to the elder.

The elder looked at the pile of books on his hand and asked, "You do know that you can only rent books for a week, right? And you don't get any discount for the techniques,"

"Yes, I'm aware," Alex said.

"And you still want to rent it all?" he asked.

"Yes" Alex nodded.

"Very well," the elder said as he took the pills and calculated the price. "Its 8 True Spirit stones," he said.

Alex nodded as he looked through the books he had. Only one book amongst these book was even worth any money in his opinion, but he needed to all if he wanted to improve himself at all. So, he paid the money and walked out.

He went back to his house which was just a house lane below Luo Mei's house and walked in.

It was dead in the night by now, so he had two choices. He could either go through his memories to understand the concept behind the procedure for diagnosis for his medicinal knowledge, or he could learn the techniques he had just brought back.

When he thought about it, only the techniques made the most sense to him. So, he poured out the techniques from his storage bags and started reading through them all.

These books were all simple techniques that were either Mortal Grade or Earth Grade in strength. He had strong techniques, and that wasn't what he was looking for.

He separated one book from the pile and called out Pearl.

"You need to practice this technique, okay?" he said.

"Meow?" Pearl questioned.

"No, I will read it to you. Just remember while you are in your space, okay?" he asked.

"Meow!" Pearl said with a bright smile. Alex smiled too and started reading the book to Pearl. Pearl had the comprehension level of a child, but thanks to his Spiritual sea opening, he should have been able to remember it all.

Once he comprehended what all of the words Alex had just said were, it would depend on his talent to understand it.

'The technique is metal aligned, so it should work for Pearl right?' Alex thought. Once he was done, he sent Pearl back into his beast space and continued reading the rest of the book.

The simple books took barely any time to read and learn thanks to his God Grade talent. Once he was all done, he close the books and started practicing what he could.

Once it was morning, he stopped.. It was time to leave with his sister.

Chapter 431 - Remember What You Never Learned

Alex and Luo Mei along with Meng Yun were seated around the middle of the moving merchant caravan.

The caravan belonged to Heaven's Path merchant group, the 2nd richest merchant group in the whole empire, only behind the official royal merchant group called the Royal Fu merchant group.

"Don't worry sect leader Wen, I have other cultivators employed as well. They will certainly not be in any trouble," said a man from behind Wen Cheng.

He was Zhang Xie, the current head merchant of the caravan, nephew to the owner of the merchant group.

"Thank you, brother Zhang. I will leave these kids in your care," Wen Cheng.

"Haha, don't worry about them, sect Leader Wen. They are old enough to take care of themselves," Zhang Xie said as he chuckled a bit.

Wen Cheng still couldn't help but worry.

"We'll be fine, master. I will take care of senior sister," Alex said.

"Alright, Good. Take care on your journey, I will tell Ma Rong about this later," Wen Cheng said. "Sigh, she's going to get angry for sure."

"Well... I will leave that to you, master," Alex said with a chuckle.

"Remember, I have only marked you absent for 15 days. If not, I will have problems of my own in the sect," Wen Cheng said.

"Since you will reach Rubyroad city by Sunday morning, the merchants may stay there until the next Friday. Remember to get back by that time," Wen Cheng said.

"We understand, master," Alex said.

The caravan started moving and soon they were on the way out of the western gate of the Scarlet City. There were cities to the west, but none were big enough for the caravan to stop.

They tirelessly walked day and night until they reached Rubyroad city in 2 days. Alex was happy that he wouldn't need to wait a very long time to reach the destination, unlike last time.

He looked out of the window of the carriage he was in and looked behind them at the Scarlet City that was moving further and further away from them.

The city gates barely managed to block the sun that was rising from the east as well.

"Well, I guess I will be gone for a week now," he thought.

He put his neck back inside and looked at the two ladies with him.

Meng Yun had changed in a simple commoner's clothes. Alex remembered seeing similar clothes worn by the servants back in the City Lord's manor.

Luo Mei on the other hand still was wearing the Tiger Sect's yellow robes, similar to Alex, and had her head down with a blank expression on her face.

He always remembered seeing his senior sister with a warm smile, or in some cases anger too, but never nothing. This made him feel a little sad for her.

"Are you okay, sister? Are you comfortable?" he asked.

"I'm... I'm fine. You don't have to worry about me. I'm just lost in thought," Luo Mei said.

"Don't worry, young miss. I'm sure the master is fine," Meng Yun said. Now that she was out of the sect, she had started addressing Luo Mei how she originally did.

Luo Mei did nothing to correct her, so Alex believed that she was used to it.

Alex tried to speak a few times on different occasions, but Luo Mei didn't seem like she wanted to participate in any conversation, so he stopped.

Instead, he decided to focus on understanding what medical knowledge he gained the other day.

He quickly sat down cross-legged and started understanding the information he had. For some reason, it was incredibly easy to learn, despite him never learning any part of it before.

He would process the information from the memory and it would implant itself onto his brain like metal to a magnet.

'Is this because of my talent? Can't be. The formation information took way too long to comprehend, and I still need to understand it all. This on the other hand is coming to me like instinct,' he thought.

From what Alex could tell, if normal information was akin to writing on a blank piece of paper, then what was happening to him right now was akin to him ripping off the blank sheet of paper in different places and revealing the information that was already inside.

"Could it be...?" he wondered and kept learning the knowledge more and more. The more he tried to comprehend the knowledge, the more he realized how unnecessary it was.

As long as he even began to try and understand what he had read, information regarding the same subject would pop up in his brain.

Rather than learning something, Alex felt like he was remembering something he had long forgotten.

However, that was impossible since he had never learned it at all. This could only mean,

"This has something to do with the Alchemy God's Knowledge?" he wondered. This made him question more about the 'Alchemy God' in the name of the skill.

Was that a real person? If so, was that person still alive? Or was it just a name made up by the person who had a large enough knowledge about Alchemy.

Also, just how much of this was skill, and just how much of it was the information? If information was a vital part of this skill, then where did the information end?

He still had to unlock at least a single level, if not more. When he did that, what knowledge would he gain next? What skill would he gain next?

Finally, one thing he really cared about and made him think about it all was what was currently happening to him.

"If Alchemists are the doctors of this world... then it's a given that a knowledge about Alchemy would have medical knowledge too."

"Is that what is happening to me right now? Am I unlocking information that is already in my brain?" he wondered.

"If that is true... then why do I need to read it all in the first place? I never felt any of this with information regarding alchemy. Do only medical information do that... or are there other alchemy related, but not strictly alchemy focused information out there that will do this too?' he wondered.

He couldn't help but be excited about what was to come in the future.

He swiftly learned all the information that was on the books from last night and was done with it for the day.

By the time he was done, the sun was reaching the mid sky and the heat of the day was slowly making its way into the carriage.

"Uh, I should go eat something before I start training on the techniques," Alex thought and quickly logged out while he was still in his meditative position.

He freshened up and went out to eat. His part of the meal was kept in the refrigerator, so he simply heated it back up and ate it.

Once he was done, he returned back to what he was doing.

"Sigh, I can only practice half of the techniques, right?" he thought as he remembered through what he had learned.

"Whatever, let's start," he said to himself and started circulating his Qi. Since the technique wasn't a strong one and didn't require a lot of Qi, the Qi it did require traveled through his body at an incredible rate.

Finally, when it reached his hands, it release onto the air. The Qi was of the fire element, but it did not produce fire. Instead, it just dissipated into the air.

To anyone looking from the outside, they would think that this was a failure, however, to Alex he had succeeded.

He had managed to produce Fire Qi and would continue to do so from now on. Fire Qi on its own was pointless as it didn't do anything, however, if he were to mix it together with Wood Qi, that was where the magic would happen.

He could finally empower the wood element he had. That was the entire reason he had learned this technique.

It wasn't just this technique that he had learned. He had also learned to produce Wood, Water, and Earth Qi from his body. He didn't learn any for Metal Qi as he had full control over it and could produce it anytime he wanted without a technique.

He quickly learned all 3 of the remaining ones and practiced producing them. Once they all worked, he was very happy.

There was still one problem to all of this however that he hadn't thought about and that was because he hadn't been able to test it yet.

He was worried that his Metal Qi couldn't be empowered by the Earth Qi and would instead weaken the Earth QI. But he didn't know if that would be the case as Empowering was quite different from the other 4 results of two elements mixing.

"I should try empowering a few attacks of mine when I reach sister's house," Alex thought.

These weren't the only attacks he had learned. He half also learned bare-handed and sword techniques for each of the elements he didn't have one of.

They were all normal projectiles that could fly through the air and hit the opponent. Unfortunately, he had yet to test them either.

"So many things to do. Thankfully, the medical information didn't take that long to understand," he thought and started sifting through the information to fundamentally understand how medical stuff with alchemy worked.

He had nothing else to do, so he did that for the next 3 hours. That was when something happened that suddenly stopped him from doing anything.

"Oh no! Master was right," he silently said as sweats formed on his forehead and palm out of fear.

He was starting to feel the feeling once more.. He was starting to feel the advent of the beast invasion.

Chapter 432 - Spreading Awareness

Alex started fearing; he knew what this feeling meant for not just him, but the empire itself.

He looked outside. This time, the feeling felt like it came from the southeast rather than just the south.

'What's there to give me this feeling? It's completely different from the one from the desert, and yet I feel it so clearly,' he thought.

'No, now is not the time to ponder on these things. I need to hurry up and do something or else the beasts will attack the caravan.'

He immediately took out his talisman that was meant to message his master. He hoped it was close enough for him to reach, but unfortunately, it didn't. He had come too far away for the low-range communication talisman to function.

He looked towards his senior sister who was still emotionless except for the tinge of sadness in her eyes.

"Sister, I need your help." Alex stood up and walked over next to her.

"Go away, Yu Ming. I am not in the mood to talk right now," Luo Mei said in a low voice.

"Sister, please. Now is not the time for you to be depressed," Alex said.

"Just leave me alone," she said. "I want to be depressed right now."

"Stop acting like your father is dead!" Alex shouted. "He's not dead, okay? Aren't we going there to heal him in the first place? Or have you already killed him off in your heart?"

"Do you have that little faith in your brother that you don't think I will be able to save him at all?" Alex asked.

Luo Mei finally looked up with tears in her eyes. "I can't lose him, Yu Ming. I already lost my mother, I can't lose my father too," she said as tears started dripping down her cheeks.

"Don't worry about your father right now, sister. Worry about yourself. With what's happening right now, we might end up dead before we even reach your father," Alex said.

"What?" that caught Luo Mei's attention for sure. She immediately spread out her spiritual sense to see if there was any problem, but she couldn't find any.

"What are you talking about, little brother? What danger? I can't see anything," Luo Mei said.

"Beast Invasion," Alex said. "Not the second one either. One similar to the first one in the capital. That beast invasion is coming for this caravan right now.

"Wha—?" Luo Mei immediately lost any hint of sadness from her face as she got both confused and scared.

"The beasts will attack at any moment all around the empire. We need to let the master know so he can protect the city," Alex said. "My communication talisman is too low leveled to work. Do you have any that works?"

"Uh... yeah, mine is a higher grade one. As long as we haven't left 1000 Kilometers away from Scarlet City, it will work," Luo Mei said.

Alex frowned. While the caravan wasn't fast by any means, it was much faster than the average car in his real life. Given that they had been on the road for a whole day with no stopping in between, he worried if they had left the range already.

"Try communicating, or rather let me talk," Alex said.

"No, only I can operate it," Luo Mei said and brought it out before sending a message through it.

After a few moments, the talisman glowed a little and made a small noise to let them know there was a message back.

Luo Mei quickly read it and said, "Master wants to know how you know about that. Also, are you absolutely sure?"

"Uh... Tell him I have a similar feeling to the one I had before the first one. I told him about it when the invasion started in Capital too," Alex said.

"As for whether I'm sure or not, I don't think that should matter right now. Just the fact that there is a chance of the invasion should mean that master should get to take precautions," Alex said.

"Yes, you are right," Luo Mei said and quickly sent the message back to her master. After a few more moments, they got a message back again.

"Alright, Master is going to start preparing for the attack. He has also taken it upon himself to send messages to the other cities to let them know," Luo Mei said.

"Alright, if others will be fine, then it's time for us to worry about ourselves," Alex said.

"Huh? Oh right, the caravan," Luo Mei said and tried to walk out of the carriage.

"Not the caravan, sister. Me! The beasts follow me. I'm sure they are on their way here right now for me. Imagine the entirely of the beasts that attacked the Capital coming for this one small caravan," Alex said.

Luo Mei's face immediately went pale. Even Meng Yun got scared.

"N-n-no, that can't be. You will die, You will die for sure," Luo Mei suddenly got unreasonably afraid.

"Um, we still have time sister, I can run away," Alex said.

"No, You can't. They will catch you. Oh no, and then they will kill us too," Luo Mei said.

"Um, I'm sure I can go far away so that not even the True realm beasts can catch us," Alex said.

"I'm not scared about the True beasts," Luo Mei said.

"Huh? Then what?" Alex asked.

"The Saint beast," Luo Mei said.

Alex's eyes went wide. "Sister, what do you mean by saint beast?" he asked. "Are you saying there is a beast out there with Saint Realm cultivation base?"

"Yes. There was a Saint Beast, a black Jaguar-type beast, during the first attack. The Emperor himself fought it, but couldn't beat it off. He said that if the beasts hadn't returned back on their own during that time, he would have surely died there," Luo Mei said.

Alex was shocked to hear these 2 new pieces of information.

'So there is another saint beast out there, and the Emperor himself is in the Saint realm too, huh?' Alex thought.

"Alright, let's not waste any more time. If last time is anything to go by, we have mere hours, but it's better if we don't rely on that. It's better to act like we could be under attack at any moment now," Alex said.

"Yes, let's go," Luo Mei said and immediately searched for Zhang Xie with her spiritual sense. Once she found him, she opened the carriage and walked into the evening light.

"Senior Zhang, it's an emergency," Luo Mei said.

"Huh? Little Miss, what's wrong?" Zhang Xie said as he opened the door to his carriage.

"Senior Zhang, I just got a message from my master. He said that there is another Beast Invasion coming and that we need to get away from this path right now and get as far away from the forest as possible," Luo Mei said.

"Miss, this... you aren't joking right?" Zhang Xie said. He had always been afraid of the beast invasion, but despite his uncle's opposition for him to go on a caravan, he had insisted that he would be safe.

And now...

"Senior Zhang," Alex called out. "Take this."

Alex brought out two pills and handed them to Zhang Xie. Zhang Xie looked at the pills for a while, but couldn't understand what they were.

"What are these pills, young man?" he asked.

"These are called the Beast Attracting Pills. When you pour in a little Qi and throw it away, it will attract every beast below True realm to its place. If the situation is dire, use these," Alex said.

"This pill... I've never heard of this," Zhang Xie said.

"I wouldn't doubt you have, but you must have heard about the Royal Alchemist saving the day in the capital during the first wave of Beast invasion," Alex said.

Zhang Xie's eyes shined widely as hope appeared in them. "You mean—"

"Yes, they may be a little worse since I was the one that made them, but they are the same pills as the Royal Alchemist's," Alex said.

Zhang Xie immediately pocketed it with a smile, but then stopped. "Why aren't you keeping it? You can use it if the situation is dire, young man," he said.

"I have some myself. As an Alchemist, I have a lot of such pills," Alex said. "As for why I'm giving it to you is because... I will need to go somewhere else."

"Huh? Where do you plan on going?" Zhang Xie asked.

"I'm going to lure the beasts from here and go perpendicular to the forests. You guys go diagonally towards the Northwest side and get as far away from here as possible. It's a shame you can't go directly towards the north due to the terrain," Alex said as he looked at the uneven hills to the north.

"I can't let you do that, young man. You are my responsibility. I promised sect leader Wen. I can't let you go anywhere," Zhang Xie.

"You don't have a choice, senior Zhang. I'm leaving with or without your approval. Please take care of my Senior sister in my stead," Alex said.

"Huh? No, I'm coming with you," Luo Mei said.

"No, sister. It will be dangerous. You need to go with the caravan," Alex said. "I will lure them away and since I have that escape technique, I will surely be fine."

Secretly, he sent spiritual sense to Luo Mei to say something else.

"Go with them. Since the beasts are following me, you will be in more danger. I also happen to have a boat artifact that I've somewhat managed to learn to use and will get as far away from here as possible."

"Adding onto that my ability to conceal myself and go invisible, the beasts won't find me so easily," Alex said.

"That's..." Luo Mei was torn. She was already sad about losing her father, and now she had to see her newly made brother throw away his life to save theirs.

"Don't worry, sister. I will find the caravan as soon as the beasts return back," Alex said. "Take care."

Alex suddenly stopped moving and watched the caravan and Luo Mei go along with the caravan.

Alex stayed there for a minute or two watch as the caravan changed its course and started heading Northwest where they would most likely encounter any beasts as most would be coming for this area.

The ones that did go there would have to fight the True cultivators in that caravan.

Alex didn't know how many there were, but there should have been enough to fight off a random bandit army.

Once the caravan was no longer in view, he took out a boat from his storage space.

"Alright, time to leave."

Chapter 433 - Jaguar

In front of Alex was a small flying boat that could house preferably only one person at a time, but could fit 3 people if needed. The boat was white in color with a slight purple hue along the outlines.

The design of the boat itself was quite simple.

It was about a meter wide, 2 meters long, and barely half a meter high. It had a small compartment on the front where one could place True Spirit stones inside it to make it run on its own.

The boat was something Alex had gotten after Zexi's death. It was one of the things inside Zexi's storage bag along with everything else he gained.

Being a True rank artifact, Alex couldn't really refine it at all. However, he had noticed that even without refining, the boat flew way faster than if he did normally.

He couldn't imagine how fast the boat would be if he really did manage to refine it once he reached the True realms, however, that would be something he would think about when the time came.

He quickly jumped onto the hovering boat and checked the True spirit stones in the front compartment. Once he made sure the spirit stones had Qi in them, he closed the compartment and sat on the boat.

The boat didn't have any control equipment and entirely relied on the user to control it through their Qi.

Alex put his Qi into the compartment and suddenly, the boat activated and started moving forward.

The boat did nothing but go forward, and since the boat was angled a little off from the north, it started speeding towards there.

"Not there," Alex thought as he slightly pushed the front of the boat from the side using his Qi to straighten its path.

The boat was incredibly fast and moved through the air faster than the sect's giant ship or Ma Rong's own flying artifact.

"I guess you really can't argue that a royal has some of the best stuff," Alex thought. He wouldn't argue if someone came and said that this was a Heaven-grade artifact, even though he knew it was just an earth-grade artifact.

The feeling Alex felt had disappeared by now. But that didn't do anything to make him feel better. In fact, that was the exact same thing that happened last time as well.

The feelings would disappear for a few minutes, then come back up stronger. It would repeat a few times and increase to the point that it would be physically uncomfortable for Alex.

He felt like it was halfway there by now. He flew up the hill and went past another set of the small jungle as he made his way as far north as he could.

Even then, he couldn't get rid of that feeling.

In the veil of the night, he flew for nearly 3 hours when the feeling reached its peak.

By now he was very far away, but that wasn't consoling at all. The beast side had a Saint Beast. If it wanted, it could probably reach him in a third of the time it took him to fly this far away.

He had crossed villages by now, but his fear did not drop in the slightest.

And that was not without reason as he soon felt an enormous aura from many kilometers away. Even at a distance so far away, he could feel the aura of the saint realm.

"Shit! Saint realm is truly terrifying. But… why do I sense two different auras?"

* * * * *

Half an hour earlier.

A massive nearly 3 meters tall and 5 meters long Jaguar flew through the night sky, fully hidden under its darkness.

The black jaguar was flying at incredible speed and headed north while the minor beasts started searching for things to attack mindlessly.

Most of them had all followed behind it. Where ever the Jaguar went, they went as well.

"Just when will these mindless children grow? Just when will the wound upon this land heal?" the beast asked itself as it flew towards Alex's location.

"I already failed the first time when those humans stood in my way.? If I could kill them, I would have already found him by now," the Jaguar lamented.

"And the second time did not bore any fruit as I couldn't locate him, to begin with."

"This time, however, I will make sure to get him and return back," the Jaguar said.

As one of the faster types of beasts, it wouldn't even take half an hour to reach where Alex had already gone to.

It flew without stops for the next half an hour and finally felt that the target was within grasp. It was excited.

"Friend, would you mind stopping for a little bit," A voice suddenly appeared in the Jaguar's mind.

"Yes, friend. We would like it if you could stop for a little chat," Another voice said.

The Jaguar suddenly stopped. The voices had just spoken inside his head, which meant the speaker must have a Saint Realm cultivation base.

The Jaguar suddenly sent out its own Spiritual sense and noticed the two people about a few kilometers away.

"It's you two. How are you two here?" the Jaguar asked.

"Oh, how can we say? I guess we can call it fate," one of the people said.

"Fate… hah! What utter crap," the Jaguar said and immediately sent his spiritual sense all over himself.

"I see… I didn't realize that there was an imprint on me. My age must be catching up to me. I guess I will need to hurry up or I won't get a proper chance to enter the Immortal Realm," the Jaguar said to itself.

The imprint on its body immediately disappeared as if it was never there. The two men standing a kilometer away frowned.

"This seems… troublesome, brother Feng," a red-haired male with short hair and a clean face said. He had an ordinary-looking body and attire, but his attitude and ability were anything but ordinary.

"Truly does seem that way, brother Yang. Unfortunately, we don't have the highness to help us this day," the man named Feng said. Feng had long jet black hair and a thin face which was contrasted by his fat mustache.

"Guess we will have to give our all then," the man named Yang said and flared out his cultivation base, getting ready to fight.

"I guess we do," Fend said and flared out his cultivation base too.

Together, their cultivation base was enough to scare anyone in the entire empire. However, the Jaguar wasn't fazed at all.

The only thing on its face was a frown from not being able to go to where Alex was.

"Humans, I don't wish to harm you, so please let me go do my duty," the Jaguar said.

"We followed you all the way from the capital, friend. We can't leave empty-handed. At the very least we need answers," Yang said with a menacing smile on his face.

"Sigh, I guess being a pacifist really does hurt one from time to time," Jaguar said and suddenly released its cultivation base too.

The two men frowned at first seeing the Jaguar release its cultivation base. They believed the Jaguar was getting ready to fight. However, the Jaguar didn't stop.

Its cultivation base kept on growing more and more, and the frown on the two men's faces slowly turned into fear. Soon, the fear disappeared too and it changed into despair.

Finally, the Jaguar stopped releasing its cultivation base and slowly walked towards the two men with its overwhelming aura.

"Do you still wish to stop me, humans?" it asked.

The two men started fearing for their life now. For all of their nearly thousand-year-long life, they hadn't met anyone or anything with this high of a cultivation base.

"N-no, no," the Yang named man started blurting out on his own. The man named Feng couldn't even speak.

"Leave!" the Jaguar ordered.

"Y-Yes, senior," Yang said and disappeared from there. Feng too disappeared within a second after Yang.

"Finally, no more disturbances," the Jaguar said and was about to follow Alex when it realized it could no longer locate him at all.

"NO! It can't be over already," it said. It looked back and saw the hundreds of thousands of beasts rushing back into the forest.

"I'm sure he's around somewhere ahead of me. I just need to search for him," it said and flew further ahead searching for Alex, but no matter how hard it did, it would never locate something it hadn't seen before. It saw thousands of humans and beasts alike, but it couldn't see the target at all.

"Shit! Today was a failure too. I will have to wait another month again," the Jaguar said.

"I hope that damned puma had more luck than me," the Jaguar said and turned around.

Once again, it had failed. It hated the humans for stopping it on both times it could locate its target.

It lamented the fact that it could not find its target this month, but next month, it promised on its master's grave to find him for sure.

* * * * * *

The aura of the two human cultivators that Alex had mistaken as the aura of the Jaguar had disappeared far away behind him.

He had moved too far away to feel that aura at all now.

In the next 2 minutes, the feelings he was feeling disappeared too. 'Is it okay now?' he wondered and flew towards a spot of light in the night.

It turned out to be a small village in the mountains. Alex dropped near there and took in his boat. Then he walked into the village and meshed with the people there.

He acted like he was a cultivator from far away and was only resting. He gave the villagers a few pills in exchange for letting him stay with them for a bit.

A spiritual sense came and went, and Alex was left in sweats. Thankfully the owner of that sense never came looking for him.

So, he stayed in the village for half an hour more and finally felt like it was time to leave.

"Thank you for your hospitality, senior. I will leave now," Alex said to the village chief.

"No, no, lord Cultivator. It is our village's honor that a person such as you came here at all," the chief said.

Alex thanked them again and walked out of the village. It was dead in the night and the sky was cloudy.

'Is it going to rain?' he wondered. He wouldn't mind a bit of rain. Rather, he wanted some.

He quickly got on the boat and started flying towards where he assumed his sister and the caravan would be by now.

He didn't have an accurate map of the land, so he could only base where he was on some crude information he had about the general area of the lands.

"So… that direction?" he guessed as he looked towards a certain direction and flew away in his boat.

Chapter 434 - Huang And Xing

Alex didn't have a compass, nor did he have the night sky to help him know exactly which direction he was going towards.

'How do I tell the direction exactly?' he thought. He had been flying for an hour towards where he assumed was the caravan, but he saw nothing.

"Hmm… what should I do?" he wondered. "Compass… something that can tell me the direction… Ah, maybe I can find those," he thought and immediately lowered his boat down towards the ground.

He then spread out his spiritual sense on the forest below, looking for something.

At first, it didn't seem like he would find it any time soon, but then after a dozen or so minutes, he found one and quickly released his Qi from the boat and stopped it.

"Well, I wanted a sunflower, but that helps too I guess," he thought and jumped down from the boat.

Alex landed next to a small patch of grass where he saw a few yellow flowers blooming.

These flowers were yellow in color and were called Yinful Daisy. These plants contained trace amounts of Yin Qi in them, and always looked towards the Sun for their Yang.

Even at the night, they followed the path of the sun and looked at them. As long as one knew the time of the night, one could infer the direction from these flowers.

"Since it's facing towards me, and it's 2 am in the morning, then west must be—"

Alex stopped. Something was weird here. "Wait, why is it facing towards me? The sun should be below us right now?" he said.

He quickly thought about the flower once more. "Ah, well… I didn't expect to see it attracted towards my Yang Qi. That's… problematic," he thought.

Alex immediately stood up and went far away from the flower. Until a certain distance, the flower looked towards him, but once he was away, it dropped down towards the ground and looked in a certain direction.

"That… should be east, right?" Alex thought. He quickly sent out his spiritual sense around the flower to see if there were any other plants or minerals with yang energy.

Only when he couldn't find it at all did he accept that west was behind the flower.

"Nice. I should go left to the left from West so that I can catch up with Sister and others right? I should at least reach the Southern forest so that I can reach Rubyroad just in case," Alex thought and flew away.

In the next 3 hours, he finally reached the Southern Forest, but he couldn't find any signs of the Caravan. Even if there were any, it was impossible with the beasts destroying almost everything outside of the forest.

Thankfully, there were no villages there, or it would have been disastrous for them.

'I guess beast attacks happen from time to time. Any villages that still stood would have disappeared by now,' Alex thought solemnly.

He then moved again, looking for the Caravan. 'Do I go diagonally too? Or have to change their course back to their original route?' Alex wondered.

He regretted not making plans on how to meet once they were separated. But to be fair to Alex, the only thing on his mind at that time was survival.

Now that he had survived, he would certainly do something about finding the caravan.

"Let's just go through what route I assume they would go through. Even if I don't find them, I can just go to Rubyroad city directly."

So, he changed courses towards the path the caravan might be moving towards.

Time passed and the sun came up, but Alex didn't find the caravan still. He saw a few other types of carriages and caravans, but not belonging to the Heavens Path merchant group.

At some point, he needed to log out so that he could eat, so he flew into a small patch of trees and sat down on a branch.

After making sure he wouldn't fall at all, he used his concealing and invisibility techniques. He didn't know why, but he knew these clones would continue to use these techniques even when he was logged out.

At least, that was what it did back inside the alchemy garden inside the Southern Forest.

He logged out and went to have his breakfast.

"Hey, what happened yesterday. You didn't come out," Emily asked.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I had to go out on a Caravan journey in the game, so I couldn't log out in time. But I did come out later around noon and ate the food. As always, it was delicious," Alex said.

"Thank you," Emily said while blushing a little.

"Urghh! It's too early in the morning for us to hear you being lovey-dovey. Just sit down and have your breakfast," Sarah cried from the dinner table.

Alex chuckled and said, "Maybe you should get a boyfriend too, Sarah."

Sarah then looked at him and said, "Who said I liked boys?"

Alex was a little surprised. Emily chuckled from the side and so did Hannah. "You guys knew?" he asked.

"Of course I knew. She's my friend," Emily said.

"It was quite obvious actually," Hannah said.

"Uhh, alright, I will just eat and go. I'm in a hurry anyway," Alex said and quickly finished his breakfast.

Then, he went back to his room and logged in.

When he opened his eyes, he found himself upon the tree, still fully concealed.

"Haha! It still works," he thought and flew up. He then took out his boat and checked the True spirit stones in the front compartment.

"Wow, this thing is expensive to run. Just half a day and I've already wasted nearly 5 True Spirit stones. Makes me wonder how expensive the sect's ship is to run," Alex thought.

He quickly replaced the true spirit stones and used his Qi to activate the boat. After that, all he had to do for the day was looking for the caravan.

He flew for hours on end but did not manage to find the caravan at all.

"They must have taken a different route. Whatever, I will directly go to the city then," he thought and took a direct route to the west, instead of trying to follow the route.

However, just as he was about to stray from the path, he heard something. Alex looked towards the front and could see some sort of smoke coming out.

He moved his boats in that direction and could finally hear a larger amount of shouting from that area.

"Is that a caravan?" Alex thought when he saw that. There really was a caravan under attack, but it wasn't the caravan he was looking for.

"Bandits!" Alex said when he finally saw what was happening.

He quickly sped up to help the caravan. When he got close, he jumped out of the boat and quickly took it into his storage bag before concealing himself and getting closer to them.

"Damn those bandits. Why are there so many across the empire? I should help those people in the— huh?" Alex was surprised when he finally reached the location of the caravan.

He lifted his concealment and got closer to watch what was happening.

The caravan was indeed under attack and one of the carriages was burning with smokes plumes coming out without stop.

However, the countless shouts didn't belong to the members of the caravan at all.

It was in fact the Bandits. The bandits were currently inside a barrier and were surrounded by green smoke that seemed to hurt them.

Alex looked down towards the members of the caravan and saw them looking at the bandits in horror.

Everyone seemed to be unaccustomed to what was happening, except for 2 people who seemed to be the cause of it all.

Alex looked at their red robes and recognized them, or at least he recognized the sect.

The red-robed man looked towards the Sky to where Alex was and got ready to fight. But then when he saw the Yellow robe on his body, he stopped.

"Xing'er, that man is from Tiger sect, right?" he asked the girl next to him.

The girl turned towards the Sky and saw Alex too. "Yes, I believe so, Elder brother," she said.

Alex was surprised that they met each other in such away. He dropped down to the ground and took another look at the men in the barrier.

They were now starting to claw out their faces from all the pain they were suffering. It was a truly inhumane way to kill someone.

But he did not feel any pity, as bandits were known to do such horrible things.

"Fellow Daoist, may I know who you are?" the man said.

"Greetings, my name is Yu Ming. I came to help, but… it seems you don't need my help," Alex said.

"Ah, these were just minor bandits that thought they could take their chances while the stronger ones were hiding due to the beast attacks."

"Even if we didn't help, this little caravan could have successfully fought them off. But since we saw them, we decided to help," the man said.? "Oh right, My name is Xiao Huang. This is my senior sister, Luo Xing."

"Hello," Luo Xing said.

"Ah, yes. I recognize sister Xing. I assume you are going back to Rubyroad as well, right?" Alex asked.

"How… do you know that?" she asked, suddenly getting suspicious. The man named Xiao Huang suddenly flared up his cultivation base as well.

'True Realm cultivator? He did look quite old,' Alex thought.

"Please forgive me for not properly introducing myself. I am a Junior apprentice-brother to sister Luo Mei. She is on a caravan ride to Rubyroad city as well. However, during the beast hoard attack, I got separated from them."

"I was trying to search for the caravan when I spotted this one," Alex said.

"You are Mei'er's junior brother?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "It's good to finally meet you, Sister Xing. I wanted to speak during the Annual competition, but didn't get the chance."

"Didn't get the chance? Or did Mei'er just not bother?" Luo Xing asked.

"Uhh…" Alex didn't know what to say.

"Whatever, I need to leave soon, senior brother," Luo Xing said.

"Ah right. I will finish them off now," Xiao Huang said and suddenly upped his Qi input in the 10-meter wide barrier.

The speed at which the men died increased by a lot and within a dozen seconds, they were all dead.

Xiao Huang swiped his hands in a gesture and 6 formation flags came flying towards him.

"Let's go," he said. The Caravan people tried to thank him, but he didn't accept any of it. Instead, he even let those people take the bandit's storage bag.

Just as the two of them were about to leave, Alex called out to them.

"Um, Sister Xing," Alex called out. "Would you mind if I go the remainder of your journey with you guys?"

Chapter 435 - Helping

"It should be fine. What say you, senior brother?" Xing asked.

"Well, if Xing'er is fine with it, then okay," Xiao Huang said and took out a large, red-colored ship.

The design of the ship was similar to the one Alex had, but was larger and could probably house up to 6 people easily.

"Come, little brother. Sit next to me," Xiao Huang said as he sat towards the front.

Alex nodded and jumped onto the ship. He sat down next to Xiao Huang while Luo Xing sat behind them both.

They quickly said goodbye to the people from the caravan and started moving.

"We should reach Ruby road city around midnight. Don't worry, Xing'er" Xiao Huang said.

"I'm not really worried about father. I'm more worried about how Mei'er is holding up. After stepmother's death 10 years ago, she would get depressed whenever something bad happened to anyone."

"Hehe, there was this one time when mother got food poisoning a year before we left for our sects, and she spent the entire night with mother, crying that she too shouldn't die on her."

"I probably shouldn't be laughing, but it's quite a sweet memory actually," Luo Xing said as she thought about the past.

"Oh, how is she holding by the way?" she asked.

"Well, she was indeed a little depressed when we started the journey, but halfway through when we heard information about the beast attack, she stopped worrying about everything else."

"After that, we were separated as I took the task of luring the beasts away from the caravan so I don't know how she is holding up."

"However, since Meng Yun is with her, she should be fine," Alex said.

"Oh, Mengmeng is coming too? I probably should have brought Fei'er too. At least one pair of sisters would be happy to see each other in our household," Luo Xing said with sadness in her voice.

Alex was about to ask something when Xiao Huang asked him another question instead.

"Little brother, what do you mean by you took the task of luring the beasts?" he asked.

"Oh, since we thought the caravan couldn't handle the onslaught of the beasts, I took the task of luring the beasts away from them with this," Alex said as he brought out a pill.

"This is the same pill that the Royal Alchemist used to lure away the beasts from the capital. Using these, I could lure the beasts away."

"I also happened to have a flying artifact that I used to escape away from them," Alex said as he mixed truth and lies.

"Oh, I heard about that. How did you get your hands on the pills? Did the Royal Alchemists sell them?" Xiao Huang asked.

"Oh no, I made them. The recipe was handed to the participants of the new pill-making competition on the 4th day, and my friends gave it to me," Alex said.

"Oh, little brother, you're an alchemist?" Xiao Huang asked.

"Ah, yes. One of the reasons I was going with Sister to see her father was to possibly heal him if I can."

"Since most alchemists are not moving from their cities, I was hoping to at least diagnose him even if we have to roam the empire, looking for clues."

"After all, finding what is wrong is the first step to solving it," Alex said.

"Y-You… came here to find out what's wrong with father?" Xing asked with wide eyes.

"Yes, sister. At least, I hope to help a bit in these desperate times," Alex said.

"Haha! I like you, junior brother. Come, tell us more," Xiao Huang said and started asking questions.

Alex hid as much as he could but eventually let it be known that he was part of the Hong Wu Sect as well.

The two of them got a little surprised but said nothing about it.

Alex asked them a few questions too.

Xiao Huang and Luo Xing were direct disciples of the 2nd Elder of the Heaven's Barrier sect, a popular formation-focused sect of the east.

Luo Xing was one of the best formation makers amongst the students, while Xiao Huang was already an elder thanks to his age and cultivation base.

Luo Keng, the father of Luo Mei and Luo Xing was good friends with both Wen Cheng and the 2nd Elder of the Heaven's Barrier sect, so when it came time to send his daughters to study and enter a sect, he sent them both to two of his friends to grow separately.

Now that he was dying, they were both returning back from their sects as fast as they could.

It was soon nighttime, but the three of them didn't stop at all. It was then around midnight that Luo Xing spoke out.

"We're here," she said.

Alex looked ahead and could see a massive city, around the same size as Scarlet city.

Even though it was midnight, the city was full of light.

"They must be rebuilding after the beast attack," Xiao Huang said. He could see that people were rebuilding parts of the walls that had broken during the attack.

"It… doesn't look that bad, does it?" Luo Xing asked while surprised.

"They must have learned about the beasts attacking like I was let know," Alex said.

"Must be. I wonder how they learned this time? They must have left sentries in the forest or something," Xiao Huang said.

Once they got closer, a few people flew up to see who it was. However, one of the people, an elderly man with a white beard spoke out.

"Young Lady, you're back!" he said.

Xiao Huang stopped the boat and Luo Xing flew out. "Senior Jin, are you out here helping the walls?" Luo Xing asked.

"Ah, yes. Since the lord is unable to, I was tasked with helping them rebuild. We were hoping to finish early, but we don't have much manpower. Most people got hurt during the attack."

"The casualty was quite high this time. However, thanks to the warning we got, the fatalities were none," The old man named Jin said.

"Oh, I hope those men that got hurt are well. You should treat them fast and get them to help with the walls. We can't leave it destroyed like this," Luo Xing said.

"Sigh, I wish we could do that too. But due to the lack of proper healers, we are suffering a bit. We've used all the pills available here, but there are more wounded people here."

"We've sent a few people over to the next city to buy some pills, but… we don't see much hope. Those people must be suffering just like we are," Old man Jin said.

"Excuse me, senior," Alex suddenly spoke from the back.

"Yes, young man," old man Jin said.

"Um, what cultivation base do the wounded have? If they are not in the True realm, I can help a bit," Alex said.

"Umm… you are?" the old man asked curiously.

"He is Mei'er's junior brother in the sect and an Alchemist. If little brother wishes to help, take him with you. Certainly, he will be of much help," Luo Xing said.

"Oh," old man Jin's eyes opened wide. "You are Young lady Mei's junior brother? Welcome to the Rubyroad City, young lord," Old man jin said.

"If you truly wish to help, we can use some. Please come with me," old man Jin said.

"I will go to the house and go see the father. Little brother Ming is here to diagnose father's illness as well, so be sure to give him the utmost respect, senior Jin," Luo Xing said.

"Young Lord is here to check up on the lord? Oh my, please forgive me if I have been rude," Senior Jin said.

"Alright, I will leave now. Come to the house when you are done. Senior Jin will bring you there," Luo Xing said and left with Xiao Huang following behind her.

Alex nodded and followed behind senior Jin to a massive camp laid out outside the walls.

"Here are the injured. We have some people with some medical knowledge trying to keep them alive, but their knowledge isn't extensive enough to heal them," old man Jin said.

"I see… let me see," Alex said and opened the tent.

Suddenly, he was bombarded with a heavy smell of blood. Even when he was doused in the blood of the monsters he killed, the smell didn't seem so heavy.

"How many people are here?" Alex asked.

"Hmm… around 200 I would say," old man Jin said. "There were about 250 originally, but we managed to use what remaining pills we had after the last battle and saved the most injured ones.

"These less injured ones are the ones that suffer the most."

Alex looked around and asked, "I thought having knowledge of the attack would let you guys survive more, but even after that there were still 250 injured? How many were injured last time?"

"Last time should have been around 180 injured," senior Jin said.

"Huh? It was worse this time?" Alex asked.

"No, it was better this time, much better. While the injured may have been more this time, it's unlike last time when about a hundred different people died," Jin said.

'Ah right. I nearly had Survivorship bias,' Alex thought.

Alex walked to one of the injured people and looked through his wounds. He quickly thought of what was wrong with him.

'Shoulder Blade has been pierced through. Even the best common pill won't help with that. However, just healing the rest of the wounds and not moving the shoulder for a month should fully heal him,' Alex thought.

However, he didn't immediately bring out a pill to help him. Instead, he stood up and moved to another patient, and checked him.

Once he figured out what was wrong with that person, he moved to another one.

Senior Jin watched as Alex moved from one bed to the next and checked all the people one by one. Finally, after an hour, he was done with every single one of the 200 patients.

There were other people tending to the wounded that too looked at Alex weirdly. Alex closed his eyes to think for a moment as he sent out his spiritual sense into his bag to check for the pills.

'Shit! I only have 60,' he thought.

He quickly took out the pills and decided to give them to the ones that were most wounded amongst them all.

He went towards the most injured ones one by one and gave them the pills. Once they ate the pill, the people slowly stopped grunting in pain and had a calm face once more.

"Thank you, brother," they said with a sigh of relief. They were on the verge of death, and Alex had saved them.

Alex said nothing and went through everyone he could and saved all of the 60 people he could. They weren't fully healed, as common pills just didn't have that much ability, but they were good enough that they could use their own natural healing to heal themselves now.

Once he was done with them, Alex then took out a blank talisman and brought it to senior Jin.

"Senior, I have a list of ingredients here. If you can help me find a lot of these, I can help around a hundred of these people," Alex said.

"The rest of the 40 people are True Realm cultivators and I don't have the capability to help them currently," Alex said.

"You-You really can help them?" Senior Jin said in surprise. He didn't expect a single alchemist to reduce their problems by so much.

"Yes, you can ask those people that are going over to the next town over to only bring back True pills," Alex said.

"Yes, yes, I will get on it," senior Jin said and left. The people working inside the tent finally saw hope for the patients and smiled.

They and the ones that were healed thanked Alex once more.

"It's too early to thank me.. I still have a lot to do."

Chapter 436 - Lie

"Can you guys help me find an Alchemy room somewhere? I have some ingredients of my own that I can immediately turn into pills that can save these people," Alex told the healers there.

"Uhh, there is one a little north of the city center. Oi, Bingbing, come show senior here a way to the alchemy hall," the woman said.

"Oh, okay. Come with me mister," a little girl, who didn't seem phased by the people dying around her, took Alex towards the city.

They were stopped by the guard when the little girl said, "Mister is an alchemist. He is going to make pills to heal the people."

"Oh, the one Senior Jin was talking about? Please come," the guards immediately let them in.

Alex suddenly grabbed the girl and started flying. "We don't have time to waste," he said.

The girl screamed with joy when she was high in the air. "You are strong, mister. You can fly so high," she said.

"Where to?"Alex asked.

The girl pointed towards a direction and Alex flew to the Alchemy hall. Once he reached there, he immediately told the people what he was here for and they let him enter the empty alchemy hall without any problem.

The girl left them, and Alex was taken in by a young man. "Are there seriously no alchemists here?" Alex asked.

"No good ones," the man said. "The ones we have can't even make Earth-grade pills. The good ones saw the danger the city could face in case of another beast attack, and left in fear."

"Can't say I blame them though. I would have probably done the same. We are after all one of the weaker cities that barely even has a sect," the man said.

"I see. Well, I should hurry. Have someone stationed here so I can easily pass along the pills as I make them," Alex said and entered the room.

He quickly opened his storage bag and realized he had about 25 sets of ingredients all together to make pills that could help those people.

He probably would have had more if he could make True Pills as well, but since he couldn't, he had to stick with what he had.

He quickly sat against the fire and took out his cauldron before putting it on top of the fire.

Then he hurried with making his pills. In the first hour, he made 7 pills. He handed those pills to the man stationed outside.

In the second hour, he learned to cut back on unnecessary parts and made 9 pills.

In the third hour, he refined his pill-making process more for the night and made 10 pills.

By the fifth hour, he was done with all 25 sets of ingredients he had and made about 35 pills.

When he walked out to hand over the 5th set of pills, instead of a random guard, it was senior Jin who had been standing outside.

"Young lord, here," old man jin brought back a storage bag from somewhere.

Alex quickly looked at the storage bag and saw that it had about 45 sets of ingredients in total.

'That's enough for 45 people; 68 if I get lucky. I already have 35 pills of my own… let's hope that's all that is needed,' Alex thought.

"Um… Young lord, I heard you've been in there for 5 hours. Don't you… need to rest?" old man Jin asked.

"No, senior Jin. There are still people I can save. Don't worry about me, I'm young. I can do this all night," Alex said and handed him the remaining pills before walking in.

Senior Jin looked at the pill blankly and said, "But… it's already day."

Alex lost sense of time as he made pills after pills after pills. In fact, he even lost count at some point.

Everywhere he looked, he could see the shape of the ingredients, or the color of the fire, or sphere shapes like the pill. He even started seeing them whenever he closed his eyes.

He had made a lot of pills but never had he forced himself to make this many pills, under such a small span of time, while being under pressure to do the best.

"I can do it," he thought and did the best he could. It took him 7 hours to finish all of the 45 sets of ingredients and managed to make 70 pills out of them.

He had given his best, and fate had taken his side. He walked out with the last 9 pills and instead of handing them to anyone, flew directly to the outside of the walls.

He went over to the tent where people were coming out of one by one. When he walked in, there were only about 45 people left.

Alex walked over to the last remaining 5 self tempering realm people and gave them the pill.

Soon, they too started to get healed and rejoiced as they could make a full recovery.

Everyone got emotional and started crying. The patients and the healers started thanking Alex.

Alex was happy he could help. He was happy that the little knowledge of the medicine he had learned had helped him.

He walked outside of the tent and was about to take a deep sigh when he saw someone up front.

"Sister," Alex called out.

Luo Mei immediately ran forward and hugged Alex. "Thank god. I thought you were dead again," she said and started crying.

"Young lord, I am happy that you are okay," Meng Yun said.

"I'm fine. I tried to find my way back to the caravan and didn't know which way you guys went after the beasts stopped moving," Alex said.

"I stopped the caravan to wait for you to catch up, but you never came, so I thought… thank god you're okay. Old Jin told me that you were here and helping the people since midnight yesterday."

"How did you even get back here so quickly?" Luo Mei asked.

"Well, I told you I had a boat right? So I took half the journey in the boat, and the other half, I met sister Xing on the road and came here with her," Alex said.

"You met Luo Xing?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yes. She's back already," Alex said.

"Damn, old Jin. He didn't tell me that," Luo Mei said.

"Grandfather knows about your irrational hate towards Young Miss Xing, so he likely kept it to himself," Meng Yun said.

"It's not irrational. It's… whatever let's just go," Luo Mei said.

"One moment, sister. I need to speak to senior JIn about something," Alex said and ran over to old man JIn and told him about everything.

When the people there learned that majority of the injured had been healed, they were extremely happy.

Alex then suggested what else could be done in regards to extending the remaining injured people's lives until the others brought back the True rank healing pills from the city over.

"Alright let's go," Alex said and the 3 walked towards the gate. When the people saw Luo Mei, they all greeted her. Luo Mei too greeted them back as politely as she could.

"By the way, how long did you guys wait for me outside the tent?" he asked.

"Hmm… we had just arrived, so maybe 10 minutes?" Luo Mei said.

"Oh, then you haven't gone to meet your father yet?" Alex asked.

Luo Mei's face suddenly lost all colors as she was reminded once more why she was here.

"It's okay, sister. I am here. I will definitely do something," Alex said, seeing her blank face.

Luo Mei shook her head to get back her thoughts. "Yes, it will be fine," she said.

The Rubyroad city was not very different from the Scarlet city. Only, it had a single 2nd Grade sect that had just upgraded a few years ago, and as such, it wasn't that populated.

The city was also ruled by a distant member of the Royal Fu family, but the ones with more position in the city were the heads of House Luo and House Tian.

Both of these houses belonged to a noble of the empire, so they had quite a bit of backing too.

The Luo household was southwest of the city center, while the Tian household was to the northeast. These two houses had quite a good relationship with each other as well.

The 3 walked through the street as Alex finally started to feel the fatigue from 12 hours long, fast-paced Alchemy session.

"Are you okay?" Luo Mei asked a little worried.

"I'm fine. I'm… just tired after making the pills," Alex said.

"You should rest after we reach back home," Luo Mei said.

Finally, Alex could see a massive house, smaller only to the City Lord's house back in Scarlet city.

"Woah!" Alex said.

Luo Mei smiled when she saw her home. "It's been a while since I've been back," she said.

She walked over to the gate and the guards immediately opened the door. "Welcome back, young miss," they said.

"Huh? Young miss, did you not take a carriage?" a woman who saw her said.

"Oh, young miss, you are back," another woman said.

"Oh, Mengmeng is back too. Welcome back, you guys."

The servants seemed quite used to talking with Luo Mei, and Luo Mei herself was quite fond of talking with the servants.

Luo Mei walked through the main door and was about to ask where her father was when he heard loud laughter from the house.

She was surprised and followed the sound of the laughter, while Alex and Meng Yun followed her.

"Haha, it's just a small white lie to get them here. It won't hurt anyone. Besides, our household merging together is a really great news," A loud man said.

"Hahaha, right? Ask your two daughters and see what they say. I will leave, for now, you damn old fart," another man said.

"Haha, see you later old fart," the loud man said.

A hawkish-faced man with a beard walked out of a room just as Luo Mei was getting close to it.

"Oh, little Mei, you're back?" the man said.

"Yes, uncle Tian. How are you?" she said.

"Haha, I'm fine, I'm fine. I will take my leave for now. Please talk to your father about my proposal I just put forth inside," the man said and left.

Luo Mei stood still for a moment and then walked towards the room. When she saw what was inside, she started to grow angry.

Inside was a middle-aged man with black hair and beard, drinking wine from a wine glass as if he had no care in the world.

"What was that just now?" Luo Mei asked in anger.

The man nearly spilled his wine when he heard her. "Oh, Meimei, you're back," he said happily.

"Don't 'meimei' me. Did you lie to bring us back? Do you know how worried I was about you dying? Do you know that we nearly were attacked by the beasts when I came here?"

"I nearly lost my junior brother on my way here, and all for what? Just so you can make arrangements of marriage with the Tians?" he asked angrily.

"Oh, you heard that?" the man's smile dropped a little. "I was just—"

"Why would you lie about dying? Is this a game to you? Did you even help the people out there?"

The man tried to speak, "No, I was just—"

Luo Mei continued harassing her father with her words while the man couldn't find openings to talk back. He started getting more and more agitated as he started feeling uncomfortable.

Suddenly, he started vomiting all the wine and food he had just ate, along with some amount of blood.

He took a cloth from the side and wiped his mouth. "That finally shut you up?" he asked.

"What?" Luo Mei was confused.

The man then wiped a layer of makeup from his face and showed his pale and sunken face.

"I didn't lie, Meimei.. I really am dying."

Chapter 437 - Hannahs Question

"What?" Luo Mei lost her train of thought and immediately sprinted forward. "No, no, no, no, no, no. Father, what's going on? What is happening to you?"

"I don't know, my child. I've been asking myself that as well. Unfortunately, COUGH COUGH something is really wrong with me," her father said.

"Then what were you talking about with him?" Luo Mei asked.

"Oh, he heard about me being sick from somewhere, so he acted like he came to check up on me."

"But that bastard was really just trying to ask your hands in marriage. That bastard, he thinks he can get my lovely daughters just because I'm sick? I will be dead and still not hand you guys over to that bastard," her father said.

"Oh," Luo Mei said. "I'm sorry. I got overly emotional, father."

"Haha, it's alright, COUGH COUGH. Let's go somewhere else, this place is dirty now," he said and walked out.

"Oh, Mengmeng, you came back too. Go meet your mother, Meimei is fine now," he said to Meng Yun who swiftly took her leave.

"And… are you Meimei's junior brother that Xingxing told me about? Wen Cheng's youngest disciple, right?" he asked.

"Yes, senior. I am Yu Ming," Alex introduced himself.

"Oh, good to see you, young man. Since you are Meimei's disciple brother… you can call me Uncle Keng," Luo Keng said.

"Yes, Uncle Keng," Alex said.

"Did little Xun not come? It's been a while since I've met him too," Luo Keng said.

"Senior brother is the leader of the guards. He can't leave whenever he wants," Luo Mei said.

"Well, at least your junior brother is free to go around as he likes. Haha, COUGH COUGH," Luo Keng said.

"He is not that free, he came here with a purpose father," Luo Mei said.

"He did? Oh, right. Xingxing told me about that," Luo Keng said.

"I just saw Meng Yun leave. Is Mei'er back?" A woman's voice came from the hallway. Luo Mei immediately walked out and hugged a middle-aged woman.

"Mother, I'm back," she said.

"Oh, my sweet child. You must be tired from your journey," the woman said.

The woman was wearing a refined, violet robe. She had a fair face and had her hair braided down the side.

She looked nothing like Luo Mei, but did have features belonging to Luo Xing.

"Oh, and who's this young man?" She asked when she saw Alex.

"This is Meimei's junior apprentice-brother who came with her, Yu Ming. And as far as I can tell, he's going to be my doctor for the next few days," Luo Keng.

"Ah, the boy Xing'er was talking about. I am Shi Nangong, Mei'er's stepmother. Welcome to the house, young man. Think of this as your own home," the woman said.

"Mother!" Luo Mei screamed in annoyance.

"Haha, yes yes. Mother, not stepmother. Mei'er hates when I say otherwise," Shi Nangong said.

"Mother, show little brother to the guest room, please. He's been making pills non-stop for the people injured in the beast hoard attack. He is extremely tired," Luo Mei said.

"What?" Luo Keng said. "You've been helping the people all night long. You must be extremely tired. My bad young man for keeping you here."

"Honey, show him to our guest room," Luo Keng said.

Shi Nangong took Alex through the house to an area where the guests stayed at. There were multiple rooms there, and all of them were for the guests.

A door suddenly opened as a young man walked out.

"Oh good afternoon Auntie. Huh? Junior brother, did you just come?" Xiao Huang asked as he saw them.

"Yes, I just arrived with my sister," Alex said.

"Oh, so your sister made it back safely? She wasn't attacked by the beasts or anything right?" Xiao Huang asked.

"Oh no. Mei'er is fine. Little Yu here on the other hand is particularly tired from helping everyone overnight. I was bringing him to his room to rest," Shi Nangong said.

"Ah, yes of course, Auntie. Sorry for stopping you, junior brother," Xiao Huang said and left.

"This is your room. If you need anything, just ask any servant in the house. I will leave you alone now," Shi Nangong said and left.

Alex entered the yellow-colored room and walked up to the bed. He felt how soft the bed was and just fell on top of it.

"Arghh, that feels… good." He felt himself losing his mind to sleep but made no effort whatsoever to stop it.

The moment he fell asleep, his eyes opened up. He was inside of his capsule once more.

"Oh right, people automatically log out when they fall asleep in the capsule," Alex said and pushed open the lid.

Alex got out of the capsule and went to go get fresh. After that, he went to the kitchen to get his meal.

There he saw Hannah heating her food in the microwave.

"YAWN, good afternoon, sister," Alex said.

"You woke up late too?" Hannah asked.

"Yeah, I ended up making pills from midnight until noon. 12 hours of nonstop pill making. I'm feeling mentally fatigued out of the game too," Alex said.

"Oh, take care of your body then," Hannah said.

"Yeah, I need to exercise more often," Alex said. "What about you? Why'd you wake up so late?"

"Oh, uh… I just cultivated for a little too long I guess," Hannah said.

"Huh? I thought you didn't need to cultivate," Alex asked.

"Whatever, it's my matter. You don't need to know. Here, heat your food too," Hannah said.

"Why are you getting angry all of a sudden?" Alex asked as he put his bowl in the microwave.

"Let's change the topic. Actually, I wanted to ask you about something," Hannah said.

"I'm all ears," Alex said.

"Sigh, do you still believe that the game is real?" Hannah asked.

"Huh? Why are you asking this?" Alex asked.

"Recently… I've started… experiencing stuff that feels way too real to be fake. When I thought about it, I remembered you saying that the game is real. Do you… still believe that?" Hannah asked.

"More than ever actually," Alex said. "Someone in the game looked into my memories of real life. That sort of thing shouldn't be possible normally. Not to mention, I've… recreated the formation in the chip and it… works."

"The plate I made it on was wrong so it did nothing, but it was the right formation. From what I could tell, it's a super high-level formation, one that is not possible in the world of Eternal Cultivation," Alex said.

"What about you tell me it's just an easter egg?" Hannah asked.

"Maybe. But given everything else that has happened. All the senses, all the information of how taking over a dead body as a clone works to how the people are all so real. Even the language is different in each place. Those sort of thing is hard to make, especially by people that don't have a strong company behind them," Alex said.

"So believe what you want, but I will believe it's real. That was why I stopped mom and dad from playing too," Alex said. "I didn't want them to live in such a world of murder and violence. They would be traumatized if they ever found out it was all real."

"I…see," Hannah said. "You truly thought quite far ahead. I guess you're not the little Alex I knew after all."

"I… guess," Alex said. He himself felt like he had been hardened as a person after living in the world of Eternal Cultivation. It was a gradual process, and there was never an immediate change, but he surely felt it now that he thought about it.

"Alright, we'll talk about this some other time. I need to go back soon," Hannah said and quickly finished her meal.

Alex slowly ate as he had nothing to look forward to in the game for at least 6 hours.

'If I remember correctly, I can't log in while I am asleep right? Or was it only when I fainted?' Alex wondered. 'Whatever, I will just stay outside.'

Alex finished his meal and went to watch some TV. The house was silent with the only sound coming out of the TV. Alex spent the next 6 houses just relaxing, doing nothing.

Finally, once night fell, he went back to his room and got into the game.. It was finally time to go see what the hell was wrong with Luo Mei's father.

Chapter 438 - Diagnosis

Alex logged into the game and slowly woke up from his sleep. He felt well-rested even after just 6 hours of sleep.

'I probably could've just cultivated… but then I wouldn't get to choose when I wake up,' he thought.

He opened the door and walked out. It was evening time and the hallway was lit up with normal lanterns.

'Are normal lanterns expensive?' he wondered. He didn't know a lot about formations yet so he assumed there was a reason for all of these.

He walked into the main hall of the manor and found a servant.

"Excuse me, miss. Do you know where sister Luo Mei is?" he asked.

"Please come with me, young lord," the servant said and took him over to a room.

"Young Lady Mei, you have a visitor," she said from outside the door. The door soon opened and Luo Mei looked out.

"Oh, you're awake. Are you fully rested?" she asked. Alex saw the blue-colored room inside that was bigger than his guest room.

"Ah, yeah, I'm fine. I was thinking of going to check Uncle Keng," Alex said.

"You're ready to check father?" Luo Mei asked with surprise. "I thought you still needed to read some more?"

"I can read later," Alex said. "The learning part after reading takes time, so I wanted to see what I can get from Uncle's illness as fast as I could."

"I can always read afterward and try again if I can't," Alex said.

"Oh, okay," Luo Mei said and walked out.

"I was actually hoping you would go find some medical books for me while I check up on Uncle," Alex said.

"No, need. I will just have some servant do that. I can't go out and look for medical books anyway. That's like telling the Tians that my father is ill and I'm looking into whatever I can to heal him," Luo Mei said.

"Those vultures will come to eat us alive before we can even heal father."

Alex was surprised at the tension between the two families. "Aren't the two families supposed to have a good relationship?" Alex asked.

"On the surface, yeah. Even most servants in the house would think so. But underneath, there is a lot of envy and jealousy between the two houses."

"You can imagine what money does to people. The old man Tian came to ask our hands in marriage because he knows father doesn't have sons, so our entire fortune is in the hands of me and my sister."

"He wants to intervene in fast enough to get that fortune. Fuck that guy! He should see how ugly his sons are first," Luo Mei said angrily.

"Anyway, let's go."

Alex followed Luo Mei along the inner hall and walked to the backyard.

"Oh, Young lord Ming seems to have rested already," old man Jin walked from the side.

"Oh, hello again, senior Jin," Alex said.

"Grandpa Jin, I have a job for you," Luo Mei said.

"Anything, young lady," old man Jin said.

Luo Mei quickly tasked him with finding every medical book in the city as well as getting the ones in the library.

"I will do it as quickly as I can," old man Jin said and left.

"Come," Luo Mei then walked up next to a big pond where Luo Keng and Shi Nangong were spending their time together.

Right next to them were Xiao Huang and Luo Xing talking with them as well.

"Oh, you guys are here," Luo Keng said. "Are you rested, nephew Ming?"

"Yes, uncle," Alex said.

"Father, Yu Ming wants to examine you," Luo Mei said.

"Oh… right now?" Luo Keng was surprised. "Very well. What do I do?"

"Well, you can start by answering some questions," Alex said. "For starters, when did you notice you were ill?"

"Hmm… when was it, honey? About a month and a half ago?" Luo Keng asked.

"Yes, about that time," Shi Nangong said.

"What are the symptoms?" Alex asked.

"I… feel generally weaker. I vomit blood from time to time. Nothing I eat stays in my stomach for long either. There are times when I feel piercing pain in my stomach."

"I send in my Qi to use Qi sense and see what is wrong, but it doesn't work as it should," Luo Keng said.

"Other than that… I'm fine. Ah right, cultivating no longer works. I can cultivate, but I only get weaker instead of growing stronger."

Alex mused on the information he was given. The symptoms seemed to match with a few of the things that were in his mind, but he needed to learn a bit more.

"Can I check your pulse?" Alex asked.

"Sure," Luo Keng said. "Do whatever you have to."

Alex walked up and pulled up Luo Keng's sleeves to show his not so muscular arms.

Luo Mei's eyes started tearing up when she saw her father's weak body. She knew he was dying but didn't expect the situation to be so bad.

Alex placed his two fingers in Luo Keng's wrist and took a deep breath. He felt the generally slower pulse that Luo Keng had but knew that it was the result of whatever was happening, not what started it.

He hesitated a little. He knew what he had to do now; the process was etched onto his mind. However, he had never done it, so he was a little nervous.

'No, I can do it,' he said to himself and slowly released Qi into his blood system.

Luo Keng felt something hot enter his veins through his wrist. It felt like a small section of his blood was boiling, but he endured it.

'What the hell is this kid's Qi? Why is it so hot?' he wondered. But he didn't let it show on his face.

Alex closed his eyes and tried to feel where the Qi was moving. The Qi was connected to his fingers through a fine line of Qi, so he could monitor where it went.

Alex knew the human body's veins and arteries inside out after learning it from the book so he carefully navigated to see what he could find.

When he reached the stomach area, he found that his Qi didn't go ahead as he had expected. Instead, he tried to move through the side.

'What? There shouldn't be any path there. Is he injured in that spot?' Alex wondered.

Suddenly, his Qi disappeared and the connection broke.

"What?" Alex said in surprise.

"What's wrong?" Shi Nangong asked in fear.

"I… have a general idea of what is wrong, but nothing absolute. The Qi I was using to check inside disappeared before I could see what the problem was for real. Although the problem is right around his stomach," Alex said.

"You say you have an idea of what it is," Luo Xing said. "Can you tell us what you think?"

"Um, before I say this, you have to understand that I am not 100 percent sure about this. But I am at least 80% sure," Alex said.

Everyone there nodded and waited for him to speak.

"Uncle… did you eat a beast's meat anytime before you were ill?" Alex asked.

"Beast's meat? Of course, I did. After we fought off the beasts in the first beast invasion, we feasted on the corpses of the dead beasts," Luo Keng said.

"And… who cooked the meat? Or rather, how was it cooked?" Alex asked.

"We all cooked it. We're not cooks, so we just put it on a stick and lit a fire beneath it," Luo Keng said as if he was remembering some glorious moment.

"Is that what is causing him so much problem? Uncooked meat?" Shi Nangong asked.

Alex shook his head. "It's not the meat, but rather what was inside of it. One that he ate along with the meat."

"So, I think there is a type of worm or parasite inside Uncle's stomach. One that feeds off of Qi. I think that is what ate my Qi just now, and what eats Uncle's Qi every time he cultivates," Alex said.

"If… if that is true then… how dangerous is it?" Luo Mei asked.

"Well, you see how Uncle can't cultivate right? And if what he says is true and the food won't remain in his stomach, then at some point… he will stop having enough energy for his organs to function… after that…" Alex spoke no longer.

"Is there a cure?" Luo Mei asked hastily.

"I… don't know. I don't even know if what I think is correct. I will first have to verify the existence of whatever is inside, but if my Qi disappears, I can never know," Alex said.

Suddenly, Luo Mei's voice drifted onto his mind. "If Qi disappears, then… why not try spiritual sense?" she asked.

"Of course," Alex said as he face palmed himself. He had been so tunnel-visioned on his medical knowledge, that he forgot about the other tools in his arsenal.

"Uncle, let me try one more time," Alex said.

"Sure, go ahead," Luo Keng said. Alex once again held his wrist and sent in Qi, but along with that, he also sent his Spiritual sense.

The spiritual sense couldn't look inside a human or beast's body so easily. There was a sort of veil on a human body that wasn't easy to navigate using spiritual sense unless that body was one's own.

Alex had tried it multiple times, and it hadn't worked. However, now that he had his Qi to help him navigate, along with the medical knowledge, he looked through the inside of Luo Keng's body.

He saw the blood in the veins and the red walls. He saw the Qi flow through the blood until it reached the stomach. There he saw what the problem with his stomach was.

'Damn, that's a giant hole,' he thought. Suddenly, the yellow blob of Qi he had was devoured by something, and he clearly saw what it was.

'A parasite. I was right,' he thought. But then came another problem.
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"Um… I have located the parasite; there is in fact one," he said.

"Oh, that's… good news, right?" Luo Keng asked.

"Depends on the next bit of information I will give to you," Alex said.

Luo Keng and the rest got silent and listened carefully.

"So the first minor thing is that the parasite is something that I do not recognize. But that most likely has something to do with my lack of medical knowledge rather than the parasite itself being rare," Alex said.

"I also have both the recipe and the ingredients to the pill that should cure you," Alex said.

The others smiled a little but still waited for Alex to finish speaking.

Alex sighed a little and said, "but… here comes the main problem."

Chapter 439 - Hundred Lives Parasite

"What's the problem?" Luo Keng asked softly waiting to hear the main concerns.

"Well, the first problem is that the pill recipe I have is not something that others have. It's called a Parasite Erasing Pill. The pill basically kills the parasite in your body without harming you."

"One of the ingredients to the Parasite Erasing pill is the root of a small herb known as Lavender Bloodweed, and I only have a single one of that ingredient."

"I will need to know the grade of the parasite after a few more examinations to know exactly how strong of a True Rank parasite it is. But, normally, the pill will need to be at least Earth grande to be successful," Alex said.

"So... we only have a single chance at making the pill?" Shi Nangong asked.

Alex nodded in affirmation. Both Luo Xing and Luo Mei gasped in horror when they learned that.

"How long do you think I can survive like this?" Luo Keng asked.

"From what I can tell... you will start having problems moving around in a week or so, and soon after that lose functions of your organs one after another. After that, it's only a matter of time before..." Alex stopped.

Luo Xing started sniffing as tears streamed down her face. Luo Mei was still in disbelief.

"C-Can't you wait until you know more before you make such conclusions?" Luo Mei asked.

"You're not wrong, but the fact still remains that we need to make an Earth Grade True Pill. That alone is clear to me. I will let you know if there are other methods," Alex said.

"An alchemist who can make True rank pills with Earth grade Harmony on the very first try... that is going to be troublesome," Luo Keng said silently.

"The number of people that can possibly do that can be counted on a single hand," Xiao Huang said from the side.

"Oh right, can't your master help father?" Luo Mei asked. "We can take him back and you get get your master to make him a pill."

The surrounding people were confused about who Luo Mei referred to as master when they should be disciple siblings themselves.

"Master... should be unavailable at the moment," Alex said. He didn't want to reveal that Ma Rong could no longer make pills like she used to. She had received a boon and a curse after her constitution awakened.

"Then... then... then the Royal Alchemist? He should be available. Let's go to the capital," Luo Mei said.

"Isn't the Royal Alchemist impossible to be found or recognized? He changes his face every time he moves around. Unless you have direct communication with him, you can't find him at all," Xiao Huang said.

"I've heard the same," Shi Nangong said.

"Then..." Luo Mei tried to think of other possible ideas.

"Meimei, enough," Luo Keng said. He then turned around to Alex and said, "I can't really move around a lot, so travel itself should be out of the question. Nephew Ming should try and see if there are other ways to heal me."

"Don't worry, Uncle. I will do my best," Alex said.

Luo Keng looked over to his girls and said, "Don't cry. At least I got diagnosed. Just a day earlier even that seemed impossible. Surely something better will happen in the coming days."

Old man Jin return a few moments later and stayed away from the group. Alex saw him standing at the side and walked up to him.

"Senior Jin, did you get it?" he asked.

"Yes, young lord. It's quite a few books though, I don't know how you will finish these," Old man Jin said as he took out about 30 books from his storage bag and handed it to Alex.

"Oh wow, there's so many," Alex said in surprise. He quickly took it into his storage bags and thanked the old man Jin.

"Uncle, Auntie, I just got some medical books so I will go and try to find out more if I can," Alex said.

"Sure Nephew, go," Luo Keng said.

Alex nodded and left them there. He went back to his room and looked at the time.

"8 pm huh? This... will take me a while," he thought and took out the books and started reading them one by one.

Since he was just reading and nothing else, he used his focus mode to the max to read the books as fast as he could. In fact, he didn't even read the books properly but simply just looked at them and moved on to another page.

When he tried to recall the information, he would simply just think back to this page and then could read it all properly at that time.

In such a way, he finished reading through all of the books in just 2 hours. However, at the end of the reading, he felt very mentally fatigued once more.

"Wow, using Focus mode to the fullest for so long is so problematic," he thought. He quickly tossed the books back into his storage bag and got into a lotus position to start learning about the books.

Memories of something he had never learned before started returning to him as he thought about the information one by one.

He still couldn't believe how weird it felt. 'I am easily allowed knowledge of all plants, but medical knowledge I have to read to get,' he thought.

The more he read, the more he remembered. The entire night passed by before he knew it and it was the morning.

Still, he was a little more than halfway done learning everything. Alex stopped after that.

He looked back at how much he had learned. Unfortunately, even though he learned about 20 books of content, a lot of them were content from books he had already read so most of it turned out to be a waste of time.

Still, he learned about 13 books worth of content, so he was quite happy. He looked through his understandings and at some points he got a little confused.

'Did I read that somewhere?' he wondered when he looked into the memories of the books. But from what he could see, he never read it anywhere.

It was minor information that he could've easily skipped, but he caught it, and now it was making him really curious.

"Wait, am I remembering more than I read?" he thought. If that was true then it would be glorious for him.

He tried to experiment with it a little and started remembering just one more book. There was information in the book that he had already acquired back in the Tiger sect, but most of it was new.

As he read the book, he realized that during some of the information he tried to understand, a few more information would be released in his mind.

"Are these... extra information, or just more accurate information?" he wondered and continued learning.

After a few more times it happened, he compared the results and saw that it was both. Sometimes the information would be something a little different from what he learned, and sometimes it would be a little more than what he learned.

It was never entirely new or entirely different. It was just extra.

Alex felt a little happy learning all that and logged out. He went on with his daily life for the rest of the day.

He went to get his breakfast, studied a little, checked the internet to see what was happening, went to his classes, and finally returned back to his game.

Once he was back in the guest room, he decided to finish learning the rest of the books. It took him quite a bit of time before he did so.

Only around 10 pm did he finally finish learning everything.

'That's a lot of information to keep track of. Thankfully, my mind does it for me. Alchemy God's Knowledge really is great,' he thought.

It was finally time to see if he could find some more problems or solutions for Luo Mei's father.

So he started searching for answers. As soon as he started looking for them, answers started flooding his mind like they were hungry dogs seeing meat.

"This..." he thought as he looked at what answers to the problems were.

The first thing he figured out was the name of the parasite. He had seen the parasite using his spiritual sense yesterday, so when he thought about it, a parasite with a similar description came to his mind.

Long and thin worm-like organism, with a gaping hole for its mouth. The parasite had giant wing-like flaps with spiky carapaces next to its tail to firmly attach itself to the host.

The overall color of the parasite was white but looked red in most parts due to the blood it was in. It had fine black circular lines across its body and would consume any Qi thrown towards it.

If it came across something that did not have anything to do with Qi or Blood, it would force the host's body to throw it away.

"A Hundred Lives Parasite, huh? Let's see..." he thought as he checked through the information. At first, it was normal stuff he read that all parasites could do, but when he reached the part about curing the host of the parasite, his eyes went wide and he smiled.

"This... this can be done. We don't need the pill or an alchemist. But..." Alex looked at the only problem there was for curing Luo Keng.

"I hope this helps a little," he thought and opened his status page.

Then, he clicked Breakthrough.

Chapter 440 - Mind Tempering 1st Realm

Notifications started appearing in front of Alex's eyes. But none of them were as captivating as what was happening inside his own body.

Most of the time, when he broke through to a realm, his Qi would get just a bit denser and increase just a little more in amount.

During minor realms, those increased by quite a bit more, but not a lot.

Aside from that, the main change came in the body being tempered a little more to gather more Qi during the self-tempering realm.

That was what happened every single time Alex broke through without question. However, this time was a little different.

Along with his Qi and body changing slightly, he felt a hot rush of Qi that flew up through his body and entered the brain. They stayed there for a few seconds without any discomfort and left.

When they did, he felt his mind grow cool and just a little bit stronger.

Finally, he opened his eyes and looked at the notification in front of him. When he saw it, he smiled.

<Congratulations! You have broken through to the Mind Tempering 1st Realm>

'Finally, I'm on the last stretch of realms before I enter the True realms,' he thought.

He felt a lot fresher now that he had broken through. 'Did reaching the Mind tempering realm really help my spiritual sense?' he wondered and released it.

"Woah!" he was surprised when his spiritual sense immediately reached 25 meters.

"It increased by around 3 meters," Alex mused to himself. He tried stretching his spiritual sense and it nearly reached 40 meters mark.

He quickly brought back the spiritual sense and entered his spiritual sea to see how it had changed.

"Oh!" he was surprised. He was expecting to see denser water, but surprisingly, the water was vaster as well.

"Wait, not only did it increase in density, but it also increased in amount?" Alex thought in pure happiness.

"And this is just the first realm. Will I have nearly 50 meters of spiritual sense by the time I reach the True realms?" he thought.

He quickly stopped and got up. However, he decided not to leave now. It was already late night, so there was no point in leaving right now.

'But, I will have to see him very early tomorrow morning to explain what is wrong,' Alex thought and went back to his bed.

It had been a while, so he decided to cultivate. He called out Pearl and gave him a monster core.

Pearl meowed as he ate the core.

"How are you feeling today, Pearl?" Alex asked. He was hoping for some sort of complex answer.

"Happy" however was all he got.

'Well, I guess it will take some time before he can fluently speak,' Alex thought and asked Pearl to start cultivating.

Cuts started appearing around his body but the pain wasn't as high as it should have been.

'Sigh, Pearl is falling behind once more,' Alex thought. He shook his head and started cultivating as well.

Soon, sleepiness overcame him and he could no longer keep his consciousness up.

When he woke up once again, he realized that it was 6 AM the morning. He stopped Pearl from cultivating any further and asked him to go back to his space.

Once the cuts disappeared and Pearl was gone, Alex got up to leave, but then... he felt something weird about his body.

'Huh? What's going on?' he thought. In just a single part of his meridian, he could feel just the slightest hint of something strong.

That single small part has a stronger aura than his entire cultivation base.

'Is this...?' he wondered as he tried to send his Spiritual sense to check inside. When he reached that part of his meridian, he could see a viscous bright yellow Qi that outshined the other Qi around him.

Alex's eyes went wide in both shock and surprise.

"True Qi!"

He didn't know what to think for a while as his thoughts ran array in a million directions. He quickly gathered them all and tried to think about it all.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! How do I have True Qi? Isn't that something I can only gain after I reach halfway through the Mind Tempering realm?" he wondered.

He thought back to the information he had already read, and it only confirmed what he already knew.

"Yeah, around 5th or 6th Mind Tempering realm, the common Qi gets condensed so much that I turned from Qi to True Qi. It doesn't normally happen before that. So why is it happening to me?" Alex thought.

The Qi was really way too small to be of any use to him, but it showed that he could easily jump up to the True Realm when the time came.

"Wait, how well can it work?" Alex thought. He wanted to try out a technique using this True Qi, but he couldn't think of a single technique that could be of use inside a room.

"Ah, let's try the fire," he thought and quickly reached into his storage bag before bringing out the Fire formation.

He did have a fire palm technique that could produce fire, but he wasn't sure he could control that fire fast enough to stop it from hitting the wall, and he didn't want to damage the house at all.

So, he quickly set up the formation on the floor and watched as fire appeared on top of it.

He tried to normally control the fire as he would with his Common Qi and it was very easy. He was very used to it so there was no problem.

Then, he started to do the same thing with the one strand of True Qi that was running around his meridian.

He slowly brought it from all over his body to his hands and released it into the fire.

He didn't know what could go wrong if he tried to change the size or temperature, so he decided to go with changing its shape for now.

He wished to turn the fire from the normal shape it was right now, to a cube.

He had just visualized a cubic fire when the fire swiftly changed into it.

"What? That was so smooth," Alex said in surprise. "He tried to change it to something else and it change into that too very quickly."

He then tried to turn it into a sphere, but that took about 3 times as much time. That was still very fast to normal eyes, but to Alex, it felt abnormally slow.

"Ah, my True Qi vanished," Alex said with a sigh. "I guess I will have to make more. I... just have to cultivate like everyone else right? I wonder if leveling up will give me more True Qi."

From what he had read, cultivating condensed the common Qi that was already very condensed to an extreme level and the Qi changed its very essence to something higher.

That was what happened to normal people. His body, however, was anything but normal. So, anything could happen and he would just have to wait to know.

"Hmm, maybe I am getting True Qi faster because I have denser common QI than everyone else," Alex thought.

"I wonder what will happen if I reach 100% yang Qi purity," he wondered, but that was something he would have to think about later.

For now, it was time to give the Luo family a semblance of good news in these dark times.

He didn't ask anyone this time and directly walked to his sister's room and knocked.

Luo Mei came out of her room in white robes. "Oh, you're finally out, brother. What's going on?" she asked.

"Sister," he said excitedly, "I found another way to heal Uncle."

Luo Mei's eyes went wide. "You found it? Oh... OH! We-We needs to go find father," Luo Mei immediately sprinted to a room a long while down the hall.

She then knocked on it loudly. "Father! Father!"

The door opened and Shi Nangong walked out. "What's going on, Mei'er? Your father is cultivating. It's not a good time to stop him," she said.

"Oh, junior brother found another cure for father's illness," Luo Mei said loudly.

"What?!" Shi Nangong was surprised too. "Oh dear, maybe I should wake your father up."

"What happening? COUGH COUGH. What's the noise about?" Luo Keng walked out too.

"Uncle, I've found another way to cure you. It... is quite hard to do, but it's definitely easier than finding an Alchemist to make the pill," Alex said.

"Oh, if there is a chance then I will take it. Tell me what needs to be done," Luo Keng asked excitedly while he coughed.

"So, I learned that the parasite inside your body is called a Hundred Lives parasite. It's a type of worm beast that eats your Qi to get stronger," Alex said.

"The reason it's called Hundred Lives is that it can eat up to 100 people's worth of Qi before it dies. So, if we can feed it 100 people's worth of True Qi, it will be fine," Alex said.

"So... that's it? 100 people's Qi and it's done?" Luo Keng asked. That seemed... too easy for him.

"Yes, but of course, there are some problems," Alex said.

"Ok, tell me, I'm ready," he said.

"First of all, we don't have much time. At the rate your body is deteriorating, we have maybe 2 weeks at most before we kill the parasite, maybe less."

"Also... um, how many days have you cultivated since 2 months ago, after the beast invasion?" Alex asked.

"I... don't remember. Maybe a few times before I found out I was ill. After that, I have maybe missed a week at most," Luo Keng said.

"So, on a low estimate, we can say you've cultivated for 40 days, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, that number sounds about right," Luo Keng said.

"Since the parasite releases all of the Qi it ate when changing host, the parasite must've eaten only those 40 day's worth of Qi, so about 40 people's True Qi by now."

"So, in the next 14 days, we need to feed you 60 people's worth of True Qi, maybe even more just to be safe," Alex said.

"...and how will we do that?" Luo Keng asked.

"You will have to gather people to give you their Qi so that we can send it to the parasite to eat. Once it eats it all, it will give birth to more parasites and die," Alex said.

"Wait, more parasite? No, but won't that be bad?" Luo Mei suddenly said.

"Let me finish sister. The new parasites will be common ranked at best, so I can make some Common pills to remove parasites from your body. In fact, you might even be able to remove it with your True Qi as well, Uncle," Alex said.

"Okay, so let me get this straight... I need to gather around 5 true realm people to give me Qi to feed the parasite for about 12-15 days, right?" Luo Keng asked.

"Yes," Alex nodded.

"Hmm, if we could ask random people, it would be fast, but... those people need to be trusted too," Luo Keng said to himself.

"By the way, how will you pour in the Qi? Through my mouth?" Luo Keng asked.

"Um, since the parasite is stuck next to a blood vessel, it's best to send it through the closest blood vessel. That way, in case there is some problem in the Qi, we can stop it from affecting your important organs in the chest," Alex said.

"Also there is another important thing that I haven't mentioned. You definitely need a medically talented person to navigate the blood vessel using their Qi. Otherwise, the problems that come from the random movement of Qi inside your body would be no different from going into Qi deviation," Alex said.

"But don't worry... I have an idea for who can help us with that."

Chapter 441 - Traversing The Body

"No, no, no, no, no. I can't do it. I-I don't know how to do it. I'm not so talented like you," Luo Mei said as she walked into her room.

"Sister!" Alex called out, making Luo Mei turn around. "You have True Qi right?"

"Y-Yes," Luo Mei said.

"How much?" he asked.

"Uh... About 30 percent I would say," she said.

"Then you have to do it," Alex said.

"Bu-But why can't you do it?" Luo Mei asked.

"I don't have True Qi," Alex said. "Common Qi won't be able to handle 5 people's True Qi by itself. So it has to be True Qi that shows the way."

"If it could, I wouldn't make you do it," Alex said.

"But... I don't know the human body as you do. Will I be able to know how blood vessels are even placed in the human body? In the first place, are blood vessels the same as Meridians?" Luo Mei asked.

"They overlap in most of the places but there are a few places they vastly differ," Alex said.

"For example, the origin and end of blood vessels is the heart, while the meridians don't have an origin or ending as far as I can tell. Although, there is something weird in the naval area, but I don't know what that is exactly," Alex said.

"So how can I who knows nothing about blood vessels help navigate them then?" Luo Mei asked.

"Don't worry, I will teach you," Alex said.

"Sit down, I will show you by sending some in through your own body. You can use your Qi and spiritual sense to check it out," Alex said.

"O-okay," Luo Mei said and sat down.

"Alright, give me your hand," Alex said.

Luo Mei put forth her hand, but then questioned, "Aren't we doing it from the back for father?"

"For uncle's treatment, the back is the only thing that makes sense. But for now, since you are learning, we will start with the easiest way, the wrist," Alex said.

"To start with, you need a clear idea of where the blood vessel is. You cannot just prick your Qi into anywhere you want. So, places that had more of an exposed blood vessel like the wrist is the easiest one to start with."

"For uncle's back, we will have to spend a few minutes searching for one that is the closest to the parasite," Alex said.

"Alright, do what you want," Luo Mei said.

"Okay, releases your Qi around my fingers with your left hand. I will take them inside," Alex said.

Luo Mei nodded and released an almost cool feeling Qi onto Alex's hand.

Alex nodded too and released his own vibrant yellow Qi. The yellow Qi was definitely influenced by his Yang; there was no question about that. But he sometimes wondered if his Supreme Metal root also influenced its yellow color. After all, Metal Qi was golden in color.

"Phew," Alex softly released his breath and said, "Here I go."

He slowly started grabbing onto the Qi next to his hand with his own Qi and started dragging it. He could suddenly feel a lot of weight on his Qi, but it was nothing his robust Qi couldn't handle.

In fact, he felt like he could carry about 10 of such Qi before his connection with the Qi thread broke. He didn't know how accurate his assumption was though.

"Watch with your spiritual sense," Alex said without looking at her and slowly pierced through the wrist's blood vessel.

The moment it entered, he started sending his Qi up her hand. However...

"AH! AH! Ouch! Stop, Stop, Stop, Stop STOP!!!" Luo Mei started crying out. Alex's attention was broken and he immediately released his Qi which faded into her body.

"What's wrong, sister?" he asked.

"Ouch," Luo Mei cried as she held her hands. "What the hell was that? Why did it burn my hand so much? Is it supposed to hurt like that?"

"Hurt?" Alex was surprised for a moment. "Wait, no, you said burned right? Hmm... is my Qi too hot for your body then?" Alex wondered.

"What was that about?" Luo Mei asked.

"Ah, I think my Qi might be... um, too Yangful for you," Alex said.

"It has too much yang? You have a yang-focused spiritual root?" Luo Mei asked as she massaged her wrist. "Thank god I have a water attribute Qi so I can cool my burnings. Imagine you do it on someone with spiritual roots that could not handle it."

Luo Mei had just said it when she remembered, "Ah! Father. You must've hurt father too."

"Shouldn't be," Alex said. "Uncle is in True Realm, he should be able to handle common yang Qi."

"I see. Well... what do we do now? Our plans flopped though. What do we do now?" Luo Mei asked.

"Hmm... ah right," Alex thought as he brought out a book. "This book has the stuff about blood vessels. Try to read it and just understand a general level of knowledge on it."

"You really just need to remember how they are arranged. Once you do that, I will give myself up as a guinea pig for you to try on. Or, you can test on yourself as well."

"For now, I think I will just go and get some rest. I spent all night thinking about Uncle's problem," Alex lied.

"Oh, okay. I will read it by the time you are rested," Luo Mei said.

Alex said his goodbyes and walked out of her room before making his way into his own room. Finally, he logged out of the game.

The day did not differ from any other day aside from the fact that Hannah took away some of his money to pay rent.

He didn't care about it much though. He had enough retirement funds and could earn some more money from the games if need be.

Besides, his stock in the Deva Corp shares was growing every day, along with the other ones.

He logged back into the game after he returned home and went directly to Luo Mei's room.

Luo Mei had read all she could and was gaining a bit of confidence.

"Come here quick. I think I can do it," Luo Mei said happily.

"Sure," Alex walked up to her. "Do it slowly though, or I might have problems."

"Of course I'm going to take care. I'm not going to ruin my talented junior brother's cultivation. Don't worry, just give me your hands," Luo Mei said.

"Very well. I will also check to see if you are doing it right. I will forcefully stop you if something goes wrong," Alex said and put front his wrist.

Luo Mei took a deep breath to calm herself and started pouring in her Qi. Alex used his spiritual sense to look at where she was going, but she didn't make any mistake at the beginning.

'Oh, she knows a little,' he thought. As it went on for more and more, he realized that she truly had learned a lot.

'She didn't slack off after all. Makes sense given her father's life is on the line,' Alex thought.

Luo Mei carefully navigated through his blood vessels. She looked like she would stumble at some places and Alex was ready to destroy her Qi inside of his body, but she found her footings and fully revolved her Qi before it came back to the wrist once more and left.

"Yes! I did it. Haha, see?" Luo Mei proclaimed loudly.

"Congratulations, sister," Alex said.

"Hehe," Luo Mei was really happy. "Wait, does this mean I can become a medical examiner too?"

"No," Alex said as he shook his head. "Learning how to send in your Qi is to check for the problems. You need to know what you are looking for, what you are not looking for, other forms of diagnosis, as well as general knowledge of alchemy to cure someone's illness."

"Oh... then I won't be able to reach your level even if I have spiritual sense huh? That sucks. Whatever, let's proceed with your back then," Luo Mei said.

"Urghh... sure," Alex said and laid on the bed on his chest.

"Um, you are sleeping?" Luo Mei asked.

"It's better if I don't move, so I laid down. You should have uncle do the same thing when you do it as well," Alex said.

"Alright... I just have to reach the stomach right? How do I know what's the stomach? Do I use spiritual sense?" she asked.

"You don't know what blood vessel is connected to what organ, do you?" Alex asked.

Luo Mei shook her head.

"Sigh, alright. You just start and use your spiritual sense to follow around. Unlike the wrist, you might not be able to immediately tell where you are starting from," Alex said.

"Okay," Luo Mei said and lifted Alex's robes. His pristinely smooth back showed itself to Luo Mei for the first time, and she immediately got to searching for the blood vessel."

"I think this is it," Luo Mei said.

"Can you tell me what you think it is?" Alex asked.

"It's the vessel that immediately goes towards the intestines and from there I take a branch to the stomach," Luo Mei said.

"Um... just try a little bit. I will tell you if you are correct," Alex said.

"Okay, here it goes," Luo Mei said and started using her Qi to enter Alex's body. She had just touched onto Alex's blood vessel when he immediately shouted.

"Stop! Stop!"

Luo Mei stopped pouring in Qi and dispersed what remaining there was. "What? Was I wrong?" she asked.

"Yeah. That's the vessel that goes directly to my heart," Alex said. "Try again."

"Hmm... how about this one?" Luo Mei asked and chose another blood vessel around the same area.

"That one goes to my legs," Alex said.

"This?"

"That one goes to the stomach, but it first goes through the lungs," Alex said.

"What about this one?"

"Legs."

"Damn, why are there so many blood vessels in one small place?" she got angry.

"I told you, sister. That's why we use the wrist," Alex said.

"Sigh, what about this one?" she asked.

"Oh, right that's it," Alex said. "You got it."

"Did I? Okay I will start now," Luo Mei said and sent in her Qi. This time, however, she sent in her spiritual sense as well.

"Woah! Why are your meridians so multicolored? What's this... like 6 colors?" she asked.

"7, the yellow and gold colors are hard to differentiate at a glance, but they are there," Alex said.

"Woah, is this what all meridians look like? Mine is just one single deep blue color," Luo Mei said.

"That's because you have the Superior Water roots, sister," Alex said. "Mine is many, meaning it's not that good of a spiritual root."

"Ah, I see," Luo Mei said.

"Anyway, sister. Focus! I don't want you messing up my innards okay?" he said.

"Stop worrying so much. I can split my attention quite easily," Luo Mei said.

She proceeded to send her Qi to the intestine and from there found a blood vessel she could travel up to the stomach.

"That's it," Alex said. "That's right around where you will find your Qi disappearing."

"So, that's where the parasite is stuck?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

She immediately stopped all of her Qi from moving anymore and dispersed it. "Okay, let me try once more," she said.

Alex sighed and nodded. She practiced on him for a little longer before deciding to leave and find her father.

She wanted to practice on his body for a while so she could be comfortable when it was her time to bring the True Qi from the other people up to the parasite.

Alex left too and thought about what he needed to do. "Hmm... I should go find sister Xing.. She might be able to help me understand more about formations."

Chapter 442 - Irrational Hate

Alex found Luo Xing outside near the pond with Xiao Huang.

"Sister Xing, brother Huang" Alex called out.

"Oh, little brother, what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be with sister Mei?" Xiao Huang asked. "She just took away Uncle to practice on him."

"It should be fine. I'm in the same spot as her with what needs to be done next," Alex said.

"Did Mei'er really learn it all in a single day? That just seems unbelievable," Luo Xing said.

"Haha, your sister is quite talented," Alex said.

"So, what did you come here for?" Luo Xing asked.

"Oh, you see. About a month or two ago, I started having interests in formations and even started learning them. I learned how to make base formations on plates and can even make Heaven grade True ranked formations on plates. But I couldn't understand how to proceed with the formation flags."

"What should I do? How do I get them made? How I should carve them? Those sorts of things. So, I was hoping you could teach me a little," Alex asked.

"Oh little brother, you're talented in formations too? Do you have any you've made?" Xiao Huang asked.

"Uh, yeah. I made a few. Here's one of the better ones I've made," Alex said as he brought out his True ranked formation plate.

"It's a—"

"A light barrier formation?" Xiao Huang said in a bit of surprise and took it from Alex's hands.

He carefully looked at the strokes and the angles the strokes were in.

"What Efficiency is this formation at?" he asked.

"56%," Alex said. He had in fact made better ones, but those were formations that he found through the dead man in the Southern Forest, so he couldn't bring it out.

"Hmm... although I can see some errors, it's really not bad for a newbie. The bigger problem is either in the depth of the strokes or the impurity in the metal plates."

"Still, the fact that you made such a high-level formation, even if it's just on a plate is quite amazing. Congratulations brother," Xiao Huang said.

"Haha, it's the product of 2 months worth of effort. Also, I learned a lot about focus and persistence thanks to making pills, so I could make these," Alex said.

"Let me test it," Xiao Huang said and attached two True Spirit stones onto the plate and threw it on the ground just as he filled it all up.

Suddenly, a barrier burst forth from the plate and surrounded the people there. Alex was a little surprised as he wasn't expecting Xiao Huang to suddenly test his formation plates.

He looked around and saw the bright light surrounding him. He walked up to the barrier and placed his hands on it.

Xiao Huang did the same and said, "Hmm... that's not a bad barrier. That should be able to stop at least True Master realm attacks."

"Of course you can destroy the plate as well. Deforming a True ranked metal plate might be hard, but you can surely just remove it from the energy source that is the True Spirit stones," Xiao Huang said and went up to the plate to do just that.

"Let that be a lesson, little brother. Never use a plate formation in a fight. With a formation made through formation rods, you can set the distance from how far away they can activate. That way you can properly fight without worrying about people taking off your formations," Xiao Huang said.

"I see," Alex said. He did remember how the Spirit Disorienting formation was set about 50 meters out of where it actually started.

'Oh, that reminds me,' Alex thought.

"Um, can you tell what this formation flag does?" Alex said as he brought out two formation rods.

"I could only find two of these, so I'm not sure if you can learn anything, but I hope you will at least try."

Xiao Huang nodded and took the rods. "Hmm... it's hard to tell how the formations would go, but I can make some guess," he said and looked further.

"Hmm... the metal alloy itself is not very much used, so the formation should be either some sort of illusory formation, Cloud making formation, or concealment formation," Xiao Huang said.

"Concealment formation?" Alex's eyes perked up.

"Yeah, the kind that stops light, sound, and even aura from escaping," he said.

'That must be it. No wonder master and sister couldn't find me at all,' Alex thought.

The rod he had taken out was the same rod he found when he was stuck in the Southern Forest. If it truly was a concealment formation, then it would have been impossible for them to come to find him.

"Alright, come sit down. We will teach you what we can," Xiao Huang said.

Luo Xing sat right by and taught him too.

For the next 2 hours, they cleared most if not all of his confusions about making formations using formation flags.

Apparently, when making a formation flag, you did not make the full strokes. Instead, you only carved the beginning of it.

If a formation blueprint had 6 corners also known as origins, then there would have to be 6 formation flags.

Each of the rods of the formation flags would have to have one of the origins carved onto them. Since the rods were usually cylindrical, getting a curved carving that was straight was very hard to achieve.

Once one was done with that, there was also the case of the cloth part of the flag itself.

The cloth was just there to hold the spirit stones and transfer the Qi through the air. Apparently, it was made up of beast hides for fluid energy transfer.

The better the cloth was, the further apart the formation flags could be.

Alex was quite happy when he learned that he didn't have to worry about making the cloth and only needed to worry about carving the formation.

'Thank god, I just need the formation blueprint,' Alex thought.

"Nephew Huang, can you come with me for a second," Shi Nangong called Xiao Huang and he left. Alex could guess why that was.

'Uncle must be looking at brother Huang as one of the people to transfer Qi,' Alex thought.

"Do you want to continue?" Luo Xing asked.

"Um... sure, but don't you want to go look if Uncle is fine?" Alex asked.

Luo Xing smiled and shook her head. "Mei'er wouldn't want me there most likely. She still hates me quite a bit," she said.

"Um... can I ask why? if you don't mind," Alex said.

"Uh... sure, it's stupid really. Most would say she's in the wrong here, but I think it's okay for her to be angry at me," Luo Xing said.

"When I was little... I was contracted with a rather fatal illness. It...was horrible, but the illness didn't affect children as fast, so I was still mostly okay."

"Mothers took care of me one after another, day after night, and reared me. They did it so much so that... Mei'er couldn't even see mothers for most of the days."

"Father brought in doctors to check what was wrong, and they found the problem rather easily. Except, the cure wasn't so easy to come by."

"It needed a special ingredient... hah, I don't even remember the name of it anymore," Luo Xing said as she shook her head.

"The ingredient was rather rare and hard to find, so father took some men and went into the Southern forest to search for it."

"He spent days in there looking for the ingredients. He was motivated to save me. Unfortunately, one day... mother, Mei'er's mother contracted the illness too," Luo Xing's eyes were starting to fill with tears.

"When father came back, happy with the single ingredient, after many days, he returned home to see both mother and me on the deathbed."

"The illness..." Luo Xing's tears started dripping down her cheeks.? Her lips quivered as she forced herself to speak. "Mother looked so frail back then. I... I wished she had used the pill on herself."

"But she chose..." Luo Xing started crying. "She chose to give the single pill to me."

"I was cured, but mother..."

Luo Xing didn't continue and just sobbed. Alex could feel the sadness in her voice.

Just as Luo Mei loved Shi Nangong, Luo Xing loved Luo Mei's mother too. However, there was no way a child could love a mother more than the mother could love her child.

"I'm sure she was happy when you got the pill," Alex said.

"She was, I don't doubt it. She told it to me herself. But..." Luo Xing said. "But it hurts when I remember back that... that the reason mother died was because of me."

Alex sat quietly while Luo Xing sobbed. "But that doesn't mean that Sister should hate you," he said.

Luo Xing sniffed while wiping her tears. "Since mother and I were kept in the same room, most people stopped visiting us in fear of contracting the illness."

"Mei'er, who was already having little time with mother, stopped getting to meet her after she fell ill."

"Even when... when mother died, even then she couldn't meet her in fear of contracting the illness."

"Really the only time she saw mother after I got ill was... perhaps her covered body in the funeral."

"Even then... Mei'er couldn't go close to her. I got ill, and mother got ill. We both went into a single room for containment and when I came out okay, mother did not."

"To the young Mei'er, when the adults tried explaining what was happening, she started blaming me for taking away mother."

"At least... I got to say goodbye to mother before she died. Mei'er, however, didn't even get that."

"So, while I think the hate is completely irrational and I don't deserve it... I also think that she's not in the wrong with hating me," Luo Xing said.

"Perhaps... one day she might choose to call me sister again. But until then... I will just have to wait," Luo Xing said with a sad smile.

"I'm... sorry for making you remember that," Alex said.

"Don't be," Luo Xing smiled meekly. "It had been a while since I thought of mother again. It's... good to know that I still have memories of her."

"You know what they say, a person is not gone as long as you can remember them," Luo Xing said; her mood getting better. She wiped away whatever remaining tears she had.

"Since you helped me remember mother and are helping father right now, I will leave you with one information about Formations that you likely won't find from any books," Luo Xing said as she looked around.

Alex immediately sent out his spiritual sense to see if anyone was listening.

"It's kind of a secret... so I hope you don't tell it to anyone," Luo Xing said and came close to whisper.

"You don't need a metal base to make a formation."

Chapter 443 - Remuneration And Job

Luo Xing explained that she herself didn't know what it meant and that it was only something she had happened to learn in her sect.

She then proceeded to teach the remainder of what she knew about formations without really giving away any secrets.

The information that Alex already had in his brain finally started to make sense as to what it meant.

'So I was just missing the core that connected it all,' he thought. He would still need to practice a bit, but this alone was enough for him to learn formations on his own now.

Once the training was over, he went to check on Luo Keng. When he reached the room, he found the door open and a few people inside there

There were Luo Keng himself, Shi Nangong, Luo Mei, Old man Jin, Xiao Huang, and another old man he did not recognize.

Luo Mei was apparently doing the task right now 4 people other than herself and Luo Keng gave her their Qi.

'Considering Uncle will cultivate the next 2 weeks, 4 people should be enough,' Alex thought.

Luo Mei put 100 percent of her concentration into sending her Qi to the stomach area and from what Alex could see, her Qi was getting eaten.

Every time the Qi was eaten, she would have to carry the remaining Qi outside with her all the way inside.

Finally, after 20 minutes, she stopped.

'That's... a bit of a problem,' Alex thought. 'I should make some pills for her.'

"I... I can't do it. I just don't have enough True Qi to carry all of yours," she said as she huffed.

"It's okay, Meimei. Take your time," Luo Keng said.

"Uncle is right, sister." Alex walked into the room. "You can cultivate shortly and start again. I will make some pills to help with that, and brother Huang should have some formations for assisting too."

"Ah, Nephew Ming, you are finally back," Luo Keng said while he wan on the bed. "You somehow taught my daughter how to navigate the human body's blood vessels. I'm truly amazed. Honestly, I didn't know her brain could hold anything but cultivation."

"Oh, who's this?" the new man in the room said.

"Brother Hong, this is the young man you were looking for," Old Man Jin said.

"Oh, this is the junior Yu Ming?" the old man named Hong asked.

"Uh...yes, I am Yu Ming. Senior is?" Alex asked.

"You can call me old man Hong. I am the city lord's butler and was sent here to reward you for helping all of the different people. If not for you, we don't know how many we would've lost," the city lord said.

"Reward? I don't need any reward, senior. I was happy to help with what I could," Alex said. "Besides, senior Jin helped me gather so many ingredients in such little time. So he should be the one you should be thanking really."

"Ah, I like a humble young man. Still, the Lord sent me with the reward and I can't return without giving it to you," the old man Hong said and took out a small bag. "Here you go, young man."

Alex looked through the bag and realized that there were nearly 500 True spirit stones in there.

"Senior, this is too much. I just made a few dozen pills; they don't cost this much," he said.

"Keep it, young man. You can't put a price on life, and you saved many that day. This is the least we can do," old man Hong said.

Alex didn't know what else to say, so he kept it and thanked the old man Hong.

"Actually, there is something else the Lord wanted me to ask of you, young man," old man Hong said. He pulled out another storage bag and handed it to Alex.

"Here we have a few ingredients and recipes, all for Common rank pills since that's all you can make from what we've heard."

"We were hoping we could employ you to make as many as you can," old man Hong said.

Alex thought for a moment and tried to think of what jobs he had for the next few days. There was only 1 thing he needed to do.

'I just need to make pills for sister and uncle.'

"Yeah, I can do that," Alex said.

"Great, here you go." Old man Hong gave the ingredients. Since Luo Mei was tired, and this was just a test, Luo Keng decided to dismiss everyone.

"I can do with a little more people, father.? Although I don't know if your body can handle it," She said.

"I felt no discomfort. If you can handle it, I will try to find a few more people," Luo Keng said.

Alex checked Luo Keng once more to make absolutely sure that it was in fact the parasite, but that was pretty much proven at this point.

He thought of going back to his room to cultivate but instead decided to go to the Alchemy hall to make some pills.

Before that he needed to find Old man Jin for a small task.

"Senior Jin, here are the books you gave me. I'm done with them," Alex said as he handed them back.

"You're done reading them? Don't you want more?" he asked.

"No, it's fine. There wasn't a lot of new information on it, but just enough to find Uncle's cure," Alex said.

"Oh, that's great then," old man Jin said.

"Also, can you do a small task for me for tomorrow morning?" he asked.

"Sure, young lord. Anything you ask," he said.

"The merchant group that sister came with, it should be leaving in a day or two, can you find out when that is?" Alex asked.

"Uh... sure," old man Jin said. "But, won't you stay a little longer?" he asked.

Alex shook his head. "Sister might have to stay, but I will need to go back. There are still a few things I need to do back in the sect," Alex said.

"Sigh, I will find that information for you then, young lord," he said.

"Thank you. I will be in the Alchemy hall, so... come find me around evening time tomorrow," Alex said.

"As you wish."

Alex left and went towards the alchemy hall. It seemed the people in the hall were let know about his arrival, so he was taken to one of the Alchemy rooms.

"You don't need to wait on me. I will be here for at least 2 days," Alex said.

Afterward, he entered and sat down on the floor next to the fire. He brought out the ingredients bag to check once more.

"Hm... damn, that's close to 100 sets of ingredients. Even when I do 4 an hour... It should take close to...25 hours. If I speed up and exhaust myself, I should be able to do it in around 18 hours."

"That's still quite a lot," he thought as he sighed. He looked at the recipes and realized that he knew all of them.

'Nothing new here either I guess. Although, I don't think I've made this one pill before,' he thought.

It was around 10 pm, so he started making the pills. At first, he started slow with 3 pills an hour, but once he got the hang of it, he started doing 4, or even 5 pills an hour.

However, he never forced himself to make 6 pills an hour.

'Damn, it's hard trying to cram the recipe when I need to do spend the same amount of time per ingredient. It's only the in between time that I can eliminate to make things faster,' he thought.

He slowly made pills, resulting in about 2 pills every 45% of the time. It wasn't 50% like he was promised, but that was just how probability worked.

In the next 10 hours, he did 45 sets of ingredients and got about 65 pills. Since it was 8 am in the morning, he decided to log out. He wanted to bring out Pearl and have him cultivate, but he wasn't sure if that was a good idea since he couldn't control what happened during that time.

He went to get his breakfast and then went to school. Exams were getting close and he hadn't properly studied, so he decided to study in the morning.

After he returned back from school, he went into the game to continue it all over once again.

Fortunately, he didn't have the fatigue from making pills for an entire night and could restart once again.

For the next 3 hours, he made the pills again and stopped.

He stood up and walked out of the room to see old man Jin standing there.

"Senior Jin, I must have made you wait. Apologies," he said.

"Ah, no need to apologize young lord. I have got the information," he said.

"Oh, please tell me. When is it?" he asked.

"The Caravan will start moving tomorrow around 3 pm. It seems they were ready for you, so they have you registered," Old man jin said.

"Hm... I should finish making these pills by the morning. So, I will meet with my sister and Uncle for the day and leave in the afternoon. Thank you, senior Jin. Please let Sister know about this too," Alex said.

"My pleasure, young lord," Old man Jin said and left.

Alex went back inside and made some more pills. Since he had such a long time, he took it slow and did it without gathering much mental fatigue.

When he was done, he had made around 140 pills using the 100 or so ingredients.

Chapter 444 - Goodbye

It was 4 in the morning when Alex was done making the 100+ pills for the city lord.

Finally, he could proceed onto some pills of his own. The first thing he made was some Qi Renewal pills for his sister. She needed a desperate amount of them, so in the next hour, he made as many as he could.

Then he made two sets of common parasite removal pills. It came out to be 3, so he was quite happy with it.

He made other miscellaneous pills that he thought his sister's family would need and was finally done around 8 in the morning.

"Ahhh…" he stretched as he stood up. Sitting down on the same spot for over a day and a half in a row with minimal movement was very hard for him.

'How do people go on months like this? Is closed cultivation that easy?' he wondered. 'Maybe it gets easier the more I get used to this.'

He sorted out the pills and kept 40 for himself. He didn't want to do it, but he also didn't want to reveal that he could make more pills with a single ingredient.

So, he reluctantly hid those pills away.

He walked out of the alchemy hall and walked towards his sister's house. The city was bustling in the morning and was very different from the midnight or noon he walked around.

'People return to daily life so easily, huh?' he thought.

Once he reached his sister's house, he went directly to her room and knocked.

Luo Mei opened the door and beamed. "You're back," she said.

"Yeah, and I brought the pills for you," Alex said.

"Oh, come in," she said and took him inside.

Alex walked in and took out some pill bottles. "Here! These are the pills for fast cultivation. These are for a breakthrough, these are for Uncle after he is done with the parasites, these are normal healing pills for you and your sister, these are for smooth breakthroughs… and these are pills to improve your spiritual sense."

Alex handed out multiple pill bottles and Luo Mei was a little overwhelmed.

"Wait! Wait! Wait! There are so many. Aren't these expensive?" she asked.

"Umm… each one should be about 2-3 True spirit stones in cost," Alex said as he wondered if he was right. He had never really such good pills outside of auctions.

"I can't take that!" Luo Mei said.

"Well, you have to whether you like it or not. Especially this one," he said as he pointed to the one he had created himself.

"It's a recipe I came up with on my own. Well, that might be a little untrue… it's more like I stumbled on it by accident, but it's my own recipe nonetheless. It greatly increases your spiritual sense, so it should help you a bit," Alex said.

"But—"

"Just eat it, sister. Are you going to say no to your brother?" he asked.

"Sigh, okay. But I'm asking father to give you something too. You can't say no to your sister either," Luo Mei said.

"Uh… sure," Alex said.

"So… do I cultivate after eating this?" she asked.

"I don't think you need to," Alex said.

"Alright then, here it goes," she said and took one of the new pills out and ate it.

"Ah, it's so… warm," she said as she shook her head a little.

"D0 you feel any changes?" he asked.

"Let me check."

Alex felt a wave of spiritual energy wash over him as Luo Mei sent out her spiritual sense to the extreme without stretching it beyond her normal level.

"Wow!" she cried out.

"It increased by nearly 5 meters. That's amazing," she said. "My spiritual sense is now up to 40 meters."

"Was it 35 only before?" he asked.

"Yeah. I started with what was it… 32 I think? And got to 35 when I broke through to the 6th realm. I think it will increase when I breakthrough more," she said. "Oh, how many should I eat?"

"I don't really know. Just to be safe, don't eat more than 3. Give the rest of sister Xing," Alex said.

Luo Mei's face soured when she heard that. "You give it," she said.

"Sister, there is no bad blood between you two. You should also know how unreasonable you are being towards her. Imagine what she must be feeling like with her only sister hating her for something that was not her fault."

"Just go and make up with her. Say sorry! You are the one in the wrong here from what I understand," Alex said.

"But I…" Luo Mei couldn't come up with any argument so she just crossed her arms. "She told you about it? Or did mother?"

"She did. I asked first though," he said.

"Sigh… I will see what I can do," she said.

"It's okay. Just start slowly. You don't need to make up in a single day. Slowly build back the connections you've lost," Alex said. "As long as you come out of it being closer than when you started,? you will have succeeded."

"I hope to hear news about you two sisters being sisterly again when you return back to Scarlet City," he said.

"Oh right, that reminds me. You are leaving today?" she asked.

"In the afternoon, yes," he said.

"Hmm… this might be troublesome for master now," she said softly.

"Huh? Why?" he asked.

"I won't be returning for another 2 weeks. So by that time, my spot will have changed. Someone else will take that place," she said.

"Um… does master immediately leave his position when someone else takes the Prime Disciple spot? No right?" he asked.

"No, he stays as the sect leader for another 6 months to figure out what is going to happen next."

"When senior brother left his spot, it was only after 5 months that I finally managed to securely make my place on the first spot after defeating Du Yuhan."

"That was about 3 years ago. The stronger disciples just happened to be older than 25, and I got insanely lucky," Luo Mei said.

"Oh, then we have nothing to worry about. Just return back to the sect and you can take back your spot," Alex said.

"No. If Du Yuhan takes my spot, I can't force it back from him," she said.

Alex was surprised. "You can't win against him? You have a 3 realm advantage," he said.

"And he has Sword Qi," Luo Mei said. "I haven't fought him since 3 years ago. All this time, I thought he didn't bother since he was weak, but as we saw in the Annual Competition, he is insanely strong."

"If I'm not wrong, at his best, he can dish out a True Disciple level attack. That's not something the current me can handle," She said.

"That's… shit! That's a problem for sure," Alex said.

"Sigh, I will continuously try and take back the 1st rank, but I'm not sure if I can. We will have to see after I've returned," she said.

"Thanks for the pills."

Alex nodded and walked out to find Senior Jin. "Oh, senior Hong is here?" he said in surprise and went to find the old man.

"Senior, here are the pills," Alex said and handed the 100 pills to them.

The old man's eyes went wide when he saw the 100 pills. "You managed to make 100 pills?" he asked.

"Uh… you did give me 100 sets of ingredients, right?" he asked.

"Yes, that's why I'm surprised. You didn't make a single mistake?" he asked in surprise.

"Ah, I may not look it, but I'm one of the most talented alchemists amongst my sect disciples, senior," Alex said.

"I don't doubt it. Still, I've seen way too many alchemists that require 3 sets of ingredients to make a single decent pill and call themself talented. Compared to them, you are miles better," he said.

"Haha, you jest me, senior. Please check the pills," Alex said.

Old man Hong checked the pills and was about to thank Alex to end the conversation when he remembered.

"Oh right… uhh, a 100 so… here," Old man Hong handed him a storage bag.

Alex looked inside and saw about 300 spirit stones. 'That's about the right price. Plus I ended up with about 40% more pills so I profit quite a bit here,' Alex thought.

"Thank you, senior," Alex said.

"No, no, no. It's me who should be thanking you. I didn't know you could make so many pills. I thought we would only have around 40 or so pills. I will immediately bring it to my lord," the old man said and left.

Alex went to meet with Luo Keng and talked for a bit. Both him and Shi Nangong were very kind to him and reminded him of his own mother and father.

He met up with Luo Xing and gave her a few mental strength pills to thank her for helping him with the formation studies.

Since she wasn't in the Mind Tempering realm yet, she could thankfully make use of the pills.

Xiao Huang on the other hand couldn't get anything. Alex apologized and promised he would make him any pills he needed for free once he reached the True realms.

Xiao Huang laughed and said there was no need. They conversed for a bit and soon it was noon.

Alex went back to his sister and talked to her for a while longer. This time, Meng Yun was with her too.

She was rarely with Luo Mei inside the house since she was pardoned from serving Luo Mei for the entirety of their stay back home.

She would only resume her work once they left back again. Still, Meng Yun liked spending time with Luo Mei and came to visit her from time to time.

"Meimei, uncle Jin, please go see young nephew Ming to the caravan. I would do so myself, but unfortunately, I am unable to," Luo Keng said when it was time for Alex to leave.

"Take care, Young Man," Shi Nangong said.

"Goodbye little brother," Xiao Huang said.

Luo Xing silently nodded and waved her hand.

Alex said his goodbyes and went to the caravan with Luo Mei and old man Jin. The afternoon city wasn't as loud as the morning's but it was still pretty crowded.

Old man Jin had found a carriage for them, and the three of them rode on it to the outside of the city

It was close to 3, so the sun wasn't as hot and the days were also slightly cold.

"That's the caravan," old man Jin said as he showed them the way.

"hmm, little brother. You are okay?" Zhang Xie was surprised when he saw Alex return.

"Hello, senior Zhang. Yes, I'm okay," Alex said.

"I was told you were okay, but… it's still impossible to believe something like that after seeing those beast hoards," he said.

"The beasts didn't reach the caravan this time, right?" Alex asked. That was what Luo Mei had told him.

"Oh no, I'm talking about last month's. Actually, I also saw the month before that. Weird…" Zhang Xie thought of something. "Why are the attacks exactly a month apart?"

"Anyway, come you two, I have the carriage prepared for you," he said.

"Oh no, senior. I'm not going back. Only junior brother is," Luo Mei said.

"He is? Oh right, my men must-have set for him alone then. Come," he said and took him to a carriage.

Alex walked up to the carriage and looked inside. He could see about 4 different people in there. 2 of them were young men nearing 30 years of age. There was one woman that looked like she was 25, but who really knew.

The three of them were wearing similar clothing and had a cultivation base in the True realms.

And the final man in the carriage was actually an old man that seemed to be in his mid-50s.

Chapter 445 - More Bandits

"These 3 are part of the guards I hired. There are 18 guards for this trip. Usually, it would be around 10, but since the beast attacks, all merchants have increased the guard count," Zhang Xie said.

"There are 5 in the front carriage and 10 in the final 2 carriages. Since this is the 2nd carriage, you should be relatively safe, little brother. Although I hope you will fight when the time comes," he said.

"Don't worry, senior Xie. I won't be a freeloader," Alex said.

"You hear that old man?" Zhang Xie said. "You can't be a freeloader either. You've promised to fight beasts and bandits in case we are attacked, we will leave you behind if you coward out of the fight."

The old man simply glared at Zhang Xie and Alex for a while and nodded in affirmation. The old man had gray hair and a mostly hobo look from what Alex could tell. His clothes were pretty dirty and it looked like he was out of money.

'No wonder needs to ride the caravan like that,' Alex thought. He got up and introduced himself to the group in the caravan.

The men and woman smiled but didn't seem to be in a mood for conversation. The old man glared at Alex and tried to avert his eyes when he was greeted.

Alex understood that he didn't want to talk either. The caravan was ready to move, so Luo Mei came next to the window.

"Have a safe journey, junior brother. Also, don't worry about the Prime disciple problem once you go back. It's my burden to bear, not yours. You just have fun, you'll get there someday," Luo Mei said.

Alex nodded and said his final goodbye before the caravan left for the east. It was going to take about 2 days before he reached Scarlet city, and seeing as though nobody wanted to talk, he felt like it was going to be a very boring time.

The 3 men and women spoke to each other, but Alex didn't get into the conversation. He could tell that they were good friends, so it didn't feel right to butt in.

The old man also kept looking towards him from time to time, and Alex wondered if he wanted to talk or something. But since the old man never said anything, Alex didn't talk either.

Seeing as though he had nothing more to do, he decided to close his eyes and think about the different kinds of stuff.

One of the things he had always wanted to see is if he could make recipes for pills using the ingredients he was familiar with. He was sure he would likely never reach the same level of accuracy as when he did it practically, but he had time to waste, and from the looks of it, he couldn't go anywhere for now.

The sun went down and the night started doing its job. However, it was not at all quiet. The people in the caravan sang and danced along the way as the group moved forward.

"Hey you two, get ready. The bandits will be here any moment," the woman told Alex and the old man.

The old man say anything and simply nodded with an eye that burned with anticipation.

"Do bandits usually attack this area?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, and nighttime is what they like the most. The bandits move all over the southern forest, so we can't tell exactly where they will show up, but given how loud these people are, they will know where we are and will attack us," the lady said.

Alex nodded. "I keep wondering, why do bandits even attack? They should know by now that the merchants hire strong guards. It sort of doesn't make sense," Alex said.

"Not all merchants can afford us. Most can barely get self-tempering realm cultivators, people weaker than you. So, they attack, hoping they got the right one," the woman said.

"It must be terrible for those merchants. I can only imagine how many people die to those horrible people," Alex said.

"Most of the time, the bandits aren't really bad. They are just thieves that want your possessions. As long as you hand it over, they won't hurt you."

"But once in a while when the merchant struggles or a particularly bad character turns into a bandit, there are problems."

"Still, bandits don't attack that many times. Maybe once in a week, some even once in a month. However, recently since the beast attacks, they are terrified of coming out of their caves for while"

"Also given that most merchants have stopped traveling, their supplies must be ending. So... I assume we will meet a lot of bandits this trip," the woman said.

Alex nodded as he thought of something and asked, "how strong are the bandits?"

"Some are weaker than you. No, most are weaker than you. Some are close to you in strength and very few come close to us in strength. However, that doesn't mean that there are people stronger than us."

"Don't worry. The strong ones hate doing the work themselves so even if their groups do come, it's usually the lower-level thugs. We should be fine with those," the woman said.

The group went along without any hitch for a few more hours until it was midnight. Alex wondered if anything was going to even happen, and that was when he heard the shout.

"BANDITS!"

"Let's go!" the woman shouted. But before she could even stand up, the old man had already opened the carriage door on his side and walked out.

Alex quickly opened the door on his side after hearing the woman and walked out as he took out his steel sword too.

'Try not to use Sword Intent,' he told himself. He didn't want to reveal something like that in front of the strangers here.

"Haah!" a bandit shouted as he charged towards him. He held a sword in his hands and swung it directly at Alex.

'So weak,' Alex thought when he saw the man's high Organ Tempering realm cultivation base.

Alex didn't even dodge and directly hit the incoming sword. The bandit's sword bent in half and flew out of the bandit's arms. The bandit himself fell onto the ground with fear creeping up in his eyes.

He tried to get back up, but his hands kept slipping on the dried leaves on the ground. Finally, he got a grip and managed to turn around and run back into the forest.

Alex looked around and saw that the bandits were being beaten up left and right. This was a very weak bandit group and was definitely out of luck.

On the other side of the caravan, Alex could hear shouted of agony as screams rang out from time to time.

Another man jumped at Alex, but he was kicked directly on the ribs and sent flying away.

Alex then looked around and saw that there were no other bandits here.

He looked at the two men who had the bandits with broken limbs, laid sprawling on the ground.

"Do we leave them like this?" Alex asked.

"What? You want to help them?" they asked mockingly.

Alex didn't say anything and looked at the bandits with a little shocked expression.

'The ones from the princess' caravan always killed people no matter what though,' he thought.

The caravan was starting to move so he got onto the carriage. As soon as he entered, he was assaulted with a heavy smell of blood.

He looked at the old man, whose body was mostly covered in blood.

"Damn it old man, You don't need to kill them. You could've just broken their bones and left them. Why did you have to go on a bloody massacre?" the woman asked while incredibly annoyed.

"Hmph," the old man said and minded his own business.

"Dammit," the woman turned around, not wanting to face the bloody old man.

"Sigh, you didn't go psycho on the bandits, right?" she asked Alex.

"No," Alex said as he shook his head. "But I'm quite surprised that you guys leave the bandits alive. The caravan I was in about a month ago didn't do that. Every bandit group they came across, they would kill them all," Alex said.

"Killing all bandits? That must be either the Royal Fu merchant group who don't hire anybody and instead uses national guards as their guard."

"Or it could be the Victorious Snow merchant group. They are known to have ruthless guards all the time," the woman said.

"We on the other hand don't do that. For one, we don't like killing people a lot. Secondly, you don't want to be known as the bandit-killing merchant group."

"That only draws out the worst in every bandit you meet and they end up attacking you with the intention to kill even when you can't fight them," she said.

"I see," Alex said. "The merchant group came from the capital so it must have been the Royal Fu merchant group. Yeah, they killed every single one of the bandits."

"Alright, let me know if you are injured. If you're not, rest up. There will be more of such fights throughout the night," the woman said.

Alex nodded and closed his eyes to wait for the time to pass. He desperately wished that he could log out and go get something to eat, but it didn't seem like he could get any chance now.

He just had to wait until he was back in the city.

A few hours passed, and the people shouted outside once more.

"BANDITS!"

Chapter 446 - Black Venom Bandit Group

Sun had come up and Alex was not the least bit exhausted. The two men next to him were pretty jovial and were talking to each other, while the woman in front of him made a slightly disgusted face from time to time.

The old man next to her was drenched in blood by now and had done nothing about it. Thankfully, he hadn't attacked a single ally during the 3 different bandit attacks last night.

The woman had told Alex that 3 attacks were surprisingly very low for the night.

"After 3 beast attacks in a row, anyone would be scared. Especially if they lived in the forest," the woman had said.

Alex looked around and realized that nobody really cared about his existence, and it didn't look like they were going to get attacked any time soon.

So, he decided to log out real quick and get his breakfast. He closed his eyes and got into a meditative position for a bit to see how they reacted, and after realizing that the people didn't care, he left.

He quickly did his business in the bathroom and went to eat. He gorged down the food while telling the people how precarious of a position he was in and how he could not really leave.

Then, he returned back to the game and found himself perfectly fine. Still, it was quite scary to leave his body alone like that.

The day passed by and Alex was bored with nothing to do. He tried sleeping but even that didn't really work since he wasn't tired at all.

Back when he was with the princess, he at least had a friend to talk with. If not that, he could spend his time learning about the different formations.

Now, he couldn't even do that.

'Making pills in my mind is boring and hard,' he thought. 'And there's really nothing else I can do.'

He was seated on the left side of the carriage, so when he stuck his face out to get fresh air, he couldn't even see any of the southern forests.

Instead, he saw the farmland to the south. The cool breeze of the upcoming winter hit his face and reminded him of the changing seasons.

He started spending the rest of his time doing just that, looking at the different lands to the north, instead of focusing on the south.

'That's where the ocean is right?' he thought. 'I wonder when I will get to see that and just how far it is.'

The day passed by and night fell once more. The bandits would soon attack once more.

Alex could hear the gasps of people from all around him. Even one of the men sitting towards the right window gasped.

At first, he thought it was the bandits again, but there wasn't any shout.

"Just look at that. So much damage," the man mumbled under his breath.

Alex looked over on his side and saw that massive, almost wave of destruction all around him.

Lands were torn to shred, trees missing all around, and even the Souther forest was in a mess.

'Oh, are we back around the place where I left?' he wondered. 'This must be where that saint realm beast showed up through with its entire beast army.'

"This is seriously getting too dangerous. We can't keep risking our lives for this small sum of money," the man said.

"Sigh, we will quit after this job and wait until the beast attacks settle down. No need to die for a little money," the woman said.

"Ssh! Did you hear that?" the other man said.

Everyone got quiet and tried to listen to what was going on. They heard the trees rustling and then someone shouted.

"BANDITS!"

Alex was used to this by now and opened his side of the door before walking out.

The bandits surprisingly didn't charge at them, and instead slowly appeared from what remaining bushes there were and lined up against the caravan.

Alex was surprised why they were not attacking, but then he saw the woman's face.

She was worried. She wasn't scared or horrified, but she was definitely worried. Alex looked at the other members of her team as well, and they seemed worried as well.

'This one is not going to be so easy, is it?' Alex thought. He realized that the only reason the guards could be worried is if they didn't have the ability to protect their employers.

"Damn it, it's the Black Venom bandit group," one of the men said.

Alex didn't know bandit names, but he could see where the name came from. All of the bandits had black robes and had long black hair.

'That explains the black part... so, is the venom part that they use something venomous?' Alex wondered.

"Surrender your items now, and we will let you go along just fine," the man with a thick mustache spoke. From the looks of it, the 20 or so bandits seemed to follow him as if he were the leader.

"Don't worry guys, this is not the Black Venom Bandits. At least... not the real one," the woman said.

"What are you? An off-shoot of the main bandit group? You certainly have to be related to have this much strength, but I know who the leader of Black Venom bandit group is, and you are not it," the woman said confidently.

"Hah, just because I lead the weaker members of our group doesn't mean that we are not part of the group. Anyway, enough talking, will you give us the items or not?" the man asked.

Alex looked at the group of bandits and saw that most of the people, including the leader had a cultivation base in the True Realm. They were very weak in the True realms, but it was the True realms nonetheless.

Only about 3 people were in the self tempering realm, but it was still quite high.

"Sister, let's fight them. We've got the force to beat them to a pulp," one of the men said.

The old man looked at the bandit group with furious eyes. Even when he couldn't fight them, it seemed like he hated the bandits too much to care.

"I'm not worried about them. They couldn't hope to hurt us with how overconfident they are. I'm just worried what will happen if the Black venom himself learned about this."

"He is not someone we can mess with," the woman said.

"Miss Gong, you must protect us," Zhang Xie said from behind them.

"Tsk. It seems you all don't really care. Whatever boys, kill them," the leader of the bandit group shouted.

"It seems we have no choice. Listen up, if they live we will be in trouble. So, make sure to kill them no matter what," the woman shouted.

Alex went for one of the weakest of the bandits, a 4th Mind Tempering realm cultivator.

The bandit seemed to use two axes, so he came running towards him with just that.

The bandit swung the right ax towards Alex which he blocked with his sword.

At the same time, the bandit attacked him on his right shoulders with his left ax.

Alex lifted his right hand so that the target was no longer the shoulder but the chest.

CLANG

The sound of the ax hitting something hard rang loud and Alex smiled. His True Mortal T-shirt armor was working just fine.

Without hesitation, he started attacking the bandit. Left and right, front and dow, he tried the attack everywhere the bandit couldn't block in time and immediately change position if he did.

The bandit had one of the best close combat fighting weapons, so Alex had to be extra careful with how he approached the fight.

Alex slowly started having trouble when the bandit started using techniques of his own. First of all, the movement technique of the bandit was too hard to understand for Alex.

Secondly, there was a weird green glow that shot out from the ax every time he blocked it and hit him. Fortunately, they weren't strong enough to truly hurt him, and only pricked him a bit.

Finally,? the man started using some defensive techniques of his own and Alex had a hard time penetrating through that defense without using something unusual in his arsenal.

He tried to fight it out normally for as long as he could, however. He wanted to take it slow, but then he heard someone shout in pain and anger.

Alex looked to the side and saw the burning flesh of one of the weaker bandits. However, the shout was not coming from one of the bandit's allies.

Alex immediately turned around to block the attack of the bandit and used Heaven's impact on him.

The bandit lost consciousness and Alex hit him with the side of his blade to send him next to the woman who had just finished her opponent.

She cut the incoming bandit without worry and looked at Alex. But Alex no longer cared about it.

Alex was now looking at the person crying in anger and pain near the burning bandit, the old man.

Except, the voice coming from the old man wasn't old... it was young.

The old man looked towards Alex by sheer coincidence and Alex saw the look of pain, anger, and now quickly building shame in his eyes.

Alex's heart started racing when he realized he recognized those eyes. "You..." he said.

"Go away," the old man shouted in a young man's voice. By this time, most the of bandits were dead and the leader of the group was injured in his fight against the people.

He hadn't realized how much of a mistake he had made in underestimating the caravan.

"No!" he shouted and suddenly ran away.

"Stop him. We can't let him report back," the woman said and ran in.

The old man ran behind the leader too.

"Brother Li!" Alex shouted as he ran behind the old man.

The old man stopped for just the tiniest fraction of a second before running behind the running leader

The leader was mostly injured, so he couldn't fly or run at his fastest speed, so everyone followed him. Letting the man return back alive and report who killed him was not a choice.

The leader, however, knew the jungle more than the guards could ever hope to.

Even Alex who had tried to keep track of him using his spiritual sense missed him. However, the old man kept running into the forest.

Ale changed his direction and ran towards the old man, getting closer and closer until he was right next to him.

"Brother Li, stop!" he shouted, and the old man finally stopped.

He looked back at Alex and said, "Please go back, brother Yu. I don't want to involve you with this petty revenge of mine."

Wan Li finally decided to speak up to Alex.

Chapter 447 - Wan Lis Revenge

"What are you doing here, brother? Are you looking to avenge your parents? Please don't risk your lives and come back to the sect," Alex said.

"You... won't understand," Wan Li said softly and ran further in.

'Where is he going? Does he know the way?' Alex wondered as he followed Wan Li.

"Oi kid, leave the old man behind. You don't have to follow him," the woman and 3 other men were following behind but stopped.

"Kid, we are leaving with or without you. The bandit is gone and we need to leave before he informs his boss," the woman said, but Alex didn't listen.

He continued following behind Wan Li as he went deeper into the forest.

"Senior, what do we do now?" one of the men asked.

"Let's go back. We need to move soon or the Black Venom himself will come to find us," the woman said.

"And that kid?" another man asked.

"Forget about that kid or even the old man. If they went in deep, they are sure to die. We need to save our hide for now," the woman said and started running backward.

The men followed her and they soon reached the road again.

"You guys are back," Zhang Xie said and looked around. "Where's the little brother? And that old man?"

"They followed deep after the man; they didn't want to come back," the woman said.

"Oh no, we need to get them," Zhang Xie said.

"No, we can't. We need to leave now before the Black Venom realizes we've killed his people," the woman said.

"But... but the little brother, we need to get him at least," Zhang Xie said.

"Do you want to risk the lives of everyone here for a feisty kid that won't listen to us and goes in looking for danger?" the woman asked.

"But—"

"Mister! If we don't leave now, you will die," the woman said.

Zhang Xie finally came to his sense and softly said, "I'm sorry brother Wen, your disciple brought this on himself."

"Alright people," he then loudly shouted. "Move! We need to leave this area right now," he said.

The caravan started back up and the carriages moved hastily. They left the area as fast as they could and moved along.

* * * * *

The leader ran through the forest at incredible speed while going through thick trees using his movement technique that worked best in the trees.

He used his wood-related movement techniques to quickly lose the guards behind, but he was losing a ton of blood.

'I... I need to find the boss soon,' he thought. 'Those bastards need to die. They dare kill members of our group?'

He huffed and puffed and made his way further in. Finally, after finding a relatively secure place in the forest, he placed his spear on the tree and sat down.

He quietened down and listened to the people, trying to feel the people's aura.

"I should be safe. Ugh... that bastard cut through my waist. Shit!" the man said to himself.

His vision was starting to get hazy and he could feel himself falling unconscious.

He tried to reach his storage bag, but his left arm was hurt too. Still, he looked for his storage bag to take out a pill to heal himself now that he was relatively safe.

"Huh? Where's my storage bag?" he worriedly checked his cloth, but it wasn't there.

'Shit, did it fall out of my robes?' he wondered.

He patted himself left and right with his right hand, but couldn't find the storage bag anywhere.

"Shit! Where the fuck did I drop my storage bag? this wound is so big and I need medication. I hope I don't die not even 2 months into the—"

Suddenly a fireball flew right to his head and smacked him across the face.

"Fuck!" he got scared and stood up to run, but he realized the fireball barely stung.

He looked around and checked the person who just attacked him.

"Mind Tempering realm? Fuck you man, why the fuck are you scaring me for nothing?" he shouted.

Wan Li had made it up to him and had attacked. He took out his sword and started sending out fire slashes towards the man.

"Goddammit! Die," he shouted and tried to jump forward to hit, but his feet just wouldn't move like they needed to.

He still took out his spear and slashed around, sending out attacks. They were very dangerous for Wan Li, but the man was wounded and slow, so he could dodge pretty easily.

The man suddenly placed his hands on the ground and roots started propping out from the ground.

They were very fast and were closing in on Wan Li.

Wan Li too dropped down and touched the ground to quickly turn it into lava and sent it forward to stop the roots.

The roots were mostly elemental with little Qi, so no matter how strong they were, they couldn't survive the lava.

"Shit! man, just go back or I will kill you," he said.

"15 months ago, a caravan ride passed through here. It was the caravan of the merchant group Night Soul. You were the ones that killed them, weren't you?" Wan Li demanded.

"Fuck you, kid. Just die," the man slashed the spear with both of his hands and grunted at the pain from his right hand.

Wan Li pulled up the part of the earth in front of him and blocked the attack. But mere rocks couldn't stop the attack of a True realm cultivator.

The impact tore apart the rocks and threw Wan Li flying back as well.

"Ughh..." Wan Li said as he felt the pain.

"You think a mere Mind Tempering realm cultivator can beat me? I'm already at True Disciple 3rd realm. I can beat you with half my body dead," the man said.

'Fuck those bastards who said this was a good way to earn money. There's nothing easy about this. I really hope I don't die. Let me kill this kid first and see if he has any loot,' he thought.

The man walked forward towards Wan Li and was about to slash when he suddenly lost his consciousness.

The spear he had propped up to attack nearly dropped out of his hands as he too fell along with it.

"Brother Li, what are you doing? Come on! He'll wake up soon, we need to leave. We can't fight a True realm cultivator right now," Alex said.

"Ugh, my chest," Wan Li said.

Alex quickly took out a healing pill and shoved it into Wan Li's mouth. Wan Li immediately felt better and stood up.

Then, he saw the unconscious body of the man. "I can kill him," he thought with red eyes and propped up his sword to swing.

Just then, the man woke up and dodged the sword just as the swing was coming down.

"Shit! What happened? Why was I out?" he asked. "Oh shit! Mental attacks."

The man suddenly started using a cultivation technique. White light appeared around his body as his whole body started glowing slightly.

He then tightly held his spear and stabbed it towards Wan Li. The attack was fast and Wan Li couldn't dodge it in time.

Suddenly, Alex appeared between the two and took the attack to the chest. His armor blocked the damage, but the force still sent him flying backward with Wan Li.

Alex quickly got his footing and looked up only to see the man right about to stab him with the spear.

Just then, Alex disappeared once again and appeared a little behind. His spiritual sense churned as he let out another Heaven's impact while the man hit empty land.

The man lost consciousness for a second but immediately woke up.

"What? Why is he not affected like the last time?" Alex thought.

The man turned around and looked towards Alex's silhouette. With most of his vision running hazy due to his lack of blood, he couldn't see Wan Li who was hidden a little further away from him.

"Damn you!" he shouted and ran towards Alex and swung his spear around. The spear was fast, but as long as Alex teleported someplace else, he couldn't touch him.

Alex tried luring the man away from Wan Li, while Wan Li healed and ran away. At least, he was hoping that was the case.

However, just after Wan Li stood up, he came back charging.

Alex could probably play around with this weak True Realm cultivator, but not if Wan Li kept intruding.

The man heard Wan li approaching and turned around to slash towards him. The sword and the spear clashed, making a rather loud ringing sound.

The man suddenly sprouted roots from the ground and caught Wan Li. However, Wan Li too started creating lava under his feet. Since the Lava was made up of mostly Earth energy that was empowered using Fire energy, it was particularly powerful.

The roots started crushing Wan Li's legs but they were also getting destroyed. But since Wan li wasn't resistant to heat, he was starting to take damage from the lava too.

Alex teleported right next to him and hacked away the roots before pulling him out. He pulled out another pill to feed Wan Li, but the man hit his arm and the pill flew into the forest.

"Ouch!" Alex cried out. There was a long gash from the bottom of his thumb to his little finger. Alex teleported away and took out another pill before eating it.

He then took out another pill and saw Wan Li rolling around to dodge the attack.

Alex teleported right next to the man and used Heaven's impact to harm him before swinging right at him.

However, he didn't feel the same force as he had imagined. 'Shit, his glow also stops physical attacks,' he thought.

He teleported out and dragged Wan Li back before giving him the pill. "Stop being so stubborn, Brother Li. We need to leave," Alex said.

Wan Li however looked at the man with nothing but anger and hatred in his eyes. "My parents were killed by the Black Venom bandits. I've been searching for them ever since they died. Now that I have finally found them, I can't leave, brother Yu. I must avenge my parents," he said.

"What? He was responsible for your parent's death?" Alex asked in surprise.

"Yes, that's why I want to kill him," Wan Li said. "Don't try to stop me. Either he dies today and I get my revenge. Or I die today and the circle of violence ends with me."

Alex tried to stop him but he couldn't.

"I have met True Disciple bandits that were stronger than you, you weakling!" Wan Li taunted. Alex got ready behind him, if Wan Li wasn't going to leave, then he would have to help him.

Alex took a deep breath.. If he was to fight, he would fight with his full strength.

Chapter 448 - Thank You

The man clutched his stomach and tried to stop the bleeding, but the blood just kept flowing out.

'I will die anytime now if I don't find any medication,' he thought. 'How are these kids not hurt after taking so much damage. Did I not hit them? I'm sure I did. Then… do they have medicine?'

The man started to get greedy. "Yes, that must be it," he said. "I will kill you and find medicine for myself."

"Get ready," Wan Li shouted.

The man suddenly leaped forward and swung down the spear. However, midway through, he lost his consciousness once more.

However, the very next second, it was back once more. He was getting used to this happening and immediately focused back on heating.

Wan Li had thankfully stepped out of the way and hit the man to the face with his sword.

The man grunted at the pain, but there was not even a cut. The damage was akin to being hit on the wrist with a ruler.

It hurt just enough to make him make a sound. "Dammit, which one of you keeps attacking my mind, I can't even see you move," the man said.

"Come here and give me your storage bags. I need the pills," he shouted and ran towards Wan Li once again.

Alex needed to keep his spiritual sea at least mostly full, so he could check for danger.

He ran forward and teleported in at the right time to block one of the attacks and was thrown away.

Wan Li attacked the man with rocks and also sent out slashes. The man took everything head-on, but grunted in pain.

Alex quickly got up and teleported in to take another attack with his sword this time.

"Urghh!" he grunted at the force. It was quite a strong force, but—

'It's nowhere near the level of what a True Realm cultivator should be. This feels more like he's in the upper realm of Mind Tempering realm,' Alex thought.

'I can do this!'

He fought against the man for a little longer and was steadily realizing that his strength really wasn't very high.

'Is it because he's injured?' he thought, but he couldn't get any answers.

The man was slowly starting to lose it. "No! I don't want to die. Give me a pill! I don't want to lose my talent!" he shouted.

"What?" Alex was surprised. 'A player?' he thought.

"AAARGGH! Give me a pill!" he shouted and started waving around the spear with no rhyme or reason. Alex teleported out, but Wan Li was hell-bent on fighting, so he didn't leave.

The two clashes weapons, but it was very clear who was going to win here.

"Goddammit! Brother Li, why aren't you leaving? You will only die," Alex shouted.

"No, I will kill him, and then I will leave," Wan Li said.

Alex wanted to leave, but not while Wan Li's stubborn ass was still fighting.

"Shit!" he screamed and teleported back in to fight. Neither of their hits was dealing much damage.

Alex used different slashes, Penta Sword techniques, Iron Fist punch, Palm of the sun, and even tried using his fire to attack, but they didn't work.

His damage was high, but not high enough to penetrate through that white film of light covering the man's body.

They both got into close combat and started hitting the man who was just wildly swinging around his spear.

Alex was about to go in for another attack when he noticed something behind him.

Suddenly, massive roots sprung out from the ground and attacked both Alex and Wan Li. Alex could see the attack through his spiritual sense, so he dodged, but Wan Li was struck on the back of his head.

The roots were massive, and they suddenly started constricting Wan Li's body like they were snakes wrapping around their prey.

Wan Li tried to use fire to burn the roots, but they just didn't take any damage. He was about to try and use lava, but he lost consciousness.

Wan Li was out, but the roots did not stop moving. Alex could start hearing Wan Li's body getting wrapped tighter and tighter.

"Die! You goddamn NPC. Give me your loot," the man shouted maniacally.

"Stop!" Alex shouted and went in to attack, but the man didn't stop.

"You die too!" he shouted and roots started wrapping around Alex as well.

"Dammit," Alex shouted and teleported out.

"Fuck! How do you keep teleporting? Do you have a skill? Give it to me," he shouted and started swinging at Alex.

At the same time, Wan Li was getting crushed slowly. 'Shit! I will have to make him stop,' Alex thought and launched another Heaven's impact but it did no damage basically aside from giving him a headache.

"Damn you! So you were the one with the mental skill. I will kill you and get that too," he shouted.

Alex felt like he was trapped. His opponent wasn't going easy on him, and he couldn't leave either due to his friend's life being in danger.

"Fuck!" he said. Suddenly, his dull sword started to glow slightly white and Alex attacked.

TING

The man felt a far greater force from his opponent now. "What?" he was surprised.

Alex calmed his mind as much as he could with only a single thought being there.

'CUT'

He dashed and slashed at the man and nearly ripped the sword out of his hands.

He kept attacking and the man could feel more and more pain as the attacks landed on him.

"What's going on? How are you so strong suddenly? Fuck! Did you break through? Screw it, I will do it too," he said and pressed something in midair.

Suddenly, Alex felt his opponents' cultivation elevate a realm higher and frowned. 'Did he breakthrough just now?'

He was horrified. He had never come across a fight where his opponent broke through in his cultivation mid-fight.

'This is going to be annoying,' he thought and started attacking once more.

The man too started attacking once more to quickly kill Alex and find some pills. He couldn't even leave without the pill even if he wanted to now.

The attacks were hard and Alex was having a hard time damaging the man. He could wait it out and the man would surely die due to the blood loss, but Wan Li would die sooner if he waited.

His sword was glowing bright yellow by now with a hue of white light around it as he weaved through the man's attacks and hit him all over.

Still, he wasn't hurting the man enough to even make him scream out. 'That untimely breakthrough made him stronger, shit!" he thought.

He needed to up his power too, but unfortunately, he didn't have enough Qi to breakthrough right now.

He continued fighting but he was slowly losing the fight now.

Just then, he heard soft cracks from the side. He looked towards Wan Li and realized his bones were starting to crack.

'No, I need to hurry. I can't just fight him; I need to beat him. I need to…' Alex's heart started beating when he realized what he had to do.

'I… I need to kill him,' he thought. He was horrified that he even came to the conclusion, but he had to do it.

'If I want to save Wan Li, I can't just beat him, I need to kill him.' His resolve got stronger and his intention towards the battle got clearer to him.

'KILL'

His sword shined brighter as it flew towards the man.

'No, I can't kill people. I can't be a murderer,' he thought. The sword slammed at the man's spear, but couldn't do much damage.

Alex's resolve had faltered at the last second.

CRACK

However, the bones of his friend behind him reminded him of what he was fighting for.

'No, this is different. I'm in a different place. I'm at a place where he isn't hesitating to kill me or my friend for his own gain. So, I shouldn't be hesitating either.'

'If I need to be a murderer to protect me and my friends, then I should gladly become one,' he thought.

'I will gladly become one. I will gladly kill him.'

'KILL'

His clear resolve brought back the shine his sword has lost and attacked the man once more.

The sword clashed with the spear, but the spear wasn't able to stop the sword and was pushed aside.

"WHAT?!" the man was surprised. Then he saw something bright golden swing towards his waist again.

Alex felt the hardness of the white light he had just hit and the sword didn't go in much further. But, it had gone in just enough to cut the man's skin and harm him.

'I can do it. I can kill him.'

'KILL'

He swung once more. The man's confidence was faltering and he tried to block with his hands now that his spear was gone.

However, that was a really bad idea for him as the sword cut halfway into both of his arms.

Even though he was cut, his blood didn't escape from his arms. All of the blood had already left his body. The man was solely surviving on QI alone now.

If Alex hit him enough, then that too would end and Wan Li would become free.

'KILL'

Alex brought back his sword and slashed it once more. The man tried to dodge but moving aside only made Alex's strike land on his arm.

In a single slash, his arm was cleanly cut off.

"ARGGHH" the man shouted in a hoarse voice. He started shouting "Log out! Log out!"

But he didn't leave immediately. The system didn't let him log out while he was in danger and gave him a warning instead so he knew what was at risk if he did.

However, before he could agree to the condition, a golden blade slid past the warning notification and drilled into his heart.

The man's eyes lost color and he fell to the ground. His body started convulsing before a hoarse voice escaped from his body.

"T-Thank you."

Then, the man died.

<Congratulations. You have killed 'Honey_Truth29'>

No more notification arrived after that. No rewards, no punishment. The game only told him what he had done.

He had killed the person. He had killed people before, but never had it been this directly. Never had it been intentionally.

Seeing the bloody body on the ground with white eyes and a blank look, Alex felt like vomiting. Thankfully, he contained himself and forced himself to come to terms with what he had done.

Alex felt horrible for killing the man, but what was more horrible was hearing the last words of the man.

'Thank… you? Why did he thank me?' Alex thought.

"Urghh" he heard? Wan Li take a deep breath. He immediately forgot about killing the person and turned around to go see Wan Li.

Wan Li's body was pale and he could see blood dripping from all over his body from the bones that stuck out.

"Oh no no no-no. Hang on for a second, brother Li," Alex said and searched amongst the few True pills he had.

"Ah, here it is. The Bone Restructuring pill. This will help you," he said and slowly put it onto Wan Li's mouth.

The pill slid down his throat and soon Alex could see the effects of the pill.

Within seconds, Wan Li's bones returned back to how they needed to be, and he was all but fully healed.

"Brother Yu… you saved me?" he asked as his consciousness returned back to him.

"Yes. Are you fine?" Alex asked.

"Is he dead?" Wan Li asked.

Alex sighed and said, "Yes. Yes, he's dead."

"Good. One of my parent's killers is dead," Wan Li said. "But… the rest of the Black Venom group is still alive, especially Black Venom himself. He must be the main person who killed my parents."

"I will make sure that he and the rest of them find salvation for my parent's dead through their death as well. I won't stop until the lot of them are dead."

"But… I'm too weak right now. I will need to get stronger," Wan Li said as he gritted his teeth. "I couldn't even kill a weakling of the group and needed your help, Brother Yu."

"Let's go back to the sect, brother Li," Alex said.

" No," Wan Li said. "Not until I have found my revenge." Suddenly Wan Li punched Alex.

Alex blocked the punch but was still sent flying back. When he got back up, Wan Li was gone.

Wan Li was nowhere to be seen even with Alex's Spiritual sense. "He's… gone," Alex said in surprise. 'Did he use an escaping technique, or did he… fully learn the invisibility and Concealment techniques?'

Alex stretched his spiritual sense to the fullest and looked around, but no matter what he couldn't find Wan Li at all.

"Sigh, I guess I should leave," he thought and reached into his storage bag to pull out the boat.

But suddenly, a massive pressure landed on him and dropped him onto the ground.

Someone strong had arrived in the forest.

Chapter 449 - Black Venom

Alex was down on the ground as pressure crashed all over him. This pressure was way stronger than the person he had just fought before.

In fact, it was stronger than that time Zexi had him pinned on the ground in the alleyway too.

'No way! Someone in True Lord realm? Or maybe even higher,' he thought. The aura was less than his masters', but he wasn't sure by how much.

He tried to use his Qi to escape but no matter what he did, his Qi just wouldn't move. The pressure was too much for him to use any technique.

Warm energy rushed from within him that lowered the pressure on the inside, but he was still unable to use his techniques.

"So, someone is indeed here," A voice came from behind Alex. He quickly sent out his spiritual sense and noticed a lot of people around him.

'Shit!' he thought.

"What's that?"

"It's a corpse. Hey isn't this that new guy Phillip or whatever his name was?"

"I think so. Boss, someone killed your arrogant new star."

"Wait, didn't he have a small group of his own cause he wanted to act like a leader? Where are they?"

"Probably dead like him, right? Hahaha"

People started laughing all around Alex. Finally, a person landed in front of him.

"Is he alive, boss?" someone asked.

Alex could see a fully black-robed person with a black mask that had a single design that made it look like a snake's tongue was coming out of it.

Other than that, there were 2 holes through which amber-colored eyes were staring at him.

"You look young. Did you kill my person?" A hoarse voice escaped from behind the mask that made the boss sound like he had lost his voice after speaking for hours.

Alex didn't answer. He was too busy checking how much trouble he was in.

His spiritual sense could now clearly see the nearly 3 dozen people surrounding him.

Each and every single one of them was wearing a black robe and a rather tight-fitting black mask on just on their mouth and nose.

"Are you conscious kid? The boss is asking you a question," a man said. However, he didn't come close to Alex and stayed far away.

"He's conscious; just look at him fidgeting," the boss said.

Suddenly a force pulled Alex off of the ground and he was face to face with the boss. The pressure crashing on him lowered and he could finally move his body around.

He could also use techniques with the pressure mostly gone, but now that he was away from the ground, he had lost his chance to escape too.

He wanted to turn invisible, but just a single burst of aura would make him unable to stay that way. He wanted to conceal his aura, but it wouldn't work against someone at a higher Major realm than his.

He wanted to simply teleport away, but everywhere was surrounded by the goons. Teleporting would still leave him within the encirclement, in range of the boss' intense pressure.

So, he really only had one choice, and he did it.

His Spiritual sea churned as a massive vortex appeared that quickly turned into mist and flew to the sky. They gathered there to form the shape of a fist and it escaped away from that place.

Heaven's impact flew directly at the boss, but just before it hit the boss, the mask glowed a shiny white and his spiritual attack was stopped.

"Oh, you just used a mental skill on me? How? I didn't see you use any techniques," the boss said with a chuckle in his voice.

Alex was horrified. His one plan that should have worked, didn't.

'How?' he thought. 'Mental protection items are so rare. How does the boss of a bandit group have those?'

'It's the mask. I need to get rid of it,' he thought. His sword was still on the side of his hand, dangling beside him.

From what he could see, the boss still believed him to be unable to move. He didn't know that thanks to his inner warmth, he could now move.

'I need to take this opportunity carefully,' he thought.

"Yeah, I'm sure he killed him. That is truly a surprise. A Mind Tempering realm kid killing a True realm cultivator. Hmm..." the boss looked around.

"He must've gotten help from what I can see. Someone else was here and they ditched him."

"Were you betrayed? Do you want to take revenge on the person that left you behind?" the boss asked.

"I... I want to," Alex said. "I want to kill him. He ruined my life."

"Hehehe, do you hate society like every one of us here?" the boss asked.

"Yes!..." 'I need to fight.' "... I do." 'Soon.'

"Hehe, but then you will have to—"

Alex suddenly swung his golden-white sword across the boss's face and cut the mask in half.

Alex was still hanging in the air, but he saw the boss's mask drop from his face.

"A woman?" he asked in surprise.

"You!" the boss's normal, female voice was revealed once the mask disappeared.

Alex was about to use his Heaven's Impact, but he suddenly felt that he was in a state of euphoria. He almost couldn't do anything.

It felt like his mind, body and spirit became one. However, just then he felt his mind get hot and that woke him up.

He woke up just in time to see the notifications about the toxins being destroyed from his body.

He looked up front and saw the woman's face anger up. He then saw her taking out another mask from her storage bag and was about to put it on.

"Oh no!" he thought and immediately sent out another Heaven's impact. This one managed to barely slip through and hit the boss just before she put on the mask again.

Just as she put on the mask, she lost consciousness too. Her control over Alex dropped and he fell to the ground. He immediately started his Earth Devour techniques.

His Qi traveled across his body at incredible speed and came out from under him to open the ground. But, even as that happened, he could see the boss's eyes coming back to life.

He didn't know if Heaven's impact wasn't as strong due to her putting on the mask, or if the mask had mental healing properties, but she had recovered from her unconsciousness and he was in trouble.

The ground below him had barely opened when the boss stopped herself from falling and immediately sent a palm attack towards him.

Alex felt like he had lost his control over the Focus mode and time was back to moving slow.

He could see the slow opening of the ground and the palm attack flying towards him at incredible speed.

He knew for sure if the palm hit him, he was dead. And... it seemed it would reach him before he escaped.

He was doomed.

He started worrying about what to do. Whether to teleport or to use an attack of his own, but that was impossible.

His body was still sending out Qi for the ground below him, and he couldn't use it right now. Even if he could, it wouldn't be fast enough to dodge the palm attack that was right in front of his face.

'Am I dead?' he thought.

Suddenly, something flew out of his robe and stood between him and the palm attack.

Bright yellow light shined from it and a golden barrier appeared in front of him just in time to block the attack.

Alex looked at what it was and was thoroughly surprised. "Master's talisman!" he shouted.

The talisman managed to stop the attack and both of them disappeared.

The ground opened up fully and swallowed Alex while the rest of the people there couldn't see what had happened at the last moment.

"That... That bastard saw my face!" the Boss's hoarse sound appeared once more. "Find out where he went! I want him dead."

The boss spread out her aura all around her and suffocated her followers, but couldn't find any sign of Alex.

The other bandits were shocked to see their boss rage like that and didn't dare make another peep.

"Go find him, you bastards!" the boss shouted.

"Yes, boss." Immediately, everyone jumped out of their place and went around the forest to search.

* * * * * *

Alex was released from the ground and he quickly stood and immediately went invisible and hid all of his aura.

He then cleaned himself of all dirt and looked around.

'Am I far away? I hope I? didn't go closer into towards the inner forest,' he thought. He slowly flew up above the forest and looked around.

'Where do I go now?' he wondered. He flew up even higher, but all he could see was the forest. He had come in way too deep.

'Do I leave or do I stay around until the morning arrives?' he thought.

He looked around more to make sense of anything, but his eyes could see nothing for the forests and trees. There was not a single thing around him to tell him of his location.

"Sigh, I guess I will wait until the morning then," he thought and went down to the ground.

Instead of staying in one place, however, he decided to keep moving and find some alchemy ingredients throughout the night.

So, he chose a route he thought was correct and started moving. The night had just started and there was a lot of time still remaining for the sun to come up.

So, he did all he could and moved forward.

Chapter 450 - Sect Leader Position In Trouble

Alex started contemplating what had happened tonight. He had met his sect's top disciple that was supposed to have disappeared and lost him.

Also for the first time, he had intentionally killed a person.

He didn't know how to feel about that. He certainly felt bad about killing someone, even going as far as to call it horrible. but there was also a sense of freedom to it as well.

He always knew that it was inevitable for him to kill someone himself. But, he didn't want to do it-for he knew that killing one person would lead to killing many.

However, he also knew that it was impossible to survive in this world without the resolve to do what was required, even if it meant killing someone.

He felt absolutely horrible about killing someone, but he also felt a sense of relief. Now that he was over this hurdle, it wouldn't be hard to gather his resolve to do what needed to be done.

Throughout the night, Alex walked around and found many ingredients that had grown all over the Southern Forest.

He was scared that he might come across more bandits or stronger beasts, but thankfully, the strongest beasts he came across were only at the Meridian realm.

The night felt slow, but even so, it passed by, and right before dawn, Alex could see the sky start to light up.

"So that's East," he thought and brought out his boat before flying in that direction.

Along the way, he drifted more and more to the left to come out of the forest. Finally, after an hour or so of flying, the boat came out of the forest and Alex finally saw the road.

'The caravan must've gone way further ahead,' Alex thought and sped up. He didn't plan on going back to the caravan, however. That was just something he had to do for the sect.

He could later lie to the caravan people that he was saved by someone. For now, he just flew.

'Did they take a detour to escape the bandit's way?' Alex thought when he couldn't find the caravan even after hours.

'Or maybe I missed them?' he thought when he saw the number of caravans start to be more and more.

'I'm getting closer,' Alex thought. Soon enough, he saw a figure of a wall very far away.

"I'm here," Alex said excitedly. He was finally back to the Scarlet City. Once he was close, he dropped somewhere in the forest and walked out of it.

He walked over to the gate and entered after showing his Tiger sect's badge.

He walked through the crowd of the noon and made his way to the sect. He entered through the front gate and met with his elder brother.

After talking with him for a few minutes, he made his way towards his master's manor.

Wen Cheng had already been informed of his arrival, so he was waiting for him at the manor.

"You guys are back quite early. I didn't think you would've returned until tomorrow morning," Wen Cheng said. "Where's your sister though? Did she go to her house first?."

"Sister did not return, master," Alex said. He went on to explain what had happened in the Rubyroad city, followed by what happened on the way back.

"You met the Black Venom bandit group?" Wen Cheng was truly surprised.

"Yes, master. I was in quite a lot of danger too, but I was able to escape thanks to the talisman you gave," Alex said.

"Oh, that talisman came in handy huh? Thank god. I'm surprised it didn't come in handy during your encounter with Zexi. Although, he was too weak to activate it, or your life was never in danger when he got you," Wen Cheng said.

"That was really dangerous. I was correct in being scolded so badly."

"Anyway, let's forget about that. So, your sister won't be back for another 2 weeks huh? That's... going to be a slight problem," Wen Cheng thought.

"Sister says she will take care of it all when she comes back," Alex said.

"Sigh, I don't know if she can. Little Yuhan really is very strong. I might just have to give up my spot as the Sect Leader now," Wen Cheng said.

"Don't worry about that, Master. You have 6 months. I will surely help you get back the spot for you," Alex said.

"It's fine, the sect master's spot was meant to be ever-changing in the Tiger sect. That's why only the disciples under True realm and less than 25 years of age count," Wen Cheng said.

"Forget about it, for now, you have something else to worry about," Wen Cheng said.

"Huh? What?" Alex asked.

"I... may or may not have gotten scolded for letting you go to a different city during these dangerous times without consulting Ma Rong," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, uhh.... I think I will return back to the Hong Wu sect then. Damn, I really wanted to go a few ranks higher. I managed to enter the Mind Tempering realm too," Alex said.

"Oh, you did? Congrats! It was only a matter of time I guess," Wen Cheng said. "Alright, go get your return registered in the Disciple hall and go back to Ma Rong.

"Yes, master. Goodbye," Alex said and left. He walked across the right side of the crater and entered the city crater before he lined up for the disciple hall.

Since it was Sunday, there weren't that many students, and he wasn't recognized as much.

He let the elder working there know that he was back and left. He walked back under the gazing eyes of many and went directly to the gate at the front.

After saying goodbye to his elder brother, he left.

The afternoon sun was hot, and it was much hotter than what should have been really. Alex looked around and realized that the people weren't really wearing anything thick.

'How come it's not cold here?' he wondered.

The busy marketplace slowed down his speed quite a lot as people walked past him multiple times, but he still reached the sect in under half an hour.

He was initially stopped at the gate, but once he showed his nameplate, he was let in.

"Master, I'm back," Alex left a message on his talisman and walked ahead.

Alex looked at the outer sect disciples that had joined the sect. He wondered how many, if any, of these were players.

While he wasn't sure about it, he was confident that there would be other Alchemy-related skills similar to the Alchemy God's Knowledge that would help the people join the alchemy sect.

Whether or not they were lucky enough to join the western continent in the first place was a different question altogether.

All throughout the outer sect mountain, Alex was the center of attention thanks to his yellow robes.

These disciples knew nothing about him, so they were curious why a Tiger Sect disciple was here in the first place.

Alex smiled and walked past them down to the sect market. Even there he was looked upon by many people. Some even went ahead to tell the elders.

An elder soon came to see what was happening and smiled when he saw it was Alex.

"Martial nephew, you're back," the elder said.

Alex looked at the elder and his eyes went wide in surprise. "Martial Uncle, you are back too," he said.

Alex was quite happy to see Lang Shun back in the sect. "When did you return?" Alex asked.

"Uhh, a few days ago," Lang Shun said disappointedly. "My mission was a failure, so I was quite sad. At least I got happy when I heard you were still alive. That was a relief."

"Mission?" Alex thought for a second and went, "Ah, brother Li? I found him," Alex said.

Lang Shun didn't comprehend what Alex said at first and was going to say "oh, good for you."

But once his thinking mind took control and he finally realized what was just said, he immediately ran forward and grabbed Alex's shoulders.

"You found Wan Li?" Lang Shun asked.

"Yeah, I was coincidentally on the same caravan as him and happened to meet him," Alex said.

Lang Shun looked around and put his arms around Alex before dragging him ahead. "Let's go talk somewhere quieter," he said.

"Ah, then let's go to master's place. I can give you two the information at once," Alex said.

"Uhh, that might be a bad idea," Lang Shun said.

"Huh? Why?" Alex asked.

"Things in the sect are... delicate right now. Sister is in closed cultivation currently and isn't coming out for anybody. Not even the sect's matters. So the elders are a little concerned and angry towards Sister's actions. Some are even going as far as to say that she needs to be removed from the Sect leader position," Lang Shun said.

"Master isn't responding? But I thought she talked with Master Wen Cheng a week before," Alex asked.

"That's the thing. I don't actually think she's in closed cultivation and is actually just faking it. However, that isn't proven yet. So, while the elders are angry, they can't do anything."

"However, if you were to go meet her and she came out, they will start calling her selfish and might lose their trust in her," Lang Shun.

"I see, then where should we go?" Alex asked.

"Um, let's just go to the—"

BUZZ BUZZ

Alex's storage bags buzzed and he took out the talisman from inside.

<Come to my place>

That was all that was written in the talisman.

"Master is calling me," Alex said.

Lang Shun looked a little annoyed. "Dammit, I knew it. She's not in closed cultivation. So why is she not coming to handle sect matters?" he asked.

Alex thought for a second and asked, "Umm, have you seen her after she awakened her constitution?"

"Awaken her constitution? Oh right, master said something about that. But what does that have to do with sister not leaving her home?" Lang Shun asked.

"Umm, you should come with me and see," Alex said.

Lang Shun shrugged his shoulders and agreed. Both him and Alex walked up the mountain and soon came before Ma Rong's house.

"Sister, I've brought nephew with me," Lang Shun shouted as he walked in. "God, why is this place so cold? Did she start making ice sculptures or what?" Lang Shun asked.

Alex could feel the tiniest hint of a fear building inside of him when he felt this coldness. 'Did master's body get stronger again?' he asked in surprise.

It was quite easy to find where Ma Rong was. They just had to follow the coldest place in the house and they would reach her.

"What the hell?" Lang Shun shouted when he finally saw Ma Rong. "Sister, why the hell is there so much ice around you?"

"Oh, you came as well?" Ma Rong said. "Shut up for a little, I'm trying to concentrate."

Ma Rong's body was constantly leaking mist that flew down to the ground like what one would see happen on a frozen bottle of liquid.

Lang Shun couldn't comprehend what was happening and looked at Ma Rong with her jaws dropped, while Alex tried to make sure he didn't let the fear get to him.

The mist leaking off of Ma Rong's body started to settle down and stopped forming around her. Soon enough, they completely stopped.

When they did, Alex noticed that his fear had also subsided.

"Sigh, it takes me quite a while to rein in my body's aura. Otherwise, everything around me gets frozen," Ma Rong said and slowly stood up.

Crackling sounds appeared from all around her as her frozen clothes started snapping as she stood up.

"Sigh, even the clothes freeze. I will need to do something about it all soon," she said softly.

"So, what's going on? I only called my disciple here. Why did you come along?" Ma Rong asked.

"Oh, that's right," Lang Shun said as he remembered.. "Apparently, martial nephew has some information on Wan Li."

Chapter 451 - Elders Meeting

Ma Rong's demeanor quickly changed. "You know about Wan Li?"

"Yes, master." Alex went on to explain everything regarding what happened in the forest, aside from the last part about nearly dying to Black Venom herself.

"Sigh, he's going around killing bandits huh? That damn Black Venom bandits. We tried to find them previously, but we couldn't find them at all. They always work away from the capital, and never in the same place."

"Wan Li knows that, so he might try to move again. You said he was wearing the face of an old man, right?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, master," Alex said.

"Sigh, then it will be more so impossible to find him," Ma Rong thought. "How many elders are still out looking for him?"

"All but the 3rd Elder returned. 3rd elder said that she won't return until she finds him."

Ma Rong nodded when she heard that. "Alright, go and tell the Second Elder to send a message to 3rd Elder to-No, wait. I will do it myself," Ma Rong said.

"No, sister. You can't go out right now," Lang Shun said.

"Huh why?" Ma Rong asked.

"What do you mean why? You stayed cooped up in your house for nearly 2 weeks for closed cultivation and didn't respond to the sect's problem once."

"Did you realize that since you were ill, it has been over a month and a half in which you haven't done your job as the sect leader?"

"Since the sect upgraded to the 1st grade, our student intake has increased. We are transitioning to a better phase, but our sect leader is missing to make the transition easy."

"Of course the elders will start to hate you after that happened. They think you are dodging responsibilities."

"The only reason they aren't taking any actions is that they think you are truly in closed cultivation and not ignoring them. If they find out that not to be the case, then there will surely be some mutiny," Lang Shun said.

"Are they actively talking about this?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes. It's a daily conversation about how you've been missing for so long and don't care about the sect for so long," Lang Shun said.

Ma Rong's face turned slightly cold as she fell into thought. "Very well, I will do something about it," she said and pulled out a medallion.

Without a single hesitation, she sent a message to all the numbered elders in the sect.

Lang Shun got a message in his sect medallion as well and pulled it out before checking it.

"What? Did you call a meeting right now? You are just doing what they think they are doing," Lang Shun said. "Are you thinking straight, sister?"

"I know you worry about me, but you don't have to. Just go to the Elder's hall, I'll be there soon," Ma Rong said.

"Uhh... if you say so, Sister," Lang Shun said and left.

"Did you break through?" Ma Rong asked.

"Huh? Oh yeah," Alex answered.

"You should have let me know before you were leaving," she said.

"Uhh... sister's father was ill so we had to leave in a hurry. I couldn't send a message," Alex said.

"Sigh, I guess that's a valid excuse. Also, I heard there was a beast invasion around the same time, were you safe?" Ma Rong asked.

"Uhh... not really, but it wasn't due to me traveling at all," Alex said as he wondered how he should explain what happened to Ma Rong.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Um, did you hear about the black Jaguar that fought the emperor in the capital?" Alex asked.

"The new saint beast? Yeah, that beast was something I heard about after returning," Ma Rong said.

"Yeah... so I think that beast is after me. Even a week ago, during the invasion, I could feel it coming towards me. I could feel the aura of a saint realm cultivation base," Alex said.

Ma Rong's eyes went wide with shock and fear. "A-A Saint Beast is following you? That's... " Ma Rong couldn't understand what she was to do in this situation.

What was she to do as a master? What could she do against a Saint beast? Not even the ancestors inside the mountain could help her in this situation.

"I... I don't know what to do," Ma Rong said almost apologetically. For the first time, she felt like she couldn't help her disciple even when she knew he was in trouble.

"It's okay, Master. I ran from it once, I will do so again," Alex said. "On a positive note, I can now make True Qi."

Ma Rong got confused for a second. "Wait, you said True Qi? What's your cultivation base right now? Are you hiding it?" she asked.

"No, it's what I'm showing right now, but thanks to my Qi already being dense from the very start, I think it's starting to happen sooner than other people," Alex said. "I can only make a single strand of True Qi for now, but I'm sure I will soon make more after I cultivate a lot."

"Hmm," Ma Rong mulled over the info for a second. "Theoretically, it does make sense that you can make True Qi already. Hmm..."

Ma Rong thought for a second and spoke, "Are we looking at your cultivation base in the wrong way? Are you actually a Mind Tempering 5th realm cultivator, with a really weak aura instead?"

Alex felt like that could be true, but then he thought, 'No, the game's system says I'm at Mind Tempering 1st realm. Also the number of times I have broken through doesn't match up, and there was no way I started with the strength of a Skin Tempering 5th realm cultivator, so I should still count as a Mind Tempering 1st realm cultivator,' Alex thought.

"I guess it doesn't really matter in the end. It actually helps you better since most people underestimate you," Ma Rong said.

"Haha, they sure do," Alex said. "There had been many fighters in Tiger sect that couldn't fathom how strong he was after seeing his cultivation base."

"Alright, go back to your home and rest. I need to go to this meeting now," Ma Rong said.

"Okay, master. I will go and try improving some pills of mine," he said. "Oh right, that reminds me. What happened to the sweating pill? Did you improve it?"

Ma Rong sighed and shooked her head. "The way I am currently, I don't think there is any chance of me showing any improvement in anything Alchemy for a while now," Ma Rong said with a downtrodden face.

"Thankfully, Senior Lai also got the recipe and is improving upon it now. He will either send the improved recipe to me, or the princess will take her aunt back to the capital to have her healed," Ma Rong said.

"I see," Alex said.

"Okay, go now. I will be late otherwise," Ma Rong said.

"Yes, master. Good luck on today's meeting," Alex said and left the room.

Ma Rong stayed in the room for a little longer and finally sighed as she thought forward to what she would have to face in the meeting.

However, she had been away from the elders for quite a while now and at least owed the elders this much.

So, she walked out of her house and flew down.

* * * * * *

"Is sect leader finally leaving her closed cultivation?" an elder asked in the meeting hall.

"That seems to be the case. I don't think she would call a meeting for some other reason," another elder said.

"Was the sect leader really is closed cultivation though? She came out quite immediately after her disciple came back. Seems kinda fishy to me," another elder said.

"Sigh, if sect leader doesn't want to deal with the sect's problems anymore, she should just choose to resign from the position. I'm sure she would still garner the same about of respect as an alchemist either way," another elder said.

"Honestly, I think we should go forth and request a new sect leader," another elder said what they were all thinking on the inside.

"Settle down, guys," the 5th elder said. "Stop making decisions in a rush. Let's hear what the sect leader has to say. Maybe she does have legitimate reasons to ignore the sect's status for 2 weeks."

"Yeah, 5th elder is correct. Let's just have some patience," another elder said.

Lang Shun stayed at the side, a little angry at the elders, but he couldn't do anything as he knew his sister was at fault here.

'Sigh, why did that idiot sis have to leave now?' he thought angrily.

A pair of footsteps rang out as a person walked in. "Oh, thank god I'm not late," the second Elder said as he walked in.

"Haha, Second Elder. Did you lose track of time after spending hours talking with your wife or what?" someone teased.

"You sound pretty jealous, 9th elder. Maybe it's about time you found someone for yourself too," the Second Elder said.

"Sigh, no matter who I find, I doubt I will ever be as lovey-dovey as you and the Third elder," the 9th Elder said.

The Second elder laughed and walked up to his spot before sitting down.

More footsteps sounded from the door and Ma Rong walked in along with the First Elder and the Great Elder.

They walked up to their seats at the front and sat down. Ma Rong had a rather cold demeanor to her now and looked like an ice queen.

She looked at the lot of them and waited for them to quiet down.

"So, I hear you guys have some complaints."

Chapter 452 - My Problems

The elders looked around at each other, not expecting a direct confrontation from the sect leader.

They didn't know how to respond and waited for someone to speak.

"Sect leader," the Fifth elder spoke. "You were ill for a while before you were healed. Are you alright now?"

"Yes, I'm mostly fine, Fifth Elder. There have been some... complications, but it has nothing to do with my health thankfully," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, complications? Is that why you went into closed cultivation? To deal with it?" the Fifth Elder asked again.

"Yes, that was the reason," Ma Rong said.

"So, was it such a bad complication that you had to ignore the sect handling?" the elder asked.

"Can we learn what sort of complication it was, and if you've solved it," another elder asked.

"Oh right! I heard the Sect Leader awaken her constitution. Is that what the complications were about?" another elder asked.

"Yes," Ma Rong said. "Do to my awakened constitutions, I had some problems. It still persists however and I will need a lot more training to solve it."

"Huh? What sort of constitutions require so long to fix? What sort of constitutions create problems in the first place?" an elder asked.

"That right. Aren't constitutions supposed to be just something a body automatically has? It's not like a poison that tries to kill a body, right?" another elder asked.

"How much longer would you say you need to control it all?" an elder asked.

The First elder looked at Ma Rong and sighed. The sect leader was showing too much indifference to the questions and he was worried she would start to give answers without much thought.

The Great elder was also worried but for a different reason. He had decided to keep the awakened constitution a secret, but it seemed it was leaked around somehow. He had also later learned about Ma Rong's inability to make pills anymore and was worried the elders would find out.

If they did, he had no doubts that they would try to throw her away from the sect leader's spot. After all, most of them were around when Ma Rong was named the next sect leader by the previous sect leader and the elders were mostly against it.

They were all looking for a reason to throw Ma Rong away from that spot, and they were just about to get that opportunity.

Ma Rong looked at the lot of them and said, "I will still need many months if I want to properly deal with my new constitution."

"What?"

"A few months?"

"A sect leader can't disappear for that long. We need guidance."

"The sect needs guidance from its leader. We can't have someone who won't deal with the sect for so long keep on becoming the sect leader," the elders shouted.

The Great Elder was shocked at Ma Rong's answer. "Little Ma, what are you doing?" he asked softly.

"It's fine, Master," Ma Rong said from the side.

"Sect leader, we... we can't go on with our sect leader missing for so long. Is there no other way?" the seventh elder asked.

"When did I say I was going to disappear for so long?" Ma Rong asked. "I just said that I need many months to deal with my condition, that's all."

The few elders that were genuinely concerned about the sect breathed a sigh of relief, while the ones that were looking forward to her removal frowned.

"Can you guarantee that you will be available from now on, sect leader?" one of the elders asked.

"No," Ma Rong said. "But that was always the case, wasn't it? There have been times before I've gone on closed cultivation. I understand the sect is growing now, but it's not that different yet, is it?"

"Right, you should take care of yourself, sect leader. We will take care of the sect if you are absent sometimes," the seventh elder said.

The few elders were getting desperate after seeing how well the meeting was going in Ma Rong's favor.

"I heard disciple Yu Ming returned to the sect today, is that true?" one of the elders asked.

"Yes, he did," Ma Rong said.

"Did you meet him, sect leader?" the elders asked.

"Yes, just before this," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, okay. Wait, weren't you in closed cultivation? How did he contact you?" an elder asked.

"Oh, sect leader must've just finished her cultivation when her disciple returned. Although... that's quite a coincidence," another elder asked.

"Sect leader, I hope you're not only caring for your people and not caring about the sect. That would be horrible for us," an elder directly said.

Ma Rong sighed and stood up. The elders were surprised at the sect leader suddenly standing up from the seat. They wondered if she was going to cancel the meeting right here so that she wouldn't have to answer anymore.

"So," she started speaking. "About my constitution. After returning ill from the Forbidden Fields, I was healed and somehow my constitution awoke."

"Now, some of you think I may be lying when I say it's hard to deal with.? You think what constitution could there ever be that would create problems for the person."

"And you would be right," Ma Rong said as he kept on walking forward, surprising the elders. "My constitution creates no problems for myself."

"So... you were lying?" an elder asked in confusion.

"Obviously not," Ma Rong said. "I only said it was problematic and hard to deal with. I never said the problem was for myself."

Suddenly, the air around Ma Rong chilled. Mists started forming around her body as they slowly dropped down to the ground.

The elder closest to her could feel the temperature of the air rapidly going down. When she looked down at Ma Rong's feet, she could see Ice forming on the ground.

Ma Rong took a single step forward, and suddenly the ground where she stepped was frosted as it slowly spread further out the longer it went on for.

The elders around her immediately started using their cultivation base to stop the frost from getting to them, but even then it was cold. They couldn't understand, how something could be so cold as to make them shiver with their whole cultivation base running.

Ma Rong took another step forward and more elders started feeling the chill. With another step, the elders further at the back felt the child.

Soon, the entire room was like a freezer with the ground fully frosted and signs of frost appearing on the chairs.

"S-Sect leader! What is the meaning of this?" someone finally asked.

"This? This is the problem I was dealing with. Without me forcefully controlling my body, you will all freeze solid with just me standing around. Do you still want me to be there for every single minor thing the sect has to do?"

"Because if you really need me, just let me know. I will come right over to where you are and will help you," Ma Rong said with a smile and drew in her naturally flowing Yin Qi.

The elders finally felt some warmth return back to them after Ma Rong returned to her seat. They were scared for a while, but then an elder gathered up his courage and spoke.

"If- if you have a hard time being around the elders, then shouldn't you not be a sect leader? A sect leader is needed in every situation," the elder said.

Ma Rong stopped right before her seat and turned around.

"Are you all so incompetent that you will need a sect leader for everything?" Ma Rong asked. "Of course I will be there when I need to make decisions for things, but I doubt you will need me every single day instead of letting me solve my own problem right?" Ma Rong asked.

"However, if you think I am wrong, then go ahead and vote me out. If you don't want me as a sect leader then I won't stay as one," Ma Rong said.

The elders looked around at the chance and one of the elders raised his hands.

"If the sect leader won't be around to care about the sect, then I say that she doesn't need to remain a sect leader at all," he said.

The other elders looked around. The few who wanted her to go away immediately raised their hands. Of the 18 elders in the room, 7 had raised their hands.

The elders who were concerned about the sect started mulling over the problem too. It was true that the sect leader should get some time of her own to deal with the problems, but not many months.

If there was going to be a problem, then it would be better she didn't remain there and someone more appropriate took her place.

Two of the elders raised their hands as they were concerned about it all.

Ma Rong looked at the 9 people who raised their hands and said nothing. Since it was half of the elders, just a single more hand and Ma Rong would have to leave her spot.

"Sigh, who do you guys want as your new sect leader after I leave anyway?" Ma Rong asked.

"Uh... The first elder would be a good choice," someone said.

"I'm getting old and I am planning on retiring soon, so I won't be a sect leader," the First elder said.

"Oh... uh, then what about Second Elder? He's should be great. He's been handling the sect for a while himself anyway" another person said.

The Second Elder looked towards the person who just spoke and smiled before turning over to Ma Rong as he opened his mouth to speak.

Chapter 453 - Plans

The Second elder looked at Ma Rong and spoke, "Sect Leader, I know you are angry that people didn't let you take some much-needed break, but please don't leave your position just because of that."

"No one in this room right now is more capable than you in handling the sect. I'm doing fine, but I'm nowhere close to you in maintaining all the stuff. If you really leave the sect leader position, it will certainly be the sect's loss without question."

"And when that happens, I will be the first to leave the sect and never look back," the Second Elder said.

"That's… a little too extreme, don't you think?" Ma Rong asked a little surprised that the Second Elder wasn't using this opportunity to elevate his position in the sect.

"No, I truly believe that the sect has improved the most under you. If you leave then there will be nobody in the sect to do the job at the same level," the Second Elder said.

"Now that I think about it, I think the Second Elder is right," one of the elders with the hands up slowly lowered their hand. "If Sect Leader truly doesn't want to leave, then it's a pleasure to keep having her."

"You're right. I was blinded in my hope to do better for the sect. I don't want the sect leader to leave either," another elder said and lowered her hand as well.

"Anyone else wants to raise your hands?" the Grand Elder spoke. The remaining elders looked at each other and started shaking their heads. They were fine with Ma Rong staying at the Sect Leader.

"That settles it then. Sect leader will not be leaving her post," the Grand Elder said.

"Alright, listen up. I may not be around most of the time, but I will still be handling the sect business. I will workaround for a few hours a day for now. If you have anything that needs urgent attention, you may find Grand Elder, the Second Elder, or my disciple to send me a message."

"I will only consider those as urgent," Ma Rong said.

"Eh? What about the Eighteenth Elder?" the First Elder looked at Ma Rong weirdly when she left out his son, her junior disciple brother from the list.

"Elder Shun will soon be returning back to his search for Wan Li. Oh right, Second Elder, tell the Third Elder to look for recent information on the Black Venom group. Wan Li seems to be hanging around in caravans looking for a chance to meet those groups," Ma Rong said.

"I will get on it, Sect leader," Second Elder said as he bowed.

Ma Rong made a few more commands for the other elders. Finally, once she was done, she dismissed the room.

The elders left one by one and finally, only 5 people remained.

"That was quite dangerous, Sect Leader. A single wrong word out of my mouth and you would've lost the seat," the Second Elder said.

"Heh, I knew First elder didn't want the hassle at the old age, and I was counting on you not wanting the seat as well," Ma Rong said.

"What made you guess that?" the Second Elder asked.

"If you were a Sect Leader, you would be separated from your wife for most of the time. Given how lovey-dovey you are, I doubt you would want that," Ma Rong said.

"Isn't it obvious for me to love my wife? She's the best thing that has happened to me, sect leader. She's talented and beautiful, all a man can ask for.? Hehehe, I'm really lucky in that matter," the Second Elder said with a sheepish smile.

Ma Rong chuckled as well.

"So, do I leave now?" Lang Shun asked.

"No, in a few days. Rest for now. The second Elder should call the Third Elder to rest as well. She's been out for way too long," Ma Rong said.

"She loves doing that. I did ask her to return this time, but she's probably gone to some other city by now in search of Wan Li. Well, I will just send this information to her and hopefully, she'll bring back Wan Li soon," the Second Elder said and left.

Lang Shun and his father bowed and walked away as well.

"Little Ma, please stop doing such a stunt next time okay? You nearly gave your master a heart attack," the Great Elder said.

"It's fine master. I was ready to lose my position, so it wasn't really a stunt. I'm still trying to fit into my position with this new disability I have right now," Ma Rong said.

"I was secretly hoping they would let me go so I wouldn't have to feel guilty about it all."

The Great Elder sighed when he heard this. "It's fine, little Ma. You will be able to make pills once again. You only need a little bit of getting used to," he said.

"I hope so, master. I really do."

* * * * * * *

Alex walked out of the pond with Pearl after cleaning up. He wore his clothes and started planning out his next 2 weeks in the sect.

The first thing he needed to do was make some more pills for himself since he had spent most of it in the Rubyroad city and the fight with the bandits.

One of those pills was the mind pill that would give him a much better Spiritual sea.

Since he decided on it, he went into his Alchemy room and started making pills.

Over the course of the day and halfway into the night, he made a lot of pills. He would have to make some more before he could actually have a few stocks with him.

"Hmm, should I make more?" he wondered for a second. "Although, I do desperately want to see how much True Qi I can make with my cultivation base."

Ning quickly decided to cultivate, so he called out Pearl and started cultivating inside the Alchemy room.

Soon, he had fallen asleep.

Alex woke up in the morning to feel a buzz on his storage bag. He instinctively took out his talisman and checked it.

His sleepiness ran away and he looked at the time on the top right. "Master is calling me this early?" he thought and stood up.

"Ow!" he screamed when the soles of his feet hurt a lot from the cuts being crushed.

"Pearl, you can stop now," he said, and Pearl finally stopped with a 'Meow'. "Come here," Alex called and soon sent him into his beast space.

"Woah!" Alex was surprised when he noticed 3 distinct strands of Qi floating in his meridians. He started smiling when he realized that he had more True Qi now.

"Oh wait, so is cultivating the only way to make True Qi?" he wondered. If that were true, then it would take him an incredibly long time for his cultivation base to improve.

At 3-5 strands a day, it would take him forever to convert all the Qi into True Qi.

"Oh wait," he facepalmed himself when he realized where he was wrong. "I can just break through to make my Qi thicker and I won't need to worry about speed."

"Alright, let's go to master's," he thought and walked out. He soon flew over to his master's house and sent in his spiritual sense. The whole house looked empty from his perspective aside from a single spot in there that he couldn't see at all.

He quickly went to that place and greeted Ma Rong.

"Sit down," Ma Rong said.

Alex went ahead and sat down. Ma Rong got into her bag and took out a lot of True Spirit stones, at least 50 of them.

"What's this?" he asked.

"Your payment, from the sect's shop," Ma Rong said. "They said you asked for it to be sent to me."

"Oh right, I forgot about those," Alex said. "Thank you, master."

"Don't thank me, it's your hard work's result after all. There are still a few pills that have yet to be sold. You will get that money once you sell them," Ma Rong said.

"I understand," Alex said. 50 True spirit stones were 5000 spirit stones which were equivalent to 50 thousand dollars in real life. That was a lot of money for anyone.

He had other True spirit stones on him too that he could send back to himself soon.

"Another thing, since you've already understood the fundamentals about making pills by yourself, I will soon start your True pill-making classes. Although, it should take no longer than a single class for you to learn everything."

"The others will just be me looking at you try to make pills. Hmm… given your cultivation base, that might be a problem too. Whatever, I will teach you first, the rest we will do something about it," Ma Rong said.

"Go and practice for now."

"Ok master," Alex said and was about to leave when he remembered something.

"Oh right, I had a few plans for the upcoming few days… I was hoping to get your approval on them," Alex said.

Ma Rong made a weird face. "What bizarre thing are you going to do that requires your master's approval?" Ma Rong asked.

"I don't need my master's approval; I need to sect leader's approval. Having master's approval would be quite nice too," Alex said.

"Alright say what you want," Ma Rong said.

Alex listed out the 3 things he wanted to do and Ma Rong's eyes went wide with each thing he said.

Her eyes started darting around as she forced herself to ask. "Do you really want to go back there again?"

Chapter 454 - Storm

Alex walked through a tunnel.

For the last 4 days, he had spent his entire time either making pills or learning to craft formations on formation rods.

He started off slow and only carved formations with a lower amount of strokes. He was slowly learning how to make the formations on the rod.

During the nighttime, he also went to the Southern Forest for a few hours of fighting. He had his boat with him, which would help him reach the Mind Tempering realm beasts a lot faster.

Thanks to that, he had managed to gather quite a lot of Mind Tempering realm cores. He also killed as many Meridian Tempering beasts as he could to get cores for Pearl as well.

Finally, the last thing he did was send close to 700,000 dollars to his account once more, which he immediately distributed amongst his retirement fund, different shares, and his current account.

Once that was all done and it was the morning of the Friday, he came here, the tunnel to the Forbidden Fields.

It took Alex a bit of explaining to make Ma Rong let him go to this place. However, he finally managed to when he said that he was close to something and only needed a few more Yang Jades.

He wasn't lying when he said that. He was indeed more than 70% done with his Yang Purity and would technically need about 3 Yang jades to reach 100%.

He finally walked out of the cave and looked at the vast grassland as well as the desert further away. There was something far away over there that he wanted, and he was going to get it.

The place was completely abandoned now as this was no longer a punishment place. Thus the elders guarding this place were removed as well.

Alex brought out a single thing before walking down the slope. The thing he got out was a common sword. He didn't bring out his Steel Sword but kept it at an accessible distance in his storage bags as he could take it out later.

He also made sure some foods and pills were at an accessible distance over the other storage bags too. Once he felt like he was ready, he ran.

He took massive steps as he quickly ran down the mountain slope. As he got lower and lower, he could start feeling the force of the outside pushing in his cultivation base and spiritual sense.

Alex tried his best to push it all back using his cultivation base and spiritual sense, but he couldn't.

His spiritual sense could barely push it away a little bit, but his cultivation base was completely useless. Not even True Realm cultivators could use their cultivation base here, so he had no chance.

Alex ran through the grassland and within 10 minutes, he reached the riverside. However, he didn't stop. After all, his destination lied beyond.

Alex jumped when he reached the bank of the river and flew through the air, guaranteed to reach the other side.

However, just as he was landing, he saw a scorpion shake itself out of the sand on the shore. The scorpion immediately targetted Alex who was midair with its tail ready to attack him.

However, Alex wasn't worried in the slightest. There were two things different about him from the last time he had come here.

The first thing was that he knew now that toxins, or at least, all poisons and venoms he had come across to at this point, including the scorpion's venom were useless against him.

The second thing was that he now had a body cultivation base at Meridian Tempering 1st realm, which was a lot different than what he had last time.

So, the scorpion was no threat to him.

He brought up his sword as he reached the other shore and slashed it down before him. The scorpion's tail was cut in a single slice.

With the next strike, he cut the scorpion's head off. Once the scorpion was head, he slashed his sword in midair to throw away any blood that was on it and started walking.

He had about 3 days to go somewhere and return, so he started searching for yang jades along the shore.

He decided to go around in a zigzag way so he could cover the most area while not missing a single yang jade along the way.

He walked for a few hours while constantly fighting the beasts. The beasts around here were mainly around Muscle Tempering, so he didn't have to worry at all.

Alex grabbed the giant snake's lower jaw and pierced his sword from the bottom before cutting open the snake's skull.

He didn't even get out of breath when he killed the snake. It was all too easy for him. At least, for now.

"Damn, why are there no yang jades around at all?" he wondered. He took out a piece of food from his storage bag and ate it.

He was till not getting any sense from his body at all about the yang jades, which was very weird. He walked on for a few more hours and there was still no sign.

Soon, night fell and chilly air started running through the desert, or at least he expected it too, but there wasn't any chill in the air.

"Why does it not get cold in here? Why does it not rain? Why do clouds never stay in the sky long enough?" Alex asked, but there was no answer.

So, he shook his head and walked further along. "Damn this is slow. I wonder if the boat works here," Alex thought and forcefully brought out the massive boat.

Alex could barely cover the entire boat with his spiritual sense, so it was to pull it out under the suppression. Even then, he did it and it fell with a thud.

It didn't float up in the air like it should have so Alex went to the front compartment and checked the True Spirit stones there.

"I see," Alex said when he realized all the spirit stones had grown dull. They has lost their slight glow and were simply a normal stone now.

"Wait, I'm sure I changed these a little while before I? came back to the Scarlet city. So, it must be the environment. Well, it at least proves my hypothesis of artifacts not working here, I guess," Alex thought and put the boat back into the storage bag.

He then looked back and realized that he could barely see the silhouette of the cliffs now. They were so far away.

"How far have I come? 2 kilometers? 3 kilometers?" Alex wondered. The distance from the river shouldn't have been that far away when he really thought about it.

"If logic were to work in this place, given the way the Crimson Empire is set up, there should be an ocean at the top of the map, which is where I'm headed. But…" Alex thought as he looked further ahead.

"It should take me days to fully traverse the whole place. Given the average width of the crimson empire based on the maps, it's about a little longer than the distance between Scarlet city and the Cardinal city."

"So, if I wanted to see the ocean… I would have to walk straight for days. But who knows how dangerous the beasts get as I go forward," Alex thought.

"Whatever, let's just find whatever it is I am attracted to and retu—"

Suddenly, Alex felt a very low level of vibrations from the sand below him. He looked around and saw that the sands slowly slide down from the small dunes around him.

"An earthquake?" Alex thought but it wasn't. The low-level vibration persisted for a while and instead of going away, it got bigger and bigger.

Alex didn't dare move as he was unsure of what was happening and just looked around carefully. Finally, he saw what was causing the vibration.

'A storm?' he thought at first when he saw the clouds, but soon he realized that the storm was made up of yellowish-brown particles.

"A storm of sand," Alex cried out in surprise. He looked around for places to shelter himself, but couldn't see anything aside from the dunes of sand.

He then once more looked at the storm and decided to handle it himself. He braced for the impact and took the full brunt of the storm's attack.

Surprisingly, it was very easy. It looked like the storm wall would be quite dangerous, but there wasn't any damage.

"Oh, it's quite f— COUGH COUGH-COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH" unknowingly, he breathed in a lot of sands in the air and started coughing very loudly.

Without hesitation, he took off his upper robes and hid his face with them. He started breathing through the cloth as he coughed out the sands he had just taken in.

He got onto his knees and hid his face in his laps while breathing through the cloth. He was currently a mortal. A very strong body cultivator, but a mortal nonetheless.

If he couldn't breathe for a few minutes, he would easily succumb to death.

Alex did nothing but keep his face hidden from the storm as the storm raged on for another 10 or so minutes. But these 10 minutes seemed t last an eternity for him.

He waited and waited and waited, and finally, the storm was over. He could finally let go of his cloth.

Alex tried to lift his head up to see if it was alright but soon realized that there was a lot of sand on top of him.

He quickly jumped out of the sand and dusted himself. He started spitting out sand and even took out some water to cleanse his mouth before drinking some.

"God! What was that? I don't want to experience that ever again," Alex thought. He looked around and realized that the general location he was in just now was totally changed.

Nothing around him looked like what it used to just a few minutes earlier. 'That storm changed everything here?' he thought in surprise. He really didn't know a lot about deserts so he was surprised to see this happen.

"Huh? That's weird," Alex thought and spit on his finger before lifting his finger up high. "There was just a storm, why is there no wind anymore?"

This confused him quite a bit, but no matter what he did, he couldn't feel any wind. ' That's not how storms work, right?' he thought trying to remember if the calm after the storm was ever a thing.

Just as he was thinking that he heard something move in the sand. Alex immediately turned back and saw a worm wriggle its way out of the sand.

Alex looked at it and suddenly noticed another one wriggle out, then another and another. Soon, there were nearly 15 worms that came out of the sand at the same spot.

"That's quite unusual. Why didn't your guys come out before the storm? I'm sure I was making more noise before that. Or was it the storm that woke you up," Alex asked and gripped his sword?

Without a single hesitation, he ran towards the closest worm there was. The worm saw Alex approach it and opened its mouth to attack, but a single slash from Alex killed it immediately.

Then, the other worms started making their way towards him too. One after another, Alex killed every single one of the worms.

He chopped in half the final worm and finally sighed. "Damn, that was hard. These were either very high Bone Tempering realm, or low Organ tempering real beasts."

"How are they even here? Aren't there only supposed to be weaker bone tempering beasts here? Or am I mistaken?" Alex wondered.

He looked at the corpses around him but had no way of finding an answer.. So, he just cleaned his sword and started walking in his original direction once more.

Chapter 455 - The Bigger Storm

It was the evening of the 2nd day now, and Alex had gone through 5 more of the same sandstorms as the previous night, each one stronger than the last one.

By now, he had learned his lesson and would immediately cover his face with his robe and wait out the storm. Each time he did that, he would be covered in sand, followed by storm beasts coming out of the sand.

Alex fought those beasts quite easily, but he was still wondering how they were even here at all.

Going in a zigzag pattern, he was barely 20 kilometers off the shore of the river and needed to go on for a lot longer. He was barely starting to feel whatever was on the other side after all.

He took out a yang jade from his storage bag and tried to feel it. His body barely responded enough for him to even tell he was holding the stone in his hands.

He kept it back in and started walking ahead to find some more. "I hope it won't be so hard to find them or going any further would be a waste of time," Alex thought.

It had already been a day and a half since he was searching for the jades, and it didn't seem like he could make it whatever was on the other side that was calling him.

Suddenly, Alex started feeling another set of vibrations. 'Another storm of sands?' he wondered and looked in the direction. But no matter where he looked, there was no storm.

'Where is the vibration coming from then?' Alex wondered.

He walked some more and finally felt another yang jade close by, although it was very faint. Alex ran towards the location, but the stone moved as well.

Alex got apprehensive. "A beast?" he wondered and got his guards up. The faint vibrations still kept up, so he couldn't tell where the beast would pop out of.

Suddenly, a giant, wide snake popped its head from underneath the sand and angrily opened its mouth to hiss at him. Alex held his sword with a strong grip and got ready.

The snake suddenly lunged towards him and Alex stepped aside. He suddenly got up to realize the snake had already followed up its attack using its tail.

Alex was about to put up his hands to block but stopped mid-action. Instead, he took the attack with his chest.

BAM

Alex was hurled back and hit a dune of sand a few dozen meters behind him. He quickly walked out of the sand just in time to dodge another lunge from the beast.

Alex was perfectly fine thanks to the armor he was wearing and took almost no damage.

He slashed his blade at the snake's body and barely managed to make a small cut in it.

'That's a strong snake. Is it close to the Meridian Tempering realm? This is going to be tough,' Alex thought and kept fighting.

Fighting the snake was hard. Despite being so big, its head and tail were very agile and kept jumping at Alex to hit him.

Alex on the other hand constantly tried to cut the snake, but mostly he was doing was simple cuts. "Should I take out the steel sword?" he thought for a second.

"No, I should try that first," he thought and jumped back. He looked for an opening and took a deep breath.

'KILL'

He suddenly jumped towards the snake's body and slashed at it. White light appeared around his blade as he targetted the snake and Alex cleanly cut through half the snake's body.

The snake hissed as loud as it could and sent its tail directly at Alex. Alex brought back his sword in time and directly slashed at the incoming tail.

His Sword Intent was getting way better now and he could deal a lot of damage. So, in a single slash, he cut the tail in half.

The snake cried out even more while Alex felt the force of the tail on his hands. The rebounded energy made his palms sting a little.

The snake started twisting on the sand in pain as blood spilled out of its two major wounds. Alex took the opportunity to jump at its head and pierce through its head.

The snake twisted around a few more times before stopping. It was dead.

Alex took a deep breath and got a little happy when he realized that his sword intent worked in this place.

'So sword intent isn't actual Qi related, huh?' he thought. He knew this already, but he was still surprised to finally have it be proven to him.

Alex was about to go up to the snake's corpse when he felt even more vibrations than before. 'Wait, so it really was not the snake's doing?' he thought.

Still, he needed to get the Yang jade first so he focused on that. He looked through the snake's corpse and finally reached a place where the yang jade could be vaguely felt.

He started cutting through the snake's body and before long, he got the yang jade.

"I got 2," he thought with happiness. He just needed one more and he could happily go back.

Just then, he lost his footing and nearly slipped in the sand. The vibration was very strong this time, on the level of an earthquake.

"Just what is going—"

Finally, he saw it. He had looked for it before, but it wasn't there. However, it seemed to have arrived during his fight with the snake.

The storm.

However, something was different this time. For once, the storm was really, really fast. Secondly, he could see something yellow and black all over the storm.

"What's that?" he thought and looked closely at the storm still far away.

Slowly, a feeling appeared inside him and his eyes went wide. "Those...are yang jades?" he thought as he looked at the thousands of yellow sparks in the sand.

"Then the black—"

He recognized those wriggling and movements in the air too. Those were all the beasts of the desert.

Alex got terrified. The incoming storm was strong enough to send yang jades and beasts flying. If that was anything to go by... he needed to run.

Without hesitation, he put the yang jade in his storage and ran.

Chapter 456 - The Storm That Shook The Empire

Alex ran as he had never run before. Seeing such massive beasts being carried around like toys in the storm scared him. What was worse than it was scary fast, and he would definitely not outrun it.

Soon, he realized that he had to stop. Running was not the way.

'What do I do? Where do I hide?" he thought and looked around, only to see nothing but the dunes of sand.

'Underneath?" he thought for a moment. "I have no choice," he thought and quickly took off his robes to use it as a mask. He then dug a hole as fast as he could and jumped in before covering himself with sand.

He hoped that this would keep him safe from the storm. It didn't.

Massive winds ripped the very sand from underneath Alex as they sent him tumbling away with them.

He barely opened his eyes to see the beasts and yang jades floating around. However, he didn't focus on either of them.

The thing he was most fascinated by was actually the yellow energy inside the storm that he hadn't noticed before. It was bright and strong, and it slowly dying down.

He closed his eyes as the sand started hitting his eyes. Thankfully, the storm wasn't strong enough to harm him at all. It was only fast and not strong at all.

Alex decided to wait out the storm which was already slowing down.

Sometime later, Alex realized that he was just flying through the air by the initial force of the push, the winds were no longer carrying him and he was falling down back to the ground.

He looked around and saw that the beasts and the yang jades were also falling down around the same place as him.

He then looked at the yellow energy and realized, the energy had barely slowed down at all. Even though the wind was gone, the energy stayed.

Alex and the rest of the objects in the air fell on the other side of the river, but the yellow energy kept on going forward.

* * * * * *

Ma Rong was in her room trying to practice her control over her Yin Qi. She let go of all control and white mist started appearing around her body that slowly drifted downwards.

Ma Rong could feel the Yin Qi leaving her body as the ground slowly started frosting over.

Immediately, she breathed in and all the Yin Qi that was floating around her was sucked into her body through the various pores and organs.

Not a single Yin Qi remained outside.

Ma Rong, however, struggled to keep them in for very long. She soon had to slowly let it escape out, although at a very low amount.

She sighed and smiled. She had improved a little at least.

"Finally, I can go about 10 minutes without leaking any Qi. Although, I should find other ways to do this. This one method isn't working," she thought.

She tried coming out with ideas to somehow keep leaking her Qi without it interfering with anything else.

She even thought of using artifacts that could story Yin Qi, which she could later either throw away or maybe even sell for quite a profit.

She thought of expelling every single yin Qi in her house before leaving for anything,

She even thought about practicing some yang-based cultivation method to counteract the yin in her body.

However, none of those ideas was something she could use right now, so she had to wait and think a little longer before she did that.

"Alright, let's continue," she thought and started once more.

She started spilling out her yin Qi into the air and soon her whole room was filled with it. The amount of frost had increased by a lot and the overall temperature of the house was starting to get colder than the Northern Continent.

"Now, to take in," she thought and took a deep breath.

Suddenly, she felt something go past her. Something... warm but at the same time burning.

The Yin Qi in the room disappeared like water on a piping hot metal. The room immediately defrosted, and it was just a puddle of water now.

Ma Rong herself felt that she had completely run out of Yin Qi.

"What... just happened?"

* * * * *

"Alright, the meeting is adjourned," Wen Cheng said as he sent the elders away. It was past evening, so it was time for him to return to his house too.

However, he soon realized that one of the elders had stayed behind. Wen Cheng was quite surprised.

"What's going on, elder Jung?" he asked.

Elder Jung was one of the main elders that were in charge of the disciples. He was the de-facto leader amongst the group of elders responsible for working in the Disciple hall.

"Um, sect leader, I had a little something to speak to you in private," Elder Jung said.

"Please say it. We are as alone as we can get," Wen Cheng said, very curious as to what this elder who rarely wanted to talk with him had to say.

"Uhh, this is about disciple Mei. Do you happen to know where she is?" the elder asked.

"Of course. She's currently back home. Her father is a little ill, and he's looking after him," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, I see," elder Jung said, fidgeting a little.

"Elder Jung, if you have something to say, please freely say it," Wen Cheng said.

Elder Jung sighed. "Sect leader, did you know that disciple Mei took a 2-week break before leaving?" he asked.

"Yes, I was the one that took the leave for her," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, that makes it a little easier to explain then. You see, sect elder, Disciple Mei's official leave ended yesterday. I thought that was an error and decided to wait today for her to return, but she didn't."

"Still, I left her as absent on leave for today as well. However, if she truly isn't back by tomorrow, I can't keep her absent on leave on Monday," Elder Jung said.

"Sigh, so that's what you wanted to talk about," Wen Cheng said. "You can put her on Absent without notice, elder Jung. You can also make her rank available for grab. If any disciple chooses to take it, they may. You do not need to feel guilty about this."

"Ah, I see. You've already thought of the consequences. I shall do that tomorrow then. That is all, sect le—"

"Sect Leader!" someone came running into the room. The elder who had just walked in was a younger one, and Wen Cheng frowned when he saw that.

He was about to scold the elder for barging in without notice, but then he saw the horror and confusion on the elder's face.

"What happened?" Wen Cheng asked inquisitively.

"The... The Treasury room, sect leader, " the elder spoke. "Something is happening in the treasury room."

* * * * *

"Do you really think we can't kill the Jaguar at all? The 3 of us together?" Fu Zexian asked.

He was currently in a large, white room with crimson furniture, drapes, and carpets. He was sitting on a large chair with two other chairs in front of him, facing towards himself.

On one of the chairs was an ordinary-looking man wearing simple attire. But this was heavily contrasted by his clean-shaven face and stark red hair. He also had a very haughty attitude that made him stand out more than the Emperor he was before.

On the other chair was a thin man with long jet black hair. He was quite good-looking, but he had a rather fat mustache that didn't seem to match with his face.

These were the two Saint realm cultivator named Yang and Feng.

"You didn't feel what we felt, brother Zexian. That beast... that monster, it was on a different league of its own," the long black-haired Feng said with fear in his mind at just the thought of the jaguar again. "Tell him, brother Yang."

"It's true, brother Zexian. We keep telling you, but you don't believe us. That beast is truly very strong," the red-haired Yang said.

"I understood that it's strong. But this time you will have me too. Last time, I was alone in the fight, and you two joined very late, which was why the Jaguar ran away at that time," Zexian said.

"And then two weeks ago, you two went chasing it and lost."

"But this time, if we meet it, we can all fight together from the very start. There is no way the beast could survive us at that time, right?" Zexian asked. He truly didn't like thinking that there was a beast out there that could destroy half of his empire before he even realized it was attacking.

"Brother Zexian, brother Feng and I barely entered the Saint Foundation realm a few decades ago. You have been in the Saint Foundation realm for almost a century now, so there is no way I doubt your strength, brother."

"However, please believe me when I tell you this, that beast... its cultivation base should be beyond the Saint Foundation realm. It's definitely in the Saint Core realm," Yang said.

"What? No way," Zexian said in surprise. "If it truly is in the Saint Core realm then why hasn't it attacked us already? I see no reason for it to return every time it attacks."

"In fact," Feng spoke from the side. "I wouldn't be surprised if it were in the Saint Soul realm either. We are just assuming at this point because it showed us a level of power we had never seen before. Not from you, not from the old man."

"Yes," Yang said. "As for why it doesn't attack us... I do have an idea. I think the beast isn't really intent on harming us at all. You said it spoke about it wanting something right?"

"Yes, it said something about duty to acquire something. I didn't listen pay much attention at the time," Zexian said.

"Yes. It said the same thing when fighting us too. It seems to not want to resort to violence unless necessary, so when we fought, it didn't harm us. Instead, it asked to let way to get something," Feng said.

"You think if we give what it wants to it, it will leave us alone?" the Emperor asked. He was willing to let go of something if it was for his empire.

"Unfortunately, we have to clue," Yang said.

"No, we do," Feng suddenly said. "You remember the flying boat?"

"What flying bo-Oh, the one you talked about. You should know my eyes aren't as good as yours, brother Feng. I couldn't see anything at that time," Yang said.

"What's this about a flying boat?" Zexian asked.

"You see there was this weird little boat flying away in the direction the jaguar was going towards, just moments before we arrived. I barely managed to see its shape from far away," Feng said.

"You think that boat had what the beast wanted?" Zexian asked.

"Yeah. Although we don't know what it was, so searching would be troublesome," Feng said.

"That is tru—"

Suddenly, the 3 of them stood up and looked towards the west. They were all frowning and slowly starting to sweat.

"What was that?" Yang asked.

"I don't know, but it felt... strong," Feng said.

"That's... not a person. Neither is that a beast. Just what was that energy," Zexian asked.

"That felt... dangerous too," Yang said.

Zexian suddenly took out a talisman that was slowly glowing and spoke into it. "Yes father, I felt it too. I will look into it," he said.

Zexian felt defeated.

"First the beasts attack, then Zexi disappears and now this. Just what is happening in this empire," he frowned.

"Finding a way to deal with the beasts should be our number one priority, brother Zexian," Feng reminded.

"Yes, I know. But the other two can't be ignored either," Zexian said. "You two don't need to worry, I will find an answer to it all.. For now, I will send a small unit to find out any information they can in the west."

Chapter 457 - The Storm That Keeps On Shaking

"What do we do now, father?" a person asked.

"Don't worry, child. My time will come. Be like me, look how many years I've waited for my chance."

"It was taken away from me, yes, but I still have a chance. Especially now that I've realized where the sect treasure is," an old man said.

The two father-child were inside a cave in the Southern Forest. All around them were dead bodies of what seemed like bandits.

The younger person was wearing a hooded figure while the father was out in the open seemingly unworried about people recognizing him.

"Sigh, if only you have figured it out earlier, I could have helped you. Then, you wouldn't have to have your clone die to that bitch's disciple's hand. How did he even do that? Weren't you guys' cultivation base suppressed there?" the hooded figure asked.

"Yes, it was. But that kid was also a body cultivator. If I had a few more Yang Jade, then I would have won against him. Unfortunately, most of the yang jade on this side of the river was gone," the old man said.

"So, what will we do now? How will you sneak there this time?" the hooded figure asked.

"I'm... still thinking. I'm thinking of finding the boy while he is alone and taking his body to use as a clone. But I can't harm him that much. It's such a strong body, it will definitely help me in my ambition," the old man said.

"Just kill him. We can find another," the hooded figure said.

"No!" the old man shouted. "I told you. You need to learn patience. As I said, I will do something. You don't need to worry about anything."

"Sigh, I understand, father," the hooded figure said.

"We might need some help. You got information about those ban—"

Suddenly, the old man stopped speaking. His body convulsed a little and his eyes went wide. The hooded figure showed no response and was instead confused by their father's unusual behavior.

"Father?" the hooded figure asked.

"It's matured," the old man said.

"What? What are you talking about father?" the figure asked.

"It's... it's matured."

Horror filled the old man's face as he spoke softly. "I wasn't expecting that. This is... sooner than I thought. My calculations were wrong?" the old man contemplated for a second.

"Father? What matured?" the hooded figure asked.

"No, no. It hasn't matured... yet. There's still time, but just a few months of it. Maybe 2, maybe 4. Definitely not more than a year though," the old man said.

"Father, please explain what is happening," the hooded figure asked.

"Didn't you listen to me?" the old man said as he whipped his face towards the hooded figure, with his eyes shining brightly.

"It matured."

"What did?" the hooded figure asked.

"The Sect Treasure."

* * * * *

"Is he dead yet?" a voice asked.

"No, he's holding by a thread. But I don't think he can stay for much longer," another voice said.

"Sigh, another failure," the voice said.

"We might have found him already if you came with me, instead of going out searching on your own," the second voice said loudly. Its voice shook the very white marble they were standing around.

"Stop shouting," the first voice said.

"Oh? And what will you do?" the second voice said again. The both of them started snarling at each other.

Suddenly, something else ran into the hall the two of them were in. The two of them stopped bickering and turned to look at the newcomer.

"What?" the angry voice asked.

"Senior, the child is dead," the newcomer said.

Both of the two of them suddenly grew quiet. "You made sure?" the first voice asked.

"Yes, senior," the newcomer said.

"Sigh, another dead," the second voice said.

"How many is that now? 9?" the first voice asked.

"Yes, just over the course of 4 different instances too," the second voice said.

"Sigh, I should have not doubted the feeling at that time and immediately ran. We were searching for so long, and the first hope we see, I screwed it all up," the first voice said.

"Just forget about that backwater empire, and come follow me next time. The Luminance empire has weaker blood there, but it's a lot of it. We will surely find some for sure," the second voice said.

"No, this one is the one we need. I can promise you. I've never felt someone feel the bloodline this clearly before," the first voice said.

"Urghhh! Fine, do what you want. Hey, you," the second voice shouted.

"Yes, senior," the newcomer spoke.

"How many more drops of blood can the fountain make, go find out," the second voice shouted.

"Yes, senior," the newcomer left.

"You're worried?" the first voice asked.

"Yes, I don't think we have that many left. Maybe 4 at best," the second voice said.

"I'm sure this on from the Crimson Empire will be successful," the first voice spoke.

"As I said, do what yo—"

Suddenly, both of their faces changed.

"What was that?" the first voice asked.

"It came from the north," the second voice said.

"That... that aura reminded me of master's majesty, it's... what is that?" the first voice said.

"Whatever it is. It doesn't belong here," the second voice said.

Both of them showed slight fearful expressions as they kept staring towards the north to feel more.

"Senior, I've come with bad news," the newcomer had come once again. Only this time, he was huffing like he had sprinted at the top of his lungs to reach here.

The two of them finally got out of their stupor and looked at the newcomer.

"Bad news?" the first voice was surprised.

"What's wrong?" the second voice asked.

"It's... its the fountain. Lady... Lady Ren checked the fountain again, and she doesn't know if its because of the excessive use lately or not, but... but it- it seems to be not working as well," the newcomer said.

"Boy speak more clearly. What's wrong?" the first voice said.

"Get to the point," the second voice ordered.

"Yes," the newcomer gulped and said. "The fountain can only produce a single more drop of blood. Any more, and the fountain will turn useless."

"What?" the both of them were surprised this time.

"A single more use?" the first voice said in shock.

"Brother, I see that we may not have as many chances as I had first thought of.? Are you really sure the one you found is the one?" the second voice asked.

"Yes, absolutely," the first voice said.

"Very well," the second voice said with determination in its voice. "I will help you out this time. We'll go together."

* * * * *

An old man was in closed cultivation, fully focused on improving his cultivation. Suddenly, his eyes opened and he turned around to look at the wall behind him.

However, he was seeing much further than that. He took out a talisman and called someone. Soon, he got an answer back and started contemplating.

"Is it opening up again?" the old man thought. He still remembered the last time the secret realm opened up, nearly 1200 years ago.

He had lost his elder brother that day, along with all the talented kids that had entered the secret realm that time.

Ever since then, all the seven families of the Luminance Empire had stopped sending their kids to the secret realm.

"However, is it time again? Has enough time passed such that it's desperately calling us back again?" the old man thought. "It must be the secret realm too that is sending these monster hoards at us. We must answer back."

He then took out the talisman and contacted someone. Soon, he would contact every one and would get the youngsters to go back to the secret realm once more.

* * * * *

Alex skidded along the shore of the river and was thrown into the grasses. However, he didn't spend a single moment in the grass and immediately stood up.

Without a single hesitation, he threw away the sword in his hand and picked up his storage bag to bring out the Steel sword.

Just as the Steel Sword left his bag, he dashed backward and rolled under a giant scorpion. His sword suddenly glowed white and he slashed its belly from underneath.

Both and guts fell from the scorpion which he quickly dodged. He jumped out of the way of a snake's tail and landed on top of the scorpion's tail.

He immediately cut the tail of the scorpion corpse and jammed it onto the snake just as it attacked him. The snake fell to the ground in pain and Alex cut its head off to relieve it.

He caught the snake's giant head and opened its lower jaw. He then stabbed his sword through its mouth right where the venom sack would be.

Purple venom flew down the sword until it was completely coated in it. Alex finally pulled out the sword and looked all around him.

Alex could clearly feel all of the many Yang Jades that were on the ground near him. His body was getting overwhelmed with happiness, but he calmed himself down. He had one more problem to deal with.

Dozens of snakes, scorpions, centipedes, worms, and lizards were starting to surround him. However, Alex showed no fear. He held his sword tight and carefully scouted out the strong beasts.

His eyes skitted around looking for any sudden movements from the many beasts. These were all beasts thrown away by storm from way far away.

So, there was no way any of these were weak by any extent of the imagination.. Still, Alex took one final breath and went into battle.

Chapter 458 - Something Shiny

Alex cut the head of the final snake and emerged victoriously. There were cuts all over his body, his left arm was fully broken and there was a large hole on his shoulder plate from a scorpion managing to sneak attack him.

Blood had stopped flowing by now thanks to the intense healing capabilities of his body, but still, the pain was all over him.

He huffed as he barely stood over the corpse of the snake he had just cut. Alex's legs slipped on the snake in the water, and he fell in the river too.

Thankfully, he was on the shore, so he didn't drown.

The clean water slowly took away all the blood and grime on top of him, as well as the venom and poison on his body and the blade.

Alex was thirsty, but he was too tired to take out his water from the storage bag, so he simply opened his mouth and drank the clear water that was flowing above him.

A few minutes passed as he let his body heal as much as it could and finally stood up. He looked at the many beasts that he had cut up.

Most of them were at the Organ Tempering realm with some being in the Meridian tempering realm. If it wasn't for his Sword Intent, he would have likely had to run away from this battle.

"Arghh!" he cried out from the pain and accidentally saw something yellow glowing on the ground.

"Oh, right. The yang jades," Alex thought and started limping along the shore to start gathering yang jades.

There were hundreds of them around him, and all of them were giving him the feeling of attraction he always felt towards them.

He went around the field, navigating through the blood and filth, trying to find all the jades left and right.

It took him more than 10 minutes to get through all the Yang jades in the field. When he was done, he had nearly 300 yang jades. The number alone made his mind go crazy.

He wanted to immediately grab a handful of them and eat them, but he controlled himself and stored them in his storage bags.

Finally, he looked back at the massacre he had committed and was surprised at just how cruel and vicious it all looked. Yet, he felt nothing towards it all since most of them were trying to kill him too.

That was after all how life was in this world that may or may not be a game.

'Sigh, I just need to learn to be more decisive when it comes to fighting other humans,' Alex thought.

He was about to turn around to return when he saw something glint in the night light. The moonlight reflected off of something shiny and immediately caught his attention.

"Huh? Did I miss a yang jade?" Alex wondered and went towards the object that glittered. Even when he reached there he couldn't clearly see what it was.

The shiny object was crushed under a broken statue of some sort. Alex pushed away from the half statue of what looked like a lion's back, though it was nearly impossible to tell what it really was with the amount of destruction it had suffered.

Once the statue was off, Alex finally saw what the shiny object was.

"A ring?" he looked at the shiny object with a hint of surprise and confusion. The ring looked to be of the perfect size to fit his finger.

It was mostly made out of gold except for an extremely shiny large ruby on top of it. The ruby was of an oval shape with a 2-centimeter length and 1 centimeter of width.

'This isn't bad looking,' Alex thought and looked at it a bit more. There was nothing on the ring except that made it look anything extraordinary aside from the ruby, however.

"Yu Ming!" someone cried out loud.

Alex suddenly turned around and saw people not very far away. He could clearly see them all, but they couldn't see him at all in the night with their cultivation suppressed.

"Disciple Yu!"

"Yu Ming!"

Multiple people had come looking for him.

'Why are they here?' Alex wondered.

"I'm here!" he still shouted and called the elders that had come looking for him.

"He's here, everyone," someone cried out and everyone started to converge towards Alex.

Alex decided to hide the ring for now and stored it in his storage bag. Except… the ring didn't go in at all.

'Huh?' Alex was surprised. He tried once again to send it back in, but no matter what he did, he couldn't send it back in at all.

"What's going on?" he was surprised. He tried some more but to no avail.

In the end, the elders were right about to see him, so he quickly hid the ring on the inside of the pants and walked forward to meet the elder.

"I'm here, elder," he said as he limped forward.

"What? Disciple Yu, what is up with all of these wounds?" the elders started asking.

The elders were focused on him, and Alex could see that they couldn't see the many bodies behind him.

'That's for the good maybe,' he thought. He told them that he fought some beasts and was injured as a result.

The elders helped him walk properly, but they were slower than he would be if he skipped on a single leg all the way. Still, he decided to just take the help and didn't complain.

They walked up the cliff and soon Alex could see Ma Rong's figure at the top. She seemed to be there with the Grandmaster, the First Elders, and many other prominent figures of the sect.

Ma Rong could not only see her disciple wounded and limping, but she could also see the many beast corpses far away near the river as well as the desert that seemed to have now extended well beyond the river.

"Did he do that?" Grandmaster asked from the side.

"You saw those beasts die yourself didn't you?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yeah, but it was so small that I couldn't even tell them apart," Grandmaster said.

"I guess that's true. But yeah, as a body cultivator, he should be able to kill the weaker beasts close to the grassland," Ma Rong said.

Finally, Alex and the elders arrived up at the clifftop. Ma Rong immediately took out a pill and handed it to him.

"Thank you, master," Alex said and quickly ate that pill. All the wounds in his body, the broken left arm, and the gaping hole in his shoulder plate were all healed subsequently.

"Are you okay? I saw you fight with quite a few beasts," Ma Rong said.

"Oh yeah, I'm fine," Alex said. "Why are you guys here though?"

"Sect master said there were some disturbances in the Forbidden Fields and called us. We were worried about you, so we sent out elders," the First Elder said.

"Oh right, there were the desert storms. But I thought the storm ended at the riverside. I didn't know it moved forward too," Alex said.

"There were storms in the desert?" his Grandmaster asked.

"Yeah, I was deep into the desert, but then the storm threw me back," Alex said.

"We will talk about this later. You should rest for now. You've been in the desert for 2 days," Ma Rong said.

"I'm fine. Although, I will take some rest," Alex said.

"Thank you, elders, you can all return now," Ma Rong said. Alex bowed towards them as well. Then, all of them left.

Ma Rong took Alex to her house and walked inside. The Grand Elder and the First Elder walked in as well.

"What actually happened? Tell me," Ma Rong said.

"Umm… I already did, master," Alex said. "There was a storm and I was sent flying away by the storm."

"What about the beasts? I don't see why there should be so many beasts on the shore of the desert. That was an ungodly amount," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, those were also sent flying by the storm," Alex said.

"Ah, I see," Ma Rong said, but her eyes showed a certain amount of shock.

"I see, tell me more about this storm then. Go into as much detail as you can," Ma Rong asked.

Alex told her what he could. He told her it was a storm that only carried sand, that it was really strong, and that It came from somewhere in the north.

"Nothing else?" Ma Rong asked.

"Umm… no master," Alex said.

"I see," Ma Rong said. "Thank you for your time, First Elder, master."

"It's alright. I'm just glad to see my grand disciple doing fine," the Grand Elder said.

"I will take my leave then, sect leader," the First Elder said and left along with the Grand Elder.

"So, were you successful on your venture?" Ma Rong asked.

"Ah, right," Alex thought as he brought out a few Yang Jades and showed them. "See? I found so—"

Just as he brought it out, the bright yellow color of the jade faded to light yellow, before fully fading. All that was remaining now was a simple white jade.

"Huh? What's going on?" Alex was surprised for a second. "Wait, is this?"

"Oh no!" Ma Rong gasped. "I'm so sorry, I didn't know they would fade away like that," Ma Rong said.? She seemed very sorry about what had just happened.

'I see,' Alex thought. ' No wonder master's Yang Jades faded so fast before too. She has a yin constitution so it's obvious.'

"It's fine, master," Alex said.. "I've got hundreds."

Chapter 459 - 100%

"Hundreds? So many?" Ma Rong asked in surprise.

"Yes, the storm flew many of the yang jades in the desert over to the riverside. Thankfully, the storm was mostly concentrated in one area, so they all dropped at the same time. But that meant that I had to fight will all of those strong beasts too," Alex said.

"Right, I meant to ask you this before," Ma Rong said. " Those beasts… they weren't weak, were they?"

"No. I would say they were around Organ Tempering realm to Meridian Tempering realm in strength," Alex said.

"I see… so you are that strong now, huh?" Ma Rong said. "Alright, go back home and rest for now. I will see you tomorrow to teach you Alchemy as I promised."

"Oh, about the procedure to make True pills? Nice. I was waiting for that all week. Alright then, see you, tomorrow master, "Alex said and left.

Ma Rong watched Alex walk away and sighed as a sad face took over her. "Just when will he catch a break?" she thought.

Alex went into his house and jumped into the pond to wash once more. When he was done, he looked at the time and saw that it was only 10 pm right now.

It was still too early for him to just start cultivating, so he wondered if he should eat those Yang Jades right now.

He took one out and his body hungered for him to eat it. Suddenly, Alex remembered something.

"Oh no," he thought and immediately logged out of the game. When he was out, he felt an intense need to use the bathroom as soon as possible.

He hadn't been out of the game in over 2 days. Just under 2 days was the recommended number of hours the doctors said was good for your body, and Alex crossed it by quite a few hours easily.

Once he was out of the room, he felt hunger like he hadn't felt in a while now. He made his way to the kitchen and ate all of the leftovers that Emily cooked for him every day.

Not only that, but he also prepared some food for himself and ate those as well. Only then was his hunger finally satiated.

Once he was done, he returned back to his room and entered the game again.

Alex opened his eyes back on the courtyard where he had logged out. He once again took out a Yang Jade and looked at it.

Since his body hungered for one still, he put the yang jade in his mouth and swallowed it.

Suddenly, he felt the hot Yang Jade melt in his tongue and flow down his throat. Then, he could start seeing the notifications once more.

The numbers surprisingly started from a random point in the middle and counted upwards. Soon, his yang Purity reached 80% and stopped.

He could feel the remaining Yang in his body whittling away for some reason after it reached 80%. The Qi in his meridian got a little denser and the reduction of quantity was filled by the remaining yang Qi in the Yang Jade that he didn't get to consume.

"Just 2 more and I can reach 100%. I wonder what sort of improvement I will see when I reach 100%," Alex thought.

So, he took out another yang jade and ate it. Soon, he was once again seeing the different notifications that said that his body was purifying the Yang Qi.

After a few more minutes of pain, his Yang purity reached 90%. No extra Qi was remaining, so he could tell that he was missing some Qi that he could probably cultivate back.

Alex couldn't wait, so he took the final piece of the yang jade he needed and ate it. Immediately, he could feel the pain once again, but he was used to it now.

1%, 2%, 3%…

He patiently waited and watched as the number went up steadily.

51%, 52%, 53%…

Alex was really excited to reach 100%. He waited and waited and waited for a long time. Finally, it was coming to a close.

97%, 98%, 99%…

"Just one more," Alex thought.

100%

<Congratulations, your Yang purity had reached a 100%>

Alex felt his meridians suddenly have less Qi in them, but way more compared to previous times, but not a lot.

From what he could tell, his Qi was compressed to the amount that he could probably compete to a Mind Tempering 7th realm, or maybe even 8th realm cultivator in terms of pure Qi density.

Those cultivators still had a lot more Qi, but Alex certainly had about the same density for sure. If he was to fight the others only on Qi-based attacks, he was sure to survive easily for quite a while.

This game is quite a strong advantage in his fights against others in the Tiger sect, or even in real fights. Although, real battles had more variables than just Qi.

He waited for more notifications to pop up, but none did. He waited some more but nothing happened?

"Wait, that's it?" he thought. "But I reached 100%. Isn't something supposed to happen now?" Alex wondered. But no matter what he thought, he didn't get any answer.

"Whatever, let me try another one," he thought and pulled out another Yang Jade from his storage bag. Without hesitation, he put it in his mouth and swallowed.

Then, he just waited for the notifications. As expected, they appeared.

<Sun God's Divine Yang body disintegrates everything>

<' Yang Jade' has been consumed>

<You've gained 21,254,666 Qi>

"What?" Alex was surprised. The Yang Jade only gave him Qi, instead of giving him more Yang purity. Also, the number of Qi wasn't even that high. In the Mind Tempering realm, the number of Qi required to breakthrough was in the hundred million.

He tried eating one once more and realized that it gave a similar amount of Qi once more.

"What's going on? Am I really done with Yang purity?" Alex wondered. He was extremely disappointed by the current way things were going.

"Even as a Qi resource, this is too low of a Qi number. I can get way better results by just eating a single Mind Tempering 1st realm monster core," Alex thought.

He was utterly disappointed by the yang jades. "And here I had nearly 300 of them. What the hell did I fight such a hard battle for?" Alex started wondering.

He sighed and just sat down. "What do I do now? I was so excited even," he thought. He felt like his head would start hurting at any moment now.

Suddenly, he remembered something.

"Wait for a second… didn't…" he tried remembering as well as he could, and he could clearly remember it.

"Song Zun did use the Yang Jades to improve just his skins. Maybe I can do that too. Didn't he use a formation or something?" Alex wondered and thought back as well as he could.

"Huh?" he suddenly thought. "Wait… didn't Song Zun make a formation on the ground? He didn't use a metal plate or metal rods. He just simply made a formation on the ground."

"How did he know that?? Didn't sister Xing tell me that it was a big secret that formations without metals were possible?" Alex thought.

He was getting more and more suspicious about who the person was that the Clone Song Zun belonged to. Not only did he have some strong techniques like the illusion technique, or the Concealment technique. He also had the knowledge to make formations without Qi or metal.

That was really something Alex found curious. He tried to remember what the formation looked like. From what he could remember, the formation had a certain design.

He quickly took out a random metal plate and started making strokes on it to form the formation he remembered. When he was finally done with the formation, he looked at it.

What he was looking at was definitely a True formation, but whether it was a realm formation or if he made a mistake, Alex sent out his Qi on the formation to check.

Surprisingly, despite seeing it a single time, he was able to properly recreate the formation on the metal plate, and a working one at that.

'Well, I don't know what it does, or what I should draw it on,' Alex thought. He took his chance and drew the formation on the ground as Song Zun did. He even dropped Yang jades in the middle, in almost the same way as he had found it.

Still, nothing happened. In the end, he was left with nothing but a desire to find out more. He quickly took back all the Yang jades.

"Sigh, I should just cultivate for the night now," he thought and sat on the grass. He called out Pearl and talked with him for a bit before starting cultivation.

Soon, Alex was once again feeling pain all over his body. He then closed his eyes and soon he fell asleep once more.

When he woke up, it was early in the morning, and the sun had just come up from the east.

Alex felt his storage bag vibrate a little. He stopped Pearl from cultivating any further and sent him back into his beast space.

Suddenly, Alex could feel something that he couldn't before at all. His eyes widened as he experienced this feeling in his body for the first time.

"Holy Shit!" he called out in absolute shock. After all, he hadn't been expecting this at all.

"Nearly 5% of my total Qi has fully turned to True QI."

Chapter 460 - True Pill Training

Alex checked his Qi once more but there was no doubt that about 5% of it was True Qi. He was only in the 1st Mind Tempering realm and was already 5% of the way into getting ready for the True realms.

He stood up and checked his aura, but he realized that there wasn't any difference in it.

"Hmm... so it's only because I have such a thick Qi that I got to make so many Qi into True Qi huh?" he thought. "I wonder if I will get more True Qi when I log out."

He couldn't know that until he tried, so he forgot about it for the moment. He took out the talisman from the storage bag and looked at it.

"Oh, she's teaching me in her house? I thought she'd come here," Alex thought with a surprise. Since it was time for his alchemy lessons, he left.

He went to his master and sent out his spiritual sense to find her. Surprisingly, she was already in the Alchemy room practicing her own Alchemy.

Alex walked up to the alchemy room and stayed outside, waiting for him to finish. He could see her struggling to control the fire.

'Why did this happen to her?' Alex couldn't help but feel bad every time he thought about his master losing her alchemy skills.

He kept watching until she was barely able to make a pill. She pulled the pill out of the cauldron and put it in the pill tester.

34%.

That was the harmony the pill tester showed the pill had. An alchemy master that could make Heaven grade True pills was now struggling to make a decent Earth grade one. In Alex's eyes, that was one of the cruelest tragedies life had played on anyone.

'Still, 34% is quite a progress,' Alex thought.

"Oh, you are here? Come sit down," Ma Rong said.

Alex walked forward and sat in front of her with the cauldron in between the two of them. Ma Rong took back her cauldron. She caught Alex's gaze at her pill tester.

"Sigh, yes. Your master has indeed fallen into such a dire state. I can barely make such pills," she said, half-mocking herself.

"I-It's fine, master. 34% is still 34%. I'm sure you will be able to increase that up to 50% and make Heaven grade True pills once more," Alex said.

Ma Rong flinched a little when she heard that and her face twisted to show a hint of agony and sadness she was hiding inside.

"Is something wrong, master?" he asked.

Ma Rong took out the pill she had just made and threw it to Alex. Alex caught the pill and looked at the pill trying to understand what was wrong with it.

He checked the color and smell of the pill as well as he could, and that was when he realized.

"This is a common pill!" he said in surprise.

"Yes. Your master has become so incompetent that she can't even make a Heaven-grade common pill now," she said.

"But... But just because your Qi turned into Yin Qi shouldn't mean suddenly losing so much ability, right? As far as I can understand it should only affect the temperature," Alex said.

"No, it's different. My Qi affects the temperature, yes, but it also affects the energy. Do you remember about the attacks that my body stopped so easily?" Ma Rong asked. " Similarly, it also stops all energy that comes close to my body. So, if I stay close by, the ingredient's energy in the cauldron starts suffering too."

"That's why its so hard. If even the energy of the cauldron starts being hampered with due to my body, it's impossible for me to do anything," Ma Rong said.

"That's... there much be some way to control it, or maybe even suppress the constitution altogether right?" Alex asked.

"I... don't know, but it's not your problem to think about. For now, focus on yourself. It's not like your own body doesn't have mysteries that need some explanation either," Ma Rong said. "You are just as unique of a person as me, perhaps even more so."

"Okay," Alex said after seeing Ma Rong not wanting to talk about it at all.

He took out his cauldron and kept it on top of the fire. While the cauldron started heating up, Ma Rong started explaining.

"Do you know the theory behind making True pills?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, just the theory," Alex said.

"Tell me," Ma Rong asked.

"Uh, making True pills is the same as making common pills. The only difference is that True pills have a few ingredients in them that are of True rank, which requires one to be in the True realm to use," Alex said.

"Hmm... the fundamentals are at least there," Ma Rong said. "Do you know any more?"

"Umm, I know a lot of miscellaneous information, but nothing concrete regarding just the True pills," Alex said.

"That's understandable. Alchemy is not something someone just randomly writes about for someone else to learn for free. Most of the people out there want to use it to earn money."

"Given how expensive ingredients can get if they want to improve upon their Alchemy knowledge, they have to use their information to finance themselves. Even then most won't give out everything they know since that could bring up potential alchemists that could surpass them," Ma Rong said.

"So, it's better not to fully rely on those books as everything there is to about alchemy. Most of the important information is always kept close to the chest."

"For example, you don't need to be in the True realms to make True Pills, you just have to have True Qi. I believe I've told you this before," Ma Rong said.

Alex thought for a second and said, "Yeah, you did say something to that effect. It was so long ago that I completely forgot."

"That happens. Anyway let's start the lesson," Ma Rong said. " Do you know the recipe for the Chromatic Disillusionment pill?"

"Yeah, I believe so. It's the pill that makes people see the colors perfectly such that they can separate even the most similar shades of the same color, right?" he asked.

"That's the one. Do you have the ingredients for it?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex looked into his storage bag for a minute, and then finally answered, "Yes, I've got about 8 sets in total."

"Alright, it's not the most important pill so we can waste it for training," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded and took out all 8 of the ingredients set.

"Thankfully you have some True Qi, or It would all just be us talking for today," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, you can see my Qi? It's about 5$ of the way to True realm now, "Alex said.

"Yes, I wouldn't have let you make any pills today otherwise," Ma Rong said. "Okay now, do you know which one of the ingredients is the main ingredient in the pill?"

Alex looked through the list of ingredients as well as what they did and finally answered. "The Rainbow Peacock's feathers?"

"Yes. Those are the main ingredients. There are other 2 ingredients that are semi-important, but those come at the final end of the pill-making portion, but we won't reach there today," she said.

"We won't?" Alex asked in confusion.

"Start!" Ma Rong commanded without explaining anything.

Alex put his first ingredient inside of the hot cauldron and started moving it almost instinctively.

'Oh, should I switch to True Qi for this?" he wondered. He thought for a second, but since he was making True Pill, he needed to switch for sure. So, he started moving his True Qi around his body and started bringing it—

"Don't use True Qi. Keep using your normal Qi," Ma Rong said as he kept track of everything that was going around her.

Alex nodded and stopped using True Qi. If his master said he didn't need it, then he truly didn't need it. He continued moving the ingredient around until it was all powder and all of its energy had escaped.

Without asking his master for further instruction, he immediately put in the 2nd ingredient too. The energy from the ingredient escaped out faster due to his taking it slow and the heat getting to move onto the ingredient at a fast rate.

The energy from the second ingredient mixed with the energy from the first ingredient, and soon resulted in another energy.

Alex looked at it all with a very confused look. 'This just feels like a normal pill-making process to me,' he thought.

"Focus," Ma Rong said as she noticed his change of expression. Alex nodded and put in the third ingredient too.

Ma Rong felt the third ingredient disappear into powder soon and felt the energy settle in the cauldron.

"Use your True Qi for the next ingredient," Ma Rong said.

"Okay," he said and nodded. He took out the fourth ingredient and put it in. Alex could see that the fourth ingredient was the Rainbow Peacock's feather.

He moved his Qi around and brought out his True Qi. The True Qi felt weird, almost not belonging to him. But he could perfectly control it, so he knew it was his.

He used the True Qi and followed the recipe. He moved the ingredient around inside the cauldron and could feel quite a strong energy being released from it.

This energy was of a level that he had never before felt. His eyes went wide as he sensed the strength of the energy compared to the other energy that was released before.

"So that's what a True rank ingredient feels like, huh?"

Chapter 461 - Final Lesson

Alex was shocked after sensing the sheer difference in the quality of the energy as well as the density of it. The overall strength of the True rank ingredient's energy was starting to easily overwhelm the energy that already existed in the cauldron.

He also sensed his Qi during that time and saw that with almost half of the ingredient's energy released, he had also done about 30% of his own True Qi.

He was confident in fully turning the ingredient into power and mixing it with the other ingredients, but then he wondered what he was going to do with the other 2 ingredients that came towards the end of the recipe.

'Hmm... master did tell me not to worry about it,' Alex thought.

"Switch to normal Qi," Ma Rong suddenly said.

"Sorry?" Alex was taken off-guard by the command. He even thought he heard wrong.

"I said, stop using True Qi, and just use your normal Qi now," Ma Rong ordered.

"But master, there is still a bit of the ingredient left. It's still releasing energy," Alex said.

"I know. Just do it," Ma Rong said.

Alex was still confused a little but decided to do what she said. His flow of True Qi stopped and his normal Qi once more started releasing from his hands.

The remaining True Qi he had already sent out did what they could towards the end of the ingredient's energy-releasing process.

Everything worked fine with True Qi. But once it ended, and the normal Qi touched the ingredient, the still releasing energy of the ingredient suddenly fought with his normal Qi.

Alex's Qi was dense enough to Turn into True Qi, but they weren't as strong as True Qi themselves. So, while he struggled against releasing energy to control the ingredient, inevitably, he lost.

Suddenly, he lost his connection with his Qi, and the whole Alchemy process came to a staggering half.

Alex panicked. He immediately sent back more of his normal Qi, but the hot ingredient was constantly releasing the energy, and his normal Qi couldn't fight against it.

The energy inside the cauldron started going into instability. Alex realized what could happen next, so he immediately sent out his True Qi to control the situation.

However, it was all too late. Even with sending in his True Qi, the energy was reaching the limit of instability and was moments away from disaster.

Just then, cold energy flowed towards the cauldron. It entered the fire, the cauldron, and the energy inside of it. Suddenly, all of the energy that acted agitated inside, had calmed down to a level that Alex couldn't even believe.

The cauldron was now as good as unused, even though it had been sitting on the fire for the last few minutes.

"Thank you, master," Alex said.

"You realized what the difference between True Qi and normal Qi has when it comes to making True rank pills?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes. The energy in the True rank ingredients of True rank pills are hard to control, and without True Qi, I shouldn't even try. Only the True Qi can fully control the energy from True rank ingredients," Alex said.

"Yes, you've understood the most important part. Taking that logic, can you guess why a True realm person might not find a common rank pill very useful?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "is that because their True Qi naturally suppresses the energy in the common pill, so it becomes not very useful?"

"Uhh, you're not wrong, but you're not right either," Ma Rong said. "A True realm person does in fact show those signs, but what about if the True realm cultivator has suppressed his cultivation base? What then?"

Alex fell into thought again, only this time the answer was taking longer and longer to find out.

"Don't think so hard. The answer is actually much simpler than you think," Ma Rong said.

"Uh... it's not because their body is used to True Qi, so anything lesser doesn't affect them, right?" Alex asked. That was the first answer he had thought of but disregarded it because it sounded... simple.

"That's exactly it. Due to cultivation day in and day out, a normal True Realm Cultivator's body is used to having True Qi in his body. So even when the True Qi leaves his body, he cannot fully make use of the common pills anymore."

"If you truly want to give a pill to such a person, then make sure it's a True pill. Of course, if you have Saint pills or higher, they also work very easily,"? Ma Rong said.

"I see," Alex said.

Ma Rong went on to teach him about making True Pills for a little while longer. Alex attentively started listening to everything Ma Rong said.

The amount of information was honestly not even a fraction of what he had learned from the books in the capital and other libraries. However, none of them ever gave such important information directly for free.

After an hour or two of teaching, Alex's Alchemy lessons were finally over.

"That's it. That's all I can teach you today... or maybe even forever," Ma Rong said. "Come find me if you have trouble. Aside from that... I don't think I have anything else to teach you that you don't already know," Ma Rong said.

"Don't say that master. No matter if we don't have lessons anymore or if I ever get better than you, you will still be my master," Alex said.

Ma Rong smiled. "That's all I needed to hear," she said. "Sigh, alright, you can go now."

"Okay master," Alex said and got up to leave.

"Oh yeah, wait," Ma Rong said.

"Yes?" Alex stayed behind and waited for her to continue speaking.

"Your other two requests. You can go do them both today," Ma Rong said.

Alex's eyes immediately went wide. "Thank you, master. You've no idea how long I've waited for this," Alex said.

"Are you confident though?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yeah, quite a lot. I had less confidence for the second one, but with you around, it should be successful too," Alex said.

"Alright," Ma Rong said. "I will let the elders know. You can take their help if you want later on."

"Thank you, master," Alex said. "By the way, which mountain did you decide to give up on?"

Ma Rong shook her head and said, "I couldn't decide, so I went to discuss it with master. He said that it would be better to use the one on the right."

"Any specific reason?" Alex asked.

"Yes. The mountain on the left is surrounding by the Elder's quarters in between that mountain and ours, Pill testing Swine stable to the back of it, and Core disciple mountain to the other side."

"I cannot sacrifice a mountain that has such a great amount of life around there. If something goes wrong, we will need those elders and students and swine to have their home," Ma Rong said.

"I see, that's understandable. Since the one on the left is next to only Inner mountain, but that too is very far away. So, even if something goes wrong on that end, it will be safe for the others," Alex said.

"Ok then, I will go clear it out later on just in case. Goodbye, master."

Alex left. He went back to his home and after spending a bit of time understanding what he was taught, he logged out.

He was out of the game at around 9 pm. He wasn't hungry at all from the massive dinner he ate last night, so he returned back to the game after a very light breakfast.

Alex debated on whether to do what he needed to do right now or not but thought that it would be better to do it in the veil of the night when most of the disciples would be back in their houses, unknowing of what he was doing.

"Alright, let's prepare for now," he thought and brought out some formation flags and started messing with them. He checked if they had any imperfections or anything that was out of place in those flags.

Once he was absolutely sure nothing was wrong, he moved on to different things to pass his time. He made some more pills during this time.

He now had 3 Mind Elating pills, the pills he had created that gave someone increased intelligence. He had decided on naming them Mind Elating pills on a whim.

These 3 pills were some of his best works amongst his self-made pills. Two of the pills were of 54% Harmony, while the third one was of 57% harmony.

He had practically given up after that. Unless he fundamentally improved his understandings of how pills worked, he didn't think he could rely on anything other than luck to improve the pill now.

He spent the next portion of his day making different formation plates and formation flags that he still had. By the time he was done, he had a few more formations he could sell.

He even tried a few with his remaining True Qi and was very surprised with how well they worked.

Once night came around, he finally left his home and walked down the mountain to the sect valley.

The valley was as festive as ever with the people happily going about their night. Alex looked around and decided to go towards the right.

He soon found someone elders and spoke to them.

"Good evening, elders. Master must've told you what I'm here for, right?"

Chapter 462 - The Two Tasks

Alex was handed many empty storage bags at once by the elders.

"Sect Leader told us you would need these too," one of the elders said.

Alex took the bags and nodded. "I will need these for sure," Alex said.? "Alright, then. I will get on with the work."

He walked into the Alchemy garden on the side of the inner sect mountain and immediately started picking up all the ingredients that were ready.

That was the only thing he needed to do now. One after another, he picked up every ingredient he could see. Whether they were roots, leaves, fruits, flowers, branch, stem, or any part of a plant that could be used in alchemy, Alex picked it.

The elders kept watching on the outside, while he worked tirelessly on the other side. It took him about an hour and a half to pick up every single ingredient in here and make sure that there were none here that could be harmed needlessly from what he was going to do.

Once he saw that there wasn't anything left, he was finally ready. He walked up to the top of the mountain at the very peak and looked around him. He looked at the sect valley in front of him down below.

He saw the sect leader's mountain on the left and the inner sect disciple's mountain on the right side.

He then slowly turned around and saw nothing but jungle for a long distance until it ended and there were no trees behind there.

'So the desert goes on for quite a long time, huh?' Alex thought. He stopped looking around and checked for a suitable spot.

'Hm, maybe master knows which spot would be better. It might be better to call her,' he thought. So, he took out his talisman and sent a message to her.

He tried to look around and figure out in the meantime, no matter what he did, he couldn't find out at all which would be a good location.

After 10 minutes, Ma Rong came to the top of the mountain, next to Alex.

"You picked up all of the ingredients already?" she asked.

"Yes, master,"? Alex said. "I need your help a little right now."

"Regarding?" Ma Rong asked.

"I wanted to know if you have any idea which spot would be better. I think we can put it in any place, but maybe you know more," Alex said.

Ma Rong kept quiet and looked around to search for a spot. "I don't see anything special around this place, so we might have to go with anything we want," Ma Rong said.

"If... if there is no special spot, then we should make one," Alex said.

"How will you do that?" Ma Rong asked curiously.

"With this," Alex said as he brought out something from his storage.

Ma Rong saw her disciple pull out a wooden box and slowly open it up. Inside it was a small flower that had 5 petals, all of which were bluish-black in color.

The center of the flower was a little white, but that was the only light color in the entire flower. The moment the flower showed up, Ma Rong felt the familiar aura that was about the same as her, but far more stable and reserved.

Her mind started churning out information until she was left with a single answer that widened her eyes in surprise.

"An Umbra Lotus. Those are incredibly rare. Where did you get one?" Ma Rong asked.

"This was one of the items auctioned off in the Pink Cloud Auction house during the break day in the competition," Alex said.

"You bought this? This should've been quite expensive," Ma Rong said.

"Oh no. I tried to buy this, but I couldn't. Zexi kept on outbidding me. But... in the end, it still came back to me," Alex said.

"I see. So, what do you think we should do? Wrap using the flower?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yeah, I think so," Alex said.

"Very well, let's try," Ma Rong said as he reached into her storage bag. There she brought out a small wooden box as well, and slowly opened it.

Alex could see a pill on the inside of the box. Only, it was not a pill. 'Finally, after so many months of waiting,' he thought.

"I hope we can do it," Ma Rong said as she stared at the seed in her hands. This was the seed to the Yin Gathering tree. It was a very hard seed to find, and even harder to grow.

Ma Rong has spend quite a lot during the first auction Alex had gone to with her to get it. The only reason she hadn't spent a lot more was due to the Yin Gathering Tree not having a great chance at germinating.

But, with the Umbra Lotus, it would now have a really high chance since it would have a head start in the quality of the Yin Qi from the very beginning.

"A seed that is rarer than the Spirit Cleansing lily, eh?" Alex thought. "I hope this works out."

"I hope so too," Ma Rong said. She slowly lifted the Umbra Lotus towards herself and wrapped all 5 of its' petal around the seed. The flower wasn't very big, to begin with, so it could only barely wrap the seed in it.

Ma Rong then lowered them both onto a small hole on the ground she had prepared and buried it. Then, she released some of her own Yin Qi and scattered it around on the soil so that the tree could have an easier time finding Yin Qi when it started.

"Do we have to keep the place away from the sun?" Alex asked.

"No, the dirt will do that for us. Once the seed has started germinating, at that point there will be no need to keep it away from outside Yang energy so it will all be okay," Ma Rong said.

"I see," Alex said. "So we're done here?"

"I believe so. I will come back once a week or maybe more frequently to cultivate here. While I try to practice containing my Yin Qi, the tree will get benefits from me doing that at least," Ma Rong said.

"Okay, since we're done. Let's go to the next one," he said.

Ma Rong nodded and flew down to the gate. Due to the formations around both of the Alchemy gardens, they couldn't just fly away.

Alex and Ma Rong then quickly went to the other side of the sect to the second Alchemy garden.

Alex stopped out of the gate and looked at the formation that was set out of the Alchemy garden. "We should set it on the inside, right?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, that's better. Although, are you sure we shouldn't call someone that actually knows about formations to set them?" Ma Rong asked.

"Do you not trust your disciple with setting a formation?" Alex asked jokingly. "Besides, it's not a formation we can reveal to someone so easily. You will understand once it has been set, master."

With that, Alex went in. Ma Rong followed behind and went on to see what he was doing but all Alex did was walk around. He reached the very peak of the mountain and looked down.

"What are you looking for?" Ma Rong asked.

"For locations," Alex said. "I need to make sure the nodes are perfectly aligned on the same altitude, or the same orientation if they're on different altitudes."

"I will have to set 3 different formations for it to work as effectively as it did back there," Alex said.

He stopped speaking and looked around to find the most suitable placements. Once he thought he had it, he walked over to the places.

He took out a formation rod and started digging a bit of the ground. The more inside the formation was in the ground, the better it would be for the Alchemy garden. After all, many of the trees and plants got their nutrients from the root.

So, if he could make the soil they grew on rich with Qi as well, then it would be a great success.

Ma Rong stayed up on top of the mountain and watched her disciple put in one after another formation flags.

She was surprised how well he was handling the task he had put upon himself. 'So he really knows how to make and set formations, huh?' he thought with surprise. 'I wonder who taught it all to him.'

Not only was he getting great in alchemy, but his formation skills were also above average too. And that was considering he was making and setting True formations.

Alex went around the mountain to place down the formation flags in the night and occasionally went back to the peak of the mountain to check if his angles were correct. Once he made sure they were, he went back down to plant some more flags.

It took him nearly 3 hours to just plant those 24 formation flags. He might have finished it earlier if he didn't have to dig for all of them. Unfortunately, he didn't have any convenient earth technique that could move aside the ground for him.

Once they were all ready, he flew back to the peak of the mountain and looked down. "That... looks symmetrical to me," Alex said. "Don't you think so master?"

"Yes, it does seem that way, but I'm not sure how well it will work," Ma Rong said.

"I guess we will have to find out," Alex said.. "To start with, why don't you go and pour in some True Qi on that node."

Chapter 463 - Formation Set

"Which one? Any?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex looked down and pointed at 3 different nodes and said, "Those 3 nodes. As long as the Origins in those nodes are filled, and assuming I set everything properly, it should work."

Ma Rong nodded and flew down to one of the nodes Alex had pointed at. She released her True Qi onto the node and started pouring it out as much as she could.

Alex watched from above and waited for the formation to start. As for Ma Rong, she struggled to activate the node. No matter how much she tried, she just couldn't get the formation to start.

In the end, she couldn't help but be sure that she couldn't do it. "It's not working," she said.

Alex frowned. "That shouldn't be the case. These nodes seem perfectly fine," he said as he flew down next to her.

He then checked the nodes to see what the problem was and realized that the node was unusually cold, even frosted at places.

"Ah, it's your Qi, master. I think the Yin Qi is stopping the formation from running as well as it should," Alex said.

"That… so my body is at fault again?" Ma Rong softly spoke and stopped pouring in Qi. "Just how much trouble is it going to give me?"

"It's okay, master. Take your time getting used to your constitution. It shouldn't take that long now," Alex said.

"Sigh, I know," Ma Rong said. "Anyway, what should we do now?"

"Hmm… maybe we should call some other elder. We need someone to pour in more tru—"

Alex stopped speaking. He suddenly looked back and felt the air. The node had defrosted a little and Alex could start feeling the Qi in the air.

"It's working," he said under his breath.

"What?" Ma Rong asked.

"It's working," he shouted. "Haha, it's working, master. You did it."

Ma Rong looked around, but she couldn't tell anything. Everything including Qi and air came to a complete standstill when they were near her, and the only thing she could possibly feel now was auras.

She tried to feel the air, but nothing happened. "What's supposed to happen?" she asked.

"It's Qi, master. Qi is gathering in this area," Alex said. "I hope this means the other formations will work too. Let's go, master."

Alex then flew over to the next node with Ma Rong following right behind him.? Once he reacher there, he let Ma Rong work on it again.

Ma Rong wasn't sure what happened to the last node, but her disciple said that it was working so that was all she needed.

He put aside her hesitation and started pouring her Qi into the node and waited for it to work. But once again, despite her constant pouring of Qi, it didn't show any signs of working at all.

Alex waited for a few moments and said, "Master, can you stop for a moment?"

Ma Rong nodded and stopped pouring in Qi. She was about to be disappointed about it not working when she saw her disciples concentrated face. She waited for a moment and saw his face put on a smile.

"It's working," he said.

Ma Rong couldn't help but sigh. She still couldn't tell anything. Somehow, even her spiritual sense was cold, so she couldn't even use them to feel most of the time unless she focused on keeping her Yin Qi inside.

"I can't even tell if they work. Let's just go to the next one," she said.

"Uh… but you can, master," Alex said. "Look behind you."

Ma Rong didn't know what he was referring to and turned around. Suddenly, her eyes went wide as she visibly saw Qi and energy start gathering on the mountain.

The 5 colored Qi was moving all in front of her face, going left and right as it flowed with the wind.

"How?" she asked.

"I think I understood what is happening, master," Alex said.

Ma Rong turned to look at him inquisitively and waited for him to tell her what she had figured out.

"So, just as how all energy and attack lose momentum near you, the Qi you pour out onto the formation also suppress the formation from doing anything at all."

"However, the moment you stop using it and the Yin Qi gain their freedom, they go back to functioning normally and the formation starts working."

"Or at least that's what I think is happening," Alex said.

"I see. That… makes some sense," she said. There was still a lot of mystery surrounding her new body, but at least she was learning something.

Her eyebrows got together when she squinted a bit and started thinking. She suddenly released a lot of energy from herself and stopped her connection.

She couldn't watch the Qi in the air, but she could see the small wave of condensation in the air. The Yin Qi that wasn't under her control exhibited no similar properties to what they did when they were inside her.

She suddenly had an idea. "-ster."

"Master," Alex called repeatedly.

"What?" Ma Rong asked after waking up from her stupor.

"I said we should go to the final node and get it done with," he said.

"Oh right, let's go," Ma Rong said and moved. Alex flew behind and finally, they were at the final node.

Ma Rong was a lot more confident this time and didn't hesitate at all as she poured in her True Qi onto the final node. She poured it for quite a while before she stopped.

She looked at the slightly foggy mountain with the five-colored Qi and waited. As she did, more and more of the same Qi started appearing around them. She smiled as she watched the mountain fill with a very dense Qi.

"This is amazing," Alex said as he looked at the fog. "It's not on the same level as the one from the southern forest, but this alone is amazing."

"This is not similar to that place?" Ma Rong asked in surprise.

"Oh no, it is. It's just that since the formation there had been going on for years, there is no chance a formation created just minutes ago would compare to that. We will have to wait for a few years," Alex said.

"Oh, and how much Qi do these formations take? I hope they don't steal a lot from the True Spirit vine down below. That would be horrible," she said.

"Huh? Oh, did I not mention it yet? This is all the energy this formation needs. There is no more requirement," Alex said.

"Huh?" Ma Rong asked in confusion. "I thought all formations needed a power source, which is always either spirit stones, spirit vine, or some other ingredients that are very rich in Qi," she said.

"You are not alone in thinking that, master," Alex said. "However, the fact is different. While you do require a power source, it already has one."

"You see there are 3 different formations in this place. 2 of them are Element Convergence formations, while the last one is a True Qi Delivering formation."

Alex then pointed behind him at the multicolored fog and said, "that which you can see is the work of the 2 Element convergence formations. Its job is to gather different energy from the surrounding that belonged to one of the 5 common energies."

"It converges Yang and Yin energy as well, but just as night comes along, the Yang Qi disappears, and just as the day comes along, the Yin qi disappears, so it's not possible to see them getting gathered," Alex said.

"Not like they are that freely available out in the open without certain circumstances."

Ma Rong looked at the fog. Now that she was looking for it, she did in fact notice certain bluish-black Qi floating in the air. 'So Yin Qi is there, huh?' she thought.

"Oh right, what about the single formation? What's its job?" she asked.

Alex sighed and shook his head. "This is one of the reasons I was so vehemently against getting formation setters, master. This is one of the main reasons," Alex said.

Ma Rong started getting curious. "What does this one do?" she asked.

Alex took a deep breath and said, "It's a True Qi Dellivewring formation. It gathers True Qi from the air and uses it to sustain whatever formation is created inside of it.

"The formation this formation makes is a little different from the rest. Instead of spanning across a large amount of land, it only works in a certain… circle," Alex said.

"Or maybe saying just around the outer circumference would be better. Since that's all where it works. It gathers True qi just on the circumference."

"If you happen to have a formation working in that circle. It works as the power source for that formation," Alex said.

"Wait, so it's a formation that powers other formations?" Ma Rong asked in surprise.

"Yeah, and that's not even the best part," Alex said. "Normally, if you use this, you would have to constantly put in more True spirit stones to keep them working."

"However, there is a neat little trick that one can do," Alex said. "If you make it so that the formation's outer circumference is the same path is where the formation itself is, then you can keep the formation running forever."

"That is what is happening here right now. I've set the 3 formations in the same circle and set the formation to work in that circle as well."

"So, not only will it automatically fuel the other two formations, but it will also fuel itself for eternity."

Chapter 464 - Improvement

"So, it's a self-sustaining formation that will also sustain the other 2 formations forever?" Ma Rong asked with her eyes wide open. She was in absolute shock from the information she had just received.

She tried making sense of what her disciple said, and while it did make sense, she still had a hard time believing it.

"It's one of those 20 formations then?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, master," Alex said. "You can see why I tried to do it all by myself, right?"

"Yeah, this would've led to a lot of serious question and answer if other people found out we knew about this," Ma Rong said.

She turned back to look at the formation and took a deep breath. "I will have to remake a few rules regarding the Alchemy gardens," Ma Rong said as she started contemplating a bit.

Alex flew back to the top of the mountain and looked down, but he couldn't see anything clearly. The fog was starting to reduce his visibility by a lot. Still, he could tell how rich the Qi in the air was and knew for sure that most of these ingredients would grow with a lot better output rate.

He then tried to think of everything he'd done and anything that he had missed. Once he made sure that there were no problems with the formations, he happily flew down next to his master.

He waited for a few moments before Ma Rong was done talking into her medallion.

"Master, I believe we are done here," Alex said.

"Oh, let's go back then."

Alex nodded and walked out of the gate of the formation. There were a few people curious about the fog in the alchemy garden and were gathered around.

Alex turned one last time to check the garden and started feeling pride in what he had done. The level of ingredients that they would have now would be amazing.

He beamed with happiness as he turned around and went back to his house. Now that both of the Alchemy gardens were fitted with different things, given that the seeds they put in the right first alchemy garden grew, the Hong Wu sect would have a better grade of disciples.

He walked back into the courtyard and sat down, thinking what he had to do next. He had 4 tasks in his mind when he first went to Ma Rong.

He wanted to help her germinate the Yin Gathering tree using the Umbra Lotus that he had.

He then wanted to use the formation flags that had been in his storage forever.

He wanted to make the Mind Elating pills and eat them soon enough, and finally, he wanted to reach 100% with his Yang Purity.

Now that he thought about it, he had mostly done all of it. The only thing remaining was to eat the Mind Elating pills.

Alex brought out the 3 pills and looked at them. "I currently have a 25-meter wide spiritual sense. If the same increment is to be had, then my next 8 breakthroughs will increase me by about 24 meters, bringing me to 50 meters."

"Woah, isn't that equal to what master has right now?" he thought. "So if I eat these pills, my final spiritual sense will go farther than master's."

He still deliberated if he should eat the pills right away or not. He didn't know if it was better to eat them now, or later.

In the end, he decided to separate them by 3 realms. Every 3rd Mind Tempering realm, he would eat one.

So, he kept back the pills into his storage and stopped thinking about them for now. He looked at his storage bags and saw the many ingredients he still had.

'I need to make some more pills. Should I directly go for True pills now? For that I will have to have more than just 5% True Qi,' he thought.

So, he decided to cultivate for the few coming days and focus less on everything else. However, before that, he had something he needed to do.

Alex opened his status page and looked at it. Since it had been a while, he already had quite a few Qi he could use.

He was about to click the button when he stopped. 'Can I not breakthrough on my own?' he wondered.

He had thought about it for a while but always stopped thinking about it. Now that he had come to this spot, he finally tried wondering about it himself.

"How do people break through again? By cultivating was it?" Alex thought. That was something impossible for him. Even if he knew how one broke through during cultivation, that was not something he could do himself.

'What is wrong with me?' he wondered. 'Everyone in the real world can cultivate without falling asleep, except me.'

He had tried finding the answer to that, but no one else suffered the same thing as he did.

"Whatever," he thought and hit the button.

Suddenly, his body convulsed as a massive amount of Qi went through his body, improving it all at once. Some of the Qi also went through his brain to improve his mental ability.

He was now on Mind Tempering 2nd realm.

"If I couldn't compete with Mind Tempering 7th realm now, I can be called nothing but a waste," Alex thought.

He could tell that he should be quite close to Mind Tempering 8th realm in terms of fighting ability too. After all, his Qi density was definitely there.

Alex then sent out his spiritual sense and saw that it was between 28 and 29 meters in terms of the distance he had. 'One more realm and I will eat that pill,' he thought.

He was not starting to think about focusing solely on cultivation for the next few days.

At the same time, Ma Rong was also in her home improving herself.. After starting the formations successfully, she had gotten a new sense of motivation as well as some ideas on what she could do next.

Chapter 465 - True Pill Making

Ma Rong had realized that it was not her Qi that was the problem, but rather her connection with the Qi. Yin Qi was naturally cold and dark,? but never to the level as what Ma Rong was showing.

Which meant that the main problem lied with her body and not her Qi. So, instead of reeling in her Qi and not letting it overflow, she should be trying to reel in what her body did.

Meaning, she had to find a way to suppress her body enough to keep it on the same level as when she had it unawakened.

There were ways she could do that, but none of them felt as good as the most dangerous one she could think of.

Ma Rong sighed and looked back towards the Forbidden Fields, for that was the only thing that could truly suppress her.

******

A week had passed in the blink of an eye and Alex opened his eyes after cultivating for the entirety of the night. He now had around 20% of his total Qi as True Qi.

He had also learned that after 20%, his Qi wouldn't change to True Qi no matter what. Meaning, that even if he cultivated forever, his Qi wouldn't turn to True Qi if it was already there.

The next thing he had learned was that if he did not cultivate, and instead let his body gather Qi passively, then he wouldn't get True Qi at all.

So, if he ever spent all the 20% of the True Qi he had, he would have to go back and cultivate all over again to gather it. And given how he was using it, he definitely needed to do that.

For the last week, aside from cultivation, he had also started making True pills. While he wasn't really good at it due to having not as much True Qi, or due to energy in the pills being too strong to control with his barely formed True Qi.

Alex stood up and went back to the alchemy room to make the pills once more.

He put the cauldron down and started putting in his ingredients. He started with pills that had recipes where barely any of the ingredients were in the True rank so that he didn't have to worry about it much.

He put in his first ingredient and started stirring it. Since it was a common rank ingredient, he didn't have to worry much for now.

He did the same thing for the second ingredient, which was also a common rank ingredient, and soon the energies from those two ingredients were started to mix with each other, resulting in another energy.

The third ingredient was the one Alex needed to care about. It was the first True rank ingredient of the bunch.

Alex put it in and immediately sent out his True Qi to control it. Since he wasn't even in the True realm yet, the amount of True Qi he had could be considered to be barely any.

And that was enough to maybe make 2 pills with it all. So, Alex had to be extra careful not to overuse it.

He started moving the ingredient around and soon it released its energy. He continued moving it around until it released all of its energy, and only then did he finally get to go back to common Qi.

Once the energy was released, it very quickly overwhelmed the rest of the energy in the cauldron and dominated them to become the final resulting energy in the cauldron.

Alex then went on to put the rest of the ingredients. The next 3 ingredients were normal ones and only required his common Qi. So, he easily finished turning them all to powder and the energy released from them mixed together with the energy in the cauldron.

The 7th ingredient was also a True rank ingredient, so once more he had to use his True Qi to make a powder out of it. The 7th ingredient has particularly strong energy, so he had to fight it to not let it use up all of his True Qi while making sure he didn't lose control of them either.

He could feel his True Qi drain at an abnormally fast speed and by the time he was finished with this ingredient, almost 8% of his original 20% true Qi was gone.

The energy from the 7th ingredient was the one that gave the current energy in the cauldron the most change. The two energy collided with each other and threatened to destroy the cauldron.

To stop them from being so volatile, he had to use his True Qi once more to control them. With that over half of his True Qi was gone.

Alex sighed thinking just how much True Qi was required to make a single pill. However, once he remembered he wasn't even in the True Realm yet, he got happy again.

So, he focused back on making the pills.

Fortunately, there were only 4 more ingredients remaining and every single one of them was common ingredients.

So, Alex quickly turned them all into powder and the energy released from them mixed together with the other energy and quickly formed final energy that would go onto the pill.

Alex formed the pill using his normal Qi but then used his True Qi once more to use Elemental Guidance. Elemental Guidance using his normal Qi wouldn't be able to move the energy at all.

Suddenly, his pill-splitting Qi escaped from his body started splitting the pill into two. Once they were done, a vortex appeared from the pills and started devouring the energy.

Unfortunately, since they used common Qi, they couldn't devour the energy at all. So Alex had to keep using his Elemental guidance to keep making the pills.

Once he was certain that he couldn't force any more Qi into the pills, he sighed and stopped.

He barely had 5% of his True Qi remaining how, so he simply sighed and shook his head.

Chapter 466 - Elder

The cauldron lid opened and Alex pulled out 2 different pills and looked at them.

[Skin Smoothing pill: 14%]

[Skin Smoothing pill: 15%]

Alex chuckled a little when he saw that. Even when he tried so hard and did everything right, he could barely make Mortal grade pill. Even if the pills did not split, he doubted he could reach above 20%.

"Sigh, I have a lot of ways to go with making True pills," he thought. Since he was practically out of Qi, it was time to stop.

So, he took back his cauldron and properly stored his pill. Then, he logged out.

It was early in the morning of a Sunday, and he had nothing to do today. The only thing he planned on doing was going to the Tiger sect today since it had already been 2 weeks since he came back.

He went out to get his breakfast and met with the other girls. Since he didn't have much else to do that day, he decided to go on a date with Emily.

They went to a theater to watch a new movie and watched whatever movie was out at the time. The movie they watched wasn't as good as they had hoped it would be, but the time they shared was fun for both of them.

They went to a cafe next and spent some time there too. Then they went around the city just roaming, having a fun time.

Around 3 pm, they returned back home and Alex went back to his room to log into the game.

Once he was back, he stood up from the alchemy room and went over to Ma Rong. He sent out his spiritual sense to check for her, but couldn't find her anywhere.

"Master?" he called out, wondering if he missed her somewhere since it wasn't like he could see her with his spiritual sense.

He got no response, so he turned around to leave. Just then, he saw his master walking up to the house.

She looked tired and not very well. Her face was pale, and the stride in her feet gave away her fatigue.

"Master, are you alright?" he asked as he ran up to her. He grabbed her by the arm and helped her walk.

"Yes, I'm fine. I'm just a little tired," Ma Rong said. She continued walking to her house, and Alex brought her there.

During the entire time, there was just one thing that Alex couldn't understand at all. 'Why am I not feeling scared?' he thought.

Ever since Ma Rong awakened her constitution, Alex couldn't help but feel scared around her, but now, he didn't feel anything.

In fact, he really didn't feel anything.

"Master, what happened to your cultivation base?" Alex asked worriedly. To him, she was nothing but a mortal right now.

"Don't worry about it. It will be back in just a few minutes," Ma Rong said. After Alex took her to her room, he could finally not feel cold in this place.

Ma Rong sat down and immediately started cultivating. Soon, tiny bits of Qi left her body, followed by a rush of Yin Qi escaping through.

The feeling of fear immediately returned back to Alex, so he once again stepped back so as to not get affected by it.

Ma Rong took a deep breath as all of her tiredness and fatigue disappeared as well. Her cultivation was back with full force and she could finally feel at peace again.

Then, she took another breath, and all the Yin Qi that came out rushing went back inside her.

Alex could still feel her aura, but it wasn't to the same level as when she wasn't in control of her constitution.

"Master, you started getting better at it?" Alex asked in awe.

"Yes," Ma Rong said. "Or at least I'm getting there. Which is working."

"So, you can make pills again now?" Alex asked.

Ma Rong put on a sad smile and shook her head. "Not yet, but I'll get there," she said. "It's just a matter of time."

Alex put on a sad smile too. 'I'm not sure we have any,' he thought. There was still one thing on his mind that was nagging him at the back of his head, but he wasn't concerned about it since he hadn't taken the time to think it through.

"So, why did you want to find me?" she asked.

"Oh, right. I was coming to let you know that I'm going to the Tiger sect now," Alex said.

"Oh, it's time, huh?" Ma Rong said. "Although, before you go, I had something to discuss with you."

"Sure, master. What is it about?" he asked.

"Since you are already so good at making pills, and are already in the Mind Tempering 2nd realm, it's nothing but a few weeks before you reach the True realms."

"At that time, whether you want to or not, you will have to become an elder, or graduate from the sect and leave," Ma Rong said.

"What? Leave? I don't want to, master," Alex said.

"Yeah, I guessed that," Ma Rong said. "So, I had a suggestion for you."

"What is it?" Alex asked and waited for her to continue speaking.

"Do you want to just cut the line and become an elder now?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex was surprised. "Right now?" he asked.

"Yeah, what do you think?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex fell into contemplation. He would just have to hand over a single Heaven grade common pill and he would become an elder just like that.

However, he wasn't sure if he wanted to do that right now. 'But what else do I have left to do here?' he wondered.

'Besides becoming an elder, I really do have nothing. But then the responsibilities...' he started worrying.

"How about this, master?" Alex said. "I will think about it after I return from the Tiger sect."

Ma Rong smiled. "I didn't want to make you an elder right now either. Go and come back.. We will have plenty of time to talk about this."

Chapter 467 - Back Again

"Ok master," Alex said and stood up.

"See you in 2 weeks."

With that, Alex left her home. He went back to his house and changed his clothes to wear the Tiger sect's robes. After that, he left the mountain.

He went down to meet the other elders and disciples before he left the sect.

He didn't immediately go to the Tiger sect, however, and instead went to the sect's pill store. He found an elder and handed him some pills he had made over the course of the past few days and told him to sell them.

The earnings were once more going back to Ma Rong for stay. When the elder realized who he was speaking with, he finally understood why there were such amazing pills being sold by a random disciple he hadn't seen before.

After confirming everything, Alex left the store as well and walked away. Finally, he reached the small market outside the gates with tiger statues on it.

He was back in Tiger sect.

Alex walked in and asked a guard to call his elder brother. However, it turned out that he wasn't there.

"Did he go somewhere?" Alex asked.

"No, he's posted on the wall, like almost everyone else," the guard said.

Alex didn't understand what he meant, so he left there. It had been 2 weeks since he left so he started wondering just how low he was sent by the people here.

So, he took out his badge and looked at it.

"Oh, 177 huh? That's not too bad. That... makes me an inner sect disciple, but I can live with that, I guess," he thought. The disciples along the way kept on staring at him, understanding who he was.

They pointed fingers towards him, surprised that he was finally back.

"Right, I've been gone for over 3 weeks now. I forgot about that. I did cause a commotion and then disappeared so it's only right that they are surprised," Alex thought.

Then, a smile crept up on his face. "Should I target someone tomorrow?" he thought. However, then he remembered that he was very strong and there were maybe two people in the sect that were his genuine match.

First was his sister who should have been back by now, and second was the strongest young person he had ever seen, Du Yuhan.

"Is sister even back yet?" Alex wondered. She was supposed to have stayed in Rubyroad city for 2 weeks after he left, but the two weeks had already passed. So he wasn't sure if she had time to leave and return in time.

Alex walked up the mountain and at the same time messaged his master that he was back.

Wen Cheng replied back saying he was a little busy and that Alex should wait around in his house for a bit before he returned.

Alex felt that was okay, so he walked all the way up. He was about to reach his master's manor when he stopped.

"Oh, if sister is back then she will get angry if I don't tell her I've returned," Alex thought. But then he remembered about the problem they faced.

'Is Du Yuhan the prime disciple now?' he wondered. Since his sister was available for target when she couldn't defend her rank, he could only think how many vultures would jump at that.

And no one was stronger or more troublesome than Du Yuhan. 'Oh god, I hope he isn't one yet. I don't know how Sister will ever beat him,' Alex thought.

So, to check if he was or not, Alex went to the house for the 2nd ranked disciple of the sect. He walked up the steps and took a deep breath before he knocked on the door.

The seconds when the door didn't open felt like eternity for him.

'Is he gone?'

'Did he really take the first spot?'

'Is sister not back?'

'Who's in this house then?'

'Is this empty?'

Many questions ran through his mind. He was starting to accept their worst case scenario as true when he heard a clack on the door.

His eyes widened as he watched the door slowly open. 'Who is inside?' Alex thought and watched as a figure slowly walked out.

The figure was surprisingly a female and it wasn't his sister. It took him a moment to recognize the figure and when he did, he couldn't help but be confused about why she was here.

"Huh? You're back? What are you doing here?" the girl asked.

Alex woke from his stupor and asked, "What are you doing here?" he couldn't believe for a second that she was the 2nd strongest disciple in the sect right now.

"What? I'm in my senior brother's house. Why are you here?" she asked.

Just then another person walked from behind her and came out. Alex finally understood what was happening when he saw Du Yuhan with her.

'Ah, right. I forgot Su Min was Du Yuhan's junior sister. Stupid me, thinking she was the 2nd strongest,' he thought. 'Then that means he didn't take sister's spot, or that she took it back.'

"Hello," Alex said. "I'm back from learning Alchemy, I hope you will teach me this time."

"It's good that you are back, but can you stop bothering me, I told you to find me when you are in the 3rd rank, didn't I? Little Su, let's go in. He's a maniac who will drag me into battle if we talk too long," Du Yuhan said and walked in.

"Eh?" Su Min looked back and forth between her brother and Alex and slowly closed the door. As she did, Alex could hear the words, "But it's Sunday."

Alex almost laughed out loud seeing Du Yuhan go back in a hurry. 'So that means our worries were for nothing, thank god,' he thought.

After learning that Du Yuhan was still the 2nd place, Alex was really surprised how his sister managed to even secure her place back.

'Did 2 weeks of handling other people's Qi increase her own ability somehow?' Alex wondered.. He couldn't see how else she could beat Du Yuhan with his True realm equivalent of Sword Qi.

Chapter 468 - First Rank

Alex's mood was a lot better after learning that his master wouldn't have to leave his spot for a while now. At least 5 months from what Luo Mei had told him would take her to become a True realm expert.

'I will enter True realm way earlier than her though,' Alex thought. He soon reached her house and knocked on the door.

"Sister, I'm back," he said out loud. However, nobody answered. He knocked a few more times, but his sister didn't open the door at all.

'Huh?" Alex thought. "Why is she not opening the door? Is she not back by some chance? Maybe she's gone somewhere. Master will let her know later I guess."

"Searching for your senior sister, are we?" a voice came from behind him. Alex felt that the voice was familiar, so he turned around.

Behind him was a young man in a yellow robe with a red outline. The robe looked great on him since the outline matched his red hair a lot.

Alex could feel a cultivation base of the 3rd Mind tempering realm, close to the 4th Mind Tempering realm from this person.

He started to have a sour feeling in his heart when he saw him but didn't let him show on his face.

"Maybe, what are you doing here in my sister's house," Alex asked Yang Ma.

"Haha, your greetings lack a bit of respect, brother Yu," Yang Ma said. "You shouldn't talk like that to a prime disciple now, should you?"

"What?" Alex was surprised when he heard then. Only then did he realize that he was staring at a Yellow robe with a red outline, the robe of a Prime disciple.

"How did you..." Alex's confusion was at an all-time high.

"Get the first rank? It's quite easy actually," Yang Ma said. "Since sister Luo Mei isn't back yet, and Du Yuhan didn't show any attempts to make it his, I decided to take it for myself for now."

"Sister Luo Mei will probably ask it back when she returns, but I can have some fun as rank 1 until then," Yang Ma said. "Who knows, maybe you will fight me to take it back too."

Alex was still surprised, but his confusion was going away. "Oh, I see. So sister isn't back yet, huh. No wonder you got it, brother Ma. Don't worry, I won't come for your rank. Rank 1 doesn't appeal to me as well as rank 3 does," Alex said.

Yang Ma immediately showed signs of anger in his face, as if Alex had just said something that offended him.

Alex didn't understand what was wrong with what he had said, however, he could see through Yang Ma's expression that it struck a bone for sure.

"Anyway, I'm leaving. Have fun with your 1st rank" Alex said and walked away. If Du Yuhan didn't want the 1st rank then Alex had nothing to worry about. When Luo Mei did come back, she would have an easy time getting back her rank.

"I wonder why Du Yuahn didn't take the spot though?" he wondered. That reminded him of the semi-finals in the Annual competition too.

'Hmm... he didn't fight sister at that time either. Could it be...?' he was just thinking that when another thought struck his head.

"Oh, so that was why he suddenly got angry, haha," Alex thought as he chuckled remembering Yang Ma's reaction when he said he would get the 3rd rank.

Alex said that because he was looking forward to having Du Yuhan teach him about sword intent and such.

However, to Yang Ma, it sounded completely different. Ever since the maze run when Alex took his talisman, Yang Ma had thought of Alex as someone he needed to put in his place.

He was just an Organ Tempering realm cultivator that managed to win the whole thing when he himself barely got any points there. Not to mention, Wan Li beating his so bad in the competition stung him a little too.

Two alchemists got the better of the grandson of a Saint realm expert. That had made Yang Ma unreasonably angry.

Now that Alex said that he was going to take the 3rd rank, that meant that when Luo Mei did return and easily took back her place, Yang Ma would then have to challenge Alex to take back his original spot.

And that felt like an open invitation of duel to him, which he didn't like.

Alex didn't care about Yang Ma enough to worry about him attacking him. For now, he was simply going to focus on himself getting stronger.

'Should I go to 3rd Mind Tempering realm today?' Alex wondered. 'Although, I do want to learn from Du Yuhan as well as I can.'

Alex contemplated for a bit and decided to wait on it. It had only been a week since he broke through to the 2nd realm and he definitely needed some more time to stabilize that cultivation base.

The bigger the realm he would go to, the longer they required to stabilize. He sighed and made his way to Wen Cheng's manor.

He stayed there for a few minutes before Wen Cheng returned.

"You're back, huh? Good. What do you plan on doing now? I don't really have anything left to teach you. Maybe a couple of fighting techniques but that's it," Wen Cheng said.

"It's alright, master. I can take care of myself now," Alex said. "Oh right, did Sister not return yet?"

"No," Wen Cheng said. "I can't communicate that far away so I don't really have any information. But, she should be returning at anytime soon now. Didn't you say she had to stay there for 2 weeks?"

"Yes," Alex said. "If they were successful, it should be right about now. Although, she may choose to stay around for a little while with her father."

"No, he will send her here for sure," Wen Cheng said.

"Huh? But it should have been a while since she was back there. Why would he send her back immediately?" Alex asked. He didn't think Luo Keng was a heartless father at all.

"Because it's dangerous there," Wen Cheng said with a serious face.

Chapter 469 - Plan To Evade The Saint Beast

Alex got serious too when he heard that. "What do you mean master?" Alex asked. As far as he remembered, Rubyroad city didn't look that different from Scarlet City, other than being maybe a step down in quality.

"The beast hoard," Wen Cheng said. "They can't handle the beast hoards that well, and Luo Keng would never keep his daughters around during something so dangerous."

"So... you think he'll send them back to they have the safety of the sect behind them?" Alex asked.

"Yes. That only makes sense given how he is," Wen Cheng said, reminiscing the past.

"Oh right, I heard that senior brother was at the backside of the sect too. What's up with that? Is that because of the beast hoards too?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Wen Cheng said. "Did you realize by now that they attack every month? It may be off by a day or two, but every attack has been with a month of interval."

"So, since the last attack was 3 weeks earlier..."

"... They will be attacking in a week from now," Alex finished the sentence and the dread he had in his heart for a while was brought forth.

He had been worrying about it in the back of his mind but had never consciously thought about it. Now that it was brought forth, he didn't know what to do.

"How do you know the beasts are attacking, Yu Ming?" Wen Cheng asked out of nowhere. He had been thinking about this for a while now. He remembered Alex saying something to that effect the first time, but the beasts had already attacked by then.

The second time around, they believed he was dead.

However, the third time, Alex accurately let them know that the beast hoard was coming and that was what saved a lot of people from unexpected death.

"I don't know, master," Alex said. "It's like a feeling I have. Every time they come for me, I have this feeling like something is calling me towards the south. That was how I was able to know they were coming for me."

"Nothing more?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I do know that every time there is a beast hoard, a Saint beast comes after me," Alex said.

Wen Cheng's face went pale. "That's right. There was a Saint beast in the capital too," he said.

"Yes, and there was one that followed me during the last beast hoard attack as well. I don't know why it stopped though," Alex said. "I did feel it come to search for me a little later, but by then the feeling was gone."

Wen Cheng didn't know what to think. "This... this is quite dangerous. What do we do when they come by again?" Wen Cheng thought.

"I don't know, master. But we will surely think of something. I have a fast boat that I can maybe run away in like I did last time," Alex said.

"Alright, I guess that should work if it did last time," Wen Cheng said.

"Is that why the security at the front is so bad? All of them are posted at the back?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, we have to do something," Wen Cheng said.

"What about the sect activities? Any changes?" Alex asked.

"Nope, no changes there. You will probably get 10 different challenges tomorrow so get ready," Wen Cheng said.

Alex nodded and stood up. "I will go back and rest for now master," Alex said.

"Alright, go back," Wen Cheng said.

Alex bowed and left the manor. He had said words of confidence to Wen Cheng, but he himself was worrying a lot.

'Where do I run off to though?' he thought. The entire northern section of this area was nothing but the forbidden fields where Qi didn't work. The only reason more people didn't know was due to the massive mountains that blocked the view of the desert.

Going east or west didn't work either since the Saint beast would catch him in no time. Obviously, going south wasn't a choice anyway.

'What should I do?' he started worrying. 'Should I run away from the sect so that I can keep them safe?'

Many thoughts ran across Alex, but no place seemed any safe. "Oh wait," Alex thought. "The Saint beast didn't come for me during the second time right?"

"I was even helpless during that time since I was back at home. Why didn't it?" Alex wondered. After a few moments, he thought he had the answer.

"Did the Spirit Disorienting formation and the Barrier formation that made new space block my aura?" Alex wondered. "God, I hope it wasn't the one that blocked Images and sounds."

"That's my only hope, I guess," Alex thought. Finally, he had a plan. He would now open a formation and trap himself in so that the beast wouldn't find him.

He thought the plan was perfect. All he needed to do was make a formation, hide in it for a while, and once the feeling went away, he could come back.

Hopefully, the Saint beast wouldn't find him in there and leave this place alone. The people in the Scarlet City could certainly handle a normal beast hoard.

Thinking that he had a perfect plan, he happily walked to his house numbered 177.

It was nighttime, and he had nothing to do, so he decided to make a few bits of formations with what little formation plates he had. After that, he would go back to cultivate.

It didn't take him very long to finish what little formation plates he had remaining. He would have to go sell those in the market tomorrow morning.

For the next hour or two, he tried to understand how the formation that Song Zun made on dirt even worked. He couldn't understand it no matter how much he thought about it.

"Sigh, do I really have to find an expert on this?" He wondered. "I wish I could talk with sister Xing once more. Maybe she could help me with that.." After that, he called out Pearl to cultivate together.

Chapter 470 - Going For 3

Once more before cultivating, Alex wondered if he really shouldn't just go to Mind Tempering 3rd realm. "Better be cautious," he said and closed the panel.

It was all ready, so he could go anytime he wanted either way. "I will see how well my battles tomorrow are. Based on that, I may break through tomorrow," he thought.

He took out a beast core and flicked it towards Pearl who jumped in the air and caught it with his mouth. He immediately munched on it and started getting sleepy.

"Come, cultivate," Alex said.

"Meow," Pearl cried out and got on his lap before finding himself a perfect place to lie down on.

Alex chuckled and shook his head as he got ready to cultivate once more. He took a deep breath and soon the world around him turned silent as he slowly drifted into a trance and fell asleep.

Early in the morning, Alex opened his eyes and looked at the time, it was 6 am in morning. He told pearl to stop cultivating and soon sent him back to his beast space.

He was in the Tiger sect and couldn't spare to show Pearl to anyone for even a single moment.

Alex logged out and went to the kitchen to find that Emily was already awake and cooking their breakfast.

She had a crappy body and talent in the game, so she didn't have a very fun time in the game at all. She could barely remain as an outer sect disciple of some mid-tier sect.

So, she liked spending her time in the real world, rather than the game. Alex stayed with her and talked for a bit as she finished preparing breakfast. Once she was done,? Sarah and Hannah arrived as well and ate their breakfast.

Once they were done, Alex returned back to his room and logged in to sell his formation real quick before getting ready for his classes.

He walked over to the marketplace and got his formations checked out. It turned out that his recent formation flags that he had been purchasing himself and carving the origins onto them were actually barely Earth grade at best.

He couldn't help but chuckle when he realized how bad he was at making the formation flags.

Some of that problem definitely lied with the metal he carved them on, but most of the problem was definitely with the angle he carved the formation on. His strokes were probably not straight either with how the formation rods were curved.

Still, he managed to at least make back what he spent on them, so he was quite happy.

Once he returned back, he logged in and got ready for his classes.

"Are you going to keep using my car? Why not buy one for yourself?" Emily asked.

"Eh? But sister has one, so I'm fine for now," Alex said as he drove towards his classes. "Besides, I won't really be needing them for a while after I drop out from university."

"Huh? You're going to drop out?" Emily asked with a concerned face.

"Yeah, I'm not really getting out of the university. Still, on the off chance that I need to go back, I will at least finish the first semester," Alex said.

"Sigh, I guess I can understand what you mean, but it's still sad that you won't continue it. I guess I will have to start considering the idea of going back to university classes alone," she said.

"It's not all that bad. I will try to make some time for us," Alex said. However, he didn't let go of the idea of dropping out of his classes.

His exams would start in just 2 weeks, and after that, he would drop out of college to focus on earning more money.

The two of them started talking about other things as they went to their classes. After their classes were over, they returned back to their home.

He was quite happy to learn that his classes for the semester were ending after this week. 'I will have a lot of free time for the game,' he thought. The game was all he could really think about at the moment.

After he went back to the game, Alex felt a vibration in his storage bag and realized that he had been challenged.

'Are they really that desperate that they think I will go high so fast?' he thought. He wondered if he wanted to go up or not, but in the end, thought...

"Maybe I should just go for the 3rd rank right now' he thought. If he got the 3rd rank he could immediately start with his Sword Intent training. That way, maybe he could reach the realm of what a proper Sword Intent was like.

Alex walked out of his house and went along the side of the sect crater to go towards the fighting stages.

He checked his badge and went to stage number 15 where his first match was. His number was soon called out, and he went up.

His opponent was a young man that seemed terrified of him. He was most likely simply fighting him because he was told to.

Alex shook his head and quickly beat this man before moving on to the next one. He was still keeping his cultivation base hidden, so people didn't really realize how high his cultivation base was improved.

They kept on coming for him regardless and regardless of who they were Alex beat them.

His final opponent was a man in rank 163 who was using water abilities against him. Since the water wasn't as deadly of an element in the hands of someone so weak compared to him, Alex didn't need to worry about it at all.

He dashed forward, going in a zig-zag pattern dodging all of the attacks. Once he was next to the man, he lightly pushed him with an open palm. The opponent flew through the air and fell out of the stage.

Alex was finally done with all 10 of his challenges.. Next up was his own challenge.

Chapter 471 - Bing Li

Alex walked up to the registering area and queued up. He waited for a while before it was his turn.

"Hello elder, is the 3rd rank still Bing Li?" he asked.

The elder was a little surprised, but when he saw who was asking, he understood. "Yes, it's her. Don't tell me you want to directly go for Bing Li?" he asked.

Alex smiled and nodded. The elder just shook his head and registered the fight. Bing Li was the 4th ranked disciple of the sect, and after Luo Mei's absence, she rose up the rank of 3rd by simply challenging the empty rank of 3rd.

Now, Alex was going to take that rank from her and then go to Du Yuhan to learn about sword intents.

He wasn't sure how long he would have to wait, so he went around the sect crater looking through the different kinds of stuff.

On his walk, he once again came across the Black stele. The rock didn't shine with any light as the sun was starting to set and there wasn't enough light around him. Still, it looked as majestic as ever.

'Should I try once more?' he thought. He was after all in the mind tempering realm now and that meant his mind was a little stronger than before, as well as having a little larger spiritual sea.

'Let's try,' he thought as he got ready and sent out his spiritual sense once again. Just as the spiritual sense reached the text on the black stele, something crept up his connection with the spiritual sense and tried to enter his mind again.

Alex quickly shut off his connection once again before even half of his spiritual sea was empty.

"Damn," he thought. "Still no other information. I will need to have a stronger mind."

He left the place and went back to stage 1 to wait for his opponent to arrive. He had to wait around for nearly 2 hours before someone other than him responded to him being called.

He walked up the stage and saw a white-haired girl climb up on the other side. She was a little shorter than Alex and had a cold expression on her face.

The moment she reached the stage, she gave an angry look towards Alex and got ready to fight. From her storage bags, she pulled out a white rod of some sort.

'Does she fight with a staff by some chance?' Alex thought while he prepared himself. He realized that his opponent's cultivation base was in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm, just like Yang Ma, but she was most likely weaker than him.

Alex couldn't decide if he should fight bare-handed or use his sword, so he took out a common sword just in case. He didn't know what the rod could do, so he had to stay ready.

"FIGHT!"

The moment the elder gave the go, Bing Li started pouring her Qi into the rod. Alex could see a light blue outline creeping up and from the center of the rod where she held it.

Suddenly, the rod started deforming and started getting flatter and more flexible. A line separated from the middle and soon Alex realized what it actually was.

'A bow?' he was surprised. He was getting ready for close combat between a sword and a staff, but it turned out that it was going to be different.

Immediately, the girl pulled the string of the bow, and light coalesced on her bow as it soon turned to a light blue arrow.

She immediately let it loose and the elemental arrow flew towards Alex. Alex struck the arrow with his sword to stop it, however, instead of being blocked like a normal arrow, the light blue arrow simply disappeared in a burst of light that sprinkled all over Alex.

Bing Li made a fist and suddenly the floating motes of blue light converged towards Alex and started freezing him.

Alex tried to move away, but the lights quickly followed him and soon fully froze him over. He looked like an ice statue completely.

The girl looked at the fight and made a 'hmph' sound, thinking he got what he deserved for looking down on her.

She was about to celebrate her victory when the ice cracked all over and Alex walked out.

"That's a really interesting ability," Alex said as he was completely unphased by the attack. He even had a smile on his face.

The girl immediately picked up her bow again and pulled the string once more to shoot the same shot.

Alex knew he couldn't stop it, so he dodged the attack. However, just as it was going past him, she once again made a fist and the arrow burst into lights of motes once again and converged on him.

Alex created some fire and started burning everything around him. The fire quickly took care of the light.

Without even turning back, he hit the incoming arrow with his sword and then drowned the with fire.

"So you have an ice-type mutated spiritual root huh?" Alex asked. He was surprised to see something so different here.

"Why would you care? Just fight," Bing Li said.

"Sure," Alex said, and immediately his sword started burning red.

Bing Li understood what was going to happen so she quickly moved her hands and light blue Qi released from them to quickly form an ice barrier in front of her as well as ice armor on herself.

Ice was a sub-type of Water, so if Alex used his most certainly weaker Fire elemental attack, he would definitely not succeed in this confrontation... was what Bing Li believed.

However, she had no idea how dense his Qi was.

Alex slashed his sword without hesitation and it flew right up to the barrier and crushed it at once. It blocked most of the attack but the remainder that reached her armor also managed to put some sort of damage on the armor.

She was so surprised by the turn of events that she didn't even realize that a sword had already appeared next to her throat.

She looked up in fear and barely managed to say, "I concede."

Chapter 472 - Fifth Elders Disciple

It was late at night, but the smile on Alex's face was as bright as ever. He looked at the badge on his hand and the rank 3 written on it.

He was excited like a little child whose parents just bought him his favorite new toy he had seen on TV.

'Yes! Finally, the damn rank is mine,' he thought. He would've certainly got this rank a few weeks ago, but then he suddenly had to take a detour and go heal his sister's father.

However now, he finally got to fight as he wished and got the rank he wanted.

He didn't even waste time walking as he ran up the side of the crater and very quickly reached Du Yuhan's house.

He walked up to the door and knocked on it. He waited for a while and Du Yuhan finally showed up, slowly opening the door.

Du Yuhan put on an annoyed face when he saw Alex's face once again.

"Why is it always you? Can't you leave me al—"

His words were cut short when Alex simply put up the badge close to his face. Du Yuhan saw the number 3 on the badge and shut up.

His annoyed face immediately turned serious as he looked at Alex and asked, "You really got it?"

"Yes," Alex said with a sense of pride.

Du Yuhan was still a little skeptical, so he took out a talisman and communicated with someone through it. He soon got an answer and his skepticism vanished, leaving only a surprised expression on his face.

"You really did beat little Bing? That's quite surprising," he said. "However, If you can defeat Bing Li, then you should be close to Yang Ma too. Why don't you go for him as well?"

Alex shook his head. "That's my sister's rank, I don't need to take it back for her, she can do it herself. I only needed to take the 3rd spot so you can teach me Sword Intent," Alex said. "So, are you ready to teach me now?"

Du Yuhan sighed and said, "Yeah, I promised, so I won't be going back on my word. However, it's already nighttime, do we really have to practice right now?"

"I usually like to practice at night. If that's not okay with you then we can change it to morning or evening," Alex said.

"No, the time is fine, but what about training ground? You know we can't make much noise when others are cultivating right?" Du Yuhan said.

"Oh, don't worry about that," Alex said. "I know a place."

* * * * * *

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

A young man had his eyes closed inside a room in a core disciple's house.

The young man was tall and had a very well-built body. He had short, spiky green hair which a face that couldn't be called anything but handsome.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

The knocks kept coming from the door. Not only that, his storage bag was buzzing too. However, he didn't move at all.

After a few minutes, the young man finally opened his eyes and sighed. "I shouldn't play this game for so long. I nearly died of hunger," he thought.

He then realized his talisman was buzzing. "Hm… who's calling me?" he wondered and picked up the talisman.

Just then his door was knocked on once more.

"Who's outside?" he wondered and stood up while looking at his talisman. The message was from his master who told him to come and meet him as soon as he could.

'That idiot is calling me? He never calls me anymore after telling me to hide from the public eye as much as I can,' he thought.

He took out his badge and put it on the wooden block next to the door. The door opened and suddenly someone pushed it open from outside to walk in.

"Huh? O— Master, what are you doing here?" he was surprised to see his master, the 5th elder here. "I thought you wanted me to meet you at your place."

"That was over an hour ago," the fifth elder said in an annoyed voice.

'The hell is wrong with this idiot?' the disciple thought.

"Are you aware of what has happened in the sect?" the fifth elder asked.

"Uh… no, I was cultivating," he said.

"The Sect Leader's disciple is back and took the 3rd rank. He defeated someone in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm," the fifth elder said.

"So? That's not hard at all," the disciple said.

"Tha- that's not hard?" the elder said with an astounding face. "How high is your cultivation base to—"

Finally, he checked his disciple's cultivation base and suddenly shut up. "S-so high?" he said in surprise.

"Of course it is," the disciple said. "You told me to cultivate in secret. This is what I've been doing all this time."

"Bu-But you were just at the start of Meridian Tempering realm not 2 months ago," the elder said.

'Yeah, well I would've been much higher if my parents let me play it as much as I wanted. Now that I've got my own place, I was able to finally cultivate without all the nagging,' he thought.

"So, what are you doing here, master? It can't be that you want me to take down this sect leader's disciple right?" he asked.

"What? Yes, that's what i—"

The fifth elder lost his train of thought again as he checked his disciple's cultivation base once again. 'How is this possible?' he couldn't help but think.

The disciple scoffed at his master's dumbfounded face and said, "So you want me to go challenge him tomorrow?"

The fifth elder was still a little distracted, but he quickly gathered his thoughts and looked back towards his disciple.

"I did come here to see if you could challenge him but turns out you are far stronger now than I had imagined. So… change of plans," the fifth elder said.

"You have someone else to challenge."

The disciple got curious as well.

"Who?"

Chapter 473 - Learning About Sword Intent

Alex and Du Yuhan walked into the training hall behind Wen Cheng's manor. Alex had asked Wen Cheng for permission to use this building and Wen Cheng had allowed him to use it without a second thought.

"There was something like this here all the time?" Du Yuhan asked in surprise. He had been training in the Training hall where he would have to pay an hourly fee. Even though it was mostly discounted for him due to him being at Rank 2, it still cost him quite a few in total.

"Yes, this is where I've been practicing for a while now," Alex said.

Du Yuhan didn't speak after that and simply looked around. "You don't have to worry about breaking the walls or making too much noise. The walls can handle even True realm attacks and the whole hall is sound-proof, so no one will hear us train outside," Alex said.

Du Yuhan nodded and brought out a common sword. Alex smiled seeing that he was ready and brought out his own common sword.

Du Yuhan stopped and asked, "Don't you have a better sword?"

Alex was confused and said, "I do. Why?"

"Then take it out. It can't be that you want to fight with that right?" he asked.

"Huh, but that's what you are doing," Alex said.

"Don't try to copy me; You are not me. Every person is different, every intent is different. Someone might have more intentions about attacking, some might have more intentions about defending. Everyone is different, and their weapon intent manifests differently."

"It's quite unnoticeable at Sword Intent, but when Sword Qi appears, you can start seeing your own personality into the Qi. My intent is to cut down everything and make my way to the top, and so my Sword Qi manifests to defeat everyone. Yours might be different than mine."

"So you should stop copying and try to find some on your own," Du Yuhan said.

"So... I have to find my own form of Sword Intent?" Alex asked.

"Something like that," Du Yuhan said. "First of all, stop using the bad swords. The first part of having a sword intent is to have the sword and the person be one. If you use different swords each time, how can you ever truly become one?"

"The fact that you can use sword intent means that you already have the correct mindset. Now you just need the correct sword to go along with it," Du Yuhan said.

Alex felt enlightened about something he hadn't thought of before. But then he thought of something else.

"Wait, then that means that... you have a proper sword too," Alex said.

"Of course. But it's a little different for me. I put in twice the effort as anyone would need to. I first put in all my effort to learn the sword with a common sword, and then move on to my proper one and learn it all over again."

"That way, I can not only put in more practice for the same thing, I can also slowly understand my own sword better and better," Du Yuhan said.

"Then the reason you never pulled out your true sword in the competition was that?" Alex asked.

"Those people in the competition were not worth me putting in that much effort. If I could win against them at my worst, then I saw no reason to do my best in front of them," he said.

Alex's eyes went wide when he realized that he was most likely looking at the strongest person in the empire that was not in the True realms. He could only imagine what sort of name Du Yuhan would make for himself once he truly got to shine.

"Take out your sword," he said.

Alex nodded and kept away his common sword before taking out his Steel sword.

Du Yuhan looked at the sword and nodded. "Good sword," he said. "Let's start."

"Wait," Alex said. "One moment."

Du Yuhan looked with a confused face as Alex took a deep breath and started taking in all of his cultivation bases.

Finally, once no more aura remained, Alex got into his fighting stance and said, "Ready."

"What? No. Why did you take in your cultivation base when we are just going to start our training?" Du Yuhan asked.

"Eh? You won't use Sword Qi, right?" Alex asked instead.

"Of course not. That is dangerous," he said.

"Yeah," Alex said. "Same thing. If I use my cultivation base, then it's dangerous for you. Don't mind it though, It won't be a detriment in our fight at all."

Alex got into position and his sword slowly started glowing white.

"Well, if you have a death wish then I can't help you there," he said as he held his sheathed blade next to him. "However, it does seem you've improved quite well on your own as well."

"Thanks," Alex said and immediately charged forward. He slashed straight in front of him and tried to hit Du Yuhan.

CLANG

A sound appeared out of nowhere when Du Yuhan's sword clashed with Alex's, blocking his sword on the spot.

Alex was beyond surprised when he realized that he couldn't see Du Yuhan unsheathe his sword. The single motion of pulling out his blade, swinging at Alex, and hitting his sword was so smooth that it didn't even register in his mind.

At the same time, Du Yuhan was quite surprised as well. Given that Alex had no cultivation base at the moment, he expected the sword to escape from his hands and fly away. Yet, the sword remained right where it was in his hand, and Alex didn't even look the least bit hurt.

Du Yuhan started getting confused before a possible answer started appearing in his mind. "You're a body cultivator?" he asked.

Alex had no reason to hide that anymore as anyone who had seen him fight in the fighting hall would have made such a guess by now.

"Yes," he said.

"Interesting," Du Yuhan said, finally showing a curious face. "It seems that you really weren't lying when you said you were stronger than me with your cultivation."

"Finally I feel more interested in teaching you."

Chapter 474 - Surprise

Alex already knew how to use Sword Intent. All that was left was fine-tuning what he did know to the extreme to make the most use of it.

After that, he could finally start thinking about Sword Qi, which even he had to accept was quite far away.

According to Du Yuhan, it had taken him just 6 months of constant sword use to learn Sword Intent. That was after putting his all into the sword for all of those 6 months.

As for the Sword Qi, it had been 6 years since then, and he could barely form it enough for a single attack.

That was enough for Alex to know just how long he would have to persist to learn Sword Qi. Plus, he needed to find his own path before he could even attempt to form the Sword Qi.

After a full night of practice, Du Yuhan left in the morning. However, it wasn't over. Alex needed more training, and given how strong he was, Du Yuhan finally felt like he found someone he could compete with.

Alex went back to his house to do what he needed to for the day. He got some breakfast, went to his classes, and returned back.

He had decided to continue the practice after 5 pm the night, so Alex wanted to go to the fighting hall to take care of his challenges.

However, surprisingly there were no challenges. 'Did they give up now that I'm at Rank 3?' he wondered.

Since he still had some time before the practice started, he decided to do something. He went behind his master's manor and started bringing out some formation flags before putting them all over the open land.

He carefully placed the formation, making sure where they all went and how they were oriented.

Once it was all done, he simply needed to turn it on. Except, he couldn't. He didn't have enough True Qi to sufficiently power the formation for sure.

For now, he was just making sure to remember the spots he should put the formation flags when the time came.

He pulled them all out and put them back on the ground at the exact same position, with the exact same orientation.

Once he was sure that he remembered it all and could easily reproduce the formation, he kept them all back.

At the same time, Du Yuhan returned back and the two of them started their training all over again.

Time slowly passed while the two of them trained, and before they even knew it, nearly 4 hours of training had gone by.

"Let's take some rest. We will start again in 20 minutes," Du Yuhan said as he huffed from the lack of breath.

Alex wasn't nearly as out of breath and that surprised Du Yuhan a lot. As a body cultivator, Alex just didn't get breathless as easily as the others did.

Still, he sat down and rested for a bit. 'I should breakthrough after this,' he thought.

Suddenly, Du Yuhan felt his storage bag vibrate. He took out a talisman from his bag and read the message.

BANG

At the same time, the door to the training hall fully opened and a Wen Cheng with very shocked emotions walked into the room.

Alex was surprised to see that. "What's going on, master?" he asked.

"It's changed," Wen Cheng said.

"What's changed?" Alex asked.

"The rank. The number 1 rank changed again," Wen Cheng said. "We have a new prime disciple."

"What?!" Alex said in surprise. "You mean someone other than Yang Ma?"

"Yes," Wen Cheng said. "Yang Ma was just beaten by—"

"Trevor," Du Yuhan said from the side as he put down his talisman with a bit of surprise on his face too.

"Yes," Wen Cheng said. "You got the message, I see. Trevor just challenged Yang Ma to a battle and won against him."

Alex was still surprised and then he thought of something. "Wait, isn't Trevor that one guy that stopped going up in the rankings?" he asked.

From what he remembered Wen Cheng talking about him, the player should have become a disciple of the Fifth Elder.

"Yes, that's him," Wen Cheng said. "He came back after a more than a month-long hiatus, and he came back strong."

"…how strong?" Alex questioned.

Wen Cheng shook his head when he said, "his fight against Yang Ma… wasn't even a fight. It was way too one-sided to be called a fight. That little guy came back way stronger than I would've imagined him to get."

"He's so very faster than you too at cultivating," Wen Cheng said.

Alex and Du Yuhan were both shocked when they heard that. Du Yuhan's ambition was to become the strongest. So, when he heard someone getting called Strong made him want to fight this fellow named Trevor.

"How strong is he, sect leader?" Du Yuhan asked. "You said he easily beat Yang Ma. As far as I remember, Yang Ma was in his 3rd Mind Tempering realm, right?"

"Yes," Wen Cheng said.

"Then… is Trevor in the 5th realm?" Du Yuhan asked. Du Yuhan himself was in the 4th Mind Tempering realm. Adding on the fact that he had a very mediocre spiritual root when it came to learning strong abilities, if he didn't know Sword Intent, he would most likely lose to this guy too."

"No, he is much higher from what I've heard," Wen Cheng said.

"Higher than 5th realm? 6th?" Du Yuhan asked.

"No, this person can breakthrough very easily without cultivation. I'm sure he's in the 7th realm, if not 8th," Alex said.

"How do you know that?" Du Yuhan asked.

"He's… similar to me in how fast he can cultivate," Alex said.

"You know something?" Du Yuhan asked curiously.

"I-I'll tell you some other times," Alex said.

"Still, he can't be in the 8th realm, right? I haven't even heard of his name before, so he shouldn't have been that strong," Du Yuhan said.

"It's just a hunch. In fact, he could even be in the 9th realm," Alex said.

"There is no way that is true," Du Yuhan said.

"That is true," When Cheng said from the side, stopping the both of them from talking any further.

"What?" Du Yuhan exclaimed. "He's in the 9th Mind Tempering realm?"

"Yes," Wen Cheng said. "I'm worried poor little Mei will never be able to take back her spot."

Du Yuhan felt the same. Only Alex was a little less concerned about that.

"That's… not necessarily true, master," Alex said. "You see, I don't think-- no, I know his cultivation base isn't stabilized at all. At best, it could be equivalent to 7th or at best, 8th Mind Tempering realm at best."

Wen Cheng's eyes shined as he finally remembered. "Right. Meaning that if they fight, little Mei will have a slight chance at victory if she can play her cards right," Wen Cheng said.

"Right," Alex said with a smile. "Also… if Sister can't take her down then… I might go and do it myself."

Wen Cheng was surprised at the level of conviction he could hear in Alex's voice.

"Are you sure about that?" he asked.

"I believe I have a very high chance of beating him after I breakthrough once more," Alex said. "And if I use everything in my arsenal, I can beat him with 100% guarantee."

"I might not be as strong as brother Yuhan here, but I'm sure I can at least do that much," Alex said.

Wen Cheng nodded when he thought about how strong his disciple really was.

"Little Yuhan, are you sure you don't want the spot?" he asked.

Du Yuhan simply shook his head.

"I see," Wen Cheng said. "Alright, you guys keep practicing. I will go back to my tasks."

Wen Cheng turned around to leave. However, just as he opened the door, he remembered something and turned around.

"Oh, right. Yu Ming, make sure to go easy on him. His pride has been broken, so… be a little cautious how you go about the fight tomorrow, okay?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Tomorrow?" Alex said with surprise and thought about it. "Ah, right. I will make sure to make it look like I barely won, master."

"Actually, no. That would make him feel worse. Just show that you are strong and that you were hiding it all this time. Once he sees the difference, the loss won't hit him as hard as it will if you acted weaker," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, okay," Alex said. He still needed to learn a bit about understanding how others thought and felt.

"Do you still want to train?" Du Yuhan asked.

"Yes," Alex said and got back up. Even though it hadn't been 20 minutes yet, they both felt like they were totally rested after hearing the news.

They could only imagine what the entire sect would be feeling like right now after hearing that the second strongest person they knew of in the sect right now lost to a newcomer in the sect.

Alex could only imagine the news it must've made. While the many elders focused on him and stopped him from going up in ranks, they were clearly blindsided from the surprise 1st rank from this disciple that went into hiding for over a month.

Now that he was nearly in the True realms, he was sure to make some changes in the rankings. Or at least, they thought so.

After training for a bit longer, Alex and Du Yuhan both decided to stop the training there for the night and went back to their home.

Tomorrow was going to be a hectic day.

Chapter 475 - Improvement And Worry

Alex was in his room, looking at his status. It had been over a week since he had broken through, and although it was probably a little too fast to break through once again, it just felt right to him.

His cultivation base was fully stabilized thanks to the two sessions of intense training he had gone over with Du Yuhan. Not only was his cultivation base stabilizing, but even his Sword Intent was also starting to be stable as well.

There had been moments where his Sword Intent came to be during the fights even when he wasn't consciously minding his intentions.

If he could proceed to do everything subconsciously without ever having to make sure his intentions were on point while using the sword, he would advance to the rank of Weapon Intent users as the ones he saw in the competition in 2 months ago.

His face was unable to stop a smile from forming the same way he was unable to keep his excitement under check.

He took a deep breath and brought his hands forward to click on the button.

The moment he touched the button, he felt a rush of Qi swarm his body, going through all the meridians without stopping and finally into this mind. Once there, the Qi then rushed back down through his body once more, decreasing in amount the whole time.

By the time the Qi was gone, he could feel his cultivation base increase to a level he had never before felt.

He broke through.

"Woah!" he thought as he remembered the experience. He was surprised how well he could feel the Qi during his breakthrough nowadays. And it was only getting more and more pronounced.

'Did it always originate from my lower stomach when I broke through in the earlier realms as well?' he wondered. The only reason he even knew it originated there, despite not feeling it was because he knew for a fact that his Qi was stored in that area back from when he ate those pears in the Forbidden Fields.

"I wonder if there is a reason why only I think that? There doesn't seem to be any public information regarding this knowledge," he thought.

Alex was sure that he was correct about it though. There was no doubt. It wasn't only what he felt in the Forbidden Forest though, it was as if knowing that single piece of knowledge unlocked another part of the information in his brain regarding some medical knowledge.

Alex soon forgot about that since it had nothing to do with what he was doing right now. Since he had broken through, he started feeling his Qi.

His Qi was much denser once more and he could feel his strength reach quite high. "8th mind tempering realm?" he assumed. It was quite hard to quantify his increase in strength to a single cultivation realm.

He had never seen or fought anyone in that realm, so whatever he thought his strength was, that would have some amount of falsehood to them.

"Should be enough," he thought and went on to check the other few things. The one thing he was mostly looking forward to was to see the increase in his spiritual sea.

He released his spiritual sense and stretched it as far as he could without straining himself.

"Wait, over 34 meters?" He looked at his divine sense in shock. He thought of something and tried remembering.

The first increase when he entered the Mind Tempering 1st realm was from 22 meters to 25 meters, which was 3 meters increase.

Then it went from that to 28-29 meters, which was a bit more than 4 meters in increment. While it had increased, he hadn't thought about anything at the time.

However, now that it went from that to over 34 meters with an increase of over 5 meters at once, he started to get confused. "Why is it increasing so much?" he thought.

He now had about the same distance of spiritual sense as he did when originally had it and stretched to the fullest.

Now, if he stretched as much as he could, he could surely reach more than 55 meters in distance.

Alex was happy, very much in fact. However, he soon reeled in his happiness for there was something else he needed to do right now.

Alex reached into his bag and brought out a single pill bottle. He removed the stopper from the top and dropped a single pill onto his hands.

This was the Mind Elating pill, a pill of his creation. He knew this pill would increase his mental ability again, but wasn't sure by what amount.

He looked at the 54% harmony pill on his hands, one of the 3 he had prepared to eat, and without any hesitation, popped it into his mouth.

Even as he swallowed the pill, he could feel nothing, truly nothing. There was no information about him eating a pill, nor was there anything he could feel was happening in his stomach.

"A dud?" he wondered for a second. Abruptly, a rush of Qi, similar to when he broke through ran up to his mind and started rushing through all over it.

Alex could only feel a cool sensation around his skull, and some sudden bursts of heat. Neither of which hurt him at all.

He endured the happenings in his head for a while and soon they disappeared.

'Is it over?' he wondered. Just to be safe, he decided to wait for a few more minutes more. Once he was sure it was all over, he released his spiritual sense once more.

It slowly spread outwards and soon reached a point that made Alex's eyes go wide in surprise.

"So far," he thought and immediately reeled back his sense. His eyes were still stunned as he muttered a single word. "40."

40 meters was what his spiritual sense had extended to. At best, he had expected it to extend to around 37 or 38 meters, but he had never expected it been reached such a high 40 meters mark.

"Is this pill supposed to be this good?" he wondered. That could only be the explanation to the current happenings, for the other explanation of there being something different about him was not something he was looking forward to hearing.

"Okay, good. I got 40 meters mark, that's great. Let's cultivate now," he said. He wanted to quickly move away from whatever he was thinking of at the moment and called out Pearl.

He sat him down next to him and soon the two of them started cultivating. Alex too started breathing in and out slowly and before he realized it, he had fallen asleep.

******

Alex logged back into the game after returning from his second last day at the university. He now only needed to go to his classes for a single more day before his exams would start.

After that, he was going to drop out of the university for sure. He was still thinking about how to break the news to his parents.

While he was surely earning a lot of money, he was also missing out on learning stuff that would be helpful in his life. As long as he could persuade them that he could easily learn later, but not earn as easily, he could likely get away with dropping out.

His storage bag was buzzing a lot, but he ignored that entirely. The thing that took his attention immediately event though he had already felt it already was his True Qi.

"50%," he said quietly. That was the percentage of Qi in his meridians that hard turned to True Qi.

This was happening way too fast for him right now. From 5% to 20% to now 50%, the amount at which his True Qi was increasing per breakthrough was astounding.

However, this also came with a simple worry for him. If he kept on going like this, by 5th Mind tempering realm, he was likely to turn all 100% of his Qi into True Qi. What would he do after that?

As far as normal cultivation progress went, once someone converted all 100% of their Qi to True Qi, and were left with not a single hint of Common Qi, they could then, and only then, breakthrough to the True realms.

"Does that mean that when I get 100% True Qi at 5th Mind Tempering realm, then I too would directly go to the True realms?" he wondered. He just couldn't see how else it would work.

He worried that his advantage of having a high cultivation strength while having a low cultivation base was soon going to disappear.

"Urghh! Why did it have to be like this?" he worried. He moved around his hands in frustration, not sure if punch something or pull out his hair.

Finally, he managed to calm down and took a deep breath. He took a few more deep breaths and opened his eyes to look at his storage bag that was relentlessly buzzing for the last few minutes.

"What is it?" he thought and opened his bag to take out the thing that was buzzing. It was his badge.

"Oh, did they decide to come back—"

He suddenly stopped when he remembered. So many things had happened with his cultivation base and his spiritual sense that he forgot about the reason he had broken through in the first place.

He looked at the badge and saw what was written on it. Alex couldn't help but snicker at the words.

-Number 45 has challenged Number 3-

Chapter 476 - One Sided

Alex walked around the crater's side and then down the road until he reached the fighting hall.

He walked up to the stage he was called to and waited. Even as he waited, he could see his opponent on the other side who was looking at him too.

Alex send back a polite smile, implying that he was looking forward to the fight. His opponent scoffed and made a snicker.

The battle on top of the stage was starting to end and before they knew it, the battle ended. The winner took their badge and walked off the stage. However, no one was looking at him.

The surprisingly few people in the crowd around the stage were currently looking at just two different people. One of them was Alex since he was the 3rd Ranked disciple of the sect, and the other person was Yang Ma, who had come back after his one-sided defeat to make some of his names back.

Unfortunately for him, Alex wasn't going to let him.

"Number 45 and Number 3," the elder on top of the stage called out. Alex looked to the side at Yang Ma and walked up the stage while staring at him the whole time.

He had a little smug smile on his face, but it was barely noticeable to anyone who was looking for it.

"I'm sorry you had your fun as a 3rd rank for just 2 days before I came back to attack you," Yang Ma said with an ingenuine smile.

Alex copied the same smile and said," Don't be, I'm going to stay as one for a while now."

Yang Ma scoffed. "We will see about that," he said.

The two of them separated and moved back to either side of the stage and waited for the referee to give them the go.

Alex shook his head and took out the Steel sword. This was most definitely overkill, but since Du Yuhan had made him see the ways of the sword, he was going to only use this one from now on.

At least until he could finally weird that heavy sword that no one else seemed to be able to pick. It was a wonder how the person who wielded it could even pick it up in the first place.

Yang Ma took his sword red-colored sword out and got ready to fight. Alex could see red light shine from the sword even though the sun hadn't gone down yet.

"BEGIN!"

The moment the referee said that, Alex immediately started his Jade Skin technique. A bunch of marble-like patterns appeared in his skin, increasing his overall defense by a realm or two.

At the same time, he waved his hands and a five-colored barrier appeared in front of him.

A fire-red slash struck the barrier and tried to go past it. Alex was ready to block the remainder of the attack with his own body, but…

BOOM

A massive explosion rang out from the barrier that pushed both Alex and Yang Ma backward. Alex was barely moved a foot backward, and the same was true for Yang Ma.

However, given how far they were from the explosion, it was easy to see who had the upper hand here.

"What happened?" Alex was surprised. He truly hadn't expected an explosion to occur like that. What he had expected was the fire element to significantly reduce and thus make the attack no longer a threat for him.

However, what happened was different.

'Heaven's Five Barrier is focused on controlling the element and lowering it, then why di—'

Just as Alex was thinking about it, he finally remembered. 'Ah right. My metal root. It's now way too strong for his fire, and is thus Ruining it when it comes into contact,' Alex thought.

'Does that mean… I'm invincible against him since my Supreme root is a direct competitor against his?' he wondered.

Yang Ma didn't know what had happened, but he was more than happy to send out another shot at Alex.

This time, Alex didn't use Heaven's Five barriers. Instead, he simply freely controlled the Qi in his body to form a metal Qi and brought it out forward to form a barrier on its own.

The slash struck the metal barrier and once more exploded the same way it did just before.

"What's happening?" Yang Ma couldn't help but shout. "What are you doing to my attacks?"

"Hey! You can't blame me just because you're weak," Alex said and readied his sword.

Yang Ma sent out another slash, and Alex did the same. Only his was golden, compared to Yang Ma's red slash.

BOOM

Another massive explosion rang on the stage. Only, this time, there wasn't just one slash to disappear.

A remaining golden slash flew towards Yang Ma who barely dodged it by using his movement technique.

"Damn you!" he shouted and immediately took a deep breath before blowing it all out from his mouth.

Along with his break came out a bird of red and blue. The reds slowly disappeared and soon it was only left with blue, a fire that was much, much hotter.

Alex had never seen this technique or this bird. However, even as clueless as he was, he knew what a phoenix was.

'That's quite extra,' he thought. He couldn't imagine how strong this technique was, but seeing flames of a different color, he got cautious.

"DIE!" Yang Ma shouted and made the flames fly down on him. Alex wanted to send out a slash, but then he remembered his master telling him to beat him with all he got.

"Very well," Alex thought and let go of his sword.

Immediately, he brought both of his hands in front of him and started releasing Qi from it. It was the same Qi that he usually used when he had to control fire for alchemy, except with a key difference.

He was using True Qi.

The bluebird stopped right in front of him as he immediately gained control of it. Yang Ma tried to move the bird, but it was no longer under his control. He had lost connection with it.

His eyes went wide in surprise as he looked at Alex in horror.

"Do you want it back?" Alex asked with a sly smile. Without waiting for Yang Ma's answer, he sent the bird flying back towards him.

The bird flew at a speed that was impossible to Yang Ma's eyes. Yang Ma tried to dodge, but that wasn't going to happen at all.

Even the elder felt like he was going to be a step late to protecting Yang Ma.

However, right before the bird struck him, it stopped. It flew, and moved around in an obviously fake manner, going around Yang Ma's head, horrifying at the thought of it hitting him at any time.

"Give up," Alex said.

"N- NO!" Yang Ma shouted.

"If you say so," Alex said and dropped the bird on him. The bird wasn't as fast anymore when it dropped towards Yang Ma.

Yang Ma immediately tried to form an attack to block the bird, but he had lost sight of his main threat right now.

Suddenly, he felt a fist land on his stomach. Even as his mind realized what was happening, his body couldn't react. So, despite not wanting it to happen, his body flew out of the stage and into the crowd.

The few members in the crowd that was looking, looked in silence at another one-sided victory that lead to Yang Ma's defeat.

The dropping bird immediately stopped and perched upon Alex's shoulders in a manner Pearl never could.

"I wouldn't mind having a bonded bird beast sometimes," he thought.

The elder announced his victory and Alex smiled and took back his badge.

'Still, using True Qi in battle is not as efficient, huh?' he thought. He hadn't even used much True Qi to handle the bird, but he already lost 5% of it.

'It will only to truly viable to use True Qi when I can start getting it passively. And that would only be in the True realms,' he thought. Finally, he looked back at the bird and wondered, "how strong are you?"

He ordered the bird to attack the ground in the middle, and it left his shoulder to go attack.

The bird was incredibly fast and it struck the ground at the perfect angle.

BOOM

A massive sound rang out, followed by a bunch of small rocks falling on top of him. When the dust settled, Alex's jaw dropped to make a similarly large hole as he had at the center of the stage.

The stage for stronger disciples was made with very strong stones that wouldn't break easily even under intense battles. However, seeing the massive hole on the ground made him understand the strength of the True Qi.

However, True Qi alone couldn't possibly make this much of a mess. That was when he realized how terribly strong the attack Yang Ma was using on him.

'Where the hell did he get such a strong technique?' Alex wondered.

The elder came to scold him, and Alex made a small lie saying his bird was starting to go unstable, which was why he had to throw it out.

The elder was convinced after seeing the disaster, so Alex was able to get out without getting into trouble.

He walked down the stairs and heard someone shout "Junior brother" towards him.

"Huh?" he thought and looked aside to see someone in there that he would have never thought to see in this place before.

"Brother Xiao?" he called in surprise.

Xiao Huang was in the crowd, below the stage right now.

"Hey, junior brother, Good job on the fight just now. You did amazing," Xiao Huang said with a massive smile.

Alex looked to the side, expecting to see Luo Xing, but she wasn't there.

"What are you doing here, brother Xiao? I thought you would still be in Rubyroad city," he said.

"Oh, no. We came back today," he said.

"We?" Alex asked with a gasp. "Does that mean sister is back too?"

"Yeah, both of them are," Xiao Huang said while pointing towards a crowd in the distance with his head. The crowd on that side was infinitely larger than what it was for him and Yang Ma.

Alex looked towards there and saw a red-robed woman, standing out in the midst of many yellow-robed disciples. She wasn't looking in Alex's direction at all and was instead staring at the stage in front of her.

Alex turned his head towards the stage and saw a massive Iceball floating in the air, with a person inside flapping about, trying to breathe.

Beneath the ice ball, was a single woman with both of her arms up, controlling the ice.

Luo Mei was back.

Chapter 477 - Favor

"Sister is back?" he asked in surprise. He looked inside the ball of ice that was floating in the air and saw something yellow inside with occasional hints of green.

The elder that was refereeing the match suddenly stepped in and stopped Luo Mei. The ball of ice that was floating midair crashed onto the ground and the disciple that was inside fell out, unconscious.

Luo Mei was quickly pronounced victorious and the crowds of disciples looked around in awe. Luo Mei walked down from the stage and continued huffing. Alex ran up.

"Sister!" he shouted. "You're back."

Luo Mei turned around and chuckled. "It seems you're finally out of your room. Honestly, were you sleeping? I called you out so many times," she said.

"Oh, you did?" Alex asked shyly. It must've been when he was still logged out, so he couldn't have heard her call him out.

"Wait, if you're here. That means… Uncle is okay?" Alex asked.

"Yes, all thanks to you," Luo Mei said softly. "Thank you, junior brother. Taking you on my journey back home was the best thing I ever did."

"Aw, you don't have to say that. But you're welcome. I will always help you if you need it again," Alex said.

"No, seriously, Junior brother. Thank you for what you did," Luo Xing came from the side and said. "Do not hesitate if there is anything you need help with. Call us, and we will be there."

"Oh, thank you. Actually, I do have a small favor to ask of you," Ning said. "Let's talk about that later though."

"Anyway, who were you fighting, sister? Did you decide to beat someone because you saw your badge number was low?" Alex asked with a chuckle.

"No, I just took my rank back," Luo Mei said with a smile.

"Wait…" it took a moment for Alex to comprehend what she had just said. He immediately stretched his neck to look at the green-haired disciple that was no longer there.

"You beat Trevor? He was quite strong from what I heard," Alex said.

"I saw. He was strong, much stronger than I imagined. However, his abilities hadn't matured. He doesn't have any skill at fighting at all, and his knowledge wasn't that good either," Luo Mei said.

"I saw that too," Xiao Huang said from the side. "Like what sort of idiot continues fighting against Water with Metal and Earth? That kid needs to learn a lot before he advances to the True realms."

"He's one of those stupid, but talented ones that have been appearing lately I believe," Luo Xing said.

"Anyway, let's go back. Please tell me what happened after I left," Alex said.

The four of them walked back up the mountain. Luo Mei explained everything that had happened in Rubyroad city for the last few days.

She explained how her father was healed and how eating the pill that Alex left him helped get rid of the rest of the parasites.

Luo Keng was now starting to show signs of recovery. His pale face was starting to show color once again. He then ate pills that healed him and were now on his way to making a swift recovery.

Luo Mei also explained how the Mind Elating pills that Alex left her had helped her.

"I knew little brother was an alchemist and a healer, but I didn't know he was such an experienced fighter too," Xiao Huang said.

"Oh, you fought today? When?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yeah," Alex said. "It was right around the same time as when you fought, so you didn't realize."

"Oh, someone dared challenge you even after reaching the 3rd rank, huh?" Luo Mei said. "They must've lost their mind."

"It was Yang Ma," Alex said.

"What?" Luo Mei asked.

"It was Yang Ma who challenged me," Alex said.

"And you won?" Luo Mei asked.

Alex smiled. "Yeah, easily. I'm strong now too sister," he said.

"Nice. Good one. I always like it when I get to see his sour face," Luo Mei said.

"You really do hate him, don't you?" Alex asked. "Did he try to go for the 1st rank before too?"

"No, it's his arrogance. He comes from an aristocratic family, not unlike our own, but really likes to show it. Just because his family apparently has a Saint realm expert, he used to act like he owned the whole world."

"He's way more refined now compared to how he was back then. But still, I can't help but remember his arrogant looks and hate him," Luo Mei said.

"I see," Alex said.

The four of them reached Luo Mei's house and entered.

"Oh, hey Meng Yun, good to see you again," Alex said.

"Hello," Meng Yun greeted him back. She sneakily checked his aura and realized how much further and further behind she was getting compared to him.

"Are you and sister Xing staying in the city for the night, brother Huang?" Alex asked.

"Yes. The Beast horde will be attacking any day now, so we will have to stay here just to be safe," Xiao Huang said.

"I see. That's not a bad idea," Alex said. "Are you staying somewhere nearby?"

"Uhh… we were thinking of getting a lodging outside the sect," Xiao Huang said.

"Nonsense, we have so many rooms. Just stay with us," Alex said. "Sister Xing can stay here, and you will stay with me, brother Huang."

"Haha, if you invite me like that, then I can't refuse, little brother," Xiao Huang said.

The four of them continued talking for a while. Alex was also consumed by the conversations and forgot about the passage of time.

Suddenly he remembered something. "Oh no!" he shouted.

"What? What's wrong?" Luo Mei asked.

"Uhh," Alex made a wry smile and said, "Nothing. Everything is fine. I just forgot something. I will take my leave for now."

"Little brother, what about your favor? What did you want to ask me?" Luo Xing said.

"Uh… I don't know if I can ask that out here," Alex said. "Can you come into this room real quick?"

"Is it something we can't hear?" Luo Mei asked.

"I can't be the judge of that," Alex said. "I will tell sister Xing, and if she deems it okay to share, I will share."

"Very well, go on in then," Luo Mei said and the two of them entered the room.

"What is it, little brother? What do you need help on?" Luo Xing asked.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense to make sure no one was listening, especially Xiao Huang. At the same time, he took out a talisman and handed it to Luo Xing.

Luo Xing took the talisman and read what was inside. She saw a formation blueprint inside that didn't depict many things that a normal formation blueprint should.

Instead, it only had the rough drawing of the formation.

"What's this?" Luo Xing asked with confusion.

"It's something I need help on, sister," Alex said. "I didn't know who to ask. Fortunately, you came here."

"What's this formation? Where did you get this? I've never seen one like this before. I can't even tell what base formations make up this formation," Luo Xing said.

"Also, there are so many strokes. This almost looks like a Saint formation too," she said.

"I know, sister. This is a formation I got from a man I… from the clone of a man I killed. He had this formation carved onto the ground, and he was making use of it."

"You told me formations without metal were possible… can you tell me how I can get that one to work?" Alex asked.

Luo Xing looked at the formation and contemplated. "Did he really not use any metal?" she asked.

"No," Alex said. "In fact… he didn't even use any Qi to start it."

"Huh? How is that possible?" Luo Xing asked.

"Also, he used this as a power source instead of a regular spirit stone," Alex said as he brought out a Yang jade.

"What's this?" Luo Xing asked.

"It's jade with yang energy in it. You can find a few from time to time behind our sect," Alex said. "He was making use of it to use that formation to strengthen himself. Can you figure out how?"

"I… I don't know. I will have to ask brother Huang," Luo Xing said.

"Is that alright? I thought that bringing up information about the metalless formation was against the sect rules of yours," Alex said.

"I can explain to him that you brought it up first," Luo Xing said. "Either that or I can be truthful. That should work too.? Don't worry, he's my senior brother. Besides, this formation could be the key to figuring out how those things work."

"Well, if you are confident about it, then sure," Alex said. He handed her the yang jade and left it all up to her.

"I will have to go now. I made a promise to someone and I'm already late," Alex said.

He walked out of the room and saw the curious faces of Luo Mei and Xiao Huang.? He chuckled and said, "if you want to learn more about what it is, ask her."

He then tossed his badge to Xiao Huang and said, "you can use this badge to enter my house. Just take any room you like and make yourself home in there. I will see you guys later."

Alex said his goodbyes and walked out of the house. He checked the house next over and quickly ran up to his master's manor.

"Brother Yuhan, I'm sorry I was late," he said as he walked into the training room while apologizing for his tardiness, but when he went inside, there was nobody.

Chapter 478: Forfeit

The training room was completely empty with no signs of anyone, anywhere.

‘Did he leave because I was late?’ Alex wondered. But he quickly gave up on that thought. After all, he was only an hour late, and even if he left, Alex had already searched his home before coming here, and he was absent from it.

“He left his home, but didn’t come here? Maybe he was called by his master,” Alex thought. He decided to wait and see if he would return. If he didn’t, Alex would tell his master to send a message to Du Yuhan saying to cancel today’s lesson.

So, he waited for an hour. It was getting closer to 7 pm now, and if Du Yuhan still didn’t return, then Alex was going to leave.

Thankfully, at the nick of time, Du Yuhan entered the hall.

“Oh, you’re here huh. You were running a little late,” Du Yuhan said.

“Yes,” Alex replied. “Sister returned so I went to speak with her to talk for a few minutes, but it ended up being over an hour,” Alex said.

“I see. I did hear Luo Mei was back,” Du Yuhan said. “I also heard she fought with Trevor too. How is she?”

“She’s alright,” Alex said. “In fact, much better than how she was previously. Given how easily she won against Trevor, I would say that she is doing perfectly fine.”

“She won against him easily?” Du Yuhan said with a hint of surprise in his voice. “Even I had a bit of a problem with him.”

“Oh,” Alex said almost mechanically. But then he understood what Du Yuhan was saying and asked, “Wait, you fought him too?”

“Yeah,” Du Yuhan said. “He challenged me just now.”

“He challenged you? Already? He only just lost like less than 2 hours ago,” Alex said.

“Ah, that makes sense,” Du Yuhan said after realizing something. “I was wondering how he had such a low rank. He must have gotten Luo Mei’s previous rank and came to fight with me with that.”

“I remember him being unconscious,” Alex said. “Did he come back to target you the moment he woke up?”

“Maybe, who knows. Although, I must say he was quite strong. I’m genuinely surprised Luo Mei won against him. Her cultivation base must have improved again.” Du Yuhan said.

Alex remembered Luo Mei saying that she was using True Qi to fight most of the time, so that was probably the reason why she won so easily.

“Did you use Sword Qi?” Alex asked.

“I had to,” Du Yuhan said. “There is no other way for me to beat him if I didn’t use it. Although, once I did, I did realize how much of an overkill it was. Sigh, that’s Sword Qi for you, I’m weak if I don’t use it, and I’m too strong if I do.”

Alex smiled when he heard that. Du Yuhan was normally quiet and liked to keep to himself, or at least that was what Alex had thought his nature was. However, after getting close to him, he had realized that he just didn’t have people to talk with and did talk quite a lot when he got the chance.

‘Maybe he just needed a friend,’ Alex thought.

“So, are you tired from the fight and want to rest for a few minutes?” Alex asked.

“No, it was hardly a fight. I just struggled because I tried to see how strong I could be without Sword Qi,” Du Yuhan said. “Once I did, I won. So, we can start now.”

“Okay,” Alex said with a smile and the two of them started training once more.

The fight between the two of them was getting more and more unhinged as Alex’s skill level in using Sword Intent was getting closer and closer to perfection.

The clinks and clangs of the two’s swords rang about inside the training for over an hour. At some points, the two of them had started using techniques too. Slashes with sword intent flew about, with Alex’s sword intent barely losing to Du Yuhan’s.

Du Yuhan was a little shocked at how terrifyingly good Alex was at learning stuff. ‘Just two days and he’s learned what would’ve taken me a month to learn with the same level of training,’ he thought.

Alex didn’t hold back in the least and started sending around attacks left and right. At some points, he was close to running out of Qi, so he asked, “I’m going to use True Qi now, please use Sword Qi. I want to see how I would fare.”

Du Yuhan was a little surprised to hear that. “Use it once and let me see if it can handle the sword Qi,” he said.

Alex nodded and used a simple fire slash, but it was formed using True Qi. The heat the sword gave off with the Fire Qi inside of it was unlike any he had felt before.

Once he slashed, the slash directly flew towards Du Yuhan who looked at it with surprise. Without spending a single another moment in hesitation, he dodged to the side and the attack flew directly to the wall behind him.

“Eh?” Alex said with surprise. “Why didn’t you block it with Sword Qi? It can’t be that it’s stronger, right?”

“No, it’s weaker, at least by a small amount,” Du Yuhan said. “Much weaker if I use True Qi too, but… I need some time to prepare Sword Qi for attacks. It doesn’t come naturally as it does with Sword Intent.”

“Oh right, I remember seeing that in the competition,” Alex said. “So that means I can use True Qi right?”

“I mean… yeah, but how much True Qi do you even have? In fact, I’m surprised you even have any,” Du Yuhan said.

“Oh, don’t worry. My cultivation method allows me to have True Qi way earlier than normal people. Which is why I’m stronger than normal,” Alex said.

“I see, then go ahead and use it,” Du Yuhan said as he got ready to fight. Motes of lights flickered around him as they started moving around him and condensed into his sword, forming Sword Qi.

‘Damn that looks awesome no matter how many times I see it,’ he thought.

Alex got ready too and used True Qi along with his sword intent to fight against Du Yuhan. Du Yuhan made the first attack and the fight began.

The two of them fought as if they were mortal enemies, fighting to get the other’s head. If someone else saw from outside, they would surely believe that some sort of illegal fight was going on inside.

Alex only used normal slashes and True Qi along with Sword Intent and didn’t use any other techniques, while Du Yuhan stuck to just Sword Qi. And yet, the sword Qi was easily beating his triple combination attacks like it was nothing.

They continued fighting until Alex couldn’t keep up anymore and all of his Qi had ended.

“Wait, wait, I’m done,” Alex said as he huffed and puffed. Du Yuhan too was out of breath and full of sweats.

“That was one of the most intense training sessions I’ve had in a long time. Thank you for that,” Du Yuhan said.

“No problem. I really like this session too,” Alex said. He took long breaths after being out of it, and just then, he noticed someone opening the door.

“Oh, someone’s calling me?” he wondered and sent in his spiritual sense to see that it was actually his sister that was calling him.

“I’ll have to leave, for now, brother Yuhan,” he said. “My sister is calling me for some reason.”

“Oh, okay. I will leave too,” Du Yuhan said and walked out with Alex.

Alex walked down, past his home towards his sister’s, and saw that his sister and others were standing around outside.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“You idiot,” Luo Mei said loudly, surprising both him and Du Yuhan. “You should respond to messages quicker.”

“Um, I was busy training with brother Yuhan,” Alex said.

“Training?” Luo Mei looked at Du Yuhan with surprise, who looked aside, not being able to meet her eyes. “Anyway, you’ve been challenged,” Luo Mei said, handing him his badge back.

Alex looked at his badge in surprise.

‘Can’t be, right?’ he thought. The badge said that he was challenged by someone in the 15th rank.

’15… that was sister’s right?’ Alex thought. “Brother Yuhan, what number was Trevor ranked as?”

“Umm… 15, I think. Why?” he asked and saw Alex holding onto his badge. “No way, you didn’t get—”

Alex gave a sad smile. “I did,” he said. Alex looked at the time and saw that there were only about 15 minutes left before it was 9 pm and the fightings would be over.

“But you don’t have any Qi,” Du Yuhan said. “You won’t be able to win.”

“I know, but if I don’t go over now, I forfeit the match anyway,” Alex said.

“You’re out of Qi?” Luo Mei asked with surprise.

“Yeah, I was training very intensely,” Alex said with a sigh. With zero Qi in him at the moment, there was no way for him to fight against Trevor, let alone win. So, there was no choice but to give up right now.

“Sigh, I won’t go then,” he said. “I will give up on the rank.”

“Are you really giving up?” Luo Mei asked with concern.

“Yes. I should have noticed when you messaged me, sister. I’m sorry,” Alex said. “But I don’t think there’s a cause for any worries. I will just challenge him tomorrow and take back my rank.”

Chapter 485: The Emperor’s Search

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng started searching for Alex, but he was nowhere to be found. He didn't respond to any sort of message at all.

Alex was the only one the Saint beasts were after, so after not finding him for nearly 15 minutes, they started to get worried that he might have already been found by the beast and maybe even be killed.

With no choice, Wen Cheng let out a sect-wide message, asking if anyone knew anything about where Alex was. That was the only way he could think of finding him.

* * * * *

3 men were inside an inn in Rosewood City.

"Any news yet?" one of them asked.

"No," the other one said. "I tried searching around, but it seems most people didn't feel anything. I have called the bald guy here. He didn't want to give me an answer, but I doubt he will want to do the same to you."

"Alright then, let's wait," one of the others said.

So, they waited. The inn was empty for the most part, but the three didn't seem to care.

"They should be fine right?" one of them asked.

"It should be mostly fine. I'm ready to fly back should they ask for our help again," one of them said.

"Look, he's here."

The door opened and a man walked in.

"I told you, old Yang, I don't want to talk with you bastard. I don't care who you are with, I don't want anything to do with you," the bald man said as he walked in.

"What? Not even me?" one of the men said as they lifted their hood.

"Y-Your majesty? Why are you here?" the bald man said with surprise.

"Am I not allowed in a city of my own empire? Is the Honor sect so big that they can question why I am anywhere?" the Emperor who was staying hidden until now said.

"Your highness, you are always welcome. Whatever I said, please don't mind it. They were all directed towards that bastard," the bald man said as he gestured towards the red-haired Yang.

"Whatever, I don't have time for your grievances. I'm here for some information and will leave as soon as I get it. There is a beast horde incoming and I don't want to stay here for much longer either," the Emperor said.

"Yes, please, ask whatever you want. If I know of it, I will tell you," he said.

"Okay, 2 weeks ago we felt a wave of an aura pass through the capital. It turned out only us 3 sensed it in there, and none of the others did. After we left searching for more information, we realized that there were very few people who managed to sense it."

"We are searching for the source of that aura and came to ask if you know something about it. I know of a fact that it came from this general direction. It was maybe even released from this very city," the Emperor said.

The bald man's eyes brightened. "2 weeks ago? I knew I wasn't going mad. I told the sect elders to see what was up, but none of them felt anything and instead thought I was just talking nonsense. Damn those fools, they think I'm going senile with old age," the bald man said.

"I mean, they're not wrong," the red-haired Yang chipped from the side.

"Stop talking," the Emperor ordered. "So you did feel it. Where was it from?"

"That... it's weird. I felt the aura come from somewhere up northwest, but you should know what's there, right your highness?" the bald man said.

"The desert? I've heard of it in the records. I've never been there myself," the Emperor said.

"Right, that desert. I felt the energy come from the desert area," the bald man said.

"That can't be true," the Emperor said. "From what I know of, there shouldn't be any Qi in that area. Even people with a cultivation base lose all of it when they go there. How can something with such a profound aura originate from there," the Emperor said.

"Besides, the desert is so big that it will be impossible to find anything in it at all," the red-haired Yang said. "I once went there when I was still in the True realm when there was a sect in the desert. I had immediately lost all of my Qi and didn't want to stay there any longer."

"But the desert is massive right?" Feng who had been staying quiet this whole time said. "Even if we know it's there, it will be impossible to find it, assuming he's not lying in the first place."

"I promise on my longevity, your highness. The aura definitely originated from the desert," the bald man said.

"Hmm... the desert. How do we enter there again?" Feng asked.

"If I remember correctly, it should be through the mountains in the Scarlet City," the Emperor said as he recalled the map in his head.

"Isn't there a sect there? I remember my grandson mentioning it a few months ago," the red-haired Yang said.

"Hmm, maybe we should go there. My daughter and nephew are there looking after my sister-in-law. I heard she was also healed recently. It might be a good idea to go there," the Emperor said.

"Wait," the old man Feng said. "Didn't the information for the beast horde come from there too? I thought it said Tiger sect."

"Right, it did," the old man Yang said. "Hmm... maybe it is a good idea to go and see how they find out about the beast horde. They predicted it last time correctly, so there must be something important there."

"Now I'm curious too. Let's leave. Thank you for your help, sect leader," the Emperor said.

"Uh, I haven't been the sect leader for ages-I mean, its my honor, your majesty," the bald man said.

The three of them left the inn and flew up into the air above the Rosewood City. The entire city was empty with the only people visible being a crowd on the city walls, ready to fight.

"How far is Scarlet City again?" the old man Feng asked.

"About 20 minutes away for us," the red-haired Yang said

"Let's go," the Emperor said and put on his hood again before flying.

The 3 of them flew at an incredible speed that no flying artifact could ever hope to achieve. Their speed was just something most True realm cultivators could even imagine.

They flew on top of the road that would usually be filled with peddlers and merchants and caravans. But, now, it was empty. There was not a single soul in sight for the longest time.

The 3 Saint Realm cultivators couldn't even sense any bandits outside. With the Beast Horde incoming, there was not a single sight of anything.

"It's coming," Feng said as he looked to his left. Far away in the southern forest, he could see the trees moving.

"God damn, they really can predict the beast horde's timing," the red-haired Yang said.

"That will maybe take 15 more minutes, let's hurry up," the Emperor said and was about to increase his speed when he sensed something.

"Fuck!" the red-haired Yang said as he sensed it too.

Feng's face went white with fear as he sensed it too.

The Saint Beast was amongst the ones coming in the direction of the Scarlet city.

"How are we so unlucky to meet that damned thing? He's way too strong for us," the red-haired Yang said.

"Do we retreat, your highness?" Feng asked.

"We shou—" the Emperor was about to answer when suddenly his face twisted. Not only him, Yang and Feng too had massive changes in their faces all of a sudden. And none of them were for the better.

From what their senses were telling them, there wasn't just a single Saint Beast coming their way, there were 2.

"Your highness, this is bad. We already lost to a single beast. If a second one decides to fight us then we are done for," Yang said with a worried face.

"Your highness, I seriously suggest that we retreat back," Feng said.

"NO!" the Emperor said. There was a hint of a tremor in his voice, but he spoke with as much determination as he could muster. "My daughter is in that city. I cannot abandon her," he said.

"Shit!" the red-haired Yang said. "My grandson is there too. Fuck! I hope we don't have to fight them."

"Let's go," the Emperor said and all 3 of their flying speeds increased drastically.

"How much further?" the Emperor asked after a few minutes.

"We should be close to the Gap soon. After that, it's at most 5 minutes. We will surely make it before the beasts do," Yang said.

"That's for the best. As long as my daugt—" the Emperor suddenly stopped talking and looked down at the road next to the gap.

Feng also saw what was on the road and was a little surprised.

"What's that idiot doing there? Does he not realize a beast horde is coming?" Yang said.

The emperor didn't speak and instead flew down from the sky. The other 2 followed suit.

"Young man, there is a beast horde incoming, you should quickly run away from here," the Emperor said.

The young man turned to look at them. When he did, the other 3 could see nothing but fear in his eyes. And even then, the young man spoke up and said, "I know. The beasts are here for me, and if I let them have me, I will probably be able to save the people I care about."

Chapter 486 - More Arrivals

"You 3 seniors should run away quickly. The beasts should be here at any moment," Alex said. "You should go help out the others in the city that will have to fight the other beasts."

The 3 saint realm figures couldn't believe what they were hearing.

"Junior, are you alright in the head? What makes you think the beasts are after you?" the red-haired Yang said.

"I... I just know. You should hurry away instead of staying here. It will be very dangerous here very fast," Alex said.

"Haha, what makes you think that we can't handle a bunch of beasts?" Feng said.

"I don't doubt you guys can fight the beasts normally but are you sure you guys can fight the saint beast coming over here?" Alex asked.

"What? Why would the saint beast be com-Shit!" the red-haired Yang said.

"What?" Feng asked.

Yang's face twisted as he realized something. "Kid, where were you during the last beast horde attack?" Yang asked.

"I was running away last time," Alex said. "However I have nowhere to go now. You guys really shouldn't be staying here, talking with me. Leave already."

The one named Feng seemed to have realized as well.

"Brother Zexian, I think he might be the one running away from the Jaguar last month. He is certainly telling the truth," Feng whispered into the Emperor's head.

"I can see that," the Emperor said. "Besides, I would have figured it out eventually it seems." The Emperor turned his head towards the south as a twisted expression appeared on his face.

The 2 Saint beasts weren't going towards the Scarlet City from what he could sense. They were coming right where they were, apparently attracted to the kid in front of them.

The Emperor then turned towards Alex and asked, "What do you have that they want?"

"I don't know," Alex said without hesitation. He truly had no idea. He could come up with a bunch of reasons such as his body constitution or his talents or even his spiritual roots. However, none of them made any sense to be attractive to a beast, one at the Saint realm at that.

"Stop lying, young man. If you tell us, then we might be able to save you," Feng said.

"I seriously don't know. If I knew what it was by now, I would have either discarded it or handed it to someone stronger," Alex said.

"We are strong. If you do know of it, this is your last chance to save yourself," the Emperor said as he got rid of his hood and showed his face.

Alex was a little confused for a second as he felt the face was familiar. However, in the next moment, he realized who he was looking at.

"Your majesty," Alex said as he bowed a little.

"Oh," the Emperor said with a bit of surprise. "I didn't know my vessels recognized my face so easily."

"I was there during the competition in the capital when the beasts came for me there too," Alex said. "I remember you from then."

"I see," the Emperor said. "It seems they truly are after you. In fact, they should be here any moment now."

"Well, we have company before that," Yang said as he looked up in the air. Alex looked up and his heart skipped a beat when he saw who was there.

In the air were 3 people, 2 ladies and one man in a small boat that flew towards their location.

Alex could see both his master and senior sister there and immediately started panicking.

"You guys, what are you doing here?" he asked in a worried tone.

Ma Rong flew down from the boat and landed in front of him.

"You stupid disciple, what were you trying to do?" she asked as soon as she was before him. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

Alex could see the worry in Ma Rong's eyes and didn't know what to say. "I—"

"Ma Rong," Wen Cheng called from behind as he came down with Luo Mei. "Your Majesty," he bowed towards the Emperor. Luo Mei did the same.

Ma Rong finally realized that she was in front of the emperor. "Your Majesty,"she said as she bowed towards him as well.

"Who are you people?" the Emperor asked, not recognizing the two sect leaders, but then his eyes fell onto Luo Mei.

"Oh, it's you, little girl. You were the one that nearly won the Annual competition, weren't you?" he asked. "What's your name again?"

"It's Luo Mei, your majesty," Luo Mei said.

"I am Ma Rong, sect leader of the Hong Wu sect," Ma Rong introduced herself.

"I am Wen Cheng, sect leader of the Tiger sect," Wen Cheng said.

The Emperor's eyes brightened. "The Tiger sect? You were the one that messaged about the Beast Horde, weren't you? How did you kn-Ah, I see," the Emperor said as a mystery opened up to him as he looked at Alex in front of him.

"No wonder you always knew when the beasts were coming. He told you, huh?" the Emperor said. He then turned to Ma Rong and asked, "You said Hong Wu sect right? So it must be one of your people that found the recipe to the pill that helped by younger brother's family."

"Yes, your highness," Ma Rong said. "In fact, it was my disciple who found it."

The Emperor's eyes brightened even more. "You did?" he turned to ask Alex.

"Yes, your highness," Alex said, but he turned around in worry once more. "Master, please go back. The beasts will be here any moment. You can't fight them at all."

"And you can?" Wen Cheng asked. "What did you plan on doing here? Giving your life to protect us? Do you even know if that will work? Did you ever stop to think what we would feel like when we found out that you died for us? What would we do as masters who couldn't even help their disciples?"

Wen Cheng seemed calm, but there was anger hidden in each of his words.

"Let's go back quickly, junior brother. We will think of something for the beasts. I'm sure we can fight them off this time. Look, even the Emperor is here. He will surely save us," Luo Mei said as she turned towards the Emperor.

The Emperor just shook his head. "I'm afraid that's impossible," he said. "If I could defeat the beast, I would've done so ages ago."

"Your majesty, if you can't defeat the beast then you should go to the city as well. Please take my masters and senior sister too," Alex said.

"I..." the Emperor stopped for a moment and said," I would happily do that considering what you've done for my brother and sister-in-law. However... I'm afraid we've run out of time."

Suddenly, a massive aura erupted from the forest as a horde of beasts, in amounts that exceeded the one from the capital appeared in the Gap.

The Gap was created previously during the wars when the empire was still shattered. No beasts could be seen venturing this open part of the Southern forest, but now it did.

Alex could feel the overwhelming aura that gave him nothing but a sense of hopelessness. Adding on to that the feeling of tragedy that he had caused when he saw that his masters and sister were here, he couldn't feel anything but the worst right now.

The many beasts ran through the open grass and flew through the air, all coming directly towards the 7 people that were there.

However, just before they reached Alex and the rest. 3 distinct aura appeared from behind Alex that seemed to suffocate the entirety of the beasts, and also the 4 non Saint realm folks that were there.

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng's faces changed when they saw that the two other people with the emperor were also Saint realm in cultivation.

Even Alex was surprised.

The beasts all stopped right where they were and started cowering in fear and they tried to crawl on top of each other to find a way back.

Sounds of whimpers and hisses and howls all sounded from the group of beasts that were hurting from the pain they were feeling.

"Stop harming them."

A voice came from behind the beast that rung around the entire forest, followed by a massive aura that seemed to snuff out the Emperor and the other two's aura as if they were nothing.

"So, it's true," the Emperor said as he realized the difference between him and the opponent.

The black Jaguar showed itself, with its purple eyes that seemed to look directly into a person's soul.

Alex saw the beast and immediately recognized it without even having ever seen it.

"How are you humans always there where I am?" the Jaguar asked.

"Haha, well, this one is just a coincidence," the Emperor said. "Why don't you introduce our new friend? I don't see why he had to remain hidden."

"Who says I'm hiding?" a voice came from behind the Jaguar as a puma with white furs and black-tipped ears and paws showed itself.

The puma was very bulky and looked almost twice as wide as the jaguar who itself was quite large already. "I'm only in the sideline for today, so you humans don't need to worry," the puma said.

The Jaguar looked down at the group of humans and said, "Finally, I managed to track you down after 4 months. It's time I take-huh?" the Jaguar stopped speaking.

"This can't be," it said as it looked at Alex.. "But you're a human."

Chapter 487 - Ruler

Alex and the rest were both scared and confused when they heard the black jaguar.

"You… you are a human. This can't be true. What is going on?" the jaguar asked as it was itself confused as well.

Suddenly, a fearsome aura spread out from the jaguar making even the Emperor himself cower in fear. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead as he finally realized just how wrong he was even after figuring out that the jaguar was stronger than him.

'This is like nothing I've sensed before. Not even grandfather ever lived enough to be this strong,' he thought.

It didn't need to be mentioned just how badly the others were suffering.

"Did you do something to deceive me, human? Speak up or I will kill you right now," the jaguar said.

The Emperor and the other two turned to look at the jaguar only to see a truly angry face of his.

The puma who said that he was just an observer in this event, slowly came forward. A wave of similar anger appeared on its face as well.

"Let's kill them all," he said, striking fear in the heart of all 7 that were there.

"No, we need to make sure we are wrong first," the jaguar said. He then turned around to the 7 and asked, "Speak up, what is going on here?"

The emperor didn't exactly know why the jaguar was angry, but seeing how it didn't seem to be here for a human, he asked, "are you not after this child?"

The jaguar turned to look at Alex properly once more and a bit of hesitation arose in his heart. "I don't know. Who is this and why did you bring him here?"

"I didn't bring him," the Emperor said.

"I came here on my own," Alex said, with a really pale face. "You are here for me, so take me and leave them alone."

The Emperor and the other 2 saint realm experts looked back in shock to see Alex even able to speak. It was hard for even the emperor to speak given how much suppression they were under due to the jaguar's aura. And yet, a kid that wasn't even in the True realms could speak up under such conditions.

The jaguar and the puma were certainly surprised as well. The jaguar slowly looked up and down at Alex, with the thousands of beasts that were cowering in fear behind him as well.

"The one I'm looking for does appear to be you. But this has to be a mistake because we aren't looking for any sort of humans. We want nothing to do with your kind," the jaguar said.

"Then what are you here for if not me?" Alex asked.

"For our own kind. I'm here to take back the one who has our lord's bloodline. I do not know why it appeared on you human. However, It seems I must take you back to see what is happening." The jaguar said.

"If it appears to be deception on your part, I will come back to destroy your entire empire," the puma threatened from behind.

"There is no deception here," Alex said. "I came here because I could sense the feeling of something calling me towards the south. Every time this feeling appeared, the beasts appeared along with it."

"To protect the ones I cared about, I chose to give myself up," Alex said.

The jaguar and the puma's face suddenly changed. The puma disappeared from where he stood and appeared right next to Alex, smelling him a little.

"Where is the feeling coming from? Show me," the Puma asked.

"I can't move," Alex said.

The puma released his own aura and countered the jaguar's aura, allowing Alex and the rest to move again.

"Show me," he said.

Alex nodded and pointed towards the southeast direction. "That's where the feeling is coming from," Alex said.

Puma looked in shock and went back to the jaguar. "What's going on? That human child is accurately locating the palace," the puma asked.

"I do not know. Is there something wrong with the fountain perhaps?" the jaguar asked.

"No way," the puma said. "Every single one I found was accurate. There is nothing wrong with the fountain. Besides, this is our last chance. The fountain won't work after today."

The jaguar's face soured when he heard that. Lady Ren had indeed given such an assessment, which was the reason the two of them had decided to team up together for this time.

"So we take him back, right?" the jaguar asked.

"We have to. If the fountain isn't wrong, then he has the bloodline of our Lord," puma said.

"Can it really be that this human was born to be the king of our people?" the jaguar asked.

The two of them were speaking softly, but they were in no way quiet. Alex could clearly hear them say the words 'bloodline', 'lord', and 'king', and a distinct feeling rose in him.

'It can't be!' he thought as he felt a sense of clearance in his mind. He seemed to have finally realized that they weren't here for him.

They were here for Pearl.

'These feline beasts are here for Pearl? But why? Are they his family? Are they taking him back?' Alex wondered and looked back up to listen to the beast's talk.

However, they weren't talking anymore. Instead, they were staring directly at him.

'Shit!' Alex thought when he realized that his shocked expression had given away that he knew something.

"Speak up, or we won't be very merciful," the puma said.

"No, I won't," Alex said. There was no way Alex was going to let them learn about Pearl without first learning their intentions properly.

"I might have an idea as to who you are looking for, but you will have to tell me what you want with him," Alex asked.

"You know who we want?" the jaguar asked with surprise. "Spill it."

"Right after you," Alex said, not budging a bit. The Emperor and the rest were clearly surprised to see Alex stand up to a battle of words against the saint beasts.

"Yu Ming, stand down," Ma Rong whispered to him from the side. Her heart was leaping out of her ribcage when she saw her disciple speak with a saint beast like that. It wouldn't even require the beasts to make a move if they wanted to kill him at any point.

"Human child, you have no room to order us around. Tell us what you know, or we will kill all 7 of you," the puma said.

"I know you can," Alex said. "But I just heard that this is your last chance. If you don't want your last chance to be a failure, then tell me who you beasts are and what you want with him."

Anger flared in the puma's eyes and he decided to kill them all. However, just then, a voice appeared out of nowhere.

"STOP!"

A third saint realm aura appeared from beyond the two beasts as a white beast appeared from behind them.

Alex looked behind and saw another feline beast appear, only this time, Alex couldn't help but be surprised by her appearance.

'A White Cat, just like Pearl,' he thought as he looked at the female cat appearing in front of them.

"Did your fathers never tell you how much the lord cared for his people?" the White Cat asked the two beasts.

The two male saint beasts were much stronger than the female saint beast, and yet they still lowered their head when they saw her approach.

"Lady Ren, why are you here? You shouldn't be out of your chambers," the two of them said.

"A day or two out won't hurt me," Lady Ren said. She then turned to Alex and looked at him.

"Hm… this certainly is weird. Why do you have my husband's aura on you? Are you perhaps someone from outside?" she asked.

Alex's heart skipped a beat when he heard that. 'She knows about the real world? Is she a player? Or is she someone with knowledge of a world existing aside from this one?' Alex wondered.

"No, you can't be from the outside," Lady Ren answered herself. "Your cultivation isn't high enough to make those sort of travel. This certainly adds to the mystery of why you have my husband's aura then."

"It's someone else you guys want, but I won't tell you the location until I know what you're up to," Alex asked.

"Oh, so you not only know that we are looking for a beast, but also know that beast's location? Adding onto the fact that you have the aura on you… am I correct in assuming that you've bonded with the beast?" Lady Ren asked.

Alex's face paled when he realized that he had given away his hand. He looked left and right, trying to think of a way to avoid any sort of tragedy.

"Don't fear, child. We aren't here to harm you. We are just here for the beast, and once we get the beast, we will leave," Lady Ren said.

"How can I believe you?" Alex asked, still fearing.

"Young man, we have no other choice," the Emperor said. "We are in their palm now. Whether they want to squeeze us, or gently lay us down on a bed of flower, it's their choice now."

"However, if it's any consolation, that Jaguar said the same thing to me on the first day they arrived in the capital too," the Emperor said.

"Why do you want him then?" Alex asked.

"This continent has been without its ruler for a long time now.. If your friend is worthy, he shall be the next king of the entire Western Continent."

Chapter 488 - Taken Away

"A… king?" Alex was surprised when he heard that.

"Yes, of the Continent," Lady Ren said. "Or Queen, whatever your friend can be. But I do remember you saying 'him', so he must be a male beast."

"This continent is lacking because it doesn't have a ruler, and so it desperately needs one. Please show us the beast so we can see if he's worthy to become what this continent needs," Lady Ren said.

Wen Cheng, Ma Rong, and Luo Mei's eyes were wide with shock since they had realized what the beasts were after. The two sect leaders who knew the origins of the little cat were especially surprised that there was such a big history behind him.

Alex still didn't trust the beasts fully, but he was more so inclined to do what they said after listening to them and seeing the type of beast Lady Ren was.

"Come out, Pearl," Alex said. A bright white light appeared as a small White Cat appeared from inside of the beast space.

The three beasts saw Pearl after the shine disappeared. The moment they did, their faces changed.

"That's…" the jaguar looked at Pearl in surprise.

"Another White Cat?" the puma asked as well. "That shouldn't be possible."

Lady Ren was very surprised as well to see another one of her kind after so long. "Child, come here," Lady Ren said when she saw the White Cat.

"Meow?" Pearl cowered a little in fear around the new people and beasts. He jumped onto Alex's arms and tried to snuggle in there. He then looked around at the new figures.

He could only recognize Alex's masters and sister since he had interacted with them and they had been nice to him.

He then turned around towards the other 3 humans with no recollection as to who they were.

Finally, he looked at the beasts. At first, he thought he was fighting them, but once he felt their aura, he cowered even more.

Then, out of nowhere, the aura from a few months ago started calling to him to the distant place, and once again, the same fear from when he was inside the formation started appearing.

"It's alright, I'm here," Alex said as he caressed Pearl slowly.

The jaguar and puma seemed to have realized something. "Lady Ren, what's going on?" they asked.

"What do you mean?" Lady Ren asked.

"Our senses, we can't lock on anyone anymore. Neither the child nor the human," The puma said.

"That can't be. I can perfectly sense—" Lady Ren stopped as her eyes went wide again.

"What's wrong?" the jaguar asked.

"I can sense the human and the child," Lady Ren said.

"Hm, I wonder if we lack the lord's bloodli— wait, did you say you can sense the human too?" the jaguar asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said with clear confusion on her face. "I don't know what's happening now. The human… he has the bloodline of our King too."

"That's impossible," the puma cried out. "How could a human possibly have our lord's bloodline."

"I do not know. None of the knowledge I have told me anything about a human having the bloodline of the 4 great families," Lady Ren said. "The fountain's aura should be ending soon. If we want to find out more… then we will have to take them back."

"No!" Ma Rong shouted. "He's my disciple. You can't take him anywhere."

Ma Rong stepped in front of Alex. Wen Cheng wanted to get there too, but he realized that the atmosphere had changed. The warm air had turned incredibly cold all of a sudden and the grass below them frosted.

The three saint realm humans were surprised too when they sensed the sheer chill around Ma Rong.

"Interesting," Lady Ren said. "I didn't know there were still humans with such great body constitution. But little girl, you can't do anything to us. Especially, to me."

"I can try," Ma Rong said stubbornly.

Alex was behind her and he wanted to say something. However, he could not stop his body from trembling in fear at the aura his master was releasing. This one was far more potent than any of the other times.

It seemed that not only had she gotten good at controlling her constitution, she could also make it stronger now.

"MA RONG!" Wen Cheng shouted. "Can't you see what you're doing to your disciple?"

Ma Rong lost focus on the beasts and turned around to see Alex nearly on the ground. Her heart skipped a beat when she remembered what her aura did to her disciple.

"I'm sorry," she said and hurried to catch him before he completely fell. Once her cold aura disappeared, Alex began to retain his senses and could think without feeling fear for his life.

"Are you his Master, little girl?" Lady Ren asked.

"Yes," Ma Rong said.

"I see," Lady Ren said. "I can see why you are defensive then. But I can promise you that we mean no harm for your disciple. We will just be taking him back to the palace and we will learn why he has the bloodline that he does."

"Give us the child, human boy," the puma said.

"No need," Lady Ren said. "He seems scared around us unfamiliar faces. Let him stay with the human until he's back in the palace."

"Lady Ren," the jaguar whispered. "What do we do about the bond? Can someone who submitted himself to a human truly be our king?"

"Hah," Lady Ren said. "You guys need to grow up quickly and learn more. You can easily tell that the child hasn't submitted to anyone. They have the Bond of equals and thus none is below is the other."

"Oh," the jaguar and puma said as they turned back to look at Alex and Pearl.

"I see," the jaguar said. "Thank you for enlightening me, Lady Ren."

"Alright, enough time has been wasted already. We need to return back and not miss the optimal timing for the baptism," Lady Ren said.

"Yes, Lady Ren," the two beasts bowed their head.

Alex suddenly felt his body move on its own as he was lifted into the air and put on top of the black Jaguar.

"Carry him," Lady Ren said.

"Wait, you can't take him," Wen Cheng cried out.

"Don't take my little brother," Luo Mei shouted as well.

Ma Rong was starting to pour out her yin qi again, but she was a little apprehensive about how much she did it.

"Worry not, this human will be back very quickly," Lady Ren said, not allowing any of their words to reach her. "You will be able to see him again in less than a decade."

"A… decade?" Ma Rong questioned with surprise.

"Let's move," Lady Ren said.

"No, let me go. I don't want to be away for a decade," Alex shouted, but he couldn't struggle against the constraints of a saint realm's aura.

"Yes, Lady Ren," the two beasts said and started moving.

"Let me go," Alex shouted but could do nothing aside from that.

"No!" his masters and sister started shouting.

Seeing that he was not going to be able to get away from them, he resorted to the only thing he could do. He shouted.

"Don't worry about me. I will be back one way or another. Just wait for me."

* * * * *

The sun had set and the battle was over. The Scarlet city remained victorious against the beasts with very few casualties. The people celebrated in happiness and the ones hiding finally came out to celebrate as well.

Outside the walls, the people who were dealing with the aftermath remained.

"Are the beasts always this low in number?" the Royal Alchemist asked after seeing the pile of beast corpses.

"No," the City lord said. "Maybe continuously attacking for months led to them being low in number?"

"I don't feel like that's true," the Royal Alchemist said. "If anything, there should be more beasts out there than there are humans. I don't think you realize just how massive the southern forest is."

"Then only God knows why their numbers are low," the city lord said.

The Royal Alchemist looked at the corpses once more and looked around immediately searching for someone.

"What's little Ma?" he asked.

The city lord looked around and shook his head. "I don't know. I haven't seen her for a while," the city lord said.

"What is that girl doing? She should be getting her sect members to butcher these beasts and take out the alchemy ingredients before they turn bad," he said.

"I will go look for her," the city lord said.

"No need, she's here," a voice said. The city lord and the Royal Alchemist book looked up to see 4 people on a boat.

"Your majesty. What are you doing here?" the Royal alchemist asked.

"Stuff happened, Lai Qing," the Emperor said. "How are you doing, nephew?"

"Uncle, it's good to see you," the City lord said with a bow.

"We would like to be dismissed, your majesty," the miserable-looking Wen Cheng said to the Emperor.

"Sure, go. I have some questions for you, especially your sect leader Ma, but those can wait for later. I will stay in the city for a week," the Emperor said.

"Surely, your Majesty," Wen Cheng said and shook Luo Mei and Ma Rong who were even more miserable than him.

"Go and rest, Ma Rong. It's been a long day today," Wen Cheng said. "We will do the same."

Ma Rong nodded and flew away, speaking to not a single person along the way, knowing completely that she had lost her disciple for good.

Chapter 489 - Questions

Alex was holding dearly to Pearl, ever so vigilant of his current situation. He still didn't trust the beasts completely, and the only reason he didn't struggle to fight back was that somewhere in the back of his head, he was curious to see what was going to happen.

On the slightest hint of anything bad happening to him or Pearl, he would do his best to get himself out of there.

"I know you are worried, young human and nothing we will ever say will get you to trust us right now. So, just trust on the fact that despite us being so strong, you are alive right now," the White Cat said.

Alex looked around at the forest underneath them. They were moving so fast that almost everything looked like a blur to them. He decided to use focus mode to see what was underneath them.

"What are you doing?" the White Cat asked Alex suddenly.

"What?" Alex asked, controlling the focus mode back.

The White Cat scrutinized him with her golden eyes for a few moments before taking them off. "Nothing," she said.

'Can she sense it when I use focus mode?' Alex wondered and stopped doing that.

"Who are you, uhh… miss?" Alex asked.

"I am Ren," Lady Ren said. "You can call me Lady Ren, human. And as for you my child, you can call me grandma."

She gave a sweet smile towards Pearl with no hint of malice at all.

"Grandma? Are you very old?" Alex asked.

"Boy, speak respectfully to Lady Ren," the Jaguar said.

"Let's just kill this human," the puma said.

Alex immediately cowered as the saint beasts started releasing their aura once more.

"STOP IT!" Lady Ren shouted. As soon as they did, the two beasts stopped using their aura on Alex and he could finally feel free again.

"I told you two to stop this hatred you have, and you still keep it up?" she asked.

"Forgive us, lady Ren," the jaguar said.

"But lady Ren, it was the humans that—"

"Not another word. It doesn't matter what the humans did. You can't use the crime of a few to hate on the many," lady Ren said.

"I-I'm sorry," the puma said.

Alex looked at them curiously. "What did the humans do that you hate us so much?" Alex asked.

"It's because of humans that this continent is as bad as it is," lady Ren said with a sigh.

"Why? What? did they do?" Alex asked.

"Haha, no need to ask so many questions right now. Why don't you answer my question first," lady Ren asked.

"Uhh… If I can answer it, then sure," Alex said.

"How did you come upon that child?" she asked.

Alex was surprised that was the first thing she wanted to know. "Pearl? I found him by chance I should say," Alex said.

"His name is Pearl?" Lady Ren asked with amusement. "That's a nice name." She then went close to Alex and looked at Pearl with a smile again and said, "Nice to meet you, Pearl."

"Meow?" Pearl looked back at Alex to find out if he should answer at all or not.

"Go ahead," he said. This wasn't the time to hide what he knew or could do. The more he showed off himself, the higher his chances at survival would become. There was also the chance of them wanting him so much that they wouldn't let go of him, but that at least meant that he would live.

As for leaving, given how fast he could cultivate, it wouldn't take a lot of time. At least not the 'nearly a decade' that Lady Ren predicted.

Pearl looked back towards lady Ren after getting the permission and said, "Nice to meet you too." Only, he didn't say it out loud but used his spiritual sense to speak.

Just as Alex expected, a face full of shock appeared on her face. "How did you? How does he have spiritual sense?" she asked.

"I gave him a Spirit Cleansing Lily," Alex said.

"A… Spirit Cleansing Lily? I'm afraid I'm not familiar with flowers. Can you tell me what it does?" she asked.

"Sure," Alex said. "It unlocks one Spiritual Sense without needing to enter the Saint realm."

"Hmm, do all humans have spiritual sense then?" she asked.

"Are you planning on just asking questions and not answering any?" Alex asked.

"Oh, my bad. Go on ask what you want," she said.

"Who are you exactly to these two? You are much weaker than them, but they respect you very much. I thought the beasts followed a hierarchy of power," Alex said.

The other two didn't seem offended at the question and instead started giggling.

"Oh, they do follow the hierarchy of power," Lady Ren said with a chuckle as well. "The fact that you call me weak just means that you are weak yourself. Cultivate for a few hundred years, and if you are lucky, maybe you will start finding inkling of my strength then."

Alex was surprised when he heard that. "Are you very strong?" he asked.

"There are only a handful of beings stronger than me on this floating piece of rock," she said.

The way she said it, Alex couldn't help but believe her. "Are you at the peak of the? Saint realm?" he asked.

Lady Ren gave a mysterious smile and said, "it's my turn to ask the questions."

"Oh, sorry," Alex said. "Please ask."

"Regarding Pearl, can you tell me more about the circumstances you found him under?" she asked.

"Uh, I was in the forest one day, and he and his mother crashed into the forest. She was very heavily wounded and couldn't even fight a common beast. When I helped her fend off a wolf, she asked me to take care of pearl, and… she died," he said.

"I see," Lady Ren said with slight tears in her eyes. "So my granddaughter died just like that huh?"

"Yea— wait, your granddaughter?" Alex asked with shock on his face.

"What? You think I want to be called grandma by just any other beast?" Lady Ren said.

"Are you telling me Pearl is your…?"

"Great-Grandson, yes," she said. "Or at least I think he is. There shouldn't be another White Cat beside me in this realm, and the only ones that have been was my daughter."

"Where is she now?" Alex asked.

"We married her off to a beast in the Eastern Continent," she said. "So I think the White Cat you met might have been my granddaughter. Although, she could have been my great-granddaughter as well. Sigh, I can't tell how much time has passed in the outer world."

"It should have been about 5000 years since the Princess' marriage, Lady Ren," the jaguar said.

"Has it only been 5000 years? I thought more time would've passed already," she said.

'Only… 5000? How old is she?' Alex wondered.

"So you aren't certain that Pearl is your descendant, right?" Alex asked.

"No, of that we are absolutely certain," the puma said. "After all, we had his mother's body brought to us a few months ago."

"… wait, Pearl's mother's body went to you guys? Why?" Alex asked.

"It was someone who recognized her kind and brought the dead body to us and left without letting us know. We wanted to find more out, but we couldn't at the time. But it seems we now have the answer," the jaguar said.

"Wait, wait, wait," Alex said as something didn't make sense to him. "You said you married your daughter to the Eastern continent, right? Then why were Pearl and his mother here?" he asked.

"That…" Lady Ren stopped for a second as the same confusion Alex had appeared on her face as well. "You're right, how was she here? You said she was wounded too, right? Then there was no way she flew across the Blue."

"Well, how did you marry off your daughter to the Eastern Continent in the first place? Did they fly all the way there too?" he asked.

"Don't be silly, human. The ocean is not something one dares to cross even at the higher realms of the Saint Realm. There are many beasts in the ocean that will kill you before you even know what is happening," the Puma said.

"Then how?" Alex asked.

"She teleported there," Lady Ren said.

"Teleported?" Alex asked. "You can teleport between continents? Isn't that very far away? How many resources would that use?"

"It is far," lady Ren said. "That was why they were teleported twice instead of once."

"Twice?" Alex asked.

"People would first teleport to the Central Continent, and then to the other continent. Since the central continent is at the center, it was used as a mid-point to go to before going to your desired continent," Lady Ren said.

"Central Continent?" Alex asked with confusion. "You mean the 5th continent that people can't enter?"

"Oh, you know about that?" Lady Ren asked with surprise. "I'm surprised humans have this much knowledge of the world. I assumed that after the teleportation formation stopped working, they wouldn't be able to get any more information about the outside world. It seems I was wrong."

Alex didn't say anything and let her believe what she thought of it. "so the teleportation formation is not working anymore?"

"No. Humans found it useless after they stopped working due to the central continent no longer being accessible and destroyed it. they plundered the resources keeping it alive, and thus is no longer usable," Lady Ren said.

"I see.... What happened in the central continent making it unable to go to?" he asked.

Chapter 490 - Blood Blessed By The Gods

[A/N: A small change was made to the last chapter. Lady Ren's daughter has married 5000* years ago.]

Lady Ren sighed as she remembered the incident with the Central Continent.

"Stuff happened there, making it start gathering Qi from all over the realm, and destroyed everything there as before," Lady Ren said.

"It used to be a continent with barely any Qi in it, so the only ones that lived there were common beasts and mortals. Due to that, no one wanted anything to do with the continent, and most of it was barren."

"Later on, everyone got tired of using way too many resources to teleport between continents, and so the four rulers of the other 4 continents got together to establish teleportation formations on the Central Continent itself. They used resources from the continents to make it a transition point during teleportations," Lady Ren said.

"But one day, it suddenly started showing unusual behavior. When people couldn't access the teleportation formation, all 4 of the rulers went to check, but... sigh, forget about it. It's not a memory I would like to remember," she said.

"Oh, the other continents have rulers too?" Alex asked with surprise. He didn't remember anything about them in the myriad of information that was floating on the internet.

"Of course they do," Lady Ren said. "Only the Central Continent didn't have one, and that was for obvious reasons."

"Oh, is any one of the humans?" Alex asked.

"No, little human. The rulers are chosen from the 4 Great Families. No human would ever have a chance of obtaining that honor," Lady Ren said.

"The 4 great families? I don't think I have ever heard of something like that," Alex said.

"I would be rather surprised if you knew who they were," Lady Ren said. "Can I ask my questions now?"

Alex nodded. '4 Great Family huh? I will have to ask my sister and see if she knows something about it tomorrow morning. If not, I hope the internet has some answers,' he thought.

"Can you tell me truthfully how you came to acquire the bloodline of one of the 4 Great Families?" Lady Ren asked.

"Huh? I have something like that?" Alex asked with surprise. But then when he thought about it, the ruler of this continent was from the 4 great families, and Lady Ren did say that he had the blood of the ruler.

"You very clearly do. In fact... you have just as much as this child does from what I am sensing," Lady Ren said.

"Uhh... I think I know the reason for that," Alex said. "Wait a second. Pearl, can you go back inside?"

"Meow!" he said and agreed. He would rather go back to his beast space than stay out here amongst these unfamiliar faces, flying so fast in the sky.

"Why'd you send him inside?" Lady Ren asked.

"It has to do with his mother's death, so I would rather not talk about it in front of him," Alex said.

"Go on then," Lady Ren asked.

Alex nodded and explained it all as much as he could and told them how he acquired a blood essence from her. He didn't go into detail about how the blood essence came to be and just said that she handed it to him.

"And then?" she asked.

"Then one day when I was just messing around, I brought out the bead that was the blood essence. It was so strong that I was nearly choked to death, but Pearl ate it up like it was nothing," Alex said.

"After that, he absorbed it, but not all. After a few minutes, he spit out some blood that he couldn't absorb, and... somehow, my body attracted it. I don't know what happened afterward, but when I woke up, I had absorbed it too," he said.

Suddenly, the jaguar stopped flying, and so did the puma. Lady Ren stopped too, but the shock in her face made it look like she wasn't paying attention to anything.

"You absorbed the blood essence?" the jaguar asked.

"That's not possible. Even we can't do that," the puma said.

"When you say your body attracted it, what do you mean?" Lady Ren asked.

"The blood, it was floating in the air and my body craved it and took it in directly through my forehead," Alex said. "I fainted afterward, and since then my Metal roots have significantly improved."

"Your metal roots? My god, you really did absorb it. You not only absorbed blood blessed by the gods, but you absorbed the blood essence itself. That's... that's not something I have ever heard of happening," the White Cat said with a face full of confusion.

"Does the library not have anything on it, lady Ren?" the jaguar asked.

"No, we might have to go back to the lord's ancestral home if we want to learn anything about it at all," Lady Ren said.

"Is it that unusual?" Alex asked. 'My body is divine grade, so there should be a few bodies above mine that can do that as well, right?' he wondered.

"I admittedly don't have all the knowledge as I am but a lowly concubine to the lord, but... I have never in all of my life heard of a human absorbing the bloodline of any of the 4 Great Families. The bloodline blessed by the gods is not so easily acquired by just about anyone."

"Most of them can't even reproduce in all of their lifetimes. It's one of the downsides of having just a godly bloodline," Lady Ren said. "Even when they do manage to reproduce, the child may not fully acquire the bloodline and only part of it."

"It's similar to what is happening to your right now. You are part of whatever your parent's bloodline was and part the bloodline of blood essence you absorbed," Lady Ren said with an amused face. "Suddenly, you have started to become more interesting than I would have previously imagined."

Alex couldn't understand the benefits of having such a bloodline, but he has already experienced some of it. Just having his metal roots be improved was beneficial enough.

"Are there any more benefits of having this bloodline than just improved Metal roots?" Alex asked.

"Um... there are, but I am not sure if they will manifest on a human. Your physiology doesn't exactly match that of those that usually have this bloodline," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said. "Then, can I ask what this bloodline is called?"

"You'll learn soon enough," Lady Ren said. "Let's hurry back."

"Yes, lady Ren," the jaguar and puma said.

They immediately flew through the night sky once more at blisteringly fast speed.

'Dammit,' Alex thought as he was carried away. 'They gave so many answers, but not a single concrete one. I can't even demand that they answer more clearly.'

Alex once again looked around at the incredible speed they were flying at and wondered just how far he was. The surroundings all looked the same to him and he had no map of anything outside of the Crimson empire to even make an educated guess.

Finally, after an hour, the there of them came to stop.. It seemed they had reached their destination.

Chapter 491 - The Palace

The land below them was a massive forest, denser than anything Alex had ever seen before. The trees have mostly turned red as if autumn had arrived.

Alex looked around and he could only see trees as far as he could see. The southern forest was truly endless.

"How long does this forest go on for?" Alex asked.

"This forest takes over nearly a third of the entire continent," the jaguar replied.

"And there are strong beasts in the forest all over here?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the jaguar said. Lady Ren flew down onto the ground and so did the other two. Alex couldn't help but be confused exactly where he was being taken to.

'They said we were returning to the previous king's palace, right?' Alex wondered. 'But I don't see any sort of buildings. Do they just live in the forest, out in the open?'

He didn't think that was possible, but who really knew about the beasts.

When they finally landed, Alex still couldn't see any buildings, but there was something here that wouldn't normally exist in a forest.

In the middle of the forest was a 10 meter wide, circular stone platform that didn't match the scenery at all. It was fully white and Alex could make out some designs in it, but not all of it.

Even when he was starting to, he had another problem he had to take care of. Because of where he was and how untouched this location was from humanity, the alchemy ingredients that grew here were of very high rank, with most being True rank ingredients and some even being Saint rank.

His senses kept on telling him to pick them up, but he wasn't in a situation to do so.

"What is that stone platform?" he asked, trying to suppress the urge to go out and grab every single flower and leaves that were in the vicinity.

He saw the three beasts walk upon and did the same. "Is this—"

Alex was about to ask something when suddenly light started shining from underneath him. All 4 of them were now basking in the artificial-looking blue light that was coming from underneath them.

Just then, Alex felt something coming upon him from the stone platform that started to mess with his body. His vision blurred as a bright white light suddenly engulfed them all.

When the light went away, Alex realized that he was still standing on the stone platform, except it wasn't the same one. He looked around and saw that the area had changed as well.

He was now inside what looked like a cave. There were buckets next to the stone platform on the right, with 2 feline beasts waiting in guard on the opposite side.

The cave itself seemed to mostly be made up of a gigantic white marble that was carved to make a cave, and there were crystal stalactites hanging from above him that seemed to glow on their own and gave light to the entire cave.

The only place the stalactites weren't available was right above the stone platform. He nervously looked back and realized that a massive wall was right behind him.

"Did we... just teleport?" Alex asked.

The two beasts looked at him with a weird expression, while Lady Ren seemed a little worried. "Was that your first experience with teleportation?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I do have a similar skill, but I've never really teleported with a formation."

"Well, are you alright?" Lady Ren asked.

"Am I alright?" Alex asked back. "I think so. Is something wrong?"

"Well if you are okay, then it's fine. Most beasts and humans that have come through previously tend to have an urge to vomit the first few times. If you feel like it, we have buckets over there for you," Lady Ren said.

"No need, I'm fine," Alex said.

"Very well, come. We are here," she said and walked on. The two feline beasts bowed their head at the presence of Lady Ren and the two beasts.

The jaguar and puma were well respected, but Lady Ren's respect was on a level that would put the emperor to shame.

'And she said she was just a concubine, right?' he thought. Alex walked behind Lady Ren, and the two beasts walked behind him to keep watch.

Alex looked through the cave in amazement as it was something he had never seen before. "I don't know much about and rocks and stuff, but are there rocks that glow like that? It almost looks like its a crystal or something," he asked.

"That's... not an ordinary piece of rock," Lady Ren said.

"Oh, then what is it?" he asked.

"That's a spirit vein," Lady Ren said. "A low grade one, but it helps keep the place running and also helps mask our aura in here so that we don't get found."

Alex stopped for a second and asked, "found by who? People from another continent?"

"Found by... you're too young to understand. Just get stronger and you will find the answer on your own," Lady Ren said.

"Okay," Alex said. He didn't like that she never fully answered anything, but he wasn't in a situation to demand anything so he kept quiet for a bit.

He still looked at the glowing, mystical-looking ceiling. "Do all spirit veins glow like this? I wonder if the one beneath our sect glows the same way," he said, talking to himself. "I never thought I would see spirit veins out in the open. I remembered hearing that this was what made spirit stones after it remained unused for quite a while."

"Not necessarily," the jaguar said. "Spirit veins do turn to spirit stones if unused, but there are times when the Qi in the area is so strong that instead of turning to a spirit stone cave, they instead get upgraded to a higher grade of spirit vein."

"For example, this one used to be a True grade spirit vein a couple of hundred years ago, but we brought another True grade spirit vein from someplace else, and stashed it above here. This one slowly stole away the energy from the other vein and was upgraded to a Saint grade spirit vein," the jaguar said.

"Huh?" Alex stopped in shock. "This is Saint Grade spirit vein? But I thought Lady Ren said it was a low grade one."

"Oh," Lady Ren said when she realized her mistake. "I'm sorry. I forgot that you haven't seen higher grade Spirit vein. Hopefully, you will see them someday."

"Some of them are a sight to behold. Especially the metal one in th-never mind," Lady Ren stopped speaking and got a little sad. She sighed and moved forward.

Alex didn't ask any more questions and the group walked in silence. There were a few guards along the way that bowed their heads towards them and from what Alex could see not a single one even saw him.

'They don't dare to put their head up, huh?' he thought.

Soon, they came upon a massive golden door. The door was an arched door that was nearly 10 meters tall and 6 meters wide.

Lady Ren stopped and waited for the guards to push the door open. In the meantime, Alex noticed a sort of drawing on the wall.

From what Alex could see, it looked like a face that stared deep into his soul. The face looked like a feline beast, but before Alex could even notice what it really was, a crack appeared in the middle of the face and the door opened to show the inside of it.

The door lead to a massive hall with many seats carved directly from the marble that made the cave. So, everything in the cave was white.

There were about 20 seats on each side, and each seat was at least 4 meters in length and height. At the end of the hall was an elevated pedestal with a massive seat and two smaller seats next to them.

The two smaller seats were of the same size as any of the other seats, but one of them had a blue cloth on them with golden embroidery on iy, and the other one had a red cloth on it with golden embroidery as well.

The seat at the center, however, didn't seem to be carved from stone at all. In fact, it seemed to be fully made up of gold from top to bottom with a white cloth hanging from either side of it that too had golden embroidery on it.

The carpets on the ground were yellow in color, almost as if they were meant to be golden. There was some white in the carpets but mostly it was just golden.

There were chandeliers hanging from the glowing stalactites that were all golden as well.

It was as if the maker of this place didn't want any other color to be used aside from white or golden.

There also seemed to be murals along the walls, but Alex couldn't really see them from outside.

Lady Ren walked into the room and stared directly at the golden seat at the center. "Can you bring out the child?" she asked.

"Uh, yes," Alex said and quickly called out Pearl.

"Meow!" Pearl said when he was out. He looked around at the bright lights and showed a stunned expression.

"This shall be your new home from now on child," Lady Ren said to Pearl. She then looked at Alex as well and spoke.

"Welcome to the Palace of the White Tiger."

Chapter 492 - Four Great Families

Alex stepped into the hall and the door closed behind him. "The previous king was a white tiger?" Alex asked. "I don't think I've seen his kind anywhere in the forest before."

"Pfft!" Lady Ren laughed. "You won't see one of the 4 great families randomly in the jungle."

"Oh, right," Alex said. He thought for a bit and asked, "So I have the blood of the white tiger?"

"The Blood Essence, yes. Basically, you have the bloodline of the White Tiger," Lady Ren said. "Don't go out saying that though. As much as people respect the 4 Great families, there are ones out there that are? jealous of their bloodline and would do anything to get it, and you would be a very good target."

Lady Ren then started to take a deep breath and shook her entire body. "Ah, finally," she said as a very strong aura appeared from inside of her.

Immediately, the entire hall became deathly still as not a single one inside could make even a peep.

The aura wasn't suffocating, or suppressing at all. In fact, Alex could do everything perfectly as he wanted. However, it was so strong that a fear popped up inside of him on an instinctive level.

"Lady Ren, you are scaring the child," the jaguar said.

"Oh," Lady Ren said as she immediately stopped letting her aura run free. "I'm sorry, little one. I am not used to having such weak-doesn't matter. I will try to stop from now on.

"Meow!" Pearl said.

Lady Ren was about to say something when she noticed something. She walked towards Alex and brought her face right next to his face.

"Are you... a clone?" she asked.

Alex's heart skipped a beat when he heard it. "What makes you say that?" Alex asked, concentrating so as to not miss a single of her words.

"It's because..." she stopped. "No, that can't be right. Am I seeing it wrong?"

Lady Ren seemed to be as confused as Alex was curious.

"I'm sorry," she said in the end. "I seemed to have made a mistake. I thought you were a clone because your soul and body didn't absolutely mesh together. But, they aren't so far apart that I can guarantee that your body is a? clone."

"The only other idea would be that you are a saint realm cultivator who died and housed another person's body, but that sounds completely wrong, to be honest," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, it's fine. I'm sure there is a reason for all of this."

"I'm sure there is," Lady Ren said. "Although, I must ask. Are you really not a high-level cultivator that is somehow housing the body of a young person?"

"Uhh... no," Alex said. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, that's because you have something that most people in True realm or Saint realm wouldn't even recognize here," Lady Ren said.

"I have-sorry, what do I have?" Alex asked.

"That ring," Lady Ren said. "Can I see it?"

"Ring?" Alex wondered and looked down at his own finger. On his ring finger on the right hand, he had a golden ring with a large red ruby on it. This was the ring he found in the Forbidden Fields.

"Oh, right. I forgot I was wearing this. Is this ring of some significance?" Alex asked.

Lady Ren looked at him with a weird face. "You are joking, right?" she asked.

"Umm... no," Alex said. "Should I know what this ring is?"

"Lady Ren, this is most certainly weird," the jaguar said. "I don't think anyone on this continent has ever seen these rings, let alone own one."

"Is it that rare?" Lady Ren asked. "We should have some right?"

"No, Lady Ren. Her Majesty took everything of value with her when she left, so we don't have anything," the jaguar said.

"Sigh, right," she said. "Young human, you said you can use spiritual sense right?"

"Yes, I can," Alex said.

"Right, try using your spiritual sense on the ring. Especially the ruby," Lady Ren said.

"My spiritual sense? I'm sure I've done that before, but okay," Alex said and tried using his spiritual sense on the ring. However, like every other time, he didn't get anything from it.

It was just a normal ring.

"Nothing," Alex said as he shrugged off.

"No way, let me see," Lady Ren said and used her own spiritual sense on the ring and immediately frowned.

"See, it's just a normal ring, right?" Alex said.

"No," Lady Ren said. "It's a storage ring. Similar to storage bags, you can put items in this ring, only the size of the ring is incomparably large to those of storage bags."

"Oh, is it?" Alex asked with a surprised face. "I'm learning many new things today. But then why can't I access the storage if it has one?"

"Because it's not yours," Lady Ren said.

"Not... mine?" Alex asked. He thought for a moment and his eyes shined with understanding. "Oh, you mean it belongs to someone else? Like someone has refined it."

"Exactly," Lady Ren said. "Unless you can get rid of their ownership, you won't be able to use it."

"Umm... how do I do that?" Alex asked.

"Just refine it yourself. The ownership will be transferred over to you," Lady Ren said. "Although, I'm not sure if that is possible given how weak you are."

"Will it take me a long time?" Alex asked.

"It will take at least a decade for even me to erase the previous owner's ownership of this ring. For you, I'm afraid you will be an old man by the time you get to see the contents of this ring," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, I will keep trying then."

Lady Ren nodded and turned around to keep moving forward. Alex also slowly walked behind her and looked around at the walls where the murals were.

The mural to his left had 5 beasts on it, with their arms spread forward, nearly touching each other.

Alex recognized the White Tiger, but the other 4 beasts were a little too vague to exactly tell what they were.

"What's this mural about?" Alex asked.

"Hmm?" Lady Ren talked around. "Oh, this. My husband didn't like reading so he needed to stuff read out to him or drawn for him. To remind himself of what had taken place in the past, my husband decided to have this drawn in here."

"It is called the Pact of the 4 Heavenly Beasts. It was when the 4 Great Families decided to send candidates to look after places that needed looking after. My husband was such a candidate as well," Lady Ren said.

"Four beasts?" Alex asked with a confused expression. "But I count five."

"Haha, I can see where you are mistaken," she said.

"You have one of the heavenly beast, the White Tiger. The second one is this aerial beast known as the Vermillion Bird. The third one is the Azure Dragon.

"And finally, the fourth one is the Black Tortoise. However, the black tortoise is actually two beasts entwined together through fate. The tortoise and snake are fated to live and die together, and they always stay together. So, they are considered as one beast and are together called the black tortoise."

A fog seemed to have lifted from Alex's mind as he finally learned the names of the four Great families.

"So, the four rulers are these beasts?" Alex asked.

"Yes, these are them," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said and turned to the other mural on the opposite wall.

This one had more drawings on it, almost a bit too many. Alex looked at the thing, but he couldn't understand what exactly was going on in this mural.

Going from the left, Alex could see the five beasts that made up the four Heavenly beasts once more. Only this time, they were extremely tiny.

After that, the mural represented a humanoid figure that he couldn't assign a gender to. The figure had something circular behind his head and had his palm facing the 5 beasts.

After that, there were hundreds of different pieces of something randomly drawn in clusters.

After that was a giant circle that seemed to have cracks all over it. After that giant circle was another humanoid figure. From the looks of the circle behind his head, it seemed to be the same figure from before.

He didn't seem to be doing anything at the moment. After the man was finally another circle, but this one didn't have any cracks in it.

The entire sequence of drawings was very confusing to Alex since he didn't have the slightest idea of what it was all about.

"Lady Ren, can you explain this mural to me?" he asked.

Lady Ren shook her head. "I'm afraid not, little human. I myself do not know what that mural is about. Only my husband knew what it was. Even amongst the family, I assume not many know what it is about. My senior sister might have known a little about it, but unfortunately, she left over 4 thousand years ago."

"Oh, it's okay if you don't know about it. I will be okay without knowing a thing or two," he said.

He then stopped looking at either side of the walls and stared straight in the front.

"That golden seat, is that the throne?" he asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "That is where my husband used to sit, and that is where this child, my descendant will now sit. He will have to go through a bit of a test before that, however.. I hope he doesn't fail."

Chapter 493 - Bai Jingshen

"A test?" Alex asked curiously. "You didn't mention any test before."

"It's... less of a test exactly, and more of a ritual. At least, it's a ritual for people from the family that have part of the bloodline of the Original White Tiger but not fully. The ritual is carried out so that they can improve their bloodline, and maybe even evolve to become a white tiger," Lady Ren said.

"Evolve?" Alex's eyes went wide. Finally, someone spoke about something he had been searching for for a long time.

Pearl's evolution chance was still at 40%, and Alex had been wondering what it was for all of this time. However, nothing in or out of the game had ever mentioned anything about evolutions.

The most he could find was other players wondering what their newly tamed beast's evolution was about.

"Pearl has a chance to... become a white Tiger?" Alex asked. "Does that mean he will stop looking like a cat, and start looking like a tiger?"

"Maybe, maybe not," Lady Ren said. "I don't really understand how it works, but not everyone that has evolved has turned into a white tiger. Sometimes, they keep their original appearance while acquiring the abilities of their evolved self."

"If Pearl evolves and doesn't produce black stripes, then he would likely still show the other characteristics of a white tiger. Honestly, we can't guess it at all. All I know is that Evolution is definitely good for him," she said.

Alex then looked around the entire hall once more and asked, "who are all of these seats for? And why are they all empty?"

Lady Ren sighed when he heard him ask that. "Those are seats belonging to the subordinates of my husband. Namely people of the palace that served the King. These two's parents used to be one of them. However, they lost their lives during the many battles the followed after the death of the king."

"The only ones that still remain are hidden away in their own chambers, waiting for the next king to arrive," Lady Ren said.

"Is that so?" Alex then looked at the golden seat once more. "What about the two seats next to the throne?" he asked.

"That would be the seats of the Queen and the crown prince. The one with the red leather if for the queen and the one with the blue one is for the prince," Lady Ren said.

"Oh," Alex said and a question popped up in his head. "If there is a place for a prince, why is there no king yet? Did the prince not want to take the throne?"

"There was no prince," Lady Ren said. "Unfortunately, amongst the children born to the king, none of the male heirs had the necessary bloodline to become the king."

"Also, senior sister didn't manage to conceive a child in the time the king was alive, so the king never had a direct heir to the throne regardless."

Alex thought for a second and said, "if the king was gone, why didn't the queen rule? Surely she had the authority to do so, right?"

"She did, to a certain extent. Even if she would eventually be dethroned, she could rule until the next king arrived."

"However, my sisters were never here for the land, they were here for our husband. So, when he was gone, they all decided to leave and go back to the family. Senior sister also had to report his death to the family, so she left as well," Lady Ren said.

"And left you behind?" Alex asked.

"Haha, no. I was just stubborn and decided to stay behind, hoping my husband would come back someday. Sigh, if only my stupid delusions could be erased at that time," Lady Ren said.

"Anyway, come one. Let me take you to someplace else," she said and walked on.? She entered a door to the left side of the hall and continued walking.

Alex followed behind and entered the door to see a white corridor.

He looked behind him and realized that the other two beasts were already gone. He, Pearl, and Lady Ren were the only ones remaining.

The stalactites in the ceiling shined everything stark white and there was not a single other color to accent all the white color in there.

"The king really did like the color white, didn't he?" Alex asked.

"Haha, he did. White and Gold were his favorite colors since birth. Which was probably a bias he learned from his family that favors the two colors as well," Lady Ren said.

"May I ask how you met the king?" Alex asked.

"How did I meet him? Let's see, I was the lady of a very minor house whose elders were desperately looking for connections. So, they set arranged my marriage with my husband back then. I remember being quite angry at the time, but over the course of many years, I learned to love him as everyone else did."

"When he was sent here to rule as a king, I chose to come with him," Lady Ren said.

Alex nodded and stayed quiet as he followed her. Finally, they reached a place that seemed to have an opening on the roof that let him see the night sky.

The spirit vein ended right around here and there was no longer much light for them to work with.

"It's just ahead of us," Lady Ren spoke as she walked forward. At the center of it all, underneath the open sky, were many stones stuck on the ground all over the open space.

Alex looked at it all and was a little surprised. "Are these... graves?" he asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "We bury here those that we have lost over the years. Not many get to be buried here, but even so... the numbers have reached quite high over the years."

Lady Ren was starting to sound a little sad by now. She slowly sat down in front of a gravestone and said, "I may have found your successor, dear husband."

Alex looked at the white piece of rectangular marble that was stuck on the ground. The headstone had some words carved onto it in a language he couldn't read at all.

He wanted to try using his spiritual sense to see if he could read it, but now was not the place to do something like that. It would be incredibly disrespectful, and he didn't want to create unnecessary problems.

"What does that headstone say?" Alex decided to directly ask instead.

"It reads 'In memory of A King, a Husband, and a Father, Bai Jingshen," Lady Ren read.

"Bai Jingshen... was that the name of the king?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "Bai is the surname of the White Tiger family. If he succeeds, this little child will inherit that surname as well."

"Meow?" Pearl asked.

"No, you can keep your current name. We will just give you a secondary name that you will have to use officially," Lady Ren said.

"Meow," Pearl said.

"Haha, sure, sure. I will be sure to choose one of the best ones for you," Lady Ren said with a smile.

"That grave... it's empty right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "We couldn't get back anybody from when he died in the central continent, so we had to give him an empty burial."

"Then... how are you sure that he really is dead?" Alex asked.

"Because the other three Kings themselves came to give us the news. They saw him die while trying to save this realm," Lady Ren said. "Only the stupid humans didn't realize that and thought he was trying to attack them. In retaliation, they took everything they could get their hands on from this land."

"Now, a normal beast can't even grow enough to enter the saint realm," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said. "I do remember hearing something about beasts fighting in the central continent long ago, so that was a lie, right?"

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "The 4 great families have rivalries, but it ends there. There is no enmity between them and thus they have no reason to fight. Besides, there really is nothing worth fighting for here."

"So the other people were misinformed and attacked you? Why didn't the other kings try to clarify that misinformation?" Alex asked.

"I don't think they know there is misinformation being shared. From what I know, they were gravely hurt during whatever happened in the central continent, and so they have likely gone into secluded cultivation to heal up. It wouldn't be surprising if they started healing up all those years ago and are still healing," Lady Ren said.

"It's likely the only time we will ever see them is either when this kid becomes the king, or another king arrives," Lady Ren said.

"Sorry... another king?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "Since my husband died nearly 5 thousand years ago, the family will take about that long of a time to choose the next candidate to be sent over. So, in less than a century, someone will come to see if we already have a king or not."

"If we do, they will verify whether the king deserves to be one. If they can't, they will send over the next candidate."

"However, most of the new generation of the great family have nothing but arrogance, and I do not want to see them destroy what my husband worked so hard to build," Lady Ren said.

"For that, we will need to turn this little child into a full-fledged King in less than a hundred years."

Chapter 494 - One Way Conversation

"Wait, there will be someone else coming in the next 100 years to take over?" Alex asked with surprise.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "The one to see if there is a king already, and if the king is fit will come here first, but the actual king will come soon after if they deem one necessary."

"And why aren't we letting them take the throne again?" Alex asked. "Wouldn't that be the easier choice?"

"It would, but it would also mean that a lot of people will suffer. Which will include people that you will care about too," lady Ren said.

"Just imagine, you come from a very big family, having lived like everything belongs to you, and then you come here to find almost everything has been stolen by the humans on the other continents that do not belong to you. What will you do?" Lady Ren asked.

"Ah," Alex said. "So, you fear that the next king will try to get back what was stolen."

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "And in doing so, wage war that will destroy the whole world. I don't want that. My husband was empathetic from the beginning and even after that he mellowed out when he came here."

"He wouldn't have died if he didn't care about the people of this world. However, the next king is very much possibly not going to be like that, so we have to take the throne away before he even has a chance," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said. "Guess, you will have to grow up fast, buddy."

"Meow!" Pearl cried out.

"Don't worry, you have time," Lady Ren said with a smile. "By the way, how old is this child? Do you know?"

"Um... about 6 months I think. He's not that old," Alex said.

"Dear god, 6 months?" lady Ren said in shock. "Oh no, we can't put someone like this into the fountain. I guess we will have to wait until he is in the True realms at least before we try to put him through the ritual."

Lady Ren shook her head and sighed.

"Alright, come," Lady Ren said. "Let's go see the real reason why I brought you here."

Alex nodded and followed lady Ren to a very inconspicuous grave at the very outer edge of the graveyard.

Another headstone lied there with another set of words written on it. Only this time, the words weren't that many.

"What is written on it?" Alex asked.

"It says 'Descendant of Bai Jingshen and Ren Xiao'," Lady Ren said. "Come here child, this is your mother."

"Meow?" Pearl asked with confusion. Alex on the other hand was stunned.

"Right, I forgot you said you found the body," Alex said. "So this is where you buried her."

"Yes," lady Ren said.

Alex walked forward and sat in front of the grave. He was still holding Pearl in his hand, but there he let him down.

"You can talk to your mother here, Pearl," Alex said.

"Meow?" Pearl still didn't understand what that meant. He still hadn't fully grasped the concept of life and death, so he asked where his mother actually was.

"Meow!"

'Where' he asked. Alex didn't know what to say.

"Just talk," Lady Ren said. "She will listen to you. Say 'hi' to her."

"Meow," Pearl said and turned around to the grave and meowed again.

"She says hello," Lady Ren said. "She's asking how you're doing."

"Meooow!"

"She says that is great. You should be having fun," Lady Ren said. "She asks if you miss her."

"Meow," Pearl said as he shook his head.

"Oh, why not? She asks," Lady Ren said.

"Meeeeow" Pearl replied.

Lady Ren turned to look at Alex and chuckled a little. "You've really created quite a bond with the little guy, so much so that he doesn't even miss his own mother," Lady Ren said.

Alex didn't know if he should feel happy or sad because of that. If possible, he would want Pearl to be with his mother, but if that wasn't possible, then at least he was happy with him.

They stayed there, watching Pearl talk in front of his mother's grave and Lady Ren 'translating' what she said in return. They stayed there for a few minutes before it was time to leave.

"Say goodbye to your mother for now," Lady Ren said. "We can come back next time if you want to see her again."

"Meow!"

"Alright, let's leave," Lady Ren said and took him back to the hall. Once in the hall, she called some servants over.

"It's been a long day, so you can go and rest. Whatever needs to be done with either you or this child, we will do so tomorrow," Lady Ren said.

"Okay," Alex said and left the hall with the servants. He was taken through another corridor that lead the many rooms and was finally made to enter a certain one.

The beast servants opened the door for him and said something to him. Alex couldn't understand what they were saying, but thankfully Pearl could somewhat translate it.

"Oh, so they have rooms for humans too huh?" Alex thought as he entered the room.

The room was fully white with a bed in the middle and a table by its side, carved entirely of what the wall was made up of as well.

Alex sat down on the bench and took a deep breath. "It's really been a long day today, hasn't it?" Alex asked.

He started the day normally, but many things happened that almost made it seem like it was forever ago.

He met the Royal Alchemist again today, and while he didn't learn much, he was at least assured that he was moving in the right direction.

He then prepared for the beast hoard, and when he realized he couldn't stop them, he chose to give himself up.

He then met 3 saint realm cultivators, one of which was the emperor. He then met another 2 saint realm beasts, followed by Lady Ren, who seemed to be at the peak of Saint Realm.

He feared that today would be his last day on this game with his current body, but it turned out to be the exact opposite. Then he was taken here, where he came to learn a lot about the world and the hidden workings behind it.

"I wonder which continent the four great families are from. Maybe they all take over one of each? But then why would the head of the family not be the king of the continent? Does he not think that is worth his time?" Alex wondered.

"Bloodline of the White Tiger huh? They said it was blood blessed by the gods. There are gods in this world?" Alex wondered. "Or maybe that has something to do with the grades and not a real god."

"They realized what Pearl is and what his role is, right? So what am I doing here?" Alex wondered. "They said they wanted to check my bloodline right? But I already told them everything. What else is there to know?"

"Sigh, I will think about it tomorrow. I'm too tired for it today," he thought. "God, when did I last log out again? I forgot."

"Let me go see if I'm fine," he thought and logged out.

He slowly opened the lid of the capsule and walked out. He stretched a bit before going to the bathroom and then went to the kitchen.

He wasn't feeling very hungry, but he wasn't sure if he would have time to leave the game tomorrow on account of where he was right now, so he decided to eat something just in case.

Emily had some food made and stored in the fridge already so he just had to heat it up.

As he ate the food, he remembered something. "Oh right, I have to transfer the spirit stones I got today. How much was that again? 5000 True spirit stones?" he thought.

He silently calculated it in his mind and suddenly his eyes went wide. "That's... that's 4.5 Million dollars, isn't it? Holy... I won't have to ever work or go to university again."

"Damn, I might as well drop before I take the exam," Alex started to get excited. He happily returned back to the room and decided to check his phone to see if there was some message for him.

However, what he saw on the screen when he opened it, really confused him.

Chapter 495 - Time, Preparation, And Languages

He looked at the screen once more so that he was sure he didn't misread what he saw.

"No... that can't be right," he said to himself and went into the settings to fix what seem to have been broken. However, no matter how much he searched, he couldn't find anything that was wrong with his phone.

He closed the phone and checked his laptop instead, but then his laptop said the same thing.

Now he was starting to get really confused. "No, what about online?" he wondered and checked. He found the same answer online as well.

"What the hell is going on?" He couldn't help but scratch his head in confusion. All the emotions he had about earning a lot of money seemed to have vanished and left him with just confusion.

"No way it's the same in the game right?" he wondered and went back into the capsule. He logged into the game and opened his eyes in the room he was staying in.

Finally, he looked up and to the right of his vision to check the time. Just as he had hopelessly expected, the time said 4 AM as well.

"How the hell is it 4 AM already?" he couldn't help but ask himself. "It was barely a few hours ago when I was taken away during twilight. There is no way it has been 8 hours already."

"No, it wasn't even midnight when we entered the palace, I remember," he thought. "Then why is the time already 4 AM?"

He wondered if he had lost some memory from the past few hours, but that wasn't possible. He then wondered if took hours on end to go from the game to logging out of it. That was possible but still unlikely.

The possibility of that happening just on the day so many things happened didn't feel correct to him. "Maybe it has to do with this place then?" he wondered. "I wonder if time is moving fast here."

He decided to wait and see. However, the time on his vision didn't seem to move at any different speed than normal. "Alright, I give up. I will just ask Lady Ren tomorrow," he thought.

He wanted to cultivate for the remaining 2 or so hours before sunrise, but he wasn't sure if he could wake up after falling asleep during cultivation. If the beasts took that as an offense, that would be bad for him.

So, he decided to do something else in the meanwhile.

"Oh right, the money," he thought and quickly took out the storage bag he had with him to check.

He counted the spirit stones he had and counted about 4500 True spirit stones in there. "The emperor really cares for his family, huh? I will have to make sure he doesn't ever find out that his brother died while fighting me," Alex thought.

He transferred as much money as he assumed wasn't needed for him here. Which turned out to be a little over 4 Million dollars. With that, he wouldn't have to worry about money, ever.

Once he was done, he just lied there on the bed with Pearl next to him. Pearl didn't seem to want to sleep either, so they just waited for the time to pass.

Alex checked his time once again and it was indeed working normally this time. "I hope I'm not going mad from all of this gaming," he thought.

Soon, it was 6 AM and the sun would rise anytime now. However, since he was inside a room underground, he likely wouldn't see the sun for a while now.

"They said they were going to keep me here for a decade? I wonder why that is for. Since Pearl will have to go through the ritual soon, do they intend to keep me until the ritual is all over?" Alex wondered.

"Sigh, they were pretty clear about their intentions with Pearl, but they never let me know about what they wanted to do with me at all. Depending on whether they treat me as a guest or as a prisoner, I might have to leave this place just a little bit sooner," Alex thought.

He started wondering how he could possibly even do that, considering he was underground and the only way out seemed to be through the teleportation formation.

"Hmm.. What about the open hole in the middle? Although I didn't see any stars or moon last night. So... maybe it's quite different," Alex thought.

He would have to learn more about this place before he decided to do anything stupid.

Someone knocked on his door and said, "come out Boy."

Alex opened the door and saw the puma standing in the hallway. "Senior, what are you doing here?" he asked.

"You don't expect to sleep all the time, do you?" he asked.

'I didn't have time to sleep even if I wanted to,' Alex internally grumbled.

"Let's go, Lady Ren wishes for me to see if the child is ready for the ritual. It's really the jaguar's job, but he's a little busy right now," the puma said.

"Oh, okay," Alex said and walked outside, along with the puma. They walked through the pathway and arrived in a room.

The doors were closed, so he couldn't see anything inside, and didn't dare use his spiritual sense in the presence of genuine saint realm cultivators.

"Yao Jia," the puma shouted.

Alex heard a roar from someplace close and suddenly, a black jaguar appeared in front of him. Except, this one wasn't the jaguar he had seen before.

The hairs on this jaguar looked slicker and the body was way smaller and lean in general.

"Look after this human while I test the child," the puma said.

ROAR

"Speak in the human tongue," the puma said. "You will be taking care of a human after all."

"Oh, right," the jaguar named Yao Jia said. "What's your name human?" Yao Jia asked.

"Uh... it's Yu Ming," Alex said.

"Yu Ming huh? Is that a good name for a human? I heard you came here yesterday. Is it true that you—"

"Yao Jia!" the puma said sternly.

"Ah, sorry. I spoke out of place," she said. "Come on, let's go. I will show you the entire place."

"Huh? Wait I won't get to stay with Pearl?" Alex asked.

"No, only the candidate gets to enter, no one else," the puma said. "Just go away. I will call you when we are done."

The puma entered the room and closed the door behind him, leaving Alex without even a chance to respond. "What the hell? I feel like I have no say in any of this," Alex said.

"Hehe, no you don't. If you want to be heard around here, you either need to be strong or know someone who is strong. Come, let me show you around," Yao Jia said.

Alex wanted to say something, but he stopped. She was right. He was in the world of beasts right now and would have to work by their laws if he wanted anything for himself.

He sighed at his weakness and promised himself that he would grow strong very soon.

The jaguar named Yao Jia took him around the palace, telling him what was what. She took him to the King's hall, then to a training room, and then to the dining hall.

"What about the library? I heard there was one," Alex said.

"Yeah, that's where lady Ren and father are right now. They are probably looking for something there, so we cannot disturb them. Besides, I don't think you're allowed there. There is information in that room that your small brain cannot comprehend yet. Even I am not allowed in there," Yao Jia said.

"Tsk,? and here I was looking forward to it," Alex said. "By the way, I can understand how saint beasts can talk, but how can you?"

"Why would I not be able to talk? It's just a language that one has to learn. I now just need to learn how to speak the other one," Yao Jia said.

"The other one? The mortal ones and the cultivator ones speak the same language you know?" Alex asked.

"Haha, no silly. Mortal language changes too quickly. There is no point in learning them. I'm talking about the two different cultivator languages. Have you not read any books or what?" Yao Jia asked.

Alex's eyes went wide as a thought entered his mind. "You mean the language of normal cultivators and the so-called immortals?" Alex asked.

"Uhh... no?" Yao Jia said, unsure of her own answer, as she cocked her head in slight confusion as to what Alex was asking. "Everyone speaks in one of the two languages, be it normal beasts or immortal ones," she said. "It's just different based on the place."

"So that writing that is on the gravestones, that's one of it, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Yao Jia said.

Alex then took out some random books from his storage bags and showed them to her. "And this one is the other one?" he asked.

"Yes! Yes! So you do know," she said. "Why did you act so stupid?"

"I was just unsure," Alex said. "So, it's possible that the other continents speak in another language?"

Even as Alex asked that he knew the answer was no. If the language was different, the information would be up on the internet by now.

"You don't have to answer that," he said.

"You sure? okay then," Yao Jia said.. "Come, let me show you the garden."

Chapter 496 - Garden

"There is a garden in this cave?" Alex asked in surprise. It didn't seem like the place for those sorts of things.

"No, it's outside," Yao Jia said. "Why would there be a garden inside the cave? You, humans, are such a silly creature."

"Oh, there is an 'outside' in this place?' Alex asked with surprise. "I thought everything was underground."

"No," Yao Jai said. "Only the palace is underground, everything else is outside."

"Now I'm really curious," Alex said and followed Yao Jia. They walked through a maze corridor and came to the end of the tunnel where the spirit vein in the ceiling stopped.

Beyond that point was a door with beasts staying on guard in it. Under Yao Jia's order, they opened the door which led to a flight of stairs.

The two of them started climbing the stairs and finally reached aboveground where they came out of a well-maintained gateway at the opening of the cave.

Alex walked out of it and could see a beautiful garden with flowers all around and a beautiful meadow to go along with it.

There were small beasts in the garden that were playing with each other, and adult beasts that were looking after them. Alex felt a sense of guilt when he remembered the many beasts he had killed up until now.

He had never once felt bad for killing a beast before, unlike how he felt when he killed humans. However, that was only because he was used to seeing beasts killed back at home.

However, now that he was starting to realize that beasts were also quite intelligent and were capable of the same things humans were, guilt started to manifest.

Beyond the garden was a wall made up of vines and thorns. And beyond that seemed to be a lot of trees. He wondered how close this place was from the stone platform he teleported through when coming here.

"It's nice, right?" Yao Jia asked.

"Yes, it's beautiful," Alex said as he turned back to look at the garden again. His face suddenly changed and he walked towards the garden. Yao Jia followed him to show him more of the garden.

"You know, if you like this, it makes me really happy. After all, I was the one— Hey! Are you even listening?" she asked when she realized that Alex seemed to be lost in his own world as he walked towards the garden.

He walked towards a flower bed and crouched down to pick up a flower.

"Hey! Don't touch those. Those flowers turn bad when they—"

The words stuck in Yao Jia's throat when she saw Alex pick up the flower without destroying any of the rest.

"Huh? What's going on? Every time I tried it, the flowers wilted and disappeared," she said.

"That's because you were picking the wrong flower. Amongst these entire flower beds, there is only one flower that you can pick without destroying the flower bed," Alex said.

"That way, you can keep these flowers and make use of this most important one," Alex said.

"Oh, you know a lot about flowers?' Yao Jia asked.

"I know a lot about plants in general, and a little about beasts, but mostly about plants. I'm an alchemist after all," Alex said.

"An alchemist? Oh, you make pills right? I've read about you guys," Yao Jia said. "There's no beast here that can make pills, so I don't really know much about it."

"What do you do when you get injured or catch some sort of illness?" Alex asked.

"Oh, we have a senior who can treat the unhealthy, but it mostly extends to illness and minor injuries. I heard pills can even regrow limbs, is that true?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Although they are a little hard to make since the ingredients they require is very demanding and also very rare," Alex said.

Alex then turned around and looked at the area he had come from. The cave opening he thought he had walked out of actually turned out to be a massive mansion.

"What's that mansion for?" Alex asked.

"That's the secondary palace on top of the real palace. That is where the King's family and other important figures are kept," Yao Jia said. "Although, it's mostly empty now with only servants keeping that place alive."

"Oh, I must've not been as important then if they didn't bother to keep me there," Alex said with a deprecating laugh.

"Of course, you're not. At least, not yet," Yao Jia said. "Maybe you will be more important if they find out something regarding you today."

"Something regarding me? Like?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. Father and Lady Ren went into the library to find stuff on you, I think. You seemed to have made them very curious about you. If they end up finding some importance in you, your status in this place will significantly increase," Yao Jia said.

"Hmm… you guys need an alchemist?" he asked.

"I mean, maybe," Yao Jia said. "But are you a good one?"

"Of course, I'm a—" Alex stopped. He was talking with True realm beast and most beasts he had seen here were of similar cultivation base or higher. So, if he said that he was a good one for them, that would be incorrect.

"I can make pills for common beasts, although I'm in the process of learning how to make pills for True realm cultivators," Alex said.

"Oh, let me know once you do. I will tell my father, and you can probably find some work around here," she said. "By the way, what does that flower do? You gonna make some pills with them?"

"Uhh… no," Alex said. "Can I take some more of them? I can explain later what I can do with them."

"Umm, they won't wilt, right? If you can promise that you can get them without them wilting then you can take them," Yao Jia said.

"Thank you," Alex said and got into plucking the few Spirit Cleansing Lily that was growing in the garden.

There were about 5 in total by the time he was done with them. "Are there more of them around here?" Alex asked.

"Uh, I don't really leave this place that often so I don't know," Yao Jia said. "But there should be a few in the forest."

"How did you grow them here by the way?" Alex asked.

"Oh, no I didn't," Yao Jia said. "I just ordered some men to bring anything that looks beautiful from the outside and they brought all of them. We directly brought the whole thing instead of growing them on our own."

"Right, that works too, I guess," Alex said. He started walking around the garden, looking around to see if he could find anything else that was precious.

He found a few more ingredients, but none of them were worth picking, so he let them be to keep the aesthetic of the garden.

He walked on the soft grass, amidst the watchful eyes of the many beasts that were looking at him suspiciously. However, after seeing Yao Jia behind him, they got on with their own business.

"What are all of these beasts doing here?" he asked.

"They just like to come around here and pay their respect to the family. Also, this garden is one of the only places in this area that beasts can come to enjoy the sunlight."

"All the other places are filled with trees to the brim and sunlight barely ever passes through," Yao Jia said.

"I see," Alex said and he looked at the relaxing beasts. There weren't just feline beasts anymore, but beasts of all shapes and forms. Deer, Rhino, Elephant, Boars, every species of beasts would be found here.

Alex then looked at the wall surrounding them and saw that beyond the vines and thorns, there was an actual solid metallic wall inside.

"What's beyond these walls exactly? Just a forest?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Yao Jia said.

"Hmm, can you tell me how far this place is from the stone platform on which we teleported here?" Alex asked.

"How far? Well… that is a hard question to answer really," Yao Jia said.

"Why? Has no one measured the distance before?" Alex asked.

"Um, no," Yao Jia said. "It's kind of impossible to measure after all."

"Is it? I mean you can just fly and see how far the distance is, can't you?" Alex asked.

"Oh," Yao Jia said as she realized something. "You don't know, do you? Father and the others must've been occupied with learning about the child and forgot to tell you."

"Tell me what?" Alex asked.

"That we're not in the forest anymore," Yao Jia said.

Alex was a little confused. He looked around and could still see the forest very clearly. "What do you mean? We're still in the forest."

"No, silly. I meant the actual big forest that takes over a third of this continent," Yao Jia said.

"Oh, you mean the Southern Forest," Alex finally understood what she meant.

"Yeah, southern forest as you call it, northern forest as the others call it; same thing. We're not there anymore," she said and stopped to correct again. "Well… technically we still are… but also not."

This just confused Alex even more. "Um, can you explain a bit more? I don't think I understand what you're trying to say."

"Well, basically what I'm trying to say is that we are currently in a Secret realm inside of the big forest," Yao Jia said. "So, while we're still in the forest, we also aren't in it."

"Get it?"

Chapter 497 - Reason For Being Isolated

"Uh... no, I don't get it," Alex said. "What's a secret realm?" He had never heard of something like that during the last 5 or so months he had been in the game.

"Huh? You don't know? Wow, the humans really don't know much, huh?" Yao Jia asked. "And here father said that humans were superior in most cases because they are closer to the gods."

"Hmm... what was that?" Alex asked. Yao Jia said something that piqued his interest.

"I'm saying you guys are stupid. How do you not know about secret realms?" Yao Jia said.

"So... are you going to keep insulting me and not explain?" Alex asked.

"It's just a hidden space inside normal space. You know how storage bags work right?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "If I remember correctly, they use some sort of formation to squeeze space into those bags."

"Exactly," Yao Jia said. "Secret realms are similar. It's just a massive space, except it's hidden in normal space by squeezing it to the point where it no longer visibly exists on the outside."

"So just imagine staying inside a storage bag, only it's massive and life can flourish inside," Yao Jia said.

"Oh," Alex said. "I didn't think one could squeeze space this much. The person who made this place must've been really powerful."

"Eh? No! This one was made naturally. This sort of stuff just happen on their own from time to time. Although finding one is very hard since you can't exactly enter these places from the outside under normal circumstances," Yao Jia said.

"How do you enter these places then?" Alex asked.

"The same way you came in. Teleportation formation," Yao Jia said. "That, or under the right conditions, the secret realms open on their own for a brief period of time."

"This one opens that way too?" Alex asked.

"Yes, but you can't enter that way," Yao Jia said. "This one can only be entered through the teleportation formation. Any other method of entry has been dealt with."

"Sorry... dealt with? As in..." Alex asked.

"We have formations that stop this place from acting up. In addition to that, there are formations outside of this place that puts anyone who comes close into an illusion and sends them back the way they came from," Yao Jia said.

"What if it's a saint realm human or beast that approaches?" Alex asked.

"Why would the illusory formation care if one is saint realm? Of course, it will send them back too," Yao Jia said.

"You have such powerful formations?" Alex asked in surprise.

"You are in the palace of the White Tiger. Having such measly formations around is a given," Yao Jia said.

"I see," Alex said. "Sent back the way they came from... huh? Is that why no humans have crossed the Southern forest before?"

"Well, given that the secret realm goes from one edge of the continent to the other, I would say it's safe to assume that no humans have crossed the forest before. They would all likely have been sent back," Yao Jia said.

"No wonder," Alex thought. "So that's the reason why we are isolated. Not only is the continent itself isolated, but we are also isolated from the rest of the continent too. That would obviously lead to us growing weaker as time went on. Especially since the people from other continents took away all of our resources."

"So, how many points of entry are there? Is the teleportation platform I came through the only one?" Alex asked.

"For your side? Yes. There is another one for the Luminance empire's side. Although, the places you can enter from there are many throughout the secret realm," Yao Jia said.

"I remember seeing no one around the stone platform when we were coming in. Does no one guard those spots? Can someone come in uninvited?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Yao Jia said. "If they know how to activate the formation, they can easily enter. Although they won't be able to enter the palace directly and will only enter some other place."

"Wait, you allow people to come in? I thought you were trying to keep people away given how you placed illusory formations around the outside," Alex asked.

"Oh, that's just to protect the secret realm from the outside, not what's in it. We just don't want someone to come in and mess up with the secret realms. There are way too many lives inside to allow someone to hamper it," Yao Jia said.

"Other than that, everyone is free to come," Yao Jia said. "As long as they can behave accordingly that is."

"You humans love killing beasts. So I wouldn't be surprised if people came in with the intention to kill us. In those cases, most of them are dealt with," Yao Jia said.

"What if someone strong comes in with the wrong intentions?" Alex asked.

"Oh, yeah I forgot to say. Only those under the Saint realm can enter this place. Otherwise, they will need to wait for us to go pick them up," Yao Jia said. "Or at least I think that's what they do. I don't really know. After all, I was only born a few hundred years ago. There are still many things around this place that I don't know about."

Alex nodded when he heard that, but then got confused. "Wait, you are a few hundred years old?" he asked with a surprised expression.

"Yes," she said nonchalantly. "How old are you?"

"I will be 19 in a few months," Alex said, still holding his surprise.

This time it was Yao Jia's turn to be surprised. "Oh wow, then I am at least 400 years older than you. Haha," she said.

"Don't most peak True realm beasts live up to around 1000 years old? For someone in your cultivation base which seems to be not that far into the True realm, you should have a life expectancy of around 700 years."

"How are you still so young after nearly half of your life has gone by?" Alex asked. He wondered if she was using some techniques to make her voice sound younger or if she was changing the way she looked.

"Oh that, it's because while I am 400 years old, I've only lived for about 60 years. So I am very young physically," she said.

This just confused Alex even more. "You are 400 years old, but you've only lived for 60 years? What happened to the other 340 years? Did you hibernate or what?" he asked.

"Us cats don't hibernate silly," Yao Jia said. "It's just because of the time difference in the place I usually stay at."

"Since most of the important parts of the palace are under a time dilation, while I was born 400 years ago, I've only lived for 60 years," she said.

Alex's eyes went wide with surprise. "You can change the speed of time here? How do you do that? Formations?" he asked.

"Of course. It's quite easy actually," she said. "Well... it's easy if you have the resources, but I don't know if you can find them in this continent."

"I see," Alex said. "Do you know what the resources are?"

"Nope," Yao Jia said. "You will have to ask my father to ask the senior Zebra that made those formations."

"Sigh, alright. We'll talk about those later," Alex said. He turned towards the wall and followed it to the side with his eyes until he saw an open gate in the front.

"Can we go out there?" he asked.

"I'm afraid not," Yao Jia said. "You are both a guest and a prisoner here, so you will have to stay inside until the seniors can decide what to do with you."

"Tsk, alright," Alex said and went back to the meadows to sit on the ground. He didn't know what else to do, so he just sat around, waiting for Pearl to come out.

"You guys don't have any alchemy room right?" Alex asked.

"What's an alchemy room? We have some free rooms if you want to turn it to that," she said.

"Alchemy room is a room with the formation in it that perpetually keeps a furnace active in it. It's also quite sturdy so that if a cauldron full of ingredients ever explodes, it can handle the explosion," Alex explained.

"Hmm... we should be able to make one," Yao Jia said. "Although, you will have to ask my father later on."

"Okay," Alex said. "At least I can distract myself that way."

He planned on practicing Alchemy and formation for the little time he was stuck around here. He wondered what other things he could do in the meantime and cultivating was the only answer he got from himself.

'Although that will require many high-level monster core, and I don't have that many,' he thought. 'How will I get them?'

"Can I ask you a question? I don't know how rude this question is though," Alex said.

"Uhh... you can ask it. I will try not to get offended if it is in fact very rude," she said.

"There must be quite a lot of deaths happening around here, right?" he asked. "What do you do with the monster core of the beasts that die?"

"Well, if it's a spoil of victory, we let the winner take it. If it's not, then the one who finds it keeps it," Yao Jia said. "Why do you ask?"

"Umm... you see, I am in need of a few monster cores myself, and was wondering if there was a way to get them around here," Alex said.

Chapter 498 - Planning

"Hmm," Yao Jia thought. "Why do you want it?"

"I... need it for some pills I might be making," Alex lied.

"Hmm, maybe you can trade for it? I really don't know if anyone would be willing to part with it though since they can all use monster cores in some manner for themselves," Yao Jia said.

"Hmm... trade huh? I should be able to work with that," he thought. "Alright, I will think of something. I will probably have to sell some pills for sure."

"Okay, do that," Yao Jia said. She didn't really know much about pills and was quite interested in it as well.

"Oh, uncle Teng is out," she said and got up from the meadow. "Let's go."

"Umm... Uncle Teng is... senior Puma?" Alex asked.

"Yes. Let's hurry, he gets annoyed if he is made to wait too long," Yao Jia said.

"I heard that," the Puma's voice sounded inside both of their heads.

"Why do you think I spoke out loud?" Yao Jia asked jokingly.

"Hurry up. I don't think this child likes me very much," he said.

They walked back into the underground palace and made their way back to the room where they had left behind Pearl.

As soon as they reached, the door opened and Pearl came flying out. "Meow!" he complained that he was left here for so long without Alex being nearby.

"Did he do something that hurt you?" Alex asked.

"MEOW!!" Pearl complained.

A confused look appeared on Alex's face. "You... made him fight you? Were you testing his strength?"

"No, I was testing how close he was to awakening his bloodline, and from what I can see, he's quite close. Still, he is just a child so it will take a while without putting some direct pressure on him," the Puma said.

"I won't let you do that," Alex said as he held Pearl in his arms defensively.

"Relax, little human. I have no intentions of providing any stress to someone who might end up being my king. That would be a stupid way to get on the wrong side of the future King. Especially one that is this young, so he will grow to hate me for sure," the puma said.

"So, what's the verdict, uncle? Is he ready for the ritual?" Yao Jia asked.

"Hmm... not yet. He is both too young and too weak right now. We will have to wait until he is either at least 10 years old, or in the True realms, whichever comes first," the puma said. "But given his speed, it might be the True realms that come first. The lord's bloodline surely is amazing at how fast it can help him cultivate."

"What do we do now then?" Alex asked.

"Nothing. You can go back to your room or go roam where you are allowed. As long as you don't bother anyone or try to run away, you will be fine," the puma said.

"I see. Okay," Alex said and walked away. Yao Jia followed behind him and asked," You want to go somewhere else?"

"No, I will go back to my room and wait around for a bit," he said. "Let's see what your father and Lady Ren find from their visit to the library."

"Not a bad idea," Yao Jia said. "Let me show you back to your room."

"It's alright, I know the way," Alex said and left. He walked along with Pearl in his hands and went to his room to wait.

"Sigh, what do I do now?" he wondered.

"Oh right," he thought and looked at the ring he was wearing. "So this is a storage artifact huh? I wonder how much space they pushed into this gem," he wondered.

"Hmm, so how do I refine it again? I should try with my Qi right?" he thought and started pouring in his Qi to see if something would happen. Unfortunately, nothing did.

"Should I try my True Qi, then?" he wondered. He tried to pour in what remaining True Qi he had and failed to refine it even a little bit. In the first place, He didn't have much true Qi since he spent most of it, if not all, opening the formation to hide from the beasts back in the Tiger Sect.

"Sigh, nothing I can do about it right now. Let me arrange my storage bags then," he thought and brought out stuff from his storage bags.

He started with the alchemy bags and separated items by importance. He put the important ones into the wooden boxes and left the unimportant ones without any.

After he was done with them, he moved on to other things he had in his storage bags.

"Right, I will have to ask them if they can help me maybe refine this sword," he thought as he looked at the heavy, black sword in his storage bag.

He had only used this sword two times to kill two different people. One of them was intentional, and the other one was Song Zun.

"Maybe I can even trade it for something from this place?" he wondered. "No, they won't care about swords. What would beasts need swords for?"

He shook his head and put aside the bag with the sword and moved on to something else. He then sorted out the talismans he had and noticed one that he didn't remember seeing before.

"Hmm... what's this?" he thought and looked into it. It turned out to be just another formation blueprint that he might have missed reading. Or at least, that's what he thought at first.

However, the more he read it, the more confusing it got for him as the talisman didn't follow the normal pattern of a formation blueprint.

He directly looked at the design and his eyes went wide as he finally realized what it was.

"Did she perfect it?" Alex wondered as he properly read it this time around.

Luo Xing had improved upon the formation that Alex had acquired from Song Zun. The formation only had the drawing and nothing else, and the only other thing Alex even knew about this formation was that it didn't depend on anyone to activate it since Song Zun had used it in the Forbidden Fields.

Alex quickly read up on the information and started understanding what he had been doing wrong all this time.

As it turned out, to run the formation without any help from the setter, the ingredients that would be used to run it needed to be set up in a certain way as well.

Also, the energy that was going to be used as the pattern of the formations also needed to be uniform in size everywhere. That meant that places with too many strokes in the nodes needed to have more of that energy source as compared to ones that had less of it.

Unfortunately, that was all Luo Xing had figured out. And that was after conferring with Xiao Huang as well. Their information on how a metal-less formation was started exactly was still missing.

"If I don't have that, then I can't do much, can I?" Alex thought. However, then he remembered something.

"Right, the zebra, I should ask him," he thought. "Maybe he knows given the company he lives with here."

He would need to later request the jaguar or Lady Ren herself to ask for help from the zebra. That was now another task he had added onto himself.

"So I need to get cultivate to get stronger, make pills so I can get better at alchemy, hopefully, trade some monster cores, and finally learn a bit about formations from the zebra," he thought. "I will also have to ask about the black sword."

"Finally, I will have to request some duels so that I can train while I get stronger," he thought. "Since I have a lot of free time in coming, I will have to make the best use of it."

Once he planned all of this, he finished taking care of the storage bags. He took a look at that one talisman he still had no idea what it did.

"Yeah, I will have to ask them about this as well."

Once he was all done, he was about to log out since he had nothing else to do when suddenly he heard a voice in his head.

"Come to the Palace Hall," Lady Ren's voice sounded in his head.. "And bring the child with you."

Chapter 499 - White Tigers Dominating Body

Alex walked along the newly familiar corridor with Pearl in his arms. The bright white walls and the glowing ceiling gave the area a different atmosphere compared to the outside he had been in not long ago.

He reached the door to the palace hall and was greeted by two feline beasts that were waiting for him and opened the doors for him as well.

"Meow!" Pearl thanked them as Alex nodded as well and walked in.

"Good afternoon, seniors," he said when he saw Lady Ren and the other 2 beasts standing next to her.

"Meow!" Pearl called out.

"Hello, my child. How are you feeling?" Lady Ren asked.

Alex kept quiet as the question was very clearly directed at Pearl. "Meow Meow!" Pearl once more found the opportunity to complain about having been forced to fight with the puma.

"He did that? I will make sure to punish him later, okay?" Lady Ren said.

"Meow!" Pearl finally got happy and smiled smugly towards the puma. The puma looked around not sure what to think. He had unintentionally made Pearl dislike him.

He grumbled how the testing was originally the jaguar's job and he wasn't even supposed to be part of any of it.

"You guys didn't spend very long in the library, did you?" Alex asked. "It's only been a few hours. Did you find anything?"

"Oh, it's only been a few hours for you, but for us, it has been days now," Lady Ren said. "Unfortunately, we were unable to find anything regarding your situation."

"There has been no precedent of humans with the bloodline of the Four legendary beasts. Many have tried, and some have even succeeded in integrating the bloodline for brief moments, but almost all of those have died," Lady Ren said.

"Those that still lived could never cultivate again as their body was mostly destroyed from inside out. However... you have somehow taken in not the blood, but the blood essence and survived it."

"You... are a mystery to which I don't have any answer," Lady Ren said. "Can I take a look at you more closely?"

"Uhh... Sure," Alex said and walked up close. Lady Ren closed her eyes and a wave of spiritual energy washed all over him.

"Hmm..." she said after a while. "I knew I wasn't being stupid when I said that your spirit and body are not aligned. But it's way too similar for it to not belong to each other. This is so weird."

She looked some more and said, "so much Yang energy. It's like your whole body is made up of Yang. Also, it's a shame your spiritual roots are 5 Elemental and Yang aligned. If it were less, you could have done better."

"However, your spiritual sea is quite massive for someone who hasn't even entered the true realm yet, and quite dense too. I'm looking forward to seeing how strong it will be when you enter the saint realm. That will be a sight to beh—"

Lady Ren suddenly stopped speaking and remained silent, looking at him with her spiritual sense once more.

After not speaking for a while, Alex started to get worried. "Is something wro—"

"SSHH! I'm concentrating," Lady Ren said as she continued looking for nearly a minute. Finally, she sighed and said, "dammit, I thought I saw something, but it's not there anymore."

Alex was a little confused and surprised. "What did you see?" he asked.

"I don't really know. It was some sort of texture or pattern. I thought I saw it for a split second, but I couldn't find it anymore," Lady Ren said.

"What sort of textures?" Alex asked.

"Some sort of lines. I think I only saw a part of it, but of even that I'm not sure now," Lady Ren said. "Are you hiding something?"

"No, no," Alex said. "How could I even hide anything from a Saint realm expert like you?"

"That is true, but... arghh! Just what is wrong with your body? The only thing I can even think of doing right now is taking the blood essence in you and giving it to the child so that he has a much higher chance of awakening his bloodline," Lady Ren said.

"You can do that?" Alex asked. "Is there any threat to my life if we do that?"

"This has never been done before, so I don't know," Lady Ren said. "All I know is that despite having the bloodlines of the White Tiger, you haven't awakened any skills the bloodline comes with, so we may be safe."

Alex nodded when he heard that but then stopped as he remembered something. "Um... actually, there is something I haven't mentioned before. I wasn't hiding or anything, I just forgot to mention something very important," Alex said.

The beasts got curious and looked at him curiously. "What is it?" Lady Ren asked.

"You see, whenever Pearl cultivates, I am forcefully made to cultivate the same thing with him as well," Alex said.

"Forcefully made to cultivate?" Lady Ren seemed confused.

"Um, let me just show you," Alex said and sat on the ground and pet Pearl as he told him to start cultivating.

Pearl sat on his lap and closed his eyes as white light shined around him. The white light soon turned to yellow, which then turned to golden. He had started cultivating.

As soon as that happened, numerous cuts appeared all around Alex, which hurt him quite a lot, but not enough to make him lose his attention from the current situation.

"See? This is what i-What's wrong with you guys?" Alex asked when he saw all of their eyes wide open and their pupils enlarged.

"It can't be," the jaguar said.

"He hasn't even awakened his bloodline yet," the Puma said.

"The White Tiger's Dominating Body technique. How... does he have the technique? Those should be memories lost to him for a very long time," Lady Ren said.

"Memories?" Alex asked.

"Yes, Memories of the first White Tiger," Lady Ren said. "When the first 4 beasts were blessed by the gods, they all received some sorts of skills, each different from each other."

"In the case of the White Tiger, the progenitor got a few different techniques that were later named White Tiger's Golden Claw, White Tiger's Roar, White Tiger's Steps, and a few others."

"These skills were skills ingrained onto the bloodline itself, and whoever acquired the bloodline, acquired the memory of these skills as well. The first children of the progenitor White Tiger could all use these skills pretty well."

"However, as the White Tiger's bloodline extended and started to get diluted, the number of skills they acquired also started to dilute. If they did retain the memories, it would only be some of them, not all."

"My husband had the knowledge of White Tiger's Steps and White Tiger's Golden Claw, just like many of his brothers and sisters. However, only very few White Tigers ever acquired the memories of the White Tiger's Dominating Body technique."

"To think I would get to see such a fabled skill on this child; I did not expect that," Lady Ren said. "This child is no longer important to us alone. If the family learns about him, they might just take him there to rear him."

Alex was about to argue after hearing that when Lady Ren herself spoke once again.

"No!" she said, surprising the lot. "He is too young right now. He will either grow up to be a pawn or die before getting any strong at all. So, the best choice is to keep him here until he is old enough to know better and fend for himself."

As she said that, she turned to look at Alex who still had cuts appearing all over him. "Does it not hurt, little human? All of these wounds," she asked.

"Huh? Oh yes, it hurts. But I'm used to it. Do you know why this is happening?" he asked.

"I'm not really certain, but I believe that because of your 'Bond of Equal' and you also have the same bloodline, you can cultivate what this child does. However, because of your lack of a similar physique to the White Tiger, your body cannot handle the cultivation method," Lady Ren said.

"I see," Alex said, even though he had already guessed that much.

"Do you have anything else to ask?" Lady Ren asked.

"Yes, a bunch."

Chapter 500 - Answers About The Sword

"I have a few unrelated questions and requests that I was hoping you could help me with," Alex said.

Lady Ren looked at him curiously with an amused look on her face. "Requests? I didn't think you would be bold enough for that. But still, go ahead. If it's something I can give easily, I will. Don't try to push your luck though," she said.

"I promise, I won't," Alex said. He quickly brought out a storage bag and stopped. "Um, is there someplace where you wouldn't mind having your floors destroyed?"

The jaguar and puma looked at Alex weirdly, while Lady Ren still had her amused face with her. It even looked like she was enjoying it all.

"If you can put a single dent on this marble, I will fulfill whatever these requests of yours are," Lady Ren said.

"Oh, are these floors very strong then? I guess it's fine then," Alex said and brought out the sword from inside of his storage bag. The brown-ish black sword flew out of the storage bag and immediately fell onto the floor.

It made a very large 'clank' sound and even clattered on the floor for a while, but there seemed to be no signs of a dent on the floor. Just some minor scratches.

Alex was really surprised to see that the sword that could dig through the ground if just kept on it was actually so effortlessly kept away from damaging the marble.

"Woah, is this some sort of special marble? I have never seen something like this," he said in surprise. "That makes me even more curious how you guys managed to carve it to such perfection in the first place. The craftsmen must've been really strong," Alex said. He still couldn't believe that the sword that killed Pearl's mother couldn't even do anything against this marble.

"That's... just an ordinary marble," Lady Ren's voice came from in front of him.

"Is it?" Alex asked as he looked up and saw genuine surprise from all of their faces. "What's wrong? Why do you guys look like that?" Alex asked.

"Where did you find this sword?" Lady Ren asked. Her face was a shade of fascination he hadn't seen before.

"Uhh... this is the sword that was stuck in Pearl's mother, the one I told you guys about," Alex said. He bent down to pick it up and tried to move it, but even with his incredible power, he couldn't do anything.

Lady Ren's face immediately changed from fascination to anger when she heard that. "This is the sword that killed my descendant?" she asked in a solemn voice.

"Yes," Alex said. He was starting to get a little scared when he saw her angry face. He did not want to face the anger of someone this strong.

"Let me see," the jaguar said, intervening to stop Lady Ren from ruining her own mood. "You said you couldn't pick it up, right? Let me check."

The jaguar grabbed the sword by the hilt as well as he could with his paws and tried to pull it up.

He was doing it with one hand and he could barely lift the handle off of the ground, with the tip still touching the ground. He tried with both of his paws the second time and barely got the sword to go up higher than a meter before dropping it as well.

The jaguar was full of sweat in just a few seconds of trying to pick up the sword. Alex watched in surprise as he realized that not even the jaguar could do anything.

'Not even a Saint realm expert could pick this sword up? Is it a very high-grade sword by some chance?' he thought before immediately remembering that was incorrect. 'No, it's an earth-grade sword. It says so in the description. Then the rank must be very high then. What sort of person could use such a heavy sword in this world though?' he wondered.

"Sigh, as expected on the sword that made scratches on the marble. Even without being used it nearly broke our formation," the jaguar said.

"Formation?" Alex asked.

"Yes. This hall has a formation on all of its walls and floor such that even a Saint realm expert couldn't easily destroy it. Yet, this sword is able to do such a thing. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a Saint rank sword," the jaguar said.

"It's not a saint rank sword? Then... can it be an Immortal rank sword?" Alex asked.

"You know about the immortal rank? That's unexpected," the jaguar said. The puma walked up and he too couldn't pick the sword up very well. He too had to drop it in the end.

"Lady Ren, this sword really is very unique," the Puma said. "This reminds me of that other sword for some reason too."

"You 3 have got me very curious. Let me try as well," Lady Ren said and walked up to the sword.

Alex waited for her to pick up the sword, but she didn't. Instead, the light started shining from all around her so bright that Alex and the others had to guard their eyes against the light.

As the light faded away, Alex finally put down his hand and was very shocked to see what he did.

In front of him was a middle-aged woman with thick white hair flowing up to her waist. Her skin was very fair as well, and she saw wearing a white robe with hints of yellow here and there.

Her human face looked very familiar to Alex too. "Lady Ren?" he questioned as to her facial features somewhat matched to that of her cat form.

The woman said nothing and simply got low to pick up the sword. "Careful, it's hea—" Alex's voice stuck in his face as he watched Lady Ren simply pick up the sword with no problem whatsoever.

She moved the sword left and right. "Hmm, I see what's going on. This is definitely not an Immortal ranked, but just a Saint ranked sword. There is no doubt about that," she said.

"Huh? Lady Ren, but then why is it so heavy? A saint-ranked expert couldn't possibly fight with that sword," the jaguar said.

"That's because it's not meant to be used by just any saint-ranked expert. It can only be used by the one it accepts as its user," Lady Ren said.

"Oh," the jaguar said as his eyes shined with understanding. "This sword has an artifact spirit?" he asked.

"Yes, a very rudimentary one, but there is one nonetheless. All it can do is choose whether or not it wants the person carrying it to use it. If it allows, the weight becomes insignificant."

"If it doesn't, you will have to bear the weight while carrying you. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be advanced enough to completely stop you from using it," Lady Ren said.

The jaguar and the puma nodded in understanding, while Alex stood there dumbly, not understanding a thing.

"Um, what is an artifact spirit?" he asked them.

"You don't know?" Lady Ren asked.

"No," Alex said. "And I would also like to know how you look like a human right now."

"Oh, never mind this," Lady Ren said. "You will learn about transformations later on. For now, all you need to know is that I, as well as a few others in this world, can transform as one."

"As for an Artifact spirit, when an artifact is made up of incredibly high ranked material or crafted to perfection, there is a chance that it will grow a spirit of its own that has consciousness," she said.

"I have never seen a saint realm artifact have a spirit before, but it seems they aren't quite impossible. Its users must've left it alone to take in a lot of energy and refine itself a consciousness. That is also another way artifact spirits can be born," Lady Ren said.

"No wonder I thought they were similar. This one also has a spirit in it, huh?" the puma said.

"Well, at least we won't have to worry about this one," Lady Ren said. "The spirit in this one is not as bad as the black o—"

Suddenly, Lady Ren noticed something on the surface of the sword and stopped. She brought it up and looked at it through the shine of the ceiling at a certain angle. Her face suddenly turned all serious and even a little bit worried.

"Why would they attack her?" she mumbled to herself.

"Lady Ren? Are you okay?" the jaguar and puma got worried.

"Yes, I'm fine," Lady Ren said.

"What did you find?" Alex asked.

"Nothing of import to you," Lady Ren said and handed the sword back. Alex let it fall to the ground and then went to pick it up.

He wondered what she saw and he too tried to look at the sword-like she did. At a certain angle, through the light's shine, he could see a sword with something wrapped around it.

"A sword with a snake wrapped around it?" Alex asked in confusion.

"A snake?" the jaguar looked confused.

"That is no snake. That's a dragon," Lady Ren said. "A Dragon wrapped around a sword, that is the crest of the Azure Imperium. Blessed by the Azure dragon himself, they rule the eastern continent in his stead."

"If that sword can bear their crest, then it has to belong to someone important in the Imperium. Whoever killed my descendant belonged to the Azure Imperium," Lady Ren said.

"The only question left to answer now is why?"

Chapter 501 - More Questions

Alex stood around quietly, trying to understand the information he was just given. "So she was indeed from the eastern continent then. How did she get here? With no way to travel in between continents—"

"Lady Ren, could it be that the Azure dragon helped her? After all, he does have the ability to teleport," the jaguar asked.

"No, that would not make any sense," Lady Ren said. She was already back to her beast form and looked incredibly annoyed because of the information she had just learned.

"Yeah, why would the imperium attack her if the Azure Dragon wishes for her to be well. Besides, the Azure dragon should still be in closed cultivation right?" the puma asked.

"Hmm, that's true. I didn't think of that. God, this makes no sense," the jaguar said.

"That's enough. Leave that sword here, young man. We will keep it. You can't use it for now anyway. Also, we can't let something this important go around with a weakling like you," Lady Ren said.

"Huh? But that's my sword. Why should I give it to you guys?" Alex asked.

"It's not your sword. This sword belongs to the Azure Imperium. Do you know how many people would kill you to have that sword? If a single person ever learns that you have that sword, your life would be the least of your worries," Lady Ren said.

Alex feared a little when he heard that. It was true that the sword wasn't the best weapon for him since he couldn't even use it. And if people did really learn about the sword's origin, he didn't know how much trouble he would be in.

So, he reluctantly agreed to have the sword being taken away.

"Don't be sad. If you ever become strong enough to handle it, we will give it back to you. We have no use for this sword," Lady Ren said.

"I see. Thank you," Alex said, but his mood was clearly soured by now. He couldn't help but sigh at what the situation had come to be.

"So, do you have any more questions? I thought you had a lot," Lady Ren said.

"Oh, yes," Alex said as he hurriedly brought out a talisman. "Can you tell me what this talisman is? I tried checking, but I just can't figure it out at all."

"Hmm, a talisman?"

The talisman in Alex's hands started floating and they went up to Lady Ren's face. She looked at it for a bit and her eyes went wide.

"Young man, how do you always have such good stuff on you? Your luck is out of this world," Lady Ren said.

"Umm, so I can assume the talisman is good?" he asked.

"Yes, it's great," Lady Ren said as she gave back the talisman. "It's a teleportation talisman. Although it's dormant right now, you will have to wait for a bit before you can use it."

"Oh, a teleportation talisman?" Alex's eyes went wide. "I can teleport around with it?'

"Not so fast. I said you will have to wait, right?" Lady Ren said. "It will take a while before you can use this talisman I suppose. From what I can see, it requires a lot of Water Qi fed to it before it can be used. If you know of someplace like that, you can make it active right now."

Chapter 502 - Dropping Out For Good.

Alex walked out of the palace hall and walked along the white corridor with the new information running through his mind.

The sword that he was unable to use for the longest time belonged to the royal family of the Eastern Continent, the royal family being antagonistic towards Pearl and his mother for some reason, and the fact that he had a teleportation talisman that could help him leave so long as it was active again.

These were all information that he wasn't sure how he felt about it. At least, they were information about stuff that was way out of his reach for him right now.

"Sigh, I should just go back and wait for the alchemy room to be made. There really is nothing to do around here, isn't it? I can't even visit the library," Alex thought.

"Well, since it's still afternoon, I should just go and-Huh?" Alex was surprised when he noticed something.

"It happened again?" he said with a face full of shock. He looked at the time on the right and had noticed that it was now 4 in the afternoon.

"But it was barely noon when I entered that room. How did the time-oh right, the Palace Hall did have time dilation formation in it," Alex thought as he remembered. "Damn, is it always like this? I should be careful where I go then."

Alex was still in shock at the time changing, so he quickly went back to the room that was assigned to him, and logged out.

He went out of the capsule and checked the time. As expected, it was indeed 4 pm. "Wow, how did the change in time in the game affect me in the real world as well?" he wondered.

He wasn't hungry or needed to use the bathroom, so he quickly went back into the capsule and logged in.

While the change in time had surprised him once more, he decided to do something else to take his mind off of them.

He brought out a monster core, one belonging to that of a Mind Tempering 4th realm beast, and consumed it.

After reaching Mind Tempering, the beasts seemed to always have a soul in the cores regardless of which ones he had.

Still, Alex's own spiritual sea was far stronger than what the Mind Tempering beasts could really be, so he had no difficulty in killing it.

The spiritual sea beneath him was so vast and dense, that he could keep on using techniques after techniques and it wouldn't deplete in the slightest.

After killing the beast in his spiritual sea, the yellow fog once more consumed both him and the beast, and he got the Qi from the beast.

"I finally have enough to break through to the next realm huh?" he thought. "Although, it wasn't very long ago that I did breakthrough, so I probably should wait a little longer."

Alex decided to keep the breakthrough aside for now, and checked his storage bags. There was 1 more 4th Mind Tempering realm beast's core, and another one belonging to a 5th Mind Tempering realm beast.

Since he had gone to the forest for hunting when he only had Mind Tempering 1st realm cultivation base, he couldn't kill anything stronger than those at the time. Thus, these were the highest cores he had for now.

"Sigh, these should help me get to the 5th Mind Tempering realm, but after that, I will be in trouble," Alex thought. "Collecting Qi through normal cultivation will take me months. Even with using pills to assist in it. Sigh, no wonder the everyday cultivators cultivate so slow."

The normal cultivators could do the exact same thing the players did. That was to sell what they can gather through trade or hunting, and buy themselves pills that increased their Qi.

Alex couldn't help but wonder why they didn't do that. There must be a reason why only players could increase their cultivation base so fast, despite the normal cultivators having a headstart.

"Is using pills to get stronger considered wrong? It couldn't be that they just never thought about it, right?" Alex thought. "I should have asked the master what would happen if people only consumed pills to breakthrough."

"Now that I think about it, I might have to do the same thing, won't I?" he thought. However, he immediately thought otherwise. "No, as a Mind Tempering realm cultivator, pills won't help me as monster cores will. I will still have to stick to the cores, I guess."

With nothing else to do, Alex called out Pearl and got onto his bed. He let Pearl start cultivating, and slowly, he too started doing it.

Before he knew it, he had fallen into a trance and fell unconscious.

Slowly, his consciousness returned back to him as he woke up from sleep. He looked up at the time and realized that it was 6 am in morning.

His True Qi had returned to him at 50% once more and he could feel himself getting just a little bit stronger.

"I should go train a bit so that I can breakthrough again," he thought.

"Ah right, if someone comes, open the door and tell them I am cultivating, okay? If the person who came is any of the 4 from yesterday, then you can leave with them," Alex said to Pearl.

He didn't take Pearl back into the beast space since no one was possibly going to harm him in this place. Then, sat in his cultivating position and logged out.

He got out of the capsule and freshened up before going out to the kitchen. Emily was already up, preparing breakfast for them all.

"You know you don't have to wake up this early to make us breakfast right? We can just have cereals," Alex said.

"Nonsense! Cereals are bad for you. It's better to have bread and eggs," she said.

"Yeah, but you could play the game for a little longer. No need to leave, what is it, 6 in the morning. You need more sleep," Alex said.

Emily stopped after putting the bread in the toaster and sighed. "I have nothing to do in the game, unfortunately," she said.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

She turned around and said, "well, since I have a really bad body and talent and almost unusable spiritual root, I can't really cultivate at all. Despite it being months, I'm still in the Bone Tempering realm."

"Wow, that is really slow. Is your cultivation method not very good?" he asked. As far as he knew, even with bad talents, one could cultivate fast if they landed a very good cultivation method.

"Uh, it's not bad I guess," Emily said. "It's heaven grade, so I really can't call it anything but good. However, due to me not having any talent, most of the Qi I collect gets wasted during my breakthroughs."

"Like the last time I went from Bone Tempering 3rd realm to Bone Tempering 4th realm, it took me 3 different tries. I only had a 65% success rate. From 4th to 5th, I have around 62% success rate, so it will take me another long while."

"Sigh, don't do what I did, and never die in-game. It just ruins everything. I might actually end up not playing the game anymore," she said. "But... the holidays are coming and I have nothing else to do for now. I think I will stop playing the game when the classes come back a month later."

"If they do come, right?" Alex asked. "Wasn't there that rumor of the university going to close for 2 to 3 months due to the game? I wonder if that is true."

"I hope not. Otherwise, I would have nothing else to do for the entirety of the winter vacation," she said.

"Oh, you won't have to worry about that. Given where I am, I might actually end up not playing the game a whole lot in the future either," Alex said.

"Oh, what happened?" she asked.

"Well, I'm in this jungle with beasts that say they will keep me there for 10 years, so I think this is it for me too. Unless I manage to find a way back or convince them to let me go back," Alex said.

"That's awful. You were doing so well in the game too," Emily said. "Well, I guess you will now have time to focus on your studies, instead of the game."

"Uhh... about that," Alex said. "I am going to drop out of University."

"Drop out? Why?" Emily asked.

Alex shrugged. "You know why. I don't really need the classes," he said.

"Huh? What did I just hear?" Sarah said as she walked into the kitchen. "You're going to drop out? You must be earning a lot of money then."

Alex got a little embarrassed to talk about his money, but still said, "something like that."

"Woah," Sarah said. "I was kind of joking. Are you really earning a lot? How much do you earn?"

"Sarah, that's not something you should be asking so openly," Emily said from the side.

"What? You're siding with him now? Does our years-long friendship mean nothing to you now?" Sarah exaggerated.

"Haha, it's not bad. Let's just say that," Alex asked.

"Oh, must be in the high hundred thousand then. How much do you end up returning though?" Sarah asked.

"Returning?" Alex questioned.

"You know, putting back into the game. Returning the money," she said.

"Umm, why would I give money back to the game?" Alex asked.

"Uh, you know. To buy stuff, get spirit stones for cultivation. Wait, have you not put the money back into the game yet?" she asked.

"Of course not. I'm self-sufficient in-game," Alex said.

"Tsk, no wonder you make so much. I always end up giving back half of what I make because I always need it," Sarah said.

"You should be like me, Sarah. Get yourself a husband in-game who can give you stuff for free," Hannah entered and jokingly said.

"Damn, why is your timing so right? Also, your brother is dropping out of college. Say something to him," Sarah said.

"Oh, you're dropping out? You lasted quite a while longer than I imagined," Hannah said.

"Huh? You expected me to drop out earlier?" Alex asked.

"Yeah. I only stayed cause it was my final semester. You had barely just started, so I thought you would simply leave. Especially given that you have no money involved in it," Hannah said.

"Hm, I guess that's fair," Sarah said from the side.

"Alright, let's stop the discussion here. I might have something to do in the game soon, so I should return quickly for now," Alex said and started eating faster.

The rest of them did the same thing and left the kitchen to go back to their room.

Chapter 503 - Training Partners

Alex logged back into the game and found that Pearl was still with him. It seemed that he wasn't required anywhere else for today.

Seeing that he didn't seem to have anything else to do, Alex started getting a little bored. "Should I just make some formations?" he thought.

He took out the few spare metal plates and the inscription pen from his storage bag and started making strokes on the metal plate.

Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing the efficiency of the formations he was making without the tool that was available in the Tiger sect. So, all he could do was make the formations, try to run it, and see how it worked.

'Urgh, I wish I had more formation rods. I could practice those too,' he thought. After a few hours, he was done making the formations. Once he was done, he started feeling incredibly bored.

"Wanna go out and train?" Alex asked.

"Meow!"? Pearl cried out and happily jumped onto his shoulders before pointing at the door. It seemed that Pearl too was incredibly bored with nothing to do.

It was still a few hours till noon, but the sun was shining brightly and the garden meadow already had a lot of beasts in it.

The ones that hadn't seen him looked at him with a weird gaze since a human's presence wasn't common at all.

Some growled and roared at him, while others just kept watch of what he was doing. Some even threatened to come to attack him from the way they were staring at him.

Alex felt incredibly uncomfortable amongst these stranger beasts. "I wish I had gotten Yao Jia to come with me. She would've helped me not feel so afraid at least," he said to Pearl.

"You called me?" a beast jumped towards him from the side.

Alex reflexively jumped backward and got in an attacking stance. When he finally saw who it was, he let down his guard.

"Geez, you scared me," Alex said. "What are you doing here?"

"Basking in the sun. Also, I told you I am in charge of this garden right? I look after this place," she said. "Did you come to stay in the sun too?"

"Sun? No. I came here to train. I need to become stronger," Alex said.

"Ooh, can I watch? I'm really interested in how humans train," Yao Jia said with a curious face.

"Uh, sure. I doubt it's different from beasts though," Alex said.

"Oh, you guys get the memory of your parents where you learn how to fight and use techniques too?" Yao Jia asked.

"Uh... no. I see, I guess we are different," Alex said. "My training style is different. I learn the techniques on my own, then practice them while fighting with someone else."

"Ooh, we do the second part too. Practice sure is important," Yao Jia said. "However, you don't have any partner to fight against right? Do you want me to find someone?"

"No, I'm good. I'll train with Pearl," Alex said.

Yao Jia's curious face slowly turned into a confused face as she asked, " you're going to fight the little child?"

"Uh, yes. It's just practice after all," Alex said.

"But, he's more than a realm weaker than you," Yao Jia said, still sort of confused.

"Oh it's fine, I will lower my cultivation base to become equal to him in strength," Alex said.

"Still, isn't he only 6 months old? You're going to fight an infant?" Yao Jia asked.

"Uhh... when you put it like that, I don't know what to say," Alex said.

"Also, will lowering your ability to that of someone weaker than you, will it help you become stronger at all? Isn't that just wasting your time mostly?" Yao Jia asked. "If you want to become strong, then you need to push yourself to the limit. Fight someone on equal footing as you. Only then will you become stronger."

Alex stopped to contemplate. "What you said is true... but who will I even fight against here? I only have Pearl."

"Oh don't worry about that. If you really are interested in fighting, I can find many beasts who will be more than happy to beat a human, hehe," Yao Jia said while giggling.

"It sounds like you want me to suffer more than anything," Alex said.

"What? Of course not. I will let them know not to be too heavy-handed when they fight you. Don't worry, I will stay watch too. As I said, I am interested in watching a human train," Yao Jia said.

Alex thought for a moment and nodded. "Thank you. I will be happy to take this offer then. Also, if you can, can you find someone for Pearl to train with? I don't want him to be idle too."

"No Problem," Yao Jia said and made a loud growling noise. Suddenly, 2 beasts ran up to her. One of them was a jackal, and the other one was a hyena. They bowed in front of her,? and he spoke to them in some sort of beast language.

Alex couldn't understand what she said, but he could tell that she was ordering them to go find fighters for him.

"Oh right, make sure the beasts I fight are 8th Mind Tempering realm or above. Otherwise, it won't be a fight at all," Alex said.

"Huh? Aren't you 3rd Mind Tempering realm?" Yao Jia asked as she checked through his cultivation base.

"Yes, but I can fight people stronger than me. Also, the same thing for Pearl. Find someone 2 to 3 realms higher than him," Alex said.

"Are you sure?" Yao Jia asked as she looked concernedly at Pearl.

"MEOW!" Pearl meowed, letting her know that it was okay.

'I will need to ask her to teach him how to speak as well,' Alex thought when he heard Pearl meow. Pearl already knew a few words and could speak to him through his mind. But his mouth wasn't able to articulate the words at all, and he always ended up meowing his sentences.

"Okay, I will find a strong one for you, but the child is too important to throw into a strong match-up. He will have to start with someone in his own realm," Yao Jia said.

"That's fair, I guess. Please do what you think is right," Alex said.

Yao Jia nodded and let the 2 beasts know, who ran away to find fighters for him and Pearl.

When they returned, they came back with 3 beasts, all of whom looked quite excited to fight.

From what Alex could see, only 1 of these beasts was for Alex to fight. The other two were for Pearl. One of those beasts, a snake, was at the same cultivation realm as Pearl, and the other one a deer was 2 realms higher than him.

As for Alex's opponent, a Rhino, was in the 8th Mind Tempering realm, just as he requested. Given that it was a beast, the rhino's strength would be similar to that of a normal 9th Mind Tempering realm human, which for Alex would be quite an ordeal.

However, that was just what he needed to become stronger and he was all the happier for it.

"Will they work?" Yao Jia asked as she turned towards Alex.

"Yes, very much," Alex said.

"Alright," Yao Jia said as she turned around to speak to the 3 beasts. The 3 beasts kept glancing at Alex sneakily while nodding to whatever Yao Jia was telling them.

"Alright, come. Let's not disturb the peace here with your training. I also don't want to deal with the destruction of my garden," Yao Jia said.

"Where will we go?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, I can't take you outside since you are not allowed to. And the underground is off limit for training, so I guess there is only one place remaining. We'll go to the palace," Yao Jia said.

"The palace?" Alex asked as he turned to look at the castle that had remained unused for a lot of years. "What about the backyard? Is there no space there?"

"There is a giant hole in the backyard and inside is where the cemetery lies, so it's considered rude to go there for anything other than praying for the dead. Don't worry, there are giant empty rooms in there that will be perfect for you guys," Yao Jia said.

"I see, let's go then," Alex said.

The palace was a giant white mansion with at least 3 stories to it. From the outside, Alex couldn't tell how big it was, but it was more than 100 meters in width alone.

If the palace was really built on top of the entire spirit vine, then it would be the largest building Alex had seen to date. Even larger than buildings he had seen in his city in real life.

The way to the underground was on the right side of the palace while the gate outside was in front of it. So, Alex and the others had to go towards the front of the palace before climbing up the stairs to enter the palace.

As soon as he entered, Alex could feel the emptiness. He could hear the sounds of beasts working inside, could see the palace being well-kept through the years, but he could still sense that the warmth that was once in this building was lost.

With the queen and the other wives and concubines, as well as the descendants, leaving the place to go back to the family ground, the palace no longer had any residents in it, and it showed in the emptiness Alex felt.

"This way, the rooms are right here," Yao Jia said as she walked through the corridor in the palace.

Chapter 504 - Training With The Rhino

Yao Jia walked through the halls with a sprint on her steps. Along the way, Alex saw many beasts that seemed to be working there, and Yao Jia found 2 very strong ones among them to come along with her.

From Alex's senses, they were all in the upper True realms, all stronger than him and the 3 others that came with him by a lot. He wondered why they were called but didn't question it.

She growled something in her beastly language that Alex couldn't understand and the other two beasts nodded.

"What's going on?" Alex asked.

"Oh, I'm just getting these two to watch over the child as he trains. We don't want him to get injured, right?" Yao Jia said.

Alex nodded and agreed. She growled towards the beasts once more and pointed towards one of the rooms. The 4 of the beasts that were with them nodded and walked to the room. Ning assumed that was the training room and walked towards it as well.

"That's not the room you'll be going to," Yao Jia said. "That's where the child will train. You will have to train in another separate room."

"Oh, okay. Pearl, go and train with these guys okay? I will go to another room to train," he said.

"Meow?" Pearl said, not wanting to be left with the strangers.

"Don't worry, I will be close by. If you need me, just call me," Alex said. Pearl reluctantly agreed and went into the room.

"Alright, they will train there for at least an hour. You will be training in that room," Yao Jia said as she pointed at one of the rooms down the hallway.

"These are just normal rooms, right? Not rooms made specifically for training?" Alex asked.

"Yes, they're just rooms where the family lived. But even so, it all has formation in it that makes it damn near impossible for even me to do anything," Yao Jia said.

The door opened, and the three of them entered. The door was big enough for even the bulky Rhino to enter, and the room was just as equally large.

The room was totally empty aside from a set of curtains on the window. The room had been empty for so long that Alex couldn't even tell where everything was kept since the start.

Alex walked to the center of the room and recognized how wide it was. Although it wasn't the same size as the training hall back at his master's manor, it was still more than half of its size.

That was big enough for him to train freely.

"Whose room did this use to be? This is quite big," Alex said.

"Hmm, I don't know. No one has lived here for the last 5000 years, so I can't know. But it's more than likely it was either one of the King's partners or his children. Definitely one of those two. Although, it could also be a guest room. I don't know," Yao Jia said.

"So, are you ready? I want to see you train," she said with a jovial tone in her voice.

"Yes, I'm ready," Alex said. He walked away from the center and to one side of the room. He took out his sword and waited for the Rhino to get to the other side.

"Hey, Hey, Hey! What are you doing? Why are you bringing out a weapon?" Yao Jia asked.

"This is how I fight though," Alex said.

"But this isn't a fight. It's a training session. What if he gets hurt," Yao Jia said as he pointed towards the Rhino.

"Uh, I'm sure he had a tough hide. Also, I will try not to hit too hard," Alex said.

"No, if he gets injured from this fight, that will be on me. Can't you train with just normal techniques?" she asked.

"Um," Alex thought about it for a bit. He wanted to learn the sword to improve his Sword Intent, but it would be a bit too hard to train the intent itself under the current situation since his training partner wasn't that much stronger.

"Alright, I will fight without any weapons," Alex said in the end as he kept back his sword.

"Good, start when you want. I'm just here for the show," Yao Jia said.

Alex nodded and looked towards the Rhino before nodding towards him as well. "Alright, I'll begin then.

He said and lightly jumped towards the Rhino with his hands in a fist. The Rhino was plenty intelligent being in the Mind Tempering realm and immediately knew what to do.

It twisted its neck a little to the left with a smug look on its face, dodging the punch and bringing it back like a snapping rubber band, hitting Alex's upper body with the side of its head.

Alex lost balance as he was sent aside by the simple attack. "Alright," he said and stood up before going back to punch once more.

The Rhino made a scoffing noise as it thought that Alex was doing the same thing again and dodge once more. However, this time Alex didn't move a step further and immediately came to a halt after the Rhino moved its head.

His other fist came from the side and punched the Rhino directly on the nose below its horn. Once the Rhino was hit, Alex returned back to his spot, preparing to attack once more.

The Rhino shook its head as a slight stinging pain emanated from its nose. Despite the difference in cultivation, it had taken damage from Alex. It got a little irritated and decided to attack seriously now.

Alex dashed forward once more, but the Rhino didn't bother dodging at all. Instead, it also dashed forward at an incredible speed as its horn started glowing green in color.

Alex could see a barrier appear around the front of the Rhino, like a shield protecting the front side. However, the Rhino was using that shield to attack.

With the rhino already being massive, and the shield being even bigger than it, Alex didn't have much space to maneuver in. He wanted to teleport out, but the amount of light in the room wasn't enough to make any distinct shadows for him to teleport to.

So, with no other choice, he quickly started both of his defensive techniques. His skin started showing a marbled pattern, and a barrier made up of multicolored light appeared in front of him.

As the Rhino's barrier passed his own, the Rhino's barrier lost the majority of its green light and what slammed at Ning was only part of it.

A rather loud sound emerged from the two of them colliding, but neither of them was at an advantage during the clash.

The Rhino came to a full stop and Alex himself didn't move a bit.

"Ooh! That was nice. You use so many techniques all at once. I saw like 3. Those aren't memories of your parents right?" Yao Jia asked from the side.

"No, this is what we learn after training," Alex said. "We never get anything from the start."

Yao Jia thought for a bit and asked, "Can you teach me?"

"Um… I don't think so. I know there are techniques that you can learn, but I don't have any. I had looked through a few to teach Pearl, but all of them looked terrible. Maybe there are good ones in the sects that primarily focus on beast taming," Alex said.

"Sigh, that's unfortunate. Continue your training," Yao Jia said.

Alex nodded and got back to his training. Throughout the next half an hour, he showed many of the abilities he had that didn't require the use of a sword.

This also helped him realize that he was way too reliant on the sword itself. In the case, if he ever had to fight without a sword, his survival rate would go down by a lot.

'I need to become stronger even when I'm not using the sword,' he thought.

The training was hard, but Alex was also not using all of his abilities, so that could be improved upon.

The Rhino sent a gale of air flying towards him, which he dodged by moving around it with seemingly no resistance in the air.

He then very quickly went behind the Rhino and kicked at it. The Rhino bulked up until its body and got extra sturdy such that Alex's attack didn't do much damage to it at all.
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Alex was about to go for another attack when Yao Jia suddenly spoke up. "Alright, that's enough," she said.

Alex stopped and turned around with a confused face. "But it's only been half an hour," he said. "Can't we do this for a little longer?"

"Oh, I'm not stopping the training session," Yao Jia said. "I'm just changing your partner."

"Changing my partner?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, I didn't expect his lack of maneuverability to be a factor in this training, but it seems you are getting a lot of hits off just because he isn't as flexible as you," Yao Jia said as she gestured towards the Rhino.

The Rhino said something in return while bowing his head, and Yao Jia replied in the same language that Alex couldn't understand.

She said something, to which the Rhino bowed once more and left out of the room.

"What did you say to him?" Alex asked.

"Oh, I just told him he was no longer needed here," Yao Jia said.

"I see," Alex said. "Should we go check on Pearl while we wait for my next partner then?" Alex asked.

"Oh, you don't need to worry about that. Your training partner is already here," Yao Jia said with a big smile.

Alex slowly turned his head towards her as a thought came to his mind. "Uhh… by my training partner, you don't mean… you, right?" he asked.

"Of course I mean myself. Who else could I be referring to?" she asked with a laugh.

"But you're so strong. Will this even be a training?" Alex asked.

"Oh, don't worry. I won't fight back at all," she said. "I'm way too eager to see how you fare against someone clearly out of your range."

Alex thought for a moment and said, "That's not a bad idea, honestly. I would love to fight someone strong so that I know where I'm failing. Also, I should be able to use my abilities without holding back at all"

"Right? You can also use your sword if you want. I can take those hits without a problem," Yao Jia said smugly.

"I would rather not use my sword right now. I would like to fight the best I can without any weapons," he said.

Yao Jia smiled and said, "Suit yourself.. now come, let's train."

Chapter 505 - White Tigers Golden Claw

For the entirety of the next 3 hours, Alex and Yao Jia trained for as long as they could. It was an intense training session for Alex, but to Yao Jia, it was just a simple bout, as if she was playing with a child.

No matter how much speed, strength, or surprise he put into his attacks, there was nothing that she could do that wasn't better in all aspects.

Alex was sure that the only thing that could bring the slightest bit of result in this training was Heaven's Impact. However, that wasn't a skill suitable for training practices.

He kept to with his normal skills, but even his teleportation skills were being bested by her with her speed. He couldn't even sneak attack.

His fist and palm attacks were doing nothing, so he decided to use the one technique he had come upon his own.

Yellow light floated in the air as it slowly came together on his arms and coated it golden. Yao Jia's eyes shined when she saw this.

Alex dashed through the air and punched towards her. She casually brought forth her paw and stopped it. Even as she thought it did, the yellow light exploded, attacking her paw once more.

"Woah, Woah, Woah, stop!" she said. "What was that?"

"What? My skill?" Alex asked.

"Yes! That was like... where did you learn it?" she asked.

"Nowhere. I came up with it on my own," Alex said.

"On your own. Wow! That technique is so close to one that the White Tigers have too. It's called the White Tiger's Golden Claw. The King had it, and it was one of his strongest attacks I was told," Yao Jia said.

"White Tiger's Golden Claw huh?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it was one of his strongest skills. Honestly, your skill is very lacking compared to his, but that's understandable. However, since you said you came up with this on your own, maybe you can improve on it," Yao Jia said.

"Improve my skill? How do you suggest I do that?" Alex asked. Golden light flickered around him once more as they slowly coalesced on his right arm to form a golden fist.

He kept it there for a bit and listened to what Yao Jia had to say.

"There's an obvious answer, honestly," she said. "Instead of a fist, make it a claw. Make it sharp so that it can cut through things. That will deal a lot more damage than just regular punch, don't you think?"

"Hm... claws. I can't have nails coming from out between my fingers, so I guess this is my only choice," Alex said. Slowly, he opened his golden fist and loosened his hand.

Then, more golden light appeared around his that started converging on his hand once more. Only this time, they were sticking to his fingers, making each one of them sharp like claws.

He turned his hand around and looked at it. He was genuinely impressed with what he had come up with.

'I can't use it the same way I use the punch though, right?' he thought. 'The punch is meant to be a one-hit attack, but this one will have to last me several bouts. So, they must be quite durable.'

"Hey, that's pretty good," Yao Jia said from the front. "But you know what's better than one claw?"

Alex chuckled. "Two claws, huh?" he said and formed a golden fist on his left hand that also soon changed to claws.

"That looks much better," Yao Jia said. "But you know what's better than two claws?"

"I'm not making claws out of my feet," Alex said as he laughed.

"Whatever, that's your loss," Yao Jia said. "Okay, come attack me. Let's see how well they perform."

Alex didn't really have any claw technique to fall back on, so he had to go in on the attack blindly. He dashed forward the same way he would during normal punches and started slashing when he got close.

The attack procedure felt incredibly inefficient as his claws didn't really hit the targets properly. Yao Jia was also quick and dodged most of his attack.

The only time he genuinely got to test the claws was when she would use barrier skills and he would get to freely attack them

For now, he had realized that his claws weren't durable at all, but he had some idea on how to fix that. If he could give them a base to form upon, for example, long nails, then they would surely be more durable.

'Although I won't be able to rely on pill always. I will need to make them stronger just as is. Maybe I should use True Qi. Those would certainly be stronger,' he thought.

He let go of his golden claw and reformed it while using True Qi this time. It looked far more brilliant in color than it did with common Qi and felt a lot stronger as well.

He checked the claws for a few seconds and remembered something from a few months ago that had given him the idea for his golden fist in the first place.

He seemed to recall a skill to the same effect as what he had now being used by Pearl back when they were stuck in that formation.

"Now that I think about it, part of the reason I came up with the golden fist technique was that I saw Pearl use it actually. He used it against me during one of our training. After seeing that, I came up with the idea to use it for myself as well," Alex said.

Yao Jia who was getting ready for the next round of fights stopped as her eyes went wide.

"What?" she asked. "The child can use that already? Dear lord, I must let the elders know about this."

"Wait, what's wrong with him using it? It's a White Tiger's skill right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, but the child hasn't been through the ritual yet. His being able to use skills before the ritual is not something I know is possible. I must let the elders know to see if this means anything. Come, we can end the training here."

Alex nodded. "Yes, let's end it here. I'm quite tired too," he said.

Yao Jia briskly walked out of the room with Alex following behind her quietly. He wondered if he had made a mistake by telling her that Pearl knew the technique.

The older folks already knew that Pearl knew the White Tiger's Dominating Body. If they now knew that he also knew White Tiger's Golden Claw skill, they would put more importance on Pearl, which would always mean a good thing for him.

However, it was also possible that they would force Pearl to go through the ritual before he was even ready to make him the King of this place as soon as possible.

That was the reason he did not feel like revealing that Pearl had also used another skill back during their training, one that he used to block Alex's sword completely with no damage.

Pearl was done with his training in the other room and jumped onto Alex's embrace as soon as he saw him.

"You okay, buddy? How was your training?" Alex asked.

"MEOW!" Pearl once more complained about being left with strangers, made to fight.

Alex chuckled a little and said, "I'm sorry that keeps happening, buddy. But you will have to do that if you want to get stronger. Also, I will stay with you, for now, so cheer up."

Alex bowed a little towards the snake and the deer that were training with Pearl. From what Alex could see, the snake didn't even seem to have fought that long. As for the deer, it was in an absolutely disheveled state.

Pearl surely made some work out of him.

"Let's go back," Alex said. While Yao Jia went to report on her findings today, Alex took Pearl back to his room to rest.

Once again, there was nothing for him to do so he went back to his room to wait around.

"Well, the training session itself was quite intense, wasn't it?" he asked. "I think I should ask her to help me train tomorrow as well. What do you say, buddy?"

"MEOW!" Pearl refused.

"You will come around to it, surely," he said. "Right then, I think it's time."

Alex then opened up his status and clicked breakthrough.

Chapter 506 - A Month Later

"AAAAAAAA-AHAHAHHA~"

Emily screamed from the top of her lungs as the rollercoaster went downhill. Alex could also feel the rush of the moment, but it wasn't scary at all to him for some reason.

Even until the end, he never once screamed like the other people on the roller coaster.

"Gosh, you're no fun. You've become too used to heights in-game, haven't you?" Emily asked.

"I can't help it if I know how to fly, can I?" Alex asked.

"Sigh, at least one of us is having fun in the game," Emily said. "Come on, let's go. I want to have some crepe."

"Oh, don't you want to go on that ride before that?" Alex asked as he pointed to a fun-looking amusement park ride.

"Arghh, I do. But I'm also feeling a little hungry. Are you not hungry right now? We both haven't eaten anything since breakfast," she said.

"I guess I am. Alright, let's go eat something, and we can continue having fun afterward," Alex said and went to a food stall in the amusement park.

They ordered some crepes for themselves and found a place to sit down to eat.

"I haven't had this much fun in a long while," Emily said. "Also, it's nice having someone to talk to. Being alone all the time wasn't very fun, I must say."

"I'm sorry. If I knew you had completely stopped playing already, I would've made more time to spend with you. God knows I have a lot of free time right now," Alex said.

"No, no, don't be sorry. It has nothing to do with you anyway," Emily said. "It's my fault that started all of that problem. Now I can't even go past being an outer sect disciple. The game is not worth it for me at all."

"Besides, it helped me find time for my parent's store when I went back home. They were surprised to see that I wasn't addicted to the game like everyone else.

"What will you do with your capsule then?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. Maybe I will sell it, but maybe I will want to go back and play. I will keep it for now at least," Emily said.

"That's not a bad idea," Alex said. "I wonder how many people end up selling their gears after they die and the game isn't fun anymore. Should be a lot of people right?"

"I would assume so. As far as I know, there is not a single person that managed to get a good roll on their body, and talent after reincarnating," Emily said.

"Hmm, maybe I should pull out my shares from the Deva corp's stocks. It feels really flimsy right now," Alex thought.

"By the way, you never talk about your game. Is there a reason why you are so free right now? Don't you have to work hard to earn money?" Emily asked.

"Uh, I only have 2 things to do all day in-game. Train, and make pills. Training takes 2-4 hours at most and making pills takes at most 2 hours too, so I? have a lot of time free on my hand," Alex said.

"Hmm... and you make money from these pills right?" Emily asked.

"Yeeee.... Actually, not right now. I can't sell my pills, but when I can, yes. Pills are what make me money the most," Alex said.

"I probably should have taken some sort of profession when I started too. Then I probably wouldn't have died on that mission in the snow," Emily said.

"Alright, enough of this depressing talk. Let's finish and go ride some more of those rides," Alex said as he started chomping on his crepe.

Emily giggled and rushed to finish her crepe as well. After 2 more hours of having fun in the amusement park, they finally returned back home.

Both Hannah and Sarah were in the game, so they never even realized that the two had gone out at all.

"Do you want me to keep you company out there?" Alex asked.

"No, no. Go back to the game. You don't have to stop doing something you enjoy just because I don't," Emily said.

"Thank you," Alex said and left the living room. He went to his room and freshened up before going back into the capsule and logging in.

He woke up in his room and looked at the bed he was sitting on. Pearl wasn't anywhere to be seen.

"He must be training," Alex thought and walked out. He walked along the white underground hallways and made his way to a special place designated for him and him alone.

It was the alchemy room that was created for him. The beasts had worked extra hard to make sure the room was ready the day after he had asked for it.

Since then, he had been making pills daily, and his experience with making True pills had increased a lot.

By now, he was successfully creating Earth-grade True pills without any issue. The pills he made were on the easier side amongst the recipes he knew, but that was still an achievement for him who wasn't in the True realms yet.

That was all because of his Qi. Thanks to his Qi becoming increasingly denser and more profound as he broke through, by the time he was in the 5th Mind Tempering realm, all of his Common Qi would turn into True Qi after a night of cultivation.

When that had happened the first time, he had wondered if he had reached the True realm by some chance and skipped a couple of realms. However, the status on him still said that he was in the Mind Tempering realm, so he knew what realm he was in.

As for after that realm, every subsequent realm, his Qi had gotten more and more dense. Now, even his common Qi was so dense that he could almost handle True rank ingredient while making pills.

He himself was surprised at how well he had done at making the pills with just his normal Qi. With True Qi, he could easily form most True pills that weren't complex in recipes.

Alex entered his alchemy room and sat in front of the furnace. He brought out his cauldron and put it on the fire before taking a deep breath to regulate his 8th Mind Tempering realm cultivation base.

That was the realm he had reached after a month of being in this place, and he was very close to the 9th as well. Just a few more days of training, and he could surely be there.

After that, it was just a matter of time before he reached the True realm.

Alex was giddy with happiness every time he remembered this. Still, he calmed down his excitement and started making pills once more.

He put in the ingredients one by one and started moving them as the recipe asked for. If Alex had made this pill a month ago, he would have to be cautious enough to change his common Qi to True Qi 3 different times so as to not get attacked by the energy of the ingredient.

However, now he didn't need to worry about that at all since all of his Qi was True Qi, to begin with. In just 10 more minutes, Alex managed to form the pill.

The pill-splitting Qi still didn't release when making True Pills for some reason, so Alex was at least happy about that.

When he finally finished the pill, he looked at the harmony and realized that it was at 32%. For a True pill made by someone that hadn't even entered the True realms yet, this was not a bad harmony at all.

Alex nodded to himself when he saw this and put it in a bottle. He then brought out more ingredients and started making more pills.

Unfortunately, despite being True Qi, his True Qi wasn't dense enough to last very long. So just after 2 hours, he had to stop making pills.

Still, Alex was satisfied with the 6 pills he managed to make, with breaks in between them.

Once done, he stood up and left the room to go outside. He walked through the bright hallway and came up to the stairs that led to the garden on the right side of the palace.

Alex was allowed to freely go around this place, so he walked up to the aboveground with no hesitation.

When he finally walked out of the door, he could see quite a few beasts standing around. When they saw him, however, they started jumping and screaming before making their way to in front of him.

"Please, stay behind. I have 6 pills for today," Alex said. "I can sell them to you based on what you have."

The beasts didn't understand what Alex had said at all, but that was when Yao Jia came in handy. She had been waiting for this to start in her garden outside, and as soon as Alex spoke, she translated what he said to the beasts.

It had taken him a bit, but Alex had managed to show that his pills were effective to the beasts. Especially the ones that healed and helped in cultivation. In these peaceful times, the ones that made them temporarily powerful didn't receive as much attention, but they were also loved by the beasts quite a bit.

Alex's intentions at the start had only been to exchange the pills with monster cores, and he still wanted them, but after seeing what else the beasts could give in exchange, he was more than happy to accept them.

That was how Alex had set up this small auction of his own, and it was going to start right now.

Chapter 507 - 9th Mind Tempering Realm

The 'auction' went just as it always did. The beasts had brought Spirit stones, monster cores, and plants that they considered rare.
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Alex would look through them as always, and if he ever found something interesting, he would exchange them for a pill he had.

Today, he managed to get 2 rare Saint-rank alchemy ingredients, 2 9th Mind Tempering realm monster core, and finally quite a lot of spirit stones.

They were common spirit stones, so they weren't worth as much as True spirit stones, but there wasn't anything else he found useful amongst the bunch of things the beasts had brought for him, so he took those instead.

Still, this made up to a few ten thousand dollars a day, so he couldn't get mad about it. Once he was done for the day, he told Yao Jia to tell them to go away and come back tomorrow at the same time.

Yao Jia did as Alex said and sent the beasts away.

"It's amazing to see how quickly they changed their stance on getting your pills once they saw how well it did," She said.

"Well, it's only right that you don't accept things from strangers. Especially things that you eat. Human children are taught this from a very young age," Alex said.

He looked at the 2 cores in his hands and smiled. He could now finally break through to the 9th Mind Tempering realm. After that… it was just one more step to the True Realm.

"Oh right, what's happening with my requests? I haven't heard about anything," Alex said

"Well… it's under consideration. We don't really know about alchemy, so the elders are a little hesitant to let you go out to pick ingredients. Who knows what you can make with your pills," Yao Jia said.

"As for the other one… senior Chen himself keeps saying later, so there is nothing we can do. You will just have to wait for him to get tired enough to accept your request," Yao Jia said.

"Can't lady Ren order him or something? It's just for a really small thing that I wanted clarifications on," Alex said.

"No," Yao Jia said. "He is really stubborn and also very old. Most of the time, he just wants to sit in his home and sleep all the time. He can get real grumpy if we force him to work more than he wants."

Alex couldn't help but sigh when he heard that. It had been a month since he wanted to use the yang jades in his storage bag that were just lying there doing nothing. But it seemed that they would have to stay there for much longer once again.

"Sigh, I guess I will wait then," Alex said and brought out a pill. "Here, this one is for you. Thank you for helping me with everything."

"Oh, a pill?" Yao Jia's eyes shined. "What pill is this? Can I eat it?"

"Uhh, don't eat it. It's a healing pill. If you ever get hurt, you can eat it then to get better. It works for True rank cultivators, so don't bother giving it to your father if he ever needs one," Alex said.

"So, it's for only me huh? I like it," she said.

Alex smiled and waved her goodbye to return back to his room. He had missed today's training, but that was only because he had already planned to go to the amusement park beforehand.

He walked into his room and saw Pearl sitting on top of the bed.

"Oh, hey Pearl. You returned?" Alex asked. "How was training?"

"MEOW!" Pearl said, implying that it was the same as always, which was fun.

"Oh, nice. Can you say that in the human tongue?" Alex asked. " Yao Jia is teaching you to speak right?"

Pearl stared at him for a few seconds and said, "Meow Meow Meow."

Alex snickered when he heard that. Despite his intelligence and cultivation, Pearl was still a child. And it seemed that his vocal cords just weren't developed enough at such an early age.

He would have to wait for a bit longer before he could speak in the human tongue. "Alright, don't force it," Alex said.

Alex then brought out an 8th Mind Tempering realm beast's monster core and ate it. He slowly closed his eyes and drifted into his spiritual sea where he was attacked by the spirit of the beast in the core and had to defeat it before gaining the Qi from it.

He opened up the status page and saw that it was enough to break through, so without thinking much, he broke through once more.

The Qi in his body got considerably thicker to the point that he was having a hard time differentiating it from True Qi. He didn't doubt that his current common Qi was way denser than most True Realm cultivators starting Qi.

"Just a few more days now," he thought. He had the 2 cores he got from today, so he had no reason to worry about anything anymore.

It was evening time, so he decided to start cultivating once more.

He called Pearl to sit down in front of him and opened up Pearl's status page as well.

"Hm, 2nd realm of Mind Tempering huh. You're doing not bad as well. If you keep this up, you should be able to enter True Realm in about a month as well," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl said that he could make it faster if he got monster cores too.

"I told you, didn't I? Cultivation is always better than any other form of Qi acquisition. I have to do it because normally gathering Qi just isn't worth it for me anymore. But for you with your cultivation method, it's super-fast, so you should keep with it," Alex said.

"Come on, let's cultivate now."

Pearl sat down on his lap and started closing his eyes to cultivate. He slowly started glowing, and random cuts started appearing all around Alex.

"Let me start as well," Alex said and slowly breathed in and out. He got into a routine of inhaling and exhaling, and before he even realized it, he had fallen asleep.

Alex woke up early in the morning and noticed that his True Qi had also gotten much, much denser.

"With this much True Qi, can I perhaps fight against someone in 3rd True Disciple realm?" he wondered. His training partner as of yet had only been Yao Jia, but her cultivation base was in the True King realm. It was likely that she was just as, if not stronger, than both of his masters.

"I really wonder how strong I've gotten," he thought. He stopped Pearl who was still cultivating and logged out to go get some food.

Once he returned, he went out of the underground with Pearl to train once more. He made his way to the palace aboveground and fought with Yao Jia for nearly 3 hours this time.

He tried to keep himself from using True Qi as much as he could, but from time to time, he would end up using it in his training.

'I probably won't need to worry about keeping True Qi as much now,' he thought. 'After all, my normal Qi is capable of making True rank pills too.'

Once the training ended, he left the palace and went out to the garden to rest in the sun.

After resting for a few hours, he went to the alchemy room. He took a few minutes to decide on what pills to make and in the end, decided upon the pills that he could cure beasts once again.

Alex didn't really know what the beasts needed, after all, he couldn't go outside to check on their daily life. However, he was sure that no matter if it was peaceful or not, healing pills were always asked for.

So, he mostly made healing pills, with a few pills that helped in faster cultivation speed for a set amount of time.

It took him nearly 3 hours to finish 10 pills. Thankfully, his common Qi could also help him in making True Pills now, although he had to use more of them to compensate.

Once he was done, he went outside to auction them off once more. This time, he took no monster cores, and only spirit stones and herbs.

"That was a good sale for you," Yao Jia said.

"Thanks, you helped a lot too," Alex replied.

"Don't thank me yet. I have good news for you," she said.

Alex got curious and listened attentively.

"Your request to go outside has been accepted."

Chapter 508 - Going Outside

Alex got into stance as golden light turned both of his hands into sharp animal-like claws. The tips of his fingers were now so sharp that he could dig them into stones and crush them from the inside.

Once both of the claws were set, he attacked Yao Jia. He dashed forward and got close to her. However, just before he reached her, he stopped and simply swiped high claws diagonally at her.

Yao Jia jumped backward to dodge the attack and then jumped forward to attack with her own claw. Alex brought his other hand from the side and attacked her claw with his own.

Yao Jia wasn't serious about the fight, so he could stop her attack without much effort. He then attacked with his other claw.

Yellow light flickered in front of him as a barrier appeared and blocked his attack. Alex didn't let that stop him, however. He retaliated with a barrage of claws that hit the barrier one after another, threatening to destroy it.

Yao Jia got rid of the barrier to emulate Alex breaking through it and continued the training.

Alex was starting to learn more and more about fighting with claws after training with someone who could use nothing but claws to attack most of the time.

He had come to learn of a few things that helped him understand more about using claws.

First of all, claws were different from punches. A normal punch, if strong, would usually send a person flying backward, in which case the attacker couldn't attack more than once. so most of the time the attacker would put their all into the punch.

However, claws couldn't do that. No matter how strong the claw attack was, it couldn't create a gap between the attacker and the target. So, with claws, it usually became a battle of attrition.

You had to stand your ground and attack multiple times before the opponent was so wounded that they couldn't fight back. At the same time, you also had to be strong enough to take a couple of hits or be fast enough to dodge the attacks using the least movement possible.

Alex was starting to get used to fighting with claws by now. To him, it wasn't just a fighting style, but an entirely new weapon in and of itself. It was a weapon he could use in case he ever couldn't use his sword.

He trained his claws for an hour before he decided to switch to the sword. While using claws and training was fun and engaging, he didn't forget about Sword Intent. He needed to improve upon it as well, so he trained with it on a daily basis.

He was now very proficient at using Sword Intent, and thanks to using his True sword every single day, he didn't have to worry about his Sword Intent having problems.

"How do your attacks keep getting stronger every day?" Yao Jia asked. "Did you breakthrough again?"

Alex stopped and the glow in his sword disappeared. "Ah, yes. Just yesterday I broke through to the final realm of Mind Tempering actually," he said.

"Woah! That is so fast. Does that mean you will enter True realm in a month?" she asked.

"Probably just a week actually. We humans can use pills and stuff to improve our cultivation bases, you know," he said.

"Dang it, and here I spend over 3 years just to go up a realm," Yao Jia said. "I wish I could have the same speed as humans."

"Um, I'm not sure if human speed is really a good idea. Besides, humans too have people that take forever to breakthrough. It's only a few that have learned how to breakthrough fast," Alex said.

"All they do is eat a bunch of pills and grow stronger. They don't know how to fight, how to use skills, and their cultivation base is really bad too. So in the end, it's you who comes out on top with your diligent cultivation," Alex said.

"Really? Oh, I guess I shouldn't get jealous then," Yao Jia said.

"Okay, can we end the training here? I'm way too excited to train anymore," Alex said as he was unable to hide his smile from deep within him.

"Sure. We can leave in a few minutes. Do you want to bring the child too?" Yao Jia asked.

"Oh yes. Let me go get him," Alex said. He left the palace room and went to the other room where Pearl was.

Pearl was currently fighting against a wolf who was nearly 5 times as big as him. Still, they were on equal ground as Pearl's strength was the same as the Wolf's.

Alex watched the back and forth for a few minutes before deciding to end the match.

"You can stop now, Pearl. We are going outside now," Alex said from the doorway.

Pearl who was fighting stopped and looked towards him. "Meow?" he asked.

"No, we're not fighting anyone. We are just going to go get some ingredients from the forest. And some Spirit stones if we can find them, but mostly just ingredients," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl was a little disappointed. He didn't really care about alchemy or spirit stones, and just wanted to keep training.

"Are you saying you don't want to see what it's like outside, and just want to stay here fighting?" Alex asked.

"Meow!" Pearl cried out loud saying that he did want to go outside. He was getting annoyed staying in this one place all the time.

"Alright, let's go then."

Alex and Pearl went out to the garden and waited for a few minutes. Yao Jia arrived not soon after with a few beasts to look after them.

"Do you really need this many beasts just for me? I won't run away, you know?" Alex said.

"They are not for you. They are here to look after the child. If anything were to happen to him, we would be in trouble," Yao Jia said.

"Oh, so you don't care if I run away?" He asked.

"We do. But I am more than enough to keep you in check," Yao Jia said.

"Sigh, I see. Can we leave now?" he asked.

"Okay, let's go."

The group then started walking out. A beast led the way as it walked in front of Pearl and the remaining walked behind him. Yao Jia was next to Alex who was holding Pearl in his embrace.

As soon as he walked out of the gate, Alex could see a massive forest that was so dense that the ground was nothing but shadows.

The shade made the surrounding considerably cooler and with it being the winter right now, Alex could feel the chill in the air.

Thankfully, as a cultivator, and even more so a body cultivator, the cold didn't bother him as much as it would a normal person.

He hadn't even walked past a few trees when his Alchemy senses started tingling, giving him the feeling that there were ingredients nearby.

Alex turned around and looked at the spots where he felt the ingredients from. "Oh, a Vengeful Elderberry. Those are so rare," Alex said as he walked up to pick it up. But suddenly, Yao Jia put her paw in front of him and stopped him.

Alex was surprised and confused. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"You were going to pick up something?" she asked.

"Yes, that fruit over there," he said as he pointed at the single reddish-purple berry hanging from a small bush.

"I see," she said and growled in a low voice. The beast at the very front walked away from the group and went up to the berry and smelled it.

Alex was still confused as to what was happening until the beast growled back.

"Alright, you can pick it up," she said.

"You lied, didn't you?" he asked as he looked at Yao Jia in shock. "You said they were here for Pearl, but they are actually here to keep me in check."

Yao Jia made a sad face and said, "Sorry. It wasn't my idea. Father forced me to bring them. That was one of the criteria for letting you go outside."

"But why? Are they afraid that I will poison everyone?" he asked.

"Hey! We don't have anyone who knows about alchemy, okay? All we can do is make sure you don't get anything poisonous. They are here just to make sure that happens. Other than that, you are free to get what you want," she said.

Alex didn't say anything for a few moments and shook his head. "Fine, do what you want," he said and went on to find more ingredients.

"That fruit, those green leaves, that one fruit that is different from the rest, that flower over there that has white petals, roots of those plants, the bark of that tree..."

Alex started naming one thing after another and the beasts had to run around trying to check everything he said.

That was his way of revenge. Every single ingredient he saw, he would let them know and the beasts would have to run around trying to figure out if it was poisonous or not.

Only once or twice did the beasts say the ingredient was poisonous, but most of the time, it was just a normal plant that didn't have any poison on its own.

After the third round of going around, smelling every single leaf, flower, and fruit, the beasts started to get annoyed.

"Alright, stop. You don't have to name anything. Just go pick them up," Yao Jia said with no other choice.

Alex's felt proud of himself for getting rid of his problems in his own way.. After that, he freely went around gathering ingredients as much as his heart desired.

Chapter 509 - Spirit Stone Cave

Alex could see many beasts roaming the jungle that was the land of this kingless kingdom.

Very few beasts bothered making any sort of shelter at all, and almost all of them lived out in the open.

Alex tried not to take ingredients from places where the beasts considered their home. The beasts however didn't seem to care about it as much as he did.

Some of those beasts bowed when they saw him. They recognized the healer that had started living in the palace a month ago.

After nearly 2 hours of picking up ingredients, Alex felt that he had enough of the ingredients for now. Most of the ingredients he had found couldn't even be used right now since they could only make Saint rank pills.

Once he felt he was done, he turned to look at Yao Jia and asked, "is there any way we can go to a spirit stone cave?"

"Spirit stone cave? Hmm, let's see. There should be one close by as far as I know. I can take you there," she said.

"Thank you," Alex said and followed her. Along the way, Alex saw more beasts that were all in the True Realm. The only beasts not in the True realm were either young beasts or beasts that were incredibly close to being in the True Realm.

Since beasts started cultivating from a very young age, it was a hard task to find a beast that was both an adult and not in the True realms.

Finally, after a few minutes of walk, Yao Jia stopped in front of a cave at the foot of a mountain. Alex was even surprised to see a mountain in this place. His image of this place had been nothing but forests.

"How many mountains are there in this kingdom?" he asked.

"I don't know, hundreds maybe," Yao Jia asked.

"And are there anything else here? Like a desert, a sea, and what not?" he asked.

"No," Yao Jia said. "Although there are a few large lakes, but not sea. As for a desert, you won't find that in the Western Continent. You will have to go to the southern continent."

"Huh?" Alex stopped and put on a confused face. "What do you mean there aren't any deserts in the Western Continent?" he asked with a chuckle. "There's one right behind where I stay."

"Eh?" Yao Jia stopped too. "There is a desert in this continent? Can't be. I've read every record, and there is nothing about a desert in this continent."

"No, there is one to the north," Alex said. "It's a rather large desert too. Furthermore, you can't use cultivation base there at all."

"Huh?" Yao Jia was fully confused now. "No way. Wait for a second," she said and thought about something. She started drawing a map on the ground right in front of the cave opening.

The map depicted a land that was wide at the top and thin at the bottom. It was also pretty long vertically as well.

"What is this?" Alex asked as he had never seen such a land structure before.

"This is the Western Continent," she said.

"Oh," Alex's eyes widened as he looked at the drawing of the continent. "Which way is north?" he asked.

"This wider section," she said.

Alex tried to think about the map of the empire and superimposed the image in his mind with the image in front of him.

"So, this is the Crimson empire," he said as he drew on top of the map. "And this is where I live. The desert is right above me, here."

"No way. The books say that it's just a bunch of mountains," Yao Jia said.

"No, your books are wrong. It's nothing but desert up there," Alex said.

"Really?" Yao Jia asked in a troubled manner. "Oh god, I wonder what other information is wrong in that book then."

"How old is that book anyway?" Alex asked. "You must not have updated the information in that book for hundreds of years right?"

"Thousands," Yao Jia said. "Wow, I shouldn't accept all information there as facts."

"Can we go in now?" he asked.

"Ah yes, let's go," Yao Jia took him through the opening.

As soon as Alex entered, he could feel a different level of Qi in the air. The amount of Qi in the surrounding had doubled, if not tripled in just the first five meters of the cave.

Light started to disappear the further they went in. Darkness was taking over. But, at some point, light returned once again, but it had a slightly blue hue to it.

Alex started seeing crystals along the sides of the wall deep in the cave. The further in he went, the more such crystals he could see.

The crystals were naturally formed into perfect cuboid shapes that with just a little effort could be broken into many pieces.

"Woah, so this is how people get spirit stones huh?" he asked. He walked up to a clump of it and hit it slightly with his fist.

The clump of spirit stones broke down into about 20-30 different spirit stones, which Alex pocketed. He stood up and looked at the cave. Just in his vicinity, he could see hundreds of such clumps.

"So many," he thought. He felt like he had hit a jackpot.

Without any other thought, he started picking the spirit stones up. He would take clumps and easily crush them to turn them into spirit stones.

"Such a shame that these are just common Spirit stones. It would be amazing if these were True spirit stones," Alex said.

"If they weren't common spirit stones, they likely wouldn't be spirit stones, would they?" Yao Jia said.

"Sorry? What do you mean?" Alex asked.

Yao Jia stopped from breaking apart the clumps and looked at him. "Do you know how this cave is formed?" she asked.

"Sort of, yes," he said. "When a common spirit vein remains stagnant for long, it turns to a spirit stone cave."

"You are a little wrong there," Yao Jia said.

"Which part?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, alright let me ask this. How do you think True spirit veins are formed?" she asked.

Alex fell into thought. "Uhh... they don't form naturally?" he asked.

"They do, but they are also a matured form of Common Spirit veins. Without a common spirit vein, you wouldn't have a True spirit vein," Yao Jia said.

"Wait, so both spirit stone cave and a higher rank spirit vein are formed from the same spirit vein? How does that work?" he asked.

"When you have a spirit vein, it tried to absorb the energy from the surrounding. If left alone and it successfully gathers as much energy as it wants from the surrounding, it evolves to a higher rank Spirit vein."

"But, if it is left alone, but cannot gather the required energy, the spirit vein slowly dies, and the crystal breaks apart to become the spirit stones. So, you can either have a lower rank spirit stone cave, or a higher rank spirit vein."

"If you want a higher rank spirit stone cave, that will take a very, very long time since it will have to fail as ascending to a higher grade,"? Yao Jia explained.

"Ah, I see," Alex said. "Are there any True rank spirit stone caves in here?" he asked.

"Um, I think there are a few. But they're quite far away from here. Even father would take an hour or so," she said.

"Can we go there someday?" Alex asked. "I have a boat artifact that can help us travel fast. If it takes your father an hour, we can do it in about 3 to 4 hours with my boat."

"Hmm, I will ask him if he allows it," she said.

"Thanks."

They went on with the rest of the time doing the same thing over and over again, collecting as many spirit stones as possible for Alex.

Finally, once they were done, they left the cave, with it almost barren now. "What will you do with so many spirit stones," she asked.

"Uhh... cultivate," Alex said.

They walked back towards the palace and in just a short few minutes returned. They walked past the gate and entered the garden.

The amount of sunlight that struck them in just that moment was more than their entire journey through the forest.

Yao Jia sent the other beasts on their way and turned around towards Alex. "That should have satisfied you for a few days right?" she asked.

"Ah yes, thank you," Alex said.

"Good. Now please make some more pills so that I can breakthrough faster as well," She said.

"Haha, I will try. I have a recipe for a p—"

Suddenly, a bright light followed by a loud 'hmm' appeared from far away. Alex shielded his eyes and looked in the direction the sound had come from.

But to his surprise, it felt like it was everywhere in front of him. "What's going on?" he asked.

When the light finally went away, he turned around to ask Yao Jia, but her face was in the most utter shock he had seen yet.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Intruders," she said. "Someone opened the formation and entered the secret realm. From the sound of it, there were many that entered."

"What? Someone got into the secret realm?" Alex asked in surprise.

"I'm sorry. I will talk to you later. I need to inform the elder," She said and immediately left the garden.

Alex stood where he did and looked towards the direction the light had appeared from and thought, "Who came to the secret realm?"

Chapter 510 - Meeting Senior Chen

Alex woke up in the morning from his cultivation and logged out to get some food. When he returned, he immediately went out to the garden with Pearl.

After yesterday's sudden departure, he hadn't seen Yao Jia yet and was wondering what was up with the intruders that had come to the secret realm.

"Ah, there you are. I was searching for you everywhere," he said when he found her tending to the flowers in the garden.

"Oh, you came out early. Do you want to start training this soon?" Yao Jia asked while looking towards the sun that had barely come up past the horizon.

"Sorry, no. I'm not here for training. We can do that later. I'm here to ask what you learned about the intruders. Are they bad people? Should we be worried? What's going on?" he asked.

"Oh, you were worried about that? There's nothing to be concerned about. I went to report to my father and uncle but turned out they already knew about it. They got reports from the other part of the kingdom that at the various entrances, humans had entered," she said.

"Humans? The intruders are human?" Alex asked. Suddenly his eyes widened with fright and asked, "It can't be those people from the other continent right?"

"Oh no, these are just some kids from the Luminance Empire. Father said that they did the same thing some 1000 years ago too," she said.

"Oh, so we don't have to worry about it, it seems. What's going to happen to them?" he asked.

"Nothing. At least, nothing if they don't make any trouble. I hear that almost all of the humans from last time died because they offended beasts in the kingdom they shouldn't have. Hopefully, they are smart enough not to this time," she said.

"All of them died? Isn't that too cruel?" Alex asked.

"Not if what you did is try to steal some beast's children, or destroy their home by attacking them. Also, not all of them died. One of them managed to escape out to the north I heard," she said.

"I see," Alex said. Suddenly, he felt like he had heard something similar before. He tried to rack his brain and immediately realized what it was.

"OH!" he exclaimed. "1200 years ago, the founding emperor of the Crimson Empire, Fu Qing came from the southern forest. We knew he came from the south but never knew how. So this was how, huh?"

"Oh did something like that happen? Good for him," Yao Jia said.

"Anyway, there won't be any Saint realm expert amongst the humans, right? You did say that saint realm experts were denied entry except under special cases," Alex said.

"Yes. Those who entered are all in the True realms," Yao Jia said. "Do you want to go help them perhaps?"

"No," Alex said. "I don't really feel any closeness towards strangers. I see no reason why I would help them unless I was feeling generous."

"You are not that different from a beast in that regard then," Yao Jia said. "Alright, I will go tend to the garden for a while. We can train later."

Alex nodded and Yao Jia left the area. He sat down on the grass and felt the sun hit his face as it proceeded to get higher and higher into the sky.

He felt at peace with his current state of being. But then, he started thinking about his sect and friends once more.

'I wonder how master is doing. Is her constitution still harming her alchemy ability?' he wondered. 'Is sister doing well? I hope master hasn't lost his spot as master yet.'

'Since I will be entering the True realms soon, I can't even help him keep his spot,' he thought. He chuckled a little when he thought about his other friends.

'Is Kong Yuhan still trying to get together with Zhou Mei's sister, or are they together by now? I hope she doesn't mind them being together. Is Fanfan doing well? She wasn't as cheerful after Wan Li left. I hope she's doing better now.'

'I hope Wan Li is doing better too. Hopefully, Martial uncle and 3rd elder found him by now and brought him back to the sect already,' he thought.

The morning slowly passed as Alex's homesickness slowly came and went away. Once the sun was higher in the sky, he went looking for Yao Jia and trained for a little longer.

And then, his usual schedule started once more. He rested in the sun for a while and went to his alchemy room to make some pills. He made as many as he could, and sold just a few to the beasts while keeping the rest for himself.

He did so for a few days when he finally got to hear a piece of incredibly good news.

"Senior Chen has accepted your request. You can come with me right now to ask what you want to him," Yao Jia said.

"REALLY?!" he asked in surprise. "That's amazing. Let's go."

Alex was forced to leave Pearl behind since he was going out of the palace, but he didn't mind it at all.

"I'll be back in an hour or two, okay buddy?" he said and left with Yao Jia. They walked out of the palace and Yao Jia took him through the forest to an area with a lot of zebras.

It was a small open area with a meadow in the middle, but the trees still put a shade in the place. Some of the zebras were resting while the younger ones were running around in the field.

Surprisingly, on the other side of the field, there were houses made up of wood and leaves that had zebras going in and out of.

"Let's go," Yao Jia said and walked through the field to reach the biggest house amongst them.

The zebras looked at Alex as he walked in between them, just behind Yao Jia.

"Senior Chen, we are here," she shouted from the outside. "Careful, there should be a lot of formation around this area."

"Oh, I'll keep that in mind," Alex said.

They waited for a bit, but no answer came from inside. Yao Jia was about to call him again when a zebra came from the side.

"Calling him won't work, you know. There is a sound barrier set up around this place. You will have to knock on the door to let him know you're here," the zebra said.

Alex was a little surprised to hear the zebra speak. There hadn't been any beasts out of the palace that had spoken in a human tongue yet.

"Oh, okay," Yao Jia said and walked up to the door to knock on it. She waited for a few minutes and the door finally opened.

An old, wrinkly-skinned zebra walked out on all fours with a sour look on his face. He looked at Yao Jia and then at Alex and asked, "Is he the one that requested the meeting?"

"Yes," Yao Jia said. "He said he has some questions about formations that he wants you to clear him on."

"Goddammit. Ruining my free time just to ask a bunch of questions anyone could probably answer. If it weren't lady Ren's request, I would've killed him right now," the zebra grumbled.

"I'm sorry for intruding upon your rest, senior Chen, but I really needed to know the answers to these questions," he said.

"The questions better be worth my time. Ask, what is it?" the zebra said.

'He isn't even going to let us in first?' Alex thought as he brought out the talisman with the formation on it.

"Can you tell me how I can set up this formation on the ground so that it starts on its own?" he asked as he handed the zebra the talisman.

The zebra took the talisman and started reading it with an annoyed face. However, just as suddenly, his annoyed face changed to that of incredibly surprised.

"How did you find this?" the zebra asked with wide eyes.

"From an enemy of mine," Alex said. "That person used it to improve his physical durability. Can you teach me how I can do that too?"

"You got this from a human? What cultivation base is he in?" the Zebra asked.

"Uh, I don't remember. Something like Meridian Tempering realm, maybe. But that shouldn't matter since he used this formation to strengthen himself in a place devoid of any Qi," Alex said.

"A self tempering realm human? That can't be true," the Zebra said. "How the hell would a self tempering realm human get his hands on an Immortal rank formation blueprint?"

Alex's eyes shined. 'I was right then,' he thought. Given the number of strokes, he had already guessed that, but still hearing the confirmation from someone who really knew about formations made it happy.

"I don't know how he got it, senior. Can you tell me what the formation does and how I can use it? Preferably with it activating on its own since that is what he did," Alex said.

"This formation..." the Zebra looked through the Blueprint and said, "from what I can see, this is a formation that is meant to temper just one aspect of the body. The intensity of the tempering depends on the ingredients and amount, I suppose."

"As for what part it tempers, let me see," the Zebra looked through the formation and tried to find his answers.

"Ah, here it is. This formation can help you temper the skin, and skin alone.. Depending on what you use as the energy source, you can get your skin to be very durable after using this formation."

Chapter 511 - Level Up

"Tempering skin, huh?" Alex asked. He remembered that it was only the skin of Song Zun that was tough. Once he broke through that with the Ebony sword, the rest of Song Zun wasn't so tough.

"So I can use it to make my skin more durable too? Can you teach me how?" Alex asked.

"Do you have knowledge of formations?" the zebra asked.

"A little, yes," Alex said. "I'm an alchemist by profession, but I dabble in formations too."

"If you can understand the terminologies, then I can teach you," the Zebra said.

"Every formation has nodes where the different strokes meet up at. For example, this formation has 10 separate nodes. What you will have to do to make it work automatically is put your energy source around the ingredient."

"However, you cannot just put it just randomly. Each node must have the same ratio of energy as the strokes in the nodes. Also, depending on the distance between each of the adjacent nodes, you may or may not have to add even more energy to the nodes."

"Once you are done, and it is perfect, the energy will start to flow on its own, and the formation will automatically start. At that point, the formation will last for as long as the energy remains," the Zebra said.

"Oh, so I don't need to worry about making a mistake right? Since the formation won't even start if I made a mistake," Alex asked.

"Yes. You can make as many changes as you want. You can even stumble upon the correct answer by just trying. Just hope that there aren't other formations that work with the same energy source but have a slightly different formation design," the Zebra said.

Alex nodded when he heard that. "Can I use other formations without metal as well?" he asked.

"I mean, you can, but I don't see why you would. Using formations without metals, especially at the Saint rank and below is a lot less efficient than using metal as support."

"Not only is the efficiency bad, but you also can't even keep the formation continuously running since the energy in it will die. Then you will have to use another batch of energy source and put them in the same pattern all over again."

"There is no reason people in the saint realm or below should even try to make anything other metal-based formation plates and rods," the Zebra said.

"I see," Alex said. "Thank you, sir. That was all I wanted to ask."

"This enemy of yours you got this formation from… be careful of him. He might be in league with some very strong individuals to be able to get such fearsome formations," the Zebra said and walked back in.

Alex didn't even get to say anything else before the Zebra was gone back to his hut-like home.

"Was that the answer you were looking for?" Yao Jia asked.

"Yes, that was exactly what I needed to know," Alex said.

"Good for you. Let's return now."

They returned back to the palace and separated. Just before they went their ways, Alex asked for permission to use some area to make formations for himself.

Yao Jia told him he could use one of the empty rooms right by his room and left. Alex smiled and excitedly went back underground.

The more he went in, the more excited he got. The formation was something to be excited about, but that was not the reason why he was so excited right now.

There was something he needed to do before he could use the formation. He went back to his room and found Pearl on the bed.

He meowed when he saw Alex walk in and welcome him back.

"Today's an exciting day, isn't it buddy?" he asked with giddiness in his voice

"Meow?" Pearl asked, not understanding what was so exciting about this mundane day.

"You will find out soon enough," Alex said and got onto the bed. He sat cross-legged and took a deep breath.

"Status," he called out before a blue screen appeared in front of him. The screen had information written on it that made him feel the excitement he was feeling right now.

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Mind Tempering 9th Realm (1,000,000,000 Qi : 100%)

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry-Sky Cultivation Method

Qi: 1,128,383,384

]

The breakthrough button was bright green, and everything was set. Alex felt his heart start to beat faster as his hands refused to follow his orders. Finally, he controlled himself and slowly reached for the button.

And he pressed Breakthrough.

Alex felt it happen. All the Qi that was hiding all over his body started moving in unison. It was different from any feeling he had felt while breaking through up until now.

The Qi started following a certain path around his body through the meridians, which Alex had never seen them do. He had no clue why his Qi was even taking that path, but for some reason, his body seemed to be familiar with that path and it allowed the Qi to do its own thing.

Alex thought about it for a second and his eyes went wide. "No way, is this the cultivation route my Qi takes every day?" he asked himself.

He had always fallen asleep when cultivating, so he never knew what happened during those moments. This was the only time he could see and feel the cultivation happening in real-time without falling asleep.

The Qi in his body slowly started to get denser and denser by the second and soon all of it had turned denser to the point where it was basically the True Qi his body made every time after cultivation.

He was simply watching it happen in real-time right now. Once all of the Qi in his body turned to True Qi, including the ones that were hidden most of the time, he felt a slightly muffled boom coursed through his entire body.

He had broken through. Notifications started appearing, congratulating him for successfully breaking through.

"Nice," Alex said as he felt his own cultivation base. What he was feeling now was many times stronger than what he was feeling just moments ago.

Breaking through to the True realms had increased his strength by a lot. He was about to get up from bed to check himself properly when another set of notifications arrived, notifications that made his eyes pop out in surprise.

<Your Spiritual Roots and Talent satisfy the conditions>

<[Alchemy God's Knowledge] has successfully leveled up>

[Alchemy God's Manual:

Grade: Earth (Growth)

Level 1:

Unlocked: You have knowledge of all alchemy material.

Unlocked: Can learn any alchemy recipe instantly.

Unlocked: +50% chance to produce an extra pill during alchemy.

Level 2:

Unlocked: You can tell the age of Alchemy materials

Unlocked: You can tell the elemental alignments of all materials

Unlocked: You have a chance to improve Common rank recipes

Level 3 is required to Unlock more

]

Alex was really very shocked when he saw that. He had expected to see something like this long ago but had long since lost his hope for it.

So, when he finally saw the notifications, he was really surprised. "So those levels really do come every major realm," he thought.

He was about to look through the newly unlocked skills of his Alchemy God's Knowledge when suddenly more notifications came his way.

<Your Spiritual Roots and Talent satisfy the conditions>

<[Flame Mastery Scripture] has successfully Leveled up>

[Flame Mastery Scripture

Grade: Earth (Growth)

Level 1:

Unlocked: Can freely control existing fire and influence its temperature

Level 2:

Unlocked: Can create fire and influence it with greater control.

Unlocked: Fire Energy deal reduced damage to you

Level 3 is required to Unlock more

]

"Oh god, I forgot this was even a thing. That's right, this too was a growth ability, wasn't it?" he thought. He was a little disappointed with the new unlocks since he had already found himself other ways to create fire, but it was still better than nothing.

Also, the technique wasn't really an Earth grade technique and only was written that since it could grow. It was the growth attribute of the skill that was more important than the grade itself.

And somehow, neither of this two skills had the 'MAXED' attribute to them which was a cause for celebration in and of itself.

Alex opened the Flame Mastery Scripture's information and read it again to make sure he didn't miss anything. From what he could see, there was nothing he could miss even if he wanted to.

He then opened up the Alchemy God's Knowledge and read up on the new unlocks.

"Hmm, knowing the age of an ingredient will be super useful, won't it?" he thought. "That's like having one of those instruments that vaguely checks the age of ingredients."

"As for being able to tell what energy an ingredient is, I can always tell them after I am done with them. I guess it will be useful for new ingredients I have no clue about, but at that point, I'm not sure how useful that information could be," he thought. "Anyway, it's always good to have more information I guess."

Alex read up on the final unlock and fell into thought. "Being able to improve common pills… how exactly does it work?" he wondered. His eyes shined with a hint of anticipation.

"I guess I will have to check it right now."

Chapter 512 - Missing Elements

Alex felt very excited. He didn't even care that he had just broken through to the True realm and might need some time to get used to his new cultivation base.

No. He wanted to try out the new unlocked skills of his Alchemy skill.

"I'll be back in a bit, okay?" he told Pearl and left the room. He walked over to the alchemy room and sat down in front of the furnace.

He brought out his cauldron and let it heat up while he tried to think of the perfect pill to test out his new unlocks with.

"Hm, let's try out the Nail Elongating pill," he thought. Up until now, the best harmony he could create for the said pill was 52%. So, he wanted to try and see if he could improve on it.

"I wonder how the improvements will happen. Will it be similar to the pill splitting Qi that comes out randomly?" he wondered.

He brought out the first ingredient for the pill and immediately 2 distinct thoughts came to his mind. It wasn't a notification or a panel that popped up at all. It was just a simple thought.

The first thought was about the age of the ingredient in his hand. Without even doing anything, he had a distinct idea that the ingredient in his hand was about 2 years and 5 months old.

That age however did not include the time since the ingredient was picked up and only how long it had grown before it was picked up.

The thought about age was a simple one, and so was the next thought about the energy of the ingredient.

However, that one thought alone made him feel like a whole new path of alchemy had been opened up to him.

The first ingredient was Black Vine Water. It wasn't a liquid ingredient, but a vine that held water elements in it. At least, that was what Alex had come to learn about the ingredient up until now.

However, the information he was getting in his mind now was different. The thought that had randomly popped up was that the Black Vine Water he held in his hands contained all 7 of the different energies and not just water.

Only thing was that the Water energy it held was in far superior number than any of the rest.

"An ingredient can have all the energies in it. How does that not mess up an alchemy session?" Alex wondered. "Also, is this a one-time thing or what?"

He brought out the next ingredient on the list which was a Red leaf from the Mulberry tree. It was supposed to be a Wood Element ingredient, however, the information he was getting was once again very different.

Similar to the Black Vine Water, the Red Leaf too had all 7 elements in it, and only the Wood element was in high number.

"Wait, so it's all of the ingredients that have it all?" he wondered and started bringing out every ingredient he had for that recipe.

Every single one of the ingredients was as suspected. They all had the 7 different energies in them, with only a single one that was very high in number.

"That's not true, right? How is that possible?" Alex thought. His basic understanding of Elements and Elemental theories was starting to have tears in them. He was starting to have doubts that what he knew was even true at all.

"No, wait. The theories perfectly work when making pills. So maybe these energies don't really have much effect when we use them. That should be it," Alex thought.

He then casually brought out a True rank ingredient to see if the information held true for those as well.

"Hmm," Alex was a little surprised when the information for the True rank ingredient came to his mind.

As expected, the information about age was similar. The ingredient was about 7 years old. However, the information about Energy was slightly different.

The ingredient he had gotten should have had high Fire energy with the rest 6 being very low in amount.

However, what it actually was was that the ingredient had high Fire Energy with only 5 other energies being in low amounts.

One of the energies from the list was missing. It didn't take very long for Alex to realize that the Earth energy was missing.

He brought out another few True Rank ingredients and checked them out as well. As expected, each one of that ingredients had one energy missing from the list of 7.

"Hmm... is it True rank because an energy is missing? Or is the energy missing because it's True rank?" Alex wondered.

Alex wanted to know if it was the missing of energy that made the Primary energy so strong, or if the energy was missing because the Primary energy was so strong.

"Wait, is there even a logic to what energy is missing?" he wondered. He picked back up the first ingredient with the Fire energy that had the Earth energy missing.

He kept that in mind and brought out another of the same ingredient. That too had Earth energy missing.

Alex then went ahead and looked through the other ingredients and noted which ones were missing.

With that information in hand, it didn't take long for him to realize what energy would be missing from each of the ingredients.

"It's the energy that Weakens it," Alex said out loud. Looking at the first ingredient, the ingredient had Fire energy.

Water that Controlled Fire was there. Metal that Ruined Fire was there. And finally, Wood that Empowered Fire was also there.

However, Earth that Weakened Fire was no longer there.

The other ingredients followed the same rule as well. Any energy that weakened the primary energy was missing from the ingredient.

"So, I can freely say that True rank ingredients always have 1 missing element, that being the one that weakens right?" he thought.

"If I were to guess that the weakening Energy not being there was the reason why an ingredient became True rank, then I would be wrong. That wouldn't explain why the primary energy is what it is. Also, that wouldn't answer why some other energy didn't leave first."

"So, the correct assumption would be that it was the primary energy that got rid of the energy that weakened it," Alex thought.

He was happy to learn something new today when suddenly he remembered something. "Wait, what about Saint rank ingredients?" he thought.

He had never really used Saint Rank ingredients, so he didn't even know what ingredient had what energy.

However, thanks to the unlocked skill, he could do so without having to waste the ingredients now.

Alex brought out a wooden box with the ingredient inside and opened it up. As he looked at it, all 3 information entered his mind.

The ingredient was called a Demon Moon Grass, and it was about 26 years old. The first two pieces of information were normal and he was expecting them, albeit they too were a little intriguing.

However, the third piece of information took him by surprise once more. The Demon Moon Grass was an ingredient with Earth as the primary energy. The thing that was surprising however was the fact that the ingredient not only had an element missing but it had 2 elements missing.

Alex could see that the Demon Moon Grass had Metal and Water energy missing from the list. This was likely due to the Earth energy being very strong to the point that only Saint Qi could control it.

However, Alex was once more stuck with finding logic behind the missing ingredients.

"If I go by last time's logic, then Metal which Weakens Earth should be missing, and it is. Then, since Water is also missing from an ingredient with Earth primary element, can I assume that the second energy missing is something that Ruins the primary element?" Alex wondered.

He brought out the other Saint rank ingredients he had and weighed their information against his new theory.

"I was right," he thought with a massive smile. He put the ingredients back into his storage bag and started wondering about the reason why it was all happening.

Unfortunately, he couldn't see any logic behind why only Weakening and Ruining elements were disappearing.

Unable to understand anything, he decided to give up for now. "Let's just forget about that for now.. I should start making the Nail elongating pill."

Chapter 513 - Improving A Recipe

Alex had a recipe for the Nail Elongating pill. It was a recipe he had made himself and he was quite proud of it.

However, he was never able to improve it past making 52% harmony pills and that bugged him a lot. There were too many permutations and combinations he could do with the speed of the ingredients in the cauldron, the rate at which they were heated, and the direction in which they were moved in.

All of these things were very important to making the pill, but they were too many for him to properly know which to change to improve the pill.

Now that he had his new skill unlocked, he was hoping that would automatically tell him what to do.

The cauldron was hot enough, so Alex put in the first ingredient. He followed the recipe and did what was needed, but on the back of his head, he waited for something to happen.

He vigilantly checked for anything that was happening on its own. However, nothing of that sort happened. Everything was going normally as it would.

"Hmm, that's weird," he thought and continued. The True Qi was making it extremely easy to control the ingredient and the energy in the cauldron.

Somehow he felt like if he used Elemental guidance now, he could easily guide the energy without missing the tiniest amount.

He put in the second ingredient and moved it around. He waited for something to happen, but nothing did once again.

"Do I have bad luck or is this not how it's supposed to go?" Alex wondered.

He tried with the next two ingredients once more, but unfortunately, nothing happened. "Maybe I'm doing something wrong," he thought.

He continued normally with the remaining ingredients and soon was close to being done with it. Right before he was finished, the pill-splitting Qi, which he hadn't seen for a very long time came out from within him and separated the powder to form two different pills.

The vortex appeared once again above it that pulled in the energy from the cauldron and the two pills were ready.

Alex pulled out the pills and saw that the harmony in them was 25% and 26% respectively. '1% less than ideal. Something must've been wrong with the ingredients,' he thought.

He stored the pills in a ceramic bottle and into his plastic bag. Then he started thinking. "What's going on? What was there no improvement?" he wondered. "Am I missing something?"

Alex was confused, so he opened up the description about Alchemy God's Knowledge and read up on it again.

"Unlocked: You have a chance to improve common rank recipes," he read the main part he was concerned about. Suddenly, his eyes squinted as he read it again.

"Wait... chance? Is that... for every single ingredient I put in? Or for every single pill I make?" he wondered. "If it's for the ingredients, then the chance must be egregiously low, but if it's for each pill then... oh god, how many pills will I have to make before I see any improvements?"

Either way, he would have to make pills for hours on end to see any improvements at all. Now, all he could hope for was that the improvements were so good that he didn't need to make it that many times.

Alex brought another set of ingredients and made the pills once more. While he waited for something to happen, he was realizing an interesting fact about himself at the moment.

Thanks to the common grade pills required not as much Qi during its making, Alex could easily replenish the True Qi he lost while making the pills.

Meaning, if Alex chose to make only common grade pills, then he could likely go for as long as he could mentally handle.

Given that he had gone through the mind tempering realm and had eaten all 3 of the mind improving pill, it was probably going to be multiple days.

Alex put in the 2nd ingredient and continued making the pill. During the whole time once more nothing happened. No extra Qi from in him, no feeling, nothing.

Alex was starting to doubt if something was even going to happen. If it was meant to, it would have happened already.

He was dejected and disappointed at the 52% harmony pill that formed in the end. Still, he didn't let that beat him down and tried once again.

His expectations were at an all-time low, but he kept his hopes up. He brought out another set of ingredients and tried again.

He put in the first ingredient. Nothing Happened.

He put in the second ingredient. Nothing Happened.

He put in the third ingredient. Nothing Happened.

Alex was damn near sure that this one was a failure as well. Then, he put in the fourth ingredient. That was when something happened.

When he put the fourth ingredient in, he was supposed to move the ingredient clockwise about 5 times with each rotation taking about 3 seconds.

The heat at the moment was supposed to be really low to compensate for the rather slow-moving speed of the ingredient.

But, for some reason, when Alex put in the ingredient this time. He didn't want to do that. He could tell that while that would bring out a result, there was another way to bring out a better result.

It was a piece of knowledge rather than a feeling that came from deep in his mind. It felt like a thought that he hadn't thought of himself, so it was a weird experience for Alex.

He let the knowledge move him and instead of going clockwise, he went counterclockwise. The only difference between being clockwise and counter-clockwise was the shape of the ingredient when it was powdered would turn out to be different.

He moved the ingredient at the same speed, with the same temperature, and followed the rest of the recipe.

Not a single piece of information came to his mind after that, but that one information alone left a mark in his mind.

Alex waited for the pill to be made and in the end, the pill-splitting Qi came out to make it into two.

"Dammit, not now," Alex said with a sigh. He wanted to see what results would happen after what he just went through, but the stupid pill-splitting Qi messed it all up.

"Sigh, I hope it's good still," he thought and pulled out the pills. He looked at the first pill and suddenly his eyes went wide.

"31%?" he exclaimed. He couldn't believe how high that one pill was. "Then what about...?" he pulled out the other pill and read its harmony too.

"33%?" he shrieked.

"Huh? Wait, huh? 64% in total? Just by reversing the direction of one ingredient? Is that what I was missing?" Alex was seriously taken aback. He questioned how he could've missed something so simple, however, there was no way for him to know that something like this would've happened.

"I need to try it once again," he thought and took out another set of ingredients. He followed the recipe once more, but this time, he changed what he did for the fourth ingredient to what he did in the last batch.

When he was done with the ingredients, it was time to form the pill. He prayed that the pill-splitting Qi didn't come out, and somehow his prayer was answered.

He managed to make the pill without splitting it into two. "Nice," he said to himself. He pulled out the pill from the cauldron and looked at it.

"58%?" he cocked his head to the side in confusion. 58% was obviously better than the 52% he was making previously, but it was nowhere as good as the 64% he was getting from the two pills.

"What's going on?" he wondered. He decided to try once more.

He went through the whole ordeal of making the pill once more to end up with the pill splitting Qi forming two separate pills.

"No, that's fine. No need to be mad. Let's check this again," he thought and pulled out the two pills.

31% and 32%. He had managed to make two pills with 63% total harmony. That went in line with the other two pills that made 64%.

"I did nothing different though. Why do these end up with 63% and 64% total harmony, while the single one ends up with 58%? Am I doing something differently?" Alex wondered.

He quickly came to the conclusion that something was indeed being done differently, and it was quite obvious at a simple glance.

The pill-splitting Qi formed the pills on their own, while Alex had to make the pills by himself.

"There must be something unique about the formation technique with which the two pills are formed. Maybe there is a secret behind it that allows for the highest amount of energy to be stored in the pills?" Alex thought.

That would make sense since it was something that belonged to the Alchemy God's Knowledge skill. Anything named 'Alchemy God' must be a very high-tier skill after all.

"Maybe I should learn how it works even. It would be great if I learned something from it that improved my pill-making process," he thought.

He put the pill back into a ceramic bottle and started making the same pill once more.

Over and Over, he continued making the pill for an entire night. He didn't waste a single moment and made over 100 pills.

By the time he was done in the morning, he had managed to improve the recipe to a point that he could now consistently make a 70% harmony pill if the pill didn't split into two.

For the first time, Alex was getting close to making an Immortal grade pill whose final energy wasn't Metal.

Chapter 514 - Making The Formation

Come morning, Alex was feeling pretty lethargic. He had enough energy to go for much longer, but mentally he had already tapped out.

The monotonous making of the same pill over and over was just too much for him.

He looked at the pill bottle in his hands and smiled. The green-tinted bottle contained one of the best pills he had ever made.

A 73% harmony common rank pill. Without the assistance from his Supreme Metal roots, this was the best pill he had created without a doubt.

Adding onto the fact that every single aspect of this pill from the very first creation came from him made him even more proud of his achievement.

He took back his cauldron and took a deep breath as he finally caught a break from all the pill-making. "Sigh, that took so long. From what I can see, I have around 30% chance to improve the pill?" he thought.

"Geez, I didn't even get to do anything about my new cultivation base before I started making pills. Thank god I didn't go through any Qi deviation or some such,' he thought.

He walked out of the alchemy room and went back to his room. Just as he was walking there, he felt something uncomfortable happening to him.

His body started itching uncontrollably. He stopped to see what was happening, but he couldn't find any reason why.

"What the hell? Am I having an allergic reaction to something?" he thought. He continued walking, and suddenly, the itching started turning to pain.

"Huh? Did it change?" he thought. He walked closer to his room and the pain got more intense until finally, his entire body started having nothing but cuts all over him.

"Wait for a second," he thought and quickly opened the door. As he expected, Pearl was inside calmly cultivating.

"Oh, so that's why it's happening," he thought. "Wait, does distance affect our cultivation?"

Alex had never in the past 6 months been away from Pearl while he was cultivating, so he had no idea what would happen if Pearl cultivated while he was away.

Pearl also hadn't yet cultivated out of his own volition and this was the first time.

"Pearl, can you stop?" he asked.

"Meow?" Pearl suddenly got up from his meditative position and stared up straight at Alex. "MEOW!!" he asked where Alex was.

"I was making some pills. Sorry, I took forever," he said. "Did you start cultivating on your own?"

"MEOW!" Pearl said. He wanted to grow stronger so he could fight off more beasts during his training session.

"Alright, let's go train soon then," Alex said and logged out.

He went to the bathroom to freshen up and quickly walked out. As he did, he couldn't help but smash his face with his palm for forgetting the one thing he was supposed to do.

"I got distracted so badly," he thought. He had forgotten to make the formation to improve his skin. "I will have to do that after the training. Hopefully, the 300 yang jades help a lot."

He went to the kitchen to grab his breakfast and returned quite soon.

After he logged back into the game, Alex went to the garden to find Yao Jia. Yao Jia was as usual tending to the garden, and once Alex found her, they went to train.

"Oh wait, you broke through?" Yao Jia said with a surprised face when she realized that Alex was stronger once again.

"Yes, last night," Alex explained.

"What? How are you so fast?" she exclaimed. "That's unfair."

"Uh, yeah, sure," Alex said. "Can we continue?"

They fought for a while longer as Alex got familiar with his new strength. His strength and speed had increased by a lot. Also, his ability to process information in real-time was also a lot better.

He was mentally faster now as well.

As for his Qi, they were vastly stronger as well. Unfortunately, against someone in the True King realm, they did little to no effect, so he couldn't really understand how good they were.

The training lasted for an hour longer before they stopped. "Whew! That was a good session," Alex said.

"Congrats on entering the True realm," Yao Jia said in the end.

"Thank you," Alex said. They walked out together and went to Pearl's room where he too was training with some beast.

Alex waited for him to finish.

"Ah right, any news on the people that entered the secret realm?" Alex asked.

"Nothing important I guess. I heard 2 of them got overconfident and tried to fight a beast, but they were swiftly killed. Now they must be looking for a way back," she said.

"Can they go out if they wanted to?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it's pretty easy. They just have to know the method to unlock the formation. Given that they got in, they must know the way out too," Yao Jia said.

"I see," Alex said.

Pearl finished his training and the two of them left the palace to go into the garden to bask in the sun.

After an hour or two of staying in the sun, Alex returned back to his room.

"Alright, stay here okay. I will need to do something in the room over," he said and left his room to go to the next one.

He walked into a completely empty room and measured it with his eyes. "This should be enough," he thought. It was time to make the formation.

"Can I even make a dent on the floor though?" he wondered and brought out his sword. He tried to carve something on the floor, and he found it really hard to do. But, fortunately, carving was possible.

"Let's not use the sword. It's too hard with it," he thought and kept back his sword.

He stretched out his right arm and suddenly golden lights converged onto it. Quickly, sharp tips formed on his fingers that turned to claws.

"This hopefully does it," he thought and tried to carve onto the ground again. It was hard, but with this, he had a lot more control over the strokes of the formation.

"Alright, I can't make any mistakes. This is my one shot, one opportunity," he thought and started by carving a giant circle that went around the room from edge to edge.

He tried his best to keep the circle as circular as possible as only that would give him the most efficiency.

Once the circle was done, he market the different nodes and started carving a straight line in between the nodes.

Some nodes had multiple connections to them, some had few. Alex had to make sure he didn't mess up on a single stroke since that alone could spell failure to his entire project.

He went slowly and steadily, and after 25 minutes, he finally managed to fully carve out all of the formations.

"Phew!" he wiped away his sweat and looked at the formation. He made sure that every node, every angle, every stroke was as perfect as it could be.

Once he was sure, he proceeded on to the next part of the task. He needed to now calculate just how many he would have to put onto the different nodes.

"Hmm, since it will only activate when the total energy is in balance, there is no way to mess it up right?" Alex thought.

He quickly counted the total number of Yang Jades he had and started dividing the number by the number of nodes and the number of strokes.

He got a rough estimate in his mind and put that amount into each of the nodes. In total, the 289 yang jades were distributed amongst the 8 nodes in a not-so-equal number.

The rough estimate didn't help Alex at all since the formation didn't start. So, he had to go through a period of trial and error to see what worked.

"Distance between the nodes also means the amount should be different right?" he thought and changed the number there.

"Hmm, this one is quite alone, so maybe I should put more here." He brought a few jades from the other nodes and put them in there.

Alex spent the next hour and a half simply tinkering with the number of jades he had on his hand, failing to make the formation run.

"Let's put this one here, and..." suddenly, a light started shining from the formation. Alex's eyes went wide.

"I DID IT!"

Chapter 515 - Intense Heat

The light that was shining started getting brighter and brighter now. "Oh shit! What do I do now?" he thought.

He quickly ran to the center of the formation and sat down. "What happens now?" he wondered.

Soon he was starting to feel the heat coming off of the yang jades. "Is this it?" he wondered. The heat wasn't strong at all.

"No way this is it," he thought. That small of heat would do nothing for him. Just then,? he felt the intensity of the heat grow a little bit.

"Oh, it's going up," he thought and waited. A? few moments later, it got even higher. The heat was so high that it was starting to get a little uncomfortable now.

A few moments later, Alex couldn't stand staying in the center of the formation anymore. It was way too hot.

"No, I must persevere," he thought. He took off his upper robe and threw it towards a corner. He also threw away his storage bags and his ring and sat there with his well-built body.

Beads of sweat formed all over his body as the heat got higher and higher. The uncomfortableness soon disappeared, and all that was remaining was pain.

Alex felt like he was being cooked from all around him. The heat was just way too high.

"Oh no. I got way too hasty," he thought. Just eating a single yang jade would give him quite a pain while it was being digested.

And right now, he was suffering the direct influence of nearly 300 yang jades. He hadn't thought of the consequences when he started this.

"Dammit! Because Song Zun did it, I thought I would have an easy time. That bastard must've used not many yang jades then," Alex thought.

It was either that, or he was very bad at making formations and thus couldn't bring out the same intensity as Alex did. If not, there was no way someone with a mortal body could have survived such a harsh formation.

The pain just kept ramping up as the heat around him got hotter and hotter. Alex tried his best to hang on, but the pain was way too intense.

"Aargh!" he started grunting. He was in more pain than he had been during his cultivation with Pearl in a long while. The only other times he had likely felt more pain was during the first times when his body cultivated.

And yet, the heat was still increasing. The pain was reaching a point where all Alex could do was struggle to keep his wits about everything.

"No! I won't give up. I will survive through it all," he cried out and stayed in there.

The heat he was suffering wasn't normal heat. It was the heat of Yang itself. Even though his body and spiritual roots had yang affinity to it, somehow this Yang was far more potent than either could handle.

So, the pain was all Alex could feel.

Alex's body convulsed as his skin started getting red from the heat. The pain reached a staggeringly high level as splits started appearing on his skin as well.

The hot skin was starting to dry to the point that it was stretching on itself to tear at places. Marks of burnt skin could also be seen all over his body.

Fortunately, that was the extent of the damage. The heat was for some reason not entering his body and he felt nothing on his muscles and organs. It was just the skin that was hurting.

Alex wasn't conscious enough to know that at the moment, however. All of his senses were being fully focused to stop himself from going mad over the pain he was feeling.

The event went on forever, or just an instant. Maybe it was an hour or 10 hours. Was Alex even feeling anything? Why was he feeling so much pain?

Did it stop? Why would it not stop?

Alex couldn't keep his thoughts straight and his mind wandered everywhere. He had lost track of everything and at some point, he even lost track of the pain.

Even then, somehow, he didn't log out. He never lost consciousness during the whole event, so he never logged out.

After some unknown time, Alex could feel the pain once more. His wits were returning to him as he could gather his thoughts to himself to realize what was happening.

He tried his best to ignore the pain and soon the pain itself started growing dull. No, it wasn't growing dull. Rather, the heat was lowering.

Alex had his eyes shut, so he couldn't see anything that was happening outside. He tried to open them, but they wouldn't follow his orders.

He released his spiritual sense to see that all of his body was in ruin. His crusted skin was starting to flake away as new skin was showing up underneath many of them.

Even his eyelids had crusted away and refused to open up. He then looked outside of himself and saw that the lights coming out of the formation were already very low.

The yellow yang jades were looking very pale, and almost white as well.

He struggled for a few more moments and soon it was over. He stood up from the place and felt his entire body make a crackling sound as flakes of dead skin fell onto the floor.

"Ouch!" he said as the pain still existed somewhat. He still couldn't open his eyes, so spiritual sense was all he could use to navigate the room for now.

He took one of the lightless yang jades and saw that it had turned to just jade.

"So, I was successful, right?" he thought. He wanted to test it out, but his skin was hurting way too much to try right now.

"Later," he thought and got his clothes. He cleaned up everything and went back to his room.

"Meow!" Pearl cried out. He wanted to know Alex had been all these hours and why he left him all alone once again.

"Eh? How long was I out?" Alex asked and looked out of the corner of his eyes. "Holy! 2 AM? I was out for over 12 hours?"

He didn't know that such a lot of time had passed while he was in pain. "No wonder I look so bad right now. A night of cultivation should... uh, maybe I shouldn't get pearl to cultivate. It might aggravate my wounds more," he thought.

"Pearl, can you not cultivate today? I'm in pain and I don't want to be in pain anymore," he said.

"Meow!" Pearl said that he wanted to get stronger.

"Just for today. For me. Please?" he asked.

"Meeow~" Pearl accepted his request.

"Thank you," Alex said and got on the bed.

"Meow?" Pearl asked why his eyes were closed.

"Yeah, I'm hurt. So I can't open my eyes. After I cultivate overnight, I will eat a pill tomorrow morning and see how much it helps," he said.

"Meow!" Pearl said.

"Thanks. I hope I get well soon too," Alex said. He picked up Pearl and caught him in his lap.. Then, he slowly started breathing in and out, and waited for himself to soon fall asleep.

Chapter 516 - Cannot Cultivate

It had just been 2 minutes since he started cultivating, but Alex realized that he couldn't fall asleep at all.

"Huh? What's happening?" he thought. Nothing was happening inside him as well. No Qi movement, nothing.

"Damn, did the formation screw up with my body?" Alex wondered. "That can't be. The heat shouldn't have affected my meridians," Alex thought.

"What's going on then?" he wondered and started breathing once more. A few more minutes passed and he realized that it was just not happening.

"Something's wrong," Alex thought. He put Pearl aside and got up. "Is something wrong with me?"

He used his spiritual sense to check everything inside of him. However, he could see that everything was perfectly fine.

"Huh? Is it because I'm hurt?" he wondered. He decided not to wait at all, and brought out a pill from his storage. It was a True rank healing pill that he had made himself and he immediately ate it.

The moment he swallowed the pill, a cool sensation passed through his entire body. The energy rushed through his entire body and soon arrived at his skin.

The cool feeling got rid of the slight heat and pain that he was still feeling and healed the parts where he was hurt. It helped his new skin grow faster and his old skin flaked off of his body.

By the time Alex was done, there was a bunch of old skin on the ground in front of him. He was truly surprised to see such a large amount of skin fall beneath him.

His eyes finally opened and he was a little happy about that. "Sigh, will this help me now?" he thought and sat back on his bed.

He then closed his and slowly breathed in and out. Unfortunately, nothing of what was supposed to happen was happening at all.

"The hell is going on?" he wondered. "Can I not cultivate at all? Is True realm just that—"

He suddenly stopped speaking as a thought occurred in his mind. "Status!" he shouted and a blue panel with his player information appeared in front of him.

His eyes slowly widened as he finally learned what the problem was. "So that's what was happening," he thought.

His eyes fell onto the part on the screen that said that he no longer had a Cultivation method. The Starry Sky cultivation method he had been using all this time was no longer usable at all since he was now in the True Realm.

Now, he had to find a new cultivation method of his own to use. "Damn, where the hell am I supposed to find a cultivation method in this place?" Alex wondered.

Alex sighed seeing no hope and closed the panel in front of him. He then told Pearl that he could cultivate if he wanted to.

Pearl meowed happily and started cultivating. Surprisingly, there seemed to be almost no cut on his skin due to it being way too strong for the cultivation Pearl was in right now.

Still, the inside of his body was in pain. He meditated to keep the pain in check and waited out the cultivation.

Before he knew it, it was early morning and time for breakfast. He logged out and got his breakfast before returning back to the game.

With no way to improve himself, Alex was looking ahead at days that were mundane and monotonous.

* * * * * * *

In the middle of the forest was a massive tree with a hollow trunk. Inside the hollowed-out tree was a girl who was crouched on the floor holding her knees to her chest.

One could see signs of fear in her eyes as she couldn't manage to stop herself from shaking in terror.

The girl looked to be in her mid-20s, and was wearing a lime green robe that was dirty all over.

She jerked in fear when she heard a noise coming from next to her, but felt relieved when she saw that it was the man returning.

The man's age was in the late 20s, or at least that was how he looked physically. With his cultivation base in the True Realm, it wasn't easy to tell exactly what his age was.

He was quite tall and well build, and had a clean-shaven face to make him look younger. He was wearing a red robe with golden embroidery on it.

"Brother Tao, you are back," the girl said with a happy face.

The man looked at her and smiled, but hidden in that smile was a sense of loss.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"I just… I just saw a beast kill someone from the Shen family," he said.

The fear in the girl's eyes increased as tears started flowing from it. "I knew it. We are all going to die. We shouldn't have come here at all. We made a mistake," she started crying out loud.

"Sshh, the beasts will hear us," the man said softly.

The girl immediately quietened as much as she physically could. Despite being a cultivator, fear was not something she could easily get rid of.

"Wh-what do we do?" she asked.

"I don't know. But, I think we should try to get away from here for now," he said. "Damn those old foggies. They said it would be a simple adventure, going in and out. They didn't even tell us there were such strong beasts in here."

The girl ignores the complaints. She had them too, but they wouldn't help them live right now. "Where do we even go? I don't even know the way back," the girl said.

"Sigh, me neither. This stupid jungle is way too dense. I can't even see the direction the sun rises up from. Anyway, it isn't wise to stay around here, we need to keep moving so that the beasts won't find us," the man said.

"And do what? There is no place to leave at all," the girl said. "Didn't you listen to the elders? They won't open up the formations until after a full 30 days goes by. There is still nearly half a month left before that happens."

"We will be dead by then," the man said. There was no doubt in his voice. Every single beast they had met until now was not something they could mess around with.

"Come on, there is one hope of survival, and we have to take it," the man said.

The girl wiped away her tears and curiously asked, "What hope do we even have, brother Tao?"

The man took a deep breath and said, "I know the way to open up the formation. If we can get to the platform we entered from, I can get us out."

* * * * * * * *

Deep in a forest, but not a very dense one, there was a cave by the side of a small hill. The cave was well hidden amongst the flora of the surroundings and was easy to miss if you weren't looking for it.

Inside the cave were a few people gathered around. A lantern-lit upon the side of the cave wall, and nearly 3 dozen people were surrounding a lone elderly man.

Every single one of the 3 dozen people wore black robes and had long black hair. At the center of them was an important figure that wore a similar robe and had a cultivation base that was much higher than theirs.

The figure wore a black mask with which only the amber-colored eyes were visible and they were staring directly at the old man the group was surrounding.

The old man wore dirty green robes and had thin gray hairs on his head. He showed no fear of being in the midst of the bandit group at all.

"We've heard a lot about you, bandit killer," the boss said in a hoarse voice. "Have you come here to try and kill us too?"

"Depends on how you respond to my proposal," the old man said.

"Your… proposal?" the boss asked. "You came here to make a proposal? For what?"

"There's something I need in a place protected by many. I need your group to act as a diversion while I get it," the old man said.

The boss didn't say anything and kept listening.

"So?" the old man asked.

"So? So what?" the boss asked in reply. "No way, that was not your proposal right?"

"Of course it was. Now answer me, do you agree?" he asked.

"Are you shitting me, old man? That proposal had almost no information in it. Give us something more," the boss said.

"Little girl, that is the most you will get for now. Accept the proposal and you will obviously learn more about your task," the old man said.

"Little girl?" the boss asked in surprise. "It seems you did not come here without doing some homework."

"It's not that hard to guess that the boss of the Black Venom bandit group is a girl. I would be food if I didn't know that by now. So, do you accept or not?"

The boss turned to look at her men who had no mind of joining with the person that was known to mercilessly kill bandits for the last few months.

"What if we don't accept?" the boss asked. Sounds of weapons being pulled out of their sheaths rang out everywhere.

The old man looked around and saw the many weapons being pointed at him. Sword, saber, spears, bows. Every conceivable spear was being pointed at him right now.

He scoffed at them all with a mocking smile.

"Well, then you will force me to keep my Bandit Killer title for a little longer, I'm afraid," the old man said and started pouring out his cultivation base.

The boss' eyes widened in fear when she realized that the old man in front of her was stronger than her, far stronger.

"You are no easy man to deal with, huh?" she said.

She immediately took off her mask to use her voice on him, but the old man suddenly moved and caught her by the throat, refusing to let her talk.

"You can't use your tricks on me, little girl. Now choose. Do you want to work for me? Or do you want to die?'

The girl felt fear like never before. A single misstep and she would surely die at this place. She put her hand forth to stop her men from attacking. Then, she nodded vigorously to let the man know that she and her bandit group would follow them.

"Great. We will go to work in a week. I want every single one of your men on the job that day."

The old man left as freely as he came, but in his wake, he left his terror all around him.

Chapter 517 - Previous Candidates

Alex woke up early in the morning to the sound of his alarm. He got up from his bed and put aside his blanket.

He went to the bathroom to freshen up and then made his way to the kitchen.

"Good morning," he said to the three girls that were already having breakfast. He got himself a plate as well and sat down.

He mindlessly ate the food on the plate as he made small talk with the girls.

"Why do you look so tired?" Hannah asked, watching him yawn all the time while eating.

"I do?" Alex asked. "That's probably cause I am."

"What's wrong?" Hannah asked.

"Well, I've been sleeping in my bed this last week, and I've learned that my sleep schedule had been horrible. So I can't go to sleep on time, and end up waking earlier than I should."

"So, I've been feeling a little tired for this past week," Alex said.

"What happened to sleeping in the capsule?" Hannah asked. "Is your capsule broken?"

"No, it's not," Alex said. "But I currently can't cultivate in the game, so I have no point in staying overnight in the game."

"What's wrong?" Sarah asked.

"I broke through to the True Realm," Alex said.

"Oh, congratulations. That's a big step," Hannah said. "So, what's the problem?"

"Well, I don't have any cultivation method to continue cultivating at night. Thus, I've resorted to not spending the night in the game," Alex said.

"Oh," Hannah said. "Have you tried taking one from the internet? You said you learned one a while ago right?"

"I did," Alex said. "But I could only find Earth grade ones, and for some reason, they were impossible to remember all the way through. So I just gave up."

"I would rather find a proper one once I leave where I am," Alex said.

"Okay, you do you," Hannah said and got back to eating her breakfast.

Alex finished his not long after and returned back to his room. He entered the capsule and returned back to the game.

He opened his eyes and immediately felt the pain coarse through all of his body. "Argh! Pearl, can you stop please?" he asked.

"Meow!" Pearl heard him speak and immediately stopped. "Meow?"

"Yeah, I just got done cultivating," Alex lied. Ever since he entered the True realm, he had let Pearl cultivate alone while he left the game to sleep on his own bed.

He looked at the time and saw that it was around 7 am. "Let's go to the garden," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl said. He was excited to go fight once more. By now, his cultivation base had reached Mind Tempering 5th Realm, and soon, he too would enter the True realm just like Alex.

'Damn, if I don't improve by then, my body will hurt a lot more, won't it?' Alex thought.

The two of them walked out of the room and went to the garden. Alex stayed in the sun for a while and simply felt too bored to even do anything anymore.

Yao Jia came up to him and said, "Let's go."

"Can we delay the training a little bit? I'm not really improving a lot, so I would rather have some peace for now," Alex said.

"MEOW!!" Pearl cried out that he wanted to train right then.

"Uh, no. You can go, buddy. I was only talking about myself," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl said as he smugly nodded to himself and walked away.

"Have fun. I'll see you later," Alex said as he watched Pearl leave.

"Is something wrong?" Yao Jia asked.

"Not really. It's just that I don't have any cultivation method to cultivate, so training isn't as efficient as it used to be," Alex said.

"Ah, I see. Unfortunately, this place doesn't have any cultivation methods for humans," she said.

"It's okay. I will get it somehow," Alex said.

Yao Jia stopped speaking and laid down by his side, basking the sun in peace. They stayed there for a while before Yao Jia remembered something.

"Ah, I have some bad news for you," she said.

"Eh, bad news?" Alex got a little scared. "What is it?"

"Almost half of the people who entered the secret realm have died by now," she said.

"Huh?! Ah, you're talking about the humans?" Alex said.

"Of course," Yao Jia said.

"It's fine. I don't really feel anything for them," Alex said.

"Weird. I thought you would show more emotions towards your own species," Yao Jia said.

"I said it before right? I don't really feel anything for people I don't really know about. I mean, it's not like I don't think it's sad that they're dying, but... it's not really bad news for me. It's just news," Alex said.

"I see, so you don't care about them because they are from the Luminance empire, huh?" she asked.

"Kind of, yes," Alex said. He wondered how different those people must've been. He said he didn't feel anything for them, but there was a sour feeling growing in his heart when he heard that news.

He would've wanted to help them if he could. They must've had families waiting for them to return as well.

"Have you ever been to the Luminance empire?" he asked.

"Ah, no. I haven't left this place ever in my life," Yao Jia said.

"I have always wanted to leave the Crimson Empire and go to the other locations in the world to see how they are. The first location on that would be the Luminance Empire for me. I wonder how it is compared to the Crimson Empire," Alex wondered.

"Ah, you can ask uncle. He's been to the Luminance empire," Yao Jia said.

"Oh no, it's fine. I wanted to know about the more recent stuff. They must only have knowledge about the stuff from years ago," Alex said.

"No, no. Uncle went to the Luminance empire just a couple of months ago. Multiple times at that too," Yao Jia said.

"Eh? He did? I should ask him about that when I see him again," Alex said. "Was there a reason why he went there?"

"Oh, you know, to get a candidate for the throne. When the fountain called out to the bloodline, while my father went to the Crimson Empire, Uncle went to the Luminance empire," Yao Jia said.

"I see," Alex said. "It must've sucked for him then."

"Hmm, why would you say that?" Yao Jia asked.

"I mean, how many times did the fountain call for us again? 4?" Alex asked.

"Uh, I believe 5. But they didn't leave the first time, I think," Yao Jia said.

"Yeah, 4 times. Imagine getting a reaction 4 times to leave and go find candidates only to return empty-handed each time. It must've sucked for him," Alex said.

Yao Jia chuckled a little. "Who said he returned empty-handed?" she asked.

"Huh? He didn't?" Alex asked.

"No, he returned with candidates each time he went out there," she said.

"Oh," Alex was surprised. He wasn't expecting there to have been candidates to be the ruler of this continent before Pearl.

"So Pearl isn't the first one?" he asked.

"No, silly. We've had candidates before," she said.

"I see," He said. "What happened to them? Did they not have enough bloodline or something?"

"Something like that, I would say," Yao Jia said. "All of them failed the ritual."

"So, they weren't successful, huh? Poor guys, they lost their chance at making it big in the future," Alex said. "Are they still in the palace? Can I talk to them?"

"What?" Yao Jia's expression changed when she heard that. "Why would you want to talk to them?"

"Oh, it's nothing. Pearl is getting stronger and stronger each day and soon enough he will enter the True realm. After that, it shouldn't be long before he is made to go through the ritual."

"I don't know much about the ritual, so I wanted to ask them if their experience with it was good or bad. I really don't want Pearl to go through pain if he can," Alex said.

Yao Jia looked at him dumbly without uttering a single word back.

Alex looked at her confusedly and asked, "Are they not here? Can I not talk to the candidates?"

Yao Jia continued looking at him dumbly and finally uttered a sentence.

"You cannot talk to any of them.. All of the candidates that went through the ritual are already dead."

Chapter 518 - Confrontation

"What?" Alex asked with a stunned face. After spending nearly 2 months in this place, this was the first time he was learning of this information.

"They died? All the candidates did?" he asked.

"Yes, every single one of them," Yao Jia said softly.

Alex had already thought of the worst possible scenario that could've happened to them, so he deluded himself to thinking maybe that was not the case.

"Did they suffer from some sort of injury during the ritual that killed them later on?" he asked.

"No," Yao Jia said. "There was no injury or anything. They just couldn't handle the ritual and died before they even finished it."

Alex suddenly stood up, his face pale with fear. "And you guys want to let Pearl go through that?" he asked.

Yao Jia shrunk a little. "We have to, I think. That is the only way to find a successor now that the fountain won't form any more drops of blood for a long time," she said.

"No way. I won't allow it. Where are your father and uncle? I want to talk to them," Alex demanded.
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"I don't know if they will—"

"I don't care for their permission. I won't be sitting still while they want to play with my Pearl's life," Alex said with a furious face. "If you won't tell me then fine, I will go find them myself."

Yao Jia tried to say something, but Alex ignored her. Pearl's safety was the most important thing for him, and so he ignored everything that didn't concern that point at the moment.

He suddenly turned around and left for the underground palace. That was the only place any of the 3 could even be in at the moment.

It was either the Palace hall, the training room where the Puma trained Pearl, or the library. It was already daytime, so he cut off their living quarters from the list of places they could be at.

There was also the fountain where the ritual would take place, but he doubted they would be there.

Still, there were chances they could be elsewhere as well, so the moment he entered the underground corridor, he immediately spread out his spiritual sense in all 4 directions.

Having gone through the Mind Tempering realm and eating the 3 pills that improved his mind, he now had a spiritual sense that spread nearly 80 meters in all directions.

When stretched to the extreme, Alex could spread it up to 120 meters. With this, he could easily search the underground palace without any worries of missing anything.

He walked around the underground while looking through every corner of it, and for the first time realized that there were so many metal rods hidden amongst the ceiling.

He did not understand what the metal rods were for, nor did he care. He simply walked around searching for any of the 3 saint realm beasts he could find.

"Boy, what insolence is this?" A voice entered his mind that belonged to the Puma. He had noticed Alex using spiritual sense in the hallway before Alex's spiritual sense had even reached him.

"Where are you, Senior? I want to talk to you," Alex said.

"I don't have the time, boy. Go away," the puma said with a bored voice.

"No, you will have to speak to me. I am not going to let you guys make Pearl go through the ritual," Alex said.

"What?" A threatening voice entered Alex's mind. Suddenly, a gust of wind struck him as the Puma stood before him.

"What sort of nonsense are you spouting?" the puma asked with a snarling face.

"As I said, I will not let Pearl go through the ritual. I just learned that there have been many before that died when going through the ritual. Knowing this, you guys still want to make him go through it?" Alex asked in an angry voice.

"We don't like it either, but we have to do what we have to do. Besides the child has a higher chance of surviving thanks to his bloodline," the Puma said.

"That still means that there is a chance that he will die, right? I won't let you make him do it then," Alex said.

The puma scoffed when he heard that. "Are you forgetting who you are speaking to, boy? I don't hear any respect in your voice. You won't let us do what we want? You think you can stop us?"

Suddenly, a massive aura appeared around the puma, as he used his cultivation base to threaten Alex.

"Young human, don't think that just because we let you do what you want in this place that you are a guest. No, your identity here had always been that of a prisoner."

"You do what we say here, not the other way around. Without our permission, you won't even be able to talk so much as a word," the puma said.

Alex felt the pressure crush on him worse than it ever had. The puma was really using the full force of his cultivation base to threaten him, something he hadn't even done when facing the 3 human saints.

Still, that wasn't enough to keep Alex quiet. A warm feeling rushed from inside of Alex that alleviated some of the pressure, allowing him to at the very least speak.

"I won't let you," Alex said in a grunting voice.

The puma looked surprised. He hadn't expected Alex to be able to talk at all. "How can you talk?" the puma asked.

"Not even the White Tiger's blood essence could make me shut up. Do you believe yourself to be stronger than that?" Alex asked.

The puma's eyes widened even more. "It seems you are not an ordinary human after all. I should have known. After all, you are the very first human to have acquired and integrated the White Tiger's bloodline into you," the puma said.

Alex felt the intense aura around him leave. Just then, he saw a paw moving towards him.

Alex was hit square in the face and sent flying at the wall. "However, that does not mean that you get to be insolent in front of me. You are still under our rule. You will do what we tell you to do."

"If I tell you to die, you will die," the puma said.

Alex felt a stream of warm blood flow from the side of his face. He still stood up and glared at the Puma through his blurry vision.

"You may as well kill me then because that is the only way I will ever let you make Pearl go through the ritual," Alex said.

"Hmph, You talk big for a tiny human," the puma scoffed. It was very angry right now. "If only you didn't have the White Tiger's bloodline, I would've killed you right now. However, that doesn't mean I don't have other ways to take you out of the picture."

The puma suddenly picked up Alex with his aura and sent him hurling inside an empty room. Alex struck the wall and fell to the ground.

By the time he stood up, the door was locked. Alex went up to the door and tried to open it, but he couldn't open it. He punched at the door and walls as hard as he could, but he couldn't damage it at all.

Anyone in his place right now would've started to despair, but Alex didn't. He kept calm and immediately sent out his spiritual sense to see the outside.

"Keep that thing to yourself," A voice came from outside, and he felt his spiritual sense being pushed back into his head. It hurt quite a bit, but Alex had the information he needed.

He suddenly disappeared from inside the room and appeared outside, right in front of the puma. He then suddenly turned around and started running away.

"I see. You won't be so easy to confine huh? Teleportation skill… that is not something so easily found in this realm," the puma said.

He then stopped Alex mid-sprint and pulled him back. "You were trying to get to the little child huh? You must've thought that if you put him back into the bonded space, we wouldn't be able to get to him."

"And you would be right. Without your permission, we would never be able to get to him. However, you should've thought of this before you came to confront us."

"The child is currently training in the upper palace, and you won't get to him at all now," The puma said.

Alex cursed himself for thinking that these beasts would ever give a thought about his concerns. 'Fuck! I spent so much time here and forgot the most integral part about them. They are beasts, and that is how they will always act,' Alex thought.

"I can't kill you, I can't confine. I can't even force you to stay quiet, huh? If you won't follow our orders and let the child go through the ritual, then there is really only one thing left that I can do," the Puma said.

Alex tried to understand what he was going to do and anxiously waited.

"You see, we brought you here because you had the White Tiger's bloodline. A human with that bloodline was unique, and we thought you would turn out to be something amazing."

"However, after days of research, we didn't find anything about humans with the bloodline blessed by the gods. Furthermore, we can't even extract the bloodline from you given how well it had integrated."

"Also, since you are a human, you can't even go through the ritual to awaken it. So, considering all of this information, we came to the conclusion that… there was absolutely no reason to keep you here anymore,' the puma said.

"However, lady Ren let you stay here since you would be an emotional support for the child while he grew up."

"We've been monitoring you, and we know that the child doesn't rely on you as much anymore."

"So, the only reason you had of staying in this place is also gone," the puma said.

"What?" Alex asked with a shocked face. He understood where this conversation was going.

Suddenly, he felt himself being moved at an incredible speed. When the blurry surrounding disappeared, he found himself in the same place he had been in when he had first arrived in this place.

The Teleportation formation platform.

The puma brought out a medallion of sort from someplace and started using it. "Goodbye, little human. I hope I never see you again," he said.

The formation platform lit up with no prior warning. "NO!" Alex shouted, but his cry was cut off midway through as the light enveloped him completely.

When the light died down, Alex was gone.

Chapter 519 - No Way Back

When the light disappeared, Alex found himself on top of the stone platform out in the middle of the forest.

"No! NO!" he shouted. He had realized what had happened. The puma, in his attempt to keep Alex away from Pearl, had decided to send Alex out of the secret realm, with no way back.

"NO!! Let me in," he shouted. He looked around, trying to look for a way to go back into the secret realm. But no matter where he looked, all he could see was just a bunch of withered trees.

"What do I do?" Alex put his hands on his head as he started suffering from an anxiety attack. He crouched on the floor, trying to control his fear.

However, no matter how he looked at it, he had no way of going back. And if he didn't go back, they would kill Pearl.

A few minutes passed, but Alex couldn't calm down at all. The worry he felt for Pearl was making it too hard for him to think of anything other than his upcoming death.

Alex decided to wait around, hoping, foolishly for someone to come get him. He hoped that maybe the puma had a change of heart. He hoped that Yao Jia spoke some sense into him. He hoped that Lady Ren would see how important Alex was to Pearl's life and make them come get him.

He foolishly waited for almost the entire day. In the end, nobody arrived. That was when Alex truly understood just how worthless he was to the beasts.

Maybe the ones that benefited from his pills cared somewhat for him, but the saint beasts didn't.

"I understand," he said calmly. "They think they can step all over me just because I'm weak, huh? Just wait, I will come to get my revenge."

Alex's face twisted with anger and determination. Separating him from Pearl was the worst thing the beasts could have done to themselves.

He placed his palm on the formation and softly spoke. "Wait around, Pearl. I will come to get you for sure," he said.

He then took out the boat from his storage bag and flew away.

He had been flying for just a minute or two when he suddenly saw the formation light up again from far away.

Alex's hopes grew high. "Did they really come to get me?" he thought and flew back.

However, when he reached there, there was nobody. Alex couldn't see or feel a single soul around.

"What the hell?" he thought and waited around for a bit longer. However, at some point, he assumed that he must've been mistaken and flew away once more.

* * * * * * *

A man and woman were running away from the platform they had just arrived in. They were afraid of the beasts coming after them, so they concealed themselves and hid on a tree while they waited to see if any beasts would come.

"Phew, it seems we are finally out, brother Tao. We are safe," the green-robed girl said after a few minutes of noticing no light from the direction of the platform they had just left from.

"Yes, but… are we really out? Why are we still in the middle of the forest?" the red-robed man asked.

"Who knows? Maybe there was another formation platform in the northern forest that we never knew about" the girl said. She then brought out a curious-looking artifact and looked at it.

"Which way?" the man asked.

"It says… that way," the girl pointed.

"Alright, let's go. I hope we get out of this forest soon," the man said and brought out a flying boat. He and the girl got on it and started flying south, deeper into the forest.

* * * * * * *

A man was sitting in front of a group of similarly dressed people, listening to one of them speak.

"Compared to last month, our earnings have increased by a total of 12%. If this goes on, we should be earning a similar amount as before the beast invasion by next month. This is a really good improvement, sect master," The elder in charge of finances excitedly said.

However, the news brought no excitement to the sect master's face, just more sorrow.

The elder quickly hid his excitement and bowed to go away. Another elder came up and gave another statistic that the sect leader needed to care about, but just couldn't.

He would get especially depressed when they talked about how much better it had gotten compared to the past few months when the beasts attacked every month.

"Since more and more merchants and travelers are going around the empire, the demand for guards has helped the disciples get a way to earn money once more," the elder said. "Our missions boards are also starting to get filled the way they used to before…" the elder trailed off.

"Anyway, if we go on like this for just the next month, we will be back on track," the elder said. He too bowed and walked away.

The sect leader waited for someone else to come up and say something to remind him all over again of the day he lost his disciple, but no one else came up.

"Sect Leader," a thin man called him.

"Hmm," the sect leader looked at him.

"The meeting is over. Please dismiss it,' the man said.

"Oh, uhh, the meeting is over. You may leave now," the sect leader said unenthusiastically.

The elder sighed and started to leave one by one. All of them left except for the thin elder that had spoken up earlier.

"You need to get a hold of yourself. Is this what a sect leader should be like?" the elder scolded.

"Okay," the sect leader said.

"Hey! Are you even listening to me? You are just ignoring me again, aren't you?" the elder asked.

"What the hell do you want me to do? My disciple is gone, and I as his master couldn't do a damn thing to save him. All I could do was stand around and watch the beasts take my disciple."

"Do you how it feels to have your disciple taken away from you? What would you do if it was your little Yuhan, or little Su that was taken away, huh?" the sect leader shouted his words at the thin man.

The thin man kept quiet and just shook his head.

"I… I'm sorry. I shouldn't be shouting at you when all you are doing is trying to help me. I promise I will get a hold of myself. Just… let me be a mess for a little longer," the sect leader said.

The thin man sighed. "Wasn't little Mei there too? Have you talked with her? Is she okay?" the man asked.

"I… I have talked with her, but all I can do is lie to her that everything will be okay. I'm sure that even she knows that I'm lying," the sect leader said.

"It doesn't matter. Lie to her even more. She lost her younger brother too. The both of you need each other more than anything right now," the thin elder said.

He then sighed again and said, "at least you have each other to pick you up when you fall down. I wonder how much of a mess sect leader Ma has been these last months."

"She is surely the worst of us. I hope she finds someone to rely on too. She definitely needs it," the sect leader said.

"Alright, go to your disciple and help her. Fortunately, your other disciple is doing better and doesn't need your help," he said.

"He wasn't there. He doesn't understand the despair and helplessness we felt," the sect leader said. "Alright, I will leave now. Thanks for the talk."

"Anytime," the thin elder said and left.

The sect leader also walked out of the room to the evening lights in the crater of the sect. He made his way to his disciple's house and knocked on it.

The door opened and a girl walked out. However, this wasn't his disciple. "Little Xing, how is your sister holding up?" he asked.

"She's fine, uncle. Come on in. She's doing much better than before once she started focusing on training. I think the bad thoughts have gone away now," she said.

The sect leader walked in and knocked on a door on the inside. "Little Mei, can I talk to you?" he asked.

He waited for a moment and the door opened up. "Master, what are you doing here?" she asked.

"I was just here to check up on you. How are you doing, lately? Do you need something?" he asked.

"No, I'm fine, master. How are you though? You don't talk about yourself," she said.

"Don't worry about an adult. That's not your job. Just worry about yourself. How is the training coming? Do you feel like you're getting stronger now?" he asked.

"It's okay, master. Du Yuhan is a good training partner. Although… I feel like he's hiding his strength from me," she said.

"Oh, why would you say that?" the sect leader asked.

"Well, you see, Every time I push myself to the extreme and bring out something stronger than before, he always has the strength to handle it. I think he's toying with me," she said.

"No way. It's probably just a coincidence. Are you going to go train now?" he asked.

"In a few minutes, yes," she said.

"Good. Take c—"

Suddenly, he felt a vibration from his storage bag and he brought out the talisman. However, when he saw which talisman he brought out, his eyes went wide with shock.

His hands trembled as he brought the talisman close to his head and read the content inside.

It said "Master! I'm back."

Chapter 520 - Return

"Master!" Alex shouted as he looked away from his older brother and towards Wen Cheng.

"Y-Yu Ming?" Wen Cheng couldn't believe his eyes at all. He ran up to Alex and grabbed him by the shoulders. "Are you really here? I can't believe this!" Wen Cheng said.

"It's me, master. I really am back," Alex said with slight tears in his eyes as well.

"Junior brother!" Luo Mei didn't even wait to find out if he was real or not, and immediately stole him from Wen Cheng and hugged him.

Alex felt warmth in his heart that slightly lessened the pain of losing Pearl. He could feel tears that were not his drenching his robes. Luo Mei really couldn't handle loss very well.

Losing her mother at an early age, she thought the worst of every event. She was worried about her father before she even returned to see how bad his health was.

When Alex was taken away, she fully believed him to be dead and turned into a mess. If it wasn't for her sister looking after her, she would be in a lot worse state than she currently was.

"I'm so glad you're back," She cried out. Liu Xun walked up and hugged the two of them as well.

"Welcome back, junior brother," he said.

Wen Cheng smiled as he realized how close his 3 disciples were. The hug lasted for a few moments before Wen Cheng separated them to ask Alex some questions.

"How are you, Yu Ming? Are you okay? How did the beasts treat you? Are you hurt somewhere?" Wen Cheng asked with concern.

"Right! Are you alright, junior brother?" Luo Mei asked as her face suddenly turned concerned as well.

"I... I am fine, but..." Alex stopped. Tears filled his eyes which made the other two believe something bad must've happened to him.

"What's wrong, Junior brother?" Liu Xun asked.

"The beasts... they took Pearl. They are going to make Pearl go through a ritual where none of the other beasts that have gone through it before have survived. I tried to complain to them that I won't let them do it, but... they threw me out of the secret realm."

"Now Pearl is there alone, and I have no way of returning to him," Alex said. His voice choked a few times as the tears made it hard to speak.

Luo Mei's eyes turned watery as she felt the sorrow Alex was feeling and hugged him again. "It will be okay. We will get Pearl back, don't worry," she said. It was all a lie, there was no way she or anyone in the empire could do any of that. However, it was a lie that Alex needed to hear right now.

"Come, let's go to my place. You must be tired and need to rest," Wen Cheng said.

"No, master. I need to go to the Hong Wu sect before that. I will need to let them know that I am back as well," Alex said.

"Right, you should," Wen Cheng said as he realized. "Ma Rong is a mess. Let's get you to her quick."

"I will bring him there, you guys go back for now," Wen Cheng said to the other 2.

"Okay master," Luo Mei said and turned to Alex. "It's really good to have you back, Junior brother."

"It's good to be back, sister," Alex said. Wen Cheng flew high and Alex followed. Just as they flew a bit in the sky, Wen Cheng noticed something unusual.

"What happened to your cultivation base? I can't feel a single thing," he said. He was looking directly at Alex, but he realized there was no aura coming off of him. If not for his spiritual sense, he would actually believe that he was hallucinating Alex right now.

"Oh," Alex said as he looked at himself. "I had to fly through the forest, so I concealed myself. I forgot to remove the concealment."

Alex then let go of the concealment technique that hid all of his aurae, and soon his mortal and cultivation aura both returned to him.

As they did, Wen Cheng's eyes started to widen more and more. He was dealt such a shock that he had to stop flying and look at Alex with a gawking face.

"Y-y-you! You entered the True Realms?" He asked in surprise.

"Ah, yes. I did so a week ago," Alex said

"But wait, didn't you enter the Mind Tempering realm just 2 months ago? How are you so quick?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Umm... I am one of the new cultivators that can cultivate very fast, master," Alex said.

"Is... is there a reason why you are so fast?" Wen Cheng asked. He had always knew or at least suspected his disciple to be one of the new cultivators that could cultivate fast. But he never expected to see him be this fast.

"Reason... not really. You can also cultivate fast, but I would suggest you don't. There are a few other minor reasons, but... I will tell you about them someday, master. You will learn the truth behind it all," Alex said.

"Okay," Wen Cheng didn't pry anymore. "I will wait for the day when you will tell me more."

Alex thanked his master for not asking for more information and kept on flying.

The sky had turned fully dark, and the stars were visible, some brighter than others. Finally, the two of them reached the Hong Wu Sect and dropped in front of the sect gate.

The elder standing in front of the gate suddenly stood upright when he noticed people flying down from the sky. Not anyone could fly inside the city, so whoever it was must be a big figure.

When the two people came into the light, he realized that one of them was Sect Master Wen Cheng from the Tiger sect.

Beside him, the elder saw someone else from the tiger sect, going by the yellow robe. However, when he looked closely at the face, he couldn't believe his eyes at all.

"Disciple Yu Ming?" he questioned. The face, it was the same face he had seen with the sect master so many times, but... he was supposed to be dead.

Alex didn't recognize this elder at all. There were many elders that he didn't care for and didn't keep in mind, so he was surprised that he was even able to recognize him back.

"Hello Elder," Alex said and bowed a little. He then walked past the elder and entered.

The elder wanted to stop him to confirm if it was him, but with Wen Cheng's presence, it was hard to even doubt if it was him.

Alex entered the mountain and flew again. He brought out a talisman from his bag and talked into it.

"Master, I have returned," he sent a message.

Deep in her manor, surrounded by iced-up walls, Ma Rong's sickly thin body was breathing in and out as she cultivated.

When the deep vibration of the talisman came from her storage bag, she stopped to see who it was as she had told the elders to not message her unless it was urgent.

However, her eyes went wide when she read the message in the talisman. Her lips quivered in shock at who had sent her the message.

She couldn't help but mutter softly to herself.

"Alex?"

Chapter 521 - Choose

Ma Rong cried. A lot. Not even Luo Mei had cried for Alex this much. She was a sobbing mess as she hugged Alex and started thanking the gods for his return.

Alex didn't know what to say. However, the warmth he felt from them all was making him slightly happy that he returned, which in turn was making him more guilty about the fact that he left behind Pearl.

Ma Rong's body was quite skinny. It seemed she wasn't taking care of herself properly. It's my fault, Alex thought.

It wasn't really his fault. He did what he could to save them and was taken away by the beasts. There was nothing he could do in that situation.

Now he needed to go save Pearl, and yet once again, there was nothing he could do.

Alex met with the other elders who welcomed him back. His Grandmaster grew emotional when he saw him as well. The second Elder sighed with relief when he saw him as well. Even the third Elder seemed happy to see him, despite not having much connection with him.

Alex saw his Martial uncle as well. He seemed to have returned from his mission in the past 2 months. He said he was successful. Alex couldn't wait to go and visit Wan Li, who they said was being heavily guarded so he didn't escape again.

Ironically, for an alchemist who made many different pills to hide from the ones searching for him, he was found out exactly thanks to the heavy alchemical scent on him.

Zhou Mei, Zhou Mi, Fan Ruogang, Kong Yuhan— some of the only people in the sect he could call his friend— came to meet him as well.

They were all truly happy to see him back. Alex was happy to see them as well. He was particularly happy to see Fan Ruogang, who had her cheerful personality back thanks to having both Wan Li and Alex back in the sect.

They stayed around for a few hours before leaving him alone with his masters.

With Wen Cheng present with them, Alex started telling the both of them what he had been up to for the last 2 months. He told them how the beasts treated him, how he trained, what they were planning to do with Pearl, and how— if they could enter the secret realm— they could go out of the Empire.

Wen Cheng and Ma Rong were surprised to even learn that there was an Empire outside of the Crimson Empire. It was just speculation they had that there was civilization outside of the Crimson Empire, which they never expected to be an Empire that was larger than their own.

Alex took the time to explain to them about the 5 continents as well as he could. That was another thing that surprised them the most.

Learning that they were an isolated bunch with no access to outside resources, in a continent that itself was low on resources, and was thus the weakest one of all, was perhaps the biggest shock they had received their entire life.

"We should tell the emperor about this. He will be happy to learn as well," Wen Cheng said.

"I don't think you have to," Alex said. "They probably already know."

Wen Cheng looked at Alex with a weird face. "How do you know that they know?" he asked.

"The Emperor's grandfather, Fu Qing, the First Emperor, was from the Luminance empire. He was someone that entered the secret realm from the other side, and escaped through this side when everyone else he had come with died."

"I suspect he would at least tell his family about something so important. I also suspect the only reason they never dared to make it public is because of how difficult it would be to go through a secret realm full of beasts," Alex said.

"Hmm, you might be correct. But, there is a chance they really don't know and the first emperor just never bothered to tell them because of how dangerous it is," Wen Cheng said.

"Somehow I doubt that," Ma Rong said from the side. Her tears had dried away completely, and she was no longer red in the face from all the crying. She also no longer choked on her tears while speaking.

"Why do you say that?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Did you know that the Emperor's sister-in-law was sick?" Ma Rong asked. "The city lord's mother, she was brought here in the Scarlet city for me to treat."

"Eh? They brought someone so important here? Why not let her stay in the capital?" Wen Cheng asked.

"That's because they didn't feel the capital safe because of the beast attack. Also, senior Lai— Ah, the Royal alchemist, he couldn't find any treatment for her, so they brought her here to see if I could treat them," Ma Rong said.

"Did you?" Wen Cheng asked curiously.

"Yes, thanks to a pill Alex came up with. He came up with the pill and the Royal Alchemist improved upon it. She was starting to heal before the final Beast invasion, and I heard she left a month ago, fully healed," Ma Rong said.

"Oh, she's healed? That's good for her," Alex said.

"Yes, that is good, but I don't see the point of this information," Wen Cheng said.

"Well, the point is that the reason she was sick was that she ate a Divine Devil fruit, a rather raw one with not enough age to it, and was stuck halfway in Mortal Cleansing."

"That fruit, she had found on one of her expedition to the south, which I highly doubt was just a random expedition. I have been wondering why they would ever go to the south, I suspect this is the reason," Ma Rong said.

"Ah, I see," Wen Cheng said. "Still, just for formality's sake, I will report what I've learned today."

"That should be okay," Ma Rong said.

It was quite late into the night, so Wen Cheng decided it was time that he left.

"When do you plan to come to the sect?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I don't know master," Alex said. "I'm not a disciple of the sect anymore, am I?"

"What do y— Ah, I hadn't thought about that," Wen Cheng said as he fell into thought. "Right, now that you are in the True realm, you are supposed to be graduated from the sect."

"So, I can either leave the sect or stay as an elder, right?" Alex asked.

"That's right, but…" Wen Cheng fell silent.

"I doubt I can be elder in two different sects, can I?" Alex asked. "Besides, I'm too young to be an elder too."

"This…" Ma Rong fell silent too. "You will have to stay an elder here," She said after thinking for a while. "Your alchemy skills are too great to waste your days doing normal elder stuff."

"That's very selfish of you, Ma Rong. Don't forget, our disciple's cultivation talents aren't that weak either. I sometimes even think that it might be better than his alchemy talents," Wen Cheng said.

"I can argue otherwise," Ma Rong said. "But that's not the point right now."

"I can't join both sects as an elder, can I?" he asked.

"No, the amount of information and responsibility an elder holds in a sect is just too big to share between the two sects without any supervision. Even if you don't mean any harm for the two sects, even if the two of us agree, the other elders will stand up against it, so it's just not possible," Ma Rong said.

"What should I do then?" Alex asked.

"We can't tell you that," Wen Cheng said. "You will have to choose this time, and you can not choose both."

"Normal Cultivation, or Alchemy, the choice will be easy for you once you understand what your heart desires, but at the same time, it will be the most important choice you have made in your life until now."

"What you choose will shape your future from here on out," Ma Rong said.

Alex fell silent. He didn't want to choose. As much as he liked Alchemy, he liked the normal cultivation stuff too. He liked the training, learning new skills, breaking through to the other realms.

He liked formations, to make them, to carve them. He wanted to learn about talisman creation and artifact forging too if given the chance.

There were way too many things he wanted to do to be tied down by a single decision he was forced to make right now.

"I… I will have to think about it," Alex said with a solemn face.

Wen Cheng pointed at Alex's chest and said, "Don't choose with your head, choose with your heart. Don't choose what you think is right for you. Choose what you FEEL is right for you."

"Don't worry. Regardless of what you choose, regardless of where you will be, we will always be your master, and you will always be our disciple. Nothing in the world will ever change that," Ma Rong said.

"We just recruited elders a week ago, so the next one is about 3 weeks away. When is yours?" Wen Cheng asked Ma Rong.

"We have one coming up this week. After that, it will be next month," Ma Rong said.

"Ah, yours is closer that. Sigh, I don't want to force you, but if possible, try to choose one of the two sects by the end of this week, okay?" Wen Cheng said.

"I will leave now. Come to the sect whenever you feel like it," Wen Cheng said and waved goodbye.

"Rest, you have a long week ahead of you," Ma Rong said and she walked out as well.

Alex remained in his house, alone with his thoughts, many thoughts, thinking what he should be doing.

The thoughts conflicted with each other, the feelings contradicted each other. Choose with your heart, Wen Cheng had said. But how was he to do that, when his heart wanted different things?

He felt a close connection with the Hong Wu sect, much more than what he felt with the Tiger sect. That in turn made him guilty towards the Tiger sect and made him want to do something right for them as well.

There was also the feeling of guilt he felt towards Pearl as he didn't think about him all the time, which he felt was what he should have been doing.

Too many things. His mind and heart, a jumbled mess of thoughts and feelings. Alex sighed. He really could not choose at all.

He decided to put it all aside for now. The night was late, and he had nothing to do anymore now that he was back.

So, he logged out of the game, got out of the capsule, and jumped into his bed.. The thoughts and feelings slowly disappeared as he fell asleep.

Chapter 522 - Spirit Reed Pill

Alex logged back into the game. He was still unsure of what he was to do, what he was to choose. So, he didn't choose at all, at least not right now.

He walked out of his room and went into the courtyard. He looked at the water and remembered that he hadn't taken a bath in a while.

Cultivators didn't need to eat, drink, or take a bath. However, Alex was a human too in the real world. Sweat and dirt always made him take a bath there. That was the same here as well.

Instinct and habit were hard to change when you continued doing the thing you needed to change.

Alex took off his robes and jumped into the water, going deep underwater. He opened his eyes and sat on the bottom of the pond. He felt at peace.

If I never leave, I will never have to make that choice, Alex thought. He really didn't want to make the choice. It just wasn't fair to him.

But that was life and he understood it. Nothing was fair in life. Sometimes, you just had to push yourself through the unfairness and come out on the other side, hopefully not losing yourself in the process.

Alex walked out of the pond after feeling cleaner than he was and used his aura to dry off the rest of the water.

He redressed and felt something buzzing.

"Hmm."

He felt the storage pouch in his robe and saw that one of them was buzzing. He looked into it and found out that he was being messaged by his master.

Come to my place when you're done cultivating, she said.

Alex chuckled a little. He couldn't cultivate even if he wanted to. "I should ask if she had any good cultivation methods. She uses one too, right?" Alex thought.

He made his way out of his house and went to his master's place. He let go of his spiritual sense and was surprised to find his master in the alchemy room.

He wasn't surprised that she was in the alchemy room, but rather that he was able to find her at all.

"Weird," he thought as he made his way to the alchemy room.

He entered through the doorway and found his master making some pills at the moment. He decided to wait. A few minutes later, Ma Rong was finally done with the pill and removed it from her cauldron.

She placed the pill in a pill tester and waited. 41%.

Alex hadn't seen the ingredients, so he didn't know what pill she had made. But, whatever it was, 41% was a good harmony for a pill.

"What pill was that master?" he asked as he finally went in and sat on the other side of the cauldron.

"It's a Spirit Reed pill," Ma Rong said.

"A Spirit Reed pill? What's does it do?" he asked.

"It helps a True realm cultivator improve their Qi output by a significant amount. With this one being 41%, this should help increase their Qi output by... something like 10% I guess," she said.

"Woah, if people can increase the amount of Qi they can produce at once, then they would be quite strong for a limited time, won't they?" Alex asked.

"That's the point of the pill," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded. His own mortal cleansing worked somehow like that. It made the movement of the Qi in his body faster and thus he could bring more of them out at once.

That was one of the reasons why he could fight people with higher cultivation realm compared to him. It was just one of the reasons, but a reason nonetheless.

Suddenly Alex realized something. "Wait, Master did you get a handle on your constitution already?" Alex asked. The fact that she could create a true pill at such a high harmony, when the last time he saw her, she was much worse at even creating Common pills.

This meant that between the time he had gone and come back, she had already fixed, or at the very least improved her situation.

"Yes, I have got a hold of my constitution," Ma Rong said with a smile. "It took a bit of effort, but it wasn't in vain."

"Great!" Alex exclaimed. He was truly happy for his master. "How did you achieve that? As far as I know, your Yin energy was truly very strong. Even stronger than my yang energy."

"I did what I thought was right. Since my Yin was going out of control, I used the Yang to help me suppress it," she said.

"You used... yang to suppress it?" Alex said with a confused face. "How does that work? I took away all the Yang stones, so where did you get the Yang from?"

"Did you forget that the whole of the Forbidden Fields is covered in Yang energy? I went there every morning to calm my Yin energy so that I could learn to control it using external force," she said.

"What?" Alex's face grew pale. "Master, that's so dangerous. What if something like last time happened and you fell unconscious for days?"

"I... I worried about that too, but I had to do what I did. That was the only way to control my constitution. Fortunately, it worked," she said.

"Thank god, it did. What would we do if you fainted again," Alex said worriedly. "Just seeing you unconscious last time was so worrying. Please don't do something so reckless again."

Ma Rong smiled when she heard that. To hear her own disciple be worried about her, She felt accomplished as a master.

"Alright, stop talking about that. That's not what I called you here for," Ma Rong said.

"Right, what did you call me here for?" Alex asked.

"I want to see how you've improved. I know I have already taught you the most I can, but there may still be something left to teach, depending on how you do today," she said.

"Alright," Alex said. "What do you want me to make?"

Ma Rong thought for a moment and brought out a pill recipe. Alex took the recipe and read it.

In an instant, the knowledge was imprinted onto his mind, and with the slightest recall, he could tell the recipe by heart and instinct.

"You want me to make the Spirit Reed pill?" He asked. He cocked his head as he read through the ingredients and cross-referenced them with what he had.

"Take your time, learn the recipe and see how you handle it," she said.

"It's fine," Alex said. "But I'm missing the False Indigo flower petals, Feather Reed grassroots, and Crested Iris's leaves."

"Oh, don't worry about the ingredients, I have 3 sets," she said and brought one of the sets.

Alex took the set and looked at it. As he did, information such as name, age, and energy constitution flowed out of his mind. It was honestly surreal how the information he had never learned before kept popping up in his head.

Ma Rong took away her cauldron and Alex put his cauldron upon the fire. After a significant time had passed, he started making the pill.

He started with the Snapdragon tendrils and worked with them in the cauldron. Once the powder was formed and the Earth energy released, he put in the second ingredient, the Crested Iris's leaves.

Yarrow seeds, Jade Horse's tail hair, Flame lizard's teeth, Feather Reed grassroots, Verbena thorns, False Indigo flower petals, and finally Million Gold leaves.

Alex put in the ingredients in that order and followed the recipe he had just learned the best he could. He made some mistakes here and there, he could tell what they were.

However, he was confident that the mistakes weren't big enough to have much impact on the pill that was created.

What worried Alex the most however was that his Qi wasn't strong enough to completely handle these energies.

He was still only in the 1st True disciple realm. While his Qi might be equivalent to someone in the 4th True disciple realm, that was still not strong enough to fully handle the pill's energy, or at least handle it enough to completely guide it into the pill he was going to form soon.

He did his best and thankfully, the pill-splitting Qi did not escape out of him. He struggled and guided the energy back into his newly formed powder sphere and waited for as much of it to seep into it.

It was the same all the time. The True pill's energy refused to go in without much 'persuasion'.

The pill finally formed and Alex picked it out. Ma Rong presented him with the pill tester to put the pill in it.

Alex didn't need it, but he still put it in there for her sake. He waited for the pill tester to reveal the result.

31%

Ma Rong's eyes went wide in shock. She was so stunned that she nearly dropped the pill tester. Alex caught her trembling hands before she could do any damage.

"Master?" Alex called her.

"31%... how did you?" she asked. "Have you learned this recipe before? Have you made this pill before?" she was started to get suspicious.

"No, Master. It's thanks to my eidetic memory, that's all," Alex tried to lie.

Ma Rong didn't buy it at all. After all, she had the same thing too, and she couldn't make such great pills on the first try. However, there just wasn't any other explanation.

In the end, she had to accept that her disciple was gifted in ways she was not and that he made the pill on his first try.

This was very scary for her.. Soon, she thought, he wouldn't even need her anymore.

Chapter 523 - Winter Moon Cultivation Method

"Master, is everything okay?" Alex asked after seeing Ma Rong not speak for a while as she stared at the pill in her hand.

"Yeah, yeah. Everything is fine," She said, but her eyes painted a different picture. She kept staring at the pill in her hand and said nothing else.

"31%, that's good right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it's very good," Ma Rong said. "You don't need any more learning at all after this. You just need to keep practicing making the different pills, and you will get a lot better soon."

Alex nodded, but he didn't believe her. There were many different ways to improve even right now. He could learn how to improve the recipes to make a higher harmony pill. He could learn what the mysterious Structure and Compositions truly were. He could learn, even before trying, what ingredients could mix up to be used in any pill.

He knew he needed a lot more training, perhaps from someone, perhaps just himself, but he knew he needed them.

He didn't tell his master this, however. He didn't want her to think she wasn't teaching him enough.

'Once I find out more about these things, I will let her know about them,' Alex thought.

"You made a few mistakes, right?" Ma Rong asked.

"Huh? Ah, yes. I felt there were a few things I missed here and there because it was my first time," Alex said.

"Hmm, that means you should really be making some better pill. Maybe closer to 35% or more," Ma Rong thought out loud. "Here, take these 2 remaining sets and keep practicing. I will go deal with the sect matters I have neglected for a while."

Alex nodded. He was about to leave when he remembered something. "Ah right, master. I don't have any cultivation method. Do you know what I should do?" he asked.

"You don't have any?" Ma Rong asked, and remembered that he had just entered the True realms.

She fell into thought for a bit, not letting any of her inner voice out. After a while, she finally spoke.

"There are some True realm cultivation methods in the library, but I doubt you would want them," she said. "They are all either Mortal or Earth grade methods and given how fast you cultivate, you would want something better, I'm sure."

Mortal and Earth grade, those truly were terrible in his eyes. If possible he wanted his methods to be at least Heaven grade.

"I have a heaven grade technique I use that my master gifted me when I graduated. Maybe I can gift it to you since you have graduated too," Ma Rong said.

She brought out an old book from her storage bag and handed it to Alex. "Take care of this book, okay? Grandmaster paid a lot for this book," she said.

Alex took the book and looked at it. The book was old, decrepit, and the outer cover was torn at places. He flipped the book and fortunately the inside of the book was fine.

"Winter Moon Cultivation method?" Alex read the title. "I will check it out later. Thank you, master."

Alex left her place. He went back to his house and sat down for half an hour to make the Spirt Weed Pills once again.

He made 3 different pills this time. 2 were split up, 1 was full. The harmony came out to be 22% and 23% for the 2 pills, which told Alex that he had a lot more potential in the pill which he could refine once he had better cultivation.

The 2nd pill was 36%, which also let him know that he really needed a higher density Qi to work with the True pills.

"Fortunately, I have a cultivation method now," Alex thought and brought out the new book.

He had no intention of destroying the book as it was a gift from his master, so he started reading it, rather than using the game's system.

The cultivation method, despite looking very difficult and cryptic was actually pretty simple. All it did was mention a route in his meridians through which he was to circulate his Qi every time he cultivated.

That would help the surrounding Qi to converge onto him and increase his cultivation slowly.

Alex kept on reading and understanding more and more about the technique. He felt like he could start cultivating now without just meditating and waiting for it to automatically start.

Now that he knew what to do, he was confident that he could start it whenever he wanted. That made him a little happy.

He kept on reading and everything else about the book was normal. However, when he reached the end, he read something that troubled him a bit.

"Best used by a person with high affinity to Yin?" Alex was surprised to read. His master was a person with a high affinity to Yin. It was very high.

'Was that why grandmaster paid a lot to buy this book? Because master had good affinity with Yin?' he thought. He felt like he could understand his grandmaster's thought process.

"Master had a Yin constitution from the start, so he must've gone far and wide to find this method for her since it matched her perfectly," Alex thought. "But... will this work for me?"

High affinity to Yin was not exactly how he would describe himself. Having a body that was focused on Yang, he was sure that he couldn't really learn the method.

"But it says affinity to Yin, not Yin focused body. I do have a Yin spiritual root, which does make me have an affinity to Yin. I wouldn't be able to properly learn the Flickering Shadows technique if not for that."

"So... it should work?" Alex wasn't sure, but he was hopeful. He continued reading the method and right after he finished, he got a notification.

<Congratulations on learning 'Winter Moon Cultivation Method'>

"Aw, yes!" he exclaimed. His hope didn't betray him. "Great! This works," he said with a wide smile. Somehow, he had learned a Yin affinity cultivation method.

"Alright, I should have trained enough back in the secret realm to breakthrough right now, right?" Alex thought.

He brought out a healing true pill and ate it without hesitation. He had no wounds, so the pill instead turned fully into Qi, giving him the required amount to break through to the next realm.

Alex opened up the status page and without any sort of hesitation, hit the breakthrough button.

The Qi that was inside him started moving around his meridians. Surprisingly, the route they took was the same as his new cultivation method.

Alex waited for it to quickly complete moving completely, however, the Qi wasn't moving quickly at all. In fact, it was struggling to move through his body.

"What's going o—"

Before he could finish his sentence, the Qi in his meridians all vanished as they left his meridians and his body, giving him a feeling of backlash from the sudden release of Qi.

Had it been more Qi, Alex surely would have suffered some damage to the meridians. Had his meridians not been through body cultivation, he could've suffered some damage too.

Fortunately, none of that happened, but what did happen was worrying. He didn't feel his strength increase at all.

He had failed to break through at all.

Chapter 524 - Problems

"Did I just fail?" Alex asked himself with slight confusion. This had never happened before.

"What's going on?" he wondered. The problem was obviously the new cultivation method, but why did it have a problem? It wasn't that it didn't suit him, right? He clearly learned it.

"Wait, does just learning it not mean that it suits me?" he wondered. He decided to check the status page.

[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: True Disciple Realm (1,000,000 True Qi : 53%)

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Winter Moon Cultivation Method

True Qi: 1,345,224

]

There was the problem. 53%. He only had a 53% chance to break through, and he had failed this time. He hadn't checked it before he pressed the button, but the chance was probably the same that time as well.

"Sigh, so this isn't really a good cultivation method for me, is it?" he thought. With only half a chance to breakthrough each time, his rate of cultivation would be pretty much halved.

He was pretty sure that he had lost a significant amount of Qi during the previous breakthrough, perhaps all of the 1 million True Qi as the status said was required to breakthrough.

"What do I do now?" Alex thought. He clearly needed to break through as he had already set his mind.

"Sigh, surely I won't fail twice," he thought and pressed the breakthrough button once more.

The Qi inside of him started moving through the same route once more. They moved around the meridians and when they reached the starting point, Alex felt a small 'boom' go off inside of him.

He had successfully broken through. "Phew! Thank god," he thought. He didn't have to waste more pills just to break through as he was dreading.

"Oh right, is the percentage the same or did it go higher?" Alex wondered and opened his status again. His heart sank when he saw it.

52%.

It didn't remain the same or go higher as he expected, instead, the percentage had gone down. 'Is it going to go down every single breakthrough?' he thought.

At a 1% reduction per breakthrough, he was going to lose about 45% of success chance throughout the entirety of True Realms. That would be horrible.

Having only a 7% chance to break through to the Saint realm, where one single mistake could put you on a Qi deviation and ruin your entire cultivation… Alex needed to get rid of this method soon.

However, it was a gift from his master, a graduation gift not to mention. He felt guilty at the thought of changing it.

"It's fine," he thought to himself. "I can keep using it for a little longer. At least the True disciple realm. I can change it after that."

It wasn't like he could change to any random cultivation method either since most mortal and earth grade cultivation methods would also have the same horrible chance at breakthrough.

His only hope was to find some random heaven or higher grade cultivation rank in an auction.

"Oh right, it's been 6 months since the Pink Cloud Auction halls bi-annual auction. Surely they will have something good like that, right? I will wait until then," Alex thought.

He still remembered the auction where he sold his pills and got his first big money. It was the same auction where he learned about beast handling, about Heaven's Impact skill, about the Yin Gathering tree.

"Hopefully I will find something good in that auction," Alex thought.

Once he was done, he stood up and left his house. He walked down the mountain and went to check the right alchemy garden where the Yin Gathering tree was planted on.

He greeted the elders he knew there and was allowed entry to the garden based on not his identity, but the authority he had from the time when he became Ma Rong's disciple.

He walked up the mountain, looking at the different plants that weren't destroyed at all. He had picked up all the alchemy ingredients 2 months ago, leaving only the immature ones, and somehow they were still growing.

'So the tree will take a while to grow, huh?' he thought if it even grew at all. After all, the Yin gathering tree was a hard tree to grow. It was a tree that rarely grew fruits and the fruits rarely had seeds in them.

It wasn't just anywhere that the tree could grow either, it needed an appropriate environment with plenty of Yin Qi to grow. Which, to be fair, he had provided with the Umbra flower he buried along with the seed.

When Alex reached the top of the mountain, he saw a small budding tree about half a meter in height. It had really small leaves and only a few branches. This was definitely the Yin Gathering tree, however…

"Oh no!" Alex said as he saw how malnourished the tree looked. The branches looked weak and dangled downwards, the leaves were started to grow yellow, even the newly grown ones. It looked like it could fall at any moment.

The tree wasn't growing as well as he had hoped it would. "What's going on?" he wondered. He got close to check it.

"Eh? Yu Ming?" A voice called him from the side.

Alex looked to the side to see his master flying down from above. "Master? What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I came for this little guy," she said, pointing at the small tree.

"It looks quite bad," Alex said.

"It is," Ma Rong said. "We didn't think much about what we were doing, and now this little guy is suffering the consequences." Ma Rong landed next to the plant and slowly touched it.

"What do you mean?" Alex asked. He couldn't understand what he was supposed to think about. They had a seed, he had an extreme Yin flower, so he planted it.

Was there really anything else left to consider?

"A Yin Gathering Tree requires a Yin environment to grow," Ma Rong said. "This place isn't one."

"What do—" Alex stopped and looked to the north. "The Forbidden Fields?" he asked in surprise.

"Yes," Ma Rong said. "It has been getting larger and larger for a while. Its influence has already crossed the river and come way over on this side."

"What? Such drastic changes took place in the Forbidden Fields? How? When?" Alex asked in surprise.

"I don't know when exactly it started, but it was after you went in there last time. I remember a wave of energy coming from the north at that moment. It must've knocked away most of the Yin energy in the surrounding."

"If not for the Umbra flower, and me coming here to pour in my Yin Qi every day, I doubt this little guy could even grow up at all. Even this almost dead-looking plant is already a miracle," Ma Rong said.

She touched the ground around the stem of the plant and closed her eyes. Slowly, Alex could see the white mist escaping from all over her body, but mostly from her hands that were touching the ground.

The fear that Alex had already forgotten about reappeared when he saw his master use her body constitution. He still didn't know why it was happening, all he knew was that he was instinctively scared.

Ma Rong finished putting her Yin on the ground and got up. Just as fast as she released her Yin Qi, she constrained it as well.

"So the Yang from the Forbidden Fields is leaking here as well?" Alex asked. "That's… that's dangerous. That means pretty soon no one will be able to cultivate here, will they?"

"I'm afraid so. If the Forbidden Field's suppression reaches here as well, soon Scarlet City would cease to exist. Even if it did, it would be a place only mortals would live in. That is assuming it's not overrun by the beasts in the Forbidden Fields," Ma Rong said.

"Do you have any solution to this problem?" Alex asked.

"None as of yet," Ma Rong said. "I'm planning to inform the Emperor about it soon and see what they offer. "Worst case scenario… we might have to leave this place and relocate to someplace else."

"That's terrible," Alex said, however, he had no idea what could possibly be done as well. 'Hopefully, the storm from last time doesn't come again,' he thought.

Ma Rong left soon after and went to deal with the different things. Alex left too and went to check on the next alchemy garden.

Before he even entered the other Alchemy garden, he could already see the thick fog from outside.

Going in only made him happier. The formation was working just as it was supposed to. The multicolored Qi that the fog was made up of was helping the ingredients grow at a much faster rate, as well as allowing for the high tier of ingredients to grow as well.

"This is pretty good," Alex thought. Soon, he was sure that even saint-rank ingredients would take root here and grow properly.

"Who knows, maybe this will help cultivate a Saint realm cultivator as well," Alex thought optimistically. Although his optimism immediately washed away, like cotton candy in water, when he realized that this place would probably not last very long now given what was happening to the Forbidden Fields.

"Sigh, I hope everything turns out fine somehow," he thought. This was in regards to all the problems going on around him lately.

Pearl, his cultivation method, the choice between the Hong Wu sect and Tiger sect, and now this problem with the Forbidden Fields.

Nothing seemed to be going properly for Alex right now.

He shook his head and let the bad thoughts disappear.. Then, he walked away from the alchemy garden and went to the Core disciples mountain.

Chapter 525 - Visits

Alex's mood got a little better once he met up with Kong Yuhan and the rest. Talking with his friends made him forget about the problems, at least for now.

Kong Yuhan seemed to be doing good right now. He had gotten together with Zhou Mi and was quite far ahead into his cultivation base as well.

He was in the 8th Meridian Tempering realm right now. 6-7 months ago when Alex had met him for the first time, he was 9th Organ tempering realm.

'He must've focused on Alchemy more than cultivation,' Alex thought. After a bit of conversation with them, he went on to the house at the peak of the Core disciples mountain. He had never been here before, but he had heard a lot about it.

Alex saw 2 green-robed elders standing guard in front of the house. Both of those elders seemed fearsome too as Alex could tell just how strong they were.

'They are truly worried that he will leave again, huh?' Alex thought as he greeted the elders.

"Can I go meet him inside?" Alex asked.

The elders seemed to have no problem with this. Apparently, they seemed to be used to this even. Alex thanked the elders and walked in.

Surprisingly, the house was in a much better condition than Alex would've expected it to be. The tables, beds, chairs— They were all clean and properly maintained.

'How did they keep an empty ho— ah, it must've been her,' Alex thought. Fan Ruogang, she must've taken care of the place in his absence, Alex thought.

The door opened ahead of Alex and a young man walked out. Behind him, Alex could see fire coming out of a pit in the room. 'He must've been making some pills,' Alex thought.

"Hello, brother Wan. How are y—" Alex's eyes turned wide as it took a moment for his brain to process what he was feeling.

"Brother Wan, you… how are you in True Master realm?" Alex asked in surprise. The aura the youth was giving was not that of a mere Self-tempering realm cultivator, but rather a True realm expert.

"Oh, brother Yu Ming, I heard you had returned. Good for you," he said in the most unenthusiastic way possible. Then his face changed, as a wave of seething anger appeared on it.

"You must've let them know about me, right? Why did you do it? I was so close to finding my parent's murderers," Wan Li said.

"Brother Wan," Alex wanted to say something, but he felt like he could understand him just a little. Alex wanted to get back to secret realms to stop them from basically sending Pearl to a death sentence as well.

He didn't know what he would do if he truly did die. He had come to love his little buddy a lot.

However, he still understood why this was bad. Revenge, Alex thought, was not really fine, but understandable given what a person was going through.

But revenge in this condition when victory was basically impossible, Wan Li was just throwing his life away.

"Brother Wan, I won't tell you what to do or not to do. I just want to ask you, do you think your parents would be happy with what you're doing? Do you think they would feel proud of watching you give up what they loved the most?"

"I can't really give you much advice but… just take care of yourself okay? Your parents would want you to be happy," Alex said.

Wan Li looked angry, but there were tears forming in his eyes. Alex understood that Wan Li had already thought of this stuff.

'The pain he feels must be terrible. I pray no one else has to feel it,' Alex thought. Seeing that Wa Li didn't really want to talk with him, Alex left the place.

He went to the Elder's Hall and met up with his Grandmaster and Martial uncle. From there he learned how they had been dealing with the sect matter the last 2 months.

With Alex taken away by the beasts, Ma Rong had been depressed to the point that nothing in the sect was getting done. Fortunately, the grand elder and Second elder helped a lot.

After talking with them, Alex met up with his master and let her know that he was going to the Tiger sect.

He wanted to spend some time there as well before he made any choice.

"I really want you to choose to stay with us, but I won't force you. Do what you want," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded and left. He went out of the sect and walked around the city before making his way to the Tiger sect.

His senior brother was still the guard's leader so he talked with him for a bit, explaining what he had been doing and the choice that he was going to have to make.

After talking for a while, he went up the mountain.

It was mid-day, so a lot of disciples were out in the sect, simply walking around. Alex walked amidst them, looking at the easy-going life.

He took out his badge to check what his rank was now, but it seemed that they had truly considered him dead as he had fallen to the lowest rank possible.

Alex chuckled a little and shook his head before he continued walking.

He made his way to the top and walked towards his sister's house. He wondered if she knew about the choice he had to make. He wondered if she even knew what his cultivation base was.

Just as he walked towards her house, the doors to another house opened and a person walked out.

"Brother Yuhan, how're you doing?" Alex asked when he saw Du Yuhan walk out of his house. Du Yuhan stared at him with a confused and surprised face for a while before speaking.

"Wow! They didn't lie, huh? You really did come back from the dead twice," Du Yuhan said.

"Back from the dead huh? I guess you could call it that. Although, I was nowhere near as much in danger either of the time," Alex said.

"Either way, it's good to have you back. You're going to take your 3rd rank back now, right?" Du Yuhan asked.

"Uh, I'm afraid I cannot," Alex said and pulsed his aura a bit before hiding it once more.

Du Yuhan's eyes went wide when he felt what he did.

"True realm?" he asked, to which Alex nodded.

"Dear God, that is so fast. You were barely at the beginning phase of the Mind Tempering realm just 2 months ago. How are you progressing so fast?" he asked.

"I can't really explain it right now. Maybe later on," Alex said. "I'll see you around, brother Du."

Alex left and went to his sister's house. He knocked on the door and waited. The door opened to reveal that it was Meng Yun.

"Oh, hello sister Meng, how are you?" Alex asked.

"Oh, it's you. Welcome back. I heard you came back yesterday. Are you okay?" she asked worriedly.

"Oh, I'm fine. Nothing to worry about," Alex said. He walked in and went to the living room to meet with Luo Mei.

He found his sister cultivating normally, and she opened her eyes when she heard her come in.

"You're back already?" she said with a confused face.

"Haha, why? Do you not want me to?" Alex asked with a chuckle.

"No, I thought you would stay there for 2 weeks before you returned," Luo Mei said.

"Oh," Alex's smile disappeared. "So, master didn't tell you huh?"

Luo Mei's face changed. "Tell me what?"

"I have unofficially graduated from the sect," Alex said as he sent out his True realm aura. Luo Mei's eyes went wide when she felt that.

"You reached the True realm? What? How? Why?" she was having a hard time comprehending it.

"I reached it a bit more than a week ago," Alex said. "Since I'm in the True realms, it means I've graduated, and am no longer a disciple of the sect."

"Oh, so you are going to become an elder faster than me huh? I'm kind of jealous. I still have 2 more realms to go through," Luo Mei said.

Alex's face changed. "That's something I wanted to talk to you about, sister," he said. "I… I don't know if I will be an elder."

"Huh? Then what? You can't stay a disciple, you know," she said.

"I know. What I meant is… I will have to either choose between becoming an elder here or becoming an elder in the Hong Wu sect. I talked with both masters and they want me to make a choice by the end of the week," Alex said. "I was hoping you could help me with it a bit."

"What? Of course, you have to choose Tiger sect then," Luo Mei said without even thinking.

Alex laughed a little. There was no point in asking for help in a choice from someone that was biased to one of the choices.

He really had to come up with it on his own.

"Let's forget about that for now. I will think about it more later on," Alex said. Then he looked around the room and didn't notice someone.

"Where is sister Xing?" he asked. He had seen her yesterday.

"Oh, she left for her sect this morning. She had been staying here for way too long and needed to return back desperately, so I sent her today," Luo Mei said.

"Is that so?" Alex said. "I needed to thank her for the formation blueprint she fixed.. I guess I will do so later."

Chapter 526 - Interrupted Cultivation

Alex stayed with his sister until evening and explained everything he had been through to her. Once it was time for his master's tasks to be done, he left his sister's home to go to his master's manor.

Alex looked at the sky as he walked. It was an open sky and the moon, as well as the stars, were shining brilliantly, some more than others.

The days were supposed to be cold. They were cold everywhere else but here. 'Is that because of the yang in the area as well?' he thought.

He remembered that it never rained, the clouds that covered the sun never stayed in the sky for long, and it didn't get cold, even in winter. Alex couldn't think of the cause to be anything else than the Yang leaking in the Forbidden Fields.

'That means it must've been leaking for a while now, and only recently did it accelerate. I wonder what is happening there,' he thought.

Alex reached his master's manor and waited a few minutes for him to return.

"Oh, you're here. Did you make a choice already?" Wen Cheng asked as soon as he walked in and saw Alex sitting on a chair.

"No Master, I will still need some time," Alex said. He didn't want to be reminded of the choice he had to make.

"Alright, take your time. But I would be really happy if you chose the Tiger sect. You have a lot of potential to be wasted hiding in a room making pills," Wen Cheng said.

Alex sighed internally. None of the people around him could hide their biases. He wasn't going to listen to any of them, so it didn't really matter.

"I wanted to ask, master. What is going to happen now? There should be official graduation or something like that right?" Alex asked.

"Oh yes, there will be one. As for when it will be... umm... I think it will be fine to do it once you make your choice. By then, whether you choose the Tiger sect or the Hong Wu sect, you can graduate without worry," Wen Cheng said.

"I see, that would be great then," Alex said. "By the way, I heard that Sister was just 2 realms away from promoting to the True realms as well. Do you have any plans for after she breaks through?"

"Sigh, I have no plan. If anything, I think I will just have to give up on being the sect leader now. I've been one for 5 years straight now, and that should be enough," Wen Cheng said.

"Who do you think will be the sect leader next then?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. It probably won't be the First elder, since little Yuhan should also be breaking through soon. The Second elder might become one, but he won't be able to stay as one for very long either," Wen Cheng said.

"So, in the end, I think it will be the Third Elder. Disciple Bing Li should be the prime disciple after a while," Wen Cheng said. "She's young and her cultivation is low, so she should be able to hold the spot for a long time."

"I see," Alex said. " I assume Trevor already left the sect?"

"He didn't stick around a day after entering the True realm," Wen Cheng chuckled. "He had so much hope, but that disciple of his didn't really seem to care about his master's reputation."

"After the humiliation he suffered, he probably didn't want to stay in the sect," Alex said. Wen Cheng agreed. They stayed around to talk for a little longer before Alex decided it was time to leave.

He returned back from his master's place and went over to his sister's place.

Luo Mei didn't want him to go stay in the outer sect houses, so she left him to stay there.

They talked for some more and returned to their respective room late at night.

Alex walked into his room and sat down on the bed. There was no pill to make, no formations to be made, and no training to be done. So, he planned on logging out.

But then he remembered that he did already have a new cultivation method today. It didn't work as well as his previous one so he was sure to change it, but using it for just a few more days was fine.

"Let's start," he thought. He sat cross-legged on the bed and closed his eyes to put all of his focus on his meridians. There were Qi in the meridians already, and he slowly gathered the Qi at one specific location.

Once enough Qi had gathered there, he started moving the Qi through the predetermined route in his meridian.

He breathed in and out as the Qi started moving. Just as it did, something happened inside of him that he could feel for the first time.

It was a feeling of freedom he hadn't felt before. It was like finally breathing through a clogged-up nose after a long time.

The feeling was amazing, but it lasted just a split second. Or rather, he lasted just a split second. Before he could even feel it anymore, he slowly fell asleep. Once again, even at the True realm, he couldn't stay awake when cultivating.

Suddenly, Alex opened his eyes as a violent thrumming went on in his body. He felt cold, unnaturally cold from the inside out. Wisps of bluish-white Qi released from all over his body, not unlike his master.

He was hurting. 'What's happening?' he thought. After the months of body cultivation, this much pain was something he could easily handle. However, the fact that he was hurt made him worry.

In just a few seconds, the bluish-white Qi stopped releasing from his body as he felt the heat returning back to his body. This was a truly weird experience for him.

"What was that?" he wondered. He glanced around him and saw that the lantern was still burning.

"What's the time?" he thought and looked to the top right corner of his vision.

10:43

It had only been merely half an hour or so since he started cultivating. He felt quite surprised.

'I have never woken up this early before. Is my new cultivation method being a problem?' Alex wondered.

He decided to try once more. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let the Qi gather in one spot.

He let the breath he held go and started moving the Qi. Once more, he felt that amazing feeling, and just as last time, he fell asleep.

The violent thrumming returned as Alex was forced out of his sleep. Once again, bluish-white wisps of Qi were being expelled from all over his body like steam coming off of someone after a warm shower on a cold day.

The wisps disappeared once again after a few seconds, but the experience was weird. Alex was ready for what was going to happen this time, so the moment he was out, he paid attention to what was happening to his body this time.

The cold, the heat, and the repelling, he felt it all. Alex realized that what was coming out of his body was Yin Qi.

Somehow, due to the cultivation method, during his cultivation, the Qi in his body was slowly changed to Yin Qi. Due to him having a Yin Elemental Spiritual root, he was perfectly capable of changing normal Qi to Yin Qi.

However, just because he was capable of changing it didn't mean that his body was okay with it. Being a Yang affinity body, the Yin Qi was definitely not welcomed in his body.

So, after a while when the Qi was fully transformed to Yin Qi after numerous circulation in the Meridian, his body forced it out. Which, in turn, made him jump out of his sleeping state since the cultivation was abruptly stopped.

'Dammit, so I can't even cultivate with this method?' Alex was starting to really not like this technique. It didn't matter that his master had given it to him as a gift. He was definitely going to change it the next chance he got.

"Fine, I will log out for now," he thought. Just as he was about to, he felt his badge vibrate in his storage bag.

"Hmm? Did someone challenge me in the middle of the night?" Alex thought and opened his badge only to read one sentence written on the badge.

"Scarlet City is under attack.. Stay in your room and do not leave."

Chapter 527 - Another Invasion

"What the hell?" Alex thought. He thought he read it wrong for a second and reread it, but it said the same thing as the first time.

Scarlet City was under attack and the disciples were to stay inside.

Alex's heart started beating fast. 'Did the beasts come back?' he feared. He took a deep breath to calm himself and see if there was the feeling he got when the beasts were agitated.

There wasn't any.

If the beasts were back, they were either not here for him, or he couldn't feel the feeling anymore now that he wasn't with Pearl.

Alex feared it was the latter. That was the only option he could come up with.

Alex swiftly walked out of the room. Luo Mei left at the same time as well. "Yu Ming, what's going on?" she asked.

"I don't know, Sister, but I think the beasts are back," Alex said.

"What? Why would they make us stay back then? They will need our help, let's go," Luo Mei said and went towards the front door.

Alex got a weird feeling when he heard that. Yes, it was weird that they didn't want the help of the disciples to fight off the beasts when in the previous days, they used all the help they could get.

Was he wrong about the situation then?

"Sister, stop!" Alex said.

"What? Why?" Luo Mei asked with a confused face. She was already at the door and had opened it already. "They need our urgent help."

"Maybe they don't want our help," Alex said as he walked towards her. "Look" he pointed to the words on the badge, "they specifically asked for the disciples to stay in their room. This must mean that the beasts that are attacking the Scarlet City must be way stronger than any of the disciples."

"But..."

"You must trust them, sister. Don't leave the house," Alex said as he pulled her inside.

Luo Mei sighed. "Okay, I guess you're right." She walked away from the door. Alex let her walk inside and grabbed the door.

Instead of walking in, however, he walked out. Luo Mei noticed him walking out and was taken aback. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"I'm going to check what is happening out there," Alex said.

"What? You just said we needed to stay inside," Luo Mei said.

"No, I said the disciples needed to stay inside," Alex said. He tossed her the badge he was holding and smiled. "Unfortunately, I'm not a disciple anymore."

"Don't go! It really could be dangerous," Luo Mei said.

"Don't worry sister," Alex said as he lost all of his aurae and slowly faded into the darkness until nothing of him was visible anymore. "I will be fine."

Luo Mei had to use her spiritual sense to even locate Alex in front of her. She wanted to tell him that it was dangerous again, but... she couldn't argue that Alex would be very safe as long as he was careful.

"Alright, but if it's too dangerous, return immediately. The elders must be fighting outside the wall, so approach there slowly," Luo Mei said.

Alex nodded and closed the door. He immediately run away from the house and started going uphill towards his master's manor.

His objective wasn't to find his master or look for something in the manor. It was just that the manor was at the peak of the mountain, and Alex could see where outside the wall the beasts were attacking.

He had activated his movement technique and could barely feel the air hitting his face. There was absolutely no air resistance and he was moving at almost supersonic speed.

The houses became a blur as in just a single moment he reached the manor. He ran behind the house to the open yard and from there looked out towards the wall.

With the southern forest being there, there should've been some people watching around, some guards keeping security, or just maybe some noise.

However, it was all silent. Alex looked down at the crater beneath him and saw the many lights that were still on. However, he couldn't see a single soul.

The entire sect crater was empty. Something was weird. Alex had never known for the sect crater to be empty. Even at night, there would be some disciples walking to and from the training hall or the library.

However, this was all silent. If there was a fight outside the wall, there should have been people gathered here to help with the beast attack.

That was when Alex heard something. A loud rumbling came from somewhere far away. Alex could tell the location of the sound-it was behind him.

He turned around and walked to the front of the manor. That was when he saw it.

Beyond the small patches of trees and walls of the sect, in the different locations of the city, Alex could see bright locations in the night as well as a lot of loud coherent noises.

Alex focused and listened to the sound carefully. Crackling of fire cries, shouts of people, weapons clashing, and a general sound of destruction.

The attack he had assumed was happening outside was instead already in the city. Alex feared the worst was currently happening-The beasts had invaded the city.

Without a single thought, Alex immediately flew from the mountain and went straight towards the invasion. He was still hiding in his concealment, so he wasn't really worried about anyone seeing him, but he still sent out his spiritual sense just so he could avoid any stray attacks coming his way.

The closer Alex got towards the front of the sect, the more he realized how bad the situation was.

There were fires breaking out everywhere, many people were terrified, and there were even fights playing out in the sky.

Alex was horrified because of what he was probably going to witness. Scenes of human flesh strewn around as beasts munched on them, that was his prime expectation, something he wasn't looking forward to.

Still, he had to check and see if he could help.

He soon reached outside the wall and looked around. He could see many people, running around haphazardly, with blinding fires behind them.

Alex looked around, but he didn't see what he was expecting. There was a lot of terror and destruction, but... not a lot of deaths.

There were barely any human bodies that were clearly dead.

However, what surprised Alex the most about the situation was...

"Where are the beasts?" he looked around in confusion. The many buildings and houses were on fire, people were fighting, but there were no beasts.

All the clashes and the clankings of weapons... it was all coming from the people, with not a single beast involved.

That was when Alex realized he had made a grave mistake in his assumption. This wasn't a beast attack.

This was a human attack.

The city wasn't under attack from strong beasts, but rather fellow cultivators themselves.

"What's going on?" Alex spoke solemnly. He could see the humans attacking each other, some of the soldiers belonged to the City Lord, some of them from the tiger sect, and some, most likely the attackers, were people he didn't recognize.

Still, he didn't see a reason for them to attack other humans. The war in this empire was over nearly a millennia ago. The empire was at peace and people were living freely.

So... why was there an attack happening on the city right now? Who would be so bad as to attack other human beings?

Just as the questions formed in his brain, Alex got an answer. Coincidentally, he saw one of the attackers nearby attacking one of the city guards.

The attacker was wearing a black robe from top to bottom, fully tight fitted to their body, and their hair long enough to reach their back.

"Black Venom bandit group," Alex said quietly. He finally understood clearly what was happening. The city was under attack from the bandits.

This was weird and stupid, but it was happening so Alex couldn't deny it.

Usually, a city would have stronger fighters and guards than just a normal merchant group, so Alex was a little confused as to what was happening.

If anything, with the bandits daring to leave the forest, their light should've been snuffed by now.

Alex didn't know exactly how strong the Black Venom bandit group was, but he had met their leader who was presumably the strongest, and even she was merely at the True Lord realm.

With his master and many others being at a higher realm than her, Alex couldn't understand why they would dare attack the city on their own. This was beyond stupid.

Granted that since the bandits were all in the True realms, only the elders would be able to fight against them, but even then it was surely a failure without how many True realm experts the two sects plus the city lord had.

Just as Alex was thinking that he noticed something. An elder from the Tiger sect was currently fighting against another man in the sky. From what Alex could see, the man was wearing a bluish-gray robe and was fighting on equal footing with the elder.

That made Alex pause for a second. "Wait a minute... that guy is not from the Black venom group," Alex thought. Suddenly, he realized something and turned around to look at the rest of the people fighting.

It wasn't just black robes he saw that were fighting. Alex could see many different people from presumably many different factions.

That was when his confusion turned into fear as he realized what was happening.

Multiple people, presumably bandit groups, had joined together to attack the city.

Chapter 528 - A Significantly Insignificant Battle

Multiple bandits, many people who Alex had never met, seen, or even heard of. Given the bandits' guts to dare attack a city, it was obvious that they were at least certain of their victory on some level.

Alex just wasn't sure how confident they were of their victory. "What even is the point of attacking a city? That's just asking the empire to fight back," Alex thought.

He looked down and saw a fight breaking out. A man in an orange-colored robe was starting to attack an elder of the Tiger sect.

Alex saw that the elder for the Tiger sect was a younger man, who by his age, Alex guessed must've become an elder just a year or two ago.

He was merely at the 2nd realm of True Disciple realm, so he was considered weak. His opponent on the other hand was someone in the 5th realm of the True Disciple realm.

If they fought right now, the Tiger sect elder would lose for sure. Alex knew that the bandit knew that, and even the elder himself knew that.

* * * * * *

The elder was terrified of being confronted by the bandit. The spear he held showed obvious signs of shaking. Still, he stood his ground as behind him there were a few mortals that he was saving from the wreckage of their houses.

The bandit looked at the elder and the spear he held. The spear was of some quality from the way the blade shined in the firelight.

"Stay away from me," the elder shouted.

The bandit gave a sinister smile and said, "that's quite a nice spear you have there. I bet it costs a lot."

"Wh-What?" the elder was taken aback.

"That spear... I want it," the bandit said as he slowly made his way towards the elder.

The elder took a step back in fear and looked around, but there was no help for him. He heard the whimpers of a child behind him, who was being practically suffocated by their parents in an attempt to stop them from making any noise that would attract the attention of the attackers.

The elder could only see one way out.

"I-If I give you my spear, will you leave?" he asked.

The bandit stopped. He wasn't expecting the elder to say that, but given how scared he was, the bandit decided to give it a thought.

"Sure. Give me the spear, and I will leave right now," he said. The bandit lowered the sword he was holding a little to appear less threatening.

The elder mulled over his decision for a while, but this was the only direction he could see for himself right now.

"Here!" the elder threw the spear at the bandit's feet. "Now leave."

The bandit bent down and grabbed the spear. He picked it up and looked at the slightly rugged texture on the handle, the pristine blade with barely any scratches on it. The craftsmanship of the spear was on another level.

"Not bad," he said as his eyes revealed that despite being a bandit, it wasn't every day that he got to see something like this every day.

"Such a good spear. You must be pretty rich to afford something like this," the bandit said as he played with the spear. He swung it, spun it on his hands, checked its balance, and finally stopped when he was in a stance to begin fighting.

And then his eyes turned sinister again as he said, "Makes me wonder what else you might have on you."

"What?" the elder looked at the bandit with a pale face full of fear.

"I think you have stuff on you that is better than this spear, and I want it. Oh, I want it so fucking bad," the bandit said and immediately dashed forward.

The elder wasn't ready for this change of pace at all. He knew most bandits were trash, but he was hoping for this one to leave him alone after getting the spear.

Unfortunately, he put his hopes on a trash bandit, and that was going to be the reason for his death. The bandit had arrived right next to him with the spear, and at the next moment, he was going to—

Suddenly, a flash of golden light shined as it arched right in front of him between him and the bandit. When the light disappeared, he saw a torrent of blood flow in front of him.

The elder sucked in a deep breath as he heard the spear drop right in front of him, along with a pair of hands that were still grabbing it.

The bandit that was attacking the elder now stood still and looked at the spear and the arm on the floor. It took a moment for it to click before he looked at his own arms and realized they were not there.

That was when the pain arrived.

"AHHHHH!" the bandit shouted as he looked at his amputated limbs of his.

The elder looked in shock. He didn't know what happened, or how the bandit lost his arms, but regardless, he was presented with an opportunity... and he took it.

The elder immediately pried his spear off of the cut arms and thrust it into the skull of the bandit who, for some reason, had his eyes turned white and his whole body limped to the floor.

The spear pierced the skull and came out on the other side. The elder pulled the spear back out and made a downward thrust to pierce the heart of the bandit just to make sure he was dead.

The elder fell on his butt as the realization of the fact that he was just moments away from death dawned on him. His body trembled with the thought that he could've died just now, but didn't.

He then remembered why he was fighting for and immediately stood up and controlled his fear before confronting the family he was protecting behind him.

"Are you guys, okay?" he asked, trying to sound as calm as he could while failing miserably.

"Come, I will take you someplace safe."

Chapter 529 - Another Killing

Alex looked back at the elder who ran away with the family. He then looked at the corpse on the ground that belonged to the bandit.

He was dead.

Alex wasn't fond of killing people, especially the people that were from this world. He had never intentionally killed anyone from this world after all.

The last person he had killed was a player who would be alive on the other side, so he hadn't really thought much about killing at the time.

But someone from this world... taking away their life-Alex was still hesitant about it. That was why he subconsciously went for the hands and not the head of the bandit.

He didn't feel bad about the dead bandit. He deserved what he got. What Alex did feel bad about was that even after all this time, he still didn't have the courage to do it himself.

He wasn't a pacifist who refused to kill. He was just someone who feared the permanence of death he would put someone else under by killing them.

'Now is not the time to worry about this. I will kill if I need to,' he told himself. He looked at the corpse one last time and threw a massive fireball at it, burning it. Then, he flew up.

He was still invisible and being concealed all the way through, no one would really see him at all. So, he could help all he wanted without worry.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense to look for people to help. Immediately, multiple pieces of information about people attacking each other entered his mind. There was too much information coming to him from all directions, and the chaos was hard to understand.

It took him a moment to realize what was happening. He found someone who looked like they needed a lot of help and went there.

Two bandits, both in the True Master realm were fighting against a city guard in the sky. Beneath them was a house burning and the smokes rose up between the fighters.

The guard held a sword in his hand and was cautiously looking at the two bandits, while the bandits held onto a massive shield and a bow.

The guard himself was at True Master realm as well, and maybe even as strong as the bandits if he were fighting them individually.

However, together the bandits were a problem for him. The guard could run away at any time as he had no one to protect at the moment. However, what sort of guard would he be if he ran away from mere bandits.

His pride made him stay there. He charged up an attack and sent it flying towards the bandit with the bow and arrow. The green slash flew through the sky and threatened to cut down the bandit.

However, at the last moment, the other bandit stepped in with the massive shield and blocked the attack without a problem.

"Tsk!" the guard said. There were no trees around him and they were flying in the air, so half of his skills related to woods and trees were practically useless up in the air.

Still, he fought how he could. He charged up another attack and sent it flying out once again.

The bandits were ready for the attack once more with the shield, but just then, Alex arrived at the scene.

He was still invisible and concealed when he appeared, and immediately looked at the bandit with the shield.

His spiritual sea churned as a massive amount of the spiritual energy in his changed into the shape of an invisible fist and flew towards the bandit.

The moment the spiritual fist hit the bandit, his vision went black, and lost all control of his body. He could no longer keep himself afloat and started falling downward.

As he did, the other bandit was left exposed.

"Huh?"

The green slashed slammed onto him, destroying the bow and arrow, and going further to cut into the bandit's body. He had dropped all of his guards with his friend blocking the attacks for him, so when the attack landed, it did the most damage it could.

Blood gushed out of the bandit's chest and felt it hard to breathe. He heard something from in front of him and looked to find a sword right in front of him.

In the next moment, the sword cut his neck and his head fell, along with the rest of the body.

Alex wanted to help the guard a bit, and leave, but when he saw what his help had resulted in it, he was forced to stay.

The bandit that he had used Heaven's impact on, had fallen onto the burning wooden building below them and was still unconscious when he started burning as well.

Alex saw the fire raging harder. He could see the bandit's clothes burn away and his skin start to blacken as the surface charred. Even so, he wasn't waking up.

Alex's mental prowess was so strong that normal cultivators couldn't stop him. They needed either skills or artifacts that stopped mental attacks, neither of which the bandit had.

So, he burned. Alex started feeling horrified. Seeing the slow killing of a bandit wasn't exactly the thing he had hoped to see when he made up his resolutions to kill bandits. He hadn't even intended to kill this one.

And yet, the bandit was dying in such a horrible way. The bandit was nearly halfway burned to death when he started screaming.

The bandit had returned back to consciousness and was crying out in pain. The fire had already destroyed most of him, and he was no longer thinking straight to do what he could do to save himself.

Alex knew the feeling. He had lost his wits many times when the pain was too much to handle. He could only start thinking of something properly when the pain was enough to handle

Alex could hear the torture and pain through the bandit's voice. Did a bandit deserve this pain? Probably. But Alex felt that not even a bandit deserved to die like this.

He walked forward, as quickly as he could, put away the fire around him, and raised his sword. He instinctively looked away when he saw the burnt body of the bandit but forced himself to look back.

Then, he left the sword swing. He didn't attack the torso or the limbs. He went directly for the neck.

The cries of pain stopped as the head rolled a little to the side, the eyelids already burnt to char, but the hollow eyes still looking outwards.

The rest of the body was in no safe condition either. There were ruptures all over the skin, blood flew out of them relentlessly causing the rest of the body to not char all over, and only at a certain parts.

Alex nearly threw up when he saw that. He controlled himself and stood up to walk away. The bandit was dead and he had killed him. However, he couldn't focus on that or give it any attention.

Surprisingly, despite worrying so much, he didn't feel bad after killing someone. Perhaps it was because the person was a bandit, or perhaps because he felt what he was doing was helping rather than hurting.

Or maybe he was just used to killing people after having already killed 3 before now. Nevertheless, he didn't feel any remorse over the death of the bandit.

'Am I growing numb to deaths?' he thought. That must've been the reason, Alex thought.

He left the location, leaving the guard high above confused as to why the bandit that suspiciously fell was now beheaded.

He didn't understand what had happened, but he took the opportunity to go help the others, just as Alex did.

Alex went around the field helping others. Fortunately, there was no longer a situation where he had to kill anyone.

While concealed, all he had to do was use Heaven's Impact, and that would change the trajectory of the battle very quickly. With one side unconscious, it was obvious the other one was going to win.

Heaven's impact didn't do as much damage to True Realm cultivators as it did to Self-tempering realm cultivators before they went through the Mind Tempering realm.

When impacted, they would only lose consciousness for maybe a minute at most. At a higher level, it had a lower impact on the opponent's mind.

Still, a minute of free attacks was enough to change the tide of battles, and that was exactly what Alex was doing right now.

Chapter 530 - The Sect Targeted

Sparks flew in the air.

Two swords clashed against each other in mid-air, away from most of the other fights.

Wen Cheng looked at a middle-aged man of similar height to him, wearing a brown robe. The man had streaks of silver hair on his head that made him stand out quite a lot amidst the other bandits.

Wen Cheng didn't know the man, but he was familiar with the title. He was one of the most ruthless bandits in the east.

The Silver Bandit.

Despite his streaks of silver hair, he didn't have any natural gray hairs at all, as he was still a youth in terms of a cultivator's age. The silver hairs were something he apparently dyed on himself.

Every time he killed someone, he would dye a small patch of his hair. Judging by the amount of silver hair on his head, he had killed hundreds.

Wen Cheng could feel the True King realm cultivation base of the enemy, the same cultivation base as him.

It was going to be difficult. He dashed forward once again and slashed at the Silver bandit.

The silver bandit returned the blow back with his own sword and the sparks flew in the air once again.

Wen Cheng was very concerned about this fight. Fighting against someone so similar in strength to him, there was a definite chance that he could suffer some damage, if not lose.

He had to be extra careful.

'What the hell is going on?' he thought. 'Why are the bandits here?'

He tried making sense of the situation, but this was one of those times when the more you thought the more confusing things became.

He had sent someone to let the Hong Wu sect know of the invasion, but he wasn't sure if they knew about it or not. The messenger he sent could very well be in the midst of a fight just like him.

'Not the time to think,' Wen Cheng told himself and got back to fighting. Red Qi flowed into his sword which he slashed towards the Silver bandit.

The bandit too charged his sword with brown light and slashed towards Wen Cheng.

The two energy clashed in the middle, making a deafening blast between them.

Wen Cheng took the moment to look around him and saw that he was being pushed back towards the sect.

"No, it will be dangerous if the disciples get caught up in the battles," he thought and went on the offensive.

He got close to the bandit and started fighting again. With his Elusive Heavenly sword, he could attack while constantly dodging the attacks of the bandit.

Still, it was hard to consistently dodge someone that was so strong, so he had to back away a few times. Right now, he just wanted to force the bandit to back away as well.

After a minute or so of fighting, the bandit was getting pushed back thanks to Wen Cheng's relentless attack.

The bandit looked around and realized so as well. Then, once again he started attacking Wen Cheng more and more to force himself back.

Wen Cheng's eyes widened when he realized what his foe was doing. 'Shit! Is he intentionally pushing me towards the sect? Is their target the Tiger sect?' he thought.

He sent out the third strike of the Elusive Heavenly sword, which was a bright green slash that went flying towards the enemy.

The slash was much stronger than anything Alex could ever muster up even if he had the same strength as Wen Cheng due to Wen Cheng's superior Wood spiritual root.

At the same time, he took out a talisman and sent a message onto it.

"Everyone, beware! The assailant's target might be the sect. Protect the sect at any cost," he sent the message.

Everyone from elders to disciples received the message. Alex did too.

Alex opened his badge and got confused when he saw that message. 'Why would bandits care about the Tiger sect? Is there something there that they want?' he wondered.

He had been helping the other people all this time and had managed to turn the situation around to favor the guards and the elders.

Now that he was needed less around this place, he decided to go back to the sect to see if it was safe there.

He flew towards the sect and reached the gate. He was about to fly in when he saw some people on the ground.

He flew down and saw that there were elders on the ground. 'Are they dead?' Alex feared and quickly rushed to them.

However, when he reached there, he saw that they were actually just knocked out, at least that was what he thought when he saw the weird smile on their face as they lay there unconscious.

"Elder?" he called out to them but they didn't hear him. He shook them up a little and they finally opened their eyes.

"Wh-what happened?" one of the elders asked.

Alex was fully visible by now, so they looked at him to ask.

"I don't know, Elder. You should tell me instead. The entire city is under attack, what are you guys doing here?" he asked.

"I— I don't know," the elder said. "I remember… I just remember feeling happy, happiness like never before, and the next thing I know, I'm here on the floor."

"Happiness?" Alex asked with a confused look.

"Oh no, someone was here," the elder finally remembered. "We need to go save the disciples. Someone infiltrated the sect."

Alex's heart skipped a beat. He immediately turned around and flew off, no longer caring for the elders as they could take care of themselves.

When he reached the outer sect disciple's houses, he could see a few of them destroyed, along with corpses of those disciples buried in the rubble.

There were at least a dozen such houses destroyed, and he could hear another one being destroyed as well.

Alex turned around and saw a figure in black destroying the houses. When he saw the face, he realized who it was.

"Black Venom!"

Seeing the female bandit called Black Venom killing his fellow disciples, especially ones that could not fight back, Alex's anger reached sky-high.

He lost all sense of reasoning and his will to kill flared up like never before. He immediately went invisible and rushed at her with his sword in hand.

Golden light flared from his sword, along with a pure white outline around it. That was something he was unable to hide at all.

Black Venom was about to destroy another house when she saw something glint from the side of her eyes.

Just as she turned around, the sword came to strike at her neck. With her impressive reflex, Black Venom managed to put up her hands just in time to block the sword.

Still, she felt herself being pushed back a step. Her long sleeves now had cut in them, revealing a bronze-colored bracer on them.

The light had died after she was attacked, so she couldn't see who had attacked her and that only made her more vigilant.

She turned around, her amber eyes glowing in the dark, as she used an eyes skill to look for hidden auras but she couldn't see anything.

Unable to find anyone, she was forced to speak.

"Who is there?"

A beautiful melody escaped her mouth as she asked that question. The melody sounded like she had the voice of gods, and anyone who heard it was blessed by them.

Ecstasy was all Alex could feel as he heard her beautiful voice. A smile rose on his face as he slowly drifted onto the ground and lay there in happiness.

He had never felt happiness like this before.

Alex's two skills he was using right now were the Invisibility skill and the concealment skill. The concealment skill was an immortal grade technique that didn't require him to do anything for it to work.

Rather, he had to do something to stop it from constantly working, which was how he kept it most of the time.
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On the other hand, he had to consciously keep up the invisibility technique. If he ever lost control of himself, the invisibility would also go away.

Which was exactly what happened when he lost himself to euphoria after listening to Black Venom's heavenly voice.

He fell on the ground, with a smile on his face, and his whole body perfectly visible to Black Venom.

Black Venom was initially surprised to see that someone was in fact hiding that even her eye technique couldn't locate.

However, when she saw the person, her vision turned dark as her facial expression changed to one of anger.

She remembered Alex from back then and had been searching for him for a very long time.

"So this is where you were hiding huh? You bastard," she said. "Good! I'm glad I get to kill you by myself."

She took out a weapon from her storage bag, a sickle, and walked towards Alex as fast as she could.

"Now you die," she said and got ready to strike at him. Just then, Alex's face changed from one of ecstasy to one of dread.

His body had once more gotten rid of whatever was causing him to lose consciousness, and he opened his eyes just in time to see the attack coming.

Without even thinking, he suddenly used Heavenly Impact on her. Alex then used that moment to slip away from under her and ran to the side.

Now, it was Black Venom who was on the ground, and he was the one who could attack her while she was down.

Chapter 531 - Keeping The Black Venom In Check

Alex propped up his sword and got ready to strike. He wanted to kill, he needed to kill. He looked around at the death and destruction. Death was what she deserved.

The Black Venom was defenseless right now, and the thought did cross his mind that he couldn't kill someone defenseless, but the situation wasn't what it seemed.

The only reason she was defenseless was that Alex had knocked her out. This was the perfect opportunity.

His sword glowed yellow with a white outline on it, and he rushed forward to kill her.

He went for her neck as that was the only way he had ever known of killing anything, man or animal. The sword made an arc in the air as it fell directly on her defenseless neck.

TWANG!

A rather unfamiliar sound emerged when his sword reached her neck. A white glow appeared around her body as a golden amulet emerged from her chest.

It was well hidden in her clothes, and not easily visible, but when she was in danger, it came out to protect her.

At the same time, the large sound and force woke her up. Her head still hurt from Heaven's impact, but it wasn't so bad that she couldn't handle a mere True Disciple.

Without hesitation, she reached into her storage bag and brought out a mask. Alex's eyes went wide when he saw that. He remembered the mask from the last time.

It was a mask that blocked all mental attacks. Such a precious mask wasn't even available in any stores. If one wanted such things, they would either have to get lucky in an auction house or specifically visit a high-grade artifact maker and ask him to make one.

Alex knew that she had multiple such masks, at least she was able to replace one when the first one broke last time. He couldn't help but wonder how a bandit could ever come across something so good, and so many of them too.

He wondered if she had connections on the outside with people in high places.

"Shit! Not the time to think about that," he thought to himself and immediately used Heaven's Impact once more to knock her out.

Unfortunately, he couldn't match up with the speed of a True Lord realm expert. She had put on her mask as if it was second nature to her, and the spiritual fist dissipated when it hit the mask.

Alex frowned. He was too late.

Without a second thought, he turned invisible and concealed himself. Black Venom looked around, and once again, she couldn't locate him at all.

The both of them had come to a standstill of a sort.

Alex couldn't fight her as she was too strong for him, and the only skill of his that worked on her was blocked by her mask.

As for Black Venom, she couldn't find Alex to kill him like she wanted to, and the only way she could, which was her voice, wouldn't work on him since it was also blocked by her mask.

Neither of the parties could use their mental attacks on each other, and the match had come to a standstill.

"Come out of hiding, you coward!" Black Venom started to taunt Alex. Her voice sounded like that of a man, very hoarse and deep. "You are a weakling if all you can do is hide. And you dare call yourself a man? If you call yourself one, then fight me like one, you bastard!"

She started shouting curses at him that Alex hadn't even heard of before. Alex started thinking about what he should do as well.

"If you won't come out, then I will just do what I came here to do in the first place," she said and walked over to one of the houses that were still fine.

All the houses in the sect had soundproofing done to them, so even if Alex shouted them to run away, they wouldn't be able to. The best he could do was knock on their doors and then explain to them what to do when they came out.

That wasn't an option right now.

His sword glowed goldenly. He arched it over his head from left to right, and the sword left behind 5 phantom images of itself, all glowing golden.

The phantom swords then turned as they faced Black Venom and shot at her.

Black Venom could see the glowing swords, even if she couldn't see Alex himself. So, when the attack landed on her, all she had to do was use her defensive technique, and not a scratch appeared on her.

Alex was just too weak to do anything to her.

Just then, he saw something golden in front of him as well. He just happened to see Black Venom coat her sickle in golden light as well that she shot towards him.

Alex immediately dodged the attack and jumped to the side. He was surprised that she could see him but later realized that she had just attacked where his attack had launched from and gotten lucky.

"I can't stand around. I need to keep moving," he thought.

Black Venom went on to destroy the house, and that was when Alex struck at her once more. This time, it was a golden fist that flew towards her.

The moment he attacked he left the place and watched Black Venom attack where he had been standing before.

His attack was like a child hitting an adult. It barely did anything at all. With the adult fighting back at full strength, the child had no chance of victory.

'I need help,' he thought. "Fuck, where did those elders go?"

He spread his spiritual sense to the furthest he could and saw a bunch of elders sleeping on the ground with happy expressions once again.

"Fuck!" he thought. Black Venom had unintentionally affected them as well when she was talking to Alex. He definitely needed some immediate help right now.

He couldn't leave to wake those elders up as she would destroy the houses and kill the other disciples, so all he could do was call people for help.

Alex's first choice of contact was his master. He sent his master a message saying that there was an intruder in the sect and that he needed help.

Once he sent the message, he went back to stopping Black Venom. After a few seconds, Alex realized that his master was probably out there fighting someone, so he couldn't come even if he wanted to.

So, he messaged his second choice of contact, his Senior brother. He sent the same message as his master, but once again, he got no response.

'Dammit! He must be busy too,' Alex thought. Alex went back to fighting with Black Venom.

It was less of a fight, and more of an annoyance for Black Venom as an invisible fly kept buzzing around her while she tried to do some work.

After a few moments of conflict, Alex pulled out his communication talisman once again. He had called his Master and his senior brother, but neither were responding.

He decided to call the next strongest person for help. So, he called his senior sister. He sent a short message and immediately put it away, and went back to annoying Black Venom.

"God Dammit! You keep buzzing around. Come out and fight me, you bastard!" she shouted. Alex didn't respond. He just had to stall as much as he could until help arrived.

He stopped fighting from away and got close. The moment he was close enough to her, he disappeared. He appeared behind her and slashed at her neck once more.

However, a white barrier appeared once more that blocked the attack with a 'twang' sound like before.

Black Venom's eyes went wide when she realized that she could've died right now if not for her amulet.

Just as she was thinking that another 'twang' sound appeared. She was attacked at her neck once again.

She turned around to look at her assailant and that was when another of the same sound appeared. She was horrified now.

She knew how good her amulet was. It was one of the best artifacts her father had created, but still, it too had a limit of how much damage it could take without reducing in durability.

She couldn't have it taking so much damage that it became completely useless or worse was destroyed. She couldn't have it be that, as it was one of the only things her father had left her with when he died.

This was what she used to remember him.

She stopped targeting the houses and flew up. When she did, she realized that the attacks stopped as well.

Alex could no longer teleport around now that she was in the sky.

Black Venom waited for another attack to appear, but it didn't. She looked around carefully for any disturbances on the ground or in the air, but she noticed nothing.

"What? Are you done? You got scared that you can't beat me? Then come out and let me kill you!" her hoarse voice rang throughout the sect.

She got no response, so she decided to bait him out. "Very well, if you won't' come out, then say goodbye to your fellow disciples," she shouted and charged up her sickle in yellow light.

As soon as the light peaked in maximum brightness, she attacked. However, at the same time, a sword appeared in front of her and struck her sickle right towards the end of its swing.

The flying slash of the sickle's path was changed just enough that it struck the empty land at the side of the house and not the house itself.

Alex had managed to save his fellow disciples.. However, as a result, he had come right in front of the enemy.

Chapter 532 - Qi Sense

Alex wanted to fly away, as he was still invisible and concealed, and if he got far away, he could escape from her.

However, he was afraid that she would once again start to attack the houses when he tried to run away.

Just as he was thinking that he felt something pass around him and wrap him up.

"I finally found you, you bastard," she shouted.

Alex's heart skipped a beat when he realized what had just happened. He immediately turned around to run away, but the invisible force wrapping around him solidified into something stronger and stopped him from doing anything.

He was trapped.

Black Venom turned towards him with a face full of hatred. Her eyes couldn't hold still as they drifted slightly on his position as there was nothing in the air for her eyes to lock onto, but with her Qi sense, she could tell that Alex was there.

Qi Sense.

That was something Alex had never bothered learning about when he reached the True realm. To normal cultivators, learning Qi sense was something that was pretty mandatory to do if they wanted to get better at fighting or producing stuff.

But, for someone like Alex who had spiritual sense, Qi sense was pretty much useless. After all, Qi sense was nothing but a worse mimicry of Spiritual sense.

True realm cultivators were more sensitive to changes in their Qi compared to self-tempering cultivators. So, when they sent out their Qi in a massive volume, they could feel the physical objects based on the QI that they displaced.

It helped them in situations when vision wasn't really helpful. That was Qi sense.

Qi sense was only useful in situations when the thing you wanted to locate or keep track of was a small distance away from you. For example, Alchemists used Qi sense to keep track of the ingredients in the cauldron, which was much easier to do than normal Qi manipulation.

Since Alex had been using ranged attacks for the majority of the fight, Black Venom couldn't locate him at all. However, now that he was right in front of her Qi sense finally came in handy.

Alex struggled to move in mid-air, trying to fly off, but he could feel the Qi wrapped around his torso that stopped him from doing that.

Fortunately, despite the difference in cultivation, Black Venom couldn't suppress Alex as she did a long time ago. Unlike last time, Alex could move his hands and feet, however, that didn't help him a lot right now.

Black Venom held her sickle in reverse as it started glowing in yellow light. Alex had realized by now from the lack of other colors that Black Venom probably had a Superior Metal Spirit root.

"Die!" she swung the blade as fast as she could and struck at Alex.

Alex wasted no time and used every single skill he knew that could help him right now. A barrier of multicolored lights appeared in front of him to defend him. His skin shined with slight brown light and was full of marble patterns on him, making him look like jade.

At the same time, Golden lights appeared on his hands as well as his sword which he struck at the sickle as hard as he could.

At the same time, he made full use of his Supreme Metal spirit roots to push away the energy in her sickle as much as he could.

He knew that he couldn't control metal energy that belonged to someone else, but he was desperate and needed to try it in this situation.

A slight tinge of happiness arose in his heart when he realized that he could in fact push some of the stray metal energy around her sickle to fight back with the other energy.

It may be stopped some 5 percent of the total damage, but that too was a big enough number to make some difference right now.

At the same time, his Heaven's Five barriers too blocked some of the energy coming towards him.

Just then his sword struck her sickle with full force, and he expected the sword to stop some of the damage too, however, he misunderstood just how much force she was carrying.

The sword rebounded when it hit the sickle and flew back towards him. It came back to hit him with additional force, destroying the armor he wore inside. it then went on and destroyed his right collar bone as well as a few ribs.

Neither his Jade Skin technique nor his exceptionally strong skin was able to stop him from taking the damage from his own sword. The rest of the force behind his own attack at him made him fly backward towards the ground.

At the last moment, just before he was thrown back too far away, the sickle struck him. He was far enough back that his body was safe from the sickle, but his elbows that were extended from him hitting himself in the chest were not.

The sickle hit his left arm, and in a single swing, sliced it in half. Alex struck the ground with a very loud thud and sent rocks flying everywhere.

He coughed up blood as it started leaking from his mouth, his chest and now the cut-off left arm. Alex's vision darkened as he could barely see anything from all the pain. He was also starting to feel lightheaded from blood loss.

'I need to… I need to do something,' he thought with what little consciousness he had left.

He wheezed loudly trying to take a breath, but he couldn't. It turned out that his lungs had also been pierced with his own sword and was now starting to get filled with his own blood.

It was also starting to fill up his other lung. He needed to do something quickly, or he would die for certain.

He sent out his spiritual sense into his robes to locate his storage bags so he could find a healing pill from there.

Just as he did, his vision returned slightly, just enough for him to notice Black Venom drifting towards him.

"So you are still alive huh?" she asked. "However, it won't be for long."

She slashed down with her sickle, bothering to use no skill at all, and struck at Alex.

Alex looked at the falling sickle with terror in his eyes. This was it. He was going to die.

He closed his eyes, bracing for the pain.

CLANG

Alex felt something sharp cut his cheeks and some other things rain down on him as well. However, none of them felt like it was an attack belonging to that of a True Lord expert.

He opened his eyes and saw a familiar face standing in front of him. The person had serious eyes with slight hints of anger in them. Alex tilted his head to the right to see Black Venom somewhere a bit far away, looking at the new figure in shock.

"Oh no! Junior brother," a voice came from someone close by. Luo Mei ran up to him and looked down to see him in such a horrible situation.

She looked down to see his bloody wounds and missing limb and was immediately horrified.

Alex however felt relief at her sight and the other person in front of him. Finally, at least one of the person he called for had arrived.

He took the opportunity to pull out a pill from his storage bag and ate it. It was difficult swallowing when all his body wanted to do was breathe, but Alex controlled himself for long enough to swallow it.

Immediately the energy from the pill started spreading from his stomach and reached to the different locations of his body. His lung which was punctured was healed. His bones which were shattered, rejoined.

Even the cuts on his cheeks and other various scratches all over his body were healed. However, his left arm that was sliced off wasn't healed at all.

The pill he had just eaten could heal pretty much anything in his body, but limbs that were torn off were beyond it. It was beyond any of the recipes to true pills he knew.

In fact, at the moment, the pill he knew that could help him was a Saint-ranked pill, and that was impossible for him to obtain.

"Shit!" he thought. Once the pain was gone, and the need to breathe started reaching the peak, he stood up and forced his lungs to push out all the blood that was inside of it.

Black Venom looked cautiously at the new arrivals. From what she could tell, the two that had just arrived had a cultivation base of the Mind Tempering realm. However, she couldn't tell if that was correct or not.

After all, the young man that had attacked her had strength far beyond that of what a Mind Tempering realm should have.

In fact, the strength he put out could rival that of True Disciple master. She didn't know if he was hiding his cultivation base or what, so she decided to stay back for now.

She watched Alex stand up and was shocked. 'How did he heal so fast?' she wondered. She didn't see anyone of them offering him a pill, so she was very confused.

Alex, which his arm still dripping blood, looked at the man next to him and bowed a little. "Thank you for saving me, brother Yuhan. If you hadn't arrived on time, I would've died for sure," he said.

"If I had known something like this was happening, I would've come sooner, brother Ning," Du Yuhan answered while maintaining his serious face.

"However, I don't know if my coming here will be of much help to you.. After all, I don't think I have the strength to fight against a True Lord expert."

Chapter 533 - Triple-Defense

"You don't have to worry about beating her," Alex said. "There are a few elders there. All we have to do is hold out until they wake back up."

Du Yuhan looked to the right and saw that there were in fact some yellow-robed figures on the ground that were barely visible in what little light there was.

"What's wrong with them?" Luo Mei asked as she got close. She worriedly looked at Alex's arm and saw that his left elbow had turned into a stub. He would now forever be missing an arm.

She then looked around at the destruction and the deaths of the many disciples, and she too started feeling the rage.

"They are sleeping," he said. "Her voice puts them in a sort of hypnosis where all they can feel is happiness and lose their mind in it."

Du Yuhan's face got a little confused. "Her voice? Is it a sort of skill?" he asked.

"I don't think so," Alex said. "She doesn't seem to have any control, so I would say it's more of a unique body constitution she was born with. As long as she wears the mask, she won't be able to hypnotize us, but... at True Lord realm, I doubt that would be necessary."

"Why isn't she taking off her mask then? Won't that make it easier for her?" Du Yuhan asked with a confused face.

"Because if she does, she will be the one that loses the match," Alex said. Alex looked down at his leg to search for his sword. That was when he found it still attached to the chopped-off arm.

"Are you okay? Does it hurt?" Luo Mei asked from behind.

"No, it doesn't hurt," Alex replied, but he only answered the second half of the question as he too was unsure about that first half.

Was he okay? He had just lost his arm, something that would normally be considered extremely important to anyone. However, it was just a game. Losing an arm meant nothing really. But was it really that simple though?

He really wasn't sure what to think right now. He looked for answers deep within him, but they just weren't there.

He took the left arm and sighed when he realized there was no use of it anymore. He had spent so much resources and time improving his body, and it got cut just like that.

The higher realm cultivators truly were very scary.

He then looked at his stub and sighed in relief when he saw that it was cut beneath the beast space where Pearl used to stay.

'Thank god!' he thought. If that part of his arm had been lost, he would definitely have lost his bond with Pearl.

He quickly looked towards Black Venom, wondering why she hadn't been attacking all this time. When he did, he stared right into her amber eyes that were very confused at the situation.

She was still wary, but her sickle was in her hand, ready for combat at any moment.

"Should we attack?" Du Yuhan asked.

"I don't think we have a chance of victory if we do," Alex said. "So, it's better to wait for now. Let's see how long we can stall."

It turned out, it wasn't very long. Just half a minute later, Black Venom started cursing, asking who the hell the new arrivals were.

After not getting any answer from them, she got angry. Her sickle glowed bright yellow as she got ready to attack.

"Sister, you should leave from this place," Alex said.

"I'm not leaving," she said.

"Sister, you have no chance of survival, please just leave," Alex said, but Luo Mei didn't listen. She stubbornly stayed as her rage was making her not think straight. She wanted revenge and she wanted it now. That only made Alex more anxious about the situation.

Black Venom sent off an attack, and immediately Alex put out all the defenses he could. Du Yuhan and Luo Mei wasted no time and put up their own barriers as well.

It was like adding another layer of thin glass in front of an oncoming cannon, but that thin glass was better than nothing.

They could've easily dodged the incoming attack. However, if they did, the house behind them would be destroyed and the disciples in them would then die. They didn't want to let that happen.

Alex marbled his skin and used everything he could to push off the stray metal energy back. Since the slash was flying through the air, rather than being attached to a weapon, there was a lot more stray energy than last time which helped him quite a bit.

Alex brought forth his sword and used it to strike at it once again. Only, this time he used the flat side of it since he didn't want the blade to strike him again.

Alex wasn't sure if he could stop the attack at all with just one hand, but he had to try.

Just then, he saw something white glow from right next to him. Even without looking, he could tell that Du Yuhan was going to attack as well.

Motes of white light circled around him before coming to his sword and glowing it fully white.

On the other side, Luo Mei was using some sort of water skill.

When the yellow slash appeared next to them, all 3 of them launched their attack at the same time as well.

A massive explosion rang out from where they struck the slash. All 3 of them were sent crashing into the buildings behind them.

Alex took the brunt of the damage as he was the closest to them, but thanks to that the other two were relatively safe.

Alex's whole body hurt as he stood up from the rubble. The disciples inside the house looked at him with a terrified face after seeing him burst in.

They had no idea what was going on outside, so this was way too sudden for them.

Alex checked himself and found that his knee was dislocated. He held the sword with his hurting palm and used the hilt of it to hammer the knee back to its place.

He wobbled a little when he finally fixed it and stood up. He hurriedly walked out to check Du Yuhan and his sister, but it seemed that they were fine as well.

"Not dead yet, huh? I thought you new brats might have been a hidden genius or something. Looks like you are just slightly stronger than your peers, not enough to trouble me at all," Black Venom said. Her sickle glowed yellow once again.

Alex felt his heart skip a beat when he realized that they were spread too far apart. They wouldn't get back together in time to protect themselves if Black Venom decided to target any of the three.

"Oh no!" Alex thought. He was in the middle so he had to run towards someone. Du Yuhan was to his left and Luo Mei to his right.

Before he could even make a choice, Du Yuhan shouted at him. "Save her," he said.

Alex lost all hesitation at that moment and ran towards his sister. He didn't care about Du Yuhan, he couldn't. He had his priorities... and so did Du Yuhan.

However, Black Venom's target was never the two anyway. Since the beginning, it had always been Alex.

When she saw him running towards Luo Mei, she realized that he cared about her and was going to protect her.

So, she decided to kill both of them at once. She brought up her sickle and threw the attack.

Another golden slash flew through the air, targetting both Alex and Luo Mei. Both of them were a bit hurt from the last attack so they couldn't muster up their full strength.

Still, they did their best to give it all they had to stop the attack.

Alex could feel that this attack was way too strong, and doubted if he could stop it at all. Still, he had to give it his all, after all, once more there were disciples behind them they had to protect.

He put all his strength into his sword and sent out an attack at the incoming slash. His attack disappeared like snow in a raging fire. It was useless. He was going to die.

The barriers they had put up crumbled like it was nothing and the slash came flying towards them, barely losing any strength at all.

Just then, something fell from the sky at blisteringly fast speed and crashed in front of the two of them.

The force of the slash striking whatever had dropped created a big enough shockwave that the two of them were sent flying back, but this time they didn't suffer any damage at all.

Alex immediately stood up to look at what had appeared in front of them and saw the backside of a shield.

"I'm sorry I arrived so late," A voice came from high above as the figure slowly drifted down. "I was busy dealing with the bandits outside, so I couldn't read your message soon enough."

The figure looked around the sect's destruction with a hint of sadness behind his eyes. "If I did, I probably would've been able to save some of them," he said.

Alex and Luo Mei's eyes started to shine as happiness and relief returned back to them.

"Are you guys alright?" the figure finally landed and brought out his shield from the ground before turning towards the two of them.

"Senior brother!" the two of them shouted at the same time.. Liu Xun had arrived just in time to save his Junior disciple siblings.

Chapter 534 - Liu Xun VS Black Venom

Liu Xun looked around at the destruction of the sect. The dead disciples, the broken buildings, his own junior brother in such a horrible condition.

Rage built up inside him as his face changed pretty quickly.

"I will kill you!" he turned to look at Black Venom. A sword appeared in his hand, bloody and chipped at parts from the fight he had before coming here.

He held the shield back up. The shield was made up of wood with metal on the outer edge as well as two strips of metal making a + sign in the middle.

The shield itself was a kite-shield with 3 pointy edges on the top and 1 at the bottom. The wood was colored red, and the metal, silver.

Liu Xun got into a stance with his shield and sword and dashed into the fight.

Black Venom wasn't expecting a newcomer, and even less she was expecting him to attack her the moment he arrived.

She tried to back away, but suddenly vines grew from Liu Xun's shield that wrapped around her, keeping her from moving away.

She immediately used her sickle to cut off the vines and barely made an escape when Liu Xun's sword reached her.

She retaliated by jumping forward at him and struck with a golden sickle, but Liu Xun put up his shield that blocked the attack.

Liu Xun was pushed back a few steps but he took no damage. He pushed himself forward once more and slashed towards her again.

Black Venom couldn't run away in time, so he used her bracers to protect herself. The sword landed directly on the bracers, and she was sent back a dozen or so meters.

Her eyes narrowed when she realized that she wasn't taking much damage. Finally, she focused on the man attacking her and realized that he was weak. Much weaker than him.

While she was in the 4th True Lord realm, the man was only around the 6th realm of the True Master realm. There was no way he could ever deal enough damage to her unless she was careless.

She looked behind him and noticed only 2 of the 3 youngsters. One of them was gone. Alex was missing.

'Dammit,' she thought. She was angry that she didn't get to kill Alex like she had wanted to.

She used a movement technique and immediately sped up. Liu Xun did the same. The violent clashes between the two were sending shockwaves all around them.

Luo Mei was worried for her senior brother, while Du Yuhan was just engrossed in the fight. Liu Xun was someone he had never seen give his all in fights. Even during the challenges when he was still a disciple many years ago, Du Yuhan remembered him having it easy for the fights.

Now, watching him finally bring out his fullest, he could see just how good he was at battle.

Liu Xun weaved left and right. The Elusive Heavenly Sword technique that he had learned as well as helped him dodge most of the simple attacks. The stronger ones, he simply used his shield to block.

Black Venom was starting to lose her mind with anger watching the way Liu Xun fought. She was so much stronger than him, and yet she could do nothing to him.

She could also tell that on a technical level, his skills were far better than her own. After all, she was never a fighter, nor was she trained as one.

But the anger only grew and she started attacking recklessly. She nearly took damage a few times even. That only served to get her more reckless.

Her fit of anger disappeared when she heard a 'twang' noise from behind her. 'That bastard,' she thought and turned around to grab Alex. However, the person who had attacked her was someone else.

She didn't recognize the person at all, nor did she have the time to since behind the man were other men, all running towards her.

Her heart skipped a beat and she immediately flew away from the fight. She instinctively reached to grab her mask on her face but stopped.

'That bastard is still hiding around somewhere,' she thought. She deliberated for a moment, but now was not the time for that. There were too many opponents for her to remain safe.

She immediately opened her mask and shouted, "GET AWAY!"

It wasn't a normal shout since the sound was quite extreme. She was definitely using a skill to amplify her voice.

Alex wanted to launch his own attack at her, but she had been careful. After she spoke, she immediately put her mask back on, not letting the Heaven's Impact that Alex did launch at her affect her.

Everyone around her fell unconscious at the same time, with faces of bliss on them. She wanted to kill them right away, now that they were all down.

However, when she started getting close, she could see 2 of the bodies start moving a little.

Alex was the first to open his eyes and look towards her. Seeing that others would be waking up at any moment as well, Black Venom decided to leave.

Alex walked her leave without a way to stop.

A few moments after she left, Liu Xun got up as well. He looked around but was unable to find her.

"She's gone, brother," Alex said. "She ran away."

"Dammit!" Liu Xun shouted. "I couldn't kill her at all."

"It's okay... for now. At least we managed to protect the others," Alex said as he looked back. Some of the houses had been destroyed with quite a few disciples dead, but at least they had been able to save a lot of them.

Alex curiously turned around at Liu Xun and asked, "do you have a mental protection artifact on you?"

"Hm, yes," Liu Xun said as he brought out a necklace from his robe. "Why?"

"Her voice is a mental attack. I was just surprised to see you wake up so fast after she knocked you out," Alex said.

"You woke up sooner than me though," he said and looked towards Alex's arm. "Will you be alright?"

Alex grabbed his left arm and put on a solemn face. "I will be alright," he said.

Liu Xun then turned around at the elders who were asleep again. "Good thinking waking them. While I could've held her back for a while, eventually, I would have ended up losing due to me not having more Qi than her," he said.

"I will go wake them up. The city should still be in danger," Alex said, and Liu Xun nodded.

After the elders woke up, they all went out back to fight. Alex helped Luo Mei and Du Yuhan wake up and sent them to take care of the disciples.

Soon enough, they were knocking on every door, making the disciple leave towards the back of the mountain to hide them.

Alex on the other hand didn't stay with them. He too wanted to go help out in the city.. He didn't know how much help he would be with a single arm, but he would give it his all to protect the sect and the city.

Chapter 535 - Black Venom Defeated?

Fu Wen took a few minutes, but he managed to kill off a leader of a bandit group called the Yellow Devils. The leader was in the early True King realm, but Fu Wen was still able to kill him.

He flew down from the sky towards the many soldiers of his that were still fighting, and shouted, "Protect the mortals. That's your primary task. Protect them however you can."

"Yes, Lord," the soldiers shouted. Fu Wen then flew over to where Mo An, his wife was fighting and helped her defeat the bandit too.

"Have you figured out why they are attacking us yet?" she asked, wiping the blood off of her face.

"No, maybe the sect leaders had more luck," he said. Mo An nodded. Then, the two of them flew off to help the others, while trying to find answers to the reason behind this disaster.

* * * * * * *

Wen Cheng was struggling to win his fight against the Silver bandit, but so was the Silver bandit. Neither of them could get an upper hand at each other, nor could escape away either.

The Silver bandit couldn't leave because he was being attacked by Wen Cheng relentlessly, and Wen Cheng couldn't leave because he was sure that if he left, the Silver bandit would go attack the sect.

Wen Cheng had tried taunting the Silver bandit into explaining their motive, no matter how much he was taunted, the Silver bandit just smiled and said nothing.

The battle was going nowhere, and Wen Cheng was still worried about that message he had received from Alex.

'They have already reached the sect. What the hell am I still doing here? I need to go save them,' he thought. But he couldn't move. The Silver bandit wouldn't let him either.

Their bout lasted longer than it was meant to. Wen Cheng was starting to get frustrated from the battle. His worries reached high enough that his will to kill the bandit started increasing in intensity as well.

They clashed and clashed and clashed. The Silver bandit was smiling during the entire time, but slowly, his smiles started to fade away.

'He's getting stronger somehow,' he thought. The clashes were becoming more violent and he was being forced backward a lot.

He was surprised and couldn't help but wonder what was happening. During one of the clashes, he noticed something.

Every once in a while, a flash of white light would shine from the otherwise red or green flashes of Wen Cheng's sword.

"No way," the Silver bandit got scared. "How did he learn it? Dammit, did I help him hone it?"

Wen Cheng himself was surprised. He thought he didn't have talent. He thought he would never be able to. He was sure that he had already peaked in cultivation and there was no way for him to improve.

But here it was. A white outline in his otherwise mundane-looking sword. Wen Cheng gave a bright smile.

He had acquired Sword Intent.

In the midst of battle, in the midst of danger, in the midst of his will to go protect others, and in the midst of his will to kill the one standing between him and his sect, he had manifested Sword Intent.

The Silver bandit watched in horror. Sword Intent wasn't easy to come by. Even if it was in the early stage, it would still make Wen Cheng's attacks stronger by at least a realm. That alone would be enough to defeat him, which would probably lead to his death.

"No, I can't die here. Screw this mission," the Silver bandit cried out and tried to run away. But suddenly, in his moment of carelessness, he was attacked from the side.

Something flew right at him and wrapped around him. Wen Cheng was surprised and got ready to fight back, but when he saw what it was, he calmed down.

He recognized the beast that was constricting the Silver bandit's movements.

"Now you die, bandit," Wen Cheng said. In an instant, a very intense green slash left his sword as it flew towards the Silver bandit.

"No! Let me go! Let me—"

The Silver bandit's jaw dropped, while whatever was supposed to be above it was no longer there.

Half of the bandit's head, along with his signature hair fell off from the sky. The constrictions around the bandit loosened, and his body fell from the sky.

Wen Cheng took quick breaths to calm himself and looked at the beast in front of him with a smile. "So she finally decided to come out, huh?"

* * * * * * *

Black Venom flew away as far as she could away from the sect. "Dammit!" she shouted out loud. "How the hell is there someone who can deal so much mental damage while at the same time not taking much in return? Does he have some supreme artifacts as well?"

She was speaking out loud, and along the way, everyone who tried to come to fight her kept on falling to the ground before they could even reach her.

Her mask was off her face as she no longer needed it anymore. Rather, she needed her voice right now to put everyone in a lull while she ran away.

'He's probably not chasing me right now. I should be able to make it out,' she thought.

She kept flying, moving towards the western side of the city. She had already seen corpses of her men and felt saddened about it, but her survival was more important than any of the others.

"Move away," she shouted at the people that came to attack her. Without exception, all of them fell to the ground with a large thud.

She flew some more and closer to the city walls when she saw practically no light coming from the city below her.

Something felt wrong. Something was missing. Her eyes widened when she realized what it was. "The fire... it's all gone?" she asked herself in surprise.

She hadn't expected them to put out all the fires already. 'What happened to the fighting. Did they win?' she thought.

She knew she was getting close to the wall as the chillness in the air increased. It was only this city that was warm, while the rest of the empire was living in winter.

She didn't understand why not that she cared. She smiled as the air got chillier. The freedom was right around the corner.

However, the more she moved, the more chilly it got. It was getting to the point where it was abnormally cold.

Still, she flew, not minding the cold. Up ahead, she saw a woman flying in the air, alone.

"Move, you bitch!" Black Venom shouted.

The woman turned her head towards her. Once she saw her, she then turned her whole body towards her.

"What?" Black Venom looked at her with a confused expression. "Move!" she shouted once more. That only served to make the woman angrier.

'What's going on?' Black Venom got worried. She instinctively put her hand on her face to check if the mask was perhaps still there. It wasn't.

The green-robed woman moved forward towards her.

"Get away from me!" Black Venom shouted. She couldn't tell how strong the woman was. For some reason, the person standing in front of her wasn't giving auras that a normal cultivator would.

"I SAID MOVE!" she shouted, but that did nothing to the woman. Black Venom was scared at the prospect of the woman perhaps being stronger than her.

Immediately, she brought out her sickle which started glowing yellow without a single second wasted.

"DIE!" she shouted and sent a slash flying towards the woman. However, something incredible happened.

When the slash got closer to the woman, it started slowing down. It got slower and slower, while at the same time getting dimmer and dimmer. In the end, right before it reached the woman, it vanished as it had never existed before.

"What?" Black Venom looked in horror. She didn't understand what happened. She sent another slash flying and the same thing happened once again.

"Wh-what's going on?" she freaked out.

Ma Rong was looking at Black Venom with both a curious as well as an angry face. She was angry not because of the words she had said, but rather the clothes she wore.

She was a bandit, and she deserved to be killed. As for curiosity, it stemmed from whatever mental attack she had been doing for the last couple of times. It was similar, yet more frequent than Alex's Heaven's Impact. This made her really surprised.

Still, as a bandit, Ma Rong would rather kill her than have her curiosity fulfilled.

Black Venom dashed at her with her sickle in hand and directly hit Ma Rong with the weapon.

However, when it got close to Ma Rong, the color faded, and frost started appearing on the sickle. As she got closer, Black Venom could feel her momentum fade as well.

Her body grew stiffer and the cold was getting to her. When she did reach close to Ma Rong, she was completely frozen.

Without even doing anything, Ma Rong had defeated her. Black Venom tried to move, but her body wouldn't listen to her. It remained where it was, waiting for Ma Rong to kill her.

"I was quite interested in learning how your mental attacks work, but unfortunately, you will have to die," Ma Rong said as she brought out a sword of her own and got ready to slash at Black Venom.

Black Venom could see her death approaching, but just then someone else appeared.

"Wait, don't kill her."

Chapter 536 - Hei Dan

Ma Rong heard the cry to not kill, but her sword didn't stop. It directly fell on Black Venom's neck.

A bright white light appeared from her neck as the amulet sprung forth to stop Ma Rong's attack. But even that was unable to stop Ma Rong.

The white light dimmed and the barrier shattered. The amulet itself cracked into pieces, unable to block Ma Rong's attack at all. However, what it did manage to do was deviate Ma Rong's sword just slightly that it changed direction.

Ma Rong's sword slanted upward and cut through Black Venom's cheeks while cutting her left eye, leaving a massive wound on the left side of her face.

Black Venom groaned in pain as she wasn't even able to move her mouth to speak with Ma Rong's aura freezing her in place. The pain was too much for her to handle.

Not only had she just lost an eye, she had also lost one of the objects that she used to remember her father with. Both the physical and the emotional hurt was bearing down on her as she lost all hope for life

Ma Rong was slightly surprised to see that her attack was blocked by the amulet. But now that it was destroyed, she would be able to kill her.

Ma Rong brought back her sword and slashed it again.

Just then, Alex appeared right in front of Ma Rong. "Master, stop!" he shouted.

Ma Rong's heart skipped a beat as the sword stopped mere inches away from his throat.

Alex breathed heavily, both from the fear of nearly dying and the aura Ma Rong was giving off at the moment.

"What the hell are you doing?" Ma Rong shouted. She asked with fury in her eyes. Alex could feel the fury and be even somewhat scared deep inside.

"Don't kill her master," Alex said.

Ma Rong frowned when she heard that. "Why are you protecting a bandit?" Ma Rong asked. She angrily looked at Alex, wondering if he was a fake, but the complete lack of aura he gave off was impossible to hide.

She was just wondering why he was doing that when she saw his left arm. Her eyes went wide as she gasped in shock.

"Where is your arm?" she shouted.

Alex held his left arm and sighed. "She cut it off," Alex said, pointing behind him.

Ma Rong's fury burned hotter than the sun itself. "You dare hurt my disciple!!" she shouted. "Move away, I will kill this bitch."

"No, master. We need her," Alex said. "She's no ordinary bandit. She's a leader of one of the groups. She's Black Venom."

Ma Rong's anger was still high, but she also felt surprised. "She's… the one that killed off Wan Li's parents?" Ma Rong asked.

"I'm afraid so," Alex said. "But let's not talk about that for now, master. We don't know why the bandits are attacking the city, and since she is a leader, I thought she might have some answers."

"Trust me, master. I wouldn't have suggested this if I didn't see you handle her so easily," Alex said.

Ma Rong heaved heavily and tried to calm down. She was still angry about her disciple's cut arm, but the information was more important right now.

Ma Rong suddenly looked to the side and a green snake flew up to her. "You're back, little green," she said as the snake disappeared onto her beast space in her neck.

Wen Cheng flew up close to her, following the green snake that came to its master.

"Thanks for sending the snake to me. I probably couldn't have killed the Silver bandit if not for that," Wen Cheng said.

Black Venom's eyes went wide when she heard that. The Silver bandit was stronger than her, and even he was dead.

"What are you doing here with this bandit?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Trying to find out the reason behind this whole thing," Ma Rong said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a pill.

Alex looked at it and recognized it. It had been a long time since he had seen it again.

"The Truth-Seeking pill?" he asked.

"Yes," Ma Rong said. "Only then will we know she is truly speaking the truth." Ma Rong got close and fed Black Venom the pill.

Black Venom couldn't resist getting fed and had to eat it despite not wanting to.

Alex turned towards Wen Cheng and said, "You should leave master. Once she starts speaking, we will start falling out the air like flies."

"No you won't," Ma Rong said, chilly white mist appearing from her arms around Black Venom's face. "Her mental attacks won't land on you now."

"Let's start."

* * * * * *

Hei Dan came from a small family in the town of Lionspring. It was a small town that barely ever appeared on the official maps of the Crimson Empire.

It was located in the northwest region of the empire, never close enough to any of the big cities.

COUGH! COUGH!

A man violently coughed from a room filled with metals and leather and other various materials. There was a furnace in front of him, one that forever burned with very hot fire.

The man seemed to be in his 40s but was somewhat ill. He coughed for a while and only stopped when the blood in his lungs was coughed out.

He watched the blood on his hand, sighed, and got back to work.

"Father?" Hei Dan was barely 14 years old at that moment. She walked into the workshop, as always wearing a simple black mask on her face.

"What are you doing father?" she asked with worry in her amber eyes. "I told you, you are sick. Please don't work on these useless artifacts, you can't even sell them," she said.

In front of her, her father was in the midst of making some sort of necklace.

The man coughed once again and looked back at his daughter's face with a small smile.

"I'm not making these to sell, my gem. I'm making these for you," he said. He brought out bronze-colored bracers and handed them to her.

"How is it? It's not my best work, but definitely high above," he said as he started to cough once more.

"It's good, father. But you need to stop," Hei Dan said with tears forming in her eyes. Her father coughed once more and blood pooled in his hands again.

Hei Dan felt a chill go down her spine when she saw that. "Father, please stop!" she said. "If you won't, I will go ahead and accept his offer."

"NO YOU WON'T!" her father violently turned around. "I will not let that bastard lay a single hand on my daughter. I would rather kill him myself before he can have you."

"Then please, stop working on these, and take care of your health father," Hei Dan begged.

The Hei family was a long lineage of artifact crafters. They weren't the best at it, but they could get by fine with the artifacts they learned to make.

Hei Dan's father was the most genius artifact crafter that had yet been born to the family. However, due to the lack of resources, as well as just being in a poor town, he could never learn much in his early years.

So, throughout his life, he had to struggle by himself to even get by daily. Fortunately, what he made sold well in the town, and he had a good business going.

He fell in love with a girl and had a child. However, not long after Hei Dan was born, her mother passed away.

It didn't take long for her father to know that she was special. Every time she cried as an infant, her father would have a headache.

As she got bigger, the headaches became more potent. So, her father used what resources he had left to try and refine something that could help her.

It took him a few years, but he managed to come up with a blueprint for a mask-type artifact that blocked mental attacks on his own.

He crafted multiple of those artifacts and made Hei Dan wear them since then. As such, almost no one in the town had ever seen Hei Dan's face.

She and her father had lied about the mask, saying she was disfigured behind the mask due to an accident, and while many accepted that reasoning, there were a few that didn't.

The town lord's son, who was in his early 20s, could see her every day in her shop, and despite the mask, he was attracted to her.

He believed, based on her body and her eyes, that the father-daughter duo was spreading lies and telling them she was ugly, when in fact, she was really pretty.

The son proposed to her right away in her shop one day, and when she refused him using the excuse that she was ugly and not fit to be married to him, he had left saying, "Your lies won't work on me. I know you are very beautiful behind the mask. I will wait for you to accept my offer."

When her father learned about this, he himself went to the town lord's manor to refuse the proposal. Not only did he not want her daughter to marry this bastard whose reputation was one of the worst, but there also had an age gap of nearly 10 years.

When the son heard all of this, he had made the guards beat him up, resulting in his current illness.

The town lord had then made the town not interact with them, and forced the Hei family to have no income. They also were made to not help them at all.

Fearing the town lord's fury, the town had started to shun the father and daughter since that day.

The town lord had also told the guards to not let them leave the city. Unless they accepted the marriage proposal, her father would likely die from his injuries.

Hei Dan was worried about her father's injuries. Every day, it was getting worse, and he was getting no medicine.

Despite being in the True realms, her father was getting closer and closer to dying.

"Leave me be, my gem. Go tend to the shop for now. Maybe someone will come," her father said.

Seeing her stubborn father, Hei Dan sighed. "Please don't overexert yourself, father," she said and left the workspace.

She walked to the front of the house where the shop was and went in, waiting for people to come to buy something, knowing on the inside that no one would.

As if to betray her expectations, someone finally arrived at her shop, after nearly 2 months.

"Welc—" her words stopped when she saw the customer.

"Since you refuse to come to me by yourself, I decided to come to you.." The town lord's son had arrived in front of her once again.

Chapter 537 - Hei Dan (2)

Hei Dan feared the men in front of her. She was only at Muscle tempering realm at the moment, so even if it was the trash son of the town lord, he could easily overpower her.

"Young lord, why are you here?" she asked with a serious face.

The lord's son looked at her mask and could see the eyes behind them, making him elate at the prospect that he was likely going to take her as his wife today.

He put on the most amiable smile he could, which still made him look like a creep, and said, "I came here for you, of course. I still haven't gotten your answer."

Hei Dan was starting to get angry just seeing his face. This was the man who got her family to where they were now, the person who hurt her father, the reason why her father couldn't seek medical treatment.

Feeling emerged deep inside of her that she herself didn't know she had. The anger, the rage, all of it was telling her to just kill the man standing in front of her.

However, when she saw the two guards behind him in bulky armor with spears on their hands and a wildly stronger cultivation base, she lost all courage to do so.

"Young lord, I told you. I am ugly behind this mask. You do not want me," Hei Dan said. Her voice was particularly loud in the hope to gather the people in the town so that the lord's son couldn't do something publically.

People quickly gathered around, wanting to see what the commotion was about. Hei Dan got happy when she saw them.

"Young lord, please… my facial scars have distorted my face. You really don't want me," Hei Dan insisted.

"No, I don't believe you," the young lord said. "If it is as ugly as you say, then just take it off and prove it."

"What?" she got anxious. There was no way she could open her mask, especially given how much of a problem it gave caused to everyone around her.

It would've been fine if it was the headache that happened when she spoke as a child. But lately, especially after starting cultivation, it was like her constitution had awakened, and it started making things more problematic.

The lord's son got a little irritated. "Will you die if you just show me your face? Are you trying to defy me?" he asked.

"What, no young lor—"

"That's right, girl. Just take off your mask."

"Show us your ugly face then."

"The young lord is right. If your face is just ugly then you have nothing to hide."

The townsfolk started speaking against her. The people she had gathered for her safety were now speaking up against her.

"Enough!" the town lord's son shouted. "Guards, take her mask off."

"What? No, please no!" she cried out. Even as she did, the two guards went into her shop and started manhandling her.

She tried to run away, but they were too strong. "Please, no! Father, help me," she cried out with tears flowing down her eyes.

One of the guards grabbed the side of her mask and tried to take it off. Just then, a sickle appeared out of nowhere, chopping off his arm in half.

When the other guard looked up to see what was happening, another sickle entered his head through the opening in his helmet.

"Young lord, run away," the guard with his arm cut off ran out of the store. Hei Dan's father walked out of the store too, with two bloody sickles in his hands.

"I will kill you today," he said.

The lord's son was scared, so he let the remaining guard delay her father while he ran away.

Hei Dan's father was already weak from the illness. Exerting so much strength to fight the guard only made him weaker.

Hei Dan walked out, trembling from what she had just gone through. "Father, don't leave me," she cried out, but her father wasn't there anymore. He had run after the lord's son to kill him.

She struggled to keep herself standing with how much she was trembling. The other townsfolk that were watching everything had already run after her father to see what he would do.

Hei Dan prayed that her father was safe and slowly made her way forward, following the path her father took.

It didn't take her long to reach the location where her father was, but when she did, she saw a big crowd of people, surrounding a smaller crowd of guards, all of whom were fighting her weak father who was all alone.

The lord's son was protected behind some guard with nothing but a mere cut in his cheeks. He demanded death, shouting at the guards who were fighting.

"Don't hurt my father, please. I beg you. I will go with you, stop!" she shouted, but the sounds of the clashes were just too loud for her voice to make any impact.

The lord's son saw her amongst the crowd. With her black mask, it was pretty easy to spot her in a crowd.

The lord's son made the other guards go grab her and bring her to him. Hei Dan didn't resist.

"Please, young lord. Forgive my father. He… he was just trying to protect me," she said.

"No, there is no saving your father now. He cut my beautiful face. All you can do now is say goodbye to your old man and be my wife," the young lord said.

"No, please," she started to beg again.

"Before that, however, let's see your face. After all, I can't take you in as my wife if you aren't beautiful," he said and moved towards her.

Hei Dan turned around and tried to run away, but two guards grabbed her. She was now directly watching her father barely manage to hold himself with so many wounds on him.

The sickle on his left hand was broken, and he was forced to use his right one only to fight.

When he saw the bastard come up to his daughter from behind and grab her mask, his rage flared as if someone poured oil on the fire.

In his rage, he put his guards down. Someone attacked him from behind.

Hei Dan couldn't hear anything anymore. The young lord's hands crept on her mask, but she couldn't feel it either.

All she could do was feel her heartbreak into a million pieces as she watched a sword getting pushed through her father's back.

Her father vomited a mouthful of blood and fell onto the ground. He shakily put his arms forth, trying to reach for his daughter, but before he could do so, another sword dug into him.

He breathed his last breath.

At the same time, the lord's son ripped off her mask.

"NO!!!!" the harshest and most painful scream she had ever screamed came out of her. She felt the clutches of the guards loosen, and she ran up to her father.

She immediately got on her knees and grabbed her father's hand, calling him to answer her. But he wasn't there anymore.

She held her father in her embrace and looked up to the sky as she cried. The loudest, most hurtful screams escaped her mouth.

As she sat there in the pool of her father's blood, crying her eyes out, everyone else in the surrounding was on the floor, smiling from one ear to another, happy, like they were seeing the best of dreams.

She cried for hours. Anyone who heard her would fall onto the ground, asleep with a smile on their face, so she was able to cry for as long as she wanted.

After a while, she finally stopped crying, and instead of tears, there was rage building up in her eyes.

She looked around her. As tragedy befell her, the people around her were smiling as if it were a comedy to them.

She grabbed her father's remaining sickle and gritted her teeth as she stood up. The first thing she did was walk up to the young lord.

Seeing him with a happy face only served to fuel her rage. In one swift motion, her sickle separated his head from his body. Once that was done, she then went on to cut off his arms and his legs.

When that was done, she then stabbed every single inch of his body with the sickle. Still, the fury in her wasn't gone in the slightest. No, it was only beginning.

She looked at the guards, the townsfolk, all of whom did nothing but only acted against her and her father. Her fury targeted them next.

Man, woman, child. She saw nothing but enemies in front of her. In a matter of minutes, every single person in the crowd was dead, in their own blood. Most of them held their smile even as they died.

Once she was done and there was no one else to divert her anger to, the anger was replaced by the horrifying realization of what she had done.

She had never ever even hurt a single soul, and yet today, she had killed so many. "No! These monsters deserved it," she told herself.

She carried her father's body back to the house, making everyone who saw her fall asleep on the ground. Every time she saw their happy face, the rage would return again.

She killed who she could to satisfy her vengeance, but she couldn't ever satisfy it.

She buried her father behind their house, along with her mother. Then, she understood that she couldn't remain in the town anymore.

She started packing stuff to leave. The items from the store were just too many and she was forced to leave those behind.

She looked for what else she could pack and as she did, she entered her father's workplace.

It was there on the table. Her father had finished making it. The amulet. His last gift for her.

Before she even knew it, Hei Dan had the amulet around her neck. As she realized that this was the final keepsake of her father, she clutched it against her chest and cried again.

She became a sobbing mess once again and cried for hours. Only around the dead of night did she finally stop.

She took her stuff and escaped the city while death created the commotion.

She moved town, went to a different city. But the rumors of a girl with a mask killing everyone in a town started floating around.

She couldn't stay there anymore and changed cities once again. However, no matter where she went, the news followed her like the ghost of the young lord she killed.

With no other choice, she was forced to go into the forest to protect herself. There, she met other bandits, who took her in and accepted her.

Slowly, she built up a reputation for herself, known primarily for her black mask, and became the well-known bandit she was today.

Black Venom

Chapter 538 - Distraction

As Ma Rong asked questions, Black Venom told them everything. She told them everything without hiding anything.

Alex and Wen Cheng who heard just parts of her story couldn't help but feel bad for her. However, that poor, tragic girl was no more. She was already changed, twisted to what she had become now.

"Why did the bandits attack the city? What do they want?" Ma Rong asked.

"Survival," Black Venom answered, as she gritted her teeth. The coldness she felt had gone away considerably, and she could finally emote again.

He could no longer feel her father's amulet on her chest. The pain she felt inside was enormous, coupled with the fact that she couldn't herself from speaking the truth, which only served to make her feel worse.

Once again people were forcing her to do something she did not want to.

"Survival?" All 3 of them looked at her in surprise. Someone came from a little away at the same time. When they looked at the person, they saw the City lord approaching.

The City lord came to the group with a weird look on his face. "What are you guys doing here?" he asked. Behind her was his wife, Mo An, who was also curious to see them.

"Kill the bandit already, you guys need to go help the others," the City lord said.

"Not yet, city lord," Ma Rong said, her eyes not leaving Black Venom. "She is a captain and we are questioning her reasons to come here."

"Oh?" the City lord was finally attentive. "Let's hear it then."

"Explain. What did you mean by you came here for survival?" Ma Rong asked.

"We were threatened to do it. If we didn't do what he said, we would've been killed," Black Venom explained while she kept grinding her teeth.

"Threatened? By who?" the City Lord asked.

"He's known as the Bandit killer. He's been killing bandits for the past couple of months. They were all the bandits who refused to do what he wanted," Black Venom said.

"Bandit Killer? I've never heard of someone like that. What's his name?" the city lord asked.

"He never gave us his name, nor does he use anything to call himself," Black Venom tried to keep as much information to herself as she could, but her body spoke on its own and she had no control over it.

"This bandit killer, why did he tell you to attack the city?" the city lord asked.

"For distraction," Black Venom said.

Immediately, all of them frowned. "For distraction? What is he distracting us from?" Wen Cheng asked.

Everyone's heart started beating faster. If such a massive attack on the city was just a distraction, then what was that person's actual purpose.

Did he want to steal someone important or something important? Did he want to kill someone? Destroy someone? They had no way of knowing.

"Wait, was your attack on the Tiger sect a distraction too?" Alex asked. Wen Cheng's eyes widened when he heard that.

"She attacked the Tiger Sect?" he asked.

Alex's face grew serious as he answered, "Yes master. And she killed a few disciples as well."

"You bitch!" Wen Cheng brought out his sword to attack, but just then, he felt all the energy in his body disappear as he started feeling cold.

"Control yourself, Wen Cheng, we are still questioning her," Ma Rong said.

Wen Cheng looked at Ma Rong with a face of awe and fear. He had never known this was how strong she was and couldn't help but keep away his sword after that.

"Our attack on the Tiger sect was a direct order from the Bandit killer. Only us leaders got the order, and we were told to destroy the sect as much as we could," she said.

Wen Cheng was angry, so was Alex. But the others didn't care about the Tiger sect enough to let their confusion be clouded by their anger.

"Was it a distraction or the actual purpose?" the City lord asked, not to Black Venom but rather to everyone around him.

"This Bandit Killer," Mo An spoke. "He should also be doing something on his own right?"

"What could he be doing though? We have no idea," the City lord said.

"I understand that. What I mean is, if he were to be doing something and it was in the Tiger sect, I don't believe why he would send the bandits to destroy it since it would cause people to go there."

"The last thing he would want is to distract us with the bandits outside the sect and then bring attention back to the sect, right?" she asked.

"Hmm, Lady Mo isn't wrong about this," Ma Rong said. She then turned to look at Black Venom and asked, "Do you know anything else about all of this?"

"No," Black Venom said.

"Very well. You have no more use then," Ma Rong brought out her sword again to attack.

"Wait, master," Alex said.

"What is it now?" Ma Rong asked.

"She's the one who killed Wan Li's parents. I believe he would want to learn more about it," Alex said.

"We don't have time for that anymore," Ma Rong said, and tried to kill her again, but she found herself unable to swing the blade.

She understood that Wan Li would never go back to his old self without learning about his parent's death.

"Dammit! Alright, let's bring her to him. He should still be in his home under house arrest," Ma Rong said.

Alex nodded. He looked around the city and found that the city no longer had many fights. The bandits had brought on a lot of destruction to the city, but even after that, they didn't win. They never had a chance.

"You should go manage the city, city lord. Us 3 will take care of this bandit later," Ma Rong said.

"Okay," Fu Wen said. "I will talk to you guys later."

He and his wife left the area and went towards where their soldiers were heavily concentrated.

Ma Rong, Alex, and Wen Cheng went together towards the center of the city where the elders of both the sect should have been gathered for now.

Black Venom saw the bodies on the ground, all scattered throughout the city, reminding her of the day when she killed all those people in her town.

She hadn't regretted it then, but now, there were her men, her people that had given her food, clothes, and shelter. To see them all die, she couldn't help but cry once again.

As they got closer to the city center, Alex got a weird feeling like someone was watching him. He turned around to see if anyone was there but saw no one.

Not only that, but he also got a feeling that something was off with the city. "What is it?" he asked himself, but he just couldn't find an answer.

The closer they got to the elders, the greater the feeling got. However, he quickly ignored the feeling when he saw the elders in front of him.

All of them were wounded, bloody from all the cuts they had received. Some of them even had multiple lost limbs, making Alex look fine in that regard.

"Are there elders in the sect?" Wen Cheng asked his men.

"Yes, sect leader. We have already sent half of the elders to protect the sect in case we got attacked again," someone answered.

"Is there no bandit left now?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes, sect leader. We have already gone through the whole city. After you defeated them, there weren't many left. Those who were, we already got rid of them," the elders from the Hong Wu Sect said.

"Go back to the sect," Wen Cheng ordered his people.

"Yes, Sect leader," the elders replied and left.

"Sigh," Wen Cheng finally took a sigh of relief. "So much tragedy, but at least, it's over, finally."

"No it's not," Alex said from beside them.

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng turned around to look at him. Alex was frantically looking around him.

"What's wrong, Yu Ming?" Wen Cheng asked with a serious face.

"Look around us, master," he said. Wen Cheng looked around, but he wasn't sure what he was supposed to be looking at.

"What are we supposed to be looking at?" Ma Rong asked.

"The city. Look how much damage the southern half of the city suffered, yet the northern half barely seems to have suffered any damage," Alex said.

"That's obvious. The bandits started from the southern half, and probably couldn't get very far," Wen Cheng said.

"Exactly, master. They started from the southern half, which we now know, thanks to her, was a distraction."

"What if that bandit killer's target was north, so he sent the bandits to the south?" Alex asked.

Ma Rong's heart skipped a bit as a deep chill went down her spine. "The sect must be in danger," she said.

"Lang Shun!" she cried.

"Yes, sister?" Ma Rong's junior brother appeared from the group, his leg missing. Alex felt a tinge of sadness looking at his Martial Uncle look like that.

Lang Shun felt the same way seeing his Martial Nephew like that.

Ma Rong took Black Venom's storage bag and took out 2 masks from it. She also took out a pill and fed it to her. Black Venom slowly fell into a lull and fell unconscious.

"Wear this. Her voice is a mental attack and only this mask will protect you. Don't interact with her without the mask."

"Keep her with you for now. I will ask her questions later," Ma Rong said. After that, Ma Rong flew off to go look at the sect and see what sort of danger it was in.

The elders followed, along with Wen Cheng and Alex as well.

When they reached the sect, they found nothing abnormal happening there at all. Alex looked around and was equally surprised and glad to see nothing happening there.

The second elder and third elder flew up to them and asked, "is it over?"

"Yes," Ma Rong said seeing that nothing was wrong with the sect. "It's over."

The elders flew off towards their place to take care of themselves, while Ma Rong flew towards her own as well. Alex and Wen Cheng followed her, and so did the second elder and the third elder.

"Did you learn anything, sect leader?" the second elder asked as they flew towards the sect leader's mountain.

"Not really, only that this was meant to be a distraction," Ma Rong said.

"Distraction from what?" the third elder asked.

"We… we don't know," Ma Rong said.

They landed on the mountain in front of Ma Rong's house. They were about to walk in when Alex got the feeling that someone was watching him again.

Without wasting any time, Alex spread out his Spiritual sense as far as he could, and suddenly, he noticed someone flying high in the sky.

"Who's there?"

Chapter 539 - The Name

120 meters away from him, at the very edge of his spiritual sense, there was something… someone floating high in the sky above them.

The only reason Alex even noticed the person was due to the nothingness of everything around him. If he had been on the ground, he doubted he could've caught him.

The man had been looking at him this whole time, which was where Alex had gotten a strange feeling.

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng immediately turned around at Alex's call and searched for people around them.

"What's wrong?" the 2nd elder asked, searching for around him as well.

"There, someone is there," Alex pointed up in the sky. The moment he did so, the person in his spiritual sense disappeared.

Ma Rong and Wen Cheng obviously couldn't see someone that was so far away. Wen Cheng only had some 50 meters of spiritual sense range, while Ma Rong had about 70 meters now after her constitution awakening.

Still, with that, they were nowhere close to seeing what Alex had seen.

"What did you see?" Ma Rong asked.

"There was someone in the sky above us. He just walked out of my sensing range," Alex said.

"Are you sure?" Ma Rong asked.

"I… I think so. It had a humanoid shape for sure, but… I'm not sure if it was a person or not exactly," Alex said. "It didn't really have any aura to it."

"Is it possible you were seeing things?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I definitely wasn't seeing things, Master," Alex said. "But… I might have been a little too—"

Suddenly, Alex sensed something flying towards him at an incredible speed. He had no time to put any strength into his legs to jump away, so he did what he could in the split second he had.

His Qi moved and his vision changed. He started seeing the world in patches of white and black. The white parts represented the shadows on the ground, while the black part represented the light.

He chose one in his mind and at that moment, he disappeared.

Ma Rong noticed something enter her spiritual sense as well and immediately turned around to catch it. But even she was too slow to stop it.

A loud explosion rang out at the thing crashed onto right where Alex was, throwing up a cloud of stone and dust.

Wen Cheng only managed to bring out his sword after the thing had already landed.

Alex reappeared next to Wen Cheng. At the same time, Ma Rong pushed out her Yin towards the thing that landed to keep it there.

When the dust settled, there was nothing there at all. The second elder looked at the empty space and was surprised. "What the hell did this?"

"No, he's still there," Alex said. Wen Cheng had his sword glowing red and ready to attack, while Ma Rong was keeping the thing there with her Qi.

Slowly, a layer of front appeared in the air around the crash location that made a humanoid shape.

The second elder looked with wide eyes when he realized that the person was actually invisible.

"I've got him," Ma Rong said with a serious face that has hints of anger behind the cold eyes. She brought out a sword and was about to strike when suddenly her layer of ice melted and the person ran away from her.

Ma Rong looked at him with wide eyes, clearly surprised that someone actually managed to get away from her coldness.

"Tsk. I knew you got a Yin-type body, but I never realized how potent it was," a voice appeared from the air, as a figure appeared from inside of it. The figure was a brown-robed old man with gray hair and some gray beard flowing beneath the mask he was wearing.

"That's… Black Venom's mask," Alex said from the side.

"I know about your mental attacks, boy. I'm not going to let myself be caught off guard," the old man said.

"Are you the bandit Killer?" Ma Rong asked him, pointing her sword straight towards him. She couldn't tell the old man's cultivation base at all, but from what she could tell, he was very strong.

"Yes, I believe that's what the bandits call me," the old man said.

"How are you here?" Ma Rong asked. Alex and Wen Cheng were a little confused at the question, but the 2nd and 3rd Elder understood what she meant.

"Why am I here? Hehe, well that would be because of this of course," the old man quickly took out a nameplate belonging to the sect and put it back inside.

Ma Rong's eyes went wide. "Where did you get the nameplate from, intruder," the 2nd Elder asked from the side. He brought out his sword and pointed at him too. He wasn't much of a fighter, but he still could fight at a basic level to protect himself.

"That's not very important right now," the old man said. "What's important is that you guys die."

The old man dashed towards Ma Rong at incredible speed and slashed at her with a thin, black sword.

Ma Rong's yin aura released to stop his attack, but even as she did, she realized that it wouldn't stop it. The slash went through the aura, cutting it in half and even almost reaching Ma Rong herself.

"What?" Alex looked surprised from a little away from her. He couldn't understand how his master could possibly not be able to stop him at all. After all, Ma Rong was able to stop all forms of energy around her.

"All forms of… no," he thought. Ma Rong couldn't stop all energy. There was one element she had trouble stopping.

"Master, be careful," he shouted from the side. "He is using Yang Qi."

It had taken until the second attack, but Ma Rong had understood that as well. The old man in front of her was using Yang Qi, which was why he was able to cut through and escape her Yin aura.

Even Alex when he was only in the Meridian Tempering realm could send out attacks that reached her if they were Yang elemental attacks, so it was obvious that Yang attacks would be the only thing that can fight against her so effortlessly.

"You can't win against me at all, little girl," the old man said. His blade glowed yellow as he dashed ahead once again.

"We'll see about that." Suddenly, Ma Rong let go of anything she was holding back. The amount of Yin Qi that flowed out of her body was incredible.

The whole front yard of her house started to get frosty, while the rest of the 4 people there were starting to feel the cold.

The old man also frowned behind his mask. "Shit! I didn't know this bitch could produce such strong Yin Qi," he thought.

Ma Rong put her sword for and an illusory snake came out of her sword, making its way towards the old man.

The old man suddenly spun his sword in his hand, sending out circular blades of Yang Qi to cut the Yin snakes.

However, things didn't go as the old man expected. His Yang blades quite dissipated when they struck the snakes. The snakes also lost a lot of their energy, but that told him that if the two of them clashed directly now, Ma Rong would definitely win.

"Screw this, I'm not here for her anyway," the old man thought and dashed away. Everyone saw that he was going for Alex.

The second elder and Wen Cheng got their swords ready, while Alex got his teleportation ready to dodge. However, suddenly Ma Rong appeared in front of all of them.

She had teleported in front of them as well and sent out a Yin slash. The old man was surprised when he saw her appear out of nowhere and immediately switched his direction to get out of the way of the attack.

Ma Rong was about to go attack him when she felt something behind her. She turned around to see Alex completely white-eyed, falling to the ground.

Her Yin Qi was just too much for him to remain conscious. The fear was something she understood and could give an explanation for, albeit a really poor one.

Alex had a yang body that was worse than her Yin body. So, whenever she was around and openly using her constitution, Alex would feel a bit scared.

However, this was not something she understood. How could her Yin possibly make him faint, when everyone else around her was perfectly fine?

Ma Rong stepped away from Alex and he finally got back up. He couldn't tell what had happened as his vision had just gone in and out of focus, but he could feel a sense of fear from deep within him.

Ma Rong had now moved away from in front of him.

The Bandit Killer was also looking at them with a hint of confusion in his eyes. He didn't understand what was happening, but as long as the kid was fine, he was fine with it too.

Ma Rong looked forward, toward the old man, as she asked, "What do you want with my disciple?"

"You don't have to know," the old man said. Without even seeing his face, they could all tell how smug he was inside of his mask.

"This man is after you Yu Ming, Leave while we keep him here," Ma Rong said.

"No, master, I can help," Alex said.

She suddenly turned around with an angry face and shouted, "Alex, LEAVE!"

Alex was about to say something when he realized what he had just heard.

"How… how do you know that name?"

Chapter 540 - Fathers Name

Alex's eyes were wide open at the moment. He looked at his master with a look of confusion and surprise.

"Master, how do you know my name?" he asked.

"Now's not the time. Run away," Ma Rong said. As she dashed forward. She started fighting with the old man who couldn't really fight against her directly, so he started kiting her.

He would attack her a little and run away before attacking her again. He kept her from getting too close to him as it would be near impossible to fight her with how strong she was.

'Dammit! We have practically the same cultivation base, and yet thanks to her superior body constitution, I am being forced to take the coward's role in the fight,' he thought.

He looked to the side and saw Wen Cheng grabbing Alex.

"Yu Ming, let's go. That old man seems to be here for you. We need to leave while Ma Rong is holding him off," Wen Cheng said.

He knew he couldn't really add much to the fight unless Ma Rong dropped her aura, in which case, she would likely get very injured.

The best way to help her was to not help her right now.

Alex was stubborn, but he understood it as well. He wanted answers as to why Ma Rong knew his name that he had never spoken in the game, not even by mistake, but that could wait until she defeated the old man.

"We need to leave," Wen Cheng turned to the 2nd and 3rd Elders too, who started running towards Alex to protect him.

Seeing Wen Cheng hold Alex to take him away, the old man started getting restless. He was here for Alex and if he was taken away, all the planning he did for the last 6 months, all the bandits he had to kill to make them accept the offer. It would've all been in vain.

He wasn't going to let that happen. He couldn't let that happen. It would seem that he needed to use his hidden knife right now.

"Stop him from getting away!" the old man cried out.

Suddenly, of the two pairs of legs that were running towards Alex, one of them sped up.

Wen Cheng reacted to the change and brought out his sword, but he was a little too late. A bright light flashed right where he was and the sword he was holding fell to the ground.

Two streams of blood gushed out of Wen Cheng. Both of which came from either of his arms. He looked down to see that his right arm and 2 of his 5 fingers on his left hand had been severed off.

"Wha-?" he looked dumbfounded as the reality of what had just happened didn't settle in his mind immediately.

The attacker turned around and went for Wen Cheng again, but the other person arrived just in time and stopped the person's sword mere inches from Wen Cheng's neck.

Alex watched the Second and Third elder clash with a pale face that was stunned.

Ma Rong noticed what had happened, and she too had to stop fighting with the old man to look back.

The Second Elder gritted his teeth with a face full of anger and shouted, "SuSu! What the hell are you doing?"

The third elder moved a little back and got into a stance. "Go away dear, you don't have to fight me," she said.

"Answer me, SuSu! What are you doing? Where are you attacking sect leader Wen?" the Second Elder pointed his sword towards his wife as he screamed in anger.

"What do you mean?" the third elder asked as if she had done nothing wrong. Her left hand went behind her back as she pulled out a black mask. "It is my responsibility as a daughter to obey my father, isn't it?"

All 4 of them watched as the third elder put on the mask in horror as they realized what was happening.

They were betrayed.

"Your... father?" the Second Elder was stupefied. The revelation rang in his ears like a thunderclap.

"You... you told me your parents died of a disease when you were little. How can he be your father?" the second elder asked.

"Easy," the third elder said. "I lied."

"You lied?" Anger flared back in his eyes. "You lied all this time? What's was your purpose in getting close to me?"

"My purpose?" this time it was the third elder who was surprised. "Why would I have any reason to get close to you? I only needed to infiltrate the sect and get it ready for when my father arrived, that's all. Falling in love with you was... a happy coincidence."

Wen Cheng grunted as the shock faded away and the pain came flaring back. Alex turned towards him and saw a pool of blood beneath him.

He quickly brought out a healing pill from his storage bag and gave it to Wen Cheng. Wen Cheng quickly ate it and his wounds closed up, but just like Alex, his cuts too ended on a stub.

Wen Cheng was now without his right arm a few centimeters down from his shoulder and was missing his little and ring fingers off of his left hand.

He gritted his teeth and pried his sword off of his fallen hands and grabbed them with his three fingers. His grip was weak, that too on his off-hand that he rarely used his sword with, but he took it and got ready to fight.

"Yu Ming, run away from here," Wen Cheng said.

"Master, you need to leave too. We all need to leave," Alex said. "Let's call in reinforcement."

"You go call them," Wen Cheng said. "I will kill this bitch."

Alex looked one last time towards them and turned around to leave.

"You're not leaving anywhere," the old man shouted. Immediately he took out a formation plate and threw it below him.

Suddenly, a massive formation sprung forth passing through everyone and reaching a size of about 50 meters in diameter.

It encompassed the entirety of Ma Rong's residence as well as part of the land outside of it.

Alex could see the barrier surrounding them, but he hoped that he could still escape. The earth opened up beneath him, and he fell through. He then involuntarily traveled through the earth until he hit something and came back out.

When he was out, he saw a slightly yellow barrier in front of him. "Tsk!" he thought. He really couldn't escape now after all.

"YHAAA!" Wen Cheng shouted as he ran forward to attack the third Elder. However, before he could reach her, another sword arrived in front of Wen Cheng and stopped his attack."

"What the hell are you doing, Song Heng!" Wen Cheng shouted.

"I can't let you kill her, sect leader Wen. She's my wife, the person I love," the Second Elder said. Despite being weaker than Wen Cheng, he could easily stop Wen Cheng's strike.

"Look at her! She's not the person you knew. She was acting this whole time. She's a traitor and has been using you this whole time," Wen Cheng said.

Song Heng felt a tinge of pain in his heart as he knew that was very likely the truth. Still, he held on to the hope that it was all a lie and that he was likely dreaming.

The Third Elder jumped at them with the sword glowing brown and slashed towards Wen Cheng.

The second elder pushed back Wen Cheng in time and blocked her attack.

"How dare you say that?!" she shouted towards Wen Cheng, trying to force her way to him. "How dare you say my love is fake? There is no truer love than what I feel for him."

The Second elder didn't know what to do. All the things she said... it sounded so good, so true, and yet... could it really be true?

"I'm not lying honey," the third elder turned towards him. "I really do love you." She said.

The Second elder could only see her eyes, but in those eyes, he could see the truth. It was true. She really did love him.

"I loved you so much that when my father asked for a fake name, I even suggested him your family name," she said with a fervent glee in her eyes.

"You did... what?" the Second Elder was confused. "What fake name?"

"My father, when he was here, he needed a name, so I took your family name, Song, and made him a name."

Everyone was confused, but Alex's eyes went wide. Before the third elder even spoke, he already knew who she was talking about

The first person he truly fought to the death, the person that had infiltrated their sect.

"Song Zun!"

Chapter 541 - Stopping The Formation

"What?" Ma Rong and the Second Elder turned towards Alex when he shouted out that name.

"Song Zun, that's him. That's the original body of Song Zun who was just a clone. He's after the thing in the Forbidden Fields," Alex shouted as the understanding of what was happening came to him.

He gasped as he understood more. "Master, he wants my body to make me his clone. That is the only way he can survive in the Forbidden Fields. That's why he is after me," Alex shouted.

The old man's eyes showed annoyance through the mask. "Tsk, you idiot. Why are you going around giving out information?" he scolded the Third Elder.

The Third Elder's eyes changed from glee to fear. "I'm sorry father," she said.

"Whatever, just kill them so we can be done with. The formation won't last very long," he said.

"Bu-But father, he's my—"

"Screw your husband. If I tell you to kill, you kill," the old man shouted.

"Y-Yes, father," she said and turned towards the Second Elder. "I'm sorry, dear. It seems you lost your chance to leave."

A tear flowed down the Second Elder's face while his face grew resolute. "No, don't be. I was stupid to fall in love with you in the first place."

He held up his sword, pointing directly at her, and said, "I won't make the same mistake again."

Wen Cheng walked up to his side and got into an awkward stance with his sword pointed at her as well.

The Third Elder still looked at the Second Elder and said, "I promise! I will make your death as painless as possible."

"Tsk. So much talki—"

The old man was halfway through speaking when he was attacked by Ma Rong. The cold air reached him before even she did.

The old man immediately employed his movement technique, putting in physical force and Qi into his legs to create one snappy jump that would send him elsewhere in an instant.

He didn't really have control over his body when he did this, but it was the fastest he could be, so he always employed this technique.

Ma Rong saw him run away and went after him. She wouldn't let the old man get close to her disciple at all.

The Second Elder and Wen Cheng started fighting as well against the Third Elder.

Wen Cheng sent a green slash flying towards the Third Elder, who sent a brown slash of her own to block the slash. Her attack turned out to be slightly stronger and went past the green slash to attack Wen Cheng.

The Second Elder appeared in between and hit the slash away with his own sword. He placed his palm against the flat side of his sword and wiped it until his hand ran off the sword.

A burst of blue flame erupted from where he touched, making his sword burn with fire that was truly at a very high temperature.

He dashed forward and swung the sword at his wife. The Third Elder saw the attack coming and brought up an earthen wall in front of her.

The Second Elder easily destroyed the wall, but there was no one on the other side. His wife had already left the place and went to Wen Cheng to kill him first.

Wen Cheng saw her coming and used his Elusive Heavenly sword to dodge the close-ranged attacks. He also retaliated with his own attacks, but due to the lack of grip and strength from his off-hand, they didn't do much.

The Second Elder returned, attacking her from behind, but the Third Elder was too agile. She immediately turned, parrying his sword, and used her feet to produce an earth spike that directly targeted his chest.

The Second Elder managed to block it, but he was pushed away. At the same time, multiple rocks were sent hurling towards Wen Cheng, who barely managed to stop them with his sword.

Right when he blocked the final rock, he realized that the woman was missing. A chill went down his spine when he sensed her behind him with her sword nearly reaching his neck.

He was going to die.

HISS

A snake appeared out of nowhere and attacked her, forcing her to stop her attack and dodge away.

Wen Cheng turned towards her and got into his stance again. 'This woman is dangerous,' he thought. The Second Elder appeared next to him and got into stance as well. He too had realized that his wife had been hiding her skills from him all along.

Little green, Ma Rong's snake, appeared next to them and got ready to fight under the orders of its master.

Immediately, the 3 of them rushed forward, fighting against a sole woman who was finally showing struggle as there were too many fighters against her.

Ma Rong was still chasing after the old man who did nothing but kite her to tire her. She knew that and was letting him do that.

The more he thought he was winning, the better it would be for her when she sneak-attacked him. For now, she had to keep attacking without her attacks doing anything to the old man.

Alex was left alone, doing nothing. The battle around him was way too high level for him. It wasn't like when he fought Black Venom where he was confident that he could dodge her.

These people were a realm higher than her, and the difference was very apparent. If not for his spiritual sense and focus mode, Alex couldn't even keep track of half the attacks that were happening around him.

He understood that he couldn't help them at all right now. The only help he could do was bring someone from outside to aid the others in battle.

However, the barrier was tough and Alex couldn't destroy it all. "Master should be able to shut it off at a moment's notice if she used her Yin Qi to stop the energy of the formation plate," he thought. However, his master was busy.

If she stopped for even a moment, the old man would definitely come for her. Alex went invisible and concealed his aura to disappear. This way, his master could probably stop the formation at once.

However, just as he went invisible, a wave of spiritual energy went past him. 'Dammit!' he thought. The old man had spiritual sense too.

Alex didn't know how or where he acquired the spiritual sense, but he did and that was terrible for him. Now, his master couldn't leave the old man to stop the formation.

"I will have to do it," he thought. He didn't let go of his invisibility or his concealment and ran towards the formation plate before standing in front of it.

"What do I do now?" he thought. As far as he knew, there were 3 normal ways to shut down a formation plate.

First, you could destroy the formation plate, however, that required a lot of strength since the metal was made to withstand the attacks of very high leveled True realm cultivators.

Alex knew without even trying that there was no way he could break the formation. Still, he needed to try it, just to be sure.

Alex took out his sword and brought it up way overhead. The sword started glowing golden with metal Qi with a bright white outline around it thanks to his Sword Intent.

He took a deep breath and brought it down very hard at the formation plate. He expected the sword to hit the formation plate, yet not leave single damage.

However, what happened instead surprised him even more. Before his sword could even touch the formation plate, a barrier appeared around the plate.

His sword rebounded off of the barrier, sending his hurtling back.

"What?" he cried out loud. The formation plate that produced a barrier, had a barrier protecting it as well.

'Shit! That's ingenious,' Alex thought. Usually, a True rank formation could only do 2 or 3 things at once.

Most barrier formations used it to create a barrier, then used the other 1 or 2 base formations to either stop sound and images from leaking outside or put a disorienting formation to mess with their opponent.

However, the old man's formation did none of that. Alex couldn't tell if it had a 3rd function or not, but the 2 function of the True grade formation in front of him was to create a barrier to stop the enemy from leaving and then another barrier to stop them from tampering with the formation plate.

Alex had never even thought of doing something like that before.

"Dammit! This means the other 2 methods won't work either," he thought.

Aside from destroying the plate, the other two methods for stopping a formation were to remove the energy source from the plate.

If Alex had removed the energy source, the formation would end on its own.

The final way was a bit more dangerous. What one could do was tamper with the formation strokes themselves and make it so that the formation no longer did what it was supposed to.

99 times out of 100, the formation would just stop working. However, there was a chance that the formation would end up turning volatile and end up as a make-shift bomb.

Alex wondered what he could do since neither of the 3 methods was doable due to the barrier.

That was when he noticed something. He noticed the number of strokes on the formation plate.

As expected, this formation did 3 things, not 2.

"What's the third effect of this formation?" Alex thought.. He needed to find out.

Chapter 542 - That Face

There was a third base formation in the formation plate. Meaning, there was one more thing the formation did that hadn't been apparent to anyone yet.

What was it? Was it an illusory formation? Maybe disorienting? It didn't look like the old man was very worried about sound when he started attacking, so it was likely that wasn't it.

Alex looked at the formation diagram and understood that he had never seen that formation before. So there really was nothing in his mind to immediately give him an answer.

The only way to tell what it did was to separate the 3 Base formations in the diagram as well as the extra strokes that connected them.

This was gonna take some time. He didn't know if he had any.

"Please hold on for a little longer," he softly begged his masters and immediately created a fire in mid-air. The fire immediately changed shape as it twisted and elongated to make a circle.

Alex then started putting in the strokes of the formation.

The reason for him creating an image of the formation rather than just looking at the one on the plate was so that he could erase and add the strokes as he likes.

Having a physical, visual diagram he could interact with made it all easier. He could've done it on the ground, but with his grown Flame Mastery Scripture, it was very much easier to just use fire instead.

Very quickly, Alex drew one stroke after another nearly finishing the formation. People had seen him draw the formation on the air, but no one had time to ask him what he was doing.

'A single line through the middle,' Alex thought and put in the final strokes of the formation.

Suddenly, a low humming sound was released from the diagram, as if he had just put the final piece of the puzzle. The hum lasted for maybe a second before it went away.

'What was that?' Alex thought, but he didn't have the time to think about it. He immediately started tinkering with the diagram.

They kept on going on the other side. Ma Rong kept her eyes on Alex at all times, not letting the old man ever get close to him.

The other fight however was at a standstill. Wen Cheng was all bloodied up at the moment. Due to many mistakes he had made during the fight, he had cuts all over his body, making it harder for him to fight.

He could easily tell that they were at a disadvantage against the woman, however, every time she got close to killing him, the Second Elder would interfere and she would get away.

It seemed she was still hesitant about killing him, despite what she proclaimed earlier.

Little green was helpful, perhaps the most of the three, but even the green snake couldn't withstand the strength of the woman. She had always been a fighter it seemed, and she had kept it hidden very well.

Ma Rong's fight against the old man wasn't going much better either. However, since she was stronger, she wasn't bloodied up like Wen Cheng was. It had been nearly 15 minutes since she started fighting, but she wasn't making much progress.

She was still waiting for that one moment when he wasn't attentive. That moment when he wasn't on guard. That one moment where she could hit him.

Suddenly, Alex shouted from behind her.

"Master, you need to defeat him quickly," Alex said. In front of him were 3 different formation diagrams. Of them, two looked identical, while the last one was different.

These first two were the barrier diagram, while the last one was…

"The formation is helping him recover his Qi he lost while fighting. As long as he is in the formation, he likely won't run out of Qi," he said. "You can't keep this chase going forever or you will lose."

The old man heard it and looked towards Alex in surprise. "Tsk, he figured it o—"

That one moment was here.

Ma Rong teleported for the first time since she was seriously fighting the old man. She appeared behind him and slashed her sword at his neck.

Unfortunately, the old man seemed to have more awareness than Ma Rong expected him to. He moved to the right, without employing any movement technique, to escape from the sword.

However, the cold aura slowed him down by a considerable amount. The sword hit the side of the old man's face, putting a crack on the mask he was wearing.

The old man was sent flying and he crashed into the walls of the house as the house came caving in on him.

Ma Rong got ready to attack when she noticed him come out of the rubble.

"Tsk. That was sneaky of you— What? What are you looking at?" the old man asked her daughter who had stopped fighting and was staring at her father. He then saw Wen Cheng, Ma Rong and Alex stare at him with wide eyes.

"Hmm?" he suddenly brought his hands onto his face and realized his mask was missing. He immediately brought out another mask and wore it again.

Alex was so stunned that he didn't even realize the man's mask was down.

"You…." He said. "You are that old man, from that beast attack," he said remembering the night when it rained for the first time in the game.

They had been on their way to the tournament when they stopped to help some people getting attacked by the beasts. After saving them, Ma Rong refused to take them with them saying that he was likely a fraud.

This old man had the same face.

Ma Rong didn't speak at all and instead started wondering just how far back this whole thing went. Still, it was clear to see that she was pretty shocked too.

However, neither of their shocks could match up to the shock Wen Cheng was feeling at the moment.

"Su Chen!" Wen Cheng said with eyes so wide that one could look into his soul to see how unreal the moment was feeling to him.

"Hmm… you actually recognize me, boy? Were you around back then?" the old man asked with a hint of intrigue.

"Yes," Wen Cheng said with a serious voice. "I was there. I was there to see the destruction you brought forth. The cries you evoked. The tears you made them bleed."

"I was there to watch the sect nearly get extinct on that day, the day the sect leader died and the day you were supposed to have died in your exile, Second elder," he said.

Alex's eyes went wide once more when he realized who the old man was. 'That old man that incited the Tiger Sect war back then? Wasn't he supposed to be dead?' he thought.

"Haha, you really were there. Since so many people died, I didn't think many would remember," the old man said. "They were stupid, weren't they? Thinking I would die just because they threw me out while I was wounded. Those cowards couldn't even kill me correctly."

"Wen Cheng, who is he?" Ma Rong asked.

"This is the Tiger sect's second elder, Su Chen, from over 50 years ago. He started a war with the sect leader of that time due to his greed for the sect leader position, leading to infighting that nearly wiped out the entire sect."

"Barely a few elders and disciples remained alive at the time," Wen Cheng said. He had his eyes on the old man the whole time, not taking them off even for a bit.

"How did you survive? You were near death back then," Wen Cheng asked.

"With my expertise and knowledge, it's easy for me to survive," the old man said. "Albeit, I had to destroy my cultivation base at the time and had to remain as a mortal for a few years before my meridians were all set back. However, it helped me rebuild my foundation and made me stronger than I would have been with my previous cultivation method."

"Why are you targeting my disciple now? Are you trying to take revenge for the past?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Tsk, another idiot. Did you not hear the boy say I was here for his body?" the old man asked in an annoyed voice. " I don't really care about the Tiger sect enough at the moment to take a revenge for the past. A single instruction to the bandit leaders was enough for it."

"Then what's your purpose?" Wen Cheng asked. "What do you want with my disciple's body?"

"Same thing I have wanted since I learned about it in the sect records way back then," the old man said. "That stupid Tian Chengong, I told him I was right about it, and that we could not let this new sect take over our ancestral grounds, and yet he never listened to me."

"Look at how they took it for their own, not a hint of the old Tiger sect left in this place," the old man said as he looked around.

"The…old tiger sect?" Wen Cheng and Ma Rong were both surprised. Wen Cheng looked around. "Was Tiger sect previously located in this place?" he asked with a hint of a shock to his voice.

For years, he had taken the incomplete information about the Tiger sect having relocated from someplace else.. He went above and beyond trying to find that place, yet he never did. "So the Hong Wu sect took over where the Tiger Sect was previously?"

Chapter 543 - Stalling For Time

"My house used to be there, on that mountain, yet it's nothing but fog now. I used to fight against my fellow disciples at the valley down below, yet not a single fighting ground exists there anymore," the old man said with melancholy to his voice.

"I don't blame you though, little girl. The only one I blame is Tian Chengong. We could've stopped you from moving here, but he didn't want to let go of the new location of Tiger sect, all because he found that black stone pretty."

The old man turned to Wen Cheng and spoke, "You see, there is something wrong in your story about the past. You called me a jealous man, a greedy man who wanted all for himself. You said I attacked the sect leader because I wanted his position."

"Truthfully, you would not be wrong. Yes, I did attack Tian Chengong because I wanted his position, but it wasn't because I was drawn to its power. No, I had no other choice at that time since only a Sect leader had enough power to do what I needed to do."

"I had gathered a significant amount of people to come transfer back to this place, but I also didn't want to split the Tiger sect at the time. I insisted Tian Chengong to move the sect back."

"But no," the old man said. "That coward would always use the emperor's orders as a means to persuade the rest to stay where he was. Everyone knew he was just attached to that black stone too much to let go of it. Since it was impossible to move, he didn't want to leave that place."

"That was why I decided to attack him when he returned wounded from the adventure. It was the perfect time for me to get rid of him and take charge of the sect to bring us back here, bring us back to glory, bring us close to the location that helped the Tiger sect reach the height it had back then."

Wen Cheng felt like everything he had known about the past was a lie. It seemed what was written on the records wasn't entirely true and missing a lot of the information.

Only a few high elders from back then had survived and merely 2 of them remained at the current time and were inclosed cultivation for a long time to hopefully extend their life.

The Second Elder was still holding off the third elder, while the rest of them were at standstill. Even Ma Rong wasn't sure what to do right now as whatever the old man was telling her seemed really important.

Tiger sect? In this place? She couldn't wrap her head around it. She had only come to this sect some 30 years ago and by that time the sect had already been established for over 15 years.

Also, the elders of that time mentioned nothing about it.

Wen Cheng was reeling in his shock when he realized something. Something he read in the few remaining records, they mentioned something that he hadn't thought about at the moment.

"The records," he spoke out, his eyes darting everywhere. "The records spoke of the sacred land, the holy land of Tiger sect to be close to the original location. Does that mean...?"

"Hmm? You're close, but a little wrong," the old man said. "While this was the previous location of Tiger sect, this too was a place we had moved to since we couldn't stay in the other place any longer. At least, that's what I read in the records."

"The original place where the Tiger Sect was originated was there," the old man said while pointing behind him.

"The Forbidden Fields?" Alex asked in surprise. He remembered the record he had read in the library. It stated that the sacred land was a place the sect members didn't dare enter.

Wen Cheng, and with his influence, Alex had come to assume that the sacred land was in some ways Holy to them, which was why they wouldn't dare step on it.

However, now that he realized it was the Forbidden Fields, he realized that it wasn't that they wouldn't step in the sacred land, but rather they couldn't. At least, not without losing their cultivation base for the moment and having to fight with dangerous beasts as a mortal.

"Wait," Wen Cheng shouted. "The records mentioned a massive blue landscape where the previous location of Tiger sect was, but... there is no such thing back there."

Alex nodded. If anything, with all the yellow sand, the writer of the record would call it a yellow landscape.

"You stupid idiot, what did I just tell you? We moved from the other place," the old man said. "We came from the north. What do you think you will reach if you went all the way up north?"

Wen Cheng's eyes opened wide as he realized how far the original location of the Tiger sect was located. Up north, over a thousand kilometers away, a location that would take even True realm experts nearly half a day to reach, at the edge of the Crimson Empire, one could see...

"The ocean," Wen Cheng realized. The blue landscape wasn't a large river or a lake as he had previously imagined. It was the ocean.

"What... is there," Wen Cheng asked the old man.

Even through the mask, people could see him smile as he said, "the Sect's Treasure."

"The... sect treasure?" Wen Cheng was both surprised and confused.

"Yes, the sect treasure. The treasure around which the Tiger sect came into existence. It was at its initial phase at the time and would take years to grow according to the records."

"The time has come. The treasure has grown and is a step away from maturing. Any day now, it will mature. Do you want to know what the treasure is?" the old man asked.

"Yes," Wen Cheng nodded his head without even knowing.

"Then hand over that kid to me. With his body, I can traverse the desert, and find the treas—"

The moment the talking turned back around to being about Alex, Ma Rong attacked the old man. The old man had been consciously waiting for one of them to attack the whole time.

He talked all this time so that he could gather up the Qi he had lost. Using the formation, the amount he would get back would be a lot and could last longer in the fight against Ma Rong.

Ma Rong turned to look at Wen Cheng who was still dumbfounded about the whole thing.

"Wen Cheng, stop daydreaming and go help them," she shouted.

The whole time the old man was stalling for time, the second Elder and the third elder were fighting each other.

The Second elder had been protecting Wen Cheng by putting his own life on the line which the Third Elder refused to take.

Even the old man had noticed this and had been annoyed for a while, but he didn't want to bring attention to their fight.

However, now that Ma Rong was attacking him again, he was starting to feel the pressure once more and needed his daughter to help him out a bit.

"Dammit," he cried out. "Kill that bastard and come help me already, or are you useless just like your mother?"

The Third Elder shuddered and her eyes grew cold. "I'm sorry, father. I will deal with this quickly," she said.

She slammed her feet down and a bunch of rock spikes appeared from the ground around her.

The Second Elder used his flaming sword to cut the stones around him, little green just twisted his body to dodge the spikes, and Wen Cheng jumped back entirely to escape it all.

However, right as he was landing, another few rock spikes appeared beneath him and pierced his right leg's calf. Wen Cheng couldn't keep his balance and fell to the ground. With his already numerous cut, he was having a hard time with the battle.

"Master," Alex shouted and brought out a pill to feed him. He was about to walk towards his master when a wall appeared between him and Wen Cheng.

Alex tried to go around it, but Wen Cheng spoke, "stay back, it's dangerous."

Alex wanted to help, but it was indeed too dangerous. He watched the fight and quickly realized how serious the Third Elder was at the moment. Her attacks were no longer holding back and she was using techniques she hadn't shown before.

Just like her father, she too used a movement technique that gave her a burst of speed. Wen Cheng was barely holding on, especially with one of his feet not holding his weight properly.

The Third Elder launched herself towards Wen Cheng to stab him with the sword, but the Second Elder appeared in front of her once more, hoping to stop her like he had been all this time.

He was gravely mistaken. The brown blade pierced through his chest and came out on the other side.

Alex gasped in shock when he realized that the Second elder had been stabbed through the heart.

A single tear escaped the Third Elder's eyes as she said in a small voice, "I'm sorry."

The Second Elder looked at the sword in shock. He couldn't believe that he was actually stabbed. Was he going to die? Is this how he was going to die?

The loss of blood to his brain was slowly making his vision got darker by the second. He only had a few more breaths left.

'I won't go out like this,' he thought. He did his best to pull up his dangling arm and wrapped it around his wife, hugging her as tight as he could, pushing the sword deeper into him until his body was fully touching her.

He rested his head on her shoulders as tears started streaming down his cheeks as well, and said softly, "I'm sorry too."

He used the last of his breaths to scream. "DO IT NOW!"

Little green immediately rushed forward.

"No!" the Third Elder cried out but she couldn't move her husband's arms from herself in time. Or... maybe she could, but she didn't want to. Maybe she thought she deserved what was coming.

The snake wrapped around the both of them, keeping the Third elder steady in one place, giving Wen Cheng the perfect shot.

Wen Cheng stood on his left leg, held the sword with his 3 fingers on the left hand, and used the best technique he had at the moment.

His Sword Intent.

His sword glowed white around the edges, and he used an explosive speed to dash forward.. When he reached right next to the two of them, he slashed his sword on the Third Elder targetting her neck.

Chapter 544 - Yin And Yang

THUD

The Third Elder's head rolled on the floor. Little green let go of the constriction and the two bodies stuck together also fell on the ground.

The Second Elder's eyes were wide with tears rolling down them. "I... I'm... sorry," he spoke one last time and breathed his last breath.

He was dead.

Wen Cheng slumped on the floor, his body giving upon him. The right calf was hurting him incredibly along with the other cuts in his body.

Alex rushed over and stopped for a second when he saw the Second Elder's blank eyes. He felt a tinge of sadness seeing someone he was quite close to in the sect die like this.

To die by the hands of someone he loved, what greater tragedy could there be in this world?

Alex knelt in front of him and put his hands on his eyes. "Rest in peace, Second Elder," he said and brushed down his eyelids to close his eyes.

Alex then made his way to his master and brought out a pill. Wen Cheng ate the pill and felt the energy in it healing him. In mere moments, all of his wounds had disappeared.

"Thank you," he said and tried to stand up but...

"Woah!" he felt dizzy and fell back down to the ground.

"Don't move too quick, master. You've lost a lot of blood. The pill I gave you only healed you, but it did nothing for your blood. With your lack of blood, you will have blurred vision and dizziness for a while," Alex said.

"Urghh!" Wen Cheng grabbed his head. "Don't you have any pills for giving me blood?"

"Unfortunately not, Master," Alex said. "I will get one for y—"

"Look out!" Wen Cheng shouted and pushed Alex away. A yellow palm hit Wen Cheng directly on his chest, throwing him into the barrier.

Wen Cheng coughed up blood as he hit the floor and stopped moving.

"No!" Alex shouted and looked back to where the attack had come from. It was the old man.

His eyes were red with fury, his body glowing yellow as he used every bit of Yang energy in his body to bypass Ma Rong's attacks to send out his own attack towards them.

"I will kill you bastards!" he shouted.

Ma Rong immediately teleported in front of him and struck at him. The old man swung his sword to get rid of Ma Rong and go after Wen Cheng, but he couldn't.

"Get away from me!" he shouted, but Ma Rong wasn't going to let go of him. She too was angry at the fact that the Second Elder died.

The Second Elder was one of the best elders in the sect. Perhaps even better than her when it came to handling the sect matters.

When she was unconscious due to the Yang energy in her body, or when she was stuck indoors due to her newly awakened constitution. Or even when she stayed in her room neglecting the sect work due to the pain of probably having lost a disciple.

The Second Elder helped her in all of those situations by taking on the workload all on himself, and now he was dead. The person who killed him was also dead, so the only person she could go after was the old man.

Being the person who started it all, and being the person who wanted to kill her disciple, Ma Rong finally started feeling fury like she had never before.

Just like the old man, she too was angry.

Ma Rong and the old man went into what looked to be the final stage of their battle. Both of them were giving their all to end it as quickly as possible.

Alex ran back to his master and saw him on the floor choking on choking on his own blood. Alex immediately pushed him on his side and used his Qi to help him release all the blood in his lungs and esophagus.

'Master has already lost so much blood. If he loses some more, he will probably retain some permanent damage,' Alex thought.

He brought out another pill and slowly pushed it down Wen Cheng's throat. Alex sent his Qi through Wen Cheng's veins and checked if the inside was now fine or not.

It took a while, but he fully checked Wen Cheng all over and sighed in relief that he was okay. The blood loss had made him fall unconscious, but he was breathing fine. He would make it out alive and well.

Alex took out his sword and held it in his right arm, he was going to protect Wen Cheng from any attacks that came his way now.

However, it didn't seem like he would be needing to do that anymore. Ma Rong was continuously getting the upper hand.

For a good chunk of time now, she had been fully expelling Yin from her body to stop the old man, and Alex was worried she wouldn't be able to keep it up for very long.

The old man was fully flaring his Qi too, but he had the formation to support him. Alex was really worried as he watched the two of them fight.

But it seemed that was the right choice as he saw parts of the old man's body having ice on it. Ma Rong's hit was getting in.

"Hang in there a little longer, master," Alex said. It was unclear which master he was talking about, but it was very much likely to be the both of them.

Ma Rong sent out a ball of frozen water at the old man. With his movements delayed, the old man couldn't dodge in time and ended up taking the hit on the left shoulder.

Frost built up at the place where he was hit, but he ignored it. A handful of fire gathered in front of him, which he blew on to create a massive spray of flames that attacked Ma Rong.

Ma Rong swung her blade in front of her and immediately the fire was cut in half, but it wasn't destroyed. She was a little surprised to notice that the fire had Yang energy in it.

The two halves of the fire hit either side of her but did nothing to her. In the chaos, the old man tried to run away, but he couldn't. Ma Rong's spiritual sense was on him the whole time.

She immediately teleported next to him and sent two Yin snakes at him. The old man reacted in time and slashed the two Yin snakes, but a third one, hidden behind the two suddenly appeared in front of him and directly bit him on the shoulders.

"AHH!" he shouted as the right half of his body started freezing over. Finally, he was hit with something he couldn't deflect.

He flared his Yang Qi, but the freezing wouldn't stop. Ma Rong's Yin was of a higher grade than his Yang.

His arm, including his fist which was still wrapped around his sword, also froze, making it impossible for him to do anything with his sword.

He tried to move back, but he realized that his back was up against the house rubbles again. He could feel the stiffness in his legs as well. He could no longer move very well either.

"No," the old man said. "This can't be it! I can't die like this!"

"You deserve this death," Ma Rong shouted and dashed towards the old man. The old man tried to run, but he was unable to.

"NO!" he cried out.

'No, I can't die like this. I still have yet to find the treasure,' he thought.

Suddenly, he heard something crack behind him. The crack was loud and following it, he felt a massive amount of energy passing past him.

It was Yang energy.

Ma Rong's sword that was coming straight for his heart deviated just slightly enough that it missed his heart and instead stabbed just a few centimeters above it.

Due to how thin Ma Rong's sword was, he was fine.

The frost in his arms and body started to melt away. The Yin Qi that Ma Rong's sword had, that would've otherwise frozen his heart and killed him, never actually came. He had lived.

His eyes went wide at the thing he had just experienced. He was happy at first, but after he understood what had happened, his eyes changed. It wasn't just a surprise in his eyes anymore, but rather fear too.

'No! It's too early,' he thought. 'I am not ready yet. I can't turn that kid into my clone in just mere 3 days.'

The treasure he had been so looking forward to had matured, and it would only remain that way for 3 more days before getting ruined forever.

He forgot all the pain he was feeling and angrily looked at Ma Rong only to be surprised at what he was seeing.

Ma Rong had no Yin Qi coming out of her. In fact, she had no aura. The old man tried to flare his cultivation base when he realized that he was being suppressed by the Yang energy.

He couldn't use his cultivation base at the moment. However, he didn't need to.

He suddenly swung his sword in front of him, cutting off Ma Rong's right hand which was still holding the sword that was deep inside of him.

Ma Rong was surprised, but she couldn't do anything. She couldn't even move. The Yang energy was especially suppressing her in more ways than just her cultivation base.

The old man took the opportunity and jumped towards her, sword at the ready, and directly stabbed through her stomach.

Chapter 545 - Poison

Alex watched as Ma Rong got the upper hand. The old man's right arm was frozen and she was getting ready to stab him.

"Yes!" he said softly to himself.

'Finally, tonight's tragedy is over,' he thought.

Suddenly, he saw the massive barrier behind them crack open and fade as a giant wave of yellow energy flew their way.

Alex put his hands up to stop the light from hitting his eyes. While his hands were up, he heard a thud coming from in front of him.

He lowered his hands and…

"Eh?" the scene wasn't what he had expected. His master had been ready to kill him and yet..."Eh?" he watched blood flow down the missing arm, and a sword stabbed through the abdomen. Only, the victim was his master.

"Eh?"

He couldn't understand what had happened just now. His master was totally winning the battler. She had even stabbed the bastard through the heart. But then… why was she on the ground and that bastard standing.

The old man looked at his chest, then at his sword that was in Ma Rong, and pulled it out as fast as he could. He then looked towards Alex for a moment and started running up the mountain with his master's blade still stuck in his chest.

Why? Alex didn't understand again.

Finally, the urgency of the situation went through to him and he realized what had happened.

"Master!" he cried out and immediately ran forward. She was missing an arm just like his other master, but that was fine.

As for the stab wound in her abdomen, she could be fully healed with just a pill. There was nothing to worry about.

However, just as he was running, he realized something he hadn't realized due to the shock.

He had no cultivation base at the moment.

"What?" he cried out in surprise, but he made his way to his master regardless.

Ma Rong had gone into shock from the missing arm and getting stabbed in the abdomen. Her eyes darted around not understanding what was happening.

He grabbed Ma Rong's head and placed it on his lap to let her breathe easier. "Wait for a second master, I will get you a healing pill," Alex said. He brought out his storage bag with the pills in it, but then remembered that he had no Qi right now.

'No…' he thought. He quickly tried to use his spiritual energy, but he couldn't use that either.

"NO!" he shouted. He looked down at Ma Rong and the blood she was losing. He quickly tore off his already torn robe and wrapped it around her cut arm.

He then started wrapping the rest of the cloth around her abdomen. He picked her up a little and passed the cloth underneath, and that was when he noticed something.

The cut… the skin around the cut was starting to turn purple with red veins popping up in it. Alex didn't even have to guess to know what that was.

"Poison!" he thought.

His emotions were turning chaotic, his thinking all over the place.

"What do I do?" He was starting to panic. "Who can save her?"

Who could save someone that was poisoned by a cultivator's sword? His first instinct was to go to a doctor. However, did this city even have doctors? Alex didn't know.

'Maybe not all the place is Qi-less. Maybe I can use it elsewhere,' Alex thought and tried to carry her, but Ma Rong groaned in pain.

"Hang on, master. I will save you," he said and picked her up with his one arm before running out of the place. He ran past the two corpses and the unconscious master before leaving the sect master's front yard.

He then ran past his house and went down. However, before he could make it very far down, Ma Rong shouted once more.

"Master, hang on. Just a little l—"

Alex looked down to console her only to see her entire body starting to become the same as the cut which was still bleeding.

The red veins were starting to show. "No no no no no no no… master? Master! Can you hear me?" he asked.

Ma Rong slowly opened her weak eyes and looked at Alex. "Is that you… Alex?" she asked.

"Y-Yes master, it's me, Alex. Hang on," he said and started running down but Ma Rong cried once again.

Alex was starting to get scared as well. No matter how far away he went, he couldn't feel the Qi at all.

"Al… Alex... put me down," Ma Rong said.

"No, master. Just a little longer—"

"It's likely a saint rank poison," Ma Rong said weakly.

"What?" Alex's eyes went wide. "Wha-what do you mean it's a saint rank poison?"

"No-normal poisons don't work on my body. Th-there is no antidote to the poison in the sect," Ma Rong said with bated breath.

"I can tell. My body is trying its best… but it can't stop it," she said weakly.

Alex's face turned fully pale. "No way, that can't be true," Alex said.

"Alex?" Ma Rong called him again.

"Yes?" Alex asked with tears in his eyes.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Master? Master, I'm right in front of—" Alex stopped speaking. The red veins had made it up her body and reached her eyes. She could no longer see.

"Where are you Alex?" she asked.

"Master, I'm here. I'm right here," he said as he put her down and held her left hand with his right hand.

"Alex? Where's do you go? Why aren't you speaking?" she asked.

"Master, I'm speaking. I'm right here," he said as he squeezed her hands. However, it didn't look like she could feel it. The red veins had also reached her ears, making her unable to listen to anything anymore.

"Is anyone still here?" she asked. "Master? Shun'er? I… I think I'm dying. Am I dying? I don't want to die."

Ma Rong moved her right arm, trying to get a hold of something, anything— completely unaware that she had lost it.

"I don't know if you're listening or not right now. I don't even know if I'm talking or not. But, if I am… I'm sorry," Ma Rong said. Tears streamed down her eyes with a mixture of blood in them.

"I'm sorry I couldn't keep my promise, Alex," she said. "I'm sorry I couldn't keep my promise. I promised you, I promised that I would… ack…ack…"

The veins stopped her from speaking as well. "Master? MASTER! Please speak! Master!" Alex started crying. Ma Rong didn't respond at all as her breathing started to get heavier.

"No, no," he cried, tears streaming down his face. He picked her up once again and ran down the mountain.

She was starting to cough up blood by the time he reached the sect valley. "Help! Please help!" he shouted as he made his way through the valley to the Elder hall, crying all the way through.

The already tragic atmosphere got more tragic when they saw the deathly state of their sect leader.

The elders were already out after Qi was missing.

"Grand Elder! Martial Uncle! Anyone— Please help master," Alex shouted in front of the Elder's Hall.

"Little Ma?" the Grand Elder walked up to Alex with a pale face.

"Sister!" Lang Shun jumped with some other elder as a support due to his missing leg.

"Wh-What happened?" they asked as Alex laid Ma Rong down on the ground.

The elders started gathering around Ma Rong. Soon the disciples came to see what was happening when they saw Ma Rong.

Her body hadn't turned purple, but the red veins had crept all over her body. Tears were still streaming down her eyes, but at this point, they were so bloody that it was impossible to tell if it was even tear anymore.

Despite the redness, one could see how pale her skin had gotten already from the lack of blood. She had been bleeding this whole time.

Grand Elder cried as he struck the ground, angry at his helplessness. Lang Shun was angry too, but only towards the person who did this to his sister.

Alex cried at his helplessness as well. 'It should've been me,' he thought.

Ma Rong struggled with the poison for some more time while the people gathered around helplessly.

Only after minutes did she stop struggling.

That was when Ma Rong, the sect leader of the Hong Wu Sect, one of the most proficient Alchemy experts of the Crimson Empire, master of Alex, in the midst of all of her loved ones, passed away.

Chapter 546 - Funeral

Alex couldn't accept that his master was dead. He just couldn't. He believed it all to be a dream, but the reality was often disappointing.

He cried along with the other elders for some time after she passed away.

Afterward, he explained what had happened. He told everyone how the attack on the city was a distraction for the old man to enter the sect and look for him.

If not for him being in the Tiger sect instead of here, he would've likely died at the start of the night.

The elders went up the mountain and saw the bloody scene of the stabbed Second elder and the beheaded Third elder, lying dead on the floor together.

The tragedy felt unending for them.

Wen Cheng too was quite bloody, but he would survive. The elders immediately got to treating him under Alex's request.

Alex had stopped crying by now, but then the tears started falling once more when he heard someone else crying.

Zhou Mei was down on the ground, next to both of her master's dead bodies. Alex had only lost a single master tonight, but she had lost two.

Even more so, she had been with her masters for a long time longer than Alex had. Surely, she was in much more pain than he was. Still, he couldn't imagine anyone feeling as much pain as he was.

Was it even possible to feel this much pain?

He would rather go through Body cultivation all over again, have his skin burned alive by the formation, or eat a thousand yang jades and feel his stomach burn to cinders than feel what he was feeling at the moment.

The elders ran up the mountain to check for the old man, but apparently, he wasn't there any longer.

'He must've gone to the Forbidden Fields,' Alex thought. After all, that was what he had been saying the whole time.

"Dammit! I could've got him if I had run after him!" Alex said as he slammed his own thighs. The regret was starting to get to him.

"Don't beat yourself up for what happened, Nephew. None of this was your fault, and you did the best you could," Lang Shun said with red eyes. "Be thankful that your master at least got to see you during the last few moments."

"If you had run after him, sister would've likely been alone during the last moments, with no one else by her side," he said.

Alex couldn't help but start crying when he heard that.

The elders started preparations for the funeral. It wasn't just Ma Rong or the Second elder who had died tonight. There were other elders too that had perished in the fight against the bandits.

They needed a funeral as well. Just as they were planning for the funeral, Alex made a request to them.

. . . .

An hour passed since Ma Rong's death and finally, people could feel a hint of Qi in the air again.

Alex tried to use his spiritual sense and saw that he could spread it up to about 5 meters now. If only he could do that an hour earlier. Would that have helped his master in any way?

The yang in the air was subsiding, and Alex could feel the chill return back to the air.

He was standing on top of the alchemy mountain where the Yin gathering Tree was planted. Next to him were a few other elders, all of whom had come for his Master's funeral.

He had requested that she be buried here, given how much she cared for the plant. Surprisingly, none of the elders protested, as it seemed that they knew it too.

They dug a hole next to the decrepit tree. Alex and Lang Shun helped carry her corpse into the hole.

Once that was done, everyone started walking forward, throwing something of theirs into the grave.

"What is everyone doing?" Alex asked.

"They say after someone dies, they go to the afterlife. We are sending her anything that could be of help to her there to live a happy life after death," Grand Elder said with tears streaming down his eyes.

Alex felt sad. There was nothing of value he could give her.

The Grand Elder noticed this and added, "You don't really have to put in anything. I'm sure just seeing you stand here is already making her afterlife easier."

Everyone put in something, most of them putting in some spirit stones. When it was time for Alex, he took out a single pill.

He looked at the pill for a moment and tossed it down below.

"What is that?" Lang Shun asked.

"It's a pill I made," Alex said. "I never got to tell master how much progress I had made for the last 2 months. I hope she learns about it in the afterlife and knows that she does not have to worry about me."

"What pill was that? I didn't recognize it," Lang Shun asked.

"It's a common ranked pill, but it's one I came up with on my own," Alex said.

"I see," Lang Shun said. "Sister will be happy certainly. I remember when she said that just a few months after reaching the True realms, you will beat me in Alchemy."

Lang Shun chuckled when he remembered that day as tears pooled up in his eyes again. He wiped the tears and said, "I hope to see you reach that level someday."

The elders started pouring the dirt back onto the grave and filling it. Once they were done, they said a small prayer and moved on to the other funerals.

The rest of the funerals were taking place somewhere else. They went behind the elder residence area and to a graveyard that Alex didn't know about previously.

There weren't many gravestones in the place anyway. With only having been formed 50 or so years ago, the Hong Wu sect didn't really have many deaths that required burying here.

They buried the Second Elder and also the third Elder. Despite being a traitor, she was also an elder and had helped them quite a lot.

Alex once more saw Zhou Mei crying with her sister and Fan Ruogang consoling her. Kong Yuhan walked up to him and gave him his condolences.

The other elders were buried as well and the same ritual of passing something along took place once more.

Alex dropped his other best common pill he had been holding onto the second elder's grave. If not for him, he would have likely lost his life as well as his other master in the mountain tonight.

He thanked him for everything he did and walked away.

By the time the funeral was over, the Qi had returned a great amount. By thing time, Alex could feel himself having a cultivation base equivalent to that of a Muscle Tempering realm.

While the suppression was still there, it wasn't as bad as the ones in the Forbidden Fields.

He wondered why the yang in the air was going away, and where.

After everything was done, the Grand Elder told everyone, including Alex to go and get some rest.. It had been a truly long and tragic night, and people needed their rest.

Chapter 547 - Promise

Alex went to check up on Wen Cheng. After seeing him breathing a bit more easily, he sighed in relief. 'A few days to recover,' he assessed.

He walked out of the Elder's hall and looked at the surrounding. The sect valley that would always be cheerful, even at nighttime with disciples running all around, trying to perform alchemy was totally empty tonight.

The bright streets of the valley looked gloomy from the lack of any human in it.

Alex looked up at the sky, stars gleaming in the nighttime, some brighter than others. The moon seemed a little paler tonight as if the moon itself grieved over the tragedy it witness from the sky.

So many things had happened today and yet... it has still only been 5 hours at most. The time wasn't even 4 am in the night.

Everyone was ordered to go back to their homes to rest, so Alex returned too. He went back to his home and went into a room.

His cultivation base was close to the Bone Tempering realm by now. The yang energy was slowly dissipating from the surrounding. It would still take until morning if not more for it to completely disappear.

Alex decided not to dwell on it anymore and logged out. He opened the capsule and walked out. In the middle of the night, the world was silent.

He got onto his bed, but he couldn't sleep. His eyes were wide open as the feeling started to overwhelm him.

He didn't feel hungry. He didn't feel sleepy. He didn't feel tired. The only thing he could feel was pain. A deep pain that was etched into his soul itself.

The grief, the pain of the loss-it had followed him across bodies, across worlds.

Once again, Alex cried. This body hadn't cried prior to this, so when he cried, the tears flooded his face. Snot dripped down his nose, but he couldn't care any less.

He cried like he had never before. It was close to 4 am in the morning and the rooms had good noise cancellation, so nobody could hear him cry.

Alex wanted to rest, but the tears wouldn't let him. He didn't even feel like he could cry himself to sleep.

No one was there to console him for his loss. Alex felt alone in this place. So, he got back onto the capsule and logged into the game once again.

The grief once more transcended space and came over in his new body, but he had already cried enough and there were no more tears.

He was told to rest, but he didn't think that was possible for him at the moment. He walked out of the room and left the house.

He went up the mountain and walked over to his master's house.

The front yard was fully destroyed, the house turned to rubble. Alex walked past the large patch of blood that was the result of the Third Elder's death.

He then walked up to the other smaller patch of blood that belonged to his master.

He touched the blood on the ground that felt like his tear ducts, completely dry. Even as he looked at the blood on the ground, he didn't feel like crying. He was emotionally exhausted from crying already, numb to the pain.

He felt sad, but that was it.

He then looked ahead of him, a little further away from where the blood was. That was the place where the bastard had fallen over to the ground.

He looked at the ground, and it was clean. Not a single hint of blood was on the ground at all.

Alex was confused at first, but then he remembered what had happened. Due to his master freezing him with all of the attacks, the bastard had never really suffered any wound that made him bleed.

Even the one wound in his chest where the sword had stabbed, the bastard hadn't taken the sword out and was thus not bleeding.

The lack of any emotion other than sadness was slowly changing.

"My master bled so much, and yet he doesn't even bleed a single drop of blood?" the emotion in his heart grew stronger.

"My master was poisoned, and yet he walks away so easily," the emotion continued to grow stronger.

"My master died, and yet he lives." His emotions reached a crescendo.

Rage.

The rage of a thousand suns burned in him when he thought of the unfairness. That bastard lived while his master died.

He gritted his teeth as his eyes narrowed with hatred like never before. His face was a tempest of fury.

He looked up towards the top of the mountain where the bastard had gone towards and left there himself.

Alex understood clearly, more than anyone where the bastard had gone to. So, he decided to go there as well.

He would go there and find that bastard. Then, he would enact his revenge by delivering pain unto him a thousand times more than what his master suffered.

He promised that in his heart.

Alex started walking. He walked up the mountain until he reached the peak. There were 2 elders standing guard there, but he didn't care to stop when they told him to.

They barely had any strength to stop him anyway. He looked down from the massive cliff and jumped.

* * * * * *

A figure appeared outside the city walls. As he got closer to the city, he felt his cultivation base disappearing.

At first, he was incredibly scared. However, after realizing that he was just being suppressed, he sighed in relief.

Still, his cultivation base was in the upper True realms, so he could easily fly over the walls.

The guards were in a terrified state, so when they saw someone fly over, they immediately got to arm. However, in their current state, they couldn't fight the person at all.

The figure looked at the destruction around the city and frowned. He flew down to one of the guards and spoke, "You! What happened here?"

The guard was fearfully putting his spears towards the man, but when he realized who the person was, he immediately put his spear down and bowed.

"Greetings, your majesty!" he shouted. The other soldiers and guards heard him and immediately stood up to bow towards him.

The new figure who had come to the city was the emperor.

"What's going on here?" the Emperor asked again.

"Your Majesty, we-we suffered a bandit attack," the guard said.

"Multiple bandit groups had joined together and attacked the city, Your Majesty," another soldier said. "But we fought them off."

"Where's the city lord?" the Emperor asked.

"He is in his manor, your majesty," the guards said.

"Alright, keep up the good work," the Emperor said and went towards the city lord's manor.

He entered the manor and had the city lord explain to him in detail.

"I see," the emperor said after understanding the current situation. "And what is this suppressing aura around here?"

"That I am baffled by myself, Uncle," the city lord said. "Fortunately, it's slowly dissipating. Anyway, what are you doing here?"

"Sigh, I came here because I heard that kid was back from the beasts' territory.. There are some people that want to meet him."

Chapter 548 - Pursuit

Alex ran across the tall grasses that were filled with sand. He held the sword in his right hand, ready to fight any beasts that came his way.

The Forbidden Fields had so much sand now that it wouldn't have been a mistake to stop calling it a field now.

Alex walked over dried grass near the river and easily ran through the river with how shallow the water was.

The sands were a little harder to run through. There wasn't enough solid land under his feet to run, so he decided to use his boat artifact to fly through the desert.

This wouldn't have been possible previously, but now that the Qi had somehow returned to the desert as well, Alex thought it was possible.

His cultivation base was still heavily suppressed at around Muscle Tempering realm, so he wasn't really sure if the boat would fly, but he had to try it.

He couldn't keep running through the entire desert when he knew how far away the ocean was.

It would take him days to reach there and by that time, that bastard would've already taken whatever it was and run away.

He couldn't let that happen. He needed to find him and kill him.

He jumped on top of the boat and put some True spirit stones in it before flying off. The speed wasn't very fast, unfortunately, but it was still better than simply running.

The sun came up pretty soon and the heat was along with it. At the same time, Alex felt the suppression around him growing as well.

He was now back to being at the early stages of the Skin Tempering realm. The boat had also slowed down to barely moving.

"Dammit!" he cried out and jumped off of it and took back his ship before running. He would have to run now that the suppression was high again.

Along the way, he saw something and stopped. It was a big snake, simply laying there doing nothing. Ning got his sword ready and charged to attack it.

However, when he got close, he realized that it wasn't moving at all. It wasn't even breathing. The snake was dead.

Alex looked at the snake, but he couldn't see any signs as to why it had died. He got close to it, the snake's head almost as large as him.

He nudged the snake with his sword, but after seeing it not moving, he proceeded to check the snake's body.

He flipped the snake around and saw a wet spot in the sands. Ning got close to it and saw a small cut in the snake.

He realized something and quickly ran up to the snake's head again and pulled its eyelids apart.

He startled himself when he saw the red, veiny eyes of the snake. It had been poisoned by the same poison as his master.

Ning gritted his teeth in anger when he realized that his master's murderer was close by.

By now, the feeling of the thing with extreme yang was already pulling him towards a certain place far away.

He didn't even have to look to know what direction he needed to be moving. His body was doing it all on its own.

He started running again. With his body cultivation, he could run for days and not be tired at all.

The speed at which he ran was obviously slower than his boat previously, but with the suppression, he was being the most efficient he could be.

'Fuck!' he thought. 'That bastard must have a flying artifact as well. One that is faster than my even.'

Alex kept running and encountered a number of beasts along the way. Some tried to fight him, but they were too weak and easily died to his attacks.

Others were already dead and were simply a trail leading him towards the bastard that had a headstart of a few hours.

Alex kept running for hours, but he never seemed to be able to find the old man. Just then, he noticed something about himself again.

His cultivation base had returned to about Bone Tempering realm. He hadn't noticed it before due to being way too focused on simply running and fighting, but now that he noticed it, he was confused.

'What's going on? How do I have this high cultivation base in the middle of the desert? Having a cultivation base itself was weird, but I thought it would be in a radius of that extreme yang. But somehow I am getting stronger the closer I am to the source?' Alex thought. Just the prospect of it didn't make sense to Alex.

"No something else must be happening," he thought. He remembered back to when the yang energy had come in and broke the barrier. After that, no one could use their cultivation bases anymore.

However, an hour or 2 later, their cultivation bases were returning to them. Alex remembered, he already had Bone Tempering realm back in the sect. He had only lost it when he entered the Forbidden Fields.

'The yang energy in the sect dissipated, and we got out cultivation partly back. The yang energy in here is somehow also dissipating and I am gaining my cultivation back again, is that it?' he thought.

If that were true, where did the yang energy go to? It wouldn't have simply disappeared into the sky. Alex couldn't understand why at one place it was dissipating faster than another.

Was it because it was closer to the source that it was dissipating slower? That too couldn't be right. He had been running towards the source this whole time, and he remembered it dissipating slower previously than it was now, even when he was getting closer.

"Unless... it's not dissipating," Alex thought. He immediately closed his eyes and sent out his spiritual sense into the surrounding. He focused on the energy in the air and could feel the Yang energy that was suppressing him even now.

He could've perhaps used his cultivation base if it were Qi, but since it was only energy, he couldn't do anything.

Just then, he noticed something unusual. The Yang energy in the area was all moving in the same direction.

Alex opened his eyes in surprise and looked in the direction they were moving towards.

The source of the Extreme Yang.

"I see," Alex thought. "So I was wrong in assuming that the Yang is dissipating from the area. It is not. Instead, it is moving back towards the source."

Alex couldn't imagine why that was the case, but it was. Whatever the source was, it was attracting the Yang energy it had spread around all this time.

"The old man spoke something about the sect treasure, right? The Tiger sect's treasure. So, is the source the Tiger sect's treasure?" he thought.

He stopped caring about those things and brought out his boat once again. Since the suppression had disappeared quite a bit, the boat was now faster than ever in this place and he flew off.

He saw many beasts along the way, some still fidgeting from being stabbed with the poison sword.

Alex understood when he looked at them.. The old man was getting close, and so was the time of his revenge.

Chapter 549 - Confrontation

Alex started to struggle the closer he got to the old man. The intense feeling of 'want' and 'need' he was feeling was enough to drive him crazy.

However, the feeling of needing to kill, to get his revenge-that overshadowed everything else in his heart.

He could finally empathize with Wan Li. He now understood what it felt like to lose someone, to want to take revenge when someone killed your loved one.

He looked up straight ahead and accelerated his ship as much as he could.

The sun had just gone down and the night was approaching. And yet, somehow, far away in the north, Alex could see a bright light hidden behind the high sand dunes.

'Is that the source?' Alex wondered. His body at the very least thought it was. He was looking at the light when he noticed something.

A small black figure in the distance crossed over the dune that was blocking the light and went downwards.

Alex's rage came back flooding all over again. He had finally found him.

Alex dropped from his boat as the speed was really low at the moment. With how much suppression was around him, it was better to just run.

Which he did. He ran for nearly 15 minutes before he reached the dune he had seen from the distance and looked down.

The light far away was still blocked by many other dunes, however, it also lit up the desert enough for Ning to see down.

That bastard was currently running in the sand due to the suppression as well. He held a sword in his hand, ready to fight the beasts. However, there were none.

Alex had noticed that too. The more he went to the source, the less the beasts became. By now, it was rare to even find a beast.

Alex ran down the dune to follow after the old man. Considering the suppression he was facing, the old man shouldn't be doing very well either.

Since Alex was starting to reach Muscle Tempering, he assumed the old man to be around Organ or maybe Meridian tempering realm. If that was true, Alex could easily kill him with his superior body cultivation.

The old man was running slower than Alex, so in the next 20 minutes, Alex finally reached close enough so that he could barely hear the old man's footsteps in the sand.

In the next 10 minutes, he got close enough that even the old man could hear him, despite the low cultivation base he had.

The old man turned around, expecting a beast he would have to fight. However, when he saw Alex, he was shocked.

"You followed me?" he asked as his eyes narrowed in suspicion. Then, he saw the anger in Alex's face and suddenly started laughing.

"Hahaha! That bitch died, didn't she? Great!" the old man exclaimed. "Good riddance."

Alex continued running towards him, his face unchanging.

"Hmph! You must be here for revenge. Let me do you a favor and send you along with your master. That will be my gift to you," the old man said and got ready to fight with his sword as well.

Alex looked at him and noticed not a single hint of wounds. Even the stab in his chest was healed, and his master's sword gone.

He then looked at the old man's sword. Despite being in a fit of fury, he hadn't lost enough of himself yet to not be careful of the sword.

That was the sword that was laced with the poison that killed his master. If even his master's superior body couldn't erase the poison, then there was no doubt that he himself would lose to it.

The other poisons his body had managed to cure were usually normal poisons and toxins that were relatively low in grade. However, if the poison that man had was indeed Saint grade, or god forbid, a higher one-there was no doubt he would die.

The first thing he needed to do in this fight was figure out what the old man's current cultivation base was.

With his own 5th Mind Tempering realm body cultivation, he needed to be careful if the old man had a higher or lower cultivation base.

Even if it was lower, having access to abilities he didn't at the moment would make the battle much more difficult than normal.

He could guess based on the difference in their cultivation base what the old man's cultivation base probably was, but he didn't want to trust his instincts right now.

The old man held too many secrets that were enough to make even the emperor jealous. Immortal ranked concealment art, Invisibility technique, and Saint grade poison were a few of the things he had.

Alex wondered what else he could be hiding if any.

Alex dashed forward at the old man, his only hand holding his sword. The old man saw him coming and got ready. He immediately went to the side and sent a flying yellow slash towards Alex.

Alex put up a barrier in front of him, but with his cultivation base, it was way too weak to do anything.

The attack easily destroyed the barrier and came towards him. The attack was slower than when the old man had fought his master, so Alex could easily dodge it. Still, Alex didn't move and let the attack hit him.

Alex was sent flying a few meters and landed on the hot hand. He slowly stood up and dusted himself off.

"Somewhere in the upper Mind Tempering realms, huh? This shouldn't take very long then," Alex said.

The old man freaked out when he saw Alex perfectly fine. 'How is he fine? His body should be close to a mortal's in comparison to me,' the old man thought.

Suddenly, his eyes went wide as he realized something. "You brat. How did you cultivate your body to that level? Did the beasts help you or something?" he asked.

Alex didn't reply. Now that he knew he didn't have any dangers from the old man, aside from the sword of his, he was ready to fight seriously.

He immediately dashed forward and swung at the old man. The old man struck back with his sword too and felt Alex's force in his attack.

Although it was strong, it wasn't something he couldn't handle at all. Realizing this, the old man struck back as well.

He pushed back Alex's sword and went for a straight thrust. Alex parried the blade and swung it at the old man's neck.

The old man suddenly employed a movement skill to walk out of Alex's sword range.

However, Alex dashed at the same moment and reached the old man. He slashed at the old man again, who barely brought back his sword to protect himself at the last moment.

However, that didn't help him a lot. Alex's sword, which was glowing slightly white, managed to hit the old man on his left arm. However, the old man was sent flying before Alex could properly hit him.

The old man slammed into the sand, sending them flying in the air. He stood up and looked at Alex with a hint of anger on his face.

"You are quite strong even with just a single-arm, huh?" he said. He held his left arm as it was bleeding profusely. He brought out a bottle and poured out something slimy before applying it on his arm.

'A medicinal paste?' Alex thought. Alex had heard about them but had never seen them. In other parts of the world, people used these pastes in place of pills since they were much cheaper.

'How does he know how to make one?' Alex wondered.

The old man tightened his fist as his wound burned in pain. The paste was working. Then, he looked at Alex.

"Hmph! You really are quite talented. Not only do you cultivate very fast, but you also have body cultivation. And I heard you are quite talented in alchemy too. Combined with the Sword Intent you showed just now, you really can't be underestimated, huh?" the old man said with a snarl on his face.

Alex didn't care enough to listen to him and started preparing to go on the offensive again.

Just then, the old man said, "You must be a player as well then."

Alex stopped. "How do you—"

"Know about players? Hehe, I've tortured a few to learn how you all cultivate so fast. To think it was so easy as just chucking in a few pills, or using spirit stones all the time. How wasteful."

"Not only wasteful of resources but of your own cultivation as well. Destroying your chance at reaching the heavens just for a few moments of glory. So stupid," the old man said.

"Not only that, but you all are also stupid enough to believe this world is fake as well," the old man said.

"Are you sure you want your last words to be those?" Alex asked, preparing to attack.

"Hmph! Do you think you can kill me, boy? Let's see how you handle it when I actually try a little," the old man said.

Suddenly, he went invisible. Alex looked around, but he had no aura either. 'Shit!' Alex thought. He had momentarily forgotten about his hiding skills.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense around him, even pushing it to its limit, but the furthest he could sense was 15 meters.

Under a normal situation, Alex wouldn't mind having 15 meters worth of sense.. However, against the old man with his incredibly quick movement speed, and a sword that was sure to kill him if it ever hit him, Alex started to fear a little.

Chapter 550 - Visionless Fight

Alex tried to use the invisibility skill himself to hide just like that old man did, but due to his low cultivation base, he couldn't successfully employ it.

The light that cover him would break open at places randomly, allowing others to see him through invisibility.

'What do I do?' he thought. He needed a bit higher cultivation base to properly go invisible.

The old man was invisible, but it was impossible for his movements to do the same as well. No matter how good he was, his footsteps would leave a mark on the dune.

Alex looked at the sand around him to look for the old man. Just then, he saw a bunch of indentations on the sand. The old man was moving.

Alex waited for a bit and sensed the old man entering his spiritual sense range. He immediately slashed at the incoming old man and blocked his thrust attack.

Alex used the momentum to back off and looked at the sand again. Suddenly, something hit Alex from the front and sent him flying.

Alex immediately stood up, the attack doing almost negligible damage to him. The old man came with a straight thrust once more and Alex blocked him just in time. He had managed to see the footsteps in the sand in time.

"Tsk!" Alex could hear the old man getting annoyed by him blocking his attacks.

"Congratulations! You can see my footsteps and predict my attack. Let's increase the difficulty then, shall we?" the old man shouted from in front of Alex.

He saw the old man's footsteps in the sand and got ready to block once more, however, no attack or the old man came towards him.

Instead, they started moving around him. The old man sped up quicker and quicker, and soon the sand started flying all around him.

"Shit!" Alex cried out. He had realized what was happening. The old man, in his plan to make his footsteps invisible, had started throwing the sand in the air.

That way, no matter where he looked, Alex had no way of seeing the old man... or so the old man thought.

Realizing that he couldn't rely on his vision or sound or touch for that matter, he understood that the only thing he could rely on was his spiritual sense.

However, given how fast the old man was, he couldn't reliably depend on his mere 15 meters spiritual sense to tell him when the old man would arrive next to him.

So, the next thing he needed to do was give himself more time to react to the old man entering his spiritual sense's range.

Alex smirked. He had the perfect way to do that.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Suddenly, time slowed down, and all of his senses were amplified.

The sound of the sand blowing around him got louder. He could hear the old man's footsteps cooking up a storm around him.

He could feel the dryness of his mouth, his chapped lips. He could feel the hot air hitting his face, slightly cooling him by taking away his sweat.

He could feel the minute grains on sands hitting his skin. They hit his hands, his face, and his legs.

He could smell the scent of hot sand, as well as some iron in the air from the crusted blood on his own lower pants.

He could feel the weight of his sword, slightly imbalanced on his single hand when it was meant to be held with two.

Finally, he could sense the slowness of everything around him. He could feel the sand flying through the air, and in then, the old man running at him with the sword at the ready.

Alex's own movements were incredibly slow, however, that was enough to do what he needed to do.

Alex struck away from the sword thrust and used the same momentum to hit his neck. The sword barely managed to graze the old man, but that was enough to make him bleed.

The old man jumped backward and looked at the close-eyed Alex in fear. 'How the hell is he seeing me? How the hell is he fighting back?' the old man wondered.

Alex hadn't used Focus mode in a long time. Once he stopped controlling the Focus mode like he had come to do by muscle memory, he once again realized just how effective it was.

Focus mode was something only players could use, so the old man had no idea how Alex was doing any of it.

Alex nodded to himself when he realized that it was just as effective as he wanted it to be and smiled. The fight would be a lot easier now.

The old man kicked up a dust storm once more and ran around Alex to juke him. Then, he thrust his sword from behind Alex.

Alex could feel the sword coming towards him in slowed downtime and moved just out of the way of the attack. Then, he slashed at the old man's legs.

The attack reached deep and he felt like he struck the bones. However, he couldn't go beyond that.

"ARGH!" the old man cried out in pain. Alex pulled his sword back and struck at the old man again, but the old man ran away.

Alex waited for the old man to come to him once again, so he could attack him. 'Just a little more and I can go invisible too,' Alex thought.

With the Yang energy around him slowly disappearing, he would soon be able to properly use his technique. That way, even though the old man would get stronger as well, he wouldn't have to worry about him.

Alex waited for a bit longer, but he didn't hear the old man moving at all. The sand in the air was also starting to settle down.

When all the sand fell to the ground, Alex realized-the old man wasn't there anymore. 'Fuck! Did he run away?' Alex thought.

He looked around him and saw no indentation in the sand anymore. 'I was so close,' Alex thought and ran behind him.

The old man was likely to stay invisible the entire time, so he remained careful as well. He kept his eyes open for any change in the sands in front of him or any incoming attack.

Alex felt his cultivation base lowering once more as he got closer to the source. He would have loved it if he had no cultivation base at all and the old man had barely any. That way, defeating the old man would be pretty easy.

However, that was just a hopeful thought. Given how strong Alex was, it was likely that the old man wasn't going to go somewhere where his cultivation base dropped below the threshold of a Mind Tempering realm, so Alex had to be extra careful when his own cultivation base dropped to the lower realm of Muscle tempering realm.

Very soon, Alex saw the footsteps again. The old man had indeed not made it very far, be it intentionally or not. He was still invisible, but his footsteps movement showed Alex that he was moving.

'Wait!' Alex thought. There was something wrong with those footsteps. By now, the old man should have heard and even seen Alex running up to him, but not once did the footsteps slow down to turn and see, or speed up to run faster.

Also, the indentation they made on the sand was too uniform. There was no sand spilling over the foot as it was happening to his own foot.

'It's a trap!' Alex thought and immediately got ready for an attack. He closed his eyes to solely rely on his spiritual sense to see.

Just as he was thinking, he felt a movement over him. Not front, or back, up above. The old man had been flying this whole time.

The sword entered his spiritual sense, followed by the old man's hand, head, and the rest of the body. His neck and foot would be gone by now, likely healed by the same paste as earlier.

Alex rolled to the side and dashed to go on the offensive. The old man saw him coming and sent out a palm strike at him. The attack did no damage, but it halted his movement for just a bit. The old man took the moment to get out of his spiritual range.

The old man knew Alex was using his spiritual sense, he could sense it too. However, his spiritual sense barely went anywhere past 8 meters, so he was inwardly surprised at how large Alex's spiritual sense was.

He remembered back in the mountain where the brat had sensed him so high up in the sky, despite having never put out any aura at the time.

The old man hadn't thought about it at the moment, but that had been quite weird at the time too. He shook his head to forget about it for now and proceeded to attack once more.

He just needed to stab him once and this miracle poison of his that he had stolen from the sect treasury when he started a coup 50 years ago would certainly kill the brat.

He waited around for a bit for more of his Qi to return to him, and when it did, the old man dashed forward at a speed that was his fastest yet to kill Alex.

Alex noticed the old man come into his spiritual sense range, but his speed was too fast. He hit the sword to parry it, however, at the last moment, the old man used the momentum of the parry to spin around and hit Alex on his right shoulder.

Alex felt pain in his right arm as he saw the poison sword cut into it.

Chapter 551 - Broken Sword

Alex felt a chill go down his spine. He looked at the sword on his right arm that had barely gone past the skin. The wound wasn't anywhere close to being worrisome. The poison, however...

"Tsk!" the old man said when he saw the cut. For some reason, his face was frowning with annoyance.

Alex hit the sword again to push it off his arm and immediately went on the offensive. He knew now that he was struck with the poison sword, he didn't have much longer.

So, even if it was the last thing he would do in this world, he would kill this man. A slash, a stab, a swing-Alex used whatever he could to make the old man stay on guard so that he couldn't leave his range of spiritual sense.

The old man was trying to hit him back, but Alex was just overwhelming him. He needed to find a moment to run away.

The chance came when Alex swung his sword right at his chest. The old man brought forth his sword to black the strike, however, he underestimated Alex's strength at this moment.

Alex had used every part of his strength, including his Qi into this strike and struck at the old man's chest. Their sword made a massive clang sound as the old man was hit in the chest.

Despite using his own sword to block, the force behind Alex had still managed to hit his chest. The old man used this momentum to leave Alex's range of senses, but the damage he took wasn't a tiny amount.

He coughed up visible blood onto the ground and had a hard time breathing for a moment. When he saw Alex coming towards him, he forgot about everything and ran away.

Alex saw the disorderly footprints in the sand and realized that the old man had ran away once again.

He started chasing after the old man, but his movement technique was not something he could hope to catch up to immediately. He needed to chase for a bit until the Qi in the area was more suppressed, and the old man's speed was slowed down.

Along the way, Alex kept checking his wound for it to turn purple and red veins to start. However, even after a while, nothing happened.

"What?" he thought. "Am I not poisoned?" he was sure that he was poisoned. After all the sword had poisoned his master and many of the beasts along the way.

'Could it be I am immune to the poison?' he thought. But that too felt impossible as his master who had a better constitution than him also had been poisoned.

Then the only possible answer was that... he hadn't been poisoned. 'Does the sword no longer have any poison on it... or,' his eyes shined with understanding.

The poison was just on the tip of the sword, not the sides. 'Was that why the old man frowned? Because he knew he didn't get me?' Alex thought.

The old man had always tried to stab him ever since he started fighting. Not a single time did he go for a swing until the last time when he managed to hit him.

"Now that I think about it, master's cut arm didn't have the purple area either, only the stab wound did," Alex thought. He was now fully sure that his assumption was accurate.

He ran for close to 3 hours before reaching the old man again.

"Goddammit! Stop following me. Because of you, I will be too late to get it," the old man cried out.

"The only thing you'll be getting is this sword through your head," Alex shouted at the old man. The old man went invisible once more and they started fighting.

Alex made sure to never get hit by the old man's sword tip and fought the best he could. However, the fight kept getting dragged out due to the old man running away once again.

Alex chased and fought for nearly the whole day and half of the night once more. The night wasn't as dark as he would wish it to be.

The light coming from the north made him believe there was a new sun in the northern horizon.

He reached the old man once again, however this time it was going to go differently. He had a plan to win.

The old man's fury was quite high at the moment. There was barely a day remaining before the treasure would go past its maturation point and lose its quality, and from his understanding, there was still about 3 hours' worth of journey left. But with Alex's interference, the time kept on increasing.

"Fine, I won't leave before I kill you then," the old man cried and started fighting again.

The two of them were already familiar with their fighting style, so the battle fell into a stalemate once more. Alex was doing fine at the start but as the Qi suppression kept on lifting, the old man got his strength back.

The old man was happy to see that his attacks were having an effect on Alex and kept hitting him with more. He also stopped relying on his sword and used ranged attacks to hurt Alex.

Fortunately, the increase in Qi meant Alex could too use his spiritual sense to a higher range and easily dodged the attacks. He ran towards where the attacks originated and found the old man flying in the air.

He closed his eyes and threw his sword at the old man. The old man was surprised at first and moved aside to dodge the word. However, just as the sword passed him, Alex appeared out of nowhere next to the sword and grabbed it with his only hand.

He then put out his other hand which was only up to the elbow. However, from the elbow emerged an illusory hand made with metal Qi.

He used that arm to hit the old man in the stomach. The old man felt the claw like hand try to rip his stomach and flew backwards. Alex fell to the ground and turned to look towards the old man's direction with a snarl on his face.

He let go of his metal Qi and the hand disappeared. When it did, the things that were in his hands fell to the ground. When the old man saw what Alex had, his eyes went wide.

"You!" he shouted when he saw his storage bags on the ground. Alex took the storage bag and kept it in his own robe before getting ready to fight once more.

Since his cultivation base had returned by quite a fair amount, he too could now fight just like the old man. Alex immediately went invisible and started flying.

His bone tempering realm cultivation base would surely struggle against the man's True disciple realm cultivation base, but Alex was sure he could do it.

The old man tried to run when he saw this, but Alex wouldn't let him. He kept bombarding the old man with all the attacks he could.

He sent slashes filled with Sword Intent to increase their effectiveness. Then, he got close and went into a sword fight.

The two sword clashed again and again. Slowly, both of their sword started showing signs of damage, but Alex didn't care. He kept hitting the man, the fury he had forgotten for the past few hours returning to him.

The old man blocked as well as he could, but the maniac like fighting Alex was putting up was barely giving him any chance to retaliate.

As the old man's strength increased, so did Alex's. Again and again, Alex hit the old man's sword, putting both their swords on the verge of destruction.

Finally, Alex swung one last time, as hard as he could, and shattered the old man's sword. The old man looked in fear when that happened.

He immediately let go his sword handle and used his hands to send a yang slash towards Alex. Alex blocked with his sword, but his sword was barely durable as well. When the slash hit his sword, the sword broke in two.

Alex watched as the top half of his sword flew right past him in slowed time. His eyes moved to look at it, and so did his left arm.

His Qi left his body at the last moment and caught the piece of metal, before pulling it back towards him and driving it down at the old man.

The sword entered the old man's abdomen, right around the area where he had stabbed his master. However, it wasn't deep enough.

Just then, Alex let go of his sword and used his golden fist to punch at the sword. The sword drove though the man's stomach and came out of the other side.

The old man gasped in horror as he felt his abdomen get stabbed. At the same time, he lost his ability to fly or remain invisible.

The old man fell to the sands below him. He tried to move, but Alex jumped on top of him with his sword in his hand. The old man spurt out some blood from his mouth from the strike.

He tried to send out an attack, but his body held no strength at all. He had lost all of his Qi.

"Wh-What's happening?" he shouted.

"I told you old man. You die today," Alex said. He looked at the panicked old man. He had for some reason lost his cultivation base.

Alex looked at where he had stabbed him in surprise. 'That's the place where all Qi goes to. Is it responsible for his cultivation base as well?' he thought as he saw blood pouring out from the old man's naval region.

The old man tried to scramble away, but but Alex's rage wouldn't let him. Alex pulled up his half broken sword to strike at him. In a last ditch effort, he moved his arms around on the ground to save himself.

Just as Alex was about to swing down on him, The old punched Alex using his right arm. Alex was faster than the old man and stabbed him through the abdomen again.

The old man's hand continued the punch, but Alex casually put out his left arm to stop it.

He had no hand of course, but he used his Qi to stop the old man's attack. However, at the same time, Alex felt something else prick his right leg.

When he turned around, he saw the old man's left arm next to his leg. The old man's hands opened to show a purple wound in it, next to which was a broken piece of the sword.

Suddenly, a bunch of notifications appeared in front of him.. He was poisoned.

Chapter 552 - The Source

<Toxic substance detected>

<Sun God's Divine Yang body is attempting to disintegrate the toxin>

<Disintegration unsuccessful>

<Trying again>

Alex looked at the notification in front of him with a shock on his face. He had thought he won, but it seemed to be at the cost of his own life now.

"Shit!" he cried out. His anger reached sky-high as he pulled the broken sword out of the old man's body and immediately cut off his left arm all the way up in the shoulder. He wanted to stop the old man's poison from reaching his body so soon.

"Don't you dare think you'll be dying so easily," Alex said. He pulled out a healing pill and ate it to heal himself as much as he could and looked down towards the old man.

That was when he noticed the many broken pieces of metal all around him. The old man had fallen on top of his own broken sword and somehow managed to find the tip that held the poison. Likely due to it cutting himself and poisoning him.

The old man was bleeding out of his abdomen would as well as the giant gaping wound on his left shoulder.

"J-Just kill… me," the old man spoke in between spurts of blood escaping from his mouth.

"Your death won't be so simple," Alex said. "I promised you will feel the pain my master felt a thousand times over."

"I had to watch my master die, and I cried. Now I will do the same for you and watch you die. Only this time, there will be nothing but a smile on my face as I do so," Alex said. A deep-seated hatred flared from within him, telling him, urging him to torture the man as much as he could.

Alex dropped the sword as it was no longer necessary for the next thing he was going to do.

Alex put up his palm and a small fire appeared on top of it. He pushed it down at the old man's stomach and left arm, and burnt it as badly as he could.

The old man cried miserably, but Alex only smiled when he heard that. "Now that your wound has been cauterized, you won't die of blood loss," he said.

He then turned the flame into a sharp, arrow-head-like shape. "Let's begin." He brought the flame close to the old man's eyes.

"D—"

Before he could even say anything, Alex put the flame into the old man's eyes and burned it from the inside.

"ARGHH!" the old man cried out loud.

"Shut up!" Alex said. "We're only beginning." He brought out the flame, the old man's wound never bleeding due to it being cauterized on the way out.

He then put the flame onto the other eye of the old man and burned it as well. Both of those times, he made sure not to touch the nerves so that the old man could feel it.

"My master lost her eyesight first," Alex said, remembering Ma Rong's question of if he was there.

"After that, she lost her hearing."

The old man understood what was coming. He tried to cry to stop Alex, but Alex never did. He burned both of the old man's ears.

"Then, she lost her sense of touch," Alex said and stood up before he started burning the old man's body. He made sure that the fire had as low of a temperature as possible so that the old man would suffer much longer.

"She couldn't speak after that," Alex said and got rid of his fire before turning his hands into a golden claw. He grabbed the old man's neck and ripped out his vocal cords.

The old man could no longer cry out and started gasping for air. Alex moved to the side as he watched the old man burn and choke on his own blood.

For nearly 10 minutes he struggled to find a way to live before his lungs were filled with blood and he could no longer keep breathing.

The old man drowned in his own blood, feeling the hot flames on his skin the entire time as he died.

Alex breathed heavily, huffing very quickly as the anger in his heart slowly started calming down.

"Did you see that, master? I killed him. I hope this helps you find peace," Alex said. He walked upto the old man and used his broken sword to stab him through the head one last time to fully make sure he was dead.

He then increased the flame's temperature and watched the old man burn to cinders.

Now that his strong emotions of rage and motivation were gone, the other emotions in him finally started taking over him.

The yang source was still calling for him, and Alex wanted to go find what that is. Now that he was poisoned, he at least wanted to see what it was that drove this man to kill so many people just to get to it.

The Qi in the area was considerably stronger than previously, so Alex brought out his boat and flew away on it.

He had lost many things in the past few days. His arm, his master, and now he lost the sword that had been with him since the very first day.

Still, he had one more thing he was going to lose today. That was himself. With how hard his body was trying to get rid of the poison and still failing, Alex was sure he would die very soon.

He would likely never be able to return back to the game ever again, back to this world. That was why he wanted to see it. He wanted to see what was so attractive to the old man, and to him for the last time before he disappeared from this world.

The boat kept on flying, while Alex saw the red veins creep upon his body. It wasn't as fast as with his master, however, and Alex couldn't figure out why.

He had a few hypotheses. The first was that the poison didn't work very well against people with Yang-type energy and was slow to take effect.

That seemed plausible in his eyes. Another was that it just took a slower time to take effect on body cultivators.

Another reason could also be that his master didn't have any Qi at the time to fight off her poison, while he currently had some.

He noted the speed at which the red veins grew and made an estimate that the poison would kill him in about 3 hours. He hoped that was enough to reach the source.

Alex flew for an hour before he started noticing the symptoms of the poison. His body started going into a fever to fight the poison. He felt hot, despite the winter dawn.

He couldn't handle the heat, even as a cultivator, and started taking off his robes. He took the outer robes off, then the inner.

A little later, he also dropped the lower pants as well, until he was fully naked. Even then he felt it burning.

He knew the burning was good, it was his body fighting the poison, but the discomfort of it all made him annoyed.

By the next hour, however, Alex had stopped feeling hot, and instead, he stopped feeling most things his body was starting to go numb as the red veins crept up close to his neck.

Alex sighed and shook his head. 'Just a little more,' he thought. The boat slowed down considerably on the last foot of the journey, so Alex jumped off of it.

He left the boat where it was as it wouldn't be necessary for him anymore. He left his possessions there as well, wishing the best of luck to the next person that found him, hoping it would help on their cultivation journey. That was all Alex could do at the moment.

He looked up ahead and saw a massive dune he would have to climb. After that, he could feel the source of the Yang being just behind this dune.

He slowly climbed up the dune. The sand threatened to slide down, but Alex used what little Qi he could use to keep the sand in place as he walked up.

He looked the east along the way and saw the sun just about to come up over the horizon, and looked at the top of the dune, seeing another sun about to rise up the horizon as well.

He sensed the red veins crawling up his neck as well. Very soon, he would lose vision for sure. 'Not so fast,' he thought and sped up his climb.

He reached the top of the dune and look beyond it. Down below, A bright white light shined with the shine of a burning sun. The light made him feel like he was looking directly into one.

He took a step forward while blocking his eyes and suddenly, slipped. He rolled from the top of the dune all the way to the bottom.

He didn't feel it anything at all thought. He rolled for nearly a minute before he reached the ground.

He felt disoriented and even a little nauseous from all the rolls. "Argh!" he shook his head as he stood up. He was starting to hear some sounds that he had never heard before.

His heart skipped a beat when he realized what he was. He looked in front of him and saw the source of the bright light. However, it was just too bright to understand what it was.

Alex put his hand in front of his eyes, and he could somehow see the veins light up in his palm.

He squinted his eyes as well as he could and watched not the source, but rather what was beyond it.

Dark, blue, and murky waters. Splashes that came up the shore. Unending to the furthest horizon he could see.

"The ocean!" he said softly. That was something he had wanted to see all this time, and right before he was about to die, he got to see it.

The ocean was huge, and it covered his entire vision. He turned his head from left to the right, and besides the light and the shore, he could see nothing but the ocean.

He felt a bit of melancholy as he realized that he would likely never get to see this sight again.

Tears started rolling down his cheeks. He too didn't want to die. But he couldn't stop the inevitable at all.

He watched the ocean through his blurry vision. It looked so beautiful. He wanted to see so much more of this world, but he wouldn't be able to. Just as he thought that the image in front of him was gone.

He lost vision in his eyes and could only hear the splashes of the giant body of water. Before he knew it, even that was gone.

Alex could neither see nor hear anything. He soon realized that he had fully lost his sense of touch as well.

All of his senses were gone. If not for his body cultivation, he would've likely lost all ability to move as well.

He felt pain and regret in his heart. Pain that he was going to die, and regret that he didn't make more of his time.

However, those weren't the only feelings in him at the moment. There was also the intense attraction he was feeling towards the source.

Since there was no point at all, Alex let go of all restraints and started walking towards the source.

The source got closer and closer. He assumed he was burning at the moment, but he felt nothing.

When he felt he reached the location of the source, he put his hands forth. Even though he couldn't feel it, he felt the source appear on his palm.

Alex felt the intense urge to eat the thing. Since he had already let go of all restraints, he decided to not restrain himself on this one either.

He opened his mouth as wide as he could and put the source inside of it.

Immediately, everything went dark and Alex opened his eyes.. He had logged out.

Chapter 553 - The End

Alex opened his eyes inside his capsule. He could see some lights around him, he could hear himself moving, feel the softness beneath him.

'I logged out?' he thought with a solemn expression on his face. The memory of the sea was still clear in his mind. 'Did I die?'

He tried to log back in. Instead of going back to his body in the game, or the other world as he had come to believe, he got a single message in his ears.

<You have died>

<Would you like to restart with a new body?>

Alex sighed. "I really did die, huh?" he said softly. He didn't want to make any such decisions at the moment, so he declined the capsule's offer.

He opened the lid and walked out.

Suddenly, he felt a wave of nausea and hunger hit him as he nearly stumbled onto the ground.

His stomach cried really loudly. "What's—" he remembered that he hadn't eaten anything in nearly 3 days now due to the events of the game.

He remembered feeling really happy when he got to take his revenge, but now he didn't know how to feel anymore.

Revenge wasn't going to bring his master back. It even made him die in the process. Because of his impulsive action, he was now unable to go save Pearl as well.

Alex sighed once again. He had let revenge destroy who he was and what he had left. He shook his head and forgot about it for now.

He got up and left to eat. He didn't even bother going to the bathroom as he was too hungry to do that.

He ate as he had never before, surprising all 3 of the girls who had come down to eat as well.

"Slow down, or you will choke," Hannah told him.

Alex nodded, but didn't speak and continued eating. Once done, he left the kitchen and went back to his room.

He went back into his room and went to take a shower. He thought about what he would do next in the shower.

He knew he was going to get a bad body like everyone else, so he didn't really look forward to going into the game. Even if he did, he likely wouldn't spend such a long time in there.

He had surely lost his alchemy skills so there was no way he could remain an alchemist either. Without his body, he didn't see himself getting strong quickly as well.

The only reason he even wanted to go back was to rescue Pearl, but would he even be able to? Pearl was no longer bonded with him now that he was dead as well.

"Will I even spawn in the Western Continent? People usually don't spawn there, right?" Alex thought.

He started worrying a little more. Still, he needed to take the chance. For Pearl.

Once he got out of the bathroom, he immediately went back to the capsule. He opened the lid, got in, and logged in.

He waited for the capsule to ask the question again… but it never came.

"Huh?" he wondered. "Why is nothing happening?" He tried to log in once more, but again, there was nothing but silence.

'The hell?' he thought. "No way that question from before was a one-time thing, right? Just because I rejected it once, that shouldn't mean I don't get to enter at all."

Alex started to get worried. Did he lose his one chance to 'reincarnate' in the game?

Suddenly, he heard a knock on the door. He walked out of the capsule and opened the door.

Outside the door, was a confused Hannah. Before he could even say anything, she quickly shoved him aside and jumped into his capsule.

'What the hell?' Alex thought. 'What is she doing?'

He waited for a minute or so, and Hannah walked out of the capsule. The confusion was ever so high in her eyes.

"Did your capsule break before today?" she asked.

"What? No, I logged out this morning after I died in the game," Alex said. "After that, I haven't been able to log in."

She then opened her phone she had brought along and went on to check the news.

"Hey guys, is your capsule working?" Sarah shouted through the house.

Alex and Hannah walked outside to find a confused Sarah in the living room with her laptop in her hand.

"It's not just us," Hannah said while looking at something on her screen. "The entire world is suffering this. Everyone was simultaneously logged out while we were eating, it seems."

"What's going on? Is this a maintenance break? Is there anything on the internet about this?" Sarah asked.

"No, but people are asking questions," Hannah said.

"Let's wait for it to get fixed then," Alex said.

And so they waited for an hour. Then two hours. 4. 8. A day. 2 days. 5 days. 10 days.

However, there was no information about the game. Deva Corp had a fire lit under them from all the harassment they suffered from the players.

However, even though they owned the game, they weren't the ones who were responsible for maintaining it. But, they didn't know who was, and could never get into contact with the developer.

After many days, people simply lost all hope. They started a lawsuit against the Deva corp. Their stocks dropped from sky high, all the way to the ground.

The people understood that they could no longer go back to the game, so people started going on with their life.

Alex had already sold his stock of Deva corp when he had come to understand that the reincarnation aspect of the game would one day ruin it for everyone. And while he was wrong about the reason, he had luckily sold it while it was at its peak.

With the game not existing anymore, and him having no way to sustain himself, Alex decided to go back to University. He took classes that would help him in business this time so that he could help his father back home.

They changed apartments too as this one was too costly to sustain and got themselves a more affordable one.

Alex's relationship with Emily steadily progressed as well. As for Hannah, it didn't seem like she could find someone to love anything soon.

After a few months, she left Oakleaf city and went back to her hometown to help her father with their business.

Alex studied in the university for a bit longer before returning back home to improve his father's agriculture.

He helped him gather new workers and added facilities to house them. His father insisted on doing everything alone, but Alex didn't let him.

He then expanded his farm by a lot and started working on it himself. His business knowledge, as well as his father's agricultural knowledge, helped them create one of the biggest and most well-known farms in the entire city of Mapleleaf.

A year or so later, at the age of 25, Alex married Emily. Their wedding wasn't very big, but both of their family were happy with a small wedding.

A year or two later, Hannah also got married to a man she had fallen in love with at work.

They hadn't forgotten about the game. Eternal Cultivation may have been short-lived, but it had made a very large impact on their lives.

Alex still remembered his master who had died. He prayed his other master who lived was well now. He remembered his senior sister, senior brother, his friends, and he missed them all.

Most of all, however, he missed Pearl. If he had any regrets regarding the game, it was that he couldn't save him. All he could do was pray that Pearl passed the ritual without dying.

Hannah still loved her husband from the game, and would sometimes tell Alex how much she missed him. However, she didn't let that ruin her current relationship with her husband.

The world remembered the game, they remembered it very well. But they had also moved on from it.

A few years later, Alex had a child with Emily. A daughter. He named her Maron, after his late master, Ma Rong.

That was the only child he had, and he loved her dearly.

Life went on, and many years passed. Alex was now in his 40s. He had retired now and lived happily on his farm with his wife.

And he wouldn't want it to be any other way.

[The End of Volume 1: Inside the Game]

* * * *

--Extra from Alex's LIfe--

A certain day.

Alex couldn't sleep at all during the night with the back pain that kept him awake. While he was awake, he heard a loud bang coming from somewhere behind his house.

He walked out in the midsummer night, with a flashlight in his hands.

The sound had come from the forest behind his house. There were no workers at the moment due to the summer festival they had gone to set up close to the city.

"What's going on?" he asked himself. He walked into the woods without any fear. There were no beasts in there after all. The only thing he needed to worry about was falling off of the edge.

However, he didn't need to worry about that as they were very far away from where he was.

He walked slowly as his old bones hurt a lot during the night. He walked about 5 minutes into the forest when he noticed something.

There was some sound coming from up ahead. 'I hope it's not dangerous,' he thought.

If there was danger ahead of him, he wouldn't be able to run away. Still, it was too late to turn around as he saw what had made the noise in the forest.

His eyes narrowed when he saw the source of the sound.

Chapter 554 - Finally Free

Sounds of water splashing close by rang all around.

"Urgh…" Alex cried out as he slowly came to consciousness. He struggled to push himself against the crusty, hot ground to stand up. His left arm never touched the ground.

'Right, I don't have it anymore,' he thought. He slowly stood up to feel the cold wind blow past him. He saw vague light in front of him, but nothing else.

He used his spiritual sense to look around him. He was on top of hard ground, close to where the water entered his spiritual range.

He saw his own body. Fully black from burning from whatever the source was. Fortunately, it hadn't gone past his skin.

He had a memory of being poisoned, but the red veins he remembered were not on him anymore.

He stood there for a moment before he realized, he wasn't cultivating at all. "Huh?" he wondered.

He checked with his spiritual sense and he really wasn't cultivating at all.

"How… am I here when he's not cultivating?" Alex thought for a moment before he thought of an answer.

He wanted to believe it was true, but… the hope it gave was too much for him if it were not.

He took a single step forward. He moved… and nothing happened. He stepped again. Nothing happened once more.

"Is this true?" he wanted to cry, but no tears came out of his eyes. Even his eyelids were fully burnt from the heat of the source.

He slowly reached to his crusty eyelids and peeled them open to see in front of him.

There is was, with all of its greatness, and all of its terror. The ocean.

He remembered seeing this scenery with a lot of light around it, however, this was the first time he actually experienced it himself.

He felt the Qi in the air. There was not a single hint of Yang energy in it.

He looked around. He moved around. It was true. Somehow… it was true.

Finally, tears started flooding down his face.

"I'm Free! I'm finally free!" he cried out. It had been ages since he could control his own body.

He wiped the tears off, ignoring the pain he felt when he did so. In fact, the pain made him feel happy. Finally, he could do something on his own after so many months.

The winter air was cold, but the sun in the sky helped him feel the warmth.

Alex loved it all.

He took a deep breath. The smell of salt was in the air all around him. He slowly walked ahead and jumped into the ocean.

"Hahaha-hahaha!" he started laughing while tears streamed down his face again. The cold ocean water made him feel alive. Finally, after so many months.

"So he's really gone? Forever?" he wondered.

After a few minutes, he stood up and walked away from the ocean. Just as he was leaving, he saw something out of the corner of his eyes.

To the side, he had missed something by being too tunnel-visioned on his freedom. He had missed a giant tree about 10 meters tall, with a yellow trunk, yellow branches, and yellow leaves.

He slowly walked up to it, he felt like it belonged to him for some reason. He placed his hands on the trunk and closed his eyes.

He could tell, the tree had lost all of its yang energy and it had died.

"So, was this… the treasure?" he wondered. A memory came to him, something he hadn't experienced himself, but the other guy did.

It was the memory of reading a book, a record of the Tiger sect.

The words flowed through his mouth as he looked around him. "Where the fiery earth embraces the yin like water," he looked at the tree next to him and continued, "A golden wood of Yang emerges."

He looked at the rock-hard ground that was likely molten before from the heat. The Fiery Earth.

He looked at the ocean whose coldness knew no bounds. The Yin-like Water.

Finally, he turned back to the tree once more. Golden Wood of Yang.

"So this is the place that record was talking about, huh?" he wondered.

This was the birthplace of the Tiger sect. Their Sacred land.

He looked up at the tree and saw something missing on one of the branches. "I see," Alex said. "So the source… it was your fruit, wasn't it? No wonder that old man was so scared about you losing your maturity."

Alex felt like the tree had a soul, so he kept talking to it. "You're dying, aren't you? I can't save you."

The tree suddenly moved. The branches dropped to the ground, tearing up the land beneath them before the branches brought out something.

"A seed?" Alex asked in surprise. "Is this your seed?" he asked.

The tree moved in acknowledgment.

"Do you want me to sow it somewhere?" he asked.

The tree moved once again.

Alex looked at the yellow seed about the size of his thumb and said, "You were the reason I got my life back. I will do everything in my power, to get one for your child as well."

The tree moved again, and as a gesture of thank, 3 leaves fell from the very top of the tree.

Alex grabbed the leaves and looked at the shiny, golden leaves. "You don't have to thank m—"

Before he could even finish speaking, the tree lit up all over, and as if winds could carry light, the motes of light slowly flew away, before the entire tree vanished from his sight.

"Thank you," Alex said and bowed towards the tree. He looked towards the ocean again and smiled. He smiled because he was happy he lived. He smiled because he was free.

Then, he turned around and left. He flew up the massive dune of sand and slowly floated down on the other side.

He saw a sand-covered boat just sitting there. He walked up to it and looked at his items.

Were they even his items? He never did anything to get them. It was the other guy who got them after all.

He took… his... storage bag and pulled out a few pills. He needed quite a few healing pills to bring him back to looking like normal.

That meant healing the innards, healing the skin, and even growing out the hair all over his body.

When his body did heal, Alex used his spiritual sense to check if there was something wrong with it still.

He checked his whole body, and finally moved on to his face. At first, he saw nothing wrong, but when he realized what he was looking at, his eyes went wide.

"My… My face! It's back?" he shouted out loud. Alex's face looked exactly the same as his real face back in his homeworld.

His… Alex wasn't sure if he could call that world his at the moment. From what he understood, he was just a clone, trapped in his own body, while the real soul drove it.

Now that the real soul had gone, he could finally surface and use it as his own.

'Am I really a clone?' he wondered. The last thing he remembered doing by himself was putting on that helmet for the first time, getting ready to log in.

That was the last time he ever did anything by himself. Ever since then… he was suppressed in his own body.

"No," Alex thought. That was not the only time he did something on his own.

He remembered the other time, when his real soul fought with Zexi, while he watched from beneath the water in his spiritual sea.

He was in a stasis, unable to do anything. However, when his other soul had lost all control, at the last moment, he had gotten his control back and had then killed Zexi.

Alex looked down at the boat and with a wave of a hand cleared the sand. There were his dirty clothes and his other storage bags.

He recalled another memory, not his but the other soul's memory.

The other soul had left all of his possessions here, wishing luck to the next person who found it. He had hoped this would help them on their cultivation journey.

Alex looked at them and said in a soft voice, "Thank you for giving me all of this. I promise I will put them to good use."

Alex quickly put on a new set of robes. The robe was neither green nor yellow, but rather a neutral gray color.

He then stored the golden leaves and seed into a storage bag, before putting all of the storage bags into his robes and got on the boat to fly back towards the Hong Wu sect.

'How many days has it been since the attack? How many days was I out?' he wondered.

The sun was in the sky, but that gave no information of how many days had passed.

"Will I ever be able to go back home?" he wondered. He also wondered if that other world was his home.

The speed at which he had flown was very fast now that the suppression in the desert no longer existed.

Within a matter of hours, Alex could see the giant cliffs of the Hong Wu sect.

He didn't know how to feel about the sect yet, as it was never his sect, but the other guys. However, the memory of the other Alex told him just how much he cared about it.

Just before he reached the sect, however, he saw something shine next to the river.

He slowed down to check what it was. When he did finally see it, his eyes went wide.

He immediately took back the boat and jumped down to the object. It was half-buried in the sand around the grasses, but the half that did stand up made it very clear what it was.

The short blue handle, the light blue cross guard, the thin blade with the blue hue.

That was his master's sword. He slowly pulled it out and looked at it, half of it bloody from the old man's stab wound.

The memories this sword evoked, they weren't something he wanted to feel at the moment, but he couldn't help it.

Tears streamed down his face as he remembered Ma Rong, his master, and her promise.

He walked up to the river and washed away the blood from her sword. He couldn't let the filth's wound desecrate it like that.

He looked at the sword again. His master's sword. Not the other guy's master. HIS master.

This evoked another memory of his. This one, however, didn't belong to the other guy. This was a memory of his own.

The memory he had from the time he talked to Ma Rong.

Chapter 555 - Master

Many months ago, back on the ship to the Cardinal City.

"You see… I still fall asleep when I cultivate and… I don't know when I stop doing it," Alex said to Ma Rong.

"What? You haven't fixed that yet?" Ma Rong asked.

"I don't know how to master. I keep falling asleep. At first, I thought that was normal, but it seems that it is not. I don't know what to do," Alex said.

"You should have let me know that way earlier," Ma Rong said. "Alright, Cultivate right now and I'll try to see what the problem is."

Alex had closed his eyes to cultivate and started breathing slowly. The Qi in his body started moving to the rhythm of his breathes and soon, and slowly Alex started falling asleep.

As one Alex fell asleep, the other one finally came to the control of the body once again.

'He started cultivating?' Alex thought as he assumed control of his body once again. He circulated the Qi around his body to cultivate.

That was what he did. The other guy would always think cultivation was something that happened on its own. But he was wrong. It was him doing all the work while the other guy fell asleep.

He had always hated the other him. The him that got to do what he wanted, the him that was always free. The him that got to go back to the other side.

However, despite hating him, he never did a single thing that would harm him. For he knew that the other him was not responsible for whatever he was going through.

They both shared the same memory before they came to the game, the same experience. It was only after jumping into the game that they separated.

And while the other him got to experience both worlds, he was stuck on this side, fated to forever hide beneath him.

Alex sighed on the inside. He continued cultivating as that was the only time he wasn't suppressed and could actually think for himself.

If he stopped cultivating, he would immediately go back to being suppressed, so he had no choice.

"Does he have school tomorrow? What time does he need to wake up at?" Alex wondered and looked through the memory he had that he never experienced.

This was what he always did. He looked through the other Alex's memory and cultivated until it was time for him to leave, be it if it was for his classes, or just to have breakfast.

There were times when he just wanted to keep on cultivating forever, so that the other Alex could never assume control, but he never did any of that.

After all, the other him was the only way he could know how his parents were doing on the other side.

'Hmm? Oh, he got on a ship to the capital for competition?' Alex thought while he looked at the memories. He saw the top 3 disciples of the Hong Wu sect.

He saw the 2nd and 3rd elder and saw an old man who the other guy's master said was a fraud.

Following that, he finally recalled the memories of when he was to wake up. He was to do so when Ma Rong told him to.

'Does that mean…' Alex was about to send out his spiritual sense when he noticed Ma Rong's spiritual sense on his own body.

Ma Rong could see that Alex had indeed fallen asleep, but she couldn't figure out what was wrong with him.

So, she had decided to check if he wasn't cultivating properly by some chance. She used her spiritual sense on him, but she couldn't find any problems at all.

She was very confused as to what she should do now.

"Yu Ming! Yu Ming!" she started calling him out. However, she got no answer.

"Yu Ming!" she called out again, but she still got no answer.

"Yu Ming!" the last time, she called him directly with a spiritual sense. "Wake up."

Alex could hear it all, but he didn't know what to do. She kept on calling for the other guy. So… should he just stop cultivating?

He couldn't see what was happening outside, so he sent out his own spiritual sense.

"Ah, so you are awake. Why didn't you say so?" Ma Rong asked the moment she sensed the spiritual sense.

Alex panicked a little and nearly stopped cultivating. However, when he stopped to think about it, he realized that maybe… just maybe, she could help him.

So, once again, he sent out his spiritual sense towards her, and this time he actually spoke to her.

"H-Hello!" he said.

"Ah, you are awake. How did it go? Did you learn how to not fall asleep?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex didn't know how to ask for help. What was he to say? How should he form the questions?

"Yu Ming?" Ma Rong asked when he didn't reply.

"Um… I'm not Yu Ming," Alex replied. "Your disciple is still asleep."

Ma Rong's face narrowed in confusion. "What are you saying, Yu Ming?" she asked.

"My name is not Yu Ming. My name is Alex," Alex replied a little scaredly.

Ma Rong's eyes went wide. "Did you take over my disciple's body?" she immediately got angry.

"No! No! No!" Alex was still replying with his spiritual sense. "He took over mine."

Ma Rong's serious face showed confusion again. "What do you mean… he took over?" she asked.

"I mean… I'm not sure, but I think he took over mine. I have been stuck in this body for nearly a month and a half now. The only time I gain control is when he cultivates," Alex said.

Ma Rong got even more confused. Alex thought for a moment and decided to tell her everything from the very start.

He told her about his life, where he came from, the other world, how this was a game to them, however since the start he had been suppressed in this body.

Ma Rong's shock was great and understandable.

"Are you saying that… you are not from this world, but another?" Ma Rong asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I don't know how any of this works, but… yes, I, we are from another world."

"Hmm…" Ma Rong thought. The shock had been truly great for her and needed some time to process.

"So… you are a clone of his?" Ma Rong asked.

"Um, I think so," Alex said. "I think our souls were sent here to find a random dead body and take over it."

"I may have just been a contingency plan in case something happened to his soul," Alex said.

"No, that's not possible," Ma Rong said.

"Huh?" Alex asked.

"There are two methods of making clones," Ma Rong said. "First is using a dead body and putting in a bit of your soul to control it. Making clones that way takes weeks since the soul will need time to integrate with the dead body."

"You said you appeared in a forest right? If it were just you, it would be possible, but you said there are millions of people just like you here, right?" Ma Rong asked.

Alex nodded. "Yes, you won't find so many dead bodies just lying around, especially ones that have no damage to them."

"Then?" Alex asked.

"Then, the body you have now was created somehow, and you were the soul grown along with it," Ma Rong said as his eyes went wide in just the thought of what she was saying.

"To think someone is out there that can clone bodies in an instant, that too of such high caliber. I couldn't even begin to imagine the resources that would be needed for your body alone, let alone the other millions of people."

Ma Rong's breath got heavy. She understood the gravity of the situation. The only ones who could possibly do these sorts of things were definitely immortals.

"Does… does that mean… this body is mine?" Alex asked.

"Yes, that… that should be your body which is being controlled by your original soul," Ma Rong said.

Alex felt stunned. He didn't know what to say. Slowly, as he processed the information, a question appeared in his mind.

"Does… does that mean that I will never get to go back home? That… I do not belong there anymore?" he asked. He felt like crying, but he couldn't. Any unnecessary movement could stop him from cultivating, sending him back to the dark corner in his mind.

Ma Rong stayed quiet for a while and watched the sun come up the horizon. She sighed, and finally said, "yes. Yes, I believe you are stuck here forever."

A few elders appeared from the side. "Sect leader, we've arrived," they said.

Ma Rong looked out of the boat and saw the capital. "Let the 2nd elder take control for now. Tell him to take you all to the hotel. I will leave later."

"Yes," the elder said and left.

Alex's emotions could be vaguely seen on his face. Pain, despair, agony, sadness. He was feeling a multitude of emotions at once.

"That means I will never get to see my mother again? Never get to meet my father? I had only just left the countryside for the first time. Will I never get to see the city like I wanted to?" he asked himself.

Ma Rong quietly listened to his complaints while everyone else left the boat.

She looked around and saw that no one was onboard anymore. "We should leave soon too," Ma Rong said. "Can you…" She felt guilty asking him to surrender control of his own body to the other soul.

"Do I have to? Do I have to give control of my body, even after knowing it's my own body? Why should I? Why doesn't he leave instead?" Alex's voice started getting louder in her mind. She could hear the anguish in hiss voice as well.

"Why does he get to have everything while I stay trapped in my own body? Why do I have to suffer through all of this?" Alex cried out.

"Am I not worthy of a life just because I'm a clone? Do I not deserve freedom?" he asked.

Ma Rong started tearing up when she heard him. "You do, you deserve it," she said.

"Then why? Why don't i—"

"I will help you. I will help you find a way to get back your freedom," Ma Rong said.

Alex stopped shouting and asked, "You will?"

"Yes," Ma Rong said with tears in her eyes.

"I… I can have my freedom back?" he asked. "Please don't give me false hope."

"No, it's not false. I promise, I will do everything I can to find a way to help you," Ma Rong said.

"Even if that means getting rid of his soul?" Alex asked.

"No, I will find a way so that neither of you gets hurt, and both of you get to live your life just as you want," Ma Rong said. "Trust your master."

"Mas..ter," Alex said slowly. "I can call you, master?"

"Of course," Ma Rong said as she wiped her tears. "I am your master, and you are my disciple."

Alex started crying on the inside. "Thank you, master. Thank you" he cried. At the same time, Ma Rong started crying again.

"Now, can you please let him come out? We need to leave," Ma Rong said.

"Yes," Alex said. "Thank you."

Slowly, his cultivation cycle slowed down, and he felt the suppression come back to push him back to the depth once again.

The other Alex came out and saw Ma Rong, with tears in her eyes, and asked, "What's wrong, Master? Why are you crying?"

* * * *

Alex looked at his Master's sword as tears flowed down his face again. He had just recalled his memories of the first time he talked to his master.

He then remembered the last memory he had of his master, her dying in his arm, regretting that she never got to keep her promise.

He brought the sword to his chest and hugged it as he cried, "You didn't fail master. You did it. You kept your promise."

"Thank's to you, I'm finally free."

Chapter 556 - Returning To The Sect

Alex stood up and dusted off the sand from his pants. He had washed his face with the river water and no longer did he have the tear on his face.

He suddenly sensed someone moving behind him as he sensed their Qi in the air. He spread out his spiritual sense and saw 2 elders walking towards him.

"My head suddenly hurts," one elder said.

"Yeah, mine too," the other one replied.

They had noticed Alex from far away already, so the moment they appeared, they put their swords towards him as if he were a bad guy here.

"Who are you?!" they shouted at him.

Alex looked at himself. He no longer looked like 'Yu Ming' at all, so it was obvious they wouldn't recognize him.

"Senior, I am Yu Ming." Alex said. "I have changed my appearance, but it is me."

The two of the elders looked at him with confusion in their face for a moment, before the confusion turned into anger and disdain.

"How dare you lie to us using the late Sect leader's dead disciple's name?" they shouted at him and got ready to attack.

"Eh?" Alex was surprised.

'They think he's dead? Well, they're not wrong in a sense,' Alex thought. Suddenly, he lost all aura of his, and similarly, even his image disappeared.

"Huh? Where did he go?" the elders shouted.

Alex didn't want to do this, but he didn't know how he could explain to them that it was indeed him, and not some random person faking being him.

He left the elders concerned and in full combat mode, and he back towards the sect.

With all of the suppression gone from the Forbidden Fields, one could easily fly in and out of it.

It had now changed to perhaps one of the better places in the sect. Maybe someday the elders would establish some other things here.

He would love to see a combat section established here. Not that he was sure he would be here to see that happen.

He flew up the mountain and landed in front of his master's house. It seemed to have been repaired by now, although he could see that the repair was pretty new.

'How long was I really out?' he wondered again.

The other guy had learned a lot from this place, so Alex felt that he owed this place at least a bow.

Once done, he left and went to his own house and walked in for a bit. He knew each and every corner of this house.

After all, there wasn't many things he could do while cultivating aside from sending out his spiritual sense to check this place.

He smiled a little as he looked through all of the place and walked out.

He walked down the mountain, now fully visible, and was starting to attract glances from everyone.

He smiled towards everyone and made his way to the Elder's hall. As soon as he reached the place, he sent out his spiritual sense to find someone that he could talk to.

The Grand Elder was in room along with the First elder and his Martial uncle, talking about something.

"Grandmaster, are you free to speak right now?" he asked him through the spiritual sense.

The old man's eyes went wide and he suddenly turned.

"Yu Ming?" he called.

"Yes, Grandmaster," Alex replied through his spiritual sense.

"What's wrong, master?" Lang Shun asked.

"Y-Yu Ming, he's back," the Grand Elder said.

Alex walked into the hall and opened the door to the room.

The moment they saw him, instead of elation, they felt confusion. "Who... who are you?" they asked.

Alex chuckled a little. "Grandmaster, Martial Uncle, it's me," Alex said. Despite his face being different, his voice was the same, so they easily recognized him.

"Yu Ming? You're alive?" they asked in surprise.

"Yes, Grandmaster," Alex said. "I'm... I'm sorry for my reckless and impulsive action. I must've worried you all."

"Worried us? Hell, we thought you died," Lang Shun shouted.

"Eh? Died? Uh, I was close to it for sure, but as you can see, I'm not dead," Alex said.

"How did you survive? Where did you even go? We scoured the desert after you left, but we never found you," the Grand Elder said.

"Um, did you go towards the ocean?" Alex asked.

"Ocean? That's so far north. There is no way we could go there with all the suppression on our cultivation base," the Grand Elder said. "Did you really go there?"

"Yes, I did," Alex said with a solemn face. "And I killed master's killer too."

All 3 of their eyes went wide. "You killed sister's killer? Are you sure?" Lang Shun asked.

"Yes, Martial uncle," Alex said. "He's dead. I killed him with my own hands."

Lang Shun immediately walked upto him and embraced him. "Good! Good!" he said as tears spilled down his face.

The Grand Elder's eyes were tearing as well. Alex simply smiled with a sad face.

"How did you kill him? He should have been stronger than you, right?" Lang Shun asked.

"He was, but the suppression helped me. With my physical strength, under the right circumstances, beating him was easy," Alex said.

"Oh right," Alex remembered his burning question. "How many days was I gone for?"

"Do you not know?" the Grand Elder asked.

"No, I was unconscious after the battle," Alex said.

"Sigh, it's been 7 days since the invasion," Lang Shun said. "I'm surprised you survived in the desert with so many beasts for 7 days."

"There weren't any beasts there. They were probably hiding due to the intense suppression that happened out of nowhere. Also, you guys should know, the Qi has returned to the desert. The Yang Qi is fully gone now," Alex said.

"What?" all 3 of them shouted in the room, including the rarely speaking first elder.

"Right, did master wake up?" Alex asked. It felt a little weird calling Wen Cheng, master, but when Alex thought about it, all the combat knowledge he had in his mind came from him. So it was only right to call him that.

"Sect leader Wen Cheng was fully healed 3 days ago and has went back to the Tiger sect. Although, he does have an arm and a few fingers missing, not unlike you," Lang Shun said.

"Are you alright? Do you want to contact an artifact creator to make a fake arm for you?" the Grand Elder asked.

"Right, you can make a fake puppet arm which wouldn't be weaker than your normal one," the First elder said.

"That's... tempting, but I'll pass. I would rather have my own arm," Alex said.

"How will you do that?" Grand Elder asked curiously.

"Umm, do you guys have master's spiritual bag?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the Grand Elder said.

"Then you will find a bunch of talisman inside them, all recording recipes for different pills, including many True pills and Saint pills. Amongst those saint pill is a pill that can help me regrow my arm," Alex said.

"A Saint pill? That's impossible to make," Lang Shun said.

"Yes," Alex said. "That's why I plan to convert the saint pill to a True pill by using similar ingredients."

"Woah!" Lang Shun said after listening to his idea. "You think it'll work?"

"Yes," Alex said. "Although I do not know how, yet. The Royal Alchemist successfully upgraded my Common rank pill recipe to a True rank pill recipe. Going by that logic, downgrading should be similar as well, right?"

"I wouldn't say it's similar," the Grand Elder said. "Upgrading is easy from Common rank to True rank because the one doing the changes is usually familiar with both the ingredients."

"However, it will be impossible for you to be familiar with a saint rank ingredient. Heck, it's impossible to even find one," the Grand elder said.

"It's alright, Grandmaster. I will do it," Alex said.

"I hope you do, Martial Nephew. I will need such a pill for my leg too," Lang Shun joked.

"Of course, Martial uncle," Alex said with a smile. "By the way, what's the situation of the sect leader status now? Did you already choose one?"

"No," Grand Elder said. "First elder is currently the acting sect leader until we can decide on something else. But... it's likely going to be the 4th Elder."

'4th Elder huh?' Alex thought. A memory of a short and thin man with a relatively thick mustache came to his mind. He had never really interacted with the man, so Alex didn't knew much about him.

"Also," Alex spoke up to ask something, but the question stuck on his throat.

"Yes?" the Grand Elder asked.

Alex forced himself to speak and said, "when... can you hold my graduation?"

"Hmm, it will be a week in the earliest," the Grand Elder said.

"I see," Alex said. "I will wait for the day then."

"Have you... made any plans for after your graduations?" the Grand Elder asked.

Alex nodded and said, "I plan to leave the sect."

"What? Wh—" Lang Shun spoke up in surprise, but the Grand Elder stopped him from speaking any further.

"I see," he said. "I hope you've thought of this choice for a bit before you made it."

"Yes, Grandmaster," Alex said.

The Grand Elder nodded. "Very well then. I will have them set your graduation soon."

"Thank you," Alex said. "I will go for now."

"Wait," the Grand Elder said. "Before I forget. There was someone from the City Lord's house here to look for you. We sent them back telling you were dead, but you might want to visit and let them know you are still alive."

"I see. I will do that," Alex said. "Goodbye."

He turned around and left the Elder's hall.

Chapter 557 - The City Lords Task

A girl in her mid-20s appeared on the outskirts of the Scarlet City. She had long flowing dark hair and wore a black robe made up of silk.

She had a frown on her face as if she didn't want to do what she was here to do.

She flew up to the city walls and saw a few soldiers. "Who is in charge of your city?" she asked.

The guards suddenly fell into a lull of sort and answered her without any thoughts.

'A city lord huh? Let's go see him,' the girl thought and flew through the city to the city lord's manor.

When she reached there, she sent out her spiritual sense to find the city lord.

"Come out!" she ordered directly into his mind.

Fu Wen was surprised when he heard the girl's voice in his mind. He immediately knew that it was a Saint realm expert who had arrived.

He walked out of the manor, and directly went outside. When he saw the person that had called him out, his eyes went wide.

'So young!' he thought as he looked at her. however, she was way too strong to trust her looks to be a direct representation of her age. For all he knew, she could be an old grandma.

"How may I help you, miss?" he asked as politely as possible. He really didn't want to anger this expert.

"I need your help with something," she said. "I need you to get your soldiers to gather some people."

"Some... people?" Fu Wen asked curiously. "May I know who I am to gather?"

"Yes," the girl said. "Go and gather the cultivators that will identify themselves as a player."

* * * * *

After leaving the Elder's hall, Alex left for the alchemy garden to the right. The place where his master was buried.

There were elders staying guard there, and surprisingly one of them even recognized him.

When he asked how he recognized him, the elder said, "I remember, that was the face you used for nearly 3 days in the competition back in the capital city."

'That's right,' Alex thought. The other Alex had indeed used his face to hide from Zexi.

After knowing that it was Alex, they let him enter the place without any hesitation.

Alex walked up the mountain to the place where his master was buried.

Her grave was right next to the Yin Gathering tree, which was starting to look a lot healthy now that the Yang energy from the city was gone.

"Hello, Master," Alex said. "We haven't talked in a long while, have we?"

Alex had a sad smile on his face while tears started building up in his eyes. He wiped the tears and continued speaking.

"I hope you are doing well... in your afterlife. You can rest assured about your killer, he's dead already," Alex said. "Although, I'm sure you wouldn't be happy learning that your disciple died in the process."

"It's just happened on its own, and now I'm free."

Alex then took out her sword from his storage bag. "Here," he said as he stabbed the sword next to her headstone.

"They say we can give you some things to make your afterlife easy. I hope this sword is of use to you in the afterlife, just like it was here."

Alex talked to Ma Rong for a while. After that, he decided to leave. Just as he was standing to leave, he heard something rustle a bit further away from him.

When he sent his spiritual sense to the place, he was a little surprised.

"Senior Green," Alex called out the snake that was hiding in the bushes. The green snake slowly appeared out of the bushes and looked at Alex.

After Ma Rong's funeral, the snake had decided to stay closer to her, to protect her and the tree she so very loved.

"Are you looking after Master?" Alex asked. The snake hissed while nodding its head.

"I see. Thank you for doing that," Alex said. "Please continue looking after her, and this tree."

Alex then looked into his storage bag and brought out something. "Here, I hope this helps you in your task," he said and handed the snake a Spirit Cleansing Lily.

The snake took the lily and nodded to Alex in thanks.

Alex thanked the snake once again and left the garden. He walked away from the place and went to visit the core disciple's mountain.

He met up with his friends that had somehow by now learned of his survival.

"I should have known. You are not the type to die," Kong Yuhan had said, giving Alex a little chuckle.

He talked to Zhou Mei and Fan Ruogang. Zhou Mei was in a very depressed state. She was still in denial that her beloved masters had killed each other.

All of a sudden, she felt like she was alone. Her sister and Fan Ruogang were taking care of her, but it would take a little longer for her inner wound to heal.

Alex handed them a Spirit Cleansing Lily as well. He had quite a few, so he wouldn't mind giving them to these people who treated him as a friend.

Even though he never experienced their friendship, the memory and emotions were still with him.

Alex also met Wan Li.

"My condolences for what has happened. It is truly a great loss for the sect to lose not only the two elders but also the sect master," Wan Li said.

Alex nodded but kept a solemn face. It seemed after the invasion, Wan Li had somehow lost all of his aggression. There weren't even guards looking after him now.

"Thank you," Wan Li said all of a sudden.

"Hmm? For what?" Alex asked.

"For capturing Black Venom alive, so I could interrogate her," Wan li said.

"Black Venom?" Alex remembered the memory. "Oh right, What happened to her? Is she imprisoned somewhere?"

Wan Li shook his head. "I killed her," he said.

Alex felt stunned for a moment, but in the next moment, he understood. "Did you at least get the information you needed?"

"Yes, I got what I want," Wan Li said. "It turned out that it was the Victorious Snow merchant group that paid her to kill my parents. My parents were starting to get successful, and it was impeding on their business."

"Victorious Snow..." Alex thought for a moment and a memory surfaced once more. "Ah, that fat guy. Huo Tu's father."

Alex remembered the old man from the first-ever auction he visited.

"Do you plan to take revenge against him as well?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Wan Li said as his face overcame with rage, but he calmed himself a bit. "But I can't do it right now. I will need to be stronger."

Alex nodded. "I heard Huo Zemin's first son is quite capable. Not to mention the mercenaries his money could buy. You really have to be very careful, brother Li," he said.

Alex looked at Wan Li's cultivation base which was close to True Lord now.

"Take care of your cultivation base, brother Li. If you cultivate too fast without consolidating your foundation, you will suffer later on," Alex said.

"I know," Wan Li said. "I'm slowing down now."

"I see," Alex said. "Here." He handed him another Lily and told him what to do. after that, he left.

He gave Wan Li all the advice and help he could. the rest was something Wan Li would have to do on his own.

Alex left the core disciple area and walked out of the sect. He wanted to go directly to the Tiger sect, but since the city lord's manor was on the way, he decided to go there first.

He looked around the city. He hadn't been able to experience it before, but now he did.

Should he be happy about it? He would certainly be happier if he was back at home. However, if he was to remain in this world now, he would certainly make the most of it.

'Hmm, what's up with all of these soldiers running around the city today?' he wondered. They were saying something, but Alex was lost in his own world, so he didn't listen.

He reached the City lord's manor, and let them know of his arrival.

He could hear a bit of commotion not far away from the lord's manor and wondered what it was.

The guards relayed the message to the City Lord and soon the city lord himself came running out.

He looked at the youth in front of him with confusion on his face. He was missing an arm, but his face looked different. "You are not him," he said.

"No, it is me, City lord. I just look different," Alex said. "I heard you wanted to see me."

Fu Wen still didn't trust that it was him, so Alex brought out a pill from his storage bag.

"It's the pill that makes someone sweat a lot," Alex said. "Is this proof enough?"

"Oh, it is you," the city lord finally accepted. "Why did you change your look?"

"I just... felt like it," Alex said.

"Come on in, let's talk inside," Fu Wen said and the two of them went into the manor.

"First of all, let me give you my condolences. Ma Rong's death is a tragedy for the whole empire," Fu Wen said. "It is truly a big loss for all of us."

"Thank you, City Lord," Alex said. He could tell that the City Lord truly felt of his master's death as a loss.

"So, let me get to the point. My uncle came here a week ago looking for you. He heard that you were back from where you were taken and wanted to talk to you," Fu Wen said.

"The Emperor wants to talk to me?" Alex asked. "Is he still around?"

"No," Fu Wen said. "After he learned you most likely died in the desert, he returned back."

"I see. May I know what he wanted to talk about?" Alex asked.

"Well..." Fu Wen hesitated a bit before finally saying, "he has two guests from outside the empire that came through the beast's land."

"Hmm," Alex was surprised. "Humans came out of the beast land? Ah, it must've been one of the ones that entered from the Luminance empire."

"You know about the Luminance empire?" Fu Wen asked in surprise.

"I learned a bit about it from the beasts," Alex said.

"Oh great," Fu Wen said. "The two that came out want to go back, but they're scared. You somehow survived there, so they want you to tell them how to survive in there."

"Oh, they want to get back? Wait, so they know how to enter?" Alex stood up suddenly and asked.

"Uhh... I believe so? They said they escaped on their own," Fu Wen said.

Alex's eyes moved around in surprise and a sense of happiness. He finally found a way to go save Pearl.

"I will do it," he said. "Please inform the Emperor of my survival as well as the fact that I will go to the capital a week or 2."

"Are you sure?" Fu Wen asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I will graduate from my sects in a few days. After that, I will leave."

"Ok," Fu Wen said with a smile. "I will let my Uncle know.

"How's the city doing?" Alex asked. "I hope it's back to being a bit more normal."

"Yes," Fu Wen said. "We finished the repair a few days ago, so it's as normal as it can be after a bandit attack."

"I see," Alex said. "I saw many soldiers outside. You must've upped the security a lot."

"Hmm? Oh no, those aren't for securities," Fu Wen said. "I am just using my soldiers and guards to gather people for someone."

"Gather people?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Fu Wen said. "Someone came and asked me to help them gather cultivators that would call themselves Players."

Alex's eyes went wide all of a sudden. "Players?"

Chapter 558 - You Are The Reason

Alex walked out of the City Lord's manor after saying his goodbye. The City Lord told him that he would relay the information to the Emperor about him being alive.

Alex would need to quickly graduate and go to the capital so he could save Pearl. Also, he wanted to meet up with the Royal Alchemist to see if he had any ideas to regrow his arm.

He was looking forward to that, but for now, there was something else that had grabbed his interest.

"Who's gathering players?" he wondered. He had learned that the commotion outside that he heard before getting in was actually the place of gathering.

So, he decided to make his way there before he went to the Tiger sect.

Walking there, Alex saw a lot of people along the way. All of them had the same sad, confused, and somewhat hopeful look on their faces.

'They must really not want to stay here, huh?' he thought. 'Understandable.'

He saw a building next to the group of people where the soldiers were governing the players. One by one, the players would enter the building and walk out less than a minute later.

'What's the purpose here?' Alex wondered. Initially, his thought was that someone had started a therapy group for people that were now likely depressed and anxious.

But… this seemed nothing like it. 'Do they perhaps have some malicious intent?' Alex thought. If they had, Alex decided to help these poor folks a little.

He waited in line as more and more of the players entered and walked out.

He didn't know how long it had been going on, but from what he could tell, there were about 600 players in total in the Scarlet city.

He would've never thought of there being this many.

He looked to the western sky and saw the sun. It would set in merely 2 more hours. 'I hope this hurries up,' he thought.

As he waited for his turn, he spoke with a few of the players that were on the line.

At first, he thought everyone was just a normal person, who was busy playing their game. However, it didn't take him long to realize that just like him, they were the old souls stuck here too.

'Why did I think this only happened to me?' he wondered. He started asking questions.

However, when he continued listening to their anguish, he realized that these people had zero ideas about what was happening.

The last thing they remembered was, just like him, putting on the helmets. Aside from that, there were some thoughts and memories that popped up into their mind of the time when the other soul controlled their body, but aside from that, they remembered nothing.

Alex was really surprised to hear that. He asked if they had ever been conscious after coming to the game world, but it seemed they hadn't.

Some of them did say that they thought they were awake the first couple of days, but it was a memory from so long ago that they couldn't trust themselves with it.

'Wait, was I the only one who remembered it all?' he thought. 'How is that possible?'

He tried thinking of answers to the question and after a while, came up with 2 answers.

Firstly, he had something that they didn't, which was the eidetic memory. Having spiritual sense, he could remember every memory, every detail to perfection.

Even after so much time had passed, he could remember everything since the day he cultivated with a Spirit Cleansing Lily.

Since these people didn't have that luxury, after months on end, they couldn't remember most of the memory they had made.

Another answer was that it was all because he came up to the surface everything the other Alex cultivated. He still had no idea why that was, but from talking to these players, it seemed that it was only him that did that.

'Right,' he thought. 'He was the only anomaly in the other world who would sleep during cultivation. Did that help me somehow?'

Alex guessed that while both of these answers were equally true, the second one held more importance.

'There must be something wrong, or rather right with my body for me to wake up when cultivating, unlike them,' he thought.

He had a Divine Grade body, a God-grade talent, and… a seemingly very powerful spirit roots.

'It could be any of these things,' he said. Finally, a little before the sun was to go down the horizon, his turn came up.

Under the watch of the soldiers, he saw a woman walk away, and he entered the building.

The building seemed to be a sort of warehouse, now that he could see it more clearly from the inside.

The room was open and there was a girl with a notepad in her hand, seemingly writing down something.

"What's your name?" she asked without even looking at him as she clicked the pen and started writing down what he was going to say.

"Alex Benton. I assume you wanted my real-world name," Alex said.

The girl looked at him with narrowed eyes and continued writing. 'She's quite pretty,' Alex thought.

He sent out his spiritual sense to see what he was writing but suddenly felt a backlash when the girl sent her own spiritual sense to attack his.

"Stay in your place," she told him angrily.

Alex felt a little scared of what she had just done. 'How is she so strong?' he wondered. Her age barely made her look a few years older than him, so this came to him as a genuine surprise.

Just when he was thinking that, he noticed something that was so obvious that he couldn't believe he missed it.

He immediately put up his only hand as he pointed at the thing that was on her hand.

"A PEN!" he shouted in surprise. A body made up of plastic, with ink in it that was topped off by a small layer of gel. That was a pen that was impossible to be found in this world.

"You! How do you have that pen?" he asked.

"Hoh! You are the first one to ask me about this pen. The others just asked me about what was going on. It seems you are not as concerned about it," the girl said.

"Now, put your arm down or I will cut that one off as w—" suddenly the smirk in her face disappeared, and her eyes went wide.

"That ring!" she shouted when she saw the golden ring with a ruby in Alex's hand. "Where did you get that ring?"

"This ring?" Alex showed a confused face, but on the inside, he was surprised that she noticed the ring at all.

"I found it in the de—"

His voice stopped as well when he noticed a similar ring on her fingers as well. It wasn't the same design, but it was similar enough that Alex knew for sure that it was a storage ring as well.

"Where did you find it?" the girl asked again.

"Why don't you tell me where you found yours?" Alex asked.

"You don't need to know that," the girl said.

"Then I guess, you don't need to know this as well," Alex said. Despite nearly answering it already, he decided to hold off the information.

"How about this?" Alex said. "If you tell me how you got the pen, I will tell you where I found this as well."

The girl thought for a while and answered, "I got it from where you think I got it from."

Alex's eyes went wide. "From the other world? For our homeworld?" Alex asked.

A curiously little smile came upon the girl's face. "You could say that I guess," she said.

"How did you get it? Where did you get it from?" he asked.

"You don't need to know anything else. Just tell me where you found the ring. I have a few more questions after that and you can leave," the girl said.

Alex really wanted to know about them, but he couldn't force the girl considering how strong she was.

"I found them in the desert north of here," Alex said. He didn't give her any hints as to the fact that he knew what they were.

"Can I see them?" the girl asked.

"No thanks. I would like to keep it myself. It looks pretty on me," he said.

The girl's eyes narrowed. She really wanted to take the ring, but her master would scold her if he learned that she hit him. After all, she was told to be as diplomatic as possible.

"Alright, let's forget about it then," she said. Alex was surprised she didn't insist further given how strong she was.

He kept looking at the pen and notepad, and they were definitely from his home-world. 'How did she get them here?' he wondered.

"Do you know how long you've been here?" she asked.

"About 7 or so months," Alex said.

The girl's eyes changed when she heard that. He was just a month off from the correct answer after all.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I started a month later than everyone else, so it's been 7 months."

"What?" she suddenly exclaimed. "You know that too?"

"Uh, yes," Alex said. "Unlike the ones out there, I was conscious some of the time and have full control over my memories."

"Woah!" the girl said, actually impressed, or at least surprised. "Maybe you are the only one that can help me then."

"I can?" Alex looked at her in surprise. "What do you want the help with?"

"I wonder if you remember anything important happening here 5 days ago," she asked.

"May I ask what it is for?" Alex asked.

"5 days ago, something happened that caused all the players to revert back to their original state. I have come to learn that the cause of that problem was from this area," she said. "So, I'm looking for information on it. if you have any, it's better you give us so we can do something to fix it."

"5 days ago, huh?" Alex said. He wasn't sure if he should be giving out this information, but if it meant learning a way back home, he would be ready to give out every single secret he held.

"Let's see… 7 days ago there was a bandit invasion on this city. Many people died… including people I cared about."

Alex's face turned solemn as he remembered the night once more.

"And? That's it?" she asked with a disappointed look.

"What? No, of course not. Uhh… north of here there was a source of Yang that suppressed cultivation in the entire desert. That night, the Yang energy reached a climax."

"What?" the girl cried out. "Yang?" the girl stood up once again in surprise as her eyes that had gone done to being a normal size had widened again.

"Uh… yeah," Alex said, slightly surprised at such a reaction from her.

"Sorry, please continue," the girl sat back down and carefully noted everything, not wasting a single word of his.

"And?" she asked.

"Well, I had a fight with someone who poisoned me. So, in my near-dead state, I went to check what it was."

"When I found it… I ate the source," Alex said.

The girl suddenly stopped writing. "You ate the source?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Wait, I must have heard it wrong. You said… you ate the yang source?" she asked once again.

"Well… technically the other guy that was in my body did. The real player," Alex said.

The girl's hands started shaking and with a snap, the pen broke in two.

Alex stepped back a few steps when he saw the rage build up in her face.

"YOU IDIOT!" she cried out.

"Wh-what's wrong?" he asked.

"WHAT'S WRONG? What's not wrong?" she exclaimed. "You ate the Yang source!"

"Uhh… so?" he asked, still unable to understand what was happening.

"It was your fault, you idiot," the girl cried out.

"You are the reason the system broke, and now everyone is stuck here!"

Chapter 559 - Home World

Alex looked a little stunned. "I was the reason? Wait, what? How can that be?" Alex asked.

"Tell me exactly when you ate the Yang source," the girl demanded. She seemed furious, but it didn't look like she was going to harm him.

"Uhh… it was early in the morning 5 days ago," Alex said.

"It is you, then," the girl said. "You ruined everything!"

"No," Alex said. "Why would I ruin everything by simply eating something? That doesn't make sense. Also, what did you mean by destroying a system? I don't understand."

"Goddammit! This was why I told him not to get mortals to do it," she said in a soft voice.

"How did you even survive eating that Yang source? It was so powerful that it traveled back through your connection and destroyed all of our systems," the girl said.

"I… just did. Wait, did you say YOUR system?" Alex asked, his eyes narrowing in suspicions.

"Yes, our system," the girl said.

Alex had a thought occur in his mind that he wasn't sure if he wanted to be true. Still, he decided to ask.

"Were… were you the one that sent us to this game?" he asked.

"No," the girl said. "That's my master. He's the one responsible for all of the artifacts and formation. My job is just being his voice for the mortals."

"Wait, wait, wait. Artifacts? Formations?" Alex asked in surprise. "You don't mean in our homeworld, do you?"

"Obviously I'm talking about that. What else would I be talking about?" the girl said.

"Huh?" Alex exclaimed in surprise. "But our homeworld is a world without Qi. Even if someone managed to gain the knowledge to make artifacts and formations, there is no way they could run it without Qi."

The girl stared at him for a bit before rolling her eyes and saying, "Your home is not without Qi. It's just lacking Qi."

Alex looked at her without a single change in expression. "That's the same thing I said," he said.

"A little different. Saying your home is without Qi is wrong because that insinuates that it never had Qi. But that is wrong. It used to have Qi long ago, but it no longer does due to a terrible battle," she said. "Since it once had Qi, it's easy to use Qi if you get a hold of it."

Alex looked surprised. He couldn't believe what he was hearing. 'There was Qi in our homeworld previously? So why is it absent now?' he thought.

He then remembered a certain piece of information that was tucked away in his brain.

His eyes went wide as he asked, "does it have anything to do with the apocalypse our homeworld went through 600 years ago?"

"What?" the girl asked. "Of course not. Your home hasn't been without Qi for over a few millennia."

"Oh, so I was wrong," Alex said. "Wait, getting back on topic. So our home-world is still without Qi. So how would artifacts and formations even work?"

The girl looked at him with a face that said that it was obvious. "You can't think of anything?" she asked.

Alex shook his head in response. He couldn't figure out where his home-world would even get Qi from.

"Have you earned money from the game?" the girl suddenly asked.

"Yes, I've earned a few," Alex said, a little proud of himself, even though it wasn't really him that earned it.

"What did you sell to get the money?" she asked.

"That's obviously the—" finally, the realization hit his mind as his eyes went wide.

"The spirit stones," he said. "The spirit stones that we sell are sent to our homeworld?"

Alex's eyes were full of surprise with this thought. He never thought that something as simple as selling spirit stones in the game was what was actually running the system back in his homeworld.

"Yes, we use the spirit stones that you players send back to us. That is the only way to keep the formations running," the girl said.

"Wait, does that mean I could've cultivated back in our homeworld if I ever got spirit stones?" he asked.

"Yes, that's possible," the girl said. "Also, please stop calling it your 'homeworld' that makes it sound so distant. Just call it home."

Alex was confused again. "What do you mean? It is distant."

"I mean, yeah it's far. But it's not that far," she said. "It's just an ocean's flight away."

Alex's heart started beating as he looked at her with more confusion and suspicion. "Umm… what are you trying to say?"

The girl looked at him with a bit of confusion as well. "Oh, right. You don't know," she said. "You home, or as you call it, your homeworld is just a small land hidden inside the Central continent."

"WHAT!" Alex exclaimed with surprise and shock very much apparent in his voice.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait! A-are you s-saying… that the central continent that is said to be devoid of life… is actually our homeworld?" he asked.

"Devoid of life?" the girl's eyes flashed with a shine. "Have you learned something about the Central continent? Not many should know this information."

"I-I learned it from the White Tiger's palace. Apparently, the white tiger died there in a battle some 5000 years ago," Alex said.

"But let's forget about that for now," he said. "Are you sure the central continent is my home?"

Alex was starting to get teary-eyed now. If what she was saying was true then there may actually be a way back home.

"You've been to the White Tiger's palace?" the girl looked at him with surprise. "That is truly surprising."

Alex wasn't listening to her, however. The thoughts in his mind were chaotic at the moment. He was trying to process everything he was hearing.

He quickly wiped off his tears as questions flooded his mind again. "Wait, what about the void around our world? Does the central continent have that void?"

"Void? What void?" the girl asked. "Ah, I remember. That's a lie my master told you to keep you all from killing yourself trying to find out what's outside your small Qi-less safe land. It's actually just an all-destroying chaotic Qi which will turn metals to shred in a matter of seconds."

The girl sighed when she said that. "Sigh, I finally found the culprit and it didn't even seem like he knows what he did."

"I'll go and let my master know what I've learned here today. You go and tell the rest of the people that it's over."

"Wait," Alex said. "What do you mean you're leaving? When do we get to leave?"

"Didn't you hear me?" the girl asked. "The system is broken. We can't take you back even if we wanted to."

Alex's eyes ran around trying to find ways to convince her. "Wait, wait. Your master, he's the one that made the system right?" he asked.

"Yes," the girl said with a suspicious face.

"T-tell him about the teleportation formations that lie in the central continent. It used to exist as a hub to teleport people around the other conti—"

The girl put up her hands to stop him from speaking. "I'm genuinely surprised that you know about the teleportation formation in the central continent."

"However, let me ask you this," the girl said. "What did you think the system you destroyed was?"

Alex's jaws dropped. "No way… you're lying," he said.

"Nope, you destroyed the thousands of years old teleportation formations that we used to send you all throughout the other continents," the girl said.

She brought out a talisman and started using it.

"What's that?" Alex asked.

"A one-time use teleportation talisman. I'm going back to master," she said.

"Take me along!" he asked.

"Can't do. It's a one-man teleportation talisman," the girl said.

"Then give me one of them too," Alex said.

"There were only two with me. I already used one to get here. This is the only one remaining until my master makes some more," The girl said.

"Then how do I get back? How do any of us get back?" he asked. His home… it was so close, and yet, he couldn't reach it at all.

"Hmm," the girl seriously thought about his question. "With the system destroyed, it will take master a while to finish repairing the formations. Just wait until then, and we will get you all back."

"Oh," Alex said. Waiting a little longer… he could do that. After all, he had already waited 7 months.
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"Will it be done in a few weeks?" he asked. He was planning on going to save Pearl. So he hoped that it was later than that.

"Week?" the girl nearly scoffed at his question. "It's going to take decades. At minimum 3 decades, and at maximum... never."

"What?" Alex lost all hope he had gained in the past few seconds. "I can't wait for 3 decades."

"Unfortunately, you will have to," the girl said and continued using her talisman. She caught him glancing at her as if he wanted it for himself.

"Don't try to do anything unneces—"

Suddenly, Alex dashed forward at an incredible speed that surprised himself. He put his only arms forward to grab the talisman from her hands.

However, at the last moment, a massive aura erupted from her, pushing him down on the ground.

Alex could feel the floor crack beneath him. He knew the girl was likely in the saint realm, but this was too much. She was likely as strong as the two saint beasts.

'Dammit!' he thought. His one chance at returning back home didn't seem to go as he wanted it to. He tried to fight the aura that was pressing him down.

"You really did it huh? You think you can walk away after you've tried to steal from me?"

The girl had gotten angry.

Chapter 560 - Celestial Grade

Pressure crashed on Alex like a rock being tossed over him. He felt his knees buckle as he was pushed to the ground.

He gritted his teeth as he kept his bones from cracking under the pressure.

Suddenly, something warm appeared from deep within him. No, this wasn't warm. This was hot. It was undoubtedly hot.

Once the heat traveled all over his body, the pressure on him subsided by a lot. Alex no longer felt the pressure pushing him to the ground and stood up perfectly fine.

The girl's eyes shined in surprise when she saw him stand up. She noticed something and let go of her aura.

Alex took the chance to attack her again. He rushed towards her, with his arm glowing golden.

"Hey don—" the girl had decided to stop fighting, but Alex attacked her anyway.

Just then, something very fantastical happened. Right when Alex's punch was about to reach her, her body turned illusory, like she was a ghost.

Alex's punch went through her without even touching her. Even the talisman she held in her hand had turned illusory.

"What the hell?" Alex thought in surprise. However, he didn't let the surprise hold him back. He immediately turned around and sent out a palm attack.

A yellow palm flew towards the girl.

"You should know by now your attacks won't harm me," the girl said as the palm reached her. She expected the palm to go past her, but instead of doing that, it actually pushed her back a little bit even in her illusory form.

'What?' her eyes went wide in surprise. 'How did he manage to do anything to me in my Ethereal form?'

Just as she was thinking that another attack landed on her. A mental attack.

Suddenly, she felt her mind burn in slight pain. "Aah!" she cried out, momentarily coming out of her illusory form.

Alex noticed that and smiled. He could steal it now. However, he extremely over-expected how long his Heaven's impact would work on her.

In a fraction of a second, the girl got rid of her headache and sent her her own mental attack at him.

Alex felt a brain-splitting headache and fell to the ground in pain. "AAHHH!" he cried out in pain. This was the first time he had ever suffered mental damage in all of his memory.

The girl looked at him in surprise, maybe even a bit of terror. 'How the hell is he still okay after taking the spiritual attack of a Saint Core cultivator?' she wondered.

She also started wondering as to why his mental attack even burned her. Not only that, the yellow palm, it had done some negligible damage to her too.

'That can only mean that his Yang is just that pure,' she thought. 'Does his body still hold the yang from the source he ate perhaps?'

She remembered how terrible the Yang energy that transferred to her master's mansion was. It was continuously being transferred for nearly 3 days, wrecking everything they had worked hard for the past few decades creating.

Not only that, her master actually wasn't able to stop that Yang at all. It had stopped on its own. All her master could do was try his hardest to free the suppressed soul of the players that were sent to the other world while removing the formations he had set on them.

About a minute later, Alex started recovering. His headache had become a lot more manageable.

The girl looked at her talisman and saw that there was merely half a minute before she disappeared.

'He's recovered already? So fast,' she thought. All the things that had happened with him had surprised her quite a bit.

She suddenly thought of something and asked, "Do you have a unique body?"

"What?" Alex asked, trying to stand up.

"I don't have time. Do you have a unique body? The system must have given it a name right?" she asked.

"Ughh! It was Sun God's Divine Yang body," Alex said. Nobody really knew or had even heard of this body from what Alex remembered.

"I knew it," the girl silently said to herself. "So it's you, huh?"

"What?" Alex looked up at her in confusion only to see her hand in front of him, asking for a shake.

Alex hesitated for a second, but after seeing her not retaliate despite him attacking her, he decided to reciprocate and shook her hands.

"My name is Hao Ya. You can call me sister Hao," the girl said.

"Sister Hao?" Alex asked.

"Yes, and congratulations," she said with a smile on her face as she understood something.

"For what?" Alex asked.

"Your body... it's evolved. That yang source you ate, while it destroyed the system, it also helped you evolve," Hao Ya said.

"My body... evolved?" Alex asked.

Hao Ya sensed the Qi gathering around her, just ready to teleport away.

"Wait around for 3 or 4 decades, please. Just cultivate and wait. You don't need to worry about your family and friends either. You have the other copy in there in your place," She said. A silver glow started appearing around her.

Alex sensed the energy coming off of the silver glow. Surprisingly, it was not energy he knew of.

'It's not one of the 7 elements?' he thought.

"I hope to see you doing well in a few decades, younger brother. Until then, just sit tight and cultivate," she said. The light consumed her and she started disappearing.

Just as she was gone, she said one last thing. "Please don't die. You are one of the only ones we can depend on." And she vanished.

Alex looked at the place where Hao Ya had previously been in with a surprised and confused expression. The information he got in the last half a minute was just too much for him to comprehend at once.

'Wait, what did she mean by depending on me? What am I supposed to do?' Alex thought.

He played back the things that had happened in this place as he walked out of the warehouse. His had been the longest time spent inside, so people started asking questions.

Alex gave them as clear of an answer as he could. He told them that if they stuck around for another 30 or more years, they would get a chance to go back to their home.

People got disappointed and even sad. That was expected. Alex himself felt similar feelings too. But just the information he had gotten about the 5th continent being his home-world, and that his body had evolved was enough to make him feel a little happy.

As for going back home, he just had to wait.

* * * * *

Hao Ya appeared in the mansion of her master. She went back to the courtyard to find him.

"Oh, you're back quite early, Hao Ya," the thin man with a ponytail looked at her as she appeared. He was sitting next to the small lake behind his house.

"Yes, master," she said.

The man looked at his clock and asked, "this was quite early though. I thought you would stay there for a few more days to gather information. Don't tell me you already gathered it."

"I did more than that actually," she said. "I found the culprit behind this."

"Oh," the man looked surprised. "There was a culprit?"

"Yes," she said. "Your guess of it happening on its own was wrong. The culprit, this kid named Alex, had eaten a yang source at the northern shore of the western continent."

"He ate a yang source? Such powerful yang should have incinerated him in an instant."

"That's what I thought too, but he was alive and well, aside from missing an arm. But then, I had this thought and I asked him to confirm this."

The man listened intently.

"The person that ruined all of this was the same person you had put so much of your expectations on," she said.

"I... did?" the man asked.

"It's the player that had the Sun God's Divine Yang body," she said. "And what's more, it's evolved."

"WHAT?" the man suddenly stood up and reached in front of her in an instant.

He grabbed her shoulders and looked at her with only seriousness in his eyes. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"Y-yes, master," she said. "He used a yang attack on me and managed to interact with me even when I was in my ethereal self. Also, his mental attacks have yang affinity to them."

The man sat back down on the ground.

"Oh yeah, there was also this weird thing. He had a storage ring with him, just like this one, but as far as you've told me, there shouldn't be any in the Western Continent, right?" she asked. "What more, he said he found it in the desert."

"A ring?" the man looked confused for a second before his eyes went wide. A memory from so long ago flooded back to his mind.

"THE RING!" he shouted. "The plant! That plant! He found the plant. Oh my god! It all makes sense now. No wonder our formations were destroyed. He found the plant!."

"Master?" Hao Ya looked a little scared seeing her master acting this crazy.

"Haha! I'm not even mad now. If having our systems being ruined means him evolving his body to a Celestial grade, then I'm all up for it," he said. [A/N: Ancient will now be replaced with Celestial]

"Aren't you too happy right now, master? Last time when you learned he had the Sun God's body, you were a little more serious, angry even," she said.

"Ah right, but that was only because I didn't know what sort of person he was. It would be a really bad thing if he wanted to do the wrong thing instead of the right."

"We would have to nip this in the bud if it were that," the man said. "So, how was he? Does he seem nice?"

"Well... he's impulsive, but that's probably because he saw the teleportation talisman in my hand and wanted to come back here. But, I don't think he's really a bad guy. He seemed polite enough, I guess," she said.

"Well, as long as he is not bad, I'm fine with that," the man said. He happily turned towards the lake and said, "you heard that old friend? I might just have done it this time."

The lake's water moved a little as a response.

"Right, what else happened? Tell me from the start," the man asked. Hao Ya recited everything about him, including the fact that he was aware of the game even when he should have been suppressed at the time.

"Hmm, maybe I made some mistake there," he said. "Also, you said he had an arm missing?"

"Yes," Hao Ya said.

"Poor kid," the man shook his head. "You gave him a pill to heal him, right?"

Hao Ya stopped talking as a feeling of embarrassment came over her.. She scratched her head a little and said, "Ah... oops."

Chapter 561 - Meteor Shower

Alex walked towards the Tiger Sect with many thoughts running in his mind. The main thought obviously was the fact that his home was in the same world as the game.

'So it was never 2 different worlds. We were just… isolated,' he thought. It was not that dissimilar to the situation of the Crimson Empire itself.

'Isolation from the rest of the world, huh? I wonder how we turned out so differently compared to the Crimson Empire. The technological improvement we have had for years is better than anything the mortals of the Crimson Empire could ever make,' he thought.

He wanted to know what his future was like now. Hao Ya had told him to wait for 30 years. He was told to just sit tight and cultivate.

So what if he did that? Would waiting 30 or 40 years to go back home even be worth it? What would he even do at that time? What would any of them even do at that time?

The world would have moved on by then. Their friends and families would have moved on.

What would even be left for him to go back to? Alex started feeling very anxious.

He couldn't wait to go back home right now because it had been months since he was stuck here. However, if he could only go back 30 or 40 years from now… there was no point to going back.

Especially now that he knew that his other soul was back at home, fulfilling his duties and responsibilities.

He no longer saw a reason to just wait around to go back home. Yes, he still wanted to go back home and see everything he had missed.

But, he no longer viewed it as very important. The priority of having to go back home plummeted to the very bottom.

He reached the Tiger Sect's gate and called his master as well as his senior brother to tell them he was there.

He also made sure to let them know that his face had changed.

Surprisingly, all 3 of them came to see him at the gate.

"I knew it. You wouldn't go die by yourself," Wen Cheng said with a proud face.

"Are you okay, little brother?" Luo Mei asked.

"He's fine. Look at him," Liu Xun said.

They took him back to Wen Cheng's manor and have him sit down to talk. They started asking how he was, and how he was feeling now that Ma Rong was gone.

He told them the truth that he was still sad but was working through his grief quite well. It had especially helped since he managed to kill the man that killed her.

Alex decided not to drop the burden on them of knowing that he wasn't the one they were waiting for.

At least, he didn't want to let his sister know that. He didn't want them to act differently towards him after knowing the truth.

However, he did want to tell his Wen Cheng. He already considered him his master, so he was ready to tell him everything.

After an hour of talking, Liu Xun left to go back to his duty. While Alex asked Luo Mei to leave as well since he had something to talk to Wen Cheng privately.

"You really killed the second elder?" Wen Cheng asked in surprise.

"That's… what I wanted to talk to you about, master," Alex said. "You see… it wasn't me who killed him."

Wen Cheng was confused at first, but once Alex explained everything his eyes went wide.

"From another continent?" Wen Cheng asked in surprise.

"Yes, the real me was from that continent, but now he's gone back, leaving me behind with all the skills and memories," Alex said.

"So… what does that mean? Are you not the Yu Ming we know?" Wen Cheng asked.

Alex struggled to come up with an answer and sighed. "I don't know, master. I still have the same memory, and the feelings I have towards you are the same as well."

"The only way I'm different is that I never got to experience the things that evoke these feelings and memories. I don't know if that makes me a different person or not. In the end, I believe we are the same person, with different souls," Alex said.

Wen Cheng put his hands on Alex's shoulders. "If you have the same memory and feelings, then I will consider you the same person. Don't think too much about it," he said.

Alex's felt a little relieved in his mind. "Thank you, master."

"Alright, go rest. You must be quite tired," he said.

"Not now, master," Alex said. "We have something more important to discuss."

"Something important?" Wen Cheng looked at him with a curious look. "What's more important?" he asked.

"Along the way back from the desert. I looked into the second elder's bag. He didn't have many things, but he did hold a talisman with him regarding information about the sect that was previously lost to you all," Alex said.

He took out the storage bag of the old man. It didn't have anything Alex would consider important aside from a set of ingredients and formation plates, but the talisman with the information was one that he would consider truly important.

Alex handed the talisman over to Wen Cheng who started reading it. As he did, his eyes went wider and wider in shock and surprise. He had never expected the origins of the Tiger sect to be… this incredible.

Nearly a thousand years ago, a group of people saw a meteor shower in the night sky. Some of the meteors landed nearby, so they when to check it.

When they did, they found a small, growing tree about 2 meters tall at the northern shore of the empire.

The golden tree put them in awe and they decided to live around it in hopes that it would bring good luck to them. And good luck it brought them.

Not far away from them, they started finding other various materials. Some spirit stones, some books, some pills, some weapons, some artifacts, and many other things.

The people of that time used these materials to start a small sect. Within a few years, they finished using the spirit stones.

They used the pills, weapons, and artifacts to make themselves stronger as well and improved their sect until it was big enough to become a well-known sect at the time.

The books, however, were useless to them. Aside from maybe 10 or so books, the rest of them were written in a language that wasn't legible to them.

So, the tiger sect could only use some of the books. The rest, they kept them safe for a time when they would understand the language.

During this time, something incredible happened. The tree that they set their sect around started growing hotter and hotter until the ground beneath them melted.

Now other trees in the vicinity were starting to die, and no other plants were growing there.

So, the sect had to move further away and made the location of the tree be known as a sacred land that no one could step in.

As time went by, the tree grew more and more, forcing the sect all the way back to the scarlet city.

Then, 150 years ago, the Emperor ordered all capable sects to set their base closer to the southern forest just to have them protect the civilians.

When they did swap the location, they came across the Black Stele. A stone stele that was written in the same language as the other unreadable books they currently held.

The sect leader was truly fascinated with this stele and didn't want to return back to their original heritage, while the second elder wanted to slowly return back to the place with the tree.

The records mentioned after all that the tree would bear fruit, an incredible treasure in about 50 years.

Seeing that the sect leader was still not agreeing to go back, the second elder tried to become the leader himself.

However, things didn't go as he wanted. The fight that broke out was way too big and many people died.

That was when the second elder realized that in this chaos he could be the only one to learn about this stuff and have the treasure for himself.

So, he either destroyed or stole all the books and records for himself. He also stole some weapons, but was caught in the end and was exiled out of the sect, left to die.

Wen Cheng didn't really care about reading the Second Elder's life after that. While it did mention something about living as a mortal for a few years, having a daughter, Wen Cheng quickly skipped over it and stopped reading.

"They found so many treasures huh?" Wen Cheng said softly. "They were quite lucky."

"Yes," Alex said. "Although it's a shame that so many of the books that were in another language were destroyed or stolen. He probably destroyed what he took too."

"You may be right," Wen Cheng said.

Alex took out two books from his storage bag, something his master had returned to him not long ago.

"Here," he said. "I believe these belong to the Tiger sect."

Wen Cheng took out two books and handed them to Wen Cheng. The first was the Veiled Light technique, and the second one was the Immortal Concealment technique.

"I got these from the old man, which he must've stolen from here," Alex said. He finally knew why some random old man was walking around with an Immortal Grade technique.

These were likely some things that came with the meteor shower. There were various other things that Alex could say came with the meteor shower.

For one, the Black Stele in the Tiger sect was definitely something that came down in the form of a meteor. If it didn't, it wouldn't have made such a massive crater in the sect.

Alex remembered his Heaven's Impact technique was the other thing written in a language that did not belong to them. The person who sold it had claimed that the ones who gave his ancestor the book were immortals that came down from heaven.

'Is this the language of the immortals?' Alex wondered. That also made him question if all of these other things also came down with an immortal.

The ring he was wearing was certainly not something that could be found in the empire, or even the Western Continent itself. Did it come down in a meteor shower as well?

Alex went so far as to think that the Flickering Shadows technique that the Hong Wu sect had was also a skill that came down in a meteor shower.

He wondered what else could have come down in that meteor, and who else had gotten anything from it. That was a question he really wanted the answer to, but he couldn't get it for now.

So, he asked Wen Cheng if he could leave and went back to his sister's place to spend the night there.

Chapter 562 - The Skill In The Stele

Alex returned back to his sister's room to talk for a while before going to the other room to rest.

Once again, he had no cultivation method he could use, so he was forced to not cultivate at all. He was fine with that. He had too much on his mind to cultivate right now.

Now that he was finally free, he tried the things he was too preoccupied with to try.

"Status!" he said. However, nothing appeared. That was expected. Everything game-related was gone already after all.

He looked to the top right, the time had disappeared as well. He thought of other things that might have been game-related.

He brought out pills and could no longer see their name or harmony floating around them, but he could tell what the harmony was.

'This pill has 45%,' he thought. It was somewhat simple to tell the harmony. He tried with other pills and even used a pill tester to test it.

As expected he was right about it all. 'Maybe it was never the system that helped me know it, but the Alchemy God's Knowledge,' he thought.

The skill he had gotten at the start was one of the most unique skills he had encountered to date.

Even after having the entire book in his mind, he couldn't read it all. It was like the words themselves had a seal on it that could only be opened once one's cultivation base reached a certain realm and changed their entire Qi.

However, there was something Alex could tell about the book. Surprisingly, it only had 3 more layers to unlock. As for Flame Mastery Scripture, it only had 1 more layer.

Alex took a deep breath and started shuffling through the rest of the skills in his mind, but there was nothing different about them.

"Hmm, what about the focus mode?" he wondered and tried it out. He knew it was a player-only skill, but... he was optimistic.

He shouldn't have been. As expected for it too, there was no more focus mode.

Alex slumped back on the bed. Too many things had changed, and it would take him some time to get used to it.

A smile crept upon his face, a small smile. 'My body evolved huh?' he thought. 'Does that mean it's in the Celestial grade now? I wonder if anything's changed.'

'Wait, does that mean master's body was a Celestial grade body as well?' he thought. 'That should be correct given how strong her body was compared to mine.'

Thinking about his master once more, he started getting sad again. Many things had happened today, major things, but that did not take away the pain he still felt when thinking about his master.

He decided to stop caring about whatever the game elements or himself for now and went to sleep.

Cultivators didn't necessarily need sleep, they didn't even need to care about the day and night cycle, mostly. Having been a mortal merely 7 months ago, the habit of sleeping at night time was still hard to let go of.

Alex slept for as long as he wanted. When he woke up, he couldn't help but feel rejuvenated.

He got up, leaving a bed that looked as good as if it were ironed, and walked out of the door.

His sister was already gone, possibly to train with Du Yuhan. They were after all starting to feel like they were too weak to help when someone they cared about was in danger.

Alex went to find Wen Cheng and asked him about the graduation.

"It's still set to be in 2 weeks, but I can move it forward by a week if you want me to," Wen Cheng said.

Then, he put on a saddened face and asked, "then I will assume you chose Alchemy over normal cultivation?"

Alex shook his head. "No, master. I am choosing to go with neither. I will go do my own thing for now. I... think I found a way to get Pearl back. There are some people in the capital that can maybe take me into the beast's realm."

"After there, I will likely go to the other side to the Luminance empire and find out if there is a way to heal my arm."

"If I can do that, I will come back and help you with yours as well," Alex said.

"I see," Wen Cheng said. "I would rather you don't put yourself in such a precarious position for us. However, I'm proud of knowing that you want to go out and venture into the world on your own. You have my approval."

Wen Cheng smiled towards Alex and patted him on his shoulders. "Thank you, master," he said and turned around to leave.

"Are you okay?" Wen Cheng asked, just as he was about to leave.

"Hmm... I'm fine," Alex said.

"Oh, okay," Wen Cheng said and watched Alex leave. He then slowly looked at his left arm and thought to himself, 'it didn't look like he had a fever or anything.'

He quickly forgot about it and went to do his own thing.

Alex went down to the sect crater. He planned on checking his strength this morning. During yesterday's short scuffle, he had realized that he had gotten stronger, but without the system, he was a little unsure of what realm he had reached in either his body or his cultivation.

He walked past the group of disciples that were fighting in the stages. None of them recognized him at all, which was understandable.

He was making his way to the Training Hall, when he saw something that caught his eyes.

"Ah, the stele," he thought. He hadn't been here in a long time. The last time he remembered being here was around the time when he was in the 3rd Mind Tempering realm.

That was over 2 months ago. Now, he was an entire realm higher. However, there was one problem now.

He no longer had the game system in him to translate the writing for him. Previously, he remembered the other soul reading the writing on it with his spiritual sense, which would give him a general idea of what was written on it, but that was only due to the system.

Would it even make sense to read it now that he was not a player anymore?

'It won't hurt to try right?' he thought and walked towards the Black Stele.

In the morning light, the Stele shined with iridescent glory, which could only be viewed at a certain angle.

Alex took a deep breath. He was both nervous and excited as he thought of using his spiritual sense on the stele once more.

"My spiritual sense has grown a lot. It will definitely not be able to attack me back this time, right?" he thought and opened his eyes to pour out his spiritual sense.

However, just as he was about to, he noticed something.

He could understand the words. He couldn't read them, just like previously with the other Alex, but he could understand them. Unlike the other him, he didn't even have to use his spiritual sense.

He felt exhilarated. 'So it had nothing to do with the system? Then what?' he wondered.

He looked back at the Stele and started reading it with a happy face. However, just as he was doing that, he started feeling a load on his mind.

Just reading the word was hurting him a bit. "Dammit! Is it attacking me for just reading too? How the hell does it realize I am reading it?" Alex thought.

Still, he forced himself to read the Stele.

After reading for a while, understanding the meanings behind those words, he stopped after reading the last word.

His head ached a lot, but it was manageable. 'Holy shit! That was so hard,' he thought.

He rubbed his head and waited for it to hurt a little less. "Is this a sort of security preventing people from reading the stele? I thought it was only supposed to hurt me when I used my spiritual sense," he thought.

After the pain died down a little, he started gathering the information he had learned.

Previously when he had read it, he had learned just two words from it, Attack and Weapon. At that time, he thought it was just a simple physical skill that used a weapon.

However, now he had come to learn it was not.

"Change the shape of my spiritual sense, and turn it into a weapon shape to attack? That sounds amazing," he thought.

Turning spiritual sense into a weapon. He could already change it into a fist and attack, but having a weapon with you that you could use endlessly was pretty amazing.

'I assume this is a mental attack too, right?' he thought. He wasn't sure, and wouldn't be until he could use it.

He decided to test it out and went to the Training Hall.

He asked for a room that would usually be asked by elders. Since the disciple's training room would no longer be strong enough to stop against him, he went with the stronger ones.

He first decided to test out his physical strength. He closed his eyes and took in his cultivation until he felt as nothing but a mortal.

Once that was complete, he looked at the puppet in front of him and dashed towards it.

He had no sword or any sort of weapons on him, so he could only use his fist to strike.

The punch landed on the puppet and a message popped up on it to tell him his strength.

-True Lord 3rd Realm-

Chapter 563 - Testing And Training

-True Lord 3rd Realm-

"Oh, I got a little stronger huh? 1 step above my cultivation realm," Alex thought at first, his mind unable to comprehend the increase in strength his body had shown through the puppet.

However, when he did, he had to look back once again to make sure he read it right.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. True Lord? What the... how did I reach True Lord already? That's like 3 minor realms higher," Alex thought.

He was about 5th Mind Tempering realm in body cultivation when he fought the old man, and now he was at 3rd True lord realm.

'Did I get stronger due to my body surviving the poison... or? No, it's gotta be the fruit of the tree, right?' he thought.

If the tree alone was able to make the ground molten lava, then surely he was burned really bad by it as well. He couldn't imagine how much pain he must've gone through at that time.

He silently thanked the poison for damaging his pain receptors at the time.

"Then what about my cultivation base?" he wondered. He couldn't use his body to hit the puppet due to his body cultivation interfering with the result, so he needed to use a ranged attack.

'Hmm... I only have 3 attacks I can use,' he thought. He had a Supreme Metal root, so it would give a wrong assessment as well. So, the Iron Fist punch was out of the question as well.

He decided to use Palm of the Sun in the end. Alex pulled back his hand and sent out a palm-shaped vibrant yellow attack forward.

The flying palm hit the wooden puppet and showed another piece of information.

-True Disciple 9th realm-

"Wait what?" he exclaimed. That was 7 realms higher than his cultivation was at before. Considering he could always fight 4 realms higher in the self-tempering realm, which would become 3 realms higher in True realms, this meant that his cultivation base was now at True Disciple 6th realm.

'I broke through 4 times without knowing?' Alex thought in surprise. He wondered how he even broke through while his body was busy evolving into a higher grade one.

"Oh wait!" he thought. "Since my body's grade went up, my Qi must've improved along with it as well. That would make sense why I got so strong, instead of it being me breaking through."

"Still, it got strong enough to make my strength go up by a whole 7 realms? That's busted," he thought. Just as he was thinking that another thought came to his mind and a sneaky smile appeared on his face.

"Wait, does that mean I can put out True Master 1st realm attack if I use my metal skill?" he thought.

Alex got into stance once more and punched towards the wooden block. A fist-shaped golden attack flew through the air and struck the wooden puppet again.

Alex waited to see the result, and when it popped up... he got confused.

-True Disciple 9th realm-

"Hmm... wait, what?"

Both of his attacks returned the same damage. This was super confusing to him since he was expecting his metal attacks to deal damage a step higher than his yang attack.

Suddenly, a thought came to Alex.

"No way," he thought. Without thinking, he created a ball of fire, turning it into the shape of an arrow and shot it directly at the wooden puppet.

-True Disciple 8th realm-

"Woah!" Alex thought. His disbelief slowly cleared away as his excitement started reaching sky high.

Without hesitation, Alex put up his palm and tried to create yang Qi from it.

Yellow Qi escaped from his arm and moved in the air, all according to his will. It changed shape, increased in density, and even went back to his body.

"YES!" Alex shouted out loud.

His Yang spiritual root had evolved to become a Supreme Yang Spiritual Root.

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" Alex jumped around excitedly. "I can't believe I forgot about root promoting. After encountering such a rare Yang treasure, obviously, it would've evolved."

He smiled happily and said to himself, "2 down, 5 to go."

Alex continued his testing for a while and understood that those two elements were indeed anomalies. Other elements as expected gave him an attack equivalent to that of a True Disciple 8th realm cultivator.

Still, all of this wasn't really necessary since his physical body alone was stronger than half the elders in this sect.

He was now a little more confident that he could save Pearl easily.

Once he was done testing his strength, Alex felt annoyed that he still couldn't tell his own cultivation base at all. He was way too used to having the system tell him what his cultivation base was that he himself couldn't tell it anymore.

'Dammit, I will have to learn that all over again. For now, let's forget about it. I will ask master later when I see him,' he thought.

He finally stopped testing and started training. He started training.

The training was simple. He just had to follow what the technique in the stele had instructed him to do.

Alex took a deep breath and started by releasing his spiritual energy. Unlike the spiritual sense, the energy came directly from the spiritual sea itself.

Alex could see the slight yellow liquid changing to a slight yellow mist as it appeared in front of him.

"Release a bit of the spiritual sea," he said to himself. He continued with the instruction and said, "condense the energy as dense as you—"

The mist dissipated before he could even move on to the next step. "I need to concentrate more," he told himself and restarted.

He released a bit of the spiritual sea which came out of his mind in the form of a mist and landed on top of his palm.

He then concentrated hard on slightly yellow mist to condense it as well as he could. He concentrated for minutes as he condensed the mist as well as he could, and then released more to condense that onto the condensed mist as well.

Soon, the mist was starting to take a pale yellow, ethereal form that was slowly taking the shape of a sword. The sword he had chosen was the Steel sword he had now lost.

Alex concentrated to keep it in that shape. He couldn't focus on anything else.

Finally, the sword took form and Alex tried to grasp it. However, when he did, his hands passed through the hilt, giving him a bit of a surprise.

In his surprise, he lost a bit of his focus, and the whole sword came unraveling into wisps of mist once again and disappeared.

Alex sighed. He hadn't assumed this would be an easy task, but he hadn't expected it to be this difficult either.

He focused once more and tried to recreate it. It took a while, but he successfully made it again.

He then tried to grasp it again, and same as last time, his hands went through the hilt of the sword.

"Hmm... how am I supposed to use this if I can't even hold it?" he thought. Just keeping the shape in the form of a sword alone was taking all the concentration he could afford.

If he wanted to use this ability, then he would likely need to be more proficient in making the sword.

Chapter 564 - The Same Thing

Alex trained for a couple of hours. He wanted to use the sword of Spiritual energy he had finally managed to create, but he was still having a hard time understanding how to grasp it.

Or maybe he didn't grasp it at all. He didn't understand what he was supposed to do. For some reason, that part of the skill wasn't written on the stele.

'I wonder why?' he thought. By the time he left the Training hall, he could at least say that he could easily form a spiritual sword while also concentrating on one other thing… half the time.

The task was so hard that he felt pride in just the slight bit of success itself.

'It's quite demanding of my spiritual sea though,' he thought. If he could make as many swords as he wanted at the same time, he was sure that he would only be able to make about 20 swords.

It was because he had to take time to create each one that his spiritual sea would replenish in time for another sword.

'I don't have anything to do tonight, so I guess I will train with it,' he thought.

He looked at the sky outside and figured it was a little past noon right now.

'What do I do now?' he thought. 'Ah, I should go make some pills.'

He had used up quite a few pills, so he needed to create some healing pills as well as some more that he could use to buy himself a cultivation method for himself.

'Let's go to the production hall then,' Alex thought and walked away from the Training Hall.

Alex got himself an alchemy room in the Production Hall, one that cost him full price because of his absurdly low badge number.

He chuckled to himself when he had heard the price. He shook his head and brought out his cauldron before placing it down on the furnace.

He thought to himself what he was going to make and what ingredients he would be needing for it. If he were to be honest to himself, he was feeling a little nervous about what he was going to do.

He hadn't by himself made any pills yet, so he was both anxious about it, and looking forward to it at the same time.

"No, I can do this. I know what to do. I just have to take a deep breath, and follow the recipe," Alex thought.

He waited for the cauldron to heat up to the appropriate temperature and dropped the first ingredient in.

'8 times— Counterclockwise— 4 seconds per rotation,' Alex knew what he had to do. He sent out his Qi and started moving the ingredient.

He followed the recipe as well as he could, even though it felt incredibly awkward to him to be taking pills.

After half a minute or so, when the ingredient finally turned to powder, all the energy in the ingredient seeped out of it.

Alex felt something wrong with what he was sensing. 'Is that… correct?' he thought. The energy was… just a tad bit stronger than it was supposed to be.

He thought he followed the recipe very well, but it seemed he was still making some mistake somewhere.

'Where did I go wrong?' he wondered while preparing his next ingredient.

He had to now drop the temperature to about 520 degrees before dropping the second ingredient, and he needed to do that in less than 5 seconds, or the powder would start burning.

He controlled the flame with his Flame Mastery Scripture and lowered the temperature to his desired temperature. However, it didn't go down as fast as he wanted it to.

Alex panicked a little and dropped the temperature all the way down to 500 very quickly and brought it back up to 520 degrees right around the time he was to drop the 2nd ingredient.

'I'm… safe right?' he asked himself. He dropped in the 2nd ingredient and followed the recipe.

As for the 3rd ingredient, he had to increase the temperature once again. He thought he was following his instinct and his muscle memory, but once again, he timed it wrong.

He increased it way too fast and had to work to bring it down a little, but it wasn't as smooth as last time, so he knew he screwed up, even if just a little bit.

'Am I really that bad without my real soul to help make the pills?' Alex worried. He knew he just needed a bit more training to get back into business, but it made him feel that everything his body was put through with the other soul was in some ways useless if he had to do it all over again.

He continued with the pill making and after about 15 or so minutes, it was time to form the pill.

He was surprised to notice something. He knew what he needed to do to form the pill in a single one, or if he wanted to, split the pill into two.

"I didn't know I had that knowledge," he said to himself and continued with forming a single pill since this was his first one.

When the pill was out, he had ended up forming a 29% Harmony pill. That… wasn't so bad for a first try, however, he was still disappointed. His other soul would've probably reached about 34% easily.
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'How are we the same soul and yet so different?' he thought to himself and proceeded to continue improving.

He closed his eyes and thought of the mistakes he made.

'Spent a bit too much time on lowering that temperature. That temperature went high abruptly. That temperature…'

As Alex continued revising what he had done, he came to get to the conclusion that all the major mistakes he had done… had something to do with the temperature.

"Wait a second," he thought. "That's so weird. Why is only the temperature being affec—"

Alex's face changed when he got the inkling of what was happening. It had happened before… with his master the day she got her new body constitution.

"Am I going through the same thing as Master did?"

Chapter 565 - Controlling Constitution

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The fire burned silently under the cauldron, preparing it for the next set of ingredients that wouldn't come for a while.

Alex was like the fire too, silent and hot. He didn't know what to think now that he had realized the reason for being worse at alchemy than his other soul.

His Yang energy was building up in his body. It was the same as his master, whose Yin energy built up so much that she couldn't perform alchemy for a long time.

'I must be producing heat around me like Master produced coldness,' Alex thought. It had only been a day since he had gotten the Celestial grade body, so it was understandable that he wouldn't know how to control it yet.

However, he still felt like it sucked since he was intended to make so many healing pills. He didn't want to waste more time trying to relearn alchemy for his new body when he needed to go save Pearl as soon as he could.

He tried to think of ways to counter his heat for now. 'I should be able to contain it for now right?' he thought.

Even his master who would freeze everything around and her make him fear could contain it, so he should be able to as well.

He took a deep breath and tried to contain any aura he was sending out of him right now. He slowly felt the yang energy with his body and willed it to come back to his body.

Surprisingly, it didn't take any more persuading for the Yang energy to enter his body and go deep within him. Within seconds, the yang energy emanating from his body vanished without a single sign.

'That… is weird,' he thought. He remembered his master still having a cold aura around her even when she had completely taken in everything she could.

"Am I doing better because of my Supreme Yang Root?" Alex wondered. That was the only answer that made sense.

He nodded to himself once he was fully done with controlling his aura. Then, he proceeded to make more pills.

This time, there were no mistakes. At least, there were no mistakes that he made by not being able to control the flames like before.

There were still many mistakes, many mysteries to creating pills themselves that Alex probably had no clue about.

He continued making the same pill as before and in the next 10 minutes, turning all of the ingredients into powder.

Next up, was the time to form the pill. As before, he understood that he could split the pill if he wanted to, but he decided not to do that again.

Since he was making a healing pill, it was better to have a single good pill, than 2 mediocre ones.

So, he formed the powder into a single compact pill that could hold more of the energy.

Once the pill formed, Alex brought it out and looked at it. "Hmm… 34%, that's actually pretty good," he thought.

It was only his second try at making pills, and he had already reached a level that would take others over 10 years to reach with common pills.

This rejuvenated Alex's motivation to make more pills. So, he continued making healing pills for the next 2 hours.

Over the course of the 2 hours, on multiple occasions, his yang energy escaped from his body while he was focused on the pills and disturbed his process again.

They weren't as bad as the first time, but his pills still came out worse than desired during those moments.

However, the times he did have them in check, the pills came out quite well. In fact, one of the pills even reached 40% harmony, despite Alex didn't really do anything different.

He was quite happy about that. Unfortunately, he couldn't continue to make the healing pills since his ingredients were finished.

'I ran out so fast,' he thought. There was a pile of ingredients in his own bag that were of no use to him just because he didn't know what pills they could make.

Alex would have to do some tests with them once he was more comfortable with making True pills.

After the healing pills were made, Alex decided to make some other pills he could use to sell for money or use to gather more Qi to breakthrough.

He prepared his ingredients, made sure his Yang energy was in check and started making pills once more.

As he continued making the pill, and the pill was finally ready to be formed, something in him told him that he should try to make this one into two.

Not only would he be able to contain more of the energy using the two pills, it would also be a test on how the thing exactly worked.

Since the other Alex never figured it out, he was going to find out what was happening.

One thing he knew that the other Alex didn't was that, the 'pill-splitting Qi' as he called it was actually a technique, most likely created by the Alchemy god himself, that could be used to separate the pill into two parts.

Similar to what the previous Alex encountered, the technique was mostly automatic in that it formed the pills on its own and even forced energy into them. The only difference now was, Alex had the ability to dictate when to use it.

He no longer had to worry about the pills accidentally splitting when he needed a single, better pill.

Alex employed the technique, and the Qi in his body started moving. They went around his body in a certain pattern and released it in front of him to carve a divide in the powder and slowly form them into two separate spheres of the same size as what the original pill would have looked like.

Alex watched curiously as the vortex started once more that sucked in the energy from the cauldron into the pills.

Once the pills formed, Alex brought them out and checked them.

'24% and 25% harmony, huh?' he thought. 'Meaning, I could have done about 49% if I knew what the technique did.'

He tested the pills and bit and noticed that the two pills were quite hollow, compared to what a normal pill could be. After all, the two pills were formed from the powder that should have formed a single pill.

'Hmm,' Alex thought. 'Since a single pill is supposed to have all the energy in the powder, I guess it makes sense that half the powder can only store half the energy.'

'But that still doesn't answer why the two pills have collectively more energy than what a single pill would have,' Alex wondered. This was something the previous Alex had wondered as well without any luck.

'I should focus on finding this answer,' Alex thought. 'Also, how does pill tester work? How are they able to tell how much harmony a pill has? Isn't Percentage supposed to be relative to the pill? That would make this 25% make no sense.'

He wondered what criteria the tester considered when it formed its assessment. Whatever it was, Alex didn't know. There was not a single piece of information in his brain about the pill testers themselves aside from how to make one.

'So… we only know the blueprint to the testing system itself huh?' Alex thought.

He shook his head and forgot about the questions for now and continued making the pills. Over the course of the next few hours, he made quite a lot of pills.

The highest of which reached 48% on a pill with Metal energy as the final energy. He was so happy to see that he was getting so close to making Heaven-grade True pills.

After he was done, Alex left the production hall. The sun had just gone down, and the lanterns around the sect crater were starting to burn to illuminate the area.

Shouts of fighting still rang from where the fighting stage was. Alex walked the opposite way went back to his sister's house.

When he arrived, he noticed that the door was locked, so he went to find his sister.

As expected, she was training along with Du Yuhan in their Master's training room.

Alex went in and watched as his sister attacked with all her might, sending out slashes, and ice spears at Du Yuhan.

Du Yuhan on the other hand was focused on using Sword Intent as well as his more polished Sword Qi to block the attacks and even force some back towards Luo Mei.

Alex watched the two of them fight for a while before the two decided to stop.

"Do you want to fight too, brother Yu?" Du Yuhan asked.

"It's fine," Alex said. "You guys can fight."

Du Yuhan looked at him with a weird face and asked, "Won't you need to train some more now that you only have one arm to use? Surely you don't think fighting will be the same with a single-arm compared to two right?"

"Hmm, you aren't wrong in that," Alex said. "It would be good to learn how to use sword in ways that benefit me, but unfortunately I don't have my sword now. I broke it in the fight a week ago."

"Excuses," Du Yuhan said. "You can get comfortable with a sword you get later on. For now, use a common sword as I do."

"Come, let's fight."

Alex thought for a bit. He really didn't want to fight as he didn't believe there was any way for Du Yuhan to win against him. However…

"Sure," Alex said with a smile.. The temptation to fight was too much for him.

Chapter 566 - Graduation

Alex left the training hall with his sister, leaving behind a shocked Du Yuhan.

That hadn't even been a fight. Alex had casually blocked all of Du Yuhan's attack and used an attack of his own to bring Du Yuhan down to his knees.

Even when Du Yuhan used his Sword Qi, Alex could easily overpower it. Alex was excited about the fight, but this wasn't it.

He returned back to his sister's house and went back to his room.

'What am I to do now?' he wondered. Once again, there wasn't anything to do, so he decided to sleep.

The next couple of days went in a similar fashion. Alex spent the majority of the day making something or training his new technique, the one whose name he didn't know of.

Occasionally, he went to the Hong Wu sect to see what was happening.

Finally, his graduation days were fixed. It would take place in the Hong Wu sect first, and then in the Tiger sect the next day.

Alex felt anxious. He had never expected to have to leave this place one day permanently, but that didn't mean he wouldn't have to.

He wished for the auction to take place earlier since he needed a new cultivation method, but it didn't seem like there would be one.

The bi-annual auction seemed to have been canceled after the attack on the city that happened nearly 2 weeks ago.

Alex spoke with Wen Cheng too, but it seemed the sect only had Earth grade cultivation method as well. Most Heaven Grade cultivation methods were in private hands that Alex couldn't have.

Wen Cheng gave Alex his own cultivation method, but it was a Wood affiliated cultivation method, which Alex didn't find very helpful.

Since his wood root was quite bad, he decided not to use it.

"It will be better if I find one with no affinity, metal affinity, or Yang affinity since my roots favor them the most," Alex thought.

Something else had been happening over the course of the last few days. Alex had been slowly and slowly growing hotter, just like his master had.

It wasn't hot enough that he had to stay inside and isolate himself, but it was still causing him some major problems during alchemy.

Worst of all, it wasn't stopping at all. Fortunately, however, he had the yang roots that could control all free yang, so he could contain the yang in him much easier than his master could contain her yin.

For now, he had nothing to worry about. He only feared that there would come a day when he too would have to get holed up in a room somewhere, heating up everything around him.

Alex woke up early the next day and went over to the Hong Wu sect. Today was the day of graduation.

Surprisingly, it wasn't just him graduating. It seemed Wan Li had decided to use the day to graduate as well.

The ceremony was simple. It was held in the Elders hall, where only the elders could view it. The First elder who was acting as the interim sect leader officiated the ceremony.

He gave a small speech, congratulating the alchemists that were graduating and offering them good wishes on things that were to come in the future.

He then called them out by the name, as one by one, they went up to get their graduation award.

The award was simple. Before the ceremony, they had been asked for their nameplate. Now, their award was their nameplate, but it had an 'Alumnus' carved onto it.

Alex got his nameplate back and shook the first elder's hands. He walked away and stood by Wan Li who had already gotten his award.

Alex looked at the word 'Alumnus' and started feeling a little emotional. He had spent so many nights and days in this place that he couldn't help but feel sad, but also, he was sad that his master wasn't here to see him graduate.

She had planned for so long for him to graduate to become an elder, and yet, things never happened the way she wanted to.

The graduation ceremony changed to become an Elder recruitment ceremony.

Wan Li and a few others walked up to say their vows and get recruited as the elder of the sect.

'So… Zhou Mei is the number 1 disciple now, huh?' he thought. It wouldn't take very long for her to graduate either.

The ceremony ended not long after, and the elders congratulated all of them.

"I know you have made up your mind, but there is still time. You can still be an el—"

"Lang Shun!" the Grand Elder shouted. "He's already made up his mind. Don't try to dissuade him now."

The Grand elder then turned to Alex and said. "Congratulations on graduating. I hope you continue to do well and make us all proud."

"Thank you, grandmaster," Alex bowed towards him.

Grand Elder started tearing up a little. "If only your master was here to see you. She would be so proud of you," the Grand Elder said.

Alex talked to the two for a while before leaving outside. Outside the Elders hall, a few disciples were waiting for the rest to come out.

Wan Li had already appeared outside, and the group was done congratulating him.

After Alex walked out, most people didn't recognize who he was at all. Only a select few congratulated him and started asking what his plans were next, which Alex answered without hesitation.

"Mingming, are you really leaving the sect?" Fan Ruogang asked with a somber voice.

"Yes, I am," Alex said.

"Will you ever come back?" she asked.

"Of course," Alex said. "I will come back a lot, but you shouldn't expect me to be around a lot."

"I can't believe it, brother Yu. It feels like a week ago I asked you to help me by being an aid. Now you've graduated as one of the best students. This is just mind-blowing," Kong Yuhan said.

"You're not very far away from graduating as well, brother Yuhan. Keep working hard," Alex said.

"I will," Kong Yuhan said. "Especially now that I have used the flower you gave me, It will be much easier, I suppose."

"It will. Trust me," Alex said.

Zhou Mei was mostly quiet, so Alex didn't bother to say much except wish her good luck on her graduations as well.

Afterward, Alex left the group and went to the alchemy garden to see his master. He reached the top and sighed a little when he saw the plant slowly try to distance itself from him.

"Hey, Master. Were you lonely? I hope senior green has been keeping you company," Alex said, sensing the snake close by. "I came here to let you know that I graduated today. I know you wanted to see me do it very badly, but it seems fate had other plans."

"I miss you master, and I will continue missing you. This is probably going to be my last visit for a long while. I don't know when I will return, but when I do, I promise you that I will be someone you can be proud of."

After a few minutes, Alex left the garden and went out of the gates of the sect. He turned one last time to look at the sect he called home.

This was going to be the last time he got to see the sect for many, many years.

Chapter 567 - Sect Treasury

Alex returned back to the Tiger sect late afternoon. He wanted to go practice his spiritual weapon technique.

By now, he was able to somewhat effortlessly create a sword, but using the sword was still a problem for him. As he couldn't hold it in his hands, and since Qi didn't work on it, he needed to think of something else.

However, before he could go anywhere, he got a message on his communication talisman telling him to go to the Disciple's hall as soon as possible.

Alex wondered what the reason was and walked to the sect crater before making his way to the Disciple hall.

The Disciple's hall was also the Elder's hall, so when he reached there, he sent a message to his master, telling him he was there.

He waited a few minutes before Wen Cheng walked out with the First Elder. Alex greeted them both, hiding his curious expression as he wondered why the first elder was with them.

"Come," Wen Cheng called him and took him along away from the sect crater. However, they weren't walking towards the wall or either path that lead to the crater.

Rather, they were walking towards the back half of the mountain, the one that was half gone when the crater formed.

"I've never been to this part of the sect before," Alex said as they walked up the side of the mountain.

There was a staircase that lead a bit up the side and was quite indistinguishable from far away, so Alex was seeing something new today.

"Let's go," Wen Cheng said and walked up.

Alex followed behind and looked up. There were a few elders standing guard in front of a couple of houses built into the walls.

Alex knew this was where the elders that weren't numbered stayed, but this was his first time seeing this.

However, Wen Cheng and the First elder didn't seem to be bringing him to an Elder's house.

Instead, they walked past the houses and went to a massive stone door. There were 2 more elders standing guard in front of the door.

They bowed towards Wen Cheng the moment they saw him and stepped to the side.

Alex curiously looked at the patterns on the door. At first, he thought it was a normal stone door, but it didn't take him very long to realize that it actually had a formation carved onto it.

'It's a seal,' he thought.

Wen Cheng brought out a circular metal plate that had the word 'Leader' written behind it, and placed it onto the stone door.

Suddenly, the door lit up and opened inwards, revealing a dark cavern that was dug into the mountain itself.

Alex could see no light coming from inside the room so it was as dark as he expected it to be.

"Let's go inside," Wen Cheng said and walked in, followed by the First elder and finally, the curious Alex.

"What is this place, master? I didn't even know a place like this existed before," Alex said.

Alex heard a slam just then and turned his head to look behind him. The stone doors had shut themselves and the metal plate flew past him back to Wen Cheng's hand.

When Alex turned back to the front, he suddenly saw light flickering all around him.

Before he knew it, the lanterns that were present in the wall started glowing all around him, illuminating the place like they did the crater in the nighttime.

"This is the sect treasury. Everything the sect has ever owned is stored in this place," Wen Cheng said.

"Sect treasury?" Alex couldn't help but make a shocked face. He looked around in awe as he saw the glistening armors, the stacks of books, and the various other treasures in the room.

"This is your first time here right?" The first elder asked with a smile.

"Yes," Alex said. "What are we doing here?"

"I explained your deeds to the other elders. They know what you did for the sect. Not only did you save the various disciples while nearly dying on your own, but they also know that you killed the Second Elder, Su Chen who was a dark spot in the sect's history."

"So, to reward you for this I persuaded the elders to let you have something from the treasury. This… is my graduation gift to you," Wen Cheng said.

Alex looked around the treasury in shock once more and turned back to Wen Cheng to ask, "I can take a thing from this place?"

"No," the first elder said, killing Alex's excitement in one go.

"You can get 2 things," he said.

Alex's excitement came back in full swing. "Two things? Are you sure?"

"Yes, see what you like, and choose two of the. We will sit here," Wen Cheng said.

"Thank you, master," Alex said and walked forward to see what he could find that he would like.

The treasury room was long and narrow. To his right was a wall full of armor and shield. To his left were formation plates, kept in a stack.

Adjacent to the formation plates were some talismans, and opposite to them was a group of weapons, adjacent to the armors.

Going further up, there was a stack of various different things, including books that were kept in a very orderly manner as well as a few pills.

Alex walked forward and started checking the various things that were on the shelves.

He started with the armors and shields. They looked shiny in the lantern light, and some looked very strong, but… for some reason they didn't appeal to him.

Shields would be useless for a one-handed man like him, but the armors also felt useless once he thought about the fact that he was a body cultivator with a True Lord 3rd realm of body cultivation.

'Yeah, I will have to skip these,' he thought. He went past the armors and looked at the weapons. There were spears, sabers, axes, and even hammers, but barely any swords.

Any sword that was there made him feel like they just weren't for him. 'They just don't seem as good as the steel sword,' he thought.

"Sorry about the swords. Those are some of the things that get taken away the most when we do reward students and elders. After hundreds of years, those are the only ones that have managed to get left behind," Wen Cheng shouted from the back.

"I see," Alex said. 'So in a sense, these are the bad bunch, huh? Better not choose it then.'

Alex turned around towards the formation and talisman shelves and looked around. He picked up a few and noticed that the formations were mostly True ranked formations. Which meant… he could easily make it too.

He wasn't sure what grade he could make, but as long as he was given the blueprint and a metal plate, he could easily recreate them for himself.

As for the Saint ranked formations… he didn't have Saint Qi, so it would be impossible to use it anyway.

He looked towards the talismans and… yeah, they were impossible to decipher for him. The runes required to make the talismans were not something he had knowledge of at the moment, so he couldn't choose amongst them.

Alex shook his head and walked forward to look at the final giant shelf on the wall at the end.

He looked through the various things, hoping to have something here that he would like to keep.

"Do you not like anything?" Wen Cheng asked from behind while Alex was still looking.

"Not yet, but I have yet to look at the books. Hopefully, they have something," Alex said.

He randomly picked up a book and tried to dust it, however, no dust came off of it.

"Oh, these are quite clean," Alex said. He turned around to look at the items that he had walked past, and they were equally clean.

"Do people come here often?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, no. Maybe once a few years," Wen Cheng said, a little confused why Alex was asking.

"Oh, I'm surprised this place managed to gather no dust with barely any visitors in years," Alex said.

"Ah," Wen Cheng understood. "No, it was opened 3 months ago. That was when we cleaned it. Otherwise, it gathers quite the dust."

"Oh," Alex was curious now. " 3 months ago… wasn't I still here at that time? I didn't know someone did something to be rewarded," Alex said.

"I believe you were in the Hong Wu sect at the time. And no, nobody got any reward. We opened the place because there was some commotion inside here," Wen Cheng said.

"Ahem, brother Wen, you are a little wrong about that," the First Elder said from the side.

"Hmm? I'm wrong?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Yes," the First Elder said. "There was another commotion not two weeks ago. It happened the night after the bandits were defeated."

"Oh," Wen Cheng said. "I didn't know something like that happened."

"Yes," First Elder said. "It was quite problematic timing too since the commotion happened right as we all lost the ability to use the Qi. It was only later we got to come in to check when I assumed the sect leader role for a few days."

"Commotion right as the Qi disappeared?" Alex asked. He thought of something and started recalling the days in his mind.

3 months ago… that was about a week or two before he was taken to the Beast's realm. If the two commotions were to be caused by the same thing, then there was something that connected them.

'That was the same day as the sand storm in the desert, wasn't it?' Alex realized.

Chapter 568 - Silver Stone

Two times, the tree had sent out a wave of Yang energy, and two times there was commotion here. 'That is no coincidence,' he thought.

"What do you mean by commotion exactly, master?" Alex asked.

"Well, there are some books that fall down, along with some of these armors and formations, but that's it. The commotion is usually these armors making noises. They are quite loud," Wen Cheng said.

"Armors?" Alex walked back to the armor and checked them again carefully. Except, this time he used his spiritual sense as well.

'Yang energy,' he thought when he felt the slightest hint of yang energy on those armors.

'Shame I don't need them,' he thought. He then turned back around to the books and thought, 'some of those reacted to the yang energy too right?'

He went on to check them as well. He spread out his spiritual sense and found that they still had some lingering yang Qi in them.

'Hmm... will they...'

Suddenly, Alex let go of the restraint he was constantly putting on himself and let his Yang energy flow around freely.

He kept tabs on the books with the lingering yang, and suddenly they responded with slight vibrations. It wasn't much, but Alex caught the vibration with his spiritual sense.

There were 3 that showed the most response. Alex took back the yang before either of the other 2 noticed what he was doing and checked the books.

He pulled all 3 of them out and tried to read them. He started with the lowest one and when he opened it, he realized it was in a language he couldn't read but could understand.

'Hmm...' he read the introduction section of the book and as expected, he could understand what the words meant even if he couldn't read it.

The first book was a defensive yang art that created a defensive barrier that could withstand strong attacks.

From what Alex could tell, the technique was a heavens grade technique, and maybe even an immortal grade one.

'That's quite good,' he thought. He continued to the second book and read about it.

This technique was one that helped create a false clone that could be used as a method of confusion and distraction for the enemy. While it didn't have any offensive capabilities, Alex reckoned it could be quite good if used properly.

Finally, he read the one that gave the most reaction when it came into contact with Yang energy.

As he kept reading it, his eyes went wide. 'No way!' he thought.

It was decided, he was going to take this book. "This is my first one, master," Alex said.

"Oh, you chose one?" Wen Cheng looked curiously at the book Alex chose. From what he could remember, he had no way of reading it.

"What about the second one?" Wen Cheng asked.

Alex looked at the doppelganger book that could be useful, but its use cases were so... limited that he didn't want to choose it right away.

'Is there anything else I can take?' Alex wondered and look to the side. There were some pills, some stones, some books, and various other trinkets.

Alex looked at them and couldn't really tell what he could want from them. 'Maybe they have yang aura too,' he thought and released his spiritual sense to check through all of those.

As he did that, he sensed something weird. Rather, he didn't sense it at all.

Alex moved to the object and picked it up. It was a silver-colored rock, about the size of a human head, and weighed practically nothing.

If not for Alex holding the stone, he would have assumed that it was not there at all.

Even his spiritual sense told him there was nothing in his hand. That was perhaps the weirdest thing he had ever sensed.

Even his master who was a void in his spiritual sense could still be told that she was there just based on the dead spot in his senses.

This stone, however, was as if his spiritual sense just passed through it.

'No?' Alex thought when he realized he was a little wrong. He had been limiting his senses to just sense the rock so he didn't notice it, but when he increased the range of his spiritual sense, he realized that the stone was acting as a sort of absorbent that swallowed all of his Spiritual sense.

No matter how far he released his spiritual sense, the stone would swallow all the spiritual sense that he was putting on it.

'This is incredible. Is this a sort of rock that can be used against mental attacks?' Alex wondered.

"Master, do you know what this is?" he asked, showing the silver rock to Wen Cheng.

Wen Cheng walked up to Alex and looked at the rock. "No," Wen Cheng said. "I have seen this here for a long time, but still to this day, I have no idea what it is. All I can guess is it's a special artifact material."

"I guessed so too," Alex said. He was truly fascinated by the stone now. However, since he didn't know what it did, he didn't want to choose it either.

He fell into a dilemma. 'What should I do?' he wondered. No matter what he thought, the doppelganger skill was definitely more useful for him, but... this silver stone that could make spiritual sense useless was also quite useful if he could use it right.

'Uhh...' he was having a really hard time choosing. 'Should I just read that book right here?' he wondered.

He took the book and started flipping through it.

"Disciple Yu Ming, are you choosing that book?" the First Elder asked.

"Uh... no, first elder. I am just trying to see if it is even useful to me since it's impossible to read, you know," he lied and continued reading.

Finally, after a few minutes, he finished the book and closed it. "This language really is similar to the one in the stele, isn't it? Have you managed to figure out what it is?" Alex asked.

Wen Cheng looked at him weirdly. He knew Alex could read the book and was even sure that Alex was reading it right now. The only reason he let him be was that he was his disciple.

"No," the first elder replied. "I don't think anyone has managed to crack the language yet."

"That's unfortunate. Then I guess I will take the stone," Alex said and put back the book.

"What about the other book? Why are you taking it if you don't understand it?" the first Elder asked.

"Um, since I'm going to the capital tomorrow, I will try and see if there is anyone out there that knows this language. It might be a lost cause, but I will try," Alex said.

The First elder could find no faults in his words, so he let him be and accepted it.

"Let's leave," Wen Cheng said and the lot started walking outwards.

Alex looked at the book and put it back into his storage bag, he would use it later tonight, and then he looked at the silver stone too and kept it in his storage. Only...

"Huh?" Alex exclaimed in surprise.. The rock wouldn't go into his storage bag at all.

Chapter 569 - Five Yang Divine Path

Alex panicked a little. 'Huh? What's happening?'

Alex tried to force the silver stone into the storage bag, but no matter what, it wouldn't go in there at all.

"What's wrong?" Wen Cheng asked, having already opened the door in front of him.

"I don't know, master. I can't put this rock into my storage bag at all," he said, still trying to use his Qi to force it in.

"Is that so?" Wen Cheng asked with a weird face and returned to help Alex, but he too couldn't force the rock into any storage bag.

"That is weird," he said, with his hands rubbing his chin in confusion.

"Do I take it out like this?" Alex asked.

"I don't know," Wen Cheng said. "Maybe swap it for something else?"

Alex thought about it but shook his head in the end. "I want to take it," he said.

It was an amazing rock that blocked spiritual sense. If he could make an artifact out of this rock, he wouldn't even have to worry about Saint realm cultivators finding him.

'I would rather carry it around in a backpack. Not like it's going to weigh me down or anything,' he thought and walked out with it in hand.

The three of them dropped down from the place. Alex took his leave and left to go to his sister's house. He couldn't wait to try out a few things.

As soon as he reached there, he quickly made up an excuse and went into his room.

As soon as he went in, he set aside the silver stone on the bed. The stone was definitely something fascinating, but there was something else that fascinated Alex even more.

'No way I read it correctly, right?' he asked himself as he brought out the book he had acquired from the treasury. It was the thing with the most yang aura around it and definitely something incredible.

He was more sure when he read the introduction of the book, but that… that was simply unbelievable.

He read it once more just to be sure, and as expected, no matter how many times he read it, it still said the same thing.

"Five Yang Divine Path," he read the name with nothing but awe in his eyes. Using a cultivation technique to cultivate the yang and use it to reach the Divine realm.

Alex continued reading it as he had finally found a cultivation technique that suit him the best.

He continued reading it and soon, his eyes went wide. He had underestimated the book.

He had truly underestimated what he had come to acquire. His hands shook while he read the book and the content of it was poured into his brains.

'No way!' he thought. 'Even if this book came down in the meteor shower, there is no way something this good can exist, right?'

Five Yang Divine Path was a cultivation method that contained 5 different cultivation methods that were similar in most ways except for a few which made one better than the other.

The five cultivation methods all ranged from Common grade all the way to Divine grade, and one could only use those cultivation techniques when their Yang Qi was of a certain strength.

This meant that while you had to start with a not-so-great cultivation technique if you persisted and continuously broke through a couple of realms, you could reach a level where you could start using Immortal grade and even Divine grade techniques.

Alex couldn't wait to try this technique. If it worked, he could finally breakthrough from his current True Disciple 2nd realm and continue on his cultivation journey.

He could use the same technique all the way to the divine realm too, so that made him lose the problem of having to find cultivation methods again.

Alex finished reading the cultivation method and decided to try it out. He knew all 5 of the methods but wasn't sure how well his body could handle them. So, he decided to start with the Common grade one.

He sat down on his bed and started cultivating. Within minutes, he realized that it was too easy.

The Yang in his body moved in a very swift manner, and he could feel himself barely collecting any Qi at all.

'No, I have to use the Earth grade one,' he thought and changed his cultivation method.

When he used this method, he felt like it fit him perfectly. The speed of the yang Qi in his meridian wasn't overly fast, and he was collecting a decent amount of Qi too.

However, he felt like he could go a step beyond. So, he changed his method one last time and started cultivating using the Heaven grade method.

He took a deep breath and started moving the Qi in his body in accordance with the technique.

As he did, he found it a bit uncomfortable to his body. It was like his Qi was trying to burst out of his meridians. Fortunately, as a body cultivator, Alex could handle it without any problem.

So, All in all, he could afford to use this method well, however, he didn't dare go a step higher with using the next method in line. He didn't know if his Qi was thick enough to use it or not, but his body was definitely not strong enough.

'It's likely meant to be used by a normal Immortal realm cultivator from the heavens,' Alex thought.

As he cultivated, he could feel the Qi around him converge on him, and soon he became an eye of the vortex.

In the vortex, Alex found serenity. He fell into a deep trance, not the kind where he fell asleep, but the kind where he knew nothing but the fact that he was cultivating.

The serene feeling was something he had never felt before. It was as if he was finally reunited with something he had lost for a long time.

Seconds passed, minutes passed, and hours passed. But Alex knew not how long passed. Alex could no longer feel the time pass.

Just as he was cultivating, Alex heard a large knock on his door. He slowly stopped cultivating and felt disappointed. It was just getting good too.

He shook his head and walked up to the door and opened it.

"What the hell are you doing? Are you okay?" Luo Mei quickly walked into the room and looked around.

Alex looked around with her and didn't notice anything at all. "What's wrong, sister?" he asked.

Luo Mei looked at Alex and frowned. "Are you the cause of it?" she asked.

"The cause of what?" Alex asked.

"This heat. Why the hell is it so hot in this house? I can't even cultivate cause of it," she said in an annoyed tone.

'Heat?' Alex immediately sent out his spiritual sense and realized that there was nothing but Yang Qi in the surrounding.

"Ah, sorry sister. This must've been because of my new cultivation method," Alex said.

"Your cultivation method?" Luo Mei asked in a strange tone. "How is a cultivation method producing this much heat? I couldn't use my spiritual sense to check what was happening, since it kept getting destroyed."

"I'm sorry. I will take care of it," Alex said and took a deep breath to pull back all the Yang energy his body had defused into the air.

Within minutes, the house was back to being cool again, but Alex felt a little uncomfortable this time.

This was just too much yang Qi for even him to hold back. He needed to release it somewhere, but he didn't know where.
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Luo Mei shut down the door and left. Alex sat down on the bed with the new problem in hand.

'What the hell do I do now?' he wondered.

If cultivating for just a little while caused this much problem, there would be more problems if he cultivated it for days.

'I need to find a fix to my body constitution problem before it gets any worse,' Alex thought. 'Master managed to do it, so I should be able to as well.'

Alex was very sure that it was possible. He just didn't know how.

'How did master fix her problem again?' he tried to think. Soon a memory surfaced in his mind with a weird feeling attached to it.

He could almost feel that this memory belonged to him, that he was the one that experienced it, even though he was never the one to have experienced this.

The feeling was weird for sure, but not very important at the moment. What was important was the memory he had just found.

He had asked the master how she got rid of the Yin Qi that her body was constantly diffusing and she had given him the answer.

'Since my Yin Qi was getting out of control, I used Yang Qi to contain it,' she had told him.

"Right!" he thought as he finally remembered it. "If she used Yang Qi, I can use Yin Qi. Now where can I f—"

Alex's eyes shined as he realized that he already had the ability to create Yin as much as he wanted.

He sat back down on his bed and started cultivating once more. Only, this time he wouldn't use the Five Yang Divine Path cultivation method. Instead, he would use the final gift his master had given to him.

Her own cultivation method, the Winter Moon Cultivation method.

Alex took a deep breath and started employing the technique and soon the Qi in his body, which was yang, was slowly being turned into Yin thanks to his Yin spiritual roots.

And very soon, things were starting to happen in his body that he had never experienced before.

Chapter 570 Mountain

The last time Alex, or rather the other Alex had tried out this cultivation method, the yin forming in his body had been contested by the Yang in his body and quickly pushed out of him.

This was what Alex had assumed would happen this time as well, and he was hoping to use that removed yin Qi to surround him and contain his Yang Qi.

However, something different happened. Something he hadn't been expecting at all.

The Yin Qi that had barely formed in his meridian were immediately attacked by the excess Yang Qi that was all over his body and meridian.

Within seconds, the Yang destroyed the Yin. However, in the process, the Yang that destroyed the yin got just that bit weaker.

It wasn't what Alex had expected would happen, but it was working.

Alex closed his eyes and started cultivating. He put all of his focus into his body and started producing as much Yin as he could to fight off the Yang Qi.

'I can't believe it,' he thought. 'I finally manage to get a cultivation method that is incredible and suits me perfectly, and yet I'm stuck here cultivating the wrong type of Qi.'

He couldn't help but sigh. 'At least there is a silver lining to all of this,' he thought. 'With this, I can finally cultivate the method my master left me with.'

Time passed, neither fast nor slow. When it came to be morning, Alex finally stopped cultivating. He had been cultivating for nearly 5 hours now, and all he did was convert Yang Qi to Yin Qi and then use the Yin Qi to fight off the other Yang Qi.

Somehow, this one technique had turned out to be more effective than just him containing the Yang aura within him.

In just 5 hours, he was back to being around the same level in yang aura as the first day he left the desert.

The better part about this cultivation method was also that when the Yang and the Yin destroyed each other, Alex would get pure Qi, which due to alchemy he knew was just Yang and Yin linked together in harmony.

'Well, there is the problem that I can't collect any outside Qi, but using a day to clear up 6 days worth of yang in a week might not be a bad idea when I actually start to cultivate,' he thought.

Finally, he got out of bed and stretched. Today was the day. Today was when he graduated from this sect as well.

Alex felt melancholic and shook his head. He turned his head around and saw the silver stone simply laying there on the bed next to him.

Without realizing, he had cultivate next to it all night. 'Right, I forgot about this thing,' he thought and picked it up.

As usual, Alex was a little startled to feel it's weightlessness. 'This surely is a very unique rock,' he thought and checked it again.

Alex put used his spiritual sense again and just as he felt yesterday, it absorbed all of it.

'I wonder if it works the same for Qi as well,' he thought and poured in his Yang Qi.

To his surprise, it did. No matter how much Yang Qi he poured in it, it continued to get filled.

'Wait, can't I use it to keep my excess Yang aura?' Alex thought. As if realizing something incredible, Alex increased the output of his Yang Qi and poured in as much as he could.

A tumultuous amount of Qi was poured into the silver rock and it absorbed every single one of the Qi.

This only made Alex pour in more. 'Just what is this thing? How is it so incredible?' he thought.

Just as he was thinking that, something weird happened. The silver rock suddenly glowed a little with bright silver color and disappeared.

"Wh-What?" Alex was surprised. "Where did it go?"

He looked at himself, his surrounding and even his storage bags. Yet, the stone was nowhere to be found.

'What happened? Did I over do it and break it?' he wondered. That would be bad. If he had known something like this would have happened, he would have never poured in so much of his Qi.

'But it looked to incredible. I didn't know its durability was so low,' he thought and brought out his spiritual sense to search for its fragments

However, just as he did that, he found the rock. The rock was floating.

It wasn't floating in the room, or his storage bag, or anywhere physical either.

It was floating above his spiritual sea in his mind. 'What the hell?' Alex thought.

He immediately put himself into his spiritual sea and appeared on the surface of the water. He looked up high in the air and saw the rock that was about the size of a mountain in his mind, a mountain that was 5 kilometers tall and 5 kilometers wide.

Alex didn't even know his spiritual sea could stretch this far.

'What the hell is this?' he thought. He slowly flew up and touched the silver mountain with his palm. He could feel the texture of the mountain, yet the weight was still missing.

Suddenly, he noticed something. Right where he had touched it, a single silver hair-like strand separated itself from the mountain.

It flew it the air, hovering just like the mountain next to it. Alex had never been this confused before.

In all of his knowledge he had acquired in the past 8 months, nothing came close to describing what was happening.

He tried to grab the silver strand that floated away from the rock and when he did, the strand vanished.

Alex felt like he absorbed it for some reason, even though he wasn't sure about it.

'Can I absorb it? What does it do? Surely not increase my mental strength right?' Alex was excited at the concept of absorbing it.

He placed his palm back on the mountain, and with just a thought, a massive amount of Yellow fog erupted from around him. It quickly enveloped the entire mountain, and Alex started absorbing it.

However, no matter how much he tried, he couldn't absorb it at all. He soon realized that there was no change to the mountain.

'What the hell?' he thought and removed his hand. When he did, another strand of silver hair floated away from the mountain.

'No way,' he thought. 'Am I going to have to absorb this entire mountain one hair-like strand at a time?'

This was an ordeal that he couldn't complete in a single day. If he were to go strand by strand, it would take him an eternity to completely absorb the entire mountain.

'I guess I have that long of a time to spare now,' he thought. He escaped out of his spiritual sense.

That was quite dangerous as in that situation, he usually had no idea what was happening outside.

He made sure everything was in order, and walked out of the room to go see his master, sister, brother, and anyone else he might want to.

After all, today was the day he would graduate from the Tiger sect and leave.

Chapter 571 The Palace

Luo Mei teared up once again, as she always did. However, she was not the only one to cry this time.

Wen Cheng and Alex teared up as well. Only Liu Xun stood stoic in the group, but he too saw suppressing the tears in his eyes.

The graduation was over and Alex had received a badge that said 'Alumnus' similar to the nameplate that he had gotten from the Hong Wu sect.

"Will you really be alright?" Luo Mei asked in between her tears. She had considered him guaranteed to leave by this point, so she didn't bother trying to make him stay.

"I will be fine, sister. You have nothing to worry about," Alex said.

"Yes you will," Liu Xun said. "Next time we see each other, you might even be stronger than me or master."

"Even if I am, I will still be your younger brother and Master's disciple," Alex said with a small smile.

"Alright, take care. Go get your beast back," Wen Cheng said.

"Yes, master," Alex responded.

The 3 of them hugged Alex and Alex waved them goodbye before leaving the sect. He wiped his tears away and walked onward with a face full of determination.

* * * * * *

A day later, Alex arrived at the Cardinal city once more. He had already kept away his flying boat nearly an hour earlier just to be safe and not be seen by anyone.

Since then, he had been flying normally all the way to the capital.

He got into the queue of people waiting to get in. He remembered having to do something similar when he first came to the scarlet city.

'Hmm… are these my memories?' Alex got a little confused. It sure felt like it.

Alex brought out some money to pay the guards, but they stopped him and showed him the way to another group of guards who were with other cultivators.

Alex didn't understand what was going on, but he obeyed.

"May we ask who you are and what your purpose of visit to the city is?" the guards asked him when he reached next to them. "We're sorry. There has been a bandit attack on a city to the west, so we've been asking everyone that has any worthy cultivation base."

"Ah," Alex understood. "Yes, my name is Yu Ming, from Scarlet City. I am here to meet the emperor."

The guards were about to note down the information when they stopped. "Brother, please don't joke around. Give us the correct answer," they said.

"That's the truth," Alex said. "I was invited by the Emperor. You can call the palace and check up if you don't believe me."

"Take him aside and keep him in the room for a while," a guard ordered another guard, who complied easily.

"This way," the guard took Alex. The guard was neither polite, nor rude in his treatment of Alex, and when he reached the room, Alex sat on a chair that was inside.

"Please wait while we confirm your words," the guard said.

"Yes, please do," Alex said with a smile toward the guard.

The guard sent some information through a talisman and waited for a while. After a few minutes, a message came back in the talisman.

"Sorry brother, but what did you say your name was?" the guard asked.

"Yu Ming," Alex said. It felt a little weird using that name, but it would be one he would keep for a while.

"What sect are you from?" the guard asked.

"From the Hong Wu sect and Tiger sect of Scarlet City," Alex replied.

"Ah, I see. It seems you were the right person. Please come with me; I've been assigned to bring you to the palace," the guard said.

"Yes, let's go," Alex stood up from the chair and walked with the guard.

Alex saw the many people of the city going about their days in the city. It wasn't as crowded as when the competition had taken place, but it was still plenty crowded.

The colorful atmosphere of the city reminded him of the festival back in the countryside.

"You don't look very strong, brother," the guard asked as he looked at Alex.

"Haha, not when compared to you," Alex said, looking at the guard whose cultivation base should have been between True Master 7th and 9th realm. Alex still had a slight problem telling cultivation apart.

His own cultivation was still at the 2nd realm of True Disciple, so he was really weak comparatively. Of course, that was without counting his body cultivation.

"So you must have some other features than just being a cultivator right?" the guard asked.

"I'm an alchemist," Alex said.

"Oh, an alchemist?" the guard asked with a surprised look. "You must be a genius in alchemy to be called by the emperor at such a young age."

"I… do fine for myself," Alex said. He didn't bother explaining that he wasn't here for alchemy purposes.

The guard was a curious one who kept the conversation going by asking quite a few questions, most of which Alex answered without any hesitation.

The 2 of them walked through the city going in the southern direction.

Alex had come from the northern gate, so he would have to walk for a while to reach the palace.

The palace occupied a large area of land at the center of the city and was surrounded by large walls about 20 meters high. They weren't as tall as city walls which were close to 50 meters high.

The palace had a single gate that was facing to the north. So, Alex and the guard had to completely walk around the walls to reach the palace.

"Here we are," the guard said as they finally reached the palace.

An old man stood at the front of the gate and looked at Alex who was next to the guard.

"Are you sir Yu Ming?" the old man asked.

"Yes, I am," Alex said. "But you don't have to call me sir."

"Hmm… your appearance doesn't match what I was told you would look like. Also, I wasn't told that you had a missing arm," the old man said.

"I lost my arm in the city against the bandits. As for the appearance, I can't help it. I've changed since then," Alex said.

"This puts me in a bit of tro—"

"Yu Ming? You are finally here?" A voice came from behind the old man as a woman walked up to them. She wore a blue, translucent robe that seemed to have been made from the lightest silk out there.

Her hair was braided behind her in such a fancy way that Alex was sure it took 5 different maids to tame that.

"My greetings, princess," Alex said.

"Why are you hiding your face? Did you make an enemy or something?" she asked.

"Your highness, you recognize this sir? The information I was given doesn't match—"

"Oh, don't worry, old Han. He's the right person. I saw him with this face in the competition the day of the invasion," she said.

"Ah, then that settles it," the old man said.

"You go in, I will take him in," the princess said.

"Princess, I can't let you do that," the old man said.

"Alright, then follow us," she said and turned to Alex. "Come in. Father has been waiting for you for a long time."

Chapter 572 Discussion

"I heard your master passed away, my condolences," The princess said as they walked in.

"Thank you, princess," Alex said. He looked around the outer gardens of the palace that was nearly 3 times as large as the City lord's manor.

There were trees and flowers of many kinds and Alex could recognize quite of few of them as being rare ones.

The servants in the garden and the walkway to the palace wore two different kinds of clothing. One was a simple peasant robe of very light red color.

The other was a black robe that Alex recognized to belong to the Royal Fu Academy.

"Do the graduates of the Royal Fu Academy come to work in the palace?" Alex asked.

"Some do," the princess said. "Most do their own thing. We don't bind them to work for us only."

"I see," Alex said. Ahead of the path came the massive palace that looked to be completely made up of white limestone. However, given how well it had handled its weight, Alex doubted if it really was that.

The princess didn't ask him a lot of questions and directly brought him to her father's place deep in the palace.

Along the way, Alex could see that the whole palace was made up of grayish-white color with a few red pieces of furniture that worked as accent pieces for the palace.

When Alex entered the room that belonged to the Emperor, he was immediately met with a bright white room with furniture that could only be called crimson in color.

Not only the furniture, even the curtains, and drapes as well as the carpet was crimson in color.

There were a few chairs in the room, all grandiose in nature, and had a few people sitting on them.

"Come on in. This is my father's study room," the princess said bringing him in to meet the people.

The Emperor was sat in the center of the group. His face showed confusion when he saw Alex walk in.

"He's here, father," the princess told the emperor.

"That's not…"

"Greetings, your Majesty, your highnesses, and seniors," Alex bowed towards the entire group.

"This is him," the princess said. "I think he might be one of those players too."

"Ah, that makes sense," the emperor said. "Welcome to the palace, young man. I'm glad to see you have survived the beasts somehow."

'Eh? Do they know I'm a player? Has the news about players spread this far?' he wondered.

"Come on, sit down. Let me introduce you to these people," the emperor beckoned Alex to sit on the seat next to him.

Alex nodded and walked over.

"Where am I going to sit?" the princess asked in an annoyed voice.

"Eh? You want to sit with us, Wuying?" the Emperor asked.

"Of course," the princess said. "I haven't asked him any questions just because I wanted to get him here quickly."

"Alright," the emperor pointed to the corner of the room and a chair floated right next to them.

The princess smiled and sat on it next to Alex.

"Let me introduce you to everyone, young man," the emperor said. "You already know these two old men Yang and Feng from last time, right? Feng Xuan and Yang Fei are both heads of the Feng and Yang family and are some of the only Saint realm cultivators of the Crimson Empire."

Alex bowed towards both of them.

The emperor then moved on to the two men next to them who looked young but showed signs of aging.

"These are my 2 sons, Fuxian is the older one and will succeed me, and Yuhan is the younger one," the Emperor said.

The two sons looked just like their father but lacked broad shoulders as well as rough beards.

Alex bowed to the two of them as well.

Finally, there were two people on the last chair. One man, one woman.

Neither of them looked like they belonged here, and judging by the message Alex had received, he believed these two to be the outside.

"Fellow Daoist, my name is Fu Tao," the man said as he cupped his fists towards Alex. He wore a red robe and looked quite young for someone with a cultivation base that Alex couldn't quite figure out.

'Is he in the upper True Lord realm? Maybe even lower True King realm,' Alex thought.

The man had a well-built body and a clean-shaven face. His red robe with the golden embroidery made him look like someone of royalty as well.

"This here is Lu Yan," the man introduced the woman next to her. She wore a green robe that covered her whole body, including a veil that hid her face.

From what Alex could see, he assumed the girl wasn't very old either, and she still exuded aura close to the upper True lord realm.

"Greetings, brother Tao, Sister Yan," Alex greeted them back as well. "If I may be so rude, may I know how old brother Tao is this year?"

"Oh, it's fine," the man said. "I'm 27 years old."

"Wow, my master who is nearly triple your age is only a few realms higher than you, brother Tao. You must be really talented," Alex said.

"Haha, I am alright," the man said, but he was feeling a little proud of himself at the moment.

"Now that introductions are over, young man, why don't you tell us about your days in the Beasts' realm? How did you survive there?" The emperor asked.

Alex nodded and got to explain as much as he could without giving away the specifics. He told them that he was kept as a prisoner, but had enough freedom to go out to the gardens. He told them how he spend most of the days simply cultivating and doing nothing.

He told them that his beast had been taken away as well. Aside from that, he gave information about the secret realm spanning continent-wide, making it impossible to directly go to the other side without going through the beast's realm or taking a detour through the ocean first. The two outsiders listened to him and frowned.

"You can't go to the ocean," the Emperor said. "It's a death trap. The beasts there are so strong that they will make me look like a weakling."

Alex was surprised to hear that. 'The ocean has such strong beasts? Thank god nothing attacked me when I was on the shore,' he thought.

"Those beasts can't come up to the land, so there's no need to worry about that area. As for actual information, Do you have anything that will help us survive in the realm?" the man named Tao asked.
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"I have a piece of information that may be able to help you," Alex said. "It was around the time when I saw the flash of light inside the secret realm. I had asked a beast at the time, and she had told me that it was you guys entering the realm."

"When I asked if you were safe, she said that you would be safe as long as you didn't go around looking for trouble yourself," Alex said.

"Although, I must warn you. The humans were the ones that destroyed the western continent after their king died, so most of the beasts have an improperly driven hatred for even humans of this continent itself."

Chapter 573 Teach Me

Alex explained to them a few more things regarding the secret realms that he had come to learn through simply hearsay.

The man and woman, namely Fu Tao and Lu Yan, were still scared of returning even after learning what they had learned.

"Cousin Tao, I'm sure you will be alright. If what young Yu Ming has said is accurate, you will just have to not try to provoke the beasts," the emperor said.

'Cousin?' Alex wondered why the emperor was calling him that. 'Is this Fu family the same as the royal Fu family?'

"I understand, cousin," Fu Tao said. "But my fear still remains. I watched a lot of the people who entered with me get torn to shreds by the strong beasts."

"Although I believe they were the first ones to provoke the beasts, it still causes me quite a bit of discomfort knowing that they can kill us at any time."

"Given that we have to travel for nearly a week's worth of time without stopping anywhere, it will be hard to stay unnoticed," the man said.

"So we will have to sneak in quietly," the girl said.

"Sneaking is just impossible. Entrance through the teleportation platforms shines a bright light in all directions on top of making a noise. Also, the palace will immediately learn about the intruders the moment we enter."

"Our process should not be to sneak in, rather enter politely. If you sneak, they might consider you to have a bad intention," Ning said.

The man nodded when he heard that, but then he rose his eyebrows. "We? Are you planning to go in there again, young brother?" Fu Tao asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "As I mentioned, my beast is still in there. I intend to take him back."

"Uhh… isn't the cat in the palace with the saints?" the emperor asked.

"What? If that is so then we can't take you with us, young brother," Fu Tao said.

"I don't expect you to help me save my cat. I only ask you that you let me get in with you," Alex said.

"I… don't know, that still sounds quite dangerous. We are afraid of the trouble coming back to us," the man said.

Alex sighed. That was understandable. He would have perhaps done the same thing in the man's situation as well.

"Then how about this," Alex said. "Can you teach me how to open the teleportation platform? I will go in a week after you guys. By then, you should have already left the realm, right?"

The man fell into thought. "Yeah, that should be possible," he said. "If you are willing to wait at least a week, then I am willing to teach you the method to open the formation as well."

Alex's eyes shined. "Thank you, brother Tao," he said.

"Alright, that should be enough for today. Will you leave tomorrow then, cousin Tao?" the Emperor asked.

"Yes, I want to go back as soon as possible," the man said.

The two of them left, and so did the princess. Only the princess and the Emperor remained.

"I didn't think you would be wanting to go there too," the emperor said.

"I need to," Alex said.

"Alright, Wuying will show you to a guest room. Since you will be likely staying for an entire week, make yourself at home," the emperor said.

"Yes," Alex said. "By the way, your majesty. I… have a small request."

"Request? Go on, if it is possible, I will grant it," he said.

"Will it be possible for you to ask senior Lai to meet me?" Alex asked.

"Lai Qing?" the emperor asked curiously.

"Yes," Alex said. "I want to know if he has any knowledge about pills that would help regrow my arm."

"Ah, yes. You should be concerned about that as well. I will send him a message. As for when he will come, I don't know myself," the Emperor said.

"As long as you send him a message, I am fine with that," Alex said.

"Alright, I will do so," The emperor said.

Alex left with the princess and went along with her to his guest room. However, it didn't seem like the princess intended to bring him there as she brought him someplace else.

Alex looked around awkwardly as the passing maids and servants looked at him curiously.

'Where are we going?' he wondered.

They went past a set of hallways before reaching a section of the palace that seemed to not have that many people working there.

The Princess walked up to a room that was guarded by 2 black-robed figures and asked that she be let in.

The guards opened the door and she walked in with Alex in tow.

"Aunt Mixie, look who is here," she said in a loud voice as she walked in.

"Little Wuying, you need to stop shouting while inside," A man said as he walked out of the inner section of the massive room.

"Second Uncle, where is aunt?" she asked.

"I'm here, child. I heard you the first time," a woman that looked to be in her late 20s arrived in front of them. She wore a red dress with long flowing hair.

Alex looked at the woman. Although her skin color had changed quite a lot, her face still remained the same.

"Aunt Mixie, I brought him to meet you," the princess said.

The husband-wife looked at Alex, but they wouldn't recognize him no matter what.

"Who is this young man? Certainly not your…" the uncle said.

"Stop thinking stupid things uncle. He is the one that helped cure Aunt," the princess said.

"Oh, OH," the two of them finally realized who they were looking at.

"Young man, you must be Yu Ming then. I am Fu Zemin, the second High prince of the empire," the man introduced himself.
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"Greetings, your highness," Alex bowed towards the both of them.

"You need not bow towards us, child. You saved my life. I, Rei Mixie, bow towards you," the woman bowed slightly towards Alex.

"Ah, you don't have to do that, your highness," Alex said. "I am just glad to see that you are doing fine."

Seeing a person, whose cultivation base was in the True Emperor realm bowing in front of him made Alex feel quite awkward.

The two couples happily asked questions to Alex, who answered as well as he could. They showed a genuine smile towards him and were really kind people.

Alex couldn't help but wonder how such a family could produce someone like Zexi.

After a while, the princess finally took him to his guest room. Alex went into the grand guest room that would make anyone feel jealous regarding the royals.

Alex closed the door and went on to cultivate. He decided to not cultivate his yang technique while he was in the palace and instead went with the Yin technique to reduce the yang his body was naturally producing.

After a whole night of cultivation, Alex woke up in the morning. He went out and met up with the people that were ready to leave.

"You're here, young brother," Fu Tao said. "Let us go then. Finally, we can return back home."

Chapter 574 Equilibrium

After nearly 4 hours of flying, the group of 6 arrived at the location for the teleportation platform.

Alex's face turned cold when he saw that location. Just one more step and he would be on his way to save Pearl.

However, Alex couldn't do that right now. He needed to wait like he had promised. If he tried to force himself in, he could very well be attacked by them for trying to ruin their chances of survival.

He looked at the group of 6, of which Fu Zemin and Rei Mixie were the most surprising ones.

It seemed that they were going to leave the Crimson Empire to go roam the rest of the continent together. They already had no responsibilities whether it be to their children, to the family or to the empire.

They were free spirits, bored out of their minds, which was one of the reason why Rei Mixie had went out exploring so long ago and had found the raw Divine Devil fruit that made her unconscious for months.

"So this is the platform huh?" she said. "Last time during the expedition, I had gone way further from here. If only we knew at the time that there was a saint grade formation laid around that place."

"At least we know now," Fu Zemin said.

"Are you two absolutely sure you want to go?" The Emperor asked.

"Yes, brother," Fu Zemin said.

"You guys really don't want to wait for your grandchildren to be born?" the Emperor asked.

The couple hesitated for a moment and then shook their head. "I'm sure we will be back soon to meet our grandchildren," Rei Mixie said.

"If you say so, sister-in-law," the Emperor said.

"Young brother, come here. I will show you how its done," Fu Tao said as he called Alex to the formation.

Alex went up to him and looked at the formation. He still wasn't sure how one was supposed to run this formation without it having a metal base.

Alex looked at the formation and based on the number of strokes, it seemed to be a simple True rank formation.

"You've used normal formations, right?" Fu Tao asked.

"Yes, I have," Alex said.

"Good, then it will be a little easier to explain. You see, in normal formations, there is always a metal plate in it. In a metal, we can pour however much Qi we want and it will bring it to an equilibrium once all of these dividends are filled."

"However, this one is different. Since there is no metal plate to bring your energy to an equilibrium, if you want to run such a formation, you need to bring equilibrium to it yourself," Fu Tai said.

'Equilibrium…' Alex thought. He understood this idea quite well.

Fu Tao walked on top of the formation bringing Alex with him. "You see these end points where all the lines gather? What you need to do is give a specific amount of Qi into it. Then, you immediately give the next one a different amount of Qi, followed by the next one and so on until all the end points have energy in them."
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"As for how much energy you have to put in, take a moderate amount, and multiply that by the number of lines per end point," Fu Tao said.

Alex didn't need to hear Fu Tao anymore. He already understood the concept and was surprised that it was so easy. Especially since he had already used the same concept last time to improve his skin alone.

'Right, equilibrium. That formation was based on the Yang jades, which defused the energy onto the formation, instead of a user. Maybe I could've done it too if I had the same level of yang Qi,' Alex thought.

'So, while that formation used the yang jades as an energy source, I can use myself as one for this one. In a similar concept, all the nodes need to have the same amount of energy so that they spread through the stroke at an equal rate.'

Alex felt enlightened. It was such an easy concept he had already put to use, but he was only understanding how it worked. 'So metals automatically bring energy to equilibrium, huh?' he thought.

As he continued contemplating on the matter, a curious case of confusion came before him.

"Brother Tao, do these formations not need an energy source?" he asked.

"No," Fu Tao shook his head. "Since it is a one-time use formation, it doesn't need an energy source, only enough energy to run it once."

"Ah," Alex understood. 'Right, once they're teleported, the formation would have no use if it keeps on running. I never thought about that.'

"You are quite talented in the matters of formation," Alex said while thinking, 'even though you can't use words like stroke and nodes.'

"Haha, it's not me who is smart. It's just that my grandfather is a formation expert. It was him who came up with the knowledge to run this formation," Fu Tao proudly said.

"Ah, I see. Are there many people in the Luminance empire with such high knowledge?" Alex asked.

He was quite surprised to think that he had never learned about such things from the internet.

"No," Fu Tao said. "Only my grandfather knows of it. Which is why only my Granduncle knew how to open it, and why now only I know how to open it."

"Ah I see," Alex said. "He must be an exceptional genius in the ways of formations then."

"Haha, not really. He just found a book that talked about formations from the meteor shower," Fu Tao said with a slight smile.

"Meteor shower?" Alex's eyes suddenly narrowed. "Um, brother, can you tell me a little more about this Meteor shower?"

"Um… sure," Fu Tao said. "About 1200 or so years ago, there was a meteor shower that dropped quite a few things onto the western continent. Some got spirit stones, some got weapons, some got unreadable techniques."

"My grandfather got a book that taught about formations. I don't know how many of those there are out there, but my grandfather is certainly one of the luckier ones since his book could be read."

"I see," Alex said. "Thank you for teaching me all of that."

"It's alright. You've been quite a bit of help for us too," Fu Tao said.

"Are we ready to go?" Lu Yan came up to him and asked.

"Yes," Fu Tao turned around. "Cousins, come. We should leave now."

"Yes," Fu Zemin and Rei Mixie walked up to the formation platform, while Alex got off it.

"Say your goodbyes now," Fu Tao said while releasing his energy to the different nodes at the same time.

"Goodbye brother," Fu Zemin said.

"Go, and don't worry about your children. They are already old enough to take care of themselves," the Emperor said.

"Good luck on getting your cat, young man," lady Rei said to Alex.

"Thank you," Alex responded.

Soon, the energy on the platform reached an equilibrium and everything started shining in bright white light.

Alex closed his eyes as the light got very bright at once point, and then it disappeared.

When he reopened his eyes, the 4 people on top of the platform were gone.

Chapter 575 Burnt Book

A few more days, that was all Alex had to wait. It had been 4 days since Fu Tao and the group had teleported into the beast's realm.

For the last 4 days, he had been doing nothing but staying in the palace or going out to the city with the princess.

The princess' guard was always with her, but she never came out to speak with Alex. It seemed that she was still shy from the last time.

Alex had already gone through all the markets buying everything he wanted from ingredients to recipes to formations to even swords.

The one he got was a weak one even compared to his own previous sword. At least, it would be easier to refine.

The rest of the time he would spend in Alchemy hall in the city where he could make as many pills as he could.

On the 2nd day, he had made a particularly good harvest.

After returning from walking around the city, Alex had gone back to his room to rest.

However, just then someone knocked on the door to his guest room. Alex left his bed and opened the door to see a maid outside.

"His Majesty calls you to his study room," she said.

"The emperor is calling for me?" Alex asked and left the room. The maid showed the way to the study room and stopped a bit before reaching the place.

"Your Majesty, you called for me?" Alex asked as he entered the door.

"Ah, you are here. Come, come," the Emperor beckoned him in.

Alex walked in to see that the Emperor was not alone. He was instead with a feminine-looking man of thin building, luscious flowing black hair, and eyes that would make men question their likes and dislikes.

The man looked weak, but his cultivation base aura said otherwise. The man was as least a True Emperor realm expert. That was all he could tell from the aura.

'Who is this person?' Alex wondered.

He walked up to the emperor and took a seat next to him, waiting for him to introduce the man.

"Alright, I will leave you two to talk," the Emperor said standing up to leave.

'Huh? Talk? What?' Alex was extremely confused, but before he could even say anything, the emperor left.

Alex didn't know what to do now. He felt extremely awkward in front of this person he had never seen before.

"Greetings!" Alex still decided to greet the man.

The man bowed a little towards Alex and said, "I only recently came to learn about little Ma's passing. My Condolences."

"T-thank you," Alex said before his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

'Little Ma?' he thought. 'Aside from Grandmaster, I have only ever heard one person…'

"Ah, I'm sorry, senior Lai. I recognized you too late," Alex said. The man in front of him was Lai Qing, the Royal Alchemist.

"Haha, I'm surprised you recognized me at all. I usually have to talk with people for a while before they figure out who I am," the Royal alchemist said.

"Thankfully, I recognized you, or our conversation might have been incredibly awkward," Alex said. "Still, I have seen you 3 times now, and each time you have a different face on. Is there a reason?"

"No particular reason, really," the royal alchemist said. "I was a young man when I got into alchemy and spent nearly 2 centuries trying to hone my skills as an alchemist."

"By the time I was big enough to be given the title of the Royal Alchemist, I realized that I had spent all of my youth tucked away in a room with a fire and a cauldron."

"I felt a little regret for losing my youth, so I try to bring it back in any way possible," the Royal Alchemist said.

"Centuries?" Alex was a little surprised. "How old are you?"

"Me? I… don't know," the Royal Alchemist said. "I should be a little more than 400 years now."

Alex was stunned. He had met old people, but none that were this old as a True realm cultivator.

"That's not what you brought me here to speak about, is it?" he asked.

"No," Alex said. "I requested your audience so that you could teach me about the Structure and Compositions as you promised."

"Sigh, I told you to give up last time, didn't I? It's a difficult concept to understand that even Ma Rong would have a hard time understanding."

"As I said last time, come back to me when you've made a Heaven Grade Tr—"

Alex suddenly put forth a pill bottle next to the Royal Alchemist, stopping him mid-speech.

The royal alchemists sniffed the aroma that was coming off of the pill bottle even though it had a stopper on it.

His eyes widened as he took it. "What pill is this?" he asked.

"A Two-fold Qi Absorption pill," Alex said. That was a pill that doubled the speed of cultivation under normal circumstances.

The Royal Alchemist knew pretty well about this pill. It was a commonly found recipe that almost all True realm alchemists knew.

However, that was not the reason he was so surprised. He opened the stopper and took the pill out and looked at it.

It was a light lime-colored pill with uneven spots of red dots all around it.

The Royal Alchemist said nothing and pulled out a Pill Tester and immediately put in the pill.

Fog appeared around the glass of the tester and slowly went up. The Royal Alchemist had a guess about the pill, but no matter how he looked at it, this should not have been real.

However, it was.

The fog stopped moving and the tester gave the result he was expecting.

51%

This was a Heaven Grade True pill.

"You made this?" the Royal Alchemist asked with wide eyes.

"You said that I would be eligible to learn about Structure and Composition once I was able to make a Heaven Grade True Pill, right?" Alex asked.

"Here it is. Now, please teach me."

The Royal alchemist looked in absolute shock. He had been nearly a hundred years old when he had reached this level.

However, this kid that was in front of him, that wasn't even 20 years old could somehow make such an amazing pill. The Royal alchemist couldn't believe it.

"Did you really make this?" he asked.

"Yes, only 2 days ago," Alex said. "I was hoping you would be okay with this 48% pill I had managed to do about a week ago, but fortunately, I happened to make this 51% pill too."

The Royal Alchemist heard this and his eyes changed and got serious. "It seems you were serious about learning it. I guess you have the right to."

He reached into his storage bag and pulled out a small book that looked old and almost torn in places. The outer cover looked new, but everything else did not.

"What is that?" Alex asked.

"It is the book that gave me the knowledge I have today. Everything I am came from this book right here," the Royal Alchemist said.

"Everything I am about to tell you is something I learned from this book," he said.

He put it forth in front of him, and Alex slowly moved his hands towards it, thinking he was presenting it to him.

"NO!" The Royal Alchemist pulled back his hands, his eyes glaring at him fiercely. It took him a second to realize what he was doing.

He calmed down, the look in his eyes disappearing, and said, "Sorry about that. This is my holy scripture, and I cannot let anyone else touch it."

"Holy scripture?" Alex asked. "Does that book contain information about Alchemy?"

"Yes," the Royal Alchemist said. "I was but a normal cultivator at the start. I was a poor, rogue cultivator that lived his day-to-day life by hunting beasts and selling it."

"If I hadn't accidentally come across this book during one of my hunts, I would have never been able to reach the heights I have reached today," the royal Alchemist said.

"What is it called?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. The outer cover was burned off, so I could never learn its name," the Royal Alchemist said.

'Outer cover was burned?' Alex thought. There was something in his mind that told him why the outer cover could have possibly been burned.

'Could it be…' he thought, 'that this book too… came down in the meteor shower?'

Chapter 576 Symmetry

Lai Qing was just a young man that had been sent down the path of cultivation without any wishes of his own.

He wasn't the best at it and had to try his hardest to even reach Bone Tempering realm.

One day, in the forests that were still present where the desert had formed, he was hunting for weak beasts as he should and found the book that contained information about alchemy.

He dismissed it at first but was soon intrigued by the information and decided to check it out.

That was at the age of 29.

He didn't join any Alchemy sects, or take any teachers and simply tried on his own.

He bought books about ingredients and recipes with what little information he had and used the superior information of the coverless book to augment his understanding of Alchemy.

He spent decades upon decades trying to learn alchemy. When he realized that the book was truly incredible, he started showing it off as well.

Soon, people started noticing him. Some called him to teach them alchemy, some called him to lecture in theirs.

Even the ministers called him to write an alchemy book for the royal library. Afterward, he was given the title, the Royal Alchemist of Crimson Empire, making him someone with a status that was only lower than the Royal family themselves.

Now, he was one of the most well-respected people in the entire Crimson Empire.

And it all happened because of the colorless book he was holding at the moment in front of Alex.

"How much do you know about Structure and Composition again?" the Royal Alchemist asked.

"As much as you've written in your book. I know that Composition has to do with the ratio of the powders in the final product so that it can absorb the most energy."

"As for Structure… I'm a little confused about that. It has to do with the shape of the powder's particles themselves which I will be honest, I don't understand much of," Alex said.

The royal Alchemist nodded his head when he heard it. "You are not far off on Composition."

"Every time you make a pill, you put in the ingredients and turn it into powder right? Forget about the temperature and movements. The most fundamental truth of making pills is that you have to turn an ingredient into powder."

"Do you know why we do that?" the Royal Alchemist asked.

"Yes, to release the energy within the ingredient," he said.

"Yes, but then why is there a focus on keeping the powder in there? Can't you just put in other powders you had maybe prepared beforehand? Why do alchemists insist on keeping the powder of the ingredient the energy came from?" the Royal Alchemist asked.

Alex cocked his head in thinking. He had never given this aspect of alchemy much thought.

"That's because only that ingredient's powder can be used in absorbing the final resulting energy?" he asked.

"Close," the Royal Alchemist said. "You seem to have a very fundamental misunderstanding of the Alchemy process. You seem to believe that energies disappear when you mix ingredients, but that is not so."

Alex knew that already, but he kept quiet and let the Royal Alchemist speak as he listened with full attention.

"When you mix the energies, they interact with each other, and out comes a single type of energy from the two. However, even though you only see one type of energy, there is in fact both of those previous energies in that resulting energy."

"They are only hiding because the weaker of the energy interacts with some of the stronger energy and brings it into equilibrium, thus leaving only one type of the energy to be seen by the observer."

"Also, if an energy comes from one ingredient, only its powder can hold that energy in the end."

"So, if you make a pill with 14 different ingredients, even though the final resulting energy will be of one type, they will still have all the 14 original energy. They are only hidden because they are in harmony."

"Since you have 14 types of energy, you still need 14 types of powder to hold it. This is why you cannot throw away the original powder. That is where Composition comes in."

"If you lose even the tiniest bit of powder, it cannot hold energy that belonged to it. And since all energy is in a harmony, if there is no room for one, there is no room for any."

"This is one of the major reasons why alchemists end up making low harmony pills," the Royal Alchemist said.

Alex nodded. He had truly come to learn something. 'So the best course of action is to start with the appropriate amount of ingredient, and never lose any bits of powder,' Alex thought.

"I believe I understand, senior Lai," Alex said.

"Good," the Royal Alchemist said. "Now let's move on to Structure."

Alex waited for him to start speaking, but the Royal Alchemist didn't speak at all.

"Senior?" he called out.

"Ah, sorry. Structure… is a difficult concept to explain," he said. "You see there are more than one ways to turn an ingredient into powder while releasing the same rate of energy."

"Ah, yes. I know about that," Alex said. "I came to know a lot about it when I made my own pills."

"Yes, so when you do the things differently, you end up creating the different shapes of powder. It is those powders that you put together in such a way that there is no gap in between the powders," he said.

"Sorry, gap?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the Royal Alchemist said. "Having gaps in your pill is one of the worst things you can do. Well, it's less of a gap between the powders being the problem but more of the chaos gaps can bring to the overall structure of the pill."

"Let's take the 14 ingredient pill from before as the example. When you finish making the pill, you will need all 14 of those different powders to form a clump such that there are as less gaps as possible."

"Since you can't individually make them, you will have to rely on shapes that more or less fit together perfectly. That way, you get rid of the gaps in the pill."

"So what you are actually doing with structure is removing the gap as much as possible. A compact pill is always a better pill," The Royal Alchemist said.
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Alex was very confused. He understood why having more powder helped gather more energy, but how did gaps have anything to do with it?

"Shouldn't just having all the powders be enough? That should do it even if there are gaps, right?" he asked.

The Royal Alchemist smiled. "You would think that, wouldn't you. Logically it makes sense for pills to contain energy like that. Except, it turns out that isn't the case."

"After all, our world is way more magical and mystical than even what we've come to learn," the Royal alchemist said.

"I've told you about composition and structure, but those two are merely two parts that come together to make the most important aspect of a pill's formation," the Royal Alchemist said. "That is… the Symmetry."

"Symmetry?" Alex looked confused. "Symmetry of…?"

"The powder in the pill. Depending on how symmetrical the structure of the powder in the overall pill is, the amount of energy it can store is the same as well," the Royal Alchemist said.

"This is why you don't want gaps. Having solid clumps of powder make it easier for a pill to be symmetrical," the royal Alchemist shape.

Alex was still a little confused. "What does symmetry have anything to do with it though?" he asked.

"I don't know," the Royal Alchemist said. "But that's what this book tells me to do, and ever since I did, it's been working for me. So, it should work for you too."

'Symmetry? How does that help a pill with keeping more energy in it?' he wondered.

As he thought that, he remembered something else. Something that felt so obvious to him by now that he didn't even think of it the first time he heard it.

"Symmetry… formations have that too. When you make a formation, you have to make straight strokes at correct angles so that the overall formation comes out symmetrical. The better the symmetry, the better the formation's efficiency," Alex said as he remembered about it.

"Ah yes, I've heard about that too," The Royal Alchemist said. "Not only that, for Talismans, all the runes are symmetrical and the final drawn bigger run has to be in symmetry too."

"Similarly, Artifacts that usually have skills in them need to have symmetrical Qi lines too," the Royal Alchemist said.

"What is this fascination with Symmetry for all production skills?" Alex asked.

"Don't ask me, that's just how things are. I don't make the rules, I just follow them," the Royal Alchemist said.

"I see," Alex said. "I guess I understand everything you said today. Although, I might have to dwell on them for a bit."

"Take as much time as you need. These… are not simple concepts that you can understand in a sitting. Even if you do understand what they mean, putting them into work will take years," the Royal Alchemist said.

"Yes, I will try my best," Alex said.

"So, was that all you wanted to ask?" the Royal Alchemist asked.

"No, actually. There is one more thing I wanted to ask," Alex said as he pulled up his robe's sleeve to show the stub of his left arm and asked, "Can you help me with this?"

Chapter 577 Conversion

"Oh, you lost your arm?" The Royal Alchemist asked with a bit of surprise as he seemed to have finally noticed it.

"When did you lose it?" he asked.

"Um, about nearly 3 weeks ago now," Alex said.

"Ah, I'm sorry then," the Royal Alchemist said. "I could help you reattach it if it was a few hours or at most a day. But, over 2 weeks, I cannot help you with that."

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "Then, can you help me in downgrading a Saint Rank recipe to a True rank?"

The royal alchemist's eyes changed. "You have a saint rank recipe?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Can I see it?" he asked.

Alex shook his head. "I only remember the recipe. I don't carry it around," he said.

"Alright then, write it down for me," he said.

Alex hesitated for a bit before remembering what the person in front of him had done for him by teaching him today. So, he decided to repay it back through the recipe.

He wrote it all down on a Talisman and handed it to the Royal Alchemist.

The Royal Alchemist read the talisman as his face appeared to be full of shock. "These are ingredients that I have only read about in this book. I have never seen them before myself," he said.

"Do you know how I can possibly downgrade these ingredients to a True rank alternative so that I can make a pill for myself?" he asked.

"Downgrade? That's… hard," he said. "Wait a second." The royal alchemist opened his book and flipped it for a good while before reaching a page.

"Ah, here it is! Note this down," he said.

Alex wasn't sure what he was about to say, but he waited for the ingredient list.

"Thorny Bugloss for Winevein Poppy, Silverstring Diascia for Trileaved Periwinkle Leaf, and… Auburn Rue's seeds instead of Dried Torenia flower," the Royal Alchemist read it out loud.

"These are the only conversion I have at the moment. Unfortunately, I have more Common and True rank conversion instead of the higher ones," the Royal Alchemist said.

Alex thought for a bit. The Saint Body Regeneration pill had about 12 ingredients to it. Of them, the Royal Alchemist had just given him 3 of the ingredients that would be used for the True rank version of the pill.

'That doesn't help me a lot at all,' Alex thought.

"Um, Senior Lai, can you teach me the concept behind upgrading or downgrading an ingredient? Even if it is just for the Common and True rank ingredients?" he asked.

"I suppose I can do that," the Royal Alchemist said.

"First of all, you have to understand that even though 2 ingredients might have the same energy, its actually different in subtle ways. You can never swap the metal energy of one ingredient for metal energy of another ingredient."

"So, the first thing you do is find out what this aspect of the ingredient is that makes it different."

"Usually you figure this out by looking at what the ingredient does, rather than the energy itself. If you want to upgrade or downgrade an ingredient that helps in closing up wounds, then the ingredient you want will likely do that same thing but just better or worse."

"So you start there," the Royal alchemist said.

He went on to explain as much as he could about the concept and Alex soaked it in like a dry sponge left out in the rain.

For nearly 20 minutes, the royal alchemist spoke on this topic, finally ending it with, "in the end, it's just trial and error. Once you have the ingredients, you just have to try and make a pill that works."

"I see," Alex said. "So, I will have to keep trying it for a long while, huh?"

"Unfortunately, yes," the Royal Alchemist said.

"Thank you for your teaching, Senior Lai," Alex bowed towards him a little.

"It's alright. My visit hasn't been all a waste of time either," the Royal Alchemist said as he waved the talisman in his hands.

He stood up to leave, and as he did, he said, "From what I understand, Little Ma had a lot of expectations on you. I hope you smash through every single one of them and reach heights neither she nor I have ever imagined."

Then, he left.

Alex remained in the room for a while longer contemplating on the information he had just received.

There was no secret technique, there was no book. He would have to do everything on his own from the ground up.

Now, Alex felt himself to have 2 choices.

First, he could try his best and convert all the Saint rank ingredients to their True rank equivalent, and then make a pill to heal himself.

Or, the perhaps easier option, rush through the True realm to reach the Saint realm and directly make the saint rank pill.

Finding Saint rank ingredients was perhaps going to be a bit too difficult of a task for him, but in either case, sitting on his ass wasn't going to help him.

No one was going to come to help him. If he wanted help, he would either need to go out on his own and find it or be strong enough so that he no longer needed the help.

Alex didn't do anything for the next 3 days aside from staying in his room and cultivating. While he did that, he contemplated on the things regarding the things he had learned.

Composition, Structure, Symmetry, and finally, Conversion. Suddenly learning more about these things had opened up a lot of ways for him to improve on his pills.

He couldn't wait to put all of this knowledge into making pills. However, now was not the time. Right now, he needed to focus on rescuing Pearl.

The Beasts' realm was not such an easy place to infiltrate that he could go in and out without having to worry for his life.

As far as he knew, this could possibly be the final days of his life. Still, Alex didn't let that stop him.

He wouldn't be able to live with himself if he let Pearl go through the ritual knowing that all the previous candidates had died. Either way, he was very close to death.

And for some reason, that did not scare him at all.

'Is that because I'm a clone? Because there is already the realm me living back in home?' he wondered.

Alex took out a pill and ate it. He let the energy of the pill dissipate in his stomach and instead of doing what it needed to do, he made the pill's energy convert into Qi in his body.

Next, it was time to breakthrough.

Using the Heaven grade technique of the Five Yang Divine Path, Alex started moving the Qi in his body in a certain path through his meridian.

The Qi originated from his naval area and would move through his entire body before coming back to his naval area.

He did that two or three more times when he heard an 'oomph' sound coming from deep within him.

He had broken through. While it wasn't as fast as pressing the breakthrough button, it was still very fast as it only took a bit less than a minute to breakthrough.

As far as he had come to learn, breaking through usually taken from a few minutes up to a few hours for most people, and that was in the self-tempering realm.

Alex felt a small increase in his Qi density, meaning his strength had likely increased as well.

He cultivated for half an hour to stabilize his cultivation base for the moment and stopped so he could train something else.

There were 2 things he could do aside from cultivating. The first was using his spiritual energy to form a weapon.

Alex did that for an hour or so. By now, he was extremely proficient in making the weapon itself. However, the weapon still had no physical properties, so it couldn't be held or influenced by Qi.

He suspected that it had something to do with Spiritual energy as well, but he couldn't figure it out at the moment.

'Is the information in the stele really not complete?' he thought.

Alex then stopped and went on to his next training. He wasn't sure if this was training or not, but he liked to call it one.

He closed his eyes and soon found himself floating on top of the Spiritual sea, looking at a bunch of floating threads of silver light around the Mountain.

After a week or so of having this, Alex had come to learn just a bit more about the silver mountain.

Every day, a certain amount of such silver threads would come off of the mountain. If he wanted to accelerate the process, he just had to keep on touching the mountain, but then he would start losing Spiritual energy to it.

Alex spent the next 5 minutes, going around, gathering the floating threads of silver light.

There were hundreds of them, but it didn't look like it affected the mountain in any way at all. It really would take him forever to completely dismantle the mountain into threads.

But then, what would he do with the threads? He hoped he would have an answer by then.

After he finished with that, Alex left his spiritual sea and started cultivating again. He cultivated the Yin technique for the entire night to keep his Yang in check.

He had to do that. After all, tomorrow was the day he infiltrated the beasts' realm.

Chapter 578 Re-Entering the Beasts’ Realm

Early in the morning, Alex said bade farewell to the royal family and flew off to the southern forest.

The location, the formation platform was about 4 hours away from where he was, so once he was sufficiently far enough, he took out his boat and sped up.

Along the way, as the journey started getting monotonous, Alex fell into a lull and soon started thinking of what he was going to do inside.

As soon as he entered, he would fly in the direction of the palace. With the guards there, he would have to use his skills situationally to hide from them and get into the underground palace.

After that, it was just a matter of time before he found Pearl. After he found Pearl he would…

"What will I do?" he asked himself. He started doubting himself. 'Will Pearl even come with me? I… am not the person he bonded with, right?'

'I'm just a clone of a real person that's no longer here. Do I have the right to take away Pearl?' he thought.

These thoughts had been playing in his head for a while now, but he had never let it surface. He had been keeping them hidden deep below.

However, now that he was getting close to Pearl, the doubts and feeling of impostor only got louder, and even when he didn't want to hear it, he could hear it clearly.

'No,' Alex told himself. 'I still have the scar. If Pearl wasn't bonded with me, the scar would've never been there.'

"Yes, he's still bonded to me. I will teleport into the forest and make myself to the palace. Hopefully, I can see it if I go above the tree-line," Alex thought.

He still had doubts in the back of his mind, but he stored them away as he needed to focus on this mission.

Any wrong move and he would be caught by the beast, and likely killed by them for trying to steal their future king.

'I can't afford to make any mistakes,' Alex thought.

He reached the location and landed near the platform. He slowly stepped on it and took a deep breath before remembering what Fu Tao had done.

"They will know when I enter. I will have to immediately hide in the forest," he thought and opened his eyes.

He looked at the nodes where he was supposed to put in the energy and counted the strokes per node. Then, he released his energy.

He didn't immediately pour his Qi into the nodes, however, and instead kept it hovering in front of him.

As far as he remembered, he was supposed to put his energy at all nodes at once, so he decided to do it the best way he could.

In just a couple of seconds, a massive amount of Qi was released from his hands and it floated in front of him.

Since it was all Yang Qi, he could freely manipulate them in mid-air. He then separated the gathered energy into multiple, equal amounts and hovered them over the nodes as they would require.

He added more energy where he thought was needed and took away where he thought was too much.

If there was excess energy, he simply threw it away. Finally, once he believed he was ready, he let the energy fall onto the nodes.

The moment the yellow blobs of light touched the node, they immediately started filling the nodes at an incredible speed that shocked Alex himself.

'Isn't this too fast? Is something wrong?' he thought. Blue light shined in between the yellow light that slowly turned brighter and lighter until it turned white.
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Once the white light encapsulated him completely, he felt the lurching feeling in the pits of his stomach that told him, he had teleported.

When he reappeared, the bright light lingered in his eyes for a while. While it did, he thought of what he needed to do next.

As the light around him died down, he made the decision that he was going to have to hide in some trees in the forest before making his way to the palace.

He needed to be extra careful so that he wasn't seen by an—

Alex looked around him. He wasn't in a forest at all.

He was now inside a massive cave with white walls made up of marble. The area shined from the light of the glowing crystal-like stalactites hanging from the ceiling.

He stood on top of a white formation platform, and in front of him were two beasts in True realms that were curiously looking at him to understand who had just teleported in.

"Fuck!" Alex thought. He had somehow teleported into the palace.

The two guards noticed something was wrong. Alex noticed them notice it as well.

Without even thinking, he shot out two back-to-back Heaven's Impact on the two beasts. Both of their eyes turned white and they slumped onto the ground.

Alex breathed heavily as he realized that was too close. He, fortunately, had enough reflex in him to attack the Lion and Leopard beasts as soon as he saw them.

Had he waited even a little more, they might have somehow notified the saint beasts.

Alex shook his head. 'Who knows, they might've done it already,' he thought.

Light gathered around him and soon he couldn't be seen at all. After going invisible, he reigned in his aura, and soon it couldn't be felt as well.

"Just how the hell did I come in here? Don't I need a sort of medallion or badge of the beasts to use this line of teleportation?" he thought to himself.

Using the concealment technique, Alex was sure that he could easily go past the other True beasts that would be roaming around in the palace, but what about the Saint realm beasts?

Even with this, their Spiritual senses could easily find him if they even just sent it in his way.

He couldn't worry about that for now. 'I need to go find pearl and leave as soon as I can,' he thought.

Alex ran through the hallway, as silent as he could be towards the room that was previously his room. When he reached it, he pushed it open, only to find nobody in there.

'Of course,' he thought. 'They won't let their future king live in such a place now that the prisoner is gone.'

He needed to start looking some place else, but he wasn't allowed to go to very many places as he had been a prisoner that was simply treated like a guest.

'Where can he be?' he thought. The place was way too big to randomly go around looking for Pearl, and thinking alone wasn't going to cut it.

He needed something more, something else. Whatever he was thinking of doing wasn't going to help him at all.

So, Alex stopped thinking. He suddenly stopped all thoughts and closed his eyes.

If his brain wasn't going to help, he needed to listen to his heart. If he couldn't think it, he needed to feel it.

As his thoughts slowly disappeared, a feeling appeared deep within him. It was a very mild feeling, but it was there. He could feel it, the connection.

The connection between him and Pearl.

He opened his eyes, and— "that way"— knew where to go.

Chapter 579 Family

Pearl felt lonely.

Ever since his only family, Alex, decided to leave him, he had felt lonely. When he had asked why Alex had left him, they told him that this was not his world and that he left for his.

His world was with the humans and they were his family, so he had to go back to his family. Pearl thought he was his family.

Was he not his family then?

The big puma was quite scary, and while the jaguar tried to not act scary, he still was. The jaguar sister made him feel loved, but she couldn't be with him all the time.

He liked the training and the cultivation during the start because Alex was there was to praise him. But now it just felt like a chore.

He no longer got the free time to simply stay around being a normal little cat, like he wished to do so these days.

He missed the days when he could just endlessly sleep in Alex's beast space. He didn't have to fight, cultivate, or learn to speak. He missed that.

He wished the grandmother cat would tell them all to leave him alone and let him do what he wanted to, but she didn't do that. She was rarely ever around these days.

She had told him she was his family. Then why was she not here for him? Did she lie to him?

Was he not her family as well?

Pearl felt lonely. And, in his loneliness, there was only one person he could go to meet.

Somebody who would never stop being his family. His mother.

By now, he had remembered the way to the open area of the cave where his mother stayed in. Or so they said, but she never really talked back.

Were they lying? Where was his mother even?

He had a vague memory of a smile on the face of a big cat that licked him while he was hurting all over the body.

That was, from what his memories told him when he met Alex the first time. He had no recollection of a time before that.

Was that cat his mother? He liked to believe so.

He reached the big stone stuck onto the ground that had something written on it. Writing, the jaguar sister had taught him a little about it.

But he couldn't read this language. This was not the writing he had been taught. Would she teach him this next? He didn't mind if it meant spending some time with her.

He did like her quite a lot.

Pearl crouched in front of the big stone and started meowing. He told his mother about how boring the training this morning was.

There wasn't anyone in the palace that could fight him now, so they had brought in stronger people. But they never fought seriously, and would always win against him.

He already didn't like fighting, and fighting someone that didn't fight seriously was very boring.

Pearl told her mother that he was bored and didn't want to go cultivate after this.

He waited for her to answer, but he could never hear her. The old Grandmother cat could hear his mother speak, then why couldn't he?

She probably spoke, but I just wasn't able to hear it, was what Pearl thought every time he listened to the silence.

He continued speaking with his mother, occasionally stopping for her to reply.

One of these times, she would speak, and he would hear her. He was sure about it.

So, he spoke to her again. He told her he felt lonely. He just wanted someone to be with him, call him by his name.

He just wanted to be with his family.

He waited for his mother to speak, but as always, she never di—

"Pearl!"

Someone suddenly called out his name. Pearl looked up with a surprised look on his face, trying to find his mother who had just called out his name. However, she wasn't there.

He then turned around and looked behind him to see a man standing there.

Did this man just call him? How did he know his name? He didn't think he had met the man before.

After all, when did he meet a man with short hair that was missing an arm? Never.

But, this feeling he was having. This was familiar.

"Pearl!" the man spoke with slight tears in his eyes.

Pearl decided to give in to the feeling and ask. "Meow!"

Alex smiled. "Yes, yes it's me," he said. "I came to save you."

"Meow!" Pearl got happy when he realized it was Alex but then cocked his head. Save me? He asked. Save me from what?

"Meow?" he asked.

"Save you from these beasts. They are trying to hurt you, so I came to take you away," he said.

"Tyek Mi?" Pearl tried to speak in human language, but he just couldn't speak it properly yet.

"Yes, I came to take you," Alex smiled with tears when he heard him speak.

"MEOW!" Pearl meowed harshly. Lies, he said. These beasts had never done anything to hurt him. They always treated him like he was the best. The only one who hurt him was in fact Alex himself, by leaving him.

"Meow!" Pearl told him. You left me, why did you leave me? He asked.

"I didn't leave you. They kicked me out of this place, and I couldn't find my way back," Alex said.

Pearl stopped talking and cocked his head again. "Riallee?" he asked.

"Yes, of course," Alex said. "Did they tell you that I left?"

"Yes," Pearl said, finally pronouncing something correctly.

"They lied. You are my family, I would never leave you," Alex said as he walked ahead and knelt next to Pearl before taking him in his arm in a one-handed hug.

"Meow?" Family? He asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl hugged him too as he let him know that he missed him.

Alex felt tears flowing down his eyes as he finally managed to reach Pearl. "Come, we need to leave now, or they will separate us again," he said.

"Meow," Pearl agreed. He wasn't sure why they were trying to kick out Alex, but whatever the reasoning was, Pearl wouldn't question it.

However... "Meow~" he asked. He wanted to know what would happen to this place after he left. As far as he remembered, this place needed him. Or so they told him.

"We don't need to worry about that for now. We don't have the time to," Alex said.

"Meow!" Pearl was ready to leave as well.

Alex stood up and turned around to leave, but suddenly, he felt a wave of spiritual sense go past him, most of which seemed to have been destroyed somehow.

In the next moment, a gust of air rose in front of Alex as three figures appeared.

There was the puma, the jaguar, and surprisingly a cheetah beast that Alex hadn't seen before.

However, given that it was giving off the aura of a Saint realm, he didn't dare underestimate him.

"Who are you?" they all got angry at once seeing Pearl in his hands. "Leave him at once!"

A wave of pressure came crashing onto Alex that only tried to crush him while keeping Pearl safe.

Alex however didn't fumble in this pressure. Instead, he simply stared back at them, with anger in his eyes.

Chapter 580 Confronting the Beasts

The Saint realm aura of the 3 beasts pressured over Alex to bring him down to the ground, but he stood still.

Their aura was unable to stop him from moving around as most people would be during such a situation.

The beast's aura was strong, but his body was perhaps stronger, simply based on their quality, so even though he couldn't do anything to fight against the beasts themselves, he could fight against their suppression.

He had been suppressed before about 2 weeks ago. The woman named Hao Ya had suppressed him, and even then he had been able to move around and even attack.

Compared to her who felt so very strong, these 3 beasts, they were just…

"Weak!" Alex said with a mocking smile on his face. These beasts weren't as strong as her.

"Who are you?" the jaguar asked. He had been ready to attack the intruder, but he didn't. With their next king on his hands, he needed to be absolutely sure about his attack before he sent it forth.

Given how the enemy wasn't being suppressed at all even though his cultivation base was only at True realms, they held a suspicion that the enemy was hiding his cultivation base.

Alex continued smiling with his lips, while his eyes showed no such emotion.

"Answer us, Who are you?!" the puma shouted at him.

"Eh? It hasn't even been a month and you've already forgotten me, huh?" Alex asked.

The two beasts turned to look at the puma, wondering if he knew anything about the human.

"Don't look at me. I've never met this human," the puma said while trying to remember if he was forgetting anything.

Less than a month ago… the only human he had seen in this time period was…

Alex's sleeves folded onto his arm, revealing the stub of his left elbow. However, that wasn't what he was showing.

The sleeves folded a little higher, revealing the cat paw on his upper arm. "Pearl, go inside."

"Meow!" Pearl said, immediately changing into a bunch of light, disappearing into his beast space.

"You!" the puma finally recognized.

"Young human, it's you?" the jaguar asked in surprise. He couldn't fathom that the little human that had been thrown out by the puma in a fit of rage was back.

"Yes, it's me," Alex said. "What? You didn't think I'll come back for my brother?"

"No, no, we wanted you to come back, young human. Brother puma sent you out wrongfully," the Jaguar said with a tone full of remorse.

The leopard just listened to the conversation as it seemed the two others knew the human in front of him.

He had been cultivating in his room until a few moments ago. It had been a couple of years for him since he started cultivating, and maybe a few dozen or maybe even a hundred years on the outside.

He normally wouldn't wake up as that wasn't his job, but recently, he heard too many noises of someone entering the realm, so he had gotten up to check.

Now that he looked at what was happening, he realized he had likely missed a lot of crucial things that he would have to ask about later.

"You wanted me to come back?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the jaguar said. "You're like a brother to the child, and have the White Tiger's blood in you. Of course, we wanted you to come back after the puma's impulsive decision."

The leopard looked to his right in shock. A human with their lord's blood? He really had to ask them next.

"Ho? You wanted me to return? Then did you go out looking for me? You should have known that I could not enter on my own right? You could've easily flown to my city to get me," Alex said as rage built up in his eyes.

"If you did, maybe my master would've still been alive. Did you come?" Alex asked.

"I—" the jaguar didn't know what to say. It was true that they thought that the puma was in the wrong after learning of the situation, but none of them cared enough about the human to fix the wronging.

They had basically decided to forget about it.

The puma started getting angry, as the blame was going to fall on him once again. So, decided to speak.

"Y—"

"Cease this at once, young human," a voice came from deep within the palace.

The 3 of the beasts immediately stopped speaking a bowed a little. "Lady Ren," they said.

Alex got a little apprehensive as well. After all, Lady Ren was one of the few beings whose upper limit he didn't know yet. He had thought of her to be at the peak of Saint realm when he had first arrived here, however, since then his world had been widened quite a bit.

By now, he was starting to believe that she might not actually be in the saint realm, but a realm further above it. He didn't voice it however as he didn't have any concrete evidence towards it.

"Are you going to stop me from saving Pearl, lady Ren?" Alex asked.

"Saving? He is in no danger here, young human. We are his friends and family, we would do nothing to hurt him," lady Ren said. She wasn't present at the moment, but her voice still carried the majesty that came with having a high cultivation base.
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"Oh, then what about the ritual?" Alex asked.

"The ritual is something necessary to bring forth all the latent talent hidden inside the child's bloodline," Lady Ren said.

"What about the fact that the ritual has killed everyone in it? It has killed all of the candidates up until now?" Alex asked.

"That is unfortunate, but that won't happen with Pearl. He has some of the purest bloodlines of the White Tiger. He will surely survive the ritual," Lady Ren said. "I'm his great-grandmother, don't you think that I am worried too? Trust me, he will survive."

"Are you absolutely sure about that? Or is that just your hopes and expectations?" Alex questioned. "Are you absolutely sure that there is no chance Pearl will suffer any fatal damage in there? That just like the other candidates, he too won't die in there? Can you make me a genuine promise of that?"

Alex asked the questions, but he got nothing but silence in response.

That was the answer he was expecting to hear.

"You call yourself family, but you won't even come out face to face to get your great-grandson back," Alex said.

"I- I am not in a situation where I can come out as I wish to," Lady Ren said.

"I don't need to listen to nonsense anymore. I am leaving now," Alex said.

"No you aren't," the three beasts said at once. While Lady Ren was speaking, they respectfully waited for her to finish speaking.

Now that it looked like she did, and that Alex was about to leave, they finally sprung onto action.

The three beasts were very strong for Alex. A single hit and he would likely die. After all, what was a mere True disciple realm cultivator against Saint beasts?

Just because he could stand against their cultivation aura, didn't mean that he was immediately strong.

So, even as the beasts started to move, Alex started moving before them. He was sure that once he announced to leave, they would come attacking him, so he prepared for it.

Multiple Heaven's impacts flew off from his head towards the saint beasts. Each one of them was hit at least 3 times before Alex stopped.

The three beasts felt a headache coming as soon as they were hit with the mental energy that seemed to give them the sensation that they were burning on the inside.

The disorientation lasted for a couple of seconds, but that was all Alex needed. When they refocused their eyes, they could see the end phase of the ground closing under where Alex previously stood.

'What the hell just happened? What was that burning mental attack?' they all wondered.

They looked around trying to figure out where he had gone to, so they sent out their spiritual sense.

Before they could even locate Alex, a voice floated into their head.

"Go! Quickly!" it was an urgent-sounding voice belonging to Lady Ren.

"What's wrong, lady Ren?" the Jaguar asked. He had never heard a more worried voice of her.

"That human, he's found the treasury," she said. Immediately everyone realized what had happened as worry started forming in their hearts as well.

They weren't worried that the human found the treasury and would somehow steal the treasures inside.

No, they were worried that the human had found the treasury and would now die trying to steal the treasure inside.

They weren't worried for Alex, but rather Pearl that was inside his beast space. If Alex were to die, as a bonded beast, Pearl would die with him as well if he was inside him.

They needed to save him fast.

* * * * *

Alex had used the Earth Devouring technique to escape the place. The technique sent you very far away, depending on the density of the user's Qi.

With Alex's Qi being so dense now, he should have been sent at least a dozen kilometers away, but somehow he was still inside the palace.

Not only that, he was in a dead-end section of the palace with a door blocking his way.

Alex saw a bunch of formations on the door and realized that it was likely a seal.

'What is this place?' he wondered.

Chapter 581 The Sword

Alex felt a wave of spiritual sense coming from the other side of the corridor that ended at the room with the door, which was the dead end.

'Dammit! How did I stop such little way?' he wondered. 'Is there a seal in this place that won't let me leave using my techniques?'

If that were to be the case, he needed to think of something quick. Concealing himself wasn't going to help him against the spiritual senses, so he needed to do something else.

He sent out his own spiritual sense around him while thinking of what he could do.

Just then, he realized that his spiritual sense wasn't working beyond the door behind him.

'I can hide there,' he thought. He needed to find a way to get inside. From what he remembered of seals from all of these memories, he needed some sort of key to open it.

The key was usually physical, but would sometimes be Qi-related as well. After all, a seal was simply an incomplete locking formation that would be complete after placing the key in.

Alex looked at the seal and realized that it had no place for something physical to attach to. Meaning, the answer to the seal was in the seal itself.

Basically, instead of the door having a padlock with a physical key, it was a lock that would open by a combination on the lock itself.

Alex wasn't that good at formations that he could fix it. He needed other ways.

He thought of teleporting to the other side of the seal, but the seal somehow stopped that too.

"Dammit!" he thought. The beasts were probably going to be close any second now.

Alex started panicking and then started punching, kicking, and using attacks on the door.

None of them did anything to the seal at all, but when he used the Palm attack on in, something happened.

The formations on the seals started moving on their own and reached a correct position. Then, the door opened.

Alex was elated. He quickly ran inside and locked the door, before the seal remade itself.

Alex breathed heavily as that was close. He was confused as to how the seal opened by itself as he didn't really do anything.

The confusion only grew on him as he realized this was the second time such a thing had happened now.

First, he somehow entered the palace using the teleportation formation even though that couldn't have been possible without permission.

And this time, he had opened the seal, even though he did nothing.

'What's the connection between these two things?' Alex thought. Since he had never experienced something like this happening before coming to this place, he wondered if it was something exclusive to this place.

'Is it the White Tiger's blood essence within me?' Alex wondered. That felt like astute guesswork on his part.

"Yeah, that's likely it," Alex thought.

BANG! BANG!

He suddenly heard the sounds of something banging coming through the other side of the door. Either, the beasts had just arrived outside or they had already arrived and were now trying to open it.

Reflexively, he sent out his spiritual sense to see what was happening on the outside. Surprisingly, he could see beyond the seal and it wouldn't stop him like it did the other way around.

He saw the beasts hastily trying to solve the puzzle that was the seal and get in.

Alex felt scared. He had trapped himself in this room with the only way out surrounded by the beasts.

"Is there an—" suddenly he realized that his spiritual sense was looking at things that he hadn't noticed before.

He turned around, facing the room.

The room was mostly empty, with all but 2 things inside it. Alex looked at the first thing in there.

A slender long blade of ebony color with a big hilt laid in the middle of a room. The blade had an imprint on it that depicted a dragon wrapping a sword.

'The Saint rank sword,' Alex thought. This was the Ebony Corundum Stilleto. A sword that held the crest of the Azure Imperium, the sword that killed Pearl's mother.

This was the Saint rank sword that the beasts took away from him by telling that it was too dangerous to be in his possession. And Alex still trusted that they were right, however, he didn't care enough to leave it here with them.

He would take the sword and find the person who owned it before helping Pearl get back his revenge. He would kill that man.

That was what he had thought when he saw the sword. As the dark thoughts moved around in his head, something else sensed the darkness.

Something else took notice of Alex.

"You want to kill someone?" It asked, startling Alex as he had believed himself to be the only person in the room.

"Who's there?" he asked, spreading his spiritual sense to the fullest, yet he still failed to notice anyone.

"If it's killing you want, I can help you," the voice spoke again. This time, Alex saw where the voice had come from.

However, that shouldn't have been possible.

Alex walked forwards and reached the Ebony sword… and went past it.
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Behind the sword was another sword. It was stuck on a large piece of stone that was completely black.

From what it looked like, someone had dug around the sword and brought it here.

As Alex got near, he heard the voice more clearly.

"Good, good, come to me," it said. Alex was surprised. That sword was definitely talking to him. Was it directly talking into his mind? That's what it felt like, but he could hear it on the outside as well.

Alex saw the door being nearly opened by the saint beasts. They were very close to solving the puzzle that was the seal.

"Take me, and I can help you defeat them all. I can help you become the strongest."

As he got closer, Alex finally saw the sword. It was a thin sword with a black-colored blade that only had a single edge, instead of the normal two edges that were found everywhere.

The crossguard and the hilt of the sword were completely black as well. There was even a black miasma falling onto the ground.

Something about the sword was very attractive to him. He felt there was some truth in the sword. All he had to do was take the sword and he would become strong.

The temptation was getting to him. Alex slowly reached out his hand towards the sword.

Suddenly, the door opened and the beasts entered the room.

"TAKE ME!" the sword cried out.

"Boy, do—"

Before the beasts could even speak, Alex grabbed the sword and in one quick motion, pulled it out of the stone.

He turned towards the beasts, with the sword in front of him and that was when he noticed it.

The sword no longer looked black at all. It was a silver-colored blade with some signs of damage to the side.

He then noticed the crossguard losing color as well. The black crossguard changed to a bronze-like color.

Soon, the hilt lost the black color as well, revealing the clear white color of the hilt.

All of the blacks that had left the sword was now crawling up Alex's arm.

"Drop it now, human, or you will die!" the beasts shouted. Alex's pupils dilated in fear and tried to let go of the sword. However, he couldn't move his hand at all.

He couldn't even feel it.

As the black miasma moved up Alex's hand, it left behind blackened veins in its wake. Alex could feel himself losing more and more of the control.

He really had screwed up badly.

Alex tried to use his legs to try and get his hand to drop the sword, and he succeeded.

After a couple of hits with his legs, his grip loosened enough for the sword to slip out. However, that made no difference.

The black miasma was already on him now. Soon it reached his neck and started spreading across his whole body.

Alex could only stand there and watch in horror as darkness enveloped him completely.

The beasts watched in horror as well.

Alex then reached downwards to the ground and picked up the sword he had just dropped and looked towards the beasts.

His eyes were now fully blackened, with black veins all over his body, and there was a maniacal smile on his face.

"Hehehe! Go tell them," A voice merged with Alex's voice came out of his mouth.

"GodSlayer has returned."

Chapter 582 Black Slash

Black smoke curled around Alex as it floated down to the ground. His black eyes and skin made him look like he wasn't a human anymore.

Alex's face smiled from ear to ear with an eerie grin, but that wasn't Alex anymore.

It was something else. It called itself 'Godslayer'. The beasts didn't know what that was, only that it was something that had originally been trapped into the metal sword and had been specially kept in this place.

Standing in front of that thing, the beasts felt true fear for their lives for a long time. They were truly scared

The aura the person in front of them was giving off wasn't human anymore either. Alex's aura was nowhere to be felt, only the inhuman aura could be.

And that rang all the bells in the Beasts' head.

Immediately, they turned around and ran away. They knew there was no way they could fight it at all, so instead, they chose to run away.

Not only that, fighting in such a location was not a very good idea either. Not just for themselves, but for Lady Ren's sake as well.

"Hey! Hey! Where do you think you all are going?" It, the Godslayer, asked as it watched the beasts run away.

In the next moment, it launched forward with the sword in hand. It moved at such an incredible speed that it put the saint beasts to shame.

In a split second, it arrived behind the beasts and struck at the puma directly on its back.

The puma went crashing onto the side of the ground along the corridor. He had a giant cut along the side of his back, but he couldn't care about it for now.

"This kid wanted to kill you, so you are going to die now," It spoke.

The Jaguar sent out an attack towards It, which It easily blocked. At the same time, the Leopard helped the puma escape the place.

It stayed where it was, instead of following the beasts, to check upon its new body.

"Tsk, this kid is only at True realms. I will need to find a suitable body soon," It thought.

It was starting to enter Alex's spiritual sea as well as a glob of black goo.

As soon as it entered, the black goo started spreading black mists, slowly corrupting the spiritual sea as well.

It could see Alex, half-conscious, standing on top of the sea with a black look on his face.

"I'm surprised this kid even managed to get a spiritual sea in such a backwater place. Not bad kid, unfortunately, you will die soon," It said.

It was pushing Alex's body beyond his natural limit to bring out so much damage. Soon, it would wreck Alex's body from the inside and force him to die without a doubt.

At that moment, It would have to find a new body.

It was about to go kill the puma again when it noticed something to its right. It turned around and saw the massive mountain floating atop Alex's spiritual sea.

"Hey, hey! What the hell is this?" It got curious and looked at the gigantic mountain.

When it noticed the silver color of the mountain, it suddenly got apprehensive.

"What the hell? No way, this can't be true right?" It thought. It knew of such silver rocks that people could use, but it had never heard of one the size of the mountain.

The largest it had heard of was perhaps the size of a boulder and that alone was quite impressive because of what the silver rock did.

"This kid has such a great potential to make it as someone big. Unfortunately, like most talented youths, he too will die before maturing," the black glob said.

The glob spoke of it as something remorseful, but it wasn't remorseful at all. Instead, it started giggling to itself.

"Hehehe, killing such a talented youth, I can't wait to drain him of his life," It thought. "Hahaha! This kid shall be my stepping stone as I make my return and slay all the gods."

"The first one in my renewed path of killing shall be the beasts!"

Even while the black glob remained in the spiritual sea, it could use Alex's body outside.

It moved through the hallway, looking for the beasts. The black goo couldn't use spiritual sense, so it had to go around looking for the beasts on its own.

It, however, could feel the aura left behind by the beasts and followed it.

Soon, it came outside and in another step appeared behind the beasts that were fleeing from the scene. They were already above the trees, taking the thing away from the palace with them.

"You shall die now," It said as it slashed its blade.

A black slash came out of the sword that held the power to destroyed anything along the way.

The beasts dodged at the last second, and the slash flew in between them before hitting a tree.

The moment the black slash hit the tree, the tree seemed to lose all moisture at once as it crumbled to dust.

The 3 beasts felt scared. Just what the hell was sealed in that sword?

"Hehehe!" It continued grinning as if it was seeing the funniest thing in the world.

It raised the sword towards the sky, getting ready to attack once more. It raised Alex's left arm, as well as a black hand made up of nothing but goo and smoke, appeared from it, holding onto the sword.

"Hehehe. DIE!" Its black eyes opened wide with glee on its face as it used a very strong attack towards the puma.

This attack was similar to the black slash from before, but this time it was incredibly large and incredibly fast.

The puma knew that if the attack hit him, he would die. And yet, there was not a single thing in the world he could do to protect himself.

Suddenly, a brilliant white light exploded in front of the puma that swallowed the black slash. When the light disappeared, the black slash was nowhere to be seen either.

The puma looked in front of him, with its stupidly scared face, and saw someone standing in front of him.

"Lady Ren!" the three of them said at the same time.

The white cat had finally decided to show herself. "Are you 3 alright?" she asked.

"Yes, lady Ren," they said, finally a little relieved to see her come out. However, when they realized what would happen, they got scared.

"Lady Ren, you…" the Jaguar asked.

"Now's not the time to dwell on it. You guys need me and that child needs me," she said. The beasts said nothing further.

Lady Ren turned towards the thing that was now Alex. "Get out of that child now," she said in a low voice. Her face turned to that of an angry cat with her canines showing towards It.

"Ooh, I'm so scared. How will fight against such a strong cat?" It started mocking Lady Ren.

Lady Ren didn't let the mocking register to herself and instead started thinking of how she could save Alex. If she didn't save Alex, she could forget about saving her great-grandchild.

There was also the fact that Alex could absorb the bloodline of the White Tiger without dying. There was definitely something unique to him, and she didn't want someone so unique to die because of this.

"Let go of him or I will kill you," she said.

"Hah! Kill me? Even the old bastard up there couldn't kill me. What can a little cat-like you from a backwater place do to me?" It asked, perfectly certain that it could win.

"Very well, I will have to incapacitate you then," Lady Ren said. Suddenly, her body glowed white and it started condensing down to her limbs and finally her claws.

The one that called itself 'Godslayer' on the other hand simple put the sword at an angle as it got ready to fight as well.

The sword glowed black and it initiated the attack. It slashed at Lady Ren, who dodged it easily and attacked it with her claw.

The Godslayer took the hit but remained standing with an eerie smile on its face. This was not its body, the damage wouldn't stop it.

Lady Ren got a little apprehensive as well. She realized that fighting it normally wasn't the way at all. She needed to stall for time so that she could think of a way to remove this thing from Alex's body.

However, she couldn't take very long either as Alex's body would be overexerted very soon, killing him.

This task felt impossible for her.

* * * * *

Alex jolted awake as the pain in his body flared. He could feel the attack he received on the outside.

He wasn't sure where he was or what he was doing. He only knew that time had passed.

He remembered grabbing the sword, and… something crawling up the sword. What happened after that? He couldn't remember.

He then looked around and realized that he was in the spiritual sea. Just like he always was when the other Alex was with him.

'Has he returned?' Alex got a depressing feeling when he thought that. He looked up to see if he was there, but no, there was something else.
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'That blackness,' he thought as he looked at the black goop that was sending out billows of black smoke all over his spiritual sea.

Alex felt anger like never before. "I finally got my body back, and you think you can take it from me?" he shouted at the goop which hadn't noticed him yet.

"My body is not something you can take as you wish. You will suffer my wrath for it."

Chapter 583 Taking Back his Body

Determination flared in Alex's eyes. He had had enough of others using his body, leaving him to be destitute.

The black fog that was taking over his spiritual sea only served to get him angrier.

Now that he had got somewhat of his mind back, Alex decided to take back his body from whatever that black goop was.

So, he jumped off of the surface of the spiritual sea and flew up to the sky.

* * * * *

Lady Ren blocked the black slash. While Godslayer's black slashes could easily destroy most things, the white glow her paws shined in was somehow able to stop them.

This got Godslayer really confused. It wasn't that he had never met anyone that could block this attack. In fact, it was the opposite.

Every single one it had fought could at some level block the black slashes. That was even true when It had its actual body to fight in.

So, being blocked wasn't anything new. Rather, the thing that was surprising and confusing was the fact that there was someone out here in the middle of nowhere that could stop it.

"You have gained my respect little missy. I don't know what you are using with that white glow, but the fact that you can block my attacks means that you are quite strong."

"How about you let me take over your body? I can bring you to places you have never been to before. I can show you the strength you can't even begin to imagine," the Godslayer said.

"Hmph!" Lady Ren sneered towards it. "I am the wife of a White Tiger. What can you do that my husband already couldn't?"

Godslayer stopped. "White Tiger?" he looked suspiciously.

It looked around and finally noticed that they were all feline beasts. It spent some precious moments thinking about what he had just learned before coming to a conclusion.

"So this is one of the lands the four beasts sent their folks to, huh?" it asked. "I had heard about them doing these things.

White Tiger. They were fearsome creatures that everyone learned to keep away from because of how strong they were.

They were one of the 4 beasts that were blessed by the first of the 2 gods.

Blessed by the God, they were like gods themselves.

Godslayer smirked. It was born to kill them.

"I will really enjoy killing you all now."

* * * * *

Alex flew right beneath the black fog. He could feel a deep sense of fear, but his anger and determination overpowered it.

He stretched his hands into the fog, both of them. Being in his spiritual world, he had both of his arms with him at the moment.

Just because he lost his arms outside didn't mean that he now saw himself as an armless man.

He felt a sharp mental pain when he touched the black fog like it was trying to consume him. However, he wasn't going to let that happen.

"AAAHHH!!" he shouted as brilliant yellow light exploded all around him. Vast amounts of yellow fog appeared around him bringing splendid illumination to the darkened environment.

The yellow fog started getting denser around Alex as it fought the black fog directly.

Soon, Alex was so covered in the yellow fog that he too started looking like he was made up of fog itself.

No, he was the fog itself. Alex lost his physical form and fully transformed into the yellow fog to fight the black fog.

As soon as the black fog came into contact with the yellow fog, it immediately was destroyed.

Alex got more confident. It would only take him a few minutes to clear it all.

The black goop noticed it and was not very happy about it. However, it could not go defend itself at the moment, as there was another fight it was fighting on the outside.

* * * *

Godslayer frowned. For the first time since it had escaped from the sword, it lost its smile.

'How the hell is this kid destroying me? What is that yellow fog? And how is it so strong?' it thought. It was definitely going to lose to Alex if it did not do something quickly.

A layer of black miasma floated in front of it, creating a sort of barrier in front of Alex.

A paw strike landed on the black barrier, destroying it. However, Godslayer that was behind it was perfectly fine.

Lady Ren frowned. The attacks she was sending out were enough to turn the area around them into dust. However, the thing that had taken over Alex was easily stopping the attacks.

It went on to show just how powerful the black entity was, but also, it went onto show just how strong Alex was.

The Godslayer couldn't become this strong if it wasn't drawing the potential from within Alex to fuel its power.

If not for that, the Godslayer would never be strong enough to fight her in her current condition.

She thought of going the extra step to deal with it once and for all, but every time she thought so, a deep fear sprung up in her heart, stopping her.

Godslayer started going on the offensive. It sent out multiple slashes at once towards Lady Ren. It was drawing incredible power from deep within Alex, leaving him a little weak at the moment.

All of the 4 beasts on the outside could see how thin Alex's body had already gotten.

Any more and Alex likely wouldn't be able to survive even if the thing left his body.

Godslayer was incredibly angry at the moment. Alex had already destroyed half of the black fog it had been using to slowly take over his mind.

By now, half of the blackness in his eyes was gone, revealing the white part of the eyes.

It didn't know how the boy's spiritual sea was so strong, but it needed to send out some sort of retaliation right now.

For that, it needed to get rid of the beast in front of him first. 'This will put me in a severe situation, but… I have no choice,' it thought before raising the sword towards the sky.

A vortex appeared on the sword as all the air in the surroundings moved towards it. All of the beasts could see wisps of blacklight moving into the sword as well.

Lady Ren's eyes went wide as she saw the aura piling up. This was bad. The attack was starting to go beyond the realm of what was possible in this world.

This was incredibly bad.

Godslayer cared none for what he was doing and simply slashed down towards the white cat. At the same time, it focused on its find in the spiritual sea.

The 3 saint beasts got terrified. This was an attack beyond their level as well.

Lady Ren saw the massive black slash that destroyed air itself as it flew towards her. If she let that attack hit her, she would surely die.

If she dodged it, it would surely destroy half of their realm, and kill almost everything it touched.

Neither of the choices was something she was willing to make. So, she decided to block the sword slash.

A fantastic aura exploded from deep within her. As the aura released, her cultivation base reached sky high and even seemed to go beyond that.

She released her Immortal Realm cultivation base.

The 3 saint beasts couldn't help but bow before her in reverence.

Lady Ren used her newly brought forth power and roared into the black slash.

A powerful sound erupted that could be heard from all over the secret realm, and even a little further beyond. Her sound turned into an attack that traveled to the black slash completely destroying it.

The task had been as easy as beating a True realm cultivator as a Saint realm cultivator.

However, the thing that frightened her the most had yet to come.

She looked up to the sky with terror in her eyes as dark clouds quickly filled the sky.

It was coming.

Heavenly Judgement.

* * * * *

The more black fog Alex destroyed, the easier it got to destroy the rest of the fog. By the time Godslayer had turned his focus back onto the spiritual sea, his influence on the mind was nearly gone.

"You damn, human," it shouted.

Alex turned towards it. The yellow fogs condensed to become Alex once again.

"You are ruining everything," Godslayer shouted and jumped towards Alex. As soon as it reached Alex, it covered his whole mental avatar and tried to destroy it.

However, Alex didn't worry about it. He had already realized how strong his mental strength was.

With a simple thought, yellow fog exploded from him, destroying the black goop he was touching.

The black goop started to get destroyed under the yellow fog and soon it dwindled to almost nothingness.

When all the fog and goop disappeared, all that was remained was a crystal ball the size of his fists. He tried to use the yellow fog to destroy it as well, but he realized he couldn't.

The crystal was something he couldn't destroy at all. He could feel the thing still alive inside of it, however, he didn't need to worry as it no longer held any strength at all.

Alex finally sighed in relief as he got his body back. He then left his spiritual sea and immediately felt the pain all over his body.

The thing had wrecked his body more than he had thought. He could barely even feel his Qi.

At the same time, something else took his attention. He looked in front of him to see the beasts looking at the sky.

Alex looked up as well and his jaw dropped.

A massive vortex of energy was gathering in the sky. One that was stronger than anything he had ever seen.

Chapter 584 Clone?

Ren Xiao looked up to the sky with a grim look on her face. 'I screwed up,' she thought.

She had been fighting with suppressed strength against the thing that took over Alex exactly because she was afraid this would happen.

She looked up at the sky, her aura barely something that could be sensed. She figured she may have a bit of time to prepare herself.

However, how was she to prepare herself? Revealing the tiniest bit of her true aura would cause the judgement to come down sooner, and surely destroy her.

He looked at the swirling clouds of different color that seemed to gather together to get darker and darker.

'If I had known this would happen, I would've just used my real cultivation base to deal with the thing,' she thought.

She regretted that she didn't get rid of the thing and now, her descendant would have to die, alongside the—

She stopped. She saw Alex, floating in the air in front of her. He was completely shrunken in body mass as if he hadn't eaten anything in months.

The thin bones gave his body a skeletal outline, making him look ghostly. His eyes were shrunken, his body a shade of red that looked closer to purple.

She could only begin to imagine what sort of pain he must've been suffering. Not that different from what she would feel if she was fortunate enough to survive the next few minutes.

She then carefully looked at his body, his sword, his eyes. Not a single shred of blackness from before was there anymore.

'How is that possible? I didn't do anything to it,' she thought.

"Are you... yourself?" she asked softly.

"Yes, I am me," Alex said as he too had looked down from the sky. He looked at the sword in his hand. Now that the black surface was gone, it looked like a pretty decent sword.

Actually, this was very much likely a great sword, given what it had been housing.

Lady Ren gasped when she heard Alex's voice. It was no longer merged with the other voice, making it sound normal.

"Where is it?" she asked, which Alex easily understood to be referring to the black goop in his spiritual sea.

"I destroyed most of it," he said. "It still remains, but it no longer has the power to fight against me."

'Dear god of the beasts! How in the world did this child defeat it?' she wondered. She herself hadn't been able to think of any way to defeat it as she didn't know what it was.

She had found it over a thousand years ago, stuck to the earth. It had come down in a meteor shower, or so her people told her when she went to check what had caused a crater to the east of them.

When she reached the sword, she realized that she was being tempted by the sword. When she touched the sword, the black thing in it had attacked her, and was siphoning off her life to fuel itself.

Ren Xiao had panicked, but the sword had been weak at the time and her mental strength was not its match. She had gotten rid of it before it could fully take over her, and she had realized how dangerous of a sword it was.

So, she had taken it away, along with the land it was stuck on, not daring to touch the sword itself again.

She had locked it away in the empty treasury room, for almost a millenia now. When Alex went to it, she was sure the sword would tempt him, and as she had expected, it did.

She regretted not leaving her room at the time to stop him. She believed shedding off her natural aura to be a more important task for her so as to not incur the heaven's wrath by being outside.

Alex had been taken over, and got most of his life siphoned off of him by the thing, but somehow, he made it back.

'What does that mean?' she wondered. Did it mean he had an impressive mental strength to fight off the temptation? But then where was the thing?

Alex had said he was destroyed most of it. Not got rid of. Destroyed.

He had? But how? It was certainly not his cultivation base. Then perhaps... his body?

Ren Xaio narrowed her eyes. Alex's body surely held a lot of mysteries that she couldn't even begin to understand. Not only was he strong and seemed to have almost infinite potential, he could also absorb the blood essence of a White Tiger.

Just what was his body?

She looked at him with her narrowed eyes when she suddenly noticed something that she hadn't in shock of the black thing disappearing.

Something was different.

"You are whole?" she asked, almost surprised.

Alex looked at himself. He didn't understand what she meant. He was clearly still missing his left arm. Not to mention the horrible situation of his where everything was numb and painful at the same time.

How exactly could this even be considered whole?

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Your body... it used to always be a sliver away from fusing with your soul completely, but now, it seems you have done something to completely fuse it," she said.

Alex understood what she meant. She was referring to the time when she saw through the other soul being in his body.

This wom-beast had impressive senses.

"Yes," Alex said. "That was my original soul controlling this clone body. I have now gotten my body back."

Lady Ren squinted her eyes at him and looked through him again.

"Why are you lying?" she asked.

"What do you mean?" Alex said. Was his story not believable? Well, not like he could help it. After all, that was the truth.

"You are no clone," Lady Ren said.

"No... I am one," Alex said. "My real body is in the Central continent right now. He used to send his soul into my body to control it, while I remained suppressed in my own mind."

Lady Ren frowned this time. "That's not true. I may believe that there was another soul in your body. That explains why your body and soul weren't united. However, not for a single second do I believe this body is a clone."

"Creating clones is difficult enough. Creating one that can take in the blood essence of the White Tiger and live? Impossible."

"Not even the Divinities and the Celestials can do such a thing, let alone someone from this land with its limited resources. You can refine this entire world, and not be able to create a body such as yours," Lady Ren said.

Alex's eyes went wide. Many thoughts roamed in his head at once, making it hard for him to understand what he was thinking.

"Are you saying that..." he couldn't continue his thoughts. That couldn't possibly be true.

"Yes," Lady Ren said. "Your body is not a clone. Its a real body, one you were born with."

Alex was stunned beyond belief. He lost all sense of the pain and numbness for a brief moment.

"Is it really true?" he thought. "Am I... not the clone?"

Chapter 585 Heavenly Judgemeent

There were two ways one could make clones.

The first method was where you refined a dead body to become your clone using a piece of your soul.

One's soul couldn't become united with the dead body completely, since that wasn't your body, Alex knew he wasn't that.

Which was why he believed himself to be the second type of clone. One that was made using various resources, that had a soul grown in it, even without using the owner's soul.

This made controlling the new clone very hard, but not impossible.

However, Lady Ren was saying that it was impossible for him to be the second type of clone as well because of the resources that would require to make his body.

Then... was it really true? Was he really... not a clone?

If Lady Ren had exaggerated the requirement for a body such as his by hundreds of thousands of times, it would still fall short of the number of players that would have to be cloned in this world.

And most of them had great talent, constitutions, and spiritual roots.

"Then... am I not a clone?" Alex thought. If he wasn't a clone and was in fact the real Alex, that would mean that everything he got from the start was not luck, but rather something he was born with.

The body, the talent, the spirit roots, everything he thought he was handed without having to work for it, was something he was born with.

Had he really had such an amazing body even when he was on the farm?

He remembered his father's incredible physical body that could easily work on the farm even at his age. He remembered his mother's incredible intelligence and talent at everything she did from being an accountant for his father to cooking every food to perfection to teaching him everything when he was homeschooled.

His aunt, his father's sister, also had a body that remained youthful even when she was as old as his father.

Not to mention his cousin, who had a Celestial grade body to begin with, the only one to ever have it in the game.

'That wasn't all a coincidence, was it?' Alex started to realize and finally believe it. 'This is my real body.'

He looked down on himself with awe at the fact that he had been wrong for the past many months.

He wasn't the clone at all. The other guy was the clone.

'Since he is a clone, his body mustn't be very good, wo—'

Alex suddenly thought of something. His eyes went wide as the piece fell into place from a simple change of thought.

When a player died in the 'game', they would be able to log in once more, but this time they would get a different body from the one that died.

The players called it 'reincarnating' as it was a second chance at life. The players that reincarnated would always be stuck with something very much worse than the last one they had.

But what if that was not it? What if it was simply the real body dying, so the creator was forced to create a clone of them.

However, since he didn't have great resources, all of the reincarnated players would get a really bad body with garbage talents and constitution, sometimes even missing spiritual roots.

If the creator really did make the body Alex currently had, then there was no reason why he would not make a good body for the reincarnators.

Realization enlightened him like dawn's first light after a particularly dark night.

"It's true then," Alex finally came to the understanding, as a swell of emotions stirred within him, causing his drought eyes to moisten up a bit.

"I am not a clone, but the real Alex."

Suddenly, Alex heard a thunderclap. Was it just something he heard because of what he had come to understand? The truth certainly hit him like a thunderbolt.

However, this thunderclap felt a little more... real. Actually, it felt more than just real-it felt terrifying.

Alex slowly looked up, and as expected there really was a thunderstorm here, one that he had momentarily forgotten about.

However, he shouldn't have forgotten about this. This was perhaps one of the most terrifying things he had seen in all the time he had been a cultivator.

In fact, the knowledge he had just gained seemed so minuscule in front of the massive vortex of black cloud with the occasional lightning sparking within it.

The colorful clouds had come together and were just about to do something that scared Alex.

Lady Ren started to wonder at her chance of survival. She wondered how many bolts would fall down from heaven.

One she could survive. Two she could probably survive as well. Three would surely put her on the verge of death, so she couldn't tell whether she would die or not.

Four, she would surely die.

She prayed that it was no more than 2, or at the very least, no more than 3.

"Go take everyone away from here," she ordered the beasts. While she knew that it would only target her, she couldn't take the chances of the force destroying everything around her.

The beasts immediately ran away to save the common beasts around this place.

"It will come down at any moment now," Lady Ren said softly. She started preparing.

"Boy, please do not take Pearl away. This place needs a king, and there is no better choice than Pearl," Lady Ren said.

"And let him die?" Alex asked. "No, I won't do that."

"I understand that there is a chance of him dying. But the chances are low. Besides, if he doesn't go through the ritual, he will never have a chance to reach his full potential," Lady Ren said.

"No, thanks. I would rather have a weak Pearl with me, than a possibly dead one," Alex said.

Lady Ren was feeling irritated. She wanted to simply grab Alex and keep him there.

However, the thing above her head was stopping her from getting close to him.

It wasn't just that she was afraid the bolts would harm him if it came down while she was close, but it was also the fact that it would see him as an accomplice and become stronger when it came down.

At that time, she doubted she would survive even 2 of the bolts.

"Please, don't take Pea—"

Suddenly, a bolt of white lightning dropped from the sky, directly hitting Ren Xiao. The bolt itself was wider than that white cat was, and had a really destructive property to it.

No matter how much preparation she did, it still overwhelmed her.

Alex, who had been moderately far away, still felt the force of the lightning bolt. The immediate force stripped away some of his skin, while the remaining force sent him flying away at a speed that he could never move at with his current cultivation base.

It took him a while to even realize that he was in the air.

As he felt himself tumbling through the sky, he immediately employed his movement technique, making the friction around him more powerful, and quickly came to a stop.

When he finally stopped, he felt the blood drip from all over his body where his skin had been lacerated.

Alex immediately brought out a pill and ate it. He felt the wounds close up and he was no longer battered from the lightning bolt. However, the 'wounds' he had suffered from the black thing weren't healed at all.

His body still remained a stick-like figure with his skeletal figure seen through his body.

He breathed heavily ignoring the pain, as fear appeared in his heart. He had never felt fear like this before.

'What the hell was that?' he thought. He had expected the lightning to be strong, but not this strong.

It had nearly killed him even when he was a distance away. He didn't even begin to wonder if Lady Ren was alive or not. With such a force attacking her directly, she should have died.

"I should leave," he thought.

Suddenly, he saw another lightning bolt drop down far away in the distance, sending roaring sounds throughout the entire secret realm while at the same time sending out a gust of wind that pushed Alex quite a bit.

Alex finally realized just how far he had been thrown away. He was hundreds of kilometers away from the location of the original lightning bolt.

Even at this distance, he could tell how much force the lightning bolt had produced.

Not a single Saint realm expert had ever made him feel such helplessness against pure power. Even Lady Ren herself failed to make him fear as much.

'I can't stay here any longer,' he thought and immediately turned around to run away.

As he flew he realized that he wasn't able to fly very quickly. It wasn't just his body, but rather his cultivation base itself that had been harmed by that black thing.

He would have to cultivate for a while to heal himself.

As he flew, he heard another lightning bolt. For some reason, it felt... weaker. Maybe it was because he was very far away now, or maybe because there was no target anymore since Lady Ren was likely dead.

Alex continued flying. Very soon, he saw something white shine through the forest, while beyond it was a shimmering white wall of nothingness.

He had arrived at the border of the secret realm.

He landed on the formation platform and immediately got to open it. He was afraid the saint beasts would come for him, but with how destructive the lightning bolt was, they probably wouldn't.

He fought through the pain in and out of his body to produce the Yang Qi and concentrated through his fatigue to pour it onto the nodes of the formation.

Once it was done, the formation glowed with white light, and with that, Alex vanished from the secret realm.

Chapter 586 Damaged

When Alex reappeared outside of the formation, he stumbled a little thanks to the many aching parts all over his body.

'I need to get away from here,' he thought. He needed to leave this area before the saint beasts came looking for him.

He looked around, in the direction that was supposed to lead him back to the Cardinal City, however, that was when he realized the location was different.

"What?" he looked confused for a moment before realizing what had likely happened.

He didn't know what to think after coming to the conclusion that…

"I have come to the Luminance Empire, haven't I?" he thought. He wasn't sure where he was when he had found himself in the middle of the forest with Lady Ren in front of him.

The things that the black goop witnessed weren't in his memories, like how the real Alex's soul had left behind.

'No,' he thought. 'I am the Real Alex.'

He didn't know how to feel regarding that knowledge. Should he be happy that he was the real one? Or should he be angry that the real him had been suppressed for so many months?

He felt both emotions and he quickly tossed those emotions aside. Now was not the time to get emotional.
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He slowly stood up, the momentary rest making his pain flare higher than he had been feeling until now.

His muscles, if there were even any, felt sore and hard to walk with. His meridians refused to move his Qi.

Only his spiritual sense was fine.

He stepped away from the platform, not knowing where to go to. This deep into the forest, he was sure there would be many beasts here.

Most of them would likely be in the True Realm. Although, he was sure he would have a hard time fighting a Mind Tempering realm beasts too.

He took out a sword. The sword that had been lodged in the stone. Without the black goop, it looked like a normal sword, albeit it was likely anything less than normal.

He slightly regretted not taking the other sword when he had the chance, but mistakes happened.

Alex then slowly breathed in and out, trying to muster as much of his cultivation base as possible to conceal his aura and go invisible.

Once he was sure he couldn't be seen by anything around him unless they had Spiritual sense, he started walking.

He dragged his body through the forest, not sure where he was supposed to go to, hoping that he could find a city up ahead soon.

* * * * * *

Alex walked for 3 days, but he still couldn't leave the forest. 'Am I walking in the wrong direction?' he thought.

He remembered learning about the disorientation formations set up around the secret realm to stop outsiders from getting close to the source of the secret realm. However, that was only when he tried to get closer to it, not further away.

Then, there could only be one of 2 reasons, if not both. The forest was big… and he was slow.

Alex didn't know how large the southern end of the southern forest, which he now believed would be known as the northern forest, was. This was something he didn't even think of discussing with Fu Tao as the size of the forest didn't really make a difference for a cultivator.

However, now that he had the slow pace of a mortal, it was certainly important.

Alex's body ached a lot, and it was a pain that a pill couldn't take away. At least, it was a pain that his pills couldn't take away.

This was the pain of your entire body being sucked dry to fight against saint beasts and an Immortal beast.

Alex was even surprised he had such powers.

For the last 3 days, he had continuously been running since he was sure the beasts would come after him to take back Pearl. But it had been 3 days. Where were they?

Were they really not coming?

Alex soon felt that he couldn't care about them. He needed to cultivate, one way or other.

'Should I really bring out Pearl?' he thought. He hadn't brought out Pearl despite his condition due to the fact that Pearl couldn't conceal himself.

However, he didn't need concealment now that he was in an area where he rarely saw any True beasts.

Pearl was only at the last realm of Mind Tempering, but he was sure he would be sufficient to protect him.

So, he called out Pearl.

Pearl came out in white light and landed in front of him. "Meow!" it meowed towards Alex with a wide smile, but it immediately disappeared when he saw Alex's current situation.

"MEOW!" it shouted with a worried look.

"I'm… I'm alright for now," he said. "I just need to cultivate, and I will be fine."

"Meow?" Pearl asked.

"Yes, I'm telling the truth," Alex said.

Pearl finally stopped worrying a little. He then looked around and started wondering where he was.

"Meow?" he asked.

"Yes, I came out 3 days ago," Alex said. "Do you… miss them?" He asked.

"Meow," Pearl said in a somber tone. He missed them a bit, but he missed his mother the most.

"Don't worry. We will come back here someday and you can meet your mother," Alex said.

Pearl nodded.

Alex then looked around for a tree that fit what he had in his mind. A tall tree, with dense leaves that had a large enough crown where he could hide while cultivating.

In such a dense forest, it didn't take him even a second to see multiple of such trees.

"Help me get up there," Alex said and walked towards the tree. With the help of what little cultivation base he could produce at the moment and Pearl, he climbed up the tree to the crown and sat cross-legged there.

"I will start cultivating now, so stand around to guard me okay?" Alex said.

"Meow," Pearl accepted.

"Also, don't cultivate if you get bored. I… I don't know how weak my body is at the moment, so I should better not take risks.

"Meow!" Pearl agreed to that as well.

Once Alex was assured he would be fine, he closed his eyes and sent out his spiritual sense to check up on the damage.

His skin, muscle, tendons, veins, blood. Almost everything aside from bone had been dried to the worst condition they could be in.

Alex could barely differentiate where his skin ended and where his muscles increased. His tendons were very weak, and there was barely any pulse on his weak-looking veins.

Not only that, but Alex also noticed a significant loss in blood as well.

He then checks on his meridians. As expected… they were in a bad condition too. They had shrunken up to a third of their original size.

'No wonder I was having such a hard time using Qi,' he thought. He needed to heal them.

He slowly started moving his Qi around according to the Five Yang Divine Path method, which he struggled a lot to do so.

After a revolution or two, Alex finally got into the hang of cultivating and soon lost himself in it.

Chapter 587 Godslayer

Time passed, but Alex couldn't tell how much. His perception of time had been muddled as he fully focused on bringing himself back to his proper condition.

Slowly cultivating, he had come to understand just how bad the possession had left him with.

Torn muscles, splintered tendons, and even fractured bones seemed to have been a side effect of the possession. Fortunately, he had solved most of the immediate problems with his pills.

However, the latent problem of his body being drained out of itself wasn't something he could fix immediately.

As he cultivated, his meridians slowly started healing. From being a third of the original size, they opened to be half the original size.

If he continued, he would surely bring them back to their proper size in no time.

'I will have to cultivate for a long while now,' he thought.

Once he was well enough that he didn't have to focus on cultivating itself, he decided to go and check the other problem he might have missed in his spiritual sea.

With a thought, he appeared inside his spiritual sea, floating atop the sea, looking at the massive mountain that floated in front of him.

The minute threads of silver light floated all around him, giving him a bit of a shock.

"So many," he thought. "This much amount… has it already been 2 days since I started cultivating? Maybe more?"

Hundreds of such threads floated aimlessly around the giant silver mountain which didn't seem to have lost any of itself at all.

'Just how many threads can this thing even produce?' Alex thought. He was used to absorbing anything in this place to gain more mental strength, but somehow this was the only thing he couldn't absorb at all.

He had to wait for the wisps of light to float away from the mountain before he could absorb it.

"Well, that's not the only thing I can't absorb now," Alex thought and made his way towards the floating piece of spherical crystal that was not far away from the mountain.

Alex went up to it and grabbed it.

He felt something viscous black goop coming out of it, coloring it black again.

He willed a little bit of yellow fog to appear on his hands and burned it away.

Finally, the crystal was clear once again.

Alex hadn't had the time to look at it previously, so he brought it up to his eyes and looked at it.

The crystal was mostly colorless aside from the slight bluish hue to its body. At around the size of his fist, maybe a little larger, the crystal ball looked completely normal.

However, Alex knew it was anything but.

He could feel life inside of it, which was something he hadn't sensed since Zexi had tried to look at the… clone's memories.

'I'm still having trouble coming to terms with it,' he thought. For nearly 7 months now, he had slowly come to terms with the knowledge that he was a clone.

And yet, suddenly learning that he wasn't one and was actually the real Alex was… certainly confusing.

Just then, he noticed something inside the crystal that he hadn't seen earlier.

At the center of the crystal was a small black… flame?

Alex couldn't tell what it was at all. Sometimes it looked like a flame, but then it would change to liquid. Not long after it would turn solid and then suddenly vanish, making it seem like there was nothing in there to begin with.

That… was very weird.

"I can make you strong, boy," a voice came from deep within the crystal ball.

Alex was a little surprised to hear it. He didn't think it was still conscious enough to talk.

"So you are alive," Alex said, after realizing he was correct.

"I can make you strong. Stronger than anything you can think of," the crystal ball said again.

"Don't bother. Your temptation only worked because I was in a desperate situation. Now that I am free, it won't work on me."

"Still, thank you for saving me from that situation," Alex said.

The Crystal ball didn't speak for a while. Alex waited for a while and it finally said, "you really are unique. Your… soul is quite strong. Who are you?"

"Just a normal person on the path of cultivation," Alex said.

"Hah! You are anything but normal," the crystal said.

"Who are you, then?" Alex asked.

"I am GODSLAYER!" the crystal spoke with a really loud sound.

Alex frowned a little. That name was… he didn't like it for some reason. Probably because his constitution contained the word 'God'.

He then asked, "What are you?"

"Hmph! Filthy backwater mortals. They can't even tell what they're looking at," Godslayer said.

Alex suddenly brought out the yellow fog and started burning the crystal again, hoping it would work this time.

It did work… for a few seconds before the black flame-liquid thingy returned to the middle of the crystal.

"HAHAHA! You can't kill me. I'm immortal. All the gods will die before I ever do," the crystal spoke.

Alex was surprised at this. He didn't know if it was because he was currently weak or if the crystal was speaking the truth, but… it really didn't seem like it would die.

"Tell me clearly, what are you?" Alex asked.

"Tsk, you backwater folk won't even know what I am even if I tell you," the crystal said.

"Are you an Artifact Spirit?" Alex asked suddenly.

"What?" the Crystal sounded surprised. "How do you know about that?"

"I guessed," Alex said. He had remembered a conversation with Lady Ren where she talked about the Artifact spirit inside the Ebony sword that belonged to the Eastern Continent.

At that time, one of the saint beasts had asked if that sword was similar to the other one.

Given that this was the only other sword Alex had seen in the storage room, he guessed as such.

"So, Artifact spirits can actually talk and even take over people, huh?" Alex asked.

"Of course not," the Crystal sounded offended. "Only I can do that. I, alone am the greatest Artifact and artifact spirit ever created. I was crafted by the best to slay gods. What other spirit could stand up to me."

Alex narrowed his eyes listening to the crystal. "You call yourself Godslayer, but have you really killed any gods?"

"Of course," the crystal spoke. "I've killed many."

"I killed the Artifact god, the Spear god, the Fire God, the Alchemy god. I even killed the Swift god, although killing him was pretty hard with how fast he moved."

"It was only because the Sword G—"

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! You killed… the Alchemy god?" Alex asked with wide eyes. This was the first time he had even heard someone else use the name 'Alchemy god' aside from the manual he had gotten.

"Of course. Killing him was very hard, but I did it," the artifact spirit said.

Alex's mind started swirling with thoughts he couldn't put together. "Who… was the Alchemy god?" he asked.

"One of the vermin that shouldn't have been alive in the first place," the Crystal said.

"Answer me properly," Alex demanded.

"I don't know who he was. Do you think I care about his name? I just fought with him and killed him because he dared to call himself a God."

Chapter 588 False Gods

Alex took a while to come to terms with the fact that Alchemy god was very much likely dead if what this spirit said was true.

He was a little saddened that he would never get to meet him in this life. He was the one whose knowledge was helping Alex so much after all.

'I should have known,' he thought. 'Why else would I get someone's book if they were still writing it.'

"Did you have some sort of bad blood with the Alchemy god?" Alex asked.

"Of course, why else would I kill him? He was a really bad guy," the artifact spirit said.

"Alchemy God… was a bad guy?" Alex asked. He wanted to learn more about him, and it seemed this spirit was the only thing in the world that would tell him.

"Yes," it said. "Very bad."

Alex felt slightly surprised. He had never expected a god to be a bad guy. 'Did the spirit mean Evil… or?'

"So, he did something evil?" Alex asked, trying to pry an answer.

"Yes, of course," the spirit said, sounding rather haughty at the moment. However, it didn't explain any further than that.

Alex suppressed his anger and asked, "what deeds did the Alchemy God do to call him evil?"

Alex could think of a few things that an Alchemist would do. Maybe he needed the body parts of some beasts, so he went around hunting many beasts who by then would be sentient.

Even trees would be sentient by then. He knew it as he had seen a sentient tree that had given him its leaves and seed by the beach far up north.

"He called himself a God," the artifact spirit said.

Alex waited for more information, but none came. He suppressed his anger once more and asked, "What other evil did he do?"

"I don't know. He probably did something bad when I wasn't around," it said.

"But you said he did something evil," Alex said.

"Yes, he called himself God," the spirit replied.

Alex paused for a moment as a thought came to his mind. "Are you saying that the Alchemy god was a bad guy because he called himself a god?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the spirit said.

Alex took a deep breath. He understood that it wasn't that the Alchemy god was evil, but rather the spirit's skewed understanding of what was good and evil.

"So, did you fight and kill the Alchemy god because he called himself a god?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the spirit said.

This was a disaster. The spirit seemed to kill everything that was named a god.

"Do you know about any Sun God?" Alex asked.

"Sun God? Never heard of him. But if I find him, I will kill him too," the spirit proclaimed.

'Another one that hasn't heard of Sun God at all. I will have to ask Sister Hao's master then. He will likely be the only one who knows,' Alex thought.

"So you really hate gods, huh?" Alex asked.

"Yes, with all my heart," the spirit said and then paused. "Hmm, I don't have a heart."

"Is there a reason?" Alex asked.

"Why would I need a reason to kill gods?" the spirit asked. The little black flaming liquid in the center of the crystal grew slightly bigger.

"So you kill them because they are gods. No other reason, huh? How did you come about to hate them like that? What could the gods have possibly done?" Alex asked.

"Aren't you listening, boy? They called themselves a god," the spirit said as if it was very obvious.

Alex was stunned. He didn't know what to think of it. The spirit had no reason to hate gods at all, but it still did.

'Hmmm… maybe…' Alex thought of something.

"You are an Artifact spirit, right? So, I assume you were originally an artifact of some sort?" Alex asked.

"Of course. I am a sword, the deadliest one out there," the spirit said.

"The sword you were in before, that's not your body, right?" he asked.

"Of course. My real body is somewhere. Probably with the Sword God. That bitch must have taken away my body when she used the other gods' help to separate my spirit from my body," it said.

Alex was shocked, to say the least. 'So many gods,' he thought. The spirit kept on talking about gods like they were nothing.

Alex couldn't help but ask, "how many gods are there?"

"5? Maybe 100? I don't know. They keep popping up even after I kill them," the spirit said.

"They keep popping up?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "Do the gods reincarnate every time they die?"

"What? No! Someone else just claims themselves to be a god, and people accept it," the spirit said.

Alex had a hard time understanding what the spirit was talking about. It was like he skipped a few steps during the explanation.

"Are gods not almighty beings? How can one just claim to be a god?" Alex asked.

"Hmph! Most of these so-called gods are just false gods. Just because they reached a certain height in their understanding of something, they dare call themselves a god. As far as I know, there are only two True gods."

"One that blessed the 4 Heavenly beasts, and the other that blessed the 3 Demonic Plants."

"And one day, I will kill those gods as well, no matter who they are and where they are," the spirit proclaimed.

Alex finally came to understand that the Alchemy god wasn't a god at all. It was just a normal cultivator whose understanding had reached the peak of what was possible.

'Is that why the technique stops at level 5, in the Divine realm?' he thought.

"What was the Alchemy god's cultivation realm when you killed him?" Alex asked.

"Divine? Maybe Celestial?" the sword spirit thought. "I couldn't really tell at the time. My vessel at the time was quite strong, so I was able to draw out quite a bit of his strength."

"Your vessel? What's that? The sword?" Alex asked.

"What? Obviously not. Why would the sword be my vessel when I am the sword?" the spirit asked. "I am talking about the human I was using."

"The human you were using…" Alex came to an understanding. Just like he was being used through his temptation, the sword likely got someone like that too.

"How were you able to tempt someone so strong to work for you?" he asked.

"It was very easy. I was very strong," the spirit said.

"You… don't seem very strong," Alex said.

"That's only because you are weird," the spirit said. "Also, I was weakened when I was taken away from my body and sealed onto that sword. Not to mention… I am being somewhat suppressed in this place."

"I see," Alex said. "But… you said you killed many gods right?"

"Yes, quite a few. Some I even killed multiple times because they kept coming back," the sword spirit said.

"If you were that dangerous then… why didn't the Sword God kill you when she defeated you?" Alex asked.

"She didn't defeat me. THEY defeated me. She had help," the spirit made sure to let that be known. "Also, they can't kill me. Unlike them, I am immortal in both body and spirit."

"I see," Alex said as he looked at the crystal on his hands. "Who can make something like you that is so strong?"

"I—" the spirit stopped. It waited for a few seconds before saying, "I don't remember. I don't need to remember. It's fine as long as I kill gods."

It shouted like Alex had hit a nerve. "Now leave me alone," it shouted and stopped talking.

Alex waited for it to return back to talk, but it didn't. After a while, he understood that he had likely talked about a sore topic. Alex checked his surroundings one last time and left his spiritual sea.

He continued focusing on his body to heal it better, while constantly thinking of the things that he had learned.
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Gods were just normal cultivators. There was no majesty to them in the way Alex had imagined until now.

Furthermore, they could be killed. And within him was something that had killed multiple of them.

Only now did Alex come to realize how scary the situation was.

'I will need to get rid of him when I can,' he thought. For now, he would have to regularly go into his spiritual sea to remove the black goo from around it in hope of containing the temptation.

After thinking that, he got back into cultivating. He needed to heal his body as fast as he could.

Chapter 589 Azure Silverbeak

Alex continued cultivating with the same sense of time as he had before, which was none.

How many days had it been? 3, maybe 4? He had never cultivated for this long before, but he knew that this was something common amongst the cultivators. So, he should start doing this more often as well.

Some cultivated for weeks on end, maybe even months. His cultivating for a few days was nothing.

However, there was one problem with his cultivation that took him a while to figure out.

Since he was so focused on healing himself, the cultivation hadn't really helped towards his cultivation base.

At least, his healing had been better. By now, everything that was torn or broken was healed. His meridians were three-fourths of the way back to normal.

The only problem was he was still very skinny, almost skeletal. It seemed his muscle mass wouldn't return from simply cultivating.

If it did, he would have to do it for a really long time. So, Alex went on to continue cultivating for a while longer.

* * * * *

5 men and women walked into the forest, a hint of hurried walking in their footsteps. They wore reddish-brown robes, tied in the waist by a yellow sash.

"Brother Yun," one of the 3 men called the other man that looked like the leader of this small group.

"What is it?" the man asked.

"That," the man pointed to something in the trees.

The leader and the rest of the group looked in the direction he pointed at and saw something up in the tree.

It was a bird. Not a simple one either. It was an Azure Silverbeak. Silverbeaks came about in many colors that ranged from red to purple. However, one with pigment that looked blue was rather hard to find.

"Woah! Good job, little brother, you found a fortune for us today," the leader said and propped up his ax to fight.

He had a cultivation base of the 1st True disciple realm, the strongest of the group.

2 of the other men held swords in their hands and had a cultivation base around the 8th Mind Tempering realm.

The 2 girls held a bow and a saber with them, and have a cultivation base of 7th and 9th Mind Tempering realm.

"Alright, slowly fan out, and get your nets ready. Make sure not to hurt it too bad. We don't want to spend money on pills to heal the bird," the leader said.

The rest of them nodded and slowly moved around the bird. Once they were in position, they got their nets ready.

The four of them looked towards the leader for the sign, and as they did, the leader nodded.

At once, all 5 of them threw their nets at the bird on top of the tree. The nets flew through the air, reaching the bird.

However, just then, the bird dived down from the tree and escaped the nets.

"Follow it!" the leader said, and the 5 of them started running towards it.

The Azure Silverbeak was a Mind Tempering realm beast, likely in the 8th or 9th realm. However, due to the fact that it wasn't very good at fighting, it had instead come to become very fast at flying.

The bird zipped through the air at such a speed that only the leader could even keep track of where it was going.

Even then, the leader was slowly falling behind.

The bird flew in between the trees, zigzagging its way through the branches high above.

The leader started to worry that he would lose it. The bird would fetch him at least 20 True spirit stones, if not more.

That, spread among the 5 of them, would mean he would get at least 5 True spirit stones.

5 True Spirit stones a week was far more than anything the 5 of them had earned in the last months.

He couldn't let that bird get away. He decided to employ his speed to the highest, maybe even using his blood essence for it.

However, just as he was about to do that, he saw something white flash from ahead of the bird and move towards it.

As the leader kept watching it, the bird flew down to the ground, with something else on top of it.

The leader stopped when he got close and saw the thing that was atop the bird.

A little white cat was licking its paw, while the other paw held the Azure Silverbeak to the ground. The bird was still alive, but it seemed to have something broken in it from the attack.

'What the hell?' the leader thought. The other 4 members of his group arrived not long after to see the scene as well and were equally shocked.

"Oh my god! So cute," the two girls said the moment they saw the little white cat.

The other two men didn't say it, but they nodded it as well.

The leader kept on looking at it with a confused look. "Have you guys ever seen a cat beast before?" he asked.

The group looked confused as well and realized that they had indeed never seen one before.
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"Maybe it's a mutant feline beast. It should be very rare," one of the men said.

"It's a little kitten too. The rich folks would pay a fortune for it if we can get it. Not to mention it's so cute," one of the girls said.

"9th Mind Tempering realm… we should be able to," the leader said. "Alright, get your nets ready."

The group got into their stance, ready to capture the cat in front of them.

Pearl looked at the 5 people with a confused look on his face. Just moments ago, he had been sitting comfortably —well, maybe not very comfortably, given how hot it was— on top of the tree branch, when suddenly a bird flew its way.

He knew that Alex couldn't be distracted right now as he had been ordered to protect him, so Pearl took down the bird.

However, now these 5 humans had appeared out of nowhere.

Humans, they are good people, right? He thought. He had only known humans that loved him and cared for him, so he assumed they were the same.

However, when he saw them get into a fighting stance with weapons and other things in their hand, he couldn't help but cock his head in confusion.

"ENIMI?" he asked, pronouncing the word as well as he could.

The group of 5 froze. They looked in awe and surprised, at Pearl and then at each other.

"IT TALKED!" one of the men whispered as loudly as possible in a slow cadence.

"HOLY SHIT! We will be so rich if we get it," one of the girls said excitedly.

The leader looked towards Pearl and numerous thoughts ran through his mind.

"Alright, let's hurry and capture it. We will be in trouble if someone stronger comes here," the leader said.

The group nodded and got ready.

Seeing that they were really trying to fight him, Pearl understood that they were his enemy.

Claws slowly came out of all 4 of Pearl's paws as he too got ready to fight.

Chapter 590 1 V 4

"Now!" the leader shouted.

Aside from the leader and the woman with the saber, everyone else threw their nets at Pearl.

Pearl understood what was happening and immediately jumped backward such that not a single net landed on him.

The Azure Silverbeak tried to stand up and leave when Pearl let go of it, but it was instead caught in the nets the Pearl dodged.

"He's quick," one of the men said, readying his sword. But then, he dropped it a little.

He couldn't harm a product. What was he thinking?

Now, he was confused. He could sense the kitten's aura, and it told him that it was just as strong as he was, maybe even stronger.

This was going to be a tough battle. They might even have to use a few more resources than normal. The cat was worth it.

Suddenly, an arrow flew through the air, hurling behind it a wave of green energy.

Pearl moved to the side and let it fly past him, but when the arrow struck the ground, it exploded in a gust of air that pushed him towards the woman with the saber.

The woman had kept her net, while the other three had thrown it, so when she saw Pearl helpless mid-air, she threw it to capture him.

However, Pearl suddenly moved to the right, dodging the net once again.

"It can fly?" the girl shouted in surprise. Mind Tempering beasts that flew weren't rare, but they weren't readily available either.

Also, the girl had only seen older beasts that were able to fly. Not this cute little kitten that looked like it was born yesterday.

One of the men with the sword ran forward with his sword and slashed at Pearl.

Pearl also swung his paw at the same time, hitting the sword as it dropped.

The other's heart skipped a beat when they saw that, but when they then saw the kitten not only block the sword but actually push it back without any injury, they were shocked.

"You could've hurt it!" the girl with the bow screamed at the man who just attacked.

In response, the man simply looked back at her and said, "it's nearly a True realm beast. It's not a clay vase that will break into a million pieces if you hit it. Stop letting the cuteness distract you from its strength."

The three of the others aside from the leader finally woke up from their image of the cat they had put in their mind.

This wasn't a house cat. It was a beast, and they couldn't be too careful with a beast.

"Also, be careful. It's really strong," the man said. The rebound he felt from the attack just now was abnormal for him.

Pearl was angry this time and he got on the offensive. He jumped towards the people, but the girl with the bow shot her arrow once again.

Pearl knew not to dodge it this time, so he sought to destroy it. However, right before it touched him, roots sprouted from the arrow that wrapped around Pearl.

At the same time, the other men and woman jumped at Pearl, hacking at him with their sword and saber.

They didn't put as much strength as they could muster, just enough to hurt him a bit.

Suddenly, Pearl's body turned golden as the weapons landed on him. It was a direct hit, yet Pearl didn't feel anything.

The White Tiger's Golden body was a very strong defensive technique that normal people wouldn't be able to break past within the same realm as Pearl.

Pearl then swiped at the roots around him, destroying them. He then turned towards the man on the right and swung at him.

The man put the flat side of his sword in front of him to stop the attack, but he underestimated Pearl's strength.

He felt the pressure of the attack at his body was lurched backward and was sent flying through the air until it hit a tree in the back.

The man fell to the ground and coughed up blood. He had been badly hit.

The remaining men and women looked in shock. Pearl was too strong.

"Brother Yun, are you ready or not?" the remaining man asked.

"I need just 1 more minute," he said.

Pearl was about to turn around to attack the woman to his right, but just then, another arrow came flying his way.

This time, he neither hit it nor dodged it. Instead, he took one step back, took a deep breath, and roared.

A deafening sound was released from Pearl that didn't seem like it belonged to him.

Before the arrow could come anywhere close, it was sent flying back, all the energy in it disappearing as it did so.

At the same time, Pearl ran towards her. He realized that he needed to take out this archer before he concentrated on the other enemies.

Golden light glowed in a flickering pattern as he started running forward.

The girl readied an arrow once again to target Pearl, but suddenly something interesting happened.

The Pearl that was running towards her suddenly flickered once more and 1 Pearl… turned into 2.

The girl was surprised when she saw the 2 Pearls coming towards her at the same time.

She looked at the two Pearls and didn't understand which one was real. She hesitated for a bit and chose the one on the right.

She chose wrong.

The one the arrow hit flickered into a bunch of golden light and disappeared.

The Pearl on the left jumped on her and threw a paw attack at her.

"AAH!" the girl screamed and brought out a talisman to protect herself.

The reddish-yellow talisman burned up and an illusory barrier of the same bronze-like color appeared in front of her.

Pearl's attack shattered the barrier in a thousand pieces, but it still managed to kill a lot of his power and when his paw hit her, it wasn't strong enough to hurt her a lot.

Just enough to send her flying backward and tumble multiple times on the ground.

The girl felt scared. If she hadn't produced that talisman, she would've likely been fatally hurt there.

Pearl saw her slowly stand up and was about to go for her when he noticed the girl with the saber attack him from behind.

Pearl jumped to the side to dodge her, but the girl expected that and suddenly blasted a massive fire attack at him.

Her eyes went wide when she saw Pearl not dodge that attack. She was worried that Pearl was hurt, but then Pearl flew through the fire, directly at her.

Not a single hair on his body was hurt.

The swordsman appeared out of nowhere, slashing towards Pearl.

As if there were a footing below Pearl, he suddenly changed direction upwards to dodged the incoming attack, then again pushed the air above him to jump downwards and swung his paw towards the newly arrived man.

The man was caught off guard and would die if he did not move. However, he couldn't change his position at the moment, and the girl couldn't help him either.

Suddenly, an ax came flying through the air that slammed into Pearl who was sent flying back towards the tree.

Pearl flipped midair and landed on the side of the tree with all 4 legs before looking straight towards the leader of the group.

He had finally entered the battle.

The leader put his hands forward, and the ax came flying back to his hands.

"Leave it to me. You are not its match," the leader said.

The 2 of them nodded and went to get the other man that was hurt beneath the tree.

The leader watched as his juniors got away to the side and then finally stared at Pearl.

"Do you understand my words, beast?" he asked in a solemn voice.

"Meow!" Pearl meowed, but the leader got no information from it at all.

"We don't plan on hurting you. Just come with us quietly," the leader said.

"MEOW!" Pearl meowed loudly as he dig the ground slightly with his paws as if he was getting ready to attack.

The leader saw that and frowned. He really didn't want to hurt the cat since that would cost him more to heal it later.

However, with how strong the cat was currently, he couldn't catch it without hurting it a bit.

So, he put up his ax and got ready to fight.

Chapter 591 Pearl vs Leader

The leader swung his ax at Pearl.

The ax was a two-handed ax, with a meter-long wooden shaft that was so polished that the wood grains were no longer visible, and an ax head that was in a circular shape of half a meter in diameter.

The leader was still a good 20 meters away from Pearl, but the swinging of the ax sent out an earthen-colored illusory ax of the same shape as his own.

Pearl understood this was a strong attack, but he didn't back away. Instead, his right paw glowed goldenly and he swung at the ax-shaped energy.

The energy dissipated as soon as Pearl hit it, with Pearl taking barely any damage himself.

Pearl was a little surprised. Was the human in front of him not strong?

The leader frowned as well. He had clearly sent out an attack that had the power of a 9th Mind Tempering realm cultivator, but somehow the cat had easily stopped it.

It looked like he couldn't hold back at all.

Suddenly, Pearl started running towards the leader. His feet flickered with golden light and before the leader could see it, he split into two.

It was impossible to tell which one was real.

He remembered that it was the left one that was real last time when it had attacked the girl with the arrow, so, he targeted it.

An earth spike rose from the ground right underneath where Pearl was. It struck through Pearl, but then Pearl disappeared into many golden motes of light.

He had chosen wrong.

The Pearl on the right jumped at the leader and attacked with his paw.

The leader didn't move away, however. Instead, his body turned brown and he used it to block Pearl's attack.

Pearl swung his paw onto the Leader's right biceps. The leader was sent back a couple of meters and looked in shock.

There were thin cuts on his arm where the robe had been torn open and he was bleeding slightly.

'I was fully defending it too,' he thought. He was finally starting to feel scared for the fight. It was a good idea he sent the others away. Had they stayed, he realized they would've likely died.

'Good thing I sent them away. Now I will have to fight properly,' he thought.

The ground shuddered around his feet and Pearl sensed it. Immediately, Pearl backed away in caution.

The earth climbed up around the leader's feet and started covering part of his body like it were armor.

He now had an extra layer of security that would also increase his strength.

So, he rushed up ahead and started attacking Pearl.

The 4 of the others looked at the battle from the side.

"Is… brother holding back?" the girl with the saber asked.

"I don't think so," the man that was heavily injured said. He had taken a healing pill by now and was healed enough to stand up. There were still cuts and bruises all over him, but that wasn't something he cared about for now.

The girl with the bow and arrow looked around and asked, "why is it taking so long?"

The other man looked around and asked, "Did brother Yun not set it up properly?"

"He must have," the girl with the saber said.

The 4 of them continued watching the battle unfold for another 5 minutes. Both the kitten and their brother seemed to be fighting with full strength, and somehow neither was winning.

They never expected the kitten to lose, but seeing their brother have a hard time winning, was the most shocking aspect of the fight.

Pearl's body flickered into two as both Pearls ran towards the leader.

The leader had already tried hitting either of the Pearls during the multiple times Pearl had used this technique. So, he didn't choose either of the Pearl this time.

Instead, he sent out multiple earth spikes towards both of the Pearl.

The attack reached the Pearl on the right who vanished into golden motes of light. When it reached the Pearl on the left, Pearl's body glowed a bit, but he a step late and the earth spike hit him.

It didn't manage to pierce him or anything, not even cut him a little, but Pearl still took some damage.

He landed on his feet a looked at the leader. How was the late just now? He was fully prepared to block the attack.

Just then, he felt a sense of weightlessness. As if his brain floated in nothingness before suddenly experiencing gravity.

Pearl stumbled a little to the right and shook his head.

The leader smiled. The formation he had set up while the other 4 kept Pearl busy was finally working.

Usually, the formation would work in just a minute or two for low-level True beasts, but even after 5 minutes, this beast wasn't down.

The leader couldn't help but feel happy about their luck in finding the beast.

He fought for a few more minutes, but it was soon apparent that the beast couldn't keep up for much longer.

Pearl huffed heavily as whatever was happening to him made it really hard to focus. He couldn't even see the enemy properly as his vision twisted into 3 separate images for everything around him.

Even when using his Spiritual Sense, he couldn't keep the direction in check.

The leader threw a net at him and it landed on Pearl. But he easily destroyed the net with his claws.

"Tsk," the leader felt annoyed. He needed to quickly catch the beast before his precious True spirit stones lost their energy in the formation flags.

He had to finish this quickly, and the only way he saw was to knock the beast out.

The Leader dashed forward towards Pearl, with his ax glowing with bright earth color, and swung it onto Pearl.

Suddenly, a flash of gray moved in front of him as his ax came to a halting stop.

Not only did the ax stop, the leader felt pain in his hands from the rebound as well as the skin between his thumb and index finger nearly splitting with the force.
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When he looked up to see what had appeared, he saw an almost skeletal man in a grayish robe stand in front of him with a gentle-looking smile on his face.

The leader followed his ax to see how it had been stopped when he nearly lost his eyes when they popped out of his socket with pure shock.

1 finger.

The man in front of him had stopped one of his strongest attacks with a single finger, and there was not a single scratch on him.

"May I ask why you are attacking my brother?" Alex asked.

The leader felt his heart sink to the bottom of his stomach. He immediately let go of the ax, and before it could even fall to the ground, he did.

The leader slammed his head onto the ground and started screaming. "Forgiveness, senior. I— I didn't know the cat belonged to you," the leader said.

"He doesn't belong to me. He is my brother. He belongs to no one," Alex said.

The leader sunk deeper into his fear, not understanding what he should do now.

Chapter 592 Pearl’s refusal

The 4 others to the side looked at Alex with a massive shock, as well as a hint of confusion.

They were shocked because to their eyes, Alex had appeared out of nowhere. They were also a little confused as to where he had been before this.

However, as soon as they heard what Alex said, their shock and confusion soon all turned to pure, unadulterated fear.

Not only was Alex strong, but he was also so unbelievably strong that they couldn't even feel his cultivation base at all.

This meant he had a really high cultivation base. Not to mention, given how scraggly he looked, they feared that he cultivated an unorthodox cultivation method.

If it happened to be one that required the blood and bones of young men and women, they would all be in trouble.

"Senior, please forgive me. I really didn't know i— he was with you. Had I known, I would've never thought of kidnapping him," the leader said, his head still pressed to the ground.

Alex looked at him and then at Pearl who was on the ground. He then kicked a stone that was on the ground, sending it hurtling towards one of the trees.

The stone accurately hit a formation flag, knocking it off of the tree. Suddenly, Pearl could see clearly again.

The formation had come undone.
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The leader couldn't help but feel awe when he saw that. He had made sure to set up the flags in such a manner that it would be impossible to find in a short time, but somehow the expert in front of him had done exactly that.

This only caused to increase his fear even more.

"Why were you trying to kidnap him?" Alex asked.

The leader couldn't answer. It was not an answer he could give to the brother of an expert like him.

"Answer me," Alex said, his voice booming, shaking the leader to his core.

"We-we were going to sell him to a rich person from the other cities," the leader said.

Alex nodded when he heard this.

He knew these people weren't evil and were definitely not looking to harm Pearl. At least that he had noticed from the very start.

When Pearl had slammed one of those people into the tree he was cultivating on, Alex had already woken up by then.

When he saw Pearl fighting, he was ready to come down to help. However, he also noticed that they likely weren't a threat to Pearl at all.

So, he stayed up, watching him fight. It had been a while, so he wanted to see how much he had grown.

When he used skills like White Tiger's Golden Claw or White Tiger's Golden Body, Alex felt a little proud of how frequently he could use those skills.

When he used White Tiger's roar, Alex had realized that Pearl had another skill up his sieve that belonged to the white tiger bloodline.

Then, Pearl gave him another shock when he used the White Tiger's steps. The movement technique was meant for short bursts of motion, but… it was so strong.

When Pearl had split into two, even he had trouble finding out which one was the real one despite using spiritual sense.

It was only when he saw Pearl in trouble that he finally decided to come down to help.

Alex looked at the leader still on the ground. "Stand up," he said.

These people were good, but he couldn't let the fact that they tried to steal Pearl slide.

"I will give you one chance. My brother will hit you once. If you can survive, you can all leave," Alex said. "You can even take that… bird over there."

Alex felt a weird sensation. It felt really weird not having the game system tell him the name of things. Without it, he couldn't even tell what the bird's name was.

It looked like he had a lot more to learn.

The leader's eyes narrowed. He didn't believe he could get away so… easily.

"Is that true?" he couldn't help but ask.

"Are you saying I'm lying?" Alex asked.

"No, senior. Forgive me," the leader said again as he bowed towards Alex.

"Get up and take the hit. I don't have much time to waste on you," he said.

The leader looked up and nodded. He got up and moved a little back to get into a stance.

"I'm ready, senior," he said.

"Pearl, go give him your best attack," Alex said.

However, Pearl shook his head. Alex curiously turned around.

"What's wrong? Do you not want to hit him?" he asked.

"Meow!" Pearl meowed. The opponent had used assistance from formations, but he had still won fairly. So, he didn't like the fact that he needed Alex's help in beating the man.

Alex couldn't help but chuckle a little when he heard that, and at some level, even felt a little proud.

Pearl had lost, and he had accepted the loss without looking for help in getting back.

"Alright, since my brother has decided to not attack you, you will have to do something else for me," Alex said.

"Anything, senior," the man said.

"Show me the way out of this place," Alex said.

The leader looked surprised, and a little suspicious too. He looked to the side of the other 4 who looked relieved and sighed.

"Yes, senior," the leader said.

"Take your bird. We're leaving," Alex said.

The leader nodded and walked over to the bird. When he removed the nets, he realized the bird was unconscious. It seemed the bird couldn't handle the nauseating mental stress from the disorienting formation.

Meanwhile, Pearl jumped onto Alex's shoulder and slumped down and purred lightly.

"You fought to protect me, right? Thank you," Alex said softly.

Pearl meowed but didn't say anything else. It looked like he was still a little annoyed that he lost to the leader.

"I saw you fight. You were very strong," Alex said. "If not for the formation, the leader would've never won against you. Also, you are not even in the True realm, and yet you are contending someone on True realm in equal strength. I think that is amazing."

Pearl's face turned a little smug when he heard that. He was indeed great.

"By the way, the techniques you used. Did they teach you that?" Alex asked.

"No," Pearl said.

'I thought so,' Alex thought. This would get problematic soon. Pearl now had about 5 skills that not even a true White Tiger born to the White Tiger family could have.

At most, they would have 2 or 3 according to what Yao Jia had told him.

"Did you use these skills while training?" Alex then asked.

"Yess!" Pearl said.

'That's problematic,' Alex thought. ' I don't think they will stop looking for Pearl then. It's already impressive that they haven't looked for me in the last few days since I left the secret realm.'

'Maybe they are preoccupied with what happened to Lady Rem,' Alex thought. 'They will come soon then. I hope they can't find me here'

"Senior, we are ready," the leader said.

Alex looked to the side and said, "Alright, show the way out."

Chapter 593 Riverweed Town

Alex sent out his spiritual sense to the max to check out the forest while the group of 5 showed him the path out of the forest.

As he looked, he realized that there had been a lot of trees cut around that area. The feeling in his body regarding the ingredients was also a lot more tamer.

It was almost like the area around him was devoid of ingredients aside from a few uncommon ones.

As he walked, Ning slowly plucked the remaining ingredients from all around him as he brought them towards himself. He used this as an opportunity to make sure his Qi worked properly.

'Although I'm not back to my best yet, it's close enough,' he thought. He just needed to cultivate for a month or 2 casually, and he would be back to peak form. Maybe even better.

"What's your name?" Alex asked the leader.

"It's Yun Jiang, senior," the leader said.

"Yun Jiang," Alex said softly as if to see how well he could pronounce it. "So, what are you guys doing here?" Alex asked.

The leader shuddered and slowly turned around to say, "It's the last day of the week, senior."

He didn't explain any further as if that information alone was supposed to be enough of an explanation.

"I… am not from around here. Can you explain a bit more?" Alex asked.

"Oh," the leader looked at him with shock. However, even with shock, he didn't dare get slow in his explanation.

"Every end of the week, the cultivators from the Riverweed town are allowed to enter the northern forest to harvest what they can. Ores, plants,… beasts, we are allowed to take these things back with us once a week," the leader said. "That's our only source of money."

"So you were planning to sell Pearl," Alex said. Pearl purred a little from atop Alex's thin shoulders.

Alex caught Pearl and put him in his robes such that only his head was sticking out. This was likely more comfortable for him than the shoulders.

The leader showed an embarrassed face and said, "y-yes, senior."

Alex turned to the left. Far away, he could see a few other groups of people as well, wearing bluish robes with a white sash around the waist.

"How many sects do you have in the town?" he asked.

"3, senior," the leader said. "Our Thousand Papers sect, Fire Spirit sect, and a Metal Jade sect."

"Those men, which sect are they?" Alex asked.

The leader looked to the side and only then saw a group of blue-robed figures far away.

"Those are the Metal Jade sect disciples, senior. They are an artifact sect, so they must be searching for materials for themselves," the leader said.

"And your sect?" Alex asked.

"Our Thousand Paper sect is mostly focused on the talisman, senior," he said. "Similarly, the Fire Spirit sect focuses on alchemy."

Alex's eyebrows raised a bit when he heard 'Alchemy' but he didn't let the surprise linger for much longer.

"How good would you say your town's sects are compared to others?" Alex asked.

"There is no comparison, senior," the leader said. "Our sect is at the outer edge of the empire, so our knowledge and skill are quite lacking compared to those at the center of the empire."

"But you guys still stay here," Alex said. "Is it because of the forest?"

"Yes senior," he said. "The forest is large and gives us a lot of ingredients. So while we aren't as big or strong as the sects at the center of the empire, we are still doing quite well for ourselves."

"I see," Alex said as he nodded. "What was the last good thing that came out of this place?"

"Last good thing, hmm," the leader thought. "There was a rumor about a True Heaven grade artifact being sold. But, it was done in secret by the Metal Jade sect, so we aren't sure."

The girl with the bow and arrow moved over to the leader and whispered something into his ears.

Alex heard it clearly, but he still waited for the leader to say. "It also seems that not so long ago, one of the elders at the Fire Spirit sect made a 42% Harmony pill. The name of the pill wasn't promoted, but the news of the pill's quality still got out."

"42% huh?" Alex realized that this place wasn't as great as he would've expected. It was just slightly better than an average alchemy sect back in the crimson empire.

'I will likely have to go deeper into the empire to find more,' Alex thought.

As they walked, Alex started noticing more and more. There were so many people wearing so many colors that it became hard to keep track of the different people.

'He did say that cultivators only get to enter at the end of the week,' Alex thought.

"Do your sects control this area of the forest? Or do you have a town lord?" Alex asked.

"We have a town lord senior, but our sects also have a say in what happens in the town," the leader said.

"So the thing about cultivators only being allowed to enter once a week, who set that rule?" he asked.

"Oh, it was a joint rule, senior. At first, there was no restriction, so very soon, the forest started to die so fast that there would barely be any resources in a few years. So, to preserve that, the elders came together and made the rule."

Alex nodded when he heard that. 'No wonder there is barely anything around here,' he thought.

"Are you an elder?" he asked.

"No, senior. This one hasn't reached 30 years of age yet," the leader said with a hint of pride on his face.

"I see. Not bad," Alex said. He realized by the context that one had to likely reach 30 years of age to become an elder in this place.

'It seems cultivation base doesn't matter to them. Or… at least True Disciple realm cultivation base doesn't matter,' Alex thought.

After a while, the group arrived at an open area. They had finally left the forest at last.

In front of Alex, he could see a massive city with newly built walls around it. There were houses outside of the walls too, and they looked newly built as well.

The stone walls let people walk in and out of the city.

'Such a big city and they still call it a town?' Alex thought. He wondered how big the cities of this empire would be then.

"Alright, you guys can leave now. I pardon your offense of trying to attack my brother," Alex said.

The leader and the other 4 looked elated. They quickly bowed and gave their thanks before scurrying away.

Alex looked at the 5 of them walk away and smiled a little.

"It's quite fun acting like an expert, isn't it?" he said while patting Pearl on his head.

"Meow!!" Pearl meowed from his clothes, asking him to pet him more.

"Alright, Alright," Alex said and pet him a bit more.

He then looked at his frail body and said, "I need to put some food in me to gain back my muscles. Without it, I will be stared at by everyone."

With that, Alex walked towards the Riverweed town and walked in through the gate.

The town looked not very different from the cities back in the crimson empire. It was almost as big as the Scarlet city and had sects in it that would qualify to compete against The Tiger sect or the Hong Wu sect.

Alex was surprised that even a town at the edge of the empire was almost as good as one of the better cities in the Crimson Empire.

That just went to show how great the Luminance empire was. Not to mention, this was supposed to be the weakened continent.

Alex couldn't wait to see the other continents. 'I'm getting ahead of myself,' he thought and walked through the town.

The houses, buildings, shops, all looked similar in design to ones from back in the Crimson Empire. Maybe even a little more outdated.

Alex was surprised. He knew that cultivators didn't like changes and liked to keep things as they were, but… did that really put them further behind than an isolated empire?

A True realm cultivator could live up to 400 years normally, and 500 years if he forced it.

A Saint realm cultivator could live up to 1000 years normally, and almost 2000 if they forced it.

With the number of people alive in this continent likely having been born before most of the people in the Crimson empire, he could see why the development was held back.

He walked through the busy street and came across a looking building that caught his eyes. The building itself was normal, but it was the name that caught his eyes.

Riverweed Branch of the Alchemy Guild.

'They have an Alchemy guild here as well?' Alex thought. He remembered the Alchemy guild in the Crimson Empire, but he never really took part in it.

However, this time, it might actually be a good idea to find himself a place since no one else would back him here.

But first, Alex needed food. Thinking that he left the place. He would come back here later.

Alex walked through the streets, ignoring the curious looks of the people who saw his skinny body.

Finally, he came across a rather grand-looking restaurant called the Three Faction Alliance Restaurant.

Alex smiled and walked in.

Chapter 594 Three Faction Alliance

The Three Factions Alliance was the alliance formed between the three sects in the Riverweed town.

Not only did they have a restaurant that Alex was currently standing in front of, but they also had many other places such as Auction houses, stores, libraries, and security personnel for guarding the town.

Alex walked up the few stairs to go into the restaurant. After he walked in, he finally saw how large the restaurant was.

This was a bustling restaurant with nearly hundreds of people inside.

There were almost 50 different tables in front of Alex, and that was just on the first floor.

Alex could see a staircase at the center of the room that one could use to go up to an open floor above as well.

He wanted to check what it was like up there with his spiritual sense but decided not to on the off chance there was someone that could sense his spiritual sense.

He looked around, but he couldn't find any free tables. So, he was forced to go sit at a table that already had a single person eating his food.

"I hope you won't mind me sitting here," Alex said as he pulled the chair and sat down in front of the middle-aged man.

The middle-aged man suddenly looked like he had seen a ghost and quickly wiped his mouth to say, "Certainly not, esteemed senior."

'Senior?' Alex thought. 'Do I look that old right now?' he thought. He was certainly not giving off a cultivation aura for the man to think he was a senior, so it had to be the face Alex assumed.

Still, he didn't think he looked that old. Maybe 25 years old at best.

Just as he was thinking, a waiter walked up to him. Alex noticed him and took a look at the menu in front of him.

However, before he could even make an order, the waiter asked, "Sir, are you a cultivator."

Alex looked towards the waiter. 'What a weird thing to ask in this place,' he thought. 'Maybe I should release my aura a little.'

"Yes," Alex said, releasing an aura close to Mind Tempering 1st realm.

"Would you mind changing seats then, sir?" the waiter asked. "Cultivators usually eat on the 2nd floor."

"Oh," Alex said and finally looked around. Due to the many people, he hadn't released his spiritual sense and had thus not realized that almost everyone that was sitting on the first floor was all mortals.

"The mortals can go to the second floor, so most are forced to wait even though we have tables empty," the waiter explained as respectfully as he could.

"Oh, I didn't know that," Alex said as he stood up. "I'm sorry to have bothered you." He told the middle-aged man and walked up to the second floor.

Finally, as he walked up the stairs, he saw and felt a cultivation aura from the people around him.

Most of them were in self tempering realm, but a few older folks were in the True realm as well.

However, he couldn't find anyone that either had a high cultivation base or young folks with the True cultivation realm.

He looked towards the left after reaching the 2nd floor and asked the waiter behind him, "what does that set of stairs lead to?"

"That leads to the 3rd floor, senior. Only VIP members and people they invited can go up there," the waiter said.

"Oh, so I can't go just because I want to, huh?" he asked.

"I'm afraid not, sir," the waiter said.

Alex nodded and made his way to an empty seat. On the 2nd floor, there were many.

The seat lied at the corner of the room, unfortunately away from any windows, but he wasn't here for the scenery anyway.

He looked at the menu and quickly ordered some food. He didn't know which was good, but he knew he needed nutrients, so he mostly ordered meat dishes along with a sort of vegetables.

He looked at the names of the dishes and was a little surprised.

'Common rank and True ranks? Foods have ranks too?' he thought. Crimson Empire didn't have it, and the players never really bothered with food as cultivators didn't require it.

He never cared about food enough to go around searching about it.

He looked at the prices and checked his storage bag. He never really had a lot of spirit stones after the other guy kept sending it back home.

He had managed to gather about 1000 True Spirit stones before he left, and he had already spent close to 400 True spirit stones in the capital for the various ingredients and formation materials.

Of the 600 he had remaining, he looked down and the menu and realized, about 50 would be gone today if he wanted to eat the best thing on it.

Alex sighed, but he had ways to earn his money back. So, without hesitation, he ordered 5 dishes that in total cost him 58 True Spirit stones.

The waiter nodded and left.

"I know, I know. Some of it is for you too," Alex said to Pearl in his robes who quietly sent him a message through the spiritual sense that said he wanted to eat some as well.

Alex felt a few watchful gaze falling on him, but they were all simply curious about his sunken physique and his missing arm.

He didn't show attention to these gazes and simply waited for the waiter to return with his food.

It took him about 20 minutes, but the waiter returned with his food. He put down all of the food and bowed a little before leaving.

Alex was left with the 5 different dishes he had ordered. Pearl poked his head out of the robe and looked at the food at the table.

"MEOW!" he said as he pointed towards one of the plates.

Alex took the chopsticks and tried the food Pearl pointed to. "Oh wow, it's good," he said.

"MOEW!" Pearl got angry. He wanted to try the food first.

"Haha, sorry. You can try the rest first," he said and brought out Pearl to place him on the table.

Even though he had grown in the many month since he had been with Alex, Pearl was still less than a foot in length.

His white body disappeared onto the white sheets that were on the table, but people still noticed.

Some were disgusted that a beast was eating on a table meant for humans, but those were in the minority.

Most people didn't care.

As Pearl started eating, Alex did too. The food was incredibly delicious and he could even feel the energy from it directly being absorbed by his body.

Some were certainly turning into Qi like all foods did for him. There was also a certain healing factor in the food, although it couldn't reach the same level as healing as a healing paste or an actual healing pill could provide.

In less than 10 minutes, Alex ate all of the food that was brought to him. Pearl certainly ate a lot, but that couldn't be considered to the amount Alex had ate.

Once he finished, he closed his eyes and looked into his body once more. As he did, he noticed that there was no food left in his stomach at all, and he had indeed gained some muscle mass.

It was a very low amount, but it was certainly something. 'I will have to eat a bit more maybe,' he thought.

He was certain there were pills that could immediately give him muscles, but he wasn't certain how well those would work with his body that had went through body cultivation.

Eating food so that his body could absorb as much energy needed to give him muscle over the course of a few days seemed like a better choice than a single pill that would instantly restore his muscle, but likely not the strength in them.

Alex put Pearl inside his robes and decided to leave. His stomach was empty and he could eat it all twice over, but he didn't think that was a good idea.

Certainly, it wasn't good for his pockets. 'I should take it slow. It's not like I have anywhere else to be immediately,' he thought.

He left the table and went on to pay. As he went down the stairs, he saw a bunch of people walk up past him.

He didn't look in their direction, but he caught an information about an auction taking place in the near future.

Alex thought back to his low spirit stones, and thought that it would be a good idea to get some from here.

As he paid for his meals, the staff couldn't help but look at the cost with wide eyes. Who in their right mind would eat over 50 True Spirit stones worth of food in one sitting? Was this the son of a successful merchant.

She looked towards the skinny Alex and didn't think that was true at all.

"Do you know any place around here where I can learn about the city and everything else?" he asked.

"Learning? Umm... there is a library about 50 paces right from outside the restaurant. You won't miss the building," she said.

"Thank you," Alex said and walked out.

As he was told, he took a right and walked down 50 paces until he saw something and nearly laughed out loud.

'She wasn't lying when she said I won't miss it,' he thought looked at a building across the street whose front wall looked like the cover of a book half opened, with a bookmark hanging from the top left.

The cover had a title written on it which read 'Three Faction Alliance library.'

Alex had guessed what the 'Three faction' meant, but he still wanted to learn more. So, he walked in.

Chapter 595 Geography of Luminance Empire

Alex walked up to the door of the library. The door looked like a small tear on the cover of a book, which was used as a handle.

Alex opened it up and walked in.

As soon as he walked in, Alex realized the building was much large than he had imagined. He didn't know if the outer section gave the illusion of being small or if the inner space was somewhat stretched using formations, but it was a lot larger for him.

Alex looked straight ahead. The main room of the library was circular. It looked like the inside of a tower as he finally saw the library go up to 20 meters high.

There was a space manipulation going on here with some formation.

The circular room had walls that were stuck with shelves that were filled to the brim with books. There were some ladders along the side to climb up to grab the books, but most people simply flew to get them.

Surrounded by the bookshelves were reading tables all laid out in a circular pattern.

And at the center of the room was a circular reception table sort of location where men and women of green, red, and blue stayed.

Those were the colors of the 3 factions, so Alex guessed they were the disciples of the 3 factions working as a librarian.

He truly realized how large the place was when he finally went past the corridor and into the center of the circular room.

He looked at the few people in the air, searching for their books, and so he decided to do that as well.

Searching for anything related to the world, leaving alchemy and formations for later, Alex flew towards a section of the library that was filled with books about the world.

Some taught about geography, some that taught about plants and animals, some that taught about the history of the world, some that taught about famous peoples, and some that even taught about famous sects and locations.

Alex wanted to learn about geography, so he took out one related to it and flipped it.

However, when he did so, he realized that aside from the cover of the book, there was nothing else written in the whole book.

"What?" Alex spoke a little too loudly and got a lot of 'Shhh' directed as him.

"Sorry," he whispered as quietly as he could. He picked out some of the other books on the shelf and looked at them.

They were blank on the inside too. 'So the first book wasn't a mistake, huh?' he thought.

He kept back the other books and looked at the geography book again. He sent in his spiritual sense to see what it was, and that was when he noticed a seal on it.

A faint, white formation was placed on the book. Judging from the seal, Alex deduced that it was part of a bigger formation that was constantly giving the book's seal the power to continue working.

Very likely, it was the same formation that expanded the space in this building.

'They have quite a bit more knowledge about formations than I would've thought,' Alex said to himself and slowly floated down to the ground.

If there was a seal, that meant he would have to get it opened.

Alex walked to the center of the room towards where the librarians were and quietly asked, "excuse me, how do I get the seal removed from this book?"

The girl took the book from Alex's hands while looking at his robes and said, "it will cost you 150 spirit stones."

"Sorry… cost?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "It costs money?"

"Of course, sir," The girl said. "Books in here cost somewhere from 1 True spirit stones to 10, depending on the book."

Alex was stunned. Maybe because he was getting a little used to the books in the Capital's library being completely free, he didn't expect to have to pay here.

"I see," Alex said. Just then, a man walked up next to him and handed the same woman the book.

The girl removed the seal and noted something in a talisman that was inside the book before replacing the talisman and giving it back to the man.

The man walked away without paying at all.

"He didn't pay," Alex said, pointing to the man that just left.

"If you are a member of the Three Faction alliance, you do not need to pay," she said. "If you are, you can bring out an identity talisman, and you too can take a book a week for free."

"I see," he said and took out 2 True spirit stones. He handed them to the lady who handed him back 50 spirit stones.

She then released the seal and said, "You also can only read the book inside the library. Please don't try to take it outside."

Alex was a little surprised about that too, but he didn't let it show on his face. He understood that it was likely only the disciples and elders from the 3 sects that could take the books away.

Even though the number of people in the library was quite sparse —may it be because of today being the last day of the week, or libraries just not being that popular— Alex still went on to find a relatively less crowded section of the library.

Alex didn't use his spiritual sense to quickly read the book. He had nowhere to go, no need to log out, no need to go eat food or practice alchemy.

He had all the time in the world, so he used it to read and digest the book as he did.

He had paid for the book, and he would read end to end no matter how long it would take.

It took him about 25 minutes to read the whole book. However slow he may want to read the book, he was still a cultivator, one with exceptional mental strength and capacity.

Since there was no 'comprehension' required for the knowledge, he could simply read it all and learn it. And that only took him 25 minutes.

Alex was quite surprised at the information he gained from this one single book.

Alex first saw the map of the Luminance empire. It was about the same as what Yao Jia had shown him, but this was more clear than the hasty drawing on the dirt she had made.

The Luminance Empire was cone-shaped, its northern border nearly 3 times as large as its southern border. There were a lot of islands that floated around the empire too, some that were part of the empire, some that were not.
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The land was about 60% plane, while the rest 40% were mountainous. The mountains were clustered mostly along the eastern side of the empire, leaving the western half to be the plane that was home to the experts of the land.

The Radiant City, the capital city of the Luminance empire was located about 400 kilometers away from the western shore, and 2000 kilometers away from the southern shore.

Considering the Luminance empire was over 10 thousand kilometers in length and width, the capital was firmly located in the southwestern portion of the center of the city.

There were other many cities located around the empire, but most were located at the center or western side of the empire.

The eastern side of the mountain didn't seem to have a lot of cultivators willing to go there to settle.

The book read it was partly because of the many dangerous locations on the mountains that spanned from mountains with nothing but True beasts, to poisonous swamps that would even threaten to kill the True realm experts in the True emperor realm.

Alex also read about some mountain peaks that were so cold that most people couldn't even go near them without proper preparation.

Aside from those, there were also other various dangerous spots along those mountains known as the 'Dreaded Mountain range'.

That one book alone gave Alex a lot of information about this land that he would've likely never gained if he were to skip it for the internet if he still had access to it.

He nodded to himself at the information he learned and went back to the librarian to get it resealed and get another book to read after that.

Chapter 596 Fever

Alex continued reading some more books. After Geography, he went for History to learn not just about the land, but also the people that lived in it, the stories that took place in it.

He learned about how the Wei family, the current royal family of the Luminance empire came into existence, how their patriarch at the time used his exceptional poison art to win a war against other factions to become the emperor some 5000 years ago.

It also said that the patriarch then died fighting off invaders from other continents, although records of those fights were rather sparse.

It mentioned how the Families of the 7 colors came into existence. Alex read the name of the 7 great families and recognized 2 of them.

Fu family, a family that mostly used Fire techniques was the same Fu family as the one Fu Tao had been from.

They represented the Red color in the 7 colors, which consisted of Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Brown, Black, and White.

The royal Wei family donned the color purple, and could also be considered a pseudo-member of the Family of the 7 Colors, but they were far above the others in reputation, so only a few considered it.

Alex went on to read about the other historical events, one of which caught his eyes.

Nearly 1300 years ago, the western continent was shone bright with light from a meteor shower.

People from all over the empire said stories of the meteor striking close to them, and from those crash sites, people had discovered a lot of different types of weapons, artifacts, techniques, and many other things.

Alex reckoned that most consumables such as talismans and pills should have been destroyed by now, but the techniques and artifacts, as well as formations flags, should have been usable.

There were at least 3000 different instances of meteor strikes that were accounted for, and like more that weren't.

Alex wondered if there were some that he would be able to find as well, but he doubted that given how long it had been.

However, he did then read about secret realms popping up out of nowhere around most crash sites, especially in places that had a lot of different items in them, so he still had hope.

He then went on to read about the history of different sects and people that had appeared in the world. Most of the sect information only gave a vague description about the sects and Alex would likely have to find information about them from someplace else.

A few of the historical figures caught his eyes, but aside from them, there weren't a lot of extraordinary figures.

He continued reading for a little longer until the book ended up at the history of about a hundred years ago. Information about the last century would just be considered information and not history.

Alex wondered what he should read next and decided to go with a book that gave information on the various plants and beasts.

He knew most about the plants, but he read it with the hope that it would have more information than what he could find in the Crimson Empire.

As for beasts, with the lack of a game system to help guide him, every single piece of information would be vital for him.

He spent the next 4 hours learning about the plants and animals. After he was finished, he put those books back and decided to leave the library.

In total, he had spent about 22 True Spirit stones on those 4 books. While the one with geography didn't cost must, the others cost him somewhere between 5 and 8 True spirit stones.

Alex had also noticed a bunch of techniques in the library that he could learn from, but he decided not to get them and left.

When Alex walked out of the library, he was a little shocked.

"It's already night?" he thought as he looked around. The daylight had already disappeared, and darkness had taken its place.

The moon reigned high in the sky where the sun previously hung. It wasn't just evening, but actual night.

Alex wouldn't doubt it if someone told him it was close to midnight.

Still, it didn't look like it mattered that it was night. The city still roared and shouted like the lack of sunlight couldn't stop it.

Shops and services still were available everywhere Alex looked towards.

And for some reason, everyone else looked towards him as well. He couldn't walk 5 paces without someone turning their heads towards him.

They wouldn't linger on him for much longer, but he was starting to wonder why they were doing so.

'Am I that skinny looking?' he wondered as he checked his right hand. Indeed, he was skinny as a skeleton, but that should not bring this much attention back towards him.

'I should go cultivate more,' he thought, becoming more self-conscious towards his skinny body.

He could have gone to the Alchemy guild as he had wanted to, but he decided to go look for a tavern instead.

Avoiding the gazes of the people as much as possible, Alex located a place that said he could rent a place to stay.

It didn't look like a tavern, but Alex still went inside.

The moment he entered, the clerk looked towards him with his eyes narrowed.

"How may I help you, Fellow Daoist?" the man spoke.

"I'm looking for a place to stay," Alex said.

"We have places that cost 10 True spirit stones a month to places that cost 100 True Spirit stones a day. Which one would you like, Fellow Daoist?" the man asked.

Alex was a little surprised. The price difference was so much.

"What is the reason for such difference, if I may ask," Alex said.

"It's the facilities, fellow Daoist. As may be required, we have houses with training halls, Alchemy room, formation rooms, and other various rooms all fitted with top of the notch formations for your smooth rests and cultivation," the man said.

"Oh," Alex finally understood. He thought for a moment and realized he didn't need any of the facilities. He was going to spend most of the time outside of his house anyway and was also going to leave this town very soon anyway.

Still, he didn't want one that was completely worthless. So, he asked, "Is there one that costs about 10 spirit stones a week?"

"Of course, fellow Daoist," the man said as he handed Alex a talisman to look over.

When Alex looked at it, he was a little surprised. He hadn't expected the places he was going to rent to be actual houses on the outskirts of the town.

He had just expected them to be rooms in a tavern somewhere.

He looked through the list and chose one. "This," he said and told the man.

The man looked at it and nodded. "How many weeks would you like to stay, sir?" he asked.

Alex thought for a moment and asked a question of his own. "I heard there was an auction that was going to take place here soon. May I know when that is?"

"Yes, the Three Faction's auction will take place in 2 weeks," the man said.

"Then 2 weeks," Alex said and brought out 20 True spirit stones.

Once Alex got the talisman that acted as the key to the house, he was about to leave.

However, just as he turned around the man spoke once again.

"Fellow Daoist, do you want me to send a physician to your place as well? Our Three Faction alliance has the best physicians in town," the man said.

"Sorry?" Alex looked confused. "I don't need any physician."

The man's eyes widened. "My apologies. I didn't realize you were using a technique then. I assumed you had a fever. Please have a lovely stay."

Alex walked out of the location and frowned. Immediately, he drove his senses into his body to look for something he seemed to have completely skipped over.

Yang.

His body was radiating Yang like a man radiating heat when he had a fever. His body was giving of yang a lot more than previously either.

'I thought I had it under control,' he thought, but he had thought wrong. He realized that due to the last many days of constant cultivation, his constitution had gone out of control again.

'I need to go cultivate Yin,' he thought and left towards the new house he had rented.

Chapter 597 Ingredients

The people had stared at him because they thought he had a fever from the head he was radiating.

Had Alex realized that sooner, he would've found himself a place sooner than… midnight? Alex wasn't sure about the time either.

Without the time continuously blinking on the top right corner of his vision, Alex found it hard to gauge time.

'I should learn how to tell the time based on the position of the moon or stars,' he thought. 'Or maybe there were other ways people just knew.'

Alex sat down in a 4 by 4 meters room that was next to an alchemy room of the same size.

The house he had chosen came with 2 rooms, and the one he was in had a Qi Gathering formation that would be great for even someone in the True lord realm, let alone him with his True Disciple realm.

Although, it would be pretty useless since he would never be able to make a full rotation to gather any Qi in the area. The Yin Qi would likely dissolve into element-less Qi after coming into contact with Yang Qi.

Before starting his cultivation cycles, he looked at his body once more to see how much Yang he had been sending out.

Checking for the Yang was a weird sensation for Alex. Unless he was looking for it, Alex couldn't find the Yang anywhere at all on his body.

It felt normal for him like his body had no affinity at all. Fortunately, with his Supreme Yang spiritual root, he had some level of ability to sense his Yang.

'This is getting bad. I can't even tell when I'm releasing it a lot,' Alex thought. He feared that, just like his master, he too would have to spend months on end in closed cultivation to get his body constitution under control.

Hopefully, he was wrong about that.

He started cultivating, and very soon, he could feel the cold Qi lowering his body temperature to what was normal.

The first few cycles, he had to concentrate on it so that it didn't stop, but soon, he could do it without even thinking about it.

It became a muscle memory to him now. Still, he kept an eye on it so that he didn't accidentally start using the Five Yang Divine Path technique, which too had become muscle memory for him.

Once he was sure everything was going to go normally, he started thinking about the things he had to do.

The very first, most urgent thing that Alex needed to do was find a way to heal his arm.

The Saint Body Regeneration pill that could do so had 12 ingredients to it.

Winevein Poppy, Trileaved Periwinkle Leaf, Dried Torenia flower, Saint Blueflame Monkey's blood, Saint Hotfeather Eagle's tail feather, Ghostbane leaf, Two-headed Hydra's poison, Steelfur Rabbit's tendons, Seeking Mouse's whiskers, Blood Spirit ginseng, Azure Thimble twinflower, and finally, Three-colored Poison Lily.

His first task towards healing his arm without having to wait until he reached Saint realm and maybe find some ingredients here and there was to downgrade each of the ingredients to its True rank equivalent.

Thorny Bugloss, Silverstring Diascia, and Auburn Rue's seeds were 3 ingredients that were already downgraded for him by the Royal Alchemist thanks to his book.

For the rest, he was given some idea on how to.

For beast-related ingredients, Alex didn't have to worry much. For beasts that were named Saint before their ingredient, he could just use the True beasts of the same name.

For example, Saint BlueFlame Monkey's blood could be replaced with the blood of a Blueflame Monkey in the True Realm.

Similarly, Saint Hotfeather Eagle's Tail feather could also be replaced with one from a True Hotfeather Eagle.

As for the other two beasts in the list, those being the Two-Headed Hydra, and Steelfur rabbit, they were already in True realms, so Alex could downgrade them to Common realm, but it was better to keep them in the true realm.

Of the remaining 5 ingredients, as far as Alex knew, Ghostbane leaf and Azure Thimble twinflower weren't saint rank ingredients but True rank ingredients.

So, he wouldn't have to convert those either.

That left Seeking Mouse's whiskers, Blood spirit Ginseng, and Three-Colored Poison lily.

Alex had never heard of these three ingredients before today. Meaning, after today, he knew what they were.

Seeking mouse was as he had expected, a beast. But, it wasn't the type of beast he had expected. The thing with Seeking Mouse was that it didn't have a cultivation base and was just a normal mouse.

That wasn't to say its body contained no Qi at all. It wouldn't be an ingredient without any Qi or energy in it.

Seeking mouse, while not rare, were primarily used by people to scout places for them, seeking ruins, tombs, and other treacherous places.

So, they were usually in high demand and cost a lot. Alex was sure he would be able to get them, but, he would have to either go out searching for them on his own, or fight tooth and nail against someone in an auction to bid for it.

Three-colored Poison Lily was a poison flower that bloomed in the poisonous swamps of the Dreaded mountain range.

The number of colors in the flower denoted its potency and rank as well. Three colors meant it was a saint rank ingredient. So, for a true rank equivalent, he would just have to find a Two-Colored Poison Lily to be a True rank equivalent.

Finally, the Blood Spirit ginseng. This one Alex was most stuck on. He had, quite frankly, no idea what it even was. He had read about it in the books, but they weren't very helpful aside from what it was and what it did.

Its main usage was in restoring blood from what the book said. Aside from that, it mentioned nothing of where it could be found or how it could be found.

Alex would have to rely on his luck to find it. And then, he would have to somehow find an equivalent of that.

That was going to be very hard.

He had heard of Spirit ginseng, which was a Common rank ingredient, so it couldn't likely be the equivalent True rank ingredient.

He had also heard of Revitalizing Ginseng, which was supposed to make a Psuedo-Saint pill. While that was likely a True rank ingredient, there was a very high chance that was not the ingredient he was going to need.

Alex sent his spiritual sense into the storage bag to look through his ingredients.

Aside from dried Torenia flowers, he would have to find all the other 11 ingredients on his own.

That meant, he would have to go visit the Alchemy guild tomorrow morning.

He continued cultivating until he could feel a lot of his yang going down. After a full night of cultivation, his body's aura had died down by a significant amount.

It didn't help him heal his meridians though, as that could only be done using his other cultivation technique.

One saw the sunrise up outside with his spiritual sense, he did the final thing he had trained himself to do each day.

That was to go into his mind and collect all the floating silver threads. He wasn't sure why he was doing this, or if it was even of any use.

But, he still did it regardless of if he cultivated that day or not.

After he finished collecting the hundreds of floating threads in the air, that did nothing whatsoever to reduce the size of the silver mountain in his spiritual sea, he moved over to the crystal ball floating next to him.

Tiny amounts of black sludge floated around the crystal, making it opaque. As usual, Ning cleared the black sludge just in case that was what gave the Godslayer his tempting power.

Once he was done, he left his spiritual sea to train for a bit.

His training only involved using his spiritual sense to form a weapon and then try to use it.

He put forth his right hand as an illusory, misty white sword appeared on it that was almost transparent.

Alex looked at the sword and tried to grab it with his hands again, but as usual, that was impossible.

"What is going on? Am I not supposed to grab it?" he thought. The technique he read told nothing about how difficult it would be to grab this sword.

By now, Alex had come to realize that the technique was very much incomplete.

After an hour of training, doing nothing but making spiritual weapons of various other shapes, Alex left his new house and walked towards the Alchemy guild.

The town looked a little busier in the day today. Perhaps because most people had left for the Northern forest yesterday, Alex hadn't seen as many people.

As he walked past the fresh-smelling food, the chatter of the people, and the calls of the salesmen trying to sell others their goods and services, Ning came across a group of people with particularly boisterous voices.

"Fellow Daoists, please donate some spirit stones if you can. It will only go to the mentally challenged cultivators," they shouted.

'Mentally challenged?' Alex was surprised. He didn't know that was even possible for a cultivator who could heal from everything with the right ingredients.

"Please sir, would you like to donate?" the person saw Alex looking at them and directly asked him.

With no choice, Alex walked up to them and asked, "when you say mentally challenged, what are you talking about exactly?"

"Oh, sir must not know. There have been recently a group of people that suddenly forgot who they were and claim to have come here from another world."

"Most of them had integrated into the society, but some just can't work well at all. We are hoping to help them," the man said.

"Ah," Alex understood. They were trying to help the players.

Chapter 598 Hopeless Players

"Ah, are these the people that call themselves players?" Alex asked curiously. It had to be.

"Yes," the man said. "Would you like to help, fellow Daoist?"

"Yes, yes," Alex said, bringing out some True spirit stones. He handed them to the man who looked at him with a hint of shock in his eyes.

People usually didn't donate 40 True spirit stones for their causes.

"Thank you," the man said.

"It's alright. I'm a player myself, so I can understand what they are going through," Alex said.

"Ah, you were one of them as well?" the man asked with a raised eyebrow. "I'm happy to see that you are doing fine."

"Yes," Alex said. "Do most people not deal properly with this?"

The man shook his head. "Breaking down and crying all day long is one of the better scenarios. Given how fast these people breakthrough, it's always a positive if they don't decide to go on a rampage out of their minds."

"They say they just want to go home. Some... even end up killing themselves to do so," the man said.

Alex felt terrible. Knowing that he was the reason for this, albeit unintentionally, wasn't a very good feeling.

"Is it possible for me to visit these people? I just want to speak to them," Alex said.

The man looked towards the lady who was busy calling other people for donations and looked back to say, "sure, fellow Daoist. Come with me," the man said and took him to a giant building behind him.

Alex followed the man and entered the house. Before even entering, he had sent his spiritual sense inside and saw a lot of people, with various levels of cultivation base, ranging from people in Muscle Tempering to people in the True King realm.

Alex entered the house and saw the group of people, huddled around together, all life lost from their eyes.

He wondered if that would have been him as well had he not retained the memories.

The people looked at him, but there was no curiosity in their eyes. They didn't care who he was or why he was here. They just wanted to go home.

"Can I speak to them in private, brother?" Alex asked.

The man hesitated for a bit, not sure if he should let him.

"Please, I'm someone like them and understand their problem. I just want to help them," he said.

The man still hesitated, but gave up in the end and walked outside. However, Alex could sense him listening through the door.

Alex smiled. He brought out a metal plate from his storage and threw it onto the ground, creating a sound barrier around him and the other players.

Finally, the players looked concerned and got defensive.

"Don't worry, I'm not here to hurt you," Alex said. "I'm a player as well, and I want to help you all."

"A player?" the men and women finally stirred curiously.

"Yes, and I am here to bring you... a little information," Alex said. He was about to say hope, but... he wasn't sure the information he was about to give could even give them any hope.

After all, he was going to have to omit the part of the information that did give hope.

"The day you guys regained your control and realized you were in the Luminance empire, a person comes to the city I was to speak to us," Alex said.

The people listened intently, wondering what he was going to say.

"That person was a close acquaintance of the creator of the game," Alex continued. Curiously peaked to levels previously that could be thought impossible amidst these people.

"She gave me a bit of information that I have already spread in the home city, and I am going to give you that same information."

"There is no way back home right now," Alex said, immediately pouring water on everyone that had become somewhat hopeful.

"But there will be one in about 40 years," Alex said. "But in 40 years, the world back home won't be the one you left behind. It would have moved on."

"Home... is not what you should be seeking right now. What you should be seeking is survival."

"You can either stay around for 40 years and go back home, or you can make a new life right here, right now."

"Either way, you will have to get up and get to work. You can't live off of others forever," Alex said.

"Also, do not worry about your family. While... you were stuck here, the person that was previously controlling your body, a clone of yours is back at home, taking care of everyone," Alex said.

"Are you... telling the truth?" the people asked.

"Did the empire send you perhaps?" some other people asked him.

"Nobody sent me. My name is Alex Benton, from Mapleleaf city, currently living in Oakleaf city to study at the Oakleaf university. I have a mother and father who didn't play the game, so like most of you, I worry about them too."

"But then, I remember that a version of me is out there, looking after them, so my worries fade away. I hope yours do too," Alex said.

"Brother," one man said. "I... I have a wife. She plays the game too. So, she should be stuck in the game as well, right?"

"Ah," Alex thought. "What continent was she in?"

"She said it was the Northern Continent," the man said.

"If you want to see your wife, your children, your friends, and families that might be in the other continents, then you will have to get out of here and cultivate to get stronger. If you reach the highest highs of cultivation, you can easily go search for your family members," Alex said. "Do you not want to?"

"Yes, I do," one man said.

"I do too," another woman said.

"Can we reach the peak of cultivation? I... don't think I even understand what cultivation even is really," a young lady about the age of Alex said.

"That I cannot help you in," Alex said. "Everyone had their own path to forge. I have my own. But, you are not alone. Like the people outside, there will be many that will help you on your path."

"Accept the help you receive and help each other. That way, you will surely reach the peak of cultivation," Alex said.

The group started speaking in murmurs and soon one person stood up. "I still have a bit of doubt about your words, but you are right, sitting around doing nothing is not the way to go."

"That's right," another person stood up.

A few people stood up after them, but the majority still stayed down, unsure what they wanted to do.

"No need to rush. You can take your time," Alex said. 'You have so much of it anyway.'

He then picked up the formation plate from below him and got rid of his connection to it.

Suddenly, the sound barrier was destroyed and the person outside finally heard sounds. He realized something had been wrong and immediately walked in.

When he did, he saw the group of people on their feet, their eyes shining with motivation.

"What did you do," the man asked.

"Told them the thing they needed to hear," Alex said and turned towards them once again. "Make sure to spread those words elsewhere too. There should be many people that need it."

Alex left. The working man followed him outside.

"Thank you for what you're doing," Alex said.

"No... the problem," the man was still a little confused as to what had just happened in there. "It's the Royal decree after all."

"Oh, is it?" Alex was a little surprised. "Then can I expect a lot of people to be helped similarly in other cities too?"

"Yes," the man said.

"I see. Still, you have my thanks," Alex said and left. He had helped the players as much as he could while keeping some information to himself.

He didn't tell them that their home was in this world. If the news spread that the fifth continent had people living, who knew what the people from the other continents would do.

He felt it necessary to keep just that piece of information hidden.

Alex walked through the busy streets and finally reached the Alchemy guild that he had meant to come here since yesterday.

He walked into an open hall of people walking in and out of it. There was a reception at the center with 4 to 5 people working on it with a queue on each of those lines like people waiting for their turns at a bank.

Two giant, circular pillars held the ceiling that was nearly 10 meters high. Alex saw two doors on either side of the reception that led to... somewhere.

Alex got into a queue and waited for his turn.

"How many I help you, Fellow Daoist?" the lady at the reception asked him when it was his turn.

Alex handed her a talisman and said, "I'm looking to buy any of these ingredients."

The receptionist looked at the list and compared it to something else she read through using a metal plate that didn't look so different from the nameplate that the Hong Wu sect used.

"We have Winevein Poppy and Hotfeather Eagle's tail feather," the lady said.

Alex smiled. That was 2 more ingredients down.

"I would like to buy them please," Alex said.

"Yes," the receptionist said. "These will be 12 True Spirit Stones in total. You can get some discounts if you have an Alchemist's badge."

"A... discount?"

Chapter 599 Alchemist Guild

"I can get a discount?" Alex asked curiously. While he had enough money, for now, to buy the ingredients 10 times over and not worry about it, he wasn't going to go around spending the most for it.

Every single spirit stone he didn't have to pay, was a spirit stone he could use to buy something else. Perhaps, something more important.

"Yes, Fellow Daoist. If you have an Alchemist badge, you can get a discount," the woman said.

"Oh," Alex's hopes got crushed. "I'm afraid I have nothing like that."

He brought out the 12 spirit stones as asked for and handed them to the woman.

The woman looked into her metal plate again, and suddenly, on top of the counter where Alex hadn't noticed a formation before, two wooden boxes appeared out of nowhere.

"Here you go, Fellow Daoist," she said.

Alex took the box and looked into it to see 3 sets of each of the two ingredients. The poppy and the feather made the same names pop up in his head as well as the age of the ingredients.

The poppy was about 49 years old, while the feather was about 88 years old. They had most likely come from the same plant and bird.

Alex fell into thought as he saw that information. He knew that ingredients with greater age had a higher potency, but he wasn't sure how useful age was in Alchemy beyond that.

He would have to look up information on that later.

"Do you need anything else, Fellow Daoist?" the lady asked.

"Um, yes. Can you please explain to me about this... Alchemist badge?" Alex asked.

The lady nodded and got to explain.

The alchemist badge was something an alchemist would gain after joining the Alchemist guild. With it, the Alchemists would gain a lot of different benefits that a normal Alchemist would just dream of.

For one, Alchemists could forget about gathering ingredients, worrying about finding customers or finding a place to sell their pills.

It would all be handled by the guild. All an alchemist would have to do is take on missions and make the pills.

The other benefit that alchemists would get was less price while buying ingredients. Since the Alchemist guild was the main source of ingredients, aside from the occasional auctions. Alchemists benefited from this a lot.

There was also the factor of security. Hurting or offending one alchemist usually meant offending all alchemists in the guild. If an Alchemist complained about a customer, it was likely that the customer could never get another pill made from any alchemist that was part of the guild.

Alex found all of these benefits to be quite amazing. But...

"I'm planning on leaving this place soon. Will that... create problems at all?" he asked.

"Oh, no Fellow Daoist. Alchemist guild is available in all regions of the land. Where ever there is a city or town, we are available."

Alex nodded. "I see."

'So it's like a bank huh? I won't have to worry about being stuck to a single alchemist guild then,' he thought.

"I would like to become an Alchemist of the Alchemist guild then," he said.

The lady nodded and brought out a talisman for him to fill. "It will cost you 20 True spirit stones," the lady said.

"I have to pay, huh?" he thought and casually brought out another 20 True spirit stones. The benefits of getting in were enough for the price.

Alex took it talisman and moved to the side. He put his spiritual sense to fill the first thing and...

Name.

Alex froze. The first thing it had asked for was a name. What name should he give?

If it was right after he had gained freedom, he would've put in the name Alex without any hesitation.

However, now he wasn't sure if giving out his real name to the world, announcing that he was a player was a good idea or not.

Players were supposed to have lost knowledge of who they were, knowing nothing of cultivation to an extent. If he suddenly showed up like an alchemist that could make high-grade pills, the people would get really suspicious.

He couldn't imagine how many people would come to talk to him. Some may even try to kidnap him if they realize that a lot of the players had above-average body and spirit roots.

"No, I can not put in Alex," he thought and put in 'Yu Ming' as his name. The better he hid, the better his chances of survival.

Besides, he was already used to the name.

He then went on to the rest of the information. It was normal information the guild wanted, like your age, your cultivation base, your affiliations, and your highest pill level.

Alex filled almost everything truthfully. He put 19 for age, True Disciple 3rd realm for cultivation base, and None for affiliations.

However, for the highest pill, he decided to go with a safer choice. While he had made a heaven-grade True pill before, it was more luck than anything.

Still, the best would be above 40%. For a young man that didn't even hit 20, this would likely be an amazing feat even in the Luminance empire.

So, he went with 27% harmony. He would have to make some intentional mistakes, but that would be necessary to stay under the radar.

Once Alex was done with the talisman, he returned back to the reception and handed it over to the lady, along with the payment.

The lady scanned it and showed a hint of surprise on her face. She reached into her storage bag and brought out another talisman.

"This will be the pill you will have to make in the test, senior. You will be given 3 sets to make the pills. Please memorize it by 3 days when the test takes place," the lady said.

'Senior?' Alex was a little surprised to see the lady go from 'fellow Daoist to 'senior'.

'Did she not realize my cultivation base before this?' he chuckled a little.

Once he got what he wanted from the Alchemy guild, he took off towards the Library once more, where he would learn about various other things.

Three days later, on the morning of the day when his Alchemist guild's test was to take place, Alex sat in his room, having just been done with absorbing the threads in his spiritual sea and clearing the black sludge around the crystal.

Once he was done, he went onto the final part of his cultivation, which was the training part.

Pearl was moving around the room, having finally started cultivating with Alex after his Yang energy had significantly died down.

Alex focused on his right hand as energy slowly released from his mind as a formless misty white substance that was only visible to him.

It had taken him a while to realize that the only reason he could even see it was because he was using his spiritual sense to control it.

Pearl had asked him what he was doing the other day, and that was what had led him to this discovery. At the same time, he had also discovered that others could see this energy if they used their spiritual sense as well.

Alex took a deep breath and concentrated. Within a matter of seconds, the formless misty-white energy took the shape of the steel sword he used to own.

He looked at the sword with a wry smile on his face. He had tried to grab it again, but as usual, it wouldn't work.

He tried with Qi as well, but that didn't work either. He was still stumped on how to get it to—

"Wait," he thought as he thought of something. "No way it's that easy."

If it were, he would be a fool to not have thought of it before today.

Alex slowly closed his hand around the handle of the newly made sword, but he made no effort to grab it.

Instead, he moved his hand as if he were holding a real sword. At the same time, he imagined the sword moving along with his hand.

His hand moved away towards the right, while the sword remained where it was. However, as if it was lagging a bit, the sword moved as well and arrived at the place where his hands had come to just a second later.

"Holy Shit! I'm an idiot!" Alex cursed himself. All this time, he had tried using physical and elemental effort to move the sword, but not a single time had he thought of moving it with his mind.

He had been expecting it to be an actual weapon, but he should have known.

He tried moving the sword around for a few minutes, but it was hard. His body wasn't used to thinking of moving something instead of actually doing it.

His hands always ended up moving before the sword did. He tried moving it without using his hands, but that was beyond hard.

Not having something like his hand to guide the sword, he had a hard time visualizing the sword's movement.

Finally, after failing at it for a while, he resorted to using his hand to guide again.

Then, he stopped.

It was about time to go back to the Alchemist guild for his test today. He vaguely remembered the time he had taken the test for the Hong Wu sect.

Was that him or the other guy? The memories had started to become so vivid that it was hard to tell now.

He felt like it was still him for a day or two during the early days. So, he might have been the one that actually took the test there.

A smile appeared on Alex's face. He was looking forward to this examination.

Chapter 600 Alarm

Alex appeared in the Alchemist guild early in the morning. He sat on the chairs laid around the corner of the guildhall, next to a massive board with moving letters on it, reminding him of the ranking stone, and Contribution hall back in the Hong Wu sect.

Next to him were a few people gathered there as well, all of whom either wore a green robe, marking the, from the Fire Spirit sect or wore either an Iron or a Bronze colored badge around their chest that Alex had come to know to be the Alchemist badge.

Because of this, Alex doubted they were all here for the same thing.

Of the 13 present, including himself, some were here to enter the guild like him but as a Common Rank alchemist, while he was to become a True rank Alchemist.

Others were here to take a test to show their advancements to show that they had advanced enough to make a higher grade pill.

Alex wondered if there were any True-Earth Alchemists that were trying to ascend to become True Heaven Alchemists.

Although, in such a small town, that would likely be impossible. Still, he couldn't deny that this small town would likely be one of the better cities in the Crimson Empire.

He slowly scanned everyone's badge with his spiritual sense and noticed one person with an elderly face that had a silver badge around his chest with the word 'True' written on it.

Iron badges were for Mortal grade alchemists, while Bronze badges were for Earth grade alchemists. Going by the same logic, Alex figured Silver badges would be for Heaven grade alchemists, and Gold for Immortal grade alchemists.

Immortal grade… did those alchemists even exist? Alex thought they had to. After all, he had been one when he was a Common Rank alchemist.

Suddenly, he heard footsteps and stirred. The other men and women that had been there stirred a little as well.

Alex saw two people walk out of the door to the left of the reception.

Of the two, the male wore a green robe with a silver badge hung around his neck that said the word 'Common', while the female wore a light blue robe that didn't seem to belong to any factions.

She wore a necklace of bronze color, that said the word 'True'.

The man staggered a step behind the woman and stopped to let her move forward.

Alex glanced at them and got a general estimate of their cultivation base.

The man that looked to be a bit over 25 years old was in the Mind Tempering 6th realm, while the woman who seem to be of the same age was at True Master 9th realm.

Although, Alex was likely wrong on the woman's cultivation base as he wasn't used to sensing the cultivation base of people whose cultivation base was so high above his own.

The woman took out a list and then turned her head to look at them.

"I am Han Sha, and this is Jin Tiangshen. We will be your examiner for today."

"Those taking the Common Alchemist test, please follow him. Those who are taking the True Alchemist test. Please follow me."

The woman said nothing else and took off towards the right doorway of the reception.

Alex, along with 3 other people followed the woman to an open area.

Once she stopped, she turned around and looked at the only figure among the group of four, without a badge.

"You, is this your first time?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said, a little surprised that she cared. From how little she spoke until now, he was sure she was only here because it was her duty.

"I'm sorry, but you will have to take a little different test," she said.

"Eh? Why am I being singled out?" Alex asked at the unfairness.

"Since we don't know if you are truly an alchemist, we will have to test you by having you make a common pill first," she said. "We would rather not have you destroy True rank ingredients just in case."

"I see," Alex said. He was a little irritated, but he understood the logic behind it.

4 people walked in front of the side, all of them around the Bone Tempering realm of cultivation base.

Each of them held a box in their hands with a formation carved on the metal lid.

Alex understood what it was. He sighed and brought out his storage bags. At the same time, the other 3 who had been through this process already, brought out their storage bags as well.

A young man appeared in front of Alex and took his storage bags.

"Please use your Qi to lock the box," the woman said. The 4 of them did as they were said.

"These 4 will be your aid in today's test, as well as the invigilators," the woman said. "They already have the ingredients for your test, so you three may go take the test right now."

The 3 of the other examinees left.

Alex stood there and waited for his turn. "Do you have any pill you would like to make?" she asked.

"Any is fine really," Alex said. It was a common rank pill, so he didn't have to worry about it at all.

"Okay, then choose one," she said.

Alex thought of a random pill and said, "Purple Dream Pill".

Han Sha nodded and took out her talisman to call for someone. Moments later, a man rushed to her with a storage bag.

Han Sha took the storage bag and handed it to the aid, rather than him. Alex took notice of that.

"You may go in," she said.

Alex nodded and turned towards one of the rooms on the side of the hall they were in, which was an Alchemy room.

He walked up to the door and saw that it needed a key, which his aid produced from somewhere, and placed it there.

Then, Alex walked in.

RING RING RING

Suddenly, as if alarms going off, a red light flashed in the room he was about to enter while releasing a loud ringing sound.

"Huh?" Alex stepped back. To say he wasn't surprised would be to lie.

"What's this?" he asked.

"Are you hiding a storage bag on you?" Han Sha said with a frowning face. She had already sent her Qi sense to sense his outer body and had sensed no storage bag, so she only got angrier.

"What? No, I don't have any," Alex said, which he was telling the truth.

"No way, you are hiding it somewhere," the woman claimed. "That formation there is meant to find a storage bag."

"But I really don't have—" Alex stopped, but he still finished his sentence, "—any."

He had right at the end of his sentence remembered the golden ring with the large ruby-like gemstone attached to it.

According to Lady Ren, and an implication from Hao Ya, he had learned that the ring was a storage ring.

Was that what had caused the ringing? He was surprised that the formation in the room could sense something even his spiritual sense hadn't noticed when he was in the Mind Tempering realm.

As a True Disciple realm cultivator, all he could notice was 'something fishy' about the ring at best. He felt like commending the formation maker but now was not the time.

"Then why did the alarms go off?" Han Sha demanded.

"I don't know," Alex said. "Look," he said as he stripped the upper robe and placed it on the ground next to him, revealing his skinny body with a missing left arm.

"See? I don't have anything," he said, showing his empty body and empty hands.

The woman looked closely and even used her Qi sense more aggressively to look through his entire body. However, she couldn't find anything and looked confused.

"You really don't have any?" she said.

"Yes," Alex said, picking up robes again. The lady had already scanned the robe, but she didn't find anything there either. Aside from the randomly thrown ring inside of it, that is.

But, that ring gave her no suspicion at all.

"Okay," she said, giving them permission to go back to the room.

Alex nodded and returned back to the room, but once again, the alarms went off.

"See?" Alex said.

Han Sha frowned, but she wasn't able to tell what was wrong.

"I should wear this," Alex said and wore his robe, but didn't put on his ring.

"By the way, Can I open that box for once, brother?" Alex said as he opened the box before the man could say anything.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Oh, I forgot to take out my cauldron," Alex said.

"You won't be needing it. You will be using a normal cauldron, like everyone else," she said.

Alex already knew that. He had sensed the cauldron in the other room and knew that was how the test was going to be taken.

"Very well," he said, closing the box. At the same time, he slipped his ring into the box.

"Let's go. I don't have all the time in the world," Alex said and went towards the door.

Without his storage ring, there wouldn't be any probl—

RING RING RING

"What the hell?" Alex was very surprised now. At first, he had it was his storage ring that was causing the alarm.

But now he knew what the cause was.

"This is a broken formation, isn't it?" he asked out loud.

Han Sha's frown deepened. She was an alchemist, not a formation expert, so she couldn't respond to his claims.

She looked at the other rooms and her frown only got deeper. Because there were 4 participants in today's exam, they had only bothered to activate 4 of the Alchemy rooms' exam formation.

She couldn't go and ask them to activate another one as that would take some time. She didn't have much.

She wasn't going to spend more than 2 hours on this exam, and waiting for that would have would cause it to get longer.

In the end, she sighed. "Give me your key," she said to the young man holding the body.

The young man took out his key from around his neck and handed it to Han Sha. Han Sha then handed it to Alex and said, "get it."

Alex wore the metal key around his neck and walked in. This time, the formation made no alarming sound, giving him some relief.

He looked at the small alchemy room with a… surprisingly above average cauldron in the center.

He walked up to the cauldron as he heard the door shut behind him. He sat down and looked to the side, and his face changed a little.

"What are you doing?" he asked Han Sha who held his box and a few storage bags.

Han Sha sat down next to him and said, "To ensure that you do not cheat, I will be working as your aid and invigilator today."

Chapter 601 Pass

Alex was a little surprised, but he shrugged his shoulders and let her do whatever she wanted.

He looked at the iron cauldron in front of him, way better than the black cauldrons that he would find in the Crimson Empire.

He looked around and saw the lid propped against the wall not far from him. With a thought, the lid flew towards him and stayed to the side.

Then, he got to cleaning the cauldron. Who knew what sort of pills were made in this cauldron, so the first thing he needed to do was remove the powders that may be stuck on the inside of the cauldron.

Han Sha looked at him weirdly but didn't say anything. Every alchemist had their own thing that they would do before making a pill.

"So I should start with the common pill right?" he asked her.

Han Sha nodded and handed him the storage bag that had the ingredients for the common pill.

Alex increased the fire beneath the cauldron to prepare to make the Purple dream pill.

Han Sha's face suddenly turned weird. 'Why is he putting on the lid?' she asked himself. Not a single one of the different alchemists she knew would ever close the lid.

Alex ignored her and put in the first ingredient. He used his spiritual sense to look at what was happening inside and moved it around.

'Oh…' Alex thought as he moved the ingredients. He realized that information of the ingredient, the shape of it to be exact, was being sent to Alex.

The shape was quite important for the structure of the pill, but he wasn't sure why he was getting that information. Did he get that information before?

Only then did he come to realize that this was the first time he made a common pill. All the other times he made a common pill, the memories he had weren't his own.

The experience felt so much like his own that he had mistaken it.

He would have to be extra careful now.

Just slightly off the timing, Alex put in the second ingredient. He hoped that was good enough to make enough mistakes that he didn't accidentally create an Immortal grade pill.

The information of this ingredient's shape was also getting back to him through his spiritual sense. In the back of his head, he was almost sure that if he slowed down the motion of the 2nd ingredient while lowering the heat at the same time, the shape of the powder would be a different shape.

This continued for all the different ingredients that he put in after that. The shape and a mild hint of what could be if he tweaked the recipe around floated into his head.

When he was done in the end, he took out the pill from the cauldron and gave it to Han Sha.

At the same time, he closed his eyes and started thinking of what had happened.

'The shapes… if I can change it… will I be able to better fit them together?' Alex wondered.

No-Gap. He remembered what the Royal Alchemist had told him. If he could remove the gap from a pill, its harmony would shoot up.

'I see,' he thought. His ability to improve a common pill that he thought was automatic was not. It was all based on his instinct and knowledge that he would have to use to make a recipe whose powders would fall into the perfect shape.

"67%!" Han Sha said with a bit of a shock. "You are not a bad Alchemist," she said.

Her record for a common pill was around 70% after reaching the True realm. On a normal day, however, it would be around 50-55%.

Seeing Alex casually make such a high-grade pill so casually hit her pride a little. 'And here I made an implication that he wasn't an Alchemist.'

She waited for Alex to start, but he kept his eyes closed. She wondered what he was doing, but then he opened his eyes.

He seemed to have a bit of understanding about something. 'Did he go through an enlightening? No way, that was too quick,' she thought.

"Will you continue?" she asked.

"Ah yes," Alex said and cleared the cauldron again before asking for the ingredients.

Han Sha handed it to him and waited for him to start.

Alex thought back to the recipe of the new pill called Clear Eyes0 Pill. According to the recipe, it was a pill that would help magnify the vision in one's eyes to see everything around them more clearly.

Alex had remembered the Royal Alchemist using a similar pill and had wondered if it was the same pill.

It was a useless pill to anyone with a spiritual sense, but to a normal cultivator, it could come in quite handy.

Alex waited for the cauldron to reach the appropriate temperature before putting in the first ingredient.

As he moved the ingredients around, Alex nodded to himself internally when no information of the shape appeared in his mind despite looking at the shape directly with his strained spiritual sense.

He understood that the Alchemy God's Knowledge technique was also responsible for what happened during common pill making aside from just his instincts.

Or, it would be better to say that the technique was honing his instinct to realize what he did.

He put away those thoughts for now and focused on making the Clear Eyes pill.

As Alex put the 2nd ingredient in, he wondered where he should make the mistake. It was certain that he didn't want to get a Silver badge, but he also didn't want to make enough mistakes to not even reach the Earth grade.

So, he only made a small mistake every 2 ingredients. He decided to make the rest of the mistake later on.

As the combination of powders swirled around inside the cauldron, finally it was time to gather them all and make the pill.

The pill forming process went normally, but when it came time for the Elemental Guidance technique to move the energy through the pill, he slackened off a bit.

Instead of giving his 100%, he gave 85%. With the mistakes he had made before, he was sure that he would get a good harmony that would fit where he wanted to be.

So, he opened the lid and pulled out the pill. When the pill fell on his hand, he smiled.

Perfect.

He gave it to Han Sha, who was about to snatch it from his hands if he didn't and put it in the Pill tester.
New n0vel chapters are published on

The pill tester looked a little different from what it would in the Crimson Empire, its shape was more cylindrical, rather than conical, it still had the same metal plate on the bottom, making it more or less the same item.

The fog rose on this one as well as it quickly crossed 10%. Han Sha watched as the fog rose until it passed 20% as well.

When it went past 25%, she looked shocked. Finally, it stopped at 30%.

She put down the pill tester and cupped her fist and bowed towards him a little. "Congratulations on becoming a True Earth Alchemist," she said.

"Thank you," Alex said as he stood up from the spot.

Han Sha looked a little surprised. "Are you not going to make the other 2 pills?" she asked.

"No need, I got what I wanted," Alex said and walked away.

He took back his storage bags and ring and walked out of the room with Han Sha.

"Thank you for your time, sister Han," Alex said with a little bow.

Han Sha nodded a little and looked to the side. One of the participants seems to have been done already.

"Please wait around, we will start the ceremony after all the tests are complete," she said.

Alex nodded and waited. Of the remaining girl and old man, the girl seemed to have failed as she walked out dejectedly, while the old man looked happy as though he had passed.

Once they were all there, a small ceremony took place to mark their entrance or ascension in rank in the Alchemist Guild.

Alex was given a Bronze badge that said 'True' at the front. He sent his spiritual sense into the badge and as expected, it worked exactly like a nameplate did, marking his name, age, current mission, and…

"Contribution point?" Alex looked surprised. He didn't know he would have to contribute to the guild, but on second thought, it made sense.

Han Sha gave a brief explanation of what they could and could not do.

One thing that caught his ears that made him intrigued was that most clients would give about 2 or 3 sets of ingredients per pill they wanted to get made.

If you could make the pill in one set at the harmony they demanded, you could keep the rest of the ingredients.

'That's quite nifty,' he thought.

Once the explanation was over, they all left. Alex decided to immediately get to work with making the pills for the various missions.

He went out to the reception hall, his new bronze badge on his chest. People who saw him now looked at him with an eye of respect all because of the badge.

Alex walked towards the board on the right of the hall with the various moving letters on it.

He attached his badged onto an engraving on the wooden wall, and suddenly he was aware of all the different missions he could take on.

The board only showed missions he was eligible to make, so he could choose any he wanted to.

When he chose a mission, his connection with the mission board suddenly vanished.

Chapter 602 Big Pearl

Alex tried to reconnect, but only a single piece of information came back to him.

-Please complete the current mission-

"Ah right, it's one mission at a time," Alex thought. He walked to an alchemy room that was free for anyone with a badge to use and sat down.

In less than a minute, a girl walked in with a storage bag. "Do you need an air, sir alchemist?" the girl asked.

"It's fine, you can leave," Alex said. The girl bowed and left. Alex closed the door and looked at the storage bag.

Inside the storage bag were 4 different types of items.

Ingredients, Recipe, Pill Tester, and Pill bottle.

Alex didn't necessarily have to use it all from this bag, but the guild gave it to him for convenience's sake.

Alex took out the recipe first of all and read the recipe. As soon as he glanced at it, the information was firmly lodged into his mind.

Then, he looked through the ingredients and made sure they were all good.

Finally, he looked into his badge again.

[

Name: Yu Ming

Age: 19

Rank: True Earth Alchemist

Contribution: 0

Current Mission: Prepare a Soul Lifting pill of 25% or higher.

]

25% or higher. Alex had 3 chances to get that level of pill given that there were 3 sets of ingredients in the storage bag.

Most people would likely try to make some pill that was higher in harmony, but Alex didn't care for that.

The only reason you would make a very high harmony pill when not required was to make a name for yourself amongst the civilians.

The clients could always request a specific alchemist to make a pill. For those times, you wanted yourself to have a reputation.

Alex wasn't going to be staying here for much longer. Gaining a reputation thus was the least of his worries.

He brought out his Golden Jade cauldron and started making the Soul Lifting pill.

In 1 hour, he ended up making all of the 3 pills with 3 different harmonies of 32%, 36%, and 37%.

For a pill whose recipe he had only seen just now, he had made the quite good quality of pills. If he continued with it, he would likely reach 40% very soon, but he didn't have the ingredients for that.

Alex took the 36% and 37% pills for himself and put the 32% pill in the pill bottle.

He went to the staff that worked like the reception, but only for the alchemists, and handed them the bag and his badge.

Once they confirmed that the mission was complete, they rewarded him for the mission.

36 True spirit stones. The reward was originally meant to be 40 spirit stones, but the guild took 10% of it.

Considering how much ease it was to find the job, Alex had no complaints whatsoever.

He kept the spirit stones into this bag and went to the board outside to take another mission.

It was barely in the early afternoon when he finished 3 missions, and amassed an extra 5 pills for himself.

After resting for a bit, he went for his 4th mission of the day. By the end of the day, he had easily made over 200 True Spirit stones amidst the various prices on each of the pills he made.

Even the staff members were very shocked to see him make so many pills in a single day.

Alex got away from the questioning by lying to them that he didn't need to make more than a single pill. That was still above average for most cases, but it wasn't as outrageous as making 20 True rank pills in 8 hours.

From a minor investigation, he had come to find out that most alchemists around his level usually did about 2 or 3 missions a day, which would have them make 6 to 9 pills a day most of the time.

After that, they wouldn't be able to make a single pill. Not only would they be mentally exhausted, but their Qi would also dry out as well. Especially if they were in the early True realms.

Alex wondered if his Qi reserve was larger than the average cultivator. He knew it was dense, but he had never thought if it was a greater amount as well.

'That must be it,' he thought.

Once he went back home, Alex continued cultivating. This time, he called out Pearl and had him cultivate alongside him.

Cuts appeared all over his body, but he didn't feel any pain. It was hard to feel any pain as the gap between the two of them was not only a major realm but also an entire 2 realms within it.

Alex wanted Pearl to immediately break through to the True realm, but he didn't have any monster cores on him to feed Pearl.

He would have to go to the forest for that, but he didn't want to. He felt it would be better for Pearl to break through with his cultivation rather than outside help for this important step.

So, Alex forced Pearl to cultivate day and night with an occasional spar to energize his body and help recycle his Qi.

On the 6th day, while Alex was focused on removing the Yang from his body that had accumulated over the past couple of days, he felt something stir aside from him.

So, he stopped and turned around to check Pearl. When he did, he saw that Pearl was starting to break through.

Immediately, Alex pulled in all the Yang that he was emanating, no matter how little he was.

Then, he stepped to the side and waited for Pearl to be done.

After an hour more, he felt something change in Pearl and suddenly, a bright golden light exploded from him.

The light turned into golden motes that hung in the air as it slowly drifted downwards like it were confetti celebrating Pearl's advancement to the True Realm.

"Haha, Pearl you did it. You—" suddenly he stopped. Alex's eyes went wide as a silhouette of a beast appeared behind Pearl.

It was about 2 meters tall and 3 meters long. It looked somewhat like Pearl, but not entirely. The face of the beast didn't look cat-like which Pearl had.

Also, the main difference was the fact that the beast's white body had black stripes all over it.

'The White Tiger!' Alex looked at the heavenly beast's silhouette with absolute shock.

The silhouette moved a little as it drooped down to touch Pearl with his nose, and suddenly, it turned into a bright light that converged back onto Pearl.

Then… Pearl changed. His body glowed white and his size started to increase. He got bigger and bigger until he stopped.

If his original size was a little smaller than a house cat, his new size came to be about twice what a normal house cat would be.

If this continued, Alex suspected by Saint rank, Pearl's body would reach the size of his mother. After that, his body would reach the size of Lady Ren.

Finally, Pearl opened his eyes. Bright golden pupils stared directly at Alex as Pearl opened his mouth to speak.

"Breakthrough successful?" he asked in almost perfect pronunciation.

"Yes, yes, you did it," Alex said as he walked up to him and hugged him. Alex swiped his hands on Pearl's back, feeling his new, strong body.

"Wow, you are so big now," he said, still a little unsure if he liked the change or not.

"Brother not like change?" Pearl asked.

"Oh no, it's—"

"Pearl change," Pearl said and immediately his body shone with white light as his body shrunk down to the size of what he originally was, perhaps even a finger or two smaller.

"What? You can change? How?" Alex asked with nothing but surprise in his voice. He had read so many books about beasts, spent 2 months with nothing but beasts, and somehow there was no information about beasts being able to change size.

"Pearl just knows how," Pearl said. The information that he could do came from the memories he inherited from his parents.

"Can you change back?" Alex asked.

Pearl nodded and changed back to become a bigger cat that had lost its childlike features.

"And again?"

Pearl changed back to his childlike self.

Alex smiled. "Great, thankfully you haven't lost your cuteness," he said as he rubbed Pearl's little head.

"Alright, get bigger. Let's see how you can fight with a bigger body."

The room was small, and would most likely take damage if the two of them seriously fought, so Alex put on a barrier formation before fighting.

The barrier wasn't strong enough to stop the two of them, but it would be fine as long as it blocked a single attack.

Alex fought Pearl multiple times throughout the day. He even skipped going to the guild for the day and just fought Pearl all day long.

He had Pearl fight as small Pearl, or as big Pearl, or have him change in and out to confuse the opponent.

Alex didn't want to see how strong Pearl had gotten or teach him how to fight. All he wanted to do was have him get used to his new body.

Once night came, he finally stopped and cultivated overnight. The next morning, they trained for a little while before Alex left to the guild once more.

He wanted to make as much money as he could. At first, he was incredibly happy that he could make so much money in such little time.

But when he realized that he needed to make pills of his own to sell, and would have to thus buy ingredients like everyone else, he got dejected.

No matter how much he earned, it was never enough.

Chapter 603 Riverweed Auction

2 days later, it was the day of the Auction. Alex kept the tiny Pearl, who was smaller than normal in his robes, with just his head poking out, and walked towards the auction house.

The Three Faction auction house was apparently the biggest auction house in the Riverweed town and the surrounding other 3 towns that were 3 hours carriage journey from here.

On the day of the auction, major sects and families from all over the 4 towns came to gather in the Three Factions Alliance auction house.

Many people expected a lot of great things to be found in the auction house today, but Alex didn't. He just hoped to find one of the 10 remaining ingredients of the True rank healing pill that he was to make.

Not that he would mind coming across a special weapon or artifacts.

The auction house had already opened by the time he arrived, so he quickly entered it.

He likely could've gotten a better seating if he used his True Earth alchemist badge to show off a little, but he didn't need it.

He was here truly just to see how his pills would sell. After all, he really needed the money to make more pills.

Since he was going to be away from the Northern forest, he needed money to buy ingredients to practice alchemy.

For the first time, he was going to have to suffer in his alchemy progress in terms of ingredients.

Hopefully, not by much.

The auction hall was rather large, with a sound-dampening formation carved onto all the metal walls on the sides.

The stage was bright with light from all directions being produced by some sort of light-producing artifact, different from the lanterns he was used to.

Alex could see about 30 rows of seats along nearly 50 columns. Aside from that, there were more than 100 seats for the rich and famous up above.

Aside from the elders from the many nearby sects, and merchants, Alex wondered who else would be eligible to sit there.

Alex found himself a seat at the lower back corner of the hall and waited for it all to start.

As he expected, an attractive girl in a beautiful red robe walked to the front and introduced herself as the auctioneer for the day.

Alex sighed. It was always a beautiful girl who ran the auction. That, or an old man who would give the guests a sense of trust in the items that were being auctioned.

This was certainly working, as a group of men got unusually excited when they saw the girl walk out onto the stage.

A few minutes more and the girl started introducing items one by one.

A formation plate that could capture any beast under the Meridian Tempering realm.

A talisman that exploded with the power of True Master 2nd realm expert.

A pill that could make a woman's body more bountiful and even help increase fertility for up to 3 days.

A puppet that had strength equivalent to that of a Mind Tempering 1st realm, but the defense of a True Disciple 1st realm.

An armor that used water energy to freeze the attacker's weapons and fists.

A flute that could make anyone under the 1st True Disciple realm fall asleep.

A set of 2 talismans that could be used to communicate over 2000 kilometers away.

An Azure Silverbeak that was no more than 2 years old, and could be made into a bonded beast.

One after another, the girl at the stage announced the item she was auctioning, and in just a couple of bids, the amount would reach dozens of True Spirit stones.

The latest item, a pair of daggers, suitable for someone whose cultivation method was Metal aligned, sold for over 50 True Spirit stones.

Being a True Earth grade artifact, Alex was surprised it didn't sell for more. It must've been the fact that not many people used daggers at all to make the bids go high.

Finally, the pills he gave to the Alchemist Guild to pass along to the auction house were being sold.

From 20, all the way to 60 True Spirit stones. The 50 True-Earth grade pills he gave amassed him about 2500 coins in just an hour.

He wished he could give the other 80 or so pills he was ready to sell too, but that would be gaining too much attention.

He currently had no backing aside from the Alchemist guild, and if someone from the alchemist guild came to hurt him, he couldn't save himself.

Most of the pills he sold were ones that he had no use for. They included pills that helped in cultivation, changed faces, or increased one's resistance or immunity to poison.

There were also other miscellaneous pills, but not a single one of those included pills that would be used in healing.

He had already come to understand how significantly important it was to stock up on pills that healed, rather than pills that did any other thing.

Once his pills were sold, the other alchemist's pills were also sold.

A few of those Alchemists did sell healing pills, unlike Alex, but it was understandable. Not everyone had the same experience as him and prioritized the same thing.

He was starting to get bored and looked around a bit when he heard two men behind him bid for the healing pills.

"53 True spirit stones."

Alex sent his spiritual sense behind him to gently touch the man's aura and recognized that he was a True Disciple realm cultivator of slightly higher cultivation than him.

Going past that, he checked the person and saw that he was injured on his left shoulder, and likely needed the healing pill.

At 66 True Spirit stones, the man finally had to step down to some other person in the lower area and took the loss.

"It's okay, senior brother. We can have the alchemists make one for you," a woman spoke softly from next to him.

"Yes, I know, but it would cost a lot," the man said with as little emotion as he could muster, but Alex could hear the pain in his voice. 66 True spirit stones seemed to be a figure he wasn't able to bring out quite as easily.

Having to have an alchemist make one would likely cost him about the same price, if not higher.

"Once you get healed, you can go back to the northern forest at the end of the week and earn a lot more," the girl said.

The man gave a heavy sigh and nodded. "Yes, I can't let this depress me," he said. "If only we were in the capital, I'm sure the princess of the Shen clan could've healed me with a simple gesture."

'Shen clan?' Alex thought. 'Isn't that one of the 7 colors clan? Shen should be the Blue one, right?'

"If you really want that much luck, why don't you go meet the Royal princess and have her use the healing orb on you? That could heal you in no time," the girl said.

"Sure it could. But I w—"

Suddenly, Alex turned around, making the two of them stop speaking.

"I'm so sorry, but I couldn't help but overhear your talk about this Healing orb. Would you mind explaining a bit more about it?" he asked.

He really didn't want to interfere and let them know he was listening, but the talk about the Shen girl being able to heal and the Wei family princess with the healing orb was too tempting of a talk.

"Who are you?" the man's eyes darkened. No one really liked being eavesdropped upon. The man was especially angry that it was done by someone with less age and cultivation than him.

"Forgiveness, brother," Alex said. "I'm just a man in need of healing." He finally showed his stump to the man.

The man's eyes got less dangerous, but he still held a bit of anger in them.

Alex suddenly pulled out a pill bottle and offered it to the man. "I am really sorry for listening in on your conversation, but I really need to know. Please take this 22% Flesh Reverting pill as a token of sincerity."

The blue-dotted, white ceramic bottle suddenly looked very tempting to the man. It wasn't a 32% Swift Healing pill that was just sold, but it would be enough for him.

"Is this really a healing pill?" the man asked suspiciously.

Chapter 604 New Destination

Alex could see the man's eyes looking suspiciously at the pill he had taken from his hand. He was looking inside the pill bottle, wondering if he was being duped somehow.

Alex sighed. "I have no reason to lie, brother," he said as he pulled out the badge he had been hiding in his robes.

Pearl shuffled a little in his robes to let the badge pass through, and it came out easily, which Alex hid in his palm, only visible to the man and woman.

A bronze badge with leaves carved around the edges, and the words 'True' written on it in the center.

A True Earth Alchemist badge.

The man's eyes instantly went wide, and he dropped all sense of hostility from his body and eyes.

Instead, he immediately cupped his hands in greeting, wincing a little when the pain in his left shoulder plate flared a bit, but he didn't let it sound through him.

"Forgive me for my rudeness, sir alchemist. I will answer every question you have," the man said, while at the time, putting the pill into his storage bag, fearing Alex would ask it back.

Alex ignored that. A 22% pill was just above trash in his eyes. Still, if it could help him gain some information that could help him, it would be more worth it than if he had just sold it instead.

The man went on to explain.

The Shen family was one of the 7 great families of the empire, whose members usually had roots that mostly aligned with the water element. One of the skills they had was a water skill that could heal someone's wound with just a gesture of their hands.

"Do you know if they can heal a cut-off limb like mine?" he asked.

The man looked towards the woman for a bit who shook her head. "I don't believe that is possible anymore, sir alchemist," he said.

"Anymore?" Alex looked at him with a curious look. "What happened that caused the healing to not be possible now?"

"You must not have heard, sir Alchemist. About 2 months or so ago, the 7 families gathered their best, along with some other talented individuals from the empire, and had them enter a True realm."

"However, tragedy struck, and not a single one of them returned," the man said.

'Ah! Those men that entered the beast realm while I was in there. Right, Fu Tao did say that.' Alex remembered.

"So, the person who could heal was sent there too?" Alex asked.

"Unfortunately, yes," the man said. "I've heard the news the sister of the Shen young lady also has learned the same skill, but her proficiency certainly wouldn't have reached the same level, so I do not know if healing a stump like yours is possible or not."

"I see," Alex said. That was a bit of bad luck.

"What about this healing orb? You said the Wei family has it?" Alex asked.

"Ah, yes," the man nodded. "Everyone knows about it, so it's no secret. The royal family has a healing orb that is handed down to the princess every generation, I hear."

"Oh, and can it heal my stump?" Alex asked.

"Uh... that I'm not knowledgeable on, sir alchemist," the man said. "After all, the only ones that are allowed to get a use of that orb is someone who is a Lightsworn."

Lightsworn. Alex had read about them not long ago. They were a group of individuals, directly under the royal emperor who performed missions and kept peace in the land.

They were more than just a police force, however. Being under the emperor himself, they were the Judge, jury, and executioner in most cases.

Fortunately, they had to say an oath to the heavens, promising to never go against what was kind and just, to always protect the people of the empire.

After swearing an oath to the Luminance empire, the person would become a Lightsworn.

"So, I will have to ask a Lightsworn himself, huh?" he asked.

"I'm afraid you will have to do at least that," the man said.

Alex thought for a bit. It seemed he would have to get rid of his plans to travel to a city close by and instead directly go to the capital itself.

With both the Shen girl there and this healing orb there, he wanted to weigh upon his luck to get his arm back.

Not only that, he was certain that the capital would have a lot of ingredients for him to buy, and a lot more information for him to learn from.

The auction lasted for a while longer as better and better items started getting auctioned.

One of the items being auctioned was even a True Heaven grade cauldron that made him want to buy it, but he stopped himself.

For now, the one his master gave him would suffice.

In the end, he didn't buy anything. The auction ended, and Alex walked out with a newfound plan.

Go to Radiant City, the capital of the Luminance empire.

Instead of going anywhere else, Alex directly went to the southwestern section of the town where the caravans lined up in front of the river that gave the town its name, Riverweed.

He confirmed that there was a caravan that would leave around 3 pm in the afternoon. The caravan would only go about 2 cities over, but Alex was prepared for that.

The road to the capital was long and would take him multiple days. He would take it slow for now.

He returned back to his home for a bit before going back to the place where he rented the place almost 2 weeks ago.

He returned back the key and then made his way to the Alchemist Guild.

He walked past the Formation guild that was close to the Alchemist Guild. He had seen it before, along with the other 2 major guilds.

He wanted to get in here but had later decided not to split his attention across multiple things when all he needed to focus on right now was getting strong and getting his arm back.

The search for getting his arm wasn't just for himself. It was for his master, and his martial uncle, as well as the many that would walk around limbless just because there wasn't a cure for it at the moment.

He shook his head and went to the alchemist guild. He took the 2500 coins he got from the auction and asked to make sure he could leave anywhere else he wanted to.

The receptionist had only smiled and said yes.

Alex nodded and left the guild. There was only two places he needed to go to before going back to the caravan.

First, he entered the restaurant and had the most extravagant meal they had prepared.

Having focused on making pills for the last week or so, he had forgotten about coming here to eat.

His physique had improved a lot, but he still looked quite weak when judged simply visually.

After he finished eating it, he left the restaurant and walked to the place where the players were staying.

He wanted to make sure they were all fine, so he went to check on them. The man from before had been there and was surprised when he saw Alex walk there.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense to the house and saw that there were nearly half of the players missing.

He smiled. He took out 50 True spirit stones and handed them to the man. "For them," he said, and then brought out 10 more spirit stones which he handed to the man and woman, as thanks for looking after the players.

The two of them rejected the spirit stones, but Alex simply waved his hands and left.

Now that there was nothing else to do in this city, Alex went to the caravan.

With 15 minutes to spare, he got onto one of the carriages where only a few people could stay.

Alex saw a man and a woman with their less than 5-year-old daughter sit on one end of the carriage, while Alex sat alone on the other end, looking at the empty seat in front of him.

After nearly 10 minutes, the door of the carriage opened, sending light into the rather dark inside.

A young man jumped in and settled onto the seat in front of Alex, swiping his hair around.

He looked around and gave an embarrassed smile as he said, "I hope I wasn't the one that made the caravan wait."

Chapter 605 Shen Jing

Alex looked at the young man in front of him with a slight curiosity in his eyes.

The man who had just appeared wore a stark white robe with almost robe with no other colors.

Two golden earrings hung from the side of his ears that had a circular shape with some spikes appearing out of it. Calling it a golden ball with spikes would be enough to describe the jewelry to someone.

His blonde hair cascaded down below his shoulders and ended on black tips as if that part alone was dyed for some reason.

He was most likely two-finger taller than Alex, but for some reason, Alex felt the height to be actually larger.

His fair body skin had no blemishes at all, and his constantly smiling face made him look gentle as well.

However, the most curious thing about him was that he had no cultivation base at all. Almost as if he were a mortal.

Alex's first thought was that this man was an immortal, someone whose cultivation base was so high he couldn't sense it at all.

However, he immediately felt like slapping himself on the face. He had just learned that immortals couldn't walk out in the open freely not long ago.

The skies would split open to punish them if they even showed themselves. Lady Ren was only surviving by staying hidden underneath a massive Saint Spirit vein line in addition to a bunch of formations to keep her aura hidden.

The man in front of him was likely using a cultivation technique to hide his aura. His technique must have been one of the good ones to make him hide his aura so easily.

The man noticed Alex staring at him and smiled at him.

"Greetings little brother, where are you headed to?" the man asked.

"To Silverlead city for now," Alex said, not elaborating any further to the stranger.

The carriage started moving and soon the caravan was on its way to the next town.

The blonde-haired man's smile remained on his face, not leaving it once. That gave Ning a bit of a weird feeling like he should avoid this man.

The carriage rattled around for about 5 minutes, and the man finally stopped looking toward Alex and instead turned to a family of 3 to the side.

"What's your name, little girl?" he asked the girl that was maybe 4 years old.

"Shu Xue," the girl said softly, her parents encouraging her from the side to ask the man's name.

"What is your name, mister?" she asked.

"My name? It's… Shen Jing," the man said.

Alex's eyes immediately narrowed as a thought crossed his head. 'Shen Jing? SHEN! As in the Shen clan? The same one I'm going towards?' he thought.

There was no way things could be this coincidental, but he couldn't tell that for sure. After all, he had quite a bit of luck from everything he had gotten until now.

"Little Xue, ask this brother what his name is?" the young man named Shen said.

"Big brother, what is your name?" the little girl asked.

Alex couldn't help but put on a smile as he turned toward the young girl. "Little sister, my name is Yu Ming," he said.

"Yu… Ming…" the girl said to herself as if trying to try out the name on her tongue.

"And what's in Silverlead city for little brother Yu Ming?" Shen Jing asked.

"For now, it's just a midpoint in my journey," Alex said. "Where is senior brother Shen headed to?"

"Me? I don't know. I'm just going where fate takes me, I guess," The man said.

"I have a question to ask of you, brother Shen," Alex said, unable to contain his curiosity.

"How about you ask me one and I'll ask you one?" Shen Jing said.

Alex took a deep breath and nodded. "Are you from the Shen family?" he asked.

"Uhh… obviously. My family is Shen, isn't it?" the man asked with a raised eyebrow.

"So you are from the great Shen family," Alex shouted. He couldn't believe his luck.

Shen Jing looked at him with an innocent eye and asked, "Great Shen family? What's that?"

"Eh? Are you not from the Great Shen family?" Alex repeated the question.

"I think there is a misunderstanding here. I am from a Shen family, while you seem to be asking about a family that is more popular," Shen Jing said.

"So… you're not from the Shen family? One of the 7 colors of the Empire?" Alex asked.

"Oh, no. You seem to really be talking about an actual Shen family that's quite popular. Unfortunately, I'm not from that family," he said.

"I see," Alex said, his hopes sinking back a little. "I'm surprised you don't know about that family. It's quite popular in the empire."

"I don't really know much about the empire," Shen Jing said.

'A player?' Alex suspected now. The only person who wouldn't know about the Luminance empire would be someone that came from outside of it.

Given how the beast realm blocked the Crimson Empire from entering, and the other continents had no way of coming here, only a player could have possibly been someone that would not know about the empire at this point.

"You should read some books, brother Shen. Learning about the empire will help you a bit," Alex said.

Shen Jing immediately put up an irritated face. "No, I hate reading," he said.

Alex was about to ask something when Shen Jing started speaking. "Since I've answered a question of yours, you should answer one of mine," he said.

Alex nodded and waited for the question.

Shen Jing pointed at Alex's stump and asked, "What's the story behind that?"

Alex unconsciously grabbed his left arm and said, "it got cut during a fight in my city. Bandits attacked us, and I ended up having to fight a particularly strong one."

"Hah, you mean you were just weak, right?" Shen Jing said. That hit a nerve in Alex, but he took a deep breath to control his anger.

"If you are a man, you will have to be strong. Well, you have to be strong if you are a woman too, but since you're a man this works for you," Shen Jing said.

"Otherwise, how else are you going to protect your family? Your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters, your friends, disciples, master."

Alex felt coldness pass through him when he said the last word. If only he had indeed been stronger, Ma Rong would have still been alive. Wen Cheng's arms would've still been okay.

If only he had been stronger.

"With how weak you are, will you even be able to protect that cat of yours?" Shen Jing asked.

"HuH? How do you know about that?" Alex immediately got defensive. Out of nowhere, the man had suddenly known about Pearl. Alex wondered if this was—

Alex saw the man pointing at his chest. Alex looked down and saw Pearl poking his head through the robes.

'Ah,' he thought.

Shen Jing waved his hands towards Pearl.

"Meow!" Pearl greeted Shen Jing out of nowhere.

"Meow to you too, little fella. What's your name?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex's eyes started going wide. 'Pearl don't ans—' he tried to tell Pearl, however, he was a step too late.

"Pearl!" Pearl said out loud, shocking the family of 3 on the side. They had never seen a beast talk before in their life, and seeing one now in such a confined corner scared them.

"Come here," Shen Jing said as he opened his palm.

For some reason, as if hypnotized, Pearl suddenly jumped out of Alex's robes and onto the man's hands.

Alex couldn't even stop him at all. He started worrying. What was he to do now? Should he fight the man to keep the knowledge about Pearl a secret? What about the family?

Pearl smiled as the man rubbed his head and back. "You are amazing, Pearl," he said.

"Meow!" Pearl said happily. A small thought floated into Alex's mind.

"He's not a bad human, brother," Pearl told him in his mind directly. Alex didn't know if he should trust Pearl at the moment or not.

Shen Jing turned his head to the side and saw the family still cowering a little. Except for the little girl who was simply fascinated by a talking cat.

Shen Jing gave a reassuring smile to the family, and said, "don't worry. He's just a talented little cat. He won't hurt anyone."

He then called over the little girl, who ran off towards him.

"Put your hands forward," Shen Jing said, and the girl followed. He then placed Pearl on top of her hands. Pearl barely had any place to step on hands and jumped to her shoulders which were a little broader.

"Can you help teach my little friend a few more words?" Shen Jing asked.

The girl nodded. "Alright, go ask your father and mother for help as well," Shen Jing said and the girl left to her corner with Pearl.

He then turned around to Alex and chuckled a little. "No need to panic, little brother. I won't hurt you guys," he said. Alex could hear all the implications in his words.

It wasn't that he couldn't hurt him, but that he wouldn't. Alex needed to be absolutely sure to do nothing that would antagonize this man.

"So? Are you going to heal that arm or not?" Shen Jing asked suddenly.

"I'm going to," Alex said.

Shen Jing made a weird face and asked, "Well, aren't you an Alchemist? You should have already healed your arm by now."

Chapter 606 Fun

Alex's eyes narrowed once again. 'How does he know I'm an alchemist?' he wondered.

He looked down upon himself to see if there was anything that could give it away when he saw the Alchemist badge popping out of his robes.

'Pearl must've pulled it out when he jumped,' He thought as he looked to the side at Pearl. He was having fun with the little girl.

Alex had already told him not to hurt the little girl, so there was nothing to worry about with Pearl.

"Uhm, just because I'm an Alchemist, it doesn't mean I can heal myself," Alex said.

"Is that so? I thought Alchemists could do anything they wanted, similar to formation makers, Talisman creators, and Artifact crafter," Shen Jing said.

"It's true that they have a lot of potentials to do anything, but that doesn't mean every alchemist can make whatever they want," Alex said.

"Yes, I know that, but with a bit of time and practice, it should be possible right?" Shen Jing said.

"Not really," Alex said. "Those will help, but having knowledge of what you are doing is more important if you want to do something quickly."

"If I were looking for the knowledge, I doubt anything would help me learn better than self-study with a bit of outside help. But if what I want is my arm back, it's better for me to rely on outside helpfully," Alex said.

"You mean a recipe?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes," Alex nodded.

"So you don't have any recipe to heal yourself?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex shook his head. "Not at the moment. I do have one, but making that is out of my league for now. The actual recipe that will help me right now is incomplete," he said.

"Does no one else have that sort of pill?" Shen Jing asked.

"Maybe," Alex said. "I didn't find much in that town, but that was a backwater town. Which is why I'm going to the capital to see if such pills already exist."

"If they don't exist, I also have the Shen great family which could heal me, and the royal princess who also could. But for that I will have to be a Lightsworn apparently," Alex said.

"Ooh, what's a Lightsworn?" Shen Jing asked curiously.

"Protectors and guards of the empire, I hear," Alex said.

"Do you admire them?" Shen Jing asked.

"Haha, no," Alex said. "I only just learned about them today. I plan on joining them, however. That might be one way to heal my arm."

"Hmm… Lightsworn. Sounds fun. I will join too," Shen Jing said.

The carriage rattled as the sounds of people walking on the side of the caravan sounded.

"Oh, what does that say?" Shen Jing suddenly asked.

Alex turned outside the window and saw a wooden sign on the side of the road with some words on it.

"Bullfly town 30 kilometers away. Firecrest town, 103 kilometers away. Silverleaf City, 302 kilometers away.

Shen Jing nodded as he looked outside. "We will likely reach the town by sundown, then Harecrest town by tomorrow, and Silverleaf City 3 days later," Shen Jing said.

"How far away is the capital?" he asked.

Alex made some simple estimation in his head based on the map and the sizes there before saying, "About 9000 kilometers."

"Oh wow, that's far, isn't it? Don't you think it will be faster to just fly there? I'm sure you can reach the capital in 3 days if you do," Shen Jing said.

Alex didn't doubt it. He had even thought of it, but he shook his head.

"I am a bit new to this place. I want to learn a bit more about the land and its culture before I arrive at the capital. I know what being a naive, village boy does to one in unfamiliar places," he said.

"That's not a bad idea," Shen Jing said with his hands on his chin. "I think I'm starting to like you, little brother. You know what? Forget about getting strong and just focus on getting your arm back."

Shen Jing said what could only be taken as sarcastic, but for some reason, he sounded sincere. Alex wondered why he was saying that. Was there a good enough reason for him to stop proceeding with his cultivation?

Alex shook his head and forgot about it. He wasn't going to suddenly stop getting strong. In fact, Shen Jing was the weird one for even suggesting it.

'One moment he mocks me for being weak, and another moment he says I don't need to get strong. Does he have something wrong with his head or what?' Alex thought.

The carriage rattled as it went along for a bit more, and darkness soon veiled the world.

Not long after, they reached the Bullfly town, where they stopped for an hour or two before leaving.

The horses pulling the carriage were spirit beasts, so they didn't need to rest at all, and could pull as long as they had Qi.

Shen Jing suddenly pushed open the door and jumped out. Alex looked at him in surprise. He hadn't said anything for a while now, simply sleeping in the carriage with his eyes shut, and now he suddenly jumped out.

"Aah, it's not very good to sit in one place continuously," he said. "Little brother, come on out, or you will start getting backaches too."

Alex looked at him with narrowed eyes. "I'm fine," he said.

"Come on! Stretch your legs a bit. No need to sit inside forever," Shen Jing said. "Also, you might find something fun up ahead."

Alex's eyes changed again.

Fun.

Shen Jing had some sort of implication on that word that he didn't immediately catch.

His voice got a little cold as he asked, "What's up ahead?"

Shen Jing knew he had caught Ning's attention and smiled, "that's a surprise for you."

Alex hesitated for a bit. Was this some sort of trap? Was Shen Jing going to kill him up ahead?

"Don't worry!" Shen Jing said, seeing Alex's eyes full of hesitation. Then, his voice changed such that Alex could feel some sort of energy behind it.

"You know I could've killed you anytime if I wanted to by now," Shen Jing said.

Alex jumped out. He wasn't sure what Shen Jing wanted of him, but he was sure about one thing now. Shen Jing didn't want to kill him.

"Pearl, stay here okay? Your brother and I will go ahead for a little while," Shen Jing said, his jovial voice returning to him.

The two of them suddenly flew away. Alex flew as fast as he could, but Shen Jing seemed to be casually cruising through the air.

This man… he was either a very high True realm cultivator, or more likely, a Saint realm cultivator.

Alex had to be careful of him.

"Down there," Shen Jing pointed, and Alex looked below. He saw a bunch of people grouped up below him, and the group of people saw him too.

Alex's eyes went wide.

"Bandits?" he said out loud.

"Yes, and they see you now," Shen Jing's voice drifted in his ear, but his body was nowhere to be seen.

Suddenly, the bandits flew up towards him.

Alex got angry. "You bastard! You really did bring me here to kill me."

Chapter 607 Using the Sword

Alex sent his spiritual sense around, but Shen Jing was nowhere near to be seen. So, he sent them downward, towards the group of bandits flying towards him.

Without even checking at them, he could tell they were strong. Much stronger than the ones that you could find in the routes of Crimson Empire.

They were very much possibly on the same level as the bandits that invaded the Scarlet city.

His wave of spiritual sense went past them and it confirmed it. Of the 30 flying bandits, the weakest one was at True Disciple 5th realm, and the strongest one of them… was at True Lord 7th realm.

This was very bad.

His main priority was to survive. Shen Jing had brought him here to kill him, so Alex thought of instead going back to the caravan.

'No, they will follow me there,' he thought. If they did, not only would they kill him, they would likely hurt everyone in there.

Alex had already done a scan of the caravan and had known that the strongest protector in there was a True Master 3rd realm girl, along with a few of her colleagues.

Those would surely not win against these bandits. Alex was the strongest person in that caravan and now, he was separated.

"Was that what Shen Jing wanted? To separate me from the group so they can deal with me alone?" Alex wondered.

He stopped. He had no more time to give to thoughts. Since the bandits were bringing a fight to him, he would bring a fight to them.

Light flashed as a sword appeared in his right hand.

It was a meter and a half long sword, with about 30 centimeters long hilt. The blade itself was about the size of his 2 fingers, that curved a little at the front.

The edge on the blade was so sharp that Alex wouldn't doubt if someone said that light itself could be cut with it.

Alex put the sword in front of him. The silver blade pointed at the bandits, his hand on the stark white hilt, stopped by the bronze, circular cross guard.

Then, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

HAH~

Suddenly, light flared behind him illuminating everything in the night. He had released so much Yang energy behind him that it looked like a sun had appeared out of nowhere.

The bandits looked at him in the sky, the sun hidden only by his shadow. And then, the shadow moved.

The bandits saw nothing for a moment. The man had disappeared from the sky, leaving the blinding light in the sky for 3 seconds before it disappeared.

At that time, they heard multiple sounds of people gasping, but no one screamed.

When their visions came back to them a second later, they realized why there had been no scream.

As bodies fell to the ground in pieces more than one, they realized that their comrades had been cut through before they could even make a noise.

It was very much likely that they didn't even see their deaths coming.

Alex huffed a little far away. He had released a bit too much energy at once and over-exerted himself to kill 8 of the bandits at once.

Still, his eyes flashed with a cold light as they constantly looked at the bandits for an opening.

It had been a while since he fought. In fact, now that he thought about it, this was the first time he was actually fighting. So, he was a little rusty, but the experience in his mind made the fighting easy.

He used bright light to blind his enemies for a few seconds, while using his shadow formed from the light behind him to teleport onto it.

With one last breath, he looked at the remaining 22 members and got ready.

Multiple attacks came flying toward him at once, all of which Alex had to dodge.

He could likely just stand in front of most of these attacks and not get a single scratch, but some of these bandits were too strong to underestimate them like that.

A woman with a fast movement technique flew right next to him and delivered a strong fist to his head.

With his spiritual sense, Alex had already seen it coming. As soon as she got close, Alex sent out Heaven's impact, making the woman immediately lose consciousness.

As she started falling, he struck her with her sword. The sword carved her body like a hot knife on butter. It slid through her body with no resistance at all, and her two halves fell to the ground down below.

Alex made a quick slash with his sword to get rid of the blood, but there was no need, to begin with. The sword repelled blood off of it like oil repelled water.

Suddenly he ducked as a slash flew over him. 2 men came dashing towards him, with a few more not far behind him.

The 2 men that arrived next to him each had a cultivation base that was too great for his own cultivation. So, he had to rely on his body.

Alex wanted to send out slashes, but he couldn't, for the love of God, put his Qi into the sword at all.

It was not like the Ebony sword, which actively refused to take in his Qi because of the primitive artifact spirit in there. It was more akin to his steel sword not accepting Qi as quickly because they weren't bonded yet.

Only, this sword didn't take Qi slowly. It didn't take Qi at all. So, all of Alex's skills that had him sending out slashes or pouring Qi into the sword were useless to him.

Still, this sword was way too good to replace with at the moment. Just its ability to cut things with such ease was reason enough.

Suddenly, fire erupted from around his fist. Alex couldn't send Qi into the sword, but he surely could use it around the sword.

Alex used the Flame Scripture technique to quickly turn the fire into the shape of a sword, consuming the real sword in it.

Fire flared around him with each swing. The two men that were right upon him tried to use their techniques on him, but they just didn't have enough strength to harm him at all.

After all, his physical strength was close to True Lord 1st realm, and there were only 3 people here that were higher than that.

One of the sword slashes sent fire into one of the man's eyes, blinding him momentarily. Alex took the opportunity to hit the other man who was driving his sword at him.

Alex was right about to cut the man's hands when his focus wavered and his sword hit empty air.

The man's sword hit him and sent him flying downwards.

Alex caught himself midair and shook himself awake. 'What was that drowsiness just now,' he thought and sent his spiritual sense to search for the source.

That was when he noticed the man holding a square lantern with a flickering light inside of it.

Whenever that light flickered towards Alex, he felt a wave of sleepiness hit him as if he hadn't slept for days.

'Dammit! Is that an artifact that induces drowsiness?' he thought.

Alex's body could cure a lot of things, but it never prevented most things at all. That was one thing he hated about his body.

Be it poison, toxins, or mental attacks. Alex's body always dealt with it after the fact, instead of before. He really wished it were otherwise, but it wasn't.

So, he had to deal with it.
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He let the sword hover by his side for a split second as he sent a palm-shaped yellow light flying towards the man with the lantern.

While the man panicked, Alex took his sword and got back to fighting.

He had to deal with the man at some time, but right now, there were at least 5 people in between them. He needed to take care of them first.

Friction disappeared around Alex and he burst into speed as if he pushed on something solid even while in mid-air.

The man who hit him hadn't expected such a quick burst of speed and tried to bring back his sword, but Alex appeared right next to him.

He slashed toward the man who was trying to put up his sword to block, but Alex's sword cut it and the man together.

The fire appeared behind Alex in no particular shape and flew towards 4 of the different incoming men, while Alex himself went for the man whose eyes he had burned previously.

The man put his all into his next attack to try and hurt Alex, but Alex suffered it all and still slashed at him.

He felt the man get cut behind those colorful techniques, as his sword cut through it all. His lifeless body fell to the ground in 2 separate halves.

In just less than a minute, Alex had killed 11 of the 30 bandits, leaving them with nothing but shame.

The bandit leader hadn't taken part in the fight because it was only a single enemy, but it seemed waiting would only get more of his men killed.

So, he took out his spear and got ready to attack as well.

Alex huffed and looked at them. This was hard. Fighting a group of people in similar strength to his own, with only one hand that was occupied with a sword that wouldn't take in Qi at all.

The sword was great, but if he wanted to win, he needed to use his Qi no matter what.

So, he put away his sword as golden light filled the emptiness in his hand that soon turned into claws.

"Let's see how good this is in a fight."

Chapter 608 Hurt Meridians

19 bandits remained. Of them, 3 had a cultivation base higher than that of Alex's body cultivation.

True Lord 7th, True lord 4th, and True lord 2nd realm.

Alex stared at the man with True Lord 7th realm, a small with a big build, wearing an earthen colored robe.

Alex was certain that was the leader of the bandits, he had to be. Unless they were okay with someone else weaker than him being the leader, then this man was definitely it.

And he was staring back at Alex.

'I either need to get rid of the 16 others and fight the 3 with more freedom, or kill the 3 as soon as I can and fight the other with more freedom,' he thought.

Alex was sure. As long as the 3 of them weren't present, and no one had a hidden treasure that could deal damage equal to or above that of True Lord 1st realm, he was fine.

He couldn't take that risk at all. He had to think of every person having some sort of special attack that could deal with him.

"So it's the 16 that die first then," he said softly.

The leader spun his silver spear in the air as he sent a worm-shaped tempest flying towards him.

Alex had no way of fighting that. So, he instead burned another bright sun behind him, a fusion of fire and yang, mixed together to produce light enough to illuminate the world like a real sun.

Then, once the shadow was in the right place on the Leader's robes, he vanished.

Multiple sounds of clangs as well as buzzing sounds appeared in the blink of an eye.

Alex's hands blitzed through the air as he tried to rip out the throat and organs of everyone he came across.

He had targeted the leader, but that was just a test. The leader had indeed some sort of defensive treasure to protect himself.

So, using the lingering light, he teleported to the other weaker people and had attacked them. Most of them had defensive treasure which clanged with each attack, but they were way too weak to stop Alex's golden claw which was a mimic of the White Tiger's Golden claw.

At the same time, he sent out other attacks too. He sent palm of the sun, and Iron Fist punch towards the weaker opponents. They wouldn't die to these attacks, but certainly take so much damage that they wouldn't be able to recover in just a few minutes of time unless they also had equally good pills.

However, the thing that concerned him was the buzzing sounds. He had sent multiple Heaven's Impact towards the enemies, but only a few of them were dropping to the ground.

Most of the others had buzzing sounds coming from their artifacts that seemed to be made to stop mental attacks.

The artifacts weren't strong enough to stop them completely, but just enough so that they only felt slight mental pain, instead of straight-up fainting.

It would have been so much easier if they all fell to Heaven's Impact.

Alex's hand went through the glass and then through the man's chest, ripping out his heart back through the broken glasses.

Wisps of light flew into the air as the lantern artifact that was making him dizzy broke into a dozen pieces as it fell along with the man.

Alex felt horrible holding onto a person's heart, but he was getting used to it. He tossed the heart away and flew backward, breathing heavily.

'Dammit! Have my meridians not fully opened yet?' he thought. He was feeling general numbness all over his body. He couldn't tell if it was because his meridians were still to heal completely, or his body was just not back to its full potential due to the missing muscles.

Or maybe it was because he used too many spells in succession, killing 6 more men, injuring 3, and fainting 3 more.

With 12 of the 19 out of battle, only 7 remained. Alex huffed, but this wasn't the time.

He flew back like a serpent of blue flashed next to him with golden fangs. At the same time, a flaming bird flew towards him with its wings outstretched.

Alex enlarged his golden claws and crushed the firebird, turning it into motes of fire Qi, which he quickly controlled to send flying at the serpent of blue that was surrounding him.

The fire Qi and Water Qi destroyed themselves, while the metal Qi floated with no control.

Alex control the metal Qi to form into a sword of bright golden color and threw it back towards one of the men who attacked him.

Just then something black flashed next to him that Alex only caught using his Spiritual sense. If not for that, he would've completely missed it.

A spear attack flashed towards the right side of Alex, completely cutting off his escape. So, grabbed the black thing and tried to crush it.

Just as he crushed it, it burst out into a bunch of vines and roots that wrapped around him. At the same time, the woman with the 2nd True lord realm cultivation base drew an arrow, getting ready to attack.

"Shit!" Alex thought and tried to strain himself out of the entrapment. The vines came loose, but not fast enough.

A massive explosion hit Alex heat first as he was sent tumbling backward.

"Nice!" the girl said as she thought that she killed Alex.

Suddenly, the night turned into day once again and when it turned back to night, the girl's head was off of her neck.

Alex huffed, his right hand holding his sword once again as that was the only thing that could likely cut someone like her.

His forehead was bloody, but he would survive. The blood trickled down to his blade, and he almost hoped it would be refined.

However, he hadn't reached that part yet. He wasn't even able to send Qi into it, let alone be able to refine.

It would take some time.

Alex felt a bit of pain from the charred flesh on his chest, but it was nothing compared to what he felt every day cultivating with Pearl.

He gritted his teeth, which instead looked like a bloody smile as he got back to fighting.

It hurt. His face, his chest, even his right arm. But nothing hurt as much as his meridians.

He had not once, not twice, but three times forced so much Qi out of him at once to create the small sun. Not only were his meridians in constant pain, even his naval area felt a little strained.

As a person with medical knowledge, he knew that if he went any further, that would be extremely bad.

A man sent out a formation plate, which quickly deployed into some sort of formation with a barrier. Alex didn't realize what the formation did at first, but soon, he got it.

It was a vision-impairing formation. Inside the formation, only he was likely trapped in the shroud of darkness unable to see what was outside.

He could fly out, but there was a one-way barrier there. Fortunately, these bandits didn't know about Spiritual sense.

Alex sent him out to the fullest as he sensed 3 spear-shaped green lights flash towards him.

At the same time, a talisman flew towards him from the side. If he knew to do anything, it would be to get as far away from that talisman.

He suddenly stopped flying, and his body fell through the sky. The spear turned mid-flight and turned towards him.

Alex had his blade shine a little as a layer of white light appeared around it. He used the Sword Intent to add power to his slashes as he barely destroyed the 3 green spears.

At the same time, he pulled his hands back and threw his sword upwards to the talisman that was diving toward him.

As soon as the sword struck it, the talisman exploded into so much light that even Alex could see it through the black shroud.

He landed on the ground, did a roll, and grabbed the sword that came flying down like a bullet let go from a barrel.

He changed the sword's trajectory a bit, and the sword slammed onto the ground, hitting the formation plate perfectly, cutting it in half.

The barrier and the black shroud disappeared, and he could see the stunned looks of the bandits.

It was fortunate that they didn't know how to fight together, or he would've likely gotten attacked way more than just that right now.

Alex looked at them from the ground and sighed. He was going to have to hurt his meridians once more, wasn't he?

A ball of fire appeared behind him, enhanced by yang Qi to look like a small sun.

The 6 of them immediately got into defensive stances, even going so far as to bring out their treasures to protect themselves.

They looked at Alex get his sword ready, then... he vanished.

Instantly, the 6 of them used their defensive techniques and waited for the attacks to land. However, no attacks did come their way.

Instead, the light only got dimmer but didn't go out. When they looked below to see what had happened, their eyes went wide.

Their comrades, the ones that were fainted or just wounded were now burning with the same fire as the sun.

However, there was no sign of Alex at all.

"Brother, where did he—"

The man who put down the formation had his words cut short as his head rolled from his body.

Even then, the 5 of them had no idea where Alex had disappeared to.

Chapter 609 Mists

"AH!" another girl shouted, as her arm was cut at the elbows. But the glowing orange shield protected her chest.

At the same time, another man felt a clang on his barrier that threatened to shatter even when he didn't see anyone attack it.

The leader and the rest immediately sent out their Qi sense and sensed something... someone moving without being seen.

"He's invisible!" the leader shouted. Immediately, everyone started using Qi sense.

Qi sense would help them see or feel. It only gave them a vague shape of what existed wherever their Qi went through, but that was enough to catch Alex trying to attack them.

The 5 of remaining ones realized that fighting alone was not the way here. The opponent was way too tricky with his skills, so they needed to fight together, at once.

Alex huffed far away. The burning feeling in his meridians hurt him way more than he wanted to admit. Using the sun technique 3 times was already bad enough, but 4 times nearly destroyed his meridians.

If he were to do it one more time, it was very much likely that he would lose his meridians.

He had already taken a healing pill, and while his burnt skin and cut flesh had healed, the meridians remained mostly untouched.

That meant the burning feeling didn't come from his meridians being damaged, but something else.

'Did my yang and fire Qi burn through them? Can't be, they're not damaged,' he thought.

He continued keeping his attention on the 5 people flying through the air as he sensed their Qi moving towards him to sense him.

This far away, they shouldn't have been able to sense him at all, however, with nothing else in the direction, the slightest hint of something in the air would certainly make Alex be noticed to them.

'What the hell do I do?' Alex thought. 'I'm already struggling with my meridians to pump out Qi to keep flying and staying invisible. If I try to use any other skill, I will die.'

He wanted to fly far away, but the caravan was ahead in the distance. If he did, the bandits would certainly go attack them as revenge.

So, he let the Qi pass through him.

The 4 bandits and their leader rushed towards Alex with all of their skills flaring at full power.

Alex stood in the air with no other choice but to fight. He gripped his sword and looked at the figures ahead of him.

2 of them were stronger than his body cultivation by more than 2 realms, 3 of them stronger than his Qi cultivation by more than a minor realm.

Any of their attacks would hurt him. If hit properly, all of them could kill.

Still, Alex couldn't back down. He breathed deeper and deeper until his sword started glowing white, the only thing he could do. And then...

~SILENCE~

Weapons clattered down below on the ground a few seconds later.

Alex's fist that was strongly gripping his sword loosened a bit as pure terror appeared on his face.

Mists. That was all Alex could see in front of him. Red and bloody mist.

There were 5 people on their way towards him just moments ago, and now... not a single one of them remained.

"You nearly killed yourself," a voice drifted to his ear as someone appeared from the air, making himself visible.

Shen Jing reappeared.

Alex's face changed. He gritted his teeth and gripped his sword again, even harder this time.

Shen Jing chuckled a little as he waved his hands, clearing the bloody mist in front of him.

"YOU!" Alex said, with hatred in his voice. What was he up to? He had just brought Alex here to die, and yet... was he the one who just saved Alex?

As if to clear up Alex's doubts, Shen Jing said, "You're not bad when it comes to fighting. I thought I would have to save you long ago."

Shen Jing looked below at the burning flesh of the bandits.

"You said you lost your arms to bandits in your hometown. Were they much stronger than these men?" he asked.

Alex wasn't sure what was happening right now. So he was helping him?

"They weren't stronger. Only I was very much weaker," Alex said with a cold voice.

"I see," Shen Jing said. Suddenly, a wave of Qi surrounded Alex, gripping him like a fist.

"Stop flying. Stop concealing. In fact, stop doing anything that has to do with QI," Shen Jing said.

Alex tried to struggle free, but the Qi grasp was way too strong.

"Stop struggling. You will only make this worse," Shen Jing said.

"Why are you doing this? What's your purpose?" Alex asked. "Were you with the bandits?"

"Pfft! Hahaha," Shen Jing suddenly started laughing as if he had never heard of a more funny joke before. "Why would you possibly think I was with the bandits?"

"Because you brought me here for them to kill me," Alex said.

"No. I brought YOU here to kill THEM. I was testing you, a little," Shen Jing said.

"This... this is 'a little'?" Alex asked, pointing to the burning bodies to the side.

"I was planning it to be. I was expecting you to kill 2 or 3 people, maybe even 5 before you needed my saving. However, while I noticed your particularly dense Qi, I somehow didn't notice your body."

"Had I known, I might have removed the 2 stronger ones and let you fight the rest of the 28. But then, you might have easily killed them too," Shen Jing said with his hands on his chin.

"You know what? Now that I think about it, these bandits at the edge of the empire are probably not that good of a test. They didn't have weapons or items that a normal cultivator in the more established sections of the empire would have," he said.

"Either way, you did well. You should rest after we return," Shen Jing said and suddenly dragged Alex behind him.

The speed was so fast that everything looked like a blur to him. 'Yes, that's the speed of a Saint Realm alright,' Alex thought.

He couldn't help but wonder what the hell a saint realm was doing in this remote place.

"Argh!" Alex grumbled softly, but Shen Jing still caught it.

"Don't try to use Qi. The only Qi you should be using now is during cultivation. Any other will hurt you for a while," Shen Jing said.

"Dammit, what's happening to me? Am I hurt? Is this Qi deviation" Alex asked.

"Haha, nothing like that. You did go overboard a little with that little sun stunt, but nothing enough to harm your cultivation," Shun Jing said.

"What did I do?" Alex asked.

"Basically, you made too much Qi flow through your meridians at once. Too much flow caused your meridians to stretch to a point that was way beyond what it could normally handle."

"A normal person would've likely reached your current condition on the first time, maybe second time if they are lucky," Shen Jing said.

"To have created that sun for 5 times in a row, while using so many skills in between. You, little brother, are truly amazing."

Chapter 610 Not What We Want

Alex sat in the rattling carriage that slowly moved towards its destination, Silverleaf city.

Pearl was still to the side, making quite the friendship with the little girl named Xue.

He sat cross-legged on his seat, sending all of his focus onto his meridians. They… they were almost twice as wide as what his meridians would normally be.

Considering it was smaller than normal already due to it not properly healing, this was actually quite massive.

"Will it really heal?" Alex asked.

"Yes, yes, you don't have to worry. Everyone had to go through it once in a while to understand the pain of overinflated meridians. Only then do they realize that it's something bad that one shouldn't do" Shen Jing said.

By now, Alex had come to accept the fact that Shen Jing wasn't really a bad guy. The way he had killed the 5 men without Alex feeling a trace of his power… Shen Jing had no need for these petty tricks.

'Unless he likes tricks,' Alex thought but didn't say it out loud.

"It's like a little curious cubs touching Yin-fire for the first time. Once they do, they will know not to do it again," Shen Jing said looking outside the carriage.

"Yin-fire? What's that?" Alex asked. His curiosity was piqued.

"A type of fire," Shen Jing said. "But you don't have to worry about that for now."

Alex wanted to learn more, but he didn't dare ask and simply nodded. "How long do you think it will take me to heal the meridians?" he asked.

"Hmm… hard to say really," Shen Jing said. "Everyone is different. That is especially true for you. Given your body cultivation… I will give about a month of time before they can return to normal."

"Another month?" Alex exclaimed. He had already spent nearly 3 weeks trying to heal it back to normal, and yet, the time increased by another 4 weeks once again.

4 weeks of continuous cultivation.

"It would take a month… if that is what we wanted to do," Shen Jing said.

"Huh?" Alex got confused. "What do you mean by that? Should I not heal my meridians?"

"No," Shen Jing said. "You should keep them as it is."

"I don't understand," Alex said.

Shen Jing suddenly lost his casual stance and leaned forward towards Alex.

"Your Meridians are different from everyone else. When people body-cultivate, most of the time, they only manage to improve 3 things. Skin, muscles, and bones."

"Only rarely do people improve their organs. Improving Meridians? You would be luckier finding a Phoenix that can't regenerate."

"So, you are in a unique position where your Meridians are very strong. Strong enough to handle your recklessness multiple times."

"If you keep up the recklessness, they will certainly be destroyed. However, if you were to do it in a controlled environment. That is, widening your meridian from time to time. Slowly, but surely, they will start healing themselves to that size."

"Then, you will have meridians so widely open that you can pump out a lot of Qi in a very little time. I don't know if that is useful to an Alchemist or not, but to a cultivator, one couldn't ask for something better," Shen Jing said.

Alex's eyes went wide as he understood the implication. If he could do what he did yesterday, and create suns like that without breaking a sweat, he could use stronger attacks that require more wind-up time very easily.

The amount of time it took to pour his Qi into swords, or formations would halve. Creating fire entities would be very quick as well.

There were a lot of benefits and Alex couldn't even think about them yet.

"That sounds amazing," he said. "When do I start?"

"Let's wait until it stops hurting as much. 2 days should be fine. Cultivate until then," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded and cultivated. Time passed slowly, and Alex cultivated both the Five Yang Divine Path and the Winter Moon technique interchangeably.

Whenever his body started to heat up a bit, he would change to the Yin technique to cool it down. The Yin also felt cool on his meridians and gave a comforting feeling.

During this time, Shen Jing went out twice for a few hours before returning. Who knew where he went during this time.

On the second time, Alex decided to ask.

"Where do you go for hours?" he asked.

"I'm searching for places," he said.

"Places? Are you out here searching for something?" he asked. He thought he was finally seeing why Shen Jing was in this remote corner of the continent at all.

By now, his theory about him being a player had already disappeared. There was no way someone could reach the saint realm and have this much knowledge on cultivation as a player.

"No, I'm not looking for something out here. You can stop trying to guess who I am and what I am doing here. The world is way too vast and you haven't even seen the smallest of them to figure out who I am," Shen Jing said.

That shut up Alex. So, he went back to cultivating.

On the second day, Shen Jing brought Alex far away from the caravan to do his Sun trick again.

Alex prepared himself and instantly drew out a massive amount of Qi from his body that passed through the meridians, making them look like they were bulging at the seams.

The sun formed in front of Alex, the dazzling red and orange it that shined just like the sun above him.

It was about a meter in diameter and was fully constructed with Qi.

Any more heat and he would likely die from burning himself. Alex felt a bit of fear, wondering if he would injure himself using this sun.

The sun itself wasn't as dangerous as Alex. Since it was produced from his own cultivation base, the damage it could deal was the same as his cultivation base too.

However, for some reason, its aura gave off an aura that made it look more dangerous than it was.

From what Alex could see even Shen Jing was having a hard time keeping his chilled personality in front of the sun.

He breathed in and out heavily, more so than Alex. 'Is he…scared?' Alex wondered.

Shen Jing wasn't scared. In fact, he was the exact opposite. He was excited.

The sun in front of him gave him a sense of excitement and nervousness, something he had actually felt not so long ago.

Actually, that event was much more exciting… or rather fearsome than this small sun. That event he went through a few months ago, now that was something else.

But still, seeing the sun gave him a sense of need to bow down in front of it, which he resisted.

"It truly is incredible what you can do," he said. "Although, stop it or you will hurt your meridians."

Alex nodded and quickly stopped the sun. The sun lasted for a few more seconds without his constant Qi input and disappeared.

"If you were to give that a percentage, how much Qi would you say you have used to make this sun?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex felt his own Qi reserve and gave a rough estimate of 10%.

"10%? That's so much better than what I would've expected of you. And here I thought I was already overestimating you with 15%."

"So if the fight lasted longer and your meridian were fine, you could've kept going, right?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes, I still had enough to fight," Alex said.

"Great! Absolutely great. Hahaha, I'm so glad I found you," Shen Jing said.

"How did you find me?" Alex asked. "I'm still curious. What about me attracted you towards me?"

Shen Jing smiled and shook his fingers. "You are not going to be able to make me answer like that. Why I decided to help you, you will find soon enough, hopefully."

Alex shook his head. They always said that. Get stronger, and I will tell you, or it's not time for you to learn about it yet.

Couldn't they just give him the information straight on? What was the reason behind all of this secrecy?

"Are you not hurt? Your meridians should be feeling like they will burst at any moment now," Shen Jing asked.

"It does, but I've learned to live with the pain," Alex said and walked back to the carriage, ignoring the curious look of Shen Jing.

Once he reached the carriage, Alex started cultivating once more, using the two different methods alternatively.

Shen Jing looked at this point with a bit of surprise too. He wanted to ask what Alex was doing, but he believed he had a very good idea of what was happening.

'Well, since he already has a solution, he probably doesn't need mine,' Shen Jing thought and decided to keep quiet.

Alex cultivated for an entire day and only opened his eyes when he felt the carriage stop.

"What's going on?" he asked, opening his eyes for the first time in hours.

Shen Jing opened the door and jumped out.

"Come on out, we are here," he said.

"Here?" Alex asked for a second before realizing what he meant. "Oh, we already arrived in Silverleaf city, huh?"

He got out as well and looked at the city. Surprisingly, the city had no defensive walls like all the cities of the Crimson Empire had. Or even the Riverweed city from not long ago.

"How much further is your destination again?" Shen Jing asked as if to remind him.

Alex couldn't help but chuckle when he remembered that he was barely 3% of the way done with his journey.

Chapter 611 Light

"Do we go find another caravan now?" Shen Jing asked.

"No, I want to stay here a day or two, see if there is any information I can find to heal my wound," Alex said.

"Won't it be better to just go to the capital and see if the— actually, never mind. Go do what you want to," Shen Jing said. "I will return in a day or two."

"Where are you going?" Alex asked curiously.

"Just to look upon someone, to see if they need my help. Then I will go find the place I've been meaning to for two days now," Shen Jing said.

"Okay, I will wait for you," Alex said. Shen Jing nodded and flew up into the air. Before Alex could even realize it, he vanished.

"Damn, must be fun being a Saint realm cultivator. I wish I could reach there quickly too," Alex thought to himself.

Suddenly, something jumped on his left shoulder, and even without looking at it, Alex pet the cat.

"Did you have fun?" he asked.

"Had fun," Pearl answered. Alex sent out his spiritual sense and saw that the little girl was sad as she left Pearl, but that was life.

"Do you feel sad?" Alex asked.

"No," Pearl replied.

"Why?" Alex asked.

"Pearl has brother," Pearl answered.

"Alright, you rascal. You don't need to make me feel good," Alex said and grabbed Pearl before putting him into his robes.

"Ah right, if someone talks to you from now on, don't speak in human language, okay? Just meow at them," Alex told Pearl before walking into the city.

While Silverleaf city didn't have walls, it still had gates and guards protecting it from all sides.

The guards wore normal clothes, greenish-brown robes to be precise, and didn't stand out amongst the many people walking in and out of the city.

Alex got into the line as well, to soon enter the city. As he looked around, he suddenly heard gasps and exclamations from the gates.

When he turned around, he saw the two guards at the gate bowing toward two people that had just walked out.

One of them was a girl around the age of 26, and another a man of similar age. They were likely older folks, but they looked pretty young.

The woman had long flowing hair and wore a robe of green, no blue color. Wait, that wasn't right? The color was actually red.

No, that too was wrong. The color was purple.

As if they were a bunch of illusions stacked on top of each other, the colors of the robe the girl wore changed depending on how she turned. Not only that, each part of her robe was of different color depending on how the light hit her robes.

Basically, it was a robe of many colors, and thus, had no color of its own. On the left chest of the robe, there was an embroidery in white, that was perfectly visible no matter what color the robe seemed to be in.

The embroidery said 'Light'.

The man was the same. He wore a similarly colorful and yet colorless robe, with an embroidery of the word 'Light' on the left chest of the robe.

"Ah!" Alex thought as he realized who these people were. They were the Lightsworns, the ones that vowed to protect the empire and the royal family.

"Oh, it's the Lightsworns."

"Really? This is my first time seeing them."

"I don't doubt it. They never really come to this section of the empire unless they are needed."

"I wonder what has happened here for them to come."

Many of the people around Alex started speaking in a hushed tone. They all had the same thoughts and questions Alex did.

The girl Lightsworn walked forward and let them know why they were there.

"The newly arrived caravan, did you guys get attacked by bandits?" she asked.

The group of people that had come with Alex looked at each other for confirmation and then shook their heads.

"There were no bandits," one of them shouted.

The girl frowned. "Are you sure?" she asked.

"Yes," the same man spoke. The girl waited for someone to contradict him, but when they didn't, she sighed. It seemed he wasn't lying.

"What do we do now, sister?" the man asked from the side.

"We still have to go find them. It's an order after all," the girl said.

"Sigh, why do we have to be the ones to deal with such weak bandits," the man complained.

"I don't think they are weak. From the reports, they are likely to have True Lords amongst them," the girl said.

"You trust those reports? They came from such weak people. They were likely exaggerating," the man said.

"Still, it's better to be cautious. Let's go check it all out," she said and flew off. The man shook his head and flew off behind her.

As they flew, their clothes once again changed from red to purple to blue to cyan to green to yellow all the way back until they reached red again.

"That's what I'm going to wear one day, aren't I? I wonder how they make them," Alex wondered.

He looked at the two of them fly away and wondered if it was a good idea to hide the information he had.

Certainly, telling them would've ended their work at once, but then that would open a can of worms he wasn't willing to deal with.

How many were there? How did you kill them? How are you alive? How does not a single one of your traveling friends know about this event?

Questions like that would bring more suspicions toward him. So much so that they might think of him to be spreading false information on purpose.

He didn't want that.

The line moved forward, and Alex got to enter with his Alchemist badge. The guards were quite respectable when they saw that.

Alex was really happy with how useful this badge was. Paying a fee in every single town or city he visited would have been troublesome.

Alex wanted to visit the library and the Alchemists Guild in this city. However, the first place he went to was actually the restaurant.

While the restaurant in this town wasn't as fancy-looking as the three-factions restaurant, the food here was still great.

He had the most amazing meal that this restaurant made. He didn't even blink an eye when he paid 70 True Spirit stones for that food.

It was nourishing, and he needed that. After that, Alex was reminded of something by the food, so he went around the city, finding this one place.

The charity for the players.

Once again, Alex decided to go in and explain to the players that were there what was going on.

Similar to last time, he went to help, this time simply slipping through instead of asking for permission.

He told the players what they needed to do, he gave them hope, and once enough people were motivated to change their life, he walked out.

"Here, sister, some spirit stones," Alex said as he handed her a bunch and left.

The girl's face stared in awe when she saw the 60 True Spirit stones fall on her hands just like that.

Chapter 612 Locating the Ingredients

Alex wondered if he should find a place to stay, but it didn't seem necessary to him. Since he was only going to be here for merely 2 or so days, he could spend those times in either the Alchemy hall or the library in this city.

"Huh? This city has no library?" Alex asked a man with surprise. He had been asking for directions to the library when he learned about that.

"No, Fellow Daoist. But I hear the next city has one," the man told Alex.

"Next city? The Raingoard city?" Alex asked.

"Yes, that's the one. It's only a hundred or so kilometers away," the man said.

"Thank you," Alex said and left. That took away one of the things he wanted to do.

'Does this town seriously not have a library?' he thought. Well, now that he thought about it, not every town had a library.

Even the city he considered his home now, the Scarlet city didn't have a library.

'Well, I guess I will have to go read some alchemy book in the Alchemists guild now,' he thought. He wanted to learn more about the land, but it seemed it would have to wait until a while longer.

So, Alex walked towards the Alchemists guild that which he knew the direction of.

-Silverleaf Branch of Alchemists guild-

'They do have a branch in every city, don't they?' he thought. He turned around and looked at the formation guild too, but that one would have to come later.

He walked into the Alchemists guild and walked directly to the left side of the guild. Fortunately, the interior of the guild was the same as the one in the last city.

He arrived next to another Alchemist who was also looking at the board.

He ignored that person and placed his badge on the carving. Soon, a whole load of information entered his brain, regarding the many missions.

Alex looked for a good one and chose it before walking away. He didn't try to look for anyone and only focused on himself.

Once again, he started making pills for as long as he could. Each mission gave him 2 or 3 sets of ingredients, and Alex spent the whole time turning all the ingredients into pills.

In total, he made about 10 different pills by the time it was evening. He could've certainly gone for a lot more of them, but unfortunately, his swollen meridians didn't let him do that.

Once it was evening, he decided to take a bit of break and went to the front of the guild for the receptions.

"Hello, can you tell me if there are any of these ingredients available for me to purchase?" Alex asked.

The girl looked through the list and crosschecked it. "We have Hotfeather Eagle's tail feathers, sir Alchemist," the girl said.

"The tail feathers? Only?" Alex asked. He had just bought that last time too.

"Unfortunately yes," the girl said.

Alex scratched his head. 'Was finding ingredients this hard normally? Have I been terribly spoiled by the northern forest?' he wondered.

"Would you like me to look if there are any places with these ingredients?" she asked.

"Eh? You mean through the other cities, with the other guilds?" Alex asked.

"Yes, sir Alchemist. However... it will cost you 2 True spirit stones per ingredient sear—"

"Do it!" Alex said aggressively. "Sorry about that. Can you please do it?"

"Of course," the girl said and started searching for the ingredients throughout the entire empire.

At the same time, Alex took the opportunity to write some more ingredients, which were the Saint rank versions of the untranslated ones.

The girl searched for those as well.

In the end, she came up with a lot of information, which she transferred onto a talisman and handed to Alex.

Alex paid the 28 or so True Spirit stones, after discount, that had cost him to search the ingredients, and went to a seat on the side of the hall to look through it.

As he went through the locations, the names of the cities, as well as their placement of them on the map, popped up in his head.

He could find almost every ingredient somewhere throughout the entire empire. Most concentrated of them was the capital, which had almost all of the ingredients, including the Blood Spirit Ginger.

"So it's all in the capital huh?" he thought. He wanted to leave immediately, but the capital was about 8700 kilometers away. That was not something he could reach by rushing there.

'Damn, how exactly do people travel such long distances in this empire?' he wondered.

He decided he would use the boat he had with him. If he handed it to Shen Jing, with his Saint realm Qi, it would certainly fly at the speed of light.

He went back up to the lady at the reception to ask if it was possible to purchase the ginseng from here and receive it at the Alchemist guild in the capital.

"Are you sure, sir Alchemist?" the girl asked him with a weird look. Alex couldn't understand what was so weird about that.

"Of course," Alex said.

The girl still seemed to have her doubt as she didn't immediately turn toward the system in front of her.

Instead, she said, "Sir Alchemist, you do know this is a Saint rank alchemy ingredient right?"

"Yes," Alex said as a sense of foreboding fell upon him. He thought for a second and asked, "What's the price of the Blood Spirit Ginseng?"

"It's 3400 True Spirit stones or 34 Saint spirit stones," the girl said with a wry face.

"What?!" Alex burst out in dumbfoundedness. Never in his life would he had imagined a Saint rank ingredient to cost so much money.

However, when he thought about it, it was a Saint rank ingredient. Slowly his thoughts returned to the ingredients he had in his storage bag.

There were at least 20 different Saint ingredients in there. He could make a lot of money if he sold those ingredients, wouldn't he? They would be enough to buy this Blood Spirit ginseng many times over.

'NO!' Alex thought and shook his head. "I guess I won't be buying it then. Thank you."

He had already learned his lesson regarding selling something he owned that was out of his league.

Zexi had nearly killed him last time when he was only a True Master realm cultivator. If Alex sold Saint rank ingredients, he would bring the wrath of Saint realm cultivators from all over the empire.

'Until I have entered the Saint realm, I cannot touch these ingredients or reveal it to the world,' he thought.

After that, Alex took a job that required him to make a bulk of pills at 25% and went back to the alchemy room.

For the next 8 hours, he stayed inside, doing nothing but making pills. Or so, he wanted people to think.

What he really did was make pills for 2 hours, and spent the rest of the 6 hours simply cultivating.

Alex went as far as splitting the pills to increase his speed at making the pills since they were only 25%.

After finishing making the pill, he kept the ingredients and instead cultivated for 6 hours, interchanging between the two methods every hour.

By the time it was time to leave, he felt his meridians swell a little less. After he went through this a few more times, he would probably have to remake the sun again to inflate it once more.

Alex went back to making some more pills for the missions and after morning arrived, he went to the back half of the guild where a small library was kept.

Alex entered the room and saw that it wasn't even a full shelf. Even then, he was at least getting something to learn.

'I wonder if the knowledge regarding alchemy in this empire is any different,' Alex wondered.

He tried to pick out a book, but there was some sort of seal here as well. 'Do I have to pay?' he thought. He wouldn't have expected to have to pay for something as simple as a book called 'Basics of Alchemy.'

After a minute or two of trying to pay, Alex couldn't figure out how to go about it.

That was when a person came by and placed his medallion in the air in front of the shelf, and the shelf opened up to allow a book to be taken.

Alex nearly slapped himself in annoyance for not figuring out something so simple.

He took out the basic alchemy book and got to reading. It wasn't long before he realized that the book truly was for the basics of basics regarding Alchemy.

'Why the hell is something so simple in an Alchemists guild?' he wondered. 'Do newbies need to continuously refer to this book to see if they forgot something?'

That felt correct in his mind, so he went on to take out another book.

The books available were on different subjects. Such as Energy theory, the importance of a cauldron, the difference in types of energy released based on the speed of the ingredient, and such.

Alex didn't feel these information to be extremely important to him, so he kept searching for some book he might not have knowledge of.

That was when he came across 3 books with interesting titles, about something he had never thought about before.

Alex looked at the first of the book and used his medallion to bring it out.

Once it was in his hand, he read the title of the book.

"Side Effects of Consuming too many pills."

Chapter 613 Toxins and Poisons

"Side effects of eating too many pills? There's something like that?" he wondered and sat down to read the book.

At first, Alex didn't give much thought to the book as the title felt more of an attention grabber than something that was actually true.

It was like those clickbait titles he would find on the internet all the time. However, as he kept on reading, his eyes narrowed as things that he hadn't thought of before but were clearly important were mentioned in the book.

According to the book, when one consumed a pill, the pill needed time to take effect. Even after the pill did take, there would be some lingering effects that would take time to leave.

This was theorized to be likely due to the powder of the pill getting stuck on the walls of the meridians as they are sucked in through the bloodstream when the body is trying to absorb the energy.

Alex knew that the bloodstreams of a person did mix with the person's meridians in some places, so there was merit to the information.

But was it really correct? Alex for one had never faced this problem even though there were a few times when he consumed pills consecutively.

'Actually,' he thought. 'Now that I think about it, I never really did eat a pill normally, did I?'

'Aside from the few times when I needed to heal, all the pills I ate would usually turn to Qi, with my body destroying the powder too, wouldn't it?' he thought.

Alex quickly realized that he had no understanding of how pills actually worked. Until now, he had simply gone along with the fact that they worked.

"I see, so it must be true. Pill toxins... they must be quite serious then," he thought. That got him to thinking just how many toxins a normal player's body must have amassed from eating all the pills they did to improve their bodies so far.

'Was that one of the reasons why their cultivation base was so bad?' Alex wondered. That certainly had to be true in some part.

Some of those pill powders themselves could be harmful too, and while one's body could probably fight against such minor harmful substances, ingesting a lot of them could lead to serious problems.

Alex went on to read more of the book and came across sections that talked about remedies if one had a lot of pill toxins.

One of the methods was surprising to eat a pill that dealt with the toxins. Pills made of ingredients that would break down the power that jammed one's meridians and help with the proper flow of Qi.

Another method was to get an expert physician to use their Qi to push the powders through some crack in the blood vessels.

These were the cures of the pill toxins. The book also went on to explain the methods of preventing pill toxins.

The most obvious one was to limit the consumption of pills as much as possible. The less pill you ate, the lesser the chance of pill powder being stuck in your meridians.

The other, more difficult way was to consume pills with very high harmony. Unfortunately for Alex, the book didn't mention why that helped, only that it did.

That was the end of the book, so Alex closed it and fell into thought.

'What's the difference between high harmony pill and a low harmony pill?' Alex thought. It was obviously the difference in harmony.

'Or more accurate, the difference in the amount of energy each pill has taken in,' Alex thought.

From his understanding of the Structure and Composition of a pill, he understood that the more amount of perfectly clumped together the mixture of the powder was in a pill, the better the harmony would be.

'So, does that mean that the powder of the pill that does hold the energy gets easily absorbed and even breaks down into individual pieces of powder, while the one without energy in it simply stays clumped up?' Alex wondered.

If that were true, he could see why pills with high harmony would result in fewer pill toxins, and vice versa.

Alex mulled on the information for a while, taking in everything he learned about pill toxins.

In the end, all he needed to care about were not eating too many pills, and that better pills were always better.

'I can see why pills with higher harmony would be sought after more. It was not just the effectiveness of the energy, was it?' he thought.

Alex went back to the shelf and put back the book, before taking out the 2nd of the 3 unique books.

He read the title of the book to himself.

"Poison pills are almost as important as healing pills."

Unfortunately, the second book wasn't as interesting as he had hoped it to be.

The book about poison simply spoke about how important poison was to an alchemist. It spoke about the minute differences poison could have that not all healing pills could cure.

As such, people needed to learn about poison so as to be prepared against them. Knowing about poisons would help someone create antidotes way easier than not knowing about the poison.

All the book did was make Alex remember to learn how to make poisons. He had been meaning to do that for a long while, but he had forgotten about it due to the events he had been through in the crimson empire.

Alex stopped. 'I have been through?' he thought. That was wrong. He had never been through anything. It was his clone soul that went through everything in his body.

'Why do I think of the events as something I did?' he thought. He had noticed this a while ago, but now it had become way more prominent.

No longer did he think of what his clone soul did as 'someone else's work'. For some reason, it had become his own in his mind.

The distinctions between what he did and what his clone did were slowly but surely vanishing from his mind.

At this point, it wouldn't be wrong to call the current him and the one that was controlled by his clone soul the same person.

'Am I getting used to my body after being suppressed? What is happening?' Alex thought.

Alex didn't have a clear understanding of what had happened outside of the game. Those memories were still very vague to him.

However, the memories inside the game were now as good as his.

He shook his head and focused back on the poison book he was reading. The book didn't really have anything interesting for him to read further, especially since he wasn't used to making poisons at all.

He would revisit it once he had at least delved into making poisons. Now that he had learned about the poisonous swamps to the east of the empire which he would have to visit for the purpose of getting the Two Colored, or Three colored Poison Lily, he would certainly get into it soon enough.

Alex then took out the final book that had piqued his interest among the many on the shelf.

A book named 'Simple Usage of formations in Alchemy'.

Chapter 614 Formations in Alchemy

Formations for alchemy. Alex had always learned these two things separately, yet now, the book was saying that there were ways to use formations for alchemy.

"I wonder how it would work," he thought as he opened the book and started reading it.

As he read it, Alex soon understood that there was nothing simple about this knowledge. Every single page contained a bit of information that would help everyone a lot.

Use formations to help your pill-making. If people in the Crimson Empire were to be told this, they would certainly be amazed.

There were a few things you could do with your formations that would be considered simple usage.

First of all, was something that many cultivators struggled with even after reaching a high cultivation base.

That was flame control. If someone was born without fire-related spiritual roots then those people would have to usually put in more effort during cultivation.

That was to say that they would have something else to worry about while keeping track of the pill and all.

There were also outside influences that would make it hard to control the flame sometimes. Alex remembered how hard it was for his master to control the fire after she had just awakened her Yin Constitution.

He too struggled while making a few pills when he had just awakened his body as well.

If at that time he had a flame-controlling formation that assisted him in changing the temperature of the flame, it would have been a lot of help.

Another thing formations could help was pill forming. Sometimes, one didn't even have to make the pills themselves. Once they reached the last portion of the pill-making process where all that was remaining was to put the powders together to make a pill, a formation could be used to automate that process.

When Alex read that, he wondered how much that could really help him. After all, pills needed to be crafted carefully to reach a high percentage of harmony.

Of course, he didn't doubt that one could reach a certain harmony level with formations. It may have been immortal grade. It may even be divine grade.

But what about after that? At some point, the powders wouldn't clump together so nicely that they allowed energy to be held. Also, formations surely wouldn't bring out every single speck of the powdered ingredient like a human's spiritual sense would.

Not to mention about the thing the Royal Alchemist had told him.

Symmetry.

If he wanted symmetry in a pill, he would likely have to do it himself and not rely on a formation.

There were still other things a formation could help with. There was one that Alex didn't find useful to himself, but would definitely help a lot of the others.

That was using defensive formations while making pills. Using defensive formations, if the alchemist was ever in a situation where the cauldron's energy destabilized to the point that it exploded the cauldron, the defensive formation would save them.

Aside from that, there were many other simple usages such as Qi gathering formation to keep you making pills for longer, or Soul Cooling formation to help you with the mental fatigue of making pills.

Given what formations could do, these truly were the simple ones of the bunch.

Alex put the book back on the shelf and went back to his task of making pills again.

When he entered the pill formation this time, he asked the aid if there were formations here to help him.

"Sir Alchemist, you can use your badge to activate any formations you may need in here. However, please know that using formation will cost you some charge based on how long you use it for," the aid said.

Alex nodded and started making pills once more. This time, however, he decided to use the Flame controlling formation to see how much it would help.

It cost him 1 True Spirit stone every 10 minutes of the formation's usage. If it worked as advertised, Alex wouldn't mind paying that every day.

He started the formation and increased the temperature to what was needed for the first ingredient.

"Hmm?" Alex had to stop putting in Qi as soon as he started. The moment he used his Qi to even increase the fire's temperature to any level, it immediately shot up the temperature.

He required what he believed to be 30% of his originally required Qi to reach the same effect, and the time it took for the fire to get hot was a bit faster as well.

Considering he had the Flame Mastery scripture which helped him control fire at a level not many could, he could see how this formation would help the other alchemists.

Alex needed to get used to the formation, so for the first few minutes, he kept track of how quickly the formation increased and decreased his time.

Once he practiced a few ingredients, he started getting used to the sped-up creation process and made the pill in just under 10 minutes.

The pill came out to be at 43%, despite him having a slightly hard time towards the start due to the change in speed.

Now that he got used to it, he would make the better and better pill.

For the next 6 hours, Alex continued making pills, spending close to 30 True spirit stones using the formation alone.

While he certainly could work without the formation, it did speed up his process by just that bit.

So, he had continued using it.

Around late afternoon, Alex left the guild to go out and visit the city. For the next 3 hours, he did nothing but roam the city.

He saw the many people going about their own life, each one as real as the next one.

He couldn't believe that at one point he had thought these to be fake people.

Not just him, millions upon millions of people from his homeworld, the fifth continent.

'I wonder if they know this world is real or not? My clone did, but maybe after not finding a way back, he already forgot about it,' Alex thought.

After all, that was what he would do.

'He most likely doesn't know he is the clone. Poor guy, living a life with a bad body, it will be tough for him,' Alex thought.

Along the way, he saw many different guards patrolling the city. Yet he didn't see the guards that had colorful clothes. The Lightsworns.

'Hopefully, they found the corpses and weapons on the ground and learned about their deaths already,' Alex thought.

Alex walked to another restaurant and sat inside, ordering some of the most nourishing food on the menu.

He also brought Pearl out to feed him a bit. Now that Pearl was a True beast, he could also devour a lot.

Not long after, the food appeared and nearly filled the entire table he was sitting on.

Some of the men and women turned their heads to watch him eat so much. A few of them even had shining eyes, as if they found something captivating.

Alex enjoyed his meal as slowly as he could and left the restaurant. When he did, it was already evening outside, and the sun had just gone down.

Lanterns, as well as light artifacts, started shining all over Silverleaf city, giving a lively appearance to the city.

Alex smiled when he saw all that, reminding him of the Hong Wu sect.

He started walking back towards the guild. Along the way, however, he had to stop.

"Would you fellows mind telling me what you are doing following a man like me in this nighttime?" Alex asked, turning around to look at 3 thugs who were trying to discreet in their following.

"I would suggest you follow a girl instead of a man like me, but that might be bad since I don't think your intentions are very good, are they?" Alex asked.

In the middle of the street, saying such a thing with such loudness had obviously started to make the crowd of people focus on them.

The three thugs immediately looked flustered. "Brother, what are you saying? We are just walking along minding our own business. We aren't following you," one of the men said.

"Oh," Alex said, giving them a light smile. "I'm sorry to have stopped you like that. Then I suppose you wouldn't mind going on your way then."

Alex didn't want to bother with these men, so he left them a way out. With their Bone Tempering realm cultivation base, it would only be bullying to do anything stupid like bait them into attacking him after going into an alleyway.

However, when Alex did give them a way out, they didn't leave at all. Instead, they started at him with their eyes wide.

It wasn't just them, even the crowd behind them had started to stare at him with wide eyes.

'What's going on?' Alex thought and looked the crowd at the side. That was when he realized that they weren't staring at him, but rather behind him.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense behind him and nearly yelped in surprise when he realized who was standing there.

He immediately turned around, and the colorful lights reflected in his light. Even at the night, those robes changed colors like a rainbow twisting itself as it moved through the sky.

The Lightsworns that he had thought had already left the city were standing in front of him and the crowd.

And for some reason, they were staring directly at him.

Chapter 615 Mosquito

'Are they staring at me?' Alex thought with a surprised look on his face. That was when he saw a talisman floating in front of the man and woman, blinking with a soft light as it slowly flew towards him.

Alex thought of moving back, but there was no threat from the talisman at all. He caught the talisman before it could touch him, and when he did, it turned bright and burst into a million lights, all of which started coating him.

The girl canceled the talisman's locater since they had already found the person they wanted to find.

"Fellow Daoist, would you mind coming with us?" the girl asked.

Alex looked at them with a weird look on his face. "May I ask why I am being called?" he asked.

"It is regarding a certain bandit group that you have been in contact with recently," the girl said.

"Why are we wasting our time talking, sister? Let's just grab him and leave," the man next to her said.

The girl shook her head and gestured to Alex as she said, "the situation is a little more complex than you think."

The man turned towards Alex to see what she meant by complicated when he noticed something peeking out of his chest.

'Was that… an Alchemist badge?' he thought. If it really was an alchemist badge then they couldn't be hasty with doing anything.

Offending an Alchemist was the same as offending the guild. The consequences would be too extreme. Not to mention, the kid in front of him was a True Earth alchemist.

"Brother, we can talk in the alchemist's guild if that is where you wish to converse with us," the man said, now understanding the situation.

The girl was a little surprised that her partner even had a brain that could think anything other than fighting and resting.

"Very well," Alex said and left with the two. The two of them moved to either side of Alex as he walked back toward the Alchemist guild.

The three thugs nearly pissed their pants that they had nearly gone ahead with their plan of looting someone that was about to be escorted by the Lightsworns.

Had they arrived at the wrong moment, they would've become mincemeat at the hands of the Lightsworns. They quickly thanked lady luck and made their way back to their homes.

After a few minutes, Alex arrived at the Alchemist's guild and walked towards the corner away from the customers.

The customers and receptionists looked with surprised expressions when they saw Lightsworns enter the guild.

When they saw an Alchemist with them, they were even more surprised.

One of the receptionists immediately stood up and walked toward them. When she reached the Lightsworns, she bowed towards them in greeting but ignored them afterward.

"Sir Alchemist, do you require any assistance?" she asked.

"There's no need," Alex said. "If there is, I will let you know."

The receptionist nodded and went back to the reception.

Alex was surprised that she came to help him so fast. Likely all the receptionists were trained in such a way to help the alchemists in whatever problem they encountered.

'She was likely going to find me a lawyer equivalent, wasn't she?' he thought. He was liking the guild more and more now.

"Can we ask you some questions now?" the girl asked.

"Yes, go ahead," Alex said. There was nothing he could really do now aside from answering their question.

"What's your name?" the girl asked.

"Yu Ming," Alex said.

"Where are you from, brother Ming?"

"Riverweed city," Alex said.

The girl quickly took out a map to see where the city lied and when they realized that it was on the same path as the bandit's location, she put it back in.

"What is your affiliation with the bandits?" the girl asked.

"Affiliations? I don't have any affiliations," Alex said.

"That's a damn lie," the man said from the side. "The talisman that tracked you down had the bandit's aura in it. It was an Aura tracking talisman, and it led us right to you."

"Oh," Alex said. "That's because I killed them partially."

The two Lightsworns immediately frowned. "You killed them?" they asked. The man and woman instantly judged Alex's cultivation base again, only to find out it was still in True Disciple 3rd realm.

That couldn't have killed anyone at all.

The girl suddenly moved her hand, and Alex thought she was about to attack him. However, she was just reaching her storage bag.

The girl then brought out a talisman and suddenly placed it on Alex's forehead before he could say anything.

Alex felt a rush of non-harming energy pass through his body and a moment later, the talisman fell.

-True Disciple 3rd realm-

That was written on the talisman. "Why did you do that?" Alex frowned.

"Sorry, we needed to find out if you were perhaps lying," the girl said as she picked up the talisman. "However, it doesn't look like you are."

"Of course, I'm not," Alex said.

"Then why were you lying?" the girl asked.

Alex was confused. "What? When did I lie?" he asked.

"You said you killed them. With your cultivation base, that's not possible at all. Also, to gain this much aura, you couldn't have killed them using any other method than direct fighting," the girl said.

Alex took a deep breath and reigned in his anger. "Partially. I said I killed them partially. I only killed the ones I could. I can't kill them all obviously," Alex said.

"Huh? Oh," the girl only then understood. "Who else was with you?"

"Uh, it was one man called Shen Jing, that's all," Alex said.

"Where is this man now?" the girl demanded.

"Behind you." A voice floated from behind the girl and boy, scaring them. They immediately took out their swords and pointed their swords at him, fully scared of him.

'What the hell? How did I not sense him approaching?' the girl wondered. 'He's hiding his cultivation base as well.'

"Are you… Shen Jing?" the girl asked, looking at the newly arrived Shen Jing up and down.

"Yes, I am," he said. "Who might you be?"

"We are the Lightsworns, sent to investigate the case of a bandit group terrorizing local merchants and caravans," she said.

"Oh, those bandits are dead now," Shen Jing said.

"And you killed them?" the girl asked.

"Haha, partially," he said, repeating Alex's words.

'How long has he been here?' Alex wondered. It wouldn't surprise him if Shen Jing had been here the entire time waiting for the perfect time to enter.

The girl frowned. She took out another talisman and watched it move. Once again, it drifted towards Alex and turned into a bust of light.

"You have no aura of the bandits on you," the girl said with a cold look in her eyes as if she had found someone in the midst of lying.

"Why would I have their aura?" Shen Jing asked as if ignorant.

"If you killed them, then their aura would be on you," she said as if that were obvious.

Shen Jing simply shook his head. "They were too weak to place their aura on me," he said.

"No matter how weak, their death should have placed an aura on you," the girl said with an annoyed look. She really didn't like how Shen Jing spoke.

"Girl, does your cloth drench in blood when you kill a mosquito?" Shen Jing asked.

The girl's eyes narrowed with more annoyance in her eyes. "Are you comparing late True Lord realms as akin to mosquitoes?" she asked.

Shen Jing gave a foolish look. "Haha, I suppose it's a little inaccurate. But I don't know any bugs that are weaker than mosquitoes, but just as annoying," he said.

"HAH! Weaker than mosquitoes. That's quite arrogant of you. You think we will believe whatever your mouth shits ou—"

Suddenly, the floor below the girl cracked as she fell to her knees. Her entire body tried to crumble in on itself as sounds of cracking bones were heard from all over her body.

Shen Jing's entire demeanor suddenly changed. "Mind your attitude girl. Just because I like talking to you as equal doesn't mean you get to disrespect me," he said.

Blood veins popped up all over her body, threatening to burst at any moment. Her organs felt like they would burst out of her stomach, which her heart tried to give in at every other moment.

Her brain tried to shut down to protect her, but for some reason, she could clearly use all of her senses.

And that only made the situation worse for her.

Her face soon became blue from the pressure as blood started trickling down her nose. Then her mouth. Then her ears. Finally her eyes.

The man behind her wanted to help, but he wasn't in the condition to help either. While the pressure he felt wasn't hurting him, it was stopping him from doing anything else.

Only Alex there felt no pressure, as that was how Shen Jing intended it to be.

The girl's robes had already lost their color and were instead mostly black from the blood pouring out of the random tears in her skin from the pressure.

"Brother Jing, you should stop. If she dies, we will be in trouble," Alex said.

Shen Jing was about to say something but shook his head instead of as he kept the information to himself.

Finally, he released the pressure. The girl fell to the ground, taking deep breaths and then coughing out blood.

Shen Jing got on one knee and looked at her. "Do you believe me now, mosquito?" he asked.

The girl couldn't answer from the pain and fear she was feeling.

A smile crept back on Shen Jing's face. "Well, don't worry about your injuries. As luck would have it, you are in the one place where you can trust you will get healed."

Chapter 616 Place to Get Strong

The Lightsworn man took the girl away and fed her some pills to heal her. She would likely be in pain even after eating the pills but that was the best they could do for now.

"Did you really have to go that far?" Alex asked. He wasn't sure what to think of Shen Jing anymore. He stopped looking like a gentle elder brother, and instead looked like a sociopath who would kill him without a second thought.

'Are all Saint realm cultivators this eccentric?' Alex wondered.

"You're right. I went a little too far. But I always feel anger brewing over me when someone disrespects me. My pride doesn't allow that," Shen Jing said.

Then, a smile came upon his face. "Anyway, I came to get you. we should leave now," he said.

"Right now? Is there a caravan leaving this late at night?" Alex asked.

"Oh, we won't be using a caravan. Not that you can find a caravan go to where we're going," Shen Jing said.

"Ok, let me deal with some things here. I will be ready in a few minutes," Alex said.

"Sure, take your time," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded and took out a talisman and read it. It was the list of ingredients and where one could find them.

Alex knew he could find most of them in the capital, but since they would visit some other cities along the way, he thought it would be best if he kept a mental note of what the cities were.

It would always be better to get something early than late.

"What are you reading?" Shen Jing asked curiously.

"It's a list of ingredients for my healing pill and where I can find them," Alex said.

"Oh, what does it say?" he asked.

Alex handed the talisman over to Shen Jing. Shen Jing just took it with a weird look on his face and asked, "Does it have pictures? I love looking at pictures."

Alex sighed. "You can't read, can you?" he asked.

"Nope!" Shen Jing said, a little proud even.

"Are you a player?" Alex finally asked. He had been meaning to ask this question, but the last couple of events dissuaded him from this fact.

However, now that he found out that Shen Jing couldn't read, which was true of Players due to the changed language in the outer world, he was sure that Shen Jing had to definitely be a player.

"What's a player?" Shen Jing asked, immediately killing Alex's theory.

Alex wanted to ask if he was from the Central Continent, but he wasn't sure if he should. That was practically giving away the fact that Players came from the Central continent.

"Which continent are you from?" Alex asked.

"That's a stupid question," Shen Jing said. "You should know by now that the teleportation formation to the Western Continent has been destroyed by the outsiders."

"That doesn't answer my question," Alex said.

Shen Jing smiled. "It doesn't, does it? Well, this should then. I am from the Western Continent," he said.

"Were you born here?" Alex asked.

"No, but I've been here long enough that I can be considered belonging to this place," Shen Jing said.

"So you're really not a player?" Alex asked.

"Player... hmm, I feel like I heard this word before, but I forgot where," Shen Jing said.

Suddenly, his face changed as if he remembered. "Ah, right! In the Central continent. That senior who said he made a game. You guys were called players, right?" Shen Jing said.

Alex's eyes suddenly went wide. "You've met the creator?" Alex asked with very wide eyes.

"Oh yes," Shen Jing said. "Not very long ago either. He was really troubled about the fact that someone destroyed his game."

"YOU KNOW THE CREATOR!" Alex shouted.

Shen Jing scratched his head under his golden hair and said, "Yeah, I think I said that. Although, I just met him there by chance. I was actually trying to meet a friend who stayed with him," Shen Jing said.

'Is he talking about sister Hao Ya? Makes sense since they are both Saint realm,' Alex thought.

"How did you travel between the two continents?" Alex asked.

"I have my ways," Shen Jing said.

"C—"

"No, I cannot take you there," Shen Jing said before Alex could say anything. "I'm not trying to keep you here, but I genuinely cannot take you there."

"Even if I were to take you, you would die on the way there. That continent now has a terrible Qi storm surrounding it that will kill you before you can even enter it," Shen Jing said.

That went in line with what Hao Ya had told Alex. "You don't have any teleportation talismans?" Alex asked.

He had his own, but it was an unreliable one. It would take another 10 years before it was usable at all, even then, its randomness would make it a bad device to use as aim to enter the continent.

"Unfortunately, I am not so rich at the moment. I am what you would call broke," Shen Jing said.

Alex doubted it, but he still nodded. "I see," Alex said. "Can you tell me more about the creator then?"

"I promise I will give you some information about him from time to time," Shen Jing said with an annoyed face. "Can we leave now?"

"One second," Alex ran up to the receptionists and took out nearly 200 pills that he had made since he had become an Alchemist for the guild.

These didn't include the healing pills and other sets of pills he would likely need along the way. It only included normal pills that helped in cultivation or helped remove bottlenecks slightly so one could breakthrough.

The receptionist was shocked, but she didn't show it on her face. She quickly took it and had a formation check it all within a minute.

She got a list of the pill names as well as their harmony level. When she saw pills with nothing but 35-45% of harmony, she couldn't help contain her shock. Some of these pills were even at around 48%.

This was a man on the verge of being a True Heaven Alchemist, and he was so young.

Alex had made exactly 4 pills that went 50% or 51% in harmony in the last 10 or so days but decided to keep it under wraps so as to keep some aces up his sleeve.

Once the receptionist said that the task was done, Alex thanked her and moved to the two Lightsworns that were staying by the side.

"I'm sorry for what the senior did to you earlier. Please take this healing pill as an apology," Alex said and handed the girl a 40% healing pill before leaving.

He really didn't want bad blood with the Lightsworns as that might end up becoming his only way to heal his arm in the end.

If for some reason he was barred from becoming a Lightsworn, that would be terrible.

After realizing all that he needed to do was done, he went back to Shen Jing, and together they left the guild.

Shen Jing quickly brought Alex outside the city, which made Alex very confused.

"What are we doing on the eastern side of the city? We should go to the western side. That is where we can go towards the next city," Alex said.

"Who said we're going towards any city?" Shen Jing asked with a smiling face.

"Eh? If we're not going to a city, then where are we going?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing looked at Alex and asked, "Remember a few days ago when I told you to stop focusing on getting strong, and just focus on getting your arm back?"

Alex looked at him with a confused look but nodded. "Yes, although I don't understand why you would want me to stop becoming strong," Alex said.

"I never said that you should stop becoming strong. I only said that you should stop focusing on it," Shen Jing said.

"Huh?" Alex was still confused.

"That was because I was going to focus on making you strong. And today, I've found the place where I can make you strong," Shen Jing said.

"Oh," Alex's confusion still remained, but curiosity took over his emotion. "Where are we going?" he asked.

"That's a secret for now," Shen Jing said. "Pearl, come out."

Pearl poked his head out of Alex's robe and meowed with his tiny little mouth. Then, without any hesitation, he pushed his little legs on Alex's chest and shot out of the robes, before arriving at Shen Jing's palm.

Alex couldn't help but wonder why Pearl so easily accepted Shen Jing's every word. He had said that Shen Jing was friendly, but was he being truthful?

Or maybe Shen Jing had used some sort of technique on him. Or maybe, Shen Jing had a body constitution that made one friendly towards him, but it didn't work on Alex because of his body constitution.

Either way, Alex didn't fully believe that Pearl was being entirely truthful. There had to be something here that Pearl wasn't able to understand.

Shen Jing then put Pearl inside his own robes and grabbed Alex by his. Then, he shot off.

The speed. Holy shit, the speed.

That was all Alex could think off when he felt his body rip the air apart him.

Immediately, he used his movement technique to clear the friction around his body, but the speed was so fast that his own Qi wasn't keeping up with all the friction that was being removed.

If Alex didn't have extra-wide meridians at the moment to pump out enough Qi, he was sure the air would rip his body apart.

Chapter 617 Training Location

Alex didn't know how much time had passed as all of his focus was gathered on the fact that he had to stay alive.

Then, it all vanished. As if he came to a lurching halt, Alex felt his innards move along with the previous momentum, while his outer body had already stopped.

If not for the body cultivation, his organs might have popped out in different places.

"We're here," Shen Jing said and threw Alex down.

Alex quickly balanced himself in mid-air and flew. When he looked down, he could see nothing but massive forest that grew on flatlands and hills.

"Where are we?" Alex asked.

"This is the eastern forest," Shen Jing said. "It's a piece of untouched land that only the bravest of humans dare to come."

The Dreaded Mountain range. Alex had read about it. People wanted others to know how terrifying this place was, so they named it such.

True beasts were common in many of the mountains, with existence of Saint Beasts not being very rare either.

'I am to train in such a place?' Alex thought.

Suddenly, pressure gathered around Alex. Alex could barely ignore the aura and keep flying, but that was very hard for him.

"Not bad," Shen Jing said from above him.

Then, A beast showed up below him. It was a massive bird that had red feathers and an Eagle's head. Alex looked at the bird in fear and surprise.

Saint realm. This bird was definitely in the saint realm. It was only afterward that he got back enough of his wit to recognize the beast's species.

'A Hotfeather Eagle?' he thought in surprise. 'Is this a coincidence, or did he know there was this beast here.'

"Pipe down," Shen Jing said, putting out his own aura that suppressed the bird.

"You have barely entered the saint realm. Don't show off just because of that," Shen Jing said in a soft voice, but that sounded like a booming voice to the eagle.

It quickly kept away its aura and waited for Shen Jing's words.

"This child will train in your mountain. You are not to interfere with his training," Shen Jing said.

"Yes, senior," the eagle spoke.

"Go, I won't bother you," Shen Jing said.

Seeing the opportunity, the eagle quickly flew back to where it had come from, leaving a gust of wind in its wake.

"I am to train here?" Alex thought, looking down at the massive mountain range. He could see the roaming beasts both in the air and on the ground.

Even from high up, he could tell they were strong. Very strong.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "You will have to survive in the forest, all alone."

Alex nodded. That was expected from where he was. "Can you tell me why you're helping me?" Alex asked. "Did the creator put you up to this?"

Shen Jing cocked his head to the side. "No. Why would the creator put me up to this? Are you important to him somehow?" he asked.

"Never mind then," Alex said.

"Alright, come here," Shen Jing called him. Alex flew back up to where Shen Jing was.

Suddenly, Shen Jing attacked. The attack was so fast that Alex couldn't see it coming.

When it struck him on the face, Alex tumbled backward for a few dozen meters before coming to a halt.

The attack wasn't very hurtful, but it did burn him a little on his face. Alex quickly turned towards Shen Jing and asked, "Why did you hit me so sud—"

He stopped. Something was wrong. He saw a golden light in front of him. What was that? Was he surrounded by a golden barrier?

Alex put his hands forwards to touch the golden barrier, but he couldn't see his hands at all.

'What's going on? And why is my face in so much pain?' he thought. He tried to touch his face, but still, he couldn't see his arms.

Alex blinked, and that did nothing to block the yellow light. Understanding of what was happening dawned on Alex as he quickly put his hands on his eyes, to cover the outside light.

He could still see the golden light.

There was no golden fog or barrier blocking his view outside. No, it was in his own vision.

Alex quickly sent out his spiritual sense and as expected, there was nothing outside. He then sent his spiritual sense into his eyes, and he could see a wall of Qi erected inside either of his eye sockets.

"What did you do to me?" Alex asked, horrified.

"You are going to train without your eyesight. With something so great as Spiritual sense, I can't have you only occasionally using it. You should be constantly using it, and this is going to teach you regarding that."

"Also, this is to make you stop relying on your mental attack to solve anything and everything. People have mental defense a lot more than you might think. It's about time you start looking for other ways to defeat your opponents," Shen Jing said. "Don't worry about your eyes, I just have to remove my Qi and they will work normally again."

Before Alex could even say anything, he felt something rip away from him. He put his hand out in horror, but before he could even grab onto them, his storage bags were ripped free from him.

Shen Jing grabbed the 8 or so storage bags Alex had, juggling them in his hand. "So many storage bags. You should learn to only take a couple of them with you. Not all of them," Shen Jing said as he started looking into the storage bags.

Alex feared for what he may find, all those saint-rank ingredients. Was he going to get jealous of Alex and kill him to take them all? Was he going to take the sword instead? What about the books he had?

Just as he was thinking that, Shen Jing brought out the sword. He held it in his hand, his eyes shining with surprise.

"Damn, this is a good sword. Perfect craftsmanship," he said as he looked at the edges of the sword. "It might actually cut me too," he said jokingly, but that didn't sound like a lie.

"This sword is a piece of art, and I love it. As such, you will not get to use this sword in this training," he said and brought out another sword.

It was a True Mortal grade sword, with a black hilt, straight, golden crossguard, and a silvery blade about a meter long.

It was shorter than the Steel Sword he was so used to, but it was better than nothing. Actually, since it was a True Mortal sword, it was better than many things.

Unfortunately, however, it couldn't compare to the nameless sword that Shen Jing had taken.

"Take this," he threw the True Mortal sword towards Alex and looked back into his storage bag. After a while, he brought out the cauldron and threw it at Alex.

"I suppose an Alchemist must have his cauldron with him at most times, right?" he said and continued looking through his storage bags.

Then, he brought out a variety of different pill bottles. "Choose 3," he said.

"What? Only 3?" Alex asked in surprise.

"Yes, now choose," Shen Jing said.

Alex didn't understand why he was only getting 3, but he chose 3 healing pills, each and every single one of them above 50% in harmony.

"Good," Shen Jing said, passing along the 3 bottles while keeping the rest back in his storage space.

He brought out formations from the storage bag next, and this time Alex got to choose only 2. Shen Jing then finally gave him 20 True Spirit stones.

"Alright, time for you to go down and train," Shen Jing said.

"Eh?" Alex looked at him with surprise and confusion as the sword, cauldron, 3 pills, and 2 formation plates hovered around him along with the 20 spirit stones.

"Can I get a storage bag to keep all of this?" he asked. There was no way Shen Jing was going to send him down to the beasts with all of these things floating around him, right?

"But I already did," Shen Jing said with a smiling face, as the storage bags in his hands suddenly disappeared somewhere.

Alex checked himself and said, "I don't have it on me though."

"Then what's that on your finger?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex looked at his finger and saw the golden ring with ruby on it. "The storage ring? I can't access it yet. It's apparently from someone really powerful, and it had his imprint on it."

"Breaking through this would take me ages," Alex said.

"Yes, but you have to start somewhere, right?" Shen Jing asked. "Well, it's about time you start using it then. Unlock whatever small part of this you can access and store your items in there."

"Now then, go on," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded. "Come on Pearl, let's go," he said.

However, Shen Jing put his hand on Pearl, keeping him in his robes. "You will train alone. I will help train pearl myself," he said.

"What? Alone? For how long?" he asked.

"Until your body and Qi are equal," Shen Jing said.

"Body and Qi are equal... that means until my cultivation base reaches True Lord 1st realm?" Alex asked.

"Yes, or more if you want. Also, you are not allowed to hide your cultivation base down there. If you hide your cultivation to sneak around the beasts, then I will come to beat you myself," Shen Jing said, making Alex shudder a little.

Alex nodded. "Okay," He said and turned around to look at the forest down below. For the foreseeable future, he was going to have to live here.

No, live was not the correct word. He would have to survive here.

Chapter 618 Trouble Before the Training Starts

Alex placed all of his items inside his cauldron and flew down towards the forest with fear in his heart.

There were so many beasts down there. Was he going to be fine at all?

He only had 3 healing pills, so until he made some more by finding ingredients in the forest, he would have to be extremely careful of everything.

Fortunately, he had brought a fire-making formation plate with him that could work for a while, but he wasn't sure how long it could sustain him.

Just as he was thinking that a voice drifted into Alex's ears. "You don't have to stay in one place. You can move around if you want to," Shen Jing's voice said.

Alex sent his senses towards the sky, but he couldn't see Shen Jing at all. He was more than the 100 meters distance Alex could view at the moment.

Alex thought of flaring his spiritual sense to see, but destroying your only sense of sight seemed an idiot to him.

'He took Pearl away. Is Pearl going to be okay?' he wondered. He trusted Shen Jing with everything he was about to do, and yet he didn't trust him with Pearl.

'Do I care about Pearl more than myself?' he wondered. 'I can't afford to do that. I need to care for myself right now."

Suddenly, something flew up to him from his right side. It entered his senses way too quickly, and Alex could barely react in time.

He instantly used his teleportation skill, but in mid-air, there was only 2 place he could teleport to.

That was either his shadow on the ground or the shadow on the underside of the beast that entered.

Since he couldn't see the ground at the moment, he felt better just teleporting underneath the beast.

With a flicker, he disappeared from where he was and appeared under the bird. Then, his sword lit up with golden light that was surrounded by a prominent white outline.

With a slash, Alex put a long gash underneath the unsuspecting beasts, but the damage wasn't deep enough.

He then heard the beast smash onto something as it disappeared out of his view.

'No!' Alex thought as he realized what had just happened. The beast had struck his flying cauldron, and now it was gone out of his senses.

"Where did it go?" Alex cried out, but he couldn't see the exact direction it went.

Just then, the beast entered his senses once more and Alex finally cared managed to see what it was.

It was a giant flying bat of green color. If Alex remembered correctly, this was an Emerald Wildbat.

'True Lord 3rd Realm?' Alex thought as he sensed its cultivation base. This fight was going to be tough for him. Especially without the amazing sword, but hopefully, the mixture of his cultivation and body helped him a bit.

'It should,' he thought. 'The bat is already bleeding.'

SCREEEECH!!

Suddenly, the bat let out a loud screeching sound that made Alex's head hurt, however, since he was looking through his senses, to begin with, he did not have any problem keeping track of what the bird was doing.

As the bird flew towards him, Alex once again flickered behind the bat's shadow and made another cut.

The bat was truly furious this time around. It was used to its prey not fighting back after they heard its voice, but Alex didn't falter at all. Instead, he fought back and hurt him.

'Dammit! The bat is acting cautiously,' Alex thought. The bat was no longer charging without thought. Instead, he was constantly spinning in mid-air, trying to look out for Alex who was somehow appearing behind him each time.

Alex gripped his sword tighter and poured his Qi into it, turning it golden again. With all the metal Qi in it, he was sure that one good attack would kill the bat.

So, once he was fully prepared, he burst into speed towards the bat. All of his concentration was on the bat, while the bat was concentrating both on Alex, and the position behind him where Alex might appear.

Suddenly, Alex disappeared from the bat's view. So, the bat turned around, expecting Alex to appear there, but he didn't.

Instead, it felt Alex's aura arrive behind it. It had fallen for Alex's trap.

Alex swung his sword, as hard as he could with a single hand and cut the bat's right-wing in half.

Then, while the bat was flustered, he swiftly teleported behind it and hit the bat on the neck.

The sword only went in half as deep, not managing to cut the bat's head off entirely, but that alone was enough.

The bat's eyes went wide as it died and started falling to the ground.

Alex huffed in mid-air, taking a small break while checking on himself. 'I can fight up to True Lord 3rd realm if I combine my body cultivation, Qi cultivation, and Sword intent,' he thought.

He hadn't realized this last time around when he fought the bandits. He felt his meridians hurt quite a bit, and also felt his Qi deplete a lot.

He needed to cultivate to replenish this, but where was he to go. He flared his spiritual sense for a bit, but he couldn't see a single thing around him as he was still in mid-air.

'Dammit! Where the hell did my cauldron fall off to?' he wondered. During the battle, he had lost track of which direction it had fallen in as all directions looked the same to him.

He also felt something weird about the battle just now. As if something was missing. Something that woul—

'Ah! The system notifications. It's missing,' he thought. 'Does that mean I won't get the cores and ingredients automatically now?'

He hadn't fought a beast since then to realize that this was how things happened. Now that he did, he frowned.

'So I have to carve the things out myself, huh?' he thought. That meant he needed to fly down right now and find that bat's corpse.

Since the bat had fallen through the sky, to fall along the same trajectory, he decided to free fall as well.

As he let gravity take control of him, Alex fell through the sky, the wind whipping past him as he put all of his focus into seeing anything enter his spiritual sense.

When he saw a tree enter his vision, he slowed down and slowly descended to the ground. Just as he saw the ground, he found the bat's corpse as well.

And alongside it, many hungry beasts with a cultivation base in the True realms.

'Shit!' Alex thought and immediately flew away from there before any of the beasts could see him as a threat.

Some of the beasts there were just as, if not stronger than Alex himself. This was truly a terrifying place and Alex was running low on Qi.

'I need to find a place to cultivate very fast,' he thought and expanded his spiritual sense to the furthest reaches he could.

After a while, he sensed a giant tree with a snake living on it. Thankfully, the snake wasn't very strong. It was likely guarding the fruit on the tree from what Alex could see.

'Fivefold pear, huh? I can make a healing pill with it. Although, I will need a lot of the other materials.'

Alex fought the snake, but it wasn't even a fight. He wanted to simply fight off the beast and send it away as he was invading its home, but the snake seemed to want to fight to the death.

So, Alex fulfilled its dream and cut it in two. He then cut the snake, along its lower section and pulled out a core from inside of it.
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He looked at the rest of the snake and sighed. While the snake could be used as an ingredient in some pills, he currently had no place to keep it, so he threw the corpse away.

He hoped that would attract other beasts away from this location.

Then, he jumped into the crown of the tree and finally relaxed. He could see a few beasts inside his senses, but they weren't focusing on him at all.

Once he realized that he was relatively safe, he turned invisible for the extra safety and started cultivating the Five Yang Divine Path.

Chapter 619 Night Lynx

Alex put as little concentration as he could afford into the cultivation itself while keeping everything else on the outside.

He kept track of the beasts that walked into his spiritual sense's range, and those that walked out of it.

At the same time, he started thinking of what he needed to do next. He hadn't even got to think about anything previously before the bat attacked him.

Now, he finally had some time.

'First of all, I need to go find my cauldron. If everything is fine, It will still have its lid on it. Otherwise, the items may have been scattered. At that point, I can forget about finding anything,' he thought.

'Still, I need to find the cauldron if nothing else,' he thought. He was glad that he had his sword in his hand at the time, or he would have to survive in this forest without a sword. That would have been terrifying.

He then focused on the beast's core in his hand. That was a True Disciple 8th realm core. Did he dare eat it? What would happen if he ate something that was so far above his own cultivation base?

He didn't know yet, but he needed to at some point, so why not now? However, he stopped himself from putting the core in his mouth like he was popping a pill.

There were two dangers to that at the moment. The first was a minor one. That was just him not wanting to show Shen Jing, who was probably watching him right now that he could do that.

Second and most importantly, it was guaranteed that he would have to go into his spiritual sea to fight the remnant of that snake that was in the core.

If at that time something attacked him, he would die without knowing for sure. So, he decided to not risk such an important decision.

Since it was nighttime, many nocturnal beasts were out, so Alex hit as well as he could while following Shen Jing's order. Given how eccentric he was, Alex didn't doubt he would beat him if he did anything wrong.

Just going invisible was already pushing it in Alex's eyes.

With a similar state of mind, Alex cultivated non-stop for the entire night and quickly replenished his Qi.

Just as he was done, a voice drifted into his ears.

'Don't forget about the sun,' it said. Shen Jing had come to remind him of the thing Alex had to do every 2 or 3 days.

Alex got out of the tree and flew up to an open location. Once he made sure there was nothing out there, he strained his meridian to push all the Qi he could to bring out a small sun in front of him.

Once it was out, he cut the connection to his Qi, and after a few seconds, it disappeared.

"Argh!" he thought at the slight prickling pain he was feeling all over his meridians. 10% of his Qi was gone once again, with only 90% remaining.

He would have to survive with that.

Alex went back to the tree and did something he should have done a long time ago, but he gave up very easily each time around. That was to use his Qi and spiritual sense to erase the markings of the previous owner of the storage ring on his hand.

Alex jumped back into the crown of the tree with the Fivefold Pear and sat down to use his spiritual sense on the ring.

He started off with the Qi. As he poured the Qi onto the ring, the same thing happened that would always happen. The ring did not accept any Qi as if it weren't meant to.

However, Alex had gotten too many confirmations for that to be wrong. So, he tried again. He failed once again.

He tried again, but he failed then too. And again. And again. He kept trying for as long as he could. While he understood that he couldn't break whatever barrier he was facing by simply punching at it, again and again, he hoped that it would weaken it a little.

Once he felt tired of doing that, he started using his spiritual sense. Alex felt a force repelling his spiritual sense as if the ring didn't belong to it.

Usually, he would give up at this stage, but now, he fought. At a time when his spiritual energy was the most important resource to him, he fought back.

He had to. Without the storage ring, he would miss out on a lot of different things that he wouldn't want to.

The number of resources on these mountains was too great for him to skip out on them, and have his heart bleed.

So, he tried. Once again, and again. He tried and tried until… something slammed onto him from the left.

Alex felt a pain travel up his shoulder as he immediately sent out his spiritual sense around him. A cat-like creature with the fur of black stood on top of the tree crown, staring directly at him.

"Dammit! I lost focus on my surrounding," he thought. He had put all of his spiritual sense towards breaking into the ring and he had forgotten about the dangers surrounding him.

The cat-like creature jumped towards him. Alex was still on the ground and was about to swing the sword in his hands when he sensed another of the same beast coming from behind him.

'Dammit! How many Night Lynx are there in this place?' he thought. He twisted from his location, dodging the first Lynx, and used his sword to block the 2nd Lynx's attack.

From his senses, he could tell that they were both in the True Master 3rd realm and True Master 5th realm, respectively.

Alex could easily win against them. He just needed to land his attack on the two Lynxes.

The first one came for him again, and Alex ducked while at the same time swinging his sword above him.

The sword was about to cut the Lynx, but then the Lynx suddenly turned into a black liquid and managed to slip away.

"What?!" Alex thought. They had some defensive skills that seemed to make them hard to kill.

'I should have read some books that were more thorough on each of the beast's abilities,' he thought. Although each beast usually learned something different, so it might not have been as useful as he hoped it to be.

Alex teleported suddenly, appearing behind the 2nd Lynx and cutting it too. But once again, it turned into some sort of ink-black liquid and reformed a bit further away.

'Can I not kill them?' Alex thought, but he could see the Lynx be a little tired despite not fighting for very long.

'The skill must take a toll on their body then,' he thought and went on the offensive again.

Since both the beasts were in the True Master realm, long-range attacks, despite being a combination of Qi and Sword Intent, would not work on them.

Suddenly, one of the Lynxes roared loudly, making Alex a bit dizzy. Just then, the 2nd one dashed towards him and slammed its claw on his chest.

Alex was thrown back and slammed onto a tree, from which two monkeys jumped down to attack him.

Alex swung his sword and the weak monkeys died without knowing what had killed them. With barely True Disciple cultivation, they should have known not to interfere at this point.

After all, beyond the Mind Tempering realm, all beasts gained a certain level of intelligence.

Alex ignored the monkey's corpses and put his focus back on the battle with the Lynx. While the monkey's corpse was enticing for its loot, he needed to fight the Lynx quickly before another beast heard their battle and came to fight him afterward.

The 2nd Lynx ran towards him and Alex ran towards it too. The first Lynx roared again, sending Alex's mind into chaos, but he quickly grabbed onto his little sanity following which his body healed him from the mental pain.

He then slashed onto the 2nd Lynx which once again turned into an ink-black liquid that moved a little further away to reform itself.

When it did, Alex was already on top of it. He slashed at the Lynx once more, and the tired Lynx's body automatically turned itself into ink-black liquid once again.

However, Alex followed it once again. The First Lynx tried to help, but Alex ignored it completely. For as long as he knew where the Lynx was, he didn't need to worry about it.

After 2 more turns of changing itself into the black liquid, the Lynx's body finally gave up and couldn't change any longer.

That was when Alex struck and chopped its body in half. Seeing this, the first Lynx tried to run away, but that was the beast that started it all, so Alex wasn't going to let it get away under any condition.

He teleported close to it and cut it a few times, by which its body gave away too, and Alex killed it.

Alex let go of the sword and turned his hand into a golden claw that dug into the corpse of the beast and pulled out the core.

Since he couldn't keep the other parts anyway, there was no need in being careful about how he took out the core.

He then moved to the other Lynx's body as well as the monkey's bodies and took their cores out too.

Then, he looked around at the dead bodies of the beasts and understood that if he stayed here, he would have to fight more beasts that came to eat these corpses.

So, he grabbed his sword and walked away.

Chapter 620 Escape

Alex walked down the mountain, finally after figuring out he was on top of one. That had been a difficult thing to figure out as it turned out, he had actually landed on a plateau.

He wasn't sure if going downhill was the best idea or not, since he didn't know if stronger beats liked the peak or not.

However, he assumed they did, based on the fact that the density of Qi would always be higher on the peak than in the valley.

Which was why most sects' hierarchy was based around who got to live higher on a mountain.

Other than that, he thought it was a good assumption to think that the cauldron of his, if it had fallen down on the mountain, would have likely rolled downhill.

So, he wanted to wrap around the mountain range and see if he could find it at all.

As he walked down the mountain, in the span of about 30 minutes, he saw about 3 different beasts fight and kill another one, eating their cores.

'How the hell are there still so many beasts here?' he wondered. With day-to-day violence like that, most beasts should have died by now.

It was another hour and a half down the mountain later than he realized why that was.

There were too many beasts in the mountains. They liked to mate as much as they fought, giving birth to more beasts than was appropriate.

Them fighting themselves was simply their way of population control.

Finally, Alex managed to reach a patch of land that wasn't sloped at all. He hadn't walked down too quickly, but it had still been relatively fast, so he was surprised when he didn't get her sooner.

'Finally, the valley,' he thought. There were multiple beasts in his senses, someone ignorant of him, some eying him as food.

Alex ignored all of them. 'Let's go find the cauldron,' he thought and started walking towards his left, hoping he was on the right path to wrap around the mountain.

Just then, a beast entered his vision, a lizard the size of a crocodile. Its body texture was rough with a dull brown color to it. However, when looking closely, one would see that it wasn't a brown color, but rather a group of many, many vibrant colors, mixing together to become muddy.

'Colorful… venomous?' Alex thought. That was something he had been taught in his home. If something out in the open was colorful, it was likely venomous and one should stay away from it.

Alex tried to go around it, but it looked like it was staring directly at him.

'True King realm, dammit I cannot fight it yet,' he thought and tried to back away, instead of going the other way around the mountain.

However, the beast started following him. 'Why the hell is it following me? I'm just a puny True Disciple 3rd realm,' Alex thought.

It would make sense for other True Disciple and True Master, even True lords to see him as an easy target and attack. But this was a True King beast. No way in hell would his 'monster core' ever be useful to it.

Just then, he noticed two True Lord beasts slowly make their way towards him as well. They seemed to want to eat him right now, but they didn't.

Alex wondered if there were actually more beasts in the valley than at the mountain top and started frowning at the fact that he might have guessed wrong.

Then 3 more beasts came from his backside, 3 vulture beasts. Then, a pack of wolves with cultivation in the True Master realm.

Now that this many beasts had gathered, Alex couldn't help but wonder if there was something else going on here that he wasn't aware of.

It surely wasn't possible that all of these beasts had come to him just because of the aura of a True Disciple 3rd realm, right?

That was when a thought struck Alex. 'What if they aren't here for me?' he thought and looked in his robes.

The 5 monster cores lay there hidden inside. But while the cores were hidden, their aura certainly was not. And with 5 of them together at once, it must have looked like a buffet to the beasts.

Alex frowned. He cursed himself for not eating the cores, but they were too high level at the time, and he didn't want to risk fighting such strong beasts' mental image in his mind when his mind was all he had for now to survive.

And now, it had come back to bite him. 'I guess it was true when they said a treasure in a weak's hands is a crime,' he thought.

Now, the only way to escape this situation in his eyes was to get rid of the treasure.

He was willing to depart with it quite easily as the treasure weren't very valuable ones, to begin with.

Now, the only thing to understand was who exactly to give the treasure to.

The lizard was clearly the strongest, but if he did send all the cores towards it, the others would like a hound of him to get something for the trouble they went through.

So, Alex brought out the cores and put all four of them into one hand. Then, with not much force to it at all, he threw the cores about 20 meters into the air.

Immediately, the beasts saw what was happening and jumped forward towards the four monster cores in the air.

At the same time, Alex tried to wrap around the lizard and run away.

The lizard saw that and even saw through the fact that Alex had hidden away one of the cores in his robes.

It raised its head up in the air, ready to shoot out its tongue. Just then, Alex threw at it Heaven's Impact.

The lizard lost its consciousness and started falling down on him. At the same time, other beasts also started noticing him.

Using the lizard as a divide between them, Alex ran away from the group of beasts. However, just a bit further, he could see other beasts making their way toward him as well.

At the same time, he noticed the lizard behind him wake up from its unconsciousness.

'So fast? Does it have a defensive mental skill or what?' Alex thought. Now there was nowhere to run.

So, he was forced to do something he really didn't want to at all. That was to use the Earth Devour technique and run away.

As he employed the technique, the ground opened up beneath him. Just as Alex was falling through a crack. Something shot at him from behind.

He turned around in time to block with his sword, but something else sprayed afterward.

The lizard had shot out its tongue at Alex, and its saliva was now all over him.

Just as he fell inside the crack, pain flared all over him. Even as he moved through the ground, and he appeared somewhere else, he felt the pain burn right through him.

The venom of the lizard was getting to him. He could feel his body actively fighting it, but without his help, the body would take some time.

The pain lowered a bit when he reappeared, but suddenly he started drowning too. He had appeared in a body of water and it was washing away some of the acidic nature of the venom that was harming his skin.

Still, very quickly his body finished taking care of the venom that had gotten into him, while the outer one was washed away by water.

However, while the pain was gone, the danger was not. Even though he was in pain, Alex did not lose track of his surrounding.

And in this new surrounding, he felt many more beasts. The water had more beasts than the land. Snakes, fishes, crocodiles, and many other aquatic and amphibians beasts roamed the water.

Alex shot off in the direction he thought was up, towards the place where he could no longer feel the water.

As he shot up, he got closer and closer to the surface. However, just as he was about to go further up, he sensed something like a ceiling above him.

Still, there were no beasts there so he felt okay going there. Once he was out, he looked around with his senses and could see actual rocky ceilings above him, as if he were inside a cave.

'A cave above a pond?' Alex thought. He flew a little further and noticed the walls surrounding the pond and also the dry land he could go down on.

There were surprisingly no beasts here at all. 'What is this place?' he thought and roamed around.

When he reached a wall in the cave, he started walking around the cave while remaining close to the wall to see if he missed something.

When he made a full round of the cave, he frowned. There was no way out. His spiritual sense reached far and wide, but it still couldn't see the outside. Just a bunch of rock and dirt.

'I must be under a mountain,' he thought. 'I wonder how this pocket came to be formed then.'

The cave was about 200 or so meters wide in diameter, with more than half of it being taken over by the large pond in the center.

In total, there really was just about 40 or so meters of actual land to occupy for oneself.

Still, that was enough for Alex. 'I will rest here for a few days and train,' he thought. 'This can also be the place where I go into closed cultivation from now on.'

Chapter 621 Closed Cultivation

After making sure that there was nothing in the cave once more, and even going so far as to plunge into the pond once more to look if there was any strong beast in there, Alex finally sat at the edge of the cave to cultivate.

The Qi in the room was as low as not much had been able to permeate through the mountain and enter here.

Still, that didn't really matter to Alex all that much. He had never really needed Qi to breakthrough.

He then reached into his pocket and brought out the silvery-white beast core that was tainted a little red with the blood of the snake.

Alex wondered why he kept this core and not another one. Was it because he had been thinking of eating this for so long that he somehow didn't want to let go of it?

He wondered if he could keep the other beast cores when he traveled through the ground, but more than likely the same scenario would have happened again.

'I need to get rid of this core now,' he thought. He cleaned the core and prepared himself. Then, he ate it.

Alex didn't immediately get sent into his spiritual world, but he could sense the snake had appeared there and was about the wreck havoc.

'Oh, do I have to do it manually now?' he wondered. Maybe it was because he was the original soul of the body and not the clone's soul that was just controlling it, it seemed he had more control over himself than he initially thought.

He felt the slight numbness in his mind, while his body was already breaking down the core, giving him Qi.

When he sent his spiritual sense through his body, he could also sense that his Qi was being accumulated around the naval region.

The numbness though was more annoying than anything. He could likely go on for a long time, but Alex could feel his spiritual energy draining.

With vision, he could allow this. But now, he had no choice but to get rid of the snake.

So, he quickly jumped into his own Spiritual sea and looked around in awe as he saw the massive amount of floating silver threads in the air.

"What the hell?" he thought. "I know I haven't been here in about a week, but... no way there should have been so much gathered in that period of time right?"

Then, he looked around to attack the snake. However, there was no snake. "Huh? Where did it go?" he thought. He could still feel the numbness... was that not the snake?

"Thanks for the meal, kid!" a voice said to him from next to the mountain. Alex turned towards the voice to see a ball of black goo, what should have been a clear crystal, floating in mid-air.

'Dammit! Just a few days and it's already regenerated that much black goo?' he thought. Alex flew up to it and asked, "did you eat the snake that was here?"

"Of course," the spirit said. "You sent it here for me right?"

"Why the hell would I send something to you?" Alex asked with an annoyed look. He certainly hadn't lost anything by letting the spirit eat the snake's spirit, but for some reason, it made Alex angry.

"Eh?" the spirit was surprised. "Were you not trying to mend our relationship so that I can help you kill a god?"

"There is no god to kill here," Alex said. "Also, you shouldn't kill gods just because they are one."

"Huh? But they're gods. What do I, Godslayer, do if not slay gods?" it asked confusedly.

"Alright, I don't have the time to deal with you," Alex said and grabbed the floating ball with both hands before a yellow fog appeared around him, devouring the black goo, leaving behind the clean crystal ball again.

"Hey! Oi! What the hell are you doing? Why would you give me food, just to take my strength away?" the spirit shouted, but Alex ignored it.

He looked at the flying threads that originated from the silver mountain. It was to gather these too.

Alex wasn't sure why exactly he was doing this or if it was even beneficial at all. After all, after so many days, he hadn't even begun to see anything manifest in him to suggest it was working.

Still, he kept at it. Just in case that mountain was a parasite, like the Artifact spirit, he needed to keep his mind clean.

Once he was done absorbing all the threads, Alex left.

When he reappeared on the outside, he immediately shot out his spiritual sense to the furthest he could. Once he saw that no beast had walked out of the pond, he drew it back.

However, along the way, he couldn't help but wonder... did his spiritual sense grow in strength again?

It had grown once before this, by quite a massive amount too. It had been after the incident on the beach which gave him his freedom.

His 80-meter spiritual sense had become 100 meters, but Alex simply attributed this to his real soul finally being in control, which he still believed to be true.

However, this time it was different. 'Why did it happen?' he wondered. It surely couldn't just be him having secrets that he still didn't know, could it?

Alex shook his head and got rid of such useless thoughts for now. Right now, he needed to breakthrough.

Qi gathered around him as he used the Five Yang Divine Path to cultivate his Qi and put it through his body to seamlessly break through to the next realm.

It had been so easy that he felt he could do it in his sleep. 'This really is an amazing technique, isn't it?' he thought as he continued using it.

He needed to stabilize his cultivation base before he could do anything else.

From time to time, he stopped himself from cultivating any further and instead spent the rest of the time focusing on the ring at hand.

He felt like he was about to crack open some part of it, but that might have just been his illusion for all he could tell.

Then, at other times, Alex took his sword and practiced his swordsmanship, using it to hit the cave wall a few times before realizing that was not a very good idea. He shouldn't train in here as there was the chance of the place caving in on itself.

He wouldn't mind being buried, he could easily get out. But the problem would be that losing such a good cultivation spot would be unfortunate.

He also jumped into the water a couple of times. He couldn't possibly stay here forever, so he went into the water from time to time to see if there was a way out of this place.

Unfortunately for him, the underground pond was way more massive than he could have imagined. So, he couldn't roam all the location without some beast coming to attack him.

'The beasts must come from somewhere, so there definitely is a route,' he thought, but as of yet, he didn't find any.

So, instead of finding a way out of this place, he decided to carve one. Every single day, he turned his hand into a claw and took out a chunk of the land in a direction.

Since even 150 meters away he couldn't see any sight outside, he knew he would have to go at it for a long, long time.

In between cultivation, finding ownership of the ring, training, carving a pathway out, and finally, refining his new sword, Alex's days passed pretty quickly.

Before he even knew it, a month had passed.

During the month, Alex's cultivation base hadn't improved at all, but his meridians were now amazing in his eyes.

They kept their wide shape without it hurting much at all, but he would have to practice making the sun for much longer to be absolutely sure it became permanent.

He had also gotten close to making a pathway out. He could see the outside world just on the edge of his senses and knew that in just a week or so, he would be able to reach there.

And finally, as a reward for all of his hard work, the ring on his hand had become weaker at fighting back, and now Alex was able to open a small space in it, just enough to store his sword.

'Nice!' he thought as he tried to pull in and out his sword with just a thought. The ring was much easier than using his storage bag as his senses perfectly saw everything inside at once, whereas in storage bags, he would have to search for each item individually.

After hearing that the ring might have items that he could obtain if he tried to remove the ownership from it, Alex had been expectant of getting something valuable. But unfortunately, his wishes didn't come true.

"I shouldn't mind at all," he thought. "This is merely a small space. There is likely a thousand times bigger space inside, if not more. Surely I will find some things."

Then, he started his routine all over again. Cultivation, training, and making the path. Alex focused on just these three things for now.

And after a bit more than a week, he had arrived right at the edge of the mountain without having made an opening.

So, knowing that he would now have to leave and go train through real fights, he sat down one last time, employed his cultivation method once again, and broke through.

Chapter 622 BlueFlame Monkey

Alex could feel that his body was starting to get a little out of control, even for him, but a long period of cultivation with the Yin art controlled it to an extent where he could be fine.

Not for very long though. After cultivating for more than a month with the Five Yang Divine Path, he knew that sooner or later, he would end up having the same problem his master did, and a mere cultivation technique would not be able to stop it.

However, that wasn't right now. Right now, Alex needed to go out and train. So, he walked into the newly carved path through the mountain and appeared on the edge of it.

There was still a good 10 meters of distance to carve out of the ground, but Alex had stopped here. This was his way of hiding his entrance. To get out of here, he simply needed to do one thing. And he did it.

Alex teleported.

Once Alex was outside the cave, out in the forest, he marked the entrance to the cave with a few slashes from his sword.

Now, he was going to have to do 2 things. First, go find his cauldron. It was imperative that he found it.

2nd, fight a strong beast. There would be no point in coming to this place if he didn't find and fight a strong beast.

He wouldn't overreach and look for True King beasts, but True Lord 5th realm beasts were what he believed to be the perfect ones for him to fight.

Currently, together his strength should have been a little less than True Lord 5th realm, but he still needed that challenge to get stronger.

It turned out, he was right about being below a mountain. When he came out, he appeared in the valley. So, the beasts were plenty for him to fight.

To start off the training, he ducked. A bird about the same size as Pearl, when he was small, went flying past where Alex's head was.

That little bird was going for the kill. Alex recognized the bird as a Red Silverbeak. It was a more common variance of the exceedingly rare Azure Silverbeak that Pearl had beaten in the Riverweed city.

This one, however, wasn't as weak as that one. It was a True Master 8th realm beast. To it, Alex must've looked like a tasty little prey.

Alex sighed. He didn't want to kill such cute little beasts, but if it was going to attack him, he wasn't going to not fight back.

As the Silverbeak flew back towards Alex, his sword shined with white light and he flicked it, making an arch with his sword.

The next moment, the Silverbeak fell onto the ground, its body cut in two. Alex simply shook his head at the beast. So many were going to fight him because he was an easy target, only to come up dead not so long after.

He walked over to the bird and removed his core. This time, He had a place to keep it.

Alex then continued his journey. Since he was planning on only keeping cores in there, he skipped the bird's body, but he didn't skip out on the small alchemy ingredients he found growing around him.

He had enough space for now anyway. Alex didn't want to leave very far away, but it seemed he had to as there weren't many beasts nearby for him to fight.

So, he left the area. But, every couple of meters, he left a mark on the trees around him the direction he needed to return to the cave.

As he kept on walking, Alex fought 3 more beasts, but none of them were very strong. They were more of a hassle than a challenge.

Alex started to frown. 'Will I not find a good beast to fight against?' he thought. But just then, he saw something at the edge of his senses.

There was a beast sitting on top of a tree with its tail dangling beneath it. It seemed to be enjoying its time in the wind as it had its eyes closed and seemed quite relaxed.

Alex stopped. What should he do? Should he fight the beast? Or run away? He couldn't decide at all.

On one hand, the beast had a True Lord 6th realm cultivation base, with Alex's standards just a bit too strong for him. He didn't see any chances of winning on his side at all.

However, on the other hand, it was a Blueflame Monkey, one of the beasts that held the ingredient to his pill to regrow his limb.

Alex fell into a dilemma. Did he value his life more, or his limb?

"Don't be a coward now," Alex said to himself. "It's just a bit strong of a challenge. Nothing to run away from."

Thinking that, Alex gripped his sword tightly and ran towards the monkey, consciously letting it know he was coming.

The Blueflame Monkey was surprisingly red in color. The name Blueflame came from the little fire that burned at the end of its tail that was fully blue in color.

The monkey looked at the shouting Alex and frowned. It didn't know why such a weakling was coming toward it, but it didn't care.

It jumped down from the massive tree it called its home. There were many other stronger beasts nearby, yet the monkey was able to keep it for itself.

Alex noticed the tree it was sitting in as well as the massive fruits that grew in it.

His running slowed down as his breathing got heavier.

"Enlightening Mango!" Alex thought in surprise. The giant mangoes were said to have the capability to help someone gain some understanding in their cultivation path.

Alex didn't know what that meant or did, but the mangoes were really coveted and thus he wanted them too.

The monkey and the fruit were two things he wanted at the same location. Alex couldn't help but be extremely happy.

The monkey noticed that Alex wanted the tree and suddenly got angry. With a growl, the monkey jumped at Alex.

Alex was surprised at how quickly the monkey decided to attack, but he had been ready. So, as soon as it arrived, he brought out his gleaming, golden sword with white outlines around it, and tried to slice its hand.

The hand that struck the sword bled a little under the strike, but it was Alex who felt more of the damage.

His legs skid a few steps back before coming to a stop. 'Damn, this monkey sure is strong. I need to be careful,' he thought.

The monkey realized that it was the superior figure in this battle, so it started teasing Alex by showing its behinds.

It worked. Alex got mad. His sword moved in an arc in front of him, leaving behind 5 distinct phantom swords of the same sword he held, all of which were golden in color.

The swords slowly tilted until they were targeting the monkey, and flew off. The damage the Penta Sword Skill did was negligible to the monkey, but it was the visual Alex needed.

Once the 5 swords flew toward the monkey, the monkey got a little concerned, but still more or so careless about its situation.

The monkey punched in mid-air, sending a flying blue flame towards the swords, which when hit created a massive explosion that nearly knocked Alex off of his feet.

Alex stood his ground, however, and sent Heaven's Impact at the monkey. Right now, its blood was more valuable to him than the fight.

The monkey seemed to somehow notice the incoming mental attack and suddenly spun around. As it did, the blue flames in its burning tail lit up brightly, leaving a blue light where it passed through which created a barrier around it.

Heaven's impact landed on the firewall and destroyed it, not before being mostly destroyed itself.

"Tsk," Alex said as his only chance at victory was stripped away so easily. "How come the beasts are so good at blocking my mental attacks? Or am I just unconsciously drawn towards those that can block my attack?" he thought.

The Monkey had likely eaten the fruit and gained a lot of mental prowess as well since the remaining mental attack did nothing.

'Dammit, I don't think this beast is beatable right now,' he thought. So, Alex changed his target.

Instead of trying to go for the monkey, he decided to steal the fruit behind it.

Alex needed a distraction. Slowly, a yellow light glowed from Alex for a second, confusing the monkey.

Then the light down and nothing had changed. Alex was still there. He then took his sword in his right hand and ran towards the monkey with all of its speed.

The monkey ran faster. Far faster than Alex could've realized it was possible. However, he didn't let that distract him.

He still did what he was supposed to and ran. When he was right next to the monkey, he didn't stop and still ran. The monkey ran past him too, towards the 'Alex' that was running at it with his sword high in the air.

The monkey once again gave a punch, it didn't feel anything from its fist. It was like hitting a ghost.

The Alex disappeared into a burst of yellow lights, telling the monkey that it had been fooled.

The real Alex was on top of the tree, with his hand on one of the fruit. Just then, the monkey cried out and ran towards Alex.

Alex jumped away from the tree to avoid the monkey, but the monkey twisted in midair, sending a tiny blue ball of fire that struck Alex directly on his chest.

BOOM

Chapter 623 Explosion

As the blue ball of fire landed on Alex, it opened like a blossoming flower into a massive fireball that only grew larger to cause a great explosion.

Alex was sent flying away into the distance with terrible pain in his chest. When he landed on the ground, all he could do was writhe in pain.

He placed his hand on his chest and all he felt was head and blood. This was a terrible wound.

It didn't end there. His arm, face, and legs had been scorched as well. His hairs were singed all over his body. His clothes were still burning with the terrible blue flame, which he quickly tore off and threw to the side despite the pain.

When he stood up, all he could do was limp. Fortunately, he hadn't suffered anything permanent, but he had taken a lot of damage.

The wound, the pain, the fire, it all told him one thing that he couldn't believe at all.

"That monkey is not an ordinary True Lord 6th realm beast at all. No way something like that could have done this much damage even when I was fully defending myself," he thought.

He coughed a bit in pain and felt a salty taste enter his mouth. 'Dammit! I'm bleeding internally too,' he thought.

Alex looked around and brought out the sword he had kept in his ring. He felt some sort of happiness in this tragedy when he saw the marks on the tree.

While constantly being aware of ambushes and attacks, Alex wrapped the remaining bit of cloth around his waist to hide his naked body.

Then, he walked-nay, limped back towards the cave.

Once he was inside the cave, Alex slumped to the ground and immediately started cultivating. That was the only way to heal himself right now.

While healing pills would've been instant, cultivating was also a good way of doing so. The only problem was that it took quite a long time to heal a non-serious injury this way.

Alex cultivated continuously for a whole day so that he wouldn't die from his injuries. While he wasn't healed a lot, he was healed to the point where the proper movement was possible.

On the end of the 2nd day when his wounds were healed to a point where cultivation needn't be his only focus, he brought out a giant, orange mango from his storage ring.

At the very last moment, he had been able to snatch this fruit and drag it into his storage ring.

'Dammit! There were so many of them, and I only got one,' Alex thought. However, this one fruit alone was quite coveted by many humans too.

So, Alex didn't beat himself over it. Not wanting to waste any part of the fruit, Alex took a bite out of it with the skin and all.

Suddenly, all sense of fatigue and sleepiness he had been feeling from the pain and days-long cultivation was immediately gone. Alex felt as if he had woken up from a 12-hour sleep, fully alert and ready.

His mind processed things so quickly, that everything started feeling like they were moving in slow motion.

At the same time, the pain became quite intolerable under his fully awake mind as well.

So, Alex's mind decided to switch to something else. Whether it was because he was hating his defeat, or because the pain reminded him of the event, the final scenes of his fight with the monkey ran past his head.

Unconsciously, Alex took another bite of the mango, and the vision seemed as real as if it was happening right at the moment.

He watched the tiny blue ball of fire slowly open up, expanding itself... no that was wrong. It was a shrunken ball of fire, so it was returning to its original size.

At least, that was what Alex thought at the moment. However, his next moments of thoughts were plagued by his panic and skill employment.

He didn't see what happened to the fire next.

He took another bite of the fruit as he mulled on why that tiny ball of fire had done so much damage. He thought he understood it while he replayed the event in his mind, but that didn't really work once he didn't have it in front of him.

Also, the main part of the attack, the part where the blue fire actually attacks him was missing from his memory. Without it, Alex doubted he would never understand why.

'Why am I so fascinated by this?' he wondered t himself while taking another bite of the mango. The mango slid directly into his stomach, turning into cool energy that flowed up to his brain.

His thinking churned again. Even though he couldn't understand why the attack did as much damage as it did, he still wanted to learn about the first half of the attack where the ball of fire was small.

That felt like a sneaky little attack on him. A fireball that looked innocent but suddenly turned large in front of the enemy could take them by surprise.

So, Alex thought about it while eating the remaining mango. He felt like he was getting somewhere with his thought process when he tried to take another bite of the mango, and nothing entered his mouth.

When he looked at it, there was only a pit remaining in his hands. Then he wondered, could he perhaps grow it?

He had no idea, but he could try it sometimes after leaving this place. So, he kept the pit in his storage ring and continued thinking about the fireball.

Without the mango, it was hard, but Alex still struggled to understand what was done and how it was done.

He felt like he was on the verge of understanding, but then his thoughts would go astray. When he felt like he was in a zone, his pains would bring him out of it.

This happened so often that he decided to not care about learning anything for now and concentrated on healing himself.

About a week later, he finally left the cave once more. He had been fully healed, his body ready to go fight back and kill the monkey.

However, Alex didn't want that. He only wanted two things for now. To steal a mango, and get attacked by the monkey so he could understand how that happened.

So, he went towards it.

Half an hour later, Alex returned back to the cave, without any fruit. He had been attacked not soon after the fighting started.

After a week of healing, he went back once again. An hour later, he returned back again.

This time, he had nearly lost an arm, but hadn't. Also, he had managed to snatch two mangos.

He hoped this was enough to do what he wanted. Alex focused a week on healing and then ate the fruit.

Once again, as if diving into a cool pool, formless energy went up to his mind, getting him fully awake.

Once Alex was awake and alert, he started thinking about the attack. This time, he had been ready, so he saw what happened when the monkey attacked him.

Alex was positively happy to realize that the small ball of fire had indeed been condensed before leaving the monkey's tail.

When Alex took the hit, the small fire got big, as if unfolding to its original size, and then, as if suddenly heating the air around it to a million-degree, the air was what expanded around the fire, before the fire even arrived.

Alex hadn't realized that while he was learning this, he had fallen into a trance, forgetting to eat his mango at all.

'The ball of fire unfolding is just to hide the amount of fire the monkey put into the attack. It has no other purpose at all,' Alex understood.

'The true damage arrives when the fire is suddenly increased in temperature to a very high degree, causing air itself to act as an attack.'

'When temperature changes, air expands. When air expands, it hits everything around it. Not just the air either, the sound waves and the flying debris do a lot of damage too.'

'Explosion... is the rapid destruction of everything around it. I see.'

As such, for the next 2 days, Alex remained in a trance of Enlightenment. When he woke up, his eyes shined with understanding.

He hadn't known it yet, but he had done something that most people would need to reach the Saint realm to even hope to do.

He had learned one of the many worldly Daos. The Dao of Explosion.

Chapter 624 A Tongue of Fire

A large, yellow snake slid on the ground, ready to pounce at its target, oblivious that its target was simply acting unaware of its arrival.

The snake was at True Disciple 4th realm, not bad for a beast that was so far away from the mountain range, and in the grassland.

Once it was ready, the snake suddenly jumped and bit its target. However, when it did, its target disappeared into a bunch of golden light.

Out of the tall grasses, the real target emerged. Revealing itself to not be a target, but the prey all along.

The snake slammed its tail at its target, but Pearl was ready for it. His body shined with golden light, and when the tail hit him, it did practically nothing.

At the same time, Pearl's claws extended forward, his paw starting to shine with golden lights as well.

The snake opened its mouth, sending a ball of fire toward Pearl, but Pearl simply ignored it. The fireball directly hit him, but Pearl emerged from it mostly unhurt.

The snake got scared when it saw that and tried to dig its way down the earth, but Pearl wouldn't let it.

Along the way, Pearl roared with a loud voice that could be heard from miles over, and at the same time, the snake's vision dimmed as it forgot what it was about to do.

The mental attack from Pearl was not very weak either. It was only weaker than Alex's.

Pearl finally reached the beast and hit it with his shining paw. The snake was sent sliding across the grass, all bloody, with a massive chunk of its body missing.

Pearl then followed it, not wanting to let it go anywhere, and once again attacked it near the same location.

The snake tried to fight back, using skills related to fire, earth, and in between, but nothing stopped Pearl.

He quickly killed the snake, and finally slumped on the ground to rest.

Shen Jing flew high in the air, watching the fight between Pearl and the snake with pure awe in his eyes.

A cat that hadn't even reached the peak of its potential was easily handling a snake that was 2 realms above it.

He didn't remember if he could do that when he was young or not, and couldn't help but compare himself to Pearl.

"Even if I had all of those skills, I still wouldn't have been able to fight that snake and win so easily," Shen Jing thought. Pearl's body was definitely better than normal, and his talent at fighting was not something to scoff at either.

However, he frowned. While skills and talents could get you so far, he didn't see him reaching very high with his cultivation base. The natural limitations of an unevolved beast would soon show themselves.

Unless the potential in Pearl was tapped, he would die being mediocre forever.

'While he does have those skills, they are quite basic,' Shen Jing thought. 'I should teach the little guy somethi—'

He stopped. An aura flared from deep within the mountains. Shen Jing could feel the Dao around the world gather at a certain location in the mountain.

"Dao Enlightenment? Is a Saint beast breaking through?" he thought. "Not bad, it must be a lucky one to have understood a Dao. These beasts usually don't have the intelligence for it."

While thinking that, Shen Jing sent his senses to the far lands of the mountain ranges, trying to see what was trying to breakthrough. He followed the traces of the natural worldly laws and quickly found a cave inside a mountain.

And in there, he found Alex.

Shen Jing's smile dropped, replaced with awe. He watched Alex open his eyes and look at himself for the new understanding he had just gained.

'Did that kid... just learn a Dao?' Shen Jing felt it unfathomable even as he said that. Dao... was not something someone could learn randomly.

He saw Alex look at the mango in his hand, and while that mango should have certainly helped him focus and concentrate on what he was trying to learn, there was no way it was what directly helped him learn the thing.

If a person had the ability to learn something, he would need nothing to learn it. If he didn't, all the heavenly treasures and divine elixirs wouldn't be able to help him comprehend it.

"And that kid somehow learned it, huh?" Shen Jing thought. "How long has it been since I have heard of someone understanding a Dao before reaching the Saint realm?"

"I had done it too, but I was in the True King realm at the time, while this kid is only just starting the path of the True Realm. How many more will he learn before he breaks through to the saint realm?" he wondered.

His eyes went wide as he thought, "how many more will he then learn before..." Shen Jing didn't even want to think about the possibilities.

Shen Jing shook his head. "It could also be that he only learns this one. Best not to think about it much longer," he thought.

Then, another thought came to him. Something that should have been the first, but the shock had derailed his thought process.

'What Dao did he learn though?' he wondered. Worldly laws always descended together, and without an expert with an understanding of the many different Daos, it was impossible to discern which one someone was learning.

'True Disciple realm... will he even be able to handle the power of his own Dao?' he wondered. Dao added strength to one's use of that Dao. Which would normally be impossible for someone.

At the same time, it also cost the person using said Dao a lot of Qi.

However, that was not what Shen Jing was worried about. He was worried about the fact that the strength of Dao attacks was sometimes so strong that low leveled cultivators wouldn't be able to survive their own attacks.

"Well, I hope he didn't learn some offensive Dao. Once he is done with his training, I will teach him about Dao," Shen Jing thought. "For now, he should go and find his cauldron already. Sigh, I even went through the hassle of getting it so close to him, but he never went there."

Shen Jing shook his head and looked back towards Pearl. "Right, back to teaching this kid again," he chuckled a bit himself and remembered a technique from his mind.

"Yes, that should suit him," he thought and flew down towards Pearl who had eaten the Yellow snake's core and had started cultivating.

If he successfully broke through, he would be a True Disciple 3rd realm now.

* * * * *

Alex felt weirdly... relaxed at the moment. His mind felt serene as his understanding of explosions made him feel like he had learned something that no one else taught him.

No, he did learn something no one else taught him. His mother would have been proud if she heard that her son was now learning things on his own without her having to teach him.

His mother... he missed his mother. And his father. And... and someone else. His memories were vague. Was that a silhouette of a girl? Why was he missing a girl?

He wondered if his clone actually made a girlfriend back in his homeworld. "No way, who would want to be together with a farm boy like me?" he wondered and stopped thinking about it all.

"Right, now that I have learned a bit about explosions, I should try it out," he thought. He was about to compress fire Qi onto his hand and do what the BlueFlame monkey did, but for some reason, he felt that unnecessary.

At least, it was unnecessary to create explosions.

"Right, not inside the cave," he remembered in time and walked out of it. Once he was outside, he put his hand forward and a tongue of fire bloomed in front of him.

For some reason... he knew what to do next. He sent the fire a little ahead of him, and thought, 'Explode.'

Within a fraction of a second, he felt Qi being driven out of his body at a tremendous rate. At the same time, fire Qi in the surrounding was being pulled towards the tongue of fire.

That was something Alex had never seen happening before.

A fraction of a second later, it exploded.

A massive boom rang from the surroundings as Alex himself had been pushed back from where he stood and crashed into the mountain with a heavy slam.

He fell to the ground and tried to bring himself up as he gasped for breaths. He wheezed, trying to breathe as the pain in his body was tremendous.

He wasn't hurt like when the monkey had burned him, but this explosion, the destruction it carried was almost as terrifying.

And it had been him who had tried to make the explosion happen.

A minute later, Alex was finally able to stand up. His body was still in pain, but he was able to ignore that to a certain extent.

He looked at his surroundings and realized that trees in a 10-meter radius had been uprooted.

Alex couldn't help but be surprised when he realized that this amount of destruction had been done with just a tongue of fire.

Had he made a bigger fire, or perhaps used the compressed fire as that monkey did, the damage would have been a lot higher than he could imagine.

'But if I do that, I will certainly be dead for sure,' Alex thought. As of yet, he wasn't strong enough for his own skill.

Chapter 625 Continuous Training

Alex went back to the cave and sat down inside, trying to think about what he had just learned.

A tongue of fire exploding had caused about True Lord 3rd or 4th realm equivalent damage to him.

A single tongue of fire.

Alex found that a little unbelievable, but he had been the one to do it, so he had to believe.

Next, he thought about what had happened with the tongue of fire. When he wanted it to explode, his body had involuntarily surrendered Qi to it.

At the same time, Qi from the atmosphere had gathered into the fire, as if the world was following Alex's orders. His wish seemed to be their command.

Only Fire Qi had gathered onto the flame, but that was all that was needed. Then, as per his understanding of the explosion, the flame had reached a very high temperature, creating destruction of such a scale around him.

Unrooting trees or turning them to smithereens within the 10 meters range, and destroying a lot up to 20 meters distance. That was a lot of damage.

Alex looked at himself and saw that he wasn't really burned at all. In fact, the single piece of cloth he now wrapped around his wait had visibly taken no fire damage.

The trees were the same as well. Not a single one of them had burned, unlike when he was hit by the monkey's exploding fireballs.

Alex nodded his head as he understood why. Explosions... only used fire to start themselves. The real damage came from the destructive force of the air around it.

Surely there could be fire in the explosion too, but a tongue of flame wasn't enough for it.

For that, he would have to make more fire before exploding them. However, that destruction would certainly kill him if the massive Qi being pulled from within himself didn't do it first.

'Let's think about that,' he thought. Qi had been involuntarily drawn from him, and a fraction of a second later, the fire had exploded.

There were a few things he wanted to know. How much Qi did it take? Did it have to be his Qi? Did the speed matter?

There were other questions that he cared about too like the size of the fire, the shape of fire, and the damage it did.

So, for the next two days, he did nothing but simply practice that.

By now, Alex understood how much fire he could use to explode. Even if a lot of fire was burning, he could choose to explode just part of it as well.

The distance, however, needed to be short. Beyond a certain range, it was as if the connection he had with the fire that was forged by the world itself was destroyed.

While he could freely control the fire, he couldn't explode it beyond a certain range. For now, that range was somewhere between 4 and 5 meters.

That meant, Alex had to be extra careful how much fire he wanted to explode without hurting himself. This also meant, that as long as his body wasn't hurt, he could create an explosion that consumed all the QI in his body. That damage would be massive.

Other than that, Alex understood that the speed of his Qi also mattered as well as the quantity of how much Qi was taken by the explosion.

The faster he released his Qi to the fire, the faster it would gather Qi from the world and explode. Delaying or stopping the transfer of his Qi only did the same to the explosion.

Alex thanked Shen Jing for helping him widen his Meridians. By now, it had completely become twice as big and was even becoming a bit larger at times, although that hurt Alex quite a bit.

However, he didn't doubt that he could expand it more if he cultivated his body with Pearl which also included tempering meridians.

After understanding all of that, Alex went out to train. Every day, he would go into the forest, marking every tree he came across on the way to show a way back to the cave.

He forgot about the BlueFlame monkey for now. It was too strong for him, and he would only likely kill himself if he kept on going for it.

So, he fought other monsters, weaker ones, and trained his explosion skills. At the same time, he also practiced his other skills.

He hadn't been able to practice the spiritual sword for a while, so that was something he decided to learn later on.

He wasn't worried about running out of time at all. After all, if he did what Shen Jing said and reached True Lord 1st realm with his cultivation base, going normally, it would take him another 15 months for sure.

That was almost double the time he had been in this world. It would be certainly enough to practice everything.

Days passed by in a flash, and soon months passed by as well.

3 months later, Alex was surveying a gazelle beast drinking water from a river he had come across on his path around the mountain.

This location was about a few kilometers away from his cave, but that didn't bother him.

Since he knew the way back, he simply had to fly there and he would reach there within a few minutes.

His spiritual sense reached 120 meters ahead of him without any forced extension. By now, Alex had realized that just as absorbing a monster core gave him Qi, absorbing their spiritual body in his mind also gave him some increase in his spiritual strength.

It was only because common beasts didn't have good spiritual strength for him to steal, so he had never realized that. However, after the Mind Tempering realm, they sufficiently gave him 2 to 3 meters of spiritual sense for everything he ate those beasts.

Unfortunately, he couldn't keep on eating the same strength of beasts, or the return would be diminishing. He needed to continuously find better and better beasts to consume.

Today, Alex wasn't here for that. He was here for a simple fight.

The gazelle sensed something and tried to run away, but a massive crocodile jumped out of the river and ate it whole.

The dark purple-skinned crocodile had the size of a school bus and strength in True Lord 4th realm. That was perfect for Alex's training.

He walked out of the trees, not intending to hide from the crocodile at all.

The Crystalscale Crocodile saw him and got curious at first, but once it saw his strength, only disdain could be seen in its eyes.

'Intelligence? It must have a good enough mind to stop my heaven's impact then,' Alex thought and tried it out.

The Crocodile's eyes suddenly rolled upwards and its giant head slammed onto the ground. However, a moment later, it stood up and shook its head again.

As expected, it had some level of mental defense. 'I should really get one after I leave this place,' he thought and flared his True Disciple 8th realm cultivation base, letting the beast know he was on his way.

Alex dashed forward, leaving sand flying behind him. The sword in his hand gleamed golden, something that he supposed was visible currently as well.

Alex couldn't tell what time of the day was with his spiritual sense alone as the light was not something he could see through it. However, stuff like heat to his senses and the number of shadows from his teleportation techniques always told him what time of the day it was.

The Crystalscale Crocodile opened its jaw, the inside red with the dead gazelle, trying to devour Alex whole.

'Idiot!' Alex thought and stopped his attack. The beast still wasn't taking him seriously, giving away its vulnerable parts for Alex to attack.

Unlike the outside, the inside of the crocodile had no scales. So, if Alex had attacked just now, he could've killed the Crocodile in one hit.

However, that wasn't what he was here for at all. He didn't want to kill it; he wanted a challenge, to push himself to grow stronger.

He wanted an experience that he couldn't get otherwise. How was he to get that if the crocodile easily let him kill it?

Alex created a tongue of fire, floating it a bit ahead of him, and exploded it instantly. The damage the fire produced just now was equivalent to True Masters 8th realm.

It was well within the range of what his body could handle.

The crocodile wasn't damaged either, but it finally understood that Alex wasn't someone it could so easily ignore.

Chapter 626 Gold and Green

The purple crocodile's scales glowed brightly as the textures on them changed. The crocodile was using Qi to harden its scales, so Alex could notice it with his sense.

He smiled and dashed forwards once again.

The crocodile, this time fully aware of Alex's strength, decided to use its tail to attack him. Its hardened tail had scales growing in all directions like thorns on a flower stalk.

Alex realized that this could be deadly and immediately poured all his metal Qi into his sword and slashed at the tail.

The tail and the sword clashed, and as expected, Alex was thrown back into the sand.

Alex quickly stood up from the flying sand everywhere and noticed something. The scales on the tail of the crocodile, which was growing in all directions, were now all facing him, and they started shaking a little.

Alex frowned. He could guess what was going to happen. Just as the tail's scales started shooting out like bullets, he dashed to the side, dodging the volley of scales.

The crocodile pulled its tail back. Its scales would take a bit to grow back before it could use again.

Alex then dashed back at the crocodile again. The crocodile's mouth opened up as if wanting to eat him.

'Did this beast not understand already that I—' just as Alex was thinking that, he saw a giant illusory crocodile, made up of entirely blue color appeared on top of the crocodile.

The illusory crocodile's lower jaw was missing, and its upper jaw was now coming down, slamming onto him.

This was the attack of a True lord 4th realm beast. Alex couldn't underestimate it at all.

A wall of 5 colors appeared in front of him that contained the five elements. This was a technique that could stop a lot of the incoming attacks.

At the same time, he strengthened his body with the Jade Skin technique as marbled texture appeared all over his body.

Then, finally, his hand glowed with yellow light and he sent out a palm strike to stop as much of the damage as he could.

Then, the crocodile's upper jaw slammed on him. A cloud of sand blew into the wind, causing a giant sound that reached far into the forest and deep into the river.

The crocodile harrumphed, thinking it had won. However, not very long after, when the sand settled down, he saw Alex still standing there, with no damage to him at all.

When the remaining power of the illusory crocodile hit him, it felt like he was hit by a truck. With a True Lord 1st realm level body, he could handle a truck.

Alex ran after the crocodile again, with his sword glowing green this time.

The Crystalscale Crocodile was a beast with Water and Earth elements to it. To even negate some of the effects of both of those elements, Alex needed to use an appropriate technique of his own.

Since he had to use a sword for the additional damage of the Sword Intent, Alex could only rely on sword techniques. While he had sword techniques for all 5 elements, the only ones that were strong were the Elusive Heavenly Sword with its Wood Element, the Penta Sword technique as well as the Smiting blade with the Metal Element.

The Metal element could weaken the Earth element, but it did nothing against the water element, instead of acting just like a non-Elemental attack against it.

Meanwhile, Wood Element could both weaken the Water Element and control the Earth element, so he decided to use that instead.

As he reached the crocodile, Alex appeared right underneath its jaw and slammed his sword into it, releasing the green slash at point-blank range.

The crocodile was sent flying upwards into the air. Seeing the school-bus-sized crocodile flying was quite a sight.

The crocodile slammed into the water, making a giant wave in the river. The beast that was close by quickly ran away.

Alex saw this and smiled. Then, he got his sword ready once again. That attack just now would have hurt the crocodile quite a bit, but it would have done nothing to harm it at all.

It only worked to make it angry.

The crocodile swam out of the river in a surprising speed and looked at Alex with disdain in its eyes, then it slammed its legs.

Alex wondered what was happening when suddenly, his feet started sinking into the ground. He tried to pull it out, but his feet wouldn't accept that. Instead, the more he moved, the more he was getting pulled under.

'Dammit! The crocodile used a quicksand technique,' he thought. Then, he looked up and saw the crocodile preparing to do something.

He could feel Qi being gathered in front of its mouth. It was going to attack something soon.

Alex saw a blue ball of water spiral in front of it, and then, it let it loose. A massive stream of water shot out of the crocodile's mouth towards Alex who was still stuck to the ground.

Then, the stream hit him... and Alex's body tore into a thousand pieces.

The crocodile was surprised at how easy it was, and he saw the pieces fall to the ground. Then, the pieces vanished in a bunch of yellow light.

BAM!

Something struck him underbelly with so much strength that the crocodile was once again sent out flying. However, Alex didn't stop this time.

He hit the crocodile again in mid-air, throwing it further away. The crocodile tried to turn itself in mid-air, but Alex kept hitting it and sending it further and further down the river.

When Alex was about to hit it again, the crocodile this time enforced its scale in time and managed to swing its tail around.

Alex tried to block it, but that was not all he needed to do. The crystals on the tail's end were already turning towards him.

He would die if he let that hit.

Suddenly, a tongue of fire appeared in front of him, while he enforced himself with his Jade Skin technique, then he thought of a single word.

'Explode!'

A massive boom rang in between him and the crocodile, sending the crocodile slamming down into the water, while he was sent flying away and landed in the river as well a good 100 meters down the line.

Alex's body hurt a bit, but that was the price of survival. 'The crocodile is coming for me,' he thought and prepared to fight when he saw something not far from him that shocked him beyond belief.

Deep in the river, about 70 meters away from him in the opposite direction of the crocodile was a golden ball of light. This was something that shouldn't have existed in nature and was definitely man-made.

However, that was not what had shocked him at all. No, the thing that shocked him more was what was within this ball of golden light.

Floating within the ball of golden light was something made up of mostly green and gold. Alex smiled when he saw this, and his eyes gleamed with joy.

"My Cauldron!" he shouted in happiness. He had finally found the Golden Jade Cauldron.

He wanted to go get it, but he didn't yet have enough space to keep his cauldron in his ring. Not unless he wanted to throw away the stuff that he had gathered until now.

So, he was forced to leave it be just for now. 'I'll get it back soon,' he thought and turned around to the approaching angry crocodile. 'Right after I kill it.'

Alex stepped on the surface of the water, and it solidified underneath him as if he were stepping on stone. Then, he shot off, leaving a massive explosion of water.

The crocodile saw this and jumped up to attack him. Alex's sword shined with a green light which he sent flying before even arriving close to the crocodile.

He knew it wouldn't damage it at all. He just wanted to distract it a little. The crocodile slammed the green slash with its tail, only to realize that it did no damage.

When Alex arrived, it wasn't ready to attack with its tail again. So, it instead roared, sending columns of water flying out of the river to disrupt Alex.

Alex, however, only said a single sentence. "I'm sorry, but I don't have time to keep playing." Then, he disappeared.

When he reappeared, he was right below the crocodile, its underside fully vulnerable to him with no scales.

Alex swung his hand, but there was no sword in it. He had already stored the sword.

Instead, a sword formed on its own made up of misty white color with a slight hue of yellow. A sword only he could see.

The sword lagged just a bit as his hand swung, but not enough to make a difference. Then, it stuck the crocodile's body.

The illusory sword passed through the crocodile's stomach, and the crocodile fell into the water.

The crocodile felt nothing wrong with itself at all, so it suddenly turned around towards Alex and tried to send out a water blast.

A column of water shot out from its mouth but it was very weak. The damage it did was almost negligible to Ning.

Ning smiled. "I told you, I am done playing."

Then, 3 Heaven's Impact hit the crocodile one after another. With its scales not working properly, it couldn't block the damage at all.

Alex got close to the unconscious crocodile and opened its mouth. He then created a tongue of fire and sent it inside the crocodile's mouth and closed it.

As it did, he spoke a single word again.

"Explode!"

Chapter 627 Alchemy Training

Alex pulled the cauldron out of the water and looked at it with a happy expression. He felt like hugging it, but he didn't do so.

He had already taken care of the Crystalscale Crocodile's core and would use it sometime later when his cultivation base reached a close enough level.

He had also taken some of the crocodile's crystal scales and had hoped of making some mental defense artifacts with them.

Alex didn't have to open the cauldron to see that everything inside was as it should be.

A fire formation, A barrier formation, 3 healing pills, and 20 True spirit stones. All right there inside with no damage.

'That golden light... it must have been Shen Jing who put it here, right?' he thought. That was the only thing that made sense.

Then, Alex took the cauldron and went up the river to the location where he fought the crocodile first. Then, he found his way back to the cave.

At first, Alex was a little worried that he wouldn't be able to take the cauldron into the cave given that it wouldn't fit in his storage ring at all.

However, when he did try to, he could somehow teleport inside with his cauldron in hand.

'That does make sense since it is an item I refined. If I can teleport with the sword, I should be able to teleport with the cauldron,' he thought.

Alex sat down when he reached the inner cave and rested for a few moments before he started cultivating. He ignored the cauldron for now as he wanted to be at his peak before he tried anything.

He cultivated for a full day before his lost Qi had returned to him. At the same time, he tried to calm the Yang aura that was desperately trying to get out of him.

After he was done with that, he opened his eyes and got ready to practice some alchemy.

Alex dug out a little piece of land, using the True spirit stone to run the fire formation plate. With a single spirit stone, Alex was sure the fire would burn for almost 5 days nonstop.

With 20, he could practice for 100 days. That was more than enough to gain some insight into what he was going to practice, or so he hoped.

During the last 3 months, Alex had gathered a lot of ingredients. They were still dwarfed by the number of ingredients he used to hold in his storage bags back in Crimson Empire, but this one was quite great as well since almost all of the ingredients he had acquired were for True pills.

Alex had found many ingredients but ignored most that he couldn't make pills with.

He could try to make new pills as he did back in the barrier after he had killed Zexi, but that was not his intention at the moment.

At the moment, he was just trying to practice making pills with structure and composition in mind.

When his cauldron was hot, he put the first ingredient into it. Alex had a recipe to follow, and he did, turning the first ingredient into powder not long after.

Then, he stopped. Instead of putting in the next ingredient, Alex took the powder out and set it aside. He made sure to not leave a single speck behind in the cauldron.

Then, he did the same thing for the 2nd ingredient. He put it in, did what the recipe told him to do, and pulled it out.

He did the same for the third, the fourth, all the way to the last ingredient.

Doing so obviously removed all energy into the air, but Alex didn't care for that at the moment. He was more so focused on the powder as that was where structure and composition came in.

Once all the ingredients were powdered, he pulled up a single speck of all the ingredients and put it in his hand.

Then, Alex took a deep breath and enhanced the vision in his mind. Is it looking through a microscope, the specks of powder magnified in his spiritual sense to the point that he could see what they all looked like?

Somehow, Alex didn't feel as much strain as the last time he had done it when his mental strength was nearly 6 times as weak as now. Well, that was to be expected.

Once he saw the shapes of the powder, he tried to fit them together. The powder shapes acted like puzzle pieces that came together to form a larger puzzle piece.

Unfortunately for Alex, he didn't know if these puzzle pieces were working puzzle pieces or not.

His brilliant mind worked to look through the specks of powder, trying to find an orientation in which they would all fall together with no gap inside.

Alas, he couldn't find any. No matter the changes he made, the highest he could go in his estimation was 80%.

80% sounded incredible, and it was, but only on paper. In reality, there were a lot of aspects to pill-making that would bring this down quite a bunch.

The ones he knew of were the age of an ingredient before it was taken, time passed after it was taken, mistakes while following the recipe, grade of a cauldron, and of course, the ability of the alchemist himself.

These things would surely bring the harmony down by a lot. So, Alex needed to increase the theoretical potential to as high as possible so that even when he made those mistakes, he still ended up with a high-grade pill.

Alex thought of changing the recipe a little. Alex wondered what he could change and saw that if he used the portion of the 4th ingredient twice, he could cover quite a large gap in the structure, which could surely increase the potential by about another 5-8%.

Alex took another speck of the 4th ingredient and tried. As expected, it fell into place, giving him quite a bit of joy.

"Hah, if I just use twice the amount of the 4th ingredient, I can do it," he thought, but then stopped and frowned.

"No, that won't do," he thought. Having a little less energy in an ingredient, or a little more didn't really affect a pill-making process to a high level.

At best, they would just cause to pill to lose of a bit of harmony by not having all the combined energy having a place to inhabit.

However, if Alex really did double an ingredient, the increased amount of energy from that one ingredient would change the structure of the entire pill, making the later incoming ingredients interact differently with the massive energy of the 4th ingredient.

So, increasing the ingredient amount was not the way to go, unless he wanted to end up with an entirely different pill instead.

What Alex really needed to do, was change the structure of the powder by changing the speed, rotation, and temperature with which he interacted with the energy.

And that was something he had no idea about and couldn't figure out by thinking. For that, he needed to sit down and burn those ingredients to see how the powder came out.

Alex spent half a day on a single ingredient, trying to form every type of shape he could while keeping the same rate of release of the energy.

Then, he moved on to the next one. He spent 2 consecutive days learning with just 4 ingredients. Then when the mental fatigue hit, he stopped cultivating.

After going back and forth between practice and cultivation, Alex finally managed to make almost every single shape of every single ingredient for his pill.

Then he closed his eyes and sank his thought into his memories. From all the different memories, he searched for the shapes that would fit together the best.

Because he had spent the last week preparing, it didn't take him very long to find a solution to the puzzle.

He quickly compiled a recipe based on that combination and finally, for the first time in nearly 5 months, proceeded to make a pill.

The pill he was going to make, the one he had been practicing was called the Disciple's Ascension pill. Unlike its grand name, it was just a pill that helped the True Disciple realm cultivator have a higher chance during breakthrough to the True Master realm.

It was one of the easiest pills to make, not because the process was easy, but rather because of how readily available the ingredients were. They were True rank ingredients but grew like a weed in most places where humans didn't step in.

If cared for, these ingredients would grow even more easily. In a forest as dense as these lands, there were more than enough ingredients here to occupy Alex's time for almost a decade.

After a decade, there would be enough growth to occupy another decade.

Alex prepared the cauldron and recalled the recipe one more time to be sure, and started making the pill.

Alex put the first ingredient in and put all of his focus on the task at hand. Since he had made so many powders of the same ingredient, he didn't want his muscle memory taking over and ruining this attempt.

Once he was focused, the process became easy. He took out the 2nd ingredient as well and tried that as well. That too was converted into powder rather easily.

The 3rd, 4th, 5th, all the way to the last ingredient, it all easily turned into powder with the shape he wanted.

With that, the easy part was over, and next came the hard part.

Now, Alex had to conjoin each individual speck of powder into a group like puzzle pieces.

Chapter 628 Tries and Failure

Alex focused on his spiritual sense, using it to magnify into the powder in the cauldron, but there were too many to focus on.

He couldn't possibly join all of those powders right now. At least, not with the level of spiritual sense he had right now.

He could focus on multiple of these at once, so he decided to start with that. No matter how impossible it looked, he had to try.

So, he started doing it. He went around the cauldron, trying to find the individual specks of powder and brought them together. He moved them, twisted them, slid them into places, and finally managed to make a clump of the powders that perfectly fitted together.

His eyes beamed with joy, but then immediately dulled as he saw the other many individual specks he had to get to.

He sighed and got onto it. He split his concentration, putting all of his focus into the cauldron, and started fitting the other pieces together.

Once he had done the first one, the rest became easy. However, when he was just 10% of the way through, his physical body twitched and he immediately pulled his senses back.

That was when he realized that the aura inside the cauldron was extremely turbulent and was moments away from bursting open.

Alex immediately opened the lid and used Elemental Guidance to move the energy out of the cauldron.

The energy soon dissipated in the air, and the threat was subdued.

Then, he sighed again.

'I can't lose focus of the energy while making the powder,' he thought.

He cleared the cauldron and tried again.

This time, once he was done until the point before he had to form the pill, he split half his attention of the energy, moving it around, stopping it from going out of control.

While the other half of the attention formed the powder. The speed was half as slow. But, it was working.

The energy wasn't going turbulent and he was halfway done with making the po—

Alex noticed something. When he looked for more specks, amongst the colorful specks of powder, he started seeing black specks.

When he focused on it, he realized that they were burnt powder. When Alex looked over the entirety of the cauldron, he noticed that a lot of the powders had been burned.

He sighed. Another failure.

Alex tried again and again, and each time he failed.

When he turned off the fire to not burn the powder, the powders wouldn't stick together anymore to form the pill.

When he tried to hurry up, he would make mistakes.

When he tried to slow down, the energy would start breaking down with the constant heat put into them.

When he was done with the last pieces of the powder, he noticed that many of the fire pieces had fallen into individual pieces.

When he tried and tried and tried for days on end, after nearly 3 weeks, he finally managed to make a pill with no mistakes made at all.

Its harmony came out to be 60%.

60%. 3 weeks of effort, so many ingredients wasted to get a 60%. 60% was amazing, but that was not what he wished after such long period of effort.

When he wondered why that had happened, he intensely started searching for the answer.

He recalled the recipe, there was no mistake.

He recalled the structure and composition, he had done the best he could.

He checked for the gap, there were some in the pill itself as not everything had fit tightly snug together, but that was clearly not responsible for merely 60%.

Alex thought of the abstract concept of symmetry the Royal Alchemist had told him about, but it shouldn't have been as important.

Then, the only problem could have been that Alex let the powders and energy remain in the cauldron for too long and they lost their potency.

Alex leaned backward, slamming his back onto the ground.

"I give up!" he said out loud. "I don't want to do this." After having tried the same thing over and over for the last week or so, he felt like he would rather take the BlueFlame Monkey's exploding flower to the face than do this.

As he lay on the ground, a thought came to him. 'Shit!' he thought. He was getting motivated again for no goddamn reason.

'I really do love Alchemy, don't I?' he thought.

He breathed in and out for a while and got back up to make the pill again. This time, he wanted to try something he hadn't tried in the last 3 weeks yet.

This time, he wanted to try nothing.

Every single time, he had ruined the ingredients trying to do something and failed. He now wanted to see how the recipe fared when he did nothing.

He followed the recipe with 0 mistakes, and when it came to the pill making turn, he moved the powder randomly, clumping it into a ball and letting the energy pass through it to collect as much as it could.

When the pill floated into his hand, Alex wanted to cry.

66%.

For something he had done randomly, he got 66%. But for something he had tried for 3 weeks straight, he got 60%.

Alex concentrated on the newly formed pill and noticed that about 70% of the pill had automatically done what he had been trying to do for the last 3 weeks.

The gap and symmetry were quite bad in the new pill as well, so he knew that had never been the problem.

'So I really need to finish it fast, huh?' he thought.

He tried it once again to see if this one had been a fluke and came out with 67% harmony instead. No, that could not have been a fluke.

Alex started thinking. He needed to do something that would capitalize on the positives of both of these different methods of following the same pill.

He needed the 100% puzzle completion aspect of the manual pill-making process, while he needed the speed of the random pill-making process.

If he combined these two, he had no doubt he could reach the Immortal grade with his pill.

'How do I do that though?' he thought. How in this godforsaken mountain range was he supposed to find a way to make perfect symmetrical, 100% energy-absorbing pills as quick as possib—

Alex jumped onto his feet. That couldn't be it, could it? He had a thought come to him, but he wasn't sure if he was being stupid or extremely intelligent at the moment.

He quickly calmed himself and thought if there was any way it would work at all.

"I won't know if I don't try," he thought and brought out another set of ingredients.

With the cauldron hot, he put the ingredients into the cauldron one by one until he reached the moment when the ingredients had turned into powder, and he simply needed to form the pill.

Alex didn't enhance his senses to join the individual specks together, nor did he randomly start moving the powder together for another pill.

Instead, he looked into himself and thought, 'come!'.

Qi stirred in his naval region and started moving automatically through his meridians. With how large his meridians were at the moment, they took no time until they reached his arms.

Then, out of both his right hand and his stump, the Qi moved out on its own until it reached the cauldron.

Alex didn't need to guide the Qi or make sure it didn't do anything it didn't need to. The Qi worked like it had a brain of its own.

It went into the cauldron, moved the powders together, brought it to a single clump, and then as if a knife had cut through that clump, it broke into two halves.

The Qi separated as well, moving into the two smaller clumps of powder and starting doing its magic.

Alex couldn't tell how they did it, but they quickly formed the two halves into normal-sized pills with a lot of gaps in them, and a vortex formed above them that sucked in all the energy of the cauldron.

In less than a moment, the pills were done.

Alex pulled out the two-pill and looked at the two with absolute surprise.

46% and 46%.

Alex's jaw dropped and there was only one thought in his mind.

"I need to learn this technique."

Chapter 629 Intent

Alex was excited when he decided to see how the Pill Splitting Qi worked. So, he made more pills, using it each time to split the pill into 2 and see the result.

2 weeks later, his excitement turned to disappointment. He couldn't be more disappointed at the fact that he couldn't extrapolate any information from the technique at all.

He had focused on the skill from the movement of Qi, to the formation of pills, and yet, he understood nothing.

In fact, halfway through the process, he could already see the problem with himself.

He didn't know how techniques worked at all. How did they function? How did moving your Qi in certain ways through your body do something when it came outside?

Those skill books he read all talked about the path through the meridians the Qi should move in, the requirements for that technique, and what the technique did.

Sometimes, they also talked about how one could improve on the technique as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the technique.

However, never did they talk about HOW the technique worked at all. How did moving your Qi through your body in certain ways produce a unique result at all?

Did it even actually produce a result? Alex decided to try it out.

He remade the pill all over again, and instead of using the technique this time, he instead just manually did the entire thing himself.

From the moment the Qi in his body stirred to the moment they arrived and left his hands, it was all done by him, manually. However, when the Qi appeared outside of his body, it simply dissipated into the air.

'What?' he thought with surprise. 'But I followed the way perfectly,' he thought.

He quickly had the real pill splitting Qi come out and make the two pills, each with 44% harmony.

Then, he started thinking once again about what had just happened or rather didn't happen.

'Did I make a mistake anywhere?' he thought and reviewed what he did, but he saw that he made no mistakes. That or, he made mistakes he couldn't see.

Once again, he had to wonder what was going on.

"Hmm…" he started thinking, but he wasn't making progress. So, he decided to go and get some of those mangoes that helped him focus and understand more.

After all, they had helped him understand how explosions worked. So, he hoped they helped him understand how this thing worked as well.

Alex returned 2 hours later, all bloody and battered. This time, he had thought he would win, but the BlueFlame monkey's explosion was still very strong. Way stronger than his explosion.

And worst of all, the monkey could explode it at a distance from itself, causing the damage to mostly falling on Alex.

'Is my understanding incomplete perhaps?' he thought. Maybe there was more to explosions than he thought.

'Later,' he thought and tried to forget about the explosions, but the thought still lingered in his mind.

He cultivated for a few days, bringing himself back to the top condition before proceeding with his meditation.

He made one more pill, trying to do the exact same thing he did earlier, and failed.

Once he fully understood his failure, he took a bite of the mango. The cool energy from the mango flowed to his brain and washed it like a cold splash of water to the face on a hot, sunny day.

Alex's mind was alert and awake, and he put all the focus on the problem and started thinking about it.

He immediately understood another problem with what he was trying to do as well that he hadn't even thought of because he hadn't reached that part of the problem yet.

The Pill Splitting Qi was essentially 3 minor techniques, fused together. So, the Qi path he followed would have no use whatsoever.

Alex realized, that he needed to learn 2 of the 3 minor techniques, which to be more accurate were equal to 2 of the 5 minor techniques.

He needed to learn the technique that formed the pill. This was the most important one right now to him.

The other thing he needed to learn was the technique to create the vortex that pulled in the Qi.

Alex could forget about the vortex for now as Elemental Guidance did the same thing it did, just worse. However, he really did need to learn the technique to form the pill.

It was not just forming the pill either. It was forming the pill with almost no gap in between the individual specks when they stuck together and had perfect symmetry in between them.

After checking the two pills that formed from the pills, he had learned that despite having a lot of gaps, having perfect symmetry made the pills devour as much energy as they could.

As he thought about it, his thoughts went towards the moment when he failed to even use the pill splitting Qi manually. That was what he had sat down to learn in the first place.

As he thought about it, he frowned a little. He quickly compared the Qi that was released from his hands when he let his body do the work, compared to when he manually cycled the Qi.

They were obviously the same. So what was different?

As Alex took another bite of the mango, he was reminded of the explosion he suffered to get this fruit.

The explosion was bad, but he tried to shake the thought away for now. As he did, he was reminded of his own understanding of explosion, and how with a single thought, he could make a tongue of fire explode.

A single thought.

A thought.

Alex immediately stopped cultivating as he activated the fire Formation again and heated his cauldron. Then, he proceeded to turn the ingredients into powder.

He had done this part so many times, that he thought he could do it with a complete lack of vision inside the cauldron.

He wasn't going to be stupid right now.

Once all the ingredients were powdered, with a thought, he pulled out the Qi from his naval area.

As the Qi passed through his meridians, with him consciously moving them, he thought about why he was doing it in the first place.

He thought of splitting the Qi, forming the pill, and finally collecting the energy in the cauldron down to the pills.

As his Qi escaped his hands, exactly what he had thought of happened. The powders were split into two portions, each portion formed into balls, and a vortex appeared to collect the energy.

He successfully made the two pills.

Then, he the pills another 2 times. The first time, he moved the Qi around his body through the same route, however, with only intended to form the pill, and not split or collect energy.

He failed.

Then, he tried it a second time, this time moving the Qi in a different route, one he created himself, intending to only form the pill once again.

He failed this time as well.

Alex then stopped making pills altogether and went outside the cave. He thought he was learning something, so he decided to try what he was thinking with the other techniques he knew of.

The Iron Fist Punch technique was the first one he tried with. He moved the Qi through his body, which his body did on its own as it had become muscle memory at this point.

When it reached his hands, he let it out in the shape of a first. The technique struck down a tree in the distance.

Alex took a deep breath and moved the Qi once more. This time, only moving it around and not focusing on the attack itself. When the Qi came out of his body, it dissipated as if nothing.

Next, he tried a different route but wanted to throw a fist. The energy he released did take the shape of a fist, but it dissipated not long after.

Alex tried the same thing with several of his other techniques, and finally realized something.

"You need both the proper path for the Qi and the proper intent of the action to use a technique," he said to himself and went back into the cave, not thinking about it any longer.

Out in the distance, Shen Jing looked towards Alex's location with a horrified look on his face. The worldly laws had stirred for a moment, catching his attention, before calming down again.

'That kid,' he thought with nothing but shock on his face. 'He was so close to learning another Dao.'

Chapter 630 True Master

After realizing that there was no way for him to extrapolate just one aspect of a technique without having any knowledge of how techniques functioned in the first place, Alex removed any thoughts of creating the pill-forming technique while he was here.

Alex also thus gave up on trying to create the perfect pill. Until he had the pill forming technique ready, he would have to give up on increasing his pill-making ability.

That wasn't to say he had made no improvements at all. Just being able to make pills with more than 60% harmony was already good enough for the little training he had done.

Also, it was only hard to learn about structure and composition the first few times. Once he got a hang of it, he could improve the pill without even thinking about it.

Alex couldn't wait for that time when he could simply look at an ingredient and tell what he needed to do to get the best variation of the recipe.

For now, however, he had to simply grind at it. A few more months passed with less time focused on cultivation and more focused on simply alchemy.

As such, he didn't advance on his cultivation base and was stuck at the 9th True Disciple realm… until today.

The final of Alex's spirit stones stopped working and now he was left with 20 dull stones with no Qi in it. He sighed.

'Well, there was no point in bringing a barrier formation with me,' he thought. Without spirit stones, the formation would be useless.

Or so Alex thought until he put his Qi into the formation just to check and a ball of fire lit up suddenly.

He then used his Qi again, and a barrier appeared around him with the 2nd formation. They, however, disappeared the moment he let go of his Qi.

Alex looked surprised. 'Did they always work like that?' he thought. That… should not have been possible, or so he thought.

If simple Qi could activate a formation then it would be news in the Crimson Empire. And no, not a single bit of information about formations he had learned in there had ever mentioned formations working on their own.

'That's weird,' he thought but was just happy that he could use them if he ever needed them.

Then, he put everything he owned into his storage ring, which had about 10-meter squares of space by now. It was enough to store his cauldron, pills, ingredients, and entire corpses of at least 2 beasts.

Alex smiled and closed his eyes. With a thought, the Qi in his body started moving, following a familiar path they took every single day.

After a circulation or two, Alex felt a loud drum-like sound in his head like an exaggerated heartbeat.

With that, he broke through to the True Master realm.

'How long has it been since I broke through to the True realm? How long did it take me to go up a single minor realm?' he thought to himself, but it was impossible to tell.

He had first broken through to the True realm in the Beasts' realm which he stayed in for a month or so due to not having any cultivation method to breakthrough.

After that, it had taken him a few weeks before reaching 3rd realm. Then, he reached the 4th realm after coming to this mountain. In fact, he had broken through from the 4th True Disciple realm to the 1st True Master realm all right in this dark cave.

Day and night were the same to Alex who's vision was just a haze of gold and a sense that could see no light or shade.

Still, based on the somewhat reliable perception of time he had in his body, he could tell that he had spent nearly least three-fourths of a year in this place.

Most of the time for the last few months, he had spent on nothing but Alchemy, putting less focus on his martial training.

'This cave has given me safety and a place to stay, but it has also made me have no not fight at all,' he thought.

'It's time I leave this place. I cannot grow if I don't face danger,' he thought and walked out of the cave.

Once he was out, he took out his sword from his ring and walked in a certain direction.

While he was ready to leave this place, there was still one more place he needed to visit.

* * * * *

The sound of two beasts fighting rang through the air, or so it sounded. When looked at, it was clearly a young body fighting the monkey.

The BlueFlame monkey swiped its tail at Alex from far away, sending a spinning wheel of fire flying towards him.

Alex dodged the flying wheel of fire, not daring to fight it directly. He couldn't be sure if the explosive ability of this monkey was something it learned to like him from the many mangoes it might have eaten, or it was just that, an ability it inherited from its bloodline.

Alex hoped it was the latter, but he had to fight assuming it was the former. If he assumed that any fire anywhere would explode at any second, it made him that more alert.

Alex sent a flying water slash, that should do nothing to the monkey, but he hoped it would distract it. It did not.

The monkey came crashing down on Alex, but at the last second, rotated while in midair and punched to its right side.

An invisible Alex showed up with his sword striking the monkey. The Alex that was on the ground vanished into motes of light, revealing that it was a fake.

'Dammit! This monkey has seen all of my techniques already,' Alex thought. Then, the monkey swiped its tail again, the tail releasing a small blue ball of fire that flew towards Alex.

Every single cell in Alex's body screamed at him to dodge. Alex trusted his instincts with all of his heart.

As the small ball of fire unfolded, Alex vanished. The space where he had been shaking with the strength of many bombs. Alex was meant to have appeared behind a tree, but somehow he appeared a little left to it.

He took part of the explosion's hit, but it was far enough that it didn't hurt him. He quickly moved to the side, and let the uprooted tree beside him fall to the ground.

Alex checked at the monkey and saw that it was breathing a little heavily.

'Of course,' Alex thought. 'Such a strong technique should have taken a lot out of it.'

He decided to go force a bit more of it out of the monkey. Alex dashed from behind the fallen tree, surprising the monkey who didn't expect Alex at all.

The previous times it had fought him, he would always leave after taking the explosion to the chest. But now, he had come to fight back.

The monkey panicked a little. Blue flames erupted from its body, like armor made up of pure fire.

Alex struck its body with his sword, but he could barely force it in at all. He sent out Heaven's Impact, but as expected, the fiery body soaked up the mental attack, leaving not much for the monkey to handle.

Alex frowned. If Heaven's impact didn't go through, then his Spiritual sword wouldn't either.

He needed to make an opening to have his spiritual sense enter the monkey's body. That was the only way for him to win.

Alex's cultivation base flared and he put all of it into his movement technique. Alex then burst into speed that the monkey hadn't seen before.

A hit to the back. A slice to the neck. A cut to the tail. A Heaven's impact on the mind.

Alex slipped and slid through the monkey's surroundings, attacking it from various angles, which the monkey couldn't see.

From time to time, he would slow down and let the monkey 'catch his off-guard', in which case it would throw out an explosive fireball, that Alex could dodge with his teleportation skill.

Alex appeared to the side of the tree, or high in the air behind it. Sometimes, he would even appear in front of it.

Sometimes, the range wouldn't work as well as it should. Alex frowned at the teleportation technique that refused to work properly, but he couldn't worry about it now.

The monkey was starting to heave loudly, with nearly all of its Qi disappearing with the explosive balls of fire.

The armor on its body dimmed a lot. Alex jumped back at the monkey and started cutting it again, but no matter how hard he tried, his blades couldn't penetrate at all.

He wasn't breaking through the armor to cut its body. He needed a better sword intent. He needed Sword Qi.

It wouldn't come to him right now.

A Heaven's Impact flew at the tired monkey, and a hole opened in its armor.

Alex's eyes shined. He put his sword back into his ring and an illusory, misty white sword which only he could see appeared on his hand.

He rushed at the monkey, sending 3 more Heaven's impacts at it. The three impacts opened a big enough hole in the monkey's armor, and Alex put his sword through its back.

He then slid it down and cut it through the tail.

The monkey felt nothing happening aside from its vision going in and out for a few moments. Then, it turned around to see Alex standing behind it.

It moved its tail to send out a ball of fire that started unfolding in front of Alex, but Alex showed no fear towards that.

He simply grabbed the fire with his empty hand and snuffed it out.

Chapter 631 Advancements in Sword

The Spiritual Sword, from Alex's observation, did just one thing. It disrupted the flow of Qi through one's meridians.

Alex couldn't tell if it slowed down the movement of Qi or made the meridians squeeze together so that not much Qi to move through it, but it always made what came out in the end vastly weaker than what the opponent was capable of.

This only lasted for a few seconds or so before they usually got back their ability to fight, but that was enough to take care of most enemies.

Alex took out his sword and send a barrage of attacks at the monkey who couldn't put up any defense. Despite the fiery armor, it was still hard to cut the monkey with his strength.

But slowly as more and more Qi was lost, it became easier to cut. The monkey, despite getting back its strength, couldn't produce any of the explosives balls of fire anymore.

A few minutes later, it finally died.

Alex breathed in and out, trying to get rid of the fatigue. He had to use his entire strength to kill a monkey that could barely protect itself, and it still took so long.

He felt a little angry at himself even. He quickly ignored the thought and pulled out some spirit stones.

The spirit stones were all dull and without energy, and were nothing more than simple translucent rocks.

Alex used his golden claws to carve a chunk out of the spirit stones and used that to store the blood of the BlueFlame monkey for now.

Since he had no vials, he had to make do with what he could. Then, he cut the monkey into many pieces, doing a not so good a job in it, and took whatever he could.

Once he took all of the mangoes, he looked at the surroundings and all the destroyed trees.

'There were some ingredients there. Well, it's all destroyed now,' he thought.

Alex put everything into his storage ring aside from his sword. His sword he stared at for a minute.

From being a young man who had never even seen a sword, to being someone who could beat a True Lord 6th realm beast, he had obviously come a long way.

In his journey, he had gone from learning how to use his sword to learning how to use his intent.

However, the journey wasn't over yet. No, it was only beginning. For the next phase of his journey, he would have to advance his sword skill to the point where he could use Sword Qi.

For that, he would have to live and die by the sword.

* * * * * * *

A long time passed. As for how long, Alex wasn't sure. A week would sometimes feel like 2 days. A day would sometime feel like 2 weeks.

A fight would end as soon as it started, or it would drag on forever to make him feel completely unable to grasp the passing of time.

Not to mention, cultivation alone would make him lose his sense of time, almost all the time.

During these times, he had done nothing but fight with his sword. He would use his sword to solve any and every problem.

If a fight was easy, he would beat it with his sword. If it was hard, he would run away.

Even when there were times he could easily defeat a beast were he to simply use his Explosion skills or his mental attacks, he still chose to use his sword and make it hard for himself.

If he couldn't beat it, he would then just run away and come back later.

If he couldn't run away, he let the world devour himself and send him somewhere else.

He had to use this technique more than once, and more than once he had ended up in more trouble than not.

One time, he had even entered the lair of a Saint realm snake. Alex was sure he would die at that time, but fortunately, the snake didn't attack him.

It only told him to leave and never go back there again.

'Shen Jing must have given them instruction,' he had thought.

At first, he had been surprised that Shen Jing's words even held value to these beasts given that they were both in the Saint Realm. However, when he realized that the Saint realm, just like the True realm and Self-Tempering realm, must have multiple minor realms as well, he understood why they would do that.

After all, even the Saint realm Emperor had been scared of the Saint realm beasts from the Beasts' realm. So, he didn't think about them for long.

It wasn't the Saint beast he had to worry about, then. It was the True King and True Emperor realm beast. Fortunately, they were just as rare to come by as well.

In the past however many months he had been here, he had seen about 2 dozen or so True King beasts, most of which didn't bother him, and he didn't bother them either.

As for True Emperor beasts, he could count them in his one remaining hand.

During this time, his strength had also grown by a large amount. Since he was only focused on fighting and cultivating, his cultivation had grown to True Master 5th realm.

However, that wasn't what had made Alex happy. The thing that got him happier was his advancement with the sword.

He hadn't yet reached Sword Qi, as that was still elusive to him, but he could feel himself getting closer and closer.

From time to time, while fighting, he could see a sword-shaped Qi or two split off from his white Sword Intent outline. From what Alex remembered, there had to be many more such sword-shaped Qi to be around him for it to be considered having learned Sword Qi.

Also, Du Yuhan had said something about Sword Qi having the personality of the user. Du Yuhan wanted to cut down everything in front of him with his sword, and that had manifested a sword Qi that gave him unimaginable cutting power.

'What is my own personality then?' Alex wondered. He couldn't be sure. If he had to before, he would call himself kind and gentle.

Could that be used to explain the person he had become now? Obviously not. The amount of blood on his hand was not something someone kind and gentle would have.

He was... different. He had changed.

Alex sighed. 'There's no point in thinking about it now, is there?' he thought. He would soon learn it on his own.

Alex opened his eyes on top of a tree crown. He looked around to see the wilted leaves and slightly darkened wood beneath him.

He couldn't help but sigh. Last few months, his body had gotten worse and worse, to the point where his Yang energy couldn't be contained any longer with the Yin technique.

Unless he decided to sit down and cultivate the Yin technique for days on end, there was no way to control his yang body now.

It was also troublesome with how helpful his Yang body was. Most of the beasts below the True Master realm scurried away whenever he came close to them.

True Lord beasts and above were the only ones who seemed to not be afraid of him now. That was helpful. True Master beasts were no match for him after all.

At True Master 5th realm, his attacks dealt about the same damage as his body, if not higher.

As for his sword, it was close to dealing damage about the same as his body too. Very soon, his body would start falling behind.

'Sigh, if only I knew of a way to increase my body's strength too,' he thought.

His master hadn't lied at all when he had told him that most body cultivators abandoned their path after a certain point because cultivating the body became too hard and resource-intensive.

Alex wished he knew what resources could even do such a thing.

As he walked along the side of the mountain, no beasts came up to him thanks to his yang aura.

When he reached the top, the wind blew at him, bringing a sour and pungent smell along with it.

'What is that smell?' he wondered. He couldn't see anything ahead with his spiritual sense that would produce such a smell, so he decided to go ahead and check it out himself.

Just as he was about to walk ahead, a voice drifted to his mind and said, "STOP!"

Chapter 632 Poison

Alex didn't move a step forward when he heard Shen Jing's voice in his head. A moment later, he felt a gust of wind.

Alex turned around, simply out of instinct, to see if Shen Jing had come. However, no one was there.

"That's not the direction you want to go towards," Shen Jing said from right next to him, but Alex couldn't see him at all.

He strained his senses as far as he could to find him, however, the next set of words came from so near him that he felt the breath on his ears.

"I'm right here."

Alex jumped a little, looking in the direction where the sound came from but saw no human standing there. It wasn't until Shen Jing got rid of some sort of technique that Alex finally saw him.

'What was that?' he wondered.

Alex checked his connection with Pearl and felt him someplace far away. "Where's Pearl?" he asked.

"Cultivating someplace else," Shen Jing said.

"Is he safe?" Alex asked as a sense of panic ran through him.

"With me around, there's nothing on this continent that can threaten him. You need not worry about his survival at the moment. You should worry about yours," Shen Jing said.

Alex sent his senses to the slopes of the mountain, wondering if there was some sort of beast down there.

"It's poison," Shen Jing replied, letting Alex know.

"Poison?" Alex asked with surprise, but he couldn't sense it yet. Even after his spiritual sense had grown to about 150 meters in radius, he couldn't see any signs of poison.

"Can you not smell it?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex took a deep breath and a familiar smell of sour and pungent air filled his senses.

"Ah, this was the poison's smell drifting to me, huh?" Alex asked.

"Poisons, Venoms, and Toxins of every kind," Shen Jing let him know.

"So many?" Alex couldn't help but let out a surprise in his voice. Then, a thought came to him.

"Am I… close to the Poison Swamps of the Dreaded Mountain range?" he asked.

"Oh, you know about this place huh?" Shen Jing asked. "Yes, you are correct. It is exactly the site you are thinking of. Down this mountain, there is nothing but plants and animals that will kill you with a single touch."

"Although your physical body might be able to protect you a bit, without antidotes, I suggest you do not go back there," Shen Jing said.

Alex thought to himself. 'Will the poison really hurt me?' he thought. His body was after all evolved from the version that could already destroy most poison.

He had also seen poisons being destroyed by his body during the fights in the last year or so.

Still, there had also been a time when his body hadn't been able to protect himself from the poison.

'That saint realm poison still nearly killed my previous body,' he thought. He couldn't be sure if his current body could save him or not, but his master surely couldn't protect herself.

And she had a body at the same level as his right now.

Alex didn't know what to do.

"You seem to be lost in some thoughts," Shen Jing said, looking at his lost look.

Alex was startled back to reality and bowed a little. "My apologies. I was just thinking about something."

"About what?" Shen Jing asked. "Ask me, and maybe I can help you."

Alex frowned and thought for a moment. 'Should I tell him?' he wondered. He wanted to keep it a secret, but he couldn't be sure if that was the right path to take here.

Shen Jing was an incredible human, with knowledge and experience that far surpassed him. Keeping information to oneself when he could be using it to advance himself really did feel like the wrong approach here.

So, he took a deep breath and told him… some of the information. "Brother Shen Jing," he called him, feeling a little weird calling a Saint realm human his brother.

"It's like this. My body can destroy most poison I come across, but I'm still unsure of the limit of my body. So, I thought it might be a good idea for me to go into that swamp and test it out myself," Alex said.

Shen Jing looked at him with a curious look. "I knew you could gather Qi through beast cores, but I never knew you could survive poison too. Do you have some sort of a rare, heaven-defying bloodline or what?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex flinched. He did have one, but he wasn't born with it, and neither could he use it at all. The only time he did use it was to improve his Metal spiritual root, so… that likely didn't count.

"I'm joking, I'm joking," Shen Jing said. "I don't care if you were the son of God himself. Actually yes, I would care but I wouldn't be jealous or envy you. Actually no, I would be jealous and envy you, but I would never hurt you for it."

Alex didn't know how to respond to that.

"Anyway, are you sure your body can handle poisons?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes," Alex nodded.

"Have you never been poisoned with something that your body couldn't handle?" Shen Jing asked as if he knew things he shouldn't have.

"I have," Alex said. "But it was a Saint rank poison."

Shen JIng's eyes turned suspicious. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," Alex said. "It came down in the meteor shower some thousand years ago."

Shen Jing's face narrowed with a confused look. "What meteor shower?" he asked.

Alex didn't know what to say. This should have been well known even throughout the Luminance empire. Even the Crimson Empire had some documented events of it happening, but since it was back when the empire didn't exist and everything was the Shattered Kingdoms, most information was lost.

So, Alex went ahead and swiftly explained everything he had learned about the shower until now.

Shen Jing nodded his head in surprise as if this was the first time he was hearing all of this. 'Was he not supposed to have been lived his entire life here?' Alex thought.

"How old are you?" Alex blurted out, before even thinking about it.

"Very old," Shen Jing said, not giving an accurate answer as he thought about the meteor shower.

"How did you not know about this until now then?" Alex asked.

"I only just recently returned back to the continent, so it's obvious I missed it right?" Shen Jing said.

"But you said you've lived here your whole life," Alex said, finding the contradiction in his words.

"Ah, but you see, someone like me can live for a long time. So for me, a thousand years is nothing much," he said.

Alex's face frowned. "Are you an immortal then?" he asked, knowing that was impossible since immortals needed to remain hidden lest the Heavenly Judgment tears them apart.

"What makes you say that?" Shen Jing asked with a curious face.

"Because a Saint realm can only live up to 2000 years at best," Alex said.

"Those saint realm artists are weak. Most saint realms I know can live 10,000 years. I've even met some folks who've been alive for 20,000 years, but those people mostly depend on elixirs and spirit foods, not to mention tons and tons of pills," Shen Jing said.

"Oh," Alex said, fully surprised. He hadn't known that. Was the information in those books incomplete? Maybe the lack of Saint Qi in the air had made the saint realms of this continent weak.

"I have a question of my own actually," Shen Jing said and asked, "how do you know the poison that nearly killed you was saint rank?"

"Because… " Alex searched his brain for a proper answer, but aside from 'my master told me,' and 'what else could it be?', he found no other answer.

His eyes widened. 'Was I wrong about the poison then?' he thought. 'Was the poison I was struck with not saint rank?'.

"You see the problem right? How can you mere mortals judge something that fell from the heavens if it did not have a label to it?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex was about to say something, but Shen Jing put up his hands to stop it.

"Actually, there is a better method to find out," he said. Shen Jing became a blur in Alex's senses and he moved out of the range of his vision in a fraction of a second and reappeared back in it a second later.

This time, he wasn't alone. Next to him was a confused-looking snake with 3 heads instead of one, each a different shade of purple.

It hissed and tried to attack Alex, but a golden barrier blocked it. Only then did the beast calm down and started looking around in caution.

"Are you going to act properly? Or should I kill you?" Shen Jing said with a smiling face, but the pressure he created made the poor snake nearly frighten to death.

The snake kept hissing and quickly nodded.

"Do you have an antidote for your poison?" Shen Jing asked the snake.

The snake looked confused, but it nodded.

Shen Jing's face widened into a glorious smile. "Good!" he said. "I want you to go poison that young man."

The snake still looked confused, but it nodded. It looked like it understood words, but couldn't speak properly.

'He's worse than Pea—'

As Alex was thinking, the golden barrier blocking off the snake was removed, and suddenly, in came a terrifying aura that nearly got Alex down to his knees.

This snake was a Saint beast.

Chapter 633 Poison Testing

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!" Alex said, seeing the snake slide, and not slide at the same time towards him.

The Saint realm aura was making Alex very scared. There was no pressure, but it was the incoming poison that scared Alex.

"It's fine, little Brother. He has an antidote," Shen Jing said, and the snake nodded.

Alex gulped down and looked at the snake. It was only now that he was properly taking a look at the snake.

The snake had dark blue scales all over its body until its heads split into three two-thirds of the way into its body.

Each head had about a meter-long neck before the head arrived. It looked like despite having 3 heads, the snake was a single thinking organism.

Spiritual senses escaped from the snake, scanning Alex and a voice drifted into his mind.

"Choose one head," it said.

"What?" Alex asked. He looked at the snake with a bit of confusion.

"My three heads have different poisons. Choose one," the snake said.

'Is this a game?' Alex thought with shock. Still, he didn't dare defy the snake and slowly moved his hand and said, "The middle one."

The snake hissed. "Bad choice."

It moved in a blur, enough to catch Alex off guard and the middle head sprayed purple fog directly at his face.

Alex unconsciously took in a breath, and suddenly his body froze up. Then, he fell to the ground with his entire body writhing in pain.

"AAAARRRGHHHH!!!" He shouted so loud that Shen Jing had to create a barrier with his Qi to keep in the sound.

It burned. Not his body, not his mind, but his meridians. All the intricate channels in his body swelled as poison dared to break them.

His body tried to get rid of the poison, but the poison was in his meridians. Aside from having some influence, the body couldn't really do anything for the poison. Still, it devoured his Qi, trying to heal what was hurt, rather than get rid of the poison.

His body would run out of Qi before all of it could be healed. Even though his reserves were of massive amounts, this was a saint beast's poison. His body couldn't heal faster than the poison could damage it.

The snake hissed at Shen Jing, saying something and after a minute of listening to the scream, he finally spoke.

"Yes, go cure him," he said.

"NO!" Alex shouted. "I can do it."

Shen Jing was surprised. He didn't think Alex had enough wits at the moment to see what was happening on the outside.

"You will destroy your meridians if you become stubborn here, you know," Shen Jing said.

"I know!" Alex shouted. "But I can get rid of it."

He pushed himself up with a single hand and got into a cultivating position. He took a deep breath, and with a thought, his Qi started moving through his meridians.

The Five Yang Divine Path taught him how to move his Qi through his meridians and he followed it.

As the Yang Qi moved through his meridians, it destroyed the poison on its path, leaving just a slightly swollen meridian along the way.

As it passed through more and more of his meridian, the poison was more and more destroyed.

In the next two minutes, as Alex cultivated, all of the poison in his body was completely destroyed.

Alex opened his eyes and heaved a sigh. For some reason, it felt like his Qi had increased a bit as well.

The snake's eyes were wide open in shock, but it wasn't limited to the snake alone. Even Shen Jing was a little shocked.

He went close to Alex and checked. "If I hadn't seen it for myself, I would have likely never believed it," he said with awe.

'Just how many secrets does this young man have?' Shen Jing thought.

"I'm surprised myself," Alex said. The snake hissed something at him in shock, not even remembering to use spiritual sense to talk.

"That was its strongest poison designed to disrupt the opponent's meridians, it says," Shen Jing somehow translated.

"Forgive me senior, but can you use your other poisons on me too?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing raised an eyebrow in surprise and turned around to nod at the snake.

The snake slid up to Alex and bit him on his leg. Intense pain flared in Alex's body as his blood vessels swelled and became purple in response to the poison.

Alex immediately started using his Five Yang Divine Path and as if it never existed, the poison vanished.

It didn't even take two seconds. The snake was beyond surprised at this point, and Alex too was fairly surprised.

'So cultivating helps quite a lot while removing poison, huh?' he thought. He had never cultivated while he was poisoned, but seeing that it could remove Saint rank poison too, he would make sure to do so from now on.

"The last one, senior," Alex said.

The snake said something to Shen Jing and Shen Jing fell into thought. "The last one is a mental poison. Are you—"

"Please do it," Alex said, getting ready.

The snake had no choice, so it used the technique it had only learned after growing the third head to its left.

A mental attack.

Spiritual energy that was purple in Alex's senses gathered in front of the snake and shot at Alex at a speed that he couldn't even register.

When it entered his mind, he felt another intense pain from his spiritual sea. With a thought, he appeared inside his spiritual sea to see a massive gathering of purple clouds that were starting to corrupt some of the water in the sea.

"Oi, kid! What is happening? You're not dying, right? If you're dying, please send me out first. I don't want to die with you."

The artifact spirit, Godslayer spoke hurriedly from the side, but Alex ignored him.

Alex then flew to the top of the mountain and put both of his hands to the side. With a thought, a massive fog of yellow light emerged from his hands and started spreading towards the purple fog.

It looked like there would be a fight between the two patches of fog for a moment, but a moment later the yellow fog started devouring the entire purple fog.

When all the poison disappeared, Alex brought back his fog into him, leaving a pristine but stormy sky with threads of silver light flying through the air.

He never really could consume those silver threads with anything but his hands themselves.

Once all the poison was gone, Alex ignored the thankful cries of the Godslayer and teleported out.

When he came outside, Shen Jing looked in awe and so did the snake.

Alex got up from his position and bowed toward the snake. "Thank you for letting me test the limits of my body with your poison," He said.

The snake hissed to say something and only later realized that the human couldn't understand it. Then, it repeated the same words again in his mind.

"It's fine."

The snake was too shaken by what had happened to say anything else.

"I am surprised that you managed to survive the Three-headed Hydra's poison too. I never thought it would be possible, but you really did it," Shen Jing said.

'Three-headed Hydra?' Alex thought with surprise and he spoke up.

"Senior, I have a request."

Chapter 634 Coincident?

The snake hissed after hearing Alex. "What's your request?" it asked directly into his mind.

"I need the poison of a Two-headed Hydra for my left arm's recovery. Can you perhaps help me with that?" he asked.

"I can," the snake hissed.

"Alright, that settles it then," Shen Jing. "You can go and happily roam the poison valley where everyone else would die with a single breath."

Alex looked at him with a weird face. "That's very morbid of you," he said.

"Haha, I'm kidding. Most people that come here will know to bring a poison repelling artifact that will repel poison in the air. They will also come with tons and tons of antidotes. So it's unlikely anyone would actually die."

"Unless they end up beating beasts like him," Shen Jing said while pointing to the hydra who hissed.

"I see," Alex said. He didn't know such artifacts existed, but now that he thought of it, he didn't know what sort of artifacts existed exactly.

He was used to seeing weapons, armors, necklaces, and such only, but after coming to the Luminance empire, he had seen a few weird artifacts like the lantern that hurt him mentally.

"You guys should go now," Shen Jing said. "I won't waste any more of your time."

"Brother Shen, wait," Alex said before Shen Jing could leave.

"What is it?" Shen Jing asked.

"Can I get empty vials and wooden boxes from my storage bag? I need them to keep the valuable ingredients from losing energy," Alex said.

"Hmm… Okay," Shen Jing said and brought out 5 of his storage bag at once from somewhere. Then, he looked through them all, and within moments he found all of the empty containers.

It looked like his face lingered for a split second at something, but it quickly changed, making Alex wonder if he was even seeing it right.

At the same time, he also gave Alex a few pairs of clothes to change. The hide of some furred beast he was wearing at the moment could barely be called clothes right now.

Once Alex took the items, he bowed toward Shen Jing and turned to walk away with the Hydra.

Shen Jing turned around to leave, but just as he was about to, he remembered something and his voice drifted towards Alex.

"In less than a year, a demon realm is going to open. Be prepared as I will come to take you there," Shen Jing said and disappeared.

At the same time, the snake got instructed to not help Alex beyond what he had requested.

The snake nodded and continued slithering.

Alex was confused now. "Demons? There are demons here?" he asked out loud, but Shen Jing was nowhere to be seen.

In Alex's mind, demons were horrific beings that were meant to scare children to send them to sleep. 'Certainly, he means something else by demons, right?' Alex thought.

The sour and pungent smell drifted into Alex's nose which he breathed again, but aside from the smell, there was nothing bad about the poison in the air at all.

He actually wondered if his body was cleansing the poison while he was consuming it. 'That must be the case,' Alex thought.

The saint realm snake could probably go back to its habitat immediately if it wanted to, but for some reason, it chose to slowly walk along with Alex.

Alex's senses were still spread out and he could see several plants and animals all roaming throughout the field.

Just as he was looking around, he couldn't believe he found something so easily.

"A Two-colored Poison Lily!" Alex shouted and immediately ran towards it, but as soon as he stepped forward, his feet sank to the ground and he nearly stumbled upfront.

He caught himself while in the process of falling and got back up, this time hovering a few inches above the ground.

'What the hell?' he thought to himself. He slowly let his Qi disappear and drifted back down, sinking both his feet into the wetland down below.

"Oh right," He said after finally realizing what was going on. "It's a swampland. I forgot."

Now that he sent his senses beneath what he thought was the land, he could see it clearly went a bit lower before there was any hard surface.

The poison swamp it seemed was aptly named.

Alex slowly flew towards the Poison Lily and felt a nauseating smell come from just being close to it. Alex didn't know if it was just the flower or the entire swamp, but he could feel that the poison in the air here was more than what his body could handle for the moment.

He was about to use his cultivation technique to make it easier on himself, but then he remembered something about himself that had been keeping away normal beasts.

He wondered if it worked the same for poison in the air too, and decided to give it a go.

With a thought, yang energy spread out of his body, creating a small area around him where poison in the air ignited to nothingness.

'Oh, it worked,' Alex thought with a surprise. His nausea immediately cleared and before even having to cultivate, he was perfectly fine.

Then, he sensed something moving in the water.

Alex immediately reached into his ring and brought out his sword. Despite being in the swamp, he was going to fight with his sword, and sword alone.

When he finally saw the beast waiting to attack should he move forward, he frowned. This… was just too coincidental, wasn't it?

In front of Alex was a dark blue beast with 2 purple heads of different shades, hissing at him with both of the heads.

No matter how Alex looked at it, it was a Two-Headed Hydra. Did he fight it now? Or ask the Saint beast next to him for help?

The Hydra was in the True Lord 4th realm, so Alex could easily win it, but he didn't want to offend the senior next to him by attacking a beast of his kind.

"Is this… your relative, senior?" Alex asked.

The snake looked offended at that question actually. It hissed back at Alex, and a question carried by the snake's spiritual sense entered his mind.

"Is every human in this world your relative?" it asked.

"No," Alex said and turned around towards the snake. "Then, please don't mind if I fight a little here."

"The head that is more red than blue," the snake's voice drifted into Alex's mind.

"Sorry?" he asked. 'Head that is more red than blue?' Alex wondered. He could see that the Saint realm Hydra was referring to the head on the left, but Alex didn't understand why.

Was that perhaps a weak spot in the snake? Or was the second head where the monster core lie?

"You said you wanted our poison right?" the Snake asked. "The head that is bluer has poison fog that harms the meridians. You cannot carry that back."

"Then, it is very easily the 2nd head with our fangs," the saint beast said.

"I see," Alex said, finally understanding what the snake was trying to tell him. He hadn't even thought that the two heads would be a thing of confusion for him.

He usually left such concerns for after the fight was done and his life was safe.

Once Alex got the information he needed, he moved forward. As if waiting for this, the Two-Headed Hydra lunged forward at Alex.

It hadn't noticed the tiny Three-Headed hydra slithering in the swamp at all and thus thought of only Alex as the enemy.

No. From the looks of it, it thought of Alex as food.

'Let's see which one gets eaten first,' Alex thought as a bright white outline appeared around his sword.

'Who am I?' he asked himself before proceeding to fight. Ever since he thought of the sword Qi following his personality, he had been asking that question himself.

Who was he? What was he doing? Such questions drifted in his mind for a split second, and when he realized he still didn't know, he ignored the two flickers of white light that jumped out from his sword and launched forward.

He met the snake in mid-air and hit it on its right head with a blow that rang its brain as if it had just hit a mountain.

Had Alex put in his Qi for this attack, the snake would have likely died with just this one attack.

His Sword Intent surely had improved. And it wanted to improve it even further.

Alex jumped back, following the snake that was sent flying away. The yang energy from his body stopped all Qi from entering his body.

The snake caught itself from going any further and looked back at Alex who looked more like a beast here than it did.

A layer of purple liquid seeped out of the snake's body, solidifying to become armor of some sort.

Alex's sword hit it again, but the snake managed to hold itself with just one of its heads.

With its other head, it sprayed gaseous poison onto Alex's face. Without even Alex breathing it in, the poison entered his body, immediately starting to attack his meridians.

Alex took a step back and immediately circulated his Five Yang Divine Path technique and within moments, the poison vanished from his system.

It was so fast that both of the snakes around him looked at him like they were looking at their natural enemy.

Once the poison was gone, Alex jumped back to his fight.

Chapter 635 Poison Swamp

Since the snake was no problem to Alex, after a few minutes of battle, he easily subdued it. Killing it would've taken longer, but in front of the Three-headed Hydra, he didn't want to do so.

Alex grabbed the snake's left head and forced its fangs out, making it pour poison into an empty glass vial.

When the purple, viscous poison barely slid down the vial, making Alex wonder if it was perhaps more solid than liquid.

Alex put the Two-Headed Hydra back on the ground and plucked the Two-Colored Poison Lily flower as well. He then kept both of them in his ring and took out another empty vial before turning around.

"Senior, you've helped me so much, but I would like to request you one more thing," he said.

The snake looked at Alex then at the vial and understood. "You want my poison too?" the snake asked.

"Just a little, if it is not much trouble," Alex said.

"It isn't," the snake said and slid forward to Alex, immediately pouring poison into his vial.

"My task of looking after you ends here. I will take my leave now," the snake said and moved away with such a speed that Alex could barely tell the direction it moved in.

He couldn't even find the time to say his thanks to the snake.

Alex looked back at the even more viscous poison in the vial and couldn't help but be amazed that his body was able to clear such a terrifying poison in just 2 seconds.

That just gave him more proof that the poison he had been struck with back in the Forbidden Fields, the same poison that killed his master had actually been an Immortal grade or higher poison.

Alex wondered if he could have cured the poison in his body back then if he had sat down and cultivated. Even if it did not fully cure, it should have been able to slow down the poison's advance.

Then, his face fell as he realized that his master could've likely survived too had she cultivated during that time.

'But there was no Qi. We were suppressed,' he thought. He couldn't help but feel horrible at the thought that his master would have likely survived the battle with that old man had she only been able to cultivate after being poisoned.

The wounds wouldn't have stopped her at all since she had a lot of pills. It was all because they were suppressed.

Alex's face turned gloomy and his eyes welled up. But he quickly wiped it away and shook his head with a sigh.

"What's done is done. I can only live my life and keep moving forward like my master wanted me to," he thought and walked away from that location.

The swampland, for now, was a valley where every single plant and animal was either poisonous, venomous, or simply toxic.

Everything else that lived here could either survive toxicity or was simply too strong to care about poisons.

Alex kept walking... or floating. He stepped on the water, but his feet never sunk below it.

His yang aura was still flared out to the fullest and he was starting to wonder if that was a good idea or not.

It was helping him keep away the poison in the air, but it was also forcing him to make such yang being flared normality.

He knew he would suffer from this if he kept it for a long time. He was already suffering its effect as his Flickering Shadow technique was starting to perform worse and worse now.

Every time he teleported, he would appear close to where he wanted to, but not exactly where he chose to.

It had taken Alex not long to realize the problem. His body had a Yang constitution, with his Qi having heavy Yang properties. When he tried to create Yin with his body, it was hampered by his yang, and not all of it was made to the technique.

So, when he teleported, he fell short each time.

That was one problem his body was causing, but there were also others. Another problem he suffered was when he made pills. Every time he sat down to make pills, he would have to cultivate his yin cultivation technique for a long time to get rid of as much Yang as he could before starting.

Otherwise, he had a hard time even making pills most of the time if he didn't do that.

'I need to find some yin treasures and consume them. That should be able to help me balance it a bit more,' Alex thought.

With many of the poisons having yin attributes, he was sure he wouldn't have a hard time finding such treasures.

So, Alex went around the swamp, freely as there was nothing that could hurt him or surprise him, and roamed the land.

Every day, he found new plants or beasts that he recognized to be alchemy ingredients and took them. He fought monsters left and right with nothing but his sword.

Most of the time, he would be poisoned, but he didn't need to worry about that. A single circling of his cultivation removed all poison from his body.

Alex was surprised to see that plants here were more toxic than the animals. Most of the time, the animal was just cultivating the toxins the plant gave off, capturing them into their own body.

He was learning more and more about poison and venoms every day.

A few times, Alex even sat down to use the ingredients he had gathered to make some poison pills.

One of the pills he made, a Heart Wrenching Poison pill, even came out to be around 56%. He would have likely gotten more out of the other pills too, but splitting his concentration into igniting a flame under the cauldron without using his formation plates held Alex back quite a bit.

In the months that passed since Alex entered the poison swamp, he had gone nearly 30 kilometers into the heart of the swamp, or so he believed.

A few times, he even saw humans in the poison swamp, walking around with artifacts and talismans hovering in front of them to block the poison. The first time he had seen them, he was surprised. But once he realized that it was a normal occurrence for people to come here and gather ingredients for themselves, he relaxed.

No one really wanted to fight another person for no reason in a place where a breath of the air could likely kill you.

Alex also never tried to talk with those people either. Most left only an hour or two after getting there.

With only about 150 meters of range on his senses, he was sure there were many more humans that came to this place, but he only got to see these ones.

Alex's Sword Intent progressed quite a bit and he could now cut a normal True Lord 3rd realm beast in half without even using his Qi.

If he did use Qi, it would reach True lord's 5th realm.

"Can I even progress any further?" he thought, standing next to the corpse of a red-skinned lizard.

Its head and tail were cut in half, and half the scales on its body were gone, likely to Alex's ring.

Alex watched his sword and wondered if he had reached a bottleneck. His progress fell stagnant and while he felt like he could progress, there just wasn't any.

'Maybe I'm supposed to take a break and try again,' he thought, but that didn't feel right. It was like he was reaching the limit of his Intent and was having trouble understanding what he should have done next.

'Dammit! If I had some more time in the library, I would have learned about swords. Now, I'm stuck with doing what Du Yuhan told me to do,' he thought.

Finding your personality and putting it into your own Sword Intent. That was how Du Yuhan told him sword Qi was born.

"I really need to learn who I am," Alex thought. That was the only way forward.

Alex walked forward and reached the tree behind the dead lizard. There hung a fruit on the tree that was shaped like a litchee but was the size of Alex's head.

Even as Alex walked close, he could feel the familiar coldness that his master used to produce. This fruit had a Yin attribute to it.

Alex plucked the fruit from the tree and sat down beneath it to eat it. He opened one of the fruits and tore off a giant piece to eat it at once.

When it reached his stomach, he didn't immediately let his body get rid of it. Instead, he slowly permeated the fruit's energy throughout his body. Wherever the poison reached, the existing yang aura would come to get rid of it.

By the time he ate the entire fruit, it felt like Alex had cultivated his yin technique for a month continuously.

Alex put back the other 2 fruits into his ring as he would use those when the Yang flared back again.

During the next few months, Alex roamed around more of the poison swamp, stealing as many ingredients as he could find.

After nearly a year of being in this place, Alex was starting to get fed up. He wanted to leave, but he knew Shen Jing would be coming any time now, so he didn't leave.

As expected, not many days after, while Alex was fighting with a giant insect, a voice drifted to his ear.

Shen Jing was here.

Chapter 636 Dao of Techniques

"You ready to go?" Shen Jing's voice drifted into Alex's ear. That meant he was close by. However, even with his nearly 170 meters wide spiritual sense, he couldn't pinpoint Shen Jing at all.

"Just after I'm done with this," Alex said as he dodged a poison shot from the insect in front of him.

Alex wasn't even sure if the insect was the right term to be used here. The beast in front of him was a 3 meters tall ant-like beast with a rather thin, circular body, with 8 spider-like legs coming out of it.

Its dark-brown skin with a furry body made it look nothing like any insects Alex knew of. Not to mention the many dozens of small eyes on its head and the straw-like mouth which it used to spit poison at him.

Alex didn't dodge because of the poison, but rather the force behind each shot of the poison.

The insect's exoskeleton was strong enough to handle most attacks, and its poison shots were enough to scrape off his outer skin which gave him a burning sensation that he didn't like.

Alex's sword glowed white, with no hint of any other Qi, and occasionally strayed out white flickers of light as if someone were hammering on a hot piece of iron.

Alex dodged past the incoming poison shot and dashed beneath the insect's massive legs to strike at one of its legs.

However, as if steel hitting steel, his sword only rang in his hands and did nothing whatsoever to the beast.

Its hide was way too strong. "Of course, it would be," Alex thought. "It is a True Lord 7th Realm beast after all."

Alex fought for a few minutes more, trying to find some way to beat the insect, which was clearly a defensive beast when he heard Shen Jing's voice again.

"You might miss the opening if you don't leave now," he said.

Alex started. He didn't know what this Demon realm was but if Shen Jing was talking about it, then he definitely didn't want to miss it.

Aura flared around him as the originally white blade started glowing golden as well.

Alex then zipped past the insect and hit the insect through its underbelly. As if opening a zipper on a jacket, a long gash appeared on the insect's body that opened fully and the entrails of the beast flopped out.

Just like that, the beast was dead. Shen Jing appeared next to him and said, "Not bad."

Alex could finally see him through his senses and turned to face Shen Jing. "How much of a hurry are we in? Do I have time to get some of this beast's parts?" he asked.

"Hahaha, I was joking. Do what you want. There is still a day before the realm opens," Shen Jing said.

Alex was about to frown, but he stopped his face from showing any changes. Instead, he just nodded and started carving out the eyes, heart, and the monster core of the insect.

The eyes alone took him about 15 minutes to carve out as he had to be careful not to pop them.

Shen Jing looked at Alex as used his golden claw to carve the core out and said, "That's quite a bad technique, you know."

Alex turned around with his monster core and asked, "Sorry?"

"What you're doing right now. That's bad," Shen Jing said. "Always find a meridian path for your technique for maximum efficiency."

"Is that so?" Alex said. "It's a technique I created, so I just randomly bring out my Qi," he said.

"I can see that," Shen Jing said. "Attack me with that claw."

Alex raised an eyebrow with curiosity, but asked no question and instead simply attacked.

As his golden claw scratched against what was clearly flesh, the claws disappeared as if they were made up of sand.

"See? It's weak. Also, I bet it takes quite a lot of Qi to use that," Shen Jing said. "I know you are just making this technique, but try to find a correct path for it and you will find the efficiency increase by a lot."

"Same for your Sun-making technique. I didn't say anything as I needed something to strain your meridians at the time, but now that they seem very wide and flexible, you can try out different paths for it as well," he said.

Alex thought to himself. 'Hm, so that means there is not just one way to form a technique huh? Just like there is not just one recipe for the same pill.'

'However, with each variation, it can be improved upon. A proper path and a proper intent, with these two things, any techniques can be strengthened,' Alex thought.

Shen Jing had a wry look on his face as he looked at the sky. The Worldly laws had stirred again.

"You are in the right direction, but you are mistaken about something it seems," Shen Jing suddenly said.

"Sorry?" Alex asked.

"The thing you were thinking about just now. Whatever you were thinking of, you are making a mistake somewhere," Shen Jing said.

'He can read my minds?' Alex thought with surprise. He didn't know there was such a skill.

"What am I mistaken about, brother Shen?" he asked.

"I don't know," Shen Jing said. "What did you learn just now, tell me."

Alex frowned but still told him what he had just learned about path and intent.

"Ah! I see," Shen Jing said. "So that's what you were learning about. Well, I can see where you are mistaken there."

"Oh," Alex looked surprised. "Where am I mistaken?"

Shen Jing shook his head. "I can't tell you," he said. "I will only be harming your future prospects if I tell you right now."

Alex was confused now. "How would you be harming my future by teaching me something I don't know?" he asked. The words coming out of Shen Jing contradicted themselves.

Shen Jing sighed. "Let's leave, I will tell you on the way."

The two of them started flying, but Shen Jing didn't speed up at all and went along at Alex's pace.

"What you are trying to learn, or actually have already learned, is called a Dao."

"A Dao is a fundamental law of the world that anyone can learn if they contemplate on it enough. However, you also need to have the talent for it."

"The Dao of techniques is what you were trying to learn just now. It's certainly one of the weaker Dao that won't even help you in battle. But if you were to look into making techniques, this would certainly help you," Shen Jing said.

"Dao..." Alex softly said to himself. "I've learned a Dao before?"

"Your explosions. You learned how to do it yourself right? Even the world helps you perform it," Shen Jing said.

"Ah!" Alex realized. "That's a Dao?"

"Yes, and see how strong it is," Shen Jing said.

"So, why can you not teach me about the Dao of techniques? You said I was mistaken right?" Alex asked.

"A Dao only comes down from the heaven when you are enlightened about a technique. The more information you get about a Dao from someone else, the less likely you are to obtain that Dao because you did not earn it yourself."

"Which is why I don't want to explain to you anything. Certainly, there is a chance that you have enough knowledge and understanding of this Dao yourself that my help isn't accounted for much, but if there is the slightest chance that you may falter because of me, I think it's better I just shut up," Shen Jing said.

This was a massive bit of information for Alex. He thought to himself as he flew for a few minutes, letting Shen Jing do the navigating when a question flowed into his mind.

"You said that the Dao of techniques was one of the weaker Daos right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "Anything that doesn't directly influence a battle is usually considered a minor Dao. But it's a ranking that humans gave so you will have to see for yourself how worth it is to have that Dao."

Alex mulled over this information, but his original question still remained in his head, so he decided to ask it.

"If this Dao of techniques is considered a minor Dao, then certainly it's not very useful during the battle itself. Then... does it matter if you teach me the Dao or not?" Alex asked.

"I can see that my Explosion Dao is very strong. So strong that I myself have to fear it, and I doubt I could have learned something this great by simply learning about it from someone else," he said.

"But, the Dao of Techniques doesn't seem like that. If, as you said, it helps me come up with techniques, then won't simply learning have a similar effect?"

"Even if the effect is worse, won't learning about it right now help me way more than learning about the Dao myself many years later?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing couldn't immediately answer this question. "Your words have truth and they do make sense. But you are lacking one bit of information," Shen Jing said.

Alex curiously looked at Shen Jing, waiting for him to speak.

"While a Dao may or may not be useful to now, or learning the information may be more useful than gaining the dao, there is something else a Dao is helpful for," Shen Jing said.

"The more Daos you have acquired by the time you reach the peak of Saint realm, the better your chances of breaking through to the Immortal Realm becomes."

Chapter 637 Gratitude

Shen Jing suddenly stopped flying and Alex had to stop too.

"So tell me," Shen Jing asked. "Do you want to become stronger right now? Or do you want a better chance at entering the Immortal realm?"

Alex's head was reeling with this new information.

Immortal realm? He had never even thought about reaching that realm before. Even Saint realm was something out of reach for him.

Sure, he had thought that he would reach those realms for sure in the back of his head, but he had never given it more thought than that.

However, when he was suddenly put forth with this question out of nowhere, he didn't know what to say.

Sure, getting stronger right now would be awesome, but if that hampered him in the long term, he wouldn't like that at all.

'Where I am right now isn't my final destination. I need to keep moving forward and reach new heights,' he thought.

He then bowed towards Shen Jing and said, "I would rather be weak right now than not enter the Immortal realm, brother Shen. Thank you for enlightening me."

Shen Jing's serious face turned into a smile, "Good! That's what I wanted you to say."

Alex gave a smile as well.

"Although," Shen Jing said. "I think I can give you some information. You are right about intent and path, but you are forgetting about the main source of what makes your techniques work."

"Source?" Alex thought. "Ah! My Qi."

"I won't he saying anything anymore," Shen Jing said. "Now, let's leave."

This time, Shen Jing grabbed Alex with his aura and flew away once more.

Alex immediately poured out his Qi using his movement technique to disperse the friction he was feeling only to realize that his Qi was vanishing at an astonishing rate.

Alex clearly remembered the same thing happening 2 years ago as well, but that had been a vastly weaker him.

His cultivation base was nothing like what was before, reaching True Master 9th realm. Any moment he wanted to, he could break through to the True Lord realm, reaching the same rank as his body.

He also had a wider meridian, by at least 3 times compared to what he had before. And yet, the speed at which they were flying was threatening to rip Alex's body away.

He could only hope that his body didn't fail him right now, or Shen Jing had enough sympathy in him to help him if that happened.

When they stopped, Alex realized that they were in open grassland. "Is this where the Demon realm is?" Alex asked.

"Haha, no," Shen Jing said. "We are taking a small detour to grab our little friend."

Alex wondered what he meant when he suddenly sensed something through his body. His eyes went wide.

"Pearl!" he cried out and suddenly flew down to the ground. As he got closer, Alex could sense Pearl with his spiritual sense. When he got very close, even Pearl could sense him.

"Brother?" Pearl spoke in an almost perfect voice and looked up from what looked like a golden entrapment.

Shen Jing removed the barrier with a swipe of his hand.

"Pearl!" Alex shouted and hugged the massive Pearl that was about the size of a normal tiger now.

He still looked like a cat, but he was certainly bigger than what he had become when he had just entered the True realms.

Alex's senses washed over Pearl and he couldn't help but give a look of shock.

"True Lord 5th realm? Huh? How?" He shouted in disbelief. He never thought that Pearl would beat him in cultivation.

"I trained very hard, brother," Pearl said. He then put a paw on Alex's shoulder and said, "Don't worry brother. I will protect you now."

Alex felt like a proud father at the moment. "Yes. Yes, you will," he said. "But how did you cultivate so fast?"

Pearl gave a confused look. "I don't know," he said. "I simply cultivated, fought, and ate. So I got strong fast."

"In the last two years, you spent the majority of your time learning Alchemy," Shen Jing said. "While I won't say you wasted it, it certainly slowed you down."

"In the meanwhile, Pearl's entire attention for the last 2 years had been on nothing but the most optimum cultivation training I could give him," Shen Jing said.

Alex bowed deeply. "Thank you for everything you've done for us, brother Shen," he said.

Shen Jing scratched his cheek with his finger and said, "Don't say that. I have my reasons for helping you. Well, Pearl more than you really. I just left you in a jungle to fend for yourself."

"I understand, but I still thank you for what you did for me and Pearl," Alex said. In the back of his head, Alex wondered what Shen Jing's reason was for helping him, but the gratitude he felt overwhelmed his suspicions.

"Alright, are you guys ready?" Shen Jing asked. Pearl switched back to his tiny form and jumped into Alex's robes before Meowing back at Shen Jing.

"Yes, brother Shen," Alex said.

"Right. But, before we do," Shen Jing's fingers flashed with golden light and at the next moment, Alex felt a cool breeze on his face again.

When he touched his face with his hand, the beard he had grown in the last 2 years had gone away just like that.

He felt his hair, but his hair was still coming up to his shoulders. He wanted to grow it out longer, so he thanked Shen Jing for not cutting it all.

"You still look like a rogue cultivator, but that should be fine," he said and immediately flew while carrying both Alex and Pearl.

Alex was better prepared this time and had his technique block all of the air.

They flew for about half an hour with Alex losing nearly half of his Qi. Shen Jing slowed down a bit near the end and finally came to a stop about 5 minutes later.

"We're here," He said as he slowed down to a halt.

"Humans!" Pearl said as he looked down below from Alex's chest.

"Huh? I can't see anything," Alex said as he was still too far high to be able to see anything with his sense.

"Hmm... oh, my bad," Shen Jing said and with a simple gesture, removed the golden barrier inside his eyes that had been blocking his vision forever.

As the golden haze disappeared, the normal light entered Alex's eyes making him wince back into closing his eyes again.

When he tried to open them again, he had to force them to stay open. When he did so, his eyes started tearing up.

However, even though the tears, he could see the massive improvements in his vision.

"I can see so much clearer now," he said.

"Of course," Shen Jing said. "You've nearly crossed 2 minor realms during the period in which you couldn't see. It's only obvious you should be able to see better."

Alex wiped his tears and forced himself to look at the white clouds and the blue sky. He then turned downwards and saw the crowd that was gathered below next to a giant monument of some sort.

There were trees and grassland surrounding the monument, but neither that nor the people took Alex's attention.

His attention was instead stolen by what was surrounding the place.

The land the humans were gathered was actually quite small, just about a kilometer in diameter.

Aside from that, it was all surrounded by the ocean.

"The Ocean!" Alex said with a hint of surprise on his face. He had seen the ocean before, but it was still very surprising.

He looked out all around him, and aside from the direction which they came from, everything else was surrounded by water.

"Is that the mainland?" Alex asked, pointing to where he had come from.

"Yes," Shen Jing said.

"It's so far," Alex said. It was almost 10 kilometers away from what he could see. "I heard beasts in the ocean are scarier than normal."

"They are. You shouldn't try to fight them... for now," Shen Jing said, looking to the side to see more people flying by.

Alex noticed them as well, and almost every single one of the older ones gave off a Saint realm aura.

"Let's head down, and wait for the demon realm to open up."

Chapter 638 Demons

Alex slowly drifts down to the grassy land and stands some distance away from the majority of the crowd.

Seeing so many young men and women accompanied by the many Saint realm was very surprising to Alex.

"I thought reaching the saint realm was a hard task for cultivators in the Western Continent," Alex said. "But there are so many of them here."

Alex started counting and he found nearly 20 different Saint realm experts here.

20… that was nearly 7 times more than what he had seen in the Crimson Empire. Given how many more must have been hidden, Alex couldn't help but show shock on his face.

"Only 20," Shen Jing said. "Such a sad fate for the Western Continent."

"It's still 20 you know," Alex said from the side.

"Do you understand how bad of a number that is?" Shen Jing asked. "There should be close to 15 billion humans living on the Western Continent alone."

"Even if 150 of them end up entering the Saint realm, that is still 1 in a 100 Million entering the Saint realm. Do you think that is many?" Shen Jing asked.

When put like that, no, that was not that many.

"By comparison, the northern and southern continent would have around 1 in 10 Million people enter the Saint realm. As for the Eastern Continent with their better Spirit veins and resources, I wouldn't be surprised if there were 1 Saint realm in every Million people."

"Do you still think these measly 20 is a lot?" he asked. There was a sense of sadness and disappointment in his voice that Alex couldn't understand.

"It's all because of the other continents, right? They stole the resources," Alex asked.

"That is correct. From what I hear, all of the saint rank spirit veins were taken away for themselves, lowering the chances of any Saint realm cultivator to improve in this continent," Shen Jing said, shaking his head from side to side.

That got Alex thinking. "If they took away all the spirit veins, then how come there are Saint realm cultivators here now?" Alex asked.

"Ah, they took all, but more appeared." Shen Jing said.

Alex looked curious. "Can spirit veins simply appear?" he asked.

"Well, some appeared from the remaining True spirit veins upgrading to Saint spirit veins," Shen Jing said. "But that was rare."

"When I say more appeared, I am referring to that," Shen Jing said as his fingers pointed somewhere.

Alex followed the point and saw the large, nearly 10 meters tall, yellow column with words written on it.

"That monument?" Alex asked, wondering how a monument could have created spirit veins.

"No, not the monument itself, but what's inside of it," Shen Jing said.

"What's inside?" Alex asked with a confused look. But a moment later he realized what Shen Jing must have been talking about.

"The demon realm?" Alex's eyes changed.

"Yes," Shen Jing said.

"So it is a secret realm?" he asked.

"It's a pocket space created by the demons to hide themselves during the… Eternal War for Dominance," Shen Jing said, slowing himself down on the last words. He seemed to be contemplating if he should be saying those words or not.

"Eternal War for Dominance?" Alex's curiosity was piqued. "What is that?"

"It's… a war of forgotten times. It was so long ago that it doesn't matter anymore," Shen Jing said. "It was a pointless war."

Alex saw that Shen Jing didn't want to say anything about it, so he didn't push any further.

"What's a demon then?" Alex asked.

"Demons are just humans with two small red horns, weird colored eyes, and a slightly better physical body," Shen Jing said.

Alex frowned. "That's it?" he asked. Just two horns and weird eyes… that was enough to get yourself to be called a demon?

"Yes, that's it," Shen Jing said.

"That's not enough to have an entirely different word for you," Alex said.

"Tell that to the people who started that war so many years ago. If you can see how pointless this distinction is, you can likely understand how pointless that war back then was too," Shen Jing said.

"Well that's what I heard at least," Shen Jing said. "I wasn't alive or anything during that time to know exactly how pointless it was."

"What was the war for?" Alex couldn't help but ask.

"What all wars are for," Shen Jing replied. "Land and resources. However, neither the humans nor the demons had ever lacked land for themselves."

"So you can see what I mean when I say it was pointless right?" he asked.

Alex nodded. He understood… to a certain extent. But there had to be something more to it.

Alex changed the topic back to the secret realm. "So that demon's realm, that provided the western continent with Saint rank spirit veins to help produce Saint realm cultivators?" he asked.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "They never cared for this tiny realm when the Western continent was just as good as the rest of the world, but once it was no longer as good, they all hounded on it until nothing of worth remained to them."

Alex's face narrowed. "If there is nothing of worth there then why am I here?" he asked.

Shen Jing gave a bright smile. "What is not of worth to a Saint realm cultivator is usually treasure to a True realm cultivator," he said.

"Besides, it's been 5000 years or so since the saint realm experts robbed this place. Since then, they have only sent in True realm cultivators to train them, have them cultivate in the rich environment and find what treasures were left behind," Shen Jing explained.

Excitement swelled up in Alex's heart when he heard all of this and looked at the many young men and women that were gathered in the area.

They were all here to train themselves and find treasures as well.

"Wait a second," Alex said. "It's been 5 thousand years since the secret realm opened and people have been going inside all the time. Are we sure that there is even anything worth taking in there?"

"Oh, you don't need to doubt that at all," Shen Jing said. "The realm opens once in every 10 years, so there will certainly be quite a few resources still in there."

"Also… the secret realm is covered in seals all over that are so powerful that even Saint realm experts can't break through them."

"And… it's been so long that every few decades, a few of the seals end up dimming and whatever is behind it opens up. Do you want to guess what the demons were hiding in there with seals that made Saint realm expert return?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex's heart started beating faster and faster as he heard that. He looked back at the monument, unable to wait for it to open up.

However, since there was still some time, according to Shen Jing, he had to wait.

More and more figures came to the island with a cool breeze flowing from the south. Alex could hear the splashing of the ocean against the island from quite far away.

Shen Jing handed Alex back his storage bags, which Alex checked and found that not a single thing in them was missing.

He transferred all the valuables in those storage bags into his ring in a way that only Shen Jing could see, and he noticed Shen Jing's eyes flash for a split second when he put one of the items into his storage ring.

'What was it?' Alex wondered, but he had too many important items to realize.

In the next 6 hours, as the sun began to fall, and everyone started setting up their own tents and stations, Alex had sat down to cultivate with Shen Jing protecting him.

Pearl wanted to cultivate as well, but Alex didn't want to show the wounds that would appear on him to the outside world right now, so he stopped Pearl from doing anything.

Alex circulated a poison flower of yin element in his body as he got rid of the Yang energy that was building up because of his body.

After a round of cultivation that lasted somewhere until midnight, Alex stopped once his Qi was full again. That was when he looked around the humans that were spread throughout the island, and wondered if more Saint realm experts had appeared.

As if on cure, Shen Jing told him that there were 27 Saint realm experts on the island now.

Shen Jing also told him that there were likely going to be about 200 or so, maybe even more young people that would enter the secret realm from what he could sense.

Alex didn't dare release his spiritual sense amongst these crowd of Saint realms. It was scary enough doing that with just a few around.

"Oh, interesting," Shen Jing said.

"What's going on?" Alex asked, curiously.

"I am just surprised that a lot of the disciples here are quite talented. I have found at least 5 people other than you that have unlocked their spiritual sense," Shen Jing said.

"Although, it seems that they unlocked it later than you, so their senses are much weaker than your own," he said.

"Woah!" Alex thought. He was surprised, but he shouldn't have been.

Compared to the Luminance Empire, the Crimson Empire was like a children's playground. A beginner's town for users in a game to level up before they went out to venture into the real world.

Alex had come to this real world, and he was starting to see just how terrifyingly difficult the real world was going to be.

Chapter 639 Runes

The sun rose back again, and according to Shen Jing, there was still a couple of hours before the realm would start.

So, everyone was just staying there, waiting for it to be open.

So, Alex was quite bored and decided to ask Shen Jing something that had been in his mind for a while.

"Brother Shen, what happened to the demons?" he asked. If there was a demon realm here, then there had to be demons living on this continent, or more likely all 5 continents.

Why was there no information about demons anymore in this world?

"Oh, nothing bad," Shen Jing said with a glowing smile. "Once the war was over, they left the secret realm and went out to live with humans in harmony, happily ever after."

Alex stopped his face from frowning. "Please be serious, brother Shen," he said.

"Oh but I am serious," Shen Jing said. "When the war ended, the demons had no longer any reason to stay in that realm, so they left it and went on to live on the main continent with the humans that had now occupied most of the land."

"And where are these demons now?" Alex asked, half expecting Shen Jing to make up something else to continue his lie, and half hoping that he was telling the truth and that there really were demons, but he simply had not seen them.

"Well… there are no demons exactly so to speak," Shen Jing said. "Since the war, I am talking about happened so long ago that records of it are hard to find, the demons that lived together with the humans started really living together."

"As in they got into relationships and even had children of their own. Those children had their children and those children had their children."

"Slowly, the pure demon bloodline diluted to the point that it is nowhere, and yet everywhere."

Shen Jing looked at everyone in-crowd and slowly said, "Each of these humans here has some level of demon blood in them. But it is so diluted that their physical properties, like the horn, eyes and superior body usually don't manifest at all."

"I see," he said. "So… in a sense, we are all at some part demons too huh?"

Shen Jing looked at Alex with a smile that looked like it was keeping a chuckle from showing through.

"Everyone, please gather here for a quick meeting," a man with no hair called out to the people in the crowd.

He wore a white robe that had burnt edges that were fully black. Next to him, stood 2 other people.

One of them wore a white robe that was nearly filled with red all over as if the man stood on in a blood rain while wearing white.

The other one, a woman, wore a fully purple robe with multicolor linings on the inside.

Of the 3, only the bald one had spoken.

"Let's go see what it is," Alex said to Shen Jing, who half-heartedly stood up and walked to the crowd.

Finally, as Alex got closer, he was able to sense more and more cultivation base of the people that were on the island.

Even while they tried to suppress their aura, the Saint realms could still be sensed from a kilometer away.

But these True realm cultivators were harder to sense from where Alex was, at least without sending out his spiritual sense.

So, now that he was sensing them, he looked surprised. 'So strong,' he thought.

These normal-looking disciples ranged from the True Master realm, all the way up to the True King realm. Amongst them, Alex ranked somewhere in the middle, he thought.

"You will have a hard time in the secret realm, but it's also a good opportunity to see where your training has brought you," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded. It wasn't a competition that he needed to be afraid of True King participants. All he needed to do was walk aside when they were around.

As Alex was looking through the crowd, watching the Myriad people in there, his eyes fell on a young man —well, young for his cultivation base— standing next to two elder figures wearing the same fully red, almost crimson robe.

His eyes flashed as if to sense someone watching him, and he turned around towards Alex and looked at him.

Alex gave a smile and a nod to this young man, confusing him if he had even seen Alex before.

However, as he searched through his mind, he quickly remembered where he had seen him before.

"Brother Yu Ming?" a shocked voice entered his mind, surprising Alex. 'Spiritual sense? He didn't have it last time,' Alex thought.

The young man rushed towards Alex, while the rest of the crowd was focused on the older men that were still in the process of gathering everyone.

"Sorry for startling you like that with my spiritual sense," the young man said.

"It was a pleasant surprise, brother Fu Tao," Alex said, bowing a little in greeting.

"My surprise on the other hand is undeniably shocking, brother Yu," Fu Tao said. "You really did come to the Luminance Empire."

"I did, and it was all thanks to you," Alex said.

"Right, right, don't worry about that. I remember you talking about wanting to save someone, right? Did…you…" Fu Tao slowly asked.

"Yes," Alex said, pushing Pearl a little until his head popped out of his robes.

"Meow!" Pearl greeted. After Alex's insistence that he only meows from now on to strangers, Pearl remembered not to say 'Hello' even if he wanted to.

"Oh, it was a cat huh?" Fu Tao said, with almost all of his interest in the conversation disappearing slowly.

He turned to the side and looked towards the older bald man and said, "Something seems to be happening, we can talk later."

Then, he walked back to where he had been before.

"True King 7th realm?" Alex softly asked.

"8th," Shen Jing replied while staring at Fu Tao. "He sure doesn't know how to hide his disinterest, does he?"

"I think he's a good guy, but I wouldn't trust myself to judge a person," Alex said.

"Better to be careful," Shen Jing said.

Alex turned around to look at the front where the people were gathering and by coincidence looked at the monument to the side of them.

The monument was rectangular in shape and had something carved onto one of the faces that Alex couldn't see from where he had been before this.

'Are those… writings?' he thought. He read the word 'Demons' at the very top of the monument, but other than that, he could read nothing else.

It didn't even look like the other languages that the beasts and immortals used.

"Brother Shen, what does that say?" he asked, looking at the carving.

Shen Jing looked at Alex, then turned to the monument, then looked back at Alex, then turned to the monument and looked back at Alex for the final time.

"You do remember that I cannot read, right?" he asked.

Alex stopped his urge to laugh out loud. He really had forgotten. "I'm sorry. I read the word Demon at the top, but other than that, I couldn't read anything," he said.

Shen Jing turned around to look at the monument once again and said, "Ah, I do know what those are."

Alex looked at him with narrowed eyes.

Shen Jing gave a bright smile back. "I do," he said. "Did you forget that I've been here before? I simply remembered what they are."

Alex's suspicions disappeared and he asked, "So, what do they say?"

"Nothing," Shen Jing said, keeping his bright smile to himself.

"Brother Shen, please don't joke around," Alex said.

Shen Jing chuckled a little and said, "I'm really not joking. That thing might say demon at the top, but other than that, it's all just runes carved into the block."

"Runes?" Alex asked with a confused look.

"Yes, runes," Shen Jing said.

Alex frowned. He looked at the monument once again and carefully looked through each of these 'runes.'

'Oh my god,' he thought.

"They really are runes," Alex said out loud.

"See? I told you I wouldn't lie," Shen Jing said.

Alex was genuinely surprised to see runes carved on the monument's wall. After all, as far as he knew, runes were only used in talismans.

"Why are there runes on the wall?" Alex asked as he looked at the monument again.

The perfectly carved runes flowed artistically in all sorts of geometrical figures as well as curves, making designs in the monument that was intrinsic, artistic, and most of all… Symmetric.

Alex couldn't help but wonder what all of these runes did or meant. He desperately wished to know anything about talismans right now.

But, he didn't, so he had no idea.

"Of course, you would find runes here. It's a demon's realm after all," Shen Jing said.

Alex turned his head to look at him. "What does that have to do with anything?" he asked.

Shen Jing gave him a curious look and asked, "Do you not know?" only to immediately say, "Ah right, you only learned about Demons today after all."

Alex's curiosity was obviously piqued by this statement.

"What do I not know?" Alex asked.

"That it was the demons who created the runes in the first place," Shen Jing said.

"What?" Alex asked in surprise.

"Well, created is a wrong word. Discovered is more like it," he said. "While the humans discovered pills and formations, it was the demons who discovered runes and medicinal pastes."

Chapter 640 Right of Strength

Alex was a little surprised, but it didn't last long. He instead thought to himself about what he had just learned.

"So these runes do something even when carved on rocks, but no one knows how it works now, huh? I assume so since I haven't seen it being used anywhere in this place," Alex said.

"Yeah... well, over time things change a lot. Some information disappears, while others get adopted," Shen Jing said.

"The demons forget how to use the runes on anything other than talisman after mixing together with the humans, while humans forget their own language," Shen Jing said with a sigh.

"Their own language?" Alex narrowed his eyes. "The language we use currently is demon language?"

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "Although I can not read, I am told that the language used currently is the demon language, while the human language is now very hard to find."

Alex felt shocked to his core. 'Those two languages,' he thought, referring to the language he could read, and the one he simply understood. 'Those languages are the Demon language and the Human language?'

Alex couldn't believe that he had learned a language belonging to the demons this entire time. Although, that didn't matter much anymore after learning that he was in some part a demon himself.

Everyone in this world was.

'I guess humans with no demon influence must live in the heavens then,' he thought. 'They must be the immortals.'

Shen Jing said nothing further as he stared forward towards the old man in the white robe with burnt-up sleeves.

By now, the majority of the people here had already gathered around the old man, so he started speaking.

"Thank you for coming here to listen to me," he started. "As many of you might have learned, 2 years ago, our empire suffered an incomparable damage in the form of losing almost all of our disciples and young talents inside the secret realm to the north."

"So, we currently need to find ways of major improvements for the young generations. Thus, along with brother Song and sister Wei here, we have planned to put a limit on the number of people that can enter," the bald man said.

Immediately, people started whispering amongst themselves. Many saint realm folks looked around themselves, saying nothing. But from what Alex could see, it looked like they were communicating amongst each other but only using their spiritual sense.

"What do you propose exactly, Zhou RenKong?" one of the Crimson-robed elders from next to Fu Tao spoke.

"It is simple, Fu Shun. Those from the big Clans and Sects get to send in 3 disciples each. Those from the small ones get to send 1 disciple each."

"And unfortunately, those without any affiliations, we will have to stop you from entering this time around. Please wait until the demon realm opens in 10 years for your next chance," the bald man finished speaking.

Not a moment passed, and chaos erupted on the island.

"What do you mean we only get to send one?"

"I have waited 15 years for this event."

"I need to find a rare ingredient inside to save my sister. You cannot stop me.'

As expected, people immediately protested. The only ones who didn't protest were those of the big clans and sects that were happy with getting 3 spots each.

"I for one think that is an excellent idea," one of the female saints experts in golden robes with a sword hovering next to her spoke.

"I think that's a brilliant idea too," Another man in green robes with stitches that looked like leaves spoke as well.

People once again erupted into voices of anger and unfairness. They claimed that neither the Jin clan nor the Lu clan suffered from these rules, which was why they were accepting it in the first place.

In the people's protest, Alex heard the names of all of the 8 great clans in the Luminance empire, as well as some big sects.

He heard names such as Broken Ravine sect, Heaven's Peak school, Falling Lotus sect, and Glory's Edge sect amongst many other names of sects and schools.

Alex tried to look around to recognize who was who, but with how little information he had about the status of the Luminance empire, it became hard to tell.

Still, he looked at the faces of those who approved this and saw no sign of surprise or amazement. 'They must have planned it all from the start, even before coming here,' he thought.

Alex counted the number of people that looked satisfied and it was easy to tell how many of them would get to send 3 disciples inside.

From Alex's count, it was about 15 of them. Meaning 45 spots for entry was already set.

If 1 from the remaining sects and clans were to enter, and even if that number happened to be a massive 50, that would still be less than half of the True realm cultivators that had come here today.

A man wearing dirty brown robes walked forward. From what Alex could sense, the man's cultivation base was weak. He realized that it must have been a rogue cultivator that reached this current realm on his own.

"I beg your pardon, Elder, but what gives your the right to block me and my fellow peers from entering the realm? We might be rogue cultivators, but we are still hardworking people. Do we not deserve the chance to enter?" he asked.

The bald man's face twitched a little when he heard the young man speak.

"It was a collective decision between us three and since so many have already agreed today, it only makes this rule even stronger," the bald man said.

"I have eyes, elder," the man said. "We all do. You don't have to lie and say that you just happened to come up with the idea and others happened to agree."

"We can all see that this was your idea from before you even came to this place. It can't be that you all happened to bring only 3 disciples each, right?" the man asked.

"So, I still ask you. What gives you the right to—"

Before the rogue cultivator could finish speaking, a tremendous aura appeared around him that made him kneel to the ground, with his knees buckling.

The man strained to speak, but he couldn't even breathe at the moment.

"What right you say?" the bald man's furious eyes looked at the rogue cultivator.

"Strength! My strength is what gives me the right to do whatever I want to," he said.

"You, a mere rogue cultivator, dares to talk back to me? The only reason you are even alive at this point is that killing you is beneath me," the bald man said.

The other Saint realm cultivators from the big sects and clans simply shook their heads, not in disdain towards the bald elder, but in pity towards the rogue cultivator.

The saint realm experts, who were likely patriarchs and sect leaders of other smaller sects and clans were frowning and protecting their disciples from the bald man's aura.

As for the rogue cultivators, while they weren't the direct targets of the bald man's aura, they were still struggling to keep themselves up.

Alex too was feeling the aura of the old man press on him, but mere aura no longer worked to stop him in his place.

He stared at the old man with hidden disapproval. However, he couldn't do anything about it at all. If the saint realm cultivator wanted to do something, what could he, a mere True realm cultivator do?

"Do any of you have any more complaints?" the bald man asked with heavy disdain in his voice.

None of the crowd moved as they didn't want the full fury of a saint realm elder from a massive clan. They were all too scared to even think o—

Suddenly, a hand went up. Everyone looked around in shock as if they were looking at a dead man.

The young man who raised his hands walked a little forward so everyone could see him.

The young man had blonde hair that ended in black and came down to his shoulders. He wore a white robe with no other colors and held a brilliant smile on his face.

Alex sighed as the young man who had walked forward was obviously Shen Jing.

"Dear brother, do you think it is fair to stop all of these young men from gaining a chance to improve themselves?" Shen Jing asked.

The bald man gave a strange look at Shen Jing as if surprised that he was able to stand his aura.

"Of course It is fair. If I decide that is fair, then it is," the old man said.

"I see, you did say that your strength gives you such right," Shen Jing said.

"Of cour—" the old man was about to say when Shen Jing continued.

"Then, I say it is only fair that none of your disciples get to enter as well," Shen Jing said.

"What did you say?" the old man was about to walk forward when a cut appeared on his cheeks out of nowhere.

Then, he buckled onto the floor, his right leg twisting towards the side, clearly broken.

At the same time, massive pressure landed on the whole island, targeting only the Saint realm cultivators.

Even amongst them, only those from the big clans and sects felt the real, horrifying pressure.

Their eyes opened wide in horror at sensing a pressure that only their sect leaders and patriarch could likely summon.

Shen Jing smiled looking at the crumpled Saint realms and said, "Since I hold the strength now, I suppose it's only right and fair that I make a new rule."

Chapter 641 Demon Realm Opens

The pressure was terrifying, and nauseating as if they were being pushed down onto the ground by a massive block of metal.

The saint realm experts quickly broke into a sweat when they felt the aura of the newly arrived young man.

Saint Soul realm.

They were sure that the young man in front of them had reached the Saint Soul realm at a very young age. The implication of that thought terrified them more than the pressure they felt at the moment.

The young man may kill them right now, and that was in fact scary. But if they really did anger him and he did go to find justice with their clans and sects, that would lead to almost all the sects being destroyed.

In a split second, they all immediately understood. They could not anger this young man at all.

"Let's see," Shen Jing walked around, as the True realm cultivators looked at him in surprise. Even a few of the saint realms that were not from the major clan and sect only felt slight, uncomfortable pressure, nothing scary.

However, seeing the reaction of the other cultivators bigger than them, they understood that they were only feeling slight pressure because he wasn't focused on them.

"Uh-huh! I know. None of you can enter the demon realm aside from the younger brother I came with," he said.

Alex didn't like the attention of so many people in the crowd, but fortunately, Shen Jing didn't turn to him and thus nobody realized who he was talking about.

"Fellow Daoist, that is unfair," one of the saint realm cultivators forced out a few words.

"Unfair?" Shen Jing gave the most exaggerated chuckle when he heard that. "Unfair you say. Why didn't you say so when the other unfair rule was put forth?"

"I—" the person didn't know what to say. "I apologize Fellow Daoist. I was only thinking about myself."

"Fellow Daoist, I'm sure we can talk this through," the other saint realm cultivators started speaking.

One after another, suddenly everyone wanted to talk peacefully. Shen Jing snorted at them and lifted the pressure on them.

They all took a collective breath, some taking in more than normal, and immediately thanked Shen Jing for taking mercy on them.

"So, what do you want to talk about?" he asked.

"Fellow Daoist, would you please give us your name?" one of the men asked.

"Shen Jing," Shen Jing replied quickly as if he had been expecting this question.

The man who asked the question quickly turned his head towards a man wearing bluish-gray robes with moving water depicted on them.

The blue-robed man looked towards Shen Jing in confusion as well. "Forgive this junior brother, but I don't recognize you at all, senior brother," the blue-robed man said.

"Oh?" Shen Jing looked curious. "Who are you?"

"This one's name is Shen Liwei, senior brother Jing," the blue-robed man said.

"Ah, I understand the confusion," Shen Jing said. "I'm not from your clan."

"So, let's get on to the point. Why did you guys want to talk to me?" Shen Jing asked

"Daoist Shen Jing, please do not stop our disciples from entering that secret realm. As you must know, we lost a great number of talented young people 2 years ago, and we desperately need to retrain more disciples to replace the ones we lost," the elders said.

"Yes, fellow Daoist. Even if you do not fear our sects and clans coming after you, please do it for the fear of the empire not growing as fast," another elder said.

Shen Jing made a thinking face again, but before he could say anything, the ground shuddered a bit.

Then, a bright light shined from the monument as the runes flared to life.

Shen Jing smiled when he saw that. The Demon Realm was open.

The elders started scampering, wondering what to do now. The other rogue cultivators and smaller sect members wanted to enter, but since Shen Jing said he only wanted one person to enter, they had to look at frustration.

Just when they thought the predator had gone down, a different, bigger predator had come to eat their future.

"Daoist Shen, we cannot wait any longer," one of the elders said frantically.

"There are only 10 days available, Fellow Daoist, please do not waste any more time," another elder said.

Shen Jing's smile hadn't left for a single moment.

"Then I will leave you to make a choice," Shen Jing said. "Either 1 person will enter, or all of them will. What do you choose?"

There was not a single shred of hesitation as everyone immediately chose the 2nd option.

"Good," Shen Jing turned around and walked away. "You may send in your disciples now."

As soon as they got the approval, the elders turned around and made their disciples run toward the monument.

Alex watched as they placed their hands on it and disappeared.

Shen Jing walked up to Alex and said, "you should go inside as well. You will only have 10 days to stay in there, so it might be better to go around searching for natural and material treasures rather than cultivating somewhere."

"Yes," Alex said. "I will leave right now."

"Wait a moment," Shen Jing said and placed his hand on Alex's shoulders. Alex felt warm energy enter his body and disappear somewhere.

"While most of the kids from the big families who went in there won't die. There is still a chance that you will. I don't have any treasures on me that will bring you out when you are about to die, so the best I can do is give you the protection that will save you one time."

"If you ever don't want it to be used, just think of it not working, and you will take the damage."

"However, the moment you take any damage greater than True Lord realm, this protection I put on you will work."

"When that happens, run away," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded. "Thank you," he said. While he knew that having a treasure that would directly bring you out of the demon realm in case of a fatal threat was better, he also knew that Shen Jing had nothing on him at the moment.

So, this was, for him, better than nothing.

It wasn't like he was planning to antagonize anyone, so he didn't worry much about facing any real threat in there.

"Go now," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded and left. The rogue cultivators, now incredibly happy, were turning to Shen Jing to thank him before placing their hands on the monument.

Some disappeared immediately, while some took a while.

Alex placed his hands and waited to be teleported as well, but it didn't happen. Then, he noticed the young man next to him pour Qi into the monument.

Alex followed suit and poured in his Qi as well. As soon as he did, he felt the familiar feeling of teleportation take over him.

Alex gave in to the feeling and watched the silvery-white light envelop him. Then, he disappeared.

When Alex reappeared, he found himself on top of a mountain somewhere.

"Where the hell am I?"

Chapter 642 Trekking down the Mountain

Alex was on top of a mountain filled to the brim with trees. In fact, he could see trees as far as he could see.

Although, at a certain point, some sort of chromatic haze stopped him from seeing any further.

'That must be the outer wall of this secret realm,' Alex thought. This was the first time he was seeing a wall for a secret realm. Usually, he was at the center of it all in the beast's realm, so he got to see nothing there.

The overgrown trees stopped him from seeing everything but the other giant mountains that were equally covered in trees.

There were about 6 in total including the one Alex was in. Other than that, the massive secret realm was simply plain ground.

Alex closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. The salty air of the island was gone now that he was in here.

And the Qi… it was so dense in here. A normal person's cultivation speed would surely increase by a couple of times if they were to cultivate here.

Alex was tempted to just sit down and cultivate, but he didn't see the point for himself. He was already capable of gaining as much Qi as he wanted by simply consuming pills and monster cores.

He could even eat spirit stones to gain Qi, but the one time he had done it, he hadn't liked it afterward.

Alex had to reach into his stomach with his Qi and pull out the dull stone. Unlike pills and cores, the stones didn't dissolve.

Besides, spirit stones for him were more helpful in other instances than simply cultivation.

Alex looked around from his mountain top to see where he could go. If possible, he would have wanted to go find the alchemy ingredients immediately.

However, due to the massive forests everywhere that seemed to have grown over the last thousands of years, there was no way for him to recognize any places.

He could see open spots in some places, but they were too far to make out exactly what they were.

"Guess, I will have to go down and see," Alex thought.

"Meow!" Pearl wanted to come out too. Alex didn't want to bring him out, but now that he thought about it, he didn't need to worry about Pearl, did he?

"Alright, you can walk along with me," Alex said, bringing Pearl out of his robes and letting him go around on his own.

"Try to hide your cultivation base, okay? I don't want people attacking you before they attack me," Alex said.

"Okay!" Pearl answered.

"Since we have 10 days to spare, let's start with looking around this very mountain," Alex said and flew off.

Pearl was a step late behind him and was about to fly when he saw Alex drop to the ground face-first in front of him.

"Brother?" Pearl asked, wondering why Alex jumped down like that. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," Alex said as he stood up and dusted off his robes. He fixed his long hair and looked towards the air.

"Was that a barrier?" he questioned himself. He felt like he had hit something just now that sent him flying down.

He wanted to see what it was and slowly flew again. After reaching a certain height, he suddenly felt an instance of suppression on his body and he was pushed back down.

"Dammit!" Alex thought. "Flying seems to be banned here."

He was a little annoyed that he didn't receive this information before coming here. But, he hadn't received any information, so he should have known to be careful.

But this wasn't something one thought about. 'No wonder I don't see anybody flying in the air aside from the birds,' he thought. It didn't take a genius to realize that only flight using Qi was banned here… somehow.

"Sigh, let's go walking then," he said and walked down the mountain with Pearl.

Of the 6 mountains, Alex wondered if they held something important. From what his senses were telling him, there was nothing important here at all.

The forest had some common Alchemy ingredients and a few True rank ingredients, but they were so readily available even outside that Alex didn't even bother picking them.

Only occasionally when he came across something slightly uncommon did he bother to take it with him.

Alex met a variety of beasts when trekking down the mountain, but those too were very weak.

Even with Pearl in his child form, most were steering away from him. Alex could only imagine what would happen if he were to let his yang energy leak out like he normally did back in the eastern mountain ranges.

As he was about to reach the base of the mountain, Alex saw what he thought was a building of some sort.

It looked like the mountain grew around this building, or as if it was carved onto the mountain itself.

The outer walls were rough, broken at places, and looked like they would crumble at any moment. The walls seemed to be made out of some sort of polished stone, but over time, the polish had vanished all but completely.

Alex looked at the giant opening that he knew was the entrance to this building and walked up to it. There was no door here at all, and everything was open.

However, he could see signs of hinges here, so it was obvious that there used to be one before this.

Meaning… "Someone has been here before us," Alex said to Pearl by his side.

He had already sent his spiritual sense inside and noticed a beast sitting in an open room. It was a True Disciple 2nd realm beast so Alex didn't even bother getting ready to fight.

Instead, he walked up to the door and saw that dirt had filled the cracks on something that was over the arch.

Alex sent out his Qi and got rid of the dirt clumped upon it.

'Library' was what was written on there.

Alex sighed. "So this was originally a library huh?" he thought. He wondered if there had been normal books or cultivation books in there.

Whatever it was, it was no longer there at all. Everything in there had been raided already.

Alex sighed. He shook his head and told Pearl that there was nothing in there at all. Pearl sent out his own spiritual sense which extended to about 50 meters ahead of him and nodded to Alex.

"Let's go somewhere else," he said and went down to the foot of the mountain.

'Since this mountain has nothing, maybe I should check the other 5 mountains as well,' he thought.

From what Alex could tell, the mountains were quite far away from where he was. The closest mountain was to his left, around 10 kilometers away.

If he could fly, it wouldn't even take a few minutes to reach there. But now that he was slowly walking, that would take half a day for sure.

"I could get there faster if I run, but that way I might miss something along the way. There is no guarantee that there is something in the mountains in the first place.

Even this mountain only happened to have a single library that was already looted by the previous comers.

As Alex was thinking that, he saw a woman enter his senses. His sense only extended to about 160 to 170 meters at the moment, and such a short distance was easy for True Realm cultivators to see with their own eyes.

So, the Bluish-gray robe that Alex was wearing was standing out in the woman's eyes which were staring directly at her.

Alex acted like he couldn't see her at all, but the woman was definitely looking at him, and even made her way toward him.

'A True Master 4th realm, huh?' Alex thought and acted like he had sensed someone coming.

He turned around to look at her, with a sword that suddenly appeared in his hand.

'Pearl, get behind me and do nothing,' he said.

"Oh thank god! I finally found someone," the girl said as she sprinted towards Alex.

Alex still wasn't sure if this girl was here to rob him or was genuinely looking for help. He decided to play it safe.

"D-don't come near me," Alex said with his single sword pointed at the girl.

The girl was slightly shorter than Alex and had relatively short black hair that fell to her breasts. She wore a green robe with nothing fancy designed into it.

Her face didn't strike him as anything worth caring about. Her age though… he couldn't be sure if she was so young or if her cultivation base was aiding her.

He looked her all over and even sent his spiritual sense, but he found no weapons or talisman on her. Although, she did have armor beneath her robe, and a few storage bags as well.

'That reminds me. I need an armor myself,' he thought.

The girl frowned for a split second when she saw Alex, but changed it back to a smile as she thought, 'A True Disciple? Judging by his clothes, he must be a rogue cultivator. Not to mention he's lost an arm before this.'

'Can he even protect me?' she thought. She was starting to believe that approaching this young man was a mistake and that she would be better off alone.

But now that she was here, she couldn't back away.

"Fear not little brother, I am not here to hurt you," she said with her palms together in greeting.

"My name is Jiang Zhilan, a disciple of the Spear Stream sect. Will you allow me to journey together with you?"

Chapter 643 The Mountains

Jiang Zhilan was one of the best disciples of the Spear Stream sect. Having learned the Spear Stream technique from a young age, she managed to advance until she had become the top 3 core disciples of her sect.

At the age of 28, she had managed to enter the True Master realm. Now 2 years later, she was at the 4th True Master realm.

She knew that there were strong young men and women out there, but surely they couldn't be stronger than her right? Not unless they were older than her as well.

That thought lasted as long as it took for her to reach the island this morning with her sect master and her two male fellow disciples of the sect.

That was when she met young men and women that were younger than her with a cultivation base that vastly outstripped her own.

She had managed to count nearly 54 True Lord realm disciples and 6 True King realm, and not a single one of them was as old as she was.

'I can't survive in the realm,' she thought as her fear had overtaken her.

She felt guilty when she realized she was happy when they only allowed her sect to only bring 1 disciple with them. If that were the case, she was not going to be their first choice.

Then, that monster appeared out of nowhere. He was so young, younger than her even to her eyes. And yet, his cultivation base was the greatest thing she had ever witnessed.

He was like a tiger standing in front of little rabbits, and that sent deep dread into her heart.

By the time she realized that she was allowed to enter the secret realm, she had only one thought in her mind.

Find someone and have them help her.

* * * * *

Alex looked at the woman in front of him with a confused face, but he didn't forget to keep a hint of fear on his face.

He hoped that she wasn't smart enough to see through him immediately.

"You want my help, senior Sister?" he asked.

"Yes, would you please help me?" she asked.

"But you are so much stronger than me. What help could this little brother possibly give to you?" he said.

Jiang Zhilan was unsure of what to say to this question. If possible, she wanted to leave him behind. She even thought that she should do just that.

But if she were to come across someone strong then... No, she couldn't leave him. Even if just as a scapegoat, she had to bring him along.

"I'm mostly worried about being overwhelmed by beasts on the way to the Cultivation rooms. If more than a few beasts show up at the same time, it would be better for us to stick together, right?" she asked.

Alex's eyes flashed with an imperceptible shine when he heard that. 'Cultivation rooms?' he thought. It sounded like she knew this place. That could certainly come in handy.

"We can also share the resources we come across. I will give you something if I happened to find it too," she said, seeing that he was still not answering.

"I see. Given how strong sister is, seeing that you haven't attacked me yet, I will choose to believe you," Alex said with a slight bow.

"Good, good!" Jiang Zhilan said, sighing to herself in secret. She was now going to be stuck with a weakling. 'Well, at least I will be a little safer,' she thought.

Then, she noticed Pearl next to Alex's feet. "Oh my god, where did you find this beast?" she asked.

"This is my tamed beast, sister. His name is Pearl," Alex introduced her to Pearl.

"Can I hold him?" she asked, and before Alex could even do anything, she squatted down to grab him.

Alex told Pearl to go with her, and Pearl let her grab him. Neither of them was worried. If a True Master 4th realm woman could hurt Pearl who was in True Lord 5th realm, then there was nothing Alex could possibly do to save him.

"Which way should we go, sister? Please be the guide," Alex said.

"Little brother, I suspect that you want to cultivate right? Then we should head towards the mountain at the center of it all. That mountain has the cultivation rooms. I suspect many of them have gone there already and taken their rooms."

"If we don't hurry, we will miss it," she said and started walking in a certain direction.

They couldn't see any mountain from the dense forest they were in, and yet the girl was walking directly towards the third mountain from what he could see.

So, Alex concluded that she either had been on the mountain top from where she saw the mountain, or she had an artifact on her that told her the direction.

"Sister must know a lot about this secret realm to know about the cultivation rooms," Alex said.

"Eh? No, I just know what is written in our sect records," she said.

"Ah, makes sense," Alex said. "I wish I were from a sect too. I've been a rogue cultivator for quite a while, so I don't know much about the secret realm."

The girl nodded. "Yes, having a knowledge of what is going on and where we are going certainly helps," she said.

The girl took out an interesting-looking circular artifact that looked like a clock. However, it had a single hand, which spun quickly and stopped while pointed at a certain location.

"Yes, we are in the right direction," she said and continued walking.

'That was a compass?' Alex wondered. If it was, then it was quite weird to require Qi to be poured in. 'Perhaps it uses no magnet,' he thought.

Along the way, Alex brought up small talk with the girl, trying to bring out as much information about the world as he could.

He then learned that the 3rd mountain, the one with the cultivation rooms was the mountain at the center of the secret realm.

So, whenever someone entered the secret realm, they would check the direction of the mountain at the center of the realm, and suddenly, the whole map they had with them that was created from previous entries made sense to them.

The Spear Stream sect, being a smaller sect hadn't existed for long enough to have a detailed map and only located a few of the locations on the map.

From what it said, the 2nd mountain that Alex had been heading towards was actually an open training ground with training puppets and such.

Alex did want to check his strength after the training, but he immediately lost interest as soon as he learned what was on the 4th and 5th mountains.

The 4th mountain was a land with plants and beasts of all kinds. Although it was overrun with trees too, apparently there were runes beneath those mountains that gathered a lot more Qi there and thus the beasts and plants could grow to be high ranks.

Alex practically prayed that there was a Blood Spirit Ginseng in that mountain.

He had cursed at himself for so long in the eastern mountains when he had realized that after spending a year there at the very least, there was a chance he could likely lose the Blood Spirit Ginseng that he was looking forward to.

Now that it had been 2 years and some months, he was absolutely sure that the Blood Spirit Ginseng was gone.

He had all but 2 ingredients, and that drove him mad. He didn't want to remain one-handed forever.

The 5th mountain was the one around where the people used to stay, or demons rather.

There were apparently houses all over the mountain and even around it. And most of them had runes around them blocking entry from what Alex heard.

Although that was something he had heard from Shen Jing, who as he had gathered was missing from the Western Continent for the past thousand years. That made trusting his words a little harder due to his lack of credibility.

What if in between that time all the runes had failed and everything had been taken away?

This secret realm was starting to feel more and more useless to him by the moment.

Still, he kept hope in him.

With Pearl in her hands, Jiang Zhilan lead the way forward and Alex followed behind her, waiting for her to lead him to the more interesting locations.

Chapter 644 Change in Direction

The travel to the 3rd mountain took a long time for the two of them.

The mountain itself was about 35 kilometers from where they were, so even when sprinting, it would take them about an hour.

However, Jiang Zhilan was too scared to run away. What if a strong beast was ahead of her and she didn't notice it before it was too late?

What if she met one of those strong disciples from the major clans and sects, and they deemed her an eyesore?

She needed to be careful.

As for Alex, he was torn between wanting to run away and taking his time.

As much as he loved the idea of finding treasures in the houses at the 5th mountain, his attention was primarily on the 4th mountain, which stood behind the 3rd mountain.

If he could enter the mountain and find a Blood Spirit Ginseng...

"No, I can't get my expectations up. That will only lead to disappointment," he thought. "Besides, I might find other treasures while taking my time as well."

Still, he hoped to be a tad bit faster. At the rate they were going, it would take them almost 8 hours to reach the 3rd mountain.

That was just a bit too slow for him.

Just as he was about to ask Jiang Zhilan to speed up, he noticed something in his spiritual sense.

There was a man about 160 meters away from them who was walking in his own direction. His cultivation base was veiled as well as he could and it was hard to tell what his cultivation was exactly.

The man hadn't noticed them, and Jiang Zhilan hadn't noticed him either. But that would change any moment now as the man was walking in a direction that would pass them eventually.

As expected, at about 50 meters away, both the man and the woman noticed each other.

Alex fully revealed his True Disciple realm cultivation base that would be a threat to nobody. The man showed no expression when he saw him.

However, when he sensed Zhilan, his eyes changed a bit.

'He's that weak, huh?' Alex thought. If he was scared of True Master 4th realm then he certainly couldn't be very strong.

The man and Zhilan stared off for a few seconds before Zhilan asked, "Wanna join our group?"

The man shook his head and walked away from the two of them.

Alex was surprised at how easily this was gone. The man didn't want to fight Zhilan right now it seemed.

"Don't worry, little Brother," Zhilan said. "We've only come to the secret realm, so they know we don't have anything valuable on us at the moment. The looting will only begin on the 2nd or 3rd day."

Alex nodded. He understood that. But it was still surprising to see the man not even try. Did he not expect them to have valuable treasures from the outside world?

It was only a few minutes later that a thought came to Alex. They really couldn't take away the items the people in here had.

After all, when they left, they would be outside and at the mercy of the Saints that waited outside.

Unless someone was definitely a rogue cultivator with no backer, no one was going to steal someone else's property.

The treasures from this world, however, that was up to anyone to grasp. So, even if you steal that, no one could say anything at all.

After all, you didn't own it in the first place.

As they continued moving, Zhilan herself brought the idea of moving faster, and Alex nodded.

Zhilan found a weird-looking bird that Alex didn't recognize and wanted to tame.

She brought out a black spear with a green blade on it. As soon as she started using it, her black spear moved like a river while the green blade tried to carve a path out for the river.

Water splashed around with every strike and hurt the bird she was fighting. Her spear art was good. Better than all that he had seen back in the Crimson Empire.

But those were kids with spears, and this was a True expert. The difference in speed and control was vast.

Even if those others had discovered their Spear Intent, seeing actual damage done by a spear was different.

If those kids reached the same cultivation base as her, it was likely they would do so much better than her. But it would take them a long time to do so.

After a couple of minutes of the fight, she realized that it was only different in terms of looks, but was no different than any of the birds that were outside.

As such, she lost interest in the bird and told him to continue moving.

Throughout the journey, Alex went around gathering the uncommon ingredients that he came across.

Zhilan showed some slight suspicions to see if he was lying and doing something else instead. But once he showed her his bronze badge that was in his storage bag, she immediately dropped all suspicions.

In fact, her attitude started changing quite a bit too. The words that sounded fake and hollow were now starting to sound full-on weight and enthusiasm.

"I can't believe you got a bronze badge at such a young age, little brother. You must be a prodigy in alchemy. How does one get better in alchemy as a rogue cultivator? It must be very expensive to you right?"

"Oh, I forgot. You're an alchemist. You folks don't really have a problem with money, do you? You, those formation makers, talisman makers..."

The woman kept on talking about things that basically boiled down to "I'm so jealous of you."

As she spoke, she changed her topic towards the information that she hadn't broken through in nearly 7 months.

Alex frowned. He knew where this topic was going.

"Oh my god, that's right. Little brother, can you make me a pill so that I have an easier way to advance my cultivation base? I would be really happy."

"Oh, and I'm not asking you to do it for free or anything, okay? I'm going to pay you fairly. Let's change our direction and go to the 2nd mountain. There are some artifact forging rooms there, but you should be able to use them the same as Alchemy rooms right?" she asked.

Alex nodded absentmindedly as a thought crossed him. 'Artifact forging rooms?' he thought. She hadn't mentioned that before.

That meant that this woman was keeping more information than he thought.

Also, Alex didn't want to go to the 2nd mountain at all. That would only add time to his travel to the 4th mountain.

That was his main priority right now.

"Sister, I don't have the ingredients to make a pill for you right now," he said. " But if we go to the 4th mountain where there are many plants, I might find some ingredients there."

The girl frowned. It wasn't because of what Alex said, but because if she went to the 4th mountain, then that meant not going to the 3rd mountain, which housed the cultivation rooms.

She desperately wanted to go there. But if she did have a pill before she entered, she would have a great chance at advancing to the next realm.

After all, a single day in those cultivation rooms lasted almost a month.

"Alright, let's go to the 4th mountain," she said, bringing joy to Alex's heart.

From Zhilan, Alex learned that the 4th mountain was about 10 kilometers away from the 3rd mountain. From where they were, at their current speed, it would take them 3 more hours.

Alex was more than happy with this speed.

As the two of them continued walking, in an opening at the front, Alex noticed 2 young women and 1 man fighting against a beast that was double their size.

This beast was an armadillo with a red shell and yellow body. The red shells had spikes growing out of them and it was seriously fighting against the man with the sword.

One of the wounded girls behind her held another wounded girl in her arms.

Ning scanned their cultivation base and it was obvious that they were either from a small sect or normal rogue cultivators.

Aside from the man who was in his True Master 5th realm, the other two girls were in the late True Disciple realm.

Seeing the man fight against an equally strong beast that was focused on defense, Alex knew this match could not be won unless the man had better attacks up his sleeve.

From how bloody he was, it was obvious that he didn't.

However, Alex didn't keep focusing on that. He focused on the three behind those two with fruits that bore strong Earth energy.

One of those fruits almost felt like a Saint Rank fruit.

Zhilan's footsteps slowed down as she heard the sounds of battle. If those that were fighting there were stronger than her, then she definitely didn't need to interfere.

Alex frowned when he saw her cowardice. As if not noticing, he kept walking forward towards the sound.

"What are you doing?" the girl shrieked.

"What? I'm going to see what the sound is all about," he said.

"Are you crazy, what if they are strong?" she asked.

"I mean, I'm just looking. If they are strong, I will run in the opposite direction," he said.

That made sense to Zhilan. So, after a bit of contemplation, she went along as well.

Finally, they reached the opening in the forest where the tree rose and the fight took place below it.

As soon as Zhilan saw that there was nothing to be afraid of here, she smiled and walked ahead.

Alex sighed, but he too walked ahead. However, unlike her, his eyes were only focused on the fruits that littered the tree.

Chapter 645 The 4th Mountain

'The Houndbear Berry,' Alex thought as he looked at the fruit that hung on the 3rd branch from the left of the tree.

All the other fruits in this tree didn't seem mature to him at all. He wondered how that fruit remained up there.

However, it didn't take him long to realize that he could only see and sense the fruit because of his talents. With his eyes, that fruit was nowhere to be seen.

'Was it forgotten here and left to grow as big as it could?' Alex wondered.

The girl that was taking care of the other one noticed the two of them coming and let the man know. The man who was fighting to keep them both safe only had more and more stress on him.

At some point, he was going to make a mistake, and all three of them were going to die. If he tried to fight the newcomer and the beast by himself, that was going to be one of the mistakes.

So, he chose not to make it.

"Run!" he shouted and immediately, the girl who had been prepared, carried the other wounded girl and ran away with the man.

Alex commended them on their lack of hesitation to leave the place.

Since the man and the two women were gone, the armadillo turned towards Zhilan and Alex.

Looking at the bloody body of the beast, Zhilan was exhilarated. This beast's body and cores would sell for a lot. Since it was wounded, it would be easier for her to fight it as well.

Alex, who stood to the side and saw her facial expressions, couldn't help but wonder if this girl by his side even realized that the blood on the beast didn't belong to itself.

Its shell was too strong to be bleeding like that. Before Alex could say anything, she tossed Pearl back to him and dashed towards the beast.

In mere seconds, a fight between the two of them took place.

Alex sighed. He didn't care for this fight. He simply wanted the fruit on top of the tree.

So, leaving behind a duplicate of himself, the hidden Alex freely walked to the tree, got the fruit, and walked back to his place.

Then, he leisurely returned back to his spot, at which moment the duplicate disappeared.

He waited for a few minutes to see the two in front of his fight. Zhilan was one realm lower than the beast, but her spear art made up for the gap.

As such, the two of them were on even standings.

Alex sighed at the fact that it was going to take way longer than he imagined, so he decided to interfere.

An imperceptible Heaven's Impact landed on the armadillo right as it was about to roll up again. Instead of rolling up, it fell to the ground in a simple motion.

When Zhilan's spear strike it its head, the force of the stream behind her strike blasted the armadillo's head open.

The girl looked in shock. She didn't expect to win this easily at all.

"Wow, sister. You are so strong," Alex said from the side.

The girl immediately got rid of her shock and looked behind. "Aren't I?" she asked as she slammed the butt of the staff on the ground.

She quickly dismantled the beast, well... more butchered than dismantled, and gave some of it to Alex once he told her he could use some of those bone marrows and tendons as Alchemy ingredients.

He didn't ask for the beast core, however. That would be practically useless to them.

After they split the fruits 50:50, which Alex thought was her trying to get on his good side now that she knew he was an Alchemist, they walked on.

Very soon, Alex could hear a number of people spar in the distance. 'That must be the training grounds of the 2nd mountain,' he thought. Seeing how the sounds came directly from his left, Alex was sure this was the point where they crossed the 2nd mountain.

Zhilan looked a little to the right as they walked along, worried that if she didn't go to the 3rd mountain now, she wouldn't get the chance again at all.

The weaker people that entered this realm would never even think of gaining anything from here, so they would immediately head to the cultivation rooms to improve their cultivation bases.

As for the stronger people, they would go around and search for the treasures. Only after spending a few days in the 4th and 5th mountains, gathering as many treasures as they could would they return.

Since one could only stay there for a day in total during their visit, it was very much possible for her to find the chance to enter on the 2nd day, even if it were already filled.

If she instead waited for Alex to make her a pill, which she wasn't even sure he could make.

She didn't want to take the chances.

"I'm sorry, little brother, but I really need to cultivate. So you will have to go on alone," she said and turned to dash away.

Before Alex could even say anything, the girl was out of his spiritual range. 'Well that was abrupt,' he thought. But he liked this better anyway.

"Shall we head over to the 4th mountain then?" Alex asked.

"Meow!" Pearl gave a response back affirmatively.

Alex smiled at him and the two of them walked on ahead.

Along the way, Alex met a lot of different people. Now that he was getting close to the center of the realm where everything was, he could see more and more people.

Fortunately, no one was stupid enough to steal from him this early on. Although, a few of them did look at Pearl curiously.

Alex frowned, but he didn't take Pearl back. In fact, he dared those people to come and attack him.

Finally, after another hour of walking, he finally came across a mountain that glowed in many colors. Beasts and plants of every type could be found here.

As if sirens blared in his mind, his ingredients feeling gave him an idea of just how amazing this place must be.

Even as he got closer to the Qi the air got thicker and thicker, making Alex wonder why people didn't just come here to cultivate. Surely the cultivation rooms couldn't be better than this place, right?

Alex saw at least 5 people in his vicinity and got a little scared. There were some here that had spiritual senses. Alex didn't want to give away that knowledge so easily.

So, he pulled back his senses and left normally.

As he felt the pull from the different ingredients, Alex walked towards the mountain with a single thing in mind.

Find a Blood Spirit Ginseng.

Most of the ingredients in this location were True rank ingredients, with some even being Saint rank ingredients.

Alex was surprised that Saint rank ingredients were even available here in the first place, but it didn't take him long to realize why that was.

Alex watched a young girl dash along the mountain and reach a tree with a shining fruit on it.

There was nothing protecting this True rank spirit fruit, so she simply jumped up, grabbed the fruit, and stored it in her storage bag.

With a satisfied expression, she walked away.

Alex looked at her with a stunned expression as she left. He went closer to the tree and sighed.

He reached out his hand and an orange leaf that hung at the top of the tree was plucked from the air and drifted down to Alex's hands.

A Saint Rank ingredient.

Unlike flowers and fruits, leaves, barks, thorns, vines, etc never gave off much energy, so people who passed by could never tell how amazing these ingredients were.

Alex couldn't help but chuckle at that thought. That meant that unless a proficient alchemist with great knowledge of ingredients entered this realm, no one would likely take the less noticeable ingredients from this mountain.

Alex had a chance. So, starting at that moment, he went around the entire mountain searching for the best of the best ingredients that were left behind by the ones that came before him.

Most people who saw him carve out barks or cut vines from a tree gave a weird expression, but some of them couldn't help but show shock at his ability to recognize ingredients.

Alex ignored such gazes and focused on finding the Blood Spirit Ginseng.

Pearl followed beside him as well and from time to time, some beasts would come out to fight Alex, but as soon as they got near, Pearl would fight the beast back.

A few times, Pearl would simply roar, and the beast would run with its tail between its legs.

Alex pat Pearl after every fight, and Pearl wanted to show off his power more and more, so he went around finding stronger and stronger opponents.

Night fell into the land, but that stopped no one from searching for treasures. Even at night, sounds of battle rang from all over the mountain.

Pearl sensed someone and Alex sent out his spiritual sense to see who it was.

It wasn't a who, but a what. A Fox the height of Alex and the length of two Alex slept under a very old tree with not a single leaf on it.

Alex didn't want to bother with the Fox, but Pearl seemed to have sensed his cultivation base and really wanted to fight him.

"Are you sure?" Alex asked, to which Pearl furiously nodded.

"Ok, then let's go."

Chapter 646 Sneak Attack

When Alex arrived next to the tree on the slope, he focused more on the tree itself rather than the fox that slept underneath it.

From what Alex could sense, the fox was around True Lord 7th realm. While that was something that would be hard for him to fight against using only Sword Intent and his physical body, if he added Qi, he would easily win against that beast.

So, he ignored the fox and looked at the tree. The tree looked like a hurricane had passed through here and had stripped it of its leaves.

However, Alex could tell from how smooth the branches were that there were no leaves here in the first place.

What fascinated Alex about this tree were its roots. From what he could tell, they were incredible Saint rank treasures of Wood and Earth energy.

His senses told him it was also an Alchemy ingredient, but without any recipes, these roots would be useless to him in that aspect. As a treasure, however, they would be priceless.

Pearl strolled forward in his tiny form, but as he got closer to the fox, his size grew.

He was now half the size of the fox and ready to fight.

The fox opened its eyes as well and sensed Pearl's cultivation base. At 2 realms below its own, the fox should have thought it would win, but it still stood up to give its all to this fight.

At double the size of Pearl, the fox towered over him, but Pearl looked straight at it with no fear in its eyes.

The fox had fur brown and white.

"Meow!" Pearl cried towards the fox.

"Awooo!" the fox cried in the night.

With not a single second wasted, the two started fighting each other.

The fox tried to bite Pearl who knocked its head aside with a single paw attack. The fox returned a paw attack of its own that landed on Pearl, but with a golden light on its body, it took the attack without moving an inch.

The fox's eyes shined brown in the night as it jumped towards Pearl. Pearl tried to move aside, but for some reason, his movement got rather sluggish all of a sudden.

Alex's heart skipped a beat, thinking Pearl was in danger, but Pearl took the second attack with his golden body. With how much defense it provided, there was likely nothing the fox did that Pearl could take damage from.

'What was that before,' Alex thought about the time when Pearl had gotten sluggish. He had never seen this type of beast on the outside, so he couldn't know what it was either.

It was likely a beast that had grown to become something else by now, or the attack it had just done didn't pass along with the bloodline.

Maybe that was a power it came up on its own as well.

Alex couldn't be sure, but he would have to ask Pearl after this. He spread out his spiritual sense once more to see if the fox would use that technique again, but instead, he noticed someone approaching him from behind.

The man who was coming made no sound at all, giving Alex the understanding that he wasn't here for a good cause.

When Alex sensed his cultivation base, he frowned. True Lord 4th realm.

This was one of the stronger people he had met until now. What was someone like this doing here? Sneaking no less.

Still, True Lord 4th realm wasn't that special to him. He sighed as he grasped his left arm which was just a stump.

2 years ago, he had lost this to that woman whose cultivation base was about the same as his now. Had they waited to attack for 2 more years, Alex would have likely been the one to kill her instead.

He put the thought aside to watch Pearl's match while keeping an eye on the man that had stopped now to watch the fight as well.

Pearl fought hard, but not very hard. Even though the Fox was strong it couldn't produce enough force to hurt Pearl at all.

Pearl still fumbled from time to time when the sluggishness returned, but aside from that, there was nothing that could stop Pearl.

Towards the end of the fight, the fox realized that it couldn't beat Pearl no matter what, so it chose to escape away.

Pearl tried to go after it, but a message from Alex stopped him in his tracks.

'Act like you are tired.'

Pearl didn't know why that was as he had been very focused on his battle, so he decided to sit down and take a few breaths. He was actually a little tired, so this wasn't all that bad.

As expected, after the battle finished, the man rushed out of the shadows and swung a hammer at Alex's head.

Alex saw the attack coming, so he jumped ahead and landed a distance away.

"Tsk, I was hoping to kill you right there while your beast was tired," the new man said.

Alex's eyes raged with hidden fury. He hadn't thought that the man would be so vicious as to sneak behind him with a fatal attack.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Let's forget about introductions, shall we? I'll get straight to the point. I like your beast, so give it to me," the man said.

Alex stared at the man more intently. His cultivation base suggested that he was one of the better younger generation members. The red and green robe with the emblem of a bird perched on top of a deer's antler suggested he was likely from a sect.

Now the only thing Alex wondered was if that sect was big or not. If he attacked him here, would he bring back stronger people?

'Not if he dies first,' Alex thought. He gave no answer to the man's question and instead brought out the normal True rank sword that he had been using for more than 2 years in the forest.

He was used to that sword and could bring out the best Sword Intent with that. After all, the closer you were to a sword, the better your Sword Intent was.

"I see that is your choice," the man said. "But don't think your single beast will be able to defeat me or anything."

The back of his hand, his chest, and the right side of his stomach all shone at once as 3 beasts appeared in front of him.

A Golden Armed Ape of True Lord 5th realm cultivation base.

A Silver String spider of True Lord 6th realm cultivation base.

And finally, a Blue Scaled Lizard of True Lord 6th realm cultivation base.

Along with the man, the 4 of them looked quite terrifying to fight against. If someone normal were here in Alex's place, they would likely run away.

But this was Alex, he yearned for this fight more than he feared it.

"Meow!" Pearl said he wanted to help, but Alex shook his head.

"This is my fight."

Seeing Alex slowly walk ahead with his sword in hand, the young man frowned. He had been sure that Alex would give up on his beast after seeing his beasts, but to think that he would instead come after him.

The man frowned with discernible anger as he shouted, "If you want to die, then Die!"

The Golden Armed ape jumped at Alex from its high ground with both of its hands in the air.

As it fell, it slammed its hands on top of Alex. Alex dashed to the right as the Ape fell and after it slammed the empty ground, he dashed back towards the Ape with his legs that were clad with golden light.

With a single kick, Alex hit the beast so hard that he rattled its brain. The Ape fell to the side, completely unconscious.

"What?" the man cried out in shock.

The spider sent out a white projectile that opened to become a fully formed spider web that would trap him.

A small tongue of fire appeared in front of Alex that exploded with just enough damage to not hurt him. The force of the explosion instead knocked the spider web off its path to elsewhere.

Alex took the opportunity to appear behind the Blue Scaled Lizard and before it could even use any poison on him, Alex kicked the beast with his gold-clad legs.

The lizard flew towards the spider, giving it no opening to attack Alex.

Then, Alex turned toward the man.

In mere seconds since the battle had started, the man had learned that he chose the wrong opponent.

"Y-You... why are you so strong?" the man shouted.

Alex didn't bother giving a reply. His sword shone with a white outline that sprayed white ember from time to time.

Golden light filled the sword in no time as well. Once it was done, he dashed towards the man.

When Alex's sword landed on the man, Alex realized with a shock that he had been blocked.

But it wasn't the man who had blocked him, but rather a barrier that appeared from a talisman.

"No!" the man cried out, but even as he did a silver-white light engulfed him all over.

Alex went back for a second attack to kill this man for sure when he noticed the barrier disappearing, but even as he did, the man vanished in thin air.

Alex looked around in shock as he found no sign of that man anymore.

"Did he... get teleported nearby... or was he sent out of the secret realm without his beasts?"

Chapter 647 Journey to the 5th Mountain

Once Alex dug out some of the roots from the tree, letting the majority be, he left to find better ingredients in the mountain.

The 3 beasts of the man looked awkward and restless as they ran around the mountain like headless chickens.

Alex still couldn't tell from their behavior if the young man was sent outside or not.

Even if he was sent outside, did it really matter? Wouldn't using the monument just send you back inside?

Well, that was one safety net that Alex didn't have, so he had to be careful.

"Do you want their cores?" he asked Pearl.

"Meow!" Pearl said, telling him that they were too weak to be his food and that he wouldn't eat something that he didn't win himself anymore.

Seeing how lacking in will the 3 beasts were, Alex only felt sympathy in his heart and let them be.

As he searched the massive mountain, the sun rose again through the horizon. The chromatic wall to the distance made it hard to see the sun exactly, but the rays of light still scattered throughout the secret realm.

Once it was higher in the sky, it would become clearer.

Alex roamed the mountain throughout the next day as well. He saw more and more people coming to the mountain, so he hid Pearl in his clothes.

He was lucky that a weakling met him last night. Had it been a strong enemy, he would have likely had to flee away.

There weren't any saint realm beasts or even any True King realm beasts in the mountain either, despite the dense qi in this place.

"It seems that after opening every 10 years, not many beasts get to advance fast enough, huh? They get targeted every time," Alex thought.

After plucking a few fruits that others seemed to have missed, Alex sighed to himself.

Night had fallen again, and yet he hadn't managed to find the Blood Spirit Ginseng at all.

At this point, Alex was sure that even if there was one, it was already taken away by someone else.

With a sigh, he decided to leave the mountain. He had spent over 24 hours here already and had gathered everything he could, or everything he was able to.

The third day of the 10 days was approaching and Alex couldn't waste any more time here.

So, he left the mountain and headed northeast.

From what Alex could when he was up on the mountain, the 6th mountain was far to the north, while the 5th was towards the northeast at about 20 kilometers away.

"Let's go see if we can find something interesting there," Alex said. If he didn't, this trip would surely end up becoming a waste of time.

'Although I did get quite a few ingredients for myself so I shouldn't complain,' he thought. 'Also, only 2 days have passed. Who knows what the remaining 8 days will provide me.'

As he walked forward, Alex thought he heard something. Immediately, he extended the spiritual sense he had been keeping hidden for fear of bringing the gaze of the truly strong and noticed three people, a woman and 2 men walking towards him.

From their mismatched robes and lack of a good cultivation base, Alex reckoned those were rogue cultivators that were walking together.

'No, WORKING together,' Alex thought when he noticed their eyes on him. '2 days have passed, people must be going around looting now,' he thought.

Before he could think of anything else, the three of them rushed towards Alex. With their True realm cultivation base, they crossed the 150 meters or so distance in mere seconds.

Surprisingly, they didn't sneak attack. Rogue, they may be, they still held enough honor in them to not attack secretly.

A sword in one of the man's hands, and a spear in the woman's hands pointed at Alex, while the man without a weapon stood behind him, getting one of his attacks ready.

Not a single one of them was a threat to Alex.

"You were quite amazing in the mountain, little brother. I see that you have quite a bit of knowledge about the plants," the man with the sword said.

"I do in fact know quite a bit about plants," Alex said, not moving his eyes from the man while his senses took note of everything else.

The spiritual sense wasn't an omniscient ability. While Alex could see everything around him, without paying attention to the things he could see, not everything would register in his mind.

After the 2 years of constantly using his spiritual sense alone to see, however, paying attention to multiple things at once had become a child's play.

Alex could now pay attention to up to 15 things at once without breaking a sweat, but if he tried to go higher, that drained quite a bit of spiritual energy for some reason.

Just 3 people weaker than him? Paying attention to them was something he could do in his sleep. It was as easy as it came.

"Would you like to share your prizes with us, little brother?" the girl with the spear asked.

Alex smiled. "Do you want to look for yourself, sister?" he asked. As he did, his veil over his cultivation base dropped and the True Master 9th realm cultivation base's aura spread around them like a raging storm.

"Tr-True Lord!" the man behind Alex shouted. That was incorrect, but Alex wasn't going to correct him.

A second later, the aura disappeared, and Alex veiled his cultivation base again. His eyes kept staring at the woman as he said, "You didn't answer me, sister."

The woman immediately dropped to her knees, tossing the spear aside. "Forgive me, senior," she shouted.

The other two men followed suit as well. Alex smirked at them and ordered them, "Get out of my sight."

"Thank you," all three of them said at once and immediately ran away. Within seconds, they were out of his senses.

Alex thought to himself over what had just happened. "Well, that was easy," he said out loud. He wondered if he should show his cultivation base more often. It really stopped a lot of problems.

But then he would lose one of his advantages. Underestimation was one of the best tools he could use against the strong.

In this place filled with the strong, he needed every advantage he could get.

Alex continued walking through the massive forest while talking to Pearl. He asked him how he was trained if Shen Jing took care of him properly and the sort.

Pearl was happy enough to answer everything, and from what Alex understood, Shen Jing had treated Pearl very well. Too well, in fact.

Alex wondered why he didn't treat him like that. Was it because he thought highly of his talents? Why did he even think highly of his talents in the first place?

How exactly did Shen Jing know about his talents? It didn't seem like the creator had told him anything about him.

Alex could only scratch his head in confusion and hope Shen Jing answered his questions after he left the secret realm.

But... Alex had a feeling he simply wouldn't.

He shook his head and continued onwards. Along the way, he met a snake that breathed fire, a lake with pulsing smooth water that healed, a metallic tree with leaves as razor-sharp as any blade.

Pearl easily defeated the snake, eating its core with no hesitation as that was a prize of victory.

Both Alex and Pearl dipped in the water and felt the water smooth out any roughness on him. There were other people in the lake, but most were focused on cleansing themselves.

The water was only capable of healing minor cuts and wounds, but Alex still used it.

As for the metallic tree, Alex trained his sword against it for a while, hoping it would give him some insight on advancing his own sword, but he had been expecting too much of the sword.

Alex took a few of the leaves from the tree and went towards 5th mountain.

Even as he got closer to the 5th mountain, Alex noticed an abundance of people in this place. He wondered if, in the previous 2 days, the number of people in the realm had perhaps increased.

If what he assumed about the secret realm being permanently open for the next 8 days was true, then he could only assume that more and more cultivators might have entered the realm.

In a sense, the big clans and sects that had made the plan to bring only 3 of their disciples had actually shot themselves in the foot with their plan.

As he strolled past a few trees, Alex saw a man enter and come out of a small stone house. As he walked further, he saw more of such houses that were completely open.

Not a minute later, Alex saw the whole mountain that was filled to the top with nothing but houses.

Most of these houses had been open already, and as he would expect, they were empty. Not even pots and pans were left behind.

As Alex moved through the place, he saw more and more people in this location, going up and down the mountain.

He heard the sound of some distance bangs like drums, but he ignored that. For now, he simply went around the place with his spiritual sense completely withdrawn.

As he saw more and more empty houses on the land around the mountain, he could only assume that the ones that hadn't been raided yet had been up the mountain.

So, following the distant banging sound, Alex climbed the mountain.

Chapter 648 House of the Undying

As the distant banging sound got closer, Alex finally started seeing houses that weren't closed at all.

He got curious and went up to one of them, but before he could, another woman came out of nowhere and walked towards it.

Alex didn't stop her at all and simply stopped to see what she would do. As he watched, the girl placed her palm on one of the doors and poured her Qi into it.

The rune on top of the door that looked like a mix of numbers 6 and 2 shined with slightly blue light, and a barrier shone for a split second like a thin film covering the whole house.

Seeing that it didn't work, the girl then took out an Axe from her storage bag and slammed it onto the wall again, creating a loud banging noise.

'Is this what is creating all the banging noise,' Alex thought.

The girl did whatever she could to open the stone door, but she couldn't. So, in the end, she had to leave.

Once she did, Alex finally walked forward to check up on it.

The house looked so poor. The wall didn't look very smooth, instead of like flat stones piled on top of each other. The door to the house was a solid flat rock, that Alex wasn't sure would swing at all.

'Now that I think about it, the other houses were fully open. Did you perhaps have to break it open once the rune stopped working?' he thought.

He was curious how runes worked in the first place, but since no one here had any idea, Alex would have to give up on the door.

'Wouldn't hurt to try,' he thought and placed his palm on the rune that looked like the mix of 6 and 2.

With a thought, he poured in his Qi and the rune glowed yellow.

'Yellow? Not blue?' Alex thought with surprise. He thought something would happen, but after a second, nothing did. The yellow light disappeared and everything returned to normal.

Alex couldn't help but wonder why there was such a difference in the color of the rune between him and the girl. Was it because of his Yang Qi?

That would mean that the girl from before was likely someone proficient in Water Qi.

Alex punched a few times, hoping his physical body would be strong enough, but as expected, something that even the Saint realm cultivators couldn't open, he wouldn't be able to open it either.

He left that house and walked away. The distant banging was getting closer, but it was still a good few hundred meters away. However, by now, he could feel the aura of the people gathering at that location.

"Something big must be going on there for so many people to gather," he thought to himself.

There was some empty house along the way that Alex wanted to check, but without even looking, he could tell that not a single thing inside had been left there when they were raided.

With the closed houses, not budging an inch, Alex had no choice but to go to the very top of the mountain where over a hundred different people were gathered.

The top of the mountain was a plateau with a single house that looked massive compared to the other locations.

The design too looked better than most of the houses he had seen. The stones that made up the walls were uniform and slick. There were wooden frames around the house that had clearly stood the test of time.

And at the center was a stone door with a complicated script that Alex couldn't understand at all.

With not a single tree around them, Alex was surprised at how well kept this place was despite being thousands of years old.

Alex saw disciples of various sects and clans that he didn't recognize as well as rogue cultivators that were curious about the house as well.

As he got closer, he could finally make up the words that were written just above the stone door.

Since it was written in the demon language, Alex could easily read it.

House of the Undying.

'Undying...' Alex thought to himself. He wondered what that was. Was that the name of a person or perhaps an attribute of his? Name of the demons that lived in this realm? A clan? Maybe a sect?

He also wondered if there was perhaps a person inside the house, that hadn't died until now despite how many years had passed. That would truly make them Undying for sure.

As he slowly pushed the sea of cultivators, he reached a location towards the front, from where he could more or less see what was happening in front of the house.

Alex saw about 3 people standing in front of the door while a smaller, but equally important group of nearly 20 people stood behind them.

Of the ones that were going to attack the door, there was a woman with a strong physical body. She wore brown robes and held a large hammer in her hands as if it were weightless.

She ran forward with the hammer and slammed onto the door. A blue film appeared around the door, absorbing all of the damage. Even as it did, it flickered a little, never solid like the ones in the other houses in the mountain.

"Not me either," the girl said and moved away from the door and back to the group of nearly 20 people, standing next to people that wore very

A man stepped forward with golden robes that had a criss-cross pattern all over them. A black sword appeared in his hands which glowed with golden light.

Even as it did, Alex could see white light appear on his sword. Not an outline, but the entire sword was clad in the white light.

Alex couldn't help but feel a sense of envy when he saw that. 'Sword Qi,' he thought to himself.

The man slashed and the golden-white light struck the door. Once again, a blue barrier shined around the place and absorbed all of the damage.

However, still, it flickered a bit like an unhealthy barrier that was just about to end.

The man shook his head. "I told you guys it was useless," he said and went back to the group again.

Finally, the last man moved forward with no weapon in his hands. He wore a red and white robe as if it was originally a white robe that had been ruined by a red rain.

As Alex watched him, the man brought out a vial from his storage bag and undid the stopper. Then, he poured the contents of it out onto his hands.

As the smell of iron drifted across the wind, Alex knew what this was.

Blood.

'The hell?' Alex thought. He couldn't tell why the man was pouring out blood onto his hands. Then, the blood slowly moved out of his palm and floated in the air.

The young man pinched the blood with his thumb and the side of his index finger and pulled on it as he used the index finger of his other hand to aim it at the door.

He stretched it as far as he could, and soon the blood looked like it was taking the shape of an arrow.

With a snap, he let go of the blood arrow, that flew through the air like a normal arrow and struck at the door.

As everyone expected, the blue barrier appeared to block the attack. But also as everyone expected, the barrier still flickered.

"Alright I give up," the young man said and returned back to the group. As the group of 20 or so gathered there Alex couldn't help but look at them in sheer astonishment.

These were the descendants and disciples that defined the young generation of the Luminance empire. These were the strongest of them all.

Alex looked at the big lady with the hammer, the short-haired man with the sword, and finally, the man that used blood.

Every single of these three was in the True King realm. If the target of any of these attacks hadn't been the door, but rather Alex and the others standing here, he had no doubt that the 3 of them could win against them all.

Fear crept up in Alex's heart but quickly overshadowing it was another feeling.

Excitement.

He was excited when he thought of the future when he could reach the same level as these people and fight with them on the same level.

Chapter 649 The Elites

Xu Meirong twisted the pink side of her robe in frustration, leaving the green side be. Her small height would usually be a problem in the crowd, but she had been allowed to stand at the front with the two dozen youths, so she could see the house in front of her without a problem.

Only, she couldn't help but frown when she saw the stone door still unbudging.

House of the Undying was a well-known location in the sect records of the Falling Lotus sect. So, when she heard that its runes were giving up, she couldn't help but come here to reap some benefit.

Now that she was here, she saw that despite everyone attacking the barrier one after another, no one could break through the barrier.

Even the True Kings couldn't break through the barrier, so she, a True Lord 8th realm individual had no chance at all.

She only wished that she could leave and go back to the Life mountain where she could search for alchemy ingredients. She was sure with her knowledge of the plants and beasts, she could make a lot more profit there than what she could make here.

"If no one is able to break through the door then I shall leave," a ghostly sharp-eyed youth of a lanky physique spoke with a deathly voice and started turning around.

"Brother Guo Chiang, you don't have to leave so fast, right? Surely the Broken Ravine sect couldn't have a better place to be than this," Another youth spoke from the side.

"I will be honest, Zhou Ren. I don't like you, so stop calling me brother. As for the rest of you, good luck," the young man said. Then, he turned around and left, his blue and green robes fluttering in the wind.

"Tsk!" the white-robed young man whose sleeves and helms looked like they were burnt with fire said silently.

"He's not really patient, is he?" Song Shing spoke, his blood-stained robes staying eerily still in the midst of the wind.

A girl slammed the butt of her spear on the ground to gather the attention of the group. "I for one, agree with him," she spoke. "There is no way we are opening this door at all. Not in the next 8 days at least," she said.

"Liang Qiu, please stay. You are one of the strongest here, so we would really appreciate your help," Fu Tao spoke from the side.

Fu Tao was in fact the strongest of the people here, but that was only in terms of cultivation base. While cultivation base did help you a bit, in a real fight, he was sure that at least 3 people in here would give him a lot of trouble.

Especially with their unlocked spiritual sense. Since his main attacks were mental attacks, these people would last long enough to fight him.

"And do what?" Liang Qiu asked. "My Heaven's Peak school counts on me to break through to True King 5th realm during these 10 days. If I don't do that, I will have disappointed them."

"I can understand your intention here, sister Liang," He Liwei spoke from the side, his gold and brown robes somehow not catching more attention. "I too am in the same situation and am in a hurry to leave. But let's wait until someone comes soon."

"I believe sister Shen Huan should be bringing him soon," he said.

Liang Qi's eyes shone. "Who's coming?" she asked.

"Tian Ye," Song Shing spoke from the side. Liang Qi frowned when she saw this person. Strong he may be, but she still didn't like how he looked like he would drink blood if given the opportunity.

Still, if Tian Ye was coming, then she would wait.

Suddenly, a loud bang rang the surrounding, and everyone turned to look towards the door. A pale blue light flickered in front of it as it blocked the attack.

Han Daiyu turned around with her giant hammer hefted on her shoulders with her half-sleeved robes showing her big muscles.

She looked to the group who had just turned around and asked, "What? I got bored of waiting. If you guys want to help keep me company, then come along."

"Sister Daiyu... that's... never mind," someone from the Han family wanted to speak up towards their senior sister, but they knew how much she loved challenges.

Keeping her distracted with the door was likely better lest she went around the crowd, randomly looking for challenges herself.

Lu Yan stood in the small group with a green veil on her face and she softly spoke with a man with purple robes.

The purple in the robe started with dark purple at the bottom and as it went up, it lost its saturation, slowly changing to softer and softer purple until it was fully white.

There were 2 other young folks behind this young man but those two were surprisingly acting like guards who protected this young man rather than be his peers.

From time to time, Lu Yan would bow a little as she spoke to this young man.

Fu Tao frowned a little when he saw her speak to the young man, but he couldn't do anything at all. Despite being in the True Lord realm, that man was still a prince of the empire. So, he had the greatest saying in all of this place.

Alex looked at all of this with a keep eye while he waited for whoever this Tian Ye fellow was.

He took what he heard into memory and remembered the names of the ones that were the best of the young generation.

He recognized Fu Tao and Lu Yan from the time they were in Crimson Empire. Aside from them, he only learned the name of the other people.

Song Shing, from the Song clan, with the blood technique.

Shen Huan, from the Shen clan, who was absent at the moment.

Jin Tengfei, from the Jin clan, with the Sword Qi that Alex wanted too.

Han Daiyu with her large hammer from the Han Clan.

Zhou Ren with the white burnt robes from the Zhou clan.

Together with Fu Tao from the Fu clan, and Lu Yan from the Lu clan, these were some of the best descendants of the 7 great families of the Luminance empire.

The 8th honorary great family of colors, the Wei clan was the Royal family of the empire. If Alex had to guess, given their association with the color purple, it was likely the man speaking with Lu Yan.

He also learned a bit about the other sects as well.

The ghostly youth that left at the beginning was from the Broken Ravine sect.

The girl with the spear was from Heaven's Peak school.

The girl in pink and green was from the Falling Lotus sect.

And finally, the guy He Liwei was from the Glory's Edge sect.

Aside from that, there were other sect disciples or disciples of those same sects and clans as well, and Alex put their information in his head as well.

However, he didn't bother giving much thought to their information.

Even as everyone waited, instead of the crowd dispersing, more and more added to it.

Soon, there were nearly 200 of them here. Alex even saw disciples from the big sects and clans in the group now, but they didn't dare to go mix in with the elites at the front.

'Did those saint elders from the elite sects and clans go to get more of their disciples?' he wondered. That had to be it. If everyone was getting a chance to enter, they would be stupid to let this opportunity go by only sending 3 each.

Just as he was thinking that the crowd parted as two figures walked ahead.

The elite group turned their head around and suddenly relief appeared on their faces.

The woman that strolled upfront was wearing a blue robe that looked like water splashing across each other. She had a casual expression as she walked back to the elite group.

Behind her, a young man walked with a thunderous roar on every step. It felt like the ground shuddered as he appeared.

Alex looked in shock as he watched the young man in cyan robes walk forward and join the elite group.

Even as he did, a single question ran through Alex's mind.

'How the hell can a cultivator be this fat?'

Chapter 650 Test at the Door

Alex looked at the fat young man walking up to the front crowd. The young man in the cyan robes was about 170 cm tall but looked like he weighed nearly 120 kg.

He was unquestionably fat, which for a cultivator was a hard task given that most didn't have to eat at all after entering just the Organ Tempering realm.

The Qi they cultivated on a daily basis alone was able to sustain them.

So, Alex couldn't help but wonder why this young man was fat at all.

Tian Ye's round, chubby face stared at the lot in front of him. "Have you all been waiting for me?" he asked.

Alex was surprised to see that he was able to be so direct, despite only being in the True lord 5th realm. 'What gives him such confidence?' he wondered.

"Brother Tian, you're here," He Liwei said from the side and went out to greet Tian Ye.

Tian Ye gave a slight nod to everyone and didn't say anything. The only one he gave a more than a passing glance was the young man in the purple robes.

To the one who Alex suspected was from the Royal family, he gave a deep bow.

"Fellow Daoists," Tian Ye spoke. "I'm sorry, but I have some other tasks to perform, so let's hurry this up okay?"

He then brought out 3 talismans from his storage bag and turned to the crowd.

"I need someone to help me hit the—"

Before he could say anything, a loud bang appeared from behind him. He slowly turned his head to see Han Daiyu's hammer resting on her shoulder and a blue shield on the surface of the door.

"Aah! I needed to record that," he shouted suddenly. "Sister Daiyu, can you hit it again?"

"What?" Han Daiyu had not been paying attention to Tain Ye at all.

"Can you hit the door again?" he asked.

"Oh, you didn't have to ask me. I was already going to do it again," she said and raised her hammer before slamming it onto the door at full force.

At the same time, the young fat man used the talisman as if he had done this a million times.

The talisman took in his Qi and flew to the wall right where the hammer hit it.

The talisman did nothing to stop the attack at all. At the same time, the young fat man once again sent out his second talisman to the wall of the barrier a little far away from where it had been hit.

Finally, he used the last talisman in his hands to record the visual of what he had seen.

"Sister Daiyu, step back please," Tian Ye said. He knew how she was. Everyone did. If left alone, she would try to hit the barrier again.

Being a body cultivator, she thought of every physically taxing task as training and kept doing it as long as he could.

"Why do you want me to stop?" she asked.

"For test purposes, sister," Tian Ye said.

He quickly grabbed the two talismans on the wall and looked at them. These were one-time-use talismans that noted the strength of one's attacks, and the strength of a barrier.

He didn't do more than look at it once though. For now, they were very useless as there was nothing to base this reading off of.

It was hard for him to stop Han Daiyu from attacking the door again, but with the help of others, he did.

Han Daiyu grumbled a little as slowly an hour passed.

Finally, Tian Ye stirred up. He took out 3 other talismans and sent one flying to the door, another to the side, and finally kept one for recording.

"Sister Daiyu, can you do exactly the same attack you did last time?" he asked.

The girl nodded and attacked. Once again the blue barrier flickered.

Tian Ye immediately grabbed the two talismans and compared their reading with the previous ones.

From what he could see, the strength of Daiyu's attack was practically the same.

However, the strength of the barrier… was very different. He looked at the reading between the two and did some mental calculations.

"Woah!" he said out loud, catching the attention of everyone here.

"What is it?" Liang Qiu asked from the side. Her attention was entirely on him.

"If… if my calculations are not wrong… then this barrier will open in 10, at most 11 days," he said. "The barrier is continuously weakening even as time goes on and surely in the next 10 days, it will be gone."

Instead of being happy, every single one on the plateau frowned. 10 days… they didn't have 10 days.

The third day was already half done. At most, they had maybe a bit more than 6 days.

"Can we not weaken it ourselves?" Jin Tengfei asked.

"I don't know. That's what I'm going to test now," he said and turned around to Han Daiyu.

"Sister Daiyu, can you do me the favor of hitting that door the same way for 60 times in the next hour?" he asked.

"One attack every minute?" she asked. "I can do that."

She held her hammer tight in her grip, and once again attacked the door again.

As the blue light flickered and died down, she held it up again and was about to attack.

"Sister Daiyu, wait. Not right now. Spare a minute or so in between," Tian Ye said.

"What? I can't do it all at once?" she asked.

"I want a close to normal environment of how it would go if we were to need to do this," he said.

"Sigh, alright," she said and let her hammer fall to the floor. With a small bang, the hammer sent off dust into the air. Only then did Alex realize just how heavy the hammer was.

'I should be able to carry it, right?' he thought.

As they waited for the hour to pass while Han Daiyu hit the wall once every minute, Alex wondered if he was wasting time here.

But since he was so close to getting more answers from this Tian Ye guy, he decided to wait the extra hour. If there was something that would help him enter this place and get some sort of benefit, then it was better to wait.

The hour finally passed and they did the test one more time. This time, after being beaten with the hammer for an hour continuously, Tian Ye wanted to see how much worse the barrier had become.

"Hmm…" he said as he looked at the readings.

The whole crowd looked quietly as Tian Ye closed his eyes and calculated the reading.

"The attacks do have an effect on it," Tian Ye said as a passing remark. However, everyone who heard it suddenly had their breathing come to a halt.

"It… it helps?" Fu Tao asked suspiciously.

"Yes," Tian Ye said. "It does."

"By how much?" Xu Meirong asked curiously.

"If… if we were to do what Sister Daiyu just did for as long as we can, then we can likely get the stone door to open in 4, if not 5 days," Tian Ye said.

"5 days?" everyone was immediately shocked.

That was a lot better than the 11-day estimate that had come prior to this.

Immediately, everyone started getting happy. The Elite group cheered loudly, and the emotions passed to the rest of the crowd as well who quickly cheered.

"Stop, stop, stop," Zhou Ren shouted and the entire celebration came to a staggering halt.

"What's wrong, Zhou Ren?" Liang Qiu asked.

"I had one question that I hope brother Tain Ye can help settle," he said.

"Uh, sure. Ask," Tian Ye said.

"You said that it will get weaker as the time goes on, right?" Zhou Ren asked.

"Yes, I did," Tian Ye said. "Ah, I see where you are going with this question. You want to ask me if I calculated the weakness of the barrier as a factor of the days required, don't you?"

A collective gasp rang through the crowd as not many had thought of this in their immediate celebration.

"Ah, that is exactly it, brother Tian. You are incredible to have thought that far," Zhou Ren said. "So, does that mean you calculated it, or should we expect a faster time for the opening?"

Everyone from the group looked intently at Tian Ye, waiting for the answer.

"I didn't calculate that into the estimate I gave just now," Tian Ye said. He immediately added, "Not because I forgot, but rather because it's useless."

"I'm not sure how runes exactly work as they are still a mystery when not used through a talisman paper, but as far as I know, it works similarly to a formation."

"Meaning, these runes on the door are directly connected to a power source, which I believe is a miniature Saint rank spirit vein underneath it."

"That means the barrier itself is at Saint rank. So, no matter how much it takes hits, you are never going to affect it with your current cultivation base," Tian Ye said.

"What is actually happening to the runes right now is that since it's not properly maintained, the runes' connection to the spirit vein is slowly decaying."

"It's already on its last leg, but if you do continue to hit it, you can make the gradual decay faster, thus opening the door in about 5 days," Tian Ye finished.

Han Daiyu looked at the door and said, "So… I just need to keep hitting it right?"

Chapter 651 Test at the Door

The elite group started deciding on who would attack the door and who would go around doing their own thing, but Alex didn't bother to wait around to see their plan.

The moment he learned that he had the next 4 days free, he decided to go around the Demon Realm and see the places he hadn't visited yet.

The current location he was heading towards was the 6th mountain to the north. For some reason, he could only see rogue cultivators on his way to the 6th mountain.

As he walked along, he couldn't help but wonder what the purpose of the 6th mountain was.

The 1st mountain to the south was a library that likely held books and techniques for the demons that lived here.

The 2nd mountain from there was the Training and Crafting mountain. It was a location where people could go to train their techniques or create artifacts from what he could understand.

Since the demons weren't known for making pills or formations, Alex suspected there was no such room there at all.

The 3rd mountain was the Cultivation mountain. From what he had heard, it had rooms there for people to cultivate. He had heard people saying that time slowed down in those rooms, but he wanted to see that for himself before believing it.

The 4th mountain was the Resource mountain. It was where the different plants and animals were reared and given a dense Qi environment to grow properly.

Finally, the 5th mountain was where the demons lived. Those demons had to be strong as each of the houses was protected with Saint rank runes.

Now, Alex couldn't help but frown as he thought of what was possibly left for a hiding clan to have.

They had enough resources to do whatever they wanted here. Had places to live and cultivate, as well as train and craft. They even had an entire mountain dedicated to just a single library that wasn't even very large.

'The leader's mountain? But the house from back there looked like that would be it. Then... a place to pray? I can't think of anything,' he thought.

He decided to stop thinking about it as he would learn very soon.

When he reached the peak, he would know for sure.

As he went further along, he saw the disappointed looks of the people returning.

Someone even told him not to bother going there and that the door was locked.

That only increased Alex's curiosity. He quickened his pace and reached the mountain in just the next hour.

There weren't many people here, just a few rogue cultivators who were returning down from the mountain.

Even from where he was, Alex could see a small stone door halfway up the mountain which was where these people had likely been too.

Alex walked up the mountain, ignoring the other people's disappointed looks, not letting it bother him at all.

When he reached halfway up the mountain and saw the stone door, he stayed back and let the young man there do what he wanted.

The stone door was a single stone slab, that seemed to be placed right where the room was carved into the mountain itself.

It was about 4 meters tall and 2 meters wide, with a bunch of runes on it that were a little more complex than the ones he saw on the houses back in the 5th mountain.

The young man placed his palm on the door and blue light filled the rune. Then, the young man struck it with a sword, in which case the blue barrier appeared around the door.

This barrier was nothing like the flickering barrier from the House of the Undying. This one was perfectly healthy and would continue to be so for days to come.

Once the young man left, and Alex realized he was alone, he walked up to the door and placed his hands on the rune just like that young man did.

Then, he passed along his Qi into the rune, and it glowed yellow.

'Why is it glowing yellow, if it glowed blue for that young man?' he thought.

He would have assumed that it was because the young man had a Water attribute to his Qi just like he did with the young woman who had tried to open a door, but Alex had gone beyond that thinking.

Now that he realized that the barrier itself was blue, he gave up on the thought of it being related to the person's Qi, but to something about the rune itself.

'Why is it shining Yellow though?' he thought. He decided to see if the barrier was blue when he hit it too. So, he punched the door with his only hand.

As expected, a blue barrier spread around the door.

"Wait, so it is blue? What?" None of this was making sense to Alex at all.

He sent out his spiritual sense but it was blocked by the barrier. He had expected as much.

He thought for a moment and decided to test what happened if he hit the door while it glowed yellow.

As he placed his only hand on the door and poured in his Qi, he struck the stone door as hard as he could with his feet.

BANG!

"Argh!" Alex fell to the floor as he clutched his foot with his only hand as he writhed in pain.

When he looked down, he saw blood spilling through his shoes. He quickly took it off and checked his feet.

The toes on his right foot were completely mangled.

"Meow?" Pearl cried out from his robes in worry. "Are you okay?" drifted onto Alex's mind.

"Yes, I'm fine," Alex said while he gritted his teeth. He hadn't expected to feel such sudden pain.

He then quickly took a healing pill and the toes on his foot immediately healed, relieving him of the pain.

Then, he looked back at the door in shock.

The barrier on the door had not appeared at all, and there was a dirty smudge on the door itself where Alex had hit it.

He had made direct contact with the stone even when he was trying to hit it.

His eyes went wide. Did the barrier not work because he was pouring in his Qi?

He decided to try once again. This time, he hit a little less hard.

As his foot hit the stone door, he could tell that it was working. He was at the very least getting rid of the barrier.

However, the stone door itself was super strong, to the point that he couldn't imagine breaking the door until his body reached Saint realm.

'Just what sort of stone is it made up of?' he thought as he hit the stone again.

Dirt fell on Alex's head, which he cleared from his hair. Then, he looked up to where the dirt had fallen from.

There was writing on the top of the stone door that Alex hadn't noticed before. he tried to remove it with his hands, but a barrier appeared.

Alex was confused. He placed his hands on the door, but no barrier appeared there. But when he tried to touch outside, the barrier popped up to stop him.

It didn't take Alex very long to go around testing how far the barrier extended to, before realizing that it was a barrier that covered the entire upper half of the mountain.

He didn't have evidence to support his theory, but he was sure that if he were to dig through the ground towards the bottom of the mountain, he would surely find a barrier halfway through as well.

This mountain... it was likely more important to the entire realm than any other, even the House of the Undying.

Alex circled back to the stone door and placed his hand on the barrier, then started hitting the door continuously.

Since he couldn't touch through the barrier, he wanted to use the vibrations of the kicks to dislodge some of the dirt in the writing to make it clear.

'If only I could use my spiritual sense,' he thought.

As the dirt was more and more dislodged, Alex could finally make out the outlines of the word.

'North' it read.

"North?" Alex looked at the name weirdly. He looked around the word and saw if he missed something.

"Did they really just name the mountain in the north, North?" Alex thought. "They could have at least named it after what its purpose is."

"Hmm... or was this on purpose and they wanted to hide the purpose of the mountain?" he thought.

That certainly seemed plausible. If the Library mountain's door was named 'South', people wouldn't be able to tell what it was for until it opened up.

'They must have been prepared to have intruders then,' Alex thought.

'I wonder what they were trying to hide here,' he thought. 'I wish I could see insi—'

"Oh wait, maybe I can," he thought and quickly placed his hand on the door. Once the rune glowed yellow, he tried to send his spiritual sense inside.

To his disbelief, it did. His spiritual sense entered the door and into the room.

From what he saw with his sense, it was a long and wide hallway that led all the way to... Somewhere.

The hallway was longer than his senses could reach, unfortunately. In the end, Alex was forced to stop as it yielded no result.

He waited around the mountain for a little longer, but nothing seemed to be working anymore.

However, he did gain some ideas on what he could do in the houses back in the 5th mountain.

So, with renewed vigor, he walked back and left the North mountain.

Chapter 652 The North Mountain

The elite group started deciding on who would attack the door and who would go around doing their own thing, but Alex didn't bother to wait around to see their plan.

The moment he learned that he had the next 4 days free, he decided to go around the Demon Realm and see the places he hadn't visited yet.

The current location he was heading towards was the 6th mountain to the north. For some reason, he could only see rogue cultivators on his way to the 6th mountain.

As he walked along, he couldn't help but wonder what the purpose of the 6th mountain was.

The 1st mountain to the south was a library that likely held books and techniques for the demons that lived here.

The 2nd mountain from there was the Training and Crafting mountain. It was a location where people could go to train their techniques or create artifacts from what he could understand.

Since the demons weren't known for making pills or formations, Alex suspected there was no such room there at all.

The 3rd mountain was the Cultivation mountain. From what he had heard, it had rooms there for people to cultivate. He had heard people saying that time slowed down in those rooms, but he wanted to see that for himself before believing it.

The 4th mountain was the Resource mountain. It was where the different plants and animals were reared and given a dense Qi environment to grow properly.

Finally, the 5th mountain was where the demons lived. Those demons had to be strong as each of the houses was protected with Saint rank runes.

Now, Alex couldn't help but frown as he thought of what was possibly left for a hiding clan to have.

They had enough resources to do whatever they wanted here. Had places to live and cultivate, as well as train and craft. They even had an entire mountain dedicated to just a single library that wasn't even very large.

'The leader's mountain? But the house from back there looked like that would be it. Then… a place to pray? I can't think of anything,' he thought.

He decided to stop thinking about it as he would learn very soon.

When he reached the peak, he would know for sure.

As he went further along, he saw the disappointed looks of the people returning.

Someone even told him not to bother going there and that the door was locked.

That only increased Alex's curiosity. He quickened his pace and reached the mountain in just the next hour.

There weren't many people here, just a few rogue cultivators who were returning down from the mountain.

Even from where he was, Alex could see a small stone door halfway up the mountain which was where these people had likely been too.

Alex walked up the mountain, ignoring the other people's disappointed looks, not letting it bother him at all.

When he reached halfway up the mountain and saw the stone door, he stayed back and let the young man there do what he wanted.

The stone door was a single stone slab, that seemed to be placed right where the room was carved into the mountain itself.

It was about 4 meters tall and 2 meters wide, with a bunch of runes on it that were a little more complex than the ones he saw on the houses back in the 5th mountain.

The young man placed his palm on the door and blue light filled the rune. Then, the young man struck it with a sword, in which case the blue barrier appeared around the door.

This barrier was nothing like the flickering barrier from the House of the Undying. This one was perfectly healthy and would continue to be so for days to come.

Once the young man left, and Alex realized he was alone, he walked up to the door and placed his hands on the rune just like that young man did.

Then, he passed along his Qi into the rune, and it glowed yellow.

'Why is it glowing yellow, if it glowed blue for that young man?' he thought.

He would have assumed that it was because the young man had a Water attribute to his Qi just like he did with the young woman who had tried to open a door, but Alex had gone beyond that thinking.

Now that he realized that the barrier itself was blue, he gave up on the thought of it being related to the person's Qi, but to something about the rune itself.

'Why is it shining Yellow though?' he thought. He decided to see if the barrier was blue when he hit it too. So, he punched the door with his only hand.

As expected, a blue barrier spread around the door.

"Wait, so it is blue? What?" None of this was making sense to Alex at all.

He sent out his spiritual sense but it was blocked by the barrier. He had expected as much.

He thought for a moment and decided to test what happened if he hit the door while it glowed yellow.

As he placed his only hand on the door and poured in his Qi, he struck the stone door as hard as he could with his feet.

BANG!

"Argh!" Alex fell to the floor as he clutched his foot with his only hand as he writhed in pain.

When he looked down, he saw blood spilling through his shoes. He quickly took it off and checked his feet.

The toes on his right foot were completely mangled.

"Meow?" Pearl cried out from his robes in worry. "Are you okay?" drifted onto Alex's mind.

"Yes, I'm fine," Alex said while he gritted his teeth. He hadn't expected to feel such sudden pain.

He then quickly took a healing pill and the toes on his foot immediately healed, relieving him of the pain.

Then, he looked back at the door in shock.

The barrier on the door had not appeared at all, and there was a dirty smudge on the door itself where Alex had hit it.

He had made direct contact with the stone even when he was trying to hit it.

His eyes went wide. Did the barrier not work because he was pouring in his Qi?

He decided to try once again. This time, he hit a little less hard.

As his foot hit the stone door, he could tell that it was working. He was at the very least getting rid of the barrier.

However, the stone door itself was super strong, to the point that he couldn't imagine breaking the door until his body reached Saint realm.

'Just what sort of stone is it made up of?' he thought as he hit the stone again.

Dirt fell on Alex's head, which he cleared from his hair. Then, he looked up to where the dirt had fallen from.

There was writing on the top of the stone door that Alex hadn't noticed before. he tried to remove it with his hands, but a barrier appeared.

Alex was confused. He placed his hands on the door, but no barrier appeared there. But when he tried to touch outside, the barrier popped up to stop him.

It didn't take Alex very long to go around testing how far the barrier extended to, before realizing that it was a barrier that covered the entire upper half of the mountain.

He didn't have evidence to support his theory, but he was sure that if he were to dig through the ground towards the bottom of the mountain, he would surely find a barrier halfway through as well.

This mountain… it was likely more important to the entire realm than any other, even the House of the Undying.

Alex circled back to the stone door and placed his hand on the barrier, then started hitting the door continuously.

Since he couldn't touch through the barrier, he wanted to use the vibrations of the kicks to dislodge some of the dirt in the writing to make it clear.

'If only I could use my spiritual sense,' he thought.

As the dirt was more and more dislodged, Alex could finally make out the outlines of the word.

'North' it read.

"North?" Alex looked at the name weirdly. He looked around the word and saw if he missed something.

"Did they really just name the mountain in the north, North?" Alex thought. "They could have at least named it after what its purpose is."

"Hmm… or was this on purpose and they wanted to hide the purpose of the mountain?" he thought.

That certainly seemed plausible. If the Library mountain's door was named 'South', people wouldn't be able to tell what it was for until it opened up.

'They must have been prepared to have intruders then,' Alex thought.

'I wonder what they were trying to hide here,' he thought. 'I wish I could see insi—'

"Oh wait, maybe I can," he thought and quickly placed his hand on the door. Once the rune glowed yellow, he tried to send his spiritual sense inside.

To his disbelief, it did. His spiritual sense entered the door and into the room.

From what he saw with his sense, it was a long and wide hallway that led all the way to... Somewhere.

The hallway was longer than his senses could reach, unfortunately. In the end, Alex was forced to stop as it yielded no result.

He waited around the mountain for a little longer, but nothing seemed to be working anymore.

However, he did gain some ideas on what he could do in the houses back in the 5th mountain.

So, with renewed vigor, he walked back and left the North mountain.

Chapter 653 Diary

Alex walked back to the 5th mountain. By the time he was there, the sun had set already and night had fallen.

The open sky was filled with dozens o bright stars and many more that twinkled. The bright half-moon hung in the sky, illuminating the far reaches of the Demon realm.

Even though night had fallen, the demon realm was still restless. The sound of distant bangs told Alex that there were people at the top of the mountain, still attacking the door with everything they had.

'Well, keep on working guys. I'll see if I can reap some benefit from you,' he thought to himself and went up the mountain to find a house that wasn't opened yet.

There were still a few cultivators here and most of the elite ones were likely just around too, so Alex didn't dare use his spiritual sense to search for anything.

Not even halfway up the mountain, Alex found a decently large house with its door intact.

When he lightly punched the door, a solid blue barrier appeared like a film around the house to protect it.

Since those barriers could withstand attacks from the Saint realm, Alex didn't even think of attacking it twice.

He slowly turned around to see if anyone was looking at him. Once he was absolutely sure that no one was looking at him, he placed his palm on the door and poured in his Qi.

Once again, the rune of the door glowed yellow. Alex sent out his spiritual sense and bypassed the door to slowly peep inside the house.

The house, was as he had expected just a single room. There was nothing of value in there from what he could see. Even if it was, Alex doubted it could have lasted so many years.

There was a bed, a table, a chair, and a bookshelf from what he saw. There was a metal sword to the side of the shelf, but from his senses, he could see that it was just a light tap away from crumbling.

It didn't seem like a weapon that was meant to last. Even if it was, it was likely not a very good one then.

The bed was messy, with part of the wood rotting all the way through. The chair and the table were the same as well.

The shelf to the side seemed to have lasted a little longer, but it too seemed to be rotting at the sides too.

Alex couldn't tell if the rotting speed was slow or fast. For one thing, it was only rotting halfway despite being here for so many years.

For another, it was likely a strong wood from one of the better trees in that forest that wouldn't succumb to rot so easily.

'That doesn't help me at all,' he thought and looked through the other things. He checked the bed, pillow, table, and chair but found nothing. There were many items on top of them, but time had taken everything.

On the shelf, however, there was still a book in it. For some reason, Alex couldn't read it at all.

'A book that my spiritual sense won't bypass?' he thought. Now he really wanted to check it.

"What do I do?" he thought for a moment. Then, an idea struck him.

'No way a random home can have the same strength as a door that leads to the entire mountain right?' he hoped and prepared to hit the door.

He looked around to make sure there was no one there. There were likely people around and would hear him if he hit it too hard, so he needed to time the kick right.

He waited for the banging noise from the top of the mountain to fall into a rhythm for him to learn.

Then, timing it perfectly, he hit the stone door at the same time someone attacked it on top of the mountain.

~CRACK~

The stone cracked and Alex didn't feel any hint of pain. This was not a very strong stone from what he could see.

Although, it would surely still be considered a treasure to not get destroyed by a True Lord 1st realm cultivator's attack.

Alex hit the door twice again and only then did the stone crumble and fell down. When the run was destroyed, the barrier disappeared as well.

Before anyone could realize what had happened, Alex rushed in, grabbed the book, and rushed out.

He also grabbed one of the pieces of stone from the door and walked away from the location. Not long after, a few rogue cultivators came to see what had happened.

Despite timing the hits with the attack from the top of the mountain, they were still not fooled at all.

'Thank god I walked out,' he thought.

People immediately started shouting and telling people that someone broke open a door that was previously locked.

Some called Alex lucky, while some just believed that the barrier was on its last leg.

Still, a lot of people were motivated to see if they too would get lucky like him.

"Tsk!" Alex thought to himself. With this many people occupying the mountain and more likely being called here, he wouldn't be able to try out the same thing here again.

"I will have to do it some other time after the people here realize that they won't be able to do it on their own," he thought and left to go see what was happening at the plateau.

When he saw Han Daiyu, Fu Tao, Lu Yan, and a few others still attacking the door one after another, Alex understood that he had some time to spare.

He felt the Qi in his body start to pile up a bit and thought, "it's about time I breakthrough."

So, he left the mountain and walked towards the 3rd mountain, the Cultivation mountain.

Along the way, Alex took out the stone piece from his storage ring and looked at it.

"This certainly isn't an ordinary stone," he thought to himself. "Since a rune was carved onto it, I wonder if stones are to runes what metals are to formations."

"No, that wouldn't make sense," he immediately thought. "Formations can be carved onto stones too."

"Hmm, then maybe the reason is just to have a sturdy door," he thought and tossed away the piece of stone.

Then, he took out the book from his ring.

The front of the book was stuck to the rotting side of the shelf, so a few of the front pages were rotted away as well. Using his spiritual sense, Alex realized that there was no seal or anything in the book. It was the material itself that stopped him from doing so.

The remaining part of the book was legible, so Alex flipped it to read in the moonlight.

[My eyes still haven't healed. I know I was lucky to be chosen for this and everyone expects great things from me, but I don't know how much help I can be until I can actually see.]

"It's a diary?" Alex looked with a surprised face.

The demon language was easy for Alex to read as it was the normal language of this world. So, he continued reading.

It looked like the diary of a demon who lived inside this realm. There were a few unimportant information like when the person broke through or how long he cultivated that day.

So, Alex focused on the important ones only.

[I hear the war outside is reaching an end soon, mostly since we are losing. I don't want to die, but we might be exterminated.]

[I killed a human today. I vividly remember as his blood melted the snow beneath his dead body. I can't believe I had it in me.]

[I hear the young lord nearly died when he was ambushed by 4 humans on the outside today. Thankfully, he is Undying.]

[My eyes reached the next level today, and I'm really happy about it.]

[I hear the lord is taking in a lot of those little fellas into his house. I wonder what he's doing with them.]

[News says that we are reaching the humans for some sort of truce. I hope it happens. I have fought the humans too many times and I hate fighting again and again endlessly.]

[I lost my left leg in the fight today. The enemy hid under the frozen lake and sneak attacked me. I'm a little saddened.]

[Good news. The young lord might be passing on his techniques to one of us. I will have to try extra hard to get it.]

[The young lord took heavy damage to his spirit today. He has gone to closed cultivation and likely won't come out until he has broken through to the next realm. He says that is the only way for him to live.]

[Truce seems to have been met, and we demons are definitely on the losing side of it. But since we get to live, I don't really mind. I just hope these new rulers aren't evil humans that hate the demons.]

[We are leaving today. The young lord still hasn't left the timeless palace. I hope he successfully breaks through.]

Alex turned the page, but there was nothing else written besides that. That was the end of the book.

Who was this person? What happened after he left? Who was the young lord? Did the young lord ever survive?

Many questions moved around in his head, but there wasn't nearly any information in the diary as he had expected.

Still, he got to hear the thoughts of someone who was present during the war between the demons and the humans. So, Alex considered that a win.

With a sigh, he put the book back into his ring and continued on his way to the 3rd mountain.

Chapter 654 Waiting for a spot

Alex slowly walked through the forest with Pearl by his side. With Pearl's insistence, he went around searching for a worthy enemy for Pearl and watched as Pearl annihilated his enemy.

"Yeah, you need someone stronger than that. Or at least someone with better skill and intelligence to use them," Alex said to Pearl who was busy chewing on his victory prize.

"Meow!" Pearl sent information to Alex's mind that shocked him a little. "You can break through again? When was the last time you did it?" he asked.

"A month ago," Pearl replied.

"Hmm... that is a little fast. I'm not su-oh wait, the 3rd mountain's training room each last for a month. If we can get a place there, you can break through towards the end of it," Alex said.

Pearl nodded happily.

'Geez, only 3 years old, and already close to True Lord 6th realm. He might end up being unstoppable in the future soon,' Alex thought. Then, they continued walking at their leisurely pace.

The 4th mountain had been stripped empty, and the 5th mountain was stolen from already.

Since the 2nd mountain was a training mountain that most cultivators didn't care about, almost all of them were present in the 3rd mountain and it was filled to the brim.

Alex arrived here as the sun rose from the east, and he couldn't help but be surprised at just how many people there were in this place.

And they were all gathered by the foot of the mountain too. A few people did go up, but from what Alex could see, there wasn't anything up there.

At least, the diary didn't mention it. It did mention the cultivation mountain and how the owner of the diary went there once a week to cultivate in the mountain.

Alex was sure after reading that line that the cultivation rooms were likely carved into the mountain itself.

From what he could see now, that was correct.

"Are the rooms all occupied?" he wondered when he saw the many people just sitting around, not even looking towards the opening.

Alex himself only then looked towards the opening and saw a group of people sitting by the opening.

2 young men wore a white robe that seemed to be burnt at the edges. A young girl and a young man wore blue robes that looked like they had waves crashing in on them. Another young woman wore a robe that seemed to be fully doused in blood.

A young man wore gold and brown robes of the Glory's Edge sect. 2 women wore the black and red robe of the Heaven's Peak school. A man and a woman wore the green and pink rose of the Falling Lotus sect.

There were other people there too, and Alex recognized them all as members of the great clans and sects. Not a single one of these were the members of the elite group that was gathered at the mountain plateau yesterday.

"Fellow Daoist, are we not allowed to enter the mountain?" he asked.

The woman he asked the question turned her head towards him and answered, "You can, but you will have to pay a price at the gate and wait for your turn."

"Price?" Alex asked with a confused look.

"Yes," she said. "It's about 20 True Spirit stones. Not many are willing to pay at all since that's not a small price for most of us."

"You should sit here like us. They can't protect that place forever anyway," the woman said.

Alex couldn't help but see the disciples of the great clan in a more negative light.

Still, he wanted to try the cultivation room out, and 20 spirit stones were nothing for him. So, he walked to the front where a woman in a green robe was standing.

"I want a spot in there," Alex said. "When is the latest I can get?"

The girl looked at him carefully for a bit and looked into her talisman. "There will be a spot empty around tomorrow noon," she said.

Alex frowned a bit. 'A day and a half? I will have to wait that long?' he thought.

He shook his head and said, "Fine. I want it."

The woman's lips turned to a grin. "Great! Give me 20 True Spirit stones."

Alex took out some spirit stones and handed them to her. The girl took it and handed him a small piece of paper with "Stamp of the 7 colors" written at the top. Next to it was the number 155.

"Be sure to be here tomorrow when I call your number," she said.

Alex nodded and walked back. As he left, he heard someone walking out of the opening and looked back. Alex didn't recognize the person, but it was someone from the Shen clan.

The girl then called out the number 102.

'102?' Alex thought. 'That means there should be around 40 to 50 functioning rooms in there, right?' he thought.

When Alex saw the person who was walking in, he couldn't help but show a hint of surprise on his face.

It was the beast tamer from the first night in the secret realm.

"So he really did come back," Alex thought. His face turned into a smirk when he saw the anger flaring in the other guy's face when he saw him too.

'Good! I can properly kill you this time around,' Alex thought.

Once the man went into the mountain, Alex turned around, not giving him any thought anymore.

'Well, let's go check the 2nd mountain. I'm curious how it looks,' he thought.

As he walked away from the mountain, he found a few people following him. 'Surely they're not following me because I paid 20 spirit stones right?' he thought.

He slowed down his pace and let them catch up. When they did, as he had expected, they tried to rob him.

It took them exactly 3 seconds before they were on the ground with the newfound understanding that they had chosen the wrong target.

Alex left the few people grunting on the ground and continued thinking how stupid they were.

In the next 4 hours, he met 2 other groups of stupid people.

Alex looked at these people that were on the ground with wounds all over their bodies and thought, 'Are the rogues really that desperate that they are already stealing on the 4th day?'

He wondered if it had anything to do with not finding the chance to enter cultivation in the 3rd mountain.

Finally, after a few hours, he reached the 2nd mountain as he heard the shouting of many people who seemed to be training out in the open.

Towards the foot of the mountain, there was an open area where the trees seemed to have been cut recently.

There were a lot of different stones propped up all around the area, and while some were cracked and broken, most of them were still functioning.

From what Alex saw, almost all of them were occupied at the moment.

'Just how many people are in the realm at the moment?' he wondered. He walked over to one of the open spots and took out his sword to see how strong he was.

At the same time, Pearl propped up his head and meowed. He wanted to test too.

Chapter 655 Training and Forging mountain

Most people in the training grounds were focused on their training. They seemed to be practicing some of the new techniques that they had learned.

Alex wondered if there was a reason for that. 'Do techniques become easier to train here?' he wondered.

Unfortunately, in the last 2 years, he had trained every technique to a great level. Even his spiritual sword technique was decent enough for him.

So he only decided to check his strength at the stone wall in front of him.

Alex took out his refined sword from his ring and without any augmentation, attacked the stone.

As expected, True Lord 1st realm appeared on the stone slab. However, next to it were also the words 'Physical Damage'.

"Oh, does it tell me the difference in damage types too?" Alex thought. None of the puppets back in the Crimson empire did that. But then, that was the Crimson empire.

Next, he tried the same attack but with Sword Intent. When he struck, another reading popped up on the stone slab.

[True Lord 5th Realm - Total Damage]

[True Lord 1st Realm - Physical Damage]

[True Lord 4th Realm - Weapon Intent Damage]

"Woah!" Alex cried out in surprise.

Pearl jumped out of his robes and ran up to the stone wall to attack it. He used the White Tiger's Golden Claw technique so that when it landed, Alex got two separate values for the damage again.

[True Lord 8th Realm - Total Damage]

[True Lord 5th realm - Physical Damage]

[True Lord 7th realm - Elemental Damage]

"Oh wow, was that because of your Qi or because of your technique?" Alex asked curiously. He thought of ways to check, but Pearl didn't know any other techniques.

"Can you even learn other techniques aside from metal-related ones?" Alex wondered. "After we leave, I will find some projectile-based attacks for you so that you never have to reach close to the enemy."

"Meow!" Pearl said happily and attacked the wall multiple times, but each time the result was the same.

"Come on, get back. It's my turn next," Alex said and tested his attacks.

With normal Qi attacks from a distance, his damage reached True Lord 5th realm.

With metal and Yang Qi, his attacks from a distance yielded True Lord 6th realm in damage.

When mixed together and attacked with the sword, his damage yielded True Lord 6th realm for normal Qi and True lord 7th realm for metal Qi.

With the lack of Yang Qi skills for short-range, Alex couldn't test it at all, but he supposed it would be the same as the metal Qi.

Finally, Alex took out his sword which he couldn't pour Qi into, and attacked the stone. When it struck, Alex left a sword mark on the stone.

"Holy..." he looked at the wall in shock. He hadn't expected the sword to be so strong. Alex wondered if it could in fact cut through the rock, but Alex himself was too weak to make that happen.

'Just what sort of expert could have crafted this sword,' he wondered. 'Could I ever refine it? I will have to try.'

Alex shook his head and kept the sword back in his ring. Then, he turned around to leave.

Immediately after however, he stopped and turned back around to the stone slab.

"Hm... if it can find the difference between the 3 types of damages... can it also test the 4th type?" he wondered and strolled back towards it.

He got close to the stone and let out Heaven's Impact at it. When it hit, a few words appeared on the stone slab.

[True Emperor 9th realm - Mental Damage]

Instead of getting happy, Alex frowned. 'True Emperor 9th realm? That's the peak of the True realm,' he thought. 'Did I coincidentally happen to reach this damage amount? Or is the stone slab unable to quantify my damage? '

'Surely a Heaven's Impact would be weak against a Saint Realm who opened their own Spiritual sea and have a large amount of it, unlike me. At the same time, most True realm experts would be vulnerable to such an attack.'

'Is it trying to say that the damage I do with Heaven's Impact is enough to hurt everyone below the saint realm?' Alex thought.

Alex also tried the spiritual sword, and it gave the same result.

In the end, Alex was forced to leave with the understanding that his spiritual sense at the moment would be considered second only to those in the saint realm.

Even the ancient demons didn't have figures with a spiritual sense that could reach him if the stone slab was anything to go by.

Finally, Alex left the training ground and roamed in forging rooms in the mountain. Alex saw quite a few doors that were open and not a single hint of fire was inside.

On the ones that were closed, Alex saw two types of doors. One was with glowing runes, and another one was with closed runes.

Alex placed his palm on one of the rooms with dim runes and poured in his Qi. The door shuddered a bit and opened to reveal a person in the process of forging inside.

Alex frowned and hurriedly apologized before closing the door. 'What the hell? Why did the door open if there was someone inside?' he wondered.

"Are the dim ones supposed to represent the one with people inside?" Alex wondered and placed his palm on one with a glowing rune.

When the room opened, he realized that he was correct. He walked into the room and the door locked behind him.

There was a stone slab in the middle of the room and a heart in the corner of the room. Alex sighed, thinking that he couldn't make pills here, but when he noticed a small hole in the middle of the stone slab, he held his conclusions for now.

He looked inside and saw nothing, but there had to be something there. He sent his spiritual sense over the entire thing and noticed a small blockage that was stopping the fire from entering the stone slab.

After looking around for a bit, Alex noticed a rune to the side. He placed his palm and poured Qi into it.

Suddenly, the blockage hit away, and fire rushed into the stone slab.

"Hey! It works," he thought and brought out his cauldron.

Once he got himself comfortable, he started making some random pills to pass some time.

Over the course of the whole day, Alex did nothing but make pills in the room. As for what pill exactly, he didn't care.

His pills only came out to be around 45%, however. He needed to do extensive research with his spiritual sense to understand exactly how to improve the harmony of the pills he was making.

In the last 2 years, he had gathered the perfect recipe for about 20 or so pills. When he did make those pills, his results improved to about 65% for each pill.

Since there were many more such recipes for True pills that he had gathered through the sect, the corpse in the southern forest, and random purchases from shops he visited, there were still close to 30 pills he needed to research.

Alex wasn't worried, however since he knew how easy it would be as he continued doing this.

Somehow, Alex managed to make close to 70 pills with barely any mental fatigue.

Based on the time he wasted here, he was sure that morning would come very soon.

He sat down in the room for a few hours and cultivated to recollect his Qi. Once he was done, he left.

Sun had barely come out of the east, so Alex knew he still had some time before he had to be back in the 3rd mountain. Since it was less than 10 kilometers away, Alex could take his time.

He leisurely walked down the mountain as he watched the many others train down at the training field.

'Quite a lot of those from the elite sects and clans,' Alex thought as he saw the different robes. Those unique robes were quite easy to recognize.

Pearl walked by his side with no care in the world as the two of them made their way to the 3rd mountain.

He had his spiritual sense withdrawn out of fear of meeting those True Kings that did have spiritual sense.

As such, when he stumbled onto a crime scene, he was surprised. Two men and one woman seemed to be robbing a cultivator. However, Alex couldn't call it robbing at all. This was more of a murder scene.

The victim was so bloody, that Alex wouldn't be surprised if they were already dead.

Alex wanted to turn around and walk the other way, but the three of them had already seen him and were starting to make their way toward him while dragging their nearly dead victim.

'That robe looks familiar,' Alex thought for a moment before he saw the person's face.

And Jiang Zhilan saw his.

'I'm about to be implicated in this, aren't I?' he thought with a frown. But since they were already coming after him, maybe that didn't really matter.

"Junior brother!" Jiang Zhilan said with as much energy as she could muster.

'Here it comes,' Alex thought as he looked at the three robbers in front of him.

"RUN!" she shouted.

"Huh?" Alex froze.

"Run, quickly. They're st—" one of the men in pink robes punched her in the face mid-sentence, cutting her off.

The girl pointed a saber at him as she said, "Don't think of running away, or We will kill you."

Alex's face grew solemn as he truly hadn't expected Jiang Zhilan to be selfless when she was down.

"You know what? I was planning on running away. But... now I think I won't."

Chapter 656 Taking out Trash

"RWAMBH!" Zhilan's words came out muffled, but Alex could still understand what she was trying to say.

Run.

Even now she wanted him to run. Did she not get together with him in the first place so that she could use him when the situation got dire? Or was he wrong about that?

The girl with the saber wore a yellow robe and had a True Master 8th realm cultivation base.

The man in the pink robe that punched Zhilan had a cultivation base of True Lord 1st realm.

And finally, the other man with the sword and the most blood of them all had True Lord 3rd realm cultivation base.

They were all strong, and yet not a single one of them was a threat to him.

"Why are you doing this?" Alex asked seriously. "You guys are so strong. Is robbing the only way you guys can think of to earn in this realm?"

"This little shit has a tongue on him, doesn't he?" the girl said with a wicked grin.

"Of course, we have other ways of gaining what we want here," the man in the pink robe said.

"Then why are you—"

"What makes you think we're doing this for gaining treasures?" he asked.

"What? If not for treasures and cultivation resources, why would you rob anyone?" Alex asked.

The man grabbed Zhilan's hair and pulled her up to show her bloody face. "What part of this do you think is robbing?" he asked.

"Enough with that, let's just kill him. He's one-handed already and so weak. Torturing him won't be very fun," the man with the sword said.

Alex looked at the three in shock. "Are you doing this because you like to hurt people?" he asked.

"Exactly!" the young man said and let go of Zhilan, whose face hit the ground with a smack.

"I love when I can beat people up," he said as he kicked Zhilan in the face and sent her flying into a wall.

"Good," Alex said. "Then I won't have to feel bad about killing you."

The moment Alex said that he disappeared. The man with the sword and the woman reacted as they had been watching him, but the man in the pink robes had his head turned so he didn't see him.

When he heard the rustle behind him, he quickly turned his head around only to see a palm outstretched onto his head.

Alex enforced his body with the Jade Skin technique and a fire burned out from his palm as he grabbed the man's face.

'Explode!'

~BOOM!~

Both the man and the woman were pushed back by the force of the explosion.

When they got back up, they could only see Alex brush off chunks of red from his grayish-blue robes.

Next to him was the headless and half a torso missing corpse of their previous companion.

"Don't worry," Alex's voice rang in the silence as he brought out his blood essence refined sword. "Unlike you trash, I don't like torturing people."

As he said that, his cultivation base flared to show that he was in the True Master 9th realm.

The man's eyes narrowed in fear and confusion when another aura flared a little further away.

The small cat that they hadn't noticed had gotten big and now showed a cultivation base of True Lord 5th realm.

The man lost hope.

Before he could say anything, the girl from the other side immediately got up and ran away.

"Take care of her," Alex said softly.

"Meow!" Pearl said and ran after all. Not 3 seconds later, the man heard the terrifying scream of the woman as she was killed.

His eyes darted towards the side to see if the beast would return.

"He's not your opponent, I am," Alex said. Then, he slowly strode forward towards the man.

When the man realized that the beast wasn't returning, he gained unfounded courage to fight Alex as his cultivation wasn't strong enough to fight with him.

In his fear of Pearl, the man forgot what the young man in front of him had just done to his own companion.

With a glowing blue sword, the man slashed, sending out chunks of sharp ice toward him.

Alex still had his defensive technique running, so he ran through the ice shards and directly appeared in front of the man.

The man slashed down in a hurry, but Alex's golden sword easily parried it. Immediately in the next moment, he slashed at the man and cleanly separated his head from his neck.

The man didn't even realize what had happened as his head struck the ground. He could only stare at the sideways image of Alex who turned around and walked towards Zhilan.

Then, his vision slowly vanished and he died.

Alex quickly arrived next to near-dead Zhilan and force-fed a healing pill to her.

He waited for a few seconds as the healing pill started doing its work.

Pearl arrived next to her in his small form and nudged her a little. "Meow?" he called.

Zhilan slowly opened her eyes and looked at Alex. "Wha-What happened?" she asked.

"Nothing, I just gave you a healing pill," Alex said.

Zhilan slowly got up and tried to circulate the healing pill to make it work faster. She could feel the broken bones and cut flesh slowly fixing themselves as her pain disappeared.

With a flick of his finger, Alex got rid of all the blood that was on her. He then handed her a pill to restore the lost blood which she ate a moment later.

5 minutes later, Zhilan was perfectly healthy. Aside from the tears in her robe, it was impossible to tell that she was near death just moments ago.

Finally, she looked at the dead bodies around her and hesitatingly asked, "Did... did you do this?"

Alex nodded without hesitation.

"Then... you must be very strong," she said.

"So-so," Alex said.

"I see," she said as she lowered her eyes. Alex couldn't tell what she was thinking of at all.

After thinking for a while, he brought out a pill and handed it to her.

Zhilan thoughtlessly grabbed the pill and was about to eat it when Alex grabbed her hand. Only then did she look up with confusion.

"That's the pill to help you break through. Do you want to eat it here?" he asked.

Zhilan's eyes immediately went wide. "What?" she cried out. "Wait let me pay you." She started searching around her robes for some spirit stones.

"I don't need anything, sister Zhilan," Alex said. At the same time, Pearl returned from gathering the storage bags of the three people. In total, there were 5 of them.

Alex sent his spiritual sense through them and checked. He noticed a few alchemy ingredients, and techniques books but aside from that, he saw nothing of value to him.

He kept what he wanted and handed the rest to Zhilan. "You can take these," he said.

"I cannot accept this!" Zhilan immediately said.

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "Since I don't need them, you can throw them away."

Of course, Zhilan wasn't stupid enough to throw it away, so she helplessly kept the storage bags.

"I will take my leave now sister. You can go to the 2nd mountain and enter one of the forging rooms to cultivate to True Master 5th realm. Although the Qi there is thin compared to the 3rd and the 4th mountains, you should be able to breakthrough with the pill," Alex said.

"Junior brother, thank you," she said.

"Don't mind it, sister Zhilan. I'll leave, for now. Take care," Alex said and stood up to walk.

"Meow!" Pearl said goodbye and walked next to him.

"Wait Junior brother, what's your name?" she asked hurriedly.

Alex stopped. "Oh, have I not introduced myself yet?" he asked. "My name is Yu Ming. Goodbye, sister."

With that, he left.

Zhilan sat in a daze as she watched the pill in her hand before standing up to leave.

She grabbed the sword from the man's corpse and made her way to the 2nd mountain where she would spend her remaining time trying to breakthrough.

With the month-long cultivation in the 3rd mountain, she had nearly broken through. But now with this pill, it was practically guaranteed.

* * * *

Alex arrived at the 3rd mountain a little before noon and walked up to the midsection and waited for his name to be called out.

The number now was 149, so his turn wasn't very far away. As more and more started getting called in, Alex felt someone's gaze on him.

He didn't know how he could tell, but he was sure he was feeling something. So, he looked in the general direction of where the feeling came from and saw a man staring at him.

'This guy again. Is he so ready to die?' Alex thought as he stared back at the beast tamer. It seemed he had already left the cultivation and was now waiting for Alex.

Soon, Alex's number was called and he walked forward. After showing the paper slip, he was let inside. Alex went through the hall and just like the 2nd mountain, tried searching for a room with a glowing rune.

When he found it, he entered. As soon as the door closed behind him, a rune on the floor of the room started glowing all of a sudden, scaring Alex.

He worried that it was something dangerous, but soon felt a lot of Qi gathering in the area.

'Oh!' he thought. It was preparing the room.

So, without hesitation, Alex sat down on the floor and placed Pearl on his lap.

At his command, the both of them then started their closed cultivation that would last exactly an entire month.

Chapter 657 Obstacles

As Alex started moving his Qi around his body, Pearl started cultivating as well.

At first, Alex felt nothing. However, slowly he started feeling the familiar feeling of skin splitting from the body cultivation that happened with Pearl.

He hadn't felt this feeling for over 2 years, so he started to forget the worry he was feeling about cultivating for a whole month in one go.

He wasn't worried so much as he was anxious, after all this was the first time he was going to cultivate for so long without any alchemy or training breaks in between.

Even that was gone now that he was starting to feel the slight, tingling pain around his skin which was starting to extend to his muscles.

As his muscles started tearing up, his bones started to show signs of fractures while the cut on his skin started to grow to be longer and wider.

Next were his organs, then his meridians, and finally mind. Alex had wished that tempering his mind made him have better spiritual sense but that was expecting too much of a technique that was shared with him.

Tempering his mind during body cultivation did just that. It made his brain physically stronger.

By the time the small cuts had reached his mind, the cuts on his skin were getting so wide that drops of blood were starting to ooze out of it.

'That has never happened before,' he thought but continued with his cultivation. Anytime now, he wanted to break through and stabilize his foundation in the True Lord 1st realm.

However, even as he thought of beginning that, the cut on his skin, and his muscles started to widen even more.

Blood poured out of him like he was sweating on a particularly hot day. They gathered upon his skin and rolled down together.

Soon, there were lines of blood all over his skin from head to toe, and they kept flowing down.

Worst of all, the wound on his kept on getting bigger and bigger. As Pearl gets more comfortable in his cultivation, the worse the wound on Alex's body got.

At one point, he started thinking that this was the most pain he had ever felt in his entire life.

This was not true at all, but at the moment, Alex had a hard time thinking of a pain that was worse than this. Even when he lost his arm, that pain felt like a light tap compared to this.

Fortunately, unlike the first few times when he cultivated with Pearl, he did not lose consciousness.

Even though the pain hurt a lot, he endured it with gritted teeth and even moved his own Qi around his body to cultivate.

As the pain stopped increasing, Alex could finally be relieved, even though he had to keep gritting his teeth with the pain.

On the inside, he was only starting to realize what his mistake was.

Never in his entire life had there been a time when Pearl's cultivation base was ahead of him. Even in the time when Pearl had a cultivation base, and he had a normal body, he still had a Qi cultivation that far surpassed him.

Now that Pearl was both ahead of him on body and Qi, the real power of his Golden Tiger's Dominating body technique was starting to show itself to Alex.

Now, his body was trying to rapidly catch up to Pearl, and in the process, it was wrecking itself.

It wasn't long before Alex understood that he couldn't cultivate for quite a while until his body cultivation had grown enough to handle the wound without bleeding out.

Alex took out a pill to restore the blood he had lost and ate it. After circulating the energy of the pill throughout his body to replenish his blood, he left his body so that he wouldn't have to worry about the pain and went into his spiritual mind.

Even in there, he could feel the pain from before, but it was more muffled and so it was slightly easier for Alex now.

Alex looked at the silver threads from the silver mountain that floated throughout his spiritual world.

He looked at the spiritual sea below him and somehow none of the silver threads fell into it.

Since he hadn't been here in almost a month, the silver strings had flown far and wide. Collecting them was going to take some time.

Fortunately, Alex had many.

He leisurely flew through the sky and grabbed the silver threads as they disappeared into him.

From time to time, he kept an eye on his body outside to see if there was something wrong that happened to it from him not being there.

However, from what he could see, he was fine. Judging from the speed of blood loss he was suffering, the blood replenishing pill he had eaten should do him good for an entire day, if not more.

With that in mind, Alex went back to gathering the silver threads.

Godslayer remained quiet as he watched Alex gather the silver thread, and Alex knew it was seeing him do so.

One of the times during his 2-year training, it had, in cryptic words, told him how fortunate someone would be if they managed to find something like this, let alone manage to get it into their spiritual sea.

It didn't say anything more than that, but that was enough for Alex to continuously absorb the thread without questioning everything.

After all, Godslayer was a spirit that dealt with the gods. If it said something was good, Alex was absolutely sure that it was good.

The black goo-covered spirit didn't even say anything as Alex destroyed the black goo around him.

Alex wasn't sure if the black goo was what brought on the power of its temptation, but he wasn't going to let it grow too much and start tempting him again.

He was sure he could defy it this time, but he wasn't confident enough to test that theory. Especially not now when he wanted so many things for himself.

Alex wasn't sure if he would be able to stop himself if the spirit was strong and it promised him to go back home.

It took him many hours to collect all of the silver thread as he went in and out of his body on multiple occasions to look at what was happening outside.

When he was finally done, he left the spiritual sea.

Alex was either getting used to the pain, or his body cultivation was increasing. He couldn't tell if he had grown or not, but just getting numb to the pain, for now, was a win in his heart.

With this, he could get ready for breaking through to the next realm.

He finally started using his cultivation technique and he got his body ready for a clean breakthrough.

After some time, he started pushing his Qi through the pain as he moved it around his tattered body.

As he was doing so, Alex heard someone speaking.

He immediately stopped. He looked around and even sent out his spiritual sense to see if someone had come inside.

However, aside from him and Pearl, there was no one in the room. 'What was that?' he thought. After noticing nothing wrong, he continued with his breakthrough.

However, once again, as he was getting close to it, he heard a voice saying something incoherent.

Alex stopped once more and even checked to see if that Godslayer was doing anything. In the end, he found nothing.

So, when he started breaking through for the third time and still heard something, he ignored it and continued with his breakthrough.

After a couple of minutes, his Qi circulation reached the peak and he broke through to True Lord 1st realm.

Now that he was slightly stronger, the pain from Pearl felt less and less. So, he continued cultivating to stabilize his foundation and at the same time, improve his body cultivation.

* * * * *

The Saint realm experts on the outside were still around, waiting for their disciples to come out.

They were in meditation as there was nothing else to do.

Shen Jing simply waited around on top of a rock. He had gone back to check on the people he had left behind and came back after making sure everything was fine.

Now, it had been half a day since he came back.

Since there were still 5 more days, he wondered if he should leave and come back sometime later. However, it was only 5 days. He didn't need to do that.

As he thought that, he sensed something and looked towards the sky as his eyes narrowed.

A few seconds later, some of the stronger Saint realm elders also noticed something.

It was a dark aura that undulated above the sky, flickering for a few seconds.

It looked as if it was hesitating whether it should descend fully or not.

Shen Jing frowned. He looked around but he couldn't see a single saint realm elder missing.

"Did a Saint enter the realm while I was away?" he asked softly, but every single person there heard him.

"No, senior," the saint elders told him.

Shen Jing didn't see any reason to doubt them since their number was the same.

'Then… could it be him?' he thought. Alex was the only non-saint realm cultivator to go inside the realm who could have learned a Dao for himself.

Since he now held authority over something fundamental in the world, the world would start to slowly give him obstacles in his cultivation journey.

Sometimes, they would be mental, sometimes physical.

From the looks of the sky, Shen Jing was sure this was a mental obstacle that never fully descended. If it fully did, it would be unnoticeable. Meaning…

"That kid nearly developed an Inner Demon, huh?"

Chapter 658 Followed

The door to the cultivation room opened and Alex walked out with Pearl in his robes.

He looked warily outside, wondering if he really had stayed in that room for an entire month.

The light at the end of the hallway shined with people outside, so Alex was more sure that the 10 days had not passed.

'So it really has been only a single day huh?' he thought and slowly walked outside.

When he reached outside, he saw a massive group of people simply watching him.

"192!" the lady next to him shouted out and someone walked past Alex after showing his paper.

"What are you doing here? Leave," the lady shouted at Alex. Alex turned and looked at her. She was so weak and yet she was giving orders to everyone.

'That's the power of backing, huh?' he thought and left. In the back of his mind, he wondered if he should find a powerful organization to back him when he left this realm.

But when he thought about it, he already had the Alchemy guild. If as he had thought, he went to the formation guild and got entered there as well, he would likely improve as well.

After that, he planned on learning the runes too, which would give him extra knowledge to go around in the future.

As he left the entrance and walked back to the crowd, he couldn't help but wonder what day it was. He had spent too much time feeling nothing but pain back in that room.

Alex's mind was in so much disarray that he had to ask someone how many days it had been since the realm opened.

'Ah, it's been 6 days already huh?' he thought. Then he thought about the 3rd day. 'Wasn't that door supposed to open sometime soon? Sometime between tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, right?'

Alex needed to go back to the 'House of the Undying' and wait around for it to open up. After that… he would likely have to think about that after it was open.

He could likely open up the door right now if he had help from others, but he didn't want to show off his ability to anyone else.

So, he would just have to wait out the days.

'I wonder what I should do after the door is open?' he wondered, there didn't seem to be anything interesting going on after that in the realm.

'Well, if people start leaving early because of boredom, then I can enter the various rooms and find some treasures for myself,' he thought.

That was assuming this place even had treasures anymore.

'I hope it does,' he thought and walked down the mountain.

Pearl really wanted to go to the small lake that healed them to clean themselves.

It seemed Pearl cared more about being clean than being wet now. He still remembered the time when he hated getting into the pond with him.

'Ah~ he's growing by the day,' Alex thought.

As he walked along, with not a care in the world, he suddenly sensed something. It was a feeling that was hard to explain.

It was something negative for sure, but it more so felt like someone's gaze was on him.

Alex didn't turn around and slowly spread out his spiritual sense to see if he could find anyone with it.

'Ah, it's this guy,' he thought as memories came back to him and his eyes grew colder.

He acted like he didn't see the man, or his 2 friends that he had brought along and went deeper into the forest, away from where he needed to be going.

After nearly 20 minutes of walking, Alex thought he was far away that no one else would see him fight.

"You guys must be quite interested in me to even follow me to such an obscure location," Alex said as he turned around. "Are you not afraid something bad will happen while you aren't around people?"

The man from a few days ago, or a month ago for everyone here, showed up in front of him from behind a tree.

"You really are quite strong to have sensed us coming," he said. "However, that doesn't mean anything. Now that I have help, I will be sure to kill you and take your beast for myself."

"Let's not get hasty now," the short-haired man next to him said as he brought out a metal bowl. "If I like it, I might keep it for myself too."

"Hehe, you jest quite a lot, senior brother," the other man with a thick mustache said. "You already have 4 beasts. Any more and you will have trouble breaking through, you know?"

"You don't have to worry about my spirit, younger brother. I ate a spirit enhancing pill some time ago and I can handle 5 beasts easily," the man with the short hair said.

"Senior brother, Junior brother, I was the one who gave you the information. You can take his items, but you can't take away the beast from me," the man said.

"Hehe, how about the one with the least beasts gets that… what was it? A Cat? Right, that cat," the youngest one said.

Alex looked in surprise. 'Did he forget how close to death he was? Or is he relying on this older man with True Lord 7th realm cultivation base?' Alex wondered.

The man had improved to True Lord 6th realm, and the youngest one was still at True Lord 5th realm.

'I wonder if their beasts improved as well?' Alex thought. Even though their cultivation bases were slightly hard to quantify against his own, he knew for sure that Pearl's cultivation base in the 6th realm could easily deal 9th realm damage.

So, he saw no reason to fear.

Still, he decided not to let Pearl fight this battle. He wanted to find out how much his own ability had grown.

"Alright, stop wasting time. I don't have all day," Alex said.

"Why? You going somewhere?" the youngest one asked.

"As a matter of fact, yes. So please hurry up. I need to test my newfound strength," Alex said.

All 3 of the men immediately narrowed their eyes. "You want to test your strength against us? Keep wishing," the oldest one said.

"Junior brother, send out your beast and beat him. Make sure not to kill him. We need to wait until he brings out that cat," the old man said.

"Sure!" the youngest one said and brought out a True Lord 6th realm Steelbeaked Hawk.

The young man checked Alex's right arm to make sure there was no tattoo, and said, "Go tear off his right arm."

The hawk screeched as it flew up to the sky and came down at a very fast speed.

Just when it was about to reach him, Alex swung his empty hand above him. Even as the Hawk swooped down, an illusory sword only Alex could see passed through it.

The Hawk's body froze up, no longer as elegant, and crashed onto Alex.

After getting cut with the spiritual sword, the Hawk could no longer produce the same amount of defense as it previously could. Still, its speed never feels.

So, when it slammed onto the stone-solid Alex, its head caved in and within seconds, the beast died.

Alex swiped off the bits of blood from his robes and looked back at the men. "Are you going to die without having your beasts out?" he asked as his sword appeared in his hand.

The youngest of them cried out and brought out a yellow snake.

The oldest of them frowned and brought out a Green Bull, a Purple Pheasant, a Black Snake, and an Emerald Wolf.

Finally, the one that Alex was after brought out his Ape, Spider, and Lizard.

Each and every one of the beasts was strong, but not a single one of them was over True Lord 7th realm.

"Finally," Alex said and dashed forward.

The Ape and the Bull ran in front of all the other beasts. Alex jumped to the right of the Bull and used the Ape's incoming arm to spin himself on top of it and slashed at the same arm.

He wasn't able to cut it in two, but his sword did go in deep.

When the Pheasant sent out fire projectiles towards him that themselves were in the shape of Pheasants, Alex dashed backward and sent his own water slashes to destroy them.

Water Slash was a Mortal grade technique, but that was enough to destroy these attacks.

The ground vibrated as spikes appeared from below it. Alex could see that it was the job of the Black Snake.

Alex spun in mid-air to dodge the incoming fang-shaped metal attack of the yellow snake and created a small explosion next to him to destroy the spider's webs.

At the same time, he cut the vines that were creeping behind him and spun mid-air to kick the bull back.

Alex let the spit of the lizard land on him as the poison did nothing to him and in one fell sweep cut the wolf that was trying to swing at him.

After the wolf was cut, Alex turned around and gave the 3 men a wide grin.

The fight had only lasted a couple of seconds at best, but they understood that Alex was very strong.

Just then, they heard a groan

Even Alex was surprised as he looked in the direction of the groan.

The Ape was now down on the ground and was holding its cut arm as it fidgeted around.

'What's up with that?' Alex thought.

Chapter 659 Poison

Watching the Ape scream and roll on the ground, Alex couldn't help but be surprised.

Sure, a cut to the arm was painful, but… not that painful, right?

As he watched, suddenly he noticed something. White fizz appeared around the corner of the Ape's lips.

'What?' Alex was a little surprised.

"It's been poisoned," the oldest man of the group said with a hit of fear in his eyes.

"What?" the Ape's master looked at it and then towards Alex. A hammer appeared on his arm and he rushed forward.

"I will kill you myself," he shouted.

The other two looked at him in confusion and then terror. "Idiot! Come back, you'll die," the older one shouted, but the man didn't hear him at all.

"Good," Alex said and dashed forward.

Just as he was about to reach Alex, the man's eyes suddenly lost all hint of anger, and instead a calm but serious look took its place.

Then, the man suddenly changed his direction.

'Going towards your beast huh?' Alex thought. He inwardly commended him on putting on such an act. Alex had surely been fooled.

But, that wasn't going to stop him from defeating the man.

Instantly, he teleported next to the man and swung his sword. However, the target wasn't there at all.

"Shit!" Alex cried out. His Yang Qi was once again disrupting his ability to use the teleportation technique.

Fortunately, he wasn't more than a couple of steps away from the man, so he stepped down on the ground and took off again.

The man had noticed him already and turned his hammer around to attack him. At the same time, a lion's roar sounded from the hammer as an illusory head of a lion appeared on it.

Alex flipped his sword and caught it in an underhanded position as golden light clumped upon his hand to make up a golden claw.

~BOOM~

The Tiger influenced claw met a Lion's head and a destructive shockwave sent both of them flying in either direction.

Alex slammed onto a tree and caught himself as he fell down. At the same time, vines appeared around him to wrap him again.

Alex swung his sword twice and all the vines disappeared. Then, seeing that the man was far away, he jumped towards the other beasts.

If he wanted to protect one beast, then he should be ready to lose two.

Alex appeared in front of the spider who could only cower in fear. In a single motion, he cut 4 of the spider's legs before it could even do something and then dug his sword onto its head.

Next, he moved towards the bull. It had been trying to wrap him around with vines. As he approached, the green's body shined green and suddenly, there were 4 clones of the bull, making a total of 5.

Alex suddenly used the Penta Sword technique and controlled each one of the metal Qi to go flying towards the 5 beasts.

4 beasts were hit, and 1 of them dodged. Alex knew which to attack now. So, with a sword that nearly shone fully white, he sent out a golden slash at the bull that was too fast for it to dodge.

The bull was cleanly cut in half.

"No," the older one thought. "Come back," he suddenly ordered his two remaining beasts.

This fight had been a mistake. They were going to lose more than they could ever gain. Each of them had already lost a beast, and now he lost another one.

"No way you are going anywhere," Alex said and dashed towards him. The older man startled and quickly hefted the sword in his hand.

When their two swords clashed, a barrier suddenly appeared on the older man's body.

'So strong,' he thought, and then the feeling of horror came as the teleportation energy of the talisman that had just activated started to take him away.

"No, I haven't take—"

Before he could speak, he vanished.

"Tsk!" Alex didn't like that his enemies kept escaping from where they stood because of some goddamn talisman.

He casually used his stump to block the spearhead of the youngest one and got close to drive his own sword through his stomach.

Another barrier appeared as the young man was teleported away.

"Fuck!" Alex cried out. He hated letting them get away. However, he couldn't do anything.

When he turned around, he noticed something missing from the area. The yellow snake was gone too. That guy just now must have taken it back into its beast space.

Alex's eyes saw nothing but hateful faces of the remaining beasts and the single man who had already turned around to run away, leaving his beast behind.

Something white flashed in front of Alex as a small cat appeared. "Go after him, I will fight with them," Pearl said.

Alex nodded and ran after the man. Alex felt that it was a joke how fast he caught up to the man.

As he did, he slashed his sword at him. The man tried to dodge, but he wasn't fast enough and cut on the back.

The man then pulled up his hammer and got ready to fight. A lion's shout appeared on it again, but Alex dodged it this time. Blocking would only give the man time to run away.

At the same time, he sent out a slash back at the man, who barely used his defensive technique to block it.

Alex sent out, even more, slashes at him, but he was barely hanging on with his defense. Seeing this, Alex decided to add his sword intent to the attack as well.

As he was about to do that, the man's eyes began to shake.

Then, he fell onto one knee as his whole body started shaking. "Da-Damn you… poison… use…" the man tried to force out his words, but his throat was already closing.

He tried to look at his storage bag with shaky hands, but Alex wasn't going to let him.

In a single dash, he appeared right in front of the man. Then, in a smooth motion, expecting a barrier to appear anytime, he swung his sword.

~SWISH~

To his surprise, Alex's sword easily went through the man's neck and came out the other side.

"What?" he thought with nothing but the surprise on his face. 'Why did his talisman not activate? Did he forget to bring one back?' Alex thought.

Since he hadn't done that, he was now dead. 'That's what you get for not preparing,' Alex said as he scanned his body with his spiritual sense.

He stole away the storage bag and looked back towards Pearl to see him having an easy time with the beasts.

He could see the pheasant and the black snake wrapped up in something golden, while Pearl fought the venomous lizard from a distance.

'Good,' Alex thought after seeing Pearl's intelligence in fighting a beast that could beat him. Shen Jing had taught him better than he could have hoped for.

Then, he turned around to check on the wound the man. As expected, he was telling the truth.

'I poisoned him,' Alex thought and looked at his sword. He hadn't checked it in the time when he trained, but now that he did, he could see that his entire sword had actually been coated in the poison and venom of many different beasts and plants from the poison valley.

He couldn't tell how the poisons and venoms interacted with each other now that they had fully mixed on his blade, but whatever it was, he could kill True Lord cultivators with that poison.

"I got something good out of that fight, I see," he said to himself. "I wonder if I should make sure not to put the sword in water."

Alex returned back to Pearl, only to find that he had managed to kill the lizard by putting it on the same sort of binding the other two beasts were at.

Alex went up to them and saw that they were golden ropes forged by metal Qi. "How did you learn this?" he asked.

"Old man," Pearl said.

"Old man?" Alex looked confused. "Shen Jing?"

"Yes," Pearl nodded.

"Well, he's not really— wait, I guess he is very old," Alex thought. Sometimes, he forgot how old Shen Jing was from just seeing his young face.

"Alright, let's take care of this and leave," Alex said.

Pearl nodded and without hesitation killed the other two beasts before taking their cores to Alex.

Alex got out what body parts he could from the beasts and left with Pearl in his robes.

Pearl insisted on visiting the healing pool again, so Alex was forced to take him there.

Alex had time to waste so he didn't mind.

Once night fell, they left the pool and slowly made their way towards the 5th mountain.

With their speed, it was nearly sunrise when they reached there.

Even before reaching the plateau, Alex could tell that there were a lot of people already gathered there.

Climbing to the top of the mountain only helped to confirm this. 'So many,' Alex thought as he looked at the near 500 people in that location.

Given that it was actually supposed to be opening tomorrow, Alex was sure there would be more people coming soon.

As the sound of attacks rung throughout the mountain like a giant bell hung in the sky, Alex was relieved that the door had in fact not yet been broken through.

Now that he was here, all he had to do now was wait around.

Chapter 660 Chaos

Alex stood in a corner of the crowd, quietly watching the elites in front of them hammer away at the house.

Some of the elites turned around to look at them and showed a dissatisfied expressions.

"While we slave away here trying to weaken the barrier, they are simply waiting to get a part of the prize," He Liwei said with a frowned expression on his face.

"Why don't you invite them all to hit it then? That should solve your problem right?" a low, ghastly voice escaped from the thin and emotionless Guo Chaing.

He was the disciple from the Broken River sect that had decided to leave once he learned that attacking the door wasn't worth it.

However, after learning about Tian Ye's assessment on the matter, he seemed to have returned to get some sort of prize for himself as well.

"That's… not a bad idea," Zhou Ren said from the side, making Guo Chiang make a 'tsk' sound. Zhou Ren heard it, but he didn't comment on it.

"Stop talking and continue attacking!" Liang Qiu shouted at them, leading the three to go back to attacking.

The only ones who stayed to the side without attacking were the prince and the green-robed Lu Yan that Alex recognized.

The attacks continued for a while longer. However, with each attack, Alex could see the barrier flickering more and more unstably.

'It's any time now,' he thought and slowly stepped back from the crowd until he was behind a tree and couldn't be seen by anyone.

Then, he concealed his cultivation and went invisible. As far as he could tell, this was the best way to sneak in there and get away with stealing under supervision.

Surely Alex would be seen through the spiritual sense of the 5 or so people that were here, but that was fine. There were simply too many people here for someone to keep track of just him using their spiritual sense.

After all, despite seeing everything at once, it took them quite the mental power to perfectly keep track of everything at once.

Now fully concealed, Alex waited in silence.

The group kept on attacking one after another, and after two hours, the barrier flickered for the last time.

~BANG~

One of Han Daiyu's attacks broke a part of the house's wall and everyone looked in shock.

"Go!" someone from the crowd shouted and everyone ran forward.

Not even the elites dared to stop nearly 800 people trying to enter the house. All they could do was get in first and get what they could.

Alex was in the middle group when he walked through the door. He sensed multiple spiritual senses all around him that were slowly moving further and further away.

They were too bothered with finding treasures, so Alex was fine for now.

Books, artifacts, weapons, furniture, paintings, jewelry, metal works. The group of people that entered didn't leave a single thing behind at all.

Some even started fighting in the crowd, trying to steal each other's treasures.

Alex frowned. The scene was too chaotic and the House of the Undying was way too large for him to go around leisurely searching.

So, in an act of desperation, he opened up his spiritual sense and sent it out in every direction.

He could see the people already reaching the far corners of the house that was nearly 300 meters wide.

At the same time, Alex saw something that surprised him.

'There is an underground,' he realized. Before his spiritual sense brought attention to him, he took it back and directly teleported to the lower floor.

Alex appeared half a foot above the ground and lightly tapped on the wooden floor underneath. He could already hear people coming down, so he had to hurry.

Alex rushed towards one of the rooms to the right and saw vials lined up on a shelf. He immediately walked in and emptied the shelf.

Then, he walked out and went to another room. Even as he did, Alex could sense someone's spiritual sense upon him.

'Dammit, I'm isolated, so I'm easy to find,' he thought. He sent out his own spiritual sense, not worrying about getting caught for now, and checked the room ahead of him.

There were weapons in that room, but Alex didn't need one at the moment. 'Should I still take it?' he thought.

However, just then, he noticed another floor below him. "Let's go," he thought and teleported down to that floor.

The person that had followed him frowned when they saw that he had gone downstairs, but stayed behind to get the weapons while still keeping tabs on Alex.

Alex had already sensed the person by now and saw that it was a woman in the True Lord 9th realm cultivation base.

It would be a little hard if he were to fight her, but he could certainly escape from her. The thing that worried him more than her cultivation base was the robe she was wearing.

A crimson red robe that was hard to stare at. That girl was from the Fu family.

'Fu Tao is at the 8th True King realm. While I may be friendly to him, I can't tell if he will suddenly ask me to give him all of my belongings,' Alex thought.

So, quickly, he went around the underground, looking for anything he could find.

From what he could sense, this was the last floor, and beneath him was just dirt. He could also sense that most of the room was empty, aside from one.

At the same time, Alex heard a lot of footsteps coming down the stairs again. He needed to hurry.

He dashed towards the door and slammed through it instead of opening it. Then, he grabbed the single thing that was in this room, a storage bag, and turned to walk out not before looking at the horrifyingly black floor.

If his guess was not wrong, then all the black down there, was blood. 'How many demons and beasts had to be killed here for there to be such a carpet-like layer of blood,' he thought with horror on his face.

However, he couldn't think for long with the people coming. So, he immediately teleported to the upper floor.

When he did, a spiritual sense landed on him from not far away from him. As such, he got face to face with the lady in crimson who looked at him with gleaming eyes like a predator that had found its prey.

She ran towards him but Alex teleported again, going one floor higher.

"I see you, boy," a voice drifted into his head from the lady down below.

'Dammit!' Alex thought. He really wanted to find some more treasures but from the look of it, most of them had already been taken away by others.

Alex gave one last look with his spiritual sense and ran before another one of the spiritual sense users could find him.

"Shit! That's why I didn't want to use my spiritual sense," he thought as he ran down the mountain. "No, it wasn't the spiritual sense that got me caught. It was the teleporting ahead of everyone."

Isolating himself from the group of people had really been a bad choice, but that was what had allowed him to raid that room with a lot of vials.

Alex took out the vials and opened them to see what was inside. At first, he saw some sort of gooey substance inside and wondered if the pills that were supposed to be inside had already melted.

However, he then remembered that the demons didn't know how to make pills.

"Oh, that means these are medicinal pastes," he thought. When he checked through the many vials, he saw that there were maybe only 5 different pastes together.

'Well, that's not bad, I guess,' he thought as he walked through the forest towards the 6th mountain.

He wasn't planning to go to the 6th mountain, but rather stay away from the woman as far as he could for now.

Since it was already the 7th day's afternoon, there were only 3 more days to stay in this place. After that, he would be in the protection of Shen Jing, and he would be fine.

After coming relatively far away, Alex sat on top of a tree and took out the storage bag to see what was inside.

He slowly sent his spiritual sense inside and couldn't help but be both shocked and confused at what he saw.

Chapter 661 Spiritual Attack

"The hell?" Alex said as he saw the only thing that was inside the storage bag.

An egg.

Alex took out the egg and carefully looked at it. The surface of the egg was the same rough texture as any chicken's egg he had handled back at home.

The size was a bit bigger than a normal chicken's egg, and that confused Alex as to what it could be.

His spiritual sense didn't enter the eggshell either.

'Could it be a bird?' he thought. 'Am I going to have to raise a bird now?'

'No wait, reptiles lay egg too. So do fishes, but that's not what a fish egg looks like,' he thought.

"So it can be some sort of bird, or snakes, or lizards and such huh," he thought.

"Also, what do I do to get it to hatch? Is this egg even fertilized? Should I heat it under low-temperature flames?"

Many questions ran across Alex's mind, but not a single answer came to him.

In the end, he could only put the egg back into his ring and wait until he left and found more information about how beast eggs.

Just then, Alex heard something and turned around, only to see a woman standing not far away from him with a grin on her face.

Alex's heart skipped a beat when he saw this woman. It was the same crimson-robed girl he thought he had escaped.

Alex jumped down from the tree and stood in front of her. He then sent out his spiritual sense all around her and checked if there were more people with her.

"So strong," the girl said with genuine shock. "How did you get your spiritual sense to become this wide?"

Alex didn't notice anyone around her at all. 'Are they far away?' he wondered. Judging by the girl's cultivation base, Pearl would definitely have a hard time.

Not only Pearl, Alex himself would have a relatively hard time against her. 'Should I hide Pearl? Or should I use his help?' Alex thought.

In the end, he decided to protect Pearl for now. If he needed help, Pearl could come out whenever required.

In a flash of white light, Pearl went back to the beast space on Alex's body.

The girl in front of him frowned when she saw that. "Are you not going to answer me?" she asked with a tone that said her feelings were hurt.

"Why are you after me?" he asked.

"Because you are special," she said. "Cultivation hiding technique, invisibility technique, teleportation technique, and such a large spiritual sense."

"If I had to guess, you have a lot of treasures on you right now, don't you?" she asked.

Alex frowned. 'I can't waste any more time,' he thought and sent out Heaven's Impact at the woman.

As the fist-shaped spiritual energy was about to reach her, an illusory barrier only visible to his spiritual sense appeared in front of her that blocked Heaven's impact.

Alex frowned. 'I can't win this,' he thought. If someone with a higher cultivation base than him had ways of protecting themselves from his spiritual sense, then the only thing Alex could do was run.

And so he ran. Using every skill aside from the Earth devouring technique, Alex ran as far as he could and left the woman behind.

He ran for nearly half an hour and almost reached the edge of the realm.

He stopped after a while and panted for a few seconds. Then, he jumped up to a tree to gather the Qi he had lost.

It didn't take him very long to get back to top shape and jumped down to go somewhere else instead of staying in the corner of the world.

Just as he was thinking that he saw the woman walking through the thicket in the forest with a casual pace and a smile on her face.

"You left without answering me, so I had to come to find you," she said.

By this time, Alex was more than shocked. 'How is this woman finding me?' he thought. He had clearly run in random directions to arrive where he had, and somehow she had come directly to him.

Judging by her pace, she must've taken the most straight route as well.

'Is she tracking me somehow?' he thought. Using his spiritual sense, he tried to find out what she was using to find him, but there was nothing on his body.

No talisman or any Qi.

"How are you finding me?" Alex asked with a serious face.

"Do you think I will reveal my skills to you?" she asked with a giggle. "You know what? Maybe I will if you just tell me how to increase my spiritual sense to the same level as you?"

Alex tried probing her spiritual sense to see how strong it was, but clearly, it wasn't very strong.

The girl frowned a little. "Don't think you can win against me just because your spiritual sense is stronger than me," she said. "My treasure helps block any mental attack that did not originate from a Saint expert themselves," she said.

"Also, I doubt you would want your measly True Lord 1st realm cultivation base to use against me, right?" she asked.

Alex's heart lost another beat. 'How does she know?' he thought. He had been hiding his cultivation base as much as he could, and yet the woman had found it somehow.

"Can we leave our separate ways?" Alex asked. He didn't want to do this, but it seemed he would have to use the one way he had to escape this situation.

"I'm on good terms with brother Fu Tao. Can you let me go on that account?" Alex asked as he looked at her face for changes.

And changes he found. The initially haughty and curious face turned into surprise.

"You know Fu Tao?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I was the one that helped him return to this empire from the other side of the Northern forest."

The woman's face changed once again. This time, it went from surprised to angry and raged.

'What?' Alex thought as he looked at the face.

"You were the one who helped Fu Tao return?" she asked. "You were the one who destroyed my future as the best disciple of the family?"

'Holy shit, she's crazy,' Alex thought. It seemed he had somehow managed to find the only fuel he had and dumped it all on her silently burning anger.

Now she was raging.

Suddenly, to Alex's senses, waves like spiritual energy crashed onto him, threatening to devour his mind.

Alex sent out his own spiritual sense to counter it but despite being stronger than her spiritual sense in general, Alex had a hard time fighting it.

He felt like he was using normal Qi in his body to fight a power that was born out of a technique.

Brute force could only help him as much.

Alex sent out a Heaven's Impact, and as he expected, it quickly broke through the wave and struck the girl. However, another spiritual barrier appeared to protect her.

'I'm not going to get through to her like this,' Alex thought. He needed to do something quickly.

The poisoned sword appeared in his hands and he rushed forward. At the same time, a sword appeared in the girl's hands as well.

Fu Xiran's main expertise was in mental attacks. Given that her family's signature skills were all spiritual attacks.

From a young age, she had been trained in the arts of mental attacks and when she was able to prove herself to the family, they finally handed her a Spirit Cleansing Lily when she entered the True Realm.

This year, she was already 30 years old. A 30-year-old at True Lord 9th realm would be considered a top-class talent anywhere.

However, to the Fu Family, who had Fu Tao, a 26-year-old talent that entered the True King realm, she was nothing.

The only time in her entire life when she had heard news about Fu Tao, which was also good news for her, was when she learned of his death.

However, not a few months later, that too was destroyed by another news about his return.

She had never felt more anger and despair in her whole life. She wanted to beat him, and become the strongest in the family.

She wanted more than what she had right now. And just as she wished for it, in came a young man with a spiritual sense that dwarfed anyone in the entire group of the young generation.

After placing a spiritual mark on him, she had also come to find out about his cultivation base as well.

'Hmph, I will have to carefully disable him without activating the teleportation talisman he too may have,' she thought.

So, when the fight began, she met his sword with her own.

And then, her eyes went wide.

"What the hell is this strength?" she shouted out loud at him. The mark was clearly telling her that he was in True Lord 1st realm, and yet the strength... it was close to True Lord 7th realm.

Alex's sword glowed with golden light as well as a white light that tried to cover his sword but ended up being nothing more than an outline.

'Sword Intent as well?' the girl looked in shock. When she took that attack, she felt the strength of True Lord 8th realm.

'I need to do something quick, or I won't be able to defeat him without using my strong attacks she thought.

So, she brought out some things from her storage bag and got to work

Chapter 662 Dream

Alex saw some things come out of her storage bag, but before he could see what it was, a large spiritual wave crashed at him, forcing him to recall his spiritual sense to fight against it.

At the same time, a barrier of blue appeared around her, stopping Alex from seeing what she was doing.

Then, the barrier crumbled as many sharp icicles remained around her.

The girl grabbed one of the icicles and threw it at Alex with her full force while continuously driving down her wave of spiritual energy at him too.

Alex swung his sword and crushed the icicle coming at him.

Then, two more came. One right next to him and one quite far away. Alex easily dodged the one that was further away and broke the one that was next to him.

Even as the wave of spiritual energy crashed down on him, the girl didn't stop the barrage of icicles at him.

Alex blocked the ones he needed to, but most of them he simply dodged.

'Is this girl trying to tire me out?' he thought. She clearly wasn't planning to hurt him with the icicles, so Alex wondered if her plan was to make him use up as much Qi as he could before she completely dominated him with her own power.

'She doesn't know how much I have, and that will be her downfall,' Alex thought.

Just as he thought that the icicles around the girl ended, she showed a happy smile like a crazed maniac.

"Finally," she said as she stopped her spiritual attack and pulled back her spiritual sense.

Alex's own spiritual sense finally spread out freely with no obstruction. And when it did reach around him to see the neatly lined icicles, suspicion grew in his heart.

Then, the icicles melted, and of the nearly 30 icicles that were on the ground, out of 8 of them, black metallic rods appeared with a leather flag on top of it.

"Shit!" Alex cried out and tried to run, but it was too late.

A massive barrier of crimson light appeared all around him, blocking his escape. Worst of all, the formation rods were outside the barrier.

"I finally... got you," the girl said with a heavy strain on her voice. She hadn't done well attacking him with her spiritual sense with such persistence.

Alex attacked the barrier with any and every skill he had. Fist, Punch, slash, anything he could think of.

Alex even tried to use the Earth Devour technique to escape, but the barrier blocked it.

'Dammit!' he thought. His lack of experience when it can fighting a strong human opponent had become his downfall.

Then, he started feeling groggy. 'Disorienting formation?' he wondered, but that wasn't it. He could clearly see the woman outside eating a pill with no problem.

If he was being disoriented, then the direction or the angle of what he saw would become disoriented as well.

'Why is my head feeling so heavy?' he thought.

As if to answer him, the girl spoke. "It's a Spirit Restraining formation. Inside that formation, your spiritual sense will be restrained to a mere fraction of what you can truly use," she said.

Alex struck the formation as hard as he could. If his attack was strong enough, he could surely destroy the formation even from the inside.

If not destroyed, he could use up the spirit stones and cause that to have the formation fail.

So, he continued attacking.

Then, something happened that caused Alex to drop his sword. He looked in front of him and saw the girl use some sort of spiritual technique on him that was making him really groggy and sleepy.

Alex used his spiritual sense to fight back, but he was barely able to push it back. He didn't bother getting down to grab the sword and instead brought out the other, better sword to attack with it.

Then he continued sending out a barrage of attacks at the barrier.

The girl frowned. 'How strong is his mind? Why is the Spiritual Dream Sequence not starting already?' she thought and pushed further.

She even ate a Saint rank Mind Recovery pill to restore her lost spiritual sense in a matter of minutes as well as eat a Spiritual Enhancement pill to improve her mental strength for a few minutes.

She just needed a few minutes of him not fighting back before the formation fully suppressed his spiritual sense.

As the strength of her attack grew, Alex was unable to keep up his own attack and slowly, he succumbed to the dream she put him in.

* * * * *

Alex opened his eyes in the midst of many people, all of whom were wearing black clothes.

'Where am I?' he thought for a second before he realized there was a casket at the center of the group.

They were outside, and this was a funeral.

Alex looked to his side and saw his Aunt Liz crying her eyes out while holding a little Hannah next to the very young-looking Uncle Rob.

Aunt Liz never seemed to age after hitting her prime, but why was Uncle Rob so young?

Alex heard some sniffling behind him and turned his head to see his mother's young face, filled with tears.

He then looked around, hoping to find his father, but he wasn't there at all.

"Where is grampa, mama?" Alex was surprised to hear his own voice come out of his mouth.

Helen only cried louder, unable to answer.

'Ah!' Alex thought. 'This must be grandfather's funeral. I was... 3 at the time, right?'

Alex's grandmother had died before he was even born, and about 10 years after that, his grandfather had died as well.

'What is this? Am I back in time?' he thought. 'No, this feels more like a dream.'

'What a vivid dream,' he thought.

"Thank you all for gathering here today," a man's voice boomed even without any speaker.

'Father!' Alex thought as he looked towards the front of the funeral to see his, young but still brawny, father speak while holding back his tears.

"My father," Alex's father started and went on a speech about how good a man his father was, and how he had on his own opened a farm at the end of nowhere, and did such an amazing job raising two fantastic children.

Liz could only cry louder as she heard the speech.

"This is a grim day for us, but we will not let it stop us," Alex's father said, his voice booming with every single word.

"As my father used to say, whether you are beaten or hurt, you let that pain go through you, change you, and then you stand up and keep moving forward."

"I know my father wouldn't want us to stop here and would want us to do better, keep moving forward, and make him proud."

"So, that is exactly what we will do. You hear that, father. I won't stop! I will keep moving forward and make you proud."

Alex looked in stun as he had never heard his father say something with so much intensity and conviction.

He wanted to see more, but even as he did, the people blurred like ink drops on water, and the scene in front of him changed.

Chapter 663 Keep Moving Forward

The inks in the water moved and twisted as they settled on another dream, another scene from his past that he had forgotten.

This time, Alex was inside a small room with shelves full of books and trophies to one side, and a large window on the other.

He was sitting on top of something and could see a desk in front of him. There were pens and markers in a glass, a bunch of files to the side, and a sign that said 'headmaster' next to a lamp.

Behind the desk was a man with round glasses and a thick beard. At the very least, this man was 40 years old.

"Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. And Mrs. Benton," the man spoke. "I... I don't know what to say, honestly."

"You can start by saying why there is a bandage wrapped around my son's head for now," Alex heard his father speak.

His father was currently holding him.

'So young,' Alex thought when he saw his father. He looked almost as young as in the last dream.

Next to him, Alex saw his mother. She too was so young and so beautiful. Alex almost couldn't believe how thin she was as well.

Then, he saw her face with fury clear in her eyes. She was angry.

Alex didn't remember seeing her angry. Sure, she would get annoyed sometimes and become serious when it was time for him to get a scolding. But never had he seen her with such rage.

'What happened to make her feel this angry?' he wondered.

"I'm so sorry that this has happened. These kids aren't used to seeing someone younger in the same grade as them. We... we didn't think that little Alex would get bullied by the older students. Please don't worry, we have punished them and let their parents know as well," the headmaster said.

That was when Alex put together where he was. 'This is the school?' Alex thought. Because of how far away the school was, Alex's father had taken him out of it to home-school him. So, he never really remembered his time at school.

'I was also... just 5 years old, wasn't I?' he thought.

"We told you," his father's calm voice spoke. "We insisted that you don't send Alex up a grade and instead keep him with his own peers. But you didn't listen, did you?"

"And now my son is hurt because of you. He is bleeding from the forehead."

Despite looking calm, his father had rage in his voice too.

"I'm so sorry about that. That was our mistake. I will suspend the other children if that's what you want," the headmaster said.

"I don't care about what you do to the other kids. I simply want you to immediately transfer him back to first grade again, so he can study like a normal child," Alex's father said.

"That's... that's a little hard. Alex is too good for his class. He understands everything about his subject. Trust me, it will be better for him to skip class."

"He's already starting to show how good he is at second grade's subjec—"

"Stop it," Alex's father said. "If you won't transfer him to his appropriate class, then we will take Alex out of this school."

"And go where?" the headmaster asked. "This is the only school in the area. The nearest other one is 2 hours from here. You will have to waste 8 hours a day just to get your son to and from school."

"We don't have to take him to any school. We will home-school him. My wife used to work as a teacher in the city, so she knows how to do it well," Alex's father said and stood up.

When he did, he hulked over the Headmaster, giving him a small fright. "Let's go, dear," he said and walked out.

The entire time there, Alex's mother said nothing at all for she feared all the curses she would throw at the headmaster for letting a bunch of older students bully her 5-year-old son.

When they returned back to his father's old truck, his mother finally took him and caressed his head.

"Does it hurt, Al?" she asked softly.

"N-no," Alex once again heard his voice come out even though he didn't speak.

Alex chuckled a little as he heard the pain in his own voice. 'Why was I trying to hide my pain? Did I want to look strong like father?' he thought.

Suddenly, his father slightly pressed on his wound. "Ouch!" Alex cried out and tear filled his eyes.

"See? It hurts," he said with a slight chuckle.

"What are you doing?" his mom cried out, but his father ignored her and looked at him.

"Listen son, you don't have to act like it doesn't hurt. You can cry if you want. All you need to do is not let the pain take you down."

"As my father used to say, whether you are beaten or hurt, you let that pain go through you, change you, and then you stand up and keep moving forward," his father said.

"Keep... moving forward?" the little Alex asked.

"Yes," his father said.

"What are you telling to a 5-year-old kid?" his mother said.

"Uh... right. My bad," his father said and started the truck. "You want to get some snacks on the way, son?"

"Yes," the little Alex shouted in happiness and the small truck moved.

Even as it did, Alex was left behind as he saw the family of 3 move on without him. And soon... they disappeared once more like ink on water.

When the ink resettled once more, Alex found himself standing in the midst of a lot of people. He was maybe a couple of centimeters smaller than what he was at the moment.

'Oh, I grew,' he thought. When he looked around, he recognized the place.

'It's the train station,' he thought. If he was here then...

'This must have been the day I left for university,' he thought.

"You've got everything in your suitcase right?" his father asked.

"Yes, father," Alex said.

"And the location of the dorm? Can you go there by yourself?" he asked.

"I can, father," Alex said.

"Sigh, we sheltered you for far too long because of... never mind. Now that you are an adult, you should be able to handle yourself," his father said.

"For what?" Alex looked confused.

"Oh, here's the train. Quick, get it," his father said and Alex went in.

"Have a safe journey, son. Remember what I told you okay, no going to clubs and stuff," his father said.

"I know, father," Alex said.

"Good," his father said. "And remember, don't let anything in the city weigh you down. It will be new, unique, and probably a scary experience."

"No matter what happens, keep moving forward," his father said.

"Yes, father," Alex said.

"Goodbye son," his father said and the train left.

That was the last day Alex had seen his father. That was the last day he had been in this place. For that was the day he would enter the game and be teleported to the Western Continent.

As the train vanished like ink in water, a single thought swirled around Alex's mind.

Keep Moving Forward.

The ink changed to something else, and Alex found himself on top of a mountain in the middle of the night.

He knelt on the ground and had his master's dying body in his hand.

Alex's face got serious. This was a pain that he never wanted to experience again.

He had already been through this once. He didn't need to go through it twice.

The pain had changed him already, and he didn't let this pain weigh him down. He had already moved forward.

"No!" he said with a stern expression and the dream vanished.

* * * *

Alex opened his eyes on the outside and saw the crimson barrier still surrounding him.

"What? How are you not suppressed already?" the woman outside the barrier shouted at him.

"You..." Alex said with a heavy, but stern expression. He tightened the grip around the sword in his hand, and continued, "You cannot stop me."

"What?" the girl said.

"You cannot stop me," Alex said and dashed ahead to slash. he remembered the words his grandfather used to say, which then became his father's.

Now, it would be his.

"You can beat me, you can hurt me," Alex said as he swung back at the barrier with all he had. He hadn't noticed that he was holding the sword in which he couldn't pour in his Qi at all.

"All that will do is make the pain change me," he shouted and slashed back harder. The barrier shuddered and even the girl was surprised as to what was happening.

This was already a weak barrier because its important function was mental suppression, but physical suppression.

So, when the barrier shook, her heart shook along with it.

'No, he can't break it,' she thought.

"One the pain goes through," Alex shouted as he slashed. "I will stand up."

His strikes got exceedingly violent.

"And I will move forward," he said as he slashed the barrier and stopped. He looked ahead of him in awe as if noticing something for the first time.

"I... will move forward," he said absentmindedly as the pained expression in his eyes changed to one of happiness.

"Yes," he said as he prepared his sword with a white outline appearing on top of it.

"That is me," he said. "I am the one who moves forward no matter what."

The white outline on his sword started to grow and soon, it fully covered the entire sword.

Then, he struck the barrier.

Chapter 664 Just a Little Forward

The white light covered the entire sword as specks of light also flickered out of it like embers from a fireplace.

After 2 entire years of wanting to do it. After getting on the edge of it and being stuck, Alex had finally managed to complete it.

His own Sword Qi.

Even as he sent out a slash with his full force behind the attack, he knew for a fact that this would be the last time he saw the barrier.

When the Sword slash filled with Sword Qi struck the crimson barrier, the barrier shuddered and threatened to break.

The girl felt scared when she saw that, but a split second later her heart calmed down when she saw the barrier didn't break.

However, she then noticed the white slash that still hadn't disappeared.

Alex understood it himself. Unless his Sword Qi was destroyed, it was now a Sword Qi that kept moving forward and didn't stop at all.

So, even when it didn't break the barrier, it kept pushing on it with all of its force.

Then, a second later, there was finally a crack in the barrier.

Then, another second later, the barrier shattered into a million pieces that drifted into the wind like crimson powder that soon disappeared.

Then, the remaining power in the slash moved forward to hit one of the formation flags, and finally, the formation disappeared.

Finally, Alex felt his mind clear up like never before. The sleepiness and the grogginess disappeared just like the suppression on it.

Then he looked at the woman with pure hatred in his eyes.

"You are dead," he said and dashed forward towards her.

The girl used both Spiritual as well as physical attacks but not a single one of them stopped Alex's advancements.

While she was a step higher than him in what she could bring out from her attacks, her attacks never really were about doing physical damage.

They were always about doing mental damage.

She had ways to even beat someone who used artifacts to block mental attacks. All she would have to do was keep them busy until she was able to rip out their artifacts.

However, against someone who had none, she was helpless.

All she could do was fight back and hope she won against him.

However, it very soon became apparent just how stupid her idea was. If it was Alex from before, she could have somehow held him back, or even win against him.

However, now that he had found the inspiration for his sword Qi, she was useless.

Even if he had just learned Sword Qi, he was already sending out attacks that were in the True King realm.

Her defense couldn't stop her from more than a few True King realm attacks.

So, very soon, she found herself on the verge of death.

However, she wasn't worried about death. None of them were. All she was worried about was not being able to beat Alex and steal what made him so great.

She was worried that the treasure she tried so hard to find would be lost to her if she couldn't beat him anymore.

So, she kept fighting back, hoping he would slip, hoping he would make some mistake.

But Alex did none of those. Each one of his attacks was made to kill. If not for the girl's defensive armor, she would've died by now.

However, she couldn't hold on for long. Even an armor as strong could only block as long as it had Qi in it.

Naturally, an armor would siphon Qi from her slowly to continue working. But if she drained it too fast, she wouldn't be able to keep up with the replenishment for the armor.

Once it stopped working, she would have a hard time putting in Qi to make it work again.

And that time was coming closer and closer.

The violent slashes landed all over her body, each with the power to cleave her in half like she were a butter to his hot knife. But the armor kept on protecting her.

Until... it didn't.

Alex heard a crack in the armor, and suddenly, it stopped working. Now, all it could do was work as normal metal armor.

That did as good as being naked in front of his sword.

The girl's eyes went wide as she realized what was about to happen. She was going to lose to a kid. Not only did she lose to Fu Tao, but now she was going to lose to a kid that had barely entered into the True Lord realm.

Rage filled her eyes even as the white sword came next to her, and then...

BANG~

A barrier appeared around her to protect her from the deadly attack.

The girl was already getting wrapped in the silver-white light as she was being teleported away.

Alex felt the rebound and his sword came back to him. Once it stopped, he gripped it harder and slashed it back at her neck. Or, where he thought it would be in the light that already covered her.

His eyes were fueled with rage now. This girl had just come here and tried to kill him, and now she was leaving just like that?

Alex had already let 3 different people that tried to kill him get away all because they were being protected.

'No!' he thought. 'Not this time.'

However, even as his sword arrived next to her next, he could tell that there was some distance between him, and the girl was already being teleported away.

She had begun moving and would soon be out of here.

'No! A little more,' he thought to himself. 'Just a bit forward.'

"Move forward!" he shouted at his own sword and his own self.

Then, as if responding to his cries, his sword increased its length a bit.

No, that was wrong. The sword's length was the same as before.

Alex had moved forward a bit.

No, that was wrong as well. Alex was right where he stood from the beginning.

Then had the girl moved closer to him?

Alex didn't understand, and for now, he didn't care. His wish had been heard and the girl's neck was on his blade.

SLASH~

The white light disappeared, and the girl vanished.

Alex gathered himself as he looked at the empty space in front of him. Then, he looked at the sword in his hand.

There was not a speck of blood on it. There never was.

He didn't need the blood to tell him that he had been successful in cutting her head off. He was confident he had.

Only... he didn't understand how.

* * * * * *

The Saint realm experts were on the outside, calmly meditating in the open space.

There were still 3 more days to go until the realm closed, so they weren't in any hurry.

Just then, two silver lights flashed not far away from them and immediately spiritual sense moved to see who it was.

"Two lights at the same time, what a coincidence," someone said.

"Those kids must have fought each other and managed to land a strong hit on each other," another saint realm expert said

"Or maybe it really is just a coincidence," another elder said.

They expected one of their disciples to come out of the silvery-white light, so all of them looked with interest.

Then, the two lights disappeared at once.

On one side fell a headless corpse of a woman wearing crimson robes. On the other side fell the head of the corpse of the woman who one of the elders recognized.

"Xiran!" the crimson-robed elder shouted and went up to her. However, he was too late. The girl was dead.

"Who killed our disciple!" the old man shouted with rage and the island shuddered.

Shen Jing's eyes opened at the commotion as even he was surprised.

'How was a corpse teleported after the person was killed?' he wondered. His first thought was someone used a teleportation talisman to send the body and head separately, but that didn't make sense.

The girl herself should have had a protective talisman on her.

He checked her wound and suddenly something caught his eyes. Those cuts...

'How?' his eyes went wide in horror. 'How is someone able to do this?'

He couldn't imagine how there could even exist a True realm cultivator in this continent, nay, in this entire world that could possibly do such a thing.

If that person was to grow and learn more... even Shen Jing started to fear a little for the future of these lands.

Chapter 665 Another Door

Alex stared at his sword. With a thought, an outline formed on top of it full of white light.

This was his Sword Intent.

Then, with another thought, the outline increased to the point that it covered the whole blade and all of it glowed white this time.

This was his Sword Qi.

But then... what about when sparks flew out of the white light that surrounded a person? Alex had seen it with Du Yuhan. When he used Sword Qi, sparks would flow around him before converging on the sword to form the sword Qi.

'Am I doing it wrong? Or is my path of the sword just that different?' Alex wondered.

Du Yuhan had told him that his path had been one where he cut everything in his path. So... maybe it was different?

Alex decided to stop thinking about it now and simply rejoiced at the fact that he managed to get past the bottleneck and established his own Sword Qi.

He sat at the foot of the tree with Pearl protecting him as he cultivated to gather up his Qi once more.

By the time he was done, night had already fallen. Alex could leave, but he didn't.

Memories of the day flooded his mind and tear welled up in his eyes. His mother and father... he hadn't seen either of them in over 3 years.

Only after remembering them, seeing them care for him did he realize just how much he had missed them both.

'She did at least one thing nice before she died,' he thought and stood up.

Just like his father said, Alex wouldn't let even this pain stop him. He had to keep moving forward.

So, he stood up from the place and left. The rest of the remaining 3 days felt empty to him.

He couldn't think of what there was in this place to do. He went to the 6th mountain, but it was the same old.

He went around the forest, but aside from finding some ingredients and treasures with a lot of Qi, there was nothing more to find.

Some rogue cultivators as well as normal ones tried to rob him, but they were usually too weak for him even without his elemental Qi, or his sword Qi.

As such, the 8th day passed along as well with nothing of value happening in the land around him.

Alex had returned to the 5th mountain on this day, but there were too many people looking for some treasures, so he could sneakily open a few doors and steal what he could find.

So, he had to leave that place too.

On the 9th day, while roaming around the place, Alex returned back to the 3rd mountain that still had a host of people that looked ready to attack the cultivators belonging to sects and clans that were blocking the route.

Alex shook his head when he saw that and ignored it to go around the mountain. He walked up the side of the mountain, trekking in between the trees as he saw everything around him.

At the top of the mountain, there was another plateau. Alex half-expected a house to be there, but there was nothing there really.

All he could see were tall grasses and short trees.

"Hmm... weird," he thought for a second as he looked at the trees and something looked misplaced there.

He turned around and looked at the other areas and immediately realized what it was. "Right, the trees are too young," he thought.

The grasses and trees filled the area, but they were young.

'Why is it young?' he wondered and sent out his spiritual sense.

At first, nothing seemed abnormal. The Qi was fine and the trees were healthy.

However, it was then that he noticed something.

'My spiritual sense won't' go underground?' he thought in surprise. He tried to force it into the mountain, but he simply couldn't.

'Is there a barrier around this mountain?' he wondered and stumped his legs beneath him very hard.

Suddenly, the surroundings vibrated as a blue barrier that appeared around them pushed the entire soil and plants above it.

Alex then took out his sword and slashed using his Sword Qi. He didn't know exactly how strong his attack was at the moment, but he knew it was in the True King realm.

He would go check the damage on the next mountain after this.

When the white slash landed on the ground, the blue barrier appeared once again to block the attack, but his sword Qi wouldn't budge.

The Qi diminished by the second and until the very end, they kept attacking the barrier.

In the process, they destroyed quite an area around them as soil and plants both were ripped away from the area, revealing the true thing that lay underneath.

A giant cluster of complex runes.

Alex recognized part of the runes in the cluster as the ones he could find in any door.

'So this is a door?' Alex thought. 'Where does it lead to?'

He kept away his sword and placed his hands on the runes before pouring in his own Qi.

When the Qi flowed into the gate, Alex got his spiritual sense ready to peer into the place and see what it held.

After all, it wasn't like the gate would just op—

Suddenly, a familiar feeling took over Alex, and before he could say anything, he was teleported away.

When he reappeared, Alex found himself inside a relatively bright room that had runes that burned with bright light.

"Where the hell am I? Why did I teleport?" he immediately started freaking out. He really hadn't expected the door to suddenly teleport him.

None of the other doors had done anything like that. Why did this one do such a thing?

When he sent his spiritual sense out, he found that he couldn't bring it out at all. It was as if spiritual sense was suppressed in this room.

"What the hell?" he thought. He started looking around and soon found a complex rune of the same type outside

'Sigh, there's a way to leave,' he thought.

He relaxed a little after learning that he could leave it whenever the hell he wanted to. But he still couldn't help but wonder where the hell he was.

Alex was standing in the midst of a relatively grand hall. The walls seemed to be made up of something that looked like limestone but was harder.

The floor was made up of the same material and had bright red carpets on top of it.

He walked around the room, looking through it everything and that was when he noticed a door at the corner of the room.

'Oh, what's that?' he thought and walked towards it.

This time, the door looked incredibly simple. There were no runes on it at all. "It's a simple door?" Alex couldn't help but be surprised.

He tried to push on the door, but it seemed to have been lodged somewhere, and didn't want to be pushed.

It was either that or the door itself was very heavy. "Screw it, I will cut it," he thought and brought out his sword.

White light covered the sharp sword in his hands and he directly struck the door. When the strike landed, Alex's eyes went wide.

Somehow, even with his strongest attack at the moment, the best he could do to the door was put a small cut on it that was merely half a centimeter deep.

Alex half expected to find the sword with chinks on it, but of course not. His sword was one of the best ever.

If only it accepted Qi, that would have been awesome.

Alex tried a few more times, but all he could do was make some cuts. He sighed a stopped.

At this rate, it would take him 5 days at least to break through the door. He didn't have that sort of time.

'What the hell is this place exactly?' he thought one last time before deciding to leave. If he couldn't open the only door that could lead him to possible treasures, then he didn't need to remain here.

He walked back to the front of the room and placed his palm on the runes before pouring Qi into it.

The runes glowed bright yellow, and then... nothing happened.

"What?" Alex was confused for a second. He poured in his Qi once again, but the same thing happened once again, which was nothing.

"Oh, you can't do this to me," Alex said and he poured in more Qi and even punched it a couple of times.

However, he still couldn't teleport at all.

"What the hell is going on? Am I stuck here now?" he asked with shock. He couldn't help but start blaming the Alex from 5 minutes ago for being so stupid.

But, when he thought back to the event that took place then, he had no reason at all to suspect that such a thing could've even happened.

Even if he was twice as cautious as he was now, he would still have done the same thing.

"There's no point in bothering then," he thought and let out Pearl.

Pearl came out with a meow and asked where they were.

"You can speak freely here," Alex said. "Also, we are stuck somewhere with no way to leave."

"We're stuck? What do we do now?" Pearl asked.

"Well, I think the best thing to do now, is to do nothing," Alex said. "There are only 2 more days left for this realm to be over. All we have to do now is sit tight and wait for the world to teleport us out."

Chapter 666 The 11th Day

Outside the Demon Realm.

The many Saints had stopped meditating and were now waiting for their disciples and juniors to come out of the place.

Any minute now, the demon realm would end.

Suddenly, a bright light flashed all around them, and one by one people started popping out of the place.

Fu Tao walked toward his senior and waited for more of his juniors to leave.

Liang Qiu started looking for her juniors herself.

More and more people starting to pop out. Some rejoiced, some became sad.

Some tried to attack others claiming that their stuff was stolen, while some were dejected at the fact that they were teleported just as they were about to reach for some treasure.

Most showed one emotion or another, but all in all, most were simply glad to be out.

Of course, not everyone got to come out. Some of the elders waited, but their juniors and disciples didn't come out at all.

"Where's sister Xiran?" Fu Tao asked the saint expert next to him.

"Dead, I'm afraid," the man said with a sigh. "Have you any idea what happened?"

"Dead?" Fu Tao gave a weird look. "I haven't seen her since we entered the House of the Undying 3 days ago."

The elder shook his head when he heard that, but then he stopped. "You did what?!" he asked in surprise.

A similar reaction was popping out all over the location as the elders found out about the event that took place in the House of the Undying.

Very quickly the disciples summed up what was going on and the elders couldn't help but get more shocked.

"You were successful in getting treasures then?" he asked.

"Yes, elder. There was quite a bit of treasure in there. Although most of them have lost their effectiveness due to time, I should still call myself lucky with how many I got," Fu Tao said.

"Good, Good," the elder said with a happy face. It was as if he had forgotten the momentary sadness of losing a disciple.

They all talked for a while, and finally, as disciples stopped popping out of the monument, they started leaving.

Most of the greater clans and sects left immediately once they understood that no one else was coming out.

They had been here way too many times to be expectant about something like that.

The lower grade sects and clans too left not long after seeing the greater clans and sects leave. If they were going, they had no reason to stay behind.

Some folks stayed behind, hoping their person wasn't dead and just stuck, but life wasn't all sunshine and happiness.

Not long after, they too began to leave as they understood that they had lost someone precious to themselves or their organization.

No one waited for the rogue cultivators without a backup. After all, they were rogue.

So, by the end of the day, as the sun started to set, there was only one person that still stayed on the island.

Shen Jing

He's always smiling face held a troubled look as he kept staring at the monument. He hoped and hoped and hoped, but no matter what, Alex didn't come out.

'Did he really die?' Shen Jing wondered. That thought only made him feel worse and worse by the second.

He walked up to the monument and placed his hands on it. When he poured his Qi into the monument, the secret realm inside of it started to get unstable.

He let go.

"It really did close up, huh?" he thought, and after a long while sighed.

"Master's final grace before he left... I destroyed it all," Shen Jing sighed.

"Not to mention, now she is going to be angry with me. Ahhhh! I should have kept him back and not let him enter the realm," Shen Jing cried out.

Shen Jing had thought that with Alex's 2 year-long survival training that he would be able to walk out of any danger without a problem.

However, now it all seemed like a lie to tell himself.

"Goddammit!" he shouted in anger.

His aura shook the island as waves crashed onto it with far greater strength.

After a while, Shen Jing finally accepted the fact that both Alex and Pearl had died in the secret realm, and left the island as the sole bearer of this tragic news.

* * * * * *

The first day that Alex had been inside this special room, he had thought that he would simply wait around.

However, once Pearl got bored, they started throwing out attacks at the door in hope that it opened up in the next 2 days before the realm closed up.

'Is tomorrow the 10th day, or the beginning of it?' Alex thought. Soon, he realized that there was still another day to go before he would be sent out.

So, one more day, he continued sending out attacks at the door, hoping to get it open before the day was over.

Unfortunately, he couldn't do it in time.

As the day was ending, Alex stopped. There was no point in attacking the door. It was still only halfway done.

He would have to attack for some more days before he could get it to break open.

"Stop Pearl, there's no need now," Alex said.

"Why?" Pearl asked with a confused look.

"It's time to leave," Alex said. "You should get back for now."

Pearl nodded and jumped into his beast space. Then, all Alex had to do was wait.

As time slowly passed, he started wondering when he was going to get taken out.

When it reached the time for him to get out and he still didn't, the wonder in his heart turned to anxiety.

After that, every minute he wasn't taken out, the anxiety turned to fear.

"Oh no," he thought. "Am I stuck here? What's going on?"

He went to the runes at the front of the room and was still unable to activate it to teleport.

As more time passed, the 11th day of the realm arrived.

While he wondered if the realm had made a mistake and was going on for another day. but as more and more time passed, he started becoming more and more sure that the reason why he hadn't been teleported out was that he was in this goddamn room.

So he understood that he needed to leave this place immediately.

But how?

An answer came to him almost instantly.

"Through the door."

Alex brought out his sword and started attacking the door relentlessly. Not long after, Pearl joined in as well and continued attacking the door.

Minute after minute, slash after slash, Alex started chipping away at the door bit by bit.

With both Pearl and Alex hitting at it with the urgency they had, their power was only stronger than what they put out the last two days.

Each one of Alex's strikes was filled with the power of his Sword Qi. Each one of Pearl's attacks was the White Tiger's Golden Claw.

Slowly but surely, they managed to dig deeper and deeper into the stone door.

Once the door was on its last leg, Alex gave one last strike and the door suddenly broke into a hundred pieces.

Finally, Alex could see what was inside the room. When he did, he couldn't help but be shocked.

Chapter 667 Death

"Someone is cultivating?" Alex asked himself as he looked inside.

The room beyond the door was a small compact room that could not have been a way out of this place.

Still, Alex forgot about all of what had made him want to open up the door. For now, all he could do was be curious as to what the man was doing here.

'Is he in closed cultivation?' he wondered. 'How long has he been here?'

Covered in a black robe, the man stayed still with no sign of movement. His eyes were closed, and his body slumped.

He looked just like a normal man, maybe even a little handsome with his young look and his handsome face.

Except there was a single difference that made him not look like a normal man.

There were two, skin-colored spikes coming out of the man's forehead, which slanted the more it grew up.

Horns.

The horns were maybe 10 centimeters long at best, but that was enough for Alex to tell what the man was.

'A demon,' he thought and looked at the man in complete shock. 'How many years has this thing been here?'

"Pearl, get back in right now," Alex said, and without question, Pearl jumped back into the beast space.

Should he leave now? but how?

Then, Alex gathered up his courage and spoke, "Ex-Excuse me?"

He waited for the demon to open his eyes, but the demon gave no response.

"Sir?" Alex called out to the man, but once again, he didn't respond.

In fact, he didn't move either. And he gave no aura… and he wasn't breathing either.

'Is this man really in closed cultivation?' Alex thought and slowly stepped in.

"Senior?" he called out even as he went in just in case, but there was no response.

Alex started to get more and more suspicious. This demon… was dead, wasn't it?

As he got closer, Alex saw something curious. On the man's neck was a circular medal of sort hanging from a thin piece of thread.

In his right hand was a storage bag, simply out in the open.

Alex waited for a bit and carefully looked at the man. Only after he was absolutely sure that he was looking at a corpse did he move his hand.

Slowly, he reached out to the storage bag and lifted it off of the demon's hand. Immediately afterward, he shot backward and got into a defensive position but the demon didn't stand to attack him.

"Phew!" Alex thought and looked at the medal next. The medal looked smooth with no carvings on it.

'Is it wood or metal?' he wondered when he saw the metal. The bronze color made it impossible to tell from where he stood.

Alex reached for the medal and grabbed it to turn it around. Just as he did, something happened.

A glorious aura of death and darkness suddenly erupted from the demon's body. It was so strong that Alex fell back suddenly while still holding the medal.

When he did so, the thread ripped, and the medal came undone from the demon's neck.

At the same time, the deathly aura around him abruptly grew more dangerous as it started putting pressure on Alex.

And then, a face emerged from the cloud of black Qi in the air.

The face of the demon.

Its skin was black like it was dipped in ink. As such, even its horn was pitch black.

The only thing of color on that face was the dazzling yellow eyes. Alex couldn't help but tell himself how beautiful those eyes were.

The face's mouth opened and a booming voice emerged.

"I... SENSE... NO... BLOOD... OF...MINE... IN...YOU" the voice said in slow, methodical words. The aura suppressed Alex, and all he could do was look at the giant face in horror.

"YOU… ARE… NOT… MY… KIN!" the face continued.

Then finally, it said, "ALL... INTRUDERS… WILL… DIE!"

The black face suddenly twisted until it looked like a crescent moon on a handle, and it dropped with tremendous force towards Alex.

All Alex could do was watch the scythe fall on top of him in horror. The only aura stronger than this that he had ever witnessed was the lightning from Heavenly Judgment.

And those were meant to kill immortals.

Alex watched his death approach with not a single drop of blood remaining on his face. His body could move, but he didn't do anything.

For he knew, there was not a single thing he could do to save himself.

The scythe fell on his neck, and…

~ROAR~

Suddenly, Alex heard a roar coming from within himself. A large golden light came out of him and struck the incoming scythe.

Like a candle in a raging storm, the scythe vanished into nothingness.

Alex stayed on the ground and clutched his neck where he had scythe had nearly struck. He had, at some point, already dropped the medal on the ground.

All he could do right now was thank god that he wasn't dead.

'No,' he thought as beads of sweat rolled down all over his body. 'I need to thank Shen Jing.'

Alex remembered the single defense the Shen Jing had placed on him before he entered. Fortunately, he hadn't come across anyone strong to have a need for it to be used.

If not for that, he would've died today for sure.

Alex took a few minutes to gather his wits and finally looked back at the corpse of the demon.

Now that all the aura had left it, it looked decrepit and rotten with barely any muscle remaining. In fact, it was simply a skeleton now.

Alex wiped some of the sweat in him and quickly ran out of the room, not before picking up the medal he had dropped.

Once he was out, and hopefully safe, he got as far away from the door as he could and sat down close to a corner to look at the items in his hands.

The first one, the medal, was a bronze-colored circular stone of some kind that was colored to look like it were wood or metal.

One side of it was flat and smooth, but the other side was full of intricate carvings that Alex recognized to be runes.

As for what runes exactly, he couldn't tell. One thing he was sure of was that this medal didn't have a teleportation rune on it.

"Sigh, was all that work for nothing?" he wondered and put the medal to the side before checking what was inside the bag.

There were a few things in the storage bag, and Alex brought them out one by one.

The first one Alex brought out was a bunch of spirit stones, maybe around 20.

It had been in the storage bag for so long, and yet it hadn't lost any of its glow. It was a little surprising to think that it would have Qi even after being with the demon since it was here.

'Is there even any left?' Alex wondered and tried to cultivate his Qi when suddenly, he had to let go of it.

"Argh!" he cried out in slight pain. The right arm became numb for a few seconds before returning back to normal.

'That energy, it was so strong,' he thought and picked back the stone. 'Is this… a Saint rank spirit stone?'

He couldn't help but be shocked at the realization.

Saint spirit stones. This was not something that was so readily available in today's world. After all, a Saint rank Spirit Vine had to die for Saint Spirit stones to form from it.

Alex looked at the 20 spirit stones in awe for a while and put them into his ring.

Next, he brought out a small jar of… something. Without his spiritual sense, Alex felt really blind.

He slowly opened the jar and an intense aroma of a mix of herbs and flowers wafted out of it.

Alex looked inside and saw a magenta-colored medicinal paste of some sort. 'What is this? Is this saint rank too?' he wondered.

He got close to it to see if he could recognize the ingredients used by the scent, but all he managed to do was make his nose and throat burn for a few seconds which forced him to cough and sneeze for a little while.

Only after he recovered did he put the medicinal jar into his ring and brought out the next item in the bag.

A Talisman.

Chapter 668 The Undying God

Alex opened the talisman and saw that it had some words written on it. Since it was written in the demon language, Alex could understand it quite easily.

[The Undying God is dying. How ironic. I can sense my spirit fading. Soon, my soul will move on to the cycle.]

[I have learned the Dao, but I believe I'm not strong enough to survive the advancement. As such, I leave behind my legacy.]

[If you know me, which I hope you do, you can find it all in this exact room. Please do not let the legacy of our ancestors created since the primordial times die with me.]

Below those words was a map with a location that located the exact position of the treasure that was left behind.

'The Undying God?' Alex thought solemnly. Undying… that was the name of the house at the peak of the 5th mountain.

Alex thought back to the diary he got from one of the better houses on that mountain.

It spoke of a lord that had gone into closed cultivation because he took damage to the spirit. This was the young lord of the demon, who according to the diary was once ambushed by 4 humans and still managed to survive because he was Undying.

'So, he was the Undying God, huh?' Alex thought as looked towards the door on the other side of the corner. The demon behind that was someone that was supposed to never die.

The Undying god never got to pass on his techniques, his legacy. The owner of that diary was quite happy when he learned it was going to happen, but it seemed that being in closed cultivation stopped the demon from doing so.

'His legacy… does it mean the thing that made him undying?' Alex wondered.

He thought of another piece of information he read in the diary. The young lord of the person whose diary he got had entered the Timeless Palace. Did that mean that he was currently in the Timeless Palace?

"Does that mean that time has stopped in this place? Is that why no matter how many days have passed, I still haven't gotten out?" Alex thought.

That made him a little happier. He wished his assessment of the situation was correct and continued thinking about the talisman's information as he looked at the map.

The map showed a location with 6 mountain peaks arranged in a weird order. On one of those peaks was the marking that located the legacy.

Alex's first thought said that the location was the secret realm he was in currently. However, upon closer inspection, he realized that the order of the mountain was a bit different.

The 1st mountain was closer to the 2nd than it was to the 3rd. The 4th mountain was very much larger than most of the others which weren't correct.

The 5th mountain was very close to the 6th, which didn't make sense to him.

'Is this a map to a different secret realm?' Alex wondered. That was the only thing that made sense. After all, it was unlikely that during such an important war, there was only a single hiding location for most of the demons.

'So it's not this place huh?' Alex thought. His enthusiasm immediately disappeared once he realized there was no treasure here.

"Sigh, let's just find if there's a way out of this place," Alex thought and pulled out another one of the talismans in the bag.

This one turned out to be a recipe for a healing salve that one could apply to the wound for instant heals.

'Pills are way more useful than these,' Alex thought, but he didn't immediately discard it. Who knew when such things could come in handy.

So, Alex quickly memorized it and moved on to the other things. Most of the other talismans were also about medicinal paste.

Finally, Alex reached one that wasn't. This too had something written on it.

[After days of experimentation, I have finally come across the information that will help me turn this technique of mine into a bloodline.]

[I have found the perfect specimen for experimentation. If I am successful, we will soon be able to save heaps of our members from needlessly dying during scouting missions.]

[I was successful in turning my technique into a bloodline power, and have managed to infuse it into the beast. I have since bonded with the beast, but I've left its descendant back in my house.]

[I hope someone finds the egg.]

"The Egg?" Alex's eyes went wide. He immediately brought out the egg from his storage ring and looked at it with clear curiosity in his eyes.

'This egg holds the power of the Undying god?' Alex thought with a hint of surprise in his eyes. His smiles widened as well when he thought about the fact that he had obtained this beast.

Now, he only wondered what it was exactly.

'I will find that out after I leave this damn place,' he thought.

Alex sifted through a few more pastes and finally reached another talisman that wasn't about pastes.

[If you can read this, then I am already dead.]

[I will die any time now. Even after coming to the Timeless Palace in hope that someone out there can find a way to cure me, no one has come to help me.]

[I cannot tell how many years have passed outside. If it has been years for even me, then it must be eons for the ones outside.]

[I do not know what has happened to the war. We were losing, but I hope we didn't. Even if we did, I hope we weren't eradicated.]

[Since I am to die, I will wait here for someone that holds the demon blood to take this Medallion of authority from me.]

[As such, I have removed the authority required to enter this place. Take the medallion and leave. I hope that in being the one with the most authority over the secret realms of ours, you will do some good.]

[I failed in helping us survive, but I hope you will do our legacy proud.]

[With this, the 8th Undying God bids his farewell from this world. I hope to reach the place where valiant warriors of the demon races go to after they die glorious deaths.]

[Goodbye.]

Alex stopped reading the talisman. His eyes grew solemn after having read the final words of a man who knew he was dying.

His death was likely slow, and maybe even painful. However, he didn't seem afraid at all. In fact, he seemed to welcome death like a friend.

"Farewell, 8th Undying god," Alex said softly and bowed a little in the direction of the corpse.

He placed the talisman into his ring and took the medal back out.

"So this is a medallion that grants authority over parts of this secret realm huh? I wonder what one can do with this?" Alex wondered.

Alex tied together the threads of the medallion and put them on his neck.

The moment he did so, as if a suppression field was lifted off of him, Alex could feel his spiritual sense roam freely all around him.

Alex spread it all around to check every nook and crannies of the place. That was when he noticed something.

"What?" Alex exclaimed and moved his hand. A gust of wind followed his gesture with incredible force and it lifted the red carpet until it was clumped to the side.

Finally, Alex noticed something that was hidden beneath the carpet the entire time.

Runes.

Alex recognized part of the rune as part of another cluster of runes from something else. He had seen this part in the cultivation rooms in this very mountain.

Except they were less complex and different.

'Does this place increase time too same as the cultivation room?' Alex wondered. That would make sense given where he was.

But then, the name didn't make sense.

There was nowhere more time than the place he was at, so calling it the Timeless palace wouldn't make sense.

The only time it would make sense is if the time in this place was stopped… or slowed down.

Alex's eyes went wide and he quickly brought out the last talisman again. Then, he read one of the lines that he had simply read once without thinking much about it.

[I cannot tell how many years have passed outside. If it has been years for even me, then it must be eons for the ones outside.]

"Dammit!" Alex cursed. As it turned out, this place really was slowing down time compared to outside.

Then… if he had been here for 3 days, how many days had passed outside?

"I need to leave quickly," Alex said and went back towards the runes on the circular stone embedded in the wall.

Now that he held the medallion, he knew that he had the highest authority in this place.

With that, he poured his Qi into the runes, and as expected, familiar teleportation powers engulfed him. Before he knew it, he was back out into the mountain top.

However, the teleportation powers didn't leave him. In fact, they grew stronger as Alex felt something wrap around him from all sides.

He tried to push it back out of sheer instinct, and it even looked like he was successful for a couple of seconds.

However, that did not last long enough as the power got stronger by the second.

Very soon, the stronger teleportation power engulfed him and Alex disappeared.

When the power finally left him, Alex found himself on grassy soil with the smell of water and salt all around him.

Finally, he was out of the secret realm.

Chapter 669 SouthShore City

Alex looked at the familiar but empty island. Not a single soul could be found here at all.

"I'm finally out," he said with a sigh of relief. "Shen Jing didn't wait for me, huh? Well, I can't blame him if what I found out is true."

Now, he only needed to know how many days he'd been inside during the last 3 days he spent in the Timeless Palace.

'I have time,' Alex thought and stood up to walk over to the monument. He wanted to check if he could go inside or not.

He placed his palm on the surface of the monument and let his Qi flow in. A yellow light shined throughout the runes all over the monument and Alex felt it activate.

However, when it tried to teleport him over, he felt the space not wanting to budge, and as such he couldn't go in at all.

"Tsk!" he thought and stopped.

There was no point in trying. 'I guess I will have to wait for another 10... no, fewer years for it to open up. Then, I can go through all the houses on the 5th mountain, and probably that door on the 6th mountain as well' he thought.

Then, it was time to leave.

Alex concealed his aura fully and became invisible before flying through the sky. He even reined in his spiritual sense just in case there was something terrifying in the water.

From everything he had learned, the ocean was extremely terrifying and he did not want to find out how.

It took him a couple of minutes to cross the 10 or so kilometers distance that was between the island and the mainland.

Once he reached there, Alex continued until he saw some light.

Since he knew that he was far to the south, Alex needed to navigate his way towards the southwestern side of the central area of the empire, the place where the Radiant City was.

After flying for half an hour, Alex quickly found a city. It was starting to get dark, so the glowing lights were all over the place as hard to notice from the sky.

He flew down to the outer edge of the city, before entering on foot.

"Woah!" Alex thought with a bit of surprise when he saw that the city was quite developed.

He could sense the True realm aura from every person that walked through the street. With a bit of logic, he was sure that Saint Realm experts were hidden in the city for sure.

There was no way such a place wouldn't be a lawless zone otherwise.

Just as he thought that figures in colorful robes flew across the sky. 'Lightsworn? No wonder this place is so safe,' he thought. It also reminded him of his wish to become one soon.

He didn't really care about justice or stopping criminals. He wanted to do it for a completely selfish choice, which was to get his arm back.

'I still don't know if it will even work,' he thought. 'What should I do now?'

Suddenly, he remembered something. "The pill... I need the ingredients," he thought. Then, he remembered the Blood Spirit Ginseng that he had ignored for 2 and a half years, and then some time.

'It must've been gone by now,' Alex thought. Since the city was a big one, he was sure that an Alchemy Guild must be in this city.

After asking for directions, Alex quickly reached the center of the city where all the different guilds were located.

'Southshore City Branch of Alchemy Guild' it wrote on the front of the board.

Alex walked through the door. He saw the familiar layout of the Alchemy guild and found his way to the reception.

"Excuse me, is there a Blood Spirit Ginseng in the sale currently?" he asked.

The receptionist put on a welcoming face and looked up the information. After a few seconds, she gave him the bad news.

Alex took out two spirit stones and said, "Broaden the search to the entire empire."

The receptionist took the stones and checked. Still, she returned the same bad news.

"I'm afraid there isn't one available at the moment," she said.

"Can you tell me when the last one was sold? And to whom?" Alex asked.

"Due to our policy to protect customer's privacy, we are unable to tell you," she said.

"You can't even tell me the date?" Alex asked.

"Wait for a second," the girl checked once more and replied. "The last Blood Spirit Ginseng was sold about a year and a half ago."

Alex sighed. If only he had been in the city at that time.

"I have another question not related to any of this, which I hope you can answer me," Alex asked.

"What would you like to know, fellow Daoist?" she asked.

Daoist... he was one now, wasn't he?

"Do you know about the secret realm that everyone visits every 10 years?" he asked.

The girl nodded.

"Can you tell me when the next opening of it is?" he asked.

"Hmm, I believe the last one ended just under 3 years ago, so you will have to wait 7 years, fellow Daoist," she said.

Alex remained stunned. 3 years... really? 3 goddamn years? If he had been outside, he would have been 24 years by now.

Alex thanked the girl and went to sit at one of the chairs to the side.

'3 whole years huh? I lost 3 years just like that,' he thought. 'And in that time, I lost my chance to get back my arm as well.'

'Although, I do have some more opportunities now,' he thought. ' For one, I hope that Shen girl has gotten better with her water arts so that I can ask for her to heal my hand.'

'Secondly, the princess hopefully got learned enough with the healing crystal to get my arm back as well. Aside from that, I have nothing else to do,' he thought.

"Wait no," he thought. He abruptly stood forward and walked toward the receptionist.

"Would you happen to have an idea on how to help a beast come out of an egg?" he asked.

"Sorry?" the receptionist was surprised by the random question she was thrown at her.

Alex repeated the question, but the girl didn't know. "Hmm... then do you know if there is a library in this city that may have the information?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the receptionist said and gave him the direction.

Alex quickly walked out of the guild and turned left to go towards the library.

However, before he could do so, he heard a commotion coming on from close by.

Alex turned his head to look at a crowd trying to push itself through the small doors of a building.

Alex tilted his head up to read the words 'Southshore City Branch of Talisman guild'.

"Talisman?" he looked confused. "Why are they all trying to go inside a Talisman guild all of a sudden?"

A voice spoke loudly, but Alex couldn't hear it over the crowd at all. He did manage to hear a few words such as 'Today' and 'Winners.'

He couldn't help but wonder what that was all about.

The people started to disperse after the announcement and Alex went back into the Alchemy guild to see the receptionist again.

"There is a crowd in front of the Talisman guild, do you know why that is?" Alex asked.

"A crowd? Oh, the competition results must have come back," the girl said nonchalantly.

"Competition?" Alex asked curiously.

"Yes," the girl said. "Did you not hear that the Talisman competition was taking place this week?"

"Sorry, Talisman competition?" Alex asked.

The girl made a weird face and looked at him.

"Sister, can you simply assume that I'm a newborn child and explain to me everything?" he asked.

The girl gave an even weirder look.

"Are you one of those player people?" she asked.

"Sigh, yes. I am. It's a little embarrassing to say, but I went into deep cultivation not long ago and only came out recently. So I do not know what is going on at all," Alex said.

"I see," the girl said. "Since you are going to the library, look up information on Guild Competitions. That should give you more information than I can."

"I see, thank you," Alex said and was about to walk out when he remembered that he was a little low on spirit stones.

But there was nothing to worry about. After all, he remembered that before he went to his training, he had given a lot of pills to the Alchemy guild to sell.

However, Alex couldn't help but sigh. 'I just told her I was a player who is supposed to have lost his memory. I can't just go and tell her to bring out the money now,' he thought.

'Screw it. I will have to make do with what I already have' he thought and continued walking.

He made his way to the library that was not very far away. Once he entered, he immediately found the librarian and asked for two different sets of books.

One for hatching beasts out of eggs, and another for these so-called Guild Competitions.

Once he got the book and even paid for it, he had them unlocked and sat down somewhere to read it.

First, he opened the book about the beast eggs.

There were many things written in there, most of which Alex found boring to read. Still, he did and an hour later, he was done reading the book.

"I see," he thought. "So if I give my blood essence to the egg, it will start the hatching process huh?"

Chapter 670 Seeking

After learning the simple information as well as some more that explained the process, Alex moved on to the second book about the competitions.

After reading for a while, he understood that the 4 guilds came together to hold a competition every year for a specific production skill of cultivation.

According to the book, this was to promote the production skills to more people since they were an integral part of cultivation.

There were exactly 7 production professions that had competition take place. They were Artifacts, Painting, Talisman, Music, Formations, Spirit Foods, and finally Alchemy.

All in that order.

Each of these professions had a competition taken year after year, for a total of 7 years.

Then, there was a gap of 3 years to let something else take place that the book didn't tell him about, but Alex concluded that it must be some sort of competition as well.

So, if he were to look at it from a single profession's point of view, a competition took place every 10 years.

"I see, so today was that day for Talisman, huh? No wonder everyone was so excited there. I wonder who won," he thought and returned the book.

Then, he walked out of the library and soon left the city altogether.

He didn't go very far though and instead went to a small forest that was on the northern side of the city. There, Alex brought out Pearl to keep him safe while he worked on the egg.

He was on top of a tree when he brought the egg out. The egg with a patterned shell was making Alex quite a bit excited.

'Calm down. Don't get your hopes up,' Alex said to himself as he pressed his forehead.

A small sword Qi flashed through his fingers which cut his forehead and a drop of blood spilled out.

Alex grabbed the drop of blood and placed it on top of the egg. As soon as he did that, the egg devoured the blood like it had hungered for it all this time.

"How many times do I have to do that again? 5?" Alex remembered. Each beast required some amount of blood, but on average, it was 5.

Then, one would have to wait for months before the egg started hatc—

CRACK~!

"What?" Alex's eyes narrowed at the egg. There was a small crack on the surface. "How? I only gave a single drop."

The cracks start spreading and before Alex knew it, it was throughout the egg. Alex stopped breathing as he waited for the beast inside to come out of it.

What would it be? A bird? A reptile? Maybe even an Amphibian? Or maybe insects.

Alex had a lot of guesses, but nothing substantial as he had nothing to go by.

The shell opened on one part and a snout pushed through. Along with the snout, long and thin whiskers came out of it.

All sort of anxiety and excitement left Alex's face and only shock remained as he watched the entire beast push through.

The beast finally landed on all four and started squeaking.

"A mouse?" Alex asked him with shock and confusion. "How… did a mouse come out of the egg? What?"

Pearl jumped to the branch Alex was on and looked at the little mouse with a curious looked.

"Meow!" Pearl cried at the mouse, who turned around to see Pearl. Seeing the cat, the mouse immediately scurried along with Alex's hand and disappeared somewhere.

"What? Come back," Alex jolted out of confusion and searched for the mouse. He looked around himself, and the tree, and even the ground.

But the mouse was gone, impossible to find.

"Where did it go?" Alex thought for a second before he remembered something. A spiritual sense emerged from him and it quickly scanned his entire body.

As expected, there was a rat-shaped scar on his right shoulder plate. Alex put a little Qi into it and said, "come out."

White light emerged and the mouse appeared on his palm again.

It tried to scurry off, but Alex caught it. Finally, he brought it up to its face and said, "Don't worry, no one is going to hurt you."

As if understanding what Alex was trying to say, the mouse calmed down.

"Meow!" Pearl cried at the beast once again, saying something that Alex had completely missed.

"So weak!"

"Right, he doesn't have a cultivation base," Alex said with a weird look. "Shouldn't newly born beast have a cultivation base? Speaking of which, what beast even is this?"

Alex finally looked at the mouse carefully to try and judge the species.

Its fur was extremely short and its color was somewhere between white and silver. It had 8 extremely long whiskers that looked contracted at the moment.

Finally, its tail was very, very short.

'Hmm… those whiskers… could it be?' Alex thought to himself. The lack of cultivation base only increased his suspicions by that much.

Finally, unable to keep it to himself, he said it out loud.

"Is this… a Seeking Mouse?"

A Seeking Mouse held no combat capabilities and even couldn't cultivate at all. All it was useful for was scouting something that a cultivator himself didn't want to go to.

Its whiskers were extremely sensitive and picked up on every little Qi, aura, and scent in the atmosphere.

And, they also happened to be the only other ingredients from Blood Spirit Ginseng that Alex had to obtain.

"I got my own whiskers," he said happily, if not a little disappointedly.

He had expected some sort of powerful beast from the egg, but it turned out to be this mouse.

'I could've obtained those whiskers from somewhere else too. It's not like they are an extreme rarity,' Alex thought to himself.

Finally, he sighed to himself and decided to check what good it could do to him.

"Can you go and check north? I want to see if it is safe or not," Alex said to the mouse.

The mouse raised its head, made some squeaking noise, and then ran away from his body.

"Pearl, go keep his safe," Alex said.

"Okay," Pearl said and lightly flew away.

As Pearl left, Alex got an unusual feeling come to him. It was… coolness?

Then he got information about the living things around his location, followed by their strength.

It took him a second to realize he wasn't sensing the area from his location, but rather the mouse.

Heat, Pressure, Humidity, Qi density, Qi type, number of living things, their aura, the composition of the surrounding, and finally a view of what it looked like.

All of that information was being sent back to Alex in vivid messages as if he were standing there.

As the mouse kept moving, he saw more and more. Until he sensed something in the bushes further along.

The mouse tried to move to the side, but the snake from the bush started slithering towards him.

The mouse tried to move away but it was too slow.

Just then, the aura in the atmosphere grew as a strong beast came out of nowhere and killed the snake in a single strike.

"Pearl!" Alex said in surprise.

"Get back," he gave a mental message to both of his beasts who immediately returned back.

The mouse returned first, followed by the cat. Alex could feel the mouse's fear when seeing Pearl as if it had met its mortal foe.

"Sigh, you're not too bad," Alex said. 'If only you could cultivate.'

Alex wanted to check the Undying part of the beast too, but that would involve hurting the poor thing.

He wasn't so cruel as to torture something that had just been born. "I'll do so later," he thought to himself and sent the mouse back.

Then, he sent Pearl back as well before flying away from that location towards a different city that he knew was to the north.

He had a single goal in mind now. He would join the Lightsworns and give enough contribution until the princess was forced to meet him.

Alex flew almost all night and arrived at Brightstar city near the morning.

He was still close to 3 thousand kilometers away from the Radiant city, so he needed to take some sort of transportation here so he could be on his way there.

So, as soon as he arrived, he went to find some caravan group or such.

Chapter 671 Teleportation

Alex found a caravan that was ready to leave. He found the owner, a short man with an amicable face, and asked if he could go with them.

He even let him know that he was strong and could help him defend if it was required.

When the man heard Alex's cultivation realm, he gave a weird look.

"Sir, I don't think you want to come with us right? Surely we aren't worth your time," the owner said.

"What do you mean? You won't take me?" Alex looked at the caravan owner with a suspicious look.

"Um sir, it's not that I won't take you, but rather are you sure you want to come with us? It's a little suspicious you would even want to, you know," the caravan owner said.

Alex was a little confused. Why was the caravan owner so adamant about not letting him go with them if he did realize that he was strong.

Was he afraid that he would rob them?

"What's so suspicious about me wanting to go with you guys?" Alex asked.

"Um, why would you want to take the slow ride with us that will take half a month to reach our destination, when you can get there just like that?" he asked.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean? You know that no matter how strong of a cultivator I am, it will still take me some time, right?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm not talking about you going by yourself. I'm talking about you using the teleportation formation in the city. As a cultivator, you should be able to afford it right?" the owner asked. "Of course, if you are lacking spirit stones then I will surely accept you into the caravan."

Alex stopped in his tracks. "Teleportation formations?" he looked confused. "Are you telling me that I can directly teleport to somewhere else from this place?" Alex asked.

"Yes, of course. Brightstar had a formation made not too long ago. Sir must not have known this," the owner said.

'Tsk, my lack of knowledge about this empire is showing. Once I reach my destination, I will have to shut myself to a library and learn as much as I can,' he thought.

'I would've likely figured it out very soon if I hadn't been literally taken away from the very second city I ever visited,' he thought to himself.

"Thank's for letting me know," Alex said and went back to the city.

The sun was still on the verge of rising, and from what the people said, the teleportation formation apparently only started at around 9 in the morning.

Until then, Alex decided to learn more about the teleportation formations.

According to the book he found, the formations were placed in almost every major city in the Luminance empire.

Then, every day the formation would work once every hour to teleport about 50 people to a destination at once.

There could not be more people in the formation, and if you were too slow to join, you would have to wait until the next day.

That scared Alex a bit. He needed to go register right now then.

So, he found the location of the formation and was let know that there were more than enough openings for him to choose from.

Alex found out that he couldn't directly go to the Radiant city as it was too far away, and instead he had to go through multiple cities to reach the capital.

Alex looked at the shortest route and took it.

This would've caused him problems under normal circumstances, but since people were all leaving the capital, rather than going towards it now that the Talisman competition had ended, he had easier times.

Alex looked at the shortest route, as written on the wall for him.

From Brightstar city, he would have to go to Springmist city at 10 in the morning. From there, he would have the opportunity to take another teleportation formation to Lightborn city around noon.

Finally, around 3 in the afternoon, he would be able to go to the Radiant city.

That was the route he would take for now. If by any chance, either one of the pathways was already full, he would have to either wait for an entire day or take the other longer routes.

Alex nodded once he learned it and paid the man exactly 46 True spirit stones. He couldn't have expected that it would cost such an amount to travel about a thousand kilometers, but it was well worth it considering how instant it was.

Once it was time to leave, Alex was finally let inside the building along with 40 or so other people.

He found two teleportation platforms and from research knew that one of those was meant for sending people away, while the other one was meant for receiving people.

Having the same formation be used for both tasks would have been extra taxing to it, and would even cause problems during transportation if either of the teleports was already in use.

So, they had decided to create two.

Once everyone was ready, both teleportation formations glowed at once. Alex saw the people appear in the other formation before he was teleported away.

When he reappeared, he was standing on the receiving circle while the sending circle was empty.

He walked out of the formation and immediately went to purchase his spot for the next teleportation at noon.

Since he had the time, Alex left the place and went around the city for the next 2 hours.

He walked around the city and was starting to see more and more Lightsworns. He could only wonder how many there were in the capital.

'Right, what do I need to do to join their ranks again?' he wondered and went to the library to learn a bit about the Lightsworns.

From what he found out, he had to take some tests to be eligible to become one. Some of which included being in the True realm at a young age.

"I can do tests," he thought. All he had to hope for was that his lack of arm wasn't taken as a detriment to his ability as a cultivator.

Once the sun hit its zenith, Alex returned back to the building with the formation. It was time to leave the Springmist city and go to the Lightborn city.

Lightborn city was about the same distance away from Springmist city as Brightstar, so it once again cost him about the same price as well.

'50 True Spirit stones,' Alex thought to himself. With 50 people using the formation at once, they must earn about 2500 True spirit stones every hour under normal circumstances.

The formation started glowing bright and after a few seconds, he disappeared. When he reappeared, he was in a similar building, but a different one.

He looked to the side to see the people on the other teleportation formation disappear.

'I have 3 hours now,' Alex thought and went out.

The Lightborn city was close to the capital and was quite crowded due to it being one of the bigger cities in the empire.

According to his small research, aside from some small clans and sects, the Broken Ravine sect had its roots just outside of this city.

On the other hand, the Jin family, one of the 7 great families had their ancestral grounds in this city.

Alex remembered Jin Tengfei and his Sword Qi. He was so strong with it, and now Alex had it as well.

'I wonder if my sword Qi is just as strong as his,' Alex thought. Around the city, he heard instances of people talking about how great the Talisman competition had been. Alex heard the name Tian Ye as someone who won the competition.

Alex couldn't help but remember the fatty from the secret realm.

He roamed the city for a bit longer before returning to the building with the formations.

Finally, he was going to go to Radiant city.

Alex stood on the formation and waited for it to activate. Once the people filled it, it started to shine

Soon, Alex felt the aura of teleportation grab him and in the next moment, along with everyone else, he vanished.

When he appeared out of the formation, he once again turned to look at the other formation circle that was full of people ready to leave.

Just then, he caught sight of a lady a split second before the teleportation took her away. However, that sight alone was enough to send waves of shock and surprise through him.

After all, the lady that had just left looked exactly like...

"Mother?"

Chapter 672 Radiant City

"No… can it be? Really?" Alex was too stunned to think clearly. His mind showed him the same image over and over as he remembered the face.

That was the same.

She wore something different from the farm clothes he saw her in. Now she wore magenta robes with light blue linings on the side.

She was thinner, much thinner now, but Alex could easily reason that to be something that came from her cultivating.

Despite all that, despite all the changes she had gone through, Alex felt very certain.

That was his mother.

That only brought on more confusion. 'How? How is she here? Why is she here? Is she okay? Am I going mad?' Alex couldn't think of anything else.

"Fellow Daoist, is anything wrong?" one of the staff members came up to him when they saw him standing still inside the formation circle.

Alex jolted out of his daze and looked at the staff member.

"That group right now, what city did they teleport to?" he asked.

"The one just now? It should be the same place you came from. We only swap with a single city every time," the staff said.

"Same city? So they went to the Lightborn city?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the staff said.

"I need to go there right now. Can you teleport me there?" Alex asked.

"I'm afraid not, fellow Daoist," he said.

"I will pay for it. I will pay the price of 50 if I have to. Fellow Daoist, please, I really need to go back right now," Alex said.

The man seemed to notice Alex's troubles and shook his head. "I'm afraid that's not possible, Fellow Daoist. The formation can't work for another hour and needs to recharge before the next transfer."

"Besides, even if it was ready, we cannot teleport you anywhere without the other formation activating at the same time, and it only happens once a day for each location," the staff member said.

Alex knew that, but he still couldn't help but hope the information was wrong.

'Should I just do it?' he thought to himself. He had many tests to do with his own Qi, but one thing he knew for certain was that he could activate runes that others couldn't.

Since he had noticed similar situations for formations over the last few years, he had reasons to believe that his Qi did the same thing for formations too.

There were still many caveats to this theory of his, but he really wanted to test them out right now.

In the end, he calmed down and thought logically. 'I can't do something so radical out of nowhere,' he thought to himself and walked out of the teleportation formation.

As he did, he started thinking of how he could go back to the Lightborn city as fast as he could.

That wasn't only it. Lightborn city could be just another stop in their journey. He didn't know where his mother was actually going or who she was with.

"Can I register for tomorrow's teleportation?" Alex asked the staff member.

"To Lightborn city?" the staff thought to himself. "I don't think you can go there for another 3 days, Fellow Daoist."

"You see, due to the talisman competition, the number of people coming to the capital was quite high. So, the formations are already booked for the next 3 days," the staff member said.

"If not for normal travel taking less than 3 days for most people, I'm sure the list of people leaving using formations would have lasted for days."

Alex sighed when he heard that. The staff member wasn't lying or anything, but he still couldn't help but find the answer unpleasing.

Just as he was about to leave, the scene of him seeing his mother played in his mind once again.

Only this time, he didn't focus on her but on the other things he had missed.

There were nearly 50 people standing there. Most were random men and women who just happened to be here at the same time as his mother.

However, he could see a few figures that wore Magenta robes with a light blue lining on their robes.

'That's definitely a group of some sort, right?' Alex thought. If he found what organization that robe was from, he would certainly find where his mother was.

"Brother, do you know what organization be it clan or set wears Magenta robes with light-blue linings like the ones that just left?" Alex asked.

"Uhh… I'm afraid I'm not knowledgeable about organizations and their uniforms, fellow Daoist," the staff said.

"I see, thank you anyway," Alex said and turned to leave.

"It's my pleasure to help a customer," the staff said. Just as Alex was about to leave, the staff remembered something and said, "I don't know if it is any help, but I'm pretty sure that most of the people who left just now were here to watch the Talisman competition."

Alex thought for a second. Many people would come to watch such a competition, so that wasn't really any help. But still, he had someplace to start from.

"I see, thank you," he said and left the place.

Alex walked out of the building into a majestic city full of a million colors all around him. It was 3 pm in the afternoon, but the city looked like it radiated as brightly as other cities would in the nighttime.

The atmosphere was like a festival with people moving from left and right with no regard to anyone else causing a crowd so big that Alex was stunned that this many people could even live in a single city.

But then again, this was the capital. If many people didn't live here, who would?

Alex sighed. He couldn't enjoy these sights at all, not with his mother's situation being on his mind all the time.

'Where do I start from?' he wondered. 'I need to find someone from the competition. If there was someone amongst them that gathered information about the guests, then I will have a much higher… chance…"

Alex's words trailed off as an idea grew in his head.

"Wait, this is a competition set by the guilds, right? Doesn't that mean they are the ones who would be responsible for the guests?" Alex thought.

A glimmer of hope rose from his heart as he immediately went into the crowd to make his way towards the guilds.

After half an hour of searching and asking for directions, Alex finally made his way to the location in the capital where the 7 guilds were located in.

Unlike the other cities, the capital held all 7 of the guilds.

The very first thing that surprised him in the location, even more so than the number of customers was the amount of space each guild took.

The guilds in the capital were at least 5 times as large as any other guilds he had seen in any of the cities.

Following that, there were nearly 10 times more receptions as well. Alex could only begin to imagine just how many experts each of these guilds held.

Without hesitation, Alex entered the Talisman guild. While he wanted to go check the Alchemy guild, the Talisman guild was more important to him at the moment.

Alex found the shortest of the queues for the receptions and stood there. After about 20 minutes of waiting his turn finally came.

"Excuse me, I have an unusual problem that I hope you would help indulge me in for a few minutes," Alex said.

The receptionist in front of him looked confused. "How can I help you?" he asked.

"I need to find the identity of someone who may or may not has been at the competition grounds. You guys keep track of all the audience, right?" Alex asked.

"Uhh… if they entered the competition ground, yes," the receptionist said. "We can't tell if they didn't enter the competition ground and instead watched from outside."

"Outside?" Alex looked confused. "You had screenings set up outside the competition grounds too?"

"Yes, that's how a majority of the people watched the competitions," the staff said.

'Shit,' Alex thought. 'I don't even know if mother was here to watch the competition or not. This may just have been a complete coincidence as far as I know.'

'Shit, to begin with, I am not even absolutely sure if that is my mother, or maybe someone that just happens to look like her,' Alex thought and even started to doubt himself.

He quickly shook his head. 'No, there's no way I can't recognize my own mother. That was definitely her,' he thought.

"I don't know if they were inside the competition grounds or not. Is there anything else you can do to help me? I can tell you what their robes looked like," Alex said.

"Um," the receptionists thought for a moment and said, "Ah, there are recordings of the matches from the competition currently being sold right here. Would you like to buy them to see if the group entered?"

"I cannot guarantee if everyone was recorded or not, but you may get lucky and see them in the crowd," the receptionist said.

Alex felt the knot that was growing in his stomach softening a little. "Do you have such a thing? Please, I would like to buy one," Alex said.

"Yes," the receptionist brought out a small stack of talismans containing about 20 individual talismans.

"All of this?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it's over the course of multiple days and consists of multiple perspectives over the stage," the receptionist said.

Alex sighed. He needed them all it seemed. "How much for all of these?" he asked.

"300 True spirit stones."

Chapter 673 Hei Lin

"Thank you for your patronage," the receptionist said with a bright smile as he took the 300 True Spirit stones from Alex's hand.

Alex wanted to punch the man's face when he saw that goddamn smile.

'Such a fucking rip-off,' he thought to himself. 300 True spirit stones could buy a person a high-grade pill made by the best of the best True rank alchemists. That was including the cost of the ingredients.

And here, he was being sold the recordings of a competition that took place for only 4 separate days for 300 True spirit stones.

This wasn't even an exclusive talisman or something. It was a mass-produced talisman that was likely copied from the original with little regard to the quality of the copy.

The worst offense of these talismans in Alex's eyes was the fact that they were single-use talismans. He wouldn't even be able to sell them after looking through them once.

'Fuck,' he cursed once more and sat on a bench in the corner of the hall to view the talismans.

The talismans were ordered according to the date of the recording. So, he took the talisman for the first day and looked into it.

The moment his spiritual sense touched the talisman, it was like he had opened a floodgate of information as visions of someone else entered his mind.

He suddenly felt like he was standing in the midst of a crowd, seeing different things, but focusing on a single one.

He tried to move his eyes, but he couldn't. He was forced to see what the recorder of this talisman was watching.

'Wow,' Alex couldn't help but say. If he had known the recording would be this amazing, he likely wouldn't have cursed that poor receptionist earlier.

He immediately put all thoughts aside and started searching for his mother, or someone that was wearing a similar robe as her.

When Alex started focusing on the crowd, he was truly surprised by their sheer size. 'So many people,' he thought. The arena the recorder was staying at was larger than the coliseum from the Crimson Empire.

That was not all, the number of people was also clearly larger. And each one of them was a high-ranking cultivator.

Alex tried to keep down his shock while he searched for his mother, but it felt impossible.

The man had recorded not much from before the competition started, and once it started, he would only focus on the cultivation.

"This isn't it," Alex thought and stopped watching.

When he did so, Alex felt his vision cut off and he was staring blankly back into the real world. 'Damn, if I was anywhere else, this would've been dangerous. I shouldn't view such talismans out in the open from now on,' he thought to himself.

Since it was the guild, there would be security, so he was free to watch the talismans as much as he wanted to.

Alex was about to view the second perspective when he noticed something. The talisman in front of him was empty, as expected of a one-time use talisman.

However, the information was still in his brain. He could sense a small pocket of energy floating in his spiritual sea that he could tap into to view the information back again.

'That's pretty nifty,' he thought and moved on to the second talisman.

As soon as Alex started watching, his vision drifted to another side of the arena. While not on the complete opposite side from the first perspective, it still gave a different group of people for Alex to search from.

He was sure that there was a group of people close to him that were in his blind spot and would never notice these visions. All he could do was hope that his mother wasn't amongst the group.

Soon, he started searching for the same group again but alas he wasn't able to find her.

He sighed, but he had one last hope still in him.

Alex hadn't seen anyone young from his mother's group when they had teleported, so he had little hope, but he still held some.

'I hope her group was one of the participating groups and thus she is in a special seat somewhere and watching this all privately,' he thought.

After all, if he thought about it logically, there was no way that someone who could use the teleportation formation so early from the capital couldn't even enter the arena in the first place.

So, this time when the competition on the first day started, he didn't stop and watched the starting ceremony.

The contestants were called one after another as their information appeared in a small panel on top of them.

Alex recognized a few of the family names of the competitors that appeared on stage.

Shen, Jin, Zhou, Fu, Lu, Han, Song, and even the royal family, Wei had participants in there.

Aside from them, Alex noticed the robes of a few other disciples as belonging to the elite sects too.

A man of big stature walked onto the stage after them. He looked quite bigger than last time, horizontally that was.

The fatty Tian Ye appeared on the stage and suddenly everyone cheered.

'He won this competition, didn't he?' Alex thought. That had already been spoiled to him. He could see that he was a definite crowd favorite for sure.

Alex looked at his name on the flying screen on top of the stage.

Tian Ye - 38 years old - True King 2nd Realm - Demon Whisper sect

'Oh shit, that fatty already entered the True king's realm?' Alex felt slightly shocked.

Last he remembered, this man was in the True Lord 5th realm. In just 3 years he managed to break through 7 times to reach his current realm.

'Given how much time he must have spent on talismans, he must have worked hard to reach this realm,' Alex thought. Still, he wasn't sure if this was fast or not, but from how people reacted to hearing True King realm, he was sure this was at least better than average.

As he looked at the floating screen, the information changed to something else.

Hei Lin - 49 years old - True Lord 3rd realm - Flowing Brush sect

'49 years old? They allow such old people to take part?' Alex looked at the information with a bit of shock.

All the ones that had come before this person were at least younger than 40 years old, so Alex had assumed the age requirement to be less than 40 years old.

However, it turned out that he was wrong. 'Is this person allowed because of how weak thei—'

Alex's words stopped in his heart as he saw the person walk onto the stage.

She wore a magenta robe with light blue linings. Her gaze looked down on the stage, away from the crowd with clear nervousness visible. None of the crowd cheered for her as they did for Tian Ye, but there was still a round of applause.

Alex saw her look up after gathering enough courage on the stage. Then, he finally saw her face clearly.

This vision was much clearer than the split-second glance he had made back in the teleportation building.

There was not a single doubt in his mind now.

This was absolutely his mother.

It wasn't just the face that gave away, however. There were other hints as well. His mother had been about 43 when he had left home to go to Oakleaf city.

Now, 6 years later, she would be 49 years old. Besides that, her name was an absolute giveaway.

Hei Lin. She had either very thoughtfully named her so, or more likely, she had called herself her real name, Helen, and people here just misheard her.

Without even knowing, tears streamed down Alex's cheeks. He didn't understand how or why his mother was here. At the moment, he didn't care.

All he could care about was that his mother was here and he knew who she was.

A member of the Flowing Brush sect. With this information, Alex could easily find her no matter where the sect was.

He wiped his tears and continued looking at the competition. The competition soon started and the first day's contests were soon concluded.

His mother had done quite well, ranking in the top 10 amongst the nearly 300 participants.

Once the vision ended, Alex brought out the next one and watched it.

The competition reminded him of the Annual competition back in Crimson Empire.

Alex was nearly sure that it was these competitions that inspired those in that empire. After all, the first emperor was someone from the Fu family who would have had knowledge of such things.

The first day was about recognizing ingredients and such.

The second day was about cognitive skills and how fast one could learn something. Alex could guarantee that his mother was one of the best in this.

He had gained his talent in learning everything fast from her after all.

This time, his mother had ranked first easily.

The third day was about speed. Alex was sure his mother would struggle in this, but it seemed he was wrong. She still managed to place in the top 10 towards the lower end of it.

Finally, the last day was about putting everything to the test and creating the best talisman you could make in as little time as possible.

Alex watched that one entire competition in shock as his mother placed second in it.

His shock only deepened when the final results arrived, and his mother placed 2nd in the whole competition, only behind the fatty Tian Ye.

Chapter 674 DawnSpring City

After a quick questioning, Alex found the location of the Flowing Brush sect. It lay to the southeast of the capital, just outside of a massive city known as the Dawnspring City.

From the map, Alex could tell that the city was quite close to the eastern mountain ranges, albeit it was still a couple of hundred kilometers away.

Once he got the information, Alex left the guild. He walked out and looked in the direction of the Alchemy Guild. However, once he saw the number of people inside, he decided to skip it.

'I need to go to DawnSpring city as soon as I can," he thought and started walking away from the area where the guilds were.

He wondered if he could take the teleport formations back, but from what he had heard, it was all packed up for the next 3 days or so.

'It will be faster to just fly there,' he thought.

The distance between Radiant City and Dawnspring city was about 5,000 kilometers.

Which, if he few would take him about 3 days as well. He could stay back and then leave, but there was no guarantee that there would even be an opening after 3 days given how many people he saw in those recordings.

'Alright, that settles it,' he thought and started walking away.

As he did, his eyes fell on a group of people making their way through the road. They wore clothes that changed color based on the direction it was viewed from.

Lightsworns.

Unconsciously, Alex placed his right hand on his stump. He was finally here, in the radiant city.

And he was going to leave already?

How long had it been since he had lost his arm? And he still hadn't gotten it back.

'Do I stay... back?' he thought to himself. He couldn't imagine the help his arm would be if it grew back. He desperately wanted it back as well.

But...

'No, I need to go see mother first,' he thought to himself. 'My arm doesn't matter as much to me right now as my mother's situation.'

Once his heart grew resolute, he left the city.

* * * * * *

The talisman competition had ended just yesterday, and today the prizes had been distributed. Helen was back in her room in the Flowing Brush sect looking at the prizes in her hand.

There were a few talismans in her hand. Some recorded designs to craft certain talismans, while some contained power to block some damage.

Helen didn't really care much for them. At least, not as much as the prize on her other hand.

In her right hand, she held a brush made up of exotic bamboo as the handle, and the manes of the Soaring Lion as the soft bristles.

she stared at the brush for a while before bringing out her talisman-making station from her storage bag.

She poured some ink to the side and dipped the new brush in it.

The brush absorbed just the right amount of ink. Not too little, and not too much.

'As expected of a Saint rank artifact,' she thought to herself as she held the brush and finally placed her palm on the empty talisman paper.

Helen took a deep breath and then started making runes on the piece of paper one by one.

Helen couldn't go too fast or too slow. The slightest deviation from what was symmetrical would make the talisman go from good to unusable in a single instant.

After nearly 10 minutes of slow drawing, she finally managed to create the talisman. Her arms moved as a technique was used upon the talisman.

Within seconds, the slightly went ink on the paper dried like it had been made years ago.

"Phew!" Helen wiped her sweat and ignored the slightly throbbing head to quickly check the Alignment of the talisman.

After placing the talisman in the square-shaped tester, she learned that she had reached 72% alignment.

"Ah, so close to 75%," she thought. Still, just the fact that she was able to reach such a high alignment was monstrous, to begin with.

'I gained nearly 5% with this brush. It's quite good,' she thought and cleaned the ink from the brush using some sort of concoction.

'Good!' she told herself. 'If I can go on like this, I can become strong enough to leave this land and go look for them.'

Once she cleared everything, She sat on the mat and started to cultivate. However, before she began, she heard a knock on her door.

"Come in," she said and watched a tall, old man walk in. This man had no beard, but his mustache came down in a short thin line to his chin.

His head was bald in a circle and what remaining hair he had was tied in a ponytail.

His magenta robe seemed to shine with some slight color in the night as he slowly walked in through the door.

"Greetings, master," Helen said as the old man walked in.

"Lin'er, were you making talismans?" the old man asked.

"I was simply testing my new brush, master," she said.

"Oh, I see. Make sure to rest up. You've done a lot in the past week," he said.

"Yes, master," Helen said. She expected her master to leave after saying that, but he stuck around for a little longer.

"Is something wrong, master?" she asked.

"Um... there is a small... not really problem, but situation rather, and we need you to stay here for the next month or so. Can you do that?" the old man asked.

Helen's eyes narrowed a little. "What's the situation?" she asked.

"It doesn't matter. It will go away within a few weeks. It's just a side effect of you winning 2nd place in the competition," the old man said.

"I see, then... I guess I can stay here. I want to practice the new talisman I got the designs for today," Helen said.

"Okay, do so. I will let you know when it is safe to leave," the old man said and walked away.

He closed the door behind him and sighed. The problems for the next few days wouldn't be much for him as he wouldn't have to handle them, but he couldn't help but feel bad for the disciples that did have to.

Once he was out of her place, the old man left for his own abode while making sure to remember to leave some information for the disciples tomorrow.

* * * * * * *

"Is this the Dawnspring city?" Alex wondered as he finally arrived at the outskirts of a city with tall walls, surrounded by many other smaller city-like patches of buildings.

He stopped before entering the city and looked at the entire area from high above.

There were 3 distinct, separate locations that Alex could see from his viewpoint.

One of them was a large set of buildings not far from where he flew off.

Next, there was another separate group of buildings to a small mountain range to the south of the city.

Finally, similar to the one in the south, there was another set of building in the larger mountain ranges to the north. This place was also far larger than the other one.

"If I'm not wrong, this place on the flat land must be the Han ancestral family home," Alex thought. "Then the larger one in the mountains must be the Heaven's Peak school, and finally, this smaller one must be the Flowing Brush sect. That's where I need to go to."

Alex soon came to the ground and dropped from his boat. It felt quite good not having to sit down all day long.

He entered the city and was immediately greeted with the sight of many cultivators, all wearing different colored robes.

He saw the brown robes of the Han family, the black and red of the disciples of Heaven's Peak school, and finally the magenta of the Flowing Brush sect.

These were the main group of people, but of course, there were many others as well.

Alex ignored them all and without hesitation walked to the other side to find his way out of the city and to the mountains where the Flowing Brush sect.

Surprisingly, he found a lot of people were going there too. Some were on flying treasures, while some took carriages.

Alex on the other hand simply walked on foot. It would take him some time, but he would reach his mother sooner or later.

Chapter 675 Excuses

When Alex finally arrived at the gates of the Flowing Brush sect, he couldn't help but be surprised when he was greeted by a crowd that fully occupied the sect gate.

"The hell?" Alex looked in confusion. He looked left and right and saw people from different sects and cities who seemed to have come here.

Alex even noticed a few cultivators from the elite sects and clans in the crowd. However, they looked like they were one of the less important individuals in their given sect.

He had to line up to even get a chance to talk with the guards. So, he waited for his turn to come up as the crowd murmured on its own.

'Why are they here? Is there a celebration of some sort for my mother winning second place?' Alex wondered. If that were true, he could only wonder how much rowdier the Demon Whisper sect was.

After all, the fatty Tian Ye had won the…

Alex's thoughts wandered off as his eyes fell on the same fatty he was thinking about. That fatty too was in the crowd, waiting like everyone else.

"What?" Alex couldn't help but blurt out under his breath. 'Why is he here?'

This crowd was starting to make less sense to him now. 'Is there not a celebration then?'

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he arrived at the gate with a few young individuals who seemed to be on guard duty.

They sighed when they saw him, which surprised him as he had never seen them before. 'Is dealing with the crowd just that demanding?' he wondered.

"Hello, I'm here to meet someone," Alex said.

"Yeah, yeah. Get on with it," the guard said with clear annoyance in his voice.

Alex was surprised, but he didn't let the rudeness get to him. "I'm here to see my mother. I was hoping you could let her know," he said.

"Oh," the guard's attitude changed at once. "Your mother?"

The guard took out his medal and got ready to communicate back with the sect. "Is she an elder? A helper? What's her name?" the guard asked.

"Um, I don't know her role in the sect, but my mother's name is Hei Lin. She's the one who won second place in the Talisman competition," Alex said.

The guard's hand that was bringing the medal up to his forehead stopped as he looked at Alex with what looked like shock on his face.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"Hei Lin, that's my mother's name," Alex repeated.

The man stared at him with a completely serious face, and then… he burst out laughing.

"Hahaha! Nice one, young man. I nearly fell for it. Hey guys, we have a new excuse amongst the crowd," the guard said, calling to the other ones.

"Oh, what is it?"

"A new one? So soon?"

People gathered around making Alex feel awkward. 'What's going on?' he thought.

"This young brother says he's sister Hei's son," the guard said.

"Son? Haha, that really is a new one. Brother, thanks for the laugh," another guard said.

"Wait, does he want her to adopt him?" one of the confused guards asked.

"No, not adopt. He says he already is the son," the guard reiterated.

"Now that's a comedy," the confused guard finally said.

Alex looked at them all for a few seconds and said, "Um, can you please call my mother first before you laugh yourself unconscious?"

"He's already calling her his mother. Oh, this poor brother must have something hit his head in the last few days," the guards laughed again.

"I really am her son. Can you guys please get serious?" Alex asked.

"Oh yeah? Then everyone that's standing here should be her brothers and husbands, right?" the guards asked. "Go away, little brother. At least come up with a better excuse next time if you want to meet with sister Hei."

Alex was flabbergasted. He had come all this way from the capital to see his mother, and right when he had arrived at the door, he was stopped?

His spiritual perception landed on the 5 guards and saw that their cultivation base was in the higher end of the True Lord realm. They were likely one of the better disciples of the sect.

"Little brother, please leave. We have more meeting requests and marriage requests to deal with. Everyone here wants to meet sister Hei. We need to continue rejecting them all," the guard said.

"Can't you just give her a message and see if she comes out or not? Brother, I really am her son," Alex said.

The guard only shook his head. "Can't do that. We are on strict orders not to disturb sister Hei while she is breaking through," the guard said. "Please leave now."

'Mother is breaking through?' Alex thought for a moment and walked away. 'Was that true, or were they trying to get rid of me?'

"I am from Hiding Sword Palace and have come on behalf of my master. I'm here to visit Maiden Hei Lin. I hope you can call her out please," a man walked up to the guard after Alex moved away.

"Sorry, brother. Sister Hei is currently in closed cultivation, trying to break through. I'm afraid we cannot call her at the moment," the guard said.

"I see, that's a shame," the man said and left.

'Ah, so it really is just a lie,' Alex thought. Still, he couldn't believe so many people had come for his mother just because she won 2nd place in the competition.

'I can't believe they would go so far as to ask her hand in marriage,' Alex thought. 'What would father do if he found out?'

As his thoughts steered in that direction, Alex's heart skipped a beat. He hadn't thought about his father at all.

If his mother was here, then his father must have entered the game as well, even if it was just once.

Was he okay? Was he in the western continent? Or did he end up somewhere else?

Worry grew in Alex's heart as he looked back towards the guard, and then to the crowd. With so many people wanting to see her, Alex became increasingly sure that he wasn't going to meet her today at all.

He could sneak in, but he didn't know what sort of defenses this place had, not to mention the saint realm that could see with a single scan of their senses.

'No, I will have to come back later for sure,' he thought and left the area. People would continue to pour in and the guards would continue to make excuses.

Alex looked at the sky and saw that it had gotten darker. "I should find a place to stay soon," he thought.

"Or I could just stay in the alchemy guild like I did last time."

After thinking for a moment, he decided to not waste money on renting places when he could just stay in the guild.

So, Alex went back to the city, and by evening, he had entered the DawnSpring branch of Alchemy Guild.

Alex took out the bronze badge from his storage and hung it over his chest before going towards the mission board.

It was time to make some pills.

Chapter 676 Questions about the Sword

Alex stayed in the alchemy room sometime after finishing the product. Being in a big city, the demand for better pills was everywhere, so Alex was forced to create pills that were in the 35% or higher harmony consistently.

That wasn't hard for him, but that did mean he couldn't cheat his way with the twin pills which could get him to 25% consistently.

After finishing one of the pills, he decided to rest for a bit.

'How long has it been since I've rested?' he thought to himself.

From the 11 days in the demon realm to the 5 days it took him to go to the capital and get to Dawnspring city had wrung him dry.

He wanted to let his body stay still for a moment and finally now was the time.

He did nothing but let his mind wander as he took a deep breath.

His mind wandered from having nothing to do and soon he found himself thinking about his mother and father again.

He couldn't wait to meet her since it had been nearly 3 years for him since he had met her.

When he thought about that, he realized that she hadn't seen him in 6 years. She must've been more desperate to see him.

Alex was just happy that she didn't fall victim to the mental problems some of the players developed after their soul was suppressed.

'I hope they are starting to get back their memories of the time when they were suppressed,' he thought.

Alex fiddled with the ring on his index finger as he remembered that he still had to open it up more.

After reaching about 20 or so cubic meters in volume, the ring was getting harder to open. The Qi he put into the ring would simply disappear with no hints as to why.

So, Alex was forced to stop for now and try once his Qi was stronger. Still, 20 cubic meters was a lot of space for someone who only hoarded ingredients for pills.

He kept most in the storage bags anyway out of fear of people noticing him using the ring too much.

As he thought that, Alex brought out a jar from his storage bag. It was the big jar of spicy medicinal paste that was supposed to do... something he believed.

He wanted to test it on his body but was a little afraid about it. It would be fine if it were poison, but what if it wasn't considered something bad by the body and it still destroyed his body?

Alex kept that particular jar away as he brought out the other small vials of medicinal pastes. He had recipes for the pastes, so if he wanted to, he could make the pastes and simply compare them with the medical pastes in the vial to learn which was which.

Alex spent a few more minutes just absentmindedly going through the items in his ring when he found the talisman with the map again.

Alex looked at the map and showed a confused look. "If the demon realm opens every 10 years, the other one has to do so as well right?" he thought.

If there was another realm that opened up, he would have a way to find it. However, the demons were in hiding at the time, so he wasn't sure if they would leave the door to the demon realm in an open area.

'Wait, did they create the demon realm? Probably not. It must've been a secret realm that they refined,' he thought.

Alex put away the map for now and pulled out the thin sword from his ring. He poured in his Qi, but nothing entered the sword at all.

It wasn't like when he tried to pour Qi into the ring, or the Ebony sword where he felt something else push from the other side.

This one just felt like he was splashing water into a metal wall, and hoping it would cave in. There just didn't seem to be a chance for that to happen.

"How is a sword without a spirit keeping me from putting my Qi into it?" Alex thought to himself. "I wonder if it knows."

Alex immediately went into his mental space and saw the mess that was there. Having not come here in a week or so had caused the silver threads to fly all over the place

Alex flew up to the side of the mountain and grabbed the crystal ball as he moved around the place gathering the threads.

Alex wanted to ask the spirit first, but the spirit spoke up before him. "I sensed your spirit grow a little weaker a few days earlier, what happened?" it asked.

"Weaker?" Alex was surprised. 'Has my spirit grown weaker?'

"Were you attacked? Did you create a puppet? Did you get a beast? What did you d—"

"Ah yes, I bonded with a new beast," Alex said.

"I see. Well, it wasn't bad damage to your spirit. Also, the change wasn't very much so you should be fine," the spirit said.

"You care about my spirit?" Alex asked.

"I care about mine," the spirit said. "Whether I like it or not, I can't seem to leave this place. Since you aren't so easily tempted either, I can't do anything but remain here for eternity."

"The only escape I can find from here is death, and I don't want that. So, until I want that, you will have to remain alive," it said.

"If I die, you die?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the spirit said.

Alex looked at the spirit for a few seconds with narrowed eyes as he got curious.

"The beast I bonded a few days ago, it has a bloodline of someone," Alex asked.

"Why are you telling me this?" the spirit asked with clear confusion in its voice.

"The bloodline belongs to someone called the Undying god," Alex said.

Suddenly, the spirit seemed to change as the black goo around it jumped to life.

"God? Did you say GOD? Where is it? Let me kill it! Let me kill it right now!" it shouted.

Alex watched the spirit go berserk with absolute amazement in his eyes. "I lied," he told the spirit to calm it down.

"You did? Tsk, why would you do that?" it said.

"You sound so earnest and... normal when you are talking about normal things. Now that your arrogance and haughtiness are gone, you feel like a common spirit," Alex said. "However, the moment I bring up a God, your attitude changes entirely. Why is that?"

"It's clear isn't it?" Godslayer said. "I hate gods."

"Can you think of a reason as to why you hate gods beyond the simple 'because they are gods'?" Alex asked.

"That's... do I need another reason?" the spirit asked.

Alex couldn't think of anything to say. It seemed the hate for gods was ingrained into the spirit.

"Right, I almost forgot why I was here," Alex said as he remembered about the sword.

"That thin sword you were trapped in. Does it still hold another spirit? No right?" Alex asked.

"That sword? No," Godslayer said.

"Then can you tell me why I can't use my Qi with it? I can't seem to pour any," Alex said.

"HAHAHAHA!" the spirit suddenly laughed as if it had heard the biggest joke of all time. "You expect to be able to use that sword? Keep dreaming. No one in this world can use that sword aside from its owner."

"Although, I can make it possible, you know. All you have to do it put me back into the sword, and you will be able to pour Qi into it. I can work as a conduit to connect you to the sword," the spirit said.

"Absolutely not. I'm not letting you get out of here. I don't know what atrocities you would do if you got out," Alex said.

"Well, then good luck," the spirit said and flew out of Alex's hands as it went drifting around the mountain.

"Tsk, it didn't tell me anything in the end," Alex thought. However, he still learned that it was simply impossible to use that sword.

He wouldn't stop trying outright just because the spirit told him so, but he would find less inclination to try to do so now that he had learned what he did.

Once he finished collecting the silver threads, he looked back at the mountain with a curious look on his face.

"Is this getting small at all?" he asked himself. It looked like a few of the imperfections here and there were getting smoothed out. Other than that, there was virtually no difference.

Alex sighed and got back out of his spiritual sea. He then looked at the sword in his arm, knowing full well that he would likely never be able to use it to its fullest extent.

He sighed once more and put it back into his ring before walking out of the room. Once he delivered the pills he had created, he walked out of the alchemy guild again and quickly made his way out of the city.

Since it was late in the afternoon, people who visited the Flowing Brush sect would start to leave now.

So, it was a better time for him to go and quickly get to meet the guards. Alex wasn't sure how long they could keep the excuse of his mother breaking through, but it surely couldn't be wrong.

Sooner or later, they would have to be fed up with him and either attack him, which would cause a big enough commotion to get everyone's attention, or the better result, just send his mother a message.

Chapter 677 Guests

"Brother, you here to see your mother?" one of the guards joked as they saw Alex approaching.

Alex simply smiled. "I guess I don't have to say anything to you then," he said. "Will you please send a message this time?"

"Can't," the guard shrugged. "Sister is still in closed cultivation, trying to break through."

"It has been 5 days you know?" Alex said to the guards. "Look, I just want to see my mother, and I'm sure she wants to see me too. It's been 6 years since we saw each other, so I'm getting a little desperate here."

The guards frowned a little. "Let us for a moment believe you, okay brother? What do you want me to do exactly?" he asked.

"Simply send her a message that her son is here to see her," Alex said.

"That's the problem, brother. Sister Hei is in closed cultivation and we can't help you at all," the guard said.

"Since you call my mother you sister, I shall call you uncle. Please help this nephew of yours by getting him to meet his mother," Alex said.

The guard frowned a little. "You know, after seeing you come here, we have had a lot of other young cultivators come here jokingly, calling sister Hei their mother," the guard said.

"They have?" Alex was surprised.

"Yeah," the guards said.

"Have they been as persistent as me?" Alex asked.

"Sigh, no," the guard said.

"Then, can you help me please, uncle," Alex said.

The guard hesitated a little more and finally gave in. "Fine, but I can't send a message to sister Hei at all," he said.

"Oh, who will you be messaging then?" Alex asked.

"Her master," the guard said.

"Sect Master Qin?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the guard said. "You scared? You can give up now."

"No," Alex shouted. "In fact, that's amazing. I'm one step closer to seeing my mother. Why would I be scared?"

"Sigh, you are something, little bro— Nephew," the guard said and brought out a talisman.

"Can you tell me your name? I will need to record it and send it to sect master later," the guard said.

"Yes, my name is Yu Ming," Alex said.

"Right, do you belong somewhere? A sect or a clan? Or are you a rogue cultivator?" the guard asked.

"Uhh… I guess I'm a rogue cultivator for now," Alex said. "Unless the Alchemy guild counts as something."

"Oh, you're part of the alchemy guild? Are you a staff there?" the guard asked.

"Oh no, I'm an alchemist," Alex said.

"Alchemist? Can you prove it?" the guard asked after a moment of hesitation.

"Sure," Alex said as he brought out the badge from within his robes.

"True Earth Alchemist? Woah, that's amazing. You're so young too," the guard sounded shocked. "Why didn't you show it earlier?"

"Eh? Would this have helped me get in contact with my mother?" Alex asked.

"Uh, no. Even True Heaven would get you the same result, but it would have stopped us from laughing at you for coming here every day," the guard said.

"I'm ready to be laughed at if it means I get to meet mother," Alex said.

"Ooh, I like your determination, nephew," the guard joked. "Go back for today, I will get this information to sect master. He will do with it what he wants to do."

"Thank you, Uncle," Alex said and walked back to the alchemy guild.

One of the other guards that was done dealing with the guests came towards this guard when he saw Alex leave.

"He came once again?" the other guard asked.

"Yes, he's persistent for sure. He even called me uncle today," the guard said.

"Poor guy, I wonder if it is really true," the other guard asked.

"Don't know, but we may find out tomorrow," the guard said.

"Eh, why?" the other guard asked.

"I'm going to deliver the information to sect master tonight," the guard waved the talisman.

He ignored the other guard's complicated look and got back to work.

Once night fell and the other guards came to take their place, the guard that Alex had talked to walked back into the sect towards the sect master's abode.

He looked at the house at the feet of the mountain where their Sister Hei was cultivating at the moment and directly walked towards the top of the mountain.

Once he reached the top, he saw a few guards there and greeted them.

"I need to see sect master," the man said.

"Is it important?" the guard of the mountain asked.

"I cannot judge it for myself, which is why I'm here to seek sect master's help," the man said.

"Well, you better hope it's important," the guard said. "What is it that you need?"

The man quickly explained the situation causing the guard to frown. "That's obviously false, you idiot," the guard said.

"Are you willing to take the risk?" the man asked, causing the guard to retreat a few of his words.

"Fine, I'll get it to him," the guard grabbed the talisman and went towards the sect master's abode.

He was able to go in freely because he knew that the sect master wasn't in cultivation or anything. In fact, he had been entertaining some of the bigger guests that couldn't simply be told no to.

When the old man with the long, thin mustache felt the guard approaching, he excused himself out of the room.

"What is it? Why are you here?" the sect master asked.

"Sect master, someone who keeps claiming to be sister Hei's son keeps coming to the sect requesting to see her," the guard said.

"What?" the old man quickly took the talisman and looked over it. "Early 20s? Yu Ming? None of this sounds true."

"What should we do then?" the guard asked. "Should we punish him for lying?"

The sect master glared at the guard for even suggesting such a thing. He stared back at the talisman. While the information was wrong… a son had come.

The old man's eyes suddenly changed as he thought, 'even if this is false… this can help me.'

"Tell the guards to inform me directly when this person arrives tomorrow," the old man said.

"Yes, sect master," the guard said and ran back.

The sect master turned and returned back to the room full of individuals from great sects and clans.

"Sorry about that. Something small came up," he said as he entered the room.

"No worries, no worries," one of the men sitting in the room said.

"So, where were we?" the old man asked, and as soon as he did, he regretted it.

"Of course, we were talking about your disciple's marriage," one of the old men said. "My son is already a True King 5th realm at the mere age of 50. Your daughter and my son would make a great couple."

"What are you saying, you senile old fool. My nephew is a True Earth formation master, on the verge of becoming a True Heaven formation master. Hei Lin would do better with my son than you," another man said.

The sect master Qin started frowning again when he heard them. 'Dammit! If my disciple hadn't been so old, none of this would be happening. Just because they think she's out of her prime, they come here trying to jump at her like vultures seeing dead meat,' the sect master thought. 'Sigh, this wouldn't have been happening had I found her just 2 decades ago. At that time, she would've shocked the empire with her talent.'

One of the older men that wore a cyan robe started speaking.

"True Heaven talisman experts are hard to come by already. Even if they're on the verge of it, one cannot necessarily go above it."

"However, the difficulty gets so much larger once you try to become a True Immortal talisman expert. The amount of resources you will require is just insane."

"If you don't get that soon, I don't see your disciple advancing any further than she already has, brother Qin. Her skill is great, but skill is not all that is necessary to become an expert. You need cultivation as well."

"She isn't young and in her prime like nephew Tian Ye here. Just being able to reach second place in the competition alone is an amazing feat, but I'm afraid that's the last thing she will ever do."

"So in my eyes, the only way to improve her cultivation quickly is to get her to marry a person of great backing. You may choose the young men these two brothers have brought along, or you may choose someone of your own, but you must choose soon," the man finished talking.

'You only say that because you don't know how great my disciple is. Her talent is beyond any of you fools.'

'You think I will let such a precious disciple of mine get taken away by swine who don't deserve her at all? Keep dreaming,' the old man Qin thought to himself, which was different from what he said on the outside.

"Yes, I'm afraid I must do something like that in the end, but I also have to think of my disciple's feeling, you know. She's not mine to simply wed her away," the sect master said.

"Right, call your disciple here. You can't just keep her hidden forever, you know," one of the elders said.

"Right, sect master. I came all the way to converse with sister Hei, and I still haven't gotten the chance to," Tian Ye, the fatty spoke from the side.

"Nephew Ye, I'm afraid it's not possible right now. She's still in deep cultivation," the old man said.

"I see," the fatty said dejectedly.

'Hmm, is there perhaps a problem with her breakthrough? Is she stuck?' Tian Ye thought.

'Maybe I should go get some help for her.'

Chapter 678 Lord Clearance Pill

Alex spent the night inside the alchemy room doing nothing but cultivating. He had taken a particularly large Alchemy task that would normally take about 10 hours for a normal cultivator.

However, he had finished it in just 3 hours and had spent the remainder of the time simply cultivating.

Alex walked out of the room a bit after noon and looked outside. It was just an hour before he got to meet his mother again.

'I can do one more pill,' Alex thought and walked out from the back of the guild to the front where the mission board lay.

As he was about to place his badge on the carved spots, he heard someone shouting behind him.

"Hey, you!"

Alex continued with his task, wondering why someone would dare be rowdy in the guild.

"Can you turn around, please?" the voice continued. "I'm talking to you, the one with the missing arm."

Alex stopped and finally turned around. When he did, he came face to face with someone he didn't expect to see here at all.

Fatty Tian Ye.

"Brother, are you an alchemist?" Tian Ye asked.

"Yes," Alex said, while at the same time a little surprised at the fact that the fatty was still in the city. He would've expected him to leave already after being rejected.

"Good, good. Can you check for me if someone has taken up my order yet?" he asked.

"Uhh... sure, what's your order?" Alex asked.

"Lord Clearance Pill. 40%," the fatty said.

"Hmm... let's see," Alex placed the badge on the carving and started looking.

"Ah, found it. It's not been taken yet," Alex said as he looked at the mission. This was a simple pill that wasn't different from the Disciple Ascendance pill, only this one worked for the Lord realm cultivators.

'Why would he need one? Isn't he a True King?' Alex wondered. Still, this was a pill for him to make and he needed to pass some time.

"Alright, I've taken up the order. You will get your pill soon," Alex said.

"What? No!" the fatty shouted.

Alex stopped. "Did you not want your pill to be made?" Alex asked with a confused look.

"Of course I do! But, not by you," the fatty said.

Alex felt a tinge of anger when he heard that. "Why? What's wrong with me?" he asked.

"You... you... you're a bronze. I'm afraid you will mess up my order," Fatty said.

"Then you shouldn't have put up an order a bronze could take," Alex asked. "Don't worry. If I mess it up, I will compensate for the loss. That's guild orders. You should know that."

"I... I'm not worried about losing money or ingredients. I'm worried about losing time," the fatty said. "There's someone who needs this pill desperately right now. She's been cultivating for 6 days already, and still hasn't broken through."

Alex paused in his steps. As the pieces fell together, Alex understood who the fatty was talking about.

'He's buying this pill for my mother?' he thought curiously. 'No way he's trying to marry my mother too right? He's nearly 15 years younger.'

"Don't worry, brother. I will make your pill. Besides, I can't give back a mission I've already taken," Alex said. After that, he left the outer hall and went to the back, leaving a nervous Tian Ye waiting outside.

Once Alex was in the alchemy room, he got the ingredients. He looked at the two sets of ingredients and wondered, 'Does my mother even need pills?'

Alex still didn't know what was responsible for his very weak, almost non-existent bottlenecks. Was it his body? Or was it his spiritual roots?

Or maybe was it his talents? If it was his talents, his mother certainly didn't require the pills.

But, if it was any of the other two, he would have to do his best with the pills.

So, Alex brought himself to the best shape he could and started making a pill for his mother.

Half an hour later, he walked out with a satisfied expression.

After handing one of the pills that came out at 44%, he walked out. The fatty immediately saw him come out and jumped to his feet.

"What happened? Did you do it?" he asked.

"Yes, you can go take the pill," Alex said as he walked away from the place. He only had half an hour to arrive at the gates of the Flowing Brush sect, and it would take him just a little under that.

So, he hurried his way out of the city and went up the mountain roads all the way to the sect.

"Oh, you've come in time," the guard from yesterday said.

"About the message...?" Alex asked.

"We'll call the sect master, right now," the guards said and sent a message.

Alex had waited a few minutes for the sect master to walk out when he heard a surprised "Oh, you!" come from behind him.

He turned around to see the fatty stand not far away from him. It seemed he had come back as well.

"Hey, brother," Alex said. "Hope you like your pill."

"Yes, yes, I do," the fatty said. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm here to see my mother," Alex said with a smile.

"Your mother, huh? Is she an elder?" Fatty asked.

"No, she's—"

"Where is he?" a voice came from the gate catching everyone's attention.

"Sect master, here," the guard said and pointed towards Alex, who instantly stood up and readied himself.

The sect master walked out of the gates and saw Alex.

'Hmm... that's him?' the sect master Qin walked up to Alex.

"You are the one who's claiming to be my disciple's son?" the old man asked.

"Yes, sect master. I am he," Alex said with a bow.

"Huh? What? Son? Whose?" the Fatty was startled.

"What's your name?" the old man ignored Tian Ye and asked Alex.

"My name is Yu Ming," Alex said.

'Wrong name. That's not her son's name,' the old man thought with a bit of disappointment visible in his eyes. 'Sigh, but he looks close enough that I should be able to use him to dissuade the suitors.'

"Very well," the old man said. "Come, I will take you to your mother."

Alex's face brightened and he thanked the old man before walking forward.

"Wait, what's happening sect master Qin?" the fatty asked.

"Nephew Tian, can't you see? This young man says he's my disciple's son. I'm going to take him to meet her," the old man said.

"Sister Hei Lin has a son? And he's this old? No way. Why would you keep this information hidden?" the fatty asked.

"I did not hide anything. This is the first time I've seen her son too," the old man said as he turned towards Alex. "Let us hurry."

Alex felt an aura grab him and hoist him into the air before pulling him away.

He was moved fast, but not as fast as Shen Jing. So, he was perfectly fine.

He tried to look below, get a lay of the land. However, the excitement and nervousness were taking over him and he couldn't focus.

The Fatty was flying quite quickly as well, following the two of them.

At the same time, a spiritual sense touched Alex and a voice entered his mind.

"I know you're not my disciple's son, but I am in need of your help right now. Simply act like you're her son when you see her."

"Cry, call her mother, do what normal families would do. If you do that, I will grant any wish that may have brought you here."

Alex looked at the old man in surprise. 'He doesn't believe me?' Alex wondered.

Still, he nodded to give a yes to the old man. Finally, 2 minutes later they landed at the feet of a green mountain.

The moment Alex landed, he felt the aura of many True and saint realm experts appear in front of him.

Many seemingly high-ranking people were standing in front of him. Nearly everyone held a confused or annoyed look.

"Brother Qin, what is this? Your disciple has a son?" one of the old men and women asked.

"Why were we not let know about this beforehand?" the people started complaining. They had been staying here, hoping to rope in the old, but definitely talented Helen by using their family as leverage.

However, now that they learned that she had a son, marrying her into their family would only put a dark spot on their son's and nephew's images.

They couldn't stand that knowledge.

'Did the fatty let them know what was happening?' Alex wondered as he looked at the crowd.

"Brothers, sisters. Please calm down. I wasn't keeping this information from you at all. I too only came to learn about this right now."

"I haven't even checked this fact with my disciple yet. However, given how close this young man's features look like my disciples, I'm inclined to believe his story," the old man said.

"No, don't believe him," the fatty shouted. "He's an alchemist. He must be wearing an illusion formed by his pill."

The old man Qin's eyes hesitated for a moment. 'Dammit, is that true?' he wondered.

"We will find out after I ask my disciple," the old man said and walked to the house close to them and knocked on the door 3 times before entering.

The moment he was inside, he found Helen making a talisman under the lantern's light.

"Master?" she looked up surprised.

"Lin'er!" the old man said. "I need you to do something for me."

Chapter 679 Reunion

"Oh, what is it, master?" Helen asked.

"Outside, there is a young man claiming to be your son," the old man hadn't finished speaking when Helen's eyes went wide.

"My son?" she asked.

"Sigh, don't be excited. He's a fake," the old man said, immediately deflating Helen's excitement like a knife through a balloon.

"His name is… what was it? Yu Ming, and he's missing an arm. Go out and act like he's your son. That way, we can keep your suitors at bay," the old man said.

"Suitors?" Helen asked with a curious face.

The old man shook his head and explained everything.

"But I already have a husband and a son," Helen objected.

"I know that, but how do you expect to tell that to those old foggies? Without your son and husband here, it's hard to dissuade their interest."

"If they take a dislike to our attitude, they may even work against our sect in the future," the old man said.

"Which is why this is perfect timing. Go out and hug that young man like he were your own son. Maybe cry a little too," the old man said.

"Sigh, okay master," Helen said and stood up.

"Alright, let's go."

Outside, Alex was bombarded with questions from all sides. Someone asked him his name and origin. Others asked him if this was a ploy.

And one of the old women even went as far as to ask him if someone else paid him to disrupt her nephew's marriage.

Alex simply told them his name and that he was Hei Lin's son. As for anyone that may have tried to force him to answer him, Alex let slip the bronze Alchemist badge that was hiding in his robes.

With that, there was no way anyone would dare threaten him, lest they wanted to face the wrath of an angry guild.

Alex really liked how handy the Alchemist guild badge was.

Just as he was thinking that the door opened and the old man walked out. Then, following him, the magenta-robed Hei Lin walked out.

She had an excited look on her face, but it seemed obviously fake to many eyes.

Her eyes fell on the old men and woman before slowly moving towards the right before they fell on Alex.

Alex had long hair now and was about two fingers taller than he had been 3, or rather 6 years ago. His body was also more built up, more muscular.

And he was missing an arm.

However, the face… it was a face that Helen could never forget. She could see part of herself in that face, and part of her husband. There was also a part that was unique on its own.

Helen's leg moved forward on its own as the initial facade of excitement was immediately torn down and a face with a multitude of expressions landed on her face.

Happy, excited, nervous, scared, and even a little sad. Her face held it all, and so did Alex's.

"Mother?" he cried out, his voice nearly choking as it came out.

"Al?" Helen's voice went up 2 octaves.

"Mother!" Alex said as he slowly walked ahead, but Helen was already running.

Before Alex could also run, Helen arrived in front of him and took him in a motherly embrace.

"My Al, you're okay. You're alive," she said, tears streaming down her face without her approval.

Alex couldn't hold in his tears either. "I'm so happy to see you again mother," Alex said as he too embraced her with his only hand.

Helen somehow both cried and laughed at the same time, her face slowly became a mixture of happiness and sadness.

She quickly let go of her son and held him by the shoulders to look at him with a horrified look.

"What happened to your arm?" she cried out.

Alex gave a melancholic smile. "I… lost it during a fight," he said.

"Aw, my sweet child," Helen said as she hugged him again. Alex didn't remember the last time he had felt this loved.

He smiled.

This was nice.

The elders that were standing around showed nothing on their faces, but inwardly they cringed.

'Dammit! I nearly got my son together with someone that was already married,' one thought.

'That's a trap dodged,' another one thought. Everyone thought one thing or another as they looked at the mother-son reunion.

The only one that hadn't been thinking anything was the sect master Qin.

The old man Qin's face was riddled with surprise. The change had taken place too fast for him to understand things properly.

By now, he had already guessed that the fake son he brought for his disciple was her actual son and that only served to increase his astonishment.

'What the hell? That is actually her son?' he finally thought with shock clear on his face. 'Why the hell did he not tell me his actual name then?'

Tian Ye was about to speak, but the elder from the Demon Whisper sect stopped him. This was a family reunion that they couldn't interfere in at all.

"You seem quite shocked, brother Qin," the man sent a mental message.

"N-no, I'm just happy to see my disciple reunited with her son," the sect master sent back a mental message.

"Yeah, yeah, keep lying. Well, congratulations I guess. Now, no one will pester your disciple for marriage," the man sent.

The old man Qin couldn't help but give back a wry smile.

Helen finally let go of Alex and turned toward her master. "Master, is there any way to get my son's arm back?" she asked.

Qin turned towards her for a moment and then towards Alex's arm before shaking his head. "I don't think there is a way. Maybe if the Shen young lady improves her talent, but I hear she's got nothing on her elder sister, so your son will have to wait until he reaches Saint realm," the old man said while shaking his head.

Helen's eyes teared up as she looked back at her son and took his head in an embrace again. "It's fine. Mother is here. I will think of something."

Alex wanted to say that he had a way already, but he let it be. For now, he was just happy to have his mother back.

"Uhh… Lin'er, your son is going nowhere, but I'm afraid these guests of ours probably will. They came all the way here to meet you," the old man said.

Helen quickly bowed to all the elders in front of her with her hands cupped together.

"Hei Lin greets seniors," she said.

Alex felt a little weird seeing his mother treat the others the same way he treated them.

In terms of seniority, he and his mother could be considered from the same generation, as such they were equally respectful to the elders.

That didn't make it any less awkward for him.

The elders nodded back and congratulated her for getting her son back. Helen couldn't hide her smile or her tears.

"How only are you, young man?" one of the elders asked.

"I'm Twenty… four years old," Alex said after a bit of hesitation. It was probably better to keep his actual age a secret for fear of confusion.

"Oh, 24 and already a True Earth alchemist? You have quite the talent," one of the other elders said.

"Must take after his mother then," another one spoke.

"Young man, you are at the ample age to marry. I have a niece back at home. She is what they call city toppling beauty, do you wan—"

"Brother Huan, what are you doing? Are you seriously trying to rope in the son now that you didn't get the mother?" one of the elders asked directly.

"What? No. I'm just asking the young man what he wants," the elder said.

"Thank you, elder. But I have no such plans at the moment," Alex said.

"Hmm, if you do have such plans, let the sect master Qin know. He will message me," the man said. "Since I have seen junior Hei Lin, I will have to leave now."

"Congratulations on your performance in the competition."

Once the first man left, one after another, the people spoke some sweet words to Helen and left.

Tian Ye played with the small ceramic bottle where the pill was kept. He had brought it here to gift it to her, but it turned out the alchemist was her son.

Now, he was feeling incredibly awkward and didn't know what to do. In the end, he decided to go forward and give it to her.

"Although it's not much, Sister Hei, I hope you can accept this little gift of mine," he said as he put forth the pill.

Alex looked to the side as if not seeing what was happening in front of him, and the fatty felt grateful about it.

"Little brother Tian, you don't need to do that," Helen spoke, but the fatty didn't take the pill back.

"No, no. Just think of it as your little brother's help for you to break through without a problem," Tian Ye said. Then, he turned toward Alex and said, "Call me Uncle Tian from now on. If you ever need any help, you can use my name."

"Thank you, uncle Tian," Alex said without hesitation.

"Mmm," the fatty made a sound before saying, "I will have to return back to my sect too, so I will take my leave for now, sister Hei. Please come by the sect when you are free."

"Of course, little brother," Helen said, greeting the fatty a farewell.

Once everyone left, the sect master Qin finally turned to Alex as he said, "Inside that house. Now! I need some explanation."

Chapter 680 Helen’s Story

Alex walked into his mother's single-roomed house and made his way towards the back of the room where he could see some brush, inks on a stone slab, and a talisman laid flat on a smooth metal plate.

"Were you making talismans before I came, mother?" Alex asked.

"Oh yes, I was practicing," Helen said as she walked up to the brushes to quickly clear away the place for him to stay in.

Old man Qin walked behind them, carefully watching Alex as he found a place for him to sit in.

"Quick, tell me! Where have you been all these years? Were you on a different continent? How did you get here?" Helen asked.

"I… I was in a different part of this continent before everything went wrong," Alex said. "It was only afterward that I came to this empire."

"You are from a different empire? There's a different empire in this continent?" the old man Qin showed a shocked face.

"Yes, there is one beyond the secret realm to the north. You have to go through the secret realm if you want to cross it," Alex explained.

"Is that really true?" Qin thought to himself.

Alex wanted to ask his mother some questions and give her some information of his own, but he didn't find it comfortable telling the old man next to him.

In fact, he was already annoyed that the old man knew his real name and the fact that he was a player.

"Sect master Qin, may I request some alone time with my mother?" Alex asked.

The old man nodded. "Just answer a few questions of mine and I will leave," the old man said.

Alex nodded, "go ahead, senior."

"When did you come to the empire?" he asked.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "about 5 and a half years ago."

"5 and a half years?" the old man seemed surprised. "And how long have you been cultivating?"

Alex didn't feel fine answering this, but since the old man already knew how long he had been playing the game, he sighed and gave him the answer.

"A bit more than 6 years ago I believe," Alex said.

"Hmm, 6 years to reach True Lord 2nd realm. It makes sense for your mother to be so slow, but you have cultivated for longer than her. Why are you not of higher cultivation base?" the old man asked.

'Is this kid not as talented as his mother perhaps?' the old man wondered.

"I spent most of my last 5 years training myself, so I have neglected increasing my cultivation base a little," Alex said.

"You trained, but you neglected your cultivation?" the old man looked confused.

"I trained not only in techniques but Alchemy too. Also in some parts formations," Alex said.

"Oh, you know alchemy and formations? Not bad," the old man said.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Oh, what's your…" the old man's voice trailed off as he noticed the badge hanging on Alex's neck.

"True Earth alchemist? Woah, you really do have your mother's talent," the old man said.

"And formation? What about formations?" the old man asked.

"I haven't had the chance to enter the formation guild yet. Now that I will likely settle in this city with my mother, I intend to join it not soon after," Alex said.

"Good, good. What about talisman?" the old man asked.

Alex paused for a second and said, "I haven't had the chance to learn anything about talismans, but I do plan on learning about the runes soon so I may as well learn talismans as well."

"Yes, yes," the old man nodded more aggressively. "Say, do you want to enter the sect?"

Alex didn't even have to think about this question. "I'm sorry, sect master Qin, but I don't plan on joining any sect at the moment," Alex said.

"Are you sure? You can learn from me as your mother does," he said.

"I am sure, senior," Alex said.

"Master really does know quite a lot Al. Why don't you learn from him?" Helen asked.

"I'm not opposed to being taught, mother. I'm opposed to joining a sect, any sect," Alex said. After the Hong Wu sect and the Tiger sect, his interests in sects had dwindled quite a lot.

"Are you sure?" Helen looked at him closely as she asked.

"Yes, I'm sure," Alex said.

"I think there's nothing more to say here, Master. If my son doesn't want to join, he won't have to," Helen said.

"Sigh, alright. What about joining the sect temporarily then? You can be a guest elder and stay here with your mother."

"Although you will have to do some things here. Can you make pills for the sect?" the old man Qin asked.

"I can definitely do that. Thank you for the opportunity, sect master Qin," Alex said.

"Good! I think I'm done with my questions for now. I will leave the two of you to your own," the old man said and left.

Alex chuckled a little when he felt the thin aura of spiritual sense still hanging in the air. He brought out a formation from his storage bag and placed it on the ground before pouring in some Qi into it.

Instantly, a barrier was put up around them that blocked all senses. Alex was glad he bought this formation a couple of days ago.

The moment the barrier was up, all the questions Alex was holding back came pouring out.

"Mother, why are you here? How are you here? Is dad here too? Did you play the game too? Are you okay?" Alex asked.

"Slow down," Helen said with a chuckle. "I will explain from the start."

* * * * * * *

6 years ago.

Helen was cooking some afternoon meal when a message rang on her phone. She wiped her hands on her apron and looked up the message.

-$20,000 has been credited to your account 1223#########57-

"Oh dear, he sent so much money again," Helen thought to herself with a proud look on her face.

"What are you smiling about?" Graham, Alex's father, asked as he walked through the door.

"Look," Helen said as she showed the message to Alex's father. Even almost 10 meters away, Graham showed a surprised look when he saw the message.

"Oh, he sent money again? Well, I was getting a little worried about what he would do now that he's given up on university, but I guess he's doing quite well," Graham said.

"Of course, he would. He's our son, you know? He's the best of us," Helen said with a proud smile still on her face. Then, a thought came to her mind.

"Say, should we play the game too?" Helen asked. "We don't have much to do around here, and Liz keeps pestering me to play as well."

"Do you really want to?" Graham asked. He seemed a little hesitant.

"Yes," Helen said.

"Sigh, alright. Let's go pick one of those game machines when I have to go deliver those vegetables then," Graham said.

"Yes!" Helen said excitedly.

That night, Helen bought 2 capsules. Graham told her they didn't need 2, but she insisted.

However, she didn't let Graham enter immediately, and neither did she enter.

She spent the entire night scouring the internet learning about the different parts of the game.

"Oh, it says if you die, your character gets ruined. Also, it seems you randomly start in one of the 4 different continents," Helen said excitedly, but graham was already asleep.

She spent a little longer learning about the game. She called Alex to learn a bit more, but he didn't pick up her call at all.

"Geez, he must already be in the game then," Helen thought. If that was the case, she would try tomorrow.

Tomorrow afternoon, Alex still didn't pick up. "What is this child doing?" Helen thought.

In the end, she decided to go into the game without asking him. That night, both she and Graham entered their capsules and jumped into the game.

When Helen opened her eyes, she found herself in a customization room where she could alter her appearance and name.

Helen chose to keep everything mostly the same and entered the game.

When the game finally started, she found herself standing on a slope next to a forest. When she looked down the slope, she found a massive city in the distance.

"Right, I need to get out of here and find out where I am," she thought as she walked toward human civilization.

"Right, Status!" she called out for her information to come up.

[Player Name: Helen

Cultivation: Mortal (1 Qi : 100%)

Body: Heaven Seeking Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: None

Qi: 0

]

Helen was quite satisfied with her information and checked her storage bag. She quickly went through the tutorial and opened her gift to reveal 4 different things.

She found a cultivation method, a minor talisman book, a bow, and finally a pill that improved cultivation speed.

She did what most people did and went to sell the pill. After all, she knew how simple it was to acquire Qi to start becoming a cultivator.

Once she got some money, she found herself a tavern and logged out. That was all she would do for today.

When she logged out, she found Graham already out of the capsule.

"How did it go?" she asked.

"It was okay," he said. "Did you find out where you are?"

"Ah yes," she said as she brought out her phone to check the name 'DawnSpring city.'

"According to this, " she spoke. "I'm in the Luminance Empire of the Western Continent."

Chapter 681 Mother-Son Conversation

"What about you?" Helen asked Graham.

"I... don't know. There's not a single thing growing in the parts I'm at. Nowhere to sell, not a human soul in sight," Graham said. "I tried... uh, doing what that thing said and sitting down, but nothing happened."

"You cultivated?" Helen asked.

"Yes, that. But it didn't work," Graham said.

"You should go try again," Helen said. "Let's stay the entire night this time."

"I need to sleep," Graham protested.

"You can sleep in the machine. It's designed that way. Go now," Helen chided and Graham reluctantly entered the capsule.

Helen followed him and entered the capsule as well. The next thing she knew, she was back in the tavern she had logged out from.

Helen decided to cultivate. She knew what she had to do. Focus your mind, let your thoughts go astray, and slowly breathe in and out.

As she thought that, Helen slowly fell into a lull and soon enough, she fell in a trance. A trance where the soul in her real body would be suppressed for the soul in her fake one.

Unfortunately, while she was cultivating, her soul could never be suppressed by trivial formations.

Though the system tried to, her soul would always surface when she cultivated. Not that it mattered, for this would be the last time the fake soul ever stayed in her body.

While the fake soul was logged out with a random disconnection prompt, Helen opened her eyes in the tavern with confusion clear on her face.

"How long has it been?" she wondered and looked at the time. There was no clock in her vision.

"Setting?" she cried out but no setting came. No panels appeared.

"Log out!" she demanded, but that was impossible as well, for unbeknownst to her, Alex had destroyed the system that kept everything in order.

As such, soon her life was sent into disorder.

Helen was more fortunate than the rest of the players that surfaced after the game system's disappearance. She had her wit and with her soul never fully suppressed, she knew every single moment of what she lived through in this world.

More than that, she had information about this world that she learned through the internet. When she understood her situation, she decided to give it her all to find her son and her husband.

She didn't know what continent they were in, but she promised herself she would find them.

So, she took the one simple talisman book in her storage bag and started studying.

Months would go by before she reached a high enough level in her cultivation base that she could consistently make great talismans, and someone took notice.

Qin Shan of the Flowing Brush sect was the only Saint rank Talisman maker of DawnSpring city, one of the very few in the entire empire.

When going through new recruits in the guild, he came across Helen's speed at which she was going up in her talisman.

When she went from reaching Common Earth rank to Common Heaven rank in just mere 3 months, he understood that he had someone special in this place.

So, he met up with Helen and after seeing her absorb information like a sponge, he decided to take her in as his own disciple.

He even went as far as to make an exception for her in the sect as no one above 40 was allowed to remain a student.

At first, Old man Qin thought that he would have to spend a lot to get Helen to cultivate and reach a higher level. However, he soon realized how wrong he was.

Helen needed just the bare minimum and she could breakthrough easily. In fact, her speed of breakthrough was way too fast if she only focused on it.

So as to not bring up suspicion, he made her not cultivate at all most of the time and only made her focus on making talismans.

Soon, her talent shone through that as well.

* * * * *

"And then he made you take part in the competition?" Alex asked.

"Yes, partly to improve the sect's name. Partly to help get my own name and image into the world so that you would see me if you were in this continent," Helen said. "I'm glad it worked."

Alex nodded and asked, "I suspected your talent to be high but to think you had God-grade talent as well. Not to mention, our spiritual roots are the same. Hmm... I wonder if you can take the White Tiger's blood as well?"

Alex had barely thought for a second before shaking his head. "No, you need the body more than the roots. While your body constitution sounds great on paper, if I'm not wrong, it's a Heaven Grade body," Alex said.

Helen nodded. "It was considered an above-average grade for most players," she said.

"Right, did father mention his status at all? What his body was, or what his talent was?" Alex asked.

Helen sighed and shook her head. "Your father said nothing. He couldn't even cultivate where he was," Helen said. "Honestly, I worried about him more than I worried about you. At least you were already doing good with earning so much money, but him... sigh."

Alex sighed as well. 'Place where you can't cultivate... that just sounds like...,' Alex thought of a place before another thought occurred to him.

"Do you really remember entering the game and coming back out?" he asked.

"Yes, I do," Helen said.

"I see," Alex said with a thoughtful. "So our souls must not be swapped unless we sit down and cultivate."

"Souls swapped? What do you mean?" Helen asked with a confused look.

"It's like this," Alex said and proceeded to explain everything he could think of to explain.

Partway through, his own story mixed into the things as it became impossible to explain everything without telling where he learned it all.

He told her about the book of the Alchemy God, his two masters, Pearl, Beast realm, and finally the fight he had to go through in the desert beyond the Forbidden Fields.

He tried to skip over Ma Rong's death and the empty space his heart still held, but he couldn't do that. Halfway through, his eyes became misty as he explained it all to his mother.

Helen hugged him once more and pat his head.

After a while, she let go and asked, "wait, does that mean there is another me and you back on the 5th continent?"

Alex was about to answer when he finally understood what that question meant. 'Wait, then I don't have to find my way home?' he thought to himself.

He still wanted to meet sister Hao and the creator, and learn why they did what they did. Why they risked the lives of many... No, killed so many just for a game? Was there a hidden purpose? Or was this just entertainment for a god that was easily bored?

He felt a shift in his motivation from finding a home to finding answers.

Helen saw her son go quiet and wondered if she said something to remind him of something bad. So, she quickly decided to change the conversation topic.

"You mentioned a pet, right? where is he?" she asked.

"Ah yes," Alex came out of his stupefied expression and brought out Pearl from his beast space.

In a bright white light, the tiny and cute cat jumped in front of Helen with his head held high.

He looked at Helen with a confused look and then turned back to Alex. "Pearl, meet my mother," he said.

"Meow?" Pearl said.

"Aw, come here little one," Helen said as she lay her hands flat for Pearl to jump on top of it. After Pearl climbed on top of it, she brought him up to eye level as she used one hand to rub his tiny head.

"Hello, Pearl," she said with a smile.

Alex smiled and gave a mental command to Pearl.

"Hello, mother," Pearl said with a smug smile on his face.

"What?" Helen was shocked a little when she heard the cat speak. "Wh-what? what? Is he like a parrot?" she asked.

"I'm Pearl, not a parrot, mother," Pearl said.

"Wait, can you really speak?" she looked at him with her shock fixed on her face.

"Yes, I can," Pearl said.

Only after a minute did the shock wane from her face and a look of incredulity appeared on it.

"Wow, I can't believe there is a beast out there that can speak," she said.

"There are many that can do that, mother," Alex said. "Although I've only seen 2 that can do so at True realm, all Saint realm beasts are able to speak."

"Do they learn it from somewhere?" Helen asked.

"No, they just..." Alex stopped. Wait. Where did the saint beasts learn to speak the human, no demon language?

No, that was wrong too. Both Human and Demon language was the same, just written differently. Yao Jia had told him so.

'So everyone in this world just knows how to speak one language?' he wondered. 'How did we come to learn that same language despite being isolated for so long too?'

There were a lot of questions for him to think of, but unfortunately, the other him hadn't spoken aloud a lot of things for him to remember his words. So, Alex was not privy to a lot of information that was simply in the other Alex's mind.

He remembered the other him talking about a few things and had pieced most of it together, but some information clearly still missed.

He couldn't help but wonder, 'What else do I still not remember from back home?'

Chapter 682 Sect and Clan

Alex and Helen talked with each other for the rest of the day and the entire night. Helen didn't bother to cultivate or train as she heard her son's stories.

When he learned that he had been in what was practically their backyard for 2 whole years, she was very shocked.

Although, perhaps not as shocked as when she learned that her son who she assumed was 24 years old was actually only 21 years right now.

When Alex told her that he lost 3 years in just 3 days, Helen's face made a very understandable surprised expression.

It wasn't every day you heard of someone time traveling.

Alex also showed his mother the little mouse he had, which she wasn't surprised by very much. After all, with the speaking Pearl in her hand, it was hard to bring any other beast that could surprise her.

Although, when she learned that the little mouse was born not long ago and that he needed a name, she aptly decided to call him Whiskers for his extraordinarily long whiskers. Alex thought of protesting, but he swallowed the thought in the end and let it be.

Its name wasn't very important to Alex as Pearl, at least not yet.

Alex was telling his mother how pills were made exactly when he heard a knock on the door. He quickly turned off the formation and walked to the door.

When he opened it, he saw the guard that had helped him waiting with a surprised look.

"Greetings, uncle," Alex said.

The man gave a wry smile. "To think you really were sister Hei's son. Congrats on meeting your mother finally," he said.

"Thank you," Alex replied.

"Are you done with your reunion? The sect master wants me to show you around the sect," he said.

"Oh, okay. One moment," Alex said and returned back to the room. "Mother, I'll be back in a bit. The sect master wants me to see the sect. Pearl should keep you company."

"I will stay with mother," Pearl said from the side.

"Yes, you will," Helen said with a smile as she petted Pearl.

Alex nodded and left. "Let's go," he said to the man and walked out.

"What's your name, uncle?," Alex asked the man.

"Zhou Ji," the man said.

Alex gave a surprised look. "From THE Zhou clan?" he asked, remembering the white robes with burnt edges of the young man named Zhou Ren back in the demon realm.

"More of a side branch, but yes," Zhou Ji said.

"I see," Alex said. "I didn't think a big clan like Zhou would let their juniors choose another sect instead of teaching them in the clan."

"The clan only bothers teaching people who were born with the ability to create White Fire," Zhou Ji said with a sad smile. "I never was."

"White Fire?" Alex asked with a curious look.

"Do you not know about the Zhou clan's White Fire? It's what made us famous in the first place," Zhou Ji said.

"I'm afraid I don't know much about the great clans of the Luminance empire," Alex said. "I planned on reading about it, but one thing led to another and I keep putting it off."

Then Alex thought of something and said, "Would you mind telling me what you can about the different families while we take this walk, Uncle Ji?"

"Uh, sure. I don't mind," the man said and soon Alex started learning about both the sect and the different families.

While the Flowing Brush sect was primarily a talisman-centric sect, it also had a small group of disciples that joined it simply to learn cultivation as a whole.

So, the sect was divided into two groups, which included both disciples and elders. The only difference this brought was that the small group that wasn't interested in talisman only got a small section of the sect to work with.

However, there was no difference when it came to how they were treated. According to Zhou Ji, one could only remain a student until 40 years of age. After that, they had either leave or go through a test to become an elder of the sect.

'That's not very different to how it is back in the Crimson Empire,' he thought.

The sect itself had multiple mountains, most of which were not even inhabited. It was only the few 10 to 12 mountains that were truly full of people.

The disciples lived in 5 of the 12 mountains, with only 1 belonging to those that weren't part of the talisman group.

Of the other 6, 3 of them house the Sect master, sect elders, and the guest elders as well as guests of the sect.

Finally, of the remaining 3, 2 were used for practicing talismans and 1 was used for everything else that ranged from disciple hall to Law enforcement hall of the sect.

The rest of the miscellaneous events and lectures took place in the small flat valley that lay between the mountains, directly after entering the sect.

When Alex asked what they did for the talisman ingredients, Zhou Ji told him that they either bought the ingredients or simply sent the students towards the other 16 or so uninhabited mountains to search for it.

If neither way proved successful, they would start a small expedition group to go to the eastern mountains.

Alex nodded to himself when he heard that as that seemed to be the best of ways.

After explaining about the mountain, Zhou Ji took Alex to actually see said mountains. During this time, he decided to explain what little he could about the 7 great families.

Zhou clan got famous after their progenitor developed his White Fire technique to such a level that it was ingrained into his blood essence and thus most of his descendants were born with the White Fire as a bloodline ability.

Because of this, the Zhou clan was represented with the color white.

White Fire could reach temperatures that normal fire struggled to get to with the same amount of Qi. So, the Zhou clan ended up being recognized as one of the better clans.

It was said that the progenitor gained the White Flame from the demon realm, but no one knew if there was any truth in that.

"The Han family," Zhou Ji spoke while pointing towards the west where the Han ancestral home lay and said, "they are just a bunch of people with an incredible physique."

"They are body cultivators right?" Alex asked, remembering Han Daiyu's impressive strength.

"Uh... not exactly?" Zhou Ji said. "I don't understand the difference myself but I believe theirs is a result of a technique while real body cultivators temper their body through pain and torture."

"They practiced a technique that gave their body incredible strength. What I know, their body itself isn't good at defending, just exerting a lot of strength," Zhou Ji said.

"Oh, so they are half a body cultivator in a sense," Alex asked.

"Maybe even less," Zhou Ji said. "From what I hear, their endurance is better than most people but not as good as what a real body cultivator could reach. Their healing capability is normal, and their longevity doesn't increase either, despite being of a strong body."

"Oh," Alex said. 'So in a sense, Pearl's body isn't a result of body cultivation, but is a physique huh? While mine is fully body cultivation.'

'So White Tiger's Dominating Body is the name of his physique probably,' Alex thought.

"I saw Han Daiyu using a hammer. Is the Han family's main weapon of choice that?" Alex asked.

"Uh... not necessarily. They use what they can to exert their strength. Hammer is usually the best weapon for that," Zhou Ji explained.

The Han Family's physique technique could only be used by those that had a good Earth spiritual root, so they took the color brown.

He took him to the disciple mountains next and explained about the Jin family.

The Jin Family was a family of swordsmen. They came to power after their progenitor found a sword manual during the meteor shower over a thousand years ago.

He shocked the empire back then with his strength and established the Jin family. It is said that the progenitor still lived, but no one had seen him in centuries to know if that was true or not.

The Jin family used a particularly fierce technique that employed 12 swords at once, and as such with metal being affiliated to their clan, they took the color Gold.

"The Lu family is perhaps the simplest out of everyone in the 7 different clans. Their family is simple in that they are usually born with a better wood spiritual root and as such use the powers of wood and wind," Zhou Ji said.

"While it is simple, don't misunderstand that for it being weak. The Lu ancestor is said to be able to create wind so fierce that it will rip the skin off your face before you can beg him to stop," Zhou Ji said.

"Because of that, they are also affiliated with the color Green," he said.

Alex nodded as he listened to the information.

White, Brown, Gold, and Green. Alex had initially expected them to be simple clans that were primarily focused on one of the 7 elements.

Such as White being Yang, Brown being Earth, Gold being Metal, and Green being Wood. Now, it turned out that he was only right on one account and wrong on the rest of the 3.

Zhou Ji didn't notice Alex falling into thought and continued.

"Next up is the Shen family."

Chapter 683 Qi-like Aura

The Shen family was a family that mostly used water techniques as Alex had expected. However, they also had a secret healing technique that they had apparently found in the meteor shower.

From what Zhou Ji said, Alex understood that one needed to have a very good Water spiritual root to make the most of that technique.

'So, the little sister must have worse spiritual roots than the sister that died,' Alex thought. He couldn't help but wonder how his own senior sister would do if he took that technique to her.

Thinking about it, he started missing Luo Mei and the others again.

Zhou Ji reached the guest elder's mountain and started explaining about the Fu family.

"Fu family is a family full of mental attack users. I believe it started off as a family of fire users, but slowly, over the course of millennia, they shifted to using mental attacks, especially their spiritual sense," Zhou Ji said.

"They also have some terrifying knowledge of formations that most others don't know of. That makes fighting against them hard since you don't know what they will bring out," he said.

Alex nodded when he heard that. He had fought with that girl that could in fact use both strong mental attacks and formations.

Alex didn't know why they had strong mental attacks, but that certainly lined up with what the Royal Fu family could use as well.

After all, it was Zexi who used the memory scouring skill to enter his mind. That was certainly something his grandfather brought from the Fu family of this empire.

As for formations, Fu Tao had told him that their grandfather had found a great book about formations from the meteor shower and had become a great formation maker.

Alex wanted to know what informations he had, but he didn't know how he could possibly approach that.

'So their crimson robe has nothing to do to reflect their skill or abilities, but rather something historic that they just didn't bother to change huh?' Alex thought.

"Next up, perhaps the weirdest family out there. The Song Family," Zhou Ji said.

"Yes, I saw one of them use blood. What's that about?" Alex asked.

"The Song family is known to use blood Qi," Zhou Ji said.

"Blood Qi? I've never heard of such a thing before," Alex said.

"And I wouldn't doubt that. Unless you see or hear about the Song family, you likely wouldn't hear about Blood Qi at all," Zhou Ji said.

"Is Blood Qi something born of a mutant spiritual root?" Alex asked. He wondered if it was something like people being only able to use wind or ice because that was the spiritual root they were born with.

"No, it's not Qi specifically but is more of an aura. But since it acts just like Qi, as in you can absorb it to enhance your cultivation and such, so people just call it Blood Qi for convenience's sake," Zhou Ji said.

"That's quite complicated then. I'm assuming they can't just cultivate blood Qi then like the rest of us cultivate daily," Alex asked.

"I don't think they do. They simply use blood for techniques and such that they themselves developed. Usually, it's their own blood that they can freely manipulate, but sometimes they end up using others' blood as well," Zhou Ji said.

Alex nodded to himself as he heard that.

"Honestly, I'm really not sure how this all works. Just that they have the ability to use blood," Zhou Ji said.

"If they use blood, is there a reason why they don't have the red color, and instead Fu family does?" Alex asked.

"It's just a first come first thing. Since the Fu family wore red first, the Song family that came afterward were forced to choose a different color."

"In the end, they chose black," Zhou Ji said. "Not that it matters, since they still wear red."

Zhou Ji took Alex finally to the elders' hall where he got an elders badge that gave him the authority a guest elder did.

Not that he would ever use that authority. After all, Alex was perhaps the youngest of them all here, not counting those that had yet to enter the True realms.

So, he would better just steer clear of using his authority over those that were older than him by quite a lot.

The tour was over when Alex was returned back to the sect master's mountain with a new house being built right next to Helen's house.

"Your abode should be completed by evening time. Please bear with us for now," Zhou Ji said. "I will take my leave then."

"Thank you for the tour and those explanations," Alex said as Zhou Ji left. Alex returned back to his mother at around noon.

"You took quite some time to return," she said. "Did you go around the whole sect?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Come, sit. I have so many more questions now that I had time to think about it all," Helen said.

Alex nodded with a smile and sat next to his mother as he answered her question.

They talked until the sunset and someone came to inform him of the house was ready. Alex thanked them and returned back to the room.

"I'll go to my room for now mother," Alex said.

"Eh? But I was planning to teach you about talismans tonight. Don't you want to learn about them?" she asked.

"I do," Alex said. "But not today. I have something important to attend to tomorrow, but after that is done, you can start teaching me."

"Oh, what are you doing tomorrow?" Helen asked.

"Uh, why don't I make it a surprise?" Alex said.

"Oh, you're keeping secrets from your mother now just because you've become a few years older?" Helen asked with a slight pout on her face.

"Uh... do you really want to know?" Alex asked.

"Haha, I'm joking, obviously," Helen said with a light chuckle.

"Oh," Alex said. "Alright, come on Pearl."

"Eh? You're taking Pearl? He can stay with me," Helen said.

"No, you have some things to do, so I can't really let him stay here and disturb you," Alex said.

"No, I won't disturb mother," Pearl said.

"I have nothing to do really. I just need to make some talisman for practice is all," Helen said.

"Well, then here. I give you more tasks," Alex said as he dropped two flowers of red and yellow color in her hand.

Helen looked confused for a second, "What's this?" she asked.

"It's a Spirit Cleansing Lily," Alex explained. "If you cultivate while holding that, it will open up your spiritual sea and allow you to use your spiritual sense."

"What? Spiritual sense?" Helen gave a surprised look. "Ah right, I have heard about these things. I remember now."

She looked down at the flowers in her hand. The 5 petal lily looked quite ordinary to her eyes. She couldn't believe that it was actually something that could help open her spiritual sense.

"Sh-should I tell master about this?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "Sure, but after you've used it. Just in case he doesn't take one of it away."

"Eh? Isn't using just one enough for me though?" she asked. "I hear getting just one is very difficult. I have to say I'm surprised to see 2 of them at the same time."

"It's hard for others, but not for me," Alex said. "I have that alchemy knowledge about ingredients which subtly helps when picking ingredients."

"It's like I have someone else's instinct inside of me."

"As for using two, you can actually use up to 3 of them, each giving you an equal amount of spiritual sense. It's quite unnoticeable when compared to saint rank, but for a True realm cultivator, it's plenty," Alex said.

"Honestly, I would give you three, but I only have those two with me at the moment. If in the future I ever do find some more, I will bring you back some," she said.

Helen stared at the flower and asked, "have you used it?"

"Yes, all 3," He said. "It is more helpful the lower your cultivation base is. Especially if you haven't improved past Meridian tempering realm since the Mind Tempering realm has a lot of benefits if your spiritual sea is already open."

"I will get some pills for you to improve on that aspect, but for now just cultivate," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow."

Chapter 684 Proud

Alex entered his new home and was more than surprised with how well it was for something that was prepared just moments ago.

It looked exactly the same as his mother's in that there was a single room. But that was more than enough for him.

He would've loved to have some furnace in the middle for his alchemy, but it was understandable that they couldn't set it up in just a single day.

'So, I will have to go to the guild for a while longer huh? I hope they can prepare it in time,' Alex thought to himself.

From what he heard, they had to bring a formation expert to make sure that the formation that would run the furnace was properly integrated into the formation that ran the whole sect.

'I wonder why they don't use runes instead. It's the same thing, right?' he wondered. But then again, he didn't even know the first thing about runes and how they worked, so he didn't really have any authority to speak in these matters.

When Alex really thought about it, he realized that he wasn't that knowledgeable about formations either.

He mostly just followed recipes instead of creating one himself from the knowledge he had.

The only creating he had done were those pills he made back when he was stuck in that formation for a month.

'Now that I have some more information about ingredients and such, I should be able to create new pills,' he thought. 'That should help prepare me for when a Blood Spirit Ginseng comes on the market.'

Alex had nothing better to do, so he and Pearl cultivated the entire night, waiting for the morning to arrive.

When it did, Alex left his room and went back to the city.

* * * * *

Helen opened her eyes a little later than usual. She couldn't tell why she was late waking up today, but something in her told her that she couldn't wake up very early.

She looked down at her hand and realized that the two flowers she had been holding were gone.

'Is it done?' she wondered as she looked around. 'I can't see anything different.'

The moment she thought that, as if growing eyes all around her, she noticed everything in her vicinity.

Her mind was boggled at the amount of information that she received. Seeing the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the wood, the grains in the wood, etc all felt very weird to her.

She tried moving her 'eyes' and looked elsewhere. She looked at her own clothes she was wearing. Never before had her robe seen this unsightly to her.

She noticed all the creases on it, the frayed threads that came out at different places that would not be noticeable otherwise.

She noticed her long hair and how beautiful it really was. She would see her face and all the tiny blemishes on it.

It was so much better than what she used to have before she became a cultivator. She couldn't help but admire it.

Her spiritual sense started extending outwards and soon it escaped past the boundaries of her room and nearly reached her son's place.

However, it stopped just before it touched that house. Helen made a mental measurement and thought '50 meters?'. That was the extent of what she could reach with her senses.

She tried to go further and forced her mind to follow her will. Surprisingly for her, it worked and her spiritual sense entered the room easily.

She wanted to see her son inside, but he was gone already. She felt the light mental strain from her sense and immediately pulled it back.

'I can't extend it very far?' she thought to herself.

Once she was done reveling in her level up, she started remembering all the benefits one gained from having a spiritual sense.

First, she could see and, in some ways, touch something with her spiritual sense.

Second, it increased her mental capability to the point that she no longer required artifacts to protect herself from mental attacks. She simply needed some protection techniques.

Getting those techniques was a little difficult, but not very much when compared to getting spiritual sense itself.

Third, it gave her a very good memory, which would come in very handy for someone that was trying to learn Talismans.

Lastly, she could also use mental attacks, but the fighting had never really been Helen's interest before. She was more in tune with creation than destruction.

When Helen thought about her mental strength is very high now, she decided to try out making some more Talismans to see how they helped her.

After 2 hours, Helen's eyes were properly wide when she realized she could keep going for a very long time and make as many talismans in a single day as she could in a week before.

"With this, I should be able to increase my alignment by quite a bit. Given how the brush helped me reach 72%, with my spiritual sense I should be able to reach the immortal grade now," she thought.

Immortal grade, as far as she understood, went from 75% to 100% Alignment. That was what her master had told her and what she had learned before coming to the game too.

That only made her more confused when he understood that there were grades higher than that for other things.

She quickly had come to the understanding that the other grades simply didn't exist. If you threw away the arbitrary system of giving grades to a percentage of alignment, you would remain with a simple system that graded something from 0% to 100%

That was all one needed anyway.

She excitedly brought out her Saint grade brush that she hadn't brought out for the current testing purposes and started making another talisman.

The brush dipped into the ink, and it retained a certain amount as per her wish. Then, she placed the brush on the empty paper and started drawing.

Her spiritual sense was on the paper at all times, so she could clearly see everything. She saw how many bristles of the brush actually touched the picture.

She saw the flow at which the ink left the brush and remained on the paper. She saw those tiny, almost imperceptible lines of ink that were at the very edge of those lines she drew.

As she got more and more conscious of what little mistakes she was making, she started fixing them going forward. By the end of it in 20 minutes, Helen ended up with a talisman she knew would make her master proud.

76%

That was the alignment she had reached with her new brush and her new sense.

Helen realized that even after that daunting 20 minutes, she could still make more.

So, she brought out another empty piece of talisman paper and got ready to draw.

However, just as she was about to proceed, she heard a knock on the door. Usually, she would call to ask who it was. This time, she simply sent out her spiritual sense and saw that it was her son.

Alex sensed his mother's spiritual sense and smiled.

"Congratulations, mother," he sent her a message directly into her mind.

"Woah!" Helen freaked out a little. "Right, I forgot you could do that with a spiritual sense."

"Uh… can I come in?" he asked.

"Oh right, come, come," she hurriedly called him in.

Alex opened the door and entered. As he did, Pearl also came out from his space and ran up to Helen.

"Mother, I missed you," he said as he jumped into her lap.

"Aw, I missed you too," Helen said as she started petting him.

Pearl meowed and then closed his eyes with a smile on his face.

Helen chuckled a little and looked back at her son. "Where were you gone?" she asked.

"To the city," Alex said.

"Did you do what you meant to do?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex gave her a bright smile.

"And… that's the surprise?" she gave a quizzing look as if expecting something.

"Hehe," Alex gave her a wide grin as he reached into his storage bag. "Here it is!"

Helen saw something white hanging on a piece of string. She couldn't tell what it was immediately, so she sent her spiritual sense to look at it.

Finally, she could see the silvery-white circular metal as clear as day. It hung by a thin but strong string that one could easily put around their neck.

She looked at the metal itself, silver, which was about 5 to 7 centimeters in diameter.

And then she noticed the carvings.

On one side, it said 'Alchemist Guild' in big and bold letters. On the other side, there was a simple 'True' written on it, surrounded by leaves and vines.

This had been so sudden that Helen took a second to put 2 and 2 together. When she did, her expression was priceless.

With wide eyes and mouth hung open, she stared at Alex for a good 10 seconds before she spoke, "You became a True Heaven Alchemist?"

"Surprise!" Alex said.

"Really?" she asked again.

"Yes," Alex said and walked closer. "Here."

Helen checked the badge and as expected, it was the same as her. Only, hers was from the Talisman guild.

"Come here," Helen called and Alex walked closer.

Suddenly, she grabbed his head and pulled it closer to give him a kiss on his forehead. Then she held his head for a second as she said, "I'm so proud of you son."

Alex looked with a stunned expression for a second as he had never known before how much he had needed this.

His motivation and enthusiasm practically doubled at this very moment as he gave her his bright smile again.

"Just watch mother, your son will make you prouder."

Chapter 685 Homeschooled

Qin Shan walked to his disciple's room late afternoon. He had been too busy with the tasks in the sect he had kept off from doing due to the arrival of so many guests.

Now that they were gone, he was forced to do everything.

Only now had he finished the task he started a day and a half ago.

Wondering if Alex was with his mother or not, Qin Shan knocked on the door.

Suddenly, he felt a wave of spiritual sense and heard the words, "Come in, master" from inside the room.

Qin Shan paused a moment to understand what had just happened. When he realized that his disciple had used a spiritual sense, he quickly opened the door and entered.

"Lin'er, did you just?" he hurriedly asked as he walked inside.

"Master, I can use spiritual sense now," she shouted.

"How?" the old man gave a confused look and even checked his disciple's cultivation base to make sure she hadn't broken through.

Seeing his puzzled look, Helen answered. "My son brought me the… what was it called? Spirit Cleansing Lily."

"What?" Qin Shan gave a surprised look. "Young man, you gave your mother that flower? Where did you find it?"

"My son, he—"

"I was given it by the person that trained me," Alex said, cutting off his mother.

Helen gave him a weird look and said nothing.

"Wow!" Qin Shan still had a hard time believing it. "That means your mother's talismans will become a lot better. Not only that, she will be able to make a lot of them as well."

"Yes, her spiritual sense should help her improve on the minor imperfections that is impossible without a spiritual sense," Alex said.

But then, he gave them a confused look. "Wait, what does having a spiritual sense have to do with making many talismans?" he asked.

"Opening your spiritual sea allows your mind to get stronger and last longer when doing such production tasks. Since making talisman is so draining, having a strong mind helps a lot," Qin Shan said.

"Oh," Alex said with clear surprise written on his face. "I didn't know talisman did that."

"Huh?" Qin Shan made a confused noise. "It's not just talisman. All of them are like that. Whether you make pills, formations, or artifacts, they all consume a lot of mental strength, which is why not many are able to do that one after another," Qin Shan said.

"I see," Alex said as he fell into thought. 'All this time I had thought I could make more pills than others because I had better Qi than others. Turns out it was actually my spiritual sense,' he thought.

Surely his Qi helped a bit too, but it was most likely the spiritual sense that helped him more than anything.

"Did you not know?" Qin Shan gave him a weird look.

Alex shook his head. "I've had a spiritual sense from the very moment I started making pills, so I was never able to tell the difference," he said.

"Also, I made pills alone most of the time, so it was impossible for me to learn about it from my peers," he said.

"Did you not learn about it from any alchemy books?" he asked.

Alex shook his head again. "Where I learned alchemy, Spiritual sense isn't common at all. When I had spiritual sense, I could count the number of people who also had a spiritual sense on my hands. That is consisting of the entire empire."

"Is that so?" Qin Shan gave him a surprised look. "I didn't know you were from a backwater place."

Alex gave a dry laugh.

"Anyway," Qin Shan continued. "You really gave me quite a surprise today."

"Ooh, that reminds me," Helen said and turned to her son. "Show him, Al."

Alex chuckled and brought out his medal again.

Qin Shan's eyes went wide just as Helen wanted them. "When?" he asked a single-word question.

"Today," Alex said.

"You passed that tough exam?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said, remembering the test to become a True Heaven Alchemist. It truly was difficult to say the least.

The test wasn't as simple as making a pill with 50% Harmony. They didn't accept that as proof of one having the capability to do it every time.

So, instead, they gave 10 different recipes, and the alchemist had to make 10 Heaven-grade pills.

Fortunately, they did allow 3 failed attempts for the whole thing, which Alex had to use one for a pill that came out to 48% because his Yang flared a bit mid-alchemy.

However, perhaps more frustrating than that was the fact that this time too, the test room had blared out its alarm at him even when he had put both his storage ring and storage bags into a separate box.

Alex was starting to believe that he was inadvertently using his body's Qi, which could activate everything, to activate that formation.

But then, he couldn't think of an answer as to why all the other formations didn't work for him just being there. Alex shook his head and forgot about that.

Qin Shan gave some congratulations and wholeheartedly welcomed him to the sect as a guest elder.

According to him, there was no saint-rank Alchemist in this city, so Alex was one of the three greatest alchemists of this city. If people there were to find out, surely that would cause a roar throughout the empire.

A 24-year-old True Heaven alchemist. That wasn't something you heard every day.

"You mentioned you wanted to try your hands on talismans right?" Qin Shan asked. "When do you want to start?"

Alex thought for a bit as to what he had coming up next. There was nothing.

The only urgent thing he could think of was his hand, but that too started seeming useless now. He would do his best to get it back if given the opportunity. However, with no opportunity at the moment, he didn't want to do anything.

At least not yet.

So, thinking about this all, Alex gave an answer to the sect master Qin.

"Right now."

A few minutes later, Qin Shan walked out of the room with a sigh and went up the mountain back to his abode.

Helen had refused to let him teach Alex, saying that she had taught him all this time, and she wanted to continue to do so. At least, the starting part.

Alex watched his mother with a smile as she put on the appearance of a strict teacher as she did every time he was taught something back when he was homeschooled.

This brought forth buried memories and that made him smile.

"As you already know, Talismans are simply a piece of paper with runes drawn on top of it," she started teaching him.

"Each rune does something very specific," Helen said as she brought out a blank talisman paper.

"This rune," she said as she drew on the top left corner of the paper, "it is a rune that will create heat."

She poured in some Qi into the rune and soon Alex could feel mild heat coming from the paper.

He was quite surprised to see that a talisman actually worked with most of the paper empty. He hadn't seen such a talisman in his life, so he was surprised, to say the least.

"Next, when I draw this rune for this rune," she said as she drew another rune. "It will create more heat. This new rune is the rune for 'Growth' by the way."

Alex nodded as he listened intently to his mother's explanation.

He watched her draw the two squiggly lines that were runes and then saw her draw a single straight line between the two runes.

"We call this line a Rune Bridge. It connects the 'Heat' rune to the 'Grow' rune," she said. "When connected the 'Grow' rune will aid the 'Heat' rune and help the heat grow."

"So, when I do this…" Helen said as she poured in her Qi into the talisman. Alex waited a moment, and a second later he could start feeling intense heat radiating from the talisman.

In the next second, the paper caught fire and burned off.

"…that happens," Helen said as the final remains of the talisman papers were burnt away.

"Isn't that wasteful?" Alex asked seeing her so easily destroy her creation.

"No," she said. "I'm not stupid enough to use good papers and ink when teaching. Most of these papers are very low grade that I use to practice new runes on before trying it in my actual good quality paper with my good quality ink."

"Oh," Alex said.

"Let's continue," she said and brought out another piece of paper and did the same thing that she did last time.

When the 'Heat' and 'Grow' runes were connected, she stopped and looked at Alex.

"When this talisman is used, it produces too much heat for the talisman to sustain. What do you think we can do?" Helen asked.

She knew Alex didn't know the first thing about runes, yet she still asked.

Alex thought for a moment and asked a question instead. "What's our purpose with the heat? Are we trying to use it or just make sure the paper doesn't burn?" he asked.

"Good question," Helen said. "Hmm… okay, what if we don't want the paper to burn?"

Alex thought for a moment and answered, "is there a rune for cooling?' he asked.

"There is," Helen said. "But that affects the heat from the talisman which we don't want to lower. What else can you think of?"

Alex thought for a moment. He could think of a few other ways.

Chapter 686 Talisman Learning

"Fortify the paper?" Alex asked.

"Yes, that works," Helen said. "What else?"

"Is there a rune for making something resistant to fire?" he asked.

"There is," Helen said with a smile. "But it's better if you make it resistant to heat itself. What else?"

"Make the heat release outwards faster?" he said.

"Be careful," Helen said. "Too fast and you'll make the talisman explode."

'Oh,' Alex thought in his head. He then thought for a bit longer as he remembered all the talismans he had seen being used.

However, he couldn't think of anything specific aside from those few ways. He was too uneducated about talismans.

Helen saw right through him. "Okay, what if you were to make it so that the heat releases a distance away from the talisman itself?" she asked.

"Oh, you can do that?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "Have you seen talismans that make barriers? The barriers are never next to the talisman itself. That's because they make it so that the barrier appears some distance away from where the talisman is."

While Alex nodded as he understood the reasoning, Helen drew another rune that looked like 2 runes put together.

"If your talisman has numerical information, you need to use compound runes to give all the numbers," she said. "I will teach you the numbers later, but for now, this number is saying 1 and it's compounded with the distance unit 'Chi', which is about 33 centimeters long."

"So, when I connect this distance with 'Heat'," Helen said as she drew the Rune Bridge.

"This happens."

The moment Helen put Qi into the talisman, Alex felt something warm appear around her hand. There was no high heat like before that could burn the paper.

This time, the heat was mellow.

"Is the heat being distributed?" he asked.

"Yes," Helen said. "There's only so much heat you can produce with such a bad paper and ink."

She stopped it and said, "now, can you think of a way to turn this heat into a fire that burns away from the paper?"

Alex thought for a moment. "The heat is already away from the paper, so we should just concentrate it on one point, instead of letting it spread all around."

"Yes," Helen said with a bright smile and quickly drew a rune before connecting it to 'Heat' rune.

Then when she used the talisman again, this time about 30 centimeters above the talisman, Alex saw a bright point of light which soon turned into a tongue of fire.

"It's great right?" Helen said as she excitedly looked at his son. "Look how hot it got just because we made the heat gather at a certain point."

Alex nodded as he looked at the fire. "1823 Celcius. That's quite hot," he said.

Helen gave a surprised look. "You can tell the temperature so accurately?" she asked.

Alex nodded. "It's one of the requirements of being an alchemist. Being able to tell how hot your fire is. A technique of mine helps me be hyper-specific," he said.

"So you now understand how talismans work, right? Just the basic concept at least," She asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Now, let's take the lesson a step further as I will teach you how to immediately improve upon this," she said.

Alex smiled as he waited for his mother to continue.

Helen had started his teaching of talisman at a very weird point in the study. Instead of going with theoretical knowledge first and supplementing that with practical usage, she had decided to only show him the practical stuff first and follow that with some explanation.

Alex guessed that would work in the end, but the start felt very weird nonetheless.

Helen quickly drew the same runes on another talisman and flipped it around to show it to him.

"What's wrong here?" she asked.

Alex looked at the runes and didn't see anything wrong with it really. Except for one glaring problem that he knew wasn't a problem because it had worked before.

"You've only drawn the runes on the left half of the talisman," Alex said. "Why did you leave the right half empty?"

"That's because I'm going to draw the same runes again," she said as she drew the runes right in front of him.

"Wait," Alex said. "You made a mistake, mother."

"Oh, did I?" Helen asked with a hidden chuckle in her voice before completing the talisman.

Alex was confused now. "Those runes are wrong, aren't they?" he asked when he saw the right half of the talisman. Every rune she drew on that half was the exact opposite of the other one like q was to p.

Alex stopped when he saw the bigger picture however and his mind nearly reeled in shock.

"You've created symmetry," he said. The right half of the rune was a mirror image of what was on the left half.

"Yes, and that helps us improve align—"

Helen stopped when she saw Alex move forward suddenly and look at the rune closely.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Symmetry... that's something I've learned about a while ago, but it still surprises me how well it can work," he said.

"Yes, making a symmetrical talisman makes the Alignment improve by nearly half," she said. "If a normal talisman did 50%, adding a simple mirror of it can help it reach 75%," she said.

"And how do these reverse runes work?" he asked. "Do they not do more harm than good?" he asked.

"Okay, that is something very special about runes. You can flip it, move it around, or change the location of the runes themselves. If it is there, it will work," she said.

"There's no logic to what the orientation should be?" Alex asked.

"No," Helen said. "As long as you draw it, it works."

"Oh," Alex said and looked a the paper for a bit before asking. "What if instead of making 2, you made 4?"

"Right, that's where I have a few things to teach you," she said and placed the talisman down.

"There are 3 things that determine how good a talisman is," she said.

"First, is the quality of the paper and ink you will use to draw. The paper needs to be very smooth and as few imperfections as possible."

"The ink needs to be smooth as well, with no floating chunks of the ingredients," she said.

"Second, is the uniformness of your drawing. I'm not just talking about the shapes of the runes, but rather the thickness of the ink you leave behind on the paper."

"Having a properly shaped rune is obvious. Having perfect lines through and through is obvious. These are not things I will need to explain to you."

"What most don't realize is that when they focus on making sure they haven't fumbled on the obvious, they fumble at places that are not obvious."

"Finally, the third thing that helps in improving the alignment of the talisman is the size of your runes," she said.

"The number of runes do not matter. What matters is its size. Since symmetry is so important in the talisman, we usually stay at two opposite pairs of runes," Helen finally finished.

"Oh," Alex said as he tried to comprehend what he just learned.

"Oh right, one thing," She said. "While your runes have to be absolutely perfect to make it work, your Rune Bridge however can be however you want."

"You can curve it, twist it, whatever you want to fit it into your design. Of course, straight ones are the best since it does the same thing and there is little place for error, but you have other options too," she said.

"I see," Alex said.

He couldn't help but think of how different talismans were to formations. When he learned that demons had founded runes while humans founded formations, he had half believed that those two things worked just like each other.

However, now he could see how wrong he was.

As he thought that, a question appeared in his mind.

"What determines the rank?" he asked.

In formations, it was the number of base formations used in the overall formations. If he followed that logic, then there should be a number limit for runes that changed it from one grade to another.

However, given how different they already were, Alex didn't trust his logic.

"Oh, it's the quality of the ink," Helen said, half embarrassed that it had taken her this long to tell him that which she should have explained from the beginning.

"Quality of ink?" he asked.

"Yes, depending on the ingredients used for the ink, your talisman can do some tasks better than others. Some ink are better for heat, some are better for keeping records, some are better for sending information, etc," Helen said.

"The inks that are made from common rank ingredients make Common rank Talisman. Inks made from True rank ingredients make True rank talisman, and so on," she said.

"Wait, what about the runes? Is there anything stopping me from making the same design in all ranks?" he asked.

"Nope, nothing is stopping you," she said. "Well, nothing aside from finding ingredients for the ink that is... and maybe your mental strength as higher rank inks use up a lot more mental strength than you can imagine."

'They really are very different,' he thought.

"I think you should read this book to learn a lot more," Helen said as she brought out a book called 'Ink, Paper, and Runes - A special guide to Talisman.

Alex casually flipped through the book and saw a mind-numbing amount of information in there.

He nodded with a smile. "I will learn this later tonight," he said.

"Good," Helen said. "For now, let's see you try your hand at making a talisman."

Chapter 687 Three Heaven

The first few of Alex's attempts were absolutely botched, to say the least.

For a man who hadn't held a pen in almost 4 years, holding a brush and having made it to make intrinsic design was absolutely undoable.

That being true only for the first few times at least.

His hands were sturdy like a surgeon and he could hold his brush as steadily as well. But being steady came at the cost of flexibility one was required to move their wrists dynamically as per the rune's demand.

After fumbling so bad the first 2 times where the result couldn't even be called a talisman and then the next 2 times which both resulted in less than 10% alignment, Alex finally succeeded on his 5th attempt with 14%.

Alex felt a little disappointed that he took nearly an hour to draw this simple rune that his mother drew as if she were writing a grocery list.

Still, he was at least happy to have done it.

Helen made no remark on how extraordinary this feat was. For someone who had just learned the first thing about talisman an hour ago, being able to successfully create a talisman that was acceptable by the masses was incredible.

But, Helen was used to her son doing remarkable stuff. So, this thing which would have taken even the best disciples at least a day to do, or at least 3 for normal ones, didn't surprise her very much.

As such, Alex was once again blissfully unaware of how great his speed was.

He made about 5 more of the same talisman, each with above 15% alignment. One even reached 20% towards the end, making Helen give out a short gasp.

After Alex finished making the talisman, a question came to him that he hadn't thought of asking before.

"What rank of talisman am I making?" he asked.

"True rank of course," his mother said.

Alex gave a little surprised look. "I'm already nearing True-Earth rank as a Talisman maker?" he asked suspiciously.

"Not exactly," Helen said. "Talisman creating is more than just following a set design. It's about creativity and ingenuity. You or your client will have a problem they want to solve."

"While most of the time you can follow a design someone already made, other times you will have to formulate a design based on the problem."

"Which can take a very long time," Helen said. "There was this one time a man needed a talisman that could keep cold away from him without the talisman releasing any heat."

"I was honestly stumped for a few hours since that felt impossible. The only thing I could think of was creating a barrier that kept out air, but the man needed to breathe."

"So, I had to create a talisman that not only kept out air but released some in as well. In a sense, I had to make a storage talisman mixed with a barrier," Helen said.

"There are ways to create spaces inside talisman?" Alex asked with surprise.

"Of course. You can use runes for almost anything," Helen said. "But don't expect them to keep anything of yours in it."

"It could barely even hold much air at all in the end. Fortunately, the man had a high enough cultivation base that he didn't need much," Helen said.

"Still," Alex said. "Since I might not really get into the creative sides of runes, I should probably just glee at the fact that I'm getting close to the True Earth realm."

"If I was practicing alchemy like this, without any aid of techniques, it would've probably taken much longer for me," he said.

"I don't doubt that," Helen said.

"Perhaps Alchemy and Artifacts are the only two professions where you have to do everything by yourself," Helen said.

"What do you mean?" Alex gave a confused look.

"Look, for talismans, you already have the ink prepared for you, even though that is the most important part of the talisman."

"For formations from what I hear, you already have a well-shaped and refined piece of metal for yourself to carve on."

"For the rest of the two? You have to do it all by yourself," Helen said. "Maybe that is a reason why Talisman and Formations are so much easier to learn and do than Alchemy and Artifacts."

"What about the other 3?" Alex asked. "Music, Spirit foods, and painting."

"Well, a musician doesn't have to make her own flutes and zithers. A spirit food chef needs only worry about the taste, making its nutrients a second thought, and finally, painting needs talent and practice, but similar to the talisman, the paint and paper are already handed."

"So, they could never measure up to the difficulty of Artifacts and Alchemy," Helen said.

Alex fell into thought. "Who makes the inks then?" he asked.

"There are a certain group of talisman makers that are focused on just that," Helen said. "You are taught and can learn the basics of ink making, but it is always better to have an expert make it for you."

"I see," Alex said as he stared at the ground, thinking to himself.

'Formations need artifacts, artifacts need formations, alchemy needs artifacts and formations, maybe you can carve runes on artifacts too,' Alex thought to himself. 'It's all so interconnected.'

"Alright, go back and read the book for now. Try to remember as many runes as you can, and we can continue from there," she said.

"Okay," Alex nodded and left, leaving Pearl behind with his mother to keep her company. She had really come to take a liking to the little cat and he liked that.

Over the course of the entire night, Alex remembered every single rune in that book. He also remembered everything else that was written on it.

That book wasn't a technique book at all, so Alex had to deal with the information over the course of the next couple of days.

After all, remembering something wasn't the same as knowing it. It wouldn't be hard, but it wouldn't be easy either.

Slowly, under Helen's teaching and the occasional sect master's guidance, Alex managed to reach 40% on his talisman by the end of the month.

And that was despite the fact that he also practiced Alchemy quite a lot and a bit of formation on the side.

Alex was certain that he wouldn't reach for very soon due to the limitation of the ink and the brush he held.

What he was certain was that he would surely cross True Heaven rank at the very least.

Now, all he had to worry about was making sure his creativity kept up with his talent.

'I guess I can just rely on what others have done before me and not really worry about how I would solve some problems,' Alex thought to himself.

Alex knew that right now his main focus needed to be on alchemy. Because of that, he had to begin downgrading some of the True pill recipes he had to Common pills in preparation for the pill to heal his hand.

Still, he gave some equal time to both talismans and formations, while spending the majority on alchemy.

In one month, he felt he had made a lot of advancement in both of them and could consistently create Heaven-grade talismans and formations.

So, no longer hesitating, Alex went to the Talisman guild during the second month and took an exam.

He passed with flying colors as he made every single talisman with more than 55% Alignment.

Half a month later, Alex went to the formations guild as well and became a True Heaven formation master.

Fortunately, not many people learned of this fact. And the few that did keep their mouth shut.

If anyone learned that a single young man of age less than 25 had not only learned 3 of the main professions, but was also good enough to reach True Heaven rank on all 3 of them, the city would certainly be shocked, and even figures from the capital would come to see him.

Fortunately, those that did know about it really wanted to keep him for their own guilds, and as such, no information was spread.

There was also another event that took place during the 2 months that was enough to distract the city's attention enough so that no one took notice of Alex's improvement.

After all, it wasn't always that the empire gained a new True Immortal rank Talisman maker.

Qin Shan's nose was massive with pride and glee as he watched his disciple be taken as one of the best talisman makers out there.

Even Tian Ye would barely be her match now that she had the spiritual sense to aid her.

The only thing that could possibly hold her back now were things that were out of her hands such as Ink, paper, and brush.

The quality of these things wasn't something Helen could simply change herself. Buying better ones cost a lot sometimes, so you had to make do with cost-effective stuff.

Since you had to buy paper and ink yourself, most talisman creators were only so eager to spend so much on their craft.

Fortunately, paying for your own stuff meant that, unlike the alchemy guild, you didn't have to pay some fee for screwing up your talisman.

Alex didn't know how he felt about that for in his mind the Alchemy guild's system was much better.

As such, 3 months passed by in flash. Alex had learned a lot during this time and he found every second he spent learning Alchemy or the other 2 professions was very helpful.

However, that also meant that he had neglected his own cultivation quite a bit. He needed to think of a way to get that back on track as well.

Chapter 688 Help

Alex was out in one of the uninhabited mountains of the Flowing Brush with his mother.

They had flown here because his mother insisted that she wanted to find some ingredients for some ink. Alex decided to use this opportunity to train his mother in some techniques.

Over the last month, he had scoured the depths of his mind to remember the techniques he had read back when he first got them. He had noted down most that he remembered.

While he couldn't note down the one in the Human language since he wouldn't be able to translate it for his mother, he did note down the other ones.

Most importantly, he noted down 3 particular techniques.

Immortal Concealment technique, Veiled light technique, and finally, Flickering Shadow technique.

He was a little sad that he didn't get to note down Heaven's Impact as that would have perhaps been the best of them all, but this would have to do as well.

Aside from that, he had also noted down the few defensive techniques he knew. As for offensive techniques, Alex couldn't think of many he had that his mother could use.

Most of his elemental techniques were, to put it mildly, bad. Some of them like his metal techniques and yang palm technique took advantage of his Supreme Spiritual roots which his mother did not have and could likely never have.

Unless he learned how to acquire them by himself.

He had no water technique. His fire technique was something he learned before he had established his spiritual sense, and his wood technique was a sword technique, which his mother likely couldn't use.

Alex thought it was better to give her whatever sect master Qin had in mind for her.

For now, he decided to focus on defense and evasion.

Alex looked at his mother who picked a ripe blackberry from the vine and put it in a jar of sorts.

"Come behind me," he said. As soon as she heard that, it took her 2 seconds to get everything in order and teleport right behind him where his shadow lay.

"You're getting better," Alex said. "But you should be able to do even more so."

"I know," Helen said dejectedly. "But my meridians aren't wide enough to send my Qi through it."

Alex sighed. Since his mother wasn't a fighter or dealt with something that required constant pouring of Qi like he had to with Alchemy, she hadn't used her meridians anytime aside from cultivation.

So, they weren't flexible enough to let her move her Qi.

'I could stress her meridians, but I don't have any way to heal them afterward,' he thought. They weren't tough like his own so if he by some chance ruptured her meridian, he wouldn't be able to heal her back as easily.

'I need a lot of knowledge about the human body, especially cultivator before I dare do anything risky with my mother,' he thought.

Then he thought of something else. 'Can I find the Divine Devil's fruit somewhere?' he wondered.

If he found that, he could easily get his mother to go through Mortal Cleansing, in which case her meridians would naturally become more flexible and her Qi would flow easily.

"I'll do something about that soon," He told his mother.

It required his mother to go through 3 different mountains before she found what she was looking for. During this time, he helped her train a lot.

Not just him, even Pearl helped her a lot. Alex let her know that she was ready for a breakthrough after such long training.

Alex wondered if he himself was. He knew he could easily breakthrough, but was 3 months of doing nothing helpful in any way?

At that very moment, he decided to go back to the Eastern mountain ranges sometime again to improve himself.

'I should go there within the next month, I've put off my training for far too long,' he said to himself.

Once the mother-son duo was done with their task, they returned back to the sect.

At that time, they found the sect master waiting for them outside their home.

"Master, why are you here?" she asked. "Do you need something?"

"Yes, your son," he said and turned to Alex. "Junior Yu, do you have any antidote pills?"

He had started calling Alex, Yu Ming as per his request, so that others didn't accidentally know of his name and connect that with him being a player.

While players were already largely integrated into the society, Alex still felt some paranoia about the fact. He didn't want people meddling in his business and trying to hurt him or kidnap him to use him.

His body was way too unique to go around letting everyone know of his origins.

What he feared most perhaps was someone picking his brain like Zexi did, only this time successfully. The amount of information they could learn that would destroy him and the calm 5th continent was staggering.

Alex nodded to the Sect master's question and asked, "is it for someone in the True realm?"

"No, common," the old man said.

"I see," Alex said as he quickly brought one out. "What happened?"

"Sigh, there is some poison grass growing on the mountains now. Some of the disciples get scratched by it and end up becoming poisoned from time to time," he said.

"I see," Alex said. "Still I didn't expect you to come personally for something like that."

"I wouldn't," the sect master said. "But the other elders couldn't find you, so I came down looking myself. I didn't know you had gone out."

"Yes, mother needed something," he said. "Actually, should you be wasting time on this idle conversation?"

"Right, I'll see you later," the old man said and flew off.

Alex checked his storage bag and realized he was a little low on antidotes. He also had a duty to the sect as a guest elder.

So, he decided to fulfill it by making a bunch of antidotes and healing pills for both Common realm and True realm cultivators.

He looked to the sky and realized that it was only mid-afternoon.

'Sigh, I don't have any ingredients on me for antidotes and healing pills,' he thought to himself.

"Mother, I will go to the city and make some pills for the sect. I'll see you later," Alex said and went away.

Alex arrived at the Alchemy guild some 15 minutes later. The moment he entered, the receptionists that were working bowed towards him in greeting.

They were well aware of the fact that he was one of the 3 greatest alchemists in the entire city.

Alex brought out a talisman he himself had made and note down a bunch of ingredients and amounts.

"Can you guys help me get these? Are there any that aren't in stock?" he asked.

The receptionist girl who Alex talked to looked over the ingredients with what they had and answered, "We are a little short on Bitter Thorns, we have about 10 of them. Aside from that, everything else is in stock."

"Can you help me buy them all? Use the spirit stones that are under my name," Alex said.

"Yes, Alchemist Yu," the girl said and did something with the formation in front of her, and soon he could see the storage bag in front of the receptionist fill up.

The ingredients were being transferred. Once it was done, she handed the storage bag to him and Alex checked.

Everything was in order.

"Thank you," he said and turned to leave.

"Alchemist Yu, wait," the receptionist cried out, stopping him mid-walk.

Alex turned around with a confused look. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"There's someone here to meet you," she said.

"Meet me?" Alex asked.

"Well, not exactly you, but a True Heaven alchemist. Since you are the only one here, I can only have you meet them," she said.

"I see," Alex nodded. "Who wants to see True Heaven alchemists?"

The girl pointed her finger to two figures that sat on the bench in the corner of the guild.

Alex followed the finger and was surprised to learn that he recognized both of them.

He walked off and quickly arrived in front of them.

"May I ask what sister Liang and sister Han want from this lowly alchemist?" Alex asked.

The two girls that were sitting inconspicuously, turned their heads to look at him. When they saw his badge, their eyes shined.

"We need your help."

Chapter 689 Willow’s Bark

Liang Qiu, the best disciple of the Heaven's Peak school, wore the famous Black and Red robes of her school.

She had pitch-black hair as well as a tall and slender body. Her fair complexion made her quite desirable to most of her peers of the opposite gender.

However, it was likely that no one dared get close to her with how above everyone she was.

3 years ago, or 3 months ago from Alex's perspective, she had been at around the 4th True King realm.

Right now, Alex could sense something close to the 9th Realm of True King realm.

It seemed she had stopped at the doorstep of the True Emperor realm. Alex sighed to himself. He wondered if he could ever manage to catch up to her.

Han Daiyu seemed equally strong as well. She was a big muscular girl with brown, half-sleeved, cultivator robes that showed her well-defined physical body that she certainly trained in the sun for a long time to get.

Alex could see the dark tan on her face, surrounded by light-brown hair.

Alex had only seen her with her hammer back in the demon realm where she had helped Tian Ye with the experiment to get the House of the Undying open. So, he found her a little unusual when she wasn't holding one.

Her cultivation base itself was around the 7th realm of True King, but Alex knew of the Han family's physique and he wouldn't doubt that she could manage to bring out attacks close to the same level as Liang Qiu's.

The two girls stood up when they saw Alex. Liang Qiu was a step faster than Han Daiyu.

"Are you really a True Heaven alchemist?" Han Daiyu said before even giving out a greeting.

Alex saw Liang Qiu give a stern side-eye to Han Daiyu who dismissed it slightly with a shrug.

Alex tried not to laugh as he said, "Yes, I am. Please don't let my age confuse you regarding that."

"I'm sorry about her. She didn't mean anything disrespectful," Liang Qiu tried to speak up for Han Daiyu.

"It's alright. I can see why sister Han is concerned," Alex said. "So, you said you needed my help, sister Liang. May I ask what it is about?"

"We need a pill," Liang Qiu said.

Alex gave a confused look. "I don't see why you needed to meet me for that," he said. "Please don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have finally met you two after hearing so much about you, but you could have simply left a mission for us. I'm sure any of the 3 of us would have gotten to it when we checked upon it."

"No!" Liang Qiu immediately shouted. "We do need a pill, but first we need its ingredients too."

"Oh," Alex said. "Is it not available in the guild?"

She shook her head.

"Not even in the entire empire?" he asked suspiciously.

The girls still shook their heads.

"Hmm," Alex mused to himself. "May I then know why you are exactly here?"

"We have a recipe for a pill that I would want to be made for me. But I can't gather all the ingredients."

"It is just one ingredient, but I can't find records of it anywhere, let alone knowing what it looks like. I've been to many people and places, but none of them have been any help," she said.

"So, you came here hoping that one of us would be helpful?" he asked.

Liang Qiu nodded. Han Daiyu didn't do or say anything. She let Liang Qiu do all the grunt work while she simply stood watching the two of them talk.

"May I know what the ingredient is?" he asked.

"It's something called 'Corrosive Willow's bark'," she said thoughtfully.

"Corrosive Willow? I see. You couldn't find its bark in the market huh?" Alex asked.

The girls shook their heads. However, even as they did, Liang Qiu gave him a weird look.

"Do you know the tree?" she asked confusedly.

"Yes," Alex said before thinking for a moment. He did know of the tree, but not about it.

Meaning that he had seen the tree, but had read nothing about its properties or even learned what the ingredients could be used for.

Han Daiyu's eyes went a little wide when she heard a positive response. "You know of the tree? Please don't lie, sir alchemist. It's fine if you don't know about it."

Alex gave a smile. "I can promise you, I know of the tree. In fact, I know the general area of where it is too," he said.

The girls' faces were a sight to see. "You really know of the tree? Please don't lie, this is a very important pill for us," they said.

"I can promise you on my pride as an alchemist, I do know of the tree and where it is," Alex said.

"Oh, where is it?" the girls asked.

"The Poison Swamp," Alex said.

"The Poison Swamp?" the two girl's faces drained a little in color when they heard that.

"Please excuse us for a second," Liang Qiu said and took Han Daiyu to the corner to speak with her.

Meanwhile, Alex couldn't help but think to himself, 'should I just move forward with my plan to go train and go to the poison swamp then? That's not a bad training area.'

'At the same time, I should be able to get their Corrosive Willow bark as well,' he thought to himself. 'Sigh, if only I got Blood Spirit Ginseng that way too.'

'Is it safe for me though?' he thought to himself. 'Without Shen Jing to look after me, they may attack me with no one to save me.'

Alex started to hesitate a bit when he thought that.

"Um, sir Alchemist," Liang Qiu spoke to catch her attention.

"You can call me Yu Ming," Alex said with a slight smile.

"Alchemist Yu, would you mind giving us an exact location of where the tree is?" she asked. "We can give something in return, be it spirit stones or something else."

"Uh, I'm sorry," Alex said. "I don't remember the exact location aside from the fact that it was in the Poison swamp," Alex said.

That was true. He had his eyes blindfolded, so as he went around the massive swamp, he had seen many things in many locations which he couldn't connect to s specific location due to his eyes being shut all the time.

"Um, can you tell us what it looks like then?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "It's a 5-meter-tall tree, with a trunk about this big that grows into 7 different main branches that branch out, even more, to fill the tree with green leaves that..."

Alex trailed off when he saw the look on their faces. Frowns.

"I'm not giving a very good description, am I?" he asked.

"I'm sorry, I can't really visualize it properly," Liang Qiu said. "It's too..."

"Generic," Han Daiyu said from the side.

"I know," Alex said. "I'm afraid I can't help on that part. It is a generic-looking tree. That's how it had managed to hide from everyone, I suppose."

"That... makes sense," Liang Qiu said.

"What do we do now?" Han Daiyu asked from the side in a low voice, but Alex caught her words.

"I don't know," Liang Qiu said from the side.

Alex waited for a bit before saying, "If you don't need me, then I should go back to making—"

"Wait!" Liang Qiu said. "I mean, please wait, Alchemist Yu."

"Yes?" Alex waited.

The girl sighed for a moment before saying, "Would you mind accompanying us to the Poison swamp so that you can help us find the tree?"

Alex didn't answer immediately and stared at the girl for a moment. "What's in it for me?" he asked.

"Um, can't you do it for us?" Han Daiyu said, putting on a cutesy face and voice.

Alex openly chuckled in a non-disrespectful way. "I'm afraid I can't simply leave my job here at the guild without me getting something return, you know," He said.

"No, no. Of course not," Liang Qiu intervened, not before glaring at Hai Daiyu who simply laughed.

"We won't ask you to go with us for free," she said. "We can give you some compensation in return."

"Oh," Alex made an amused look. "What can you give me, sister Liang?"

"Anything that is within my capabilities, I will give it to you," Liang Qiu said with an air of pride.

"Anything?" Alex gave her a sly look that made her reconsider her words. She saw him stare at her and started getting the feeling that she should have phrased her words better.

'Anything? Stupid! What if he asks for you?' she blamed herself, but she didn't let it show on her face.

Alex chuckled. "I do know exactly what I want. In fact, I have two things I want," he said while looking at both of them.

This time, even Han Daiyu got a little uncomfortable.

Liang Qiu frowned a little and was about to speak up when Alex put up his hand.

"My apologies, I was merely having some fun. I really do need two things, however. One is armor, and another one is an artifact for stopping mental attacks. I need both of those of high rank and grades."

"You can get me either of these two things, but I would really appreciate it if you could get both of them to me," he said.

Liang Qiu thought for a moment and said, "Both of those can be arranged, so long as you will come with us to the swamp."

Chapter 690 30 Thousand

"Great!" Alex exclaimed when he heard that. "When do we leave?"

"As soon as possible," Han Daiyu said.

"In 3 days," Liang Qiu said after a bit more thought than Daiyu. "We will need to prepare since it won't be just us."

"Oh," Alex said. "More people will come?"

"Yes," Liang Qiu nodded. "Since we are both very valuable to our sects and families, they won't let us go to a place like the Poison Swamp without some assistance, so to speak."

"I understand," Alex said. "I will make sure to get ready for that day then."

"I should be able to have a defensive mental artifact ready for you in the next 3 days. Daiyu here knows more about armors, she will be in charge of that," Liang Qiu said.

Han Daiyu nodded without saying any words. Alex was surprised they were going to help him with both of those items, and with so little thought at that.

"It seems the pill you want to be made is very important," Alex said seriously. "May I ask what sort of pill it is?"

Liang Qiu's face changed a little as she thought for a bit. "I will be very honest, Alchemist Yu. This pill is so important and… unique, that I'm not sure I'm even confident of letting you make it."

"Please do not take offense to that statement. I don't mean it to demerit your ability, it's just that the secrecy of the pill is our top priority right now," Liang Qiu said. "So, we might end up requesting senior Xue instead."

Alex nodded when he heard that. Xue Mufan was perhaps the most popular alchemist in the whole Luminance Empire.

If anyone asked who the best alchemist in the empire was, the names that would pop up were Xue Mufan of the Falling Lotus sect and Zhou Zirong of the Zhou family who made his name through his exceptional use of White Flame.

They were both Saint Earth ranked alchemists, meaning if they were to agree to do this, they could easily reach an amazing harmony.

"That makes me even more intrigued, sister Liang," Alex said. A pill that they had to request the best Alchemist in the empire to make, Alex was dying to learn what it was.

"I'm sorry, but we have to go with someone we know can create the best pills," Liang Qiu said.

Alex nodded since he understood. If the pill was as special as Liang Qiu was making it to be, then he too would suggest not wasting time on just about anyone and go straight to someone you know for sure can do it.

However, that didn't mean he was letting go of the chance to learn about said pill.

Alex thought for a moment and waved his hand to bring out two pill bottles. The two of them gave a confused look to Alex who placed one of the bottles each onto their hands.

"What is this?" Liang Qiu asked with a confused look.

"Are you trying to bribe us, Alchemist Yu?" Han Daiyu said with a gleeful smile from the side.

Alex shook his head. "I expect you to not eat these pills and return them to me… uh, where are we meeting to leave?" he asked.

"Outside our sect's gate. We will fly from there," Liang Qiu said.

"Yes, when I meet you two there, I expect you to return those pills to me," he said.

"Hmph!" Han Daiyu said. "Then why give it to us?"

Liang Qiu looked at him with an inquisitive look as well.

"Consider this my audition, a test if you will, so that I may prove that I am a good choice to make the pill for you," he said. "You won't have to go far away to meet Saint Alchemists who may not have the time to make True pills."

"You wish to sway our thoughts with these pills?" Liang Qiu asked with a smile.

"Yes," Alex answered. Then, he bowed to the two girls. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some pills to make. I shall see the both of you in the morning in 3 days."

"Thank you for your assistance, Alchemist Yu," Liang Qiu said.

"Thank you," Han Daiyu followed.

Alex gave a warm smile and a wave of his hand as he walked over to the mission board to complete some missions while he was there.

He took a few missions at once, one of the advantages of having the rank he did, and went to the alchemy room.

It wasn't until around evening that he finally left the room and handed all the pills that he made for the missions.

Then, he handed all the extra pills he made from the ingredients he got in those missions over to them as well to sell for him.

Alex knew he had close to 10 thousand True Spirit stones in the guild right now, but he never took them out. It was better to just use them to buy ingredients and so forth.

Also, with his money with the guild, if there was ever a Blood Spirit Ginseng on the market, the receptionists in the guild had his full authority to buy it at whatever the cost was.

Once Alex was done with his tasks in the guild, he went back to the sect and went directly to his room to make the pills.

Unfortunately, after his house was improved upon and more formations were added, there was also a formation to keep out spiritual sense. These formations only worked up to a certain range, but Saint realm cultivators were mostly unable to pierce them, so his mother had no hope of seeing him inside his room to check if he was back or not.

Fortunately, however, Pearl was with his mother, so he could let her know that he was back since their bond was stronger than this measly formation.

So, without any worry, he started making the pills that he was so desperate to make.

It took Alex nearly 2 days to finish all the ingredients he had bought with about 3 different breaks in between to cool off his head and go visit his mother.

In those 2 days, he made 7 different types of Healing pills, each with different strength and focusing on a different part of the body, as well as 5 different types of antidotes that worked on different types of poison, with many inter lapping with each other.

In total, he made exactly 193 pills, not bothering to separate any of the pills into two weaker pills using his splitting technique. However, he didn't give it his all for all of the pills so as to maintain his mental strength throughout the day, so only about 150 of those pills came out at Heaven grade with the highest being at 62%.

The lowest, however, didn't go below 43% either. So, all in all, this was an excellent acquirement for the sect.

Qin Shan's shock was a sight to see when Alex brought out all of those pills. It wasn't the number that shocked him of course, as he was used to having to buy pills in bulk for the sect.

No, it was the quality of those pills.

He gave a rueful smile to Alex as he said, "Junior Yu, I'm afraid the sect doesn't have enough extra budget to buy all of those pills at once."

"Oh, how much do you think these will cost?" Alex asked nonchalantly.

Qin Shan's eyes went to the pills while the rueful smile never left his face. " 24 thousand True Spirit stones for the pills alone, and likely 30 thousand if we add the cost of the ingredients too."

Alex smiled. "Close, the ingredients cost about 7 thousand, but I got them in 5 thousand since I bought in bulk and because of my rank."

"As for the pills, yes it will cost around 25 thousand, but I won't ask you to pay that."

"Pay me the 5 thousand for the ingredients and whatever extra you can manage for the pills. Consider the rest of it as me paying interest on the debt you have put me under for taking care of my mother all these years," he said.

Qin Shan's heart skipped a beat when he heard that. The thought of acquiring such impressive pills for such low cost was him coming upon a sizable fortune.

However, he didn't like the feeling of ripping off Alex's hard work as he too was a professional just like him.

"Say what, I don't have the money right now, so I will take these pills for now and pay for them later," he said.

"You don't have to do that. I really mean it when I say I don't need much," he protested.

"No, I would have a guilty conscience if I did that," Qin Shan said sternly.

Alex had to give up in the end. "Uh… fine," he said. "You can give the money to my mother."

After getting a nod from the sect master, Alex went to his mother and told her what he was planning to do for the next couple of days.

"What?" his mother freaked out a little when she heard his destination. "The Poison swamp? That's full of poison. No!"

"It's fine, mother. Don't you remember me telling you that I had been there for an entire year before? Poison doesn't affect me at all," he said.

"But still…" Helen tried to protest but Alex cut her off.

"Don't worry mother. I will be very careful. Besides, it is likely that strong figures from both Heaven's Peak school and the Han Family will go with us as well," he said.

"Sigh, if that is true then sure," she said. "But you must take good care of yourself. If something bad happens, you save yourself first and leave."

"I promise, mother," Alex said. After that, he stayed with his mother for a little longer before returning back to his room where he cultivated with Pearl for the entire night in preparation for tomorrow morning.

Once morning came, he went back to his mother and left Pearl there. Since he would be amidst unfamiliar faces, he didn't want to reveal the uniqueness that was Pearl.

"Take care, son," Helen said.

"See you later," Alex said and left the sect early.

He took out the boat artifact from his storage bag and flew off.

The Heaven's Peak school lay in the mountain ranges on the northeastern side of the Dawnspring city. It was further away from the city than the Flowing Brush sect was.

It took Alex a little longer to reach the sect to him having to take a detour around the city due to flight prohibition, but he still managed to get there before anybody.

He put away his boat and looked at the majestic gates in front of him.

"So this is the Heaven's Peak school, huh?"

Chapter 691 Meeting Big Names

Alex looked at the gate and the subsequent mountains that were full of trees, houses, and all sorts of colors.

He could see different buildings, all of the different shapes, and sizes, as well as people walking amongst them.

Even though it was early morning, he could see disciples of the Heaven's Peak school walk in and out of the sect in their black and red cultivator's robe.

There were also a few people wearing non-sect clothes that also came for their own business.

Alex walked up to a tree that grew next to the cliff and sat next to it on the grass. He looked to his left and could see the city down below quite far away.

The guards, who were likely disciples of the sect on duty, gave his curious glances, wondering who he was.

"Little brother, do you need anything?" they asked him.

"No, I'm just waiting for someone," he said.

"Someone from the sect?" they asked him.

"Yes," Alex answered, and they left him alone. Still, they kept an eye just in case he was up to something.

Alex, meanwhile, simply closed his eyes and sat, thinking about the different things he had to do up next.

He absentmindedly poured his Qi into his storage ring, which devoured it like always without showing any sign of getting larger.

He could tell there was more space inside, way more than the 20 square meters he had at the moment.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem like it was going to improve, so Alex was stuck with th 20 square meters of space. That was by no means a small space, but that was something he could easily get with 4 better storage bags.

'Well, it's not like I need any more. I can just keep the important items here,' he thought to himself.

He then thought about everything else he had to do next. For his arm alone, he needed to go be a Lightsworn, even though it didn't sound hopeful.

It was almost guaranteed that the Shen Girl wouldn't be able to help him, but he still wanted to try with her as well.

If nothing else worked, he would go around scouring the empire in search of the ginseng. Maybe even exchange it for something else with the last person that had bought it.

Other than that, he needed to find a way back to the Crimson Empire and help his own master and martial uncle to get their limbs back.

Alex sighed at the difficulty of everything that he needed to do.

Just then, he heard a commotion from upfront and he looked up to see the guards parting ways for someone, while the people outside also backed off with looks of shock on their faces.

Immediately, everyone started bowing in front of them. Some of the were a little slow to realize what was happening, but once they saw someone bow, the rest of them did as well.

Alex got up to his feet, clearly curious as to who was coming out, and felt a wave of spiritual sense pass through him.

Then, he saw Liang Qiu walk out of the gate and turned directly toward him. She put on a warm smile and started walking.

Alex felt a little shocked when he saw everyone bowing toward her, but when he saw the people, he saw that their eyes weren't focused on her at all.

Instead, it was focused on someone that slowly walked out from the gate after Liang Qiu.

Alex saw a man, who seemed to be in his mid-30s, softly nod towards everyone, beckoning them to stand up.

He was tall, perfectly handsome with clean-shaven face, and black hair that fell to his shoulders perfectly straight.

Not a single strand of hair looked out of sight, and Alex almost thought he would get cut from the hair itself.

Before Liang Qiu could even say anything, she saw him staring at the man's hair and immediately stood in front of him to block his vision.

"Don't look so intently. My master uses his spear Qi to cut his hair and thus his intent is always around him," she said.

"Sorry?" Alex asked, a little confused.

"You will cut spirit if you're not careful. My master's spear intent is very strong," she said.

"Your master?"

A name floated to Alex's head. Shangguan Quan.

When the man slowly walked up to him, Alex immediately fell into a bow. "Greetings senior," he said.

Shangguan Quan stopped right next to his disciple and looked at Alex. "Little brother must be the new True Heaven Alchemist of the Alchemy Guild," the man said.

"Yes, senior," Alex said, clearly surprised that arguably the strongest person in the Heaven's Peak school was talking with him.

Alex didn't know the internal structure of the sect, but he knew that Shangguan Quan was the 1st elder of the sect and the master of Liang Qiu, which may have been the reason for him being the first elder in the first place.

'Why is he here?' Alex wondered to himself, unable to immediately come up with an explanation of how surprised he was from seeing the man.

The crowd around them started soft murmurs of shock, surprise, and confusion. Everyone asked each other who Alex was, but not many knew him to begin with, so the chances of anyone recognizing him were impossible.

Still, some of them had caught the words 'True Heaven Alchemist' and connected that with the news from the guild to realize what was happening.

Shangguan Quan seemed to not mind the crowd at all and instead said, "little brother looks quite young for a True Heaven Alchemist. May I know what your age is?" he asked.

Alex frowned internally a little and decided to add a few numbers to his age. He was about to answer when he saw the man's smile slouch a little as his eyes wandered towards the right before his whole head turned back.

Alex followed his gaze and saw a boat that was capable of holding about 10 different people comfortably as well as having two different rooms on the inside.

As the boat got closer, Alex could see the deep brown color of the boat somehow glow brightly.

At the front of the hull, there was a word written in giant white letters.

HAN

When the boat came next to them, it hovered next to the cliff, but nobody got off it.

Instead, a burly man with arms as big as Alex's torso looked towards them and shouted, "Hey brother Quan, little girl, come on up. We should be leaving already."

Shangguan Quan didn't hide the frown on his face when he said, "You're the one who is damn late." There was no more of his earlier air of elegance.

The other man, however, took no offense to the statement and just laughed. He watched the man gesture for them to get on while Han Daiyu also waved for them from behind.

Liang Qiu was the first to move as she turned towards Alex and said, "Alchemist Yu, let us get aboard the ship."

Alex nodded softly and walked behind her. He slowly floated and landed on the ship where he got a confused look from the burly man.

"Uncle, he's Alchemist Yu!" Han Daiyu quickly said from the side, and the man's face immediately widened to a grin that looked kind of unnatural to Alex.

"Greetings, Alchemist Yu. I am Han Hongqi, this little lass's uncle," the burly man said.

'Han Hongqi... another familiar name,' Alex thought.

"Greetings senior Han," Alex bowed to greet the man.

Han Hongqi was the 3rd son of the Han Family patriarch, and one of the strongest in that family. He was a Saint realm cultivator, just like Shangguan Quan, and a very well-known person in the entire empire.

Alex was already surprised to see Shangguan Quan, but now he saw Han Hongqi as well.

Alex had expected to see Saint Realm cultivators, but not these two. They were some of the strongest figures in the empire, only second to the likes of patriarch and sect leaders of the various major sects and clans, as well as the hidden figures like Shen Jing.

Finally, Shangguan Quan also got onto the ship and glared at Han Hongqi.

Alex wondered if there was some hidden grudge between them, but then he saw Han Hongqi put an arm around Shangguan Quan's shoulders.

"Haha, Brother Quan. You really are a sly fox aren't you?" he said in a voice so loud that even the crowd outside the Heaven's Peak gate could hear them.

Shangguan Quan tried to move away from Hongqi's hand, but it was too strong for him to do so without using a bit of his Qi.

"Goddammit! Couldn't you have come a little later?" he asked with a frown.

"Tsk. Tsk. Tsk." Han Hongqi shook his head while clicking his tongue.

"Alchemist Yu," Liang Qiu said catching his attention and Alex turned around.

He greeted Han Daiyu who was full of smiles this morning.

"Here," Liang Qiu said as she handed something to Alex. Alex looked to see what it was and saw that it was the pill bottle he had given them.

He opened the lid for a split second and saw that the pill was indeed inside.

Next, Han Daiyu also gave him back his pill, which he took with a face full of smile.

He was about to say something when the ship suddenly moved, catching him off guard.

"Hold on to something. I will get us to the poison swamp in no time," Han Hongqi shouted from the side as the ship took off.

Chapter 692 Earrings, Armor, and Shield

It took them all a minute or so to get their composure back from the sudden departure.

Alex sat on the floor of the ship, copying both Han Daiyu and Liang Qiu.

Shangguan Quan was begrudgingly taken away by the ever boisterous Han Hongqi and spoke about something to the side that Alex wasn't curious enough to dare eavesdrop on.

"How have you been, Alchemist Yu?" Liang Qiu asked from the side.

"I've been fine, sister Liang," Alex said, a little surprised that she asked that, but he guessed it was just common courtesy.

He wanted to ask them about the pill but decided not to be the one that brought it forward himself.

"I didn't expect either of those two seniors to come along with us," Alex said, showing clear surprise in his voice. "I would've expected an elder or such of little responsibility to the sect and family to accompany us."

"That just goes to show to you just how important not just we are to them, but also how important this current mission is," Liang Qiu said with a smug smile.

"Right, Alchemist Yu, how did you make that pill?" Han Daiyu suddenly asked. "That pill was amazing, I nearly at it too, and only stopped because I didn't know what that pill was about."

Alex smiled. "It's amazing, isn't it? It's one of the better products," he said. "Only downside is that it takes me at least 3 weeks to be able to make those pills."

It would've taken him shorter if he had more of those mangoes from the mountains, but he had already eaten all of them. Still, he was starting to notice that he was getting better at the whole thing and as such the overall time was getting lower.

"3 weeks per pill? That's ridiculous, isn't it?" Liang Qiu asked.

"Yes, it's ridiculous," Han Daiyu said from the side as she constantly nodded at Liang Qiu's words.

Alex was confused for a second. Why would that be ridiculous? But then he realized what he had said.

"Ah, my apologies. I meant something else and said something else," he said.

"Oh, what did you mean then?" the girls asked curiously.

"When I said it takes me 3 weeks to make one pill, I wasn't talking about the number of pills I could make, but rather the time it takes me to come up with a way to make one of those pills."

"Once I make a single of those pills, I can make nearly 50 a day since I would have some recipe to follow," Alex said.

The girl's eyes went wide when they heard that.

"Are you serious? You can make so many of those pills in a single day? Will they retain the same level of quality?" they asked.

Alex thought for a bit and answered, "Saying that I can guarantee all of those pills to have such quality would be a lie as there is a chance of randomness to the process."

"However, what I can guarantee is that if I were to make 100 of a single pill that I have taken 3 or more weeks to study, I can make more than 90 of those have the same level of quality as the ones that I handed to you."

"I can also guarantee that even the rest of the pills that don't reach the same quality as the pills I gave you will still be heaven grade," Alex said.

Han Daiyu kept on her surprised look with a hand to her mouth to hide her shock, while Liang Qiu fell into a thoughtful expression.

"If it isn't so rude, may I ask alchemist Yu if you have more of such pills to prove your words?" she asked.

Alex thought for a moment. While what she was asking could certainly be taken as rude, Alex didn't think so.

Instead, he wondered why she even asked that in the first place. 'This is the part where I shock them with my talent so they give me what I want, isn't it?' he thought.

He was extremely cautious about showing off his talents to random individuals, but his curiosity got the better of him.

So, with a simple gesture, he brought out 20 different pill bottles each with a different pill and laid them in front of them.

The girls immediately showed a doubtful expression and without even missing a beat, Liang Qiu brought out a tester before realizing what she had done.

"Um… may I?" she asked half-scared that he might be offended.

"Please, how else are you going to find the legitimacy of my statement?" Alex asked.

The girls nodded and Han Daiyu picked up a pill bottle at random before handing it to Liang Qiu.

Liang Qiu slowly opened the bottle and put the pill directly into the tester.

As the fog on the tester started growing, Alex could feel 2 different sets of spiritual senses settle around them.

'The saints are watching too, huh?' he thought.

The pill easily crossed 50% and slowly went up to stop at around 67%.

Liang Qiu nodded in amazement as such a high level was not something people could possibly make without having a lot of talent.

"Another one!" Han Daiyu said and picked another pill in front of them.

72%.

This was much better than the previous pill.

"Another one!"

69%.

"And another one!"

71%.

They checked about 7 or 8 pills in total before deciding to stop.

Alex smiled and took back all the pills. He looked forward and saw a thoughtful expression on Liang Qiu's face. Even Han Daiyu wasn't her usual self.

Then, something appeared in front of Liang Qiu who looked toward Alex as she said, "Here."

Alex took whatever it was without thinking and saw that it was a pair of earrings.

There was a twisted hook on one side, followed by an amber-like gem hanging on each of the earrings.

Alex looked at the most golden ring and asked, "is this…?"

"Your payment you requested," she said.

Alex finally gave a proper look at the earrings and asked, "Defensive mental artifact?"

Liang Qiu nodded.

"But, I haven't done anything for you yet," Alex said as he handed it back to her. "I can't accept my payment without having done my part."

"No, please take it. I insist," Liang Qiu said.

Alex was about to refuse when he saw something else appear in front of him. This time, there were 2 items.

One was a regular-looking brown-colored armor that was thin enough to wear under his robes, and another one was surprisingly a circular concave shield with nowhere to hold it.

Han Daiyu was the one that brought those two items out, so she started explaining.

"This armor is capable of stopping any attacks under the True Emperor realm. For True Emperor realm, it can stop about 3 attacks before it becomes unusable," she said.

"This shield on the other hand can stop all attacks under the True Emperor realm, but will not stop any attacks over that. What it can do, however, is the ability to create a barrier around you that can stop Omni-directional attacks."

"You may choose whichever one you like," Han Daiyu said.

"Sister Daiyu, as I was explaining to sister Liang, I cannot take it since I haven't provided my services yet. Please let me take—"

"You are being annoying, young man. If they give you something, take it," Han Hongqi arrived next to him and said.

Then he slumped onto the deck and put his arm around Alex. However, to Alex, it felt like a mountain had come down upon him.

He slouched a little before managing to hold on. Han Daiyu gave a cold glare to her uncle who let go of Alex's shoulders and just laughed.

"Anyway, choose one," Han Hongqi said. "If you don't, I will take offense."

Alex sighed. "Very well," he said. "The armor then."

"Oh," Quan gave a surprised exclamation as he sat down on the other side of Alex. "Why not the shield? It can block more than just your chest, you know?"

Alex chuckled a little and lifted his left arm to make them notice it.

"So?" Hongqi asked. "You don't need to have a hand to use that shield."

"Eh? I don't?" Alex looked surprised.

"No," Hongqi pulled the shield to his hand and poured some Qi into it. Then, the shield started hovering in front of him.

"With a single thought, you can move it around you," he said.

Just then, Alex saw something white strike the shield and a brown barrier about double the size of the shield appeared in front of it.

"Or, you can fully activate it… and," as Hongqi poured in more Qi, something flashed in front of them and Hongqi was entirely covered in the shield's barrier, while the shield itself freely moved inside of it.

"If you do take a very strong attack, it's the barrier that will break, not the shield itself, which is different from the other armor which takes the damage physically," Hongqi explained.

"I suggest you take the shield, young man. Something like protecting against True Emperor or higher attacks can be done with talismans too," Shangguan Quan said from the side.

Alex nodded. "Thank you for the information, seniors. Then, if you don't mind, I will take the shield," he said.

"Haha! Good," Hongqi said and passed along the shield.

"Keep the earrings too," Shangguan Quan said and Alex nodded.

Suddenly, Alex was 2 artifacts richer than he had been moments ago.

Chapter 693 Earth Element Ingredients

Seeing how easily they were supporting him with the things he had requested, Alex got increasingly sure that whatever pill recipe they had found, it was for an incredible pill.

However, with both Shangguan Quan and Han Hongqi staying on either side of him, Alex thought it would be rude to bring up that question.

So, instead, he brought up something else to distract them and hopefully make them leave.

"Senior, shouldn't you look after where we are going?" he asked.

"Don't worry, little alchemist. My spiritual sense is at least 3 kilometers wide. I can easily catch any mistakes that can come our way, so have no worry," Han Hongqi said.

"Oh wow," Alex said while secretly wondering what realm of the saint realm one had to be at to have such a vast spiritual sense.

"It's not just him, I'm keeping an eye on things as well. So you don't have to worry about it at all," Shangguan Quan said.

"Not to mention, my spiritual sense is nearly 3.5 Kilometers wide, so I will catch things that come our way before even he does," Quan said.

"Eh? That's a lie. Your spiritual sense is barely as vast as mine," Han Hongqi said.

"Nonsense, I've always had greater spiritual sense than you," Quan said.

Seeing the two of them bickering with each other, Alex got a weird feeling that he was looking at two close friends trying to one-up each other, rather than the enigmatic Saint realm experts.

The two girls sighed and gave an embarrassed smile to Alex who smiled back at them.

After finally concluding that Quan's spiritual sense was in fact wider, but just by a few meters, the two Saint realm experts finally calmed down.

"You two," Shangguan Quan spoke to the girls. Go and prepare, we will reach the Poison Swamp in about 10 minutes.

"I don't have anything—"

"Yes, master," Liang Qiu immediately grabbed Han Daiyu and pulled her away, leaving Alex alone with the two Saint realm experts.

Surprisingly, he didn't feel any form of nervousness or fear at the fact that they were Saint realm experts.

'Perhaps I've been around a bit too many of those lately,' he thought.

The beasts, the Emperor, Shen Jing, Qin Shan, and now these two. He had perhaps been with more Saint realm experts than there were in the Crimson Empire.

'Not to mention lady Ren was an Immortal expert,' he thought to himself.

"Junior Yu, where do you stay these days?" Shangguan Quan asked suddenly.

"Sorry?" Alex gave a little confused look as he took a few minutes to realize what he had been asked. "Ah, I'm in the Flowing Brush sect right now," he replied.

"Flowing Brush sect? I see," Shangguan Quan gave a slightly disappointed look.

"Huh? Wait a minute, that's a talisman sect. How are they helping grow an alchemist like you?" Han Hongqi asked.

"Oh no, I'm not part of that sect. I'm just a guest elder. I have family there, so sect master Qin gave me the guest elder role while I stay there," Alex said truthfully.

"Oh, do you have responsibilities there?" Quan asked.

"Simple ones. I need to make pills for them which they will buy from me," Alex said.

"Oh, they treat you quite well then," Quan said.

"Who taught you how to make pills? You must have a master right?" Hongqi asked.

"I… I did," Alex said with a heavy sigh. "But she's no longer alive."

"My condolences," Quan said.

"Were you part of a sect when you learned from this master of yours?" they asked.

"I was part of a sect," Alex said. "But I left after my master's death."

"Hmm… so is it correct to assume that you do not have any sect or family you belong to at the moment?" Han Hongqi asked.

"That's…" Alex finally realized what it was all about. The two saint realm experts, the smiling faces, the upfront payment, their attitude.

'They want me to join them,' he thought to himself, half surprised and half flattered at what was happening.

"I do not have any organization I belong to aside from the Alchemy guild if you can even call it that," Alex said, immediately bringing an unhidden wide grin to the faces of the two Saint realm experts.

"Have you given any thought to what you want to do in the future? If you haven't, our Heavens' Peak school is willing to take you in as a core disciple of the sect," Shangguan Quan said.

"Core disciple? Pfft," Han Hongqi laughed before looking at Alex and saying, "Young man, our Han family, has a lot of pretty girls. If you want, we can have you marry some of them. You can choose as you want."

"In fact, you can even have a harem if you want. Plus, we will give you the secret technique that can help you cultivate the Earth Demon physique like we all do," Han Hongqi continued.

Shangguan Quan couldn't help but show an aghast expression when he heard that. "Are you willing to go so far? That's your family's physique," he said.

"And this young man will be a member of our family by then. What's wrong with letting him train in that," Han Hongqi said.

Shangguan Quan furiously thought of what he could do to come up with a better deal than that, but he couldn't think of anything.

The only thing he could think of was his disciple. If she agreed to marry him, he could possibly keep him, but that felt like he was going too far.

"I'm sorry, senior," Alex replied to the both of them. "I do not plan on joining any clan or family at the moment. Certainly not marry for sure."

"Come on, there must be something you want right? Something we can help you with or give to you in exchange for you joining our family," Han Hongqi said.

Alex thought for a moment. "I don't know about joining completely, but there is something you can do to have me join your sect and family for 10 to 15 years," Alex said.

Han Hongqi frowned a little. There was no point in keeping Alex for just 15 years if after spending their resources on him, he just gets to leave.

"What is it?" Shangguan Quan decided to ask. While he didn't like the idea just like Hognqi, he wasn't going to immediately say no to it.

"It's regarding this," Alex said as she showed them his left arm. "If within the next year, you are able to help me get my arm back, for the next 15 years, I will dedicate all my time to exclusively serving your sects and clans."

Quan frowned a little. "How old are you, junior Yu?" he asked.

"25," Alex said with a smile.

'So young,' the both of them thought and immediately changed their thoughts for a few of the things. Alex's offer looked a little better than before.

Still, getting an arm back in a year was not something they could do at all.

"Even if we get you to saint realm in a year, which is impossible, it will still take you many years to grow your arm back," Hongqi said.

"As for the ones that can heal you… can the princess help him?" Quan asked Hongqi.

"I don't know," Hongqi said. "They are so secretive with that healing crystal ball."

"And the Lightsworns will never do anything to betray the royal family, so we can't get answers out of them," Quan said.

"That's what happens when you swear an oath to the heavens," Hongqi said.

"I'm afraid I can't think of any ideas then," Quan said.

"Sigh, I was hoping seniors would know something," Alex said while putting on a sad face.

'Why the hell does no one know for sure what the healing crystal does?' he thought to himself. He simply wanted someone to tell him that the path of Lighsworns would be fruitless so that he would stop having hope.

'All I can do now is hope that I reach Saint realm soon enough,' he thought.

"Is there really nothing else to get you to join us?" they asked one last time.

After Alex said no, they decided to leave it be.

Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu returned after seeing their seniors leave.

"How did it go?" Liang Qiu asked him.

Alex smiled and said, "You should know already given that you were eavesdropping on us."

"What? Nonsense! I would never do that," she said.

Alex didn't say anything else. He looked to the side of the boat as the surrounding flew past in a blur.

This boat was at least 4 times as fast as his own boat, and it didn't even look like it was being forced to move at its top speed.

Alex remembered something and finally turned around.

"Right, I keep meaning to ask, but don't get the chance," he said. "What exactly is the pill you want to make?"

Liang Qiu hesitated a bit.

"Am I still not good enough to learn that?" he asked.

Finally, Liang Qiu gave up and brought out a talisman, and handed it to him.

Alex looked at the recipe and immediately frowned. "That's a weird recipe," he said out loud. "Most of the ingredients on this list have earth energy. I've never seen something so extreme."

"I shouldn't have doubted you to know that," Laing Qiu said. "Yes, that pill's recipe mostly consists of Earth element ingredients."

"That is because the pill that recipe is for is a pill that will significantly improve the Earth Spiritual root of a person."

Chapter 694 Importance of Spiritual Roots

"Improve the Earth Spiritual root?" Alex asked, not sure if he heard her correctly.

"Yes," Liang Qiu said. "It will improve the Earth spiritual root of a person."

"Can it turn a lesser spiritual root into a superior one?" Alex asked with a curious look on his face.

Han Daiyu chuckled a little when she heard that, while Liang Qiu simply sighed.

"It seems alchemist Yu does not know about spiritual roots then. Given your capabilities, I would have expected you to know a lot about it," Liang Qiu said.

"I'm sorry?" Alex looked confused. What was he wrong about?

"Don't be," Liang Qiu said. "It's not just you. Most of the world is also unaware of this fact. We only came to learn it about a thousand years ago from the meteor shower."

"You see, people think there are two types of people. Those who have bad spiritual roots, and those who have good spiritual roots."

"But that is wrong," Liang Qiu said. "It is instead a spectrum and you fall somewhere in between."

"Of course, someone will have perfectly amazing spiritual roots. Some will have embarrassingly bad spiritual roots. But that is not all. Some had good, but not great. Some had bad, but still usable."

"Even if two people are said to have Superior or Lesser spiritual roots, they will still have some differences in which is better or worse," Liang Qiu said.

"What we have come to learn is that, even if you were to be born with a so-called Lesser spiritual roots, there are ways to improve upon it and make it better."

"Until now, this had just been a theory for us. A piece of knowledge no one could verify. But now, we've finally found a piece of the puzzle that will prove it all."

"This recipe," she said.

Alex looked stunned. "This did not come with the meteors?" he asked.

"No," Han Daiyu shook her head. "We found it 3 years ago in the demon realm when one of the major locations inside opened up. You might have heard about it."

"House of the Undying?" Alex asked with a surprised expression.

"Yes, us two came upon the same room where this recipe was kept. I got the recipe, while she got the explanation of what it was."

"It wasn't until nearly a year later when we talked about our treasures from the demon realm that we found out we had the other half of each other's treasure."

"Since that day, we've been going around searching for the ingredients. Unfortunately, while most of the ingredients were easy to find, the Corrosive Willow's bark was impossible to find."

"That was where you came in," Liang Qiu finished.

"Do you have the talisman with the information, sister Daiyu?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Han Daiyu quickly gave it to Alex which he read. Once again, it looked like a diary of some sort.

[I have translated the words written on those papers and have come up with the recipe for their pills.]

[This pill is ingenious. It will improve a person's Earth spiritual root by a decent amount, but it has to be used while they are still under the True Emperor realm.]

[Unfortunately, I am unable to create these pills that humans make.]

Alex felt shocked, even though he felt he shouldn't have. 'This is another diary of the Undying God, isn't it?' he thought.

'This man was able to translate the Human language?' Alex thought.

He reread the talisman all over again and got a little confused.

"Sister Liang, do you practice any Earth-aligned cultivation method?" he asked.

"No," Liang Qiu said. "I do have some techniques that require earth Qi, but they're not my most important skills. My most important skills all have to do with the spear after all."

"Then why all the hassle?" Alex asked. "It doesn't say that the roots will improve significantly, just by a decent amount."

"Then why are you going so far for this?" Alex asked. "I understand that this will improve your Earth roots by a bit, but for a person that doesn't use Earth-related techniques much, this doesn't seem to demand as much effort as you're putting into it."

Liang Qiu frowned for a bit and sighed. "I know. Daiyu will benefit from it a lot more than I will," she said. "However, I'm not thinking about right now. I'm thinking about the future."

"The future?" Alex gave a confused look. "Are you planning to practice Earth techniques in the future? If so then I can see it being useful a bit. But, If your spiritual root was bad from the beginning, it could be improved only so much, right?"

"No, it's not for techniques," Liang Qiu said. "It's for something else that I'm not sure Alchemist Yu can understand at the moment."

"Please say it anyway," Alex said.

"There's this thing that Saint realm experts will sometimes learn. When you're really in tune with something fundamental of this world and understand it fully, the world will—"

"Are you talking about Dao?" Alex cut her off.

Liang Qiu gave a surprised look. "You know about Dao?" she asked.

"Yes, I have... heard of it," Alex said. He nearly fumbled away that he had learned one already.

"I see," Liang Qiu said with a sigh of relief. "That will make it much easier to explain then."

"You see, one of the ways to learn a Dao is to have a better spiritual root. The better the spiritual root, the easier the understanding of the Dao comes to you," she said.

"Is that true?" Alex asked with wide eyes. He had never heard about it, but they were in a hurry when they left for the demon realm, so Shen Jing must not have had the time to explain it all.

"So spiritual roots improve your chances of learning a Dao huh? I wasn't expecting to have such a revelation for myself when I left the sect this morning," Alex chuckled to himself a little.

"Hmm... so is it difficult for people without spiritual roots of a certain element to learn Dao relating to that element?" Alex asked.

"No," Liang Qiu said with a serious face. "It is impossible for someone without a spiritual root of an element to learn Dao relating to said element."

"That is why even if someone had lesser spiritual roots of all 5 elements, they are still considered to have a future so long as they persevere until they reach the Saint realm where they have more Dao to learn from instead of focusing on simply a few like most of the others do," she said.

"I see," Alex said as he thought about it all. "Thank you for explaining that all to me. I feel enlightened at the moment," he said.

Ignoring what other things the girls said afterward in courtesy, Alex began thinking about something.

'Why did I learn a law relating to fire before everything?' he wondered. 'I have Metal and Yang spiritual roots that have been tempered with the blood blessed by the god, and a fruit that may itself be a sun.'

'Instead of those two, I learned about fire,' he thought. While it was true that he was inspired by the explosion before he began comprehending his law, given how bad his fire root was, he was surprised he even succeeded.

'Wait,' Alex thought to himself. 'Is my Fire Spiritual root even bad?'

As far as Alex could remember, Fire had been one of the better elements that he could control. Flame Mastery Scripture was something that he learned pretty easily, and controlling fire was very easy as well.

'Does that mean I had a good Fire Spiritual root to begin with?' he thought. 'That's right, it could have always been good without ever being great. It was good enough.'

Alex thought that was correct and nothing else would make any sense for him with not just how easily, but also how early he learned the Dao of explosion.

'So, Yang and Metal first, followed by Fire, and finally the rest,' Alex thought when grading his spiritual roots.

'No, Yin at the end. My body is probably messing with that spiritual root already,' he thought to himself.

While deep in thought, Alex was immediately pulled out of it by the sudden stopping of the boat.

"We're here kids," Hongqi shouted from the back.

Alex stood up and walked to the front of the deck to look down below. Finally, he could see the Poison swamp with his own eyes.

Chapter 695 Colorful

Alex looked down below at the vibrant, prismatic fog that covered the ever so colorful valley that was the Poison swamp.

Having been blind the last time he was here, Alex barely knew what only a little of it looked like. Seeing so much of it at once made it look like a place he would want to own.

Of course, that was what most poisonous and venomous plants and animals had as their main trait: Colors that would lure someone to them and then poison them.

The ship lowered down to the top of a large mountain, and even here Alex could smell the familiar acrid smell of the valley waft up through the mountain.

A barrier appeared around the ship, protecting them from the poison down below.

"It's a miracle the plants and beasts in this region haven't escaped and started taking over the other regions of this area," Han Daiyu said.

Alex looked at the nearly 40 kilometers wide swamp and said, "the plants that grow here are ones that can only grow on a swamp. They don't do well on solid land. Since most beasts need to be near such plants, you won't see them move out of here at all."

"Alright girls, take out your protective gears," Han Hongqi said, and within a second both Han Daiyu and Liang Qiu brought out some cylindrical formation-like discs that Alex recognized to be poison evading artifacts.

They were easily available in the markets and cost just a bit more than a Heaven grade True ranked immunity pill that would keep one immune to poisons and such for about a day.

Seeing Alex eat the pill, the other two Saint experts nodded. Of course, Alex didn't eat the pill they thought he did. He just ate a random pill in his storage bag, which he then immediately turned into Qi.

His naval area felt a little fuller than it already was. 'I need to spend some of it and breakthrough,' he thought.

He had come here to train, or at least that was his plan, but from the looks of it, he wouldn't get the chance at all.

"Everyone ready?" Shangguan Quan asked.

"Yes, Master," Liang Qiu answered.

"Good, now go down. We'll look after you from up here," Quan said.

"Oh, are you not coming senior?" Alex asked, clearly surprised.

"No, it's your adventure. We are here to simply make sure you don't die. Everything else is for you to do," Quan said.

Alex's face immediately brightened when he heard that. Maybe he would get a chance to train.

All 3 of them jumped down from the ship and started trekking down the mountain. Within moments, they reached the area where the poison fog started getting more than just visible.

It started affecting them too. At the same time, a small flimsy barrier appeared around the two girls, while Alex simply walked without the need for one.

"We have to be careful," the girls said. "While the barrier may protect us from the fog, anything that touches or attacks us will cause serious trouble."

Alex nodded.

"So, Alchemist Yu. Which way?" Liang Qiu asked.

Alex stopped to look at the nearly 1300 square kilometers of expanse in front of him and gave an embarrassed look as he answered, "I don't know."
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"What?" the girls asked.

"I'm sorry, I don't even remember which way I entered from the last time I was here 4 years ago, let alone where the tree is which I saw after many days of travel," Alex said.

"You came here alone?" Liang Qiu gave a puzzled look.

"No, no. I had a senior look after me, just like right now," Alex said.

The girls nodded and said, "Well I guess we should start somewhere then."

Alex nodded and took the way.

As soon as his feet touched the wetland, he started floating on top of it, instead of sinking in it. He was used to this, after all, he had spent a year in this area, and it had only been 3 months since he left.

Alex looked at the thick, colorful fog and frowned at the fact that he couldn't use his spiritual sense to see through it.

He could feel Liang Qiu's spiritual sense looking around them for sneak attacks, but that wouldn't help him look at things.

In the end, he decided to give up on one of his aces in his sleeves for an easier time.

So, without any prompting, he let go of his spiritual sense which immediately flew all around him, and started looking at things as well.

"Woah!" Liang Qiu gave a shocked expression which surprised Han Daiyu.

"What? What is it?" she asked.

Liang Qiu ignored Han Daiyu and turned to Alex to ask," Alchemist Yu, you have spiritual sense?"

"Ah, yes," Alex said nonchalantly as if he hadn't debated about showing it for a while now. "It's something I acquired a few years ago."

"Wow, you must have been really lucky then," Liang Qiu said.

"Yes, I was lucky," Alex said. "But I wouldn't call it really lucky."

"No way, you are very lucky. Look at Daiyu, she's from a big family and even she doesn't have her spiritual sense unlocked yet," Liang Qiu said.

"Uh, I guess I'm really lucky then," Alex said. "Let's go find this tree now."

Alex didn't let them ask any more questions that would lead him to talk about how he got the lily and instead started looking for the tree.

He kept his spiritual sense at 50 meters at most and did not go further than that. Liang Qiu might not find any problems if he did, but the two Saints up above would definitely notice it.

He didn't want to be questioned right now.

Suddenly, a sword appeared in his hand at the same time a spear appeared in Liang Qiu's.

Han Daiyu looked at the both of them and belatedly took out a hammer on her own.

Alex sensed the beast and found out it was a True Lord 6th realm beast. The exact same cultivation as his body.

Liang Qiu was about to attack when Alex put his hand out to stop her. "Please, let me handle this," he said as a circular shield appeared from his storage bag and started hovering around him.

"Are you sure? Your cultivation is a little…" Liang Qiu said.

"It's fine. You can help me if it looks like I won't win," Alex said and slowly walked forward.

Not even 10 meters away from him was a black salamander with yellow patches of skin all over it.

It was nearly as tall as him and almost 3 meters long without even counting its tail which was another 3 meters long.

It brought out its deep purple, forked tongue and stared at Alex with its slitted, yellow eyes.

Alex knew it had seen him as an enemy after that.

Without hesitation, he dashed forward as the best shot out its tongue at incredible speed.

Alex could dodge out of the way, but he didn't feel like it. Suddenly, the shield appeared in front of him and with a 'DENG' sound, it blocked the attack.

Alex tried to slash at the forked tongue, but the salamander was too quick at retracting it.

When Alex got close, the beast immediately scampered backward and suddenly a wave of the swamp water came toward him like an ocean wave.

Alex sent out a wind slash and cleared the water from hitting him. At the same time, he saw yellow energy light up from deep beneath him as chunks of wet rock started flying in his direction.

Alex immediately employed the shield to move all around him, carefully blocking each and every piece of rock.

Every single one of those rocks felt like a full-blown attack of a True Lord 4th realm expert. With each hit, Alex felt his Qi drain, but it was so small that he could simply get it back while he was fighting.

It would only get problematic if the beast attacked him with something more—

Alex watched as the salamander spewed out purple liquid from it's mouth directly onto him. The area it covered was so wide that Alex would get caught up in it even if he tried to run away.

What he would usually do was teleport away from this location and attack the salamander. But that didn't seem like an option right now.

Not with the girls and the saints watching him. If he teleported, that would be one more technique he would be questioned about and might even try to force him to take it out.

So, he decided to stick with something that was already established as him having it.

As the girls watched, Alex was devoured by the poison shot. Han Daiyu couldn't help but gasp in shock, but Liang Qiu could see everything, so she wasn't worried at all.

"He's fine," she said to Daiyu with a bit of annoyance in her voice. "Why are you afraid for him when you gave him the shield?"

"Uh… he's safe?" she asked and looked at Alex as the purple poison fell onto the swamp water and mixed together with the rest of the poison already on it.

When it was finally off, she saw a brown barrier appear around the shield that fully protected Alex from all the poison.

The moment the poison was gone, Alex put away the barrier and moved his shield to the side in preparation for what the beast's next attack was going to be, and what he was going to do next.

Chapter 696 A Few Friendly Faces

The remainder of the fight lasted quite a bit. Alex fought like he was weaker than he actually was, which to the others seemed normal given his cultivation base was only around True Lord 2nd Realm.

He didn't use Qi or Sword Qi during this fight and kept the attacks only to his physical body.

He did send out slashes from time to time to vent out his Qi that was stagnating, but most of those attacks never landed on the salamander. Intentionally of course.

Finally, after using his shield to block the attack and using his sword to make numerous cuts throughout the salamander, he managed to kill it while taking no damage himself.

"Phew!" Alex wiped the non-existed sweat from his brows and heaved a deep sigh in relief.

"Alchemist Yu, that was amazing," Liang Qiu said. "How did you learn to fight like that?"

"Oh, I learned it from the senior who I came here with last time," Alex said.

"You are quite strong for an alchemist," Han Daiyu said as she stared at the salamander.

"To think you managed to kill something that was 4 realms-what are you doing?" she asked suddenly.

Alex had turned around and started using his sword to carve open the black and yellow salamander.

"Oh, I'm just dismantling the corpse. These beasts are quite good as alchemy ingredients, you know?" he said.

"Is that so?" Liang Qiu asked. "What sort of pill can you make with these parts?"

"I don't know," Alex said simply.

"You... don't know? Then why are you taking these beast parts?" she asked.

"Because I'm going to find out what pills I can make with these," he said.

"So you are going to find out a recipe from these?" Han Daiyu asked.

"Precisely," Alex said and continued dismantling it all. Finally, once he got everything, he placed it in his storage bag and turned around.

"Let's get moving. We need to find the willow tree as soon as we can," Alex said and the three started moving.

As they went along, either more monsters popped up which they were forced to fight, or Alex found a rare ingredient which he was forced to fight something to get.

Either way, they fought a lot.

Alex got to fight most of the time, but there were times when the beast was so strong that he couldn't possibly win against it without showing off more of his skills which he didn't want to do.

So, instead, he let the girls do the fighting since they were stronger than him.

Han Daiyu's fighting style was rather simple. She hit things until it stopped moving. Her hammer, which was naturally heavy, was enough to kill most beasts with a single blow.

When she activated her physique, her strength would become so massive that she could probably lift 5 of such hammers without any problem.

Other than that, she would use her Earth techniques to use ranged attacks and then kill the beasts.

When Alex had seen her attack the door back in the demon realm, he was mistaken into thinking she could only attack at melee range, but now he realized how incredibly stupid he was being.

No one in their right mind would train one of their best to have such an obvious vulnerability. Han Daiyu had more in her arsenal than Alex originally believed her to have.

Liang Qiu on the other hand was closer to what Alex thought Han Daiyu would be.

Her mastery of the spear had reached well into Spear Qi and each one of her attacks sent out slashes of Spear Qi toward the enemy.

Unlike his own, Liang Qiu's spear Qi had developed to the point that each of her spear Qi was in the shape of a spearhead.

'I need to train my Sword Qi until it starts looking more like swords all the time,' he thought to himself.

Liang Qiu's mastery of the spear had left him breathless. The way she moved with it was like the spear was an extension of herself.

Each one of her attacks was precise and accurate, and it was never less nor more than what the enemy needed to die.

Unfortunately, Liang Qiu didn't use any of her other skills, so Alex didn't get to see the full ability of an elite from an elite sect.

Even after night fell, they continued searching for the tree, but it didn't seem like it was going to be anywhere near here.

Alex came across a few places that looked familiar, but he would have to go through a year's worth of memory to understand exactly what route he took to get here.

As such, directly finding the willow's location was truly very hard.

Other than that, Alex was also searching for something else in the poison swamp.

He had come here with 3 objectives in total. The first one was their collective objective of finding the willow tree.

The second one was his training to breakthrough in his cultivation.

Finally, the third one was to find ingredients with a high concentration of Yin in them.

He had already used up the ones he had taken from here and his body was starting to heat up once again.

It was still in the starting phase, but it was getting harder and harder to maintain. Soon, it would certainly reach a level where it would be impossible.

Alex feared that day more than he thought he should.

The next day went by the same as well. Since the land they had to tread was so big, they still hadn't found a willow tree at all.

Alex remembered seeing only one tree, so he was starting to fear that there really was just one tree.

Finding one single tree in a sea of toxic fog, poisonous plants, and venomous beasts was going to take longer than he had expected.

Plus, the girls were forced to stop from time to time to recharge the artifact that they had been using.

Every 6 or so hours, they needed to replace the spirit stones inside of it and that took about 15 minutes out of their day every day.

On the second night, Alex finally felt like he was ready. He had fought all day yesterday and today, and his body felt ready to breakthrough.

So, he told the girls and they agreed to it. Besides, they had been walking around for nearly 2 days now and wanted rest.

Alex sat beside a naked tree with the girls also cultivating on either side. They had set up a barrier formation around them, so they could safely cultivate inside of it.

With how long it had been since Alex had broken through and how ready his body was, it didn't even take him a full rotation of his Qi to simply break through to the next realm.

Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu who were next to him looked at him in shock as he had broken through the moment they sat down.

'So fast,' they thought and wanted to ask questions, but decided not to when they saw that he was still mid cultivation.

Half the night went quietly, but then around midnight, Alex heard something slam down on the ground.

It was so fast his spiritual sense didn't even see the object enter his senses. When the two objects finally did land, he realized that it was Shangguan Quan and Han Hongqi who had come down from the ship that was hovering in the sky.

Before either of the 3 of them could ask what was going on, Shangguan Quan's cold voice spoke to someone in front of them.

"Fellow Daoist, please go away from here. These children are under our protection," he shouted from beyond the barrier.

Han Hongqi brought out a hammer of his own as he slowly circulated his Qi, activating his physique.

"Don't mind my presence, fellow Daoists. I am not here to hurt your juniors," A voice came from far away.

Alex heard the voice and something about it gave him a familiar feeling.

"Then you won't mind going away, right?" Han Hongqi asked.

"I am here to speak to that junior there," the voice said and Alex finally remembered who it was.

Without hesitation, Alex stood up and walked past the barrier to bow into the darkness.

"Greetings senior," he said to the newly arrived figure.

Slowly, through the marsh slithered something purple with 6 bright slitted eyes. It was the Three-headed Hydra.

"I thought you had already left. I see you've returned, young human," the Hydra spoke to Alex's mind.

"Just for a few days, senior," Alex said "we're here to find something. Once we do we'll leave."

"Hmm," the Hydra stuck its tongue out. "Is senior here?"

"No, I'm afraid I haven't seen him in 3 years," Alex said.

"I see," the Hydra said. "Well, doesn't seem like you'll need him."

The Hydra looked towards the two Saints next to Alex who held curious looks on their faces.

"So, what do you want here?" the Hydra asked. "You're in my domain right now. If it is here, I will give it to you."

"I'm looking for a willow tree," Alex said and started explaining everything he knew about the tree from its looks, shape, and size, all the way to what its surrounding area was like and what beasts lived there.

"Hmm, that sounds like a location in that direction," one of the Hydra's heads turned to point in a certain direction.

"If you go there, you can find it," it said.

"Is that so, thank you for your assistance, senior," Alex said.

"Don't worry. Just give my greetings to senior," the Hydra said as it slithered away, leaving the confused group.

Alex looked back at the group with a happy expression. "It looks like we know where to go now."

Chapter 697 Bristled Spider

"What was that?" Han Daiyu asked with a surprised face.

"How do you know a beast, junior?" Shangguan Quan asked.

"Oh, we met the last time I was here with a senior," Alex said without hesitation.

"And you made a big enough impression for that beast to remember?" Quan asked.

"No, I'm afraid I don't have such capabilities. It was the senior I was with who made the impression," Alex said with a rueful smile. "The Hydra most likely came because he was scared that the senior was back here again."

"Oh, Who is this senior that would have such reputations?" Hongqi asked.

"I'm afraid I can't answer that," Alex said. "The senior's information is not mine to give."

"Not even a name?" Quan asked.

Alex simply shook his head.

"Fine, continue with what you were doing," Quan said and flew back to the ship in the air, leaving behind the 3 of them.

Alex turned around and gave an apologetic look. "I'm sorry your cultivation was disrupted because of me," he said.

"It's alright. Since we know where to go, we should leave now," Liang Qiu said.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! Let's go quickly. I can't wait to eat that pill," Han Daiyu excitedly urged them all to leave.

Alex nodded and the three of the left the area. Now that they knew the general area of where they had to go, Alex started going through all the different memories of anywhere he was around.

He didn't trace it all the way, but just enough to see where he went next or where he had come from.

The further they went along, the more Alex started regretting not taking the ship there. He forgot just how long it would take to walk through this swampland.

Even after daybreak, they were nowhere near the willow at all. Instead, they were forced to keep fighting the different beasts along the way.

It wasn't until halfway into the next day that Alex reached a place that looked familiar to a place he had been after arriving at the willow.

"We're close," he exclaimed and looked around as he started tracing the memories back to the willow.

"This way," he said and walked in a certain direction.

The closer he got, the more Alex started sprinting. The girls followed him for another 5 minutes, and finally, they reached the location where the willow was.

Just like Alex's description, the willow tree looked extremely normal with green trees and brown bark. But in a sea of abnormalities, the simple scenery of normal looked very unique.

Alex slowly walked closer to the tree and stopped.

Liang Qiu stopped as well when her spiritual sense noticed the same thing Alex did.

"What are those?" she asked curiously.

"It looks like a bunch of porcupines stuck toge-oh," Alex saw the beast slowly rise out from underwater and finally saw what it was.

"Oh," Liang Qiu finally saw it too. "A Bristled Spider."

A dark brown spider with hairy legs slowly climbed onto the willow while its 8 different colored eyes never left any of them.

Its back was full of green and red bristles which seemed like it would be ready to shoot out at any moment.

Alex's eyes shined when he saw that. "Ooh, can I fight it?" he asked excitedly.

"Uh... yeah, sure," Liang Qiu said.

"Yeah, let him fight. He's shown us he's able to handle such beasts," Han Daiyu said.

"Yeah, but this one is especially troublesome, you know," Liang Qiu said. "If it's true that each of those bristles contains a different type of poison, then he would be in trouble if he is hit by them."

"He had the shield," Han Daiyu said. Liang Qiu had no more reasons to keep him back and let him fight.

Alex felt the True Lord 6th realm cultivation base of the spider and got a little easier. He wasn't here to fight a difficult battle, but to test out his strength after he had broken through to the 3rd realm.

Alex brought out his shield and kept it floating around him. At the same time, he brought out the poison sword and charged the spider.

The moment rushed towards the spider, the spider suddenly sprayed poison out of the bristles.

Alex hadn't expected it to shoot liquid instead of the bristles themselves. However, given how far he was, he managed to dodge it easily and continued with his charge.

At the same time, he sent out a water splash toward the spider. Alex's water slash was a mortal grade technique so it was very poor in terms of damage. Had it not been Alex who used it, the damage the technique would have done was far lower than his own cultivation base.

With Alex's Qi, it easily reached the power of True Lord's 8th realm. However, Alex was clearly playing around as the water slash struck quite far from the spider.

"What are you doing? Finish it quickly," Han Daiyu said.

"I can't," Alex shouted. "I don't want to damage the tree."

Only after hearing him did Han Daiyu realize how stupid she was being. "Sorry, continue at your own pace," she said and looked away to hide her embarrassed face.

"I think he's hiding his powers from us," Liang Qiu spoke directly into Han Diayu's mind.

"What do you mean?" Han Daiyu asked aloud, before realizing she wasn't supposed to speak here.

"His sword skill feels like something one can only acquire after a long time of practice. You can tell he knows the sword very well and knows exactly how he can use it," she said.

Han Daiyu shook her head, not understanding the implications.

"Anyone who's mastered to this great level of the sword is bound to start showing signs of Sword Intent at the very least," She told her. "However, I can't find a hint of it on his sword."

"Then..." Han Daiyu murmured.

"He's hiding it," Liang Qiu said. "He's hiding his Sword Intent. He's stronger than he's making himself out to be."

"Which was already surprising, to begin with."

Liang Qiu suddenly brought out a talisman and asked her master, "is his cultivation base real? Are we being misled?"

"No," an answer came from Quan. "It really is True Lord 3rd realm."

"Hmm..." Liang Qiu thought to herself. 'Then is he perhaps using his Sword Intent from time to time to give himself a boost in damage?'

Liang Qiu wouldn't even begin to think that Alex had Sword Qi as that was not something one could acquire while so young while being a prodigy in alchemy.

Expecting him to have Sword Intent was already her given him high appraisal based on his age and profession.

Other than that, she also simply wouldn't imagine Alex to be a body cultivator either. Those usually never got stronger than self-tempering realm levels of strength due to how hard it was to cultivate one's body.

Alex's fight with the spider continued. He sent out weak slashes from time to time to get it off of the tree, and when it didn't, he started getting more and more aggressive and went into close-ranged combat.

He slashed at the back of the spider, but surprisingly it was too tough an exterior for him to breakthrough. At least, not while the bristles were still on the spider.

He needed to force it to throw them his way.

So, Alex started to become a greater threat to the spider than he originally led it to believe.

With just the slightest hint of Metal Qi poured into his sword Alex struck its back once again.

This time, there was a definite mark left behind on its back and even a few of the bristles were broken and leaking venoms.

Immediately, the bristles flared to life as the spider carelessly sprayed it all in Alex's direction.

Using the barrier on the shield, Alex was able to block all of the red and green bristles.

Each passing day, he was starting to like the shield more and more. After the bristles stopped firing, Alex put away the barrier and charged forward.

But as he did, he realized the spider had kept some bristles to itself, which it only threw out a moment later.

Alex hurriedly tried to bring back the barrier, but he was a step too late and one of the bristles suddenly hit his thigh.

Alex felt pain in his thigh as the poison in the bristles started affecting him instantly.

The girls saw this and tried to hurry over, but Alex stopped them. He pulled out the bristle, leaving a deep wound that bled a lot.

He started circulating his Qi as per the cultivation technique and brought out a pill to eat.

While his body got rid of the poison, he used the healing energy from the pill to fix his body.

Then, he stood back up and stared directly at the spider. There was no wasting any more time now.

The moment he confirmed that the spider had no more bristles, he ran directly onto it and started making deep gashes on its body.

The spider tried to fight back, but nothing it did could stop Alex whose body cultivation was the same as its own cultivation.

Finally, Alex severed its head from its body while its 8 wide eyes stared up.

Alex took a big sigh of relief and slumped to the ground. After a few seconds, he turned back to the girl to see their concerned faces.

"I'm fine," Alex said. "More importantly, you should start getting those barks."

Chapter 698 Return

Once the girls started tearing up the bark using metal tools, making sure to not touch it at all, Alex also joined in and tore up some barks on his own.

"Wait, where are your tools?" Han Daiyu asked.

"Oh, I can touch this," Alex said. "I ate an immunity pill earlier that stops all poison from affecting my body. Didn't you see?"

"Oh, okay," Han Daiyu said and continued.

Finally, they managed to turn the tree naked by taking out the entire outer cover from its trunk.

Alex wanted to take more than just the bark, but given how rare this tree was for them, he decided to leave it be and let it grow and spread.

While the bark may not grow back, he hoped more willows could be found here instead.

'If only I had some botany knowledge,' Alex thought to himself. That was another thing that was to be added to the list of information he needed to learn.

The ship lowered from the sky and everyone got on it to leave the poison swamp.

Alex looked back in a bit of disappointment. He wanted to train harder and more, but with so many people it was hard.

Also, he found maybe 2 Yin plants that could help him. Other than that, he would have to find yin plants and artifacts through the guild or some auctions that apparently took place every month in the Dawnspring city.

Those monthly auctions wouldn't have such important treasures, but he would still have to go so as to not miss them.

Once they all boarded the ship, Han Hongqi immediately moved to the hell out of that toxic place.

"You guys get all you needed?" Shangguan Quan asked as he turned around.

"Yes, master," Liang Qiu said.

The group silently returned back to the city and stopped in front of the Flowing Brush sect.

"Thank you for helping us find the plant, Alchemist Yu," Liang Qiu said.

"Yes, truly thank you," Han Daiyu said.

"It was no problem for me," Alex said. "So… what now? Do I get to make the pill or do you still want to go to senior Xue?"

Liang Qiu chuckled a bit. "We chose you the moment we decided to show you the recipe," Liang Qiu said.

"Oh, thank you for trusting in me," Alex said.

"I hope you won't break that trust," Han Daiyu said.

"I promise you, I won't," Alex said.

Liang Qiu brought out a small storage bag and gave it to Alex. "I hope I can get to see the pill very soon," she said.

Alex took the storage bag and looked at it once before shaking his head. "This won't do," Alex said.

"Huh? What's wrong?" she asked.

"The ingredients are too few. I will need a lot more," Alex said.

"Eh? That's 6 sets of ingredients. Isn't that enough for 2 people?" she asked.

"It would be if I were to only follow that recipe," Alex said. "But I won't. I will have to see if the recipe is good or not first, and if it isn't, I will have to recreate it."

"Recreate it? With different ingredients?" Shangguan Quan asked curiously.

"Oh no, just used the same ingredients a little differently," Alex said. "I try to find what is wrong with the recipe and try to fix those parts. In doing so, the recipe subtly changes."

"Okay, then I will send Qiu'er tomorrow to the Alchemy guild. Tell her if you require more ingredients or not then," Shangguan Quan said.

"Well, I guess Daiyu will have to go too then," Hongqi said.

"I'll be there," Han Daiyu said.

"Alright, go take some rest, for now, junior Yu. You deserve it," Han Hongqi said.

"Yes, senior," Alex said and left the boat. Just as he did, someone flew out of the sect and looked in surprise at the people in front of him.

"Senior Quan, Senior Hongqi, what are you doing here?" Sect Master Qin asked when he saw the two. He turned to Alex and back towards the two and asked, "Did little Yu cause some trouble?"

"Haha, sect master Qin, you have nothing to worry about. Junior Yu helped us with some task and now we've come to return him, that's all," Hongqi replied.

"It's good seeing you, sect master Qin," Shangguan Quan said and nodded. The girls greeted him as well and after a short talk, the boat left.

Qin Shan looked dumbfounded, same as all the other guards and guests that were outside the sect gates.

"What's happening?" he asked Alex.

Alex looked around and said, "Let's go inside first."

Once they entered the sect, Alex explained everything as best he could. When Qin Shan realized that Alex was going to make some important pills for Han Daiyu and Liang Qiu, he started breathing heavily in fear.

"You must make sure the pills are good. Pay extra attention to not mess up their ingredients. Also, make it as soon as you can. You can't keep people like that waiting," Qin Shan said.

"I understand, sect master," Alex said and went to his mother.

"Brother!" Pearl shouted and ran up to him, jumping directly into his embrace.

"Hey Pearl, did you look after mother?" he asked.

"Yes, I did," Pearl said proudly.

"You're back," Helen came up to him and suddenly took out a talisman. She threw it at him and suddenly, the air touching him and around him burned with brilliant light.

When the light disappeared, he looked confused. "What was that?" he asked.

"It's a talisman to get rid of the poison in the air. Since you came back from the poison swamp, I had to make sure you didn't bring back any poison of your own," Helen said.

"Oh, you didn't have to worry about that, mother. I can do that on my own," Alex said as he flexed Yang Qi.

"Whatever," Helen said. "So, how was the trip? You were with girls, right? Come tell me."

Alex chuckled a bit and started telling his mother about his visit to the poison swamp.

Chapter 699 Preparations

That night, Alex went back to his room and prepared to make the new pill.

He read the recipe and thought about it all for a few minutes. There were 16 ingredients exactly, of which 4 of them would be considered rare.

Of course, they weren't as rare as the willow they just found, but it was rare enough that only one or two of such ingredients would pop up in the market every day.

'I will have to gather them and use them towards the end,' he thought. For now, he simply had to make the pill.

'Maybe I won't even need to do anything,' Alex thought. 'Maybe this pill is already the best it can be.'

Since this was a pill recipe from the long past when humans and demons fought, Alex had more faith in the recipe than the new ones made by local alchemists.

So, once the cauldron was properly heated up, he started making the pill.

One by one, he put in the ingredients and followed the recipe as closely as he could on the first try without making any mistakes.

As time went along, he put one ingredient after another. The ingredients were all filled with either Earth energy or neutral energy. So, as more and more Earth energy mixed together, the final energy ended up becoming a very dense and strong Earth energy that was hovering on the verge of reaching Saint level.

Fortunately, it didn't and Alex managed to guide the energy into the pill.

What came out of the cauldron was a brown pill with a dirt-like smell. He could see spots of black too, and from that, he could easily tell how unsymmetrical the pill was.

It was better than most pills he had seen, but it still needed a rework.

Alex checked the Harmony and realized that it was 52%. It was decent, but not good enough. Even if he fixed the other problems like good quality ingredients, proper control of fire, or a high-quality cauldron, Alex was sure that the most he could do were reach 60% with it.

If he had a technique to perfectly form a pill, then maybe he could push it to 75% too. But he would never be able to reach 100% with what he had at the moment.

Alex went ahead and made 2 more of the pills, which came out better than the first one with 54%, and 56%.

Most alchemists would consider this an amazing Harmony, but Alex wanted more. He knew he could get more, so instead, he decided to go ahead and rewrite the formula.

Of course, he didn't have any ingredients at the moment, so it would have to wait for tomorrow.

In the meantime, Alex thought of something and brought out an ingredient to turn it into powder.

Once he was turned to powder, he studied it carefully, checking its shape and size before discarding it for another of the same thing.

For the entire night, Alex did the same thing with the same ingredients, changing only the speed of the ingredient's motion, the direction of the motion, and the heat of the fire, all in order to bring out the energy of the ingredient at the constant rate as a certain pill's recipe dictated.

For the whole night, Alex dwelled on just that one ingredient, and it wasn't even an ingredient for the pill he needed to make.

Once morning came around, he spent 2 hours practicing his talisman and formation skills before leaving to go see his mother.

"I might not return for a few days, mother," Alex said. "Keep Pearl with you, and tell him to train while he can."

"Where are you going?" Helen asked curiously. "Are you going somewhere with those girls?"

"No, mother. I will be at the guild for the next 3 days working on the pill I told you about. If I succeed, I can help you and myself improve our spiritual roots," Alex said.

"Alright, alright, no need to get defensive. I was just teasing you," Helen said. "Go, I'll take care of Pearl."

"No, I'm taking care of mother," Pearl interjected.

"Yes you are," Helen said as she rubbed his head.

"Bye," Alex said and left the sect to go to the guild.

When he arrived at the guild, it was still morning, so instead of doing anything else, he started buying as many ingredients as he could for the other pill.

Alex sweat a bit when he realized he had spent over 4000 True spirit stones on what most would consider a frivolous purchase. However, since he knew it was important, his heart, fortunately, felt no negative impact.

He waited a few minutes for Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu to come around, but it seemed it was really early for that. So, he took a few missions on a whim and went to complete them.

An hour later, Alex came out with 5 different pills and handed them to the staff who looked at him with a dumbfounded face when they realized he had taken this mission just an hour ago.

5 pills in an hour meant that he made exactly 1 pill every 12 minutes, and that was without wasting a single minute, which was impossible.

Secretly, the staff was starting to think more and more of Alex as an alchemist.

Alex went back outside and managed to find Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu waiting for him.

"Oh, sister Laing, sister Han, you finally came," Alex said as he walked towards him.

"Alchemist Yu! How could you make us wait for so long?" Han Daiyu complained.

"My apologies. I waited for a while, but you never came so I went to complete a few missions for the guild," Alex said.

"Whatever," Han Daiyu shook her hands to tell him to get over it. Then her face made the most excited smile as she asked, "Did you make it? Is it done?"

Alex shook his head. "I'm afraid I was correct," he said. "I will need at least 2 if not 3 weeks to change the recipe around. Otherwise, even if you were to take the recipe to senior Xue, you will never end up with pills above 60%."

"You tried it already then?" Liang Qiu asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I reached 54% and 56%. If you want those pills then I will hand them to you right now, but I suggest you wait for the next 3 weeks so I can improve the pill."

"Are you sure you can improve it?" Han Daiyu asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I'm confident I can. All you will have to do is wait 3 weeks."

"Alright, if you can really improve it, do it," Liang Qiu said. "I've already waited 2 years for this. I can way 20 more days."

"Thank you," Alex said. "So... uh... about the ingredients"

"How many do you need?" Liang Qiu asked.

"At least 50 each," Alex said with an embarrassed smile.

"50 each? Are you serious?" Liang Qiu asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "With that, I can increase the pill's Harmony by at least 10% if not more."

"That's tempting really," Liang Qiu said. "Alright, let me go do it right now."

Liang Qiu stood to go to the reception to buy the ingredients but stopped.

"Should I make a mission while I'm at it?" she asked.

Alex shook his head. "No need, this pill won't be under the guild's name. I assume you would want to keep it that way," Alex said.

"Yes," Liang Qiu said. "Then I will just buy the ingredients for now."

"You may not be able to find a lot of the rare ones, so leave that part to me," Alex said.

Liang Qiu nodded and went to buy.

"I was looking forward to that pill you know? Can't I just eat this one right now and take a better one later?" Han Daiyu asked.

"I don't know how helpful that would be, sister Daiyu," Alex said. "If this pill improves your roots, it won't be as much as the other pill I will make."

"So, if you were to eat this, improve your root, and eat the next pill, I'm afraid that your roots will not respond to the pill like they would have when they were weak," Alex said.

"It's like—"

"I understand," Han Daiyu said. "I was just saying what was on my mind. I can wait too."

Alex smiled back at her. "I promise you, sister Han. I will make the best pill you've ever seen," Alex said.

"Is that so? I come from a big family you know. I've seen great pills. I've even eaten Saint rank pills," she said.

"I promise you won't have seen pills like what I will make," Alex said. "Ahem, barring saint rank pills of course."

Liang Qiu returned with a bag full of ingredients and handed it to Alex. "I couldn't get some ingredients, so you will have to get them on our behalf. There are some spirit stones in that storage bag, you can use them however necessary."

"I only ask that you make our pill with it," Liang Qiu said.

Alex looked through the storage bag and saw every single ingredient. Just as he asked, there were 50 each of about 12 ingredients.

Of the last 4, there were between 2 to 10 of them. 'How much do I have to buy them?' Alex thought and looked through the spirit stones when he stopped.

"Um... isn't 10 thousand spirit stones a bit too much? I'm not sure I'll need more than 3 thousand," Alex said.

Liang Qiu smiled. "Use however many as you want. I just want the pill," she said.

Alex smiled. "Very well then," he said. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I seem to have a new task come upon me."

Alex waved the two goodbye and went back to the alchemy room to make this new pill.

Chapter 700 Spring Mist Pavilion

A week into the process, Alex decided not to rush through the whole thing and get himself burnt out.

So, after going through 10 of the ingredients. He decided to take the rest of the 2 weeks going through 1 ingredient each.

The process was as simple as it could get by now since he had done it over 20 times already.

Alex would first go through each ingredient and find out the shape of each and every iteration.

Then, once he knew in detail all the shapes of the powder, he would try to combine the different shapes in such a way that it would fit perfectly without any gap in the pill.

The combination was what held the energy once it was finalized. One such combination needed to be duplicable for the rest of the pill as well.

The less gap there was, the better the pill would store energy. So, the shape of the overall combination also needed to be able to come together to make as little gap as possible.

Alex didn't worry about the overall combination, but rather the individual ones which he would have to do manually until he figured out a way to understand the perfect technique he had in his mind.

For that, however, Alex needed to learn the Dao of Technique, which didn't seem like it was going to happen anytime soon.

So, Alex decided to do what he should have done a long time ago. He decided to go buy a Pill forming technique.

After asking a few of the staff, he came to know about a large store owned by a merchant that hosted any and all sorts of techniques.

They let him know that alchemists have also bought pill-forming techniques from there.

Alex remembered pill-forming techniques back in the library of the Hong Wu sect, but those were either Common or Earth rank techniques, something that would never enter his eyes.

Not even his master made him study those as she knew that wasn't necessary. Especially since he had a spiritual sense from the start, so there was no need to use a technique to form a pill.

Most of those techniques were simply meant to find every little bit of the powder and clump it into a ball anyway. The only difference between most would be how they found every little bit.

Alex made his way through the city towards the northwestern side which was where most people entered the city.

So, for the sake of convenience, this area was also the commercial sector of the city while the ones closer to the mountains were treated as the residential area, even though there already was one outside of the walls.

After 20 or so minutes, Alex reached the building that the staff told him about.

The Spring Mist Pavilion.

Alex looked at the tall, pagoda-like building that was equally as wide as it was tall.

It was like a supermarket to his eyes where anything and everything was sold.

Alex went in and looked around only to realize that the ground floor was for common folks that did not cultivate. It consisted of stores that sold food, drinks, clothes, furniture, and every other thing a regular person might require.

Then, Alex noticed a stairway that went to the next floor. After going atop it, Alex finally noticed a slew of cultivators all doing their own things.

The floor seemed to be divided into 6 or so different sections each with massive names hung atop each.

Artifacts and Weapons as well as Cultivation books and techniques took up nearly half the entire area. The rest of it was occupied by Pills, Formations, Talisman, and Miscellaneous.

The very first room he was greeted by was pills to his left and talismans to his right.

Alex chuckled as he realized this was not a random placement and was placed here since most people would regularly come here for these items after all.

Only rarely did anyone want to buy techniques or artifacts when compared to pills and talismans.

Alex curiously walked over to the right where the Miscellaneous store was past the Talisman store and saw that it was full of beasts, paintings, puppets, and various types of treasures that one wouldn't normally find in any of the other sections.

Alex walked past it and the artifacts section to reach the skill section that was on the complete opposite side of the stairs.

As he was walking past the artifacts, Alex saw various items and objects that piqued his interest and he stopped to check.

Swords, spears, shields, armors, amulets, masks, shoes, and various other things were laid in plain sight for everyone to see.

Alex thought of sensing what formations they were possibly using to keep it all safe while so easy to reach and steal, but decided not to.

When he was about to leave, his eyes fell on something that made him stop touch subconsciously touch his left arm.

'Should I get one?' he thought to himself when he saw the fake arm.

Alex was starting to doubt another Blood Spirit Ginseng would become available for him to purchase. The last time one was available to buy, it lasted nearly 4 whole years before someone bought it.

Given such a lack of necessity for the ingredient, it was likely no one would bother selling it. Even if they did, for the sake of speed, they would sell it in auctions.

As a normal person, he couldn't be in every auction in every place at the same time.

Aside from the pill, even the royal princess was losing his trust more and more to fix his arm.

Alex shook his head and got rid of the thoughts. "If I want one, I will get one later," he thought and went to the skill section of the store.

Alex was about to ask for a technique when he noticed something weird. He looked at the various figures standing around the section as well as the people working on it and realized that none of them were in the True realms.

'A coincidence?' he thought.

"Hi, do you have Heaven-grade techniques here?" Alex asked. Immediately, all the people turned to look at him like they had just seen a clown.

"No, dear guest. This floor is only for Common grade techniques. If you want better techniques you will have to go a rank higher," the store clerk said.

Alex said his thanks and left the place to go up a floor again. Once he reached there, he quickly asked to find out that this one was for everything Earth grade only.

Alex had to go one floor above again. Finally, reaching the 4th floor of the pagoda, Alex looked around.

As a pagoda, the pavilion's width got smaller and smaller as it went higher. So, by the time he was on the 4th floor, the total area of the stores had dropped to a third of its original size.

Alex didn't bother with the other 5 and directly went to the room with the books and techniques.

The floor got more majestic and well maintained the higher it went. On this floor, the entire floor was tiled with pristine white marble that Alex could see his reflections on.

The store was also not a mess with customers as there was more staff here than people coming to buy.

The moment Alex arrived a girl walked up to him.

"Whatever you need, honored guest, this He Yin is here to help you," the beautiful store clerk said to him.

"Hi sister Yin, I'm looking for a pill forming technique. Would you guys happen to have one?" Alex asked.

"Pill forming technique? Let me check," the girl said as she brought out a medallion and looked through it.

After a while, she opened her eyes and looked at Alex. "We have 3, honored guests. Let me get them for you," she said.

Alex nodded and watched her go. He found a sofa in the corner and sat there to wait. There were also other people already on it who too seemed to be waiting for their staff to return.

After 5 minutes, He Yin returned with 3 different books in her hand, all of which were sealed with a talisman on top.

Without breaking through the talisman, one couldn't read the book. If it was torn, they would know.

Fortunately, it allowed the buyer to read the technique's name and what it was about.

[Sublime Pill Convergence Technique]

[Earth Aligned technique that creates a small pocket of gravity to move the powder throughout the cauldron, while absorbing all the energy. Once done, it pulls all the powder in the cauldron to immediately form a pill. This technique is usable after you have properly mixed the energy.]

Alex shook his head. This wasn't it.

[Golden Star Pill Forming technique]

[Metal Aligned technique that puts extra metal energy onto the pill and then pulls it into one solid pill before destroying the metal energy. In the process, it also absorbs all the energy in the cauldron. Suitable for after the energy of the ingredients is processed.]

Alex sighed and took the third one, this was his only hope now.

[Summer Breeze Pill Forming technique]

[Wood Aligned technique that used the wind to pull ingredients...]

Alex didn't even bother finishing it when he realized it was the same thing. None of these techniques creators gave a hint of knowing what Combinations and Structures were for a pill.

"Are there any more?" Alex asked.

"I'm afraid this is it, honored guest," He Yin said.

"I see. Thank you," Alex said and turned left. This trip had been a massive waste of time.

He walked over to the stairs to go down when he noticed something he had been too focused to notice before.

There was another staircase that led to a floor above.

Chapter 701 Up the Stairs

Alex saw the stairway to the floor above and couldn't help but wonder if they sold Immortal rank items there.

Immortal rank… Alex hadn't seen anything other than skill books that had such a high rank before.

He had seen high grades for sure, but not high ranks.

Even he had made Immortal grade pills before. Making immortal rank pills, however, was just a dream.

Alex walked up the stairs and just before he reached the next floor, he was stopped by some staff.

"Sorry, fellow Daoist. You cannot go higher than this," the person said.

"I can't?" Alex felt disappointed. He had been expecting a bit too much. "I'm sorry, I thought there was more store up above."

"There is, but not for you," the staff said.

Alex was about to return when he stopped. "Pardon? Do you mean that I'm not allowed up there?" he asked.

"I mean no disrespect, Fellow Daoist, but only someone with a certain level of achievement or reputation can be allowed up there. Or, if you have some strong backing, we can take you on the merit of your backing's strength as well," the staff said.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "I'm a guest Elder at Flowing Brush sect. Does that count?"

"If you can bring back a letter of recommendation by Sect Master Qin, then we can let you enter," the man said.

"Good," Alex said, but he didn't leave. He wasn't going to waste time going back to the sect and coming back. He wanted to enter right now.

"What about Alchemy guild? Does it count as my backing?" Alex asked curiously.

"To a certain extent, yes," the man said. "But this time you will have to bring a high-ranking figure of the guild along with you."

"What counts as high ranking?" Alex asked. "Does this count?"

Alex brought out his True Heaven badge and showed it to the man. The man took a moment to see what it was, and when he did, his eyes went wide.

However, being a professional, he kept the look for maybe a second before removing it. Then, he put on a smile as he said, "Honored Guest, you should have begun with that."

Afterward, the man stepped to the side and left Alex to enter.

Alex entered the top of the stairs and looked around confusedly. There were no shops here at all. Then why did the staff say there was a store here? Alex couldn't make sense of anything.

He noticed a seating area next to a wall with a single person sitting on it. Aside from that, there was another staff guarding the door that lead to a room.

'Is that the store? A room?' Alex thought and walked up to the seating area to sit down.

He decided to wait and see what was going on for a few minutes, so he relaxed in the seating area next to the woman who didn't look like she wanted to speak at all.

After a few minutes, someone wearing Han family robes left the room and the staff by the door softly told the woman to enter.

Alex continued waiting, looking around at the mostly wooden pagoda, and started searching for a staircase.

'Seems like this is the final floor,' he thought. After waiting for maybe 5 or so minutes, the woman finally left the room.

"Honored guest, you may enter," the staff said to him. Alex nodded and entered through the door.

The interior of the room was small and cozy. There was an open window directly opposite the door. In the center of the room was a table surrounded on each side by two sofas, each of which was wide enough for 3 people to sit side to side.

The left sofa was empty, while the right one held an elderly woman with a wrinkled face and white hair.

She had a gentle smile on her face and a terrifying aura of a Saint realm expert.

Her white and blue robes were perfect with no creases at all.

"Ah, a young man. Please come and sit," she said.

Alex nodded with a smile and walked up to sit opposite her.

"May I know your name…" the woman's eyes drifted to his missing left hand and a curious look appeared on her face. "You wouldn't happen to be Yu Ming, would you? The guest elder of Flowing Brush sect, and a True Heaven Alchemist, Formation Master, and Talisman Expert."

"You know about me?" Alex asked with an unhidden tone of shock.
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"It's my job to know about any and all potential customers," the woman said. "You happen to be one of the ones that are high in priority in this city."

"You flatter me a lot, senior," Alex said.

"I don't think you flatter yourself enough," the woman said. "It's not easy to do all of these things when you're not even 25."

Alex was genuinely shocked now. "You know my age too?" he asked with a serious face.

"And about your relationship with True Immortal talisman expert Hei Lin, amongst many other things," the old woman said and looked at the shocked Alex with a smile. "As I said, I need to remain informed about any potential customers."

"It seems like you went a bit overboard with that concept," Alex said.

"Don't worry, young man. Our customer's privacy is very important to us. The information we have, we won't give it to anyone," the woman said.

"You see, someone said the exact same thing to me once. A month later, I had a murder-hungry bastard kidnap me and nearly kill me in the middle of a forest. So, all your talk about privacy and protection doesn't mean shit to me," Alex said and looked at her.

The woman gave a surprised look. "I can promise our stor—"

"How did you find that information?" Alex asked, not giving her the chance to speak.

"Any information is available to buy at certain places," the woman said.

'An intelligence agency huh? Qin Shan did speak to be about those once,' he thought.

"Anyway, let's forget about all this," Alex said. "I came here because I wanted to buy something, but I don't see a store. Was I misled?"

"No you were not, honored guest," the old woman said. "I am the store."

The old woman brought out a few storage bags from her robes and placed them in front of Alex.

With just a simple look, Alex could tell that these were high-grade storage bags, capable of holding at least 10 cubic meters of space.

Some of these may even hold as much as his own storage ring, at least how much of it was available right now.

The old woman brought out two cups and started pouring some steaming, light green liquid into the cups.

"Please have some tea. It's made with the best ingredients our chefs could find," the woman said.

"Thank you," Alex said and drank the tea. As soon as the tea entered his throat, Alex could tell how amazing it was.

Within seconds, he felt like his mind was clear and awake. All the anger and annoyance he had been feeling was gone within moments and he was left with a fresh mind.

"My apologies, I forgot to ask you your name earlier," Alex said.

"It's alright. I am Ga Xueyuan," the old woman said.

"It's good to meet you, senior Ga," Alex said. "So, let's get to business please."

"Yes, what is it that you want to buy from me today?" the woman asked as she brought out some items from her bag.

"A Saint rank sword? Some talisman designs, Pill recipes, formation blueprint, maybe a prosthetic arm? What is it?" Ga Xueyuan asked as she brought forward all the different items.

The moment the items fell into Alex's eyes, they started shining with the bright light of wanting them.

"How do you have Saint rank items here? I thought that was for the floor below," Alex said.

"No, only Common and True rank items are found below. Saint experts don't like wasting time with normal store clerks you see, so I deal with them," The woman said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, you have some amazing items, but that is not what I am here for."

"I am actually looking for a recipe to form pills," Alex said.

"Pill forming recipes? I would have guessed you to already had one given your ability to create Heaven grade pills," the old woman said.

Alex shook his head. "It's a low-tier technique and is unusable now," he said. "So I was hoping you had one, hopefully, an immortal rank too."

The woman looked at him for a moment and at the different items below. Once she became sure that he wasn't buying any of them, she reluctantly reached into one of her bags and pulled out a book.

Once out, she handed the book to Alex. Alex took it and was confused.

"Why is this not sealed?" he asked.

"There's no need to," the woman said. "You will find that Immortal grade skills of any kind are quite hard to remember, let alone learn."

"I see, so you are confident I will neither be able to learn it in the period of time it's in my hand," Alex said.

"That's exactly it," the old woman said.

Alex shook his head and looked down to check the book he had gotten. The outer cover looked quite good, almost pristine.

The yellow color seemed to be a choice rather than the book being old too. Then Alex turned the page and looked at the title of the technique.

[Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations]

Chapter 702 Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations

"Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations, huh? Quite a big name it's got here," Alex said as he read the front of the book with a serious look.

Even without reading very much into it, he could tell that this was it. Still, he continued reading for a little longer until he finished the introduction.

Then, he put the book down and started thinking a bit as he drank the tea. After a minute, he looked at the old woman.

"How much for this?" he asked.

"Only 6 Saint Spirit stones," the woman said.

Alex frowned when he heard that. "6000 True Spirit stones for this?" he asked suspiciously.

"It's not just any book, you know? It's an immortal grade skill book," she said confidently.

Alex frowned a little. He was too used to getting Immortal grade books for free. Having to pay for one just didn't sit right with him.

Also, because of that, he was unaware of how much techniques even cost in the first place.

In fact, if he thought about it, books of Immortal rank should have their cost in Saint spirit stones, not True spirit stones. This was way too cheap when he gave it more than a second's thought.

But, given the lack of resources for the Western continent, maybe this was the appropriate price.

"Fine, 6000 it is," Alex said and brought out a storage bag. Before he brought out the 6000 spirit stones from it, he stopped for a moment and looked at the table.

"Can you tell me more about this?" he asked the woman while pointing at the prosthetic arm. "I assume you put it here because of my condition."

The old woman smiled. "Sure, let me explain it to you," she said and picked up the wooden arm.

"This artifact was created by Yuan Yening, an excellent artificer that works exclusively for our Spiring Mist Pavilion. As you can see, it is modeled after a real human arm, and can change its shape or size depending on your wish, although it will take some time so that won't be useful in a fight," the old woman said.

"What will be useful is the fact that it is made up of materials that are perfectly capable of conducting Qi without any resistance. And it works with each and every type of Qi, aside from the ones that aren't natural of course," the woman said. "But I suppose you won't be using Blood Qi or some such."

"What grade is this?" Alex asked.

"Saint Earth grade," the woman said.

"Then it must cost a lot," Alex asked.

"Is another 8000 True Spirit stones a lot to you?" the woman asked.

Alex smiled and handed her the 6000 spirit stones. "It seems I am capable of only buying the book for now," he said.

"You can come for the arm any other time you like. I doubt anyone will require it very soon," the old woman said.

Alex nodded and left after taking the book.

The woman sat for a while doing nothing as she knew there was no one waiting outside the door. She looked at the items in front of her and then at the teacup that Alex had drank from.

It was empty. A curious look appeared on her face as she brought out a talisman that contained Alex's information. There, she added a single piece of information.

"Has incredible mental strength and won't succumb to normal mental influence."

* * * * *

It had been 7 days since Alex had returned home, so he decided to go home for today and learn the technique in private.

Pearl and his mother welcomed him back and they talked for a while. Alex told her exactly what was going on in the guild as well as his trip to the Spring Mist Pavilion.

"Oh, you need some money? Master gave me some a few days ago. He said it was your money," she said and brought out some spirit stones that Qin Shan had handed to her for the many pills Alex had made for him before going to the poison swamp.

"It's fine. You can keep it for now," Alex said. "I'll go learn this new technique now," Alex said and left the room.

Back in his house, Alex brought out the book and started learning it.

As he started reading, he understood what it mean. He flipped through the pages as he finished reading it all in under 10 minutes and in no more than 5 more minutes comprehended it all.

Now, he just needed to practice it on some things. So, he brought out his cauldron and a few ingredients to test it out.

To begin with, he decided to make common rank pills as his priority was to get used to the technique first.

When the cauldron heated up, one by one, Alex put in the different ingredients.

Although he was testing out the technique, Alex wasn't making some random pill, however. It was one of the pills that he had changed the recipe to before he knew how it could be done.

After getting to the True realms, the Alchemy God's Knowledge skill had allowed him to have a knack for finding flaws in a recipe for common pills simply based on instincts.

He didn't need that now with how he had learned to fix the recipe on his own, but this one was much faster than the other one and required far less use of ingredients.

Alex could fix the recipe in a day and it would be nearly as good as what he could do in 2 weeks.

However, the only reason he didn't use it any longer was that it could only be used for Common pills. Also, it wouldn't be as perfect as the manual one.

Once the energy and the powder were ready to combine, Alex used the technique. As he circulated the technique, neutral Qi escaped from him and lingered in the air, waiting.

Alex nodded to himself as he knew this would happen. He then reached into the cauldron with his spiritual sense and started finding the different shapes of the powder, and used the technique to put them together.

Once he did, the technique then automatically followed what he did to as many things as possible. His Qi would go through the cauldron find the many different powders and try to make the same shape as he did.

Once the powders were combined to form as many individual combinations as possible, Alex used Elemental Guidance to move the energy in the cauldron into it.

Then, once everything was done, all Alex had to do was use the other technique in the book to form a sphere with the pre-combined powders.

That was perhaps the easiest part of the whole task. The powders underwent a revolution around the cauldron as they came together to form a single pill out of the many combined powders.

With a wave of his hand, Alex brought out the ready pill and stared at it.

"65%?" he thought as he looked at it. "Did I mess up that much? I must've left it in the cauldron for too long while I made that first combination then," he thought.

This being the first time he was using the technique, he didn't expect it to become an Immortal grade pill.

Still, he expected it to come close to it. This was far from that.

"Guess I will have to train in it a bit longer then," Alex thought and started making more of the same pills as well as the other pills.

The more he used the technique, the more familiar got with its who aspect. It didn't take him long to realize that there were ways to make the process easier on himself.

Alex made 3 types of pills in his process to train and experiment with this technique.

The first type was pills whose recipes were unaltered.

The second type was pills whose recipes he had altered but didn't know the shapes of the powder.

Last were the pills whose recipes he had altered and also knew the shapes of the pill as well as the combinations.

After experimenting with these different pills, he had come to learn quite a lot about his new technique.

First of all, it was imperative that he knew the shapes of the powder. It didn't matter how good the recipe was if he couldn't turn it into a pill fast enough and instead let the powder burn away.

Second of all, while the technique was incredible, far better than simply randomly making the powders into a pill. It couldn't hold a candle to the pill formation technique in his Pill-splitting technique, which was capable of forming the most efficient pill on its own.

Lastly was perhaps the biggest problem with this technique. It used all the powder in the cauldron. On the surface, that looked like it was working perfectly, but most of the time, you didn't want to use all the powders.

If there were excess powder in a pill that didn't have other powders to combine with, you ran the risk of creating asymmetry, which would reduce the effectiveness of the pill even if it held all the energy it could, to begin with.

So, if Alex wanted to make the perfect pill, he needed to make sure he had the perfect amount of ingredients from the start. For that, he would have to get rid of even the tiniest bit of extra material from the ingredients before they went into the pot.

Once he did that, the result Alex received were much better than earlier.

In fact, with pills of the third type, he was starting to touch on the Immortal grade.

Chapter 703 Negligence

1 week later.

Alex sat in an alchemy room in the guild and focused as well as he could while making the pill.

For the pill that improved one's Earth spiritual roots, Alex still had 4 more ingredients to gather. So, in the last week, he only had two ingredients to work with, which he did easily in a single day.

The rest of the week, he had worked on the other ingredients for the other pill he was making.

He had finished it finally last night and had spent the rest of the night thinking of the perfect combination for it.

Now, it was time to make that pill.

Remembering the combination, Alex sent his spiritual sense into the cauldron and started using his new technique to combine the individual particles.

Once his Qi knew what to do, it started working on its own. Soon, his cauldron was full of the combined powder and all that was left was putting the energy into the powder.

This was the part Alex had to be very careful with. The resulting element of this pill was very, very volatile and could explode on his face if he wasn't careful.

The balance between the elements could be disturbed by the slightest fluctuation, so he very slowly started to push the energy into the powder.

Alex found this to be one of the most frustrating pills to make all because of the volatility of the pill.

After what felt like a very long time, Alex finally managed to put all the energy into the powder without making it explode.

Then, all that was left was to use the final technique and form the pill.

Alex opened the lid and pulled out the pill from inside. However, he didn't look at the pill's quality at all. The very first thing he checked was how it worked.

He closed his eyes and used his senses to surround the pill and feel the subtle changes in the air around it.

Even as he held it, the pill was reacting to the slight yang aura that was coming out of it and making it disappear.

The fire Qi from the furnace was also slowly mixing with the constantly escaping energy of the pill and disappearing.

Alex took the pill and walked out into the hallway. The guild staff walked by, but no one bothered him at all.

Alex sensed the Qi in the surrounding suddenly change from only Fire and Yang to any and all. One by one, as they gathered around the pill, they would also disappear from it.

Alex smiled when he sensed that. "It's working," he thought and walked out to the front hall to sense the pill some more.

People watched curiously as he walked out, but Alex didn't give them any thought. His attention was only on the pill and being in a new environment to check the pill's reaction to the environment.

Slowly, the reactions started to get weaker and weaker. Alex was now watching how long it would last.

"Alchemist Yu," someone spoke from the corner of the hall, but Alex didn't hear it.

"ALCHEMIST YU!" another person shouted, jolting Alex awake. He turned around and saw Han Daiyu with her hands next to her mouth as she was ready to shout again.

Next to her was Liang Qiu. Both of them looked ever so elegant, only that Han Daiyu also had a hint of barbaric tendencies.

"Sister Han, Sister Liang, what are you two doing here? Do you need a pill?" Alex asked as he walked over.

"No, we're here to talk to you about the progress on the pill," Liang Qiu asked.

"Oh, it's going alright. I'm just waiting for the last 4 ingredients. I have about 40 each, but I should be able to start today or tomorrow for it," Alex said.

"Oh, and what's this pill?" she asked, looking at the white pill in his hand.

"Oh, it's something I made just now. It's an important pill," Alex said, not explaining much.

"Should you keep a pill out in the open like that? Won't the customer get angry at you?" she asked.

Alex's attention slowly went back to his pill to see if the energy in it was gone or not. "It's not for the customer. I made it for myself," he said.

"Then why not eat it?" she asked.

"This is the first time I made it. It took over a week to get here, so I want to see how the pill works outside," he said in an absentminded tone.

"What? You've been working on this pill for over a week? What about ours?" she asked.

"I'm working on that. Still need that 4 ingredients," he said.

"How long has it been since you worked on it?" Han Daiyu asked.

"Almost a week," Alex said without thinking much as all of his attention was on the very faint aura of the pill that was close to disappearing.

"WHAT?!" Liang Qiu shouted, garnering looks from everyone in the hall. "You haven't worked on our pills for a week? Alchemist Yu, we trusted you to make our pills," she said.

Alex's attention nearly wavered, but he kept it on the pill. "I know, but this pill is important as well," he said as he finally saw the last little aura of the pill dissipate away.

"How is your pill more important than ours?" Liang Qiu got mad. "We gave you a job, that means you do our work. Alchemist Yu, please don't neglect our work, or we will be forced to go elsewhere with the work."

Alex clutched his pill and finally looked up at the fuming face of Liang Qiu. "Sister Liang, I can assure you, I have not neglected your pill for a single moment," he said.

"Oh yeah? Then what is this pill?" she said, pointing to his palm.

"As I said, this is important," Alex said.

"Doesn't matter if it is important," Liang Qiu said. "Only thing that matters is you neglected our pill for the sake of making yours."

Alex's face frowned a little as she finally got on his nerve.

So, he reached into his storage bag and brought out a pill bottle with a single pill inside of it.

He handed the pill over to Liang Qiu and waited.

The fuming Liang Qiu looked confused now. "What is this?" she asked.

"An almost Immortal grade True pill. That's for you to eat," Alex said.

Liang Qiu opened up the stopper and looked inside. "What does it do?" she asked.

"I don't know. Can be a good pill or a bad one. Can be a healing pill or a poison pill. Can make you the most beautiful woman in the whole world, or can turn you into a man," Alex said. "Eat it and find out."

Liang Qiu hesitated, as anyone would. "I'm not eating this," she said.

"Why not?" Alex asked.

"Because I don't know what this does," she said.

"Ah, I see. Well let me make something up then," Alex said as he gave a thinking expression. "Yes, this pill helps improve your Wood Spiritual root."

Liang Qiu frowned. "Are you mocking me, Alchemist Yu?" she asked.

"No. Do you not trust me?" Alex asked.

"Of course not," she said.

Alex took one step forward. "Then why do you trust the words of a demon that lived thousands of years ago, and wanted nothing but to destroy humans? Why do you trust the words of someone that doesn't even know how pills work?" he asked.

"That… I…" Liang Qiu couldn't speak. "Are you saying the recipe is false?"

"No," Alex said. "I'm saying there's a possibility it is false. The pill does seem to do what it says it does, but if there's the slightest chance it does something else, I cannot let you or anyone else take it."

"So? What are we supposed to do? Find a scapegoat for us and feed it?" Liang Qiu asked.

"Yes," Alex said with a smile. "Except I'm not a horrible person to test a random pill on another human being."

"Then?" she asked.

"Then I am going to test it on myself," Alex said.

"What?" Han Daiyu finally spoke from the side. She had been watching Liang Qiu get angry and had let her handle it, but this tangent of the conversation made her speak up.

"You will test on yourself? Didn't you just say it was dangerous?" she asked.

"Yes, it is," Alex said. "But I have a way to make it less dangerous."

"How?" Liang Qiu asked.

"This," Alex finally opened his closed fist and showed the white pill to her again.

"What is this?" she asked.

"True Nullifying Pill. If taken immediately after eating a pill, it can revert the effects of the pill."

"Only caveat is that you must eat this pill within the first five minutes of making this. I made this nearly 7 minutes ago, so this pill is a dud now. But, I will make a better one later," he said to her.

Liang Qiu looked at him with a shocked expression. "You are going that far for the job?" she asked.

"Sister Liang, I told you from the very beginning, that the only thing holding me up is the lack of ingredients. As soon as I get them, I will make your pill."

"And for the sake of making sure the pill is in fact safe, I also worked on the True Nullifying pill," he said.

Then he looked Liang Qiu straight in the eye with a confident look in his own.

"As I said, I have not neglected your pill even once. Everything I did for the past 2 weeks, and everything I do for the next week, all of it is going to be for your pill."

Chapter 704 Heat

Once the girls apologized and left, Alex went to the reception to see if he could buy the ingredients.

Fortunately for him, there were more ingredients available for one of 4 remaining ingredients. Immediately, he bought those and waited for them to get transferred to the guild later on.

It took him exactly 3 days to gather everything he needed and two more to finish working on them.

For the next 3 days, He did nothing but study the different shapes of the powder he could produce.

Finally, after exactly 20 days, Alex had done it all. Now, all that was left was to make the pill.

To say that he was nervous was to understate it. He was scared. This was not only a very important pill, but it was also a pill that was going to make or break his relationship with one of the greatest sects and one of the greatest families of the empire.

Also, the reputation he could gain from this was so substantial that he may even be able to find a way to make them search for the ginseng.

Alex took a deep breath and began thinking about all the ways this could go wrong.

His Yang Qi could cause trouble when making the pill. Except, he had already taken care of it using what few Yin element poisons he had managed to find in the Poison Swamp from last time.

His control of heat could be a problem. With the Flame Mastery Scripture, it was amazing. It could be better, but that would mean he would have to be perfect with it.

His cauldron could be better. The Golden Jade cauldron of his that he had been using for the last 3 or so years was a True Earth artifact. Meaning, that there were many other cauldrons that he could find and they would be much better than this.

In fact, he had enough money to go buy a Saint Earth cauldron if he wanted to. But he didn't. This one held a sentimental value that no other cauldron could replace.

Unless push came to shove, he wouldn't budge from his stance of not changing the cauldron.

The ingredients could cause problems if they were bad, but Alex had made sure to use the ones with lesser age for his experimentation and kept the ones with greater age for the pills.

That way, he could guarantee that the pill would have the best of the best ingredients to work with. Also, he was going to weigh them on a formation before using them just to make sure everything is right.

He had the best technique he could use to make those pills as perfect as he could make it, so that side was taken care of too.

Finally, the problem could be the recipe itself. Only, there was no way the recipe would be a problem. After all, having spent the entire night on the recipe alone, Alex knew that it was perfection itself.

Once he was sure there was nothing that could be improved and nothing could go wrong, he began.

Once the cauldron was heated enough, Alex put in the first ingredient. Without missing a beat, he started moving it around the cauldron as per his recipe.

Once that was ready, he changed the temperature of the cauldron in an instant and put in the second one.

Then the third one, then the fourth one, all the way to the last one.

He processed the final ingredient and turned it into powder as well.

Then came the time to turn it into a pill, so Alex started by using the Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations technique to bring out his Qi.

Once it was out and hovered around the powder, Alex started to combine the ingredients to make a single particle.

Then, his technique worked on its own to combine the rest of the powder as well. Once that was done, Alex quickly used Elemental Guidance to pour the energy into the combined particles.

Afterward, he used the technique to combine the many particles into a single pill. Alex turned down the heat the moment the pill was formed and opened the lid to bring it out.

He put it in his hands and instantly knew how good the pill was.

76%.

An Immortal grade pill.

Alex frowned.

He really wanted to be happy about it. After all, this was one of the best pills anyone in this Empire had seen until now. But for some reason, he just couldn't bring himself to think of it as good.

He had made Immortal grade pills before when practicing the technique previously, so getting one again didn't bring him the same happiness as it once would.

Having done so much preparation before this, he had expected something better to come out of this.

He sighed. "It's only the first one. No need to get hopeless," he told himself and prepared the next set of ingredients.

Once ready, Alex made the pill once more, and once more, he couldn't get the result he desired.

"How can I do better?" Alex thought to himself. "Is there any way?"

The recipe was perfect. The ingredients were the best they could be. So was his technique.

His Yang Qi was under control so that wasn't the issue at all.

If anything, the only thing he could improve on was the cauldron. But how could he? That was something his master gave him. Did he really need to change it?

"No, that's not the only thing I can improve," Alex thought as he put on a strange face.

There was indeed one more thing he could improve. But could he? Could he turn what was already nigh perfect, into something perfect?

"I have to try," Alex thought and stared into the fire. Or more accurately, Alex started looking into the temperature of the fire, and its heat.

All this time that Alex had made pills, he had been content with his control of fire. After all, what better could he have asked for?

But now, he wanted more. He needed more.

But then again, how could he get more than what he already had? How could he gain better control at Heat?

Heat… what was heat exactly?

If he remembered the science lessons his mother taught him, Heat was one of the forms of energy and one of the fundamental truths of the world.

Heat was the energy stored in a body, manifesting itself as temperature.

Heat was the energy that moved from one thing to another based on the difference in their temperature.

As Alex stared more and more into the fire, he started understanding even more.

Temperature couldn't exist without the concept of heat. Hotness was just the presence of a lot of heat. Coldness was just the lack of heat.

Alex's eyes stared at the fire, but his mind was somewhere else by now.

If he wanted a fire to lower its temperature, he had to take the heat away. If he wanted to increase its temperature, he had to put energy into it.

As Alex thought more and more about it, he soon fell into a trance.

Outside the guild, energy stirred in the air as the worldly laws started to slowly descend onto the ground.

In Heaven's peak school, Shangguan Quan was standing in front of a massive rock that was carved with a spear strike.

The wound on the rock had such an intense Spear intent to it, that Quan felt like he was going to be cut to pieces by it.

Suddenly, he was forced to look to the side as the disturbance nearby caught his attention.

Han Hongqi was the only member of the family that stayed in the ancestral home for now. Most of the other members were in the capital, enjoying their life.

He was cultivating his Earth Demon physique when he too felt a disturbance in the natural law, forcing him to stop and stare outside.

Ga Xueyuan's attention flickered away from her customer as she was forced to look outside with a confused look.

'Was there another Saint realm expert in the city?' she wondered. 'Must be quite lucky to learn a new law while breaking through.'

Then she went back to speaking with her client.

Every other saint realm expert noticed the laws descending, but not a single one of them even considered the possibility of it being someone else aside from a Saint realm expert.

As such when Alex opened his eyes, fully understanding the Dao of Heat, not a single person came to bother him for the disturbances.

Chapter 705 Finishing the Pill

Alex opened his eyes and they shined brightly with enlightenment.

He slowly moved his hands forward and the fire responded to his will. With a single thought, Qi moved out of him of its own volition, and the Qi in the air moved to the fire too.

Not even a moment late, the fire grew hotter by nearly 200 degrees. This was incredible.

Usually, no matter how fast, there was a gradual increase in temperature. With Alex, it was quite a bit fast thanks to the Flame Mastery technique and also very accurate.

However, now it was instant. The amount of time it took for the temperature to change was the same amount of time it took for the Qi in his body to leave.

For a person who had gone through Mortal Cleansing and had improved his meridians through constant training for over 2 years, releasing his Qi was everything but an instant.

Unfortunately, that didn't help him in Alchemy as much as he would have wanted it to. Having an accurately hot fire was never the problem at all.

After all, the temperature of the fire was never what mattered. It was the temperature of the cauldron rather that defined how an ingredient was going to behave.

However, the Dao of Heat didn't simply extend to fire itself. It extended to everything that existed and had heat, no matter how low.

So, when Alex tried it, he realized that even without the existence of fire itself, he could heat up the cauldron to the required temperature, and he could do it instantly.

Unfortunately, he still needed the fire. Changing temperature was one thing, but keeping it constant, however, was completely different.

The amount of focus and Qi he would require to make a pill without using fire was way too high.

So, in the end, Alex still needed the fire. Still, these two things together had already made an incredible difference for his alchemy going forward.

So, once he was done learning how to manipulate heat, he started making the pills once more.

He heated up the cauldron but that took no time at all. The moment he thought about it, the cauldron was ready for the first ingredient.

Alex put in the ingredient and started processing it. Once he was done with it, he put in the second ingredient.

Before the second ingredient even finished falling through the cauldron, both the temperature of the cauldron and the fire switched to the required amount instantly and he processed the 2nd ingredient too.

Then the third and the fourth.

After all 16 ingredients had been processed with almost no time in between them, he started forming the different combinations and soon afterward finished forming the pill.

Once the pill was ready, Alex brought it back out.

80%.

"Holy shit!" he thought to himself. This was definitely one of the best pills he had ever made.

Still, for some reason, he thought he could do better.

* * * * * *

After making about 10 more of the pills, Alex finally ran out of ingredients to make any more.

He stopped and went forward to complete the next set of steps he needed to take before passing along the pill back to the two girls.

So, he started making the True Nullifying pill.

Alex needed to be very careful with this pill as it was extremely volatile. So, he took as long as it required him to make the pill.

Right when he used the technique to form the pill, Alex took out a 75% Harmony pill from the one he made before he acquired the Dao of Heat and ate it without a second thought.

Even as the pill went down his esophagus, Alex needed to make a decision. He could either convert it into Qi or have the pill take effect.

Since he was testing the pill, he let it take effect.

Just as the pill started dissolving in his stomach, the True Nullifying pill was ready.

At the same time, Alex employed the Jade Skin technique as that was the only earth technique he could use at the moment.

Alex took the True Nullifying pill and waited a few seconds before he took it.

The moment he felt his Jade Skin technique get even the slightest bit better, he immediately at the True Nullifying pill.

Instantly, he felt hollow. As if he was a bubble that had just popped.

The energy that was in fact affecting his body was immediately destroyed and what little effect it had on his roots was also eliminated.

When it all passed away, and he started feeling normal again, he had the widest smile imaginable.

He had done it. He had not only made the pill but also made sure that it was an actual pill that improved one's Spirit roots.

It was not a harmful pill at all. He could now give it safely to the two girls that had given him the recipe.

Of course, he hadn't done the testing for those two. It did help to get on their good side, but their safety was never his concern. He could simply make them the pill and be done with it.

It was not even his own safety that made him take the True Nullifying pill's approach.

It was the thought of his mother eating this pill that made him want to test it before letting her have it.

Alex knew how great his body was. Anything his body deemed harmful, it destroyed, leaving not even a trace of it.

As such, if the pill he ate did do something bad, his body could handle it. However, his mother had no such body.

Alex had been worried from the start. What if he gave her the pill and it turned out to be a bad one? He couldn't imagine the thought of giving her some pill that he didn't know about.

That was the one and only reason he decided to test the pill.

Now that he had done it, he could happily go ahead and give it to her. So finally, after who knew how long, Alex left the alchemy room and walked out.

* * * * * * *

It was early morning when Alex returned back to his home to rest. The mental fatigue of working non-stop for a week and then comprehending a dao had left him feeling tapped out.

So, he spent the next whole day simply cultivating and resting.

The morning after that, Alex opened his eyes and brought out one of the better pills to eat and improve his spiritual root.

The moment he ate the pill, he could feel the roots getting better. He didn't know if that was some sort of placebo effect or not, but once he used the Jade Skin technique, it was perfectly clear that his Earth Spiritual root had been improved, albeit not by a lot.

At least, not when compared to the Supreme Spiritual roots that his Metal and Yang roots had become.

Once he was done, Alex left his house and went over to his mother's house to give her the same pill.

They talked for a while before Alex needed to leave. He needed to visit both the Heaven's Peak school and the Han Ancestral family home to deliver the pill.

However, just to be sure that he didn't have to do that, he went to the guild, hoping to see the two girls.

To his surprise, they were in fact there. Alex was glad he came by here first.

"Sister Liang, Sister Han, I'm glad to see the both of you," Alex said.

"Alchemist Yu, where were you? You made us wait for so long," Liang Qiu said.

"My apologies, were you waiting on me for a long time?" Alex asked.

"For you to make the pill, yes. For you to come out of the room? No," Liang Qiu said. "We got some of our junior disciples to come here and stake you out. The moment you left, they let us know and we came here first thing in the morning."

"I see, well I'm glad that you came here because you are just in time," Alex said and pulled out two pill bottles from his storage bag and handed them over.

"Your pills are ready," Alex said.

The girls opened the bottle and saw the dark brown pill. "Is it safe to eat?" Liang Qiu said.

"Yes," Alex said. "It does do what it says it does."

"I see," Liang Qiu said. "Then I hope you won't mind if I check the pill's harmony."

Alex smiled back. "Go ahead."

Chapter 706 Fighter

Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu both brought out pill testers and proceeded to put their pill into them.

Alex waited as they watched the fog around their testers start to grow. Even Alex got a little curious about it.

He wanted to know if the tester was in fact accurate around higher percentages. After all, the testers themselves were formations with not a lot of Efficiency to them.

The girls watched as the fog reached 50% and continued to grow without stopping. Of course, they knew the pill was going to be better than that, so they patiently waited.

As the fog grew past 60%, they finally showed signs of nervousness. From the pills they had seen before, around 65% to 70% was the best they could hope for.

If Alex was lucky, he would have reached 75% even. They wanted him to be lucky.

Soon, the percentage grew past 65%, and with each increase after that, they watched in fear as they half-expected the fog to stop growing.

However, it wasn't going to do that. The fog continued to grow and soon went past 70%. Still, it did not stop.

The girls were stunned beyond belief. They thought they would be able to see it now, something they had never seen before.

An Immortal grade True Pill.

Finally, when the fog hit 75%, their face was a sight to see. It was fortunate that they were in the corner of the hall, very early in the morning.

Otherwise, a lot of people would've noticed their faces and would've definitely been interested in what they were seeing.

"Alchemist Yu, you… you are an Immortal rank alchemist now?" Han Daiyu asked with a shocked face.

"No," Alex said. "You need to make more than just a single type of pill to become an Immortal alchemist I believe."

"But since you made this, you should be able to make others too right?" Liang Qiu asked.

"Of course," Alex said. "But I will hope you keep this a secret for now. I don't want people coming to me expecting an Immortal grade pill. After all, you saw how time-consuming it is to make this pill."

"If that is what you want," Liang Qiu said. "Still, I can't believe you were able to make a pill that reached 75% in ha—"

Her words stuck in her mouth as her eyes widened once more when she saw the static number on the tester.

She had assumed that the tester would stop when it reached 75%, so she had begun speaking, but who would've thought it would increase so much.

Han Daiyu too quickly stared at her own tester and then at Liang Qiu's. Both of their pills had the same Harmony.

Together, they spoke in a very serious voice.

"83%".

"How?" Liang Qiu asked.

"3 weeks, sister Liang. That's how," Alex said. "Also, I had to improve on 2 other things aside from the pill recipe itself. That was how I was able to improve the pill past Immortal grade."

"This is incredible!" she said. "I don't know how I can ever repay you for this."

Alex shook his head. "You don't have to pay me anything for those two pills. Consider it my payment for bringing such an incredible pill recipe to me," he said.

"What? But we do need to pay you," Liang Qiu said.

"Ah, I believe you misheard me," Alex said. "I don't need any payment for those two pills. Yes. But I suppose you would want to buy these pills too, right?" he asked as he brought out a storage bag.

"What's that?" Liang Qiu asked as her spiritual sense slowly entered it and saw what was inside.

"There are 12 pills in there," she said with a hint of shock in her voice. "Are those all…?"

"Yes, they are the same pill. Although they aren't as good as the one I gave you, they are still Immortal Rank," Alex said. "So… will you buy them?"

"How much?" the girls didn't even need to say yes.

"Your wish," Alex gave them the reins.

5 minutes later, Alex was about 3000 True Spirit stones richer. Each one of those 12 pills was sold to the girls for at least 200 True Spirit stones, which Alex was quite happy about.

"Thank you, Alchemist Yu," the girls said. "We would like to come to you whenever we need something again."

"Sure," Alex said with a smile. "But this time you might have to go through protocol." Alex pointed to the reception.

"Of course," the girls said.

"Oh yeah, one more thing," Alex said. "I don't doubt that you will be showing these pills to your elders and they will want to rope me in. Please tell them I am not interested."

"Nothing they can give me will interest me at all to join you guys. Sure we can have a friendly relationship, but I won't be joining at all," he said.

"I see. I will pass along the message then," the girls said. "Once again, thank you, Alchemist Yu."

After that, the girls left, leaving Alex alone with the newly acquired money.

He added that money to some he got from his mother this morning and a smile crept on his face.

"Screw this," he thought. "I'm not staying armless anymore."

* * * * * *

Alex showed off his new arm to his mother and Pearl.

"It looks quite real," Helen said as she stared at his arm.

"Why are you joking, mother? It looks nothing like a real arm," Alex said as he looked at the puppet-like arm.

"Oh, I thought you wanted to hear that," she said.

"No, I'm just showing off my new arm. This should help me for the next… what? 10 years it might take me to reach Saint realm?" he said.

"It will take you 10 years to reach Saint realm?" Helen asked and started counting in her mind.

"You have to breakthrough 24 more times to reach Saint realm. If you hurry, at 1 month per breakthrough, it will only take you 2 years," Helen said.

Alex shook his head. "That's impossible. At my current cultivation base, advancing once every month is too risky. Even once every 2 months is barely acceptable."

"It has to be close to 3 months per breakthrough, that being for my current realms. As I break through more, I will need to put in more and more distance between each breakthrough," Alex said.

"Even the best of the best disciples from the great sects, who get all the resources one can find, don't go over less than 9 different in 3 years."

"Han Daiyu broke through maybe 5 times in the last 3 years, and Liang Qiu broke through a similar amount too," Alex said. "So, I know I can't rush myself through this."

"Alright, alright," Helen said. "What are you going to do now then? Wasn't your original plan to find ingredients for your arm? Now that you seem to not want an actual arm anymore, what do you want to do?"

"That's where you're wrong, mother," Alex said. "I still want my arm, and I will take opportunities if they show themselves for me to get my arm back."

"But I can't keep waiting for it to show up. I need an arm for the times when I will need them," Alex said. "Especially because I use a sword that won't take my Qi in at all, I need an extra arm to use my techniques when I fight or use another sword side by side."

"I see," Helen said solemnly. "So you really take fighting with such high regard, huh?"

"I have to, mother," Alex said with a serious face as well. "This is not the world we lived in where the law protected the weak. No, this is the world where the strong live and the weak die."

"If I can't become strong and defeat those that come after us, I can't protect you, I can't protect myself."

"I already lost someone because I was weak before… I don't want to go through that again," Alex said.

"I see," Helen said with a sad look on her face. "It took me a while to realize, but now I do. My son that left his house to go study in the university is no more."

Alex's heart stung a bit when he heard that and a single tear dropped from the edges of his eyes. "I'm sorry, mother. I have become someone you hate."

"Nonsense!" Helen shouted. "I don't hate you. I could never hate you. What I hate is this world that forced my sweet little boy to become a fighter just to protect himself. That is what is hate."

More tears streamed down Alex's eyes as he involuntarily went to hug his mother. Helen took him with open arms.

"I'm a fighter too, and a sweet little boy," Pearl said from the side, bringing a bit of chuckle into both of the human's silent cries.

"Come," Helen called Pearl and hugged him too.

After their emotions faded away, Helen asked, "What do you want to do now then? You don't need to force yourself to learn talisman, formations, or even alchemy."

"You won't be searching for a way to get your arm back either. So what do you want to do now?" Helen asked.

"I… I think I will focus on my cultivation for now," Alex said. "I will have to train a lot for that. I might need to visit the Eastern mountains a lot."

"Why the Eastern mountains?" Helen asked. "What's wrong with fighting against normal people?"

"Where would I find normal people to figh— Wow, how did I not think of that before?" he said to himself.

Helen smiled. "I will talk to master later."

Chapter 707 Training

"This is the training hall we use for disciples to train in," Qin Shan said as he gave Alex a tour of the place where he would be training.

"Does this suit you?" he asked.

Alex looked at the wide and open room with enough space for him to maneuver around as he trained.

"Yes, this will be perfect," Alex said. "But there's another problem."

"What? What's wrong with this room?" Qin Shan asked.

"Not with the room, sect master," Alex said. "With the fighters."

"What's wrong with my fighters?" Qin Shan asked.

"I feel a little awkward fighting with people that may spread rumors of my ability," Alex said.

"Do you know a lot of techniques?" Qin Shan asked

"Not techniques… exactly," Alex said. "You'll understand when you see me fight."

"Alright, how about if I make them swear to secrecy?" Qin Shan asked.

"Will that matter? How do we make sure they keep their promise?" Alex asked.

"No, we make them make an oath to the heavens. That way if they do break it, they will suffer Qi deviation at best, and lose their soul at worst," Qin Shan said.

"What?" Alex looked a little shocked. "You can do that?"

"Did you not know?" Qin Shan asked.

"I don't think anyone in the Crimson Empire knows about this. If they do, nothing is public," he said.

"Well, if you make an oath to the heavens, it forms a seal on your spirit. If you break the oath, the seal damages your spirit," Qin Shan said. "That will be enough to keep your secret right?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Alright, I will call someone who's free to train with you," Qin Shan said and brought out a talisman, but Alex instantly spoke up.

"Only those in the True King realm," he said.

"Okay, only those in the True King re— wait what?" Qin Shan turned around to give a confused look. "Did you misspeak? You mean True Lord realm right?"

Alex shook his head. "There's a reason I'm going so far as to get them to make an oath, sect master," Alex said.

Qin Shan's face quickly got serious and he whispered to Alex. "Are you saying you can fight True King realm cultivators?" he asked.

"Yes, or rather, I can beat every other True Lord realm without any problem," Alex said.

"Oh, now I'm curious how strong you are," Qin Shan said and quickly called over someone.

Not even 5 minutes later, a young man who seemed to be in his late 20s appeared in front of Alex. From what Alex could see, the young man was likely not young at all, but rather in his late 30s.

His cultivation base was at True King 2nd realm.

"Yes, sect master," the man arrived next to Qin Shan.

"Yao Bai, meet the guest elder Yu Ming," Qin Shan said.

"Ah, you must be sister Hei Lin's son. It's nice to meet you, elder Yu Ming," the man said respectfully, even though he was the elder here in terms of age.

"Hello," Alex gave a sincere greeting.

"What am I doing here, sect master?" Yao Bai asked.

"You're fighting him, a practice match," Qin Shan said.

"Uhh…" Yao Bai looked around. "Fight?"

"His idea," Qin Shan gave a shrug. "But first, you must swear an oath to the heavens that you will not reveal anything that happens in this room to anyone else."

"What? An oath?" Yao Bai was scared. "Sect master, I…"

"Relax, it's a one-way oath, and you only need to keep a secret of whatever happens here," Qin Shan said.

Alex brought out a pill from his storage bag as an incentive and threw it to Yao Bai. "Make the oath and you can get more of those pills for free," he said.

"This is?" Yao Bai opened the pill bottle.

"It will help improve your speed of cultivation by nearly 60%," Alex said.

"What?" Yao Bai looked back. "Okay, I will swear."

Yao Bai immediately stood straight and said, "I swear to the heavens that I will not reveal whatever I witness in this room today and will keep it a secret until I am given the permission by guest elder himself."

Alex felt a faint movement of Qi and air in the surroundings and felt something else move upon Yao Bai.

Yao Bai shuddered a bit and shook himself free of the feeling. "Done," he said.

"We can begin," Qin Shan said.

Alex moved over to one side of the training hall and waited for Yao Bai to do so. Once they were both in position, Qin Shan moved over to the side and waited for them to begin fighting.

The fight started when Alex sent out a simple Iron Fist punch with barely any effort in it.

It flew fast, but slow enough for Yao Bai to dodge. Only then did the fight officially begin.

Yao Bai's brought out a metal rope from his storage bag and got ready to fight.

'A metal whip?' Alex wondered when he saw that and noticed something at the end of the whip. There was a sharp dagger on the end of the whip.

'A dagger whip?' Alex thought. He had never seen a weapon like this before.

A shield appeared from Alex's storage bag and hovered around him, constantly moving around to protect him from the attacks.

Alex didn't bring out a weapon of his own. After all, this was the time for him to test his fake arm for the first time.

Yao Bai swung the metal rope and sent the dagger going his way. Magically, the rope extended and hit the side of his shield.

Alex heard a bang and knew it was time to go fight. He dashed forward to attack his opponent, but Yao Bai suddenly stepped on his expended metal rope, and the dagger attached to the end of it came flying back towards Alex.

Alex didn't give much care. The shield moved behind him in time and stopped it. At the same time, Alex dashed forward and punched the man.

The man stretched his rope and caught Alex's punch. However, he was pushed back a little as he hadn't expected him to be so strong.

His eyes went wide immediately and he sent out a long part of the rope around Alex's right side.

Then, he pulled and Alex was suddenly constricted.

"Give up!" the man said, thinking he caught Alex, but Alex only smiled.

The next instant, Alex disappeared, appearing next to the man. He then punched as hard as he could and the man took it with his body.

Alex felt something hard and knew the man was wearing armor. But still, he was sent flying back as he hadn't defended the attack at all.

The man stumbled, caught himself, and got back up just in time to see Alex jump towards him.

The man suddenly spun his rope around, creating a sort of spiral around Alex while he was flying towards him.

The next moment, the man pulled the rope to constrict Alex once again, but a barrier appeared around him, stopping the rope from touching him.

Then, Alex's left hand moved. The moment the barrier went away, his left arm caught the metal rope and pulled.

As a Saint rank artifact, it was stronger than his normal body. Since it was primarily meant to be an arm, it wasn't as strong as a weapon could be, but it was still a Saint Earth artifact.

At the very least, it had the power of a True King realm fighter.

As he pulled on the rope, suddenly, he felt the rope grow as it extended past where he pulled, but the man stood where he was.

Then, the rope shrunk and the man used the opportunity to pull himself.

Alex tried to let go immediately, but his hand wasn't as fast as his real one would be. As such, he was pulled with the rope.

Alex heard a bang even as he was pulled and knew that his shield must have protected him.

Along the way, Alex let go of the rope and landed on all fours.

As if some animal instinct suddenly kicked into him, he dashed on all fours and started fighting like an animal with his claws on both of his hands.

As a replica, the fake arm could do everything his real arm could do, and thus it could also form claws with his metal Qi.

Alex slashed at the ropes and the man's armor. Yao Bai was completely unsure how to fight this fight. After all, he had never seen a man fight like an animal.

Alex was finally using the training he got back in the beast realm where he fought hand to hand against beasts every day.

Qin Shan looked from the side with clear shock in his eyes. He was sure by now that Alex's strength far surpassed his cultivation base.

However, having the strength and being able to use it were two different things. Even seeing him fight like an animal was very surprising for him.

'How the hell did he learn to do that?' Qin Shan wondered. 'How is an Alchemist able to fight this well? That too in just 6 years?'

One could only wonder what Qin Shan's face would be if he knew 3 of those 6 years were non-existent.

Alex flipped and backed away from Yao Bai and got on his feet. He no longer continued to fight like a beast and instead, a warm, yellow aura flickered around his palm.

With a slam, Alex sent the Palm of the Sun directly at Yao Bai.

Chapter 708 Qin Shan’s Unending Shock

A yellow palm strike flew towards Yao Bai which he stopped with his own palm strike that shone with golden light.

When the two palm strikes destroyed each other, with his strike barely stronger than Alex's, he started to understand why he was made to take the oath.

The fighting style was already unorthodox, to add on such a massive strength that didn't match his cultivation base-if information about him got out, any and every sect and faction would try their best to get him.

Yao Bai frowned as he thought of this. 'How is a kid so strong? How do I beat him?' he wondered.

He was sure he could beat him, given that he was a bit stronger than Alex, but his weapon was turning out to be of no use against him as the shield stopped everything.

'Best choice for me is to draw out this battle, or take advantage of when he slips,' Yao Bai thought.

Alex sent out an Iron Fist Punch as a golden fist flew through the air towards his opponent.

Yao Bai once again sent back a metal palm that stopped his attack and even pushed back a little.

'So my strength is only around True King 1st realm, huh?' Alex thought to himself.

Yao Bai threw the tied dagger towards Alex, who dodged slightly and caught onto it to pull himself closer.

When he got close, Yao Bai suddenly got uncomfortable and his eyes changed.

It wasn't just him, however. Even Qin Shan's eyes changed a little when he noticed the aura in the air move slightly.

'What's that?' he wondered. He could see it, but did not understand it. After all, Qin Shan had yet to find a Dao of his own, so he didn't know what it looked like.

"Argh!" Yao Bai shouted and let go of his rope as it was burning hot at the moment. At the same time, Alex got close to him and tongue of fire appeared between the two.

'Explode!'

BOOM!~

The explosion rung the area in between them. Alex hadn't put much energy into the explosion and wanted to only use a weaker version as this was a friendly battle.

However, he was still surprised how strong it had become.

'Explosion is fire suddenly heating up to create destruction. Did my Dao of Heat help in the heating process to make it stronger?' Alex thought.

The explosion was certainly faster than it should have been normally and just a bit stronger. But that tiny bit would go a long way in the future.

Alex stopped using his Dao after that fight as it was too strong to use without doing some tests first. So, he went back to fighting normally.

The two of them fought for a while, and slowly but surely, Yao Bai was getting the upperhand. Each conflict between them ended in his victory.

However, he was still unable to win against Alex even after the fight was drawn out.

Yao Bai huffed a little and his face grew worried. 'How is he still so full of energy?' he thought.

After fighting each other for 10 more minutes, both in close combat and ranged attacks, neither of them were on the verge of winning.

Alex was now getting more and more used to his fake hand. He was starting to understand the strength and weaknesses for his arm.

Physically, his fake arm was stronger than his real arm. That was something he couldn't deny at all as his fake arm was a Saint Earth artifact.

However, when it came to using techniques, his fake arm was unable to match his real arm.

Perhaps it was because his fake arm was modeled after a normal human, the channels through which his Qi moved wasn't wide enough to best fast and overwhelming like his real hand.

Alex looked at the tired Yao Bai and asked, "Are you okay? We can take a break if you want to."

Yao Bai felt his heart prick a bit when he heard that. "No, I can keep going," he said as he prepared his whip to fight again.

"Very well, then let us fight seriously," Alex said as he brought out a sword.

"What?" Yao Bai looked surprised. "You're a swordsman?"

"Ah, yes," Alex said. "I was testing out my new arm so I didn't use it, but now I will."

The sword he took out was the poison sword. Since he was intending to stay away from his opponent, he wouldn't have to worry about poisoning him.

Alex put the sword on his fake hand to test it too. To start with, he sent out a wind slash towards his opponent.

The mental whip moved and the dagger at the end of it struck the wind slash, destroying it in mid air.

Alex moved around his fake arm as it felt a little stiff when he used his sword. No, it wasn't the arm that was the problem. It was the fact that he hadn't used his left hand to fight in a long time.

Using it randomly to attack someone, versus using it in a sophisticated manner to send out an accurate strike, it was obvious which one would show him his shortcoming.

The sword moved once again, sending out a water strike this time. Then a fire strike, then an earth strike.

Yao Bai easily stopped all of those attacks as the techniques Alex used were common grade ones that he simply learned to be able to use specific Qi.

'Oh, the last two felt a little stronger than others,' he thought to himself.

Right now, his Fire and Earth Spiritual roots were much better than the other non-evolved spiritual roots of his.

Of course, the strongest one amongst the common elements was still his metal one.

So, when Alex sent out his Penta Sword Strike, Yao Bai had to fight harder to stop it.

Qin Shan looked from the side, his shock never leaving his face. 'Does he actually have all 5 spiritual roots? How is he able to throw out such strong attacks if he had Lesser Spiritual roots?'

Qin Shan simply couldn't understand what was happening.

As the fight between the two raged on. As time went by, Alex slowly added Sword Intent into his attack, and fortunately for him it worked even with his fake arm.

Yao Bai had it harder and harder as the attacks got stronger than ever. 'How?' he wondered.

He wanted to end it, but the battle kept on going. In the end, it was him that was starting to slowly run out of Qi.

Once Alex became aware that Yao Bai was starting to struggle, he decided to end it.

"Careful," he said and suddenly his sword which barely hand a white outline suddenly came to life with the whiteness covering it completely.

White sparks flew out of his sword catching both Yao Bai and Qin Shan off guard.

"Sword Qi!" Qin Shan shouted, confirming Yao Bai's deepest fear.

Alex viewed his own sword Qi. Only when he focused did the spark that flew out of the sword take the shape of an actual sword. Otherwise, they were just white sparks.

That made him a little happy. That meant he still had more to learn. He still had room to grow.

Without using any techniques or whatsoever, Alex simply sent out the Sword Qi.

Yao Bai quickly attacked with his own Dagger whip, but it couldn't stop Alex's attack at all.

In the end, Qin Shan had to step in and block the attack.

A water barrier appeared around him and Yao Bai, stopping Alex's attack. The attack landed with a bang, but could do nothing else against the powers of a Saint realm individual.

Qin Shan was about to stop his barrier when he noticed that the attack in front of him hadn't disappeared at all.

Instead, the cluster of sword Qi kept on attacking one after another, attempting to go past the barrier.

They got weaker the longer they clashed, but the fact that they could even do that in the first place was enough to shock Qin Shan once again.

When the bright, white light finally stopped, Qin Shan let go of the barrier and looked at Alex, who did not even break a sweat.

"Junior Yu, how are you so strong?" Qin Shan asked, completely disregarding the existence of a disciple behind him.

"I trained," Alex said, not explaining any more.

"I see," Qin Shan said, not asking for more information. He finally turned around to look at Yao Bai and asked, "Are you okay?"

"Huh? Oh yes... thank you for protecting me, sect master," he said.

"Good work, disciple Yao. You can leave if you want now, but remember your oath. Nothing that happened today is to escape this room," Qin Shan said.

"Yes, sect master," Yao Bai said. He turned to Alex and bowed a little. "Thank you for the opportunity to learn, elder Yu," he said and left.

"I can finally understand why you would want to keep this a secret," Qin Shan said. "You can easily win against anyone in the early True King realm if you were to use your sword."

"I could win even without it if I were to use my other skills," Alex said as he suddenly lost all aura and went invisible.

Qin Shan could barely sense him and even had to use his spiritual sense to find him.

"You just keep on surprising me, young man," Qin Shan said with a sigh. "Alright, I will help you find other disciples to fight against. If those don't work. I will get you elders to fight against. Of course, they will all be swearing an Oath, just like young Yao did."

And that began Alex's year long training as he made his way through his cultivation.

Chapter 709 Resonance

Time passed quickly when one did the same thing over and over for a long time.

Alex's days soon turned into a routine. 4 times a week, every other day, he trained with someone that was around Mid-True King realm in cultivation base.

He had come to find out that his Sword Qi was currently only that strong. Over the course of the 17 or so months, he improved it, but it only went 2 realms higher at most.

On the other hand, Alex himself broke through about 5 more times in the many days, reaching a cultivation base of True Lord 8th realm.

When he trained, he always gifted someone a pill he made, no matter what type it was. That made the people fighting with him happy to be a training partner.

Alex's pills were now consistently in the upper 50s when it came to harmony, and in the upper 70s, or lower 80s when the recipe was something he had come up with himself.

Or at least, that was the case whenever he cultivated with a Yin treasure. If there was no Yin treasure, the yang in his body would get so bad that even reaching lower 70s felt like a chore to him for his own recipe.

Alex desperately went around the city to find Yin treasure, but rarely did anyone have it.

In the past 15 months, he had managed to come across only 20 or so Yin treasures that had helped him calm his Yang build-up.

'I need something with so much Yin that it fully stabilizes my yang,' Alex thought. 'These little Yin treasures aren't helping at all.'

Aside from training, Alex spent 3 days a week going to the 3 different guilds in his city and completing his responsibilities there. After all, he was a True Heaven rank professional there.

Every other free time he had, he spent it all on fixing the recipes he had yet to.

Alex had already learned about the different ingredients that he needed for the pill to fix his arm. He even cut off the whiskers of his own seeking mouse to practice.

He did that partly for himself, and partly to check what the 'Undying' part of the mouse truly was.

The experiment was simple. He cut off Whisker's whiskers and waited. When nothing happened, Alex sent him back to his beast space, where he realized Whiskers grew back his whiskers in just under a week.

So, Alex had relentlessly practiced on the whiskers as well.

Now, all that was left was the ingredient that was the equivalent of Blood Spirit Ginseng. However, even in the many months that went by, there never was a Blood Spirit ginseng in the market.

Other than him, Pearl had also increased in his cultivation base. He had somehow managed to reach True King 2nd realm, which was sadly not as fast as Alex.

Soon, the two of them would catch up to each other, and Alex would once again have a better cultivation base than him.

Today, Alex was all alone in his room. He was attempting to break through to the 9th True Lord realm as he hadn't done so in the last 3 months.

As such, he had left Pearl in his mother's house.

As Alex cultivated the Five Path Divine Yang technique, a wave of Yang Qi escaped from his naval area and rushed up to his entire body.

Alex quickly circulated the Qi and in just a few more circulations, he broke through to the next realm.

If anyone found out that it only took him less than 2 minutes in between the start and the breakthrough, they would likely cry tears of blood as they remembered the hour of cultivation they had to do over the entire night as they tried to breakthrough.

Once Alex was done, he started cultivating once again to stabilize his foundations over the course of the night.

* * * * * * *

2 months later, Alex let his mother know that he was intending to leave for the Eastern mountains again.

"What? Why would you want to go there? Did someone employ you to make a pill again?" Helen asked.

"No," Alex said. "I'm going there mostly for Pearl."

"Me?" Pearl gave a confused look, which Helen gave him as well.

"Yes," Alex said. "Pearl hasn't been cultivating well, and part of that I assume is because he hasn't been training at all like me."

The real reason Alex assumed was that he had somehow stifled Pearl's cultivation base by not letting him go through the ritual back in the beast realm, but he didn't want to admit that.

He also didn't want to make Pearl go through that as that would likely result in his death.

'I would rather have Pearl slowly cultivate than let him take a risky bet,' Alex thought to himself.

"I see," Helen said. "Well, if you can't help it then I guess you should take him. But you have to be extra careful as you won't have anyone to protect you two."

"Also, take this communication talisman and constantly sent me mess— eh? I don't have any?" Helen checked through her bag and was unable to find any at the moment.

"It's fine, mother. I promise to stay out of trouble," Alex said.

"No, sit," Helen said. "I won't let you go without a communication talisman." She continued searching for them but didn't find any.

In the end, she gave up. "Fine, I'll just make one," she said and brought out two empty talisman papers and a vial of ink.

Alex sat down and watched his mother prepare to draw a talisman.

"Do you know how to create a communication talisman?" she asked him.

"Uh… yes?" he said. "I know the design."

"No, design alone won't help you," she said as she dipped her saint rank brush in the ink and drew the rune for 'Communication'.

She followed it by drawing the rune for 'Far', 'Long', 'Text', 'Memory', 'Durable', and various other little runes throughout the left half of the talisman.

Then, she drew the last rune for 'Resonance'. After that, she started drawing Rune Bridge throughout the many runes to connect them.

Once she was done, she drew a straight line through the middle to separate the left half from the right.

Then she drew the mirror opposite on the right half of the talisman as well, creating symmetry in between.

Then, she started drawing the same design on the other talisman paper as well.

Alex watched in genuine awe at how great his mother was at making talismans. He too was good, but he never gave it as much thought as his mother did.

He slowly reached one of the talismans to take it for himself, when suddenly his mother's hand snaked out to slap his own.

Alex's reflexes kicked in and he managed to dodge her, but he still gave her a weird look.

"What's wrong? Didn't you make this for me to take?" he asked.

"What's wrong? Are you really asking that? Did you never learn how to create a communication talisman?" she asked.

"Uh… as I said, I learned the design, is that not enough?" he asked.

"Did you not read that you need to create a resonance between them?" she asked.

"Resonance? I did," he said. "Didn't you already create it though? Look, there's the rune."

"No, not in rune. Resonance for real," Helen said. "Sigh, those poor staff members must have thought you were lazy when you handed them talismans that never resonated."

"Hmm, now that you say it, I did get a lot of weird looks from time to time," Alex said.

"Alright, look," She said and showed it to him. "Whenever you have two or more talismans that you need to communicate in between each other, or work with each other, you need to make sure the talismans know which ones to work with."

"For that, we need to create a resonance between them. The first part of resonance is creating the rune for it. That is what you most likely do and nothing more," Helen said.

"The next step, however, is the most important."

Helen took the two talismans and held the rune for resonance in between her thumb and her index finger.

"You need to create a link between the two runes," she said. "Then, you need to pour in your Qi into the rune and activate it."

As she said that, Alex saw the rune 'Resonance' light up. Suddenly, he heard a low buzzing sound as the talisman paper started vibrating.

"Then, you slowly and steadily continue putting in Qi," Helen said. "At some point, if your stream of Qi on both sides is the same, the two talismans will start resonating with each other."

"Meaning, that the two of them will start moving at the same frequency. At that point, all you have to do is simply let them be and watch."

Helen put down the talismans and let the two of them vibrate for a bit. Slowly, the two talismans started moving closer and closer.

In the end, like two magnets getting really close, the two talismans jumped and snapped into each other, and stayed stuck.

"And that is how you create resonance," Helen said as she took one of the talismans and peeled off the second one to Alex.

"Now, if I send a message in here," she said as she put her spiritual sense into the talisman.

Alex's talisman vibrated and he got a message.

-You will get my message there.-

"Amazing!" Alex said with wide eyes.

"Isn't it? Now, take that talisman and make sure to keep sending me messages," she said.

Chapter 710 Pearl’s Training

A week passed since Alex and Pearl came out to train. Alex didn't fight most of the time, leaving Pearl to pick up the slack since he was the one they were here for.

It had been about 23 months since Alex and Pearl left the Demon Realm. When they had entered it nearly 5 years ago, Alex had been at True Master's 9th realm, and Pearl had been in True Lord 5th realm.

Now, Alex was in True Lord 9th realm, and Pearl was in True King 2nd realm. Given their comparison, Pearl really was slow.

He was still just as fast as most of those that were considered talented in the empire. Given his lack of resources, he was perhaps even faster.

However, given the fact that he used to keep up with Alex in cultivation back when they were in the common realms, Alex felt a little bad when he saw Pearl's cultivation slow down.

"We will have to train a lot," Alex said softly as he watched Pearl fight someone stronger than him.

They were currently at the foot of a giant mountain and were surrounded by trees all around. Pearl was in his big form which made him about as big as a normal tiger would.

Pearl's opponent was a blue frog in True King 4th realm. From what Alex could see, the frog used Water and Wood elements, both of which were harmful to the Metal element that Pearl used.

So, he was having a harder time than usual. Not to mention, the blue frog had poison secreted all over its body, so Pearl had to be careful when it attacked it.

His golden claw seemed to be fine for the most part, but if the splashes of poison ever got on Pearl, there would be trouble.

So, Alex held in his hands 2 different kinds of pills, both of which worked to cure the poison of the frog.

Pearl suddenly split into two, one of which was a fake Pearl, but both looked equally real. Even Alex couldn't separate which one was real using his spiritual sense.

A long, pink tongue shot out of the blue frog and hit the Pearl on the left side, before slinking back into its mouth.

The Pearl that was hit suddenly vanished into a bunch of golden light and the Pearl on the right arrived next to it with a glowing golden claw.

The claw slashed onto the blue frog's skin and tore out blood from it. Pearl immediately jumped back and slashed in front of him again.

A golden set of lines emerged from where Pearl slashed and wrapped around the frog as if it was tied up by a rope.

The frog couldn't move at all under the force of Pearl's ropes for a while, and in that time, Pearl gave another strong claw attack directly to its head.

However, even after that, the frog didn't die. Instead Pearl was forced to back away as the frog's tongue flew toward him. At the same time, the frog managed to break through the golden binding and continued fighting.

Alex watched from far away as Pearl used every ability in his arsenal. White Tiger's Golden Claw, White Tiger's Golden body, White Tiger's Dominating Body, White Tiger's steps, White Tiger's roar, and the binding technique that Alex didn't know the name of.

The frog's skill set wasn't even as big as Pearl's since it mostly relied on its poison. So, Pearl was able to easily beat the frog after a couple of minutes.

"Stop!" Alex said when Pearl was about to bite into the frog's body to retrieve the frog's monster core.

"Why?" Pearl turned around to ask.

"I told you," Alex said as he walked up to the frog. "It's got poison all over its body."

Alex tore into the frog's body with his bare hand and ripped it apart to bring out the core with his Qi. After cleaning it up for a bit, he gave it to Pearl.

"Eat," he said.

Pearl jumped at the monster's core, his body already reducing in size, and ate it.

Alex waited for a few minutes for Pearl to digest it, and once it did, it turned around toward Alex.

"I think I can break through now," he said.

"Really?" Alex asked. He had been waiting for Pearl to say that. Alex could already feel himself getting close to breaking through as well.

He was just a few weeks out if his assumption was correct.

"Alright, let's go cultivate some more."

* * * * * *

By 2 weeks later, Pearl had already broken through to the True King 3rd realm, which meant Alex's body was equally strong as well.

They were currently fighting a pack of wolves all of which were equally as strong and in the True King realm.

Alex wasn't going for the kill on any of them, just testing out his fighting. He could feel himself getting closer and closer to the time when his breakthrough would happen.

'Just a little more,' he thought as he fought. He could massacre the entire pack of wolves if he used his sword, so Alex kept it to his hands. Even then, the pack of wolves was quite weak against him.

With True King 3rd realm physical attack and True King 6th realm Elemental attacks, Alex's overall damage reached True King 7th realm.

If he added his Sword Qi, that would put his attacks a realm higher than it already was.

It was truly surprising how strong he had come to be in no time at all.

'I'm about as strong Fu Tao was before he entered the Demon realm right?' Alex thought for a moment.

Fu Tao had been True King 8th realm from what he could remember. He was most likely a True Emperor now, halfway towards becoming a Saint realm.

'I should reach what he was back then in just a few days,' he thought to himself.

Alex continued fighting the wolves with his arms and his invisible sword that he could only carry on his right hand for some reason.

When he didn't have a left arm, he believed that it was a mental block that stopped him from being able to use it with an imaginary left hand.

However, now that he had a left arm, he still couldn't use it at all. 'Do I need a real arm to fake grab it?' he wondered.

A gray-furred wolf suddenly jumped at him from behind. Alex ducked and sent out a punch with his left hand directly onto the wolf's stomach.

The wolf fell to the ground and whimpered as it was hurt. It tried to stand up and run away, but the pain was too much for it.

Another wolf came to its aid and stood in front of it, guarding it against Alex.

Alex smiled at their relationship. He wasn't here to kill them, so he let it be and waited for others to attack him.

Pearl was fighting to the side, struggling a little, but still getting by easily.

He had to be both offensive and defensive at the same time and fighting a single monster every time hadn't helped him with that.

Now, the group of wolves would give him valuable training that Alex never could

As Alex prepared to defend against another wolf that was about to attack him, the wolf stopped.

Its eyes suddenly went wide with terror and it looked to its right. Alex was surprised by this event so he quickly sent his spiritual sense to his left, where the wolf was staring towards.

He saw nothing. He even stretched it as far as he could, but he still found nothing in that direction.

'What is it—' just as he was thinking that he noticed that all the wolves in the pack had stopped fighting and were staring in the same direction.

That only made Alex scared. After all, if there was anything that could make these wolves fear this much, it would certainly be enough to kill him as well.

The wolves suddenly started running away, going away from the area in a matter of seconds. Not only them, but even the other beast in the vicinity also ran away.

Even birds flew through the air, moving in the opposite directions from where the wolf stared towards.

"Brother!" Pearl's terrified voice came from behind him.

Alex turned around and found the scared Pearl running towards him.

"Pearl, what's wrong?" he asked.

"I don't... I don't want to go back," Pearl said.

"What?" Alex asked.

Before he could say anything else, Pearl turned into a bunch of white light and disappeared into his beast space.

Then, now together with Pearl, Alex felt it too. The ever-so-familiar feeling, that usually came from the south, now came from the north.

Alex turned his horrified face towards the north as he finally realized why the beasts were so scared.

After 7 long years, the Beast realm had once again sent out its beacon to find their candidates with the White Tiger's blood.

Which meant... the saint realm beasts were going to come find Pearl anytime now.

Alex took a deep breath to calm himself down.

"No, I'm too far away. They won't be able to make it here in time before—"

Alex was going to delude himself into thinking he was safe. However, when he remembered how fast Shen Jing was as a Saint realm expert, he couldn't help but imagine the speed lady Ren could reach as an Immortal expert.

If she had survived and recovered from the Heavenly Judgment, then both him and Pearl were going to be in a lot of trouble.

Chapter 711 Take It Back

Alex stayed stunned for a moment. He looked around, trying to think of what to do. The panic he was feeling didn't help much in thinking either.

'Should I run? Should I hide? Or should I stay?' Alex thought.

He was perhaps in the best location he could be in if he didn't want people to get hurt in the process.

It wasn't just the saint beasts that were going to be a problem, but the other beasts that would come attack too.

Especially in the direction where he was in.

'I can't go back to mother. I will only implicate her in all of this,' Alex thought.

Finally, he decided to stay. Neither running, nor hiding would ever get him out of trouble if a Saint beast was dead set on finding you.

He could've escaped if the beast didn't know his face, but they clearly knew who to look for this time around.

'No running,' he thought to himself and put on a resolute face to wait for whoever came to him.

Was it going to be the jaguar? Or the puma? Or was Lady Ren really going to come out herself and put herself in danger?

Alex stood on the empty meadow and waited.

5 minutes passed. Then 10. Then 30. Soon, an hour passed.

Then 2 hours passed, and then 3 hours.

Alex simply stood where he was and waited for the beacon to lead someone toward him. However, even as 4 hours came to pass, no one came.

Finally, the beacon ended and the feeling disappeared. Alex could feel the panic in the air disappear as the beasts went from being restless to tame in a matter of seconds.

Alex on the other hand was only confused. 'Why did they not come?' he thought to himself.

He waited an hour longer just in case, but no one came for him.

'Did they not realize that I've come to the Luminance Empire and went back to check the Crimson Empire?' Alex thought. 'No, they should get a strong feeling from this side.'

Another thought came to Alex all of a sudden that was more horrifying than he would care to admit.

'Is Pearl's potential as the White Tiger's descendant destroyed?' he thought. 'Did I destroy his chance at becoming strong already? Is that why they didn't bother coming here?'

Alex's breathing got harder and harder until he had to force himself to calm down.

'No, it's not your fault. Those beasts probably made a mistake,' Alex told himself.

With a thought, he let Pearl come out, who immediately looked around to see if he was safe.

"They're gone?" Pearl asked.

"They never came," Alex said. Then he gave Pearl a curious look. "Do you not want to go back at all?"

Pearl shook his head.

"Why? Your grandmother is there, you know?" Alex said.

"But they will send you away," Pearl said. "I don't want to be away from you, brother."

Alex smiled, his troubling feelings disappearing like snow on a hot day. He got down to his knees and rubbed Pearl's tiny head.

"Come, let's go back. Mother is waiting for us," he said and the two of them went back to DawnSpring city.

* * * * * * *

Alex didn't tell his mom anything about what had happened out there. He didn't want her to worry about him more than she was already.

Besides, this was a consequence of his choice, so it was his burden to bear.

Alex went to the guild to find news of the amount of destruction the beasts had caused this time. Along the way, he couldn't help but hope his master, senior sister, and others were fine amidst all of this.

Even though seven years had already passed since the last beast horde attack, he wished they were prepared for it.

Once Alex reached the Formation guild, he asked for information about the beast horde attack to the north.

However, the receptionist told him no such thing took place at all.

"Are you sure?" Alex asked. "No such thing took place?"

"No, sir," the man said.

Alex looked confused. 'Did the beasts not attack? But they clearly were restless in the mountains.'

"Is there no big piece of news out there then?" Alex asked.

"Well, the only big news right now is the competition taking place next week," the receptionist said. "Ah, right. Are you going to take part in the competition, sir? I will have to register you if you are."

"Competition?" Alex gave a confused look for a moment before remembering about the Guild competitions that took place every 10 years.

2 years ago was the Talisman Competition where he found his mother. Now, it was the turn for the Formation competition.

Alex thought for a moment and shook his head. "No," he said. "I don't want to join it."

There was just too much trouble that he would face with joining the competition right now.

It would put him in the spotlight which he didn't want to do. It wasn't the competition itself that bothered him, but rather the information that would be out when he did take part in it.

A 23-year-old True King 1st realm was enough to make the whole world go mad.

It would also make people look into him, causing them to find out that he was a True Heaven Talisman expert and a True Heaven Alchemist.

Then they would go into his background and find out about his mother, and maybe even find out through Fu Tao and the others that he wasn't from this Empire, to begin with.

All of it would be way too troubling for a competition that wasn't even his primary profession.

The receptionist made no remark when he said no. Instead, he said, "Alright, I won't register your name, sir. Since you are a True Heaven formation master, you have the right to go watch the competition."

"If you require, we can pay for your travels, or you can go on your own," the receptionist said.

"Thank you," Alex said and left the guild.

The thoughts of the competition soon left his mind and only the news about the beasts not attacking took over it.

'Wait, so it is all fine now?' he thought. 'Why did they not attack?'

Questions he knew wouldn't get answered kept popping up in his head. So, he decided to stop thinking about it. It wasn't like thinking about something that was going to change the outcome.

Alex went to the Alchemy guild and checked if his one ingredient was on the market yet.

It was not. So, he took some missions and spent the rest of the day finishing those up.

By the end, Alex realized that he needed to go look for another Yin treasure again.

'It is getting harder and harder to find them here. Maybe I should go to the capital,' he thought to himself.

Late at night, he return back to his mother, and an hour later was back in his house.

Now, it was time for him to break through.

Alex sat on the floor of his house and started to slowly circulate. He felt that he wasn't as prepared as he would have hoped, so he needed to take a little longer when he broke through.

As he did, the Five Yang Divine Path circulated Yang Qi throughout his system. The slight pain, or rather discomfort he felt when he used the Heaven grade technique of his technique had slowly started fading over time.

Now, it was perfect for him. This couldn't help but make him wonder if soon he would be able to change the cultivation technique and go a grade higher once more.

For now, he stuck to what he had.

As Alex cultivated and prepared for the breakthrough, something weird happened. He thought he heard someone speaking.

Alex stopped and looked around. "Pearl?" he shouted as he sent his spiritual sense. No one was in the room.

He looked around once more before going back to his cultivation. As he prepared to break through once again he started hearing sounds that sounded like voices.

Alex stopped to look around once more and even stood up to go check. No one was there at all again.

Finally, after making sure no one was there at all, he started cultivating again.

As the time for him to breakthrough got closer and closer, the voices returned. This time, he didn't bother stopping to check who it was and decided to do so after he broke through.

"It's your fault," A voice spoke directly into his mind.

Alex finally stopped once more and shouted, "Who?"

He immediately stood up to look around, yet once again, no one was there. After 5 minutes of being on edge, he started cultivating once more.

"You are useless," the voice returned.

Alex almost stopped cultivating, but he continued it.

"You are the reason Pearl is so weak right now," the voice said. "Had you left Pearl alone, he would have evolved by now and would have become the ruler of the continent. You are the reason he is so weak."

Alex shook his head, trying to get rid of the thoughts. However, they just kept on coming to him.

"You think you will find your father in the southern continent? Lies. You know surely that he's already dead, and there is nothing you can do about it."

"You think you are strong, but that is not your power. Your techniques, your cultivation, your alchemy. You got it all because of me," the voice said.

"And now, I'm here to take it all back and send you to the darkness where you belong."

Chapter 712 Inner Demon

"Who are you?" Alex asked. By now, the only explanations he could think of were that someone was either using spiritual sense to talk with him or that their spiritual sense was way too strong for him to notice it.

Or… he was back. He was back and he was taking it back just like he said he was.

"You know who I am," the voice said. "You know what you took from me."

"NO!" Alex said. "It wasn't yours to begin with."

"I cultivated so hard, day and night, not you. I took all the pain, the suffering, not you. It was I who lost my arm, not you," the voices said. "It was I who had to watch my master die, not you."

"If you think you can just take over the life I created and live it out like you were the one who worked hard, then you are a bigger idiot than I would have thought you to be," the voice said.

"No!" Alex said. "You're wrong. It wasn't yours. It's mine."

"Yours? Like Pearl is yours?" the voice asked. "You already know you are ruining his cultivation by keeping him, and yet you still haven't taken him back?"

"There is a chance he will die if he goes back," Alex said.

"There is a chance he will die if he stays with you," the voice said.

"You know he will soon be very weak for you. At that time, I know you will just abandon him. I know that because I am you," the voice said.

"No, I would never abandon Pearl," Alex said.

"Never? Like you never abandoned MY master? Like you never abandoned MY senior sister? Like you never abandoned all the relationships that I created back in the Crimson empire?"

"The moment you saw a way out, you took it. Because that is what you do. You abandon people," the voice said.

Alex tried to ignore the voice, but it was getting to his head.

"A dead father, a dead master. I bet Hannah is already dead on the other continent too. Same for Aunt Liz in the Northern continent."

"Soon, there will be a dead and abandoned Pearl too."

"How many more family members do you need to lose before you realize just how weak you are," the voice said. " You are going to lose mother--"

"NOOOOO!" Alex suddenly got out of his cultivation trance in a fit of rage.

The Qi circulation he had been maintaining suddenly went haywire and Alex started feeling pain all over his body.

It wasn't a very intense pain, but it was worrying as he felt it all over his meridians and even his naval area.

Alex quickly sat back down to circulate his Qi and only after a few minutes did he get it back on track. By that time, however, the damage was done.

Alex put on a sour face as he realized that his peak True Lord 9th realm cultivation had dropped to the point where it felt like he had just broken through a month or so ago.

He had lost nearly 2 months' worth of cultivation because of a single mistake.

'I went through Qi Deviation?' Alex thought with nothing but shock on his face.

'Why? How?' he thought.

The fear and anger he had felt just minutes ago when he had been cultivating were no more.

'Was that… not real?' he thought to himself. 'It felt so real though.'

Alex felt like he had been in a dream moments ago. When in the dream, he didn't realize that it was a dream, but now that he was awake, he could tell it wasn't real.

'What happened again?' he thought to himself, but slowly he started forgetting what the events that led to him going through Qi Deviation were.

It was the same as dreams. Once awake, he forgot what the dream was about. Not even Alex's eidetic memory helped with that.

Right now, Alex only remembered the feeling he had felt. Slowly, he was starting to forget the feeling too. Soon, he would only remember that he remembered feeling fear and anger.

"So many days of cultivation wasted just like that," he thought as he checked himself.

In the end, since there was nothing else he could do, he sat down and started cultivating to start fixing what he had just broken.

* * * * * * *

A week later, Alex was standing on top of a Teleportation formation in the DawnSpring city, ready to go visit the capital to see the Formation competition.

After his failure during cultivation, he told what happened to his mother and sect master Qin, both of whom seemed to have no idea what he was talking about.

So, Alex had gone to check the library to see if there was any information there. Unfortunately, the library wasn't as useful as he would have hoped it would be.

The only other way he could think of was to either go to the Han family or Heaven's Peak school and find Han Hongqi or Shangguan Quan there to ask them what had happened to him.

However, if he did so, there was a chance they would put him in their debt and force him to join them. He didn't like the idea of that one bit.

So, he decided to go to the capital and see if there is information there. Unfortunately, due to the competition, the teleportation formations were packed and he couldn't use them at all.

Except, the Formation guild could, and he had been invited to go with them not long ago.

So, Alex took the chance to go together with them and watch the competition while at the same time trying to figure out what could have possibly happened to him during the breakthrough that made him fear and angry to the point that he went through Qi Deviation.

His mother was happy to see him go see the world after staying with her for 2 years. Now that Alex thought about it, 2 years was the longest he had ever stayed anywhere in this world.

It took the Formation guild 2 trips to reach the Capital, with them having to go through Lightborn city.

Once they reached the capital, all the guild membered were taken through the afternoon heat towards a busy street that ended on a massive hotel that would be housing them for the next week.

Alex got settled onto a room all by himself, one of the perks of being a True Heaven ranked formation master. Once he was settled, he decided to leave and go to the capital library.

Since the competition was tomorrow, he could spend the rest of the day today looking through information.

Alex quickly found the library not far away from where he was staying and started searching through books that had anything to do with problems on breakthroughs or Qi Deviation.

The books gave many reasoning such as a mismatch between one's cultivation path and cultivation technique, a deep injury to the body or the soul, lack of potential, and poisons, and yet none of the explanations matched Alex.

Alex continued searching for the information, but even until the next morning, he found nothing in the nearly five-story tall building.

Of course, had Alex known what he was searching for exactly, he would have realized how useless his search was.

Things that were only related to Saint realm experts were something that he would never find out in the open. Especially not in a public library.

Alex had yet to even know of a single Saint realm beside Saint Condensation that Qin Shan was in as there was no information out there.

There was no way he would ever find out information about Inner Demons on his own.

Finally, after realizing that his search was fruitless, Alex returned to the hotel, from where he was soon taken to the competition ground.

Over the next 7 days, for 4 different days with a break between each, Alex watched the Formation competition take place in a massive location that the guild had prepared.

From what Alex could see, the location was the exact same as the one for the Talisman competition.

It was perhaps the same location that was used for all 7 or maybe even 8 of the competitions.

The competition went smoothly throughout the entire week. There were a few twists and turns, but in the end, the winner of it was the person everyone had expected to win in the first place.

A young woman by the name of Fu Fanrou. The woman was 32 years old and had a cultivation base of about True Lord 8th realm and hailed from the Fu family, whose ancestor was a Saint rank formation master.

Her final, winning formation had been a formation with an Efficiency of 77%.

Judging by the rest of the group in the competition, Alex guessed that had he taken part, he would have most definitely come in the top 5 amongst them.

He was feeling glad he didn't take part in it. Seeing the people surrounding the woman before she could even leave the competition ground, Alex was sure the swarm he would get would not be less than this.

Once everyone started leaving after the cultivation was over, Alex too stood up and left. Tomorrow, after the rewards were distributed, they would all be taken back home.

However, along the way to the hotel, Alex saw something that gave him a feeling that he should perhaps not return.

'I've done so much already,' he thought to himself. 'I can't stop now.'

So, instead of returning with the group back to the DawnSpring city, Alex decided to stay.

He decided to stay and go join the LightSworns.

It was time to once and for all figure out if the princess could get him his arms back.

Chapter 713 Third Time is the Charm

It was a large, open ground with a lot of tents. From there, Alex could even see the purple building in the distance that was the royal palace.

Standing in line for the registration, Alex looked at the many people in colorful robes walking around them, all doing their own things.

'If things go well, I will finally be wearing that," he thought.

The first time he had thought of joining the Lightsworns, he had been sidetracked into training for over 2 years.

The second time he had thought of joining them, he had found his mother and suddenly another 2 years had passed.

Now was the third time.

"This time's the charm right?" he thought as he waited for his turn.

"There are too many of you trying to get into the Lightsworns. Do not waste our time, or we will throw you out immediately," someone shouted from the front.

Instantly, everyone got alert and looked forward. From time to time, the man repeated the same thing, putting the newcomers on edge too.

Finally, after nearly 40 minutes of waiting, it was Alex's turn.

He walked into a tent and saw a man with a talisman waiting for him in front of a stone wall.

There was a formation carved onto the wall and Alex had to place his hand on it for it to show any and all information about him that it could find.

Alex had studied about this before coming here, so he knew what he must do. So, he placed his hand without even a prompt from the person, and immediately a variety of information appeared on the screen.

The man looked at the screen, gave a split-second look of surprise, and proceeded to record the information.

23 years old - True Lord 9th Realm - Superior Metal root.

"Name?" the man asked.

"Yu Ming," Alex replied.

"Any sect or family?" he asked.

"No," Alex said as he shook his head.

That made the man give him a curious look before looking at the information on the stone. He was probably wondering how someone so young could have such talent and cultivation base yet not belong to any sect or family.

Alex was a little surprised by the information himself.

'So despite me staying 3 years in the demon realm, it only counts the time I experienced, huh?' he thought to himself.

The cultivation base wasn't anything new at all, but he was surprised that it showed his spiritual roots. Except, it was completely wrong.

'Is my Metal root so much better than the rest that their formations can't even separate the other roots?' Alex thought. 'Also, what happened to my Yang root? It's obviously just as good as the metal too.'

The only reason Alex could come up with was that the formation on the wall wasn't advanced enough to learn it all, even though it was a Saint rank formation.

Alex quickly left the place and went to another location where he was made to sit down to the side as a group of people watched someone else fight a puppet on a stage.

The person fighting was a woman with True Lord 3rd realm cultivation base, and the puppet she was fighting against had the same cultivation base as well.

A man stood to the side, recording everything that he saw on the stage. The woman fought for a while before it was clear that she was struggling against the puppet.

"Stop," the man said and the girl stopped. She knew she had failed.

After she left, another man's name was called out and he began fighting against the puppet.

Just as they started, Alex was surprised to see the puppet's cultivation base suddenly increase to True Lord 6th realm to accommodate the man's own True Lord 6th realm cultivation base.

The fight lasted for a few minutes, in which it was clear that the man was strong enough to win against the puppet.

The evaluator stopped the match and passed the man.

"You have passed both of the tests. You can now go become a Lightsworn," the evaluator said as he brought out something from his bag.

When Alex saw what it was, he was a little confused.

'A sand watch?' he thought when he saw the evaluator place it on the table and the sand started flowing.

"Here in the Lightsworns, we do not accept tardiness. So, you have until this time to go and register yourself in the other tent right," the man pointed.

"Yes," the man said and ran away.

The evaluator then turned around and called another person to fight. This lasted for a while until it was Alex's turn to go down and fight.

He walked up to the puppet and its cultivation base changed to True Lord 9th realm.

That was way too weak. Still, Alex had to fight for almost a full minute, so he started.

The puppets attacking style was a simple hand-to-hand combat, so Alex decided to go with that too.

He dashed close to the puppet and delivered a weak, but still strong enough punch directly onto its chest.

The puppet tried to move away, but it wasn't fast enough. Alex's punch landed squarely on the chest and the puppet flew away.

It quickly stood back up, but Alex was already on top of it. He kicked it to the side and dashed in the direction it flew to attack it once again.

"Stop," the Evaluator said and Alex stopped.

'So fast?' he thought, but it was obvious he was better than the puppet.

"Good, you've passed. Same as everyone, you have a minute to reach that tent over there and register yourself," the Evaluator said and flipped the now pull sand watch.

Alex nodded and immediately left the room.

The tent was far, but not very. It would take him half a minute at best to reach it if he ran the whole way.

So, he ran.

Just as he was about to reach the opening of the tent, he heard a rather loud voice coming from the side.

"Mother, come on. I will carry you back," a small body of barely 8 years old said to his mother, who looked sickly.

"I am alright, my son. You don't have to—"

Before she finished, she immediately started coughing and vomited out a bunch of blood.

Alex's eyes immediately went wide and he rushed to her without thinking.

"Are you alright miss?" he asked, but the woman simply kept on vomiting blood.

"Miss, quickly eat this," he said as he brought out a poison antidote pill and a healing pill.

He brought the pill close to her face, but she showed no reaction.

"You passed," A voice came from behind him.

"What?" Alex said as he turned around and saw a man looking at him with a talisman in his hand.

"You passed the test," he said. "Whatever you are seeing is an illusion that was created to test your empathy and compassion. You can go to that tent and register for real now."

"Oh," Alex said as he turned around to look at the woman who was still vomiting blood. "So this is fake?" he thought and tried to touch her.

While his mind told him that he was touching someone, he could feel a surreal feeling that only came with knowingly being in an illusory formation.

"I see," he said. "Thank you."

Alex turned and went to the tent to prepare for the finalization of him entering the Lightsworns.

There were a bunch of people already in the tent he went to, but not everyone that had passed the puppet test was there.

'They failed at the empathy test?' he thought.

He sat by on an empty seat and waited for the tent to fill up. 20 minutes later, it was finally full.

"We have recorded your information and have registered you into the Lightsworn. However, one more task remains for you to fully become a Lightsworn and enter our legion," the man said.

Suddenly, words appeared in the air on a floating screen that started with 'I make an oath to the heavens...'

"Once you've said this oath, you will become a Lightsworn," the man said.

Everyone clamored to start saying the Oath. Alex prepared to say it as well.

Chapter 714 Oath

Alex read the words that hung in the air in front of them all. The information outside only said what the oath was about, not what it exactly was.

Only now did Alex get the exact oath he was meant to say to become a Lightsworn.

I swear to the heavens to protect this empire from any threat it may face.

That part of the oath felt fine for him. After all, as Lightsworn they were meant to protect the empire.

I swear to the heavens to serve the people of this empire and keep them safe from any harm the others may cause.

This was like the job of a normal police officer back in the central continent: serve and protect. It made sense why one would make such a vow.

I swear to the heavens to be lawful and enforce the law of the empire.

That oath was fine for the most part, except if there was ever a law change. What would Alex do if they changed the law to something worse?

'It's highly unlikely that would happen,' Alex thought and finally focused on the final part.

I swear to the heavens to above all always follow and obey the Emperor.

That, to him, felt like the most suspicious part of the oath. Follow and obey the Emperor? What if the emperor told him to go kill innocent folks? What if the emperor changed and it was now some douche?

And he had to obey the Emperor above all? The previous Oaths would mean nothing if the order came from the emperor directly. That let him use the Lightsworns as his personal group of slaves.

It was probably true that the Emperor wasn't the sort of person who would do such a thing. However, it still didn't help the fact that there were possibilities.

Alex fell into a dilemma on whether to say the oaths or not. Perhaps the dilemma would have been less hard on him if there was a way to get out of the oath through a sort of time limit or someone letting him free from the oath.

However, there was no such thing.

The only way Alex saw getting out of the oath was by leaving the Empire entirely or going to the forests to live like a hermit.

"I swear to the heavens…" One of the men close to him started saying his oath and soon the others followed suit.

The people around the room that were not the newcomers kept a close watch on who said the oath and who didn't.

Soon, aside from a few including Alex, everyone said the oaths.

"If you do not want to say the oaths, we understand. You are free to leave," the man in the front of them all spoke to the remaining few.

Half of them immediately bowed and left with no hesitation. The other half, including Alex, still couldn't decide.

In the end, all of them, except Alex, made a choice. Now, only Alex remained.

He looked at the oaths once more and thought of the things he would have to do. Then, he thought of the things he would likely obtain.

His arm.

"Are you saying it or not?" the man asked Alex.

Alex took a deep breath. 'Screw it. If anything bad happens, I will just leave this Empire,' he thought and opened his mouth.

"I—"

"I wouldn't say that if I were you," a voice spoke from next to him as a hand appeared around his shoulders.

The voice felt… familiar.

Alex quickly turned around to look at the new arriver. It was a young man that wore a stark white robe and had a head full of long golden hair that ended on black tips.

He had circular earrings with wavy spikes poking out from every side, and a smile hung on his face as if it were an accessory of its own.

"Brother Shen!" Alex called out in both shock and joy. "What are you doing here?"

"You should have let me know if you were alive. Why didn't you come to find me?" he asked.

"I—"

"Hey! Who are you?" the people in the room were now staring at them.

Shen Jing slowly turned his head towards the man in front of them all and brought his hand up to his face before putting a single finger on his lips.

"Ssshh," he sounded.

Suddenly, the whole room went silent. It wasn't just silent but rather suppressed. Every single person in the room could feel a pressure on them that they had never felt before.

"I'm talking here, so it would do you good if you kept quiet for a bit," Shen Jing said and turned back around to Alex.

"So? Why didn't you come to find me?" he asked.

"Come where?" Alex asked. "Brother Shen, I don't know where you live. Hell, I don't even know who you really are."

"Ah, right," Shen Jing said as he scratched his chin. "That's a problem, isn't it? Unfortunately, it is going to have to stay that way. So? Are you okay? How's Pearl?"

"We're doing fine," Alex said. "How did you find me?"

"I found you earlier this week," Shen Jing said. "I wanted to go talk to you, but you instead teleported away to who knows where."

"I had to go around the Empire searching for you and I only found you here this morning," Shen Jing said.

"Eh? Why didn't you just ask the people where I was teleported to?" Alex asked.

"I could do that? Ahem, Let's not talk about that," Shen Jing said and looked to the screen with the oath.

"They are making you say an oath?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I will finally be a member of the Lightsworns after I finish saying the oath."

"I heard these people say the oath," Shen Jing said. "It wasn't a bad oath, but there were too many loopholes one could exploit. You are better off not saying it."

Alex gave a dejected look at that.

"What's wrong?" Shen Jing caught his sad face.

"Well, if I don't say that, I won't be a Lightsworn," Alex said.

"Why do you want to be an Empire's lapdog in the first place?" Shen Jing asked.

"I told you before, brother Shen. After becoming a Lightsworn, I will have a chance to meet with the princess and use her healing crystal to see if I can get my arm back," he said.

"Ah, right. You did say that before," Shen Jing said. "So why bother with this oath? Let's just go meet with the princess and be done with."

"Meet the princess?" Alex was shocked at the boldness.

"Yes, where is she?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex shook his head. "I don't know," he said.

"What does she look like?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex shook his head again. He really did not know anything about the princess.

Shen Jing turned his head at the man whose eyes were wide with shock and fear still. A single call for silence had left him reeling in fear.

"You! Where's the princess?" he asked.

"I…I do not know, senior," the man barely spoke up.

"Anyone here knows anything about the princess?" Shen Jing asked. However, not a single soul answered.

Shen Jing shook his head and sighed. "Well, this isn't working," he said.

"What do we do then?" Alex asked.

"Well, one person should be able to help us for sure," Shen Jing said.

"WhoooOOO…" Alex couldn't finish his words before he was picked up and taken away somewhere.

When his blurry vision became normal again, he was in the middle of a large hall with a very tall ceiling.

The entrance was behind him with large doors made of the most exquisite wood out there. The pillars and walls were also made with probably the best item one could find.

The purple accent looked quite good all around the hall with even the chairs looking majestic.

Alex was standing behind Shen Jing and couldn't see the front, but on both sides of them were people sitting on great chairs that looked at him, or rather Shen Jing with a threatening look.

"Calm down, I'm not here to hurt anyone," Shen Jing said as he looked at the people that looked like they were about to attack him.

Alex slowly walked out from behind him and saw what was in the front.

At the center of the room on the opposite side was a young man with long black hair and a clean-shaven face that wore purple and gold clothes.

Alex had a suspicion that he knew who this was, and the suspicion got answered when he saw the golden crown full of intricate gemstones on the man's head.

This was the Emperor of the Luminance empire.

"Who are you?" The Emperor asked calmly. "What are you doing in my Palace?"

"Are you the Emperor?" Shen Jing asked.

"Insolence!" a man stood up, but the Emperor put up his hand to stop him from speaking any further.

"Yes, I am the Emperor," he said. "Who are you?"

Shen Jing shook his head. "It doesn't matter to you. We're not here for you in the first place. We're here to see your daughter for a small thing. Call her here, the one with the healing crystal."

Chapter 715 The Princess

From what Alex could tell, the Emperor was already showing signs of fear around Shen Jing, but he was still keeping his cool.

"Ohh," Shen Jing gave a smile. "Very well, I will tell you who I am."

Shen Jing then turned to the rest of them and said, "Leave!"

The different court officials and guards looked confused for a second. After all, following the orders of someone else in front of the Emperor they swore to follow and serve was unacceptable.

Shen Jing sighed when he saw that. He simply flicked his fingers and suddenly every single one of the people in the room, including the shadow guards hiding in the ceiling and walls was thrown out of the room.

Alex was astounded when he saw them all get thrown out, but he was sure they would be alright. After all, they were all cultivators, to begin with.

"You should leave for a while too," Shen Jing said to Alex.

Alex nodded and left the room. After he was gone, Shen Jing turned around to the young emperor.

"Who exactly are you, senior?" the Emperor asked with a timid face. He could already tell that Shen Jing was stronger than him. So, all he could hope for was that he wasn't an enemy.

As he waited, Shen Jing spoke up and said something to him. The Emperor's eyes widened in horror when he heard the words.

"No way…" he said.

Then, the young Emperor's face lost all color when he saw something else. Only then did he vividly remember the thing his father had told him about.

The truth that every Emperor should know about before they take the throne. That truth was here in front of him today.

* * * * * *

Alex waited for a bit outside while the many court officials and guards tried to open the door. However, the door was covered with a golden barrier that they couldn't break through it.

Many of them also looked at Alex as if they were going to hurt him, but the threat of who was inside kept them from doing so.

As Alex waited, he suddenly heard a different set of commotion coming from the other side of the crowd.

He turned around to see the servants, guards, and court officials part to give way to a young woman who walked through.

The young woman wore light-purple robes and a hair braided full of gems and ribbons. A purple veil covered her face, but even then one could see that she was beautiful.

There was a certain elegance in her steps that only came from rigorous training. Besides her, there was two purple-robed male, both very strong.

From what Alex could tell, they were both in the saint realm. As for the young woman herself, she was in the upper realms of True King.

'Is she the princess?' he wondered.

"What are you all doing out here?" the woman asked the group.

One of the court officials walked forward and explained everything that had happened.

The woman's eyes went wide. "And you let my father be with such an individual?" she asked, worry filling her voice.

She quickly walked off and stood in front of the golden wall before striking it with a blue-colored attack.

'Water Qi?' Alex thought when he saw that.

The attack landed on the barrier and suddenly the barrier disappeared.

"Woah!" people started shouting in surprise.

"When did the princess get so strong?" they asked.

However, the door opened and Shen Jing's voice came from inside.

"Little Yu, come in. Bring the young lady too," he said.

Alex walked forward and stood next to the princess. "Princess, please," he said as he led the way.

The princess didn't understand what was happening, but she had been called here by her father, so she walked in without even Alex prompting her to.

The two guards of hers tried to walk in as well, but a force stopped them from entering.

Once both Alex and the princess were inside, the door closed on its own.

"Father, what's going on?" the princess asked as she ran up to her father, barely giving a glance to Shen Jing.

The Emperor had gotten back his composure, but he seemed a little afraid of Shen Jing still, and Alex could see that.

'What did he do?' he wondered.

"Xumei, did you bring the crystal, as I asked?" the Emperor asked.

"Yes, father," the Princess said and brought out a staff. The blue staff had intricate details along the side of the shaft, and at the top of it was a half-sphere transparent crystal that shined a very light shade of blue.

"Is that the healing crystal?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes, Senior," the Emperor said before the princess could say anything. The princess looked at her father with a weird look on her face. She had never heard him call someone so young senior before.

"Come here, little girl," Shen Jing called.

The princess looked at her father who nodded to her. Only then did the princess walk over to Shen Jing.

Shen Jing stepped to the side and said, "heal his arm for me."

The princess nodded and looked at Alex, who quickly pulled up his long sleeve and proceeded to remove his fake arm.

"Wait, he isn't wounded," the princess said. "That's an amputated limb. I can only heal, not regrow."

As soon as Alex heard those words, disappointment filled every corner of his very being.

"Are you sure?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes, senior," she said. "I have tried before, but I can only heal wounds and poisons, but I can do nothing for something that isn't already there."

"Hmm… still, try it for me," he said.

The princess nodded and grabbed her staff by the sphere, rather than the shaft, and placed another palm on Alex's now bare stump.

She took a deep breath and started doing something and slowly Alex could feel the energy enter his body.

The ends of his stump felt stimulated, but other than that, nothing else happened.

The princess gave up. "See, it doesn't work," she said.

"Why did you hold your staff so weird?" Shen Jing asked.

"Oh, that's because it's the crystal that's the source of the power and I have to touch it in order to heal others," she said. "The rest of the staff is just there for decoration or a bit of convenience because of the shape of the crystal making it hard to hold."

"Oh, what shape could that be?" Shen Jing asked as his spiritual sense went into the staff and checked it thoroughly. Suddenly, his eyes narrowed when he noticed something.

"It's in the shape of a—" before she could finish Shen Jing grabbed the staff and took it away from her.

"Senior?" The Emperor spoke but Shen Jing gave him no heed. Even Alex was weirded out by what was happening.

"Brother Shen?" he called out, but Shen Jing was focused on the crystal.

He grabbed the edge of the metal that cupped the crystal and tore it away like it was made up of paper. After tearing it away from each side, he brought out the crystal.

Alex finally saw the crystal in full.

The transparent crystal with the blue hue was mostly spherical, except for one side where it looked like someone pinched it and pulled it until it was pointed.

Without any warning, Shen Jing pulled back his arm and punched the crystal as hard as he could.

"No!" the princess cried out in horror, but it was too late.

BANG!

Alex suddenly felt a shockwave in the air as it pushed him back towards the door where he struck it and fell to the ground.

He felt his brain rattle and his interior organs shuffle around for a bit. He felt like vomiting out everything in his body, but he stopped himself.

The Emperor put up a barrier to protect himself and his daughter, but even then they were scared.

"Senior?" the Emperor asked.

Shen Jing's smile was no more and instead, he had an irritated, but the concerned face on him.

"Where'd you find this?" Shen Jing asked, bringing Alex's attention back to the crystal that was perfectly fine.

"The crystal?" the Emperor asked. "That is something that had been passed down in my family for generations."

"Every single princess that can take the crystal and use it to heal our family and our warriors," the Emperor said. "That's how it has been for a thousand years."

"I didn't ask you that," Shen Jing said.

"Ac-According to the records, this crystal came down in the meteor shower over a thousand years ago, senior," The Emperor finally answered his question.

Shen Jing's face changed. "The meteor shower?" he asked. "God damn it!"

"Is something wrong, senior?" the Emperor asked.

"Yes, there is," Shen Jing said. "But you won't understand."

"Damn it!" Shen Jing said before rubbing his chin as he thought of something.

"This artifact is far too dangerous to be kept with you," he said. "I will be taking it away today."

"Senior?!"

"No, you can't!"

Both father and daughter spoke up at once as they put on aghast expressions on their face.

"I'm not trying to steal from you, little girl. I'm trying to protect you," Shen Jing said.

"You have no idea the amount of trouble you will get from keeping the Ocean God's Teardrop with you."

Chapter 716 Legacy Artifact

It was by accident that they realized it could heal wounds, but aside from that, they knew nothing.

Just like every other item that dropped during the meteor shower, this one was an enigma too.

They had all wondered at times as to what the meteor shower was exactly. However, after getting no answer for millennia, they had given up.

Now that the Emperor found an answer, albeit being the name of a single thing, he wanted to know more about it.

"It would be a lie to say I know it exactly," Shen Jing said. "I have heard and have seen images of it."

"How did something like this come here?" Shen Jing softly spoke to himself.

"Who's the Ocean God?" Alex asked from behind.

"A dead guy," Shen Jing said without thinking. "He doesn't matter right now. What matters is that his Legacy Artifact is here and the people that are under him will soon come looking for it."

"And trust me when I say this, you don't want to mess with these people," Shen Jing said.

Shen Jing then turned around and tossed the crystal to Alex. "Try and heal yourself. See if you can do it," he said.

Alex nodded and poured Qi into the crystal. It was a struggle as the artifact belonged to someone else, but he succeeded.

Suddenly, cool energy released from the crystal that once again tried to heal him. However, this time the energy was weaker than when the princess did it so nothing happened.

"It's not happening, brother Shen," Alex said.

"Well, I didn't think you could," Shen Jing said.

Alex got dejected. "So, this won't help me?" he asked.

Shen Jing shook his head. "It could if we had time, or the little princess here had refined it better, but as it stands, I don't see how you will."

"This artifact demands a superior Water spirit root. The better the root, the better the results will be," Shen Jing said. "However, aside from that, they also have to refine it."

"From what I can tell, these princesses have been refining the same small part of the artifact since the very beginning and haven't made any advancement in it since then."

"This thing can heal the worst of wounds. You could lose your whole body, and if your soul survives, it can heal you."

"It could heal you from the worst of poisons out there too."

"It could even heal wounds to the spirit itself. However, since the princesses stopped refining it, they have only touched on the first part," Shen Jing said.

The rest of the 3 people stood stunned when they heard that information. The Princess knew the most about the crystal out of all the three, and yet even she was surprised.

"So… if we were to refine this, we can use it?" Alex asked. He had refined things before. The ring he was wearing once belonged to someone else. Since he had managed to refine that too, he should be able to refine the teardrop as well.

Shen Jing shook his head. "You can't," he said.

"But, I've refined such things before too," Alex said softly to him. "Remember the ring?"

"This is different," Shen Jing said. "A Legacy Artifact is not so simple to refine. That is the artifact someone spends their whole life with. It's the artifact they used every day for a long time."

"It is the artifact that they are remembered by. Do you think you can compare such an artifact to something so common as a storage ring?" Shen Jing asked and shook his head.

"The princesses must have taken decades to even reach the level they have and the reason they stopped was that refining any more became excruciatingly hard."

"If they wanted to advance, they needed a better cultivation base," Shen Jing said. "If you can wait until the princess or you have a better cultivation base, you will have already gotten your arm back by simply being in the saint realm."

"I see," Alex said as disappointment filled him again. 'I guess I really am meant to wait until I reach Saint realm then,' he thought.

"Anyway, I'm taking this now, goodbye," Shen Jing said and turned to leave.

"Senior wait," The Emperor spoke even before the Princess could voice out anything.

"What is it now?" Shen Jing gave an annoyed look that stopped the words that were going to come out of the Emperor's mouth.

"Senior, we are too reliant on that crystal. Our people expect me to heal them whenever they are wounded. If you take that away, we will…" The Princess didn't know what to say next.

Shen Jing thought for a second and sighed. "You're right," he said. "I shouldn't just take things away from others."

"You only use it for healing, right?" he asked.

The princess nodded.

"Alright, then take him in exchange," Shen Jing said as he pushed Alex forward.

"Huh? Eh? What?" Alex was surprised and panicked.

"I'm trading you for this crystal," Shen Jing said as the crystal disappeared somewhere.

"Who… is this young man?" the Emperor asked awkwardly, trying not to push any boundaries with his questions.

"He's a little guy I found in your empire. Since you need to heal your people, he will be doing what the crystal has been doing until now," Shen Jing said.

"This young man can heal people?" the princess asked suspiciously.

"Well, he's an alchemist so I hope so," Shen Jing said. "You can make healing pills right?"

Alex nodded.

"See? He will be a fine replacement," Shen Jing said.

"That's…" the princess didn't know what to say. Even the Emperor was speechless.

"Tell them how good you are. They will trust you then," Shen Jing said.

'Am I being sold off? Is this human trafficking?' Alex thought for a second. Still, in the end, he sighed and brought out his badge to show the Emperor.

"I'm a True Heaven rank Alchemist, your majesty. I can promise you that I can make the pills as required," he said.

"Oh," the Emperor gave a surprised look. He hadn't expected someone so young looking to have such a high rank as an Alchemist.

"What's your name, young man?" the Emperor asked.

"I am Yu Ming, your majesty," Alex said.

"Very well. Since Senior has given you to us, we will gracefully take you. Xumei, he will be under you from now on. Treat him like he's my guest," the Emperor said.

"Yes, father," the Princess nodded.

"Are you really selling me off, brother Shen?" Alex whispered next to him.

"Selling you? Why would I sell you?" Shen Jing asked.

"But… but you just gave me away to the Emperor," he said.

"Oh, right," Shen Jing said and turned to the emperor. "I hope you know this is just a limited-time thing. You can give him ingredients and he will make you a pill."

"However, that will go on for just 2 years. After 2 years, he will leave. Meaning, you have 2 years to switch from being reliant on this artifact to being reliant on pills and such to heal you," Shen Jing said.

"Yes, senior," the Emperor said. He wouldn't have kept Alex longer even if he wasn't told. After all, Alex really wasn't a replacement for the crystal, but rather something to aid in their transition to stop being reliant on the crystal.

"Alright, now that things are done, we're leaving," Shen Jing said. "Let's go, little Yu."

"I'm not staying here?" Alex asked.

"You'll come here tomorrow. For today, I have many questions to ask you," Shen Jing said and took Alex away.

The doors closed behind them and only the Emperor and the princess remained.

"Are we really going to let him take the crystal just like that?" the princess asked.

"Yes," the Emperor nodded.

"Why? That's ours. How can he just take it away like that?" the princess asked.

"Xumei, there are times when you have to know to back off. This is one of those times," the Emperor said.

"Is he stronger than you?" she asked.

"Many times," The Emperor said.

"Who is he?" the Princess asked.

"I can't say," the Emperor said. "You shouldn't go around trying to find his information either. That is a royal decree."

"That's… I've never seen you so serious before, father," she said.

"I know," he said. "I just… I didn't expect to meet him today."

"Who is he?" The Princess' curiosity was truly piqued.

"I told you, I can't say," the Emperor said.

"You can't say? Or you won't say?" the princess asked.

"I can't say," the Emperor repeated himself.

"Oh… wait, did you?" the princess' eyes went wide. "Did you make an oath?"

The Emperor nodded. Finally, the princess understood the severity of the situation.

'Just who the hell can force an emperor to make an Oath?' she wondered.

* * * * * *

"Are sure it was a good idea to talk to the Emperor so directly? You might be strong, but he's still the Emperor, you know?" Alex asked.

They had already left the palace and were out in the streets now.

"Of course," Shen Jing said. "Why would it matter to me? He's not my Emperor."

"Eh? Are you not from the Luminance Empire?" Alex asked.

"Is Luminance Empire the only location on this continent?" Shen Jing asked with a smile.

'Right,' Alex thought. There was the Crimson Empire and the beast realm. Aside from those two, there were also multiple islands to the west and south that were their own hegemony.

"Are you from one of the Hegemonies in the ocean?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing simply smiled, not saying anything. They soon reached a restaurant where they sat down to order some food.

"Here, I got you something," Shen Jing said as he chewed on the biggest piece of meat on the table. He reached into… somewhere and brought out something before placing it next to Alex.

Alex looked at the new item, a fruit, and gave a weird look. He had never seen it before. Even so, very quickly a name floated up to his head.

As soon as it did, his eyes went wide and his jaw dropped to the point that one could see the food inside his mouth.

Alex quickly swallowed and picked up the fruit to watch it with reverence.

"This…" he still couldn't believe what he was seeing. One of the rarest things in the world was sitting on the table in front of him.

"This is a Divine Devil's fruit."

Chapter 717 Three Demonic Plants

Alex looked at the bright red and yellow pear-shaped fruit with swirls all around the outside of it.

"Um, I don't need it though," Alex said. "I've already gone through Mortal Cleansing."

"Oh, you've eaten this already?" Shen Jing asked with a bit of surprise.

"No, I've never even seen this before," Alex said. "I just went through Mortal cleansing... on my own."

Alex wasn't sure if he wanted to reveal the existence of Pearl's help in Mortal Cleansing. While he was sure that one would need to ingest the White Tiger's blood essence to do what he did, there was still the chance that Shen Jing would think Pearl would help him and take him for his own.

While the chance was very, very small, Alex didn't want to take it.

"You went through mortal cleansing without a Divine Devil's fruit? Now that's interesting," Shen Jing said. "Wait, how did you know about this fruit if you've never eaten it or seen it in the first place? There's no way there are pictures of it out there, right?"

"No, I just know the names of all alchemy ingredients out there. So while I haven't seen it before, I recognize it," Alex said.

"Huh?" Shen Jing gave a weird look, maybe even a confused one.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"This isn't an Alchemy ingredient," Shen Jing said. "Why would you think a Divine Devil's fruit is an Alchemy ingredient?"

"Huh? But it is. I know the information of all Alchemy ingredients," Alex said as he grabbed the Divine Devil's fruit.

He was about to say something when he noticed something weird about the fruit. The fruit was indeed the Divine Devil's fruit and it was about 122 years old, however, it had no energy in it at all.

Or rather, it did but the information about it that he was supposed to get wasn't there at all.

'What's going on?' he thought.

"Yeah, right. Like anyone can create pills out of Divine Devil's fruit. If they can do it, I will call myself their little brother," Shen Jing said.

Alex was still confused. "But... I know the name," he thought to himself.

"I have never even heard of anyone talking about making anything out of plants that descend from the three Demonic plants," Shen Jing said offhandedly.

"The three Demonic Plants?" Alex asked as his eyes narrowed. He had heard of that before... but where?

As he thought for a moment, an answer came to him.

"Ah! The plants blessed by one of the gods," Alex said as he remembered Godslayer's words.

'There are only two true gods in the world. One that blessed the Four Heavenly Beasts, and the other one that blessed the Three Demonic Plants.'

"Wait, are you saying the Divine Devil's fruit is one of the three Demonic Plants??" Alex asked with a shocked face.

"What? No. It's descended from one. Pretty close too," Shen Jing said.

"If you don't mind me asking, what are the Three Demonic Plants?" Alex asked.

"Well," Shen Jing mulled for a bit as he saw Alex's face. "Fine, I'll tell you."

"The Demonic plants are just normal plants that were blessed by the gods to be the best of all the plants in the world."

"There are 3 of them, each that affect one of the 3 things for a cultivator."

"Body, Qi, and Mind."

"The Divine Devil's fruit is a plant that descended from the plant that affects one's body. While the Demonic body Plant affects the body with every single part of the plant, its descendant, the Divine Devil plant, only affects the body with its fruit," Shen Jing said.

"Oh," Alex said. "Does it have a name? The Demonic body plant I mean."

Shen Jing smiled. "It's too early for you to know about them. Just learning they exist is already more than you should know."

"I see," Alex said, not asking any more questions. "I wonder why I know the name if it's not an alchemy ingredient. Maybe I just know the plant names."

Alex looked at the fruit once again and started considering what he could do with it.

"Stop acting like this is your first time seeing something like this," Shen Jing said as he continued eating his food.

"Huh? But it is my first time seeing this fruit," Alex said.

"Not the fruit, a descendant of one of the Three Demonic plants. It's not like you're looking at one of the Demonic plants itself," Shen Jing said.

Alex's face suddenly got serious. "I've seen another one? Where? When?" he asked.

"Did you forget what I said?" Shen Jing said. "The Demonic plants affect Body, Qi, and Mind."

Shen Jing pointed to his head. "Have you never seen anything that affects that?" he asked.

"I have?" Alex thought for a second and immediately his eyes went wide. "I HAVE!"

"Spirit Cleansing Lily!" he shouted.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "It's a descendant of the Demonic Mind Plant where only the flower of it actually works."

"Is that why it is not part of any pill?" Alex said. "I didn't know I was so close to the descendant of one of the Demonic plants."

He then looked at the fruit in his hand and said, "Two, now."

"Are there any more?" Alex asked.

"There are," Shen Jing said, "But most of them don't do anything. It's like when you have too good of a physical constitution, so you have a hard time having kids since Heaven doesn't want you to pass on your advantage to your offspring."

"Huh?" Alex was confused.

"Are you an only child?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex nodded.

"Point proven," Shen Jing said as he chewed his meat.

"Wait, what are you saying, brother Shen? Are you saying that my parents couldn't have more than me?" Alex asked.

"They might have wanted only one child," Shen Jing said, "but it is more than likely they wanted more, but they just couldn't."

"The heaven is really considerate about letting a person with great constitution have children. Just the fact you were born means your parents had to fight the odds for that," Shen Jing said.

"Is... is everyone like that?" Alex asked. "What if the parents are normal? Can their child not be special?"

"Oh, they can. Absolutely," Shen Jing said. "But do you think your parents are normal?"

Alex thought for a moment and shook his head.

"Yeah, the plants are similar too. Heaven just can't let a Demonic Plant's offspring be good too, so most of their offspring end up mutating. Mostly into something useless, but sometimes into these," Shen Jing said.

"Even then, it is hard to acquire them," Shen Jing said. "Not only are they rare, to begin with, but they are also hard to pick."

"For the Spirit Cleansing lily, you have to choose it from one of the many flowers that grow. It's nearly impossible unless you have a particularly strong spirit."

"As for the Divine Devil's fruit, you have to pick them up after they have become 120 years old and before they become 123 years old."

"If you eat anything that was picked outside of those 3 years, you end up causing problems for yourself," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded. He had already seen the effect of eating a raw Divine Devil's fruit on Fu Wen's mother back in the Scarlet city where she had fallen into a coma after reading halfway through Mortal Cleansing.

"Thank you, brother Shen, for explaining it all to me," Alex said.

"Yeah well, turns out you didn't need it in the end," Shen Jing said.

"About that, I have a favor to ask," Alex said. "Can I take this fruit anyway?"

"Hmm? Why?" Shen Jing asked. "You want to feed it to Pearl?"

"No, I want to feed it to my mother," Alex said. "Wait, it works on beasts too?"

"Of course," Shen Jing said.

'Right, if the Spirit Cleansing lily worked, then, of course, the Divine Devil's fruit would work as well,' Alex thought.

Now, he didn't know what to do. He had been thinking of giving this fruit to his mother for a while, but if Pearl could eat it, then he deserved it too.

Especially since his cultivation had been slowing down for a while.

'What should I do?'

Chapter 718 Insecurities

"Well, here's the thing," Alex said. "I want Pearl to eat this fruit, but I also want to give it to my mother. So, I'm not sure what I should do."

"Your mother? Did she come to this continent too?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex nodded.

"Oh, then don't worry about here," Shen Jing said as he reached somewhere and brought out another Divine Devil fruit. "I have two."

Alex was surprised. "Where did you find two? Aren't they very rare?" he asked.

"They grow in my backyard," Shen Jing said.

"In your backyard? It must be quite amazing to grow these then," Alex said.

"Where's your mother now?" Shen Jing asked.

"In the DawnSpring city. She's a disciple in the Flowing Brush sect," Alex answered.

"Alright, I will give this to her later then," he said.

"I can give it to her," Alex said.

"Well, we both will," Shen Jing said with a smile. After they finished eating, Shen Jing took Alex and flew in the direction of DawnSpring city.

A distance of around three thousand kilometers ended up taking Alex only 6 minutes at best.

Due to his increased cultivation, it seemed Shen Jing was going faster than before now.

'Geez, just how fast can he go?' he wondered.

When they stopped, Alex pointed toward the sect and they entered. Shen Jing was practically trespassing, but not a single alarm went off for some reason.

As far as the sect running formation was concerned, he wasn't even there.

Alex quickly introduced his mother to Shen Jing and gave her a Divine Devil's fruit. Then, the two of them went to his house to talk for a bit.

"That you for telling me about the Demonic plants again," Alex said. "Those sort of information are impossible to come by."

"Yeah, well you shouldn't be searching for such information in public places. Sects and families are very conscious of what they have and what they can protect.

Alex nodded to agree with the statement when he thought of something. 'Something that can't be found in public places.'

Suddenly, a question that was plaguing his mind for 2 weeks ago came flooding back.

"Brother Shen, I… am facing a problem with my cultivation right now. I was hoping you could help me," he said.

"Oh, you're facing problems with cultivation? That's weird," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded. "About 2 weeks ago, I sat down to cultivate, but I kept coming out of it. I think someone was talking to me, and I also remember feeling very angry and scared."

"Honestly I have no idea what happened, but I ended up going through Qi deviation and lost a bit of my cultivation due to that," Alex said.

Shen Jing's face suddenly got serious and he sensed Alex's cultivation base again.

"True Lord 9th realm," he said softly. "If what you say is accurate, then you must have been tormented by an Inner Demon."

"An Inner Demon? What's that?" Alex asked. "Does it have anything to do with the demons from the demon realm?"

"No, these are completely different. Inner Demons were named way before," Shen Jing said. "What an Inner Demon is, is the world forcing you to face your trauma and insecurities."

"The world?" Alex asked.

"Yes, the world. Or you may call it Heaven too. The same thing," Shen Jing said. "Remember what I said before? Heaven hates letting someone with an advantage grow. So, they try to stop them by putting obstacles in their way."

"Wait, wait, wait," Alex stopped him. "The Heaven is trying to stop me from advancing because I was born with my body and talent?"

"No," Shen Jing said. "That is something your parents faced, not you. Since they fought through it, you have nothing to worry about in that regard."

"Then what advantage do I have?" Alex asked.

"Dao," Shen Jing said. "You know the Dao of Explosion, right?"

"Yes," Alex said. "And Heat too."

"Another one?" Shen Jing raised an eyebrow.

"Yes," Alex said.

"When?" Shen Jing asked.

"2 years ago," Alex said.

"Wow, nice," he said. "Anyway. Since you now have 2 different Dao, you have power, or rather Authority over the world itself in that regard."

"You can force the world to do what you want. The world allows it, but they also put obstacles in your way to try and stop you."

"There are 2 types of obstacles that they put on you. Physical and mental," Shen Jing said.

"Physical obstacles usually come when you are about to break through between Major realms, like from True to Saint, or Saint to Immortal."

"Since you know 2 Daos, it is likely you will have to face it when you break through to the Saint realm," Shen Jing said.

"I will? What will I have to face? Will different beasts come to attack me?" Alex asked.

"No, you will have to fight something that comes from up above," Shen Jing said.

"From above?" Alex asked as he started thinking about what came from above. Then, he remembered the scene when Lady Ren's strength went past the Saint realm and crossed the border of the Immortal realms.

"Heavenly Judgment?" Alex asked with a face that was drained of any blood.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "Except, this time we call it Tribulation lightning."

He saw the scared look on Alex's face and said, "Don't worry, it won't be as strong as a Heavenly Judgment's lightning. Just a realm or two above what you are trying to break through to."

"Although, in your case, it might come down stronger given how high your strength is."

Alex's face which was about to be relaxed tightened up again with fear.

"Don't worry, you'll be fine," Shen Jing said. "Besides, we are talking about Inner Demons. That's the mental obstacle the world will put in your path to stop you from breaking through a minor realm."

"From True Lord to True King, from True King to True Emperor, from True Emperor to Saint Condensation, that sort of thing," Shen Jing said.

"We will go through it even when we break through major realms?" Alex asked.

"Of course, it's not going to stop now," Shen Jing said. "Anyway, Inner Demon is simply your trauma and your insecurities taking the form of a voice to play with your mind."

"As long as you have a solid heart, you will pass through," Shen Jing said.

"So… I need to know what my Inner Demon says so I can prepare against it?" Alex asked.

"No, you do not prepare for Inner Demon," Shen Jing said. "There is no preparing for it. No matter what, there will always be something in you that your Inner Demon will focus on to torture you."

"The worst part is you don't realize it's an Inner Demon while it's tormenting you, and you don't remember what it tormented you with afterward."

"So, the best way to prepare for an Inner Demon is to face your insecurities before you try to breakthrough. That way, you give the demon not many things to use against you."

Shen Jing slapped his thigh. "Right, bring out an empty talisman," he said.

Alex nodded and brought out one.

"Okay, now write everything that is troubling you in there. One of the ways to face your insecurities is to write it down and think through it one by one," Shen Jing said.

Alex thought for a moment, nodded, and started writing. He thought about what could be troubling him so much and noted down whatever came to mind.

"Are you done?" Shen Jing asked after seeing Alex put down the Talisman.

"I don't really know much, but I think I'm done," Alex said. "Do you want to read?"

"I can't read," Shen Jing reminded him. "Say your first point out loud."

"I worry I will never get my arm back," Alex said.

"Haha, that's a stupid one," Shen Jing said. "I told you, once you reach Saint realm, it will grow back even if you don't want it. You should throw it out of your mind now. Alright, next?"

Alex nodded.

"I worry I am ruining Pearl's potential," he said.

"Ruin his potential? How?" Shen Jing gave a weird face.

"I… Pearl was supposed to go through a ritual to evolve or something, but I stopped that from happening. I am starting to believe that is not the right thing," Alex said.

"Hmm, can you bring out Pearl?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex nodded and in bright white light, Pearl came out.

"Hmm… Old man?" Pearl asked when he saw Shen Jing.

"How are you doing, little fellow? Did you miss me?" Shen Jing asked.

"No," Pearl said.

"What?" Shen Jing made a sad face. "Here I thought you would be happy to see me again."

"I am," Pearl said, "but I didn't miss you. I have a brother and mother with me. I don't miss anyone else."

"Mother?" Shen Jing gave a weird look.

"My mother," Alex said.

"Oh," Shen Jing said. "Come here, Pearl."

Pearl jumped into his embrace and Shen Jing pet him a bit. At the same time, he checked Pearl as well.

"Yeah, he's fine. There's nothing to worry about him," Shen Jing said.

"Really? But his cultivation speed has been slowing down recently," Alex said.

"That's just how beasts are. Their cultivation speed is usually slower than humans. Plants have it worse," Shen Jing said.

"So, he's fine?" Alex asked.

"He's fine," Shen Jing said. "Of course, if he can evolve, that would probably increase his speed. But strictly speaking, he doesn't need it right now."

"As long as you get him to evolve before he reaches the Immortal realm, he will be okay."

Chapter 719 Belong

Alex read the next one.

"I worry about my father," Alex said.

"Your father? Where is he?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex shook his head. "I don't know. That's why I worry. He was teleported to a random location along with my mom. While I think he's in the Southern continent because he said he ended up in a place with Desert, I can't be sure," Alex said.

"Well, Southern Continent is the only place that's mostly desert," Shen Jing said. "Is that the only information you have?"

"Well," Alex thought for a second. "He couldn't cultivate either."

"Yeah, that's definitely Southern Continent," Shen Jing said.

Alex couldn't believe that. "The northern section of the Western Continent is also a desert," he said.

"I know," Shen Jing said. "I went there in the last few years. Trust me, that is not where your father went to."

"How do you know?" Alex asked.

"Because Senior used the teleportation formation that was already in place," Shen Jing said. "He made sure to send people to places where they could survive."

"You ever wonder why you didn't appear inside a lake, or in the middle of a pack of beasts? That's because he made sure to put some safeguard when teleporting you all."

"Besides, it is unlikely all 3 of you ended up in the Western Continent. After all, the teleportation formation here is considerably much worse than the other continents, so fewer people got sent here anyway," Shen Jing said.

"Eh? That's the reason why Western Continent didn't get many players?" Alex asked.

"Yes. Either way, your father should be in the southern continent," Shen Jing said.

"That doesn't make me feel very good though," Alex said. "He's still in a new place and probably didn't know what to do. I worry."

"It's just the southern continent, you know," Shen Jing said. "It's not like he was sent to the ocean. Also, hasn't it been 7 or 8 years since he went there? He's probably living a good life right now. You needn't worry at all."

Alex nodded, but he couldn't get rid of the worry.

"Next up," Shen Jing said.

Alex looked at the next one. "I worry that someone will find out about my talent and try to take advantage of me while I'm still weak, maybe even kill me," he said.

"Why do I feel like this is directed at me?" Shen Jing asked.

"What? No, I'm talking about in general," Alex hurriedly explained.

"I'm joking, chill," Shen Jing said with a chuckle. "You don't need to worry about that. After all, who dares do anything to you while I'm around. Besides, I even got the Emperor to be in your favor. Do you still think you have something to worry about?"

"I guess not," Alex said.

"Any more?" Shen Jing asked.

"Well, there is a big one," Alex said as he deliberated a bit.

"What is it?" Shen Jing asked.

"You see, as soon as I became a cultivator, my masters took me in and trained me in the sect. While I was there, I thought of the sects as my home. However, after my master who taught me alchemy passed away, I realized there really isn't anything keeping me tethered to the sect."

"After I came here, I was going to roam around too. I found my mother, but while I like living with her here, I still don't see this place as my home."

Shen Jing listened. "What place do you see as your home then?" he asked.

"The Central continent. Back where my actual home is," Alex said.

"So, what's the problem? What's troubling you?" Shen Jing asked.

"I… I think of it as my home, but none of my parents are there, and everyone I cared about is scattered throughout the world. Even if I manage to go back there… do I still count it as my home?" Alex asked.

"Not only that. Ever since I became a cultivator, I feel like I was destined to cultivate and become someone big."

"If that is the case then, can I still go back to my home? Do I even belong there anymore?" Alex asked. He had been wanting to go back to the Central continent for a long time, back to his home.

However, now that no one lived there, was it still his home?

Shen Jing sighed. "That's one thing I can't help you with. You will have to figure that out yourself," he said.

Alex nodded.

"However, there is something I can tell you. It is fine not feeling like you belong somewhere but still finding happiness there," Shen Jing said.

"Besides, it's not the place you really belong to, it's the people. You don't feel like you belong to your home now because deep inside you can tell that it's no longer your home."

"Your home was a place where your father and mother lived. As soon as they moved to a different location, that location became your new home," Shen Jing said.

Alex fell into thought. Shen Jing was right. He didn't feel like he belonged there because he really didn't belong there anymore.

But that didn't matter. He didn't have to care for something just because he belonged to it, or it belonged to him. There was nothing wrong with wanting to go back to see the Central continent.

After all, it had once been his home. It wasn't anymore, but who cared? He would go because he wanted to, not because he felt like he belonged there.

Alex felt his heart grow significantly lighter after the talk.

"Thank you, brother Shen," Alex said.

"It's okay," Shen Jing said. "Are you done?"

Alex looked at the list and saw that he could figure out the rest on his own. "I'm done," he said.

"Alright, my time to ask questions then," Shen Jing said. "Tell me everything that happened back in the Demon Realm."

Alex nodded and told everything.

"Wait, you were the one that killed the girl?" Shen Jing raised an eyebrow.

"Yes," Alex said. "Why?"

Shen Jing smirked and sent his spiritual sense to thoroughly check Alex. When he reached a certain point, he couldn't help but show a shocked expression.

"What? What's wrong?" Alex asked. He hadn't sensed Shen Jing's sensing, so he didn't know what he was reacting to.

"Well, aren't you full of surprises?" Shen Jing said with a bit of chuckle in his voice.

"What? What surprise?" Alex asked.

"You will find out later on your own," Shen Jing said.

"What? No! Come on, you have to tell me," Alex said.

"Well, you did something that you weren't supposed to until you reached the immortal realm. I don't think I've ever heard of any case where someone did it even in Saint realm, and yet you've done it in True realm," Shen Jing said.

"I wonder though how this could possibly be related to how you killed that girl," Shen Jing thought to himself. "I don't see any connection, but maybe I'm just stupid."

Alex wasn't understanding anything that came out of Shen Jing's mouth. "What are you talking about?" he asked.

"Do you like a mystery?" Shen Jing asked.

"Yes?" Alex said.

"Great. There's a mystery for you to solve once you reach a higher realm," Shen Jing said as he giggled. "I can't wait for you to find out on your own."

"What are you even talking about?" Alex asked. "What did I do?"

"Never mind it now, let's change topics. You learned Sword Qi?" he asked.

Alex nodded.

"Good, so you need to improve your sword intent more if you want to get better. If you do so, you should be able to create your own Sword Aura in a few dozen years," Shen Jing said.

"Sword Aura? That's the next stage?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "You're still way far away though. You still need to perfect your Sword Qi. For that, you need to perfect your intent."

"My Intent? Not my Sword Qi?" Alex asked. "I thought I would have to improve my Sword Qi to reach the next level."

"You do, but you also need to improve your Intent. Only when both your Sword Intent and Sword Qi are at the peak level will you form your Sword Aura."

"Then, for the next one, you elevate all three of them, and so on and so on," Shen Jing explained.

"I see. Thank you for explaining that," Alex said.

The two of them talked for the entire night and Alex learned a lot of things. When the sun came up, Alex went to speak to Qin Shan.

"Sect master Qin, thank you for everything you've done to me for the last 2 years," Alex said.

"Sigh, so you're really leaving, huh?" he asked.

"Mother told you?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Qin Shan said. "Well, where are you going?"

"I'm going to be an alchemist for the royal Wei Family. I'm going to be working under the princess," Alex said.

"Wait, wait, wait, what?" Qin Shan couldn't believe what he heard. "How did this happen? I thought you were going to become a Lightsworn."

"Well, things happened and I ended up becoming the person Alchemist for the princess," Alex said. He too couldn't believe how it had happened.

"Here," Alex said as he handed back his Guest Elder badge.

"No, keep it," Qin Shan said. "Use that to remind yourself while you are with the princess that this sect will forever open for you."

"Thank you, Sect Master Qin," Alex said. "And goodbye."

Chapter 720 Pearl's Cleansing

If Alex were to fight against Shen Jing, he would need no one else to train against.

The princess stood at the front of the gate with her two male guards that were in the Saint realm.

"Your highness," Alex bowed in greeting when he saw her.

"You are called Yu Ming, right?" She asked.

"Yes, your highness," Alex replied.

"Don't call me your highness, call me Princess Xumei or you can call me Sister Xumei if you want," she said.

"I think I will stick with princess Xumei for now," Alex said.

Xumei wanted to get close to Alex just so she didn't accidentally offend him and bring the wrath of Shen Jing on her family.

"Alright, follow me," she said and walked in.

Alex walked in with her and watched the empty meadow on either side of the walkway as they went towards the Royal Palace.

The servants and workers bowed toward the princess as she walked in. Alex hadn't read up much on the royal family, but he had read enough to know that she was the most important princess in the family.

Behind only the crown prince whose name he didn't know.

As they went in, the princess carefully explained every single aspect of the palace to Alex. Where he could go, where he couldn't go, which side the royal family lived on, where the servant's quarters were etc.

Once she was done explaining, she took him to the back of the palace. The backyard of the palace lay beyond the city walls and was actually at the foot of a tall mountain facing the west.

The backyard itself was beautiful. Even as the princess explained everything, Alex was just in awe over the garden that lay there.

Different types of rare plants of all types of grades grew in there. There was also an empty area at the center with a massive pond where fishes of all types swam.

"This garden is beautiful," Alex said.

"Isn't it?" the princess said enthusiastically. "Our gardener takes good care of it."

Alex wasn't lying. The garden was indeed very beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful he had ever seen.

He didn't see much value in the plants as ingredients as no matter how rare they were, the pill they made weren't important, but aesthetically, they were marvelous.

"I would love to meet this gardener of yours and learn a few lessons of raising plants," Alex said as he remembered that he really needed to learn about botany.

As an alchemist, cultivating plants and beasts for ingredients was supposed to be one of his talents, yet he knew nothing about it.

He didn't even know where the seeds for most of the plants came from. Especially for ones that didn't bear fruit.

"Alright, let me go show you your room," the princess said and took him along. Alex saw his room and nodded to himself.

He couldn't have thought of a better-looking room out there. This was even better than the guest room back at the royal palace of the Crimson Empire.

"If you want to go anywhere else, just let me know," the princess said.

Alex nodded. "Where's the room I'll be working in?" he asked.

"Um... we don't have an alchemy room," the princess said.

"Huh? Where will I be working then, princess?" Alex asked.

"In the guild," the princess said.

"You don't have Royal alchemists or the likes?" Alex asked.

The princess shook her head. "We haven't needed an exclusive alchemist... ever," the princess said. "If we ever need a pill, we simply tell the guild. They have an exclusive agreement with us where we are prioritized if we do request for any pill."

"I see," Alex said. "So I will be working in the guild huh?"

"Well, I'm sure we can prepare a room if you truly require it," the princess said.

"I don't really require it, but it would be better if you do prepare it. After all, I suppose you will be taking in alchemists for the family after I am done here," Alex said.

"I suppose so," the princess said. "Alright, I will talk with old Huo later and tell him. For now, take this."

Alex reached out and grabbed the talisman she handed it to her. Just from looking at the runes, he could tell it was a communication talisman that worked within a few kilometers."

"I will get you a servant. Work along with him to gather ingredients and make pills. If there is anything important, you can message me directly," the princess said.

"Thank you, princess Xumei," Alex said.

"I have some work to do, so I will leave you now," she said and left.

Alex locked the door and entered the room. With a simple scan of his spiritual sense, he realized that there was a formation carved into the room that blocked off senses from outside.

"Good," he thought and spread his spiritual sense to the fullest inside the room.

The guest room he was given had 2 more rooms. One was a bathroom with a big bathtub inside. The other room was a cultivation room with a small Qi gathering formation carved in the center.

"The bathroom first," Alex thought and called out to Pearl.

"Woah, where are we, brother?" Pearl asked as he looked around the room with its massive size and beautiful white walls.

"We're in our guestroom. Make sure to behave here and never speak when you are outside this room, okay?" Alex said.

"Okay," Pearl said. "I miss mother."

"Me too, buddy, but we will go visit her from time to time," Alex said.

"I hope so," Pearl said.

"Right, I don't know when I will have to start my work here, so we should finish our little task before that," Alex said.

"What are we doing?" Pearl asked.

"YOU are doing something," Alex said as he brought out the Divine Devil's fruit.

Shen Jing had already given one to his mother, and now Pearl was getting one too.

Alex prepared a bath, and despite Pearl's insistence on not needing it, he made Pearl get in the bath and cultivate.

After Pearl was comfortable for a while, he finally made him eat the fruit. Not knowing what else he was supposed to do, he made Pearl cultivate even more.

There were numerous cuts on his body as Pearl cultivated, but Alex kept a steady eye on the little furball.

Soon, the white fur on his body was starting to stain black a little.

As he waited, the white fur got even more black in some spots.

Time passed and Pearl kept cultivating. After finally 4 hours of cultivation did the black stuff stop coming out.

Alex had to already close his nose because of the smell, but when he saw that Pearl was done going through Mortal Cleansing, he told him to stop and thoroughly cleaned him.

'That was faster than mine. It probably has to do with age,' Alex thought.

"How do you feel, buddy?" he asked.

"Amazing," Pearl said. "I feel like I can jump really high."

"Is that so?" Alex chuckled. "Alright, let's quickly test how good you are. I need to go work soon."

Chapter 721 Shurin

Alex looked around. "Hello. Have you been waiting for me?" he asked.

"Yes, dear guest. Her Highness, the princess has given me the order to assist you in anything you need," the girl said.

"My name is Yu Ming, you can call me Brother Yu," Alex said. "How old are you, Shurin?"

"I am 18 years old," Shurin said.

"Woah, really?" Alex was surprised. "But you look so young."

"I have lived in the palace for a long time, so I started cultivating from a young age. As such, I ended up looking younger than I really am," she said.

"Hmm," Alex nodded as he heard her. He quickly sensed her cultivation base and was surprised to see that she was on the very of breaking through to the True realms.

"Is there anything you would like me to do?" the girl asked.

Alex thought for a second and quickly pulled out a talisman to write down something.

"These are a list of ingredients. Can you get me as many as you can? You can find me in the guild after you've collected them," Alex said.

"Right away, brother Yu," the girl said and left.

Alex left the palace too. He made his way towards the center of the city where the guilds were.

'Still as packed as ever,' he thought as he looked at the guild. Since it hadn't even been a week since the Formation competition, the city was still packed full of people waiting for the Teleportation platforms to be open before they could leave back.

So, at that time, they were busy roaming the streets and visiting different locations, including the guild.

Fortunately, the guild was massive, so it could easily house the many people that were there.

Alex looked around for a bit, taking in the guild's image as he would be working here for the next 2 years or so.

After checking the guild, Alex made his way to the mission board and looked around for something to make.

As he did, a new mission popped up for an interesting pill. "A pill to increase someone's libido?" he chuckled a little, but he was interested in the recipe himself. He was interested in every new recipe he came across.

Alex took the mission despite it only requiring a 30% Harmony pill and looked for other missions to take. As he searched, he found another mission regarding an antidote and decided to take it.

However, he couldn't. "Huh? I can't take two missions at once?" he was a little surprised. That hadn't been the case back in DawnSpring city.

'Is it because this is a capital? I will have to ask the staff later,' Alex thought and pulled out his badge from the mission board. As he was about to leave, a hand landed on his shoulder.

"Wait!" a voice spoke to him. Alex turned around and saw a man in his 30s with a thick beard as well as a True Earth badge.

"How may I help you, brother?" he asked.

"Did you just take a mission regarding a libido pill?" the man asked.

"Yes," Alex said, a little surprised the man noticed. 'Can other people check what mission I took?' he wondered.

"That was meant for me. Why did you take it?" the man said in an angry voice.

"It didn't have your name on it," Alex said. Usually, if someone wanted a specific alchemist to make them something, they would make sure to name the alchemist in the mission so that only he could take it.

"Well, that's… goddammit! He was supposed to put my name on it," the man said. "Can you return the mission?"

"Uhh… no, I will have to pay a fine," Alex said.

"It's just a little fine. What does it matter?" the man asked.

"Are you going to pay the fine in my stead then?" Alex asked.

"Sure, yeah, whatever," the man said.

Alex shrugged and went on to return to the mission. However, when he did, the mission board gave him a rather weird prompt.

-Forfeiting this Mission will cost you a fine of 460 True Spirit stones-

"What the hell?" Alex said as he looked at the pill. It only asked for a single pill, then why was it asking for 460 spirit stones? It wasn't like he already got the ingredients and wasted it either.

"It's asking for 460 True Spirit stones. Give it to me before I cancel it," Alex said.

"What?" the man said in an exaggerated tone. "How could it— shit! It must be… arghh!"

"So? What do you want me to do?" Alex asked.

The man deliberated for a moment but couldn't say anything. 460 was a lot of Spirit stones that he couldn't force someone to pay and couldn't bring it out himself.

"Alchemist Tang!" A relatively angry voice spoke from behind them.

Alex turned around to see a man in a purple robe look at the middle-aged man.

'That robe… is that the same one as the little girl from earlier?' Alex wondered when he saw the man.

"Why are you still out here? You should be making my pill," the man said.

"Um, brother Lu, there's been a little problem," the man said.

"What problem?" the purple-robed man asked and the man named Tang explained.

"So? Just pay the fee and make my pill," the man said. "You, forfeit the pill right now. I'm in a hurry."

"Alright, give me the spirit stones then. Besides, What are you in a hurry for with such a pill in the middle of the day?" Alex asked.

"You! Do you know who I am?" the man shouted.

"Brother, you shouldn't talk back with him," the man whispered to Alex.

Alex sighed and shook his head. "I'll just go make your pill then. It will be faster that way," he said.

"No, I don't like you. You will not be making my pill," the Lu man said.

"Dammit! Pay me the spirit stones then," Alex said angrily. He was starting to get frustrated too.

"You! You dare talk back to me, I will—"

"Brother Yu," A voice came from far away as Shurin came running towards them.

"Oh hey, what's up?" Alex asked her as she gave a weird eye towards the Lu man before running up to her.

"Here's the ingredients you requested for," Shurin Gave it to him.

"Oh? So quickly?" Alex asked as he looked through the ingredients. There were indeed a lot of the ingredients he asked for.

"It was a request by you, brother Yu. I will have to do it fast no matter how," she said.

"You don't need to be so serious about it. Think of me as a friend," Alex said and looked at their robes.

"Are you guys from the same sect or something? I thought you worked in the royal family," he asked.

"We are disciples of the Royal family," Shurin said. "That makes me wonder, Uncle Lu, what are you doing here?"

"I… I'm just…" he couldn't answer since the answer was so embarrassing.

"Oh, did the princess give you an order too?" Shurin asked with bright eyes.

"The princess… what?" the man named Lu asked.

"The princess. She didn't tell you to meet with brother Yu?" Shurin gave a confused look.

"Um… which princess are we talking about? Your mother?" the man asked.

"Princess Xuemi," Shurin said. "Did she not send you for Brother Yu? He's her guest. Or rather, he's the Emperor's guest and is working under her."

"What?" the man was shocked like he heard the name of god. "Is this… true?"

"Of course," Shurin gave a weird expression. "Did you not know? Why else would you be bothering brother Yu at this time then?"

"I… I'm sorry, brother Yu," the man suddenly fell to the ground in a bow.

"What's happening?" Shurin asked Alex. Alex explained the best he could without saying anything… unnecessary.

"What? A high fee for forfeit?" the girl's face suddenly got angry. "Uncle Lu, are you abusing the royal family's privilege in the guild?" she asked.

"I... I..." the man couldn't say anything.

"I will tell my mother about this today," Shurin said.

"Wait, no, please," the man started pleading but Alex only shook his head.

"Alright, I'm off to make pills. You guys do whatever you think is right," he said and left.

Chapter 722 Learning New Things

Even without wanting to, he was starting to reach 70% with good recipes now.

'I should be able to do better if I manage to get my damn body under control,' he thought as he forced the little yang that leaked back into his body.

He walked outside and saw Shurin waiting at the side of the hall.

"Shurin? Why are you still here?" Alex asked.

"I'm waiting for you, brother Yu," she said.

"Oh, did you need something?" Alex asked.

"No, I'm just doing my job," She said.

"And waiting for me? You don't need to do that. I will let you know if I need something, but most of the time I won't need anything," Alex said.

"No, it's my job to go around with you," Shurin said. "That's the job her highness the princess gave me."

"I see," Alex said. Now that he thought about it, members of royal families went around with guards and the likes everywhere. Maybe this was a similar thing.

The two of them walked out of the guild and made their way back toward the palace.

"You're not a servant, are you?" Alex said.

"No," Shurin said. "Did you think I was?"

"Well, the princess said she would get me someone so I assumed it would be a servant," Alex said. "But then I heard what you said this afternoon about your mother being a princess, and I thought no one would make a princess a servant."

Shurin bowed her head a little in embarrassment. "I... I'm not a princess," she said.

"Eh? You are not? Then what was that about your mother being one?" Alex asked.

"My mother is a princess, but I am not one," Shurin said.

Alex was still confused, so she explained further. "Everyone that is more than 2 generations away from the main branch is not considered part of the royal family."

"My mother's grandfather was the brother of the Emperor at that time. Because of that my grandmother and my mother are considered part of the royal family, so they are princesses."

"But since I'm a third-generation, I get no such title," Shurin said. "In fact, if you see someone that wears these colors, you can consider them someone with royal bloodline, but not a royalty."

"So the guy from this afternoon, he was..."

"His great grandmother was a princess during the same era as my great grandfather," Shurin explained.

"I see, I didn't realize such a thing would happen. That would mean the royal family technically is huge," Alex said.

"You could say that," she said.

"And these robes, what are these for?" Alex asked.

"These are robes worn by disciples of the royal family," Shurin said.

"The Royal family has a sect?" Alex asked.

"No, it doesn't," Shurin said. "Well, technically it is a sect, but they don't call it that since they only accept members with the royal family's bloodline that aren't royalty anymore."

According to Shurin, there were at least a thousand different disciples in the royal family that trained every day.

The place where they trained was beyond the massive mountain behind the palace.

"Oh right," Alex said as he brought out something from his bag. "Here, I made this for you."

Shurin took what Alex gave her and looked at it. "A pill?" she asked as she opened the pill bottle. Inside was a bluish pill with a vaguely sweet smell.

"What is this?" she asked.

"It's a pill to help you easily enter the True realms," Alex said. "Just eat that before you are to break through and you will enter the True realm for sure."

"Woah, really? I've been thinking of getting something like this made," Shurin said. "How much do I need to pay you?"

"Pay me? That's a gift. You don't need to pay me," Alex said.

"A-are you sure? I can't have you give me something like this. The family will think I took advantage of being with you," Shurin said.

"Well, if you can't even get something out of an opportunity, what's the point of even getting that opportunity?" Alex asked.

Shurin thought for a moment before nodding. "Thank you," she said.

It didn't take them long to get to the palace and Shurin took off with the pills Alex had made for the others.

He was very happy with the result he got from those pills, but when he thought of the gruesome wounds those pills could heal, it felt like a huge waste letting someone with minor injuries eat those pills.

Those should be left alone for someone with more serious injuries. But what else could he do? He couldn't just cut a pill into parts and give those to people.

That would ruin a pill.

He needed to find other ways to heal a—

"That's right!" Alex thought. "I completely forgot about them."

Alex quickly returned to his room and locked the doors before throwing everything in one of his storage bags into the bed.

What came out of the bags were multiple vials and talismans. Alex quickly opened one of the vials and looked inside it.

There were medicinal pastes in there.

'It hasn't gone bad right?' he thought and started looking at the talismans that were full of recipes for the medicinal pastes.

Once he realized that he could easily gather the ingredients, he decided to venture out into the art of medicinal paste making.

'Well that alone might not help either,' Alex thought. He would have to do something concurrently to that to make it extra effective.

After a whole night of cultivation, early next morning, Alex went to find the princess.

The princess was out in the garden with another princess that Alex only saw today.

"Little brother Yu, meet my sister Xianzi," the princess said introducing the younger, but almost as pretty princess opposite to her.

"Greetings, princess Xianzi," Alex greeted her, who greeted him back.

After a few friendly conversations, Alex turned to princess Xumei and told her that he planned to stop making pills in the batch for now and wanted to try out medicinal pastes.

"What's medicinal pastes?" the princess asked.

"Oh, it's like this," Alex brought out a vial from his storage and quickly explained everything he knew about it until now.

"You don't need to eat expensive pills to heal yourself, and even the most talentless person can make them since the recipe is so simple," Alex said.

The princess was intrigued. "Anyone can make them?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Can I make them?" she asked again.

"I would think so," Alex said with a confused look. "But you're a princess. Would you want to make this?"

"I make poisons all the time," the princess said. "These are nothing."

"Poisons? Ah, right. I forgot for a second there," Alex said as he remembered that the Royal Family Wei was known for the poison arts.

"So, can you teach me?" she asked.

"I will have to practice for myself first, but I don't see why I won't be able to teach you," he said.

"Great! Tell Shurin whatever you need. She will get it to you," the princess said.

"Thank you," Alex said. "Also, I wanted something else princess."

"What do you want? Just ask me," the princess said.

"I was wondering if there were books or journals regarding medical knowledge from a physician or doctor," Alex said.

"Um, there should be some in the royal archives. Have Shurin take you there this afternoon," the princess said.

"Thank you, princess," Alex said. "I will be off then."

Alex couldn't go very far away before he found Shurin waiting for him outside the garden. He told her what he needed, and after taking him to the Royal archives, she left to get his stuff.

Alex entered the massive room in the palace that was the royal archives. It was just a single room full of books, but it had so many books that he could likely not finish reading in even a hundred years.

There were already a few people inside who gave him a weird look for his lack of guard or royal outfit. Still, since he managed to get in, no one bothered him at all, and continued with their study.

Alex started searching for the books he wanted to read about. It didn't take him long to find one about general diseases and illnesses.

He took the book out and started reading it slowly. Most of the information in the book was something he had already read before. Still, he finished it all just in case there was more information.

Once he was done, he went to find another book and read them too.

After a few hours, Alex left the library with about 3 books worth of knowledge in his mind that he needed to process for a bit.

Shurin gave him the ingredients he needed after he left, and Alex made his way to the Alchemy guild.

Alex tried telling Shurin that she didn't need to follow him all the time, but she was adamant that she follow the orders of the princess.

'I will have to talk with the princess about this,' he thought and made a mental note.

Once at the Alchemy guild, Alex made a few pills to start off and then started making some more healing pills for a few hours.

Only after that did he finally take out the ingredients he had ordered as well as the mortar and pestle he needed.

It was time to make some medicinal pastes.

Chapter 723 Medicinal Pastes

Most of the ingredients were plants, but there were some that were from beasts too. However, unlike Alchemy, very few of them were from beasts.

As Alex crushed the ingredients, he started noticing the flaw of the medicinal pastes. Even as he crushed it, energy left the ingredients and flew away.

Unlike a cauldron with a lid, mortal and pestle couldn't contain the energy. Still, it wasn't like he was burning the ingredients, so not much energy left the ingredients.

Having never done this before, it took a while before the paste came to be as smooth as he wanted it to be.

'That looks like it will work,' he thought and brought out the sword from his storage ring and cut a line along the back of his arm.

"Argh!" he winced a little from the surprise at how easily the sword cut his skin. It was almost like his True King realm physical body was nothing against this sword.

'Just what the hell are you?' Alex thought for a moment before bringing his attention back to the medicinal paste.

He made another cut next to that one and immediately went for the medicinal paste.

He scooped a bit with his 2 fingers and applied it to his new cut. Within seconds of applying, the wound completely vanished, while the older one was still squirming a little, trying to heal.

Alex let it be and it took him nearly 5 minutes to fully heal a simple cut. And that was only because he was a body cultivator. A normal cultivator would require nearly half an hour to heal that wound on his own.

"Well, this works perfectly," Alex thought and looked at the medicinal paste. There were still 20 or so more scoops of what he had applied still remaining in the mortar.

Alex scooped it all up and put it in a vial. Then, he looked at the list of ingredients and compared them. If he had used these ingredients to make a pill, it would have only helped a single person.

However, with medicinal paste, it would help many of them.

Alex shook his head when he realized how easy it was. 'I should have started years ago,' he thought. But he knew how busy he was with the 3 different guilds.

Fortunately, he didn't have artifact guild on his list as well. Otherwise, he wouldn't know what to spend his time on.

For the rest of the day, Alex spent his time on the same medicinal paste and made about 3 more batches of it that came out to be around 20 vials altogether.

'I should probably get bigger vials. These pill vials won't hold much,' he thought. He remembered the jar of acrid-smelling paste in his bag that nearly burned his nose from the smell.

He needed that type of jar.

"Yeah, I should ask them that too," Alex thought.

He walked out of the Alchemy guild with Shurin who had waited for him despite his insistence.

He gave her a vial for the troubles and told her it was a medicine that would heal her minor wounds.

"How do you use it?" she asked.

"You take a little bit and apply it to your wound," Alex said.

"Oh," Shurin said. "What if I have a lot of wounds, would this one vial be enough?"

"Well, no," Alex said. "But those are cases where you eat a pill."

"What if my wound is on the inside?" Shurin asked.

"That... I think you can eat it, but I don't know how to start testing that," Alex said. "I would need a volunteer."

"I can be one," Shurin said.

"You want to get cut on the inside?" Alex asked.

"Wait, does it have to be a cut? Won't a sprain be enough?" she asked.

"Ah, right," Alex said. "I should try with broken bones too, and if I can, maybe someone with some sort of sickness or disease. Although those might need other pastes."

"I will let the princess know what you need. For now, let's just try with the sprain," Shurin said.

"Give me your hand," Alex asked.

Shurin brought out her hand and Alex immediately grabbed it and pulled on it hard.

"Argh!" Shurin cried out in pain as some tears flooded her eyes.

"Sorry," Alex said and looked at her wrist. "Yeah, that looks sprained. Eat this quick."

He had her scoop out some medicine with the other hand and eat it.

"Ew," she made a weird face before swallowing the medicine. Once she was done, she looked at the wound in her hand.

"No... wait, a little," She said. "Let me eat some more."

Shurin ate 2 more scoops of the medicine before there was some noticeable difference in the wound.

"What if I apply it directly?" Alex asked and scooped some too before applying it from the outside.

"Same difference," she said. "Maybe it's because it is the hand? It is quite far away from the stomach."

"Well, try diverting your energy to the hand with your cultivation technique," Alex said.

"Right here?" Shurin looked around in the middle of the street.

"Right, let's go back to the palace first," Alex said and they went back. Without stopping anywhere, they sat down on the front lawn and tried it all out, including broken bones. Multiple locations at that.

The only thing they couldn't test the paste against was sickness or diseases as Shurin didn't have that.

Soon, Alex came up with a small hypothesis of his own.

For a medicinal paste to work, it needed to be close to the injury. In fact, touching the injury itself was always better.

If the wound was on the outside, applying it directly to the wound was the way to go.

If it was internal, one needed to eat 2 or 3 scoops and cultivate to move the energy from the paste to the wounded section.

The medicinal pastes worked on skins, muscles, and organs, but bones were hard to treat.

A fractured bone would need at least 5 scoops to heal properly. If the bone was broken, the medicinal paste wouldn't help at all. That being said, Alex only knew about the pastes from True rank ingredients.

He couldn't help but wonder how Saint Ranked ingredients would affect physiology.

There were also multiple other types of paste that did different things, but he could tell that their influence wouldn't be any better.

For the trouble, Alex gave 5 healing pills to Shurin that were some of the best he had prepared today.

She of course didn't want it as she had been doing what she was appointed to do, but Alex didn't take no for an answer.

After she left, Alex returned back to his room and sat down to cultivate. At the same time, he started processing all that he learned today at the library.

He hadn't learned very much, but he hard started off small after all. Slowly, he would go for more difficult topics and subjects and learn more about the human body.

Alex chuckled as he wondered what his mother would think if her homeschooled son suddenly became a very talented doctor.

Chapter 724 Training with Shen Jing

Pearl dashed from the left and used his White Tiger's Golden Claws. Alex dashed from the right and slashed with his poison sword.

Shen Jing simply put up a finger in each hand and diverted the attacks elsewhere.

Pearl used his golden threads to try and bind him. The threads wrapped around Shen Jing and it looked like it would stop him.

Shen Jing smiled and waited for Alex to attack.

Alex sent out a strong metal slash at Shen Jing with all of his power.

Shen Jing's body started shining golden all of a sudden and it spread out in a wave until it was a circular barrier around his body.

The golden threads that Pearl had wrapped him with broke apart like they were mere spiderwebs, and Alex's attack didn't even make a strong sound when it disappeared after hitting the barrier.

Even his Sword Qi which was supposed to keep attacking didn't remain for longer than a moment.

"Not bad," Shen Jing said. "You two have definitely grown better. Here's a little reward for you then."

Shen Jing put up his index finger and made a simple swipe. Suddenly, Alex had a feeling akin to the wind rustling his clothes.

He quickly looked down and saw part of his robe fall to the ground.

"What?" he exclaimed. "I didn't see your attack."

"That's because I didn't attack you," Shen Jing said. "The world did."

"Dao?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "I wanted to show you examples of some other Dao that you might want to learn about."

"Since you use a sword, you will learn it sooner or later, so I am showing you it here today."

Shen Jing swiped his fingers again and another part of Alex's robe was torn off. "This is the Dao of Sharpness. It's a Metal Dao that had its roots in Sword Dao as well."

"Since I'm not a swordsman, I can't put it into my attacks, but I can directly attack with it," Shen Jing said.

"You can't teach me that, right?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing shook his head. "That would defeat the whole purpose of learning Dao on your own, won't it?" Shen Jing asked.

Alex nodded.

"Here's another one, although not very useful in battle," Shen Jing said. "Give me your sword."

Alex threw his poison sword at Shen Jing. Shen Jing then started pouring in his Qi as the world around him put Qi as well. Slowly, Alex saw the metal deform.

It wasn't much, but his sword started getting thinner and thinner. Shen Jing stopped once it was thinner by at least a third of its original thinness.

"Phew! That really takes a lot out of me even for a True grade sword," Shen Jing said and passed the sword back to Alex.

Alex looked at his sword and was surprised at just how sharp it was now.

"Dao of Malleability," Shen Jing said. "I can make metals thin without breaking them regardless if they would break under normal circumstances or not."

"Where did the rest of the metal go?" Alex asked. The sword was thinner now, but it wasn't longer or wider.

Shen Jing smiled. "Dao of compression. I compressed your sword so that while it is sharper, it is not any less weak. I wouldn't have dared to make your sword thinner if I hadn't learned this Dao before," Shen Jing said.

"Woah, what other Dao do you know, brother Shen?" Alex asked.

"Well, there's the Dao of Ductility, Dao of Conduction, Dao of Shine, Dao of Rust, and some minor Daos that aren't very useful on their own," Shen Jing said.

"Dao of Conduction, I think I've learned that too," Alex said.

"You did? When?" Shen Jing asked.

"About a week ago," Alex said. "I was making some pills when I realized that I understood how heat went from one body to another. So, I wondered if it could go in the opposite direction too."

"After a bit of thinking, I learned a new Dao and now I can transfer heat from cold body to hot body too," Alex said.

"Great!" Shen Jing said. "That's a really good Dao, but it's not Dao of Conductivity. It's the Dao of heat Conductivity."

"To truly learn the Dao of Conductivity, you need to learn the Dao of lightning Conductivity too and mix those two Daos to learn the higher one," Shen Jing explained.

"Ah, I see," Alex said. Lightning... where was he supposed to learn about those from?

'Maybe I can use the electricity back in the Central continent. That might work,' Alex thought.

"Will Pearl ever learn some Dao?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing made a weird, hesitating face. "Yeah, I'm worried he might reach the peak of Saint realm too quickly and not learn any Dao. So when the Tribulation lightning does come eventually, he will definitely fail and remain as a false Immortal."

"What? He will fail?" Alex asked in surprise.

"If he doesn't learn a Dao. He's too young for that. Which is why I am not pushing you to get him to evolve, even though it would be faster."

"Being fast would only hurt him in this scenario. He needs to mature before grasping Daos," Shen Jing said.

"I see," Alex said. "That does make sense."

"Alright, come. Attack me some more," Shen Jing said and the three of them got to fighting again.

After an hour or so of fighting, Shen Jing finally left and Alex returned back to the Capital and went to the Palace.

In the last month, he had already made a lot of pills and medicinal pastes for the royal family. He was sure that he didn't need to do anything for them for the next 3 months or so.

He had also already learned a lot of the things he wanted to learn regarding sickness and diseases. Of course, there was a lot more to learn, but he had managed to learn most of the books in the Royal archives.

If he wanted to learn more, he would have to go out and find books of his own.

Alex checked the twenty thousand true spirit stones in his storage bag and thought to do something with them.

He had so many of those medicinal pastes, and yet they were being wasted by simply sitting in a storage bag when there were so many out there that needed its help.

The royal family, especially the princess only cared for the Lightsworns and cared that they were never hurt or injured from their missions.

If they were, they would get their treatment. Other than that, she may care for her family. She had a duty to her family and people.

However, Alex didn't. His only duty here was providing aid in their transition. Which, he had done for the next 3 months.

So, for 3 months, he was free to help those he wanted to. Thus, Alex decided to go make the medicinal pastes for those that would require them.

The common folks.

For that, he would need to become a well-known doctor. Which meant Alex needed to open up a clinic of his own.

Fortunately, he had plenty of money for that.

Chapter 725 Yu Ming’s Medicinal Clinic

At first glance, it looked like a bargain, but the location wasn't as visited by the normal visitors from everywhere, so it was actually a proper price.

Still, Alex decided to bet the popularity on his product that wasn't available anywhere.

He was sure that many of the sects and families knew about medicinal pastes, and maybe even have a few from the Demon realm. However, none of them had gotten recipes for it.

If they had, it wasn't public at all.

Today was the opening day, so Alex put up a board that simply said 'Yu Ming's Medicinal Clinic'.

As a subtitle, he wrote 'Sells medicinal pastes for all types of wounds, sickness, and diseases.'

Once that was up, he went upstairs to his empty clinic.

Inside the clinic were two rooms. One was a waiting room, while the other was the checking room.

Alex placed a sound and spiritual sense dampening formation plate on the ground and used it.

He wanted to simply carve the formation onto the wooden floor, but there was no energy source to connect it to.

Once he was inside, Alex walked up to a seat at the end of the room and sat on it. Then, since he had nothing else to do, he brought out Pearl to let him roam free.

At the same time, he took out a book on formations and started reading it.

This was an interesting topic on formations that he had been reading on. This book explained how sect running formations worked and how one could create them.

According to the book, the sect running formation was actually multiple different formations all linked together by one linking formation that took the energy from the source.

It was the communication between the formations that aided them in running without a power source.

There was more for Alex to learn there, so he simply kept on reading.

He did feel a little bad that no one came to the shop, but being a new shop and being at a weird location, he couldn't fault anyone but himself.

Still, about an hour later, a man walked through the door with a confused look on his face.

"Is... is this the clinic?" he asked after seeing the empty room with a kid and a kitten.

"Yes, it is," Alex said as he closed the book.

"Oh, I need to speak to the phy-ah, the physician," the man said, holding his stomach as he grunted in pain.

"I am the physician," Alex said. "What troubles you?"

"Uhh... are you really the physician? Aren't you a little too young for that?" he asked.

Despite his age reaching mid-20s, Alex still had the face of a teen as that was when he reached the True realm. Since then, his growth had been rather slow.

Usually, people wouldn't be surprised as the people he was around were people that were used to people looking young despite his age.

However, currently, Alex was with a person that barely had a cultivation base in the Muscle Tempering realm, and he himself had completely hidden his cultivation base so as to not scare away any customers.

Even Pearl was hiding his cultivation base using the Immortal Concealment technique that he taught him after writing it down for his mother.

"Don't judge my skills by my age," Alex said with a smile. "Tell me what is the problem?"

"I... I'm just feeling a little pain on my left side," he said. "I thought it was because of what I ate, but it doesn't seem to go away."

That did sound like food poisoning to Alex, but he needed to be sure it wasn't something else like parasites in his stomach or something else.

So, he called the man and scanned him with his spiritual sense. He then sent his Qi inside the man's body to check and didn't find anything either.

"It does seem to be a simple stomach ache from food poisoning," he told the man. Alex then brought out a simple thyme-like plant and gave it to him.

"Here, chew on this for 5 minutes and swallow the juices. If the pain still persists, tell me," Alex said.

"Ok," the man looked weirdly at the plant and wondered if he was being fooled here.

"You can sit on the bench and chew. You can pay me after you are healed," Alex said.

The man finally nodded and sat down to chew the plant. At first, he nearly gave up due to how bitter the plant was, but he forced himself to continue.

Slowly, he felt the pain in his stomach lessen bit by bit. By 5 minutes, the pain was completely gone, and the man felt like he was reborn.

"Woah, that was amazing," the man said. "It totally worked. How much do I need to pay you."

Alex smiled and said, "3 Spirit stones."

"3?" the man asked in surprise.

"Yeah, it costs that much because I have to diagnose and give you a plant," Alex explained.

"No, no, no," the man shook his hands. "I was just surprised how cheap it was. Usually, I would have to pay 10 to 20 spirit stones for a pill that would do the same thing."

"No worries," Alex said with a smile.

The man brought out the 3 spirit stones and winched a little when he was about to hand them to Alex.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"Oh, nothing. It's just some back pain," the man explained. "I might have pulled a muscle or two back there while sword fighting in the arena."

"You want me to help you with that?" Alex asked.

"Uh... no?" the man said. "I don't have that kind of money. Well, I do, but I have other things I need to spend it on."

"It will only cost you 5 spirit stones at best," Alex explained.

"What? No, that can't be right. I've talked to the Alchemy guild and they said a minor healing pill would cost me about 40 spirit stones when including the ingredients," the man said.

"Well, that's because those are pills, these are not," Alex said and brought out a medicinal paste jar.

"I will just need to apply it to you, and you will be fine. Although, if the pain still persists, I might need to apply a second one too, which will cost you another 5 spirit stones. Are you okay with that?" Alex asked.

"Okay? Are you kidding me? I would be mad if I didn't say that was okay. But are you sure I will heal?" the man asked.

"Same thing as before," Alex said. "Pay me if you get healed."

"Well, if you say so," the man said and started pulling off his robes when Alex stopped him and pointed to the room.

"Ah sorry," the man said and went into the room.

"Let me know if anyone comes," Alex whispered to Pearl who was still roaming around the room, looking at every nook and corner.

Once inside the room, Alex activated the formation and waited for the man to take off his upper robes.

"urgh," Alex made a cringing sound. "That's quite bad."

The man's right shoulder blade area was blue and black, and quite sore. "I think you did more than just pull a muscle back there."

Alex quickly scanned his back and said, "Your shoulder is a little dislocated as well. While you won't notice any problems on the outside, there are problems on the inside."

"What? Can that be healed too?" the man asked.

"Yeah, don't worry," Alex said and pulled out a scoop of the paste. He placed it on the man's back and gently rubbed it all around the wounded area.

The man's body sucked in the medicinal paste-like water on a dry sponge. Alex waited for a bit and saw the bruised shoulder go back to being skin-colored.

Still, there was more healing needed there, so he applied another scoop of the medicine.

After 2 minutes, the man's back was finally healed of the wound, but there was one more thing remaining to do.

Without telling the man anything, he grabbed his shoulder and popped it up a bit back into place.

"Argh!" the man cried out in a sudden jolt of pain, but after a few seconds, he realized how relieved he felt.

"Wow, I feel like I was never injured," the man said.

"Yes, that's what my medicine does," Alex said.

"How much is it again? 10 Spirit stones?" the man asked.

Alex nodded. "5 spirit stones per scoop of medicine," he said.

"So cheap too," the man quickly took out 10 spirit stones and stopped. "What about the last part? With the shoulder?" he asked.

"That one is one the house," Alex said with a smile and took the spirit stones.

"Thanks," the man said moving his shoulders a little. "Damn man, this place is so cheap for what it does. I would never go to the Alchemy guild if I knew this place was here before."

"Anyway, I will be sure to come by again if I need you. Thanks again," the man said and left.

Alex returned back to the empty room and was about to open up his book again when he closed it and thought.

"Right, I should put up the prices too to show how cheap this place is," he said to himself. "Only that way will more people come around."

Chapter 726 Little Trouble in Little Clinic

The first two or three days were mostly free as not many people noticed his clinic, or it hadn't gone through enough ears to be recognizable.

However, once he had treated enough cultivators, that too with comparatively very cheap medicine, his clinic got lined up from day's start to day's end.

It got so ridiculous that Alex had to decide to take a dedicated day off on the weekend or else he would be overworked.

Shurin came to help out in the clinic as well, mostly just to make sure people were staying in line.

Alex used her Royal disciple robes to gain some more popularity as well. After all, anyone who could employ a Royal disciple had to be someone notable.

And yet, when the people tried to figure out his identity, they didn't find anything notable about him.

He never learned anywhere, had not appeared in any auction, had not been part of any school, sect, or family.

The Alchemy guild didn't openly give away their alchemist's private information, and the princess made sure everything about Alex was under wraps in the palace, so no information about him could ever reach the public.

As such, Alex became an enigma that came out of nowhere and took the capital's lower-end citizens and cultivators by storm.

The rich ones would still look for pills, and the strong cultivators never trusted a mere doctor to take care of their issues.

As such, Alex was stuck to selling healing pastes made from common rank ingredients, while his True rank pastes never saw the light of day.

Shurin played around with Pearl as they waited for Alex to be done in the room inside.

This was the last customer of the day and they would leave after this.

The man who went in with a limping leg, came out all straight with a happy smile on his face.

"Thank you so much, doctor," the man said. "I can't tell you how long this leg has troubled me."

"It's my pleasure," Alex said and waved the man away.

"Phew! That's it right?" he asked.

"Yes, brother Yu," Shurin said.

"Alright, let's leave," Alex said and left with the two.

The next day was a day off for Alex, so he spent the day making pills as a way to cool off. He didn't really know what else he could do aside from that.

He wanted to fight, but then without Shen Jing, he just couldn't. Alex sighed and returned to making more pills and pastes.

A set of ingredients for a normal paste usually cost him about 20 to 30 spirit stones, whether it was Common rank or True rank.

Each paste made with these ingredients would give about 20 to 25 scoops worth of paste, meaning if Alex sold each scoop for 5 spirit stones, he would earn about 100 spirit stones, giving him nearly 4 times the profit on his investment.

He started wondering if he should lower the cost even further, but then he decided not to. At least, not right now.

The next day, Alex returned back to shop with Shurin and saw a long line of customers.

"Physician, please hurry up."

"I needed you yesterday."

"Do you still have enough pastes to sell? I want to buy some."

"Sir, I am from the Snowhill merchant group. Do you have time to talk with me?"

People spoke one after another, but Alex walked without acknowledging them. Only after he was in the front of the room did he turn around and spoke.

"I will immediately start treating you all. Don't worry about the pastes, I have plenty, but you cannot buy more than a jar each. As for merchants, I have no intention of doing any business with you all," he said and called the first person on the line before entering.

Alex treated one after another as well as sold pastes at the same time. 'Sigh, I need to get someone else to do the selling part,' he thought. He wanted to employ Shurin for that job, but she was already handling the line outside and making sure people were orderly.

'I will think about it later,' he thought.

He continued treating for half a day when an incident took place. Shurin knocked on the door while he was treating to let him know there was some problem outside that she couldn't handle.

Alex told her he would be out right away and looked at the naked lady in front of him.

The first few times he had to ask a woman to undress, he had felt bashful and couldn't help but show a bright red face. However, slowly, he started getting somewhat more used to it and could now treat them without any hesitation in his hands or mind.

He applied a scoop on his medicine around the rashes that had appeared under the lady's breasts. In a matter of seconds, the rashes disappeared and Alex breathed a sigh of relief.

He continued treating the woman in front of him for a while longer as there were more areas with rashes. Only after fully treating her did he leave.

He took a deep breath to make sure his face wasn't red yet and walked to Shurin.

"What's wrong? What is the problem?" Alex asked.

"These men cut their lines, and they won't listen to me," she said.

'Someone who wouldn't listen to a disciple of the royal family?' Alex turned with a curious look and saw a group of young men and women who were in the early True realms.

Unlike Shurin who had broken through just half a month ago, these people had been in the True realms for a few years now, so it was obvious they would be hard for her to handle.

The one that took his attention was someone that looked like he was the leader of this small group. The man looked young like he was in his teens, but given his cultivation base, he was likely as old as Alex himself, perhaps even more.

The man would've normally never grabbed Alex's attention. Neither with the True Disciple 6th realm nor with the True Earth alchemist badge.

However, what did catch his attention was the white robe with burnt edges.

'A member of the Zhou Family,' Alex realized. The Zhou family were the people with White Fire and were known to be great alchemists.

The fact that this young man already reached True-Earth as a mere True Disciple realm cultivator was perhaps one of the best performances anyone could pull off on this continent.

However, that didn't impress Alex at all. After all, the robe had only grabbed Alex's attention, not his interest.

Alex walked up to them and stood before them. Alex was shorter than the man by a couple of centimeters but he started directly at the man.

"Are you here to cause trouble?" he asked.

"Who are you?" one of the men asked.

"Hey, that's the doctor I think," one of the girls replied.

Alex quickly glanced over them and they were all alchemists too, mostly in the True Mortal rank.

If Alex was to make a bet, he would bet that these alchemists were mostly just responsible for making Common pills, as True rank ingredients would be a waste in their hands.

"Did you guys cut the line?" Alex asked.

"You must be the one in charge here," the man from the Zhou Family gave a smile. "I am Zhou Guyang. I have come upon a rare problem in my butt area, would you be willing to look at it?"

"Did you cut the line?" Alex asked again.

"What? No," the man said and turned to look at everyone else in the line who didn't dare speak up as they realized who he was.

Alex turned around to Shurin and asked, "Where did they cut the line from?"

"That man in yellow robes. They are supposed to be behind him," Shurin explained.

"So, who is next?" Alex asked.

"This woman in blue," Shurin pointed.

Alex nodded and looked at the woman. "Please come in," he said and walked towards the door.

However, when he reached the door, he realized that the woman didn't dare move at all.

'Of course,' he thought. The woman was afraid of disrespecting the alchemists and Alex couldn't blame her for that.

'It seems I will have to take care of them first then,' he thought.

Chapter 727 Demonstration

"Hey! What's that supposed to mean?" one of the others asked.

"Brother, he's rude, let's beat him up," another one suggested.

Zhou Guyang didn't show any other emotion in his eyes and remained neutral for the most part.

Still, he couldn't avoid the engagement that Alex had forced him into, so he answered, "Very well, I am here for the people."

Alex gave him a weird look and waited for him to continue.

"You are selling something fake and claiming that you've treated people," the man said. "You sent around fake testimonies to capture the heart of these poor and oblivious citizens that have barely saved up a little money."

"Do you not feel a shred of shame at that?" the man said. "Stop this farce at once or I will destroy it myself and take you to the Lightsworns."

The man puffed his chest and waited for the civilians in the line to get doubtful of Alex. That was when he would tell them to stop bothering with pastes.

"You say my treatments are fake?" Alex asked. "Very well, why don't I prove it to all of you."

Alex flicked his finger and a sword Qi flew straight at Zhou Guyang. A long, thin line of red appeared at the center of the man's forehead.

"Argh!" Guyang shouted and clutched his bleeding forehead.

At the same time, Alex grabbed him by the hair and pulled his hands away to show the line of blood on his forehead.

"Look," he shouted. "Normally, he would have to wait a week or so before it fully settled and healed. However, with my paste, he doesn't have to wait at all."

Alex brought out a jar and brought out a single scoop of his medicine and applied it across the man's forehead.

Even as they all watched, the bleeding on the man's forehead stopped and there was no scar remaining as well.

Gasps of surprise rang around the room, some originating from the alchemists too.

Once Alex was sure that his customers had seen it clearly, he let go of Guyang's hair and finally released his aura from around him.

Finally, the man could move.

"I know why you guys are here," Alex said. "You think that because I suddenly arrived, I have taken away your customers."

"And the answer is yes. Yes, I did take away your customers, but that is only because of how terrible the rest of you are at alchemy."

"Instead of looking to blame someone for your incompetence, go and try to improve. That way, you will get jobs regardless of what I do here," Alex said.

"Now leave! I don't have time to bother with any of you," Alex said.

Guyang was the first to leave. The fear of God that Alex had put on him by basically making him immobile and being in control of his life and death was basically enough to make him run away from the room.

After he left, the others soon followed suit, and soon peace returned back in the clinic.

Alex went back to treating the rest of the patients and returned around the evening after he was done.

Back at the palace, he decided to look for people to help him sell the medicinal pastes while he was treating people.

Unfortunately, it was late and everyone had retreated back to their room, so Alex was left with nobody to talk with.

So, he decided to wait for tomorrow.

'Sigh, I should have made some friends,' Alex thought and started cultivating.

The next day, he left the palace with Shurin and went to his clinic again.

The line at the clinic was already long, especially after the stunt he had pulled yesterday. Many people, including the ones in the True realms, had come this time and the clinic was becoming quite cramped.

'No way. Do I have to search for a new location just two weeks in?' he thought.

Alex called one of the patients and entered the room. He quickly cured the person and called another one in.

The next one was here to buy the medicinal paste for True realm cultivators.

"You can get this vial with 10 scoops for 50 True spirit stones, or this Jar with 50 scoops for 250 True spirit stones," Alex said.

"I will take the jar," the man said and bought the jar. Alex was giving him two options because he didn't want to sell more than a single piece of item each time.

If he was to sell multiple vials, people would start buying in droves. Instead, selling it in a single jar was much easier.

He treated the people for the rest of the day when late afternoon, Shurin called him again saying the man from yesterday was here.

Alex sighed and left the room after finishing treating the patient.

When he walked out, he saw Zhou Guyang from yesterday. However, next to him was another man wearing the same white robe with burnt edges, but there was an air of authority about him that the other man could not carry at all.

The man had long black hair and was about as tall as the other man. As for his cultivation base, he was one step away from entering the True Emperor realm.

'It's this guy,' Alex thought when he saw him.

The man in front of him was Zhou Ren. Zhou Ren was someone he saw back in the group of elites outside the House of the Undying when he was in the Demon Realm.

This was one of the more chatting fellows in the group. He remembered another man saying that he hated him.

Alex got a little solemn when he saw him. He did not want to go against one of the strongest younger generation members, that too someone from one of the big families.

Alex was sure the princess or the Emperor could intervene on his behalf if this argument went anywhere physical, but he had hurt Guyang yesterday, so he wasn't sure if they were considered to have already crossed it.

"That's him," Guyang pointed to Alex.

Zhou Ren nodded and walked toward Alex. "Yu Ming's Medicinal Clinic, it says outside. Is brother's name Yu Ming?" the man asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Greetings, brother Yu," Zhou Ren cupped his hands. "I am Zhou Ren."

Alex felt a little uncomfortable, but he cupped his hands and greeted back. "Why is brother Zhou here?" Alex asked.

"My little brother here says you beat him yesterday and made a joke out of him. Is that true?" Zhou Ren asked.

"I am afraid he did try to ruin my business. Also, all I did was give him a minor cut on his forehead which I healed immediately," Alex said. "Are you perhaps here to take revenge for your brother?"

Zhou Ren chuckled. "Haha, no," he said. "Instead I'm here to apologize on my brother's behalf and thank you for giving him a lesson he desperately needed.

"Huh?"

Chapter 728 Overwhelmed

"Shut up! You've already embarrassed me enough," Zhou Ren said. "Did you think that just because you are my brother that I will side with you when you are in the wrong?"

Alex looked at the two brothers with a confused expression. "So, are you not here for the revenge?"

"No," Zhou Ren said. "I'm just here to apologize for my brother's behavior."

Zhou Ren looked to the side to see Guyang's surprised look and suddenly hit him on the back of his head.

"Ow!" Guyang cried in pain. "Why did you hit me?"

"Was I the one that did the wrong thing or was it you?" Zhou Ren asked.

"I... it was me," Guyang said.

"Then why aren't you apologizing yet?" Zhou Ren shouted at his brother.

Guyang got scared and apologized to Alex for fear of being reprimanded by his brother. Alex looked at the two, unsure what he was to say.

"It's fine," Alex said. "He was already punished yesterday."

"No, he is not nearly punished," Zhou Ren said in response to Alex as a hateful look appeared on his face.

"This bastard has been using our family name all the time to force his way through places or to bully the weak. As his older brother, I can't watch him ruin himself," Zhou Ren said.

"As such, I hope to punish him even more." Zhou Ren then turned to Alex and asked, "Would you be willing to have him work in the clinic? You won't have to pay him at all and he will be like your servant."

"Brother!" Guyang tried to speak.

"Shut up! You've embarrassed us enough. You will accept this punishment," Zhou Ren said.

"I don't think that's necessary, brother Zhou," Alex said. " I don't think there is any more punishment I can give him."

"No, I insist," Zhou Ren said. "Since he dared do something so unbecoming of someone from our family, he deserves this punishment."

Alex was about to refuse as he didn't like the thought of having someone unknown working in his clinic, but he did need a worker.

So, he decided to accept the offer. "Very well, he can work as a guard in my clinic," Alex said.

"Thank you, brother Yu," Zhou Ren said. He then turned around to his brother and said, "remember, act well."

After that, Zhou Ren left the clinic, leaving his brother back with Alex.

"Shurin, I think your job will be changing from tomorrow on," Alex said. "Teach him how to do what you are doing."

Alex went on to treat the rest of the patients there while Shurin made Guyang look after the people so that they didn't cut in line as he did.

That day, the incident that took place in the clinic reached the entire capital and even more as people learned that a young elite talent like Zhou Ren had visited the clinic and even bowed his head to Alex.

That only made Alex's clinic even more popular and even more, eyes fell on him.

The next morning, as Alex and Shurin reached the clinic, they found the people in an orderly line, with Guyang making sure no one went out of line.

"Oh, he's here already," Alex said with a bit of surprise.

"Hello, brother. What do you need me to do?" Guyang asked respectfully.

"Uh... nothing really. Do what you've been doing," Alex said. He then brought out a storage bag and handed it to Shurin. "You're in charge of selling these. Do what I told you."

"Yes, brother Yu," Shurin nodded.

Alex turned around to the group of people that were lined up and shouted, "Who is here to buy the medicinal paste and want nothing to do with being treated?"

A bunch of voices rung out and hands were raised.

"Please step to your right," Alex said. Most of the people stepped away from the line, but a few of them were suspicious that they were going to be turned away, so they sat in their line.

"Please line up here in a different file. You will be buying your pastes from her and I will only be treating patients from now on," Alex said.

The people who had left the original line immediately got onto a new queue. While the one that remained regretfully went to the back of the new line.

Alex started treating the patients soon while Shurin helped sell the pastes. After that, the day went smoothly.

Guyang, despite being punished to be here, didn't shy away from the work he did and did it as well as he could. Being from a big family, he was a proud man and would masterfully do what he was made to do.

A few days passed and the clinic got more popular. Fortunately for Alex, once the people who had been walking around with their wounds for ages were healed, there were not many new patients despite the vastness of the capital.

Even if there were a good number of injured or sick that appeared every day, they would simply buy the paste instead of going to get treatment.

As such, Alex got a bit more free time during the day. During such free time, he started making more and more pastes to reach the demand of the customers.

Spirit stones gushed in like water from an open dam, but so did the stress. Every day, Alex focused his time on either treating the wounded or creating pastes.

At night, he once again used his free time to make more pastes. Soon, that became his daily routine.

His only relief came when the weekend arrived and he was finally free to do whatever he wanted.

During those days, Alex simply went to libraries and read up on new things, or stayed in his room and cultivated.

Perhaps it was because of the stress, or perhaps he was simply not getting enough time to deal with it, Alex's yang body flared once more and was getting hotter and hotter.

He needed some yin treasures to deal with it, but he had none right now. Since Yin treasures were quite rare, to begin with, he would need to send someone to an auction.

Fortunately, the Royal palace always had people go in place of others to buy items from the auction house, so Alex had the princess buy something for him too.

The next week went fine for Alex, but the stress one increasing on him.

One of these days, Shen Jing showed up for training, but Alex had no time at all.

"You became a healer, huh? Suits you quite a bit," Shen Jing said.

"Brother Shen, can we move our schedule to the week's end? I don't have the time to train at all," Alex said.

"I'm afraid I can't do that," Shen Jing said. "I'm on quite a tight schedule too. I only have today as a free day to train you for the next few weeks."

"But I can't..." Alex was a little saddened.

"No worries, I will just take Pearl. Besides, you won't make any real progress until you break through," Shen Jing said.

"Right," Alex said. "He needed to do that too."

"Well, don't kill yourself trying to take care of others. You need to take care of yourself too," Shen Jing said.

After that, he left with Pearl to train and didn't return until it was late evening.

The next few weeks went by the same, but slowly Alex started to feel more and more overwhelmed with all the work.

On one of the free days, he sat down to relax in the garden when Princess Xumei arrived by his side and sat down.

"You're a busy man, little brother," she said. "It is getting hard to get a hold of you."

"I'm sorry, I've been really busy," Alex said. "Did you want something?"

"Actually, yes," the princess said. "Have you kept any track of time at all? How long you've been here?"

Alex thought for a moment and he shook his head. The days were bleeding into each other.

"It's been over 3 months," the princess said. "You know what that means right?"

Alex thought for a second and lost the color on his face again. "You are running out of the pills and pastes, aren't you?"

Chapter 729 Get The Recipes

"Because of how simple the pastes were, everyone started coming by to get pastes for even the simplest of cuts."

"As such, we quickly ran out of it," the princess said.

"I'm sorry," Alex said. "I should have known. I started this clinic and there were so many customers that I got overwhelmed and didn't know what to do."

"Well, if you don't have the time, you can teach me too," the princess said. "I remember someone telling me they would be willing to teach me about the pastes once they learned it."

Alex sighed and gave a small smile. "I did, didn't I?" he asked.

He thought for a moment and brought out a mortar and pestle before bringing out more ingredients to show the princess.

* * * * *

Guyang walked out of his weekly alchemy session. Due to having been sent to work for Alex, his daily alchemy session had been reduced to weekly.

In the past month, he had been with Alex, he had only had 4 such sessions. As such, there was almost 0 improvement in his Alchemy. His cultivation base was in an even worse situation.

As he was about to walk away, he saw his brother walk out of the room next to his.

"Good morning, brother," Guyang greeted his brother.

"Hey, I haven't seen you in a while," Zhou Ren said. "How is your work at the clinic going? Any progress?"

"Yes brother, I've learned to become humble now. I won't use my name or my family's name to bully the others," Guyang said with a serious face.

Zhou Ren's face went blank with surprise and confusion. "What the hell are you talking about?" he asked.

"Uhh... my progress? You wanted to know how I was doing with my punishment, right?" he asked.

"You idiot," Zhou Ren cried out so loud that the nearby house servants ran away in fear.

"Who the hell cares if you bully people or not? Who the hell cares about your punishment? I'm asking have you made any progress on getting the recipes for the pastes? How they are made?" Zhou Ren asked.

It was Guyang's turn to be confused now. "You didn't send me there to be punished?" he asked.

"Of course not, you dumbass. What do I care about how you go about your day? Do you think I would have shown up and bowed to a goddamn nobody if I didn't want something out of it?" Zhou Ren asked.

"Uhh..."

"If you don't get those recipes by tomorrow, I will break your goddamn legs myself," Zhou Ren said. "Now, leave!"

Guyang swallowed heavily and nodded before rushing away.

Zhou Ren walked away and was soon called by his father, the head of the Zhou family.

"Any information on the pastes?" Zhou Tianqiu asked. Tianqiu was a man with thin hair and short height. He didn't even reach the shoulder of his tall son.

However, the fiery demeanor he carried made everyone look up to him even when he was below them.

"I put idiot Guyang up to the task, but it seems me being subtle about it didn't help at all, father," Zhou Ren said. "I've told him that I will break his leg if he doesn't bring the paste recipe by tomorrow, so we should be seeing it soon."

"Hmm," Tianqiu said nothing for a while as Ren waited for him to speak again.

"Son, you know how important this paste is, don't you? For years, we have had pastes come out again and again from the Demon Realm, and yet not once has a recipe come out."

"Now there's someone with a recipe and we absolutely need it," Tainqiu said.

"Why aren't we just going and getting it from the man, father? He is quite young and not very strong. I could just go and beat him up to get the recipes you need," Zhou Ren said.

Tianqiu took a deep breath and asked, "Why do you think I haven't done that already?"

Zhou Ren thought for a moment. "That kid has backing?" he asked.

"That kid is a personal guest of the Emperor and is directly working under princess Xumei. Our people have noticed him going in and out of the palace. He practically lives there," Tianqiu said.

"What? Is this information public?" Zhou Ren asked.

"It's public to those that are willing to look," Tianqiu said. "The kid hasn't tried hiding it or anything."

"So force is not going to work on him," Zhou Ren said. "I understand father. We must be first before everyone else. I will make sure that little brother gets the recipes within in week without mistake."

"Good," Tianqiu said and smiled. "I know I can always depend on your son."

Zhou Ren smiled and walked away.

* * * * *

Alex returned back to the clinic the next day with a new sense of purpose.

After having a little talk with the princess the other day, he had come to a small revelation for himself that he didn't think he would so soon.

Shurin was confused at his happy mood but didn't say anything as Alex hadn't been in this mood for nearly a month now.

The patients were already lined up at about 10 different people, but the ones that were here to buy the pastes were over hundreds of people.

That was understandable. After all, Pastes were far superior to pills for most the injuries.

Guyang was already in the store and was thinking of how to approach Alex for the recipes. When he saw Alex walk in, he jumped and tried to say something, but nothing came out.

How did one ask for someone's secret that made them rich and famous?

Guyang racked his brain but the only way for him to get those recipes were either to sneak into the room and watch Alex make those pastes, or try and steal the recipes from him.

Neither of those ideas was any good in his mind. However, when he remembered that his leg would be broken today if he didn't bring back the pastes recipes, he would start having the same bad ideas again.

He felt tortured the whole day.

He watch Shurin sell the pastes in vials and jars one after another and even asked her if she knew how they were made.

However, he got no straight answer.

In the end, he was left with no choice. He had to do what he could to get those recipes.

So, when the time came for the clinic to close, and Alex walked out of the room, Guyang confronted him.

Alex looked at him weirdly. "Do you need something?" he asked.

"Yes," Guyang said. "I was wondering if you could teach me how to make those pastes as well. I really want to learn it."

"I'm sorry, I don't have the time," Alex said. "I—"

"No please, I beg you. Here, I will get on my knees," Guyang said as he really did fall on his knees. "Please teach me! I will call you my master if I have to."

Alex sighed. "I told you, I don't have the time," he said.

"Please—"

"But," Alex continued. "You don't really need me to teach you anything."

Guyang felt something touch his head, so he looked up and saw a talisman in front of him.

"Here! These are the recipes for the different pastes to heal and cure illnesses, disease, and poisons," Alex gave them to Guyang.

Guyang looked shocked, even a little bit skeptical.

"This... this is your recipe?" he asked with an untrusting voice.

"Yes," Alex said.

Guyang quickly read through the recipe, and while he couldn't tell if they were real or not, he could tell that most of these ingredients were indeed ingredients necessary for healing.

The truth matched up.

"Thank you," Guyang said and bowed again before taking off.

He didn't wait to see a single person on the street as he ran all the way to his massive house on the southern side of the capital.

He quickly entered and found his brother.

"Brother, I did it!" Guyang said proudly as he handed the talisman to his brother.

Zhou Ren quickly checked the talisman and his eyes went wide as well.

"Come on. Let us go show father this," Zhou Ren said. "He will be proud of you."

Chapter 730 Stop Making Pastes

"What's wrong?" Tainqiu asked after seeing both of his sons come together.

"I've brought it, father," Zhou Ren quickly handed over the talisman with the recipe.

"What have you brought?" Tianqiu asked, not getting his hopes up.

"The recipes, father. For the pastes," Zhou Ren said.

"Are you telling the truth?" Tainqiu asked while checking the talisman. From what he could see, it really was the recipe.

"Good job, son. I knew you could do it," Tianqiu said to Zhou Ren. Guyang looked dumbfounded that Zhou Ren was getting the reward for what he had done.

He wanted his father to be proud of him too. But if he spoke now, he was afraid his brother would get angry and may even beat him for speaking out of turn.

So, he kept quiet and watched his father and brother continue to speak.

"Have you tried and found out if this recipe is true?" Tainqiu asked.

"I just got this recipe father. I came to show you the moment I got it," Zhou Ren said. "Worry not. I've already sent someone to get the ingredients. We will find soon enough."

Not a minute later, a servant returned with Zhou Ren's ingredients and handed it over to him.

Zhou Ren didn't have a mortar and pestle, so he simply handed the ingredient over to his father who crushed them in his hands.

As a Saint realm cultivator, these mere common rank ingredients were crushed as easily as if they were made up of sand.

Soon, the familiar scent of the medicinal pastes formed and without even looking at the final product, everyone in the room could tell that this was the real stuff.

"Great!" Tainqiu should. "Now we can branch off from just pills and make pastes too."

"Yes, father," Zhou Ren. "Given how early we've gotten here, we can quickly have a monopoly on the pastes too.'

"Yes," Tainqiu said. "As for that kid who you got the pastes from, we will have to make sure he isn't around in the picture anymore."

Zhou Ren's face got serious. "We're going to kill him?" he asked. He was ready to do it, but it seemed a little too extreme in his eyes.

"No. He's the Emperor's guest. If we do anything directly to him, we will surely be in trouble," Tianqiu said. "No matter how strong my position in the family is, if I get on the emperor's bad side, everyone will join together to get rid of me as the family head. Then that bastard Zirong will take over."

"Then what do you suggest father?" Zhou Ren asked.

"Buy him off," Tianqiu said. "Promise him you'll teach him how to make pills. Getting a lesson from our family, he should be more than happy."

"Yes, father," Zhou Ren said. "I will go right away."

"No, I will go with you too. Where is he now?" Tianqiu asked.

Zhou Ren turned around and looked at his brother with a questioning look.

"He should be returning back to the palace right about now," Guyang said.

"Yes, let's go," Zhou Ren said and the father-son duo left without their youngest son. Guyang felt saddened and returned to his room feeling like the black sheep of his family.

Zhou Tianqiu and Zhou Ren reached a street near the palace and hoped Alex hadn't returned to the palace already.

Fortunately for them, Alex was running a little late today and only returned five minutes later than when they had arrived.

"Father, it's him," Zhou Ren pointed to Alex who was walking over with Shurin beside him.

Tianqiu nodded and walked ahead to stand in front of Alex.

"Excuse me," Alex said and tried to move away but Zhou Ren appeared and stood in front of him.

Alex finally noticed that they were blocking him purposefully and stopped.

He looked at Zhou Ren and the at the old man who was definitely in the Saint realm.

"Greetings senior, brother Zhou," Alex greeted the both of them.

"You can call me Ren," Zhou Ren said.

"I believe we haven't been introduced yet. I am Zhou Tianqiu, Zhou Ren's father," the man said.

'Zhou Tainqiu? The clan head of the Zhou family?' he thought to himself.

"I am Yu Ming. It's my pleasure to meet you, Clan head Zhou. May I ask what you want from this weak me?" Alex asked.

"Weak? You are younger than my younger son and already on the verge of entering the True King realm. No one is going to call you weak," Tianqiu said.

Zhou Ren gave a look of surprise. Due to Alex's concealment technique, he hadn't been able to tell how strong Alex was, but he would have never guessed he was this strong.

"You are the one with the pastes recipes, aren't you?" Tianqiu asked. "I have a proposition for you."

"What proposition would that be?" Alex asked.

"From today on, you will stop making pastes for the people," Tianqiu said. "We, the people of the Zhou Family will take over that process."

Alex was about to speak up, but Tianqiu cut him.

"I know what you are going to ask. You want to know how we got the recipe," Zhou Tianqiu said. "The truth is it doesn't matter. My son here managed to get his hands on your recipe."

"If he can do it, anyone else can too. So, I say that you stop making pastes and let us take over the business," Tianqiu said.

Alex tried to speak again, but Tianqiu didn't let him. "I'm not finished. I won't ask you to leave this business for nothing. In exchange for stopping, we will help you become an Alchemist."

"I promise you, with our resources, we can make you a True Earth Alchemist in no time," Zhou Tianqiu said with a smile.

With the lure of being an Alchemist, that too from a world-renowned family like the Zhou Family, Zhou Tianqiu was sure Alex would be surprised and excited.

However, Alex showed no such expression as the ample smile remained on his face.

Alex wanted to speak, but he waited just in case he was interrupted again. Since this was the third time he was trying to speak, he was already annoyed on the inside and decided to not say what he was going to say the first two times.

Instead, he said, "I do not need an Alchemy lesson, clan head Zhou. I am fine as I am. As for the pastes, I had already planned on not making any more pastes to sell from tomorrow on."

"Really?" Zhou Ren asked from the side, but Zhou Tianqiu cut him off.

"Nephew Yu is wise," Zhou Tianqiu said. "In case you change your mind and want to become an Alchemist, you may find my son."

After saying that, he left.

In Tianqiu's mind, What Alex had said was a roundabout way of agreeing to his demands while not asking for anything in return. Tianqiu thought Alex respected him a lot and was feeling happy with the successful venture he had set out for today.

"See? That's how you do it. From now on, our family will be the only one that sells pastes in the entire capital. No, the entire world."

Tianqiu's smile was wider than the northern half of the Luminance empire while his head was held so high he was nearly taller than his son.

Zhou Ren too was surprised at how well his father did today. "Although, I hadn't taken him for a coward," he said.

"What coward? He's a young man with a brilliant mind. He knew not to go against us and—" Zhou Tianqiu's words got lost in his mouth when something else called for his attention.

He saw a massive group of people crowding the outside of the Alchemy guild and wondered what was happening here.

"What's going on? Did they put out information about the Guild Competition already?" Zhou Ren asked excitedly. He couldn't wait to embarrass Xue Meirong in front of the entire world.

When the two walked inside, the group parted to let them in. However, along the way, they started hearing about pastes this and pastes that.

"What's going on?" Tianqiu demanded of the receptionist to explain everything.

"Senior," the receptionist bowed hurriedly. "The physician Yu Ming just came by the guild 15 minutes ago and gave away a whole bunch of paste recipes for free. He distributed it to everyone in the guild and now the recipe is spreading around the Empire like wildfire."

Tianqiu's eyes went wide with shock and anger. "He did what?"

Chapter 731 King

Over the course of the month, he once more made the necessary pills for the princess. With the recipe for the pastes out in the world, she didn't ask him to make them.

After all, making pastes was very easy for just about anyone.

In his free time, Alex went back to learning and training more and even made time for his practice fights with Shen Jing.

A month later, Alex felt like he was ready to break through to the next realm.

So, on one auspicious day, he locked himself into the cultivation room in the room he was living in and started cultivating.

He thoroughly examined himself as he prepared for his breakthrough.

The Yang energy in his body had flared up once more. The Yin treasure the princess found for him barely helped at all. In just a matter of weeks, their powers disappeared and his Yang energy flared up once again.

Fortunately, one thing the yang energy never did was cause problems for his cultivation.

The reason Alex was so against it was that it caused problems in Alchemy. If it weren't for Alchemy, Alex would've already taken advantage of it and tried to find out how it worked and what else he could do with it.

Since it affected his Alchemy, however, he needed to get it under control.

Alex continued checking through everything and then started thinking about the things that were causing him mental problems.

'Thank god I stopped overworking myself for the last month, or this breakthrough would've gone to trash before I even started,' he thought to himself.

After making sure every little thing was in order, Alex started his breakthrough.

At first, nothing happened. But slowly, as time progressed, Alex started hearing the voice again.

"Are you really trusting Shen Jing for all of this?" the voice asked him. "Are you going to believe whatever he tells you?"

And his inner demon got right to the point. To Alex, it felt so real, but somewhere in the back of his head, a logical brain kept saying this wasn't real and that he shouldn't be affected.

However, the logical brain was far too quiet when facing something that was formed by heaven.

"It's fine, I trust him," Alex said.

"What if just like the third elder's father, he too wants your body. You know how much people would love to get your body?" the voice asked.

"He's known about my constitution for years. If he wanted it, he would've taken it already," Alex said.

"What if he wants Pearl then? He spends an awful lot of time with him," the voice said again.

"If he wanted to take Pearl, he would have taken him already," Alex said calmly.

"Do you really trust him that much already?" the voice asked.

"No," Alex said. "There are still so many things about him that are a mystery that I worry about. However, in the last 7 years, not once has he done something that would be harmful to me."

"He even teaches me so many things that I would otherwise not find out for ages," Alex said. He realized just how much he respected Shen Jing.

"He's a wolf, fattening up the little sheep before he's ready to devour it," the voice said.

"And since there is not a single thing I can do if he decides on that, so there is no point in thinking about it," Alex said.

Alex felt something change, but he was too out of it to realize what had happened.

"Your father is most likely dead," the voice said.

"Father is a tough man. He's more hardworking and resourceful than I could ever hope to be."

"If he fell into a forest, he will make a farm out of it. If he fell into a cave, he will break the rocks until he can walk out of it."

"If he fell into a desert, I'm sure father will dig a river through the sands and make his way out."

The voice stayed quiet for a bit while Alex continued his breakthrough.

"You are stifling Pearl's cultivation," the voice said.

"I'm not," Alex said in a calm voice. "Even if I was, it doesn't matter. He will still be the Pearl I know and love."

"No, you will abandon him, as you've always done," the voice said.

"I don't abandon people," Alex said.

"What about leaving behind everyone you've know—"

"That is not me abandoning people," Alex said. "I left there to go find Pearl. I never abandoned them. One day, I will find my way back there, that I can promise."

He waited for the voice to speak again, but nothing happened. Slowly, Alex came back to being fully conscious and realized that he had been talking with his Inner Demon.

"Does that mean I passed?" Alex thought. That was when he realized that he was on the last leg of the breakthrough.

He quickly got hold of himself and continued his breakthrough. After a couple of minutes, he had successfully broken through to the True King realm.

Now, he was in the same cultivation realm his master was when she died.

"Look at how far I've reached, master," he spoke softly. "And I don't plan on stopping any time soon."

He called his mother to let her know that he had successfully broken through. His mother was perhaps happier at the fact that he even sent her a message.

After all, due to the workload, he hadn't had the time before. Once he was done talking with his mother, he put away the talisman and brought out Pearl.

After a little talk, he went on to cultivate with him in hopes that Pearl would breakthrough soon as well. After all, he watching just 2 realms below him once again.

Alex spent the next few weeks making as many pills as he could right in the palace. They had prepared a top-grade Alchemy room for him and he was going to use it as much as he could.

In those few weeks, he made all the pills that could be required by the Lightsworn for the next few months and then some more.

Once that was done, Alex returned his focus to two different things.

Perfecting the recipes in his mind that he had yet to do, and learning the process of downgrading a True rank ingredient to a common rank.

Once he was done with the second part, he would then move on to downgrading a Saint rank ingredient to a True rank. That would be the most difficult part for him.

But that was still some time away. Alex's days barely consisted of visiting the clinic. After all, with the widespread of pastes, rarely anyone needed him anymore.

His name now only came up when they talked about the source of the pastes.

Alex made his way to the garden in hopes of finding the princess. Now that he had some free time, he wanted to give learning about poisons a go too.

Since the Royal Wei family was known for their poison arts, that would be the perfect place to start from.

Chapter 732 Wei Ruoran

But the princess wasn't around them at all. Alex walked up to them, and only then did he notice the veiled princess in the distance.

He wanted to talk to her, but he saw her talking with an old man that limped a little as he walked.

Alex waited for the princess to finish talking with that man.

After a few minutes, the princess walked away and returned back towards the table to see Alex sitting there.

"Good morning, princess," Alex said.

"Good morning," the princess said. "What are you doing here? I thought you would be by your clinic by now."

"I can go there any time I want. There's not much pressure anymore," Alex said.

"Well, you do look quite free," the princess said.

Alex looked towards the old man who kept limping as he walked around the flowers. "Who's he?" Alex asked. "He doesn't seem like a disciple or a member of the family."

"Who? Ruoran? He's a disciple. He just doesn't bother with it, that's all," the princess said.

"I'm surprised he gets to touch the flowers," Alex said. "I thought you said the gardener was quite strict about people messing with his flowers."

The princess chuckled a bit. "Yes, aside from him, no one else is allowed to mess with the flower," the princess said.

"Then— wait, is he the gardener?" Alex asked.

The princess nodded.

"Woah!" Alex thought. He had been planning to learn about taking care of plants for a while now, but he just didn't have the time.

"Do you think he would teach me about gardening if I asked?" he asked the princess.

"Is that what you came to ask of me today?" the princess asked with a smile.

"Oh right, I nearly forgot," Alex said. "I came to ask you if you would be willing to teach me the poison arts."

"The poison arts?" the princess' voice got serious. "You do know that it is the royal family's secret right?"

"I know," Alex said hurriedly. "And I don't expect you to teach me everything. I'm just asking for a few lessons to get started, that's all."

"I see, I will think about it," the princess said.

"And at the same time, can you get him to teach me about gardening too? As an Alchemist, I really need to know more about these things," Alex said.

"Why don't you talk to him yourself?" the princess asked.

Alex thought for a moment and nodded. "You're right, I should."

He stood up and walked towards the gardener. "Greetings senior," Alex bowed a little to him.

The man was checking some of the flowers when Alex arrived, so he didn't speak for a while. Only after he was done looking through them did he finally turn around.

"Who are you?" the man asked.

"My name is Yu Ming. I am the Royal family's Alchemist," Alex said. "I was hoping to ask a favor of you."

"What is it?" the man asked in a grumpy voice.

"Would you mind teaching me about gardening?" Alex asked. "I would really appreciate it if you taught it to me."

"What use do I have for your appreciation? Go away, don't bother me," the gardener said.

"Please, senior Ruoran, I really need someone to teach me about growing plants, and who better than the royal gardener?" Alex said.

"Go away kid, I don't have the time," the man said and tried to move to the next plant.

"Ruoran, you would do good not to call his majesty's guest a 'kid'," the princes spoke as she too had walked there.

"What? His majesty's guest? Seriously?" the gardener looked to the princess in shock.

The princess nodded.

The gardener mulled for a moment and shook his head. "No, I still won't teach you," he said.

"What can I do to make you teach me?" Alex asked.

"What can you do?" the man asked.

"I'm an Alchemist so I can make pills," Alex said and the princess nodded behind him.

"I'm also a True Heaven rank Formation master, and Talisman maker," Alex said, which surprised the Princess.

"You are?" the princess asked with a look of surprise.

"Of course, did you not know?" Alex asked.

The princess shook her head.

"I thought you would have every piece of information on my background before I came here," Alex said.

"You are the Emperor's guest. I wouldn't dare do anything that would bring your ire," the princess said.

"You're an Alchemist?" the gardener asked.

"Yes," Alex said, seeing that he might be going somewhere after all.

"I am an Alchemist too," the man said. "Or… at least I was, until…"

"Until?" Alex waited for him to speak.

"He doesn't like talking about whatever happened," the princess said.

"Leave me alone," the gardener said as his mood was suddenly ruined and he walked away.

Seeing his face, Alex didn't want to talk about it anymore and let him go.

"What's wrong with him? Is he injured or something? He keeps limping," Alex said.

"He was injured because of a stupid decision," the princess said. "Sigh, if only he didn't do that."

"What did he do?" Alex asked.

The princess then started telling him about the gardener.

Wei Ruoran was born to a distant cousin of the emperor and had thus lost his royalty. However, that didn't stop him from being one of the most talented individuals in the whole empire.

A century ago, he was one of the most talented youth in the empire. In fact, most would say he was the most talented.

Ever since young, his talent for cultivation was high, but his love was for the plants. His mother, the princess, was an alchemist and as such had started a little garden in her own backyard.

Ruoran used to help his mother take care of the plants in the garden and as such, he gained his love for plantation and gardening.

Even when he grew, he became an Alchemist and spent most of the time just growing ingredients.

Most who heard that would consider him to be wasting his time with the plants, but the royal family knew different.

They could see that he had a talent for it. Any plant he was given would grow without a doubt. Any plant would blossom its flowers to him.

It was like the plants loved him and always grew whenever he took care of them.

They suspected it had something to do with his constitution, but there was no hint of it at all.

Even when he did spend his time in the garden, his cultivation speed did not drop. In just a few dozen years, he went on to reach the peak of the True Realm.

Then, one day, on a stormy night, he decided to break through.

Ruoran made his way up the mountain of the disciple's area and decided to break through in the middle of the storm.

At the peak, he was in the middle of breaking through when the lightning struck him and he went through Qi deviation.

The cultivation base he had worked so hard for was ruined, and he fell down to the True King's realm.

His leg where the lightning hit was also injured, and no matter what he did, it never healed itself.

The people only found out about it all after the incident, but everyone who cared about him was furious at his stupidity to try and break through in the middle of the storm.

Ruoran didn't speak any longer of what happened or why he went stupid. Since that day, he never broke through again.

He decided to become a gardener for the royal family and live out the rest of his life like that.

Alex heard it all and a curious expression appeared on his face. "I will go and talk to him again," he said.

"I don't think he will want to," The princess said. "He isn't the easiest person to talk to."

"I will still try," Alex said.

"What about the poison training?" the princess asked.

"Next time," Alex said as he ran away. "This one is more important."

He quickly returned back to the garden, but he found that Ruoran was on his way toward the giant mountain.

He was making his way to behind the mountain where the royal disciples stayed in.

"Senior Ruoran, stop," Alex shouted as he made his way halfway up the mountain where Ruoran was at.

He was walking up slowly so he hadn't made it very far up by the time Alex got there.

Ruoran turned around and his grumpy face turned even grumpier. "What is it now? I thought I made my intentions clear?" the man said.

"I know," Alex said. "But I just heard about your story from the princess."

"My story? So what? Did you come here to call me stupid too? Go ahead, everyone else does," the man said.

"No, I'm not going to call you stupid," Alex said with bright wide eyes.

"You still think it on the inside," Ruoran said.

"No," Alex said. "You're not stupid. There never was a storm when you went to break through, was there?"

Ruoran's face changed. "How do you know?" he asked.

"I know because you are good with plants," Alex said.

Ruoran's face changed to confusion. "What does that have to do with anything?" he asked.

"It has everything to do with the plants," Alex said. "Since young, you learned about the plants and were deeply interested in them. As you got older, you learned more and more."

"Then… one day you learned about them so much, that you learned a Dao about the plants," Alex said.

"Dao?" Ruoran's face changed.

"Yes, a Dao," Alex said. "Which is why I know that there was no storm when you went to break through to the Saint realm."

"No, instead you created one," Alex said. "The lightning that struck you was your Tribulation lightning, wasn't it?"

Chapter 733 A Path Ahead

"I was trying to break through to the Saint realm, so I thought I would go to a secluded location and do it. However, once I tried to, I felt like I was gone for a few hours like I had fallen asleep."

"However, it had only been a few minutes from what I could tell. Next thing I know, there's a storm brewing above me, threatening to destroy me."

"It struck not once, but twice. I defended myself the first time, but the second time, the lightning was stronger than me and I was injured," Ruoran said.

"Why didn't you tell anyone?" Alex asked.

"I tried," Ruoran said. "They thought I was making excuses."

"Do they not know about your Dao?" Alex asked.

"No," Ruoran said. "Even I only learned in the last few decades that what I had was a Dao. I don't even know much about it as information on it is hard to find."

"I understand," Alex said. Then, he looked through Ruoran's body once more. "Your leg is injured. Can it not be healed?"

"I don't know," Ruoran said. "No pills work on me for some reason."

"Weird," Alex thought. 'I will have to ask Shen Jing if getting hit by tribulation lightning results in such injuries.'

"Wait," Alex said. "Your wound shouldn't be stopping you from cultivating though. You didn't completely lose your cultivation base after all."

"I... I don't know what is going on anymore," Ruoran said. "I just can't seem to breakthrough. Every time I try, I just end up in a pool of cold sweat."

Alex thought for a while when he realized what the problem was. "Oh," he said. "Your inner demon must be incredibly hard to get through."

"Inner demon?" Ruoran asked with an inquisitive look.

"Let us settle somewhere. I will explain to you everything I can," Alex said.

Ruoran took him to a spot on the top of the mountain where an area was open with not a single tree.

"This is where I was struck with lightning. This emptiness is a constant reminder of my life now," Ruoran said.

Alex looked around and was surprised to find not a single sign of life in the 10 meter area.

There was a small hut in the center and Ruoran took Alex inside. There was a single bed, but Ruoran brought out a small chair from his storage bag and offered it to Alex.

"My apologies, people don't usually visit me," Ruoran said.

"It's fine," Alex said. "There is no point in having anything more than this as a cultivator."

"So, would you mind explaining what is happening exactly? From the start please," Ruoran said.

"I will, but in exchange, I hope you reconsider my request. I really do want you to teach me about growing plants," Alex said.

"I will," Ruoran said seriously with not a sense of grumpiness in his voice.

Alex nodded and started explaining everything he knew about Dao, Inner Demon, and Lightning Tribulation.

He told Ruoran that heaven itself was judging him every time he was going to progress. It was putting obstacles in his way to stop him from getting better.

Ruoran nodded as it all made sense.

"I was troubled with Inner Demon too and lost a bit of my cultivation base about 5 months ago. It wasn't until a while ago that I went for it after preparing and managed to break through," Alex said.

"How did you prepare against something you don't even know is there?" Ruoran asked.

"It is there, and the way to prepare for it is simple," Alex said. "You prepare for anything and everything it could use against you."

Alex wondered just what could this man's insecurity be when he realized that almost everything that happened in this man's life was probably some sort of insecurity.

A man that was born to the royal family, but was not a royal himself.

A talented cultivator that wasted his talent taking care of flowers.

One of the strongest of the younger generation member has to now watch those that were weaker than him become his senior.

A person that was deemed an idiot by everyone for a thing he didn't even do.

A man that was terrified of breaking through for the fear of losing his other normal leg and half of his cultivation base.

That were a lot of problems that Ruoran himself would have to tackle one at a time.

Alex made him do the same thing Shen Jing made him do: write a list of his problems and deal with them one by one.

Alex helped him deal with a bit of them, but Ruoran would have to tackle most of them on his own.

"I will come back on the day you return to become a True Emperor," Alex said. "After that, I hope you will teach me about growing plants."

"You believe that I can do it?" Ruoran asked.

"Of course, you can," Alex said. "Trust in yourself. That's how you're going to fight your inner demon."

"I'll let you be for now," Alex said and left Ruoran alone to mull over the conversation he just had.

Knowing what was wrong with him and knowing that there was a way to fight it rekindled a fire that was deep inside Ruoran that had been slumbering for a century now.

* * * * *

It had been a few days since Alex talked to Ruoran, but he hadn't met him after that.

Alex took up on the princess' offer to teach him about the poisons in the morning. So, every morning for one hour exactly, he learned about the different types of poisons and how to make them.

She taught him about the various different types of poisons. Some harmed the body, some harmed the mind, and some harmed the spirit itself.

There were poisons that killed someone, poisons that made people unable to use Qi, and poisons that stopped one's spiritual sense.

In a sense, anything that had a negative impact on a body was poison for it.

It didn't take long for Alex to realize how easily he could harm someone if he managed to turn the poisons into pills that were extra effective.

The training only lasted a week or so but Alex got what he had been looking for from this training.

A path ahead.

If he followed the path, even on his own, he would surely do well and get better at it.

A day or two after the training ended, Shen Jing returned for another day of training, and in that moment Alex asked him about Ruoran's injuries.

"An injury from Tribulation lightning? Those can be healed," Shen Jing said.

"But senior Ruoran says that no matter how many pills he ate, his legs never healed," Alex said.

"Well, since he was on the verge of becoming a Saint realm expert and all of his Qi has changed to Saint Qi, it will be impossible for True pills to work."

"If he wants to heal, he would need Saint rank pills. I doubt anyone would want to waste that on someone like him," Shen Jing said.

"Ah, I see," Alex said. "So he needs a pill from a higher rank, huh?"

"That or he needs to go through the tribulation again and beat it," Shen Jing said.

"Why would he need to do that?" Alex asked.

"Because he would get his leg healed that way," Shen Jing said.

"What? You can heal wounds by breaking through in a lightning tribulation?" Alex asked with surprise. If that was true then there was no need for him to try and make his healing pill.

He could just silently train until he reached Saint realm and he would get his arm back.

"No, no, no," Shen Jing quickly corrected him. "You will only get back what you lost to the tribulation. Any other problems that occurred that were not caused by the tribulation are not touched."

"Oh," Alex said as his excitement dwindled to nothing.

"Don't worry, you'll do fine," Shen Jing said.

Alex nodded.

"Listen," he then suddenly said. "I need to talk to you about something."

"What is it?" Alex asked.

"I will be leaving this continent very soon," Shen Jing said. "I just wanted to tell you in case you suddenly don't see me anymore."

Chapter 734 Another Path

"I... am going home," Shen Jing said.

"Home?" Alex asked curiously.

"Yes," Shen Jing said.

"I thought you said this place was your home," Alex said.

"It is, but if you remember, I told you I wasn't born here," Shen Jing said. "I'm going back to where I was born."

"Where is this home?" Alex asked.

Shen Jing put on a nostalgic smile as he remembered his family who must be missing him a lot.

"It's a place called the Land of the Blessed Sun. It's a tacky name, I know, but it fits the place," Shen Jing said.

"I kinda like the name," Alex said. After all, the place had the word 'sun' in it. "Can I visit there someday?"

"Of course," Shen Jing said. "Someday, I assume you will be invited even after I tell them about you."

"About me? Why would you tell them about me?" Alex asked worriedly.

"Because of how special you are. I doubt they won't want to see you after I gush about you."

Alex didn't know what to say, so he changed the topic. "What continent is this Land of the Blessed sun in?" Alex asked.

"I'm sure you will figure it out on your own in due time," Shen Jing said.

"Are you leaving for good or are you going to return?" Alex asked after a considerable amount of time.

"Oh no, it's going to be a short visit," Shen Jing said. However, his face twisted to show a grimacing smile as he said, "but what I consider short is usually a decade to two at least."

"Decades, huh?" Alex said. "I can't believe you would make such rushed decisions for something that would take decades. I wonder if I will feel the same sort of dissonance with time once I reach the Saint realm."

Shen Jing made a weird face. "Who said this was a rushed decision?" he asked. "In fact, it was a delayed decision."

"Delayed? You were supposed to leave earlier?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Shen Jing said. "I made plans for leaving once I thought you died in the Demon Realm. I was supposed to leave a while ago. But then I found out you didn't die there, and instead stuck around for a while longer to teach you what I could before leaving."

"When do you leave then?" Alex asked.

"Within a year," Shen Jing said.

Alex thought for a moment and asked, "if you really are going to leave then would you mind telling me what your cultivation base is?"

Alex had tried to figure out Shen Jing's cultivation base, but he still couldn't figure it out at all. He was sure it was at least in the Saint Soul based on the fact that the Emperor who was likely in Saint Core was afraid of him, but that still didn't tell Alex anything.

"How about this? Once I return, I will answer every question you could possibly have about me," Shen Jing said.

"But that would mean I will have to wait 20 years just to find out," Alex said.

"Don't worry, as you cultivate, time will go by in a flash."

The two of them trained along with Pearl for a bit longer and Shen Jing returned.

Alex went back to the palace around late afternoon and was about to go to the Alchemy room when a servant found him.

"Senior Ruoran is looking for me? Where?" Alex asked hurriedly after getting the information.

"The garden, sir alchemist," the servant said and Alex took off. Within a minute, he was back in the garden and found Ruoran by one of the flowers, checking it.

Alex walked up to him and before he could say anything, Ruoran started speaking.

"The Bluethorn Dahlia is notorious for requiring a lot of nutrients and water from the surrounding. So, where ever it is planted, you can expect an area around it where it is near impossible for anything else to grow."

"The Gripping Cactus on the other hand doesn't need as many nutrients to grow. Instead, it absorbs water from the surroundings and creates nutrients in its own body to grow."

"However, the Gripping Cactus is notorious for having thorns that release a rather foul-smelling scent. Fortunately, the Bluethorn Dahlia's flower's sweet scent perfectly masks the foul smell and even compliments it."

"As such, when you plant them side by side, neither of the plants affect each other, and both of them can become greater than the sum of their two parts," Ruoran said.

Alex smiled as he heard and said, "That sounds ingenious. Taking two non-conflicting plants and putting them together to negate the negative aspect of both of the plants using the positive aspects of another."

"Yes," Ruoran said. "Gardening, or rather, Planting is all about that. Whenever you want to grow something, you look at the positive and negative aspects of the plants."

"If you have a lot of areas, you don't really need to consider anything other than giving enough nutrients to the plant. However, when you have a small area, like the edges of a garden, or the formations for Alchemy gardens, you have to be mindful about everything, and use your knowledge of the plants to the best of your advantage."

Alex nodded as he heard that and smiled at Ruoran. "I guess congratulations are in order," he said. "Congratulations for reaching the True Emperor realm, senior Ruoran."

Ruoran smiled. "Thank you, and call me brother from now on. You have helped me way too much to call me just a senior."

"How about I call you a teacher then? For teaching me about plants?" Alex asked, but Ruoran cringed a bit. "Very well, thank you for accepting my offer to teach me, brother Ruoran."

Ruoran finally smiled and moved along. "How much do you know about the plants, about growing them?" he asked.

Alex remembered back to his days on the farm, and how his father would tend his crops. His father taught him a bit about farming, but he never gave a hands-on experience to him.

So, it wasn't too far to say that Alex was a complete novice when it came to this topic.

"I would say I do not know anything," he said to Ruoran.

"A newbie, huh? Well, then I guess I will have to start from the beginning then," Ruoran said and started teaching.

"First of all, there are different categories and subcategories of plants. Let's start with the most common ones," Ruoran said and started explaining what he knew about plants.

The whole day, he went around the garden teaching the very basics of everything while giving examples along the way.

Alex matched the knowledge with his own knowledge from back when his mother taught him about plants. There wasn't much information in his mind from back then, but it still helped quite a bit.

That night, Alex returned back to his room and sat down to cultivate while recalling everything he was taught.

What he was taught was simple knowledge, but that knowledge helped him open up another path for his future.

Another path that if he went along, he was sure he would master in no time.

Chapter 735 Spirit Foods Competition

"22 Thousand True Spirit stones, going twice."

"22 Thousand True Spirit stones, going thrice."

"Sold!"

The auctioneer lady stuck the gavel and announced the product sold.

"Thank you everyone for coming. That was the last item on our auction today. There will be another auction in a month's time. Please come by again," the auctioneer lady said and waited until everyone left.

Alex left out of the auction house with a disappointed look.

His Yang body was getting worse by the day and his hopes of finding any sort of Yin treasure were getting worse and worse.

He walked by the streets of the capital and saw the influx of people that had arrived here to see the competition that was held for Spirit Foods.

'It's already been a year since the Formations competition huh?' Alex thought. 'Time really does go by quickly when one cultivates.'

In the last 7 months, Alex had broken through twice and had reached True King 3rd realm. In the next two or three months, he should be able to break through once more.

Pearl on the other hand had broken through twice too, but there was nearly 6 months gap in between each of his breakthroughs.

Part of the problem was obviously Pearl's slow cultivation speed, but part of the problem was also the fact that he hadn't managed to find any beast cores to consume, which had slowed him down.

'If only we could go to the mountains to fight and grow again,' Alex thought. However, he shook his head.

He had a job here in the capital. He was assigned to the royal family to make pills and he wouldn't return until he was done here.

'Just one more year,' he thought to himself.

He ignored the crowd of people talking about Spirit foods and made his way to the Alchemy guild.

There was a long list of lines and Alex found the shortest one to queue in.

As he waited for the line to move, a hand suddenly fell on his shoulders. Alex turned around to see who it was and saw Zhou Ren.

"Brother Ren," Alex said. "It's good to see you again."

"Brother Yu, It's been a while, hasn't it?" Zhou Ren said. "When was it I saw you last time? Oh, that's right, back when you gave away all the pastes recipes for free."

'Does he hold a grudge against me for that?' Alex wondered. Alex thought he hadn't done anything directly to the father and son, but who knew how the elites took to even the slightest damage to their pride.

"What are you doing here? Are you looking for a pill? Tell me what it is, and I will make it for you," Zhou Ren said.

"It's fine, brother Ren. I'm not looking for any pill. I'm just here to talk to the receptionist about some ingredients," Alex said.

"What ingredients?" Zhou Ren inquired.

"It's something only the staff can help me with," Alex said.

"Do you want to come with me to the back? There are people there that can do similar things too. The line in here is so long," Zhou Ren said.

Alex's eyes narrowed a bit in thought. He was friendly with the staff back in the Dawnspring city, so he could ask the ones in the back about anything.

But in the capital, where everything was so strict, he wasn't sure if he should do something out of line here.

"That's not the staff's task though," Alex said.

"They will bend a rule or two from time to time," Zhou Ren said. "Especially if I show them my True Heaven rank badge."

"Hmm... " Alex thought for a moment. "Well, if they will do that then I should do just that."

Alex walked out of the queue and started walking towards the back of the Alchemy Guild.

"Hey, not so fast. I need to show my badge to get you—" Zhou Ren's words stuck in his mouth when Alex brought out his own badge to wear.

His eyes went wide as he couldn't possibly correlate a True Heaven rank badge with someone like Alex.

"Where did you get that badge?" Zhou Ren asked. "Do you know how much trouble you could cause to the person whose badge this is?"

"Problem? This is my own badge, Brother Zhou," Alex said.

"No way," Zhou Ren said. "You're not an Alchemist."

"The badge says so," Alex said and continued walking.

"Is that really not a stolen badge?" Zhou Ren asked.

"Of course not," Alex said.

Alex walked up to the staff members that were in charge of handing the mission's ending.

"Greetings, Brother Yu," one of the staff members that recognized him greeted him quickly.

"Hello," Alex put on an amicable smile. "I needed to buy something but the line outside is very long. Would it be alright if I had you guys look something up for me?"

"Sure, Brother Yu. What would you like for us to search?" the staff member asked.

"Is there any treasure in the guild with a lot of Yin?" he asked.

The staff checked through the records and came up with a few names.

Alex mulled over the list and chose the ones that would actually affect him somewhat.

"This, this, and this," he quickly chose the ingredients. "As for the money, please take it from my account."

"Yes, brother Yu," the staff said and quickly finished the transaction.

"Thank you," Alex said and turned away.

Zhou Ren watched the whole thing with a shocked expression as he finally realized that Alex truly was a True Heaven-ranked alchemist.

"I don't understand," he said. "Why would a True Heaven alchemist ever bother with the common folks and stoop so low to treat them himself?"

"It kind of felt like it was my responsibility," Alex said. "After I got the recipes from the Demon Realm, I realized that it could treat so many people with such little resources."

"So, I started practicing and got good at it. However, since I was the only one who knew how to make it, I didn't think anyone else could do it," Alex said.

"Well, that went in a different direction very quickly, didn't it? If you and your father had asked just 20 minutes earlier that day, you would've likely gotten all the recipes," Alex said.

Zhou Ren slowly got angry as he heard Alex talk. To him, Alex's words sounded like mockery. He felt like Alex was telling him they failed.

As a member of the Zhou family, he couldn't bear being a failure.

"What's the highest Harmony pill you have ever made?" Zhou Ren asked.

"Sorry?" Alex was confused at the sudden question. "Highest harmony? Let's see. It was a 63% Body Relaxing pill." He wasn't stupid enough to answer truthfully just because he was asked.

"63% huh? That's not bad. If you take part in the Alchemy competition, you should be able to get top 5 if you reach that high," Zhou Ren said.

"I, myself, can reach 65% consistently. I even reached 67% on a pill not so long ago. Of course, the Alchemy competition is more than just making the best pill. There is so much more that goes into it," Zhou Ren said.

Alex nodded as he heard it, but there wasn't any need to hear about it at all. After all...

"I don't plan on joining the Alchemy competition," Alex said.

"What?" Zhou Ren's face sank with displeasure. "Are you getting scared? If you are a man you need to fight adversity with courage, not fear. So what if you won't come first? Or even second. It's all about standing up and taking a stance."

Alex didn't say anything. He was afraid after all. Not of the competition or coming last.

He was afraid that if whatever was going on with his body went on forever, then he wouldn't be able to make pills for a long time and would have to start all over again, just like his master did.

He would have to change his entire 8 year's worth of experience in Alchemy just so he could make a decent Common Rank pill again.

He didn't want that. So, the moment his job in the Royal family was done, he was planning on leaving the capital.

He wasn't sure where he would go, but what he was sure of was that he would do anything to get it fixed.

Even if that meant going directly to the Beast realm to see if they had any clue about what was going on.

"I'm sorry, brother Ren, but I really don't have any interest in the Alchemy competition," Alex said. "But I will wish you good luck right now."

"You still have 1 year to make your choice. Don't be too hasty," Zhou Ren said.

Alex nodded just to appease him. "I will think about it carefully then," he said.

"Good, that is the least you can do as a True Heaven rank alchemist," Zhou Ren said. "Now, if you will excuse me, I came here to find out information about the competition next year."

Alex let him be but stuck around long enough to hear about the date the competition was taking place in.

'It will be just around the time I am supposed to leave. Maybe I can spare a week?' Alex thought but quickly shook his head.

'I can't waste any time,' he thought. He looked at the 3 Yin ingredients he had been lucky enough to find and decided to go back to the palace and cultivate with them to temporarily fix his body.

Chapter 736 New Alchemists

Ruoran had given him a small area of the garden to do in it as he pleased. So, Alex had been growing some special plants that would one day give True rank ingredients for Alchemy.

Aside from that, he was continuously making pills for the Royal family, but there was less and less need for it.

Shen Jing had visited less and less as it was time for him to leave, and Alex's cultivation was getting slower once again because of it.

Thanks to his yang-filled body, his Alchemy was regressing as well. By now, he was only making 2 or 3 Immortal rank pills a day because of how hard it was for him to maintain his body.

Most of the time, even with his Heat and Heat conduction Dao, it was getting hard to exactly set the temperature of the flame straight.

His yang energy would always fluctuate, and so he couldn't even adapt to it to increase the temperature just as.

He was afraid that soon he wouldn't be able to make Immortal rank pills despite his recipes.

Treasures with Yin and Yang were just hard to get by, so Alex didn't have many options even in the capital. Not even Shen Jing had Yin treasures. Although, Shen Jing never really had anything.

He never took any flying boats, or weapons, or armors, or anything of his own and always relied on his body and cultivation.

Alex felt a little weird that a strong person like Shen Jing had nothing with him, but he figured it was just the way Shen Jing liked to live.

The princess did mention something about a snowy area in the eastern mountains way in the east towards the ocean where he could find some Yin treasures.

She had said that really great Yin treasures came from there. Alex wanted to go there, but the princess also let him know how treacherous the place was.

Apparently, it was so cold there that even breathing became hard due to the air condensing on the floor.

Only those with a really strong cultivation base like the people in the Saint realm went there. But even then, they had to be extra prepared.

Alex decided to check that place out right after he left the capital.

He didn't want Yin treasures. He wanted to fix his condition. Yin treasures were just a temporary remedy, but not the actual solution to his situation.

He wished there was a tree like the one that evolved his body but of the Yin variety. That would certainly help him a lot.

Alex continued his day normally until one day there was a knock on the door.

Alex opened the door and found Shurin standing outside.

"Hey, Shurin. I haven't seen you in a while," Alex said. After Alex returned back and secluded himself in the palace for the majority of the days, Shurin was sent back to do whatever she wanted.

She would only be called from time to time when Alex needed to buy some ingredients.

"The princess is asking you to visit her in the garden. There are some guests she wants to introduce you to," Shurin said.

"Oh, what guests?" Alex asked.

Shurin shook her head. "I don't recognize them, sorry," she said.

Alex nodded and walked along with her. When he reached the garden, Alex saw quite a few tables lined up that usually weren't in the garden.

There were quite a few princes and princesses sitting there, talking with a lot of different people he hadn't seen before.

Although, that was not necessarily true. After a few seconds, he did see a girl that he recognized.

'Xue Meirong,' he thought to himself when he saw her. This was a girl he had only seen once in the Demon realm as he had with all the others when she stood around the House of the Undying.

She was wearing the same robe back then as right now, a robe with green and pink, giving off an impression of a blossomed lotus.

That would make sense as she was part of the Falling Lotus sect. Next to her was a relatively old man with a similar robe, but his cultivation base left Alex stunned as he was in the Saint realm. Quite high at that too.

He had a suspicion as to who that was, but he didn't dare guess it right now.

"You're here," The princess said and beckoned him.

"You did call for me," Alex said as he sat down next to her on the empty seat. "What's going on? Some sort of event?"

"Yes," the princess said. "I want you to meet these people."

The princess introduced him to every single person there, and Alex greeted them all respectfully. Just as he had expected, the man by Xue Meirong was Xue Mufan, the Saint rank alchemist most well known in the empire aside from the Zhou family's Zhou Zirong.

"And this is one of the empire's current best young generation members, Xue Meirong," Princess Xumei said.

"Greetings, sister Meirong," Alex said.

"And finally, this is Yu Ming, our temporary Royal Alchemist," the princess introduced himself to the others. "The person who you will be replacing.'

Alex's ears perked up. "Replacing?" he asked softly to the princess.

"Of course," the princes said. "You didn't think we wouldn't prepare until you left, did you?"

Alex gave a rueful smile and shook his head.

"Anyway, these are your replacements, and I would like to ask you to help us choose from them," the princess said.

"Including senior Xue?" Alex asked with a bit of surprise.

"Haha, no. Senior Xue came here with his daughter. He isn't looking to replace you," the princess said.

"Young man, what rank of Alchemist are you?" Xue Mufan suddenly asked.

"I am a True Heaven alchemist, senior," Alex said and brought out his True Heaven badge.

"And you look so young," the man said with a bit of surprise in his eyes. "Are you even 30?"

"No," Alex shook his head.

"Wow, then you will be able to take part in 3 different Alchemy competitions before you aren't allowed to. I see a great life ahead of you, young man," Xue Mufan said.

"Thank you, senior," Alex said.

"Senior Xue, my father is looking for you. Shurin, show senior to the Palace hall," Xumei ordered Shurin who was nearby.

Xue Mufan gave a smile and left, not before looking towards his daughter and giving her an encouraging look.

Alex looked back at the group and was now confused as to what to do. He had always been the one being tested and had never given others some test.

He thought for a few seconds and brought out a talisman. The talisman recorded one of his improved pills, but the pill was one of the more common pills that already had a good enough recipe.

He handed it to the princess and told her to get it replicated a bunch for the test.

Without hesitation, the princess ordered someone to do it immediately. At the same time, Alex had her bring 5 sets of ingredients for the same recipe per examinee.

Then, he started speaking to the group.

"The test is simple. I have a recipe in my hand for the Disciple Ascendance pill. I'm sure you guys are all familiar with the pill and its recipe, but this one is an improved version that should be able to help you all a lot."

"In a few minutes, you will all be given 5 sets of ingredients. Whoever can make the best pill in an hour wins," Alex said.

"So simple?" the princess asked.

"This should be enough," Alex said.

Soon the ingredients were here and everyone was handed the recipe as well. Some of the people said they didn't need the recipe as they already knew the recipe by heart after making it hundreds of times.

Alex didn't bother explaining and let them do what they wanted to do.

"You have 20 minutes to read the recipe and learn it as well as prepare. After that, you will have one hour to make the pills," Alex said.

"There are Alchemy rooms over there, and you will make your pills there. If you want, you can go ahead right now and save yourself 20 minutes."

Chapter 737 Disturbance

"Well, part of the reason is that you didn't give me time to prepare," Alex said. "Had you told me you were doing this, I could have prepared much better."

"How could you not know this was happening? This is the news of the capital right now," the princess said.

"Uhh... is it? I haven't left my room in some time now," Alex said while shaking his head.

"You need to go out some more," the princess said. "So, what's the other part of the reason?"

"The other part is that I'm looking for 3 things in the new alchemist," Alex said.

"What 3 things?" the princess asked.

"Well, I'm looking for tale—"

Alex's words stopped midspeech when he sensed something and turned his head to the right towards the palace.

The princess looked confused and looked towards the palace but she couldn't understand why she was looking there.

"What's there?" she asked, but Alex wasn't hearing anything. He was focused on the tiny pulse that he had felt just now and was wondering what it was.

He felt it once more in his chest and couldn't help but put on a serious face. 'What is happening?' he thought and continued looking in the direction as his senses told him something was up.

It wasn't just him that was having such a reaction. Both the Emperor and Xue Mufan had stopped speaking with each other and were sensing something.

"Is someone comprehending the Dao?" the Emperor asked.

"Doesn't feel like it," Mufan said and continued looking in all directions, trying to find exactly where this feeling was coming from.

Deep in the Fu family's Ancestral home, Fu Tao's grandfather was woken up from his deep cultivation once again as a feeling came to him again.

The last time this had happened was a decade ago when he had felt something from the north and had sent many of the younger generations into the Beast realm.

He had inadvertently killed the majority of the last generation of youngsters by making everyone agree to send them in the first place.

His older brother had gone to the other side and started an Empire there, so he knew one could go through now. Not only that, even his own grandson had returned with a couple from the other side.

So, he knew traversing was safe. Still, he didn't dare think about sending any more people through the Beast realm again.

'I don't know what is happening out there, but I'm staying out of it,' the old man thought and stayed secluded.

Zhou Tianqiu noticed the disturbance too, and he too couldn't tell what the cause was.

Shanggaun Quan felt his Spear Qi waver when the disturbance reached him. "What's that?" he wondered as he was unable to pinpoint the disturbance or even give it a general direction.

Han Hongqi was training his physique when he too sensed the disturbance and wondered what it was.

The Broken Ravine sect, the Glory's edge sect, the Heaven's Peak school, the Falling Lotus sect, the Lu clan, the Shen clan, the Zhou clan, the Jin clan, the Han clan, the Fu clan, and the Song clan.

Every single one of these locations had their secluded Saint realm cultivators riled up from the disturbance that was happening and no one could tell what it was.

Most of the Saint realm cultivators that were in the Saint Condensation realm didn't even notice it at all.

Those that did, did not have the perception to notice where it was happening.

The only one that was perceptive enough was Alex for some reason, and he too could only tell the direction at best, not the distance.

Alex continued staring at the sky for a while, hoping to see some visual changes in the sky. However, aside from maybe a flash of light, which he wasn't sure really happened or not, he couldn't see anything else.

A few moments later, the weird feeling of some pulse hitting him disappeared, and Alex couldn't help but wonder if he had hallucinated what had just happened.

"What are you staring at?" the princess asked once again after not getting any answer the first time.

"Sorry, I was just..." Alex looked back in that direction and wondered what he was really trying to find in that direction. "I don't know. I thought I noticed something, it might be a mistake. Where were we again?"

He quickly changed the topic and the princess noticed that he didn't want to talk about it, so she went along.

"You were telling me about the 3 things you were looking for in our new Alchemist," the Princess said.

"Right! What I'm looking for is Talent, Experience, and Ego," Alex said.

"Talent is obvious as you most likely want people that can make the best pills," Alex said. "However, just finding people that can make pills won't help you a lot."

"You also need people with enough experience," Alex said.

"I don't see how that's any relevant," the princess said. "Every single person here today is a master in their own right. They have been making pills for ages. Experience is the last thing they won't have."

Alex nodded. "While you may be right about that, it is not the type of experience I'm looking for," he said.

"Oh, what type is it then," the princess asked.

"The experience I'm talking about is knowing when something you have just received is better than what you have. If not that, then at least know that testing it won't hurt very much since I did give them 80 minutes in total to make simply one pill that triumphs it all," Alex said.

"Are you that confident in your pill recipe?" the princess asked.

"No one should be able to come up with one that is better," Alex said without hesitation.

"Alright, so what about Ego?" the princess asked.

"It's simple really," Alex said. "Those who try will know that my recipe is better. I just want to see if their ego isn't too big to stop them from using it."

"I don't think you would want an alchemist that is not willing to learn from others when the time comes," Alex said.

'I see. We wouldn't want someone like that," the princess said. "But will there be someone that is as good as you?"

Alex smiled. It wasn't a surprise that the princess knew he was a True Immortal alchemist by now. The only reason the news hadn't spread was probably that she didn't want to offend him.

That or she was afraid of Shen Jing.

Either way, the two of them had acted like the other person was not aware of anything regarding that topic.

"I will find you the best I can," Alex said.

The hour passed quickly as the two of them continued their conversation and soon people started coming out of the Alchemy room with smiles on their faces.

Most of them thought they were the best here. Alex was going to love to see how they all did.

Once they all arrived, Alex brought out a Pill tester and said, "Bring out your best pill and let me test it."

Chapter 738 Winner

"Please give me your pills," Alex said to the first man to his left. While he looked through the pills and put them one by one in the 5 different testers.

As they waited for the result to come, Alex asked the man, "What did you think of the recipe I gave you?"

"It was good," the man said with no other expression on his face. Alex immediately knew he hadn't used it.

The results came and the best pill was around 56%.

Alex went on to the next one and did the same thing. This person said that he did use the recipe, but only for the last one, but it was the first time he used that recipe so he got a little confused and messed up.

The results came and his best pill was around 53%.

It went on for a while as Alex tested everyone's pills and asked the same question. Most of them didn't bother with the new recipe as 80 minutes was too fast a time for them to risk their pills.

That wasn't to say that no one used it. A couple of people had clearly heard him say that this was an improved recipe of his, so they had tried it immediately.

While the first 2 pills weren't what they wanted, soon they got a much better result.

By the end, they were making pills that were in the 60% range.

Xue Meirong came forth and handed her pills. Alex put the pills in the testers and asked her the same question.

"What did you think about the new recipe?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said. "I didn't bother with it. I had too many things on my mind anyway."

"Okay," Alex said and waited.

The fogs rolled up in the tester and soon he saw the number 63% in one of the testers.

"Not bad," Alex said. She was the highest yet and she had done it by herself.

Although, Alex doubted she did it using the same recipe everyone else had. Her father must've improved the recipe somewhat and passed it along.

Alex moved on to the next few people and the best he got was 61% by someone who used his recipe.

"Hello," the final participant came and spoke with a nervous voice.

"Hi, your pills?" Alex asked.

"Here," she gave it nervously with a shaking hand. Alex started putting in the pills into the testers and even as he did, his eyes slightly widened at the result.

"You used my recipe?" he asked confidently.

"Yes, yes," the girl with the green and orange-colored robe said. "Can you tell me who changed that recipe? That was amazing."

"Thank you. That was me," Alex said.

"Wow, but you're so young," she said.

Alex had a favorable impression of the girl. "Sister Zhanrou isn't that old herself," he said.

"Ahem, little Yu, why are you flirting with her?" the princess asked in a low voice.

"I'm not," Alex said. "I'm just creating a favorable atmosphere between us two, considering we will have to work together for over 10 months now."

Just as he said that the crowd made a gasping sound and Alex smiled at the princess.

The princess looked to the testers and realized what had just happened.

71%.

"Congratulations, Gu Zhanrou. You are now the Royal Alchemist for the Luminance Empire," the princess said.

"Wow? Really? Yes!" Gu Zhanrou celebrated while all the other participants congratulated her.

"Wait, no! How did she get 71%? She must've cheated," Xue Meirong said.

"What? No, I didn't," Gu Zhanrou said. "You're just mad you didn't beat me."

"Zhanrou, you know yourself you're not as good as me," Xue Meirong said.

"That's arguable at best," Zhanrou said. "Besides, I won, didn't I? You might've won if you had followed his recipe instead of being stubborn."

"What's going on here? I hear my daughter shouting," Xue Mufan said as he walked over to the group.

"We chose our alchemist, senior," the princess said. "Your daughter is just angry that it wasn't her."

"Oh, she didn't win? What happened?" Mufan asked.

After getting a short primer on what had happened, Mufan laughed a bit. "Don't be a sore loser, rongrong," he said.

"But... how could she and I have such difference?" Meirong asked.

"Well, it sounds like she had a better recipe," Mufan said. "Which if I say honestly, I'm very curious about. How did you come across such an amazing recipe, Junior?"

"I came up with it myself," Alex said.

"How?" Mufan asked curiously.

Alex gave a single thin smile and said, "now senior, I'm not going to give away trade secrets just like that."

"Ah, right. My apology," Xue Mufan said. "Well, if there is nothing else, then I will leave now. Come, rongrong."

Xue Meirong gave a snort to Zhanrou and then turned to Alex before saying. "You think you're some big shot huh? I will show you how great I am in the Alchemy competition," she said.

"Well, my apologies, but I won't be attending the competition," Alex said.

"Coward!" Xue Meirong said before walking away.

Alex gave her a weird look as she and Mufan flew away. 'Why does everyone think I'm running away?' he wondered.

"We will leave now too," the different alchemists said and started leaving one by one.

Finally, only the princess, Alex, and Gu Zhanrou remained.

"Well, you two talk. I have things to do. Welcome to the palace, miss Alchemist," the princess said.

"Thank you," Zhanrou said excitedly.

After the princess left, Zhanrou and Alex sat down by the table and started talking. The two talked about themselves and got to know each other.

Alex talked a bit about him but didn't go into details for the most part, while Zhanrou couldn't stop speaking about herself.

She was one of the best disciples from the Azure Leaves school. It was an Alchemy-focused school like the Hong Wu sect was and was one of the main rivals of the Falling Lotus sect, which was more popular than it due to it having more than just Alchemy.

Because of that, since a young age, Zhanrou had come to see Meirong as her rival, and for the first time today, she had won against her.

In her nearly 36 years of living, she had finally gotten the victory she wanted.

"Her father is too good and she always ends up getting the best training resources, while I have to work for mine," Zhanrou said. "I'm sure I get better with good ingredients and recipes too."

"Ooh, can you give me some of the recipes that you changed?" she asked.

Alex thought for a moment and wondered if he should do it or not. In the end, he nodded. "I will give you a few of them," he said as he planned to give her the most basic ones that would be useful for the Royal family.

After staying here for 2 years, he wouldn't want to leave the place worse than when he joined.

"Ooh, I can't wait," Zhanrou said excitedly.

The two of them continued talking for a while before the princess came back and took her on a tour of the palace.

Alex was finally free and returned back to his room as well.

Chapter 739 Farewell

The Winter Moon cultivation technique his master gave had become practically useless long ago, but even so, that was all Alex had most of the time to contain his Yang aura.

Even though it took his 3 days of cultivating with this technique to revert 1 day's worth of change, he did it as he had no other choice.

He did find Yin treasures that affected him, but they were getting harder and harder to find. It was as if the more he used Yin treasures, the more tolerant his body was getting to it.

So, each time he had to go out and find something strong, as weaker ones only made the yang stronger.

In the final 10 months that Alex had remained in the palace, nearly 4 months of his time was spent on just fixing his body, so there wasn't much time to cultivate either.

As such, in that time, he had only managed to reach True King 5th realm. Pearl on the other hand didn't have the same problem as him, but he was still slow and only reached True King 7th realm.

He would've probably done better had he managed to go out and train, but Alex had no time to leave the palace and go all the way to the east.

He hoped Shen Jing would help him, but Shen Jing never came to train them again. Alex guessed he must've left without saying goodbye. He had said he would likely leave without telling him, but it still stung him a bit to know that he wouldn't see him for at least a decade more.

Without Shen Jing, Alex's life became that more simple once again. Whether it was a bad thing or not, he wouldn't know.

Due to the increase of his Yang aura, he had slowed down Alchemy as well. Most of the time, it was getting difficult to make pills for longer than a few hours.

Not only that, it even hampered his task to improve recipes. So, Alex stopped making pills for a while and focused on Formations, Talismans, and poisons.

Zhanrou had taken over the task of making most of the pills after Alex gave her some of the recipes.

She begged him to teach her how to improve, but he didn't feel like giving out all the advantages he had.

If everyone started having good recipes, his value would certainly lower quite a bit. While he wasn't materialistic as most other people, he still cared about his worth to people.

His time with the royal family was coming to a close and in just another day, he would be leaving.

The princess wanted to throw a big farewell party, but Alex didn't want such a thing.

So, she compromised with him and threw a small one with amazing spirit foods and quality entertainment full of the greatest musicians and dancers of the city.

The party was small and the guest lists smaller. Aside from Princess Xumei, there were a few other princes and princesses that Alex had managed to befriend.

Shurin was there with her mother who she introduced to just at that party alone. In the 2 years, she was with Alex, she had grown from Peak Mind Tempering realm cultivator to a True Disciple 6th realm cultivator.

According to the people around her, her cultivation was very fast and she would one day become one of the leading members of the next younger generation.

Ruoran had come as well to visit him. After Alex's help, Ruoran's cultivation journey had become smooth and he was now a True Emperor 3rd realm cultivator.

Alex thanked him as he would a master for teaching him everything he knew about growing and taking care of plants.

Ruoran thanked him for all the aid he provided him.

Zhanrou was both excited and sad about the farewell party as she felt her only friend in the palace was about to leave her. Sure she had other friends, but none of them had the same interest in Alchemy as Alex did.

"I'm sure we'll meet again. This isn't our final meeting," Alex said.

"Yeah, but I will feel lonely," she said. Alex could only smile at that.

The party ended not long after and everyone went their separate ways.

Alex returned back to his room and cultivated one last night before he was going to leave in the morning.

The next morning, he heard a knock on the door. Alex opened the door and found the princess standing outside.

"Come with me," the princess said. She started moving before he could even respond.

Alex followed her quickly and asked, "where are we going?"

"My father wants to see you," the princess said.

"Oh," Alex was surprised. In the 2 years, Alex had stayed here, he had never, the Emperor had never once bothered to visit him or call for him, so he was surprised he was only being called while he was about to leave.

Alex reached the Palace hall and entered with the princess.

"You're finally here," the Emperor said when he saw Alex.

"You called for me, your majesty?" Alex asked.

"Just to bid you farewell and thank you for all the things you've done for us," the Emperor said.

"That was my job, your majesty," Alex said.

"We both know you had no duty or responsibility to us and yet you still helped us. For that, I thank you," The Emperor said as he even bowed a little.

"Father?" the princess was surprised. She had never seen her father bow before any.

"Your majesty, please trust me when I say that I wouldn't have done it if I didn't enjoy it. I am sure in the future I will look back to these days of mine in the palace with nostalgia," Alex said.

"That makes me a little happy," the Emperor said. "I wouldn't want to anger someone who even he values so much."

"He?" Alex was a little confused. "You mean brother Shen Jing?"

"Yes," the Emperor said. "You call him brother? Can you tell me what your relationship is exactly?"

Alex shrugged. "I guess he's like a master to me. He treats me like a little brother. He teaches me different things and helps me out a lot."

"You are quite lucky to be treated like that by him," the Emperor said with a hint of fear and envy in his voice.

Alex got a distinct feeling in his heart and so he asked the Emperor. "Do you know his identity?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the Emperor said and finally saw Alex's curious face. "Do you not know?"

"He never tells me who he really is," Alex said. "Can you tell me?"

The Emperor hesitated a bit.

"My father made an oath to keep his identity secret. He won't even tell me," the princess said from the side.

"An oath?" Alex looked at the Emperor in shock. Just what was Shen Jing's identity to make even the Emperor say an oath just to keep his secret.

'Do the hegemony islands have that much power?' Alex wondered.

"Anyway, I didn't call you here to talk about him. I came to say thank you and goodbye," the Emperor said.

Alex quickly threw out the thoughts he was having and thanked the Emperor himself.

Once they were done, the princess and Alex left the Palace hall.

"I guess this is goodbye then," Alex said to the princess.

"You're leaving now?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I already have my farewell so I should leave now."

"Where will you go next?" she asked.

"Um, remember that chilly area you told me about in the east? I think I will go there," Alex said.

"The Icy Hell?" the princess asked. "Are you still looking for Yin Treasures?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I'm afraid I will have to keep looking for them until… nevermind. I will leave now."

"Okay, take care. Come to us if you need anything," the princess said.

"I will, thank you," Alex said. "Goodbye."

Alex turned around and left the palace. He felt a bit of melancholy in his heart for leaving a place he had been in for the last 2 years, but his need to go to the place known as the Icy Hell triumphed every other feeling.

'If what they say about the place being a frozen nightmare is true, then I will have to prepare some pills to heat me up,' Alex thought and made his way to the Alchemy guild.

While he trusted his yang body to keep him host in most situations, he would still prepare for the cold just in case his body couldn't handle it.

He walked into the guild and saw a long crowd out front. So, he walked to the back of the hall.

"Oh, hi brother Yu, did you come to register for the Alchemy competition?" one of the friendly staff that recognized him asked.

"The wha— Oh right, I forgot it was starting soon. No wonder there are so many people in the front," Alex said. "But no, I'm not here for the competition. I won't be taking part in it."

"Really?" the staff gave a disappointed look. "I would've thought you would join the competition and want to show them how good you are. Given how young you are, I'm sure you will have a lot of people try to sponsor you too."

Alex smiled, he knew what would happen if he went through the competition. Even if he didn't get the first place and just came in the Top 10, just based on his age alone, there would be a line of people that would try to take him in their group.

They had done so to his mother and she was already 49 when she got 2nd place in the talisman competition. Not to mention, she already had a sect behind her and they still came.

Given how Alex had nobody behind him, these people would be like vultures to his dead meat.

"Yeah, I'm not taking part," Alex told the staff member.

"Well, I guess it's your choice, so I can't say anything," the staff member said. "Still, given how many times you come here to find Yin treasures, I'm surprised you are going to let go of this one."

"Sorry?" Alex was a little confused.

"I was talking about the rewards for the Alchemy competition," the staff said. "Have you not seen the rewards yet?"

"No," Alex said. "It has a Yin treasure?"

"An incredible one too. Look, it's a saint rank Yin ingredient," the staff member said as he gave Alex a talisman.

Alex read the talisman which turned out to be full of information about the competition. Alex skipped all the other information and went directly to the rewards.

The rewards were quite incredible, to say the least.

The top 10 all got a True Heaven ranked artifact each along with 5 thousand True Spirit stones.

Those that entered the top 5 got a few rare True ranked ingredients, along with another 10 thousand True spirit stones.

The person that came in Third place got 1 saint ranked artifact on top of what the Top 5 got.

The person that came in Second place got 1 Saint ranked artifact and 2 Saint pill recipes on top of what the Top 5 got.

The person that came in First got 1 Saint ranked artifact, 2 Saint pill recipes, and 3 Saint ranked ingredients on top of what the Top 5 got.

Alex read the names of the 3 ingredients.

The first one was a Hammerhead Snake's venom. Alex had never heard about the venom being used in any pill, but it would work well as a venom alone.

The second ingredient was what the staff had told him about. It was a Blizzard's Rainbow core, a multicolored fruit that was filled to the brim with Yin energy. This was something that would definitely help him a lot.

Alex was already wondering if he should change his decision about not joining the competition when he laid his eyes on the third ingredient on the list.

His eyes went wide as his breathing became shallow with shock. He had done it. He had finally found it.

There it was, the final reward for the first place in the competition.

The Blood Spirit Ginseng.

Chapter 740 Competition Day

"Mother, you don't have to call me your little boy anymore. I'm 25 already," Alex said.

"Hmph, is that how you should be speaking to your mother who you haven't seen in over a year? Besides, why do you think I'm talking about you? I'm talking about Pearl," Helen said.

Alex sighed. "Come out, Pearl," he said.

"Meow?" Pearl looked around after coming out and caught sight of Helen. "Mother!" He jumped straight into her embrace.

"There's my little boy," she said and rubbed his head.

"I missed you, mother,' Pearl said.

"I missed you too," Helen said as she hugged him gently.

"He's close to being a True Emperor soon, you won't hurt him even if you use all your strength," Alex told her.

"Wow, you're close to being a True Emperor realm cultivator. You're so great, Pearl," Helen said.

"Aren't I?" Pearl asked with a proud face.

Alex watched his mother give more love to Pearl than him and felt a sense of envy. He waited for a few moments and finally, she stopped focusing entirely on Pearl.

"So, you really did register huh?" she asked. "I guess you had to after you saw the rewards."

"Yeah, I finally found it after nearly 10 years. I can't let it go now," Alex said.

"Yeah, I can understand that," Helen said. "Are you confident in winning this?"

Alex hesitated a bit. Any other time, he might have said yes. However, right now his body was heating up more than it did regularly and that would affect his performance a lot.

"I should be as long as I find any sort of Yin treasure to revert back my Yang," Alex said. "Hopefully, the first few competitions don't require me to be at my best."

"Anyway, you came with the Alchemy guild's group, right? They let you come with them?" Alex asked.

"Of course," Helen said. "Despite how I look, I'm already a True Earth alchemist. If I continue for a few years, I will reach True Heaven surely."

"But still, I'm surprised they—"

"Well, I also told them you were my son, so they had to let me come with them," Helen said.

"I see," Alex said with a smile. He quickly changed the conversation and started talking about other things. "So, you already learned so much huh?"

"Of course. I never knew how easy it was to make pills. Especially since I have recipes to follow. Although at the start..."

The mother and son duo continued talking until midnight and only then did they both retreat to their room.

Alex soon started using the Winter Moon technique to do whatever he could to revert even the littlest yang in his body.

The technique was slow, but perhaps there was a solace here as his yang didn't increase while he was cultivating the technique.

Early next morning, the two of them left the hotel, and along with the rest of the people from the guild went to the competition ground.

Once they reached the location, Alex was surprised to see the number of people there. The previous time he came here, he was a mere audience member, so he hadn't given the scope much thought.

However, now that he was looking at it from the perspective of a participant, he could see how much pressure there would be on them to do their best.

"Oh right, before I forget," Alex said and quickly took out a bunch of storage bags and handed them to his mother.

"Keep these for me," he said and took off his ring. "These too."

His mother took them and nodded. "Good luck," she said while holding Pearl in her hands.

"I'll see you guys later," Alex said and left towards a different section of the place where the registered participants were bring brought in.

Alex was allowed to enter once he showed his Alchemist badge. He was taken to a separate, massive room where he was assigned a random number 3.

He didn't know what the number meant yet, but he took it off his mind as that would likely come later.

Alex was truly shocked when he saw the number of people that were participating. Since anyone below 50 years could join, every single person that had already entered the True realms was here.

Alex understood that Saint realms were likely allowed here, but there was no Saint realm cultivator below the age of 50 that was also an Alchemist.

Alex looked around and saw a few familiar faces. Most of them were people he had tested to join the Royal family.

Others were people he saw around the guild while he went there.

"Brother Yu, you came?" an excited voice spoke from the side as a girl approached him.

"Hi, sister Zhanrou," Alex said as he met the orange and green-robed Zhanrou.

"I thought you weren't coming," she said.

"I changed my mind after seeing the rewards," Alex said.

"Right, right, you do like the Yin treasures quite a bit, don't you?" she said. "Well, I'm glad you came. But I'm afraid the first place is gone now."

"Now you're just talking nonsense," Alex said.

He turned his head to his left and saw Xue Meirong glancing at him however after he turned around, she immediately turned her head and looked away.

"Well, she's here too," Zhanrou said. "I promise I will beat her this time around."

"Good luck," Alex said.

Suddenly, a hand fell on his shoulders and a tall man approached from behind him.

"I'm surprised to see you here. I thought you said you weren't joining," he said.

Alex turned around to see Zhou Ren standing behind him.

"I'm afraid some things came up and I had to go back on my words," Alex said. "I'm glad to see you here."

"Me too," Zhou Ren said. "I will see you at the competition. Take care sister Zhanrou."

Zhou Ren walked back to a group of disciples who all wore the white robes that belonged to the Zhou family.

"How do you know him?" Zhanrou asked him quietly.

"There's a feud between us," Alex said. "I just can't seem to figure out if it's a friendly feud or not."

"Well, if it's with him then it's most likely not friendly. He's known to be either a show-off or bully to people he deems below him. Many people don't like him at all," Zhanrou said.

"Well, he can't bully me since... well, he didn't bully me when I was a guest in the Royal family. I don't know how that will change now that I am no longer there," Alex said.

"Oh right, that reminds me. On whose behalf are you taking part in this competition?" Zhanrou asked him.

Alex was about to answer when he heard some loud but distant-sounding announcements outside. The competition had getting commenced by the host.

"I'm on no one's behalf," Alex said. "I'm on my own."

"Really? That... that will cause you trouble later, you know?" Zhanrou said.

"Compared to getting what I want, that will be a piece of cake," Alex said.

"You sure have a lot of confi—"

"Can I have your attention please?" someone spoke from upfront.

Everyone started quieting down and looked to the front and saw a woman standing before them.

"The first competition is about to start, so we would like you to get ready. You will be going out in groups of 20 and taking part in the first competition."

"I'm sure everyone was assigned a number, right? That is the group you are in for today. Everyone in group 1, please come forward," the woman said.

20 different Alchemists of all gender and age came forth.

"Please go through here and have your information set up. We will also check a few other things if you don't mind," the woman said.

Alex saw the people walk through and formation and talk about something. Then, they walked outside.

Alex heard shouts of cheers and introductions from the host before the rules were about to be explained.

Just as that time, the sounds cut off and the room was silent again.

The woman smiled at them and said, "You will not be allowed to hear about anything that happens in the competition today for the sake of fairness."

'Well, guess I'll have to wait for my turn then,' Alex thought.

Chapter 741 First Round

Alex walked up to the group of staff members who were calling for them.

"Good luck," Zhanrou said from behind and waited.

Alex reached the staff and was made to go through a formation. Since the formation was upside down, he wouldn't be able to see what it was without using his spiritual sense.

While he wouldn't mind using it during the alchemy, he didn't want to blatantly show it off right here.

"25 years?" he heard the shocked sounds of some staff members next to him.

Alex quickly turned around and realized that the formation was meant to check his age. 'No wonder they are shocked,' he thought.

He couldn't help but wonder what they would do if he was here 2 years ago when he had the same knowledge as right now and considerably more talent considering his body hadn't regressed to such a hot mess.

The staff members then took his name and affiliations and put him amidst a group of 19 other people.

Alex looked at the group and saw that there wasn't really anyone that he recognized. There was a person or two that he saw before but he didn't count them as he didn't know them at all.

As Alex waited to walk out, a wave of spiritual sense washed over him.

"Please get your storage bags checked before you walk out," a voice said and everyone got in a line to get their storage bags checked.

Alex handed it over and the saint realm cultivator checked it. Since he only had a cauldron in his storage bag, he was allowed to go out easily.

Some of the other ones had to keep back their storage bags because of the items they had.

"You can move out one at a time now," the staff said and the first person in the line moved out. As soon as he was out, Alex heard the host speak out loud and introduce the participant.

One by one, everyone started walking out, and finally, it was Alex's turn.

"Next up, we have Yu Ming. A 25 years old, True King 5th realm cultivator that is also a True Heaven Alchemist. Most of you may know him as the person who spread the recipes for medicinal pastes, but he is also the first Alchemist that was appointed by the Royal family in a long time," the host spoke up.

'Wow, he sure knows a lot,' Alex thought with a surprised look.

After a few more introductions, they were finally all on stage and the first competition for the group was underway.

The competition, as Alex had expected from the other competition, was an ingredient recognition competition.

There were exactly 100 ingredients in front of the group, but they were hidden in a bunch of wooden boxes that were meant to keep their energy intact.

"You will all get at least 5, and at most 10, chances to come up here and pick an ingredient for yourself. Your task is to name it."

"If you answer the name correctly, you get 2 points. If you don't, you lose 2 points. These points will be deducted from your overall points so be careful."

"If you happen to choose an ingredient and don't know its name, you can choose to not say anything to preserve your points."

"Okay, so let us have you lined up for the competition. For the sake of fairness, we will do it by age," the host said.

Alex didn't even have to look around to know that he was the youngest. He lined up in the front and everyone else was lined up behind him with the help of the staff members.

"Come on up," the host said. "You will have 10 seconds to answer."

Alex nodded and walked to the front to see 100 different boxes laying around. '100 boxes and 20 players. It does seem fair,' he thought and randomly chose a box.

"Box 76," the host said. "What could possibly be inside?"

Alex slowly opened up the box and saw a branch that was full of greenish-blue thorns.

"Aquamarine Bellrose's thorns," Alex said.

"Correct! 2 points," the host said and took the box. Box number 76 was now off the table.

Alex returned to the back of the group and looked up at the floating images that were meant for the audience.

Surprisingly, the ones he could see always had the ingredients hidden. The second person after him hesitated for a moment and handed back the item.

Then the third one went and answered, getting it correct. Of the 19 others, about three-quarters of them answered, while the other quarter chose not to answer.

Finally, it was Alex's turn again. He walked up to the ingredients, picked one, and answered.

"Blue Spirit Vine."

"Correct!" the host said.

Then, Alex returned back to the line again. The same thing went on one after another until Alex had gone through 5 different rotations and had answered all 5 of his ingredients.

He had gotten all 10 points that were meant for everyone to get. And yet, his 6th turn came up as there were still 18 or so ingredients remaining that people had failed to answer.

Due to the host's announcement, most people had skipped the number that others had failed to answer or in some cases even made mistakes.

Alex could've chosen those, but he needed to play the game to get as many points as possible. As such, he had left the harder ones for last so everyone would have to skip over those and not get enough points.

Alex picked his 6th ingredient and answered it nonchalantly. Getting his 12th point, he returned back to the end of the group and waited for the group to answer.

If even 3 of them didn't manage to answer or got it wrong, Alex would get to guess again and that was all he wanted.

He waited for the people to go up front and name the ingredient, but to his surprise, there weren't just 3 people that failed to name the ingredient, there were 11.

Meaning, that when Alex's turn came around for the 7th time, there were exactly 9 ingredients left.

Alex went forward and named one of the 9 remaining ingredients, getting him 14 points.

He waited for the other 8 ingredients, silently hoping the others couldn't name it.

The other 19 members went through the round again, and Alex's turn came up again. This time, there were 4 more ingredients remaining.

Alex hadn't opened up these boxes so he was curious why everyone was failing these.

He went ahead and opened one of the boxes to find a Blue rose flower that just screamed Blue Spirit Rose, and that was what Alex wanted to say. However, before he could answer it, he realized that his mind was thinking of another answer on its own.

He looked at the flower curiously and noticed something that was hard to notice if he wasn't looking for it. Underside the blue flower, there was a patch of black that would otherwise be mistaken as a shadow.

"True Wound's Rose flower," Alex answered.

"Correct!" the host shouted.

Alex smiled and went back to the group. But even as he did, he realized that even after all of this time, he was still having to rely on Alchemy God's knowledge.

'How much more do I have to learn Alchemy before I can name an ingredient accurately without the skill's help?' he wondered.

He watched the people struggle to name the remaining 3 ingredients. By the time he was back there again, 2 of the original 3 remained.

'Again huh?' he thought and walked forward. He opened one of the boxes to find a fruit that he thought was Surging Henbit Orange. However, he didn't answer and checked it more carefully.

There was an answer in his mind, but he ignored it for the sake of finding the name on his own.

He stared at the fruit for 5 seconds before realizing that the leaves were rather thin and very dark green. Not to mention, the veins on the leaves were pointed in the other direction.

'Wait, this is not Surging Henbit Orange, this has to be Thin-leaved Skunk Orange,' he thought.

When he checked it with the answer in his mind, he realized he was right.

"Thin-Leaved Skunk Orange!" Alex answered.

"Correct!" the host said.

Alex smiled and returned to the group with only 1 box remaining on the table.

He counted his points and realized he had 18 points at the moment, and if everyone failed to answer the remaining box, he would get his 10th turn.

Alex didn't think that was possible as there were 19 members in front of him.

However, to his surprise, every single one of them failed to answer the name.

'How hard could it be? People should know by now not to go with the obvious answer,' Alex thought.

When his turn finally came around, he walked ahead and picked the final box.

He opened the box and saw a piece of ginseng in there. What was perhaps more surprising was that the name of the ginseng was pretty simple.

However, when he tried to answer it, he realized that there was a certain pull on his mind from the ginseng that was disturbing his thoughts.

'No wonder they couldn't answer,' he thought. 'They couldn't even think straight.'

Fortunately, Alex's mind wasn't so weak to fall victim to such manipulation. So, he loudly answered, "Mind Swallowing Ginseng."

"Correct!"

Chapter 742 End of the First Day

"Now begins the second round of today's competition," the second host spoke to them.

'What? There's another one?' Alex thought. Since the room he was in previously was soundproof, he couldn't hear to know that there was another competition there. Not to mention, this one seemed more secretive than the other one.

Alex was handed a talisman paper as well and the host started explaining the rules of this competition.

"There are 3 of the same pills in there, the name of which has not been set yet."

"The pill uses exactly 10 different ingredients, and your task is to name the ingredients. You have exactly 1 hour to name it all and you may use whatever method you require to find out the name of the ingredient."

"You will not be given any other hints aside from the information that the pill is not harmful to eat."

"Points will be based off of the number of ingredients you get correct, and points will be deducted per ingredients you get wrong."

"Your 1 hour starts now."

The moment the host said that every single one of the 20 participants immediately sat down on the ground and started looking at the pills.

Alex sat down too and brought out the pill. It was a greenish pill with specks of black scattered throughout the surface.

Alex took one of the 3 pills out and looked at it. He tried to think of any pill he had made that looked the same as this one, but given how this was a new pill, there was likely no way for him to figure out the ingredients in this way.

He could tell that the pill had about 35% harmony, but other than that, he was getting no information at all.

"Smell then," he said to himself and started taking in the smell of the pill.

He got a distinct acidic, citrusy smell amongst the many other smells and wondered what it could be.

He made a mental list of all the ingredients that he could think of that made this smell when performing alchemy.

Alex then went on through the rest of the smell and one after another, he made 10 different lists of what it could be.

Once he had the list, he started going through each ingredient and seeing if they would ever cause pigmentation on the pill to cause it to become green.

He didn't toss away those that didn't, but he did pay extra attention to those that did.

Once it was all done, Alex wondered what else he could do. He put the pill between his fingers and crushed it.

He checked the powder with his eyes, and once he realized that wasn't helping, he started using his spiritual sense.

He went through the powder and found the 10 different shapes. Then, he started comparing it with the information he had in his mind through the many months of refining pill recipes.

This was a really hard task and Alex barely stumbled on 2 different ingredients that he was sure belonged to the pill.

Still, he waited before writing it down.

He took the powder of the pill and put it in his mouth. The competition holders had mentioned that there was no problem with eating the pill, so tasting it would cause no problem either.

Not that Alex had to worry about it either way.

Alex tried to isolate the multitudes of tastes he was getting. It was hard, but he managed to separate them to a certain level and figured out the 3rd ingredient.

Unfortunately, most of the flavors weren't unique enough to pinpoint them to the ingredients on the list.

"Guess there's only one thing left to do then," Alex thought and took out one of the remaining two pill. Then, without any hesitation, he popped the pill into his mouth and swallowed it.

Alex waited around for a second for the pill to take effect and realized that he could feel his cultivation base elevate a little.

'It improves your cultivation base huh?' Alex thought. That gave him some more ideas.

He felt the energy from the pill for a few moments and started going through his list one more time.

He waited for a few moments for the pill's effects to disappear and ate it one more time to see what he could find out.

There wasn't much difference between the second and the third pill, so there wasn't much Alex could figure out.

'Well, I guess I'm only doing this much then,' he thought as he looked through the 6 ingredients he had figured out.

The rest of the ingredients were hard to figure out and he didn't want to risk points for something he wasn't even sure about.

So, Alex stuck with the answer and didn't write in anymore.

'This would've been so much easier had they given us a pill that we actually knew about,' He thought.

He handed the answer over to the staff around the 50 minutes mark and waited for the hour to end.

Once the hour ended, the results were published.

Alex got 12 points with his 6 ingredients, while someone actually managed to get 7 ingredients.

Most, however, struggled with around 3 or 4 ingredients.

'I need to experiment more with the ingredients,' Alex thought.

Once the competition was over, Alex was let go to the audience. He quickly went and found his mother sitting alongside many of the people from DawnSpring's Alchemy guild.

Alex recognized a lot of them, so he sat together with them.

"That was amazing, brother Yu," they said.

"Yeah, it was fine," Alex replied.

"No, no, that was amazing. You are the first person to get 32 points in the first day's competition," they said.

"Oh, what's the highest point?" Alex asked.

"You can see up there," they said as they showed a large, hovering ranking screen where his name was on the top with 32 points.

The 2nd closest one was at 26 points, which was really surprising for him. He looked at the name and realized he didn't know the person.

"Have Zhou Ren and Xue Meirong not come out yet?" he asked.

"I don't think I've seen those names before here, so likely not," his mother said.

"Oh," Alex said. "Then I haven't yet won anything."

Alex turned around to the group that was currently transitioning from the first round to the second one and noticed Zhanrou.

"How much did Zhanrou get?" he asked his mother.

"I think she got 7 names right," his mother said.

"7 huh? So 14 points. She will need to get 6 ingredients correct in the next one to tie for 2nd place," Alex said.

The host started introducing the 5th group and that was when Zhou Ren came out.

Alex sat and watched Zhou Ren's match which ended with him taking the most points with 8 different ingredients named.

Surprisingly, there were still 5 ingredients on the table remaining by the time all 20 of the contestants had used up their 10 turns.

That meant that either the contestants had gotten the ingredients wrong or didn't choose to answer.

'Each missing ingredient name is more points for me,' Alex thought and watched.

Zhanrou seemed to have guessed only 5 of the ingredients and got 10 points, bringing her total to 24. It wasn't bad on its own, but it struggled against Alex and the 2nd place.

Nothing worth mentioning happened for the 6th group, while Zhou Ren's fifth group was done with the pill as well.

He surprisingly found 7 ingredients in the pill and got a comfortable 30 points to get to the 2nd place right behind Alex.

In the 7th group was Xue Meirong who managed to name 9 of the ingredients, but on the 10th one, she got overconfident and named it wrong. In the end, she only got 16 points from there.

In the second round, she named exactly 7 ingredients, once again showing her capabilities as an alchemist. Alex couldn't help but be surprised at how talented they were.

'Had she not answered the final ingredient, she would've been equal with me. Not just that, had she named it correctly, she would've come in the first place,' Alex thought.

The rest of the group had nothing noticeable and as such, all the 200 different participants were done for the day.

Zhou Ren and Xue Meirong tied for 2nd place while Alex got 1st place in the first day's competitions.

Chapter 743 Second Day of the Competition

According to them, he didn't have to worry about making pills for the 2nd day's competitions as well. It was only on the 3rd day that the competition became about making pills.

According to the records, the 2nd day's competition was most likely going to be about pills, just not making them.

Alex read up some more on the rest of the records in an open library, but no one was looking at him. After all, he had completely changed his face to come out today.

Ever since people realized that the number 1 participant, the 25 year old prodigy, Yu Ming was staying in the one particular hotel, they had been camping it day and night to meet him.

Not only that, there were many people who actually came to meet him too. What surprised Alex the most was that the guild wasn't providing any sort of security as people were openly scanning his room with their spiritual sense.

Fortunately, the room had spiritual sense blocking formation, so Alex was somewhat safe. Still, walking outside wasn't possible, so he had to teleport away from his room to his mother's room and then leave that way.

Fortunately, no one could see past his disguise, so he was fine.

After the library, he went to the alchemy guild to search for Yin treasures, but there weren't any that would help him.

Disappointed, Alex returned back to the hotel and started preparing for tomorrow's competition.

The competition was held for 4 days, over the course of 7 days. So, there was 3 days of break, one in between each.

When the 3rd day arrived, the 2nd day of the competition commenced.

Alex's disguise wore off and he made his way to the competition ground along with his mother and the rest of the people.

Because this was the competition day, no one dared block his path. Not only because they respected him enough to not bother him, but also because the Lightsworns were flying around the city, maintaining peace.

Once Alex reached the cultivation ground, he separated and went towards the contestant hall once more.

"You are number 7," a girl told him as he walked in.

"I was number 3 the other day," Alex told her.

"It changes everyday," the girl replied.

"I see," Alex said. "Thank you for letting me know." He then made his way to Zhanrou who was excited to meet him.

"You left too early the other day. I didn't even get to congratulate you," she said.

"Save your breath, it's only the first day," Alex said. "Who knows what sorts of mistake I will make the following days."

"You are too pessimistic," Zhanrou said. "What group are you today?"

"7," Alex said. "What about you?"

"2," Zhanrou said. "I'm kinda glad I don't have to go against you today."

"Me too, I guess," Alex said. "I wonder if its on purpose because of how high our points was for the first day."

"Maybe? It would make sense to separate us for the sake of entertainment," Zhanrou said.

"Congratulations on being first for the first day," Zhan Rou said. "But its only one day. You can't just be good with ingredients. You need to be good with the other aspects of cultivation as well."

"You weren't bad yourself, brother Zhou," Alex said. "I'm afraid you will do way better now that you're so motivated. I might have to step up my game."

Zhou Ren showed and hid an angry face in seconds and instead smiled. "Yes. Its a shame we're not in the same group. It would be fun to compete from the start."

He walked away, leaving the two of them to talk to each other.

After a few minutes, the staff started moving around and soon the host started starting today's competition.

Not long after, the 1st group was called upon.

Silence ensued throughout the whole room as they were once again not made privy to the contents of today's matches.

Alex sat down nearby and waited for the matches to end. Unfortunately, they weren't allowed outside to see what was happening as that would give them an advantage, so Alex had to wait for over 6 hours before it was his turn.

By the time his group was called, the only person that was still remaining that he recognized was the middle aged man in the corner of the room.

This was the man who took the 2nd place on the first day.

Alex stood up and left for the checking area before he was let outside.

Once outside, Alex saw the crowd cheer up when they saw him. Suddenly, a pressure he hadn't felt yet started forming deep inside of him.

'Am I feeling nervous?' he thought. He couldn't see why that wasn't the case. In front of so many people, having to do his best when he didn't even know what was happening, he was slightly scared.

Not to mention, his arm depended on it.

Once again, Alex and the rest were passed along empty talismans to write it, only he wondered what he was going to have to write.

Alex was then handed a storage pouch which he checked inside to see 10 different vials, all with numbers on them.

"Your job now is the check into those vials, recognize the pill, and write down the ingredients required for that pill in the order of the recipe."

"Each answer is worth 2 points. For every wrong answer, you will lose two points. For every right answer that is not in the correct order, you will lose 1 point."

"If you cannot recognize the pill, you may call the staff to help you. However, for each pill they will reveal to you, you will lose 1 point from your overall points."

"You are allowed to eat the pill if you wish. Begin!"

Alex took out the first vial and opened the stopper to see a pinkish pill.

He smelled it once and immediately recognized the pill. "Swift Fox's advancement pill," Alex thought. The moment he did, the entire recipe for the pill came into his mind.

Without hesitation, he started writing the entire list of ingredients in the order they would go in.

Once done, he opened the 2nd vial and recognized that pill too. So, he started writing down the ingredients for that pill as well.

Then the third, and the fourth. It was on the 5th pill that Alex had to slow down and figure out what the pill was.

He looked at the color and analyzed the smell. Using those two info, he went through his mind to see through all the pills he had made until now.

Since this was a test about knowing recipes, he was sure that there was no recipe that would be hard to acquire, but that still left hundreds of pills to sift through.

Finally, he found what he was looking for and wrote down the recipe.

He did the same for the sixth and the seventh pill as well. Then, he was stumped on the 8th pill.

The 8th pill was completely white with no impurities on a visual level. It had some mild smell but nothing you could smell from a normal distance.

Alex tried to go through his mind but there were just too many generic white pills that smelled like nothing, so it was hard to tell what the pill was.

In the end, he had to eat the pill to figure out what it was.

As soon as he ate the pill, Alex felt the Qi around him get pulled in even faster than normal.

'Ah!' he thought and remembered a pill he made not very long ago for a mission.

'That pill huh?' he thought and wrote down the ingredients.

The 9th pill was the same. A generic white pill with no smell. Without hesitation, Alex ate the pill and felt his face start to change.

'I see,' he thought and quickly wrote down the ingredients of the pill.

Finally, he ate the 10th pill and felt a little squirming on his left arm as if it was trying to heal it.

'Got it,' he thought and named the ingredients for that one as well.

Once all done, Alex handed over the talisman to the staff who checked it.

"All correct," the staff said. Just like that, Alex got another 20 points.

Chapter 744 Third Day of the Competition

They would also deduct 1 point for each question wrongly answered so it made it hard for everyone to simply guess.

Alex read the questions and surprisingly found most of them easy. The exam lasted about an hour, and Alex finished it in about 20 minutes.

He went over his answers a couple of times but nothing seemed wrong, so he gave his answers to the staff and had them evaluated.

Just as he hoped, he got the perfect 20 points.

'That went well,' he thought as he walked towards his mother's location. However, before he could get far, a staff member suddenly stopped him.

"How can I help you?" Alex asked him.

"Dear participants, as you may know, on the third day there is going to be a speed pill-making competition. We would like to know what pill you would like to make for that," the staff asked. "You can answer me right now or go to the guild before tomorrow noon and answer there."

"Oh, uh... I will make the... Purple Crane pill," Alex said.

"Thank you," the staff then went away, leaving Alex to go back to his mother and the rest.

"Good job," his mother said as he arrived. "You're still in the lead."

"Am I?" Alex turned around and saw the rankings.

He was in the first place with 72 points, and both Zhou Ren and Xue Meirong were trailing behind him at 70 points.

"It seems no one got an answer wrong today," Alex said. He looked through the ranking and as expected, most of them got the full 40 points.

He waited for a while and watched through the rest of the competition, but there was no one to do better than him so he had nothing to worry about.

"Just 2 more days of this and my son will get first place," Helen said.

Alex doubted he could keep this up for 2 more days. He was going to have to start making pills from the next competition onwards and that was going to be problematic.

After all, due to his condition, it had been nearly 2 months since he last made a pill or even dared to make one.

'I need to go practice,' he thought. He turned to his mother and asked for his items before leaving the competition ground.

He told her that she would only see him on the day of the competition itself.

Alex then went to the guild directly and got himself a room to start making pills. He brought the ingredients for the Purple Crane pill and prepared his cauldron.

Then, one after another, he put in the ingredients and began. The Purple Crane pill only had 6 ingredients, as opposed to most other pills that had at least 10 or higher normally.

As such, this was the perfect pill to choose for fast pill making. The only problem was that this was a very well-known pill and everyone else would go for it as well.

So, Alex had to use the advantages he had to become faster than everyone else.

As he moved the ingredients around, Alex realized that he was having trouble maintaining the fire's temperature despite his Dao.

If he let the fire be, its temperature would slowly creep up until it was so hot that his pill was getting ruined. Then, he would have to pull his attention away from the ingredients and fix the temperature before going back to the ingredients.

Alex trained for the whole night, but he barely saw any improvement. What little adapting he did became useless as the more Alchemy he did, the more he lost Qi, which in turn made him cultivate to gain Qi and that increased his yang once more.

Frustrated, Alex left the room multiple times to go find some yin treasures. However, each time he went to the staff, the answer was still no.

Alex trained for the entire next day as well as the night and finally left the guild on the day of the competition.

He met his mother outside the competition ground and gave her his things before going to the waiting hall.

He found Zhanrou and the rest waiting around, but he was too frustrated to make small talks.

Surprisingly, he was given group 1, which included no one from the rest of the top 10.

Then, the competition began and Alex walked out.

The cheers he heard from the audience rang full and far wide. He had come to the competition with a certain prestige and had kept it up throughout the first 2 days, even exceeding the expectations of many.

Had he done a little worse than the others, he might have been called a dark horse of the competition. But since he was doing so good, he was now considered one of the better ones in the tournament.

A lot of the people even expected him to win the whole thing with how it was going.

That just created a sense of pressure for him that he didn't need right now.

He waited for the host to start explaining about the speed competition, but contrary to his expectation, the competition that was being held currently was a different one.

"For the first round today, you will all be making a new pill you've never seen before," the host said.

Each one of them was passed along a talisman with a recipe and Alex understood where this was going.

"You will have exactly one hour to learn the recipe and make the pill," the host said. "You will be ranked from best to worst based on your pill's harmony."

"You may begin the moment you get your ingredients," the host said and immediately a group of staff members came up to them with storage bags.

Alex looked into the storage bag and was beyond surprised to see what he did.

There was only 1 set of ingredients.

'So I have to get it right on the first time for a new pill I've never seen before?' Alex worried when he saw the ingredients.

This wasn't a speed thing so he could take his time, but he still only had an hour to prepare the pill.

Alex sat down and closed his eyes to visualize what he was going to do. He thought of putting the ingredients in the correct time and order, collecting the ingredients, and finally preparing the pill.

In his mind, nothing could go wrong, but Alex knew there would come some problem.

'How am I going to make the pill in the end? Should I use the technique or just clump it all together. If I do use the technique, how am I supposed to figure out how to make the combination?' Alex thought.

Since this wasn't something he had made before, he couldn't visualize the powders before getting into the pill. Not to mention there were ingredients in there that he had never interacted with, so he didn't even know what shapes they would form when put through the recipe.

'I can only rely on my luck now,' Alex thought as he decided to not use the technique in the end.

He brought out his cauldron and started heating up the cauldron while he prepared himself.

Then, he started making the pill.

The moment the first ingredient went in, Alex started increasing the temperature to reach the required amount. Thanks to his Dao of Heat, that happened instantly, but as his focus shifted to the ingredient, the temperature slowly slipped out of control.

Alex immediately focused back on the temperature and lowed it while also moving the ingredient around.

Then he changed it once more and put in the second ingredient. The problem with the temperature kept popping up each time he put the ingredients, but he was always conscious of the temperature so he thought he could keep it in check.

A few problems appeared here and there, but mostly he thought he did a fine job with the ingredients.

Once it was all powdered, Alex pulled the energy into the powder and then formed a pill out of it without using any technique.

When the pill finally formed, he brought it out and looked at it, only to get a disappointed look on his face.

His pill barely reached 44% harmony.

Chapter 745 Struggle

'That's bad, but it is a new pill that no one has made before, so maybe I didn't do so bad,' Alex thought.

With 19 other True Heaven Alchemists here, that was a bit of hope, but that was all Alex had at the moment. He was sure he could've knocked it out of the park if he had a regular body, but he didn't, so he was stuck with the 44%.

Alex got his pill tested by the staff and waited for the rest of the people to finish making their pills. A few minutes later, most of them did.

42%. 31%. 45%.

All sorts of different numbers popped up in the tester as Alex counted only the points that numbered above him.

There were exactly 4 different people that got more points than him, making his 44% the 5th highest in his group of 20.

'16 points,' Alex thought. That was better than whatever his pessimistic self today was expecting to get.

After the first round was over, Group 1 was taken to their next round which was the speed pill making. Whoever made the pill the fastest won.

Everyone was handed their ingredients as soon as they entered and the host started explaining the competition.

As expected, the one that made the pill fasted and had it tested got the 20 points. Everyone after that got fewer and fewer points until the person in the last place got 1 point.

Alex didn't want to be that person.

'Worst case scenario, Zhou Ren and Xue Meirong get 20 points, putting them 2 points ahead of me. If I can get 20 points in this round, I can stay at a comfortable distance from them.'

'With only 2 points difference, I can easily beat them in the final competition which is all about making the highest grade pill,' Alex thought.

"You will need above 30% to have considered passed."

"Alright everyone, go to your seats," the host said and waited for everyone to sit in front of the furnace.

"Begin!"

Alex immediately brought out his cauldron and used the Dao of Heat to get the cauldron's temperature to the appropriate amount.

It should have been instant considering he had the Dao, but due to his body, he overshot a bit and had the bring the temperature down.

At the same time, he put in the first ingredient. He managed to do that before most of the other people's cauldron was even half heated.

Alex had an advantage in this regard and he was going to use it. He moved around the first ingredient when he realized the fire was going up way too fast.

Since this was a speed test, he was worried he would be slow if he spread his attention between the fire and the ingredients, but he didn't have a choice.

When the fire got hotter, he had to move away from his focus and deal with it.

Once the first ingredient was powdered, he prepared the second ingredient and readied the temperature by dropping it to the appropriate level.

However, due to him compensating for the fact that his Qi was heating up his fire, he ended up overreaching and made the fire colder than it needed to be.

So, to counteract that problem, he heated it up again. However, because he was scared of making the same mistake again, he did it in small increments until he was at the perfect temperature.

Only when the temperature was correct did the 2nd ingredient go into the cauldron. Alex moved around the ingredients like normal while constantly checking the fire to make sure he wasn't screwing it up.

When it came time for the 3rd ingredient, he slowly increased the fire and it took a few moments to reach the proper temperature.

Then he put the 3rd ingredient.

While he had a headstart, these common mistakes started dragging Alex more and more down. By the time he had the 5th ingredient ready, his headstart no longer made a difference as most of the others were starting to catch up.

'I need to be faster,' Alex thought and increased his pace to match up with the others, but it was hard, especially when he kept on making mistakes.

By the time he was done turning all ingredients to powder, everyone was basically on the same stage as he was in.

Alex hurriedly poured energy onto the pills and started forming the pill.

As he did that, from the corner of his eyes, he saw a few people stand up and move forward.

'Dammit! Faster,' Alex thought and pushed himself hard to finish forming the pill.

As soon as it was done, he pulled the pill out and rushed forward to put it into the tester.

He didn't even see how many other people were around him as he waited for his pill Harmony to go above 30%.

He shouldn't even have waited for that as it obviously would. Alex turned around the moment he reached above 30% and counted the number of people that had finished before him.

6.

6 people had finished before him and had earned the 15 through 20 points, leaving Alex with 14. Combining with the previous 16 points, Alex now had 30 points for the 3rd day of the competition.

Alex sighed and started walking away from the stage when staff stopped him again.

"What pill will you be making for the final day?" the man asked.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "Body Rebinding Pill." It was a healing pill that Alex was used to making and was one of the very first pills he ever refined the recipe for.

As such, he had the most practice with it and hoped it would be a lot easier to get his points with it.

Once the staff took the note, Alex walked back to the audience.

"Hey," he said to his mother with a sigh of dejection.

"Aw, don't be sad. You did well. You did very well," Helen said. "Come sit, I'm sure the rest of them will make a lot of mistakes too."

Alex sighed and sat down to watch the match. He looked at the stage and noticed only one person from the top 10, who was towards the bottom of the group.

He didn't really care for that person so he ignored him and looked at the 3rd group that was doing their new pill competition.

Xue Meirong was there and she was sitting around doing nothing. 'She must be reading her recipe,' Alex thought.

He looked up at the rankings and saw his name still in the first place with 102 points, but people were getting close.

And not a single one of the top 10 rankers aside from him was even done.

Alex went back to watching Xue Meirong make the pills. When ignoring the prideful side of her, one could see a really hardworking girl that was doing what she loved and had been doing it ever since she was very young.

There was nothing fantastic about her alchemy, no flourishing moves or crazy techniques. It was all simple Alchemy that anyone could do. However, even if it was simple, she worked hard to do the simple thing precisely and perfectly.

Once she was done with the pill, she had it tested and as expected, she did amazing by getting a solid 56%. That put her in a league above most of the other participants in her group.

Which also meant she got the 20 points and was now at 90 points total.

Even if she did her absolute worst and got 12 points in the next round, which she wouldn't, she would still catch up to Alex and have exactly the same points as him.

If Alex wasn't aware of how the scoring went for the final competition from all the records he read, he would've likely thought that his chances at victory over the whole tournament were over.

While Xue Meirong moved to the speed competition, Zhanrou came out to the new pill competition.

Xue Meirong scored 20 points as expected, finishing nearly a minute earlier than all of her contemporaries.

'110 points,' Alex thought with a grave face. 'I will have to get at least 8 points more than her in the final round to just catch up. If I want to win, I will have to get 9 points higher than her.'

'This is going to be hard.'

Chapter 746 Final Day

More people came along as more rounds were held and they got high scores too. Soon, Alex was starting to reach the lower end of the top 10.

With 3 more rounds remaining, he was sure he would fall out of the top 10.

Zhou Ren walked out with the 8th group and sat down to make his pill. The fire that was burning red and yellow a moment ago suddenly turned white as Zhou Ren used his powers.

The white flame burned smoothly like liquid smoke and after a few minutes, Zhou Ren put in the first ingredients.

There wasn't anything fancy about the rest of the moves he did, but the white flame made it look amazing regardless.

Soon his pill was done and it came out with 58%. Without even waiting, Alex knew he had gotten the 20 points.

The white fire burned for the 2nd competition as well as Zhou Ren finished first and got another 20 points.

Another person from his group also did really well, coming in 2nd at each round and got a total of 38 points and caught up with Alex.

The rest of the 2 groups also had 3 people that ended up getting equal or above Alex in the ranking.

By the time the third day was over, Alex was in 12th place.

"Don't worry son, you'll be fine," Helen tried to console him. "Besides, you just want your arm back right? You can reach Saint realm for that."

'And cultivate behind closed doors for who knows how many years,' Alex thought.

"It's fine, mother," he said. "I'm still not out of the running. Since the final competition counts the pill's Harmony as points, I just need to make better pills than everyone else."

"Oh, okay. You can do that," Helen said.

"Hey, brother Yu," Zhou Ren spoke as he walked toward Alex. "I saw the ranking and couldn't help but be surprised. What happened? Why are you so low?"

"I was just off my game today. I will bring my best on the final day," Alex said.

"Oh, okay," Zhou Ren said. "I must have been stupid to think you were only good on the theoretical stuff and couldn't actually make pills. Well, see you later."

"I don't like that guy. Why is he so snarky?" Helen asked.

"He was born to a big family and is kind of a big deal amongst the younger generation. His ego is inflated as a result. Let's not worry about him. I'm going to the guild again to see what I can do for the next competition. You two should go back to the hotel room. I will go back to the guild and see what I can do."

Alex left the competition grounds and went to the guild once again to practice.

The entire time he was there, he did nothing but make the one pill he had told the staff members he would.

As it was a healing pill, there were plenty of ingredients available for him by the guild.

Alex started making the pills and realized he was truly getting terrible. Most of the pills he made ended up being in the high 60s, not even touching 70s.

When he did do almost everything perfectly, there was still enough mistake to cause him to get 72%.

Unless either Zhou Ren or Xue Meirong got 63% or less on the final round, he was screwed.

Alex started to get anxious but calmed himself. 'I don't know how well they can do. I just need to do better,' he thought.

Before making the next pill, he took some time to take in every yang energy he had been releasing subconsciously.

Then, he split his attention to keep his Yang in check. This made him incredibly slower than normal, but that was a trade-off he was willing to make.

Even with that, it wasn't like he wasn't making mistakes, but he did end up getting more than 75% this time around.

He tried some more and took it slow for the most part. Soon, he realized that if he wasn't being hasty, and made sure to get rid of all the yang around him and stash it within him, he could perfectly reach 78% too.

'That's good,' he thought. He didn't like the feeling of having all the yang inside of him, but he had no other choice.

Over the course of the night, Alex cultivated to get ready for the next day.

In the morning, he walked out with newfound vigor and hope in himself for the next competition.

Alex arrived at the competition ground not long after and met up with his mother.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Great," Alex said with a genuine smile. "I think I can do it."

"Good, now go," Helen sent him off.

Alex went over to the staff that took him to the waiting list and was assigned group 10.

After a few minutes, Zhanrou came in and she got group 10 as well.

"What a coincidence," Alex said.

"No, it's not," Zhanrou said. "It's the final day so they are going to make it exciting by making the highest rankers in the same group. Brings out more competitiveness."

"Oh, so that means—"

"It seems we're in the same group finally," Zhou Ren said from the side as he walked over the Alex.

"It seems so," Alex said.

"Oh, my bad. I was talking to sister Zhanrou here since she and Xue Meirong are the only ones that have a chance against me today," Zhou Ren said.

Alex didn't let his emotion waver at the blatant disrespect and instead channeled his anger into motivation.

"If you think you have a chance of beating me, you are sorely mistaken," Xue Meirong arrived to say to Zhou Ren.

"We will see who's right later," Zhou Ren said and moved away.

Xue Meirong turned away from him and Zhanrou and humphed away as well.

"Group 1 gather up!" the staff started calling for the first group. "The rest of you can leave and go watch the competition. Group 2, make sure to come here as soon as the Group 1's round is complete. If you are missing when it's time for you to go on stage, we will mark you absent."

Alex and the rest walked out of the waiting area while Group 1 left for the stage where the host was already starting the competition.

"How do you think your chances are?" Zhanrou asked.

"It's good. I should be able to get a lot of points," Alex said. "What about y—"

"What pill are you making today, young man?" the host asked out loud to the first person that entered the stage.

"Disciple Ascendancy pill," the young man answered.

Next up, a girl came up and the host asked the same question.

"Disciple Ascendancy Pill," the girl said.

Another person came up and once again the host asked the same question.

"Disciple Ascendancy pill," the third person said as well.

Alex watched curiously as of the 20 people that entered, 18 of them were making the Disciple Ascendancy pill.

"What's going on?" Alex softly asked Zhanrou.

"You don't realize?" Zhanrou asked.

Alex shook his head.

"Do you remember the test you had us take when we tried for the Royal Alchemist job?" Zhanrou asked.

"Yes, I made you make my… Disciple Ascendancy pill." Blood drained from Alex's face fasther than his mind understood what was going on.

"No way!" he said.

"I'm afraid that's the case," Zhanrou said. "You gave your recipe to so many people that over the last year, it was spread throughout the empire."

"It isn't talked about much because it is such a low-level pill, but it is the best recipe we have for in the whole empire, so everyone is going to use that recipe, including me," Zhanrou said.

"No, but if that happens then…" All forms of motivation Alex had been feeling just moments ago were gone.

Who cared if he could make 78% pill after trying really hard if others could easily reach 75%.

"It seems everyone is making your pill, brother Yu," Zhou Ren said from the side. "Seriously though, it's an amazing recipe and you should be proud of yourself for refining it to such perfect… even though you lack the ability to make good pills."

Alex was feeling so angry that he nearly punched Zhou Ren. Instead, he ignored the man and walked directly to his mother, and sat down beside her.

"What's wrong? You seem mad," Helen asked.

"I am," Alex said. "Everyone is using my recipe today and they will use that to beat me."

"Your recipe? What? But they are so much better. If they use that then…"

"They will easily close up on me and I won't get the necessary points," Alex said. "Dammit! How the hell do I get 9 points more than them when I will now barely get 3 points more if I'm lucky."

Helen started to panic as well. "How did they get your recipe?" she asked.

"I used it for a test a year ago for the royal family," Alex said. "I had no idea such a simple thing like that would come back to bite me."

Helen didn't know what to do and only watched her son become restless and panicked.

Just then, she saw a girl appear behind Alex and place a hand on his shoulders.

"Brother Yu, I finally found you," the girl said.

Chapter 747 Weight Measuring Formation

"I've been searching for you since the day before yesterday. Where have you been?" she asked.

"I've... been in the guild, holed up, practicing," Alex said.

"Whatever, you need to come with me now. The princess wants to see you," Shurin said.

"I'll be back in a bit, mother," Alex said and left with Shurin. She took her around the stage until he reached a secluded area in a high tower.

The princess was inside, watching the competition in the comfort by herself.

"You're here," the princess turned around. "Finally. I hope I wasn't late in finding you."

"What's going on?" Alex asked,

"I saw your performance the day before, and I must say it was less than great," the princess said.

"Sigh, yeah, I feel less than great right now," Alex said.

"Does it have anything to do with you finding Yin treasures?" she asked.

"Kind of. I have a problem with me currently, the solution to which I haven't found yet. So, I use Yin treasures as a temporary cure," Alex said.

"Good thing I thought so then," the princess said and brought out a box from her storage bag. The moment the box came out, Alex thought the room's temperature dropped by nearly 5 degrees and that was before the box was even opened.

"What's that?" he asked.

"It's a royal treasure I took out from the treasury," the princess said. "Well, we call it a treasure, but really it's just a drop of water that our ancestor found that is full of Yin Qi."

"We don't know what to do with this, so it had been sitting around in the treasury for a few hundred years now," the princess said.

"And you're giving this to me?" Alex asked. "Why?"

"Because we appreciate all you've done," the princess said. "Also, you must show the world what is possible with Alchemy. Show how great one can get will pills."

"I want people to have a high bar they can work up to, and I want you to be the one that sets the bar," the princess said.

"Thank you," Alex said.

"How long do you need to... cure your problem?" she asked.

"A whole day maybe, I don't know," Alex said. "Oh no, we don't have much time."

"Alright go, we will talk later," the princess said.

"Thank you, princess Xumei," Alex said, bowed, and left. He directly ran to his mother and told her what he was going to do.

"Where are you going? The hotel?" she asked.

"No, the guild is closer," Alex said. "How's the first round going?"

"They are halfway through making the pills," Helen said. "You should hurry."

"I'll see you later," Alex said and ran off. He blitzed through the street and arrived at the guild.

Some of the staff that recognized him were surprised to see him there, but he didn't stick around to talk with any of them.

He entered one of the rooms and immediately started cultivating with the Winter Moon cultivation technique. Once he was in the zone, he brought out the box and felt the air chill again.

Then, he opened the box and the air became even colder. 'What do I do now?' he wondered as he looked at the small drop of water.

There was one thing he could do that would be the best way to work, but he wasn't sure if it was safe or not as this was a highly Yin-ish treasure.

"Oh, what the hell," Alex thought and drank the drop of crystal clear Yin water.

Immediately, a chilling cold entered his body, freezing the pathway to his stomach. Alex felt his organs start to freeze and slow down.

At that moment, without even thinking, he released all the Yang he had been holding back currently.

The Yin and the Yang started mixing with each other and started circulating his meridians while he cultivated.

Alex closed his eyes and left the two to do what they did best.

At first, the Yin and Yang became violent, seeking to destroy each other. However, soon they found harmony in each other and the violence ended.

Alex continued cultivating for who knew how long. Even the urgency he had felt was gone as the two found equilibrium and maintained each other.

After what felt like an entire day, Alex opened his eyes and stopped cultivating.

The moment he did, the equilibrium vanished. After stopping the Winter Moon cultivation technique, Alex found that his Yang was starting to overtake him again.

However, this time around, it was so little that it wouldn't even be noticeable for the most part, let alone be an inconvenience.

"The competition!" Alex finally remembered and ran out of the guild. When he arrived outside, he saw that the sun was to the west and it was way past the afternoon.

"Oh no, how long did I stay in there?" he thought and ran back to the competition grounds.

He quickly ran to the audience stands and found his mother.

"Mother! What's going on? Am I late?" he asked hurriedly.

"Oh god, you're finally here," Helen felt relieved finally.

"What's going on? What round is this?" Alex asked.

"It's the 9th round. Your turn is next. Quickly go," Helen said.

Alex nodded and gave her everything but a single storage bag and ran towards the waiting area.

Even as he was going, he could hear the results for the 9th group being announced.

65%. 67%. 63%.

Everyone was using his pill and scoring really high points. In fact, one of them even managed to get a 72%.

Alex rushed through the waiting room and arrived at the back of the room where they were being scanned before being ready to get sent to the stage.

The other 19 participants looked at him with surprise.

"You're finally here," Zhanrou shouted with relief.

The others most made a grunting noise while Zhou Ren gave a mocking smile.

"I had thought you would have given up by now. It seems you got a little kick in you just yet," Zhou Ren said.

Alex smiled back at him. "Just keep watching, you will get a little kick in you later too," he said.

He ignored his agitated face and went to get his storage bag scanned.

"Hmm?" the saint realm expert made a frowning face. "What is this? This is not allowed."

"It's a weight measurement formation," Alex said. "I need it for the ingredients."

The Saint thought for a moment and asked, "Do you really need this?"

"Yes," Alex said.

The Saint turned around to converse with his colleagues and turned around after a few seconds.

"Okay, what exactly do you plan to use it for?" he asked.

"Just checking the ingredient's weight," Alex said.

"Anything else?" he asked.

Alex shook his head.

"Okay, someone will sit by you while you use it and take it away after you're done. Understood?" he asked.

"Absolutely," Alex said.

Once everything was set, everyone was let onto the stage and introduced one by one. As they came out, everyone was once again asked the same question as to what they were going to do.

Out of all 20 of them, everyone that went ahead of Alex said the same pill's name.

Disciple Ascendancy pill.

"What pill are you making, Contestant Yu?" the host asked.

"A Body Rebinding pill," Alex said.

The crowd murmured a bit when they heard that and even the host showed a surprised expression.

"I hear you were the one that perfected the recipe for the Disciple Ascendancy pill. Mind telling us why you're not making that pill like everyone else?" the host asked.

"It's simple," Alex said. "Everyone else doesn't have choices with the recipes as I do."

"Oh, are you saying that this pill you are going to make... do you..." the host didn't have to fully answer the question for everyone else to understand what he was implying.

Alex smiled at the host and walked to his position.

"It seems we are going to get an amazing round folks. It's the time you've been waiting for all day long. For the top 20 of the competition so far to compete together for the first time and once and for all let us know who the best alchemist of the younger generation is," the host said.

Then he turned to the contestants. "Get in position," he said and waited.

Once everyone was in place, a slew of staff members came up front and handed them their ingredients.

"You have one hour to make the best pill you can ever make. Begin!"

Alex heard rustling from all around him as people started preparing their cauldron.

However, Alex didn't bring out the cauldron. Instead, he brought out the formation plate.

A staff member sat by him and watched him do what he did.

Alex took the ingredients out one by one and started weighing them against the formation.

The staff was truly surprised to see him measuring. After all, they had expected some sort of shenanigan from him to win at this competition after yesterday's unworthy showing.

Alex checked through the ingredients. 20 grams. 52 grams. 33 grams.

He used his fake arm to break away some of the ingredients as they were too heavy.

Alex then checked a tree bark that needed to be 45 grams. However, when he measured it, it was only 43 grams.

It was missing 2 grams.

2 grams didn't look like much, but that was 2 grams missing which the other ingredients would latch onto when forming the pill, thus creating a massive problem that would lower the percentage by a lot.

"Sir," he said to the staff member. "I cannot use this bark. I will require another ingredient."

Chapter 748 Multiple Immortal Grade pills

"This bark isn't of the right weight. I need one that is at least 45 grams, which this is not," Alex said.

"Certainly that is no problem, right? It's just a few grams," the staff said.

"Sir, I am trying to make the best pill I have ever made in my life. If you are going to deny me of that opportunity, then I would like to speak with someone else," Alex said.

"Okay, okay, I will talk with the host," the staff said and went to the host. He whispered a few words and the host walked up to Alex.

"Is it true that you need another ingredient?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"But the round has already started. I cannot delay the round for you," he said.

"It is fine. I can wait for you to bring the ingredient," Alex said. "If you cannot, I have the ingredient with me. I will just need you to ask it from my mother in the audience."

"No, if you are willing to wait, we will get it for you," the host said and ordered someone to go get one that was at least 45 grams.

Alex closed his eyes and waited, knowing certainly that the host didn't have a favorable opinion of him in this matter.

However, it was important so he was willing to disregard other people's thoughts for his own opportunity.

After 10 or so minutes, a staff member finally returned and handed him the ingredient.

Alex took the bark and weighed it. 46 grams.

He lightly scratched a bit of the bark until it was 45 grams and was finally ready to make the pill.

By the time he was starting to make the pill, the others were starting to finish their pills. Just a few minutes and they would have their pills ready.

Alex handed over the weighing formation as he promised and pulled out his cauldron and placed it on the furnace.

The moment the cauldron touched the fire, both the fire and the cauldron heated up to exactly 544 degrees as the recipe required him to.

Not a degree higher, and not a degree lower. Alex waited for a minute as he watched the flame and cauldron and there was absolutely no fluctuation on his part.

What little Yang energy his body was releasing had absolutely no effect on his alchemy today, and that gave Alex confidence he hadn't felt ever since he made those Earth spirit root enhancing pills back in DawnSpring city.

Alex took out the first ingredient and placed it into the cauldron. The moment the ingredient touched the base of the hot cauldron, Alex could hear the sizzling sound, and he started moving it around to quickly pulverize it.

After 5 and a half slow rotations, he could see the ingredient was done being refined, so he turned up the heat again.

With his Dao, the fire increased in temperature and so did the cauldron. At exactly the same time, he placed the second ingredient.

Alex was making sure to make no mistake on his part for this pill. He wasn't taking any chances by letting the previous powder stay in the cauldron far too long while he fumbled around, waiting for the next ingredient to be put inside.

While the ingredients once powdered didn't burn up like they would when they were ingredients, it was only because the other ingredients would soak up the heat.

If the powder alone was left there, it would certainly lose some of its ability to take in the energy.

In the grand scheme of Alchemy, that mattered very little. It hampered maybe a percent or two. However, right now, every single percentage counted, so Alex did his absolute best to not let any ingredient take in more heat than it already had.

As soon as the third ingredient was done being powdered, Alex instantly moved away heat from the fire and cauldron into the air and decreased its temperature.

At the same time, he put in the fourth ingredient and continued.

Alex was so into his pill that he didn't even notice the people stand up from their spot and walk up front to hand over their pills.

Some looked excited, while some looked disappointed. Some were nervous as they wondered how good their pill was, while the others were confident that this was the best pill they had ever made.

The host let them put their pills onto the 20 pills testers and had the percentages checked.

67%. 65%. 69%. 72%.

One after another, the number started popping up. As it did, the ranking in the sky kept on changing as well as the people from this group started jumping into the top 10.

Xue Meirong stood up from her spot with the pill in her hand. While she was stubborn, she still had to acknowledge just how great this recipe was.

As her father had told her that day, whoever came up with that recipe was a master of Alchemy.

She agreed with him as well. Only —she turned to look at Alex-she didn't want to believe it was him.

She searched for an open tester and walked towards it. However, before she reached it, Zhanrou appeared out of nowhere and placed her pill in it.

"Oh, didn't see you there," she said with a smirk on her face.

"Goddammit! You always like taking what's mine," she said and turned away to another tester and placed her pill in it.

The two of them acted like they were focusing on their pills alone, but their rivalry was too much to keep them from making side glances at each other's pills.

As the testers fogged up and went past 50%, they watched their result with bated breaths.

60%, 65%, 70%. It didn't stop.

71%, 72%, 73%. Around that part did the pill finally started slowing down and it looked like it would stop.

74%. And then, 75%.

The crowd was shocked, to say the least, as the first Immortal grade pill ever appeared in the competition. Two of them at once too. But it wasn't over yet.

The percentage went up to 76% and it stopped for Zhanrou. However, it didn't stop for Xue Meirong at all.

The pill went one step forward and stopped at 77%.

A happy smile appeared on Xue Meirong's face as she looked at the 77% pill.

"Congrats," Zhanrou said after losing to Xue Meirong.

Xue Meirong looked at her with surprise, forgetting for a moment what she was even doing in her happiness. "Oh, congrats to you too, I was just ahead by a single percent."

This was too happy an occasion to drown it with smugness and disdain towards others.

The ranking in the sky flickered as Gu Zhanrou appeared in the 2nd place and Xue Meirong appeared in the 1st place.

She had a definite chance of becoming the 1st place if only—

"Step aside, ladies," Zhou Ren appeared behind her. "It's my turn now."

Zhou Ren placed his pills onto the empty tester in between them and waited for the fog to rise up.

Zhou Ren was the only person waiting for his pill to work and the eyes of the contestants, the host, the staff, and everyone in the audience were on his pill now.

Zhou Tianqiu sat alongside Zhou Zirong, who was a relatively young man, and watched his son's pill from a separate building just like the princess.

"Just watch, your nephew will catch up to you in no time," Zhou Tianqiu said.

"I hope so. I expect a lot from him," Zhou Zirong said with a smile.

"He will, I assure you," Zhou Tianqiu said. "The recipe these kids have is nothing but perfection. My son will do great."

"Yes, the recipe is indeed great," Zhou Zirong said. "That's why I'm more curious about the recipe maker."

"That kid?" Tianqiu's face was angered for a split second as he remembered Alex and the night when he went to personally ask for the medicinal paste recipes.

"He's nothing. Didn't you hear about his performance on the 3rd day? The kid got 30 points in total and lost his first-place ranking. I guess he's only good when it comes to ingredients and recipes."

"When it comes to actually making pills, he's but a common man with no talent at all," Zhou Tianqiu said.

"Is that so?" Zhou Zirong asked with his smile not fading for a single second. "But I have heard different rumors."

"What rumors?" Zhou Tainqiu asked.

"Well, let's just say we might have an interesting round in our hand," Zhou Zirong said, not answering the question.

"Doesn't matter," Zhou Tainqiu said with a massive grin on his face. "Can he beat that?" He pointed to his son's result that had finally settled on the stage below them.

Back on stage, Zhou Ren's eyes went wide in shock because of his own pill. He knew he had done well, but not this well.

Zhanrou and Meirong couldn't help but be shocked when they saw the result.

Zhou Ren had outdone himself and made a pill with a Harmony of 79%, shocking everyone in the audience.

"I did it! I won!" he exclaimed, only to get shushed by the host.

"Huh?" he was confused and looked around to see a single tester empty. "Someone's not done yet?"

He turned around to the furnaces and saw Alex move his arm around in various gestures. Then he finally stopped and so did the fire.

Alex opened his eyes as the lid popped open and let out a single pill.

Chapter 749 Result

As he stood up to take the pill to the front, he couldn't help but mull over that exact thought.

What did he do wrong?

There were 3 things in his mind that were wrong with the pill he just made.

First, there was a problem with the ingredients. It wasn't the amount that was the problem, but perhaps their age, or maybe how long they had been kept without a container.

Some of the ingredients had lost a bit of energy.

Alex reached the front and placed his pill into the tester. While not many waited for his pill to show the result, there were a few that were desperate to know that result.

That included Zhou Ren, as Alex alone now stood between him and victory. He tried saying something to Alex, but Alex wasn't hearing anything. He was lost in his own thought.

He was still thinking of the things that he did wrong today.

The second thing that was wrong in today's pill-making process was his method of putting in ingredients. Every time he put an ingredient inside, he needed to lift the lid of the cauldron.

While he did use Elemental Guidance to keep the energy inside like most Alchemists used on a normal basis, there was still a chance that the energy escaped and thus brought down his pill's overall harmony by a couple of percentages.

Alex watched the fog grow on the tester as it smoothly went past 40% and crossed 50% not long after.

As it went up, he thought of the third problem that might have occurred that caused his Harmony to be lowered.

The third problem was his pill-forming technique. While he had to admit that his technique was amazing, far superior to just randomly clumping up powder to make a pill, it was still a far cry from the technique that formed his split pills.

If he had that, he would certainly not have lost a single percentage of his pill's Harmony today because of the technique.

Aside from that, Alex saw no other problem today. His ingredients were properly measured, there was no downtown between the ingredients being powdered, the temperature was being perfectly manipulated, and there wasn't a single mistake in the pill-making process.

Even his cauldron just being a True grade cauldron didn't affect him at all due to his Dao of Heat that allowed him to instantly heat stuff.

It was just the 3 problems that hampered him today.

And that was why he couldn't reach 100%.

A small smile appeared on Alex's face as other people's faces were a mixture of shock and surprise.

"Tha-that can't be true," Zhou Ren mumbled to himself.

"How..." Xue Meirong couldn't even finish her sentence.

Most of the other people were simply way too speechless to say anything. In fact, the entire crowd was silent, including the people outside the competition ground that were watching the match on the giant, floating screens.

"This has to be a mistake, right?" Even the host himself couldn't believe the result.

"That tester must be broken," Zhou Ren said. "Test it again."

"Yes," the host agreed and empties another tester before placing Alex's pill into another one.

When he did that, the whole crowd leaned in closer to see the result again.

1%, 2%, 3%, the fog quickly started covering the glass as it blitzed through the early numbers.

10%, 20%, 30%, they passed in the blink of an eye.

Before people even realized what was happening, the fog reached 50% with no sign of stopping anytime soon.

55%, 60%, 65%. Alex was already reaching the Harmony that most other people barely reached in their lifetime. As they watched, it soon reached 70% and kept climbing up.

When it touched 75%, Zhanrou and Meirong quietly watched the fog. When it rose 1%, it was the same result as Zhanrou.

When it rose 1% again, it was the same result as Meirong. When it rose 1% again, it was now better than both of their results.

When it rose 1% again, Zhou Ren's face lost color as he got the suspicion that the previous answer was correct.

When it rose 1% again and reached 80%, his pill had been beaten as well. Alex had won today's round.

However, the fog was not showing any sign of stopping. 81%, 82%... it kept on rising as everyone watched with bated breaths.

83%, 84%, 85%... that was when it finally slowed down. Slowed, but not stopped.

The princess, Zhou Tianqiu, Zhou Zirong, Xue Mufan, and even the Emperor watched the retest with a shocked expressions on their face.

When the pill crossed 86% and reached 87%, Zhou Ren realized Alex now had the exact same points as him and was tied with him for the first place in the competition.

However, that didn't last long as the pill rose again to 88%. Now, Alex had won the competition with no question.

Still, no one cared about that for now, not even the host. He just wanted to see if the result that they saw previously was true, and it was coming dangerously close to being so.

89%, and 90%, the numbers increased once again, making people truly believe that what they had seen before was not a mistake.

So, if that were true, then...

91% and finally, 92%. The fog stopped moving and the result was the same as last time.

92%.

"Holy shit it's true," the host cursed out loud for everyone else to hear. "He did it, he actually did it."

The moment the host stopped speaking, the entire crowd went into a craze at the result. Whether it was the audience, the staff, or the contestants, not a single one of them could shut their mouths as they screamed miracle.

The numbers on the ranking above them flickered as Alex jumped from a 102, getting ahead of Zhou Ren who had a 189, and reached 194 as he obtained the first place.

Alex's name solidified on the final ranking, making him the victor of the Alchemy competition.

Chapter 750 Anything You Want

"On the third place, with 187 points, is Xue Meirong from the Falling Lotus sect," the host announced and the people cheered.

"On the second place, with 189 points, is Zhou Ren from the Zhou Family," the host announced again and the people cheered once more.

"Finally, in what can only be called an unexpected event, with 194 points, is Yu Ming. Give him a standing ovation everybody," the host shouted and everyone stood up to clap, including the staff and other contestants.

Alex took the medal he was given and thanked everyone. After that, the event ended.

"Alright, we will see you guys tomorrow at noon, great job today," the host said and left.

"Congratulations, brother Yu. That was amazing. How did you even make a 92% pill?" Zhanrou came to ask.

"Well, I've been making this pill for over 4 years now with my refined recipe, so I kind of know exactly what to do with it. Plus, the guild provided really good ingredients," Alex said.

"Is that so? I should learn from you more," Zhanrou said.

Zhou Ren walked over to him with a dark face. "You have bested me. Congratulations," he said.

"Thank you, brother Ren. You were quite close yourself," Alex said. Zhou Ren felt a sense of shame when he was told they were close.

"Congrats," Xue Meirong said just that one word and left.

The other contestants came and congratulated him. After they left the stage, even more people came to congratulate him.

It was so crowded around him that his own mother didn't get to congratulate him for nearly 15 minutes.

Even after half an hour, the group of people continued coming up to him and congratulating him while constantly telling him who they were and how he was invited to their place.

Alex smiled and nodded as most of their words entered one of his ears and exited through another.

"Brother Yu," Shurin came to him once again. "The princess wants to see you."

"Oh, okay. Let's go," Alex said and ignored the crowd to go to the princess. The crowd was a little angry but there was nothing they could do as they had heard who called Alex.

Alex was taken to a different location this time, a much larger room. When he entered, he was surprised to see that there were more than just the princess and a few servants.

Alex saw many new figures he had never seen before.

A man wore a golden robe with a criss-cross pattern all over it. A woman wore a green robe with multiple shades of green layered on it.

Another woman wore blue robes that looked like waves of water. The man with the crimson robe was one of the eldest in the room.

The bloody-robed man had a thin and short face but somehow looked fearsome. Han Hongqi stood upright in his brown robes next to an older person that seemed to share some features with him.

Zhou Tianqiu stood next to another Zhou family member with a younger-looking, amicable face.

Shangguan Quan stood next to an old woman in black and red robes that had spear Qi flicker around her even as she stood there doing nothing.

Xue Mufan sat with his arms crossed with an awkward expression.

Other than him, there were also figures from the Broken Ravine sect and the Glory's edge sect that Alex recognized from their robes alone.

At the center of it all sat the Emperor, next to whom sat the princess that had called him.

Seeing such a group of high-ranking figures that could easily determine the fate of the empire, Alex felt a little bit scared.

"Greetings, seniors, your highness," Alex bowed a little to greet them all.

"Sit," the Emperor spoke while everyone else remained silent.

Alex sat down on an empty chair in the center of the room.

"First of all, congratulations on your victory in today's competition," the Emperor said. "You have done something today that most of us wouldn't have dreamed of seeing in our lifetime."

"Thank you, your majesty," Alex said.

"No, thank you. You have done a great service to us, young brother. All of us here stand before you to grant you anything you want, so long as it is in our power," the Emperor said.

"Anything?" Alex asked and looked around the crowd while thinking to himself what he wanted. There was really just a single thing he could ever want.

"There is one thing I want," he said as his eyes fell on Xue Mufan.

"Oh, you want to become my disciple?" Mufan asked with a surprised look on his face.

"No, senior," Alex said, restraining his chuckle. "I require some assistance in refining a Saint rank ingredient."

"As I am unable to do it until I enter the saint rank, I will be requiring your help," Alex said.

"Refining a saint rank ingredient huh? Are you going to make some pill?" Mufan asked.

"No, senior. I only need to refine the ingredient alone," Alex said.

"Okay, I can help you with that," Mufan said.

"Is that all you want?" the Emperor asked, clearly surprised that Alex wasn't requesting something better given the opportunity.

"I have nothing I require more than what I have asked for," Alex said.

The Emperor nodded and ignored the many messages he was getting directly.

"By the way, young man, where did you acquire those recipes of yours?" the Emperor asked.

Alex felt a little suspicious that he was about to ask him for his recipes. "I refined them myself, your highness," Alex said.

"Oh? How did you learn to do that?" the Emperor asked.

"Brother Shen Jing gave me a book that taught me how," Alex lied.

"Is that so? Thank you for answering my questions. You may leave now. Xumei, take our little brother out," he said.

"Yes, father," the princess stood up and left her seat. She then took Alex and walked out.

As soon as the door was shut, everyone in the room suddenly turned to the emperor with a confused face.

"Your highness, what was that?" Zhou Tianqiu asked.

"Weren't we going to ask him how he improved those recipes?" Xue Mufan asked.

The various other people also chimed in and asked the emperor the same thing.

"Enough," the Emperor said. "I know what I'm doing. You heard what he said. The technique is not his, but it belongs to someone else."

"So?" the others asked.

"It belongs to someone we cannot offend in the least," the Emperor said.

"We cannot offend?" the people got confused.

"Do you know why I had to find a royal alchemist these last 2 years?" The Emperor asked.

"Uhh... there are rumors, your highness," someone said.

"What rumors?" the Emperor asked.

"The rumors say that the princess has either lost the healing crystal, had it stolen, or it just doesn't work anymore," the woman in blue said.

"None of that is true," the Emperor said. "The person in question came to the palace, took the crystal from us, and I thanked him for it. That is how much we cannot offend him."

"What?" the group was surprised beyond belief.

The Emperor didn't explain any longer and only said, "That is why I didn't force him to reveal his secrets. While the young man might be weak, he has a backing that our entire empire cannot offend."

"Not to mention, do you really want to offend a 25-year-old True Immortal alchemist that is already in the True King realm?" the Emperor asked.

The group unanimously shook their head, despite feeling angry at having to do so.

* * * * *

"You did better in today's competition than I could've ever hoped to. Were you hiding your skills when you made pills for us? The best I saw from those were at 80%," the princess said.

"Of course not, princess," Alex said. "I was just not in the right state to make pills at the time."

"Your condition that requires Yin treasure?" the princess asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "While it wasn't that bad early on as I continued finding Yin treasures, over the year I found myself developing an immunity to the Yin in most treasures. So I kept needing something better."

"Were it not for you bringing that yin water, I would've never been able to show the result I did today. In a way, you are responsible for my result today. Thank you for that," Alex said.

The princess smiled. "So, what are your plans now that you have won the competition? Do you still plan to go to the Icy Hell?" she asked.

"I do, but not just yet," Alex said. "There's a reason I took part in the competition. Now that I've won, I get to make a pill I've been waiting for a long time to make."

"Oh, what pill is it?" the princess asked.

Alex smiled. "You will know after I make it," he said.

"So what about your deal with senior Mufan? Where are you going to have him help?" she asked.

"I... don't know actually. I will think about it after we get our rewards tomorrow," Alex said.

"Why don't you come to stay in the palace?" the princess asked. "That way, you can stay away from the crowd too."

"Actually, that's not a bad idea," Alex said. "Would it be okay if I bring along my mother? She's here with me and I don't want to send her back alone."

"Of course, I don't mind," the princess said. "Besides, I would love to see just what sort of women can raise a genius like you."

Chapter 751 Rewards

Some of the big figures from the Alchemy guild including Xue Mufan and Zhou Zirong were present in a secluded section of the guild, along with the top 10 winners of the competition.

Everyone was handed a pile of storage bags, which included the recipes and ingredients as promised.

Alex got 15 thousand True Spirit stones, 3 Saint rank ingredients, 2 Saint rank pill recipes, a bunch of True ranked ingredients and 1 True Heaven ranked artifact.

The artifact that Alex got was a single fist-sized orb of chromatic color. Alex wondered what it was, but he didn't have to think for long as he noticed a talisman by its side that had its information.

[Poison Absorbing Pearl: Absorbs almost all poisons and venoms from the air and one's body. You can later use the orb to use the poison as an attack.]

The orb could only absorb poisons below a certain rank and it couldn't absorb a lot of it, so using it to protect yourself from the Poison swamp was useless, but it did absorb enough poison to protect you on a daily basis.

It was a useless treasure to Alex, but it would be amazingly useful for his mother so he accepted it gracefully.

Alex ignored the Hammerhead Snake's venom, and even ignored the box that contained the fruit that was the Blizzard's Rainbow core, and took out the box that contained the Blood Spirit Ginseng.

This was the ingredient he had been waiting for for a long time and finally, it was here.

Alex slowly pulled open the box and saw the ginseng. The ginseng looked like any old ginseng that one could find. It was a cylindrical body with patches of dirt that descended to multiple tendrils that looked like roots.

What made this ginseng different was its color. The ginseng was fully crimson in color.

Not only that, the moment Alex opened the box, the air smelled of iron, and everyone got alert.

Alex quickly closed the box and put it back into his storage bag. 'Holy shit!' he thought. He had never expected the ginseng to have this strong of a bloody smell.

"You can check your rewards later when you are alone," one of the elders said. "For now, the three of you, come with me."

Alex, Zhou Ren, and Xue Meirong followed the elder and went to a different room where they saw 3 items on 3 different pedestals.

One was a black and gold cauldron, another one was a crimson red whip, and finally, the last one was a giant necklace.

"These are the Saint-ranked items that you are to get. Let us start with young man Yu and see what he chooses," the elder said.

Alex nodded and looked at the reward. "May I check them?" he asked.

"Absolutely, go ahead," the elder said.

Alex walked up front and inspected the cauldron. The cauldron was sturdy and could probably be used as a blunt weapon. It was made up of a material that easily let Qi pass through and also seemed to have some sort of skill forged into it.

When Alex inquired about it, it turned out that the cauldron could keep the energy from escaping while activated.

Alex was intrigued, but he moved on to the whip. The whip was somehow extremely stiff and flexible at the same time. He poured in some Qi and suddenly the whip came to life as a fire burned all over it.

"Be careful not to burn yourself. The whip can produce an incredible amount of fire," the elder said.

"I see," Alex said and moved on.

The final item was the necklace which was a mental attack blocker for the most part, but there was also a skill that created a barrier to stop any attack below the Saint realm.

While that sounded incredible, it would be useless to Alex within a year or two, that he was sure of.

So, circling back to the whip and the cauldron, Alex thought for a moment and made his decision.

"I'll choose this," Alex said as he grabbed the item.

"The whip?" the elder was surprised. "Not the cauldron or the necklace?"

Alex shook his head. The necklace was useless to him soon anyway. As for the cauldron, while it would be useful to him, it wouldn't aid him as much since his Dao was able to cover up any shortcomings of his own cauldron.

Besides, the cauldron he had was his master's gift. He had used it for over 7 years, but he wasn't willing to give up just yet.

"I have made my choice after considerable deliberation, elder. You need not worry about my decision," Alex said.

He had decided to take the whip after realizing that he didn't have any good weapons on him other than the poison sword which wasn't very good.

The other sword was great, of course, but he couldn't use Qi in it and as such, it was pretty much useless for him when it came to real fights.

So, he had gone with the whip choice.

Zhou Ren chose the necklace as expected. Coming from an alchemy family, he had no lacking of cauldrons that he could choose from.

As such, Xue Meirong was stuck with the cauldron despite already having one of the same ranks.

Since the rewards were handed over, the competition had officially ended and they could all go on with their life now.

"Go and train for the actual competition you young folks are always excited about," the elder said as he waved them goodbye.

* * * * * *

Xue Mufan sat in front of a scarlet and green cauldron and had a serious look on his face. By his side, his daughter sat with him, watching him.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked.

Alex sat in front of him with a serious look on his face as well. He held the Blood Spirit Ginseng in his hand and learned the information that naturally flowed into his mind.

The ginseng was 216 years old, and it was a Wood elemental ingredient that was missing Fire energy and Earth Energy.

Alex remembered that, a Wood Elemental ingredient. So, the ingredient he had to find was also a Wood Elemental ingredient that was missing, from his experience, most likely the Fire energy.

Now that Alex knew it, there was another thing he needed to do. He needed to get an impression of the aura of the ginseng. Only through that could he ever learn what sort of ingredient he was supposed to search for.

He took a deep breath and nodded, knowing that whatever he was going to do was about to destroy the ingredient in his hand.

Alex took out a knife and cut the ginseng into four different parts and handed one of the parts over to Xue Mufan.

Mufan shook his head at the waste but said nothing. "Alright, watch carefully. I don't know what you are going to do, but you need to pay attention," he said.

"Yes, senior," Alex said in a monotone voice as the warning didn't register in his ear because of his concentration.

"Alright, at 2122 degrees, 18 rotations counterclockwise at half a rotation per second. Coming right up," Mufan said and tossed the ginseng into the cauldron.

Alex's heart started beating furiously as he closed his eyes and ears to the surrounding, and used his spiritual sense to look into the cauldron and felt the shift in energy.

Wood energy was released from the ginseng of a certain variety that Alex got a distinct impression of. He continued feeling the energy and tried to ignore the bloody smell in the air, but it was too strong to ignore.

Still, he managed to focus on the wood energy altogether. After a few moments, the ingredient was powdered and there was nothing for Alex to sense as the energy remained stagnant in the cauldron.

"Again, please," Alex said.

Mufan nodded and took the 2nd of the 4 ingredients and did it again. Once again, Alex was forced to power through the bloody smell and focus on the wood energy, feeling the certain parts of the wood energy that would help him find the necessary ingredient.

"Again," Alex said and the 3rd of the 4 parts were used up.

Alex did his best to feel every different aspect of the wood energy, including whatever sub-energy of wood that might be hidden in there.

When the ingredient was powdered once again, Xue Mufan looked at Alex and asked, "Again?"

"Hmm?" Alex looked up with a confused look as he didn't hear what he had just said.

"I'm asking do you want to use up the last one too?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said and was about to hand it over when he stopped. "Actually, I would rather keep this just in case I need a reminder again."

"Suit yourself," Mufan said. "So is this all you needed me to do?"

"Yes, senior," Alex said as he kept the final part of the Blood Spirit Ginseng in his storage bag. "Thank you for agreeing to do this to me."

"It's fine. You barely took any of my time at all," Xue Mufan said. "Besides, I managed to get the recipe for the Body Rebinding pill for my daughter. She's been nagging me to ask you for it forever."

"Father!" Xue Meirong tried to hide her red face but everyone saw.

"My daughter doesn't have the best of manners, but she's not a bad person. I hope you'll be friends with her," Xue Mufan said.

"Of course, senior," Alex said.

"Anyway, I will need to leave now. I've left my sect alone for nearly 2 weeks now," Xue Mufan said as she stood up. "Good luck on whatever you endeavor next."

Chapter 752 Experiments

Even after Alex was back in the Flowing Brush sect, not many realized he was there. As such, Alex got the chance to miss the many people that came after him because of his newfound popularity.

While this also meant Alex didn't get a chance to find free gifts from people, his mind was way too concerned about something else to care about.

After returning back, Alex immediately went to his work in finding the final remaining ingredient of the pill that would help restore his arm.

He used the 15 thousand True Spirit stones he had acquired from the competition to buy many different true rank ingredients, all of which were Wood Element ingredients.

Once Alex got that, he started going into a secluded Alchemy session where he would refine every single ingredient and compare it to the impression he had received from the Blood Spirit Ginseng.

That began Alex's 2-month-long seclusion where he went through thousands of ingredients, sometimes multiple times through to find the ingredient.

Every day, he would go through about 50 different ingredients while also pacing himself properly so as to not overwhelm himself.

Alex recorded about a hundred different ingredients in this time that felt similar to the impression he got from the Saint rank ingredient, but none of it felt exactly the same.

Alex knew that finding the same one was impossible, but he still wanted to and so he spent all days finding the one that was it.

After the hundred different ingredients were chosen, only then did Alex leave his room to take a few days of break.

When he got out, there was stubble on his face that he would otherwise have gotten rid of had he had the time. He quickly got rid of the beard and went to his mother.

"You're finally out," his mother said. "Did you do it?"

Pearl cultivated next to his mother, while his mother was making some talismans.

Alex shook his head. "I'm just done with the first phase. I've narrowed the thousands of ingredients to just a hundred. I will have to go through again to reduce the number," he said.

"Take your time," Helen said. "There's no hurry. Are you really alright though? You're burning up."

Helen placed her palm on her son's forehead and winced a little t the heat.

"Oh, sorry," Alex said and took in the yang Qi to cool his body again. The yang never bothered him normally so he hadn't realized, but it was clear now that his yang Qi had returned.

"I thought you had it cured," Helen said.

"Not cured, just temporarily suppressed is more like it," Alex said. "Sigh, I might have to use the yin fruit again. I really didn't want to do it until it was time to make the pill."

The two of them chatted for a while and Helen let him know that the people had found out about their relationship. A few of the important families and sects in the empire had even guessed that he was living here and had sent their gifts to him.

"Anything important in there?" Alex asked.

"Uh, let's see. There are a bunch of ingredients, and I mean a bunch of them. It's like they realized you were an alchemist and thought you would need nothing else."

"Aside from that there are a few True ranked weapons and armors, but it's not really of high grade. There are some other weird artifacts too, but none seem really amazing."

"Do you need cauldrons? A few of them sent some too," Helen said.

"Sure," Alex said. "I'll take the swords, cauldrons, and ingredients. You can keep the rest."

"Okay," Helen said. "Oh right, there have been a few people that came to meet me directly and are requesting for you to teach Alchemy in public. Can you do that?"

"I don't know. I'm not really the public speaking type," Alex said. "Not to mention I won't be able to do anything until I make the pill and then visit the Icy place."

"How about this? Tell them I will give a week-long alchemy lesson within the next year," Alex said.

"Great, I will let the people know when they come the next time," Helen said.

Alex stayed around for a while longer and talked to his mother. He fought with Pearl for a few hours afterward to get back into shape and only then returned back to his room to cultivate.

Once he cultivated and was back to his finest shape, he started going through the hundred different ingredients once again.

This time around, Alex went through the ingredients in a different manner. Since he was done with the impression part of the ingredient, he needed to go through and see what the ingredients did.

So, he went through the ingredients and read up on all of them to understand what most of them did.

Unfortunately for him, that didn't help much in narrowing it down. So, he decided to send it all to hell and start making the pill.

One by one, using the 100 different ingredients, Alex started making pills that would work for him.

Of course, he didn't just test the pills with no caution. He prepared a True Nullifying pill for every single one of the pills.

Most of the pills he made surprisingly came to work as healing pills. He cut himself before every test and about 60 of the 100 pills were healing pills.

Of course, they became healing pills of different varieties and different strengths where one was obviously better than others.

10 of the remaining pills deformed his body and were obviously bad pills.

For the remaining 30, they were useless pills. All they did was when Alex ate them, they would stay in his body and create violent energy that would start to wreck his body from the inside.

If not for the True Nullifying pill, Alex wondered how many times he would have died from the pills.

Alex finished the experiments in a month and at the end of it, his arm still wasn't back at all.

'What am I doing wrong?' he wondered. This was it after all. He had narrowed down everything to a list of ingredients and somehow none of them worked.

'What do I do?' he worried. He had destroyed the Blood Spirit Ginseng. Had he not done that, he would have had an ingredient to immediately make a pill when he entered the Saint rank.

"No, I can't be wrong. I can't afford to be wrong," Alex thought and went on to make the strongest healing pills amongst the many he had just made.

It was one that used a Fragrant Ginger vine as the replacement ingredient for Blood Spirit Ginseng.

Alex made the pill once more and ate it. He could feel the healing energy squirming in his body but it never great out the bone and muscles.

'I am definitely missing something,' Alex thought. 'But what?'

After long contemplation, Alex decided to use the final piece of the Blood Spirit Ginseng to once again check what he had been doing wrong.

Chapter 753 Realization

"What am I doing?" he thought, almost disappointed at himself. "I can't refine a saint rank ingredient by myself."

"I need help," Alex thought.

He was getting so desperate that he nearly risked not only ruining the ingredient but also hurting himself.

He remembered what happened when he was in the Mind Tempering realm and tried to refine a True rank ingredient. He had nearly caused the energy to go violent and volatile.

Saint rank ingredient would be way worse than that.

So, Alex decided to ask Qin Shan for help in this matter.

"You want me to refine an ingredient?" Qin Shan was surprised. "I'm sorry young man, but I've never performed Alchemy. I will... I don't how I could ever do it without messing it up."

"Don't worry, senior. I will train you myself. Besides, I just need your help because you have Saint Qi. I would have done it myself if I had the Qi," Alex said.

"Fine, fine," Qin Shan accepted in the end, seemingly reluctantly. On the inside, however, he couldn't help but be super excited.

After all, the whole world was trying to take a glimpse of Alex's face right now, and he was getting a one on one training for him.

Besides, it was hard to deny the words of someone who made a 92% pill.

Alex gave a personal lesson on alchemy for the whole day to Qin Shan who happily absorbed it all. Later that night, he sent him back to revise the lesson in his mind as the next day he would have to help Alex.

Come next day, he sat in front of Alex in a confident manner.

"Now listen to what I say and do exactly that," Alex said. He then started teaching Qin Shan exactly how to move the ingredients.

"Just focus on moving it, leave the fire and temperature to me," Alex said started focusing on it.

Once he was ready, he told Qin Shan to start.

Gently, Qin Shan dropped the final piece of the Blood Spirit Ginseng and Alex immediately poured all of his attention into gaining the impression of the ginseng once again.

It had been 3 months since he last got the impression, so he was hoping to be somewhat wrong so that he could go on to find other ingredients that would work.

However, unfortunately for him, it was entirely the same. The same wood energy, the same feeling. In fact, he could tell that the Fragrant Ginger Vine was the perfect ingredient to replace it if it was also a Saint rank ingredient.

A minute later, Qin Shan stopped and took some heavy breaths. "Whoo! Saint rank ingredients sure are hard to control," he said.

"Yes, the higher the rank, the harder it becomes to handle them," Alex said without any emotion on his face.

While he was capable of making small conversation, his mind was entirely focused on finding what he would do now. The last piece of Blood Spirit Ginseng was gone and he had found nothing new.

He could just wait until Saint realm to get his arms back as everyone else told him. However, no one knew why he was really doing this.

If it were only for him, he could've waited to make the pill once he reached Saint Realm and not have destroyed the Blood Spirit Ginseng.

But given how rare the ingredients were, he doubted he would get more than a single set of ingredients. What then? He would be healed, but what about his master?

Wen Cheng was back in the crimson empire without a hand and a few fingers on the other one. His Martial Uncle was without a leg, and so were the many other elders that fought on the night when his master died many years ago.

He wanted to help them too. He was sure that they would never enter the saint realm, at least without any external help. As such, if he didn't make a pill for them, he would never have them healed.

'What should I do?' he started feeling panicked and stressed. He had a few people around him but none of them could help him right now.

His mother wasn't helpful in alchemy. Shen Jing had gone home and wouldn't return for another decade or more.

Aside from these two, there were a few others he could rely on in most cases, but not this.

"You must have been in a lot of life and death battles," Qin Shan suddenly spoke, taking him back to what he was doing.

"Sorry?" Alex asked as he didn't quite hear Qin Shan.

"I said that you must have fought a lot of life and death battles, or been around a lot of deaths," Qin Shan said.

"Not really around humans, but for beasts yeah," Alex said. He had killed a lot of humans already, but compared to beasts, the number was insignificant.

"No wonder," Qin Shan said with a sigh.

"No wonder what?" Alex asked.

"No wonder you can stand this thick of a bloody stench," Qin Shan said.

"Yeah, you get used to it. You just need to ignore it and focus..." Alex trailed off as he realized something and abruptly stood up.

"Stupid!" he called out himself. "Why the hell am I ignoring the Blood Aura of an ingredient named Blood Spirit Ginseng?"

"Are... you alright?" Qin Shan asked.

"Yes, thank you, senior. You helped me realize my mistake," Alex said. "If you'll excuse me, I have to be somewhere."

Alex ate a face-changing pill and went to the guild to buy a bunch of true rank ingredients with Blood Aura in it. From what he hoped, he would pair the Ginger Vine with one of these ingredients, and hopefully, the blood aura would do its job.

So, Alex returned back to his place and started making the pill once more.

He put in the ingredients as per the recipe with a lot of mistakes along the way as his body had heated up to a point where making pills was getting hard again.

Still, he forced his way through it and prepared the pill. As he went along and was on the final step of the process, he put in the Fragrant Ginger Vine.

Once that was refined, most of the time, he would make a pill out of it. However, now he was going to put in another ingredient because of its blood aura.

Alex took out a red leaf and was ready to place it in when he stopped as a bunch of information appeared in his mind.

Fire. That was the elemental energy of the ingredient in his hand. If he were to place this ingredient in, the fire would very easily cause problems for the Water energy that was the current result.

'This will destroy the pill,' Alex thought. He switched through the other ingredients, but very easily, any one of them could ruin the pill.

Alex turned what was in the cauldron into a pill and started thinking of what other choices he had.

'I need blood aura without it having any other energy,' he thought.

Chapter 754 Blood Aura

As such, many of the ingredients had mutated to the point that they were carnivorous and would kill any beasts that got close to them to improve themselves.

Blood Ginseng, a common rank ingredient was mostly vines above ground that would grab and kill any beasts that walked close by it.

Similarly, other ingredients also had evolved to kill beasts and humans for themselves.

As Alex recalled all of this, he realized the main problem he hadn't thought out before going out to buy a bunch of such ingredients.

It was the fact that any ingredient that had a blood aura was a byproduct of the death around it.

At the center of it all, the ingredient itself existed which had its own energy. As no ingredient had neutral energy, any ingredient he did put in the recipe would drastically change the final result and end up becoming a different pill from what it already was.

'I need pure blood aura and nothing else,' Alex thought. 'How can I do that?'

He started going through his mind once more to remember more about the blood aura, but he couldn't think of any ingredient that he had read about that did have only it.

As he thought more and more, Alex's mind went back to the time in the Demon realm when Song Shing attacked the door that wouldn't open.

The Song family were known as a bunch of Blood aura users whose entire arsenal revolved around fighting using blood aura.

Alex remembered the attack he did. He had brought out a vial of blood and used it to attack the door. The attack had been quite strong as well.

'Blood,' Alex thought as he realized. "Will blood work?"

He needed to try it out immediately. Alex thought about how he could find blood to use, but it would be hard to come by unless he went and killed some beasts.

However, even then it would be difficult.

"I can't use just blood," he thought. "Blood contains energy too."

He remembered the Blue Flame Monkey's blood that was also an ingredient for this part. The blood was of Fire attribute, so it was impossible for just blood to be an ingredient.

'Maybe I can keep the ginger vine in a blood overnight for it to gain blood aura?' he wondered.

With no other choice, Alex cut his palm and collected a bowl full of his own blood. He placed the ginger in the bowl, and left it aside to cultivate after eating a blood rejuvenating pill.

The whole night, he was anxious, but he managed to keep himself from getting distracted and focused on his cultivation.

The next morning, he got out of cultivation with a hopeful heart and went to check on the ginger vine.

Alex instantly took out the Ginger Vine and even without checking anything else, he knew he had passed somehow.

Having stayed in the blood overnight, the Ginger Vine was absolutely full of blood aura. While it wasn't of the same level as the Blood Spirit Ginseng, this was good enough for a True rank pill.

Alex excitedly thought of making the pill when the vine in his hand gave information about itself that immediately disappointed Alex.

The Fragrant Ginger Vine that was supposed to be a Wood Element ingredient, was now a Yang Element ingredient.

Having stayed in his blood overnight, the extreme yang from his body had messed with the ingredient.

"Dammit!" Alex cried out. He was so hopeful, and it had even worked. And yet, he still failed.

He started cursing at his own body for being so full of Yang. He needed blood from a body that was without yang.

'Wait,' Alex thought. 'No, I still have a way, don't I?''

Alex quickly brought out the Saint ingredient that was part of his rewards for winning the competition.

The Blizzard's Rainbow Core.

The fruit looked like a multicolored apple, and the moment Alex took it out, the surrounding chilled to a few degrees lower than it previously was. It wasn't the same sort of drop in temperature as the water that the princess had given him, but it was close enough.

Alex took a deep breath and started cultivating as he ate the fruit. The Yin energy from the fruit started invading Alex's meridians and fighting with the Yang energy in his body.

Very soon, Alex could feel the yang in his body lowering to a point where it was nonexistent.

It lasted an entire day and night as Alex took things slow, but somehow it felt like just a couple of hours for him.

When Alex opened his eyes the next morning, he could feel not a single bit of Yang in his body.

Using the opportunity, Alex immediately cut open his palm and gathered another bowl full of blood, and placed another Ginger into it.

Alex spent the next whole day once again cultivating and only stopped when it was time for the Ginger to be ready.

Alex took out the ginger from the bowl and was immediately surprised at the even stronger blood aura that was coming off of it. It was almost as if leaving it in the blood for a long time was helpful.

Alex took a deep breath to calm his mind as he took the Ginger out to check its properties.

"Yes!" he shouted out as he realized that the Ginger was still a Wood ingredient. Only now it was full of Blood Aura.

Alex took another deep breath as he started preparing the ingredients once more for the pill and started making it.

Without his yang body to make problems, and the perfected recipe after tons of retries, Alex had a really easy time making the pill.

There was still a lot of little fixing here and there left to do, but even with that, he managed to make an 82% pill.

Alex wanted to immediately eat it and test it, but he needed to be safe, so he continued heating the cauldron as he brought another set of different ingredients and made the True Nullifying pill.

As the pill was on its final stage, Alex started undoing the bindings on his puppet arm and it came off easily.

"I hope I do not need you anymore after today," Alex softly said as he finished the final stages on the True Nullifying pill.

As soon as the pill was formed, Alex got rid of both the fire and the heat in the cauldron.

At the same time, he brought out the healing pill and placed it in his mouth. The moment he swallowed it, Alex could feel a wave of energy pass through his body.

Alex immediately pulled out the True Nullifying pill just in case there was a problem, however, nothing bad happened yet.

As the energy moved around his body to repair what was broken, it finally reached his left arm.

Alex tried to keep away his anxiousness but that was impossible. For what felt like a long time, nothing happened, but then he felt a little itch on his stump.

Soon, the itch grew to an unstoppable degree and Alex felt like he needed to scratch it, but he held himself.

As the itch grew, Alex saw his stump wriggle as if going through a cramp. Just after that, it violently started expanding forward as bone, muscles, veins, tendons, and skins all started appearing one by one.

As if the pill had a knowledge of his genetic features, his left hand slowly grew to look exactly like the one he lost.

What was just until the elbow, grew to the wrist. Then the numerous bones of the palm started emerging as fingers grew out of it.

The bones were soon covered by muscles, which were then covered by skin. His fingers were bare for a few seconds before nails grew back on them.

Alex looked at his left arm in a daze as it grew to be exactly what it was supposed to be.

He moved his new arm a little. He grabbed stuffs. He felt the heat, the cold. He even hit it a little to feel the pain.

"I did it," he softly said to himself as it dawned on him that his arm was really back. "I really did it."

He had finally done what he had set out to do over 9 years ago.

Chapter 755 Blood Experiments

"What is it? Is something wrong?" Helen hurriedly opened the door in worry. However, when she opened the door, she was met with a really excited Alex.

"Look!" Alex lifted his left hand with a child-like glee in his face.

Helen looked at his left arm for a few seconds before she realized what she was looking at.

"You did it?" she asked.

"I did it," Alex said excitedly.

"Oh, my sweet child. Congratulations," Helen said as she hugged her son. "Pearl, come look what your big brother did."

"Oh, what did brother do?" Pearl came out of the room.

"Look Pearl, my arm's back," Alex showed it to him.

"Your arm?" Pearl was surprised for a second. "Brother you finally got it back."

"Yes," Alex said.

The three of them celebrated Alex getting his arm back and even Qin Shan was joined in on the fun after he was notified of some loud screams from his mountain.

Throughout the entire time, he was there, Qin Shan had his mouth wide open as he couldn't believe what Alex had achieved.

"You were a big help in this happening, senior Qin," Alex said. "Had it not been for your little help, I might have been stuck around with a failed pill."

"I helped?" Qin Shan asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"So you made a pill that can restore lost limbs?" Qin Shan asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Or at least I would like to think I did. There are some concerns on whether it can heal just my injuries or everyone's."

"Why would you be concerned about that?" Qin Shan.

"The final ingredient requires me to keep it in blood for a little while so it can absorb the blood aura. Since the pill I made had my blood aura, I'm still not sure if it can work on others or not," Alex said.

"You should test it soon," Qin Shan said.

"I was already planning to," Alex said. "I have quite a few on the ingredients dipped in my blood there. I had to draw out so much blood for this that I feel kind of woozy right now."

"You deserve to rest more than you deserve this celebration, son. Go take a break," Helen said.

"Okay, mother," Alex said and returned back to his room.

Alex then cultivated for 2 whole days before he was back to being in the perfect condition.

Once he was, he took out the ingredients from the blood and started making pills with it.

As he continued making the pills, Alex started making fewer and fewer mistakes. By the time it was his 4th pill, he was reaching 85% consistently.

One of these times, he even reached 90%.

In total, Alex ended up making about 12 different pills and he needed to test them. He couldn't just have any person test it for him just in case it was bad.

So, Alex instead went to the guild to find some Pill Swines to test it on.

Alex found one that had its limb cut off due to a pill's reaction and became the perfect testing swine for him.

He fed it the pill and watched. The swine started getting irritated immediately and started rubbing its cut-off end on the ground from the intense itching sensation it was feeling.

Alex understood what was happening, so he quietly watched it get better. Within half a minute, the pig's little leg was starting to wriggle out, and within the next minute, it had a new leg.

"Yes!" Alex thought. "It works on others too."

There were a few more testing to be done, but Alex was happy that he now had a recipe in hand that could fix a lot of problems that would otherwise remain unsolved until one reached the Saint realm.

"Alright, let's get back to more testing," Alex thought.

There was one thing that he desperately needed to try. That was to use others' blood instead of his own.

Alex went around the Flowing Brush sect, requesting blood from everyone. Soon, he had a cauldron full of blood.

Alex wasn't worried about blood types causing problems in a pool of blood as cultivators never had that problem. At least not in the same way mortals did.

Alex went out of his way to make sure he didn't get blood from the individuals that had a superior Spiritual root. He couldn't risk the blood having an element.

Fortunately, there were many people in the Talisman-making profession that were there for exactly the reason of not having talents for the fighting profession.

Once his cauldron was filled from the blood of thousands of volunteers, Alex got a bunch of Fragrant Ginger Vines and dumped them in the blood, and let it rest overnight.

The next morning, Alex went to check on the vines, but there was no blood aura. So, Alex decided to let it be for a little longer.

The next day, there was still no blood aura. Alex wondered if he put in too many vines at once and took out about 3 quarters of it.

At the same time, wondering if there was some sort of mistake, he used his own blood as well to separately test if the speed was the same.

The next morning, Alex's blood created a vine with a thick blood aura, while the cauldron full of blood was barely starting to make a change.

Alex brought out more vines until there were about 5 remaining in the cauldron full of blood. Then, he decided to wait and see exactly how long it would take to reach the point of concentration as his blood did in just a single day.

While waiting for that to happen, Alex focused on other things and broke through to True King 6th realm while Pearl was still at True King 7th realm.

At the same time, he also noticed that his Yang energy was starting to come back, and now he couldn't make any more of those vines as his blood would contaminate them with his Yang.

He needed attribute-less blood after all.

It took the cauldron full of ingredients nearly 25 days to turn the 5 ingredients into having a thick blood aura.

Alex then proceeded to make 5 different pills using them and tested them too.

Afterward, Alex tested one of those pills and it worked as well as the first one did.

"So, the pill doesn't exclusively need my blood," Alex thought. "But it needs a lot of blood from ordinary folks. I can't use beast blood as they are all full of elemental energy."

"I can't use the blood of most talented folks as their blood is likely contaminated too. I would likely get a far faster result if I had Saint realm cultivator's blood but how hard is it to find one that doesn't have a superior Spiritual root."

"Even if it did work, would they be willing to draw so much blood just to cure a True realm cultivator?"

Alex started thinking about more and more things as his thought went past just the normal ways to acquire blood.

'What if I reveal this recipe and suddenly people start mass murdering mortals to gain their neutral blood? Can I handle their death on my hand?' Alex thought.

As Alex kept thinking, he soon realized that there was no way he could ever reveal the existence of this pill to anyone else. At least, not the recipe.

"Well, how the hell do I go about consistently making these pills now?" he thought. As far as he could tell, he would need the blood from someone or something with both a really strong cultivation base or bloodline, and with blood that have no attribute to them.

As far as he was concerned, there was not a single person in the empire that was just that. Not even himself.

"I guess this one is just going to have to be a secret then," Alex thought as he looked at the 15 different pill vials, all of which contained Immortal Grade True Body Regenerating pill.

He knew there were far more than that just in the Crimson Empire that needed such pills.

Alex then looked at his own body. He would be happy to give away some more blood if it meant saving someone from being without legs and arms or even other organs.

However, he couldn't, now that his blood was full of Yang again.

Alex sighed as he realized what he needed to do now.

"Time to go to the Icy Hell."

Chapter 756 Icy Hell

"Finally," Alex thought as he checked his left arm.

When his arm had come back, Alex had been too excited to worry about anything. Then, for an entire month, he went on a testing spree where he ended up figuring out that revealing the recipe was a really bad idea.

Aside from that, he had also realized that his arm that came back wasn't very high in body cultivation as the rest of his body.

While it was in the True realm in terms of strength, it was in the lower end of the True Realm. So, for another month, Alex spent his time cultivating his left arm along with Pearl.

At the same time, he also prepared for his journey to the Icy Hell by making many different pills, talismans, and formations.

When Qin Shan found out he was going there, he was beyond furious, saying that this was a very quick way to kill himself.

The Icy Hell was well known amongst the upper Echelon of the Luminance empire as being one of the more unapproachable locations on the continent.

That, and the secret realm that lied to the north. Compared to the Icy Hell, the Poison Swamp was tame to most people.

His mother started worrying after her master told her the truth and soon she started telling Alex not to leave.

It took him a rather long time to explain to her why he needed to do this. Even then, she was very worried about him.

"I will keep Pearl here then," Helen said to Alex as he got ready to leave.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

"Yes, he will tell me if something bad happens to you. If I get any sort of information as such, I will bring the whole empire to look for you," Helen said.

"Okay, if you say so," Alex said. "Alright, I will leave now mother."

"Take care, and make sure to message me from time to time," Helen said.

Alex left.

It was late afternoon when Alex flew southeast where the Icy Hell domain was.

Since he was going to fly above the eastern mountain ranges that were full of beasts that would want to attack him, Alex concealed his aura to be less noticeable.

Saint Realm beasts would find him if they were more or less alert, but since they had no reason to do so, there wasn't any need to worry for Alex.

Night fell soon and the moon rose to the sky. The bright, spotless moon shined brighter than the stars around it.

Countless mountains went past Alex, but he kept on flying. The night was mostly quiet, but he could hear roars and other beastly noises from down below from time to time.

Soon, the sun came up and he could feel the heat on his body. However, the cold air around him never left.

Even as the sun rose higher in the sky, the air was continuously colder and colder.

'I'm here, aren't I?' Alex thought as he started seeing the snowcapped mountains. He was in the region where the Icy Hell was. The Icy Hell itself however wasn't here yet.

So, Alex flew on for much longer until he started seeing snow everywhere.

At that point, it started getting so cold that his flying boat started to have ice forming all around it.

'Time to get down then,' Alex thought as he took back the ship and flew down from the sky.

As he landed on half a meter deep snow, Alex immediately spread out his nearly 200-meter wide Spiritual sense and started looking for the main thing he was here for.

Yin treasures.

According to the princess, this was where many of the Yin treasures originated from, including the drop of yin water that she had given him to temporarily get rid of the yang in his body.

In the 400-meter diameter of the circle that was his Spiritual sense, Alex didn't find any treasures, so he started walking further ahead.

Perhaps due to the lack of sun because of the forever-covered snow land, there weren't many plants in general, let alone ones that were alchemy ingredients.

Still, he had heard about Yin treasures growing here so he could only continue forward.

As he was walking, Alex felt light thumps on the ground coming from up ahead. 'What's that?' he wondered and slowly climbed up the shallow mountain.

When he was at the top, he saw a giant bear of white fur and icy blue body stand on a pool of blood-red snow and the carcass of… something.

It ate the dead body with its now bloody snout and then suddenly turned towards Alex.

Alex feared it a bit at first, but then he noticed that the bear was on the verge of entering the True Emperor realm.

'I have nothing to worry about,' he thought and ignored the bear, but the bear didn't ignore him.

Suddenly, it charged through the snow, kicking it everywhere, and lunged at Alex.

Alex suddenly made a fist with his left hand and used his Qi as well. Then, as soon as the bear was close to him, he punched it directly on the side of its snout.

The heavy bear was suddenly sent back as it skidded on the snow, revealing the barren ground underneath.

"You want more?" Alex asked as he was surprised at how strong he was even when he was holding back.

The bear looked at him with fearful eyes and suddenly ran away.

'That felt good,' Alex thought and turned around to walk deeper into the cold. Soon, the cold was starting to get to him. Not in the same way any other cultivator would feel, however. He was just getting uncomfortable.

At that point, Alex let his yang aura radiate out of him as there were no more reasons to hold it back.

Alex got deeper into the cold, but thanks to his Yang aura, he felt nothing. He continued searching for Yin ingredients but they were really hard to come by.

In the 4 hours he had been here already, he had barely managed to find a single yin flower, and that too wasn't of a very high rank.

So, he could only go deeper.

In the next 6 hours, Alex found 2 more ingredients, neither of which were particularly good.

To him, an ingredient that wasn't at least a pseudo-Saint rank was now useless. So, even as night fell once again, Alex needed to get deeper into the cold.

Around 4 hours in, Alex found a tree that was on Yin energy. While it wasn't the best quality, he decided to gather the ingredient just in case.

However, before he did so, he noticed something. Hidden below the snow under the tree was a snow fox that was waiting for him to approach.

Its body was so easily camouflaged into the snow that Alex nearly didn't notice it. Alex then sensed the beast's cultivation base and realized it was a True Emperor beast.

But of course, it wasn't very strong, so Alex was ready to fight it. He acted like he didn't notice the fox and got closer.

Suddenly, the beast lunged at him and Alex punched the fox. However, even as his fist reached the snow fox, he realized something was wrong.

Stopping mid-attack, Alex immediately jumped to the side and rolled on the snow. Where he had been previously, now there was a snow fox with its fangs baring at him.

The fox that had lunged at him was nowhere to be seen or sensed. If not for him sensing the fox's attack on his leg, he wouldn't have dodged the attack.

'What was that?' he wondered. 'A clone? No, an illusion? How did it manage to create an illusion that seemed so real to my spiritual sense as well?'

As Alex asked that, the beast suddenly split into two. Alex knew one of these two foxes was fake, but he couldn't tell which one was it.

"Two can play at this game."

Alex's body blurred for a bit as a Yang clone of his appeared next to him. He stood side by side and got ready to fight.

Since he was going to fight a beast, he decided to win at its own game and dropped to the ground.

Claws appeared from his hand as his metal energy of his went to work.

"Come!"

Alex suddenly dashed forward as a tiger did. At the same time, his yang clone did so too and the both of them looked like 2 fighters fighting against two foxes.

Alex slashed at the snow fox, but his hand passed through. At the same time, the snow fox also went through the fake Alex and realized it had been duped.

Alex quickly turned to the real fox and lunged at it, but suddenly the fox cried out loudly.

"Awoooo!'

Alex didn't understand what it was doing until he felt his earrings buzz a little. The fox was using a mental attack and his earring easily stopped it.

At the same time, Alex swung his two claws at the fox and tore off a chunk from its right side.

The beast tried to create an illusion again, but it was in too much pain to do so.

So, Alex took pity on the beast and quickly killed it to keep it from being in such pain.

Once the fox was dead, Alex collected its material and went over to the tree. There he took the Yin treasure from it and went on his way.

Chapter 757 Canyon

The area was a massive plain now as Alex had gone past the mountains and it was all plain past that point.

As far as Alex could see, which was barely more than a few meters due to the hellish blizzard that never seemed to stop, everything in the area was dead.

His spiritual sense however gave a different answer. Everything on the surface was dead. However, there were some things growing underneath the ground, but those too were rare to the point that in a day's slow travel, Alex barely found maybe 3 different items, 2 of which had nothing to do with Yin.

The Yin treasures he did find were good, but he wasn't sure how helpful it would be considering it wasn't exactly Saint rank.

It had been an entire day since he had seen beasts, so at this point, Alex didn't even know if he should feel worried about them at all.

He couldn't think of a single beast that could live here after all.

Alex suddenly stopped and looked ahead with his spiritual sense. Something was on the ground that wasn't either snow or rock.

Alex couldn't exactly tell what it was, so he got closer until he was right on top of it and moved aside the snow.

When he finally uncovered what it was, Alex felt his heart drop.

This was a corpse. Alex saw the wide sunken eyes of a female whose entire body was frozen solid, including her orange robes. Her body was encased in clumps of ice from the snow that likely melted around her before she died.

Alex didn't know how strong this woman likely was, but the fact that she had died here meant she had at least some strength.

'This would be my fate too if I didn't have the yang aura blocking the coldness for me,' Alex thought. He finally started realizing for real how treacherous his path currently was.

The wind suddenly picked up and Alex felt it try to push him back. But he fought through it for a few seconds until it stopped.

Alex looked back at the frozen lady and bowed a little in respect. "Whoever you are, may you rest in peace," he said and walked away.

The dead corpse might have scared him, but his need to find cures and solutions for his body far outweighed his concerns for his own survival.

Alex understood that this was bad, but he couldn't stop himself.

As night fell, the blizzard got even worse so Alex had to stop wandering aimlessly and take shelter.

Since there was nothing to take shelter under, he dug the snow and made a small cavity on the ground where he placed a barrier formation that also generated heat on its own.

The barrier was amazing and kept Alex safe, but due to the constant attack from the outside, he needed to continuously replace the true spirit stones in leather pouches around the formation poles.

Overnight, the blizzard died and the sun rose up. It was still cold as hell, but he would rather just have a cold than cold and strong winds.

Alex undid the formation and walked out of the hole in the snow. Once he was out, he could see the clear sky since the first time he was there.

The sun was so bright that Alex was forced to close his eyes and just look at things using his spiritual sense.

Just as Alex spread out his spiritual sense, he noticed something at the edge of his sense. However, before he could take a look at it, the thing escaped out of the range of his sense.

'What the hell?' he thought. 'What is so strong that I can't even sense it leave?'

Alex started worrying that there was a Saint Rank beast around here. 'Dammit! I knew saint realm cultivators came around here frequently. Of course, saint beasts can survive here too,' he thought. 'I should have been more prepared.'

He brought out a bunch of talismans and even revolved his Qi as he got ready to use the Earth Devour Technique to escape from the area. However, even after a few minutes, nothing came into his sense again.

Alex squinted in the bright light, but there really was nothing around there at all.

After realizing that whatever was here had likely left, Alex continued moving closer towards the coldness to find more ingredients.

'Should I leave?' Alex thought as he trekked further into the coldness. He had already bared his fangs at the Icy Hell, so he saw no point in returning without finding some good ingredients for his body.

'Is it getting colder?' Alex thought. Even as he walked forward, he felt the temperature drop noticeably. Not only that, it was so cold that even the air struggled to move.

Alex arrived at the top of a cliff that led down to a valley of some sort through a couple of hundred meters drop.

'Weird,' he thought. 'I thought I was already walking on a plain. How is it suddenly so high? Is this what they call a canyon?'

Alex looked down at the valley down the cliff and got ready to jump down there.

"Wait!" A voice suddenly called out from close by, freezing Alex in his tracks.

"Who?" Alex asked as he looked around to find whoever was speaking. He didn't need to search much longer as the figure in black clearly contrasted against the harsh whiteness of the snow.

Alex saw the figure with nothing but shock on his face and a small budding fear in his heart. His breathing got irregular and even the yang barrier that he had been creating by letting his yang energy flow out was destabilizing a bit, letting in the coldness inside.

"Se-senior, what are you doing here?" Alex asked.

The figure in black moved closer to him, walking on all fours. The yellow eyes contrasted the deep black fur on his body, making him look extra frightening.

"Don't go any further, young man. You will die," the black jaguar spoke.

After 9 years of leaving him alone, the beasts from the beast realm had finally caught up to him.

Were they going to kill him? Were they going to kidnap him back? Maybe experiment on him?

How was Pearl? Did they capture him already? Was he already taken to the ritual? Was that even a bad thing?

Numerous thoughts ran around his mind while his mind refused to settle on any one of them.

"Are you alright, young man?" the beast asked after seeing Alex not speak for a while.

"Wh-why are you here?" Alex asked. This was at least a Saint Core realm beast from what Alex could tell. Meaning, that the jaguar was stronger than many of the upper echelon of the Luminance empire.

The last time Alex was in the beast realm, he had humiliated them. So, he needed to be extra careful.

"I am here to look after you," the jaguar said. "To make sure you don't do anything stupid, like what you are about to do."

"What I am about to do?" Alex asked as he looked behind him. "Like go into that valley?"

"Yes," the jaguar said.

"Is it dangerous?" Alex couldn't help but ask. "I'm already in the Icy Hell, how much more dangerous can that be?"

"How much more dangerous? What about the fact that what the humans call Icy Hell is just the surrounding? That down there is the real Icy Hell. Is that enough of an answer?" the jaguar asked. "Or do you want me to tell you that the place down there is so cold that even Qi in your body gets sluggish to the point that they don't work?"

"What?" Alex couldn't help but get afraid.

"Come, let's go," the jaguar moved forward.

Alex hurriedly got back in fear. "Don't come near me," he said. "Tell me why are you here exactly."

"I told you, I came here to look after you," the jaguar said.

"You mean you came here to look after Pearl, right? Well, Pearl is not here," Alex said.

"I know. He's with your mother back in Dawnspring city. The leopard is looking after him. I really am here for you," the jaguar said.

"What? How do you know that? How long have you been keeping an eye on us?" Alex asked.

"Ever since 2 years ago when we found you in the mountains after doing a search, we have been keeping an eye on you," the beast said.

"2 years ago?" Alex was surprised. He remembered the beacon being activated, but he thought he was safe and they hadn't been found him after all. However, it seemed it was all a lie.

They had not only found him but also kept an eye on him ever as he went through the empire.

"Come, let's go," the jaguar said.

Alex looked back and realized he really was at the edge of the cliff. If the place was as treacherous as he was told, then it was better to leave.

"Alright, let's go," Alex said.

Just then, something happened. Alex had been standing on the edge of the cliff which was nothing but ice. When he poured out his yang energy all around him, it also affected the ice underneath him.

The result of his yang energy wasn't noticeable generally as he kept moving around. However, this time he had stood there for a long time as he talked with the jaguar.

A little too long.

The ice beneath his feet melted until it couldn't handle him. Then, Alex felt his body go into weightlessness and he started falling.

Even as he fell Alex tried to fly, but he felt his Qi move sluggishly. The more he fell, the more sluggish his Qi got, until he couldn't fly at all and fell to the ground that was many hundred meters below.

Chapter 758 The Real Hell

The ground crumbled as Alex found himself deep underneath it.

It turned out that the ground was actually fully ice.

Even then, Alex felt pain all over his body. Not only that, he felt the cold as well.

Without hesitation, Alex pushed out as much yang as he could from his body to protect himself while he tried to climb out of the ice.

There was barely any Qi for him to use so he had to claw his way out of the ice.

When Alex finally managed to drag himself out of the ice, he realized what a horrible thing he had just done.

The ice had isolated him from the coldness that was up there, but now, he was open to the elements and was fully bombarded with the coldness.

Alex once again tried to use his Qi, but it barely worked. He barely managed to even take out a healing pill for himself.

'So cold,' Alex thought as he shivered vigorously. He looked back up to the cliff top only to see a horrified Jaguar.

"I need to climb back up," he thought to himself but he wasn't sure if he could. The cold was way too much for him.

Alex once again reached into his storage ring and difficultly pulled out some pills, talismans, and formation plates.

Immediately, he activated all of them. The formation plate landed on the ice and created a barrier. The talisman fell in front of Alex and started generating heat, and the pill also heated his body from the inside.

Alex felt a sense of relief as his body was heated. However, in just a few seconds, it all came to a stop.

"What?" Alex was shocked by the sudden cold that followed the lack of heat. He quickly checked the items and realized that they were all exhausted.

"No way!" he thought. He had barely used it for a few seconds and it was done. Only the pill that was inside his body lasted a normal amount. Unfortunately, that little heat couldn't stop him.

Alex continuously spread out his yang, but it wasn't helping much against the cold. At the same time, he spread his spiritual sense but it barely went past a dozen or so meters.

"What the hell? Not only my cultivation base is suppressed, but even my spiritual sense. This is starting to feel a lot like the Forbidden Fields," he thought.

He looked back up at the cliff and shouted, "Senior! What do I do?"

The jaguar didn't know what to answer. He was simply way too surprised that Alex had even managed to survive in a place that would likely cause trouble for even Immortals.

It was hard for him as a Saint Realm to stand in the vicinity. He couldn't imagine how a True Realm cultivator could survive at the heart of hell.

"Can you see a way to climb back up?" he shouted back at Alex.

Alex looked around and noticed nothing but cliffs. "No!" he shouted. "Let me try something."

Alex couldn't fly, so he decided to climb the cliff with his bare hands. He went up to the cliff wall and grabbed onto a piece of rock.

Immediately, he felt pain shoot through his palm and he had to let go of it. "Argh!" Alex cried as he looked at his palm and saw deep red marks as if he was burned.

'Dammit! Ice burns,' he thought. If he tried to climb this cliff without any support, by the time he was halfway done, he would lose his fingers to frostbite.

He would be willing to let that happen if that helped him reach the top, but it didn't, so he was forced to stay away from it.

"I can't climb this. It's too cold," Alex shouted back.

Then, he sat down on the ice and started cultivating. That was one way to improve his healing, and it was also a chance to see if he could produce more Yang to protect himself.

Alex barely finished a full circulation of his technique after nearly 2 minutes. The Qi in his body had slowed down to a half and it was getting hard to cultivate.

The Jaguar kept thinking of ways to get Alex out, but nothing worked.

The place down there was so cold that no matter what he tried to do, the cold would destroy it.

"Dear Lord, how am I going to answer them if I let this kid die," he worried.

Alex felt a bit better as he cultivated, but it was still quite cold. As he waited for ideas to get out of this place, he started thinking of something.

'This is definitely like the Forbidden Fields. Stagnant Qi, no spiritual sense. I'm half-surprised I can even cultivate at all,' he thought.

His mind slowly drifted to the scene of the dying tree that he promised to take care of the seed. The 3 yellow leaves were full of yang.

The object is full of Yang that he grabbed and subsequently ate.

A Treasure.

'There's a treasure here,' Alex realized as his eyes opened. 'A treasure that far surpasses what is normal.'

Alex stopped his cultivation technique for a moment and switched to the Winter Moon cultivation technique.

Not even a second later, a vast amount of Yin entered his body and started getting rid of the Yang. Alex instantly stopped, but his mind never did.

'This valley really is full of Yin,' he thought. 'No wonder there are so many Yin treasures in the surrounding. Just what sort of treasure could cause create this much Yin?'

Alex started getting excited and stood back up. He stopped cultivating a new hope that appeared in his heart.

When Ma Rong had problems with her Yin Constitution, she had gone to the Forbidden Fields to take care of it.

Which meant, if he stayed around here, he could likely have his constitution fixed as well. He wanted to cultivate the Yin the speed it up, but that was most likely a bad idea considering he would freeze to death before he could fix himself.

"Maybe I should get closer to the treasure and stick around," he thought. The valley wasn't big, maybe a couple of kilometers wide at best, so Alex was more than sure he would be able to get close to this treasure.

"Senior, I will look for other ways to get out of this place," Alex shouted and walked away from the cliff side.

Unlike with the Yang tree, Alex had no idea or feeling that led him towards a path, so he was forced to walk around the place in the freezing atmosphere.

Alex forced out as much Yang in his body as he could, which surprisingly increased even more.

It was as if all this time, his body hadn't even been trying to create yang, and only did so now because Alex needed to.

Even then, somehow the cold was getting to him. Alex shivered his way through the entire valley in search of the treasure.

After going around for hours searching with just his eyes as his senses refused to work much, Alex still didn't find anything.

Night fell soon enough, but Alex kept searching. It didn't really matter much for a cultivator if it was night or day, so he wasn't really worried.

Unfortunately for him, it mattered to his surrounding. Without the day full of the Sun's yang, the Yin in the air grew ferocious and soon Alex started feeling colder than ever.

If this continued on, Alex would freeze to death. He tried to bring out some pills to eat, but they too didn't help much at all.

'I need heat,' he thought as he shivered in the cold, but where in this frigid hell could he even find any heat?

'No,' he thought. 'Every object has heat. Even cold ones.'

Suddenly, his authority over the surrounding grew and the world moved to follow his command. The cold air around him grew colder as Alex drew heat from it.

He felt a warmth that he hadn't felt in over hours and was more than happy. However, the heat didn't last long as the colder the air got, the more difficult it became to bring out heat from it.

As such, Alex was forced to move away from this place where the air was particularly chilly than the rest.

As he moved, he started using his Dao of Heat Conduction to fight against nature to more heat from the cold surrounding to his hot body.

Alex was more than glad that he learned this Dao as he wouldn't have survived today without it.

Alex couldn't stay in one place to gather heat, so he kept moving around until he reached a location where there was barely any heat to pull from.

'Did I walk around in a circle?' he thought for a moment but he saw something that surprised him a lot.

In front of him, in what looked like a really small puddle was some liquid. He got closer and realized it was water.

"What?" Alex thought in surprise. "How the hell is there liquid water here?"

However, upon close inspection, Alex realized that it wasn't any normal water. He started feeling the cold yin aura pierce through his yang aura and Alex soon realized what he was looking at.

'A puddle of yin water?!' Alex thought in surprise.

A single drop of this water had helped him revert many months' worth of yang. He could only imagine what a puddle of it could do for him.

Chapter 759 ¬†Return

Alex opened his eyes to a gentle feeling of serenity. He looked around his surrounding at the sight of ice everywhere, but there was no cold he could feel at the moment.

The sun shined bright and the rays hit his body directly, yet he felt no heat from it.

Alex closed his eyes again and sent his senses into his body. The Yin orb and the Yang fruit were nowhere to be found again. However, he could feel pure Qi coming out of his naval area.

A Qi that was far stronger than his normal Yang Qi. Alex moved his Qi through his body, and this time there was no sluggishness, no pain, nothing.

It was as if water flowing down a clean creek. Finally, Alex thought to himself, 'how long have I been here?' He could tell that it had been a while, but it was quite impossible for him to tell the exact period of time he had been cultivating for.

Either way, he knew it had been quite a while since he had started cultivating, so there were surely some problems that accumulated, that he needed to take care of before they got too troublesome.

Alex took a deep breath and suddenly found himself in his spiritual space where the spiritual sea was far and wide below, while the silver mountain hung in the sky.

It had been more than 7 years since he had acquired the mountain, and finally, he saw some difference. Had Alex not had a photographic memory, he wouldn't have noticed it at all, but there were some spots on the mountain that were visibly smaller than before.

It was negligible when compared to the entire mountain, but this at least told Alex that the mountain would disappear in the future.

He then moved his attention to the millions of silver threads that flew in the sky and went up the mountain to absorb them.

As he did, he also noticed the massive black goo that covered the artifact's spirit. Alex hurriedly devoured that too until the crystal remained.

Ignoring the spirit, he went back to gathering the silver threads, which took at least half an hour. After he was done, Alex looked at the surroundings to see no other problem that required his help. So, he left the place and arrived back in his body.

Finally, he stood up from the frozen lake he was on and checked his body one last time. After seeing nothing wrong with it, he tried to fly.

Since his Qi was working fine now, he could also fly perfectly well. Alex flew to the top of the cliff that was closest to him, but he had no way of telling if this was the place he had fallen from.

From the regular snowfall and blizzards, the place changed daily. So, all Alex could do was try to judge the direction using the sun.

He stood on the ice for a few minutes and watched the shadow slightly shift direction. From that, he could tell which direction he needed to go in.

Before leaving, Alex changed his tattered clothes for a better ones and flew away.

He searched for the jaguar, hoping he was close by, but of course, he wasn't there. After flying a little further away, Alex took out his talisman and let his mother know that he was okay.

Helen was beyond rejoiced to hear that and asked him to quickly return back.

As Alex flew, he checked his body once more and was happy to find out that there was almost no yang coming out of his body. Sure he could create some if he wanted to, but it never released on its own. This gave Alex some hope that it would continue to do the same from now on.

After a little while, Alex brought out the flying boat and rode it all the way back to the DawnSpring city.

When he finally reached back, he went straight to the Flowing Brush sect and then directly to his mother.

"You are alive," Helen started crying the moment she saw and hug her son.

"I'm sorry I worried you mother," Alex said. "I was forced into cultivating to save myself so I couldn't switch my attention to anything else."

"Brother, are you okay?" Pearl asked from the side.

"Yes, I am fine," Alex said. "How about y-wait, what? Pearl, how are you in True King 9th realm already?" "Hehe, mother made me cultivate every day so I can be strong enough to protect brother one of these days," Pearl said.

Alex moved away from his shocked eyes from Pearl and looked at his mother. She too was as True King 3rd realm, which was 2 realms more than what she was when he left here.

"H-how many weeks was I gone?" he asked cautiously.

"Weeks?" Helen said incredulously. "You were gone for nearly 8 months."

"8... months?" Even in his wildest dreams Alex could never have imagined to have disappeared somewhere for 8 months.

"We tried searching for you the day you had disappeared, but we couldn't find you. What exactly happened?" Helen asked.

Alex proceeded to explain as well as he could. "After the orb entered me, I don't have many memories aside from forcing myself to cultivate. I did feel them entering my naval area, and only after that did I gain proper consciousness again," he said.

Qin Shan arrived not long after and was beyond shocked to see Alex still alive. Alex told him what had happened, but kept the important details to himself.

Alex was surprised when he found out that the empire thought he was dead now. He thought of letting them know he was back, but then he would have to fulfill his promise of the Alchemy lesson that so many of them had very much likely been waiting for.

So, he decided to keep the facade a little longer.

After speaking with his mother and reassuring her that he was alive and okay, Alex walked out of her room to go to his own house.

However, he stopped in his tracks halfway through when he realized that he was sensing something in him.

'A spiritual sense?' he thought as he spread his own spiritual sense around to find the individual. However, this spiritual sense came from way too far away for him to track down the source.

'A saint realm?' Alex thought. In just a few seconds of thinking, a thought came to his mind and he flew away from the location to the outer edge of the sect towards the empty mountains.

The spiritual sense got stronger and stronger and Alex knew he was in the right direction.

"Senior," Alex called out. "You can come out."

He waited for half a minute before a beast arrived in front of him. It looked at him up and down for a moment before opening its mouth to speak.

"You don't seem that dangerous when you don't have the spirit fighting for you," the beast said.

Alex recognized the leopard from back when he went to rescue Pearl from the beast realm. Aside from the jaguar and the puma, this leopard was the third saint realm beast he saw that day.

"Thank you senior, for looking after Pearl and my mother," Alex said.

"I was just doing as I was ordered. Besides, looking after the young lord is my honor," the leopard said.

"Can you let senior jaguar know that I'm alive now?" Alex said. "He must've thought I had died in the Icy Hell region."

"He knows you are alive. He's been going there to look after you frequently. You probably just missed him by a couple of hours. Once he realizes you aren't there, he will come here directly," the leopard said.

"I see," Alex said.

Suddenly a spiritual sense landed on Alex that was different from the Leopard's spiritual sense.

The black jaguar appeared in front of the two and looked at Alex in surprise. "You really survived?" he asked.

"I did. Thank you for looking after me, senior," Alex said.

"You don't have to thank me," he said. "I nearly killed you instead of protecting you."

"No, it was my fault mostly," Alex said.

"Since you are fine, we haven't failed at our job," the jaguar said. The jaguar turned to leave, but Alex stopped him.

"Wait senior, I need to ask you something," Alex said. "Are you planning on taking Pearl back for the ritual?"

Chapter 760 Plan to Leave

760 Plan to Leave

"Don't worry about the young lord. He does not need to go through the ritual just yet," the jaguar said. "Perhaps we were too hasty to do what we did. He's barely over 8 years old. It wouldn't hurt for him to gain a little more emotional maturity."

"Is lady Ren fine with that? Oh actually, how is Lady Ren? Was she hurt? Is she fine?" Alex asked. The last time he saw lady Ren, she had taken the brunt of 3 different Heavenly Judgment lightning attacks. That attack had been so strong that Alex felt fearful just being in the vicinity of it.

"Lady Ren is doing... okay," the jaguar said. "She did suffer a bit of damage from the lightning, but it's nothing a little bit of closed cultivation won't heal."

"I see," Alex said. "I'm sorry how it went the last time I was back there. I was way too focused on protecting Pearl and I ended up disrespecting and even hurting you all."

"It's... alright," the jaguar said. "It's in the past now. You can go and focus on your own thing now."

'My own thing,' Alex thought. He thought about what his thing was and realized what he needed to do now.

"Senior, I have a request," Alex said. * * * * * 2 months passed by in the blink of an eye.

Alex stuck to his room making pills one by one. Since he was 'dead', he made his mother go and get the ingredients for the pills for him.

During this time, he refined the healing pill the best he could and found other ways to make them besides using just his own blood.

Now that his body was full of unadulterated Qi, his blood was the best resource for the pill. However, Alex found that blood from beasts that had a wood element to them also worked to a certain extent.

They were still slow in terms of transferring aura over to the ingredient, but using Beast blood was a much safer way than humans. In fact, Alex now believed that he could reveal this information to the world without fearing the unnecessary loss of life.

Of course, as his status was still unknown in the empire, he was going to keep it that way for a long while.

Alex finished making the pill and brought it out to look at it. Even without focusing on the process much, Alex was still consistently making over 85% pills now. That was just how well his body was working.

He truly felt reborn.

Alex did a logistics check on all the pills and pastes and recipes he had. He made sure he had enough prepared and finally left his room. He walked over to his mother's place and found her ready to leave.

Qin Shan was also with her asking questions, but Helen didn't have many answers to give him.

"Young man, you're finally here," Qin Shan brought him in. "Tell me, what are you planning? You've been holed up in your room and even told your mother to get ready. Are you leaving for somewhere?" "Yes, I am," Alex said. "You can come with us if you want to. Although I'm not sure how the sect will take it if you take a few months-long breaks."

"Where exactly are you going?" Qin Shan asked.

"A place I consider my home now. The Crimson Empire," Alex replied.

"The Crimson Empire?" Qin Shan's eyes narrowed for a bit before widening. "The place beyond the northern forest? Are you joking? You will die."

Alex smiled. "No, we won't. I can assure you that," he said.

"Why are you going there?" Qin Shan asked.

"As I said, it's my home. My master, disciple brother, sister, and many friends are there. Also, they desperately require my pills, so I need to go back there," Alex said.

"I see," Qin Shan said. "What about the competition?" "Competition?" Alex asked. "Ah, I completely forgot about that. How long do we have?" "Around 9 months. But you will need to go through a preliminary test around 3 months prior to even registering, so really just 6 months," Qin Shan said.

"Oh, then it's fine. We'll make it. I plan to stay there for a few months only. Maybe try and bring some of them here, but that's it," Alex said.

Qin Shan thought for a long while and asked, "How sure are you that we can go across the forest?" Alex chuckled. "You must be worried about the dangers we will come across in the passage. Well, worry not. After all, it will be the dangers that will take us through the passage," he said.

Qin Shan couldn't understand the cryptic sentence.

"I am taking my mother through there. You can rest assured that I am not making a hasty decision," Alex said.

Qin Shan finally thought for a while and said, "Fine, I'm in. I want to see what this place is like too."

"Great," Alex said. "We leave in an hour."

"AN HOUR?" Qin Shan exclaimed. "I will have to go give some commands while I'm not here then." Qin Shan left to handle the matter of the sect for when he wasn't around, and Alex helped with his mother's packing.

After an hour, the 3 of them along with Pearl flew to the east where the beasts waited for them.

Qin Shan couldn't help but tremble a little when he sensed the aura of the two beasts.

"Sa-Saint Core?" he couldn't believe it. He finally realized what Alex meant by 'dangers taking them'. "Young Lord!" the two beasts bowed down towards Alex.

"Young Lord? You?" Qin Shan was surprised, but Alex only chuckled and shook his head. Pearl jumped down from Alex's embrace and stood in front of the two. "If you try to hurt my brother or my mother, I will tell my grandmother," Pearl said.

"Of course not, young lord," the two beasts said.

"Hmph!" Pearl snorted and looked at Helen with a smirk on his face. The jaguar ignored his young lord's show-off attitude and looked towards Alex. "We can leave whenever you are ready," he said.

Alex nodded and they left.

Helen held Pearl while sitting on top of the jaguar, while Alex sat on top of the leopard. Qin Shan was forced to fly all alone.

Due to Helen and Pearl's presence, the jaguar didn't speed up very fast, and that let Qin Shan keep up with them.

After flying for what felt like half a day, the group finally saw the forest in the north. They were getting close.

Alex looked down below and saw the nightlife of the Riverweed City, the first city he had been to in the empire. Once they went past that, Alex patiently waited for what was to come next.

The formation platform.

Once they reached the formation platform, the ground finally got down and the jaguar brought out a medallion from its armband. However, before he could activate it, Alex spoke up. "Senior, may I try instead?" he said.

"Try? The formation?" he asked.

"Yes, I want to try something," Alex said.

"Sure, go ahead," the jaguar said.

Alex nodded and placed his hand on the platform. Then, he forced his body to produce yang Qi which he instantly poured into the formation.

Before anyone was ready, the formation activated.

Chapter 761 Plan to Leave

"Is lady Ren fine with that? Oh actually, how is Lady Ren? Was she hurt? Is she fine?" Alex asked. The last time he saw lady Ren, she had taken the brunt of 3 different Heavenly Judgment lightning attacks.

That attack had been so strong that Alex felt fearful just being in the vicinity of it.

"Lady Ren is doing… okay," the jaguar said. "She did suffer a bit of damage from the lightning, but it's nothing a little bit of closed cultivation won't heal."

"I see," Alex said. "I'm sorry how it went the last time I was back there. I was way too focused on protecting Pearl and I ended up disrespecting and even hurting you all."

"It's… alright," the jaguar said. "It's in the past now. You can go and focus on your own thing now."

'My own thing,' Alex thought. He thought about what his thing was and realized what he needed to do now.

"Senior, I have a request," Alex said.

* * * * *

2 months passed by in the blink of an eye.

Alex stuck to his room making pills one by one. Since he was 'dead', he made his mother go and get the ingredients for the pills for him.

During this time, he refined the healing pill the best he could and found other ways to make them besides using just his own blood.

Now that his body was full of unadulterated Qi, his blood was the best resource for the pill. However, Alex found that blood from beasts that had a wood element to them also worked to a certain extent.

They were still slow in terms of transferring aura over to the ingredient, but using Beast blood was a much safer way than humans. In fact, Alex now believed that he could reveal this information to the world without fearing the unnecessary loss of life.

Of course, as his status was still unknown in the empire, he was going to keep it that way for a long while.

Alex finished making the pill and brought it out to look at it. Even without focusing on the process much, Alex was still consistently making over 85% pills now. That was just how well his body was working.

He truly felt reborn.

Alex did a logistics check on all the pills and pastes and recipes he had.

He made sure he had enough prepared and finally left his room. He walked over to his mother's place and found her ready to leave.

Qin Shan was also with her asking questions, but Helen didn't have many answers to give him.

"Young man, you're finally here," Qin Shan brought him in. "Tell me, what are you planning? You've been holed up in your room and even told your mother to get ready. Are you leaving for somewhere?"

"Yes, I am," Alex said. "You can come with us if you want to. Although I'm not sure how the sect will take it if you take a few months-long breaks."

"Where exactly are you going?" Qin Shan asked.

"A place I consider my home now. The Crimson Empire," Alex replied.

"The Crimson Empire?" Qin Shan's eyes narrowed for a bit before widening. "The place beyond the northern forest? Are you joking? You will die."

Alex smiled. "No, we won't. I can assure you that," he said.

"Why are you going there?" Qin Shan asked.

"As I said, it's my home. My master, disciple brother, sister, and many friends are there. Also, they desperately require my pills, so I need to go back there," Alex said.

"I see," Qin Shan said. "What about the competition?"

"Competition?" Alex asked. "Ah, I completely forgot about that. How long do we have?"

"Around 9 months. But you will need to go through a preliminary test around 3 months prior to even registering, so really just 6 months," Qin Shan said.

"Oh, then it's fine. We'll make it. I plan to stay there for a few months only. Maybe try and bring some of them here, but that's it," Alex said.

Qin Shan thought for a long while and asked, "How sure are you that we can go across the forest?"

Alex chuckled. "You must be worried about the dangers we will come across in the passage. Well, worry not. After all, it will be the dangers that will take us through the passage," he said.

Qin Shan couldn't understand the cryptic sentence.

"I am taking my mother through there. You can rest assured that I am not making a hasty decision," Alex said.

Qin Shan finally thought for a while and said, "Fine, I'm in. I want to see what this place is like too."

"Great," Alex said. "We leave in an hour."

"AN HOUR?" Qin Shan exclaimed. "I will have to go give some commands while I'm not here then."

Qin Shan left to handle the matter of the sect for when he wasn't around, and Alex helped with his mother's packing.

After an hour, the 3 of them along with Pearl flew to the east where the beasts waited for them.

Qin Shan couldn't help but tremble a little when he sensed the aura of the two beasts.

"Sa-Saint Core?" he couldn't believe it. He finally realized what Alex meant by 'dangers taking them'.

"Young Lord!" the two beasts bowed down towards Alex.

"Young Lord? You?" Qin Shan was surprised, but Alex only chuckled and shook his head.

Pearl jumped down from Alex's embrace and stood in front of the two. "If you try to hurt my brother or my mother, I will tell my grandmother," Pearl said.

"Of course not, young lord," the two beasts said.

"Hmph!" Pearl snorted and looked at Helen with a smirk on his face.

The jaguar ignored his young lord's show-off attitude and looked towards Alex. "We can leave whenever you are ready," he said.

Alex nodded and they left.

Helen held Pearl while sitting on top of the jaguar, while Alex sat on top of the leopard. Qin Shan was forced to fly all alone.

Due to Helen and Pearl's presence, the jaguar didn't speed up very fast, and that let Qin Shan keep up with them.

After flying for what felt like half a day, the group finally saw the forest in the north. They were getting close.

Alex looked down below and saw the nightlife of the Riverweed City, the first city he had been to in the empire.

Once they went past that, Alex patiently waited for what was to come next.

The formation platform.

Once they reached the formation platform, the ground finally got down and the jaguar brought out a medallion from its armband.

However, before he could activate it, Alex spoke up. "Senior, may I try instead?" he said.

"Try? The formation?" he asked.

"Yes, I want to try something," Alex said.

"Sure, go ahead," the jaguar said.

Alex nodded and placed his hand on the platform. Then, he forced his body to produce yang Qi which he instantly poured into the formation.

Before anyone was ready, the formation activated.

Chapter 762 Back in the Beast Realm

After merging with the yin orb, he needed to know if his body was still capable of doing what it used to do before.

The first thing he tested was if he could create Yin and Yang separately now that they were coming out in a fused form.

Alex realized that he could easily pull out yang and quickly fill his whole body with it if required.

As for Yin, it wouldn't come out unless he started circulating the Winter Moon technique.

He found his yin to be much better than before, and his only Yin technique, the Flickering Shadows technique had a much wider range and accuracy.

As such, Alex was sure that his Yin root had improved much more than he could have hoped for. However, like his Metal Qi and Yang Qi, he couldn't freely control Yin Qi outside of his body.

This meant, unfortunately for him, his Yin Spiritual root hadn't reached the Supreme rank and was only stuck around what others called 'Superior.'

If anyone found out that he thought having a 'Superior Yin root' was an unfortunate event, they would call him ungrateful and try to rip it away from him.

Other tests Alex did involve trying to see if he was capable of surviving poison or not. Thankfully, that aspect of his body hadn't disappeared at all.

In fact, it might have gotten stronger as well.

Aside from that, he found his body cultivation to have improved, he found his ability to overcome many realms to have improved, and various other small bits here and there to have gotten better.

Now, Alex only wished his sword skills would get better as well.

* * * * * *

The way to open a formation that wasn't carved on metal was to spread one's Qi into an equal amount per stroke at every node.

Each formation usually had a medallion or similar object accompany the owner that did the task of splitting their Qi for them.

Alex however didn't do that. He simply pumped his yang Qi into the formation, and somehow it started on its own.

That was a test Alex had been meaning to do for a while now but didn't have any chance to.

The first time Alex had been here, he had noticed something similar happening, but he hadn't given it much thought.

However, after the demon realm, Alex was starting to know just what his Qi was capable of.

He had done a few more tests since then, which had been successful. However, nothing was as substantial as what he had done right now.

Blue light shined from the platform that soon grew white and before anyone knew it, they were all teleported away.

When the light disappeared, Alex found himself inside the cave with white walls all around the massive room with glowing crystal stalactite hanging from the ceiling.

This looked similar to the room he remembered, but something was different. The shape of the room wasn't the same as the one he had been in previously.

"Where are we? This is not the room I had been to before, is it?" Alex asked.

"This is the platform that connects to the Luminance empire," the jaguar said with an incredulous look in his eyes. "Young man, how did you bring us into the palace exactly?"

"I…" Alex didn't know what to answer. He realized he hadn't just done one thing but two.

He had not only activated the formation, but also bypassed a security aspect of the formation that always sent everyone to one of the outer formations, and instead brought them directly into the palace.

'How indeed?' Alex thought. 'I had done it last time too.'

"Isn't it obvious?" the leopard asked. "He has the blood essence right?"

"Ah, right," the Jaguar said. "That would make perfect sense."

"Senior? Can you explain to me?" he asked.

"Anyone with our lord's blood can directly enter the palace," the jaguar said.

'Ah!' Alex thought as he finally realized why it happened. 'So I came here because I had the White Tiger's blood in me,' he thought.

If not for that, he would have likely been teleported to the forest inside the realm. That didn't explain how his Qi could easily activate formations, but at least he got one answer.

"Alright, let's go," the jaguar said.

The jaguar took the path forward and showed them the way. Alex felt nostalgic as he walked through the glowing hallway.

Helen looked around curiously, wondering what crystals in the ceiling were.

Qin Shan however was way too shocked out of his mind to think of anything clearly.

He was here. The heart of the continent that over 10 years ago had taken the lives of the most gifted youths of the empire.

Due to that incident, the empire had canceled the competition last decade that was supposed to take place every 10 years.

Which was why this year's competition held so much weight and was going to be just that extravagant.

They were going to have 2 decades' worth of competition in a single year.

"It's fine," Alex calmed Qin Shan down. "Seniors might be beasts, but they aren't like the beasts you will see outside. Most of the beasts that grew up in this realm are intelligent and aren't much different from the humans."

"But… but… they killed so many talents from the last generation," Qin Shan said.

"That was a mistake on those youth's part. I was here when they came. Had they been discreet and not caused problems to the beasts, started fights, tried to steal children, and overall not been a menace, they would have still been alive," Alex said.

"We aren't savages," the jaguar said. "Our lord is the lord of this continent. Believe it or not, we are all subjects of our lord. Be it human or beast or even plant."

"Your… lord? Where is he?" Qin Shan asked.

Alex cringed a bit when he heard that. That was a touchy subject as their lord, the White Tiger that ruled this continent had died over 5 thousand years ago.

"Our Lord, he… he is not in this world anymore," the jaguar said, refusing to elaborate any further.

Alex softly explained that their lord wasn't there anymore and that Pearl was to be their new lord if he had the potential in him.

Qin Shan's mind couldn't comprehend the fact that Alex's beast had the opportunity to be the lord of the beasts that were stronger than most Saint realm cultivators of the empire.

After they walked for a while, Alex noticed that they had reached the hallway that had many guest rooms available.

"Rest here tonight, you can leave after the sun comes out," the jaguar said.

Alex and the rest nodded and went to the room to rest. The 3 humans got 3 separate rooms, but they all converged into one for most of the night to talk about various things.

In the end, the gathering became Alex mostly just answering Qin Shan's inquiries. Helen was curious about a few things too, but Alex had already told her nearly everything when they first reunited, so there wasn't much for them to talk about.

Late night, they returned to their own room and rested for a while.

Early morning, the jaguar came to take them. He took the three and Pearl through a serious of the hallway before arriving at the cave with the formation platform from where they would go to the Crimson Empire.

"Eh? Are we leaving just like that? Without meeting Lady Ren?" Alex asked.

"Lady Ren can't speak to you right now. Otherwise, she would come here to see the young lord without question," the jaguar said.

"Is… is she still injured? I thought she was okay now," Alex asked.

"No, she's fine. but she can't come to you right now," the jaguar said.

"And your daughter? Where is sister Jia?" Alex asked.

"She's currently in closed cultivation and can't come to see you either. I will make sure to have her out while you return back, so don't worry," Jaguar said.

"I see… and senior Puma?" Alex asked.

"He's too embarrassed to come to see you," the jaguar said. "Alright, stop wasting time, and let's leave."

The 5 of them walked over to the formation platform. Alex realized the leopard wasn't there, but then he also understood that he wasn't necessary as they were all going to be in one place.

The jaguar brought out the medallion with which he activated the formation. Then, the 5 of them teleported away.

Chapter 763 I'm Back

"Are we here?" Qin Shan asked.

"Yes," Alex said without even looking around. Looking around wasn't going to help a lot anyway given how much change the place had been through in the last 10 years.

"What do we do now, Al?" Helen asked.

Alex brought out a compass device and checked the direction. "The place where I'm to go Scarlet City is in that direction about half a day's worth of flight on our ships."

"Or we can go to the capital first, the Cardinal city that's just an hour away in that direction," Alex said.

"Let's go to the capital first. I want to start from the place where the Fu Ancestor established his own empire," Qin Shan said.

"Very well, let's fly to the capital then," Alex said.

Qin Shan brought out his ship which could house all 3 of them and the two beasts. Then, he launched towards the direction Alex pointed to.

Alex didn't directly take them to the capital but instead towards the east side of the capital.

He didn't want to be seen coming from the south as that would cause too many questions that he didn't want to give answers to.

"The Qi here is quite weak," Qin Shan casually mentioned as he flew.

"Yes, this place was most likely hit quite hard in the war that took place 5 thousand years ago," Alex said casually as well.

"Huh? War? 5 thousand years ago? What are you talking about?" Qin Shan asked curiously.

"Uh… I will explain later," he said. "Just know that this place doesn't have many Saint rank spirit veins."

"I see," Qin Shan said as he continued looking at the scenery.

The group soon reached the eastern wall of the capital city. They landed on top of one of the mountains and then flew down to the ground.

As they walked towards the city gates, Alex noticed some things hovering near them in the sky. It wasn't him that noticed them however, everyone did.

"Does your empire like showing off their ships or what?" Qin Shan asked after seeing the massive ships that hovered outside the capital.

"Those are most likely the ships belonging to the many sects. They put it out here to show the people that they are here. It's a pride thing I guess," Alex said.

"Your capital doesn't seem that big. Does it have that many sects?" Qin Shan asked curiously.

"No, these ships are from sects all around the empire. If I'm not mistaken, there should be an annual competition taking place inside, which is why so many sects are gathered in this place," Alex said.

"Oh, a competition huh? I'm curious to see just how your competition goes," Qin Shan said.

Alex turned around to the jaguar and asked, "Senior, are you coming in with us too?"

He wanted to tell the jaguar to stay outside, but he couldn't bring himself to be this rude.

"Don't worry, unless they are in the Saint realm, their perception will pass away from me," the jaguar said.

He then activated some sort of technique that made Alex unfocused and lazy when he looked toward him. Every time he tried to pay attention to him, his eyes would drift away and look at the ground beside him.

It wasn't until he used his spiritual sense that he managed to keep track of the jaguar.

"That's… such a weird skill," Alex said.

"It's nothing compared to yours that can completely hide your aura from anyone in your own rank," the jaguar said.

The group reached the gate and quickly paid their way in. On the way, Alex asked if there was a competition going on inside. When he found out there was, he asked what day of the competition it was.

According to the guards, today was the Top 64 competition, which was going to start anytime soon now.

'Top 64,' Alex thought. Which meant if the competitions hadn't changed in the 10 years, there would be the beast competitions and the maze competition this day.

Alex made his way through the city and arrived at the coliseum not long after. Since they had come from the eastern side of the city, it barely took them any time to get there.

Alex purchased 3 tickets for themselves and walked into the coliseum. The halls weaved and wove through the coliseum before popping them out to the audience stand.

Alex turned to look towards the sects, but no one was there yet. 'They must be getting registered,' Alex thought.

After waiting for a while, the sects started coming out one after another.

Blue robes, red robes, orange robes, green robes, and all sorts of robed figures walked out onto the stands.

"The contestants are here," Alex told them.

Qin Shan gave a quizzing look as he turned towards Alex. "Am I missing something? Why are there kids in the stands when they haven't even reached the True realm yet? They are asking to die," Qin Shan said.

Alex chuckled a bit. "People here are weak compared to the Luminance Empire. So Common realm is the equivalent of True realm over there," he explained. "Lower than 25 years and not in the true realm yet, that is the requirement for participating in the competition."

Alex looked at the stands waiting for his own sect's people to come out. He half expected to see Ma Rong walk out from inside with a bunch of disciples around here and a few elders including the First elder.

Of course, that was just wishful thinking on Alex's part.

As he was lost in his own thoughts, something brought him back to reality as he sensed something land on him.

His eyes shot upwards as he saw a group of people fly into the coliseum.

The Royal family was there. Alex saw the Emperor, the Empress, the two princes, and the princess, along with another female that was likely married to one of the princes.

"Saint Foundation realm," Qin Shan said with a bit of surprise. He hadn't expected someone this strong to come here.

"The Emperor," Alex said. "He's noticed us. I should go say something."

"You can talk later," the jaguar said. "I will go speak to him now."

The jaguar disappeared from their side and arrived high in the sky in front of the Emperor. However, even then no one noticed him being there.

The jaguar returned after a few minutes of talking.

"What happened?" Alex asked.

"I told him I'm not here to cause trouble but to look after you three. He asked us to come by the palace later," the jaguar said.

"I see. We can do that," Alex said and finally moved his eyes back to the stands on the other side.

Just as he did so, his eyes landed on a thin figure that slowly walked behind a group of disciples. His posture looked resolute, but his body said otherwise.

Someone else was the leader of this group of people and Alex quickly realized who it was.

'The First Elder huh?' he thought. The bald man led the disciples to the stands and they all seemed to follow him. Which meant he was likely the sect leader of the Tiger sect now.

Alex looked at the others and didn't recognize anyone else. None of the kids there were around when Alex was part of the sect.

"I will be back soon," Alex said and walked away from the group.

Alex took the round way around the coliseum and before he even reached the other side, the competition had already started.

Top 64 was underway and people were out to fight already.

Alex ignored the fight and made his way to the sect's seating area. When he arrived at the location, there was a guard that didn't let anyone other than sect members enter.

This would cause a bit of a problem to any other person, but to Alex, this was no trouble.

His cultivation was already concealed, so all he needed to do was hide his body. At a moment's notice, his body turned invisible.

Then he teleported directly into the seating area before making his way towards the Tiger sect's seating area.

He undid his invisibility when he reached there and stood behind the weak-looking figure.

"Master?" Alex called out uncertainly.

The weak figure turned around, letting Alex see a fake right arm along with a real left arm that was missing 3 fingers.

In his face was a shadow of confusion. However, that didn't last long as he saw who had just called him and what he had just called him.

His eyes went wide as he realized who was standing in front of him at the moment. It was his disciple.

"Yu Ming?" Wen Cheng asked, unbelieving of his own eyes.

In the nearly 70 years that Wen Cheng had been alive, Alex had been in his life for just a single year, in fact even less.

However, he would never forget the face of the disciple that meant so much to him. After all, no one had ever left an impression on Wen Cheng as Alex had.

"Yes master, it's me," Alex said, his voice breaking at parts.

"Yu Ming!" Wen Cheng's shock finally made its way to his voice and soon tears started forming in his eyes.

Using both his real and fake hands, Wen Cheng hugged Alex tightly. "You're back, my disciple. You're back!"

Alex started tearing up as well as he hugged his master even more tightly.

"I'm back, master."

Chapter 764 Giving the Pill

"Young man, is that you?" he asked. He had only seen this face of Alex for a week back over 10 years ago, so he wasn't quite sure he was looking at the same person.

Alex let go of Wen Cheng and bowed towards the first elder. "Greetings senior, it's good to see you," he said.

"It's good to see you too. Where have you been all this time?" the first elder asked.

"I was over on the other side of the Southern forest," Alex said. "In a place known as the Luminance Empire."

"You were there? You weren't captured by the beasts?" Wen Cheng asked.

"No, master. After I rescued Pearl, I managed to escape, but in doing so I ended up on the other side," Alex said. "I only now managed to improve my relations with them and returned."

"Its good that you returned," Wen Cheng said. "But weren't you missing an arm? What happened?"

Alex turned around and looked at his master once more. He couldn't stand to watch how his master looked at the moment and brought out the healing pill.

"Here, master. Eat this," he said.

"What's this?" Wen Cheng asked as he took the pill.

"It will help you," Alex said.

"Okay," Wen Cheng said and ate the pill without any more questions.

"You should sit down for this," Alex said and gently placed Wen Cheng on the seat. Then, in one swift motion, he undid the latches on Wen Cheng's fake arm and pulled it off.

"What are you doing?" Wen Cheng was surprised, and even a little suspicious.

"It will start to itch really soon. Don't scratch anything," Alex said.

At the same time, Wen Cheng felt the itch around the place where his arms and finger were cut off.

As everyone else, including the many sects around them, watched, bones started growing from Wen Cheng's right arm. Then muscles, ligaments, and skin followed right behind.

People watched in shock as Wen Cheng's arm slowly came to life. His left arm which had 2 fingers, now had 5.

Wen Cheng was perhaps the most shocked when he saw this. He could feel them, his new arm, his new fingers. Tears started flowing once more as he finally felt whole again.

"How did you...?" the First elder asked.

"I spent the last many years trying to figure out this exact pill. It was only about a year ago that I really managed to find all the ingredients and made it. After my arm grew back, I knew I had to come and help master."

"Now, a year later, I'm here," Alex said.

Wen Cheng brought up his new arm and placed it on Alex's shoulders. "My disciple, you've made me proud, and you've certainly made Ma Rong proud. She would be more than happy to see how you've turned out," Wen Cheng said.

"Thank you, master," Alex said.

The commotion had reached to the guards who came to take Alex back, but the First elder sent them away saying Alex was an elder of the sect.

"So, where's Pearl?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Oh, he's there with my mother," Alex said.

"Wait, what? Your mother?" Wen Cheng asked in surprise. Despite learning that Alex was a player and someone from another continent, he was still under the initial assumption that Alex was an orphan.

So, when he heard that Alex was here with his mother, he was surprised.

"You have a mother?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I was surprised too, master. Turned out she had come here too. I found her in the empire while trying to join their military," Alex said. "Look, she's over there."

Alex pointed across the coliseum towards Helen in her purple robe, who waved back at them.

"She's with her master. I think you'll have to wait until these matches are over before you meet," Alex said.

"Yeah, my disciple should be up soon," the first elder said.

"Are you the sect leader now, senior?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the First Elder said. "I've been one for a few years now."

"I see, congratulations," Alex said. He looked around the area and was a little disappointed.

"Is the Hong Wu sect not here?" he asked.

"They didn't have fighters that made it to the top 64, so they are taking a day off I believe," Wen Cheng said. "They should be in their hotel rooms."

"I see," Alex said. He made a mental note to go visit them later.

"Did brother and sister not come?" Alex asked.

"Your brother is in charge of the security, so he cannot just leave. As for your sister, she..." Wen Cheng sighed.

"What happened? Is she okay?" Alex felt a little panicked.

"No, no, she's fine. She's just not in the sect anymore," Wen Cheng said. "She reached the True realm about half a year after you left and became an elder."

"But after 5 years, her family needed her more so she left the sect and went back to her family," Wen Cheng said.

"I see," Alex said.

"We can message her and let her know you've come," Wen Cheng said.

"No, don't. I want to surprise her," Alex said.

"Sure, if that's what you want," Wen Cheng said. He then slowly drifted away from the conversation and continued checking his new arm.

Alex let him be and talked with the sect leader while assessing the junior next to him.

"These are some good disciples, aren't they?" the sect leader asked.

"They're not bad," Alex said. Most of the disciples were in the Mind Tempering realm, which was quite surprising to Alex as that was not the case for the year when he had joined the sect.

"You must be surprised. After we became a First-grade sect, our batch of disciples continued to improve over the years. Now, we're with these," he said.

"I see," Alex said. "The sect has improved a lot in my absence then. I'm happy."

"Yeah, it has," the sect leader said. Just then, the host announced the next set of fighters and Alex heard the words 'Tiger Sect' being called.

"Oh, it's my disciple's turn," the sect leader said.

Alex switched his focus to the fight as well. He saw a short-haired individual in yellow robes walk out to the stage with a sword hanging on his hips.

His opponent was a blue-robed individual with cloud-shaped patches all over his robes. 'Cloud Valley sect?' Alex wondered and was immediately proven right as the woman brought out two different Mind Tempering 5th realm beasts.

"He's a swordsman?" Alex asked.

"Just like his elder brother," the sect leader said.

The match started and the two beasts attacked him. The young man brought out his sword and suddenly a white outline appeared on it.

"Oh, he has sword intent. Not bad," Alex said as he watched the fight. The young man's cultivation base was Mind Tempering 6th realm. Along with Sword Intent, he easily beat the fighter on the stage down below.

"You've got yourself a good disciple, senior," Alex said.

"Yeah, I'm proud of him," the sect leader said.

Chapter 765 Meeting Old Friends

Seeing that Alex was the only one with a different set of clothes from the rest, the young man couldn't help but wonder who he was.

"This is my disciple, Dong Duxin," the sect leader introduced.

"Hello," Alex said.

"Hello," the young man returned his greeting with a curious look.

"This is your senior. He graduated over 10 years ago," the sect leader explained. "He's the one people bring up when wanting to be part of 2 sects at once."

"Oh," the young finally realized who he was speaking to. "It's good to meet you, senior."

"Congratulations on the win," Alex said. "Brother Yuhan must be teaching you quite well."

"He's a great teacher when it comes to Sword Intent," the young man said.

"I know. He taught me how to use Sword intent too," Alex said. "Where is he, sect master?"

"He's back in the sect. He's one of the elders now," the first elder said.

"And sister Su Min? What about brother Yang Ma?" Alex asked.

"They both left the sect after graduation," the sect leader said. "Su Min is here in the capital. She's part of the formation guild, while Yang Ma returned back to his clan."

"Sigh, this really brings me back to 10 years ago," the sect leader said while shaking his head.

"You look so young, senior brother," Dong Duxin said. "How old are you?"

"Me? I am... uhh... 26 I believe," Alex said.

"26? No way," Wen Cheng and the sect leader said at the same time.

"That would make you 15 when you graduated away. That's not right, you should be more like 29," the sect leader said.

"I know I should be 29, but due to some things I went through on the other side, I'm missing 3 years of my life," Alex said. "So physically, I'm 26. That's what the formations will tell you too."

"26?" the young man couldn't help but be surprised. "You're only 2 years older than me?" he asked.

"You're 24? Then I guess yeah," Alex said.

"Right, what's your cultivation base now?" the sect leader asked.

"I..." Alex decided to remove his concealment as there was no point in hiding it at all. As the veil lifted, Wen Cheng, the sect leader, and various other people around him couldn't help but gasp.

The disciples didn't know what was going on, but the elders did.

"Tr-True King!" Wen Cheng was completely blown away by the revelation. "You already reached the True King realm?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I did so about 3 years ago."

"Your cultivation isn't that bad either, master. You're already on the verge of entering the True Emperor realm," Alex said.

Wen Cheng shook his head. "I entered the True King realm when you hadn't even begun cultivating yet. A dozen or so years later, I finally managed to reach its end. This is really slow in comparison to you," Wen Cheng said.

"Don't worry, master. I have pills that will help speed up your cultivation. If used properly, you should be able to get close to entering the Saint realm within a decade or two," Alex said.

"I... I can enter Saint realm?" Wen Cheng asked.

"I'm absolutely sure," Alex said.

The group soon forgot about the matches down below and continued talking with Alex.

Alex openly answered any question they had about his life and the life of people on the other side of the forest.

They were surprised to learn how many Saint realms there were and how True Realm cultivators were known as the younger generation.

Alex explained the reasons too. The Luminance empire had a higher concentration of Qi, not to mention they also had a lot of Spirit veins of various grades improving the cultivation process of many.

Not to mention, most of the items in the Meteor shower had dropped on that side of the map, so they were more advanced than the rest.

Had the western continent not been looted 5 thousand years ago, they would be some of the greatest powerhouses of the entire world.

After talking for over half a day, Alex decided to leave them. "I will go check up on the Hong Wu sect. Do you know what building they are staying in?" Alex asked.

"It's the same one as ours," Wen Cheng said and gave directions to the hotel.

Alex nodded. "I'll see you later, master," he said and walked back to his mother.

"When are you going to introduce us?" his mother asked.

"Soon," Alex said. "I need to go find my other sect. Apparently, they took the day off. If I don't return by the time this whole thing ends, you can follow them and reach the hotel where I'm going."

"Either that or just go to the royal palace along with senior. I will go by there later as well," Alex said.

"Alright, go do what you want to," Helen said.

"I'm coming too," Pearl said, but Alex didn't let him. If Pearl left with Alex, no one would be here to look after his mother.

While he wasn't worried about her getting hurt, he was worried about her getting lost in this new place.

Finding her then would be quite troublesome.

So, Alex left the coliseum alone and made his way west towards the hotel where the Hong Wu Sect was staying at.

The path to the hotel somehow felt familiar while also completely new at the same time. He felt like he had walked through this exact same street 10 years ago too, but most of the shops weren't the same, so he couldn't be sure.

After 20 minutes, he made his way to the hotel and requested the staff to send a message to the people from the Hong Wu sect.

Alex waited for nearly 10 minutes before someone walked down the stairs.

Alex saw the woman that walked down and was surprised to see how much she'd changed. Her childish looks no longer remained as she had a sophisticated attitude now.

Alex was surprised to see her in elder robes, but that shouldn't have been a surprise when he really thought about it.

Her eyes turned from confusion to surprise back to confusion again.

"It's good to see you, Fanfan," Alex said.

"Mingming?" Fan Ruogang asked skeptically.

"Yes, that is me," Alex said.

"Mingming! What? How?" she couldn't form proper sentences as one thought after another kept bombarding her mind.

"Greetings to you to—" before he could finish speaking, Fan Ruogang jumped onto him and gave him a tight hug. The childish happy-go-lucky girl had apparently still not disappeared.

"You're finally back, the 5th elder will be happy to see you," she said. "Wait, I need to tell Wanwan and Meimei."

"Is brother Wan Li and sister Zhou Mei here too?" Alex asked.

"No, they're back in the sect, but I'll send them a message," Fan Ruogang said.

"Brother Yu, is that you?" someone came down too.

Alex turned to look at the big and buff man that seemed to be an elder too. "Brother Kong?" Alex asked.

"So it's really you," Kong Yuhan said.

"Brother Kong, you seem to be doing quite well for yourself," Alex said after noticing his cultivation base in the True Master's realm.

"I don't doubt you are doing quite good too," Kong Yuhan said. "Way better than me, no doubt."

"I'm doing fine," Alex said.

"Come on up. Let's talk in our quarters," Kong Yuhan said and the three of them walked up the hotel floors.

Alex asked about the current situation of the sect. Apparently, the sect went through a small downfall after what had happened 10 years ago, but that only lasted a year or two before more disciples joined the sect.

Now the sect flourished as any First-grade sect would.

The current sect leader was called Song Wushen, who was previously the 8th elder during Alex's time. The 4th elder had taken over the position for a while before they decided to choose a leader for real and Song Wushen had gotten the majority of the vote.

Alex talked with Kong Yuhan and Fan Ruogong for a while as no one else he knew had come on this trip to the competition.

The conversations lasted for nearly 3 hours before Alex decided to leave, not before promising to return back to the Scarlet City along with them.

Chapter 766 Introducing the Pastes

Not only were the Hong Wu sect's people there, but even the Tiger Sect's folks were also there as well.

He wanted to talk with his master a bit, so that entire night he stayed there.

He told Wen Cheng almost everything regarding what he had gone through. Hearing that his disciple had gone through over two years of training as soon as he left them had surprised Wen Cheng.

Not to mention learning that his disciple basically skipped 3 years was that much more shocking.

The next day was the final competition, so they all went to watch. Unfortunately for the tiger sect, their number 1 disciple, Dong Duxin reached the top 8, but lost to the person that later came second.

Still, that was a great achievement for them so everyone was more or less happy.

The Hong Wu sect had also done quite well during the production competitions, so they were happy too.

Wen Cheng was starting to look better in just a day. He no longer seemed weak and fragile, but was now starting to gain the confidence and impact he had 10 years ago.

Now that he had received the various pills from Alex, he was sure to get back on track with his cultivation.

"I will see you guys tomorrow," Alex said as he waved goodbye to both the sect and went to the palace.

The moment he arrived, the guards welcomed him without a single delay and took him to the guest rooms where his mother and Qin Shan were staying at.

"I thought I was going to meet them today," Helen said.

"Sorry, its hard when there's so much security," Alex said. "But worry not, you will meet them tomorrow."

"Fine," Helen said.

There was a knock on the door and Alex was invited to the Emperor's study room.

"I will see you guys later," Alex said and left.

When he arrived at the Emperor's study room, he found the princes and the princess waiting for them as well.

"Greetings, your highnesses," Alex said.

"Young man, you've improved quite a lot in the years I haven't seen you. You are a whole different person now," the Emperor said.

"Thank you for the compliment, your majesty," Alex said.

"I had a few questions, I was hoping you would answer," the Emperor said.

"Sure, I can do that," Alex said.

Alex was expecting questions about the empire, how it ran, and other things, but surprisingly the emperor wanted to know about his brother and sister-in-law that had left for the other empire.

"I'm sorry, your highness. I haven't met them," Alex said. "However, given that they helped bring back one of the current strongest young generation members, their status in the clan shouldn't be low."

"I see," the Emperor said. "Also, I remember you lost your arm before, and I heard you helped bring back your master's arm recently. Are you capable of making those pills?"

"Yes, I am," Alex said. "It's a True pill so anyone below the Saint realm can get back their limps if they've lost it."

"Are you willing to sell the recipe? We can pay a hefty sum for it," the Emperor said.

Alex shook his head. "It's a special recipe so I don't want it to fall in the hands of just about anybody. I will pass it along to my sect and the elders can decide what to do with it themselves."

"Oh, okay, that works too. As long as the pill is available in the empire, I'm fine with that," the Emperor said.

"I do have something else I want to inform everyone about, so after tomorrow's ceremony, can you help gather some alchemists or doctors somewhere?" Alex asked.

"Sure," The Emperor said.

He then asked about various things relating to the beast realm and Alex's experience in the other empire.

Alex told them what he thought was okay and kept the rest for himself.

Once they were done, the Emperor left with the princess, while the princess remained behind to speak with him.

"You don't seem to have aged a day," she said.

"Neither did you, princess Wuying," Alex said.

"I will be 36 this year. If you think I haven't changed, then you should get some special eyes skills and look again," she said jokingly.

Alex simply scratched his head, not knowing what to say.

"Anyway, welcome back," she said. "Are you returning for good?"

Alex shook his head. "Just a few months. I will need to be back before long," he said.

"I see," the princess said. "I hope you enjoy what little time you have here."

Alex went back to his room and early the next morning, the there of them went to the award ceremony for the competition.

There Alex introduced his mother to his master, elders, and friends.

"Thank you all for taking care of my son while he was all alone. He didn't really have much knowledge outside of his house, so it must have been quite hard for you all," Helen said.

"No... well, yes. It was hard to take care of him as common sense didn't apply to him, but he's a quick learned," Wen Cheng said.

"Master!" Pearl spoke up, surprising everyone in the surroundings as he jumped onto Wen Cheng.

"Pearl? You can speak?" Wen Cheng was surprised. "You've grown so much."

"Uh-huh," Pearl said.

Alex ignored them and looked towards the stage as the Emperor arrived and made a special announcement now that the ceremony for the award had ended.

"We have a special guest that had something to say to you all," the Emperor said as he looked toward Alex.

Alex nodded and jumped onto the stage, surprising his mother as he hadn't told her what he was doing.

Alex looked at the crowd and didn't know how to address them exactly, so he ignored the number and started explaining what he was going to talk about as if there were a single person in front of him.

"What I am going to talk to you, and subsequently show you is known as a medicinal paste. Medicinal pastes are..." Alex started explaining everything about medicinal pastes to them.

The Emperor wasn't sure what was going to be announced but when he did hear what medicinal pastes were and how cheap they were compared to pills, and sometimes even more effective, he was flabbergasted.

Pills that regenerated one's arm were useful, but not many people needed them. Normal pills that cured minor injuries, however, were necessary every single day and would destroy so many ingredients because of the shoddy work.

Now that the medicinal pastes were a thing, the Emperor could only imagine how much improvement there would be in the health sector for his empire.

What was even more impressive was that just about anyone could make this. He could only imagine the impact this would have once it spread throughout the empire.

Alex explained in detail and promised to spread talisman with this exact information soon enough.

When he was off, he gave the talisman with the information about the pastes from how they worked to what the recipes were to the Emperor.

"I'm sorry about the pills, but I can give you this. I hope you are alright with that," Alex said.

"Alright? I'm more than happy," the Emperor said. "You could've asked me for something in return for this, but you just gave it to me for free."

"Thank you, young man," the Emperor said.

"It's fine, your majesty," Alex said. He did think of asking some sort of payment for this, but he couldn't think of anything the emperor could have that he would want.

Spirit stones weren't very useful to him and there wouldn't be many treasures here he could want.

He did have the hope of obtaining the secret technique that could read someone else's mind, but that would mean revealing the fact that he did know about that technique.

Also, the technique stemmed from the Fu clan of the luminance empire, so getting the technique from there was a much better choice.

After everything was said and done, there wasn't anything Alex needed, so he didn't ask for anything.

Once the ceremony was done, the sects started to leave one by one.

The Tiger sect and the Hong Wu sect left as well, and along with them left Alex and Helen.

Chapter 767 Returning to the Hong Wu sect

Alex and Helen on the other hand went along with the two sects back to Scarlet city.

Liu Xun looked a few years older than he did before as he stood outside where the ship landed.

Alex gave a bright smile from atop when he saw him. As soon as he disembarked, he immediately went up to Liu Xun and opened his arms for a hug.

Liu Xin gave Alex a big hug before slapping him on the back, telling him how proud he was of his little brother.

"You've already beat me in cultivation, haven't you?" Liu Xin asked.

"What are you saying, brother? I could never beat you," Alex said.

"Don't try to suck up to me. Master told me how strong you are now," Liu Xin said.

Alex's elder brother was now at True Lord 9th realm. 10 years ago when Alex left them, he was in the early realms of True Master. So he hadn't improved by much when compared normally.

Alex then met up with Du Yuhan who was an elder. Their conversation consisted of just a simple greeting followed by a look of understanding of each other's strengths.

Du Yuhan was now in the early True Lord realm, so in a few years, he would reach the True King realm too.

After they were done talking, Alex took his mother over to the Hong Wu sect.

Alex stood in front of the sect gate and looked at it with a face full of nostalgia.

Having been informed of his arrival, Lang Shun came flying over to the gate. Even after seeing him, he couldn't believe that Alex was back.

"Martial Nephew? You really are back," he said.

"Martial Uncle, I hope you're doing well," Alex said.

"So-so," Lang Shun said. "This is?"

"This is my mother, Hei Lin. Mother, this is my master's disciple brother, Lang Shun," Alex introduced them.

"Thank you for taking care of my son," Helen spoke.

"It was our pleasure, miss," Lang Shun said. He was internally surprised at how strong his mother was.

Lang Shun had by now entered the True King realm, but he had done it after a long time and had only done so a few months ago.

So, he was surprised that Alex's mother was stronger than him by a realm. 'Like son like mother,' he thought.

"Please come in," Lang Shun said and took them inside.

Alex walked through the outer disciple mountain and arrived at the sect valley. However, he was surprised at how packed it was.

"The sect really grew a lot in my absence, didn't it?" he asked.

"This is nothing," Lang Shun said. "After we started taking in normal non-alchemy disciples, the mountains weren't enough to keep them."

"Now, two of the mountains are for the outer sect, and one is for the inner sect," Lang Shun explained.

"Where are the core disciples?" Alex asked.

"We call it the Core region of the sect, but it's the Forbidden Fields. Now that Qi has returned, that area has become exceptionally amazing for the main parts of the sect," Lang Shun said.

Alex came to understand quite a bit about the changes. Similar to the Tiger sect, the sect valley had multiple stages and training grounds for normal disciples to train.

Outside of the main halls, every other location in the valley was stripped away as it was unnecessary.

Alex saw the many disciples fight and couldn't help but wonder if he would have ever joined the Tiger sect had the Hong Wu sect had this as well.

"So the new disciples aren't that great yet?" Alex asked.

"No, but they're improving. In a year or two, they should be able to prove themselves in the competitions," Lang Shun said.

The disciples greeted Lang Shun as he was one of the more important elders now. "Where's Grandmaster?" Alex asked. "I was hoping to meet him too."

"Master won't be able to see you now," Lang Shun said. "He's entered his final closed cultivation."

"Final... closed cultivation?" Alex asked with shock.

Lang Shun nodded. "After sister died, and then you left, Master forced himself to work very hard. As such, he ended up overworking himself very soon and went through Qi deviation."

"He tried to recover but there was nothing he could do as his longevity was already ending."

"As such, exactly 6 years ago, he entered his final closed cultivation to try and break through to the True Emperor realm."

"If he succeeds, he can live for just that much longer. If he doesn't... well, let's just hope he does," Lang Shun said.

"Can you visit him?" Alex asked.

"Um, we aren't allowed to unless there is an emergency," Lang Shun said.

"What if I had a pill that would help him break through to the True Emperor realm? Would you take it to him?" Alex asked.

"I don't know how much that would help. He's tried every type of pills he could find," Lang Shun said.

"Mine is a little special. It has better harmony than most of the pills he most likely ate," Alex said. "I am sure it will improve his chances by a lot."

"Well... if you say so," Lang Shun said.

Alex quickly brought out a few pills and handed them over to Lang Shun. "If grandmaster eats these 4 pills he will have a much higher chance of breaking through," Alex said.

"What about this 5th pill?" Lang Shun asked as he picked it up.

"That's for you," Alex said. "It's to regrow your leg."

"Regrow my leg?" Lang Shun looked confused. "That's not possible."

"Is it not?" Alex asked while showing his left arm.

Lang Shun didn't realize what he was doing until he remembered what he was looking at.

"Your arm! It's back?" he asked in surprise.

"Yes, thanks to that pill," Alex said. "You should eat it quickly."

"Do you have more? There are so many more elders that will need it," Lang Shun said.

"Yes, I have many," Alex said.

"Good, we should start distributing it to everyone. How much do you take for it? I will speak with the sect leader to open up the treasury," Lang Shun said.

"Martial uncle, do you really expect me to take compensation for helping you?" Alex asked. "I brought it all just for you. Take it."

"A-are you sure? Pills that can regrow limbs should be very rare," Lang Shun said.

"Don't worry. I have a recipe with me that I will share with you. Then you too will be able to make these pills," Alex said.

"I can't wait to eat this then. Come on, let's hurry," Lang Shun said and took Alex over to the Elder's hall.

Helen on the other hand walked around the sect, looking at the various things.

After entering the hall, Lang Shun quickly went to an empty room and took off his fake leg. Then, without waiting, he ate the pill.

5 minutes later, he was full of tears and had 1 more leg than he did before.

"Thank you, martial nephew," Lang Shun said. "I would have never imagined I would be able to get my leg back at all."

Chapter 768 Changes in the Hong Wu sect

Zhou Mei sat close by as her lecture would start not long after Wan Li's ended.

Alex arrived at the location and sat down at the end of the open area. His grayish blue robes somehow helped him not be noticeable in the sea of green.

Still, both Zhou Mei and Wan Li looked at him with surprise.

Wan Li tried to teach the disciples, but his eyes kept darting over to Alex, and was unable to continue for much longer.

"What the hell?" Wan Li shouted as he walked over to Alex. "Am I seeing this correctly? Zhou Mei, are you seeing this?"

"It seems the sect's best disciple has returned," Zhou Mei said.

Wan Li was now much older and seemed to have lost his timid persona, while Zhou Mei now looked like a girl in her mid-20s that had just blossomed to be an adult.

"What do you mean by 'the best disciple'?" Alex asked.

"That's what most people call you after learning about the number you pulled in the competition that year," Wan Li said.

"60%? The disciples think that is amazing huh?" Alex asked.

"Are you trying to show off?" Zhou Mei asked.

"Not in the slightest," Alex said. "It's good to see you two are doing well. I mean, at least one of you is."

Alex gestured towards Wan Li's missing leg.

"Yeah, don't mind it. I'll find a puppet leg soon," he said.

"I don't remember you losing a leg the last time I left you. What happened?" Alex asked.

"Some things I don't want to talk about," Wan Li said.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "You got your revenge?" he asked.

Wan Li's eyes flashed. "Absolutely," he said.

"Doesn't help much, does it?" Alex asked.

Wan Li gritted his teeth and shook his head.

Alex shook his head too. "Revenge brings justice to the dead and only more pain to the living," he said.

He then brought out a pill and tossed it over to Wan Li. "For your leg," he said.

Wan Li caught the pill and looked confused. Alex quickly explained what it was.

"Are you serious?" Wan Li asked.

"At least you can be happy now that you didn't lose yourself in your revenge," Alex said.

"How did you find this?" Wan Li asked.

"Find? I made it myself," Alex said. "I will teach you how to make it later. Just eat it for now."

Wan Li nodded and ate the pill. A while later, he was standing on both feet without the need for the two support.

Zhou Mei was surprised and started asking Alex for the recipe, but Alex promised to give it to them altogether.

Fan Ruogang arrived there too and started telling them and bunch of things. A few other young elders came too and they introduced Alex to them.

When they realized who exactly he was, they became quite talkative. These elders had been students around the time when Ma Rong was alive, so they knew who Alex was.

They talked for a while before Zhou Mei had to go teach. At that time, Alex decided to leave and go roam the sect.

He walked through the forbidden fields that were no longer such a hard spot. There were houses carved into the side of the cliff with the fruits growing near them.

The grass field was left intact but with less grass overall. Alex went up to the river and saw that the desert had changed quite a bit.

For one, it was no longer a desert, but just a place with some grass growing here and there. In a few years, what remained of the desert would disappear and soon this too would be a massive open field just like any other place in the empire.

Alex wondered who owned this place at that time. Would it be the Hong Wu sect or perhaps the empire?

After roaming around, he met up with his mother who was with his Martial Uncle, talking about Alex's life.

"Are we leaving?" she asked.

"No, I have one more thing to do," Alex said. "Martial Uncle, can you help me get into the garden."

"Yes, let me take you there," Lang Shun said and walked on his own two feet.

"I'll be back in a bit," Alex said to his mother and walked away with Lang Shun. When they reached the Alchemy garden on the right side, Alex instantly noticed the thick Yin in the air.

Of course, this was nowhere as thick as the Icy hell, but for a place that was originally concentrated with Yang, this was almost a miracle.

"It might be a little uncomfortable now that the Yin Gathering tree had grown so much, but bear with it," Lang Shun said.

"I'm fine," Alex said. He didn't even feel anything really. It was only his closeness with Yin now that he even noticed it.

As he walked through, he was surprised to see some core disciples walking through the mountain. Almost all of them were females too.

"Are they the ones picking up the ingredients now?" Alex asked.

"Oh no, they just take care of it in exchange for being allowed to cultivate here. Given that this is a haven for most girls with even the slightest bit of Yin root, they go to great length at being here," Lang Shun said.

Alex looked around. "It doesn't look like they're taking really good care of the plants though," he said. "You should get rid of that Green Serpent's thorn vine before it messes with the Frost Bellflower. That Firemoss should be cleaned off or the Morning's Dew plant should be moved away. They will destroy each other soon."

As he went along, Alex told Lang Shun the mistakes that he saw along the way that completely shocked him.

"You know so much already?" Lang Shun asked.

"I learned it from an expert gardener in the Royal palace," Alex said. "Royal palace of the other empire I mean."

"You already got in touch with the royal family of the other empire too?" Lang Shun asked.

"Not of my own merit," Alex said. "I just got lucky."

They reached the top of the mountain where a considerably small tree stood resolute. It was maybe 5 meters tall at best, so it still had a lot of growing to do.

Still, it was something alright. Alex ignored the tree and looked next to it on the headstone that was properly cleaned and could thus read it well.

His master rested here.

"Sister, look who's back," Lang Shun spoke up first. "Your disciple has returned after over 10 years, and he's managed to beat the both of us in terms of how far he's gone."

He then turned to Alex. "I'm sure you have a lot to say, so I'll leave you alone," he said and lightly slapped Alex's back before walking away.

Alex watched Lang Shun walk away and finally sat down in front of his master's grave.

"Hey, master," he spoke. "I hope you're doing well."

Chapter 769 Revisiting the Library

The one-sided conversation included Alex talking about the various experiences and the knowledge Alex had gained throughout the years.

There was no one to speak back to him, but he continued talking for nearly 15 minutes.

He felt like a weight had been lifted off of him. Like he did something to help himself connect back to his roots, instead of forgetting it.

He wasn't sure why, but he felt like this would improve his chances of a breakthrough now that he had come here.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense around the grave and sensed a weak life force on the other side of the tree.

His master's beast companion, the snake was resting calmly behind the tree.

Alex smiled and stood up to leave. However, before he did so, he thought he should do something for the tree, for his master's sake.

He stood next to the tree and placed his hand on it. Then, he closed his eyes and started cultivating the Winter Moon technique.

Deep and cold Yin Qi flowed out of his naval area, nearly turning his skin blue. As it flower around his body, little by little, he poured some of it into the tree to help it.

The tree graciously accepted the Yin and Alex increased his input a bit more.

After a certain amount of time, the tree's third for Qi ended, and Alex slowed down his input until completely stopped his Qi circulation.

After that, he left the garden and arrived outside to see Lang Shun waiting for him.

"Come, the sect leader wants to meet you," he said.

Alex went to the sect leader's mountain, walking through the familiar yet different sceneries.

He saw his old house to the side, now occupied by someone based on his Spiritual sense.

He wanted to visit that house, but that was no longer his. He only just realized how much he had moved on from this place.

But that was what he was taught since childhood. To not be held back by something as fickle as emotions. No matter what, he had to keep moving forward.

Alex reached the sect master's house. This house looked completely different from what his master used to live in. After its destruction, it seemed they had decided to make some improvements.

Alex went into the house and met with the dark-haired, middle-aged man that was the new sect leader.

Alex remembered seeing this man, but he had never interacted with him, so this was in a way his first encounter.

"Greetings, fellow Daoist," the man said.

Alex greeted him back. It felt weird being greeted as equal rather than a junior. While Alex had been giving off some of his True King cultivation base's aura, he still expected to be treated like a disciple.

Seeing the sect leader refer to him as a 'fellow' took him aback a bit.

The man remembered Alex being talented, so he wanted to know how far he had come.

Alex didn't hide much, but he also didn't bother showing off much. So he simply told the man that he was a True Heaven alchemist and nothing more.

The sect leader was mostly interested in learning if Alex had new recipes and knowledge from the other empire he had gone to and wanted to know if he was willing to sell it to the sect.

Alex thought for a bit and said yes. He would sell a few of the new pill recipes he had, but instead of spirit stones, he wanted a book from the library.

"From our library? Sure," the sect leader said. No matter what book Alex got, it would never be as expensive as the recipes he would get, so he was totally up for it.

"I will pass along the recipe through some teachings I want to do for the disciples if you are okay with it," Alex said.

"Sure," the sect leader was more than happy to accept Alex's knowledge.

Once they finished talking, they walked out of the sect leader's house and walked down the mountain.

"Why did you give up so much for practically nothing?" Lang Shun asked.

Alex shook his head. "I care too much about the sect to care about giving things away for free," he said. "I was already planning to spread a few recipes here and there. Now I will get a technique in return," he said.

"What technique could possibly be worth so many new recipes?" Lang Shun asked.

"Well, there is one," Alex said as he walked towards the library. Along the way, he met up with his mother and took her along as well.

Once they reached the library, Alex was allowed free entry throughout the many floors of the library, but Alex didn't need much of it.

He quickly went to the place where they kept the Earth rank technique books and found the Mortal ranked book he was looking for.

"Here, mother. This is for you," he said.

"For me?" Helen was surprised. "What is it?"

She took hold of the old, rugged book and flipped to the first page before reading its name. "Flame Mastery Scripture? I think I've heard of this name before, haven't I?" she asked.

"It's the fire skill book I told you about that helps so much with handling flame during Alchemy," Alex said.

He poured a little Yang Qi into the book to test and as he had expected, the seal on it came undone.

Helen sat down right there and started reading it. Lang Shun was shocked to see the seal gone, but he simply assumed that Alex had learned some special techniques that worked on seals.

"She doesn't have to read it here," Lang Shun said. "She can take it back."

"No need, Martial Uncle. It won't take long," Alex said.

Helen closed the book not even a few seconds later and closed her eyes to read through her memories.

About 5 minutes later, she opened her eyes, completely learning the Flame Mastery Scripture. Or so Alex thought.

"I don't think I know the last bit of the language," she said.

"Sorry?" Alex said and took the book before reading through it himself.

The first level of the technique helped control the shape and temperature of the fire.

The second level gave more control over how fluid the shape and temperature were while allowing one to create fire on their own. This level of the technique made it an Earth rank technique, which was why this book was kept amidst the Earth rank techniques.

Looking at only the descriptions that would pop up on the screen, Alex would've never known this when he was a player.

Finally, the third and last level of the technique gave the user control over Fire Qi itself and could even help them wrestle control of it from someone else so long as their Qi was strong enough.

Furthermore, to Alex's surprise, there was a flame technique in there that slowly improved one's Fire spirit root if used for a long time. Granted, it seemed one needed to find fire treasures to do so.

The better the fire treasure was, the better it would improve one's roots.

This came as a big surprise to Alex as he had never expected something like that to be possible. However, when he thought about it, using elemental treasures was the way to improve one's spiritual roots.

Alex tried to recall the technique he just read, but he couldn't at all. It was like there was a part of his mind that was locked away from the rest of it.

'Is the technique stopping me from learning how to use it?' Alex thought. He read the book again to see what it wrote and only now did he realize that it was written in the Human language, rather than the demon language everyone was used to.

"No wonder you couldn't read the third part," Alex said. "I think there's a way to read this. I will try and ask sister Yao Jia for the language books. She should be able to help us."

"Still, you can only use the first two parts, for now, so you're not really missing anything," Alex said.

"Yes, I think I did understand the first two techniques," Helen said.

Alex looked through the book one last time before keeping it back on the shelf and walking out.

"Let us return now."

Chapter 770 Guest Elders

After going in, Alex was immediately taken away to the Sect Leader's mansion where his master and the sect leader were waiting for him to arrive.

"You're finally here," Wen Cheng said, his original pride and attitude returning back to him.

"What is it, master?" Alex asked.

"I wanted to ask you something," Wen Cheng said. " You aren't back forever right?"

"No, just a month or two," Alex said. "3 at best."

"Sigh, I guessed so," Wen Cheng said. "I assume you will be staying here in the meantime, or do you want to stay in the Hong Wu sect?"

"I will be staying here," Alex said. "I will go there to teach a few things about Alchemy from time to time, but aside from that, I don't see myself spending too much time there,"

"So, here's what were were thinking," Wen Cheng said. "Since you are going to stay here, why don't you become a guest elder?"

Alex thought for a bit and said, "I can do that. Also, why don't you make my mother a guest elder at the same time?"

"Your mother? She won't have to worry about where she is staying with you being a guest elder," Wen Cheng said.

"No," Alex chuckled a bit. "I was thinking you could make her a guest elder so she can do something. Maybe give her a job in the market outside. She is a True Immortal Talisman expert, you know."

"What?" both Wen Cheng and the sect leader showed incredulous faces when they heard that.

"True Immortal? Is that even true?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Did I not mention it to you already?"

"You only told us that she was a Talisman maker," Wen Cheng said. "If she's truly as good as you say then it would be our honor to have her be our guest elder."

"Yes, yes," the sect leader added.

Alex smiled and quickly brought his mother to speak about the various things.

"I don't mind it," she said. "In fact I was worried I would be a little bored."

"Alright, that settles it then. Starting today, Sister Hei, and Young Yu will become the Tiger Sect's guest elders," the sect leader called.

The sect leader sent a message and soon Du Yuhan came to see him. He was informed on what had happened and was then sent to show them their new place of stay.

"Come with me," he said and walked out of the mansion before going behind the mountain to jump off of the cliff towards the elder's living area.

Alex remembered this place on the back of the mountain where the elders lived. This was also where the treasury was where he got the Five Yang Divine Path, the Yang clone skill, and the silver stone that later became a silver mountain in his mind.

"This will be your living quarters from now on," Du Yuhan said as he pointed to two houses there.

"You can rest if you want to. The sun is already going down so you can start tomorrow," Du Yuhan said.

"Okay," Helen said.

"Go rest, mother. I want to see a bit more of the sect for now," Alex said and left with Du Yuhan.

As the last rays of the sun left, the lanterns around the sect crater started glowing giving a familiar and nostalgic look to the entire area.

Alex heard sounds of shouting and fighting in the stage all over the sect crater.

"How's your cultivation going?" Du Yuhan made casual conversation.

"It's going fine," Alex said. "What about you?"

"Not bad I suppose," Du Yuhan said. "How's your sword Intent?"

"Great, I got Sword Qi now. Although I haven't improved upon it in a while now," Alex said.

"You have Sword Qi?" Du Yuhan asked with surprise.

"Yes," Alex said as he flicked his finger, sending out a Sword Qi into the sky.

"You really are gifted in the way of sword," Du Yuhan said.

Alex didn't say anything and soon silence fell between them.

"Oh right, what should I do if I want to become a referee for these fights?" Alex asked.

"You don't have to, but if you want to, you can come around early next morning to the Elder's Hall and register yourself," Du Yuhan said.

"I will," Alex said.

Alex continued walking around the crater, going through the different place, until he came upon the stone stele again.

Alex wanted to read it, but there was no point in reading it anymore now that he knew the content. Not only that, he didn't want the backlash he got every time he read it.

Although, it did remind him that he hadn't been training in this technique for quite a while now. 'I will not only need to train in this, but I also need to learn the language from sister Jia and translate this for my mother and the rest,' he thought.

After it truly became dark, Du Yuhan left to train his junior brother, while Alex roamed the sect on his own until he met up with his elder brother.

The two of them talked for a while and returned back to the elder's are together.

Alex returned back to his room and lay on his bed. It felt weird coming back to the sect. Over 10 years had passed, and he was but a blink in the eyes of many here.

Still, he was surprised how much they remembered him. He really had made an impact on many of the people here.

After thinking so for a while, Alex stood back up and brought out some pill bottles.

He checked the pills inside and there were exactly 7 of those.

Alex frowned a little. He needed to now make decisions on who to give the pill and who not to.

Anyone who got the pill would advance quite a lot further than those who didn't. After all, this was the pill that would massively improve their Earth Spiritual roots.

Alex started making a mental note of who he absolutely had to give the pill to.

His master, his senior brother and sister, and his Martial uncle.

After those four came the tricky part. There was Zhou Mei, Fan Ruogang, Du Yuhan, Kong Yuhan, Zhou Mi, Luo Xing, and others.

Alex didn't plan to give it to Wan Li for two reasons. One, he was already had a superior Earth Spiritual root. He was the owner of Earth and Fire spiritual roots after all.

Even if he didn't, Wan Li had now destroyed his cultivation base by reaching True Emperor too soon, and the pill didn't work on those that were in the True Emperor.

It did seem like Wan Li had started stabilizing his cultivation base now that he had gotten his revenge over the Huo family that killed his parents, so there was a chance he could still reach the Saint realm if he went on steadily.

'I should maybe check their Spiritual roots and see if they have any need for it,' Alex thought. 'Yes, that is what I should do.'

"For now, let's breakthrough."

Chapter 771 Testing Spiritual Roots again

Pearl was still cultivating and there were cuts all over his body, but they didn't hurt him at all. After all, his body cultivation had already exceeded Pearl's own cultivation thanks to the clash of yang and yin.

"True King 7th realm," he thought to himself. "3 more breakthroughs and I enter the True Emperor realm as well."

When that happened, Alex wondered if he would be the strongest under the Saint realm.

'Probably not,' he thought. There was too much of a gap between the True Emperor realms themselves due to the existence of Saint Qi.

Alex woke Pearl up from the cultivation and went over to the Elder's hall to register himself as a referee.

He got the 9 to 3 schedule for Stage 12 and was handed a talisman that was used to keep track of the fighters.

Once it was time, disciples came in one by one to fight.

Alex called out the first fighters and watched them come aboard the stage. He then took their two badges, 332 and 1432.

That was quite a bit of a gap in numbers, but their cultivation was about equal so Alex watched the fight carefully.

As the fight started, he watched carefully so that he could intervene whenever needed. However, there wasn't any need to.

The person with the 332 badge won easily to his surprise and only then did Alex realize that the challenger had most likely increased his cultivation base too fast.

Once the match was over, he handed back the badges and commenced the next match.

Half a day went by before Alex realized how boring this task was. Watching Organ tempering realm cultivators fight didn't bring him the same excitement as when he himself was in that realm.

After his time was over, Alex promised himself to never go through that again.

As he walked away from the location, he saw Du Yuhan walk out too.

"Brother Du, wait up," he said, catching his attention and arriving next to him.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Do you have some time? I need you for something," Alex said.

"I... I have about an hour free right now. What do you need?" he asked.

"Is there any empty location we can go to? A place where people won't disturb us?" he asked.

"Uhh... we can go to my master's training hall," Du Yuhan said.

"Yes, that will work. Let's go there," Alex said.

The two of the went to the Training Hall and Alex pulled out a formation plate from his storage bag.

"What's that?" Du Yuhan asked.

"It's... you'll see," Alex said as he set up the formation.

When the formation activated, a white fog streamed out of the plate.

"What's this?" Du Yuhan asked.

"It's a formation to test your spiritual roots," Alex said. "It's much better than the ones you will find here."

"Is that so?" Du Yuhan said. "And... do you want me to test here?"

"Yes," Alex said. "Just place your palm on the plate and take in the Qi it gives you before sending it back out."

"I... I have trash roots, you know," Du Yuhan said. That was the main reason why he became a swordsman in the first place. With bad roots, there was no other option for him.

"I know," Alex said. "I'm actually kinda hoping you are correct. Let's test it just to be sure. This will show more."

"Sigh, fine," Du Yuhan said and placed his palm on the plate. Half a minute later, he finished the test.

As soon as he released the Qi he had taken in, the white fog suddenly changed color.

Red, green, blue, gold, and brown. The five colors flew about, but none were vibrant at all.

"You really do have inferior five roots," Alex said as he looked at the colors.

"I know," Du Yuhan got dejected.

"No, that's a good thing," Alex said. "That means you have a chance to improve them and gain Dao of those 5 elements."

"Dao? Improve? What do you mean?" Du Yuhan asked.

Alex brought out a pill bottle as he was certain now that Du Yuhan needed one. "Eat this pill and cultivate," he said. "I will explain everything later."

Du Yuhan hesitated for a bit, but accepted the pill in the end and ate it.

As he sat down to cultivate, Alex placed his own palm on the formation plate and closed his eyes to circulate.

Pearl's head popped up from Alex's robes as he watched the white fog curiously.

After Alex finished circulating the Qi, he sent it back to the formation plate and the fog changed colors.

Red, Green, Blue, Gold, and Brown were obviously there, but Yellow and black floated along as well.

Gold and Yellow were so vibrant that they were easily distinguishable. The Black was the most vibrant after those two, but could never reach their level.

Red and Brown were of the same vibrancy coming after the Black.

Blue and Green on the other hand were weak, almost the same as Du Yuhan's own Spiritual roots.

'I need ways to improve my Water and Wood roots,' Alex thought. He placed a hand on his chin as he started thinking about what he could do.

Could he make an all Water, or all Wood element pill and eat it? Would that work?

Or would he have to go find the Blood Essence of the legendary beasts and eat those like he did with the White Tiger's Blood Essence?

Or maybe there were some techniques like he received yesterday for the Fire roots?

Whatever it was, Alex wanted to get those soon enough.

Just as he was thinking that he noticed something golden out of the corner of his eyes. His focus wavered from his thought as he was pulled back to reality.

"What are you doing?" Alex asked Pearl who had his paw on the formation.

"Same thing as you," Pearl said.

"Are you checking your spiritual roots?" Alex asked with a bit of a chuckle in his voice.

"Yes," Pearl said.

"You don't need to," Alex explained. "You have the White Tiger's bloodline, meaning you will only have Metal—"

Alex's words stopped in his mouth as he saw something in the fog down below.

The golden fog moved around as he had expected, but out from it also moved some green. While the gold overshadowed it, the green was still very visible to Alex.

"What the hell?" Alex couldn't help but shout in surprise. "How do you have Wood spiritual roots?"

"Is that bad?" Pearl asked.

"No, no, that's great... but I can't understand why you would have it," Alex said. "All White Tigers are supposed to only have Metal roots. That's what Lady Ren told me."

Alex suddenly sent out his spiritual sense and noticed the Jaguar's senses on them. A few seconds later, the Jaguar was in the room.

"You know about this?" he asked the jaguar.

"We indeed learned about his roots back when you were gone," the jaguar said.

"How is this possible?" Alex asked. "This is different from what I was led to believe."

"We believed what you believed too. We had to see to find out as well," the jaguar said. "But we believe there is a simple explanation for this."

"What explanation?" Alex asked.

"We think he got the Wood root from his father."

Chapter 772 Reason for Leaving

"Yes," the jaguar said. "We have no idea who his father was. Since it couldn't have possibly come from his mother's side, we are left to believe the little Wood spiritual root is from his father."

"Are you sure it couldn't have come from his mother's side? Isn't it possible that his mother had Wood spiritual root given that she wasn't a White Tiger?" Alex asked.

The jaguar shook his head. "When the young lady married over 5 thousand years ago, she had some blood of the White Tiger in her giving her only Metal roots. As such, we made sure that her partner also didn't have any other bloodline that would conflict with her just in case."

"Given that we were unable to have the same influence over his mother's marriage, we are left to believe that she got together with someone with a Wood spiritual root and that was passed along to her," the jaguar said.

"I see," Alex said. "I guess I would've known this much earlier had I bothered to check his spiritual roots. Not only that, but I also never really bothered finding techniques for him to properly learn."

When Alex really thought about it, he himself needed some Wood techniques that weren't just usable with swords.

"Thank you for telling me this," Alex said and the jaguar left.

Du Yuhan got up from his cultivation not long after and looked at him weirdly.

"What did you do to me?" he asked.

"Test it again," Alex pointed to the formation plate.

Du Yuhan suspected what was up, but he couldn't believe it at all. Even as he placed his palm on the formation plate and started testing it, there was really just a single hope that he wouldn't be disappointed.

All his life, he had been told that his spiritual roots were trash and therefore any techniques he learned would be trash too.

He had learned the sword because it didn't require one to have good spiritual roots, but he still got jealous of others when he saw them use colorful attacks at each other.

So, when the colorful fog rose up and the brown color in it was especially vibrant, he couldn't help but tear up a little.

"My Earth spiritual root got improved?" he asked softly.

"Yes, that was what the pill does. It's still not very good and can be improved a lot more I believe, but it—"

"No, this is more than amazing already," Du Yuhan said as he stood up from the formation plate.

"Thank you," he said.

"No problem," Alex said. He then put away the formation and turned to leave.

However, Du Yuhan stopped him. "Wait, I have a request," he said.

Alex turned around. "Yes?" he asked.

"Will you fight me?" Du Yuhan asked.

"Fight you?" Alex was surprised. Du Yuhan was barely in the True Lord realm so he was still far from being Alex's match, but since he had requested...

"Sure," Alex said.

Alex let Pearl go to the corner and got ready for the fight himself.

"Use your sword. I want to see your Sword Qi," Du Yuhan said.

"Okay," Alex said and brought out a random sword he had received from the various people as gift.

"You can start," Alex said.

Du Yuhan nodded and dashed towards Alex to slash at him with his sword. He made a vertical slash that came down upon Alex.

Alex swiftly moved his sword above him and parried the sword away.

Du Yuhan let the sword come at Alex horizontally, but Alex simply put his sword to the side and blocked.

Du Yuhan then took some steps back and his sword started glowing white. He cut in front of him and a white sword slash flew toward Alex.

Alex could feel the intent behind the sword attack, the will to cut anything in its path. It was extraordinary.

The power behind the sword was equivalent to that of a mid True Lord realm. Alex sent out his own Sword Qi slash that destroyed the incoming attack and even went ahead to attack Du Yuhan with its remaining power.

Du Yuhan had to dodge away to survive the attack.

"You held back?" Alex asked Du Yuhan.

Du Yuhan nodded.

"Why don't you bring out all of your power?" Alex asked.

"My body can't handle more than a few attacks if I do so," he said. "The backlash is always way too strong."

"I see," Alex said. "Still, I hope you will show it."

The fight continued for a while longer as Alex tested Du Yuhan's skills and power while attacking back with a power that he could barely handle.

During the battle, Du Yuhan revealed his true powers which came close to being around the early True King realm.

"Let's stop," Du Yuhan said as his right arm trembled from having to use that much force.

Alex felt like he understood what was happening. 'He's too powerful for his own good,' he thought.

Similar things happened to him with his explosion if he wasn't careful in regulating how much power he put into the explosion too.

"Alright, I will leave now," Alex said and called Pearl.

"Actually, I have one more question," Du Yuhan said.

"What is it?" Alex asked.

"Are you not going to meet with Luo Mei?" he asked.

"I am," Alex said. "I was planning on going to surprise her in a couple of days. I just have a few things I need to take care of here and in the Hong Wu sect. I will leave after that."

"When you do leave... umm... can I come with you?" he asked.

"With me? Sure, I don't mind," Alex asked.

"Thank you. I really need to meet with her," he said.

"I don't see why you had to go with me if you really needed to meet her," Alex said.

Du Yuhan shook his head with a self-mocking smile. "I don't think she would ever talk with me if I went there alone," he said.

"Oh, why not?" Alex asked.

Du Yuhan hesitated a bit before asking, "Do you know why she's not in the sect anymore?"

Alex gave a curious look and said, "isn't it because she wants to help her parents and their business? That's what master told me."

"That's what she tells everyone," Du Yuhan said.

"Oh, what's the truth then?" Alex asked.

"The truth is... she left because of me," Du Yuhan said.

"Because of you?" Alex asked. "What did you do?"

"I... I asked her to marry me," Du Yuhan said.

Alex felt his mind go blank for a second before everything came back to him. "You asked her to marry you? Wait, are you guys a couple?"

Du Yuhan gave a scoff as he said, "we were until I did that. Then she just packed up and left."

"Did... did she give any reason?" Alex asked.

"She did," he said. "She said her parents wouldn't approve of this since I was an orphan."

"Well that's bullshit," Alex said.

"Exactly. Which is why I want to learn the real reason, but she won't talk to me, even when I went to meet her," Du Yuhan said. "I... I just wish she would just tell me why she left."

"Whether it was because she was already promised to someone, or if someone else caught her eyes. I am willing to not bother her if she had any valid reasons, but she never gave me a single one. Even after we were in together for nearly 3 years," Du Yuhan said.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "yes, you deserve an answer. With me along, she can't ignore you. At the very least, if she has lost her love for you, you can find some semblance of closure from this."

"Thank you," Du Yuhan said.

"Now, tell me all about how this happened. I'm curious to learn of it," Alex asked.

As it turned out, Du Yuhan had always been in love with Luo Mei since they were mere Inner sect disciples. While he was focused on his own thing, he also worked towards her love.

Once Alex was taken away to the beast's realm, Luo Mei had asked Du Yuhan for his help and since then he had managed to form a bond with her, which slowly improved into a close friendship that ended up with both of them falling in love.

Alex was surprised that he was somewhat responsible for these two finding love.

Chapter 773 Alchemy Lesson

So, he had to take a detour before going over to the sect.

Fu Wen was curious about his parents as any child would be after not seeing them for over 10 years, but Alex had no information on them so he was a little disappointed.

He now had a 3-year-old child and desperately wanted them to meet their granddaughter.

"Are you going back?" Fu Wen asked.

"In a few months, yes," Alex said.

"Can you take us too?" Fu Wen asked.

"Um, what about the city?" Alex asked.

"My uncle will manage it. There are way too many of our family members out there for us to worry about this part," Fu Wen said.

"Uhh, sure then. You can come with us," Alex said.

"Thank you," Fu Wen said. He asked a bit more about the Empire on the other side and was happy to know that it wasn't some barbaric land his parents had gone to.

Once he was done there, Alex finally went over to the sect where everyone was already gathered as per his request.

It wasn't just the Core disciples and elders, but also the Inner disciples as well as Outer disciples, so in total there were nearly 6 thousand people gathered in the Forbidden Fields grassland.

Once Alex recognized that it was time, he started off by teaching about medicinal pastes.

The elders had already come to hear about the pastes and were curious as to what it was. So, when Alex started teaching them they were more than eager to learn about it.

In just a few minutes, Alex managed to teach them exactly what the pastes were. As for the more minute details, he had it written on a talisman for the sect to distribute on its own time.

After that, he moved on to Alchemy and started teaching them what he had learned.

Without spiritual sense, many of the concepts he taught would go over the head of almost everyone here. But if they could understand even the tiniest bit and keep it with them until they managed to acquire spiritual sense somehow, they would immediately find themselves much better than they were before.

Concepts like Combination and Structure could be hard to understand for them, but concepts, like not wasting time in between ingredients or using the proper amount of ingredient for each pill, was something they understood.

Alex continued teaching for half an hour, at the end of which he handed out a bunch of recipes, claiming they were better than the ones that were in the sect.

The sect leader accepted them and would then replicate them for the disciples.

As for the pill to heal one's missing body parts, Alex decided to teach that to only a few select groups of people.

As such, once the lecture ended, he found Lang Shun, Wan Li, Zhou Mei, Zhou Mi, Kong Yuhan and Fan Ruogang, and brought them to a secluded location.

"Can you guys first test your Spiritual roots here?" Alex asked of them all.

"Okay," they said and one by one started testing their Spiritual roots.

Alex watched carefully as he needed to select 2 more people aside from his Martial uncle.

However, to his surprise, his martial uncle didn't have an Earth spiritual root at all.

'That's a problem,' Alex thought and looked at the rest. As he had expected, Wan Li's Earth spiritual root was really vibrant, perhaps even more so than Alex's own.

Zhou Mei and Zhou Mi had weak Earth spiritual roots themselves, while Fan Ruogang had slightly better ones.

Kong Yuhan too had a strong Earth spiritual root. So, in the end, Alex gave the pills to the 3 girls and was done with it.

He explained what the pill was and why he didn't give it to the rest of them. Once that was done, the girls ate the pill and sat down to cultivate.

In the meantime, Alex answered any questions about Alchemy that the other 3 had from today's lecture.

It was obvious that they would be curious about the information Alex gave out, considering every single person aside from Zhou Mi had a spiritual sense of their own thanks to the Spirit Cleansing Lily Alex had given them.

Once the girls were done with their cultivation and had an improved Spiritual root, Alex started teaching them the recipe to make the pill that could heal everything for anyone below the Saint realm.

At first, they assumed the pill was going to have a simple recipe. However, when they realized they had to do something so drastic as keeping a single ingredient in a bucket of blood for over a month, they were surprised, to say the least.

Not only that, but hearing the constraints on the blood itself, they were truly flabbergasted.

"A bucket of blood for a single pill? How do we find that?" Lang Shun asked.

"From beasts or maybe humans. I understand it's hard, but that's exactly the reason I'm not teaching this recipe to everyone," Alex said. "Not everyone can either get the ingredients and even if they did, they would use some underhanded method to get the blood. This is why I chose you guys because I trust you."

Alex spent perhaps half a day more teaching the small group of people everything he knew and everything they could understand, including Symmetry.

Once he was sure he taught them everything he knew, Alex handed over a technique to his Martial Uncle.

"What's this?" Lang Shun asked.

"A pill forming technique I bought in the other empire. It's one of the best out there, so I hope you can make use of it," Alex said.

"Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations, huh? Sounds fancy," Lang Shun said.

"It better be," Alex said. "That's an Immortal grade technique after all."

"What?" the group looked at him in shock.

"Yeah, so keep it safe," Alex said. "I don't know how long it will take you to learn it, but pass it along once you are done reading."

Given that they had spiritual sense, they could easily remember whatever they read.

"I have taught you guys all I can, so I will leave for now. Martial Uncle, I will come tomorrow to teach about growing plants and taking care of them. Can you help me gather up anyone that is interested?" he asked. "Oh right, those girls that stay in the garden, those should absolutely be there to learn."

"Okay," Lang Shun replied, but his thoughts were still hung up on the book in his hand.

"Don't worry, we'll make sure to do it," Kong Yuhan said.

"I guess I will leave now then," Alex said. "So remember, tomorrow get the disciples and those girls for the gardening lesson."

"After that..." Alex thought to himself. "After that, I might teach you guys about something you will need to know once you enter the Saint realm."

"What? What do we need to know?" Wan Li asked as he was the closest to the Saint realm.

"It's a little something called Dao."

Chapter 774 Changes

Alex was done teaching about plants and Daos, as well as teaching about medicinal pastes for the Tiger sect.

Once he was done overall, he decided to go visit his sister. As she was the only one he had yet to meet, he was a bit too excited about it.

The ship they used flew at such incredible speed that Du Yuhan felt scared about it half the time.

"Should we really be going this fast?" he asked. "Not even the sect's grand ship flies this fast."

"It's fine," Alex said. "Those ships are meant to carry very many people, so they have to be slow in general for stability."

"This one carries 3 people at most so it can go as fast as I can make it go," Alex said.

"Still…" Du Yuhan looked around as the trees blitzed past him.

"Don't worry, we'll be fine," Alex said. "Also, just think about how fast we will reach there. In just a few hours we will be in Rubyroad city," Alex said.

"Yeah… I don't doubt you on that," Du Yuhan said. He was still a little scared about the speed but said nothing as Alex continued to steer it.

Alex felt a little happy that Du Yuhan did come with him as there would be no one else to keep him company while he was here.

Since he was forced to leave his mother alone, Alex let Pearl stay with her as well so that the jaguar would look after her just in case.

"So, this competition you mentioned," Du Yuhan asked, "it's going to have strong fighters right?"

"Yes," Alex said. "It is the biggest competition in the arena in the last 2 decades."

"How strong are these people going to be?" he asked.

"Well, it's for anyone that is below the age of 50, so anyone that counts I suppose," Alex said.

"And what's the general cultivation base of these people that are below 50 years old?" he asked.

"Well… at this time, it should be True Emperor realm," Alex said.

"What about the saint realm? Are there any?" Du Yuhan asked.

Alex shook his head. "No," he said. "There's a certain difficulty in reaching the Saint realm that one cannot do just by breaking through."

"Even if one is at the peak of True Emperor realm, they would need quite a while longer before they are able to enter the Saint realm," Alex said.

"Oh, is there an obstacle?" Du Yuhan asked.

Alex nodded. "To enter the Saint realm, you need to open up your naval area so you can freely access the energy that is stored there."

"Once it is accessed, it becomes the main essence of your cultivation, and that is very hard to achieve from what I've heard."

"So, I think it is unlikely that anyone will enter the Saint realm before this competition," Alex said.

"Oh, so you have a chance then," he said.

"Well, maybe, maybe not. It all depends on how far I can go in the next 9 months. I plan on cultivating with a lot of dedication so I can at least touch the True Emperor realm," Alex said.

"If I can do that, I will finally have a chance."

The two of them talked for a while longer as the sun reached the zenith. Finally, they saw a city far in the distance.

"We're here," Alex said.

Once they got close, the two of them dropped from the ship and walked on foot.

They lined up to enter and soon entered the city itself.

Alex remembered this city. In the city, he had to make pills overnight because there were people dying from the beast attack.

However, nothing of what he remembered remained much around here.

"I don't know if I can even navigate to my sister's house," Alex said. "We might have to ask for directions."

"Don't worry, I know the way. I've been here before remember," Du Yuhan said and took the lead.

Alex's memories returned as he went through the streets. He recognized a clothing shop that used to be a restaurant before. He recognized a blacksmithing place that had now turned into a small general store.

One of the flower shops had turned into a bakery, while the medical shop at the end of the road remained the same.

It felt really weird knowing that 10 years was barely any time for him. All he had done was train a bit, learn a few knowledge, and returned back.

And yet, in that time, so much had changed for the mortals. There was nothing more telling for him about the life he had already left behind.

And he didn't even know it himself.

After a few minutes, Alex stood in front of a familiar white manor. 'If you want something unchanged and untouched over the years, leave it to the cultivators,' he thought.

Alex saw a carriage stop by and a woman got down from it. The moment she did, Alex immediately recognized her.

"Sister Meng!" he called out.

The woman turned around and looked toward Alex before giving him a confused look. "Hello, do I know you?" she asked.

"Eh? Do you not recognize me?" Alex asked with a surprised voice. He couldn't understand how Luo Mei's sister-like maid could have possibly forgotten about him.

"It's me, Yu Ming. Remember?" he said.

However, the woman's face didn't show signs of remembering at all.

Alex felt a little shocked by that. 'Are 10 years really that long?' he wondered. 'Or have I changed that much? No way.'

He remembered giving Meng Yun a Spirit Cleansing Lily before leaving, so as far as he knew, she should have a concrete memory of him. 'Is she sick?' he wondered.

"Do you really not remember me? I'm your young lady's junior disciple brother," Alex said.

That only confused the woman even more so. "My young lady doesn't have a junior disciple brother. She only has an elder disciple brother," she said.

Alex was stunned now. 'What's going on? Was her mind wiped? Did my existence erase from her memories? Did she suffer from a Qi deviation?'

Alex's mind went everywhere when Du Yuhan placed a hand on his shoulder. "I think I get what is going on," he said. "Luo Mei had made an off-hand comment about this once."

"What do you mean?" Alex asked.

Du Yuhan ignored him and looked at the woman in front of him. "You're not Meng Yun, are you?" he asked.

The woman shook her head. "I'm her sister, Meng Fei," the woman said.

Du Yuhan pat Alex as he said, "you were speaking with her twin."

"I… see," Alex was still stunned, only now the reason had changed. "So when I said your young lady, you meant…"

"Lady Luo Xing," she said.

Alex finally realized where the problem lied and laughed a bit. "I'm sorry for the confusion. I'm sister Luo Mei's junior disciple brother. Can you let her know I am here?" he asked.

"Of course," Meng Fei said and quickly walked into the house.

Alex and Du Yuhan waited a bit before a woman in a pretty blue dress walked out of the house.

In the last 10 years, she had grown and matured, but she didn't seem to have aged a bit.

Her black hair that shined with a hint of blue was longer than he ever remembered it, and her blue eyes popped that much more due to it.

Her fair skin remained ever untarnished as she walked out into the sunlight.

When she looked to the front of the house and saw Alex standing there, her eyes visibly moistened.

"Junior brother?" she called out, just to make sure what she was looking at was real.

"Sister!" Alex called back as he was really happy to see her as well.

Luo Mei realized that he really was her junior brother so she immediately ran out and hugged him tightly.

"You're back!" she cried out as tears began flowing down her face.

"Yes, I'm back," Alex said as he hugged her back as well.

Du Yuhan remained behind as he watched the two. "I wish you would someday be that happy to see me too," he said.

Luo Mei's tears vanished when she heard him and immediately let go of Alex. Only then did she realize Du Yuhan was there as well.

"Wh-what are you doing here?" she asked with a trembling voice.

Du Yuhan could only give her a sad smile in response. "Hello, Meimei."

Chapter 775 Indecisive

"Mei'er, what are you doing keeping your brother at the door? Quickly bring him in," She said.

Luo Mei found the opportunity to skip out of this awkward situation with Du Yuhan, so she followed what her mother said.

"Come on in."

She let the two of them walk into the house.

"It's good to see you, Senior Nangong," Alex greeted her, and so did Du Yuhan.

"It's good to see you two too," she said. "Also, call me Aunt. No need to call me senior."

"Okay, aunt Nangong," Alex said.

"Anyway, I haven't seen you in a decade, how are you doing, young man?" she asked.

"I'm doing fine," Alex said.

"And you? The last time we saw you we had to ask you to leave. How are you doing?" she asked Du Yuhan.

"I… I'm doing alright, I guess," Du Yuhan said.

Alex looked at the two awkwardly. 'Asked to leave? What happened?' he wondered.

"Don't worry, nephew Yu. It was nothing serious. It wasn't that we didn't welcome him, but that our daughter didn't want to meet him so she asked us to ask him to leave on her behalf."

"Were it for us, we would have never asked him to leave," Shi Nangong said.

Luo Mei walked in the front, not daring to show her face when this particular subject was being talked about.

The four of them walked over to the living room where they were made to sit on the magnificent sofa that was there.

Luo Mei and Shi Nangong sat on the other side.

Alex looked around the room and asked, "where's Uncle Keng and Sister Xing?"

"My husband is on a business trip. He should return in 2 to 3 days, so if you stay you might be able to meet him."

"As for Xing'er, I'm afraid she's an elder at her sect and won't be returning for a few good years," Shi Nangong said.

"Junior brother," Luo Mei interjected. "Where were you all this time? Were you really captured by the beasts? What about Pearl? Is he alright?"

Alex laughed a little as he realized he was going to have to tell the story of the last 10 years all over again.

However, since the audience was new, he told everything all over again.

"There's an empire beyond the forest?" Shi Nangong asked with a horrified face.

"Did you not know aunt Nangong?" Alex asked.

"No. How could we?" she asked.

"Did sister not tell you?" he asked.

"I… I didn't even think it was possible for you to go to the other empire," she said. "I mean people did mention it, but how could you have escaped the Saint beasts?"

"So I never even thought of the other empire from that point forth," Luo Mei said.

"Well, at least you are back now. What do you plan on doing? You're an Alchemist, right? You can become an alchemist in the capital," Shi Nangong said.

"I… I don't plan on staying here for much," Alex said. "In just 2 or 3 months, I will be returning."

"Eh? You're going back?" Luo Mei asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I can take you along if you want."

"I…" Luo Mei glanced at Du Yuhan quickly before returning back to Alex. "I don't think I want to."

Shi Nangong sighed. "Nephew Yu, how are your medical skills? Have they improved?" she asked.

"I would say so, yes," Alex said.

"Oh great! I have had this really bad pain in my back for a few days, can you help me check it?" she said.

"Umm, sure," Alex said.

"Come, come. You can check me in the other room," Shi Nangong said and took Alex away.

As Alex walked away, he saw Luo Mei's eyes flash with panic while Du Yuhan looked thankful.

After going a little further away, Alex asked, "Are you really in need of my help, aunt Nangong?" he asked.

"Hehe, of course not. I just want the two lovebirds to talk it out," she said.

"I thought so," Alex said. "Do you know what's wrong with those two? Brother Yuhan said a bit, but I don't know if you know sister's end of the deal."

"She's just confused right now," Shi Nangong said. "Her heart is in two places and she can't decide what to do."

"In two places? Is she in love with someone else?" Alex asked.

"Not someone, something. Ever since she was young, we talked about how talented she was and how great she would be in the future."

"So, she doesn't know if she wants to focus on cultivation or love," Shi Nangong said.

"Oh," Alex said. "I honestly thought it would be more serious. So it's just that."

"Well, it's supposed to be just that, but this girl is so indecisive that she's let the young man wait for her for nearly 5 years."

"If she doesn't make a choice this time, I'm going to force her to," Shi Nangong said with a surprising amount of annoyance in her voice.

However, Alex couldn't argue against her as he did feel that way too after hearing what was going on.

'If both of them truly love each other, then they should just talk and work it out,' he thought.

"Well, since I already brought you away, want to tell me more about yourself? Do you have someone you love?" Shi Nangong asked.

"No," Alex said. There wasn't a single hesitation in him at all. As far as he understood himself, he didn't even have a crush on anyone.

"Well, you should try and find someone for yourself too. You should be 30 too right. Only a few years before you are considered adult," Shi Nangong said.

"Let's see what life has," Alex said while hiding a chuckle to himself. He didn't want to tell her what she got wrong about him since there was no way of knowing it without him telling her.

'That is true though,' he thought. 'I should be about 30 right now. At least, the other me. I wonder if he is doing fine and if he found someone to marry. 30 is very close to the time to get married.'

A woman walked up to the two of them and Alex recognized her, or so he thought.

"Oh, I heard you were back young lord," the woman bowed to greet him.

"Um… Meng Yun?" he asked. He still wasn't sure if there was a way to distinguish the two twins.

"Yes, it's me," Meng Yun said.

"Oh, hi. How are you doing? How's life?" Alex started making small conversation.

Shi Nangong took the chance to leave and go back to her own work of handling the manor and the business in the absence of her husband.

People came in one by one to ask for stuff, and she needed to be there to handle it.

As Alex and Meng Yun talked, with Meng Yun always calling him 'young lord', Alex heard someone walk towards them.

When Alex turned to see, it was Meng Fei.

"Sister," Meng Fei hurriedly came up to Meng Yun.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

Meng Fei came close to Meng Yun and whispered, "he's back."

"Who is back?" Alex asked.

"I'm sorry. No time to explain," Meng Yun said as her spiritual sense spread out in search for Luo Mei. When she found her, she sent a message directly.

"Is there a problem?" Alex asked.

"Not one you should worry about," Meng Yun said, but Alex wasn't listening. Spiritual sense spread from him like a barrier from an activated formation.

He sensed every entity that was currently in the house, and that included a man that was very audaciously entering the house.

Alex saw the face, but he had never seen him before.

Alex also saw the anger flare in his sister's eyes and knew this wasn't just some guy.

"Who's he?" Alex asked.

"He's Tian Chen, son of the Tians," Meng Yun said. "They are a rival merchant family and have been trying to join hands with the master for a while now."

"One of the ways they are trying is by asking young lady's hand in marriage. Every so often he comes to court young lady, but—"

"Does sister like him?" Alex asked.

"She hates him," Meng Yun said.

"Well, that's all I need to know."

Chapter 776 New Proposal

"Tian Chen, can you leave, please? I don't have time to deal with you right now," she said.

She was finally getting somewhere with her thoughts and feelings after years of putting them aside, and just at that time, he had come in to ruin it all.

"Meimei, stop being so distant. Our families will join together soon anyhow," the young man with a hawkish face said. His long straight hair fell down the side of his shoulders, making him seem regal.

"Who are you?" Du Yuhan walked out from the living room as well.

"I'm her future husband," the young man spoke. "Who are you?"

"Shut your trap, Tian Chen. I am not going to marry you, no matter how much you fantasize about it," Luo Mei said angrily.

"Come on, Meimei. Don't be like that. We are childhood friends, and we're bound to be tog—"

The young man's words froze on his tongue as a sword fell on his neck. He could feel the cold and sharp metal touch his skin and even prick him a bit.

Du Yuhan stood in front of him, ready to cut his head off if he dared speak any longer. However, to his surprise, the young man didn't seem scared at all.

Du Yuhan could understand why. The young man was in the True Lord 4th realm, 3 realms higher than Du Yuhan himself. So, he felt pretty good about the odds of fighting Du Yuhan.

Which was to say, the guy overestimated himself.

There was a very fine line between confidence and stupidity. Somehow, this guy had his feet on both sides of the line.

"Go ahead," the young man said, very certain Du Yuhan wouldn't go forward with it. Even if he did, what did he have to fear against someone that was 3 realms weaker than him?

A white outline appeared on the sword in Du Yuhan's and Luo Mei was spooked. While she certainly hated Tian Chen, killing him was not something she would have ever thought of doing.

"No, stop," Luo Mei said.

"See? She worries about me," Tian Chen gave a mocking smile. That only served to infuriate Du Yuhan even more.

The white outline on his sword slowly started covering it completely.

Luo Mei understood how strong that was and knew Tian Chen would die if Du Yuhan dared to attack. From the looks of the situation, he definitely dared to.

"What are you waiting for?" Tian Chen spoke up. "Are you sc—"

Suddenly his eyes went white and he fell to the ground with a bang.

"No need to get blood on your hands for such a little thing," Alex said as he walked up to the front.

Du Yuhan was surprised. "What did you do?" he asked.

"Just a simple mental attack," Alex said as he walked up to the unconscious fellow.

"What should we do with him?" Alex asked.

"Mengmeng!" Luo Mei called the girls.

"Yes, young lady," both Meng Yun and Meng Fei arrived in the room.

"Can you throw him outside the house and find some of his men to take him back?" she asked.

"Throw him in the dirt? Won't that infuriate senior Tian?" Meng Yun asked.

"I don't care," Luo Mei said. "I'm infuriated myself."

"Okay," Meng Yun said and grabbed the young man before bringing him out to the front.

"Alright, since the distraction is gone, you two should finish your talk soon," Alex said.

"What? I've missed you a lot. We two can talk this out later, I want to talk with you now," Luo Mei said.

"We can talk later after you two figure it out. For now, I think I might have something to do," Alex said as he left the two to talk.

Luo Mei looked back at Du Yuhan and sighed. "I'm sorry we were interrupted," she said.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Just tell me what you were going to say," Du Yuhan asked. "Why did you leave and make excuses to not see me? Do you really not love me anymore?"

"No, that's not true, I…" Luo Mei struggled to put her thought into words.

"You what?" Du Yuhan asked.

"I… I was scared okay?" Luo Mei said. "Things were moving too fast, and I… I didn't know what to do. I loved you, I still do, but I feel like if I accepted your marriage proposal, I… I would not be able to continue with my life the way it has been going."

"It felt too big of a change to take place in such a short time. So I… I decided to leave to take some time off to think," she said.

"You could've just refused," Du Yuhan said. "Had you only told me you weren't fine with it, I would have understood."

"I couldn't refuse you," she said. "In some ways, I wanted it too, which is why it was so scary. I felt myself with different thoughts contradicting each other."

"So… you didn't leave because you didn't want to be with me?" he asked.

"No, I… I just wanted to make sense of my own thoughts. I'm sorry it's taken me so long but I don't think I'm still able to come up with an answer yet," Luo Mei said.

"It's fine," Du Yuhan said. "I will take back my proposal."

"What? No, you ca—"

Du Yuhan put up his palm to stop her from talking any further. "It's fine. I'm sorry I didn't understand your thoughts at the time and simply assumed the worst."

"So, I will take back my proposal for marriage for a few years until you're fine with it yourself. Until then, what do you say we go back to the way things were?" he asked.

Luo Mei's eyes teared up as she quickly wiped them away. "Really? I would love that."

She jumped into Du Yuhan's embrace and finally felt the weight on her chest lift after 5 full years.

Du Yuhan too couldn't help but feel a knot in his heart disappear at the moment as he embraced her back

Alex was on the outside, looking at the two of them, and smiled. 'Guess it's time to go do my thing,' he thought as he walked away.

Meng Yun handled Tian Chen's body as she brought it to the gate, but didn't know what to do with it afterward.

The man was clearly unconscious, so leaving him there wouldn't be the best thing to do. But he also disrespected her young lady so she felt like hitting him a few times before throwing him out.

Just then, Alex walked out of the manor and then towards her. "Hey, sister Meng," he said as he went up to her.

"What are you doing here?" she asked with a confused look.

"Come, let me take him," Alex said as he pulled Tian Chen's body onto his own shoulders and carried him.

Meng Yun couldn't even say anything before he was taken away.

"The young lady said we can drop him off just outside the gate," Meng Yun said.

"That's just her anger speaking," Alex said. "He's a young master of a well-known family. Throwing him out won't be good for the family."

"Then?" Meng Yun asked?

"Can you guide me to his house? I'm going to take him there myself."

Chapter 777 An Easier Way

Those that did recognize the young master of the Tian family couldn't help but secretly run off to tell people about what they were seeing.

Alex ignored the people on the path and walked for nearly fifteen minutes before he arrived at a green manor with the word 'Tian' written on the front gate.

When Alex looked closely at the manor, he realized that the green was mostly just vines growing all throughout the walls, giving it an illusion of actually being painted green.

The men and women at the gate immediately ran to Alex to check on their young master.

"Young master, Chen? Are you okay?" they called him but he was out cold. Alex's mental strength was way too strong for him to handle right now so he would continue to remain unconscious for another half an hour unless someone used some treasure.

"What happened to our young master?" the servants asked Alex.

"He went unconscious, so I had to carry him here," Alex said.

"What? How? Why did he go unconscious? Was he poisoned?" the men and women started asking. At the same time, some of them had already left to inform the master of the house.

"No, he was being an idiot, so I made him unconscious," Alex said with a genuine smile on his face.

Meng Yun's eyes flashed with a hint of worry. She was brought all the way here and now he was saying things that were just going to make people attack him.

"You hurt our young master?" the servants asked.

"Yes, now where's your master. I didn't come all the way here to bring this bastard home. I'm here to talk to his father," Alex said as he walked through the gate.

The men tried shouting at him to stop and some even pointed spears and swords at him, but Alex simply put Tian Chen's body in front of him and walked through the weapons.

The servants hurriedly backed away, not wanting to hurt their young master.

"Where's my son?" a loud voice came from inside. A gruff, middle-aged man with the same hawkish face, but with a messy beard walked out of the manor.

"What are you doing to my son?" the man demanded.

"Nothing," Alex said as he walked straight toward the man. "I'm just here to talk to you about what your son is doing, senior. Would you mind speaking with me inside?"

Alex didn't wait for the man to respond as he walked in. Meng Yun didn't understand what was happening, but she too walked into the manor.

Tian Fuzhen was too confused about what was going on to even begin to stop Alex. Only when he realized that a stranger had entered his house did he finally follow.

Alex's spiritual sense went throughout the house looking through everything.

'As expected,' he thought. These people truly were weak. A Merchant house such as this would have True Emperor realm guards at the very least.

A bigger one would have a low-tier Saint realm employed to the job. In the Crimson Empire, the best mid-tier merchant house such as this could afford a low-tier True King at best.

"Who are you? If you don't answer right now, I will kill you," Tian Fuzhen started shouting the moment he saw Alex.

"You can try," Alex said as he dropped Tian Chen to the ground. "Did you know that your son has been going after the Luo family's girl despite her clear refusal?"

Tian Fuzhen immediately went to check on his son and was glad to find he was fine. More and more members of the Tian family were gathering at the spot, and Tian Fuzhen turned around to speak.

"So my son is trying to find himself a woman. What does that have to do with you?" Tian Fuzhen asked.

"Well, she happens to be my senior sister and she definitely does not want to be his woman. So, I'm here to tell you to keep your son in check. Next time they come by they might end up with broken bones, or at worse, dead," Alex said.

Tian Fuzhen's anger was peaking. Meng Yun saw this and didn't know what to do, but Alex's words entered her mind. 'Take a few steps back.'

She immediately did as told and backed a bit giving them some room.

"You bastard!" Tian Fuzhen brought out a spear as he slammed the butt of it onto the marble below him, cracking it into many pieces.

"You dare threaten me in my own house? You are looking to die," Tian Fuzhen said. At the same time, the people from the house surrounded Alex.

"I suggest you don't attack me," Alex said.

"Scared? I'm glad. That will be the last thing you feel before you die," Tian Fuzhen shouted as his spear started glowing red. Fire Qi entered the spear and a fire serpent moved around the spear's blade.

The old man Tian then thrust the spear directly at Alex, with all the power that he could muster with his True King 4th realm cultivation base.

BANG!

The spear struck Alex straight in the chest.

Tian Fuzhen smiled for a second before he noticed no sign of injury on Alex. Yes, his clothes had been pierced but it wasn't soaked in blood yet.

He tried to pull back the spear to see the wound he had caused. However, before he could do so, Alex directly grabbed the blade of the spear.

He didn't just grab the flat side, but everything.

"Sigh," he shook his head. "Brother Shen was right. I tried to make sense with words but sometimes it's far easier to beat someone and make them understand you."

CRACK~

The blade crumbled to pieces under Alex's clutch, he immediately struck Tian Fuzhen in the chest. Tian Fuzhen stumbled back as he clutched his chest in pain.

He barely opened his eyes enough to see that his beloved spear was now fully destroyed. This was a True Earth spear, and somehow it was… Tian Fuzhen started feeling very scared.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Kill him!" he shouted in his pain and fear.

The men were entranced for a second, but the scream from their master brought them back to reality and they jolted into action.

Alex sighed, but there were too many to simply use Heaven's impact to knock them all out.

He used Heaven's impact on the first person that ran at him with a spear. He stepped aside for the man to drop down and at the same time dodged the second person's sword swing.

At the same time, he punched the 3rd person's incoming spear and caught the 4th person's sword with his other hand.

The sword crumbled in Alex's hand and so did the spear he punched. Alex reached behind the second man's neck as a sword appeared in his hand.

He slashed the sword through the man's neck but it didn't cut him at all. After all, it was a sword created by Alex's imagination.

Even then the man fell unconscious as if being hit by Heaven's impact. The spiritual damage the spiritual sword did as it passed through a person's spine was enormous compared to making the meridians lethargic when it went through limbs.

The sword had no one that could stop it so Alex casually dodged the attacks that were coming after him and danced through the crowd as his fake sword carved its way through the crowd.

Many swords and spears hit him, but the most they could do was cut his clothes.

Tian Fuzhen watched with wide-eyed horror as everywhere Alex moved through, people would fall to the ground as if dead. He saw no weapon in his hand, so he couldn't tell what technique he was using. Whatever it was, it was horrifying.

He looked at his son that was on the floor too and couldn't help but wonder if that was what had happened to him as well. He feared for his son's survival.

Finally, Alex was done with the many people and walked towards Tian Fuzhen.

Before Fuzhen could say anything, Alex used the spiritual sword to cut off all of his limbs so that he couldn't produce much power from his cultivation base.

Then he let go of the sword and crouched down in front of Tian Fuzhen. "So, senior, about our little talk. Please make sure your son doesn't bother my sister ever again. I won't be so kind next time."

Chapter 778 Justice

He was really happy about getting to test how strong the Spiritual sword was on humans now.

'Well they were weak, but it's still a good test,' he thought to himself.

Meng Yun had no idea what to say the whole time she walked behind Alex and didn't plan on saying anything either.

The two of them then arrived back in the manor and walked in.

"Where were you two? We searched around everywhere," Luo Mei asked.

"I went out for a little something," Alex said.

Luo Mei's eyes narrowed. "What did he do?" she asked Meng Yun.

"Young lord threatened the Tian family to not let their son come after you again," Meng Yun said without hesitation.

"What? Did you go to those bastards? Are you okay? They didn't hurt you right?" she asked.

"I'm fine. They can't hurt me," Alex said.

"Still, they have True King realm culti—"

"I know," Alex interrupted her. "They can't hurt me." He smiled at her. "You guys finished talking right? Come on, I have a few things I need to talk to you about."

Luo Mei went along with her junior brother to the other room where they talked about more things. Luo Mei wanted to see how the little cat had grown, but unfortunately, Alex had to leave Pearl back before coming here.

Alex then tested Luo Mei's spiritual roots and was glad to find that she did indeed have some weak Earth roots. So, he handed her the pill to improve it.

That was the final pill he had, and after this, there would be no more unless he found a Corrosive Willow tree or something that had similar energy as the bark.

As the group talked with each other, night fell soon and they all retreated to their quarters.

Alex and Du Yuhan were led to their own guest room where they rested overnight.

The next morning Alex opened his eyes to come knocking on the door. He quickly unlocked the door to see Meng Yun's panicked face in front.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Old man Tian is here," she quickly told him. Alex spread his spiritual sense and saw him in the backyard, sitting opposite Luo Mei and Shi Nangong in the garden. Not only that, there was someone else next to them that he didn't think he had seen before this.

"I'll go there," Alex said and hurriedly left. Not long after he was walking out of the door into the garden.

Tian Fuzhen flinched a little when he saw Alex walk out. Due to his reaction, Shi Nangong and Luo Mei also noticed him walk out.

The final man turned his head to look at Alex. This was a younger man, around the same age as his elder disciple brother.

He had a thin line of mustache but no beard. He also had a prominent nose that stuck out beyond the normal amount.

Alex sensed his cultivation base and realized he was at the end of the True King realm.

'A strong one,' he thought. 'A guard?'

He walked up to the group and sat down on one of the empty seats. "I didn't expect to see you so soon, senior," Alex said.

"You think you won't see me after what you did?" the old man Tian sneered at Alex.

Alex ignored him and turned to the young man next to him. "And who is this senior?" Alex asked.

"This it City lord Fu," Shi Nangong introduced. "City Lord, this is my daughter's disciple brother, Yu Ming."

"So you are the young man that wreaked havoc in the Tian family yesterday?" he asked.

"Not intentionally," Alex said. "He attacked first. I only went there to talk."

"Nonsense. You hurt my son first," Tian Fuzhen shouted out loud.

"Who was being extraordinarily rude to my sister. Is that how you've taught your children to act, senior?" Alex asked.

"Young man, you went to his home and attacked him. You will need to face punishment for this," the city lord said.

"Yes, city lord. Thank you," Tian Fuzhen said. He was still afraid of Alex, but not when the city lord was around. After all, who could offend someone from the royal Fu family?

"City Lord, you can't do this. My brother was not in the wrong. It was Tian Chen that came to our house first and was rude to me and others. Why isn't he being punished here?" Luo Mei asked.

"This is not about him," Tian Fuzhen spoke up. "Its about this bastard coming to our house and—"

Alex's cultivation base suddenly exploded as it fell upon Tian Fuzhen. "Just because I call you senior doesn't mean you get to walk all over me and call me a bastard. Next time you say anything that offends me, see if I don't break your arms."

"You!" Sweat started appearing on Tian Fuzhen's forehead.

"Are you willing to talk now? " Alex asked. "Or do you still want justice?"

"Young man, you—" the city lord was just about to speak up when he suddenly felt something powerful crash upon him.

Alex had let his cultivation base fall upon him too. "I'm not talking with you." Alex didn't even look at the man as he continued staring at Tian Fuzhen.

"Make an oath to the heavens that you will never let your son interact with my sister again."

Tian Fuzhen only glared at him and did nothing as he waited for the city lord to help. However, the City Lord himself was in trouble as he couldn't move or even begin to use the power of his cultivation base despite it being so much better than Alex's.

Seeing Tian Fuzhen not speak up, Alex decided to act to make him speak. He suddenly grabbed his arm by the wrist and brought it up to his eye level.

"Say the oath that you will never let your son come close to my sister," Alex said. "Or else."

Alex didn't need to say any further. Tian Fuzhen remembered the sword from yesterday and knew what would happen if he refused.

He didn't really understand what Alex wanted, but he did it anyway.

"I swear…"

"To the heavens," Alex reminded.

"… to the heavens that I will keep my son from ever approaching you sister," he said.

Alex felt the slight disturbance in the air as Qi moved into the old man Tian.

"Good," Alex let go of the arm. "Now you can go."

Tian Fuzhen looked dumbfoundedly as he felt the subtle tightness in his chest.

"What did you do?" he shouted.

"What do you mean? I did nothing. You were the one that made an oath to the heavens," Alex said. "If you break it, the Heaven will punish you. At that time, you will either go through Qi deviation, be crippled, or worse simply die. How's that for justice?"

Tian Fuzhen remained in his seat completely horrified at what he had been just made to do. He didn't know if what Alex said was true or not, but in his heart, he could tell it was true.

Alex finally lifted his cultivation aura from the city lord and turned. "Do you have something to say?"

Chapter 779 Making Memories

"I'll give you an out," Alex said after seeing the man fall into a dilemma. "As we've been telling you. This man's son has been harassing my sister, coming into the house uninvited, and has been in general very rude."

"This is your chance to do something about this situation." Alex looked at him.

The city lord gave a small self-mocking smile as he said, "you're right. I should get to the root of this problem. Thank you for showing me the way."

He then stood up and apologized to the mother and daughter duo for ruining their morning. "Let's go." He took the dazed Tian Fuzhen and left the house.

Luo Mei looked at Alex with a blank face. "What's your cultivation now?" she asked.

"True King 7th realm," Alex said nonchalantly.

Both Shi Nangong and Luo Mei gaped in surprise. "That high?" she couldn't believe it.

Alex talked to them for a bit, making them understand that their annoying rival wasn't going to cause problems.

He told them about the oaths and how they worked. That was one more thing he could teach to this empire, but he didn't want to as that would probably cause more trouble around here.

Luo Mei couldn't help but feel amazing starting that day. Her love life was fixed, the annoying childhood friend no longer came, and her junior brother who hadn't come home in over 10 years was back.

She couldn't be happier.

That day, she took both of them around the city, showing the various landscapes and scenic places around the city.

She took them to the market where the Luo family's merchant group was situated. She then took them to a small auction that was held in the open market every day.

There was nothing to be found there, but Alex did manage to find some good memories.

They returned back after traveling some more and then came the most important question that Du Yuhan had been meaning to ask after Luo Mei told him to hold off on the marriage.

"Will you come back to the sect with me?" he asked.

"The sect?" Luo Mei hesitated. "But… I left so abruptly. Will they even accept me back?"

"You forget that you are one of the best students of the sect. Not to mention I'm the sect master's disciple. They will have to accept you back," Du Yuhan said.

"Don't worry, sister," Alex told her. "If all else fails, I will just take over the sect and have you join it."

"That…" Du Yuhan didn't know how to respond to that. That was an open threat to the sect and the elders.

Alex chuckled a bit. "I'm joking. Geez, you guys think I'm some blood-thirsty demon now?"

"Sigh, I think it's time to go rest," Du Yuhan said.

"You guys go. I don't think I want to rest tonight," Alex said.

"What will you be doing?" she asked.

"Oh, you know. Ingredients gathering and such," Alex explained. "I doubt anyone has really disturbed this side of the forest, so I might find some rare plants."

"Who knows, I might even find a Spirit Cleansing lily," Alex said. "See you tomorrow."

Alex left the manor. He really did plan to go to the forest, but first, he decided to take a detour and see how things were going.

He turned invisible and flew directly over to the Tian family. Once there, his spiritual sense spread in all directions as he looked to see how the people there were acting.

Tian Fuzhen seemed to be in an incredibly bad mood, while Tian Chen was practically grounded for a while. It seemed the city lord had in fact done his job.

Alex still waited for a bit. The oath he had made Tian Fuzhen had no clause about not attacking the Luo, so Alex waited to see if they planned something like that.

Fortunately, the old man wasn't that stupid and was trying to forget his embarrassment with alcohol.

"Well, that's that then."

Alex flew over to the forest after that and spent the entire night searching for ingredients.

Since he directly went over to the area where the True realm beasts roamed, the ingredient he found were also ones that had been growing for a while, so he had a really good chance of finding rare ingredients.

To his surprise, Alex did find 3 extra Spirit Cleansing Lily in the entire night he was there.

One of those had to be for his mother, he thought. The other two, he decided not to give anyone else one as they would already have it.

'I'll keep it for the future,' Alex thought.

He found some more True rank ingredients, but he didn't find a single Saint rank ingredient.

That was to be expected. There was barely any Saint Qi on this side of the forest.

There weren't even any Saint spirit veins in this empire except for maybe one or two here and there. Those spirit veins were mostly occupied by big sects and families.

The Fu family definitely had that as no Saint rank cultivator could progress without it. As for the others, Alex wasn't sure.

All he was sure that there was no Saint rank Spirit vein in a massive radius around this place, and that meant the inexistence of anything Saint rank.

Alex returned back around 8 am in the morning and talked about his haul from the forest. They were surprised how many ingredients he got from the forest, but they weren't alchemists, so they didn't know if that was a big amount or not for a single trip.

Later that day, Luo Keng returned home to find his benefactor back.

"Nephew Yu? You're back?" the man was surprised. He wasn't told anything about any of this during his trip so it was understandable.

However, what shocked him, even more, was what his wife told him about what had happened in his absence.

"That bastard Tian dares?" Luo Keng got angry.

"It's already settled. Your nephew took care of it," Shi Nangong told her husband while trying to get him to not get worked up for nothing.

"Still, I'm surprised how strong nephew Yu has come to be. He's stronger than me right?" Luo Keng asked.

"Of course he is. He spent 10 years in a foreign empire. How could he not come back strong?" Luo Mei said.

"Yes, yes, you're proud of your junior brother, we get it," Luo Keng said, and made Luo Mei sit back down.

The group talked for a bit before Luo Keng took Du Yuhan away to talk on his own.

"You told them about leaving?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I told mother yesterday and she's okay with it. Hell, she's happy I'm not staying around doing nothing," she said.

"Great, when do you plan on leaving then?" Alex asked.

"Whenever you want," she said.

Alex looked back at Shi Nangong sipping tea alone and said, "let's stay for 2 more days then. We can leave after that."

Chapter 780 Passage of Time

The moment they landed in the Scarlet city, they immediately went to the sect to give master the good news.

"Mei'er, you're back?" Wen Cheng was surprised.

"Yes, master. And I won't be leaving for a long while," she said. The master-disciple reunion lasted for a little while.

Luo Mei then met up with Liu Xun and there was a warm welcome for her from her elder disciple brother as well.

After that , he got her paperwork and some other things done. Finally, after all that, Alex took her to meet his mother.

"Aunt Lin, it's good to finally meet you." Luo Mei showed proper respect as she bowed towards Helen.

"Oh hello. Wow, you're pretty. So you are his senior sister, huh? I've been wanting to meet you ever since I heard about you. Come tell me more about yourself." Helen instantly took a liking to Luo Mei and started a conversation with her.

Luo Mei mentioned her surprise at the fact that Alex even had a family, but when she really thought about it all and remembered about the players, it did start to make sense.

Luo Mei had never seen Alex as a player, but at some point, she too had come to accept it for the truth. It didn't make any impact on who he was now that most of the players had properly integrated into the society, but it did give a window to his past and why he was the way he was.

"Hello!" Pearl jumped up at the familiar face too.

"Oh… wow," Luo Mei's surprise was muddled with confusion. "How has he not grown in the last 10 years?" she looked to Alex.

"He has." Ale turned towards Pearl. "Pearl, show her the big you," he said.

"Okay!" Pearl instantly changed his size and grew bigger in size until he was large enough to be the size of a normal True beast.

"What the!" Luo Mei stumbled back a bit in surprise. Helen simply chuckled as she remembered being this surprised as well when Pearl had first transformed for her.

"Small Pearl is much better," she told him as she rubbed his back. So, Pearl once again changed his size to that of a kitten again.

Alex left the girls to talk and went over to the Hong Wu sect to meet up with his Martial uncle again.

He also met up with his other friends and checked what they were doing. They were all practicing alchemy just the way he had taught them so their progress was fairly visible.

Just using his recipes, they were able to consistently get heaven grade pills. If they improved on their techniques, soon they would get higher numbers until they too could make Immortal rank.

It took the first person in that group exactly 20 days to make the first Immortal grade pill.

By the end of the first month, they had all successfully made Immortal grade pills shocking everyone to their core. Making Heaven grade pills alone was considered super difficult for them, and here they were making Immortal rank pill so very easily.

They were now realizing just how much knowledge they were missing regarding alchemy. If they improved it further and could teach it to everyone in the sect, they would certainly be the best alchemy sect in the entire empire.

Around the same time, Qin Shan arrived in the Scarlet city and found his disciple. After a month of being in the sect, Helen was starting to get bored as well, so Qin Shan took her, and Pearl with him to roam the rest of the empire.

Alex diligently cultivated during this time and also helped train some of his friend. He would fight them whenever they wanted so he could help them hone their skills.

Days passed slowly and with Alex being done with teaching them everything he wanted, it was slowly approaching his time to return.

So, after 2 more months, Alex was ready to leave.

Things got emotional again as everyone gathered to say their goodbyes. Wen Cheng, Luo Mei, Liu Xun, Du Yuhan, Wan Li, Zhou Mei, Fan Ruogang, Lang Shun, Kong Yuhan, Zhou Mi, and finally, Qiu Ju, the current sect master of the Tiger sect gave them a farewell.

Alex held back his tears as he waved his hands and promised to come back soon. He promised to be back once a year at least.

Qin Shan brought out his boat and everyone boarded as they got ready to leave.

"Goodbye everyone," Alex said one last time and zoomed off into the distance.

"Are you okay?" Helen asked.

"Yes, I'm fine." Alex smiled at her.

Helen rubbed his head. "You'll be fine."

Within a few hours, around the middle of the day, the group reached back to the teleportation formation and saw a few people already there.

Fu Wen had arrived to the capital a week or so earlier with his wife and was now waiting to go with them to the other empire.

"Are you guys ready?" Alex asked the city lord and his wife.

"Yes, we've already said our goodbyes," Fu Wen said. Mo An held her little child in her hand.

"If you are ready, then we can leave soon." Alex then turned to look at the figure that was standing a little far away from the formation platform.

Alex went and greeted the Emperor.

"So you weren't here forever, huh?" he asked.

"No, your majesty. I was always going to return," Alex said.

"The other side must be quite amazing then if you are willing to leave behind your friends and families to go back," the Emperor said.

"It's not better exactly, more so challenging," Alex told him. "It helps one reach their potential much better. Although yeah, the Qi there is better too and much easier to cultivate in."

"I see. I hope I will get to go there sometime too. However, its hard when you're an emperor."

Alex nodded. "I'm sure you'll find a way, your majesty," Alex said. He gave a bow to dismiss himself and walked back on the platform.

"Senior, please activate it," Alex requested the jaguar.

The jaguar brought out a medallion from his storage armband and activated the formation. A while glow enveloped them all and in the next second, they vanished.

When the group reappeared, they found themselves in the glowing cavern.

"Where are we?" Fu Wen asked with a look of surprise on his face. "Are those…"

"Spirit Veins," Alex said. "We should keep going."

Alex felt the stark difference in Qi between the forest in the Crimson empire and inside the Beast realm.

'Its just too vast,' he thought. He couldn't help but plan on something spontaneous.

"Mother," he spoke up.

"Yes?" Helen turned around as she was about to walk away.

"I think you guys should leave on your own," Alex said.

"What do you mean on our own?" Qin Shan asked from the side.

Alex looked around and felt the grandness of where he was. "I want to stay behind and cultivate here."

Chapter 781 Training

After that, they would be on their own to find their parents. Alex wouldn't be responsible for them afterward, but he still hoped they made it there safe and sound. After all, they had a very young child with them.

Alex trained for a while that day and returned back to his room. 'Not yet,' he thought. It would still be a few weeks until he was ready for a breakthrough.

Still, Alex diligently cultivated, along with Pearl by his side. Alex was particularly hopeful that Pearl's breakthrough would come at any moment too.

When he did, Pearl too would enter the True Emperor realm.

As they were cultivating, someone knocked on the door.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense outside without opening his eyes and saw someone standing there. A smile rose on his face as he tapped on Pearl.

"Get up, we have a visitor."

Pearl opened his weary eyes and looked around. "Who's here?" he asked.

"Why don't you open the door?" Alex gestured him forward.

Pearl went up to the door without question and pulled on the handle.

"Sister!" Pearl's eyes went wide and his smile large when he saw the one that stood on the other side of the door.

"Pearl! I missed you." A female black jaguar said with a happy smile on her face.

"Sister Yao, I'm glad to meet you again," Alex said.

"Oh human child, you really are back? You are not still angry are you?" Yao Jia asked.

"Oh no, of course not," Alex said. "Well, maybe a little with the other senior, but not with the rest."

"With uncle Cheng? Well, you don't have to worry about him. He's gone into closed cultivation after learning you are here. He was scolded quite badly after his— what am I saying?" Yao Jia stopped abruptly. "Nevermind. Anyway, how have you been? You wanna go visit the garden?"

"Sure," Alex said and walked out with her.

Alex went out to the garden and sat around for a while. Immediately, a few of the beasts recognized him and walked over as they started roaring.

"Wha-what's going on?" Alex asked.

"Oh, they want pills. They remember you making pills and they're asking if you have some," Yao Jia said.

"Yeah, he says his father's knees are injured and would love for some pills," Pearl said. "That one says he had headaches all the time. That one said he can't breakthrough properly."

"Do they?" Alex sighed. "Fine, I will work on their pill as long as they can get me something precious."

"Should I tell them that?" Yao Jia asked, to which Alex gave a weird face. "Right, I should tell them that."

After the beasts went away, Alex and Yao Jia talked for a while. As they did, Alex brought up the question he had been meaning to ask for a while now.

"Hey, you once mentioned that you learned the human language right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Yao Jia said.

"But it was the Demon's language, was it not?"

Yao Jia shook her head. "Demon, human, same thing. You can't even tell the difference most of the time," she said.

"Yes, what I was meaning to ask you is you said you had a way to learn the Human language too right?" Alex asked.

"Oh yeah, I was planning to do that, wasn't I?" Yao Jia thought to herself. "Hmm… There should be some books in the library. Why, do you want to read it?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Alright, I will ask my father and get it to you if he agrees. What do you want to do in the meantime?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit. "Do you think your father will agree to fight with me for training?"

And so began Alex's 2 month-long training session. Every morning, he would wake up from his cultivation session with Pearl.

Then he would go to train with the Jaguar in the morning. He would fight against the Saint-ranked beast with nothing held back and truly get the most out of his training.

Then, he would spend 3 or so hours in the afternoon focused on his Alchemy session to make pills for the beast.

Then, he would spend another 3 or so hours in self-training, where he practiced his techniques and helped Pearl practice with him.

After that, he would once more have a short training with the jaguar and then go back to cultivating.

He was a little sad to hear that he couldn't read the Human language just yet, but there was a good reason for it.

Apparently, all the books in the library were written in the beast language, another language Alex just came to learn about.

It wasn't a well-known language, so Alex didn't have to bother reading it at all. Besides, only the beasts could speak it anyway.

However, because it was another language that Alex didn't understand, Yao Jia had to now work day and night and create a new book from scratch that translated the Demon language to the Human language.

Since she didn't know the human language, she also had to learn it in the process to do so.

Because of that, Alex wasn't going to get the book for a long while.

Time passed soon and it approached the end of the 2nd month. Alex passed along the pills in return for alchemy materials or spirit stones that the beasts brought.

He was working at a loss certainly, but most of the common pills would be useless to him, so he was using the opportunity to clear them away from his storage.

Late that night, he trained with the Jaguar for a while until it came to an end.

Alex huffed as he sat down to the side while clearing his sweat from his forehead.

"You're getting better, much better," the Jaguar said.

"Thank you," Alex replied.

"If we were to fight on skill alone, you would have me beat a long time ago. Now, you just need to gain the cultivation," the jaguar said.

"I'm working towards it." Alex took a deep breath. "I'm already at True King 8th realm and will soon enter True King 9th realm. So, I will get there eventually."

"Still, I didn't expect you to fall behind the young lord considering you were ahead of him in cultivation by a long while," the Jaguar said.

"Well, Alchemy took most of my time, and that nearly year-long outing on the ice." Alex shook his head. "Pearl got ahead of me, and to be honest I'm quite happy for him."

"I'm happy too," the jaguar said. "I didn't think the young lord would become a True Emperor this early."

"Wouldn't he have been faster if he had gone through the ritual?" Alex asked.

"Not necessarily. Well, at least I didn't think so. But now that I know the young lord's potential, I can't say I will be surprised anymore."

"His potential?" Alex asked. "It's not the same as before?"

"It is, but I just didn't know it at the time," the jaguar said.

"What's different? Doesn't he still have the potential to become a White Tiger?" Alex asked.

"No, it's no longer just a potential. It's a given he will become a White Tiger someday. The Ritual will help accelerate it, but he will do it even without the ritual. Only that would take a lot of time," the jaguar said.

"I'm fine with it taking time," Alex said from the side. "Right, is Lady Ren ever gonna come out from her closed cultivation?"

The jaguar hesitated for a bit. "I'm afraid you won't see her for a while," the jaguar said.

'Shit, just how wounded was she from the Heavenly Judgment?' Alex wondered.

Yao Jia arrived next to them. "You guys are still training? Isn't it time to stop it?"

"We've already stopped, honey," the jaguar said. "anyway, you should go back to your room." The jaguar turned around and left.

"Right, I should," Alex said and stood up from the fighting area as well.

He looked back at the two jaguars that walked away and wondered why they were so human-like, so intelligent.

"Well, that's a question for another time, I suppose."

Chapter 782 Bloodlines

Why are the beasts in the Beast realm so much more intelligent as compared to the beasts outside it. Not only were they intelligent, but some of them could also even fluently speak the human language.

When he asked about it the Jaguar, he had answered him the exact reason for it.

Apparently, the reason for a beast's intelligence had to do with its bloodline. The better the bloodline, the better one's intelligence would be.

Since the Beast realm had beasts with mostly better bloodline, they were more intelligent in general.

That made sense for Alex, but it had also raised another question in his mind. Why did the beasts outside the secret realm not have a better bloodline? Not all, but at least some of them should be vastly more intelligent, right?

That was when he learned what determined the strength of a bloodline. The bloodline always depended on the strength of its lineage.

A child of a Saint beast would always have a better bloodline than the child of a True beast even if the two of them were of the same bloodline.

Also, the bloodline would keep diluting as it went further down the line unless one could rise up to reach the same height as their ancestors.

Which for most beasts outside the beast realm was pretty much impossible. Because of this reason, Beasts that stayed in Qi-rich areas were always more intelligent than those that didn't in the long term.

After half a month had passed and Alex had trained every day, it was time for him to leave.

"I should go now. The registration should begin at any time, and I don't want to miss it," Alex told Yao Jia and the Jaguar.

"Alright, let's leave," the Jaguar said and took Alex to the teleportation platform on the other side of the palace underground.

They stood on top of the formation platform and the jaguar brought out the badge.

"Wait, father," Yao Jia hurriedly ran up to them. "Here."

Alex took what she had handed and saw a book in his hand. Even as he flipped through it, he realized what it was.

"You finished it?" he asked excitedly.

"Yes," Yao Jia said. "It was quite hard, but I did it."

"Thank you." Alex was very genuine. "It must have been difficult to translate it all."

"Eh, don't mention it. The translation wasn't that difficult. The most difficult part of it all was just writing the words."

"Do you know how many times I had to dip my claw in ink to write? Sigh, I'm never doing it again until I reach the immortal realm and can turn to a human form," She said.

"Thank you for this, seriously. You do not know how easy this will make my life now." Alex bowed towards her.

"Alright, I accept your thanks. Now leave, you don't want to be late right?" she asked.

"Yes, I will be back soon."

The formation activated and a white glow of light covered them as they disappeared from the palace and appeared outside.

The Jaguar quickly took Alex to the Dawnspring City which took them just about half a day with the Jaguar's speed.

'So slow,' Alex thought the entire time he was with him. 'This is nothing like what brother Shen Jing could do.'

Once they reached the DawnSpring city, Alex asked whether the jaguar could speed up even more or not.

"No, that's the fastest I can go. If I want to go any faster, I would have to break through some more," he said.

'Hmm, well here is two more realms at least above where the jaguar is, so maybe that's why,' he thought.

Alex then left the jaguar and secretly entered the Flowing Brush sect to meet his mother.

There, he also let Qin Shan know he was back.

"Oh, you really are here, good. It's only 2 weeks away from now," he told Alex.

"The competition? Good thing I came early then," Alex said.

"Yes, they have already started spreading information about the upcoming competition. I grabbed on for you, here. Read it."

Qin Shan handed him a talisman which Alex quickly read.

The talisman mentioned the date and time of the competition as well as the registration event.

Apparently, according to the talisman, they were going to have 1024 different participants in this year's competition.

For that, they had 16 registration areas from where they would gather exactly 64 participants.

"The closest one is in the Han Family home?" Alex asked after looking at the map.

"Yes, it seems so." Qin Shan nodded. "That would mean everyone from the nearby area will go to this place for registration, including the Heaven's Peak school.

"I see," Alex said. "I will have to prepare until then."

Alex stayed in cultivation for the next 2 weeks in his own room, without letting anyone know he was there.

The world still believed he was dead, so he didn't want to go out and create a distraction for himself just yet.

However, when the day of the registration arrived, Alex had to get out and leave for the Han family home.

He was already late as most disciples in the sect had already gone to register, but Qin Shan had come back for him. Qin Shan prepared his boat and Alex got on it. Then, the two of them flew towards the Han Family ground.

Alex watched the mountain turn to the plain as she flew by the side of the Dawnspring city and arrived in front of the Han family grounds.

The area was a massive place filled with a lot of buildings, all belonging to the Han Family.

There was a great open area in the center for people to train in, and today, it was filled with tents and makeshift stages.

Alex jumped off from Qin Shan's ship and landed outside the giant walls that were painted brown.

The word Han hung in the massive brown metal gate that was now fully open to accept the many people that were arriving.

Alex looked at the staff that was working and realized that it wasn't just members of the Han family. Rather people from everywhere were here to make sure that there wasn't any bias when it came to choosing participants that were to be registered.

Alex followed the group of young people that were led along by the staff towards the registration hall.

Alex watched the many people, most of whom were between 30 and 50 make their way along with him. He sensed their cultivation base and realized that majority of them were in the True Lord realm with quite a few True Kings and barely any True Emperor realm cultivators.

Soon, he arrived at a location where they were registering their information, so Alex got in a line.

Qin Shan had already left him to go wait somewhere, so he was alone in a sea of strange faces.

However, seeing everyone come here for the same thing made him feel like everyone was in this together.

The queue moved forward and Alex's turn came to give his information.

"Name and affiliation," the woman asked as she prepared a talisman to record his information.

"Yu Ming, no affiliation."

Chapter 783 Registration

"Here," Alex handed her his Alchemy badge that had the information written on it.

"What? You're from the Alchemy guild?" the woman looked at him with surprise.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Why didn't you say so? I will put that as affiliation." The woman went on to change the information, but...

"Stop." Alex stopped her. "I know what I said. I don't consider myself affiliated with anything in particular."

"So you really want to leave it blank? Being affiliated will help you, you know? You won't have to fight with people in your own organization early on," she said.

"Is that so?" Alex asked. He was surprised that was the case. Although it did make sense so as to not make allies fight so early in the tournament.

"I'll still go with blank," Alex told her.

"Well, your choice," she said. "Place your whole palm on the formation."

Alex nodded and did as told. As soon as he did so, the formation crackled and a bunch of information floated on top of it.

"27... and a True King 8TH REALM?" the woman's voice increased by a few octaves and decibels as she read the information that floated in front of her.

"Anything else you want to know?" Alex asked her seeing as she was too stunned to do anything else.

"No... no," the woman shook her head.

"Ok then, I'll go ahead." Alex started walking away.

"Wait!" the woman suddenly shouted from behind him.

"Yes?" Alex turned around.

"Here, your number for now," she said and handed him a number that read 314.

'I'm the 314th person to register today? So many,' he thought. He then thanked the woman and made his way towards the center square where there would be a test for the people to finally join the tournament.

The woman got back to doing her own thing now that Alex had left, but even as she did, a weird feeling arose in her heart.

'A 27-year-old alchemist called Yu Ming? Why does that name sound so...' her eyes suddenly went wide and she turned to look at Alex. However, he had already mingled with the crowd and disappeared.

'No way,' she thought. 'I heard he died though. Can it really be him?'

'I wonder what the test entails,' Alex on the other hand wondered as he walked up to the crowd.

When he got there, he saw someone appear and stage and get tested for their cultivation base. Alex watched a girl activate a formation that read the words True King 3rd realm for her.

The staff members recorded the information and sent her along. After that, they called another person using the number they were given. 122.

"Oh, it's that far already huh?" Alex couldn't help but say.

As more and more people kept being called, Alex suddenly felt a nudge on his shoulders.

He ignored it the first time, but when the nudge got stronger the second time around, he had to turn around to see who it was.

When he did, he met the eyes of two girls that had their hands to their mouth in shock.

"Alchemist Yu, is it really you?" Liang Qiu asked with utter shock on her face.

"It has to be him. Look, it is him," Han Daiyu said from the side. Aside from there, there were a few other disciples of the Han family and Heaven's Peak school, but Alex didn't recognize the rest.

"Hello, Sister Daiyu, Sister Liang, it's been a while," Alex said as he bowed a little towards them.

"It's been a while. of course, it has," Liang Qiu said.

"6 years really," Han Daiyu said. "I haven't seen you after you made our pills. Then suddenly, two years ago I hear you died. Why did you spread the false rumors?"

"Oh, I didn't spread any rumors," Alex said. "I really was missing, so they assumed dead. I only managed to escape from where I had been half a year ago and spent the rest of the time cultivating secretly."

"You were in a dangerous place?" Liang Qiu asked curiously.

"Yes, in the Icy hell." Alex nodded at her.

"Well, I'm glad you're alive. It would've been a tragedy if the greatest alchemist the empire has ever seen were to die just like that after winning the competition." She pat his shoulders.

"Oh right, let me introduce these people." Han Daiyu started introducing Alex to the rest of the people there who were immediately friendly since they had learned who he was.

No one wanted to be enemies with someone that was an Immortal Grade alchemist.

"Are you not with the Alchemist guild?" Liang Qiu asked.

"No, how did you know?" Alex asked.

"You're not wearing their colors," she said. "Why not?"

"I just didn't want to have anyone take credit for who I am. Those who deserve it aren't here, so I won't let others take their place."

Liang Qiu smiled. "That's admirable. Anyway, what's your number?"

Alex looked at his paper. "314. Yours?" he asked.

"These here are around 270, but we two don't have any numbers," Han Daiyu said.

"You guys aren't registering?" Alex asked.

"No, we don't need to," Liang Qiu said. "We are seeded into the top 128 even without having to register. That's a benefit of the reputation we've built as some of the strongest younger generations.

"Oh, how many of you are there?" Alex asked.

"Around 16 of us I believe." Han Daiyu gave a thoughtful look. "7 great clans, 4 great sects, 1 from the Royal disciples, and 4 very strong and popular folks from everywhere else."

"I see, you're quite lucky then," Alex said.

"It's no luck. It's all hard work," Han Daiyu corrected him.

"Right, sorry."

One of the people he was introduced to was called on stage and they all watched.

The man that was called managed to receive a True Emperor 2nd Realm assessment and was sent away. The crowd buzzed with hushed discussions at the man's cultivation base.

"That's a weird reaction from the people," Alex said. Sure a True Emperor 2nd realm was great, but it wasn't anything amazing. There would be a lot more of them here today. After all, some had been waiting for 20 years just for this competition.

"Ignore them, most of them are just jealous," Han Daiyu said from the side.

"Of course, but I just don't see the need to be jealous," Alex said. "It's not like he got that cultivation base without putting in work."

"Oh no, they're not jealous of the cultivation base at all," Liang Qiu said.

"They're... not?" Alex was confused now. "Why else would they be jealous then?"

"Because he just got to skip directly to be registered," she said.

"I don't understand." Alex urged for more information.

"Do you not know?" Liang Qiu asked. "If your cultivation base is in the True Emperor realm, you basically automatically join the tournament."

"And if it's not?" Alex asked.

"Well, if it's not then, you have to sit around with these people and go through a test to see if you have what it takes to join the tournament or not. That will take you quite a long time though."

Chapter 784 Entering the Han Family Manor

"Can't they just get rid of the True Lord realm and make room for the True Kings only?" Alex asked. "That would at least get the test done much faster."

"Ah, you may not have seen it yet, but they are getting rid of the True Lords already. They just don't announce it yet," Liang Qiu said.

"They are?" Alex grumbled a little on the inside. "I guess I have nothing to complain about then."

"Well, judging by your cultivation base, I don't see anything you will have to worry about," Han Daiyu said.

"I guess that's true," Alex agreed, but he still didn't like staying around for a test for such a long time.

In the end, there was nothing he could do, so he had to sit quietly and wait for his turn.

Or did he?

Alex's number was soon called after and he walked onto the stage with a curious look on his face.

"Get on up," the tester said.

"Senior, I will be fighting with my beast, so would it be alright if I got my beast tested instead?" Alex asked.

"A beast? I didn't realize there were any Beast sects around here," the person said curiously. "Yes, of course, you can."

Alex smiled. "Pearl, come out," he said.

"Meow!" Pearl roared as he appeared on the stage as a meter-tall, 2-meter-long beast of a cat.

His True Emperor realm aura radiated off of him giving the tester a bit of a surprise. He hadn't expected a beast to be this much stronger than the owner.

'Their friendship much is quite amazing for the beast to not have broken its bonds already,' he thought.

"Pearl, walk up there," Alex told him and pointed towards the formation.

Pearl didn't speak at all and instead did as he was asked. He walked over to the formation and it soon said what it should.

True Emperor 1st realm.

"Great, you can leave," the tester said.

"Come, Pearl," Alex said, and Pearl turned into a white light that disappeared into his left arm.

"Number 315" the tester called for the next person waiting.

Alex smiled as he walked back over to the group he was standing with and looked at their surprised face.

"I should be done now, right?" he asked.

"You have a True Emperor realm beast? When did you bond it?" the girls immediately asked.

"Umm… about half a year ago. This big guy was dying in the snow, so I saved him and in exchange, he agreed to become my bonded beast," Alex said.

He didn't know why he lied about Pearl, but that felt like the right approach here. Given his age and cultivation base, sooner or later, people would figure out that he couldn't have bonded with a beast that was already in the high cultivation base.

Given that, the only way for him to have a beast with a high cultivation base would be either to bond with it very early when it was weak and then help grow it or simply bond with a strong beast later on.

With the first one, Pearl's potential would immediately be out in the open, making needless enemies that would want to take him away, so Alex thought it would be better to take advantage of the second scenario.

"Congratulations, I guess. I didn't think you would pass this early," Liang Qiu spoke up.

"Thanks." Alex smiled back at her. "So… do I leave now or do I have to wait?"

"We wait until they speak up the numbers of those that pass, but I don't think it will be for a while, so we can get out of this place," Han Daiyu said.

"Where would we even go?" Alex asked.

"Are you kidding me? You are in my house, I will be treating you. Come," Han Daiyu said and started walking away.

A few of the people started following her while Alex wasn't sure if he wanted to leave. "I am fine just waiting for my num—"

"Nonsense, if you won't come, there's no point," she said.

"Huh?" Alex was confused.

"I already messaged my family that you are alive, and they want to meet you," she said.

"Hah." Alex sighed and shook his head. He should have known this would happen. No, he did know this would happen, he just didn't expect it to happen this quickly.

"Okay then, let's go." Alex wanted to get it over with as soon as he could.

Han Daiyu excitedly took Alex to her brilliant mansion that she called her home.

Alex was awestruck at how amazing the place was.

Green grass surrounded the massive mansion that was full of brilliant colors all around. Men and women in brown robes walked all throughout the place.

As Alex entered, he felt the coolness of the place that was distinctly lower than outside and realized there was a formation around the place to keep the people cool.

The inside was filled with different arts and crafts, giving the place a more lived-in vibe than even the royal palace.

Han Daiyu made them walk through the hallway until they came across a room full of sofas.

"Sit, I'll tell the elders you are here." Han Daiyu left the lot to wait and went on.

"Tsk!" Liang Qiu clicked her tongue on the side.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"I'm a little jealous of her, or rather them. Right, would you come to our sect too after this?" she asked.

"Uhh… I don't know if I have the time. I will need to prepare for the competition," Alex said.

A minute or so later, Han Daiyu arrived back. "Alchemist Yu, the elders want to see you. Come with me."

Alex nodded and walked along with Han Daiyu through the wide hallways to a massive hall where multiple men and women were waiting for him.

Even at just a glance, Alex could tell that at least half the people there were in the Saint realm.

"This is the Alchemist Yu I told you all about," Han Daiyu introduced them.

"Greetings, seniors." Alex cupped his hand and bowed a little in front of the many strong elders of the Han Family.

He scanned the room with his eyes once more and noticed two people that he did recognize.

One of them was Han Hongqi whom he was familiar with, while the other one was a man that had similar features to Han Hongqi as well as Han Daiyu.

He had seen the man back in the competition ground when the Emperor had called upon him, and if he wasn't mistaken, this was Han Haixu, the eldest son of the Han family leader.

Speaking of which, Alex turned his head towards the heavily tanned and buff man with a bald, wrinkly head and gray beard, that sat in the seat at the center of the room.

The aura he gave off was stronger than anyone else in the room and his age was also the greatest.

Without a doubt, this was most certainly the Han family leader, Han Huaxian.

Chapter 785 Han Family Leader

The other elders nodded and gave warm smiles to Alex, but none of them spoke as it was out of turn for them.

"Thank you for having me, senior," Alex replied back.

"Young man," Han Huaxian started speaking. "I remember hearing a report about your winning in the alchemy competition. Apparently, you created a miracle out there. I must congratulate you on that."

"Thank you, senior," Alex respectfully bowed.

"But, then we also came to hear the tragic news of your death. I hear my sons were on the expedition to search you, but they never found you and so everyone assumed you had died," Han Huaxian said. "Can you tell us what happened exactly?"

"First of all, I would like to thank seniors for going out of your way to search for this junior. I thank you for that," Alex said. "As for why I wasn't found back then, it's simple."

"No one searched far enough."

Han Hongqi and Han Haixu's faces changed instantly as their eyes narrowed. They understood the implication of Alex's tone.

"Are you saying my sons gave up too early?" Han Huaxian's eyes moved from Alex over to his sons, who immediately started getting nervous.

"Of course not, senior. I'm not blaming anyone here. Going out of their way to look for me was already enough. What I meant to say was that they searched as far as they could, but the place I was at was much further in the Icy Hell," Alex said.

"You were in a place where my Saint realm sons couldn't go?" Han Huaxian was obviously starting to get suspicious at this point.

"Yes, senior. Thanks to an artifact a senior of mine gave me, I was able to traverse more of the location in the Icy hell than anyone, including Saint realm cultivators," Alex said.

"If that is true, that does explain why they didn't find you. But what about the fact that you were gone for… what? Nearly 2 years? How did that happen? And why were you there in the first place?" the clan leader asked.

Alex sighed internally as he thought of something to say, and decided to go with something that was both absurd and yet believable.

"The senior that gave me the artifact, he also told me about a treasure in the Icy Hell that could help me. So, I went out of my way to such a dangerous place looking for that treasure exactly," Alex said.

The elders in the room got curious all of a sudden. "What treasure is this exactly?" the clan leader asked.

"It's a Saint fruit that grows in the center of the Icy hell. It's a healing spirit fruit that can heal anything and everything that is wrong with one's body," Alex said.

"Oh?" the clan leader couldn't tell if what Alex was saying was true or not. It was indeed so absurd to think that a fruit existed that could heal everything at once.

"And where exactly is this fruit?" he asked.

"I—"

"You ate it!" Han Hongqi's eyes went wide all of a sudden.

"Hongqi, what are you talking about?" the clan leader got angry.

"Father, forgive my interruption. This young alchemist had an arm missing previously and had even asked me for help." Han Hongqi turned towards Alex. "You really ate it and grew your arm back?"

"Yes, senior," Alex said with a smile. His fake story was weaving itself with the truth and making it that much harder to unravel.

"I see. Incredible," the Clan leader said. "How many fruits did you get?"

"Only 1, and that too I ate immediately," Alex said as he shook his head.

"What's wrong?" the clan leader got confused with Alex's expression.

"Nothing senior, I was just remembering my stupidity," he said. "I didn't realize how strong a Saint fruit could be for my True realm cultivation and ate the fruit. I had to cultivate over a year to consume its energy so as for it to not kill me."

"Is that why you were gone for so long?" the clan leader asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "And I only came back a few months ago and had to go into closed cultivation to fix my cultivation base."

"I see. Are you still with the Flowing Brush sect?" the clan leader asked.

"Yes, I'm a guest elder there," Alex said.

"Do they treat you well?" the clan leader asked.

"I don't have anything to complain about," Alex said.

The clan leader tried to learn more about Alex, so he asked about his age and background. He was surprised that Alex was only 27 years old, they all were.

As for his background, Alex straight up denied speaking about it, saying he wanted to keep it in the past.

"I hear you joined this day's competition. Are you joining on behalf of the Flowing Brush sect?" he asked.

"No."

"Oh, then the Alchemy guild?" the clan leader asked.

"I'm joining on behalf of no one," Alex said.

The clan leader got confused. "May I ask why?"

"I don't have anyone to thank for who I am today," Alex said. 'At least, not in the empire.'

"What about this senior of yours that gave you the information about the healing fruit?" the clan leader asked.

"I… don't know who he is, so I can't really use his name," Alex said.

"You don't know who he is?" the clan leader couldn't believe it.

Alex shook his head. "As far as I know, only the Emperor knows his identity, but I doubt he will speak," Alex said.

"So, if you do not have anyone you think you belong to, then would you like to join our family? Trust me when I say this, you will get whatever you want," the clan leader said.

"I thank you for the opportunity, but I will have to regretfully decline." Alex bowed a little.

"Are you sure? You can take your time with this," the clan leader said.

"I am sure, senior. I don't plan on joining any sect or family right now," Alex said.

"I see. Well, our family will welcome you no matter when you want to join us," the old man said.

"Thank you, senior."

"So, if you can't join us, then I'm sure you can help us make some pills right? We will pay handsomely of course," the clan leader said. "The competition is coming up and our disciples need to get stronger. Can you help us make some pills?"

"I would, senior, but I myself need to prepare for the competition, so I will not have the time. You will have to ask other alchemists, unfortunately," Alex said.

"Surely you don't need to be so hard on yourself for this competition. Especially with a cultivation base like yours," the clan leader said. "One should never reach for something they cannot grab, young man. You should do what you are good at."

"Besides, whether you are going to this competition for fame or glory or just simple money, I can promise you, you will make far more on alchemy alone," the old man said.

Alex started feeling a little annoyed. Still, he didn't lash out. "I thank you for the advice senior, but I will go with my heart for now," Alex said.

"I'm telling you, young man. Your cultivation base isn't good enough to even come in the top 100 of this year's competition. You should stop wasting your time with this—"New n0vel chapters are published on

"Senior, please do not waste your breath. This junior already has his mind made up. As for whether my cultivation base is enough or not, time will tell," Alex said sternly. "I believe it's time for me to leave. They will be announcing the results of the registration soon enough. I should be out there when they do so."

"Thank you for inviting me into your house," Alex bowed to the elders once again.

"Uh… yes, I think we have kept you long enough. Thank you for coming along," the old man said.

Alex cupped his hand and bowed to all the elders before walking away with Han Daiyu following behind her.

"Father, I think—"

"Stop, I know. I made a mistake. Sigh, but that kid is still being so stupid. He has been given such an amazing talent and opportunity in alchemy and yet he wants to waste it in fighting," the old man said. "Well, he will find out soon enough."

The elders in the room nodded and repeated what the clan leader said like parrots.

"Right! Haixu, try to find out who this mysterious senior is and how he knows of something so incredible as a fruit to heal all injuries," the clan leader said.

"About that, father," Haixu spoke slowly. "I don't think there is a point in trying to learn about the person. Rather, I don't think we should try to learn about the person."

"Huh? Why not?" the clan leader got angry all of a sudden.

"Remember when we said that the Emperor spoke an oath to not reveal a person's identity and that the person had taken away the princess' healing crystal?" Haixu said.

The clan leader's eyes went wide. "Wait, that was this… right, I forgot this kid was the Royal alchemist for some time. I see, I nearly made a grave mistake."

The old man finally stood up from his seat. "Forget about what happened today and go focus on getting the disciples ready for the competition. We must have them bring glory to the family by winning this year's competition."

"Yes, clan leader."

Chapter 786 The Human Language

Once they reached the group, they left back out to go wait for the registration to be over.

When they arrived back at the event, they were already around 800, so after waiting just a little longer, everyone that had come had been tested.

A man walked onto the stage with a talisman. "Everyone whose name I will call out has been registered for the tournament. If your name does not get called out, you will have to wait a little longer for some tests to be accepted," the person said.

After that, one after another, the man spoke of the number and the name of the person that had passed. Alex waited for a while and his name and number came up.

Thanks to Pearl, he didn't have to go through the test at all and could directly enter the tournament.

By the time he was done, the man had called out exactly 21 people. These were the people that were guaranteed a spot in the tournament.

"Those whose name was called out, you may leave. Those whose name wasn't called out, please stick around so we may choose the remaining 42 participants from you," the person said.

'42… that means they are taking 63 in total? Wasn't it supposed to be 64? Or are they accounting for the 16 seeded participants?'

Alex assumed that was most likely the case.

"I will take my leave now," Alex said his farewell to the group he was with. Liang Qiu tried to stop him to take him to speak to her elders but Alex shook his head.

He promised to do it once the tournament was over and went to find Qin Shan. Qin Shan was here to look after his disciples, so Alex had to return on his own.

A few minutes later, he was back with his mother and told her about the registration.

"3 months later you get to fight huh?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex nodded.

"Are you going back to the White Tiger's palace to train for the remaining months?" she asked.

"No, I can train here. I'm close to breaking through again, which I should be able to do in the next 3 months. So, I don't need to go back."

Alex then brought out a book from his storage bag. "For now, I think you and I should both read this."

"What is it?" Helen asked curiously.

"It's a book that will help us learn the Human language. It's translated from the Demon language, so it should be easy for you to read," Alex told her.

"Okay." Helen took the book and flipped through it. "Oh, this is that language from the last part of the flame book you had me read."

"Yes, this should help you understand what that part said when you get to the saint realm," Alex said.

Helen looked through the book and made a confused face. "This makes no sense," She said. "This right here is the word for 'Heat' apparently, and this right here is for 'Heaven', yet the beginning of the words don't match at all."

"Really?" Alex looked at what her mother showed and was surprised.

He looked at the words and the way they were written did indeed not have anything in common at the beginning.

"Wait a second." Alex noticed something. "The last part of the word is the same. Here."

He pointed to the words again and they did indeed end on the same syllable.

"Then…" Helen quickly looked through the other syllables and found out that the end of the word did match.

It didn't take the two very long to figure out that the words in the Human language were written backward.

"No wonder," Alex thought. "I tried converting the language on my own, but it didn't make any sense. But, if it is indeed read from right to left, instead of left to right, then that would make sense why I wasn't able to translate it for my master."

"Have you not read this yet?" she asked.

"No, I will once you're done with it. I have something else to do in the meantime."

Alex left Pearl with his mother and went back to his room to start writing a book from his memory.

He had brought Heaven's Impact along with him from the Hong Wu sect since it was his. But that wasn't the only book he had read that had words in the Human language.

He also had the two Yang books with him so there wasn't any problem there.

He then thought of the final part of the Flame Mastery scripture, but his mother remembered the words there despite not understanding it, so that didn't require writing down as well.

Which meant, the only thing he needed to write was the words from the Black stele back in the Tiger sect.

Instead of writing it down on a talisman, Alex decided to make a normal book out of it and took out an empty book.

Then, he remembered the words on the stele and started noting them down.

Since he learned that the Human language was written right to left, he started in the same order with the stele as well.New n0vel chapters are published on

Starting from the right, he copies syllable after syllable from his mind and wrote them down on paper.

'Why is remembering this so hard?' he wondered as a slight headache plagued his mind.

He remembered more of the words and as he did, his headache grew.

By the time he had written 20% of the book, his headache was growing massively, so much so that, he had a hard time even looking at paper with clear eyes.

Since writing was getting so hard for some reason, He stopped it for a moment and just focused on remembering the words of the stele.

"STOP!" someone shouted in his head.

"What?" Alex's attention wavered for a second as she stopped trying to think about the stele. The pain in his mind lowered and he could think again.

In an instant, Alex closed his eyes and went into his Spiritual sea. When he did, he was both astonished and scared.

In front of him, his Spiritual sea moved around like the sea in an earthquake. Tides rose high and low, some nearly reaching the silver mountain that hovered above it.

The silver mountain itself was shaking a bit.

"Oi! You bastard! Are you trying to suicide?" a voice spoke to his left and Alex turned his head to see the sword's artifact spirit speak up.

"What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"What were you doing? You nearly ripped open your own spiritual space," the artifact spirit shouted at him.

"I… I did? Was that why I was having such a bad headache?" he asked.

"What were you trying to do?" the spirit asked.

"Trying to remember the words of a technique I read not long ago," Alex said.

The artifact spirit audibly sighed. "Well, if the owner doesn't want you to, then maybe you should give up!"

Chapter 787 Intents

"Sometimes when someone is particularly passionate about a technique and very good at it, if they were to write the technique down on something, they leave behind their intent."

"Sometimes this just happens, while other times it is intentional. However, it's usually only intentional if that someone is of a very high cultivation base." The artifact spirit started speaking.

The spirit was full of the black goo as Alex hadn't visited here in a white, but it still spoke clearly.

Also, since Alex's mental strength was now far better than what it was years ago when he met the spirit, he didn't have to worry about being easily tempted. Not when the spirit was this weak.

"There are such intents too?" Alex asked.

"Everything has intent. You can't do something without intent, not when it comes to cultivation and everything that surrounds it."

"Swing a sword, you need intent. Create a fire, you need intent. Even breaking through itself, you cannot do without the intent to break through. So, while it may not look like it, I promise you, everything has intent." The sword spirit was surprisingly chatty this particular day and talked quite a bit.

Alex watched the sea below start to calm down and asked, "so does that mean I cannot copy the information from my mind?"

"I don't know what you read, but the owner clearly didn't want just anyone to read it, so—" the artifact spirit stopped. "Hm… that's weird," it thought.

"What's weird?" Alex asked.

"I saw the damage just the memory of what you tried to remember did to you. If that was the case then why are you not dead when you have indeed already read the technique?" the spirit asked.

Alex thought for a moment. "What exactly constitutes as reading actually?" he asked.

"I don't know. Just reading?" the sword spirit asked.

Alex thought to himself. 'I never really did read it though, did I? I just looked through it and my mind learned it on its own.'

"What if I wanted to learn the technique, but I didn't understand what it said, would that still hurt me?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, since you did intend to learn it, it should hurt you, but since you didn't know how to read, the majority of the damage should be mitigated," the sword spirit said. "Is that what happened?"

Alex nodded. At the same time, his brows furrowed with concern. "If I were to write it down and give it to someone that can read it, will it hurt them?" he asked the spirit.

"If you're writing it, then it depends on your intent," the sword spirit said.

"So if I want just anyone to read it, I can do it?" he asked.

"Yeah, there's no problem with that. You are already fighting with someone else's intent to keep it from coming out anyway," the sword spirit said.

"I see, thank you for explaining," Alex bowed a little towards the spirit.

"That's nothing, just find me a god wannabe to kill from time to time to satiate my hunger," the spirit said.

"Uhh… I don't think anyone is dumb enough to want to be a god here," Alex said.

"Well, then let me control your body once in a while. I promise I won't use it recklessly. I'm stuck on this body you know. If you die, I die."

"Besides, you can get rid of my control whenever you want," the spirit said.

'Yeah, no,' Alex thought.

"I'll think about it," Alex said. He wasn't going to straight-up deny it, not after it helped so much right now.

He stayed behind in his mind for a bit and collected all the flying silver threads in the sky. The sword spirit had already returned to the side, doing its own thing.

Once Alex was done, he returned back outside and finally felt a calm mind that wasn't plagued with headaches.

'I should go about it slowly,' he thought.

Over the next couple of days, Alex slowly copied the words from the stele in his mind onto the page of his book. In doing so, he had to suffer from multiple migraines over the course of multiple days.

Every time it got too hard, Alex would stop and rest his mind. He would cultivate as long as it took for his mind to return to normal after fighting the behemoth of an intent that belonged to the words on the stele.

3 days later, Alex finally fully wrote everything he could remember from the stele.

Excitedly, Alex left his place and went over to his mother.

He quickly went inside and gave her all of the different books. "Since you should know the language now, you should read and learn these books. I don't know if this cultivation technique will help you or not, but you can try that too," Alex informed her.

"Okay," Helen said and took the books. At the same time, she handed back the translation book to Alex. "You should read this too."

"Okay, I will once I return," Alex said and kept the book.

He waited as his mother started reading through the books and looking at them. Meanwhile, he talked with Pearl to learn if he had any chance of breaking through any time soon.

"Alex, did you give me the wrong book?" Helen asked all of a sudden.

"Wrong book? Which one?" Alex turned to look at the books. Surprisingly, his mother had the book he wrote from the stele in her hand.

"No, that is the right book. Can you not read it?"

He wondered if perhaps the technique's owner's intent was messing up with her somehow.

"I can, but… the book isn't complete at all," she said.

"Not complete?" Alex asked.

"Look, it ends in the middle of the sentence," she said.

"That can't be." Alex took the book and read through it to remember the words on the stele. Through some headaches, he remember everything he had written was accurate.

"There's nothing wrong with the book, does it really end abruptly?" he asked.

"Yes," Helen said. "Where did you read this?"

"It's the black stele from back in the Tiger sect. Remember the one I told you not to use your spiritual sense on no matter what?" Alex said.

"Oh, that?" Helen thought as she looked at the book. "You wrote all of it?"

"Yes," Alex said. "If the technique is incomplete that would mean the technique on the stele is incomplete."

"Well, it ends abruptly. Are you sure there were more words on it?" she asked.

"Where else would the words—" Alex froze. Suddenly, he realized something he should have thought of a long time ago.

"How could I not have thought about it before?" he slapped his own forehead.

"What's wrong? What did you not think of?" Helen asked.

"That black stele, it's the cause of the crater in the Tiger sect, which I assume came along with the meteor shower," Alex said. "If it came down with such force then certainly it must have embedded itself onto the ground."

"Stupid! I should have checked below the ground too," he thought.

In Alex's defense, the stele was in fact one of the most terrifying things to use his spiritual sense around. Every time he did, the intent of the owner of the stele would come to attack him.

So, even if he had thought of there being something underneath the whole thing, he still likely wouldn't have dared to try it all.

"That bit should still help you create some technique, you should learn it," Alex told his mother. "I'll go and learn the language now."

Alex left his mother to learn the techniques and returned back to his place and brought out the book to read it.

However, before he could do it, a thought came to his mind.

"Wait, if there is more to the black stele than just this, and if knowing what I'm reading will be devastating enough to kill me when I do read it, isn't it better for me to not learn the language?" he thought.

Alex had waited many years to learn this language. However, now that he had finally had the opportunity to, he found out that it was in fact better to not learn it at all.

Chapter 788 The Tournament Approaches

Alex didn't know what to do now. On one hand, learning the language seemed like a more than good idea given that he had been hoping to learn it for so many years now.

On the other hand, just the partial knowledge of the technique let him create swords to cut through a person's mental fortitude. What if he learned the whole thing?

If he tried to read the Stele after learning the language, Alex was sure the Stele would definitely kill him.

"I don't need to learn the language just yet right?" he thought to himself. "I can just scan it and learn it that way. Like I've always done. My brain translates it into concepts on its own anyway."

While he did think that, it wasn't just a simple decision for him.

"Urgh! Whatever, I will think about it after the competition."

Alex put away the book and left the room. It was way in the afternoon, so he went to search for the jaguar.

Surprisingly, it wasn't the jaguar that was here this time. It was the leopard.

"Senior? Where is senior Yao?" Alex asked. The leopard was strong, and he didn't have any grievance with it, so Alex didn't mind it being the one to look after them.

But he had a closer relationship with the jaguar, and if possible, he would love to have found him.

"We take turns watching over you," the leopard explained. "What are you looking for?"

"Just to fight," Alex said. "Would you be willing to fight me? For my training of course."

The leopard thought for a moment and shrugged. "Why not? I'm bored anyway."

Both Pearl and Alex fought the leopard for a while before returning back to cultivate.

When the next day started, they did the same thing. Soon, they got into a rhythm, a schedule they would follow where they would train and cultivate, in between very few other things.

The jaguar returned after a few days and they trained with him too.

In such ways, Alex's days passed very quickly, and before he knew it nearly 3 months had already passed by and he was now one step away from the True Emperor realm.

The tournament of champions, as it was apparently called, was just a week away.

Alex reached the Radiant city on his own a week before the competition. The rest of the Flowing Brush sect members would come on their own a few days later.

For now, Alex had a task to do.

Without waiting around for anything, he directly went to the royal family.

When he notified that he wanted to meet with either the Princess or Zhanrou, the princess came out on her own to meet him.

"You're alive??... is what I would say if I didn't hear about you a few months ago," the princess said as she walked out.

"It's good to see you, princess." Alex bowed a little towards her.

"You really managed to stave off all those people by faking your own death huh? That's quite bold of you," she said.

"I didn't... whatever, I will explain to you later. For now, I came to meet with Zhanrou and give her something," Alex said.

"Oh? What is it?" the princess asked.

"You will have to wait princess," Alex said.

"Fine, let's wait in the garden. Zhanrou should be making pills at the moment and will take some time."

The princess turned around to walk on. However, she stopped and turned around. "Although my father might want to speak to you about your disappearance."

"Yes, of course. I will explain," Alex said.

"Good. I'll let him know we're coming."

The princess took Alex directly to the Emperor's hall where the many court officials were already making their way out for Alex's privacy.

As the princess and Alex walked in, the court officials saw him and talked about him in hushed voices.

'They know about me?' Alex was a little surprised.

"Good!" the Emperor exclaimed as soon as Alex walked in. "Our miracle Alchemist didn't bite the dust just yet."

"Greetings, your majesty." Alex bowed toward the Emperor.

"It's good to see that you are safe and sound, young man." The Emperor had just said that when he noticed something.

"Actually... more than just safe and sound. Did you get a realistic fake arm, or is that your actual left arm I see."

The Emperor got down from his throne to check on it closely.

"It is real, your majesty," Alex told him.

"How did... did you use the healing crystal somehow?" the Emperor asked.

"No, I... I managed to create a pill that can heal any sort of grievous wounds, including cut off limbs and organs," Alex told the Emperor truthfully. With what he was here to do, lying wouldn't make any sense to him.

"You did what?" The princess shouted in disbelief from behind. She hadn't noticed the new arm as it had been two years since she had seen him and had forgotten a few details.

However, the emperor with his spiritual sense and excellent mind saw all the changes immediately.

"You really are the miracle alchemist as the citizens call you," the Emperor said.

"Come on, tell me all about it."

Alex nodded and told him exactly how he found the pill. As for where he got the original pill recipe, he chalked it up to Shen Jing providing him with one.

As soon as the Emperor heard Shen Jing's name, he no longer asked questions in that direction and started changing subjects.

"Please don't let anyone know that it was the pill that healed my arm. Make up something like you found it tucked away in your treasury and Zhanrou managed to make one on her own, or something like that," Alex said.

"Huh? Why not? You will be famous when the people find out. In fact, way more famous than you already are," the emperor said.

"Your majesty, If I cared about fame, I wouldn't be here giving away my recipe."

The Emperor stopped what he was about to say and nodded. "Alright, we will hide that information. Now can you tell us where you have been for the last 2 years?" he asked.

Alex explained the same thing he had said to the Han family, except this time the fruit he had gone to eat was something that fixed his body from something that was wrong with it.

The emperor already knew about the problem in his body, he just didn't know what it was. When he heard that Alex had fixed the problem, he congratulated Alex.

"So, what do you plan on doing now?" the Emperor asked. "Do you want to join the royal family? I'm sure any of my daughters would—"

"Father!" Xumei shouted from behind.

"Haha, I was joking," the Emperor said as he scratched his chin. He was definitely not joking at all.

"I meant to say, do you want to become the royal Alchemist again? With you and Zhanrou, we will not have to worry about pills ever again," the Emperor said.

"Thank you for the opportunity, your majesty. But I will have to decline," Alex bowed a little. "For now, I just want to take part in the Tournament of Champions and see how well I fare against the elites of the younger generation. That has been my wish for quite a while now."

"The tournament? You registered in it?" the Princess was surprised.

"Yes, your highness," Alex replied to her.

"Well, you do have the appropriate cultivation base, but I'm not sure if you will make it any far with just this," the Emperor said. "Still, good luck. I will cheer you for your victory."

Unlike the Han family's leader, the Emperor was a bit more understanding of his sentiment and didn't try and talk down to him as a fighter.

"Thank you, your highness."

They were done with their talks and the Emperor needed to go back to talking with his officials about empire matters, so Alex and the princes left not long after.

Alex then met up with Zhanrou and handed her the recipe. He told her the difficulties and how she couldn't let anyone find out about them. Especially the part of it requiring a lot of blood.

Zhanrou was understanding, so she easily complied. Alex also met up with Wei Ruoran and spoke to him for a bit before leaving the palace altogether.

He then went back to his hotel room where he would cultivate for the next 7 days and wait for the tournament to start.

Chapter 789 Tournament Brackets

A man stood up on a giant stage that was perhaps kilometers wide in both length and width. Only cultivators could clearly see him from that distance away.

The space on the stage was clearly expanded using formations and the real space was perhaps a fourth of what was being shown at the moment.

The host continued talking, welcoming everyone to the competition, while the rest of the people got onto their own thing.

"I can't keep Pearl?" Helen asked from the audience space.

"No, I need him for the battles. Just keep these storage bags of mine, mother," Alex said and handed over everything except for precisely what he needed.

"Alright, but make sure he doesn't take get hurt. You're stronger than him, so you need to be the one to fight," Helen said.

"Don't worry, mother. I know what I'm doing," Alex said and left the place to go over to where the contestants would be gathered.

The host started explaining the rules of the tournament.

The rules were mostly there to give no external advantage to a cultivator that they didn't gain themselves or to protect them.

Since there were no Saint realm cultivators in this tournament, the usage of Saint artifacts was banned. Anyone found using it would be immediately disqualified.

They were also allowed only 5 different items, in general, to take with them to every battle that would be checked beforehand.

That would include any not artifact items such as formation flags and talismans as well, both of which could also not be of Saint rank.

Taking pills to enhance oneself before a match was also banned, and if found out, one could be disqualified depending on what pill one ate.

For people that fought with beasts and puppets, they could not have more than 2 of those on the stage at the same time. The rules allowed for interchanging them, but up to 4 beasts or puppets at max.

Finally, there was the general rule of not harming someone deliberately, but this wasn't that intense of a rule as Saint realms would act as referees for these matches.

Alex arrived in a room that looked familiar yet different. The competition was taking place in the same place where the Alchemy competition was held, but somehow due to the changes done to the stage and room, it felt different.

He walked in and saw a bunch of people all looking around the walls at something that Alex couldn't see properly due to the many people that crowded it.

He went on to check what one of those was and saw that it was a bunch of information about who would fight who.

'It's just a bunch of numbers though,' he thought. 'Except that one.'

Guo Chiang was written on the top right of the match bracket and he would be fighting someone who was number 84.

'Guo Chiang, I've seen this guy before, haven't I?' Alex thought. He remembered back to those group of elites in front of the House of Undying, and recalled a young man with a ghostly face wearing a robe of green and blue.

He tried searching for him in the room, but it was way too crowded to find without using his Spiritual sense.

'The top disciple from the Broken Ravine sect. So he must be one of the seeded people huh? It's surprising they're letting their names be known so easily while everyone else's names are hidden behind a number.'

Alex looked around and saw there were about 16 of these things, each with 64 different numbers on them.

'Each of those must have one of the 16 seeded participants,' Alex thought. 'Which one is mine?'

Alex walked around for a bit before finding a registration-type area that was handing out numbers to the people that came up to them.

"Hello, I'm looking for my number," Alex went up to them.

The people there asked for his name and affiliation, which Alex gave them.

The man that heard his name gave a weird look. "Are you the miracle alchemist?" he asked.

"Um, I believe people are calling me that," Alex said.

"I didn't know you would be taking part in the tournament," the man said.

Alex gave a small smile and said, "Yes, I am. Can you please help me find my number?"

"Oh right," the man went back to searching for his number and soon came up with it.

"Number 746, huh? Let's see which group I'm in."

Alex walked around the room for a bit before coming across Group 12 which contained players from 705 to 768.

Before viewing anything else, his eyes immediately went to the top right of the bracket to look at the person that was seeded in his group.

"He Liwei," Alex read his name. He didn't remember this man clearly, but he did know that the Glory's Edge sect wore a black and gold robes, so that made it easier to pick him out from the elite group that imprinted onto his head.

'Is it that young man?' he thought as he recalled his memory from nearly a decade ago.

He would have to see on his own later on. Fortunately, he wasn't the one fighting against that young man. He wouldn't want to fight a seeded fighter, at least not this early in the competition.

However, given that he was on the same side of the bracket, if both he and Alex continued winning, the man would be Alex's 4th opponent.

'For now, I have nothing to do but wait huh?' he thought and walked around.

Just then, someone tapped his shoulders. Alex turned around and saw a familiar face, that he would rather not see today.

"Brother Yu, you really are here," Zhou Ren spoke to him from behind.

"Brother Zhou, it's been a while." Alex looked at his cultivation base and realized he was in the True Emperor realm. That too at quite a high place.

'True Emperor 6th realm, huh? That's not bad,' Alex thought.

"When I heard that you were not only alive but also taking part in the tournament, I thought they were playing some kind of prank on me. However, it seems they weren't lying at all," Zhou Ren said. "What group are you in?"

"12," Alex said simply.

"Great, I'm in 8. That means we won't fight until the top 16 or actually top 8," Zhou Ren said. "Although, I doubt you will make it that far. But hey, who knows right? Maybe you will end up beating that snobby little He Liwei somehow."

"Well, it will feel good to be better than you at fighting at least," Zhou Ren said as he felt great about himself.

Alex couldn't believe how self-centered this man was.

"I will go look around the place now," Alex said and turned to leave.

"Nonsense," Zhou Ren put an arm around his shoulders. "Come, since you are one of the most popular younger generation people, you should hang out with your own peers."

Zhou Ren took him over to the corner of the room where the crowd had parted giving space for the people that were hanging out there.

Alex was now going to finally meet with most of the elites of the younger generation.

Chapter 790 Meeting the Elites

"I see you've already met these two," Zhou Ren said and turned to the rest. "Everyone, over here," he called out to the group.

"Come and meet the miracle Alchemist that returned from the dead just to fight in the tournament with us. This is brother Yu Ming," Zhou Ren introduced him.

"Brother Yu, it's great to see you again. I didn't think you would make it so far so quickly." Fu Tao walked in front of them all and bowed his head.

"It's a pleasure to see you here, brother Yu," Lu Yan walked in front and cupped her hands in greeting.

"Greetings, brother Tao, sister Yan." Alex cupped his hands and greeted them back as well. 'True Emperor 9th realm, True Emperor 7th realm. Both of them got quite strong, huh?'

"Huh? You two already know him?" Zhou Ren asked.

"We met each other back when we were lost in the Beast Realm. Brother Yu here comes from the empire beyond the forest in the north," Fu Tao explained.

Alex sighed. 'The cat's out of the bag. Not that there was ever in a bag to begin with,' he thought. It was only a matter of time before people learned about this.

"I heard you were in the empire and returned a few months ago, is that true?" Fu Tao asked.

"Ah, City lord Fu must've made it there safely then. Yes, I was in the empire. After my near-death experience in Icy Hell, I decided to go see my masters and fellow disciples again," Alex said.

"I see. You must have a way through the beast realm now then," Fu Tao said.

"Somewhat, yes," Alex said.

"Enough talk you two. Brother Yu needs to meet with the others too," Zhou Ren said. Zhou Ren turned toward Xue Meirong.

"You've already met Meirong right, so no need to introduce you there," Zhou Ren said.

Alex saw Meirong subtly nod at him and he nodded back in greeting.

"This is brother Guo Chiang, from the Broken Ravine sect. One of the strongest amongst us."

Alex looked at the deathly-faced man that looked bored out of his mind. He humphed a bit when Zhou Ren spoke, but other than that showed no other reaction towards them. 'True Emperor 9th realm,' Alex read his cultivation base as well.

"This is sister Shen Hua, from the Shen family."

"Hello," the blue-haired girl cheerfully greeted Alex.

"Hello," Alex greeted her back too. 'True Emperor 5th?' She was one of the weaker ones there.

"This is brother Jin Tengfei, from the Jin family."

Alex greeted the yellow-robed man and saw surprised that his cultivation base wasn't very high for some reason.

However, now that he thought about it, he never had a strong cultivation base back in the Demon realm either. What made him strong was his Sword Qi.

Now that it had been nearly 10 years, it was bound to get stronger for sure.

"And finally, this is brother Song Shing, from the Song family," Zhou Ren introduced him.

Alex greeted the tall, long-haired man in the bloody red robe and smelt iron in the air around him.

'Such strong Blood aura,' he thought. 'On top of that, he is a True Emperor 9th realm too.'

Until now, there were only 4 different people he had seen with that cultivation base. Fu Tao, Song Shing, Guo Chiang, and Liang Qiu.

"Well, I would introduce you to the prince that is one of our seeds too, but... wait, aren't I missing someone?" Zhou Ren looked around.

"Oh hey, what are you all talking about?"

A short and thin man with a mouse-like face walked up to them from somewhere.

"Ah, here he is," Zhou Ren said.

"Brother Yu, meet He Liwei, the strongest disciple of the Glory's Edge sect," Zhou Ren explained.

"Yu? As in the Alchemist Yu?" the short man turned to Alex. "Oh, it really is you. I've seen you in those talisman recordings. It's great to meet you, miracle Alchemist."

The young man walked up to Alex and shook his hand. Alex shook his hand as well and just then he realized what he had done wrong.

"Oh, you know what this is," the man said as a smile appeared on his face. "I didn't think I would find a fellow trapped man in this tournament."

"What are you talking about?" Zhou Ren asked as he couldn't make head or tail of He Liwei's words.

"Nothing, just a secret between two men," He Liwei smiled at Alex.

Alex gave a smile back as well, but in his heart, he was cursing himself for getting caught up in the moment.

'Goddammit! He's a player. I got caught up in the moment,' he thought. 'Is it bad? Will something happen if he knows I'm from the central continent? In the first place, he shouldn't know about it.'

Alex started thinking of all the things that could go bad from others knowing that he was a player, but for the most part, he couldn't come up with anything.

'Maybe I don't have to worry about it in the first place,' he thought.

Alex checked his cultivation base and realized he had a True Emperor 6th realm cultivation base.

'That's... doable. Unless he has some tricks up his sleeve,' Alex thought.

"Well, good job on making friends with the miracle alchemist Liwei, because he's in your group," Zhou Ren said.

"He's in my... what?" He Liwei turned to look at Alex. "You're in my group?"

Alex nodded. "If all goes well, we will meet in the fourth round," he said.

"Aw, that sucks man. Well, at least you'll make it to the Top 128 if that happens. That's something for an Alchemist like you," He Liwei said.

Alex felt a hint of anger boil up in his heart, but he didn't show it on his face.

"I will try and overcome my obstacle then," Alex said.

"You don't mean me right?" He Liwei's face turned into a grin.

"Not necessarily you. I meant whoever is in my path throughout the tournament. Be it you, or something that beat you and took your place," Alex said.

"No one is doing that," He Liwei shook his head while his grin turned maniacal.

Alex turned away from him and looked toward Zhou Ren. "What about the rest of the seeded people? I don't see them," he said.

"Well, I can't help you on that end. Even I don't know who they are. I believe they've been chosen from the strongest rogue cultivators, so they must have been selected somewhere else. I saw their names, but I don't recognize any of them."

"I suspect we will know them soon," Liang Qiu spoke up. "But now, it seems we have to start moving."

She gestured towards the other side of the room where the staff was beginning to pour in to gather them up.

"Everyone please gather by your group in front of your brackets," A staff asked and everyone started walking up to them.

Alex walked along with He Liwei to make up the 64 people group that would be fighting amongst themselves until a single one remained.

"Number 705 and 706, you're up."

Chapter 791 First Fight

Alex watched two people fight against each other using swords and spears.

The fight went on for a while before one of them won with a close victory.

Alex saw the staff member go and switch his number forward in the bracket and called out the next two participants.

'One loss and we're gone huh?' Alex thought as he looked at the new set of fighters arriving on the stage.

One by one, the people fought their way through their opponents until it was He Liwei's turn to fight.

Alex watched the man on-screen and saw him fight casually and win against his opponent. 'That was just normal hand-to-hand combat. He didn't even need to use any techniques,' he thought.

A few more people went onto the stage to fight, and finally, it was his turn.

"Number 745 and 746," the staff member called out.

Alex walked forward towards the staff and saw a girl walk out from the same group. The pink and green colored girl belonged to the Falling Lotus sect if he wasn't mistaken.

However, given that her cultivation base was around True King 7th realm, Alex knew she wasn't anyone big in that sect.

In fact, she was weak enough that Alex wouldn't even have to worry about hiding his power yet.

The staff asked for their storage bags and checked them to make sure that everything was according to the rules.

Alex had brought exactly 5 items, so he was let go.

The two of them reached the stage, and Alex felt the referee's spiritual sense land on him.

He tried feeling the woman's cultivation base, but it was so high in the Saint rank that he couldn't properly tell.

He looked at the referee's blue robe and knew she was from the Shen family.

'Focus on the match,' Alex told himself and watched the other girl bring out a thin, rapier-like sword from her storage bag.

Alex already knew she had to be wearing armor as everyone else did, and got ready to fight. He didn't bring out any weapons, however, as he didn't find the need to.

The sun had already gone way past the afternoon phase and was only a few hours away from setting.

The referee looked at both of them to see if they were ready, and when she realized they were, she started the fight.

"Begin!"

The girl slashed a few attacks toward Alex to check on his reflexes.

Alex dodged to the side. Seeing the direction Alex was moving toward, the girl got to work.

She immediately dashed forward while stabbing her sword into the air multiple times in a single second.

Each one of those stabs created a single golden line of attack that flew towards Alex.

Alex saw the Metal attacks coming his way and immediately changed direction.

The girl landed halfway through her dash and switched her direction too, following Alex to attack him.

The rogue attacks landed on the barrier around the stage that was protecting the audience from the fighters and vice versa.

Before even coming to the stage, the girl had realized that there was likely no chance of winning against Alex, given that his cultivation was 2 realms higher than her own.

However, she needed to win this round. At the very least, she couldn't be the first person to leave her sect.

For that, she needed to not let Alex attack at all. And that was exactly what she was doing.

Alex had to immediately run in the other direction when he saw the barrage of metal attacks come his way.

"AAAARGH!" the girl shouted as she kept stabbing onto the air even as her hand ached.

She turned as she attacked since her target kept moving.

Alex was weaving through her attacks, zig-zagging around the stage while slowly closing in on her.

He could have simply knocked her out already, or teleported behind her and won. Or, he could've attacked her, which could've hit her.

However, he didn't. He needed to hide his skills, abilities, and power until the right moment. At the very least, he wanted to give He Liwei a taste of what he could do since he had openly underestimated him.

As he got closer, it became harder and harder to dodge. However, he could see that the girl was struggling, so he had a chance.

Alex suddenly stopped moving and the metal shots all landed on him.

The girl rejoiced when she saw that her attacks landed and started attacking more and more.

She sent out maybe 5 hundred of such attacks before her Qi nearly ran out and she was unable to move her arm at all.

The cloud of dust rose high where she attacked and breathed in relief. However, when she saw the referee stand there, doing nothing, she worried.

Suddenly, the dust moved as Alex flew out. Next to him was a flying shield that hovered around him.

The girl was both surprised and scared. At the same time, she moved her feet and ran backward.

The place they were fighting on was about 250 meters by 250 meters, so there were plenty of areas for them to run around in.

As Alex closed on her, the girl sent out random attacks to deter him, but the shield moved on its own to block the attacks.

The girl stopped running away and placed her palm on the ground. Suddenly, vines sprung out of the ground, trying to catch Alex.

Each one of the green vines was about the size of his arm. If they grabbed him, it would be like getting constricted by a dozen different pythons.

A golden claw appeared on his two hands at the same time as he jumped forward towards the vines and swung at them.

Like a butcher's knife through meat, the claws cleaved away all the vines until they were completely useless.

The girl was surprised to see that he could fight the vines so easily. She started preparing some other attacks, but Alex wasn't going to let her do that.

He employed his movement skill and suddenly all resistance was removed from him as his speed nearly tripled and he arrived in front of the girl.

The girl's armor lit up to protect herself, but Alex was way too strong for her.

He kept away his Qi and simply used his physical force to punch the girl.

Even then, she was sent flying into the air as she landed a few dozen meters away, and skidded along the stage until she was out of bounds.

The referee had to run to grab her before she caused problems on the other side where another match was going on.

She quickly checked the girl and found out that she was okay.

"Can you get up?" she asked the girl who looked around in a daze for a while before nodding slowly.

"Good." The referee brought her up to her feet and turned toward Alex.

"Congratulations, you win."

Alex bowed towards the referee and the girl he hit and walked away.

Chapter 792 Top 512

He arrived and was immediately called up to sit near the seeded folks by Liang Qiu and the others.

"You did good," Liang Qiu said.

"Got an easy first match, that's all," Alex said. At the same time, his eyes fell on the purple-robed figure that he remembered seeing from time to time in the garden of the royal family.

"Your highness," Alex greeted him.

"Sir alchemist, I haven't seen you in a while," the man said. This was one of the princes of the empire, a cousin to the princess.

From what Alex remembered, this man was called Wei Taiwu. Alex sensed his cultivation base and was happy to find that he was only in the 7th True Emperor realm.

At the same time, Alex's eyes fell on 4 different people that he hadn't seen before. However, given that most of the elites were around them and were speaking to them, he could figure out who they were.

If not for that, their cultivation base alone would've given him the answer. After all, they were up in the upper True Emperor realm.

'The remaining 4 seeds, huh?' Alex thought when he saw them.

2 of them were girls while the other 2 were boys. Liang Qiu told him their names, and apparently one of the boys was quite famous for attacking a mid-grade sect on his own to take revenge for his father's death, but Alex had never heard of him so he didn't care.

Most of them simply focused on the matches that were happening 16 at a time, and so did Alex.

The competition ended a few hours later and Alex stood up to leave. However, Liang Qiu stopped him.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Back to my hotel, why?" Alex looked at her curiously.

"Do you not know that we will be staying here in the arena?" Liang Qiu's face was one crack away from full-on laughter. In fact, her eyes were already laughing.

"We stay in the arena?" Alex was surprised.

"Yeah, they will let us know very soon."

Just as they had talked, a staff member came and explained the situation to the 512 participants that were there.

To make sure that the participants got the best treatment and facility during the tournament and to make sure that none of them got in any harm, whether that be accidental or intentional by other parties trying to keep them off the tournament, they were made to stay in the arena under the supervision of the staff.

Given that the staff consisted of elders and Saints from all the different families, sects, and some even from the military, it was hard to cause problems for the participants.

"Why now? Why not from the start?" Alex asked Liang Qiu.

"Well, for one there wasn't any need to be concerned about the participants, especially from being attacked by someone else given that no one really knew who they were fighting in the first round," Liang Qiu said.

Alex nodded. That made sense.

"However, now they know, huh?" he asked.

"Yes. Since we know who we are fighting, there is a chance of misconduct, so they are trying to avoid that," she said. "Aside from that, I think the more important reason is that there just isn't that much space in the arena."

"For all the different competitions this place has seen, it has always been 512 contestants at the start. However, with what happened just before the last tournament, no one wanted to hold a tournament anymore and we had to cancel."

"That was why they decided to make it big and start with 1024 people. Which also meant, they didn't have a place to keep those people," Liang Qiu said.

"And now they do," Alex finished her sentence. "I should let my mother know."

"I don't think there's any need for that. Most already know about it. Those that don't will find out soon."

Alex looked around the place and saw a disciple from the Flowing Brush sect. 'Sect master Qin should let her know even if she doesn't,' Alex thought. 'I might've learned if I didn't leave a week earlier either.'

Alex shook his head and started following the staff as they handed a key to every person that walked through it.

Alex went to his room and sat down. He looked around the small 5 by 5 meters room that was mostly empty. However, he could feel the rich Qi environment that he was in and understood that there was a formation either in the room or over the whole building.

There was a talisman on the bed and he quickly read what was written on it.

The facility the staff had mentioned included a private or joint training area, as well as places where you could buy pills to improve your cultivation or heal yourself if you got injured.

Alex thought he didn't need that, but then he remembered he no longer had his items with him, so maybe he would need to use them.

Anyway, today wasn't the day.

Pearl came out and sat by him as they started cultivating.

Soon, time went by and the next day was here.

The staff members went around waking everyone up and took them to the watching area in the arena from where they would be viewing the matches today.

Alex was a bit surprised to learn that only Group 1 and 2 would be fighting on this day.

"Eh? It's a single match the whole way through?" Alex asked.

"That's what it is," Hand Daiyu explained.

"Who is in Groups 1 and 2?" Alex asked.

"Umm… I think it's sister Lu Yan and that Feng Xueshin girl," Liang Qiu said.

Alex nodded and watched as the first two fighters went onto the stage.

A swordsman vs a puppet master. The fight was surprisingly quick as the puppet master was nearly 3 realms higher than the swordsman.

With his strong puppets, the puppet master had no problem winning the fight at all.

The next two fighters went up and then the next two.

Alex watched the fighters with interest for a while but soon realized that there wasn't much point to learning how these people fought.

His group was so far away from these that it simply made no sense to care about these people.

At some point, he only watched for the sake of watching.

Lu Yan went up to fight at some point, and while her opponent tried to fight, there was simply no way for them to win.

Group 1's battles were over and the tournament went on a small break.

Alex went to meet his mother during this time and took back his storage bags and ring from her.

Once he returned, the 2nd half of the day's tournament began with another 16 different fights before the day concluded.

The original 512 people were now down 32 people, and the same would happen tomorrow and the day after that until all 16 groups will have 16 people each remaining.

Alex returned back to his room. Now all he could do was wait for his turn to come again.

Chapter 793 2nd Round

Everything around him was pin-drop silent as all noise that came from the crowd in the arena was stopped by a barrier formation that was all around the stage.

In a one-on-one battle, the staff really couldn't allow anyone to interfere in the matches, and they had made sure to do their best in that regard.

5 days had gone by since the 2nd round of the tournament started and finally, it was his day on the 6th.

Half of the original 512 had already fought and 128 of them had passed. Alex was now part of the next 256 that would have to pass.

The man in front of him wore armor, a necklace, and an armlet, and held a massive black bow in his hand.

Alex on the other hand only had his shield floating around him. Other than that, he had nothing on him.

The man had already sensed Alex's cultivation base and was certain that his victory was up for grabs. Not that he knew that Alex had intentionally let his cultivation base remain unhidden.

It wasn't every day that Alex could use the presence of his cultivation base to his advantage, rather than when it remained hidden.

The referee gave a weird look to Alex after seeing him not bring out any weapon, but enough time had passed and Alex was ready in his eyes.

"Begin!" he shouted.

The other man instantly pulled on the strings of the bow as fire Qi coalesced onto them, forming an arrow in the process.

SWING~!

He let the arrow go and it flew straight at Alex.

Alex dodged to the side. The arrow was slow enough for him that he could block it with his shield, but then the shield would break.

After all, the shield could only stop attacks from people below the True Emperor realm. Against a True Emperor realm cultivator, the shield was simply a paperweight.

Still, he kept it up to give the illusion of needing defense when fighting against someone.

Another fire arrow shot at him and Alex used the shield to parry it away.

Alex watched the man pull the string one more time and another fire arrow appeared on it. However, he didn't let it go. Instead, Qi moved on to the string to form another arrow.

Only, the second arrow was made up of Water Qi.

There was a constant flux of energy poured into both the arrows as they fluctuated between which one was stronger. As such, the Fire Qi sought to Ruin the Water Qi at times, while the Water Qi tried to Overwhelm the Fire Qi the other times.

However, the middle-aged man was talented enough to not let either mix up with each other.

SWING~!

He let the arrows fly.

Alex was ready to dodge, but the trajectory of the arrows didn't seem like they would hit him at all.

Just when he was thinking that, halfway through the flight, the arrow changed their direction slightly… towards each other.

BOOM!

A massive explosion rang out from the two Fire and Water arrows and instantly half the stage they were fighting on was full of steam that quickly condensed into the fog.

The fog only grew thicker as the visibility became horrible at some point. Alex could barely see his arm in front of him.

'Do I do it?' he thought for a moment.

The area was only 250 by 250 meters at best since the space of the stage had been shrunken for the one-on-one battles.

That meant, if Alex used his spiritual sense, he could easily cover the entire stage.

However, if he did that, the referee would also find out he had a spiritual sense. And given that today's referee was from the Glory's Edge sect, he didn't want to reveal that just in case he passed along that information to He Liwei.

The shield moved on its own and stopped one of the arrows that were attacking him.

At the same time, the shield was heavily dented.

'Can he see me?' Alex thought.

Another arrow struck it again as the fire spread all around it.

CLANG~!

The shield fell onto the ground, useless. After stopping two strikes from a True Emperor realm cultivator, the shield was done.

'Shit! He can see me. No wonder he put on this fog,' Alex thought.

He immediately moved to the side unintentionally to dodge any arrows that might come flying his way.

At the same time, he created a yang clone and sent it the other way while concealing his own cultivation base.

An arrow narrowly flew past him as he managed to hear it coming his way.

'Shit! He can definitely see my physical body,' Alex thought. 'But how?'

Just then, a thought came to him. 'Qi Sense.'

Anyone that reached the True realm was able to use Qi sense. Qi sense could be used to feel things that one couldn't see directly. It was only useful to sense the physical body and was thus a vastly mediocre version of spiritual sense.

As such, Alex had never bothered learning it and had also forgotten that most people needed to rely on it.

'So he can use his Qi sense to feel me at such a distance huh?' Alex thought. 'What if he senses 2 of us?'

The middle-aged man was using his entire focus in the fog to sense Alex's location as he pulled his bow for another arrow.

However, just as he was about to pull it, the figure of Alex doubled as another physical form appeared next to him.

'Huh? What's that?" the man thought. He saw one of the figure moving toward him, so he pointed his arrows in that direction and let it loose.

The arrow flew through the air and hit whatever was coming, with a massive explosion ringing out from the hit. However, his Qi sense told him that the figure wasn't stopping at all.

As the figure got closer, he could sense the cultivation base as well.

'True Emperor realm!' the man's eyes went wide.

Pearl jumped out of the fog and dashed towards the man.

"What the!" the man wasn't expecting a beast to fly out of the fog, so when Pearl did, he was surprised.

ROAR!

Pearl roared and used the White Tiger's Roar to hurt the man mentally, but the necklace on his chest stopped it from affecting much.

Still, he felt a slight headache, but that was nothing for him. He pulled the string of the bow back as a fire arrow appeared on it again.

He shot it directly at Pearl, but Pearl didn't flinch. His body turned golden as the White Tiger's Golden Body stopped the arrow from hurting him at all.

Pearl continued dashing as his body flickered with golden light and he turned into two different Pearls, each running towards the man.

The man was confused, he didn't know which one it was as both the Pearls felt like they had a physical body while at the same time having the same energy too.

The man thought there were two beasts for a split second before realizing that wasn't possible as he saw Pearl split into 2 himself.

So, with no choice, he pulled the string to form another arrow in his hand that he shot one of the Pearl with.

When that Pearl disappeared, he knew that it was the other Pearl that was the real one.

Then, the man pulled out an arrow from his storage bag. That was the 5th artifact he had been allowed to bring onto the stage.

He quickly placed the arrow onto the bow and pulled on it as hard as he could. At the same time, he also activated the armlet on his arm to give him an extra boost of power to pull on the arrow.

The man was quite mad. This was something he had brought along to fight against people that were above his own cultivation base, but the beast in front of him was forcing him to use it.

'Whatever, I will ask master to get me another one,' he thought and waited for the beast to get closer.

Just when the beast was only meters away, he let it loose.

Right then, a sword slash flew from the side and struck the bow right as the arrow flew off.

The strike caused the arrow to miss and Pearl landed on the man with a glowing golden paw that struck him in the chest.

The armor stopped the man from being hurt too much, but it still felt like being hit by a massive rock.

He tried to get back up, but Pearl was already on him, pummeling him on the chest time after time to beat him.

At some point, the armor failed, at which point Alex asked Pearl to stop.

Alex was already out of the fog while the man was focusing on Pearl, so he had been able to come out in time and save him.

The referee arrived next to the man to check his vitals. He had been keeping an eye on everything so he knew the man was okay, but he still needed to be sure.

After seeing that everything was okay, the turned to Alex and grabbed his arm to announce his victory.

The barrier around the stage lowered and Alex could suddenly hear the cheers of the crowd.

He smiled at them and walked back into the viewing area while the middle-aged man was taken off stage to the medical center.

Chapter 794 Fighting A Puppet Master

Once all 256 competitors had passed through the top 512, it was back to the start with the Top 256. Only this time, it would be 4 groups in a single day instead of just 2.

Alex arrived at the arena to sit and watch the day's matches. With 4 groups a day, his match would be on the 3rd day, so he didn't need to be anxious about anything, but today he did.

It wasn't just him, however. All 256 different young men and women that say here today were both nervous and excited, for today was the day the Emperor, as well as the heads of all the different families and sects, would come to watch the competition.

The past 2 rounds were child's play. They were simply there to filter out the weed, so the true elites of the empire didn't need to be there. However, almost every single one of the top 256 were True Emperor realm cultivators now.

So, every fight fought henceforth would be worth watching.

Alex looked towards the massive pillar where the Emperor, the patriarchs, and matriarchs, as well as different sect leaders, would stay and watch the matches.

Each one of these people would be looking at him when he fought. There was hardly anything he could do to stop them from finding out his secrets.

'Whatever, I've kept it hidden long enough,' Alex thought.

The matches soon started and everyone watched intently. After all, no one wanted to miss the fight between two True Emperor realm cultivators.

Alex watched the fight between an Earth and Metal elemental cultivator against a Spearman from one of the lesser-known sects.

'He knows Spear intent,' Alex thought. Alex remembered this person fighting before, but he hadn't shown spear intent at that time.

Which meant that he had decided to start revealing part of his abilities to everyone.

The Spearman's cultivation base was 1 realm higher than his opponent, so he managed to win against him. However, it wasn't an easy fight.

After all, the Earth and Metal elements were one of the Empowering combinations of spiritual roots, so the cultivator had much more powerful Earth attacks in general as compared to other people.

Once the fight was done, a few staff members got up to the stage to check the state of the ground where the fights happened and fixed it if there was any problem.

After that, the next match started.

The day held a total of 32 matches in which everyone that passed was a True Emperor realm. The few True Kings that had made it up to this point were slowly weeded out.

The same happened the next day when 32 more people made their way through to the Top 128, where they could be considered the elites of the younger generation.

And the same would happen on the third day as well.

Alex walked onto the late in the day. His match took place late afternoon as he was one of the final 4 matches of the day.

Alex stood in front of his opponent, a woman he knew fought with puppets.

Until now, she had only brought out a single puppet to win her fights, but there might be more this time around.

Alex didn't waste his time either. Everyone had already seen him, so he brought out Pearl early on.

Pearl came out in his giant form where he was the size of a massive tiger. That was, the cute Pearl could end up looking threatening.

The woman also brought out her puppet, but only one of it. It was a True Emperor 3rd realm puppet, but there was only one.

'She's underestimating me and Pearl,' Alex thought. The girl herself was in the True Emperor 2nd realm, so she must've imagined that this would be an easy match.

After all, this was the round where the True Kings were weeded out.

Alex looked at the humanoid puppet and saw the swords embedded in its arm. He brought out his own sword.

Since poison was simply not allowed in the battle, he wouldn't risk using the poison sword. Aside from that, his best sword, the one he couldn't use would be useless for the most part if he wanted to use ranged attacks.

After all, he could only use Sword Qi to throw out attacks with this, and this was way too soon for that.

Therefore, Alex was forced to bring out a new sword. It was a simple-looking sword, not unlike the poison sword, but he had only refined it for a few days now.

Hopefully, it wouldn't cause him much problem.

The referee for his match this time around was a Saint realm from the Broken Ravine sect.

As Alex and Pearl got ready, so did the girl. When the referee saw that, he started the fight.

Alex sent Pearl to fight the puppet. With his strong body and cultivation base, a True Emperor 3rd realm puppet would be just about the amount of strength Pearl could produce.

However, Pearl was a living, breathing being with his own thoughts and knowledge.

The puppet lacked that completely. Which meant the girl would have to constantly focus on it for the most part.

If he could distract the girl, Pearl would easily win against it.

So, he did. He didn't know what the girl's own powers were, but he knew he had to keep her occupied so she couldn't focus on the puppet at all.

Alex dashed at her, surprising the girl. She knew what cultivators did to fight against puppet masters, but she hadn't expected Alex to run at her, given their cultivation base difference.

She immediately brought out a formation place and threw it on the ground in front of her.

Before Alex could reach her, a barrier sprung forth from the formation plate as it solidified right in front of Alex.

Alex hit the barrier with a bang and was stopped. He got back up and hit the barrier a few times, but it was going to take more than that to get rid of this barrier.

He quickly turned around and saw Pearl's glowing paw hit the puppet, but that did nothing.

Since the girl was inaccessible at the moment, Alex decided to go fight the puppet instead.

Alex ran up to the puppet, and even as he did, a sword came swinging in his direction.

Alex swung his own sword from down to top as he parried away the attack. However, at the same time, the puppet's upper body spun with no relation to its lower body and the 2nd sword came at him as well.

Pearl attacked it at the same time and the puppet stumbled backward.

Alex realized that the puppet had free upper movement, so he needed to be careful. While he thought that, he thought of what else he could do at the moment.

The girl could see every single move of his clearly and counter it while remaining inside the barrier. He needed to counter that somehow.

Alex knew the exact way to do so.

Pearl dodged one of the sword attacks, while Alex blocked the same one to get thrown away from the puppet.

When he landed, he was right in between the girl and the puppet.

Alex turned around towards the girl and smiled. That smile would be the last thing the girl would see for a while.

A blinding light originated from right behind Alex as a miniature sun the size of a watermelon appeared on stage.

Alex kept the heat of the sun to a minimum, but the light it produced was unimaginable.

"Argh!" the girl cried out as she was forced to close her eyes. The sun was too strong for her to look at what was going on.

Even most of the audience didn't see what was happening from the brightness.

Fortunately, unlike the girl, they could simply put their hands in front of their face to block off the small sun from their vision.

This maneuver wouldn't have worked if the girl had spiritual sense, but it was pretty apparent she didn't. If she did, she would be controlling a far stronger puppet.

Alex went back to the puppet that was now on default fighting mode and fought it until Pearl was able to beat it.

Once the puppet was defeated, Alex turned off the sun and turned around to look at the girl.

The girl looked at them in shock and brought out another puppet of a slightly lesser strength this time around.

However, to get it to fight, she needed to get rid of the barrier, and that was all Alex needed her to do.

Because after she did that, it was an easy victory for him and Pearl.

* * * * *

The Emperor sat quietly in his room in the tower as he watched the battle that just concluded below.

He saw Alex and Pearl fight their way through an opponent that for all intents and purposes should have won, but she didn't.

"I didn't know he was this strong. I would have tried to have him join the Royal disciples if I did," the princess said from the side. "I can't believe he can fight against True Emperor realm puppets and react in time against them. He didn't seem like a fighter to me."

The princess spoke, but the Emperor didn't listen to a single word of hers since things were finally starting to make sense to him.

"It's all coming together," he said. "Now I know why he took him under him."

Chapter 795 Top 128 Begins

However, Alex didn't watch them at all. Instead, his eyes shifted to the figure that walked up to him and sat beside him.

"You really did make it to the top 128 huh? I'm proud of you, brother Yu," He Liwei spoke up. "That's not bad at all for someone like you. You should be the only True King in the Top 128 at this rate."

"I plan on going further, of course," Alex said as he turned towards the man.

"Oh, and how will you be doing that if I may ask?" He Liwei asked. "You know I'm not going to make way for you just because we're both from the other world. I will fight you to defeat you."

"I know," Alex said as he stared at the man directly. "I will fight you too, and I will defeat you."

He Liwei suddenly started laughing out loud, catching the attention of a few of the others that were sitting around him.

"You shouldn't overestimate yourself, brother Yu. Just because you beat a puppeteer by overwhelming her with your beast doesn't mean you can do the same to me you know," He Liwei said.

"We'll see." Alex turned around to check the fight that was starting on stage and ignored He Liwei for the most part.

The day soon ended and everyone returned back to their rooms to cultivate. Most didn't waste time with the facilities that were provided but some were still too confident to worry about that.

The next day marked the end of Top 256 and the crowd now knew the top 128 best members of the young generation.

Surprisingly, that included a person in the True King realm. However, since they had seen a True Emperor beast with him, they dismissed him as a True Emperor as well.

That meant, that not a single person that didn't have a True Emperor cultivation base to aid them had not passed the third round of the competition.

The Top 128 started the next day with the first 64 people fighting on the very first day.

Guo Chiang and Song Shing were their group's two most prominent fighters that easily won each battle with a single attack.

Half of those times, their opponents had to be saved by the referees. The battle concluded with 32 people passing on to the next round.

Alex watched those fights with not much interest as he knew who would make it out from there. The seeded fighters were way too strong.

Still, there was a chance someone would win against them so he still watched it.

The group all returned back to their rooms and half of them prepared for their next battle.

Alex sat in his room cultivating when he suddenly heard a knock on the door.

He opened his eyes, his body full of cuts due to Pearl cultivating next to him. He asked Pearl to stop and get back into his body for the moment.

After he was gone, Alex opened the door.

"Sister Liang, what are you doing here?" he looked at Liang Qiu with a confused expression as she stood outside his door.

Liang Qiu spread her spiritual sense around to see if anyone was watching and asked, "can I come in?"

"Um…" Alex looked around. "Sure, come in."

Liang Qiu walked into his room and went straight to sit on his bed. Then, she looked back at him standing by the door and asked, "You're not giving up tomorrow's match, are you?"

"Of course not," Alex said.

Liang Qiu sighed. "I thought so. But you have no way of winning, do you?" she asked.

"I will try my best," Alex said.

"I don't think you would be this confident for no reason, so I can only assume you have a plan. Will you be using your Sword Intent tomorrow? Or maybe even your Sword Qi?" she asked.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "Why do you say so?" he asked.

"I remembered seeing you fight all those years ago in the poison valley, and I saw you fight the puppets a few days ago. None of your attacks had the slightest hint of intent to it," She said.

"So?" Alex asked.

"It is impossible for anyone with such a grasp of the sword to not have any intent to it. Most of the fighters that watched you have already realized that you are hiding your sword intent," she said.

"Is that so?" Alex asked with an awkward smile on his face. "Did me hiding my sword intent backfire on me?"

"Yes, but not necessarily. Sword Intent can only take you so far in the True Realm. It's not very helpful," she said.

"I see," Alex said. "So… why exactly are you here?"

"Do you know anything about He Liwei?" she asked.

Alex thought for a moment. Aside from the few techniques he saw him use in the 3 fights before this, there wasn't much information on him.

"Not really," he said.

"And I don't suppose anyone is passing in information for you from the outside?" she asked.

Alex shook his head. "Sect master Qin might've done it, but I don't think he's allowed to come to visit me given that I put my affiliation as nothing. It would have been helpful if some of the sect's disciples passed, but they've already failed," he said.

"I thought so," Liang Qiu said. "Since you were so adamant about fighting He Liwei, I thought you would need some information on his to make whatever plans to win against him."

"That would in fact be helpful," Alex said.

"Good. The first and most important fact about He Liwei is that while his cultivation base is at True Emperor 6th realm, his real fighting power should be around the 7th realm," Liang Qiu said.

Alex's eyes widened. "He can skip levels like me?" he asked.

"Exactly," Liang Qiu said. "You surprised me there, but I guess there wasn't much to be surprised by.

"What else?" Alex asked. "What's his weapon of choice? I haven't seen him use anything."

"He uses swords and sabers, but I wouldn't call him a weapons master necessarily. He only uses them to send out his powerful attacks that come from his strong spiritual roots. That brings me to another crucial information."

"While it is only speculations based on what we've observed, He Liwei seems to have 3 Superior spiritual roots. Mainly Earth, Wood, and Fire," she said.

'Earth, Wood, and Fire,' Alex thought to himself. Fortunately, there was only one Empowering combination of Spiritual roots in him. Had it been Metal, Wood, and Fire, Alex would've been in some trouble.

"Anything else I should know?" Alex asked.

Liang Qiu shook her head. "That's the most information I have to give you. Since he's not one of the people I will be fighting, my master hasn't provided me with much information," she said.

"I see. Still, this is very much valuable. Knowing how strong he can get will help me remain vigilant and not underestimate him in the battle tomorrow. Thank you, sister Liang," Alex bowed.

Liang Qiu nodded. "Good luck," she said and left the room, leaving Alex to prepare for his fight tomorrow.

Chapter 796 Here Goes Nothing

Jin Teifeng was a master with the sword. The way he slashed in between the beasts and attacked their master left the crowd breathless.

Alex watched the fight while constantly monitoring the time. The 3rd match after this one would be his, and he was starting to get worried that the sun would reach its zenith at that point.

The fight ended not long after and the next set of fighters went up to the stage while Alex waited for his turn to come.

* * * * *

The different family heads and sect leaders were all gathered in a single massive room to watch the competition from the tower that was raised on the northern side of the arena.

"Tengfei is doing quite well, isn't he?" a bloody white-robed old woman asked the yellow-robed old man that was sitting not far away from him.

"He's doing the best he can for his cultivation base," the old man said. "His cousin would've done much better, but alas." The old man shook his head while turning to look at another old man.

The old man in the crimson red robe frowned when he saw the yellow-robed man turned towards him. "Stop looking at me. You all agreed to send your disciples into that realm on your own. Now that they're dead, all you can do is blame me," the Fu old man shouted.

"It's hard not to blame you, brother Fu," Han Huaxian, the family head of the Han family spoke up. "2 times the realm opened, and 2 times people went in. However, in both of those times the only ones that survived have been from your family. It's hard not to see the conspiracy that could exist in all of this."

"Hmph! Its not just my family that survived. Oi, old woman. Tell them that your granddaughter survived too," the Fu old man spoke to an old woman wearing green robes.

"Don't look at me. For all I know, your grandson could've been star-smitten for my granddaughter and decided to save her," the old woman said.

"Urgh!" the old man started getting frustrated and everyone found fun in that.

They all knew that the beast realm was dangerous and that it wasn't the old man's fault. Besides, it was a joint decision. Still, they had all lost something precious at that time. All except for this old man who not only had an unharmed grandson but also found out his brother from over a thousand years ago had actually survived and had an entire family on the other side of the realm.

In fact, he had been the Emperor of the empire on that side. That made these people want to tease him whenever they could. After all, they had to win somewhere.

"I hear it was the miracle alchemist that helped them get back here, is that true?" a man in blue robes asked.

"Tsk! How did you find out?" the old man asked. He had been surprised when he learned that 2 years ago after the alchemy tournament, but hadn't expected the alchemist to just die at the time.

"Apparently, your grandson couldn't keep his mouth shut," the blue-robed man laughed out loud.

The old man grumbled. "Yeah, it's him," he said.

Some of the others looked at the bracket that hung in the sky. "Well, we will have to call him here soon then," one of them said and turned to a husband-wife pair to the side. "Your disciple isn't going to hurt him too bad right?"

"He's just a mere True King. The fight will be over before it even begins," the wife said.

"My disciple knows what to do," the husband said.

"Well, let's send someone to go get him. Finally, we can talk to him like we've been wishing for this entire time."

* * * * * *

Alex walked onto the stage and it was finally his turn. He Liwei walked up next to him with a smile on his face.

"Don't worry, brother. It will be over quickly," he said and walked to one end of the stage.

Alex looked at him for a second before walking to the other side of the stage. Once he was there, he looked at the sky and then to the ground.

As he feared, the sun was directly over them. 'Well, it should still work fine,' he thought and stared towards He Liwei in the distance.

He Liwei stood without taking out any weapon as they were ordered to prepare.

Alex took out the sword he had been using to fight throughout the tournament and stared across the stage at He Liwei.

The sounds of the crowd quietened as the barrier sprung up to block all sounds from outside. Alex felt the world go quiet.

The referee, a woman from the Falling Lotus sect stood between them as her spiritual sense fell on both of them as she waited to see if they were both ready.

She frowned a bit when Alex didn't bring out his beast companion at all. It was hard to tell if he was ready or not.

"Are you ready?" she was forced to ask Alex in the end.

Alex looked away from He Liwei toward the woman. He glanced towards the tower on the left side of his vision and sighed. The people that mattered would all be looking at this fight, evaluating him.

'Here goes nothing,' he thought to himself and nodded.

"I'm ready."

The woman turned to look at He Liwei who nodded his head as well.

"Begin!"

The moment the woman gave the go, Alex moved. As if an arrow that had left the bowstring, he zipped through the entire stage and smashed his sword directly onto He Liwei's chest.

He Liwei's armor lit up to protect him, but even then Alex's attack was too strong for it to completely negate it.

As such, He Liwei was sent flying back close to the boundary.

Vines suddenly appeared around He Liwei's arm and struck the ground to slow him down. He barely managed to keep himself from going out of bounds.

When he looked up, Alex was already there.

An earth wall appeared in between the two of them to stop Alex. However, the wall couldn't stop Alex at all.

From the shadows next to the wall, Alex emerged and swung at He Liwei.

He Liwei was now scared out of his mind. He couldn't imagine why Alex was so strong or how he was doing what he was doing.

Unsurprisingly, he had to use his real strength, something he hadn't done in the tournament before.

A gust of wind pushed Alex back before he could hit He Liwei. The swing went untouched as he was pushed back too fast.

Alex tried to fight back against the wind but it was too strong. A bit too strong.

Alex landed far away from He Liwei and looked back at him. He understood what had happened right now.

'He used his Saint Qi, huh?' Alex thought. A True realm 6th realm cultivator wouldn't have much Saint Qi, but what he did have would make him very strong.

Alex smiled. It had been a while since he had felt the thrills of a true battle.

Chapter 797 No Restraint

"Is he hiding his cultivation base?" Song Shing couldn't understand.

"Can't be, he was checked before the registration," Liang Qiu said with shock filling her eyes.

"It can't be that he can really jump 6 minor realms to fight his opponent, can he?" Fu Tao asked with an awkward expression on his face.

"7 minor realms, if you count He Liwei's own ability to skip realms," Liang Qiu.

"There's only one explanation here really," Zhou Ren said from the side and everyone understood what he meant.

"He's cheating."

* * * * * *

Alex stared at the scared He Liwei and a small smile crept up on his face.

"You cheater! Tell me you didn't eat a pill," He Liwei shouted.

Alex's face turned to a frown. "Why would I cheat so blatantly?" he asked. "I'm not stupid."

"Senior, he's cheating," He Liwei complained.

The referee looked at Alex for a bit and turned to He Liwei. "The fight will continue as it is. The punishment will come afterward depending on the severity of the offense."

Alex turned towards He Liwei. "I hope you have plenty of Saint Qi in you," he said.

"What does that have to do with you?" He Liwei frowned.

"I just hope you can make me fighting with no restraint be worthwhile."

"Continue!" the referee said.

Alex dashed with his sword again while constantly remaining aware of the things that were happening in front of him.

A normal True Emperor realm cultivator would start to form Saint Qi around the 5th realm. By the 6th realm, they would have about 5% of their entire Qi turned to Saint Qi.

Since He Liwei could jump a realm, he would have denser Qi than normal. Given that, it was a good guess when Alex thought that about 15% to 20% of his Qi would have already turned to Saint Qi.

That meant, Alex would have to be extremely careful of any attacks that He Liwei sent his way.

As expected, when he saw Alex move, He Liwei reacted as well. He slammed his foot onto the ground which broke apart and turned to lava instantly.

A tentacle-like arm emerged from the lava that started waving at Alex.

Alex slashed at the lava arm and cut it in two, but that would only make the lava fall back into the pool and rejoin the arm.

Alex cut it off a few times, but the lava arm kept regrowing and wouldn't let Alex go around it either. The lava also didn't create any shadows for Alex to teleport to.

'I need to destroy the lava,' he thought.

Alex reached out with his left hand towards the lava and willed the world to come to his aid.

A single tongue of fire flickered in the lava, and Alex used his authority over it.

'Explode!'

BANG!

A massive explosion rang out on the stage that sent shock waves all around.

Alex hadn't made the explosion strong enough to hurt him, but it was strong enough to destroy the arm and make the lava lose its connection to He Liwei.

Alex flipped through the air and landed with no harm, while He Liwei was only alive thanks to a barrier that appeared around him at the last moment.

Even as He Liwei tried to get rid of the barrier Alex dashed back at him.

Ignoring the barrier, He Liwei retaliated. Vines and roots grew out from the ground and tried to constrict Alex.

However, all they met were his sword as Alex cut through each one of them while continuing his way toward He Liwei.

"Arrgh!" He Liwei shouted and used a technique. Spikes of the earth grew out of the ground as they launched towards Alex.

There were over a thousand of them and each one was sharper than the other. Alex tried to look for a way to dodge but there was nowhere he could teleport to that would help him escape this attack.

So, he instead used his defense technique and crashed into flying earth spikes.

A long strip of dust cloud rose to the air after the crash. He Liwei smiled as it soon turned maniacal. He turned to look at the referee, waiting for her to announce her victory, but all he could see was a shocked expression on her face.

'Is... is he dead?' He Liwei wondered as he looked towards the cloud of dust on the stage that was starting to settle. However, it didn't take even a moment for him to realize that if Alex was ever in trouble, the referee would have already moved to save him.

Which meant—

Alex dashed out of the dust, completely unharmed. His robes were in tatters as they showed in well-defined muscles that were always hidden beneath his robes.

He Liwei was ready and retaliated as well. He brought out his sword as he realized he couldn't keep half-assing this fight or he would definitely lose.

His sword glowed red as he swung it directly at Alex. The slash moved a little forward before suddenly turning into a fire tornado that stood like a pillar in the middle of the stage.

The pillar appeared right in front of Alex.

Alex put his empty arm out and yin Qi started flowing into his meridians. He didn't know how helpful this would be, but he would do it anyway.

He felt the fire in front of him and willed the world to follow his command. When the world agreed, he lowered the temperature of the fire until it wasn't dangerous at all.

Then, Alex plunged into the fire tornado and came out on the other side.

"HOW!" He Liwei shouted, but he didn't get any answer.

Alex slashed his sword at him, and He Liwei swung back with a hint of Saint Qi poured into his sword.

Even then, Alex only felt a slight pain in his arm from the rebound. He jumped back and slashed again.

He Liwei fought back, but Alex was too strong. To contend with him, he had to continuously deplete the Saint Qi in his body.

Alex himself was glad that using his physical body alone was enough for him to fight against He Liwei.

When He Liwei did use Saint Qi, adding his own Qi to fight was in fact better than He Liwei's own.

Not to mention, if Alex had used his mental attacks or Sword Qi, the fight wouldn't have lasted for long.

Alex had planned to hide nothing in this battle. However, just because he was willing to show everything he had, didn't mean he needed to.

If the battle didn't call for anything aside from his physical and cultivation base, he wouldn't use anything else.

After going through the ordeal of the yin orb where his body was wrecked in a fight between the yin and yang, his body cultivation had improved a lot.

In fact, he had reached True Emperor 7th realm after surviving the clash between the two.

In addition to that, after the yin and yang had found harmony and his Qi was now pure, instead of being affected by the yang, the thicker mixture of the two now made his effective cultivation base to be around True Emperor 9th realm while remaining in True King 9th realm.

If Saint Qi was out of the equation, Alex would be able to go toe to toe with every single fighter in this tournament without using his physical, Sword, or mental strengths.

He Liwei kept hitting Alex's sword back as hard as he could but slowly it was getting harder and harder as Alex started using his Sword Intent to corner He Liwei into the boundary.

Any further and he would lose the match.

Anger flared in He Liwei and flame spears appeared around him.

Alex could tell that he had used Saint Qi into those spears, so he needed to be careful.

The spears shot at Alex, but they only hit empty air. Realizing the problem, Alex had already teleported to one of the shadows that belonged to the ruins on top of the stage.

He Liwei finally breathed in relief as he got some time to rest. However, he knew that wouldn't last long, and he knew he himself wouldn't last long.

He needed to use this break he had gotten to win. So, without hesitation, he decided to use his strongest skill.

Chapter 798 Single Attack

Besides, he was more of a turret-style fighter, one that would sit around throwing out skills until something landed and his opponent was down.

However, no matter what he threw at Alex, he would still stand up with not a single scratch on him. He couldn't win like this at all.

"I have a proposal brother Yu," He spoke up.

Alex who was about to attack stopped and looked in front of him. "What proposal?" he asked.

"A single attack to determine victory between us two," he said.

Alex frowned a little. "A single attack? Against your Saint Qi versus my True Qi?" he asked.

"What? Are you scared? I thought you were winning," He Liwei asked.

"I was, and I am not planning on throwing away my victory," Alex said.

"Come on, you can't be this much of a coward, right?" He Liwei asked.

Alex showed a visible snarl on his face as if his ego had been attacked. "Fine, attack me," he said.

"Haha, good. Good. We will both attack at the same time," He Liwei said and started preparing his attack.

He Liwei was very glad when he saw Alex's cockiness. He knew he couldn't win like this and needed to use his strongest attack to win. However, the problem with his strongest attack was that it took some time to prepare.

He Liwei saw Alex prepare for his own attack and got excited. He had a chance to win it. 'You can't just have brute strength. How could you forget that the brain is always stronger than the brawn,' he thought to himself while shaking his head.

Then, he let go of his own sword and put it into his storage. Next, he put his two arms out in front of him as waves of Qi left his body at an incredible amount.

The ground shuddered while the wind roared. Heat waves distorted the surrounding for the viewers.

Tiny rocks moved on the ground as they slowly rose to the air while a raging fire appeared in the middle of it all. The fire shrunk and shrunk until it was nothing but a tiny little orb.

The rocks flew up to cover the fire and soon they started condensing too. As they did, the rocks slowly started glowing bright red from the heat of the fire orb.

The wind moved all around the newly formed glowing rock spike that flew in midair.

As He Liwei pumped more and more air onto it, the faster it spun. Soon, it was ready.

A deadly burning rock that would zip across the stage like a bullet. He Liwei didn't have much control after letting it go. However, until now he had never missed the attack on a stationary target.

Since Alex had decided to the single attack match, it was guaranteed that he wouldn't move at all.

"Ready, brother Yu?" He Liwei asked as he looked at Alex who seemed ready to use his attack. However, he hadn't prepared it at all.

'Arrogance! That will be your downfall,' He Liwei thought.

Before Alex could even say or do anything, he let the rock bullet fly.

Alex stood there, on the pathway of the bullet, like a doe in headlights. That was exactly what He Liwei wanted.

He wanted to see what defenses Alex would put up to try and block the attack, but he knew that there was no defense a True King could produce that would stop his deadliest attack which was filled with Saint Qi.

Seeing that he had caught Alex unprepared, he smiled and his eyes shifted to the referee to watch her move to protect him. However, she remained unmoving.

SWISH~!

The bullet zipped through the stage and struck Alex dead on the chest as it pierced through him before coming out of the other side and hitting the barrier.

The crowd on that side flinched when they heard the sound of the explosion from the fire and rocks that spread throughout the barrier on their side.

However, He Liwei didn't care for that. He only cared that Alex was hit. However, he wasn't hit. Alex wasn't even there.

"An illusion?" He Liwei's eyes went wide.

"A Qi clone," Alex explained from behind him.

"Wha—" before He Liwei could exclaim, Alex caught him by his armor.

"My turn now."

He put all his strength into his next move and threw He Liwei as hard as he could towards the barrier.

At the same time He Liwei left his hands, a small tongue of flame appeared between them which exploded with great intensity.

He Liwei felt like he had been hit in the head by a charging bull as the explosion rang his head hard. For a second, he couldn't focus at all due to his brain rattling in his own skull.

That second was all it took for him to crash onto the barrier and fall to the ground.

He Liwei shook his head and stood back up to fight, but the referee was in front of him and shook her head.

He Liwei was confused at first. But then something came to him and he looked down.

He had crossed the barrier.

"I... I lost?" he asked in a dazed voice.

The referee nodded without saying a single word.

He Liwei dropped to the ground. "I... I lost? I failed? How can that be? I... I'm supposed to win. I'm... I'm supposed to..." He couldn't fathom having lost against someone that he perceived as a stepping stone at best.

Now, he had become the stepping stone.

Alex got up from the ground as he tried to stop the ringing in his ears. "I should really stop having so many explosions right next to me. This can't be good for my ears," he said to himself.

The referee came up to him and he waited for his victory to be announced.

However, she instead just stood in front of him and said, "Junior Yu Ming, in suspicion of having used forbidden resources that go against the tournament rules, your result will be postponed until the elders come up with an answer. Do you agree to get tested for it?"

"Forbidden resources? You think I used pills for the strength I showed today?" Alex asked.

"That is the suspicion yes. If you do not agree to be tested, you will be considered guilty of going against the rules," the woman said.

Alex sighed. He hadn't thought that revealing his strength would end up with this.

"Very well. Let's go," Alex said and followed the woman.

The staff walked up to the stage to fix it after the tremendous battle that had left the crowd shocked.

The earth elemental cultivators quickly fixed the stage to how it usually was and walked away as it was time for the next battle to start.

Alex turned around just as he entered a hallway and frowned as he was really curious to see this match. After all, his next opponent would be between the two women that stood on the stage right now.

However, he was forced to follow the woman into the dark to prove his innocence on this matter and thus become the victor of this match.

Chapter 799 Testing for Cheats

Alex looked at the many beds that were in the room and asked, "What do I do now?"

Just as he asked, he heard a set of footsteps as a whole lot of people simultaneously walked in from the other side of the room.

He had seen almost half of them before, but he only recognized Xue Mufan amongst them.

"You should not have cheated, young man." An old man amongst them spoke up as he walked ahead of all of them.

"I did no such thing, senior," Alex said, wondering who the old man was.

"And you lie as well," the old man sighed and shook his head.

"What exactly is happening, senior? I'm missing the match outside and that may cost me tomorrow's match. Please hurry up and test me so I can leave," Alex said.

"Alright, give us your storage bags so we can check it," the old man said.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "Why do you want my storage bag? Isn't the suspicion here that I ate a pill?" he asked.

"Yes, and you might have more in your bag," the old man said.

"Senior, do you really believe that I would be stupid enough to cheat in the way I did and would be even stupider to keep the evidence lying around?" Alex asked.

"That's..." the old man had no response.

"Even if you did find something forbidden in my storage bag, you are here to prove that I used it in the first place. Surely it is not a crime to own something, right?" Alex asked.

"Sigh, Mufan, Zirong, take over," The old man said and walked back.

Xue Mufan walked up front along with another man in a white, burnt robe. 'That's Zhou Zirong?' Alex thought to himself. It wasn't every day that you got to see the two most famous Saint Alchemists of the empire in a single room.

"Seniors," Alex greeted them with a bow.

"Sigh, young man. You caused quite the commotion today," Xue Mufan spoke up.

"It was either that or lose without fighting," Alex said.

"Bring a puppet please," Zirong asked someone from the tournament staff. The man nodded and walked away for a while.

"Please tell me if you really ate something or used something to enhance your abilities," Xue Mufan asked.

"I did nothing, senior," Alex said.

"Sigh, I really hope you are telling the truth," Mufan said under his breath.

The staff that had left earlier arrived with a puppet. When Alex saw it, he realized what was happening.

"You want to test my strength?" he asked.

"Yes," Zirong said from the side. "Before we do what we do, we need to test your strength to see if you still have the pill in your system."

Alex frowned but agreed. "Okay, I'll do it," he said and turned towards the puppet. Without waiting for anything, he punched at it.

A golden fist emerged from his punch and flew at the puppet, hitting it dead on the chest.

After a second or two, a single line of sentence emerged.

- True Emperor 9th realm-

Alex turned toward the two alchemists. "That's enough right?"

Xue Mufan and Zhou Zirong looked in shock. They simply knew of no drugs that could produce such a massive result for someone that was in True King 9th realm.

That was an entire realm above where he was currently. "Just what did you eat?" Xue Mufan muttered to himself.

"Here, eat this." Zhou Zirong produced a blue pill from his storage bag. He handed the pill over to Alex, who looked at it with a dumb face.

"What's this?" he asked.

"It's a type of nullifying pill. Unlike a normal nullifying pill that works only when recently created and just as the pill is in effect, this one can be used long after one has eaten a pill," Zirong explained.

"That's... that's quite good," Alex was surprised to hear of the existence of such pills.

"It is, but it's not without its drawbacks," Zirong explains. "For one, it can only be used after the pill has taken effect. So if it's a harmful pill you ate, this would be useless."

"And worse of all, especially when concerned with the current situation, this pill needs a full 24 hours to completely get rid of the pill you ate from your system," Zirong explained.

"Which means... I won't be freed until after 24 hours?" Alex asked.

"I'm afraid that is so," Zirong said.

"You don't have to worry about your match if that's what you are concerned about," Mufan said from the side. "If we don't make it in time, your match will be postponed by a bit."

"Then, we will find out if it is you or He Liwei that will get to pass to the next round," Mufan explained.

"I see, so I better eat this early," Alex said and was about to eat the pill when he stopped.

"What will the pill do to me when it doesn't find anything in my system?" Alex asked.

"Nothing," Zirong answered.

"I see, very well then," Alex said and popped the pill into his mouth before swallowing it.

Xue Mufan watched him swallow the pill with his spiritual sense and followed it until it reached his stomach.

Spiritual sense was hard to use on someone else's body, but a Saint realm cultivator using it on a True realm gave way for his senses easily.

Once he saw the pill dissolve, he finally nodded. "Good, now you will be under supervision for the next 24 hours here. Anything you need will be provided by the staff but you won't be allowed to get out," he explained.

"I understand," Alex said.

"That's it, senior. We will take our leave now," Zirong turned to the old man at the back of the room.

"Thank you, brother Mufan, brother Zirong," the old man bowed in thanks.

"Keep an eye on him. In 24 hours, if he still has the same strength he showed earlier, he will have passed," he explained.

After the two alchemists left, the staff also left one by one until only a few remained to watch over him.

Alex sighed and went to sit on one of the beds where he started cultivating, ignoring the person that was watching him.

Yang Qi raged through his body, destroying any part of the pill he had just absorbed. While he trusted the words of two Saint alchemists to not harm a young man like him, he still decided to be careful and destroyed the pill in his body after they left.

That in turn gave him a boat-load of Qi that he now needed to refine in his body. So, for the entire 24 hours of the time he remained in the room, he cultivated.

Once the 24 hours had passed, he stopped and walked up to the staff that was watching over him now.

"Can I test now?" he asked.

The staff nodded and let Alex attack the puppet.

The golden fist struck the puppet and the same information was shown in it again.

True Emperor 9th realm.

Chapter 800 Return to Fight

He had suspected that one of them might have been broken and had asked for more, but to his surprise, they all showed the same result.

As such, he was no longer able to keep Alex held back at all and would have to let him go.

"Come with me," the old man said and took Alex along with him.

Alex followed him and soon realized he was being taken out of the arena, back to the stage area.

He arrived outside and watched the fight that was taking place in front of him.

'That's... group 9?' he thought when he saw Xue Meirong on stage. She was the seeded fighter of that group.

Flowers grew from the stage of many types that soon started filling the place with their sweet smell.

Her opponent tried to swing his sword, but the smell of the flower was getting to him.

Alex wondered how he would fight if he were in there, but it was soon apparent what he had to do.

As soon as the man on the stage held his breath, he no longer had to breathe at all. A cultivator could hold his breath for a lot of time, but not forever.

The fight became a battle of attrition as Xue Meirong kept up the flower field while her opponent tried to force him to breathe.

Slowly, parts that he did already inhale were getting to him, so the man lost in the end.

Once Xue Meirong was announced victor, the staff walked onto the stage to fix it. When it was fixed, the next set of fighters was about to be called.

However, before that could happen, the old man walked onto the stage and called Alex along with him.

Alex walked behind him and looked onto the seating area to see He Liwei still sitting amidst the people.

'I guess he still hadn't lost yet, technically,' he thought.

"I have something to announce," the old man said. "Regarding yesterday's match from Group 12 where participant Yu Ming fought against He Liwei and won, we had to postpone the results until further investigation and we are finally done with that."

The crowd looked at them curiously as they waited for the verdict. He Liwei leaned in as well as this concerned him too.

"And the result is that participant Yu Ming had not broken any rules, and this is the winner of yesterday's match. Young man He, I'm afraid to say that you will have to leave the contestant area," the old man said.

"You can go sit and wait for your turn," the old man told Alex.

Alex nodded and walked towards the seating area.

He Liwei left as Alex reached and even managed to glare at him. Alex simply nodded towards him and went along his way.

As he entered the area, all eyes fell on him. However, he was quite surprised to see just how few people there were.

Half the people from yesterday were already missing, while a third of these were still left to go today.

Compared to the original 512 that stayed here, this area felt very... vacant.

Alex searched amongst the crowd and found a dark-skinned, muscular man with short-sleeved, brown robes.

'So he passed yesterday, huh?' he thought as he analyzed his opponent for today.

Alex ignored everyone's eyes and sat down in an empty spot. Surprisingly for him, no one came to ask about it at all.

Out of nowhere, people were starting to understand that he wasn't just a random fighter in their path. He had beat the seed of the 12th group.

It was safe to say that he was now the 12th group's seed himself.

One after another, the fights went on until it was finally time for Alex to fight again.

Alex was a little bummed out that he didn't get to see his opponent's fight, but realizing that he was from the Han family, Alex knew how he would fight.

Alex walked off the seating area and went onto the stage. He stood on one end of the stage while his big opponent stood on the other.

Alex felt the man's cultivation base. He was simply at the 5th True Emperor realm. This wasn't even going to be a fight.

The man brought out a hammer to fight while Alex brought out nothing. The referee considered them both ready and started to fight.

Alex waited for his opponent to make the first move and he did. The man had analyzed Alex's match with He Liwei and had understood that Alex's advantage lay in his fighting style where he always ran to his opponent and struck them before they were aware of what had happened.

So he decided to take that advantage of himself and charged at Alex.

Alex watched the man run up to him and took a single step forward.

The man used a hammer technique that caused a lion's head to form on top of the hammer as it fell with increased force.

Considering the man likely had his physique active, this attack would do quite some harm to even people that were in the True Emperor 6th realm.

For Alex however, this was nothing. He made a fist as he twisted his entire waist to put his weight into the punch.

The punch broke the sound barrier as it made its way onto the hammer and struck it directly in the center.

The man felt pain between his thumb and his index finger as the hammer rebounded back away from him.

"Argh!" he cried out in pain and tried to grab the hammer with all he could from leaving his arm.

However, that wouldn't help him at all as Alex's left arm moved and punched him in the chest.

The man felt what he thought was the force of mountain land on him as he was sent flying back onto the edge of the stage, directly next to the boundary.

He quickly got up and tried to get out of the way but Alex was already next to him.

The man hurriedly used all of his defensive skills while also activating his armor.

As he did, Alex's golden fist landed on his body.

At first, the man smiled when he realized that his defense that stopped the attack, however just after that the golden light around Alex's arm suddenly expanded, turning into a delayed attack that sent the man hurtling back.

By the time the man tried to gain control of his body, he had already struck the barrier behind him.

He slowly got up and saw the boundary before him that he had crossed. He understood that he had lost.

What he could not understand was why it had been so quick, and just why... Alex was so strong.

The referee checked on the man and then turned towards Alex to announce his victory.

The crowd cheered as Alex walked back onto the seating area.

Another hurdle was passed. Alex managed to defeat his opponent with ease.

Now, he had entered the Top 32. Which meant the next battle he fought would result in the victor of Group 12.

Chapter 801 Victory

"Your majesty, our disciple has been wronged here, I hope you will do something," the husband spoke. "That kid is clearly cheating."

The Emperor frowned a little. He too thought something was wrong, but the committee had no reason to help Alex in any regard.

"Call Wei Tianshan," the Emperor ordered some of his guards. One of them nodded and left.

The husband and wife waited patiently for a little while before the old man that was the head of organizing this tournament arrived in the room.

It wasn't just him, however. Both Xue Mufan and Zhou Zirong also came along.

"You called for me, your majesty?" the old man asked.

"You should know why I'm calling you, right?" the Emperor asked.

"I believe I do," the old man said. "This is in regards to the young man Yu Ming's victory today."

"Yes, so what happened? Why is he still in the tournament?" the Emperor asked.

"Well, we have no reason to suspect he's cheating, your majesty. We thoroughly checked him and even had the two Saint Alchemists give him a pill to get rid of whatever he might have eaten. We even looked after him for an entire day, yet his power never diminished."

"Whatever that junior is doing to gain this much ability, it's not cheating," the old man said.

"You checked everything?" the Emperor asked.

"Well, he didn't allow us to check his storage bag, but since we took him directly after his fight with Junior He Liwei, he didn't have his storage bags on him either."

"What he did have would be checked before he walked onto the stage, and as far as that's concerned, it was only filled with swords," the old man said.

The Emperor frowned. "So he really did not cheat?" he asked.

"Not by the definition that can be given using the tournament rules," the old man said.

"Really?" the Emperor was now amused. He couldn't have possibly imagined that Alex was this strong with his own strength.

"You saw it today your majesty, how easily he beat the kid from the Han family despite being under supervision the entire day earlier. Please believe me, that kid is not cheating," the old man said.

"We can give our words too, your majesty," Xue Mufan spoke up. "I saw the young man eat our pill. His strength does not come from any pills he might have taken."

The Emperor thought for a moment. 'Did that senior do something to him? Is he this strong because of his help?' the emperor wondered.

He hadn't thought of it before as cheating had been the obvious answer at that time. However, now that he was convinced that Alex wasn't cheating, the other obvious answer was that Shen Jing helped him gain this ability somehow.

'That must be it,' the Emperor thought.

"Well, you have your answer, don't you? Your disciple lost legitimately," the Emperor told the husband and wife.

The two of them looked at each other and talked between themselves using their spiritual sense. After a few seconds, they turned towards the Emperor.

"Your majesty, if… if our disciple truly lost and that young man didn't cheat at all to win then… do you think we should call him here and ask him to explain how he did it? Learning to be that powerful with that low of a cultivation base… that would be incredible, wouldn't it?" the wife asked.

"We should do that, your majesty," the husband nodded. "Brother Tianshen, please call the young man here so we can—"

"No!" the Emperor said with a stern face.

"Your majesty?" the two of them were surprised.

"You will do no such thing," the Emperor said with a serious face. "I told you all before, that kid has a backing that we cannot offend. Leave him be."

"But we can just ask—"

"No buts," the Emperor said as he stood up. "We're done here."

The husband and wife weren't happy with the response but there wasn't anything they could do.

"Yes, your majesty."

The two of them left the area and went back to their seating area with the other heads and leaders.

They had given up on the fact that their disciple had been cheated. However, they now had a newfound reason to look for Alex. If he could help them become strong the same way he was, they would do whatever they needed to get it.

* * * * *

Alex stood before his final opponent. This woman with her 3 different beasts was all that stood against him and becoming the sole victor of Group 16.

Alex looked at the woman and then at her beast. The 3 beasts were all in the True Emperor 6th realm. She truly deserved to be where she was.

Her cultivation itself was around True Emperor 7th realm. If He Liwei wasn't as popular as he was, being the sole disciple of the sect masters of the Glory's Edge sect and all, this girl would have most likely been made the seed.

Alex wondered why she wasn't with all of these beasts, but he realized it could've been the same reason as his.

She had been hiding her skills as well. There was a good chance that the girl would've entered the Top 16, and maybe even the top 8 with the potential she had shown to everyone in the tournament.

Unfortunately for her, she was pitted against Alex.

Alex looked at the salamander, eagle, and rhino beast. He knew their names and their description.

'Poison, sharp talons, high defense,' he thought as he looked through the beasts.

"Begin!"

As soon as the match began, Alex dashed forward.

The salamander tried to spit out some poison along his way but Alex had faster than it.

A golden fist flew in the direction of the salamander and hit the poison along with the beast, sending it hurtling back.

At the same time, a flying palm landed on the rhino, pushing it back as well.

Before the Eagle could even do anything, it fell unconscious.

The match had barely begun and the girl found all 3 of her beasts incapacitated already.

The girl was scared, but not so much that she forgot to fight. After all, she too was a fighter here and a strong one at that.

A blue whip emerged from her storage bag as she quickly unfurled it and swung it at Alex.

Alex tried to dodge and succeeded, but a rather loud noise appeared right next to him as it sent his ears ringing.

This was like multiple explosions happening at the same time right next to his ear.

While he was slightly disoriented, the girl swung her whip again and struck Alex directly on the head.

Alex stumbled backward but he wasn't hurt much at all.

The girl looked at him in surprise. 'How is he not bleeding?' she thought. There wasn't even a wound on him.

'How is he so strong?' the girl realized that if she didn't capitalize on her advantage, she would lose.

However, before she could attack again, a golden fist flew at her.

The girl moved to the side with her movement technique, leaving behind a blur of her afterimages that slowly faded.

At the same time, the hairpin on her head grew bright and hot. 'Mental attacks? When?' the girl was surprised. She couldn't see Alex use any attacks other than the punch, but somehow her hairpin had stopped something.

Alex ran forward at the same time, but not towards the girl.

"Where— My beasts!" she realized and ran towards them as well.

Alex reached them first and grabbed the rhino before tossing it towards her.

The girl stopped mid-run and focused on the rhino to take it back to her beast space. However, just as she tried to do that, Alex suddenly appeared in front of her, using the shadow of the rhino, and punched her in the chest.

Her armor stopped as much as it could, but the girl was still sent flying until she was out of bounds.

The referee quickly checked up on her and announced the victor.

Alex sighed. The fight didn't go as he expected it to, but he won in the end anyhow.

He became the victor amongst the 64 people that were in Group 12.

Chapter 802 Called onto the Stage

Not even Liang Qiu or Han Daiyu came to talk with him aside from a few words here and there.

However, Alex understood that they weren't ignoring him or trying to keep their distance from him, but rather they were way too focused on their own battle to think about.

The cultivation base amongst the fighters was so high now that it was no longer a fight between True Qi users.

It was a fight between Saint Qi users.

Alex was the only one that did not fight with Saint Qi.

After a night of cultivation, Alex returned to the arena on his own and sat on an empty seat in the finalist's quarters.

He looked at the giant display that had the name of all the winners of the 16 different groups.

As Alex read through their name, he understood why the seeds were who they were. Aside from He Liwei and Shen Hua, all the other 14 seeded individuals had made their way to the top 16.

He Liwei only lost because he was up against Alex. As for Shen Hua, she was never a fighter to begin with. She was also a bit too young to be here. This was supposed to be her sister's fight, but unfortunately, she had died over a decade ago.

Still, with her True Emperor 5th realm cultivation base, she had managed to be seeded. But a healer could rarely beat a warrior.

That was the only reason she lost. Because she was not a fighter.

That truly went to show that the ones that did make it through weren't popular for no reason.

Alex looked through the names in pairs and stopped on 11 and 12. Lin Shun and Yu Ming. His next opponent was to be one of the rogue cultivators.

'At least it isn't the man that was that raided a sect by himself,' Alex thought. He watched the stairs and after a few people walked through, saw the man named Lin Shun walk on.

'True Emperor 7th realm? That should be doable,' Alex thought to himself. He had already beat He Liwei who had about the same cultivation base and the girl from yesterday that had that same cultivation base.

So long as the man didn't have any weird skills that Alex couldn't understand, he would win no matter what. He had that much confidence in himself.

As everyone arrived and it was time to start.

The host started welcoming everyone to the Top 16. Alex waited for the formalities to end so that the fights may begin.

However, he was instead surprised by the host.

"Will all 16 of the finalists please come on to the stage?"

Alex was surprised, certainly, but he thought nothing strange of it. As far as he was concerned, the host was showing the 16 finalists on stage.

However, when he reached the stage, a group of staff members brought out a large box and placed it in the center of the stage.

"Winner of Group 1, please come and pick out something from the box," the host said.

Fu Tao looked with a weird face, confused as to what was happening, but he still went on to pick something out from the box.

"Please keep it closed for now," the host said and called the next person.

One by one, they all walked over to the box and picked out a wooden box. Those who could use spiritual sense used it on theirs, but to their surprise, they couldn't see through the box.

"Please open it," the host spoke.

Everyone simultaneously opened their box to see what it was. Alex opened his and found a single card inside that said the number 6.

"Huh?" he looked confused.

"3?" Liang Qiu looked around with a confused look.

"5," Song Shing said.

"I got 1," Fu tao spoke up.

"Everyone, please quiet down," the host spoke up. He waited for the people to stop talking and asked, "who got 1?"

Fu Tao raised his hand and so did Zhou Ren.

Suddenly, a massive screen hovered in the air as a tournament bracket appeared on it. The moment the people saw that they realized what it was.

'Our next opponent,' Alex thought.

"Who got 2?" the host asked again.

This time, Lu Yan raised her hand and so did the rogue cultivator that was said to have fought the entire mid-tier sect.

The 3rd pair ended up being Liang Qiu against Xue Meirong. New n0vel chapters are published on

The 4th pair was Han Daiyu against the girl that defeated the lady from the Shen family to be here.

The 5th pair was Song Shing against one of the two rogue female cultivators that were seeded in the battle.

The 6th pair was the one Alex was in. When the number was called out, Alex raised his hand and showed himself.

At the same time, another hand was raised near him, one that had a yellow sleeve on it with criss-cross patterns on it.

'Jin Tenfei?' Alex looked in surprise.

However, the host didn't wait for him and continued on.

The 7th pair was the prince against the other rogue female cultivator.

Finally, the two remaining people, Guo Chiang and Lin Shun ended up as the 8th pair in the competition today.

Alex looked at the bracket in visible shock. His next opponent was Jin Tengfei.

While Jin Tengfei only had a cultivation base of True Emperor 7th realm, he was most likely the strongest swordsman in the competition.

10 years ago, he had already mastered the Sword Qi while Alex hadn't even discovered his own at the time.

Who knew how strong he was at the moment. He was certainly strong enough to get through the rounds without revealing much swordsmanship after all.

The bracket truly scared Alex, but it wasn't just because of Jin Tengei. Say he won against Jin Tengfei and entered the top 8. That was certainly hard, but not impossible. But after that, he would most likely come face to face with Song Shing, a True Emperor 9th realm cultivator.

He was one of the 4 people that everyone was betting on to win the whole competition.

If Alex found some heaven-sent powers and managed to defeat him, he would then have to go up against Guo Chiang, another one of the 4 people everyone was betting on. A True Emperor 9th realm cultivator.

If by some dumb luck he managed to win that too, he would have to go against either Fu Tao or Liang Qiu, another 2 that were almost guaranteed to win the whole thing. Both of them were at True Emperor 9th realm after all.

Alex felt scared of the upcoming matches as any one of them could be his final one.

It wasn't just Alex that felt scared. Every single one of the finalists could see just how dire the situation was.

4 different True Emperor 9th realm cultivators, by luck or intentional orchestration, had managed to fall on the four quadrants of the bracket.

Whether it was this round or the next one, everyone single one of them would have to face one of them, and nothing could be scarier than that.

Chapter 803 Sword Qi

The elites of the elites were starting to fight, and he needed to make sure he didn't miss anything.

Fu Tao stood in front of Zhou Ren. Neither of them held a weapon in their hands.

The moment the match started, Zhou Ren immediately started using his fire skills. Orbs, arrows, javelin, rope, whip, and all other sorts of fire skills flew towards Fu Tao who continued dodging without much struggle.

He was 2 realms above Zhou Ren, so even though the fire attacks were made of White Fire, he was still fine.

Fu Tao himself retaliated with normal fire attacks, which Zhou Ren struggled to dodge or counter either with his strong attacks or his movement skills.

As he dodged, his earring kept on flashing with light. Fu Tao had been bombarding him with spiritual attacks that were truly hard for Zhou Ren to skip out of.

Very soon, the earring lost all power and Zhou Ren took the full brunt of what Alex could only imagine being similar to Heaven's Impact.

He fell to the ground unconscious and Fu Tao won.

Next up was Lu Yan against perhaps the strongest rogue cultivator in the competition.

Lu Yan never really fought seriously, but her opponent this time pretty much forced her to.

Between attacks and defenses and control skills and movement techniques, this fight lasted quite a while.

The only way for Lu Yan to win that fight had been through the use of her ultimate skill which had Alex quite surprised.

Lu Yan had a superior Wood spiritual root, like everyone in her family. Perhaps, she had one of the best ever.

As such when she used her technique, the wind rushed past her opponent to move to the sky as it got even more violent up there.

Alex wondered what she was doing when she suddenly did it.

Every element existed in various forms that could be used to imitate the various aspects of the world.

Yang could create life and light. Yin could create death and darkness. Water could create ice. Earth could create crystals and sands. Fire could create poison. So on and so forth.

The wood element was the same as well.

Aside from growing plants, vines, and other things, someone with wood elemental spiritual roots could create wind as well.

However, that was not the only thing they could use. There was one more thing they could use.

The wind in the sky got more and more violent, and the man knew he would lose if he didn't do something.

He dashed forward to defeat Lu Yan, but Lu Yan moved before the man could reach her.

She lifted he hands to the sky and pulled IT down to the ground.

CRACK!

A massive bolt of lightning dropped from the sky hitting the man right in front of Lu Yan.

Lu Yan quickly backed away, but she didn't need to. Her opponent was fully unconscious.

Alex looked to the sky and wondered what would happen if he was ever hit by that. He had ever only heard about the Wood element being the primary source of lightning for a cultivator, but aside from the Heavenly Judgment, this was the first time he had seen an unnatural lightning bolt.

The next fight with Liang Qiu didn't last long as her Spear Qi was too strong for Xue Meirong to handle.

Han Daiyu won almost as quickly by sending out barrage after barrage of her quick but heavy hammer attacks.

Song Shing's battle was quite interesting for Alex to see. He fought with blood aura, but he never used his own. Instead, he brought out small vials of blood that he would break and then use to fight.

His match lasted barely a few minutes as the overwhelming strength he portrayed made the opponent give up a bit too quickly.

Alex feared being pitted against him, but that feeling would have to take a sidestep as his real threat walked right past him.

Jin Tengfei walked in front of Alex, down to the stage and Alex followed soon after.

The stage didn't need to be fixed with how quickly the previous match was, so before long both Alex and Jin Tengfei were on the stage.

Alex looked at the lean man that was about his height with golden-blonde hair and holding a magnificent, black sword in his hand.

Alex thought for a moment about how to approach this battle. All this time he had been thinking, but the threat was never before him to urge him to come up with something.

Now that he saw his opponent, he needed something.

'How do I win this?' he tried to find an answer, but they're never really was one, to begin with. The only answer was to give it his all and even then there was a great chance that Alex could lose.

Alex decided to change his approach. If there was no way to win this match, then he would instead find a way to learn from it.

After all, Jin Tengfei was the strongest swordsman in the younger generation.

Alex readied his sword and waited.

The moment the referee realized they were both ready, she began the match.

Jin Tengfei wasted no time and sent a golden slash in Alex's direction with no Sword Qi in it. There wasn't even much Sword Intent in it at all.

'He's testing me?' Alex thought and swung his sword to toss it to the side. At the same time, Jin Tengfei sent out another slash at Alex.

Alex's own sword glowed white with his sword intent as he hit the incoming slash as hard as he could and destroyed it.

Jin Tengfei looked with a pleasantly surprised face and nodded to himself as if he had something confirmed to him.

Then, he sent out his final slash.

Alex took a deep breath as his sword that was glowing with Sword Intent suddenly started glowing with Sword Qi.

The audience members who noticed that suddenly gasped. Even Jin Tengfei was surprised. He had expected Alex to know Sword Intent, but he hadn't expected him to know Sword Qi at all. No one did.

How the hell could an alchemist of his level ever have the time to grasp such a deep understanding of the way of the sword.

Alex swung his sword and a white slash went forward, directly hitting the incoming sword slash.

And it easily overpowered Jin Tengfei's own attack.

However, that wasn't all. Jin Tengfei noticed something in Alex's attacks that he had only noticed in select members of his family.

When Alex's sword slash landed on his own, he could see the sword slash pushing back his own even after defeating it. It was pushing it back to the point that even after his slash was gone, Alex's continued forward as if it hadn't hit anything.

Jin Tengfei simply swung his sword to get rid of this incoming attack, but it still struck his heart with fear.

After all, Alex's Sword Qi already had a characteristic, a personality to it, so to speak.

And that scared Jin Tengfei. After all, the only time a sword attack could possibly have a characteristic of its own was when one had transcended Sword Qi, and reached the realm of Sword Aura.

Chapter 804 Illusory Swords

The Sword Aura had freaked him out so he hit as hard as he could at once.

Alex saw the slash coming and sent his own sword slash back. However, it didn't really do much against Jin Tengfei's attack aside from making it weaker, which his body was able to handle.

Jin Tengfei gave a weird look. 'Why didn't he stop that?' he wondered.

Alex tried to dash forward, but the man used the same attack again, forcing Alex to either attack back or get out of the way.

Alex used the first sword attack of the Elusive Heavenly Dance to attack back.

While sending out Qi slashes were nice and all, they didn't carry the damage that came from his Body Cultivation. Since he was clearly the weaker of the two when it came to just Qi and Sword Qi, Alex had to put his body into the fight too.

The golden slash disappeared into a bunch of light, surprising Jin Tenfei again.

This time, he could only be said to be confused.

'How strong is he? Is he weaker than me or not?' he thought. He didn't expect Alex to be a body cultivator at all, so between the two attacks he made, he couldn't get a clear idea of Alex's strength.

'Does he have Sword Aura or not?' he thought.

Alex used the moment of confusion to send out Heaven's impact attack, but obviously, Jin Tengfei had to be wearing a defensive mental artifact.

"Tsk!" Alex thought. He could try a couple of times and try to fight back against that defense, but he could only use so many Heaven's Impact.

Over the course of the many years, his spiritual energy had only grown denser but not vaster.

As a result, while his mental attacks were incredibly strong, they couldn't really be used a lot consecutively.

'Should I throw it all out and hope for the best? Or should I keep it so I can use my spiritual sense?' he wondered.

After thinking for a bit, he came to an answer. 'That should be my worst-case scenario. If all else fails, I use that,' Alex thought and rushed forward.

Friction disappeared from all around him like snow on a hot day. His speed doubled if not tripled as he arrived in front of Jin Tengfei.

Their swords clashed and they started fighting in close combat.

Jin Tengfei's sword was filled with Saint Qi, while Alex drew on the power of his body.

Tengfei swung his sword horizontally. Alex swung his own sword to send it aside and followed through to stab at Tengfei.

Tengfei leaned to the side and dodged the stab as he swung at Alex.

Alex had his arms outstretched and couldn't bring them back in time to dodge at all. So instead, he simply teleported behind Tengfei and swung at him.

Tengfei immediately ducked as he too was midswing and couldn't do anything else to dodge. He slashed his blade backward without looking and accurately struck Alex's sword.

He quickly moved forward and turned around to look at Alex, but he couldn't see him at all.

'Huh?' he quickly swung behind him, but he only met with empty air.

"What the he—"

BANG!

A strong attack landed on Jin Tengfei's armor that barely managed to block him from getting hurt.

He was sent back a few steps before he stopped. Jin Tengfei remembered how He Liwei lost his match.

'Shit! He's invisible,' he thought. A wave of Qi floated all around him as he used his Qi sense to locate Alex.

He sent out a sword slash in Alex's direction with was met with Alex's sword.

'I can't do it,' Jin Tengfei thought. 'I can't win like this.'

Alex teleported in front of Jin Tengfei, but he was ready for his this time. The sword landed on the other sword as sparks flew in the air.

Alex was pushed back as he came out of invisibility. With Qi sense, it didn't make sense to keep being invisible anymore.

Alex thought of using explosions instead of just swordsmanship, but with the armor his opponent had, it didn't make sense.

"I need to—" Alex paused as Jin Tengfei suddenly brought out two more swords from his storage.

Three swords flew around him, while he wore armor and a defensive mental artifact. All 5 of the artifacts that were allowed to be used were on show now.

The three swords hung in the air with their tips pointed downward, and slowly they started circling Jin Tengfei.

Alex got cautious and got into a position to fight again. As he did so, he saw new swords from around Jin Tengfei.

They were all made up of white light as if they had been constructed solely from Sword Qi.

Numerous white swords like that formed around him, all of which were powered by his saint Qi. In the end, there were 21 swords in total hovering around Jin Tengfei.

'Shit!' Alex thought.

Suddenly, the swords started flying toward Alex. Alex smashed one of the white swords into pieces, while he hit one of the real swords that flew at him.

He was pushed back a little but he quickly got hold of himself to strike away the next illusory sword as well.

One after another, the 21 different flying swords attacked Alex relentlessly.

The illusory ones were destroyed, while the real ones were only pushed back. Since the swords had both Qi and Sword Qi, each attack was equivalent to a normal attack by Jin Tengfei.

Which meant that Alex had to give it all to survive.

Through the attacks, Alex saw that Jin Tengfei was continuously recreating more illusory swords to count for the ones he had lost.

After a while, the swords stopped attacking Alex.

When Alex finally had a chance to breathe, he couldn't as fear took over him at the sight of what was in front of him.

21 swords. 3 real ones at the front, 6 illusory ones behind it, and 9 more behind that formed 3 layers of swords that started spinning around quickly.

The audience watched this move with great intent. After all, it wasn't every day that someone got to see the Jin Family's famed 21 Sword Array.

Alex took a deep breath as he readied himself for the attack. His body turned marbled as the defensive technique activated.

A simple barrier appeared in front of him too. At the same time, he clutched his sword as hard as he could and poured everything he had into it, waiting for the array of swords to come down upon him like hellfire.

When it did, Alex moved.

Alex struck back as hard as he could as he clashed against the 21 different swords. He struggled for a moment, his sword Qi pushing back against the attack even as it was destroyed.

However, none of this managed to stop the sword array's attacks at all. This resulted in a deafening blast that sent both Alex and Jin Tengfei tumbling backward.

Alex hit the ground as he heard the clanks of many things that fell next to him. He wearily looked to the side and saw the broken pieces of his sword.

He tried to lift his arm to check the state of the sword he was holding, but to his surprise, he couldn't move his arm at all.

He tried to force it, but that only brought on more pain. When he used his spiritual sense to see what had happened, he saw the broken sword in his palm. As his senses moved upwards, he could see the many parts of his skin that had split open from the force of the attack.

As a result, the bones on his right arm had also been broken.

Alex's was fine for the most part, but his right arm was mostly unusable anymore.

His spiritual sense expanded as it fell on Jin Tengfei who had already managed to stand back up. The most he was feeling was a little disoriented.

Even then, he was back in shape already.

Alex slowly got up back to fight.

Jin Tengfei started to gather up his swords again as he used the final remaining bit of Saint Qi to create the array again.

Alex looked at the swords that were starting to gather in the sky again. He sighed.

An illusory sword only he and the referee could see appeared in his hand. "If a sword fight is what you want, then shall give it to you."

Chapter 805 Wounded

'If only they allowed to bring a pill here,' he thought. His spiritual sense was fully spread all around him, surprising even the referee to how big it really was.

People had known from his previous fights that he had it. If not for sure, they had an educated guess. So, the referee had come to the match expecting to see it.

However, when she really saw the side of his spiritual sense, she was truly surprised.

Most True realm cultivators that had spiritual sense could expand it to 60 or 70 meters at best, which would give them about 100 meters of sense if they forced it to.

However, Alex didn't seem to be straining her eyes and even then he had the entire stage covered easily.

'Can it go more,' she thought. Just then, she noticed something with her eyes that her senses had ignored.

In his left hand, there was a sword. Or so her senses had told her. This was pretty normal as people had backup weapons.

However, when she looked for it, it wasn't there at all. Only her spiritual sense could see it. Even then she couldn't feel any Qi from it.

'What's going on?' she started worrying that she might make some mistake in judging the fight since she had some knowledge missing.

Alex looked at the flying swords and frowned. Those were truly strong and there were many.

However, many swords also helped him in a way. Many swords created many shadows.

Although only 3 of them were real, that was 3 more shadows on the ground than before that he could use.

When Jin Tengfei saw Alex stand up again, he used his 21 Sword Array and the swords flew back down at Alex.

A punch and a palm strike flew directly at the incoming attack. They hit the front 3 swords, but that only paused them for a bit.

However, that pause alone was enough for Alex.

Jin Tengfei saw Alex suddenly move forward towards him and appeared halfway in between them.

Then, he disappeared again.

'Shit!' he thought. He immediately turned his swords around and pulled them back to attack Alex.

He turned around in time to see Alex swing a punch at him. He managed to back away just in time to miss it by a bit.

However, he felt his defensive mental artifact on his chest go warm. The warmth never faded as Alex's eye fell on him.

Jin Tengfei wasn't an idiot. He immediately realized what was happening. 'Spiritual sense?' he thought as his eyes went wide. 'This damn kid is like Fu Tao.'

His final bit of Saint Qi was all he could rely on to win at this point, but those Saint Qi were flying around the sky, unable to strike Alex.

The Sword Array was his last chance at victory, however, Alex kept dodging it. He could only think of a single thing to do.

The direction of the swords suddenly changed as they fell towards Jin Tengfei himself. At the same time, Alex also teleported right next to him.

Alex saw the swords in the sky, but the shadows were clustered in a single area, so he couldn't teleport to run away.

Jin Tengfei didn't run as that would allow Alex the opportunity to escape too.

Alex didn't know what to do so he punched Jin Tengfei as hard as he could, and Jin Tengfei allowed the attack with an open arm.

The punch landed on the chest and sent Jin Tengfei flying, and the sword array landed on Alex at the same time.

With no time to do anything, Alex put up his right arm in reflex as his defensive technique took over him.

His already bad arm was getting worse as they started chewing through his skin and then his muscles. Soon they would reach his bones and completely sever the arm.

The referee tried to move to save him, but Alex didn't let her. 'Don't!' his voice entered her head.

Suddenly, fire burned on top of Alex's arm and that was the only thing he could think of to save himself.

"EXPLODE!" he shouted.

BOOM~!

A massive explosion sent shockwaves through the stadium as even the barriers shook to let the audience know just how strong the explosion was.

Helen gasped when she saw her son's body tumble through the stage towards one of the corners.

He hadn't crossed the boundary at all, but that didn't matter at all if he was dead. Tears welled up in her eyes as she wished for him to be fine.

As if hearing her pray, Alex slowly stood up. The right side of his face was charred and bloody. His chest was equally bad as half his robe was gone, and his well-defined body was burnt and bleeding.

Worst of all, half of his right arm was missing. His stump bled a bit, but not much.

Alex was in incredible pain and turned to look at Jin Tengfei's horrified face. When he saw that, he smiled.

The creepy smile only worked to terrify Tengfei even more.

His spiritual sword appeared on his left hand as he dashed forward towards Jin Tengfei.

Tengfei had expected the match to be over, but Alex was clearly still fighting. He looked towards the referee who too was confused as to what she had to do.

Seeing her not move, he understood that the fight hadn't ended yet, so he brought back his swords and prepared his array again.

Unfortunately, he no longer had Saint Qi to make it as strong as before. Now, it would only be as strong as his Qi and Sword Qi could make them.

Still, he believed that would be enough to beat Alex, given how run down he was at the moment.

The sword array moved down from the sky at Alex while he prepared for Alex to teleport again. However, Alex did no such thing.

After sensing the strength behind the Qi, Alex knew there was no more Saint Qi in the swords. So, without hesitation, he appeared in front of it with a single fist burning bright in golden light.

A single punch landed on the 21 different swords. The audience watched in disbelief as the punch easily overwhelmed the 21 swords.

The 18 different illusory swords vanished, while the 3 real ones were heavily damaged without the protection of Saint Qi.

Alex arrived in front of him and punched Jin Tengfei again. However, Jin Tengfei had been ready for it, so he dodged it.

Still, he felt the artifact around his chest go warm. His mind screamed in terror as he realized he was being mentally attacked.

Alex punched at him again and he dodged, but the artifact went warm again.

Again and again, the attacks kept piling up on Jin Tengfei. He tried to fight back, but even wounded, Alex was stronger than him when he didn't have any Saint Qi.

So, after a while when his artifact finally failed, Alex's spiritual sword went across his neck and Jin Tengfei suddenly lost consciousness.

Alex stood up straight, albeit breathing heavily, while Jin Tengfei was on the ground.

Alex raised his only hand in victory while the crowd cheered along with him.

Alex had won, and now he would move on to the Top 8.

Chapter 806 Nothing

However, it was still not potent enough to make him make a sound.

The referee quickly ran up to him and caught him before he hit the ground.

"You stupid child, why did you tell me not to help?" she asked angrily as she produced a pill from her storage bag to quickly feed it to him.

Alex didn't care what percentage the pill was or what pill it was even real. All he knew was that was a healing pill and that was all he really needed to know.

He quickly swallowed the pill and everything that was damaged, including his right eye was slowly healed.

Before a minute even passed, all the charred and burnt skin around his body came back to normal. However, he was once more stuck with a stump for his right hand.

Without even thinking much about the stump, Alex instead started thinking if he should eat the pill during the tournament or after.

'People will get suspicious if I get my arm back now. Maybe I should wait a bit,' he thought.

"I'm going to get reprimanded because of you now," the referee said. "Look at your arm. We could've— Your majesty!"

The referee quickly bowed and did not dare look up again. Alex slowly turned around to find the Emperor standing behind him on the stage.

"Your majesty," he bowed as well.

"Congratulations on the victory," the Emperor said. "But you pushed yourself a little too far. Fighting for victory even when the odds are against you is a fantastic trait to have in a cultivator. However, this is a friendly battle. You didn't need to go so far for this."

"I was wrong, your majesty," Alex said.

Everyone in the crowd was surprised to see the Emperor there and many even bowed from the stands. The crowd was mostly silent and listened to the Emperor speak as it wasn't always that one got to see him.

"Well, I do applaud you for giving your all to defeat an opponent that is clearly supposed to be stronger than you. As a reward, you may have this."

The Emperor threw something onto Alex, which he caught with his left hand.

He scanned the item with his spiritual sense and a look of understanding came onto his face. However, he quickly hid it behind a facade of confusion.

"What is this, your majesty?" he asked.

He knew damn well exactly what it was. It was the pill to regrow his arm. He understood that Zhanrou must have found some incredible blood to create this pill so quickly, and from what he could tell, she had done an incredible job.

The pill was very much an immortal grade pill.

He was very happy to get it at the moment as he would no longer need to be in a dilemma on when exactly to get his arm back.

Still, he had to act it up for the sake of the audience so no one knew that he knew.

The Emperor smirked at Alex's acting. "It's a pill that can help heal your body entirely and even regrow limbs," he said.

A look of surprise appeared on so many people's faces that they didn't even see the obviously fake shock on Alex's face. No one cared about it at the moment.

"A pill to regrow limbs? Something like that exists?" Zhou Tianqiu looked at the pill in Alex's hand in shock.

"How did he get that?" Zhou Zirong wondered from the side.

"Could it be the Emperor has been hiding something like that from us?" Xue Mufan wondered.

"We'll ask him later, damn it." The Jin family lord was in a sour mood since his grandson had lost the match against someone who had yet to enter the True Emperor realm.

Down at the stage, Alex decided to waste no further time and popped open the vial to eat the pill.

His stump started itching the moment the pill reached his stomach and started wriggling.

The crowd watched in absolute awe as Alex's arms came back to him.

He felt it a bit, moved his new arm around, and was surprised to find that it had the newly grown arm also had body cultivation.

'Was the last one not matching with body cultivation because it was weak when I lost it?' Alex wondered. He couldn't help but analyze the situation and come to the conclusion that body cultivation not only made someone's body strong but also rewrote their DNA to say that their body was stronger by nature.

He then couldn't help but wonder if this rewritten DNA was part of the reason that when he did eventually have children, it would pass down as a trait of his body, giving them what people would refer to as 'bloodline' powers.

"Come, let me take you to the medical room," the referee took him and Alex had no more time to think about what he had been thinking.

Even as he left, he heard the Emperor explain the situation of the pill and how it had only recently been discovered in the Imperial Treasury.

Alex smiled as he understood that the Emperor was following through with his promise.

Alex was forced to stay in the medical room for some more check-ups and was thus forced to skip the remaining two matches of the day.

The next two matches had obvious victors in his eyes. Guo Chiang and the prince would in no way possibly lose to their opponents. Still, he wanted to see them fight more, reveal more powers.

However, it didn't matter much for him as he had already seen his next opponent fight.

Song Shing, the True Emperor 9th realm cultivator that fought with blood. How was he possibly going to fight against someone whose entire body was filled with nothing but Saint Qi?

There would be absolutely no True Qi in his body at all. At least, not initially. True Qi would slowly fill him back without cultivation, but he would have to use up the Saint Qi he would obtain through cultivation first.

And by the time he was done with that, Alex would have already lost.

He had just won a super hard battle and he would have to fight an even tougher one the very next day.

He slumped on the bed in the medical hall as he thought about what he could do.

He had many different skills, sword techniques, mental attacks, superior physical body, and even a few goddamn Dao. However, when he thought about which of them would be useful against Song Shing, there was really just a single answer.

Nothing.

That was the only answer he could come up with. Nothing. There was nothing he could possibly do to win against Song Shing.

No, there was one thing he could do, but he didn't want to do it. He could try and break through to the True Emperor realm. However, given that he was right in between the two realms, and given that he was doing it out of fear of fighting someone vastly stronger than him, he was absolutely sure that he would face an Inner Demon.New n0vel chapters are published on

If he fought with the Inner Demon and didn't win, he would at best end up going through Qi deviation. At worst, he would most likely cripple his own cultivation.

'That's not the way to go,' Alex thought. 'Maybe it's time I give up. I did end up at Top 8. That's the top 8 out of thousands upon thousands of youths that tried to take part in the competition. I've done my best.'

'Maybe I should concede? No,' he thought, bringing himself back out of demotivation. 'I might lose tomorrow, but that does not mean I will lose giving up like a weakling.'

'I will fight the best I can and lose like a warrior,' Alex thought. He nodded to himself as he came to the conclusion of what was going to happen tomorrow.

Once the staff was certain that he was fine, they let him go. When Alex came out of the area, the arena was mostly empty, except for a few people.

Alex saw his mother in the stands and had the staff members allow her to visit him.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Yes, mother. I'm fine. I'm not hurt," he said. "Listen, I need you to do something for me."

Chapter 807 Top 8

Alex arrived at the stands around noon and sat down. He was worried about his match, but the worry didn't help him win, so he was ignoring his thoughts.

The crowd was riled up as they were ready to have some of the most spectacular fights out there.

The Emperor and the other heads were up in the tower, looking down on the stage, waiting for the fights to begin.

"We really need to speak with that kid today," one of the old men said.

"Why? The emperor told us not to approach him. Didn't you hear that he has a strong backing?" Xue Mufan asked.New n0vel chapters are published on

"What backing? We keep hearing he has a backing, but we never really see it, do we?" the male sect leader of the Glory's Edge sect said.

"Apparently that kid can use the traits of Sword Aura even while he only has Sword Qi. I need to learn how that is possible. What sort of insights he couldn't possibly get into his own self," the Jin clan leader said.

The Han clan leader leaned forward. "I don't know if it is true or not, but I believe that kid has a very strong physical body," he said.

"Oh, you noticed that too?" a woman in a blue robe asked. "In yesterday's fight with the Tengfei boy, he was weaker when he fought from the distance, and stronger when he got close. He must have an amazing physique skill."

"Just the fact that he can fight against people 7 realms above his own should be reason enough for us to ask him questions," the female sect leader of the Glory's Edge sect. "Also, I have special information about him that might interest you all."

"Oh, what is it?" the people around the room started getting curious.

"Apparently, that kid is actually one of those people known as the players," the woman said.

"How do you know?" the people asked with a surprised look. While players weren't that good for cultivation normally due to their botched understanding of how to do it, when given the right training, they would go further than anyone.

"My disciple told me," the woman said. "He is a player too."

That was information that these people didn't have. However, given that He Liwei had in fact arrived out of nowhere in the last 12 years, it was obvious in retrospect.

"You know," Zhou Tianqiu suddenly spoke, "if he really is a player, he might have acquired his Alchemy knowledge from there. Do you not want that?"

He turned to look at Xue Mufan, who grumbled to himself. He remembered how serious the Emperor had been regarding the matter of how Alex had been appointed as the Royal alchemist back then. He was certain these people were playing with fire.

"He has spiritual sense," one of them spoke up, and all of them nodded. That was pretty obvious by now.

They started talking about Alex's skills and how unique they were. His ability to go invisible, his ability to teleport, etc.

As they continued talking about Alex's achievement, the first match of the day started down at the stage.

Lu Yan and Fu Tao walked onto the stage and got ready to battle. The moment the referee gave them the go, a violent round of fights began.

Lu Yan fought with wood, air, and lightning, while Fu Tao fought with fire, formations, and mental attacks.

None of Fu Tao's attacks could reach Lu Yan due to her violent wind attacks as well as violent roots that sprung up to block all attacks.

As for Fu Tao, he remained safe behind the formation barrier he had put up. The battle lasted for a while as neither side could get a clear advantage.

It was obvious that Fu Tao wasn't fighting with his all, but it was only making a more enjoyable fight so the crowd forgave him.

In the end, Lu Yan ran out of more Qi to attack with and as such ended up losing.

Next up were Liang Qiu and Han Daiyu. Their fights were perhaps more spectacular than anything else.

The fight was simple, mostly kept to close combat. However, the hammer striking against the spear gave the crowd an exhilaration that could only ever come from the shockwaves of two amazing fights clashing.

Using her physique, Han Daiyu was surprisingly keeping up with Liang Qiu despite the difference in their cultivation base.

However, as time passed, Han Daiyu's saint Qi slowly depleted to nothing as she had to use it for both her body and her skill. As a result, the battle ended up in Liang Qiu's favor, which she subsequently won.

Once the battle ended, Alex started feeling anxious. After all, the next fight was going to be his, against Song Shing. It was pretty much guaranteed that he was going to lose, he simply didn't want to lose in an embarrassing way.

Most of all, he wanted to stay in the battle long enough that people didn't think he lost immediately.

He stood on the edge of the stage and he made sure his earrings were in place. Song Shing most definitely had spiritual sense, so Alex couldn't ignore the possibility that he could have some spiritual attacks.

Aside from that, he also had the armor he was wearing. The previous day, he had sent his mother to buy the best armor she could find that wasn't a Saint-grade artifact.

The blue armor he was wearing beneath his robes was the one she came back with. It was True Heaven grade armor, capable of stopping attacks from True Emperor cultivators up to True Emperor 6th or 7th realm.

Alex didn't know how much that would help when it came to stopping attacks from Song Shing, but it was better than nothing at least.

Alex brought out a sword from his storage bag. Unfortunately for him, the actual sword that he had refined for over 2 weeks now had been destroyed in the last fight.

And since he couldn't use the poison sword, he was forced to fight with either an entirely new sword or the sword that had no grade.

Given the fight he was up against, it was an obvious choice on which sword he could use.

Alex held the thin sword with the silver blade and white handle as he stood in front of Song Shing.

Song Shing brought out a vial of blood and held it in his hand as he got ready as well.

Alex closed his eyes and took a deep breath as he got ready for the fight to begin. His spiritual sense slowly emerged from him, spreading around the arena.

He sensed Song Shing's spiritual sense, which was about 100 meters away from him, while Song Shing sensed his with wide eyes. He realized how big Alex's spiritual sense was and prepared for it accordingly.

When the referee saw that the two of them were both ready to fight, he raised his arm and began the fight.

Chapter 808 Blood Aura

Song Shing crushed his vial of blood as the droplets flew all around him, ready to attack.

However, Alex was moving too fast for him to target accurately.

'What is he doing?' Song Shing thought. His spiritual sense barely caught Alex a few times he was inside the 100-meter radius, but Alex was moving all over the place so much that he was going in and out of his senses way too quickly to attack him.

'Is he stalling for time?' Song Shing didn't understand what good it would do to him.

A sword slash flew towards Song Shing, which he easily destroyed by moving the many drops of blood all around him.

Alex finally stopped, breathing a bit heavily, but not too tired.

Song Shing saw the opportunity and shot out a few drops of blood. That was when he finally understood what Alex had been doing.

The moment the drops of blood approached Alex, he vanished, appearing a few distances away.

Song Shing, from the previous matches he had watched, had noted Alex's teleportation skill. Being in the audience, he had also noticed that he could only teleport to places where there were objects in the open.

Or more accurately, from his estimation, Alex needed shadows. He didn't know any more than that and he didn't need to.

After all, his theory was proven firsthand by Alex. During the time he had rapidly moved all around the stage, Alex had been destroying the stage upon which he ran.

As a result, the stage was now full of chunks of rocks that created shadows for Alex to teleport to.

"Let's see how long you can keep it up then," Song Shing said and the blood floating in front of him turned into many small drops that started shooting at Alex.

The moment Alex saw the blood droplets getting shot at him, he teleported again. He appeared a few meters away and had to immediately teleport again.

When he arrived at the next location, another droplet of blood was already getting shot at him.

Alex teleported again and again, and the more he did it, the harder it became to keep track of the area.

However, he was managing to dodge every single attack from Song Shing.

Song Shing kept going for a while, but he was starting to get bored. When all the blood droplets in front of him vanished, he brought out a new vial and poured the content onto the ground.

Alex watched the bloody ground slowly glow red as the blood started moving around Song Shing as if it was being affected by a cyclone.

As the blood moved, it grew bigger and bigger, until it looked like a flood of blood.

Alex prepared his sword, ready to fight any attack that was coming his way.

Just then, Song Shing activated his technique. The blood that flooded all around him moved out in incredible force. Their amount had obviously been affected by Song Shing's Qi, but it was still terrifying to see this much blood at once.

The flood of blood came up to about Alex's waists, so he quickly jumped up to dodge.

'That wasn't as dangerous as it looked,' he thought as he watched the blood flow to the edge of the stage. And that was when Alex noticed the problem.

"Shit!" he thought. All the work he had done, breaking the stage, creating chunks of rocks to teleport to, had all gone to waste as the bloody flood swept everything away.

There was no more place to teleport to. At the same time, Alex noticed that Song Shing already had his next attack prepared.

More droplets of blood appeared all around him, and this time they all fired off at once.

Alex slashed his sword, sending out a wave of energy to stop the droplets, but there were hundreds and thousands of them to possibly block.

As a result, Alex was forced to go on the defensive. He stabbed the sword onto the ground, while he used every single defensive technique he had to protect himself.

He placed his two arms in front of his face and waited for the barrage to arrive.

The drops of blood shot past him like bullets from a machine gun, battering him throughout.

His armor protected him from most of the attacks, but that was only around the chest area.

For the rest of his body, the blood bullets left tiny cuts all around him that slowly bled on their own.

Once the barrage ended, Alex quickly grabbed the sword with his bloody hands and got ready to fight. As he did, he saw Song Shing standing there in front of him with his right hand pointing towards Alex.

His 5 fingers spread out, and Alex's spiritual sense caught something behind him.

Song Shing had used 3 different vials of blood by now, and behind Alex, those blood was starting to fly into the air as droplets again.

Alex realized what was happening. Song Shing's left arm was ready to attack Alex the moment he teleported to him, and Alex saw that.

He had nowhere to go. Song Shing closed his fingers and the blood shot back towards him, leaving Alex in the crossfire.

Alex's face turned resolute as he thought of a way to escape this predicament. He immediately jumped high into the air even as the droplets flew toward him.

He waited just until the droplets were right next to him, and then, he vanished.

When Alex reappeared, he arrived on the other side of the barrage.

"Tsk!" Song Shing clicked his tongue when he saw that Alex was safe from the sneak attack. He knew sneak attacks were useless against Spiritual sense users, but that was why he had made the attack so big.

Even then Alex had found a way to dodge it. The 3 vials of blood returned to his hand as he poured more Saint Qi into it as it slowly turned into a blood disc that spun around quickly.

Alex sighed in relief as his plan had worked. Using the position of the sun in the afternoon, he had flown up to create a shadow behind him in the distance which he had then teleported to.

Alex was glad he managed to dodge the attack, but a stronger attack was forming in front of him.

Alex snapped his fingers and a small sun appeared behind his head, casting a very long shadow on the stage in front of him.

Song Shing realized what was happening and his blood disc got ready to shoot out.

Just then, Alex teleported right in front of him as he swung his sword at Song Shing.

Song Shing also moved to attack back, but he froze mid-attack. His eyes went wide as his body didn't respond to him.

Alex's sword landed directly on his chest, striking his armor as hard as he could.

Song Shing couldn't think of anything at the moment, so he was unable to protect himself.

As such, Alex's strike ended up being strong enough to send him flying back.

Song Shing realized that he had frozen and tried to get his balance back, but by the time he managed to get a hold of himself, he realized he had stepped out of the boundary.

Alex looked at the man, and then at the boundary. "The hell?" he thought. Had he won? No way.

The referee didn't understand what had just happened, but he saw that the Song Shing was out of bounds. As such, he announced Alex's victory.

The crowd didn't cheer. They couldn't. They felt like they were betrayed. They expected an explosive battle, and instead, they got a whimsy victory on the side of the battle that was clearly the loser.

What exactly happened?

Helen's worried face had already disappeared into confusion. Qin Shan wondered if Alex could've possibly bribed him.

The tournament committee was immediately sent to start looking for possibilities of collusion between the two opponents.

The Emperor looked from the tower with a confused expression, while the Princess couldn't help but smile at Alex entering Top 4.

Alex was led back to the stands, to wait and watch the next fight as he hadn't lost. 'I didn't lose,' he thought to himself. 'Wasn't I supposed to?' he couldn't possibly understand why he was still here and why he was possibly going to the top 4.

"What the hell is your grandson doing?" one of the old men in the room in the tower asked angrily.

"I'll go find out," the matriarch of the Song family walked out of the tower and went to meet Song Shing who had just been led out of the stage.

As Song Shing walked, his grandmother arrived next to him and grabbed him before taking him somewhere where they could be alone.

"What the hell was that? Are you purposefully trying to ruin our family's name?" she angrily shouted at him.

"No, no, grandmother, that is not my intention," Song Shing said. "I… I simply froze."

"Why the hell would you possibly freeze? Tell me, did he bribe you? Did he promise an Immortal grade pill? Is that why you lost?"

The matriarch was not happy with the result at all. However, Song Shing was still in a daze from the fight to care. He still remembered the feeling.

"Grandma, I… I sensed it," he said.

"Huh? What did you sense?" the matriarch asked.

"I sensed it. I SMELLED it. The blood aura. HIS blood aura. It… it's so potent, so strong. I froze the moment he came close to me and I sensed it."

"I… I have never sensed something with more blood aura than that man's blood. It… it was at least a hundred times stronger than my own blood aura,' Song Shing spoke while he was still trying to figure out how that could possibly be true.

"Are… are you serious?" the matriarch started to understand what might have happened.

"Yes, grandma. We… we need to get him. We need to get his blood. With his blood, we may be able to use the techniques we have never been able to," Song Shing said as his eyes started going manic from the blood thirst.

"With… with his blood, once he enters the saint realm, we… we might end up being able to use the technique like it was meant to," Song Shing said and the matriarch understood. She didn't think her grandson was lying, which meant…

"If… if his blood really is that potent then," her eyes went manic from possibilities as well. "Then… we can finally use them. We can finally use the techniques written in the Blood God's Manual."

Chapter 809 Guo Chiang's Strength

Liang Qiu fought against Fu Tao in the semi-finals, releasing the full fury of her Spear Qi, while constantly fighting off Fu Tao's mental attacks.

Any formation plates that Fu Tao did throw into the ground were immediately destroyed by Liang Qiu, making it impossible for Fu Tao to get an upper hand.

Liang Qiu sent out spear Qi after spear Qi. Spear Qi itself was nothing but annoyance for Fu Tao, but it was an annoyance he had to fight against using his Saint Qi.

This meant, that while Liang Qiu kept her Saint Qi, Fu Tao was forced to use his.

Fu Tao managed to bypass Liang Qiu's defensive mental artifact and finally could attack her directly. However, he was still unable to do much as Liang Qiu herself had an incredibly strong mind due to her spiritual sense.

In the end, Fu Tao couldn't go past Liang Qiu's mental fortitude before her attacks reached him, and in the end, he lost.

Fu Tao was one of the strongest individuals in the younger generation. However, due to him being stuck at the True Emperor 9th realm for the last 2 years, others had caught up to him.

As a result, today, he lost in the semi-finals.

Alex saw the final spear strike and realized Liang Qiu had won. Which meant, that next up was his battle.

He hadn't expected much from the upcoming fight, but he wanted the same thing from it as what he wanted from his fight against Song Shing.

He wanted to give it his all and lose only after giving it his all.

He closed his eyes and prepared himself. He took deep breaths until his name was called. Then, he stood up and walked directly up to the stage, watching nothing else.

He didn't realize how he had arrived at the edge of the stage, but he had.

Guo Chiang had easily won against the prince yesterday, and now he was standing against him.

Alex took out his sword and was ready to fight.

The pale and near-dead-looking Guo Chiang stood on the other side of the stage in a very tired stance. He held a sword on his left side, currently hiding inside of the hilt.

The referee, a woman from the Jin family stood between the two as she waited for the two to be ready.

Alex took a little longer than normal to get ready, but he did in the end.

Guo Chiang looked so bad that it was impossible to tell if he was ever ready to fight.

Still, after a while referee took note that both of them were ready. As such, she began the match.

Alex immediately dashed the moment the match began. He needed to take advantage of his speed and…

Guo Chiang took out his sword.

The surrounding air suddenly vibrated as Alex felt a deep chill pass through his spine. The world stopped all around Alex as if time itself had come to a stop.

Alex used his spiritual sense to see what was happening, and when he reached around Guo Chiang, he felt a backlash that hurt him.

Alex quickly withdrew his spiritual sense and looked at Guo Chiang in fear as his spiritual sense itself felt like it was cut in half when he viewed Guo Chiang.

Guo Chiang had seen Alex fight. No matter how hard the fight was for him, he had somehow won. Even against Song Shing, who should have been close to him, Alex had somehow won.

So, Guo Chaing planned on not letting Alex get started at all. From the very beginning of the fight, he wasn't holding back at all.

Alex saw Guo Chiang's sword and realized it was ordinary. However, what was around the sword was in no way ordinary at all.

Sword Qi moved away from the sword and all around him. It wasn't just the Sword that produced the Sword Qi, but Guo Chiang's body itself was producing Sword Qi.

No, when Alex looked at it more closely, it wasn't sword Qi at all. The sword Qi all around him was going in and out from looking like a sword to looking like a blob of light.

Sword Qi never moved around like that.

Suddenly, Alex guessed what it could be, and only fear invaded his heart.

Guo Chiang raised his sword and swung it downward.

All the sword Qi that was all around Guo Chaing suddenly followed the path he made for them with his intent and a large slash flew towards Alex that seemed impossible to dodge.

Alex prepared the best he could, but before he could do anything, the referee appeared in front of him and fought back against the sword slash.

Alex felt the shockwaves from the clash between the two attacks and that was enough to send his mind into turmoil.

Guo Chiang's attack was on par with a Saint realm cultivator. His attack… definitely had Sword Aura.

Alex got back up slowly. With the referee having to move forward to protect him, he had lost.

Just like that… he had lost.

Alex stared forward blankly. He had thought of so much to do. So much power and skills to fight with, and yet… he had lost just like that.

Surprisingly for him, he wasn't mad at all. Yes, it had been a very quick loss, but it had been a loss against someone that had Sword Aura.

'I didn't realize he was the strongest sword user in this whole tournament,' Alex thought. He had expected it to be Jin Tengfei, as he came from a sword family.

However, given the Sword Aura, it was obviously Guo Chiang. Unless Liang Qiu brought Spear Aura out of nowhere, Alex didn't think there was a way for him to lose at all.

The referee announced Guo Chaing's victory and the crowd obviously cheered. A small smile appeared on Alex's face as he once again remembered that he had lost.

He turned around and walked out of the stadium. However, before he could go any further, the referee stopped him.

"Young man, where are you going?" she asked.

"Um, I lost. I'm leaving the finalist's area," Alex said.

"You aren't done fighting though," she said.New n0vel chapters are published on

"But I lost, right?" he asked with a confused look on his face.

The referee chuckled a bit when he heard that. "Yes, you've lost. But there is still one more match that you will have to fight. Unless you are giving up right now. Are you?"

"One more fight?" Alex turned to look towards the area where Guo Chiang and Liang Qiu were starting to leave since the matches today were over, and was surprised to see Fu Tao was still there, despite losing earlier.

"Oh! The match for third place. I nearly forgot," Alex said. "Thank you for reminding me."

Alex returned back to his room where he now had to prepare for one more fight.

For some reason, sitting there after losing made him feel free, relieved even. As if a weight had been lifted off of his chest and that he didn't have to force himself to make it as far as possible.

He knew how far he could go and this was it. As such, a smile appeared on his face as he got a feeling that he could do it now.

So he did. He closed his eyes and started breaking through.

Chapter 810 Fighting Fu Tao

They poured into the stands, more than ever, as this was the day that would reveal to them who the strongest person amongst the younger generation was.

The host appeared on stage and started welcoming little kids who had barely started cultivating to show off before the crowd while they waited for the actual matches to begin.

Alex heard a knock on the door and walked out. He was then led by the staff all the way out into the sun.

Alex walked onto the stands just as the rest of the people arrived. He smiled at Liang Qiu and said, "Good luck on your match today, sister Liang."

Liang Qiu smiled. "Thanks, I probably need that," she said as he glanced toward Guo Chiang.

Alex had come to learn more about Guo Chiang after his fight had ended. Apparently, the Broken Ravine sect was built on top of a giant ravine that was said to have been carved out by a single attack belonging to an immortal.

It is said that people could not enter the ravine at all as it was full of the immortal's sword intent. However, if one did manage to enter, they could learn about the said immortal's sword intent and grow out their own.

Alex didn't know how true this was as it had been thirdhand information, but he thought there to be some truth to it.

Liang Qiu turned around to him and said, "Good luck on yours too."

Alex thanked her and went to go sit on his own. He looked at Fu Tao who didn't seem to be in the best of moods.

"You okay, brother Fu?" he asked.

"Huh? Oh, I'm fine. I'm just angry that I will have to be 3rd place when I could have been second or even first if I was just able to break through to the Saint realm," Fu Tao said.

Alex's eyes narrowed as he nearly chuckled when he heard that. Fu Tao's words seemed arrogant, but Alex could understand that he wasn't even expecting Alex to be much of a challenge at all.

Well, he wasn't wrong to expect that after how easily Guo Chiang wiped the stage with him in the last match.

When the fights on the stage finished, the host finally called for the two fighters that would be fighting for the 3rd place in the tournament.

Alex walked onto the stage and walked up to the edge before turning back. Fu Tao also went to the other edge and got ready.

The referee for this round was from the royal family, and he looked at the two fighters to see if they were ready.

When he turned to look at Alex, his eyes narrowed a bit at what he was sensing. 'Wasn't he…?'

Alex brought out a sword, The sword, and waited for the match to begin.

Fu Tao didn't have any weapons. He only had 2 defensive items and that was it. As far as Alex could tell, the next 3 items that Fu Tao was allowed to bring into the match were most likely all formation plates, which he would have to be careful about.

Once the referee saw that they were both ready, he decided to start the match.

"Begin!"

Alex immediately felt his earrings buzz a bit. Fu Tao had already started attacking just as the match started.

Alex ignored the mental attacks as rushed forward toward Fu Tao.

Seeing that his mental attacks weren't gonna do it, Fu Tao decided to end it with his fire technique. He poured his Qi out and a fiery bird formed in the air that flew towards Alex.

Alex smiled. He released Fire Qi from his hand which turned into a spear which then flew directly into the bird.

A fiery explosion rang out as the attacks clashed, with both of them getting destroyed in the clash.

Fu Tao looked at him with a confused look. 'How is that possible?' he thought. His firebird was made out of Saint Qi and yet it couldn't overcome Alex's own fire attacks?

Alex smirked and pushed his left palm toward Fu Tao. A massive yellow palm attack flew towards Fu Tao.

Fu Tao immediately activated his movement technique and got out of the way of the attack. At the same time, he sent out a bunch of fire arrows toward Alex.

Fu Tao was having a problem understanding how Alex was suddenly keeping up with his attacks. It was just yesterday or even the day before that Song Shing's and Guo Chaing's attacks were absolutely wrecking him and now suddenly he could keep up with him? Was he that weak?

Due to Alex hiding his cultivation base the entire time, Fu Tao hadn't realized that Alex was now a True Emperor as well. And the jump from True King to True Emperor had given him a significant boost in power.

Alex sent a golden fist towards the arrows and destroyed them all at once.

A formation plate slid below the explosion, taking advantage of the chaos. However, Alex had been expecting this as formations were one of the strengths of the Fu family.

The moment the formation plate came close to him, he immediately stabbed it to destroy it. However, when he did stab it, he realized that it was a dummy as the real formation plate arrived right afterward.

Alex pulled the sword out and turned around to move, but the formation was already activated and a barrier sprung around just the formation plate like a dome.

Alex's earrings started buzzing like crazy as he was being attacked with mental attacks from everywhere. The formation was affecting everything on the stage aside from just Fu Tao.

Even the referee was being affected. However, a saint realm's mental fortitude was too strong for a measly True rank formation to do anything.

Alex rushed to the formation plate and struck it as hard as he could, but he couldn't break through the barrier at all. At the same time, Fu Tao attacked with his fire skills, which Alex had to avoid while thinking of a way to break past the formation that was constantly pressuring him with its mental attacks.

He did think of going directly to fight Fu Tao, but that was a bit too dangerous as Fu Tao most likely had more than just one of these formations.

If he managed to trap him in another one, Alex would be in trouble.

Alex dodged one of the fiery birds that went on to explode behind him and tried to pour Qi into the barrier. However, as he had expected, it wouldn't expect the Qi from anyone other than the person that created the formation.

If only he could find a way to…

Three spears of fire forced Alex to move away from the formation. The buzzing of his earrings was getting weaker and weaker, and it was only a matter of seconds before it would be destroyed and Alex would have to rely on his spiritual sense to fight against the formation's mental pressure.

That would start an uphill battle that would only end in a loss in most cases.

Alex was preparing to go attack the barrier as much as he could to quickly destroy it, but the problem was Fu Tao. He was already creating more Fire arrows to throw at Alex.

Alex looked at the fire arrows and then at the barrier with a look of frustration. However, just then, his face changed as an idea came to him.

He immediately dashed toward the barrier and Fu Tao attacked him on reflex. The fire arrows flew through the air towards Alex to stop him from getting close to the formation.

However, when Alex saw this, he smiled.

Instead of attacking the arrows to destroy them, Alex struck one of them with the side of his blade and pushed the arrow towards the barrier.

The fire arrows that were filled with Fu Tao's Qi struggled, but managed to enter the barrier. Just as it was halfway through, Alex appeared next to it and poured his Qi into the fire, and wrestled the control over from Fu Tao's Qi.

As soon as the control was taken away, the barrier tried to force the fire arrow out, but Alex was already ahead of it as he poured more Qi into the arrow from both himself and the surroundings.

As the fire took in the Qi, Alex used his authority over it and gave it his command.

"Explode!"

Chapter 811 More Barriers

Alex was sent hurtling backward from the shockwave, but most of the explosion had actually taken place inside the barrier so he was mostly fine.

He quickly got back up, worried that Fu Tao was going to attack back, for fortunately for him, Fu Tao seemed completely dazed by the explosion to attack.

Alex also noticed that his earrings had stopped buzzing which meant the explosion had done the trick. The formation plate was cracked all over, which meant it would be impossible to use it anymore.

Now that the mental pressure was gone, he would—

Alex paused. A mental attack struck him directly, surprising him a bit. It didn't hurt, nor did it get him disoriented. For the most part, it felt like someone had blown strong winds at him, where he had to steel himself a bit to not get pushed back.

However, the hit wasn't the thing that surprised Alex. It was that he had actually been hit in the first place.

His senses quickly moved to the earrings that had stopped buzzing and only then did he realize why.

They were dead. His earrings were destroyed. He didn't know if it was the mental pressure that did it or the explosion, but they were gone.

Which meant, Alex would have to rely on his own spiritual sense to protect himself.

Alex's spiritual sense suddenly spread out in response. They wouldn't let Fu Tao's own senses pass through at all.

A clash of spiritual senses occurred in the center of the stage which only the referee could see. And as far as he could tell, it wasn't even a fair fight.

Alex's spiritual sense was way too strong, nearly double as strong as Fu Tao's own spiritual sense as he pushed him back.

Fu Tao realized this as well and couldn't help but be surprised at the fact that there was someone else in the younger generation that had a stronger spiritual sense than him.

How was an expert alchemist, whose Qi, body, and sword were strong as hell could possibly have the time to forge such a strong mental strength as well?

Fu Tao got hungry for whatever Alex had.

A wave of spiritual energy rolled out from Fu Tao as it approached Alex's own spiritual sense. This was an attack formed using spiritual sense, so it was in a way stronger than just plain spiritual sense.

Alex still managed to block it, but he had to concentrate on his spiritual sense just in front of him.

Alex waited for Fu Tao to throw out either a formation plate or more fire attacks. However, something different happened.

His fire attacks stopped as an ice spear formed in his hand. He tossed the spear at Alex, which Alex easily destroyed.

Alex got confused. Why was he suddenly switching to ice? Did he decide to change his approach just in case the fire wasn't doing anything?

Before Alex could think of an answer, another long icicle was thrown at him, which Alex destroyed with his sword.

Alex twisted his body a bit to dodge the third icicle. The fourth one wasn't even close to hitting him.

'Wait a second,' Alex thought.

He destroyed the 5th and the 6th icicle that flew towards him. However, the 7th one flew a bit too far from him to even require dodging at all.'

However, Alex teleported right in front of the icicle and struck it with his sword breaking it into a million pieces. One of those pieces, however, was a long and thin metal rod with a leather flag on top of it.

'Formation flag,' Alex realized. He remembered this exact same attack done by that Fu girl in the demon realm who was trying to steal his secrets to make herself stronger.

'Is he trying to put me in that dream state just like her?' Alex thought. It was possible that it was some other formation, but either way, he couldn't let that happen.

The formation flag flew back to Fu Tao who quickly threw out more icicles.

Alex tried to destroy the icicles to get to the formation flags that would be hidden inside them, but due to the constant attacks on his spiritual sense, he didn't realize that a formation plate had at some point appeared beneath him.

A barrier sprung up around him while another barrier sprung up around the formation plate.

Alex tried to teleport out of the formation, but it seemed the space was constrained within this place.

Alex wasted no time in destroying the formation as he sent barrage after barrage of attacks at the barrier around the formation plate.

With just a few True Spirit stones to it, the plate could barely handle more than a few punches. However, that was just enough time for Fu Tao to plant the formation flags all around the barrier.

By the time Alex destroyed the formation plate, the other crimson formation was already active and it was pressuring his spiritual sense.

It was a Spirit Restraining formation, where one's spiritual sense would be pushed down to be a mere fraction of what it was.

At the same time, more and more spiritual attacks landed on him from Fu Tao.

Alex struggled against the barrage of spiritual attacks as his spiritual energy was constantly depleting from having to protect himself from both the formation and Fu Tao.

Alex knew he wouldn't last much longer under their constant attacks, so he needed to get rid of either of those two.

Since it was impossible to touch Fu Tao given that he was outside of the crimson barrier, Alex could only attack the barrier itself.

He lifted his sword and struck it as hard as he could.

The barrier shuddered, giving Fu Tao a sense of dread. Given how well made the formation flags were, the barrier was supposed to be quite sturdy. However, it still shuddered under Alex's attack.

'Dammit! Just how strong is he?' Fu Tao couldn't help but wonder.

It was quite hard to pinpoint Alex's strength. His True Qi was denser than any other True Qi out there, however, it wasn't as strong as a normal Saint Qi.

If Alex had to guess, he was somewhere in between True Emperor 9th realm's True Qi and True Emperor 9th realm's Saint Qi.

Given that, his attacks were doing quite a lot of damage to the barrier. However, while the barrier shuddered, it still didn't seem like it was going to break.

The two separate mental attacks piled on him and by now, his spiritual energy was half of what it normally was, and it was still depleting fast.

'I need to break it fast,' he thought. Alex struck the barrier more and more but the barrier didn't seem like it would break. It looked like it was on the verge of breaking. It only needed something... stronger.

Alex couldn't help but sigh. 'Do I have to do it?' he thought. He had wanted to use this as a surprise attack, maybe catch Fu Tao off-guard and defeat him. However, it seemed he would have to use this it save himself from the barrier.

Alex transferred the sword into his left hand and then flattened his right hand. A vigorous and vibrant yellow Qi flowed into his palm.

Alex felt the strength of the Yang Qi in his palm and then shot it out towards the barrier.

The Palm of the Sun attack skill created a yellow palm-shaped attack that went on to strike the barrier at an incredible speed.

Fu Tao watched the attack without much thought as it seemed like a desperate attack from Alex to get out of the situation. However, when the attack landed on the barrier, his eyes went wide in shock and surprise.

In one fell sweep, the crimson barrier crumbled down into nothing and the formation flags went dull. The pressure that was constantly applying on Alex more than halved as only Fu Tao's mental attack was on him.

With his spiritual sense released fully, he could easily fight that.

Alex smiled when he saw the barrier crumble too. He was surprised that it worked just like he wished, but that was to be expected.

After all, what else would he expect from the attack where he had poured all of his newly formed Saint Qi into.

Chapter 812 Tournament's End

While Alex knew it couldn't be reused without replacing the True spirit stones in the flags, it was still better to just be careful.

As Fu Tao felt the pressure in his own mind from being pushed back by Alex's spiritual sense, he knew that if he didn't do anything quickly, he would lose very easily.

He immediately took back his attack and just let it permeate like a spiritual sense. Unless another attack came, his spiritual sense wouldn't be able to be interfered with.

Unfortunately for him, another attack was coming.

Alex sent out Heaven's impact directly onto Fu Tao. The crimson-robed man felt his defensive artifact chime a bit to let him know that he was being attacked with a mental attack.

Alex frowned a bit. Heaven's impact alone isn't going to do it, is it?' he thought.

His right hand held the thin sword, while his left hand held a spiritual sword. Neither of the swords could be used to attack with his Qi, but Alex didn't mind.

With zero hesitation, he dashed forward.

Fu Tao saw marble-like textures appear on Alex's body as he came close to him. He immediately used his spiritual attack that sent waves of Spiritual energy crashing onto Alex, but Alex didn't stop at all.

Alex arrived right on top of Fu Tao and swung his sword downward.

Fu Tao moved to his right, but even as he did so, Alex's other arm came sweeping down at him.

Fu Tao's eyes told him there was nothing on his hand, but his spiritual sense said otherwise.

The sword passed through Fu Tao but nothing happened to him at all. The mental attack was blocked by the defensive mental artifact that chimed a lot to warn Fu Tao.

The sound of it was nothing Fu Tao had ever heard from someone that wasn't a saint yet.

Fu Tao realized that between Qi and Spiritual energy, he was better off fighting with Qi. When it came to Spiritual energy, there wasn't even a contest.

He immediately worked toward making Alex's spiritual energy empty up before his defensive artifact broke. If he could manage that, Alex would certainly fall unconscious from having no spiritual energy.

Alex's spiritual energy was already less than half, so he needed to be careful. Every time he swung the spiritual sword and was blocked, he was losing more and more spiritual energy.

He fought against the waves of spiritual energy and teleported next to Fu Tao to hit him with the sword.

Fu Tao activated his movement technique to run to the side, but Alex teleported behind his shadow and appeared next to him.

A palm of yellow energy flew at Fu Tao from close range but between his armor and defensive ability, Alex's attack was being blocked easily.

As the same time, Alex's sword struck him from one side while his other sword passed through from another.

A bit of his spiritual energy disappeared the moment his attack was blocked.

Alex jumped back and activated his movement technique too. He arrived next to Fu Tao and swung from one side, then teleported to the other side and swung again.

He flew back, sent a golden fist at him, then used the time to get back and swing his sword again.

Fu Tao wasn't able to move much between all the attacks he had to defend himself from while also trying to fight against Alex's own spiritual energy.

Alex felt the energy deplete to a quarter, but even then he jumped back in and fought again.

Time after time, hit after hit, he depleted his own spiritual energy while slowly chipping away at whatever remaining defensive capabilities Fu Tao's mental artifact had.

His spiritual energy kept lowering in amount between his own attack and Fu Tao's attacks, however, it wasn't going to be much longer.

His head started burning with mental pain that came from his spiritual energy lowering to almost nothing, but it was just a little long.

Just a little while longer and... the artifact stopped working.

Alex teleported next to Fu Tao the very second and slashed at his arm. The sword went through the arm, and suddenly Fu Tao's right arm was numb and barely usable.

Alex kept away his sword and produced another spiritual sword in his right hand as he slashed at Fu Tao's left hand as that too became too numb to work.

Alex then spun as he landed and swung through Fu Tao's legs, immediately buckling him to the ground.

Alex finally stopped and looked at Fu Tao through his intense headache. A wave of spiritual energy struck Alex right before he was about to attack, and depleted Alex's spiritual energy to almost nothing.

Even then, Alex kept going. He used the sword in his hand and swung it down at Fu Tao's head.

Suddenly, a wave of energy pushed onto Alex, throwing him back as he landed far away.

Alex struggled to get up as his pain didn't even let him open his eyes, let alone spread his spiritual sense, but he still did as he needed to fight back.

He stumbled to his feet and looked ahead to see his opponent. Fu Tao was still on the ground with a face of shock. However, in front of him was the referee protecting him.

'Did... did the referee interfere?' Alex thought when he saw that. If that was the case then...

Relief poured over the anxious Alex as all the fatigue and pain also came along after learning the fact that he had won.

With nothing else to worry about, Alex's final bit of spiritual energy couldn't keep him standing at all, and suddenly he fell down to the ground, unconscious.

Fu Tao kept staring blankly. He couldn't believe that he had just lost. His thoughts drowned as the barrier around the stage disappeared and the cheers of the crowd exploded throughout the arena.

Alex was soon taken to the medical room to treat as soon as possible.

While he was taken away, the next fight took place between Liang Qiu and Guo Chiang.

Helen was worried for her son, but she didn't know if she was allowed to go or not. She went to talk to one of the staff members, and they immediately let her go in.

Helen arrived next to the sleeping Alex and immediately checked what was wrong with him.

Xue Mufan who was standing next to her was surprised to see that she had Spiritual senses as well.

Helen's eyes narrowed in confusion as nothing seemed wrong with him. "Senior, Why is my son unconscious? I can't find anything wrong with him," she asked.

"Don't worry, young miss. Your son is fine. He just used up his mental energy and is unconscious," he said.

"I see," Helen said. Suddenly, she heard a roar of noise from outside and turned to look curiously.

Xue Mufan turned and smiled. "It seems the young man indeed won the tournament," he said.

"oh," Helen said remembering the near-dead young man. She turned to her son and couldn't help but be proud that he had fought against such monsters out there and managed to end up in third place.

"You should take your son and leave," Xue Mufan suddenly said.

"Sorry?" Helen was confused.

"Take him and leave. The award ceremony is tomorrow, so it will be fine if you take him," Xue Mufan said.

"Oh, okay," Helen said. She didn't know why she had to take her son when he was perfectly resting here, but she thought it was maybe because the tournament had ended and the arena was closing for the day.

As she prepared to grab onto her son, Xue Mufan's face immediately soured.

Helen wondered what was happening when she heard footsteps, many of them coming toward them from the hallway

"Take your son home," Xue Mufan said directly to her mind.

Just then, nearly 20 different individuals, all with cultivation base in the Saint realm, entered the room.

Each and every single one of these was at least a few hundred years old at the youngest. The older ones were certainly over a thousand years old.

Helen recognized some of them as they had talked with her after the talisman competition.

She frowned as she understood that these were the biggest figures of the Luminance empire, and as far as she could tell, they were here for her son.

Chapter 813 Saints

Each of these families and sects was known to be the best of the best.

Helen wanted to take her son away, as Xue Mufan had told her to, but it wasn't something she could do in front of these seniors.

"Huh? Why is he still unconscious?" the husband from the Glory's Edge sect spoke up.

"He's lost all spiritual energy. He needs to rest for a while," Xue Mufan said.

"Well, feed him a pill or something. We don't have much time," the wife from the Glory's Edge sect said.

"I have suggested that, but his mother doesn't want him to take a pill," Xue Mufan said, pointing to Helen who was caught off guard.

"Ye-yes," she quickly nodded. "Taking too many unnecessary pills will cause pill-poisoning. I don't want my son to go through that."

"Please, do feed him a pill and wake him up. We have something to ask him," one of the gentler-looking elderly men spoke up.

"What is it that you want to ask him?" Helen straightened her back and spoke.

"Do you know how your son is skipping an entire realm to fight people above him?" one of them asked.

"That… I'm afraid I do not know," Helen said. Alex hadn't exactly explained to her how it all worked. She knew it had something to do with his body's constitution, but she wasn't going to say that in front of these random people.

"You see? That's why we need your son. We believe with his knowledge, the western continent can reach a height it has never before," the Jin family's elder spoke.

"Umm… surely you can wait until my son wakes up, right?" Helen asked.

"Actually, we cannot. We have already left our home for half a month, some of us need to return tonight to overlook all the problems that might have come," one of the women with blue robes said.

These guys weren't planning on letting up at all. They were desperate to know Alex's secret.

The Emperor had already warned them against causing trouble, but these old men and women didn't think that was what they were doing. As far as they were concerned, they were just politely going to ask Alex to answer the questions.

Once he did, they would leave without any trouble.

Besides, the Emperor kept saying that Alex had a backing that they couldn't offend at all. But… was that really true? Or was the Emperor trying to keep Alex for himself and not let the other clans and sects improve in worry that it might cause of them to want to have a go at being an Emperor?

That was certainly possible. After all, who exactly in this entire continent could ever make the Emperor feel threatened? There were absolutely none.

The other half of the continent where this Crimson Empire lay was inaccessible, and even if it was, they knew how weak it was. The hegemonies around the southern and western islands were weaker than each of the families here too.

That certainly made the Emperor's words questionable. Most of them were absolutely sure that the emperor was lying to them.

"Brother Mufan, why are you standing there doing nothing? Feed him a pill already," Zhou Tianqiu said.

"Please senior, I don't want my son to eat a pill. He will answer your questions if he wants to after he naturally wakes up from his unconsciousness," Helen said.

She turned to Xue Mufan and bowed toward him. "Thank you for looking after my son. I will leave with him now," she said and grabbed Alex's arms.

However, before she could pull on him, a wave of cultivation aura landed on her, making her unable to move at all.

The lady sect leader of the Glory's Edge sect spread out her cultivation base to stop Helen from doing anything else. "You can't leave with him until we've gotten our answers," she said.

"And who's going to stop her?"

A wave of energy crashed onto the lady, throwing her backward. Her husband immediately went onto the grab her and checked on her.

However, before he could assess what had happened to her, another cultivation aura landed in the room. This time, it landed on all the Saint realm cultivators in the room, including Xue Mufan.

"Who?" the group of saints turned their spiritual sense outside of the room and saw the originator of this cultivation aura walk in.

The Jaguar appeared before them.

Seeing the black beast, with a cultivation base in the high Saint Core realm truly surprised them.

"Who… who are you?" some of the older saints that too were in the Saint Core realm managed to speak up.

"This boy's guardian," The jaguar said before turning to Helen. "Grab him, we're leaving."

"Yes," Helen said and quickly used a talisman to form a barrier around him that gently carried him close to her.

As the people watched the two of them quickly left the arena with Alex, leaving them there all alone.

"Sigh, I guess that's it then. I'm leaving," the blue-robed woman simply left after learning what she did. She understood these were secrets that she was likely not going to learn about, so she didn't bother anymore.

"The Emperor was right. He does have a strong backing," the man in a green robe spoke. "Well, I guess there's nothing more for me here then." He too left the area.

"We should leave," Shangguan Xuan spoke to his sect leader and the two of them left as well.

A few others like the Broken Ravine sect leader and Xue Mufan quickly left as well, as they didn't see the necessity to keep sitting around.

However, the rest of them really wanted what Alex had.

The husband and wife duo of the Glory's Edge sect were very curious about Alex's ability to overcome many realms and fight someone vastly stronger than himself. Even after they knew that the Jaguar was protecting them and the emperor had forbidden them from troubling Alex, they still couldn't get rid of the idea of becoming stronger.

Han Hongqi tried to get his father to leave, but the old man wouldn't budge. Given Alex's body strength, he wanted to learn more about his physique and see if it was better than his own.

The Jin family really only wanted to know more about how one could use something that only Saint Aura provided while having Saint Qi.

The Fu family were certain they were the only ones with the best mental skills and attacks that made use of Spiritual sense and even boasted of having the best of it. However, Alex had proved to them that his spiritual sense was much better than theirs.

The Zhou Family was there to acquire knowledge about Alex's alchemy. They weren't really expecting to get an answer, but they had come there hoping. Now that they had learned of Alex's background a bit and saw that he was protected, they knew that there was no other way to get a hand of his knowledge.

Finally, the Song family matriarch was perhaps the one that wanted Alex the most. She didn't want him for his skill or his body, however. She wanted him for his blood.

Even here, in this room when Alex wasn't even hurt or bleeding, using all of her senses, she had managed to learn that her grandson had indeed been telling the truth.

It wasn't just some random blood that made him lose focus and then lost the match. It was this blood, this vigorous blood that she wanted to get her hands on.

"What do we do now?" Zhou Tainqiu asked.

"I think we back off,' Han Hongqi said. "The emperor was correct. We cannot offend him."

"We can't talk with the kid while the jaguar is still with him at the very least," the Fu family's ancestor said.

"Yes, as long as they are together, it will be impossible," Glory's Edge's male sect leader said.

The Song matriarch's eyes brightened a bit when she heard that. "Yes, it will be impossible as long as they are together. But what about when they're not?" she asked.

"How do you suggest we separate them?" Zhou Tianqiu asked.

"Not ourselves," she said. "They will separate on their own in a year, right?"

"In a year?" the Saints' eyes went wide with understanding. "It's opening again soon, isn't it?"

The Song family matriarch's smile twisted with glee. "We'll get him there next year, in the Demon Realm."

Chapter 814 Rewards

"Makes sense," he said as he nodded to himself. "I revealed my true strength, so they would obviously be curious."

"Do you plan on telling them why you are strong?" Helen asked.

Alex mulled for a bit, but he couldn't see any reason to not explain it to them. Explaining would actually help him get these elderlies off his back.

However, at the same time, his explanation wouldn't make sense to them. Would they believe him when he told them that the reason why he could fight those above him was that his Qi was very, very dense? Would he tell them how they had to be born with one-of-a-kind bodies to have these sort of dense Qi?

Or would he tell them that he happened to find a cat that could help his body cultivate without any other aid?

Could he even tell them that the reason why his spiritual sense was so strong was that he had been improving it by not only eating pills but also eating beast cores wherein he absorbed the mental capabilities of the beasts whose cores he ate?

None of these would ever make sense to them and they would only think of him as a liar who was trying to hide something much more important to himself.

At that point, it was better just to keep the answers to himself.

"I won't tell them. They can find on their own," Alex said.

He spent the rest of the night cultivating to get back the Saint Qi he had used up today. Saint Qi even by itself was so very strong, and given that it was extremely dense as well, he could switch up his Five Yang Divine Path technique and go one step ahead.

Once he entered the Saint realm and his Qi was naturally always Saint Qi, Alex could start using the Immortal cultivation technique among the five techniques.

After the night was over and the sun rose up, Alex stopped cultivation. He went around the city with his mother to view the various things.

Around early noon, he then went to the arena once more.

The old man, from the time when he was accused of cheating, was inside a room, waiting for the top 16 to gather.

Alex arrived and immediately mingled with the elites that were more than welcome to talk to him about various things.

He could see their elder's influence in their voices when they asked how he was strong or had better spiritual sense and stuff. But he mostly played it safe and didn't say anything other than some vague hints at some backing helping him.

With the jaguar's presence known, they would assume that Alex was talking about the beasts.

"Gather up everyone," the old man spoke up a few minutes after everyone had arrived. "First of all, let me congratulate you all on achieving what most would only ever even dream of."

Alex listened to the old man speak, but his eyes were always focused on the group of people gathered behind him with storage bags in a golden tray.

"Those who placed 9th through 16th, please walk forward," the old man said.

8 people stepped forward from the group of finalists and 8 staff members walked forward holding a golden tray with a storage bag on it.

Each one of them was awarded one of the storage bags, the contents of which were not made public at all.

The staff disappeared and 4 new ones appeared with the same thing.

"All 4 Quarter-finalists, please step forward," the old man said.

Alex saw Lu Yan, Han Daiyu, Song Shing, and the princes walk forward and accept their rewards.

"Fu Tao, please step forward," the old man said and brought out a sole storage bag.

Fu Tao walked up and accepted his reward.

Finally, it was time for the Top 3 to accept their rewards. Alex stepped forward and so did Liang Qiu and Guo Chiang.

Unlike in the alchemy competition, none of them were told what the reward for winning the competition would be. As such, Alex was more than excited to learn what they were.

The old man handed them all each their own storage bags and congratulated them.

Alex wasted no time and checked the bag with a speed that nearly matched the other two. His spiritual sense entered the storage bag and… he was shocked.

'So much stuff,' he thought. From what he could see, there were about 40 to 50 thousand True Spirit stones, quite a few talismans, and pills. A few different foods and ingredients that would aid one whether it was for Alchemy or artifact creating.

There was a True armor, sword, and even a defensive mental artifact in there that totally surprised Alex. He hadn't expected to get so many items, but even then he thought something was missing.

'There's no Saint ranked item?' he thought. Even the Alchemy competition had 3 saint-ranked items. Surely something like this tournament didn't miss it, right?

As Alex thought that, the old man brought out a different storage bag and handed it to Guo Chiang.

"Look through them and keep what you like," the old man said. "You only get one."

Guo Chiang nodded and peeped through the bag. Alex couldn't help but wonder what was in that bag, but it would take time for him to see it.

It was most likely Saint-ranked artifacts that Guo Chiang would get to see. However, if Alex wasn't wrong, the bag would then pass onto Liang Qiu before coming to him, in which case, he most likely would not have a choice on what he would get.

'Well, a Saint-ranked artifact is a Saint-ranked artifact nonetheless,' Alex thought.

Guo Chiang's face was one of a dilemma as he stared at the bag for a good while. He couldn't seem to choose anything at all.

Alex wondered what could be in it that he had to be so deliberate about everything.

In the end, he took out a magnificent sword that was dark blue all over and looked at it out in the open.

"I will take this," he said roughly.

The bag passed onto Liang Qiu, whose face changed to delight when her sense entered the bag. As if she understood what she had to take the moment the bag fell in her hand, she quickly took something out and placed it directly onto her bag.

The motion of it was so quick that Alex couldn't even see what she had taken out.

Finally, the bag landed on Alex's arm and his senses hugged it like it was his long-lost child.

As soon as it entered, he saw exactly 3 different things inside.

The first one was a green armor with a talisman attached to it. Alex read the talisman and learned about the armor.

It was called the Gardener's Armor. It was a Wood element-aligned armor that was capable of protecting people from any attacks below the Saint Foundation realm, given that the person wearing had Saint Qi in them.

Otherwise, it was still capable of such protection, but for a single attack only.

In addition to that, when activated, the armor was capable of increasing your movement speed by a lot. The increase depended on the person, but generally, it was always over 50%.

Alex thought for a moment. The armor wasn't bad at all. Ignoring the movement thing, it could block attacks from anyone under the Saint Foundation realm as long as he had Saint Qi, which he was starting to have.

However, when he really thought about it, Alex quickly realized how bad this was for him.

'Wait, the moment I hit saint realm, this armor becomes useless to me,' Alex thought. With Saint realm's saint Qi, Alex's own defensive technique would make him better than the armor.

He shook his head and moved on to the next thing that was in the bag.

His senses fell on a bow and Alex immediately frowned. He read the information for the sake of reading it, but nothing about the weapon appealed to him at all. He shook his head as it was an automatic skip for him.

Finally, Alex's eyes fell on the third and final saint artifact that was inside the storage bag.

A pristine, white mask.

Chapter 815 The Mask

There was a talisman attached to it like everything else that he read.

The mask was called Mask of Spirit's Hell. It was a Saint Earth-grade artifact that was focused on one's spirit. Or more exactly, on one's spiritual sea.

The mask was capable of creating a continuous burden on one's spirit, causing them to weaken over time. Alex couldn't help but wonder what was so good about that, but he quickly learned that the purpose wasn't to suppress one's spirit entirely but to suppress it to the point where one could fight back.

When done properly, the person could slowly increase their mental strength and improve their spirit in the long run.

The mask itself was made up of materials that stopped spiritual sense from entering. As a result, it also obstructed spiritual sense to a certain extent.

Alex tried reading just how much it obstructed one's spirit and came to learn that there were exactly 9 different stages of suppression that one could set up.

It was advised that newly ascended Saints start with the first stage as that itself would be quite difficult for them.

Alex frowned a bit. He had to wait until he reached the Saint realm to even try this out?

His spiritual sense was currently close to about half as strong as that of a Saint realm cultivator. It would likely be a little stronger than half by the time he was in True Emperor 9th realm.

If he was somehow able to break through 3 realms every year and reach the 9th realm in 3 years worth of time, he would still have to wait another few years before he could break through to the Saint realm.

'Well, it won't help me immediately as a weapon would, but it's still quite good,' Alex thought. He knew what to choose now.

He brought out the white mask and handed the storage bag over to the old man.

"Are you all satisfied with what you got?" the old man asked.

The three of them nodded.

"Great. The Tournament of Champions has hereby officially ended. Thank you all for taking part in it and congratulations once again on what you have achieved. Goodbye."

The old man turned around and left with the rest of the staff. The rest of the people slowly started to disperse.

"You chose the mask?" Liang Qiu asked him from the side.

"Yes," Alex said. "There wasn't anything better. What did you get?"

"A spear," she said. "A really good one."

They slowly left while talking to each other. They dispersed once they reached outside the arena, but not before making plans to return back together.

Alex returned to the hotel where they were staying and told his mother about what had gone on in the arena.

Once she learned that they would return back later afternoon today, she quickly decided to go around the city and see if there was something she wanted to bring back with her.

While she was gone, Alex stayed in his room alone with the mask in his hands.

He kept staring at the mask, wanting to put it on. He wanted to check whether or not the stress was really something he should be worried about before reaching the Saint realm.

He slowly brought it to his face, forcing his fingers to be ready to pull it away at a moment's notice, and... nothing.

From what he could tell, the mask didn't work on its own, and he would have to activate it to make it work.

'Good design, I guess,' he thought and slowly poured some Qi before he received feedback telling him the mask was now at the first stage of suppression.

The pristine and glossy white mask was now different. A bit of black, like ink marbled in water, appeared on top of the mask.

The black was a small amount in total, but in a background of white, it was the only thing that was visible.

Alex slowly put on the mask once again and this time, he was extremely cautious.

When the mask fell on his face, at first he felt nothing. However, the very next second a subtle pressure was applied to his mind that only grew with time.

In about 10 seconds, it stabilized at a point where Alex had to constantly use his spiritual energy to protect himself.

The feeling wasn't pleasant, but it was one he had felt before. It was the same suppressive feeling as the one from yesterday when he was in the crimson barrier.

Only, this one was much stronger even at just the first stage of it. He could only imagine how hard the later ones would be.

'And I have to use this continuously to improve my spiritual sense?' Alex thought. With this, it wouldn't even take 10 minutes to fully deplete his spiritual energy.

That made it hard to imagine how it could possibly be improving him at all. Alex took off the mask and deactivated it to return it back to the white form.

Once he was sure it wouldn't help him much at the moment, he placed the mask into his storage ring and decided not to use it very often.

A few hours later, Helen returned from her trip around the capital where she had bought many different things that had caught her eyes and even had Alex take some.

She brought him a black and gold robe that she really wanted him to try. It was a good robe and from what he could see, it was a True rank artifact too that was capable of protecting him against attacks to a certain extent.

The defensive aspect wasn't helpful for Alex, but the comfort the robe provided was still not bad.

He wore the robe and left the hotel with his mother. It was time to return back to Dawnspring City.

Chapter 816 A Purpose

Helen heard the sound coming from outside her room and tried to ignore it. She was busy making some talismans to practice her teaching before she was to go out today and teach the disciples of the sect.

Now that she too was an elder of the sect, having become an Immortal grade Talisman expert for a few years, Helen was required to teach the disciples as well.

Which was why she was currently practicing what she was going to teach. Well, at least trying to practice.

She didn't have a noise canceling formation at hand, so she was forced to constantly listen to the sound coming from outside.

At some point, she couldn't handle it anymore.

She walked out of the room and walked over to the location where the sound was coming from.

"Son, can you stop doing that, please? I'm trying to concentrate," Helen said.

"Huh? Oh, sorry. Am I disturbing you?" Alex asked.

"Yes, the sound is annoying. Also, stop destroying that tree," Helen said.

Alex looked at the tree in front of him and the surrounding. Maybe she was right.

"I will leave to the mountains then," Alex said and instantly flew away.

Once Alex left, Helen returned back to her room and continued practicing.

It had been a few days since Alex had returned back to the Flowing Brush sect. The next day, the jaguar had taken Pearl back to the Beast realm to train him as he was reaching closer and closer to the Saint realm.

Once Pearl was gone, Alex was alone in his house, with nothing to do. Slowly, it had crept up to him. The realization, the understanding of the new feeling he was having. The feeling of… emptiness, a lack of purpose.

Before he was he, his clone was playing the game for the purpose of earning money. At some point, that purpose had changed to seeing outside of the small city he was in.

Once Alex got his body back, his purpose had changed. His purpose then was to save Pearl from the beast realm and then try and get himself his arm back.

He had saved pearl rather quickly, but getting his arm back had taken him nearly 7 years. For 7 years, whether directly or indirectly, everything he had done had been in an attempt to get his arm back.

Once he did, his purpose changed to help get his body fixed, which he also succeeded.

Then, as a flimsy attempt at having a purpose, he switched his focus to the competition.

Now, that was gone too.

What did he have left now?

Alex was struggling to find an answer to this very question. What was he cultivating for? To reach immortality?

Alex never thought of reaching immortality. It was something he was going to reach either way.

It was a bit narcissistic of him to think of it this way, but it was what it was. With his talents and body, if he didn't reach immortality, it was unlikely anyone else would.

Besides, immortality couldn't really be a purpose in the truest sense. Immortality was usually the prerequisite for other things people wanted to achieve.

Just because you were falling didn't mean the ground was your goal. Just because you were swimming didn't mean floating was your goal.

Just because you were cultivating didn't mean reaching immortality was your goal. There had to be something beyond that.

So what was Alex's goal now?

Alex reached an empty mountain with a rather sturdy tree that could be used to make saint-ranked items.

He walked up to the tree that would need 3 of him to hug it entirely and started carving a circle before placing a dot at the center.

He was making a bullseye.

Alex moved about 4 meters away from the tree and turned around to face it. Then, he brought out something from his bag. A common-ranked weapon.

A whip.

With a saint-ranked whip with him, Alex couldn't dawdle around and not learn it. However, to begin with, he needed to learn how to control whips.

So, starting this morning, he had been practicing whipping at the tree in front of his house, and after 3 or so hours, he was making some noticeable progress.

The first few times, Alex couldn't even get the distance right to hit the whip properly. It was only about 10 minutes later that he could make the whip hit the tree.

Then it took him another 2 hours to hit an exact location on the tree.

Now, Alex was a lot better than he was at the start. He just needed an hour or so before he could accurately hit the whip on the bullseye every single time.

As the realization that he was going to get good at the whip came to Alex, the fake answer to his purpose, the one he had found at needing to practice the whip because he had one, was starting to fade as his conscience was asking for the real answer.

Many times, his talent was a boon he could never replace. Today, however, it felt like a curse as it didn't let him hide behind some facade he could build.

Alex swung the black whip at the tree and hit a few centimeters away from the dot at the center.

Thoughts gathered inside him, reminding the things he had yet to do that could serve as some sort of purpose in his life.

He had yet to read the Human language. Although that wasn't something that was a great purpose, it was one. However, that would have to wait until he was stronger, strong enough to handle the intent of the person who carved the technique onto the black stele.

There was also that place he had to find, the one whose map he found in the Demon Realm. Alex had scoured some records, but there hadn't been any information about any other secret realms that were known to people.

As far as they knew, the Demon Realm and the Beast realm were the only two secret realms on the Western Continent.

That had led Alex to believe that this other secret realm was most likely not a secret realm, but just a random location that he would have to find on the map.

Given that the map only located 6 different mountains on it, it would take forever for Alex to find anything close to it on the continent.

But roaming the entire continent in search of what might be a secret realm was something that would take an enormous amount of time for someone in the True realms like him.

Still, he had to start somewhere, so he had decided to start it inside the beast realm where the jaguar could assist him. However, even then, that wasn't the purpose to get Alex going.

He struck the whip against and it came ever so close to the dot at the center, but he still missed a bit.

Alex then remembered the thing that would be the main burning reason for him moving forward for the next decade or two. He had to find his father.

He believed wholeheartedly that his father was alive. Only, he needed to go and get him now. For that, however, he needed to be strong enough to fly through the vast ocean and reach the other land.

That was a good purpose to have. That was a good purpose to keep him going. However, Alex frowned. Was that really enough?

Finding his father was a good goal to have, but it wasn't a long-lasting goal, was it?

What about after he found him? Was he going to just hope that there was a purpose after that? Or was he once again going to wallow like he was doing right now?

What about just taking care of his mother? Taking care of Pearl? Taking care of his master and fellow disciples?

What about becoming a master at swords? What about having strong body cultivation? What about having a strong mind?

What about learning more about alchemy? Learning more about formations and talismans? Learning more about many different things he didn't know about?

Could they be his purpose? Yes, they could. But those weren't his main purpose. At least, not a grand one like many others seem to have.

He didn't have a single large goal in life.

Alex pulled back the whip and struck it at the tree again.

THWAP~!

He hit the target right on the bullseye, but the whip still landed just a tad away from the point at the center. Even after such a long time of doing the same thing, he was still missing the point.

Alex froze. His mind thought of a million different things before he opened his mouth to speak.

"I'm missing the point, aren't I?" he said. He wasn't talking about the bullseye, but rather his overall goals.

He was missing the point. The point was never to have goals, was it? The point was to have a reason to keep him going.

And that, he had many.

He had goals that were small by nature, and wouldn't last long. However, that didn't make them any less of an important goal.

Alex realized that he didn't need a big goal. He didn't need a light at the end of the path, guiding him towards it.

There could be several lights in the middle, guiding him to places he had yet to know he would go to.

It wasn't about finding a destination for him, but rather a journey he would have to go through.

Learning the human language, finding the secret location on the map, and even finding his father and bringing him back, were just checkpoints in his life.

They weren't great goals, but they were his goals.

Alex smiled as something dawned on him.

He didn't need a purpose in life. He just needed to be ready for when he had one. He might have small goals or even big goals, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that he reached those goals.

For that, however, he needed to be strong. He needed to be strong enough to fulfill any goals that could pop up in his life.

He wanted to learn the human language, find the location on the map, and find his father. He even wanted to find the creator of the game.

They all however wouldn't be fulfilled until he was stronger than he was now, much stronger.

In that sense, his purpose in life was to be strong enough to reach any goal he might have. Rather, in essence, it was to keep going even when he had no goals.

Alex sighed as it all came back together. "So that is my purpose huh?" he thought. "To keep moving forward."

Chapter 817 A Seed

He wanted to go to the beast realm right now, and start searching for the location where the Undying God's inheritance was left behind. But there were a few more things he needed to do before he went on fully focusing on his other goals.

First, there were still pills whose recipes he needed to fully convert. Now that he was starting to see the Saint realm being just a few years away, he needed to be prepared for it since he would be making Saint pills mostly.

Alex spent the next month or so doing that very thing. With the amount of pills he had already fixed, fixing these few pills became incredibly easy.

Not only did he know what an ingredient's powder shape would be, he was also starting to be able to guess it just based on what the ingredient was.

Flower petals for example were mostly of the same density, making each of their shapes similar when put through a similar process.

Similarly, branches, roots, barks, and even beast's muscles and bone powders were in many cases similar.

As such, in just that single month, Alex finished nearly every pill recipe he had left. As for the ones he didn't finish, he decided to slowly do it as there was still quite a while before he reached the Saint realm.

After that, Alex went over to the Poison Valley and got back some parts of the Corrosive willow that he could later grow into another willow tree and hopefully get enough of them to forever have the barks for when people needed to improve their Earth spirit roots.

During the rest of the days, Alex cultivated himself and helps his mother cultivate as well.

He would make Immortal rank pills of the highest qualities to help his mother's cultivation speed up to the point where she would reach True Emperor in just a year or two.

She was already at True King 6th realm by now, so it wouldn't take her much longer.

He hoped he could help her learn some Dao, but that was something each person had to do on their own, and Alex couldn't really aid in that at all.

So, for the rest of it, he focused on his own thing.

Alex made a habit of doing exactly 3 things at night before he would cultivate.

First, he would use up his little Saint Qi he had to try and refine the Flaming Whip. With how it was going, It would take him months before he was able to do that.

Next, he would use the True Qi he had to refine all the other weapons he had.

After winning not only the Alchemy competition but also gaining third place in the Tournament of Champions, Alex was given a lot of gifts from people that wanted to meet him or only congratulate him on his victories.

Alex did go and speak to a few, but the talks were usually about them trying to see if they could rope him in, which never really worked.

Still, he got a lot of different artifacts from the people, of which he took every single sword and cauldron.

He was now refining them just to get them ready for when he would need them.

At the same time, he would also use the first stage of the mask to completely deplete his spiritual energy, which only took about 10 minutes with the mask.

Once he was lacking in True Qi, Saint Qi, and spiritual energy, he would sit down and cultivate throughout the night to regain them all for the next day.

That continued for another month before Alex no longer had any weapons or cauldrons to refine and moved on wasting his Qi with the ring on his finger.

Alex had sort of stopped trying to refine the ring for the most part as he wasn't seeing any improvements on it. No matter how much Qi he was using to refine it, it kept on absorbing his Qi while not doing anything.

At some point, he had simply stopped giving the ring any more Qi. He would still try it from time to time, every couple of months, but that would only result in him being disappointed.

However, now that he needed something to waste his Qi on before cultivating, the ring became the perfect item to do it with.

Or, at least that was what he had thought.

About a month after starting to refine his Whip, Alex was finally successful. Which meant that he now needed to spend his Saint Qi elsewhere.

What better place to do it than the ring?

Alex refined the ring with both Saint Qi and True Qi for about a week or so, when suddenly it expanded again.

He nearly didn't understand what had happened when he did manage to break through the ring's stubbornness to not expand.

"I knew there was more," Alex thought as he quickly took off his spirit-suppressing mask and looked at the ring.

The red ruby still looked the same, but the space inside was much larger than before.

It went from having 20 cubic meters of space to about 25 cubic meters.

'What changed?' Alex wondered and looked through the space. As he did that, Alex noticed something that he did not believe he owned.

It would be hard to forget an object like this that was so big.

Alex quickly pulled it out of the storage bag and tried to keep it in the air. However, before he could realize what happened, the Qi he was trying to use to keep it afloat suddenly wasn't there anymore and Alex was forced to grab the object in the air.

When he did, Alex immediately strained as the giant object he hugged was at least a few hundred tons in weight.

Alex felt his feet sink into the ground as he quickly used his Qi to reinforce his body and lighten the weight a bit.

He tried to float it with his Qi, but for some reason, his Qi didn't work around it.

Alex used his senses to see what it was, but even without them, he was already getting information about the object in his mind. After all, it was a plant.New n0vel chapters are published on

More accurately, it was a seed from what he could tell. A giant, heavy seed, but a seed nonetheless.

If a seed was this big, Alex could only wonder how big the tree would get.

There was something weird about the seed, however. While Alex was getting the name of the seed, he wasn't getting any information on its elemental alignment or its age.

That was something that he always got with any type of plant. Of course, there were a few exceptions to that, but surely this seed couldn't belong to one of those exceptions, right?

Alex looked at the brown seed that he could barely hug fully, and read out its name that his mind was constantly spewing out.

'A seed of the World Tree?'

Chapter 818 Restricted Information

"How is it so heavy?" he wondered.

He placed his palm on the seed again and the name floated back, with nothing else.

Seed of the World Tree.

That sounded great, except Alex didn't know what a World Tree was. He hadn't ever heard of it before.

However, given the lack of information on the seed, he could only assume that this was one of the three plants that were blessed by God, or its descendants.

The Demonic plants.

Similar to the Divine Devil fruit, or the Spirit Cleansing lily, this was most likely something of a treasure as well.

'You cultivate with the Spirit Cleansing Lily, and You eat a Divine Devil fruit. What do you do with a seed of a World Tree?' Alex wondered.

If this was something like the other two, Alex was sure this plant would help him somehow. Only, he couldn't understand how.

"Do I eat it?" he asked himself as he looked at the hard, brown-shelled seed. "No, that shouldn't be the case. Then do I cultivate with it?"

Alex found that option more likely. So, he sat next to the giant seed and started cultivating.

Alex took what little Qi had remaining in his body and started moving it around his meridians in a cycle. As he did, a small vacuum was created around his meridians that started pulling in the Qi from outside.

The Qi flowed towards him, however, when it was about to reach him, something else pulled the Qi with an even stronger force and took all the Qi away.

Alex frowned. "What the hell?" He had only just started cultivating and the seed was obstructing it. At first, he wondered if that was how it was supposed to happen, that he was doing the right thing.

However, as half the night passed away and nothing happened, Alex realized that the seed was stealing away all of the Qi he was trying to cultivate.

"Alright, that's enough," Alex thought and stopped cultivating. He looked at the seed with an annoyed look as even after 4 hours of cultivation, he had nearly recovered any Qi at all.

"You need to go back with the other seed that I don't know what to do about," Ning said and sent the giant seed back into his storage ring.

He sat there annoyed for a few minutes, thinking just what he could possibly do, but once he realized there was nothing he could do at the moment, he let it go and continued cultivating.

Fortunately, after the seed was gone into the ring, it didn't continue sucking in Qi from outside, or else that would've been horrible.

Alex cultivated halfway through the morning to compensate for the time he had wasted last night. After he was done, he decided to leave for the Beast realm.

After letting his mother know about his departure, Alex left and arrived at the northern forest a day later.

Once he arrived at the teleportation platform, he used his Yang Qi to activate it and went in.

The beasts found out he was back the moment he entered, and the jaguar went out to find him.

"You came. I thought you would've stayed back a bit longer. Didn't you say you had quite a few things to do?" the jaguar asked.

"Yeah, I'm done with a lot of things already. There are a few things left, but they can wait. Actually, I'm here early because I needed your help with something," Alex said.

He brought out the seed and placed it on the floor. The marble on the floor didn't crack, but that was to be expected of the palace of the White Tiger.

"Do you know what this is?" he asked.

The jaguar looked at the seed curiously and shook his head. He had no idea at all.

"I see. So, apparently, it's something called the World Tree, or at least it's a seed of the tree. I wonder if you've heard about it," Alex asked.

"A World Tree? That... I might have heard of it before, I might have not. I can't remember," the jaguar said. He was trying his best to remember, but memories from before he reached Saint realm were impossible to remember.

"It might be a demonic plant or a mutant version of it," Alex helped him remember more.

"Huh? What's a demonic plant?" the jaguar asked.

Alex narrowed his eyes. "Do you not know what a demonic plant is?" he asked.

"I... think I've heard the word Demonic plants, but I don't know what they are," the jaguar said.

"Weird," Alex noted. "They're similar to the Heavenly beasts in that they were plants blessed by one of the gods."

"Is that true?" the jaguar's eyes suddenly widened. It was as if some of the conversations his lord had in the past was starting to make sense to him.

"You really didn't know?" Alex asked.

"Information regarding anything that was blessed by the gods is heavily restricted. The only reason we even know about the Heavenly beasts is that we are servants to one and have a little of their bloodline or in your case a lot."

"We would not have told you about the White Tigers had you not had the blood of the White Tiger," the jaguar said.

"So, you didn't know about the demonic plants?" Alex asked.

"I knew there was another god, but I didn't know he had blessed anything. This sort of information... they aren't shared so easily."

"You have to be a very important individual, or belong to an important faction to learn this sort of thing," the jaguar said.

'More important than someone that is one of the strongest individuals of the continent?' Alex thought for a second before he realized what the Jaguar was implying.

"You mean... you have to be an immortal to know this thing?" Alex asked.

"Not necessarily," the jaguar said. "You can be a mortal of an important family and you can learn this stuff. You don't need to be an immortal. On the contrary, even being an immortal won't give you the right to learn this information."

'Even being an immortal won't help? Just what the hell is Shen Jing's background to freely teach me this? He did say he wasn't born on this continent. Could he from outside of this world?' Alex thought.

He quickly ignored the thought and focused back on the seed. "So, if you can't help me with this, will Lady Ren be able to?" he asked.

"That's... uhh..." the jaguar hesitated.

"What's wrong? Is she still in closed cultivation?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, yeah, that's it," the jaguar said.

Alex didn't show it, but he did get a little suspicious. 'Is she dead?' he wondered. 'Why is the jaguar acting so suspicious.'

"Well, if she can't help me then, can you check the library and see if there is anything about the World Tree? If this is a variant, then there must be some information about it," Alex said.

The jaguar sighed. "Yeah, I guess I can check."

"Oh, and while you're doing that, can you look up another tree for me?" Alex asked.

"Sure, what's it called?" the jaguar asked.

"It's called the Nine Heavens Yang Tree."

Chapter 819 Breakingthrough

He hadn't thought about the seed for a long time because he didn't want to let anyone know that he had a seed of a tree this important.

However, he desperately wanted to learn about it, so now that he had some free time, he wanted the jaguar to look it up.

He would go to the library himself and check the books out himself, in fact, he even wanted to do so, but the library was still unavailable to him for some reason.

Alex had asked several times half a year ago as to why that was, but they only gave vague reasons, one of which was he hadn't received permission to enter yet.

In the end, Alex stopped asking anymore.

While the Jaguar was off to look up information on both of the plants whose seeds he had, Alex went off to meet Pearl.

Pearl was currently fighting and winning against Yao Jia. Yao Jia's cultivation base had improved a lot over the many years Alex had been gone, but somehow not by much.

She had only reached the end of True King realm and was one step away from entering True Emperor realm.

Comparing that to Pearl who had apparently managed to enter the True Emperor 2nd realm already, Yao Jia was obviously going to lose.

She had likely been spending her days in a room that had a heavy time difference, as such she was spending less time in general in comparison to time outside of those rooms.

It had been nearly 11 years outside, but to her, it had likely only been 2 years at best.

This was why despite being born nearly half a millennia ago, Yao Jia was still less than 65 years old.

The battle between the two similar-sized beasts lasted for a while, which ended with Yao Jia grumbling about the fact that Pearl was able to change his shape so easily.

There were advantages to being able to freely change your body size, especially for beasts who usually fought in close combat.

Since being able to change shape was something only Saint beasts were supposed to do in general, Pearl came off as an anomaly during battle.

"Great fights, both of you," Alex clapped his hands from the side when the two of them were done fighting.

"Brother! You're here?" Pearl came up to him and jumped onto his shoulders in his small form.

"Yeah, I had to come quickly for something. How's your training going? I see you're ahead of me in cultivation again," Alex said.

"It's going great," Pearl said.

"I'm going to go back to the Tiger sect for a little while. Do you want to come with me?" Alex asked.

Pearl thought for a bit and realized he was a little bored from training all the time. "Yes!" he said excitedly.

"Alright, let's leave," Alex said.

"Wait, what about the company? You need to tell my father," Yao Jia reminded him.

"Uh... I just asked him to help me with something in the library. Can you call the leopard senior?" Alex asked.

"But he just went into closed cultivation. He's nearing a breakthrough," Yao Jia said.

Alex couldn't help but frown. "Then I'll have to wait until your father is out of the library?" he asked.

"No, not necessarily," she said. Her spiritual sense broadened to a certain extent and another spiritual sense invaded their area.

Alex looked around with a frown on his face. His spiritual sense widened and he couldn't help but feel annoyed all of a sudden.

The puma arrived in front of him, with a rather nasty scar on his back.

"I see you are doing fine," the puma said.

"No thanks to you," Alex glared at the puma. He still hated it for what it did to him all the way back then.

The puma sighed. "Listen, kid, I'm sorry for what I did back then. I want this problem between us to go away. You already nearly killed me, so you should have had your revenge," it said.

Alex looked at the long scar along its back, which was likely left behind when Godslayer had taken over his body.

He was still angry, but the scar helped him feel a little better. So, he decided to be better than he wanted to be and forgave the puma.

After that, he went to the teleportation platform on the other side of the underground palace and teleported out to the Crimson Empire.

* * * * * *

Inside a dark dungeon underground, two figures walked side by side.

Little light was available at this location, but Song Shing and his grandmother didn't have much need for lights as they could see everything clearly even with no light.

Soon, they reached the end of the dungeon that led to an open room that was more brightly lit than anywhere else.

The room was giant, nearly 10 meters wide on all sides. There were also 4 pedestals in the middle of the room, all with edges that slanted towards the center.

"Are we really doing this grandmother?" Song Shing asked. He wanted to be strong, but... was this worth it?

"You don't have a choice. We have already seen how strong the kid is and in a year, he'll be stronger. If you want to have him submit to you, you need to be stronger than you are right now," The old woman said.

"Take your clothes off.

Song Shing took off his red robe without any hesitation and stripped down to nothing. He then moved his hands and the red parts of the robes moved, slowly crawling out of the robe and into his hands.

The congealed blood started flowing again as he quickly turned it into a scythe and cut off all of his long hair.

"Sit there," the woman said.

Song Shing nodded and sat on the floor, where he was surrounded by the slanted edges of the pedestal.

Each of the pedestals had a Saint formation on them, each of which was meant to suppress the cultivation base of whatever was placed on top.

On top, were 4 different beasts, whose cultivation base felt like it didn't exist, but it was obvious what they would be.

The old woman lift her right arm and all the blood on the white robe lifted off, turning into 4 different blades which she sent off.

4 different heads rolled to the ground as the headless torso started bleeding profusely.

The pedestal filled with blood, which then dripped from the side directly onto the Song Shing.

Song Shing bathed in the crimson blood of four saint realm beasts as he started to slowly absorb the blood aura through them.

At first, he felt nothing, but soon, the strong blood aura assaulted his body from all directions. It started hurting immediately, but Song Shing handled it the best he could.

The blood aura was strong, but it couldn't compare to Alex's blood he had felt.

If he couldn't even handle this, then there was no point. So, he closed his eyes and focused once again to use his technique.

Over the course of a few hours, he started feeling his naval area go from opaque to translucent to transparent.

He was starting to break through to the saint realm.

Chapter 820 Surprise

Wen Cheng, Liu Xun, Luo Mei, and Du Yuhan quickly gathered in the training hall to meet with him as it had been nearly 10 months since he had left the sect for the competition.

When he told Wen Cheng and the rest he won third place in a tournament with True Emperor 9th realm competitors, they were shocked beyond belief.

"How did you defeat such strong opponents?" Wen Cheng asked with a surprised face. "Even if you can advance 4 realms to fight, you shouldn't have been strong enough, right?"

Alex chuckled a bit. It seemed his master didn't know that the days of him jumping only 4 realms were way in the past. Even jumping 7 realms was in the past.

Each time his body changed the constitution, or his Qi got denser, he could jump more and more realms.

Now, he could jump 9 realms as opposed to other people.

He explained to his master and the rest that were there, what he could do now, and that perhaps elicit a greater shock than when he told him he won third place.

Of course, as soon as his master calmed down from the shock, his mind worked to find the inconsistencies in his story.

He saw his lack of Saint Qi and went into that line of question, to which Alex explained he overcame the gap using Sword Qi and Spiritual sense.

Finally, his master and the rest understood how he won and congratulated him.

"Little brother, what sort of rewards did you win?" Liu Xun asked from the side.

"I got a lot of True ranked treasures. Right, I don't need some of these, so you guys should take these."

Alex reached into his storage bag and took out a few words, shields, spears, armors, and various other artifacts.

"Take what you want," Alex said.

The others were surprised to see so many treasures belong to a single person, but they still hesitated to take them.

"It's yours. You keep it," Wen Cheng said.

"No, master. I have a lot more, here," Alex brought out all the swords he had and hovered them around him.

Seeing the nearly 50 swords fly in the air around Alex shocked the rest again.

"You really are rich," When Cheng said.

Alex did mention that he hadn't just won these things in a single competition. They were also things he had won in the alchemy competition or were given to him later by parties that wanted to get on his good side.

"You got all of these treasures for winning the competition there, huh? Just 3 of these swords are good enough to give to the Top 3 fighters of the annual competition and have them be excited about it. I'm surprised they gave you so many," Luo Mei said.

"Oh, sister, you haven't even seen the real treasure yet," Alex said and brought out the red whip.

Luo Mei's eyes along with his master, brother, and Du Yuhan's eyes fell on the red whip.

"A whip?" Luo Mei looked at the item with a weird look on her face. "How is this better than a sword?"

"Do you even know how to use one?" Du Yuhan asked.

"Well, I don't know how to do any fancy tricks with it, but I did practice for 4 hours, so I can confidently say that I can use it," Alex said and took the whip.

At the same time, he took one of the shields from the pile that was aesthetically bad and threw it in the air. As the shield fell down, Alex poured his little saint Qi into the whip, which immediately went ablaze in a brilliant fire.

The group jumped back in fear, but Alex stood still, watching the shield fall down.

As it reached the proper place, he whipped the fiery whip and struck the shield dead in the center.

The shield broke open into a hundred pieces, each individually burning in the same fire as the whip.

Luo Mei's eyes went in shock for a moment before realizing that she needed to put out the fire before it spread further.

Water released from her hands like a flood as it quickly drowned the fiery bits of the shield. Even then she frowned as the fire didn't immediately go out. Even underwater, it kept burning.

"Of course, it's the fire of a Saint-ranked artifact. You don't expect a True realm cultivator to be able to get rid of it so easily, do you?" Alex asked.

"Saint ranked? That whip is a Saint-ranked item?" Wen Cheng stood up in surprise.

"Yes," Alex said as he slowly walked through the flood and got close to the fire that was still burning.

He poured his Qi into the fire and lowered its temperature drastically. However, since it was quite a strong fire, it took a considerable amount of True Qi to get it to stop burning.

Once it was done, he let the group have their turn with the whip while he watched their fascinated look from the sideline.

Alex held a smile on his face as he imagined something. If a single Saint-ranked artifact was enough to get them this shocked and surprised, what would they do if he brought out another one?

Alex spent the rest of the night in the Tiger sect and only went to the Hong Wu sect the next morning.

He met up with his friends there too, and the same shenanigans occurred as he showed them his winnings.

Instead, this group was more interested in the newly converted recipes that he might have brought back for them. So, Alex gave them whatever new things he had on him.

Seeing these people be so interested in pill recipes, Alex made a mental note to give some formation blueprints to Luo Mei, so she could give them to her sister, Luo Xing.

Lang Shun arrived to meet him a little later and gave him a piece of news he wasn't expecting to hear at all.

Alex basically teleported throughout the Hong Wu sect before arriving outside the elder hall and quickly went in.

In one of the rooms, a particularly rejuvenated old man sat doing nothing. As soon as Alex arrived, the old man's face widened into a proud grin.

"Grandmaster!" Alex called out.

"Young man, I heard it was you who came to my rescue." This old man was Alex's Grandmaster, the previous Grand Elder of the sect and Ma Rong's master.

The last time Alex had visited, he was given the news that his grandmaster had entered final seclusion where he would either break through to the True Emperor realm and increase his lifespan by another 20 or so years or die trying.

It seemed that the man did in fact not die trying, and had instead added years to his lifespan.

There couldn't have been better news Alex could've heard after coming back to the sect.

He wiped his tears away before they even had a chance to form and gave a deep bow to his grandmaster.

"I am very happy to learn that you are healthy and well, grandmaster," Alex said.

"Come now, child. Don't be so formal. Besides, I should be the happy one. My disciple struck gold when she chose to make you her disciple that day in the forest," the old man said. "I'm sure she would be very proud of what you have achieved."

Chapter 821 Intent Assault

From what he knew, from what his mother had told him, the information on the stele was not complete. Or rather, what he could see was not complete.

Alex went around the black stele with an iridescent hue to see if there was something he didn't quite catch. Of course, there was nothing on the back half of the stele, meaning whatever remaining information about the technique was here, it was likely underground.

Alex did think of pulling the stele out, but just the fear of the owner's intent to assault him kept him away.

He went back to the front and prepared himself. He calmed himself and slowly sent out his spiritual sense to 'read' the stele.

Of course, he couldn't actually read it, as being able to read the stele would most likely destroy his spirit. That was why he hadn't even learned to read the human language yet.

He was afraid of the strength of the intent on the stele if he could actually read it.

Since he was only going to scan it with his spiritual sense and depend on his mind to translate it for some reason, he decided to begin.

He closed his eyes and reached the stele with his senses. The moment he did, he could feel the intent carved into the stone itself.

Since he knew what he was up against and what would happen if he lingered on it too much, Alex quickly skipped through the upper part of the stele and reached underground.

Spiritual sense didn't work as well underground as it did overground. The lump of dirt on the ground worked in some ways to resist a spiritual sense.

Normally, if one just let their spiritual sense wander around, it wouldn't even penetrate the ground. However, when one was actually focused on the ground itself, the resistance was surprisingly too easy to fight against.

Even though there was some pushback on his spiritual sense, it reduced its effectiveness by maybe 5% at best, so Alex quickly read through it.

Of course, it would be entirely different if strong formations were laid on the ground or there were spirit veins not very deep in the ground.

Right now, there was nothing to stop Alex's spiritual sense, so it helped Alex see the actual size of the Stele.

He looked in surprise as he realized that it was actually nearly 3 times bigger than what it appeared to be.

Like an iceberg, the bigger part of the stele was hidden from view.

Once Alex got over his surprise, he decided to start scanning the rest of the stele.

He looked over at the very first word that was hidden below the surface and realized he could read it.

Back when his mother was learning the human language, they had realized that the words had to be read backward in the human language to make sense.

To find that information, Alex had to inevitably read a few of the words. One of those words was the word 'Heaven'.

Alex saw that word on the stele at this very moment.

Immediately, an intense pain grew in his mind as he screamed in agony. The spiritual sea's water sloshed around as his entire mental world felt like it was collapsing.

The artifact spirit woke up from its sleep and started scolding Alex for doing whatever it was doing.

In fact, even the silver mountain shuddered under the force of the intent that was entering his mind.

Alex quickly retracted his senses from the stele and went into his own mind.

Yellow fog erupted from all around him that tried to fight off the intent of the owner of the stele.

The intent wasn't something solid or even visible. It was something Alex could feel it in the surrounding, slowly trying to corrupt him.

Alex released the yellow fog to every corner of his spiritual world, but it did nothing from what he could see.

He couldn't help but frown as the intent continued bearing down on his spiritual world while Alex had no idea what he could do to protect himself.

This was the first time the yellow fog that could consume everything was useless.

"What do I do?" he thought worriedly.

Off to the side, Godslayer stared towards the sky. It was just a crystal ball with a small black fire in the middle, but anyone could tell that it was staring into the sky.

Alex didn't see the artifact spirit at first, but he did notice it once he heard the deep growling coming from it.

He turned to look at it and saw a crimson black flame erupt at its center. Alex somehow could feel what it was feeling even without being connected to it in any way.

The spirit's very existence was giving off emotions that were influencing Alex as well. So, he could tell what it was feeling.

Hatred.

"Screw Off!" A deep regal voice, like that born from an emperor, came from the artifact spirit. It wasn't something Alex had ever heard from the Godslayer.

It was as if he was getting a glimpse into the past when the spirit was at its peak. Or perhaps... from even further back.

Alex wanted to think more about the artifact spirit's voice, but the instant relief he felt in his mind immediately took away his attention.

"I'm... free?" he thought.

The intent that was coming to attack him was no longer there.

"You can't fight off someone's intent with that devour technique of yours. The only way to fight one's intent is through your own intent." The spirit's voice had returned to normal, no longer the same regal voice Alex had just heard.

"In a clash of intent, whichever one is stronger, is the one that manages to survive," the artifact spirit spoke.

"You... managed to destroy it?" Alex asked.

"It was just a part of the real intent, whittled down through centuries. If you knew what you had to do, you could also fight against it," the spirit said. "Of course, you won't make it out without harm."

Alex nodded. Having just read a single word in the stele was enough for the intent to nearly destroy his mind. That made Alex wonder just what would happen if he did know the entire language.

He decided not to think about it and looked towards Godslayer. "You... you were angry at the intent. Is there a reason?" he asked.

"Yes," the sword spirit said. "That intent very likely belongs to one of my mortal enemies."

"Your mortal enemy? You mean the gods?" Alex asked.

"Yes... and no," the spirit said as it continued staring into the sky. "It is most likely a god whose intent that is, but... this hatred I feel, it feels more personal. I don't know why."

Alex wanted to ask some more, but he didn't know what to ask. The Godslayer's fire suddenly waned as it got weaker.

"I... I used a bit of energy to use my intent there. I overexerted myself. Would you mind getting me something to eat?" the sword spirit asked.

What the spirit ate in his mind was the remnant spirit of the beasts that remained in their beast core after they died. Whenever Alex ate a core to cultivate, the artifact spirit would be the first to feast on it.

Alex nodded when he heard the spirit wanted something to eat. Since it had helped Alex survive, he wouldn't deny it.

Besides, he was getting closer and closer to a breakthrough. It was about time to eat some of them anyway.

He came back outside and found a group of people hovering around him, worried about him as he had screamed and apparently fell unconscious.

Alex got back up and thanked them for coming to his aid. After telling them he was okay, he left.

Alex felt thankful that he had Godslayer to help him. He was happy that in what could be considered his wisest choice yet, he didn't read the human language.

He had been planning to teach it to his masters and others here, but if he were to do that, he would need to first cover up the stele completely.

He decided to do exactly that and went to talk with the Sect master about it.

Chapter 822

With the permission of the sect leader, Alex carved some formation flags to create an image obstructing the formation to block the stele from being seen by others.

He had analyzed the sect running formation of the Tiger sect for a few days before he was able to draw a blueprint for the necessary formation to join it into that one.

When he was ready, he put the formation flag around the stele, and without even needing his help, it activated itself the moment it was connected to the main formation.

Having been powered by the spirit vein underneath the sect, the formation would last as long as the main formation lasted, or the spirit vein was dried up.

Either one was just as unlikely in the current scenario.

Once that was done, Alex was finally comfortable with letting everyone read the human language.

Except for him, everyone became able to read the language and were soon reading all the different techniques Alex had handed them.

Of course, since they didn’t have Talent like Alex’s, it would take them a while to learn it all.

Alex decided it was time for him to leave.

After letting the people know that he would return in a few months, he left.

The puma helped him get back to the beast realm very quickly and Alex went to find the jaguar.

The black jaguar was sitting out in the sun, having nothing else to do in a palace that had no lord.

The moment Alex and the rest arrived, the jaguar noticed. It stood up and walked back to the paalce. Midway through, it met up with Alex.

“Senior, did you find anything?” Alex asked in a hurry. The whole way here, he had been waiting to meet with the jaguar and learn more.

Unfortunately, the jaguar shook his head.

“There is nothing on the World Tree. If it is as you mentioned, a Demonic plant, then it is understandable why there is no information on it,” the jaguar said.

“I see,” Alex gave a disappointed sigh. “About the Nine Heavens Yang tree?”

He wasn’t expecting much about this tree either, but he still asked.

“I didn’t find anything on that tree either,” the jaguar said.

Alex sighed again. ‘As expected. I don’t know what I was hoping for,’ he thought.

“But…” the jaguar followed. “I did find something.”

“Oh? What did you find?” Alex asked.

“It’s not about the tree, but when I went through the records, I did notice a mention of a faction called the Ning Heavens Yang court being one of the major factions of the Human alliance. Maybe that’s something?” the jaguar said.

“That… sounds almost the same. Maybe there is something there?” Alex said. “What’s the Human alliance by the way?”

“Don’t know,” the jaguar said. “You will have to ask someone more knowledgeable than me,”

‘I would love to ask Lady Ren if she isn’t dead already,’ Alex thought.

“Well, that’s that then,” Alex said. Now that he had gotten the info he had wanted, it was time to go roam the beast realm in its entirety.

Pearl stayed behind with the puma, while the jaguar took its daughter, Yao Jia, and accepted the task of being Alex’s guide to the realm.

Yao Jia had mostly only spent time in the palace, so she was taken on this ride with Alex.

Alex had guessed previously as to how big the beast realm was, but this was something else. It was as if half the continent had been hidden inside this secret realm that the original white tigers had found.

Yao Jia had Alex draw a map of everywhere they went, and Alex complied. He wanted to keep track of the mountains and lakes they had been to so that he could later revisit those maps and see if any of the places he had missed fit the map.

The beast realm wasn’t a unique piece of land at all. It was entirely covered in the forest from edge to edge. However, there were some places that were open grasslands where a lot of flowers grew and that made it look quite beautiful.

The land was big and going through every piece of it without missing anything wasn’t an easy task.

With breaks in between to cultivate overnight, the journey to the east took about 2 months of time which only ended when they reached the ocean.

Alex was surprised one could see the ocean through the secret realm, but he did see a chromatic wall around the beach, which was likely the barrier that kept the beast realm in place just like the one in the demon realm.

Alex was a little disappointed that he found nothing on this part of the beast realm, but he was still a little happy with the number of ingredients he had foraged in the 2 months he had been through here.

During these two months, he also broke through to the 2nd True Emperor realm.

From what he could tell, during the war after the death of the White Tiger, this place was one of the only places in the continent that didn’t have many things stolen from them.

So, throughout the realm, there were a lot of places where he found Saint Qi readily available. Alex practically decided at that moment that when he would break through to the Saint realm, he would do so here.

The trip back to the palace didn’t even take a whole day as they didn’t have to go through every piece of land this time.

He met up with Pearl and caught up with him. Pearl’s cultivation was steadily progressing, but there was still a month or two before he would enter the 3rd True Emperor realm.

As for Alex, he expected to do it in the next 3 months if he could continue to fight with the jaguar from time to time.

After resting for a week or so, Alex decided to continue his journey and he left for the western half of the realm again.

This time, Yao Jia didn’t want to go, so only Alex and the jaguar made their way through the land just the two of them.

This part of their journey would be a bit longer as the western half of the realm was about a third larger than the eastern half.

Alex scoured the land with the jaguar for nearly three months, but there was nothing.

At this point, he was pretty much certain that there was nothing here and he was just wasting his time. Still, he wanted to scour the entire land.

For 3 months he did that, and near the end of the third month, he was ready for a breakthrough once again.

Alex ate a True Emperor beast’s core, whose spirit was quickly destroyed by the sword spirit, and he sat down to breakthrough.

It didn’t take long. Only an hour later, Alex had entered the True Emperor 3rd realm.

Then, he spent the rest of the night cultivating and doing everything he needed to do.

Finally, Alex opened his eyes to the light of the new day as a person in a new cultivation realm. As soon as he did, he could tell very clearly.

Something was off.

Chapter 823 The West

He looked around. What was it?

Was it the dew on the blades of grass? Was it the slightly hung branch of the tree he was meditating under?

Was the air stale somehow despite them being in a forest? Or was his clothes not fitting him the way they used to just yesterday?

Alex couldn't tell what was off, but he could tell something was.

He stood up and looked around, trying to figure out what he was feeling. 'What's this?' he wondered.

Did he awaken new powers now that he had broken through to True Emperor 3rd realm? That didn't seem right. If he was to awaken something, it would have to happen at the beginning of a new realm, not the middle of it.

It was likely not something to do with his cultivation. Then… was it his Dao? But Alex didn't think he had understood anything new to say that it was the Dao.

'Maybe it's because I've gotten a lot of Saint Qi by now,' Alex thought.

Somehow, even at True Emperor 3rd realm, Alex's Qi had mostly converted to Saint Qi. It was easy to guess how it could happen given how thick his Qi was, but it was still a surprise that nearly 70% of it was already Saint Qi.

The jaguar walked up to him. "Are you ready to go?" it asked him.

Alex shook his head. "Something feels off, senior," he said. "I can't put my finger on it."

"What feels off?" the jaguar asked.

"I don't know," Alex said. "But something does. Not in a bad way, mind you. Although it could be, I don't think it is. It… it just feels like I'm noticing something I've not noticed before."

"Hmm, maybe you're noticing the worldly laws," the jaguar said. "Since you are so talented and know Dao, you might be sensing them again."

"No, that's definitely not it," Alex said. It still perplexed him as to what felt off about this place, but he decided not to dwell on it and went along with the jaguar to hopefully find the land on the map as he was getting very close to the edge of the western half as well.

The whole morning, Alex couldn't concentrate at all as he kept thinking about what could be happening to make him feel this way. Was having a lot of Saint Qi allowing him some sort of perception he was missing previously?

As he kept thinking that and concentrating on what felt off, he realized something.

'I have felt this before,' he thought. He couldn't remember if it was exactly the same, but this feeling was indeed very similar.

Alex remembered back to the day in the Wei Royal Palace's garden where he was waiting for the alchemists to finish preparing their pills for the test.

During that time, he had felt something off at that time too which he couldn't pinpoint. Surprisingly, the feeling had come from the direction of the Beast realm back then too.

'Could they be connected somehow?' Alex wondered.

Alex asked the Jaguar if the beast realm had anything that could be giving him this feeling, but the jaguar wasn't sure what he was even feeling. There was nothing Alex could say to describe it either, so their conversation went nowhere.

If the beast realm really was the reason behind him feeling like this, then it would explain why the feeling was constant.

He would have to wait until he got out of the beast realm to see if he was correct or not.

Alex ignored it for now and focused the rest of the day on searching through the land. When he spent his Qi away and cultivated it back the next day, he would still be assaulted by this feeling, but as time went on, he began to accept it as if it were natural.

A week later, Alex finished roaming the western half of the beast realm as well.

His search was a failure.

Still, he got quite a few ingredients here too, some that would help him a lot in the saint realm, so he was quite happy about it.

Alex stood on the beach, next to the chromatic wall that separated the secret realm from the outside world.

He stood at the edge, where just a few meters ahead, water would splash on his feet. Alas, that would never happen as he wouldn't be able to escape the secret realm this way at all.

Alex stared into the distance and saw the vast ocean of the west. He tried to look into the distance, but the haze in the atmosphere blocked his view from seeing all the way through.

'There are 5 continents in this world,' he thought to himself. 'And I'm on the west side of the western continent.'

'What's west of west?' he couldn't help but wonder.

Back in his home, there was a saying that they were surrounded by the void. If they tried to go outside, they would fall into the void and die.

Of course, it turned out to be an elaborate ruse to stop people from killing themselves in the chaotic Qi that surrounded the land, but… what if there was a truth to that information? What if they were told something that was false for them, but true on a bigger scale.

On a worldly scale.

Alex looked off into the west and wondered, was the void there?

"If I fly off to the west forever, will I fall into a void?" Alex asked. He was halfheartedly asking the question, but he was still curious about the answer.

"Of course not," the jaguar said.

Alex nearly chuckled. 'Why am I asking stupid questions?' he thought.

"Gravity doesn't work that way," the jaguar continued.

"Huh?" Alex looked confused and surprised.

"If you flew straight west, or rather in any direction, and forcefully went through the barrier of the world, you will drift off into space, rather than falling in it," it said.

"Wait, the void is real?" Alex asked in surprise.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Of course," the jaguar said. "Although, don't call it void. It gets a little confusing as the real void is something else. Call it just empty space."

"Space?" Alex asked.

"Yes, if you keep flying to the edge of the world and forcefully go out of the atmosphere, you will enter empty space with no air, no Qi, nothing."

"Slowly, your body will try to fight against the emptiness by using the Qi you have in you. But, since you will never have enough to fight against nothingness, you will die," the jaguar said. "Peak saints have tried to ascend that way and died."

Alex couldn't believe what he was hearing. There was an edge to the world and beyond it waited death.

"Wait, are there only 5 continents in this world then?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the jaguar answered.

"Then do immortals really come from Heaven?" Alex asked.

"Well," the jaguar looked to the sky, "I guess you can call it that."

"How do they get here? Do they not die while coming to this world? How did the White Tiger and his family make it here to this world?" Alex asked.

"Well, that is something you will learn on your own. Given your talent, I don't doubt it will be very soon too," the jaguar said.

"Can't you tell me?" Alex asked desperately.

"Do you want to prematurely learn about the size of the world you live in and risk giving yourself an Inner demon you can never defeat?" the jaguar asked.

Alex thought about it for a bit and realized he couldn't do that. "I'm sorry," he said.

The jaguar chuckled. "Well, it's not like I had an answer for you. I only know a few things myself having been born and bred in this realm," it said.

Alex stayed at the edge of the beach and watched the sun go down in the west, beyond the edge of his world.

At the same time, the pale silver moon showed its face from the east.

Alex sighed and sat down nearby to refine his ring to waste all of his Qi for the day. Once, it was all gone, he closed his eyes and began cultivating.

The next morning, he got up from his cultivation and began making his way back to the palace.

Chapter 824 Preparation

"When will your return next?" Luo Mei asked.

"A few months? Maybe half a year?" Alex said. He wasn't sure himself. The Demon realm that was to open in a month would only last for 10 days, so that wouldn't take much of his time. Still, he wanted to stay on the other side to improve himself further than he could over here.

"Alright, see you when you get back then," Luo Mei waved her hands.

Alex smiled and waved his hands as he flew away.

Luo Mei and Du Yuhan turned around to return to their Elder job. Liu Xun went towards the gate to work on his guard duty.

Lang Shun turned around with Wan Li, Fan Ruogang, Zhou Mei, and Kong Yuhan to return back to the Hong Wu sect.

Wen Cheng stayed there for a few moments longer as he watched his disciple go off to the foreign lands again.

Alex turned around after reaching the distance and saw that his master was still there. He waved once more.

Wen Cheng smiled. He waved back and watched his disciple disappear off into the distance. Then, he turned around and got back to his own work as well.

Alex flew off without looking back as there was no reason to. He would be back in just a few months after all.

If only he knew how far away in the future his next visit would be.

Alex returned back to the Beast realm and couldn't help but notice the weird feeling of being back.

'Does it really have something to do with the beast realm? Is it because of the thick Qi in here?' he thought. When he had left, Alex had realized that he didn't feel the same feeling of something being off as soon as he was out of the beast realm.

He had wondered if it was just the lack of Qi in the Crimson Empire that was the reason why he wasn't feeling that way anymore. It did make sense quite a bit, so Alex had chalked up the feeling of his to be because of the density of the Qi in the surrounding.

Alex quickly found Pearl who was very much stronger at this point. At True Emperor 4th realm, Pearl was just a bit higher than Alex in cultivation base.

Alex had broken through to the True Emperor 3rd realm about 3 months ago, so it would soon be his time to breakthrough as well. He hoped he could do it in the 1 month he had before he had to go to the Demon realm again.

Alex took Pearl before leaving the beast realm. After saying goodbye to the beasts, the two of them got out of the beast realm and arrived at the Luminance empire.

As soon as Alex felt the slightly less dense Qi, he realized that the feeling was gone again. 'Even though the Qi is only just a little sparse?' he thought. That made him believe that his theory on why the beast realm felt off was wrong.

If so then... what was the reason?

Alex had no way of finding that out, so he had to once again ignore that feeling.

The last time he ignored a feeling, the beasts had invaded the capital of the crimson empire. What was going to happen this time around?

Alex reached the flowing brush sect and met up with his mother. He talked to her about a few things and was surprised that she was focusing quite a bit on her cultivation as well.

She was so very close to the True Emperor realm.

Alex settled down into the sect and continued his cultivation. When he was free, he worked for the sect to help them make pills in exchange for letting him stay there.

Of course, the Flowing Brush sect was more than happy to have Alex just stay in their sect. It was in fact an honor in their eyes. However, Alex didn't feel that it was right to take advantage of them, so he helped when he could.

Helen sat in a room while she drew some talismans. Alex stayed next to her and looked through the map of the beast realm to check if he had missed something there.

The talisman from the Demon realm that told him the location of the inheritance of the Undying God was next to him, and he was looking to match the two.

None of the locations matched the map. Meaning, that he was right that this place wasn't the beast realm.

Alex brought out the metallic medallion and looked at it. This gave him authority over many of the restrictions in the secret realm.

Unfortunately, it didn't give him authority to stay longer than 10 days, or he would have entered already.

He couldn't wait to enter those houses in the 5th mountain and acquire more wealth. More importantly, he would acquire knowledge of where the other land of the demons was.

"I'm done," Helen said from the side, grabbing Alex's attention.

"You're done?" Alex stood up and walked up to her to see the talisman she had just made.

"Here," she handed it over to him. Alex took it and looked at the runes on it. There was such elegant penmanship here that he saw not a single mistake on the runes.

He looked through the different runes of barrier, and teleportation and nodded to himself.

Now he too had a talisman to protect himself if he was ever attacked inside. Although, he doubt anyone could even do it, to begin with.

* * * * *

A few figures gathered in a room somewhere south of the capital.

It was far away enough that the royal family had no idea of the gathering but close enough that any big family and sect could easily visit.

There was a single reason for this gathering.

They wanted to learn how they would extract information from Alex.

Some were there for Alex's alchemy knowledge, some for his Sword knowledge. Some were there for his physique knowledge, while some only wanted to learn how he was overcoming many realms to fight.

One of them didn't let know their attention, but they were there for his blood.

"Are we sure he's even coming to the Demon Realm? What if we're wasting time?" one of them asked.

"We don't know," another person said. "But this is our only chance, so we have to take it. Unless you want to go raid Flowing Brush sect in the open."

"So, we're working on the assumption that he will come. Then what about that beast that's threatening even the Emperor?" another one of them asked.

"We're too weak to defeat it," another person said.

"We don't need to defeat it. We just need to delay it while we get the information we need," one of them said.

"And I suppose you know a way?" someone else asked.

"I do," the same person said. "Not only will my way delay the beast, but if it goes well, but we can also kill that beast too."

"However," the same person continued. "That's not all. I have plans for the boy too. If done properly, we can extract every last bit of information from him, whether he wants to give it voluntarily or not."

Chapter 825 Arrival on the Island

Today was the day the Demon realm opened. From what the Saints had calculated, the Demon realm would open in 12 or so hours.

Alex wanted to get there just a tad bit earlier.

The small ship flew with incredible speed, but the jaguar kept up with it showing no expression of unease at all.

Flying at this speed was barely an inconvenience for this beast. Alex couldn't help but look forward to the days when he too would be able to fly this fast without the help of any flying artifact.

They continued flying for about 5 more hours before they finally reached the edge of the continent. A few minutes of flight later, they arrived at an island that was already filled to the brim with people.

Alex stored away his boat and slowly drifted down to the ground. As he did, a lot of people stared at him.

For one, he had come with a Saint beast by his side, which was extremely unusual to these people.

But more importantly, they stared at him because they recognized him. They recognized the 28-year-old prodigy that was not only a miracle Alchemist but had also managed to become one of the top 4 strongest youth in the whole empire.

Many people smiled at him at his arrival, including the ones from the big sects and families. Alex smiled back.

He wanted to stay alone until the demon realm opened, but that was impossible as people surrounded themselves around him the moment he landed.

They introduced themselves, told him how much they had wanted to meet him, and asked how he was so strong.

Some wanted pointers on the Alchemy techniques and wanted his help to improve a family recipe of theirs.

Others simply wanted to establish a friendship so that they could later use it to their advantage.

The people swarmed him, but he was too kind to tell that he was bothered. He stayed polite, telling people that he would think about their things.

However, no matter how much he tried to speak his way out, another person would find his way to speak to him.

Alex had met with barely anyone for this precise reason. However, who could have thought that refusing to meet them would have such consequences at the moment?

'Should I scare them away?' the jaguar's voice rang in his mind.

Alex contemplated for a second and ended up with the answer that, that was the only choice he had. However, before he could give his approval to the jaguar, someone else spoke.

"Move away!" a voice came from behind the group, instantly shutting their mouths.

The people slowly parted to show an old woman with blood red robe walking toward him.

"Come, young man. You don't need to waste your time with them," the woman said.

Alex hesitated for a split second. Going with the old woman, who was clearly the matriarch of the Song family was like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

He couldn't think of anything worse. However, refusing someone of such stature didn't feel right to him. Also, at least with someone like the Matriarch or patriarchs and sect leaders of the elite sects and family, he could trust them not to continue asking the same thing over and over as these people did.

"Thank you, senior," Alex said and walked with her.

"It would be our pleasure if you came with us, senior," the woman then bowed towards the Jaguar as well.

"Hmph!" the jaguar's human-like harrumph surprised a lot of people in the area, but the Song family matriarch wasn't phased at all. As if, she had been expecting this, she bowed respectfully to the jaguar that was moving away to a more solitary location and walked back.

Alex reluctantly followed her to a place where the other elite family and sects were gathered.

He was surprised to see quite a few people there, and at the same time, he was surprised to see quite a few people absent.

Alex looked around and even used his spiritual sense, but he couldn't find a few people

Liang Qiu, Han Daiyu, Guo Chiang, Zhou Ren, and Lu Yan were missing from the group. A few others were missing too, but Alex didn't know them enough to keep track of it. Instead of them, the people here were their juniors, who surprisingly were still older than Alex.

Alex could see Zhou Ren's little brother Zhou Guyang in the mix, who bowed the moment he saw Alex. To Alex's surprise, in the last 4 or so years, he hadn't seen the man, his cultivation base had increased to True Lord 5th realm.

'Not bad,' Alex thought to himself. He didn't realize any of the other juniors, but he did recognize a few of the seniors.

Fu Tao, Song Shing, Jin Tengfei, He Liwei, and Xue Meirong were here.

Perhaps, most surprising of all, however, Alex saw another person there who was crazily waving his hands in his direction.

Alex didn't know whether to laugh or not as he waved back at the man as well.

Somehow, Fatty Tian Ye was here as well.

Alex hadn't seen the man since the day he was reunited with his mother.

"Nephew Yu, I can't believe you're here," the fatty said, somehow fatter now than he was 7 years ago when Alex last saw him.

"Uncle Tian Ye, it has been a while," Alex respectfully bowed toward the man.

If Alex's guess was right, the man was about 45 years old as of now. Back in his home world, no one would bat an eye if he called someone 15 years older than him an uncle.

Surprisingly enough, they cared even less here.

"Oh, you two know each other? Come, we can sit and talk," the Song family matriarch said as she arrived at the group of elites that were gathered around.

Alex recognized nearly everybody.

The Lu family, the Song Family, the Fu family, the Jin family, the Han family, the Zhou family, the Shen family, the Heaven's Peak school, the Glory's Edge sect, the Falling Lotus sect, the Broken Ravine sect, and many more that he didn't recognize at all.

Everyone was here.

Alex looked at the crowd of Saint realm cultivators and was surprised at just how many there were.

He was also curious why the head of some of these families was here when they could just send their elders to look after the juniors.

But when Alex remembered the cultivation bases of some of these juniors, he understood why the case was.

There were tables laid around in clusters where the big figures were staying and Alex was brought directly to them.

He knew what they were going to ask of him, nay demand of him. And Alex was ready to refuse.

As long as the jaguar was close by, he had nothing to worry about.

He looked at all of the elite heads and bowed his head a little.

"Greetings, seniors."

Chapter 826

“Ah, I knew you would come,” one of the elderly men said.

“Greetings, young man. It’s good to see you again,” another old man said.

They all started speaking at the same time, and Alex had to make sure not to miss what they were saying.

“Have you improved at all since the last year, young man?” one of the elder folk with a green robe asked. “Did you sword Qi progress? Did your physique grow stronger? What about your spiritual sense?”

“Oi old man, why are you asking so many questions all of a sudden?” some of the other elders said.

“What?” the old man looked back at them. “I know you were all wondering the same thing.”

If nothing, Alex felt a little thankful for this man’s directness so that he could get the topic out of way from the start.

“The only thing I’ve managed to improve over the last year is my cultivation base,” Alex said.

“I see,” the old man said.

“You have improved a lot then,” the song family matriarch said. “Just look at my grandson, he will have to be stuck at the peak of the True Emperor realm until he finds a way to enter the Saint realm.”

Alex looked towards Song Shing and nodded when he sensed the True Emperor 9th realm cultivation base. He hadn’t improved at all in the last year, but he doubted it could be so easy to do so.

Alex himself wondered how long it would take before he could reach the Saint realm. Certainly opening up his naval area would be quite hard as not many had done so before.

“Say, are you still not allowed to tell us anything about how you got so strong?” one of the women with a green and pink robe asked.

“I’m afraid not, senior,” Alex said. “The senior I told you about hasn’t allowed me to speak on this matter at all.”

Alex was still using the excuse of Shen Jing to get away from the things, but he hadn’t expected nor knew that these elderly folks were mistaking the jaguar for the senior he was talking about.

Since most of them had felt the jaguar’s cultivation base and power, they knew that there was no way the ‘senior’ had anything to do with Alex’s improvement and was likely a ruse he was using to get away from telling them.

“Stop asking him if he doesn’t want to tell you,” the Fu family’s head said and the group changed topics.

Time went by as they asked Alex various questions.

“Oh right, are you prepared to go in?” one of the elders asked.

“I… am?” Alex said, not sure what they meant by ready.

“Right, you have to have armors and escape talismans. The beasts in there can be scary from time to time and need a Saint realm to go in and take care of,” the Song matriarch said.

She reached into her storage and fished out a talisman. “Take this if you don’t have escape talismans. It will help you teleport out if you’re in any danger,” she said.

“Thank you, senior, but I already have one,” Alex said.

“Oh, of course, you would. I forgot you stayed in a talisman sect,” the old woman said with a smile.

Alex felt awkward talking with the elders, but fortunately, they let him be after a while.

Unfortunately, Fu Tao called him to their group and Alex was forced to mix in with the juniors this time.

At least these people didn’t ask him about his powers and secrets, so Alex was a little happy.

“Do you want to stay with us inside the demon realm? We can search for riches together,” Fu Tao said. His cultivation was still in the True Emperor realm, so Alex could only imagine just how desperate he was to break through.

“It’s fine, brother Fu,” Alex said. “I like being alone.”

Alex couldn’t have company as he was going to go through the many rooms and find information that was there.

“I see,” Fu Tao said. A few others tried to persuade him to stay with them in the demon realm, but Alex refused.

He had no plans of staying with them at all.

After a while, Alex left them too and went to sit alone by some rock. He felt at peace as no one talked to him for a while.

He was surprised when the people continued talking on and on without stopping. At least, now he didn’t have to listen to them and could focus on himself.

Finally, he peacefully looked everywhere, taking in all the sights, and the numbers into his head.

‘So many,’ he thought. The number was drastically higher than last time around. People had arrived early this time around.

He saw Qin Shan and some elders in the distance looking after the disciples of the Flowing Brush sect. Just to stop others from following him, Qin Shan didn’t come to visit Alex at the moment.

Alex was a little thankful for that. He didn’t want to fight the horde of people again.

The jaguar came to his side and sat down next to him without saying anything. At the same time, the sun slowly began to rise.

Just a few more hours remained before the demon realm would open.

Alex went through his storage ring again. He checked through the map, and the medallion. He even reread the diary left behind by one of the inhabitants of the demon realm too.

The information in there was cryptic, but Alex still read it in hope of being some kind of help.

A few more hours went by and the sun came up a bit higher.

Suddenly, the monument in the distance lit up brightly with light shining from it. The sound of the monument activating caught Alex’s attention and he looked toward it.

It wasn’t just him. Everyone turned towards the monument.

Slowly, one by one, the True realm cultivators stood up as it was time for them to enter. After all, the Demon realm had opened.

People hurried as time had already begun ticking down. There were 10 days remaining after each time the demon realm opened, so they needed to hurry.

Also, the faster they could get in, the faster they could get to the riches. Who knew how many more doors would have opened in the time since last year.

Alex stood up as well. “I’m leaving,” he told the jaguar, who nodded and continued crouching there. He would stay that way for 10 days until Alex returned.

Alex walked up to the thin pyramid with runes carved all throughout it. He wondered for a second if he should wear the medallion before activating the runes. However, he didn’t know just what sort of response it would give to the person with the highest authority in the secret realm, so Alex didn’t wear it just yet.

He took a deep breath and poured his Qi into runes on the monolith. The runes shined, and Alex felt an extremely familiar sense of teleportation cover him fully.

A second later, he vanished.

Many others vanished into the secret realm as well, but a group of the elite saints only focused on Alex entering the realm.

It wouldn’t be very much longer before their disciples would put the plan into motion.

Chapter 827

Alex arrived inside the demon realm and immediately felt something was off.

It was the same feeling he got from the Beast realm.

‘So it wasn’t because of the beast realm?’ he thought even before looking at his surrounding. Immediately, a few things became clear to him.

Whatever this feeling was, he was feeling it because he was inside a secret realm. What that had to do with the feeling was unclear, but he at least knew that it wasn’t the beast realm only that made him feel that way.

That did make him question what he had felt 4 years ago, but he didn’t care enough to keep thinking in that direction.

Now that he was in the demon realm, there were more pressing matters that he had to look towards.

First of all, he needed to locate just where he was.

The Demon realm was massive in size and given that he had appeared in the forest, Alex couldn’t exactly see the mountains to see where he should be going.

Fortunately, it was still early morning so Alex could use the sun for directions.

He saw the rays of light fall through the forest from the right-hand side, so he knew he had to walk straight ahead to go towards the north.

Since he had just 2 objectives in the demon realm this time around, he wanted to finish them both as quickly as he could. It was just an added bonus that both the 5th and the 6th mountain lay to the north.

Alex sprinted.

He saw a few people along the way, but he didn’t stop to greet them or even looked at them.

He wanted to go to the closed houses as soon as he could before too many people gathered up around him.

After entering a relatively open area with sparse trees, Alex saw the chromatic boundary of the secret realm not far away from him to the left.

Seeing how it curved at the front, he finally had an accurate guess of just where he was.

Alex turned and ran east.

The 5th mountain was to his right from what he could tell, so he needed to change his direction.

He wished he could fly and get there quickly, but the suppression field didn’t let him fly above 5 or so meters.

“Wait, what if I wear the medallion?” Alex thought. He brought out the medallion while he dashed through the forest and wore it on him.

He placed it inside his robe, even underneath his armor, and tried to fly now.

However, it didn’t seem like he could still fly.

‘Weird, don’t I have the authority for it now?’ Alex wondered. However, if he couldn’t fly then he couldn’t fly.

He ignored the thought of flying and continued running through the forest.

It wasn’t until an hour or so later that he saw the giant mountain through the thicket of the trees and recognized it as the 5th mountain, the mountain where the demons lived in the past.

Alex wondered how long it the past that was, as he hadn’t gotten an accurate answer from anywhere yet.

Not long after, he arrived at the foot of the 5th mountain and saw a few people gathering there already as they went through the houses.

Some of them were told about the House of the Undying at the top of the mountain, and they rushed there to see if anything was left behind on accident last time.

Sounds of banging came from everywhere as the newly entered young men and women used every attack in their arsenal to try and break through the doors of these houses.

However, Alex could read the runes on the doors. He could read every single one and tell what it was supposed to do.

He could tell that these doors were meant to stop anyone without the right authority from entering. Authority, that one could only hold in physical form.

The medallion Alex wore was most likely not the authority the door was looking for, but he could tell that the medallion was like a master key, that worked on every single door.

He spread his spiritual sense around and saw a few people looking at him. He waited until they looked away and walked over to a door before placing his hands on it.

Pure Qi flowed out from his palm and the door cracked open. Alex nodded as that was what he would have expected to happen.

The moment the door cracked open, Alex sent his spiritual sense inside to look if it was worth it to even open the door fully.

Unfortunately for him, there was nothing left inside.

Alex locked the door and the barrier was reinstated. Then, he walked towards another door.

People kept staring at him from all directions. Not too long, but enough to make him conscious about freely opening the doors.

They would look away most of the time but turn to look at him for some of it.

Alex frowned as he started hating his own fame. While it was useful in most cases, in cases like this, he couldn’t get any freedom.

Still, he used up the chance of people not looking at him to open more of the doors and look inside.

Alex didn’t find anything inside. If there were anything, it would have already rotted with time.

He found weapons that were rusted, beds that were on the verge of collapse, and clothes that were one touch away from crumbling to dust.

After going through nearly 5 more houses did he find something of worth. Another diary.

Alex smiled when he saw it.

He didn’t want the weapons or techniques from these houses. After all, as far as he could tell, this place belonged to folks in the True Realm.

Only some of the bigger houses were for people in the saint realm and those were already low at the time of war.

The Eternal War for Dominance should have already whittled their numbers down to a few.

No, what Alex wanted to find here was obviously information about the other location he wanted to go to.

After reading up on the previous diary he had found 10 years ago, Alex knew that when the war had ended, the inhabitants of this secret realm had left.

And when they did, Alex didn’t see why they would bother leaving anything that wasn’t useful to them behind.

The Undying God, their young lord, was trapped in cultivation, fighting to save his spirit at the time. So, with the authority medallion with him, they couldn’t empty the library, or the House of the Undying.

They had likely emptied the Alchemy mountain, but it had most likely grown again in time.

The training and crafting mountain as well as the cultivation mountain wasn’t something they could take and were left behind.

So, they had taken the only thing they could. The object they owned in their houses.

Fortunately, some of them had deemed their diaries unnecessary as well, and Alex got to read what was written in this rotten one.

[Mother died the other day. I will kill those damn with my own two hands.]

[The young lord is choosing a few of us to pass down his technique to. I hope I’m one of them, but I would like to be Saint realm before that.]

[Fei Hualing didn’t break through to the Saint realm yet, so he is struggling to even see where he is going without any assistance.]

[I avenged you, mother. I avenged you. I killed those humans in battle. I carved your name with their blood on the snow.]

[The young lord was ambushed by 4 humans in the blizzard. I saw him dance with death. I saw him find glory.]

[I wonder why the young lord is making us find so many of these mouses.]

[We set out for battle today. Whoever manages to prove themselves will get to inherit the Undying inheritance.]

[The immortals themselves came down to strike the young lord. He managed to save his nascent soul, but I could see that he was hurt. What will happen now? Will he be okay? Who will look after us?]

[So many of my friends and family died, but I lived to see the war come to an end. Should I be happy that I didn’t die? Or should I be worried that we will now be ruled by these beasts?]

Chapter 828

Alex read the diary with a weird look on his face. The people around him were still looking at him, even staring, but he didn’t have the mind to think about that.

He thought about what the diary said.

It was a tragic tale of a demon who had to live through the war, and while Alex did empathize with him to a certain extent, there was something else that grabbed his attention.

Something that was entirely too easy to miss if you weren’t looking for some clues.

Alex read the two lines that he found were the most important.

[I avenged you, mother. I avenged you. I killed those humans in battle. I carved your name with their blood on the snow.]

[The young lord was ambushed by 4 humans in the blizzard. I saw him dance with death. I saw him find glory.]

He quickly thought back to the other diary from nearly 10 years ago that he had managed to take from another one of these big houses and remembered the similar lines in there.

[I killed a human today. I vividly remember as his blood melted the snow beneath his dead body. I can’t believe I had it in me.]

[I lost my left leg in the fight today. The enemy hid under the frozen lake and sneak attacked me. I’m a little saddened.]

Snow wasn’t something so easy to come by on the Western continent. Even when it got cold in the winter, it didn’t snow.

However, there was one place. A place where the snow covered the land and the blizzard threatened to kill them.

“The Icy Hell,” he thought. “Is that where it is?”

A smile appeared on his face as he was sure that was it.

“If the demons were in war then they most likely have a fortress on the eastern side of the continent,” Alex thought. “If that place was forever in ice and that is the only description I ever get in fights, then that must be the case.”

Alex was about to relish in this discovery of his when his attention was tugged away by the continuously watching people around him.

‘I’m not a celebrity, you know?’ he wanted to say but simply didn’t want to bother talking with them. If they saw an opportunity to talk back, they would likely talk for hours.

‘I’ll confirm my hypothesis later,’ Alex thought. ‘First, let’s go check the northern mountain.’

Alex ignored the stares of the people and walked away from the mountain, quickly walking in the northern direction.

The ones that were watching him continued watching for a while before bringing out a talisman to speak into it.

“He’s going in the direction of the 6th mountain in the north.”

* * * * *

The sun had gone past the zenith and the jaguar was starting to feel bored. He wondered why he was here. He wondered why he had to be the one to chauffeur the kid around.

Why couldn’t it be the Puma? Or the Leopard. Or the Lynx. Or the Cougar. Or even the young Serval.

‘No, it has to be me,’ the jaguar thought. After all, it was the one that was given the order to look after the human kid and the young lord before Lady Ren—

The jaguar’s eyes sharpened. It looked up front and saw a few of the Saints walking towards him.

It slowly got up and stared back at them.

“Greetings, senior,” the group of them greeted them the moment they arrived close to him.

“What do you want?” the jaguar asked.

“We were wondering who exactly you were, senior,” one of the women in the group asked. She wore a brown and gold robe, belonging to the Glory’s Edge sect.

“What do you want to know about me? My name or my faction?” the jaguar asked.

The group watched expectantly as if they wanted both.

“My name is—”

Before the jaguar could finish speaking, the Saints moved. The jaguar quickly created a halo of white light around its black body, but they weren’t attacking him, but rather moving around him.

The jaguar was confused for a split second before it saw the Saints bring out metallic weapons.

No, they weren’t weapons.

Those were formations flags.

The Saint had already reached position and dug the formation flag onto the ground. Before the Jaguar could move away, a barrier opened up all around it, confining it to just that formation.

The jaguar’s white halo brightened and it opened its mouth. A giant tiger head appeared all around it, large enough to be bigger than two elephants, and it roared. The roar struck the barrier with magnificent force.

The barrier shuddered, sending shivers up the Saint’s bodies, but nothing else happened.

The jaguar attacked a few more times, but nothing happened even then. “What are you doing?” the jaguar attack.

“Sit still, kitty. Or we will be forced to kill you,” the old woman with the blood-red robe spoke while freely pouring her Qi into the formation flag below her.

The jaguar looked around. They all were.

Each one of the 14 Saints that stood next to the 14 formation flags was pouring their Qi onto the formation flags.

They were trapping him in here and the only way to get out of this formation was to strike it so hard that Saints outside were forced to pour out their entire dantian before they were empty.

The Saints casually started sitting down on the ground and started cultivating while pouring in the Qi.

The jaguar knew that so long as their Qi and their Will lasted, he wasn’t getting out of here.

The old man in the crimson robe was giddy with happiness at the fact that his years of research on the formation finally paid off. He blessed the person that threw the formation manual down from the heavens that night nearly 1200 years ago.

There was a reason why the old man had gone with this approach, rather than using normal formation flags with spirit stones.

For one, Saint spirit stones were almost impossible to find except in the treasuries of the big houses and sects. Since the Saint spirit veins were taken away back before these saints were even born, the new Saint spirit veins would take years to die and turn to Saint spirit stones.

And given how rare they were, they couldn’t just use it to contain a beast in the upper Saint Core realm, where it could break the barrier eventually and turn their rare Saint spirit stones useless.

Secondly, spirit stones weren’t infinite. At least, not in the same way a cultivator could be. With 14 different cultivators constantly channeling the formation, while renewing their lost Qi, the formation would last as long as it would.

And they knew that they would last forever.

The people around them were looking at them with a horrified expressions as they didn’t understand what was happening.

“What are you doing, seniors?” one of the Saint from the Lu family asked, but he was met with a glare from the Song family matriarch.

“Any one of you that questions or dares to interfere with us right now… dies,” she said. Then, she realized that this wasn’t enough to keep them away, so she decided to go one step further.

“In fact, anyone that doesn’t leave this island in the next 5 minutes will be struck through their dantian and have their cultivation base ruined,” she said. She knew that wasn’t something she could do as the collective wrath of so many houses and sects was not something even she could handle. But, she didn’t need to as the threat of a crippled cultivation base alone was enough to send the people scurrying.

Now, only the people from the 5 different great houses and 2 great sects remained.

The Lu family and the Shen family had not involved themselves in this, and neither had the Falling Lotus sect or the Heaven’s Peak school.

The jaguar struck the barrier again, but the Saints outside didn’t even flinch. While they weren’t as strong as the jaguar, they were still in the Saint core or high Saint foundation realm.

“Why are you doing this? What’s your purpose?” the jaguar asked.

“We want answers,” the lady said without hiding anything. “We want answers from the kid inside and we don’t want you to interfere while we get it.”

Chapter 829

The jaguar growled while striking at the barrier again, but that barely did anything.

“Do you think you can keep me here forever while you work to succeed in this little plan of yours?” the jaguar asked. “Do you not believe it when I say I will tear you to shred and feast on your corpse.”

“No, I believe you,” the woman said without blinking an eye. “That is why we used a barrier in the first place.”

“By the time this barrier comes down, either of two things will have happened,” the yellow-robed figure with the crisscross pattern on his robe said.

“Either we won’t get any answer from the kid and will be forced to kill you in this formation slowly,” the white-robed Zhou Tianqiu said.

“Or we will have gotten our answer and will be strong enough to kill you without needing this formation.” A creepy smile appeared on the old man with missing teeth and a deathly face.

The jaguar frowned. They had been prepared for this. They had been prepared for him. If that was so, then the human child, and more importantly, the young lord was in danger.

“Hold this please,” the old man in the crimson robe suddenly said and stood up. At the same time, the Saint foundation realm expert next to him struggled immediately as she was forced to pour twice the Qi on two separate nodes of formation flags at the same time.

No, it was more than twice. Since the old man held one of the more important nodes, she was forced to pour in more than what she could to keep the formation stable.

The Jaguar’s eyes shined a bit. He turned to look around at all the people other 12 people in the formation.

Aside from the Crimson-robed old man, there were 7 more Saint core realm cultivators. The others were in the Saint foundation realm and they were the weakest link in the formation.

While the jaguar did learn that, he still didn’t have a way to get out. He couldn’t go protect the young lord.

The crimson-robed man moved towards the monument and started placing formation flags around them in a large area.

The Saint rank formations quickly popped up, creating a barrier field that covered the monument.

The jaguar waited for the old man to go in, but he didn’t. Instead, once the barrier was formed, he returned back to the spot and took the task of pouring in Qi away from the struggling saint foundation cultivator and continued what he had been doing.

The jaguar turned to the monument that was covered in formations and frowned. Why didn’t this man go in?

In fact, that wasn’t all. The jaguar noticed several other Saint realm cultivators waiting around, all of whom definitely belonged to the same factions that were bounding him in here.

Why didn’t they go in? Why didn’t they go and directly get Alex when that was their plan all along?

He could understand why they didn’t go in along with the other juniors because it would have caused a commotion at the time.

But why not now?

Suddenly, the jaguar noticed that there was something wrong with his thinking. Why did he think that they hadn’t gone in already? Why did he think they hadn’t hid their cultivation base and entered with the other kids? It wasn’t like the demon realm didn’t let Saint realm cultivators enter without permission, unlike the beast realm.

He looked at the barrier and realized what their plan was. They weren’t planning to find Alex in the secret realm and make him spill his secrets. No, they were planning for him to come out and then make him spill it all.

This meant, there were definitely people inside that were there bringing Alex outside.

* * * * *

Pearl walked in his small size next to Alex. After leaving the people behind, Alex was making his way to the mountain in the north that was quite literally named ‘North Mountain’.

There was a barrier around that mountain that covered it completely, and while he had seen a bit of what was inside, all he saw was a giant hallway.

Now, he wanted to see what was really behind the 6th mountain. A mountain that no one had any idea about.

He was in the forest, making his way toward the mountain when suddenly he heard a whistling sound.

Alex quickly turned around and punched at whatever was coming, but the force of the clash still sent him flying backward.

Blood dripped from his hand but it wasn’t his blood.

People quickly arrived next to him and Alex got ready to fight. Before he could think what to do, a barrier sprung up around him, separating him and pearl.

There were a few figures around him, all of whom were out of the barrier.

Alex stood up and felt the weirdness about the barrier, something he could only say was similar to the weirdness he felt about the whole secret realm.

He saw Pearl outside and tried to call him back into his beast space, but the barrier didn’t allow for it. He tried to teleport outside, and the barrier still didn’t allow for it.

He then struck the barrier, but it was strong enough to survive his punch. What if he used Saint Qi?

Before he could attack, a few figures casually walked in through the barrier as if it didn’t stop them at all.

Fu Tao, Song Shing, Jin Tengfei, and He Liwei walked in. The rest stayed outside the barrier, with their cultivation base clearly in the True Emperor realm.

“Good to see you, brother Yu,” Song Shing said.

Alex sneered. “Are you guys here to get back at me because I took away your victory in the tournament?” he asked.

“Tsk. Tsk. Tsk,” Fu Tao shook his head. “Such lowly mindset. Do you really think we are petty enough to attack you just because you beat us in some tournament?”

“It sure looks like it,” Alex said. A sword had already appeared in his hand, and he was ready to strike at any moment.

“You might want to think twice about that,” Song Shing said as he reached into his chest and tore out a talisman.

Instantly, the aura of a Saint spread out from him, making Alex fear more than he should have.

“You broke through?” Alex asked.

Song Shing smiled. “Not just me of course.”

Fu Tao’s veil was removed from his dantian and the aura of a saint emerged from him as well. However, Alex felt some inconsistencies in his aura. As if he hadn’t waited long enough to have a stable foundation before breaking through.

‘He did it in a hurry then,’ Alex thought.

Nearly 20 different individuals were gathered outside the barrier, but Alex was occupied with just these two alone.

He looked towards Jin Tengfei and He Liwei, but their cultivation base was still in the True Emperor realm, but they were at the peak of it.

Jin Tengfei was in the 7th realm a year ago, so going up 2 realms made sense for him, but He Liwei had gone 3 realms. Alex wondered if he did so naturally, or did he rush?

Song Shing moved forward and spoke up. “Time for Plan 0.”

Chapter 830

“Plan 0?” He Liwei looked at Song Shing weirdly from the side. “I didn’t get notified on any plan 0? Weren’t there only 3 different plans?”

“Oh, plan 0 is something I just came up with,” Song Shing said as he strode forward without must care. “It’s the plan where we just ask him nicely and he tells us everything.”

“Isn’t that right, brother Yu? You will tell us nicely so we don’t have to go through our actual plans, right?” Song Shing asked.

Any other time, Alex would’ve wanted to say something witty, make fun of them for even thinking that he would give away anything. Right now, however, he wasn’t in the mood to do that whatsoever.

He wasn’t worried about himself, but Pearl was stuck outside and was already getting ready to fight. But, with nearly 20 people outside the barrier, Alex knew he couldn’t let him do that.

He needed to fight.

Alex was about to turn around and hit the barrier behind him when Fu Tao saw him move and brought the weight of his energy spiritual sea on top of Alex.

Alex nearly felt his knee buckle as a force far stronger than his own, nearly twice as strong fell on his spiritual sea.

His mind started hurting from the force, but somehow this wasn’t as bad as the first stage of the mask.

He could fight through it.

Just as Alex was distracted from the mental attack, Song Shing threw 3 bottles on the ground near him, from where blood erupted like vines and grabbed onto him.

Alex tried to pull away, but a saint realm attack wasn’t something he could easily get away from. Even when using his Saint Qi, he could barely pull his right arm out of the blood constriction when Jin Tengfei arrived with his sword.

Alex parried the sword with one hand and swung back, but the man managed to get away.

He Liwei threw an entire volley of rocks at him, but Alex cut them to pieces before they even arrived at him.

‘Strong!’ the two non-saints thought, while the two Saints were smiling at the fact that it was a bit more entertaining than they would have expected it to be.

“Since Plan 0 doesn’t seem like it will work, why don’t we go for Plan 1,” Song Shing said.

“Finally, my turn,” Fu Tao said and once again crashed his entire spiritual sea on top of Alex. It wasn’t just the spiritual sea however that was the problem. The main problem was that Fu Tao was using a technique to do so.

Meaning that his spiritual energy was far more potent than just slamming it normally.

Alex was still constricted by the blood on all sides so he couldn’t leave. He tried hacking at the blood, even while his mind was in pain, but Song Shing arrived next to him before he could do so.

Alex swung back at Song Shing who protected himself with a blood shield. Even then, his eyes went wide. ‘Strong!’ he thought. His eyes only blazed with more greed when he felt that. ‘I want that.’

“Eat this or your cat will die,” Song Shing said.

Alex frowned and looked at Pearl who was already surrounded outside. ‘How did they know?’ he thought for a moment before noticing Fu Tao grinning from ear to ear.

He was the one Alex told about saving Pearl from the beast realm. Which meant he was the only one here that could’ve possibly given away any information.

Fury blazed in Alex’s heart. He couldn’t believe anyone was capable of going against someone just because they were jealous of them.

He had called the man brother at some point. He felt disgusted he had even thought of him as that.

“Eat this pill,” Song Shing forced a pill next to Alex’s face.

Alex saw the pill, sniffed it a little, and immediately knew what it was. It was a Truth Seeking pill.

As soon as he ate it, he would be in a state of mind where he would blurt out every truth hidden deep within him without any possibility of stopping himself.

They wanted him to spill his secrets.

“Okay,” Alex said and ate the pill.

Song Shing was a little surprised that Alex agreed to this. After all, when they were planning, this was one of the throwaway plans as it could have never worked on anyone.

Who in their right mind would willingly want to eat a truth-seeking pill?

It was really Plan 2 that they were relying on because the chances of Plan 1 working were really, really low.

‘Hey, I can’t complain though,’ he thought and flicked the pill onto Alex’s mouth.

Alex gave him an angry look and swallowed the pill. As he did, he remembered the face the clone Song Zun made after he had eaten the pill.

When he burned the pill in his stomach until it was nothing but Qi, he looked back up and emulated the emotions that were on Song Zun’s face all those years ago.

“It worked? So easily?” Jin Tengfei held his sword in his hand and a look of disbelief on his face.

“Yeah, we can start asking questions now,” Song Shing said. He too was having a hard time believing it worked.

Sounds of fighting rang out from behind them where Pearl had started fighting against the True Emperors, but these 4 had never really cared about Pearl.

“Tell us your secrets,” He Liwei asked impatiently.

“I…” Alex started to speak. “I…”

“Yes, go on,” he urged.

“I haven’t taken a bath in years,” Alex said.

“What?” He Liwei looked confused. Was that the secret behind his strength? No way. Cultivators never really took a bath. They could clean themselves with just Qi.

“Idiot, ask specific questions,” Jin Tenfei said from the side and looked towards Alex. “Can you use Sword Aura?”

“No,” Alex said without hesitation. There wasn’t even a need to lie here.

“Then how do you have Sword Aura’s property with only Sword Qi?” he asked.

‘What?’ Alex looked at the man with a confused look. ‘Sword Aura’s property with sword Qi? What does he mean?’

“I don’t know,” Alex said, unable to hide away the confused look on his face.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Jin Tengfei asked.

“I don’t know anything about Sword Aura aside from the fact that it comes after Sword Qi,” Alex said. To his own surprise, he hadn’t lied yet.

“How is your spiritual sense so strong?” Fu Tao decided to get his question in as well.

“I ate a lot of pills,” Alex said without hesitation.

Fu Tao frowned. He had done that too, but his spiritual sense wasn’t nearly as big as Alex’s. Did Alex really eat an amazing pill… or was he lying?

“How is your blood aura so strong?” Song Shing couldn’t wait at all. He wanted that answer right now.

“My blood aura?” Alex was too taken back to even think of an answer immediately. How was his blood aura so strong? He didn’t have a definite answer himself.

Maybe it was his constitution? Maybe it was his dense Qi? Or maybe it was even the fact that he had the White Tiger’s blood essence in him.

However, none of these answers was something that he could tell.

“I don’t know,” Alex said, trying not to make it sound like it was a contemplated answer.

However, Song Shing wasn’t duped. He couldn’t help but feel that the answer was wrong and in fact, he was most likely lying.

Which was to say… “did the pill even work?”

“I thought so too,” Fu Tao said from the side.

Alex frowned, but he didn’t show it on his face. He couldn’t let them know he wasn’t telling the truth or they would hurt him.

He wasn’t worried about death, of course. There was no chance these people would kill him and miss out on so many secrets.

But, there were other things they could do to him, that he didn’t want to suffer from.

The most important one of them being losing Pearl. He was already fighting, and Alex needed to get to him quickly.

However, going through 2 saints and 2 peak True Emperors wasn’t an easy task even for him.

“Let me see if these are the truths,” Fu Tao said and strolled forward. “Guard me.”

Song Shing and the rest nodded and got ready to attack Alex anytime. A few vials of blood flew around Song Shing.

21 swords flew in the sky, all physical swords this time around.

He Liwei also put out a few artifacts that he had made in the image of weapons from his own homeworld. One of which looks suspiciously like a bazooka.

Fu Tao came close to Alex and while still pressuring Alex mentally, placed his forehead on Alex.

Alex felt something try and breach his mental area. Fu Tao was trying to pierce into his spiritual sea where he would get information on everything using the secret techniques of the Fu family.

Just like Zexi, the high prince of the Crimson empire did all those years ago.

Alex remembered the pain, the near-death experience he had to go through, even when he was just a suppressed soul, watching his clone’s soul fight in the sky against Zexi.

That were some of the only memories he had of the spiritual sea from before he had gained back his control. A bad memory.

And now, Fu Tao was trying to do the same thing again. The same bad thing.

‘You want to get inside my mind?’ Alex thought and fully lowered his mental defenses.

‘Come.’

Chapter 831

“What’s he doing?” He Liwei asked from the side. Being someone who had only recently come to the Western Empire, he had a relatively low amount of knowledge of everything that was in the Empire.

“He’s trying to enter his mind and directly get the answer from his memories,” Jin Tenfei said. The Fu Family’s secret arts weren’t much of a secret.

“What? You can do that?” He Liwei looked with awe. “I’m surprised the Fu family isn’t stronger than the royal family if they can steal all the secrets.”

“Look at him,” Song Shing said. “Whenever they use this technique, they leave and go into the spiritual space of the enemy along with their spirit. They will now clash until he nearly defeats this guy, and then he will get us the information.”

“He’s vulnerable on the outside while he gets that information. So the Fu family can’t just go and take away others’ secrets,” Song Shing said.

“Well, anyway we should have done this from the beginning,” He Liwei said with his hands behind his head, in a relaxed manner.

“That was the plan from the very beginning,” Jin Tengfei said. “Plan 1 is getting the information ourselves.”

* * * * *

Fu Tao arrived on the vast, cold sea that was the spiritual sea. He was surprised at how easily he had penetrated Alex’s mental defenses.

‘Am I that strong?’ he thought and looked around the sea.

“Is this worth it?” Alex asked from the side.

Fu Tao turned around and saw a solemn Alex fly not far above the sea.

“There you are,” he said and slowly drifted down.

“If anyone asked me if I knew you, I would’ve said you were my friend, a close brother I knew. Turns out, I was wrong,” Alex said with a cold expression on his face.

“Yeah, yeah. Can we get this over already? Come, let’s fight. I want to get that information in your head,” Fu Tao said.

Alex smiled mockingly. “You want the information? Come get it,” he said.

Fu Tao got ready to attack when he realized Alex wasn’t fighting at all. “What are you doing?” he asked

“What? I’m letting you take a peek into my memories. I told you, come get it,” Alex said.

Was there some sort of trick here? A trap perhaps? He should sense something if there was with his superior spiritual strength. But he couldn’t.

Fu Tao saw no reason to believe that he was being lied to, so he slowly flew towards Alex, while obviously being on guard.

Even as he got close, he expected Alex to suddenly attack him, but Alex did no such thing. He stood there, unmoving as a rock, and waited for Fu Tao to arrive.

Fu Tao cautiously arrived next to Alex and saw Alex show his head towards him.

He frowned.

“You’ve done this before?” he asked.

“Yes, I’ve had my memories stolen before. I know how this goes,” Alex said. He did know how it went.

Fu Tao would place his palm on his head, then he would ask questions that would evoke memories from Alex’s mind which he would then try to make sense of.

Fu Tao became reckless after seeing an opportunity and placed his palm on Alex. He realized that he shouldn’t have been so hasty and was ready to face an attack, but no attack came.

Alex really was letting him read his memories.

‘Weird kid,’ he thought.

Alex knew there was not much pain involved in this process, so he let Fu Tao read his mind.

Fu Tao asked about Alex’s life, and he saw the memories of Alex back when he was a kid. Back when he was on the farm, back when he watched TV and helped his mother in the kitchen when he could.

Fu Tao couldn’t help but be surprised a little. He wasn’t as surprised as Zexi had been, however, as Fu Tao was completely in the knowhow about players that seemed to have come from another world and had great talent.

He saw Alex’s memories as a child and knew that Alex was a player too. Rather he had already known it for nearly a year after the glory sect had made the knowledge public to the great houses and sects.

Fu Tao saw Alex waste 18 years of his life and got angry. He had cultivated since childhood and was beaten by a kid that hadn’t even cultivated for a dozen years?

He saw Alex come into the world and see the world in a form of the game. Then, he saw something that made his eyes go wide.

He saw a book with the title ‘Alchemy God’s Knowledge’. Anyone who dared call themselves an Alchemy god would have to have the best alchemy knowledge in the whole world, even the immortal worlds.

He saw the book getting destroyed and frowned. Now the only memories about Alchemy were in Alex’s head.

A few more questions and he had a general idea of what had to be done to improve a pill’s recipe. Of course, he wasn’t an alchemist, so he would have to depend on Zhou Tianqiu to decipher what his memories said.

Memories flickered as Fu Tao’s questions changed. He asked how Alex’s spiritual sense was so strong.

He saw Alex pick Spirit Cleansing lily, eat some pills, and for some reason saw a lot of yellow fog in his memories.

‘So he really did eat pills?’ Fu Tao thought. He needed to ask other questions, so he moved on to asking why his Qi was so dense.

Fu Tao saw the pain Alex suffered each time he ate a Yang Jade. Felt the heat of a sun radiate not far away from him, and then saw coldness that would even dare freeze time itself.

These memories made no sense to Fu Tao. How could ice and fire ever make a person’s Qi strong? If anything it would make a person’s body strong.

Which was when he remembered to ask about his physique.

Fu Tao saw Alex train with Pearl and immediately understood that his physical strength was from no physique, but rather pure physical strength of his body.

A body cultivator.

There were many body cultivators in the Luminance empire, but none could ever go above the common realms.

How did he— Fu Tao saw Pearl’s image.

‘It’s the cat!’ he realized. Only now did he understand, or thought he understood, just how important pearl was.

Next, he needed to ask questions about his sword Qi.

The moment he asked the questions, Alex’s memories flickered to the time when he got his sword Qi.

A crimson barrier surrounded him, and a crimson-robed lady stood on the other side. He fought against the mental pressure and found his Sword Qi.

Not long after, he killed her.

Fu Tao’s eyes went wide. “You killed Xinyi?” he asked. “You killed my cousin?”

“Yes, are you angry?” Alex asked.

Fu Tao fumed with anger but quickly calmed himself as there was one more question he needed to ask.

About his blood aura.

Fu Tao felt the suppressive aura of the White Tiger emanating from the single drop of blood that hovered in front of Alex.

He felt the blood strike Alex and go inside his mind. He then saw a flicker of a screen where something was written.

Sun God’s Divine Yang body.

A body constitution. Was that why his blood aura was so thick? Fu Tao had gotten the answers he had wanted. Some were helpful, others not so much.

Still, he needed to go out and tell them everything.

He lifted his hand off of Alex’s head, and Alex grabbed it immediately.

“You’re not done looking,” Alex said and placed his hand back on his head.

Fu Tao wanted to stop his technique, but the very first thing he saw shocked him.

A big white cat stood in the sky as deadly lightning fell on top of her. She was an immortal, and yet the lightning was powerful enough to completely defeat her.

Memories flickered and he saw Alex walk through the poison swamp with no protection. In fact, he was poisoned many times, but he survived them without any pills.

“How?” Fu Tao couldn’t understand.

Memories flickered even faster as many different things passed by Fu Tao’s head.

The White Tiger’s Palace was in the beast realm. Pearl was the next lord of the western continent. The players came from the Central continent. Alex learning Dao.

The immortal techniques he learned. The many spiritual roots he had improved. Shen Jing’s teaching about the Dao. Shen Jing threatening the Emperor.

The many gods he knew about. The sword that killed those very gods.

The corpse of the Undying god in the timeless palace. The talismans and medallion he got from that very corpse.

The location of the inheritance. The inheritance that would make one Undying.

More and more memories flickered through that shocked Fu Tao to the deepest core. The thing he had seen, the things he had learned today. There were secrets here that he wouldn’t dare reveal to anyone.

The saint experts had been worried about the jaguar, but the jaguar wasn’t even the strongest being Alex knew.

‘I need to tell them,’ he thought, but Alex didn’t let go of him.

“So? How was it?” Alex said.

“What?” Fu Tao asked with a confused look.

“Were you satisfied with your final wish being fulfilled this way? I hope you learned everything you wanted to learn about me,” Alex said as yellow fog emerged from his palm.

Fu Tao recognized that yellow fog as the thing that killed so many beasts, and deep dread filled his heart.

“Now that I’ve helped fulfill your final wish, I think it’s about time you die.”

Chapter 832

Alex devoured Fu Tao.

He had a hard time, and Fu Tao fought back. Still, he devoured him completely, all by himself.

Once he was done, he looked below him coldly and saw that the spiritual sea had grown much denser than before. At the same time, since he had to wrestle with Fu Tao’s spiritual strength while he devoured him, he also had to spend quite a little of his own spiritual energy.

As such, despite improving by nearly half as much as before, his spiritual sea had also depleted by half as much.

“I could’ve done that if you wanted me to, you know,” the artifact spirit said from the side.

“Sorry, that was something I needed to do on my own,” Alex said.

Alex didn’t want Fu Tao to see the mountain floating in his mental space and run away before he had a chance to even get him.

As such, he also couldn’t let Fu Tao see or hear the artifact spirit for fear of him running away.

“It seems you are a bit distr—”

“Sorry,” Alex cut him off. “Can’t talk. Have a few people I need to kill.” Then, he left his mental space.

Outside, less than a minute had passed since Fu Tao had entered Alex’s spiritual sea.

Song Shing, Jin Tengfei, and He Liwei were waiting for Fu Tao to return, but they weren’t sure how long that would take.

The fight got stronger behind them as Pearl fought off the group with all of his strength.

The True Emperors that were fighting him were surprisingly unable to kill him. They had however wounded him quite a bit.

Pearl knew he was only alive because he had been using his Saint Qi, but at a True Emperor 4th realm beast, that wouldn’t last long.

The three that were inside the barrier turned around to look at what was happening behind that took them so long.

“Go kill that beast,” Song Shing ordered one of the other two.

Jin Tengfei shrugged and turned around to leave the barrier when suddenly he felt a deep chill in his body.

It wasn’t just him, but both Song Shing and He Liwei were feeling the chill. A real chill.

The temperature in the surrounding immediately dropped, making the three uncomfortable.

That was when Song Shing noticed Fu Tao’s body grow blue from cold, while the blood constriction he had created around Alex was burning red hot.

“Kill him!” Song Shing shouted the moment he saw that and used the 3 vials of blood floating around him to send 3 different arrows toward Alex.

At the same time, after hearing the shout, Jin Tengfei immediately dropped the 21 sword array onto Alex, disregarding Fu Tao that was in front of him.

As far as they could tell, Fu Tao was dead.

He Liwei didn’t attack in time and only managed to see the other two attacks get thrown at Alex.

Alex immediately pulled away his attention from conducting heat from the surrounding into the blood silently and created a tongue of fire in front of him.

A rather large tongue of fire.

An explosion shook the inside of the barrier so hard that it threatened to shatter from just the shockwave.

All three of the attackers were sent flying far away while Alex’s brunt of the damage was absorbed by Fu Tao’s armor.

Fu Tao’s rest of the body however was destroyed to pieces without his Qi there to protect it.

The heated parts of the blood constriction broke easily under the force of the explosion too, but he was unfortunately not able to fully heat the one around his ankle, so he was stopped from getting away.

Alex grabbed his poison sword and hacked away the blood around his ankle. His leg broke free in time, but just then, he heard the three shout almost at once.

“Plan 2.”

Alex didn’t know what was plan two, and he didn’t want to know what it was.

All he knew was that they were here to get information from him, and as long as they wanted it, they wouldn’t dare kill him. Hurting him though… was something they could possibly do.

A yellow light flashed from in front of Alex, while a white slash flanked him from the side.

Alex tried to teleport away, but the most he could do was flicker a bit, without moving anywhere.

Seeing that he couldn’t get away, Alex sent a palm strike flying towards the sword slash, while he struck the incoming yellow light with his sword.

When he did, whatever he hit exploded in a brilliant light.

He Liwei stood far away, proud of the little artifact he had devised of and had others create.

Alex wasn’t hurt from the explosion at all, but he was still disoriented.

“Pearl! Run!” he shouted through the smoke at Pearl who was still trying to fight the True Emperors all alone.

Unfortunately for him, Pearl couldn’t hear him. The barrier kept the sound from leaving, so Pearl didn’t know Alex was calling out for him. Even if he could, he was too distracted in the fight to listen to what he was saying.

“Pearl, Ru—”

Song Shing, Jin Tengfei, and He Liwei all flew to Alex at the same time. They launched attacks one after another, and the volley of 3 attacks was too much for Alex to fight against, especially when the formation stifled his teleportation skill.

He was getting sick of formations by now.

He thought they weren’t going to kill him, but they clearly were. Did they not want the information anymore?

Another attack came and Alex parried it, but just then, he heard Pearl’s screams from outside the barrier.

And that one moment distracted Alex.

A crimson blade formed from the blood of a Saint beast slammed against Alex, strong enough to pierce his heart through and through.

But of course, that didn’t happen.

The barrier around Alex shattered while a golden barrier appeared around him as silver light with a teleportation aura started grabbing onto him.

The three attackers suddenly stopped, smiled, and started waving him goodbye.

Alex’s mind raced to know what that meant. Why were they happy that he was getting away? Weren’t they going to get information from him?

That was when Alex realized that sending him out was most likely plan 2.

If they were happy to see him leave, then that was only because there was someone else out there waiting for him.

And the only ones out there waiting for him would be saint realm elders in the Saint foundation and Saint Core realm.

Even as the silver light embraced him, Alex knew he couldn’t leave. If he did, he would fall right into the jaw of the tiger.

He struggled against the teleportation aura, trying to get it to stop somehow. But, space had already wrapped its hands around him and it was taking him away.

Alex was moments away from being teleported away when he heard Pearl scream in pain again.

That was when he remembered. If he left, Pearl would be all alone here. Then, these bastards would definitely kill him.

Fury blazed in Alex’s heart and he thought he knew what he had to do next. He instinctively reached out to the space around him that was grabbing him. Then…

“No!” Alex said, and the silver light vanished. The space untwisted itself from around him, and he was no longer being teleported.

Chapter 833

The three men in front of Alex frowned when the teleportation aura collapsed around Alex and he was left on the ground.

They were confused. They weren’t the only ones feeling that way as Alex too was confused.

Alex didn’t understand what happened, or how it happened. However, perhaps the only difference between them was that he did know what happened.

He called upon space, and space responded.

Alex knew that if he wanted to repeat the same thing again, he would not be able to do that.

But for some reason, he had done it once. Why? How was he manipulating space when he hadn’t even learned any Dao regarding it?

It was something that happened due to him being extremely emotional for sure.

Emotional… “Pearl!”

Alex looked at the 3 dazed men and then at Pearl behind them. The barrier formation had already shattered under the attack of these 3 men, and so now Pearl could sense his message.

‘Run!’

Pearl heard the words through the bond, and he ran… towards Alex.

Jin Tengfei was the first to react as he turned around to slash at the incoming Pearl.

The bloody Pearl flickered into two different beasts, but the slash could hit both at the same time. With their power difference, Pearl would die at once.

Alex appeared between the two. He immediately took Pearl into his beast space and slashed back at Jin Tengfei.

Alex used the momentum from this hit and flew back away towards the True Emperors that had hurt pearl. At least 6 of them were cut on their bodies as the poison slowly started to kill them.

Killing them outright would only cause their escape talisman to start up, so Alex didn’t want that.

The pain they felt was great, but Alex would make sure these were the ones that died in the least painful way.

Alex stood straight and pulled something from his storage bag while the True Emperors started scampering behind the other three.

A vial landed on Alex’s hand.

Before anyone could do anything, Alex crushed the vial as the deep purple liquid flowed out from his palm, and he grabbed onto the poison sword.

Alex swiped his palm across the blade as he doused the poison sword with the Hammerhead Snake’s poison that was his reward for winning the alchemy competition.

At the same time, a white mask appeared on Alex’s left hand.

“Attack!” Song Shing shouted.

A sun appeared behind Alex at the same time, and he vanished.

Alex’s shadow landed on Hi Liwei, so that was where he arrived before anyone else.

He Liwei tried to attack, but Alex dodged and his left hand fell on He Liwei’s face. The white mask landed on his face, and it immediately turned black.

Alex activated Stage 9 of the Mask of the Spirit’s Hell, and He Liwei’s mind crumbled to pieces like an egg hurled at a boulder.

The young man immediately collapsed on the floor with his body still alive. However, his spirit was already dead.

A blood disc and 21 different swords working together came to attack Alex, but he teleported behind some of the True Emperors and cut them on the various parts of their body.

This time around, the talisman on them likely recognized the severity of the damage the poison was doing and immediately activated to teleport them.

Alex didn’t care about them. They were already dead anyway.

Heaven’s Intent fell like a boulder on Jin Tengfei’s body as his defensive mental artifact rang violently, bringing terror throughout his body.

At the same time, Alex dodged Song Shing’s attack and defeated the last remaining few cultivators that had hurt Pearl.

When they teleported away, the only two remaining on the battlefield were Jin Tengfei and Song Shing.

Song Shing frowned. He knew he could win against Alex if he wasn’t able to teleport around so freely, but he wasn’t confident enough to do so when he could.

Even if Alex couldn’t hurt him, Song Shing couldn’t keep Alex occupied for sure. If he ran away, they would have to start looking for Alex from the very start.

Given what he knew about Alex if he let him run away, he didn’t doubt that it would be incredibly hard to look for him.

A long bloody sickled appeared on Song Shing’s hand, formed entirely from the blood on his right shoulder.

He propped the sickle up high and drove it onto Jin Tengfei’s chest.

Jin Tengfei took a deep breath when the sickle hit him, but he wasn’t hurt at all.

A barrier had saved him.

The escape talisman activated and a silver light wrapped around Jin Tengfei to take him outside.

“It’s time for plan 3,” Song Shing said. “Go out and tell the elders to come in. We need their he—”

Alex appeared next to them and sliced Jin Tengfei through the neck mid-teleportation. With Saint Qi behind his attack, there was nothing that could stop him.

Alex was a little surprised that it had worked, and that he had cut someone that was already teleporting. But that was something he was capable of doing years ago.

He simply didn’t know what he was capable of at the time.

Now, he knew.

He wasn’t a master at it or even a little proficient. It was hard to tell if he had even started walking its path or not, but what he did know was that he could, at some level, interact with space.

Alex understood instinctively however that he could only do so when space was already being interacted with, to begin with. However, that alone was able to give his highs he could never hope to get.

Jin Tengfei’s body dropped to the floor. Unlike last time, the body hadn’t left the secret realm.

Alex understood why. Last time, he had cut someone that was hidden in space. This time, he had cut both the person and space itself.

Space fixed itself immediately, but a dead man could not hope to do the same.

Blood sickle fell on Alex, but Alex struck back with his poison sword as hard as he could.

Still, fighting someone with what was basically a Saint-ranked item with a True-ranked item was not something Alex could possibly hope to do.

He backed away and immediately put away the sword.

Then, a whip appeared in his hand.

Song Shing frowned the moment he saw the whip. Even without knowing what it could do, he could tell from its aura that it was a Saint Ranked item.

Alex struck with the whip and Song Shing hit back with the sickle. Neither of the two was pushed back and were on equal grounds.

Song Shing looked shocked to learn that Alex was on his level despite being a True Emperor 4th realm cultivator. Even though he knew Alex could skip realms to fight someone stronger than him, surely he couldn’t overcome the gap between the True Realm and Saint realm right?

However, he couldn’t ignore the fact that Alex did.

Alex smiled like a maniac when he realized that Song Shing and he were equals. In fact, he might even be a little stronger.

Still, just to be safe, Alex reached into his storage ring and pulled out a bunch of pills.

Then he ate them.

Chapter 834

Alex felt the powers inside the pills immediately coarse through his body.

The healing energy went all over his body looking for wounds to heal, but it found nothing. However, when it reached his left arm, it sank into the beast space and started healing Pearl.

The Qi strengthening pill slowly improved his True Qi and made it stronger by a bit. The Body strengthening pill did the same for his body, bringing it close to the True Emperor 8th realm in power.

The Pain Numbing pill would make his pain receptors work less often, while the Spirit Expanding pill would help amplify the senses he had, including spiritual sense.

The various pills worked to improve Alex’s body, spirit, and Qi as he got ready to fight Song Shing.

Last time, he had won only because Song Shing had made a mistake. This time, he would defeat him by himself.

* * * * * *

Bodies after bodies piled up outside the monument, caught by the formation that was created there.

“So many dead,” the Han family’s patriarch said with a look of surprise on their face.

“Just what is going on there today to have so many die so early,” Zhou Tianqiu wondered.

“Senior, those are our disciples,” one of them mentioned.

The formation had blocked their spiritual sense from entering or escaping from it, so they hadn’t seen who had died. Now that the extra saint realms that weren’t focused on trapping the jaguar did see that, they relayed the information back to them.

“What?” the old woman from the Song family said in surprise. “Go check on them immediately!”

“Hey, take over for me,” the old man from the Fu family said and had one of the extra saints carry on his burden.

The jaguar saw a weaker saint take over for the old man and hope built up in his heart. This weaker saint certainly couldn’t keep up this much more than a day for sure.

Then… he would definitely have his chance.

The old man walked up to the formation and entered through without any hesitation. However, the moment he saw the dead bodies, his eyes went wide and he walked outside immediately.

“What’s going on?” some of the Saint Core realm cultivators asked.

“Poison! They’ve all been poisoned. I’m afraid I might die if I touch that poison too,” he said.

“Poison? I didn’t see anyone from the Royal family enter today,” The Broken Ravine sect’s nearly-dead sect master spoke.

“They must’ve. Who else could have such potent poison? I could feel how dangerous it is just by being in its presence,” the crimson-robed old man said.

“Wait, didn’t the young man spend some time in the Royal palace?” someone asked.

“He did, as a Royal alchemist, if I’m not wrong,” another one said.

“Do you think he could have learned about poison?” they couldn’t help but speculate

The crimson-robed old man frowned. “I’m worried about my grandson,” he said. “I’m going in.”

“What? You need to sit here to keep the jaguar—”

The jaguar struck the barrier as hard as he could. With people leaving, he needed to make it harder on the ones that stayed.

“I’ll be right back. Don’t you folks worry about your juniors too?” he asked.

They all did. “Fine, go and bring him back quickly. I can’t believe how long these few children are taking already,” the Song family’s matriarch said.

The crimson-robed old man nodded and turned towards the monolith. He had to take care of the formations and burn these poisoned bodies until they couldn’t harm anyone here.

Then afterward, he would go in.

* * * * * *

The whip snapped and struck the blood shield right in the center. The blood armor broke and dissolved into blood, but Song Shing quickly forged it again.

At the same time, the blood on the right thigh of his robe moved out and formed three blood arrows that flew at Alex.

Alex sent a mental attack and the artifact around Song Shing’s neck clearly stopped him. Then, he struck with the whip again and the bloody arrows turned into nothing but drops on the ground. However, he wasn’t done yet.

Then, Alex immediately teleported next to the blood and used his Dao of Heat to instantly make it so hot that it boiled away.

Song Shing couldn’t help but frown when he saw that. He didn’t know what Alex was doing because it didn’t look like a technique. But he was destroying his blood reserve slowly and that worried Song Shing.

He was a blood user, and while he had some other techniques, nothing he had compared to using blood to fight. After all, depending on the aura of the blood he had, there were things he could do with them that would be more powerful than anything he could ever do with normal technique.

Even the most normal of blood aura was usually on par with the cultivation base of the person the blood came from.

In instances where the blood aura was stronger, he could be stronger just because of it. Now that he was using his own blood and the blood of four different Saint beasts, he should have been stronger than a normal Saint Condensation 1st realm cultivator.

Yet, somehow Alex was stronger than him. What was worse, he was now running out of blood because of him.

A vial wrapped around with talisman appeared on his hand. Alex looks at the vial with curiosity as Song Shing peeled away the talisman and a strong blood aura emanated in the surrounding.

It was drilled down into the children of the Song family that using the Blood Aura of someone or something far stronger than you put a strain on your body not just physically, but also spiritually.

Which was why most of them tended to fight with the blood of their own level. However, now that the situation was getting desperate, Song Shing had to bring out his trump card.

The blood essence of a Saint Condensation 3rd realm beast appeared and dripped onto Song Shing’s hand, which he immediately struggled to control.

Alex got cautious and tightened his fist around the whip. At the same time, a sword appeared in his other hand.

Since he was fighting against something so strong, he definitely needed something he knew was unbreakable.

The blood essence turned into a blood whip under Song Shing’s blood manipulation and struck out.

Alex struck back with his own whip and felt the power of the attack from Song Shing. It was quite a lot stronger than earlier.

Song Shing felt pain coursing through his body, but if he could defeat Alex, that would be worth it. At this point, getting the information from him was no longer even a spare thought in his mind.

All he wanted to do was kill.

Alex pulled back his whip and struck out again. Saint Qi rolled into the whip and just as the two whips clashed, a fiery explosion rang out from the center.

Alex immediately teleported and struck with his sword, but Song Shing was ready for him and created spikes from the blood on his robes that shot out at Alex.

Some cut Alex, while some pushed him back. He was hurt a little, but there was still a smile on his face.

Song Shing wondered why he was smiling when suddenly he felt something slip off his neck.

His defensive mental artifact.

Instantly, a massive mental pressure fell on Song Shing as he forced his own spiritual sense to fight against it.

Song Shing had the stronger spiritual sense of the two, just by being in the Saint realm. However, what he did not have was the experience of fighting while constantly being under mental pressure.

Alex put the sword away and another sword appeared in his hand. An illusory one.

He struck with his fiery whip with his right hand and fought against Song Shing’s own blood whip.

Then, he would teleport next to him and try to attack him with the sword.

Even after doing all he could, Song Shing realized that he was going to lose if the fight went on. He was already struggling with the powerful blood essence he had to maintain to fight against Alex. If he kept at it, he would surely weaken to the point where couldn’t fight back.

Song Shing turned around and ran.

The moment Alex saw that, he vanished and appeared next to Song Shing again. Song Shing was obviously expecting him to come, so when he struck back, Alex dodged.

At the same time, a formation plate fell on the ground and a barrier appeared around the two of them.

Being a True rank formation, the barrier couldn’t stop Song Shing at all. But it could slow him down.

While song Shing struck the barrier, Alex cut through his right arm.

Song Shing immediately felt his arm go numb as if someone can cut its connection to his mind.

The blood whip grew duller by the moment, so he quickly changed it to his other hand and struck the whip that was flying at him.

Alex appeared behind him and cut through both of the legs before disappearing away.

Song Shing buckled to the ground with legs that refused to work as he wanted.

Alex struck once again and Song Shing struck back as well, but that was just a distraction as Alex teleported next to him and cut off the last arm.

Bloody spikes flew all around Song Shing as that was the only thing he could do.

But Alex had already moved away.

When Song Shing turned his head forward, the only thing he could see was the tip of the whip flying at him.

Chapter 835 Running Away

However, the power of the whip did lower to the point that he wasn't able to hurt Song Shing when it did land on his head.

Song Shing reeled back in pain as the silver light covered him to teleport him away.

He hoped he could survive, but Alex had no such plans. The whip flew back into the silver light and shattered Song Shing's head in a burst of fire.

Alex struck the person behind the twisted space, but he couldn't touch the space itself from where he was.

So, when the power fully enveloped Song Shing, he was teleported away; Dead.

When the final enemy in front of him was gone, Alex finally loosened his body and took a deep breath in relief.

His spiritual energy was a third of what it could be, his body felt fatigued, and his 90% Saint Qi was now down to around 40%.

Whatever his body was slowly recovering was just True Qi for now.

The effects the pills had on his body would vanish at any moment, and even more pain and lethargy would follow through soon.

Alex stood up and decided to go towards the North Mountain soon. If he could just hide there for a while, and leave when some time had passed, he should be safe.

Then, once he secretly went to the Icy Hell and got the inheritance, he could bring the Beast realm and the Emperor to punish these guys.

Alex looked at the 8 dead bodies around him, 9 if one counted the various chunks of Fu Tao that was everywhere.

'The others teleported away, huh?' he thought as he walked over to He Liwei and grabbed his mask.

He turned the mask off and put it into his storage ring.

The young man beneath the mask had a blank look on his face as he stared out into the world, with not a single thought in his mind.

He might as well have been in a coma.

Alex didn't bother killing him as he was essentially dead. Instead, he took the young man's storage bags and kept them for himself.

Next, he walked over to the other rich body in the pile of bodies.

The body belonged to Jin Tengfei.

Alex picked up the 21 scattered swords and placed them in his storage bags. Then, he walked over to the body.

Just as Alex reached there, he noticed something through the spiritual sense he had been spreading for his own defense.

Someone had entered it, and that someone was fast.

The old man Fu has already noticed Alex and was making his way toward him. As he flew, he was distracted by the corpses around Alex.

When he noticed one particular one with crimson robes, giving off the aura of a dead Saint realm cultivator whose Qi was dissipating into the air, the old man's eyes went wide.

Then they narrowed as inconcealable hared appeared on them.

"You killed my grandson?" he shouted as he landed right next to Alex and kicked him.

Alex did nothing but stay there as the kick landed on him. Then, he drifted into the air as a bunch of motes of light.

The old man's hatred decreased just the tiniest bit to be replaced by surprise.

Alex was already gone.

* * * * *

Another dead body plopped outside the monolith.

The jaguar continued attacking the barrier, so the 14 Saints that were looking after the jaguar couldn't take their eyes off of the formation and had to focus on providing it with stable energy.

The jaguar could see the Saint foundation realm cultivator struggling to provide enough Qi to the node he was responsible for.

He was cultivating while he poured his Qi, but he was spending more than he was gathering. At some point, he would have nothing to spend.

The jaguar knew the only way to reach that point would be to keep on attacking.

The Saints focused on the formation, but a scream took away some of their attention.

The formation shuddered for a split second before coming back up.

"What?" one of the saints shouted.

"Matriarch! The young master... he... he..." one of the saints that were waiting around spoke. The robe he wore belonged to the Song family, and the person he called was the Song family Matriarch.

So, when she spread her senses outside, she saw that the newly arrived corpse was one of her grandson's, she nearly lost herself in shock.

Sadness crept on in her hand and she unconsciously let go of her node.

The jaguar tried to break when the node was left open, but someone else saw the situation and jumped in time to pour their Qi into the node to keep it going.

The jaguar clicked its tongue in annoyance, but there was nothing else it could do but continue attacking.

The Song Saint stood up slowly with her eyes tearing up at the death of her grandson. She truly loved him.

Just how could he have died?

Without any thoughts about her action, she walked over to the monument and activated it at once.

"Go quickly before she kills the kid in rage," a few saints said at once, and so they too entered the monument leaving none but the 14 saints to keep the formation going outside.

The jaguar looked at the situation, analyzed it for a second, and then turned towards the single cultivator that was already struggling from the very start.

It was time to up the rate of its attacks.

* * * * *

Alex ran through the forest.

After using the Earth Devour technique, he appeared at the edge of the secret realm where the chromatic haze stopped him from seeing anything that was outside.

Unlike the beast realm, this one was too denser to let him see through.

He had climbed onto a tree and analyzed where he had appeared. He had seen the 2nd mountain nearby and realized where he was.

Then, knowing that the only safe place around here was the third mountain, he had run for it.

Alex was already getting closer and closer to the third mountain and it looked like he could escape the old man that had come.

He was completely hidden in both aura and image, so no True realm cultivators could see him at all.

He ran up to the third mountain where the many people were gathered to get their turn to go in and cultivate for a month in a single day.

Aside from the Flora and Fauna mountain, this was the mountain that people really came into the Demon realm for.

Alex thought of entering the 1-month cultivation but shook away the thought. There was nothing he could gain against Saint Core cultivators that could kill him with a single breath by hiding for a single day.

So, he started running. However, before he made it very far, he felt a spiritual sense land on him from not far away.

Alex felt the horrifying dread grow in his heart and knew there was really only one way he could survive now.

So, he ran.

Chapter 836 Did you say...

The spiritual sense slammed on Alex, and Alex barely managed to survive with his wit.

Even from so far away, the old man was nearly killing him. Nearly.

With such a difference, Alex would've died if he really wanted to. The old man most likely wanted to keep Alex alive.

The only problem was that Alex didn't know if it was to gain information from him or to torture him for killing his grandson.

Alex realized that the problem for him was worse, as it was probably both.

Alex ran and ran and ran, but just before he was about to reach his destination, the old man appeared next to him and kicked him in the stomach.

The old man had held his power, but if Alex didn't have his body or technique protecting him currently, he would most likely be vomiting out his own stomach right now. That was if it hadn't already spewed out from behind him.

The old man's anger was visible in his eyes, which were more crimson than the robe he wore.

Spiritual pressure enough to drown Alex's mind fell onto him while his cultivation base slammed Alex to the ground to keep him from moving.

What little spiritual energy he had was getting sloshed around in his mind, nearly making him unconscious.

Alex only stopped from falling unconscious because the old man had let up on the pressure and didn't want him to.

He wanted Alex to be conscious for what he was about to do to him.

"Do you think you can kill my grandson and just run away?" the old man asked and kicked Alex across the chest.

Alex barely skidded anywhere with so much of the cultivation base pressuring him. The old man's Qi was like a boulder keeping him on the ground from moving away.

"We asked you politely and you don't answer. Now see what happens when I rip the pieces of the answers from your mind," the old man said and kicked him again.

He kept beating Alex while pressuring his mind. Alex tried to hold on, but the pain from getting kicked by a Saint Core cultivator was too much even when he was holding back.

Still, Alex had to hold on to his mind, or the old man would enter and gain all the answers from Alex, just like Fu Tao did. Only this time, Alex wouldn't be the one under control.

The old man kicked Alex again, and this time Alex tumbled a little further before stopping on the flat area with barely any grass or tree.

The old man appeared on top of him and placed his feet on top of Alex as he slowly started to crush his skull.

Alex felt his jaw crack and intense pain ran throughout his body, but now was not the time to reel in it.

He needed to escape. Just a little more and he would escape.

The old man stopped before he fully crushed Alex's skull as he needed the brain for his memories. He wasn't sure the answers he wanted were with Alex on his storage bags.

Alex sent his spiritual sense at the old man, but there was no intention of attack behind it. He was only sending a message.

"Just you wait, I will tear you to pieces like I did your grandson," Alex spoke directly into his mind.

The old man's eyes widened with rage and he kicked Alex in the chest again. This time, Alex definitely heard most of his ribcage on the right side of his chest cave in, and at least 3 of them were puncturing his lungs.

He tumbled a bit further away and hacked up a lung full of blood from his mouth and nose.

The old man appeared next to him and grabbed him by the hair before plunging his heat into the hard ground.

"You still have something to say, you little bastard?" he asked.

Alex coughed up even more blood and looked like he was in a lot of pain. But even through that, even through the broken jaw, he smiled at the old man.

Then his hand slammed on the ground next to him and the runes activated.

The familiar feeling of teleportation washed over both Alex and the old man that was holding him.

The old man let go of Alex in surprise and looked around. The place he had been teleported to was a normal-looking room with a giant weird cluster of runes drawn on the floor, next to a huddled-up carpet.

"Where are we? Where did you bring us?" the old man asked Alex, who was supposed to be pressed down next to him, but Alex was no longer there.

The old man hadn't noticed, but inside the Timeless palace, anyone who didn't have the authority here could not use their spiritual sense at all.

Since he couldn't keep track of Alex at all, Alex had managed to get up and run to the front.

Alex looked back while he placed his palm on the runes at the front of the hall and sent a spiritual message to the old man.

"Just wait a few days. I will come back and kill you," he said into his mind.

The old man understood what was happening and shot at Alex, but Alex was already teleporting. By the time the old man was next to him, Alex was already back outside.

Alex slumped to the floor the moment he arrived outside and immediately reached into his storage bags for healing pills.

He grabbed a handful and crunched on them like they were candies. Healing energies moved through his body to heal him, and the ones that couldn't simply be turned to Qi.

His jaw fixed itself on his face, while his ribs un-protruded themselves from his lung. The torn organs on his body mended themselves and the rest of the injuries slowly healed as well.

Finally, he was fully healed and he tried to stand up. But then, a foot appeared and pressed him to the ground, crushing his just healed chest.

Alex struggled to see what was happening and saw the Song Matriarch looking at him with a cold eye.

"Were you the old that killed my grandson?" she asked.

Alex didn't speak and just stared at her with his watering eyes.

The woman kept staring back but got no answer. With no emotion on her face, she released a bit of the blood in her robe and turned it into a blade that she pointed at his neck.

"You will answer me one way or another," she said. "Swear an oath to forever be my slave and you will get to live. Otherwise, I will kill you right here. Your blood is all I need, and I will get it either way."

Alex groaned but didn't speak.

"SAY IT!" the woman shouted.

"Wh-What will you do to me?" he asked.

"After you become a slave?" the woman's face had a sneer now. "I will have you become stronger and bleed you until your blood runs dry. Then I will use your blood to become the next Blood God."

A sneer appeared on Alex's face, while black tendrils crawled underneath his skin.

His eyes opened, fully black as if death was staring back at her. Then, his mouth opened and a hoarse voice spoke.

"Did you say... God?"

Chapter 837 Death and Darkness

Black lines appeared all over his body, like wriggling vines that crawled under his skin, giving off black smoke that dropped to the ground. Death aura, albeit not that much, started filling Alex's body all over.

his body was turning entirely black, with black veins even more prominent.

An eerie smile covered his face while he stared directly at the woman that was still pressing her leg on him.

A hand grabbed the foot and laughter rang out from Alex. "Hehehe! God, eh?"

The Song Saint frowned as fear emerged deep in her. 'Fear? From someone that's not even in the Saint realm?' she thought. But she couldn't ignore her feelings.

She knew, that if she didn't kill him right now, it would cause he problems very soon.

"Very well, kid. Die!" She pressed her leg on his chest hard enough to crush the ribs and heart at once.

However, her leg didn't move even the slightest amount. The hand that grabbed her stopped her from moving at all.

The woman's eyes went wide and she tried to back away, but the hand that grabbed her still didn't let go.

She slashed the sword in her hand at Alex's neck, but Alex caught the blade with his other hand.

Black tendrils flowed up the blood sword and tried to go for the Song saint. But the saint, in what she believed to be a wise choice, let go of the sword before the tendrils reached her.

That was in fact a wise choice. If she hadn't let go of the sword, she would have been filled with the aura of death and darkness as well, and unless she had a good body constitution or lifeforce like Alex did, she would have died very soon.

Unfortunately for her, she had let go of her sword. In the hands of Godslayer, that was the most unwise decision she could have ever made.

The blood sword slashed in a horizontal arc, leaving a trail of blackness behind it as it cut the woman's leg from the shin.

The leg that was pushing on him was now severed and the woman fell backward as pain took over her. The place where she was cut was also infected by the death aura.

Alex, or rather Godslayer slowly stood up, his body creaking at the chest from the ribs that were lifting themselves from his lungs.

The eerie smile stayed on Godslayer's face while his head twisted at a weird angle as he giggled to himself.

"God, hah! Do you think just anyone can become a god?" Godslayer asked while he slowly walked forward.

The woman had already stood up and created a dozen different attacks from her blood while a blood armor appeared on her body.

"The answer was Yes! Anyone can become a god," Godslayer said.

"Wh-who are you?" the woman asked. By now, she was aware of the fact that it wasn't Alex she was speaking to. "A nascent soul? Are you the boy's secret?"

Godslayer didn't respond to her question and continued saying, "And that is why they are so bad. Anyone and everyone dares call themselves a god, whether they are fit to be one or not."

He slowly strode forward, while the woman sent all her attacks at him.

"They're a plague. A true and definite plague in this world. They think that just because they are gods, no one can touch them. Well, that is perhaps why I exist in the first place. To get rid of this plague."

With a single slash of the sword, every single attack flying at Godslayer was destroyed.

"Oh," Godslayer looked at his own strength in surprise. "I… no, the kid got strong. Very strong," he thought. He had been stuck in Alex's mind for the last 12 years, and as far as he knew, not much time had passed.

But Alex had gone from being in True Disciple 2nd realm to True Emperor 4th realm, which was not just an increase in cultivation, but also an increase in bodily strength.

"Sigh, if I had the power I had back then when this kid took it all, I could've fought immortals now. Or at least, I could have gone at least a day fighting saints without this kid's body dying on me."

"Tsk. His fault for always stealing away the powers I gather," Godslayer said, but he was still frustrated.

If Alex died, while he wasn't in control, he would die as well. Given Alex's power to take back his control whenever he wanted, Godslayer wasn't going to bet anything on being in control.

So, if he wanted to keep living, and leave Alex at a point where he wouldn't die either, he would have to take care of this little plague as quickly as he could.

Godslayer turned his head around and the woman was already gone. Even her cut-off leg was missing.

He looked around with his eerie smile never fading as his head stopped in a certain direction.

"Death is written in your fate. You cannot hide from me at all," Godslayer spoke and vanished in a ball of darkness.

The Song Saint ran away as fast as she could in any direction she could. She needed to get away from the monster that casually fought off every single attack of her.

She didn't know how Alex did it, but she knew that he held the nascent soul of a Saint Soul cultivator who was helping her fight him off.

If not for the nascent soul, she would have certainly survived.

As she ran, she saw a group of people rushing towards her. All of them were saints that had entered behind her to look after her, but after getting here, they had lost sight of her.

The old woman didn't know why they were there, but she was glad they were.

"Do any one of you have an escape talisman?" she asked them.

"What?" the saint experts looked confused.

"DO ANY ONE OF YOU HAVE AN ESCAPE TALISMAN!?!?!" the woman shouted at them so hard that the Saint foundation realm experts had to rely on their cultivation base to not lose focus.

"Yes, yes I do," one of them said and brought out a talisman from inside his storage bag.

The old woman took the talisman and proceeded to crush it. However, a black slash flew directly at them and cut off her hand. The slash continued and carved a large wound on the Saint expert behind the old woman.

Godslayer's dark eyes looked happy to see them. "You didn't think you could leave, did you?"

The old woman felt terror that she didn't even know she could feel at this point in her life. The jaguar outside was scary, but this… this was something else.

It was as if the god of death himself had come to take her life.

"Kill him!" she shouted, but the saints didn't know if they should do that. After all, they did come here to stop her from doing exactly that.

However, when they gave the thought even the least bit of time, they knew what had to happen.

Dozens upon dozens of attacks were prepared in the span it took for Godslayer to prepare a single attack.

Once the attacks were prepared, they sent it all flying towards Godslayer.

Godslayer stood there, unmoving as a volley of attacks came his way. Then, he released a slash.

A single black slash.

Chapter 838 Outside

Space seemed to rend around it as it flew towards the many attacks that were flying in its direction.

They clashed in the center, and the black slash destroyed it all. The Saint experts experienced pure horror as the slash continued toward them without losing any energy.

The saints experienced the attack slowly, but in reality, everything happened in a split second.

The slash went through the crowd of Saints and flew to the distance where it continued to tear up trees until it struck the ground and created a massive explosion of the dust cloud.

The Song Saint remained wide-eyed, and she slowly turned her head towards her body. She realized that her upper body was already beginning to slide off from her lower body around the chest.

She saw herself dying, and then her consciousness faded away.

Many other saints in the back also got cut in half and died instantly. The black slash had cut all of them, but not all were in mortal danger.

Some lost arms, some lost legs, and some even got cut through their torso but managed to survive somehow.

Then, another slash flew at them.

A single saint from the Broken Ravine sect already had an escape talisman in their hand, so they crushed it and were teleported away.

The rest however weren't as lucky, and despite the millions of techniques they used to save themselves, the deathly slash carved through them all and killed them at once.

Godslayer looked at them and saw that they were all dead. Then it finally showed weakness and buckled to the ground.

"Shit! I ended up using too much power from the kid," he thought.

Slowly, the black veins all over Alex's body receded back into his head. The dark eyes slowly turned white until his brown iris was visible.

Then his lean body turned even leaner when Godslayer fully left control of his body and his aura no longer manipulated it.

Alex felt his consciousness return back to his body as a voice remained in his mind.

"Sorry Kid, if I help you anymore, the damage will be irreparable," Godslayer said as it reeled back into his mind.

"Well, this is a far better state than when I was at last time," Alex thought to himself.

He brought out some pills to eat, and while they did heal him, they also didn't work as well as they should have due to the effects overlapping with the pills he had eaten before.

Alex sighed and got up. He checked his Qi and frowned. Godslayer hadn't hesitated to use his Qi at all.

He had maybe 5% saint Qi remaining and even less True Qi.

"What do I do now?" he thought and looked around. The dead bodies of the Saints laid about him in a view he never thought he would see.

So many dead saints. The Western Continent was rather lacking in Saint realm cultivators, and it had dropped even more now.

Given that most of these saints that came to attack him were from specific houses and sects, rather than from all around the empire, these houses were sure to degrade over time.

He walked over to the dead saints and without hesitation took away the spoils of war. Any storage, armor, weapons, or artifact he could find, he took.

Given that these were some of the strongest folks in the western continent, the artifacts they had were definitely some of the best out there.

Alex looked at one of the severed hands and looked curiously. He had been seeing the battle through Godslayer's eyes and while he seeing was the old thing he could do, that still let him know that this was Song Shing's grandmother's arm.

And she was still holding on to the talisman. Alex pulled the talisman out from her hand, but as he did, the talisman got crushed, and a teleportation power enveloped him.

Alex tried to fight back against it, but the teleportation power of a Saint rank talisman was not something he could fight against.

So, when the silver light disappeared, Alex found himself outside the secret realm, right by the monument.

He was confused for a second and looked around.

Then, he saw a weak and scared Saint realm cultivator drag his half-broken body away from him while moving towards the giant group of people that were doing their best to hold onto the formation that was keeping the black jaguar in check.

"He-He killed them," the saint realm cultivator shouted. "He killed them all."

Zhou Tianqiu, the husband-wife pair from the Glory's Edge sect, the nearly dead sect master of the Broken Ravine sect, the patriarch of the Jin family, and the patriarch of the hand family.

These 6 remaining looked toward the saint cultivator, and then toward Alex in shock.

Did he kill them? No way.

"Where's the old bloody woman?" the Jin family head spoke.

"Dead, right in front of me," the saint spoke while dragging his body on the ground. But even as he did, his body was slowly dying.

Alex saw that he had been cut through the stomach near the naval area. This man was no longer a saint. He wasn't even a cultivator.

Before the man could speak anymore, Alex sent a simple palm strike at the man and obliterated his body.

The shock only grew on the faces of the Saints. The jaguar was no different. He had already stopped attacking to look at Alex in surprise.

'How did he survive the saints? Let alone kill them,' the jaguar thought. His mind went through a million scenarios and when he saw Alex's weak body, the scenarios narrowed down to 1.

'That sword,' he thought.

He remembered Alex from that time when he was under the control of the sword. If that was still the case, then he could see how they died.

'I didn't know that kid still had the sword,' he thought.

"Where's our matriarch?" one of the Song family saints asked.

"And our patriarch," the Fu family members asked.

The Jin family head realized something. "Where's my grandson?" he asked.

"And our disciple!" the Glory Edge sect's dual sect masters realized this too.

Alex couldn't help but sneer in their direction when he heard that.

"You bastard!" the Jin family's head left the formation and ran to attack Alex, but Alex had been ready for a surprise attack.

His hand was already on the monument, which activated in the next instant and he vanished.

The next instant, a sword slash filled with Sword Aura landed on the monolith, shaking it a bit. But aside from that, it wasn't able to deal any other damage to the monolith itself.

The runes on the monolith were carved during the times of war when Immortals coming down to the realm to fight was a common sight.

A mere Saint core had no way of damaging it, even if they wanted to. The old man Jin fumed with anger and was about to enter when he heard a massive sound from behind him.

When the old man turned around, he saw the fragments of the barrier holding the jaguar collapse to the ground.

It was free.

Chapter 839 The Final Mountain

Striking precisely at the moment, the Jaguar destroyed the weakened barrier and broke free.

The moment the Jaguar was free, it rained terror on the Saint realm cultivators.

All cultivators immediately joined together to fight it without any moment of hesitation.

14 different cultivators fought against a single beast to a standstill. It looked like they could keep the standstill going for a while, but they knew that if they kept it up, they would surely lose in less than an hour.

Instantly, the Saint cores started communicating with each other, wondering how they could get away with this at all.

They ended up with a single conclusion. They needed to take the young man hostage.

"That kid seems to be strong for some reason, you can't go in alone," the Han family's elder said.

The jaguar slammed its paw on the flat barrier created by the 14 cultivators together. The strike was strong, but not strong enough to break the barrier completely.

"Who goes then?" another person asked.

"Let me," the deathly Saint from the Broken Ravine sect said. "The rest of you might end up killing him in a fit of rage."

"I will go to," Zhou Tianqiu said from the side.

The remaining 4 Saint core realm cultivators grew solemn as they knew that while the 2 were away, they had to hold the reigns on the beast that could very well be the last thing they ever see.

"Go!" the Jin family's head said softly as that was all he could do from letting his anger show up on his voice.

He kept looking at the beast and decided to bring out the anger of his grandson's death on this very beast.

The husband-wife pair perhaps didn't hold as much anger towards their disciple's death, but they surely weren't happy about it.

They too attacked the beast with all they had.

The jaguar welcomed them all and fought back. He was ready to kill them all.

* * * * *

The two Saints teleported into the Demon realm and immediately spread out their spiritual sense to the furthest they could.

Zhou Tianqiu's spiritual sense was wider than the other saint's due to having eaten many great pills to enhance his mind. His spiritual sense reached nearly 6 kilometers wide.

Still, he didn't find Alex at all. Due to urgency, he brought out his spiritual sense and messaged every single Zhou family's disciples to tell him if they had seen Alex.

After 3 minutes, a message came from someone who was near the 5th mountain.

It said that Alex was on his way to the north.

Zhou Tianqiu realized where he was trying to run off to, and messaged the other saint.

Together, they went after him.

* * * * *

Alex ran like there was no tomorrow.

He was weak, with barely any Qi, and his feet were starting to feel numb due to having them overworked after Godslayer had overexerted them to dash around.

Still, Alex sucked up the pain and numbness and kept running towards the North mountain. After all, that was the only place other than the Timeless Palace where there was still a barrier to protect him.

With the old man from the Fu family in the Timeless Palace, his only choice was the North mountain.

Alex kept running for a while before he saw the massive mountain in the distance. Finally, he was back here after 10 years.

He was at the foot of the mountain when he felt two separate spiritual senses fall on him. A deep chill ran through Alex's spine when he realized 2 Saint realm cultivators were after him.

He used every tiny bit of Saint Qi he still had and used his movement skill to run up the mountain as fast as he could

The Saints were still far faster than him, but he did manage to keep the gap between them for a little while.

That little while was enough to get Alex halfway through the mountain where a few people were trying to check out the door.

"Move!" Alex shouted at the people in the front.

Many moved out of fear, but a few didn't respond to shouting. So, Alex used Heaven's impact to make them unconscious and arrived right before the door.

He could see the 2 saints enter his 600-meter spiritual sense, so he hurriedly placed his hand on the stone door and poured Qi into it.

Golden lights glowed from the rune on the door as the barrier around the mountain disappeared and the door slowly started sliding to the side.

Alex had no time to wait for the sliding door and instantly teleported inside before using the runes on the other side to close it again.

Right after, the two saints arrived on the mountain and frowned. They just saw Alex go in after opening the door, but the door was closed now.

"How did he do that?" Zhou Tianqiu asked in surprise.

"I don't know. We should get him quickly," The Broken Ravine sect's sect master said with an annoyed look.

Alex spread his spiritual sense outside to see the two Saints, and they caught on to it too.

"Get out, young man. We won't kill you," Zhou Tianqiu spoke.

"Kid, come out quickly or I will destroy this mountain to get to you," the other saint said.

Alex dropped to the ground and took deep breaths in relief now that he was inside the mountain. The long hallway led somewhere behind him, and he walked in to see what it contained.

While he was here, all he had to do was wait around for the Jaguar to come to save him, and he could go out—

BANG~!

Alex heard the vibrations and saw the dust fall off the sides of the hallway.

"What…?" he turned around in surprise. He was already making his way through the hallway when he heard the sound and felt the vibration.

BANG~!

Another large explosive sound shook the ground, and Alex finally sent his spiritual sense outside to see what was happening.

The two Saints were launching one attack after another at the mountain. White flame flew out of Zhou Tianqiu's hand while Sword Aura threatened to break everything the Broken Ravine sect's sect master attacked.

'The barrier will hold up, right?' Alex thought, but he could see it start to flicker a bit.

It had been ages since someone in the saint realm entered the demon realm. So, no one strong enough had come to North mountain in a long time.

After all, in their eyes, they had taken away everything they could from this location.

Now that there were two Saint cores in the realm and were both attacking the mountain after who knew how many centuries, the barrier was starting to show how much it had deteriorated over time.

Alex panicked. He had thought this would be a safe haven for him while the jaguar came to save him. But if this continued, the Saints would surely be here at any minute now.

BANG~!

Alex heard the explosion again, and without waiting to see the result of the attack, he ran through the hallway.

The long and narrow hallway wasn't very long. In about 400 or so meters, Alex arrived at a big dome-like room at the center and the only way in or out of this dome was the very hallway he had come from.

The room was massive. It was circular with about a hundred meters in diameter. There were no pillars to hold the ceiling here, and no source of natural light at all.

He looked around, trying to figure out if there were perhaps some hidden doorways in this empty room, but he couldn't see anything.

BANG~!

Another loud sound came from the outside. This time, it was much larger than before. Would the barrier even hold another hit? Alex didn't know, but he needed to do something very quickly.

Immediately, he spread his spiritual sense in every direction, stretching it to the furthest he could.

He penetrated every single rock, wall, and even the floor, but there were no hidden compartments or any hidden rooms.

He wanted to understand what this room was about if it didn't lead anywhere. The emptiness of the room simply confused Alex way too much.

How was a room that required the medallion's authority to enter, empty? Surely no one had come here and robbed it. Even if they did, they should have left something behind.

All Alex could see was piles and piles of dust and—

His eyes went wide when he noticed it. Hidden under the dust that settled on the floor over hundreds or thousands of years, there were carvings on the floor that Alex hadn't instantly noticed initially.

Runes.

Alex used his Qi to push away the dirt and looked at what the runes were about. Hopefully, it was some sort of defensive script to help himself in the current situation.

BANG~!

The barrier shattered outside, and Alex heard it. Once they broke the door, they would be here any moment.

Alex quickly looked at the runes, and while he didn't get a chance to understand it all, he saw one rune that gave him hope.

A single rune.

Teleportation.

Alex placed his hands on the floor, and even as the door outside broke open, he poured Qi onto the floor.

The rune checked the medallion's authority and accepted Alex's Qi.

The complex scripts formed of at least 2 dozen runes lit up, and a familiar feeling of teleportation covered Alex.

Even as the two saints made their way into the hall, he was already covered in silver light, ready to take him away.

The moment they arrived in the hall, he vanished.

* * * * *

The Han family's head gave up the moment he saw the Jaguar rip off the Glory's Edge sect's sect master's head.

The several other saints had already run away in fear, and the jaguar didn't chase them. His main focus was on Alex and Pearl.

Once one of the Saint cores was dead, the others couldn't match up to the Jaguar, whose strength dwarfed them.

The jaguar ignored them and went to the monument and activated it. When he went inside, he immediately started searching for Alex, and it was quite easy with the disturbance in Qi he felt in the distance.

The jaguar arrived there a few minutes later and saw the saints standing on top of a crumbling mountain.

"Where is he?!" the jaguar demanded.

The two saints answered without hiding anything, and the answer only made the jaguar angrier.

His young lord and the human boy were gone?

While the jaguar was distracted, the two humans crushed an escape talisman and left the realm. The jaguar noticed, but he didn't care.

If what the two had said was true, and there were scripts here to supplement that information, then the young man must have teleported somewhere.

But where?

The jaguar asked the few human children that were running away and got the same answer. Alex had suddenly run up here and the two saints had started attacking the mountain once Alex entered it.

Since Alex had teleported using a script, the jaguar would wait here for Alex to return.

However, as days passed and the 10-day period of the demon realm was over, Alex still didn't return.

The jaguar was sent out of the Demon Realm, and he couldn't help but worry. What happened? Where were they? Were they even alive at this point? Why hadn't they returned?

With no answer, the jaguar returned to the Flowing Brush sect and gave Helen the news that her son had gone missing.

Helen broke at the news and demanded answers as to why that happened. When she got the answer, she wanted retribution.

The jaguar understood. He too wanted retribution.

And he would get it himself.

Chapter 840 Melting the Ice

Formations were active, with shields shining all around from the barrage the jaguar left behind.

As soon as the Han patriarch returned, he made all the family members hide and brought out the clan's formations to protect themselves.

The Han ancestors that were in closed cultivation also came out to fight, but the jaguar was too strong for them, so they had to hide behind the formations and use that to fight.

The jaguar tried fighting against the formations for quite a while, but he couldn't do it at all. Even if he could, it would take him a long time to break through them and arrive inside.

So, the jaguar left.

The Han family patriarch was happy and relieved that the beast left. But then, a day later, they were under attack again.

This time, the jaguar wasn't alone.

The Han family patriarch looked in the sky in absolute awe as nearly 50 different Saint beasts flew high in the sun.

Every kind of beast was here and ready to fight. After hearing what had happened to their young lord, they were more than willing to destroy all the humans in the empire.

But, the Jaguar stopped them. He remembered the faces of those who were there in the Demon Realm, so he was only planning to hurt them.

The jaguar spoke out loud. "Give up that man, and your home will remain untouched."

When the ancestors saw the 50 different beasts, they were too scared to do anything else.

However, the Han family patriarch had no plan of dying. So, no matter what the ancestors wanted, he wasn't going to leave. As the head of the family, he was going to make the decision here.

And so he made the decision to fight the beasts, and that was the last decision he ever made.

The 50 beasts tore apart the formations and entered the Han ancestral home.

The jaguar and the puma arrived in front of the whole family who were watching in terror and tore the old man's body in two.

They told the people what the punishment was for, and once they confirmed that he was dead, they moved on to the other one.

Next, they arrived at the Jin ancestral home, and they were prepared for battle as well.

But when they saw the 50 different Saint foundation and Saint core realm beast arrive, the ancestors gave up immediately and sent the Jin family patriarch outside their formations.

The beasts tore him up like they had been hungry for his flesh for ages.

The Broken Ravine sect's sect master came out to fight on his own, and the Jaguar took him on alone.

While everyone watched, the jaguar beat the man despite his sword Aura. Once he was done, he moved on.

Slowly, the knowledge that the beasts had been going around killing people became more and more public, and the humans started to fear.

Many cried to the Emperor for help, but no help came. What did come was a group of Lightsworns that went to every single city to maintain peace and order, along with a single message from the Emperor.

The beasts had full permission from the Emperor to do what they wanted as well as a promise that no unrelated parties would be hurt.

The terror didn't fade away any better, but the cries did quiet down.

Where ever the beasts went, the Saint realm cultivators die. Even when the Saints, like Zhou Tianqiu, knew that others were coming for him, and ran to the edge of the continent, the beasts still found him and killed him.

In fact, the Glory's Edge sect was so terrified of getting attacked, that they poisoned their sect master and killed her to appease the beasts' anger.

While that worked, it also left them vulnerable to attacks by parties that had always hated them.

The 8 families and 4 sects that were said to be the greatest of the western continent, were now greatly lacking in power after so many saints died.

The power vacuum that was created there gave opportunities for lower sects and clans to rise up to power immediately.

However, the beasts didn't care what happened to the empire. Once they were done killing everyone that was involved in trying to capture Alex and Pearl, they returned back to the Beast Realm.

Only the Jaguar stayed with Helen, partly for her protection, but also to wait for his young lord to return.

He was sure if Alex came back, this was the first place he would come back to.

However, even after waiting for years, Alex wouldn't come back. In the end, he was forced to return back to the realm while taking Helen with him for her own protection.

* * * * * *

Many days prior.

Alex saw the two saints run up to him through the hallway even as the teleportation aura grab him, and then he didn't.

He had been teleported to a room that wasn't dissimilar to the one he had just been in, but there were some obvious differences that helped him know that he was teleported.

Before even checking his surrounding properly, however, Alex ran away from the ground where the runes were and moved to the corner of the room, ready to employ his Earth Devouring technique in case the saints somehow managed to come here too.

He huddled up and waited to feel the fluctuation of space in the air, but nothing happened.

It took a few minutes for the fear in his heart to fade away and the logical side of his brain took over.

"They can't come here. The script needed the medallion's authority," Alex said to himself.

Once he understood that he was safe, he took a few deep breaths in relief.

He walked over to the runes, and carefully checked it to make sure he could teleport back using it.

Once he found out that he could, he backed away as he didn't want to teleport right away.

Since the jaguar was still constrained by the formation, Alex didn't know how long it would take for him to come and help fight off these saints. That was if he could even destroy the formation.

'Let's rest for now,' Alex thought and went to the side to sit down. He finally saw the area around him with a little more attention.

The room was cold. Very cold. Of course, Alex didn't feel cold at all, but it was easy to tell that it was.

He looked towards the hallway and saw that it was entirely frozen with ice. He wanted to see what was outside, but his spiritual sense was very low at the moment.

'Cultivate first,' he thought to himself. 'I need my Qi ready.'

So, he closed his eyes and started cultivating slowly. Time passed and an entire day went by.

Alex finally opened his eyes, fully healed, but not back to his peak. He wondered how long he would have to wait before he could return, but since there were still 8 more days to go, he decided to go out and see where he was.

Alex arrived in the hallway and looked at the giant wall of frozen ice. He wanted to see how far it went on for and sent out his spiritual sense.

However, for some reason, his spiritual sense couldn't pierce the ice wall at all.

"What? Is there a script running? Or a formation?" Alex wondered. How was there ice here that he couldn't send his spiritual sense through?

'Ice... am I...?' Alex's eyes went wide as hope flared in his heart. He wasn't sure, but he was confident he knew where he was.

He was in the Icy hell, and if his senses were correct, he was still inside some sort of secret realm.

He punched the ice really hard, and all he ended up doing was hurting his own hand.

"Ow! What the hell?" he looked back at the ice. "How is it this strong... and weird?"

Alex was surprised at the properties of the ice. Was it actually not ice by any chance.

'How do I get out?' he thought for a moment and decided to do something.

A sun appeared behind him, a large ball of fire and yang Qi in one place. Then, he used his Dao of Heat Conduction to transfer heat from the sun onto the ice in front of him.

At first, Alex assumed that it wouldn't work, given how weird this ice was, but once he heated it enough, the ice slowly melted.

Alex touched a bit of the liquid that flowed and checked it.

"What the hell? This is water. How is this ice so weirdly strong then?" Alex thought. Without anyone to answer him, he kept pouring the heat from the sun onto the ice.

As the ice melted, Alex slowly walked forward in the dripping hole he had carved in the frozen hallway.

As he walked forward, he saw a small light in the distance. There was an opening there.

Alex kept on melting the ice and walking through it.

Given how hard the ice was to melt, traversing the few hundred meters of ice took him an annoyingly long time.

After nearly 4 hours, Alex was finally at the edge of the hallway where he finally melted the final layer of ice and walked outside.

The sun went out, and Alex strode forward. It was night time and the silver moon hung high in the sky, shining its light on 6 different peaks from what Alex could see.

6 frozen peaks... just like the map.

"I... I did it."

Chapter 841 The Empty Peaks

The entire land in between was covered in snow and ice, that reflected the moon's light and shone everything bright at night.

When Alex saw the 6 different peaks, he understood, that he had made it. He didn't know where he was in the Icy Hell, but wherever he was, he had made it, and he had found the location on the map, finally.

That was until he took a single step forward and realized he was inside another peak too, bringing the total number up by 1.

There were 7 peaks in this secret realm, and thus, this was not the location Alex had been looking for.

"No, but it... it's snowing. It should match. What the hell?" he couldn't help but cry out. He had been so close, and yet, he failed once again.

He quickly brought out the map and checked it out. He flipped the image of the map in his head and looked at it.

He tried to superimpose the image of the peaks in front of him, to the map on the talisman, and after a few seconds managed to do it perfectly.

The one that he had been standing on was on the left side of the map length-wise.

Then came the peak that was fully covered in snow slightly to his left in the distance.

The third mountain without half the snow on its peak was on his right, further than the second mountain.

The fourth mountain was even further in the distance, seen through the 2nd and 3rd mountains. This was the mountain that was glowing orange at the top.

This was also the mountain that was marked on the map as the one that held the secrets and inheritance the Undying God left behind.

The other two mountains were behind that mountain further away than it.

"If that's the case... then what's that mountain?"

Alex turned his head in the direction of a smaller mountain that was a little to the right of the 2nd mountain, perhaps a little further away.

It was more of a hill than a mountain, but Alex supposed it was large enough to be called a mountain.

"Whatever, I need to go get that inheritance," he thought and flew over the 2nd mountain that was to his left. Since it was on the way, he wanted to check if there were anything inside here.

Alex landed on the mountain and realized that it was empty. He didn't even have to go inside to check. Simply sending his spiritual sense inside was enough to tell him it was empty.

Still, Alex wanted to be a hundred percent sure that he was right, and he was a hundred percent disappointed when he realized he was.

Alex flew over to the small hill and landed on top of it. He sent his spiritual sense onto the mountain and realized his spiritual sense couldn't enter it.

In fact, it couldn't even tell what Alex was looking at.

Alex turned around to the opening of the hallway he had just come from where the ice that blocked his spiritual sense was and wondered if this was a mound of ice similar to that.

It did make sense if both were not letting spiritual sense enter.

Alex shook his head and flew off to the 3rd mountain, which, just like his expectations of it, was empty as well.

Finally, Alex flew off to the fourth mountain, the one that glowed orange at the top.

This was where the map said it was keeping the inheritance. However, to Alex's dismay, this place too looked like it was already raided.

Still, around halfway up the mountain, Alex found an opening in the upper half of the mountain that wasn't in snow and entered.

He walked through the empty hallway and was a little surprised at how warm it was here.

'Is some script active to make the walls warm?' he wondered. He continued walking and arrived at an empty dome room with nothing in it.

Well, calling the room empty exactly wasn't right. There were things in these rooms, and Alex's eyes widened when he saw them.

"Text?" he immediately ran to the walls and started reading what was written there.

"Demon Eyes?" Alex realized that the walls were explaining techniques to improve one's eyes and how one could continue improving them.

The technique had 4 stages, each that could only be learned by continuously training the technique that was written here.

As Alex slowly read what each stage of the eyes could do, he couldn't believe it at all.

The first stage was understandable, and the second was believable too. However, the third and fourth were complete nonsense in Alex's eyes.

However, It didn't look like there was any need to call it fake at all. After all, before one could learn it all, the person needed to... cleanse their eyes with some paste.

"Cleanse my eyes with THE paste? What's THE paste?" he looked around to the rest of the wall, but none of the four walls had any description of the paste.

"How do I make the paste?" Alex looked around, trying to find any sort of writing, anywhere. As he looked around, he saw something at the center of the room.

Having seen the texts on the wall as soon as he came in, his attention had been driven towards them.

Finally, now that his attention was anywhere other than the walls, he noticed the small, circular indentations on the ground.

Small, circular, and just right to fit the medallion.

Alex quickly tore off the medallion he was wearing and pulled it off of the thread it was on. Then, he placed it on the floor in the center.

As soon as the medallion was placed, the mountain shuddered.

Alex looked around in fear, and as he did, he saw a person standing behind him.

"Ahh!" he shouted and backed away as the Saint-ranked whip appeared in his hands. However, before he attacked, he stopped and looked at the man that was in front of him.

The middle-aged man with dark robes and white hair had shining purple eyes and a pair of horns on his head.

This man was a demon. And his body was illusory.

'A soul perhaps?' Alex thought and waited for a few seconds.

"If you found the medallion and brought it here, then I can assume that I have died," the illusory demon said.

'Dead?' Alex thought for a second and finally understood who this man was. 'The undying god?'

"I suppose you know what you are here for, but in case you do not, you are here to inherit the timeless physique passed along throughout generations whose inheritors come to be known as the Undying God."

"If I, the Eighth Undying God have died, then you shall inherit this physique and carry along what has been passed down since the beginning of time itself."

"And then, you shall be the Ninth Undying God."

Chapter 842 Understanding Death

Alex read the words on the wall again. The Demon Eyes skill did seem impressive, but unfortunately, this man had forgotten to leave behind the recipe for the paste that would be required to cleanse one's eyes.

"It shouldn't take you a long time to memorize it. If it is taking you such a long time, then I can only imagine that you haven't entered the Saint realm and haven't opened up your spiritual sea yet."

"In that case, use a talisman to record it all. But then, if you truly haven't entered the saint realm then... may the moon bless your soul."

Alex worried a bit when he heard that. Was it going to be a dangerous endeavor? Did he need to be Saint realm to do this? It didn't sound like he had to, but it still sounded dangerous either way.

He took a deep breath. 'I am already here, aren't I? And I've been through pain since the beginning of my cultivation. This can't be any worse,' he told himself and got ready.

"If you are ready, take off everything you are wearing or you own. In fact, it will be better if you take them away from this mountain."

Alex gave a surprised look. 'Take my items away?' he thought. He did what the Undying God said and took off his clothes and put everything he owned on it, and took them outside.

Since the Undying God had said it, he quickly flew off to the closest peak and placed everything there before quickly flying back.

"You have returned," the illusory voice said. "Sit here."

The Undying God's illusion pointed at the medallion. Alex nodded and went on to sit on the warm floor.

"Let us begin."

The ground shuddered, and Alex felt vibrations from the wall.

"Undying means to never die," the Undying God started speaking.

"It means to be immortal, perpetual, and deathless."

"To be Undying is to become one with eternity itself. To become Eternal."

The ground started shaking even harder and Alex saw the walls and ceiling start to crack.

Then, they broke open and Alex saw something red and orange flow down from all sides.

Lava was flowing into the room.

Alex put his arms up to protect himself from the falling lava, but before the lava hit him, it struck an invisible wall around him, that was protecting him from it.

An oval-shaped barrier kept the lava out, but as the Lava flowed in from all sides, it was quickly submerging him.

"What the hell? Am I sitting on a volcano?" he thought to himself.

"However," The Undying God's voice came from outside. "Before one understands what it means to be Undying, one must first understand what death is."

"One must understand what death is many, many times."

Suddenly, the barrier that was protecting Alex collapsed and the lava fell into him.

Alex immediately tried to use a technique to protect himself, but something didn't let him use any skills at all. It was as if there was some sort of script running that stopped him from using techniques.

However, that did not stop him from invoking the Dao.

Qi left his body involuntarily, as Alex reduced the temperature of the lava around him by several hundreds of degrees in a single instant.

The lava turned to rock, but it was still being heated by the even hotter lava outside.

Alex struggled to keep the lava off of him, but suddenly, he couldn't struggle anymore as intense mental pressure fell on him.

His mind felt like it was split apart as something started messing with his spirit itself.

"Do not struggle," the Undying God's voice said. "You will feel pain, but that is all that will happen to you here today."

"Accept the pain and do not lose your mind to it. The most important part of being an Undying is to have an undying will."

"For that, you will have to experience death many times."

Alex struggled to even listen to what the voice was saying as he really did feel something influencing his spirit in a very harmful way.

"Let go of your struggles. It is for your own good," the voice said.

Alex wanted to believe that, but his instinct for survival couldn't let him do that.

"You need a strong will. Let go," the voice said.

Alex took a deep breath, prepared himself, and let go.

Instantly, the lava consumed him, while whatever was destroying his spirit continued doing that.

Alex screamed as both pains hit his mind simultaneously, and he slowly started to dissolve in the lava.

Before he could know what was happening, he died while being consumed by the lava.

His body died and the lava slowly destroyed it all. It was quite surprising how slow it was, however. Even after death, his physical body was strong enough to survive the lava.

Just before the lava was getting to his brain, the lava separated and something that was etched onto Alex's soul instantly started healing him. In fact, it even revived him.

Alex's body slowly grew from where it was destroyed and was reinstated back to how it was before he was dead.

He suddenly sucked in a deep breath and spread his spiritual sense. "How... how am I alive? I... didn't I die?"

His mind reeled from the experience he had just gone through.

Death.

How many people in this world could possibly go through it and live to tell the tale?

"The first stage of the Undying God Physique lets you heal cuts and bruises on your body without needing external assistance, as long as you have Qi and Spirit in your body. The stronger your Qi and spirit, the faster you will get healed."

The moment the words ended, lava returned back and consumed Alex. He cried inside the lava, but his voice wouldn't make it out as it would get trapped in the dense, molten rock.

Once again, he died.

Alex sucked in a deep breath when he came back to life again. And even as he was gathering up his thoughts on his death, lava consumed him again and he died once more.

Again and again. He died and came back to life nearly 10 times before he got a bit of a break and the Undying God spoke again.

"The second stage of the Undying God Physique lets you heal from dismemberment and amputations, so long as you still have Qi and Spirit in your body. The stronger your Qi and Spirit, the faster it will heal."

The moment the words finished, Alex died again.

Alex was too busy dying to realize this, but slowly the Undying God's illusory figure was turning even more transparent.

Not only that, an entire Saint spirit vein underneath the mountain was being used up incredibly fast just to power up the rune in his spirit that brought him back from the dead.

He was being spent on an incredible amount of resources just to help him understand the concept of death.

Chapter 843 Undying

The transparent Undying god continued. Alex had died nearly 70 times now.

He knew. He kept count.

Somehow, even though all the pain, all the deaths, he was somehow able to keep a sane mind. Was it because he had gone through so much pain already in his life that this wasn't anything new? Or was it because that counting his deaths was the only thing he could do to keep himself sane?

At this point, Alex didn't even care as he counted the deaths he suffered.

75, 76, …81, …86, …95.

As the deaths went on more and more, Alex no longer had trouble counting his deaths. In fact, he was starting to assess what the illusory soul outside had spoken about all this time.

That wasn't to say that he wasn't spooked by all the deaths. The trauma he just suffered was something he wouldn't forget for a long time, but it didn't affect him as much at the moment as he was actively ignoring his experience of dying.

At some point, the Undying God said something about the fourth stage of the Undying God physique as well. Alex listened to it with a calm mind, but waves of shock reeled in his mind when he heard it.

100.

Alex counted his hundredth death and waited for the lava to consume him again, but it didn't. Instead, the lava simply pooled around him, its heat affecting him, but not daring to touch him.

He stood up straighter and looked around. Only then did he see the nearly transparent, illusory figure of the Undying god.

"If you can understand what I'm saying, pour your Qi onto the medallion," the demon said.

Alex felt drops of water on his head that immediately vaporized from the heat of the lava around him.

He looked up and saw that the night was cloudy. The walls of the ceilings of the mountain had caved in and everything above him was empty as even the lava was slowly flowing out of the hallway down the mountainside.

He saw the dark sky with snow drifting across it as a blizzard moved throughout the secret realm.

Snow fell through the open gap in the sky, and some of them even managed to fall onto him.

As the lava moved away more or cooled down and solidified around him, the snow fell more and more, which caused the lava to cool down even faster.

Alex ignored the happenings of his surroundings and moved away a little to show the medallion that had somehow survived the lava.

He poured Qi into it as per the spirit's order and suddenly the spirit grew brighter and brighter until he was nearly opaque.

"Now that you have been through so many deaths, I hope you have cultivated a will that can withstand what you will go through next."

The illusory body placed his hands on top of Alex and said, "This is the inheritance passed down throughout time. Inherit this and become the Undying God."

As soon as he said it, a massive amount of information poured into his brain, and Alex immediately started cultivating the new technique he had acquired.

Even as he started cultivating it, his body started splitting apart on its own, and healing once again.

The Undying God's physique cultivation almost became automatic as the massive amount of information he gathered slowly invaded his mind and started settling down as if they were his own memories.

Even as Alex tried to fight them, he soon found himself lost to those very memories.

* * * *

Alex saw the massive moon in the sky and the eternal cold that was all around him.

He was freezing to death in a cold night in a forest. That didn't mean anything, however, as it was always cold around here, and it was always night.

The young man, despite having a strong body felt the coldness grow so much that he felt like his horns would fall off.

The sturdy plants that had learned to live in the cold and eternal night did nothing to shelter him, and the harsh wind blew on him even this deep in the forest.

The dying young man was Alex, and Alex was the dying young man.

Alex found that he, the young man, did not possess any cultivation at all. Was that true? Did he not have any cultivation?

He thought he cultivated. Was that just a dream he saw before dying?

The young man wanted to find something to eat, to get some energy so he could stand up and walk away. But, he was already freezing to death, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He tried to fight it of course. He tried to fight death. His mother was back home, waiting for him to bring something, anything back to eat. If he didn't, she would die of hunger, just like he was right now.

He tried to move, even when his body was frostbitten and had no way of moving.

Even until his last breath, he kept fighting.

As his eyes closed for what was the final rest of his eyelids, a large glowing light illuminated the forest.

The three distinct lights made him feel warm again, but of course, the warmth was just an illusion.

Still, that gave him the will the fight again. He opened his eyes and stopped them from closing again.

But of course, with all of his body lost to frostbite, the young man had no chance of survival.

Then, he saw something. A foot slowly stepping on the snow, not sinking even the slightest bit as if the person didn't weigh even the tiniest bit.

His eyes slowly moved up as he saw a woman in a bright white dress stare at him with a curious eye. The young man couldn't tell if the dress was shining on its own, or if it was reflecting the light from the moon.

Alex saw her face and realized that she was a demon herself, with her skin-colored horns and pale silver eyes. He wondered if there was anyone in this world that was more beautiful than her. He certainly had yet to see someone this beautiful himself.

"Are you okay, my child?" the woman's voice sounded as sweet as the ringing of many bells in harmony.

The young man couldn't speak at all. His lungs were frozen by now and even breathing was hard. The young man was surviving because of his sheer will.

The woman kneeled in front of him and touched his forehead with a single finger. Suddenly, all of the death aurae around him moved away from him and he could feel life flowing back to him in its absence.

He wasn't healed at all, but he did have enough energy to speak.

"I… I don't want to die," the young man said with what little energy he had now.

"I see," the woman said, her voice still the sound of singing bells. "Then you shall not die."

Qi flowed into Alex and he was forcefully made to channel it in a specific pattern. The woman made him channel the Qi for a few times before he himself was able to continue with it.

Alex felt his body break and fit itself in many parts. The frostbitten parts healed, and the parts that were frozen, thawed.

Then, as if a miracle, he acquired a cultivation base. The young man stood up to thank the woman, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Since he didn't see the woman, he turned toward the moon and thanked the moon for sending someone to his aid.

Alex returned back to his mother with the food that he brought from the forest. He then started cultivating and slowly got strong enough to move his mother out of this place to one near a volcano.

He slowly grew as well. He fought many opponents and every time they hurt him, he healed his wounds. Every cut closed up on its own and even limbs grew back when he was cut off.

In fact, later on when he was destroyed completely with nothing but a nascent soul remaining, he still managed to grow back his body.

The people around him gave him a name. They called him the Undying.

Chapter 844 The Undying Gods

The day he was free of the eternal darkness was the day that would lead to the world being in an eternal war.

Humans attacked other humans because they were different and started calling them demons.

The Undying went on to fight in the war. He fought Immortals, Divinities, and Celestials. No matter how much damage he took, no matter how many times the people killed him, he still came back.

Slowly, the demons praised the Undying to be something bigger than they all were.

They called him the Undying God.

As the war progressed over thousands upon thousands of years, the Undying God became one of the prominent figures in the war.

However, he saw that he was going to die in the battle ahead, so he left behind an inheritance that someone worthy would soon acquire.

* * * * * *

Alex was now a woman. She fought humans in battle, jumping head first into danger, completely unworried as she had inherited the powers of the Undying God.

Space twisted as one of the humans slashed at her, but the girl simply flew upwards.

The attack cut off her left foot at the ankle, but by the time she was next to her attacker, her foot had grown back.

A sword flew out of her soul space, and she cut carved the human who just attacked her in two.

Another human jumped at her from the right employing the Dao of heaviness.

The man struck at her with a force of a realm itself.

Alex was sent flying away with a few broken ribs. But before she was too far, her ribs healed immediately, and her hands turned into vines and then grabbed onto the man before pulling on him.

Due to the man's weight, Alex was herself sent pulled towards him, then she turned her hands back to normal and fought the man for a while before the man realized he couldn't win and ran away.

Alex looked around nervously, while also wondering what she was doing here.

She? Was she a she? What about the man that was dying of cold in the forest under eternal night? What about the youth with a feline pet beast? Were those just memories she acquired from the inheritance?

"No!" Alex said. "No, I'm not this girl"

He tried to fight it, he tried to fight the invading memories, the invading personalities, but it was hard. Too many things were happening at once, and it was impossible to remember who he was.

* * * * *

Alex was now a man again. Was this real? Was she really this man?

The memories of 8 different Undying gods made it hard for him to understand which one of the 9 memories in his mind belonged to him.

"I'm Alex. Son of Graham and Helen. I was born in Maplewood city and lived my life on my farm," he said to himself, reminding him which one he was.

The third Undying god was still fighting in the war. Alex saw that his body was furry, like a beast.

He fought alongside many demons, and while the other demons died, he alone survived.

Slowly, people started learning of his feats and used the name for him that was once used by the other fighters of the Demons.

The Undying God.

And Alex understood that this man was not him.

* * * *

By the time Alex saw the memories of the fourth Undying God, he had already started to dissociate himself with the person whose memories he was seeing.

"I am Alex," he said to himself from time to time, just in case he was sucked into believing he was someone he wasn't.

The fourth Undying god was a healer and not a fighter. He used what he got from being Undying into healing the victims of war.

The war still razed the world, so he was as much needed on the battlefield as any fighter. Perhaps, he was doing something more important than anyone else was doing.

He was never called the Undying god, but in his heart he knew, he was one.

* * * * *

The fifth Undying god was a mad man.

With a weak will, he could not handle 4 different alien memories in his mind and quickly succumbed to the four different personalities in his mind.

Some days, he was the Undying. He was the monster that the humans had come to fear. He was the man that had never seen sunlight until he was an Immortal.

Some days, he was a woman with hands that could turn into vines, even though his hands never turned to vines.

Some days, he was a demon with the ability to turn into a bear. When he tried, he never could.

Some days, he was a healer who would walk into camps where the wounded warriors were kept and start treating people. Of course, since he had no knowledge of anything related to healing, he would fail every single time.

The fifth Undying God was a broken man, who never once again ever had his own personality back.

* * * * *

The sixth Undying God was a thief. After learning of someone with multiple personalities, all belonging to the so-called Undying Gods of ages past, he found the fifth Undying God and stole his memories.

Along with his memories, the Sixth Undying God found the inheritance of the Undying god flow into his mind.

5 different memories plagued his mind. Until that time, he was the one that had to fight the most memories to keep himself from going insane. Fortunately, as a man that was used to stealing memories of others, he had a strong mind to digest all the memories.

The thief let go of his scummy ways and became an honorable man. He fought on behalf of the many dead demons in a war that had been going on since before many people involved in it were even born.

At some time, he set up the next inheritance, but he knew how his inheritor would most likely be plagued by his memories as well.

So, he found a method to make sure the inheritor wouldn't lose himself in the process.

It wasn't a foolproof method and still had glaring flaws, but it was something that increased the chances of a proper passing of inheritance.

The Sixth Undying God left behind a will that would kill his inheritor many times over to solidify their own will before they were ready.

* * * * *

The 7th Undying God was struck down before she could fully utilize the powers of the Undying God.

In fact, she couldn't even regenerate her body from a nascent soul when she was dealt the lethal blow.

Knowing that she was going to die, the 7th Undying God ran away from the battlefield, to a distant land where the war had torn the place, but not as much as it had done to what these people called heavens.

There, she was saved by a weak Saint realm demon and decided to pass along her inheritance to him.

She took the saint to a secret realm and in one of the 7 mountains there, she did to him what the 6th Undying God had done to her.

The young saint died over and over again as the volcanic mountain poured out all of its lava, and the young saint inherited the Undying God Physique.

* * * * *

The eighth Undying God was a curious man by nature. Any pill, script, talisman, formations, or even beasts he came across, he would want to learn more about them.

Alex saw him make armors and weapons that were some of the best there could ever be.

However, he had to pause his passion as the war began growing bigger and he had to go fight them. Now that he had the power of the Undying, he couldn't sit behind not doing anything.

As human soldiers came through the heavens, he was one of the prominent figures that stood up against them.

However, as the humans slowly started winning more and more, and the demons submitted to them, he held the last force of resistance.

He raised soldiers to fight while hiding in secret realms that only he could access.

He discovered many pastes that would otherwise not be known in this world and passed them along.

He created pastes that he had blinded himself with before learning the Demon Eyes that were passed down to him by the 7th Undying God.

He even tested on seeking mice to pass along the power of being Undying so they could be reused over and over to scout the battlefield.

The project was a failure as while he did manage to give the beasts a bloodline that did similar things to what an Undying body did, those only worked when they were bonded to other beings and needed to use their Qi to survive instead of their won.

Finally, as the war got harder and harder to fight, the man decided to leave behind an inheritance just in case.

Alex saw his memories of him creating the interior of the mountain peak, where he carved the Demon Eyes technique onto the wall, and left a sliver of his being behind to help the next inheritor that came along.

Once the inheritance was set, the images vanished.

* * * * *

Alex sat, not on hot lava, but on frozen land. The lava that should have been hot and burning, had already cooled in the blizzard and he was now covered in a thick layer of snow.

The many memories in his mind remained vivid, but he pushed them away back in his mind. He did the same to his experience of death as well.

Finally having inherited everything, after being forged in ice and fire, the Ninth Undying God opened his eyes.

Chapter 845 Leaving the Mountain

They didn't give any insight into their being or their true personality. Alex was only affected by what he saw through the eyes of the person who was once an Undying God.

The memories weren't impactful, but they did feel like his own as if he lived through them. Perhaps only the first memory of the first Undying god was where he truly felt the emotions and despair of the person he thought he was.

Having so many memories at once did make it hard for him to keep a stable mind as to who he was.

Fortunately, he was killed multiple times before he was passed the inheritance too.

As the 6th Undying God devised, killing someone over and over was a good way to strengthen one's will and understanding of who they were.

It was a flawed skill as it was easy to lose oneself throughout the death and if done incorrectly, it was easy to kill the inheritor completely as well.

However, if succeeded, it was the method of quickly bringing a person's willpower to the level where they wouldn't lose themselves to the many memories in their mind like the 5th undying god did.

Alex looked through the memories once more and understood that he wasn't actually killed. Or at least, not in the same way death was considered a cultivator.

Yes, his body was killed over and over, but his mind and spirit were never touched. Also, not all of his body was destroyed.

His body was destroyed until his mind shut down thinking that he was dead. If such damage was dealt to anyone, they would truly have died.

However, that was if they weren't saved instantly.

That was to say, Alex was killed until he was on the verge of permanent death that even the Immortals couldn't save one from, and reversed it to bring him back to life.

The Saint spirit veins beneath the surface of the mountain, hidden in the magma was now most likely useless. Alex understood through the memories just how much energy it was required to grow his body back time after time, even where only parts of it were missing.

Alex looked at his body and was a little thankful that he went through the lava.

The Undying God's Physique required a relatively strong body before he started cultivating it. Considering that most demons were born with a strong body, if Alex didn't have body cultivation, he would've likely found himself near death every time practiced the technique.

He was still sitting in the layers of snow, so he started cultivating the Undying Physique.

His pure Qi left his naval area and went around his body in a specific pattern, slowly altering his physique minute by minute.

This technique wasn't a Qi gathering technique, which would mostly be called a cultivation technique. While it did in fact gather Qi, it was such a minimal amount that in the long run, it was considered negligible.

What it did do was alter the physique of the person that was learning it slowly and made it so that his body was more attuned to self-healing and regeneration.

After a couple of minutes of practice, Alex brought out the sword and cut himself with it.

The wound cut open started bleeding immediately, but in just 3 seconds, it healed itself to the point where Alex had trouble realizing where he was actually cut.

It was as if he was perpetually applying a medicinal paste on his body that healed any wounds he had.

Once he improved, he could even recover cut-off limbs or destroyed body parts in minutes or even seconds.

What Saint realm cultivators would take years of closed cultivation to regrow, he would do in what could be considered a blink of an eye to these people.

Of course, improving the physique to that level would take a long time and a lot of cultivation, which Alex wasn't particularly looking forward to.

Once it was all done, he finally stood up with snow coming up to his waist.

"How long was I here?" he thought while looking around. It was impossible to tell.

"Is it enough time to return back?" he thought. It was a weird thought. He didn't know how long it had been since he had come here, so he didn't know if it was time for him to leave or not.

How long did it take for lava to cool down to the point where snow could stack on it?

Alex tried to feel the heat in the stone below, and he could feel that there was indeed heat coming off from the center, but the surface of the lava itself was cold to the point where the snow could stack on it without melting immediately.

Also, the snow continued falling through the open ceiling, stacking up in layers while the residual heat blow melt what little snow it was in contact with.

That made it harder for Alex to judge the amount of time it had passed, which meant he had to quickly return to the teleportation script and hope the two saints weren't there waiting for him.

Without hesitation, he flew off but stopped when he was a bit high in the sky. He couldn't forget the medallion that was still on the ground.

Once he took the medallion, he went to the nearby peak to get his clothes and items. He quickly wore his robes and kept every storage bag and ring.

Then, as he was flying away, he saw the mountain he had just come from again. There was a black stack of molten rock on the side of the mountain that was now completely solid.

The lava that flew out through the hallway had somehow solidified in the cold. However, that wasn't the weirdest part.

The land below the lava was raised as if spikes were appearing from the mountain itself, and it stopped the lava from flowing any further.

'Is that something lava does?' he thought to himself. Alex didn't know much about volcanoes or lava in general so there wasn't anything he could speak about here.

Neither the Central continent nor the Western continent ever had volcanoes for him to learn about.

Alex shook his head and quickly turned around before flying away from the peak.

He flew over the small hill that lay in between the 2nd and 3rd mountains. If he remembered correctly from the memories, this was the hill where the 8th Undying God inherited the skill.

'Wasn't it destroyed even further than this?' he thought. Once again, he didn't know much about volcanoes to tell if maybe lava spewed out over the years and created the small peak that it was now.

Alex arrived at the ice opening in the first mountain and saw that the hole there was the same as it was previously. Not a single change.

Hoping that not much time had passed, Alex entered the hallway and reached the script before pushing Qi into it.

The formation accepted his Qi and... nothing happened. Alex wasn't teleported anywhere.

Chapter 846 Spoils of War

No matter how much Qi he poured into the teleportation script, it wouldn't budge at all.

It would accept the Qi, it would check his talisman for verification, but no teleportation aura would ever envelop him.

Alex couldn't help but wonder if the teleportation script couldn't find the other teleportation script to teleport him to, or if it couldn't find the other space it was to teleport it to.

'Did they destroy it on the other side, or did the 10 days period of the secret realm end and the space rejected everything?' he thought.

While he had initially panicked, and he still was a little, when Alex gave it more than a minute of thought, he didn't really need to panic.

For one, what had happened had happened. No matter which of the two scenarios was true, he wasn't returning back to the other side anytime soon.

At the same time, he didn't need to worry about it. He could simply leave this place and appear back in the Icy Hell and make his way back to his mother.

'Although, it might be better to stay here just in case not long enough time has passed and the jaguar hasn't managed to escape the barrier yet,' Alex thought and decided to keep shut.

Well, what should he do now then?

He decided to go check on his mind real quick. There were things that had happened to him during the inheritance that he simply didn't want to remember, and his mind had taken an impact too.

He quickly went in and looked around, but saw nothing suspicious. The silver mountain still hung in his mental space, high in the air, with an air of mystery that Alex still couldn't figure out.

The crystal ball with black flame in it curiously moved towards Alex.

"Hey, kid. What was happening out there? You looked like you were in trouble, but I didn't sense any enemy," the Godslayer asked.

"It's nothing. I was just gaining an inheritance, which had me go through some bit of suffering," Alex said.

"Oh, as long as it wasn't an enemy. I don't think I could've helped you out again," Godslayer's fire dimmed a bit.

"Thank you for saving me back there," Alex bowed towards the spirit.

"Heh, it's nothing. I wanted to go out there anyway. Besides, I got to kill a god fanatic, didn't I?" Godslayer said proudly. "That said, whose inheritance did you get? You shouldn't even be bothering with inheritances of Immortal realm figures with the talent you have."

"I... don't know what rank of the cultivator whose inheritance I got was," Alex said. "But it was someone who was there in the early days of the Eternal war."

"From the early days of the Eternal War? Impossible. That is such a long time ago that no one even knows when it was," Godslayer.

"No one?" Alex was surprised. Just how long ago had the war taken place? The memories did suggest that the Undying God had become a sort of legend or myth amongst the demons even in between two different instances of inheritance.

"Do you know when the war ended?" Alex asked him.

"The war, hmm... no, I don't," The sword said. "I'm incapable of telling how much time has passed, so it could be anything really."

"Oh," Alex thought. "Were you there when the war ended? Or were you already captured by the Sword god?"

"I was not captured by a sing—"

"Right, right, others were involved too. Were you captured before the war ended or not?" Alex asked.

"By the time I was captured, the war was long over," Godslayer said.

"In fact, I don't even remember being in the war. The war might have already ended by the time I was made... or did it?" Godslayer itself sounded confused.

It was sure that it had not taken part in the war itself, but then it never gave a thought to what was going around, and only remembered hearing that the war had been over for a long time.

Seeing that the sword spirit was lost in its own thoughts now, Alex shook his head and checked for any problem there might have been in his spiritual sea of his.

After smiling to himself about his improved Spiritual sea after absorbing Fu Tao's spirit, he came back outside.

He tried to activate the teleportation script again, but it didn't work this time either. Alex sighed and decided to move on to other things.

"Right, my spoils," he thought and moved away from the script before arriving at the corner of the room and looked at the vast amount of items he got from so many Saints and started looking through them all.

Swords, knives, bows, arrows, sabers, spears, axes, and all kinds of weapons were available in the many piles.

Not every weapon was a Saint ranked artifact. In fact, a Saint didn't have more than 2 Saint-ranked artifacts as they were incredibly hard to make or buy.

At least with the resources they had.

Alex looked at an armor that was Saint ranked artifact and nodded to himself. He quickly wore it under his robe and checked it out.

There was unfortunately no description about the armor, so Alex would have to test it out later somehow, but for now, he was fine knowing that it was a saint-ranked item.

He ignored everything else and just focused on weapons for now. He separated the saint weapons out and placed them in a specific storage bag before placing the rest of the weapons elsewhere.

He only really kept swords for himself and gave up on ever using the rest of the weapons. He would have to sell them elsewhere.

As for the artifacts that weren't your typical weapons like lamps, fans, or rulers, Alex kept them in a specific storage bag so he could check them later and decide whether to keep them or sell them.

The armors were an easy choice. There really was just the one Saint ranked one he wore, so everything else went to the recycling bag.

Once done, Alex moved on to checking on pills. With just a casual passing of his spiritual sense, Alex realized that most of these were Saint rank pills.

However, when he brought them out to check, they were all within 30% to 40% of Harmony. Not everyone had the finance to afford Xue Mufan or Zhou Zirong, and even those two didn't have much talent in making Saint rank pills due to the lack of ingredients, to begin with.

Alex shook his head and checked through the pills, and realized that not a single pill there was useful for him at all.

They were all pills meant for cultivation or to help breakthrough realms, or healing pills meant for when they got hurt. There were also antidote pills for poisons.

Alex shook his head as nothing there was something he needed at all. He wasn't affected by poison, and he no longer needed healing. Due to his talent, any pills that helped with breakthrough or help gather Qi were useless.

Alex immediately put the pills into a storage bag that was going to be sold as soon as he was out.

Pill recipes, however, he did read them all and placed it with his other belongings.

There was no hesitation in Alex's eyes when he placed the hundreds of thousands of True Spirit stones into his storage ring directly. There was not a decision to make there anyway.

Formations and talismans were something Alex simply didn't know whether he should keep or sell them. Not all formations and talismans were useful, even in the general sense, let alone fights.

Even if they were, Alex could easily make them. Also, most of these were True rank anyways so they wouldn't be of much use to him in the near future.

In the end, he decided to keep a select few of these and planned on selling the rest.

Alex found many common and rare ingredients amongst these items. They weren't just only for alchemy, but also for formations, talismans, and artifacts as well.

There was no doubt that he would keep these, and he did.

Then, he moved on to the last remaining few pieces of items that were his spoils of war.

Books.

Chapter 847 Infinite Heavenly Ice Spears

'Do these people not want to write in talismans or what?' he thought. It was true that a normal talisman didn't have as much space to keep the information as a book did, but then one could use 2 talismans.

'Maybe they are influenced by most cultivation skills being in books?' he thought. He was looking forward to seeing what sort of techniques these people had and opened the first book he had.

It was a nameless book and so Alex flipped to see what it was about.

[With the same amount of power, you can do significantly more damage to a person if your arrow is sharper than normal. In fact, if the tip of your arrow is incomparably sharp, you can destroy most things you previously could not with your arrow.]

Alex was a little confused. "That's not a technique. Is this not a technique book?" he thought and continued reading.

[Physically forged arrows can only ever have tips that are so thin. Even the best of artifact forgers can't make the arrow's tip too sharp or it breaks during the forging process. So, I will have to find some other ways of making my arrows sharp. I have begun looking into using Qi to create a fake exterior on the arrows that I will make sharp. I will record if this results in any progress]

As Alex continued reading, he learned more and more about what the person was doing. Soon, he had to close the book.

"This man was trying to find a dao, wasn't he?" Alex thought. He was fortunate that the man wasn't too deep into the book, or he might have learned what the man had understood in the process of his dao and thus not have the chance to acquire it as his own dao.

After all, the heavens never helped someone who didn't do the brunt of the work themselves. And then they kicked the ones they did help, but that was an entirely different matter.

"I can't read these insights," he told himself. A little here and there was good, and maybe a discussion itself was also good. But if one only received the information without doing anything, Dao was unachievable.

Alex looked at the book and wondered who it belonged. A person who had acquired the dao or the person who was searching for the dao.

If the saint realm who had owned this book was in fact the person who was on the verge of acquiring a dao, then Alex was lucky that he had killed the man, or Godslayer did.

If not, and this was a man that was reading somebody else's insights, then he was never going to have a Dao in the first place.

'Is that why there are so many people with no Dao at all?' he thought. He wondered how many people in the Western continent had dao.

He knew of 3 including himself. And of what he had asked of the jaguar, even it didn't have any dao. Although it did mention to Alex that it was close to one.

'Does the emperor perhaps have a dao? Maybe regarding to poison?' Alex wondered.

He kept aside the book. It was a little sinister, but he could also sell the book to some fool who wanted to learn dao. Alex wasn't yet sure if he would ever need to reach that level of desperation.

He checked a few of the other books and realized those were full of insights too. 'No way all these people grasped this much of Dao and never had any,' he thought. 'They were definitely reading other people's insight.'

Alex saw that there were more insight books than there were corpses in his memories. Meaning that some of these people were reading more than just one.

'Is the information about Dao not very widespread even amongst the Saint realm cultivators?' Alex wondered. He couldn't help but thank the god who sent Shen Jing to his aid. If he wasn't there, Alex would've likely read all of these books in an attempt to find a dao.

After quite a few books, he finally landed on a proper technique book. Unfortunately, it was a movement skill book, and one not as good as his own.

'No point in reading that,' he thought and kept it aside.

Then, he read a book with a water-elemental skill. It was a skill that allowed him to create floating icicles that he could later hurl at people with Qi manipulation.

The most impressive part of this technique was that while it did use up a lot of Qi and time for the icicles to appear, each one that was created had quite a high damage.

While Alex, unfortunately, had one of the worst Water Spiritual roots amongst anyone, he was lucky enough to have one.

"What was the last water technique I learned again?" he thought to himself. There were two nameless techniques he learned but they were simply water projectiles and water slash techniques of mortal grade that he hadn't used in ages because of how useless they were.

"Well, this is not bad," he thought and decided to read it.

Infinite Heavenly Ice spears. The name made the technique sound better than it really was. It wasn't lying in any way, but it also wasn't telling the whole truth.

It called them ice spears, when in fact the thing that was made was simply icicles. The heavenly part was just to denote that the skill was of Heaven grade, but what was truly baffling was that whoever made this technique dared claim it was infinite.

Was it infinite? In an ideal world, yes. You could make one spear after another without stopping while you split your attention into using your Qi to keep around you.

This meant that as long as you had infinite Qi and were never in a hurry, you had infinite ice spears. But that was never the case, was it?

One would have to throw out an icicle in the middle of the battle and couldn't keep it to themselves while an opponent was upfront.

Besides, in the same sense, every other technique could be considered infinite since the cultivator could continue using it forever.

Alex finished learning the technique and crafted an 'ice spear'. The icicle landed on his hand with a rather pointed tip and he suddenly slammed it onto his left hand.

Alex wanted to see just how much damage he could do, but to his surprise, his body managed to fend off the attack without a single scratch.

"What the hell?" Alex thought. 'Did my body cultivation perhaps increase again after going through the inheritance?'

One did need a rather strong body to use the Undying God's physique, so Alex wouldn't be surprised if he was indeed stronger than he had been just... how many days ago was it again?

Alex shook his head and created another icicle before throwing it on the ground. The explosive sound of the strike made Alex understand that he had indeed learned it well.

Although, given how weak his spiritual root was, the icicle likely was going to be one of his weakest attacks.

'It will only be useful against fire and earth users. Even then I have my metal skills for those both,' Alex thought.

Alex continued on to other books. He simply ignored anything that had to do with weapons that weren't swords or whips at the moment.

The defensive techniques were commendable but mostly useless for him. They were earth or heaven-grade skills, and Alex already had a similar one for it.

He wanted a defensive mental skill, but he supposed that sort of thing wasn't readily available even amongst the Saint realm cultivators.

He wondered if the old man he trapped in the Timeless Palace had those sorts of techniques. He was after all one of the strongest Saint realm cultivators of the Western Continent, barring the Beast realm.

Also, he was the one with the many mental skills, so Alex did become a little hopeful. Only he would have to wait quite a few years before he was capable of killing that old man.

Alex shook his head and continued reading through the techniques, many of which he didn't care about, and finally ended up on one that he did.

The 21 Sword Array technique.

Chapter 848 Manual

That was indeed the technique he had lost his hand to in the tournament. "Huh? I wonder if this came from him," Alex thought.

He quickly started reading up on the technique and found that the technique was rather simple.

One simply had to have 21 swords, which they would put in 3, 6, and 12 groups of swords, in 3 different layers, one behind the other.

Once the sword was in place, using a certain way, Qi would flow into the swords, binding them into something that could be considered a single artifact.

It was this binding power that was the most important here, and it made the attack one of the strongest attacks Alex had seen until now.

"Woah, it can increase one's strength by at least a realm?" he thought as he continued reading. He couldn't help but wonder why Jin Tengfei wasn't as strong when the two of them fought, but Alex quickly realized that was likely because he had been using illusory swords during their fight.

By the time he was using real swords, Alex was already way better than him and had killed him.

"I should learn this," he thought. Now that he had so many swords, it was easy to see why this would be helpful for him. If he was capable of adding Sword Qi to it, that would make it so much better.

Alex took some time to learn the technique and then some more time to practice it.

Each of the swords he used was a True ranked sword for now as the Saint-ranked swords weren't refined by him. Once he did that, his power would only get stronger.

21 swords flew in a pattern inside the hollow dome as they moved around attacking imaginary enemies.

Unfortunately, he wasn't yet adept at using Sword Qi with swords he wasn't in contact with, so he couldn't use it during his practice.

'I will have to focus on that in my free time,' Alex thought and continued practicing what little he could.

Slowly, Alex was starting to get fast and precise with the sword. Half a day later, he was done learning the technique and moved on to other books that were in there.

"More insights. Earth grade techniques. Mortal grade techniques? Why the hell would you even have this?" Alex shook his head and looked through.

Nothing of interest showed up in the many books that he still had. Until he grabbed onto one and something stirred inside him.

Alex grabbed on a book that was unnaturally heavy. Even before he had his vision on it, he smelled something that made his eyes go a little wide.

'Blood?' he thought and brought the book in front of him.

The crimson book was nearly 15 kilograms in weight as if it had been made up of pure iron. The outer cover was intrinsically designed to look like the mouth of a monster with thousands of sharp teeth.

Alex tried to flip the book, but it wouldn't open. Suddenly, a tongue flew out from the middle of the teeth and wrapped itself around Alex's left hand.

"Ahh!" he shouted in surprise and threw the book to the side of the room in reflex. "What the fuck was that?"

He looked at his hand, a bloody saliva had left a trail behind where the tongue had wrapped itself around him.

"Was that a monster? Or a book? What the hell is this?" Alex thought. He pulled the book back to him and looked at it again.

"What is this?" he couldn't help but ask.

Once again, the tongue flew out from the cover of the book and wrapped itself around Alex, but this time he was prepared enough to not get scared.

The tongue was rather weak as Alex could easily unwrap it, but he waited to see what would happen.

The tongue suddenly turned sharp at the tip and struck Alex's veins on his wrist. However, Alex's body was too strong for it to insert itself.

"BLOOD~ BLOOD~" a voice spoke directly into Alex's head, originating from the book.

The book wanted blood and even spoke to Alex. He had never had this happen to him before. "Blood? Did this belong to Song Shing? Or maybe the Song matriarch?" Alex thought to himself.

"BLOOD~" the tongue struck his arm continuously, but it couldn't break through at all.

"You want blood?" Alex asked. 'Is that a good idea?' he couldn't imagine what would happen if he did give the book blood.

"The entire Song family is still alive and thriving despite being blood users, so I should be fine," Alex said and took out the sword to cut his wrist.

As the tongue tried to reach for the veins on his write, Alex sliced his veins open and the tongue touched blood.

Immediately, his hand started healing and within the next 3 seconds, the wound was completely gone. However, from the looks of it, the book had gotten enough blood as it fell to the ground with the tongue going back into its mouth.

Alex picked the book up and suddenly, the front cover started shifting. The many tiny teeth that were at the front slowly moved around until they fell into place and for 3 different words.

Blood God's Manual.

"Blood God?" Alex's eyes sharpened. Before he could read any further, the book flashed, and he felt it disappear into his body.

"What the hell?" Alex quickly grabbed everywhere on his body to see if he was hurt, but he wasn't cut at all. The book simply… vanished into his body.

"What's going on? Is the book gone?" he thought. He tried to feel the book in his body, but that was not possible for some reason.

"Dammit, what happened? And here I was just about to read what it said," he spoke out loud and in a flash, the book reappeared.

That surprised Alex a bit again. "What the hell is going on? Where are you hiding at?" he asked the book, but of course, it wouldn't answer.

"Disappear…?" he said awkwardly to see if he could repeat what had happened. The book flashed once again and disappeared somewhere that Alex couldn't follow even with his spiritual sense.

It was definitely in his body, but he couldn't sense where.

"Reappear," he said and the book arrived back in his hand.

"How is it doing this?" Alex wondered. He measured the heaviness of the book again and the metallic material it was made up of.

Was it perhaps not a book but an artifact? It didn't seem that out of the realms of possibilities given the name of the book.

Blood God's Manual. He didn't think he would get something belonging to one god right after he got the Undying God's Physique.

He took the book and tried to turn the page. The iron book unfurled itself and floated in front of Alex as crimson words hung on the pages.

'Feed the book vast quantity of blood of strong aura to open the latter pages,' it read.

"Blood?" Alex thought and looked around in his storage bag. There were a few large bottles full of blood that were his own. While that was blood that he used to make the Body Regeneration pill, and had likely lost a lot of blood aura, Alex still wanted to see what would happen.

He brought out the blood and started feeding the book. His blood barely had any blood aura remaining, but it still managed to do something.

Suddenly 2 different metallic lights shined from the side of the book and 2 thick pages of the book opened up.

Alex turned the first page that read 'Page 1: Blood Absorption'. He quickly read through the page and understood what Blood Absorption was.

It was a skill that was used to absorb blood aura from a victim's blood, whether it be human or beast, and use it to advance your cultivation base.

Not only would that help one advance in their cultivation base, but it would also make their blood aura thicker and stronger.

Alex frowned when he read this and would have to think about using something that he felt was so morally wrong.

Then, he flipped the page and went on to the second one.

Page 2: Blood Manipulation

Chapter 849 Blood Armor

This was most likely what he was using, or at least a version of it. Alex wasn't sure if freely passing around these techniques in the book was possible or not, so he could only assume the techniques were changed throughout the millennia in the Song family.

Alex looked at the technique and learned about it. While Blood Manipulation was something that affected blood itself, to Alex's surprise, it wasn't the blood that gave it power, but the blood aura.

It was such a small difference that one wouldn't really think about, but when he did learn it, it made sense.

Blood itself wasn't strong, so it would be the blood aura that was more powerful in this case.

He continued reading and pretty much learned the technique. Unlike the first technique where one would have to gather the blood of others to cultivate over it, this technique worked with just blood, and with as little amount as one wanted as well.

That meant, Alex didn't have to go around killing beasts and humans to gather a large amount of blood, unlike Blood Absorption.

Also, unlike that technique, Alex could use his own blood in this case, which made this much better in his opinion.

He tried to flip the book again, but the words on the page changed for a split second, telling him to give it more blood or blood with a stronger aura.

Alex sighed and used the sword he had to cut open his wrist again and poured what felt like at least half a liter of blood. He tried to force his body not to heal, and he found out that he could affect it a little.

But the best he could do was push it from 3 seconds to 5 seconds.

The blood on the book was suddenly absorbed and another page shined and opened up.

Alex looked at the remaining iron pages and realized there were 4 more. 'How much better does my blood have to be for them?' he wondered.

He looked at the new page that had opened up and read it.

Page 3: Blood Armor

"Armor?" Alex was surprised and wondered if he saw this technique at all. He thought he did see the old woman use this technique.

He read the description of the technique and learned that the armor was formed from one's own blood that poured out of every tiny pore in one's body.

Since the power of the armor depended on the blood's amount and the blood's aura, Alex decided to learn it as well.

Within 5 minutes after finishing reading the technique, Alex did what was told in the technique's description and moved his Qi around. At the same time, he felt the blood aura in his body and pushed it out from every single side.

Crimson blood littered his skin as it slowly oozed out of every pore in his body. Alex found that he had full control of the armor and could change its strength of it, and design as much as he wanted.

There was a higher limit, but no lower limit.

Alex created a helmet, a chest plate, a shoulder plate, pauldrons, bracers, gauntlet, mail, leg armor, and greeves.

Making so many items with his blood took a tremendous amount of blood on his end. Alex was starting to get dizzy, so he decided to lower the amount a bit by getting rid of some stuff.

He kept the helmet, the chest plate, the mail, the bracers, and the leg armor. Everything else he pulled back into his body and his mind was really happy about that.

Alex looked at the current combination of Blood Armor on him and thought it was quite great in his opinion. There was also the advantage of quickly turning the blood armor into normal blood and using that to fight.

The possibilities were endless.

Alex grabbed onto the blade of the sword and let the blood drip onto the book. He poured in nearly 2 liters of his blood, but still, nothing happened.

'I can't lose any more blood,' he thought and stopped. The book drank all the blood but it didn't open any more pages.

"I should probably strengthen my blood aura before I try it again," he thought. "I don't really want to go kill beasts just so I can improve my blood aura, so... the easiest way to improve it would be to break through to the Saint realm, right?"

Understanding that he was correct, Alex closed the book and it disappeared somewhere into his body.

The remaining 3 books were insights again, so he put those back into his storage bag. Then, he once again tried to use the teleportation script.

"Well, guess this is not working," he thought and went back to sit down cultivate. He had lost a bit too much blood so he ate a Blood Revitalizing pill too.

After he was fully cultivated and revitalized, he stood up and turned to leave.

Since he was in a secret realm somewhere around the Icy Hell, the only way to escape would be to find some sort of teleportation script.

Being a secret realm, there had to be a point of entry and exit.

Alex walked through the hole in the ice while thinking about the memories of the 8th Undying God. There wasn't much in his memories, but he tried his best to find some sort of answer to where the way out was from this secret realm.

There were still 3 more mountains to check, so Alex flew off while revisiting the memories.

In one of those memories, he saw something that made him frown a bit. The Undying God had learned the Demon Eyes technique, but right before that, he had used some sort of paste to blind himself.

"Is that the paste meant to cleanse? Why would that blind him?" Alex thought. Suddenly, he remembered a lot more than just regarding the memories.

The diaries he had found in the Demon realm had quite a few lines about the owners wanting a technique and being blind.

Not only that, one of the demons had straight up written that their eyes' level had increased.

"That... that's the Demon Eyes technique, isn't it?" Alex thought. "The paste blinds you before you can learn it."

Alex was sure he was right. The amount of evidence was just too many there for it not to be true.

But then, if that was true, he still didn't have any passes. The Undying God hadn't left behind any sort of recipes or pa—

Alex stopped flying and his eyes moved around rapidly while his mind went to work.

The 8th Undying God was a genius. He had one of the best minds as far as Alex could tell, so there was no way he would make the mistake of not leaving behind the recipe or the paste for the Demon Eyes.

The medallion to start the inheritance was also not here, and he had to get that from the Demon's corpse. Wouldn't that mean that the recipe or paste for the Demon eyes was also most likely with the demon's corpse?

Alex dropped from the sky and landed on the small mound of ice that was on top of the 7th mountain that did not exist on the map. This was the location where the 8th Undying God was born, and Alex was currently standing on it to find something he knew he had.

Alex foraged through his storage ring for a while, going through the many medicinal pastes he had found in the Demon realm before arriving upon something that had no description or use as far as Alex could tell.

He brought it out, the jar full of medicinal paste, and opened it. The acrid smell of the paste, the one that made his eyes water and his nose itchy, was something Alex had experienced many times when he opened this paste to see what it was.

Alex had never really cared for what it was aside from the slight curiosity he would have from time to time. However, now he had a burning curiosity and he sent his spiritual sense into the medicinal paste itself.

If the Undying God was in fact a genius, he would carve the recipe onto the walls of the jar.

There was no recipe on the walls of the jar, but at the bottom of the paste, there was indeed a talisman.

Alex quickly pulled out the talisman and read it. As he expected, it was a recipe, and as he expected, it was the recipe to the paste for the Demon Eyes.

Now, if Alex followed the words on the wall that told him to cleanse his eyes with the paste and indeed use this paste to blind himself, he too could learn the Demon Eyes technique.

He didn't know how long this blindness would last before his eyes would work, but he didn't care. He had spiritual sense anyway which was far better than the normal eyes.

Alex's hands started shaking in excitement so much that he couldn't stop himself from shouting.

"Yes! Yes! I did it. I found it. I actually found it. Now I can finally learn it. Hahaha!" He shouted out loud in pure joy.

"Oh, what can you learn?" A voice spoke from behind Alex.

"Who?" Alex quickly kept everything in his ring and turned around.

When he did, he saw a massive eye the size of his body staring back at him.

Chapter 850 Another One

It was about 5 meters away from him and the eye was all Alex could focus on.

His breathing stopped in fear at the massive eye. Slowly, he moved his eyes away from the single eye and towards the rest of the body.

The eye was attached to a long, bulbous head that had dark, almost black skin that was wrinkled throughout.

The neck of the beast elongated all the way down the mountain and disappeared somewhere Alex couldn't see at all.

"Hmm? Was it time already? I thought there were a dozen more years before you changed your representative," the beast spoke rather slowly.

Alex was too dumbfounded to even understand what the beast was talking about. Rather, he was having a hard time understanding what the beast even was just from the side profile of its massive head.

He didn't know how strong it was, but if it could sneak up on him this easily, he didn't want to try and find out.

As such, Alex didn't even dare bring out his spiritual sense of fear.

"You must be the one going about destroying mountains and causing volcanoes to erupt. you disrupted my sleep little cat." the beast said.

Alex was too stunned to even speak. Just looking at the massive beast made him feel like his soul was going to escape from his body.

"Why aren't you speaking, young tiger?" the beast asked.

"T-Tiger?" Alex asked, not understanding what the beast was talking about. "I… I'm not a tiger."

"Huh?" he heard the confusion in the beast's voice.

Suddenly, he felt his body lurch forward off of the surface of the hill and was pulled down to the ground.

Alex landed on the snow and looked up quickly to see the beast's head looking down on him.

Finally, he could see what this beast was.

'A… A turtle?' Alex thought. 'No, A tortoise.'

Alex couldn't see anything but the head of the tortoise. The neck went back to some cave on the small hill.

'Wait, is that even a hill?' Alex thought. When he saw the size of the head and estimated the size of the body, he quickly realized that the small mound of land was actually the entire tortoise.

Alex's mind refused to believe just how big this beast was. There was no beast in the world that was bigger than this at all.

"Are you really not a tiger?" the tortoise asked.

"N-no?" Alex said. Obviously, he wasn't a tiger. But why was the tortoise asking that?

A thought came upon him, unimaginable in most scenarios, but he still dared to ask it.

"Ar-are you… are you talking about the White Tiger?" he asked. That was the only way anyone would ever mistake him for a tiger.

"Of course, what other tiger could I mean?" the tortoise asked.

Alex looked at the tortoise and then at its color. Black.

'No way, right?' he thought, but the curiosity burned him and he needed to ask.

"Are you a Black Tortoise?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I am," the tortoise said. "You are quite slow for someone that is meant to become a new ruler."

Alex's mind had so many thoughts running concurrently that he didn't even manage to grab what the tortoise was telling him.

A Black Tortoise, a member of the Four Heavenly beasts blessed by the gods. Alex hadn't expected to meet one so soon, and in a place that belonged to the demons at that.

"Wait, I'm not the next ruler of this continent," he quickly said. "That— That's someone that will come in about 90 years."

"Huh? Oh, so I was right about the passage of time. There indeed are still a few dozen years left," the tortoise said as it nodded to itself.

"Hmm, are you really not the White Tiger then?" the tortoise asked.

"No, I'm just a human with the White Tiger's bloodline," Alex said. There was no point in hiding that since the tortoise had already sensed the bloodline.

"A human?" the tortoise's loud voice shook the snow on its back and some of it fell down. Alex could now see the dome-shaped shell at the back that was totally black.

A spiritual sense fell onto Alex, so dense that it nearly toppled him over. It quickly passed through, searching for something, but when it didn't find it, it left.

"No beast core. You really are a human. How do you have the White Tiger's bloodline?" the beast asked.

"Uh… I took in a White Tiger's blood essence," Alex said truthfully, unable to find a way to lie against the Black Tortoise, who was one of the four heavenly beasts, just like the White Tiger. He didn't know what they might have in common and didn't try to.

"A human who took in a White Tiger's blood essence? Impossible," the tortoise said and its head flew closer to Alex, breathing warm air onto his face as it looked at him.

Alex didn't know what to say so he quickly thought to change the topic.

"Senior Tortoise," Alex called.

"Call me Xuan Luhei," the tortoise spoke.

"Senior Luhei," Alex said. "A-are you one of the rulers sent to this world as well, or are you one of one of their family members?"

"I am the ruler," the tortoise said.

"Eh? Then shouldn't you be over at the Northern Continent, ruling over it?" Alex asked.

The tortoise's eyes narrowed as it stared as Alex. "Where do you think we are now?" it asked.

"Huh? We're in the—" Alex paused. He stopped talking and slowly looked around.

Ice, snow, and blizzard filled his eyes. Something that was plenty available in the Icy Hell, but also something that would be more than plenty in the Northern Continent, which was also sometimes known as the frozen continent.

Northern Continent… North… the North Mountain. Everything slowly started to make sense to Alex. And the more it made sense, the more dread filled his heart and made him realize just how far away he was.

"Did you not know where you were?" the Tortoise asked.

"N-no," Alex said with fear in his voice. The fear of course was at the fact that he was on a completely new continent, but the tortoise thought he was being afraid of him.

"Don't be scared, little one. Us four beasts and families aren't allowed to come to this world without making an oath not to hurt anyone," the tortoise said. "Of course, there are exceptions to this oath where we can hurt when absolutely necessary, but mostly we cannot harm anyone. Even the thought of harming someone makes us freeze unless it is for the right reasons."

"Really?" Alex's fear didn't diminish, but he was able to push it down when he heard that.

"I suppose you never learned it. How exactly did you come by the White Tiger's bloodline, young human?" the Tortoise asked.

"Uh… there was some in the Western Continent. I happened to find it by accident," Alex said.

"And you survived. I wonder how," the tortoise kept staring at Alex. "I wonder if you can take in my blood essence too."

Alex got excited when he heard that. The Black Tortoise's blood essence meant he could immediately improve his Earth Spiritual root to Supreme level as he did with his Metal root via the White Tiger's Blood essence.

"Can you give me some?" he couldn't help but ask.

The Black Tortoise smiled and even laughed a little. But in the end, it shook its head. "I'm afraid I can not do that. I am already injured as I am now. If I give you my blood essence, it will take forever for me to heal," it said.

"Wounded? Who could wound—" Alex stopped when he remembered the information he had acquired at the White Tiger's palace.

The Four Heavenly beasts from the four continents arrived at the central continent when they noticed something weird happening there.

There, they fought the one who attacked them, but they were losing. There the White Tiger died, and everyone else lost. As for the enemy, Alex didn't remember hearing about what happened to it.

After that, the remaining 3 beasts had returned to their own continent to go into closed cultivation and heal.

"Are you still not healed from the time when you fought together in the Central Continent?" Alex asked curiously.

"No," the tortoise shook his head. It wasn't surprised Alex knew that information, for this was well-known information in every continent but the Western Continent.

Alex was confused. "But it's been nearly 5000 years right? Even Saint realm cultivators should have been able to heal by now. Are you mortally injured?" he asked.

"No," the turtle said. "I just don't have any Qi to heal myself."

"Qi?" Alex's eyes narrowed. "Oh, you need Immortal Qi, don't you? Is there no immortal Qi in this world?"

"I'm afraid not," the tortoise said. "Why else would Immortals have to leave if there was?"

"So, are you going to stay here forever and not cultivate?" he asked.

"No, our term ends in about a thousand more years. At that time, I will get to return home and will heal there," the tortoise said.

"You are willing to stay injured for 6000 years?" Alex asked. He couldn't believe it at all.

"6000 years goes by in a flash for an Immortal like me. Besides, I could've gone back if I really needed my help, but I can't. Not alone. Not without my brother," the Tortoise said.

"Your brother?" Alex asked. Only then did he finally remember that while they were called the Four Heavenly beast, there were actually five.

"The Snake! Senior snake is not here?" Alex looked around at the tortoise, but the snake was indeed missing.

The snake and tortoise were always spoken of together as the Black Tortoise, so Alex didn't remember that the snake was supposed to be here when he remembered the name.

"No, he is not," the Tortoise said. "I haven't seen him since that day 5 thousand years ago."

Alex hesitated for a bit, but he still decided to ask. "Is he… dead?"

"No, if he dies, I die. We are linked by fate, so I know he's alive. Just, I don't know where," the black tortoise said while looking in a certain direction.

Alex nodded as he took in the information of the two of them being separated after the fight.

That only made Alex more curious about what could possibly fight against 5 different Immortal realm beasts that were blessed by the gods, and so he asked.

"Senior To— Luhei, can you tell me about the fight that happened 5 thousand years ago? What exactly was it that you fought? And how the previous White Tiger died?"

Chapter 851 The Sacrifice

"Yes, but there is a misconception going around," Alex said. "They think that the White Tiger attacked you all to take over this world for himself, and the 3 of you fought him and killed him to save this land."

"What?!" the Tortoise's voice got louder and gruffer. "Nonsense! If it wasn't for the tiger, we wouldn't have likely even survived back then. Why would anyone think the tiger did anything?"

"I don't know senior," Alex said. "I think once you guys all went into closed cultivation, the world took the battle in the central continent as you three fighting against him, so when the White Tiger died, they believed it was your doing."

"In fact, after the White Tiger's passing, the three continents joined forces to attack the Western Continent and killed many saint realms in the process while stealing away the resources from there. It is now a husk of what it used to be," Alex said.

"Is that true?" the tortoise's voice got louder even more. "These little bastards. They do not deserve anything. Dammit, If I was allowed to hurt them, I would rip them apart myself."

Alex didn't say anything and let the tortoise vent his anger through his words. After a while, when the tortoise finally calmed down a little more, Alex asked again.

"So what really happened back then? Can you tell me?"

The tortoise got silent for a bit before finally speaking. "We were here when we were alerted to the fact that something was happening in the Central continent."

"People could no longer teleport over, and when we got out we could already sense the disaster that was happening. The world was crying for help."

The tortoise remembered the day he had got out of the secret realm and sensed the dread far away. The Qi in this world was acting so violently that day, that he thought millions of immortals were fighting in the distance.

"The teleportation formations were not working, so we had to fly over there. We flew as fast as we could, even risking getting punished, and arrived on the central continent. When we did, we saw that the disaster had already happened."

"The continent was surrounded by Qi that was now so harsh that we didn't even know how we could enter. The Dragon arrived not long after and the Phoenix did too."

"We waited for the Tiger, but we only found out a moment later that the tiger had already jumped in. Using its strong body, it survived the wind and had entered."

"We did what we could and entered as well," the Tortoise said. "By the time we had arrived, the Tiger was already in battle with... that monster."

"Monster? What sort of monster was it?" Alex asked curiously.

The tortoise shook its head. "It was a human, or at least it looked like it. It looked like a young man, but there is no way anyone that strong could look that young. Especially when we couldn't sense any cultivation base from him at all. It could not have been a human at all."

The tortoise remembered what it saw that day. The White Tiger gave it his all fighting that young man with black hair. It remembered the snarky smile on his face and the deep dread when it tried to sense his cultivation base.

The human, or whatever it truly was, had no cultivation base from what the tortoise could sense. It was either that, or its cultivation base was so high that it could hide from them, which should have been impossible.

The three of them had joined the battle and fought against the young human, but without using any technique or skill, he had fought back with just his physical body and destroyed them all.

"We couldn't fight it at all. If we continued, we would have died for sure. But we couldn't leave either, because if we did, this realm would die for sure."

"While we hesitated, it was the Tiger that took action. He told us he had a plan, but we would need to get as far away from him as we could. We didn't know what he was doing, but we trusted him and left."

"However, when we were trying to leave, because we were injured, my brother got separated from me in the Qi storm and disappeared somewhere."

"I too was too heavily injured to go find him, and while I wanted to, I sensed it."

"I couldn't see what the tiger did, but it felt like the world was caving in on itself. Terror, I felt it that day, I will never forget it. It lasted for an entire 2 minutes before the feeling vanished."

"Then, neither that monster nor the tiger remained anymore. They were both dead," the Tortoise said.

Alex heard the story in awe. What sort of thing would have to happen to make it feel like the world was caving in on itself?

"Are you sure the monster died?" Alex asked. He didn't know of any techniques a White Tiger had to make it feel like that.

"Of course, it was no longer there inside," the Tortoise said.

"But it could have left, right? Immortals and other beings can leave the world all the time? What if the monster left the world just before the White Tiger did the suicide attack?" Alex asked.

"No," The tortoise shook his head. "We were there and waiting to make sure nothing went wrong. If they had left the world, we would have sensed it."

"Leaving the world causes a phenomenon that no one can hide, and even the Saint realm cultivators have good enough perception to know when one is happening."

"Since we were right there, we know that no one left the world," the tortoise said.

"What about the teleportation formation in the central continent?" Alex asked.

"Those were already destroyed," the tortoise said. "Listen, kid, I know what you want to know. You hope that the White Tiger is alive and well, but believe me when I say I wish he was too."

"But he died in a way where not only did his body not survive, even his soul was gone. In fact, if I had to guess, he must have exploded his cultivation base and nascent soul together while doing every other thing he could to destroy the monster," the tortoise said.

"We are lucky the monster really didn't have a cultivation base, or it would have still been alive today and this world would be no more," the tortoise said.

Alex was too stunned by the information he had received today. He knew that the White Tiger had died while fighting an enemy in the Central continent, but he would have never thought that he had died while not only fighting the monster but also saving the entire world in the process.

That only made him sourer when he realized what these people were doing to desecrate his legacy. They called him an arrogant tiger who didn't know better and went to attack the very thing he ruled.

Alex felt so angry that he needed to take long deep breaths to calm himself.

"And what about the senior snake?" he asked to take his mind off of the anger.

"I never saw my brother after that," the tortoise said in a sad voice.

"You said he isn't dead, right?" Alex asked.

"No, he's most certainly alive. I would have died if he did," the tortoise said in a slow voice.

"Then... why haven't you gone out to search for him? Are you so injured that you can't even leave?" Alex asked.

The Tortoise snickered a bit when he heard that, and the shaking was so bad that more of the snow on its back started falling to the side.

"No, no, that's not the reason. Well, it is in a way, but the real reason is that back then I had used a little too much power and the Heavenly Judgment came for me."

"I was so injured that I definitely couldn't survive it at all, and if I went for my brother, I would have caused him trouble as well. So, I ran and came back here to hide."

"Now, if I go outside, the Heavenly Judgment would start immediately, and since I'm still injured, I will most likely die."

Chapter 852 Hybrids

"No," the Tortoise said. "While we are considered one and the same, we are still two different beings. We do go through Lightning Tribulation alone, but that's just because our cultivation bases are entwined."

"I see," Alex said and made a thinking face.

The tortoise slowly looked down at Alex and stared at him for a while. "Did you not know that?" he asked.

"Uh, no. This is the first time I've ever met with a Black Tortoise like yourself, senior," Alex said.

"But you have read about us, right?" the Black Tortoise asked.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "No. Everything I know about you comes from what I learned in the White Tiger's palace, which wasn't a lot."

"You haven't learned about us before? Hah! Where did you come from, young human?" the Tortoise asked.

"From the Western Continent," Alex said.

"No, no. Where do you really come from?" the Black Tortoise asked.

Alex was surprised for a bit. Did the tortoise know that he had come from the Central Continent? No way.

"I came from the Western Continent. Actually, I teleported here from a secret realm of the Demons on the western continent. I teleported over to that mountain," Alex said.

"I see," the Tortoise said as it looked at the mountain. "No wonder the senior's barrier has a hole this time. Maybe that was why he even blocked it in the first place."

"Good to know," The tortoise turned back to him. "So, where did you come from actually? And who let a little True realm cultivator go in an Inter-realm journey?"

"Um, what?" Alex looked at the tortoise with a confused face. "I did n— You think I came from a different realm? Like the immortal realms?"

The Tortoise looked at him. "Of course. Where else would a human come from to these lands?" the Tortoise asked.

"Ohh…" Alex finally understood why the Tortoise thought so.

After the Eternal war was over, the 4 beasts were sent to this realm to look over as the new rulers, and in their rule, the humans and demons lived without much conflict.

Due to this, the humans and demons started getting intimate, and soon enough, they bred and gave birth to a human-demon hybrid, who went on to give birth to more hybrids, and soon enough, the entire world was filled with nothing but hybrids with not a single hint of either the original human or demon lineage.

Alex already knew he had no demon blood in him, but he was still surprised that the Tortoise would think of him as coming from out of this world.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, senior. But I was in fact born and raised here," he said. He was still debating on whether or not to tell the beast that within the last 5 thousand years, there was now a civilization living in the depths of the central continent.

"Are you? You must be a lucky one then, to not inherit the demon blood," the Tortoise said. "Really lucky in fact. This means that you have a way better chance of becoming an Immortal than anyone else on this realm."

"Sorry? What do you mean by that?" Alex asked.

"You must not be aware. The reason why your world doesn't have many strong cultivators, let alone cultivators who can ascend is because their talent has been muddled as have their bloodline," the Tortoise said.

"The only time you can truly have someone strong is if either their human side or their demon side is suppressed to the point that it becomes irrelevant to you, but that very rarely happens in this world. Most are simply born as hybrids and thus never have great talent, constitutions, or even spiritual roots."

Alex was simply shocked to hear this. People who were hybrids were untalented? People who had a single bloodline were talented? Did he know about this before?

Alex tried to remember what Shen Jing had told him, but he had only mentioned the people being hybrids, and never about them having less talent or opportunities because of it.

'So that is why they are all so talentless,' Alex thought. 'Wait, is that why the players are so talented? Because they are all humans with no demon blood in them?'

Many things were starting to make sense to him, that he would have previously chalked up to just being luck on someone's part.

'Then the creator of the game must have been desperate to see so many talented people be around and not cultivate. Is that why he sent us all out?' Alex thought. That certainly seemed to be a plausible scenario. Although that didn't explain the end goal of doing all of that.

Alex ignored the thought at the moment and looked around. "What are you doing here, senior? This should be a secret realm belonging to demons. why are you here?"

"I don't know," the tortoise said. "The seniors that came before me chose this place to stay in, so I followed them as well."

'Seniors?' Alex looked curiously. "There were seniors that came before you?"

"Of course, as I said, we only come here for every 15 thousand years before going back. Our time ends in a thousand years from now," the Tortoise said.

"Ho-How many such seniors have come to this realm already?" Alex asked. He wanted to know something, but he didn't know if he should directly ask that question.

"Hmm, I should be the 6th one, so 5 before me," the Tortoise said.

Alex's eyes went wide when his mind instantly understood how many years that was.

90 thousand years.

That was how long it had been since the Four Heavenly beasts made a pact to come and rule over the worlds that were won over by the humans from the demons.

That was how long it had been since the Eternal War had ended.

That was how long it had been since the Undying God left behind his inheritance in this secret realm.

That was how long it had been since the Undying God was stuck in the Timeless Palace, trying to find a way to live when his spirit was dying.

"Wait, I think I remember why my seniors stayed here. I believe it was so that the humans at the time wouldn't attack this secret realm as it had been housing some of the only demon resistance at the time," the Black Tortoise.

Alex nodded when he heard that. This was in fact the place where the Undying God and his little squad of demons hid and fought from. As far as he understood now, they would fight in the Northern Continent, get into this secret realm and disappear back to the Demon realm back in the Western Continent.

While humans searched for them here, they were training and preparing back in the other realm.

'They definitely went back, so I should have a chance too if the script on the other side isn't broken, and if the Demon realm opens up. If I haven't found a way to get back in 10 years, I should get back here at that time and see if the script functions at that time,' Alex thought.

"Thank you for explaining that to me, senior. I didn't know any of that," Alex said and bowed.

"It's fine. I'm just helping someone with the tiger's blood understand a few things," the Tortoise said. "Are you going to return now?"

"Return?" Alex gave a wry smile. "I'm afraid I can't return. The teleportation script doesn't work for some reason."

"Oh, Uhhh… then is someone going to come to get you?" The Tortoise asked.

"No. I don't think anyone has any idea that I'm in the Northern Continent," Alex said.

"Hmm, then how are you going to get back? You can't fly over the ocean yet," the Tortoise said.

"I… don't think I have a way. At least not yet," Alex said. "You can't help me, can you?"

Alex asked. That was a little presumptuous of him, but he didn't have any choice here. He needed to rely on the Tortoise.

"I don't have anything to help you, young man. I'm sorry," the Tortoise said.

Alex sighed. 'Dammit,' he thought. "You don't have any family members? Any vassals?" he asked just in case. Even if it was someone like the Jaguar, that would be a lot helpful to Alex.

"I have no one working under me. Sorry," the Tortoise said.

"No one? Not even family members? Aren't you the ruler of this land?" Alex asked.

"I hold that title, yes. But I don't like ruling. Ever since I arrived here 14 thousand years ago, I have left the people to their own devices. I only pop out whenever they need help, but even then, I haven't left in nearly 5 thousand years," the tortoise said.

Alex looked at the tortoise with a look of incredulity. He didn't imagine he would find a ruler that didn't like to rule.

"I see, then I'm sorry to have bothered you," Alex said.

"It's fine, it's fine. I like having company once in a while. The last time was 5 thousand years ago, so this talk was nice. But now I must return to my sleep and continue healing," the tortoise said.

"Sorry, one last thing," Alex quickly asked.

"Go on," the tortoise said.

"How do I get out of this secret realm?" Alex asked.

"Oh, on the furthest mountain from here, there is a script. If you run it, you will be sent out," the tortoise said.

"Thank you," Alex replied and bowed towards the beast.

Chapter 853 Burning Eyes

Even as he flew away, the surprise that the giant mound of land was actually a tortoise hadn't left him. 'Can Immortal realm beasts become that big, or is it just the tortoise?'

Lady Ren certainly wasn't this large. But he didn't know if she could get larger, so there was nothing for him to think about her.

'Should I have brought out Pearl?' he thought. That was one of the things he was constantly debating about. The Tortoise certainly seemed nice, but who knew how he would react to seeing Pearl.

Or rather, how he would react to seeing a Heavenly beast bonded to a human.

Alex shook his head and continued flying and the much information he had learned today piled up on him.

So many things.

Undying God's physique, the loots, the techniques, The Blood God's Manual, finding a Heavenly beast, finding out the history of the fight, finding out why the humans were talented.

Not to mention finding out that he was in the freaking Northern Continent? What the hell was that about?

"What do I do now?" Alex thought. His mind was so occupied with everything that he nearly forgot about what had made him stop flying in the first place.

"Ah, the paste," Alex thought and quickly flew down to the 5th mountain, which was also completely empty.

He sat in the empty hallway and brought out the paste that was in his storage bag and the recipe for it.

Once again, realizing that he found the paste for the Demon Eyes, Alex was incredibly happy and couldn't wait to start the procedure.

He remembered the texts on the wall and thought back to it.

"Continuously cleanse your eyes with a vial full of the paste every month for 20 month," Alex read back the words in his mind.

'20 vials,' he thought and looked at the paste. There was indeed about that amount. Maybe even slightly more.

He frowned for a bit when he read about the application method for the paste. He was to apply the paste directly onto his open eyes while completely filling up the front of his eyes with the paste.

Only after the 20 months of cleansing had passed would his eyes be ready to start cultivating the Demon eyes. Even then, Alex wasn't sure how much longer it would take for his eyes to return back.

"I have to go blind for 2 years huh? Maybe even more," Alex thought. "Well, it's not like I haven't done that before. Besides, I have the Undying God's Physique now. Healing quickly shouldn't be much of a problem."

Alex sat down cross-legged and scooped out a vial worth of paste with his Qi. He then separated the Qi into two parts and took a deep breath.

He knew the next part would have to happen, but he was still a little hesitant. Not like it didn't make sense, after all, he was going to have to put the acrid, and definitely spicy paste onto his eyes.

Alex let out a deep breath, and the paste flew in.

SPLAT!

"AARRGHH!" Alex cried out immediately. Even though he was ready for it, the pain didn't lessen at all. In fact, the pain was incredible.

The eyes, having never gone through such pain even during body cultivation sessions, were now fully feeling the pain one would suffer just by themselves.

Millions of lights of myriad different colors flashed in Alex's mind as his eyes told his brain that they were seeing a million different things.

Due to the pain, his eyes kept giving his mind false information about its visual data, and Alex felt like he was seeing millions of tiny cultivators fight in front of him.

That only increased as the paste reached deeper into his eyes, and now even the back of his eyes was starting to burn.

Alex wanted to pour some cold water in immediately to help relieve the pain. In fact, he wanted to dig out his own eyes so they would stop hurting.

However, he understood this was necessary, so he stuck through it. Even so, the pain didn't lessen.

Alex kept hurting and hurting and hurting for a long time before any semblance of relief came to him.

Even that wasn't so much relief, just his eyes growing numb to the pain.

As soon as the pain lessened, Alex immediately sat down and started cultivating. He wasn't able to cultivate the eye skill until his eyes were ready, so for now, he just cultivated his normal cultivation technique.

Alex sat there cultivating for nearly 2 days before the pain lessened to the point of it no longer existing. His eyes were completely destroyed in a certain sense, and now he had to wait for them to be rebuilt.

That would take a lot of time. Most certainly, it would take about 28 or so days if the information on the recipe and technique were correct.

Alex finally stood up and dusted himself off of the snow that had piled on him. Then, he flew out of the mountain and immediately stopped.

"Wait, which direction do I go towards again?" he thought for a second. "I came down at that angle and the hallway was facing that way, then last mountain..."

Because his spiritual sense couldn't read the next mountain which was many kilometers away, Alex had to do mental gymnastics to remember which direction he had to fly towards.

"That way?" he thought but wasn't sure of himself. He wanted to ask Pearl if the direction was correct, but then he would have to bring him out which would let the tortoise know that he had—

"Wait, I don't need to call out Pearl," Alex thought. "Whisker, come out."

From his right shoulder plate where a mouse-shaped tattoo lay, a mouse came out with very long whiskers giving him his current name.

The mouse shivered the moment he came out, his fur standing on its edge.

Alex immediately had a pocket of heat appear around the mouse and finally, it stopped shivering.

The mouse was by now about 7 years old, but he was still as small as the time he was born.

Immediately, the vision of everything around him with flew into Alex. In fact, there was also a lot of different information he received such as the temperature of the surrounding, the energy that was in the surrounding, the pressure, and various other information about the environment.

"This is not bad. I had forgotten how good I could see through your... eyes," Alex turned towards the mouse and saw himself through the mouse's eyes.

The two black patches on his face looked not only silly, but they were also outright disturbing.

"I need to do something about these," Alex thought. He immediately weighed in on the option to use a small cloth to put around his eyes so that they could be closed, but that didn't seem like a good option given it would mess with the paste that was bulging up to his nose bridge.

"What do I do then?" Alex wondered and searched into this storage bag for a moment before the answer presented itself.

"Ah, this should work," he thought, bringing out the white mask.

The Mask of Spirit's Hell was a mental training artifact, but it had to be activated for it to do so. Without activation, it was just a simple white mask, and Alex decided to use it as so.

Once he wore the mask, he turned to Whisker and asked, "how do I look?"

Whisker released a sharp-toned screech that Alex understood as 'not scary.

The moment Alex heard that he was shocked beyond belief.

The words weren't what shocked him. In fact, they wouldn't as he was already capable of conversing with the little mouse since it was a little mouse.

When Alex brought him out from time to time to use his whiskers for the pill, he had talked to the mouse pretty frequently.

No, what did shock Alex was something that was completely unexpected to him. In fact, he had trouble believing it was real, as no Seeking Mouse was capable of such a thing.

But then he remembered that Whisker wasn't just an ordinary Seeking Mouse. He was an Undying Seeking Mouse.

And that was most likely why... he now had a cultivation base.

Chapter 854 Getting Out

That was one of the reasons why he never bothered to call out Whiskers for so long because there really was nothing for him to do outside.

Being a Seeking mouse, his only job would be to go to a place where Alex couldn't go on his own for fear of his own life.

Like scouting enemies, or checking tombs and mazes and traps and such. Alex didn't need to train Whisker for such a thing, so he never brought him out.

But now that he had a cultivation base, Alex started regretting it. If he knew this was the case, he would have helped him cultivate so much more.

"Wait, no," Alex's logical mind kicked in and he shook his head. "He couldn't cultivate before surely. If he did, he would have already cultivated while he was in my body for so many years. Why now?"

There was really one answer.

"Undying God's physique?" Alex thought to himself. Why would Undying God's physique help Whisker? Did it have something to do with Undying God's bloodline?

Another thought came to Alex at the same time. Was this a similar situation as Pearl and him?

Only in this case, he has taken up the role that Pearl did.

Pearl had the White Tiger's Dominating Physique, while he had White Tiger's bloodline. Of course, in his case, the bloodline itself didn't provide any significant power aside from a stronger blood aura, and a Supreme Metal spiritual root.

However, whenever Pearl did cultivate the physique, he too cultivated alongside it, giving him the body cultivation he had for most of his life.

In a similar fashion, he now held the Undying God's Physique, while Whisker held the Undying God's bloodline. The bloodline helped Whisker come back to life whenever he was dead, so long as he had bonded to another being. Aside from that, Whisker himself didn't get anything.

However, going by what happened between Pearl and him, if he were to cultivate the Undying God's physique, then through their bond, and Whisker's bloodline, Whisker should get something as well.

In this case, he was cultivating the physique alongside Alex, and getting a cultivation base.

So, if Alex kept cultivating the Undying God's physique for a long time, Whisker would have a great cultivation base as well.

"If this is true, then I got more than I was looking for with me coming here," Alex said to himself. He tucked the little mouse with his small cultivation base into his robes and started flying.

Even though he couldn't see himself, Whisker's vision was very clear and as he reached closer to the mountain, he used his own spiritual sense to find it and landed on it.

His spiritual sense had already got to work and he found the script with the teleportation rune on it.

Alex stood before it with a solemn face. Now that he was here, he was going to go out into the Northern continent. He didn't know where exactly in the northern continent he was or what the outside world was even like.

Going by basic knowledge, it would be full of ice and snow, but he wasn't sure if that was really the case.

Alex remembered his mother and how she would be alone for a long time. Then he remembered all his friends, fellow disciples, and master that he had told he would be back not long after the Demon realm was done.

Then he remembered the Jaguar that was stuck in the formation outside. Was he going to be okay on his own?

He couldn't help but imagine the worst case and he had to shake his head to snap out of it.

So what if he was missing? His mother was still a True King cultivator and an Immortal rank talisman maker as well as a Heaven rank Alchemist.

Anyone that came to fight against her would have to fight the entirety of the Alchemy guild and the Talisman guild, not to mention the Flowing Brush sect. Then there was the Emperor who would most likely help his mother, just because he feared Shen Jing.

As for his friends and masters over in the Crimson Empire, yes he would leave them alone for a while, but he had done everything he could for them.

His visiting them again would not result in anything but slight happiness in seeing him. That could wait, surely.

As for the Jaguar, there wasn't even a need to worry. With his cultivation base, if he was injured, then he didn't deserve to be a servant of the White Tiger.

Once the bad feeling trickled away from Alex like sweat on a hot day, a small smile rose on his face and his heart started beating faster as the feeling of nervousness and excitement of seeing a new continent and its people took over him.

Being as protected as he was when growing up, he had always wanted to see a new place, and meet new people. That was something he was quite fascinated about, and now he was going on a whole new adventure.

With a smile on his face, Alex knelt down to the script and powered it up. When the golden light from the runes flashed, both he and Whisker vanished from the secret realm.

As soon as Alex appeared outside, he felt something change. The space around him was… different. Freer, and less compressed.

He had arrived on a cold, chilling night with absolutely no wind at all. The sky was covered with clouds, not letting in any night light.

He had half his leg in the soft snow, but he could only see that with his spiritual sense.

He chuckled a bit when he realized that Whisker wasn't that helpful when there were clouds in the sky blocking the moon.

He spread his spiritual sense all around him and saw a monument behind him. It wasn't that different from the one back in Western Continent, meaning if he wanted, he could enter back again.

'10 years,' Alex thought. 'I will have to return here 10 years later to find my way back.'

After deciding that, he looked around as he needed to find a direction to move it.

With darkness against him and his spiritual sense not reaching very far away, he couldn't see much.

However, Whisker could see a small light in the very distance that Alex couldn't really tell what it was due to Whisker's eyes not being as good as they could be yet.

Still, that being the only choice for him right now, he lifted himself off of the ground and flew in that direction.

The Qi in the air wasn't as strong as the secret realm, but just by a little bit. Compared to Western Continent, it was so much stronger.

If anything, it was just a little worse than the Beast realm, but that was likely only because the Qi was trapped in the beast realm, while here it got to roam free.

After flying for a little while, Alex saw that the tiny glow was actually the magma glowing from a volcano, and not far below the mountain was a settlement of people.

"Let's start my journey from here."

Chapter 855 The Village

The village had about 100 different stone houses each with 2 to 3 rooms at most. It was night, so the village itself was silent for the most part.

There were no walls surrounding the village or roads leading anywhere. Even if they were, the roads had already been buried under the snow.

The houses were scattered under the volcanic mountain, on the other side from where Alex had just come.

Alex saw lantern artifacts all over the village glowing in the night, but that didn't say if there were cultivators here. For all he knew, these people could be normal mortals that just acquired lanterns that worked with spirit stones with maybe a person or two to activate it.

The village looked like any normal village that one could find in deep mountain valleys or somewhere a little distant from civilization.

There were gardens to the side growing vegetables, farmland not far away where grains were likely being grown, and animals that slept in their shed at night.

However, there were two things about this village that absolutely stumped Alex, because this should not have been possible at all.

First, there were trees growing in this village. Proper green trees that bore flowers and fruit.

Which led to the second thing that was surprising about this village. There was no snow here at all.

Not a single piece of land in a massive semi-circle around the volcano was covered in snow.

Alex was really curious and wanted to check it out, but he didn't go there at night time. So, he sat by the warmth of the volcano and cultivated for the night.

As his body used the Undying God's physique, Whisker started cultivating as well.

Time slowly passed and it got closer to daybreak. As the village at the foot of the mountain start to wake up, Alex opened his eyes as well.

He couldn't see anything at all, so when he released his spiritual sense to see Whisker, he found out that the little guy had fallen asleep in the warmth of his robes.

Alex chuckled a bit and rubbed Whisker's head a little to wake him up. The mouse opened his eyes and looked around drowsily.

"You can sleep later, we have work to do," Alex said.

He flew the long way around in a circle before slowly dropping down a bit far away from the village.

It was snowing in the morning, and the entire region was cold, save for the brown patch of land near the volcano.

Snow was falling in there, but it didn't remain as snow for much longer. It was melting as soon as it came into contact with the ground.

When Alex entered the unfrozen land, he understood why that was.

The ground was warm, unnaturally warm. Alex wondered if that had anything to do with formations or if the volcano's heat got to this place.

If there were formations, then there must be cultivators living here. But if it was the volcano's heat, that seemed a bit too dangerous to live around.

Alex slowly walked with a white mask on his face and wearing a black robe with golden designs on it.

A few of the men and women looked at him curiously as he looked unequivocally unique.

However, with Alex hiding his cultivation base, everyone believed he was quite weak. At least weaker than them.

Alex didn't move his head, but with Whisker had already jumped out of his robe and onto his shoulder, and had started looking around him.

People slowly gathered up to him, some holding a weapon just in case. They were all wearing the same type of clothes for some reason.

It was a grayish blue robe with white linings. Some of them had fur on them, and a hood to cover their head, but everything was the same color.

Before anyone could say anything, Alex cupped his hands and bowed in greeting.

"My apologies if I have startled you. I come from far away and know not much about these lands."

"I'm looking for a place to stay and was hoping if you could allow me to remain here," he said.

The group of men and women who seemed not too older than Alex started talking to each other to discuss.

"What is your name, stranger?" one man walked forward to ask. He had a body bigger than Alex's and a cultivation base of Organ Tempering 9th realm.

Alex saw his smooth, long black hair flowing down to his quite handsome face.

"My name is Yu Ming," Alex said.

"Where do you come from?" the man asked.

"My apologies," Alex said. "I come from a place very far away in the west that you have not heard of."

"Try it," the man said boldly.

"It's a city called the DawnSpring city," Alex said.

The man frowned a bit. "To the west? Is it in the State of Bing?" the man asked.

"I don't know myself as the city I come from is rather isolated, but when I left there, the people did indeed say that my city lay on the western edge of the State of Bing," Alex replied. He wasn't aware of what this State of Bing was or how massive it was, but that was all he had to go with for now.

"That's quite far away for someone like you. Mind telling us what you are doing here?" the man asked.

"I… I had to leave my home because some people wanted to hurt me. I couldn't go back, so I ran away for a while."

"But now that I have run so far away, I wanted to rest for a while, and I came upon this village," Alex said. "If you do not want me to be here, I can understand. In that case, please point towards the nearest village or city, and I will leave."

"No, no," the man immediately said. "You can stay, but we are just making sure you aren't here to cause trouble for us."

"Oh, I can promise you I am not," Alex said. "I just want a place to rest in for a while now and cultivate."

The man nodded when he listened and stayed silent for a while. He narrowed his eyes and asked, "can you see me through that mask?"

"I was attacked by my enemies and unfortunately lost visions in my eyes. Which is why I wear this mask," Alex said. "But I can see you through this little guy."

Whisker continuously ran around on his shoulder.

"What's that?" the man asked.

"That's a Seeking Mouse I believe," a woman spoke from right behind the man.

"You know this beast, honey?" the man asked.

"Yes, I took care of some when I was in charge of handling the beasts in the sect," the woman said.

The woman was about 30 years old and had long flowing hair that came up to her waist. She wasn't the most beautiful girl he had seen, not even close to the woman that saved the first Undying god, but she was quite decent in her own ways.

She was wearing the same grayish blue robe as everyone, and it fit her quite well too.

"You can use those beasts for scouts I believe, but he seems to be using them as a substitute for eyes," the woman said.

Alex smiled toward the woman who explained this, but no one could see his smile at the moment.

"I see," the man said and turned towards Alex. "You can stay here, but you will have to know that this place is owned by the Frigid Rune sect."

"Which means, you will have to work for them."

"Work for them?" Alex asked.

"Don't worry, it's little work here and there. Are you good at anything? Even if you are not, we can find you jobs like watering plants and such," the man said.

"Oh, I'm good with plants," Alex said. "I come from a farm."

"Great," the man said. "Come, let me show you around."

The man walked up to Alex and put his hands around his shoulders before getting ready to walk away.

"Ah right, I nearly forgot. My name is Fan Yanshi," the man said. "Welcome."

Chapter 856 Runes

With Organ Tempering 9th realm, his cultivation base was the highest in the village, followed by only a handful of people Alex had seen with a similar cultivation base.

Fan Yanshi showed Alex around the village, showing the various locations and who did what.

A man worked on formation plates, while another worked on talismans. There was also a woman who made medicinal pastes as well as what could be called Alchemy.

Most other people only focused on beasts and plants.

Since all of these cultivators were in the self-tempering realm, they still needed food to sustain themselves, so there was a massive open land to the side where rice and wheat were growing.

Alex's curiosity was too much and he needed to ask.

"Brother Fan, how are you growing managing to grow these crops in such a cold environment?" he asked. "In fact, why is it not cold in here at all?"

"Oh, that's because of the volcano right there," Fan Yanshi said.

"Volcano?" Alex looked towards it. He didn't know much about volcanoes, but surely they didn't give this much heat, this far away, did it?

"Yes, the volcano," the man said. "Well, to be fair, it's more accurate to say it's the sect's doing."

"What did they do?" Alex couldn't help but ask.

"Let's see, they explained it this way. There was a spirit vein underneath this land, and a long time ago, the sect came and ripped it off of the ground and took it away."

"At the same time, then they let lava pour into the now formed cavity and closed it up from above. After that, the land has been warm from the heat underneath and we don't have to worry about the cold even this deep in the mountains."

"Oh," Alex was surprised. He didn't expect such a unique solution to creating land to stave away the cold.

"Not bad actually," he said and looked around. "No wonder you can have plants here."

"Oh yeah, that is because the land around here is fertile. Once in a while, the volcano goes active and spews out plumes of smoke and ash. Those are apparently very good for the soil and we get to grow so much here," the man said.

"The volcano goes active? Isn't that dangerous?" Alex asked.

"Well, if it gets dangerous, an ancestor from the sect flies off to the mountain and controls it," the man said.

Alex nodded and continued looking around. He looked at the plants that were growing that weren't food. As soon as he looked at them, he knew what the plants were.

However, there was something confusing about those plants. Most of them were common plants, but not necessarily useful for Alchemy.

Those were more useful for…

Alex turned around. "This Frigid Rune sect, I assume it a sect focused on talisman?" he asked.

"Uhh… yes, and no," the man said.

"No?" Alex waited for him to explain.

"Well, it is a sect focusing on runes, so yes they make talismans. But they also focus on other things with runes you know," the young man said.

"Wait, other things?" Alex's eyes went wide. "Like using runes instead of formations?"

"Yes," the young man said.

"How do they know how to do this?" Alex asked. Despite the demon realm being so close by, no one knew how runes carved in stones or wood could be used back on the Western Continent.

However, they were able to do that here. Was the information passed down over the last 90 thousand years? If so how did it not get passed around the world before the western continent was isolated 5 thousand years ago?

"Has the information not reached the State of Bing yet? It's all over the State of Xue by now," Fan Yanshi said. "It was anonymously published by someone nearly a dozen years ago and it's been slowly traveling the continent. I don't know exactly how it works, but you can buy the information from any big city."

"After that information about out, the Frost Talisman sect changed their name to Frost Rune sect, and now they work with everything," the young man said.

'A dozen years ago… a player maybe?' Alex thought to himself. 'I should look into it once I reach Saint realm.'

Alex's current plan was to solely focus his time on cultivation and maybe in alchemy if he could spare it. Given how he would have to cultivate multiple different techniques, he didn't know if he could spare time for alchemy or not.

Besides, he had reached a bottleneck in alchemy that he couldn't just push through.

He was already so good at making True rank pills that the only thing holding him back was the ingredients, the process of placing in ingredients, and the technique to form the pill itself.

Otherwise, he could easily reach 100%.

Of course, there were now Saint rank pills to dip his hands into, but he wasn't still at Saint rank, so it wasn't the best idea to start yet.

Besides, he would just be wasting ingredients if the recipes he had weren't the best.

While he had a lot of ingredients, they weren't enough for him to go all out and fix the recipes like he did with True rank pills.

He would have to change his approach somehow.

"Ah, I need to go help my wife in the garden soon. Let me show you more of the place," the man said and took Alex around.

After a while, they arrived at an empty house with 3 rooms in it. Two of the rooms were inside while one was outside.

"The kitchen is outside. You get heat directly from the magma down underground. Do what you want with the two empty rooms inside. There are beds and sheets already, but do let me know if you need anything else," Fan Yanshi said.

"Oh, this is all right, brother Fan," Alex said. "So when do I start working?"

"Don't worry about that for today. You must be tired from walking throughout the night, so just rest for today. I will take you to see how good you are with plants tomorrow."

"If you truly are good, that will lessen my wife's and a lot of other people's work. They simply force their way through growing plants you see," the young man said.

"I see. Thank you again, brother Fan," Alex bowed a little.

"Haha, it's fine. We're going to be like family soon, so no need to say thanks. Go in and make yourself at home. You can live here as long as you want," Fan Yanshi said and pushed Alex along.

Alex nodded and entered.

While Fan Yanshi left, Alex went into the room and looked around. It was mostly empty aside from the beds and a few chairs.

Alex went over to the other room and saw this one was actually truly empty with nothing in it.

"This should be fine," he thought and brought out a few formation plates before throwing them down.

Formations activated in a small area bringing up a barrier that passed through Alex to cover him.

These were simple formations to cover any fluctuations of energy that might come from here while he was cultivating. In addition to that, there was also a sound blocking formation that blocked outgoing sound so no one would hear what was happening inside.

Alex sat down in the center and took a deep breath of relief. He had found a place to stay now, so he should try and get to Saint realm as soon as he could.

Given how he was already at True Emperor 4th realm, if he continued with this speed, it should take him 2 more years, or 3 if he had to focus on Undying God's physique and the Demon eyes.

Alex reached into his storage ring and brought out something for Whisker to eat. After that, he called Pearl out.

Pearl came out with blood all over his white fur, but he was no longer injured.

"Are you okay?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Pearl nodded and slowly changed his body to become small again. Then he noticed Whisker and immediately started running after him to play.

Whisker ran for his life and Alex could only chuckle at the scene.

He shook his head and activated the first stage of the mask he was wearing. Then, he started cultivating.

Chapter 857 Gardening

He wanted to look around and see the landscape. Since last night had been cloudy, he couldn't see anything, but tonight it was quite open and the moon shone its silver light on the snow, making the entire place glow white.

Alex looked through Whisker's eyes and saw hundreds upon hundreds of mountains scattered all over the land. He couldn't help but be surprised at just how many there were.

It wasn't just the number either. The mountains were also quite tall compared to the ones that were back on the Western Continent.

Alex tried to tell which direction he was looking at, but it was a little hard without the sun. Even with the sun, it was usually quite hard since the entire land was covered in snowy clouds and thus it was hard to tell where the sun even was.

Alex brought out a small artifact from his ring, a compass artifact, and checked the direction.

"So… the taller mountains are in the north?" he looked towards his left where the mountain looked like they were only continuously growing taller and taller as if they were reaching the night sky.

Alex flew as high as he could and looked for other sources of light in the area aside from just the moon.

There were a few glowing orange locations that were clearly volcanoes. Out of every 20 mountains he saw, at least one was a volcano that was quite active as well.

He continued looking around and saw a yellow or white-ish light coming from somewhere far in the east.

With his normal eyes, he could have seen it clearly, but with Whisker's eyes, he needed to get closer.

Alex flew in the direction for about 10 minutes before he was close enough to see what it was.

A sect.

"Is that the Frigid Rune sect?" Alex wondered.

Surrounded by 3 volcanic mountains, the sect was massive with many buildings scattered all over the other mountains.

He wanted to go closer, but he didn't know what sort of defense formations or scripts they had drawn to ward off intruders, and he definitely didn't want to show himself yet.

For now, his job was to hide and cultivate until he reached the Saint realm.

After surveying the location for a while longer, Alex returned back to the village and went back into his room.

Then, he started cultivating the Demon Eyes technique and let Whisker sleep for the night.

Early morning, before anyone could even come to knock on his door, Alex was already out and about, and on his way to the garden.

"Brother Fan," Alex called out the man from far away.

"Oh, brother Yu, you're up. Come on, let me take you to your task," Fan Yanshi said and took Alex.New n0vel chapters are published on

They made their way to the garden that Alex was shown yesterday, where a few of the girls were already working on weeding the garden.

"Honey, brother Yu is here to help. Can you show him the ropes around here?" Fan Yanshi said.

"Okay," Fan Yanshi's wife said and walked out of the garden.

"I'll leave you in her hands. Ask anything you want from her," Fan Yanshi said and left.

"Good morning, sister," Alex greeted her. "I believe I do not know your name yet."

"It's Fan Li," the woman said.

"I see. I shall call you sister Li then," Alex said. "So, what should I do here?"

He looked around at the group of people working and he could already spot some mistakes.

"What can you do?" the girl named Li asked.

"Um, I'm quite good at gardening," Alex said. "I can tell you what mistakes you've been making, or how to improve the harvest and such."

The woman's eyes narrowed a bit. "You can?" she asked. "That will be helpful. Can you show us a bit, please?"

"Sure," he said and walked up to the garden where he was introduced to the 4 other girls that were working there.

"Look, first of all, you shouldn't be throwing these weeds away at all. Just pull them out and let them be. They will become fertilizers on their own," Alex explained. "Although, I don't know how helpful that would be as I hear volcanic ashes are quite good at that too."

"It will still be useful," the woman said.

"Right, this plant. This is Bitter Grass. They are quite notorious for sucking up the nutrients in the soil. That alone wouldn't be bad, but you're planting them around this Silken Snake tree, which has long silk-like roots that search all around them for nutrients."

"If you plant these next to Bitter Grass, they won't get the necessary nutrients they need. Depending on which one is more important, you should throw away one of these plants."

"If you have to keep them, I can help you with that too."

Whisker ran across the garden, looking at everything, and Alex saw it all.

"There is another problem there," he said while pointing to a rather large tree at the edge of the giant garden.

He started explaining the problems and solutions to everything that was wrong around him.

The explanations lasted for nearly half an hour, during which not a single woman did any task and just kept listening to the explanations.

Finally, once Alex was done, Whisker returned to his shoulder and he looked at the stunned expressions of the girls. He could only smile.

"If… if everything you said is true, then we have more tasks than we thought we did," Fan Li said.

"Then we should get to work," Alex said and they started working.

Alex explained what to do to the girls while demonstrating it himself. He pulled out plants that were destructive, relocated plants that were contradictory to each other, and put together plants that would only help each other.

Unfortunately, there were some plants that he simply hadn't seen before, so he couldn't help in those cases, but for everything else, he did all he could.

About 3 to 4 hours later, they were all done. Around the same time, Fan Yanshi came to visit to let them know that the food was ready.

"What… the hell are you guys doing?" he asked when he saw everything was relocated to someplace else.

"Oh, honey. Turns out Brother Yu actually knows quite a lot about plants, so he is teaching us what to do and what not to do," Fan Li said.

"Turns out, we have been doing everything quite wrong, some of which were disastrous for the harvest even," she said. "But now that we've fixed it, this time's harvest should be quite good."

"Really?" Fan Yanshi's eyes went wide.

"Well, you will have to wait and see what happens…" Alex looked around and saw that his words had caused the moon to suffer immediately. He sighed, "Yes, they will be good. At least better than what you would have gotten with how it was before."

"Thank you, brother Yu. You have no idea how good of a news this is. If we can have a great harvest, the sect will give us a lot more resources than normal," the man said.

"Oh, then I am glad I came by here," Alex said. Whisker looked around and Alex saw some empty land.

"Actually, brother Fan, can I ask you something?" he asked.

"Sure, what is it?" Fan Yanshi asked.

"I see a lot of empty lands just around the garden even. Do you have plans of expanding it at all?" he asked.

"Well, we did have that plan for a few years, but we weren't that good at growing these plants, not to mention there wasn't much seed, to begin with," Fan Yanshi said.

"Well, I have some seeds with me. Granted they're not for making talisman ink, but medicinal pastes, but do you think I can plant some in the empty land?" he asked.

"For medicinal pastes? You have knowledge of medicinal pastes?" the young man asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I know the recipe for some pastes that are good for healing, poison, and such. I have the seeds too. Of course, I will share with the village."

"Yes," Fan Yanshi said. There wasn't even a shred of hesitation. "Please do plant them. If the village can even get the tiniest bit of what you grow, it will be amazing."

"That's great then, I will get to work over there," Alex said.

"Wait, no," Fan Yanshi said. "This is your first day, we can't have you working all the time. Come, the food the ready so its time to eat."

Alex wasn't hungry, nor did he need to eat. But since Fan Yanshi had called so sincerely, Alex didn't mind.

He and the other women walked back to the village to eat. Since they had been working all morning, the others had prepared food for them.

Alex ate what he could only imagine was a mix between congee and stew. There were a few chunks of meats in the watery rice, which was quite tasty.

They weren't anything amazing, but they were quite nourishing.

"Where did you get the meat?" Alex asked.

"There are some animals that you can find in the forest about an hour in that direction. We go there from time to time to hunt and bring back meat. The meat stays frozen in the snow, and we return when we are almost done with the supply."

Alex nodded when he heard that. He knew where he was going to go next.

Chapter 858 Back to Basic

At the same time, he made Pearl cultivate as well, so the entirety of his mind and body were constantly being refined to a greater degree.

After cultivating until the afternoon, Alex left and returned back to the garden where he started making places in the garden where he would grow the various plants.

Unfortunately, he couldn't grow any True ingredients, but growing something great wasn't his purpose here at all. His purpose was just to grow something, anything.

He could garden from halfway through when the plants were already growing. He now wanted some experience in growing plants right from when they were seeds.

So, Alex brought out the seeds he had prepared for this exact situation for a very long time, and started planting them based on what he found was the best arrangement.

Once done, he went looking for water to water the plant, but there was none in the village. At least, not spare enough to use it on plants.

But they did tell Alex what to do. So, Alex took a large bucket and walked out into the snow.

After gathering a bit of snow, they told him to put it over the furnace in the kitchen, but Alex didn't need to do that.

By the time he was inside the village, the snow had already melted and the water was already at normal temperature.

He poured the water onto the plants and called it a day.

He went to hang out with some of the guys and saw what they did. Some of the guys were in charge of handling the beasts. They had to feed them some of what grew in the gardens, and for some the sect itself provided resources.

After looking around for a while, as the sun started to dip, Alex returned back to his room.

Once the village grew quiet, Alex left the house and went towards the forest he was told about.

In mere minutes, he arrived outside the forest and used his spiritual sense to search through it.

He found quite a few beasts, but almost all of them were extraordinarily weak. He didn't know if it was due to them being continuously hunted or due to the low amount of Qi in the air.

Either way, this was the perfect situation to teach Whisker how to fight.

Alex found a beast very quickly and reached in front of it. He placed down and formation and immediately the barrier covered up the beast.

The little Frost Hamster, with his frozen tail, looked around in terror.

Alex felt a little bad for the little hamster that was just trying to survive, so he made a mental note to save him if the time came.

With the hamster being in 1st Skin-Tempering realm, and weaker than Whisker, he would really have to.

"Alright Whisker, time to show your power," he said. "Let's see how well you can fight."

Alex grabbed him and basically threw him into the barrier where he landed on the soft snow.

The Frost Hamster, even with its small intelligence knew that it was up against a rather strong enemy and had tried to run away. But seeing that it couldn't go past the barrier, the hamster was getting more and more scared. Soon, it was like a beast trapped in a corner. All it could do was fight back.

"Whisker, go attack," Alex said.

Whisker dashed as fast as he could... back towards Alex.

"Wait, no. Attack that hamster," Alex said, but Whisker kept sending back messages that said that he was scared.

"What do you mean you are scared? You are stronger than that hamster. Go fight," Alex said, but Whisker just wouldn't listen at all.

Feelings of dread and terror returned back to Alex like waves through Whisker's bond with him. The little fellow really was scared of fighting.

Alex frowned. As a beast that could cultivate, he expected Whisker to be able to fight, but he was still the coward that he was since long ago.

Despite having the bloodline of the Undying God, he still had the attitude of a Seeking Mouse that was afraid of everything.

Alex was capable of forcing Whisker to fight; their bond allowed that much to him. However, he just didn't think that it was a good thing to do, so he could only sigh.

Alex himself entered the barrier and crouched down next to Whisker. "It will be alright. I'm right here, go and fight," he said.

Whisker looked at Alex again as if asking, 'really?'.

"Yes, I won't let that beast hurt you," Alex replied back. "Now go attack him."

Whisker looked determined as he turned towards the hamster and ran in the snow. The swift movement was rather amusing to Alex's senses.

The hamster used what little Qi it had to shoot icicles at Whisker, but Whisker was slightly faster and managed to dodge in time. Alex had been ready to save him, but it seemed he didn't need to.

Whisker ran past the icicle and arrived directly in front of the hamster. Then, he slammed into the beast.

The two rodents flew into the barrier and then fell to the ground. Then, Whisker ran at the hamster again and slammed into it.

"What is he..." it took a moment for Alex to realize that Whisker had no method of fighting.

Alex couldn't help but slap his own forehead in frustration. He had expected the beast to be able to fight now that he was cultivating, but he had forgotten that most of the fighting power in a beast came from natural instinct that came from having lived in the wild, or from a bloodline that carried inherited memories of their ancestor.

He sighed. "I will have to teach you some techniques for you to learn. I thought this was an easy way to start your journey, but we have to dive even deeper to more basic territory," Alex sighed.

"Let us return home," he said and Whisker returned back to his shoulder. He was breathing a bit heavily, but aside from that, there was nothing.

As for the little hamster, it was just happy that the mouse had moved away.

Alex took away the barrier and the hamster ran away. Then, he returned back to the village.

Inside his house, Alex placed a formation in front of him and told Whisker to pour his Qi into the formation.

Whisker wasn't sure what that meant, so Alex had to show him. It took nearly 15 minutes before Whisker understood how he could release his Qi.

Then, the formation flared up and different types of lights appeared on the fog that rose from it.

Blue, black, and brown motes of lights floated into the air with some red hidden in them, letting Alex know what the little beast's spiritual roots were.

Alex was actually quite relieved that he even had any, to begin with. Now the little beast could cultivate through Meridian Tempering realm and past that.

"So, Yin is your greatest strength, huh?" he said as he looked at the information. "Given your spiritual roots, I have some ideas about what you can learn."

Chapter 859 A Month's Improvement

Aside from doing gardening and mixing in with the men and women of the village from time to time, he spent most of his time in cultivation.

With so many techniques to cultivate, he really couldn't spare much time for anything else.

Alex continued with cultivating the Undying God's physique and that surprisingly improved Whisker's cultivation speed rather fast.

Just like when Pearl cultivated to a high level and improved his physical body quickly, the same thing happened for Whisker to improve his cultivation as Alex's Undying God's physique improved.

In just a month, he went from having no cultivation base to reaching Meridian Tempering 5th realm. That meant Whisker managed to break through every 2 days.

However, it was slowly starting to slow down, but Alex wasn't worried. He had a long time to go, and all he needed to do was get him to the True realm.

After that, the Winter Moon cultivation technique his master gave him that was suitable for beings with Yin spiritual roots.

Alex wasn't sure if a human cultivation method was really usable on a beast, but Whisker had already started learning one other technique that used Yin, which was also meant for humans, so Alex was confident in his assessment.

He had also been taking Whisker to fight in the forest, and while Whisker had no actual fighting skill, he was starting to not immediately run away from fights.

That was all Alex wanted anyway. He wanted Whisker to slowly remove, or at least have him fight against his instinct to run in the face of any kind of danger.

It took time, but there were quite a lot of improvements.

There was also another improvement for Whisker that Alex was, fortunately, able to provide. Since Whisker wasn't cultivating on his own, he wasn't sure if it would work or not, but when he did hand Whisker a Spirit Cleansing lily and cultivated, he easily absorbed the lily and unlocked his spiritual space.

This was much faster than Alex as well.

Back nearly 2 years ago, Alex had found some Spirit Cleansing Lilies around the forest behind his sister's home in Rubyroad City.

Then when scouring for the secret realm in the Beast realm, he had also found quite a few of them.

He had given one of them to his mother, a few back in the Crimson Empire, and now he had used 3 for Whisker.

He still had a few, but there was no one to give them to just yet. If anything, he was keeping it so that he could give it to his father, if he hadn't already reached Saint realm by then that is.

Whisker's spiritual sense reached about 20 meters in all directions, which was quite low, but it was what Alex had also started with.

Now, he simply needed to make some pills for himself before he reached the True realm.

Aside from that, Alex focused on the Demon Eyes as well. By the time a month had passed and the medicine in his eyes was done soaking, he had tried to open it and look, but all he could see was some hazy white.

For some reason, not even the Undying Physique fixed his eyes at the moment. Alex suspected that while his eyes had already absorbed all the energy from the past, it still would take some time to refine and process them.

But, a month had passed so the next vial of paste needed to go into his eyes again.

This time, his eyes didn't feel any pain as he was already numb to it. He could only wait and see what sort of amazing vision he would get from his eyes.

Aside from his eyes, his mind improved quite a bit too. Although, it was barely noticeable.

With around 20 to 30 meters increase in his spiritual sense over the last year or so, the mask was doing its work, but it wasn't as substantial as Alex would have hoped it would be.

Of course, there were 8 more stages to go, but he wanted to take his time with that.

Early morning, Alex opened his eyes and stopped cultivating. Pearl was next to him cultivating as well, and Alex made him stop.

Whisker was asleep since he had nothing to do, so Alex made him wake up now that the sun had come up.

He opened the door and walked out. It was a snowy morning, with fresh snow falling onto the land. As soon as it fell, however, it melted in the heat of the land.

Alex made his way towards the garden, but everyone was already there, harvesting the plants.

"Oh, am I not needed?" Alex asked when he arrived.

"We're almost done," Fan Li said as she stood up. "You should go check if your little garden is done or not."

"Okay," Alex said and left them. He arrived at his own small garden, which was only small in comparison but was actually rather large.

He spent some time getting rid of the weeds which Whisker helped in as well. He was starting to learn which plants weren't needed here after watching Alex do the same thing over and over, and was starting to help out Alex whenever he could.

Alex smiled as he realized that opening his spiritual sea had made Whisker smarter than normal.

'I should start teaching him how to speak soon,' Alex thought.

About an hour later, just as he was about to finish harvesting some of the ingredients that were ready here, Fan Yanshi came up to him and called him to the village.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"The sect's people are going to come here soon to take the harvest and pay us. I thought you would be wanting to see that," Fan Yanshi said.

"Oh, yeah," Alex said and left the work. He walked back to the village where nearly a hundred people have gathered around.

Alex knew how many people there were in the village, but he had never seen all of them together, so the amount looked a bit larger than normal.

A few minutes into waiting, he saw Fan Yanshi point towards a black spot in the distant snow that was slowly getting larger.

Alex looked through Whisker's eyes, but that spot still looked quite blurry even when Fan Yanshi and a few others could already see it very clearly.

After the black spot got a little closer, Alex finally saw a few people sitting on top of a dark flying boat as they arrived close to the village.

The boat stopped once they were in the village and Alex sensed their aura from them.

Mind Tempering realm.

'Is that... good or bad?' he wondered. Looking at the people's age that had just come in, they were about 20 or so years old, around the same age as what would be considered genius back in the Crimson Empire, and maybe even the Luminance Empire.

However, he wasn't sure what was considered genius here.

'Damn, I really need some information about this world that these villagers just can't give me,' he thought.

"Fan Yanshi!" A man shouted as he jumped off the boat. "I hope you've prepared a proper harvest this time around."

Chapter 860 Harvest Earnings

The young man named Sha Yuan, behind whom stood the other 4 men and women, grabbed the talisman and looked at it.

As soon as he did, his eyes went slightly wild. "Did you seriously harvest this much in just a quarter of a year?" the young man looked shocked.

"Absolutely," Fan Yanshi said. "You can check here." He pulled out a storage bag that contained the harvest and tossed it over to the young man.

The young man quickly checked the storage bag and went, "Tsk. You really did it." He then proceeded to calculate the entire thing.

The group of nearly a hundred villagers waited patiently to hear the number as this was the only way for them to earn any money.

"For all of this, you get 300 True Spirit Stones," the young man said and handed out exactly that amount, which he threw next to Fan Yanshi.

Fan Yanshi had never seen this many True Spirit stones at once, but he wasn't surprised as he had hoped to be.

"This is too little," he said. "There are at least 350 True Spirit Stones worth of harvest this quarter. We did really good this time around."

"Yeah, but so did the other little villages under the sect. They also had a good harvest so the prices of ingredients have lowered quite a bit and you only get that much," the young man said.

"Nonsense, how can the price be so low in just 3 months?" Fan Li shouted from the side.

"Just 3 months? The price had lowered 3 months ago already. You guys should have been told, weren't you?" Sha Yuan said.

"What?!" Fan Yanshi and the rest cried out in surprise. "We weren't let know about this at all."

"Oh," the young man made an apologetic face. "I must have forgotten, my bad. Anyway, it's time for me to leave."

"Wait," Fan Yanshi shouted.

"What?" the young man turned around with an annoyed look on his face.

"Where are the resources for this quarter?" he asked.

"Oh, I nearly forgot. I'm getting so forgetful this time around," Sha Yuan said. The small group behind him started giggling all of a sudden.

"Bastard!" Fan Yanshi muttered under his breath.

"Here," the young man tossed the resources to Fan Yanshi and turned around to leave. "Good luck on the next quarter."

The group watched the 5 left.

"He hates you, huh? Is there a reason?" Alex asked from the side.

"Yeah," Fan Yanshi said. "We started the sect together and he fell in love with a girl, but the girl fell in love with me instead. He's hated me ever since then."

"You stole away the girl he loved?" Alex asked.

"No, I didn't even care about the girl. I only had eyes for my wife," Fan Yanshi said as he turned around to smile at his wife.

"Stop speaking nonsense and pick up the stones," Fan Li said.

"Yes, dear."

Alex helped them pick up the 300 spirit stones as well.

Fan Yanshi took the 300 spirit stones, but he did not divide them amongst the people. Instead, he pocketed it and checked the resources provided to them by the sect this time around.

These resources consisted of grains, beast feed, and fertilizers required for the next set of harvests.

"Bastard!" Fan Yanshi cried out. "These are of the worst quality."

"Is he screwing with us?" someone asked.

"We should complain to the sect," another person said.

Alex saw the resources too and shook his head. Nearly half the beast's food was almost rotten, and the rot was spreading to the grains too. The fertilizers seemed like they hadn't been used in a long while and were already losing proficiency.

"Goddammit," Fan Yanshi cried out and made a fist in anger. If only he was stronger, he wouldn't have to go through this.

The people behind him had started getting angry as well and were rallying up to go to the sect.

"Stop," Fan Li shouted back at them. "Do you think the sect cares about us enough to care what we say? Do you think a thousand-year-old sect would rather listen to a bunch of trashes like us, or will they favor their own disciples?"

The crowd quietened.

"Guys, relax. It's alright," Fan Yanshi said. "Look, we got 300 True Spirit stones right? We can now buy a lot of the things we've wanted."

"Everyone, make a list of what you want. We will leave for the city around the evening," Fan Yanshi said, and immediately everyone's mood improved for the better.

"Right, I need a set of talisman papers and inks."

"I need some cosmetics."

"We need some spices for our foods."

"Yes, yes," Fan Yanshi said. "Write down everything we need please."

Alex was certainly intrigued by the notion of leaving for a city. It had been a month since he had come to the Northern Continent, and the most he had learned about this place was that the continent was divided into 5 different states, each of which was governed by an ancient sect that had lasted for nearly dozens of thousands of years.

Alex wanted to learn more about these sects, along with many things about this continent. So, he walked up to Fan Yanshi and asked, "Brother Fan, do you think I can come with you to this city? I've been wanting to visit one without stress for a while now."

"Uhh..." Fan Yanshi didn't immediately answer. "We leave in the evening and will probably have to fight through some heavy snowfall, if not some blizzard. It will be incredibly hard on someone with such a low cultivation base like you, brother Yu."

"Oh, I am fine with being in snow or blizzard. I ran my way through it all before I arrived here, remember?" he said.

Fan Yanshi gave it some thought, and then said, "Sure, why not? If you want to come, you can. Oh right, you should write what you want as well."

"Thank you, brother Fan."

Alex returned to the field to finish what he was nearly done with and helped the others plant the new seeds that came in today.

Aside from that, he also wrote what he wanted, which were just some more seeds for him.

After that, Alex returned to his home and started cultivating, waiting for the night to fall.

Very late in the afternoon, when the sun was starting to burn red, someone knocked on his door.

Alex opened the door and smiled. "Is it time, sister Fan?" he asked.

"Yes, we should leave," Fan Li said.

"We? Are you going too, sister Fan?" Alex asked with a curious look. He had for some reason assumed only men would be going on this trip since that was what they did for hunting meat.

"Of course, I am going," Fan Li said with a soft smile. "The men around here don't know how to ration their money and end up spending it on unnecessary things. If there isn't a woman in the group to keep track of the expenditure, we will end up with a bunch of books on useless skills and nothing else."

Alex chuckled a bit when he heard that. He wouldn't doubt he would do the same if he was lacking some techniques of his own.

The two of them arrived and the other 3 people were already gathered and ready to leave.

Aside from Fan Li's Organ Tempering 3rd realm and Alex's own low cultivation base, everyone else chosen to leave in this group was of Organ Tempering 9th realm.

"Are you all ready?" Fan Yanshi asked, and everyone nodded.

"Very well, let us leave." He turned around and started walking away.

Alex was a little surprised. He had thought that they would be using some flying artifact, but it seemed they were planning on trekking through the snow.

Alex frowned a bit. He was going to act like he couldn't do or didn't understand many things, but this one didn't sit right with him.

He didn't want such good and humble people to walk through the snow, only to go to some city.

"Brother Fan, wait," he said and ran forward.

"Brother Yu? What is it? Are you changing your mind?" Fan Yanshi asked.

"No," Alex said. "I just wanted you to help you out a little."

"Help us?" Fan Yanshi looked confused.

"Here," Alex said and pulled out something from his storage bag.

A boat appeared in the air, capable of carrying about 4 people in total, 5 if they squeezed in, and hovered.

The 4 of them looked shocked as they stared at the boat and then at Alex.

"How did you...?" Fan Yanshi couldn't speak out the entire question.

"I stole from one of the people that tried to kill me," Alex said. He wasn't lying at all. This was the ship that belonged to Zexi he had acquired nearly 10 years ago, or over 12 years ago in actual time.

"It's a True rank artifact, so we might have to spend a bit of the spirit stones we acquired today, but no more than 5 should do it," Alex said. "Also, there are already some in there so we will be fine for now."

"Brother Yu... this... thank you. You have been truly helpful," Fan Yanshi bowed a little, and the rest followed to bow as well.

"Please, you don't need to thank me. I should thank you instead for letting me live here," Alex said.

"Also, we should leave now. We don't want to waste any more time."

Chapter 861 Snow Road City

It didn't take long for the sun to set around these parts. Sun would usually set even as fast as 4 pm in the afternoon because of some of the tall peaks around here.

Alex scanned the area as they flew. There were leafless trees and frozen boulders, yet there was not a single sign of human life anywhere.

Alex looked to his left, the east, where storm clouds were starting to move into their location. Within the hour, they were going to have to fly through a snow storm if they were lucky.

If not, it would be a blizzard, or even worse, an ice storm with pieces of ice falling sideways so fast that most self-tempering realm cultivators wouldn't even be able to come out unharmed.

From what he had heard, even early True realm cultivators didn't dare walk out in an ice storm because of how quickly it chipped away their Qi, leaving them with nothing but artifacts to protect themselves.

"How much longer?" Alex asked Fan Yanshi. They had only left about an hour or so ago, so they shouldn't have come much further, but if possible, he would want to escape the storm, just for the sake of the people behind him.

"Hmm, I think we are a third of the way there," Fan Yanshi said. "We will know if we see the villages around the Rockless peak."

About 10 minutes later, Alex saw a small hill that was completely submerged in the snow with a massive icicle stuck at its center.

He saw small sets of villages around the place that fully embraced the winter.

"Are they cultivators? How do they survive?" Alex asked.

"Oh, merchants walk through these paths from time to time to get to and from the sect. They pass through here and sell what they can to these people," Fan Yanshi said.

Alex looked at the village with no possible source of income and wondered just what they could even do to earn money for themselves. In fact, he was so confused that he asked.

"You see that peak over there?" Fan Yanshi pointed way beyond the village. "There's a glacier that flows down from there. It's opened up the path and allows these people to dig into the earth around here and bring it out."

"Surprisingly, there are a lot of golds and silvers underneath those glaciers, which they craft into jewelries and sell for a living. If that wasn't the case, they would have already moved onto warmer locations for sure," Fan Yanshi said.

"Ah," Alex understood and kept looking around.

"Are there no beasts around here?" he asked.

"There are, but not very dangerous ones. If you want to find dangerous True beasts, you will have to either go all the way to the north where they live in the tall mountains or to the south where it's very warm and comfortable for them to live," Fan Yanshi said.

"I see, so there is no danger of beasts here, huh?" he understood.

They continued flying, passing past many villages and even a few smaller cities. Apparently, they were going to a major city in the south that sold everything they wanted, so they wouldn't have to worry about not finding what they wanted.

Alex liked it better that he was going somewhere he could easily find what he wanted.

The group kept flying as the storm got even closer.

"We would have to find shelter in one of the villages along the way if we didn't have the boat. You really have been quite the help, brother Yu," Fan Yanshi said.

"Don't count on that yet, we still have to outrun the storm," he said.

About half an hour before they reached the city, the storm caught up with them, but fortunately, it was only a snowstorm.

Heavy snow fell on them, covering them up even when they were traveling on the boat very fast. However, fortunately, they didn't get blasted by heavy winds, or that would cause more problems than anything.

"Are you not feeling cold, brother Yu?" Fan Yanshi asked. The group in the back were already feeling the chill enter their body despite their cultivation base, and somehow Alex wasn't showing any signs of it.

"Oh no," Alex shook his head. "This black robe of mine was something my mother bought for me at quite a steep price. It blocks off a lot of heat and cold."

"Is that so? Maybe we should buy something like that too," Fan Yanshi mused to himself.

"We don't have the budget for that," Fan Li said from the side, barely managing to keep her teeth from cluttering as she spoke.

Alex chuckled whenever the husband was chided by his wife. Suddenly, he saw something in the distance.

A bright yellow light shone in between the snowstorm. Whisker who was in his robes focused to try and see what it was, but before he could tell, Fan Yanshi had seen it too.

"Woah, that's the Snow Road city. We're here already?" he asked in surprise. The snowstorm was beginning to pick up, but they had already made it.

"What is that yellow light? Is that coming from the city?" Alex asked. Whisker was still incapable of showing him images from long distances clearly.

"That must be the barrier formation," Fan Yanshi said. "They activated the city barrier to stop the snow storm most likely."

"Ah, that makes sense," Alex said.

The storm picked up even further, slowly changing from a snow storm to a blizzard. However, the group didn't care as they were here and had landed.

The boat stopped in front of the city, and the 5 of them got off immediately and ran to the city gates.

There were no massive walls here that surrounded the city as there would be in the Western continent. Instead, the city was just a bunch of buildings clustered in a location, not unlike the cities back in his home.

The guards took the 5 of them in without even checking them just to get them away from the snowstorm. As soon as they got in, the group felt the incredible warmth of the city radiating around them.

"Is that formation or is there a volcano around here?" Alex asked. He looked around, but the large buildings stopped his view of the surrounding. Even if there was nothing, the snowstorm and darkness probably wouldn't let him see anything.

"I believe it's the formation," Fan Yanshi said.

After paying a small fee for entry, Fan Yanshi directly went to the market to buy everything that was on the list the four of them.

Alex followed them and walked through the city. Despite it being nighttime, the city was ablaze with light from all around, and the stores were all open.

Alex could feel cultivation bases of every kind walk past him. Most of them were Self-Tempering realm to his surprise, but a good chunk of it were also True realm cultivators.

Alex tried to feel for Saint realm cultivators, but he simply couldn't. Even if they did walk the common road, they most likely restrained their cultivation base to the point where someone like Alex would have an extremely hard time looking through their concealment.

Another thing that took Alex's attention was a group of people he saw from time to time. They wore robes of royal blue color and were True realm cultivators that walked around with spears in their hands.

They were the only ones that Alex could see that were openly walking around with weapons.

When he asked Fan Yanshi about them, it turned out that they were the guards of this city, and were most likely disciples belonging to the Heaven's Frost sect, the ancient sect that governed the State of Xue.

Not long after, they arrived in a massive building that sold almost everything a mortal or a low-level cultivator would need.

It reminded Alex of the store back in DawnSpring city where he had acquired his pill-making technique and his fake arm.

Seeds, spices, minerals, talisman papers, inks, formations plates, ingredients, cosmetic items, clothing items, and every other little thing that was written on the list as to be bought here.

As the group started looking for it all, Alex needed to go out on his own to look at the various things in the city.

"Brother Fan, how long do you think it will take for you to be done with the purchases?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, I can't be sure, brother Yu. Why do you ask?" he asked.

"I was thinking of going around the city to look at various things and see if I can buy some things with the little money I have," Alex said.

"Oh, uhh… how about you wait for us by the northern gate after you are done? Or we will wait for you after you are done," Fan Yanshi asked.

"That works fine for me," Alex said. "See you tomorrow morning then."

With that, he walked out of the store and left. Alex walked through the streets while thinking in his mind where exactly it was that he wanted to go.

There were a few things he needed for sure. For example, if he could, he would want to buy some beast cores around here.

"No, that has to be the first place," Alex thought and started looking for it. Not long after, he arrived in front of what he was looking for.

A bookstore.

Chapter 862: Steps

"Did you see where they went?" one of them asked.

"Yeah, in that direction. Quickly, bring out the boat," another one spoke.

The group was far enough from the city gates that the guards didn't see them, so they weren't hesitating at all about flying after the ones that just flew away.

While one of the men brought out a boat, another one excitedly spoke up. "Did you see how much he spent? At least 15 thousand True Spirit stones. Do you think he's some sort of young master?"

"Who cares? As long as we get his storage bag, we will be set for a long time," Another man spoke.

The flying boat was out. It was a large boat capable of carrying at least 30 people in it. It cost at least 20 True Spirit stones to operate for every 200 kilometers it ran.

The 15 or so people in the group got onto the ship and the ship started. Without any hesitation, the person at the front moved the ship, and it flew in the direction Alex had left.

"Can you see them?" someone asked from behind, a young voice.

"We only just moved. It will take some time," the girl in front of the voice spoke.

"What are you guys going to do when you catch up?" the young voice asked.

"We will see. If that guy hands over his belongings, we can let him go without harm, but if he dares to fight, we might have to kill him," the girl said.

"Ooh, that's bad," the young voice spoke from behind. "You're bad. I shouldn't let you keep going after all."

The girl turned around in confusion. "What are you tal— AAAARGHH!!!!" she screamed immediately the moment she turned around.

The men and women in the boat were pushed around by the woman and a few fell off. The man at the front stopped the ship and turned around angrily.

"What the hell was… that?" his angry voice changed to confusion and surprise when he saw a white-furred cat stand at the back of the ship.

"What is that?" someone shouted.

"I am here to stop you all," Pearl spoke with a proud face. He then took a deep breath and roared.

A massive tiger face appeared in the air and suddenly many different artifacts on the people's bodies started buzzing.

About 4 of the weaker ones, who did not have any defensive mental artifacts fainted all at once.

"It's a strong beast," one of the men said with a solemn face. "We need to kill it or we might die instead."

Various weapons popped up all around the group as they got ready for battle.

Pearl smiled, he was ready for battle too. His right arm suddenly glowed golden and he swung it from afar.

3 golden lines flashed through the air as it went toward the cluster of people on the ship. A few managed to get away, but 3 got caught in the golden ropes.

An arrow flew towards Pearl, but he did nothing and watched the arrow hit his body and fall to the ground. His body was so strong that he didn't need to worry about some normal arrows that were fired by people that weren't even True Emperor yet.

A golden spear formed of metal energy flew at Pearl. Pearl's paw glowed golden again and he punched the golden spear in the air.

A man flew in with a sword and slashed at Pearl, but his body glowed golden and tanked the sword slash. Pearl then hit the man once and the man flew in the distance and skidded along the snow, bleeding from some broken bones.

3 more attacks flew at Pearl. A flying firebird, an orb of blue light, and some shaking from the ground that turned out to be vines growing in the snow.

Pearl's body glowed golden once again and all the 3 attacks landed on him directly. A massive explosion rang out, throwing snow dozens of meters into the sky.

Even then, the attacks didn't stop. Another arrow flew from the side, containing brown Qi in it. A sword slash flew from another side, and so did a few icicles.

A girl ran up to the boat and freed the 3 people that were captured there before they too joined the fight.

Another person tried to wake the unconscious people, but that didn't work, unfortunately.

The attacks kept throwing snow into the air, and while it looked like something good was happening, the stronger members of the group frowned.

There was neither any resistance from the attack, nor was there any blood from the beast dying.

Suddenly, a woman flew up into the sky, spinning through the air, and landed on the ground with a broken arm.

"Huh?" the group turned around with a confused look. At the same time, another man felt his chest cave in and he was sent flying. He struck the boat with a bang and vomited a mouthful of blood.

Some of them realized what was happening. "It's invisible!" they shouted and suddenly everyone release their Qi to sense the surrounding.

Pearl noticed their Qi and realized he had been caught, but that alone wasn't going to make him stop.

A fist-shaped floating cloud of mental energy flew out of his mind and struck one of the men. The defensive mental artifact began buzzing very loudly, alarming everyone to the fact that Pearl had used a mental attack.

"Be careful," the True Emperor that used the spear said.

Pearl's arms glowed golden again and 3 metallic ropes appeared when he swung his hands. All of the remaining 8 people dodged at once and retaliated at once.

Pearl jumped to the side and dodged the attack.

Then he looked towards the weakest of the 8, one of the girls with the bow and arrow, and ran towards her.

The girl nocked her bow and was about to shoot when Pearl suddenly glowed golden and turned into three different Pearls.

She tried to feel Pearl with her Qi, and so did the others, but there was only one answer in the mind which they knew could not be the truth at all.

All three of the Pearls were the real Pearl. They weren't that far off.

"It's the one on the right," one of them shouted and everyone targeted the Pearl on the right.

8 different attacks flew at Pearl, all hitting the Pearl on the right. Light warped for a split second around the spot where the 8 attacks landed and the Pearl there was shredded to oblivion.

However, the other two kept running.

The two Pearls converged into one and slammed onto the girl, folding her body in half forward as she flew into the distance.

Pearl quickly dodged another set of attacks that flew towards him and once again roared at them.

While the defensive mental artifact buzzed aloud, Pearl targeted the next weakest person in the group, a man in the True King realm with a saber in his hands.

Pearl's body flashed and he turned into 3 once again.

"Which one?" the young man asked in a terrified voice.

The True Emperor woman used her senses to find the right Pearl, but it was hard. After all, to her senses, all Pearls felt like the real pearl.

Still, she had to choose, and once again, like everyone else, she chose wrong.

The real Pearl arrived in front of the young man and attacked him, but the young man managed to pull out a talisman in time to protect him.

However, the talisman only protected him just once and Pearl still hit him a second time, easily breaking his shoulders and incapacitating him.

Only 6 more people remained, each more troubled than the next regarding the fight. They had come out of the city to rob someone rich, and yet somehow they had ended up fighting with a talking cat that was extremely powerful for some reason.

"How are we wrong every time?" One of the men shouted angrily. However, the others didn't have an answer for him. They too were stumped about it.

It wasn't just them of course, everyone who had ever fought against Pearl was stumped by this.

Previously, Pearl could only split his body into 2 different copies. During those situations, it was a 50-50 chance to get right, which most assumed they got wrong when they attacked him.

However, now that there were 3 of him, it was impossible to believe that it was luck keeping them from hitting the right one on the first try.

Of course, it was no luck at all.

Whenever a White Tiger used the White Tiger's Steps, they formed copies of themselves that weren't capable of doing anything but running towards their opponent. Since it was a movement technique, attacks were almost impossible to perform.

However, during those times, as long as the copies were out, they could not be harmed.

Similarly, as long as Pearl's copies were running, his real body was safe. After all, his real body was separated into these very copies.

When any one of the copies was harmed, the part of him in that copy returned to the remaining copies, turning them ever so real.

When all but one copy remained, that copy would gain all of him which had split out, becoming the real Pearl in the end.

Chapter 863: History

With only 6 people remaining, Pearl sped up.

The remaining men and women tried attacking him, but Pearl's physical body was too tough for them.

One of the men immediately disregarded it all and ran back towards the city they had just left. The woman tried to fight back, but Pearl beat her easily with the White Tiger's Golden Claw.

The third man lasted for maybe a minute longer before he realized he needed to run too. Pearl, however, got to the man before he even managed to run.

He wrapped 3 golden strings around the man and tossed him around like a ragdoll.

The three remaining True Emperors realized that Pearl was too strong, even for them. It was a little late to be realizing that, but at least they had realized it.

"Do we run?" the woman asked.

The man with the spear looked conflicted. There was no way to win here, but if he left, all these people that were down were likely going to be killed.

"No, we have to fight," he said.

"I… I'm not fighting that," the other man said and immediately turned tails to run away.

With another person gone, the remaining two had no choice but to run away as well.

Pearl watched the 3 runs, but he didn't follow them. Instead, he looked around the snow at the many people that were on the ground, some squirming in pain, some fully unconscious.

He went up to these people and took their storage bags away. Then, he went up to the boat and took it into one of the storage bags he had just acquired.

Once he got everything he could out of these people, he ran off to return to Alex.

* * * * *

The sky to the east was glowing purple when Pearl returned back to Alex. Pearl gave a general description of what had happened and how he brought back some things for him.

Alex took the storage bags and kept them to look at it later.

The boat continued flying and the 4 people behind him didn't even realize anything had happened at all. They didn't realize when Pearl had left, and they didn't realize when Pearl had returned.

The sun rose above the eastern mountains when the 5 of them returned back to the village.

When they arrived, the villagers looked confused, and couldn't help but wonder if they had to return because of the snowstorm that occurred last night.

"No, we went to the Snow Road city and returned. We bought everything," Fan Li said out loud to everyone's surprise.

"You guys will have to thank brother Yu because of his help. You won't believe it, but he has a flying boat. We reached the city in like no time at all," Fan Yanshi started describing everything.

Alex spent a little time with the people and then went off to the garden, even though he was told that he didn't need to do anything at all.

Alex agreed, but he just wanted to check on his plants before he returned to his house. He weeded some of the plants out, put some fertilizers in there, and after watering it all, he left.

By the time he had returned back to his room, Whisker was fully asleep.

Pearl came out and sat next to Alex while Alex looked at the storage bag that Pearl had brought him.

He looked through the many weapons and such, but the only thing he found useful from them was the boat.

"Maybe I will give it to these people," Alex said. "Good job."

Pearl smiled and showed his proud face. Alex pet him a bit and finally brought out the books and talismans he had been so excited to read about.

Alex opened the book named 'History of the Northern Continent' and read it.

The book talked about a certain war that no one knew anything about that brought a large amount of destruction to the land. They didn't know much about what the war was about, or who the people were up against.

"Huh? They know about the Eternal War, that's surprising," Alex thought. The war was such obscure information that he didn't think any of these people would know about it.

Just the fact that the war was common information, even though no one knew much about it, was already surprising to Alex.

Then the book talked about the ruler of these lands. T

hey surprisingly knew that a ruler existed and that it was a beast.

They didn't know that they were Black Tortoises or that they were from the immortal realm, but they knew there was a rightful ruler.

In fact, they even knew where the ruler lived.

Alex was beyond surprised at this knowledge. Back in the Western Continent, no one even seemed to know about the White Tiger's existence. Granted, the White Tiger had died about 5 thousand years ago, but he would still have expected someone to know about it.

"The White Tigers did decide to not interfere with the humans and just ruled over the beasts, didn't they?" Alex thought. He continued reading.

Aside from knowing that there was a ruler, there wasn't anything much about the Tortoise in the history book, as all generations of tortoises that ruled this land generally stayed out of the world, and acted more as its protector, than its ruler.

At first, the people didn't dare to try and become something of a ruler themselves, mostly in fear of the ruler taking offense to it.

However, as time went by and the general public started forgetting that a ruler even existed, more ambitious people came to be.

These people formed sects and tried ruling for a while, but as soon as the strongest one of them overcame the Saint realm and entered the Immortal realm, they were forced to leave, which left the sects in dire straits and under attack by the others that felt like they deserved to be the one.

The coming and going of sects happened for a long time, until about 30 thousand years ago, when a sect came around that ended up becoming so big that no one could topple it.

The Snow Immortal sect.

The sect managed to survive by always having two leaders each time.

Even when one of the Saint realm leaders of the sect could break through, they didn't do so until there was another one to look after the place when they were gone, who would then immediately start searching for their replacement.

The sect ended up being so big, that it was called a Super sect, with branches at every corner of the continent, each with its own leaders, all of which reported back to the main sect.

The Snow Immortal sect pretty much ruled the Northern Continent.

However, about 8 thousand years ago, when the leader of the sect at that time tried to break through, he brought tragedy onto the land.

No one understood why, but when the leader of that time tried to break through, he couldn't survive the process at all and died.

That wouldn't have been bad, but the process was so powerful and so destructive, that the mountain the leader was breaking through was blown to smithereens.

The many sect elders and the other leader died at once. Then, the strongest people of the main sect were gone, with the branches still intact. Then, the 5 strongest branches at the time took advantage of the situation and broke off from the Snow Immortal sect to become their own sects.

The 5 sects became ancient sects with a history of nearly 30 thousand years thanks to them belonging to the Snow Immortal sect. In fact, it was said that they even targeted the main sect and stole away their resources, forcing the Snow Immortal sect to have no choice but disband.

There still remained a Snow Immortal sect, but it was a mid-range sect at best now with no hope of being a high-tier sect, let alone an ancient sect.

The 5 sects that split from the Snow Immortal sect decided to rule their own piece of land and split the continent into 5 different states.

The State of Bing was now governed by the sect that had come to be known as the Nether Poison sect. They were a sect that mastered using Poison, not unlike the Royal family of the Western Continent.

The State of Xue was now governed by the Heaven's Frost Sect, which was one of the more normal sects of the land.

The State of Dong ended up being governed by the Frozen Heart sect, which was famous for being a woman-only sect that used some sort of technique to remove part of their emotion towards men and become stronger as a result.

The State of Shuang was now controlled by the Blue Spring sect, which was also a beast-taming sect, and one of the only few ones on the entire continent.

Finally, the Sta

te of Re was under the governing of the Blazing Earth sect, the only sect of the 5 that did not have anything to do with cold or ice, as most of the land of the State of Re never even saw snow.

These 5 sects were the strongest and largest sects of the Northern Continent and its current definite rulers.

After that, there was nothing informative in the history book aside from the beast's rebellion in the Central continent, followed by an overwhelming victory in the Western continent.

Alex shook his head when he read that and closed the book. He was done reading.

However, that was just one book, and he had so many more to read.

Chapter 864: The Nine Wonders

Alex next read the political structure of the land, and while it was informative, it wasn't really something he was excited to learn about.

It only talked about the tensions between some minor sects that he would never have anything to do with. The bigger sects that ruled the land never really tried to attack the other State and start an all-out war. That was just not profitable for them.

Alex ignored that book and moved on to the talismans he had.

The next talisman he had was something that apparently noted down many famous spots to visit in the continent, including what was known as the 9 greatest places, which was also known as the 9 Wonders of the Northern Continent.

The talisman had information on two mountain peaks that were side by side where one spewed out lava, while a glacier flowed down the other one.

There was mention of a place so dense in water Qi that it was forever misty.

There was a restaurant in a city called Frost Haven Restaurant where they made delicacies using only ice made up of spirit waters that apparently someone had to test.

There were places with arenas where people went to go to fight and earn money for themselves.

There were tombs and locations where people from before the war many thousands of years lived. Of course, they were empty now, but people could still visit if they wanted.

There were also the Forever Isles that were to the south of the Northern continent. It was a set of many islands that seemed to stretch forever into the ocean.

Along with that, there were many more 'normal' locations that the talisman said that people had to visit.

After reading through what was basic in his eyes, Alex finally reached the end of the list that contained the 9 wonders of the Northern Continent.

The first one was the Secret Realm of the Ruler.

"They really do know about it," Alex thought as he read.

The talisman made note of land in the far north of the State of Xue where a monument stood. If one activated the monument, they would be transported to the realm where the ruler lived or at least had once lived.

The people weren't sure if the ruler was still alive or not, but they knew where he was and cautioned people against going to that area without any preparation.

The next location on the talisman was something known as the Endless Tunnel.

About 2500 years ago, when the Heaven's Frost sect and the Frozen Heart sect realized that the mountain range between the State of Xue and the State of Dong was too treacherous for even normal cultivators to travel, let alone mortal merchants, they decided to open up a tunnel through the mountain range.

On either side, the Saint realm cultivators attacked the mountain to break it down, and they did manage to break off a decent amount of it, they soon realized that their attacks were useless.

The mountain range was formed out of some incredible material that was named to be Starforged Tungsten. Even just the metal ore was so incredibly tough that it took multiple saint realms to attack it and break just a small part of it.

The saint realms soon found out that they had come upon an incredible treasure and instead of opening a passage, they decided to mine it.

Since the tunnel that was supposed to open never did open and would take forever to open given how tough the ore was, it was named the Endless metal.

Since the sects couldn't spare Saint realm cultivators to harvest the ores due to how incredibly time-consuming it was, they allowed anyone to simply come and harvest it themselves, so long as they gave 50% of what they harvested to either the Heaven's Frost sect or Frozen Heart sect depending on which side of the tunnel they were on.

The next wonder of the Northern Continent was the Lightning Peninsula. As the name suggested, it was a Peninsula located in the south of the State of Shuang, where Lightning rained as if it were snow.

It was a natural phenomenon that started not very long ago. No one knew how it started or why, but experts could only guess that it was due to some weird magnetic fluctuations around the bay there.

The next wonder was to Alex's massive surprise, the Intercontinental Teleportation formation of the Northern Continent.

"Right, they have one," he thought. Due to the Western Continent no longer having one, Alex had for some reason though

t that no other land would have it either.

But they did, and Alex wondered if he could use it to go back home. However, when he read up on the information in the talisman, he got dejected.

The resources used to run the teleportation formation, now that there was no midway point in the central continent, were so massive that a normal person simply couldn't expect to use them.

Even the ancient sects would have to bring out a good chunk of what they had in their treasury to activate it, and even then they could only go to the Eastern continent or the Southern continent.

For most people who could afford to use this formation, it was much easier and cost-effective to simply fly over to the Eastern continent and then cross that land to fly over to the southern continent.

Alex was dejected that he couldn't use the formation as it was now just a relic of the past. Something one would only use in the worst emergency cases.

He shook his head and continued reading.

In the same State as the teleportation formation, the State of Re, there was a group of volcanic mountains.

There was exactly a dozen to be precise where the best Fire elemental materials grew.

Even though the Blazing Sect was right next to it, the mountain ranges were public to everyone. However, these weren't the mountains that were considered the wonder of the continent.

In between these mountains was another mountain, hidden inside a secret realm, known as the Thirteenth Volcanic Mountain. It was a place with much more fire elements and resources that one could just not get.

Alex made a mental note of this place as it would be an important place to go once he was a Saint realm cultivator.

In the State of Shuang was a massive forest filled with beasts from the Skin Tempering realm, all the way up to the Saint Soul realm.

It was known as the Forest of the Demonic Beasts and was the only place on the continent where one could find almost every kind of beast.

The Blue Spring sect, the ancient beast-taming sect got their beasts from precisely this forest.

Next up was the Dao mountain. Even from just the name, Alex could understand what the mountain could be about. However, he didn't want to trust his intuition and instead decided to look at the description.

However, to his pleasant surprise, the explanation was exactly what he had hoped it would be.

The Dao mountain was a location at the northeastern corner of the Land of Dong where one had an easier time learning the Dao.

The opportunity apparently came from some sort of fragrance created by some flowers that blossomed on the mountain every year. So every year, a set amount of people were able to go up the mountain to smell the flower, fall into a trance and learn some Dao.

Unfortunately, according to the talisman, the Dao mountain was hard to enter without becoming a Saint realm. Alex wondered what the problem was, but there was no other explanation.

"I will have to check it out on my own," he thought.

Next up was a place known as the Domain of War that lay on the southeastern corner of the State of Dong. Alex got curious and read further.

This place was a land torn by battle from ancient times, where intents, Qi, and aura from all types of attacks and weapons still remained in just that part of the land.

Since they came from Immortals apparently, the intents wouldn't just disappear and instead, people could go to it and train against it.

That was a brilliant place for anyone trying to hone themselves, and Alex needed just the type of place too.

Finally, the last location was a place known as The Nine Wells of Time. It was located on a hill in the State of Bing where one could go and drink water from these wells, and depending on the well, one could see their past or a potential future.

Alex was truly surprised after hearing about a place like this and couldn't wait to visit here.

After reading the 9 different locations, Alex couldn't help but be excited about most of those lands, but those would have to wait until he reached the Saint rank.

'I have to hurry up,' he thought. He put away the talisman and brought out another one.

This was the map of the Northern Continent, and Alex read it.

p>There were 5 states divided among the 5 different sects. Alex searched for the Ruler's realm that was so popular and his eyes nearly fell out when he realized just how far in the north he was.

Most of the cities and sects were towards the south, near the hotter areas, and he was here in the north where there were barely any people living.

"Yeah, I really need to hurry up."

Chapter 865: Useless

Alex's next talisman was about the runes that he was so looking forward to learning about.

He read through the talisman for a bit and his eyes narrowed when he realized that it was quite an easy method.

The most important thing about carving runes on objects was the rune 'Resonance'. In talismans, it was a rune that was used to connect two talismans to each other so they could communicate with each other.

His mother had taught him that when she made the communication talisman for him a few years ago.

You resonated two talismans with each other so they could easily be used to send and receive messages.

However, in the cases of scripts, you could not use the scripts without a power source, that was more than likely not going to be just a single person pumping in Qi. So, you had to resonate the script to the power source, which in almost all cases was the Spirit Vein under the earth.

The way to resonate with them was that you took a talisman that could store resonance and copy the resonance of the Spirit Vein, which was always naturally resonating, and apply it to the script.

The script would try to resonate with resonance stored in the talisman and slowly drift towards resonating with the Spirit vein below.

It could only work up to a certain distance, so the script had to always be close to the location where the spirit vein was.

The resulting resonance of the script would always be close to what the spirit vein's resonance was, but it would never be the same.

To connect the script to another script, as one would in the cases of teleportation scripts, you would first do it normally on one end where you would resonate a power source to the script.

Then, you would take the new resonance of the script, copy it, and take it over to the other script you wanted to connect it to.

There, you would resonate the two different scripts and connect them, and only then would you take the power source's resonance from there as well and connect it to the other script.

Once all the scripts and their power sources resonated, you would finally be able to use it.

"Damn, it is really simple," Alex thought. He looked at the information on how to make the resonating talisman and realized he had the ingredients.

So, he quickly brought out his brush and paper and started drawing the talisman.

10 minutes later, he was ready with the talisman and thought of what he could do. He didn't have anything appropriate to test the scripts on so he was forced to use formation plates he had just bought.

It was a waste of money, but he had a ton of that at the moment.

Alex started carving some scripts using the same pen he would use for formations. He made a small script that would illuminate his room.

After the carving was done, he took out a True spirit stone and used the resonance talisman on it. The spirit stone started vibrating all of a sudden and the talisman captured it.

Then, Alex took the talisman and pasted it on top of the metal plate, and poured his Qi into it as well.

The metal plate started vibrating and so did the talisman. The talisman's vibration didn't change, but the metal plate did, and it slowly changed towards the talisman's vibratio

n to match the resonance.

After a few seconds, it was done. Then, Alex slowly put the spirit stone on top of the plate, and before he even touched it, the plate activated on its own to illuminate his entire room.

Alex smiled at the successful scripting and nodded to himself. Now that he had learned it, he was going to practice some more.

For the rest of the day and night, he did nothing but practice it while continuously cultivating the 2 techniques and using his mask.

Once morning hit, Alex got up and returned to work.

After he was done with his work, Alex left the village and went out into the open area to practice his techniques.

The 21 Sword Array, Infinite Heavenly Ice Spear, and Blood God's Manual needed training before he could be proficient at it.

Not only that, he needed to teach both Pearl and Whisker some new techniques.

Whisker wasn't a fighter at all, so he couldn't find him anything new that he could use to fight with. Instead, he got him some movement techniques.

The first technique was one that allowed him to move through the earth without much problem, and the second technique allowed him to move through the water.

Aside from that, Alex had taught him his defensive technique. He had thought of teaching an escape technique too, but the thing that Whisker had to worry about the least was dying.

Pearl got a few techniques too. Mostly, since he was lacking some ranged attacks, Alex got him some.

The first was a technique, not unlike Alex's own Iron Fist Punch, where Pearl could send out a metal paw attack.

Then, the next one was a technique that allowed him to send out a shockwave of metal energy in a cone in front of him.

Aside from that, there was also a barrier technique that created a metal barrier in front of the user.

The three of them learned the technique as well as they could. Whisker had some trouble reading of course, so Alex had to teach him exactly what to do.

Once they learned everything, they started practicing.

Late at night, Alex returned back to his home and ate some food with the villagers there.

Alex watched them eat and remembered something. Fan Yanshi and a few others had been at the edge of the Organ Tempering realm for a while, so he decided to help them.

After returning back, Alex brought out his cauldron to perform alchemy after a long time.

He brought out the ingredients for a pill that would help one breakthrough and started making the pills.

He made about 20 pills in total in just an hour after using the pill-splitting Qi. Meaning that he had refined a batch of ingredients every 6 minutes to make a pill.

Given that these were common ranked pills, Alex could do that easily.

Once he was done with them, he proceeded to make some medicinal pastes using what he had grown in the village, and what he had bought from the city.

He made a few vials of healing pastes, antidotes, and other useful pastes.

Once done, he finished the rest of the night cultivating.

Early morning, Alex went out and found Fan Yanshi, who was on his way to t

he beasts to feed them.

Alex stopped him and handed him the pastes.

"Brother Yu, you made these?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said while bringing out the pills too.

"Thank you," Fan Yanshi said with genuine gratitude in his voice. "I didn't think you would be able to make some so— What's this?"

Alex handed him the pills as well. "It's a pill that will help you break through to Meridian Tempering realm. It should help you guys a lot."

Fan Yanshi looked surprised for a few seconds, but then his face got melancholic as he said, "Thank you, Brother Yu, but this is useless."

Chapter 866: Tutoring

"Useless? Don't say that. Take it, I'm sure you'll be able to break through," Alex said.

Fan Yanshi gave a sad smile and pushed it back. "Trust me, brother Yu. It's useless. Just take it back and use it on yourself when it's time," he said.

"Brother Fan, you may think like it's useless, but it's not. Even with the worst talents, with this pill you can breakthrough," Alex said.

"Brother YU," Fan Yanshi said with a louder, stern voice. "Please, I'm not being pessimistic here when I say it's useless. I'm being realistic. I can never breakthrough to the Meridian Tempering realm."

"What? Why not?"

Even as Alex asked the question, he knew the answer. There really was only one reason. However, he didn't want to believe it.

"No…" he looked at Fan Yanshi for an answer.

Fan Yanshi gave the same incredibly sad smile and said, "I see you've realized. Yes, I do not have any spirit roots. In fact, I have remained in the Organ Tempering 9th realm for 10 years now and will for the rest of my life."

Alex was stunned. This was perhaps the very first time that he had actually met someone that didn't have a spiritual root at all.

"That means you can never breakthrough to…"

"The Meridian Tempering realm, yes," Fan Yanshi finished the statement. "I'm thankful for your thought, brother Yu. But these pills truly are useless."

Alex felt sympathetic for Fan Yanshi. Such a good man was failed by life to be born without Spiritual roots.

"I'm sorry, brother Fan. I didn't know," Alex said. "Still, take it. You can give it to the others then."

Fan Yanshi stayed his hands and instead gave the same sad look to Alex while shaking his head.

Alex felt his heart sink when he understood that expression.

"Everyone?" he asked.

Fan Yanshi nodded. "That is why we are no longer in the sect, but living here. Since we can no longer improve, the sect doesn't want us there," he said. "Still, we are good labor, so they let us stay around and grow resources for them."

"I see," Alex thought to himself. He couldn't help but feel sad about it.

"No need to get depressed over us, brother Yu," Fan Yanshi said. "We're already used to it. In fact, most of us have also stopped cultivating altogether since there is no longer any point."

"You, on the other hand, probably have good spiritual roots. Take these and use them when you reach the peak of the Organ Tempering realm," Fan Yanshi said.

Alex still wanted him to take it, but there really was no point anymore. "I will try and make other pills then. Surely you won't reject healing pills or antidotes to poisons and such," he said.

"Haha, no, I will happily accept it," Fan Yanshi said.

Alex smiled and nodded.

Fan Yanshi then left for his own task, and Alex left for his garden as well.

He looked at the many people as he walked by. Some wore fresh new clothes, ones they had just delivered from Snow Road City.

Some worked on talismans in new papers that were just bought as well.

Other people were cooking food that smelled great thanks to the new spices that were just brought it.

Here and there, the people of this small village, filled with ones that could not cultivate as he could, went about their daily life.

Alex felt sad for them, for they would never hope to see immortality. However, given how happy these people were just as they were right now, maybe that wasn't necessary.

Maybe, just maybe, he should feel happy for them for they were happy themselves.

Alex smiled once his mood brightened and went to the garden to help out.

Between cultivating, training, teaching, and gardening, Alex didn't even realize when 3 months passed by.

He had broken through to the 5th True Emperor realm not long ago. A few months more and he would break through to the 6th True Emperor realm.

Pearl had broken through to the 5th True Emperor realm as well. While he had started earlier than Alex had, they were now equal in cultivation base.

Whisker was the one that had the most improvement of all. He was now at Bone Tempering 8th realm. A little more and he would enter the Organ tempering realm, becoming as strong as most of the individuals in this village.
 &n

bsp;

Alex's harvest from his garden had also been quite good. While the important ingredients had yet to grow, it was only a matter of time.

At most, in just 3 months he would be able to harvest ingredients that would improve the little Whisker's mental prowess.

Given how he was already able to speak in broken words using his spiritual sense, if his mind was improved even more, he would surely be able to fully speak normally.

'How is he faster than Pearl?' Alex wondered. But then Pearl was less than a year old when he had started learning words, so maybe it didn't matter.

Alex was in the garden early in the morning where there were quite a few more people than usual.

Given that this was the day of the harvest, they were there to reap everything they had sowed for that quarter.

Alex tried to help, but as always, they told him to tend to his own garden. After finding out that he was aiding them with pills and pastes, they didn't want to impose more on him than necessary.

Besides, he had already taught them almost everything there was to learn about these plants for them to grow normally.

Alex sighed and moved on to his own garden after Fan Li's insistence. As soon as he arrived, Whisker jumped out of his robe and got to work.

Throughout the last 3 months, Whisker had really grown as a gardener. Of course, he couldn't plant trees or anything, but he could clear weeds and check for any bugs that would come to eat the plants.

He was really good at killing those bugs and insects too.

Alex looked at him almost professionally clear the weeds, and he thought, 'Should I teach him more? Maybe go into how gardening works and how you can plant something? Maybe even how you can harvest them?'

Alex would be more than happy if Whisker obtained such a skill from him. Given that he had fire spiritual roots, Alex even thought of teaching him Alchemy itself.

A small mouse, that wasn't even supposed to be able to cultivate, making pill sure would be a sight to see.

'Maybe I should teach Pearl too,' he thought. Pearl didn't have Fire spiritual roots, but it wasn't very necessary. He just wouldn't be able to learn the Flame Mastery Scripture was all.

After Whisker was done clearing the weeds, Alex harvested what was ripe and ready to be picked. He then brought some ice and watered the plants as well. Then once he sowed some seeds onto the empty land, he was done for the day.

Alex was excited to teach Pearl and Whisker some things about gardening, so he quickly returned to his room and taught them a few things about gardening.

Alex started off with the easy plants and slowly moved on to the harder ones. He also taught concepts that were taught to him by Wei Ruoran in the royal palace back in the Radiant city.

Pearl was incredibly bored with what he was being taught but still stuck up with it. However, Whisker showed no sign of boredom. He simply stayed there, consuming every single piece of information that came his way.

Seeing how well he was learning —and Alex knew that Whisker was learning since there was no way he could forget this information— Alex only got more motivated to teach them.

It was about 3 hours into the teaching when there was suddenly a knock on the door. Alex stopped the Noise Canceling formation and shouted, "Who?"

"Brother Yu, can you open the door please?" Fan Yanshi asked from the other side.

"Wait a bit," Alex said and walked out, while Whisker quickly ran into his robe to help him see. Of course, Alex didn't need Whisker as he was looking around with his spiritual sense now, but it was still necessary for the mouse to be there just for the sake of appearance.

Alex opened the door and saw both Fan Yanshi and Fan Li standing on the other side. Fan Yanshi was all smiles, but Fan Li had slight anger on her face that was hard to hide.

"Is something wrong, brother Fan?" he asked.

"Oh no, nothing's wrong. It's just that today was harvest day and we got paid, so we were thinking of going to the city, and wondered if you would help us in that," Fan Yanshi said.

"Ah, right. I forgot completely," Alex said. He was so into teaching the beasts that he forgot to be there to watch the transaction.

"Right, right, you must want my boat. Sure, we can go," Alex said. "Also, how much did we earn this time around?"  &n

bsp;

"290," Fan Yanshi said.

Alex paused for a bit. "290?" he asked. "But the harvest this time around was even better than last time."

"Yes, but apparently the price of ingredients has lowered again, so we didn't get much," Fan Yanshi said.

Alex frowned a bit. "Price decreased? No way that can happen twice in such a short amount of time, right?" he asked.

He knew for a fact that the price wasn't low because there was an increase in supply. That was almost impossible this far out north unless every other village gained someone like him all of a sudden.

There was definitely foul play here.

Chapter 867: Complaint

Fan Yanshi was a little reluctant because he understood just how little they meant to a sect that was around for nearly a thousand years now.

However, he still understood that they could not let this continue. Not only were they lowballed every time they tried to sell something nowadays, but they were also provided with some of the worst resources that could barely grow anything.

Alex steered the ship until he saw the mountain range in the distance, behind which was the sect.

After around 10 minutes, they landed next to the mountain and walked up to the pass between the mountain range where people from the sect stood guard.

Alex was about to go ahead and speak, but Fan Yanshi stopped him. "Please, let me do the talking. I'm from the sect so my words will hold whatever little bit more weight they are worth," he said.

Alex frowned a bit but nodded in the end.

Fan Yanshi walked up to the guards and introduced himself. "Hello seniors, I am someone from one of the villages affiliated with the sect and have some things to complain about. Who should I speak to?"

The guards looked at them carefully and then pulled out a talisman before contacting someone.

"Wait for a bit, someone will come by soon," the guard said.

Fan Yanshi nodded and stayed around in the snow outside. It was turning evening, so they needed to quickly get done here and leave for the city.

The people in the village were already making lists of what they wanted this time around.

A person came out, an older woman with streaks of white hair on her head and a cultivation base of True Emperor 8th realm.

"I was called?" the woman asked.

"Yes, elder. These people are from one of the sect's villages and want to complain about something," the guards explained.

"Huh? What do you want?" the older woman turned to the three.

"Elder, we come from the village nearby where we survive by selling what we grow for the sect back to the sect. However, recently even though our harvest has grown, our earnings have lowered."

"Is the sect really paying less for everything now?" he asked.

"Huh? No, prices have not lowered. What do you mean?" the older woman was confused.

"Then have we been lied to?" Fan Yanshi asked.

The woman frowned and brought out a talisman. "Who's your handler?" she asked.

"Sha Yuan," Fan Yanshi said.

The woman looked at the talisman. "No, the prices here are… okay. You could argue for a few spirit stones more, but based on what you have harvested this quarter, you do get only 350 True spirit stones. That's a lot better than most other villages do, you know? They barely even reach 300," she said.

"What?" Fan Li cried out in surprise from behind before quickly clutching onto her mouth.

"Please forgive my wife, elder. She's surprised because we did not get 350 True Spirit stones. We only got 290," Fan Yanshi said.

"Huh? But it says here you got 350. Are you saying your handler lied? That's a big accusation, you know?" she said.

"Yes," Fan Yanshi said. "He lied. Not only did he lie, elder, but look at what he gives us as resources for the next harvest."

Fan Yanshi handed over the storage bag and the woman checked the bag.

"What the hell? Why are these so bad?" the woman was surprised. A flash of anger showed up on her face and she looked at the guards.

"Go call this Sha Yuan outside," she said.

They waited for a few minutes before the guards brought out the young man who was immediately worried when he saw the situation.

"Disciple Sha Yuan, can you tell me everything you did today in their village?" she asked.

"Nothing much, elder. I simply took what they harvested, paid them, and gave them the resources," he said while glancing at the three.

"And how much did you pay them?" she asked.

"350 True Spirit stones," he said.

"Lies!" Fan Li shouted.

"What lies? Why would I lie?" the young man shouted back.

"Are you really telling the truth?" the elder asked.

"Of course, elder," he said. "Do you believe these untalented fools who can do nothing but feed off of the sect?"

The older woman frowned. "Then what about the resources? Why are the resources that they are getting so bad?" she asked.

"Bad resources? I do not know about that, senior. I just grabbed some randomly and took it. My apologies, I should have checked," he said.

"No, he's lying. He said that it was because the sect was lacking in resources, so we had to use the trash ones," Fan Yanshi said.

The older woman frowned. She couldn't tell who to believe here. She asked one of the guards to go bring another batch of better resources for them in the meanwhile.

Then, she got to thinking.

The four of them saw the contemplative look on the elder and knew that she was thinking, but it was impossible to say what she was thinking exactly. Was it in their favor or not?

"What's there to think about so much?" Alex asked from the side, derailing the older woman's train of thought.

"Please don't speak while I'm thinking. These things are hard to discern," she said.

"Well, just feed him a Truth Seeking pill. He will tell you if it's a lie or not," Alex said.

"That's easy to say, young man. But using such a big pill for such a small case isn't worth it," she said.

"But it will help us get through this faster," Alex said.

"It will, but I'm not willing to spend such an important pill for this," she said. "Pills are already so hard to get by anyway."

"Huh? I mean, if you don't have one, I can let you use one," Alex said as he pulled out a pill from his storage bag. "Here, eat it."

Sha Yuan looked confused and frustrated, while the older woman's eyes shined. "Where did you get this pill?" she asked.

"Did you make this pill, brother Yu? You don't have to use it here," Fan Yanshi said.

"He couldn't have made it. It's a True Rank pill. If he can casually make a 100 True Spirit stones worth pill, he wouldn't be here to complain," she said.

She tried to gauge if the pill was a fake one, but the aroma and slight fluctuations of energy coming from it proved that it was a real one.

"It costs 100 True spirit stones for a pill?" Fan Li looked surprised. "Brother Yu, you can't use that."

"It's alright. Where else would I use such a pill?" he asked.

"Maybe sell it?" she said.

"It's fine," Alex said and turned around to look at the elder. "You are fine with me feeding him the pill, right elder?"

The woman narrowed her eyes, trying to look at his expression, but she could see nothing through the mask at all.

"If you want to end a few dozen true spirit stones worth of disagreement using a pill that costs twice as much, then be my guest," she said.

"Of course," Alex said and placed the pill in front of Sha Yuan to eat. "This disagreement is not about the money after all."

"What? No, I'm not eating that," Sha Yuan said.

"Eat it," the elder ordered.

"But, Elder it could be poison. They are trying to poison me," he said.

"It is the real pill," she said. "And if I'm wrong, I have an antidote to save you. Now eat it."

The young man was forced to eat the pill in the end, and then the truth came out.

It was true. He was duping the villagers by not paying them what their harvest was worth.

The female elder was a little surprised, but she had already expected it. However, what was more surprising was the fact that he had duped the sect as well.

It turned out that not only did he pay less to the villagers, but he also hid some of the harvests from the sect.

It was obvious that the handlers took a few things for themselves, but in the overall span of things this never really harmed the sect since what was stolen from them was negligible.

However, when the female elder found out that he had stolen nearly 10% of the harvest from the village last time, and nearly 25% this time, she became furious.

Sha Yuan was made to bring out everything he stole from the sect, plus the spirit stones he got and in addition to that, more of what he owned as compensation and punishment.

Then, he was removed from his job as a handler, and Fan Yanshi was promised that he would get a new handler soon.

Sha Yuan was taken by the guards to be imprisoned and punished by the sect's law enforcers for a month or two.

"Here, these belong to you," the elder said. "I hope you can forgive us for our mistake."

"Of course," Fan Yanshi said. "It wasn't the sect's mistake after all. It was just the one individual."

"Thank you," the elder said. "Now, if you will excuse me."

She turned around and left.

Fan Yanshi and Fan Li looked at what they had just obtained.

"So much money," she said with shining eyes. "We're rich."

Chapter 868: Scarcity

With such a clear night, the group had no worries about any snowstorm to fight through this time around.

So, when they did reach the city, they didn't even realize they were here because of the nonexistent barrier this time around.

The 5 of them entered and they immediately went to the general store. Alex asked to leave once more and left for a place where pills were made.

He was a little confused about something and wanted to check it out. Just earlier this evening, the conflict with Sha Yuan had required him to bring out a Truth Seeking pill.

That was a simple matter for him, but the elder there had said it cost a hundred True Spirit stones or so.

Pills shouldn't cost that much. Even his pills of Immortal grade would only read hundreds of True Spirit stones in the auctions.

There was no way these pills were of Immortal grade. When someone mentioned anything about pills, they would usually compare the price on an average level.

An average pill was considered to be around 40% in harmony. Which meant a pill of 40% harmony cost 100 or more spirit stones here. That was absurd.

Alex had a general idea of why that might be, but he still wanted to find out if his hypothesis was true, so he arrived at a place that wasn't different from the Alchemy guild.

The previous time when he was here, Alex had gone to a pill store, but the price there wasn't written, so he didn't know how much they cost. However, those should cost quite a lot because the ingredient there belonged to the alchemists or rather the sects themselves.

However, in a location like this, where he would be the one to provide the ingredients, he wanted to see how much they would ask of him.

"Hello, I wanted to have a pill made and wanted to know how much it would cost," Alex said to the clerk.

"Yes, what pill... do you need making?" she asked, a little surprised by Alex's mask, but she caught herself before she let herself slip.

"A Truth seeking pill at 50% harmony," Alex said.

The woman paused. "50%? A Heaven-grade pill? I'm sorry, customer, but we have no alchemists that can make such a high-quality pill," she said.

"What? You don't even have alchemists to make a 50% pill?" he asked.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Alex frowned, but then he did remember this place was quite far in the north, so there may be other better ones in other cities.

"You can buy some in the pill stores maybe," the woman said.

"Yes," Alex nodded absentmindedly. "If I may ask, how much would the pill cost to make? Given that I provide the ingredients of course."

"If we did have alchemists that made the pill, a 50% Truth Seeking pill would cost about... 140 True spirit stones," she said.

"What the... that's so expensive," Alex couldn't help but cry out.

"My apologies, but that's just how it is," she said.

"Is there a reason?" Alex asked. "Is it because of the Heaven's Frost sect?"

The woman's face twisted as she thought of the words to speak. "Kind of. Definitely in an indirect way," she said.

"Can you explain some more?" Alex urged her.

"The sect warns people against being Alchemists, and only says they can be one after joining their sect. But joining an ancient sect is not an easy matter."

"Even if one joins them, becoming a good alchemist itself isn't easy, so they stop," the clerk said. "In the end, there are neither too many alchemists in the sect, nor out of it, and overall, due to the scarcity of the alchemists, the price goes up," she said.

Alex sighed. He knew that the Heaven's Frost sect was trying to gain a monopoly on alchemists, but he didn't think the situation was this severe.

"You guys still have alchemists right? Can you tell me if they are alright? Do they get threats from the sect or such?" he asked.

"No, no threats. The Heaven's Frost sect does make some announcements once in a while to tell people that they will have a much easier time if they join them, but aside from that there is nothing," she said.

"But you did say the sect warns people against being Alchemists, right?" he asked.

"At the start, yes, but they never really go after anyone just because they practice Alchemy," the girl said. "At least not in the open."

"Huh? Not in the open?" Alex said.

The girl looked around, very careful not to speak out of work, and whispered softly, "Alchemists have been known to go missing from time to time. And surprisingly, it is never from the Heaven's Frost sect. You get what I'm trying to say?"

Alex's eyes shined. "Are they hunting down alchemists?" he asked.

"People have requested them to find the alchemists, but they surprisingly never find out what happened to them. And even stop looking for them after a month of 'searching'."

"You can guess what's happening right? Everyone knows what's happening. You get too good and the sect gets jealous so they come for you. That's why we don't have any good alchemists. They don't even want to be one," she said.

Alex frowned. Alchemists were in that much of a danger? He made a mental note of never revealing he was one.

"May I ask how many alchemists have gone missing by now?" he asked.

"Well, there's not an official number, but there should have been at least 50 high-ranking alchemists just this decade. Each one of them was a great and upcoming alchemist too. Such a shame," she said.

Alex shook his head. The sect was going too far to keep the monopoly. He would have to remain safe and not reveal himself.

It seemed Alchemy was going to have to remain a bit of a secret for now.

He walked out of the building and went back towards the general store where the group were.

50 alchemists had gone missing in just the last 10 years. Alex wondered how the sect expected to thrive if that kept on continuing.

If people stopped being alchemists, they would surely suffer too, just from an economic standpoint.

'Whatever, it's not my place to think of such problems. What am I going to do? Fight the sect that has a 30 thousand-year-old history?' he thought and shook his head.

He met up Fan Yanshi and the rest who were happily spending the nearly 500 True spirit stones they had received this month.

They were really happy. If they continued earning this much every month, the villagers could soon have to stop worrying about money and could actually start having children like they always wanted to.

After spending all the money on important things and then some, the group left the city.

Alex brought out his boat and while it was still night, they returned back to the village.

Chapter 869: Scouted

Alex went back to his room after returning to the village.

Since he was interrupted the other day, he wanted to directly go back into teaching his little beasts about what he knew.

So, he brought out Pearl and Whisker and had them learn it all from where he was stopped the other day.

Pearl kept rolling around and saying that he was bored, but Whisker was very curious about it all and learned it extensively.

Seeing him learn so much made Alex want to only add more and more content to what he taught.

He taught them for an hour or two, then paused for an hour where they cultivated and soaked in what they learned, and then continued again.

After about 8 hours of learning that, Pearl was bored out of his mind, and even Whisker thought it was too much.

'Uhh... maybe I should stop,' Alex thought.

Just then, someone knocked on the door.

Alex walked out and opened the door to find Fan Yanshi outside. It was around 3 in the afternoon, so Alex was surprised anyone was even looking for him.

"Can I help you, brother Fan?" Alex asked.

"Brother Yu, the new handler is here, and um... she's asking for you," Fan Yanshi said.

"Asking for me? Why?" Alex was surprised.

"I don't know, but they're asking for you specifically," Fan Yanshi said.

'Was I found out? Did the saints notice me?' Alex wondered.

"How did they know who I was?" Alex asked.

"I don't know, but they asked for the alchemist with the mask," Fan Yanshi replied.

Alex paused. "Shit! They know I'm an alchemist?" he asked.

"Yes, that's how they called you," Fan Yanshi said.

'How did they find out?' Alex thought. He thought back to everything that could give him away and remembered the one instance where he had brought out the pill yesterday.

'That elder knows I'm an alchemist,' he realized.

He walked up to the front where a 25-year-old girl with Mind Tempering 3rd realm cultivation base waited for them.

"Are you the one?" she asked as soon as she saw Alex.

"Maybe," Alex said.

The girl frowned. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Yu Ming," Alex said.

The girl brought out a talisman and read through it. "So it's true, you really aren't from the sect."

"No, I came here about 4 months ago. Is that a problem?" Alex asked.

"No, it's not a problem," the girl said with a smile. Then, she brought out something from her storage bag and placed it in front of her.

"Can you pour your Qi on this please?" the girl said.

Alex looked at the formation plate below him and recognized the formation on it. That was the formation not check his spiritual roots.

"No," Alex said. "I will not use my Qi there."

The girl frowned. "It won't do anything bad to you. It just checks your body to see what sort of spiritual roots you have," she said.

"I know, and I won't use it. Please take it back," Alex said.

The girl continued frowning and even got a little agitated. "Brother, please don't be so hard to deal with. I have been asked by the elders to do this. If you continue refusing, I will have to return to the elders and tell them about it," she said.

"Sure," Alex said and turned around.

The girl stomped her foot on the ground and left angrily.

"Brother Yu, was that... do you think what you did was good?" Fan Yanshi asked.

"It's... sigh," Alex didn't know how to explain. "I might have to leave here soon, brother Fan."New n0vel chapters are published on

"What do you mean?" Fan Yanshi asked with a serious face.

"I don't have time to explain," Alex said and ran back into his room.

Fan Yanshi and the rest stood around, not understanding what was happening.

"Honey, what's going on?" Fan Li asked.

"I... I don't know," Fan Yanshi said. "I think Brother Yu is being scouted by the sect, but he is rejecting it for some reason."

"What do we do now?" Fan Li asked.

"I don't know," Fan Yanshi said then looked up. "Everyone, we should get back to work."

The others that were watching the show reluctantly returned to their job, and so did Fan Yanshi. He returned back to his work which was to feed the beasts in the stable.

He did it for an hour or two before someone came running for him. An elder really had arrived.

It was evening now, and the sun had already gone past the mountains, but the elder in the sky was still being lit up by it.

The female elder, the same one from yesterday, slowly drifted down to the village.

Fan Yanshi thought of calling Alex, but Alex was already there.

"Young man, why did you refuse to take the test?" she asked.

"Because I didn't want to, and I have no intention of joining the sect if that is what you're after," Alex said to the woman.

The woman was a little surprised. "So you realize we're here to get you to join us. Can you tell me why you don't want to join our sect?" she asked.

"I have no intention of joining any sect," Alex said.

"But you're an alchemist. Do you have any idea how dangerous it is for alchemists to be out by themselves in this world?" she asked.

"I have some clue," Alex said. "But that threat alone isn't going to make me join you, so please just go back."

"I'm afraid I can't do that. I come here under the sect master's orders. If you want to refuse, then refuse to him. If he is okay with that, then you may return back to them," she said.

Alex frowned but nodded. "Okay, let's go."

The elder smiled and her Qi grabbed onto Alex. Alex let her pick him up and take him away while the rest of the villagers watched him leave from the side.

"You did good," the elder said as they flew.

"Yeah, well I'm still going to refuse," Alex said.

"Don't be so stubborn," she said. "Also, can you really see through that thing? Are there holes?"

"I can see, don't worry," Alex said.

"You must have a very recognizable face if you are hiding it then," she said.

Alex didn't answer.

They reached the sect and the elder quickly brought him in before taking him down the mountain to the massive valley that was the sect.

This reminded Alex somewhat of the Hong Wu sect, only these mountains were either volcanic or snow-filled, so no one actually lived on the mountains themselves.

Many disciples of all cultivation bases looked at him curiously.

Alex ignored them and stared at the rather fancy-looking blue building with scripts all over it.

"How many alchemists do you have in this sect?" he asked.

"None," she said. "It's hard to have one when people are afraid for their life. Besides, we teach talisman here, so it's hard to keep a disciple's interest."

"Then why do you want me?" he asked.

"Because we desperately need some. Always paying for pills is not the way to go," she said.

"Can you protect me from the Heaven's Frost sect if I were to join you?" he asked.

The woman hesitated for a bit before saying, "we don't know if its the Heaven's Frost sect that is responsible for everything>"

"Don't we?" Alex asked. "Would you be willing to eat a Truth-seeking pill to answer the question again?"

The woman hesitated even more. "We can hide you," she said. "If you remain hidden, you can grow for a long time."

"Yeah, I don't buy that," Alex said. "Let's just go to the sect master so I can refuse him."

"There's the sect master," the woman said, pointing to the blue building with the scripts.

"Then call him out," he said.

"What? No, he will meet us in there," she said.

"I am not going inside a building with so many scripts all over it," Alex said. "You surely understand why I am reluctant, right?"

Being trapped inside a barrier was the last thing he wanted to do right now.

Being trapped while with a Saint realm cultivator that is most likely a Saint Foundation or a Saint Core was even worse.

"Fine, if you're going to be stubborn, then stay here. I will go call him," she said.

Chapter 870: Talk with the Sect Master

Alex waited outside the tower while the woman went to bring out the sect master.

An elderly man that looked to be around 60 years walked out of the building along with the woman.

"This is the young man that keeps declining, sect master," the woman said.

The old man continued forward, but his spiritual sense landed on Alex before he arrived. The old man paused.

He disappeared from the woman's side and arrived next to Alex.

"You're strong," he said.

"Tsk!" Alex frowned. This was the one thing he was worried about and it came true.

Since he wasn't yet a Saint realm, his Immortal Concealment technique could barely hide his cultivation base. He had hoped that now that his Qi was much denser than normal, it would hide him, but unfortunately, it didn't.

"I... I can't tell what your cultivation is, but it's strong. Who are you?" the old man asked and his spiritual sense landed on Alex.

But the old man couldn't see his face as the Mask was impenetrable.

"Greetings, senior. I am called Yu Ming," he said.

"Yu Ming... and what does junior brother Yu Ming want from hiding himself as a villager?" the old man asked.

The woman behind the saint realm old man was a little confused by the conversation. She couldn't understand why the Saint would call him strong.

"I merely seek to stay lowkey and cultivate. I simply happened to find one of your villages and have no intention towards your sect," Alex said.

"I... will believe that," the old man said. He looked Alex up and down for a moment. "What is that mask?"

"Nothing that should concern you, senior," Alex replied.

"It's certainly a treasure," the old man said. "Don't worry, I will never do anything to antagonize a potential alchemist. You are one right?"

Alex nodded. "I can make some common pills," he said.

"Oh, I hear True pills are just the same. I'm sure you can make it if you have the ingredients," the old man said.

"I'm sure I could," Alex said. "But if I did, I would put myself in danger, wouldn't I?"

"I reckon you would," the old man said as he scratched his chin and followed. "What if we could hide you?"

"I'm sorry, senior, but I really have no intention of joining a sect," Alex said.

"You don't have to join the sect. You can just be an alchemist that works for the sect. We will pay you well," the old man said.

To be honest, Alex was very tempted by the offer. All he had to do was make some pills for the sect, and he could happily spend his time in peace until it was time to break through to the Saint realm.

However... "What about the Heaven's Frost sect? What if they find out?" Alex asked.

"They won't, I promise y—"

"What if they did? Would you be able to protect me?" Alex asked.

"Our sect is merely a thousand years old. We have no such capabilities to fend off an ancient sect if what they want is with us," the old man said.

"Then I must disappoint you and reject your offer," Alex said.

"Young man, please reconsider. I foolishly opened my sect in the domain of the ruler and realized too late that most people won't migrate here. As such I am really lacking in manpower, especially ones that can make formations and pills."

"Formations I can forgo, as I can substitute them with scripts now. But there is nothing to substitute alchemy. As such, I will need to keep you here even if you desire not to," the old man said.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "Senior, do you believe that I am polite to you because you are my senior, or because you are more powerful than me?" he asked.

"Is that not it?" the old man asked.

"No," Alex said. "I am polite to you because you and your sect members have been polite and helpful to me."

"However, if you start to become rude, I will become rude as well. So, please do not go there," Alex said.

The old man was about to say something when he stopped. "Will you really not join my sect?" he asked.

"No," Alex said. "But, if you are in need of pills, I have a few with me that I can sell to you. Because you have been polite to me, I will set them at a discount."

"Really?" the old man's eyes went wide and a smile appeared on his face.

"Yes," Alex said and brought out a storage bag with pills he obtained from the cultivators he had killed back in the Demon realm. He had taken out most of the Saint ranked pill for himself, so he was only selling True pills now.

"Please check," he said.

The old man's spiritual sense fell on all of them and he started getting excited.

"I will write you a list of the pills and what they do," Alex said and took out an empty talisman to write it all.

After finishing, he handed it to the old man and asked, "how much do you think I can get for these?"

The old man thought for a bit and gave an answer. "About 30 thousand True spirit stones," he said.

"I will sell these to you for 20 thousand," Alex said.

"Are you serious? Do you really want to give so much discount?" the old man asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "It looks like you need it."

"Thank you, young brother," the old man said and took out the spirit stones. "Did you make all of these pills?"

"Some I did," Alex said. "Some I got after killing the people that tried to steal from me."

"Oh," the old man was a little taken back. "Haha, it's a good thing I didn't try that then."

"We should be done here, right?" Alex asked.

"Ah, yes. We are done," the old man said.

"Then I shall leave," Alex said and turned around.

"Wait," the old man stopped him. "You are a guest of mine. Surely I can't send you just like that. Please come with me so i—"

"Thank you, senior. But that will not be necessary," Alex said. "I will return now."

"Where do you live again?" The old man asked and the woman by his side whispered to him the location.

"Oh, with those failed players," the old man said. "I will let them know to treat you better."

Alex stopped. "Failed players?" he asked.

"Yes," the old man said. "They are a part of a group that calls themselves players who seem to have an unnatural amount of talent. However, these are ones with no talent at all as they don't even have spiritual roots."

"The villages are formed with mostly these individuals, alongside others as well," the old man explained.

Alex stood stunned as he finally understood why there were so many people with no spiritual roots or talent in cultivation at all.

They were all players. In fact, they were all most likely players that had died and were cloned and were sent back to the outer world after their original body was gone.

Chapter 871: Farewell

"Wait little brother, I will take you back," the woman offered Alex her help even as he was already walking quite far away.

"He doesn't need it," the sect master said. "He's stronger than you and can return on his own."

The woman's eyes went wide. "No way," she said. She was already in the True Emperor 8th realm. How could the man in front of her be even stronger?

"Are you sure, sect master?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "I can't see through his cultivation at all, although it should be very strong."

The woman looked back at Alex with a surprised look.

"Let's return," the old man said.

"But what about him? Shouldn't we send some scouts to the village to keep track of him or something," she asked.

"No need," the old man said. "Anyone in their right mind will leave now that they have been revealed to be an alchemist. The only way to keep him here would be for me to act against him."

"Can you?" she asked.

"I can," the old man said. "But you don't want to keep an alchemist imprisoned. They are masters at healing you, but they are also masters at poisoning you. You don't want to leave such a fate in their hands, especially ones that you have imprisoned, now do you?"

"I suppose not," the woman said. She looked behind to look at Alex, but he was already long gone.

Then, she returned back to her own work.

* * * * * *

Alex was happy he didn't have to fight the old man. With a cultivation base of Saint Condensation 4th realm, Alex would've surely killed him if the fight was to the death.

He stopped thinking about that very quickly though as his thought went on about running away.

Now that his identity as an alchemist had been revealed, given how dangerous the situation was with the Heaven's Frost sect, he surely couldn't stay here anymore.

'I will have to say my goodbyes,' he thought.

'Still, I can't believe they are all players,' Alex thought.

He quickly returned back to the village where the people were gathered, waiting for him.

"Brother Yu, you're back," Fan Yanshi said the moment he saw him come.

"Brother Yu," Fan Li spoke as well.

The people immediately started asking him as to what had happened, and Alex explained to him the best he could.

"You... you are a True realm cultivator?" Fan Yanshi asked in surprise.

"Yes," Alex said. "I'm sorry for lying to you. I was just looking for a place to lay low for a while."

The crowd hesitated for a bit.

"I see," Fan Yanshi said. "You... you can continue to lay low if you want to."

Alex shook his head. "My identity as an Alchemist has come out, so I will have to leave now," he said. "Please excuse me, I will have to prepare."

Before anyone could say anything, Alex entered his room and closed the door behind him.

The people waited for a while, but before long, they realized that he wasn't coming out anytime soon, so they left.

People woke up the next day and went to their work. But before they did, they returned back to Alex's house to see if he had left.

He hadn't.

Fan Yanshi came to the house multiple times, but Alex didn't leave.

The day was over, and the night came by. Everyone went back to their houses, but Fan Yanshi remained.

However, he too left in the end and went back to his house.

The next day, he expected to see Alex out, but he hadn't. He came by multiple times on the second day too, but Alex still hadn't come out.

That day ended very quickly for him too and so he returned to his house.

The next day, he woke up and went to Alex's house again. This time, there was a crowd, and in the middle of the crowd was Alex.

"Brother Yu, are you leaving?" Fan Yanshi asked. His wife, Fan Li also came up to the crowd behind him.

"You're here, brother Fan. I've been waiting for you," Alex said. "Yes, I am leaving."

"I see..." Fan Yanshi's heart soured.

"However, before I did, I wanted to give you something," Alex said and brought out a storage bag.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Look yourself," Alex tossed the storage bag over to him.

Fan Yanshi looked at what was in the bag and couldn't help but feel overwhelmed by it all.

"This is?" he asked.

"Some things I have no need for at the moment, so I would like to give them to the village," Alex said.

"Inside are many different pills, formations, and talismans, all of which I made myself and which I had spare of. They will be useless to me very soon, so I hope to put them to better use," Alex said.

"Some of them are for harming others, so please be careful when you use them. Most of them can harm True realm cultivators," Alex said. Most could also hurt early Saint condensation cultivators, but Alex didn't want to mention that.

"What?" Fan Yanshi looked up in surprise.

"There are also weapons and shields. Although they aren't as plentiful as the other things I'm afraid," Alex said.

Fan Yanshi checked the storage bag and there were dozens of weapons and shields and armors. No way could this not be considered plenty.

Then, he saw another thing and he couldn't help but be scared for a second.

"Brother Yu, this... we can't take this," he said. There were nearly 5 thousand True spirit stones.

To Alex, it was a small change of spirit stones, but to these people, it was nearly 5 years' worth of work.

"Take them, and use them in cases of emergencies," Alex said. "Also."

Alex tossed him another storage bag, which Fan Yanshi slowly opened.

"The boat? You're giving us the boat? Don't you need it?" Fan Yanshi asked.

"I fly way faster without the boat," Alex said with a smile. Then, he brought out a bunch of talismans and hesitated for a bit.

He took out one talisman before giving them to Fan Li.

"These are all information I could write down about gardening and plants," Alex said. "There are some recipes on medicinal pastes as well as a basic introduction to alchemy, formations, talismans, and scripts if anyone of you wishes to practice."

"Thank you," she said softly. Although the paper talismans were light as a feather, they felt heavy in her hand.

"That's all," Alex said. "Now I must leave."

"Will you come to visit us again?" Fan Yanshi asked.

"If I can," Alex said. "I can't make promises, but I will try."

"Where will you be going?" Fan Li asked.

"Out of the State of Xue," Alex said. "I need to go somewhere where the Heaven's Frost sect won't be able to reach me."

Alex said and walked away, but the talisman in his hand made it hard for him to say his farewell.

He contemplated on whether to give it or not.

"Brother Yu?" Fan Li called him when he wasn't doing anything.

Alex sighed. He didn't have the right to keep this knowledge. "Sister Li, can you come here please," he said.

Fan Li walked up to him with curiosity on her face. "What is it?" she asked.

"Here," he gave her the talisman. "You guys deserve to know this. I've known it for over a decade now."

Fan Li took the talisman and read it quickly. As she did, her eyes went wide and tears filled them quickly.

"Brother Fan, everyone," Alex spoke out loud. "Sister Li."

"Farewell."

Alex flew off.

Fan Li remained there with her hands on her mouth as she read the talisman over and over and over again.

The talisman said that the person responsible for sending all the players here was looking for a way to bring them all back, and in just two more decades, he would do it.

"What is it? Why are you crying?" Fan Yanshi asked as he approached his wife, who simply handed him the talisman.

As Fan Yanshi read the talisman he too started getting emotional and his hands started shaking.

"We found our way back home," Fan Yanshi shouted and started crying with tears and snot dripping down his face. He immediately hugged his wife who started weeping all out as well.

"We're going home, Emily. We're going home."

Chapter 872 Intrusion

Alex flew through the night sky, through what was a blizzard in its own right.

Whisker was staying in his robe, looking far in the distance at some possible light source. Anything that was less than a city, Alex wouldn't stay around in.

He would stop from time to time to catch some rest, and cultivate. But mostly, he was flying through the land, heading east, towards what he considered one of the most important places on this continent.

The Dao mountain.

A mountain that helped you in gaining dao was incredible, to say the least. There was some confusion about how a person not in the Saint realm could enter, but he would know about it when he arrived at the foot of the mountain surely.

The way he was headed, there was only a single town marked on the map. A nameless town that held the Frozen Heart sect.

Alex would have to make a stop there before heading towards the Dao mountain through the mighty mountains all over the north of the continent.

Alex was now flying over the mountain range that divided the states of Xue and Dong. If he followed the mountain range south, he would come across the Endless Tunnel where he could mine the ores of Starforged Tungsten.

'Later,' Alex thought to himself and continued flying.

It would take him about a day to reach this nameless city. It would take much less if he could fly with all his speed, but the blizzard troubled him a bit.

Not to mention, the Northern continent was a large piece of land. Compared to the Western Continent, it was much larger. It was about 3 times as long as the Western continent with about one and a half times the vertical width of the Luminance empire.

Now that Alex thought about it, the Western Continent was much larger than it would appear in the maps because over a third of the land was hidden in the Beast realm.

'Still, the Northern continent is quite large,' Alex thought. Of course, that wasn't to say it had more or fewer people. Given how treacherous life seemed to be here, compared to the other continents, the population was most likely less when considering the ratio of land.

His thoughts continued as he kept flying.

Sun rose from the east, and while light did shine through the thick clouds, it still snowed relentlessly.

Also, now that it was daytime, there was no light to guide Alex at all, so all he could do was check his compass and hope he was in the right direction.

He continued flying for half a day before he noticed something. Whisker saw a patch of black far away on the ground.

If it were in the mountain, Alex would assume it was some rock showing through, but since it was in the ground, it was most likely something man-made.

At least he hoped so.

Whisker's vision was still hampered by the constant snowing, so Alex slowed down and got closer so that he could see it with his spiritual sense.

As he got lower, he felt something pass through him.

He had entered some sort of formation. Instantly, multiple bells rang on the ground and a dozen or more people flew into the sky to confront him.

Alex thought of running away, but that would only make things worse and the people that had flown up were all Saint realm experts.

'So many,' he thought.

"Greetings, I mean no harm," Alex said to the people that flew up. He reeled in his spiritual sense so that he didn't come off as rude or invasive.

The group of cultivators flew up to his eye level and looked at him.

"Who are you, intruder?" the girl at the very front asked.

"Senior, I'm sorry. I was looking for a city that lies around here. I seem to have intruded your place," he said.

"What city? There is no city here," the woman said.

"Huh? There should be a nameless city here. It says so on the map," Alex said and tossed out a map towards the woman.

The woman looked at the map and frowned. "It clearly says our sect is here, and yet you try and dare lie?" she asked.

"What?" Alex frowned. "Wait, is this the Frozen Heart sect? Is that massive city shown on the map just the sect?"

"Of course," the woman said.

Alex's eyes went wide. 'Just my luck,' he thought. Unknowingly, he had entered the domain of one of the ancient sects with resources spanning back nearly 30 thousand years.

'I should have known a city without a name was suspicious when there was such a big sect nearby,' he thought.

"My apologies," he said. "I will leave right now."

"You cannot come and go into our sect as you please," the woman said.

"Senior, please. It was an honest mistake. Certainly, you can let go of those right?" he asked.

"I can not," the woman said with a cold voice as her aura started enveloping Alex.

Alex couldn't tell the cultivation base of the woman exactly, but it was in the Saint Foundation realm.

A Saint Foundation realm cultivator was trying to capture him.

Alex frowned. Then, he fought off the aura that was trying to constrict him and ran.

"Get him," the woman said.

The other 11 women that were around her suddenly flew off behind Alex.

Alex pushed his spiritual sense to the max, capturing the 11 women in his senses, who were quite surprised. They couldn't see his cultivation base, but he wasn't in the Saint realm certainly.

They couldn't understand why his spiritual sense was so strong. For that matter, they couldn't understand why he even had spiritual sense.

Alex brought out a sword the moment he saw the women prepare their weapons and attacks.

"Whisker, go back," he said.

11 different attacks flew right up to him. Alex turned around and created a tongue of fire right behind him where the attacks were coming from.

"Explode."

The fire exploded into a blinding light, destroying most of the attacks that were flying in his direction, while also sending him flying back.

He had used a bit too much of his Qi and intent in this one, so the explosion was stronger than what he could have handled.

His face was fine thanks to the mask, but the rest of his body was charred for the most part. His burnt skin slowly healed as the power of the Undying God went into effect.

The girls however weren't stopped for as long as he had hoped they would. They all came to attack him but suddenly stopped.

They paused and turned around to look at the woman that was their leader.

"That's a surprise," she said as she flew up to him. "Not a saint, yet you are still capable of learning a Dao."

"Thank you for the compliment," Alex said, but deep inside he felt a bit of dread. Nobody had ever noticed his Dao aside from Shen Jing, and now someone did.

The Northern Continent was truly something else.

"Will you come with me willingly? Or will you continue fighting?" the woman said.

"Surely you don't expect me to come with you when you plan on hurting me, right?" he asked.

"Hurting you?" the woman gave a surprised look. "If I planned on hurting you, you would already be dead."

The temperature in the surrounding suddenly went down as everything around Alex started freezing solid. Even the air got dense and sank down.

Alex felt his body start to grow stiff as the world tried to freeze him.

It was the world that tried to freeze him, but the one making the choice was the woman in front of him.

She was using her dao to freeze him.

Alex could survive the cold, but this was something else. There was Intent here, wishing to hurt him, so even if the cold didn't him normally, it did a bit now.

Immediately, he used his own dao to create heat onto his body and then onto the air around him, and started fighting the woman's own authority over the world.

The woman gave a surprised look. "2 different Dao? Color me surprised," she said.

Alex was one step away from calling out Godslayer when the woman suddenly stopped.

"I am not going to hurt you," she said. "We are not evil cultivators that kill anyone that comes by us. But, we also can't simply let you go."

"What do you intend to do with me?" he asked.

"You will go through a trial, where we will determine whether you have any bad intentions towards our sect or not."

"If we find out that your intentions are bad, you will surely be killed, but if you really did come here as just a mistake, you will be let go of immediately," the woman said.

Alex thought for a moment. Was going with someone just because they said that was a good choice? But what other choice did he have right now?

"Fine," Alex said. "I hope your words are true."

"I hope your words are true as well, young man," the woman said. "It will be a shame to lose such a talented individual."

Alex sighed and finally stopped being on edge. His senses finally landed on the women and only then did he manage to focus on anything aside from their cultivation base.

Each one of them looked colder than the other, but each one was also more beautiful than the rest.

"Come with me," the woman said and flew down. "I will take you to the elders."

Chapter 873 Trial

Alex flew down with the woman, constantly on his edge to make sure she didn't land some sneak attack on him while he had his guard down.

As he got lower towards the ground, his spiritual sense that was now out finally saw the sect for what it was.

A city.

"So it really is a city," Alex said absentmindedly.

"This is the Frozen Hearts sect. You need at least this much to accommodate all the disciples and elders of the sect," the woman said. "Also, pull back your spiritual sense before you offend someone you shouldn't offend."

"My apologies," Alex said and quickly pulled his spiritual sense until it was about 50 meters in radius.

"Pull it back further," she said.

"I'm afraid, I can't do that. I will have no way of telling where you are if I do so," he said.

The woman's spiritual sense landed on his face. "What's wrong with your eyes?" she asked.

"I can't see at the moment," he said, not explaining any further. "If you don't mind me asking, what's your name?"

"Me?" she repeated. "You can call me Gan Murong. I'm the leader of the group of elders responsible for security."

Alex felt weird watching the woman speak. Her voice spoke with a jovial tone from time to time, but her face never revealed a single expression that would point to her having fun in this conversation.

They continued flying, and Alex was stunned at this moment. "Just how big is the sect?" he asked.

"You can tell just by… right, it's about 10 kilometers in all directions. Although, that's just our building," she said.

'10 kilometers in all directions?' Alex was surprised to hear just how big the sect itself was.

"Here we are," she said and landed somewhere. Alex landed behind her and suddenly saw 20 different spears point at him from out of nowhere.

He was ready to attack, but the spears stopped a few meters away from him.

"Come," the woman said.

Alex carefully walked and the spears followed. The spears were held by True Emperor realm cultivators, and it looked like they were all guards too.

There were so many strong cultivators that guarded the sect. How many more would there be in the other parts of the sect?

Alex continued walking and found that he was being taken along some rather narrow hallway.

"Is this the way to the elders?" he asked, worried that it might not be.

"No, this is not," the woman said. "It will take time to gather the elders. Until then, you will be imprisoned."

"What? That's…"

"Do you have any problem with that?" the woman asked.

Alex grumbled for a bit. "No," he said. This was better than just getting attacked or even fighting back.

He was then taken to a rather wide room and pushed in. "You will remain here until it takes time for me to gather the elders. Once they are gathered, you will be called," she said.

Alex nodded and turned around to go sit on the bed.

"Wait," the woman said.

Alex turned around, curious as to what she might need.

The woman extended her hands and said, "hand over your storage bags."

"What?" Alex was taken aback. "No, it's mine."

"I can not let a prisoner remain in a prison with all of his treasures. You must part with it until the day of the trial. If you are innocent, we will return the storage bags back to you," she said.

"What if you steal things from here?" Alex said.

"Steal? Hah! We are the Frozen Heart sect. What need do we have to steal from someone that is not even a Saint yet? Do you believe our sect to be so petty?" she asked.

Alex frowned and thought for a moment. After careful consideration, he took all of the storage bags he had and handed them over. "I trust you to keep your words."

"If you are innocent, you have nothing to worry about," she said and walked away, closing the door behind her.

Alex tried to peek outside with his spiritual sense, but he couldn't see anything beyond the door. There was a formation blocking his spiritual sense to just this room.

He touched the ring on his hand and was glad that at least the items that were important to him were on him.

He looked around the room, but it was a simple room with frost building all over the walls.

With nothing else to do, Alex sat crosslegged and started cultivating.

Time passed slowly, and he was lost in them. While the elders were let know about him, he continued cultivating day after day.

And nearly a week later, the door to the room finally opened again.

A young woman walked in. Her face was cold, and her cultivation base was at the peak of the True Emperor realm.

Alex had to admit that this girl was beautiful. Certainly one of the most beautiful women he had seen in a long time.

Which made him wonder if that was their reason for sending her. Were they trying to lure him with a beautiful face?

"You are called to your trial. Please follow me," she said.

Alex stood up and followed. However, every step of the way, he stayed on guard, making sure to never let a single thing go past him without him noticing him.

The dark and gloomy walls of the sect made it look anything but alive. Alex couldn't even see any lanterns in the room, which only made him wonder if there were some other sources of light in the hallway they were walking through.

If not, were they walking through the darkness? Sure a cultivator could see quite easily with even the least bit of light, but not having any didn't seem like something an ancient sect like this one would do.

Finally, the girl led him to what he could only imagine as a massive room. He spread his spiritual sense and it wasn't until it was about 50 meters wide that he finally reached the ceiling.

'So it isn't an open room,' he thought. As he walked forward, he noticed multiple sources of aura all around him and his spiritual sense saw them as well.

Most of these were middle-aged or elderly women. Not a single one of these were men at all.

9 of them sat around on tall chairs and looked down at him.

"Kneel!" one of the voices ordered, but Alex didn't move.

The girl that brought him here hit his leg from behind to make him buckle, but all she did was hurt her own leg.

"I would like to remain standing if you will allow me, elders," Alex said to the 9 figures.

"Bold," one of the women said and scoffed a bit.

"Fine, remain standing," the woman at the center said. She put forth her hand and something flew off of it. His storage bags.

"You may have them back," she said.

"Thank you, senior," Alex said and started looking for what was missing.

"Don't bother. We don't steal from juniors," the woman said.

Alex nodded and stopped. Not because he believed them, but rather because he didn't want to offend them.

"Murong, bring it," the old woman shouted, while the other 8 waited for her to keep speaking.

The guard leader, Gu Murong, that had brought Alex here came from the side along with something.

She held a box in her hand and when she arrived in front of Alex, she opened the box and showed a pill inside.

"Do you recognize that pill?" the old woman asked.

Alex sensed it and nodded. "It's a Truth Seeking pill," he said, feeling a little amused at how many times this pill was being used recently.

"Good," the old woman said. "Now eat it."

Alex took a deep breath and grabbed the pill before eating it. As it entered his body, instantly, his body devoured it and nothing remained.

The old woman waited for a while before speaking again.

"What is your name?" she asked.

"I am Yu Ming, senior," Alex said truthfully.

"And what sect do you come from?" she asked.

"I belong to no sect," Alex said.

"No sect, huh? What are your intentions in entering our sect grounds?" she asked.

"I had no intentions of entering your sect grounds. I mistook the sect for a city I could stop by to rest," he said.

"No intention you say," the old woman spoke curiously. Despite Alex's confession, she still didn't trust him at all. After all, there were many ways to hide one's memories even from themselves until a certain time arrived.

"If you have no intention towards our sect, as you speak, why do you hide your face from us?" she asked.

"My eyes are wounded, so I wear this mask to keep it from bothering others from seeing the medicine I have to put on behind these," he said.

"Really? Take it off," she said. "I want to see if your face is anything recognizable."

Alex hesitated for a bit, nodded, and slowly pulled it off. His face was fair, and nothing was wrong, but his eyes were black, almost all of them covered in a dark crust of the dried paste.

"What's wrong with your eyes?" the old woman asked.

"Enemy attack, senior," he said. "Someone poisoned my eyes, and I now need to use the paste to heal myself."

"Hmm," the old woman thought to herself for a while. "Murong tells me you know two Dao, is that true?"

Alex hesitated for a bit, but since they already knew, there was no reason to hide it. "Yes."

Chapter 874 Forbidden

'Oh my god', 'He's lying', 'No way', and many such sentences were blurted out in the span of a few seconds when the 9 elders heard that he had understood 2 Dao.

"Show us," the elderly woman at the center spoke, and everyone went quiet.

Alex sighed and moved his hand so that he was pointing ahead of him. Suddenly, a meter away from him, the air started glowing red.

Particles in the air burned as slight smoke appeared out of nowhere, and the 9 women felt the air shift as the newly formed hot air began to rise to the ceiling while the cold air came downwards.

They also felt the world's energies moving onto the point in front of the young man, letting them know for sure that he was using some sort of Dao.

"Use the next one," the woman said and Alex nodded.

A small tongue of fire appeared in front of him and using the least bit of energy he could, Alex exploded it.

The bang from the explosion shook the room, but aside from that, it did nothing. Still, the women managed to see the movement of Qi in the air and knew it was Dao.

"Wow, you really did manage to learn two different Dao," the woman said. "Are you really not from any sect?"

"I haven't been in any sect for over a dozen years now," Alex said.

The elderly woman nodded. She hadn't found anything incriminating amongst the items in his storage bags. However, there was something that made her extremely curious about what she saw in his items.

"I found a lot of artifacts and books and many other things from your storage bag. How did you come by them?" she asked.

"A few of my enemies ambushed me and I killed them. I got these items as spoils," he said.

"Oh... and, did you get the empty talisman papers, formation plates, and alchemy ingredients the same way as well?" she asked.

"Uh, no I bought those," Alex said.

"Do you wish to start learning how to make formations and such?" the old woman asked.

"Not exactly," Alex said. "I already know how to make them. My intention is only to improve."

The woman's eyes narrowed and the rest of them got closer to look at him too. "For all of it?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"You're a formation master, a talisman maker, and..."

"And an Alchemist," Alex finished her words.

GASP~!

All the women there gasped at once when they heard that.

"Alchemist, he says."

"We found a criminal."

"Find his master and kill him."

Alex suddenly realized he had said something wrong. Were they angry that he was an alchemist?

"Who taught you Alchemy?" the woman at the center asked.

"Uhh... my master," Alex said.

"Who's your master? Name him!" the woman demanded.

"Uh, may I ask what's the problem? My master has been dead for over a dozen years now, so surely her name won't help you," Alex said.

"Your master is dead? Then name the sect or organization your master belonged to. Letting someone pass along Alchemy knowing that it is forbidden in these lands is not a crime we can simply let aside," the woman said.

"What?" Alex cried out in surprise. "Alchemy is forbidden? Why?"

"Because we say so. Now tell us," the woman said.

"Senior, I don't come from these lands. I come from the state of Xue. One of the reasons I ran was that I didn't want to get hunted down in that state. Is the situation the same here?" he asked with fear in his voice.

"We don't stop people from learning Alchemy here, but we do forbid it from letting someone pass what they learn to others. If you did come from the state of Xue, then I have no reason to punish the sect or organization your master belonged to. Rather, I have no authority," she said.

Alex was very much weirded out by the situation on this continent. Why the hell was that in both of the states he went to, there was some sort of law punishing Alchemists?

"Congratulations, you have proved your innocence," the woman said, making Alex feel surprised and happy.

"Am I free to go now?" he asked excitedly.

"Ah, not yet. There are still a few more questions we have to ask," she said.

"Okay," Alex said, wondering what they might be.

"You said you came here by accident. Can you tell us where you were intending to go?" she asked.

"I wanted to go to the Dao mountain to possibly learn some more Dao," Alex said.

"Hah! You wanted to go to the Dao mountain?" the woman repeated amusedly. "How do you intend to enter when you're not even a Saint?"

"Uhh... I intend to find some other way," Alex said. "I read that even those that didn't enter the Saint realm can go in there."

"Yes," the old woman said. "But only if they are part of the 5 Ancient sects. Did you not know that?"

"What? I didn't know that," Alex said and frowned a little. "Is there no way?"

"You can join one of the ancient sects? But the better way would be to simply break through to the Saint realm. All Saints are allowed free entry," she said.

Alex's frown didn't disappear as he fell into thought.

So if he wanted to enter the Dao mountain, he had to either break through to the Saint realm or enter one of the 5 giant sects.

He wanted to keep his freedom, so joining a sect didn't feel right to him. But, if he wanted to wait until he entered the Saint realm, that alone would take at least 2 years.

"Is there no other way?" he asked.

"No," the woman said.

"I see," he thought. "Can I join your sect then perhaps?"

"Are you a girl?" the old woman chuckled.

"Haha, I suppose I can't," he said. That was to be expected. 'It looks like I might have to go back to the Heaven's Frost sect.'

But he simply didn't want to go to that sect. That sect was trying to have a monopoly on Alchemists, and Alex simply didn't feel right joining them.

"If I may ask, which sect treats Alchemists the best?" he asked.

"None," the old woman said.

"None? Not even the Heaven's Frost sect? They have a monopoly on Alchemists though," he said.

"Yes, but they don't treat them well," the old woman said.

Alex frowned. Was that true?

"Alchemy is taboo in the northern continent, so I'm afraid no matter where you go, you will have a disadvantage. Most will try to keep you confined, others will push you away from their land," she said.

"Can I ask why?" Alex questioned.

"No, you may not. That is how the rule is," she said.

Alex frowned. What the hell was he supposed to do now then? Seeing his frown, the woman spoke up.

"I have a suggestion for you," she said. "Become our alchemist."

"Sorry?" Alex was confused. "Why?"

"We're lacking good alchemists and desperately need some. If you join us, solely as a pill provider, you will get many cultivation resources, which you can use to quickly break through to the saint realm," she said.

"Don't you hate alchemists?" Alex asked.

"What made you think that?" the woman asked.

"You forbid Alchemists from passing down their knowledge. Isn't that because you hate them?" he asked.

"No, we do not hate Alchemists. We appreciate them very much," she said.

"Then why the forbidding?" he asked.

"You will not get an answer from me," the woman said. "Now chose. Will you leave here and go somewhere else, or will you stay until you enter the Saint realm and in return get aid from one of the best sects on the entire continent?"

Alex frowned.

He frowned because there was really just a single choice he could make in this case.

"Fine, I will join your sect as an Alchemist. And only as an Alchemist. Also, I will leave whenever I want," he said.

"Very well. If you are worth it, we will work hard to keep you from leaving then," the woman said.

"Murong will take you to your quarters. You will be under constant surveillance, so be careful what you do," she said.

"Also, you are not allowed to speak with any of the disciples unless they speak with you first. Got it?" she asked.

"Understood."

Chapter 875 Along the Bridge

"Was the senior at the center the sect leader?" Alex asked as he and Gan Murong left the building.

"No," Gan Murong explained. "The Frozen Heart sect has no sect leader. We have the 9 elders who collectively make decisions for the sect."

"Oh," Alex was surprised, to say the least. "She was the one talking and asking the questions, so I assumed she was the one with the most power there."

"In a sense, she does," Gan Murong explained. "In the Frozen Heart sect, there must always be the 9 elders who are known as the Frozen Elders. They are the highest authority in the sect."

"Whenever an elder gets too old or wishes to no longer be a Frozen Elder, another normal elder is elevated to the post of the Frozen Elder."

"There have been many such changes, but Elder Xuan is the only Frozen Elder that has been here since the formation of the Frozen Elders. So, she garners respect from the rest of the elders, and as such is in a way not that different from a regular sect leader in how she's treated," Murong explained.

"Ah," Alex thought. "Ever since the Frozen Heart sect was formed... does that mean right after the Snow Immortal sect was destroyed 8 thousand years ago?"

"Of course not," Gan Murong said. "The Frozen Elders formed some 5 thousand years ago after most of the male elders had either left or went into closed cultivation. Now, no male elder or disciple remains in the sect any longer."

"Right, that makes more sense," Alex said. "It's hard to imagine someone could live 8 thousand years."

"There are some," Murong said. "But I guess they all went into closed cultivation very long ago, so I'm not sure if they count."

Alex nodded. He knew humans were capable of living even longer as a Saint cultivator, but the humans from these realms did not have much potential, to begin with. Still, being alive for 8 thousand years was not bad at all.

"If you don't mind, can you explain to me a little about what you guys cultivate here? I read that you lose emotions towards men, but how does that help you make stronger?" he asked.

"Ah, it's the opposite," Murong said. "The Frozen Heart scripture we practice is one of the best Heaven grade cultivation methods for anyone from Self tempering realm to the saint realm. It gives you a giant boost in power, especially when it comes to using yin or water arts."

"However, as a result, we lose the emotion of love. It's not just for men, but for everything. We lose all emotions of love."

"That is not to say we are emotionless," Murong said. "We do care about people, we do laugh, feel sad, angry, and everything else the other people can feel."

"We... we just can't feel love," Murong said. "It's tragic in a way really, but what can you do? You can't get strong without losing a few things."

"Some lose their childhood, some lose their family. Some lose friends and time. Some even lose their humanity to become stronger. If we really think about it, we are luckier than others when it comes to it," Murong said.

"Also, the Frozen Heart scripture isn't everything we make the disciples read. Only that those who haven't cultivated the Frozen Heart scripture aren't allowed to enter the Core disciples, or be part of the sect once they are all grown up," she said.

"Meaning they can leave and have a normal life if they wish?" Alex asked.

"Yes, they can," Murong said.

"I see," Alex said. "Would you mind if I bring out my Seeking mouse? I wish to see the sect through his eyes."

"Oh, sure. Go ahead," Murong said.

Alex nodded and called out Whisker. The little mouse came out from his right shoulder plate and jumped into his robes.

'Do not use your spiritual sense.' Alex made sure the mouse heard it the moment he was out.

"Oh, seeking mouse have cultivation base?" Gan Murong was surprised. "Since when?"

"He seems to be a mutant beast," Alex explained. "Also, he's incredibly slow at cultivating. Although, I guess he's still a little better than other Seeking Mouses."

"You got lucky. Where did you find the little guy?" Murong asked.

"Ah, do you know the realm of the Ruler in the state of Xue? I got him in a forest not far from there. I tried searching for more, but I couldn't find any," Alex said.

"Oh, we'll have to send some disciples to check the area sometime later then," she said.

Alex saw the world through Whisker's eyes. There was no mountain here. No volcano to warm up the land.

Even at day time, the cold atmosphere gave the city-like sect an abandoned look. If it weren't for the occasional disciples walking by, greeting Gan Murong, Alex would have definitely thought there was possibly no sign of life in the sect and the ancient sect of Frozen Hearts sect was nothing more than a facade.

They walked upon what looked like a massive bridge that slowly sloped downwards until it reached the ground down below. Alex made a whisker look behind him and saw that he had been in a towering castle with multiple stone bridges coming out of it from all sides, moving down to the cityscape.

There were multiple houses down below, all that looked like a normal city. But from what Alex understood, these were houses that belonged to the disciples.

If he was right, then the 3 walls that circled the city were to separate the Core disciples from the inner disciples, who were separated from the outer disciples.

The bridge sloped forward and they walked down it until they were at the edge, where there was a flight of stairs that took them nearly 50 meters down.

Only after coming down from the bridge did Alex finally see the enormous amount of female disciples wearing crystal blue robes that walked around.

Some of their eyes turned curious when they saw Alex. Most of them were surprised as male disciples weren't allowed in the sect.

If he was a guest, then he wouldn't have come down here either.

However, seeing as he was with the leader of the Law Enforcing team, they quickly bowed and stepped aside.

Alex was subtly checking the cultivation bases of the girls that walked by him, and to his surprise, each one of them had a cultivation base of True King realm or higher.

Not a single one of them was lower than that.

"Senior Murong, are these all Core disciples?" he asked.

"Yes, they are all core disciples," Murong said. "There are nearly 3 thousand of them in the sect."

Alex's eyes went wide. "And they're all over True Lord realm in cultivation base?" he asked.

"One of the requirements for entering the core sect, aside from learning the Frozen Heart sect is being in the True King realm or higher," she said.

Waves of shock hit Alex the likes of which he would have never imagined. Hearing that this was an ancient sect that was many thousand years was good and all, but hearing that there were 3 thousand different women that were all in the True King realm or higher was something he had never expected in his wildest dream.

That was akin to having 3 times as many competitors as in the Tournament of the Champions back in the Western Continent, and that included disciples from all over the empire.

Being able to bring this many disciples from just the Core sect of the sect was something else.

"Wait, do you mean there are more of such disciples if we don't count the requirements?" he asked.

"Of course. Many of the inner sect disciples are no less scary than the core sect disciples," she said.

Alex took a deep breath to gather himself. "Just... just how many disciples are there in this sect?" he asked.

"Hmm, should be around 200 thousand," Murong said. "There's a constant flow of disciples coming in and going out, so it is hard to tell."

"200... thousand?" Alex's first instinct was that she heard the question wrong, but she clearly explained why there were that many too.

Were these ancient sects these big? Then, another question came to his mind.

"Senior, if it isn't too much of a bother, can you tell me how many Saint realm cultivators there are?"

Chapter 876 The Alchemy Room

"How many Saints? Hmm... that depends on how many elders we have. As of right now, I can't tell you, but it should be somewhere between 100 and 120," Gan Murong said.

"Sorry... 120 Saint realm cultivators?" Alex was ready for a preposterous number, but this was too much. Wasn't that the number of the entire Luminance empire?

Was a single Ancient sect really that much better than the entire Luminance empire?

Alex wondered just how great the Western continent would have been currently if the people from over 5 thousand years ago didn't steal from the continent.

'Speaking of which, the Frozen Elders were set up around the same time too right?' he thought. 'I wonder if there is any relation between those two events.'

"This way."

Gan Murong continued on, taking him through winding roads, through the same looking buildings until she came to an area of the city that was sparse and wide open.

At the center was a rather large house, and Alex could see smoke coming up from the chimney.

"This is where you will be staying. It is primarily a place where disciples can come to learn Alchemy, but we will make a room for you to stay in," she said.

"Sorry, learn alchemy? Do they learn on their own or...?" Alex asked.

"We have a teacher inside that teaches them alchemy," she said, and quickly followed it by, "yes, I know. We're hypocrites. You don't have to remind me that."

"I wasn't going to say that," Alex coughed a bit and turned aside.

"You didn't have to. That's what any normal person would think," Gan Murong said. "Now let's go inside."

Alex nodded and opened the door to walk in.

The fresh smell of herbs and flowers blew out with the hot air as the cold air from outside moved in.

The hallway was big and a few disciples moved across from room to room. They all turned curiously to look at the only male that was entering the room.

Alex nodded towards the girl who looked at him, but aside from that, he did nothing. After all, he had been ordered to not speak to any of the girls without them speaking to him first.

"Right, about that order to not speak to the disciples, who do I speak to if I'm in need of something?" Alex asked.

"This is an important location in the sect as this is the only place where pills are made for all of the 200 thousand disciples and the nearly 150 elders. As such, there will be quite a few elders that will constantly be on guard here. You can speak to them," Murong said.

"Oh, I see," Alex said. "Also, are there any Saint alchemists here?"

"There are 2," Murong said. "But they're mostly focused on making pills for the elders. For the disciples, we don't have nearly enough."

"Here, down the stairs," Murong showed him through the house and went to an underground location where he felt multiple Saint realm cultivation bases.

The saints were standing outside 2 different rooms, as if on guard.

"These are the rooms where you will be making pills. They are large enough that you can make the pills and live in there. This is only reserved for Saint alchemists, but you are given a special place here because you can stay far away from the other disciples here," she said.

Gan Murong opened one of the doors and let Alex inside. Alex looked inside curiously and saw a rather fancy-looking room with marbles laid down on the floor.

The room was massive, nearly twice the total area of the house he was staying in in the village.

As soon as you walked inside, you were confronted with elevated steps in the middle of the room that led to a well-established set of formations that were just an activation away from spewing out fire.

Directly over that was a chimney that led smoke out of the room.

To the right, in the corner was a bed and it too was in a place that was slightly elevated as well.

Given the distance between the two of them, it was pretty much good enough to be his room.

Alex looked around at the formations that were crafted directly onto the walls and nodded to himself.

"This is nice," he said. He released his spiritual sense to look at the other things and noticed something weird. He walked up to the bed and pulled it aside to reveal a formation under it.

"Why's there a teleportation formation here?" he asked with a surprised look.

"That's not for you to use," Murong said. "You can't use it without something to give you authority anyway."

"I see."

"Rest for today. Someone will come to give you your task tomorrow. Is there anything particular you can't do? If so, I will let them know not to send those your way," Murong said.

"Uhh... Please don't have me make Saint rank pills. I don't know if I'm capable of those just yet," Alex said.

Murong chuckled a bit. "Why would I make an alchemist that hasn't entered the Saint rank make Saint rank pills?" she asked and shook her head. "You will be making mostly True rank pills and maybe occasionally some common pills."

Alex nodded. That he could do.

"I was told that I would be under constant surveillance. Does that mean I won't get any privacy at all?" he asked.

"Not entirely, no," she said. "The elder outside will be watching you the entire time she is here and while you are making pills. You will have 15 hours a day to make pills, and the remaining 9 hours to rest and cultivate. Those 9 hours will be without surveillance."

"In addition, you will get a free day once a week where you will also not be under any surveillance."

"That's... annoying," Alex said. "An alchemist cannot make pills for 15 hours a day, you know?"

"Don't worry, you won't have to make pills every minute of those 15 hours. There will be a daily quota you have to fulfill to receive the rewards the elders promised you. After you are done with that, you are free to do whatever you want," She said.

"But, if you do wish to continue, then any extra pills you make that day will be counted towards your contribution points. You can use that contribution points to get yourself whatever you want from the sect," she said.

"Hmm, that sounds better. Doesn't feel outright like slavery," Alex said. "Oh right, outside I saw the open land. Is there some reason why it doesn't have any buildings on it yet?" he asked.

"Uhh... no? It was just to separate this place from the other houses I believe," Murong said.

"Ah, is it possible for me to turn it into a garden? I wish to grow some plants there," Alex requested.

"Um, I will ask the elders about it. I can't approve of it myself," Murong said.

"Thank you, and one last thing," Alex said. "Can you tell me when the Dao mountain opened the last time?"

"Dao Mountain? That was quite recent. 2 months ago I think," Murong said. "You really are interested in the mountain, huh? Well, break through to the Saint realm and you will get free entry."

Chapter 877 First Day at Work

Alex sat down in front of the formations and looked at the talisman in his hand.

The elders or someone of authority had gathered a list of pills that needed to be made, and of those, Alex was handed about 50 pills that needed to be made.

That basically meant that the elders expected him to make 3 pills an hour. That sort of requirement was nothing for Alex though.

'Fortunately, there are no saint pills here,' Alex thought.

There was a reason why he was so reluctant to make Saint pills. The main reason for that was the fact that making pills needed not only Qi and physical endurance, but also mental strength.

For Common and True rank pills, someone with spiritual sense would basically not notice the missing mental strength with pill they made because of how strong it would be anyway. It would take nearly hundreds of pills before they were mentally fatigued.

However, for Saint rank pills, one needed the mental strength of a Saint realm cultivation base. Even the starting saint realm cultivators had nearly twice as strong as Alex's current mental strength.

It meant that if he tried to make Saint rank pills, not only would his Qi have to suffer the burden of Saint rank materials, but his mind, which was half as bad, would also have to suffer alongside it.

So, he was waiting to make them.

It wasn't just Saint rank pills either. Both Saint rank formations plates and flags, as well as Saint rank talismans, required him to have an incredible mental fortitude, which he just didn't have by comparison.

Alex placed his cauldron on top of one of the many formations, and it hovered about 15 centimeters above the formation.

A fire lit under it on its own and Alex couldn't help but sigh slightly. The formations here were just way too helpful.

He didn't even need to do a lot of things aside from focusing on the ingredients themselves. The formations even helped regulate fire.

Alex shook his head and spoke, "I didn't wish to show it to you this way, but I have no choice. Look carefully at what I do, okay? Use your spiritual sense."

Whisker, that was sitting inside Alex's Black and Gold robe, nodded slightly.

"Alright, pay attention."

The first set of pills he had to make were those that would help True Lord realm cultivators break through to the True King realm with rather ease.

So, Alex started making the pill.

Since he was showing how it was done to Whisker, he didn't use any of his Dao, since Whisker wouldn't know how to use it.

He pulled the lid and placed the first ingredient. He felt the elder outside watching him make the pill, but he didn't care. He didn't care that she could see that Whisker had a cultivation base either.

A sect like this would obviously know about Spirit Cleansing Lily, and that was all Alex needed to tell them. Given that they had already searched everything he owned, they wouldn't ask him to fess up anything else either.

Once the first ingredient was inside, Alex started moving it around, following the recipe perfectly while making sure Whisker could see everything that had happened.

He had explained it all to him before, but seeing was better than just listening.

Whisker too was very curious about everything, so he watched everything Alex did. He remembered the recipe, what it meant, and what Alex was doing. He could see Alex was following the recipe perfectly, and before long all the ingredients had turned into power.

Alex then used Elemental Guidance to push whatever energy there was in the cauldron towards the powder, and then simply clumped it all together to form a single pill.

He didn't use his immortal pill-forming technique at all.

Making high-grade pills was fine and all, but he couldn't just start making pills that had 90% Harmony. If the Frozen Elders realized how good he was, they might end up imprisoning him forever, forcing him to make pills till the end of time.

He couldn't have that.

He needed to be just useful enough that they treated him well, and just bad enough that they don't think of him as something they absolutely needed to have.

The pill flew out and it was 63%. Given that the elders were interested in Heaven rank pills, this would be quite amazing in his eyes.

"Did you see?" Alex asked Whisker.

Whisker couldn't speak yet aside from making screeching noises. Given that he wasn't as full of potential as Pearl, he was likely not going to speak for a long time.

But he could think, and as such pass along information through his spiritual sense, which through their bond, Alex could understand.

"Good, you got it. Your job for today is to watch me work all day and memorize it all. Once that's over, you can sleep," Alex said and got to work.

65%. 62%. 59%. 60%.

Even though Alex wasn't giving it his all, and even though he felt that it was somewhat of a waste of ingredients, he was still certain that the elders would be happy with the result.

In the first hour, he managed to make 3 pills because he was slow and showed Whisker what needed to be done.

Starting with the second hour, however, the pills instantly jumped up to 5 an hour. If only he didn't need to make Heaven rank pills, he could've used the pill-splitting Qi to finish those 50 in almost no time at all.

Unfortunately, he had to spend the next 10 hours just making pills.

Whisker was tired by the end of the day and returned to his beast space to rest. Alex didn't say anything as he deserved it.

Alex took the pills and opened the door to greet the elder that stood outside.

"Here are the pills, elder," he said respectfully as he handed them over.

"Are you done with all 50?" the elder outside asked.

"Of course," Alex said. 'Didn't she look at me the entire time? I thought she was supposed to surveying me the entire time I worked.'

"What about Heaven grade? They all need to be Heaven grade, you know?" she said.

"Yes, they are all Heaven grade," Alex said.

"Really? How do you know? I didn't see you test any at all," the elder said.

'Ah, that's the problem,' Alex realized.

"I don't need to test them, elder. Those are pills I've been making forever and know them in and out. Still, if you think I need to test it, I can show you," he said and brought out a few pills.

One by one, he put the pills in the pill tester to show that they were all indeed heaven-grade pills.

"Oh, I see," the elder said. "They are indeed all in the Heaven rank. Although, why are you using such old devices? Those take forever to figure out how good your pill is. Use the testing formation inside the room or request for a better testing apparatus."

"Oh," Alex was surprised. He hadn't expected there to be different pill testers other than the one he was using. He didn't need one, but it was still convenient to have one.

"Thank you, elder," he said. "I'll keep that in mind."

Chapter 878 Going Wide

Alex planted some fences and then used a hoe to make some divots on the ground. Then, he handed some seeds to Whisker and told him to plant them.

Whisker took the seeds and ran along the side of the divots planting the seeds. He wasn't just planting the seeds either. He was using his knowledge about plants and gardening to plant the seeds appropriately.

From time to time, he would stop and look back at Alex to ask if a seed should go there.

"What would happen if their roots touch each other?" Alex asked the little mouse. Whisker tried to think but there was too much information in his mind to sort through immediately.

"They have contradicting elemental roots, so you don't want them touching each other," Alex said. "Which is why you have to plant them separately, far away from each other."

Whisker remembered the lesson from a while ago and nodded. Then, he continued planting the seeds.

It took about half an hour for Whisker to plant all the seeds. He could have done it faster, but he had to constantly stop and ask if he could do what he was going to do, or Alex had to stop him and explain why what he was doing was bad.

Alex was starting to instinctively know why something was bad and why something was good in regards to the plants, and he was explaining the situation to Whisker rather easily.

Alex then moved some snow from the side onto the dirt and then spread some ashes that he had requested from the sect on top of it. These were volcanic ashes that were very good for the soil, so he was mixing them here.

With a single thought, the snow on top of the dirt easily melted and started dissolving the ashes a bit. That helped the ashes penetrate the soil even better, and reached underground.

Once all that was done, Alex now just had to hope that the winter which was currently plaguing the land would soon be over so the land could see some more sunlight.

From what he had heard, it still snowed a lot in the summer too, but the atmosphere was generally hotter in the summer than in the winter.

Once his job at this little garden of his was done, Alex let it be and walked back into the house and went back to his room.

Today was his one free day in a week, so he was planning on cultivating all day, but he had already cultivated last night, so he was a little reluctant about that.

"Well, let's go back to the trusty Alchemy then," he thought. He was planning on making Whisker start making pills, but he was still having trouble learning how to manipulate things with Qi.

So, until he was able to use Qi to manipulate objects or even just fly, then there was no point in having him start Alchemy yet.

"Well, time for me to improve myself then," Alex thought.

But then, there was another problem. How did he improve himself exactly? What was there to improve even?

The only things that could be improved were either the ingredients or the technique with which the pills were formed.

Other than that, there was nothing else that could be improved. And unfortunately, these two things were something he couldn't consciously improve.

He couldn't suddenly make an ingredient better than it was, and he couldn't suddenly make the technique work better than it was supposed to.

The ceiling in making a 100% harmony pill was high, but he was already reaching it. Just 6% to 8% more and he would have made a perfect pill.

But those 6% to 8% were indeed reliant on luck, and that was not something he could improve upon.

If he couldn't touch the ceiling, then there was really just a single choice left. He would push away the walls.

"If I can't reach high, then it is time to reach wide," Alex thought.

It was time to make more than just a single pill at once.

There were 2 ways he understood he could go about making more than a single pill at once.

The first was to make pills in multiple cauldrons at once. The second was to make them all in a single cauldron.

There were advantages to both and disadvantages as well.

For the first part, making pills in multiple cauldrons allowed you to follow the recipe without having to alter it even in the slightest.

You didn't have to worry about figuring out how many ingredients went into a single batch, or figuring out if the heat needed to be adjusted because there were many ingredients this time around.

You could easily just follow the recipe and make the pills as you always had.

In fact, you could make two entirely different pills using this method too.

Only, there was a problem. You needed to be able to keep track of many things at once, perhaps even more so than a normal cultivator was capable of.

Alex was confident he could split his attention between two cauldrons and make the pills at the same time, only if they followed the same recipe.

Having to keep track of two different pills with all the ingredients, recipes, and different timings and such would be incredibly hard.

On the other hand, making pills in a single cauldron wouldn't really cause any increased problem to one mental ability to handle Alchemy as the number of things to keep track of would increase at all.

Also, he didn't have to split his Qi to manipulate anything other than the fire and the ingredients.

This was very easy, compared to the other method.

However, this one had more problems than the other one.

For starters, there was only a certain amount of pills one could make in a single cauldron. Too many ingredients and the energy in the cauldron would reach a point where it would be too compact to keep making the pill.

Even if one did indeed use intend to make maybe 2 or 3 pills at once, there were more problems one had to think of.

First of all, making different pills at once was just not something that was possible, not that one would intend of doing so with this method.

Another, more troubling problem was that having more ingredients meant that heat distribution wasn't proper at all.

Each ingredient had certain capabilities when it came to being able to absorb the heat from the cauldron. Adding more ingredients meant there needed to be more heat in the cauldron, which meant the temperature had to be different.

Because of that, to make multiple pills at once, you had to change the temperature portion of the recipe to match the new amount of ingredient so they all got the same amount of heat in the end.

"No, wait a minute," Alex frowned all of a sudden. "That would be true under a normal scenario, but I know the Dao of Heat. I can have the heat in the cauldron constantly be the same temperature using the dao."

"Which means I won't have to change the recipe at all. Only the amount of ingredients."

Alex's eyes shined. He knew what he was going to start with.

Chapter 879 That Corpse

Due to the second method having fewer cons for him, Alex decided to make multiple pills in a single cauldron.

Since this was the first time he was trying something like that, he started with a common rank pill.

He had plenty of ingredients, so Alex brought out his cauldron and started heating it.

Heat... that would be the most important thing for him to keep track of here as even the slightest deviation in it would affect how the ingredient was shaped as a result.

Alex took a deep breath and prepared the ingredients. He portioned the ingredients as per the recipe, increasing the amount by twice in all cases.

He then brought the temperature of the flame and cauldron to the required level and placed them in the first set of ingredients.

Putting in twice the ingredients, Alex had to make sure to separate them onto the two sides of the cauldron so that they didn't gather up and get heated evenly.

At the same time, he made sure that the temperature of the cauldron never changed at all.

The world was pushing Qi into the cauldron constantly as Alex used his authority over Heat and used his Dao.

Once the first set of ingredients turned into powder, Alex immediately moved it away from the direct head and placed it in the 2nd set of ingredients.

Once again, he separate the ingredient so as to not crowd them up and changed the temperature as required.

He continued doing the same for the following ingredients until all of them had turned into powder. Then, he quickly poured the energy into the powder and formed them into two different pills without using his pill forming technique as that only worked for a single pill.

He brought out the pills and excitedly checked on them.

72%, and 74%.

"Hmm, for being my first try and not using the pill forming technique, this is actually quite good," Alex thought.

These were Common pills sure, but at the point he was, Common pills and True pills didn't have much difference to him given how far above he was from having either of them being difficult for him to make.

"Hmm, let's try with the True pills then," he thought. He needed to make a choice on what to make.

Given the recent demands for pills that helped one cultivate faster in between the True realms, he decided to make those pills.

He ended up on a pill, the recipe of which was in his mind since a decade ago.

As he went on to double the now required ingredients in his mind, a thought came to him that made him feel a bit weird about some things.

For millennia now, the Western Continent was without any connection to the outer world, and yet it was still not doing very bad in terms of Alchemy.

Of course, the lack of Saint Qi made the Saint rank alchemists weaker in general, but it was still comparable to Northern Continent.

Actually, it was doing better in terms of recipes because of the Demon realm they robbed and the meteor shower.

"Wait, is there really no recipe in the Northern continent that's not available in the Western Continent?" he thought.

It had been over a week, and he had made nearly 400 pills, and yet only a few of those were from recipes that he wasn't aware of. And given what sort of recipes they were, Alex was certain they were only available in the Frozen Heart sect too.

So, from his experience, all the public recipes in the Northern continent were recipes he had already learned back in the Western continent, and the Western Continent in fact had way more.

"Did the continent really regress that back because of the quasi-ban on alchemy?" Alex thought. "No, how are the recipes even being shared around in the first place?"

That was when Alex realized something he had forgotten for a very long time. It was something that had happened to him during the very early part of his life in the sect where his body was being controlled by his clone's soul.

"Is that it?" Alex's eyes shined.

He remembered the time Wen Cheng had asked him to go somewhere with him and taken him along with some elders to a location in the southern forest where there was a formation in the middle of nowhere, growing Alchemy ingredients, that included some Spirit Cleansing lilies.

Later on, he had found the man behind the formation and garden, who was already dead underground.

Alex had taken away his storage bags that contained nothing but ingredients and recipes for pills and formations.

That was how he had acquired so many of those recipes. That was what made him learn all the recipes of the northern continent before even arriving here.

It wasn't that the Western Continent had the recipes that were also available in the Northern Continent, but rather that corpse he had found, did.

That man was most likely someone from the Northern continent, and he had teleported to the Western continent.

Alex pulled out a talisman from his storage ring. It was kind of rugged at this point, but it could still be used, he knew that.

Lady Ren had told him that it would be usable in 10 years, and 10 years had already passed for him. If not, he could always go to the location with the extreme Water Qi and have the talisman recharged.

However, that was not why he took the talisman out for now. He was wondering what made the man teleport all the way to the western continent.

"No, he didn't choose to go there. It was random," Alex understood. But if it was random, then he could have arrived at any place in the world. Even the most dangerous places wouldn't be out of reach, and yet the man had used it.

'What prompted him to use such a dangerous talisman?' Alex thought. Then, he remembered that not only was the man a formation maker, but also an Alchemist.

An Alchemist in the Northern Continent.

"Dear god, how bad is the situation here?" Alex feared. If a man would rather face uncertain death than whatever was going on here, then the situation must be more severe than he thought.

'I should really make sure not to show my talent around here at all,' he thought. He put back the talisman and shook his head.

What he had learned just now was something he hadn't expected to, and in some ways, he would have rather not learned at all. Still, this was useful information, so he simply sighed and let it be.

"Yeah, let's focus on making the pill for now," he said to himself and thought back to the ingredients list he was thinking about when he got sidetracked.

Once he was done, Alex pulled out the ingredients and put them into the cauldron.

Despite being True rank ingredients, Alex didn't have much trouble with them as he turned all the ingredients into powder one by one.

When he was done, the entire cauldron was full of powder from the ingredients on the bottom and their energy floating on the top.

The next process here would be to use Elemental Guidance to pour the energy into the powder, then turn the powder into a pill.

That was what he had done last time, which had made the two pills over 70% harmony.

However, for some reason, Alex thought of something else.

"Since I'm making two pills, will that work?" he thought. The powder had stayed in the heat for a slightly longer period of time, but that shouldn't do much harm to the overall result.

Alex took a deep breath and Qi moved on its own through his body, releasing involuntarily out of his hands and into the cauldron.

As soon as they entered, they grabbed onto the entire pile of powder and halved them at once.

The powders were then very easily formed into pills and suddenly a vortex appeared above each of them, pulling in the energy from the surrounding into it.

Alex waited patiently for the pill-splitting Qi to do its work.

Not long after, the two pills were prepared and Alex quickly pulled them out before looking at their harmony.

He had made some errors towards the end where he had waited a bit longer than he should have, and still, he somehow acquired such amazing results.

88% and 92%.

"Holy... shit!"

Chapter 880 Improvements

Alex made the pills once again and ended up on two pills that were at 89% and 94% harmony.

The pill-splitting Qi was an absolutely amazing technique to use for making the two pills at once. Not only did Alex didn't have to waste any time with moving energy and forming combinations on his own, but he also didn't have to focus on it at all as the technique worked on its own.

To this day, Alex was still amazed at how the technique worked. He didn't have to do anything and somehow it worked on its own.

He wondered if he would ever learn how that worked.

Alex continued making more and more pills, and at some point even reached as much as 95% with the process.

Alex started getting more and more interested and started using the weight measuring formation to make sure he wasn't leaving anything up to chance and tried again.

For the remainder of the day, he made about 30 different sets of twin pills, and the highest he reached was 96%.

Alex soon came to realize the advantage of using double ingredients instead of a single one. Because there were more than normal ingredients in the cauldron, the individual combinations that were capable of accepting the energy were also more than enough to make a perfect pill.

This meant that under the right circumstances, if luck was on his side, Alex might end up making a pill that took all the correct combinations, and as such end up with a pill that had 100% harmony.

100% Harmony. How long had it been since he had started making pills again? More than a decade long, and he was now approaching something that felt impossible at the time.

If only his master was here to see him.

Alex shook his head and returned back to work. He made a few more pills before going back to cultivate.

He decided he would also try out making pills using multiple cauldrons in the coming days, but for now, he needed to cultivate.

Starting the next day, Alex used the new method to make multiple pills at once. While it did surprise the guard outside, as soon as she learned the idea behind it, she didn't have much to say at all.

At least not to Alex. She did pass on the information to the Saint rank Alchemists that belonged to the sect.

However, those saints had been making pills for a long time and had already had those thoughts. However, without the Dao of heat, which they were so desperately hoping to learn soon, they didn't dare change the recipes to fit the pills.

As such, Alex became the only person to make two pills at once.

Because he was now making 2 pills at once, Alex could easily make about 10 pills an hour. As such, in just 5 hours, Alex was starting to finish his daily quota.

After that, everything he made was for the contribution point that would be granted to him at the end of the week.

Aside from that, Alex focused on cultivating his eyes and physique and spent the other time on the garden and Whisker.

Pearl did nothing but cultivate on his own in his free time. He wanted to practice the new techniques he had received recently, but there was nowhere to test them.

The training ground of the sect was accessible to him, but they were quite far away, and he didn't want to go there.

As such, both Alex and Pearl were stuck in the small room, cultivating by themselves.

Still, it wasn't so bad. They had reached a point in their cultivation journey where they didn't need to train to be able to continue with cultivation.

Instead just diligently cultivating was enough to keep their body and mind in top condition.

As such, Alex could simply cultivate and improve himself without having to do much.

Time passed before Alex knew it and it was already 3 months since he had been in the Frozen Heart sect.

Every day, he made somewhere close to 120 pills, of which all of the extra 70 pills would go towards his contribution points.

Alex had thought of using the contribution points to request some things for himself, but what he received from the sect for his daily quota alone was enough to make him realize that he didn't need it.

He received different types of fruits and pills, all of which could be used to further his cultivation base and speed it up by a lot.

Alex distributed his earnings between the three of them, and even then it was quite a bit for him.

For someone who wasn't used to using cultivation resources to improve himself, this almost felt like cheating.

In the 3 months, he was here, Alex had broken through again, reaching True Emperor 6th realm this time around.

Aside from that, Pearl was also close to breaking through as well.

Whisker was the one that perhaps showed the best improvement. In just 3 months, he had gone from the Bone Tempering realm to the Organ tempering realm.

In a year or two, he would certainly enter the true realm.

Considering Alex and Pearl's speed of cultivation, Whisker was very, very slow. However, going by normal individuals of this world, he was very fast.

After all, most people would take at least 5 months to go from the Bone Tempering realm to the Organ tempering realm.

Whisker was finally starting to be able to manipulate objects with his Qi, and could even manipulate multiple of them, so Alex decided to start his journey in cultivation.

He took out one of the random cauldrons he had received and made Whisker bond to it in the meantime.

Alex spent his own time making more pills, either by making them all in a single cauldron or using multiple cauldrons at once.

He was starting to be able to use up to 3 cauldrons if he gave his absolute everything, but he usually stuck to just 2 for the sake of not making many mistakes.

He was getting good at that, so he was also starting to mix and match the techniques so that he could make multiple pills on multiple cauldrons.

Making pills from different recipes was hard, but doing so with pills of the same type helped Alex make up to 4 pills at once.

'If only there was a way to make 3 pills in a single cauldron,' he thought. But then, the pill-splitting Qi would become useless for the most part.

Alex had to reluctantly stick to 2 pills only, but since he could use multiple cauldrons he was still doing quite good.

There was still some problem in making the best use of the two cauldrons, but that would take patience and practice.

For now, the best pill he had made while making 4 at once was 92%. That was quite great considering that he could still improve.

As for making 2 pills in a single cauldron, the highest he had reached in the last 3 months was still just 96%. However, he wasn't saddened by this knowledge as he was sure he would soon do better than this.

Of course, he was only thinking this all when he was making pills for himself. During the other times when he was making the pill for the sect, Alex was starting to go up to 4 pills in a single cauldron.

Since he didn't use any technique in the end, the pills rarely got better than 65%, but that was still quite amazing for the sect as Heaven-ranked pills were nearly impossible to get in a state where Alchemy was forbidden to be taught to anyone else.

Self-teaching would never help them improve to the same level as he had.

Over time, Alex started making more and more pills in the 15 hours he was allocated to work on, and the elders were starting to learn about it.

He had intended to hide for the most part, but he was becoming somewhat of a celebrity inside the upper echelon of the sect, who were starting to look at him as someone worthy of entering the sect.

As such, in the coming days, Alex's resources that he was to receive were also improved to reflect upon what he was doing.

Alex enjoyed the newly found resources and spent his entire time using them with his two beasts.

Their cultivation base improved, but not by enough to be noticeable. Whisker, however, was making proper improvements.

Around 2 months later, Whisker was finally able to completely refine the cauldron he had received.

Whisker was the least talented of the three, and as such Alex could finally understand what normal cultivators would have to go through to improve themselves.

In the 10 months of time Whisker had cultivated diligently to reach halfway through the Organ Tempering realm, Alex was already in the True realms, and so was Pearl.

Pearl was in fact still an infant when he had reached True realms, so it was fascinating for him to see a 'normal' cultivator's journey through his own pet.

"Are you ready?" Alex asked the mouse.

Whisker nodded and stood in front of the giant cauldron that was sitting on the fire.

It was his free day, so Alex was going to teach Whisker how to make pills on the days when he wasn't under surveillance.

If the little beast could really make pills, that would surely cause commotion in the sect and he didn't want that.

Alex prepared himself and looked at Whisker who was ready as well.

"Let's begin."

Chapter 881 Whisker's Improvement

"Start slow. Use the Flame Mastery Scripture to control the fire and pull it up to the temperature it needs to be," Alex explained as Whisker sat next to him, getting ready to put in the first ingredient.

When the temperature was right, Whisker put in the first ingredient and started moving it around as per the recipe.

The movement wasn't smooth, and the ingredient didn't contact the cauldron the entire time, so it was coming out a little worse than it should have.

Alex waited until the ingredient was about to turn to power and reminded the next instruction. "Lower the temperature and... no, lower even more. Yes, now keep it stable. Stable! It's rising, keep it low. Yes, now put the second ingredient."

Alex explained the little beast that was making pills for the first time and noticed an exorbitant amount of mistakes.

He didn't say anything though, as it was obvious he would make mistakes. Even he had made mistakes, despite knowing the recipes by heart when he had first started making pills.

He reminded what had to be done next and where he was making the obvious mistakes, but other than that, Alex was completely letting him do it all on his own.

After everything was done, the mouse tried to use the Elemental Guidance he had learned to put the energy into the powder, but that barely worked at all.

The structure just wasn't of the shape to collect the newly formed energy. Whisker didn't realize this and still continued to form his pill.

After he was done making the little pink ball, he pulled it out and showed it to Alex.

Alex smiled and took it. He placed the pill on a formation in the center, and instantly a number appeared on top.

7%.

"It's only 7%, little guy. What should we do? Do you know where you made the mistakes?" Alex asked.

The mouse thought for a bit and started communicating mentally. Alex heard everything and nodded.

"Yes, those are the primary mistakes. Let's try it again and see if you can rectify them," he said.

Whisker nodded and went back to making another pill.

Alex didn't say many things this time around, except for when he was making some obvious mistakes that he wasn't paying attention to.

A wide smile appeared on his face when he realized this one would be an obvious improvement.

When the pill came out, and Alex took it, a genuine smile formed on his face.

He placed the pill on the formation and a two-digit number popped up.

15%.

"Not bad, Whisker. You did better than even I did when I first started making pills," Alex said.

The mouse made some screeching noises of happiness.

"Alright, tell me what you did wrong this time around," Alex asked. Once Whisker told him everything he could remember, Alex made him do it all over again.

For the rest of the day, Whisker had to make the same pill over and over, perfecting the pill with each successive attempt.

When Whisker ran out of errors he could understand, Alex reminded him of new ones and told him what was wrong.

By the end of the day, Whisker was consistently making pills over 25%.

That wasn't a lot of harmony for Alex, but for someone who had just started Alchemy, that was an enormous amount.

"Every day I work, you will look at what I do, and try to understand it. On our free days, you will make pills from what you've learned," Alex said.

"I will teach you everything I know, and before long, you will start making immortal grade pills too, I'm sure."

Alex was absolutely certain he would be able to make Whisker create Immortal grade pills in no time, however, reality said otherwise.

No matter how talented Whisker was, or how great his curiosity was, he still needed to learn the normal way.

Until things were ingrained into him as if they were muscle memory, he wouldn't be able to improve at all.

Especially with just making pills once a week.

As such, it was only after 3 more months had passed that Whisker was able to make Heaven Grade pills.

Even after another 2 months passed, Whisker still wasn't able to make Immortal-grade pills as he had to pay too much attention to basically everything.

Despite Alex having made him some pills to improve his mind, Whisker still wasn't able to look at the structure and combination while in the middle of making pills.

So, even after learning the pill-forming technique to some extent, he was still not capable of making any good happen with it.

"Don't worry, you will learn it soon," Alex said and sighed.

Whisker had improved quite a bit for sure, but the improvement was quite slow. If someone had given Alex this same level of training, he would have reached over 80% harmony by now for sure.

'I guess that's what talent is all about,' he thought. The little guy didn't have the talent for alchemy, yet he was still working hard and showing results.

Wherever Alex was, he would reach there for sure. He would be slower, absolutely, but he would get there.

As such, Alex had every motivation to continue teaching him and wait for him to get better at it.

He was only in the upper realms of Meridian Tempering realm anyway. He still had much to go through before entering the True realms.

Plenty of time to improve on making pills.

In the last 5 months, Alex himself had only improved once, entering the True Emperor 7th realm. However, he was close to reaching the next realm and would do so in a month or two.

'It's taking much longer as I break through even though I get so many resources,' Alex thought. He knew things would slow down as he got to the higher realms, but he hadn't expected it to be this slow.

Now even breaking through the realms felt impossible to do in just 4 months.

"I only managed to breakthrough 3 times in the last 14 months I've been here, and Pearl only twice," Alex thought.

14 months. How easily time passed nowadays. 'Maybe it's because I'm just sitting in this one room, stuck with nothing much to do,' Alex thought.

He sighed. He couldn't help but worry about his mother, but there was nothing he could do with just worrying.

"Hmm... 14 months? Not exactly right?" Alex thought. Suddenly a thought came to him.

"I spent 4 months in the village, so I must have spent a little less than 10 months in this sect," he thought.

10 months was important to him.

"The Dao mountain opens very soon, doesn't it?" he thought. Only the students were apparently allowed, but since he had done so much for this sect, shouldn't he be allowed too?

Alex walked out the door and went out of the building. He wanted to know when exactly the mountain was opening.

Since he wasn't allowed to speak to any disciples of his own volition, he made his way up the giant bridge and walked towards the elder's section at the center.

The elder that stood guard looked at him curiously and stopped him.

"What do you need?" she asked.

"Senior, do you happen to know any information about the Dao mountain?" he asked. The woman was a Saint realm, so it was obvious she would know, but he still asked.

"Of course, what do you want to know?" she asked.

"It is opening soon, right? Do you know when exactly?" he asked.

"Um, 5 days maybe," the elder said. "It should be 5 days."

Alex looked at the time and frowned. It was close to the end of the day, so there were really just 5 more days left.

'What can I do in 5 more days?' he wondered.

"Do you wish to join too?" the elder asked. "I heard we only have 1966 Saints this time around that will enter the mountain, so the True realms will have about 34 spots to take up."

Alex was stunned by the number of Saints he had just heard, but what was more interesting to him was the number of spots for True realm cultivators.

"How do I take up the spot?" he asked.

"Well... you will need to be a disciple of one of the sect, or something like that," the elder said.

Alex's heart sank a bit before he asked, "I would like an audience with anyone that can give me that authority."

Chapter 882 Responsibilities and Opportunities

"I'm afraid you can't just get an audience with someone like that, young man," the elder said. "You will have to use some of your contribution points. Do you have any?"

"Uhh... yes I do," Alex said and pulled out his nameplate to check on it.

"Different elders cost different amounts of contribution points to bring out. Which one are you looking for?" she asked.

"Uhh..." Alex thought for a bit, but he really didn't know any important elders' names.

"Ah, Elder Xuan. How much would it cost to have an audience with her?" Alex asked.

"Elder Xuan?" the elder in front of him got a little confused. "The elder Xuan? She's the oldest of the Frozen Elders, you know?"

"Yes, how much would it cost?" he asked.

"That... let me check," the elder said. Since no one ever held an audience with her, the elder had to go ahead and check.

Her eyes went wide when she saw the prince.

"A full 30 thousand contribution points," she said. A normal core disciple could earn about 100 contribution points a week. If she were to ever want an audience with the elder, she would need about 300 weeks' worth of contribution points.

That was 5 years' worth of contribution points on a single conversation.

"I'm sorry, young man. It's just how--"

"Here," Alex handed her his nameplate. "Please summon the elder."

The elder weirdly looked at the nameplate and slowly sent her spiritual sense into it.

When the nameplate activated and she saw the information, her mind went blank for a few seconds.

The name 'Yu Ming' was there, along with the date he had joined the sect. However, aside from that, there was nothing about him. No age, cultivation base, nothing.

The only other thing in the nameplate was his contribution points.

The elder had to count 3 times before she realized the number she was reading was right.

Contribution Points: 56,437

"How did you...?" she couldn't even form a sentence. She looked at the date he had joined and realized it was 10 months ago.

10 month. That meant Alex had earned about 5500 points every month.

Even the best disciples in the sect never earned more than a thousand points a month, and yet the young man in front of her had done so 5 times over.

When she realized that he had done that on top of his daily quota of making pills, her eyes truly went wide.

"Senior?" Alex called out to the woman who wasn't responding at all.

"Yes, yes, I will do it," she said and used her authority to use up his points and summon the elder.

"You may leave now," she said.

"Sorry? You mean to enter, right?" he asked.

"No, leave," the elder said. "Elder Xuan won't give you an audience the moment she has been called. She will most likely come out of her cultivation tomorrow."

"You will be called when she comes out, so you can return for now," the elder said.

"I see," Alex said. 'What the hell? I don't even get to see her immediately?'

He felt a little dejected and returned back to his room. He needed to wait now, so he waited by cultivating.

5 days remained. Hopefully, that was enough time.

The next day came around, and Alex made the 50 pills as soon as he could to continue waiting for her.

He waited and waited, but it didn't look like she was going to come out today either at all, so there would only be 4 more days left.

As he was thinking that he had run out of the day, around evening, he received a message on his nameplate. Elder Xuan was ready to see him.

Alex got happy and immediately walked out of the building. He made his way to the Elder's place as the sun set and arrived there after it went down.

"I am here for my audience with Elder Xuan," Alex explained while handing over his nameplate.

"Oh, let me take you," the elder that was on guard for today said and took Alex over to Elder Xuan.

Elder Xuan was sitting in a room, sipping a cup of tea when Alex arrived.

"Ah, you wanted to see me?" the elder asked in a sweet tone.

"Greetings, Elder Xuan. I have a request that I hope you can fulfill," he said.

"Come inside first. We can talk slowly," the elder said.

Alex nodded and walked in. He sat in front of the elder and was about to speak when the elder stopped him again.

The old woman went on to take a teacup from next to her and poured a cup of tea for Alex.

"Drink," she said as she handed over the cup.

Alex thanked her and smelled the fragrant tea before taking a sip. That sip was all Alex needed to realize he was drinking some sort of treasure.

The tea slipped into his throat, and before he realized he was taking the second sip.

Then the third sip and the fourth.

Alex only got back to himself when he finished the entire cup of tea and felt a serene calmness flow over him.

"Have you calmed down?" the elder asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Thank you, elder, for letting me drink such a great tea."

"Haha, we aren't here to talk about tea, are we? Go on, tell me why it is that you need me," she said.

"Elder, I want to enter the Dao mountain," Alex said without beating around the bush.

"Enter the Dao mountain?" the elder asked. "Do you know how that's possible?"

"Not exactly, no. But I hear that the ones in the True realm that can enter have to be from the sect in some capacity. Doesn't that mean I can enter too?" he asked.

The elder thought for a moment before answering. "Technically, yes. You can enter. You are a member of the sect and have a cultivation base that is not in the Saint realm yet. By all means, you have the possibility of entering."

"However, there comes another thing that stops you from doing so," the elder said.

"Something stopping me from entering? What is it, elder?" Alex asked.

The elder sipped on her tea and said, "Responsibility."

Alex was taken aback. "Responsibility? Please explain, elder," he implored.

"Do you know how many Saint realm cultivators are entering?" she asked.

"Umm, wasn't it 1966?" he asked.

"Good, you know that." Then she said, "Then do you know how many of those are from the Frozen Heart sect?"

"Umm, around 100?" Alex asked. "There were around 120 elders, so I assume everyone but a few elders would be staying back, I suppose."

"Ah, only know about the active elders. You do not know how many remain inactive, that's understandable," the elder said. "Speaking of just the 120 active elders, the truth is only 50 of them will be going to the Dao mountain this time around."

"Sorry? Only 50?" Alex was surprised. "Isn't this quite an important event for a Saint realm cultivator? Why would they want to miss it?"

"Yes, it is important, but there are a few reasons," the elder said as she sipped her tea. "For example, you might be close to breaking through on a technique you were learning about, or had just learned a Dao and thus have no need for learning another one so soon."

"However, the main reason they don't go is that they have responsibilities. Responsibility to the sect, responsibility to the clan, responsibility to their disciples."

"Saint realm cultivators simply cannot leave their sects or clans without having someone to protect it in their absence. So, many of them don't get to leave it even when the Dao mountain opens up."

"We are the same. Of us 9 sisters, only 4 will be going this time around, while 5 of us remain behind. That is because we have a responsibility to protect this sect," she said. "Do you have a responsibility?"

"Me?" Alex thought for a second. He was about to say 'no' when he realized his daily quotas were in a way his responsibility towards the sect.

"The pills I have to make every day," Alex said.

"Yes," the elder said. "Because you have to make pills every day, you cannot leave the sect at this time. As such, I'm afraid that you cannot leave at all."

Alex felt devastated. Was there really no way?

"However," The elder continued. "Since you spent so many contribution points to speak to me, my saying no would be almost criminal. So, instead, I'll give you an opportunity."

"Opportunity?" Alex got curious. "What opportunity is it, elder?"

"The Dao mountain opens in 4 days, and one will be able to remain there for an entire month and return after that month ends."

"In a sense, if I were to say yes and let you go, you will have wasted a total of 35 days doing nothing for the sect."

"However, if you can fulfill your responsibility of those 35 days by the evening in 3 days when we leave for the north, I shall give you an opportunity to have an opportunity to enter the mountain," she said.

"Meaning..." Alex understood.

"You have to make 1,750 pills by the evening in 3 days from now," the elder said.

1800 pills. 3 days. 600 pills a day.

"Remember, it's an opportunity for an opportunity for an opportunity," the elder said. "Will you still accept?"

"Absolutely," Alex said without hesitation.

"Good," the elder said. "Go and rest. I will have someone prepare everything required by tomorrow morning when you may start on the journey of accomplishing the impossible."

Chapter 883 Many pills

Alex started his preparation.

Since he was going to be making pills all day long, he needed multiple cauldrons for sure to make all those pills.

He needed to make nearly 600 pills in a day. Excluding the time to rest and cultivate back his Qi, which would be about 4 hours, Alex would have to make 600 pills in 20 hours.

"30 pills an hour," Alex thought. Considering he could do about 5 sets of pills realistically, he would have to make about 6 pills at once.

"That's going to be hard," Alex thought. He could make about 3 pills at once in two separate cauldrons, but they would require a heavy focus on his end because of how many ingredients there would be for him to keep track of.

He couldn't just put 3 ingredients at once and treat it the same as when he made a single pill. He had to split the ingredients into 3 parts and make sure they were getting equal heat.

"Sigh, will I even be able to make 6 good pills at once?" Alex wondered. "What if every pill I need to make is different? No, that's not realistically possible."

"I guess I will have to wait and see."

Alex closed his eyes and started cultivating.

Come morning, someone knocked on his door and Alex walked out to see that it was the elder from the sect that was responsible for looking after him during the day.

"I heard about your arrangement with Elder Xuan. I will be making sure you don't cheat and do indeed make all the pills that have been requested," she said.

"I see, thank you, elder."

Alex took the bag full of ingredients and recipes and took it back into the room to start preparing the pills.

"I don't have time to waste," he said to himself and looked at the two cauldrons that were heating up already.

He took a few minutes to then look at the entire list of pills he had to make and separated them based on the amounts. There were 3 pills with amounts in the hundreds that needed to be made.

"I will have mental fatigue by the end and won't be able to make different pills one after another without taking some break," he thought. "If that's the case then leaving these 3 pills for the end might be a better idea."

Alex started with other pills.

He prepared the ingredients and lowered the temperature on both the cauldron before putting in 6 of the same ingredients into the 2 cauldrons.

Once they were in, he started moving them all around with proper caution. Then, he dumped more and more ingredients as time went on.

When it was finally time for the pills to be made, Alex split the powder into 3 parts on his own and clumped them together to form a ball.

Since there was no technique to be used here, at least not without wasting some time, he had to do it manually.

The pills popped out of the cauldrons and he placed them in the formation one after another.

56%. 61%. 62%. 59%. 62%. 57%.

'6 is really pushing it,' he thought. Aside from not being able to use all of his ability, he was also making some obvious mistakes for the sake of not wasting time while making these pills.

Fortunately, they were still Heaven grade.

"I will need to be more careful," Alex thought to himself and started making the pills once again.

Over the next hour, he managed to do the same 4 more times. It was slow, of course, but he was only starting, and there were also way too many different pills he had to constantly change between.

Not to mention there weren't always 3 pills he had to make. Sometimes, they would be only 2, and in those cases, he was forced to make only 2 instead of 3.

As such, by the end of the hour, Alex had made about 26 different pills in total.

"That's... not bad. I do need about 30 pills an hour, don't I? I can surely improve further later on," Alex thought and started making the pills again.

In the next hour, he made 28. Then after that, 32. By the fifth hour, Alex was starting to make 30 pills on average. Some hours it was more, some hours it was less.

When the 6th hour ended, so did Alex's saint Qi. All the Saint Qi he had prepared for making this pill had ended as he made nearly 180 pills in the 6 hours.

However, that didn't mean he was out of Qi. Before beginning the day, Alex had eaten a pill to improve his passive Qi collection, and as such had gathered enough True Qi to fill his cultivation base all over again.

It wasn't as good as Saint Qi of course, but it was plenty powerful still. With his entire Qi as True Qi, Alex was able to keep going for another 4 hours and ended up with nearly 300 pills made in the first 10 hours.

Then he was out of Qi.

"Time for my break," he thought and went to sit down by his bed where he started cultivating. Alex was quite happy with the result he had. With how many pills he was making, he was certainly going to pass in 3 days' time.

"Actually, I will have to improve my timing around the 3rd day, right?" he thought. "The elder did say she was leaving around the evening."

He would have about 12 hours to make pills on the 3rd day. "Well given the pills I left for the final day, I should be fine," Alex thought.

In 2 hours, Alex cultivated with many different resources to regain all of his Qi. Then, he went back to making pills again.

The first hour back, he made 32 pills.

In the second hour, he made 31 pills.

In the third hour, he made 32 pills.

On the fourth hour, the door opened and the elder walked in.

"Elder? Is something the matter?" Alex turned around with confusion. Why was she disturbing him?

"How many pills did you make?" She asked him.

"Uhh... 401 pills," Alex said.

"401?" the elder had seen it all happen, but the number still struck her as something crazy. She sighed for what she had to do next. "Good, hand it over," she said.

Alex nodded and gave her the pills. "If that's all then I will go back to making pills elder," he said and turned around.

"You don't need to make pills anymore," the elder said.

"Why not?" Alex looked at her with a confused expression.

"Your 15 hours quota for the day is over. You can make more pills if you want after I leave, but any pill not created in my presence will go towards contribution points, rather than your quota," she said.

"Wait, what? No! Elder, I still have 1400 pills to make," Alex said with panic clear in his voice.

"Yes, and you will do so when I return back tomorrow. For now, rest," She said and turned around to leave.

Alex tried to stop her, but the elder didn't listen to his words. She left the building and left Alex with 1400 pills to make in what he now realized was just 30 more hours.

"No, with 12 hours on the final day, I only have 27 hours to make 1400 pills."

That was going to be a problem.

Chapter 884 Getting Behind

Alex made preparation for the next day. Knowing that he was only going to have 15 hours to work, he needed to make the best of his time.

One thing he realized was that if he wasn't so extravagant with his Qi, he could extend it to 15 hours, given that he takes two pills with a 7-hour interval in between.

Next, since he was going to have to make more than just 6 pills this time around, Alex started having thoughts of making either 8 pills at once with 4 pills in 2 cauldrons, or 9 pills at once with 3 pills in 3 cauldrons.

After a little thought, he realized that the second one was rather hard, so he had to stick to the first one.

"I should be able to reach about 700 if I did that," he thought. Of course, making 8 pills at once alone was hard too, but he had no choice.

Alex then ate a pill that improved his mind and waited until the elder arrived.

The moment she was there, Alex began making the pills. He had already planned exactly what pills to make and when, and as such he had no hesitation when he began.

The elder watched him with a pitiful look, as she knew that it was nearly impossible to make 1350 pills in just 27 hours.

He would have to make 50 pills for that, which meant he would have to improve his output by nearly 66%. He had already pushed it to the last day, could he really do it this day?

The elder had only thought that when Alex put in 8 different ingredients in 2 different cauldrons. He was surprised at first and even shocked when he finished making 8 pills at once.

However, when she saw that he took nearly 13 minutes to make the pills, she realized that he could only make 40 pills an hour, when in fact he needed to make 50.

Alex improved his speed in the upcoming hours, but even then he could only make about 45 pills an hour.

The problem with his pill making mostly arrived when he didn't have 4 pills of the same types to make at once, and he thus couldn't make the ideal 8 pills at once.

Also, another problem that Alex, unfortunately, didn't foresee came upon him, forcing him to be unable to make the pills constantly.

Just 4 hours into the pill-making process, he realized that he was running out of Qi and would have to continue on with his True Qi. Not even the pill he ate was helping him.

He had used as little Qi as possible, but he was still spending it on 8 pills rather than 6, so the usage was overall higher than yesterday.

By the 5th hour, he had already started making the pill, and by the 8th hour, he was out of True Qi as well.

Alex started cultivating at once without moving and started counting the pills he had made.

About 360.

Alex didn't cultivate all the way through and stopped only after an hour or so. Since he didn't have to go on for 8 more hours, he didn't bother cultivating the whole time.

Starting from the 10th hour, he once again made more and more pills.

By the time the elder entered the room, Alex had made about 280 more pills.

Overall, he had made exactly 643 pills. It wasn't exactly a bad result. Hell, this was the most Alex had ever made in his entire life.

Alchemists would be depressed if they ever learned how many he had made with just 14 hours of pill making.

However, that didn't make Alex happy at all. Even as he handed the 643 pills to the elder, he was already thinking of the problem that lay ahead of him.

Tomorrow, in just 12 hours or less, he would have to make 706 pills. What he couldn't do today in 14 hours, he would have to do tomorrow in 12.

That was problematic.

The elder took the pills and left, and Alex was left alone, thinking for himself to come up with ways to improve himself.

What could he do? Considering he wasted an hour to cultivate in between tomorrow's pill-making session, he would have to make 700 pills in 11 hours.

That meant he would have to make 64 pills in an hour or so.

'Damn it!' Alex thought. 'That's just not possible.'

Alex could try to make 3 pills in 3 cauldrons, but that meant that he not only had to split his Qi in between 9 ingredients instead of 8, but also to an additional cauldron, and an additional source of heat.

Not only that, he had to split his Dao too to another source, making it way too mentally taxing for him.

But what could he do? That really was the only way to do it, wasn't it?

Alex rested for a while, with hopelessness filling his heart. He felt depressed for a bit, thinking that he had no chance of visiting the Dao mountain.

However, he quickly picked himself up and went ahead to cultivate for the night.

Whether he had a chance or not, he would find it the hard way by not managing to make all the pills in time.

Alex prepared as best as he could before the elder arrived the next morning and started making the pills once again.

This time, the elder saw him bring out 3 cauldrons, instead of just two.

For a split second, Alex thought of using 12 ingredients, but that would be way too much. The mental fatigue he would suffer from increasing his workload by double when compared to the first day didn't sound like a good idea when he was already at his limit.

He also couldn't make it 10 pills, by having the pills split into 3, 3, and 4, as the asymmetry of the whole thing would require more focus than it just being 9 or 12.

So, he was stuck with making 9 pills every time.

Fortunately, now came the span of pills that were mostly the same with their amounts being in the hundreds.

Alex had made the right choice to leave those for the last day, so for the most part, he would definitely only have to make 9 pills in each cauldron and all of them would be the same.

Alex started. Since the 3 cauldrons were pre-heated, he put 9 different ingredients into them and instantly split them into 9 segments in the 3 cauldrons, and individually moved them around while keeping an eye on the heat.

When they were powdered, he lowered the temperature on all 3 cauldrons at the same time and put in the next set of ingredients.

He tried to waste as little time as possible in between the moves and as a result, managed to form the pill in around 9 minutes.

After testing all 9 pills one after another in the formation, cleaning the cauldrons for the next use, and then heating it up again, he lost another minute.

In effect, every pill took about 10 minutes in total.

So, in a single hour, Alex managed to make 54 pills in total. That wasn't bad. Only, it wasn't enough.

Chapter 885 Through the Pain

Alex continued making more and more pills, without any mistakes, but he was still only making 54 pills an hour.

By the time 4 hours had passed he had made exactly 216 pills. If this continued, with about 7 more hours of this remaining, he would certainly fail without a doubt.

He need to do something else, he needed to improve the process this late into the game.

But how? Should he really make 12 pills? But then what about the mental fatigue he would have to suffer?

Should he even be caring about that at this point?

Alex finished making another set of pills and put them in the formation to the side to prove that they were indeed all above 50% in harmony.

After they were all tested, he cleaned the 3 cauldrons with his Qi and started heating them up again.

Suddenly, he paused as a thought came to him. He was wasting about 6 minutes an hour doing just this. This which had nothing to do with making pills was taking up 10% of his time.

But then, was there a solution? It wasn't like he could make up a formation or scripts to automate this at all.

'Wait, I can automate it,' Alex thought.

"Pearl! Whisker! Come out," He said at the same time.

"Meow!" Pearl meowed the moment he sensed the external spiritual sense on him, and Whisker looked at him curiously.

At the same time, Alex brought out 3 more cauldrons and placed them on the other side of the formations where one could perform alchemy as well.

He didn't use them as he stuck to the 3 he had in front of him and started making pills. At the same time, he gave a mental command to his beasts to help him when the time came.

Alex focused his everything on making the 9 pills. He finished powdering them, replacing the energy with them.

However, when it came time to form the powder into pills, he moved away.

He didn't form them into pills at all. Instead, he left that task for Pearl to complete.

Since it was only separating the powder in small clumps and then making a small sphere out of the powder, Pearl could do that easily.

After having watched him make pills for years on end, Pearl too knew the process behind alchemy.

Alex immediately moved on to the next 3 cauldrons that he had previously taken out. These were cauldrons that were perfectly heated up to the right temperature as that was what Whisker had been doing this entire time.

Without wasting a single moment, Alex put 9 ingredients into them and started making more pills.

In the meantime, Pearl and Whisker together did what Alex considered a waste of time for himself.

They pulled out the pills, tested them, and then proceed to clean the cauldrons afterward. After they were clean, Whisker started heating them again as per the recipe for the next set of pills that were going to be made next.

When Alex finished putting energy back into the powder, he left Pearl to handle it again and started making the next 9 pills immediately over on the other 3 cauldrons.

Alex was improving his time by a lot, but he was also spending more Qi than he could afford to.

In just 4 and a half hours, Alex had ended up using all the Saint Qi he had in his body, and at the rate, he was going he would use up his True Qi in just the next 2 hours.

After the 6 and a half hours were done, he would be forced to cultivate again.

Alex sighed, but he had no choice. He continued making the pills. By the time the fifth hour had ended, Alex had made exactly 63 pills using the new technique.

He realized that because he was saving himself something close to 2 minutes for every single pill he made, he was now able to make pills 15 times in 2 hours.

So, without hesitation, he continued. When the 6th hour ended, he made 60 pills as this was one of the hours where he had to switch the pills, and thus had to do half and half for one of the turns.

However, the new few hours would be smooth sailing as he was going to have to make this one single pill for a while now.

But, he had to stop around 40 minutes later because he had run out of Qi. Not only that, even his head was aching rather badly this time around as the pill he ate for mental stability had lost its effect already.

Alex would have to eat another one, but that wasn't going to have the same effect as the first one.

Alex stopped and started cultivating, but even as he did that, the thought of losing time made his heart hurt.

So, he decided to do something risky. Something that would generally be considered a very bad choice because of the high chance one had of going into Qi deviation and destroying their own meridians.

While cultivating, Alex started using his Qi and continued his alchemy.

He ate the pill for his mental stability, but with one more very important thing to focus his mind on, it wasn't very helpful.

Still, it allowed him to make 9 pills every 8 or so minutes, and that was something Alex had to thank it for.

By the time the 7th hour had ended, Alex made another 63 pills.

His mental ability to concentrate was going down more and more as time went on, but he still continued.

By the time the 8th hour ended, Alex made about 63 pills, with 6 minutes remaining.

In the 9th hour, Alex made about 69 pills.

However, around this time, his mind was getting so bogged by all the different things he was concentrating on that his ability was lowering more and more.

As such, he was forced to give up on the most important thing he had been concentrating on, that being his cultivation.

Having constantly used his Qi, his cultivation had barely helped him gather any Qi. However, it was still enough for him to last the next 3 hours.

Or at least he hoped so. With one less thing to concentrate on, Alex found some levity which he used to continue making pills.

As he did, Alex realized that he was slowly running out of Qi again. He hadn't gained as much as he had hoped.

He wasn't sure if it would even last 3 more hours. However, now was not the time to think about that.

Actually, now was not the time to think at all. Any brain power he put into things that were not making pills only increased his mental usage, thus increasing the fatigue in the already fatigued mind.

By the 10th hour, even as Alex made another 63 pills, he was feeling empty in both mental power and Qi.

Having sat there making pills, even his body was starting to feel the pain.

Still, he kept going. He continued making pills for another hour and ended up with another 69 pills.

In the final hour, for what felt like an eternity, Alex pushed his body to the limit, using every single drop of Qi and mental power to make the pills.

He made it once, then once again, and then once again.

His mind hurt like someone had used a rather strong spiritual attack, and his meridians hurt from not having any Qi to push out anymore.

Still, he found any little Qi he had and pushed it out to make the pills one more time.

The next time was a struggle as there was nothing to use in himself. Still, with a head that felt like it would burst open, Alex started cultivating once more to gain back just the tiniest bit of Qi to continue.

He put in the ingredients, processed them, and after using the last bit of Qi to put them into the powder, he left for the other ingredients.

Pearl quickly formed the pills and started testing the pills, while Alex barely focused himself to look at the 3 cauldrons in front of him.

He tried to push his Qi, but he was a still step away from fainting.

'No, I have to continue, just a little longer,' Alex thought. The 12th hour hadn't ended yet. He needed to continue.

Just then, the door burst open the moment Pearl finished testing the pills which were all surprisingly good, despite Alex's condition.

"Stop!" the elder shouted.

Alex's heart sank. Was it time? Did he fail? Had the elders left already?

"N-no! I can keep going," he barely managed to speak up and tried to focus back on the cauldrons.

"I said stop!" the elder said again and used force to pull him away from the cauldron.

"Elder, please let me go. I promise I can make some more," he said.

The elder looked at him with pity in her eyes, and obvious shock at what he had shown her today.

A smile formed on her face as she brought him to his feet. "Stop. You don't have to make any more pills. You already finished your job."

Alex paused for a moment. "I... I did?" he asked.

"Yes, you made all 1750 pills as per Elder Xuan's request," the elder said. "Congratulations, you passed the test."

Alex was stunned for a second before he started counting all the pills he had made. "I... I did it, I really did it," he said.

By the end, before the 12th hour was even over, Alex had made exactly 1755 pills.

Chapter 886 Second Opportunity

Alex understood what this meant. If he had passed the test, then he could go visit Elder Xuan.

"Wait, when is Elder Xuan leaving for the Dao mountain?" Alex asked. The Dao mountain opened up the day after tomorrow, so Alex needed to go meet her immediately.

"You don't have much time," the elder said.

"I need to leave," Alex said and tried to move, but a wave of nausea hit him all of a sudden. Not only that, his entire body was extremely fatigued, and with no Qi, his Undying physique wasn't working too.

"Don't worry. I will take you to see Elder Xuan," the elder said and took him.

Pearl and Whisker jumped into their beast space as Alex was taken away from the building.

The land was clad in darkness, but the sky was still a little alight. The sun had set for the sect, but the clouds could still be seen illuminated it the light.

Below the elder's tower, in between two of the bridges that led down to the sect, a group of 100 girls was gathered, along with about 60 elders.

They were a few minutes behind on schedule to leave, but because Elder Xuan had told them not to leave for a while, they had to wait for whatever was going on.

Far in the distance, they suddenly noticed two people flying towards them. Actually, it was more like 1 person was flying and she was carrying the other person behind her.

The elder landed in the snow, in front of the group, and so did Alex.

"Elder Xuan," the elder called out. "He's done it."

The elderly woman's eyes went wide in surprise. She turned to look at Alex who was seriously out of everything be it Qi, stamina, or mental strength.

"You really did the impossible. I... I didn't expect that at all," the elder said. The other elders looked confused as they weren't in the knowhow about what went in between Alex and the elder.

The elder that brought Alex walked up to Elder Xuan and handed her the storage bag to show everything that Alex did.

"You really made 1750 pills in the span on 3 days. That too while having it all be above Heaven grade. That is very commendable," she said. "You did well to make proper use of the opportunity I provided you with, regardless of it being an impossible task."

"Does that mean I can join you on your way to the Dao mountain, elder?" Alex asked.

"Not yet," the elder said. "As you may remember, what I gave you was an opportunity for an opportunity for an opportunity. You did well to seize the first opportunity. Now it's time for you to do the same again."

Alex waited patiently to hear what she was going to say.

"We are only allowed to take 100 disciples over to the Dao mountain. That is the agreement the 5 of our sects landed upon," she said. "So, there must always be 100 disciples."

Alex was trying to use as little spiritual sense as he could as his mind was still in pain, but when the elder said that he had to check.

There were exactly 100 disciples there. Which meant that if he were to go, one of these girls must stay back.

"Choose one of them. If you can defeat her in combat, you may take her spot," the elder said.

He sighed. As expected, he had to fight someone to take away their opportunity for himself.

"Elder, that's a little..." the elder close to Alex felt that this was a little wrong. Alex was not in the shape to be fighting anyone. He had no qi, his mind was in chaos, and his body was fully fatigued as well.

"Her!" Alex spoke without hesitation. The elder had well intentions, but he needed to accept this offer.

He saw anger flash on the pretty face of the girl he chose, and he did feel a little bad about taking away her spot, but his needs came before anyone else's.

"This one? May I ask why you chose her?" the elder Xuan asked.

"No reason, aside from her being the closest to me," Alex said.

The elder smiled. "Very well. Elder Bing, will you please officiate this match between the juniors?" she asked.

"Yes, elder Xuan," the elder next to Alex spoke.

All the other girls, both disciples, and elders moved back to make room for Alex and the girl.

The girl moved forward and brought out a weapon from her storage bag. It was a spear, made up of some sort of wooden shaft ad a blade that almost seemed to sparkle.

Alex tried to feel the girl's cultivation base but was unable to do so as he didn't have any Qi in his body right now.

However, given that she was given such an opportunity, she had to be no weaker than True Emperor 9th realm.

With that thought in mind, Alex brought out the thin sword. At the moment, that was the only thing that he could possibly use against this girl.

"You cannot use pills or talismans. Everything else is allowed," the elder said. "Are you ready?"

Both Alex and the girl nodded. "Begin!"

The girl took charge and rushed forward with her spear. Alex saw her coming, but his reflex wasn't very good at the moment, so he only managed to react when she was already next to him.

He barely moved his head to the side as something golden blasted out of the spear's metal blade.

At the same time, fire erupted from it and the girl swung it sideways at Alex's head.

Alex brought up his sword to the side and blocked it in time. Despite his speed and reaction not being very great, and even without having the slightest bit of Qi, his body was still very strong.

The girl moved away and sent out some spear stabs at him, which flew out as a ranged attack.

Alex did nothing and let the attacks hit him. Not only did he have a strong body, but he was also always wearing a saint armor he had acquired over a year ago. As such he was perfectly fine in all regards.

The girls and even the elders looked surprised when they saw that. They could see that he was wearing armor, but he didn't have any Qi, and the attack belonged to someone that was 2 cultivation realms above his.

The girl got angry and dashed at him again. She jumped up this time and swung the spear down.

Alex got ready to parry, but as he did, suddenly the metal blade of the spear enlarged nearly 3 times its original size and was now as long as a normal sword and maybe even stronger than one.

Alex realized that he couldn't parry this easily, so he held his sword above him to block the attack.

The two blades rang out loud in rather violent noise. Alex felt the force of the attack sink his feet deeper into the ground, but he also saw the sparkling blade right next to him, stopped only by his unimaginably strong sword.

To his surprise, there was a chip on the girl's spear, and some cracks had begun to form around the chip.

The girl noticed this, and so did the others. Together, their shock at the turn of events was massive.

"He... he destroyed the blade?"

"How did it get destroyed so easily?"

The girls couldn't help but speak out loud. Even the girl that was fighting looked at her spear in shock and nearly forgot she was fighting.

Alex took the advantage and jumped up front to attack the girl. The girl realized that he was attacking and activated her movement technique to run away somewhere further away.

Once far enough, she started sending out fire and metal attacks over at Alex. Each of those attacks had Spear intent embedded in them.

Alex's sword was covered in a white outline that gradually turned the entire sword white as he used his Sword Qi as well.

The elders and disciples were quite surprised to see that he was using Sword Qi.

Alex sent out his own Sword Qi attacks toward the flying Spear attacks. The attacks struck each other and created a violent explosion that couldn't beat each other.

Alex was on the weaker end as he was only using Sword Qi, but that was still enough to block the attack.

The girl sent out some more attacks, but Alex didn't pay attention to those attacks.

For him, there was only a single important thing that he had to keep his mind at.

He sent out his attacks as he bid for his time, and after he had passively acquired enough True Qi, he attacked.

The sword disappeared from his hands as he suddenly appeared behind the girl. In the darkness of the night, the entire land was in shadows.

Golden light flared at his right hand as he used the golden fist to punch at the girl.

The girl was surprised at the attack, and still managed to block, but his power was too much.

Not only was his body in the Saint realm, but even his True Qi was comparable to Saint Qi now.

As such when the punch landed and the golden light exploded on her, the girl was sent flying into the snow and was knocked out.

The elder quickly checked the girl and fed her a pill.

Everyone looked at Alex in surprise as there was no need to announce a victor here.

"Good," Elder Xuan said. "You seized another opportunity. Now let us leave."

Chapter 887 The Dao Mountain

Alex sat on top of a massive boat that housed all 160 of the Frozen Heart Sect members.

Even though he wore the crystal blue robe that belonged to the sect, being the only guy on deck, he did stand out.

Most girls looked at him curiously. They knew that he was an alchemist, but they didn't understand why he had to be employed in the sect at all when he was a male.

However, if the recent information they learned was true, then he was an invaluable asset to the sect. After all, not just anyone can make 1750 pills in just 3 days.

While some of the girls spoke about him with each other, wondering how an alchemist that wasn't even in the True Emperor realm was so strong, Alex focused his entire time on cultivating.

As he cultivated and gained back the Qi he had lost, the fatigue in his body was also slowly healed due to the Undying physique going into work.

His mind slowly healed from the pain and stress, and bit by bit, he was returning to his peak condition again.

The ship flew in the night for at least 2 hours by the time Alex was anywhere close to being done with his cultivation.

As he still continued it, someone came up to him and sat by his side.

Whisker, who was in his robes looked to his right, and Alex saw who it was.

"Greetings, Elder Xuan," Alex spoke and stopped his cultivation cycle for time being.

"Are you okay?" the elder asked. "Did forcing yourself to make 1800 pills cause you any trouble?"

Alex thought for a moment and shook his head. "None that I haven't already dealt with, Elder Xuan," he said.

"I see," she said. "I suppose I owe you an apology then. I tried to keep you out from going to the Dao mountain."

"But you gave me an opportunity," Alex said.

"You really think of that as an opportunity? I was trying to get you to not go," she said. "I gave you something impossible in hope that you would fail. Hell, I didn't even give you much time to work on it. I was really trying to stop you from going."

"I have nothing against you of course. I'm just trying to look out for our core disciples. Given that they will become the pillars of the sects in the future, even taking away one of their spots would be devastating, to say the least."

Alex stayed silent for a second or two. He could understand what the elder was trying to say.

"Whatever your intention was, elder, you gave me an opportunity and I'm thankful for it," Alex said.

"I'm quite thankful too," the Elder said. "When you eventually failed, I had intended to return you the contribution points, and give you some time off based on how many pills you made. Who would've thought that you could actually do it."

"We really are lucky that you thought our sect was a city and stumbled in," the elder said.

Alex nodded and thought of ways to change the topic. He didn't want her to linger on how good of an alchemist he was and increase his value later on.

"Elder, you said I had 3 opportunities, and now I have seized two of them. What's my third opportunity?" he asked.

"Your third opportunity is the same one all of these girls and the other 400 disciples that will be gathering at the foot of the mountain will have," the elder said.

"Same one?" Alex asked.

"Do you know how many True realm cultivators are allowed this time around in the mountain?" she asked.

"It's 34 right?" Alex asked.

"Yes. This means you need to be one of the 34 people to enter from amongst the 500 different disciples. That's your opportunity," the elder said.

Alex was curious now. "How can I do that?" he asked.

"You'll find out soon enough," the elder said. "We'll arrive in a few more hours. Cultivate and be in your best condition. Given how strong you are, I'm sure you will easily take the place."

"Oh, so it's fighting huh? I can do that," Alex said.

The elder smiled and turned to walk away. However, before she did, she stopped and spoke once more.

"Also, once you are there, do not speak about alchemy or pills. Never reveal that you are an alchemist. You will be in a far larger danger than you could ever imagine," she said.

Alex's heart sank for a second when he heard that. "Why is it so dangerous, elder? Can you tell me?" he asked.

"I'm afraid I cannot," the elder said and left without speaking.

Alex frowned. What the hell was wrong with being an alchemist in these lands?

Alex thought of possibilities, but soon, he forgot about it and returned to cultivating for the time being.

Sometime later, while the moon was still hidden behind the cloud, the group arrived at their destination.

Alex stood up and looked to the far distance where a brilliant mountain in green was located inside a massive dome of barrier, surrounded by nothing but snow and gloom.

The Dao mountain.

It was surprising just how the mountain could remain so green and beautiful in this cold, and harsh. Was it the formation? Or was there some sort of situation that heated the entire place?

Alex looked to the side and saw 2 different massive boats that were sitting on top of the snow, and some people were already down on the ground doing something, but Whisker couldn't tell who they were from this far up.

The boat then slowly moved forward while gently lowering down to the ground.

Only then did Whisker see the boats and the people on them clearly enough to recognize who they belonged to.

The people wearing the Royal Blue robes belonged to the Heaven's Frost sect, while the people wearing the purple and white robes belonged to the Blue Spring sect.

With the Frozen Heart sect here now, three of the five sects had arrived.

A dozen or so elders suddenly moved out from the boat and went up to the many people that were working on the plain land covered in snow.

They were creating some sort of platform. If Alex's guess was correct, then they were creating stages for the disciples to fight in.

"You stay and get read while they work on it. We will start as soon as the rest of the sects arrive," one of the elders said.

Alex nodded and continued cultivating for a while.

As he waited, the next two sects arrived not even a few hours later.

Wearing red and white robes were the disciples and elders of the Blazing Earth sect, and wearing green and black robes were the people from the Nether Poison sect.

Their ships landed next to the other 3 and the elder from there went to work as well.

When the sun rose and the land was illuminated, the elders finished working and had now fully prepared the fighting arenas.

"Get off," one of the elders said to the group, and one by one, all the disciples from all the sects started getting down the boat towards the arena.

Chapter 888 Selection Starts

Alex got off the boat along with the other hundred disciples and grouped up next to the many girls.

The other disciples from the various sects looked at him, mostly with envy, but some understood the situation and pitied him.

After all, it was not like he could steal the hearts of those that were frozen.

To his surprise, Alex felt about 20 different spiritual senses pass through him.

From what he could sense, they belonged to disciples of the Frozen Heart sect and the Nether Poison sect that were next to him.

Alex spread his own spiritual sense out and noticed many more that simply couldn't reach up to him.

Now that he was sensing them, he realized that every 5th person in the group had a spiritual sense.

'Hmm, is Spirit Cleansing Lily that prevalent in the Northern Continent?' he thought. Given that even the Luminance Empire had a few, he wouldn't doubt that to be true.

He saw the many disciples with his senses, but not many stood out to him. So, he took the senses back and let Whisker look around the land for him.

The Dao mountain stood to their right about a kilometer away, and even this far, Alex could see faint hints of a gate being there.

'Right, where are the nearly 2000 different Saint realm experts? Are they not here yet?' Alex wondered.

"Listen up!" one of the elders wearing a purple and white robe started speaking.

"We will begin the selection process. For you that are doing this for the first time, make sure to listen properly. The process is simple."

"We have 7 different stages set up for you to fight in. Each turn, one of you will go up there on your own and start fighting. If you can fight 5 different people in a row without being defeated or stand on the stage for 5 whole minutes without any challengers, you will be eligible to enter the Dao mountain."

"However, if you lose a single time, you will not get a second chance, so choose wisely," the elder said.

He brought out a stack of paper and suddenly threw it toward everyone. The paper spread out systematically into 5 groups and gently floated down onto the disciples that were bunched up.

"Spread that amongst yourself however you like," the elder said and disciples started spreading the paper.

Alex got one and it was numbered 216. There was nothing else written on it.

"Anyone wants to be the first to start?" the elder asked.

A few hands rose up and the elder picked 7 disciples based on whose hands went up first.

They were all sent up to one of the stages each with an elder already waiting there.

"You may start challenging whoever you want," the elder said and began the competition.

Alex stood by the side and tried to make sense of the rules. He looked at the 7 people on the stage and thought, 'I need to challenge them and beat 4 successive people to pass?'

He realized that one couldn't just challenge just anyone as losing even once was bad for you.

'Who should I challenge then?' Alex looked towards the 7 disciples who were already starting to fight someone else.

Alex couldn't hear the sound, but he could see the space distort around each of the fighter's clashes.

They were all True Emperor 9th realm from what he could see that was a shocking sight to imagine.

There was one other thing that surprised Alex here, that he hadn't expected to see at all. Some of the disciples of these sects were old people.

Unlike back in Western Continent where only disciples under a certain age were allowed to participate in anything, here however they didn't seem to care about age.

Anyone that was capable could take part.

Alex wondered how old some of these people were, and was certain that some of them were surely in their hundreds.

He checked to see how challenging worked exactly. From what he could see, a group of disciples had lined up to fight the person on the stage.

Alex decided to line up as well.

Each of the 7 stages had a different line, so Alex randomly chose one to line up. The line he was on had about 20 different people already, while the rest were either in the other lines or still contemplating which one to choose.

On one of the stages, Alex noticed that the battle was over, and the challenger had won, sending the previous victor out of the stage with a sad look on her face.

The new victor seemed to be someone of power, and that seemed to have deterred a few people that stayed in the line.

As such, a few of them left the line. They either went to the back of the line to wait for someone else to deal with that person or simply joined another line elsewhere.

Alex noticed that the match on his own stage had ended, and about 7 people from the front of the line moved away and they didn't want to fight the person that stood on the stage.

Suddenly, Alex went from being the 21st person in the line to the 14th.

The middle-aged man on the stage defeated 2 more people with his excellent sword skill, deterring a few other people to move away.

Despite having fought 3 battles, the middle-aged-looking man was doing quite great. He didn't seem tired at all.

A few more people were deterred and Alex ended up in the 4th position on the line, as one girl went up the stage to fight a man.

Alex watched the fight from up close and noticed the fight more clearly. The man was using Sword Qi, on top of just being a very good fighter, and was winning the fights rather easily.

On top of that, he seemed to be stronger than the others in general. His True Emperor 9th realm Qi was stronger than the other people's.

The man enjoyed his fight thoroughly, to the point that his opponent was humiliated. Only then did he finally end it.

The loser left the stage with a sad face after realizing that she had lost the opportunity to enter the mountain.

The old man raised his hands in victory and beckoned the next fighter, as this 5th match of his would be what would grant him entry to the Dao mountain.

Unfortunately for him, the 3 disciples in front of Alex left the line after realizing they would lose, and Alex was now at the front and the next in line for battle.

Alex handed over his paper to the elder in front of him and walked up to the stage. As soon as he did, he could finally use his spiritual sense to view everything around him.

Now that he didn't need Whisker at all, he sent him back.

"Get ready," the elder told the two of them.

The old man saw Alex and his cultivation base, and couldn't be any happier to see that his final hurdle was someone that wasn't even at the peak of the True realm yet.

"Hahaha! Come," he shouted as he readied his sparkling sword.

Alex brought out his Saint whip to fight against that.

The elder noticed that they were both ready and started the fight.

The man instantly sent out a slash as Alex, filled with both Saint Qi and Sword Qi.

Alex swung his whip and accurately hit the slash, destroying it. He then pulled back the whip and sent his Qi through it as he swung it again.

The man swung his Saint ranked sword at the Whip to block it, but to his surprise, the whip hit very hard. Flame exploded from the tip, sending the man's sword backward.

His arms pained from the rebound he suffered from his own sword, and his eyes went wide.

"How?" he couldn't help but ask.

Alex sent his whip flying again but hit nothing. This time, instead of facing the attack directly, the man used his movement technique and dodged to come near Alex.

He pulled his sword up and slashed down at Alex. Even as he did, the sword grew nearly 3 times the normal amount, becoming a massive piece of metal that fell onto Alex.

Alex jumped up suddenly and kicked the incoming sword on its side so hard that the sword went flying sideways along with its holder.

The man managed to stop himself in time before he was out of bounds, but Alex was already next to him.

He swung his whip from up close and the whip moved forward while building up fire along the way.

The man feared for his life and sent out a slash toward Alex. However, the whip was already too close, so even as the whip and the slash clashed together, the man felt the force of the clash from close range.

He was sent flying even further and slammed against the barrier that was the boundary for this battle.

The man tried to stand up quickly and fight back, but when the elder appeared before him to stop him, he realized what had happened.

"I... lost?" the man asked, and the elder nodded.

A complicated look appeared in the man's eyes. He was so close to winning, and yet...

He shook his head in frustration and walked away.

Alex went back to the middle of the stage, barely feeling anything for his opponent, and waited for the next person to challenge him.

Chapter 889 Weird Metal

Alex's next opponent was a lady from the Blazing Earth sect. She wore the red and white robes of that sect and held no weapons in her hand.

Alex was a little confused for a few seconds but then realized that she was an elemental fighter that needed no weapon.

So, as soon as the fight started, the girl used her technique that involved fire and wood energy.

Her fire Qi was Empowered by the Wood Qi. Even as the attack formed, the girl suddenly felt a vibration from the amulet she wore around her neck.

In the time it took for her to send out the attack, the amulet vibrated not once, not twice, but three whole times.

A massive ball of fire flew at Alex with incredible speed. In response, Alex simply stood there and took the attack head-on.

His Saint-ranked armor and his Saint realm body cultivation made it sure that he didn't take a single bit of damage from the attack just now.

Unless someone was using a Saint-ranked weapon themselves, Alex found no need to worry.

The girl was surprised, and even a little scared. She tried to use some other spell, but the amulet on her chest kept vibrating nonstop.

She had no time to worry about that amulet, however, and prepared to launch her next attack.

However, she didn't need to worry about that either.

At the exact time she was about to launch her attack, her amulet broke and the full force of Alex's Heaven's Impact landed on her and immediately made her mind go blank.

The girl fell to the ground, unconscious, as the powers she had been preparing to launch dissipated into the air.

The surrounding people that were watching the fight were very confused as to what had just happened.

That was barely a fight at all, and somehow the girl was down. Not only that, the elder was already moving to send her away from the stage.

"What... just happened?" some of them didn't understand.

"Did he attack? I didn't see anything," another person said.

"It must've been a mental attack then. I noticed that guy had spiritual sense," another person spoke.

"Oh, spiritual sense. That makes sense," the people finally understood what was going on.

"That's one dumb girl to not have brought a defensive item with her. How did she even qualify to come here? Is she some elder's daughter or what?" the people started talking bad about her.

Those who didn't know the girl assumed that she lost because of her lack of foresight. However, those who knew her, or even just sensed her as she was walking out, noticed the amulet on her and realized that the mental attack must've been quite strong for her to just pass out like that.

Of course, in the last 14 months, since he had been here, Alex was constantly improving his spiritual sense using the mask on his face.

His 600-meter radius spiritual sense that he had when he came to the Northern Continent, was now nearly 750 meters in radius.

That wasn't as good as simply swallowing the mind of someone strong like Fu Tao, but it was still not bad nonetheless.

Being three-fourths as strong as a Saint realm, Alex was now capable of bypassing True ranked mental defensive artifact in just a few attacks.

Which was what he did for the next person that came up as well. The young man that was looking forward to winning against Alex immediately regretted being up there when the barrage of mental attacks fell on him.

In just half a minute after the battle started, the young man had lost as well.

Alex stood on the stage, looking at the group of people that were moving away from the line they had set up in. They were starting to understand that Alex was not someone they could just hope to win.

Alex was starting to understand something too. He knew this beforehand, but the fight just now only solidified the feeling in his heart.

True realm cultivators were no longer his opponents or rivals. He could no longer be compared to them in any way or fashion.

In every other sense, but the most important one, he was a Saint-ranked cultivator. His Qi didn't show it, but he was one.

It was only now that Alex truly came to understand that fact. He couldn't help but chuckle a bit at the realization.

'I could've just asked for a spot at the mountain, couldn't I? I didn't have to go through such trouble,' he thought. It was a shame he realized this too late.

'If only my cultivation base could follow along with everything of mine,' he thought to himself.

He waited for the next person to walk up, but was surprised when no one came up. If that went on for 5 more minutes, he could just pass without having to fight.

Alex waited and watched the people contemplate whether to fight him or not. A few outsiders noticed him alone on the stage and tried to go up on stage, but a few good souls explained the situation, and they were forced to sit aside.

'So am I going to win just like that?' Alex thought when another person quickly arrived at the stage before the entire 5 minutes were over.

The young man looked quite confident, and when he did get up on the stage and noticed that Alex's cultivation base wasn't even that strong, a wide smile appeared on his face.

"Hahaha! Time for you to lose," the young man proclaimed.

Alex was amused, to say the least. The young man should have been in his mid-30s at best. With a high cultivation base, he didn't look older than he should be.

Alex wondered why he was so confident when the young man answered it himself.

"So you've been winning with your mental strength huh? Let's see what you can do against my Saint-ranked defensive artifact," he said.

"Oh," Alex understood where his confidence came from. If it was him, he would most likely be confident as well.

Alex smiled and waited for the elder to start the match. The young man opposite him didn't bring out anything either for some reason.

Seeing that neither of them was going to bring out any weapons, the elder started the match.

Alex waited for the young man to make a move when the young man threw out something from his storage bag.

Even as the thing flew out, it turned into something big and landed not far away from Alex.

'A puppet?' Alex looked at what had come out. It was a puppet that held a staff in its hands.

Immediately, the puppet attacked.

The puppet was surprisingly agile as it swung the metal staff that sparkled all the way through.

Alex jumped to the side and dashed next to the puppet, but the staff in its hand suddenly shrunk to a third of its original size before expanding at the same time and hitting Alex in the chest.

Alex was tossed back, but he quickly stopped himself. 'What the hell is up with these weapons?' he wondered. 'How are they all shrinking and growing?'

He flew back to the puppet at an incredible speed and struck it on the chest this time without being caught off guard.

The puppet broke into a thousand different pieces, while the weapon in its hands fell next to Alex.

Alex picked up the weapon and looked at it curiously. The staff was entirely made up of a metal that sparkled as if it was made from a piece of the sky and stars glittered all over it.

Also, for some reason, it was incredibly heavy.

That was not the impression he had gotten when he saw the other cultivators use such a weapon. But then, they were probably using their entire cultivation base to carry it.

'It really is quite heavy,' he thought. The weapon weighed close to 5 tons at least and was definitely a vicious weapon in anyone's hands.

'Stars,' he thought as he saw the glitter in the metal even through his spiritual sense.

A certain metal came to his mind, one that could only be found on this continent.

'Starforged Tungsten?' Alex thought. 'Is that why it is so strong?'

An attack flew from the side, and Alex casually swung the staff to knock it aside. He had for a moment forgotten that he was still in a battle as even though the puppet had lost, the owner was still there.

Alex looked at the weapon and wondered, 'how do I expand it?'. He poured in some Qi and suddenly he felt the staff struggle to keep itself together.

He thought of expanding the rod, and suddenly it did. The staff enlarged to become 3 times it's normal length and hit the young man in the chest who was trying to come close to attack him.

The young man dropped to the ground far away and was unconscious.

"Oh, I won?" Alex asked with a surprised tone in his voice.

The elder checked on the young man and asked back his staff. Unfortunately, Alex couldn't keep it at all.

After giving the staff back, Alex waited for the next person to come up and challenge him.

However, after seeing how easily he broke the puppet in the last match, no one dared come up to him.

As such, no one came up to the stage for 5 whole minutes, and Alex won himself a spot in the Dao mountain.

Chapter 890 Rules

Alex walked over to a group of 5 different individuals who had passed the selection process as well. 3 of them were girls, and two were men.

Surprisingly, 2 of the girls were from the Frozen Heart sect as well.

'Not bad,' Alex thought to himself and sat down on the snow to look towards the stages. Whisker had to come out to help him with that.

The 5 of them, even the 2 girls, were beyond surprised how a person that wasn't even in the Saint realm could have possibly gone through the selection process and won when literally every single other person in here was stronger than him.

Alex could sense their senses on him, but he ignored them and looked ahead at the stages where the fight was happening.

It was still a few hours away from noon, so they had a lot of time.

As Alex waited, he saw quite a few Saint realm cultivators come to the area either by flying on their own, or in a ship.

By the time it was noon, there were over a hundred different cultivators that didn't even belong to the 5 ancient sects.

From what Alex could see from the distance, they were all very respectful of the Saints that were still staying in the boat.

Alex continued watching the True Emperors fight, and saw quite a few weapons that were made up of the same material as the staff he had seen before. He couldn't help but wonder how good the material was exactly.

He only knew it was good from the information he had bought, but it seemed it was the best material out there.

Their group of 6 was now up to 22 and as more fights took place on the stage, the number of spots left was starting to dwindle more and more.

5 hours later, the selection process had ended. All 34 True realm cultivators that were to enter had been chosen.

Of the 34 different people, 8 of them were from the Frozen Heart sect, 5 were from the Nether Poison sect, 7 from the Blazing Earth sect, 7 from the Blue Spring sect, and 7 from Heaven's Frost sect.

Not being allowed to use poison above True rank, as that would easily kill anyone in the True realms, made it so that the Nether Poison sect didn't perform as well as they should have.

Some of them even complained, but this was a group decision made by the five ancient sects, so there was nothing they could do about it.

"Congratulations," one of the elders in charge of the process spoke. "We have recorded your names, so you may go back to your boats and wait there until tomorrow morning when the mountain is opened by the ancestors."

Everyone nodded and moved back to their sect's boat.

Alex sat somewhere in the corner and started cultivating. However, he kept Whisker outside so he could see what went around him.

Every time a Saint realm flew close, Whisker would sense a slight fluctuation of energy in the air through one of his whiskers and turn towards the direction where the saint was flying from before some of the Saint realms even realized someone was coming.

Hundreds of Saint realm cultivators were present by the time night fell and even more were coming.

All of them flew past the 5 ships, greeting the people there in the process. Then, they went on to stages that were now empty where they sat and waited.

As more and more Saint realm cultivators arrived, the elders of the Frozen Heart sect that were going to enter also came out to socialize.

Alex remained in utter shock when he saw more Saint realm cultivators gather in one place than there were True realm cultivators.

A thousand different Saint realm cultivators from the far reaches of the world were here and this wasn't even everyone. Half of them had yet to come, and more than those who were here weren't. They were back in their own place, protecting their sects, clans, and organization in the absence of these people.

Suddenly, Alex heard gasps and murmurs from all around him. To his surprise, it was coming from the saint realm cultivators.

He spread out his senses to listen to what they were saying, and from what he understood they were talking about some woman that had come here.

She apparently belonged to the Blazing Earth sect, but aside from that, Alex got no other information.

Most Saint realm cultivators were too used to using spiritual sense to speak with each other. If only he could listen to those conversations.

"Congratulations," a voice floated next to him from the side. Alex sent his senses back to see that Elder Xuan had come up to him at some point.

'I didn't even realize,' he thought.

"Thank you, elder," Alex turned toward her to bow.

"You have cultivated your body too right?" the elder asked.

Alex didn't see any reason to lie since she had already seen through it. "Yes, Elder," he said.

"You must have suffered quite a bit for that. I hear most people in the Blazing Earth sect are refusing to body cultivate because of how much pain is involved. I commend you for sticking through with whatever process you went through," the elder said.

Alex raised an eyebrow, but that couldn't be seen behind the mask. "The Blazing Earth sect is a body cultivation sect?" he asked.

"Somewhat," the elder said. "They used to have about 5% of their cultivators go through body cultivation, but it has now slowly gone down to the point that not even 200 people want to body cultivate because of how little impact it has on someone's cultivation life."

"After all, there is nothing you can't get with a Qi cultivation that you can with a body cultivation," she said.

Alex nodded. Body cultivation was good, but it wasn't necessary.

"Anyway, you've surprised me today quite a bit," the elder said. "I wonder what new surprises you will bring tomorrow. I hope you reach quite high," the elder said and left.

"Reach… high?" Alex didn't understand what she meant by those words.

However, it wasn't even a few hours later that Alex got the information.

About 2 hours before the Dao mountain was to be opened up, everyone including the True realm cultivators and the Saint realm cultivators that were new here was informed about the rules inside the mountain.

An old man with a thin build, a bald head, and a long mustache and beard walked back and forth in front of the grouped-up cultivators as he explained what to do once inside the mountain.

"Inside the mountain, you will find many Soul Elucidating Tulips. Those are what make the Dao mountain what it is," he said.

The old man was Huang Xinyi, the sect master of the Blue Spring sect, so everyone listened carefully when he spoke up.

"If anyone of you is found to have destroyed a single one of that flower, even if it is by mistake, you will be forever forbidden from entering and will be made to pay a massive fine."

"If you can't pay the fine, we will make you work in the mine until you can," the sect leader said.

"Those flowers produce a special kind of scent that is trapped in that mountain for 11 whole months. That scent is what makes you drowsy and forces you into a sleep-like state where you are one with the world and start to understand more of what you already understood a lot, and helps you form a dao," the sect leader said.

"Since the scent was trapped there for 11 months it has formed a sort of layer on the mountain that only gets thicker as you go up. The higher you go, the denser you will find the scent which will help you in getting closer to the state where you will learn dao," he said.

"Now, that means that the higher you go, the better chance you have of learning a dao. But that doesn't necessarily mean you should go higher than you can. The scent affects one's soul, so unless your body can handle it, don't go too high up," the old man said.

"Once you reach a certain height and find yourself trying to fall asleep, find yourself an empty spot away from the flowers and start cultivating. That will somewhat counteract the scent and help you fall into the trance where you will learn Dao."

"Any questions?" he asked.

Alex raised his hands, along with many others. The old man picked some people to ask their questions and Alex waited for his.

Through these questions, Alex learned that there weren't many places in the mountain to sit far away from people and that was why only 2000 people were allowed to enter every year.

As the old man chose through the people, one of the people asked the same question that he was intending to ask as well.

"Can we take out our beasts in there?" he asked.

"You can as long as you find a spot where you can cultivate with your beasts," the sect leader said. "You will be responsible for everything they do as well."

"But, beasts usually don't have the same talent as us, so they will only keep you back if you decide to help them too. So, if you ever find your beast getting sleepy early on, I suggest you take them back and go as far as you can," the sect leader said.

That was all Alex needed to hear. So he put his hands down and waited for the mountain to open up.

Chapter 891 Opening the Seal

Alex stood not far from the gate in the group of 2000 people that were looking forward to the gate opening. There were 5 people present in front of the gate.

Huang Xinyi, the old man that had explained that earlier, the sect leader of the Blue Spring sect, wore his purple and white robes as he stood in the middle.

Wu Song, another elderly man that was the Grand elder of the Heaven's Frost sect wore his royal blue robes, waiting for the sun to come up.

Xuan Texin, Elder Xuan of the Frozen Heart sect also stood there, waiting.

Mu Beigong, the sect leader of the Nether Poison sect, had a face that looked half melted. Most others would have likely sought a cure or at least looked to hide it if they could not, but he didn't. Having been the victim of the best poison he had made, he proudly presented the horrific results of his actions to deter his enemies.

Finally, Tai Guan was an old woman that was a simple ancestor of the Blazing Earth sect, that was here today because she was close to learning a Dao.

The five of them were gathered in front of the gate to open it up as the gates of the Dao mountain required 5 Saint Soul realm cultivators to work in unison or a single Saint Transformation realm cultivator.

Alex watched the 5 elders with awe. Not only them. Every other Saint realm cultivator was in a league that was far above Alex.

He looked around, taking in the surroundings as he heard people talk to each other, and learned some names.

Long Jie of the Divine Heavens sect was known for being one of the best artifact crafters in the Northern Continent.

Gong Yaozhu was well known for being the oldest person that came to the Dao mountain every year and had never learned a single Dao.

Qin Meifen was known for being in charge of the Plum Fragrance Auction house's main body that had branches in all the different states in multiple cities.

Chang Lihua of the Nether Poison sect was unanimously said to be the most beautiful woman in the whole Northern Continent, even more so than anyone in the Frozen Heart sect. It was regularly said that the girl could kill anyone with just her look.

Alex did see her from not far away, and even he had to agree that she was very beautiful. Perhaps more so than anyone else he had seen. However, if memories counted, then she was nowhere close to being even half as beautiful as the woman that aided the Undying god when he was about to die.

Other than that, there were many more talisman makers, puppet masters, or other well-known figures in the group that were regularly talked to or simply greeted.

However, perhaps no one got as much attention or greetings as the woman who wore red and white robes from the Blazing Earth sect. No one seemed to know her real name and called her Veiled Fairy because of the veil she constantly wore to hide her face.

Some said she was not as good-looking as her contemporaries, while some said she was hiding her face because she was too good-looking.

Not that it mattered anyway since her face or the lack of it wasn't what gave her the popularity she had.

What made her so popular was the fact that even before she had entered the saint realm nearly 12 years ago, she had entered the mountain and made it all the way to the top where she apparently learned an incredible dao.

No one knew what the Dao was or what it could do, but based on the descent of the Daos, most knew that it was a particularly strong one.

After that, the woman had broken through and in just 12 years reached Saint Condensation 5th realm. That was incredibly fast for anyone here.

She had also come here without fail every single year, and in 3 of those times, she had learned some other Dao, making her one of the people with the most potential in the entire Northern Continent.

Alex was quite surprised when he heard that. 'Another person with multiple daos huh?' he thought. In fact, her number of Dao was even higher than his.

He couldn't help but wonder what exactly it was she learned.

As the sky in the east started to brighten up, it was time to open up the gate of the dao mountain.

The gate was a massive metal door with intricate patterns on it. When viewed closely, one could tell that it was a seal.

The seal suddenly brightened when the 5 elders from the 5 ancient sects started pouring their Saint Soul Qi into it. The seal brightened even further and suddenly a slit appeared in between the doors.

The gates then started opening up and finished opening by the time the eastern sky was fully bright.

Without any word, the 5 elders entered the gates and went up the mountain.

The people that were new here looked around awkwardly, wondering if they should go in or not.

At the same time, a group of Saint realm cultivators arrived by the gates and turned around to watch the group go up.

"Please proceed slowly," they said. "Saint realm cultivators get to go in first."

Alex and the 33 other cultivators there had to wait as the many Saint realm cultivators slowly entered the mountain before them.

They started grumbling, saying that they were likely not going to have any place to stay where they could be and then would have to climb back down to a place with an open seating area.

That would be quite bad when Alex thought about it. However, he could only hope for there to be a spot for him when it was their turn to go.

It took the Saint cultivators nearly 15 minutes before they were all inside the mountain. The sheer amount of people that were here made it so that Alex and the rest were 15 minutes late in finding their spot.

As soon as the True realm cultivators were finally allowed to enter, they rushed into the mountain.

As soon as they entered, however, many of them, including Alex, had to stop for a moment to take in the weird scent that was neither bad nor good.

Alex felt the effect of the flower's scent on him immediately as he felt drowsy the moment he entered the mountain.

However, not even half a second later, he lost that feeling and could now start walking up the mountain.

Alex looked carefully in front of him to make sure there were no flowers that he would accidentally step onto. Fortunately, there didn't seem to be many until one had walked over 200 meters upward.

Just then, Alex saw one of the people from the Blue Spring sect bring out their beast.

Alex already had Whisker out, so he too didn't hesitate and brought out Pearl immediately. Pearl shook himself once to get rid of the random drowsiness.

Once there was nothing more to think about, Alex started walking up the mountain.

Chapter 892 Hot Spring

Alex slowly walked up the uneven steps. Now that he was already inside the mountain, the scents from the Soul Elucidating Tulips did nothing to hamper his movement.

Whisker sat inside his robes and Pearl walked next to him in his tiny form. Normally, he would've had him walk in his bigger form, but with so many people that were most likely knowledgeable about the attack on the Western Continent 5000 years ago, he didn't want someone to make the connection that Pearl was affiliated with the White Tigers somehow.

So, he remained in his tiny form.

Alex made sure to take note of both his beasts as he walked up the mountain. Any time either of them showed signs of getting sleepy, he was immediately going to put them back in their beast space.

Fortunately, they didn't do any such things and kept wide eyes as Alex walked up.

At around 200 meters up the mountain, Alex finally sensed a distinct change in the density of the scent. Because the scent flowed upwards, and there were no flowers below the 200-meter mark, the tiny amount of scent they were getting was basically nothing.

This was where the main test started.

Alex continued slowly walking up and felt that he was quite fine. Pearl didn't show any signs of drowsiness either. To his surprise, neither did Whisker.

Alex looked at his surrounding, and a few of the True realm cultivators coming up were already grabbing their heads a little as sleep started to look like a valid option for them.

Alex looked back at Whisker and asked, "are you not feeling like sleeping yet?"

Whisker shook his head. Alex looked at the group and wondered if mental strength had anything to do with any of this.

The ones that were feeling the headache didn't show any signs of spiritual sense after all.

He continued upwards and the few True realm cultivators be unable to go any further above. Around the 300-meter mark, they immediately stopped and started walking around the mountain to find a spot where they could sit down and meditate.

Of the 34 True realm cultivators, about 27 were left now, and they continued upward.

At 400 meters, 4 more stopped and went on to find a spot for themselves. Only around this point did Whisker start feeling dizzy. Even Alex was having trouble seeing a little through Whisker's eyes.

By the time Alex crossed 500 meters, 7 more dropped out of the pathway to go find a place to stay at.

Alex tried looking through Whisker's eyes this time around, but he was struggling a lot. By the time he would walk a hundred meters more, Whisker would surely get knocked out.

Alex couldn't help but wonder what would happen then. In fact, what would happen if Alex took him all the way to the top? Would his soul be hurt so bad that he couldn't do anything anymore? But then Whisker was supposed to be Undying. Even killing him shouldn't work, so a little pain to the soul shouldn't do much to him.

However, when he remembered how the 8th Undying God died because of some damage to his spirit, Alex didn't dare test the theory with Whisker's soul.

"You should go back," Alex told him.

However, the stubborn little mouse declared that he could keep going, even when he clearly couldn't.

So, Ale gently tapped Whisker on the head and said, "You did better than 18 True Emperor cultivators as a Meridian Tempering realm cultivator. You don't need to do anything better than this."

Whisker hesitated a bit but went back in the end.

Alex felt someone missing when he could no longer see. Especially when there were still 1500 meters to go.

"Come on, Pearl. You're my eyes now," Alex said. He couldn't see through Pearl's eyes, but Pearl sure could describe what he was seeing to Alex.

Along the way, by the time he reached 700 meters in height, only 3 more True Realm cultivators were remaining.

Alex ignored them and continued walking. Pearl had no problem with the height too.

Alex smelled the scent as he kept going and felt a slight bit of drowsiness. However, with a simple shake of his head, it would disappear.

As he walked, Pearl started relaying information about what he could see on the sides.

Since Saint cultivators would be cultivating here now that he was approaching the halfway point, Alex had kept his spiritual sense at best 10 meters around him, just so he knew where he was going.

So, when Pearl told him that there were Saint realm cultivators sitting not far away before even reaching the halfway point, he was quite surprised.

By the time Alex himself reached the halfway point, all the True realm cultivators were gone, and according to Pearl, there were Saint realm cultivators above him now.

Alex wondered why there were still Saint realm cultivators on the path now. Given how early they had left, they should have already reached the point where they could no longer go above, or simply kept going until they did.

However, it was only when he crossed the first slow Saint realm cultivator did he realize that they were so slow.

The Saints were forcing themselves to move. As opposed to the True realms who immediately went on to sit down because they felt they could no longer keep going, the Saint cultivators were slowly pushing themselves up the mountain to see how far they could go.

In a way, they were testing their resolve. Also, if they could go even 50 meters higher, the benefits would be surely higher.

Alex continued walking and was informed that there were fewer and fewer saints in front of him now. Either they were stopping to go find a place for themselves, or he was simply passing them too quickly.

"You are fine, right?" Alex asked Pearl.

"Yes," Pearl gave an answer.

Alex smelled the thick scent and was hit with a wave of sleepiness. However, 2 seconds later, it disappeared.

He shook his head and kept walking.

1400 meters, 1500 meters, and even 1600 meters, he easily cleared the distance without any trouble.

He was now at a height where he constantly felt slightly drowsy, but he could handle that easily. Even Pearl could handle it.

There were only 400 meters left, and at this point, every other Saint cultivator had already stopped and found themselves a spot.

Only Alex and Pearl were remaining, so they continued walking. Pearl looked around and told Alex that there wasn't anyone in the surrounding now.

For the next 150 meters of stretch, Alex felt all alone. Everyone who couldn't come up had stayed behind, and everyone who could had most likely gone to the top.

As he thought, numerous spiritual senses landed on him from up front, so he too spread out his spiritual sense to see who it was.

Alex saw around 8 different people at the top of the mountain, sitting inside a small pond.

'There's a pond?' Alex was quite surprised. He could sense a hot spring up there.

"Can you keep going?" A voice spoke in his head.

Alex recognized elder Xuan's voice and nodded. It wasn't like he had any problem. Not even Pearl had any problems. But then, was that really so surprising? He did after all have a Celestial Grade body, and Pearl was the descendant of a legendary beast, whose skills and talent he seemed to have inherited.

He continued walking and finally arrived at the peak of the mountain where the scent was most concentrated, but he could still go.

The 8 people, that seemed to have only just gotten into the hot spring, looked at him with curious eyes.

5 of these people were without surprise the 5 elders that helped open the gates of the mountain.

Aside from that, 2 of the others also looked like they were ancestors from the Blue Spring sect, and the Heaven's Frost sect.

The last person was the very popular and nameless Veiled Fairy, whose face Alex had no way of seeing as the veil blocked all spiritual sense.

"A True realm cultivator? That too a male from the Frozen Heart sect? Lady Xuan, you've prepared quite a surprise for us," the sect leader of the Heaven's Frost sect said.

"Not just him, even his beast was able to get here. How did you come upon such a beast, boy? With such a beast, you have a very good chance of becoming an elite Elder in our sect," Huang Xinyi of the Blue Spring sect asked as well.

The several others didn't speak much, but they did congratulate elder Xuan for having a disciple that made it this far up.

"Well, it's a surprise for me too," elder Xuan said.

She then turned to Alex and said, "I had hoped you would make it far, but this far was never in my imagination. Come, get in the water."

Alex nodded and looked at the water and how deep it was using his spiritual sense.

"The scent from the flowers has been infused with the water," the ancestor of the Blazing Earth sect said. "You will find quite a bit more benefit if you get in the water."

"Thank you, elder," Alex said and stepped into the slightly foggy, and even a little pink, water. The hot spring was about 15 meters wide, so there was plenty of room for just 9 people there. Alex walked to an empty place and sat down with Pearl.

Chapter 893 Learning another Dao

As soon as Alex sat inside the hot spring that barely came up to his knees, he could immediately feel his mind go blank for a few seconds.

Not only was the hot spring extremely potent with whatever scent the flowers gave, but also the vapor that came off of the hot spring contained even more of the scent, which would then gather inside the dome that was just a few dozen meters above them, making the peak of the mountain even more potent overall.

"What's your name, young man?" one of the elders with Royal blue robes asked him.

"It's Yu Ming, senior," Alex said.

"Yu Ming... hmm, I don't think I've ever heard of that name before," the elder said. "Where did you come from young man? And how exactly did you manage to enter a sect like the Frozen Heart sect?"

Alex was about to say something to answer without answering when Elder Xuan spoke on her own.

"Does my sect needs to tell brother Wu why it does what it does?" she asked.

"Of course not, sister Xuan," the old man said. "Forget I asked anything. I just hope you can come to increase your understanding of whatever it is that you are practicing. Having another talented individual like this little girl will help elevate us a lot."

"That's enough talk, brother Wu. My head is starting to hurt. The young man must be barely hanging on too. Let us start meditating," another man said.

"Yes, yes, of course," Wu Song said and spoke nothing else. Then, the 9 of them slowly stopped resisting the effect of the scent, and one by one they fell into a trance.

Alex too gave in to the scent's effects, but even then it took some time for him to fall into a trance. Even though he was willing, his body constantly cleansed the effects of the scent, making it hard to do anything.

With nothing else to do but wait, Alex started cultivating as he waited for his body to fall into the trance.

Pearl was told not to cultivate, so simply staying in the scent, it didn't take long for Pearl to fall into a trance as well, however, he still managed to hang out longer than the old men and women there.

It wasn't until noon that day that Alex finally felt the effects of the scent and he too fell into a trance.

The trance wasn't a simple trance either. Alex knew he was lucid, he could think everything, but he wasn't able to do anything else.

As if his outer body had been disconnected from him, only his mind seemed to be working. He could tell that if he forced it, he could break this trance and wake up, but since the trance was why he came here in the first place, Alex let it be and accepted the experience.

His mind was extra clear to think about anything he wanted. Every single memory was vivid.

He remembered when he learned about the Explosion Dao, the remembered what he had thought to come to that conclusion. He remembered the Heat Dao as well as the Dao of Heat Conduction and remembered how he had gotten to that point.

What thing was there for him to think about that he was getting good at?

Alex remembered that what helped Dao to become easier to understand was being close to the thing or having come in contact with its essence.

For example, it was easy for Alex to understand Dao related to Fire because he had a good Fire spiritual root and was used to making alchemy which required a lot of fire.

This meant that since he had such good Metal and Yang spiritual roots, he should be able to obtain their dao rather easily.

However, given how little time he spent understanding metal itself or even Yang itself, Alex couldn't find a start to understanding any Dao under it.

The next best thing after that was his Yin dao, but once again, that was in a similar situation. There was one aspect of Yin that he could understand, but for reasons he couldn't explain himself, he didn't want to understand it, as that would mean reliving the horrible moment.

As such, Alex's mind started to wander as he thought of the many things he had come to learn during his lifetime.

Slowly, he forgot he was even in a trance and started thinking of something that he had come to learn a lot about recently.

Alex failed to realize this, but over a week passed as he fell into this course of thought. There were many things he had to test about this topic, but for some reason, one by one, he started understanding what would happen if he did something.

Even without physically doing it, Alex had an instinct he had built up over the last 6 years that was starting to show fruit now.

All he had learned, all he had accumulated came to him in a wave of information, and as the understanding reached a crescendo, the worldly laws descended upon him from the sky, making it, even easier to continue the understanding.

Many people who were out of their trance could feel the laws descend, but many didn't think twice as Alex's wasn't the only law that descended.

Over a dozen different people were learning Dao this time around, so Alex's Dao was hidden amongst them.

The only ones who realized he was learning a Dao were the elders that were around him and could feel the disturbance not far away from them.

They were surprised that he was understanding Dao so easily, but they did nothing to disturb him.

However, what they did not realize was that within the worldly laws that had descended on Alex, there was another Dao that was being understood by the little cat that stayed on his person.

Pearl was fully in trance, understanding the Dao for something he was very much used to.

Pearl had some help in learning the Dao. It wasn't just him that understood the concept he was learning the Dao of, he was also remembering the information that was ingrained into his bloodline.

Nonetheless, Pearl was learning the Dao himself, which made it his own accomplishment.

Not long after, Pearl opened his eyes, fully understanding the Dao. He had started learning earlier than Alex, so he understood it faster than him.

He was a little confused by what he had learned, as Dao wasn't something that he had information on. However, he remembered what the old man that had taught him had told him.

He had said that he would someday learn about this, and when he did, he should ask Alex for his help in understanding what he had learned and to not use it recklessly as it could hurt him.

So, he waited for Alex to wake up so he could ask him. About half a day later, Alex opened his eyes as well.

It had taken him a while, but he had understood it. The understanding had come to him and the worldly laws that descended had left.

Alex didn't move and only kept to himself as he thought of what he had just learned.

Dao of Plant Growth.

To be more accurate, it was the understanding of how plants grew and how it could be helped to grow even better and in most cases, faster even. Having worked with plants for so long now, when it was time for him to learn a Dao, he naturally gravitated toward what he was very used to these days.

Alex wished it was the Dao of Techniques, as that would make everything so much easier, but without putting any work into it, there was no way he could learn that.

As he was thinking that, Pearl spoke to Alex.

"I learned something," he sent a mental message.

Alex had been invested in himself to even realize that Pearl had learned a Dao too.

"You learned a Dao? Of what?" he asked.

"Of Metal," Pearl said. "I know a lot about metal energy now."

"Oh, not bad," Alex said. He spread his sense around to see who was awake, but most people were in their trance.

"We'll do a test once we are out, okay?" Alex said and let Pearl return back to another trance in hope that he learned something.

Alex also at the same time remembered to reapply the medicinal paste to his eyes and then returned to falling into a trance. Since quite a bit of time was remaining, he hoped to learn something else as well.

Chapter 894 Elemental Interaction

Alex was a little surprised by the amount of time it took to learn a Dao. Back when he learned about explosions, he had taken about 2 days to understand them. While he had some understanding of the explosion at the time, the real understanding had come from witnessing the explosive technique of the Blueflame monkey.

In addition to that, he had eaten some Enlightening Mangoes which helped him understand further, not unlike what he was going through right now.

Right now, Alex was nowhere close to learning a Dao, but thanks to the help of the scent that made him fall into a trance, he had the time and necessary mental ability to possibly understand some concepts and learn some Dao.

This made Alex think back to the time when he learned the Heat dao. That had come out of nothing as he simply thought about heat and hadn't taken a lot of time either.

Which was to say, Alex was worried that learning Dao with this system would take too much time, and it was much better to learn it on his own.

Still, it wasn't like he was simply going to say no to an opportunity.

Alex fell into another trance and his mind started naturally thinking of the many things that he had learned over the course of his life.

Alex started thinking of the different elements. Water and Wood were his worst spiritual roots, so he didn't have any chance with them.

He tried to think of the various Dao that might be related to Earth but somehow came up empty. He simply wasn't too involved with earth, to begin with.

Next was Fire, which he was plenty involved with. Being an Alchemist, Fire was one of the most essential elements you always dealt with.

However, Alex had already learned what he could about Fire from there. At least in regards to how he used it. He already had the conduction and heat dao, so there wasn't anything that jumped out to give him some information.

Next up was Metal. Despite having Supreme Metal roots, Alex had for some reason not bothered to experiment more with them. He did learn all the techniques, but nothing that could be said to be about learning metal itself.

As for Yin and Yang, they were higher elements and didn't easily give away their secrets to Alex.

He knew they represented light and darkness, life and death, hot and cold, sun and moon, day and night, active and passive. However, even knowing this there was nothing he could do to further understand them, and thus could not gain a Dao.

So, Alex stopped thinking about the normal elements and moved on to the more nontraditional elements, such as blood.

Unfortunately, he hadn't trained in the techniques from the Blood God's Manual for over 10 months, so he wasn't very knowledgeable about that.

Another nontraditional element, or rather an aura that Alex had come to know about recently was Space.

Space and Time were more things that could be manipulated to a certain extent. He had seen this with formations and scripts that did it such as the various teleportation formations, or the time-dilating and constricting formations in the White Tiger's palace and the cultivation caves and the Timeless palace in the Demon realm.

Still, he was unable to get much out of either thought as he simply wasn't proficient with them. It would take a long time before he understood either of them.

Alex's mind next moved to weapons, and as a Sword user, there was nothing else for him to think about.

Alex tried thinking about the sword, learning its Dao, but for someone who hadn't even improved his intents or Sword Qi, it was simply impossible to understand swords as they were right now.

Alex's mind went through the many things he knew other than these. He thought of talismans and formations and finally ended up on Alchemy.

Alchemy was such a vast topic that Alex didn't even know where to start thinking about it.

Did he think about it with the fire? Or the cauldron? Or the ingredients that went into it? Or did he start somehow sooner and try and think about the recipes that went into making a pill?

Or maybe he should go to the end where the pill is formed. Could he learn a Dao regarding it?

Alex let his mind think what it could while he was under the effect of the scent. His open mind could think of many things at once and at a level that simply wasn't possible without the trance he was in.

As Alex thought of the various things, his mind caught onto something that he had more idea about than anything else when it came to alchemy.

He honed in on that knowledge and started thinking of it, and potentially even expanding on it from what he understood it.

Alex was thinking about the elements again. Only, this time he was thinking of how they interacted with each other.

Empowerment, Control, Weakening, Overwhelming, and Ruination. Each element that interacted with another element showed one of the 5 effects depending on what element they were and how strong the energy itself was.

This was something Alex had learned over 14 years ago and had been using in his alchemy. During this time, he had also come to learn more about how they interacted.

He not only learned how two energy reacted, but multiple ones, and how they all came to result in a single collective element. After all, that was the essence of alchemy.

As such, when Alex started thinking of it, he once again caused the world to stir and the worldly laws to descend.

The elders, none of whom had managed to show any signs of learning another Dao were beyond shocked when Alex brought down the laws again.

The month was coming to a close, so the elders were ready to leave at any moment, but seeing the worldly laws descend made them wait.

They kept watching for a whole day before the worldly laws ascended back to the skies and Alex learned the Dao of Five Elemental Interaction.

Alex opened his eyes, slightly happy, but slightly disappointed as well. He had learned a Dao, but it was for something he already had most of the knowledge about.

While the Dao did help him in some ways as he now knew that there was nothing more for him to understand about the elemental interaction.

At least amongst the five of them. The 2 higher elements, Yang and Yin barely ever had ingredients and thus Alex didn't know much about how they interacted mostly.

He was about to think more of what he had just learned when suddenly the elders around him sent their spiritual sense up to him.

"Young man, you learned two different Daos?" the green-robed elder asked.

"What did you learn, young man?" the red-robed elder asked.

"Not even a Saint and already knows two different Daos. So talented," the sect leader of the Blue Spring sect said.

"Makes me wonder..." the ancestor of the Heaven's Frost sect said. "Young man, are you one of these so-called players?"

Chapter 895 Leave

"Sorry… players?" Alex looked at the elder curiously. "What makes you say that?"

"Are you not?" the elder asked. "All the new and talented youngsters have ended up being players, which was why I asked. This young girl is a sol called player too."

"Oh," Alex looked towards the girl in the veil, who was curiously looking forward to his answer too. "Yes, I'm a player."

"I knew it!" the Heaven's Frost ancestor said.

"Calm down, old man. We all knew it. It's obvious at this point," the red-robed elder named Guan said. "You must have been quite lost then. Being in a new world, sent away from the immortal realms. You were tricked, huh?"

Alex was a little surprised at the woman's words. "Sent away by an immortal?" he asked.

"Of course," the older woman said. "It's obvious really. You were some talented group of people that didn't know about cultivation, so the immortal sent you here from the heavens so you can train in a relatively safe environment."

"Well, at least that's what we think, based on the information we have," elder Xuan said. "After all, your world is so different from our own that it simply has to be one of the higher realms."

"I never thought about that," Alex said. "So we were sent here by an immortal? What would the immortal want from us?"

"Who knows, kid? For all we know, the immortal could have just been bored," the elders said.

"Anyway, can you tell us about the Dao that you learned?" one of the elders asked.

Alex didn't even have to think about if he should speak or not because Elder Xuan spoke on his behalf.

"No, he won't say. Why don't you reveal what Dao you learned?" she asked.

"Tsk! You don't have to attack me like that. You could've just stopped at no," the elder said and stood up.

The water didn't cling to him at all as he stood, and not a single part of his cloth was wet.

At the same time, the other elders started standing up too. "Let's go, young man. The scent has already disappeared for the most part, so it is impossible to learn dao now," one of the elders said.

"Oh, yes," Alex said and stood up.

One by one, they exited the hot spring and slowly started descending down the mountain.

Alex took Pearl back into his beast space and descended along with the elder.

The elders tried to talk with him, but Alex was lost in his own thought. He wasn't thinking about the Dao he had learned, but the ones he hadn't learned. There was something about them that simply didn't sit right with him.

He answered a few questions here and there, most mostly Alex simply kept to himself, thinking of many things.

When they finally arrived at the gate, Alex saw many people that were already outside. There were no more boats as those were already taken by the other disciples to go back to the sect.

"Whose job is it to handle the closing this time around?" the Heaven's Frost sect's ancestors asked.

"I believe it's the Frozen Heart sect's turn," Tai Guan, the Blazing Earth sect's female ancestor said.

"Yes, it is ours. You may leave if you want to," elder Xuan said.

"Good, My disciple and I were going to leave anyway. Come, little Zhu," the elder said and the red-veiled girl walked away with the elder.

Alex watched them fly away and then saw the various other sect leaders and ancestors try and find some of their elders to fly back with.

Elder Xuan stood there and looked back at the gate as many started climbing down on their own to leave.

"Every year, one of us is tasked to make sure that everyone has left and then seal the mountain. This turn, it's ours so I will have to stay here for 2 more days," she explained to Alex who was standing next to her.

"I see," Alex said, still a little lost in his own thoughts.

"So you can go back on your own if you want to," the elder said. "Or you can wait for a few of the elders and disciples to come out so you can leave with them."

"Elder, I wish to leave," Alex said.

"Okay, you can go back on your own. You can do that right?" she asked.

"No, elder," Alex's voice grew more stern. "I wish to leave."

The elder paused and turned around. "You don't mean to say…"

"Yes," Alex said. "I wish to leave the sect."

Elder Xuan frowned. Her face grew somber as she asked, "does it have anything to do with how we treated you?"

"No, it had nothing to do with that," Alex said.

"Wait, did one of those elders give you a better offer? Those bastards, trying the take—"

"No, elder. It has nothing to do with what you did or what anyone else did," Alex said. "It has to do with me."

The elder was now confused. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"Here's the thing, elder. When I was trying to understand the dao, I came to learn that there were so many different Daos that I could potentially learn. However, I simply cannot because I haven't been giving them enough time for a long while now."

"I have been couped up in that small room for over a year doing nothing but making pills. While I am happy that it has helped me improve my pill-making skills, I have also regressed in other ways."

"I haven't trained in a long while. The sword skills that I should be improving on aren't being improved in the slightest, and the many techniques I should practice have been something I simply don't have the time to spend on."

"As such, I wish to leave the sect and go explore the world and try and understand everything I can," Alex said.

The elder stayed quiet as she listened to it. "You learned more than just Dao up there, huh?" she spoke. "I must tell you this before you make any further decision. If you do leave the sect, there is no way for you to enter this mountain ever again, until you enter the Saint realm."

"It's fine, elder. I don't think another visit to the mountain next year can help me so quickly anyway, and by the year after that, I will have entered the Saint realm, so I will make it here," he said.

"Even then, given how many important figures we will have to go through, if there are more than 2000 figures that want to enter this mountain, you might not get a chance to," she said.

"That's fine too, elder," Alex said. "If we are to go through importance, then I can simply make myself an important figure."

The elder thought for a bit and spoke. "You learned two different Dao today, and you know even more of them. Logic suggests that I should keep you however I can."

Alex's eyebrows narrowed in fear. "Elder, you gave me your word. I can leave the sect whenever I want," he said.

"I did, but what if I wanted to keep you? What if I didn't want to let you leave the sect?" she asked.

Alex was starting to get scared of the elder. Could he escape if a Saint Soul cultivator wanted to keep him there?

"Then I would resent the sect, Elder. And more than anything, I would resent you," he said. He got ready to use Heaven's Impact and then the Earth Devouring technique when suddenly he stopped.

The elder burst into laughter as her chuckle was heard all around the mountain. "Yeah, I definitely can't afford that. And I'm not twisted enough to destroy that which I can't have," she said. "If you truly do wish to leave, then leave. However, I hope you can make an oath."

"An oath?" Alex frowned. Oaths were powerful binding that would force him to do something or destroy him if he didn't.

"Yes, an oath. Make an oath that if you ever learn that the Frozen Heart sect is in danger, you will come to help it as long as you can," she said.

Alex thought for a moment and shook his head. "I'm sorry, elder. I cannot speak the oath. It isn't a bad oath, but I do not wish to bind myself into doing something compulsorily."

"Is that so?" the elder's eyes turned downwards as a sad little expression appeared on it. "I guess I asked for too much."

Alex nodded and then spoke. "While I cannot speak the oath, elder, I will give you my word. If I ever learn that the Frozen Heart sect is in trouble and that I can help it, I will definitely come to help the sect. That is the least I can do."

The elder smiled. "Thank you," she said. "I expect a lot from you."

Alex nodded and bowed toward her, ready to leave.

"Before you leave, can you tell me what Daos you learned?" she asked. She was quite curious about it as well.

"Sure," Alex said. "I learned Dao of Plant Growth, and Dao of Five Elemental Interaction."

"Dao of… plant growth? And elemental interaction? Isn't that…Hah!" the elder exclaimed. "As expected of an Alchemist. I should have known you would learn something related to that."

The elder rummaged into her bag to bring out something that she tossed to him. Alex caught the thing and realized that it was a small badge.

"Frozen Heart sect Affiliation badge?" Alex asked as he read the words on it.

"It means you have some connection with the Frozen Heart sect. While it might not help a lot, it should help you get out of some sticky situation," the Elder said. "Still, I hope instead of having to use such a badge, you would use one that belongs to an elder. If you ever do plan on returning, the Frozen Heart sect will accept you with open arms."

"Thank you, elder." Alex stored the badge and bowed once more.

Then he turned around and flew off to start a new adventure of his own.

Chapter 896 Snowsoot City

Alex stopped cultivating early in the morning and left the tavern room. His white mask still hung on his face as he walked through the crowd of people that looked at him with peculiar expressions on their faces.

Of course, not just anyone walked around with a mask on their faces.

The black robe he wore made it impossible for people to guess just what faction he belonged to. Not that it belonged to any faction as this was one of the few robes that his mother bought for him because she thought it looked good on him.

The city of Snowsoot was located near a volcano, but unlike the other cities that were located near a volcano, this one didn't get affected by the heat of it as the Spirit vein below the city was never ripped off.

Because of that, the city was clad in white snow, as well as some volcanic ash from time to time, giving it the name Snowsoot city.

The city was south enough that people could start growing crops in the summer, but it was still north enough that snow plagued most year-round.

There were no gates to check for exit or entry, so anyone could come and go as they wished.

Most cities that did this would have to start charging newcomers immediately since every year the mayor had to provide a tribute to the Frozen Heart sect in exchange for having their disciples protect the land.

However, this city was exempted from having to pay tribute, so the mayor did not bother setting up any form of entry fee.

Actually, setting up one would hurt them more than anything, so there weren't even any gates around the city.

Alex walked past a store that sold weapons and simply shook his head at the thought of the costs he had seen at the store when he first got there. He shook his head out of the city through one of the roads and arrived at the outskirts which lead to the mountains.

He continued up the pathway, which was filled with people coming and going as well. At the top of the road was a group of people lined up outside a cave that was either entering or leaving.

The ones entering needed no time to enter as the only thing they needed to do was to take a talisman with them.

The ones exiting, however, had to bring out a lump of stone and hand it over to the Frozen Heart disciples that were working there.

Alex entered the cave and looked at the giant opening that was filled with sparkling metals on either side. He followed the tunnel and made his way through the tunnels to one of the many forks that were created by the people here and were still being cleared.

However, none of those paths would ever come to an end. At least, not for a very long time as no one had any intention of ending the tunnel.

Which was why this place was known as the Endless Tunnel.

Even inside in the dim light, Alex could see the sparking walls and ceilings. Even the floor sparkled. The scenery, however, had already lost its novelty as Alex had come here for nearly a week now.

After leaving Dao mountain, Alex had a single thought in his mind. He needed to find a place where he could both cultivate, train, and be free to do whatever he wanted.

Of the information he had, Alex could think of only one place where he could improve himself by training.

That was obviously the Ancient Battlefield, where the aura and intent of ancient times were still available and one could train against them.

So, Alex had made his way south to go there. However, when he entered the Snowsoot city and learned of the Endless Tunnel being right next to it, he realized that it was a brilliant coincidence as he was in quite urgent requirement of a sword.

Given how good the weapons made up of Starfroged Tungsten seemed to be, he wanted to buy one, but the cost seemed too extraordinarily high. So, he wanted to mine some of it to make a sword out of it. It turned out that he could also buy the metal in the city, but why would he do that when he could simply mine it for free?

Besides, he didn't just want to make a single sword. With the 21 Sword Array technique with him, he would want at least 21 different swords to be used.

Since swords here were expensive and buying was out of the question, Alex had a different idea in mind. If possible, he would like to start getting his hands into artifact forging as well.

That way, he would be able to make any sword he wanted without having to worry about finding a forger or worry about having money for it.

With that in mind, Alex had started going into the mines to mine some of the ores. He had in mind how much he would require for 21 swords and then maybe a little extra.

Since it was just some mining, he had expected it to be done in a day or two. However, it was only after the first day that he realized just how stupid his expectations were.

There was a reason why Saint realms had to stop working on this mine. There was a reason why for the last 2500 years they had barely made such little progress.

The reason was simple. Starforged Tungsten, even as just an ore, was incredibly tough. So tough that the Frozen Heart sect didn't even take any ore from the True realm cultivators that entered. They only took Spirit stones.

It was only for Saint realm cultivator that they asked for 50 Kilograms of Ore for every day they spent in the mine.

50 Kilograms was quite an evil number for first-timers as it brought in waves of happiness and despair.

50 Kilograms was just a lot to simply give away after mining for a whole day, which would be what most newcomers would think, which would be their first wave of despair.

However, for Starforged Tungsten, even just a fist-sized ore weighed at least 20 to 30 kilograms. Two fist-sized ores were enough to pay the daily cost. So, when newcomers learned of that, they would get their first wave of happiness.

However, not long after, they would realize just how much energy they had to put into mining the ore for even just a fistful-sized ore. That would be their second wave of sadness.

Still, they would work on the mine and gather some ores and take it to sell. When they did sell the ores and learned that each fist-sized Ores cost around a thousand spirit stones, they would get their next wave of happiness.

The work was hard, but it paid well if you could do it. This was why this location was quite popular amongst those who were looking to make a quick buck.

The first day Alex mined, he barely managed to get about 150 kilograms of ores. At first, he was happy, but when he remembered the staff that was used by that one disciple he fought, he was depressed.

That single staff was about 5 tons in weight. So, if he wanted to make a single sword, he would need a weight that was close to that, which would be around 2 to 3 tons.

In comparison, the swords he had seen that weighed around this much were tended by a Saint realm cultivator and cost about 300 thousand Spirit stones or items of similar value.

On top of that, the sword wasn't even fully made up of Starforged Tungsten as it was usually an alloy of sorts where only 50% to 80% of it would be the actual tungsten.

Given how hard the tungsten was to work with, a sword that was entirely made up of the tungsten would go around to sale for over 500 thousand True spirit stones.

Alex definitely wanted a blade made up of 100% tungsten since he knew how tough it could be.

If Alex continued his first day's speed. He would need an entire week to get 1 ton of ore. When refined, that 1 ton of ore would change to about 400 kilos of the actual tungsten.

So, he would have to work about 5 to 8 weeks to have enough ore for a single sword.

That was incredibly tough for him as it would take 3 and a half years of constantly coming here to mine just to get enough ore for the 21 different swords.

That was without calculating how much time it would take to take the metal out of the ore, and then further processing would be required to turn a solid block of metal into a sword.

At some point, Alex thought it would be better to simply sell pills and earn enough money to have someone else do it all for him.

However, on the 2nd day, he found a method that worked really well and stuck with that for the whole week now.

Alex spread his spiritual sense as he searched for a place with not many people in it and walked there. When he arrived, he looked for a relatively empty spot where he put a small formation to cover up his portion of the working space so no one would be able to see just what he did there.

Once it was all set up, Alex began mining by first training his various techniques.

Chapter 897 Understanding the Basics

The walls of the Endless Tunnel that were made up of the StarForged Tungsten ores were without a doubt one of the best places to train his attacks in.

They were tough and durable, and Alex didn't have to worry about holding back his powers at all. In fact, it was advised that he didn't hold back at all, or he wouldn't be able to dislodge or break open any of the ores at all.

And that was what Alex wanted in the end after all.

His attacks began with his punches and palms. The Iron Fist punch and the Palm of the Sun were techniques that he had learned from the very beginning when he was in the Tiger Sect.

They weren't the strongest skills he had, but because their elements were Metal and Yang, they did end up being one of the strongest skills for sure.

Next was the Flame Mastery Scripture. Alex created a fiery bird using his will and sent it to strike the wall in front of him.

The wall resounded with a massive boom, but aside from a little dirt, nothing came off the wall.

Alex practiced the three techniques for a few minutes before moving on to his next skill which didn't use a sword.

The Infinite Heavenly Ice Spears.

Alex created an icicle out of thin air and attacked the wall in front of him. The icicles, although weak because of his Water Spiritual root, ended up being quite strong when Alex used his Yin Qi for it.

Although, it could never end up being as strong as his Metal or Yang attacks.

Once he was done practicing that, He switched to the next set of techniques by taking out a single sword. Then, he started training on his sword skills.

Alex had various sword skills, but at this point, only 2 were usable given how weak the others he had learned were. The Penta-Sword technique and the Elusive Heavenly Sword were what he considered the two best Sword techniques that he learned in the Tiger sect, not counting Sword Intent itself.

Alex attacked the wall as well as he could using both techniques, and clearly one was superior to the other. Being a person with a very weak Wood Spiritual root, Alex simply could never bring out the full strength of the Elusive Heavenly Sword.

After he finished training with the two techniques, Alex moved on to the next sword technique as he brought out 20 different swords out of his storage ring.

The swords flew in the air and immediately got into their place as they hovered with 3 swords at the front, 6 in the middle, and 12 at the back.

Then, the 21 swords started spinning altogether as Alex used the 21 Sword Array skill.

Alex had come to learn a bit about the technique after having used it for quite a while now. First of all, the technique used up quite a lot of Qi to use it. However, similarly, it was also very strong.

Alex didn't have an opponent to check the strength of the attack, but he could guarantee that the attacks were always stronger than his strongest Metal technique.

And that was without infusing any Sword Qi or Intent into it.

The technique's strength seemed to also rely on the swords that were in the array. The better the sword, the better the strength would be.

However, just because he got a chance to use Celestial-grade swords didn't mean he could suddenly kill Divine realm cultivators. The swords only provided so much power.

Still, he couldn't imagine that they wouldn't do a lot of damage if each of the 21 swords weighed above 2 tons and were made of one of the most durable metals in the whole world.

Alex had another thought about the technique as he practiced it on the wall. Each time the swords struck the wall, and he heard the reverberation, he wondered... what would happen if he were to add more swords to the technique.

Given the pattern of 3, 6, and 12. The next set of swords to be added had to either be 21 or 24. However, even when he tried both the amount, for some reason he simply couldn't use the technique at all.

Because he added the swords, he had to make alterations to the technique. However, for that, he needed the Dao of Techniques.

There were other techniques he had, that he needed to improve and needed Dao of techniques for that too.

His hands could be covered in Metal Qi, turning into golden fists or claws at his demand, but they were rather bad techniques as their efficiency wasn't something he had managed to improve.

Even his own skill to create a sun that he had created by simply adding Yang Qi to a ball of fire was quite bad.

Shen Jing had told him long ago that they were bad, however, it wasn't until now that he was starting to give thought to his words.

He was starting to think of how he could change a technique to improve them.

To use a technique, one needed 3 things. Qi, a route through the meridians for the Qi, which was also known as the Path, and Intent.

With a combination of these three, one would be able to use any techniques. Most people failed, however, because they weren't always able to fulfill the 3 conditions.

A man without a Fire Spiritual Root could never use Fire techniques as they didn't have a way to produce Fire Qi.

Similarly, if one's meridians were hurt or blocked, they couldn't use a technique at all.

Finally, without the proper intent to use a technique, the technique wouldn't ever come out.

For the techniques that were Heaven Grade or even lower, Alex had both the Qi and Intent for them. His Five Elemental Yin-Yang spiritual roots made sure that he would have access to every natural element out there, albeit they started off as rather weak set of Spiritual roots

Since he also had proper intentions for each of the techniques as he was already capable of using them, the only way to improve on a technique was to improve the pathways.

He needed to find a different path for the Qi to flow out through his meridians. If he could figure that out, he could improve every technique he had.

However, he didn't know where he could begin with altering a technique. As such, Alex decided to start with not altering but creating a technique.

He closed off his senses to nothing but himself and let a tongue of fire burn in the air in front of him. As the fire burned, Alex used his authority to call upon the Dao of Explosion to explode the fire in front of him.

The world acted on his will and the Qi moved into his fire. However, at the same time, Qi also moved from within him to go into the fire.

Alex was waiting for exactly that. He sensed the many meridians that existed in his body and then searched for the ones through which the Qi moved out.

The fire exploded in front of him, but Alex didn't give a single thought to that. He continued thinking about the movement of Qi within him and then decided to copy it.

Qi streamed out of his navel area and Alex forced it to flow into the exact same meridians instead of the thousands that he could choose from.

The pathway was perfect, so as they came out and reached his hands, they streamed out into the open air where a tongue of fire was waiting for it.

Finally, Alex needed to add the third part of the technique, the Intent.

The intent on what he wanted to do didn't seem as important as the other two, but there was no doubt that it was equally important.

So, from the start to the end of the technique, he had been continuously adding it. The intent to explode the fire in front of him.

He didn't use his authority over the explosion at all, simply just intent.

The moment the Qi touched the fire, the fire suddenly turned violent and exploded in a massive boom.

The explosion was weak, much weaker than when he used his Dao, and there was an upper limit to the strength of the explosion based on the strength of his own Qi.

However, Alex cared for none of that. A smile appeared on his face as he successfully created a technique that wasn't in his arsenal before this.

This meant that his understanding of the basics behind every technique was correct. And what was better was that this gave him the confidence to be sure that if he tried, he could definitely improve his techniques.

The Saint realms in the area were too weak to sense this, but worldly laws had stirred just now when Alex had understood the basic concept of the Dao of Techniques.

However, they were only basic, so the worldly Daos wouldn't descend with just that. He needed to understand a lot more in-depth about techniques in general before he actually acquired the Dao itself.

Alex did plan on improving with it, and he began trying. He began testing by bringing the Qi out through the various different paths, but there were too many for him to simply learn about it.

This needed more time than what he had in the cave, so Alex stopped improving that for now and started training on something that needed a lot of training on his end.

Blood Manipulation.

Chapter 898 Mining

Blood suddenly poured out from every single pore in Alex's body as he covered him up in intricate armor.

The blood armor was the easiest way for Alex to bring out blood from his body, so he did just that.

Having just learned a little about the Dao of techniques, Alex got a little confused when the armor appeared from his body. How did that happen?

He understood that one needed Qi and a pathway for a technique to work, but the blood didn't follow that surely.

The Blood Armor disappeared back into his body as Alex carefully brought it out again. It was only then that he noticed something.

Qi was indeed being used to bring out the armor. Most of the work was actually done by Blood Aura itself, but Qi did indeed help a bit. Qi also helped strengthen the armor.

Considering that Blood Aura was the equivalent of Qi, it did make sense that it would be required in forming the armor too, alongside intent.

However, that still left out a pathway for the aura to go through to use the technique. Or was it that Qi itself was enough and Blood Aura didn't need to be counted in this technique? It would make some sense when he thought about it.

In fact, going a bit ahead, Alex turned the blood into a sword as it landed on his hand.

The technique on the second page of the Blood God's Manual, Blood Manipulation.

Alex used the technique to pour Qi into the blood around him to fluidly change its shape.

"So, even if it is not one of the 7 elements, it still uses Qi to move, huh?" Alex thought to himself.

However, he immediately remembered something that made his assessment wrong, or at least he believed so.

Back in the Demon realm, when he was being forcefully ejected out of the realm by the escape talisman, he had somehow made the teleportation power disappear.

Or more accurately… he had made the space to stop being affected.

"Wait, I didn't use Qi those times when I killed them while they were covered in Space aura, and I don't have a Space dao," Alex thought. "Then the only reason I could have moved space back then was through… wait, do I have Space aura?"

He had a basic understanding of half of what was going on, so everything that felt similar was in no way the same at all.

Space aura and Blood aura were two different things, sure, but they should somehow act similar, right? There had to be a rule.

"Hmm, you can in fact manipulate space with Qi," Alex thought. "That's how I teleport in the first place. That's how formations work, that's how runes work."

"Then… is what happened that time in some way similar to what I am doing with blood aura?"

"Wait, Sword Intent, Qi, and then Aura. They don't need a pathway either, just like Space, in my case. Then… is blood different somehow?" he thought.

"I can see how Sword and Blood aura can be different. One I'm using with a technique I found from a book, while the other is something I'm gaining through my understanding of it," Alex thought. "Then, going by the same logic, does Space somehow fall under the same category as Sword and not blood?"

That only meant one thing. "Am I understanding Space somehow? How? Why? How could I learn something without knowing I'm learning it?"

Alex was left scratching his head.

"This is confusing, I will have to think about it later," Alex stopped thinking about it and continued his training.

The blood sword struck the wall in front of him and didn't even make any sparks despite how strong it was.

There was barely a dent in the wall, so Alex struck again, and again, and again. He switched it up from time to time.

He would freely transform the shapes the blood was in. Sometimes it would be staff, sometimes a spear, sometimes a scythe, and sometimes a hammer.

He tried every other weapon, but he wasn't very good at them, so he returned to a sword every so often.

Aside from that, also tried ranged attacks. He copied what Song Shing had done to him and created droplets out of his blood to shoot out like bullets.

Those were quite strong attacks if he did say so himself.

Since all of the attacks were powered using blood aura, the attacks themselves depended on just how strong the blood he was using was, and if his body could handle such a strong blood aura.

The Qi was there to supplement the blood in case it was weaker than the Qi itself.

Alex practiced every variation of the attack he could think of, but he was limited by his imagination and experiences. As such, his blood art would only improve as he learned more about cultivation in general from the many Saint realms of the Northern Continent.

Alex continued his training for a little while longer before stopping it.

He had spent nearly 5 hours on his training, so it was time for him to actually mine the ores.

While Alex hadn't used his strongest attacks or had even planned on mining at all, despite attacking the walls so much, all he had managed to do was dislodge a single fist-sized ore of the metal, which he put into his storage ring.

Now that he was seriously going to mine it, he needed a much better system than just attacking the wall with all he had.

During the first 2 days, Alex had thought of renting a hammer outside the gates for not a lot of price. However, he had come up with a way better technique on the third day.

Alex brought out a sword. The sword.

It was the strongest object that Alex had ever seen. He couldn't be sure who forged it, or how such a metal could even exist, but there was nothing in this world that was stronger than this sword.

However, that was perhaps to be expected. After all, one wouldn't simply bind someone like Godslayer to an everyday sword. Alex couldn't even imagine the origin of such a sword.

Alex used his Saint realm body and his Sword Qi to drive the sword into the wall. Only the tip of the sword was in, but Alex didn't need more than that.

Once the tip was in, Alex took out a massive ore from his storage bag that was the size of a human head and weighed about a hundred kilograms.

Then, he started hitting the sword from the back like he was putting a nail in the wall.

He hit the sword until it was more than halfway into the wall, then it started hitting it sideways to slowly push the sword horizontally on the wall.

Every so often, he tilted the sword so that instead of going just horizontally, it would also go upwards in an arc.

By the time 2 hours had passed, Alex had barely managed to make a quarter of a circle whose radius would be around a meter.

He needed about 5 hours before he was fully done with the city. By the end of it, Alex's muscles started burning with pain.

Given how little he knew about the various other methods of Body cultivation, Alex would bet that this would certainly make someone very strong if they kept it going for a long time.

Alex stopped for a while to cultivate and heal his body. The Undying physique easily healed him, but the fatigue still remained and that was what he was trying to truly get rid of.

After a couple or so hours, he got back up and started mining again. Now that he had made a deep cut on the wall, all that remained was for him to start carving away the walls.

He struck the sword diagonally on the wall and started hitting it again until the sword came out of the circle that was cleared away.

Once again, he started striking sideways until he carved the wall to the point that there was nothing holding that piece of the wall anymore and it just fell off.

About a ton of ore fell off just like that. Once he put the ore into his storage bag, he continued with the rest of the ore, in what would certainly be over 20 tons by itself.

Chapter 899 Break from Mining

Night had fallen outside, but Alex didn't give any thought to that. It wasn't just him that worked here endlessly. Even the other Saint realm cultivators remained inside as long as they could to make the most of their time.

Alex continued cutting up the wall for the next 5 or 6 hours until nothing much remained left to be cut after he was done.

However, that did not mean he could leave just yet. Given how sharp most of the edges were, people would realize that he was cutting up ores here after he left.

So, he needed to make the hole appear more natural, something that would appear after a saint realm had worked on this portion for a long time.

Alex released his blood armor again and used the blood from there to strike at the wall all over again.

He took a few hours of break in between to cultivate and get back his Qi. In the meantime, while he didn't do anything, Alex brought out Pearl and let him train on the wall.

Pearl's skill sent attacks flying left and right s he began training as well.

His shockwave technique didn't work as well against the wall, but the paw strike did work well. The skills Alex had bought a long time ago were being put to good use finally.

Many hours later, he was finally done. He was quite tired and felt drained, but he was done. He also earned quite a few more in the process.

By the time he had spent 2 days in the mine, he had gathered around 25 tons of ores, which would be about 10 tons of Tungsten.

That was good enough for 3-4 swords.

Considering he had already gathered around 50 tons in the last week, Alex was good for over 15 swords now.

A few more days and he would have enough for the sword. However, he didn't simply watch metals for just the 21 swords. Now that mining was so easy, he wanted metal for the 45 swords that he would add to the technique to improve it.

So, he was going to get as much out of his time here as he could.

Alex closed the formation behind him and left the mine, slowly making his way outside. He paid the fee for two days' worth of mining in Spirit stones and left the area.

He made his way back to Snowsoot city, which seemed to have gone through a considerable amount of ashes in the last 2 days. He saw people sweeping the ground and... collecting?

"Are they collecting soot?" Alex thought for a moment. "Ah, must be for the plants."

He ignored the people and went back to the tavern where he had rented the room for the entire month.

As soon as he returned, Alex went into his room and started cultivating endlessly along with Pearl and Whisker.

Alex only stopped when the sun rose from the window behind him.

He put Pearl and Whisker back into their Beast space and went into his mind to check on the situation inside there.

The silver mountain still hung in the sky and there were quite a lot of silver strings floating in the air as well.

'They're starting to increase in number now,' Alex thought. He wondered why that was. However, he knew he wouldn't find any answer just mulling by himself, so he started absorbing all those into his body.

Once done, he looked towards the Godslayer that was staying on his own.

"Hey, are you doing okay?" he asked. "I know you haven't gotten any food for a while, but since I've left the sect, I might go back to being forced to eat beast cores again."

"Hmm? Oh, good for you," the sword spirit said and went back to not speaking.

"Is something wrong?" Alex asked.

"I don't know," the spirit said. "It's like something had been awakened within me and it's calling for me."

"Calling for you? You mean like you found your body?" Alex asked.

"No, not that sort," Godslayer said. "More like... I don't know how to explain it. I'm sure I've had this feeling before as well, but I had been able to ignore it so easily since I was in control at the time."

"However, now that I'm here, stuck, with nothing to do but mull on this feeling, the reaching levels it has never reached before," Godslayer said. "It's like I want to do something, but I don't know exactly what it is that I want to do."

Alex was quite curious too. "When did it start exactly? This feeling I mean," he asked.

"A week? A month? I can't tell how long has passed in here," the sword spirit said.

'Could it be because of the Dao mountain?' Alex thought. With the worldly laws falling down twice, did the sword spirit sense something?

'Wait, can artifact spirits even learn Dao? Given that they have so much intelligence, that should work, right?' Alex thought.

"Well, let me know if you have any idea," Alex said and got back out of his mind.

He took a few minutes after that to reapply the medicine for his eyes. This was the 16th month in a row now that he had done this.

8 more months and he could stop. Hopefully, his eyesight returned after that.

Alex left the tavern and walked out into the city. This time, however, he wasn't planning on going to the mine at all.

Instead, Alex took another road to arrive in front of a rowdy place with a massive board that written 2 words.

Snowsoot Blacksmithing.

He walked into the blacksmiths and was beyond surprised to see that the ones that were hitting the metal with all they could be almost all Saint realm cultivators.

They all seemed to belong to different factions, but they were all working there.

One of the blacksmiths, a huge, muscular man walked up to Alex.

"What do you want, Junior?" he asked.

"I was wishing to learn how to smelt the tungsten ore, senior," Alex said.

"Hah! You True Realm cultivators will never be able to smelt such a metal. The heat alone will be something that you won't be able to survive."

"Give me your ores and I can do it for a few thousand Spirit stones," the man said. "It will be profitable if you bring a larger batch of ores at once so that it won't cost you as much."

"Thank you for your words senior, but I wish to learn how it is done myself. Would I be able to do that?" Alex asked.

"Don't waste my time if you're not going to have anything made, please leave," the man said and turned around.

"Senior, wait," Alex said. He hesitated for a second and slowly brought out about 100 kilograms of Ore.

"I have 100 Kilograms of ores here that you can refine, and I will pay you. However, if you let me view the process, not only will I pay you, I will let you keep the metal too," Alex said.

The Saint stood there, contemplating for a few seconds. The conditions weren't bad, but he just didn't like the idea of having some True realm cultivator being there while he—

Alex brought out the Frozen Heart affiliation badge and kept it over the ore. "I hope I can persuade you with this," he said.

The Saint's eyes narrowed. "You're affiliated with the Frozen Heart sect?" he asked.

"Yes, I've had dealings with them," Alex said. "We're on good terms. We're on quite good terms, I should say."

The Saint stared at him silently for a bit. "I don't like people who hide their faces. I believe they are hiding something," he said.

Alex took off his mask and showed his face. "I'm afraid the only thing I have to hide here is this medicinal paste I use to heal my eyes," he said.

The man got curious. "How do you see then?" he asked

"Through this little guy," Alex rubbed Whisker's head in his robes. "Also, I have spiritual sense."

Alex sent out a wave of spiritual sense that passed through the Saint.

"You... you truly are something," he said. He didn't see any more reason to disagree right now.

"Fine, come with me. I will only show it to you once, so if you run away from the heat, don't tell me I cheated."

Chapter 900 Smelting Tungsten

The man took Alex behind the smithy, to a place that was quite separate from all others.

"Where are we going?" Alex asked.

"The furnace for melting this metal is over there in those buildings. You can't just melt it anywhere you want because of how much heat it produces," the man said.

"I see," Alex said. He looked around the snow-filled backyard of the smithy and saw quite a few people working on parts of artifacts that didn't require much physical work.

The basic furnace-related work was done in the front shop.

They arrived at a location from where Alex could feel intense heat without even entering any of the rooms. "The furnace is here?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the man said. "Scared? I'm not returning your ores even if you want to quit now."

"Oh, it's fine. I don't plan on quitting so easily," Alex said and waited for the man to open the door.

The man shrugged and opened the door. Alex felt the hot air hit him, but the heat barely registered in his senses.

He was more surprised about the size of the furnace. "It's quite small," he said without thinking much.

"It can fit up to a ton of the ore at once, so it's not really that small," the man said.

The furnace looked like a cauldron, except it was long vertically with barely half a meter in diameter.

"That's where we'll melt the ore?" Alex asked as he looked at the material of the hot furnace. "That looks like it's been made from the same metal as well won't it melt?"

"No, that's an alloy, made by mixing different metals. It's not really strong, but has a high melting point," the senior said.

"Oh, what metals? Are they as good as the Starforged Tungsten themselves?" Alex asked.

"No, just 3 parts Ice Iron, 1 part Pale Onyx, 2 parts Violet Obsidian, and 10 parts Starforged Tungsten. You can easily make that furnace too," the man said.

"I see," Alex then turned to look at what the man was doing. "Are you not going to put the ore in?"

"Not yet," the man said and placed the ore in a giant platform and activated some sort of formation.

Instantly, everything was blocked by the platform. The man then brought out a giant hammer, clearly made from the same metal, and watched golden energy flow into it.

The man raised the hammer up high and slammed it down on the ore.

A deafening boom resounded all over the room as the formations on the wall lit up to block the sound from escaping.

Alex felt the force behind the attack. That was definitely in the Saint Foundation realm.

The man pulled the hammer up another time and slammed it down. He continued doing that for a while as the ores turned into even smaller pieces.

'Oh, he's making it easier to melt,' Alex understood.

After a while of beating the ore, the man finally stopped and took the broken ores out of the platform. The platform itself, however, wasn't damaged at all.

The formation there was most likely connected to the Spirit vein that lay below the city.

The man took a giant drum of water and poured the ore into the water. After mixing them for a bit, he threw out the water.

"That gets rid of a lot of the dirt," he explained and continued. He then took the drum of material and poured it into the furnace.

Then, all that was left was to heat it up.

"Tell me immediately if the heat causes a problem, okay? We need this thing to reach over 4000 degrees, and that's not something you should be able to handle," the man said.

"4000? That's quite high," Alex said. He thought back to his own pill-making sessions and never did he have to go over 1500 degrees. Even those didn't last for more than a minute or so before lowering the temperature immediately."

'Not even lava gets that hot, right?' Alex thought.

He stayed to the side and watched as the man suddenly poured his Qi into the furnace.

Alex sent his senses into the furnace and saw that the temperature in there had reached very, very high.

He was also quite surprised to see that the Qi to heat up the metal was being pulled from all around the room, meaning that the Saint Foundation realm cultivator in front of him also had learned the Dao of Heat.

As the man said, the heat really did have nowhere else to go but outside and soon the room started heating up.

The man sent his spiritual sense back at Alex to check if he was okay, but he didn't need to worry at all. Alex was perfectly fine with the heat.

Just because the metal was heating up at 4000 degrees, didn't mean that all the heat that reached Alex was that high as well.

It wasn't even 400 degrees, and that was an amount that Alex could easily navigate through.

Alex watched everything happening as he remembered the methods to smelt metal.

The first task was the pulverize the ore as best as you could. Powdered ores worked the best, but no one would expect the Starforged Tungsten to be powdered.

The second task was to remove as much extra stuff from the ore as possible, such as dirt, minerals, and even other metals using whatever method possible.

Finally, the third task was that you melt the remaining metal and use some reducing agents to remove whatever it is that is still available in the molten metal that didn't float to the surface or sink to the bottom.

Alex waited for a bit and saw the man pull out something from his storage bag.

He poured the bag into the furnace from the top where the hot air was blowing out.

"You're still fine?" the man asked with a confused face.

"Yes, I'm fine, senior," he said. "By the way, what did you put in there just now?"

"This? This is the soot that falls from the volcano. We use it to purify the Tungsten," the man said.

"Oh," Alex thought. 'So that's for the third task.'

Alex felt the molten metal in the furnace move as the soot was immediately mixed into the metal. He watched the soot react with the stuff in the molten metal and float to the top as slag.

The furnace burned for a while longer as the temperature in the room continued to increase. Finally, the man stopped pouring in his Qi and stepped back with a face full of sweat.

"You handled that quite well," he said.

"I was quite far from the furnace," Alex said.

"Still, I've seen Saints run out because the heat was too uncomfortable for them. Are you sure you're not a Saint realm cultivator yet?" the man asked.

Alex smiled. "I'm afraid not," he said. "However, I have been around volcano peaks a lot, so I'm used to being in high heat"

"Oh, is that so?" the man said. He dragged a mold for the metal and opened up the furnace at the bottom as the molten tungsten slowly flowed down the side of the furnace and into the mold.

The mold didn't last very long as it could barely hold the heat from the tungsten, but the man was already working on cooling it down the moment it poured down, so even when the mold broke, the shape of the metal remained.

He further cooled it down and finally, the metal was possible to handle.

In the end, the metal was barely big enough to make a single formation flag if one wanted to. However, that formation flag alone would weigh about 40 kilograms.

Alex watched the rest of the stuff in the furnace begin to flow, which the man let pool on the ground. Once it was cold enough, they would pick it up and either throw it away or repurpose it for other stuff.

"Here, you happy?" the man asked. "Now give me my spirit stones and you can leave."

"Thank you, senior," Alex said and brought out his spirit stones. However, before handing it over, he looked at the man and asked, "Do you think I can learn how to forge artifacts here?"

"You want an apprenticeship?" the man narrowed his eyes.

"Just for a few weeks, to learn the basics," Alex said.

The man thought for a while and snatched Alex's spirit stones. "Fine, but you'll have to pay me a lot."

Chapter 901 Apprenticeship

Alex gained an apprenticeship under the artifact forger who was named Hwan Fulin. The man liked being called a blacksmith more than an artifact forger as his mastery lay more in swords and shields than unique artifacts.

That wasn't to say he couldn't make them. Only that he wasn't very proficient.

The apprenticeship would last a total of 10 days over the next 2 weeks, from morning to evening with no breaks.

In return, Alex would have to pay 50,000 True Spirit stones. That was 5,000 True spirit stones every day, but Alex didn't worry about that. He had way too many things he could sell to earn more. Besides, he had a lot of spirit stones that were just sitting there, doing nothing.

Once Alex accepted, the training began the very next day.

The first day of training was for Alex to melt metals that the blacksmith Hwan would have to work on.

At first, Hwan tried to stay by Alex's side to teach him exactly how it was done, but he was surprised to see that Alex was very proficient at heating stuff and even wondered if he was playing a joke on him by trying to learn it.

However, seeing him not be able to differentiate between the different metals and alloys, and not be able to tell what a crucible was made up of, the man finally believed that he was here for the first time.

Alex pulled out the molten metal and poured it onto a large working surface where it flowed down a pre-established path to form the shape of a sword.

The man brought out a hammer and said, "now watch." Then, he started hitting the slowly cooling metal as hard as he could to bring the shape as close to what was asked of him.

"You can do this part with just your Qi, and it will be fine. Most use only their Qi after all," the man said and struck. "However, I have found that using Qi can never bring the same amount of tempering required as a hammer would."

He kept striking the red-hot metal.

"The more force you exert on a metal, the better it comes out in the end," he said as he struck again. He then took the slightly red metal and put it back into the furnace to heat it up again.

"The metal, no matter how well you extracted it from the ore, will always have impurities. Not just the metal, any wood, or leather, or bone that you use for artifacts will always have impurities."

"Your first course of action should be to try and get rid of the impurities," he said. "For some, it will be impossible. But, for molten metal, it's quite easy. You just continue melting it and hitting it. As it tempers, the impurities slowly remove themselves, or simply get burnt away."

He pulled the sword out of the furnace and started hitting again.

"Then, once you get rid of the impurities, or as much as you can, your next course of action is to do 2 things at once."

"First, you need to even out the metal. It was almost liquid just before, so some parts will have more, and some parts will have less. You need to hit it and redistribute the portion as required."

"At the same time, you need to start pouring your Qi through the artifact. As you do that, the Qi will create natural lines all over the metal from where Qi can later travel when you've finished it."

"If you don't do this, there will be no Qi lines in the artifact, and the artifact will resist your Qi every time you use it," he said and continued hitting it. "Any good artifact forgets will make sure to put Qi lines in their artifact, no matter how trashy the materials are."

Alex nodded as he took in all the information.

"If a sword is made up of the best material, using the best techniques by the best forger, but it doesn't have any Qi lines, is that sword considered bad?" Alex asked.

The man paused for a second. He put the sword back into the furnace as he thought. "Not necessarily," he said. "If it really does have excellent material and techniques, then it will be a great sword nonetheless."

"However, if there are no Qi lines, then it will be hard for a cultivator to use it. In those cases, only ones with great Sword skills could use those, which while not bad is still a shame," he said.

The man pulled the sword back and said, "Watch me. I'll put the Qi lines now."

Alex nodded and sent his spiritual sense onto the molten sword.

Qi poured out from the Saint and entered the base of the sword that would go into the hilt. Then, starting there, it separated into multiple paths as they entered the sword.

At the same time, the man hit the sword again. Once the Qi made its way to the end and solidified to form a Qi path, the man started once again and poured his Qi in again to form different paths.

He continued doing that multiple times over the course of the next few minutes while continuing to temper the metal all the while.

Then, once he believed he was done, the man put the sword into a large barrel full of water and sighed as he was finally done making the blade.

Alex noted down every aspect of what was done here today. "Is that it?" he asked.

"We still have a few things remaining. I need to pick an appropriate handle or make one myself. And then I have to sharpen it as best I can," he said.

"I see," Alex said and waited for him to do it.

The man showed how the next few steps were done, and they were relatively easy.

When the sword was formed, Alex held the silver blade as he looked at it from all sides.

"Pour some Qi and see how it is," the man said.

Alex did as told and found that his Qi entered the sword quite easily. "What rank and grade is this?" he asked.

"Given the materials, it's a True rank sword. As for grades, that's hard to tell. Artifacts don't have anything to test their grades with. As such, we usually go by evaluating a variety of things."

"Such as if the artifact is well built, if the ingredient's impurities still remain, if there are skills that have been imbued during the crafting, and many other minute things," he said. "Given my evaluation, that sword is True Earth grade. Not bad for something that took about an hour to make, and it will also fetch about 2000 to 3000 True Spirit stones."

Alex caught onto something that the man said and honed in on it. "Sorry, you can imbue skills onto an artifact?" he asked.

"Oh, yes of course. Have you not seen any artifacts with skills before?" he asked.

Alex thought for a bit. Actually, he did. He had seen plenty of artifacts with skills, but he had simply ignored them.

His mask had the skill to disrupt spiritual energy. His whip had a

Fire skill that burned with Saint fire. His armor had a protective barrier that would activate once to protect him from a very strong attack.

There were many other such artifacts that had skills imbued in them, and it only was now that Alex was consciously thinking about it.

"How do they do it then?" Alex asked. Now that he was realizing something existed, the curiosity was hard to keep back.

"Through Qi lines, from what I know," he said.

"Though... Qi lines?" Alex looked confused. "How does that work."

"You will learn soon when you build an armor, but when you put your Qi onto the artifact to form Qi lines, you can create a design inside that will activate a skill."

"So easy? Why doesn't everything have a skill inside it?" Alex asked.

"It's not so easy," the man said. "You need to know the designs too. For now, we only know the designs for barriers in armor. Most other skill either come from random coincidences or is a trait of one of the ingredients used to make them."

"Suffice to say, we don't know much about it," the man said. "Alright, now stop talking. It's your turn to make a sword."

Chapter 902 Making a Sword

Alex poured his Qi into the furnace as he sped up the process behind the melting of the metal.

Not doing anything would also work in this situation as there was a formation being used to heat up the metal inside, but since he was being apprenticed, he did as asked.

Once the metal was melted, he pulled out the crucible and poured the metal onto a mold. He waited just long enough for the shape to solidify, and then pulled the still burning hot and red metal out from the mold and onto an anvil before starting to beat it with a hammer that he had received.

He hit the metal for as long as he could before it solidified to the point that hitting simply made no difference anymore. After that, he put it back on the furnace to make it soft again.

His teacher sat on a stool not far away, watching every little move, but not teaching him anything at all unless he made some mistake.

Having remembered everything, Alex made no mistake. At least, for the most part.

Alex struck the metal as hard as he could and tried to have it be as equally distributed throughout the metal as he could, but it was hard for him to tell what metal was tempered and what wasn't.

"Try to compress it," the saint spoke after seeing him struggle at that part. "Compressing usually helps with tempering the metal and also makes it strong."

"Yes," Alex said and started heating the metal once more. He put it back in the furnace for a bit again and pulled it out once more to continue hammering it.

After doing the same thing a few more times, it was time for him to pour some Qi into it and make some Qi lines.

He put the sword into the furnace once again and looked towards the saint. "For the Qi lines, you said that they sometimes randomly make skills right?" he asked.

"Yes," the saint said. "What about it?"

"Well, can I try and make some myself?" Alex asked.

"Oh... you want to make some skills huh? How do you plan on doing that exactly?" the saint asked curiously.

"Uh, just make some random squiggly lines. Will that hurt my sword's grade?" he asked.

"No, as long as there are enough Qi lines, your sword won't suffer from it. But that also means you will have to spend quite a lot of focus and Qi on it. You think you can do it?" the man asked.

"I... I think I can," Alex said. He wasn't fully confident as this was the first time he was making anything artifact, but he was sure he had understood what he needed to do enough so that he knew what he was doing.

Once the sword was out of the furnace, he got to work.

As he hit the metal in locations where they were uneven to even out the overall thickness of the sword, he also poured in Qi from the side as it branched off into multiple sections, which quickly started curving around itself as Alex tried to take as much path as possible.

Having made 9 pills at once in 3 different cauldrons while cultivating at the same time during a period where he also had to make mental tracking of what ingredients went in next and what the temperature had to be for the cauldrons, this task felt very simple for Alex.

He was calm the entire time as he struck the metal continuously, making sparks fly off, while in the meantime he covered the entirety of the sword with Qi lines.

For being his first time, Alex was actually doing not very bad. In fact, he was doing exceptionally well.

After a few minutes of hitting and drawing lines, Alex was finally done and he plopped the sword into the barrel full of water.

The sword sizzled as it cooled and Alex stepped back in wait. He still had to put on the handle and hilt, and then sharpen the sword, but those were rather easy.

"You said this was your first time, right?" the man asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Then how are you so good at concentrating?" he asked. "Do you make something else?"

"Uhh... yes," Alex said. "I dabble in Formations and Talismans as well."

There was no way in hell he was ever going to tell the man that he knew alchemy. That would, as far as he knew, be a death sentence in most cases.

Although the rules seemed lax in the State of Dong for alchemy, and it was the teaching of alchemy that was more frowned upon, Alex still wasn't going to tell anyone that he knew how to make pills.

"Oh, what grade?" the man asked curiously.

"I... can reach Heaven grade for both," Alex said.

"What?" the man's eyes widened a bit. "You're a True Heaven formation master and a True Heaven Talisman forger?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Then why would you try and learn forging? Just focus on those two, get your skills to immortal grade, then artifact forgers will come begging to take your work. You don't need to make it yourself," the man said.

Alex chuckled when he heard that. "It's alright. I'm doing this because I want to learn," he said.

"Well, I guess I can see where the True Heaven rank for the other two professions come from," he said.

Alex didn't say much and focused on his work. Once he was done with making the sword, putting the hilt, and sharpening it, he checked it.

The sword was... average. Not as good as what the Saint had made, but it was still pretty good. The Qi lines made it easy to pour Qi into the sword, but sadly, no skill seemed to be there.

Alex showed the sword to the Saint and was told that he did pretty well, for being his first time.

Then, he took the sword to a formation, which used metal tongs to snap the sword in two.

"Hmm, you need True Emperor 7th realm to break the sword. Not bad," the man said. "However, a True rank sword is considered mediocre if it can be broken by a True realm cultivator. Make one that needs at least Saint realm cultivator to destroy it."

"So, make it again?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the man said as he tossed the broken sword back. "There's your metal. Redo it until you've tempered it to be very strong."

Alex took a deep breath and nodded. "Okay," he said.

After placing the metals back in the furnace, he restarted. He heated the metal pieces until it was down to being fully melted and then poured them back onto the mold.

Then, he started hitting it again. The problem was with tempering, he needed to temper it better.

He struck metal hard with the hammer and repeated it again and again. The sound of his hammer was lost in the many noises of the smithery, but someone heard it, loud and clear.

So, when he came to see what was happening and saw that Alex was forging a sword, he frowned at the striking technique he was using to temper the metal.

"That's not how you do it, kid," he spoke into Alex's ears. No, into his mind.

Alex paused for a second. "Godslayer?"

Chapter 903 Fully Tempered

"Who taught you to temper a metal like that? Are you trying to beat the life out of that metal?" Godslayer spoke in his mind.

"Uhh... you know how to temper a metal?" Alex asked.

"Of course I do," Godslayer said. "It's not about how hard you hit, it's about how frequent you are. You need to build up a tempo with your strikes. Don't focus on the strength, focus on stability."

Alex didn't know why Godslayer was saying this or why he was even speaking for that matter, however, he decided to take the knowledge of someone from the immortal world by heart and did as he was told.

Instead of trying to temper a metal by striking it as hard as he could, he went slow and steady.

TANG! TANG! TANG!

"You're still doing it wrong," Godslayer spoke. "Same strength, same speed, every time."

Alex nodded and improved his method. Alex tried his best to keep everything stable and soon the strikes fell into a pattern.

"Calm yourself. Let yourself fall into the rhythm of the metal. Hear its sound; understand what it wants," Godslayer spoke.

Alex nodded. He didn't even realize what he was doing as he kept hammering the metal, trying to feel its rhythm. At some point, per Godslayer's teaching, Alex started heating the metal as he hit it.

The cooling metal once again heated up and no longer needed to be put back into the furnace for heating. So, as Alex hit it for a long period of time, he found himself falling into a trance.

The Saint cultivator who was working on his own thing, found himself getting drawn to the music that was hidden behind the noise of the smithy.

"Who?" he turned to look and couldn't help but be surprised that it was Alex who was doing it.

He quickly walked up to ask what exactly he was doing but found himself unable to speak as he was drawn in by the method.

The red-hot sword brightened even further as every last bit of it was being purified by the hits.

Suddenly, a loud harmonic tone, like a ringing bell rang throughout the entire smithy, catching everyone's attention including Alex's.

Alex fell out of his trance and quickly tried hitting the metal again, but Godslayer spoke just in time. "Stop. You've tempered the metal."

"I... I did?" he asked.

"That ringing you heard was the sound of the metal resonating after every last bit of impurities was removed," Godslayer said. "With that, the strength and durability of the metal have reached as high as it possibly can."

"I see," Alex said, thinking back to the zoned-out state he had just been in. He was so focused on hitting the metal that he didn't even keep track of how many times he hit it.

100? 200? 500?

"Kid!" the man spoke, making Alex jump from surprise.

"Yes?" he asked. Alex finally noticed that a group of cultivators was surrounding him, looking at him with surprise.

"What was that just now? What did you do?" he asked.

"I... I don't really know," Alex said. "I was just tempering the sword when I fell into a trance."

"You don't know?" the man frowned. "Alright, finish the sword. You can do it again later."

Alex nodded and went on to finish the sword. He pulled the cold sword out and went to put it back into the furnace when he heard Godslayer stop him.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Putting it back into the furnace, so I can have an easier time contorting the shape to the way I want," Alex said.

"And risk getting the metal in contact with other things that have been in the furnace? You want to keep tempering the sword your whole life?" Godslayer asked. "Just heat it on the anvil where you tempered it and fix the shape."

"Ah, right. That does sound better," Alex said and returned the sword to the anvil before trying to fix its shape to not be as uneven as it was.

"Stop hitting it so much, use your Dao to shape it," Godslayer said.

"My... dao?" Alex was confused for a second. He had the Dao of Explosion, Heat, Heat Conduction, Plant growth, and Five Elemental Interactions. But then, which Dao was he to use to fix the shape?

"Yes, your dao," Godslayer said. "The Dao of Metal you learned not long ago."

"Ah, that's not my Dao," Alex said, after finally understanding what the sword spirit was talking about. "It was my cat that learned it."

"Your cat? Why would your cat be so learned that it knows a Dao? That too in this backwater realm," Godslayer said.

"Oh, that's because... he has good metal roots," Alex said, barely catching himself before he made a terrible mistake.

He was about to say that Pearl was a descendant of the White Tiger, and had a lot of its bloodline, but he caught himself before revealing that someone with a god-blessed bloodline was with him.

In front of Godslayer that acted like a maniac at the word 'God', that was a terribly bad idea.

"He learned Dao of Metal just by having good metal roots?" Godslayer sounded suspicious. "Well, I guess he's quite lucky then. Do what you can then, although it is better to learn some Dao for forging while you can. I'm going back."

"While I can? What do you mean while I can?" Alex asked, but Godslayer was no longer there to answer him. "Godslayer?"

Realizing that Godslayer was gone, Alex pushed the confusion back into his mind and continued making the sword. He put the Qi lines through the sword and didn't bother making them curved.

Instead, he put as many as he could in them. Once he thought that the sword was done, He stopped and plunged it into the water.

He then went on to put the finishing touches on the sword and 15 minutes later, his sword was ready.

He took the sword to the Saint to show him if he passed.

The saint took the sword, looked at it, then looked at the machine, then looked back at the sword, and then hesitated.

"I... I don't have the heart to put this sword in the formation," he said. He tried bending the sword a little and stopped.

"I believe it suffices to say that you have succeeded," the man said. "This is very much likely a True Heaven sword. If not for the materials used, I wouldn't have been surprised if this was a Saint Earth-grade sword."

The man admired the sword a little and gave it to Alex. "Take it. You made it, so it is yours," he said.

Alex took the sword and nodded. "Thank you," he said.

"Now, do you think you can show us what you did earlier?" the saint asked.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "I can try."

So, the many forgers gathered around and watched as Alex took another portion of molten metal and started hitting it again.

At first, nothing happened, but as he continuously hit the metal with a rhythm, he once more fell into a trance, and everyone watched it happen.

The group learned that day how one could temper a metal to its purest and strongest form. However, even after learning it, barely anyone was able to replicate it, and that too not every time.

It would take them a long time to get used to it as not everyone had the same talent as Alex to do something just by learning it once.

Alex returned back to the tavern in the evening after finishing his work. As soon as he was back, he entered his mind and looked for Godslayer.

Alex had many questions he wanted to ask him. How did he know how to temper a metal? How did he know how swords were made? How did he know about the many daos one would need to learn for forgery?

Did he perhaps watch his crafter make many other artifacts after him?

However, when he asked those questions, Alex didn't get a single answer in return. Godslayer only told him one thing.

"I don't know."

After that, he did not say anything and stayed away from Alex.

Alex returned back after getting no answer and stopped worrying about it. After all, there were many more things that Godslayer had simply never bothered explaining to him, and this one was just a few questions to add to that pile.

So, Alex went back to cultivating and continued his apprenticeship for the next couple of days.

Chapter 904 Metal Compounding

On his free weekend, Alex went to mine once more and mined about 30 tons of the ore this time around.

He spent 2 days mining there and only stopped around the evening of the 2nd day.

He closed the formation and turned around to leave when a bunch of Saint realm cultivators passed by next to him on their way in.

When they saw the giant hole in the wall, they stopped.

"What the hell?" one of them said.

"Who did that?" another person asked.

"Was it here 5 days ago? I don't remember seeing this," a woman spoke.

They saw Alex right next to them, but his cultivation was... they couldn't really tell what his cultivation was, but he wasn't in the Saint realm and that was all that mattered to them.

"Junior, stop," one of them spoke. Alex turned around, his spiritual sensing falling on them all as he checked them out.

They were all wearing different forms of clothes, but Alex did recognize one of them as belonging to the Blue Spring sect, which meant at least one of these cultivators came from the far east from the State of Shuang.

"How can I help you, senior?" he asked.

The group was a little surprised to see that Alex had spiritual sense, and his mask made him look a little eye catching.

"Did you see who did this to the wall?" one of them asked.

"No," Alex shook his head.

"Really? You were working on this section though," the woman asked.

"I merely thought it was good because it was already broken into," Alex said. "However, it isn't as good as it looks. Even with a hole, the wall is still as hard to get into as ever," Alex said.

"Of course, we know. We don't need a True realm cultivator to tell us that," the woman said.

Alex didn't reply. "If you don't have any other questions, then I will leave," he said and turned around.

The group watched him walk away and a few of them put on an appalled face.

"His gall to turn away while we're speaking. Let me teach him some manners," the woman said and was about to walk out when the man from the Blue Spring sect stopped her.

"Don't waste your time. We need to gather as many ores as we can in this month and return back to Shuang state," he said.

The other saints nodded and one by one, they separated from there to go to different locations in the cave and mine for ores.

Alex returned back to his room and started cultivating once more.

His apprenticeship continued from tomorrow on, until the next 5 days, so he prepared for it by remembering what he had learned in the last 5 days.

Aside from the sword, he learned to make spears, sabers, daggers, axe, hammers, bows, and arrows.

He was also taught how to make armor and shield and was even taught the design behind the Qi lines that came to make armor with barrier capabilities.

Alex learned it and made some armor, but they didn't come out as great as he would have hoped. He had tempered the metal perfectly, but an armor was more than just metal.

It also included leathers and clothes that Alex wasn't used to and ended up making an acceptable but not great armor. He wasn't really worried about that, however, his only interest here was in making a sword after all.

The next day, Alex went to the smithy early morning and arrived just as everyone was starting to get the furnaces working.

"Oh, you came already?" the Saint looked at him. "Uhh, can you make this sword for a while? I need to make a sword myself. A customer came after you left yesterday and paid extra money to get it made as soon as possible, so I will have to work in the back today."

"Work in the back?" Alex was curious. "They brought the tungsten ore?"

"Yes, they want a sword out of it, so I will have to work there the whole time," he said.

"Can I watch?" Alex asked.

"You want to watch?" the Saint made a confused face. "There's nothing to watch though. You already know how to make a sword and you already know how I extract the metal from the ore."

"I have always been curious about one thing," Alex said. "The weapons that use the Tungsten can increase and decrease in size for some reason. I want to learn more about it."

"Ah! You want to learn about metal compounding huh? It's a little advanced, but I guess I can teach you. Come with me," he said and took Alex to the back of the smithy.

They went into one of the rooms with the tungsten furnace and Alex watched the Saint break the ore apart as best as he could and then melt the ore twice as it was too big to do it at once.

Once he obtained the relatively pure metal, it was about 1 ton in weight.

Alex watched the volume of the metal and it was quite a lot. The 1 ton of metal would make at least 2 swords, if not more. He was surprised at how large it actually was.

"We're making a single sword?" he asked.

"Yes," the Saint said. "But first, we need to make an alloy," he said. He brought out some materials, only half of which Alex had interacted with before, and put them in the furnace.

As it melted, he put the metal into the furnace too, and used his Qi to mix them together so they blended together properly.

Once it was all done, the Saint poured out the massive pool of molten metal alloy that could certainly make about 4 different swords now.

He switched it over to a metal bed that lay on the ground in the room and brought out his hammer to start beating on it.

Alex heard the uniform sounds of the beat as he recognized the man try and listen to the metal's rhythm and follow it.

He had only succeeded twice in the last week, but he still tried. Still, even when he didn't fall into a rhythm, just trying to stay in one made a massive difference.

Alex watched the metal shrink a little as the impurities were removed. However, the man kept striking and somehow the metal kept shrinking.

Alex could see heat being constantly passed onto the sword as the man worked on it and saw the metal shrink even further.

What started as a metal that could be turned into 4 or more swords, had now shrunken in size to the point that it could only make 3 swords.

But the saint kept on going. He continued striking the metal with his hammer and the metal kept shrinking.

Alex wanted to ask what was going on, but he could see an incredible focus in the man's eyes and could even see him struggling, so he decided not to speak and only watched for now.

The metal continued to shrink. From 3 swords, it went to being the size of 2 and a half swords, and from that to 2 swords.

The focus and strain on the man's face were even greater now that he continued hammering away at the metal to shrink it more and more and more until there was only enough metal to make a single sword.

Then, he started making Qi lines and hammered away at locations to make the sword even.

Half an hour later, he finally stopped and slumped onto the ground as if he had lost all stamina.

He breathed heavily, while Alex approached him.

"What happened to the rest of the metal? Did you compress it?" he asked.

"Yes," he said. "In the artifact forging field, we call it compounding. Few metals work like this and can be compressed to such a point. When you use Qi on it now, it reveals its original size."

"Oh," Alex finally understood what he had been curious about for a very long time now. 'So that's why they were so freely compressing and expanding their weapons.

"Is there a reason why you make an alloy and not just used the ore?" Alex asked.

"Heavier is better most of the time, and despite being an alloy, it's barely any weaker than if it had been made with pure tungsten," he said. "Also, having more metal to work with is much better when you plan on compounding something."

"I see," Alex said. "A 3-ton weapon with a lot of tungsten would obviously be much better than a 1-ton weapon that is all tungsten. Thank you for teaching me that."

"I'll teach you what to do in theory later on. For now, go back and make the sword I told you to earlier. I'll come to check after I'm done finishing this up."

Alex nodded and returned back to the smithy at the front and worked.

The 5 days that week, Alex spent learning the little crafts. Like making handles, or hilts or cutting leather, and such; Skills that didn't seem fancy from the outside but were rather integral to every artifact out there.

While Alex didn't learn how one could make the more weird and fantastical artifacts, what he did learn, he was very grateful for.

With this, he would be able to make the many swords he wanted, even though he wouldn't make it until he was in the Saint realm and learned a few Dao.

On the final day of his apprenticeship, Alex was given a small test, which he passed with flying colors.

Then as a gift, Hwan Fulin gave Alex an anvil and a hammer so he could continue forging no matter where he went.

Alex thanked his two weeks long Master and left the smithy, never to be seen there again for a long time.

Chapter 905 Weak or Strong

Alex spent the next three weeks in the mine, not going anywhere as he carved chunk after chunk from the wall.

With a sword that didn't lose its edge no matter how many hard surfaces he struck or dug into, Alex was able to do what many others would simply assume to be an impossibility.

Alex had now made such a big hole, that it could be a pathway in its own right.

He sent his spiritual sense into his storage ring and saw the nearly 700 Tons of Ore that he had carved out from the wall in all these days.

"Yeah, I've wasted a lot of time here," he thought. He hadn't improved at all in all these last few weeks as he had just focused on mining as much as he could. He did gain about 200 tons more than he would have if he trained, but that was not what he wanted at the time.

However, now that he did want it, he needed to leave this mine and get stronger. Thus he needed to go to the ancient battlefield as soon as he could, so he could train.

Alex closed the formation behind him and was about to walk out when a group walked past the location at the same time.

A girl noticed him and her eyes widened. "You! Stop!" she shouted.

Alex turned to see who it was and immediately his face fell. They were the same group from about a month ago when he had met them.

Alex ignored them and continued walking, but the girl quickly ran up and grabbed his shoulder.

"You disrespectful little bastard! Do you think you can run—" her voice trailed off when her senses fell on the massive hole to her right and she saw the missing wall.

"What the!" the girl was surprised when she saw it, and so did the rest of her colleagues.

They were shocked to see such a massive chunk of the wall missing, but what surprised them the most was the sharp cuts that were located in multiple places around the hole.

As if someone had cut through the wall rather than used brute force to try and break the ore.

"How can this be?" the men were surprised.

The man in the purple and white robe strode forward. "Junior brother, you were there last time there was a similar hole on this wall, and now you are here too. Do you still plan on telling us that you do not know how it came to be?" he asked.

The other 6 saints moved forward at the same time with a rather threatening stance to them.

Alex looked at all 8 of them, and then his sense fell back on the man that seemed to be their leader.

"What do you want to know?" he asked.

"How did this hole, no tunnel come to be?" the man asked.

"I made it," Alex said. "Is that what you want to hear? A True realm cultivator making tunnels where Saint realms struggle to put a dent?"

The man frowned. That was true. Under all circumstances, it would be hard to believe that it was Alex who made the hole. However, he was sure that there was no hole here and now there was.

And in the last many days, he went in and out of this mine, he was certain he saw a formation barrier here, that only just came down.

So, even though he didn't want to believe it, the clues all lead to Alex being the one who put the hole there.

"Don't lie to us, boy," the girl suddenly spoke. "I'm all but certain that it was you who put the hole in the wall. I will make sure you fess up to how you did it."

The other 6 saints nodded as well, as they were very curious to find out.

Alex snickered a bit. "Come on, senior! Make up your mind. Am I a weakling you can force into doing anything you want? Or Am I someone capable of putting giant holes in rocks that you can't imagine doing in a thousand years?"

"Either way, do you really think the outcome will be in your favor? You will either be bullying a junior for nothing or provoking a very strong monster. Do you really want to find out which one I am?" he asked.

The group fell silent as they contemplated their choices and they could see that either one was bad for them. One was obviously worse than the other.

The man from the Blue Spring sect realized that there was nothing good that would come from this confrontation, so he decided to deescalate it.

"I th—"

"You think I can't call your bluff?" the woman suddenly spoke and reached out for Alex. She moved quickly, her hands reaching for his mask.

Alex was fast too. His left hand at a lightning-fast speed, catching the moving hand mid-air, next to his face. Then, he pulled the woman towards him and with his other hand struck her in her stomach.

Golden light blossomed and then exploded at the location of the strike and the girl was sent flying far away in the tunnel.

A few of the saints immediately ran back to check on the woman, while a few remained where they were, ready to fight.

"Do you still want to fight?" Alex asked. The Saints here weren't even at the Saint Condensation 6th realm yet. With such low cultivation, they had no chance of beating him at all.

The man from the Blue Spirit sect realized what he was up against. Alex was no longer a junior in his eyes, but a senior whose powers he could not fathom.

For all he understood, this was a Saint cultivator that wanted some fun in life, so he was imitating a True realm cultivator.

"My apologies, senior," the man immediately bowed at the waist.

Alex was a little surprised. He hadn't expected the Saint to not fight, let alone call him a senior.

"You aren't going to attack me?" Alex asked.

"No, senior. Please forgive us for disturbing you," the man said.

Alex lowered his guard a little and looked at the other saints. They had also assumed a junior-like stance and were no longer planning to attack.

"Very well then, I'll let you be," Alex said and turned around to leave. Even as he walked away, the man remained bent at the waist, bowing towards Alex.

It was only after a long time had passed that the man finally got back up, his face fully drenched in sweat at the fear of what could have been.

"We're letting him go?" one of the saints asked.

"You wanna catch him? Go catch. I doubt he's gone too far," Another saint said, mocking him.

"Stop it," the purple-robed man said and walked away. He went to check on the girl and saw that she was fine... as fine as a person with a few broken ribs could be.

"You have to get revenge for me, big brother," the girl said.

"Yeah, I'm not courting death for nothing," the man said with a slight chuckle in his voice. "Come on. It's about time we return back."

Chapter 906 Silvermoon City

Alex arrived at the gates of a massive city called Silvermoon city. It was further south from Snowsoot city, and very close to the border of the State of Re down in the south.

This far south, the snow melted in the summer and you could see fresh ground more than snow. A bit further down from here and you would arrive at a place where snow rarely fell, and even south from that would be places that were no different from the Western Continent.

The Silvermoon city was close to two of the Nine wonders of the Northern Continent.New n0vel chapters are published on

To its north lay the Ancient Battlefield, where everyone came to test themselves, to train against the environment left behind by the ancient war, and see if they had it in them to be as strong as the people of that time were.

To its south, beyond the border lay the 12 volcanic mountains, and within them the other Ninth wonder, the 13th Volcanic mountain where fire resources were more than just abundant.

Alex had gone to the Ancient Battlefield first, but after reaching there, he had come to learn that the battlefield was surrounded by a formation to not let anything or anyone come in and out as they wanted to.

That included the many intent and Qi that still remained in there, as well as corpses from ancient times for people to plunder… if there even was any left by now.

Alex was unaware of this information, so when he learned it, he was quite surprised. Although, it had been so long that he could forget about finding them at all.

Since there was a formation about the battlefield, the Saint cultivators put there from all 5 Ancient sects only opened the formation once every 6 months.

The next opening happened in about a month's time, so Alex was forced to find a place to stay.

As such, he found himself in the closest and biggest city he could find.

The Silvermoon city.

Alex stood at the back of the massive line of people, waiting to get in. As time went on, the line moved forward and Alex arrived at the gate where the guards were disciples of the Frozen Heart sect.

Alex was told that he had to pay to get in, but Alex used the affiliation badge he got from Elder Xuan to get in.

As soon as he walked in, he was surprised by how good the city looked. It was a massive city, far larger than any city he had ever seen.

The terrain was uneven with both flat and hilly areas, but they were all covered in houses and buildings and nearly no empty plot of land was left aside.

Alex walked through the cramped street, looking at the jam-packed architecture that seemed to call people to look at them.

The board signs hung around in front of the stores, seemingly selling anything one could want to buy.

Alex was even surprised to find a pill store here, but there didn't seem to be that many visitors or sales there.

On the other hand, the pastes section of the store seemed to be selling out like it would run out if the people didn't.

Alex didn't think of a destination as he walked around the city, looking at the various location.

As he did, he saw a few disciples wearing golden robes that seemed to belong to a sect. At their chest was the symbol of a snowflake that Alex couldn't seem to remember seeing anywhere.

"There's a sect in this city?" Alex wondered. He didn't think there was enough land for there to be a sect here, and he didn't hear about there being a sect in the surrounding.

Still, the golden-robed disciples must belong to a sect. All Alex could do was assume that they came from a sect that wasn't very big.

As he expected, Alex saw more crystal blue-robed girls patrolling the street than the golden-robed disciples wandering the street.

Alex continued to wander as well, going from location to location, from store to store, looking at everything.

Alex didn't buy anything, he didn't need anything. Still, he went through the stores, just in case.

He did need to buy some defensive metal artifacts, but he decided to wait until he was at the saint realm before he did that.

There was one thing he had realized as he got closer to the Saint realm, and that was the fact that the defensive mental artifacts were likely not as good as he expected them to be.

As a True realm cultivator, who wasn't supposed to have any Spiritual sea, having one allowed him to deal with mental attacks. But that still came from one that wasn't supposed to have it.

So, while strong, his mental attacks had a lot of flaws. However, at the Saint realm, he would certainly have a very strong Spiritual sense that could simply defeat most low-level defensive mental artifacts even as a 1st realm Saint Condensation cultivator.

As such, he likely would also not need any low-tier defense in return. So, he decided to wait just how strong someone's attack would need to be before he took damage.

On top of that, he also wanted to check if the mask would do anything to block that as well.

So, despite wanting to buy the defensive mental artifact, Alex didn't give in to his urges. He left the place and walked through the rest of the town.

The Silvermoon city was big and even as night fell, Alex hadn't been through most of the city.

'I need to find myself a place to stay,' he thought. He had taken too long to decide this and had to thus hurry up to find himself a place.

Alex wandered through the streets, trying to find himself a tavern or a simple lodging area when he came across a gate that lead to somewhere.

Normally, he wouldn't have stopped for such a place, but the snowflake symbol on the gate made him stop for a moment.

The symbol on the robes of those golden-robed disciples was nothing but a simple curiosity for Alex to learn of their origin and now he had found it.

To satiate his curiosity, he read the words that were written on the board as he moved along.

At first, the 3 words didn't mean anything to his eyes, and so he continued along his way to find a hotel for himself.

However, he suddenly paused in his steps to look back at the words behind him. A memory emerged in his mind as he recalled a single piece of information he had learned nearly 16 months ago.

Before the Northern Continent was as it was, nearly 30 thousand years ago until 8 thousand years ago, it was ruled by a great sect that had its hand everywhere.

Major sects around the continents were but its branch members, and it was easily one of the biggest sects in the entire world, raising multiple immortals.

However, during one of the leader's attempts at breaking through to Immortality, he failed miserably. Not only did he die at the time, but he also became the reason why almost every elder in the sect at that time died.

Like vultures at a corpse, the 5 biggest branches at the time came to take part of this massive sect and became the Ancient powerhouses they were today.

Alex looked at the gate of that very sect, that was the origin of everything the northern continent was today.

The Snow Immortal Sect.

"So this is where the sect was," Alex thought. This was where the Snow Immortal sect became a Super Sect and ruled over the entire continent while the Ruler still lived in his realm.

'No wonder this city is so big,' he thought.

He wondered if the Snow Immortal sect was possibly situated here because this location was close to the Ancient Battlefield, and the 13th Volcanic mountain, while also being closest to the Dao mountain, Demonic Forest, the Teleportation formation, and the Nine Wells of Time at the same time.

That would certainly be a reason to have a sect built here.

Alex shook himself out of the thought and stopped thinking about it. The Snow Immortal sect was but a husk of its former self, a mid-tier sect at best, with no hope of ever reaching the heights they had reached before.

So, Alex gave no more thought to them and turned around to leave and find himself a place to stay for the time being.

Chapter 907 Auction

As the days went by and the day of the Ancient Battlefield's opening got closer and closer, Alex came to realize that a lot of True Emperor realm cultivators and Saint realm cultivators were coming to the city to train.

Every 6 months, many young and enthusiastic cultivators would come to learn new and old Dao and improve their understanding of their cultivation journey.

With a week left before the Battlefield's opening, it was hard for Alex to go out to the city and not see a young master or a young elder from a sect come here.

Since this was the time in between the Dao mountain opening, this was the perfect time for most of them to go improve themselves on the battlefield.

However, before they entered, there was still an entire week left. And in this period, the largest auction house in the city had decided to start an auction that would last 3 days and nights.

They had been advertising this since before Alex came, and Alex had taken the chance to get rid of the various things he had that weren't exactly something he wanted.

These included everything but pills. He didn't want to risk selling pills at all.

The auction house was a little reluctant to accept his items at first after seeing his cultivation base, but after he showed what he wanted to sell, they were more than happy.

The auction was virtually split into two sections for when the auction house sold its items. The first one was the normal section, which included items sold off in the first 2 days of the auction.

Not everyone came to buy something during the first 2 days, but the auction house did take only 5% of the sale's cut.

It was only on the final day when the elites came and the prices for the items were high, but the auction house took a 10% cut on that day, so you really needed to be thoughtful about when to sell your items.

Of course, not all items qualified for the third day, but Alex did have a few that did, and after some deliberation, he decided to sell those on the third day.

Once that was done, he only needed to wait until the day of the auction, which was today.

Alex arrived at the foot of the auction house and was led to the lower halls and was made to sit somewhere towards the front. He was also handed a token which he was to use later.

Alex looked around in the velvet-covered auction hall and saw that there were 3 different floors.

The lower floor was for True realm cultivators and could house about 5000 cultivators at once.

The higher floor was for Saint realm cultivators and could only house about a thousand saint realm cultivators at once.

Finally, above them were the VIPs, which were only reserved for people like sect masters or Saint Core realm cultivators.

Alex didn't mind being sat so in the front as he wasn't intending to buy anything. Still, he wasn't against buying anything so long as he found something interesting.

As the hall slowly filled up, the time approached for the start of the auction house.

The lights slowly dimmed until everyone's attention was on the one place where the light still shined.

The stage.

4 Saint Foundation realm cultivators came out and stood at the edge of the stage. As soon as they arrived, a crimson barrier emerged in front of them, blocking everything for the moment.

The crowd didn't understand what was going on, but the barrier quickly disappeared, leaving a massive table on the stage with a woman in a beautiful pink robe standing behind the table.

"Good afternoon, fellow Daoists. Thank you for coming to our auction. I hope you've been having a lovely day," the woman spoke.

"I am Xi Qiyun, your auctioneer for this auction, and before I start it, I would like to explain to you how you can bid in this auction," she said.

"Many of you may already know this, but this explanation is for those who do not," she said. "When every one of you came in, you were all handed a small token."

"Instead of shouting out your bid, you will be silently putting in your bid through the token. Also, unlike most other bids, we have a lot of items to bid away. So, for the first 2 days where we sell normal items, you will all be subjected to a 2-minute bidding time, during which you can bid as much as you want."

"Bidding will have to happen in True Spirit stones, and once the timer ends, the highest bid will win," she said. "More information will appear in front of you as it is needed."

"So, without any more waiting, let me begin the auction," the woman said and called out the first item.

Alex waited to see what the first item would be and saw the woman bring out the books he had brought to sell.

'I'm first huh?' he thought.

"In front of me are a few books, none of which have anything to do with cultivation techniques," the woman said. "What they do have to do with is Dao."

The crowd spoke in a hushed tone, trying to figure out what she was saying.

"As you all know how hard it can be to gain an insight into a Dao. One can cultivate for years and not see a hint of it. Fortunately for you all, you now have an aid."

"All of these books are insights into Dao, and we will start with this first one. This one gives you an insight into the Dao of Earth. Betting starts at 1000 True Spirit stones, with 50 spirit stones increment. Begin."

As soon as she said that, a few words in red suddenly appeared in front of them all in the location where the crimson barrier had first emerged.

'0' hung in the middle with 120 seconds ticking down slowly. People realized that they were losing time and immediately started betting on the book.

Alex felt a little bad selling such a thing to these people who were hoping for insights, but then the Black Tortoise explained to him the situation of this world.

With a hybrid body, these people had no chance of ever entering Immortality. Also, Insights didn't just stop one from acquiring a Dao, it simply made it harder. One needed to learn more on their own without the worldly laws showing them a few insights while they cultivated.

So, he didn't have as large of guilt as he felt he should have.

He saw the number blur through on the screen as it got bigger and bigger by the second.

As the time approached its end, the number had already crossed 8000.

8000 True spirit stones. That... wasn't bad, but that wasn't great either. In fact, given how lucrative the insights must be, he was certainly more people would want to acquire them.

'Wait, why did they put my books at the start anyway?' he wondered. 'Wouldn't it be smarter to put it at the last when the elites actually start to arrive? That would certainly fetch more coins, wouldn't it?' he thought.

After a bit more thinking, Alex realized why. 'These sneaky little... they know about the problem with insights too, don't they?' he thought. 'They want to profit from it as fast as they can before someone with actual knowledge arrive. So I'm not the only bad guy here.'

The lady Xi Qiyun smiled as the number slowly racked up and when the timer ended, the price finalized at 9250 True Spirit stones.

"Congratulations to bidder number 2384. This book of insight on the Dao of Earth is yours," she said and kept the book aside were a few staff members came to take it and took it backstage.

"Next up is the book with an insight into the Dao of Sharpness. It will go for 1000 True spirit stones at the start with 50 increasing for each bid. You may begin."

Alex watched as the people began furiously bidding on the next book as well, and when the time came for the bidding to end, this one earned nearly 10 thousand True Spirit stones.

The rest of the insight books were sold after that, and those brought him about 170 thousand True Spirit stones in total.

Chapter 908 Jin Baiquan

Without a doubt, the 170 thousand True Spirit stones were the highest sales Alex had ever seen in any auction, whether it was his own sale or someone else's.

And to think this was only beginning and he had so many more things to sell this time around.

The next set of items came on stage. They were formation techniques that helped easily set up formation flags without having to worry about getting their location correct. The technique helped a lot with that.

The bidding started and Alex was quite curious about it, so he bid a bit as well.

However, there seemed to be more enthusiastic individuals in the crowd that outbid him every time.

His number, 1342, barely stayed on the barrier screen for a second before flicking through to another random number.

In the end, he wasn't capable of getting that technique.

The next item rolled up, another technique that taught someone a sword attack involving fire.

Given that it was a Heaven-grade technique, Alex didn't feel the need for that.

Items continued being auctioned off and one by one people bought them.

Every once in a while, there would come a technique, formation plate, talisman, or artifacts that Alex was selling and he would be happy seeing the high bid for each of them.

Alex didn't simply sell what he had gotten from his spoils, but also many other techniques that he had learned himself.

Not including the Immortal grade techniques, Alex sold every other technique that the people of the Northern Continent would certainly be happy to see.

The only technique that could be sold, but he didn't was the Winter Moon cultivation method. That was a technique that was provided to him by his master just a day before she had died. He didn't ever want to give it away. Not if he could help it.

Formations, talismans, techniques, cultivation methods, deeds to lands, artifacts, puppets, ores, and even pills. Everything was being sold in this auction and people spend their money on it like it was the last thing that would ever be sold, anywhere.

The first day passed, and the second day was coming to a close too. One by one, the elites started coming in too, and the people below could hear the sounds of people entering the VIP rooms.

They couldn't tell who was in there, but they didn't need to. Rather, then didn't want to find out at all.

Slowly, the first half of the auction came to an end, and the final item that was sold was his Infinite Heavenly Ice Spear technique.

It sold for a surprising 18 thousand True Spirit stones. If his math was correct, he had made something close to 600 thousand True Spirit stones based on just the first part of the auction.

While he hadn't put that many items in the second half, based on these proceedings, he still expected to earn close to 200 thousand True Spirit stones.

The ambush in the Demon realm had actually turned out to be a fortune for him.

Once the first half of the auction ended, the atmosphere shifted and the auctioneer changed.

The new auctioneer that arrived was an elderly man that looked to be on his deathbed but walked with a gait that only young men would have.

He arrived in front of the table and spoke. "I hope you are all here. I won't be waiting for any of you if you haven't," he said and brought out the first item.

He pulled the veil from the cage that hid a small green snake inside it, and coiled around in the cage.

It was a baby snake, which would otherwise be normal for the most part, but Alex was surprised to see a few wings on its back, like ones that would only belong to a dragonfly.

"First off, we have a baby Viridescent Dragonsnake," the old man said in a very unenthusiastic manner. "It hatched only a few days ago and is currently kept inside a cage with a formation that blocks its vision. So, despite having been born, the snake hasn't seen anyone yet."

"Thus, you will be able to imprint yourself on the snake. It came from the Demonic beast's forest and was the offspring of a Saint Foundation realm Viridescent Dragonsnake. The opening bid will be 10 thousand True spirit stones, and every bid must go up by 500 True Spirit stones. You have 5 minutes, start."

The old man turned around and sat on a chair nearby as he gave no care to who was buying the item or who was selling it.

Quite a few of the people around Alex started complaining about the rude behavior the auctioneer was showing them, but they were quickly shut down by the information that was being passed around to everyone which made them scared to their core.

Alex was quite shocked when he heard them too.

The man standing in front of them, Jin Baiquan, was over 8000 years old and was easily the oldest person in this auction hall. He had a really high cultivation base, but even with that, his life was slowly approaching its end.

That information alone would have made Alex quite amazed about the old man, but when he realized that this was one of the last remaining elders of the Snow Immortal sect from that time, he was beyond shocked.

"So someone did survive that disaster," Alex thought to himself. 'Was that why the sect still exists during this time?'

Alex had thought that, but then he learned that the old man had stopped being a member of the sect, so it wasn't really his influence that had kept the sect going.

'How has the sect not disbanded yet?' Alex wondered.

The 10 thousand True spirit stones that were the started bid looked pitiful when the number rose to over 60 thousand in a span of 3 minutes.

In 1 more minute it reached up to 75 thousand and when the bid ended, it climbed as high as 102 thousand True spirit stones.

"Good for you," the old man said. "Next we have a sword technique."

Alex was surprised when the old man revealed that the sword technique being sold next was his 21 Sword Array. He hadn't expected it to be sold this early on, but when he thought about it, that made sense.

While it was an amazing technique that improved its strength quite a bit depending on the swords you were using, but it was still a Heaven-grade technique and thus was most likely not something people would be crazily looking forward to.

This and the Veiled Light technique that made him invisible were the only techniques that were slotted on the 3rd day of the auction, so Alex wondered how much he would be earning.

Alex watched the 21 Sword Array rack up numbers in front of him as everyone and their mother who used a sword started bidding on it.

Even if one didn't use a sword, just having swords alone was enough to use this technique, making it that more alluring.

The 5 minutes were over, and the bid came to an end. Alex looked at the number in red hovering not far away from him.

94,000.

Chapter 909 Auction End

'That's quite a big number,' Alex thought. 'Are the elites that have arrived that desperate to get their hands on this skill?'

Alex wondered if it was a show of wealth, or if they were actually fighting for this technique to be willing to pay so much for it.

The old man at the front started a new round of bidding for a spear artifact, the blade of which was made with 50% Starforged Tungsten, twice compounded, and weighing around 2 Tons.

Alex was quite surprised when the Spear sold for over 130 thousand True Spirit stones, even when the spear clearly was only half forged with 50% Tungsten.

More items continued being sold, a few belonging to him and then even his Invisibility skill was sold.

The next thing being sold was a book as well. Only the old man looked a little confused when he checked the information about the item he was selling.

"Uhh... this... is a book that was found in the Ancient Battlefield at least 2 thousand years ago. It's... What the hell?" the old man frowned.

"Wait a minute," he said and turned around to leave.

"What was that?" people started speaking to each other.

"Did they make a mistake?" some people thought.

The old man returned. "Alright, the next item is a weird one, so we will make it a short 1-minute bidding round. Neither the owner nor the auction house understands anything about the book aside from the fact that it came from a corpse in the Ancient battlefield over 2 millennia ago."

"The reason why we don't know what this book is about is simple. We don't know the language the book is written in. I have heard such books appearing in history a few times, but this is my first time seeing one for real," the old man said.

"Still, this book has intent in it, left behind by its owner, so if nothing, you can train that," the old man said. "The bid will start at 15 thousand, with a minimum 500 bid increase. Start."

Alex's eyes went wide. This couldn't be happening to him, right? Was he so lucky?

This was the exact thing that had happened to him back in the Scarlet city when he went to his first auction. That was how Alex had acquired Heaven's Intent in the first place.

Was he going to get another great technique like Heaven's Intent just like that?

Without even thinking, Alex put in 16 thousand as a bid. While others were contemplating what to do, Alex started bidding.

Seeing a number pop up, a few of the others started getting curious too. So, a few bids as well.

The numbers on the screen flickered continuously as it slowly went up, while the timer by its side went down.

Alex bit a bit more, but slowly the bidding speed came to a halt.

However, there was still some time on the timer. Alex knew that whoever wanted to bid here was biding his time, just like him.

'I need to put in a large enough bid to outbid everyone,' he thought.

The time counted down to the final 3 seconds. Alex put his bid in and waited to send it through.

The numbers flickered on the screen to 38 thousand and continued flickering higher as the timer went to 2 seconds.

It flickered once more when it reached 46 thousand and then it reached 1 second.

Then, it reached 0.

The bidding ended, and the final price of the book was up on the screen for everyone to see.

Everyone looked at it with a slight shock on their faces for they hadn't expected a book that couldn't even be read to acquire such a massive price.

100 thousand True Spirit stones. That was what the book was bought for, and the one who bought it was numbered 1342.

Alex had won the bid.

'Phew!' he thought. Even with bidding 100 thousand True Spirit stones, he wasn't sure he would have acquired the book.

Would he have won if he bid 75 thousand? Maybe, but Alex bid as high as he thought the book was worth with as little chance of losing the bid as possible.

The old man didn't dwell on the book for long and moved on, but Alex found it hard to.

Even as various other items and books were sold, Alex simply looked forward to seeing what the book was about.

He remembered a similar situation in which his master had spent 10 True spirit stones to buy Heaven's Impact. Now, he was spending 100 thousand True spirit stones to buy an item he wasn't even sure was good.

That was a testament to just how far he had come as a cultivator.

'People in the Crimson empire, or even just the Western continent itself don't know just how cheap their stuff is, do they?' he thought.

While being looted for everything one owned was quite bad, it did also make everything cheap for everyone on the continent.

Alex started paying attention to the auction again and even bid in a few of them. However, for items that were as clear as day on what they did and what one would get, it was impossible for him to outbid the elites on the 2nd floor and the VIP rooms without wasting too much money on something he didn't even need.

As such, no items that came around were ever successfully bid by him and they always went to someone with millions of True Spirit stones to spare.

Alex was surprised by the number of pills that were sold, but he still felt it right that he didn't sell any. Until he had a concrete understanding of what was happening in this continent, he would almost never reveal that he was an alchemist.

The day slowly came to an end as the final item, the best item in the entire auction was auctioned off.

It was 5 times compounded battle axe, the main part of which was made entirely of Starforged Tungsten Ore, weighing around 5 tons in total.

Such a small axehead, weighing 5 tons in weight alone would do serious damage to a True realm cultivator even if it just fell on them.

At the hands of someone strong, they could easily kill anyone they wanted as long as they could hit them.

The axe was sold off for 360 thousand True Spirit stones, the largest single transaction of money Alex had ever heard of.

Once the auction was over, the old man left the stage and the lady from before came to bid everyone farewell.

Alex hurriedly went to get his money and item.

The auction house was swift and came to give him what he earned.

Even after the cut, the various things Alex had sold had earned him a total of 956 thousand True spirit stones. That was nearly a million that he had earned.

The items in the 2nd half had someone managed to earn quite a bit more than Alex had realized. He shouldn't have doubted the Auction house when they said that the 2nd choice always brought more money.

"Whatever," he thought and brought out the single book he had bought in this auction house.

He flipped to the first page and his mind understood what the letter he was reading said.

Divine.

Chapter ﻿910 Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array

Alex was beyond surprised when he saw that the skill he had just bought was a Divine grade skill.

He only had 2 Divine grade skills as of yet and those were his cultivation method, the Five Yang Divine Path, and his alchemy skill, the Alchemy God's Knowledge.

And those were skills that slowly got better as he got stronger. However, he had yet to find a skill that was Divine grade from the very start.

He found it hard to contain his excitement, so he took his spirit stones and book, thanked the person who gave them to him, and walked back to his hotel room.

Alex didn't even realize when he was back, but he had already locked the door and had pulled out the book.

"Look, Whisker. This is an awesome skill book I just found. Now, all we can hope for is that it isn't a cultivation method as that would be useless for me," Alex said.

Whisker, who had been in his robes the entire time helping him see in the Auction house, made some squeaking noises in anticipation.

If Alex said it was a very good skill, then it very likely was.

Alex sat down and looked at the book again and the word 'Divine' written on it.

He proceeded to read the title after that.

Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array.

"Battle array?" Alex thought. "Like the sword array?" He continued reading further.

Alex frowned when he read a little further. Not from the content; the content wasn't quite informative yet. Rather, it was the intent of the book that gave him a bit of frustration when he tried reading it.

It was like a million different people's intents, mixed together in a cacophony that constantly badgered Alex's mind.

Fortunately, these intents had either worn down in the many years or had simply never been as strong as the one from the Black Stele back in the Tiger sect.

Thus, Alex could easily force his way through the frustration and read the rest of the book.

However, as he read the rest of the book, it only served to be a source of greater frustration for Alex.

The book that he had been so looking forward to learning, the book that he had spent a hundred thousand True spirit stones one, the third Divine grade skill book he had acquired— it turned out that this was a book of battle array used by armies of hundreds or thousands or even more soldiers to fight together.

"Fuck!" he couldn't help but cuss at the book. "This is useless to me."

It was such an amazing book too. Every 10 people fighting together could boost each of their cultivation bases by a single realm.

Every 100 people fighting together could boost each of their cultivation bases by 2 entire realms.

Every 1000 people fighting together increased their cultivation base by 3 realms and every 10 thousand people fighting together increased their cultivation base by 4 realms.

The best part was that anyone that was in the array did not need to know the technique. They simply needed to follow the orders set by the user of the technique to gain the advantage.

Alex frowned heavily at first but then sighed in the end. In best case scenario, he could use the technique, and worst-case scenario, he would just sell it again to earn some money.

He shook his head and focused on the aspect of the book that was more important for him right now.

The Intent.

The intent, while not as strong as the intent behind the Black Stele was still quite scary for Alex to deal with.

However, there would be many such Intents inside the Ancient Battlefield, so he decided to prepare himself with this.

There were two ways to challenge the intent of the book.

The easier way with weaker intent was to rewrite the book from memory such that the intent of the owner imprinted onto his mind showed through and he fought him away.

The second way was much harsher and Alex decided to not worry about this method until the first one was done. After all, given how harsh the second method would be, he needed to be sure he could even handle it.

Alex returned to his mind to let Godslayer know that there would be some Intent assaulting his mind very soon and that he shouldn't worry as much.

So, once Alex was ready, he brought out an empty notebook and started rewriting the book from scratch.

As soon as he did so, he started feeling the slight hints of Intent hurting his mind.

He struggled through it for a bit until the headache reached the point of discomfort and then he went into his mind to fight it off.

You had to fight intent with intent. So, as soon as Alex arrived, he looked to the sky where the intent was invading his mental area and fought against it.

"Go away!" He shouted at the intent, intending to destroy it. To his surprise, it disappeared at once with no hint of it remaining.

"What?" Alex was surprised. Sure this might not have been the intent of one that called himself a god, but it was still full of intents. Was it really that weak, or had he gotten stronger himself?

Intent stemmed from a person's will. The stronger his will was, the stronger his intent would be.

As such, Alex who had died a hundred times to forge his will to keep himself sane had developed an intent that was strong enough to fight against the one that was attacking him.

Alex returned back outside and continued writing the book. This time around, when the mental pain did hurt him, he willed it away and his intent destroyed the attacking intent.

As such, without much hassle, Alex was able to completely write the book from scratch. This book held no intent anymore and could be read by anyone, so long as they knew the language.New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex sighed and closed the original book before putting it aside for the moment.

He looked at the new book he had written and showed it to Whisker. "Can you read it?" he asked.

For the purpose of learning Heaven's Intent, Flame Mastery Scripture, and the Spiritual Weapon skill from the Black Stele, Whisker and Pearl had both learned the Human language.

As such, Whisker could easily read the new technique and read back what it said to Alex.

Alex sat there, listening to Whisker read the book. After a little while, he confirmed that he had written everything correctly, so he asked Whisker to stop.

Whisker did stop reading back to Alex, but he continued reading for himself to the side while Alex moved on to the next method.

Since the last method was so easy, the new method was needed to bring out at least the full strength behind the intent.

For that, Alex needed to do something he wouldn't have ever thought of doing if he was still back in the Western Continent or hadn't gone through the 100 deaths to improve his will.

Alex brought out the Human language he had prepared so long ago and started reading it.

Chapter 911 Ancient Battlefield

The Human language was the same as the Demon language, except it was written backward and with different letters.

So, all Alex had to do to learn it at the bare minimum was to understand the alphabet and read everything backward.

Once he was done, he could read anything in the entire world easily.

The only reason Alex had yet to learn the language was because of the skill in the Black Stele. The intention to learn the skill alone made you get hurt by the intent hidden in the stele, being able to do so would make you a clear target for the intent.

However, now that he was so far away and would take such a long time to return, Alex decided to learn the language and hone his intent with the current book he had.

It didn't take him long to finish learning the language, and so he brought out the book and opened the first page.

At the very first word, Divine, Alex's eyes narrowed as his forehead scrunched up in annoyance. Just one word and it was starting to hurt him.

"I'll read you, whether you like it or not," he thought and started reading. Wording his thoughts or even just speaking them out made it easier to form his intent as he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

Otherwise, it would've just remained vague notions in his mind that spread out his intent too thin.

Having never really read anything with Human language in it before, it took Alex an embarrassingly long time to read even just the first page in front of him.

Having never read backward before, it was just too awkward. And on top of that, the intent constantly assaulted him, making it hard to even concentrate on reading.

"You can't stop me! I will read you," Alex said what he wanted his intent to be and continued.

Slowly, but surely, he churned through the intent, reading everything on every single page.

This was the first time he read a book and understood what the words meant, rather than simply gaining an overall understanding of what was said.

The intent fought Alex, and Alex fought the intent, and after nearly 3 hours, he finished reading the entirety of the book, closing it behind him.

"Hah!" he let out a deep breath and felt his body become incredibly weak now that everything he had used up in the last 3 hours brought him mental fatigue that he had only felt after the final day of the 3-day alchemy session.

"Whoever this Hell Emperor is, he must've been an amazing figure," Alex thought. For someone who wrote a book likely many years ago, during the days of the Eternal War, his intent still flowed through the book as if no time had passed.

Alex wondered just how weakened this intent was, and if the real figure was here in front of him, would he have been able to survive a direct assault of his Intent?

Alex felt his mental fatigue grow a little too high, so he slumped back on the bed, surprising Whisker who had been in a deep focus of his own.

Alex spent a few minutes on the bed, trying to slowly heal his mind, and only got up once he felt the fatigue be at a manageable level.

Then, he started cultivating. He would cultivate for the next 3 days until the Ancient Battlefield opened up.

* * * * * *

Thousands upon thousands of people were gathered by the entrance to the Ancient battlefield, all ready to enter.

Alex saw people from the True King realm at the lowest to people at the Saint Foundation realm at the highest, standing around for the gates to open up.

He was sure there were other people here with a higher cultivation base, but if they didn't want him to find them, then he wouldn't be able to no matter how hard he tried.

Alex saw the many colors of robes, all of whom had come from all 5 different states.

He could see people whose upbringing hadn't been very good and he could see people who were born with a golden spoon in their mouth.

He could see people who looked like they had never found happiness in life, and some who had only ever been sad when their elders were a few days late at providing what they had asked for.

He could see people who, just like him, looked around at the massive crowd, alone by themselves, while he could also see people who had already started making friends in the crowd.

All in all, they were all different types of people, but they were all going to enter the same place as him.

Alex turned around, readying himself as well.

Disciples from all 5 ancient sects stood outside the barrier gate with tokens in their hands that were required to open the gate.

"Please step back, everyone," one of the disciples said. "Let the ones coming out come out first. You will have the entire day to enter."

Once people backed off a bit, they all used the token they had at once and the gate opened.

The barrier was dispelled and the people on the other side that weren't seen until now started walking out one by one.

Many of them walked to their friends and families to reunite after months or even years of being inside, and many simply went on their own way.

However, while watching them, Alex saw a few people looking at the gate, hoping to see someone that didn't appear at all.

At the people walked out, they still waited and Alex knew that they understood what had happened inside.

The person they were waiting for could have decided to stay inside another 6 months, or he could have just been late and not made it to the gate.

However, there was another possibility that was extremely tragic.

It was possible that the person they were waiting for had died somehow. It could've been the intents and powers inside the battlefield, or it could have been people imitating intents and powers to kill people without being found out.

Alex was quite surprised at the number of disciples from the Ancient sects that were walking out of the battlefield. It seemed thousands of them entered each time.

Once the people coming out dropped from a flood to a trickle, all the people that were waiting to enter immediately ran in.

Alex followed them and walked in as well.

As soon as he was in, Alex felt the weirdness in the air.

He could see the massive wasteland with not a single tree inside. There were gorges and deep cuts everywhere along the way, and different places with different destruction.

Whisker cowered a bit when he felt the smallest hint of intent in the air and couldn't handle much of it.

Alex took a deep breath and looked at every single piece of land he could see with Whisker's eyes.

He didn't really need him as he had seen some basic maps of the battlefield from the stores in the city, but it was still better to see stuff with his own eyes.

Alex was about to send Whisker back when he suddenly saw a few people fly away.

Before they made it very far, however, they fell to the ground, clutching their heads in agony.

Many people laughed and a few of them scolded them for being so ignorant of the place they had come to. A few people helped them, but quite a lot of them simply watched them while shaking their heads.

What they had done was what anyone would have done had they not been warned before.

This was the Ancient battlefield where Saint realms had died like flies and Immortals fought with all their cultivation base and Intents.

In a place where the Immortals fought in the sky, a place where that Immortal aura and intent was still remaining, flying was the worst thing you could do.

The sky was filled with aura that even the Saint realm cultivators had to be careful of before approaching.

For True realm cultivators, even the ground was dangerous.

Alex looked at the world in front of him one last time through Whisker's eyes and then sent him back into his beast space.

After that, Alex started slowly treading into the battlefield where he would stay until he entered the Saint Realm.

Chapter 912 Intent and Aura

As Alex started walking, he felt how thick the air was. For some reason, the entire battlefield was like a viscous fluid that was blocking his movement at every step.

And from what Alex could tell, it wasn't even aura or intent that was creating the resistance, it was the actual air.

'It is not just the air,' he thought. While he couldn't physically feel it like he could the air, Alex did notice that the Space in this place was also... affected.

It didn't feel constrained as it did with the secret realms. No, this was a different feeling, one he simply couldn't explain due to his lack of understanding of space.

'I should improve that,' he thought. 'But before that, I will have to improve my Sword Intent and Sword Qi.'

It had been a long time since he had a chance for proper sword training. The last time he had done that was in the forest for 2 years where he couldn't use his eyes.

It was funny how fate was. Once again, he was going to have to fend for himself with no eyesight.

Still, compared to last time, he had a cultivation base that was effectively in the Saint realm and a spiritual sense that went further than anyone would ever need under a normal scenario.

Of course, Alex didn't send out his Spiritual sense to the furthest he could. He kept it close to him, ready to pull it back if necessary.

After all, there were so many aura and intents out there that it would be dangerous to wantonly walk around with no care. There were also Saint realm cultivators that he could offend, that he certainly didn't want to.

The thousands of cultivators that entered were starting to branch out in various directions.

With both its length and width in the hundreds, the Ancient Battlefield could house as many people as could come.

Alex walked further, feeling the slight hint of aura in the air that didn't threaten him. He had learned that most of the places were actually not threatening, granted you stuck to the ground and were in the high True realms.

There were however a few places that were so dense with aura and intent that one couldn't just go there without proper protection.

One could block aura with talismans and artifacts, but blocking Intent was hard. As long as the Intent was targeting you, you had to fight back or lose.

After walking a bit further through the desolate path, after most of the people around him had moved along to find their own way through the land, Alex brought out Pearl.

Pearl shuddered the moment he came out but was fine a second later. He just needed to get used to the area.

"Is this the place you wanted to come to?" Pearl asked telepathically.

"Yes," Alex said. "Be careful. Don't let your spiritual sense wander off too far."

"Okay," Pearl said. "You are going to train right?"

"Yes," Alex said. He felt the environment around him and sighed. "I wish this place helps me learn some Space laws, but I will have to be content with being able to learn Sword aura for now."

Alex took out a sword from his storage bag. This was a True grade sword that he was rather fond of After all, this was the sword he had made not long ago.

Using a sword he made himself, using Sword Intent and Sword Qi through it would be quite easy.

"Let's just hope that since I have improved my will quite a bit, the Sword Intent will have reached very close, if not exceeded the requirement for Sword aura," he said. "Since I already overcame the requirement to learn Sword Aura, the only thing remaining should be to hone my Sword Qi."

Alex nodded to himself as that made sense to him.

"What about me?" Pearl asked.

"Uh..." Alex thought for a bit. "Since you have learned the Dao of Metal, we should work on you learning more Dao related to that."

"So... Dao of Sharpness, Dao of Conduction, Dao of Malleability, Dao of Ductility, Dao reflection, and Dao of Cutting," Alex said. "Those were what Shen Jing told us you could learn right?"

Pearl nodded.

"Great, then we will help you learn exactly that," Alex said. "As for me... I should focus on improving my understanding of the Dao of Techniques. That is the main thing I need to do before I can improve every single technique I have to the highest level they can go."

Alex continued walking. The more he did, the more he understood how weird this place was.

With the air not moving at all, for the most part, it felt like Alex was moving through a portrait that someone had drawn.

There were no sounds here other than his footsteps, not even the rustling of his clothes. He had to take a heavy breath to even breathe normally as the air simply refused to move at all.

"How do you think this place came to be?" Alex asked.

"I don't know," Pearl said. "What is this place exactly?"

"A battlefield of ancient times," Alex said. "But it's weird because the battle was over 90 thousand years ago, and yet all these aurae still remain here. How do you think that happened?"

"Hmm... maybe someone sealed this place?" Pearl said.

"No, this place had no seal. It was an open place where anyone could walk in and out. Given how many places must've been a battlefield at that time, why is this the only one remaining?" Alex wondered.

"Even if someone had sealed it and another person had unsealed it sometime later, the aura wouldn't be this potent, and the small time intents would last this long," Alex said. "Something major must have happened in this place."

Alex arrived next to a giant boulder that looked red to his sense. However, it was just his senses that gave him such an illusion because the rock was filled with Fire Qi.

"Someone was using some sort of fire technique and it must've landed on this rock," Alex said. "How did this fire Qi last so long?"

Alex produced his own fire next to him and let it go. As soon as the fire lost connection to his Qi, it disappeared. However, the Qi that was left behind didn't.

"Oh, could it be that the air not moving is causing this?" Alex wondered. However, while it did take a bit of time, the fire Qi still disappeared into the atmosphere. It had only remained so long because of the environment he was in.

"And yet that fire Qi still remains. What's so different about that fire?" Alex wondered.

He took a deep, heavy breath and walked towards the rock. Pearl stayed behind and he had nothing to do with Fire Qi at all.

Alex walked carefully. While this was Fire Qi and he was used to it, this was one that very much likely belonged to a Saint realm or even an Immortal realm cultivator.

Alex walked one step at a time, feeling the danger as he moved forward. He felt the Qi, its strength, and the intent behind the action of using this Qi.

Alex felt the intent and it was a similar intent that he vividly remembered feeling many years ago that night.

"Murderous Intent," Alex said. "Makes sense."

He stayed there for a bit longer as he forced the Intent from affecting him and felt the aura of the fire instead.

One of the things he had learned recently was that being around a strong aura of something helped one understand the laws behind it.

One of the reasons why Alex learned so many Fire related Daos was because he was an Alchemist, who sat around a fire making pills.

However, those normal fire auras could not be compared to the fire aura that was here.

Alex had come to learn and hone his intent, but the real treasure here was the aura.

He sat next to the Fire Qi for a while and learned what he could. While he didn't gain a Dao, his understanding had improved a lot.

After a while, he stood up and left the place to go back to Pearl who was waiting for him out of the range of the murderous intents.

Hundreds of kilometers of land, with hundreds of thousands of Aura everywhere. The potential in this land was endless and Alex felt he had a chance to learn about everything he wanted to.

"Let's go, buddy," Alex said. "I think I know where I need to go next."

Chapter 913 What Can You Cut?

Somewhere about 10 to 15 kilometers away from the gates of the Ancient Battlefield, there lay a massive gorge on the ground, as if the ground had been split in two.

In fact, the ground had been split into two, and it had been done with none other than a sword.

For a sword cultivator, this place was one of the best places to cultivate in the entire Ancient Battlefield.

Alex arrived at this location not long after. He had learned about this place before even coming here and had planned on learning in this place.

But his plans were for him to come here many days later. However, learning about the aura and how useful it was forcing him to come here.

"The gorge is right in front of us?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Pearl answered.

"Describe it to me," Alex said.

Due to the self-imposed small range of his spiritual sense at the moment, Alex was incapable of seeing anything in there. However, even without it, he could feel the sword aura and could tell that whoever had fought here, had wanted to cut down everywhere.

"The ground looks like it has caved in, but at an angle," Pearl said. Towards us is the thin end of the gorge that was cut open, and it expands as it goes forward and only ends at the feet of a rather large hill," Pearl said.

"Is there any change in scenery?" he asked.

"No, it's the same barren land as we've been walking on for the past hours," he said. "There are also people here. Hundreds, actually."

Alex nodded. He wasn't very surprised. This was a famous place after all.

"How are they seated?" Alex asked.

Pearl looked around. "They're scattered, around the start of the tip of the gorge mostly, but there are some on either side as well," he said. " Although, most are quite far away from the gorge itself."

"I see. Let's go to a relatively open place then," Alex said. "We'll test ourselves against the intent and aura here. If we can withstand this, we can continue moving forward."

"This will help me hone my Sword Aura, and you should be able to look into the laws of the Dao of Cutting or Sharpness," Alex said.

Pearl took Alex to an empty location away from the start of the gorge and saw down.

Alex found himself capable of going even further with relative ease, but he still decided to stay back so that Pearl could take his time.

He sat around the hundreds of people who were all in deep cultivation, doing their best to look into the Intent and Aura that was used to split the earth in half in front of them.

Pearl concentrated on it as well, and so did Alex.

For a while, Alex could feel nothing much at all. So, he decided to sense more, deeper with his spiritual sense.

He sent his spiritual sense further towards the edge of the gorge. He needed to be careful here as the aura from the sword was still quite dangerous for him.

He continued increasing his range and soon entered an area where the sword aura and thereby intent were quite thick. As such, he started concentrating on it from far away.

It took him a while, but he was able to get lost in his own thoughts, as his mind was influenced by the aura and intent he was constantly experiencing.

Soon, he started seeing visions.

Alex saw a man in front of him with a single sword in his hand. Alex didn't know what the man looked like, how he talked, or how he dressed. He didn't even know if that was a man.

He couldn't see what the sword he held was like. Was it metal or wood? Was it a single-edged blade or double-edged? Alex couldn't even see if the man was holding a blade at all.

However, a man holding a sword was the impression he was getting for the moment. The man prepared his sword and swung.

The world lost its colors as light itself seemed to have been cut, and Alex came back to his senses a second later.

He fell into deep thought for a few minutes as to what he had seen before understanding what it was.

Intent. Alex had seen this man's intent. More specifically, he had seen this man's intent to cut everything in his path using his sword, even if the thing he was cutting was light itself.

'Such grand intentions,' Alex thought. He was shocked by exactly what the man thought he could accomplish with his sword skills.

'Are all immortals like this?' he wondered. It was hard for Alex to have such intentions. He didn't even know if it was possible to cut light or not. He had never heard of anyone doing anything like that in the first place to have intentions like this.

But, if that really was possible, then just what else was possible?

Alex began thinking. You could cut space, he knew that. Could you cut time? How would that work?

Could you cut reality? Was that even possible?

Could you cut a soul? A spirit? A mind?

Could you cut the heavens? Could you cut a dao, the very fundamental truths of the world?

If you could, just how strong could you be?

While Pearl focused on learning the truths behind the Dao of cutting hidden within the aura of the sword, Alex started unraveling the possibilities hidden in his future.

He understood that cutting everything was not what he wanted to do with a sword. A sword for him was a means of defense in most scenarios and only a means of hurting or even killing when absolutely needed.

He would rather de-escalate a situation than immediately fight the other person.

However, he was also willing to cut down anyone or anything who stood in front of him and his path forward.

Whether it be Immortals, Divinities, Celestials, or even Gods. Whether it was living or dead. Whether it was the earth, the moon, the sun, or even the stars.

Whether it was space, time, or fate, he would cut everything down and keep moving forward.

Alex felt a clear change in himself after the self-revelations. His mind felt improved for some reason, and it took a moment for him to figure out what had just happened.

'My sword Intent has improved... by quite a lot,' he thought. He could tell that it was now above the threshold of what was necessary for someone to have Sword Aura.

Now, the only thing that was lacking was for his Sword Qi to improve as well. For that, he needed to improve his way of handling the natural sword aura and make the sword Qi as dense as possible.

That was something he could either learn after a long training session or simply improve by understanding how someone else had done it through their sword aura.

With so much of sword aura in front of him, Alex was more than certain that he could gain an understanding of that here. If he was lucky, he would even learn his Sword Aura right here, in this very gorge.

Chapter ﻿914 Intent

After a day of sitting down and meditating, Pearl was able to improve himself enough that they could move some dozen or so meters ahead and sat down closer to the starting point of the gorge.

Alex was now about 100 or so meters away from the tip of the gorge and was around the same area as most other cultivators that were just starting as well.

Barring the experienced Saint realm cultivators, there were only a few that were further than them and they had been here for a while as far as Alex could tell.

Alex felt the aura and intent land on his body and simply brushed it off as if it was nothing.

Having sensed the aura and intent close to the tip of the gorge, Alex was sure he could handle anything about 10 meters away from it. They were but an inconvenience for him at this point.

Beyond the 10-meter area, however, was a location that most cultivators weren't sitting in, so Alex too felt a little reluctant to check that.

He didn't think there would be anything harsher there, but just to be safe, he kept his spiritual senses from reaching beyond that point.

As for the sides of the gorge where the Saint cultivators were apparently staying, he had no intention of going there yet. That was a place where only those who either had a very high cultivation base or understanding of the sword went. Usually both.

In order to wait for Pearl to be ready to move forward, Alex stayed where he was and started cultivating.

Time slowly passed by as he sat there, cultivating. Alex cultivated his eyes, his Undying physique, his spiritual sense, and his Qi.

Pearl in the meanwhile was getting ever so closer to understanding a new dao, but he simply couldn't force himself to understand it.

He still needed some time, so he focused on improving his fighting power over the physical and mental pain that constantly bothered him.

He hadn't expected the aura and intent together to be this strong, this far out. But, he knew that Alex was staying behind just for him, so he felt determined to fight this out and become strong enough to move forward.

If he could not, he would only be dragging Alex back with him.

So, the two, man and beast continued their own things for the next few days.

Every so often, Pearl would let Alex know that they could move forward and they would move a step closer.

It wasn't just them. Many other cultivators would move forward after some time of getting used to the aura and intent.

They all wanted to get closer to the gorge and understand its true mysteries, and if possible, learn the sword strike that made this gorge.

It took a month for Pearl to move about 50 meters closer to the gorge, but there was still 50 meters or so left.

However, he couldn't do it anymore. He had learned the mysteries behind the cut as much as he could, and now he simply had to wait for the Dao mountain to open up so he could learn another Dao.

As for improving his Intent, he was taking too long.

"I'm sorry," he said. He knew that Alex was blind in the current situation and that he was his only eye. However, he couldn't keep dragging him any longer. He was just slowing down his progress.

"You don't have to be sorry," Alex said. "I'm just glad that you did the best you could. I'm sure you'll soon figure out the entire Dao."

With that, Pearl went into the beast space, and Alex stood up to walk up front.

His spiritual sense diminished as he walked forward so as to not harm himself by accidentally seeing too much.

Some people noticed him walking quite far, but most ignored him. Only a few of them showed a surprised look on their face when they saw him suddenly move over 30 meters at once.

Alex walked even further and stopped at around 15 meters of distance. This to him felt like the perfect spot where his body was constantly assaulted by the aura, but it wasn't strong enough to cause him pain.

So, he sat down and started looking into the mysteries that were now so close to him.

Not even half a day later, Alex understood what it was exactly he had to do. He had to use his Sword Intent to generate more Sword Qi and then condense it using his Sword Intent again.

That was how he could improve it.

Since Alex had skipped a step in learning Sword Qi, his idea of how sword Qi could be improved was almost non-existent.

And since Sword Qi itself was quite rare to see on the Western Continent, he had no place to learn how it was trained.

It was only now that he was learning how one properly learned it.

Alex brought out a sword to test this and the moment he took it out, the sword started glowing all white.

Little flickers of light appeared from the sword, shooting outside as it always did.

All of a sudden, the little flickers of light that rarely stayed shaped like a sword, started maintaining their sword shapes more often. They still flickered back to being a mote of light, but they did remain, even if just for a while, in the shape of what a Sword Qi really should be.

Alex felt excited. If only he knew this was all he had to do. He forced himself to create even more of the Sword Shaped Qi, and to his surprise, it worked.

The method to turn raw sword Qi into Sword Shaped Qi was simply the intent behind it. So, the more he focused on his Sword Intent, which was now acceptable to be in the same category as Sword Aura, his Sword Qi naturally started improving as well.

Alex focused on that and only that, oblivious to the fact that there were people around him, looking at him with awe.

The relative ease with which he had gone from having almost no Sword Shaped Qi to almost all of the Sword Qi being Sword Shaped Qi was mind-boggling for them.

The rate of improvement was just too much, and some even began to think that he was just showing off, putting on a fake performance.

However, those that understood Sword Qi better, and especially those that understood Sword Aura, could see the terrifying speed at which he was approaching the limit of Sword Qi.

Alex's Sword Intent was not just creating more Sword Qi around his sword, but it was also starting to create some Sword Qi here and there all around his body.

The surrounding cultivators kept looking with shock, expecting to see a miracle.

However, in the end, Alex stopped. "God, this is so draining," he thought. Using so much intent at once gave more mental fatigue than he would have liked to admit.

He sighed, and unknown to him, so did the others.

A True realm cultivator learning the Sword Aura was a feat that was rarely precedented, and learning it so quickly was surely unprecedented.

However, now that Alex had stopped, they couldn't help but sigh in disappointment. Just a little more and they could've seen history, and yet he just had to—

Alex's Sword Intent burst back into action, forcing Sword Qi in the shape of a Sword to appear not just on his sword but also all around him.

He had understood what he had needed all this time. Shen Jing had hinted at it, but he had likely never told him because he needed to learn this on his own.

Everything stemmed from intent.

Whether it was the intent to use a technique, intent to use a weapon, or intent to use a Dao.

Without intent, none of these things were usable.

Without Intent, a cultivator would just be a mindless husk, incapable of doing anything.

Without Intent, cultivators wouldn't exist.

It was only their Intent to grow stronger and live longer that made the mortals cultivate in the first place.

As such, using Intent as a base, one would be able to do anything so long as they had the potential for it.

In the case of cultivation, as long as there was Qi around them, a normal person could start cultivating.

In the case of a Dao, as long as one understood the dao, they could use their Intent to use the dao.

In the case of swords, as long as one had a sword, using the Sword Intent as a base, one was able to generate Sword Qi.

Previously, he was using his Intent to 'keep moving forward' as an indirect method of creating Sword Qi. That resulted in the Sword Qi rarely being sword-shaped.

However, now that he had learned the actual method, he was able to use Sword Intent to force out a lot of Sword Qi that he normally wouldn't be able to.

His sword glowed ever so brighter, forcing out the Sword Shaped Qi in all directions around him.

However, Alex didn't stop there. He used his Intent to make even more Sword Qi, and before long, his Sword was too overwhelmed to handle more Sword Qi.

In that instance, his body started creating more Sword Qi, all of which were influenced by his will to 'keep moving forward', and would act accordingly.

As such, when there was enough of them hanging around him in unison, Alex understood that at this moment, he had learned Sword Aura.

Chapter 915 Training

Alex stopped his Sword Aura. While he did learn it, it was a bit too strong for him at the moment to continue keeping it active without throwing it out.

Also, he was certain that he was still going to need a lot of practice to use it multiple times.

The amount of mental strain alone used up by his Intent to create Sword Qi around him would be a lot for him now.

'Well, it's only been a month since I entered anyway. I have a lot of time,' Alex thought.

Once the Sword Aura disappeared, he stood up and walked forward. He got closer and closer to the 10-meter mark that he was told by Pearl.

He had not yet seen the gorge or whatever that lied around it. Until now, he had only been explained that.

So, Alex decided to see it for himself and took his first step into the unknown.

Intense Intent assaulted him the moment he did. He was not the one the Intent was targeting clearly, but even then it was hard to not be attacked by it.

'Attacking intents are so much stronger than ones that are simply there to stop people from reading some words,' Alex thought.

It could also be that in this stagnant world, this intent had remained fresh, while the ones in the book and stele had faded over time, but that didn't take away from the fact that Alex was currently being attacked by some of the strongest intent he had felt to this day.

Alex stayed determined, however, and kept moving. There was nothing that was going to stop him.

He took another step, fighting the forces of the intent and aura together. They were bad, but nothing that could stop him right now.

Besides, the truly bad part would start at the spot where the ground was attacked.

Alex moved three more steps forward, arriving around the 6-meter mark, where he was finally forced to stop. He could have kept moving forward, but then he would have to move back immediately as he would be completely exhausted.

Instead, he sat down and started tempering his intent again, while at the same time trying to look into the mysteries behind the aura.

However, this time he was looking for different mysteries. Previously, he was searching for the mystery behind Sword Aura. However, now he was searching for the Dao that was hidden within this aura.

He knew for sure that the Dao of Sharpness was hidden within this aura, but he wanted to see if there were more he could find.

So, he sat and continued understanding the dao for as long as it took him.

Time passed slowly, but surely. People continued coming and going from this place, but very few actually stayed there long enough to give themselves ample opportunity to learn everything.

Alex was one of them. He had stayed there for one month with Pearl, and that was what he had needed to slowly grasp the concept of Sword Qi so he could form his own sword aura.

After that, he stayed there for 2 more months, learning everything he could. During these times, he practiced bringing out Sword Aura frequently but found that he still needed a lot of time if he wanted to use it multiple times.

What he did successfully do was understand the Dao of Sharpness to a certain extent now, but there was still something that he needed to learn that he wasn't able to get from here. He would have to mull over it on his own in the Dao mountain.

Aside from that, he had also glimpsed at something in the aura. Not only was the Dao of Sharpness there, but there was something else, something not a Dao or intent.

Alex had a hunch, but he wasn't sure if he was correct. But if he was, then whatever it was in there, was very much likely the next step after Sword Aura.

'What can it be?' he wondered.

He was curious, but the answer wasn't there. So, after 3 months of non-stop learning the sword, Alex finally decided to leave now to train on his own.

As for going forward, he could come back once his eyesight was back.

Alex stood up and felt himself a little exhausted from the constant battle that he was in for the last 2 months. He then swiftly walked away from the aura and intent, leaving it behind.

He felt a sense of relief not having to constantly fight it all.

A few people noticed it and looked up curiously. These were the people that had been here 2 months ago and had seen Alex reach Sword Aura.

Now, they wanted to see how far he had come.

One man stood up and immediately walked up to Alex. "Fellow Daoist, wait," the person said.

Alex moved his spiritual sense to the person and realized that this was a Saint realm cultivator.

"Can I help you?" Alex asked.

"I certainly hope you can," the man said. "I was hoping you would have a simple bout with me with the new knowledge you acquired here."

"You want to test my Sword Aura?" Alex asked. He was certain that people had seen him after trying it out for so long.

"I actually want to test my understanding I have received from this place by comparing it against what you've learned," the man said.

Alex remained silent for a bit in contemplation.

"Please do not worry, I will not sure my cultivation base for anything other than defending," said the man with a cultivation base in the lower Saint Condensation realm.

Alex smiled behind his mask. "Sure, why not? I wish to see what I've learned too," he said.

The two of them moved a little further away, and a few people felt dejected that they weren't there before him.

Alex took out a normal sword and stood in front of the man who took out his Saint-ranked sword.

"Let's begin," the man said and his sword shined brightly.

Alex's sword shined with the same bright light as the man's as well. In fact, his might have been brighter due to the sheer number of Sword Qi he was making.

Alex wasn't even intending to use Sword Aura, and only Sword Qi, but the amount he was producing was abnormal, to say the least.

Sitting inside that place for so long had affected his Intent so much that he now had to reel it in so as not to overdo it.

The man swung his sword and the white slash moved towards Alex. Alex sensed the weak attack and slashed his own.

If the man's attack looked like a stream of flowing water, then Alex's attack was a raging river. Nothing was going to stop it from keeping on going.

His attack devoured the Saint's attack and kept on going towards the Saint. The Saint realized the danger and quickly used a defensive technique to protect himself.

Still, he was pushed back by the attack he was just dealt. He looked at Alex in horror, only now understanding just how strong the young man in front of him was.

And he hadn't even used his Sword Aura yet.

With only Sword Qi, Alex had forced the Saint into giving up. If he had used Sword Aura, he would've likely killed the saint.

Alex himself was quite surprised by how strong he had been. He couldn't help but wonder just how strong his sword attacks were now.

"I see that I'm not your match," the saint said with clear shock written in his eyes. "Thank you for parting blows with me."

"Thank you too for letting me test my new strength," Alex said and bowed a little.

The Saint turned around to leave, and another cultivator moved past him.

'Hmm?' Alex thought. He had scanned the place a few times, but he hadn't seen this woman before.

'Was she one of the cultivators that stayed further away than me?' he thought.

"Young man, would you like to test your Sword Aura with me? I wish to see how strong you've become," she said.

Alex checked the woman's cultivation base and it was clearly in the Saint Foundation realm. She was far stronger than what he could hope to beat even normally.

Which meant, that this was the best person to train against using his full might.

Alex nodded. "Thank you, senior, for giving me this opportunity."

Chapter 916 Breakthrough

Alex stood not far away from the woman and readied his sword.

The woman stood nonchalantly as she didn't sense any danger from Alex at all. "Attack whenever you want," she said.

Alex nodded. He flared his Sword Intent and his sword glowed alight with Sword Qi. At a certain point, the Sword Qi became so dense that his sword couldn't handle it, and instead, the Sword-shaped Qi started appearing all around him.

They moved randomly at first, which had absolutely nothing in common, but then Alex enforced his Intent that he had honed for years now, and suddenly the chaotic Qi came into Order.

He took a deep breath. "Here I come."

And then he attacked.

He slashed his sword casually, sending out a sword slash that followed the normal path. However, led by that slash was the many orderly Sword Qi.

They followed behind the slash and made their way toward the woman.

The woman looked shocked at the strength behind Alex's attack. She had expected it to be strong, but this... this was reaching the peak of Saint Condensation realm.

Just a little more and he would be touching onto the Saint Foundation realm.

'How is such a strong person only True Emperor 7th realm?' she wondered.

Alex's slash flew through the air, nearly 3 meters wide, and the Sword Aura that followed behind it was even wider.

As they approached the woman, the woman also attacked, slashing her sword at the Sword Aura.

Her physical sword clashed with Alex's attack, and she tried to destroy the attack. However, she was surprised that despite being stronger, she couldn't easily destroy the attack.

The aura kept on going, pushing her even after being stopped as if that was the only way.

They weren't here to cut her or kill her, and that surprised the woman.

'There's someone out there learning such unconventional truths about themselves to understand their sword aura?' she wondered. Most people, including herself, only chose to use their swords to cut everything in their path, destroy things, or kill the person they attacked.

However, Alex's sword aura wasn't trying to harm her. It would if she let it, but that was not its purpose. Its purpose was to never be stopped.

A small smile appeared on her face. She quickly slashed the rest of the aura away by overwhelming it, but even that took a split second more than she would've expected.

"You surprised me," she said. "Can you tell me how you came to learn the truth about yourself?"

"It was a long time ago," Alex said, not bothering to explain anything anymore.

"I see," she said. "With your current strength, rarely any Saint Condensation realm cultivators should be your enemy, given that they haven't learned their own Sword Aura or have some strong techniques."

"Thank you for helping me understand that," Alex said.

The woman smiled. "I'm curious. Were you the one they talked about?" she asked.

"They?" Alex was confused.

"My seniors," the woman said. "I'm an elder of the Nether Poison sect, and I heard them speaking about a young man that reached the top of the Dao mountain not long ago with a white cat of his. I heard the young man with a white mask on his face shock them quite a bit. You're that person, aren't you?"

Alex was surprised she knew him. "Yes, I am indeed that person," he said.

"Aren't you supposed to be in the Frozen Heart sect? Why are you not wearing their robes?" she asked.

"Senior isn't wearing the Nether Poison sect's uniform either," Alex said.

The woman narrowed her eyes and chuckled. "Fair enough," she said. "How do the Frozen Heart sect treat you? Is it not very sad being in the midst of all those girls, but never being able to truly interact with them?"

Alex could see where this was going. "I'm fine with how I am being treated by the sect at the moment," he said.

"I see. Well, if you ever do feel like you should be treated better, our sect will always have our doors open for you," she said.

"Thank you, senior," Alex said. "Now, if you will excuse me, I will be leaving."

"Sure, go on to do your own thing," she said and turned around to back to her cultivation as well.

The many people looked in shock, not just from what they saw, but from what they heard as well.

The young man in front of them that had just demonstrated his monstrous talent with his Sword Aura had also learned Dao at the peak of the Dao mountain not long ago.

They were certainly going to start talking about this now to everyone they met.

Alex called out to Pearl after walking a few minutes, and together the two of them continued their journey into the Ancient Battlefield.

Alex started making a few plans on what he wanted to do, but there was really just a single plan and a few other things that he would be happy about if he did, but he could skip them if he didn't get to.

However, before going on to do that one main thing he wanted to do, he needed to do another small thing that he had been pushing back for a while now.

Alex made pearl look for a place where they could set some resting area. They found a place in a rocky set of land where Alex pulled out a few rocks to make a small cave-like place where he could hide from the sight of others.

Once there, Alex made Pearl stand guard, and then he started cultivating. He was going to break through today.

He had reached True Emperor 7th realm a long time ago, but due to circumstances, he hadn't been able to break through at all.

His only time would have been in the month he stayed in Silvermoon city, but he didn't feel the time was right at that time.

However now, 3 months later, it did feel right, so within an hour of entering cultivation, he broke through to True Emperor 8th realm.

Alex stayed in cultivation for the next day or so, slowly stabilizing his new cultivation base in this world where nothing moved.

It took him not long before he was able to stand up and leave. However, Alex didn't leave.

He instead started training his Sword Aura. Now that he was away from any Intent that he had to constantly fight again, his Sword Aura appeared far quicker than he was used to while he was learning it.

It was also strong, maybe even a little stronger than when he used it against that woman, but not by much.

He experimented with his Sword Aura a bit, learning just how far he could send it without losing much of its destructiveness, how long he could hold it without attacking, how many Sword Aura attacks he could send out before his mind started feeling fatigued, etc.

He trained for a day or two, while Pearl stood to watch.

Finally, after 2 days he stopped as he had trained the same thing multiple times and came to a conclusion.

His sword skills were now his strongest asset, followed by his Qi attacks, his physical body, and finally his mental attacks.

Chapter 917 Bells Ringing

Alex used his Flame Mastery Scripture to try and create a ball of water in the air.

That obviously didn't work, but he had really intended to do that. And yet, somehow what came out was still fire.

Alex wondered why that was. Why didn't his Intent change the type of Qi that was coming out? That worked normally.

He tried it again to bring out some Water Qi, and it did, but for some reason, when using techniques, he could never determine what Qi he wanted to bring out.

Alex was very curious as to why that was. Was Intent not capable of changing Qi when it came to changing a technique? Or did pathway have an influence here?

Such instances of trial and thought occurred multiple times throughout the next few months as Alex made his way through the Ancient Battlefield with Pearl.

From time to time, Alex could come across a location with a thick aura, and sit around there to understand the mysteries hidden behind it.

When he was not, he tried using his techniques and understanding why they worked the way they did.

After all, understanding the Dao of techniques was for now his most important mission. If he could do that, he could do many things.

However, it was hard. Way harder than he was expecting.

While not as ridiculous as the trillions of nerves in a human body, there were still thousands of meridians in a cultivator's body.

Some were small, some were big. Some weren't used as much, while some were used quite a lot.

However, perhaps the most annoying thing about the meridians was that they were connected to Spiritual Roots. So the more Spiritual roots one had, the more meridians one had in their body.

With all 7 spiritual roots in his body, Alex had to keep track of the most number of meridians one could possibly have in their body.

Since pathways were made up of those very tens of thousands of meridians, Alex was having a hard time understanding how techniques worked.

He was starting to see just how massive of an endeavor he had.

"No, Shen Jing knows Dao of Techniques, and he's only a Saint realm cultivator. Surely I will learn it very soon as well," Alex thought. He was certain he could learn it very soon.

So, he wasn't disheartened at all and continued practicing.

He went through many locations, learning from the aura, but there was no place that was as potent as the one from over a month ago.

That was until Alex came across another place with a similar situation. There was a rock that was cut into two.

Alex felt a sharp intent coming from the area and could tell that there was some Dao of Sharpness he could obtain from here.

So, both he and Pearl got as close to the rock as possible and started trying to understand the mysteries hidden behind the cut.

However, it wasn't long before they realized this was different. The rock wasn't attacked by someone that knew the Dao of Sharpness, but rather the Dao of Cutting.

While the two Daos were quite similar, the Dao of Cutting was barely connected to the Metal energy, making it harder for Pearl to understand.

Still, the two of them sat there and tried to understand the mysteries. They went closer together this time and learned as much as they could.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much he could learn from this place. From what he understood, the person who cut this rock didn't have much understanding of the Dao himself and only used bits of what he knew in his own attack.

But, given that the Intent here was quite potent, Alex decided to stay here and help train Pearl as best as he could.

Alex knew he would have to stay for a very long time if he wanted Pearl to improve his Intent to a high level. But he couldn't do that and had to go improve himself.

As such, he had to settle between the two and stayed there just long enough for Pearl to improve enough, which turned out to be around 3 weeks.

After the 3 weeks were over, Alex went away, searching for better places to train and cultivate around.

He found a scorched ground with thick Fire Qi and learned as much as he could about the Dao of Fire from there in a few weeks.

He found a gouge on the earth that could have only come from someone pulling it out of the ground, and thus there were heavy Earth Qi still hanging around the edges of the crater, where Alex learned for a few weeks.

He fought a man that wanted to test his skills and defeated him rather harshly after realizing that he was trying to use him as a training puppet instead of a partner.

He fought a woman who seemed to be starting to grasp some knowledge of Dao of Ice, and fought her multiple times such that he too started to understand what she was learning.

He found a place where walking became abnormally hard due to the randomly shifting gravity all around him. He sat there for a long time, trying to learn the mysteries behind gravity itself.

To his surprise, he was getting somewhere.

During this time also came the day he applied the paste to his eyes for the last time. Now, he was all out of the paste and he would finally gain the first stage of Demon Eyes not long after.

Some days later, while Alex was training with his 21 Sword array, trying to figure out a way to add more swords onto it, he heard loud ringings from the south.

He looked towards the origin of the sound in surprise, wondering what it was. It was only after a while that he realized that it was the sound that noted them of the gate's opening.

"6 months have already passed since we came here, huh?" he thought. He couldn't believe how he had so easily spent away his 6 months.

'It felt like I came here yesterday,' Alex thought before going on his own way. The gate might open, but he wasn't going to leave right now.

He wasn't going to leave for quite a while.

Alex then fought some more people and found a few places to cultivate in, all the while training his Dao of Techniques.

He wasn't getting anywhere, but he kept practicing.

Everything started happening quickly now that he had less need to stay somewhere. Not only was there no need to improve his Intent as much, but the mysteries were also not very hidden for him after learning so many different ones.

However, that wasn't to say that he never came across a place that didn't stump him.

One did, and he was happy to find it.

He had felt the location when he was close and had Pearl look for it, but Pearl didn't see any weirdness here.

However, Alex knew what was up there, so he ran quickly and arrived next to it. He sensed the area and could tell that there were mysteries here, mysteries of a Dao that he had been looking forward to learning for a very long time.

Dao of Space.

Chapter 918 Space and Matter

"Pearl, go back inside. I will have to remain here for a while," Alex said.

Pearl nodded and went in without any question. After Pearl went in, Alex got as in as he could before he felt as if the aura was going to overwhelm him.

Then, he sat down and started meditating.

Alex's senses spread wide, trying to see if he could notice anything different with the space that he could feel. However, it didn't look like there was anything wrong.

No matter how much he tried looking with his spiritual sense, Alex saw that the space was normal, and not twisted or split in any way at all.

He realized that his spiritual sense couldn't sense space at all. 'Is this because I haven't learned the mysteries behind Space, or is spiritual sense just not capable?' Alex wondered.

He kept his senses as they were and instead focused on the aura he could feel. It was still a mystery to him as to why he could feel the space aura, but since he did, he would try to master it.

He sat there, meditating, trying to feel space. The first step to understanding the properties of space was to figure out what the property of the current aura belonged to.

He needed to figure out if the current space was enlarged, shrunken, twisted, or cut off from the rest of the space.

Alex was sure this space wasn't cut off. If it was, it would be similar to the secret realms where the space would feel cut off from the rest of other space.

Alex knew that feeling, and due to that reason, he knew this aura did not belong that that property of space.

So, it was something else.

Alex felt the aura for a while and left the place. He had spent a week there and he could see no result from just sitting there.

So, he decided to be proactive about it.

Once far enough away from the place such that the aura didn't affect him as much, but it was still affecting the space, Alex used his Flickering Shadow's Technique to teleport to a close by location.

When he did, he tried to feel his effect on the space around him. He tried to understand why he was teleporting.

Until now, he had never tried to understand the mysteries behind how he could do anything, and that was for a good reason.

As he was right now, Alex had no way of manipulating or even feeling space unless something else was affecting it. He had thought of using formations or scripts to make a place where space was affected, but that required Saint-ranked spirit veins, and it was basically impossible to find such a thing in the Northern continent.

No one in their right mind would find a Saint-ranked spirit vein and let it be. They would either take it away, or create a city, sect, or clan around it.

The only place Alex could think of that had a Saint-ranked spirit vein without any owner was the Demon realm of this side where the ruler lay.

And with the ruler hiding there from the Heavenly Judgement there, there was no way Alex would be allowed to wantonly manipulate space there.

Even if he could, returning to the State of Xue was not something he had planned.

As such, he had been without a place where space was affected and now that he had found it, he was using it to try and learn whatever he could.

Alex teleported again and felt the space move around him. There was one question he had thought about for a while that he wanted to be answered.

Did an object occupy space or did they displace it?

Could an object move through space like a spiritual sense moving through walls by both existing in the same location at the same time? Or was it like water where it was pushed aside as one moved and returned back when the person left?

Normally, it was impossible for Alex to find that answer. However, in this affected space where the aura was just right enough for it to not overwhelm his feelings but still help him feel them, Alex found his answers.

When he teleported using the Flickering Shadows technique, Alex felt some disturbance in space. He quickly caught on to the disturbance and tried to understand what had happened.

He did it multiple times and each time he got closer and closer to the answer until finally a day later he understood what the answer was.

Space existed alongside matter. Space wasn't water or air that was displaced by something appearing inside it.

Space was an emptiness. It was the lack of something. In the area where matter existed, space couldn't exist. In the area where space existed, matter could not exist.

However, those two couldn't exist without each other. If no matter existed, there would be nothing to validate the existence of space.

If no space existed, there was nothing to validate the existence of matter.

When he understood this, he teleported, again and again, to figure out how the teleportation was happening. As he continued doing that, he understood how it worked.

When he teleported, he simply stopped existing in one space and started existing in another.

Of course, it didn't just happen because he felt like it. His Qi worked to connect two different points in space as a single one and then separated them again.

However, during the separation, the other space took him and the space where he was existing all along, started existing again.

When Alex understood that, he couldn't help but frown. He had just learned that matter and space were hot and cold. One existed to define another.

But if that was the case then how was his matter being teleported around through space? Surely there were some problems in his understanding of what was happening.

So, Alex spent weeks trying to understand it all over again and he came to the same conclusion.

Matter and Space existed side by side, but never together. Where matter existed, space didn't. And where space existed, the matter didn't.

But then, the teleportation clearly connected his body to a point in space, shrinking the space until it was nothing for him and then releasing it while also taking his body there.

How was there a point in space in a matter when space didn't exist when the matter was around?

It hurt Alex's mind for a while trying to figure out what was happening, but at some point, a thought came into his mind.

A piece of trivia that he had learned so long ago that he was surprised he still remembered it.

Back when he was still a young teenager, his mother had taught him something about science. It had to do with atoms and molecules and how they formed an object.

Atoms were made up of small particles that were so small that they only occupied about 0.01% of what was considered the entire atom.

So, an atom was 99.99% empty. In other words, every single atom was filled with space for about 99.99%.

Meaning that everything that was then made up of atoms was also subsequently mostly just space.

A human being was mostly just space.

Alex's eyes went wide. He realized that his entire body was practically all space and barely any matter. So when the two points in space were connected, they were in fact connected to his body, because his body was space.

However, even when his body was space mostly, it was the matter that was the body. After all, space was technically just emptiness.

Alex felt enlightened. With this new knowledge, he started to teleport again, trying to figure out how one could possibly teleport.

He teleported for a bit and felt the aura of space around him change as he did.

Slowly, but surely, Alex came to understand what was happening.

When the two points in space were connected, the space in his body, and the space where he was meant to become one thanks to his Qi.

When they did, they swapped places. Now, the space where he had been was free of the matter that made up his body, and the space where he was supposed to become the space in his body.

Then, when the Qi no longer affected the space, the two spaces went back to where they were. However, when they did, the 0.01% matter that made up Alex's body was taken away by the 99.99% of space that was his new body.

As such, while he thought he was moving through space, disappearing in one location, appearing in another, what was truly happening was Alex was changing the space that made up his body and as such the new space became his body, making it appear as if he had teleported.

Alex sat down to quickly meditate on what he had just learned.

The Flickering Shadows technique used Yin Qi to affect the space around the shadow where the Yin Qi affinity was high.

However, one didn't need Yin Qi alone to teleport. As long as one could affect space with normal Qi and force them to swap with the space in themselves or any objects, the teleportation would be successful.

As Alex sat there, gaining this new understanding of space, the worldly laws descended from the world, unaffected by the weirdness of the Ancient Battlefield, and fell onto Alex.

Alex meditated for an entire day with the worldly laws on him, and by the time the worldly laws went back to the heavens, he had learned the Dao of Teleportation.

Chapter 919 A Property of Space

Alex stood up from his meditation session. He had been so thoroughly invested in learning about teleportation that he had forgotten to put Pearl on guard.

Alex sent his senses flying out all around him and sensed several people that were standing all around him, watching him.

He couldn't help but frown a bit when he realized that his learning of Dao had ended up becoming a spectacle for these people.

Alex ignored them and turned to go deeper into the aura to learn more, but some people started calling for him.

"Brother, wait a moment. We want to talk to you." Some said.

"Hey, did you learn a Dao? Can you tell us what you learned?" some younger folks asked.

A few of them even asked for a battle to test out what he had learned.

"Please excuse me. I don't feel like talking about what I have just learned," Alex said and went deeper into the space aura. However, unlike the other places, this space aura wasn't as dangerous at all.

It was just a manipulation of space and as such, it wasn't as dangerous around here. There wasn't any intent to stop people from coming either.

"Brother, what did you learn? I can't sense anything around here," the people started speaking as they got closer.

As they got closer, they also sensed Alex's cultivation base and were surprised that a True Emperor had learned a Dao here.

"Woah, you're just a junior?" some of them asked.

"Hey, come on! Tell us what did you learn?" they asked.

Alex sighed. "If you can't even feel the aura then certainly you have no chance of learning it. Please go to other places," he said and continued moving.

However, the people didn't like the answer.

One of the men quickly dashed up to him with his cultivation base flaring to threaten Alex.

"Stop right there," he said as he arrived right next to Alex. "You think we will just let you go after you start being disrespectful to us?"

He grabbed Alex by the shoulders and tried to stop him. However, Alex moved before he could do anything else.

Alex's right palm landed on the man's chest with a rather hard thrust, but the Saint was stronger than his physical body.

However, what came afterward was not something the man could endure. Alex's Qi flowed into the man, completely overwhelming his own Qi.

At the same time, the world moved on its own to produce Qi at the distance, which quickly made the space there connect with the space in the man's body.

At the next moment, the man disappeared, appearing nearly 500 meters away.

"What?" the people freaked out.

"Did he just—"

"He teleported that man. Did that young man use a skill?" someone asked.

"I think that was the Dao," another person said.

Even the man that had been teleported away looked in shock. He had never seen a technique that could do that for another person.

'I need to learn this,' he thought. They all thought.

Just then, Alex brought out his sword and suddenly his Sword Aura flared to levels he rarely took it to.

"Another person that is up to 5 meters around me will have to face my sword aura," Alex said.

The people were shocked and even more surprised now. Not only had Alex shown a shocking Dao, but he had also shown Sword Aura, all before even entering the Saint realm.

"Wait, isn't that the young swordsman that went from barely learning Sword Qi to learning Sword Aura in just a few minutes a few months ago?" someone asked. "I swear people by the split gorge were talking about him."

"White mask and black robes... yes, he does fit the description," another person said.

"If that is indeed true, then I hear that he can defeat even Saint Condensation realm cultivators," the first person said.

People who heard that started getting a little scared. If what they had just heard was true, then there was no way they would ever try to bother him.

Even if he wasn't the person in question, who would dare try to bother a person that knew a Dao and had a Sword Aura?

Alex waited for people to move, but after what they had just heard, nobody did.

So, he turned around and went a little deeper toward the origin of the Space aura and started cultivating again.

He wanted to test out his teleportation capabilities, but that would have to wait for now.

Still, sending that man away, he had learned a few things.

"500 meters... that's not a bad range," he thought. When he used his authority over space to use his intention to send the man away, the world responded just 500 meters away.

He wondered if it was anything different if he was the one teleporting. He didn't see how it could be any different, but he would have to test it later on.

"Hmm, I thought I would have an easier time understanding what is happening here now that I've learned about space a bit, but it doesn't look like it," he thought to himself. "What exactly is this aura about?"

Alex tried to understand how the space here was being manipulated. The space wasn't confined or separated from other spaces, that much he could tell just from feelings.

It wasn't certain about teleportations either. The only two other things he knew about space were being able to expand or shrink, but he had no practical experience with any of them to learn which it was.

Alex thought for a bit and brought out one of his empty storage bags.

A storage bag was created by shrinking space into a small pouch and confining it there.

Considering that, Alex tried to see if he could feel that aura behind the storage bag.

"No, that's not it," Alex thought and put back the storage bag. "Space isn't being shrunk here. Then is it an expansion? Or is there another property of space that I don't realize yet?"

Alex sat there, trying to figure out the mysteries of the aura in front of him. It was hard, but he persevered.

He sat there, trying to figure it out, and as such time passed rather quickly for him.

Alex moved from time to time in between and finally arrived at the location where the aura was the strongest. At this place, there was intent as well.

So, he meditated on the intent and aura and tried very hard to figure out what was happening.

A month went by and he learned nothing. People tried to learn here just like him too, but they truly couldn't feel anything, so they had to leave.

Two months went by and he realized that it was indeed not space expansion that was happening here and it was something else.

Three months went by and Alex started understanding something about what was happening in front of him.

Also, at this time, he broke through to the next realm. Finally, he entered the True Emperor 9th realm. At this point, Alex had such a dense Saint Qi, that he could very likely rival most Saint Condensation realm cultivators with just his Qi alone.

As soon as he was done breaking through, Alex returned to cultivating and learning the Dao here.

Between the third and the fourth month, the bells rang again, denoting the opening of the gates again.

1 year had passed since Alex came here. Which meant that the Dao mountain had already opened and closed by now.

In the fourth month, Alex showed some progress in his understanding of whatever was happening in this space.

In the fifth month, he noticed a crack in space that had yet to heal.

Alex stood up after finally noticing it after months and slowly sent his senses to see what the crack was about.

His spiritual sense wasn't able to notice anything around the crack, so Alex used his Qi to see if he could influence it.

The moment Alex's Qi touched the crack, he felt fear that he had never felt before.

The crack opened up wide to reveal darkness inside that tore up his spiritual sense the moment they entered.

The inside of the hole he had just formed in space was full of turbulence and chaos, and it was very terrifying.

Alex stopped using his Qi immediately and pulled back his sense, and the crack disappeared on its own.

He remained there, in his own pool of sweat as he breathed in and out hurriedly.

"What the hell was that?"

Chapter 920 Revelation

The sudden reveal of the darkness, of the thing hiding behind in the emptiness that was space-it scared Alex in a way he would have never expected anything he couldn't feel to do.

It wasn't that the darkness had no aura. It very much likely did, considering he understood that there hid chaos and turbulence inside the darkness.

However, that had been due to the slightest peak he got before his senses were completely shattered.

Alex wondered if it was truly dark or if his senses had been lied to. He wouldn't know since his eyes hadn't healed back just yet.

He could tell that they were still accepting the medicine despite having stopped using it ages ago.

However, there shouldn't be that long a period left before he could see again. When he did, he wanted to look into this darkness and see what hid behind it.

For now, Alex had nothing else to do in this place, so he decided to leave.

He wandered off, shocked that not only could you cut off space, but you could also tear it wide open as well. But what lay beyond a torn space?

Alex wondered who could answer that question. The Tortoise maybe? Or was there someone else that was capable of such a thing?

Alex called out to Pearl now that they were leaving this area, and once he was out, Alex used his Dao of Teleportation to grab onto Pearl and himself, and teleported the both of them nearly 700 meters away, at the edge of his Spiritual sense.

Alex felt his mind hurt a bit from having to use his will to push the distance of the teleportation away.

After understanding something, he moved his hands to the left, and a piece of debris about 100 meters away burst into flames from his using the Dao of Heat.

Ice formed in another area where he took away the heat from that place.

In another location further away, Alex created an explosion, the damage of which didn't reach him.

Intent could do many things, and Alex was starting to learn it slowly. Using Intent, he was now capable of changing the distance up to where he could affect it.

It took considerably more time to use the Dao as the Qi that left your body would take some time to reach the location, but Alex was very much willing to suffer the delay rather than take the brunt of the explosion himself every time.

After that, Alex didn't find any place where he could learn a lot about the mysteries behind the aura.

Not everyone that had fought in this war knew a lot about the mysteries. Sometimes, the aura was just there because someone used a technique they knew.

Their understanding of why such a thing was happening would be shallow and thus there wouldn't be much for Alex to learn from.

There were maybe 2 or 3 more places that Alex was certain had aura where he could learn from. Unfortunately, those places were heavy with Wood, and Water aura.

As such, even if he did go, the chances of him understanding anything were highly doubtful.

There was only one other place he could go to, where he was certain there was a lot of Intent and Aura, where he was certain to find the mysteries of Dao he didn't even know existed.

However, he simply didn't want to go there because of how dangerous it was. After all, the Sky on this battlefield was not a place where you simply went to.

As such, since there was nowhere else to go, Alex took Pearl and went to 2 or 3 locations.

Along the way, he stopped wherever he found places where Pearl could improve his Intent, and from time to time, when the aura and intent around him was almost nothing, he also brought out Whisker to try and handle it.

Unfortunately, Whisker wasn't able to handle it as much and was forced to go back to his beast space.

Aside from that, Alex focused on just one thing. The Dao of Techniques.

He wanted to learn it so bad that even when he was trying to figure out the mysteries in the aura that he got around to, he would try and look into the Dao of Techniques.

And to his surprise, due to his constant attempt at gaining insight into the Dao, he was actually getting somewhere.

As he tried learning more about it, Alex came across a shocking revelation that he hadn't even thought about at the very least.

One needed to have an intent to use a technique to be able to use it... or so Alex had thought, but that was wrong.

He was surprised to learn that you didn't have to use your Intent to use a technique.

That was not to say that you could use a technique without Intent, but rather YOU didn't need to have the Intent.

As long as someone else had Intent on you using it, and you allowed their Intent to take effect by helping them use your Qi and Pathway, just like a Dao would, you could have others use techniques through you as well.

The concept of someone else using techniques using your Qi and Pathway felt bonkers for Alex at first, but the doubt all disappeared when he realized that was how his Pill-Splitting Qi worked.

Alex knew the technique by now and could use it himself, but he always let it happen automatically as that meant he had one less thing to think about when making pills.

However, it wasn't happening automatically. Alex was allowing someone else's Intent to make use of his Qi and meridians.

That certain someone was most likely the Alchemy God. After reading the Alchemy God's Knowledge, Alex had imprinted onto himself the Alchemy God's Intent, and through that Intent was how he came to do many things.

It was likely due to that Intent that he could learn recipes with a single peek. It was likely due to that Intent that he could recognize Alchemy ingredients without even knowing what the ingredients were.

It was likely due to that Intent that he had such an easy time becoming a doctor, easily learning about illnesses and diseases. It was likely due to that Intent that his Pill-Splitting Qi worked in the first place.

As Alex considered this, he understood something more important than just that.

He understood that it was very likely due to this very Intent why there was a lot of information still hidden in his mind, making him incapable of learning it all at once and instead was given to him in batches every time he broke through to a Major realm.

Was he to try and fight that Intent, could he remove the block and learn it all at once?

Alex doubted he would be capable of fighting against the Intent of someone called the Alchemy God, but even if he could, would he want to?

There had to be a reason why the Alchemy god had used his Intent to stop him from learning everything at once, so Alex decided to not tempt fate and fight against his Intent right now.

Still, it meant that the Alchemy God's Intent wouldn't last forever, so maybe it was about time for him to stop relying on it so much.

After he learned that, Alex got deeper into learning about the Dao of techniques.

Since he had learned more about the Intent aspect of it, he really needed to pull up the slack on the Qi and Pathway too.

He didn't know if there was anything else he could learn about Qi, but there was a lot to learn about Pathway still.

Alex went around the Ancient Battlefield, going to the three places he wanted to, gaining insight into a few more mysteries, improving Pearl's Intent.

He fought people to see what he had learned and had Pearl fight others as well. Slowly, the news about the True realm cultivator that could defeat Saint realm cultivators reached such popularity, that people were starting to recognize him just by his white mask alone.

Meanwhile, Alex continued learning about the Dao of Techniques, and finally after months had some sort of breakthrough where he understood a few things.

These were small, but pivotal things to help him learn the Dao of techniques in the future.

Chapter 921 Ambushed

A person's meridian was connected to one's dantian in their navel area. A dantian revealed itself after one entered the Saint realm, but until then, it was always hidden, shrouded even from a person's own spiritual sense.

The meridians came out from either side of the dantian, each route separating into 8 different major routes at once.

Each of these routes was the Spiritual roots in one's body.

Alex realized that if he pushed his Qi out from dantian, it would have to go through one of the 7 different routes, which would give an aspect to his Qi.

Going through the Fire Spiritual Root would give him Fire Qi, and going through Water Spiritual root would give him Water Qi.

The final meridian had no spiritual root and was thus simply a normal meridian that could help pass Qi through. People with this type of meridian could never enter the Meridian Tempering realm where their Spiritual roots would be tempered and thus they were unable to continue on with their cultivation journey.

Alex continued learning more and more about one's spiritual roots. After all, that was the beginning of the pathway that defined a technique.

He tried using Flame Mastery Scripture to create a water ball again. This time, he understood what had happened.

Since using the technique forced the Qi out of the Fire spiritual roots, his Qi could never turn to water even if he intended it.

No matter how important one's Intent was when using a technique, the pathways were equally just as important.

He tried using the same technique, but by sending Qi through the water roots, but it didn't take him long to realize that each of the Spiritual roots had its own shape, and using one technique while using another pathway just wasn't possible.

"So I intend to use a technique, then the Qi comes out through the spiritual roots on either side. The Qi then splits off to 4 different major meridians belonging to that root?" Alex wondered.

He checked the other spiritual roots and they all split off into 4 different pathways before separating further to become a thousand different pathways that moved throughout one's body.

'Why four?' Alex wondered, but there were no answers for him at the moment.

Alex continued going through the Ancient Battlefield, making a name for himself that even he hadn't realized yet.

A few days later, the bells rang once more, calling for everyone who wanted to leave to leave.

This time around, Alex was going to go. He had learned wherever he could, and wherever he had not was simply too dangerous because of how strong the aura was.

So, it was time to leave. Besides, if his calculations were correct, the Dao mountain was going to open up very soon.

Alex walked back towards the gate along with Pearl, but before he could reach anywhere, a group of people suddenly appeared in front of him.

They pulled out their weapons at once and stood in his way.

Alex paused for a second and continued on. "I'm sorry if you wanted to spar. I'm afraid I can't indulge you on it today," he said.

"Aww! Come on man, we are leaving today. This will be our last spar. We just want to spar with you before we go," one of the men said.

Alex smiled when he heard that. Some of these men had continued to come and try to fight him and had continuously had their butts handed to them by Alex.

They were all around Saint Condensation 5 to Saint Condensation 7th realm, so they were angry for losing at first.

However, when they started realizing that Alex was holding back during their sparring, they started to be more respectful and developed a friendlier attitude.

"Lucky for you then, I'm leaving as well," Alex said.

"Oh, you're leaving? Where will you go?" one of the women asked.

"The Dao mountain," Alex said. "I need to finalize what I've learned here."

"Woah! Are you planning on learning another Dao?" someone else asked.

Alex smiled, but no one could see his expression.

"So... can we not spar?" another person asked. "The gates will open tomorrow, so we have quite a bit of time."

Alex sighed. "Alright, sure." He pulled out his True rank sword and used it to fight the 7 people in front of him... all at once.

Alex didn't even need to use his Sword Aura when he fought them. Just his Sword Qi alone was strong enough. Even his normal Qi was overkill in most instances.

However, perhaps the most problematic part of Alex's fighting style was the way he weaved in and out of combat by teleporting around.

Alex didn't even need shadows to teleport. He could now be anywhere at any time. Although, he did find it a little annoying that the Saints were acutely aware of his position just moments after his teleportation.

No matter how much he teleported, he couldn't hide from their senses at all. As such, they weren't caught off guard as much as True realm cultivators would in the same scenario.

Still, Alex fought the people. Sometimes he would teleport in, sometimes he would teleport the others out.

His fighting style was chaotic, to say the least. Sometimes, he would even drop on all four, losing his sword, and start fighting like a beast.

The Saints were horrified at how good he was at fighting like a beast. If he wasn't walking on 2 legs just moments before, they would have assumed he was a beast using illusions to appear as a human.

Alex pulled no stop in this fight as he used his sword, his fists, his claws, and even his whip which he had ignored for a while.

The only thing Alex didn't use was his blood aura. He wasn't sure if anyone in this continent had cultivated a blood aura or not, so he didn't want to be the first person to show it and thus become a person of a target for everyone to learn from.

The moment someone showed any signs of knowing Blood Aura, he would begin using it openly. For now, all he did was train with it.

After a few hours of combat, the group all gave up one by one even all 7 together, they couldn't force Alex to make any mistakes or hit him with skills that he didn't simply dodge or brush off.

Pearl walked up to Alex and jumped onto his shoulders. He meowed once, letting them know that they should be leaving soon as the gates would be opening.

So, after an hour of rest, the group of 9 walked together towards the gate where thousands of people were standing around to leave.

People noticed the man in the white mask with the white cat next to him and made way for him to leave.

Alex was surprised that they all knew him already. A few people came up to talk to him, and he indulged them in their queries and curiosities.

Many told him to visit their sects or clans or organizations where they could talk about Dao in peace.

Alex didn't make any promises.

Finally, after a few hours, the gates of the Ancient Battlefield opened up, and one by one, everyone walked out.

Chapter 922 Break the Shell

The white-masked, black-robed Alex was a very popular person in Silvermoon city.

Many people called for him to visit them when he could. They either wanted to learn more about how he improved how he did, or if he wanted to join their sect.

Alex indulged the people for a while, going around to visit them in Silvermoon city, speaking about his insights on Dao and revealing his strength to them whenever they wanted to spar.

They were all curious about how he was so strong, but they all figured it had to be because of his Dao or Sword Aura.

No one ever made the connection that Alex's Qi alone was incredibly strong as well.

It took Alex an entire month to go visit every big faction and sect. This concluded with his being requested to join them no matter where he went.

It wasn't long before Alex realized that every faction with a name out there knew about him now and wanted him to join them. And some of them seemed to be planning to do no matter what they could to get him.

In the end, Alex had to reveal his connection to the Frozen Heart sect through the token to get those people off his back. Even then, people still asked him to reconsider, but they weren't as desperate as before.

Alex returned back to his room he had rented in Silvermoon city where he stayed in close cultivation for about 2 more months.

He had learned that there were about 4 more months till the next Dao mountain, so he took his sweet time.

Now, 3 months had passed and only a single month remained before he was forced to go to the mountain. By now, the Saint-ranked cultivators were giving their names to the Nether Poison sect, whose turn it was this time around to look over the Dao mountain.

'1 more month,' Alex thought to himself. 'I should be able to do it.'

He stayed in the city for no more than a week and left it. He made his way east, and then north, going around the Ancient Battlefield, the barrier to which he could see from afar.

After a day of traveling, Alex arrived at a location that on the map was marked to be completely empty and void of any civilization in a wide area.

Even so, the area here was thick with Qi.

Alex landed on the peak of the mountain, his feet sinking into the soft snow.

"This will do," he thought to himself. He called out Pearl after that, who came out to see the new location.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"Somewhere alone," Alex said. He then picked Whisker from his chest and placed him on Pearl's back.

"Take him and go far away from here," Alex said.

"Huh? Why?" Pearl asked. Whisker wondered the same.

Alex smiled. "I'm going to try and break through here, and it is going to be dangerous for you all."

Pearl heard it and realized what it meant. He looked to the cloudy sky and back towards Alex.

"Will you be alright?" he asked.

"Of course," Alex said without hesitation. Pearl nodded and then walked away from the mountain.

Alex saw Pearl and Whisker go away with his senses and sat back on the fresh snow in the middle of the cloudy day.

It had been nearly 2 years since he touched snow this much. The wind picked up, bringing more snow, but not a single snowflake stuck to his body as it evaporated away immediately.

As such, Alex's robe remained black even in the snowfall while his entire surrounding was pure white.

Slowly, Alex started cultivating, bringing out his Yang Qi from his dantian, through the Yang spiritual roots, and sending it around his body as the cultivation method said to do.

Bit by bit, he started drawing in the Qi from the surrounding into his body, and the few remaining True Qi he had started changing to Saint Qi.

Alex continued until all his True Qi turned to Saint Qi, and then once everything became Saint Qi, he focused on enhancing the Saint Qi even further, making it denser.

Making Saint Qi denser wasn't as easy as changing it from True Qi to Saint Qi. At a certain level of concentration, True Qi automatically turned to Saint Qi.

As for Saint Qi, the only way for it to grow denser was through a breakthrough. Only when one entered the next realm did their Saint Qi follow and get stronger.

However, Alex was attempting to do it before even entering the Saint realm.

It wasn't just him that did it. Everyone everywhere had to go through the same scenario. They would have to completely turn their entire Qi to Saint Qi and then force their Saint Qi to get thicker.

It was a hard task, but not as hard as it was for Alex whose Saint Qi was already quite thick. He now had to force his Saint Qi to reach a point in density where it could rival the Saint Foundation realm cultivators, and that was nigh impossible.

Alex didn't care. He was here to do the impossible.

He forced his Qi to condense further and further. It took him quite a bit of time, nearly an entire day, but he did it.

Then, as he continued doing it, his Qi reached the limit of condensation, at which point there was just a single thing left to do.

Alex sent his Qi rushing back into his still-veiled Dantian. He forced his Qi to flow in and then had it forcefully come out.

He collected it again and sent it back before trying to forcefully have it come out.

He did it over and over as he slowly broke through the hard shell of the dantian.

Like a chick inside an egg, he had to break the shell before he could be born, before he could enter the Saint realm.

The Saint realm was what most that had reached a high cultivation base usually called the realm where cultivation truly started.

Everything that came before the Saint realm was just preparation for them to come to the Saint realm.

The Self-Tempering realms were there to forge one's body. It was where one forged their skin, muscle, bone, organ, meridian, and even mind.

The True realms were there to forge one's Qi, make it thicker and thicker until one was ready to handle the real cultivation.

Then, once it was all ready, one would finally be able to become a real cultivator.

However, before one could do that, they needed to free their Dantian.

When born, one's dantian remained in a state which could only be said to be dead from outside. It still worked, but before a person was strong enough, it had to remain in this hardened state where it remained as invulnerable as it could.

The only way to break through to the Saint realm was to remove this hardness, break through the shell and let the sea of Qi be free.

So, Alex worked on exactly that. He pushed his Qi in and out through his Dantian with steadily increasing pressure until he felt a crack in the surface.

The moment Alex heard it, instead of stopping, he went faster. He put more and more force onto it until he heard more cracks.

One after another, more cracks started forming on the surface of the dantian through which white light shone to his spiritual sense.

He could see light spilling out of the cracks on the Dantian, and as bigger cracks formed, he could even see inside a bit.

The dantian looked like a massive sea, not unlike his spiritual sea.

Only in this one, the sea was all just Qi and it slushed around, forcing the hard surface to come off.

Alex continued on, breaking more and more and more of the surface. The hard flakes of the dantian fell off, disappearing into nothingness as the transparent orb inside showed his entire sea of Qi clearly.

More and more of the shell fell off, and after enough of the shell had fallen off, the rest of it easily came off, falling down to nowhere, disappearing to become Qi itself.

As the final flake of the shell fell off, the Dantian revealed itself to Alex for the first time as a transparent ball of Qi with meridians attached to it, gleaming in the white light.

It was beautiful.

Chapter 923 Mental Obstacle

The moment Alex's dantian freed up, a wave of Qi escaped from it, rising directly through his body.

It stopped once near his heart before continuing on its way up to the brain. When it reached the brain, it stopped once more, quickly enriching his mind.

As it did, Alex felt his spiritual sense quickly improve.

This was the point when one's Spiritual sea would open up. However, since Alex had already opened it, the energy instead enriched it, making his spiritual sea far stronger.

Bit by bit, Alex felt his spiritual sense spread throughout the mountain. He could only focus on it partly as the majority of it was still focused on his breakthrough.

His spiritual sense slowly grew from the 900-ish meter range he had managed to get it to in the last year and a half, and quickly reached the 1-kilometer mark.

However, it didn't stop there. It continued growing further and further.

1100 meters, 1200 meters, 1300 meters, and so on.

Not having to open his spiritual sense made it so that Alex's spiritual sea grew since the moment he entered the breakthrough process.

It continued growing more and more, reaching 1700, then 1800, and 1900.

It continued on and reached 2000 meters, twice as large as any newly ascended Saint realm cultivator would, but it grew further.

2200 meters, 2400 meters, 2600 meters.

Alex felt his heart skip a beat out of excitement when his spiritual sense reached 3000 meters, and yet it kept on going.

3500, 4000, 4500.

Alex's spiritual sense finally stopped expanding when it reached close to 5000 meters.

5 kilometers, that was his spiritual sense settled on in the end. By now, he could see Pearl and Whisker, waiting far away for him to break through.

Pearl didn't even notice when Alex's spiritual sense passed through him. Alex's sense was so much stronger now that Pearl simply didn't even realize it was there.

Once Alex felt the energy slow down and the Qi recede back, he quickly poured all his focus back on his breakthrough.

The breakthrough itself was almost over. All Alex had to do now was make sure that the Saint Qi that was condensed would remain condensed, putting his at the 1st realm of the Saint Condensation realm.

For that, he had to use his cultivation technique for one last time to send the Qi into a cycle and continue it until he reached the next realm.

Alex started doing just that, and as he progressed, the world around him darkened, and he soon fell into a trance where all sounds faded but one.

His Inner Demon.

"You're alone. All alone," the voice said. "You found your mother, but you lost her once again. Those Saints back in the Western continent will kill her for the offense you did."

"Her blood is in your hand."

Alex heard the voice of his inner demon speak to him. He didn't know he was listening to an inner demon. At this moment, he was in such a trance that he didn't even know what an inner demon was.

This dream-esque world was a reality for him, and his reality was horrifying at the moment.

The voice spoke of endless things. It spoke about his mother being dead, it spoke about the Jaguar being dead. It spoke of how sorrowful Yao Jia most likely was.

It spoke of how he could never return back to the Western Continent. How the people here would never let him leave after what he had shown them.

It spoke of his achievement and how well he was doing, and as a result how much further he was increasing the distance between him and his friends.

He was trying to enter the Saint realm while others struggled to go through the True realms. Sooner or later, the gap would be so big that they would stop seeing him as their friend.

Perhaps the harshest words the voice spoke were when they accused Alex of slowing down Pearl's cultivation.

He spent months on the Ancient Battlefield, learning all these laws and improving his Intent, and yet he didn't give Pearl the same chance.

He made Pearl sit in his beast space while he improved himself alone. And for that, he had increased the gap between him and Pearl in a way that Pearl could never catch up ever again.

The voice went on and on, accusing Alex of every little thing that would sooner or later cause problems for himself and the people around him.

It spoke in the harshest of tones and berated him all around.

However, no matter how much the voice spoke, Alex's heart didn't budge in the slightest.

Sure, the words the voice spoke were harsh, and sometimes true, but that didn't mean Alex would be affected by them. His will was simply too strong to be affected by such little accusation.

His will was forged in ice and fire over a hundred different deaths. A simple voice in his head wasn't going to stop him from advancing on his journey. It would never stop him from taking the next step and moving forward.

If he hurt people in the process, he would heal them. If he strained any relationships, he would mend them. If he made a gap between himself and his friends and families, he would help them cultivate faster.

For if he continued to grow stronger, he could do whatever the hell he wanted.

The voice tried to speak some more, but even it knew Alex wouldn't be moved by it. So, in the end, the voice disappeared, and Alex returned back to himself in the midst of thunderous noises.

He woke up from the dream-esque world where heaven accused him of things he knew in his heart he accused himself of. However, his will had grown so much now that they didn't cause him any problems.

Alex felt his cultivation base grow significantly stronger than it was when he fell into the trance. Even when he was in the dream, his body had continued to cultivate and condensed the Qi further.

Alex continued that cultivation and made the Qi even denser. He was close now, just a little more.

He continued the cultivation, sending Qi through his meridians, helping them get used to the much condensed Qi.

It slowly reached a point where he was a hair's breadth away from entering the Saint realm. But, that hair's breadth of difference stopped him from entering it.

To cross that difference, he had to overcome the obstacle put forth in his path by the heavens itself.

He had overcome the mental obstacle of the breakthrough, gaining victory over his Inner Demon.

Now, he needed to gain victory over the physical obstacle.

Alex heard the roaring sound of thunder, threatening him, for he was the one that brought this tribulation.

Alex slowly stood up from his sitting position as he got ready for the final phase of his breakthrough.

He heard the sky roar louder at him, and he knew this was it. The lightning was going to come down any second now.

So, he slowly reached for his mask and took it off, and he used his newly forged eyes to stare back at the heavens.

He was ready to fight it.

Chapter 924 10 Bolt

For the first time since he had come here, Alex laid his own eyes on the Northern Continent, and the first thing he saw was the purple bolt of lightning that shot down from the sky.

Even as it came down, Alex looked at it with a surprise on his face. He wasn't surprised at the bolt of lightning, but rather how slow it was to his eyes.

The bolt of lightning was very fast of course, but he could easily follow its path as it came towards him.

The bolt of lightning struck Alex before he was prepared. Even though he saw it coming, his body wasn't as ready as his eye was.

So, he took the full brunt of the lightning strike that destroyed the very peak he stood on.

The lightning trail took a second before it glowed down to nothing, and from the wreckage of the destroyed mountain walked out Alex, who looked rather worn out.

'Dammit!' he thought to himself. 'That lightning strike ruined my clothes. I'm already on my 5th set now. Mother didn't buy me that many after all.'

He took off the tattered clothes and a few storage bags fell to the ground, some fine, but most destroyed.

He saw the armor that he had been wearing for so long fall to pieces as well.

'So much for wearing armor,' he thought. But then, he had relied on this a bit too much in the Ancient Battlefield, so maybe that was why it didn't have any durability.

Alex saw many items all over the ground after the lightning had struck his storage bags as well. Some of the items were burned, while others were destroyed completely.

Fortunately, these were items he kept in his storage bags, which meant they were not very important to him. Everything he wanted safe was in his storage ring, which had survived.

"I'm not going to take a risk with this one," Alex said to himself and took his ring out from his fingers. He pulled out a single Saint-ranked sword from the ring before throwing it in Pearl's direction.

"Catch!" he spoke directly into Pearl's and Whisker's minds.

Pearl saw the ring fly down and caught it before looking towards the naked Alex who now only held a sword in his hand.

He was ready to fight the lightning tribulations with only just that.

He saw the lightning crackle in the sky again. Once again, he was surprised by how slow it was to his eyes. However, when he really thought about it, that made sense.

After all, the first stage of the Demon Eyes gave extreme Dynamic vision. With these eyes, not only could he see very far away, but he could also see every single movement in crystal clarity.

Alex could see each of the snowflakes shine in the lightning's glow as the lightning slowly made its way down towards him.

When the lightning bold fell down, Alex stood in his place, doing nothing. After all, with such weak lightning, there was no need for him to do anything at all.

He understood that the lightning was supposed to be weak as it was for a new Saint realm cultivator. But still, he hoped it would grow stronger so it was much of a fight.

'I wonder how many times it will fall,' Alex thought.

The lightning struck Alex directly, destroying more of the peak he was standing on top of.

Alex wasn't hurt. His body was in pristine condition with not a single wound, and even his sword showed no damage.

The lightning crackled again, threatening to fall, but Alex didn't give much thought to the lightning in the sky.

Instead, he used the moment to learn the properties hidden behind the lightning. It was unlikely he would learn the Dao of Lightning, but if he could even glimpse into the Dao of Lightning Conduction, that would be a major help for him.

He closed his eyes, trying to understand how the lightning moved through him, how it moved through the sword.

'It's too little,' he thought to himself and stared back up. 'I need some more information. Rather than lightning itself, I need the aura in it.'

With that thought, he flew off into the sky as the next bolt of lightning struck him from the heavens.

When the glow disappeared, Alex's body sizzled a bit, but quickly healed itself back.

"Huh? That was stronger than before," he thought. "Was that Saint Condensation 3rd realm level of power in the lightning?"

Alex's body could handle the 2nd realm's worth of damage, but the 3rd realm would start injuring him, and the 4th realm would gravely injure him.

By the 5th realm, if he had no other forms of protection, there was a high chance he would die.

However, when the next lightning crackled and it fell for him, Alex didn't use his Qi still. He could sense that the damage was going to be painful, but not lethal.

Instead, he would use his raw body to handle it for one more time and learn as much as he could about lightning.

The bolt struck Alex, sending him tumbling downward with force this time. When the light faded back, Alex saw his body sizzling with skins torn off at places and even bones showing at some.

However, within a few seconds, his body healed to the point where it looked like he had taken no damage whatsoever.

"This is definitely getting stronger," he thought. "I can't just use my physical body anymore."

Suddenly, his cultivation base of pseudo-Saint Condensation realm flared as he got ready for the next lightning.

The lightning struck from the heavens once again, but this time around he fought it.

All he did was swing his sword at the lightning, and the strength he put forth easily scattered the lightning away.

The destroyed lightning turned into a lightning aura as it lingered in the air, just like how Alex wanted it to. It would disappear soon, certainly, but not before the tribulation itself was over.

Alex would have plenty of time where he could learn from the aura after the tribulation was over.

A stronger bolt of lightning fell, one that he could feel was around Saint Condensation 6th realm in power. Alex easily fought it off once more. Such a bolt of weak lightning could do nothing to him.

However, the storm didn't disappear and his lightning tribulation only got stronger.

'How strong is it going to get?' Alex started to worry. It was weak at first, and he didn't think much of it, but as it continued growing, a slight fear grew in his heart.

Alex destroyed the next 2 bolts of lightning easily, creating more lightning aura in the air, but the tribulation still persisted. Now, the lightning was so strong that anyone not in the Saint Foundation realm would surely die.

Alex simply punched the next lightning bolt and destroyed it, completely shattering the lightning aura in the atmosphere.

However, the lightning continued to crackle again in the sky, getting much stronger again.

Alex couldn't help but frown. 'What the hell? How many times is it supposed to fall?' he thought.

There had been 9 different lightning bolts already, yet it still continued to rain down lightning.

Alex prepared himself for the next bolt as it fell, not even giving him much breathing space in between.

He could feel that this lightning bolt was going to be stronger than the last, but not by much.

From what he could see, it was strong enough to defeat a Saint Condensation 9th realm cultivator but weak enough that a Saint Foundation realm cultivation.

The jump in strength for the lightning had slowed down quite a lot, but there was still an increase. However, if this continued, the damage would certainly be stronger and stronger.

9 bolts had already fallen for him, and he had fought it, but the tribulation still persisted.

"How many more?" Alex shouted at the heaven, and in response, the heaven struck back.

The bolt of lightning, slightly green in color this time, as opposed to the white bolt with a purple glow, fell down towards him.

Alex poured Sword Qi into his sword and struck back. It wasn't hard to destroy the lightning bolt, but when he felt the aura around him, he realized that the aura contained mysteries, the answer to which he already knew.

The lightning strikes now had some insights from a Dao he knew. The Dao of Plant Growth.

Chapter 925 More Lightnings

Alex stood wide-eyed in the sky as he felt the aura of the Dao he was familiar with in the lightning bolt.

He understood what that very likely meant.

As the lightning crackled again, Alex got ready for the next lightning bolt to come down, and when it did, it was going to have a Dao he learned in it.

'It's going to strike me down for each dao I've learned now, isn't it?' he thought to himself.

When the bolt of lightning struck down, Alex used his Sword Qi to fight again, this time barely destroying the lightning bolt.

This bolt was stronger again, more so than the last one, definitely in the range of what a normal Saint Foundation realm cultivator could put out.

If Alex wanted to continue fighting, he would need to handle the strength of the bolt he would have to use his stronger skills now.

'Dao of Heat Conduction,' Alex thought when he felt it. 'Is it starting with the weaker ones?'

Alex looked back at the sky. If he was correct in his understanding, then there were 4 bolts of lightning coming for him. And each one of them would be stronger than the last one.

Instead of sword Qi, Sword Aura flared this time as sword-shaped Qi started appearing all around Alex as he got ready to attack.

The next bolt of lightning fell from the stormy clouds, and Alex sent him Sword Aura flying into the air.

The sword slash struck the lightning and destroyed it once again.

'Dao of Five Elemental Interactions,' Alex thought when he felt the aura. Now, three more remained.

The next lightning fell soon after, heating up everything in the area.

Fortunately, Alex felt absolutely nothing from the heat as he was nigh-immune to heat by now.

However, the lightning was still dangerous. He struck it as hard as he could with his Sword Aura.

The aura flew into the sky, hitting the lightning bolt in its path, barely blocking it. The bolt tried to push through, but Alex's sword aura persevered. It kept moving on and finally destroyed the lightning bolt that was full of laws from the Dao of Heat.

'2 more,' Alex thought to himself.

He wondered what the next one was going to be. Explosion or Teleportation?

The answer came in a form of a red lightning bolt, full of Fire Qi. The explosive lightning fell from heaven, and Alex realized that Sword Aura alone would not be enough this time around.

And so, on top of Sword Aura, he used the Penta-Sword strike to send his attack flying back at the bolt of lightning.

When they clashed, Alex felt the shockwave from the explosion. The sound that rang from it threatened to deafen even the thunder above it.

The lightning that crackled in the sky seemed dimmer in front of this explosion, and when Alex felt it, he realized that the next one was going to be stronger.

Suddenly, blood oozed out from every pore of his body, slowly covering him all over. Alex felt a bit anemic from so much of his blood being forced out, but he could survive it.

Some of the blood on his armor seeped down into the sword, slowly mixing as his Blood aura mixed together with the Sword Aura and his Metal Qi to become stronger.

At the same time, Alex burned his sword, the flames glowing brightly on it.

Then, when the lightning fell, he sent him flying.

The fire, blood, metal, and sword aura all flew to the sky, hitting the lightning right as it came down.

The attack landed, and Alex immediately realized that he was the weaker of the two.

His Quad-Aura attack was somehow weaker than the bolt of lightning that carried the Teleportation Dao. This was the last strike, but Alex had a problem beating it.

It was just that much stronger.

However, Alex wasn't done yet. He reached his hands into the sky and he used his Intent as well as his authority the best he could.

"Explode!"

The flames that burned in the sky burst into a loud explosion, far stronger than the one that came down with the lightning last time. The massive explosion was so strong that Alex feared he could kill a Saint Core cultivator if he was given the chance for it.

The explosion was obviously stronger than the one that came with the lightning just before, and as a result, Alex was about to defeat his final lightning strike.

However, something happened that he definitely should have expected to happen.

The lightning bolt teleported, appearing right in front of him.

"Shit!" Alex thought. That was the last thing he did before the bolt of lightning struck him directly.

Alex tumbled through the sky, thrown off by the bolt of lightning. He quickly found his balance, but that took some time.

He breathed out a deep sigh of relief when he realized that his blood armor had blocked the damage for him. But he didn't doubt that he would have still been safe given how much his attacks had weakened the lightning.

Alex took a deep breath and looked towards the sky, and suddenly his heart skipped a beat when he realized that the sky hadn't lost its darkness yet.

The storm still lingered and so did the lightning. The lightning coalesced in the sky, preparing to come down again.

"For what?" Alex shouted out, but there was no answer. He didn't know why the next lightning would ever fall. He had no more Dao that he understood at all.

And from what he could tell, this lightning was going to be much stronger.

Alex felt the aura around the lightning as it continued to get bigger and bigger. Soon, he could freely sense it all and realized what the lightning was for.

It was for every single law or mystery that he had gained an insight into, every single Dao that he was close to learning, but hadn't learned yet.

"That's... not possible though! Why would I be struck for something I don't have yet?" Alex complained, but heaven wouldn't listen to him.

The lightning grew stronger and stronger, and Alex used every single skill he could to protect himself.

The Jade Skin technique, the Five Elemental Barrier, and the Blood Armor came out to protect him.

His Sword Aura flared, his Penta-Sword Strike got ready, and the Blood Manipulation skill was used to prepare his next strike.

A fire burned far above him, as he readied the rest of his Dao to fight the next lightning bolt.

He was as ready as he could be at the moment.

Just when he expected the lightning to fall onto him, a single ray of light fell from the sky.

Alex's body moved faster than his mind as he sent his attack flying into the sky. However, all it did was pass through the storm clouds that had started to part to let the sunlight in.

His tribulation clouds were disappearing and with it the lightning that was prepared to fall.

"What?" Alex looked up with surprise. "So it was only supposed to fall when I learned the Dao. Dammit! Scared me for nothing."

9 lightning bolts fell in a tribulation no matter what. After that, 1 fell for each of the Dao ones had learned.

Alex didn't know the number, but he knew now.

He survived 15 different lightning strikes, and he was more than happy with it.

Pearl quickly flew through the air as he came towards Alex. He paused a bit when he came close to him, but continued on nonetheless.

He arrived next to him and gave him back his ring. Alex quickly dressed up and sat down to cultivate.

Now that he had broken past his lightning tribulation, there was only one thing left to do.

So, he quickly focused on his cultivation to condense his Qi just that much further and within moments of sitting down, he did it.

The heavens drifted down from above like they always did when someone broke through to the Saint realm or above, which could be easily mistaken for someone learning a Dao.

When they did, Alex felt a rush of power surge within him as all of his Qi condensed into his Dantian, making it certain that without a shadow of a doubt, Alex had broken through to the Saint realm.

Chapter 926 Yin and Yang

Alex sat down and cultivated. While he had now broken through to the Saint Realm, there still were a few different things he needed to do before he could just stand up and walk.

The main thing he had to do for now was making sure his foundation was stable.

As he did, he also started looking into the mysteries in the lightning aura that lingered around them.

Pearl came and sat next to him, and so did Whisker. Pearl too started looking into what he could in the aura around him.

Alex tried to learn the mysteries the best he could, but it wasn't very long before he realized there was something wrong with the lightning aura.

It wasn't just lightning that had struck from the heavens. It was tribulation lightning, something that was completely archaic and distant from anything any cultivator could ever hope to understand.

While normal lightning stemmed from Wood Qi, tribulation lightning came directly from the heavens with no aura that anyone would be naturally familiar with. It was heaven's one and only weapon for making sure those that did not deserve something did not have it.

As such, Alex had a hard time finding the law behind the lightning. Still, he tried what he could.

Who knew, maybe one day he would learn the Dao behind the Tribulation lightning itself.

As Alex continued, Pearl continued as well, slowly understanding what he could of the aura that still lingered.

He was surprised how much easier this aura was to understand given how hard a time he had on the ancient battlefield.

Unfortunately, he couldn't learn a new dao. The aura simply didn't linger long enough for him to understand it.

Alex realized that the lightning aura had disappeared as well. So, he stopped focusing on the aura and started focusing on himself.

He sent his new and strong spiritual sense all around him, surprised at how far he could see with the 5 Kilometers distance.

He looked outside with his new eyes, seeing everything slow down again.

The bright sunlight that had passed through the sky after his tribulation was over was once again filled with clouds as it continued snowing.

Alex then closed his eyes and looked into his own body. With a stronger spiritual sense, he started looking into his own body.

He started with the head where he saw his Spiritual sea. Alex entered it and saw that not much had changed there aside from the lake being a lot bigger and denser.

'Actually, has the mountain changed size?' Alex wondered. He couldn't tell exactly as he never focused on the shape of the mountain when he entered here.

"You broke through, kid? Congratulation," Godslayer spoke from the side.

"Yes, thank you," Alex replied. "Do you think this mountain looks a little smaller than before?"

"Of course it does. It's supposed to," the Godslayer said. "You can't expect to come here from time to time, absorb so much of it, and still have it remain the same."

"Right, I have been doing that, but it still looks smaller than I expected it to be. When was the last time I came here?" Alex wondered.

"Beats me," Godslayer said. "I can't really tell how much time has passed."

Alex thought about it for a bit and realized that he hadn't entered this place since after he learned Sword Aura and broke through to the 8th True Emperor realm.

'It has been so long,' he thought. And yet, somehow there weren't that many silver threads floating in the sky.

'I wonder what happened to them,' Alex wondered. 'Can I subconsciously absorb them now?'

Alex poured his yellow fog onto the mountain, but nothing happened. It was all the same.

Once he checked everything, Alex returned back out and continued. He checked his bones, his skin, his muscles, and even his meridian as he went down.

His organs were fine, so he quickly moved down until he reached his newly forged dantian.

To his senses, the dantian was a transparent ball of pure white energy. The light that shined through it was incredibly sharp and strong.

Alex easily saw the spiritual roots coming out from either side, the 16 different meridians, 2 each.

Then, he went deeper and saw his own Qi. The sea of Qi that was the Dantian looked clean and pristine. With nothing blocking his view, Alex could now see how much Qi he had and he didn't have.

Currently, his dantian was barely half filled and he somehow felt full.

'I wonder if I will have to completely fill this up to enter the next realm,' Alex thought.

Just then, he felt something. Alex's attention shifted to something that was inside the Qi, hiding beneath the sea.

Alex slowly sent his own sense down through the sea and was beyond surprised when he saw something.

Hiding deep underwater in the ocean was a ball of pure yellow energy and an orb of pure bluish-white energy.

The two spheres were constantly pulling and pushing each other, sending out waves of energy. When one energy overpowered the Qi around there, the other one would also send its own energy to balance that out.

However, instead of destroying each other, the energy merged to become just single pure energy.

There was no chance Alex wouldn't recognize it at all.

The yellow sphere was the fruit he ate back in the deserts beyond the Forbidden Fields, the Nine Heavens Yang Fruit.

That was the fruit that went into his Dantian and stayed there for years, constantly turning his Qi into Yang, and thus imbalancing his entire body to be nothing but full of Yang.

It was only solved when he ate the other sphere in there, the one whose name he did not know yet.

He knew both these spheres were in his body, and he even knew they were in his Dantian, but this was the first time he was seeing them so clearly.

This to him was very surprising and enlightening.

At the same time, people from all around the state of Dong and Shuang started flying in his direction.

The phenomenon that Alex had created when he went through his lightning tribulation hadn't gone unnoticed. People were only extremely scared to get in between someone's attempt at breaking through to the immortal realm.

They only came afterward to either see someone ascend for the first time in what eons, or see them fail as every single other person had in the last thousands of decades.

Alex sensed them when they entered his range of spiritual sense and in the next few seconds, their spiritual sense was on him.

When they realized that the person who was there was just a young man, they were quite surprised.

They flew up to him without hesitation when they came to understand that he was just a newly ascended Saint realm cultivator.

Alex quickly placed Pearl and Whisker into their beast space and slowly got up to greet the many people who had arrived.

When they all finally saw him clearly, they were surprised to realize that they had no idea who he was.

"Young man, who are you?" they asked.

Alex looked up at the many people that stood around. He was surprised that he recognized quite a few of them, as most of the people that had come were from the Frozen Heart sect.

He bowed a little towards them. "Greetings, seniors.

It was indeed I that broke through just now."

"You brought down the lightning just before?" someone asked.

"Yes," Alex said calmly.

"Ah! We expected too much, I suppose," one of the elders said. They were all surprisingly calm about what Alex had just done.

He would've expected people to be more surprised than they seemed to be.

"So, we have another one, huh?" someone said.

"What is it now? 3?" another person said.

"I think so?" someone else replied.

'3? Are they talking about new Saint realms that went through a lightning tribulation?' Alex wondered. That would mean that there had to be other people that learned Dao before entering the Saint realm.

'Ah, right,' he thought. He remembered at least one person like that. An image of a woman veiled in a red robe floated in his mind. The same person he had seen 2 years ago on the Dao mountain.

'There must be more than me then,' he thought. It wasn't as surprising of information as he would've thought it would be, but it certainly was interesting.

Chapter 927 Temporary Return

"What's your name, young man?" a woman asked.

Alex smiled as he looked towards her. "Does elder Xuan not recognize me without my mask?" he asked.

The woman was a little taken aback, but when she focused on the voice rather than the face, she instantly recognized him.

"Yu Ming?" she asked with a surprised expression on her face. The other elders standing around were quite surprised as well.

One way or another, whether it was through his double Dao in the Dao Mountain, or his feats in the Ancestral Battlefield, people had come to know the True realm cultivator who could match up to the Saint realm cultivator.

And now, that very person had broken through.

"Isn't that your disciple, elder Xuan?" One of the men with purple robes spoke. Alex looked at the man, but besides knowing that he was from the Blue Spring sect, he had no other idea.

"He is," elder Xuan said. "He left to train 2 years ago after the Dao mountain."

She turned back towards him. "You should have come to the sect so you could break through in peace, instead of out here in the middle of nowhere," she said.

Alex smiled. "I knew there was going to be a lot of thunder and lightning, so I didn't want to implicate anyone like the sect leader of the Snow Immortal sect did all those years ago," he said.

A few of the people in the group flinched a little when they heard him speak about that incident.

"Well, then let us get you away from here," the elder Xuan said.

Alex nodded and flew up. He said his farewell to the rest of the people that had come and flown away from the mountain.

The ladies from the Frozen Heart sect flew as well.

After reaching a bit far away, he thanked them. "Thank you, elder Xuan. I wouldn't have been able to get away so easily from there had it not been for you," he said.

"I would be surprised if you had been able to. With the stunt you pulled, anyone would be interested in you," the elder said.

The other elders flew next to them as well, but they didn't speak much.

"Yes," Alex said. "But I'm not the first one to do what I did, am I?"

"No," the elder sighed. "The Blazing Earth sect's Li Zhumei did it about a decade ago now. There was also another one that did that, but he couldn't survive the lightning and died."

"I see," Alex said. He was surprised to hear that someone that had nearly broken through to the Saint realm had actually died due to the lightning tribulation.

This was the second time he was learning of someone's death from tribulation.

"You left because you wanted to grow and improve, didn't you?" Elder Xuan asked. "Are you willing to return now? This time you will be an elder too."

Alex thought for a moment, but he didn't need to. "No," he said. "While I appreciate the offer, I do not wish to get tied down to a sect."

"Is there a reason?" the elder asked.

Alex remained silent for a bit. Was there a reason? Of course, there was. But could he tell them? Could he let them know that he came from the Western Continent?

Alex tried, but he couldn't think of a reason why not. Maybe he could even get them to help him teleport back to the Western Continent.

But then again, would that be of any help given that the Intercontinental teleportation formation back in the Western continent was clearly destroyed?

So, he decided to keep the real reason until he was strong enough to defend himself from any irrational hatred these people may have for the ones on the Western Continent, or even just until he was big enough that they actually cared what he asked for.

"I just want to continue being strong," he said, which was true too in a sense when you remembered that he still had to fly over the entire ocean to return to the Western Continent when all else failed.

"You can be strong while remaining in the sect too," she said. "Now that you are a Saint, you have thousands of years ahead of you. There is no hurry anymore."

Alex smiled, but he said nothing else.

"Sigh, I assume you will want to return to the Dao mountain this time around?" she asked.

"I do, actually," Alex said. "I was actually planning on going to the sect once to get myself easily put on the list."

"Good, there's still time for that," the elder said.

Alex chatted with the elder about what he did for the last 2 years while he flew as fast as he could.

He could tell that the elder was slowing herself down for his sake, but it was still quite fast.

Within a couple of hours, he could see the Frozen Heart sect fully for what it was.

The circular city-like walled sect was mostly covered in snow. Especially this time of the year, the snow was thicker than normal as well.

The group landed somewhere away from the main tower at the center and Alex took a few seconds to recognize where he was.

"The alchemy house?" he asked confusedly.

"Now, don't worry, you're not making pills or anything," the elder said. "Unless you want to, that is. We're only giving you this room because it is the safest room out there."

"Safest?" Alex asked. He couldn't tell how his old room could possibly be safer than the tower at the center of the sect.

"Stay in the room. If anything dangerous happens, use this token to teleport away from the room using the formation. I expect you to know what I'm talking about," she said.

Alex nodded. There was a teleportation formation under the bed in the room he had lived for nearly a year before. He had never cared about it since it was a one-way formation, and also because he needed authority.

"What danger could come to the Frozen Heart sect?" he asked the elder, but she said nothing.

"It's just a precaution. You have nothing to worry about," she said. "Now, I'll let you be for now. Take some rest and deal with your cultivation base. We will talk later."

"Thank you, elder," Alex said and turned around to go back to the house. On the way, he stopped and looked at the small garden that he had been growing, which was now nothing but a ground full of snow.

It was sad, but there was nothing he could do. He did leave this place to improve, and he would do it all over again.

He returned to his alchemy room, which didn't seem to have been changed as much. He noticed the bed and the formation underneath it.

"What danger?" Alex thought to himself again. He couldn't think of any at all.

In the end, he shook his head, sat down on the bed, and started cultivating. As he did, slowly started learning about the new things that were available to him.

After all, he had broken through to the Saint realm, which meant that an extra layer had been removed from the Alchemy God's Knowledge.

Chapter ﻿928 Ingredients From Pill

Alex went through the knowledge he had learned, trying to understand what new thing was not available for him to understand. He started accessing the new knowledge he had acquired from the Alchemy god.

As he went through his mind, he realized that there were exactly 2 new things that he had no idea about before, that he now knew.

There was also one other thing that he had learned. It was similar to his ability to improve common pills just by making them but for True pills.

However, this time, it didn't just happen, but rather he knew a bit more about how pills worked.

Alex chuckled a bit when he realized that the Alchemy God was slowly giving him bit-by-bit information about Combinations and Structure.

He would likely only learn about it fully when he reached the Immortal realm.

The other 2, however, were something he wasn't expecting to learn anytime soon.

The first one was a knowledge skill. It wasn't a skill that was used using Qi, but using one's understanding of alchemy, like how one would solve a math problem using formula.

The thing he had learned was how to figure out all the ingredients used in a single pill.

Alex could do this with pills he was used to, but he didn't know how to do it if he was ever given a new pill he had no idea about.

There were a set of rules that Alex could use to determine the ingredients. That included knowing the different energy types that are in harmony in a single pill, then going from there to figure out the rest of the ingredients that would have such energy.New n0vel chapters are published on

Along with that, the color, smell, taste, and mainly the effect of the pill were used to determine the ingredients.

At first, Alex didn't think much about the knowledge he had just received. After all, how many times would he have to worry about finding out the ingredients behind a pill?

There would certainly be some moments when he came across new pills that he wanted to learn about, but those would be rare, even if they were important.

However, when he gave it a bit more thought, he started realizing the significance of the situation.

Yes, he could analyze the ingredients using the energy interaction, color, smell, taste, and its effects. But if he could do that, then the reverse was also certainly possible, right?

Sure he would fall into some fallacies here and there, but he didn't want the exact information, just a possibility. If he was given a random set of ingredients, and he knew that he could make a pill that did some specific thing using those ingredients, that alone would be quite amazing for him.

Alex understood that just because something worked one way, it didn't necessarily work the other way too.

Just because he found ingredients using all those information, didn't mean that by using those ingredients, he could come to an inevitable conclusion on what its resulting pill would do.

After all, any given set of ingredients could have as many pills as permutations were possible, which was only amplified by the change in energy released from each ingredient.

But, if he could look at a list of ingredients and say that this ingredient can be used to make that sort of pill, he could worry about finding the exact recipe later on.

He looked more into this information and frowned a little.

'That's going to be tough,' he thought.

It seemed the Alchemy god was done holding his hands for now and wanted him to do everything by himself.

Alex now had knowledge of what color, smell, taste, or effect was related to which ingredient. Since he already knew the elemental composition of every ingredient out there, there was that for him to take knowledge from too.

However, he would no longer get instant answers as he did with everything before. Instead, Alex would have to now go through his knowledge base and figure it out on his own.

It was like the Alchemy God was giving him homework and would not teach him how to complete it beyond the textbooks and formulas he was given. Everything else, he had to figure out himself.

'Very well, let's test it out then,' Alex thought and brought out a random True rank pill. It was one of the few True rank pills that he had no idea about as he had gotten it from the hands of the people he killed back in the Demon realm.

Alex looked at the bluish-green pill and closed his eyes to use his senses on it. Since he knew the color, he went with the scent.F

For some reason, he got a distinct idea that smell wasn't the best way to figure it out at all, but he couldn't tell why. After all, every single pill had a fragrance to it, right?

Maybe it was because of how little variations smells could have. But then, that was true of color too.

Alex didn't understand why, but he didn't dwell on it for very long.

After learning the color and the smell of the pills, the number of ingredients he could choose from had reduced drastically, but there were still so many different names floating in his head.

Some of which he had never heard before at all. It wasn't just the names too, he could distinctly visualize every single plant-type ingredient even though he hadn't seen it ever before.

The next task was to check the harmony in the pill between the different energies.

Overall, it looked like the pill was just a simple pill with water energy, but when looked deeper, there was a different answer.

He could see water energy through his senses, but he could also see 9 different other energy hiding behind the overall water energy.

'10 different energy,' Alex thought. '10 different ingredients.'

He was getting somewhere now. He focused on the pill's water energy and focused on it even further. He focused so much that the water-energy no longer looked like water, but rather 6 different energy.

'A True rank ingredient,' Alex understood. It was an easy guess given that it was the energy at the forefront, but that was still good to know.

However, what surprised Alex even further was that he could see the minute differences in energy now.

'So this is how it manifests huh?' Alex thought. He hadn't expected much from it, but he was glad that his Dao of Five Elemental Interaction was coming to some use here.

He could now see, in vague ideas, the general composition of energy for that ingredient based on the single energy type.

While the energy was mostly water, it also included the other type of energy, and now he could tell how much of the other energies were present in the ingredient.

Yang and Yin barely counted for anything in the energy, and even if they did have a large part, Alex would be blind about it for the most part.

There was also some fire, a little more earth, and a little less metal. Overall, those accounted for less than 1% of the entire energy which was just water.

That composition of energy helped him vastly narrow down the list of ingredients until there were but 3 different ingredients in mind.

He cross-referenced that with the color and smell, and one of the ingredients was immediately disqualified from his mind.

Between the last two, it was a hard choice, but he would find his answers when he ate the pill and saw its effect.

For now, he focused on the other 9 energies and tried to figure out their ingredients.

By the time he was all done with the energies, he had a list of about 17 ingredients, out of which there was a contention between 7 pairs, while he was sure the final 3 were confirmed.

Finally, he placed the pill into his mouth and swallowed it without hesitation.

The pill entered his stomach and slowly dissolved before… doing nothing.

"Oh… right," Alex remembered. He was now a Saint realm cultivator, so a True pill wouldn't work on him anymore.

"Well… that was a waste," he thought. He was a little disappointed that the pill didn't affect him at all, but he still brought the list of ingredients for the pill down from infinity to just 17, out of which 10 were correct.

"I will see that as a win for now," he thought and moved on.

Chapter 929 Supreme Elemental Accord

Alex moved on to the next thing he learned, which he was very surprised to learn.

Without waiting, Alex closed his eyes and learned the new technique he had received.

'Holy shit!' he couldn't help but cuss out loudly when he realized what the new skill he had learned did.

Alex pulled out a wooden box from his storage bag and opened it. Inside was a bright blue flower with a white center. It had 3 different petals drooping downward and five more pointed upward.

The stalk itself was rather blue as well, giving the flower a unique look.

This was a Saint-ranked ingredient known as Blueheart, and one of the few Saint ingredients that Alex had yet to use since the beginning of his life as an Alchemist.

Found in the Northern Forest in the storage bag of the alchemist that fled this continent, today was the first time Alex had taken out this ingredient to do anything more than just look at it.

The flower was a Wood attribute ingredient with Fire and Earth elements missing, which could easily weaken and ruin the Wood element of the ingredient.

Alex took the flower out of the box and into his palm. Then, he activated the technique.

Waves of Qi swayed back and forth in his dantian as they slowly emerged from either side of the dantian.

Alex focused on the Qi as it surprisingly took all 8 paths on each side. There was not a single spiritual root that the Qi didn't pass through.

As such, the resulting Qi that would come out of Alex would have all 7 elements and a portion that belonged to no element.

The combination of Qi then entered the flower Alex was holding and suddenly some of the Qi he sent in was being used up.

Alex could visibly see the multicolor Qi fizzle out from the flower slowly, but he continued sending in more Qi. After he had used what was nearly a tenth of his entire Qi pool, he finally stopped and took a deep breath.

Then, he stared at the flower in his hand with a wide grin on his face.

If what the technique said was correct, and if he had made no mistakes, then according to the technique, the flower was full of energy with not a single bit missing.

Meaning that the flower was now one of the, if not, the best ingredients he had ever seen.

With not a single bit of energy missing from it, if Alex could use the flower, and similar ingredients to make pills, there was a very high chance that he could reach 100% now.

'I can do it,' he thought to himself. 'I now have a way to reach 100% Harmony.'

Alex was happy that he didn't even understand how to celebrate it. Did he jump up and down? Did he shout? What should he do?

Overwhelmed with thoughts, he instead just sad there, wide-eyed, looking at the Blueheart in front of him.

Surely, the technique he had just learned, the Supreme Elemental Accord, was going to help him get closer to the 100% harmony that he had been seeking for such a long time.

It cost him a tenth of his entire Qi to fully add the required energy to just one ingredient. If he wanted to make a single pill with 10 ingredients, he would have to lose his entire pool of Qi and then cultivate it again to continue it.

'Well, that should get better with time,' he thought. He was only in the first realm of Saint Condensation realm. As he continued, his pool of Qi would get bigger and better, requiring him to use less Qi.

'Although, I shouldn't need much Qi for true ingredients, right?' he thought. He quickly brought out a True rank ingredient and used the Supreme Elemental Accord on it.

Instantly, all 8 of his spiritual roots worked once again to pull out Qi into Alex's hands, from where it poured onto the ingredient.

Within moments, the ingredient was filled to the brim with energy. Whether it had lost some energy, or never had it, to begin with, the ingredient instantly became full and thus a candidate to push his Alchemy results to the peak.

Alex thought of teaching the skill to Whisker, but then he sighed when he understood that there was really no one he could teach this skill to.

Possibly, only he and his mother were capable of learning this skill amongst every single one that he had met.

After all, the technique required one to have not all 5 but all 7 Spiritual roots, making it almost feel like the skill was made for him.

With the Supreme Elemental Accord, Alex could now do what most people would never be able to.

Alex thought for a bit about it. He wondered if he could somehow change the technique to make it so that people with not many spiritual roots, like Whisker, could use it too.

However, when he remembered how energies in ingredients were stored, how there was more than one element even when it looked like the ingredient just had a single element, they couldn't do it.

Alex also thought of using more than a single person to purify the ingredient, but that was a lot of thinking for his mind at the moment.

He didn't need to think that far ahead when he was in no trouble from using the ingredients.

He spent some time improving a few more Saint-ranked ingredients he had and finally stopped.

There were just too many ingredients for him to improve, so he decided to do so when the time came or he was free enough to do so.

With the new knowledge, he had gained to reverse engineer the ingredients of the pill, and the new technique to make any ingredient the best it could be, the upcoming pills he was going to make would certainly be some of the best out there.

Once Alex was done, he went on to the various other things he had received from entering the Saint realm.

From what he understood, there were 3 more things he had likely come to improve upon.

The first one was the Flame Mastery Scripture, which wasn't as great as he would've hoped for, but the ability to improve his Fire Spiritual roots was quite an addition.

'I will have to wait a bit for that,' Alex thought. There weren't any good Fire elemental treasures for him to use the technique to improve his fire roots just yet.

Other than that, there was also the Five Yang Divine Path where he could now use the 4th path of the 5, the Immortal Yang path. With the new cultivation method, he would increase his cultivation speed by quite a lot.

Finally, there was the Blood God's Manual. With his new cultivation base, Alex's bloodline would have improved as well, allowing for him to view at least the next page of the manual.

So, he pulled out the book and held onto the sharp blade to pour his blood onto the book.

The book drank the generous amount of blood that Alex was pouring onto it and finally, it shined crimson to flip onto the 4th of the 7 pages.

Page 4: Blood Beasts

Chapter 930 Back to the Mountain

Blood Beasts.

By drowning a beast's core in one's blood, one could reinvoke the beast's spirit hidden in the core and forge a body for it using that invoker's blood.

The forged beast would be without any intelligence, but it would carry over the natural instincts the beast may have had in its lifetime.

The strength of the beast depended on whichever was stronger, the cultivation base of the dead beast, or the Blood Aura of the owner.

Alex read the amount of blood one would need to form a single blood beast and almost felt anemic thinking about how much blood he was going to have to use.

Furthermore, it seemed that the process had a certain amount of success rate, which reached its highest when the owner's blood aura was stronger than the Beast's cultivation base.

The greater the difference in the other direction, the easier it was to fail.

Alex didn't exactly know how strong his Blood Aura was as of yet, so he would have to test it out sometime soon.

"I don't have beast cores too," he thought to himself. He had either fed it all to Pearl or eaten it himself. He would have to get it from somewhere if he wanted to try it out.

"Should I buy some? Or can I hunt some for myself in the Demonic forest?" Alex wondered. The Dao mountain's opening was coming closer, so he couldn't waste his time on experiments at the moment.

So, whatever the answer was, he would have to figure it out after he left the Dao mountain. he was also going to leave making Saint ranked pills and improving his Fire Spiritual roots after he had come out from the Dao mountain.

For now, he decided to focus on the upcoming Dao mountain and prepare for that. He told Pearl to do the same as well, and together they started thinking about many laws they had learned in the Ancient Battlefield.

There had been way too many Daos, and he needed to organize the mysteries he had understood at that time. The information in his head was knotted up pieces of rope that he would have to untangle.

In the meantime, he would be called by the elder from time to time to talk with her. He learned that Lady Xuan had missed the last Dao Mountain opening and was thus going along this time.

Between that and his cultivation, Alex spent away most of his time. During this time, his beasts also surprised him.

After remaining in his beast space for over a year and a half, Whisker's cultivation base had come incredibly close to breaking through and he had only needed a bit more time. During these few days Alex had, Whisker managed to break through and finally entered the True realm.

Pearl had also improved a lot and had entered the True Emperor 9th realm during this time. With a bit more cultivation and a few more years, Pearl too would end up as a Saint, just like him.

After a few more days, Alex heard a knock on his door.

An elder came to take him with them to the ship where everyone was ready. The day had come when the Dao mountain was to open up.

Lady Xuan and many other elders as well as 100 different disciples were lined up, waiting for the ship to open appear so they could board it.

When Alex arrived, the girls looked at him curiously. They didn't understand why a black-robed Saint realm man was going with them.

"You didn't change?" Lady Xuan asked.

"I didn't see the need to," Alex said.

In the midst of many crystal-blue-robed ladies, he was the only one wearing a black robe and thus stood out like a splash of ink on a white canvas.

"What about your mask? You should wear your mask," she said.

"I don't need it anymore though," Alex said. "My eyes are healed. Besides, my face does more for anonymity than my mask."

"You're not going to wear a mask to remain anonymous. You're going to wear it because that's your identity now," the elder said.

"Ah, then it's all the more reason for me to not wear it," Alex said with a smile. "I wish to remain anonymous. I've had too much trouble with people recognizing me when I came out of the Ancient Battlefield."

"Are you sure?" Lady Xuan asked, and Alex nodded. "Very well then. You can do as you wish."

The ship flew through the night and arrived in the morning when it came time for them to form the fighting stage for the True realm cultivators.

More ships arrived and soon all 5 ships were here.

Alex sat on the ship and watched as the battle proceeded one by one. It felt weird not being down there, fighting, and instead being up here with the 'adults'.

'I guess I am an adult now.' He chuckled to himself. It was weird how even at 30 years old, he still felt like a young man, but once he entered the Saint realm his feelings changed.

His view of the world shifted as he had raised a little higher and could see from the same viewpoint as most others.

Throughout the day, Alex saw several saint realm cultivators arrive and stay in the vicinity. Some conversed with each other, while some remained alone.

Most were with groups however as that was where the name list was first derived from for the Dao mountain.

Important sects, clans, and organizations would receive that information first, and thus they would be the ones to give all the names they could, before leaving the rest for the rogue cultivators and smaller factions.

The fights below came to an end around midnight and there were 23 True realm cultivators that had passed. After some time, everyone was called to gather up as the mountain would open up at any time now.

Alex went down and stood in a group of 2000 people, that listened to the words of one of the ancestors from the Nether Poison sect.

Alex had already heard the explanation before, so he didn't need to hear it. Instead, he focused on something else.

Ever since coming down, he seemed to have grabbed the attention of a few different people.

He didn't know if it was because they recognized him or simply because he came with the Frozen Heart sect. There was a lot of jealousy towards a man that could intermingle with the Frozen Heart sect.

People's senses landed on Alex all around, but after seeing that he was but a weakling in their eyes, their senses retreated.

However, one still remained.

The old man in front of them finished talking, but the sense still lingered on him. It wasn't just there, it was checking him, staring at him.

Alex followed the sense back and was surprised to realize who the owner of the thread was.

'Her?' Alex thought when he saw the woman in the red veil that was known as the Veiled Fairy. According to Lady Xuan, her real name was Li Zhumei.

Alex wondered why she was looking at him. He turned his head to look towards her, but instead of trying to act like she had been caught staring at him, her sense fell on his even harder.

The sun rose from the east and the elders started working on opening the gate.

"Can I help you?" Alex asked through his spiritual sense.

He got no answer for a while, but as the gate opened, he heard a question.

"What's your name?"

Alex heard the girl's voice. He was surprised at how young she sounded.

"Yu Ming," Alex answered. He wondered why she wanted to know.

"Yu Ming? Are you the young man that wore a mask last time?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex replied. He was surprised the girl had bothered remembering his name at all. Although, he had learned two Daos in a single session.

The old ancestor woman from the Blazing Earth sect came to take her disciple along with her to the top.

But the girl refused. She instead walked towards him.

"What's your name?" the girl asked him, this time speaking directly, rather than using her spiritual sense.

Alex was slightly surprised, not because she spoke to him, but because she was repeating the same question.

The other people that were supposed to go up also paused when they heard the Veiled Fairy speak for the first time and turned to look towards her and Alex.

The girl frowned and flicked her sleeve. Suddenly, Alex felt the world come to a still.

The air he breathed felt thick, and the people around him were moving extremely slowly. Even the aura in the air refused to disappear.

This was exactly what he had experienced back on the Ancient Battlefield.

It was almost as if... Time itself had come to a stop.

'Time Dao!' Alex's eyes went wide when he realized what it was.

"What's your name?" the girl asked again.

Alex looked at her. The two of them were the only ones unaffected by the stillness. Or rather, they were the only ones affected by the swiftness of time.

"Do you mean my real name?" Alex asked, considering they were both players.

The girl nodded.

"Why do you—"

"Are you Alex?" the girl asked.

Alex's expression immediately changed. "How do you know?" he asked.

Suddenly, he heard a happy giggle coming from the girl as she lifted her veil to speak.

"I knew it!" she said. "You've grown up quite a lot. Now you look just like big brother did when he was young."

Alex looked at the girl's face with wide eyes when he realized who it was.

"Aunt Liz?"

Chapter 931 Up the Mountain

“Ahhh! I’m so happy to see you!”

Liz hugged Alex tightly while Alex was too stunned to do anything else. He had not expected to meet his aunt like this. Rather, he hadn’t expected to meet his aunt at all.

“Is that really you?” Alex asked.

“Of course it is me. Who else could it be?” Liz asked with a chuckle in her voice. She simply couldn’t hide her excitement after finally meeting one of her kin after 16 years of being separated from them.

“It’s been so long... and you haven’t aged a day, aunt Liz,” Alex said. A smile was starting to form on his face as well. He was happy.

“Meanwhile, you’ve grown up a lot. How old were you last time I saw you? 15?” she asked.

“I believe so. I didn’t see you guys ever since sister went to University, I believe,” Alex said. “Have you been all alone this whole time?”

“I have,” Liz said. “Why didn’t you show yourself sooner? Where were you this whole time?”

“I... I only came to this continent 3 years ago, aunt Liz. That too on accident,” Alex said. “I—”

“Zhumei! Stop playing around. What are you doing?” the old woman’s voice reached through the slowed down time. She was forcefully fighting the dao that grabbed her and was talking though it.

“Oops, let’s talk later,” Liz said as she pulled down her veil and removed the time shenanigan that was happening around them.

The air felt light once more, and the people started moving normally. The aura dissipated as it should as well.

Time flowed back at its proper rate, and Elizabeth went back to being the quiet Veiled Fairy.

“Let’s go,” she said and started walking. Alex nodded and followed them.

“What were you doing?” the old woman from the Blazing Earth sect scolded her.

“That’s my nephew, master,” Liz said. “I finally found someone.”

“He is?” the old woman turned to look at him. “He looks older than you.”

“No, he does not,” Liz said. “He’s nearly 30 years younger than I am.”

“Well... he does look about the same age as you. Also, now that I look at him, he does look similar to you,” the old woman said.

“He’s my brother’s son after all,” Liz said.

“You sound happy,” the old woman said. She then turned towards Alex and spoke. “Young man, when this is all over, wait for us at the bottom okay? You can speak with your aunt after she’s out of the Dao mountain.”

Alex smiled and nodded. “Senior is right. I do indeed need to focus on my advances in Dao this month, so I can’t have a hearty talk with my aunt just yet,” he said.

The colorful Dao mountain looked so much better through his own eyes than Whisker’s. Which reminded him of what he needed to do. He brought out Whisker from his beast space and looked around.

“What’s wrong?” Liz asked.

“I need to find a place for him to meditate on too,” Alex said, and I don’t think he can go as far up either.”

“A Seeking Mouse with a cultivation base? How is that possible?” the old woman suddenly spoke out loud.

“He’s a variant, senior,” Alex said.

“And you want to help him learn Dao? Isn’t he too weak for that?” the elder asked.

“He has entered that True realm, Alex said. “From what I can tell, that is more than enough.” His senses suddenly spread far wide until he found elder Xuan.

“Elder, can you help me get any of the disciples to look after my mouse?” he asked Xuan who was already very far up.

“Sure,” she replied. “See how far up the little mouse can go, and then ask a disciple there. Let me know if they are hesitant.”

Alex smiled and continued up the mountain, carefully checking on Whisker’s condition. After a few minutes of walking, as Alex was close to the 1 kilometer mark, Whisker finally showed signs of not being able to go on anymore.

“You did so much better than last time,” Alex said. “You should stay here and try to understand any Dao you can, okay?”

Whisker nodded.

Alex found a girl who would take care of Whisker while he was gone. After Whisker was with her, he walked with his Aunt and her master as well.

The old woman’s senses fell on Alex with a surprised look on her face. She was checking him, like he checked Whisker, to see if he was having trouble.

However, for some reason, Alex was no longer feeling any effect from the scent in the mountain at all. He had to force his body to stop from not being affected, in which case did he finally feel drowsy.

‘Dammit, I hope that doesn’t cause any problem.’ He thought.

As he continued going further up, the old woman was losing her mind. She was already felling the effects of the scent, and yet the young man behind her wasn’t slowing down at all.

He was only a Saint Condensation 1st realm cultivator too. How was he keeping up so well?

‘What the hell is up with their family?’ the woman thought and looked towards her disciple who had no problem walking up as well.

Finally, she simply couldn’t keep the questions to herself and turned around. “Young man, are you fine? How can you keep on going?” she asked.

“Of course, I’m fine. Does elder not remember me being fine before?” Alex asked.

“I do?” the elder looked confused.

“Sigh, Elder Xuan was right,” he said as he reached into his storage bag and pulled out his mask. “It really is my identity now. No point in remaining anonymous anymore I guess.”

“AHH! It’s you!” the elder finally realized who she was talking with.

“We shouldn’t waste time, elder,” Alex said.

“Yes, master. Let’s hurry up. I want to be done with this already,” Liz said and continued walking.

The old woman wanted to ask so many things, but it had been her who said they could talk later, so she kept quiet and turned around to walk.

After reaching high enough, Alex called out Pearl, and together they reached the hot spring that was at the top of the mountain.

Alex greeted the ancestors there who recognized him because of his mask and Pearl. He walked into the hot spring alongside his aunt, and sat down to let the vapors of the scented water flow into him.

He talked for a few minutes with everyone, but soon enough they all had to start cultivating once more or they would miss precious time.

Pearl too started cultivating, so Alex closed his eyes and let the scent affect him too.

As his mind slowly drifted to nowhere, Alex freely started thinking of everything he knew. Not long after, he ended up thinking of just one thing, over and over, and soon enough he was only thinking about it.

Half a day later, the Saint realm cultivators who had barely gotten into their cultivation were woken up as the worldly laws descended upon Alex and left not long after.

Not even a single day had passed, and Alex had already learned a Dao.

Chapter 932 Some More Dao

Dao of Fire gave one a very keen sense of fire. Not only could one understand any and every fire, they could also locate any Fire element treasure that was around them.

Furthermore, it also gave them the ability to create any type of fire they desired.

Alex was amazed when he learned that part of the reason why he had never managed to learn a Dao of Fire, despite working with Fire almost every day was that he never truly understood what Fire as an element really was.

While Fire was a singular element, it was rarely that way in real life. Every treasure, material, or ingredient that was said to have a Fire element in it would always in some capacity hold the rest of the ingredients as well.

Otherwise, if it was just Fire, it would be highly reactive and would combine with whatever other energy was around it.

Pearl’s knowledge of Metal came from his instinct and bloodline, allowing him to know these things instinctively. However, as a Human, Alex had to learn it.

He had known this fact before, but he rarely gave it a thought. However, after learning what he had learned recently, the fresh knowledge helped him understand the intricacies of fire.

And if he was to go by the same knowledge for Metal too then...

The Worldly laws that had left just moments prior returned once again, shocking every single one that was trying to fall into a trance but had to wake up because of the commotion.

Even Liz was surprised when she saw her nephew bring down the heavenly laws twice in a single day.

Alex sat there in a trance, oblivious of the commotion he was causing, and swiftly learned the Dao of Metals because of how similar the two of them were.

His mind naturally tried to move on to Earth, Wood, and Water, but he simply hadn’t had enough interaction with these element or didn’t have enough knowledge about their properties.

So, once he was unable to think much, Alex’s mind wandered once more.

It drifted through the many knowledge, searching for something to grasp onto, some pathway to walk down on.

It wasn’t long before he found one.

His eyes had never seen it, but his mind saw what lay in front of him.

A man stood with a sword in his hands as he dared to cut light in front of him.

This was the scene that Alex had seen back when he tried to look into the intent of the man that formed the famous gorge in the Ancient Battlefield.

Alex started learning about that specific Dao, understanding how one could cut things and what cutting was exactly.

This time, nothing happened instantly, and instead, it took him a few days before he was able to make sense of every single thing he had understood.

And as such, the worldly Dao returned once more and Alex learned the Dao of Cutting.

He proceeded to dwell on his understanding of the new Dao for a while. It was quite simple really. It allowed one to cut things, with or without a weapon.

Alex remembered Shen Jing cutting things with but a thought. He only now understood how he had really done it.

As he was about to fall back into a trance, trying to remember the next set of mysteries to understand, when suddenly the world dropped onto him again.

The worldly laws had descended once more, and Alex quickly learned who it was for.

‘Pearl...’ he thought.

He happily looked up to wonder what Pearl had learned. Anything would be good, but he hoped it was Sharpness since that was what he had made Pearl spend the most time learning.

However, when he felt an aura that fell from above, Alex panicked for a second.

“No... that can’t be right,” he spoke softly. He couldn’t understand how Pearl was learning this Dao at all. After all, neither his primary Metal element nor his secondary Wood element had absolutely anything to do with Teleportation.

Alex felt the Dao of Teleportation fall and settle onto Pearl as he managed to fully learn it in a couple of hours.

When the Dao left for the sky, all that remained was Alex with his stunned face and the other elders that were even more stunned.

“Did... did you beast just learn a Dao?” one of them asked in surprise.

“How can a beast learn a Dao before reaching the Saint realm?” another person asked.

“Dear god, even humans are barely able to do that,” another elder said.

Alex didn’t say anything and continued staring at Pearl who was deep in thought. He wondered when Pearl had possibly learned about Space aura to understand Teleportation.

‘Was it back in the Ancient Battlefield?’ Alex wondered. ‘No, it must be afterward. After I destroyed the Tribulation lightning with the Dao of Teleportation.’

Alex finally felt like he knew what had happened, so after a while, he went back to learning his own Dao.

His mind wandered, going back to the days when he learned to make artifacts.

The metals he put under fire expanded to the point where the solid metals became liquid. To do so, he had to give it a lot of heat. So much heat.

Alex understood that if he did so to anything else, more time than not, those objects would also show the same property.

They would expand, and could no longer remain solid.

They would melt.

A few days later, the worldly laws descended down onto Alex, and he learned the Dao of Melting.

The older folks had all but gone mad. It was surprising that a beast that had yet to reach the Saint Realm could learn a Dao, but what was even more surprising was that in the span of fewer than 2 weeks, Alex had learned 4 different Dao.

4 Dao was almost 4 more than what most Saint realm cultivators knew. It was double what these Saint realms themselves knew.

And yet the young man that had already learned 2 other Dao 2 years ago, and another Dao in the Ancient Battlefield half a year ago, had learned 4 Dao once again.

He had learned 7 different Dao, and that were only the ones that were public.

Lady Xuan knew that Alex had learned a Dao before he had even arrived in their sect 3 years ago. That was one of the reasons why she was so curious about him.

Their shock only increased when a few days later, the worldly daos descended once more, and Alex learned another Dao.

This time, he understood the Dao of Burning. Having learned so many Fire Daos, it was becoming easier and easier to understand the rest of the Dao that were affiliated with each other.

As such, Dao of Burning came quite easily to him.

A few days later, following Burning, he got the Dao of Boiling as well. The elders were numb to the feat at this point.

When Alex learned the Dao of Burning, he felt something unique, something he had never expected to feel before.

It was as if heaven itself was urging him to learn something. ‘What is it?’ Alex thought and continued searching for the answer.

Dao of Fire, Dao of Heat, Dao of Heat Conduction, Dao of Burning, Dao of Melting, Dao of Boiling, and finally, the Dao of Explosion, these were the Dao that Alex had learned, which were all connected by Fire.

So, he started thinking more about fire. He tried to remember what property of fire had he missed. What happened to something when it got hot?

Was it evaporation? Alex didn’t think so. Evaporation happened when something boiled, but it also happened naturally even when there was no extra heat provided to something.

Then what was it? Destruction?

That was just something that was the aftermath of burning something. Besides, a fire wasn’t the only source of destruction.

As Alex thought, he realized that everything he was coming up with was a result or a variation of all the Dao he had already understood.

‘I’m focusing on the wrong thing, ‘Alex understood. ‘They’re all connected.’ The Daos were all connected to each other. Which meant, in a sense, the Dao he had learned until now could be considered to be a single mystery, a single law of a single Dao.

The world turned tumultuous as the heavenly laws descended with wrathful strength and fell onto Alex as he started combining everything he had learned, and everything he had understood into a single Dao.

Chapter 933 True Fire Dao and...

The Saint realm cultivators were scared. The aura they felt was not something they had ever felt before, and it terrified them.

They tried to peek into the mysteries behind the Dao that fell, but what they instead ended up with was doubt as to if the Dao they had learned themselves was real or not given that it was nowhere as vast as the mysteries behind the one Alex was learning.

Even Pearl was forced to wake up and move aside as the Dao all fell on Alex.

His clothes whipped, his hair astray, and yet his face remained calm and in deep thought. He found out questions he hadn't even known existed, and understood the answers to them too.

Slowly, the wall that stopped him from peering fully into the Dao crumbled and now he was thoroughly looking at the major dao.

The world remained as it was for many days before it finally started letting up.

A small smile formed on Alex's face as he learned the amalgamation of all fire-related Daos, the True Fire Dao.

Alex let out a deep breath as the worldly laws finally left him and the world returned to normal. He then took a deep breath and continued understanding the True Fire Dao.

He now had the ability to create, use, manipulate, and destroy fire and anything related to fire as he wished, and the world would help him do so.

Once he learned the dao, he mulled on it for a bit longer.

The saint elders looked at him and got abnormally serious all of a sudden.

"He's learned 7 dao in a single month," one of them said using their spiritual sense. Every one of the ancestor-level figures heard him.

"Even this little girl doesn't have that much potential," the red-robed female ancestor replied back.

"Do you think that perhaps he can help us?" another elder asked.

"This is something we will have to seriously consider. If we hide him well, he could be our savior," another elder said.

"He's only entered the Saint realm recently. It will take a long time for him to successfully help us," another elder said.

"Brother Wu, does your Heaven's Frost sect have any good alchemist that can help us? The young man will need a lot of help," someone said.

The man named Wu frowned. "Our Alchemists aren't the best. They can barely make any good pills," he said.

"We don't have any alchemists either," another person said.

"Sister Xuan did the same as us and outright forbid Alchemy from being passed down, so we don't have any good alchemists either," the green-robed elder said.

"The young man doesn't need any good alchemists. He only needs good resources. I'm sure he can grow on his own," elder Xuan said.

She was frowning on the inside now that she had seen the terrifying potential hidden in Alex. 'Why the hell did he have to be an alchemist? Such a good one at that too?'

"Send him to our sect. We will help him grow," the elder from the Nether Poison sect said.

"Later," the red-robed elder said. "He's my disciple's nephew, so I assume he's going to come with us for now."

"Speaking of which, why is he wearing a black robe, sister Xuan? Is he not your disciple?" Another elder asked.

"No longer," Elder Xuan replied. "He left the sect 2 years ago. He's only been using our name to remain out of trouble."

"So, we can have him join our sect right?" another elder said. Suddenly, everyone's eyes narrowed with greed.

Having a unified aid to help him grow so he could help them was one thing, but if they could also keep him afterward... that was just the cherry on top.

Alex slowly opened his eyes to see 7 different pairs staring back at him.

"What did you do, young man? That was quite the commotion" the Blazing Earth sect's woman asked.

"I... learned a dao, of course," Alex said.

"Yeah, but which one? I've never seen such an intense Dao before," Another elder said.

"It was a sort of combined Dao," Alex said. "Made by mixing two different Daos, which was why you probably found it the way you did."

The saints desperately wanted to know what two Dao Alex had combined, but they didn't voice it as that was not something one could ask so easily.

"Somehow, our time here was both wasted and worth it this time around," one of the blue-robed elders said.

"Yeah, I haven't even managed to fall into a trance yet," another elder said.

"Still, we did get to see what is it now, 7 different Dao at the same time," the next elder said.

"Well, it's time to leave now," elder Xuan said.

"Yes, it is," the others said. "Would you like you to leave with us, young man?"

"Is it time already?" Alex asked. He had been so invested in learning Dao that he had forgotten every concept of time.

"It's been 28 days. We only have 2 more days, so we are leaving," Liz said.

"28 days... I didn't realize," Alex said. He felt amused at how easily time had passed. "We still have 2 more days right?"

"Yes," the elders said. "But there is not much scent remaining in the pool anymore, and it's impossible to learn a Dao in just 2 days."

Alex smiled. "I would like to stay until the very end then. If seniors are going to leave, then farewell."

The Saints that were about to walk out, stopped. "Wait, what do you mean you want to try again? There are only 2 days left. Do you think you can learn more Dao?" one of them asked.

"I can always try," Alex said. He wasn't confident about most Dao, but he was confident regarding a single one he had been pushing back for a long time.

"If that is so then we will wait and see how far you go," the elders said and didn't leave.

"I am really curious if you can learn 8 Daos at once now," another elder said and sat back down in the hot spring.

Alex closed his eyes and began his process to learn another Dao. This time, he had a hard time falling into an assisted trance as there was almost no scent remaining in the mountain anymore. It had all been used up.

However, Alex didn't need a scent to fall into trance for this one. Previously, thanks to the scent and assisted trance, his mind had wandered on its own, thinking of whatever it wanted to.

However, now that he was without any trance, Alex could think of whatever he wanted. And he knew exactly what he wanted to think about.

His mind fell into a trance on its own as Alex began thinking about the day 3 years ago.

The day when he died 100 times.

This was a traumatic event for Alex, one that he had tried to keep at bay ever since he had obtained the Undying inheritance.

The pain he felt when his body burned alongside the lava, the horror of suffocating under molten rocks, and the terror of death was a feeling he would rather never remember feeling.

Or at least, that was his thought previously. His will had strengthened from the repeated deaths, such that he could hold on to his thought even when multiple memories invaded him.

Still, the thought of having died had terrified him, and what terrified him more was that he understood it.

He understood what death was. To lose your body, to lose your spirit, to lose your soul.

Death was the end, and he has seen it. Both by himself, and through the memories of the First Undying god.

He avoided thinking about death as much as he could, as that was not something he thought he could handle thinking about. However, after improving his Intent for so long, his will had improved as well, and he knew he could handle it all now.

So, he revisited the night he died, he revisited the memories of all the Undying gods and their constant death and revival.

Half a day later, the Saint realm cultivators remained stunned as the worldly laws dropped once again, dark and terrifying.

The few ancestors felt the aura that to them meant the signal for something. When the worldly law left after some more time, Alex had done it.

He had learned the Dao of Death.

Chapter 934 Leaving the Dao Mountain

Godslayer was stirred awake inside of Alex as he felt the aura that permeated throughout the world outside.

He could feel the death of Dao slowly settling onto Alex as he learned it and couldn’t help but be both surprised, and confused.

Death was half of what he was, while Darkness was the other half. So, he was very attuned to the Death aura, which only made him question the situation even more.

‘When did this kid learn about death?’. After a while, the aura disappeared, and Godslayer went back to sleep.

Alex opened his eyes to the stunned look of the elders. They were always stunned when he opened his eyes after learning Dao these days, but this time it was a little different.

They weren’t just stunned, they were scared.

“Young man, what did you learn?” one of the ancestors asked.

“I… learned another Dao, senior,” Alex said.

“No bullshit this time please,” Elder Xuan said. “We need to know what that aura was.”

Alex frowned. These people were entirely too serious about this one particular Dao for some reason when they kept their mouths shut for the last 7.

“It’s the Dao of Death, dealing with Death aura,” Alex said.

“Death aura?” elder Xuan asked.

Alex nodded. “It appears around people or animals, or sometimes even plants that are slowly dying,” he said.

“Ohhhh… so that’s what it was,” one of the elders said.

The other ancestors nodded as well.

“What was what?” Alex asked.

“Nothing. We should leave now. The time is over,” the elders said.

Alex thought of further asking some questions but it didn’t look like they would be answering.

“Yes, let’s leave,” Alex said and stood up. Pearl turned into a bunch of light and disappeared back into his beast space.

“How’d you do it?” Liz asked as she got out of the hot spring as well. “How’d you manage to learn 8 different Dao in a single month?”

“I had prepared in the Ancient Battlefield for the last 2 years, and I was waiting for this time,” Alex said.

“Hmm… I see,” Liz said. “Well, congratulations. You’d make your parents proud.”

Liz ruffled his hair and pat him on the back.

The girl who had kept Whisker had stayed behind, waiting for them to come down. Alex thanked her and wanted to give her something in return, but the only thing he could give her was pills, and that was not something he could randomly pull out in this situation.

So, he had to let her leave empty-handed.

They walked down the slope, with the elders continuously trying to make Alex come with them so they could show him how great their sect was, but Alex refused.

For the foreseeable future, he would stay with his aunt in the Blazing Earth sect.

And as it just so happened, the sect was right below the volcanic mountains with the Fire aura and treasures where Alex could improve his Fire Spiritual roots.

And just above that was Silvermoon city, which was just below the Ancient battlefield.

The Blazing Earth Sect was also very close to the Intercontinental Teleportation formation, which he wanted to check out on his own.

When they walked out, the old woman that was his aunt’s master, whom he knew was named Tai Guan, immediately took him and her disciple onto a small flying ship and took off.

She did not want to spend a single moment more in which time the other old foggies would try and dissuade Alex from remaining in the Blazing Earth sect too long or even make him stop going there altogether.

Alex could only chuckle when he saw that. He said his farewell as they were leaving, and soon he was far away from the Dao mountain.

“Alright, tell me now. Where were you all this time?” Liz asked.

Alex contemplated on whether to answer with the old woman watching, but he decided to do so anyway.

“I was in the Western Continent all this time, which is why you never saw me before this,” Alex said.

“Ah, right. You were on the Western Continent? How did you get here?” she asked. The old woman also listened curiously. As far as she knew, there should have been no way for him to travel here.

“I accidentally triggered a teleportation formation while running away from some people trying to kill me, and ended up here for some reason. I’m trying to search for a way back, but the only thing I have come up with is the Intercontinental Teleportation formation, but I’m not sure if anyone can use it or not. I hear it costs a lot of resources,” Alex said.

He looked at the old woman, trying to discern her expressions to see what she thought.

“Oh, people were trying to kill you? Are you okay?” Liz asked with a concerned tone in her voice.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Alex said. “I managed to escape successfully.”

“Good,” Liz said. “You don’t have to worry about them now. You’re here, and you can stay here forever. Forget about the Western Continent.”

Alex gave an awkward smile. “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said. “Mother should be waiting for me back in the Western Continent.”

Liz’s eyes went wide. “You found your mother?” she asked.

“Yes,” Alex said. “About 10 years ago. Have you not found anyone?”

Liz’s eyes teared up. “At least you found sister, Helen. Your father would be able to take care of himself, but your mother would have trouble. It is good that you found her so fast,” she said.

Alex looked at his aunt. “Have you not found anyone? What about uncle Rob?” he asked.

Liz shook her head. “I neither found Rob, nor Hannah. I have been stuck here for the last 16 years, with no one. I finally found you. I hope the others are doing well,” she said.

“Hmm, I don’t know about Uncle Rob, but from what I heard, Sister should be doing fine. Apparently, she was doing well enough to appear on a TV show,” Alex said.

“Oh, did she?” Liz asked.

“Yeah, mother told me. She said she watched the TV show multiple times before preparing to come here,” Alex said. “She also said that sister is in the Eastern Continent.”

“What?!” Liz’s eyes went wide. “You know where Hannah is?”

Liz immediately turned towards the old woman. “Master! Can we go to the Eastern Continent any time soon?” she asked.

The old woman, who had been listening to the conversation, frowned. “We can’t,” she said. “You’re too weak, and I’m too old to fly alone. And we can’t take many of the sect members, so we’re not going.”

“But master, it’s my daughter. I need to find her,” Liz said.

“We can’t. It’s just impossible right now,” the old woman said. “You can go when you’re strong enough on your own. Besides, how will you even find your daughter in the Eastern continent? It may be small, but the Eastern Continent is the most densely populated continent of all, with only a small land dedicated to the Kings of beasts. We don’t even know if your daughter is alive or not.”

“Of course she’s alive,” Liz shouted back. “Look at me, and look at my nephew. Do you think my daughter will be any less capable?”

The old woman wanted to say something, but she couldn’t. There was no retort to that, not after what she had seen.

“I’m sorry, Zhumei, I can’t do anything about it. You’ll have to become strong to do so yourself,” the old woman said.

“Don’t worry, aunt Liz. I will soon find a way to go back to the Western Continent. Once I do, I’m certain I’ll find a way to the Eastern Continent as well. Besides, I need to go to the Southern Continent as well,” Alex said.

“You do?” Liz wiped her tears as she spoke. “Why?”

“Because Father might be there,” Alex said.

Liz’s eyes widened. “You know where your father is too?” she asked.

“I’m all but certain at this point,” Alex said. He turned towards the old woman and asked, “Senior, do you know any place that is a desert and also lacks Qi?”

The old woman didn’t even have to think. “No, that’s the Southern Continent for sure. More accurately, the Wastelands. If it’s anywhere, it’s there for sure.”

Alex nodded. There was no information about the Forbidden Fields having any humans appearing there. Alex had even scoured the land not long ago, and found not a single human bone there, aside from the old man that he killed.

His father must’ve been sent to the Southern Continent after all.

‘I need to find a way for sure,’ he thought.

“So you found brother and sister-in-law. And now I know where Helen is too. If only I could find Rob too,” Liz said.

“I’m sure you will find him soon, Aunt Liz,” Alex said. “I will help you find him.”

“Yes, I don’t have any doubts,” she said.

The group flew through the high mountains, before slowly approaching the lowlands with fewer and fewer mountains, which got even more flatlands as it went along.

Alex and Liz talked for a while about their life, before Alex eventually got curious and asked, “Your Dao, it’s time-related right?”

“Yes, it’s time-related,” she said.

Alex had guessed it, but it still came as a surprise. “How did you do it? How did you learn the time dao? I must say, it was very similar to how the Ancient Battlefield feels like.”

Liz chuckled a bit. “Of course it would, silly. That’s where I learned the Time dao after all.”

Chapter 935 Liz's Story

“You learned the Time Dao in the Ancient Battlefield?” Alex asked curiously.

“Yeah,” Liz said. “I went there about a dozen years ago and managed to learn it. Well, I didn’t learn the Dao exactly, but more so just the mysteries. I had to come to the Dao Mountain actually to be able to learn the dao.”

Alex nodded in understanding, but he was still confused. Given how similar both his aunt’s dao was and the Ancient Battlefield’s environment, he came to understand that his aunt did in fact learn the Dao from there.

But the question still remained. How? He wasn’t wondering how she learned the dao, but rather how she understood the aura.

After all, as far as he understood, Time and Space were not something one could easily sense, let alone look into its mysteries.

“How did you sense Time Dao’s aura in there?” he asked. “I never felt anything like that.”

“I’m a special case in that regard,” Liz said.

“Special case?” Alex was even more curious now.

“Yes,” Liz said. “Remember how I never aged?”

Alex nodded. That was after all one of the things his Aunt was rather famous for-Staying in her 20s even when she entered her 40s.

“Turns out, the reason is that I have a special body constitution,” she said.

“I would’ve guessed that even if you didn’t say it,” Alex said. After all, his father’s side of the family was what gave him his current body constitution. “Wait, is your body related to time?”

“Yes,” Liz said excitedly. “The game said it’s called something like Profound Temporal Celestial body. It’s a Celestial grade body.”

“A celestial grade?!” Alex’s eyes went wide. That was quite good. In fact, it was the same grade as his. “Temporal... so you have a connection to time through your body, huh?”

“It seems so,” Liz said. “I only found out after I went into the Ancient Battlefield and could sense that there was something wrong with it. I realized that whoever was responsible for that situation was a very high-ranking Immortal with an incredible understanding of the time dao.”

“And more likely than not, when he was about to die, he used his Dao of Temporal Stagnation to slow down everything around him to a crawl. He was successful, but he must’ve died in the process.’

“So, the world in there is still stagnated, while here outside it’s moving normally,” Liz said. “It should stop soon... but from the perspective of everything caught in the Temporal Stagnation, soon is still a very long time later.”

“I see,” Alex nodded to himself as things started making some sense. He understood why Ancient Battlefield was the only battlefield since ancient times that remained, and he understood why his Aunt was able to learn the Time Dao.

The only thing that still remained unanswered was why he was able to learn Space dao. In fact, now that he thought about it, why were both he and Pearl able to feel the space aura?

Was it really because he spent a lot of time inside the Beast realm, and thus they were both able to sense the aura? Or was there a better answer to his confusion?

Alex had no way of finding out at the moment, so he stopped thinking about it and looked outside the ship at the scenery that passed by.

He called out both Pearl and Whisker, who he introduced to his aunt, and continued talking to her about her life here on this continent. As for his own life, he kept as much as he could to himself. He didn’t want the old woman to learn too much.

The environment changed slowly. From snow-filled mountains to snow-filled plains, the land changed a lot, and as they went further, the snow slowly melted too.

Liz talked about how she came to be where she was.

When she first played the game, she had arrived at one of the southern cities of the State of Re.

After arriving, she had found herself a small sect to join, and cultivated there until she was strong enough.

She took part in a competition under her elder’s orders and was there scouted by the Blazing Earth sect, whose elders were the guest in the competition.

She had then gone to the Blazing Earth sect and had become its disciple for a few months until the old woman had found her during one of her years when she left closed cultivation.

Liz’s body was good, but her talents weren’t that far off either. Even at the worst, being a pure-blooded human, she would be very talented.

However, as luck would have it, she had a Divine grade talent as per the system she checked it through.

With her body helping her too, she was able to quickly rise through her cultivation realms until she caught the old woman’s eyes.

It was only after the old woman properly looked at her cultivation base and told her to stop improving so quickly did Liz finally stop and worked on building her foundation better.

One of the things she had to do for that was to enter the Ancient Battlefield and improve inside.

Fortunately, she was able to gain a rather large insight into a dao, which made the old woman take her disciple to the Dao mountain.

After that, Liz defeated the others to find herself a spot there, entered the Dao mountain until she reached the top, and gained her first-time dao.

After that, she continued to improve. She was given all the resources in the sect, and it didn’t take long before she was ready to break through.

Having had precedence, Liz went to a different section of the sect where no one would be around and broke through to the Saint realm despite her inner demons and the lightning tribulations.

After that, she was the sect’s greatest talent and as such was still spoiled to this very day.

Alex couldn’t help but smile at how easy his aunt had. His mother had it easy as well.

Now, he hoped the rest of his family had it easy too.

The scenery changed even further as the mountains continued to disappear even further, only rarely appearing anymore. The snow was all but patches on the ground, and the sun shined through the clouds brightly.

The more south they went, the hotter it got. As such, after a few more hours, Alex stopped seeing snow completely.

It was at the same time that he realized that he had entered the State of Re, the only state in the entire Northern Continent where it didn’t snow the whole time.

Night had fallen by now, and he could see some volcanic mountains in the distance. In fact, it was a bunch of them. 12 to be exact.

“Is that where the 13th Volcanic mountain lies?” Alex asked.

The old woman didn’t even look as she nodded. “Yes,” she said.

“I hear entering it is free. Do you think I can go in?” he asked.

“Of course,” the old woman said. “I remember sensing Fire dao amongst the ones you learned. You must wish to learn more in there, huh? Don’t worry, after we return to the sect, I will arrange for someone to take you there.”

Chapter 936 Blazing Earth Sect

Alex and the rest arrived and flew into the Blazing Earth sect.

Situated in a barren land, the Blazing Earth sect was a massive city-like sect surrounded by 18 different pillar-like plateaus from the outside.

Each of those plateaus was a couple of hundred meters tall, and about 3 hundred meters wide. They looked natural, but Alex wouldn't be surprised if they were man-made either.

Alex saw light on top of those plateaus and could see a bunch of disciples training on top of it.

As he went further, he finally saw the sect itself.

Like the Frozen Heart sect, the Blazing Earth sect was surrounded by walls and could be easily mistaken for a city. He guessed why the two sects would look similar, as they had once belonged to the same Super sect, but it was still surprising that they hadn't changed in the least.

The old woman flew into the walls, and despite being nighttime, Alex could see hundreds of thousands of disciples on the streets.

"How many disciples do you have?" Alex asked.

"Hmm... last I recall, we had about 350 thousand disciples, with over 250 thousand in the outer sect alone," the old woman said.

"And the core disciples?" he asked.

"About 5 thousand," the old woman said.

"Wow, that's higher than the girls from the Frozen Heart sect," Alex said.

"Of course," the old woman said. "They have a disadvantage when it comes to core disciples when compared to us. Not only do they not have as many disciples simply due to the fact that they only take females, but they also only accept core disciples from amongst those that cultivate their Frozen Heart Scripture."

"It would be scary if they had any more Core disciples than they do," she said.

"I see... that makes sense," Alex nodded. "So, are you still a disciple or an elder now, aunt?"

"I'm somewhere in between. I'm a disciple with the authority of an elder, I would say," Liz said.

'Ah, like I was,' Alex thought.

The buildings in the Blazing Earth sect were simpler than the ones in the Frozen Heart sect. They were tall with multiple stories and could house more disciples at once in a single building.

Instead of there being a massive tower in the middle, the sect facilities were different buildings with a massive building in the middle for the sect leaders and such.

Alex was sure there were more buildings underground for the Ancestors to live in, closer to the spirit vein.

"Zhumei, take your nephew around the sect. I will have to go and report to the sect master about what happened in the Dao mountain," the old woman said.

"You're going to talk about Alex?" Liz asked. Alex turned to look at her as well.

"I will have to," the old woman said. "Even if I don't, someone else will."

She then turned towards Alex and said, "I'm sorry if you wanted to live a life without much hassle, but with what you did at the Dao mountain, I'm afraid your name will be spread throughout the continent. At least the upper echelon for sure."

Alex nodded. "I understand," he said. "I was ready for it anyway."

He wasn't worried about his name being spread wide as along with the name, the thing that would be spread would be his description.

He didn't know if his black robe would be a descriptive feature, but his White Mask would definitely be something that gets spread as well.

As long as he took off his mask, he would lose his identity and would thus be able to go back to being a nobody in everyone's eyes.

After the old woman left, Alex went around the sect with his aunt, looking at the various places.

He was introduced to the Formation hall, Painting hall, Puppetry hall, Talisman hall, Artifact hall, and everything else that could be considered a profession.

Alchemy hall existed as well, but Alex only sensed the disciples inside medicinal pastes instead of pills. He searched for the ones that made pills, but he couldn't even find a formation where one could place their cauldron at.

"What's the punishment for people making pills in this state, aunt Liz?" Alex asked.

"Punishment? There is none," she said. "Only thing I would really consider being a punishment is that if you are an alchemist, you can never associate yourself with the Blazing Earth sect."

"Meaning?" Alex asked.

"Let's see... Pill makers can't join the sect, and if you're ever found out to be one, you will be expelled. The sect will do nothing to help you if you are an alchemist that makes pills, the sect won't do any business with you, or sell you ingredients," Liz said.

"Well, all in all, the sect just acts like you don't exist and lets you do whatever you want. Although that is very discouraging for people that want to become an alchemist," she said.

"That's a shame," Alex said.

"Are Alchemists prevalent in the Western Continent?" she asked.

"Yes, very," Alex said. "In fact, that is the only thing we even have. It was only a few years ago that medicinal pastes were even discovered."

"Only recently? You people exclusively made pills beforehand?" She asked in surprise. She could count on one hand the number of times she had eaten a pill since she entered the True realms.

"Yes," Alex said. "Medicinal pastes are reserved for medical problems only. Everything else is solved by pills."

"I see. It's a shame that the Northern Continent hates Alchemists so much, or we would have gotten a lot of pills too," Liz said.

"Do you know why that is?" Alex asked. He had tried asking this to many people, many times, but he had never gotten any answers.

Elder Xuan especially refused to speak of the topic at all whenever he tried to inquire about her, and the rest acted oblivious in front of him.

"Honestly, I don't know. I simply treat it as some cultural thing that causes them to hate pills. Like maybe some sort of superstition? If you make pills, a monster will come and kill you... that kind of thing," Liz said.

"Have you heard these superstitions?" Alex asked.

"No, just my guess," Liz said. "Why? Can you make pills too?"

"Somewhat," Alex said. "Don't tell anyone though. I might get in trouble."

"Oh no, I won't tell anyone," Liz said. "I don't want to lose the only family member I found."

Liz proceeded to show more of the sect as they talked. They walked around as the first light of dawn shined through the east and Alex saw people rushing out of their buildings.

"Where are they going?" he asked, seeing them in such a hurry.

"Oh, these are the body cultivators. They train themselves in the sun, so they are rushing to find themselves a spot in the plateau where they can train," she said.

"Wait, body cultivators?" Alex was a little surprised. 'That's right, this sect does have body cultivators. I forgot.'

He looked at the red-robed disciples rushing through the streets.

"Do you think I can go watch them?" he asked.

"You're interested?" Liz asked. "If so, then we have to leave at once."

Chapter 937 Body Cultivation

Alex flew along with his aunt to the outside of the city and went to one of the plateaus in the east.

He landed at the edge and saw over a thousand different disciples there ready to train.

As soon as Liz landed on the plateau, every single one of them greeted her. After all, she was the highest-ranked disciple of the sect and everyone looked up to her.

They all returned to their task, and as soon as the sun was up, they brought out a bunch of staff and before Alex's eyes, started striking at each other.

They stayed in pairs and while one of them hit the other, the other one took the attack without flinching. Alex could see the signs of pain on their face as most of the ones being hit took the swing to their body while biting on their own lips.

"What... are they doing exactly?" Alex asked. "Trying to hurt themselves?"

"Have you never seen someone cultivate their body? Keep watching," she said.

Alex focused on a pair not far away from him. His spiritual sense landed on the two men as he checked what was happening to them.

Aside from getting hurt, Alex really didn't see anything in particular that changed. But of course, they weren't doing it for no reason so he waited.

Getting hurt was part of the requirement for improving one's body, but surely there were better methods than this right?

Also, getting hurt was half the task from what he could understand. Aside from getting hurt, you needed to be able to heal quickly too.

That was the part Alex was curious about more than anything. 'They don't have pills, and excessive uses of medicinal pastes should have diminishing effects if they use it too frequently. And if they do heal slowly, taking their time, that will overall slow down their body cultivation, right?' he thought.

He continued watching as the group hit themselves continuously. At some point, Alex and Liz had to sit down and talk about various things as it took a very long time.

"I heard there weren't many disciples that were willing to body cultivate, but from what I see, that's not true," Alex said.

"Where did you hear that?" Liz asked.

"Elder Xuan, from Frozen Heart sect," Alex replied. "Was she wrong?"

"No, she just had outdated information. It was true about a decade ago, but once the players started taking the spotlight slowly, the others needed to show them they weren't any worse too, so everyone started to body cultivate after that."

"Ah, that makes sense."

Finally, after a few hours, after both of them were beaten and battered, the two disciples put away their staffs and sat down in a meditative posture.

They pulled out various different natural treasures and started cultivating them.

Suddenly, Alex could feel the energy from the treasures being drawn into their body, slowly healing their wound. It was a slow heal, but quite definite.

"That's... are they using a technique to heal?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Liz said. "It's a sect secret though. You will need to speak an oath to never reveal the technique."

"It seems they require quite a few ingredients though," Alex said and he looked at the items that were being siphoned off.

"Hmm... do you need a source for every single one of the 5 elements?" Alex asked. From what he could see, that was most definitely the case.

"Oh, is it?" Liz asked. "I never realized. I never really bothered about improving my body. It seemed pointless and too painful too."

"It most definitely is painful," Alex said. He looked at the thousands of disciples in front of him and wondered how strong their body cultivation actually was.

"Who's the strongest body cultivator here?" he asked his aunt.

"I... don't know actually. I don't really mingle with the disciples much," she said.

Alex nodded and walked forward to one of the disciples and asked them the same question. Feeling his saint aura, the disciples who were merely True Lord realm cultivators could not refuse at all.

"If you count elders, then it will have to be elder Jiang over there," the man pointed to a rather buff man towards the center of the plateau.

Alex slowly treaded through the group of people and appeared in front of the man.

"Greetings brother, I hear you're the strongest body here," he said.

The man, who was way older than Alex, opened his eyes. He sensed the Saint aura coming from Alex and was confused. When he saw him with his black robe and white mask, the man was even more confused.

"Can I help you?" the man asked. Seeing a masked man looking for the 'strongest' person in the place wasn't something he had expected to see this day.

"Would you mind hitting me?" Alex asked.

"... what?" the man was confused.

"I was hoping you could help me understand how strong the body of a normal body cultivator can become," Alex said.

Alex sensed a few spiritual senses landing on him, each one of which originated from way deep in the sect, close to the outer ranges of his own spiritual sense.

He smiled but ignored them.

"What are you doing?" Liz quickly walked up to the two of them. "Why are you trying to get hit?"

"Is he with you, little sister?" the Saint asked.

"I'm sorry if we disturbed you, elder," Liz started apologizing.

"No, it's fine it—" the man stopped speaking and his head shifted a little to the left, looking towards the sect with a confused look.

He then looked back towards Alex, who was unreadable thanks to his mask, and sighed. "You want me to hit you?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Without my cultivation base, right? Just my body?" he asked.

"That is what I want," Alex said.

"Okay, then get ready."

The elder stood up while taking back the entirety of his Qi from his body back into his dantian, as his body became the same as that of a mortal.

Of course, it wouldn't be exactly the same as a mortal, as the man had body cultivation after all.

Alex stood with his arms behind his back, seemingly on guard, waiting for the man to punch him.

"Well, here I go then," the man said and wound up his arm before violently punching Alex directly on his stomach.

Alex had put up a 'guard' of Qi to block the man's arm with soft Qi so that it didn't actually strike his body and get hurt.

So, by the time the man's punch landed on his stomach, most of the power behind the punch had already dissipated.

'True Disciple... 3rd? No, 4th,' Alex judged the power behind the punch.

"Do you want me to punch you once again?" the man asked.

"No, that's alright," Alex said. "I must congratulate brother on having such a good body cultivation base on top of being a Saint. If you don't mind me asking, how many years have you been body cultivating?"

"Let's see... about 5 centuries now, I think," the man said.

Alex paused for a moment. "Sorry, did you say 5 centuries? You meant 5 decades instead right?" he asked.

"Hahaha! You can't become this strong with your body cultivation without putting in a few hours," the man said. "Of course, I could've done it faster had I focused on body cultivation, but I had to focus on my own cultivation too."

"I see," Alex said. "Thank you for answering. Have a good day."

Liz walked forward at the same time. "Let's go, Master is calling for us," she said.

Alex nodded and left the plateau.

They soon arrived in front of a rather large building with multiple stories and entered.

Liz took him to one of the rooms on the upper floor of the building that was covered with red carpet and curtains.

Inside were 3 people waiting for them. The first one was Tai Guan, Liz's master.

The second one was a man with white hair, braided along the side of his temple.

The third person was also a man who wore glowing red robes. His short hair with a shaved face made him look younger than he was.

"Come on, let me introduce you," the old woman said.

"This is the Grand Elder of the sect, Yuan Chi," she showed the white-haired elder. "And this is Bai Qiyi, our Sect Master."

Chapter 938 Alchemy; Bad

“Greetings, seniors.” Alex cupped his hands as he bowed a little toward the two men in front of him.

“I hear that you’re disciple Li’s nephew, is that true?” the sect leader asked.

“That is indeed true, sect master Bai,” Alex replied.

“Then… you must be quite young. Disciple Li herself is very young, not even 65 years old, and already a Saint Condensation 3rd realm cultivator. I suppose you are much younger than her?” the Sect Leader asked.

Alex frowned a little. He didn’t think they would realize his age so quickly. He had wanted to not draw any attention to that. But then, they would’ve tested his aunt, and using their relationship, it was easy to figure out he was young.

“Yes, I am,” Alex replied seeing as there was no reason to lie anymore.

“Would you mind telling us how young you are?” the grand elder asked.

“Hmm… time’s hard to keep track of right now, but I should be about 35 years old,” Alex said.

“My god! 35 years old and you’ve already entered the Saint realm,” the sect leader said. “Would you mind telling us how you cultivated so fast?”

“Lots and lots of pills,” Alex said. If the old woman had delivered any information, then the fact that he was from the western continent would definitely be it.

“Pills? They can help you grow that much?” the Sect master asked. He seemed genuinely curious.

“Yes,” Alex said. “Once you stop caring about your foundation and start munching on them, yes. I was lucky that someone stopped me early on, or I would’ve ruined my cultivation. Still, by that time I was quite far ahead, and stayed that way.”

“I see, pills can help you so much huh,” the sect master fell into thought. He seemed to be quite interested in them.

“Pills are bad, sect master,” the grand elder said from the side. “You cannot think just about the good things that will come with it. You have to think about the bad things too.”

“You keep saying that but you never tell me what’s so bad about it,” the sect master asked. “It’s been a decade since I took station, so as a Sect Master I should be privy to these things, no?”

The grand elder and the old woman sighed. “You will find out soon enough, sect master,” the old woman said. “You will learn soon enough why Alchemy is the bane of our society.”

Alex wanted to ask why that was too, but if it was so serious that even the sect master himself wouldn’t know why, then there was no way they were going to tell him at all.

The sect master turned back towards him and said, “anyway, I hear you left the Frozen Heart sect. Is that true?”

“Yes,” he said.

However, before he could continue, the sect master asked, “Then you surely have no reason to refuse to join our sect, do you?”

“I do have a reason, sect master,” Alex said. “I simply don’t want to. That was the reason I left the Frozen Heart sect as well. I didn’t want to remain in a sect.”

“Do you hate sects?” the old grand elder asked.

“Hmm… Hate is not the right word, I suppose. It’s more like I don’t like being tied down by duty and responsibilities. At least ones I don’t want to take on for myself. Besides, I have too many other things to worry about than worrying about the sect,” Alex said.New n0vel chapters are published on

“But the benefits you get from being in a sect is unimaginable, young man,” the old woman said. “All the free cultivation techniques, skills, elders’ knowledge, and the various resources you get are simply too great to miss out on.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Alex said. “At least, not from my experience. You can do quite well as a rogue cultivator so long as you are talented enough.”

“If you join, we will give you unlimited access to our sect’s library. You can learn any techniques you want, including our prized body cultivation technique. We will also include free resources for you to use for body cultivation,” the sect master said.

“I’m sorry, sect master. I will have to refuse.” Alex’s response left the three elders confused. They were sure that after seeing the body cultivation of the other elder, he would have been more than happy to join them, but it seemed they were wrong.

“Do you really not want to become a body cultivator?” the old woman asked. “Our sect has the best body cultivation method in the entire continent.”

“I hear that, and I suppose that it is true, but I’m still underwhelmed,” Alex said.

“You don’t understand, young man,” the grand elder said. “You only felt the elder’s body cultivation. If he were to attack using both his cultivation base and his body, he would beat anyone above his own realm.”

“Can he beat me?” Alex asked.

“That’s…” the 3 fell into thought. There was no way to come up with a ‘yes’ as an answer to this question. After all, what sort of person could possibly fight against someone with 10 different Daos, and a Sword Aura?

Not to mention, they had heard of him being able to fight incredibly high above his own realm.

“No, I suppose no,” the sect master said.

“I thank seniors for their intentions, but I have no reason or interest in joining any sect. And if you are worried about me joining the other sects, then you can stop fearing about that as well, as I truly have no need from any of the other two sects either.”

“I neither need any knowledge about how to take better care of my own beasts nor do I want to learn any more about poisons than I already do,” Alex said. “And I’m perfectly contented with my current cultivation speed.”

“I… I see,” the sect master said. “Then I suppose there is no reason to keep asking you. Although, I hope you will stay in the sect for a while, enjoy our hospitality.”

“I will,” Alex said. “I thank you for that, sect master.”

Chapter 939 Minor Training

The 3 seniors tried very hard to provide any sort of incentive to get Alex to join their sect, even if it meant having Liz ask for it herself. However, Alex refused every single time.

The next week or two of his passed quietly. He spent the majority of his time with his aunt, learning more about her and how life was for her in the sect.

Aside from training every day, Alex didn’t see anything else she did. So, he decided to teach her something so she could pass her time and be a little productive herself.

Since he was not very good at making artifacts yet, and with Alchemy simply frowned upon, he gave her the choice between Formations and Talismans.

Liz had heard about the development of runes outside of talisman, so she asked if she could learn that instead. Alex agreed and taught her about it.

Liz was talented enough that she learned anything Alex threw at her with relative ease. She wasn’t as fast as Alex or his mother, but she was plenty talented to throw most of the geniuses in the Northern Continent for a loop.

Aside from teaching her about talismans and runes, Alex also gave her the various skills he had gathered over the course of his life here.

She wasn’t able to use quite a few of them however due to her only having 3 different spiritual roots, Earth, Water, and Metal, of which only Earth was Superior.

Alex couldn’t really help her there. Liz tried giving some of her own techniques to Alex, but there was nothing he wanted from her in regard to techniques and resources.

What he did want her to do was use her Dao to make a room full of time Dao so he could see if he could possibly sense them.

He had no hope himself, but there was nothing wrong with trying.

So, every day, Alex would cultivate in a room where time passed at a very slow speed compared to outside where he forced himself to try and sense the aura.

It wasn’t just him either. He had brought out both Pearl and Whisker to see if they could sense it too. He was particularly hopeful of Pearl who had managed to learn a Space dao somehow and hoped he could sense Time dao too.

However, even after 2 weeks of doing this, Alex wasn’t able to learn anything at all.

In the end, he had to give up on it. He had managed to learn Space aura for some reason. So if he learned time aura somehow as well, he would be able to learn it for sure.

Alex left the room and went to talk to his aunt.

Liz was working on some talismans in her free time. She still spent most of her time cultivating, but she had more than just that to do for now.

“Are you busy?” he asked from the door.

“Hmm, come in. Do you want something? Did the aura disappear already?” Liz asked.

“Ah, no. It’s fine, but I don’t think I’ll be using it anymore,” Alex said.

“Oh! Did you learn it?” Liz asked happily.

Alex shook his head with an awkward smile. “I was unable to,” he said. “I’m simply here to tell you that I’m going over to the volcano now. It’s been a while since I came here and it’s about time I do what I’ve been meaning to.”

“Oh, okay. Wait, let me come with you,” Liz said as she started to pack up her things.

“No, you don’t have to,” Alex said. “I will be fine all by myself.”

“Are you sure? I haven’t been to the secret realm myself, but I hear it’s quite treacherous. There’s fire everywhere, and weak Qi sometimes gets overwhelmed and doesn’t work the way it should. It’s always better to have someone by your side,” Liz said.

“Don’t worry, aunt Liz. I have learned the Fire Dao. Fire is the least of my worries at the moment,” Alex said.

“If you... say so, ok,” she said. “Wait let me tell my master. She should arrange something for you.”

Liz used her talisman to send a message and not long after, the old woman arrived.

“You’re going to the 13 Volcanoes?” she asked.

Alex nodded. “I was about to leave right now,” she said.

“Not alone, I hope,” she said.

“I... was actually hoping to go all alone,” Alex said.

“Absolutely not! You’re too important to go in all alone. Even if you know the Dao, there are still many treasures in there, some of which can even poison you,” the old woman said.

“Huh? What do you mean by important?” Alex asked. ‘Were they still expecting him to join their group?’

“Nothing that concerns you,” the old woman said. “You’re going right now, right? Good, let’s leave. I’ll take you there.”

The old woman turned around and got ready to leave.

Alex hesitated a little bit. He really wanted to do it all alone. But how was he to refuse the words of a Saint Soul realm cultivator?

He sighed in the end. “Alright,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”

“Take care,” Liz said and waved the two of them away.

Alex walked out with the old woman and then flew his way out of the sect, going beyond the many plateaus, on their way towards the volcanoes nearly 10 kilometers away.

That sort of distance to a saint realm cultivator was nothing. In fact, Alex could already see the mountain from where he was.

They glowed orange even in sunlight due to the volcano constantly remaining active.

Alex’s eyes worked fantastically in that he could see countless figures around the mountain even from this far a distance. He could see up to hundreds of kilometers without any trouble. Although at some point everything would be too small even to make sense of it at all.

Alex could see the tiny particles of dust in the air, moving slowly in front of him even when he was moving quickly.

There was absolutely no delay between him seeing things and his mind realizing what he had seen.

As he had expected, the first stage of Demon Eyes was quite good. But still, it wasn’t good enough.

The real fun started when he reached the 2nd stage. Alex wondered if he could reach that within the next few years.

Surely in the next decade right?

As the two of them got closer to the volcanoes, his sense was already on top of the people there, and he saw quite a few people working with pickaxes.

“Are they mining for some ores?” Alex asked curiously.

“Ores or any fire treasure,” the old woman said. “Fire treasures usually grow around the volcanoes, but there are also times when they form inside the volcanoes themselves and are quite potent with Fire energy.”

“One of the most well-known treasures that come out quite frequently is Fire jade, which is quite dense with fire Energy. If they can’t get that, then the people make do with ores. The metals that come out here are already infused with fire energy, so they make for some of the best Fire attribute artifacts,” the old woman said.

“I see,” Alex said and looked towards the people who struck the ground with their pickaxes. The lava continuously flowed down the side of the mountain, but at some point, it froze enough that people didn’t need to fear them.

At that time, they started breaking through the semi-frozen lava and harvesting it.

It wasn’t just a single mountain too, but rather all 12 volcanoes had the same thing happening. However, it only happened on the outside.

When Alex arrived, he saw that the inside of the 12 massive volcanoes was an island surrounded by hot lava on all sides.

There were people at the center, harvesting more Fire treasures, and even some plants that grew from the heat.

He could see almost all of them have some sort of item on them, protecting them from the heat as they worked on it.

The two of them slowly landed on the island, and people started staring at them, primarily because of the old woman.

They all greeted her, but she gave them no heed at all.

Alex looked around the area and asked, “So, where exactly do I enter the 13th Volcano from?”

Chapter 940 The 13th Mountain

The lava from the 12 volcanoes flowed inward as well, but due to the immense heat in the valley, they never froze as soon as they did on the outside, and instead created a ring around the massive valley.

The valley itself was close to 5 kilometers in diameter and was mostly barren apart from the few plants that did grow.

Aside from that, there were many other resources that were mixed into the valley itself. If Alex wasn’t wrong, the valley itself used to be a pool of lava that later froze to be what it was at the moment.

Multiple sources of fire energy bombarded Alex’s senses as the Dao of fire, not even the True Fire dao, allowed him to locate almost every Fire energy treasure nearby.

Not only that, but he could also tell their potency and type to some extent.

Many people around the inner ring were working to freeze the lava that flowed in the ring and took from it what they could get.

Since this was a free place for anyone to enter, hundreds of people were there, trying to get their hands at getting something valuable for themselves.

As Alex felt the fire energy in the air, he also sensed something in the distance and turned around.

Towards the center, but a little to the left, there was a massive rock that was about twice the height of Alex. It was red in color and even from afar it was easily visible.

Also, Alex could sense some manipulated space from there.

“Where’s the final volcano?” Alex asked, wanting to confirm.

“Don’t you want to stay around here, do what you came to do?” the old woman asked. “There’s plenty of fire energy to go around.”

Alex shook his head. “It’s too weak. I need stronger energy. Let us enter the secret realm, senior,” he said.

“Sigh, very well. Come with me,” she said and took him over to the red rock. As they got closer, Ning could now clearly see writings on it that looked like runes.

“Who wrote those runes?” Alex asked curiously.

“It was always here,” the old woman said.

‘The demons then,’ Alex thought to himself. He placed his hands on the stone as he approached it, and even before the old woman could stop him, he vanished.

Alex appeared in a very hot environment, surrounded by glowing lava all around him.

He saw a few people working in here too but compared to the number of people that were outside, this number was terrible.

Although, why would it not be? After all, the amount of Fire energy that was here was enough to kill anyone, not in the True realm. If they were in the True realms, it would be easy to get negatively affected by the absurd amount of fire Qi in this place.

Even the Saint realm cultivators could barely get by here.

The 13th volcanic mountain was a massive volcano over 5 thousand meters in the sky. Even looking at it from far away, it was bigger than the other 12 without question.

The old woman appeared behind him and scolded him, but Alex only apologized for a little and stopped caring for her.

His senses were on fire as the many different fire attribute treasures in the area were calling for him through his dao.

Even if he didn’t have a Dao, he would still have been able to sense such a thing through his Flame Mastery Scripture.

He looked towards the top of the volcano and sensed quite a lot of fire aura emanating from there. “I have to go there,” he pointed to the location.

“To the top? But it’s extremely hot,” the old woman said.

“I’ll be fine,” Alex said and started walking.

The old woman tried to stop him, but Alex didn’t hear her words. She was way too cautious for the wrong reasons.

Alex would understand if there were beasts here that were dangerous or lava randomly jumped out of the mountain and threatened to kill you.

But from what she was saying, Alex could only assume that she didn’t think that his newly Saint ascended body could handle the flame aura.

Alex shook his head and continued on his path toward the top. He went past a few people, all of whom were searching for treasures around the location or digging for them from the volcano itself.

Alex reached next to one of the lava trails that the men were digging on with their pickaxe. He looked into the lava for a few seconds and reached out his hands.

Suddenly, something flew out of the fire. It was a small rectangular piece of translucent red stone, that was otherwise more commonly known as Fire jade here in this place.

Alex fished out 3 more Fire jades before leaving the place.

The old woman stared at Alex with a surprised look on her face. She had the dao of Fire too, but she was nowhere near as capable as him at distinguishing different fire types when they were close to each other.

The fire aura in the lava was different from the fire aura in the jade. It was such a small difference that when one was covered by the other, it would take the old woman at least a few minutes to properly grasp the differences in the fire and understand that there was more than one.

However, Alex had only used a few seconds and did in that time what would’ve taken the old woman at least 5 minutes.

While the old woman was lost in her own little world, surprised to no extent, Alex had already found his way to another free spot in the lava where he got some more stuff.

The woman quickly followed him, while Alex took his sweet time finding fire resources.

Compared to the outside, this place was amazing. The entire atmosphere was full of a Fire aura of such strength that it would leave one’s lungs burning if they breathed in too much.

And yet, Alex continued going up fearlessly, employing absolutely no techniques whatsoever as he believed that was not needed.

He arrived next to a small branch of the flowing lava and pulled out some more Fire jades from there. He clawed his hands through the ground where he stood as he pulled out more fire jades.

He also found a few hidden herbs that weren’t plucked just yet. They were either hidden incredibly well in the rocks and grounds or were simply something that wasn’t thought of as resources by the people here.

“That’s poison, don’t take that,” the old woman said from behind.

“Thank you for the knowledge, senior. I will be more careful,” Alex said. He continued walking up the mountain, with only a few stops for adding more resources.

Finally, after more than half an hour, Alex arrived at the top of the volcano and looked at the scenery in front of him.

The entire crater was just a massive pool of magma, with the only seating sites being the edge of it.

Alex looked around and felt the intense fire energy coming from the volcano.

“This is perfect,” Alex thought to himself with a smile on his face. “With this, I should be able to improve my fire spiritual root.”

Chapter 941 Flame Mastery Scripture - Heaven Grade

“Young man, you’ll-Don’t sit there, it’s hot!” the old woman cried out. She had to use her cultivation base to protect herself completely and was terrified that Alex would kill himself.

Alex, meanwhile, was fine. He sat on the hot ground, where he had to use his cultivation base, but only to protect his clothes.

“You can step back if it is uncomfortable, senior,” Alex said to the woman.

“I... what about you? I’m here to look after you,” she said. She would very much like to leave but seeing as she had to stay for his sake, she was conflicted.

“I will be fine. I will cultivate here for a while, and once I’m done, I will leave,” Alex said.

The woman frowned, thought for a bit, and finally nodded. “I will wait for you a little below then. Don’t do anything rash,” she said.

“I won’t,” Alex said and looked away from the woman.

Now, there was only one thing on his mind. The Flame Mastery Scripture’s 3rd level.

As he thought, the technique inside of it floated into his mind. The technique to improve one’s Fire Spiritual root.

He mentally prepared for a while. Once he was certain he could do it, he decided to start.

Alex checked his mind, body, and spirit one last time before taking out the many treasures he had gathered on the way up.

He spread them around him, and once there was enough Fire aura around him, he reached into himself and started cultivating the technique.

His dantian shuddered for a moment as the Qi inside of it escaped through one side of the dantian. In fact, it all escaped through the Fire Spiritual root, turning the Qi that escaped into fire Qi itself.

As it moved up, going through one of the 4 different branches of the spiritual roots, it slowly called for more Fire aura from within Alex.

There were few, once he had unintentionally gathered on his way up, but those were far too few for the Fire Qi. It wanted to grow more. Alex wanted to grow more.

So, his body reached far outside of its own scope and into the atmosphere around him, pulling the fire Qi outside into his body.

As it did, the fire Qi went into his meridians, pulled by his fire Qi and it got denser. It was too dense and hard for his meridians to control.

And it was at that point that the Qi did a complete circle, reaching his dantian again.

To enter the Dantian, however, the Qi had to be cleansed as it was far too dense for the Dantian itself to do so.

As such, as the Qi went into the dantian, it had to do so through the Fire Spiritual root, where the excess Fire aura was absorbed by the Spiritual root, growing it the slightest bit.

Alex felt uncomfortable, maybe even a little painful as his Spiritual Root wasn’t used to handling that much fire. However, since it helped it grow, he continued it.

This time when he pulled his Qi out from his dantian, he did so through the Spiritual root that was slightly better.

The Qi that came out was stronger by a little bit, but not enough for it to make much difference in the end.

Still, Alex continued the circulation of his Qi, pulling in more Fire aura that emanated from the treasures around him, and sent it back to his dantian through the other side. When he did that, the other Fire Spiritual root improved itself.

Once all the Qi was done, he brought out his Fire Qi again from the side that had just been improved.

He continued going back and forth between the two spiritual roots and felt it grow ever so slightly each time. There weren’t any massive improvements at once like when he had eaten the Earth Spiritual root improvement pill, not to even mention how his 3 major spiritual roots had perfected themselves.

Still, there was a sense of infinite growth with his technique. As long as he had enough aura, his spiritual root would continue to grow until it reached the Supreme stage.

So, Alex continued circulating his Qi, improving his spiritual roots while the treasures on the outside slowly lost their Fire aura.

It took Alex 5 hours of circulation before the treasures outside of him lost enough of their aura to make them useless.

His Fire Spiritual root, which was already quite good had improved much further, reaching close to Superior grade.

Still, Alex wasn’t done.

The old woman who stood a little away from Alex was surprised at how much Fire Qi he was sucking into his body while not letting the slightest bit out.

She could feel it disappear into him, but not a single one of it came back out.

‘What is he doing?’ she couldn’t help but be surprised. Her surprise only furthered when she sensed the Fire aura around the atmosphere started moving, slowly going towards Alex.

A massive area around his body was now under the effect of his Qi as the fire aura in it started being pulled towards him.

The old woman could see visible embers made up of the Qi move towards Alex.

He had become a vortex for everything fire and sucked it into the deep abyss that was his body.

The old woman tried to figure out what was happening, but there was simply no way for her to find out at all. All she could do was stand and watch the spectacle from afar.

Alex had lost all other sense inside of him, focusing solely on the gathering of Fire aura. He continuously improved his spiritual root and at some point, it had reached the Superior stage.

However, he wanted to go further. He continued gathering fire aura for another 6 hours before finally, he could gather no more.

It wasn’t that he could no longer gather fire Qi at all, but rather that the concentration of Fire aura that he naturally produced using his Fire Spiritual root had become the same or even exceeded the concentration of the fire aura outside of his body.

As such, he had reached the peak of what he could currently do with his Flame Mastery Scripture technique in this current place.

Alex stopped and opened his eyes. His senses drifted outward, searching for any location that might have a thicker fire aura, but he found none.

He sighed and looked into his own body again. His Fire spiritual root had either reached the same level as his Yin spiritual root or maybe even exceeded it.

However, it hadn’t entered the Supreme stage that was the peak of all spiritual roots.

He would need a lot better source of Fire aura to improve even further, and he knew he could. However, he couldn’t understand how much better of a Fire Aura he needed for his spiritual roots to enter the Supreme stage.

Even a ball of pure Yin Qi couldn’t help his Yin spiritual root reach the supreme level, so maybe he needed something better.

‘It doesn’t matter right now. I should just celebrate the fact that my Fire spiritual root has entered the Superior stage, and quite far into it too,’ Alex thought.

With this, his alchemy and even artifact forging would likely see some good improvements. However, the thing that would improve the most was definitely his fighting ability.

And with his True Fire Dao on his side, it was impossible to tell just how strong his attacks could become now.

The old woman went back up after seeing him get up from his seating position.

“Young man, are you alright?” she asked hurriedly. She sounded very worried after seeing him absorb so much of the Fire aura around them.

Alex turned around to see the old woman standing behind him. “Oh, senior. I’m fine,” he said. He dusted off his robes and started walking down.

“Are... are you truly okay? Young man, you took in so much of the Fire aura in the surrounding,” she said.

“Of course,” Alex said. “That was what I came here to do in the first place,” he said. “Now that I’m done, we should leave.”

The old woman wanted to say something, but Alex simply walked down from the volcano without even batting an eye.

In the end, she sighed and followed him, ignoring everything she had just seen. Compared to learning 8 dao in a single month, this was nothing in her eyes after all.

On his way down, Alex gathered a few more of the Fire treasures he could find. While he himself didn’t need it anymore, he intended to have Whisker use it when he entered the Saint realm himself.

By that point, however, Alex didn’t see himself remaining in the Northern continent anymore.

After all, in less than 7 years of time, the Demon realm would open up on the other side in the Western Continent, at which point he would be able to teleport back to the other side... hopefully.

If not, he would just have to become strong enough to fly over the entire ocean.

When he truly thought about it, if he went to the westernmost land of the Northern Continent, surely it wouldn’t be much of a journey to get to the Crimson Empire, right?

After coming down the volcanic mountain, Alex and the old woman used a script that was on the ground not far away to escape out of the mountain and into the valley surrounded by the 12 mountains.

Once they were out, the two of them returned back to the Blazing Earth sect.

Chapter 942 Returning

Alex and the old woman returned to the sect. As soon as they returned, the old woman left him and walked away.

She was likely planning to discuss what she had seen with the other elders.

Alex returned back to his aunt, and after letting her know he was back, he went to his room.

He then cultivated, while constantly experimenting with his skills and abilities to see how much they had improved.

From what he could see, they were around the same level as his Metal and Yang skills, maybe a little worse, but far better than anything else.

Alex was happy to see it improve and couldn’t help but look forward to finding better Fire treasures so he could improve it more.

Now that he had done it, Alex needed to think of what else he wanted to do exactly. There were a few places he wanted to visit such as the Intercontinental Teleportation formation. He wanted to go there and see for himself if it really was out of commission for the moment.

Even if he couldn’t go back to the Western Continent with it, given that the Intercontinental teleportation formation there was ruined during the war five thousand years ago, he could still use it to go to the Southern Continent to find his father, or the Eastern Continent to find his sister.

Aside from that, there was also the Nine Wells of Time, which was said to show a person his past and future. Alex was truly curious about this and wanted to know what it could possibly show him.

However, while these two things were fun places to go to, they weren’t essential for him at the moment.

The place he really had to go to was one he had been to already. So, after contemplating it for over a day, Alex went back to his aunt and let her know about his thoughts on leaving.

“You want to leave? Already?” she asked worriedly. “But it’s only been a month since you came back.”

“I know, but I need to grow stronger,” he said. “So, I’m planning to return back to the Ancient Battlefield.”

“Do you have to?” she asked.

Alex shrugged. “I don’t see what else I can do right now,” he said. “As far as I know, it will open up in half a month again, so I want to go there. Actually, why don’t you come with me? Surely you can train there too right?”

Liz thought for a bit and sighed. “I can’t. Now that I think about it, you should go there actually. I will be leaving here for a while too, so you will just be alone,” she said.

“You’re leaving?” Alex was surprised. “Where are you going?”

“To an island in the Forever Isles. Master will take me there and help me train in real combat. Until now, I’m only ever fought in tournaments and such, so she wants me to learn it for real now.”

“Oh,” Alex thought. “How long will you be gone for?”

“I don’t think there’s an exact number to that yet, but I should be there for a few months at least,” she said. “Maybe even a year or more.”

“I see,” Alex said. “Then I will go to the Ancient Battlefield again. When will you be leaving?”

“In a few days,” she said. “You should speak with my master and the sect master to let them know you’re leaving too.”

“I will do that,” Alex said. He went over to speak to the old woman and the sect master, who after a bit of hesitation agreed to let him leave.

They wanted him to take a few people with him, but Alex refused. He didn’t want an entourage with him when he trained to become stronger.

Once they accepted the fact that he was leaving for the Ancient Battlefield soon, Alex returned to his room and prepared himself to go back.

He found soon enough that there was about a week remaining until the Ancient Battlefield opened again. There was far less time than he had expected there to be.

4 days later, Alex said goodbye to his aunt who was taken away by her master to train and become stronger. Now that she was gone, Alex had no more reason to stay behind in this sect anymore.

After staying there for one more day, Alex made his slow journey north. He called both Pearl and Whisker out so that they could enjoy the scenery as well.

Alex took careful notice of all the beauty in the Northern Continent, one that he had missed because he had to speed up to go everywhere.

Pearl loved flying on his own, and Whisker was slowly learning to do so. With a True realm cultivation base, he was more than strong enough to fly on his own. Still, since he had no proper practice before, Alex took his time letting Whisker fly slowly.

There was a whole day before the battlefield opened up, and since it was so close to them, Alex was taking the utmost time possible.

However, even slow, the distance was truly small, and as such, he arrived close to the Ancient Battlefield half a day before it was to open.

Alex looked at his own clothing and frowned. He still wore black robes and a white mask, and while it had become his identity, he didn’t want to be surrounded by people that wanted to do nothing but talk to him.

He thought of changing his clothes but decided not to. It wasn’t like he could always run away from his own fame. At some point, he had to accept it and instead use it for himself.

Alex stayed away from the gate as more and more people started gathering in a bunch.

He could hear the occasional chime coming from the ringing bells inside the battlefield, letting people know that it was time for them to leave.

Half a day later, the gates opened and thousands of people rushed out of it. Alex saw them leave, and finally, the people that were gathered outside saw their chances to enter.

Alex saw the horde of people enter and finally, he too went over to enter.

“You will have to try and survive it, okay? Even if it hurts, you have to fight back,” Alex said.

Whisker nodded with a firm expression and readied himself. Pearl walked freely by his side, not caring much for whatever was happening around him.

As they entered, Alex felt the familiar feeling of slowed-down time as Air, aura, and everything in between refused to move on their own accord.

‘Everything that was here during the battle was affected by the slowed-down time,’ Alex thought to himself.

Whisker flinched from the aura, but unlike last time, he could handle it. The intent made his head hurt as well, but as Alex had said, he tried and fought back against it.

They were in the area that was supposed to be without much aura and intent, but that was still too strong for Whisker.

“Train the best you can,” Alex said. “If it gets too strong, just go back to your space, okay?”

Whisker nodded and put on a fighting face this time as he told Alex to move forward. Alex chuckled and the three of them went ahead.

Alex stayed away from any place with a strong aura. This time around, he was freely using his spiritual sense on the ground area as he looked at every place he should not go for the sake of Whisker.

As he did, he started thinking about what place he should go to after Whisker was done in a few days.

“Should we return to the gorge with the sword cut?” Alex asked. “You need to learn the Dao of Sharpness too, right?”

“No,” Pearl answered him through his spiritual sense. “I already learned the Dao of Sharpness.”

“What? When?” Alex asked.

“In the mountain, while you were busy learning your big dao,” Pearl said.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Alex asked. He was astounded that Pearl managed to keep this from him for over a month.

“Well... you never tell me everything you learn. So I thought I should do the same too,” Pearl said.

“I...” Alex hesitated. “Fair enough, but you need to let me know these things, okay?”

“Okay,” Pearl said.

“Right then... so maybe we should skip on the gorge for now and go to the next place,” Alex said. “I do want to learn some more space dao.”

Chapter 943 The Crack

Alex walked through the aura-less path, letting Whisker handle as much as he could. He was noticed by a couple of people during the times, and while some thought to come and approach him, Alex’s cultivation base made them reconsider.

They had learned how strong he was before he had even entered the Saint realm, so trying to fight or challenge him right now was simply idiocy.

After a few days of walking, Alex arrived at the location of the spatial rift where the aura of space was the most potent.

After arriving, Alex waited on the outskirt where he could barely feel the aura, and started cultivating. He was waiting for Whisker to be done, so he had to remain out here.

However, Pearl had no such restriction at all, so Alex sent him inside to feel the stronger spatial aura. He warned Pearl not to go too far in, but other than that he could do whatever he wanted to.

However, Pearl said something that Alex felt was absolutely ridiculous in Alex’s eyes. Apparently, Pearl couldn’t feel the space aura at all.

“What? What do you mean you can’t feel it? You learned the Teleportation Dao,” Alex said. If someone was capable of learning such a dao, there was no way they couldn’t feel Space Aura right?

“But I really can’t feel anything. This is nothing like the aura from when you broke through,” Pearl said. He tried sensing it a little more, but he couldn’t feel anything.

Alex frowned. ‘What’s going on?’ he wondered. Was Pearl not accustomed to the Space aura enough to recognize it? Or was teleportation somehow different from everything single other aspects of the Space properties?

He didn’t think of that to be true, which was to say that there was likely another reason why Pearl couldn’t sense Space aura. Or maybe even another reason why he could only sense Teleportation aura.

In the end, since Pearl was useless here, he called him back and let Whisker stay with him while he himself went in and tried to understand the Space aura.

He spent the next few days trying to remember everything he had learned about the aura here and compared it with what new things he was learning.

Unfortunately, he didn’t see any difference. Which was to say that he had learned everything he could from the aura itself. If he wanted to learn more, he needed to change his environment. He needed to change his surrounding.

“Pearl, Whisker, you guys will need to hide for a bit,” Alex said. Pearl stood up and walked back to Alex before jumping into his beast space. Whisker went back a second later as well.

After they both were back, Alex stood up and walked in closer, closer until he was up and close to the crack in space.

The last time he was here, he remembered the crack, seeing it wide open and his senses never making anywhere in it. He remembered the fear he felt when he stood in front of the open crack, even though nothing of harm ever came from the crack itself.

He wondered why he feared it. Was it instinct? Was it the fear of something he could not see or feel? Did breathing the fabric of space put in him fear of the unknown?

Alex didn’t know, and this time, he wanted to find out.

He stood before the crack, that was visible to his naked eyes as well if you knew where to look. The light shifted at just the right angle around the crack, giving it a glass-like refraction capability, making it visible to him.

Alex moved his hands towards the crack but stopped. There was no reason he should be putting his arm at risk here. So, he brought out a random sword from his storage bag and slowly moved it toward the crack.

As he got closer, Alex felt a slight suction coming from the crack, one that slowly tried to pull on his sword. He easily resisted the force, but he was still surprised there was anything.

However, Alex didn’t feel any movement of the air around the crack. So he wondered why his sword was the only thing being dragged in. Or was it that the air that was around the crack had already gone in?

Maybe the fact that time slowed down drastically for the air in the area had something to do with it as well.

Alex took the sword and instead of moving it close to the crack, he moved it around the crack. More specifically, he tried to see how sturdy the wall was.

Previously, the slightest use of Qi had made the crack wide open, so this time he wanted to see if it was just as easy to open it. Or maybe, hitting it from the side even made the crack disappear altogether.

Alex slightly nudged the side of the crack and was immediately shocked. For something that was supposed to be made out of nothing, the silver lines of the crack were incredibly sturdy.

He pushed with slightly more strength and was even more surprised how he wasn’t capable of forcing it to budge at all.

‘How is it so strong?’ Alex wondered and used more force to move the sword through the crack in space. However, when even that didn’t work, Alex used his entire cultivation base and body to force the sword to move.

To his surprise, it worked. His sword moved through the crack and… one-half of the sword fell to the ground. Alex watched in surprise when he realized that he hadn’t moved his sword through the crack, but rather the crack through his sword.

‘How can this be?’ he wondered. ‘How is this so sharp that it can cut my sword?’

While his sword wasn’t made up of the best material, it was still quite great. Especially after his perfect tempering, the sword was a lot strong than other swords made up using the same materials and design.

‘Space can cut through items too?’ Alex thought for a bit. That was a massive piece of information he had just learned.

He tried meditating on that fact, ignoring his broken sword, but he reached nowhere. Cutting space was already something that he was barely capable of doing. Using Space to cut was not something he could hope to do anytime soon.

Alex got back up and looked at the silver crack that somehow shined even in the night light, most likely by refracting the silver light of the moon itself.

He hesitated for a bit, but there was nothing else he could do here that would help him learn more. There was only a single thing left, so Alex did it.

He took a deep breath and sent his Qi into the crack with the intent to open it up. Space aura emerged from him along with his intent and Qi, and when it landed on the crack, the crack opened up.

He sucked in even more air from the instance of fear he could help but feel. However, he quickly lost that thought as the majesty of what lay in front of him enamored him.

In his sense, the open crack in space was dark and turbulent. However, to his eyes, it looked beautiful. Like a work of art, the inside of the crack was ever-shifting with purple and silver colors along with some dark parts that constantly seemed to move around.

For some reason, Alex’s eyes, despite the fact of how good they were, couldn’t focus on anything in front of him. The silver and purple mixture looked as if it was right in front of him at one moment, and in the next, it was so far away that it looked tiny in comparison.

Alex didn’t know much about space, but even he could tell that the space inside the crack was ever-shifting, ever-changing.

Alex felt his spiritual sense crumble within a moment after entering again, and this time he thought he knew why.

When his spiritual sense entered the crack, it would be close to him. However, at the next stage, it would be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away and thus no longer work.

If what he realized was true, then there was more in this world than he thought he knew.

Alex took the broken top piece of the sword and took it close to the crack. He held it firmly so that the space crack didn’t suddenly swallow it in, but he also held it loose enough so that if there was any strong suction force around the crack, it didn’t drag him along as well.

When he did bring the blade close enough, he was surprised that the blade wasn’t sucked in at all. There was still some suction force, but it was of the same strength as when the crack was nothing but a splinter in space.

Still, he wanted to see what would happen to a blade if it did go into the crack, so after reaching close enough, Alex tossed it in.

The blade floated in the air right where Alex had tossed it, not going anywhere at all. It wasn’t affected by gravity, it seemed. Nor was it affected by time.

Alex was confused this time around. The space inside was definitely shifting, so why didn’t the blade move along with it?

He thought for a moment and wondered if it was stationary because he had opened the crack here. What if the blade was away from the crack?

He wanted to do some experiments with the crack now.

Chapter 944 Experimenting the Crack

Alex looked at the floating piece of the blade just next to the crack in space. It was so close that he could just reach in and pull it out.

Qi didn’t seem to work there, so if he wanted to pull it out, it had to be done by hand.

However, that was not what Alex intended to do at the moment. What he wanted to do was instead push it further. So, he took the other half of the blade that was still attached to the hilt and used it to push the floating blade deeper into the crack.

For a while, nothing happened. However, at some point, the blade suddenly vanished from his sight, gone somewhere never to come back.

Alex waited but that was indeed the last time he would ever see that sword. “So it disappears if it goes any further huh?” he thought.

“Never put anything in there that you don’t want to lose,” Alex made a mental note for himself and tossed the rest of the blade inside. It hovered within his reach again and would disappear if he sent it any further.

But this was going to be a different test. Instead of doing anything to the blade, Alex was going to manipulate the space itself.

He wondered, what would happen if he were to close this spatial crack. Would the item inside remain right here? Or would it disappear?

There was only one way to find out.

The spatial crack disappeared and closed as much as it could. The crack itself could not disappear, but the gate could. Alex hoped that was considered the same thing as his experiment would fail quite a bit if it wasn’t.

He waited for a while before opening the crack again. No longer was the blade there anymore. It had disappeared to someplace far away inside this... different dimension.

He tried once again, this time with a random branch. He kept the branch right by the crack and waited a full day while it was open. In the entire time, it was open, the branch remained right where it was.

Then, he closed the crack, just for an instant, and opened it back up. The branch was still there. Then, he closed it for a little longer and the branch was still there.

However, when he closed the crack for more than 3 seconds and opened it back up again, the branch was gone.

Alex tested with various things and realized that the space inside the crack, while it was open, was quite stable. However, once he closed it, within seconds, the space inside would follow the chaos that was everywhere else, rendering whatever was inside it permanently gone.

Which was to say he should never get in there and risk having the crack close up on him.

But... what if he did? What if he did go in? Would he die? Was there air inside he could breathe? There certainly was no Qi, at least not one he could feel.

‘What happens if I put in something long and push it as deep as I can?’ Alex wondered. He searched in his storage ring for what he could find and brought out a bamboo that was a few meters long.

The bamboo was a True rank ingredient, but he didn’t care for the moment. For now, he was too focused on his task at hand of figuring out if the space inside shredded anything that went in there or not.

He slowly poked in with his long bamboo and watched how far it could go. After about a meter in, Alex suddenly felt an incredibly strong force pull on the bamboo.

Alex held his ground and didn’t let it go, but the force was so strong that he would certainly get dragged in if he kept it up any longer.

The bamboo snapped in two outside of the crack while the piece that went in was lost, dragged in by the ever-turbulent space inside.

Alex finally felt the fear that he had been keeping aside until now. The beautiful silver and purple cacophony now looked like a terrible mixture of colors that were solely created to destroy anything that dared touch them.

With how easily the bamboo broke off, he wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that the space inside the crack could turn everything to shred.

“Wait, but no,” Alex thought. “The bamboo broke outside, not inside. If it was torn to shred, then the one I’m holding wouldn’t have remained intact.”

Alex fell into thought when he realized that he had come to the wrong conclusion. “So did the space inside not destroy the bamboo, but just pull on it so hard that it had to break outside? “ Alex thought.

If that was the case, then he just needed to pull on it harder, right?

Alex decided to try again but there was nothing else with him that was this long. He had sold all the different weapons already and the ingredients were mostly small by comparison.

“I still have the whip,” he thought, but using the Saint Whip felt just wrong. It didn’t feel right to use his whip on something that might destroy it.

“Ah, I don’t have to,” Alex thought and pulled out a bunch of clothes he had. These were clothes he had bought and kept for himself.

He soon tied the robes together to make a lengthy rope that was at least 5 meters long. Then, he tossed one end into the crack and immediately felt the pull.

It was like a vacuum sucking on everything in the area onto itself, or a great gravitational pull that was hard to move away from.

Alex pulled on it as hard as he could, and finally, after pulling on it long enough, the rope of robes came back out of the crack.

Alex checked the robe as soon as it was out and was surprised. “Space Aura? Of course, that place should be ripe with aura,” he said to himself. He wondered if he could train in there, but he wasn’t going to try that anytime soon.

He thought of putting his hands in to check as well, but he didn’t want to get pulled in of course.

He sat around, experimenting with some more minor things as he kept on closing and opening the crack as much as he could.

After some time, Alex realized something he hadn’t caught up on.

“The crack is getting smaller?” he thought in surprise. He had been using it so much that he didn’t realize that the crack itself was on the verge of disappearing.

Instead of looking like a shattered glass pane, it now looked like a thin piece of crack on the glass, and it would continue to fade if Alex kept using it as he was now.

Alex moved away from the crack and frowned a bit. If the crack disappeared, he wouldn’t get to learn much about it. And he really wanted to learn more about it.

But he couldn’t continue using the crack as it was. What he needed was a new crack altogether.

A new rift in space, which Alex very soon realized that only he could create himself.

“Well, time to learn how to properly cut space then.”

Chapter 945 Cutting

Alex moved away from the location with the space aura and went outside where he couldn’t feel space at all.

He was still capable of using the dao to teleport, so he did so and appeared quite a bit far away.

He called out both Pearl and Whisker in this location with barely any aura or intent and had the two of them train by themselves, while he trained on his own thing.

Alex then brought out a sword, his sword, and prepared himself. He closed his eyes and visualized cutting space to open the crack.

The act of cutting, the act of separating one thing into many was something Alex clearly understood. That was how he learned the Dao in the first place.

However, to cut something, he didn’t just need to know how to cut but also what he was cutting. And as of yet, he didn’t entirely understand space as an entity, or otherwise, he would’ve already gained a Dao.

Still, he tried. He opened his eyes and swung his sword in front of him with no Qi or aura aiding him except the Dao of cutting.

The air in front of him split into two and refused to join back until Alex let go of his intent, but the space was forever intact.

“Once again,” he thought and tried again.

He took a deep breath and prepared as well as he could before cutting, but the cut simply didn’t touch space at all.

‘Wait, can I not cut space at all? Sure I’m not too familiar with Space as well as I would like to be, but I should have improved by now right? I could cut space already before, so why am I failing now?’ he thought.

One thing was obvious why he was failing. Before, he had an already manipulated space with which he interacted. However, now he had to cut a solid space that was very stable and that he found impossible.

If he wanted to cut it, then he needed to find a way to make it unstable.

“Hmm... can I use the same space aura I used before?” Alex thought. He closed his eyes and reached deep within himself, the place where, for some reason, he had space aura.

He had been using it unknowingly this whole time, but after coming to the Ancient Battlefield, he had understood its existence. He was still unsure why it existed, but that was a mystery he would solve some other time.

He pulled out some space aura from himself and it landed on his blade. Then, he opened his eyes and swung the sword.

Suddenly, Alex felt it. The feedback on his sword as it passed through something other than air. It cut through space itself.

Alex saw the space cut in half, separated from itself. However, when he looked inside it, there was nothing to see.

He frowned. He had somehow cut the space in two, but that had only resulted in the space being separated. There was no crack in space.

Alex frowned. The space rejoined to become whole again once he let his intent disappear and tried again.

Once again, he tried to cut space to create the crack, but he was incapable of doing so. Somehow, he could only cut space and space alone.

Alex tried seeing what the difference was and realized that the cut space had a thickness to it that Alex could feel. When viewed by the side, Alex could see nothing different, but when he touched it, he could feel his hands refusing to pass the barrier without some effort.

Once the space reforged again, his hand passed through as if there was nothing there, to begin with.

“Why can’t I create the crack though?” Alex wondered. He returned to the crack’s location and spent a week or so trying to understand it again.

However, no matter how much he cultivated there, he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t able to create a crack himself. Was he missing something?

After trying for a while longer, Alex decided to stop this fruitless endeavor and decided to leave for some other place where he would be more successful.

He wondered if going back to the gorge was any good or not. After all, he had already learned Sword Aura. Anything else he would be doing there would be trying to handle the intent, which there was plenty of everywhere, especially in the sky.

“Although it might be better to go there just in case I learn more about Sword from there,” Alex thought. So, along with Pearl and Whisker, he made his way back towards the gorge.

Along the way, Pearl practiced his teleportation skill. He was capable of teleporting only up to 150 meters away, as opposed to Alex’s over 500 meters.

Alex concluded that the difference was because of his Intent. If Pearl improved his intent more, then he would definitely be capable of teleporting further.

Whisker teleported around to show off his skill too. Alex praised him quite a lot for what he was doing. Whisker had gotten quite good at using the Flickering Shadows technique.

As they walked, Alex was surprised when something suddenly entered his limited spiritual sense range. He hadn’t increased its range as it felt intrusive to everyone that he came across.

So, when the thing that came into his vision did, he couldn’t help but be surprised.

There was also the fact that this place had static air that barely transported sounds and aura, so he couldn’t even hear or feel the thing entering.

Alex’s eyes saw the thing before his senses could figure it out. His hands started moving in response, almost automatically, as he lift them up to catch it.

He caught the eagle that was sent flying towards him and saved it. The eagle cried out in pain, and Alex thought he had held it too tightly, but it turned out that it was simply in pain from the wounds on its body.

“Where did you come from?” Alex asked the wounded beast. The eagle tried moving around, but it was too hurt.

The eagle tried to speak, but the pain only made it screech further. Alex quickly brought out some pastes and applied it on the beast.

The eagle felt immediate relief and could finally speak up.

“My master! He’s in trouble. Please help him,” the beast said. It was only then that Alex realized that the beast was in the Saint realm.

‘A saint realm beast huh?’ he thought. He wondered when Pearl would enter the Saint realm too.

“Alright, where’s your master?” Alex asked.

The eagle moved its wings in a direction and Alex flew there immediately. Whisker got on top of Pearl and followed as fast as he could as well, but he lagged a bit behind.

When Alex flew for a bit, he saw something far away. 4 people surrounded a single man on the floor that was already bloody and bruised.

He went even faster, and the others noticed his arrival.

Alex stopped not far away from the battle and looked at the group in confusion. After all, both the attackers and the victim wore the same purple robe.

They were all from the same sect.

Chapter 946 Ma Tianxin

The 4 men in the Saint realm looked towards Alex, who had arrived with the eagle. They immediately frowned when they recognized trouble.

Alex looked at the group and was likewise surprised. “Blue Spring sect?” he spoke out. Pearl and Whisker arrived at the scene, but Alex thought it was too dangerous to keep them out, so he immediately sent them back into their beast space.

He stayed there carefully assessing the situation. Should he help the man on the ground? He felt pity and thought of helping, but then again, this wasn’t his place to interfere. He didn’t even know who these people were.

For all he knew, it could be that the bloodied man was a vile criminal that deserved what he got.

Still, his inner belief told him not to let a man die without ensuring he deserved it. So, Alex slowly trod forward, looking around for any hint he could get.

The wounded eagle immeidately dropped from his arm and flew to its master.

“Fellow Daoists, may I ask what is happening here?” Alex asked the 4 men in front of him.

“It is none of your business, leave!” one of the men said. From what he could tell, the man was quite old and stronger than the man on the ground.

There were almost 5 realms of difference between the two. Which made Alex confused because the man on the ground would have died already if the others wanted that to be the case.

“You are true that this is none of my business, but this little bird asked me to save its master. I would feel terrible if I left here without helping the poor man, should he deserve it.” he said. “May I know what crime he has committed for him to deserve this sort of punishment?”

The man on the ground coughed up blood and made a loud noise as he took in some air to his blood-filled lungs.

He grabbed onto the sword by his side and used it to pull himself up.

Alex looked at the bloody man with a bit of surprise as he hadn’t imagined him to have as much life in him anymore.

The man spit a mouthful of blood on the ground next to him and spoke, “you may try as much as you want, but I will not cancel my marriage proposal. That was something awarded to me as a prime disciple. If Ren Xiuyin wants to break off our engagement, then I will accept her request, but I won’t do it because some jealous bastards threaten me.”

Alex was a little taken aback. ‘This whole thing is because of an engagement?’ he thought.

“You don’t seem to understand, Ma Tianxin,” the man spoke. “You’re on death’s door. You will either cancel your engagement with fairy Xiuyin and speak an oath to never talk about what happened here, or you will die here, along with your pet and this witness.”

The man named Ma Tianxin noticed Alex too and sent a message directly to his mind. “Run away. They won’t dare kill the Sect master’s disciple like me, but you may die,” he said.

Alex smiled. He was more so surprised that the group here didn’t recognize him at all. ‘Maybe my fame isn’t as big as I had thought it to be,’ he thought.

He slowly walked forward. “I might have walked away had it been anything else, but it seems that you guys are very intent on killing me along with this young man, so I’m afraid I will have to side with him here,” he said.

He arrived next to the young man.

“No, go away. You can’t win against them. You will die,” the young man said.

Alex turned his head towards the young man and shook his head. “I’m afraid if I let you be, you will be the one that dies here,” he said. The young man was already starting to emit a bit of death aura around him as he was on death’s door already.

“These bastards,” the strongest man of the 4 suddenly used his technique to create a flame serpent that launched towards Alex.

Alex didn’t even turn as he snapped his finger. In an instant, the flame serpent dissipated into the air with not the slightest amount of fire aura remaining in the air anymore.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to use more than just fire in front of me,” Alex said.

The four men and the wounded young man in front of Alex were all shocked at the sudden turn of events. They didn’t see Alex use any technique, and yet somehow he had dismantled the flame serpents.

“Take care of yourself. I’ll take care here,” Alex said as he pat the young man on the back twice.

With the first pat, he took away all the death aura from the young man, in which instance the life aura that was natural to every living being took over, improving the young man’s healing.

That was something Alex had learned was possible from the memories of the Fourth Undying God who had also learned a Dao of death, and had instead used it to heal the wounds of the war victims.

For the second part, he poured in his Qi and suddenly used the teleportation dao to send the young man over 500 meters behind him.

The young man jumped at the random change in scenery. When he saw that he was quite far away from where he was before, he couldn’t help but be stunned.

“What... just happened?”

Alex stood in front of the 4 men and brought out a sword. Then he asked, “Are you still going to kill me, or are we going to go our separate ways?”

The group of men looked concerned. Not because Alex was strong, but because if they let Ma Tianxin leave, he would certainly tell the Sect master what had happened here, and at that point, they were as good as dead.

“Let’s kill him quickly. We can go after that bastard Ma afterward,” the leader said.

“Yes!” they all agreed. Suddenly, 10 different beasts appeared out of nowhere, 5 of which were in the Saint realm. That was quite a large amount in Alex’s eyes.

He got ready to fight and the humans and beasts started preparing their techniques to fire at Alex.

Alex saw the attacks being prepared and sighed. “Didn’t I just tell you? No fire,” he said. In the next second, the fire ability that was being prepared by one of the men suddenly exploded, sending everyone flying in a different direction.

The man who was preparing the attack lost half his arm as well.

Alex sighed when he saw that, but it wasn’t as big of a deal as it would’ve been for True realm cultivators.

Saint realm cultivators just had to go on a few years of closed cultivation to wait for their arms to grow back.

“Anyone wanna go again?” he asked.

“Brother, he knows some weird dao. We can’t fight against him,” one of the men said.

“But... can we really leave like this?” the leader asked.

“We can get him next time,” another man said.

“Argh! My arm. I need to heal,” the wounded man said. The beasts behind them were also in pain.

The leader showed a complicated emotion before turning around to leave.

Alex watched the leave and teleported right next to the young man that was applying for some medicine on himself.

“Geez! You scared me,” the young man took a deep breath.

‘Geez? A player?’ Alex thought.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” the young man said. “Thank you for saving my life. I can’t thank you–”

The young man stopped speaking mid-speech. Now that the threat had disappeared, he finally got to look at Alex carefully, and what he saw surprised him.

“It’s you!” he said.

“Yes, yes, it is me,” Alex said. He was used to it.

“I didn’t think I would meet you again, senior, let alone you would save me,” the young man said.

“Again? Have we met before?” Alex asked.

The young man quickly wiped his face of all the blood and looked back. “Do you not recognize me? We met back in the Endless Tunnel,” the young man said.

Alex looked at the face and at the Blue Spring sect robe. “Ohh! It’s you,” he finally remembered the group he got into a fight with back in the endless tunnel.

This young man was the one leading that group.

Chapter 947 Small Journey

"Are you okay? Can you heal?" Alex asked the young man.

"Ah, yes. I-I will be fine. I just have to... um..." the man fidgeted around, looking for something of his own.

"Well, if you will be fine, then I will leave," Alex said. "Take care." He stood up and turned around to leave.

"Wait!" however, the young man wouldn't let him go.

"Do you need anything else?" Alex asked.

"Um... I will need some time to heal, and... um, those people will most likely come and attack me again, so... would it be alright if I stayed with you for a while?" the young man asked.

"Hmm, I'm not sure if you can stay with me with where I'm going, but it would be very remiss of me to leave you here wounded after I just saved you," Alex said. He hated himself for not having any healing pill on himself.

He believed he didn't need it, so what few he had, he had given to his aunt before she had left for her training.

'I seriously need to start making pills soon. I will do so immediately after I leave here,' Alex made a mental note of that.

He would have to find a place where they wouldn't hate him for making pills, which for now felt was only the State of Dong.

As Alex thought that, the young man brought out a pill of his own and ate it himself.

"Huh?" Alex looked confused. "You have pills?"

"Uhh... yes," the young man said with a confused look on his face. "I don't have many, but if senior wants I can give them to you."

"No, I don't want your pills," Alex said. "What's the Blue Spring Sect's official stance towards Alchemy?"

"Uhh... nothing? They let you be but won't associate with you or save you if you get into trouble," the young man said.

"Alchemists get into a lot of trouble?" Alex asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I only know what the sect says."

"Aren't you the sect master's disciple? I thought I heard someone say that," Alex said.

"Yes, I am," the young man said. "However I don't have much footing in the sect besides being the sect master's disciple."

"So you don't have any information about why they try to dissociate themselves from alchemy?" Alex asked.

"I'm afraid not, senior," the young man said.

Alex sighed. Just when would he be free to practice alchemy the way he wanted to?

"Well, eat your pill so we can leave," Alex said. He brought out Pearl and Whisker, and once the young man was healed enough to walk on his own, they left.

The young man looked at the white cat beside him, then at the man in front of him who wore a black robe and a white mask.

"Senior, are you the one I hear people talking about?" the young man asked. "They say you learned Sword aura in a single day, is that true?"

"Oh, you heard about me from somebody else?" Alex asked.

The young man nodded. "They use your name to encourage people to try and learn something in here. You are also famous for being incredibly strong without being in the Saint realm, although I see that has changed."

"Well, it's good that people are using me to encourage others, but this fake information might actually end up demotivating them instead," Alex said.

"Fake information?" the young man asked.

"I didn't learn Sword Aura in a single day. I had all but a single thing to produce Sword aura for the last 10 years. It was only after 2 months of meditation next to the gorge that I understood what I was missing."

"Once I knew that, I produced Sword aura in a day," Alex said. "People see what I did there and say I did it in a day, when in fact it was a decade-long work. If others come here expecting to learn what I did in a few days, they will leave back demotivated to try it ever again."

"Oh..." the young man was surprised. "Thank you for enlightening me, senior."

Alex chuckled. "Don't call me senior. I'm neither older than you nor have a higher cultivation base than yours," he said.

"Eh?" the young man looked at Alex. Sure his cultivation base wasn't truly at the 1st Saint condensation realm, right? Even if it was, how could he possibly be younger than him?

"I'm actually only 35 years old, senior," the young man said proudly.

"Congratulations," Alex said. "I'm 34."

He was technically 31, but he liked saying his age based on how long time had passed for everyone, rather than how long he had lived.

"No way," the young man said. He didn't accept it for even a second and was pretty sure Alex was lying.

Alex let it be that way. "Anyway, let's talk about what happened back there. Why were those people after you exactly?" he asked.

"Sigh, you heard them, didn't you? They want me to break off my marriage pact with my fiancee," the young man said.

"Is she so pretty that many men would kill you for her?" Alex asked.

"Of course, she's very pretty," the young man said passionately. "But that is not the reason why they were trying to kill me."

"My fiancee, she... she is the daughter of the sect leader, my master, and as such she will inherit the bond to our Sacred protector in the sect, making her the next sect leader. In the instance where she doesn't want to be a sect leader, the signs of which she's showing at the moment, the bond with our Sacred beast will move onto her husband, which if everything goes well will be me."

"Ah," Alex finally understood. "So they wouldn't have tried harming you had shown more interest in being a sect leader. However, since she's not, they want to be her husband very badly and would do anything to become the sect leader."

"Yes," the young man said.

"Have you spoken to your master about this?" Alex asked.

"I did not," the young man said. "None of these men showed any signs of greed beforehand, not even through their eyes. I should have known what they were up to when they decided to come here all of a sudden to train. I wouldn't have come had I understood that."

"You're safe now, so you can complain to your master afterward," Alex said. "For now, since you are here, focus on getting stronger. Come on, let's pick up the pace."

The two of them walked even faster as they made their way forward. Along the way, Alex slowly tried to send his spiritual sense into the sky to see what aura there was.

He was ready to pull it back if the intent was strong, so he felt less fear doing so. As he did, he couldn't help but wonder... why were there so many immortals fighting here?

Immortals would immediately be struck down by the Heavenly Judgement if they fought here with full power, and yet they did so. Did they have some way of concealing themselves while they fought with all their power?

As Alex wondered about this, his group of 4 reached the location of the gorge, where Alex was ready to train his intent even further.

Chapter 948 New Destination

Alex saw the gorge for himself for the first time. He had never seen the gorge, not even through Whisker’s eyes.

After seeing it finally, he was surprised at how clean the cut was, how deep the slash had cut and how far it reached.

Alex could see 3 different cultivators past the 10-meter range of where the gorge started and that was where Alex was intending to go as well.

“Are you a sword user?” Alex asked Ma Tianxin.

“Not really. I use them, but I use other weapons as well. I never found myself particularly interested in any specific weapons,” he said.

“I see. Then will you stay out here? It will be dangerous for you to go in there. It’s full of sword aura and intent,” Alex said.

“Okay, I can stay out here,” the young man said as he looked around at the many people that were meditating there. “I should be fine with this many people around me.”

“Alright, stay safe.”

Alex went towards the gorge with Pearl while Whisker was already back in his beast space. As he went forward, Pearl started feeling the effect of the intent around here, but he could still continue.

Alex walked until he reached a certain distance away from the gorge at which point Pearl had to stop. “Take your time adapting, I will be a bit further ahead,” he said and continued on, leaving Pearl behind.

Alex arrived within the area of the gorge where the intent was the strongest. He felt a slight mental headache from the constant badgering of the intent, but he handled it as he tried to find a good place to sit around the gorge.

About 3 meters beyond the start of the gorge, right next to where the land was cut in two, Alex sat down and started fighting the headache he was having by fighting against the intent that lingered on the cut itself.

Alex could tell that it was Sword Intent, which made him excited about how strong his own Sword Intent could grow to become in the future.

Alex kept his spiritual sense on Pearl who was less than 30 meters away from him at all times and then concentrated on his own honing.

For the next 2 months, he did nothing but sit around in the intent and overcome the headache. Slow, his headache was getting easier and easier to handle, so Alex added on top of it by activating the 1st stage of his Mask.

After breaking through, he could handle even 3 stages, but with the intent here, he didn’t go above 1 for now.

Combined, the two attacks slammed against the wall of his mind, threatening to tear it down. However, Alex had enough will and intent to fight it back.

It wasn’t just him either. Pearl was slowly improving too, getting closer and closer to the start of the gorge. Within the first month, he was outside of the 10-meter range, and stayed there for the next month and trained.

Ma Tianxin hadn’t intended on doing anything other than waiting for Alex to train here. However, seeing everyone improving, he felt the urge to train himself as well.

So, he sat down where he felt was best for him, and started tempering his intent. He had come here to try and gain some insight into whatever dao he could, but it looked like he was going to have to push that aside for now.

2 months later, Alex was finally able to sit where he sat without having the intent there affect him at all. He did have to constantly fight it back, but what else could he do? This was an Immortal’s intent after all. He couldn’t just ignore it as if it were nothing.

Before leaving, Alex took one last look into the sword aura that was still in the air there. He ignored the insights that remained there regarding dao of cutting and sharpness and such, and instead solely focused on the sword.

He tried to see if the man who made this gorge had any clue about what the next stage after Sword Aura was. From what Alex could see, he most certainly did. There were mysteries in the aura that was more than just about Sword Aura.

Unfortunately, Alex had no way of telling what they were. Even if he spent the following year in here, he wouldn’t be able to tell at all. After all, the man whose Sword aura this was himself hadn’t learned the next stage of the sword.

So, with nothing else to look forward to, Alex took one last glance at the gorge and turned around to leave.

He took Pearl who was starting to get used to the intent as well and walked away. Ma Tianxin noticed him leaving, so he too followed him.

Alex wanted to say something about him following, but decided not to. The poor guy was most likely scared for his life already.

“Do you know how long it has been since the last bell rang?” Alex asked the man as they walked on to find a new destination for themselves.

“Hmm... 4 months? Maybe close to 5, I’m not sure,” the young man said after spending a second with a thoughtful expression.

“You will be leaving in a month or two then, right?” Alex asked him.

The young man gave an awkward smile. “Am I that much of a headache for you, senior?” he asked.

“You’re not really a headache. I just like being alone is all,” he said.

“I see,” the young man said. “If possible I would like to stay with senior for a while, but if I am really causing you any discomfort then I will leave on my own.”

“What about your safety?” Alex asked. “Those men certainly won’t let you go just like that. They’re still here beyond that hill, spying on us.”

“What?” the young man turned towards the hill. “They’re still here?”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “They are staying outside my spiritual sense’s reach, but they are still standing plainly out in the open so that I can see them.”

“Woah, even through the mask?” the young man asked.

“It’s not a simple mask. Of course, I will be able to look through it. Why else would I be wearing it all time?” Alex asked.

“Is that so,” the young man said before his eyes drifted towards the hill. “They will kill me. Either that or force me to make an oath not to reveal what happened here.”

“Well, whether you want to leave or not, it’s your choice I guess,” Alex said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t babysit you as much as I would wish to. I have my own needs to take care of.”

Alex looked towards the sky. The aura and intent there was the strongest of all in this realm, and he was planning to start learning about it.

He had tried before, but it was too strong for him. He wondered if he could do it now that he was a little bit stronger.

“Brother,” Pearl called out to him from behind through their spiritual sense.

Alex paused and turned around. “What is it?” he asked.

Pearl looked confused, almost dazed, as he tried to understand what was happening to him. As the aura in the air thinned, he was finally starting to realize what was happening to him.

“I... I think I’m ready to break through,” Pearl said.

“Are you sure?” Alex asked with a hopeful look on his face. Pearl had already entered the True Emperor 9th realm over a year ago, so it was about time for him to break through to the Saint realm.

“Yes,” Pearl nodded. “I’m sure.”

Ma Tianxin looked at the two of them talk through their bond and wondered what they were talking about.

Then, out of nowhere, Alex turned to look at him and said, “It’s your lucky day today.”

“Uh... it is?” the young man asked.

“In less than two months’ time, we will be leaving the battlefield. You can leave at the same time too,” Alex said.

Confusion turned to happiness as Ma Tianxin’s lips curved to a wide smile. “Really? Are you really going out?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “You can rest assured.”

Ma Tianxin was about to say something when his happy emotions disappeared when a thought emerged in his head. “But... that’s just until the outside right? I still have to go back to the sect on my own.”

“Well, normally you would,” Alex said. “However, circumstances have made it so that I must visit the State of Shuang, and as a result will have to pass by close to the Blue Spring sect.”

“Circumstances? You have some business with our sect, senior?” the man asked. He was excited about the prospect of having a guard all the way through to the end.

“No, I have no business with your sect,” Alex said, disappointing the young man. “Unless...” He thought of something.

“Unless?”

Alex looked at the young man. “Who owns the Demonic forest?” he suddenly asked.

“The demonic forest? No one. If anyone, it would be the beasts,” the young man said. “Do you wish to enter the Demonic forest?”

Alex looked at Pearl. “My beast will be breaking through once we go out of the battlefield. Afterward, I will be needing some beast cores and was hoping to get it from some Saint beasts in the forest, what do you think?” he asked.

“I... I don’t know senior. I’ve never seen anyone killing saint beasts to use their cores for their own beasts,” the young man said. “Although, I have heard of such things happening in the past, so I don’t see how you can’t do it.”

Chapter 949 Pearl's Concerns

Alex went along with the young man to the rest of the places where he could potentially learn something new.

He visited new places he hadn’t been to before and even fought a few people that came to challenge him.

He tried looking into the aura of the Immortals high above him, but while he learned that he could handle it to a certain extent, the mysteries there were too vast for him to learn in just a month. He would have to spend at least a few months just like he did with the sword and space.

Alex also trained in trying to cut up space to reveal the crack, but all he could do was cut up space so they separated.

At least, he was getting good at that. His cuts were getting larger and larger. Soon, he would likely be able to cut the space in such a way that everything he cut up would not be in contact with the rest of the space from any direction.

Essentially, he wanted to be able to create his own secret realm whenever he wanted to. Only, this one wouldn’t be compressed like the other secret realms were. At least, not without learning the dao of Space Compression.

The young man sat down beside Alex whenever he tried to learn something and tried it himself. He failed to even feel the aura half the time, but he still tried.

Then, after more than a month, the bells rang and it signaled their time to leave.

6 months had passed once again... so easily. This time around, Alex didn’t even think much time had passed.

‘It’s only going to be worse as my lifespan increases, isn’t it?’ he thought to himself. The slow passage of time would stop mattering to a cultivator as they went on.

Alex and the young man walked over to the gate where a lot of people were waiting to leave. They even saw the group of 4 that wanted to kill the man.

However, they just weren’t able to now. They were incredibly frustrated, and the young man noticed it.

Alex however couldn’t care less about those men and had only a single thought in his mind.

That was to help Pearl with his breakthrough.

Once the gate opened, Alex and the young man went out. However, when the young man found that they weren’t immediately flying away, he got confused.

“Why aren’t we leaving?” he asked.

“I need to prepare Pearl before he breaks through,” Alex said.

“Prepare? I thought the young cat was ready,” the young man said.

“Yes, his cultivation base is ready,” Alex said. “But his mind is not. Stop worrying, we’ll only be spending a month or so in the Silvermoon city before we leave.”

“I... okay,” the young man said. He had zero grounds for complaints after all.

Alex got himself a room in the city for a month and called out Pearl. Pearl was ready to break through, but this was going to be hard.

After all, since he had learned Dao, he was going to meet an Inner Demon for the first time. Even without thinking about the Lightning Tribulation that would come afterward, the Inner Demon alone would be enough for Pearl to struggle.

So, Alex spent the next whole month telling Pearl what should happen and resolving any hidden negative feelings he could have been festering.

Only now was Alex starting to realize just how much he had been ignoring Pearl’s thoughts. Ever since he came to the Northern Continent, he had worried about his mother and the others back in the Western Continent, but not once did he realize that Pearl too would have been feeling the same anxiety that he had been feeling.

In fact, for Pearl, it was even worse. Not only was he worried about Helen, he cared about his people in the Beast realm too and was worried about them.

He worried that his great-grandmother might be dead. He worried the jaguar might be hurt as well.

He worried about his own future. He was supposed to be the Ruler of the Western Continent, but he was still a child. Could he do it? Would he be strong enough to do that?

He was already lagging behind Alex. Even though he had been ahead of Alex on multiple occasions, he had still ended up behind him. Was his potential that bad? Would the ritual to help him evolve even help him at all?

He worried that soon enough he would be useless to Alex and would get left behind.

Alex felt a pain grow in his heart that he didn’t expect to feel at the moment. He never realized just how oblivious he was to Pearl’s feelings, never even asking him how he felt.

It was only now he was starting to realize that the cat in front of him, regardless of his small size, was no longer a kitten at all.

He was no longer the naive little kitten he found in the forest who hadn’t even realized that his mother had died protecting him.

He was someone that had lived for nearly 14 years and thus was mature enough to have his own thoughts and anxieties.

Alex spent as long as needed to help Pearl understand that it was alright. Everything would be alright and he had no reason to worry.

He helped remove as much anxiety as he could from Pearl and in the process improved their own bond.

After a month had passed, Pearl was finally ready to do it. He was ready to break through.

So, Alex left the city along with Ma Tianxin who had been staying in the city as well. They went east, towards an open area with not many people once again.

“Hmm...” Alex sensed someone staring at them for a moment from far away, but they quickly went out of the range of his spiritual sense so he couldn’t be sure if there was malicious intent behind that stare or not.

“We should be careful,” he told the young man and continued his way to the east. Very soon, they entered the State of Shuang.

Along the way, Alex and the young man came across a small city, which let them know where on the map they exactly were, so all he had to do was go a little northeast from there, and he would arrive at a place where the mountain ranges will be full of snow and without any human settlement in a vast area.

After arriving at the location, Alex took out some beast armor he had bought for Pearl and had him wear it.

Pearl stood wearing the golden armor, looking intimidating. Alex smiled and said, “Good luck.”

Then, he moved away from the location and let Pearl start concentrating on his breakthrough.

“Why are we moving back?” the young man asked. He didn’t understand why they had to move over a few kilometers away.

“You will see soon,” Alex said. His senses still reached Pearl and were way beyond it as he kept a constant eye on the things that transpired with him.

Soon enough, Pearl’s cultivation got into a rhythm as he began to crack the shell around his Beast core to make it stronger.

Chapter 950 Senior Bu

Alex started fidgeting. He didn’t know what was happening with Pearl, but he knew that he was fighting his inner demon at the moment.

Pearl was done breaking through the hard shell on his beast core.

Similar to how a human had a dantian, beasts stored their Qi in their core, which was attached to their spiritual roots. Alex could feel the significant improvement in Pearl’s aura, so he knew he was just two steps away from actually breaking through.

However, it was exactly these 2 steps that were the hardest and that was what made Alex so worried.

This was Pearl’s first time trying to fight against an Inner demon. If he failed, he would face a backlash that could severely harm his progress and even drop it a considerable amount.

That alone wouldn’t have been much of a problem, but Pearl had also learned the Dao, which meant that he had to fight against the lightning that was ready to come for him as a weaker version of himself.

Alex wasn’t sure if he could do that.

“What’s… going on?” Ma Tianxin asked when he noticed a change in the aura. The bright white clouds that dropped snow were slowly turning darker and darker by the second while releasing a rather ominous aura.

“Make sure not to get close,” Alex said as he looked at the sky. “The heavens will smite you for it.”

“What? Why? What’s going on?” the young man asked, but Alex didn’t answer. Explaining Lightning Tribulation would take too much of his time and he was too focused on Pearl at the moment to do so.

Pearl’s expression said that he was struggling against the demon. Alex wished he could tell him it was alright, but he couldn’t. Pearl could hear no one at the moment.

Just as he was thinking that Alex suddenly saw someone enter his spiritual sense from the north to his right. The man that entered was wearing a purple robe and seemed to be coming exactly toward them.

The man’s spiritual sense passed through him and Ma Tianxin not long after as he flew towards them quite fast. He would arrive near them at any minute now.

Alex frowned. He didn’t care who the man was or why he was coming towards them. He was going to disturb Pearl if he came any further and Alex didn’t want that.

He flew off without any notice and went over to the man, meeting him about 2 kilometers away from where Pearl was breaking through.

The man stopped when he noticed Alex arrive in front of him and smiled. He was a middle-aged man that looked to be in his early 50s with his streaks of white hair and beard.

“Would you mind stepping as–“

“Leave!” Alex said without waiting for the man to finish his words.

The man’s smile vanished a little, but he still kept it up the best he could. “Junior, You are quite rude–“

“Leave,” Alex said. “You are disturbing my beast’s breakthrough. If you want something, you can come after he’s done breaking through.”

“Oh!” the man said and turned his head to look towards the mountain range to his right. “The white cat, huh? I’ve heard a few things about it too. It should be going through a lightning tribulation soon huh?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “So, leave.”

The man finally lost his smile. “I’ve been trying to be friendly, but you continue being rude. Do you really think you’re strong enough to be this rude?” the man asked as he let out his cultivation base aura.

Alex stood there without a single reaction to the man’s Saint Foundation 2nd realm aura.

“Senior Bu? What are you doing here?” Ma Tianxin arrived next to Alex and asked.

“Ah! Junior Ma, there you are. I came to escort you back,” he said. “I heard you had a rather rough time on the battlefield.”

“Oh, yes I did,” Ma Tianxin said with a confused look on his face. “But how do you know that?”New n0vel chapters are published on

“They told me, of course,” the man named Bu said.

“They?” Ma Tianxin’s face became gloomy when he understood what was happening. “You too, senior Bu?”

“Haha, they just paid me a lot, that’s all. I don’t really want the sect master’s position anyway,” the man said. “So, let’s make it simple, shall we? All you have to do is swear an oath to not reveal whatever took place in the Ancient Battlefield and I will return right now. Hell, I will even escort you back just like I said.”

Ma Tianxin frowned. The senior in front of him was a strong one that he couldn’t fight against. He glanced at Alex and had a suspicion that he wouldn’t be able to fight against him as well.

“I–“

“What if he doesn’t?” Alex asked. “Are you going to cause trouble?”

The man sneered when he heard Alex. “Young man, don’t get overly cocky just because you learned a few Dao here and there. Dao alone won’t make you powerful,” he said.

“I’m not in a mood for your sect’s petty quarrel. Even if he will never reveal what happened, due to my acquaintance with senior Xinyi, I will still tell him everything when I reach your sect. What will you do then?” Alex asked.

The man in front of them frowned. “You know our sect master?” he asked.

“I’ve met him twice now during the Dao mountain’s opening,” Alex said. “He’s been quite friendly with me, and I wouldn’t want to see vultures eying his spot once he stops being a sect master.”

The man frowned. He thought for a moment about how information about Alex was spread, and most of the information about his Dao had come from the sect master. “You’re not lying, are you?” he asked. “Shit! That makes things complicated.”

“Why would it?” Alex asked. “You say you don’t want anything with the sect master’s position, so all you have to do and return and give back the money you took from the betrayers and wash your hands of any rules of the sect you might’ve broken.

The man frowned when he heard that. His not wanting to be a sect master was obviously a lie. Even if he didn’t care about the position itself, being the husband of the woman who contracted the sacred beast of the sect was something no man would want to miss.

Besides, if he did nothing here and the news got back to the sect master, it wouldn’t take long before they figured out that he was the mastermind behind this whole operation.

“Fine then,” the man said as his cultivation base flared and he shot out some green wolves made up of air.

“Step back,” Alex said as he took out a sword and cut the wolves before they arrived.

Ma Tianxin started getting worried, but he was useless here anyway so he turned around and left as far as he could.

Alex checked Pearl’s situation one last time and noticed that he was still fighting his inner demon. It would take a while to be done with.

“I will need to get done with this quickly.”

Chapter 951 Battle against Bu

Alex knew he could fight someone in Saint Foundation’s 1st realm; he had done so before. However, for a 2nd realm cultivator? He had never tried it.

Still, he believed that with the various combinations of his own skills, he could beat his enemy.

The man started using a technique where rocks appeared in mid-air and started adhering to his body like armor.

Alex wasted no time and sent out a sword slash to test the man. The man casually flicked away the sword slash, but on the inside, he frowned at how unusually strong it was.

‘Is that dao?’ he wondered.

Alex then sent out a more decisive slash that was the best he could do at the moment with his entire Sword Aura on it.

The man frowned and sent an attack that landed on the Sword aura, but it couldn’t be stopped at all. Alex’s sword aura continued down its path, arriving next to the man and striking him in the chest. However, the Sword aura alone was too weak to break past his armor.

Alex needed stronger attacks, so he brought out a stronger attack.

20 different swords flew out of his storage ring at once and soon fell into a formation in the air and spun with Sword Aura emanating from each one of them.

Alex sent the swords flying toward the man who immediately employed a movement technique and dodged it. Alex frowned when he realized how fast the man was.

He was at least far faster than Alex himself was. Still, he used the swords to continue chasing the man who couldn’t help but continue running away.

Alex worried that he was up to something with how much time he was trying to waste. Pearl was fine for now, but the young man behind him was the main target and this man was definitely going to try and kill him.

As Alex thought that, 2 beasts suddenly came out of the man in front of him. One was a flying green snake, and the other one was a big rhino that looked unstoppable.

Their cultivation base wasn’t high, so Alex wasn’t that worried. However, as he thought that, the two beasts suddenly flew towards the young man.

Alex sent down the 21 swords toward the man while he himself took out another sword, the strongest sword, and disappeared.

He appeared in front of the flying snake and swung down. The Dao came to his aid as the flying snake split into two with a single strike and fell to the ground.

The man had dodged Alex’s attacks and was running away, but when he felt the connection break, he could help but cry out in anger.

“You bastard! You dare kill my beast. I will kill yours instead!” he said. The young man suddenly sped up even faster than before, flying in the direction of Pearl, while his rhino flew in the direction of the young man.

Alex’s eyes darkened in anger. He swung his sword in front of him once and teleported over next to the man and swung his sword again.

The man was surprised at how easily Alex had arrived. But he wasn’t so surprised that he was caught off guard.

Even as Alex’s sword arrived at his throat with the dao of Cutting empowering it, his sword made a small ‘clang’ sound as it couldn’t penetrate the man’s skin at all.

Alex looked surprised when he saw that. Before he could even wonder what was happening, he could feel it already.

The world was aiding man in survival. Somehow, the man was using dao to make himself far more durable than he had any right to be.

The man flew backward with sweat dripping down his neck as he had nearly just died. Still, he had managed to kil-the man frowned.

“What are you doing?” he yelled at his Rhino who wasn’t moving forward at all.

“I can’t move forward,” the rhino replied. “Something is blocking me.”

The man sent his spiritual sense. “There’s nothing there,” he said.

There truly was nothing there. At least, nothing one could sense or see. From the front, it looked fine, but Alex had cut up a massive space around that location, splitting it into two different entities, through which one couldn’t go to the other.

To the Rhino, it felt like an invisible wall. The space it was in didn’t exist any further than where it was. If it wanted to go to the other side, it either had to move around the split space or have enough power to overpower Alex’s space aura and intent.

Unfortunately for the rhino, he had no such power.

Green wolves appeared in front of Alex again, which he easily destroyed. Alex created a fire of incredible temperature next to the man, but he used water to protect himself while also using the dao to not take much damage.

Alex wondered what dao that was exactly. As far as he could tell, it was an Earth aura-related dao, but further than that Alex had no idea.

Alex created a massive explosion next to the man and he still survived with no physical damage.

“So you’re impervious to any physical damage,” Alex said.

“Physical, Qi, use whatever you want. You’re not beating me,” the man proclaimed loudly.

Alex sensed the Rhino switching targets and moving towards Pearl. He was about to teleport over, but the man flew towards Ma Tianxin, making Alex fall into an ultimatum where he had to choose between the two.

There wasn’t even a question in Alex’s mind.

He teleported next to the rhino and struck it as hard as he could and easily carved his sword through its body.

The rhino looked strong, but in reality, it wasn’t that strong.

The moment Alex finished cutting up the Rhino, he teleported away from there, arriving closer to the young man. However, he was still far away.

The man had already caught the Ma Tianxin in a bind using vines and roots that had sprung up from the ground, making it impossible for him to escape. On top of that, he himself was flying at such incredible speed that Alex wondered if the man also had a Dao of Speed.

Alex teleported once more, arriving next to the young man just in time to protect him from wind blades that would have certainly killed Ma Tianxin.

“You bastard!” the man spoke in a somber voice that failed to hide the rage he felt in his heart. Not one, but two beasts. He had to sacrifice both of his beasts to get this chance and yet Alex had killed them both and saved the young man.

Alex was about to attack when suddenly he heard a lightning crackle high above him. In his moment of hesitation, the man ran backward, away from him.

Pearl was getting out from his encounter against the Inner demon and not long afterward the lightning show would start.

Alex turned his attention towards the fleeing man and teleported next to him and swung his blade again. The world came to his aid to harden his skin again to a point where he wasn’t even cut by the dao of cutting.

Unless Alex understood the dao behind his imperviousness, it was unlikely he would be able to cut it at all.

The 21 swords flew back towards Alex and struck the man, but even they didn’t deal any noticeable damage at all.

From what Alex could see, there was only one way to beat this man.

He put back his sword and created one by himself instead.

The man frowned when he saw the sword in Alex’s hands. It was wrong to call it seeing as all he truly saw was nothing. He didn’t even feel anything. However, his spiritual sense told him there was something there, and his lack of knowledge made him fear a bit.

Lightning crackled once more as it was getting closer and closer to when Pearl would start to fight against the heavens.

At the same time, Alex slashed his invisible sword for the first time in a long time.

The man empowered his body with his dao to block it, but the sword easily passed through his body, dealing mental damage while causing his body to grow lethargic.

The man frowned and backed off, and while his body wasn’t producing much Qi, the world came to his aid and helped him.

However, Alex still teleported next to him and slashed him once again.

The man was starting to realize that it was his spirit getting attacked right now and started fearing as he had no answer to that. The best he could do was run away.

So, he continued running away even after he got hit while maintaining both his Dao at the same time. On top of that, he saw Pearl slowly open his eyes, and smiled.

“You killed my beast, so now I will kill yours. Let’s see how you will stop me,” the shouted and flew as quickly as he could.

Alex teleported next to him again and tried to cut him, but he hesitated and stopped before teleporting away immediately.

“Haha! What’s wrong? Are you out of—” the man stopped when he felt the aura. He had never felt such a terrifying aura before.

His eyes searched for where the aura originated and saw that it was the lightning in the sky.

The heavens were getting angry that someone had dared interfered in somebody else’s Lightning Tribulation, and as such, the man was about to face Heavenly Judgment.

Alex stood from the side and watched as the lightning fell from the heavens and struck the man, turning him into nothing but ashes that drifted along with the snow.

Chapter 952 12 Bolts

Ma Tianxin saw the remains of what was previously senior Bu disperse into the storm that raged above. His face lost all color as dread filled his heart at what he had just seen.

“What… what just happened?” he asked fearfully.

“You are not allowed to interfere in the Lightning Tribulation of someone else. No matter if you’re trying to aid or not,” Alex said. “He who interferes faces Heaven’s judgment.”

“That… that bolt of lightning was from the heavens?” Ma Tianxin looked to the sky again. “Is your pet going to be fine?”

“Yes,” Alex said without hesitation. He did not doubt that Pearl would overcome this. All he worried about was that he would be hurt a bit in the process.

‘As long as the tribulation lightning isn’t as strong as when they were for me, he should be fine,’ Alex thought.

He and Ma Tianxin watched as Pearl stood on all four and flew upwards. As he did, the first of the nine lightning flew down from the heavens.

~CRACK~

The lightning bolt slammed into Pearl, but Pearl walked out of it unscathed. The power of this lightning bolt was barely stronger than an attack used by a True Realm emperor if they had Saint Qi.

Pearl’s physical body alone was strong enough to protect himself entirely.

The second lightning bolt came down not long after, striking Pearl again. This time, the strength was a little stronger than what a True Emperor 2nd realm could use with Saint Qi.

Pearl brushed it off quite easily as well.

The third lightning bolt fell, striking Pearl.

Then fourth, and then the fifth.

Each successive lightning bolt got stronger and stronger, slowly increasing in power each time it fell. Each of the lightning strikes seemed to be gathering damage, slowly improving itself until it reached the maximum damage Pearl could have handled had he not broken through.

The sixth lightning bolt fell, and then the seventh. Even the eighth struck Pearl, but he easily brushed them off.

Alex was surprised at how easy it was for Pearl. But then, he remembered his own and also remembered it was easy for him until the 9 lightning bolts struck him.

The real problem came afterward.

The ninth lightning bolt struck Pearl and this time even if his body was stronger than the bolt itself, he felt the pain. He understood that he couldn’t rely on his body anymore.

So, he got ready to fight. The armor he wore could help him block quite a bit of the damage, but he was sure he couldn’t rely on it any more than his own body. He needed to use his Qi as much as he could too.New n0vel chapters are published on

Energy gathered in the sky as Alex looked up. Even he could tell what the first lightning was going to be about. He was surprised it was this one, but then Pearl only knew 3 Dao so there couldn’t be anymore.

A lightning bolt with an aura filled with the Dao of Metal struck down from the heavens toward Pearl.

Pearl swung his paw upward, hitting the lightning bolt just as it landed. The two powers collided creating a massive explosion that produced shockwaves that even Alex and Ma Tianxin felt.

Alex took in a deep breath when he felt the power behind the lightning bolt just now. ‘That was… Saint Condensation 1st realm?’ he thought. ‘No, it is weaker. So… a little below that.’

Pearl’s cultivation base was ‘a little below that’ as well. So, he was struck with the force of his entire cultivation base.

Thankfully, Pearl had more than just his cultivation base. He had his armor, and he had his body.

He walked out, not fully unscathed, but well enough that he was ready to fight again. Alex smiled when he saw that, but then it immediately turned into a frown as the next attack prepared in heaven.

‘Which dao is it now?’ Alex wondered. It had to either be the Dao of Sharpness or the Dao of Teleportation. Alex wondered which one the heavens considered more valuable.

In his eyes, teleportation was obviously more valuable than sharpness. But then… maybe he was wrong?

Pearl knew what was going to happen this time around. He had seen it when Alex was fighting the bolts of lightning the last time around.

His body glowed golden as he used the White Tiger’s Golden Body to reinforce himself. Then, he slammed his paw upwards again, sending a golden paw-shaped power directly into the sky, reinforced by the Dao of metal behind it.

The paw struck the lightning bolt and stopped it for a split second, reducing the damage as well in the process. However, it couldn’t stop it all.

The lightning bolt teleported and fell right on top of Pearl and struck him. Pearl fell down from the sky, slamming onto the mountain down below, destroying a big part of the mountain.

“Oh no!” Ma Tianxin spoke up when he saw that, but Alex didn’t say anything. He knew that level of damage would hardly injure Pearl, especially since he had his golden body.

Pearl walked out of the snow-filled rubble and flew into the sky. He didn’t look as white as he usually did, his fur a little charred at places, but other than that he looked fine.

Alex smiled when he saw Pearl safe. He looked back into the sky and waited for the next lightning to–

“Hmm?” his eyes narrowed with a confused look. “That’s… the teleportation aura?”

Alex tried to peer into the aura of the Dao of teleportation that had come down with the lightning, and while he did sense the Dao of Teleportation there, there was something else as well.

He tried to understand what it was, but he couldn’t really tell anything different aside from the fact there was some minor difference.

‘What is it?’ he wondered, but with his limited understanding of everything, he was simply incapable of telling what was wrong with it.

As he was wondering that, he couldn’t help but develop a foreboding feeling in his heart as he felt the final lightning prepared for its arrival.

Alex felt the aura of the dao and found it familiar to the one in the gorge. He recognized the dao of Sharpness, he only didn’t understand it fully yet.

‘Sharpness…’ Alex worried. If the lightning bolt was truly sharp, then Pearl would be in trouble.

“Give it your all, Pearl!” Alex shouted back at him.

Pearl couldn’t hear Alex’s words at all. He was in a world of his own as he prepared his defense against the final lightning strike.

His body glowed yellow, and he powered his armor as best as possible. A barrier made up of pure golden light appeared in front of him, once again empowered as well as he could with his metal Dao.

And then, the lightning struck.

Alex saw each moment on its own with his demon eyes. From the moment the lightning dropped from the heavens to the moment it struck the barrier.

He saw each crack appear on the barrier and then he saw the barrier shatter into a million pieces. Pearl’s paw struck the lightning as it fell and the two power clashed.

The surrounding mountains shuddered from the impact and the snow there started sliding down in an avalanche.

The mountain where Pearl stood was already rubble, to begin with. But with this attack, it completely collapsed.

Alex watched with unclosing eyes, waiting to see one thing. Waiting for that one moment.

The light disappeared and only the destroyed mountain peak remained, and they were unmoving.

“Come on, you can do this,” Alex said softly.

Suddenly, the rubble moved, and from it appeared in a tiny Pearl. He was the size of a kitten at most.

He seemed hurt, but not so bad that he was in any sort of danger. Just a few days of rest would do it.

Alex sighed in relief and looked to the sky. The storms threatened to send down another bolt of lightning, but he knew that wasn’t going to be the case.

Just as he thought, after a few sparkles of intimidation, the storm receded and dispersed as sunlight pierced through the sky.

The tribulation was done. Pearl had passed it. Now, all he needed to do was upgrade his Qi by just a sliver, and he will have entered the Saint realm officially.

Chapter 953 Blue Spring Sect

Alex waited for Pearl to be done with the final phase of his transition to the Saint realm. He watched from close, but still far as Pearl’s Qi slowly improved past the thin boundary that kept him from being a Saint realm.

As soon as he did though, Alex saw the changes immediately.

The tiny Pearl slowly grew in size as his body also began healing from what little wound it had suffered.

The palm-sized Pearl was now the size of a normal cat. He grew a little more and became a little bigger. He increased even more and reached his normal size.

However, he didn’t stop.

He grew even more, growing far beyond how big he used to be, and grew even further until he was as big as Lady Ren had been all those years ago.

The Saint realm Pearl was a massive beast that overshadowed anyone that stood beside him.

He was as big, if not bigger than the Jaguar and Puma too.

Alex quickly flew over and was surprised when he saw Pearl up close. He had to look up just to see Pearl who stood over 2 meters tall.

“Holy shit! You’re so big now,” Alex said as he gave him as big a hug as he could. “Congratulations, Pearl. You did it.”

Pearl turned towards Alex and looked at him with a curious face.

“What’s wrong?” Alex asked and checked Pearl all over. “You’re fine. Why aren’t you speaking?”

“I... can speak,” Pearl spoke with a confused expression on his face.

“Of course, you can. What’s so surprising about that?” Alex asked.

“I don’t know,” Pearl said. “It... feels weird, like I just learned to talk.”

“Are you alright? Do you feel fine?” Alex asked Pearl. He couldn’t understand why Pearl would say something like this.

“Give him some time, senior,” Ma Tianxin spoke as he flew up to Alex. “He just entered the Saint realm so the heavens have graced him with the ability to speak the human tongue. Most beasts get confused when they just learn the language all of a sudden.”

“Ah, right,” Alex said. “Saint realm beasts learn to speak on their own. Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re just confused because you were taught how to speak while already being able to speak.”

“So... should I speak or not now?” Pearl asked.

“You can speak. Since you’re in the saint realm, it is fine now,” Alex said. He had always asked Pearl to communicate using spiritual sense, but now that was no longer required.

“Haha, I can speak,” Pearl said.

Alex giggled too. He brought Whisker out and showed him that Pearl had succeeded.

When the tiny little mouse saw the giant cat in front of him, he panicked so hard that he nearly fainted. It was only after he was told that that was Pearl did Whisker finally stop being scared.

Pearl even changed his size to become a small kitten to prove that it was him.

Alex looked at Pearl curiously at that time. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were playing tricks on him, but... Pearl looked even younger than before.

“Alright, we need to leave now. Your commotion should have attracted people and you also need some rest,” he said.

Pearl nodded and changed his size back to being big again. Alex put Whisker back into his beast space. Then, with Ma Tianxin, the 3 of them started flying north.

Ma Tianxin kept asking anything and everything he had been keeping to himself. He wanted to know why there were lightning bolts falling from the sky. He wanted to know how a beast could learn Dao and so many other things.

Alex explained what he could, leaving the rest for the young man to figure out by himself.

Alex and Pearl had already hidden their cultivation base, so they were just a simple cultivator to anyone sensing them.

After flying quite a bit far, they slowed down as the various saints would no longer come looking for them for the disturbance they had caused.

He didn’t want Pearl to get the same attention he had received.

Not only was a beast breaking through with a lightning tribulation too big for the saints to ignore, but if they noticed his other specialness by happenstance, Alex also wasn’t sure what they would do.

For now, he would hide Pearl as much as possible.

‘Fortunately, he didn’t grow to look like a tiger,’ Alex thought. ‘Maybe that will only happen after he’s evolved.’

Alex took Pearl into his beast space and let him rest. At the same time, he brought out a ship where they sat and slowly cruised through the snow regions of the State of Shuang.

The state of Shuang looked no different than any other state, aside from Re. Due to the mountain ranges, and constant snowfall, it was all white with a few signs of color here and there.

There were volcanic mountains in places that gave heat to the villages below and it got progressively more common the further north they went.

This was one way the common people survived in this place.

After flying for just a couple more hours, Ma Tianxin pointed his index finger in front of him. “There, can you see it?” he asked.

Alex nodded. Even if there was a fog hiding it, the line of people and the increasing number of settlements around the area was enough to tell him that the Blue Spring sect was in front of them.

Alex saw a similar walled-up city-like sect as he had with all the other ones that previously belonged to the Snow Immortal sect.

As they got closer, a few people flew up to stop them, at which point Alex let Ma Tianxin do the rest.

He took back the ship and stayed behind Ma Tianxin as he took Alex down to the sect gates.

“You will need to record your Qi right here, senior,” Ma Tianxin said at the gate.

Alex nodded and did as told and let the people record his arrival. He gave his name as well and was finally let enter.

He saw a group of people lining up to enter, and when they saw him enter so easily, they felt quite frustrated.

But what could they really do? Ma Tianxin was most likely the next Sect master after all.

Alex looked around the sect and saw most of the disciples walking around with beasts in their care. It was quite surprising for him to see so many beasts intermingling with the humans since he had never been to a Beast taming sect before.

‘Is it always like this?’ he wondered. He looked through the beasts, trying to see if there were any names he didn’t know.

To his surprise, there were quite a few of them. He wondered why these beasts weren’t recorded in the Western continent, but when he saw what was common in between them, he understood immediately.

These were beasts that could only be found in the cold regions. Since the cold regions in the Western continent were mostly non-existent for until about a thousand years ago, it was easy to understand why there were no such beasts in the Western continent.

Ma Tianxin saw him slow down and called back to him. “Come on, senior. We’re right there.”

Chapter 954 Ren Xiuyin

The central area of the Blue Spring sect was divided into multiple sections. Towards the southern end, where Alex and Ma Tianxin were entering from, there were houses there for the Core disciples.

The land was rather large, so there was more than enough place for all 4000 to 5000 of the disciples to stay in.

Other than the disciples, there was a rather tall tower at the center where the elders were most likely to stay.

Then, the rest of the land was either open ground for the disciples to train in or some sort of beast ground where untamed beasts were kept for disciples to tame.

These included beasts that were taken from the Demonic forest, beasts that were born here, or beasts that improved their cultivation faster than their masters and thus broke their bonds of their own accord.

There were also beasts that were there because their master had died, but they were far too few and in between to be considered in the populous.

Ma Tianxin explained the area and showed him around the place as they got closer to the tower at the center.

Alex saw various disciples curiously look at him as his white mask and black robes made him stand out in the place.

The elders were also looking at him from time to time and at some point, he saw one of the 4 elders that had tried to kill Ma Tianxin.

The moment he saw them, the man lost all color on his face and turned around to run away.

“Should I stop him?” Alex asked.

“No,” Ma Tianxin’s eyes turned cold when he saw them. “You have done enough, senior. Leave the rest for our sect to handle.”

Alex nodded and stayed his hand. They finally arrived at the central tower and Ma Tianxin pulled out his talisman to call his master.

“Huh?” he suddenly made a frowning face. “I can’t reach master. I don’t think he’s in the sect right now.”

“Oh, so… what do we do?” Alex asked.

“Wait for a second, let me call someone else,” he said and pulled out another talisman paper.

Alex waited for a few seconds before a spiritual sense passed over him and a person flew out from the tower not long after, a woman.

She wore a purple robe that was designed a little differently than normal as her sleeves were thin enough that they were half-transparent.

Her face looked mature while still holding a youth that only came with having a high cultivation base. She was after all in Saint Condensation 8th realm, 5 realms higher than Ma Tianxin himself.

“Brother Ma, you’re finally back? I was worried about you,” she spoke enthusiastically after seeing him.

“Sister Xiuyin, where is Master?” Ma Tianxin asked.

Ren Xiuyin immediately crossed her arms and started pouting. “You come back after nearly 8 months and the first thing you do is call me to ask for my father?” she asked.

“Ah! No, no, I’m asking for master because it’s important,” Ma Tianxin said.

“Hmph! What could be so important that you would rather call out to your future father-in-law than your own fiancee?” the girl asked.

“The elders I went to the Ancient Battlefield with tried to kill me,” the young man said.

“What?” the girl lost all expression on her face and her hands fell next to her. In the next second, worry filled her face and she immediately used her spiritual sense on him. “Are-are you okay? Are you hurt? Who was it? Who tried to kill you?”

She was starting to get angry.

“I’m okay. I was hurt, but I’m healed now. They attacked me so I would break off our engagement. That’s why I’m asking for master, sister,” Ma Tianxin said. “If not for senior here, I would’ve probably lost my life already.”

The girl finally turned towards Alex. “I’m sorry I didn’t greet you earlier. Thank you for saving my fiance,” the girl said.

“It’s alright. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time,” Alex said to her.

The girl looked at him carefully and cocked her head as she asked, “How did you save my fiance though? You’re only… “

A thought suddenly struck her and she asked, “Is your name by any chance… Yu Ming?”

Alex was a little surprised, but not so much. He smiled back at her, and said, “I’m surprised sister Xiuyin has heard of me.”

“It’s not that surprising,” the girl said. “My father speaks rather highly of you. He keeps saying that if it weren’t for brother Ma, he would’ve done all he could to have me married to you.”

“Uhh… I’m flattered, thank you,” Alex said.

“Well, anyway, Father is not here so you’ll have to wait around a bit,” the girl said with a sigh.

“Yeah, I noticed that. Where exactly did master go?” Ma Tianxin asked.

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “The elders sensed some sort of commotion and flew south without telling any of us what had happened. It’s been over 3 hours now, so they should be returning soon.”

“Some sort of commotion?” Ma Tianxin’s eyes narrowed as he slowly looked toward Alex.

“Ahem,” Alex coughed a bit. “I’m sure we can wait around for senior to return.”

“Yes, please come,” the girl said and took him inside the tower as Ma Tianxin followed behind.

Along the way, Alex saw the girl worry about Ma Tianxin who kept insisting that he was fine. He smiled when he saw the two and wondered if he could find someone like him someday.

Although, he had no intentions of doing that just yet. There were too many other things for him to worry about.

The girl took Alex to a room where they talked for a while. She was truly curious if all the feats that she had heard of Alex performing were in fact true.

Alex was about to say yes when he heard a few of the feats that he had never heard of.

“No, I have never defeated anyone with just my legs. I don’t really use legs much in fights actually,” he said while chuckling. He wondered what other rumors had spread about him.

“And what about the rumor that you learned 8 different dao in a single month? That’s false too right?” she asked.

Alex smiled. “I’m afraid there is no lie in that statement. Although the dao I learned were similar to each other, so it was easier altogether,” he said.

“Woah, so you really did it?” the girl was surprised. “I swear I thought my father was exaggerating.”

Alex smiled and was about to say something when a wave of spiritual sense passed through the entire sect, including him.

“Oh, Father is back,” the girl said. “I wonder why he’s making such a show of it.”

Alex stood up and walked outside along with the two of them.

A small group of people landed outside the tower, along with a massive beast that was twice as big as Pearl’s current body.

It was a blue slug with a few green stripes that flew behind the sect master and the rest. It didn’t have any eyes but the two antennas on its head were each about a meter long.

Alex sensed something coming from the slug, a slight pulse, and wondered what it was.

The sect master quickly flew down to the ground and looked at Alex with a surprised look on his face. “Young Ming, you came to my sect?” he asked.

“Greetings, senior Xinyu. I hope you won’t mind me coming to your sect without any notice,” Alex said.

“No, of course not. You’re welcome any time,” he said. He held a curious look on his face as his eyes switched between Alex and his disciple before a thought came to his head.

“Young Ming did you… no, did your beast break through already?” he asked.

“Ah, I thought I hid it well, but I should have known better than to hide from seniors,” Alex said. “Yes, my beast did break through, and I left because I didn’t want any hassle.”

“I can understand, and I’m quite surprised how well you hid it too. Even our Sacred beast here couldn’t find you,” the sect master said.

“Oh, then how did you know it was my beast?” Alex asked.

“While you may have hidden your tracks, my disciple couldn’t. So I came here to ask him and noticed you. Once I put 2 and 2 together, it was easy to guess what might have caused the commotion today.”

Alex nodded when he heard that and looked towards the beast in the sky. “So senior is the Sacred beast I have heard so much about,” he said and bowed towards the slug. The aura of a Saint Soul beast alone would’ve been enough for Alex to guess that but hearing it being confirmed was still nice.

The slug said nothing and only nodded, its antenna tentacles drooping a little.

“So, what are you doing here, young Ming? And from what I see, you’ve gotten acquainted with my disciple and daughter too,” he said.

“I met your disciple in the Ancient Battlefield and have been acquainted ever since,” Alex said. “I do have a reason for coming here, but I don’t think it is the right time for me to go over it. There is something more pressing you should hear from your disciple.”

“Hmm… what is it?” the sect master turned to his disciple, who immediately started explaining the situation.

Alex could see the sect master’s eyes change from confusion to denial to fury as he immediately sent out people to search for the elders who broke the sect’s rules.

His anger wouldn’t calm down until they were punished to the extreme.

Chapter 955 Guest

"So, young Ming, did you come here to escort my disciple back?" the sect master asked.

The commotion had been dealt with and the 4 elders were punished. It also came forward that the senior Bu who had died to Heaven's Judgment was in fact the mastermind behind everything.

After that, the sect master had taken Alex to a lounging area where they sat in the setting sun and talked.

"No, sect master. I'm afraid I'm not that selfless," Alex said. "After I learned from my beast that he was going to break through, I decided to go looking for some beast cores for him to consume."

"My thought was to get them from the Demonic forest, but I'm not sure how good that idea even is," Alex said. The more he learned about the demonic forest from Ma Tianxin, the more he learned how hard it might actually be for him to secure any beast cores.

The demonic forest was apparently full of beasts with cultivation bases that rivaled the entirety of a single State.

There were beasts ranging from the Self-tempering realm all the way up to the Saint Soul realm. There was also some rumor of there being a beast with a cultivation base higher than that too, but no one had seen such a beast in thousands of years.

"The demonic forest… it's not really a place you can just enter whenever you want," the sect master said. "It is fine if you just want to stay in the outskirt, but the deeper you go the more dangerous it gets."

"The beasts there have lived a life full of wounds and pain, so they will attack whoever they can if they're threatened. Despite being in the Saint realm, they still truly act like beasts with little intelligence," the sect master said.

"How do you guys deal with them?" Alex asked.

"Well, it's easier for us. We're just too strong to worry much and we still stay around the outer perimeters. However, even the outer perimeter might turn out to be dangerous for someone like you," he said. "And we really can't afford to lose you."

Alex's eyes narrowed. Once again someone was saying that he was important. But why?

He tried asking the sect master but got no answer.

"What exactly is it that you want? Just the cores right?" the sect master asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Although, I do want to fight with a few beasts to train."

The sect master nodded as he thought of something. "How about this? Our sect has quite a few beast cores and we will give them to you. Instead, you just don't go over to the Demonic forest at all. Is that okay?" he asked.

Alex was surprised. "Are you sure, sect master? I require a lot of cores," he said.

"Of course," the sect master said. "You will not find your match in the outskirts of the forest and will have to enter the outer perimeter. At that point, however, the beasts will attack you all together for sure."

"I'm sure you're strong, but even I know you can't possibly defeat the beasts there by yourself. At that point, it won't be much of training," the sect master said.

"Be as it may, I still want to go try, sect master," Alex said, stubbornly. He had so many dao and yet he hadn't trained any of them in actual battle. So, in actual combat, he was having problems using the Dao properly.

Just like with the Senior Bu, who had a dao of his own, Alex was unable to do anything. If not for the spiritual sword, he wouldn't know what exactly he could do against him.

There were so many other such scenarios that he needed to be ready for.

Aside from that, however, he needed some ingredients for his alchemy. Since he was going to start making Saint-ranked pills soon enough.

"I don't know, young man. It is still too risky," he said. "What if you get in a situation with so many beasts attacking you at once? We can't afford that."

Alex frowned behind his mask. 'Why can't you afford it?' he thought. It was starting to annoy him way too much at this point. Still, he calmed himself enough to speak again.

"Worry not, sect master. I do have some escape methods. As long as the beasts that will try to attack aren't in Saint core realm, I should be able to escape easily," he said.

The sect master kept insisting on Alex to not leave, but Alex was equally stubborn, telling him that he was going to leave, one way or another. The sect master grumbled to himself a bit before saying, "Fine! I'll accompany you a few times and see if you can handle yourself or not. If you can't handle it, I'm bringing you back without question, okay?"

Alex finally sighed in relief. "Thank you, sect master. I know I'm being stubborn, but thank you for going along with my stubbornness," he said.

"Go rest for now. I won't have a free day for a while, you can prepare until then," the sect master said. He then called over his daughter and disciple.

"Tianxin, Xiuyin, go show him a guest room."

"Yes, father."

"Understood, master."

Alex nodded and left the place along with the other two. On their way to the guest room, Alex thought of something that had been bothering him in the back of his mind.

"By the way, Sister Xiuyin. Your surname is Ren, while your father is Huang. What is that all about?" Alex asked.

"Father's surname is Ren too," the girl said. "But he and my grandfather used to have a not-so-good relationship, so he used his mother's surname as an act of defiance. While they mended their relationship already, father's surname stuck and now he goes by this name."

"Ah, that makes sense," Alex nodded.

After walking for a little longer, Alex came across a house close to the core disciple's area.

"This is where you'll be staying. Please let us know if you require anything. Here's a talisman that you can use to directly contact either one of us," the girl said.

Alex looked at the talisman and thanked the girl. Then he went inside the house and looked around for a bit before entering one of the rooms with a Saint Qi gathering formation and sitting down.

Without wasting any more time, he called out Pearl, who appeared in his giant form. "Shrink and start cultivating. You'll need to stabilize your new cultivation base," Alex told him.

"Okay," Pearl said and shrunk down to the size of a kitten before starting to cultivate. Alex felt the cuts in his body start to appear once again after a long time.

'He's reached a level where my physical body is the same as his cultivation,' Alex thought. So, the cuts on his body were starting to become more visible as well.

Alex took the time to cultivate as well, calling out Whisker so he could train too.

He cultivated his body and eyes as long as possible while putting on his mask on the 3rd stage. After a while, he stopped all three and focused on his real cultivation.

It was going to take a long time for him to break through again, but he didn't mind. As a saint realm, he did have a lot of time to spare anyway.

Pearl's cultivation base slowly stabilized at the 1st realm of Saint Condensation realm, reaching the same stage as Alex did.

There had been some ups and downs along the way, but they had finally caught up to each other in cultivation base as well.

Whisker was still slow, coming to only around True Disciple 3rd realm. Even though Alex cultivated the Undying God's physique whenever he could, it was still not enough for Whisker.

After a while, Alex stopped cultivating and started thinking of what he needed to do next.

He did plan on fighting in the forest in the north, but that was not all he wanted to do. He wanted to make some pills as well now.

While he wasn't going to start making pills in such a location, he did have other things he could do.

After the layer of information in his mind had surfaced regarding the various different ingredients and their uses, Alex had been keen on learning about them.

Finally, he had the free time he wanted, and so, he was going to start going through the information in his mind so that he could prepare for the day he returned to making pills again.

Alex closed his eyes and started thinking of various things. Suddenly, the overwhelming amount of information in his mind surfaced all at once, overwhelming him in the process.

Alex pushed back the information and took a deep breath before letting the information come out one after another.

There was simply too much information, so he started with the ones that mattered, the Saint-ranked ingredients.

The information not only included the name of the ingredients and their elements, but it also included information about its powder's color, smell, and what exactly it could be used for.

With this amount of information, Alex was sure that he could even start making new pills while knowing precisely what they would do.

There was one problem with this information however that he hadn't realized before. Since the Alchemy God's knowledge only helped him recognize plants, while he knew the names of animal-based ingredients, he had no idea what the beast looked like.

"I can work with that," Alex thought and started focusing on his learning. After all, with the amount of information in his head, it was going to take a very long time for him to learn it all.

Chapter 956 Improvement for the Improvement

To start off his learning process, Alex decided to start with pills that he would consider to have significant importance to anyone.

Those pills being healing pills. Under a normal scenario, he no longer required any healing pills, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to know how to make one just in case someone he is close to gets injured.

Saint-ranked healing pills were all capable of not just healing, but also regenerating lost body parts. Since they were so good, Alex started learning about the pill that he had downgraded for when he was a True realm cultivator.

The Saint Body Regeneration pill.

Alex started with the Blood Spirit Ginseng and closed his eyes to learn about it. Information that was stored in his mind slowly flowed into his brain, no longer a jumbled mess but an understandable piece of information.

He learned what sort of ingredient it was, what it looked like, and where it grew. Alex was surprised he knew how to extract it from its plant without damaging it.

He had been unconsciously doing that even when he wasn’t a Saint realm cultivator, but it was only now that he realized just how he was able to do so.

Alex knew quite a lot about the Blood Spirit Ginseng, so it didn’t take him a long time to learn a lot about it. Once he was done, he moved on to the next set of ingredients.

Alex had about 30 different Saint-ranked pill recipes, and of them, only 3 were healing pills. He had about 70% of the ingredients required for these pills, so it became easy to learn about them with the object in his hand.

It surprisingly took him half a day to learn about the 3 pills and every ingredient in them. There were maybe 30 or so ingredients in the 3 pills and yet he was so slow that each ingredient required him to spend at least 20 minutes to fully understand it.

He did try and understand every little aspect of the ingredient he was learning about, rather than just remember what he was learning. He wanted it to be such that he would know what ingredient to use in what situation, rather than try and go through his memories.

Also, he spent the majority of the time seeing if he could improve the recipes with just his mind. At first, he found it quite hard.

After all, he had never made these pills and thus had no idea how any ingredient would turn out under different circumstances. Without knowing the structure of the powder, it would be hard to improve the recipe since he wouldn’t know the proper combination.

He had an idea in his head that he thought would work.

He thought of cutting up the piece of an ingredient into many different pieces and then refining them based on the various different conditions of temperature, the direction of movement, and speed of movement.

Previously, when he was just starting out with improving recipes, he couldn’t do it at all. After all, cutting up a piece of ingredient messed up its size and the amount of heat it would absorb as well as many other variables that Alex couldn’t even think of.

However, after learning the Dao of Heat and Heat Conduction, Alex wondered if he could tweak that part of the problem enough to compensate for the rest of the variables to remain stable.

He would have to try it out with True rank ingredients, but as far as he could think, he was certain he could figure it out.

“What else can I even do?” Alex wondered. “It’s not like there are so many Saint-rank ingredients lying around.”

Alex shook his head, realizing there was going to be quite a lot of trials and errors to go through to fix this idea he had come up with. After all, what else could he really do?

It was at that time that something struck his mind which completely threw him off the track.

“Wait... can I use that?” he thought with a shocked expression on his face.

When Alex entered the Saint realm, the Alchemy God’s knowledge had given him the knowledge required to reverse engineer a pill’s ingredients, and it had also given him the Supreme Elemental Accord.

However, it had given him one other piece of knowledge that Alex had skipped out on at the time because it was something that was going to lead him to learn about Structures and Combinations.

Since he already knew about it, he had decided not to spend his time on it. However, he was just starting to understand what a stupid move it was on his part.

After all, the knowledge he gained was apparently one that he could use to formulate all the different possible shapes of the ingredients using only 3 ingredients.

Using the speed of release of the energy provided by the recipe, Alex would first refine a single ingredient using the lowest heat possible and record the result.

Then he would use the highest heat possible and record the result. Then finally, he would record a result from somewhere in between the two.

Then, the 3 pieces of information would help him visualize the changes an ingredient went through as the heat changed. In this way, with just 3 ingredients, Alex could learn all the different structures of a single ingredient in a recipe, without having to necessarily spend dozens of said ingredients.

The only flaw in this technique was that he required at least 3 of the same ingredients to map out the results and thus change the recipe. If he needed to test out the original recipe, then he needed 4 different ingredients.

While that was dozens of times lower, Alex wasn’t sure how he was going to possibly find 4 of the same Saint-ranked ingredients to figure out the structure of a refined ingredient. Not to mention, if he wanted to make a pill out of it, he would need one more ingredient.

That was incredibly annoying in Alex’s mind.

As he thought of finding another method, an idea came to his mind. “Wait... what if I mix the two processes?” he thought.

Instead of refining 3 different ingredients, he could refine just a single one. The only difference was that he was going to cut up the ingredient into 3 pieces and refine those.

That way, instead of needing 4 sets of ingredients to figure out the perfect recipe, he would need only 2.

“That’s going to take a lot of effort,” he thought. “I still don’t know if cutting ingredients into pieces makes it unusable as per the recipe. I will have to try that out.”

“Also, the 3 ingredient technique to figuring out the structure is only usable for True rank ingredients. I will still have to see if they transition well for Saint rank ingredients too. That will require some heavy experimentation on my end,” Alex thought.

Fortunately, there were quite a few Saint rank ingredients with him, some of which were likely to be not so important and many in number.

As long as Alex used those ingredients, he would be able to complete his experimentation.

“That should work,” he thought.

After spending quite a bit of time thinking about the problem, Alex decided to spend the next few hours on cultivation.

Pearl was still cultivating and as such his body was still being cut up. Alex looked at Whisker who was sleeping without care and remembered that he needed to teach him how to make pills properly too.

It had been nearly 3 years since he last taught him anything. So, after he was done cultivating for the day, he started teaching Whisker more and more about Alchemy.

Since he was in the True realm now, he could start learning about True rank pills too, so Alex gave him some recipes to remember.

It would still take him a while before he had any chance of making pills, but just learning about it, for now, was enough.

After all, even Alex himself was only learning right now.

Once he had some free time, Alex continued on his path to learning about the different pills and their ingredients.

After the healing pills, he focused on poison and venom antidotes, and only after that did he learn the rest of the ingredients.

Within 10 days of starting, Alex completely learned about the ingredients for every Saint-ranked recipe he had on him.

Chapter 957 Blood Rhino

Alex spent some time outside his room when Ma Tianxin came to get him and show him around the sect.

They even went out of the sect to the nearby cities where Ma Tianxin had a few friends. Apparently, he used to be from these very cities before he was scouted out by the sect.

Alex remembered some of these friends from back then when they tried to attack him in the Endless Tunnel, especially the woman he had gone with at the time.

“That reminds me, what did you do with the ores you got back then?” Alex asked.

“I made a defensive mail out of it,” Ma Tianxin said. “Our 10-year engagement anniversary was coming up, so I gave it to sister Xiuyin as a gift.”

“Oh, not bad,” Alex said. “What about yourself? You didn’t make anything?”

“Ah, no,” Ma Tianxin said. “Master already gives me so much. I don’t need anything else.”

“I see,” Alex said. “That reminds me, why exactly did senior Huang take you as a disciple? Was it just because you were strong?”

“Uh, not really,” Ma Tianxin said. “It was more so because of my ability to tame the beasts rather easily. Ours is a beast-taming sect, so that is what matters above all.”

“So you’re very good at taming beasts, huh? Why do you only have a single beast with you then?” Alex asked.

“Well, that’s because I’m waiting to find a good beast to tame,” Ma Tianxin said.

“A good beast? You haven’t found any yet?” Alex asked.

“No,” he said. “At least not one that I’m satisfied with. But I will hopefully get one soon.”

“Oh, why is that?” Alex asked curiously.

“Well, the elders will leave for the Demonic Forest in around a week or so to go get as many beasts as they can. That should be the time you will get to go too, I believe,” Ma Tianxin said.

“A week, huh? That’s not a long time, I guess,” Alex said.

The two of them returned back to the sect sometime later and Alex went back to his room.

He sat on the bed, thinking of starting to learn some other random ingredients when he remembered something.

“Nearly forgot about that,” he thought as he brought out something.

A small, yellow pill-like object appeared on Alex’s hand, one that let out a sweet scent that immediately made Pearl’s eyes widen and he excitedly looked at Alex, hoping it was for him.

Unfortunately for Pearl, the beast core was not for him. It wasn’t for Alex either. He could probably eat it, but he had a better thought in mind for its usage.

Alex looked at the beast core in his hand. This was the one that belonged to the rhino he killed a few days back.

He had taken the entire corpse of the beasts before he left the location, and only now was he checking it out.

The Saint Condensation 7th realm aura still emanated from the beast core, but Alex ignored that part of the core. Instead, he tried to feel the spiritual energy in it, the impression of the soul that still remained in the core.

He could swear he could hear the rhino growling from within it.

“I’m sorry that you died a tamed beast,” Alex said. “But you’ll have to be one once again.”

Alex took out a cauldron and placed the beast core in it before taking about his sharpest sword.

Alex held onto the sword’s blade and let his blood drip down into the cauldron. He waited and he watched as his blood slowly fill up the cauldron.

“Oh,” Alex thought with a surprised expression when he felt the blood in his body get recreated. It wasn’t fast enough to replace what was lost, but it was still quite good.

“So the Undying Physique works for blood loss too huh?” he thought. That was certainly going to be very useful for him considering his ability to make use of Blood Aura.

However, it didn’t take long for him to realize that while he was getting blood, the blood didn’t have much blood aura in it. It needed to stay in his body for a while before gaining the aura.

Alex sighed and stopped. He couldn’t dilute the blood aura in the cauldron, so he sealed it off for use some other day.

He used the time to cultivate, learn and teach.

3 days later, he had gathered enough blood with quality blood aura to fully fill the entire cauldron.

Once that was done, Alex was ready to begin.

He pulled out his Blood God’s manual that came forth and opened up to the 4th page with Blood beast.

Alex read up on the technique again and slowly poured Qi into the blood. The blood stirred with his Qi, moving around for a while.

His Qi was there to agitate the blood for a while, getting it ready, before it was time for him to use the main part of the technique.

When he did, his Qi pierced into the blood, reaching directly for the beast’s core at the end.

When the beast core obtained his Qi, it slowly floated in the blood while violently attacking the blood all around it.

The impression of the beast that still remained in the beast core was trying to fight against the blood, but the blood aura quickly drowned it out.

A stronger impression could’ve most likely been able to fight against his blood aura, but this one could not.

As such, the beast’s core was devoured by the blood aura and slowly shaped itself in the impression it had devoured.

Alex saw the blood pour out of the cauldron, acting on its own as it started getting larger, gaining more blood from somewhere. The undulating blob of blood in the air slowly took shape.

First, Alex saw the four limbs of the beast appear from the blood, then a head, and then the rest finally becoming the body and tail. The legs grew hooves, the head grew ears, eyes, nose, and horn.

The body grew the armor and the tail grew its hair.

However, every single one of these features was fake. Not a single one of these features was anything but for show.

After all the features appeared, the rhino landed in the room, just as big as the original one, and just as domineering. No, the crimson color of the rhino and its battle-ready stance made it far more domineering.

Alex looked at it with awe in his eyes. Even Pearl was surprised and was wondering just what Alex had done.

Alex got close to the beast and touched it. “Oh,” he was surprised. “It’s not liquid.”

Having been made up of blood, Alex had fully expected the beast to be a liquid beast that he could place his hands through. However, they were as solid as any other beast he had touched before.

“Sit,” Alex said. The rhino obeyed his command and slowly sat down. “Stand,” he gave another order and the beast stood up.

Alex bobbed his head up and down in a continuous nod as he looked at the rhino in front of him. “So… this is a blood beast,” he said happily.

“Brother? What’s this?” Pearl asked curiously. Even Whisker was curious and walked forward.

“This is a beast I made with my blood,” he said. “It should help me in fights.”

“You can give it orders?” Pearl asked.

“Yes,” Alex said.

“Can I give it orders?” Pearl asked.

“Uhh… maybe?” Alex thought. “Give it an order.”

“Turn around,” Pearl said to the rhino, but it didn’t respond at all.

“Obey his commands,” Alex said to the Rhino.

“Turn around,” Pearl said again. This time, to everyone’s surprise, the rhino turned around.

Whisker came up to Alex’s shoulders and excitedly said that he wanted to give commands too. Alex let him do it and the Rhino accepted his command as well.

The two beasts tried commanding the Rhino to do various things before Alex intervened.

“That’s enough. I need to test out something so you guys should stay back,” he said. Pearl and Whisker moved away from the location and Alex stood alone in the center of the room.

He scanned the entire beast with his spiritual sense and tried to figure out its cultivation base.New n0vel chapters are published on

Prior to death, the Rhino was a Saint Condensation 7th realm beast. However, after death, it was reborn in Alex’s blood, so it was only a guess as to how strong it could possibly be.

After finding it impossible to guess just what the beast’s cultivation base was since it didn’t actually have any, Alex gave up.

The beast most likely used Blood Aura instead of Qi, so its strength was totally dependent on Alex’s own blood.

From what the information in the book said, the created blood beast would have the strength of the cultivation base they had prior to death, or the cultivation base equivalent that came with the owner’s blood.

Alex’s blood had evolved past what it used to be once he had entered the Saint realm, but he hadn’t had the time to test it just yet. So, this would be the first time he was testing it properly.

“Come, attack me,” he ordered the beast. The beast rushed towards him with incredible speed and strength that surprised Alex.

His demon eyes saw the speed and realized something was wrong. So he quickly changed his lax defense to a very strong one, putting up multiple sources of defense.

Still, when the blood beast slammed into him, Alex was sent back to the wall, his body broken in many different places.

“Arghh!” he cried out in pain.

To everyone’s surprise, the blood beast was many times stronger than even Alex was.

Chapter 958 Weak

“Brother! Are you okay?” Pearl asked as he looked at Alex who lay sprawled on the ground, his hands twisted around, and bleeding from different parts of his body.

“Arghhh… I’m fine,” Alex said. His body slowly healed. His wounds closed, and his wrongly bent arms retwisted themselves to their correct positions.

The broken bones took a bit longer to heal, but they got there too after a little while.

He stood back up and looked at the Blood Rhino with clear shock, surprise, and happiness on his face.

The Rhino was never this strong when it died, which meant that the power in it came from his blood. ‘So my blood really had progressed quite a bit huh?’ he thought.

He looked back at the wall where he was thrown and was glad that it wasn’t destroyed. The saint formation used in this building was quite strong from what he could see.

He turned back towards the Rhino and smiled. “Come hit me again.”

The Blood Rhino moved the moment it got the order. Alex watched the rhino approach him with an incredible speed, and something changed in him.

Blood poured out from every pore in his skin and quickly formed an armor on him. The rhino slammed into Alex, but this time around, he didn’t budge even a little bit.

In fact, he didn’t even feel any of the damage that was dealt to him, just a bit of pushback that he could handle.

“That’s… weird,” Alex thought. He had just made the rhino so his blood aura wasn’t quite as well as it should be, and yet his armor had managed to block the rhino.

Either the blood armor skill was strong even when used with blood of lower quality, or the Blood beast wasn’t as good as it should be.

Which was to say, his blood aura had lost strength when he used it to make the rhino.

Alex’s immediate assumption was that the beast core had fought off his blood aura, which was why the resulting beast was weaker.

But, he still wanted to be sure, so he pulled out the book again and read the description regarding blood beasts. He had read it already, but he wanted to make sure.

“… strength depends on its cultivation base, or the owner’s blood aura, whichever is higher. The probability of forging a blood beast goes down if the core is from a beast with a cultivation base stronger than the owner’s blood aura.”

“Keeps instinct, but no intelligence. Follows commands without exception. Needs around 20 liters of blood. Uhhh… Ah! there it is.” Alex finally found what he was looking for.

“Efficiency of the created blood beast depends on the difference between the beast’s cultivation base and the owner’s aura. The greater the difference the lower the efficiency,” Alex read.

“Damn, could’ve just written the resulting blood beast gets weaker if you use too weak or too strong beast cores. Would’ve been easier to remember,” Alex thought and put the book aside.

He looked back at the rhino and thought to himself. “So… Saint Condensation 7th realm, enhanced by my blood aura reached somewhere in the middle of Saint Formation realm in terms of strength.”

“Can that be considered a big enough gap?” Alex wondered. “It’s big enough to result in lower strength from the beast I guess.”

Alex still wasn’t certain how weak it was, but he guessed it wasn’t more than a realm or two at best.

“I guess I can ignore that for now,” he thought. He moved away from that thought and started testing the Rhino.

He wanted to see if it genuinely had no intelligence, and just how much instinct it had retained.

It soon became clear that the book was correct and the beast didn’t hold any intelligence at all. Unless Alex gave it orders, it would simply sit there doing nothing.

It would try to dodge attacks just based on instinct from when it was alive, but aside from that, it didn’t do anything else.

He would need a different environment to test more, so he stopped the testing for the day.

The blood beast flew into the Blood God’s Manual, and the book flew into his body, disappearing somewhere his senses could not follow.

After that, Alex sat down and began cultivating.

Alex had the Snake core in his storage too, the one he had killed alongside the Rhino. However, he knew he needed to improve his blood aura for a while before he could make another blood beast.

He spent the next 3 days deep in cultivation until someone came and knocked on his door.

Alex opened the door to find Ma Tianxin waiting for him.

“Senior, Master has asked for you,” he said.

“Senior Huang wants to see me?” he asked. “Let us go on then.”

Ma Tianxin took him back to the tower at the center of the sect, where he stood outside a door and let Alex enter.

Alex went in and saw Huang Xinyi sitting by a table. “Ah, young man. You’re here,” he said and called Alex to sit next to him.

Alex walked over and sat next to him. “Did you have something to say to me, senior?” he asked.

“Yes,” the old man said. “You do know that a small group of us will be leaving for the Demonic forest tomorrow right?”

Alex nodded. “That is when you are going to take me along, no?” he asked.

Huang Xinyi gave an awkward smile. “I was hoping you would have changed your mind by now,” he said.

“I’m afraid that will be very much impossible, sect master. Unless there is something of importance that requires my attention elsewhere, I will go to the Demonic forest,” he said.

The old man sighed and brought out a small storage bag. “Here, it’s what you asked,” he said.

Alex took the storage bag and sent his spiritual sense into it. Instantly, Alex’s eyes went wide from seeing the number of beast cores in there.

Ranging from the Saint Condensation realm, all the way to the mid realms of the Saint Foundation realm, there were nearly 3 dozen cores in there.

That was quite a lot more than he had been expecting to get here. “I hope this will help you change your mind,” he said.

Alex looked at the cores with wide eyes, showing a clear look of surprise in them that would have been hard to prevent anyhow.

He counted the cores and realized that most of the beast cores belonged to beasts in the Saint Condensation realm.

While that was quite good when looking at it from the outside, if he wanted to make Blood beasts out of them, it would be a rather bad use of his blood.

He would get many results like the Rhino or worse, where his blood aura would go down in strength by a few realms.

Alex didn’t want that.

“I’m afraid I will still have to insist on going to the demonic forest,” Alex said. He wasn’t going there for just the cores after all.

The cores were just a benefit. He was going there to train and see how he faired against the stronger beings in the real world.

“Are you sure? I will have to insist you do not go,” the old man said.

“There’s nothing you can say that will change my decision, sect master,” Alex said.

“Fine! Be ready before the sun rises tomorrow. We need to arrive at the forest before sunrise when most beasts are inactive,” the sect master said.

“I will do that,” Alex said.

After that, he returned back to his room and took out the many cores to look at them.

“Should I use all of it to make blood beasts?” he wondered. He would at least use some to test out the difference in the strength of the blood beasts forged using various different cores.

Alex put the cores aside after deciding that and started gathering some blood. Any free time he had, he would now start gathering blood so that he could use it later on.

He cultivated for the rest of the day and overnight, and finally before in the dead of night, he walked out to find the elders getting ready to leave. Alex greeted the few seniors he knew and the rest he wasn’t familiar with.

“Ah, you’re here,” the sect master said. “Let us leave then.”

Chapter 959 The Demonic Forest

Before the sun had even risen, the group of 6 flew across the morning sky towards the north.

Alex looked at the 4 humans he flew with, and the slug that was also with them. “I thought senior was the sect’s sacred beast. Shouldn’t he be in the sect in case it needs protection?” he asked.

He sat on the flying ship of the Blue Spring sect, along with the others who were all either late into the Saint Core realm or were in the Saint Soul realm.

The slug looked at him, but it did not speak at all.

“My friend here isn’t actually very strong in combat,” the sect master said. “That is not the reason why he is the sect’s Sacred Beast.”

“Oh? What is it then?” Alex asked curiously.

“Seagem is a Blue Spring slug, the beast our sect is named after. He is a rare kind of beast that is naturally capable of following Qi and aura. He can see where it is concentrated, and where it is not.”

“He can also eat on those aura and get rid of them,” the sect master said. “After becoming a Saint ranked beast, he had gained the ability to hide himself and his surrounding from the Spiritual senses of others.”

“Given how useful it is to go into the forest and take away from orphaned beasts or just some eggs, he is one of the main reasons why our sect even keeps prospering,” the sect master said.

“Oh… that does sound quite important,” Alex said. ‘Can see and eat aura to not leave any of it behind? That is quite amazing,’ he thought.

His concealment technique hid all aura he would otherwise leave, but that still left the aura that had already appeared before he used the techniques. So, if someone were good enough, they could use that aura to try and later find you.

It seemed the slug was one of those beasts that were capable of doing that.

“Do not use your spiritual sense. No matter what,” the sect leader said.

Suddenly, Alex felt the aura around him disappear. It was disappearing more rapidly than it was appearing.

The slug, also called Seagem by the sect leader, was actively eating their aura to hide them all. It was also hiding them from any spiritual sense that might be lurking around in the morning.

Alex looked away from his ship and toward the north. Even without spiritual sense, he could see it clearly.

The Demonic Forest.

Alex already had knowledge of what it looked like, but still seeing the thing for real gave him quite a bit of amazement in his heart.

He saw the trees topped with white completely covering everything in the north. The trees started in the plains but quickly went onto a mountain range.

The mountain range was massive, so massive that it surrounded the entire Demonic Forest. Hundreds of kilometers wide, the mountain ranges surrounded and were part of the Demonic forest.

Some of those in the middle were active volcanoes, leading to the area around them remaining mostly snow free.

“The forest you see ahead on the plain is what we consider to be the outskirts of the forest,” the sect master said to him.

“The first layer of mountains that surround the demonic forest is what we consider to be the outer range of forest. Everything beyond that is the Inner range.”

Alex nodded as he heard it and asked, “You have not yet made a distinction between Inner and Core range? I’m sure there is a difference there, right?”

The sect master sighed. “I don’t doubt there is,” he said. “But we are not nearly strong enough, so we’ve never visited there. Since we’ve never visited there, we’ve never had to make the distinction,” he said.

The ship passed over the dense forest, flying silently in the pre-dawn sky. Alex neither felt any spiritual sense passing through them nor did he feel any aura in the air.

He looked towards Seagem who was actively consuming everything to keep them hidden. As he watched, the beast’s two antenna tentacles on its head suddenly vibrated.

“Oh, it looks like Seagem found something,” the sect master said. He waited for a bit to get more information, and once he received it, the sect master diverted the ship at a slight angle to go towards a certain destination.

After they had passed the first layer of mountains and were in the inner range of the forest, the ship slowly descended, but it didn’t make a landing.

“Let’s move,” the sect master said.

The other 3 elders nodded, and all 4 of them dropped off at once. The Slug flew as well, and Alex was the last one to follow.

The ship disappeared from the sky and the sect master turned to Alex. “Don’t move too far away from Seagem. He wouldn’t be able to keep you safe,” he said.

Alex nodded and moved over right next to the Sacred beast. The slug let him be and focused on its own task of finding weak beasts that were all alone. On top of already having to focus on clearing their aura, and hiding them from a spiritual sense, it could be seen how much the beast was doing.

Alex heard the sounds of fighting in the distance and turned around to look, but he couldn’t see anything.

“The beasts are fighting,” the sect master told him. “It’s normal in here. They always fight here, usually to the death.”

“Oh,” Alex said. “So strength is truly power here.”

“Yes,” the sect master said. “The people say that the cultivation world is the same, that it is where Strength reigns above all and has the law of the jungle. But that is not true,” the sect master said.

“The only people that do say that are the ones that have never witnessed the true law of the jungle. There is no way in hell that a civilized world like the cultivation world could ever be considered to have a law of the jungle.”

“But power still reigns supreme, right?” Alex asked. “You can do anything if you’re strong enough.”

“That…” the sect master’s face twisted a little, and even one other elder that was with them got a little angry. They didn’t show it on the outside, but Alex still saw it.

‘Did I say something wrong?’ he wondered.

The group remained silent for a while, and then they arrived next to a tree with a massive nest on it. There were 7 eggs in the nest, all of them with a red shells and green tendrils moving across the egg.

“No one’s here, let’s make it quick,” the sect master said and the other 3 nodded. They all grabbed one of the 7 eggs, leaving behind 3 eggs only in the nest.

“That’s a little sad,” Alex said, looking at the nest. “The mother will come back to find only 3 beasts.”

“Don’t be,” one of the elders said. “This is an egg of a Firevine Cuckoo. They are known to have the firstborns kick off the other eggs to guarantee that their mother takes care of them. Had we left the eggs, they would’ve all been destroyed anyway.”

“Oh,” Alex said. “Then why not take the rest of the eggs too?”

“The newborn child needs it. When it hatches, its first instinct is to throw its siblings off of the nest. If it doesn’t find anything to throw, it will thrash around until it itself falls off the nest and dies,” the sect master answered. “We don’t want that.”

“Ah, I see,” Alex said.

The group moved away from the nest and onto another part of the forest where a cub was left alone.

Alex looked at the cub that reminded him of Pearl when he was young. This cub was a lion cub however and had brown fur on its body.

The sect master grabbed it and immediately tossed it inside the storage bag.

Alex blinked once and looked at what had just happened with a bit of confusion. “Wait… is that a beast pouch?” he asked.

“Hmm? Oh, yes. Is this your first time seeing this?” the sect master asked.

“I’m afraid so,” Alex said. “I’ve only ever heard about it before.

A beast pouch was a storage bag made the same way a normal storage bag was made. However, instead of stuffing in space, it had a chunk of land and air in it, making it inhabitable.

It was but a temporary arrangement as with the little bit of land and air, it could never fully house a beast, not like a natural beast space formed via a bond could.

“Yes, It’s called a Beast pouch, and is quite handy in these situations,” the sect master said. “Come on, we have more places to visit.”

The sun had now risen and the beasts were starting to wake up either from their sleep or from their overnight cultivation.

The 6 of them were still cloaked thanks to the slug’s ability, but that would be less useful very soon.

So, the sect master went over to the riskier spots while they could and gathered all the beasts that were there.

Once the sun was completely in the sky and some of the beasts were even starting to challenge them thanks to their lack of aura, the sect master finally decided to drop the facade.

“Alright, split off and go look for whatever you can. Once you are done, return back to the sect. I will have to stay here and help this young man for a bit,” the sect master said.New n0vel chapters are published on

The 3 other elders nodded and split off to find the beasts on their own.

Chapter 960: Finding Beasts to Fight

He went where he could that he considered safe, and got the beasts for the sect from there. Thanks to Seagem, he knew exactly where to look for the beasts, and exactly where to avoid them.

During the 3 days they were there, Alex and the sect master got into no fight with any beasts. But he did witness a lot of other fights in the distance.

Even without spiritual senses, he could see the aerial battles far in the distance. His Demon Eyes gave him a far sight that rivaled spiritual sense itself.

Alex saw many aerial battles, which only made him wonder just how many ground battles there were. He could see the trees ruffle around from time to time, but in this snow-filled forest, one white was hard to discern from another.

"I think we're done here," the sect master said after he picked up the small tortoise that was wandering the forest all alone.

He places the tortoise in his storage bag and turned to Alex. "Let's go," he said. "Once I discern if you are able to fight here or not, we can go back."

Alex nodded and flew off with the sect master. The other 3 elders were given autonomy for the last 3 days, so they would have already returned without meeting any of them.

The demonic forest was so massive that Alex wouldn't doubt that he could miss a man if they flew away from afar.

They then flew outside the outer range, arriving at the outskirts again, and the sect master gave the slug some commands.

The slug worked to find a suitable opponent for Alex's first battle. Alex had yet to release his spiritual sense, so he didn't know who he was going to have to fight, but he was looking forward to it.

"There," the sect master pointed and Alex looked. He saw a lone wolf with grey fur walking through the snowy field.

Its cultivation base from what Alex could tell wasn't that high, but he would have to use his spiritual sense to find precisely how strong it was.

"That's your first opponent," the sect master said.

Alex nodded and slowly flew downwards, away from the other two. As soon as he flew away from the Slug's domain where no aura existed, Alex found out that the beast was actually a Saint Condensation 3rd realm beast.

He looked with a confused expression and turned to look at the sect master. "Uh… is this a mistake?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" the sect master asked. "Is this too strong?"

"No," Alex said. "It is too weak. Senior, you need to find another one."

"Certainly a Saint Condensation 3rd realm beast is not weak, right? You're only at Saint Condensation 1st realm," the sect master said. "Try fighting without your Dao and you'll see how hard it actually gets."

Alex didn't look away and asked, "Senior, did you forget that the sect's Elder Bu died in battle with me? We need a stronger opponent."

"Elder Bu's situation is different, isn't it? I heard he died to the lightning strike during your beast's tribulation," he said.

"He got struck by the lightning because he ran away from our fight because I was getting close to killing him," Alex said. "Let's just go find another beast."

"Umm… why don't you try fighting this so I can know your words are true," the sect master said. "As I said, I cannot put you in danger just because you say so."

Alex sighed. "Fine," he said and few down to the ground.
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The wolf had been staring at them the entire time, unable to discern anything as its spiritual sense never actually sensed the 3 in the air.

It was only after Alex left the slug's aura that it sensed the Saint Condensation 1st realm cultivation from him.

Seeing him come down now made the wolf angry. "This is my domain. You would be better off leaving," the beast said.

Alex was a little taken aback, but he seriously needed to start not being surprised by beast talking now. Since each beast knew the language of the world the moment they entered the Saint realms, whether they could make the sounds with their mouth or not, they could speak.

"Don't worry, I won't harm you. I'm just here to show him that I'm stronger than you," Alex said. "I'll leave soon."

"Stronger? What nonsense are you—"

Suddenly, Alex's cultivation base flared to its peak as the aura landed on the wolf. The wolf buckled on its own weight, its knees bent forward as it was crushed by the aura.

Alex slowly strode forward and crouched down to look at the wolf. "What type of wolf are you? I don't think I've ever heard of one with features like yours," he said.

The wolf tried to speak, but no words came out of its mouth. The aura that Alex poured out was simply too strong for him.

Alex reached out to the wolf who couldn't even flinch and rubbed its head a little bit. "Saint Condensation 3rd realm… you would've made such a good opponent for Pearl," he said softly.

Alas, Alex would never have Pearl fight out in the open lest he wanted the sect leader to recognize the abilities that came with having the bloodline of the White Tiger.

If they ever figured out that Pearl was the heir to the White Tigers in the Western continent, Alex wouldn't know what would happen to him and Pearl.

As such, even with such a good opponent, Alex had to leave the wolf be.

"You can go," he said as he took back his cultivation base and the wolf fled away.

Alex got back up and flew up to the sect master, who looked at him with pure awe on his face.

When Alex had used his cultivation base's aura to suppress the wolf, the sect master had also seen just how powerful the aura was.

With Seagem who was incredibly attuned with auras, he could tell that despite being a Saint Condensation 1st realm cultivator, Alex's aura made his almost, if not as strong as a Saint Foundation 1st realm cultivator.

"Let's… let's find you a Saint Condensation 9th realm beast to fight. If you can beat that, then we can try finding stronger beasts," he said.

Alex sighed in relief. Finally, the sect master was coming to his senses and letting him fight as he wanted.

Saint Condensation 9th realm was still weak, but he would have to start somewhere anyway. So, the three of them went slightly deeper into the forest to find Alex's first proper opponent.

A giant Hailhorn Snake with blue scales and two icy horns lay at the bottom of a tree trunk. It stayed in the snow as if it was basking in the sunlight in spring.

When it sensed Alex arrive, it uncoiled itself and looked towards them.

"What are you humans doing here? Do you know whose land this is?" the snake asked.

"We don't care," Alex said. "I'm just here to beat you."

"A newbie Saint thinks he can beat me. You are asking for death, aren't you? You must be thinking that the human behind you will save you. Unfortunately for you, if my poison enters your veins, nobody can save you," the serpent said.

Alex sighed and punched the snake from afar without alerting it. The snake reacted almost instantly and moved away from the location, and the punch fell on the tree, instantly toppling it.

"Die!" the snake shouted and moved its tail. Suddenly, a blue illusion of the snake's tail appeared behind it, one that was at least 20 meters high and it slammed down on Alex.

Alex didn't move as the attack landed on him.

The snow around the attack blew up high in the air, making it impossible to see what was happening inside.

However, with their spiritual sense, everyone knew exactly what had happened.

The snake looked at Alex with confusion. 'A treasure? Those armors the humans wear?' it thought.

Alex walked towards the Snake, dusting off the snow from his black robes, and got closer.

The snake realized something was wrong, but it didn't understand what. Whatever it was, however, as long as it could use its poison, it would win.

As such, when Alex got close to it, the snake lunged at him.

Alex saw it clearly. He saw the snake's muscles constrict right before it was going to attack. He saw its body straighten as it flew at him with incredible speed.

He saw the snake's mouth open wide as its fangs showed up, aiming for his vitals.

He saw his own hands move quickly, reacting to the snake's attack as it was happening.

Alex hadn't even prepared for the attack and somehow he was reacting to it. It all looked so slow in his eyes.

His hands grasped the snake by its neck while its venom sprayed behind him. The snake tried to move around, and get itself free, but Alex's grip was just too strong.

Then, before the snake could do anything else, Alex used his dao. Right from his hands where he grabbed the snake, a thin line appeared on the snake's neck that a moment later started bleeding.

The snake's head fell to the floor as it was perfectly cut along its neck using Alex's dao.

Before the snake bled any further, Alex grabbed its body and stuffed it into his storage bag.

Then he turned around towards the sect master and asked, "Can we go onto stronger foes please?"

Chapter ﻿961 Fighting with Dao

Alex stood in front of a snow leopard with a sword in his hand.

The leopard was already looking for a fight before Alex even arrived, so the moment the two laid eyes on each other, they prepared to fight.

Alex used his Qi to strengthen his body, but aside from that, he wasn't planning on using any techniques today. He was well accustomed to using techniques in a fight, so he wanted to try and fight using only Dao.

The snow leopard jumped at him and Alex swung his sword. The thin energy of his sword slash flew off from his sword, empowered by his intent to cut.

The leopard moved away before it was hit and the attack flew far away, cutting various different things in the process.

The leopard's body was covered in ice and then it swung its paws at him. Alex moved his hands in front of him and a golden barrier appeared in front of him, empowered by his Dao of Metal.

Still, when the attack landed, Alex's barrier showed a clear sign of being under stress. But why would it not be? After all, he was fighting against a Saint Foundation 3rd realm beast.

Alex could easily beat a Saint Foundation 1st realm beast with just his Qi and techniques and could win against a Saint Foundation 2nd realm beast if he used his Sword Aura as well.

If he wasn't willing to use Sword Aura, then he could use Dao instead to win against it. Since the two of them were so easily defeated, he had to find a beast with a much higher cultivation base.

Huang Xinyi stood behind Alex quite far away, hidden from anyone's spiritual sense due to Seagem. He looked at Alex in awe, wondering just how someone in the Saint Condensation 1st realm could fight a Saint Foundation 3rd realm.

'So strong,' he thought to himself. 'Should I… try and get him to join the sect?'

Even if Alex didn't want to join the sect, there were ways to force him to. For one, he could force him to say an oath that forever tied him to the sect.

Huang Xinyi felt greed develop in his heart that came naturally with seeing a treasure in front of one that had no owner.

However, he quickly dispelled the thought from his heart.

'No, I can't,' he said to himself. Even ignoring the morality of his own thoughts, the sect master knew why he was wrong to think so. 'He is way too important for us to be greedy like this. '

Once the thought of greed was out of his mind, he went back to being surprised at how well Alex fought. He didn't know of his own disciples fighting so well.

Especially against beasts that were different from fighting against humans.

'Does he have some experience in fighting against beasts?' the sect master wondered.

Alex used his intent to cut the leopard in front of him, but the leopard seemed rather perceptible of dangers and always dodged the attack.

Alex continued using the Dao of cut, but at some point, he realized that if he wasn't going to be fast enough to cut it, then he wasn't going to cut it at all.

He had been intending to improve his Dao of cutting here since it was the one that failed last time against the elder Bu whose Dao made him sturdier. Alas, he had chosen the wrong target.

"Well, next Dao then," Alex thought and instantly fire erupted all around the leopard. The leopard tried running away, but its fur had already caught on fire.

The leopard quickly used its ice skills to create a layer of ice around its body to suffocate the fire, but to its surprise, even the ice was burning now.

The True Fire Dao consisted of the Dao of Burning, which was to say as long as Alex put his intent on it, the fire would forever burn. The only way to stop it was to either use a Dao that went against the burning, fight off Alex's own intent on him, or just have a cultivation base so strong that none of it mattered.

Unfortunately, the leopard had none of these. And so, it burned alive.

The leopard still continued fighting, but with the fire, it was slowly dying on its own. Then, when it realized that it had no way of winning, it decided to turn around and leave.

At that moment, Alex teleported right next to it and swung down his sword that carried his intent to cut.

The leopard was still alive and burning when it was cut in half.

As soon as Alex cut it, he immediately put out the fire on its body and took it into his storage bag.

'Damn, I hope the fire didn't cause any problems to the blood inside,' he thought.

After learning how strong his own blood was, and how strong it could be, Alex had decided to gather some blood from the beasts he killed to use for the ability that came on the first page of the Blood God's Manual.

The Blood Absorption technique.

He wasn't sure how much stronger his blood could get by absorbing the blood of the beasts that were weaker than him, but it didn't hurt to try.

He was already killing them for their cores and body, letting their blood go wasted would be a huge loss of opportunity.

Once Alex was done, he spread his senses a bit, searching for the next beast he could fight.

He looked around with his limited sense. He would've sent out his senses even further, but they were already on the inner range of the Demonic forest, so it was a little scary to show of his presence.New n0vel chapters are published on

The beasts here worked on a basis of hierarchy based on their strength. Each beast had a territory of its own that it marked and kept away from the other attackers.

The outer range didn't have it as much, but the deeper they went, the more prevalent it got.

The innermost regions of the Demonic forests were separated into a thousand different territories, each marked by a strong Saint beast. The stronger the beast was, the deeper it stayed.

Since Alex was already fighting around the area where beasts had strength that could match him, he didn't want to anger a beast deeper in the forest, as that was certain to be stronger than the Leopard for sure.

Alex knew he could beat that beast. His blood aura was just that strong. But obviously, he wasn't going to show that to the sect master here.

The sect master stayed far away, doing nothing but watching Alex search for his own opponents. Since he had promised to let Alex fight alone afterward if he could prove to him that he could survive on his own, he needed to see if he had the capability.

He needed to see how Alex found his opponent without angering the stronger beasts in this region.

Alex pointed in a certain direction and started flying away.

The sect master and Seagem followed behind him now that he had found another opponent for himself.

If Alex could do it a few more times, he was certain to get his freedom to come here and train anytime he wanted to.

Chapter 962 Blood Absorption

Alex and the sect master returned to the sect after a few days.

Alex was done with his training for now and had to go back to cultivating. He had fought beasts up to Saint Foundation's 4th realm and defeated them, and even managed to survive a 5th realm beast long enough for the sect master to interfere.

Alex now understood how strong his dao was. He was surprised to find that there was a ceiling to how strong his dao could get.

It wasn't a natural ceiling but rather one imposed on him by the heavens. Regardless of how strong his intent was, if the heavens didn't want to help him, he couldn't ask too much out of them.

Still, being able to bring out a power that was 4 realms higher than his Qi was already good enough.

If there wasn't a cap on it, he wondered just how badly a simple Dao could destabilize the entire cultivation world.

'I wonder how much stronger the others can get,' he thought.

He had come to find that not many of the saint realm experts actually knew any dao. It just so happened that the ones he met were some of the strongest and thus knew a dao or two.

Even the elder Bu he killed turned out to actually be a rather talented cultivator in the sect that was once considered to be betrothed to Ren Xiuyin. However, Xiuyin was too young at the time, so the sect master at that time, the current sect master's father, had outright refused to even entertain the thought.

The elders now considered that this might have been where elder Bu's envy of Ma Tianxin had stemmed from.

Alex had asked the sect master how strong his Dao could make him, but unfortunately, the sect master's dao was something related to the knowledge of beasts and thus wasn't applicable in combat.

Alex did come to learn that it made someone a realm or two stronger than they would be normally. The sect master had told him as much.

Alex returned back to his room and called out both of his beasts before starting his cultivation for the day.

Alongside cultivation, he also continued learning more and more about the saint ingredients from his mind. He had quite a few saint ingredients, so he wanted to be done with learning everything about them by the time he went into practical experimentation where he would try and deduce the structure of an ingredient's powder using nothing but only 2 of the ingredients.

At the same time, Alex continued his Undying Physique cultivation, his Demon eyes cultivation, and even his Spiritual energy cultivation using the Mask.

The mask had 9 different stages to help him improve, and Alex was currently using the 3rd stage, but it was starting to get easy too. His spiritual sense had started reaching around 5.2 Kilometers, and soon he would have to up the strength of the mask to the 4th stage.

Alex hadn't cultivated in over a week, so he cultivated for 2 whole days before stopping.

He went out with his beasts to get some fresh air for a while and talked with a few people that had stopped to greet him.

Alex talked with them for a while before returning back to his room. Then, he prepared for something he had been wanting to do again for some time now.

He brought out his cauldron full of blood as it was time to make another Blood Beast.

Alex had a variety of beast cores now. After all, he had killed no less than 10 different Saint beasts when he was back in the demonic forest.

Not only that but there were also the beast cores that were given to him by the sect master before he had left.

As such, he had too many choices at the moment and couldn't choose one instantly.

"Calm down, what do I want to test with this beast?" he asked himself. Obviously, he wanted to test how strong a Blood beast created by a certain beast core could get.

But there was one more thing he needed to test. As such, he knew exactly what core to choose.

Alex reached into his storage bag and pulled out a beast core of a beast with a Saint Condensation 7th realm cultivation base.

There were many other cores that were of higher cultivation base of course, but he chose this one specifically because of one single reason. It was the same cultivation base as the Rhino that had become a Blood Beast.

The core he had pulled out belonged to a beast that had died many years ago, so Alex wanted to test one exact thing.

He wanted to test if a Blood beast created from an older beast core could ever rival one created by a newer one.

Alex put the core into the pool of blood in his cauldron and started making a blood beast. He poured his Qi into the blood and the beast core started fighting against the onslaught of his blood aura.

However, his aura was just too strong for an impression of a spirit to fight back against.

Within minutes, Alex overwhelmed the beast core and in the next moment, the blood beast started forming.

The blood flew out of the cauldron into the open air. It flowed around until it became a long, cylindrical-shaped beast that wiggled horizontally.

'A snake?' Alex wondered when he saw the beast. However, he wasn't correct. The shape changed a little as 4 legs appeared on the blood beast and the trail grew thicker, letting Alex realize what it was.

"Ah, a lizard," he thought.

The lizard took a few minutes to form. Its body had protective scales, its tail was curled upward, and had large eyes.

The Blood lizard was about 3 meters wide and a meter tall. Alex brought out the Blood Rhino to compare, and it was taller than the lizard, but not as wide.

Alex moved away and kept his beasts away from harm. Then, he gave the order.

"Attack each other!"

The two beasts wasted no moment and immediately moved to attack each other. They only attacked a single time, but that was enough for Alex to get an answer.

And he was very happy with the answer.

"There is no difference," he said with a smile. "That means that if I ever find a very old, but strong beast core, I can use it without worrying about it not being as strong."

Alex tested the two beasts a bit more. The rhino was tougher, but the lizard was more agile. But when it came down to pure strength, they were the same.

Alex asked the two to fight him as well, and he used his Blood armor to handle the two of them with ease. No matter how strong they were, he was much stronger.

'Well, it wasn't like I had to worry about insubordination anyway,' he thought. Once he was done testing, he put the beasts back into the book and put the book... somewhere.

Alex's best guess at the moment was that it was going to his heart, which made sense considering the artifact was called the Blood God's Manual. But he couldn't find it there, so it was still just a guess.

Then, Alex sat back down and filled the cauldron in front of him with blood again. Only this time, it wasn't his blood at all.

The 10 different beasts he had killed had given him over hundreds of liters of blood. With the cauldron in front of him only capable of handling no more than 30 liters at a time, Alex was forced to bring out 8 more cauldrons before they were filled to the brim.

Then, he closed his eyes and remembered the words written on the first page of the Blood God's Manual. The words for Blood Absorption technique.

He slowly pulled Qi from his body through a certain pathway, one that Alex had noticed was the same one of the four pathways that he used for his other cultivation methods of his.

The only difference was that they used that the Five Yang Divine Path used the pathway in the Yang spiritual root, and the Winter Moon cultivation method and the Undying Physique used ones from the Yin spiritual root.

The Demon Eyes technique used ones from the normal meridian with no spiritual roots attached and this was the same one that Alex was going to use for the Blood Absorption technique.

Once he used the absorption technique, the Qi in his body moved along a particular path that mixed with a lot of his blood vessels creating a pulling aura from his blood that called for all blood aura in the surrounding.

Surrounded by 9 different cauldrons full of blood, the aura immediately attack Alex from all sides as it tried to enter his body.

Alex expected to feel some pain, any pain, but to his surprise, there was no pain at all. Perhaps it was because his body was just that strong or perhaps because his blood aura was stronger than any here.

As he absorbed it, Alex realized that two things were happening. One, his blood aura was getting stronger, and two, his cultivation base was rising.

Alex frowned. He didn't want to raise his cultivation base this way, so he used his intent to force all the absorption to go toward his blood and blood only.

2 hours later, the blood in the cauldrons had no aura and was akin to just red liquid. Alex had absorbed all the Blood aura from them.

Chapter ﻿963 Solo Training

Alex opened his eyes and pulled out some blood from his body. He felt the aura in it and compared it to what it was just days ago.

"It's stronger," Alex thought, but he didn't find much happiness in it. "It's stronger, but not by much."

He sensed it again, and he was right. His blood aura had advanced by maybe a quarter of a realm's worth of improvement if even that.

He would have to find close to 50 Saint beasts in the early Saint Foundation realm to improve it by a whole realm. Then, once improved, his blood aura was sure to require even heavier investment to improve it entirely.

"Well, I don't know what I was expecting really," he thought. With how strong his blood aura already was, he would definitely need late Saint Foundation realm beasts to improve his blood by a lot.

And that wasn't happening anytime soon.

"I should be satisfied with this," Alex thought and let the matter go.

Since the sect master wanted to test him once more, Alex couldn't go back to the Demonic forest immediately.New n0vel chapters are published on

However, the sect master did promise to take him 2 weeks later, so it wasn't much time before he could.

Besides, Alex wanted the time to make more blood beasts. In the two weeks, he gathered a lot of his blood, ensuring every drop constituted the highest quality of his blood aura.

In the meantime, he continued learning more about the Saint ingredients. There wasn't any major discovery there for him, but there was a good amount of progress there and Alex was happy with that.

He also continued cultivating his Undying Physique and Demon eyes, and he couldn't help but wonder when they would ever upgrade again. The Undying physique would give him the ability to regrow lost limbs within moments.

While Alex was looking forward to that, what he was looking forward to more was the Demon Eyes upgrade. He was certain it would be very useful in any and all situations.

Aside from these things, the only other things Alex did was cultivate and teach Alchemy to Whisker. Seeing him absorb all the information he was giving him at a reasonable rate made Alex wonder if he could make good-grade pills very soon.

He couldn't wait to see it.

Once Alex collected enough blood, he used the highest grade of beast cores he had and made two more Blood beasts.

One of them was a bird with incredibly strong wings that could cut through anything, and the other one was the Snow Leopard that was incredibly agile.

Alex tested the two beasts and found out that they were an entire realm stronger than the other two blood beasts he had created before that.

The higher the beast core was, the better the result really was. Alex couldn't help but look forward to the day he found a beast core that challenged his Blood Aura. At that moment, the blood beast made from that would most likely be something that could turn out to be stronger than him.

After the two weeks were over, the sect master took him back to the inner ranges of the Demonic forest.

Alex's intent here was to train in Dao, so he handicapped himself to use two dao at once. Right now, with the sect master present, he only used his True Fire dao and Dao of Cutting, with the occasional Dao of Teleportation thrown in there.

Alex was more than capable of fighting a Saint Foundation 4th realm beast now without having to worry about getting caught off guard. He still didn't want to go for the 5th realm beasts given just how strong they were but the 4th realm beasts were just about right.

His usage of True Fire Dao continued improving as he understood more about how he could use them. He learned how he could cut the beasts without them running away.

He learned to create the cuts afar. It required quite a bit of Intent on his end, but he was capable of doing it now.

The beasts with better defenses were capable of surviving the intent without being cut, but the weaker ones were wounded from afar and they couldn't do anything about it.

The sect master continued watching over Alex, and Alex continued fighting more and more beasts. He improved his Fire Dao and Cutting Dao to a level where he felt comfortable using them in battles.

After a week of such training, they returned back to the Blue Spring sect.

"I can see that you're capable of handling things on your own," the sect master said after they returned. "So, you can go back whenever you want. Just, make sure to be careful okay? Do not disturb the beasts that are on the inner side of the forest."

"I understand, sect master. Thank you for helping me," Alex bowed towards the man.

"Alright, go do what you want," the sect master said.

Alex nodded and returned to his room and spent 2 more weeks making blood beasts before leaving back to the Demonic forest.

Since he had already killed most of the beasts on this side of the forest, Alex needed to go either left or right of the place to go around the perimeter of the inner range of the forest to find more beasts.

"Let us go right," he thought and went on his own. He hid his aura and took back his spiritual sense to about 500 meters around him at best and searched for strong beasts to fight.

Starting then, Alex trained on the rest of the Daos on his own.

A giant blue-skinned toad sent out its long paws toward Alex. With its cultivation base of Saint Foundation 4th realm, if Alex let it hit him without putting up some sort of defense, he was sure to die.

The dao of metal strengthened a metal barrier he forged in front of him and the toad's limb was quite easily blocked.

Alex took his sword and cut the beast from afar. The right arm of the toad was cut off thanks to his Dao and it cried out in pain.

Alex stopped his attacks and waited.

Suddenly, he saw the toad's right arm regenerate slowly until it was back to normal. Alex had seen this before and had wondered how it was doing that, and it was only after reading up on it last time that he figured out that the toad was using his longevity to quickly heal itself.

Compared to something like the Undying Physique, this was so much worse for the user.

Alex waited until the toad could fight again, and continued. The toad shouted at him, calling him names and telling him that it would kill his entire family.

However, Alex paid no attention to its words and only focused on its regenerative capabilities. There was one thing he had been wanting to test for a long time and now was the time.

Alex clad himself in blood armor for safety and then teleported right on top of a toad. Then, he placed his palms on the toad's body and pushed something into it.

Something deep and dark. Something deathly.

The Dao of Death worked to create a death aura directly into the toad's body, filling it to the brim as if it were a beast on the verge of death.

Alex quickly flew away before the beast could do anything to him and attacked it again, cutting off its arm.

The toad grimaced and tried to regenerate its arms again, but it found it hard to do so. In the presence of so much death aura, the toad's vitality dropped, and with it its ability to regenerate.

With life aura driven from its body, the toad was unable to heal its wound, and slowly felt its life slip away.

The only way to save itself was either to fight off Alex's intent that kept the death aura in its body, or have someone else help drive it away.

The toad tried to force its Qi throughout its body to try and get rid of whatever problem it was having, and shortly after, it did show signs of improvement as the arm started to regrow again.

Unfortunately, however, Alex arrived right in front of it and killed it in a single strike.

Chapter 964 Small Insight into a Dao

Alex went in and out of the Demonic Forest, returning to the sect every 2 to 3 weeks and spending about a week cultivating.

His cultivation speed had dropped vastly, but his overall ability was growing rapidly.

In the last 2 months he had remained alone in the forest, he had trained all of his Dao to the best he could, and then some.

He also helped train Pearl to get used to his Saint realm abilities, but it didn’t need much on his end. Pearl was naturally talented and it took him no time to get used to his new strength.

Whisker on the other hand was very troublesome. Despite his cultivation base, he was very easily scared by every beast Alex put him up against and more times than not simply run away.

Alex tried to get him to fight a few times before giving up entirely. If he wasn’t meant to be a fighter then that was alright. He would follow him into the production profession and learn to make pills and medicinal pastes.

Aside from that, Alex also practiced his 21 Sword array technique. More specifically, he tried to improve it by adding swords to it while using various pathways in the Metal spiritual root to try and figure out just which pathway was the right one for him.

He didn’t learn much, but he did understand which one of the four starting pathways the technique had to start from.

He used that knowledge to see what sort of other techniques he could use with the same pathway, whether it was the same spiritual root or different ones.

Before he knew it, he was going through his various techniques at the same time and categorizing them based on which pathway they started with as well.

Skills such as Iron Fist punch, Palm of the Sun, Metal Barrier, and every other skill that was basically a long-ranged attack used one particular pathway. Most of Alex’s skills fell under this very pathway.

Cultivation skills or any that had to do with improving one’s body used the 2nd pathway.

The third pathway as Alex came to understand was used by skills such Jade skin technique, or Smiting Blade. It was for skills that could be used to put Qi or Aura into something to make it stronger or give it other properties.

The Supreme Elemental Accord fell on this very pathway as well.

As for the final one, this was what the 21 Sword Array technique used to manifest. After a bit of testing, he found out that there were a few other skills that used this pathway as well.

His Earth Devour technique used this pathway, and so did his Flickering Shadows technique. His movement skills fell under this as well, and so did some aspects of the Flame Mastery Scripture.

And most importantly, this was the same pathway used by his Pill-splitting technique. So, if he wanted to change the technique so that it always worked for a single set of pills, then he needed to use this same pathway.

Alex was very excited to learn about this, but that was the furthest he went with his new understanding. There were still quite a few things he needed to understand, and until he did that, he could forget about understanding the Dao of Technique.

After training for 2 months and killing quite a few beasts, Alex had been able to gather enough blood to push him over the edge of whatever rank he was before with his Blood aura to one level higher.

Alex was super happy about it and was looking forward to making more blood beasts, which this time around would be much stronger than before.

Between fighting and cultivating, Alex didn’t find much time to put into learning about the ingredients, which made him quite sad.

Alex planned on returning to the Demonic forest in a few days when someone knocked on his door. Alex walked out to find Ren Xiuyin waiting for him.

“Can I help you, sister Xiuyin?” Alex asked.

“My father is looking for you, brother Yu,” the girl said. Alex nodded and went along with her to the sect master’s room in the tower.

Alex entered the room and saw the sect master sitting by himself. He turned to look at Alex when he entered and smiled.

“There you are. Come, I want to talk to you about something,” the sect master said and gestured for Alex to sit next to him.

Alex sat down comfortably and wondered if he had been called here for something he did.

The sect master started the conversation with some small talk, asking what he had been doing for the last couple of days, asking him how his training had been, and so on.

Only after 5 minutes of such did he finally bring up the topic he had called him here for.

“You will have to slow down your visit to the forest now though,” the sect master said. “You will have to prepare yourself before we go to the Dao mountain.”

“Dao mountain?” Alex gave a confused expression. Had it been that long already?

Alex thought back to the time that had passed since the last one and was quite surprised.

Indeed, 11 months had already passed, and in less than a month, the Dao mountain would open up again.

“Oh, I didn’t realize it was opening so soon,” Alex said. “But there should’ve been more time, right? Or am I forgetting a few days?”

“Oh no, you’re fine. It is the Blue Spring sect’s turn this year to plan the Dao mountain, so we naturally get to be the first ones to get their names in it,” the sect master said.

“Ah, I see,” Alex nodded. “So is that why you called me?”

“Of course,” the sect master said. “Although, knowing you, you will definitely go and show off some new dao. I should have just registered your name in there and be done—”

“I’m not going,” Alex said, cutting off the sect master mid-speech. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any Dao I can just learn. I’ve been busy learning the ones I already got after all.”

“You’re really not going?” the sect master asked. “Even if you think you don’t have enough knowledge to gain a new Dao, you might start learning about it on your own when you stay in the smell and cultivate there.”

Alex shook his head. “I’m confident that I won’t learn anything new that I can’t just skip a year over. I have been training recently and am getting close to understanding some new things, so I want to continue doing that for now.”

“So you’re really not going?” the sect master asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Alex said. “But thank you for thinking about me. If I had wanted to go, I would’ve completely missed it this time around.”

“Never mind that,” the sect master said. “Well, I guess it’s fine if you miss this Dao mountain opening. You’ll go to the next one right?”

“Definitely,” Alex said.

“Alright, you may return then. I have nothing else to say to you,” the sect master said.

Alex nodded and left the room before going back to his own room.

Chapter 965 Ice Moose

A few months passed, and Alex was having a hard time finding beasts to train against. Populous as it may be, the saint beasts in the Demonic forest weren’t infinite.

So, with time, the beasts were either dead or just too scared to come to fight him.

Since they were smaller in number, Alex had been spending most of the days lately simply training on his own or cultivating in the forest.

He had also finished learning about his saint ingredients and a couple more that were in his mind. Now, he only needed to start training on a few things to improve his pill recipes, then he could start making pills as well.

‘That’s it then,’ Alex thought to himself. It was time for him to return back to his aunt who must’ve returned from her training by now.

Alex sighed as he looked at the vast Demonic field in front of him and thought to return once he was much stronger.

He was about to turn around to return when a snake came slithering towards him. Alex stopped and got ready to fight. The snake was in the Saint Foundation realm after all.

The snake came hissing at him and stopped a few meters away from him. It hesitated for a moment before speaking, “Are you the one who’s been killing all the beasts around here?”

Alex looked at the snake curiously. Did it not want to fight?

“Yes, It is me,” Alex said.

“Then die!” the snake lunged at him.

The snake was large and had a thick body, yet it was still surprisingly agile.

However, Alex had fought many such beasts and could easily defeat them. He took out his sword and slashed at the snake.

The snake’s Saint Foundation 4th realm body was strong enough to survive his attack once, but when Alex slashed a second time consecutively, the snake died.

“Not very on guard, was it?” Ning thought and took the snake’s body into his storage bag.

Just then, out of the corner of his currently limited spiritual sense, he sensed something dashing at him with incredible speed.

Alex tried to move away, but whatever it was, it was too fast for him to dodge in time.

The beast slammed onto Alex, and Alex felt something dig into his left arm and chest. He was sent flying into the distance where he crashed with a tree, destroying it.

The momentum carried him over, crashing into another tree only to destroy it and keep going on.

He destroyed a couple of different trees before he finally came to a stop.

Blood poured out of the holes on his arm and chest, marking the snow below him crimson. Alex felt his head go blank for a second before it came back to him.

“What the hell?” he said softly as his unfocused eyes tried to look in front of him. His eyes cleared a second later and he saw a massive moose with ice-like antlers that were very sharp and at the moment red in some part.

They had his blood on them.

The holes in Alex’s arms closed up a moment later and he could start up as if nothing had happened just now. The only evidence that he was even wounded was the blood on the floor.

“You survived that? No wonder you could kill so many of them,” the moose in front of him said.

“It seems you hate me for some reason,” Alex said. “Although I don’t remember fighting any moose.”

“No, you’ve hurt no one I care about,” the moose said. “But you have hurt something I care about, balance. Your presence has brought an imbalance in the forest that is causing problems and I don’t like it.”

“I got it,” Alex said. “So you want to fight, huh?”

“Fight? No, this won’t be a fight,” the beast said. “I have nearly entered the Beast Core realm, while you’re struggling with breaking through to the 2nd real of Saint Condensation. Ours will be no fight, but a massacre.”

“Is that so?” Alex asked. He held confidence even against a beast that was sure to kill him if he breathed wrong. However, Alex didn’t fret. There was no reason to worry at all.

In fact, there was a reason to get happy even.

Finally, he had found a strong beast without having to go into the inner ranges where many of them would be, and together they might be able to kill him.

However, alone, it would be quite hard.

Blood poured out of his body and clung to him, forming armor around his body. He put away his sword and instead extracted the blood from the snow below him and formed a sword.

The moose looked at him weirdly. “What are you doing?” it asked.

“I’m testing,” Alex said. “I’m testing to see if I can kill you or not. At the very least, I should be able to keep up with you in this fight now.”

“Hah!” the moose exclaimed. “I told you human, this will be no fight.”

The moose’s ice blue antler’s glowed suddenly and giant ice javelins were shot at Alex.

Alex didn’t dodge the attack and instead struck it with his sword, destroying it at once. He hadn’t even used his Sword aura or any sort of dao in this attack, but he doubted they would be of any help with such a big difference in power.

The moose looked at him in shock. “Ho-how?” it asked.

Alex too looked at the result with a hint of surprise. He had expected his Blood aura to be strong, but he hadn’t expected it to be at the peak of the Saint Foundation realm in terms of strength.

He could most likely get it to Saint Core realm too, but he would require a bit more blood of strong—

His eyes fell on the moose. “Well, thank you for delivering yourself to my doorstep,” he said as he prepared to attack.

The moose, despite being scared fought back as well. It had seen Alex beaten and bloodied the last time it had attacked, so this time as well, it moved.

Alex could see the moose’s movement quite clearly this time around as he was looking at it with his eyes. And yet, the moose was still quite fast.

There was some sort of technique it was using to move in the snow through incredible speed.

Alex could dodge if he moved in time, but he didn’t feel the necessity for it. The moose slammed onto him and he skidded a few steps backward, but other than that, he was alright.

The moose, however, hadn’t expected Alex’s armor to be that strong and found his head ringing from the pain of slamming onto what was essentially a heavy rock for him.

The blood in Alex’s hands suddenly turned into a bunch of beads that he sent at the moose. The beads struck the moose and while they didn’t penetrate its body, they did leave nasty wounds all over it.

The moose sent out more ice attacks through its antler, but Alex used the same blood beads to destroy them before they could even go anywhere.

He moved his right arm and the blood beads flew back to him, changing into a sword. Then he used his other arm to tug on the moose using the blood that was still plastered on its antlers.

The moose tried to struggle, but the pull on its antler was too strong. In the end, it let go of its antlers, discarding them like a lizard dropping its tail.

The antlers flew towards Alex, which he quickly stored in his storage ring. He looked back at the moose and saw terror in its eyes.

Without even thinking about it, the moose turned around to leave. However, 4 different thin strips of blood caught onto its 4 legs, stopping it in its tracks.

Alex then teleported right up to the moose and stabbed the blood sword in his hand through the moose’s chest.

Blood poured out of its chest as the moose started dying. Then, Alex decapitated it, killing it entirely.

He sighed and took a deep breath once the battle was over. He looked at the blood flowing on the ground and decided not to waste it.

He sat down and started using his Blood Absorption skill to improve his blood aura even further.

Chapter 966 Going West

Alex improved his blood aura by just the right amount needed to send it over the ledge to the other realm.

He was certain that his blood had reached the Saint Core realm in terms of quality.

He tested out his blood abilities a bit, and after being satisfied with it, he left the Demonic Forest altogether.

He then returned back to the Blue Spring sect and met up with the sect master.

“Are you really leaving?” the sect master asked.

“I’m afraid so, sect master. Everything I’ve come here to do has been done,” Alex replied.

He had been in the sect for about 7 or so months now, and it was time for him to return.

“Where will you go?” the sect master asked curiously.

“Uh... I’ll go and see if my aunt has returned yet or not,” Alex said.

“Well, she wasn’t back in time for Dao mountain, so you might still be out of luck,” the sect master said.

“I realize that,” Alex said. “I’ll still go and check. If she’s not back, then I’ll just go west. I have a few things I’ve been meaning to do for a while.”

“I see,” the sect master said. “When will you be leaving?”

“Tomorrow,” Alex said.

After talking with the sect master, Alex went and spoke with Ma Tianxin and Ren Xiuyin. They hadn’t expected him to leave this early, but they were more understanding than the sect master.

Alex spent the night in his room and the next day he said his farewells to the sect master and the two couples. He wished them good luck with their upcoming marriage and left.

Alex flew out of the Blue Spring sect, flying south. There was a snowstorm in front of him, but he didn’t care.

He flew for so long that the snowstorm passed away. However, somewhere in the distance, he could hear the sounds of lightning and thunder.

It was distant and faint, but he could hear it in the sky where there wasn’t much noise other than the wind rushing past him.

The tumultuous sound made Alex think at first that there was a massive storm incoming from somewhere, but when he saw a purple glow in the distant south, his thoughts changed.

“Wait, that isn’t storm,” Alex thought. Now that he thought about it, he knew exactly what that was.

“Ah, the lightning peninsula,” he thought. He remembered reading about it before. Formed 8 thousand years ago randomly, the lightning peninsula was a place where lightning rained down as if it rained.

You couldn’t walk in there without fear of lightning striking you to death.

Alex didn’t believe that the lightning was any stronger than what the tribulation could produce, but it must still be strong enough to destroy most Saint cultivators.

Otherwise, there would a constant stream of people going in and out all the time, which he had heard was practically impossible due to the density of the lightning strikes.

Alex was lost in his own thoughts about how such a phenomenon could come to be.

The most popular belief was that it had something to do with the gulf being right next to it and as such it got a constant supply of storm clouds in the air that rained down lightning when it reached the peninsula.

There were a few flaws in the logic, but this was one of the easiest to understand regarding this topic.

Another hypothesis was that there was some sort of ore in the land there that was unearthed during the period 8 thousand years ago and that it was this ore that attracted lightning all the time.

Whatever the answer may be, however, it was certain that this was a land where no human, even the Saint realms could survive for very long.

The longest anyone had managed to stay there was apparently 20 o 30 seconds before the lightning chased them off.

However, there was also another weird rumor regarding this place and that there was someone else living inside the lightning rain.

Alex found it hard to believe, but then he was in a world he didn’t know fully about. It could very well be that this was true and someone had found a way using some sort of talisman or script or formations, or even just skills to survive inside the place.

Now Alex wanted it to be true just so he could do it too someday.

He then stopped worrying about that and continued on his journey with the purple glow and lightning in the distance.

Not long after, Alex arrived close to Silvermoon city with not that many people in it.

It had been 2 months since the battlefield had opened up, so there was no point anymore to stay here. They could go back and return when it opened again.

Alex had no business with the city, other than the fact that it was on his way back to the Blazing Earth sect.

The snow had dwindled now to the point that there wasn’t even any snow there anymore. Then, he moved into the State of Re, where there definitely wasn’t much snow at all.

It was nighttime, so Alex could see the orange outline in the distance coming from the various volcanoes. He was close.

After 2 more hours, he finally reached the Blazing Earth sect, who all invited him into the sect without question.

Alex talked with the sect master of the Blazing Earth, Bai Qiyi sect for a while, telling him what he had done.

The sect master was a little surprised that the Sect master of Blue Spring sect had let him do even half of the things Alex had said just now.

He inquired if Alex was okay, to which Alex obviously replied yes.

“So... my aunt isn’t back yet?” Alex asked.

“I’m afraid not,” the sect master said. “They should be back in... 3 more months? Yeah around that time.”

“I see,” Alex said. “Then I should go west while I can.”

“West? For what?” the sect master asked.

“I’ve yet to visit the remaining two wonders, sect master. So I intend to go there and witness it all,” Alex said.

“Ah, that makes sense. Which two do you have yet to see?” he asked.

Alex told him the two and the sect master nodded. “Come, let me take you to the first one. It’s close anyway,” the sect master Bai said.

“Don’t you have work to do here, sect master?” Alex asked.

“Not really,” the sect master said. “It will only take a few hours of my time at most anyway.”

“I see,” Alex said. “Let’s go then.”

After planning that, the two of them flew west in a medium-sized ship that flew surprisingly fast.

They talked for an hour about various different things, and Alex asked the sect master why everyone called him important and such.

“Honestly, I have no idea,” the sect master said. “All I know is if the ancestors say it, so it must be true.”

“So they didn’t tell you either?” Alex asked. The hell kind of conspiracy were the old timers from the different sects planning?

“I guess I’m too young for them to tell me,” the sect master said. “I did only take up this rank only a dozen years ago after all.”

“I see,” Alex said. The question still went unanswered. “If I may ask, how old are you?”

“My age? Hmm... let’s see,” the sect master thought for a bit and said, “about 3 and half thousand years old, I believe. It definitely hasn’t reached 4, that I am sure of.”

Alex was a little surprised when he heard that. “You’re so old? But you look so much younger,” he said.

“Haha, that’s only because the others are the truly old ones. Besides, I was talented in my early cultivation and managed to keep my youth for much longer,” the sect master said. “You will be the same as me. Perhaps, you will look younger in the future.”

The ship continued sailing until it finally slowed down on top of a flat piece of land that was surrounded by mountains with no signs of civilization in sight.

There were cultivators at the location, and they were all doing nothing but working as a guard there.

They bowed when they saw the sect master, but the sect master ignored them.

“There it is,” the sect master pointed down below and Alex watched with an expression of disbelief.

“That’s the Intercontinental Teleportation Formation?”

Chapter 967 Ghostbane City

The Intercontinental Teleportation formation was a giant piece of stone with carvings on it, just like any other formation Alex had seen.

Yet however, it was maybe over 5 times the size of the teleportation formations that he had seen before in the Western continent.

The Intercontinental teleportation formation wasn’t just a single formation, but a bunch of formations working together to bring a single result.

Alex had half expected the teleportation formation to be the same size as the teleportation script from the Demon realm, so he was surprised to see them easily 10x the size of the teleportation scripts.

“Wow! It’s so large,” Alex said as he hovered a few meters away from the stage that was also the formation.

“Yes, it is big. Most people are surprised by how big it is,” the sect master Bai said. “They were very generous when they made it and they made it so large even.”

“Sorry... they?” Alex asked curiously. He had in fact never heard who exactly made this teleportation formation. His first guest was the humans, but they were too weak and too lacking in knowledge to do it.

His second guess was the Demons but they only knew Runes, and they had made a teleportation script made up of runes anyway.

That left behind 2 other candidates, and Alex had a guess which one it was.

“Before I tell you about who made the teleportation formation, I must tell you about a great war that took place nearly a hundred thousand years ago,” the sect master said.

“They say that hundreds of heavenly warriors came down to rid the world of demons and left behind 4 rulers when they were gone to make sure the demons never return.”

“The 4 rulers ruled the four different continents and thus decided to make their meetings easier by adding teleportation formations to each other.”

“That was how the formation was created,” the sect master said. “Now that’s a little history you didn’t know.”

Alex wanted to tell the sect master that it was him who knew nothing of history, but he decided not to. Instead, he simply looked at the massive size of the teleportation formation and asked, “what exactly does it need to run? From what I can tell it’s working.”

“It is working,” the sect master said. “It accepts teleportations whenever they come around. It has been ages since someone has used it, but it still waits for them.”

“What about using it then? Has anyone used it?” Alex asked. “More specifically, is there a way for me to access it?”

“Do you want to go back to the Western continent?” the sect master asked.

Alex was surprised he knew about it for a split second before remembering that his aunt’s master had told the man everything about him, so there was a lot that he knew about Alex that even he didn’t know could be known.

Alex nodded back at the sect master and asked, “I hear it’s hard. Is it really impossible?”

The sect master hesitated for a bit. “I’m not that well known about this since it hasn’t been used in my lifetime. As far as I do know, there needs to be a landing platform on the Western Continent’s end if I were to try and teleport you there, which they don’t have at all.”

“Even if they did work somehow, the cost of using the teleportation formation across the two formations would be about 2 Saint ranked spirit veins. No one is willing to do that for you now that the hub is gone,” the sect master said.

Alex sighed and nodded. He knew this was exactly the answer he was going to get, and yet he still expected to get a different answer. Alas, he couldn’t change reality at all.

“It would’ve been not as wasteful if the formations in the central continent still existed, but some stupid beast’s breach of peace destroyed it all.

Alex didn’t say anything and just continued nodding. He knew more about the situation, but that came with explaining things that either made the Northern continent one of the bad guys or made it look like he was hateful towards the other continents. So, he did nothing but looked around with his spiritual sense.

Alex spent the next half an hour looking more carefully at the formation, trying to learn how they worked exactly.

There were concepts put into work here that he was only vaguely familiar with. The more he looked at it, the more confusing it got for him to the point where he felt like he knew nothing about formations at all.

He found some truth in his own thoughts as there were likely intricacies in the other profession as well that was as deep and vast as the inner workings of Alchemy.

He was just so much of an outsider to the professions that he didn’t know them well enough at all. All he was good at was copying what others had done before him.

Alex shook his head to send away the thoughts. He didn’t need such rogue thoughts in his mind as he never considered himself that good in formations and talismans, nor did he want to.

He was perfectly content with just following other men’s works if it mean he could do what they did just as well, or maybe even better.

“They must’ve been worried about the teleportation formation being damaged when they made this since they made it so big that stealing just wasn’t possible anymore,” the sect master said.

Alex nodded as he looked around. It was quite amazing that such a large formation was just out in the open like that.

The two of them talked for a while longer before Alex was done looking at the Intercontinental teleportation formation. Since there was no way to use it to get back to his mother and friends, Alex lost all interest in it.

“I’ve seen everything I wanted to, sect master,” Alex said. “We should leave now.”

“Do we return now?” the sect master asked him curiously.

“Ah, no. I’m planning on continuing west,” he said. “Is this the furthest you will go, sect master?”

“I’m afraid so,” the sect master said. “I cannot just leave my sect for days without prior notice.”

“I see,” Alex said. “This is farewell then. Let us meet again in a few months when I return. Hopefully, my aunt will return by that time.”

“Yes, let us meet then,” the sect master said his goodbye and left.

Alex too left for the western lands. He took a deliberate, slow flight west, going over many towns, cities, and villages.

He looked at the green hills towards the north that were snowcapped at the top. He saw the ocean towards the south, so blue that he didn’t know where the water ended and where the sky began.

Bird beasts flew close to him, threatening to hurt him for using the same space as them, but with a single roar from Pearl, these measly beasts always left the area.

After nearly a day of travel, Alex arrived at the border to the State of Bing where the landscape once again changed to that of ever snow. There was even a small snowstorm that he had to fly through before coming up to a city a few hours north.

Alex landed outside the city and entered it. He paid no fee since he was a Saint realm cultivator, and he also got rid of his white mask since he wanted to remain anonymous in this location as he was planning something.

The city was called Ghostbane city, named after one of the most common poisons out there. In fact, every city in the State of Bing had a name that had something to do with poisons somehow.

It was a decree put forth by the Nether Poison sect to change their part of the continent after the fall of the Snow Immortal sect.

Alex was quite happy that he had finally arrived in Ghostbane city. There wasn’t anything unique about the city itself but rather the hill that was just north of here where there were 9 different wells with water that never froze and people lined up to drink it all day long.

That was the location of the 9th wonder of this continent, counting the Lightning Peninsula he had seen from far in the distance.

The Nine Wells of Time.

Chapter 968 The Nine Wells of Time

Alex found himself a small house towards the west of the city that was isolated by itself. He found the formations and runes there the most appealing to him due to his requirement for privacy, so he rented the place for the next 3 months, to begin with.

Once he got it, he left the city and walked towards the small hill known as Time Hill, where the 9 different wells were located in.

There was quite a massive queue of people for the hill, and Alex got in the queue as well. The line he was in was far away from the hill, showing just how many people there were coming to take a taste of the waters of time.

‘I wonder how many of these are first-timers like me, and how many are not,’ he thought as he looked around.

Alex couldn’t help but wonder about the legitimacy of the site in front of him. Yes, they said that the wells could show you your past and future, but who knew really? No one really spoke about it, and those that did spoke in vague terms, so Alex wanted to see it for himself.

Still, the Nine Wells of Time was one of the nine wonders, Alex was sure there was something special about it to make it onto the list.

As Alex got closer to the hill, he paid a few spirit stones to a booth that was set up by the Nether Poison sect and read the small description left about what the wells really were.

Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, a man capable of a high level of divination had come to this world and from his gourd of time, he had poured 9 drops of the divine liquid.

The 9 liquid had grown to become wells of their own, an infinite spring that was capable of telling someone their past and future.

The line moved forward quite quickly, and Alex arrived in front of the first well where one of the people working there handed him a small cup of water he drew from the well in front of him.

Alex took the cup and moved away while he moved away from the first well. The line had already dispersed on the very first well as everyone took their cups and sat in the open hill to see the visions that the water showed.

Alex drank the water in a single gulp and felt the water trying to affect his body. He didn’t understand what was happening, but he freely let the water course through his body as he fell into a trance where the memories of when he was but a young child played out.

Alex remembered the times when his mother took him to play with the two kids from the farm next to his own. He remembered the times she taught him in his home.

He remembered the times his father taught him how to milk a cow and the times when he took his to a festival.

He remembered the time when he played with his grandfather when he was but 2 years old.

He remembered various many things, all of which were from his young age.

These were memories that Alex had all but forgotten. So when he was starting to remember them, he couldn’t help but tear up silently.

He stayed on the short grass, reminiscing about the past when everything was normal. He rejoiced in the nostalgia of the memories of days he would never get back.

After a while, Alex stood up and went to the next well where he got his cup full of water. Alex drank it once more and remembered the past again.

This time, the past was from when he was a teenager. These were memories that he hadn’t forgotten, but they were memories he had no way of keeping himself from forgetting either.

Once again, the nostalgia for the old memories was quite fun for him. There were some parts he would rather not remember like when his master died, but the memories of him spending time with her made it all worth it.

‘Even if the rest of the wells are a sham, just these two wells alone make this place worthy of being one of the wonders. What people would do to remember the past they have lost,’ Alex thought.

If he was ever strong enough to traverse the ocean without worry, he thought about bringing his mother here so she could remember the past too. Maybe his father too once he found him.

He thought of making Pearl drink some water too, but he had opened up his spiritual sea even before he was capable of making memories, so Alex doubted it was necessary.

He could give him back the memories of his mother that he had lost, but then, he would also remember the day she died. Alex wasn’t sure if he could do that or not.

He decided not to and went for the 3rd and last well that was supposed to show him his past.

This was a useless well for him as the past it showed was from the time he clearly remembered, so he quickly got rid of the memories and moved on to the 4th well.

The 4th well apparently showed possibilities of the future. Alex was curious about what it really was all about, so he drank the water he got from the 4th well.

His vision blurred within a few moments as he saw some vague scenes. He saw storm clouds and broken shards of metal, and he saw madness.

Alex came out of the slight trance wondering what he had just seen. Rather than seeing the future, it was more like feeling it. He didn’t know what he had seen but he felt he knew it.

“Was that a future of mine?” Alex wondered. Broken shards of metal gave him an idea that he was likely going to lose a sword fight in the future, were it true.

He didn’t know what the storms were supposed to represent. Were they to be taken literally or figuratively?

Also, what about the madness? Was he going to go mad in the future?

“What the hell?” Alex thought. “This has certainly got to some sort of bullshit.”

And yet, he couldn’t help but go to the 5th well and get a cup of water before drinking it once again.

This time, he saw something different. He felt something different.

A fire raged all around him. It was warm and gentle, but it was fire nonetheless. He saw himself suffer the pain of loss, and then find joy in his new gains. Then, he saw a crown.

It lay on his head.

Alex was taken aback once more. ‘What the hell was that?’ he thought. “What was the crown for? Am I a king? No, that has to be figurative at best.”

“What about the loss and gain? What’s that about? And that fire, is that representative of my True Fire dao since it can no longer do anything to me?” Alex wondered.

The 4th and 5th well were vastly different from the first 3 wells, but he couldn’t exactly say they were bad.

So, he walked up to the 6th well too, and got himself another cup of water.

Chapter 969 Divination

Once he drank the water, Alex found himself in another trance that showed him more visions.

He saw the vague silhouette of a girl, which changed to another girl, and then another one.

He saw lightning crackle all around him, some came from heaven and some from somewhere else.

He saw a circle, one that shocked him to his core.

He saw himself losing a power that someone else gained.

He saw the truth behind his existence.

Alex woke back up. “What was that?” he thought. Compared to the other two visions, this one had more visions for him to see and was more sporadic. He didn’t understand what those visions represented.

What were the girls about? Were they real? Did this well know who he was going to meet? What about the lightning? What was that lightning for?

The feelings of the vision, rather than the vision itself were what remained with him after he was out of the trance so he didn’t know what he had actually seen.

Alex mulled over his feelings for a while before standing up to go to the next well.

The man working at the 7th well did not fill his cup, instead, he explained what he was to do there.

“You will have to submerge here. The prophecies do not work by just drinking from here forth,” the young man said.

‘Prophecies huh?’ Alex thought. The wells were big and could fit about 10 people at once, but there were already people in there, so Alex had to get into a line once again.

After a while, his turn came and so he jumped into the water. He slowly sank to the bottom of the well, waiting to fall into some sort of trance but nothing happened.

Instead, he heard a loud and archaic voice that filled his mind.

“You hold the key to a fallen power. You shall help restore that power, and that shall bring your death.”

The single sentence was all Alex got to hear in the well, and that was all he needed to hear. The deep archaic voice rang in his ears and his mind for a long time before he flew back out of the well.

Alex sat by the grass once again, thinking back to what he had just heard.

“I hold a key to a fallen power?” he thought to himself. What was that power? The problem in his mind with the prophecy wasn’t that it didn’t make sense, but it made way too much sense to understand what it was talking about.

He had many things that could be considered key to some sort of power. He had the Nine Heaven’s Yang tree’s seeds and leaves, which could be used to restore a power that had fallen.

He had the seed of the world tree, which could be used to restore another power that had fallen.

He had Pearl, who was the key to restoring the White Tiger’s legacy that had fallen as well.

He also had Godslayer, who in a way was a power that had fallen too.

Maybe Alchemy God was considered a power that had fallen since Godslayer had supposedly killed him. Or maybe the Undying God was a power that had fallen, which he was restoring.

There were so many options, and as such, if he were to believe that prophecy, then each one of them was going to signal his death.

‘Fuck, what do I do now?’ Alex started to worry. This was going to make him feel unnerved regarding every little action that went to help people.

“What is going on?” a voice boomed in Alex’s head as it stirred around in anger. “Kid are you okay? Whose intent was that?”

“Intent?” Alex asked with a surprised look on his face. He hadn’t even realized there was some sort of intent in those prophecies. He closed his eyes and went into his spiritual sea to speak with Godslayer.

“It’s fine, or at least I think it’s fine,” Alex said as he looked around the spiritual sea to see if the Intent had gone anything to him.

“What was that?” Godslayer asked.

“I’m at a place called the Nine Wells of Time. That just now was a prophecy from one of the wells,” Alex said.

“Prophecy? From a well? What sort of sham is this? Do you think divination is such an easy task that one can do it without even being present?” the spirit asked.

“I… don’t really know anything about Divination,” Alex said truthfully.

“Do you know how well someone’s understanding of the Dao of Time has to be for them to even begin to hope to see an image of the future?” the spirit asked.

“So… what I heard was not true?” Alex asked.

The spirit paused for a moment. “More likely than not, yes,” it said. “Even if the divination isn’t a sham and someone did divine something from the future, more times than not, it is a wrong future that can be easily changed.”

“So I don’t have to worry about what I hear?” Alex asked.

“Are you planning to sit in a cave and meditate for the rest of your life, without making any actions for the rest of your life?” the spirit asked.

“No,” Alex said, obviously.

“Then any little action you take will have an impact on your future. With that, it is very easy for even the best of divinations to turn out to be wrong,” Godslayer said.

“I see,” Alex said. “So I shouldn’t really trust them, huh?” He felt a sense of relief that would’ve likely never come had Godslayer not talked to him.

‘I would’ve stopped trying to help everyone in fear of my own death,’ he thought.

“Thank you for telling me all this,” Alex said. “Man, I really would’ve trusted these prophecies otherwise. I can’t believe they let these shams make prophecies too. They should totally be banned.”

“Not all divinations are wrong,” Godslayer said.

“Oh,” Alex replied.

“Usually the ones done by people with a high understanding of the Dao of Time is quite accurate, especially when done for a small time frame. It is easier to get things right when one only needs to divine a few days forward,” Godslayer said. “The further in the future one divines, the more chances of it being wrong exist.”

“However, there used to be one that never failed,” Godslayer said. “He used to be known as the Divination god, but he hated that name. One of the reasons I don’t hate the man. Every divination he made came out true, every word something from the future.”

“Unfortunately, he’s no more,” Godslayer said.

“What happened to him?” Alex asked.

“Who knows? He went missing one day, never to be seen again. Many believe he’s dead, I do too,” Godslayer said.

Alex paused for a moment. “What if he’s the one that made these wells?” he asked.

“Why would someone that wants to hide from the world make some wells in the middle of nowhere? It is impossible for it to be him,” Godslayer said.

“But there is a possibility,” Alex said.

“It’s almost as possible as finding two people finding the same grain of sand from an entire realm. I would suggest not thinking much about what you hear from these wells,” Godslayer said.

“Got it,” Alex said. “But that also means I can hear it, right? The Intent won’t hurt me, right?”

“I suppose not,” Godslayer said. “You can go.”

Alex quickly left, leaving Godslayer all alone who fell into thought, thinking about the Divination god. “Surely not,” he thought and went back to resting again.

Alex lined up for the queue to the 8th well and jumped into it when it was his turn.

As soon as he plunged in, the voice returned once again.

“When two unworthy hands meet a stone, the truth shall reveal itself.”

Alex got back out and wondered what that could possibly mean. Sure he wasn’t going to overthink these things as they were most likely false futures, but still, he wondered what sort of future there would be for when that prophecy came true.

“My hands are unworthy?” Alex wondered if that was what they meant. “And what truth is this that was going to be revealed?”

Whether this prophecy was true or not, it was a much better scenario than the previous one where he would have to die.

There wasn’t much to think about this one given how vague it was, so Alex went to the final well and jumped into it when it was his turn.

The voice spoke once again.

“When the 2 becomes 1, All shall become One as well.”

Alex waited for a bit more. ‘That’s it?’ he thought. He flew out of the well, all confused. ‘What was it so short?’

He couldn’t make sense of the prophecy at all with how short it was. Worse of all, it was just numbers in the end. 2? 1? All? What did it mean?

“Godslayer was right,” Alex thought. “I shouldn’t give much thought to these things.”

He shook his head and left the mountain. With that, he had done visiting the 8th wonder of the continent.

The only one remaining for him to visit was the Lightning Peninsula, and there was no way he was ever going to go there.

Alex then returned back to the home he had rented for 3 months and rested for a day. Once he was fully rested, he brought out his cauldron and some other materials.

It was about time he improved some Saint-ranked recipes.

Chapter 970 Improving Saint Recipes

Upgrading Saint ranked pills’ recipes were much harder than True ranked pills simply due to the scarcity of resources.

Fortunately, Alex had learned of some possible ways to do it all using as few resources as possible. Still, the ways were still just possibilities, so he needed to test them out a little first.

Alex pulled out one of the ingredients he had plenty of thanks to the Beast realm in the Western Continent and tested it how he normally would. He had a recipe for that ingredient, and for now, he simply followed that recipe.

Alex took notice of how quickly or slowly the energy was released and couldn’t help but be surprised by how easy it was to follow that.

This was the first ingredient he was refining in 3 years. A first certainly since he had entered the Saint realm.

It somehow felt both familiar and distant at the same time.

Whisker watched from the side, taking in every little minute detail of what Alex was doing, and learned what he could from it. Alex also explained the best he could without losing attention.

“They definitely weren’t wrong when they said Saint-ranked pills were hard to refine,” he thought. The mental strain he felt while just refining a single ingredient was loads more than what he would feel with a True rank ingredient.

Were it not for his improved spiritual sense, Alex would’ve very much likely had to take breaks in between every 5 pills or so.

Now, he would be able to go on for at least 50 due to how fast his mental strength recovered.

Once Alex was done with refining the ingredient and memorizing what it did, he brought out the same ingredient again, only this time he wanted to test and see if it brought the same result with cut-up ingredients.

He tried half the ingredient at first and came up with the same result as when it was full.

He then tried a third of the ingredient, which brought the same result, and so did a fourth of the ingredient.

Alex tried with the 5th one and failed. He tried it once again and the 2nd time around it worked.

He was a little confused about why that was and tried it a few more times to realize that the rate at which the ingredient was receiving heat had lowered to a point where it was no longer the same.

“The surface area is too small so it’s a hit or miss,” Alex realized. At a certain point, the rate of heat being transferred to the ingredient was so low that it changed how the ingredient released its energy.

“Either I make sure the surface area is big enough, or I stop at a 4th of the ingredients,” Alex thought. He decided to stop at a fourth its size. He would have to test it a few more times with other ingredients to see if size mattered differently for different types of ingredients, but for now, he ignored that as he stuck with the basics.

Next, Alex closed his eyes and thought back to a random True rank ingredient and picked 3 of its variations for the same recipe. He had done thousands of refinements, so it became easy to find one in his mind.

Once he found the 3 variations, he used the knowledge he gained from the Alchemy God’s Knowledge to plot out a mental map of how the shapes changed as the heat, speed, and direction of the ingredient changed.

It was a little tough to do in his mind as he had never done something like this before, and he also had to consciously stop himself from thinking back to the answer he already knew.

He got a general idea of how it changed using the 3 points of reference and mapped out the entire thing.

Then, he compared what he came up with what he had in mind.

“Oh, that was so close,” he thought. He compared the two until he had an idea why he was wrong and redid the same thing over and over with different True rank ingredients until he ended up on an accurate result.

He continued for a bit longer and only stopped after he was right 100% at least 10 times in a row.

Then, he returned back to the Saint rank ingredient, which he did the same with as well.

He had already made what could be considered the middle of the 3 different settings under which the ingredient was refined, so he did it with 2 others that were as far apart as he could keep them.

Once all 3 points of reference were ready, he used his newfound knowledge to plot them out. He found a certain line of information about the different shapes, which he now had to figure out was accurate or not.

Before that, however, he did the same thing with a quarter piece of the ingredient to make sure they did give the same result even when cut up.

Thankfully, they did, so he could move on to the more annoying part of the process. He now had to sit there and refine the ingredients many, many times over.

For the sake of preserving ingredients, he cut every one of the ingredients into 4 pieces before proceeding to the experiment.

It took him a whole day, but even though just half of it, he could see that he had got it right.

The technique that the Alchemy God had left behind for him to figure out the various shapes of the True ranked ingredients worked even on Saint ranked ingredients.

Once the whole day had passed, and his result was a success, Alex took half a day to cultivate himself back to his peak.

Then, starting the next day, he began improving the recipes to the best level they could be.

The world went about its days as Alex cooped up in the house he had rented and did nothing but improve the recipes. He made a few healing pills once he refined the recipes, but after that, He didn’t bother making any more pills and only focused on the recipes for now.

The healing pills were the very first Saint-ranked pill he had ever made, pills that every saint would pay thousands upon thousands to buy from him.

And somehow, on his very first attempt, the pill had come out to be around 92%. Alex tried it 3 more times, and each came to be about 95% Harmony.

That surprised Alex for a bit, but once he gave some thought to it, it made sense why it would be so high.

He was using Supreme Elemental Accord to help improve the ingredients. Each ingredient he used was the best it could be. It was more of a surprise he wasn’t getting a full 100%, but that was most likely due to the fact that the Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations techniques not being the best technique for forming pills.

That was still his Pill-Splitting Qi, which he was gradually getting closer and closer to figuring out how to use on a single pill. Or at least he hoped so.

There was another small problem Alex was facing at the moment, and that was the fact that his cauldron showed some signs of unstableness when making pills. The strain he had to put it through to refine Saint ranked ingredients was too much for a True Earth grade cauldron.

Still, it wasn’t a big enough problem to damage his pills, so he ignored it for now.

It took him 2 weeks to finalize the recipes for the healing pills.

Once he finished making the healing pills, Alex moved on to antidotes for poisons, venoms, and toxins. Those took nearly a month altogether.

After those two, he moved on to Qi gathering pills, and pills that helped him break through. Each of these took about 4 days to 6 days, resulting in another month of work.

There weren’t many pills that he could improve the recipes for. After all, he only had 20 recipes after all.

Even amongst them, he only had the ingredients for 17 of them, and those were the only ones he had improved.

“Sigh! Finally done,” Alex thought as he finished fixing all the different recipes. It had taken him nearly 3 months, but it was worth it.

He finally took a few days of rest and simply cultivated all day long. The next few days were peaceful and without worry, and in such time, Alex felt his cultivation base reach the peak of the Saint Condensation first realm.

It had been close to 20 months since he had entered the Saint realm, but it was still a surprise to him that he was about to break through.

“It’s been 5 years since I’ve come to this continent,” he thought to himself. “I started as a True Emperor 4th realm cultivator, and now I’m entering Saint Condensation 2nd realm.”

It had taken him such a long time to reach where he had and that made him wonder how much longer it would’ve taken him had he been using the Heaven grade version of the Five Yang Divine Path, and not the Immortal grade one.

“Very well, no point in waiting any longer,” he thought and closed his eyes to meditate. Within an hour, Alex had easily broken through to the 2nd realm of the Saint Condensation realm without any big showing.

Once done, he cultivated a bit more to make sure his foundations were stable. After that, he left the house he had rented.

Since he was done with what he wanted to do, he decided to go back and see if his aunt was back from her training.

Chapter 971 Frozen Leg

Alex left Ghostbane city not long after as he flew southeast towards the State of Re again.

He had spent nearly 4 months in this place and hoped that his aunt would be back from her training by now. He didn’t really worry, however, as even if she wasn’t back, he would simply use the time to focus on other things he wanted to do.

For one, he wanted to help Whisker learn more about Alchemy and even get him started on making True rank pills.

Besides that, he could go back to the Ancient Battlefield and learn more Dao there. So, he wasn’t lacking in ideas at all.

The cold wind had warmed up quite a bit as summer was just around the corner. The state of Re was never in the snow in the first place, so the further south Alex went, the hotter it got.

He passed by many villages and cities and even saw the Intercontinental Teleportation formation once more along the way

He didn’t stop for it, however, and simply continued on his way. After 3 hours of flying, he arrived at the Blazing Earth sect.

He was quickly escorted in, where he found his aunt waiting for him.

“Alex!” she cried out and waved at him from far away.

Alex quickly walked up to her. “Aunt Liz, you’re back!” he gave a happy smile when he saw her.

“I came back a whole month ago. I heard you come back earlier and left,” she said. “You should have waited for me.”

“Maybe I should have,” Alex said. “But I wanted to go visit the wells in the west.”

“Oh, that place,” Liz said. “I don’t like that place. It keeps saying nothing but sweet nonsense.”

“Have you been there?” Alex asked curiously. “What prophecy did you hear?”

“It was some nonsense like lightning, storm, madness, anger, loss, crown, etc,” Liz said.

“Oh,” Alex was a little taken aback. “That’s almost the same as what I heard.”

‘Godslayer was right,’ he thought. ‘These divinations are a bunch of nonsense.’

“Anyway, you weren’t out there all this time just in the wells right? I hear you’ve been gone for 4 months now. What did you do?” she asked.

“Oh, I was… ” Alex paused. “Let’s speak later.”

He turned around and bowed a little. “Greetings, seniors.”

“You’re finally back,” the old woman that was his aunt’s master spoke. She walked along with the sect master and the grand master as well.

“Master, any luck?” Liz asked.

The old woman shook her head. “None yet. The Nether Poison sect wasn’t helpful at all. But don’t worry, we’ll keep trying,” she said.

Liz’s face drooped a little, and she sighed.

“How was the trip up west, young man?” the sect master asked.

“It was good, sect master,” Alex said.

“We asked the Nether Poison sect about you, and none of them seemed to realize that you were in the State of Bing. You must’ve hidden quite well,” he said.

“I merely took off my mask,” Alex said.

The 3 elders nodded in understanding. “Well, let us go inside then. We have something to talk to you about.”

Alex nodded and walked along with the 3 elders and his aunt.

As they walked, Alex saw his aunt softly floating on her way inside. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Hmm? Nothing,” Liz quickly said.

“Why are you floating then?” Alex asked.

“Oh, I’ve frozen the time for my right leg, so I can’t move it at the moment. I just have to fly,” she said.

“Why?” Alex asked.

“Young man, how strong would you say you are?” the sect master said as they arrived by the door of the lounging area.

“Sorry?” Alex turned around to look at the old man.

“Your cultivation strength. How strong would you say you are?” the sect master repeated the question. “I heard from Huang Xinyi that you can fight 4th realm Saint Foundation beasts. Is that true?”

“If I am allowed to use my dao and such, then yes,” Alex said. “Otherwise with just cultivation, it will be around the 2nd realm of Saint Foundation.”

“Are you serious?” the grand elder asked suspiciously.

“I thought Huang Xinyi was lying. Was he really telling the truth?” the sect master asked.

“He didn’t lie. I can indeed produce strength that can be compared to the 2nd realm of saint Foundation,” he said.

“How can you…” the sect master wanted to ask something but stopped. “You know what, it doesn’t matter. If you can produce such a strong strength with just your cultivation base, then I have a proposition for you.”

“What that might be, sect master?” Alex asked curiously.

“The Heaven’s Frost sect is planning on hosting a competition for the young generations to find out who is the strongest amongst them, do you think you might be able to take part in it under the Blazing Earth Sect’s name?” the sect master asked.

“A competition?” Alex asked. Was there even a point? It wasn’t like the last time when he had something to prove. It would just be a spectacle for him.

Still, there wasn’t anything for him to do yet, so maybe he could.

“It’s a special competition too,” the sect master said.

“Special? How?” Alex asked.

“You see, only those that started their cultivation journey in the 20 years or are under 50 years of age can take part in it,” the sect master said.

Alex thought for a moment with a curious look on his face. “You’re trying to set up a competition between the players, huh? I wouldn’t mind taking part in something like that. Maybe we will find some rather strong cultivators too,” he said.

“Yes, that’s the plan,” the sect master said with a big smile on his face. “So you accept?”

“Well… sure, why not?” Alex said.

“Great!” the sect leader said. “Our sect will surely win this competition then.”

The 3 seniors stayed behind to discuss some more while Alex and Liz returned. They talked for a bit as they walked, and they told each other what they had been doing for the last few months.

However, even as they talked, Alex’s eyes kept moving toward’s his aunt’s legs which never touched the ground.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “You don’t look okay.”

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said. “You don’t have to worry.”

“If I don’t worry, then who will?” Alex asked. “Come on, tell me if you’re okay or not. Is your leg hurt?”

“As I said, it’s just because I’m freezing time for my feet,” she said.

“Why though? Why are you stopping time?” Alex asked.

“That’s… ” Liz couldn’t answer.

“You’re hurt, aren’t you?” Alex asked. “Why are you hiding it?”

“No, I’m not,” Liz said.

“Show me your leg then. I’ll be the judge,” he said.

“I’m… I’m not hurt,” Liz continued saying. “But…”

“But?”

She hesitated for a bit and sighed. “It happened while I was fighting a sea snake,” she said as she pulled up her trousers slowly.

“I thought I had killed it, but it came for one last attack and… “

She showed her ankles which were swollen to almost twice their size and had turned completely purple.

Alex realized what was happening. “It bit you?”

Chapter 972: Antidote

Alex looked at the swollen ankle and nodded to himself. "Yep, you were bit by a venomous snake for sure. Good job on containing the venom to just your leg thought," he said and kept on walking.

"You… don't seem worried," Liz asked.

"Didn't you just say not to worry?" he asked.

"Of course, but that's just because I was trying to be the grown-up here. Of course, I want you to worry. I'm worried as hell myself," Liz said. "Master has been asking around for a month, and yet she can't find any antidotes at all. She doesn't even know where to begin."

"Oh, was that what the Nether Poison sect talk was about earlier?" Alex asked.

"Yes, they have the best knowledge in poisons and venoms, and even they couldn't find a cure," Liz said.

"I see," Alex said.

Liz looked at him with a suspicious look. "You still don't seem worried. Don't you worry your aunt might die if she's not healed?" she asked.

"Will you die in 10 minutes?" Alex turned around to ask.

"No? Why would I die in 10 minutes?" Liz asked.

"Because that's how long it will take me to fix up an antidote for you," Alex said with a wide grin on his face.

"Antidote?" Liz's eyes narrowed. "You have an antidote?"

"I will be making one," he said. "Let's go to my room."

Alex quickly took his aunt to his room and started pulling out ingredients left and right along with a measuring formation to measure their weight.

"What are you doing? Are you making a medicinal paste?" she asked. "I don't think it will work. We've already tried it."

"No, it's not a medicinal paste," Alex said as he focused on the ingredients, measuring them to perfection itself.

"Then?" Liz asked.

Alex continued for a few seconds before stopping and turning around to look at her. "I've been lying to you about something," he said.

"Lying? About what?" Liz's face got serious.

"Remember when I said I had knowledge of formations, talismans, and a little bit about artifact forging?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Liz said. "What's the lie there?"

Her eyes dropped towards the ingredients again as she finished her question, and very quickly a thought emerged in her mind, one she couldn't believe.

Her suspicion of the matter was basically confirmed when Alex pulled out the Green and Golden cauldron from his storage bag.

"You're an alchemist!" she shouted in surprise and quickly caught her own mouth so as to not let others hear anything.

Alex smiled back at her. "I am," he said. "Don't tell your masters though. I don't know what they will do to me if they find out."

"Of course not. I won't tell anyone," she said. "Are you… really going to make a pill?"

"Of course," Alex said. "That's the antidote I was telling you about. Now, please be quiet I need to focus."

"Okay, okay," Liz said and walked away to the corner of the room. "I won't trouble you. Do what you need to do."

Alex nodded and looked back at his own task. He brought out a fire formation to ask as his source of fire and placed his cauldron above it.

As it heated, Alex focused on the ingredient. He had already refined this recipe, so he wanted to follow it to make the best pill he could.

Since he was trying to do his best for his aunt, he had to use his best techniques at making the pills. Which meant he couldn't use the Profound Revolutions of Myriad combinations and had to instead resort to the Pill-splitting Qi.

Which instead meant that he had to double the number of ingredients he needed to make. He was okay with that if it meant the best result instead.

Also, he had the ingredients for the pill, some of which would be incredibly hard to come by in a continent that snowed almost all the time.

Alex weighed them, measured them, poured his energy into them, and kept them aside as the cauldron heated up for a while. Liz watched it all from the side with curious eyes.

Once it was all ready, Alex started.

The cauldron lay on top of the fire with its lid closing it fully, and Alex didn't want to change that. So, to put the ingredients in instead, he used the Dao of Teleportation to send them directly into the cauldron.

This was something he had come up with towards the end of his 4-month long Alchemy training session in Ghostbane City.

He put the first ingredients into the cauldron by directly sending them inside the cauldron. There were two of them, and he kept them on opposite sides of the cauldron as he moved them around at the same speed.

With them being the same ingredients, under the same temperature and motion, they resulted in the same powder and energy.

Once the first ingredient was done, Alex moved on to the second one. He sent the two ingredients using his teleportation skill too.

Not having to open up the lid meant that even by mistake, he would no longer lose any of the energy in the cauldron anymore.

Alex was getting excited right now. If he didn't make a single mistake, he wondered how far he could push the harmony of the pills.

Once the 2nd ingredient was done, Alex moved on to the third.

Liz's spiritual sense was constantly on Alex and the cauldron, watching him do the work from afar. She was surprised at how much concentration Alex was putting into his work to make it work.

Since he was making the pill for her, she too tried her best to not make a single sound to disturb him.

Alex continued his task of putting in ingredients, releasing their energy, and turning them to powder 9 more times before it was time for him to put in the last ingredient.

He did so without hesitation and turned the last set of ingredients into powder as well.

The energy from all of the 12 different types of ingredients had all mixed together in perfect harmony, and Alex couldn't help but be excited at the fact that nothing of it had escaped even in the slightest bit yet.

With him not making a single error in the recipe as of yet, Alex was super excited about the result he would gain from this batch of pills.

With how perfectly everything was going on, if he didn't get 98% harmony at the very least, he would be severely disappointed.

Alex felt a slight throbbing in his head from making two Saint rank pills at once, but he ignored it to finish the task.

Once all the powder and energy were separate, it was time to mix them back up to form two different pills.

To do that, it was very simple. Alex used his intent and suddenly, a pill-splitting Qi came out of his body, following the normal spiritual root from the meridian that was part of Qi that controlled things.

He felt the pill-splitting Qi land on the powder and suddenly they split up into two different sections of powder as they clumped up together they form two different pills.

The Pill-splitting Qi automatically forced the powder to combine in the best way possible, meaning the combinations of these powders were always the best, regardless of the powders he had presented.

"I have made no mistakes," Alex softly spoke to himself as he watched the pill-splitting Qi quickly form a pill and pull in energy from the cauldron to make the best pill Alex could've seen.

He was super excited to see how well he had done, so the moment all the energy was back in the pill and not the tiniest amount was left, he decided to finally open the cauldron.

However, before he could, a loud noise broke off his peace, forcing him to stop. Even Liz was surprised.

"What's going on?" he thought as he heard more lightning and thunder, so he looked up.

There, inside the room, a storm was brewing.

Chapter 973: Storm, Shards, and ...

"We can't just ignore the possibilities that the other sects to have disciples that have reached a very high cultivation base," the female said. "You know how it is, these new folks are very good at cultivating."

"That is true, but still, with young Yu Ming by our side, we should do good," the grand elder said.

"Whatever, we have a more pressing problem. I still can't find an antidote for the young girl. Sigh, I was too lax when I should have been very careful," the female ancestor said.

"Even the Nether Poison sect didn't have anything?" the sect master asked.

"No, they do have a recipe for the antidote, but not the antidote itself. As for the recipe, they're lacking ingredients," the old woman said.

"Sigh, if only we hadn't ignored alchemy as much, we could have—"

"No," the grand elder said. "We cannot let Alchemy flourish. That's how we bring our own downfall."

"But how, grand elder? None of you ever explain why and simply keep on telling me to continue the tradition," the sect master said. "At least tell me why I am doing what I'm doing."

The grand elder sighed and the old woman shook her head as well. "I pray you never have to learn why," she said.

"Anyway, I should go ask the Heaven's Frost sect if they have any—"

The woman paused midway as the aura in the air changed a bit. Not only her, the other two realized something was happening as well.

The three of them suddenly walked outside and saw a storm brewing in the sky that was otherwise open all around it.

The dark clouds flashed with lightning as if the heavens were angry at something. The three of them simply couldn't figure out what.

Unknown to Alex, there was a storm brewing outside that was mimicking what was happening in his room as well.

The clouds floated at the ceiling, crackling with lightning while Alex sat there confused.

'What is happening?' he thought. The pills were ready, but for some reason, Alex knew he couldn't interfere with them just yet.

At least. That was the vibes he got from looking at the miniature storm inside of his room.

"Alex, get—"

"Don't come near me." Alex put his hands to the side to stop Liz from approaching. "You will get caught up in the storm."

"What?" Liz looked up at the storm too and a familiar feeling came to her as her eyes went wide. "That's… that's the storm that brings the lightning tribulation, isn't it?"

Liz herself had to go through lightning tribulation when breaking through to the Saint realm, so she was very familiar with the storm.

"How is there a tribulation going on in here?" she asked.

"I don't know," Alex said with some fear and curiosity in his voice. "I've never come across such a thing in the 15 years I've been doing Alchemy."

However, he did have a guess.

The heavens didn't act for no reason. He had either done something that he shouldn't have, like use Immortal Qi in a world where there wasn't any Immortal Qi.

Or, the more possible one, he had reached perfection and the heavens were putting forth an obstacle in his path.

Since he was making a pill at the moment, Alex couldn't help but be happier with the result. If his assumption was correct, then the pill inside the cauldron was surely a 100% harmony pill.

Just as he was getting happy about it, the lightning crackled once more, grabbing his attention. Alex looked up just in time to see the lightning fall.

At the same time, the lightning stuck in his room, and the same lightning struck down from the storm outside as well.

Alex watched as the bolt of lightning zigged and zagged its way until it reached his cauldron. He watched as the massive bolt struck it hard, lighting up the gold and green on the cauldron.

As he watched, Alex saw the lightning branch its way around the cauldron and his cauldron cracked.

"No…"

Alex suddenly felt horrified as the explosion sent out the shards of his broken cauldron all over the room, hitting him in multiple places, and even cutting him at some.

Liz quickly slowed down time around her and used the opportunity to dodge the shards that would have otherwise hit her.

Alex struck the wall due to the shockwave and fell to the ground. His wounds healed immediately and he got back up.

"No," he thought as he watched the many pieces of his cauldron that were spread throughout the room.

"Master…" he couldn't help but feel hollow as he watched the one thing that was given to him by his master break into a hundred pieces.

"No…" he said as he quickly scanned the room to see a hundred pieces. He pulled them all together and pilled them in front of him.

"Alex honey, are you okay?" Liz quickly walked up to him and searched him for wounds.

"No, I'm fine," Alex said in a daze as he looked at the pile of his broken cauldron.

The storm above him was dissipating, but he couldn't give it any thought at all. All he could think about was the cauldron and his master.

"What happened to the pill?" Liz asked all of a sudden.

"Pill?" Alex got back from his shock. "Right, the antidote."

He quickly searched and found a pill in the pile of metal. Fortunately, it was intact, so he quickly brought it out and looked at it.

"98%?" he was a little confused. But, now was not the time.

"Eat this, aunt Liz. This should heal your leg," Alex said and gave it to her.

Liz nodded and without hesitation ate the pill. She let go of the frozen time around her leg and the intense pain assaulted her again. However, this time around, the purple ankle slowly lost its color as it return to becoming her normal skin.

In the meantime, Alex searched for the other pill that should have been in the cauldron. However, he couldn't find it.

What he did find were powders on the ground and a whole lot of elemental aura in the air that should have been in the pill.

'It was destroyed?' Alex thought.

Suddenly, the door burst open as the sect master, grand elder, and the female ancestor arrived to see what was happening.

As soon as they entered, they saw the broken shards of metal, the elemental aura in the air, and Liz with her healed legs.

"What happened here?" the old woman asked.

"Master, please don't get angry," Liz spoke up before Alex could. "He only did it to make an antidote for me."

The old woman only then realized that her disciple's wounds were gone. "What did he do?" she asked.

"He made me a pill, an antidote master. Can you forgive him, please?" Liz asked.

The old woman's eyes went wide as she turned toward Alex. "You are an alchemist?" she asked.

Alex sighed as there was no more reason to hide. He took the metal shards from the ground into his storage ring, and answered, "Yes, I am."

"That storm just now, you manifested it?" the grand elder asked.

"That was me too," Alex said.

The moment he answered them, both of the two elder's faces darkened. Surprisingly, they were not angry but rather horrified.

"You… You are an alchemist…" the old woman muttered, almost unbelieving of the words she herself spoke.

"TAI GUAN!" the grand elder shouted at the old woman and brought her out of her shock. "We need to move quickly."

"Yes, yes," the old woman said.

Before anyone could do anything, her hands moved and pulled Alex next to her. Then, she quickly walked out of the room along with the grand elder.

"Master? What are you—"

"Stay back," the old woman shouted. "Don't follow."

"I'll go gather up a few spirit veins," the grand elder said and left.

"Senior, what is happening?" the sect master asked. He himself was very confused about the situation.

"Senior, please let go of me," Alex said and struggled, but the hold the woman had on him was on that he simply couldn't walk out of. Not even with his teleportation skill. Her Qi had properly wrapped around him and they were so strong that even the space around her was being affected.

"Shut up," the old woman said. "We don't have much time to save you."
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"What?" Alex asked, but before he got an answer, the lady moved. The sect master followed behind her, very curious as to what she was intending to do.

She left the sect and moved west as fast as she could, but the sect master kept up with her.

"Senior, where are you taking me?" Alex asked. "Please let go of me."

"Don't struggle, boy," the woman said. "I'm trying to save your life here."

"Save my life? From what?" Alex asked.

"Not what, who," the woman said. "If we don't hurry..." She couldn't speak anymore.

"Who?" Alex asked.

The woman kept quiet. "I am taking you to the Teleportation formation. The grand elder will bring some spirit veins and we will send you to the Eastern Continent. You will be safe there."

"Eastern continent?" Alex was surprised.

Someone quickly caught up to them.

"How many spirit veins did you br—"

The old woman's voice froze when she realized that the person that had caught up to them was not the Grand Elder.

Alex send his spiritual sense behind him and caught a glimpse of the man.

What he saw in that glimpse… was madness.

Chapter 974 Xue Kuangren

The sect master stopped to turn around and by that time the man had already approached them.

The old woman stopped as well with a huge frown on her face. "We're too late," she said softly so that only Alex could hear it.

Alex could only feel fear at the words she just spoke.

His eyes moved toward the newly arrived figure as he tried to figure out who he was exactly. However, he had never seen a person like this.

It was a mad man with white hair that was so unkempt that it looked like he had just recently been shocked with electricity. His eyes were rabid and pained and angry and mad, making every single person in front of him feel unease.

Alex could see a small section of his neck that looked as if it had been burned, but other than that he could see nothing from the yellow robe he wore that also seemed to have been burnt in many places.

"Did you try to take him away from me, little girl?" the man asked.

The old woman didn't say anything. Her only thought at the moment was to save Alex somehow. But no matter what she thought, she didn't see a way out of it.

Even if she somehow arrived at the Intercontinental Teleportation formation with Alex and had the spirit veins readied to teleport him, the man would still arrive and take Alex away.

He was strong enough and mad enough to do that.

"Who are you, senior?" the sect master asked apprehensively.

"Hm? Who are you?" the mad man asked.

"I am Bai Qiyi," the man said. "The sec--"

"He's a young man who recently entered the Saint Soul realm," the old woman spoke before the sect master could introduce himself properly.

"A young blood, huh? Hehe, no wonder you don't know me. Still, I would've thought she would've told you by now," the mad man said.

The sect master turned to look towards the old woman, looking for answers, but all he saw was a frown on her face.

"How the hell am I supposed to tell him anything? You made sure to shut our mouths with the oath," the old woman said.

"I did?" the mad man asked. "Right, I did. I'm getting forgetful. Well, I free you from that oath then." The man shook his head and turned toward the old woman again.

"Now, I must ask where you were thinking of going with the young man there," the man asked. "Surely, you were not trying to send him away, right?"

"N-no," the old woman said.

"Good, now hand him over so that I may leave," the man said.

Alex watched in horror as the old woman handed him over without putting up a single fight. Even the sect master was horrified at how easily she was letting go of the young man that she previously said would become their savior.

The mad man caught Alex and looked at him with a feral face. "You brought out the Pill cloud, didn't you?" the man asked. "What happened to the pill you made?"

"My pill? It... it was destroyed," Alex said.

"Hmm... no worry, you will have a lot of time to succeed now. I will teach you exactly how to succeed. Let's go."

The mad man then moved at an incredible speed away from there, going back east where he had come from.

The speed was so fast that Alex started feeling dizzy. The man had no qualms about putting Alex in danger with the speed he was moving in.

The State of Re became a blue as in just a minute, they crossed over half the Northern continent, arriving at the bay that was at the south of the Dong and Shuang Border.

Alex saw the blue water zipped past him as a sharp ringing sound entered his ears. He looked up front and saw a million different lightning strikes fall from the clouds.

Alex realized where he was going.

The Lightning Peninsula.

* * * * * *

The old woman hovered in the sky with a look that was hard to judge.

The sect master looked at her with an angry look on his face. "Why did you give him up so easily? The least you could do was try and fight," he said.

"We can't," the woman said. "There is no way for us to win against him."

"You could've at least tried," the sect master said angrily.

The woman suddenly got angry as well. "You think we haven't tried? Do you think we haven't spent the last thousands of years trying to find a solution to kill him? We've tried and we've failed. Dozens of us have died in the process. We can't beat him at all."

"Fighting him means dying. Do you want to die?" the woman asked.

The sect master's anger softened a bit when he heard that. "You've fought him many times?" he asked.

"Yes, not just us. All the other ancestors from the different sects too," she said. "We've been trying to kill him all this time, but it is just impossible."

The sect master frowned. "How strong is he?" he asked. "Is he at the Peak of Saint Transformation realm?"

The woman shook her head. "No," she said. "He's stronger than that. He's a False Immortal."

"A False Immortal?" the sect master's eyes went wide in shock. "Does he live in the Northern Continent? How come I do not know about him?"

"You do know about him," the old woman said. "You only think he's dead."

The sect master's eyes narrowed when he heard that. "Who is he?" he asked.

The answer the woman gave to that question sent the sect master's mind reeling with a million thoughts.

"Xue Kuangren."

* * * * * * * *

The madman somehow dodged through all the lightning bolts and arrived at an underground palace that was massive.

He let go of Alex there and only then did Alex could try and hold in his dizziness. It took a few seconds, but the fact that he could get dizzy as a Saint realm cultivator went to show just how fast the old man was.

Alex stepped a little back and thought of teleporting away when he sensed something. 'Something's wrong with space here,' he thought. Teleporting away would be harder, not to mention useless with the man in front of him.

Alex was about to ask something when the old man shouted. "Everyone! Come out!"

Alex wondered what was happening when one by one, men and women all walked out from inside various rooms in the underground palace.

Alex looked surprised when he saw nearly 120 different people, all of whom were of various different ages, from young to old.

"H-How can we help you, senior?" one of the old men asked.

"How many of you here can consistently make Immortal Grade pills?" the mad man asked.

The people looked around, but none of them said anything. Alex realized that the 120 different people here were all alchemists. 'So many,' he thought.

"Can none of you consistently make Immortal grade pills yet?" the man asked.

The men and women could only shake their heads in response.

"Very well," the man said. "I don't need any of you anymore."

His hands moved, and the 10 dozen alchemists were shredded to many pieces. Alex fell back in shock as the blood and guts of the different cultivators fell to the ground in front of him.

His fear reached its peak as the madman turned toward him. And the mad man smiled. "Don't worry, I won't hurt you. You are the only one that can help me. You are the only one that can make me pills to heal my wounds."

Alex heard him, but the words barely reached him. His fear made sure his primary thought was regarding his own survival.

As he thought that, his eyes fell on something he had seen before.

On the old man's yellow robe, there was an insignia he had seen somewhere before. It was a snowflake.

He remembered where he had seen that insignia. He had seen it back in the Silvermoon city, on the chest of the disciples that wore golden robes.

"You're from the Snow Immortal sect?" Alex asked in surprise.

"From? Haha, I am Xue Kuangren, the sect leader of the Snow Immortal sect," the man said.

"Xue Kuangren..." Alex had heard of that famous name before.

After all, this was the sect leader that had brought forth the destruction of the Snow Immortal sect nearly 8 thousand years ago.

Chapter 975 Pill Cloud

Before the 5 major sects of the current northern continent existed, they were but a part of a super sect known as the Snow Immortal sect.

The Snow Immortal sect ruled over the Northern Continent for thousands and thousands of years, producing dozens of Immortals in the process.

And it all came crumbling down when Xue Kuangren, the sect leader of the Snow Immortal sect of 8 thousand years ago failed in his lightning tribulation to become an Immortal.

In doing so, he was said to have died, and along with him died the Snow Immortal sect.

And yet, here he was, in front of Alex. He wasn’t in his best state, but he was alive, and he was very strong.

‘Godslayer!’ Alex shouted in his head to try and call for help. ‘I need your help.’

Godslayer heard his calls and shifted into Alex’s body. But when he sensed the man that stood in front of him, he quickly went back.

“I’m sorry, kid. I can’t help you on this one,” he said. “The man in front of you is the closest thing to an Immortal. The only one that can hurt him is an Immortal, and I, unfortunately, don’t have that sort of power in me.”

Alex was terrified when he realized the severity of the situation. There was no getting out of here.

* * * * * *

“Xue Kuangren? He is supposed to have died 8 thousand years ago,” the sect master of the Blazing Earth sect said.

“He didn’t,” the old woman said. “We speculate that the coward realized that he was going to fail and most likely die during his ascension, and thus ran away from his own tribulation.”

“In doing so, he implicated the many elders of the Snow Immortal sect at the time, all of whom died there. He himself got out of it with half of his body damaged,” the old woman said.

“Had we realized at the time this was the matter, we would’ve killed him before he had some time to recuperate. Alas, he had gone off to the southern Shuang where he established the massive formation that brought down lightning that he then used to hide.”

The sect master’s eyes went wide. “Xue Kuangren created the Lightning Peninsula?” he asked in surprise.

“Did it never seem too coincidental to you that exactly 8 thousand years ago when he was supposed to have died was the same time the Lightning Peninsula was first created?” the old woman asked.

“I… see, that makes sense,” the sect master said. “So he’s been hiding this whole time? Why hasn’t he come to reclaim his sect? Why did he just watch and let his sect be destroyed?”

“He can’t come,” the old woman said. “His wounds are too severe for him to do anything.”

“Then… why couldn’t you kill him?” the sect master asked.

“His physical body is too strong for us to do anything,” the woman said. “The only one who can hurt him is he himself.”

The sect master was confused. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“He’s a False Immortal, meaning that he has the attributes of an Immortal but not their power. His Body and Soul have combined together as it always does when one enters Immortality. His physical body was reborn to become as strong as his cultivation base. As such, we simply cannot hurt him as we are.”

“However, he is wounded. From what we know, part of his meridians are destroyed and thus he can’t use his Qi properly. Every time he does, it only aggravates his wound. And since his meridians are wounded so badly, he can not even cultivate anymore.”

“Then… what can he do?” the sect master asked.

“All he can do, and all he has been doing for the past thousands of years. Kidnapping Alchemists and forcing them to make pills for him to heal,” the old woman said. Since her oath to keep quiet had been lifted, she told the sect master everything she knew.

The sect master finally understood what was happening. “That is why everyone is so against alchemy,” he said. “Because if Alchemy grows then…”

“Then he comes back,” the old woman said. “And if he comes back, the Snow Immortal sect is reborn, and we will be forced to live our lives under the hands of the madman.”

“We wanted the young man to grow and become strong enough to kill the madman, but… dammit, he got to him before he could grow,” the old woman said. “If he somehow is able to make pills to heal the madman then… we can be certain that most of us will die.”

* * * * * *

The madman took Alex to a room full of working cauldrons that were left behind by the alchemists that had just been killed.

It didn’t take him that long to realize that these were the alchemists that had gone missing many times in the past dozens of years.

It was never the 5 sects that did anything to the Alchemists, it was this madman. The 5 sects were only trying to help the alchemists, but they couldn’t outright do anything because of their oath.

As such, they had to seem underhanded to make the alchemists think being one was a bad idea.

‘Dammit, if only I hadn’t reached 100%,’ Alex thought.

“Sit somewhere, you will start making healing pills for me,” he said.

Alex looked around and frowned. “Senior, I’m only a Saint realm cultivator. I cannot make a pill that can help you,” he said.

“Oh, but you can,” the man said. “You brought the pill clouds. That means you can definitely help me.”

Alex couldn’t help but be confused. “Senior, you need Immortal Qi to heal you. I cannot make Immortal pills while I’m in the Saint realms,” he said.

“I know that, but you can still help me,” the madman said. “Do you not know about pill clouds?”

Alex frowned and shook his head. “That was the first time I ever saw something like that happen. It was pure coincidence,” he said.

“Haha, then pray that there are more coincidences like this,” the man said. “When you make a 100% harmony pill, the heavens put it on a trail, calling forth a storm that we call Pill Clouds.”

“It will send down 9 different lightning bolts, of which you have to go through at least one before you can hope to stop. Each lightning bolt the pill survives improves the pill to a point that it has some chance at affecting a cultivator of a higher cultivation base.”

“So, if you a Saint realm cultivator make a Saint ranked healing pill that can survive through enough of the lightning strikes, I will have a high chance of restoring my body and then I can finally go back and make the Snow Immortal sect great again.”

The man started laughing like the mad man he was.

Alex frowned when he realized what a troublesome situation he had gotten himself into. “What if I did heal you? What will you do?” he asked.

“What will I do?” the man thought. “If you heal me, I will make you my heir as the next leader of the Great Snow Immortal sect that will once more rule over all of the Northern Continent.”

“Hehe, you may think I’m lying, but here’s an incentive for you. Every time you make a pill that is over 98% in harmony, I will give you whatever you want,” the madman said. “Except knowledge on talismans. I had someone man a talisman to escape previously, so you can’t have that.”

“Anything?” Alex asked, making a face that said he was willing.

“Yes, anything,” the old man said. “You will do it right?”

Alex had no choice. “Yes,” he said.

“Good, I will go and gather some ingredients for you to start. Rest for now,” the man said and left.

After the man left, Alex sat there thinking of what had just happened. He had been kidnapped by a False Immortal, forced to make a pill for him.

As he thought of what he was going to do in the future, a few words from the past, of the future, came to his mind.

He remembered the divinations he had seen back in the Nine Wells of Time.

One of the divination was a glimpse of his future where he saw Storms, Shards of metal, and Madness.

Alex had been through the storm that was the pill cloud. He had seen the shards of metal that had been the broken pieces of his cauldron that were the last physical reminder of his master.

And now he had seen madness.

Alex felt stunned once more, even after everything that had already happened today. He was stunned when he realized that the visions of the future he had seen 4 months ago were all coming true.

At least, the vision from one of the wells had come true. This meant, more than likely, the other wells had also shown his visions that were true as well.

That was when he remembered the first prophecy he had heard in there, and a deep fear couldn’t help but grow in his heart.

“I hold the key to a fallen power,” he thought. He was the only one in the entire continent that could heal the fallen power that was the sect leader of the Snow Immortal sect after all.

He realized that another one of the divinations, this time a prophecy, was coming true right in front of him.

However, if it was coming true, then he was in grave danger.

“I hold the key to a fallen power,” he remembered and slowly continued. “I shall help restore that power… and that shall bring my death.”

Chapter 976: No Way Out

But who in their right mind would refuse to do anything for the madman that had just killed 120 alchemists because they didn't give him what he wanted?

'I need to escape somehow,' Alex thought. 'But how?'

He knew there was no way he could beat someone that was once at the cusp of immortality, so he needed to think of some other way.

Unless his sword skills improved to the point where it was on the next stage, it was unlikely he was going to be able to beat him.

Even if he did, how was he supposed to wield such power with his tiny cultivation base and body strength? He was sure to struggle to wield such strength.

Godslayer couldn't help him and he had nothing on him that could help him either.

'Dammit, why is the space here so weird? It feels like I'm stuck in a secret realm or something,' Alex thought as he felt around.

He wondered if an escape talisman could help him get out of here, but then, what was he going to do after leaving? Given how fast the madman was, he was sure to catch up to him in just a few minutes.

'Can I feed him poison?' Alex wondered, but how was he going to make poison in the first place? Saint-ranked ingredients wouldn't work on him and Immortal rank ingredients were impossible to find.

'Besides, it looks like he knows a lot about alchemy to know what Pill Cloud is while I don't,' Alex thought. 'It will be impossible to dupe him.'

"Godslayer, do you have any ideas?" Alex asked.

Godslayer moved his attention towards Alex's words but remained quiet for a while. "I need to know more about the situation to even understand what is going on. However, what I can tell you is that there is no way you can beat him in direct combat. You will have to use some underhanded means."

"I can't think of any," Alex said.

"Neither can I," Godslayer said. "I might need some more time to think of something. Try and get as much information out of him as you can, I will try to see what I can come up with in the meantime."

Godslayer went back to ignoring the outside, and Alex was once again left alone. He thought of calling out Pearl and Whisker, but in this situation, it just didn't feel right.

He didn't want to give any way for the madman to find leverage over him. After all, Pearl and Whisker being hostage would be the last thing he would want.

Not long after, the old man walked into the room and went up to Alex with a face full of smiles.

"Hehe, I'm back with the ingredients. This is what I've gathered for the last thousands of years, so it will be enough for you to make pills out of them," he said.

The old man had many storage bags, but he only handed over one to Alex. "There is a recipe and a few ingredients in there. Try and make a pill in front of me," he said.

Alex took the bag and looked inside it. The healing pill recipe in there was one he had already improved, so it wouldn't take much time for him to get 100% again.

But should he do that?

'No,' Alex thought. Still, he had to do better than what the people that had died already had done, so he brought out one of the many True rank cauldrons he owned and started.

The False Immortal sat a bit far away and watched Alex start making the pill.

Alex started putting in the ingredients and refining them as he made the pill. He used the best recipe, the best control, and the best single pill-forming skill out there.

The cauldron he was using wasn't the best. It was finding a very hard time retaining heat without melting. Alex had to use his Dao of melting to stop it from doing so, and it was quite annoying.

Still, he ended up with a pill that had 92% Harmony.

Before he could even do anything, the madman pulled the hot cauldron and opened it to pull out the pill. He placed it on a formation, which showed that the pill had 92% harmony in it.

"That's far better than what all of these idiots made before," the man said. "But it is still not enough. You have got to do better."

"I don't know how I did what I did before," Alex said.

"Doesn't matter. I will be keeping this pill. I can use it to heal you later," the man said.

Alex's eyes widened. "Heal me?" he asked.

"You have 1 month to bring back the Pill cloud again. If you don't, then I will beat you until you are half dead," the man said and left before Alex could say anything else.

A formation appeared all around the room as soon as the old man left. Now, Alex couldn't even leave just this room anymore.

Alex sat in the room, stunned at what he had just heard.

'Fuck!' he thought. 'I'm going to get beat up if I don't create a pill cloud?'

Alex couldn't help but frown at the situation. What was he going to do now?

'I don't have a choice,' he thought. 'I'm going to have to make that pill cloud.'

Alex couldn't sense any spiritual sense in him, but he doubted he could sense the Spiritual sense of an Immortal level figure, so he could only work under the assumption that he was under his supervision at all times.

He would have to be very careful regarding what he did.

Alex took a few minutes of rest and started making the pills once again. For a while, he was going to have to make pills that weren't so good. Still, with his skill, every pill would be over 90%.

After making about 10 pills in a row over the next 10 hours, Alex stopped to cultivate. He used the time to think of how he was going to escape, but there was simply no way in his mind.

Unless he got help from the outside, he was stuck in this room for the foreseeable future.

Aside from cultivation, Alex had no choice but to continue making pills. For the first 2 weeks, he did what he could to get just over 90%, but after that, he needed to think of a way to bring forth the cloud.

He was going to be beaten up if he didn't, so Alex prepared for it.

To not arise suspicion at the fact that he could make some of the best pills on demand simply by using the best ingredients, he spent improving the ingredients two ingredients a day.

The 12 different ingredients for the pill needed 12 days before he was ready.

On the 13th day, with only 3 more days to go before the month ended, Alex began making the pills.

He had perfected two of each ingredient, so it was going to be two pills that he was making. Unfortunately for him, there was no other way but to show off his Pill Splitting Qi if he wanted to bring the Pill Clouds.

Alex tried his best once again. He had everything perfect, bar the cauldron, but he could work with that.

He sent the ingredients into the cauldron directly using his Dao of Teleportation and started refining it.

Halfway through the process, Alex started worrying that he might end up not doing a very good job as he might've miscalculated on the ingredients.

However, when he sent the Pill-Splitting Qi into the cauldron, and it split the pill into two, he heard the storm clouds ringing loud on top of him.

With that, he knew he had done it right.

He looked up to see the cloud floating indoors once more, reading to strike down with a strong lightning bolt.

Seeing that, Alex couldn't help but wonder. "Now what?"

The False Immortal had told him to make a pill cloud, but he had never told him what he should do once he did make it.

"Do I move away and hope for the best?" he wondered. He knew he couldn't interfere in the tribulation of the others, so he thought it was the same in this case as well.

Just then, the formations around Alex's room suddenly disappeared as the old man walked in with a stunned look.

"You really did it," he spoke softly as he looked to the sky. Then, he looked down at Alex and saw that he was standing further away from the cauldron.

"What are you doing?" he shouted. "Stay by the cauldron."

Alex's eyes narrowed when he heard that. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"Quick! You need to protect your pill from the lightning," the man said. "Sit by your cauldron."

Alex didn't know what he meant exactly, but he was the only one he could believe at the moment.

"How do I protect it?" he asked. "Do I fight off the lightning?"

"No, use the full power of your cultivation base to cover up your pill so it doesn't take damage from the lightning strike," the old man said.

"Oh," Alex said and quickly sat by his cauldron.

'Full power of my cultivation base, huh?' he thought. 'I will definitely use the full power of my Saint Condensation 2nd realm cultivation base then.'

Chapter 977: Heal or Kill

He had yet to realize which of the two pills that were inside the cauldron at the moment was the actual pill that was going through the lightning trial, so he had to cover them both.

"Good," the old man said with a maniacal look on his face. "Keep it steady, and—"

Before he could finish his sentence, the lightning fell from the heavens and struck the cauldron. Once more, the cauldron Alex was using broke into a hundred different pieces, cutting him in various different places at the same time.

As for the pills, since he was covering both at once, when the lightning fell, both of the pills were destroyed at once.

Alex halted his healing and made grunting noises as if he was in pain. Then he brought out a pill which he quickly ate. He let the pill turn into Qi, and resumed his Undying physique which healed him immediately.

He had done it all to hide his physique from the old man, but the old man wasn't even looking at him.

Instead, the old man stared at the vanishing cloud and the black smudge on the ground where the lightning broke the cauldron to pieces. On the floor there lay the powder that would otherwise have been a pill that survived the lightning bolt and become one that would help heal his wound.

Alas.

"Weak," the old man muttered. "Extremely weak!"

His head snapped in Alex's direction as he quickly walked towards him. Alex was immediately scared and tried to move away, but the old man was too quick and grabbed him by his robes.

Alex couldn't do anything as he was pulled close to the old man's face.

As the old man looked at Alex, Alex looked at him. He saw the wounds from up close. The burned skin with a lightning scar on it of which only the tip could be seen outside of his robes.

The wound crept up from his right shoulder, and Alex could feel the old man's hands trembling slightly as he hold onto him.

He could see some whiteness in the eyes that stared back at him.

"Saint Condensation 2nd realm. You're too weak," the old man said. "You need a stronger cultivation base to survive the lightning strike."

"I'm sorry, senior, but this is my cultivation base. I cannot improve it very quickly," Alex said.

The old man grunted in response and threw Alex back on the ground. His madness was slowly creeping up to him.

"Grrr… I've waited so long, I can wait a few more years," the old man said. "But not many."

The old man thought for a bit and spoke. "You have 10 years of time in which you have to reach a cultivation base where your pills can at least survive a single strike from the pill clouds. If you can't, you will be of no use to me, in which case I will kill you."

Alex took a deep breath and nodded. "I will do it," he said.

"You better," the old man said and turned to leave. "I will come back when you call the pill clouds again."

"Senior," Alex stopped him.

"What?" the old man asked.

"You said you would give me anything I want if I made a 98% harmony pill, right?" he asked. "I made one with 100% Harmony today. Do I get something?"

The old man turned around with an obviously annoyed face, but he didn't voice his annoyance. "What do you want?" he asked.

Alex had a thought in mind. "30 tons of Ice Iron," he said. "Can you find it for me?"

The old man thought for a bit and said, "fine, I will get it for you."

"Thank you," Alex said. "I will do my best to make a pill to heal you."

"Hmm," the old man walked back towards Alex and said, "just in case… I need to make sure." He stared down at Alex who was starting to feel worried.

"What is it, senior?" Alex asked.

"Make an oath that you will either heal me in 10 years or you will kill yourself," the old man said.

"What? I—" Alex didn't know what to say. This was an obviously bad oath for him to say, but then there was an obviously bad man sitting standing right in front of him.

"Make the oath," the man's eyes sharpened as he stared at Alex.

Alex took a deep breath and said, "Senior, as long as you're alive, I will continue making pills to heal you."

The old man suddenly snickered and kicked Alex in the chest before sending him back into the wall.

"Don't try to be a smart ass in front of me," the old man said. " Do you think I will let you speak such blatant oaths with loopholes where my death releases you?"

Alex coughed up blood from the attack and wheezed a little as he tried to catch his breath.

"Say the Oath I make you say, or I will kill you," the man continued.

"Senior, please—"

"Speak the oath," the old man continued. "Say that you will either heal me in the next 10 years or you will kill yourself. If you try and change a single word in that oath, I will will you right now."

Alex frowned and thought of a way to get out of this, but not a single idea came to his mind. In the end, he could only try and survive.
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"I make an Oath to the heavens," Alex spoke out loud. "Within the next 10 years, I will heal you, senior. If I am unable to do that, I will… kill myself."

The heavens accepted his Oath, and Alex felt something settle onto his mental space as if something had imprinted itself onto him.

He could feel the oath bind him in a heavenly intent that if tried to break willingly would kill him.

Alex couldn't help but frown as the oath was accepted. Such a terrible oath was forced upon him and he now had no way of getting out of it.

The only way would be to help the man and help him heal within the next 10 years. But then… there was a high chance of the prophecy coming true, which said that he would die.

Alex felt himself fall into a dilemma, one which he saw no way out of.

'What do I do now?' he thought.

The old man was laughing in the meanwhile. "Good, good. You've now put yourself on the path where either you die or I don't get healed. I will get you all the resources you need to improve as well as whatever you want. You just focus on improving and making the pills."

The old man left happy leaving a troubled Alex behind to think of what to do.

Alex stayed there, thinking for a while, but it all led to the same conclusion.

'I have to heal him,' he thought. It wasn't even him wanting to do it. It was more so that he couldn't do anything else.

Simply thinking of not helping the old man heal made him feel suffocated. The oath prevented him from even having thoughts of going against it.

"I have to heal him, or I have to kill myself," he thought. "So… if I want to ignore the first section, I will have to look deeply into the second one."

He wondered if there was a way for him to kill himself without actually killing himself.

Alex could only think of the situation when he reaches the third stage of Undying Physique where he could be reborn with just a soul remaining.

Unfortunately, he was barely at the peak of the first stage, and the 2nd stage is supposed to last a very long time as well. Reaching the 3rd stage was pretty much impossible.

"Goddammit!" Alex felt like pulling out his own hair. "What the hell am I supposed to do?"

He thought for a while with no answer. He thought of what his aunt much be thinking about right now. Was she looking for a way to help him? He hoped she wasn't.

He hoped the old woman and the sect master were smart enough to not let her do anything impulsive. He felt sad at the thought of his aunt being alone again, but then it was more likely that she was worried about him more than herself being alone.

'I miss mother,' he thought as he realized that the was feeling empty at the moment with no one to help him and no one to talk to.

Godslayer barely talked, and Alex couldn't bring either of the beasts out of safety concerns. But then, he had spoken an oath, so maybe he could do so now.

One thing that annoyed Alex more than anything was the fact that he had been captured and was being kept imprisoned for the next 10 years. The annoying part here was the fact that there were less than 5 years for the Demon realm's teleportation script to be active.

If he missed that, he was going to have to give up on returning back to the Western Continent using any conventional means available to him.

"I'm going to miss it, aren't I?" he thought. That made him feel sadder than he already was, but then he picked himself up.

"Screw this," he thought. "I will think of the future in the future. Right now, I can only use the opportunity provided to me to grow."

Chapter 978 Fear

The first 3 months after speaking the oath, Alex spent his days thinking about what he should and shouldn’t do. He kept wanting to think of ways to get out of this place, but his oath forced him to stay.

The moment he even thought of leaving without healing the old man, a feeling of suffocation would fall onto him, trying to choke him out of breath and kill him.

Fortunately, his oath had nothing about him having to try his best to heal the old man, or he would be forced to use his real cultivation base when fighting the pill clouds.

Just for his own survival, 2 times in the 3 months, he had already brought forth another 2 pill clouds. However, the weak cultivation base he was portraying could not stop the lightning, resulting in both the pill and cauldron being destroyed each time.

The old man always got mad when he saw Alex fail, but there was nothing he could really do about it as Alex was still weak, so he let it be.

Alex, however, never let it be and asked the old man for something both times.

After asking for the 30 tons of Ice Iron, the next 2 times, he asked for 10 tons of Pale Onyx, and 20 tons of Violet Obsidian.

The old man didn’t understand what exactly he was asking the various things for, but it was barely any inconvenience for him to provide the things.

The only thing he needed to do was go and steal it from places he knew it existed, or just go ask the ancestors of the various sects that he knew existed.

It didn’t take him more than a couple of days to get the items. He was curious about what Alex wanted to do with them, but when he did spy on him, Alex didn’t use them at all.

‘Is he hoarding them?’ the old man thought. But then, he really didn’t care, so he stopped checking on him and went back.

Alex continued his days normally with nothing much happening. He continued making pills, but he was starting to slow down significantly these days.

The cauldrons he owned just weren’t as good. There were other cauldrons there, all of which belonged to the alchemists that were here before him, and they would serve him well once he refined them.

But for a few reasons, he simply didn’t want to. One of the reasons was that the cauldrons didn’t seem to be made with the lightning strike in mind, so making pill clouds while using these cauldrons wouldn’t help him much.

However, the main reason was really the fact that there simply wasn’t enough room in those cauldrons if he ever decided to make multiple pills at once.

Anything above 4 would be too crowded, so he needed a rather massive cauldron. Unfortunately, he had no choice at the moment.

Which meant… he had to create an opportunity for just that. So, Alex created another pill cloud.

The old man arrived just in time to see the start of the lightning bolt that struck the cauldron and destroyed it. The pills inside them were destroyed as well.

‘Still weak,’ he muttered to himself. “Get stronger faster,” he shouted at Alex in annoyance. Usually, at this point, he would leave. However, he had already learned how Alex was, so he just waited.

“What do you want this time around?” he asked. He crossed his arms and tapped his feet in impatience.

Alex had called the Pill Cloud for exactly this moment, so he knew what he wanted out of this conversation. There was really only one thing.

“A forge,” he said.

The old man’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “A forge?” he asked, just to make sure.

Alex nodded. “Yes,” he said. “But not just any forge. A forge that is strong enough to handle molten Starforged Tungsten.”

“What the hell is a Starforged Tungsten?” the old man grunted.

Alex was taken aback a bit, but then he remembered that the massive vein of Starforged Tungsten that had later become the Endless Tunnel was actually found just 2500 years ago.

The old man would have been in hiding at the time and was most likely unaware of the stuff.

“It’s a metal that takes a very high amount of heat to melt. It’s a good metal for making items that can work with a lot of heat,” Alex said.

“Grrr… fine, you’ll get it in a few days,” the old man said and left.

Alex smiled wide knowing that in just a few days, he would have gathered enough material to make the cauldron of his dreams.

* * * * *

The old man wasn’t sure where exactly he could find the said forge, so he decided to ask the people that would know.

So, he went to the place he had been visiting a few times in the past few months. The Blazing Earth sect.

Without any invitation, he barged into the depths of the sect and arrived in the sect master’s office.New n0vel chapters are published on

The sect master was surprised when he saw someone in the room, but calmed down when he saw that it was the mad immortal.

“Senior,” he greeted the old man out of fear and kept quiet afterward to let the old man speak first.

“He keeps asking for different stuff. It’s annoying,” he said. “How did you deal with him?”

“He asked for something again, senior?” the sect master asked with hopeful eyes. If Alex had asked something, then that meant that he was still alive.

As long as he was alive, they were hopeful.

“He wants some sort of forge this time around. Uhh… something that can be used to melt… uhh, something tungsten,” he said.

“Ah! it shall be done, senior,” the sect master said.

“Good. Go do it,” the old man said and stayed in the room as if he owned the place. Which in his eyes was the truth.

Given that the 5 ancient sects were nothing but branches of the Snow Immortal sect during his time of leadership, he still believed that he owned everything.

The sect master wasn’t about to tell the strong mad immortal that he was wrong. He simply bowed and walked away from the place.

He himself flew over to the State of Xue near the Heaven’s Frost sect and brought back a forge that was used there.

Once back, he found a few of the ancestors in the room, looking at the mad immortal with fear in their eyes.

The sect master didn’t understand what was going on, but he could do so later. He walked up front and handed over the forge he had just brought back.

The mad immortal took the storage bag and started walking back out. However, he stopped by the door once just to say something. “Just wait for my return. I will be back within the decade,” he said and left.

The room became gloomy after the mad immortal left. The sect master asked what had happened when he had left. When he found out, his face too turned gloomy.

The old woman left the room and went over to her disciple’s room

Liz had become depressed after losing a family member after finally finding one in the last 18 years. She was barely cultivating and spent most of her time asking her master to find a way to help her nephew.

The old woman walked into the room to see the same Liz she had seen for the last 5 months.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

Liz barely managed to put out an ‘I’m fine’ as she didn’t care much for how she felt at the moment.

The old woman understood and sighed. “I have news about your nephew,” she said.

Liz’s eyes suddenly shot up towards the old woman, looking at her in hope and fear. She was expecting both good and bad news, and she did not know which one she was going to receive first.

“To start with, your nephew is alive and alright. Well, he’s physically alright at least,” the old woman said.

“He’s okay?” Liz asked.

“For now,” the old woman said. “Apparently, he was forced to speak an oath to the madman. Bastard loves making people say oaths to him.”

“What… what sort of oaths?” Liz asked nervously.

“He has to make a healing pill for the madman in the next 9 and half years, or he will have to kill himself,” the old woman said.

“What?” Liz’s eyes darkened in anger.

“Yes,” the old woman continued. “However, he did say that not only would he let the young man go free after he’s done making the pill, he will also make him his heir.”

“So… he has a chance at survival?” Liz asked.

The old woman nodded.

Liz calmed down. “Then it’s fine,” she said. “I believe in him. If anyone can do it, he can.”

“I…” the old woman paused. “I fear the same thing as well.”

Liz looked at the old woman with a confused look. “Fear?” she asked.

“When the mad immortal regains his strength, the first thing he will do is reform the broken Snow Immortal sect. At that point, he will seek to bring back the 5 sects under his control,” The old woman said. “Even if we go under his wings willingly, he will seek to make an example out of us and kill all the ancestors from the 5 sects that have defied him before.”

“It will be a genocide,” the old woman said. “And I fear… that your nephew will make that future come true.”

Chapter 979 Tungsten Sword

"Here you go," the mad immortal handed Alex the storage bag with the forge in it. Alex took the bag and looked inside before thanking the old man.

"What are you going to do with this?" he asked.

"Make a cauldron," Alex said.

"What's wrong with the rest of the cauldrons?' the old man asked curiously.

"They're quite weak to be useful for when the Pill Cloud forms. Every single one I use is destroyed by the lightning," Alex said.

"And this one will help you? The Pill cloud's lightning bolt transcends space and time. No matter how strong your cauldron is, the lightning bolt will strike the pill," the old man said.

"I see," Alex said. "Still, the cauldron I will be making should remain intact even after it is struck by lightning."

"Ughh... do what you want. As long as you make me the pill in 10 years time, I am fine with what you do," the old man said.

Despite being mad and not right in the head, the old man still knew that he couldn't hurt Alex. Killing his golden goose was not the right way to go at the moment.

So, he left him alone.

Alex was happy being left alone. He still didn't call out his beasts, but he didn't feel lonely at all. Cultivating by themselves for years was what cultivators did anyway after all.

In the corner of the room, he set up the forge that he was going to be using. It was going to get very hot, so he made sure to keep anything that could be damaged easily very far away.

Once ready, Alex took out about 2 tons of the Tungsten ore that he was going to have to use.

In the last few days of waiting, he had already done every single preparation required to remove the obvious non-metal part of the ore such as minerals and dirt and had already pulverized it all as well as he could in this place.

So, now he could smelt it directly in the forge.

Alex put the 2 tons of tungsten into the forge and used his True Fire Dao to quickly and easily melt it down. Since there was no other source of fire, it had to all come from him and him alone.

He couldn't help but be surprised by just how easy it was with his Dao.

It was so much better than when he simply had the Dao of Heat, as this time he had the Dao of Melting and the Dao of Metal to help him.

As the ore inside began to melt and the different materials in the ore separated themselves, Alex took out a few volcanic ashes and put them into the forge.

The volcanic ashes would react with the various minerals and even a few metals in the molten ore inside, leaving behind pure tungsten that sank to the bottom.

He continued in the heat for a while before it was time to pull out the tungsten. Alex opened the bottom of the forge and let the tungsten flow out.

He quickly use his Qi to pull it away and placed it on top of his anvil. The refined ore resulted in Alex having 800 Kilograms of pure Starforged Tungsten, which to his surprise was large enough for 2 swords.

He had lost 60% of the weight from the ore, and nearly 90% of the volume. But what remained was the best it could be. As the metal started cooling and turning semi-solid, Alex called for help.

"Godslayer, can you help me in making a sword?" he asked. He had asked for the forge to make a cauldron, but since he had never worked with the Starforged Tungsten before, he wanted to learn it.

For that, he decided to start with a sword as it was the easiest of all that he could make.

Godslayer had noticed Alex working with the forge even before he called for him, so he immediately answered. "What do you need help with?" he asked.

"I just want to see if you have any other insights into making a sword. This time around, I have the Dao of Metal, so maybe you got some idea on how I could use it," Alex said.

"Hmm... start with a general shape of the metal first. Turn it into a long rectangular shape, like a ruler," Godslayer said.

Alex nodded and did as he was told. The molten metal transformed into his Dao of Metal until it was the shape he wanted it to be.

"Now, hammer it until it is tempered," Godslayer said.

Alex didn't need any more explanation as he started doing exactly what he was told. He enforced both the hammer and anvil with his Qi, made sure to never let heat permeate into them, and started whacking away.

Slow and Steady, that was the way to temper metal, and that was exactly what Alex did. He hit the thin strip of metal with a rhythmic blow and continued for a while.

Godslayer watched his every move to make sure he didn't do anything wrong.

After a while, Alex stopped when he heard a ringing sound come from the metal, letting him know it was fully tempered.

"Good," Godslayer spoke. "Now, are you making a longsword? There's not enough for a greatsword."

Alex thought of what he wanted and there was only a single choice in his heart. "I know the shape I want to go with, and there's double the metal required here."

"Good, then you can just compound the metal," Godslayer said. "Heat up the metal again, and start shaping the sword. Use your Dao of metal."

Alex nodded and began. With the constant supply of his heat, it wasn't hard to quickly bring the softened metal into shape. At the same time, he was compounding the metal too, compressing the metal until it had a volume half it's current size.

After the volume of the metal was half, Alex finally began putting in Qi lines.

He was still shaping up the metal so there was enough time for him to do so. He formed normal Qi lines as there was not much else he could make.

"Use your Dao of Metal to continue from here," Godslayer said. "You don't have any other metal dao, do you?"

"Uhh... Dao of Cutting doesn't count right?" Alex asked.

"No, but Sharpness does," Godslayer said. "If you don't have anything else, then you will have a slightly tougher time with putting the finishing touches."

Alex nodded. He continued with the finer details of the shaping of the sword and added as sharp an edge as he could without the Dao of Sharpness.

Thankfully, Alex had the Dao of Cutting, so he wouldn't have to worry about the sword is not to sharp. Besides, it wasn't like this was going to be the sword he was going to use forever.

After a few more minutes of working on it, Alex finally finished. He immediately took away the heat from the blade and looked at it with a surprised look on his face.

"That's quite good," he said when he saw the blade.

"It's alright," Godslayer said. "You can make better ones with more metals. It will be easier if you have more dao too, and a better facility to work under."

"I'm a hostage at the moment. Having this much freedom is already heaven-sent for me," Alex said as he looked at the blade in his hand.

The dark-gray metal with a glittering surface made it look like it was embedded with tiny gems all over it. It looked beautiful, but what made Alex happier about the sword was its shape.

It was the exact same sword that he had lost when killing his master's murderer. The steel sword had been something he had refined a lot and liked using, and now he had the same shape again.

"How's the sharpness?" Godslayer asked.

Alex tried to cut his own skin to try. "Eh, it's good, I guess. Could be better, but I can't complain," he said. "So, do you think I can make a cauldron now? Am I good enough?"

"Hmm... no," Godslayer said. "You need to learn a lot more before you can make something like a Cauldron with the tools you have."

"Since you seem to have enough metal, the first thing you are going to have to make next are a large hammer and anvil for easier tempering."

Chapter 980 Stars

Alex played around with the new sword he had created. The sword had no handle, so he created a makeshift handle with bones from the monster he had created.

It was an acceptable handle if just for show or practice, but if he intended to use the sword in a real battle, the handle would be destroyed in no time.

Alex tried expanding the sword to how large it could get after it had been compounded to become smaller. The sword enlarged to become twice its size, but then it enlarged even more, which surprised Alex.

He tried shrinking it back, and he could force it to become stronger way past its actual size.

It took Alex a while to realize that he could enlarge and shrink the sword as he wished because that was the property of the Starforged tungsten, and not of Metal compounded.

Metal Compounding game had a similar result as well, but it could only expand to the volume of the metal used in compounding. It could also not shrink any further either.

Alex felt excited after learning the information and proceeded to do what Godslayer had told him to do. He made a hammer and an anvil.

He made the anvil out of 30 tons of ore, which ended up as 12 tons of pure tungsten. He refined it and compounded it twice to create the anvil.

He also put Qi lines in the anvil which made it exceptionally resilient to force and heat when it was filled with Qi. That would end up being very helpful when he made artifacts on top of it.

Normally, the anvil was about a meter long, half a meter wide, and half a meter tall. But Alex could expand it to work with larger pieces of metal.

As an anvil, he couldn’t make it too small or it would lose its purpose, and he couldn’t make it too big as it would end up being too soft to handle a metal being tempered.

The way he had made it was perfect.

He made the hammer out of 10 tons of metal, compounded to become nearly 5 times smaller in general. Even then, it looked bulky and unnaturally strong.

He asked Godslayer for any other bit of advice he could give during this process, but Godslayer was quite useless when not making a sword.

In the end, Alex ended up with a hammer that had regular Qi lines in it, but nothing special.

It had taken him quite a while to make the two, so to not bring the mad immortal’s wrath, Alex immediately went back to making pills.

After a week or so, he even managed to call forth the Pill cloud again, which he failed for not trying too hard.

The old man frowned, but he said nothing. “What do you want this time?” he asked with an annoyed look.

Alex thought for a moment but he couldn’t think of anything he wanted right then. Then, he remembered something Godslayer had said about gathering more information, so he decided to ask.

“Can you tell me about the Snow Immortal sect?” Alex asked. “How it was formed, and how it became a super sect?”

Alex’s intent was to learn more about the old man to find out if there was something wrong with him that they could exploit. He didn’t know much about what could be exploited, but certainly, Godslayer did.

“Oh,” the old man was surprised to hear Alex’s interest in the fallen sect. “You are interested now that you know you will become my heir if you succeed? Very well, where do I start?”

Seeing that the old man was in fact going to speak up, Alex called Godslayer to listen with him.

“I cannot say for certain for everything that happened in the past. Even as old as I am, I was only born 11 thousand years ago, while the Snow Immortal sect was formed over 30 thousand years ago, so some of the records are missing.”

“It was but a small sect before that, but our founder, Xue Yu’er managed to reign supreme over the entirety of the northern Continent and became regarded as one of the strongest figures in a generation.”

“Even without her wanting to, the Snow Immortal sect gathered so much influence thanks to her that it became a defacto leader of the entire continent.”

The old man remembered the glory days of the sect when he was but an outer disciple. He remembered the excited child from back then, that wanted to bring glory to his family.

“Our founder was worried that she had overstepped her boundary in the continent, as she could not rule the continent for there was a ruler already. So, she quickly broke through to the Immortal realm and ascended away from this world.”

“However, she did so not before finding herself an heir that could look after the sect in her absence, who would then become the sect leader.”

“After a few thousand years, that sect leader ascended to the heavens as well. Before he did, he had left another talented individual as the sect leader.”

“One after another, they kept ascending,” the old man said. “All the way until I was the sect leader, and then…”

“I failed,” he said quietly. “Everyone before me ascended to become an immortal, and yet… I failed. And with me ended the Snow Immortal sect as well.”

The old man’s left eye teared up a little, while his right eye didn’t even get the least bit moist.

Alex saw that the old man was starting to quiet down and wanted him to keep speaking. “Did the ancestors leave behind information about pill cloud, senior?” he asked. “Did the people from thousands of years ago successfully make pills that could clear pill clouds?”

The old man’s thoughts snapped back to reality as he looked at Alex. “Pill clouds? No, we had no idea what Pill Clouds were until about 9 thousand years ago.”

“Oh,” Alex was surprised. “Did someone manage to make pill clouds on their own like me?”

“No, we–” the old man paused for a second to think of whether he should be speaking about this or not. However, after a moment, he didn’t see why he couldn’t say it.

“We told her we would never tell anyone that wasn’t a sect leader or ancestor of the sect, but since you are my heir and the next sect leader, I think it is fine to tell you,” the old man said.

Alex leaned forward in anticipation to hear what the old man had to think so much about.

The old man remembered back to the day and said, “we know so much because our founder told us… 9 thousand years ago.”

Alex nodded once before stopping as the two pieces of information didn’t match. “Wait… your founder told you 9 thousand years ago? Wasn’t she supposed to have ascended already?” he asked.

“She did, nearly 30 thousand years ago,” the old man said. “But… she came back 9 thousand years ago to see the world that she had left behind.”

“Woah!” Alex let escape a voice of shock without even meaning to. “She came back? Have the other sect leaders come back too?”

The old man shook his head. “No, she said she only came back because she got the opportunity after winning some sort of competition she had taken part in.”

“Her arrival was a matter of great secrecy that only a few people in the sect knew about. The things she said when she had come, I still remember my shock when I heard about it.”

“She told us that when she first ascended, she tried to find herself a sect to join. But apparently, she could only join weak sects, as the stronger sects didn’t even take in newly ascended individuals as outer sect disciples.”

“What?” Alex was surprised as well.

“That was my reaction too. She told us about the pill clouds, about how immortals can’t break through without going through lightning tribulation, and just how abundant immortals were in the place she had ascended to,” the old man said.

“However, perhaps the thing that surprised me most of all was one thing she had said,” the old man remembered. “She said… that the sky had no stars.”

“No stars?” Alex was confused. “She said the sky had no star?”

“Yes. She said that this world has no stars. What we see in the night aren’t stars at all,” he said. “Everything that glitters in the sky is actually just another floating piece of rock just like our own. Some are big, and some are small.”

“The big ones are big enough that they are visible in the night sky, which we mistake for stars,” the old man said while shaking his head. “You should have seen the faces of the ancestors who learned that for the first time. It was as if their whole world had shattered in front of them.”

Alex could imagine what they were feeling, as he was feeling the same thing right now.

“Every single mortal makes the same mistake,” Godslayer said from inside his head, confirming the old man’s words.

“What shocked me the most was to learn that of those floating pieces of rocks that we mistook as stars, some of them are actually filled with life, with people just like us,” he said.

“Well, maybe better than us, for it turns out that of the worlds with life, there are a few that are capable of inhabiting humans that can reach immortality and higher realms without leaving that world.”

“That is to say that the mysterious and fabled immortal worlds that we had all been dreaming about had been right above us in the sky all along.”

Chapter 981 Malleability

The mad immortal said a few more things before he left, but Alex couldn’t focus on those words at all. His mind was occupied with the new knowledge he had just received.

“There are so many worlds out there… just like our own?” he asked. Alex knew there were multiple ones, but he had never thought there would be as many as the stars in the sky.

“Yes,” Godslayer said to him. “There should be nearly 33 worlds with Immortals alone, and nearly 70 where the highest Spirit veins available are Saint rank or True ranks. Maybe even just common rank.”

” The demons and humans used to control half of the lands, but after the war, the demons had to give up the majority of their land in a truce for the humans to not destroy them. Now, the demons barely control a third of it,” Godslayer said.

’33 Immortal lands,’ Alex thought in shock again.

“Wait, so where do you go when you ascend?” Alex asked.

“Unless you have someone that is willing to take you to some special place, this realm will send you to wherever it can,” Godslayer said.

“Then you do not know where I could end up when I reach the Immortal realms right?” he asked.

“No,” Godslayer said. “Also, forget about these things for now. Your question revealed no result. Don’t ask him about his sect, ask him about himself. We need to find something so you don’t die and by correlation, I don’t die.”

Alex quickly nodded. “I will get to it,” he said.

After cultivating for a while, he got back to making the pills. He didn’t focus on making pills any more than he focused on practicing his techniques or learning how to make better swords.

A few more months passed by with barely anything changing. The only thing of importance that Alex could think about during these times was the fact that an entire year had passed since his arrival here.

And yet, he was nowhere close to any of his goals.

He had not made many swords or a cauldron. He had not improved his cultivation base. And he had not, purposefully, completed the pill yet.

Alex could see the old man was incredibly annoyed now whenever he failed to make a pill that survived the lightning. If he failed any more times, he couldn’t be sure that the old man wouldn’t just kill him right there in his anger.

Alex needed to be very careful.

He told the old man that he would feel more confident if he had his cauldron, so he requested a 3 months period where he would only focus on creating artifacts.

The old man thought for a bit and accepted. He even gave him some books on artifacts that Alex read.

The book had insights into various things that Alex didn’t know about regarding artifacts, but it wasn’t very useful when making something so simple as swords or cauldrons.

Alex had made a few more swords until now, spending about 100 tons of ores in between the swords, anvil, and hammer, but the one he was going to try now was perhaps his greatest endeavor to date.

He was going to refine nearly 40 tons of Ore into a sword.

To even begin the process was a chore. The amount of time it took for him to pulverize 40 tons of ore was not something that could be easily done in a single day.

Alex had to spend nearly 5 days, in between cultivating, to completely pulverize them. After mixing the broken ore in the water he was able to get rid of most of the dirt and soluble objects in the ore.

Then, Alex started smelting the remainder of the ore.

He had to do it bit by bit, so it took Alex almost 6 whole hours to completely refine the 16 tons of pure tungsten.

The sword he was going to make would have the same amount of metal as the anvil and hammer combined.

The tungsten had cooled down by the time he was done with smelting it all, so he had to send it all back to the forge, this time to simply heat it up.

Once the molten metal was out, Alex poured them on the enlarged Anvil and immediately started compounding it even before tempering it.

He wasn’t doing it for no reason. Godslayer had told him to do so.

Tempering and Compounding were interchangeable in terms of when in the process they could be performed. However, tempering something that was compounded was nearly as hard as the number of times it was compounded.

Alex knew this, but he had no choice. With more metal than the anvil could hold, he had to compound it all for the metal to even be manageable.

Alex immediately started hitting the metal with his new hammer and quickly compounded it without regard to its size at the moment. He only wanted to make it manageable.

Once the metal was compounded 4 times, Alex stopped and began hitting it in a rhythmic pattern to temper it.

Compounding it 4 times meant that the sword would now be 4 times as hard to temper. However, Alex didn’t lose any hope or keep any doubts in himself.

He did what he had sought to do and after what felt like a very long period of time, he successfully tempered the metal.

Godslayer was in his ear the whole time, aiding him through his task, telling him what to do.

“Compound the sword now,” he said. Alex had compounded it 4 times already, but the remaining metal was still nearly 4 times as big as what a normal sword would look like.

So, he still needed to compound it. He still needed to make it smaller and thinner.

Alex struck the hot metal as hard as he could to continue pounding the metal in itself. He compounded the metal without stopping, but even as he tried, the compounding got harder and harder, until he couldn’t compound it anymore.

The sword was still very large, nearly 2 and half times as large as he would want it to be, so he needed to compound it more.

But he couldn’t anymore, and that was a problem.

“Dammit,” he thought to himself. “I can’t do it anymore.”

“Keep compounding,” Godslayer said.

“I can’t, I don’t have enough strength,” Alex said.

“Then find some,” Godslayer said.

Alex paused for a moment and immediately a line of blood poured out of his palm, onto the hammer and he started using the new strength to compound it.

With Saint Core 1st realm level of strength, his blood gave him a boost in power that nothing else could at the moment.

As soon as he used the blood manipulation to add strength to his hammer strikes, the compounding became easier and the 2 and a half times larger metal shrunk to about 2 times.

Then, the toughness of the metal showed once again. This time, he couldn’t compound it even when he used his blood as powerfully as he could.

“Dammit,” Alex thought. “I chewed more than I could swallow. I shouldn’t have started with 40 tons of ore.”

He complained, but he still tried. The 2 times as large blade of metal shrunk just a little more, but not much after that.

Alex tried and tried and tried, but he couldn’t do it anymore. If anything, he was going to have to either make swords from this one pile of metal or use a heavy sword himself.

“Godslayer, what do I do?” Alex asked desperately.

“I can’t help you in this matter. You are too weak,” he said.

Alex frowned, but he couldn’t fault the remark. He truly was too weak to compound it any further.

‘Maybe I should stop,’ he said and looked at the rectangular piece of metal. ‘If only I could make them thinner.’New n0vel chapters are published on

“Thinner…” Alex spoke softly as his mind remembered something from nearly 10 years ago.

It had been during the time he worked as the Royal family’s alchemist in the Radiant City when he was training with Shen Jing.

Shen Jing had shown him something interesting at that time. He had taken his metal sword and thinned it without the sword losing its strength.

Alex was a little surprised when he remembered it. ‘He was compounding it?’ he thought.

He was using the property of metal to be easily deformed without breaking itself into bits. He was using the property of the metal that allowed it to be made into a sword in the first place.

Alex remembered the property, and now that he had made quite a few swords and was working with metal for quite a while, he understood it clearly too.

The metal cooled in front of him, but Alex couldn’t find the strength to care.

“Kid? Kid!” Godslayer called for him after seeing Alex move away from the anvil and sit down. He was still going to call when he noticed that Alex had lost himself in the mysteries.

Even the mad immortal noticed when the sky moved and the worldly laws descended onto the separated space he had managed to create with the help of formation flags left behind for him indirectly by the Snow Immortal sect’s founder.

The laws fell and settled onto Alex as he learned an entirely new dao that he had not expected to learn any time soon.

He had learned the Dao of Malleability.

Alex opened his eyes and contemplated the new understanding he had just gained. After a few minutes, he stood back up and walked over to the anvil.

With this newly learned Dao, he was sure to be able to compound the remaining metal to the desired size, which he would then turn into a sword.

Chapter 982 Midnight

Dao of Malleability consisted of a few minor Daos, all of which Alex had gained insights by directly learning the Dao of Malleability.

Alex could also see that the Dao of Malleability and the Dao of Metal were somewhat connected, so the two Daos were definitely part of a greater metal dao.

Alex returned to the solid blob of metallic staff and heated it up until it was melted and very malleable.

He struck the metal a few more times before stopping. Hitting truly wasn't going to work anymore and he needed to do something else.

He needed to use his newly learned dao.

Alex dropped his hammer and instantly used his intent to compress the metal in front of him. The world followed his command to do so and even then Alex felt the Qi being ripped out of hi to compress the metal.

It took almost everything he had to make the metal thinner, and now, it was thinner than what a normal sword would look like by nearly 20%.

"I can't believe you learned a dao just like that," Godslayer said. "A rather important one for metalwork too."

"It happens," Alex said. "I should finish making the sword now."

The only thing that was now left was to make the shape of the sword and add some Qi lines. As for its sharpness, he would have to work with what he had without the Sharpness Dao.

The volume of the metal was smaller than what he would've hoped for, so he decided to make a thinner sword. He made the length of the blade up to about 80 centimeters, which including the hilt and handle would become over a meter easily.

The width was where he had to make a concession and thus it came to be about 3 centimeters wide at best. As for its thickness, it was already at the lowest amount possible.

Then, he sent his Qi to put in Qi lines throughout the artifact. As he did, he heard Godslayer saying something.

"3 Qi lines to the left, 2 in the middle, and 3 to the right. Make 8 of them at the base of the sword that goes upwards."

Alex was a little surprised to hear him speak in this part of the process, but he trusted his judgment when it came to swords, so he followed.

"The first of the left 3 curves to the right after 5 centimeters. The 2nd one curves to the right a centimeter after that. The last one makes a small loop right at the location where the second one would touch it before going straight on."

Godslayer started telling him one by one what to do, and Alex followed every instruction to the best he could.

He didn't even take away his focus to be surprised that Godslayer was giving him instructions on Qi lines. He simply did as told as the Qi lines slowly moved to the top, making countless bends and loops along the way.

By the end, Alex couldn't even make any sense of which Qi line was where, but he knew he had followed it perfectly because Godslayer said nothing else.

When Alex was done making the Qi lines, he was done making the sword as well. He was quickly going to put the sword into the water to cool it rapidly when Godslayer said something.

"Cool it with your blood before using water."

"What?" Alex was surprised.

"Just do it," Godslayer said.

Alex quickly brought out the blood in his body and poured it onto the hot metal that lay on the anvil.

When the blood touched the metal, it sizzled and boiled with extreme heat. However, even with that, Alex could sense something amazing.

The sword was taking in his blood and actually getting stronger. "Wh-what's happening?" he asked. As he asked, Alex felt a slight pain in his mind and heart, as if something had been torn away from him.

"You just blood refined the sword," Godslayer said.

"Oh, it thought that part came afterward when I was done with using my Qi to refine it and then use my blood to make it recognize me as its master," Alex said. "Also, wasn't I supposed to use my Blood Essence?"

"You don't have to with the amount of blood you used," Godslayer said. "Besides, blood refinement is not the same as the normal refinement."

"How is it different?" Alex asked.

"The sword now belongs to you, and you alone. Unless you are dead or your bloodline ceases to exist, the sword will forever only follow your orders," Godslayer said.

"Wait, so if I lost the sword, others won't be able to refine it?" he asked.

"No, not unless you're dead," Godslayer.

"I see," Alex nodded as he thought to himself. "That's... not bad, but you seem to have another reason for this too. What is it?"

"The second and perhaps most important reason for Blood Refinement is that the weapon is very capable of growing a spirit in it, far better than a weapon that is made normally," Godslayer said. "Which is good because if there is a spirit born in a weapon, then it means your weapon can grow along with you."

"Then... you will never have to change to another weapon," Godslayer said.

Alex was stunned to hear that the new sword he had made could now grow a spirit in it. "Wait, so why didn't I do that with the other swords? I could've made so many swords with spirits in them."

"You can't," Godslayer said. "A Blood Refinement requires the refiner to give away part of his Qi, Mind, and Body during the refinement process. You gave it Qi while making Qi lines, the gave it your body in the form of your blood, and you gave it your mind, in the form of part of your soul and spirit that was stripped away from you."

"You can afford to give away your Qi and Blood, but even you do not have a robust Soul or Spirit that won't be hurt from excessive giving away," Godslayer said.

"I see," Alex said. "So that was the pain I felt. It was my spirit being stripped away." Alex released his spiritual sense and realized that it was slightly weaker than it should have been. He had permanently lost that portion of his spirit.

"So one really cannot perform this refinement over and over without fearing of damaging their spirit, huh?" Alex asked.

"That is one of the reasons why Blood Refinement is becoming rarer and rarer, and is almost all gone in the mortal realms."

"Many can only afford to give away Qi and maybe a bit of blood, which is why they perform normal refinement. They cannot afford to give parts of their soul and spirit away. As such, you won't find such treasures here, and only in the higher realms."

"The other reason is that one needs to be present at the creation of the artifact to impart Qi, Blood, and Spirit. The artificer creator cannot pour his own Qi in this process and has to rely on the one he is making the artifact for."

"Since most don't have knowledge of how artifacts should be created or how Qi lines should be made, they end up failing and losing part of their soul. That is a big mishap in a person's cultivation journey, so many don't want to take the risk," Godslayer said.

"You're right," Alex thought. "Qi lines are hard to even for me after all these times."

As he said that, Alex looked at the bloody sword. "Right, what is up with the Qi lines you made me make?" he asked. "You've never done that."

Godslayer's voice suddenly turned menacing as he said softly, "test it."

Alex was a little creeped out, but since this was his sword, he didn't see any reason to be afraid.

The sword had no handle and was bloody, so Alex gave it a quick rinse, before adding a makeshift handle for now.

Then, he poured his Qi into it. Something happened, but Alex wasn't able to tell what. It was as if a door had been half opened, but he still couldn't go through it.

"This Qi line doesn't work," Alex said with a bit of anger in his voice. If he had spent part of his soul on something that didn't work, he was going to make sure Godslayer was thoroughly punished.

"Pour in Yin Qi," Godslayer said with the same menacing voice.

"Okay," Alex said and poured in Yin Qi. As soon as he did, he saw what was happening. The Yin Qi he had sent in suddenly changed its attribute to death and another something, which Alex could guess was darkness.

The dark gray sword with glittering specks of light suddenly turned pitch black while the specks of light still remained like the stars in the night sky.

"What is this?" Alex asked with a confused expression.

"Send me in!" Godslayer said.

"What?" Alex asked.

"Send me into the sword!"

Alex contemplated for a bit but quickly realized that Godslayer was too weak to take away control from him. So, he did as Godslayer told him to and used his intent to force Godslayer into the sword.

Godslayer finally slipped out of Alex and into something that fit him the best.

"Haha! I'm finally back into a sword, and it is just like my own previous body," he said excitedly.

Alex quickly tested his control and sighed in relief that Godslayer hadn't done anything bad.

"This is now your sword," Godslayer said to him. "You should give it a name."

"A name?" Alex thought as he looked at the pitch black sword with specks of light glittering in it.

He thought of a name that he thought described it best..

"Midnight."

Chapter 983: Memory

"That's arguable," Alex said softly.

"Try me. See how strong the sword is," Godslayer asked.

"Sure," Alex said and poured his Qi into the sword. The turned black once again, matching its name.

Then, Alex tried swinging it around. "Wow, I actually think it is heavy," he said. "It's been a while since I thought something was heavy."

"Quit looking at the weight and try out the skill in the sword," Godslayer said.

"Oh, there's a skill?" Alex was surprised. He poured in more Yin Qi and sent out a slash toward the wall in the distance.

Suddenly, a black slash was released from the sword, stronger than what Alex's cultivation base could release.

"Wow, that feels strong," Alex said. "That isn't your skill, but the sword's skill right?"

"Yes, it is not my skill. However, I can empower the sword with what death and darkness aura I gather," Godslayer said. "However, I don't know how long I can keep that up."

"Hm? What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"Goddammit, your newly formed spirit is already trying to fight back. It recognizes me as a foreign threat," Godslayer said.

Alex was surprised, and maybe even a little happy when he heard that. "Are you saying that my little sword spirit is so strong that he is already threatening you?" he asked.

"What? Of course not. It's incredibly weak," Godslayer said. "It is so weak that if I do anything than just ignore it, it might just die."

"Oh," Alex's smile went away when he heard that. "I guess I should be happy at the fact that the sword already has a spirit."

"Yes," Godslayer said. "It's weird how quickly it formed too. But I suppose there is something special about your body and soul. You were able to fight off my temptation when you were barely a True realm cultivator."

"I… suppose," Alex said as he fell into thought too. He never really thought about how strong his soul was, only ever his body and mind.

'I am in the saint realm, so soon I will have to worry about my soul too,' he thought. 'Although, Saint Soul realm is still quite far away for me, so I should be fine.'

Alex tested the sword for a while, enlarging it to see how big it would get, and compressing it to see if he could make it smaller.

He could use the sword normally without using Yin Qi, but when he did use Yin Qi, it turned black, and only then he could use the sword's skills.

"It's a nice sword if I do say so myself," Alex said. "Quite comfortable at the hand too."

Godslayer had already gone back to Alex's mind and spoke from in there. "You will need to make a better handle. Try making one with the metal too."

"I should," Alex said. "But right now, I should focus on something else."

Alex had spent a few too many weeks making various swords to learn, and now he was finally going to make his cauldron.

For the cauldron, he needed 30 tons of Ice Iron, 10 tons of Pale Onyx, 20 Tons of Violet Obsidian, and 100 tons of Starforged Tungsten.

The alloy made from these 4 components wasn't as strong or durable as just Starforged Tungsten by itself, but Alex was using the component for some other reason.

This was the composition that was used to make the forge back in the Snowsuit city that could easily melt Starforged Tungsten. So, on top of being relatively strong, it was resilient against incredible amounts of heat, which was exactly what Alex needed at the moment.

Ice Iron, Pale Onyx, and Violet Obsidian were something Alex had asked the mad immortal to gather. As for the 100 tons of Tungsten, Alex spent the next few days smelting and refining it.

In about 2 weeks, he was finally ready with all the ingredients to finally make the cauldron.

Alex realized that he had too much metal to work at once, so he needed to do it in part. He needed to do it all in 10 parts where each part would have 16 tons altogether.

That way, everything could fit in the forge where Alex could merge the 4 different metals in an alloy.

Making an alloy required precise amounts of the parts, and then Alex had to mix them together as smoothly as he could.

Most of it was fine thanks to Alex's use of Daos, but he couldn't help but find it annoying at how much mental strength it required for the task.

He hadn't noticed it back when he made Midnight, but now the weight of the ingredients was 20 times that of Midnight, so Alex was definitely feeling the struggle.

"If I was making these all together, I would have definitely not been able to make it at once," he thought.

One by one, Alex made 10 different blocks of the tungsten alloy which he then compounded until it was 16th times as small as the original one.

With 16 times less volume, the alloy finally became usable as a whole.

So, Alex finally mixed all 160 tons of the alloy together on top of the anvil and started tempering it.

The rhythmic strikes of the hammer rang in the room as Alex continuously struck the metal alloy. He struck it so much that he fell into a zone where all he heard was the rhythm that he followed while hitting the alloy.

Alex didn't realize how much time had passed before he heard a clear ringing sound from the metal, letting him know that it had been properly tempered.

Alex stopped and walked away from the glowing hot metal and took a deep breath as he was done with the hard part of the task.

Now, it was time to design a cauldron.

Alex had seen many different cauldrons and knew many shapes, but the one he cared about was still the one his master had given him.

He wasn't an artistic person anyway, so the best he could do was copy what the others had done.

Alex closed his eyes and remembered the broken cauldron. He had used it so many times that he knew it's every nook and corner.

He knew its rough inside, its golden edges, and its jade handles. He knew its sharp ridges, its swirly designs, and its three curved legs at the bottom.

Alex's hands moved as the Doa of heat and Dao of Metal worked at once. The heat made the metal soft enough to mold, and the metal dao did the molding.

Alex created a sphere out of the molten alloy on the anvil. The sphere was hollow and that would be the main body of the cauldron.

He cut off the top of the cauldron, which would become its lid. He made the top a little wider and curved.

He created 3 legs at the bottom for the cauldron to stand on. He made the ridges, the edges, the handles. He added the designs and whatever else he could remember.

As the cauldrons slowly started taking shape and were all but done, Alex finally put in the Qi lines.

The Qi lines wouldn't do anything but make it easier for the Qi to pass through to the ingredients on the inside.

As he put in the Qi lines, Alex immediately pulled out a bit of blood as well and poured it onto the cauldron as well.

As he did, he felt another bit of his spirit and soul get taken away by the cauldron.

"Wait, are you blood refining this too?" Godslayer asked with a hint of shock in his voice. "Your soul might get hurt if you do too much."

"It's fine," Alex said. "I feel fine."

"Well… if you feel fine, then maybe it is fine. But still, don't do that again. You will seriously get hurt. I do not know what will happen to me if your soul gets hurt," Godslayer said.

"This is the last one, I promise," Alex said.

The cauldron got stronger than it was before and more durable in every way. Being blood-refined made it far better than how it would be without being refined.

Alex wondered if there was a new spirit in this newly formed cauldron too.

The hot cauldron was quickly cooled using water and only then could Alex see the final form of the cauldron he had just created.

"Wow… it looks so weird without the gold and green," he thought to himself. The cauldron was the spitting image of the cauldron that was given to him by his master, without the colors.

Instead of gold and green, the cauldron was instead gray and sparkling.

Alex put on the lid and slowly lifted it with his Qi. "Oh thank god," he thought. After being refined, the cauldron felt incredibly lighter than it actually was.

He had been worried that it would be something that couldn't be easily moved, but it turned out to be plenty portable to his Qi.

"That's a relief," he thought.

He expanded the cauldron to test it out. The cauldron which was already one of the bigger cauldrons Alex had seen, became 16 times as large when expanded.

The cauldron filled the room easily with its massively hollow size, which Alex had to quickly shrink down.

"This is incredible," he thought. "Now I must give you a name."

Alex thought for a bit and gave it a name he thought fit it best.

"Memory".

Chapter 984: Surviving a Lightning Strike

Alex couldn't help but get melancholic. "My master," he said. "She taught me alchemy and treated me like her own son. If not for her, I would've been a dumb little kid who went by his days knowing nothing about cultivation. Maybe I would've even died by now."

"Did she die?" Godslayer asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "An untimely death. She died trying to protect me from someone that wanted my body to turn me into a clone."

"I see," Godslayer said. "Then it's a good name."

Alex nodded. He looked at the gray color and shook his head. "I will need to paint it to make it look better."

"What colors do you plan on using?" Godslayer asked.

"Green and Yellow," Alex said.

"Like your previous cauldron?" he asked.

"Oh... I didn't realize I was going for the same color," Alex said. "I actually intended to use Green and Yellow because they are the colors of the robes of the Hong Wu sect and the Tiger sect, the only two sects that I will ever consider myself a disciple of."

"Although I will have to do that later. I don't have any colors for now," Alex said. "Besides, I need to focus on making pills that succeed in their tribulation soon. If not, the madman might just kill me."

Alex kept everything away and took some time to rest. After he was done resting, he began preparation.

He had to pass the tribulation, yes, but before that, he needed to do something else. He needed to break through.

Alex had spent close to 15 months in this place, and while it was too quick for him to breakthrough in his heart, he needed a change in himself so that the old man wasn't suspicious when he did manage to finally make a pill that he could protect from the lightning.

After a day of preparation, he finally started his breakthrough and was done with it in just a few hours.

"That was quite easy," he thought to himself. While he hadn't strained himself and his cultivation through fighting, he had done so with alchemy and blacksmithing. The amount of effort it took to make a single sword with Starforged Tungsten in it was akin to fighting a Saint Foundation realm beast for a long time.

Alex rested for a few more hours and began making the pill once more. This time, he was prepared to protect the pill from the lightning.

He put Memory on the stove and started heating it. With how high a boiling point the Starforged Tungsten had, Alex, could pour all the heat into it without worrying.

However, it did become worrisome when he realized that he truly needed a lot of heat. "Geez, 160 Tons of metal can't really be heated that easily can it?" he thought.

Fortunately, Alex didn't have to heat up the cauldron all alone. With a wave of his hand, he could use his Dao to make the world heat it up for him.

Once the cauldron was sufficiently heated up, Alex teleported in the first ingredient and started refining it.

Since this was the first time he was making said pill, he was very afraid of what he might do wrong. However, to his surprise, everything went relatively well.

He wasn't used to the rate of change of heat on a 160-ton weighing cauldron, so he needed a little more time to completely change the temperature than previous times.

Still, it did not cause any problem at all, and Alex was successful in making two pills, out of which one reached 100%.

Then, the cloud started forming over his head again.

The old man had been away, resting since doing anything hurt his wounds. He hadn't felt this much relief in over a year, and finally, when the pain was going down, he felt the change in energy close by.

The last time this had happened, the old man had realized that Alex had learned a dao. However, this time he sensed it was different.

'Oh, it's the pill cloud,' he thought. For something that was supposed to save his life, he wasn't very enthusiastic at all.

After all, all the enthusiasm he had before had gone down the drain ever since he realized that Alex was simply too weak to be able to help him.

'He's just wasting ingredients at this point,' the old man thought. Still, there was that hint of hope, that tiny little thing that told him deep down that there was a chance.

And as such, he could not help but want to go see what happened. His mind told him to ignore what was happening and rest, but his heart told him to go because... who knew what would happen.

"Dammit!" the old man cursed and stood up. As soon as he did, anger filled his heart as the pain flared over the right side of his body. His burned meridians stung like ten thousand bolts of lightning striking at once.

His flesh burned like when he had been charred by a lightning bolt. His mind involuntarily remembered the 6th lightning bolt that fell from the sky.

He had managed to survive the first 5, but it was the 6th one that had put this wound on him.

"Ugh!" he quickly shook away any of the memories from his past. He did not want to recall the failure that cost him not just his body, but also the lives of many of his sect's elders and the sect's longevity.

He did not want to remember the lightning bolt that signaled the downfall of his sect.

The old man painfully spread his spiritual sense out of himself. The pain he had forgotten for the past 3 months was once more normal for him just as it had become for the past 8 thousand years.

The old man saw Alex prepare his Qi to block the lightning bolt and was surprised to see the new strength of his cultivation base.

"Oh, he broke through?" the old man thought. With this single change, the hope in his heart grew even more and without stopping for a single second, he moved.

Space seemed to contract on itself to the point where the old man and the door to Alex's room were merely a meter apart.

The old man then took a single step and arrived next to the door at which point the space expanded back to its original size.

To a normal eye, it would seem as if the old man had teleported, but all he had done was take a single step that would've been several steps instead.

The moment he arrived at the door, the lightning fell into the room and struck the pill that Alex was making.

The sound of the lightning bolt sent a resounding boom reverberating through the room, which only lost its loudness a few seconds later.

The old man frowned when he heard that and looked back inside. When he saw the intact cauldron, his eyes narrowed.

When he saw the intact pill, his eyes went wide.

Alex was preparing to cover the pill once again when the door burst open.

"Pull it out!" the old man said.

Alex jumped a little at the suddenness of the old man's arrival.

"Sorry?" he asked.

"Pull out the pill. Don't protect it," the old man said.

Alex hesitated for a split second before pulling the pills out of the cauldron. As soon as he did, the pill cloud in the sky dissipated as if the tribulation had ended.

Alex couldn't help but be internally thankful for the old man's arrival. He had no idea what he was supposed to do at this point and was going to protect the pill again.

However, this time around, he would have to use his true cultivation base strength to possibly protect the pill, and even then he wasn't certain if he could or not. He had yet to see the strength of the second lightning after all.

"Show me!" the old man came up to Alex in a hurry.

Alex nodded and slowly opened up his fingers to reveal the pills he had made.

He had made two pills, one of which was a plain pill that had reached 98% harmony. Normally, it would reach 99% or even 100%, but he had made a few mistakes which ended up lowering it by 2%.

However, no one cared about the pill. It was the second pill that both Alex and the old man cared about.

This pill was in every way the same as the other pill. The color, the texture, the smell, and the size, everything was the same as the one from the other pill.

However, there was one distinct feature in it that separated it from the normal pill.

Along one of the sides of the pill, there was a lightning scar on the pill, from surviving the lightning bolt from the pill cloud.

The lightning scar was bluish-black. It started on one side with a thick base that got thinner and thinner the more it went along, branching into various routes as if a lightning bolt in the sky.

There was enough space for 8 more such scars on the pill, which would be filled each time the pill survived one of the lightning bolts from the pill cloud, at which point the pill would have successfully survived the pill cloud.

Alex looked at the scar, and since the pill would always have 100% harmony, a new word came to his mind to classify the type of pill he had made.

Before he could say it out loud, the old man spoke the words.

"Pill Vein."

Chapter 985 Pill Vein

"Pill vein..." Alex repeated the old man in awe.

"Yes, pill vein. That is what you call this lightning scar on the pill. If I remember correctly, the lightning is supposed to have improved the pill at some level. Each lightning strikes contains worldly energy that improves the pill until it reaches the next level," the old man said.

"What about after all 9 lightning strikes fall and the pill strill survives?" Alex asked.

The old man simply shrugged. "I don't know. Founder never told me anything," he said.

The pill in Alex's hand flew over to the old man who looked at it for a while and took a deep breath.

Without waiting, he put the pill in his mouth and swallowed.

Both he and Alex waited for the pill to take effect. However, even after waiting for an entire minute, nothing happened.

"It's useless!" the old man's face suddenly turned dark as the hopes and expectations he had gathered regarding the pill shattered into a million different pieces.

"It didn't work?" Alex asked. "But it had a pill vein."

"I need pills with more pill veins," he said begrudingly. He had truly wanted this to work, but the single pill was enough to tell him that a single veined pill was simply too weak to heal him..

"But that will..." he really didn't want to know how long it would take him if he was to keep faking his strength.

"What was that strength that you showed just now? 5th Saint Condensation realm?" the old man asked.

Alex frowned internally. 'I shouldn't have made the strength so obvious,' he thought. But then he couldn't save the pill, which was what he wanted.

"I ate a pill before this that improved my Qi strength by 2 realms," Alex said. "That was how I produced such a result."

"Yeah, I guessed so," the old man said. "It had to be some forbidden skill or pill with delayed consequences. Will you be alright?"

"I can handle whatever comes my way," Alex said.

"Good," the old man said. "You will no longer be making any healing pill for the next 8 years."

"Huh?" Alex looked at the old man.

"You are only wasting the ingredients by making pills that won't heal me. Instead, I want you to save the ingredients for after you are done reaching a cultivation base that can make better use of it," the old man said.

"You mean... I have to sit around, doing nothing but cultivating for the next 8 years?" Alex asked with dumbfounded shock on his face.

"Yes," the old man said. "I'm going into closed cultivation. Be on your best behavior for the next 8 years."

The old man left the room, leaving Alex all alone.

8 years. He was supposed to spend 8 years, trapped in a room. What the hell was he supposed to do for the next 8 years?

'And he's going into closed cultivation. I can't even ask him to bring me some things,' he thought. 'God dammit!'

He wanted to voice his thoughts out loud, but he couldn't trust the sanity of a madman to save him from his insane side.

All he could do was sit there until his shock faded and the reality of the situation hit him like a giant rock.

"What in the actual hell am I really supposed to do?" Alex shouted out in anger. He didn't even care if the old man heard him, but from the looks of it, he hadn't.

"I can't even leave this god forsaken place without healing the old man because of our oath," he thought with the rage still building up in his voice.

Alex raged around a bit, but in the end, he was forced to accept the reality. He was stuck in this place for the next 8 years and there was no way out.

He was now a prisoner of the old man.

"Dammit!" he said softly and started cultivating to calm himself.

A day later, he finished cultivating. After he stopped, he almost went back to making the pills, but he stopped.

'I can't make healing pills for the next 8 years,' he thought. He put away the cauldron as there was nothing else to do.

Despair filled Alex for the first few days, but after a while, he got used to the despair. With how strong the formation walls were, it was certain he wouldn't be leaving without making a commotion.

With how strong the old man was, it was certain he wouldn't be leaving at all.

Alex sighed and decided to try on things he had been ignoring for a while now. Since he was going to be staying here for a while and since the old man had gone to closed cultivation, he no longer saw a need to keep Pearl and Whisker from coming out.

Even without keeping them hostage, he was already forced to make a healing pill for them anyway.

He simply hoped that the old man did not see the peculiarities of his two beasts and decide to take them for himself.

Pearl hadn't cultivated in a long time and still was in the Saint Condensation 1st realm. However, for the past year and more, Alex had been cultivating his Undying Physique, which had helped Whisker reach a cultivation base of True Disciple 7th realm.

With how slow his cultivation base was, it was certain he would need awhile to show any sort of improvement.

Pearl looked around in confusion, wondering where he was.

"I haven't come out in a long while," Pearl said.

"Sorry, we've been in a rather unfortunate situation. I've been kidnapped, so I couldn't bring you out earlier," Alex said.

"Kidnapped? By who?" Pearl asked.

"A very strong man who wants me to make pills for him," Alex replied. He explained the situation briefly before stopping the coversation altogether. He didn't want the madman to hear him speak about him.

Pearl had nothing to do once he was out, so he quickly started cultivating. Alex was quite thankful for that as Pearl cultivating was the only way for him to body cultivate at this point.

He did what he could to hide the cuts in his body, but they would show no matter what as his body and Pearl's cultivation base were practically the same.

While Pearl cultivated on his own, Alex decided to give Whisker the Winter Moon cultivation technique which he could learn during the times when he wasn't practicing the Undying physique.

While the Winter Moon cultivation technique wasn't the best Yin cultivation technique out there, it was all Alex had and could only give that to him.

After that, all they could do was sit around and cultivate.

After a few days, Alex remembered that he needed to sharpen Midnight, so he asked Pearl to help him in doing so.

With his dao of Sharpness, Pearl was able to make it quite sharp. Still, to make it even sharper, he would need to have a far stronger cultivation base than the one he had at the moment.

Alex put back the sword and went on to cultivate again. He didn't know how he was going to spend the next 8 years exactly, but he was certain that as long as the three of them were together, time would go by in a flash.

Chapter 986 A Few Things to Try

Alex let Pearl do whatever he wanted. Pearl didn't really have anything to do in a confined room, so he cultivated all day long.

Whisker, however, was in his element. Alex gave him a cauldron and some ingredients and had him make pills.

He watched over his techniques and skills in making pills and was pleasantly happy when he saw the Whisker was very good now at making pills. He was still only making pills without around 40% harmony, but that was only because Alex was giving him the bad recipes, instead of the fixed ones.

He wanted Whisker to start from the bottom like everyone else would, and struggle the same way a normal alchemist would, something he never got to experience.

He didn't know if helping someone this early on with an easy way out with ingredients and recipes was even a good idea or not.

If it turned out that it only made Whisker more demotivated towards Alchemy, then he would certainly give better ingredients and recipes.

For now, Whisker was trying his hardest, so Alex didn't see the necessity to help him immediately.

While his two beasts were busy doing that, Alex went on to training on his own. He had a few things he had been wanting to try for quite some while now.

One of the things was that he wanted to try reaching the highest grade of pill veins, the 9 Pill veins with True rank ingredients.

However, if he called on the 9 lightning bolts while the old man was in closed cultivation and he forced him to leave only to find out that he was making True rank pills, he would certainly be madder than he already was.

He didn't want to lose his life just yet.

Other than that, Alex had something else he had been wanting to do for a very long time, and only now was he starting to find the motivation to.

And with 8 years to spare, Alex thought he had enough time to spare for it.

He wanted to make pills with everything being the same, but with one ingredient changed to something similar.

For example, he would follow the recipe of the Body Regeneration pill, but because Blood Spirit Lily was hard to acquire, he would replace it with something else that was neutral but had a blood aura in it.

Alex wanted to try similar stuff just in case he ever had to make pills where he had all ingredients but one. In those cases, he would know whether changing a single ingredient was a good idea or not.

Even if it was a good idea, and it did work, he would still have to make a pill that was somewhat as capable as the pill with the actual recipe.

If venturing down that route was a dead end, then he wanted to know about it now, rather than realize it when he was desperate. He could only imagine how unpleasant that feeling would be.

So, Alex started testing with the Body Regeneration pill and as for the ingredient that was to be exchanged in place of Blood Spirit Ginseng, he used an ingredient with its neutral energy structure as close to the Blood Spirit Ginseng as possible and then let it stay overnight in his blood.

Alex did this for a few months and came to a few conclusions.

The most important conclusion was that he did not understand how it worked. He could make it work very often, but almost always, he had no way of telling prior to making the pill whether the new pill would be better, worse, or the same.

It was simply impossible to guess it from the start. Or at least, it wasn't possible for the current Alex who didn't have much experience.

Still, after months of testing, he could now quite confidently say which ingredient would work, and which wouldn't.

He was not surprised when he found out that the clue was hidden in the ingredients themselves. Each ingredient had its unique energy composition.

All one had to do was look for a pill with a composition that was close enough to the original ingredient. As long as that was possible, he could swap the ingredients on any pill recipe without any worry of failure.

After a few months of testing this, Alex moved on to the other things he wanted to try.

He tried making new pills using the ingredients he had. The last time he had done it was when this world was still a game in the eyes of his clone that controlled him most of the time.

The memories were his, and thus he now remembered making the pills on nothing but simply at the fact that he couldn't let the energies go out of control.

He didn't know what energy the ingredients were before he began. Hell, he didn't even know what the ingredients did. He simply went along based on his tiny understanding of Alchemy at the time and couldn't help but be surprised at the fact that he came across 3 usable pills.

This time, it was a little easier than before as he didn't have to worry about making things he did not know about.

With the many knowledge about the ingredients he had, even if he didn't know what they would do together, he would have a general idea of whether it would be bad or not.

Depending on which would become the main ingredients, and which would become the side ingredients, he could cook up a pill that did a specific little thing that would be a combination or amplification of what the ingredients would do.

He would be happy if it was the latter one, as he wouldn't be very sure what the result of various ingredients combined would bring.

He could never know when two healing ingredients mixed together would suddenly become poison.

'I definitely need more information about these ingredients,' he thought. Luckily, he had such information in his head now and was only waiting to learn it before he could remember it easily too.

A few months more passed and before Alex knew it, he had been here for 2 years. In that time, he had made exactly 3 important pills.

One of those pills was a healing pill that he had made from entirely new ingredients that he had never interacted with but had found in the Beast realm.

Of the other two pills, one was supposed to be a poisonous pill, meant to kill saints that ate it. Alex couldn't tell how potent it was however as his body would destroy the poison the moment he digested it.

The last pill was one that numbed your mind, making you more susceptible to mental influence.

Alex had wondered if there was even merit to this pill with a positive aspect to it. The only thing he could think of was giving the pill to some enemy and having them eat it so you could control their mind.

However, when he thought about it, he realized that it could be used positively as well. One could eat the pill before trying to learn a dao on their own to get an effect that wasn't far off from what the Soul Elucidating tulips gave a person.

"I suppose it depends on how the pill is made," he thought in the end before proceeding with making the pill.

After being done with switching ingredients in recipes to straight up creating new recipes, Alex started feeling a lack of motivation to work on anything else.

In his free time, the reality of his situation would come upon him and he couldn't help but think about how worried his aunt might be. His mother wasn't in a different scenario either.

She had lost her son for over 7 years now. He wondered if she thought he was dead. He wouldn't be surprised if she did, but he didn't believe so.

His mother wasn't so feeble-minded to think her son wouldn't return to her soon enough.

He wanted to return back to them right now, but he was being kept hostage by the madman. That only made him angrier at the moment.

If only he wasn't cursed, he could have tried his all to leave, but he couldn't even do that.

"I definitely need to find some way to come out of this situation for sure."

Chapter 987 8 Years

Alex was surprised at how quickly the years passed. But then, he had also achieved many things in the past 8 years.

His cultivation base had improved 5 more times, reaching Saint Condensation 8th realm. Pearl's had improved to Saint Condensation 4th realm, and Whisker's had improved to True Lord 3rd realm.

Alex was happy with the progress he had made, but he was also sad that he had to make such progress by simply staying in a room, locked for a very long time.

This sort of closed cultivation was something he would only ever expect from people that were at the end of their lives or someone who was trying very hard to reach the next cultivation realm despite their talents.

Fortunately, he hadn't wasted the years and had actually progressed in various other places too.

He had made many different new pills, some he knew were useful, some were useless at first thought, but could be useful if it was ever needed.

He practiced quite a lot regarding making pills with missing ingredients, while also learning to make a certain type of pill from scratch.

He was now somewhat confident that if someone asked him to make a pill that did one specific thing, at the very least, he could list out most of the ingredients that would go into the pill.

Aside from things related to Alchemy, he practiced some more about formations and talismans as well as runes on his own. He learned how to add runes to objects and added runes for durability and sturdiness to Memory.

These runes usually required some sort of power source, which in most cases would be Saint spirit stones, but in Alex's case, he could simply use his Qi to activate it.

He doubted he could see the effectiveness of the runes right now with how strong Memory was without it, but as his alchemy improved, it was certain he would need a strong cauldron to handle the higher level of lightning strikes from Pill Clouds.

Alex had also focused heavily on artifacts, creating quite a few more swords.

He never made another sword like Midnight as the cost alone was something he couldn't handle. He needed 21 swords at the very least for his 21 Sword Array to work, so he melted the previous swords he had made.

As for improving that technique and using more swords, he decided to do so after he had come up with a better technique. He could always have more ores from the Endless Tunnel after all.

After combining the metal with the newly tempered tungsten, he crafted 20 new swords, all of the same design as Midnight, but with nearly half its weight and quite worse all around as the likelihood of them gaining a sword spirit was nonexistent.

Alex had Pearl help him with Sharpening the sword the first few times, but after a few times, he understood the concept behind Sharpness and learned its Dao as well.

After that, he could do a better job at sharpening things than Pearl due to his stronger Qi. Still, he couldn't help but frown at how hard it was. Shen Jing had made it look so easy.

There was another Dao Alex could learn, but every time the worldly laws tried to descend, he forced them away by not deciding to think more about it. He knew he was just a hair's breadth away, but that was all he had from stopping the old man know that he was capable of that Dao.

That was one thing he had been keeping up his sleeve, just in case.

As for his Dao of technique, he had still not learned. That did not mean that he had no progress at all.

Alex had not only managed to separate the four types of meridians that were at the base of any Spiritual root, but he had also learned what most of the other branching meridians all over his body could do.

He categorized the four types into being used for four distinct types of techniques.

One was a cultivation path. It was the path that did not let the Qi go out of the meridian and instead used it to either improve something in his body or gather up more Qi from the outside.

The second one was a controlling path. It was when one could use Qi to control something. Lifting things with Qi, controlling light to go invisible, etc was what he assigned with this path.

The third path was for reinforcing stuff, whether it was his body or weapon. Usually, the purpose of it would be to add strength and defense to whatever he was using, but it could also be to add certain elements to the object.

Finally, the last path was for when you created things, whether it was sword slashes, palms, punches, fire, etc. This was perhaps the path with the most use.

Alex was able to separate the four paths and noticed that each of these 4 paths never actually intertwined with the other.

There were thousands of meridians for each spiritual root, but he was not only able to separate them by the spiritual roots, but he could also further separate them into four groups with each path of the spiritual root having its own meridians.

Doing this, Alex was starting to understand that he could in fact copy what he did with one technique and bring it to another spiritual root and use it there.

As of yet, he had succeeded in turning the Yang elemental attack 'Palm of the Sun' into a metal attack, and the Earth Devour technique into a Water Devour Technique.

He was able to change them because the techniques were close enough and the elements had the same properties in a sense.

He could not make water explode or wind heal. He couldn't make metal burn or fire sharp. He couldn't make Yin give life and Yang take it away.

He still had more to learn regarding all of the various paths, but he also needed to learn more about what each element was capable of.

After all, one of the things required to make everything work was Intent. If he did not know how something worked, he couldn't ever produce the intent to use it.

The progress had been slow for him, but he had progressed. If he had 5 or more years, Alex was certain he could practice enough to learn about everything required in the Dao of techniques.

However, one thing he had not been successful in despite having 8 years for it was a way to find himself out of his current situation.

He and Godslayer spoke a lot about what they could do, but with Alex's oath binding him, there wasn't a single thing he could do to get out of the situation without healing him.

The situation was so bad that if the old man ever died while resting, Alex would have to kill himself for failing to heal the old man.

There was simply nothing else he could do. But healing the old man was the last thing Alex wanted to do.

He could only imagine the pain and tragedy that could come from the old man being back in power. A pseudo-immortal roaming the world, unobstructed from heaven for he had already been judged for the power he held now.

Even if the old man kept his word and left him safe, he could imagine the many people that would die. The various elders from the different sects would most certainly die.

"But what can I do except healing him?" Alex thought. The only thing he could really count on at the moment was for the old man to free him from his oath for his own survival.

But then again, could he really count on a madman?

The door opened and Alex looked up. After 8 years, the door had finally opened up and the old man had come back.

"Oh, I didn't realize you had friends," he said when he saw Pearl and Whisker next to him.

Alex quickly took them back into their beast space and looked at the old man. "You're out?" he asked.

"Yes," the old man said with a rather happy face. "And I see that you have improved, as per my instructions."

"I have," Alex said.

"I hope, for your sake, that it is enough," the old man said.

Chapter 988 Seeing Aura

"Bring out your cauldron," the old man said. "It is time to see if you can acquire more than a single pill vein."

Alex nodded and brought out his cauldron. He had prepared many ingredients for this very moment. He started heating up the cauldron while he glanced towards the old man from time to time.

It had been 8 years since the last time he had seen the old man, and the things he noticed regarding the old man had changed quite a bit as well.

The old man still had a very high cultivation base for Alex to even sense the slightest bit of it. But, he didn't need to sense someone to see how strong they were.

He could see it.

His purple eyes seemed to glow in the firelight as they looked at the aura around the old man. Being unable to do anything to hide the leaking aura, he saw it all.

He could see the green and black aura. They were the Qi that was coming out of the old man's dantian, and Alex could see them with his naked eyes.

After all, one of the things he had managed to advance upon in the last 8 years was his Demon Eyes.

At stage 2, his eyes could now see elemental energy and aura for what they were in different colors.

Red was for fire, blue for water, green for wood, and so on. Alex knew all the 7 various element's colors. He also saw the crimson color for blood.

As for space, it had no color from what he could see. But then, space was something that was related to the third stage of his eyes, so maybe he would see the color after he reached that.

Alex looked at the old man's green aura and knew it was related to wood. But the black aura was weird. It wasn't simply black like it would be for yin.

It was pitch black and very thick. Which Alex associated with a single thing.

'Death aura,' he thought. 'Of course, the old man's death aura must be quite high.'

The old man was simply too strong for him to sense something in him without touching him, so only now was he realizing it.

'Could I perhaps pump enough death aura in him to ki—' Alex stopped thinking as power seemed to wrap around his neck, strangling him.

'Shit, I can't think about that. I have to heal him,' he thought. The oath was simply too powerful for him to think of doing anything that could deviate him from healing the old man.

Still, learning that the old man had a lot of death aura could be quite a helpful hint he had been missing for a long time.

He quickly told Godslayer who gave him a disappointing answer. "If I could help you with that, I would, but the old man dying is the last thing you should be thinking about. Because the moment he dies, you die too."

'Sigh, I know,' Alex thought. That was still one more piece of information than what he had before so he didn't lose hope yet.

"Don't forget to eat your pill before you start," the old man said. Alex nodded and took out a random pill to eat, which he acted like would improve his cultivation base by 2 realms.

He then started making the pill as he put in the ingredients one by one. He was very familiar with the pills now, and it was even easier for him as both his cultivation base and his spiritual energy had improved vastly in the last 8 years.

It didn't take much out of him as he completed making the pills and one of them had 100% Harmony in it.

Immediately, the room was filled with miniature storm clouds that crackled with lightning. The old man felt uneasy when he saw the lightning but did nothing to show his fear.

Alex covered the pill with a portion of his Qi to protect it from the lightning bolt. The first bolt of lightning dropped from the ceiling and struck the pill.

Fortunately, Alex's protection was strong enough for the pill to survive. However, it wasn't over yet as the lightning would still strike 8 more times.

His Saint Foundation 1st realm strength could most likely protect the pill against the next strike. Alex hadn't tried it yet, but he had a feeling it could.

He was cautiously optimistic as he covered the pill with his energy again. The lightning struck once more and fortunately, the pill survived, barely.

Alex knew that if he did not increase his energy, he could not protect the pill against the next strike.

"Senior, this is all I can do," he said. "The pill will get destroyed."

"No, continue it," the old man said. He wasn't worried about the pill getting destroyed at all. If it did, he would just ask Alex to make another one. But if it did survive, then that was so much more chance for him to heal.

Alex wanted to let go, but he didn't. If it was destroyed then it would be the old man's fault after all.

He continued protecting the pill and as expected, it was destroyed. Alex slumped back as he breathed heavily to show the fatigue he had gone through. It wasn't as bad, but he had to exaggerate it.

"Good cauldron," the old man complimented. "Start again."

Alex frowned. "Let me rest a few moments, senior," he said.

"No, start again. You barely used any Qi last time," the old man said. Being close to healing himself had made him care less about Alex.

Alex frowned but did as asked. He stood back up and started making the pill again.

Once again, he made another pill that called down the lightning. He easily defended against the first strike, and barely defended against the second one.

He then brought out the pill immediately to show the two intertwining lightning scars on it, or as it was called in Alchemy terms, Pill veins.

"Here you go, senior," Alex said.

"Good job," the old man said. "Not great, but good."

Alex felt a pang of anger when he heard that. Not only did he have to make a pill, but he also had to suffer from unnecessary judgment by a man that relied on him to survive.

'If only I could kill him after healing him,' he thought.

"Haha, you can't," Godslayer said. "You would need an immortal to win against him. Do you know any?"

"Of course I do," Alex said.

"Not that cat lady," Godslayer said.

"I know. I know a different one too," he said.

"Oh, you do?" Godslayer asked curiously.

Alex didn't say anything. Talking about the four heavenly beasts was not something he wanted to do with Godslayer since he would immediately get mad at them and throw a whole fit.

He had in fact thought of asking the tortoise for help, but how could he? He could only leave here after he had healed the old man. Then, he would have to somehow get away from his clutches and find a way to the Ruler's Domain where the tortoise lived.

Then he would have to get past the fact that the tortoise was wounded. He would have to have a pill with so many pill veins that it could heal an actual immortal.

After that, he would have to wait for the tortoise to go through Heavenly Judgment, which last he remembered had most likely killed Lady Ren. The tortoise would most likely survive, but even then Alex would have to heal him again.

In that period of time, the madman will have done all the destruction he could.

So, there was simply no way for Alex to place all of his hopes on the tortoise.

"The immortal I do know wouldn't be of much help to us," he said.

However, he could still be there when all else failed, so Alex hadn't exactly given up on the idea of healing the tortoise. Even if it was just as a form of common courtesy, he would help him heal.

The old man ate the pill in his hand and waited for it to heal him. He was very optimistic, and that was why he was even more disappointed when the pill failed.

"Dammit!" he cried out.

Alex could see the man's anger start to boil up, and he was worried that it would pour all over him. So before the man could even fully bring out his rage, he spoke.

"Senior, there might be a way to improve your chances of healing," he said.

"What?" the old man turned his head.

"I have a way to possibly help you heal better," Alex repeated.

"What do you mean?" the old man asked. His rage was dying down a bit because of just how confused he was.

"I never before noticed it, but now I do. Your body has a lot of death aura building up on it for a long while now. If you let it fester any longer, you will never be able to heal yourself. The life energy in these pills that are supposed to heal you would get eaten up by the death energy, making them practically useless," Alex said.

The old man couldn't find any lies in those words. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"I'm not entirely sure if that is the main cause or not, but I can guarantee you that it is part of it," Alex said.

The old man thought for a moment and nodded. "Go ahead, if you can do something about it, then do it."

Chapter 989 Memories of that Day

Alex put away the remaining pill and the cauldron before moving toward the old man. He reached close to him, and even then he couldn’t sense the death aura that well.

However, his eyes could see the black aura that drifted downward from all over his body. So, when he tried to sense it, he easily found it.

He went behind the old man and placed his palm on the old man’s back. The old man flinched a bit and Alex moved back.

“I’m sorry, does it hurt?” he asked.

“It’s fine, do what you need to do,” the old man said as he gritted his teeth. Alex touched his back again, and despite the pain, the old man didn’t flinch. Still, Alex could see the struggle.

“There’s a lot of death aura,” he said. “It might take some time.”

“Time is all I have,” the old man said through his gritted teeth.

“I will start then,” Alex said and slowly started taking away the death aura. He started off very slow as he wasn’t sure if the death aura of a pseudo-immortal was too much for him to handle, so he had to be careful.

‘It’s quite strong,’ he thought when the aura came flowing into him. It was a bit too strong. So much so that, Alex started wondering if his dao was enough to handle it efficiently.

“Give it to me!” Godslayer said. “I wish to consume the death.”

“You won’t act up, right?” he asked.

“Don’t worry, it won’t be nearly enough for me to regain the same strength that I had before you found me,” Godslayer said.

“Alright then,” Alex said, and using his Dao of Death, he started sending the death aura he gathered to Godslayer.

Godslayer ate it all up as if he hadn’t eaten in a long time. He seemed incredibly hungry, but even then it would take a while before Alex could bring the death aura out of the old man.

“That’s weird,” Godslayer said. “Something is odd with his body.”

“What’s wrong?” Alex asked.

“Not sure, I can’t really sense it all that well. I need more time,” Godslayer said.

Alex nodded and decided to speed it up a little. He had only just increased the rate at which he drew in the death aura when the old man instinctively moved forward in pain and the absorption ended.

“I’m sorry. I should have let you know I was going to speed up,” Alex said.

“Don’t go too fast. My body cannot handle the pain as well,” the old man said.

“Okay,” Alex said and restarted the process. But with how slow he was going, it was going to take over half a day for sure.

“I’m surprised to see that you have such an obscure dao. I thought you only learned the dao related to artifacts in the last 8 years” the old man said.

Alex’s eyes narrowed. ‘I knew it,’ he thought. The old man had in fact been keeping an eye on him while in closed cultivation this whole time. Even if not for him, he had to make sure that the others didn’t come and take him away, or worse kill him.

‘Good thing I didn’t learn the dao immediately. He would’ve tightened the security even more,’ Alex thought.

“How many dao do you actually know?” the old man asked.

“I know a few related to fire and metal,” Alex said. ” And this Death dao.”

“Fire and Metal… why those?” the old man asked.

“Fire just because I’m used to making pills with them or working with artifacts. Same reason for metal. I have worked with them so much that I learned about them a bit. Although visiting the Ancient Battlefield did help quite a lot,” he said.

“Yes, it does,” the old man said. “What about the death Dao?”

“That… was something I had known for a while. I came incredibly close to dying multiple times and the memories traumatized me. At the same time, I also understood what it was like to die. After thinking about it for a while after reaching the Saint realm, I learned the dao.”

“I see, you’re lucky to have learned so many Dao,” the old man said. “And incredibly unlucky as they will only make things worse for you.”

Alex was a little confused. “Why do you say that?” he asked.

“The Dao you learn is not for free,” the old man said. “This is an enormous debt you incur when you learn it. And when you try to break through to the immortal realms, the heavens come to ask for its payment. And it makes you pay with interest.”

‘Oh, that’s what he’s talking about,’ Alex thought. Still, having the old man speak up about anything was a good thing.

“What do you mean exactly, senior?” he asked.

“You don’t know? I’m talking about the lightning tribulation,” he said. “The stronger the dao you learn the stronger the lightning will be. If you cannot withstand the lightning, you will…”

Alex looked at the wounds that crept up the old man’s left side. “Senior must have learned a very strong Dao to be wounded like this,” he said.

“Hah!” the old man shouted. “What strong dao? I couldn’t even pass the normal 9 bolts of lightning.”

He shook his head and felt the pain along his right side again.

“Senior, if you don’t mind, can you tell me what happened that day? Was there someone that interfered with your breakthrough? Or was it just an accident?”

The old man stayed quiet and thought back to the day he lost it all. He didn’t want to remember but the memories didn’t follow his sentiment. They flooded his mind as he remembered every single aspect of that day clearly.

His eidetic memory was a curse for him at this moment.

“It was neither an interference,” the old man said finally after staying quiet a long time. “Nor was it an accident.”

“All it was… was a goddamn mistake made by a young, stupid me,” the old man said.

“I was young. I didn’t understand much. They told me I had the talent and the potential to reach the heavens. They told me I could one day become as strong as everyone ever had in history.”

“I took that to heart. I thought I was truly gifted and I did not need anything else. I started off slow with my teacher and elder’s teaching, but at some point, they weren’t there anymore and I was all alone, and I could do whatever I want.”

“I thought since I am so gifted, why do I have to worry about taking my time with my cultivation? Wasn’t it good enough that I could just reach the next realm?”

“I was also in some part motivated thanks to the founder’s story about the Immortal worlds. Even the trashiest of trash there had a great chance at becoming immortal, just because of the concentration of Qi in those worlds.”

“If even trash could do so, what about me? I had the greatest of talents, so if I were to go there early, I would be able to reach the higher realms early too. Immortality is too enticing after all,” the old man said.

“And… in doing so, I made the gravest mistake a cultivator could make before any major breakthrough. I had built myself a very weak foundation and there was no one there to correct me.”

“So, when I started my breakthrough, that was when tragedy struck,” the old man said. “I do not know whether it was my stupidity or my courage that took me past the Inner Demon. Some days I wish that I hadn’t been able to. At least… the lightning wouldn’t have arrived.”

Alex continued taking in the death aura while hearing the old man’s tale.

“The first lightning bolt was strong, but I was prepared for it. I knew they would be strong, and I handled it. But the second was even stronger, much more than I had thought it would.”

“The third and the fourth ones were very much stronger and I was already suffering through them. When the fifth bolt fell, it hurt me so much, but I survived. However, I knew I could not survive the next one.”

“So, when the 6th lightning bolt fell… it destroyed me. It charred the right half of my body, leaving it bleeding in the storm,” the old man said. “That was the moment I knew I was going to die.”

“So when I did, I couldn’t help but run away. How stupid of me to think the lightning would stop. No, it followed me, right onto the main mountain of my sect.”

“The elders came to help me, to heal me, and that was what the heavens considered interference. The next moment, thousands of lightning bolts fell from heaven, killing everyone around me, leaving only me alone.”

“I… I didn’t even feel anything when they died. I was too occupied with my own survival. I… if only I hadn’t been so thoughtless, I might have been able to save them,” the old man said. “or maybe… even just die, rather than live this painful life.”

Alex didn’t know what to say. The old man seemed to be in more pain than ever, but none of it was physical. He grieved his sect members that died due to his failure, and Alex was considerate enough to let him grieve.

However, there was someone else that wasn’t as considerate.

“Holy shit!” Godslayer said after hearing the old man’s recollection of the events from the past.

“What? What’s wrong?” Alex asked.

“I think… this old man is actually not a False Immortal.”

Chapter 990 False False Immortal

“Wait, what do you mean he’s not a False Immortal?” Alex asked with a surprised look on his face. He even missed a bit and forgot to keep absorbing the death aura for a few moments.

Fortunately, the old man was too caught up in his own trauma to notice any changes around him.

“Godslayer, explain,” Alex asked in his head.

“Ughh... it’s hard to explain. Let me go at it from the top,” he said.

“Wait,” Alex said, stopping Godslayer. He then lifted his hands away from the old man.

“Urghh!” he made a small grunting sound.

“What’s wrong? Was my death aura too hard to handle?” the old man asked.

“No, it’s not the death aura,” Alex said while still keeping a pained expression on his face. “The pill I ate before, its drawback is showing up. My meridians will flare for an hour or two now, making most of my Qi unusable.”

“Oh, then...”

“I think you should go back, senior. I will need to refine this death aura anyway, so I should rest too. We should continue absorbing this tomorrow again,” Alex said.

The old man slowly stood up and was surprised to feel a lot less pain than he was expecting. “That really works. I really did have a lot of death aura then,” he said.

“You still do,” Alex said. “You still have a lot, which should make you feel better once we remove it.”

“Alright, I will come tomorrow. Rest, for now, don’t make any pills in the meantime,” the old man said.

“I won’t,” Alex said and watched the old man leave. Once he was gone, he slowly sat down and called out his two beasts before starting to cultivate with the two.

However, that was just a front for the talk that was shaking him from the core inside.

“Alright, explain now, in detail,” Alex said as he appeared inside his mind. The silver mountain was visibly smaller than before, but Alex did not care for how much it changed.

No matter what changed about it, there was nothing happening to him that he could visibly link to the mountain anyway.

“Okay, let me ask you this first. What do you know about False Immortals?” the sword spirit asked.

Alex looked at him with a confused expression. “Just what you have told me until now, I guess? They are the people that have failed their breakthrough and can either no longer enter Immortality or choose not to.”

“That is correct,” Godslayer said. “And is there a way to tell if one False Immortal is stronger than the other, in the same way a Saint might be stronger than another Saint?”

“Umm... do False Immortals even have realms to go by?” Alex asked.

“That’s exactly what I wanted you to learn. False Immortal don’t have different realms because it’s not a cultivation realm.”

“False Immortal is a classification. Whether you survive and are the strongest being under the Immortal realms, or get beat up to half death and end up being a cripple, you are called a False Immortal all the same.”

“Still, the regular people call the stronger failures False Immortal,” Godslayer said.

“That... makes sense, but I don’t understand your point. I hope you’re going somewhere with this,” Alex said.

“Of course I am. Just shut up and listen,” Godslayer said. “Now, given the classification, you heard, would you call the old man a False Immortal?”

“Absolutely,” Alex said. “He’s someone who failed to break through to Immortality, so he is a False Immortal. Or are you using some weird context like ‘he hasn’t given up on immortality yet and can still try’ to say that the old man is not a False Immortal?”

“Not exactly, but my logic is similar enough,” Godslayer said. “Before I get there, however, let me ask you one question. Why are there barely any False Immortals in this world?”

Alex couldn’t help but think deeply at the question. Why was it? He remembered the Black Tortoise telling him that the humans of this world had mixed their blood with the demon folks so much that they were basically a hybrid at this point with only the bad traits from the two.

However, if that were true, even if not all Saints could reach the peak, those that do should have failed just enough for there to be multiple False Immortals in this world.

Which meant one of two things was most likely happening. “There have been people who failed in their tribulation, but they either failed and died, or they failed and ended up as a cripple only to die not long after,” Alex said.

“Then let me ask you this,” Godslayer said. “What is a failure in this case?”

“Hmm... Inner Demons would only make you go through Qi deviation at best, so the failure should be the tribulation. They failed to survive the lightning strikes,” Alex said.

“Yes. Now, what if I told you that when you start a lightning tribulation, 9 lightning bolts fall on you no matter what,” Godslayer said. “More if they have dao.”

“What if they don’t have dao?” Alex asked.

“Then they won’t even reach the peak of the Saint Transformation realm,” Godslayer said. “The thing you should be focusing on is that people cannot complete their breakthrough without defeating at least the 9 lightning bolts for they are absolute. It is the dao lightning that you can choose to skip out on to fail that chance to break through.”

Alex’s eyes widened when he heard that. “Are you sure you’re not misremembering?” he asked.

“Nonsense, I have tamed False Divinities and Celestials before. I would not be wrong about a simple False Immortal,” Godslayer said.

“But... that doesn’t make sense. If someone has to fight through all 9 lightning bolts to complete or fail their tribulation, then what the old man told us was a lie,” Alex said. “Dammit, all that info and he lied.”

“No,” Godslayer said. “He did not lie. In fact, I was stupid enough to not have noticed before.”

“Notice what?” Alex asked.

“Did you ever notice that for someone who is supposed to only be able to use Immortal Qi in this world with no Immortal Qi, his body had enough Qi to do stuff despite being over 8 thousand years old?” Godslayer asked.

Alex’s eyes went wide. “Now that you mention it... that is weird. I was so focused on him having Immortal Qi that I didn’t even question where he acquired it from.”

“I should have known before, but I didn’t give much thought to it. I only noticed the quality of his Qi when you drained his death aura. It’s... not exactly Immortal, a little below that.”

“I was confused about why that was at first. A Qi that was way stronger than Saint Qi, enough to be Immortal Qi, but not yet immortal Qi. If I’m not wrong, the old man can in fact collect Saint Qi, but his body, spirit, and Qi are so intertwined due to him being on his way to the Immortal realm that Saint Pills won’t heal him.”

“That begged the question in my mind as to why the old man even had a slightly weaker Qi in the first place compared to other False Immortals.”

“Of course, the situation became much clearer when he explained it all himself,” Godslayer said.

Alex thought for a moment as a realization hit him.

“When he said that he only survived 6 of the 9 lightning bolts that everyone is supposed to go through,” Alex said as he understood what Godslayer was trying to say.

Everyone was supposed to take 9 lightning bolts regardless of if they could survive it or not. But the old man had only taken 6.

“Yes,” Godslayer said. “I do not know how he could’ve done this. There are ways to pause your tribulations by using artifacts to conceal yourself, which he might have acquired from this so-called Founder of his.”

“Nevertheless, calling this old man a False Immortal would be akin to saying that a half-made sword is a failure. You can’t really label it that since it hasn’t gone through it all, has it?”

“But we do know it will be a failure,” Alex said. “If the sword had cracks forming on it halfway through, not able to handle even just the tempering phase of the process, the sword is a failure through and through. The only way to fix it would be to completely start the process from the beginning.”

“The old man had already suffered from the 6th lightning, so there is nothing wrong with calling him a False Immortal in my eyes,” Alex said. “I seriously doubt he had any method of surviving the last 3.”

“One could argue with you for the first part, but that is not what you should be taking away from my words,” Godslayer said. “You leave the tempering of a sword because it’s a failure. But what if it heats back up?”

“So what? There’s no point in continuing to temper the sword if I know it is a failure,” Alex said.

“Yes, YOU see no point. But the heavens don’t see it that way. If they see the metal glow hot, they will strike it again until it’s either tempered or the metal shatters,” Godslayer said.

As Alex heard that, his eyes started growing wide as he too understood what Godslayer was trying to say finally.

“What you’re saying is... if the old man were to return to how he was before he was wounded, the tribulation that had stopped would continue... and he would die,” he said.

“Yes,” Godslayer said. “And for that to happen...”

“I will have to make the pill that will heal the old man completely,” Alex thought.

Chapter 991 Final Pill

991 Final Pill

"So I will have to heal the old man," Alex said to himself. "That... works surprisingly well for me. I won't have to break my oath at all."

But then, there was another problem that Alex needed to think about.

"Wait, if I heal him, is there a guarantee that the heavens will strike?" Alex asked.

"If he regains his previous cultivation base, yes," Godslayer said. "His cultivation is at a stage where the heavens can't stand him, and since he hasn't been fully tested yet, he will have to go through the tribulation."

"No, but you said he most likely has something to conceal himself, right? What if he conceals himself again?" Alex asked.

"Well, most artifacts that conceal you can do so for a short period of time. Maybe a month to a year at most. Most people use it to heal themselves in the time period they get, but this man chose to run."

"What if he has another one?" Alex asked. "Can he hide from it again?"

"There's no way someone from this backwater world can have two artifacts to hide themselves from the heavens," Godslayer said.

"What if they did?" Alex asked.

"No way," Godslayer said.

"But what if? Can you guarantee that he doesn't have one?" Alex asked.

"Arghh... no," Godslayer said.

"So we will have to be prepared for that too," Alex said. "Still, that's a very low chance so it probably won't matter. The more pressing question is what about us falling victim during the tribulation?"

"The prophecy I heard said that if I were to help him, I would die. What if that comes true?" Alex asked. "Just like before, what if he runs away from the tribulation and brings the lightning down of me too?"

"I told you to forget about the prophecies. Divinations are highly inaccurate," Godslayer said. "And if he does try to run away from the tribulation again? Simply don't engage with him. The heavens know who is helping and who is interfering, and they also know who is not."

"I see," Alex said.

"But, if he does start to attack you, then you will have to make sure not to fight back. Because that would be considered interfering," Godslayer said.

"So I will just have to run away. Got it," Alex said.

Still, there were some things he worried about, so he made some preparation. He talked with both Pearl and Whisker while cultivating overnight.

The next day, he made no pill. The old man wanted to get rid of all the death aura before they did anything, so he focused the time on gathering death aura.

Alex took in as much as he could while still leaving enough for 2 more days of work. He needed the time very much for what he was thinking of doing.

The old man returned, and Alex got back to planning as well. On the surface, he looked like he was simply cultivating, but on the inside, he was constantly communicating with Pearl and Whisker.

Godslayer was also in on the conversation, but there was nothing he could provide at the moment other than the information he already had.

Alex's preparation was around running away from the location he was in as that was the only thing he was concerned about. He needed to be as far away as possible when the old man's tribulation came.

He drew out the death aura for two more days and finally all of the old man's death aura was completely out.

The old man got up from his seat and looked around. "I... I truly feel amazing," he said. "I feel like I can heal even without the use of the pill."

"You should still eat the pill, senior," Alex said.

"Of course, of course," the old man said. "So, can you make the pill now? I can't wait for it."

"Tomorrow, senior," Alex said. "I will need to process this death aura for now."

The old man was a little disappointed when he heard that, but he nodded. "Yes, you need to be in the peak condition. Tomorrow then," he said.

The old man left and Alex was all alone again. He had a single night's worth of time to make sure he was fully prepared as he wouldn't have time tomorrow after the old man was healed.

He went over the plan again with everyone, planning every single step that could go both right and wrong.

So, when the day rolled around and it was time for him to finally make the pill, he was fearless as he was fully prepared.

"Bring out the cauldron," the old man said.

Alex nodded and pulled out his cauldron before starting to make a pill again. He had done it many times, so he was starting to get used to it very much.

He put in the ingredients one by one and started refining them all. The old man watched as the ingredients were powdered inside the cauldron.

Alex focused on the pills. Once he was done with this, he would be free, so he made no mistake.

At the end, when the Pill-splitting Qi rolled around the cauldron, forming two pills that collected all the energy, the pill cloud that formed above him let him know that he had not failed.

Alex put his Qi around the pill as the first lightning bolt struck it. The energy fully protected the pill from the lightning bolt as it gained the first Pill Vein.

Then, Alex protected it against the 2nd lightning bolt which fell a few moments later.

With the two pill veins on the pill, Alex stopped making the pill anymore and pulled out the pill with the pill veins.

The old man practically snatched it from his hands and ate it without any hesitation. The pill went down the old man's throat and into his stomach.

Alex waited with bated breath as he watched the wounds on the side of the old man. He could see the pill's energy dissipate through the skin and thought it was healing the old man.

However, it turned out that it was not. The energy in the pill, despite having some worldly energy, could not help the old man's body even when it did not have any death aura in it.

The old man frowned and so did Alex. The old man had been too excited, so when he realized that he wasn't healing, he couldn't help but be sad and angry.

As for Alex, he had planned this moment way too many times for the last few days to not succeed right now.

"You said it would work, kid," the old man said with gritted teeth. "If you had lied to me—"

"I am forced by my oath to do nothing but heal you senior. Believe me, I had every bit of hope that you would have succeeded at this moment," he said.

"Then what now? You wanna try one more time so I can fail one more time? Or do you want to break through a few more times before you try again? Do remember that you have less than a year before the oath is complete," the old man said.

"I know," Alex said. He thought for a bit and sighed. "Wait a few more minutes. I might have a way."

Chapter 992 4 Veined Pill

"What can you do?" the old man asked curiously, despite the anger and frustration that was in his voice just moments ago.

"There is something I can do, but..." Alex thought for a bit. "Whatever, I will deal with the consequences later."

He sat back down and started making a pill again.

The old man watched curiously as to what Alex was going to do this time around.

Alex didn't do anything differently. He simply made the pill he was supposed to make and the pill clouds formed once again.

"What now?" the old man asked.

Alex didn't say anything and sent in his Qi to protect the pills. The first bolt of lightning fell from the skies and struck the cauldron.

One of the pills formed a lightning scar, but other than that, nothing happened. Alex breathed in and out as he prepared for the second lightning bolt to drop.

He watched the bolt fall onto his pill, but his pills were protected once more. Two pill veins had now formed on the pill.

The old man saw it too. "Now what? Am I to eat this pill again until it works?" he asked.

"Not yet," Alex said as he brought out Midnight.

The old man's eyes narrowed when he saw the sword. "No way you are going to fight the pill cloud, right?" he asked. The old man wasn't sure if that would work or not, but seeing that Alex was already incapable of protecting the pill from the 3rd lightning bolt, he didn't see how he could possibly protect against the third one now.

"I do not know if fighting works," Alex said. "It might, but I'm not in the position to make experiments."

As he said that, Alex took the sword and cut his palm. He then pulled away Memory's lid and dripped his blood inside, that surprisingly never heated up at all.

The old man was very confused at the moment. "What are you—"

Before his words were finished, the next lightning bolt fell from the pill clouds and struck the pill. However, this time, there was a layer of blood protecting it.

His blood aura was very strong now that it had improved in the nearly 10 years of Alex having been here.

So, when the lightning fell on the pill, all that happened was that it gained another Pill vein.

A 3-veined pill.

The old man was starting to get very excited at the prospect of eating this pill, but Alex wasn't done yet. His blood aura wasn't so weak that it could only protect the pill ones.

The 4th lightning bolt fell as the old man looked in awe. It struck the pill and couldn't do anything.

Alex looked inside and found that his blood had now lost most of its aura. He could probably protect the pill from another lightning bolt if he put in some more blood, but he wasn't sure about that.

So, it was better if he quit while he was ahead.

He pulled the pill out and the pill cloud disappeared. Before he could look at it, the old man snatched it away and looked at the pill with gleaming eyes as if he were looking at his own child.

"This will definitely do it," he said. "This will definitely heal me."

Alex looked at the old man whose madness was now showing its face again as he ate the pill without question.

Alex gave a mental note to Whisker to be ready.

The old man ate the pill and suddenly he fell to the ground in pain, unable to do anything.

"Senior?" Alex looked at him with fear in his eyes. Had he done something bad? Was the healing pill actually killing him by mistake?

If that were the case then the result would be his own death.

The prophecy rang in his head. He was going to help recover a fallen power, and in doing so that would cause his death.

Was this it? Was this what the prophecy meant?

Was the prophecy not that he would die at the hands of others that he helped, but rather it would be the helping part that killed him?

Fortunately, Alex was wrong for now as the old man actually was healing. He checked closely and realized that the old man's destroyed nerves had formed before anything else, so the pain from his still-wounded body had assaulted him all at once.

Slowly, the red wounds and charred skin started healing on their own as the old man's grunts and cries lowered quite a lot.

After 5 minutes of time, his breathing got natural as he was fully healed.

The old man lay on the ground with a wide smile on his face. "I... I healed," he said.

As soon as the man spoke, Alex felt the clutch around his throat that he had gotten used to by now vanish. No longer was an invisible force going to choke him out at any moment.

He was finally free of his oath.

However, he couldn't be happy at the moment. After all, the main event was going to start right now.

The old man got up, happy that he was healed. However, before he could express his happiness, a loud resounding boom could be heard from the sky outside.

The tribulation had come for the old man.

The old man's face darkened for a moment before it lightened up. "Oops, nearly forgot," he said as he pulled out a necklace from his storage bag and wore it around his neck.

Suddenly, Alex could no longer feel or sense the old man at all. It was as if his entire body had been shrouded in something that stopped him from being able to be sensed.

As a result, the tribulation that had appeared for a moment disappeared too.

Alex's eyes went wide when he saw that. 'Fuck!' he couldn't help but curse. This was the worst-case scenario.

"Now then, I don't think I can hold it off for much longer than a few months, so I should get to work," the old man said.

"Wh-what are you planning on doing now?" Alex asked.

The old man looked around. "Isn't it obvious? I am going to reclaim the continent for my own as it has always been rightfully mine," he said.

"What does that entail?" Alex asked.

"Well, I will have to kill the old geezers that destroyed my sect. Although most of them should have died already, so I will have to go after the others that tried to kill me not long ago. Yes, that should be a good starting point for my return," the old man said.

"You are going to kill people?" Alex asked. Internally, his mind churned as he tried to think of what he could do at the moment as it was obvious the old man would be doing this.

There was one thing he could do.

"Senior, it has been 8 thousand years since the Snow Immortal sect fell. Everyone that was involved in its downfall has most likely already died," Alex said. "Can't you just let the past be past and start anew?"

"No, I cannot," the old man said. "Not only did they destroy what remained of my sect, but they also tried to stop me from returning to power. The only reason I couldn't heal all these years was that they feared me and stopped alchemy from flourishing in the continent."

"I will show them exactly how right they were in fearing me," the old man said. "These big sects think there is no one bigger than them, don't they? I shall brand my name onto these 5 sects by destroying them all. I shall kill the disciples and elders in front of their ancestors before killing them too."

Alex's eyes went wide. He didn't think the old man would go this far.

"Innocent men and women will die if you do that," he said.

"Who cares about innocence? This is a world ruled by the strong. The only thing you can be is either strong or dead," the old man said.

"They were right in calling you mad," Alex said. Without hesitation, he pulled out a talisman from his storage ring and tried to send a message to his aunt to tell everyone to prepare.

However, before he could do so, the old man destroyed the talisman.

"You are trying to help them too?" he asked with disappointment in his eyes. "I thought you were going to be on my side. I even said I would make you my heir."

"I will never side with someone that thinks murdering innocents is justified just because they are strong." Alex glared back at the old man as he held Midnight in his hands.

"You're going to fight me?" he asked.

"I will," Alex said. He had no chance of winning but he would do whatever he could to wound the man.

The old man sighed and even chuckled a bit. "And here I thought I could use you to slowly make you spill all of your secrets."

The old man moved and white Alex's demon eyes saw what he was doing clearly, his body was far too slow to react.

The old man landed next to him and grabbed his right hand. Then, he grabbed his middle finger and ripped it off. And along with it, he took the storage ring.

"I guess I won't have to wait for you to spill all your secrets," the old man said as he pulled the ring out of the torn finger.

Alex didn't even flinch in pain at the missing finger. "What are you doing with that?" he asked.

"What?" the old man asked. "Did you think I wouldn't recognize a storage ring after you flaunt it over my face for so many years?"

Chapter 993 Your One Mistake

Alex became flustered when he saw the old man take away his storage ring. That was where he had been keeping everything he owned so being taken away was the same as him losing his entire fortune.

"Give me back my ring," he shouted at the old man.

"Haha, do you think mere words will make me give you back your ring? Keep dreaming young man," the madman said as he tried to see what was inside the ring.

"Eh, you've refined it well. It's gonna take a few minutes for sure," he said. Just then, Alex moved.

Midnight grew thrice its size as Alex slashed it at the old man. The old man wasn't very worried, but when the sword did fall on him, he couldn't help but stagger a bit.

"Woah, Woah, that's a strong sword," he said. There were scratches on the skin when the sword had struck but other than that, he wasn't very hurt. Still, he didn't have time for this.

He swung his arm and the wind alone slammed Alex against the wall, making his entire body hurt.

"The only reason you are alive right now is that you have a lot of talent and mysteries that I want answers to," the old man said. "Aside from that, you will also do well as being my personal alchemist that can heal me when I need to. If not for that, you would be dead for trying to attack me."

"Now, be obedient and stay here for a while. I will return in a few days," the old man said. Alex attacked him once more, but the old man left through the door and restarted the formation behind him.

Alex glared at the door angrily.

"Brother, wh—"

"Don't talk. I need some quiet," Alex said as he quickly sat down and closed his eyes as he started understanding the dao that he had been forcing back for so long.

The old man arrived outside the room and then left outside the underground palace.

He was out in the storm as dozens of lightning bolts struck down around him. For some reason, this gave him a calm that he couldn't explain despite it being the lightning strikes that took away everything from him.

Normal lightning seemed to not affect him at all. Almost as if they didn't even notice his existence in the air.

"Now, where should I start?" he thought. "There's the Blue Spring branch to the north that's the closest, or I can go to the Blazing Earth branch to the west."

The old man was too excited to think of which sect exactly to go for. "Ahh... I should definitely start with... hmm?" His eyes fell back towards the sky, looking through the lightning strikes.

"Is that... a dao?" he was surprised.

His senses suddenly entered the palace underneath and were surprised. "That young man is trying to learn a dao at this time? Why?" the old man thought.

Even as he did, worldly laws started falling from the sky and going into the underground palace. "What the hell?" the old man couldn't help but frown. "How is he so fast?" he thought.

His frown only got deeper when he sensed the dao that the young man he had locked away was learning. It was the same Dao he had learned a long time ago.

Space.

"What terrifying talent to learn about such a complex dao within moments. No, he must've been learning about it for the past 10 years," the old man thought. "So his teleportation dao wasn't a fluke."

Just then, the worldly laws that had descended, receded as the job was done. Alex had learned the Dao of Space.

The old man felt a spatial shockwave as the separation in space between the palace and the outer world was destroyed and the two merged into one.

With learning the space dao, the barrier alone could hardly hold back Alex now that he could freely manipulate space. The old man saw the barrier fall and both the human and the beast come out of the room.

"Heh!" the old man smiled from up in the sky when he sensed Alex's spiritual sense in him. "Congratulations, young man. You've learned a dao that many can hardly ever learn. No, they can hardly ever even feel the aura of space at all. You must've been incredibly lucky to come across a space treasure."

"Still, I'm afraid you did it all for nothing. Unless you have a treasure to hide from this lightning rain, you cannot even come out of that place, let alone think of stopping me," the old man said.

"I am still very young," Alex said. "I've barely hit my 40s, but even so, I've come to learn something that is fundamental to human nature in a way."

"Oh, and what is that?" the old man said.

"I've learned that people usually let their guards down against others that they deem very much weaker to themselves," Alex said.

The old man's smile lessened a bit before coming back in full. "Are you trying to say that I've underestimated you?" he asked. "Are you saying that you have the strength to beat me?"

"Of course not," Alex said. "I'm only just saying that you let your guard down."

The old man couldn't help but frown. Alex's words made it sound like he had poisoned the old man while he wasn't aware, but that wasn't possible with his oath.

"What are you trying to say?" the old man asked.

"You see, I learned something about this barrier recently. You said that someone teleported out on you before, right? Which was why you added a space-constraining effect to the barrier," Alex said.

"Yes," the old man said. "Is that what you've learned?"

"Yes, that was exactly what I figured out. I learned that the barrier and space are intricately linked. So, whenever the barrier was up, the space was up too."

"Or more accurately, whenever the barrier was down, the space was down as well," Alex said.

The old man still couldn't understand what Alex was trying to say. He had already broken down both the space and the barrier, so these conversations made no sense to him at all.

"Of course," Alex said. "You needn't worry about me leaving when the barrier was down. After all, you were always in the room, and with you being there, how could I possibly leave, right?"

"But you made one mistake in your little preparation here," Alex said.

"Oh? And what is that?" the old man asked. Just then, silence filled everything around him.

The sudden silence made the old man feel unnerved. He turned around to look at the source of the silence.

Just then, he realized something. Sunlight was starting to pour in through the sky as the storm above disappeared.

The lightning rain that had been the defining feature of this land for the last 8 thousand years disappeared.

The formation disappeared.

Alex smiled. "Your one mistake was that you thought I was all alone."

The old man's senses suddenly spread all around him and in one of the nodes that were responsible for the lightning formation, he saw a small mouse making its way away from the place.

"THAT DAMN RAT!" the old man shouted as he reached towards Whisker with his left hand. The space contracted so much that there was barely any distance between him and Whisker.

Alex saw this, but he wasn't worried.

Back when he had just finished making the pill, he had told Whisker to get ready. Since the barrier was down, Whisker could leave if no one focused on him.

Since Whisker was so weak, and since he had the Earth movement technique that allowed him to travel through the ground, he could get away from the location without being caught by the old man as long as he was distracted enough.

The distraction came in the form of the old man's pain, which gave Whisker the perfect opportunity to go.

For the next few minutes, he went around searching for the nodes. Alex had a guess where it could be, but he wasn't sure. So, all he could do was wait for Whisker to find it and disrupt it.

Then, the only thing he needed to do was keep the old man there long enough for Whisker to find the node.

That was the exact reason why Alex spoke so many words. He needed to keep the old man there just long enough.

And now, his wait had given fruit.

The old man grabbed Whisker and pulled him away from where he was. At the same time, Alex teleported back to the outside as he rushed toward the old man.

Midnight made no glow. Instead, it was pitch black as Godslayer empowered it with the death aura he had absorbed from the old man he intended to attack now.

The old man crushed Whisker without hesitation, killing him in his hands. However, Whisker wouldn't die so easily.

His body instead turned into Qi and flew back towards Alex, going into his shoulder plate to regrow again.

At the same time, Alex moved his left arm to constrict the space around the old man. The old man fought back against the space, but he found Alex's intent to be not as easy to fight against.

Even as he tried to break it, Alex arrived in front of him, and with him, he brought a sword full of death.

"Don't hold back on me now, Godslayer!" Alex shouted.

"Do it! I'll give you everything I can," the sword spirit shouted.

Then, Alex swung his sword.

Chapter 994 Run Away

Alex put into his attack anything and everything he could as that was the only thing he could do at the moment.

Godslayer gave everything he could as well. So much so that after this one attack, he would have absolutely no energy remaining at all.

Midnight was pitch black as death aura filled it to the fullest. Godslayer’s death aura had covered it entirely and since it had come from the old man, the aura was very strong as well.

The Qi lines in Midnight were also being used as Alex poured in Yin to activate it. Then, he struck the old man’s chest with the skill of the sword.

God Rending Death Blade.

“AAARH!” the old man cried as the attack struck him. Even if it was coming from Alex, the attack wasn’t something the old man could handle when he wasn’t putting up any guard.

Since most of his attention was pulled away by the constricting space, Alex had managed to gain an upper-hand.

In the last moment, the old man had managed to break free of the space that constricted him. He had realized that using intent was a losing match against Alex and had instead used brute force to break free.

Even then, he hadn’t managed to get out in time to dodge the attack.

The old man cried out in pain, but his body barely bled. With a body that was anything but in the immortal realm, it was quite strong.

So, even when he was in fact hurt, he did not take much damage at all.

Alex slowly backed away when he saw that. He had expected not to do much damage, but to see only the old man’s clothes ripped off with just a shallow wound to the skin that barely bled.

With the power he held a moment ago, he had expected the wound to be deeper than it actually was. Fortunately, it was not his intention to cut the man with the attack just now.

The old man looked back angrily and was about to attack when he noticed something slip and fall through his robes.

A long metal chain slipped through his robes, falling from the side of it. The old man caught it before it fell to the ground and looked at it with horror in his eyes.

“You…”

Before he could say anything, the sunny day turned suddenly dark as the sky filled with a storm that crackled with lightning that prepared to drop for his tribulation.

Alex saw that too and knew he needed to run off. He quickly put Pearl back into this beast space and turned around to run away. But before he could go anywhere, he stopped and looked back.

Hidden somewhere in the old man’s robes was his ring. And if he let the ring go through lightning tribulation, it would certainly get destroyed.

And with that would destroy many things. Alex wouldn’t mind most things that would be destroyed there, but he did care about the World Tree’s seeds and the Nine Heaven’s Yang Fruit and leaves.

He needed to get it back before he left.

‘Dammit!’ he thought.

Godslayer was already back in his mind and wasn’t conscious at the moment to help him. Whisker was dead for a while, and Pearl was definitely not up to the task to help him.

So, it was all up to him at the moment.

“I thought I would keep you as my alchemist, but you are more pain than anything,” he shouted. “I should kill you right now.”

Alex got ready to fight back, but before he did, he saw the storm above him and stopped. Whatever it was, he couldn’t fight back at all.

The old man reached and directly grabbed onto Alex’s neck before bringing him back to him. “I should choke you to death!” the old man shouted.

Alex tried to struggle, but the lightning was moments away from falling down. He needed to do something soon, or he would die to either one of the two.

The old man crushed his neck and Alex could feel his neck’s bones getting crushed. Any more and his spine would take damage as well.

Alex grabbed the old man’s hands and tried to force him to stop, but he couldn’t. Then, he glared at him and suddenly a fist-shaped mental attack struck the old man at close range.

The old man felt his vision go dark for a moment and at that moment, Alex reached into the old man’s robes to grab onto his ring that was hidden there.

The old man was out for barely a split second to while Alex grabbed the ring, the old man’s consciousness was already back.

He tried to grab onto Alex again, but Alex was prepared this time. Before the old man could touch him, he teleported far away with his ring.

As he teleported out, the old man’s hands reached back toward him.

Alex saw it coming and swung his sword in front of him, cutting the space right ahead of him.

The hand struck the broke space and was stopped. The old man forcefully broke through the space to reach for Alex, but before he could do so, the lightning fell from the sky and struck him.

Alex heard the sound and felt the shockwave of the lightning bolt that could easily kill him if he wasn’t careful at all.

He backed away as far as he could from the old man.

The lightning bolt was too strong, and in his mind, the old man was surely dead. However, he couldn’t stand around just in case.

He turned around to run away. However, before he could make it very far, he found himself unable to move. Space was constricting his movement, just like he had done with the old man.

However, there was something weirder with how he was being constricted. If it had been normal constriction, Alex might have gotten away after fighting back with his intent.

However, his space was constantly being destroyed and reformed. And as it did that, it started affecting the other spaces around him too.

Cuts appeared all over his body, the broken space cutting him apart. Alex put on his blood armor, but even that was useless.

The old man was using some sort of attack that didn’t come from any dao he knew, so Alex found it hard to stop.

The lacerating space was unstoppable already, and to top it all off, the old man arrived in front of Ning.

“He was missing half his left hand with the remaining parts being completely charred. His right left eye had popped and as such, it was constantly oozing with blood and tears.

“You… are not… going anywhere,” he spoke, barely. His voice was hoarse and almost indecipherable.

The lacerating space around him stopped after the old man’s arrival as he reached out. “Make… me a pill,” he said.

Alex didn’t. His body was healing already and he used the moment to try and run away. However, the old man used his power to stop the space around him.

He was even forcing his spiritual strength on top of Alex to stop him from being able to use anything.

“Make me the pill!” he shouted.

Alex swung his blade around, trying to cut up the space, but it was hard to do so. His intent wasn’t that much stronger than the old man’s, and he didn’t have the brute force like the old man to simply break through this space.

“Just die already,” Alex spoke. His voice was hoarse too as his neck was nearly destroyed just moments ago.

“I need a pill!” the old man shouted, using every bit of Qi in what he did next.

Suddenly, every single space around Alex opened up. Not only was the old man’s own space free now, but Alex also found that his storage ring and storage bags were all open all of a sudden.

Vast amounts of treasures, ingredients, and various other materials came flying out all of a sudden.

His many swords, books, alchemy ingredients, formation plates, spirit stones, and everything else were scattered in front of him.

The World Tree’s Seed, the Yang tree’s seed, and the strong sword were out. Not only that, even his Blood God’s Manual was out for some reason. Not to mention, Memory was out as well.

Alex wanted to care about everything that was in front of him, but he found it hard to care about it as his own life was in danger.

If giving them up meant he could survive, he would give up on them. There would be infinite chances in finding treasures, but there was only a single chance at life.

If he died, it was all over. So, Alex decided to run away and let the old man die.

However, just then, he saw something else that flew out from the space it belonged to.

Pearl.

Pearl’s beast space was violently opened up as well as he was forcefully brought out. Pearl cried out in pain as he was way too weak to handle the old man’s aura.

Alex looked with wide eyes as his thought of leaving all vanished within a moment. He couldn’t leave Pearl here or he would most certainly die.

His mind wasn’t fast enough to come up with a plan, but his eyes were. It moved all around the space looking at various things until it saw something near him.

There it was, the simple yellow paper that could save him from this predicament. The paper he had found over 25 years ago and had no use for until now.

The Teleportation Talisman.

Chapter ﻿995 Get Away

The old man was dead for sure. If not for the 8th lightning bolt, the 9th one would kill him for sure.

Alex was only just worried about his own survivability. So, when he saw the yellow paper float not far from him, he knew what he had to do.

His right hand held Midnight, so he reached out with his left hand and grabbed the teleportation talisman.

This was a talisman that hadn't been used in over 30 years easily, so the energy it had gathered in the meantime was enough for Alex to teleport with.

He poured Qi into it the moment he grabbed it, and as soon as that happened, he felt the aura of teleportation slowly circle around him.

The old man was too far gone in his own madness and was ravaging through Alex's various pills that were floating in front of him. He was eating any pill he came across and that gave Alex the perfect opportunity to escape.

As the teleportation aura covered him, Alex felt a sense of understanding as to what was happening. He could feel the aura trying to latch onto some sort of space in a random direction.

Alex realized that he could change this direction if he wanted to, but at the moment, he didn't even know what direction he was turning toward with the sun in the sky. So, he could only let fate decide where he was going.

Now, all he had to do was bring Pearl back into his space.

Alex also understood how this teleportation worked. His normal teleportation was on where he switched the space in his body with another open space.

In the teleportation with the talisman, it teleported the space around him, rather than just him. This was very inefficient in a sense and required too much power.

However, it had its advantage too, and Alex realized that advantage.

"If the space is big enough... I can take everything with me," he thought.

Suddenly, Alex pushed away the teleportation aura around him encompassing everything around him as much as he could. The more items he was bringing along, the smaller the teleportation distance would be, but he didn't care about that.

Not everything he had lost was inside the radius of his teleportation aura, but he didn't have the luxury to worry about it. Still, it was only some ingredients or pills or spirit stones that he was missing out on.

Now, all he had to do was teleport away.

The old man noticed him leaving. "You bastard! Come heal me!" he shouted, but his shout drowned as the next bolt of lightning fell.

"Just die quietly," Alex said, and then he disappeared as he was teleported away with various different items of his.

The moment Alex reappeared somewhere else, he felt incredible pain as his body started getting ripped apart immediately.

Winds howled around him as the wind itself seemed to slice him up every single way. When he opened his eyes to see what was happening, he saw various different colors move around to destroy everything in their path.

Alex's body healed to protect itself, but it wasn't enough. He needed to get out of this place. He was in grave danger.

Just then, he saw his storage ring float in front of him and even further than that was Pearl, whose own body was getting torn up by the wind.

"Pearl!" he shouted, and at the same time, he lost vision. The sharp winds had destroyed his eyes, and even while he tried to heal them, they would be destroyed again.

Alex sent out his spiritual sense and grabbed onto the ring. But for some reason, even his spiritual sense seemed unusable in this wind as it was very quickly destroyed.

Still, he sent it out as far as he could for Pearl. "Pearl, come back!" he shouted, but the sound itself seemed to be torn up in this location.

Alex saw glimpses of the various other things around him. Without vision, and with what little spiritual sense he could use to latch onto the object, he tried to bring them back as well.

"Come back!" he shouted as he tried to pull them away. "Pearl, come!" he shouted as he tried to pull Pearl as well.

However, he couldn't tell what was happening outside of him anymore. His senses had already stopped functioning, and now even his vocal cords were ripped apart by the wind.

His limbs were already in tatters, so if he spent any longer, he would surely die. So, with what little consciousness he had remaining, he called back everything he had once more.

Whether it happened or not, he used all of his mental prowess that still remained to use the Dao of Teleportation to get far away from this place.

The talisman from before had been destroyed by the wind, but Alex remembered the location it was trying to take him to. So, he thought of that direction and used the full force of his teleportation powers.

With his last thought before he was teleported away, he simply sent a mental message to Pearl.

Get away.

Alex teleported once again, but this time he had no idea where he had gone. He couldn't even worry about it as he fainted when he arrived at the new place.

Sometime later, Alex woke up to the constant poking on his head. He suddenly got up and the bird flew far away.

He remembered everything immediately and checked for everything. He was holding Midnight in his right hand, and his Storage ring in his left hand.

He didn't know how long he had been out, but he had healed completely.

He checked the storage ring and found that it was empty. He quickly checked his left biceps and found the claw print still there. However, it was empty.

Pearl was alive, but he was not with him.

"No...," Alex couldn't help but feel sad and destroyed. This was not the first time he had been away from Pearl, but this was the first time he had been in a such dire situation. Pearl was likely somewhere bleeding and in need of desperate treatment.

"No, I can't sit here and mop. I need to find Pearl," he thought and stand up. However, before finding Pearl, he needed to know where he was going, and where he was at.

He looked around the giant crater he seemed to have formed and wondered, "Where am I?"

[End of Volume 3: Forged in Ice and Fire]

* * * * *

[Extras]

Two figures appeared on top of the Intercontinental Teleportation formation. One was a girl and another a beast.

The moment they arrived, they looked towards the east.

"Oh, someone is trying to break through?" the beast said with a curious expression on his face before it disappeared. "No, he's dead."

"Is that so?" the girl said. She could sense the disturbance in the atmosphere to the east too, but she couldn't tell exactly what was happening. Her senses were nowhere near the level of the beast.

"Anyway, thank you senior, for bringing me here," she said.

"No problem. Just go on and do what you came here to do. I will go visit someone and might come to help you before returning to my own place," he said.

"I will," the girl said.

The beast went away and the girl was left alone. She sighed and looked around. "Now, where the hell am I supposed to find enough materials to fix 4 different Intercontinental Teleportation formations?"

* * * * * *

Tai Guan sensed the start of the lightning tribulation and the end of it as well. The moment it ended, she and various other ancestors made their way toward the now lightning-less lightning peninsula and found the remains of the mad immortal.

"He's dead," someone said with apparent disbelief in their eyes.

"He's really dead!" another person said.

"This is a cause for celebration."

Everyone started enjoying the good news the moment they learned about the madman's death. Only a few select ones weren't enjoying themselves as they searched for someone else in the area.

"Did you find any?" Huang Xinyi asked the two ladies. Both of them shook their faces.

"That's a good sign," Elder Xuan said, her crystal blue robe fluttering in the stormless wind. "That means he got away."

"He's certainly not dead, that's for sure," Tai Guan said. "But where could he have gone?"

The group tried to find any sign of Alex's death, but there simply was none.

Tai Guan returned back to the sect and found Liz.

"The old mad Immortal died in a lightning tribulation," she told her.

"And my nephew?" Liz asked with clear pessimism in her eyes. She was ready for the bad news.

"We do not know anything about him other than the fact that he did not die there," she said.

Liz's eyes filled with hope when she heard that. "So, he escaped?" she asked.

"Most likely, but that doesn't mean his life is any better now," Tai Guan said.

"Doesn't matter," Liz said. "As long as he managed to get away, he is bound to do something great. I trust in him to do that much."

She showed great determinism and optimism now that she knew her nephew had gotten away from captivity.

"Let's go, master. I wish to train even more," she said. "I want to be strong enough to kill Immortals."

* * * * *

The script to the Demon realm in the Ruler's Domain opened and the Black Tortoise noticed.

However, even if he noticed he wouldn't care. As long as they didn't bother him, he was fine. After all, he was wounded and couldn't afford any energy he didn't have toward the intruder.

Still, he sent out his spiritual sense to see who had entered. When he did, he noticed the beast that had come in.

Immediately, the tortoise got up, the snow dropping all around him like an avalanche, and looked towards the beast that had already made its way next to him.

"How..." the tortoise couldn't help but be shocked at the new figure. "How are you... !"

The new beast that had come smiled at him as it spoke, "Wow, you're in worse shape than I thought you would be. Do you need my help?"

* * * * * * *

Pearl was barely conscious to even think straight, let alone remember what had happened before.

The only thing he remembered was that when he was in the most desperate of situations, there was a golden glow coming from his body and he had somehow managed to get away from that place.

Still, He had lost a limb and had wounds all over his body. He had lost his left eye, and his right eye saw nothing but red.

He didn't know where he was and if it was day or night. He didn't even care how good he was. As he wasn't thinking straight, there was a single thought in his mind.

Find Alex.

So, he ran around, trying to find him. And then, he found him. It was faint, very faint, but he found the connection between him and Alex, and he followed that.

He was already low on Qi, so after he flew for hours, he couldn't keep up any longer. So, when he ran out of Qi, he crashed into a forest, fully wounded and unable to even move.

He growled with what little energy he had and even his body had reverted to being small to preserve as much energy as possible.

He stared into the night as he breathed in and out, and slowly he was starting to lose consciousness.

Just then, he heard some footsteps and used the last of his self to keep his eyes open.

The last thing he saw before going unconscious was a middle-aged man, standing in front of him with wide eyes and a shocked face.

The last thing he heard before going unconscious was the middle-aged man saying a single word.

"Pearl?"

Chapter 996 The Bird

Alex stood up and looked around at the fiery crater that burned with flames that were of red, yellow, pink, and purple colors.

"Weird," he thought as he looked around at the crater. "Did I make this crater?"

The crater was nearly 50 meters wide in all directions with no sign of any trees anywhere. "How did I possibly make this crater? Did I fall here with a great force?" he thought.

He didn't think himself strong enough to make such a massive crater, but then he remembered that Pearl's mother had also fallen into the forest and created a crater, so he stopped thinking much about it and started thinking of leaving.

He started walking out while checking himself. He was completely naked at the moment. Everything he wore had either ripped off in that strong wind or completely burned away after he had come here.

His Qi had dropped to almost nothing, but fortunately, his body had healed. He didn't have Pearl with him anymore, but he was kept away from despairing by knowing that he was alive for now.

He would have to find him quickly, however as he could be in danger. He put on the empty ring in his hand and placed Midnight in it.

"I even lost Memory already. Not to mention my master's... sigh." He couldn't help but feel dejected when thinking about the fact that he had lost everything.

The swords, the seeds, the books, the cauldrons, and everything else. The only thing he had on him now was the ring, Midnight, and Whisker who was still healing.

"Wait, did I lose the book too?" he thought and quickly pulled out the Blood God's Manual. Fortunately, that book was still there.

"Of course," Alex thought and shook his head. He tried calling for Godslayer, but Godslayer was unconscious after giving everything he had in that one attack.

"So, I managed to keep just 4 things with me," Alex thought as a great amount of frustration built up in him. "Goddammit! Why do I have to keep running away in every fight."

He was angry that not just once, but twice he had come across people that forced him to run away to a place he didn't know about.

"Shit!" he grunted before stopping. "I can't keep doing this. I can't keep running away. The only reason I am forced to run away is that I'm weak, aren't I? Screw it then, I will cultivate to whatever height I can reach as quickly as possible."

Just then, something fell on him. "Hmm?" Alex looked down and saw a fist-sized rock that had just dropped on his head.

"What the hell?" he thought as he looked above him to see a parrot-like bird with red and yellow feathers that ended in blue. The bird was about the size of a parrot as well and currently very happy because it managed to hit Alex.

"What the hell? It's that bird," he remembered. That was the bird that was poking him before he woke up.

"Don't drop stones on me, or I will kill you," Alex shouted as his anger was still burning inside of him.

The bird only laughed when it heard that. It quickly flew away, and Alex looked at it to see where it was going. When he saw it pick up another stone, Alex started scolding again.

"I'm telling you, you better not drop that-hey!" he shouted as the bird flew to the sky and tossed the stones towards him.

Alex caught the stone before it hit him and tossed it back at the bird. The bird dodged it, but it was angry now.

The bird flapped its wings furiously and flew down towards Alex. "What? You want to come at me?" he asked. "Come then!"

The bird flew at him with incredible speed and Alex got ready for it. He wanted to catch the bird and punish it a little for trying to toy with him.

Just the bird got close, he tried to grab it. But suddenly, the bird turned into white light and disappeared.

Alex stumbled backward in shock. "Wha-what?"

He quickly stood his ground and looked around. He even sent out his spiritual sense to try and search for the bird, but it was nowhere.

"Did it teleport?" he thought. But he hadn't felt any teleportation aura. Instead, it looked more similar to something else.

He quickly looked at his body. His arms, his legs, and even his back. There was a cat's paw mark on his left arm and a mouse's paw print on his shoulder plate.

And now, there was a bird's feather on the side of his right thigh.

"What the hell?" he thought as he realized that he had unconsciously bonded with another beast. "Another one?"

"Hey, come out!" he shouted at the bird, but nothing happened. "What? Come out." Alex even poured in what little Qi he had but the bird wouldn't come out at all.

"Why aren't you coming out? Did I bond with you or not? Come out I said or I am going to cancel our bond right now," he threatened the bird.

The bird screeched as it flew out and landed on the sand in front of Alex.

"So, you are finally out. It's not like you don't understand my words then," Alex said. "Did you bond with me while I was bloody and battered?"

The bird turned its head around before nodding.

"Why?" Alex asked.

The bird pointed towards the edge of the crater. "What's there?" he asked. "Or is he pointing at the distance?"

The bird suddenly screeched.

"What now?" he asked.

The bird screeched even more angrily and Alex thought he understood the bird this time around.

"Oh... you're a female bird, huh?" Ning thought. "Anyway, what type of bird are you?"

The parrot-like bird tried to say something, but Alex couldn't understand this thing. He shook his head to show that he couldn't understand what the bird was trying to say.

The bird looked around, her intelligent eyes searching for something. When she did, she flew away.

Alex watched as the bird flew over to some of the debris that was still in flames and jumped onto it.

"Wait, no. You'll get hu-huh?" he felt confused as the bird softly snuggled into the flames. "How are you not hurt?"

Alex slowly walked towards the bird and tried to place his hands in the fire to see if it was actually not that hot.

The moment his hands touched the flames, it instantly started burning and Alex felt pain shoot up through his arm.

"Aaaah!" he cried out loud and the bird tried to help him, but before she could, Alex used his True Fire dao to suppress the flames and make them disappear.

His right arm was still left charred, but it slowly healed using the remainder of his Qi, which wasn't a lot.

The bird looked at him with curious eyes. Alex looked back at the bird that wasn't hurt by the flames that burned him.

"Do you have a high cultivation base?" he wondered and checked the bird, but to his surprise, the bird had absolutely no cultivation base.

"Then how are you—" his words paused mid-sentence as he saw the color of the flames and the color of the bird, and words floated into his head about a bird that created flames.

His eyes went wide as he looked around him. The crater had no trees or anything, just sand.

"No way," he thought as he quickly ran through the crater and climbed up it to arrive at the highest point.

Then, he saw it.

Sand.

That was all he could see for the most part. He was in the desert and the sand was everywhere.

Then he felt the Qi around him. There was none.

"No way," he said to himself as he found it unbelievable. "Did I really just come to the Southern Continent?"

He turned around and looked at the bird that was coming out of the flames. "And did I seriously bond with a descendant of the Vermilion Bird right after coming here?" he thought.

The bird flew next to him, but Alex found it hard to concentrate on him. The sun was steadily setting, so he knew which direction was what.

So, he looked north, but there was just desert there too. Then, he flew up higher and higher until he was at a height where he could reach the clouds.

Then he finally saw what he was looking for. The ocean. Or more accurately, the land beyond the ocean.

The Central Continent.

"If I came from the Lightning Peninsula, and I was on my way here, which was cut short due to how many items I was taking, I must have ended up on the Central continent before this."

"I see," he thought. "No wonder there was such a strong wind. That wasn't wind at all, was it? But the violent Qi that circles the Central Continent. Shen Jing did tell me it was strong, but to think it would destroy a Saint realm body cultivator's body so easily."

"Or maybe it was because we had Saint realm body cultivation that we survived in the first place. A normal saint realm cultivator would've been torn to shred for sure," he thought.

"If I hadn't been greedy and tried to bring it all back, maybe Pearl would've-No, I can't think about the past right now. I need to think about my present," he thought.

"If I'm in the Southern Continent, then... " His eyes went wide. "I can find my father here."

Chapter ﻿997 Scarlet

Alex kept staring at the hazy image of the Central continent in the distance and wondered if he should try and go there.

It seemed close enough that he could reach it if he just flew for 2 or 3 hours.

But he hadn't lost enough of his rational mind to understand that whatever he was thinking was simply undoable. Ignoring the practicality of flying through the entire ocean, not getting caught off by the beasts that roamed in it, there was simply no way for him to get into the continent.

The Qi barrier that tore up everything was simply impossible to get by. He could maybe teleport in, but then how thick was the Qi wall? Given that it was a continent, it had to be massive right?

He subconsciously remembered the howling wind that put him to sleep every night as a kid and shuddered. He had never thought that it would be that destructive Qi that was doing it all.

"I can't go in just yet. Not only do I not have the strength or ability to bypass that wall, but I also don't even have the Qi to fly close to it. I will have to think of another way to get in there and get close to Pearl," he thought as he flew back down to the edge of the crater.

There was absolutely no Qi in the environment for him to gather from, and no spirit stones in his storage ring for him to use either.

"Isn't only some part of the Southern Continent supposed to be without Qi? There's an entire section of the continent where you can freely use Qi right?" he thought. If that was the case, then that was where he was going to go.

"Since that way is north, I will most likely have to go south to get to that place," he said to himself. "But first…"

He turned towards the tiny Vermilion bird. "So, little phoenix, how did you end up in this place? Did you run away from your family?" he asked.

The bird screeched, but there was no answer he could formulate from it. "I don't know much about Vermilion birds, so you might actually be a variant of it, and not actually a Vermilion bird, but still, seeing your intelligence, I can say without a doubt that you have a tremendous amount of bloodline," he said.

"You are most likely just like Pearl. He wasn't as intelligent as you when he was just a child, but then he was also an infant back then," he said. "Speaking of which, how old are you exactly?"

The bird gave a tilted glance as she thought for a while and replied something. She didn't know.

"Sigh, and what about your parents? Where are they? Certainly, they didn't just lay an egg and leave right?" he asked.

The bird screeched angrily as she didn't know the answer to any of the questions he was asking.

"Okay, okay, I get it. But one last question," he said. "Do you have a name?"

The bird shook her head.

"Seriously? You can't go around without a name. You need one," Alex said. "Let me think of a good one."

Alex rubbed his chin in a thinking gesture, and the bird followed him as she too used her wing feathers to rub her chin in a similar way too.

"What? Do you want to be called Mirror?" he asked. The bird screeched angrily.

"Haha, that was a joke. Wait, let me actually come up with serious answers," Alex said as he gave the names some more thought.

"Red Feathers? Tiny Phoenix? How about Crimson Death? Wait no, I have a really good one. How about Lord Fi—"

The bird screeched in anger as none of the names were good in her thought.

"Not even Lord Fire? I thought that was a good one," Alex said. He gave some more thought and said, "Okay, how about just Scarlet?"

The bird was about to get angry, but she stopped when she gave it some thought.

"Scarlet, it's good, right? It's a feminine name, but at the same time, it sounds dangerous. Like something you should stay away from in all cases. Scarlet. What do you think?" he asked.

The bird nodded, finally accepting the name that Alex had come up with.

"Good, then from today on, I shall call you Scarlet," he said.

Scarlet screeched in happiness at finding her new name.

"Come," Alex said as he beckoned her to climb on his hand. Scarlet was apprehensive for a moment before climbing onto it.

Alex then brought his hand next to his shoulder and had her step on it. Once Scarlet was firmly perched on his shoulder, he finally decided to get away from this burning crater.

"To the south it is," he said as he finally walked out of the crater. He sent out his spiritual sense everywhere around him, but it seemed pointless as there was nothing but sand dunes all around him.

He shook his head and took back his senses to keep it just around him.

As he walked away, he didn't notice it at all, but the fire that had been burning in the crater slowly got smaller and smaller as he got away.

After some distance, the fire in the crater was completely extinguished, never to burn there again.

Alex continued forward as he felt the atmosphere. He didn't really have to feel it as his eyes were capable of seeing Qi now.

He remembered seeing the multicolor spectrum that was the Qi wall that blocked the Central continent.

In contrast to that, there was no color in the atmosphere in this place. "It's truly devoid of all Qi," he thought. He couldn't help but wonder why that was.

The situation was clearly not like the Forbidden Fields where his body was heavily suppressed, making it impossible to use Qi or spiritual sense.

He could freely use his Qi and spiritual sense. If used up, his spiritual sense would recover quite quickly as well. However, due to the lack of Qi, he couldn't do the same for his cultivation as well.

"Still, why isn't there any Qi here?" he wondered. He thought about the Central continent's lack of Qi being a cause for a moment, but that thought seemed wrong.

He could understand if Qi was constantly being dragged towards the vortex of Qi in the Central Continent, but that was not the case. Or else he would have seen faint lines of color in the atmosphere.

Aside from that, he wondered if it was some formation that was making Qi unable to enter this region. He didn't think it was someone's doing, but rather a natural formation that formed from the ever-changing desert.

There was one other possibility here that he simply couldn't ignore. And that was the possibility that it was the doing of someone with a higher power, most likely an immortal.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Your ancestor might be why I have to walk in these shifting sands instead of fly directly across it," he said to Scarlet, who showed no reaction.

That was only funnier for him. He shook his head. "Let's just continue walking for now. I need to quickly find a set of clothes for myself."

Chapter 998 Solid Earth

Alex walked through the shifting sands, barely able to step up and down dunes without cascading along the sand itself.

It had been hours since he had started walking, but he was making very little progress because of how hard it was to walk.

He thought of flying, but with what little Qi he had, he needed to save it for if he was ever injured. In a place with no Qi, he needed to save as much as he could.

Night had fallen by now and the silver moon hung high in the sky. Yet, he saw no path that would lead anywhere, no color than the silver sands that could tell him which direction was the best to go in.

So, he simply kept walking south.

The night had grown cold, far colder than he would've ever imagined a place such as this to ever grow. As far as he remembered, the Forbidden Fields never got remotely as close.

But then, they were also affected by the Yang tree, so that might have been the reason for the warmth there.

A few hours before dawn, around 2 or 3 am in the night, Alex finally arrived on land where his feet did not simply sink.

He arrived at a land where the grounds were deserted and crusty as if they hadn't seen water in centuries, but they weren't sandy. As such, now he could walk more easily. He could even run if he wanted to.

Alex increased his pace and went further along. Then, another few hours later, right before dawn approached, he heard something and stopped.

A rattling sound came from not far away. Alex immediately spread his spiritual sense and noticed a rattling snake, one whose body had the same thickness as Alex's torso.

It was about 300 meters away from him and had absolutely no cultivation base at all. So, Alex didn't really find it necessary to worry about it.

The snake seemed to have noticed him as well and slid in his direction.

Alex was trying to ignore it, but he found it hard to as the snake came in his direction. He sighed at the trouble, but before he could think anything else, the snake's speed increased tremendously as it lunged toward him.

Scarlet flew away at once and Alex ducked at the last second and got back up to look at the snake with wide eyes. "So fast," he thought. "How is it so fast with no culti--"

His words stopped in his mouth as he remembered the beasts back in the Forbidden Fields that had the incredible physical capability.

"Wait, is this one like that too?" he thought.

The snake turned around and came for him again, but by now, Alex had Midnight in his hand.

The sword got twice as large and Alex swung it right in between the snake's mouth horizontally.

The sword cut halfway into the snake's mouth and tore along the side of its body. Blood and gut poured out of it, dousing Alex in it all.

Alex's entire body was fully covered in it, making Scarlet who was flying far away not want to come near him. In the end, she disappeared into her beast space, not wanting to stay anywhere around Alex at the moment.

Alex put away Midnight and wiped his face with his hands. Fortunately, the snake's blood didn't spell as bad, or he would be vomiting non-stop.

He used the tiniest bit of Qi and used blood manipulation to throw away all the blood from him. Then he looked at the dead snake nearly 10 meters wide and flayed open on one side.

"How strong was this beast again?" he wondered. It was hard to quantify physical strength in terms of cultivation base when there was none to compare it with.

All Alex could say was that the beast was in the True realms at most and forget about it.

"Well, at least I found something to cover myself with," he thought. He brought out Midnight again and started cutting open the beasts.

He wasn't the best at it, but he wasn't that bad at the task either. In the 10 years, he had been forced to remain under house arrest by the madman, he had spent his time doing various different things.

One of those things was butchering beasts he had killed back in the Demonic forest. It was partially to use their body parts as ingredients for pills, but it was also partially to turn them into materials for sword handles and such.

In particular, he had found himself to be pretty good at separating just the skin of the beast to use the leader for various purposes.

One such purpose was now to make himself a pants and a simple shirt.

Even as the sun rose on the horizon, Alex sat by the dead snake and butchered it until he had its skin, bones, and tendons separated. Everything else he just threw into his storage ring.

He turned a patch of skin into the shape of a shirt and wore it. He had used a few splinters of bones and tendons to tie it all up to hold it all together.

He did the same with his pants too which just happened to be barely enough to cover his shin. Bones and tendons held it together as well.

It felt awkward to wear the skin of a just dead beast, but what other choice did he have? It was also uncomfortable to weak since the leather didn't just lay on his skin like a normal robe would and instead fought with him to stay on top.

Still, it didn't come off even when Alex jumped around, so he knew it was good enough for now. "I should get proper cloth once I find civilization again," he thought.

Once done, he left the area and started walking north again.

There were mountains in this region too, but they were all barren and easy to climb up and down as opposed to sand dunes, so Alex was very fast in his walking.

About halfway through the day, Scarlet knocked on his head and pointed to the side. By now, she was out again and standing on top of Alex's shoulders again.

Alex looked towards the side she pointed at and saw something in the distance. At first, he thought it was just some cactus or desert bushes that he had come to see.

However, when he really looked, he realized that the thing in the distance was moving, and it was massive.

He slowly pulled out at midnight, getting ready to fight. However, when he saw what it really was, he stopped.

"Wait, those are carriages," he said when he noticed them. Finally, he had found some semblance of civilization.

He quickly put away his sword and started running in their direction. Scarlet disappeared into her beast's space when she realized he was going in the humans' direction.

Alex arrived close to the carriage and a few people immediately got out in front of the carriage. They were all broad-shouldered men that looked very strong and wearing nothing but a pair of pants.

They wore necklaces, bracelets and armlets made up of beast bones and had skin that was very brown. They were so incredibly tanned that Alex thought for a moment that they were just clad in black blood.

"Move out of the way or we will kill you!" they shouted as they held large bone spears in their hands.

Alex raised his hands to show that he was harmless. "I don't mean any harm. I am lost and was hoping to ride your carriage and maybe borrow a few clothes."

The men suddenly dropped their aggressiveness, and Alex was happy to see that they weren't muscle brained. However, then he heard the main person speak.

"Heh, look at his skin, so fair. Relax brothers, it's just a weak little kid," one of the men at the front said.

"Yeah, he reminds me of myself when I first came to this place," another one said.

"Kid, get out of the way. Go back to your tribe and don't run in front of our carriage again. Next time, we will kill you," they said and turned around to return.

"Brothers, wait. I'm not someone from any tribe. I'm just a wanderer who has lost his ways. Can you please let me come with you?" Alex said.

"A herd leaves behind the weak, and you expect us to add one to ours?" the man asked.

"Can I at least follow you?" Alex asked.

"Don't try, kid. We don't need another useless mouth to feed," the man said.

"I can be of use. I can do anything," Alex said.

The man however just waved Alex away. "Yeah, go be of use to some other tribe. Our Stepstones tribe has no need for you," he said.

Alex's patience was coming to an end at this point. He had been respectful for a while, but now he was heavily siding on using his fists at the moment.

The carriage had arrived close to them at this point and the one at the front suddenly stopped.

Alex and the others stopped what they were talking about and looked towards the carriage.

The door to the carriage opened and a woman with well-defined muscles walked out with heavily tanned skin just like the others.

She stepped up to the 3 buffed men while casting a curious glance toward Alex.

"Who is this young brother? And What's does he want?" she asked.

Chapter ﻿999 Pretty

"Nothing much, sister Yun. I was just trying to send this kid away. He keeps insisting on coming with us," she said.

The girl turned towards Alex with an inquisitive look. "Why do you want to come with us? Do you have something to do with the Stepstones tribe?"

"I'm afraid I have nothing of business with your tribe, miss," he said. "I simply wished to accompany you to go to the nearest city. I can drop off halfway through if you are worried about me having bad intentions."

The 3 men immediately laughed when they heard that. They did not believe Alex to be strong enough to do anything at all.

"You are so weak that you wouldn't even be able to--"

The girl glared at them and the man stopped speaking.

"When you say you want to go to a nearby city, which city are you talking about?" she asked.

"I... am afraid I do not know about any cities around here," Alex said.

"Wait, kid. Are you actually a player? I thought it was just a coincidence that you had untanned skin," one of the guards said.

Alex looked at him. "I am," he said. "Are you a player too?"

"Yes, I am," he said. "Damn, did they start sending out more of you? Do yourself a favor kid, stop playing the game and leave. This isn't a game, but a real world."

"Oh, I'm not a new player," Alex said.

"Huh? How young were you when you started playing then?" the man asked.

"Stop asking random questions," the girl said. "You, come with me."

The girl turned around and got back into the carriage. "Well, I guess we have no other choice then. Go on, kid," the man said.

Alex nodded and thanked them before going onto the carriage.

The inside of the carriage wasn't very good. All it was was some metal frame that was stuck together with some leather seats inside. There were no fancy colors or drapes.

The carriage was really just there to stop the sun. The girl sat on one side of the carriage seats, so Alex sat on the one opposite to her.

"You can seat next to me," she said as she patted the empty seat next to her.

"No, I'm fine," Alex said. He looked outside the carriage, but there was no sight to see other than barren land and dried-up bushes. After all, it really was all desert in this part of the southern continent.

"What is your name?" the girl asked.

"Yu Ming," Alex said. "What's yours?"

"Li Yun," the girl replied without much emotion in her voice. She looked at him from head to toe. "Those are some rather crude clothes you are wearing. Someone must've done a bad job at drying the leather before making your clothes," she said.

"Hehe," Alex simply laughed and said nothing else. He looked at the girl's own clothes.

She had a lot of skin showing from her face to her arms to her stomach and legs. The only parts that were really covered were her chest and thighs.

She wasn't even wearing any shoes or sandals. Alex remembered back to the men outside who were only wearing some pants and nothing else.

"Are you done looking?" the girl asked.

"Ah, my apologies. I was just looking at the tailor's work on your clothes," Alex said. "I will look away."

"It's fine," the girl said. "You can look at me if you want."

Alex couldn't help but be a little surprised. Any other girl would've surely been offended at this point and this girl was instead asking to be stared at.

"It's alright," Alex said and only looked into her eyes.

"I like your eyes," the girl said.

"Thank you," Alex said with slight confusion bubbling in his heart. He couldn't understand what was going on here.

Was she falling in love with him? Was she even old enough to? Alex looked no older than 20 or 22 just because he was a cultivator. However, in the girl's case, she wasn't one.

He had heard about Southern Continent's people being Body Cultivators, but could body cultivation improve lifespan or aging?

Alex was quite oblivious to this side of things.

"You seem to be someone important. Are you the tribe's strongest disciple or something?" Alex asked.

"I'm the chief's daughter," she said. "In terms of strength, I rank pretty high in the tribe."

"I see," he said. 'Tribes and chiefs huh? It seems I will have to get used to a new system of cultivators.'

"Where are you from?" the girl asked with her head resting on her hands, which rested on her knee.

"I'm from... somewhere far away," Alex said, unsure if he wanted to say the exact place.

"And where is somewhere far away?" the girl asked.

Alex smiled as it seemed the girl was too curious. Since she had decided to give him a ride, he decided to answer her as well. "In another continent," he replied.

The girl looked at him with foolish surprise on her face for a few seconds before bursting out into a peal of laughter.

"You are funny. Has anyone ever told you that?" she asked.

"No, not really," Alex said.

"So, where did you really come from?" she asked.

"I wasn't lying. I'm from another continent. I came here on accident, and I'm trying to find my way back," he said.

"Do you have to go back?" she asked.

"Of course," Alex said.

"But I don't want you to," she said with a sad look on her face.

"Sorry?" Alex looked at her awkwardly.

"I don't want you to go anywhere," she said.

"I don't understand what you are trying to say, miss Yun," Alex said. "I don't know why you would say you you don't want me to leave."

"Because you are so pretty and fair, like a piece of jewelry made from ivory. I want to keep around a young and pretty man like you since you are so good in the eyes," she said.

"I beg your pardon!" Alex was a little offended at what she had said.

"Oh, don't worry, you will learn to stop begging very soon. All slaves are taught that very early on. Begging won't help them at all," she said.

"Slave?" Alex's eyes narrowed.

"Of course," the girl said. Her face then turned disgusted. "Although, with your meager strength, the best you could be useful for would be bait for the beasts at night, but I guess you are too pretty to die in vain. So, I will make you my slave instead."

Alex remained quiet for a few moments as he had to take it all in. In the end, all he could do was sigh. "So, there are slaves in the Southern Continent?" he asked.

"Just in the Wastelands, but yes," the girl said.

He shook his head as he hoped that his father wasn't one. "What do you make the slaves do?" he asked.

"They beat their masters, of course," she said with a smile on her face.

Alex thought his mind stopped working for a moment as what he heard was simply outrageous.

"Wait, you mean their masters beat them... no, that doesn't make sense. Why would that be an answer? Then... what?" he couldn't comprehend the meaning behind that simple sentence.

"Well, they cook for us, wash for us, and do whatever we say them to. But mostly, we just use slaves to beat us," she said.

"Okay, I have no idea what sort of masochistic society you guys live in, but I'm not going to be part of it. I'm not going to be your slave either, so you can fuck right off," Alex said.

"Heh, you can say that all you want, but once we reach our tribe, you will either be a bait or my slave. I will leave the choice up to you," she said.

"And my choice will forever be neither. Girl, how old are you even?" he asked.

"Don't call me girl, call me master. I'm 34 years old," she said.

"And I'm 42. I'm older than you, so you will not talk to me like I'm younger than you," he said.

"Whatever! I don't know how it was in your continent, but in the Wastelands, strength beats all. If you want respect, then you need to be strong," the girl said with a puffed-up chest. "If not, you will be lucky just to be a slave. So, be happy that you are one."

*SLAP*

Alex made a resounding slap that reddened the girl's cheek. The girl didn't even see when he moved; all she could feel was a slight pain and burning heat on her cheeks.

"How's that for strength? Do you still think I should be disrespected? Do you still think I should be a slave?" he asked.

"What... how did you?" she asked.

"What now? Since you are so weak, maybe I should make you my slave. How does that sound?" he asked.

The girl held her cheek as tears rolled down her eyes. Even so, Alex didn't stop glaring at her.

Mere tears weren't enough to soften the anger he felt at the moment after being repeatedly said to be turned into a slave.

"Tell me, what should I do to weaklings like you?" he asked.

The girl slowly put her hands down. "Fine, make me your slave," she said.

'The hell? This girl isn't serious, right?' he thought.

"But in return, you must marry me when I get stronger," she said.

'Oh no,' he thought. 'I got away from a madman, only to fall in the hands of another one.'

Chapter 1000 Sacred Flames

The girl looked at Alex with expectant eyes as it seemed she truly wished to become his slave. Alex couldn't help but feel uncomfortable at the sight.

"Forget about it. I'm not making anyone a slave," he said.

"Tsk, then at least make me your wife," she said.

"No," Alex said.

"Why? Do you not want me? I'm the strongest female in my tribe that has yet to marry. Look at my hips, I can give you so many children. My breasts are quite big too. Just look at i—"

"Stop it. I do not wish to see your breasts. All I want for now are some answers. Depending on the answers, I might just leave right now," Alex said.

"Oh, go ahead. What do you want to ask?" Li Yun looked disappointed, but she still respectfully spoke now that Alex had shown his strength.

"First of all, is there any place with Qi in the southern continent?" he asked.

"I don't know," the girl said. "I've never seen this Qi in my life. I've only ever heard it from the elders."

'Hmm, then I should probably ask these elders when I get to the Stepstones tribe,' Alex thought. He would also have to search for his father when he got there.

He had already searched the caravan or whatever it was that he was part of. All he could see was the different carriages being pulled by different beasts that seemed to have been tamed.

The humans were the ones walking, so he checked inside the carriages and found them to be mostly filled with various different fishes, which surprised him quite a lot.

"Where did you get the fish from?" he asked.

The girl's eyes narrowed. "How did you know?" she asked.

"That's not an answer," Alex said.

"Hmph, we got it from the Maroon Bay," she answered.

"Maroon bay? Where is that exactly?" he asked.

"In the direction where the sun comes up from," she said. "We go there from time to time to get ourselves some food."

"You have to go to the east to get food?" Alex asked. "And you have to take an entire caravan with you?"

"What do you expect us to do? It's very far you know? It takes us nearly two weeks just to reach there," she said.

"And yet you still go? Is there absolutely no food in the Wasteland other than these fishes?" he asked.

"There are," she said. "We can eat the beasts, but mostly their meat is too tough to chew and the weaker folks in the tribe can't even chew on it. So, we have to go get the soft meat from the ocean."

"And it takes you 2 weeks to reach there, huh? Is the east that closer than the west?" he asked.

"West is closer," she said. "If we were to go west, it would take us no more than 10 days."

"Then why do you go east?" he asked with a curious expression.

"The west is off limits. There are very strong tribes there and we absolutely cannot offend them in the slightest," she said.

"I see," Alex said as he took in the information he heard. "How much longer till we reach the Stepstones tribe?"

"About 2 more days," she said. "Maybe 3, or even 4. It's hard to say how long it will take on the return since the people will have to walk instead of riding the carriage."

"I noticed that," Alex said. "Do you guys not have Storage bags to keep the fish in?" he asked.

"What's a storage bag?" the girl asked.

"That explains it," he said as he sighed. He thought of some questions he wanted to learn about and soon learned a bit more about the Wastelands.

To his surprise, there were absolutely no cities in this place. There were only tribes that liked to stay reclusive.

There were apparently hundreds if not thousands of tribes, and each one stayed about a day's worth of travel away.

In a Saint realm Qi cultivator's term, they would be about an hour away at most.

Even though there were so many tribes, there was one thing that was true among all of them. Strength meant status.

You either have to be very strong physically or have the potential to become very strong. This was why, even when weak, a youth was regarded more favorably than an older person.

Alex tried asking about how the people got stronger, and it turned out that it wasn't much different than how the Blazing Earth sect's people went through body cultivation.

The people would use slaves or take turns hurting each other to the point where one of them couldn't even stand. At that point, they would stop for the wounded person to heal.

When healed, they would come back stronger than before.

'No wonder she said slaves beat their masters. That is the only way to get strong here, he thought.

While the question of how they got stronger was answered, there was one other question that arose in Alex's mind.

"How do you guys heal?" he asked.

As far as he understood, there was absolutely no possibility for someone to make pills. Heck, even medicinal paste seemed to be impossible to make with how the ingredients would be hard to find in a place like this.

Other than that, he thought of the aura-absorbing technique that the disciples of the Blazing Earth sect used, but even that should be impossible as Qi wasn't available around here at all.

"Through the sacred flames of course," the girl said.

"The sacred flames? What's that?" Alex asked.

The girl looked confused. "The sacred flames are the sacred flames, of course. What else would it be?" he asked.

"Where do you get the sacred flames from?" he asked.

"Nowhere? You can't find the sacred flames anywhere but in the various tribes. It's been burning since generations ago, so there really is no making it. It's just there," she said.

'Flames that heal? So weird,' he thought. Just then, he thought of something and looked at the girl. "What's the color of your Sacred flames?" he asked.

"Uhh... yellow, red, and some blue I think," she said.

"So... it's a phoenix flame?" he asked.

"What's a phoenix?" the girl asked.

"Nevermind," he said. If his guess was right then it was most definitely the Vermilion bird's flames. 'Those flames heal?' he thought. The only thing he could remember of those flames was when they instantly burned his hand. There was no healing there.

"How exactly do the flames heal by the way? Do you use it to cauterize the wounds perhaps?" he asked.

"No, you just sit by its side. You never want to touch the flame itself. The sacred flames heal those that come beside it. However, for those that dare lay their hands upon, they kill them without mercy," she said.

'Does sound like the flames I saw yesterday,' Alex thought.

"What about cut-off limbs? Can your flames heal those?" he asked.

"The flames cannot heal which you do not have," she said. "If you lose a body part, you have to bring it with you when you heal, or you never will."

"I see," Alex said. "I'm starting to get more curious about your tribe now."

Three days passed rather quickly. The caravan never stopped for food or drink as the men that had come along in this journey were body cultivators that needed very low sustenance to go by their day.

They would take maybe a few drinks from their water pouch and eat some dry meats. Other than that, they simply walked without resting.

They would rest once they reached their tribe.

Along the way, Alex saw 2 different caravans go past them and checked for his father on both of them. Unfortunately, he was in neither one.

If Li Yun was right and just the Wastelands alone were larger than the Crimson Empire, then it would take him months, if not years to find his father.

He definitely had to find a way out of here faster than that.

Finally, the group arrived at the Stepstones tribe's location.

Li Yun walked out in front of him and Alex went behind her.

"My daughter!" a buffed-up man with a gray beard and no hair stood in front of her. "Tell me you were successful in this venture."

"Of course, father," she said. "We brought back quite a few fish this time around. I even managed to find myself a husband candidate."

"What? You found yourself a husband?" the man who could only be chief spoke loudly in shock.

"It's him, father," she turned around to point at Alex who was looking at the massive canyon that lay beyond where the tribe had made their stay in.

"What?" he turned around with a confused look. "I told you, I'm not going to be your husband."

The chief looked at Alex weirdly as well and turned towards her daughter. "Daughter, your father is old and doesn't understand these jokes your make. If you really found a potential husband then tell me who he is. No need to point at that skinny man that has probably never seen the light of day."

"I'm not joking, father," she said. "I want him to be my husband. No, your daughter hasn't gone mad. While he may not look like it, he's actually very strong."

"While coming here, he slapped me so hard that I cried," she said with a blush on her tanned face.

"Is that true?" the father turned towards Alex.

"Uh..."

"Why don't you test him, father? You'll see whether I'm telling the truth or not."

Chapter 1001 Stepstones Tribe

"If you want my daughter, then you better be strong," the old man with a big body said as he started walking towards Alex.

"I don't want your daughter," Alex said with an annoyed look on his face.

"Hah! Too late to run away now. You should have thought of that when you tried to get my daughter," he said without stopping his approach. "You already tried to seduce her with your strength."

Alex slowly backed away. "Sir, I did no such thing. I have no intention of marr—"

"I said it's too late now," the old man shouted as he jumped toward Alex.

Alex who was barely stepping had to defend himself when he saw the old man coming at him with a readied fist. He was used to seeing strong and fast people move slowly thanks to his new eyes, so he didn't know exactly how strong the old man was.

Thus, he had to prepare for the worst by using the tiny bit of Qi in his body to use for blocking.

He crossed his arms and the old man's fist landed right there. When the old man's fist landed on his arms, he was surprised beyond belief.

'He's so weak,' he thought. If he were to assign a cultivation realm, the old man would be somewhere in the low True King realm at best.

Due to how well-prepared he was, he wasn't even pushed back at all. However, he couldn't help but be sad that he used up the last of his Qi on someone so weak.

Now, he had nothing. 'Damn it,' he thought. He opened his arms back up, sending back the old man that could only stare at him with shock.

"Ho-how are you so strong?" he asked. Even the bystanders were shocked beyond belief. Their tribe chief was one of, if not the strongest person that they had ever seen. And somehow Alex had been able to defend against him so easily.

The old man's eyes wandered for a moment before landing on Alex again as a smile appeared on his face. "I accept," he said as he stood upright with a proud smile on his face. "You may marry my daughter."

"I don't want to," Alex said.

"What? Why not?" the chief asked.

"I only met her 3 days ago," Alex said. "Besides, I have no intention of marrying anytime soon."

The old man's eyes narrowed in confusion. "Then why did you seduce her?"

"I did no such thing," Alex spoke in a frustrated tone. He was finding it hard to keep his cool when both the father and daughter kept asking him to marry the girl.

"Huh? But my daughter said you hit her. Did she lie?" the old man asked.

"Uhh, about that, I was simply angry because she said she wanted to make me a slave. So I hit her," Alex said.

"So, you didn't hit her because you wanted to marry her?" the old man got sad. "I thought I finally found someone my daughter could accept."

"You guys seduce by hitting each other?" Alex was with a weird face.

"Hahaha, what else would we do?" the chief asked. "I still remember the day I seduced this girl's mother. I had to beat her so hard that she could barely see by the end of the day. Come the next day, she had fallen in love with me."

'Goddamn, that's messed up,' Alex thought.

"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint but I did not seduce your daughter or plan to," Alex said. "Now, can we go in?"

"Yes, yes," the chief said. "Everyone, go do your thing."

The group finally moved along, but even then, they kept staring at Alex from time to time. Li Yun came up to Alex again and grabbed him by the hands before dragging him away even when he kept saying that he didn't want to marry her.

She was adamant that he would turn around to her eventually.

The Stepstones tribe was located on top of a canyon, with a slightly deep gorge between segmented cliffs that were all interconnected by terribly unsteady bone bridges.

There were about 7 different cliffs in total with 6 surrounding a single one in the middle, which was the main site for the tribe.

Alex was simply stunned to see what a desolate place this was. He had not expected these people to live in such a location.

"Come on, let's go," the girl said as pulled Alex along.

The very first cliff where many small huts were present and various beasts and people remained, Alex could see some bone spines dug into the ground.

He also saw a wall of bones to keep things away from the tribe.

Alex walked along while looking at the people starting to carry out the gigantic fish they had killed in Maroon bay. They were taking it to the center camp where the chief and various other stronger folks of the tribe lived in.

The people walked to the canyon's edge and jumped, crossing the entire distance in between in a single go.

He was surprised because it wasn't just one person doing it, but rather everyone.

"Everyone of them is strong? Why the bridge then?" Alex asked.

"Not everyone is strong. It's just that we took the strong ones with us. As for the bridge, it is so we can take slaves and beasts to the other cliffs," Li Yun said. "Come."

She crossed the entire range in a single leap. Alex paused and turned around to see the chief lagging a bit behind, giving instructions to the various people of the tribe.

He shrugged and turned around to jump across the cliff in a single go. As he did, he saw the entire place from the air and finally understood why the tribe was called what it was.

The 7 separate cliffs when looked at from the top looked like stepping stones that one would use as a rudimentary pathway in a field or river.

It was around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, so while the sun would set in a few hours, it was still burning brightly at the entire tribe.

Alex walked through the homes made with rocks and mud and maybe some dried plants such as the bushes that could be found in the desert.

"That's my house there. You can stay in my room," Li Yun said.

"No, thank you," Alex said as he looked around at the tribe. Many dark-skinned individuals were staring at him, most likely for his fairer skin.

The children were even more curious as they ran up to Alex and asked why he was so white. Alex had to take a moment to think of how exactly to answer it when Li Yun spoke up first.

"You kids, I don't see a single wound on you. Shouldn't you be jumping into the gorge?" she asked.

"Yes, sister Yun," they said and as Alex watched, they jumped directly into the gorge.

"What? What did you do?" he asked.

"What? ... nothing?" she asked.

"You told the kids to jump into the gorge. They couldn't possibly be strong enough to survive that." Alex said. He quickly ran up to the edge of the cliff and looked down to see that the kids were nearly 20 meters below.

Fortunately, none of them were bleeding.

Alex was about to jump when Li Yun caught it. "Don't bother. Their parents will go get them once they are free," she said.

"What? You not only hurt the children but are also going to leave them there?" he asked.

"They're fine. The most they will have is broken bones. It would be better if they were more wounded, but it suppose you can't spread your resources too thin to improve the kids," she said.

She turned to look at Alex and saw that he looked appalled, even disgusted. So, she put on a frowning face of her own. "What? That's how we do things here. If you're not going to get hurt, you're not going to get strong. And if you don't get strong, the best you can be is bait to lure in beasts."

"Do you want to be the thing that lures beasts?" she asked.

Alex kept quiet. He was in a different location, so he shouldn't be judging them so harshly. He didn't know what kind of life they had lived here.

"I'm sorry, go on then," he said.

"Ok, so you will be staying in my room for no—"

"Not that. I will stay outside if you don't have a place," Alex said.

Li Yun couldn't help but pout. "Fine, you can stay in my mother's room," she said.

"And what about your mother?" Alex asked.

"She's dead, so you won't have to worry about her," she said with a hint of anger and sadness in her voice.

"I'm sorry," Alex said. "How... did she die?"

"Beast attack, 7 years ago," she said.

Alex looked at where they were and asked, "Was your mother out of the tribe at the time?"

"No, she was sleeping soundly in her room. The beasts were simply too many and attacked us too fast," she said. "It wasn't until after we were done dealing with the strong beasts that we found her corpse."

"My god," Alex said. "Are the beasts really that dangerous around here? I thought you said they were relatively rare."

"They are rare, for now. But on that day 7 years ago, they came in a wave, attacking everything in their path," she said.

"What happened 7 years ago to make them behave like that?" Alex asked.

"We are not sure, but we have a general idea," she said. "It definitely had something to do with the disappearance of the northern lights"

Chapter 1002 Inside A Fish

"The Northern lights?" Alex turned to look towards the north. "There was light there?"

"Yeah, It used to shine in the night, like a second sun," she said. "Well, maybe not as brightly."

"What was there?" Alex asked.

"Don't know," she said. "I doubt anyone knows. As far as I know, it was there before I was born. Probably since before even father was born."

"Oho, what are you guys talking about?" the chief appeared right next to them as he jumped from the other side of the canyon.

"We're talking about the Northern lights, father. Do you know since when it was in the north?" she asked.

"Well, the Northern lights go as far back as the sun and moon, I suppose," he said. Every piece of knowledge that gets passed down always speaks of the Sun, Moon, Sacred flames, and the Northern Lights."

"May I ask how old are you exactly, chief?" Alex asked.

p "Hmm, I haven't kept track of my own age for a while now. 110 maybe? 120? I should be around that age," he said.

"What is the oldest a person has been able to live out here?" he asked.

"Hmm, my father lived for about 175 years. I heard someone from the Serpent oasis managed to live to be about 300 years," he said. "I think those that live by the shore in fact live much longer, but I don't know how much."

"I see," Alex said. If a person's life expectancy was so short compared to Qi cultivation, then he could be certain that the knowledge passed down from generation to generation in this place actually didn't go too far back.

"Are you hungry, young man? We are about to cook a fish. It's a feast tonight," the old man said.

"I'm not exactly hungry, but I would love to eat something if you don't mind," Alex said. "Of course not. Come, I will show you around now."

"Father, I'm showing him around," Li Yun said as she grabbed onto Alex's arms again.

"Fine, fine, just follow me," he said. Since he had tested Alex's strength, he was fine with his daughter's public infatuation with Alex. Anyone would do that after finding out how strong Alex was.

Alex walked along with them as he didn't want to seem disrespectful. His spiritual sense was moving wildly, however, looking at everything he could in the tribe.

With how small the tribe's living area actually was, Alex's spiritual sense was covering it all. And yet, he still couldn't find his father.

He did find 2 things that took away his attention. The first was the phoenix flame that burned in the center of the giant room at the center of the tribe.

This was the sacred flame that the tribes bet their lives upon. Alex could even see some wounded folks being kept nearby who were being healed by it.

Other than that, he could also see the fish that was being prepared at the moment for cooking.

Inside the fish was something that he was way too excited to find.

Alex walked ahead of the other two, increasing his pace as he entered the room.

The man who was working on the fish was cut open the guts and was on the way to pull out something spherical from inside the fish.

Alex walked straight to the man and said, "hand it to me."

The man had been someone who had seen Alex fight, so refusing was the last thing he was ever going to do. So, he brought out his hand and gave the item to Alex.

Alex looked at it with fervent eyes. "A beast core!" he thought. He couldn't imagine finding a beast core in a place like this, but he had found one.

Although, it had to come from a fish that was not from this continent.

"Do you have some water to wash this off?" he asked.

"There's some over there," the chief said.

Alex quickly walked up to the hole in the ground that was used to hold water. He quickly washed the blood off the beast's core and with zero hesitation, ate it.

"What?"

"Don't eat that!"

Both the father and daughter shouted at the same time as Alex ate the core. The core reached his stomach and dissipated into some energy.

The fish that the core belonged to seemed to have a high cultivation base in the Self-tempering realm, so all Alex got was very low Qi, which was something he could fortunately use.

He wasn't really intending on using that Qi and wanted to keep it unused, but a portion of it still disappeared, stolen by a hungry mouse that wanted his body back.

"Are you okay?" Li Yun came up to him and asked.

"Oh yeah, I'm fine," Alex said.

"Are you sure? Why the hell would you eat that?" she asked. "Do you even know what that is?"

"Oh, it's alright. I can eat these," he said.

"How?" the girl couldn't understand. Everyone who was young and curious would try and eat that since it smelled so good, and each time they would have a horrible case of nausea and fever, followed by an upset stomach and constant vomits.

That were some of the first things that were taught to the children not to eat as the fish cores had unfortunately come to be used as a children's plaything.

"Right, do you perhaps have more of these?" Alex asked her.

"Um, we don't get many of that in the fish," she said. "But there should be quite a few outside with the children if they didn't already throw them away. Why do you want it?"

"I would love to have them if you don't mind," he said.

"I will go around and ask, I guess?" she said.

Alex thanked her. He waited around with the chief, talking for a bit as they watched the fish being cut open.

They realized that they had yet to introduce themselves to each other, so they did. The old man's name was Li Yanxiao, and his family had been chief for ages.

"Oh right, do you have some good tailor? I need to have some clothes made for me," Alex said.

"Clothes? We have some good tailors that can make you some clothes. Although we don't have fabric and only leather and fur, so you will have to make do with that," he said.

"That's fine. I just need proper clothes," Alex said. "Also, can you make it out of this?"

Alex tossed out the snake corpse that he had killed some nights ago.

The moment the snake appeared, the old man was shocked. "Where did it come from?" he asked.

"I have a place where I can keep it," he said. "It's what us cultivators do regularly."

The old man walked up to the snake's corpse and touched its skin. When he did, his eyes went wide.

"You killed this beast?" he asked.

"I did," Alex said.

"Amazing," the old man said. "This is so strong, and you somehow managed to kill it."

He turned to look at Alex. "Don't worry, we can make the best clothes for you with such a material."

Chapter 1003 Talk By The Flame

The old man took away his snake corpse and gave it to some woman in the tribe that would make him a good set of shirts and pants.

Alex told the chief that they could use the rest of the monster for whatever they wanted as that was all he could do for letting them stay there.

Of course, there was the case of him having to do nothing as strength was what these people revered, and would let him get away with almost anything just based on his strength. But he didn't feel like doing that since he had his own values that were different from what these people followed.

He walked out with the chief and went somewhere to talk. The chief was curious about where Alex was from and Alex used the opportunity to learn more about the Southern Continent from the father that the daughter would likely not know.

"These fish you get from the Maroon Bay. How often do you go to get them?" he asked.

"3 times a year," the old man said. "Each trip brings back enough food to last 4 whole months, so we only have to go there 3 times each."

"And this Maroon Bay, does it have Qi?" Alex asked.

"Qi? Hmm... I can't say confidently, but I would suspect that it doesn't," the old man said. "Well, not the bay at least."

"I see," Alex said. He had suspected as much after all.

"I have to be honest, I've only ever heard of a Qi cultivator. I know there are some in the north, but they never come in this direction. Is this true that they can live for thousands of years?" the old man asked.

Ning smiled and started answering his question.

Li Yun came back a few minutes later, holding nearly 15 different beast cores in between her arms. "Will this be enough?" she asked.

"Oh, yes. That will be plenty," Alex said.

"Just wait, I will return after washing this," she said and went into the room with the water.

"I see you guys don't treat water as a rarity. Why is that?" Alex asked.

"Oh, water is not rare. While it is rare on the surface, if you dig deep enough, you can find it," the old man said. "There's a well at the bottom of the cliff over there. We go down to bring water each day."

"Oh," Alex gave a surprised expression. He truly hadn't expected the desert to be this resourceful when it came to water.

Li Yun returned not long after with clean beast cores and sat in front of Alex as she handed them to him.

"Thank you," Alex said as he took them, but found it hard to eat when she kept staring at him.

"Umm... do you have to look at me like that when I'm about to eat?" he asked.

"Of course, I'm very curious how you can stomach it all," she said.

"Sigh, do as you want," he said as he started eating the cores. He ate them one after another, shocking both the father, daughter, and anyone that was around that saw them.

They looked absolutely appalled at seeing someone eat something that would otherwise make them terribly ill.

"How is he eating all that?"

"Is he not sick?"

"He must be a beast in human clothing."

"I hear he came from across the ocean."

People talked around him, but Alex was too focused on eating the cores to care about the rest of the stuff.

Not a single one of these cores he ate was a Saint rank one and that made him sad. If it was, then maybe he would have a decent amount of Qi.

The total Qi he got from the 15 beast cores was not even enough to fill a tenth of his dantian, and even then, half of it was taken away by Whisker, and surprisingly some by Scarlet.

'Dammit, I have two Qi-hungry beasts with me. Eating beast cores alone isn't going to be enough for me,' he thought. He would have to down hundreds of such cores to gather enough Qi to fill his dantian.

"Can all people with Qi do that?" Li Yun asked with a look of awe on her face.

"A few, not all," Alex said.

"Was it useful?" she asked.

"Uh... no, not really," he said. "It's not your fault though. The cores were just from weak beasts."

"Weak... are they really that weak?" she asked. She remembered the trouble one would have to go through to find such fish, and Alex was calling them weak.

"If you are done, let us feast now," the chief said.

The giant fish was brought out, fully cooked and every single person in the tribe that had gathered there was given a piece of it.

Alex looked around at the people who were broken arms, cuts all over their bodies, lacerated skin, and an overall hurt look as if they had just been through a gruesome fight.

They all ate some piece of the fish, the weaker ones getting more as they required strength to function.

Alex saw the slaves that had eyes full of determination to get stronger. They were with wounds too.

He quietly ate his fish while watching the people talk to each other. The tribe had been just back from a long journey, so the people were catching up to what happened.

Some talked about fighting beasts on the path. Some talked about how hard it was to catch a fish. Some talked about the many, many distance-long beaches of salt.

The chief stayed quiet as he watched his tribes folk passionately speak too.

A while later, after everyone was done eating, they all stood up around the same time and started walking away.

"Where are they going?" Alex asked curiously.

"Oh, to the hall of Sacred flames. They will sit there for a few hours to heal," Li Yun said.

"Ah, I see," Alex said. He went along and walked into the hall. Inside, he saw the same type of flame burning as the one he had seen by the crater where he had appeared.

"Come to the middle," the chief said when he saw Alex stop moving after entering the hall.

"It's fine. I can remain here. Let the wounded stay closer," he said.

"Nonsense," the old man said. "In the Stepstones tribe, only the strongest get the best treatment. Since you're the strongest, you will sit closest to the flames."

"Come on, do we have to?" Alex asked.

"It's tradition," the old man replied without giving any room for argument.

"Fine, let's go," Alex said and walked up to the fire.

He sat the closest to the fire that was at the center. Even the chief stayed a step behind him. 'They really care about strength, huh?' he thought.

The room was quiet, aside from a few grunts of pain here and there. Alex didn't have to heal himself, so he simply looked around the room at those that needed it.

He was truly surprised by just how quickly they were all healing. It wasn't at the same rate as his Undying body of course, but in just an hour, one would be able to heal broken bones. Wounds healed in a matter of minutes too.

The kids were surprisingly healing faster, perhaps due to the low energy required to heal fully.

As the entire tribe stayed quiet in the room, they were all healed.

After an hour, a few people finally started standing up and leaving. Alex kept on sitting while watching the colorful flames, trying to see if there was any way he could replicate the properties inside of it.

However, it seemed a bit too advanced for him. If there was only the property of fire, he most likely could have understood it all, but there was clearly something else present in the flames that he couldn't even begin to understand.

"You don't have these flames in your place?" the chief asked. "You seem to be entranced by it."

"No, we don't," Alex said. "This is exclusive to just the Southern Continent, and maybe a few other locations out there."

"Oh, is that so?" the old man said. "Well, we are blessed to have this then."

"Right, how easy is it to find the Sacred flames in the Southern Continent? How did you find yours?" he asked.

"Well, it has been here since before my grandfather's time. It should have been here forever. Also, just like us, you should be able to find Sacred flames in any of the tribes in the Wasteland," the chief said.

"Any tribes? Do you have a special method of acquiring it?" Alex asked curiously.

"Oh, no," the chief said. "I guess I misspoke, in a way."

"Hmm? What do you mean?" the old man asked.

"Rather than saying you can find the Sacred flames in every tribe of the Wasteland, it is more accurate to say that wherever there is a Sacred flame, you will find a tribe," he said.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "So, you're saying that you don't acquire a Sacred flame, but rather you flock to one when you find it."

"Yes, my ancestors did the same with this place as many others did with their own," the chief said.

"I see," Alex said. He was truly very much intrigued by the Sacred flames now.

He had been in the Southern Continent for just a few days and he was already curious about the mysteries it held. He hoped he would get the answers by the time he left the continent not long from now.

Chapter 1004 Incident At Night

"This is where you will be sleeping," Li Yun said.

Alex and she were in her mother's room, which hadn't been in use for nearly 7 years.

While it was technically a room, the room Alex was given was no more than the size of a closet. There was just a small sleeping area with beast fur where could sleep.

Alex looked at the small room and sighed. There was nothing he could complain about.

"Thank you," he said and lay on the beast's fur. There was a small pouch full of sand at the end that was to be used as pillows.

"Do you need a sleeping companion? I can do the part," she said enthusiastically.

"No, thank you," Alex said and lay on the bed.

"Well, you'll come around soon enough," she said and went away.

Alex sighed. He felt too tired to even care about her advances. It was a weird feeling, tiredness.

It was different from the fatigue one could get from working for a long time. It was both physical and mental.

'Is that what happens when you are out of Qi for this long?' he thought. He had been functioning on practically no Qi for over 4 days now and was now incredibly tired.

For the first time in a very, very long time, Alex felt like falling asleep. He yawned for a moment and laid back as he watched the simple roof for a while. Then, slowly, as the fatigue caught up to him more and more, he fell asleep.

Some hours later, in the dark of night, Alex woke up suddenly to some sounds. "Li Yun, is that you?' he asked. He wouldn't expect it to be anyone else that would come by his place.

However, when he saw who it really was, he calmed down.

"Oh, Scarlet. What are you doing outside? You should rest," he said. However, the bird didn't want to hear what he had to say.

Without making a single other noise, it silently flew into the dead of night, flying out of the house.

Alex was worried about where she would go, but when he saw her going toward the Phoenix flames, he guessed she only wanted to play by the fire.

'It must remind her of her parents,' he thought and went back to sleep. Soon enough, he fell asleep.

Scarlet arrived by the flames with the only people in the room being ones that were too severely wounded to leave. They had mostly healed by now, but while doing so had fallen asleep in the room.

Scarlet's deep purple eyes stared at the flames, eyes that were intelligent, eyes that seemed to be planning on doing something very soon.

* * * * * * *

Alex woke up again to noise from outside. His first thought now was that Scarlet had returned. However, he could feel her inside her beast space already, and the noise was still coming from outside.

Alex slowly stood up and looked outside the room. He could see some light from the east, lighting the horizon and the landscape a little.

It was still dark outside, but dawn was close.

'What's the noise about?' he thought as he walked outside. He saw people gathering outside, mostly by the hall of Sacred flames.

He slowly walked ahead, and heard tidbits of people's confusion, but couldn't gather anything substantial. It wasn't until he was halfway through the crowd that he heard what had happened.

The Sacred flames had been snuffed out.

"What?" Alex expressed his shock rather loudly, letting the people around him know that he was there.

The moment the people saw him, they quickly sided away to let him walk ahead.

Alex took the opportunity to rush inside and saw the chief gather around the location where the Sacred flames used to be. Now, there was simply nothing but a black smudge on the ground.

"So, it's true," he said when he saw the flame is gone.

"Did no one see who did this?" the chief asked angrily, but the other people just remained quiet.

Alex wondered what happened too when he remembered last night when he had woken up for a small moment and had gone back to sleep.

'Scarlet did this?' he thought. 'How?'

He looked back at the location of the flame and didn't know what to say. However, since he didn't want to lie or hide from them, he decided to tell them that it was him.

If someone else was punished for a situation that Scarlet had most likely caused, he would feel very guilty.

'I will have to make sure it truly was Scarlet,' he thought and sent his spiritual sense to check the area around where the fire used to be.

Just as he was about to check for it, he noticed something and he couldn't help but have his eyes go wide.

'No way,' he thought when he sensed the thing that was simply unthinkable in the wastelands.

He sensed Qi.

'This is... True Qi,' he thought. Alex quickly sent his senses underground and deep below, he found a spirit vein that was perfectly working.

'What the hell?' he thought as his eyes went wide. 'How is there a working spirit vein here?'

There was no way for him to gain answers at all. Just then, he saw something curious about this Spirit vein.

While the vein itself wasn't noteworthy, and was similar to every other Spirit vein out there, for some reason, the Qi that was released from there was slowly converging in the middle before coming up straight.

The place where it came out was exactly the spot where the sacred flames were.

A thought came to Alex that the more he thought about it, the more it started to make sense. 'The Spirit vein is sustaining the Phoenix flames, and the phoenix flames are stealing away all the Qi from it.'

He figured that was the reason why there was absolutely no Qi in the Wastelands at all.

'Don't all tribes have sacred flames? Or rather, everywhere there is a Sacred flame, you can find a tribe gathers,' he thought.

If he was to go by this assessment, then the only logical conclusion he could come by was that in every single location there was a Sacred flame or a tribe, there was a Spirit vein underneath that was being worked up.

'Is that is?' he thought. 'Is that why there is absolutely no Qi anywhere in the Wastelands because all of it is eaten away by the flames?'

Alex wanted to learn more. All he thought, for now, was just a theory. He would have to go to another tribe and see if there was a Spirit vein underneath.

If his theory was correct, there most definitely would be.

"Is no one going to answer me?" the Chief said aggressively. He was visibly angry and for good reason. In a way, since the sacred flames were snuffed out, the tribe would have to disband.

Even if they didn't want to, they would have to leave the location as everyone would want to grow stronger and there would be no way of growing stronger in a place without the Sacred flames.

"Chief, wait a minute," Alex said.

"What?" the chief turned towards him angrily too. Even if Alex was stronger, his anger was too much for him to think rationally.

"Please send the people out. I will either try to reverse the situation or find a way to make this a good thing. I promise," he said.

The chief's chest heaved in anger for a while before calming down a little. "Fine, everyone out!" he said.

"I'm staying," Li Yun said.

The chief turned to look at Alex for his approval. "It's fine. You two can stay."

The chief nodded and waited for everyone to leave. Once everyone was gone, he turned to Alex.

"What do you plan on doing now?" he asked.

Alex sighed. "Scarlet, come out!" he said.

Scarlet didn't respond at all. There was no coming out either.

"Scarlet, don't play with me right now. I know it was your doing, come out," he said. "If you don't, I wi--"

*Screech*

Scarlet finally came out, making angry noises at Alex for always using the same excuse to bring her out.

"Come down here," he said to the bird.

Both the chief and his daughter were way too surprised to see a bird appear from practically nowhere.

Scarlet refused to come down and kept flying above their head in circles. Alex got slightly annoyed as well.

"You did this, didn't you? It was you who got rid of the fire," he said.

Scarlet screeched, saying 'so what?'

"Why did you do this? Are you just trying to be rebelli--" Alex paused when he sensed it, and his eyes went wide.

Just as Scarlet was flying, he felt a wave of Qi move in her body, which signaled a breakthrough.

While he was scolding her, she had somehow broken through, while in the air. "What?" he looked confused.

"What? What's going on?" Li Yun asked.

"One moment," Alex said. He wondered how she could've possibly broken through since she didn't seem to be cultivating at all.

Then, a thought struck him. "Did you know there was Qi down there?" he asked.

Scarlet hovered at one place and nodded.

"And you put out the fire so you could bring it out? So you could cultivate and breakthrough?" he asked.

The bird nodded.

Alex was stunned for a few seconds. How was this bird so smart? Or were all beasts born from the four heavenly beasts this smart?

"You did good in finding it, but you made things worse for some people in the process," Alex said. "Can you put the flames back on?"

Chapter 1005 Wounded

Scarlet argued in an annoying screech. Alex couldn't understand much, but he understood that she wanted to keep the Qi flowing so that she could breakthrough even more.

Alex sensed her cultivation base and it was at Skin Tempering 5th realm. If she was indeed allowed to keep it going, she would probably advance through the Self-Tempering realm very fast and would be quite a bit of help to Alex.

However, this was coming at the cost of everyone in the tribe no longer being able to grow. So, Alex didn't feel right.

"Can you put back the fire or not?" he asked. "I promise you will still get to cultivate with the Qi."

Scarlet looked at Alex intently, trying to search for any hint of lying. However, when she realized that he was being truthful, she decided to do as he asked.

She flew to the spot where the Qi was being siphoned up and flapped her wings once to create a small ember of Phoenix fire. The fire caught on to the Qi that was coming up and suddenly grew to become actual flames that didn't extinguish at all.

The Sacred flames were back.

"Oh, thank god," the chief looked very relieved when he saw the sacred flames burn in the hall again. If they hadn't come back, they wouldn't know what to do at all.

"How is that bird able to bring back the Sacred flames?" Li Yun asked.

"Well, this bird is the descendant or at least a kin of the bird that your Sacred flames originate from," Alex said. "So, she seems to be able to easily get rid of it or bring it back."

"Wow, really? Doesn't that mean that she is sacred as well?" she asked.

"You can call her whatever you want to call her. Which brings me to a request I want to make," Alex said.

"What request?" the chief asked. "You can ask anything that you want."

"Yes, I would like to request a portion of the day or night when the Sacred flame is least used to allow my bird to extinguish it. There is Qi underneath this location that she can use to grow stronger," Alex said.

"Extinguish the flames?" the chief looked at Scarlet with a deliberating eye.

"I think that is fine, father," Li Yun said. "After all, we've already seen her bring back the flames, so there should be no problem, right?"

"Yeah, I suppose so," the chief said. He thought for a bit and said, "alright, I will agree to your request. After midnight, we don't really need to use the Sacred flames unless there is an emergency, so your sacred bird can use it at the time."

"Great," Alex said. "As a thank you, why don't I help you guys learn Qi cultivation too? You will find the wonders it can do and make your life so much easier."

"Qi cultivation… can we do that?" the old man asked curiously.

"I don't see why not," Alex said. "Once you've reached a certain level, which will take you a few years, you will be able to fly, use various different powers…"

Alex paused. He was so excited to tell them about everything that Qi cultivation could do that he didn't even stop to think how they will be learning it for years to reach the level he said they will.

'If I'm not here to teach them, or if Scarlet isn't here to get rid of or bring back the flames, they won't succeed at all,' he thought.

"We can really fly?" Li Yun asked excitedly.

"Um… please don't get too optimistic just yet. You will have to spend a lot of time cultivating for that to happen, and with you constantly needing the sacred flames to be burning, I'm not certain we can bring out enough Qi from underground to fill the area such that you can absorb a lot of it," he said.

"Oh," Li Yun got a little sad. "Well, you can't have something without giving up on something else, I suppose."

"Anyway, we can talk about this later. The people outside must be waiting for the news," the Chief said.

Alex nodded and they opened the doors to the halls to let the people know that they had reinstated the Sacred flames.

Alex took back Scarlet after telling her that she could use the Qi later tonight after everyone had fallen asleep.

The sun had just risen past the horizon and the day had begun.

The first thing the people did was go fetch some water. Alex jumped down the cavern to see where the water came from and was surprised to see a rather massive well in the ground with water coming up to halfway up the well.

Alex wondered how they would get the water up the cliff when a person threw something into the well. He looked closely and saw that it was a large pouch made from beast leather that could hold at least 10 liters of water.

It wasn't the only pouch as there were multiple people there, all waiting with the pouch. When the pouch filled up, the person who threw it in fished the water out and jumped up the cliff back onto the top of the canyon.

Then, another person threw in their pouch and started doing it all over again. Alex finally understood how they got water without any buckets or items of some other sort.

Once the people were done getting water, they moved on to what would otherwise take the most time in their day. That was getting beat up.

Alex watched, half horrified and half surprised at the fact that people were getting beat up by others and had happy looks on their faces.

He understood that they weren't happy because of the pain, but because this pain was going to make them stronger in the long run. However, that couldn't stop him from being weirded out.

The adults were being beaten up by other adults, ones that were certainly weaker than him, and the kids were jumping off of the edge repeatedly so that they could break their bones and get hurt.

"There you are, I was looking for you," Li Yun said as she came from the side. "I was looking for you."

"Sorry, I was looking around at what the tribe members do to pass their time. What did you need me for?" he asked.

Li Yun handed him something which Alex took without question. Then he looked at it and let it unfurl in his hands to reveal that it was a whip.

"Why are you…" he understood why it was without having to finish the question.

"Come on, hit me. Since you're so strong, I should be able to improve very fast," she said.

"Uhh… can I not? I don't feel right hitting a girl who isn't even defending," he said.

"What? Stop being a wussy and hit me. If I'm not against it, why are you?" she asked.

Alex hesitated for a bit and sighed. "Fine," he said and clutched the whip tightly.

Li Yun turned around to expose her half-naked back and waited for Alex to start. "Come on, hit me already," she said.

"Yes, yes," Alex said and tried to hold back his strength before swinging at her.

*CLACK*

The whip made a sharp sound as it struck Li Yun on the back, causing a slight wound to form on it. Even through the dark skin, he could see the skin turning quite red at the point of contact.

Li Yun grunted in pain, but she could handle it. "Hmm? What are you waiting for? Continue," she said.

"Okay," he said and whipped her again.

Li Yun held back her moans from being hurt, and Alex struck again. He whipped her again and again, multiple times.

Each time she was whipped, a different part of her back was injured. After a while, Alex managed to injure every single part of her back.

"Ughh… now my legs too," she said.

Alex nodded. He started whipping her legs this time around and soon enough her legs were fully wounded as well.

Li Yun turned around with a pained look on her face, but the clear determination to continue on. "Now the front," she said.

Alex didn't want to hit her from the front, but he gave in to her demand and started whipping her again.

In less than 15 minutes, the girl was wounded from head to toe with not a single part of her skin that wasn't lacerated, swollen, or bleeding.

"That should be enough for now. You should go heal," Alex said.

"No, not yet," the girl said through tears and grunts. "I'm not hurt as much as I can."

"You're covered in wounds from head to toe. What else do you want me to do? Break every bone in your body?" he asked.

The girl gave a cheeky little smile. "Yes. Now do it, please."

Alex hesitated for a bit before sighing again. 'I don't think I can ever get used to the way of these tribe folks,' he thought before starting to break her bones one by one.

He flinched every time her bones cracked under his hands and then proceeded to break other bones.

Finally, after everything was broken, he stopped. "We're done now, right? Don't tell me to hurt your internal organs or anything like that," he said.

"No, no, we're done," the girl said as she lay on the floor unable to move. "Umm… can you help me to the room? I can't move right now."

Alex chuckled a bit. "Yeah, let's go," he said as he carried her in his arms and took her to the hall.

Chapter 1006 Baits

Li Yun grunted in pain with barely opened eyes as Alex carried her towards the hall of Sacred flames.

"I've… never been… this heavily injured… in such little time," she spoke through her pain.

"Don't speak for now. Wait until you are healed," he said as he walked.

Li Yun didn't say anything else for a while, but her eyes remained on Alex. When they reached the hall and Alex laid her down next to the fire, she finally spoke.

"You're so cute, you know?"

Alex was not expecting that. "Ahem, is that so?" he said.

"Yeah," Li Yun said. "You're so cute. I wish I could kiss you right now."

"Unfortunately, you can't even move your fingers at the moment," Alex said.

"Then you kiss me," she said.

"I'm sorry. You should give up on it," Alex said.

"Why? What's wrong with me?" she asked. "You keep trying to deny me for some reason. Surely its not because of our age right? I don't mind if you're too old for me. You look young enough. Or are you worried that I might turn old too fast?"

"That's not it," Alex said. "I just don't have the luxury to fall in love at the moment. There are so many things I have still to do and falling in love just… it just makes it hard for me when I have one more person to care for. Especially right now, when I'm in a situation where I feel incapable of caring for myself."

"I won't be a burden. I'm sure you can—"

"No," Alex said. "I've made up my mind and I won't change it for a while. As long as I'm not together with everyone I care about, I won't even think about getting into any sort of relationship."

"Well, whatever you say, you can't stop it when your heart says you're in love. As I've said before, I'm sure you'll come around to me," she said with an air of defiance in her voice. She did not believe that Alex could hold on to his beliefs any longer than his heart could.

"I doubt that," he said. "Especially since I plan on leaving this place in a few days."

Li Yun remained quiet after she heard that. She understood that he had many other places to go to look for whatever it was he was searching for. But that didn't make it any easier for her to hear it.

"How about a bet then?" she asked. "I say that we will kiss before you leave."

"Haha, no chance," Alex said.

"That's why it's a bet," she said.

"Okay, what do you want if you win?" he asked.

"Nothing. If I got to kiss you, then I already won," she said. "What do you want instead?"

"Nothing, I guess," Alex said.

"Okay, so the bet itself will be our prize," she said and finally turned around to heal quietly.

Alex didn't know what else to say, so he remained quiet and let her heal. He sat there for a while with her, and once her body was done being healed enough, he finally left.

Once he got outside, he met with the chief who asked him to help his body cultivate next. Alex wanted to refuse, but seeing the old man's enthusiasm for finding someone that could help him, he gave in to the old man's request and helped him.

Fortunately, he didn't have to carry the old man as he did his daughter.

Once he was done, Alex jumped down to the canyon and ran away from the tribe to look at the nearby areas while he waited for everyone back at the tribe to be done with training.

'So much empty space,' Alex thought. He walked to the top of a small hill and looked all around him, but he could see no other sign of humans at all.

He roamed the area for a while, and after the sun started going down, he finally returned to the tribe.

He was told that he could eat if he wanted, but Alex didn't find that necessary. If anything, after yesterday's meal, he wouldn't have to eat for at least 3 more days.

So, instead of eating, he was taken to the hall of sacred flames where everyone started healing. Alex spent a few minutes there and wondered what he would do in the future.

Since there didn't seem to be much to do, he decided to leave this place for a day or two from now. He needed to move on with things as Pearl most likely needed him wherever he was.

He had grown a habit of looking at his left arm from time to time just to make sure that Pearl was still alive. He wouldn't know what to do if he looked at his arm and saw that it was empty.

He sighed and thought of leaving the hall early when he saw the chief leave before him. Alex looked at him leave quietly and wondered what he was doing, leaving the hall so soon.

He let out his senses and kept track of him to see where he was going this early on. When he saw the chief taking away people who were clearly very weak away from this place, he started growing concerned.

'Wait, are they…?' he remembered something Li Yun had told him when he had just met her. If not her slave, the best thing he could be would be bait for the beasts.

Without even thinking, Alex leaped away from where he was sitting and went outside. He followed the chief and quickly arrived at the southern end of the tribe where there was a fence made up of beast bones.

"Chief, what the hell are you doing?" he asked.

"Hmm? Oh, we were thinking of getting killing some beasts today, nothing more," the chief said.

"And you're going to sacrifice these people for that?" he asked angrily.

"Sacrifice? What do you mean?" he asked.

"Aren't you going to put them in harm's way just to lure the beasts?" Alex asked.

"Uh… yeah, but what else can we do?" the chief asked.

"Why not put yourself up there?" Alex asked.

"Sigh, that doesn't work. The beasts seem to be able to tell when someone isn't strong. Maybe it is our scent or something. They will only come if we let the weaker folks be the bait," the chief said.

"And you are willing to kill these people for that?" Alex asked.

"Wait, what are you talking about?" the chief asked. "Why would these people die?"

Alex was taken aback by the response. "Aren't they going to die if you let the beasts come for them?" he asked.

"Well, yes, but we'll be right here to save them. We're only luring the beasts, not feeding them," the chief said. "Our intention is to kill the beats before they can even get close enough. Who gave you the idea that we were going to let them die?"

Alex thought for a bit and sighed. "Dammit, your daughter made it sound like becoming a bait was a horrible thing and that I should instead be her slave when we first met. I thought she was being genuine, but turns out she only wanted me to accept her condition," he said.

"Hahaha, you nearly fell for it. Were you not stronger, you would've become my son-in-law by now," the chief said.

Alex said nothing. He shook his head and forgot about it. "How long does it usually take for the beasts to come?" he asked.

"We're not sure," the chief said. "It really depends on if the beasts are nearby. If they are, with the night wind, it should carry these people's scent far enough that they can smell them and come for them."

Alex instantly let out his spiritual sense and saw over 8 kilometers around him. His spiritual sense had improved thus far after entering the 8th Saint Condensation realm.

It would've continued to improve even more if he could cultivate, or even if he could just use his mask. Unfortunately, he had lost it already, along with all the other items he had.

Alex felt sad every time he remembered that as well. He didn't care about many of the items he had lost. He didn't even care about the World Tree's seed or the seed of the Yang fruit.

He didn't care about the hammer or sword or the new cauldron he lost. If anything, he could make them again once he found a way to return to the Northern continent.

What he did care about was the broken shards of the cauldron that his master had given him.

What he did care about was the beast core that belonged to Pearl's mother, which he had been waiting for the right time to give him.

Those were the things he was truly concerned about, and yet, he had lost it all.

Alex sighed once more and enhanced his spiritual sense. He spread it beyond his limit, reaching 12 kilometers after straining a bit.

"There is a group of giant rats about 7 kilometers in that direction, a rather large snake about 10 kilometers in that direction, and there is a desert hyena pack, that is wandering aimlessly about 12 or so kilometers in that direction," Alex said. "If they truly can sense these people, then they should sense them pretty quickly."

The people around him were surprised. "How can you tell?" the chief asked with a surprised look as well.

"Spiritual sense, I explained before, remember? It allows me to— Oh," Alex's senses pulled away his attention. "The rats seem to have caught on to their senses."

Chapter 1007 Fighting The Beasts

"Do you even want the rats? I suppose you can use their skins," Alex said.

"Oh, if they were bigger than my arms, then they can be good meat too," the chief said. "How many are there?"

Alex checked the number, but it was just too many to take his time to count. "Over 50, not over 80," he said. "They're quite fast too. At this rate, they might reach here in about 15 or so minutes."

"Oh, that is quite fast," the chief said. Any idea how strong they are?

Alex tried looking at their footsteps and just how much force they were putting on the ground. It was a little hard to say as the solid ground barely gave away under any force at all.

"They're not as strong, I would say," Alex said. "Compared to your tribe, I would say about average in strength, maybe even weaker than your average fighters. But I would still consider having the stronger fighters ready just in case."

"Oh no, that's quite bad," the chief said. "Had we known we would be encountering this many beasts, we would have waited until more of our fighters were healed."

The chief quickly turned around to the person closest to him and spoke. "Go to the hall quickly and call anyone that can fight. Make sure to not bring people with broken bones," he said.

Alex looked at the situation and decided he had no choice but to help them. Since the rats would be coming soon enough, he would have to help them.

He started stretching a bit. "It's been a while since I've gotten physical, so I can use this opportunity to fight," he said.

"Oh, you're going to help us, young man?" the chief asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I don't see how you can get out of this without my help. Besides, it's a good exercis—"

Alex paused as he turned to look in another direction and frowned.

"What's wrong?" the chief asked.

"The snake seems to have got a whiff of your baits' scent too and is coming this way. It's probably better if you sent them back immediately," Alex said. "You probably don't want to-and the pack of hyenas is coming too."

"What?!" the chief was startled. "How many are they?"

"About 8, but they are very fast, so I would expect them to be much stronger than the rats. But, I think it's the snake that is the strongest. Might be stronger than the snake corpse I gave you yesterday," Alex said.

"D-Do we run then? Should I start sending people away?" the chief asked. He didn't see what else he could do.

"Just for safety, yes. We can't be sure that they won't go past us," Alex said.

The chief immediately ordered a few of his people to go send the ones that couldn't find to the bottom of the canyon where the beasts most likely wouldn't reach them easily. Even if they did, the fighters would get to them easily since they would have time to get there.

The tribe's folks slowly prepared along with Alex. Li Yun had come over to fight as well. After all, she was one of the strongest people in the Stepstones tribe after.

The Hyenas were fast enough that they arrived before the rats even did. The strongest group from the tribes had all prepared as Alex relayed the information of their arrival.

Once they saw the 8 hyenas dashing toward them, everyone moved at the same time to stop them.

Alex dashed forward, ahead of every single person, and punched a hyena on its head. His fist went through its skull, destroying everything that used to be its head.

He turned around and looked at the other 7, of whom the chief quickly finished the hyena he was fighting with a sharpened piece of bone that he stuck through the hyena's torso.

The others grouped up to quickly finish the remaining beasts off.

Alex watched Li Yun team up with another man and while the man caught the beast in his clutch, she slashed its guts with a bone that was sharpened like a sword.

At the same time, he noticed something interesting that he hadn't even given any thought to yet.

'You can use Sword Intent?' He hadn't even thought about trying that. It had been more than 10 years since he had used Sword Intent or any of its other forms. He had honestly forgotten to even try them after coming here.

"Head's up," he shouted at the people who had just finished fighting. "The rats are closing in as well."

As soon as he said that, the group that was gathered behind them also got into a fighting position as there were way too many for the stronger fighters to fight alone.

Alex didn't wait for the rats to come to him and jumped ahead on his own. He arrived at the front of the rat and kicked it, destroying a part of its body at once and killing it.

He moved again and punched another rat, smashing it into a pulp on the ground. By the time he attacked the 3rd rat, the remaining rats had already gone past him.

Alex killed the 3rd rat as well, and quickly caught the fourth one before it could run away. The rest of the rats managed to go past him and the tribes' folks started fighting them.

Alex slowly crushed the rat in between his hands, but before he did, he noticed the rat bleeding a little.

He didn't think much of it and easily crushed the rat before moving on to the rest of the rats.

Without even weapons, Alex was doing more than what the other individuals were gathered around here.

He was crushing beasts left and right, while the rest of them couldn't beat them in just a single strike and had to waste quite a bit of time dealing with them.

Alex went back and helped them in dealing with the rest of the rats so that they didn't pass the front line and enter the tribe.

If they did, the people would have to leave and go to capture them, which would leave more vulnerabilities on the front line, and that would be bad.

As the group fought them, a few of them noticed something. Far in the distance, above a small hill, one could see something slithering on its way toward them.

Even from this far away, they could clearly see what it was. A snake.

If they could see what it was, then the tribes folk had to agree to the fact that the snake that was approaching them was big.

If they weren't wrong, then the snake was at least 2 meters wide, and over 20 meters long. It was a massive snake that dwarfed any other snake that was seen in this place for ages.

The chief paused his fight for a moment to stare at the snake in absolute awe and despair as well. He knew for a fact that if he were to go and fight it, there was a very high chance that he would come out of the fight either poisoned or missing limbs.

There was also some chance that he would straight up be dead by the end, and the snake would continue to attack his people afterward.

The burden that lay on the chief was a heavy one.

He made the plan to evacuate immediately and run. He turned to look at Alex to tell him his intentions, but Alex was quite far away up front where he had dashed previously to kill the rats.

Alex slowly turned around. "Kill the rats, leave the snake to me." As he looked back, something flashed and a sword appeared in Alex's hands.

The chief looked confused for a moment, wondering where the sword came from. But he didn't think for much longer as he went back to fighting the rats that were all but dead.

He had decided to leave it all up to Alex.

Alex held the sword in front of him with a weird feeling in his hands. It was the first time Midnight was going to accept his Sword Intent.

With barely even any thought put into his intent, the sword glowed with a white halo around it. Alex was surprised at the ease with which he had used it.

'Did I get stronger? Or is my sword just that good?' he wondered.

He couldn't be sure at all, but he had a feeling it was because of the infant spirit that was inside the sword.

Alex turned and looked at the snake that was incoming and saw the earth get destroyed as it slithered toward him.

"True Emperor realm for sure," he thought to himself. "Can it possibly be Saint realm?"

Alex didn't think so, but even if it was, there was nothing for him to worry about at all.

As the people started finishing the rats, Alex raised his sword to the sky with a single hand. Then, as if on command, the sword changed its size to become 16 times bigger than it was.

Now, he was holding a gigantic sword that was massive from the tip to the hilt.

Alex waited for the snake to come close to him, and then he swung.

A white blade made out of energy went out from Alex's sword, flying at a very quick speed.

When it did reach the snake, to everyone's surprise behind him, the blade of white energy cut the snake in two, killing it before it could become any sort of menace.

Alex turned to look at the chief who wasn't doing anything after being flabbergasted.

"You should get done with the rats. I want to go to sleep already."

Chapter 1008 Bonehead

"What was that? What did you do?" Li Yun asked.

"That was Sword Qi. Do you guys not know about it?" he asked.

Li Yun simply shook her head. Alex couldn't help but sigh at just how little these tribes folks knew.

"I'll explain sometime later. Finish with the rats already," he said.

The rest of them didn't take much longer to be done with their fights, and once they were done, they started gathering all the dead beasts and brought them back.

"There are quite a lot of beasts out tonight. It might be better for the weaker folks to stay away from here. Also, increase the guards for tonight," the chief ordered.

After seeing that there was no more need for him here, Alex returned to his small room and went to sleep. He didn't truly require any sleep as he could go on for days without it, but he still liked sleeping. Besides, what else was there to do?

He lay there, thinking about his future while slowly falling asleep. He heard the others come in as well and not long after, he fell asleep.

After a good night of sleep, Alex woke up rather late in the morning and went out to get freshened up. He was planning on getting his clothes from the woman who had taken the snakeskin and later in the day, leaving this place.

However, before his plans went anywhere, he heard a person rushing through the tribe in a hurry. Alex spread his spiritual sense to see what was up and saw the man quickly find the chief.

"Chief, there are other tribes people at the front," he said.

The chief and many others quickly walked away, while Alex looked at the situation from where he was. His spiritual sense had already reached outside and he could see the tribespeople they were talking about.

These people had similarly tanned skin as everyone else, but for some reason, most of the people in the tribe had messed up hair that was full of dried-up white powder that seemed to have been applied while it was wet and grimy.

Other than that characteristic of the people, he saw that a few of them were injured as well. Alex couldn't help but be surprised why that.

So, as he continued checking what was happening outside, he slowly made his way out as well.

The chief arrived outside the fence and looked at the group of tribespeople standing there. Altogether, there were about 70 different people there.

Compared to the Stepstones tribe, that was about a third or fourth of it.

Li Yun was next to her father and looked at the newcomers in front of her. "Are those… the Bonehead tribe's people?" she asked.

The Bonehead tribe was a nearby tribe that could be reached in less than a day of travel by foot to the east.

"I think so," the chief said softly. "I don't remember hearing about any other tribe that puts powdered bone on their head."

Seeing that so many of them were gathered, an older man that wore nothing but small leather shorts, walked up front. Aside from his hair, his body was also tattooed with bone powder.

Also, he seemed to have a recent wound on his right arm that had been stopped using some bone powder again.

"Who is your chief?" the man asked the Stepstones tribe.

"I am," the chief said. "Why are the Bonehead tribe's people at my tribe?"

The man saw the chief and slowly walked closer to him. "My tribe's people need a place to stay. So, I wish to fight against you to determine the future of this tribe of yous," he said.

"What?" the chief was startled and confused. "Why do you want to take over my tribe? Just go back to your own."

"I'm afraid that is not possible anymore. Now, tell me, are you willing to fight me in a match to determine the ruler of the tribe?" the man asked.

"And what? You will become the new chief of our tribe once you win?" the chief asked.

"That is indeed so," the man said. "Now, what do you say?"

"Of course, I'm not going to fight you. Why would I fight you randomly after you come here? This is not your tribe. Go back to your tribe; if you can't, then go somewhere else and don't bother us," the chief said.

"You will be making a big mistake if you don't agree to this duel. If you won't fight me, then I will be forced to start an all-out attack against your people so I can find my people a place to stay in," the man said.

"We have 4 times as many people as you. We have nothing to worry about," the chief said.

"That may be true, but the ones I have here are only the best of the best of my tribe. If you are confident that you can survive a full-on assault from all of us, then you can continue refusing," the man said.

The chief looked at the people that stood behind them. He checked every single one there and just as the man had said, they were all rather strong. He could tell by the shapes of their muscle and the posture of their body.

'But why do they all seem to be hurt?' he wondered.

"What do you say?" the man asked.

"What will you do if we fight and you lose?" the chief asked.

"Then, I will leave and go duel another tribe somewhere," the man said.

"You don't expect me to trust your words, do you?" the chief asked.

"I swear on my name, Han Guanxi that everything I speak of today is the truth. I swear on the name of our Bonehead tribe as well that if we lose the duel, and we aren't allowed to stay here, then we will leave," the man said.

"Do you swear this on your position as the chief?" the chief asked.

The man's face turned gloomy for a second before calming himself. "I cannot," he said. "For I am not the chief of this tribe."

The chief was surprised. "Then who are you?" he asked.

"Just the strongest of the group. We are without a chief, so if I can find these people a place to stay, then I might consider becoming the chief," he said.

The chief was a little taken aback. "You're not the chief? Where's your chief then?" he asked.

"He died not long ago," the man said. "Now, do you accept or not?"

"Just accept it," Alex said as he slowly walked through the crowd.

The man named Han looked towards Alex with a bit of confusion on his face, wondering why such a weak-looking person was speaking amongst the tribe.

However, when he saw the respect the people gave by moving aside for him to walk through, he quickly understood the young man wasn't so simple.

"Do you suggest that we accept their duel?" the chief asked.

"I don't see what's wrong with accepting it," Alex said. "Are you afraid you can't win?"

"I can," the chief said. "I'm just worried they might not keep their word and attack us later on."

"What can you do to stop them from attacking you later?" Alex said. "Will making him say that they will attack you help in any way? Will you suddenly have an advantage against them?"

The chief thought for a moment. "I suppose not," he said. "I see, so whether I take the duel or not, I will end up with the same amount of information. But if I do take the offer of the duel, there is a chance that they will not attack me, which will be beneficial for us."

"We won't attack you after we lose. As I said, I am the strongest. If I lose, the others won't have a chance of beating you," he said.

"Do you want me to fight?" Alex asked.

"No, this is my tribe's problem. If I include you in this, it will not be fair for them," the chief said.

The man curiously looked at Alex, wondering what the chief meant by those words.

"Fine, I will accept your duel. Let's fight," the chief said.

The man smiled and walked up front. "Let us fight then," he said.

The duel started a minute later, and it ended not even a minute after. Alex watched in surprise at how easily the chief won.

'What the hell was that? A false bravado? Some sort of trick?' he wondered as he looked at the man that was on the floor.

The man struggled to get up and nodded toward the chief. "Since you've beaten me, I will leave," he said and turned around.

"Are you seriously leaving?" the chief asked.

"I gave my words," the man said.

"Why even try and attack us when you are so weak? Are the people behind you even weaker than you or what?" the chief asked.

"They are indeed weaker than me," the man said and walked away.

"Next time, bring some of the stronger folks from your tribe," the chief said and turned to leave as well. However, he heard the man speak from behind him.

"I'm afraid that will be impossible. These are the last remaining people of the Bonehead tribe," he said. "If we can't find a place to stay soon, we will go our own separate ways."

The chief turned around quickly. "What? What happened to the rest of your tribe?" he asked.

"They all died," the man said with a solemn face. "They all died in a beast attack half a month ago."

Chapter 1009 Leaving

"Beast attack?" the chief looked at them with concern. "There was another one?"

"Yes," the man said. "But it seems to be just our tribe that suffered. Every other tribe we've been to has been fine."

"What sort of beasts were they?" the chief asked. He remembered the many beasts that had come for them last night too. Had they been oblivious to the amount, yesterday might've ended in a few tragedies at least.

"Just the normal ones," the man said. "Anyway, we will keep our word and leave. Thank you for dueling with us."

"Wait," the chief said. "Tell us more about the beasts. Instead, you can heal your people in our sacred flames."

The man contemplated for a single second before agreeing. Even if not for his people, just him alone healing would help them a lot.

"Thank you," he said and walked into the tribe.

Alex curiously followed behind them and walked over to the hall where the chief sat down the man people and let them heal.

The 70 or so people were on guard for a while, but seeing the sacred flame heal their wounds made them feel better. Only then could they find the time to remember everyone they had lost in the past few days and so they cried.

It didn't take long for the entire hall to be a cacophony of cries as everyone mourned for their family.

The chief waited for a while before asking the man named Han to explain his side of things.

Han didn't hesitate and explained everything.

About 10 days ago, the Bonehead tribe had been ambushed by a bunch of beasts that killed their chief and many other members of their tribe. They tried to fight the beasts, but it was simply impossible to stop them all.

As a result, only a few of them managed to escape.

They immediately left the area and went around to other tribes to ask for help, but no one wanted to fight after learning that the beasts were strong enough to kill so many of a tribe's people.

They would only be sending their own people to die after all. Since the beasts were known to be attracted to the Sacred flame because of its healing properties, they wouldn't leave that place at all, and as such the tribes were much safer.

They had learned about this after the beasts had settled onto several different tribe's locations 7 years ago after the incident of the beasts after the Northern Lights disappeared.

The tribe stayed there for a few more hours, healing up, and then decided to leave.

Just as they were about to, Alex stepped forward. "You don't have a place to go, right? How about I help you get back to your place?" he asked.

The man who was about to leave the hall stopped. He looked at Alex and then towards the chief.

The chief was surprised and walked up to Alex. "You will do that?" he asked.

"Sure," Alex said. "I was planning on leaving here already, so why don't I go there."

"You were thinking of leaving?" the chief was surprised.

"Yes, I was going to leave today," Alex said.

"What about cultivation? You said you would teach us," the chief said.

"Uh, that is going to be hard. Unless you are okay with losing the sacred flames forever, there is no way for you to properly cultivate," Alex said.

"That... I suppose we will have to give up on it then," the chief said.

"If that's what you say," Alex said. He turned around towards the man named Han. "You should get ready to go back to your tribe. We will leave in a bit."

The chief turned to look at the man as well and nodded towards him in the assurance that this was the best choice.

"Very well, brother. I shall wait for you to get ready to leave. However, I hope you can do something about the beasts there without us having to fight. We already fought and lost against the beasts," the man said.

"No, you won't have to fight," Alex said. "I will handle it."

The man was surprised to hear Alex speak with such confidence, mainly because he didn't look that strong physically.

"You can't leave just like that," Li Yun said. "You didn't even fall for me yet."

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Alex smiled slightly. "I told you that wouldn't happen. That's why I told you to lose hope," he said.

If he were, to be honest, he was starting to like her company. She brought a straightforwardness to life that Alex hadn't seen in a long while.

She didn't hide her feelings and spoke exactly what she wanted to speak. He appreciated that about her.

However, the underlying feeling of being out of place, needing to save his brother, find his father, and somehow go back to his mother, all bogged down his heart and made it impossible for anything else to appear from it.

"I'm coming with you," she said.

"What? No, I will take these guys there and then I will go somewhere else," Alex said.

"Well, I am going anyway. You can bring me back here if you are so worried about me. If by that time you haven't fallen for me, then you can leave," she said.

Alex was about to argue, but he couldn't find the heart to. "Sigh, fine. Do what you want. We'll be leaving in an hour."

"Great! I will prepare the carriage," she said.

"No, we will be going by foot," Alex said.

"What? But the Bonehead tribe's land is over a day that way. Do you seriously want to walk all the way there?" she asked.

"Do you want to take a carriage while all of these people walk instead?" he asked.

"Well," the girl looked around at the many people and hesitated a bit. "They can take some carriage too."

"Oh," the chief said from the side. "If we send all of our carriages with them, who will be bringing it back?"

Li Yun grumbled. "Fine, we will walk. Happy?" she said with a pout on her face.

Alex smiled and even chuckled a bit. "Yes, very happy. Anyway, get ready to leave." He turned towards the chief. "Do you know if my new clothes are ready yet?"

"Oh, right," the Chief said. "I think they're ready. Come let me take you there."

Alex went with the chief over to the lady that was given the leather to make his new clothes, and she handed them two pairs of pants and two pairs of sleeveless shirts.

Alex looked at the pants and shirts that looked seamless and compared that to his own which seemed to be a wrong motion away from slipping off his shoulders.

"These look nice," he said. "Thank you."

The lady smiled back and urged him to wear them. Alex went into a small room inside the house and quickly changed while keeping the other pair in his storage bag.

"Wow, these fit me perfectly," he said. He felt the pants and shirt that hugged his skin most of the time but still let air pass through it.

"Here," the woman said, giving him something else.

Alex curiously looked at what it was and saw a pair of boots. He looked at it with surprise as he had not been expecting to have boots made for him.

Since he had been walking around with naked feet, the boot was going to be a massive help.

The sole of the boot was made from the snake's bone, while the rest of it was made from leather. There was a small lace made into the upper area of the boot that could be easily laced together.

It left the upper area of his feet feeling a little open and without support, but that was a compromise he was willing to make. He was tired of walking without any boots after all.

Alex thanked the woman and left the area.

He walked towards the front of the tribe as he waited for everyone to gather so they could leave.

If it had gone his way, he would be saying his farewell here, maybe even promising to visit them once again in many years after he was capable of freely traversing the ocean.

However, since Li Yun was coming with him, he would have to return her here again, and as such there was no farewell.

Li Yun came out not long after, wearing something similar to what she always wore. A short leather pants that covered half her thigh, and an upper garment that was more bra than a shirt.

She held a small pouch behind her that held her clothes, food, and water.

"Here, let me take that from you," Alex said.

"No, I can keep it. You don't have to walk around with my clothes," she said.

"Just give it to me," Alex said.

"Fine, if you want to hold it behind you, then do," she said and handed it over.

The moment Alex got it, the bag disappeared into his storage ring, surprising Li Yun. "Dammit, I forgot you had that thing. And here I thought you were being considerate and were going to carry my load."

"That's what I'm doing though," Alex said.

"Not in the way I wanted," she said. "Gah! Let's just leave now."

Alex sighed and turned to look towards the Bonehead tribe that was gathered not far away from them.

"Let's go," Alex said and left the Stepstones tribe.

Then, together with the remaining people from the Bonehead tribe, Alex and Li Yun began their journey to the west.

Chapter 1010 Bonehead Tribe Grounds

The path toward the Bonehead tribe's home village was rather simple. The road was mostly flat as most places in the dried-up desert were.

There was some up and down as hills appeared everywhere, but most places were still flat and cracked from the heat.

The group of people behind Alex walked with almost no loss of momentum in their strides. In fact, the hope of getting their home back seemed to have reinvigorated them.

Alex was on a constant lookout for beasts as his spiritual sense was constantly activated all around him.

However, he didn't see that many, and they never really came toward them.

They walked without stopping and before they knew it, night fell. The hot day transitioned into a cold night. However, that did not stop the people's advancement at all.

Since every single one of them was a high-level body cultivator in their own right, they could handle this small chill.

This far out, Alex finally saw the first tribe other than the Stepstones tribe. He didn't know what these people were called, but they were settled in a valley hidden behind a slightly tall set of hills.

He quickly scanned the place for his father, and when he realized there wasn't anyone that looked like him, he moved on.

Li Yun said that the tribe they had just walked past was called the Valleywind tribe. Alex continued to be surprised by just what random names the tribes gave themselves.

"Well, you know, since we aren't like a family or something, we have to distinguish ourselves using something after all. These people call themselves Bonehead because they used powdered bone and water to put on their hair."

"Our home looks like a bunch of stepping stones. That valley gets a lot of wind. So on and so forth. We don't really care if the name is good or not, just that you can say who we are after hearing the name," she said.

"I see," Alex said. "I'm just used to hearing sect names that seem to be grand and well thought out. Hearing such random words being used throws me off quite a bit."

"Since you make it sound like you'll be staying in the wasteland for a significant period of time, you might as well get used to it," she said.

"That's not true," Alex said. "I plan on not staying here for longer than I need to."

Li Yun stayed quiet for a while. A few thoughts ran through her mind and he asked, "Where do you plan on going next? Can you take me?"

"I'll be heading south," Alex said. "I need to get out of the Wasteland as soon as possible so I can gather Qi again. With Qi, I won't have to waste a long time to find my father. Who knows, he might have also gone south and started cultivating already."

"Since I'm going to have to struggle a lot, I can't take anyone with me. Aside from that, I will have to find a way back to the other continents. Since flying through the ocean is so hard, I will need to focus on doing whatever I can otherwise to go back. If I were to take another person with me, that will double my difficulty. That's why I'm intent on not taking anyone with me," he said.

Li Yun got a little sad when she heard that. She had really come to expect Alex as someone she wanted in her life, but seeing that could never truly hurt her in ways she hadn't been hurt before.

The rest of the journey was a rather quiet one as the only noise in the wind were footsteps and tiny whispers.

No one dared make a noise that was louder than the night wind itself.

The east slowly lit up, letting them know that the sun would rise at any minute now. Still, they continued walking without stopping until a few minutes more when Alex stopped and told the rest of them to stop as well.

Just in his spiritual sense's range, he could see a few beasts roaming, going in and out of his spiritual sense.

Alex decided to see it all for himself, so he quickly expanded his field of view, taking in the nearly 2 kilometers-wide area that was covered in beasts. Compared to this, the beasts from the other night were nothing.

"Everyone, settle here," he said.

"Huh?" Han Guanxi walked forward. "We're not that far away from our tribe's grounds. Just an hour or two and we will reach it."

"I know," Alex said. "That's why I told you all to settle here. Do you want to fight the beasts again?"

"Oh," the man said. "I'm sorry. I thought you were just saying so because you didn't want to continue moving for today."

"It's fine. Just settle here for a while. Since there are so many beasts, it might take me a while to defeat them all," Alex said.

"Can I come?" Li Yun asked.

"No, there are simply too many beasts for me to be able to keep you alive. Its better if you stay here with them," he said.

"What about me? Can I come?" the man asked.

Alex was about to refuse too, but he paused for a bit. However, after thinking for a moment, he shook his head. "You're too weak,' he said. "I know how you feel, but you will have to stay and wait. That's all you can do right now."

The man's face saddened a bit and he lay on the said.

"I will be leaving now," he said. "Before I go, is there anything I should keep in mind about your tribe's grounds? Some buildings maybe that I shouldn't destroy."

The man thought for a bit. "As long as the Sacred flame still burns when we get back, we will be happy," he said.

Alex smiled at just how little the man was asking from him. "That's doable. Alright, I'll leave now. Don't leave this place unless something strong comes this way. If it does and you can't win, just run away."

"Okay," the man replied.

Alex finally left the group and walked on his own for another 8 kilometers which easily took him another hour to reach.

The moment he got remotely close to the tribe grounds, a bunch of beasts noticed him and came to eat him as he was the only source of food for them in a very large radius now.

Alex saw the beasts as well and brought out Midnight to fight. Without even pouring at Qi into the sword, Alex easily fought off the beasts.

He cut them up however he could and collected the corpse into his storage ring. Since this was the only source of usable resources, Alex wasn't going to simply give up on them.

Another few beasts noticed him and came to fight him. The same thing repeated once more as Alex got his hands on another few corpses. However, one of those beasts managed to run away injured, and Alex quickly caught it in his spiritual sense.

He was about to use Heaven's Impact to defeat it, but for some reason, he wanted to see what this beast was going to do.

He saw the beast slowly make its way through the other beasts, who quickly stepped aside.

"Ah,' he thought when he realized what the beast was doing. They were going for the sacred flames. "So they know that the flame can heal them too, huh?"

Since the beasts were occupying the small hall where the Sacred flame was, Alex wondered if they had come for the Sacred flame at all. After all, that made sense for the single reason that they could heal after fighting.

And from what he could see, the beasts really did fight almost all the time. 'Is that how they get strong? Random fighting with immediately healing?' he wondered.

If that were the case, he would have to get rid of the Sacred flame before fighting the rest of the beasts. However, if he did so, there was a chance of the beasts running away from this place, only to return later.

This meant that, whether he liked it or not, he would have to kill all the beasts in the tribe just for the sole reason of not leaving an enemy for the future.

Alex quickly counted the number of beasts that were there, but there were simply too many to completely count them. If anything, there were surely above a thousand different beasts, and each one of them was quite strong too.

He checked his tiny reserve of Qi just in case things got dicey and walked towards the closest beast.

And so began Alex's fight against the thousand different beasts that had taken over the grounds of the Bonehead tribe.

Alex fought all beasts one by one. Whether it was a fox, a snake, a vulture, a group of bugs, some worms, or even some deadly poisonous scorpion, none of them could withstand more than 2 of his attacks.

He fought outside of the tribe grounds, inside of it, inside houses, and even close to the hall where the Sacred flames were.

One by one, Alex killed all of them and took their corpse into his own storage bag.

After a while, he looked around to see the remaining beasts, and to his surprise, there were none.

Alex had done it. He had successfully killed all the beasts that were plaguing the tribe's grounds. Next, he had a little plan of his own.

Chapter 1011 Getting Answers

Alex walked into the broken hall that had the Sacred flames in the center. It seemed the beasts hadn't gone too far in and had stopped near the flames only.

Alex looked at the floor around him and such bones that clearly belonged to humans. The people that were killed here were already eaten by the beasts. He couldn't help but feel a little bad for the.

"Scarlet, get rid of this fire," he said.

Scarlet flew out from her beast space and saw the flames that burned in front of Alex. Without missing a beat, she quickly walked next to the flames. As she did, the fire vanished.

Alex sensed the area and suddenly the vortex of Qi that was underneath this place started pumping out Qi into the air.

"True Qi again," Alex said with a disappointed face. Had it been Saint Qi, it would've helped him so much.

"Well, have fun," he said to Scarlet who was already starting to cultivate by the Qi. Alex had let her cultivate yesterday morning before the sun rose as well, so she was happy when she got to do it again as the sun rose today as well.

Alex wanted to go call the people and tell them the good news, but he felt a little greedy and wanted to wait an hour or so before calling them. He wanted Scarlet to have as much time to cultivate as she wanted to.

A few minutes later, Scarlet broke through again. This time, she had entered the Skin Tempering 7th realm.

'She's quite fast really. If I let her go on for a day or two non-stop, I'm sure she can reach Bone Tempering realm,' he thought. Seeing her cultivate made him want to cultivate as well.

"I really should go to the south quickly," he thought to himself. He waited for a few more minutes as Scarlet gathered up even more Qi. It was slowly getting to the time when he had to tell the people.

He didn't want to keep them waiting any longer. "You have an hour or two more before they all come here, so you need to be ready to relight the—"

Alex paused because he heard some footsteps. He turned around to see a young man with a dark skin wearing a necklace made up of beast teeth. There was a white tattoo on his stomach that looked like a triangle of some sort.

The young man looked dumbly at Alex while Alex looked back at him curiously.

The young man immediately ran away from the place.

Alex stood there for a few seconds wondering what had just happened. He couldn't understand who the young man was or why he was there at all. What he did know was the young man didn't have a white hair that the Bonehead tribe did.

Which meant that he was from a different tribe.

Alex's senses immediately captured the young man, and his action of running away started looking like one that might belong to a person that had been caught at the act of performing some sort of illegal activity.

Alex got curious.

The moment the young man reached outside the tribe's grounds, Alex was already there for him.

"Aah!" the young man shouted and started running the other way.

Alex quickly got next to him. "Why are you running?" he asked as he placed an arm before the young man to stop him.

The young man tried to dodge, but he ended up hitting the hand due to his momentum and stumbled to the ground.

"Argh!" the young man groaned. He was hurt a bit to badly on his back. Still, he tried to move, but Alex quickly caught him and put both of his hands behind him.

The young man tried to fight back, even kicking Alex, but none seemed to hurt Alex the slightest bit.

"Stop struggling, or I will have to use force," Alex said while lightly squeezing the man's wrists, which seemed to start cracking under pressure.

Alex had no qualms about breaking off the young man's wrists. He had already done so twice just the other day. If anything, the young man's wrist would come back stronger once he healed.

The young man screamed again and finally stopped struggling.

"Now, tell me, who you are?" Alex asked.

"I am Ke Zenquan, please don't kill me," the young man shouted.

"That depends on your answers," Alex said. "What tribe are you from?"

The young man didn't speak.

"Say it!" Alex said as he cracked his wrists even more. Some more force and one of the wrist would have all its bone crushed to nothing.,

"I'm from the Arrowhead tribe," the young man said.

"And what were you doing here?" Alex asked.

"No-nothing," the young man said.

Alex crushed his left wrist completely and the young man started crying out loud. Alex couldn't help but hate what he was doing, but he had no pills that could help him at the moment so he could only use torture to get his answers.

"I told you not to lie," he said.

"I-I was just looking around, that's all," the young man shouted.

"This Arrowhead tribe of yours, how far away is it?" Alex asked.

"It's far, very far. You will need to walk for a day and a half," the young man said.

"If the Arrowhead tribe is that far away, what were you doing here?" Alex asked. He didn't remember hearing about any Arrowhead tribe during his talk with Li Yun and the others from the Bonehead tribe.

The man named Han had mentioned the tribes he had been to, and this one was not it. If that was the case, then Alex wondered what the young man was doing here.

"Please don't kill me," the young man started crying.

"Answer me!" Alex shouted back. "What were you looking for here? What is your purpose in this place? What is a young man like you doing so far away from his tribe?"

The young man continued remaining quiet, so Alex crushed his other wrist as well.

The young man screamed in pain as it was more than just broken bones that hurt at this point. Alex was being so reckless with his crushings that the bone splinters were piercing through the young man's wrist.

"If you answer me what you were doing here, I will take you to the sacred flames where you can heal all you want," Alex said. "However, if you don't say anything instead, the next thing I crush will be your neck."

Ning's hands reached the young man's neck. "Your choice."

The young man who was crying in pain had to stop as the shock and fear of what was going to happen overwhelmed him very easily.

"I-I came to check on the beasts," the young man said.

"Came to check... what? How did you know there were beasts here?" Alex asked as a suspicion grew in his heart.

"We... we..."

Alex's grasp on his neck grew tighter until the pain started seeping through to the young man.

"We were the ones that sent the beast here," the young man said.

Alex stopped. "What? Explain yourself!" he demanded.

"We were the ones that rallied the beasts and sent them to this place," he said.

"We? Do you mean there are others involved?" Alex asked.

When he heard the young man say nothing, he tightened his loose grip again.

"Y-yes, many tribes are in on this," the young man said.

Alex's eyes widened. There was some sort of conspiracy going on here. "Why are you doing this?" he asked.

"It helps mitigate the danger from the beasts," the young man said.

"Huh? How?" Alex asked.

"The beasts like to flock to the sacred flames. So if we gather them up and sent them to the tribes, they won't bother the rest of the tribes ever again. Its a sacrifice for the greater good," the young man said.

"Is that what your chiefs said?" Alex asked with a disgusted look on his face. Sacrificing innocent lives to save themselves, Alex could understand why one would do so, but that still disgusted him.

It was no different from the mad immortal kidnapping and killings dozens upon doznes of alchemists just so he could get a pill out of them. Alex hated those sorts of people.

"How did you control the beasts? Do your group of tribes hold some sort of artifact?" Alex asked.

"No, we just hurt the beasts and leave them. The wounded beasts are forced to find a place to heal. Once enough gather to go to a place, the others follow too," the young man said.

"Wounded beasts?" he thought. He had seen that recently hadn't he? A thought came to his mind.

"What were you doing here exactly?" he asked.

"I-I was checking to see why there were no beasts here," the young man said.

"And was that a task that you were given to do?" Alex asked.

"N-no, I was returning and was on my way home, so I randomly decided to check how it was going. When I saw that there were no beasts from afar, I decided to come and check," the young man said.

Alex's eyes narrowed even more. "When you say you were returning home, where were you returning from?" he asked.

"Th-the east," the young man said.

"You are planning to send another group of beasts to another tribe aren't you?" Alex asked as his hands tightened. "Do you have a target this time around?"

"Ye-yes," the young man said.

"Name it!" Alex said.

"I-I do not know the name, but it is a lone tribe living by the cliff near the canyon."

Chapter 1012 Swift Return

Alex's heart sank as his worst fears came true. 'These bastards are going to send a beast horde into the Stepstones tribe,' he thought.

Or worse, they already had.

'I need to go back,' Alex thought. If he could go there before they were attacked, he could save them.

He used Heaven's Impact on that young man and made him unconscious. Then, he took him over to the hall where Scarlet was enjoying the Qi.

"Make the fire again, Scarlet. We need to leave," he said.

Scarlet tried to argue, but Alex gave no grounds for any arguments. The people were in danger and he wasn't going to waste any more minutes.

So, after Scarlet lit up the sacred flames again, Alex dumped the young man close to it and forgot about him. With how hard his Heaven's impact had hit him, it was likely that the young man would be asleep for days.

With him being so young, he didn't feel right to simply kill him outright, but he wasn't going to let him get away with it either.

He walked close to one of the houses that were barely standing and dumped a lot of the beast corpses he had in his storage ring.

After that, he ran back toward where the Bonehead tribe's people were waiting for him.

He ran back faster this time around, and it only took him half an hour or so to return this time around. Seeing him arrive, the man named Han quickly approached him with a face that expected nothing but good news.

"Brother... our tribe... is it?" he couldn't bring himself to ask properly.

"I've killed all the beast there. None remain any more," Alex said.

The people in front of him started cheering, celebrating, and even crying when they heard the news.

Alex continued speaking. "The tribe is all but destroyed. The houses have been mostly destroyed, but the Sacred flame remains. I'm sure you can remake everything and start anew," he said.

"Also, I've left some of the beast corpses back in the tribe while taking away some. Use the beast corpses however you can," he said.

The people only celebrated harder after hearing that.

However, the man named Han couldn't find it in himself to celebrate after seeing Alex's downtrodden look as well as his look of a hurry.

"Is something wrong?" he asked curiously.

Alex looked around, unsure if he should say it. "Come with me," he said and walked over to the side. Li Yun followed as well, wondering what was happening.

"Do you know the Arrowhead tribe?" he asked after they were more or less speaking in private, away from prying eyes and ears.

"Arrowhead tribe? I believe it's one of the tribes by the Blueheart Oasis a day or two travel away towards the northwest. Why do you ask?" the man replied.

"Arrowhead tribe, along with members of the tribes surrounding the Blueheart Oasis are most likely the ones behind the attack in your tribe," Alex said.

"What? They are the ones that—"

"Quiet down. Yes, they are the ones. They have been wounding beasts and forcing them to find a place to heal, in this case, your tribe. I learned it from a kid from the Arrowhead tribe. He's unconscious in your Sacred flame hall. Keep him there even after he wakes up. I will need to ask him more questions later," Alex said.

The man was starting to get angry. If not for Alex saying that he wanted to question him later, he would've most likely killed the young man when he saw him.

"Why later? You can just wait for him to wake up, can't you?" the man said. "I want to kill that person."

"You can do what you want after I question him in a few days," Alex said. "For now, I must leave." He turned towards Li Yun. "Those people have begun their attack on the Stepstones tribe as well."

"What?" the girl's eyes went wide in shock and horror. "They're attacking our tribe?"

"Yes, the young man told me," Alex said.

"We must go back right now then," Li Yun said.

"I agree," Alex said and turned towards the man named Han. "Don't kill him until I say so."

Han's eyes were serious. "I won't. You should leave right now."

"Yes," Alex said and turned to Li Yun. "I'm afraid you will have to stay behind as well."

"No way in hell!" she cried out. "I'm going to fight for my tribe too."

"You will only slow me down if you went with me," Alex said. "Please understand."

Without even waiting for her to reply, Alex sprinted away. He knew he had already wasted some time talking with the Bonehead tribe, but that was something he couldn't skip out on.

If they let the young man leave, he wouldn't have any way of learning more about who exactly was involved in this heinous conspiracy to destroy a few tribes and their people.

Alex ran without stopping even the slightest bit and even used the Qi he had kept without using after eating the beast's cores. His movement technique aided him greatly as his speed was much higher.

It was already late in the morning by the time he left, so even after running way past noon, Alex had only gone back half the way.

At this pace, he was going to reach the tribe early in the evening. Hopefully, that was enough time. But then again, the young man had to have left quite early to reach the Bonehead tribe so soon.

'No, don't think about it. Just focus on running,' he thought. He wished he could fly, as that would've been must faster, but with the little Qi he had, he would be able to barely fly for half an hour.

At least while running, he could run for the entire way through and still have some Qi remaining at the end.

As expected, it was around when the sun started to set that Alex finally saw the Stepstones tribe in his senses.

Unlike what he had hoped, however, the tribe was currently being attacked by the beasts. He could see many different beasts fighting the many people from the tribe.

And they were all struggling.

Alex ran even faster, burning all the Qi in his body as he arrived at the tribe half an hour later.

He felt tired. Not only had he spent a whole day walking over to the Bonehead tribe, but he had also fought the beasts that were in that tribe, and then ran all the way back here.

After all that, it would be more surprising if he wasn't tired at all. However, that wouldn't stop Alex right now.

The moment he arrived, he brought out Midnight and struck the very first beast that he encountered. The lizard had barely turned its head when Alex's sword fell it from its body.

Blood sprayed out of the open neck, and Alex was doused in it, but he still kept going.

He encountered another beast that came at him. Alex saw the side of this rabid meerkat and recognized the wound from being attacked by something sharp.

Alex also recognized the non-vital part of the beast that was wounded, which meant that this beast hadn't been attacked by any of the people from the Stepstones tribe, but rather the one from the Arrowhead tribes and the other ones.

Alex felt his anger grow hotter as he cut the beast in a single slash and continued further.

He killed around 5 or so beasts before he arrived by the canyon itself. When he arrived there, he finally saw the situation firsthand and realized how dire it was.

From his senses, looking at the overall battle, it looked like the tribe was struggling, but doing well enough that they were holding on. He thought that with him here, they would perhaps even make it out well.

However, when he saw the many corpses of the people lying by the corpses of the beasts that were killed, he knew the situation was worse than what he had first thought.

The chief found him and looked around.

"What are you doing here? Where's my daughter?!" he shouted at Alex.

"She's fine," Alex said. "I left her behind and came to help you."

He slashed behind him, killing dozens of smaller beasts at once as his Sword aura struck down a path and killed everything it touched.

He swung once again, and more beasts died. However, the beasts just continued coming one after another.

'Dammit, not all the beasts are even here,' he thought. 'More are continuing to come.'

He could imagine the people from the other tribes rallying the beasts before sending them this way, and if he left, he could most likely find them, but he couldn't do so now.

He needed to stay behind and help these people.

Alex swung his sword again killing even more beasts, but the beasts were way too many, and way too spread apart to continue using Sword aura to attack.

Furthermore, there were people that were mostly in the way of his attack and he couldn't hurt them.

Alex tried using Heaven's Impact a few times to save the people that were in danger, but that too couldn't be used for long as there were just too many beasts.

Hundreds could die and hundreds would remain still. He needed more than just himself if he wanted to save as many people as he could from the jaws of death.

So, Alex decided to bring out some help.

He brought out the Blood God's Manual.

Chapter 1013 I Win

The crimson book appeared at his behest and hovered in front of him.

Alex flipped the page to the 4th one which was titled 'Blood Beasts'.

"Come out!" he said.

Out of nowhere, nearly 50 different blood beasts appeared and stood before him. A leopard, snake, rhino, and many other beasts that he had killed or had otherwise gained from the Blue Spring sect were all made into different blood beasts.

The chief and many other people that were standing close to Alex was taken aback and even tried to attack the beasts. But their measly strength was no match for the beasts.

In fact, even Alex himself was no match for the beasts at the moment since he had no way of using his own blood skills.

"Fan out," he ordered the beasts. "Kill anything that is not a human."

The beasts, with their limited intelligence, understood what Alex had said and went to fight the many beasts that were around them.

As soon as the blood beasts started fighting, there was no more need for the tribal people to worry.

The many blood beasts went around the tribe and killed any beasts, big or small, saving the tribal men in the process.

Alex made sure to keep a few at the front, blocking the way while the rest of the blood beasts finished the ones that were inside.

Alex himself arrived by the hall of Sacred flames and started killing the beasts that had already come there.

A part of him did not want to kill these beasts, knowing that it was not their fault that they were here. All they wanted to do was heal their wounds and find a place to stay where they would not have to worry about anything in the future.

But the logical part of his mind knew that killing was the only way to get rid of them. Otherwise, these beasts would kill all the humans here for food and would be a menace.

Between innocent beasts that were forced into doing what they were doing and saving nearly 300 different innocent humans from dying or being homeless, he would always choose the humans.

It was the lesser of two evils in his mind.

However, that did not mean that Alex was simply done after killing the beasts. In this incident where both of the sides involved in the battle were innocent, there was a third party that was guilty.

That was the evil that Alex was going to get rid of. Unfortunately, that had to wait for now. There were simply too many here, and more were coming. Since the blood beasts had limited intelligence, he also couldn't just leave the place in case they did something he did not want them to do.

He quickly walked out and looked at the people that were crying, whether from physical pain or emotional pain. Their bodies were hurt, but so was their heart at seeing the sight of so many people dead.

The chief looked in a daze at the destruction that lay around him. His eyes were dull, his mind unable to think of what to do in such a situation.

"CHIEF!" Alex shouted from right next to him and only then did the chief come out of his daze.

"Wh-what? What's happening this time?" he asked.

"Gather up your people by the hall and let them heal. I've cleared it of the beasts," Alex said.

"Yes," the chief said and quickly went around gathering the injured. He ordered the ones that weren't as wounded and had them gather their dead.

Alex looked around as he saw the dead people being carried away.

A man cried as he held onto a woman's corpse whose leg had been chomped off. He recognized the man as the one that had given him the beast core from the fish on his first day here.

Another man's corpse was being taken away. It was the player that had talked with him back when he wanted to ride in the carriage.

He saw a woman's corpse, the one that had made him his current clothes.

Many more familiar and unfamiliar faces passed him, all dead.

Alex watched them being taken away, but he couldn't go and see what was happening to them. He had another duty.

He walked out to the front where his beasts were fighting against the oncoming onslaught of beasts.

Thousands of corpses lay by the front, and yet the beasts still came endlessly. The beasts were fearless, and that was what caused them to not see the danger of their approach.

Alex watched his blood beasts clear the oncoming beasts as he waited for it all to be over.

'Have they grown weaker?' Alex wondered when he saw the blood beasts fight. At the very least, some of the beasts weren't fighting as well as they should have.

The blood beasts clearly did not feel pain or fatigue, so the only reason for their lack of performance was most likely that the blood aura in the beasts was slowly depleting.

'I can heal them back by using my blood when they are inside the book, can't I?' he thought. Since that was the case, they could fight as long as it was needed for the beast horde to stop coming here. Hopefully, they didn't go to any other tribes either.

Alex waited a few more hours until the beast horde finally stopped coming.

"Is it over?" he thought and sent his senses around him, pushing them to the limit to make sure nothing could hide from his senses.

There were no more beasts that were coming for them. Most that were still around were retreating north.

However, while searching for the beasts, Alex saw something else in the distance to the west.

Fallen in the desert was a woman that had wounds all over her body. She had a bloody face, swollen legs, and worst of all, a bleeding stomach as if someone had ripped out a chunk of it.

"No..."

Alex didn't even think as he jumped onto the leopard beast and ordered it to run. The beast ran swiftly.

Within just a few minutes, Alex arrived next to Li Yun and jumped off the leopard.

"Li Yun!" he shouted as he ran towards the girl.

Li Yun's grunted in pain she heard his name. She tried to move her head, but she couldn't do so. All she could do was stare into the sky as her left eye socket bled without any eye in it.

"Yu Ming?" she asked when she heard his voice.

"Don't speak," Alex said as he quickly caught her and started scanning her injuries.

"M-my t-t-tribe... my f-father... are they... s-safe?" she asked.

"Yes, they are safe. Don't talk now, I will... " Alex tried to bring a healing pill out of sheer instinct but there wasn't any.

His nerves got the better of him as his hands started shaking while he held her body.

He could feel it, her temperature. It was very low.

He could see the part of her stomach that had been ripped away and she had lost a lot of blood. She was dying.

At this point, the only way to save her was to give her a pill, and he did not have one.

He could tell that she was dying and there was nothing he could do to help her.

Being without Qi and a woman dying in his arms in the darkness of the night, he was reminded of the night he did not want to remember. The night when he had lost his master.

"They... are fine?" she asked with a small smile on her face. "That's... good. Thank you." Her wounds seem to no longer hurt her after hearing the news.

"Don't worry about them for now. I will take you to your father in the hall of sacred flames," he said. He started carrying her and brought her over to the leopard before telling it to run.

He kept some tiny hope that the phoenix flames would heal her wounds despite losing vital organs from her body.

Alex couldn't help but get angry at the sight. "I told you to stay back. I told you the beasts were attacking here and there would be many. Why did you come here?"

"Not... beasts," she said with what little words she could muster.

"What?" Alex asked with a confused expression.

"Arrow... head," she said.

Alex started when he heard that. "Did... did the men from the Arrowhead tribe do this to you?" he asked. "Was it not the beasts?"

"It... it was... Arrowhead," she said.

"Where are they? Did they leave you half dead? I will kill them," Alex said. "Did you see where they went?"

However, he did not get an answer from her at all. "Li Yun? LI YUN! Stay awake, we're not far off!" he said as he checked her heartbeat. It was very slow.

"I... need to... " she finally spoke.

"You need to stay awake," Alex said.

"I... need to..." she paused. "Come... closer."

Her words lost volume as she spoke. "What is it?" Alex asked as he put his ears close to her mouth to listen.

"Look... at... me..." she said with what little voice she could.

"Look at you? Wh--"

Li Yun used what little strength she had in herself to raise her head and kiss Alex. Alex felt her wet, blood-stained lips on his for a second before they left.

He was too stunned to say or do anything at all.

Li Yun used the last of her breaths to laugh a little as she said, "I... win."

Chapter 1014 Slaughter

Alex returned back to the Stepstones tribe with tears flowing down his face and holding the dead body of Li Yun.

His mind was all but blank as he slowly made his way toward the hall where everyone was gathered.

The hall was just as gloomy, if not more, and entering the room only made Alex feel worse.

The chief turned around to look at him and saw his wounded daughter. "Yun!" he shouted as he swiftly made his way to his daughter to check his injuries.

He grabbed her away from Alex's arms.

"Quickly, we should place you by the fi--" his words stuck in his throat when he saw her pale skin and lifeless eyes, reminding him of what he had seen 7 years ago when the previous beast horde had attacked them.

That time, it had been his wife that had died, and this time...

"Daughter? Yun? Wake up. Please, wake up. Yun?" he started shouting. Everyone turned to look and saw that she had died as well.

Most thought of consoling the chief, but they were too busy mourning for their own kin.

The chief cried for minutes as Alex stood there blankly. The chief finally looked up at him with clear rage in his eyes.

He grabbed Alex by the shirt with one hand. "You said she was safe!" he shouted. "You lied to me."

Alex tried to speak but no words came from his mouth. There was nothing he could say here that could remove the blame from him. In some ways, he wanted the chief to blame him so that the feeling of guilt he had been having could be justified.

"You let her die!" he shouted.

A few members of the tribe quickly came up to the chief and tried to calm him down, fearing that Alex would lash out.

However, Alex didn't have it in him to lash out. He couldn't even take any action. There was anger in him, boiling on the inside, but he couldn't find it in him to pour it outside. All he could do was say, "I'm sorry. I couldn't save her."

The chief couldn't find it in his to say anything and simply cried.

"How... just how could it have happened? You said you left her far away," the chief said. "How did the beasts get to her?"

The anger boiling inside Alex finally found a way out as viciousness filled his voice. "It wasn't the beasts. It was the men responsible for sending those beasts," he said.

"What?" the chief asked with a confused voice. The others beside him were confused as well.

"This beast horde attack, it wasn't random," he said. "Some men purposefully sent the beasts here so that there would be fewer beasts they would have to worry about. It is likely that... that they found her while returning."

The chief's face darkened as his eyes grew hateful. "These were the task of men?" he asked. "Not only did they kill my daughter, but they were responsible for all the tragedy today?"

"Yes," Alex said. "And I will go kill them."

He turned around without waiting for a response and walked out. The fury that had been dulled due to the shock of seeing Li Yun dying had resurfaced and the only way to calm it down was to kill her murderers.

"They couldn't have gone far," he said to himself softly and brought out of the leopard from before. The leopard was the only beast that was swift enough to make the journey he was about to make.

In doing so, the blood beast was most likely going to get weaker to the point where it would become useless. If the current status of the beast was anything to go by, it would most likely disappear entirely.

But, that was the last thing Alex cared about at the moment anyway.

He rushed the blood beast, making it spend every little blood aura it had in it, rushing through the desert at a very high speed.

His spiritual sense covered a large area as he searched every direction in search of any signs of humans.

The blood leopard ran through the half-moon night even as its speed dropped continuously by every second.

After an hour or so, the beast was so slow that it was weaker than Alex himself, having slowly lost its blood aura. It had, after all, fought for hours even before this.

Still, Alex found it better to ride on the beast instead of running to rest his body which had worked for too long without any sustenance to keep him going.

Besides, there was no point in changing his steed at the moment. After all, he had found the people.

A group of men and women either rode on a few beasts or simply walked as they slowly made their way northwest. Some of the people there were wounded, but not all were.

There were nearly 40 different people here, along with 12 different beasts that they rode.

The ones that rode the beasts were mostly the ones that were wounded. They all looked very similar in terms of clothing, but they all had different types of tattoos on their chests or arms to denote which tribe they were from.

The symbol of tumbleweed meant that the person was from the Tumbleweed tribe. The ones with the snake tattoo were from the Desertsnake tribe.

The ones with the horns were from the Bullhorn tribe, and the ones with the wave-like tattoo were from the Blue lake tribe.

Finally, the ones with the Arrowhead were from the Arrowhead tribe.

"That was tough," a woman from the Tumbleweed tribe said. "I nearly died fighting all those beasts."

"Yeah, it's hard to route the beasts as they usually don't want to go anywhere but north," another person said, one from the Bullhorn tribe.

"Do you know why that is?" a younger person belonging to the Bullhorn tribe asked.

"The beasts used to stay in the north for the longest time. We're not sure why, but our best guess is because of the lights in the north. When that light disappeared, the beasts came from the north that day," the man said.

"Any idea what was up north? Why were there so many beasts there?" the younger man asked.

"No idea. No one could really tell since no one could ever go past that monumental amount of beasts after all," the man said.

"Well, now we won't have to worry about them," the young man said enthusiastically.

"Maybe not. We might have to do one more round of it," another person said, this one belonging to the Desert Snake tribe. "Hehe, let me find the best tribe for it this time, okay?"

"Sure," A woman from the Arrowhead tribe said. "These goddamn northern tribes live so far apart that I don't want to do it again. Although, you will have to make sure it's a sizable one."

"Yeah, yeah, and I don't know who leaked it was us doing that, but we'll have to make sure no one finds out," the other man said. "It was a shame that I had to kill that little cutie from before. If she hadn't put up such a fight, I would've taken her as a--"

*BOOM!*

A loud explosion shook the ground as sand blew up in everyone's face.

"What?"

"A beast?"

They were all surprised and immediately got ready to fight. However, a second later, they had to switch their focus away as a bloody rain started pouring on top of them.

The rain lasted no more than 5 seconds, but those 5 seconds felt like an eternity as not just rain, but bones and guts flew down as well.

Aside from that, a single head fell. The head belonged to the man from the Desert Snake tribe that was just speaking.

Everyone was shocked at the sudden and violent death and couldn't help but get scared. They grew alert and searched for the beasts, only to find something glittering in the sand.

"Is that... a sword?" one person asked.

"How is a sword here? Where did it come from?" they started wondering.

The young, curious man moved before any of the adults did and reached for the sword. He grabbed it and tried to pick it up but no matter how much strength he used, he could not move the sword at all.

The 16 tons heavy sword was not something this young person could ever hope to move.

Alex arrived from behind the falling sand as if appearing from a curtain. His eyes were filled with rage, his face with disgust and his heart with a will to kill everyone here.

He grabbed the sword that the young man was struggling to move and pulled it out of the sand.

"How old are you?" Alex asked.

The young man looked at how easily Alex pulled the sword out and couldn't help but be surprised. He understood that the man who looked just as young as him was very strong.

"Who are you?" the others asked while pulling out their weapons from this back.

Alex didn't look at them, however, and stared at the young man in front of him. "I asked you, how old are you?" he asked again.

"T-Twenty-two," the young man said.

Alex nodded when he heard the words. "22, huh?" he asked. "Old enough."

No one saw when Alex's sword moved, but they did see when the young man was carved into two from his left should to his right chest.

"You bastard!" the men shouted as they immediately ran towards Alex to kill him.

Alex saw that and got happy. He wouldn't have to worry about the people here running away when he started the slaughter.

Chapter 1015 Avenged

2 were dead and 38 remained. However, Alex quickly found it unnecessary to keep track of them.

They were very weak after all.

Midnight flashed with silver light each time it moved. It reflected the moonlight before falling onto the body of its enemy.

The first to attack Alex was a man from the Bullhorn tribe. His weapon was a sickle, carved from the bones of a beast with similar physiology.

The bone sickles were sharp and strong, and yet they felt dull and weak to Alex when his sword cut it in half, along with the arms of the man that attacked him.

Alex's arms moved again and the sword cut off the man's head this time.

Then, he dashed forward, arriving next to a woman as he ducked to dodge her bone spear. He quickly pushed upward, hitting the woman on the chest with his own shoulders while at the same time spinning to cut her in half.

He grabbed the bone spear from the dead woman's hands and rammed it behind him onto the man that tried to attack him from the back.

The spear went in through his jaw and come out of his head. Alex slowly turned around and let the man's head slowly slide down the spear that remained standing in the sand.

An arrow came flying towards him and hit him in the chest, but it could do nothing more than scratch the leather of the shirt he wore.

"No way!" the woman who had shot the arrow said.

"Who are you? Why are you killing us?" another man from the Tumbleweed tribe asked.

"I'm only doing to you, what you've been doing to these innocents tribe for the past however many times," Alex said. "And you killed someone that I held dear. For that, you will all die here."

"You crazy bas--"

A sword slash cut down 6 different people at once, leaving the rest in a state so stunned that they didn't know what to do afterward.

Alex moved and started cutting more of them in their moment of weakness.

The more he killed them, the more his rage manifested itself on his face. He cut and he killed as that was the only way he could think of to deal with the grief he felt.

He cut another one, a woman with the Arrowhead tribe's tattoo on her body. Seeing her fall, the last remaining 10 or so people saw no way out of this alive, so they decided to run.

However, the first person that turned around to run fell down to the ground with no wounds on his body at all.

"I told you, you all will die here today," Alex said as he stabbed the man that was unconscious.

The remaining people cried for help, but it all fell on empty ears. One after another, they too died.

All 40 of them died.

Alex breathed heavily as his rage finally calmed a little. He was still angry, but he had his logical mind back.

He took a deep breath to finally let go of the rage, and as it went away, sorrow filled him once again as he cried amidst the sand and blood, mourning for the one whose life could have been saved so easily.

It wasn't until after minutes that Alex found the strength to stand back again. Seeing the dead bodies around him reminded him of Li Yun's death, and while that brought back some rage and hate, it wasn't to the point where he had to go kill someone.

He collected the corpses and jumped onto one of the beasts that were there while making his way west.

A few hours later, he arrived at the Bonehead tribe, where the people were working to fix their village this late into the night.

He quickly arrived by the man named Han and asked him for the young man who he had left here.

Han lead Alex into the Hall of sacred flames where the young man was still unconscious.

Alex kicked the kid in the chest. "Wake up!" he shouted at him. Han stood by the side and watched with an angry face that wanted to kill the young man, but couldn't.

The young man slowly gained his consciousness back as he looked around. He was dazed for a few seconds, but once he remembered what happened, he quickly moved away in fear and started screaming.

"Shut up, or I will kill you," Alex said.

The young man swiftly shut up and looked at Alex with a dreadful look in his eyes.

Alex slowly crouched next to the young man and asked, "I have killed some of the people from your tribes that were out here routing beasts towards the various tribes. You will now tell me exactly how many people were involved in this."

"Tell me the truth and I will give you a swift death," Alex said. "Lie to me, and I will hand you over to him so you can feel the pain that hundreds of people felt right here on these grounds where they died."

"Your choice."

The man named Han was surprised and a vicious look appeared on his face. He was looking forward to killing the young man who was partly responsible for the death of the majority of his tribe members.

"You... you will kill me?" the young man asked.

"Your death is certain, that much I will tell you. You can die a horrible death while remaining loyal to your tribe, or you can die an easy death while betraying your tribe. Now, what do you choose?"

"I..." the young man's eyes moved around fiercely, looking for a way out. However, there was none. Still, his eyes grew resolute at the last moment, and he looked back at Alex.

"I won't tell you anything. Just kill me," he said.

"Very well, then I shall leave you," Alex said. "Before I go, however, I will let you know just who you have lost."

Alex said as he brought out the 40 heads of the men and women he had killed.

"No... mother!" the young man looked broken when he saw one of the heads.

Alex looked at the young man and then towards the woman's head with eyes wide open. However, he found it hard to empathize with the young man.

In his eyes, everything happening at the moment was well deserved. He could tell that it was rage that was stunting the rest of his emotions, but at the moment, he was happy they were.

He did not want to pity the death of either of them.

"These are the people responsible for the death of your family and friends. Live in peace, knowing that they are dead," Alex said to the man named Han before taking back the heads.

"You killed them? Are these really all of them?" the man asked.

Alex paused. "I'm not sure," he said. "You can ask for that information from him if you can make him speak," he said.

"What about the Arrowhead tribe in the Blueheart Oasis? And the other tribes that conspired to destroy our tribe?" he asked. "Are you going to attack them next?"

Alex shook his head. "I've killed the ones I had a grudge with. As for the rest, they weren't directly involved with this, so I do not plan on getting any revenge on them," he said.

"But they are our true enemy," the man said. "They are the ones that most likely gave the orders to these men to send the beasts towards us."

"They most likely did," Alex agreed.

"Then? Do you not want to kill them? Do you not feel the anger?" the man asked.

"I do feel the anger," Alex said. "But it was never directed at the people that did not come here. I do not wish to redirect this hatred towards the others that weren't involved in what happened tonight."

"But we have to fight them. They attacked us, so we have to fight back," the man said.

"Yes, you should," Alex said. "But I have no part in that battle."

He finally sighed as the anger he felt slowly bled out of him. "I was dragged into this battle and I've killed the ones that dragged me in. Now, I can only wash my hands off of this anger and hatred."

"If you wish to fight the tribes in the Blueheart Oasis, then do so. That is your right. but, let me give you some advice. These people I killed were much stronger than anyone I have seen between the two tribes I have been to. It is likely you will never beat them. Still, try it if that's how you can calm your heart. As for me, I'm leaving."

Alex turned around and left the man named Han, who in his hatred began beating up the young man inside for answers. Or maybe it was simply to put the rage inside him somewhere.

Alex heard the young man's cries, everyone did, but he did not have the heart to care. He got back on the beast he had come to the tribe in and left.

Alex arrived at the Stepstones tribe just as the morning sun was rising. The chief looked at him gloomily and Alex dropped off the 40 heads.

"These were the men and women responsible for your daughter's death," Alex said. "I know that this won't bring her back, or even get rid of the sorrow in your heart. I only hope that Li Yun's soul can be happy in the afterlife, knowing that her death has been avenged."

Chapter 1016 Leaving The Tribe

The funeral took place at noon. When the sun was at its highest, the dead bodies were placed at the edge of the furthest cliff, wrapped in fur and leather of the best kind.

The Chief walked ahead with a long bone in his hand that was burning with the Sacred flame. By the second, the flame was eating up the bone, getting closer and closer to the chief's hands.

The chief slowly walked forward and lit up the dead bodies one by one, until all of them were lit up.

"May the gods in the Sacred halls accept you all," the chief said.

"MAY THE GODS IN THE SACRED HALLS ACCEPT YOU ALL!!" the rest of the tribe followed suit as they screamed the best they could to part with their dead.

Alex looked at only the one at the center that slowly burned in red, pink, yellow, and purple colors.

The fire consumed everything, not even leaving ashes behind. Only smoke remained and it blew away with the wind.

After a few more minutes of mourning, when all the bodies were burned away, everyone turned around to return.

Alex, however, stood where he was, looking past the cliff where the bodies were burned. He looked beyond, beyond the canyon itself, towards the south.

It was time for him to leave.

"This is it for me," he said towards the Chief who was returning as well.

"Sorry?" the chief turned around.

"I'm leaving," Alex said and turned to look toward the chief. "Thank you for everything that you have done for me."

The chief hesitated as little. "You've done more for us," he said. He paused a little and asked, "Are you really leaving?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I will leave right now."

The chief felt conflicted. On one hand, he didn't want Alex to leave as well. His strength was something unheard of in this place and he would be a vital asset to the tribe if he stayed.

In fact, he could even become the chief and live a life without trouble in these lands.

On the other hand, every time he looked at Alex, he saw his daughter's lifeless body being carried in his arms. Even when he knew it wasn't Alex's fault, he couldn't help but hate him for it.

In the end, the chief could only sigh. "If you want to leave, then there is nothing I can say except wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors," the chief said.

"Thank you," Alex said.

"So... where will you be heading to now? You're new here, so you don't know a lot of places," the chief said. "Hell, I barely know anything."

"I know there is an entire land without Qi south of the Wastelands," Ning said. "I will go there."

"South... I see," the chief said. "Hmm, what about your father? You were searching for him here, right? Are you going to leave the wasteland without finding him?"

"About my father, I'm not sure where he is exactly," Alex said. "It would be great if I could find him easily, but I'm not sure if I'm that lucky."

"You could head over to the Blueheart Oasis with us. Even if it is not to fight, you could at least search for your father," the Chief said.

"You're sure you want to fight the tribes from the Blueheart Oasis?" Alex asked. He had told the chief about the people that were responsible, and just like the man named Han, he too was eager to fight them.

"It's not enough," the chief said. "We may have fed the bodies of the 40 dead to the beasts, but will never be enough to bring justice to the hundreds that have died at the tribes' hands. We must avenge our fallen brothers and sisters."

"While that is commendable, I hope you have thought about this well enough. As I've said, the people I've fought were not someone that you could have fought. After all, they were capable of wounding beasts that could not fight when they were wounded. I hope you don't let your drive to avenge the dead lead to the death of the living," Alex said.

"As for whether my father is there or not, while I am curious to learn, I think it would be much faster if I simply gather some Qi and then fly around searching for him. Walking through the desert Qi-less is not very optimal when trying to find people," Alex said.

"You really don't think we can win, huh?" the chief asked. "Maybe you are right, but I just can't get rid of this hatred."

"Swallow it down," Alex said. "If not for yourself, for your tribe. If I ever visit here again in the future, I hope to not hear about your demise in a battle that couldn't be won from the start."

"And what if they come for us?" the chief asked. "If they come to search for their missing people and realize that they had died here. What should we do if they come for us?"

Alex thought for a moment. "Don't fight back," he said. "That is the only thing you can do."

"And just die?" the chief's eyes narrowed. "Surely you're not asking just to remain passive while our enemies come knocking down on our door."

"No, of course not," Alex said. "I'm only asking for you and the rest to not fight back."

As he said that, Alex brought out the Blood God's Manual and pulled something out of it.

The chief moved back in fear when he saw the blood beast stand in front of him. He took rapid breaths to calm himself down. He had seen these sorts of beasts in the fight and knew they were strong. He also knew Alex was controlling it somehow, but the fear still remained.

Alex patted the Blood Rhino. "This is my beast. I will leave him here with you to protect you from any threat," he said. "But my order for it will be simple. I will tell it to protect the tribe from any harm that will come to it. It will, however, not aid you in any battle you start on your own. While limited, this beast has intelligence, so don't think of lying to it either."

The chief looked at the beast. "You're giving it to me?" he asked.

"To the tribe, yes," Alex said.

"It must be very strong," the chief said. "How strong is it when compared to you."

Alex smiled. "If we fought, I would die every time," he said.

"I-is that so?" the chief got scared when he heard that. He looked towards the beast and gazed into its bloody eyes. "I-it won't kill us, right?"

"No," Alex said as he pet the rhino. "It has no reason to. It won't eat, sleep, or do anything. But with time, simply by existing, it will get weaker. At the very least, however, it will be able to protect you for the next 10 or so years easily. I only acquired them not long ago, so I can't guarantee much on whether it will be longer or not."

"I see," the chief said. "Thank you."

"This is farewell then," Alex said and bowed a little toward the chief. He then put the rhino one last time and gave it the order to protect them always.

"I hope to see you again someday in the future," Alex said and turned around. He jumped off of the cliff and landed in the canyon below.

He looked towards the south with the midday sun and started walking. Scarlet flew out of her space and perched on top of his shoulder, accompanying Alex along the way.

The chief turned and returned to the tribe along with the Blood Rhino. The rhino was going to be the sacred beast that protected them from all terror and tragedies.

The rhino stayed close to the beast's quarters at the front of the tribe. Every night, it would stay alert and kill any beast that would come close to the tribe.

The rhino was supposed to grow weaker by the day, and even more so every time it fought. However, without Alex to guide it, the Blood beast would drink the blood of the ones it had killed, and with every drink, his body would not only regain the strength it had lost but also grow stronger.

Alex had no idea that this was the case for Blood beasts or else he would've made use of it. In fact, he would only learn about it a few years later by accident.

Several months later, a man named Han came with many other tribes rallied behind him to go on a war against the tribes of the Blueheart Oasis.

The chief knew this was not something he should be doing, but he felt the urge to say yes since it was his heart that craved to avenge his daughter's death, something he never got to do.

In the end, he decided to not go. While death was uncertain, he still wanted to live a life that his daughter would've wished for him. He wanted to live a life his daughter and wife would've wanted him to live.

It wasn't many years later that he learned that the Oasis tribes had been defeated. Apparently, the tribe's strongest were missing, presumably dead, and as such the attacking tribes were able to ascertain victory, not without a few losses, however.

The chief felt pity for himself for not going to the war, but then when he learned of the people that had died in the battle, he felt that he had made the right choice.

After all, what sort of chief would he be if he wasn't there to lead his tribe to a better life?

Chapter 1017 True Realm Scarlet

Alex was a little bored these days with nothing much to do. He lay in the sand some distance away from a village, as he looked at the starry sky in the night.

He knew those weren't stars now, so it didn't give him the same feeling as it would when he was just a young man.

'I wonder how many of those had people living in it,' he wondered. The moon was still the most brightest, and while part of it was dark, the majority was still very bright. Bright enough to light up the entire area of the dune he rested upon.

At night, the cold wind blew, contrasted by the sand beneath him that was still warm. As he stayed there, he slowly fell asleep.

Alex woke up half-sunken in the sand. He quickly dusted himself off and walked away. He arrived at the village that was close by and went over to a well to wash himself off.

After washing himself, he moved over to the hall where the Sacred flame used to burn. Now, there was only a single bird at the center that cultivated.

Alex felt Scarlet's cultivation and sighed. 'Finally,' he thought.

About a month ago, he had arrived at this location with Scarlet. This was a location that was overrun by beasts, like the Bonehead tribe. Except, there truly was no one that wanted to return here.

Alex didn't kill the beast this time around as there was no need to. Instead, under Scarlet's insistence, he walked over to the center of the room where the sacred flame still burned.

Scarlet got rid of the flame and started cultivating in the Qi. Alex sensed that it was True Qi, and sighed.

At this point, he was all but certain that there was no way he could find Saint spirit veins anywhere in the wastelands. As far as he could tell, during the many years the flames must have sucked away the Qi so much that even if there was a Saint spirit vein, it would have degraded to a True spirit vein in the end.

At first, he was happy seeing Scarlet slowly improve her cultivation base. However, when he asked her to leave, she refused.

Alex wanted to go to the south, but Scarlet wanted to continue cultivating here where she could do so without any restriction.

The two of them argued for a long while before coming to an agreement. Alex would let her stay here but only until she entered the True realms. The moment she did, the two of them would leave.

Scarlet was angry at not being able to stay on for much longer, but under the threat of breaking off their bond, she quickly caved in.

It had been a month since then, and only now was she starting to enter the True realms.

'Sigh, I wouldn't have told her so if I knew she was going to take this long to break through,' he thought to himself.

In the month of their being here, due to the lack of the Sacred flames, the beasts had moved away from the place and went to various other locations.

At the same time, Alex had spent the month going around various different tribes around the area in search of his father.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem like he would be able to find him at all.

The Qi in the area fluctuated as in one swift motion, Scarlet broke through from the Mind Tempering 9th realm to True Disciple 1st realm.

There was absolutely nothing in her cultivation base that seemed to require careful consideration. 'Is this how the children of the Heavenly beasts are?' Alex wondered. 'Would Pearl have been the same if he had gone through the ritual where he would truly become a white tiger?'

Thinking so wouldn't help him at the moment, so Alex stopped thinking about it.

He looked towards Scarlet who had grown quite big as well. Alex wondered if she could fit on his shoulder at all.

"Come on. Now that you've broken through, it's time for us to leave," Alex said.

Scarlet looked towards Alex. "Okay," she said with her own voice.

Alex was taken aback a little when he heard her. "You can speak now?" he asked.

"Yes," Scarlet said. "I've always known how to speak. I just wasn't able to since my body isn't meant for speaking. But breaking through to the True realm allows me to speak."

"I see," Alex said. "How did you learn the language though? Did your parents teach you?"

"I learned it from them and others I was around, yes," She said.

"Alright, let's continue this conversation on the road," Alex said.

"Can't we spend some more time here? I want to break through to Saint realm," Scarlet said.

"No," Alex said. "If you want Qi, it's there in the south as well."

"Oh... right," she said with a confused look. "It's so weird."

"What is?" Alex asked.

"My mind," she said. "It feels so... clear. I should have reached this cultivation base a long time ago. That would've been so helpful."

"Well, whatever. You're there now and that's all that matters, right? Let's leave," he said.

"Okay." Scarlet didn't hesitate this time around. With a better understanding of what was happening, she could make decisions she would've otherwise been reluctant to make due to her lack of foresight.

She flew and landed on top of Alex, perching on both of his shoulders with one leg on each, sitting on his head.

Alex paused awkwardly. "Can you... get smaller or something?" he asked.

"Huh? Oh yeah," she said and flew up before changing size to become her original size and landing on top of him. She perched only on his right shoulder, and finally, Alex felt comfortable enough to walk away.

"Can all beasts change shape so easily?" he asked. "Is it that just to those that have the blood of the Heavenly beasts?"

"You know about Heavenly beasts?" she asked with a surprised look on her face. "Oh yeah, that would make sense, wouldn't it? You have the White Tiger's scent in you after all. How did you get it, by the way? Are you not from this world?"

"I am," Alex said. "I just happened to come across the White Tiger's blood essence and took it in."

"Weird," she said as she looked at him closely. "But then, I should have known you had the White Tiger's blood essence. I think that was why I bonded with you because your aura felt familiar to me."

"You feel that my blood is familiar? Do the Vermilion birds stay around the White Tiger a lot?" Alex asked.

"No, we come from the same place and have the same origin, so we can tell," she said. "Speaking of which, where are you from?"

"From the Western Continent," Alex said. "Well, technically from the Central continent, I guess."

"Central continent? There is life there?" she asked.

"Oh yes, quite plenty too," Alex said. "Although I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know. Your lord must have been wounded a long time ago. I'm not sure if he's healed by now or not."

Scarlet's eyes shined when she heard that. "You know about that too?" she said. She was starting to get curious about how he knew that.

They left the village he was staying at for the month, but not before reigniting the flame so that the beasts could come back here and not disturb anyone else.

Since Scarlet was finally capable of proper conversation, Alex decided to ask some more questions.

"Where's your home?" he asked.

"In the land of... wait, you mean here. It's a big city in the south. I think they call it the Sunborn Sanctuary," she said.

"I did mean here. Where were you born? Here right?" he asked.

"Yeah, I suppose. It gets confusing at times to decide," she said.

"It gets confusing? Why?" he asked.

"Well, it's hard to explain because it has to do with my feeling. It feels like I wasn't born here, even when I was born here. Especially when you know it's not a permanent place for me to stay at and at some point I will have to return."

"I see," Alex thought. "You do only have a millennium or so still. Enjoy it while you are here."

"Also, can I go to your place, this Sunborn Sanctuary? I would love to go there and see the various other Vermilion birds that live there. Although... would your parents or whoever you came with to this world get angry? The ruler of this continent won't get angry and just kill me, right?"

Scarlet was amused to hear the question. "Don't worry, no one will be angry at you if you go there. Well, not any Vermilion bird at least. I can't guarantee about the humans though. Also, even if you do get in trouble, you can just break off our bond, right? You seem to really want to do it," she said.

Alex coughed a bit and didn't say anything. He thought of something and asked, "do you think I can ask your lord for some phoenix blood? Maybe even some blood essence?"

Scarlet gave a confused look. "Why?" she asked.

"Uh... I want to see if I can improve my Fire spiritual root by using the blood of a Heavenly beast," Alex said.

Scarlet thought for a bit and said, "I can put in a few good words. But only if you quickly bring me to the south quickly enough so I can cultivate even faster."

Alex smiled. "Alright, that's a deal then."

Chapter 1018 Grand Bazaar

About a month or so later, Alex arrived at the top of a barren mountain range and looked below at a place far down.

In the shadow of this large range lay an Oasis. In the deep valley that was the oasis, there was a market established around it that people ran from either the tribes or people from the city beyond the giant walls to the south.

This was a place known as the Sunken Oasis, and the market was known as the Grand Bazaar of the Wasteland.

This was the place where everyone came to buy and sell their things for food, clothing, weapons, or other things.

Metal was one of the most popular things that were sold here as metal was very rare in the desert after all.

Aside from that wood was also hard to find, but it didn't sell as well as metal, especially since the desert people had already figured out alternatives to wood.

They had houses built from stones, and their fire never needed fuel. So, they were more than happy to go without it.

However, Alex cared for none of that. What he was more curious about was the fact that they apparently also sold spirit stones in this place.

Alex was more than curious about it and wanted to learn if the tribe people from nearby were cultivators now, so he felt like he had to come here.

During the last month, he had spent the majority of it on the road. However, from time to time, he would take a detour to a village or tribe nearby to check if his father is there or not.

He also needed water and food for his journey, so he would sell the beasts he killed on the way to acquire those.

During one of those trades was where he had come to learn about this Grand bazaar. They spoke so highly of it, that even if there was nothing he wanted from this place, he would still visit it.

It could be said to be one of the many wonders of the Southern Continent after all.

While Alex was curious about the bazaar, what he was really interested in was the wall in the south which was another source of shadow in this place.

Beyond those walls was where the Qi could be found, and he couldn't wait to go there.

Alex jumped off the steep mountain and basically ran all the way down to the foot of the mountain that was over 2 kilometers below him.

There were roads by either side of the mountain range that could be used for easier travel, but that meant taking a long way around, and it was easier to just run down.

Scarlet slowly flew down from the sky after him and perched on his shoulder again, as she always did.

"Ooh, this place looks fun," she said when she saw the market up close.

It was around 10 or so in the morning, so there were around 5 hours of sunlight remaining before the shadow fell into this place.

Alex slowly walked towards the bazaar while looking at the many carriages that ran through the place that brought many things to sell or buy.

Alex slowly arrived inside the market itself and saw what was being sold.

Grains, dried meats, flowers, colors, spices, and various other things. Alex was tempted to buy the things, especially the clothes that were being sold.

He truly wanted to wear cotton clothes again, instead of the leather cloth he had been wearing for 2 months now.

Unfortunately, he didn't have any money on him at all.

'Wait, what do they use as currency? Dead beasts, right?' he thought to himself while looking around. His spiritual sense took over the market and looked at everything.

'Yes, the beasts work,' he thought.

He approached the middle-aged vendor. "Brother, I want to buy these 3 robes. Can you tell me how much it will cost me?" he asked.

"Aha, don't worry customer. It won't cost you—" the vendor looked up in time to see the clothes Alex was wearing and paused. "Uhh, do you have money?" he asked.

"No, not exactly," Alex said. "I was hoping to trade with you using something else."

The vendor's eyes moved towards Scarlet that was perched on his shoulders. "I can trade with the bird, but you can only get 2 robes. That's also only because this bird is very beautiful to look at," he said.

Scarlet got angry and was ready to burn everything. Alex only chuckled and shook his head. "That's not it, brother. I had a beast corpse that I can sell if you are willing to buy," he said.

"Is that so?" the vendor said as he looked around Alex to find a place where the beast's corpses could possibly be. "I'm sorry, I don't trade with corpses. I only trade with spirit stones."

"What?" Alex looked confused. He could see the entire market both on this side and the other side of the body of water in the middle, and none of them were exclusively selling anything for just spirit stones.

'Why would you come to this place if you want spirit stones?' Alex thought. He could see that the vendor wasn't trusting him at all.

"Fine, I shall get some spirit stones. Do you know where I can trade corpses for spirit stones?" he asked.

The vendor pointed towards another vendor far away where many carriages were gathered. "They take beast corpses and buy them for many things, including Spirit stones. You can get some there," he said.

"Thanks," Alex said and quickly walked away.

He arrived at the new vendor and asked if he could get some spirit stones for beast corpses.

"Yes, you can," the woman said. "Do you have some beast corpses to sell?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I have a few."

He moved his hands and about 30 different beast corpses came out from his storage rings. He used to have more, but he had exchanged it for water and food along the way.

"How much would you say I can get for these?" he asked.

The woman looked at the corpses with a bit of a surprised look on her face. It wasn't every day that she saw someone bringing out beast corpses from thin air.

The cultivators didn't fight off any sort of beasts in the wasteland, and the tribe's people couldn't use storage bags. So, it was really a surprise to see it all come out all of a sudden.

She wondered where he possibly got it all from. She quickly checked Alex's cultivation base but could see nothing. 'A mortal huh? I wonder how he used the bag,' she thought.

Her eyes a bit around the many beasts and she said, "150 Spirit stones."

"Hmm, 150?" Alex asked. '5 per beast?'

He couldn't tell if that was high or not. People rarely used spirit stones as currency in this place for some reason, so he was unable to figure out anything.

'Well, 150 is a bit low, but it's not bad for a few beasts I casually killed while coming here,' he thought. 'I can earn more once I'm inside and start making pills.'

"I will take the spirit stones, thank you," Alex said.

The woman nodded and brought out 150 spirit stones before handing them to Alex.

Alex took the spirit stones and stared at them. He stared at them for a good while before turning to look at the moment.

"Did you make a mistake?" he asked, showing the spirit stones back to her.

"Mistake? Did I miscount?" the woman asked.

"No, the number is not the issue here," Alex said. "It's the spirit stones themselves. You gave me common Spirit stones by mistake."

"Oh... uh, is that so?" the woman got nervous for a second before feigning ignorance. "I must not have looked carefully."

"Since you did not look carefully, you might have not looked at the corpses carefully too. Because there is no way they earn such little money," he said.

"No, no, that is all they sell for. The cultivators don't really want these beasts," she said.

"Is that so? Then maybe I should take this to the old man with a grey beard about 30 paces in that direction? He seems to be selling these for about 20 spirit stones per beast," he said.

"What? No, that's not possible. This is the correct pri—"

"Are you sure that is the right price?" Alex's voice rang in her mind, shocking her to the depth of her core. Finally, she understood who she was dealing with.

"A saint realm expert!" she said softly under her breath. She quickly bowed, even kneeling in front of Alex, begging him to not punish her.

Alex felt awkward and sighed. "Get up and give me my spirit stones. I will leave immediately," he said.

"Yes, yes," the woman said and brought out about 150 True Spirit stones in total. Alex finally felt satisfied with his sale.

"Do you know what the tribe's people use this for?" he asked. He could see some tribe folks specifically buying the spirit stones.

"The stones? That's mostly for when you are traveling and need to bring along some Phoenix fire," the woman said. "The Qi inside them keeps the flame alive for a long time even when taken away from the spirit vein it is attached to."

"Oh, I see," Alex said. That made sense, considering the fire attracted Qi to continue burning.

Alex thanked her for the information and the trade and went back to the clothing vendor, who he paid with spirit stones and quickly got a set of clothes.

Now, he didn't see anything else he had to do, so he left for the wall in the south.

Chapter 1019 The Barrier

Alex looked at the many stairs that needed to be climbed to reach the top of the mountain wherein lay the gate to go to the south.

From what he had come to learn, there was a natural mountain range that separated the north from the south, and every location of it was guarded by people.

The one he was approaching was but one of the many gates that led into the non-wasteland side of the Southern Continent.

Alex was wearing fresh, blue robes and looked nothing like a barbarian anymore, and with his fair skin, it would be impossible for anyone to think of him as a barbarian.

He saw many other people who either quickly ran past him or flew through the air to go in. Seeing the people, he was getting excited as well.

Finally, more than 2 months later, he was going to be able to cultivate Qi again. He could only imagine how quickly he will be able to search for his father after that.

Alex arrived at the top of the stairs and got in a line. He looked around the place, seeing the giant metal gate that acted more like a formation flag than anything. So many meters below behind him was the grand bazaar he left behind.

Scarlet was still on his shoulder, but she seemed tame enough to not stand out. Compared to the many people with various beasts in cages or items on their person, she managed not to stand out much.

After a few minutes, it was finally Alex's turn, so he walked forward to enter. He proceeded to bring out a few Spirit stones, like everyone before him.

He handed the spirit stones and walked in. However, just as he touched the barrier that everyone passed through, he was sent back flying.

Alex crashed onto the ground a few meters behind and got up in a daze. "What the hell was that?" he asked.

When he looked back up, there were guards that were already next to him, pointing their spears at him.

"Woah, what's going on? Why are you pointing your spears at me?" Alex asked.

A man quickly arrived outside the gate not even a few moments later. "Who dares to try and sneak out of the wasteland?" he asked.

The young, but fully bearded man arrived next to the guards after seeing them next to Alex. "Is it him that tried to sneak in?"

"I did not try to sneak in," Alex said. "I paid my fee and tried to walk in. Damn, why the hell did that barrier stop me?"

The man looked at Alex with a small smile on his face. "I've never seen barbarians trying to enter the south through the gate. You're quite the bold one," the man said.

"Barbarian? If you mean the people from the tribes, then I'm not one of them. You should be able to tell that from my skin, shouldn't you?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the man said. "But I can't really just judge things based on skin. Who knows what you barbarians are up to? You will do anything to find a place that will make your Phoenix fire better."

Alex took a second to gather it all in and shook his head. "I'm not someone from the wasteland. I only came here two months ago. I'm a Saint realm cultivator looking to go south of here," he said while revealing his spiritual sense.

The man took a step back in surprise. He gestured for the guards to put their spears down.

"My apologies, senior. I was mistaken about your identity. Please let me call someone who is better suited to handle your presence," the young man said and pulled out a talisman before communicating with someone.

Quickly, an older person with an equally gruff beard flew out at an incredible speed.

"Where's the Saint realm cultivator?" he asked as he looked around before his eyes fell on Alex.

"Oh, it must be you, brother," the man said. "May I know your name?"

"Yu Ming," Alex said as he got up and looked at the man carefully.

He looked at the blue robe, which seemed not that different from the robe the young man was wearing. He wondered if they were whether from the same family or not.

"Where did you come from?" the man asked.

Alex dusted himself off and looked at the full-bearded men in front of him as he wondered if he should be saying anything. In the end, he needed to go in.

"From the Northern Continent," Alex said.

"From the Northern continent? Why did you come from the north then?" the old man asked. "You should have flown through the eastern regions into the south."

"I did not come by my own wishes," Alex said. "I came here because of a teleportation accident. I was never supposed to be here."

"Oh, sound terrible," the man said. "Anything we can do to help?"

"Of course," Alex said. "You can let me in."

"Hmm?" the man turned towards the gate. "Oh wait, you can't enter, can you? Of course. Your Qi hasn't been recorded by the formation."

Alex was thankful that the conversation wasn't going in any weird direction where they stuck to thinking he was from the tribes. He was worried how he was going to prove about his cultivation base if they thought his spiritual sense was just a random result from accidentally using a Spirit Cleansing lily or something.

"Can you do something so I can enter?" Alex asked expectantly. However, when he looked at their face, he realized something was going on.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"Well, I'm afraid we cannot help you," the old man said. "I'm not saying I don't want to, but we truly cannot help you."

Alex frowned.

"Let me explain," he said quickly. "We need to record your Qi to let you in. But at the same time, we can't record your Qi without taking you in. Do you see the dilemma we are facing?"

"Wait... are you saying that I cannot record my Qi because there is no record of my Qi? What sort of stupid system is that?" Alex asked.

"As I said, brother. No one comes from here. Everyone that is allowed inside is already supposed to be inside. We make everyone register before leaving," he said.

"Dammit, so there's no way for me to go inside?" Alex asked.

"Not from here, I'm afraid," the man said.

"Why do you even have this barrier? Why stop the tribal folks from going in? This young man said something about Phoenix fire?" Alex asked.

"Oh right, there have been instances where the barbarians have gone in and destroyed cities by lighting things on phoenix flames because that's what they are used to. Every barbarian wants to live around the phoenix flames to improve themselves, and they are too stubborn to understand that they aren't allowed to do that."

"Since then, the seniors from the Sunborn Sanctuary simply decided to add a layer of defense to the barrier by not allowing the barbarians from entering," he said.

"I see..." Alex sighed. "So I really don't have any choice."

"I mean... I don't really see the problem here, brother," the man said. "All you have to do is go east from here. When you arrive at the sea, go onto a random mountain to get your Qi back. Once you're done, you can fly over the ocean toward the end of this mountain range. Once you are there, there will no longer be any barrier to stop you."

"Oh... I see," Alex said as he thought for a bit. That was not a bad idea. It only delayed his journey by maybe a month or two at best anyway.

"I should do that," Alex said. "Is the ocean towards the east closer?"

"Yes," the man said.

"Do you perhaps have a map of some sort I can borrow?" Alex asked. "I wish to learn a bit about the Southern continent. The tribal folks had no such thing."

"Ah, wait," the man looked into his storage bag and pulled out a scroll. "Here you go. You can keep it."

Alex unfurled the map to look at it once before closing it. "Thank you," he said.

He decided to leave the place now. He turned around to go back down the stairs but stopped. He looked over his own shoulders and remembered something was missing.

"Scarlet?" he turned around to look. The two men that were watching him leave got confused for a second.

"Brother?" the man asked.

Alex didn't respond and tried to feel scarlet. "Scarlet!" he said once more, but the bird didn't respond. He closed his eyes to try and feel the direction of where scarlet was and quickly found her.

His eyes turned around to look at the barrier. He didn't see just the barrier, but rather far beyond it inside.

Scarlet was inside, and continuously going further and further.

"Scarlet, what are you doing?" he asked through his bond. At the same time, he asked the men outside. "Can beasts go in there without recording their aura?"

"Of course," the man said. "We only have qualms against barbarians after all. Anyone and anything that is not it can easily go inside."

"I see," Alex said.

At the same time, Scarlet spoke from the inside. "Thank you for bringing me to the south. I will return back to my place and start cultivating again. You don't need to search for me," the bird's message said.

Alex stood there stunned for a few minutes as he realized that his newly bonded bird had left him.

Chapter 1020 Going East

Alex realized that Scarlet was not returning at all. She had gone south, and most likely to her family.

In some ways, Alex understood why she did what she did.

'Sigh, I suppose that makes sense,' he thought. He walked down the giant set of stairs and left the mountain range.

The grand bazaar stood before him, but he had no plans of visiting it. He turned towards the east and started walking in that direction, hugging the mountain range as he went along.

There were people coming in and out of the Oasis, and along the way, Alex asked a few that were going east.

Most weren't or said no, but there was a tribe that was going way east, so he started traveling with them.

He sat inside the carriage and in his free time brought out the map of the Southern Continent that he had been so excited to see.

He unfurled the scroll and saw the map he had seen before. After just a glance, it was enough for Alex to be shocked.

"Wait... the entire Wasteland is just a fourth of the continent? There is so much more land beyond this mountain range," he thought.

The wasteland and the south seemed to be naturally separated because of how the land mass was formed. The wastelands seemed to be nearly cut off from the main continent that was chocked by the ocean on two sides.

There was no notations regarding the northern side of the continent besides simply naming the place 'Wastelands'. However, the south was teeming with cities and names.

Alex saw hundreds of cities, both named and unnamed. As he read the names to remember them, his eyes fell onto the center fo the continent.

In the middle, there was a massive mountain range with barely any humans living in it. From what he could tell, the mountains were too high, so people didn't live in it.

They either lived outside of the mountain range or in the center of it. The mountain range formed a natural valley that seemed to be filled with humans, and Alex understood why that was after reading the name of that place.

"So that's where she went, didn't she?" he thought. The location at the center of the continent was the Sunborn Sanctuary.

Alex saw a lot of islands around the continent, a lot of mountain ranges, a place towards the east called the Sunless lands that lay outside of the main continent, and many other places.

The man was unfortunately not as well labeled as the map he had gotten for the Northern Continent, so he had no way of telling what clan, family, sect, or what not occupied which place.

He couldn't tell if there were any important places that weren't cities or mountain ranges.

Still, Alex looked at the map closely and looked for a place where he could go inside from.

'If I'm here,' he thought, judging by an oasis that was noted on the map, I should reach here very soon. Once I'm here, I can either go by land or go by sea.

Alex wondered what he should be doing exactly in this scenario.

"I will think about it when I get there," he thought and closed the map.

He spent the next few days talking with the people from the tribe or killing beasts that made their way here from the north. The tribal folks were more than happy to have let him come with them.

As he thought, his journey came to an end in less than a week. The carriage stopped at the tribe's doorsteps and Alex walked out.

As Alex walked out, he could already smell the ocean.

'It's close,' he thought. The tribe members had indeed said that the ocean was about half a day's walk away from their place, so it wasn't surprising that Alex could already smell it.

He thanked the tribe members and despite their insistence, he walked away.

Half a day later, He arrived at the edge of a cliff. Beyond the cliff lay the murky blue ocean water, and in the air were many different colors.

'Qi,' Alex thought when he could finally see it. It had been so long since he had seen Qi out in the open, so he was surprised to see that his Demon eyes still worked.

Alex looked towards the left side of him and saw the cliff continue for hundreds of kilometers further than here.

He looked to the right and saw the mountain ranges that went on along further. He carefully looked at the mountain and sighed.

'Those people were right,' he thought, remembering back to something the people he had just journeyed with said.

He had asked if there was a pathway through the mountain in the east and they had told him that there indeed was.

Many different tribal folks were already living in those mountains after taking some phoenix flames with them. Some of these migrations had been as recent as just a century or two ago.

Alex could indeed see the lack of colors on those mountains, letting him know that he most likely would not be finding any Qi in there.

'I guess I have no choice but to go through the ocean then,' he thought.

Ocean was a scary place for a cultivator. He had heard it multiple times, from different people. It was a place without humans to keep the beasts in check, and as such, the beasts had grown to a frightening level.

Even Shen Jing had told him that even as a Saint realm, one wouldn't be safe in the ocean.

Alex took a deep breath as he got ready. However strong the ocean may be, he had no choice but to go into it.

So, without any hesitation, Alex jumped from the cliff and dove into the ocean. He sank deep into the ocean and even reached the sea floor of how shallow the ocean by the cliff was.

Alex quickly swam back up and floated in the ocean.

The water was cold and dark, and with it being close to evening, it was in shadow too. However, despite all of that, Alex's face still turned into a smile as he sensed Saint Qi in the water.

It was faint, but it was there.

Immediately, he started cultivating. His body turned into a vortex that sucked in all the Qi from the surrounding water.

'There's not enough,' Alex thought to himself and started swimming.

He continued collecting Qi even as he swamp away from the cliff. The further away he got from the land, the denser the Qi became.

At some point, the Qi was dense enough that Alex had collected enough Qi to no longer remain in the water.

He used his Intent and the world responded. In the next instant, he was a little less than a kilometer away from where he was just before. Only this time, he was flying in the air.

"Hahaha! Finally!" he shouted when he sensed the Qi. He looked to the left and saw that the nearest land to him was many kilometers away. The ones to the right were the same.

Alex then looked to the front where he could see many mountains coming out of the ocean as solitary islands that remained there.

Just as he was looking, he sensed some movement from below him as a snake came flying out of the water.

Alex looked down and saw the snake. When he sensed his cultivation base, he could only chuckle.

The snake was high in the True realms. If it were still in the wastelands, Alex would've had to move and attack physically.

However, now that he had some of his Qi back. He needed to do no such thing.

He simply moved his hand as if it were a blade, and an invisible slash appeared from it.

The Dao of Space and the Dao of Cutting worked together to form a blade out of space itself, which tore through the space in anything and cut it in two.

The snake didn't last a single second as it was cut in half by his attack.

Alex didn't even bother gathering the beast core of a True realm beast as that would have no use to him.

Instead, he started flying towards the mountain to the east. He decided to not get bothered by any beast in the ocean and used his concealment technique to hide.

A saint beast would still easily notice him, but he was fine with fighting them. If they were too strong, he could just teleport away.

Alex flew close to the mountain and landed on top of it. The mountain was surrounded by the ocean so it could be considered to be more island than a mountain.

He swept the entire land with his spiritual sense and saw what was it in. After a few seconds, he took back his spiritual sense as there was nothing here for him to worry about.

Alex found a secular spot at the top of the mountain and sat under a giant tree. Finally, he could cultivate peace.

His cultivation method went to work immediately and Qi from all around the mountain started flowing into him. Little by little, he was regaining his ability to use his cultivation base once again.

As he cultivated, a few of the Qi in his body also disappeared, going into his right shoulder plate.

Alex couldn't help but smile when he sensed that. "It is about time you healed, little fellow."

Chapter 1021 HiddenBay City

Alex cultivated for a few days during which he managed to finally have a completely filled Dantian again. He also cultivated enough that Whisker had finally healed enough that his body was reformed again.

It would still take a week or two for him to be fully back to the way he was before, but Alex could wait for that long.

Once he was fully done with his cultivation, Alex finally checked the mountain he was upon. Since there was a forest here, he could only hope for there to be some ingredients here that he could use to make pills.

Since he was lacking in money, he needed to sell pills to get them again.

Alex stood up from under the tree and looked towards the north where he could still see a bit of land that was the Wastelands.

He needed to find his father and since he already had enough Qi he had thought of going there. However, he still needed to prepare a few things, so he was first going to a town from the south.

A slight feeling of fear grew in Alex's heart when he thought of going south.

During the last few days he was here, occasionally he would sense the spiritual sense of a sea beast pass through him. He didn't know just how strong the beasts were but he could tell that if they were to attack him, his only method of survival was to run away.

'Dammit, I hope I don't get caught,' Alex thought.

He looked towards the south and the mountain ranges there. As long as he went there and flew on land, he would be safe from the sea.

He quickly went around the island, looking for anything worth taking with him. There were a few True rank ingredients and even one Saint rank ingredient, but that was the most there was.

Most of the ingredients were Common rank, and that was just not something Alex wanted to be bothered with. Since he was doing it for money, making common rank pills would be useless.

Alex did think of trying out pill veins with common rank pills, but he could do the same with True pills as well. In the end, there wasn't much from the mountain he could take anymore.

Alex quickly flew away from the island before immediately teleporting away. He had gone invisible and concealed his aura, but if a single Saint beast were to send out their spiritual sense, they would notice him immediately.

Which was why he was teleporting multiple times, even going as far as to push himself to teleport over a kilometer a few times.

He did feel slight headaches when he pushed himself that far. His Intent was strong, but not that strong.

Thankfully, he managed to reach the land without being caught by any of the beasts.

Alex landed by a cliff and looked back at the mountain he had just left a couple of minutes ago. When he saw how far it was, he couldn't help but laugh.

Had he tried to cover the same distance without flying, it would have easily taken him a day or more.

'Flying is so much better,' Alex thought.

He turned around to look past the cliff into the mountains lying in the south. He couldn't see any Qi with his eyes, so he could be sure that there was most likely some Phoenix fire that burned here that was constantly sucking in the Qi from the Spirit vein and the surrounding air.

Alex sighed and flew away.

He hugged the mountain to his right as he flew, going further and further deep into the south.

At some point, he had to finally stop. The road was blocked by a barrier that didn't let entry. This was the same barrier that had stopped him from entering the south a couple of weeks ago.

"So this barrier goes this far around, huh?" he thought. "That mad did tell me something like that but I didn't think it would be so far. I wonder how much Qi they are using up by constantly using this barrier."

Alex continued flying, his Qi reserve barely dropping because of how full he was. After an hour or two, he finally arrived at a certain bay where the barrier seem to end.

By now, the Qi had returned and it didn't seem like any of the tribal men had made it this far.

Alex stood by the edge of the mountain where the barrier ended and looked down. He was on a cliff so there was an ocean many meters below it. He could see people towards the end of the ocean where there was a relatively massive beach.

Beyond the beach were another few mountain ranges, but Alex could already see a city built onto the mountains themselves.

Finally, he had arrived somewhere with cultivators.

He quickly flew away from the edge and flew down to the beach. A few people looked at him with curious eyes, but most weren't bothered by his arrival.

Alex looked at the people here and their fair skin. They hadn't lived in the sun forever as the people from the tribes had, nor had they battled with pain and torture every day to gain their strength.

If these people had half the determination the people from the wasteland did, would most of them already be Saint by now? Alex could only wonder as he walked past them.

He didn't release his spiritual sense, nor did show off his cultivation base. As a result, he wasn't welcomed by anyone or got himself involved with anyone either.

Alex looked at the mountain that was the city and smiled. Was this the first time he was seeing something like this? Every other place that was a city either lay inside a mountain range or on some flat land.

He could only think of sects that lived in mountains, so this was a bit of a surprise to him.

Alex quickly found someone and asked where he was, along with asking for a place where he could possibly gain more knowledge about this city.

"Oh, are you from another continent?" the man accurately assessed his situation.

"Ahh... yes, I am," Alex said.

"Huh... we rarely get outsiders from another continent coming from here. Most usually enter through the Eastwatch city. You're the first in a few years," the man said.

"I see," Alex said. "And about my questions?"

"Ah, right. This is Hiddenbay city. Named after that bay that rarely anyone comes from," the man said. "There is an information center in the city halfway up the mountain. You can pay for more information there. Definitely a lot more than what I might be able to."

"I see," Alex looked at the mountain. "Thank you."

He left the man and walked towards the mountain.

There were houses at the foot of the mountain already. The sprawling city was larger than it looked like from up in the air.

Alex looked at the children that played in the open space, cultivators that fought each other to train, and mortals going by their day carrying various things.

He saw houses made up of wood, stone, mud, and even some that were made up of some sort of sand mixture that looked suspiciously like concrete.

These houses looked newer than others, so Alex could only guess that some players who had knowledge of concrete had already spread the knowledge far and wide and now there were mortals from this continent that were starting to use that knowledge for themselves.

Alex looked back at the beach and understood why they would be spread so fast. After all, this was a place with a lot of beaches, so the concrete wouldn't be that outside the realm of possibility.

There was also the desert in the wastelands, but Alex wasn't sure if those sands worked in concrete or not. After all, they were reddish in color, so there was likely something different about that sand.

Alex took the spiraling road up the mountain.

He could've flown up, but he wanted to see the scenery on the way up. He wanted to see more of the houses, the people.

After all, it had been nearly 10 years since he had seen a civilization like this that wasn't just a tribe living off of nothing.

Alex finally ended up in front of a place known as the Insight Pavilion. This was the place that was apparently full of any and all information that he could want.

A thought crossed for him to ask about his father, but where would he even begin to ask such things?

Besides, there were other things he wanted to ask about.

He walked into the building that didn't hold many people at all. There were about 5 people in total in this relatively large building that weren't staff members.

Alex walked up to a clerk that was free.

"Hi, I'm looking for some information. How much do they cost?" he asked.

"It depends on the information you are looking for, fellow Daoist. Can you tell me what you are looking for?" she asked.

"I'm a little low on money and want to earn it by selling some pills. Do you know what the best way to go about it is? Also to add, I do not have much money on me," he said.

The girl pulled out a few talismans and started looking through them. After half a minute, he had the information ready.

"It will cost you 15 True spirit stones," she said.

Alex currently had about 100 True spirit stones, so he paid the price without hesitation.

The girl quickly transcribed everything he needed to know on a piece of talisman and handed it to him. "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Chapter 1022 King Surpassing Pill

Alex wondered for a bit. 'Well there's nothing to lose,' he thought.

"Do you know anything about a man named Graham Benton?" Alex asked. "He should be... 70 years old or so."

"Oh, a young man named Graham? I will search," the girl said.

"Ah, no he's not young," Alex said. "He didn't start cultivating until in his 50s if he even did."

"Really? Hmm, it might to hard to find information about people that aren't really talented, but I'll try," the girl said.

"Please do," Alex said.

He waited for a bit but the girl couldn't find any information at all. "I'm afraid there is no information available regarding anyone named Graham," she said.

"I see, thank you for your help," Alex said.

"Please come again next time."

Alex walked out of the Insight Pavilion and brought out the talisman he had just bought. He read it while he walked towards the other side of the mountain.

As per his question, the answer had been tailored to his needs.

The best way to make some quick money with alchemy was actually to make pills and sell them in some auction in the Eastwatch city.

Since they were the first line of entry for foreigners to the continent, that was one of the places that were considered to be great city of the Southern Continent.

As such, they held auctions and similar events very frequently where he could sell pills to make some money.

Alex decided to fly over there immediately. He left the city behind, not even bothering to visit any other cities that were close by.

There were other cities that were on the way, but Alex didn't land on any of them either, going straight to the Eastwatch city.

Alex arrived outside the city a little before it was evening. Since it was getting close to nighttime, he decided to find himself a place to stay in the city.

The Eastwatch city was massive, almost as big as the Radiant city from the Western continent. There was a giant wall surrounding the city, with people standing on top of the wall.

Alex saw some sort of purple robe on the people that were standing on top of the wall. He paid a small fee at the gate to go into the city and found some sort of hotel to stay for the night in.

Once he got himself a room, he started cultivating for the rest of the night.

Early the next morning, Alex woke up and went towards the market. He had two sets of things he needed to buy with what little money he had.

He hoped to get himself a small cauldron of some sort, and then he needed to buy some ingredients to make pills out of.

The shop he went to was specifically meant for Alchemy and it sold everything related to it from formation plates for fire or cauldrons.

Alex looked through the cauldron. While he didn't need a good cauldron, it still had to be good enough.

He had no more than 80 True spirit stones, so he had to be frugal so that there was enough money at the end to buy the ingredients as well.

In the end, Alex bought a simple True Mortal ranked cauldron for 62 True Spirit stones and used the remaining money to buy enough ingredients for a single True rank pill.

He would have to start with this pill and hope to earn some money.

At the same time, he also learned about any auctions or sales that were happening in the city.

As it turned out, there was no auction happening for at least 10 more days. However, in 2 days, there was an open market that was going to be set outside of the city in the east.

At that time, anyone with anything to sell could set up a shop and sell the things they wanted.

"That works I suppose," Alex thought and went back to his room.

The ingredients he had acquired were for a pill that helped people break through from the True King realm to the True Emperor realm.

As far as Alex understood, pills that aided in breakthroughs were in high demand anywhere in the world, followed closely by a very good healing pill or an antidote pill that had high usage.

Alex went back to his room in the hotel and started making the pill.

Since he was lacking any sources of continuous fire, Alex decided to skip the fire aspect of the pill-making process.

Instead, he directly heated up the cauldron using his dao.

Heating up the cauldron required more mental focus than just using a flame, but with how easy this pill was going to be to make, Alex didn't have much to worry about.

It took him no more than 10 minutes to fully make the pill.

With ingredients that he improved using Supreme Elemental Accord and a recipe that was the best of the best, he easily made a pill that reached 96% harmony.

The only reason it didn't reach all the way to 100% was because of his lack of proper technique to form the pill.

If he had 2 sets of ingredients instead and used his pill-splitting Qi to make those pills at once, the people of this city would've seen some terrifying lightning certainly.

"I suppose I can make do with just these," Alex thought. Once done, he thought of how he would sell the pill.

He wasn't worried about the pill not getting sold, but rather the publicity that might come with something this good.

After all, he doubted there was anyone that could make such good pills as himself. 'Well, I can't really think I'm the best, can I?' he thought. 'After all, I don't know much about the situation of alchemy outside of the Western continent.'

The northern continent had suffered on the side of Alchemy due to Xue Kuangren, but the Southern Continent's alchemy should have flourished.

Now that he was thinking about it, he couldn't wait to see just what he could learn from the Alchemy of this continent.

The next day, Alex roamed the city and learned about various new things. He visited the site where the open market was going to be held and was more than surprised to see that a small market had already formed here from some early birds coming to set up shop.

They weren't selling much however as most of the buyers wouldn't come until tomorrow which was the actual date of the open market.

'Should I sell my Saint rank ingredient and get more True rank ingredients?' Alex thought. That wasn't a bad idea, but in the end, he chose not to. He wanted to keep some ingredients for himself in case he ever needed any.

The next day came and Alex went over to the market site.

It had been a little past sunrise and yet the entire site was filled to the brim with people selling things.

Alex not only sensed mortals here, but he also sensed the Self-tempering realm and True realm cultivators. Not just that, after checking more closely, he also sensed Saint realm cultivators.

Most of them were selling pills, formations, talismans, and artifacts, but there were also people that were selling normal stuff like clothes and food.

Alex looked around to see if there was something that he wanted, but there were simply too many to go around looking for. Before any of that, he needed a place to sell his pill after all.

He started looking around for a place where he could set up his shop. Most of the important places were already reserved, and those that were still empty were hard to see due to the crowd around him.

He wanted to use his spiritual sense to check, but seeing as no one was using any spiritual sense, he felt reluctant to use it as well.

Finally, after some time, he found a simple place in the grass that was open enough for him to sit.

Alex sat down and placed a single piece of paper in front of him that told the people exactly what he was selling.

'Selling 96% Harmony King Surpassing pill'

A few of the vendors saw Alex's paper and showed a weird look. They said nothing, but Alex could see in their eyes that they thought he was doing a very bad job of trying to scam people.

Alex showed no reaction to their looks and simply waited for someone to come and buy his item.

Eventually, a person saw his piece of paper and had to ask.

"Brother, are you really selling a 96% King Surpassing Pill?" the man asked.

"Yes, I am," Alex said.

"Where is it then?" the man asked.

"In my storage bag," Alex said.

"Can I see it?" the man asked.

"Do you intend on buying it?" Alex asked.

The man paused for a second. "No," he said.

"Then please leave," Alex said and closed his eyes. It was clear that the man had only stopped because he was curious about if there really was a pill, not because he had any intention of buying it.

The man grumbled, saying some things like 'bad vendor' or some such, but he still walked away.

Just as he left, a few people walked past him, stopping before Alex for a few seconds with a curious expression before walking away.

Alex, however, couldn't stop looking at them even as they walked quite far away. The men vanished into the crowd and only then did he finally look away.

"What the hell are these people doing here?"

Chapter 1023 Stunned Crowd

The men that had just walked past Alex had a cultivation base around the Saint Core realm. There was even one amongst the group that seemed to be in the Saint Soul realm as well.

They all wore a black robes with purple outlines and almost looked like they were all from great families going by their attitudes.

However, it was neither their cultivation base nor their attitude that caught Alex's attention.

It was the robe. In fact, more accurately speaking, it was the insignia on their robe that had caught Alex's attention.

On their left checst and either side of their shoulders, there was a circular insignia drawn in purple with a Sword in the center with a serpentine creature wrapped around it.

If it were any other place, Alex would've likely judged it to be some sort of coincidence, but in the Eastwatch city where people from the other continents were likely to come, he felt that this was no coincidence.

Because of this, he knew that the serpentine creature was no normal serpent but rather a dragon. It was the Azure dragon that was represented in the insignia, and thus the insignia and thereby the men that had just walked past him belonged to the rulers of the Eastern Continent, the Dragon Imperium.

"What are these people doing here?" Alex wondered. The thought lasted for a few minutes before he stopped thinking about it.

The only reason he was curious about them was because of the sword that was back in the beast realm. That was the sword responsible for killing Pearl's mother.

That sword had the same insignia as the one on these people's shoulders.

Alex had wondered if they were royalties, but given they looked more soldierly than anything, they probably were not.

He focused back on selling the pill and waited for another person to come by.

A curious boy, one that was at the peak of the True King realm stopped in front of Alex when he saw the notice.

"Is this a scam?" the young man asked.

"It is no scam," Alex said calmly. "I have a single pill and that is all I am selling today."

The young man wanted a pill soon enough and was planning to buy one in the near future. However, seeing such a pill available right at the moment, his urge to buy it reached an all-time high.

"How much?" the young man asked.

"I have no specific price for the pill. Anyone that can give me enough so that I'm satisfied with it will be enough," he said. Alex hadn't planned to put a price on such a pill since he had never seen such a pill being sold before.

Was 500 True spirit stones low or high? How did one compare the Harmony between a pill that wasn't even in the 70s and a pill that was 96%? Since it was difficult to put a price on the pill, he decided to let the customer do so for him instead.

"How about 250 True Spirit stones? That's enough right?" the young man asked hopefully.

Alex simply shook his head. "It's a 96% pill, not a 56% one. You will have to pay a lot more than just 250," he said.

"What about 300 then? Is that alright?" the young man asked.

However, Alex just continued shaking his head in refusal. The price was still too low.

"350?" the young man asked. That was already way more than what he usually bought pills with, so he wasn't sure if he should keep going or not.

Alex however wasn't budging at all and kept on refusing.

"Young mna, don't be duped. I bet that guy doesn't even have a pill to sell," one of the vendor owners from the side said.

"Even if he does have one, you need to make sure it's what he claims to be," another one said.

A few people turned to look at what brought on such responses from the people they were buying from. When they saw the piece of paper and the words written on it, they were immediately curious to learn even more.

So, they walked up and gathered around Alex as well.

Before the young man could even try to ask anything else, the new people started asking questions of their own.

Alex answered the question as best as he could.

He told them that he had made the pill 2 days ago, confirming that he was the alchemist behind the pill.

When asked why he wasn't selling this in an auction, Alex said that he needed money and couldn't wait until the auction. After receiving his money, he would make some more pills to sell in the auction.

"Hey, can I see the pill? I need to be sure if it is true or not," one of the people in the group said.

Alex nodded and brought out a small ceramic bottle where he had kept the pill. "This is the pill," he said while popping open the lid.

The few people checked inside and saw the pill.

"How do we tell that is it a 96% pill thought? We need to see it being tested," one of them said.

Alex frowned a little. He didn't have any pill testers on him, so he couldn't prove himself.

"Regarding pill testers, I—"

"No, we can't trust your pill tester. We need somebody else's," one of the people said before Alex could even finish speaking.

Alex shrugged. "That works for me," he said.

"HEY! DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY PILL TESTER WE CAN BORROW?"

The few people that were gathered started shouting out loud to various people, bringing the attention of many more towards them.

A larger crowd gathered while a few of the newcomers brought their own pill testers.

"We should check on all of them just in case he paid a few to go with his scam," a few people suggested. The other people agreed.

"You're free to check however many times you like," Alex said and let the people do whatever they wanted. He wasn't worried about the pill at all since it wasn't a very important pill at all.

If it was damaged in any way, he could simply make the people that damaged it pay for it.

Without waiting for his approval, the people started testing the pill with the pill testers that were given to them by the crowd.

A man in a brown robe took up the initiative to be the one to test it all. He placed the pill in the tester that looked not that different from the pill tester in the Northern Continent.

These were the ones that gave the instant result, and as such the moment the tester was activated, the crowd saw a 96% written on the tester.

"Woah!"

"No way!"

"Check it again."

The crowd spoke excitedly, making even more people gather around Alex's location. Soon, even the saints were curious about what was causing such a commotion.

The man in the brown robe tested a few more times using different testers, but each time the result was the same.

"Holy shit! It's true. It really is a 96% pill," someone said.

"That's as close to perfection as we will ever get."

"How can someone make such good pills when there are talented people struggling to make pills with 70% harmony?"

The crowd was justifiably shocked. After all, finding pills with such great harmony was pretty much impossible anywhere.

Not only was there a lack of recipes to make good pills, but there was also a lack of knowledge to make those recipes. As such, it would always depend on someone's luck to create a recipe that could create high-quality pills.

"Brother, how much are you selling this for?" the man in the brown robe asked.

Alex took back the pill and placed it inside the bottle again. "I have no set price. I will go with whoever pays the most."

The moment Alex answered that the crowd instantly started shouting out their amount.

The young man who had come at the start was bewildered by the amount quickly reaching 600 and above, something he would've never paid for.

Thinking that this was an opportunity he couldn't miss, he decided to jump in to.

Alas, as a rogue cultivator, he could never have the same amount of money as someone from a sect or a clan.

Alex watched as the numbers quickly reached over 800 and was surprised at just how much the people were willing to pay for a 96% pill. Maybe he truly had underestimated his own pill.

"Everyone, move!" a voice came from behind the crowd, loud enough that the crowd was forced to disperse a little.

"Is this where that pill is being sold?" a young voice came from a slightly chubby young man that was at the peak of the True King realm.

"Brother Huang, this is the place," another young man said. "Look, that's the kid that is selling the pill."

"Kid, how much is this pill for?" the young man asked.

"I'm selling to the highest bidder," Alex said.

"Oh, what's the bid now? 860? Was that what I heard earlier?" the young man asked.

A few people nodded with a bit of hesitation. "Haha, great! I will pay 860 spirit stones then. Anyone else want to pay more?" the young man asked.

"I can pay 870," a man that didn't know about the newly arrived young man's reputation quickly said.

Suddenly, a wave of cultivation bases landed on the man, suffocating him from all sides. "Did you say you will pay more?" the young man asked.

"I... I..." the old man couldn't speak from the pressure.

Alex's eyes narrowed and a frown appeared on his face. He did not like what he was seeing.

Chapter 1024 Selling The Pill

"Are you here to buy my pill or disturb my business?" Alex asked the young man.

"Hehe, of course, I'm here to buy your pill," the chubby young man said. "860 Spirit stones was it?"

"If you're going to buy my pill, stop harassing my customer," Alex said.

"Heh! You're quite courageous to speak up to me like this. You must be new here so you don't know about me, do you?" the young man asked.

"No, I don't. What's your name?" Alex asked.

The young man was about to proudly answer when Alex lifted his hand to stop him.

"It would be better if you just tell me what backing you have to go around flaunting yourself," Alex asked.

The young man frowned a little. "My name is Huang Fenrou, that is all you will get, bastard," he said. "Dammit, you ruined my mood. Now give me my pill so that I may leave this place."

"Sure," Alex said. "Right after everyone is done bidding as well."

The young man looked confused for a second before laughing out loud. "Haha! Do you really think they would bid now that I'm here? Hahaha, you can just try."

Alex was pissed off now.

"Leave!" he said. "I am not selling to you. Whoever else wants to buy, please start naming your price again."

However, not a single person started bidding. It seemed they were too scared of the young man.

Alex couldn't help but sigh. "You don't have to be scared of him. Just name your price, I will sell it to you," he said.

However, the people weren't going to purchase from him now at all.

"You see? They aren't going to buy from you. Now, sell it to me. I need to go home and break through now," the young man said.

"I already said I'm not selling to you, just leave," Alex said.

"Huh? Do you really think I will leave without the pill?" the young man asked in a hateful tone. "I'm leaving with the pill today. Whether you want to get paid or not, that's your choice."

"No, you'll leave without it. I'm done arguing with you," Alex said. "You three, carry your young master home."

"Carry me ho—" the young man's eyes turned white as he fell face-first onto the ground. Nobody noticed what had happened, just that the young man had fallen down.

"Brother Huang!" the people shouted immediately and came to his aid. However, the young man was unconscious and would not wake up for a long time.

"You! What did you do?" the men furiously came towards Alex.

"You three better calm down, or else..." Suddenly his Saint realm aura assaulted them just as they had assaulted his other customers.

The three of them fell to the ground in shock. "No... Saint realm..."

"Leave! This is your last warning," Alex said as he stood up.

"P-please don't hurt us," the men said as they quickly got up and started running away, only remembering a second later to take their young master with them.

'That's probably going to come to bite me back somehow. I should think of leaving this place quickly,' he thought.

"Is there no law here that stops him from doing this?" Alex asked the group of people who were gathered there.

The crowd didn't speak a word out of fear of angering a Saint realm. Finally, the young man that had come to the shop first spoke up.

"Senior... that young man is from the Huang family. They have too much power to simply be stopped by law. Especially when they aren't outright hurting people," the young man said.

"Huang family? That's a major family of this city?" Alex asked.

"No, not just the city, but rather the entire Southern Continent," the young man said, surprising Alex a bit.

"Continue."

"They are part of the 10 Sects and Families that are responsible for everything in the Southern Continent. I hear this young man is from the main family line and has been staying in this place for the last couple of years," the young man said.

"10 families huh? I should learn about them soon," Alex thought.

He wondered if the Phoenix in this region were reclusive like the Black Tortoise as well. Although, they were at least more outgoing than the Black Tortoise as they had given Phoenix flames to the Wastelands.

"Anyway, let's continue our bidding. I would like to be done," Alex said.

The rest of the crowd immediately jumped at the words and started bidding more and more. Finally, the bids stopped around 1040 spirit stones, which was the most they were willing to give.

Alex accepted and took the money from one of the people that were buying. The woman who got the pill happily walked away, while the rest kept asking if he had any more.

"I don't have any to sell at the moment. That was everything of value I had on me, which is why I sold it. Now that I have some money, I will be making more soon enough and will be selling in the auction that will happen in 8 days."

"If you want to buy any pills at the time, do so. Not only will I make pills for breaking through, but healing pills, as well as pills that will help someone restore their limbs while in the True realm," Alex said.

"Restore limbs?"

"Is that possible?"

"Senior said so, then it must be true."

Alex looked at the people and stood up. "Don't get your hopes high. I will need to find the right ingredients so they do so in the first place. Anyway, I'm leaving. Make sure to check out the auction if you want any more pills with over 95% harmony," he said and left.

The crowd talked with each other for a while about what they had just seen, but slowly they had to disperse. A few of the followed Alex, but that was useless anyway.

As he left, Alex sent his spiritual sense back at the young man who had appeared first and spoken to him. "If you want a pill, just gather up some ingredients and find me," he said. He gave the young man the information about his hotel so that he could find him.

Once that was done, Alex went back to the Alchemy store to buy more ingredients. With over 1000 spirit stones, he was free to use whatever the hell he wanted.

He bought various different ingredients, all True rank for the moment as Saint rank ingredients still cost quite a lot.

Once he was done, Alex returned back to his room and started making some more pills.

He had only finished 2 when he heard a knock on the door. Alex sensed that it was the young man from before and called him in.

The young man had indeed brought some ingredients. As one would do anytime one wanted pills to be made, the young man had brought 3 sets of pills.

"Wait outside, I'll be done in a bit," he said and got to work. It didn't take him very long to make the pill for the young man, but when he went to give him his pills, Alex realized that some trouble had arrived.

Chapter 1025 Forever Spring Auction House

Alex looked at 2 Saint realm cultivators that stood outside of his door, alongside the young man that was here to make pills.

"Here, take it," Alex handed the young man's pill and let him go. With him and another two Saints here, the young man would definitely be too scared to do anything while they were around.

As soon as the young man left, Alex turned to look at the two people waiting for him. Looking at their clothes, he couldn't determine anything as it seemed these people didn't have dedicated clothing if they belonged to a family.

He wondered if only sects and organizations had uniforms in this continent.

"How can I help you two?" Alex asked them.

One of the saints was an older man while the other one was a younger girl.

"Are you the alchemist that sold the miracle pill?" the older man asked in a rather respectful manner.

Alex was a little surprised. "Yes, I am," he said.

"Was it you then who hit our young master with a mental attack?" the older man asked.

"You're servants of that young man surnamed Huang?" Alex asked.

"We are nto servants, but relatives of the Huang family," the older man said. "Our family head wishes to see you. Would you come with us?"

"What if I say no?" Alex asked.

"Then there's nothing I can do but walk away empty-handed," the old man said. "But, please reconsider. Our family head wishes to meet you so that you could make a pill for him. He holds no grudge for you attacking his son."

Alex smiled. "Then you can return. I have no intention of meeting anyone before the auction opens," he said and closed the door.

The two Saints that remained outside were left confused.

"I told you, we should've used force," the girl finally spoke.

"You can't always solve things with force, dear child. Why would you want to get on the bad side of an alchemist with such potential?" he asked.

The girl frowned a bit. "What do we do now then?" she asked.

"What else can we do?" the old man asked. "We will go back home and report our failure. The family head was always aware of the chance of failure when he sent us here."

"Alright," the girl said. "If he gets angry, I'm blaming it all on you," the girl said and started walking.

The old man shook his head and followed behind her.

Alex returned back to his room where he was free to start making pills once more. Since there were quite a few days before the auction, he made his pills one at a time, taking as long as he wanted.

In between the pill-making session, he would cultivate his Qi as well as his Undying physique and his Demon eyes.

Unfortunately, he couldn't improve his mental prowess due to losing the Mask along with everything else.

Between cultivating and making pills, his days went by very quickly before he made the pills.

The items for the auction needed to be provided 3 days prior to the event as they would need to advertise it to attract more bidders.

The pills were simple as he had mentioned to the crowd before. They either healed you or helped you in improving your cultivation, nothing else.

He could've gone for the other pills, but since these were the ones that were contested the most, he made them for monetary reasons.

Alex waited 3 more days until the auction was to start.

Auctions in Eastwatch city were frequent, but even so, each one was just as popular as the other. They were monthly events that the entirety of the city as well as the newcomers looked forward to.

Alex walked over to where the auction was being held, at the most popular auction house in the city called the Forever Spring auction house.

It was a massive auction house that held multiple different auctions at once.

People of different financial statuses could pay to go for the auction with better items in it.

These restrictions only fell only on people that weren't saints yet. Every saint was allowed free access to go for any of the 3 different auctions that were being held.

Alex naturally chose the highest tier, the one where his pills were being sold. Despite being True rank pills, since they were 95% and above pills, people were more than excited to get their hands on the pill so that they could buy it for their family members.

Alex found himself a simple seat in the main hall. There were VIP rooms but they cost a lot of money to book, so there was no chance he was getting to sit there.

Besides, he wasn't going to buy anything today. He was just here to see just what sort of items got sold in the Southern continent.

Alex watched the hall get filled and any minute now the auction would start.

However, before it could start, one of the staff members walked up to him. "Senior, you are being requested to experience the auction today alongside our guest in room 13," the girl said.

Alex looked at the girl curiously and turned to look towards the VIP room that had a high viewpoint. Nothing inside could be seen from here, so he turned back towards the girl. "Who exactly is asking for me?" he asked.

The girl hesitated a little. "I'm sorry, senior, but our guest has forbidden me from revealing that information," she said. "But he said you would know who he was just by the fact that he was requesting for you again on Auction day."

Alex sighed. "I see," he said. "He's calling me to enjoy the auction?"

"Yes, senior," the girl said.

"Okay then, let's go," Alex said and left the seat.

He walked away from the hall and went up a flight of stairs before arriving in front of room 13.

The staff who had brought him here knocked on the door and another staff from inside opened it.

Alex walked without any hesitation into the dark room with only 2 men inside. He recognized neither of the two, but seeing how one was seating on the seat next to the window and another was off to the side, he could guess which one was more important.

"Ah, you're here," the man turned around. The man couldn't be called fit, but he couldn't be called chubby either.

He had a short beard and mustache, and a head full of hair that flowed down past his shoulders.

"You are family head Huang?" Alex asked.

"I am," the man said. "What might your name be?"

Alex walked up to the side of the family head and sat on the empty seat that was most likely kept empty for him.

"Yu Ming," Alex said.

He subtly checked the cultivation of both of the people around him. The servant was in Saint Foundation 5th realm, while the family head Huang was Saint Core 3rd realm.

The man was stronger than Alex whatever angle one looked from. Still, Alex wasn't phased. He had a lot up his sleeve as well.

"So, why did you call me here, family head?" Alex asked. "It can't be to punish me for what I did to your son, right?"

Chapter 1026 The Sun's Womb

"Punish you? Maybe I should," the man said. "My son woke up 3 days later. I was going to storm into the hotel to kill you had the physicians not promised me that he was absolutely fine."

"Of course, he was," Alex said. "I wouldn't hurt a junior just because he was becoming a little annoying."

"Haha," the man laughed. "I hear you've placed some pills of your own here or were at least planning to."

"I am," Alex said. "You should have seen it on the item list."

"I did," the man said. "But it's hard to believe that such a thing is possible at all. I mean, who in their right mind would ever believe a 95% pill would exist in our mortal world? Only the immortals of the past should've been possible of such a thing."

"They most likely still are," Alex said. "I just got lucky."

"How did you get those recipes?" the man asked.

"From a secret realm that I visited. That's all I can say really," he said.

"Secret realm huh? Which one?" the man asked. "The Sundering Sanctum? Or the Forbidden Orchard?"

Alex got curious as he had heard neither of the names before. "Neither, I'm afraid. It's a secret realm from another continent."

"Oh, you're from the Eastern Continent? No wonder your alchemy is so good," the man said. "How did you come here with such a weak cultivation base?"

"I didn't," Alex said. "It was a teleportation malfunction that sent me here. I'm looking for a way back."

"Oh, I don't think I've ever heard of people traveling like that," the man said.

The curtains opened up front as the auction began. The auctioneer, a woman that looked to be middle-aged, came out and started introducing the auction.

Around the same time, a thought came to Alex.

"I hear your family is part of the 10 that is responsible for ruling the entirety of the Southern continent. Is that true?" Alex asked.

"Yes, we are," the man said. "Although I would say governing is a better term than just straight-up ruling."

"Does that mean you have access to the teleportation formation?" Alex asked. "I wonder if I may use it somehow."

"Ah, that's what you wanted to ask, huh?" the man said as he shook his head. Unfortunately, I am not the one you are looking for."

"Despite being a family head of one of the 10, I have almost no say in anything that goes on in the actual council. The council itself is made up of 10 ancestors from various different sects and families, and they are the ones responsible for it all."

"The best I could possibly do is provide some minor suggestions here and there," the man said. "It is the ancestor that chooses everything else."

"I see," Alex said.

He remained quiet after that and simply focused on the auction. The family head was here for the auction too, so he started focusing on the auction too.

The auction auctioned off various different things from weapons, armor, artifacts, and formations to puppets, pills, and even newborn beasts.

Alex was surprised by the quality of the items being auctioned off in this place especially since this was a monthly auction.

The man by his side bought many of the items as well, each of which easily went over 1000 Spirit stones.

Alex remembered the feeling of being so rich. He didn't appreciate it at the time, but now that he wasn't, it truly was an amazing feat.

'Whatever, I'll make it back again,' he thought.

"Do you want something bought? Do tell me," the man said.

"It's alright," Alex said. "I don't need anything really."

"Is that so," the man said. "Then how about I gift you something instead then?"

"Gift me?" Alex looked toward the man. "Why would you want to do that?"

The man chuckled. "Isn't it obvious?" he asked. "I'm trying to get on your good side."

"If that is so, then I won't stop you," Alex said. "I'm not going to refuse free stuff anyway."

"Haha, let's see if I do come across something you will like," the man said.

Alex looked forward to seeing what he would be gifted as well.

Time passed by and Alex's pills were sold as well. Given how great they were, the crowd had gone into a frenzy for every single one of the pills.

In total, selling those 10 or so pills got him over 12 thousand spirit stones in total. With that sort of money, he was back to being able to afford most of the things.

As long as he didn't go for anything in the Saint rank, he would be fine for a long time.

"Oh, I think you will like this one," the man said suddenly.

"Hmm? What's next?" Alex asked. Since he didn't have any money, he hadn't bothered looking at the items being sold in today's auction. Besides, he wanted to be surprised anyway.

When he saw the large object being pulled out, he could tell by the shape just what it was.

"Oh, they're selling a cauldron, huh?" Alex said. The round shape was an immediate tell.

"Yes," the family head said. "I hear that this cauldron belonged to someone from thousands of years ago when the Phoenix still ruled the Southern Continent."

Alex got a little surprised when he heard that. "Oh, the southern continent was ruled by Phoenix before?" he asked.

"Yes, but that's thousands of years ago," he said.

"Why did they stop?" Alex asked.

"Who knows? I hear that the Phoenix simply went into the Sunborn Sanctuary and stopped coming out. That was thousands of years ago," the family head said. "All I know now is that in the absence left behind by the Phoenix, our 10 ancestors rose to the occasion and took control of the chaos that came from an ungoverned continent."

Alex thought of something. 'The phoenix was one of the 5 beasts that fought the inhumanly strong person in the central continent, right? Maybe he too is hiding in the Sunborn Sanctuary because of a possible Heaven's Judgment being dropped upon him?" he thought.

He wondered if the reason for the Phoenix was the same as the reason for the Black Tortoise. After all, they had both given their all with their Immortal cultivation base in a world that held no Immortal Qi.

It would be rather strange if some of them didn't have to survive Heaven's Judgment.

Not just that, Alex wondered if the other half of the Black Tortoise, the Snake was also hiding somewhere because of its own Heavenly Judgement. While being the same being, they were also separate, so they both could have been hiding from it at the same time.

Following the train of thought, Alex wondered what had likely happened to the Dragon on the Eastern Continent.

Was that the reason why all the Heavenly beasts that had returned from the fight had disappeared from the minds of the common people?

Alex's attention was pulled back to the auction by the family head next to him who had bid 14 thousand True spirit stones for the Saint Earth rank cauldron in front of him.

Alex finally saw the cauldron too and saw that it was covered in colors depicting Phoenix flames.

"What did they say the name of this cauldron was?" Alex asked.

"They called it the Sun's Womb," the man said. "Apparently it can handle a lot of heat."

Alex nodded. 'Memory could handle a lot of heat too,' he thought. Once again, he was reminded of the things he had lost.

The bidding for the Sun's Womb went on for another 5 minutes before finally ending with 37 thousand True spirit stones being the final bid.

The man next to him had indeed won it. "I hope you like this gift of yours. It cost quite a bit more than I was expecting, to be honest," he said.

Alex turned to look at him. "Why are you doing this exactly?" he asked.

The man gave a confused look. "I told you, to get on your good side," he said.

"I understand that," Alex said. "But why? What do you get out of being on my good side?"

Alex leaned in closer and said, "I can see that you want something from me. Tell me, is there a specific pill that you want me to make?" he asked.

The man suddenly smiled. "Finally, I thought you would never understand it," he said. "I do want something. For the last 2 decades, I've noticed that my cultivation speed has slowed down a lot. As such, I've been looking for a way to speed it back up."

"And you want pills for that?" Alex asked.

"I can't see any other way, really," the man said. "I will be needing pills and lots of it."

Alex got confused. "Why me then? Certainly, there are other alchemists that could make those pills for you," he said.

"They can, but eating so many of their low-quality pill will cause problems for me sooner or later. I need stuff that I can chomp a handful at a time and I would still be fine," the man said.

"I see," Alex said as he rubbed his chin. "So you are worried about pill poisoning. That's a valid reason to be afraid of eating many pills."

"Right? So..." the man asked.

Alex nodded. "I do have a recipe for a pill like that," he said.

"Great," the man said with a happy face. "Let's talk about this at my home once the auction is over."

Chapter 1027 True Sun Copper

The auction ended not long after. The items being sold after the cauldrons were quite good, but Alex couldn't buy any. Not that he needed any of it.

He left the room with a staff member who was to take him to a room to get his money. The family Head of the Huang family on the other hand walked away with a staff of his own to show him over to get the items he bought.

Alex received his money and was asked to sell some more pills as he had done today. He was planning on doing that anyhow so those people didn't even have to say.

Once done, Alex walked outside and met with the other man that had been in the room. This was most likely someone from a secondary branch of the family and was thus acting as the family head's guard or something.

The family head walked out not long after.

"Here you go," he said as he handed a storage bag to Alex. "It's quite good, I must say."

Alex sent his spiritual senses inside and checked the cauldron. The color was nice to look at and the cauldron itself seemed solid, however, he wouldn't know just how good it is until he tried to make a few pills with it.

"Let's go," the family head said and they walked away.

The Huang Family's mansion was not far away from where they were. It was on the southern side of Eastwatch city and was massive enough to be considered a small town.

The number of buildings and open space in there would make one think that they were actually entering a small town.

Alex was taken to the main building where the main family resided. As he walked along, he could sense a few spiritual senses landing on him.

'Not bad,' he thought. 'They're quite strong.'

If he wasn't wrong, there were people here that were above the Saint Core realm in cultivation. There were definitely quite a few that were stronger than the family head himself.

'Why is he the leader then?' Alex wondered. He came to the conclusion that it was either because he was the most capable, or more likely, he was from the main branch and was thus allowed to take up the mantle of the family head just because it was his birthright.

Either way, Alex didn't have much to consider as he continued looking at the building designs in there. Compared to the Wasteland, which was simply just a bunch of rocks, bones, and mud put together, this was much better.

However, compared to the rest of the world, it wasn't anything unique.

Alex entered the largest building and was taken to a room at the center of the house where the sun shined through an opening in the roof.

Alex sat down and so did the other two. Refreshments were immediately brought out without even being called for.

Alex drank the refreshing fruit juice that most definitely came from some semi-exotic fruit and placed the glass down. "So, let's talk about those pills," he said. "When do you want them exactly?"

"Actually, I would appreciate it if you could sell us the recipe instead of the pills themselves. We can make the pills ourselves as we have many alchemists, but it's the proper recipe that we lack," the man said.

Alex shook his head. "I can't do that. It's not a recipe I can just sell given just how good it is. You surely don't expect me to give the golden goose away, do you?" he asked.

"What if I were willing to give you a large sum of money? Would you reconsider?" the man asked.

Alex shook his head. "I can't. I will make you many pills so you won't have to worry about ever running out," he said.

"But that's going to cost me a fortune, isn't it?" the man asked. "I could handle the cost if it were spread over the course of many years, but if I have to pay such a sum in a single year, my family will become homeless."

Alex smiled. "Say I were to sell you my recipe. You should know that there will be almost no alchemists in this continent that can go over 90% in this continent. Heck, even reaching 80% will be hard for them," he said.

Alex knew that the only reason he could make such high-quality pills was because of his Dao and his techniques that added energy as well as helped in forming pills that adhered to the Structure and Combination that the pill asked for.

The man didn't believe him, however. It was an obvious thing to lie about for Alex to not have to sell the recipe and instead make the pills themselves.

"Fine, let's go with just pills then," the man said and turned to his subordinate that followed him around. "Is guest room 1 or 2 empty?"

"I'm afraid not, senior," the other man replied. "Guest rooms 3 and 4 are empty, however."

"I see," the man said. "Prepare guest room 4 for our guest here. He will be staying with us for a few days to make some pills."

"I will get the servants to get on it right away," the man said and send his spiritual sense to give some orders.

"Now, please give us the ingredients list so I can send someone to fetch it for you," the man said.

"Sure," Alex said. "Do you have an empty talisman?"

Once handed one, Alex wrote all 11 ingredients required in that one pill and handed the talisman back.

The family head got his subordinate to go out and buy the ingredients while he himself took Alex to the guest room.

The guest room was outside of the main building, in a separate building that was entirely for a single group of guests. As Alex was only one person, he got to keep this entire house.

"Please rest for a while. I will call you once the ingredients are here," the man said and left.

Alex nodded and went into the building and found his way to a room. As soon as he was in, he slumped onto the bed and gave a tired sigh.

"This is getting so boring," he thought to himself. "When should I go search for father"

He wanted to take a few healing pills with him when he went searching for his father, which was why he was so focused on earning at the moment. He did not want a repeat of what happened with Li Yun to ever happen again.

He quickly moved his thoughts away to something else and remembered the cauldron he had just received. "Right, I should check that," he thought and quickly opened the storage bag.

The multicolored cauldron came out and landed on its 4 legs. There were two birds that were on either side of the cauldron that was just there for decoration.

Alex checked for any peculiarities with the cauldron. He checked for its Qi lines, its artifact spirit, and even the properties of the metal.

"Hmm, that's weird," he thought at the last part. The metal that was used in making the cauldron was very receptive to heat. Even just placing one's palm was enough to heat up the entire cauldron with one's temperature in mere moments.

The speed at which the heat traveled through this metal was quite amazing. "That's unfortunate," Alex thought after learning all of this. After all, for someone with the Dao of Heat and Heat Conduction, such a metal provided no additional function.

"Still, that's not bad. Maybe I can just focus on the fire with this cauldron instead of trying to heat everything," he thought.

He looked around a little more before he was called outside.

"Shall we head over to the Alchemy room?" the family head asked. "The ingredients are here."

"Oh, that was quite fast," Alex said. "How many are there?"

"Uhh... should be about 60 or 70 sets. That was all that was available at the moment," the man said.

"That should be enough for me to make for a week or two," Alex said. "You can gather more by then."

"Yes," the family head agreed to those words. "By the way, did you check the Sun's Womb? How was the cauldron?"

"Oh, it's quite good actually," Alex said. It couldn't compare to Memory, but it was a fine cauldron after all.

"I'm glad my gift wasn't a waste," the man said.

"It wasn't," Alex said. "Speaking of which, do you know what metal my cauldron is made out of? I found it quite unique."

"Metal? I'm afraid I don't know much about your cauldron. I did buy it to gift you," he said.

"Well, then do you know any metals that are well known for transferring heat very fast?" he asked the family head.

The family head looked at Alex for a bit. "Oh, is the cauldron made up of True Sun Copper?" he asked.

"True Sun Copper?" Alex asked. "That's the name?"

"Yes," the man said. "It's a metal with very niche usage as it is only good for heat transfer."

"I see," Alex said. "I don't think other continents have that metal."

"I wouldn't doubt that," the man said. "There are different types of metals that are exclusive to the different continents. True Sun Copper just happens to be one of those."

"There are other metals that are unique to the Southern Continent?" Alex asked.

"There are a few," the man said. "They are usually mined in the mountains of the Sunless lands."

Chapter 1028 The Alchemy Room

"The Sunless lands, that's... in the east right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it's a group of small islands southeast," the man said.

"Oh, why is it called Sunless?" Alex asked.

"It's mostly cloudy there, and it rains a lot. So most people call it the Sunless lands," the man said

"I see."

Alex wondered if there was any merit in trying to mine some more metal here as well. Not that he needed any immediately, he still wanted to get some to make some more swords.

Now that he had lost all the swords he had made before, he had to start anew from somewhere. 'I'll worry about that later,' he thought. 'It's not like those swords were that rare. I can make some after I find a way to return to the Northern Continent,' he thought.

"Here we are," the man said as they arrived in front of a small building. Another man walked out from inside, the same man doing errands for the family head.

"Are the formations inside working?" the family head asked.

"Yes, senior. It is all ready for our guest," the other man said.

"Let's go inside," the man said and brought Alex along with him.

Alex walked inside and saw a rather large room with a fire burning in the center. "This is quite good," he said. His spiritual sense moved around the room looking at everything.

"These are formations to help you keep your fire under control. These should aid you with heat manipulation. That formation over there is useful to keep your mind cool at all times, and that is a formation for testing your pill's quality. I'm not sure how they do it in the Eastern Continent, but that's how we do it here," The man said. "There are other formations around the room, mostly defensive. But it's unlikely you will ever need any defensive formations here."

Alex looked around the room and there were indeed formation flags dug into all of it. He even noticed something peculiar about one of those flags.

"You have really put a show of just how rich one of the 10 families of the Council members can be," Alex said as he looked around.

"Of course not," the man said, a little offended too. "Being a family that brought forth the 10 Council members gives you no direct financial support."

"Oh, not even a little?" Alex asked. That was akin to saying that the prince of a royal family wasn't rich even though their father was the Emperor.

"I won't lie, there is some help. But it's not direct. It's more of an opportunity than anything. When you try to trade with someone, they won't outright reject our family because of the connection, but in the end, it still depends on how well we perform for those connections to remain," the man said.

"There are many other sects and families out there that are richer than us. Hell, even the Mayor of this city is nearly as rich as our family, and he's just one man. In the end, the connection isn't everything. If you want to succeed in life, you need true power," he said. "Fortunately, you will now help me gain it so much faster."

"Yes, my pill should help you a lot," Alex said. "Now, I should get to cooking. I want to try out my new cauldron too."

"Okay," the man said and brought out a storage bag. "Here are the ingredients."

Alex took the bag and started formulating a timeline in his mind of exactly how long it would take him to make 70 different pills.

After all, not only did he need to make the pills, but he also had to do it slowly enough that they didn't realize just how good he was. Aside from that, he couldn't think of anything else that he needed to be careful about overall.

"I should be able to finish it all in a week or so," Alex said as he looked into the storage bag. "Hmm? Why are there only 3 sets here?"

"Oh, right. I wanted to test you a little. These ingredients cost quite a lot so I don't really want to just let you make it all without knowing what sort of quality I'm going to receive," the man said. "After all, I have never seen a Saint pill made by you."

"That makes sense, I suppose," Alex said and sat down before the fire. "Please leave me alone for a while. I will let you know of the pill's situation once it's done."

"Yes, of course. I will return in half an hour," the man said and left.

Alex pulled out the ingredients and looked at them one by one. 'This is a little annoying,' he thought. He needed to improve the ingredients before every pill-making session, and they took a while.

They were obviously faster than the first time he had done it, but it still took 10 to 15 minutes per set of ingredients. If he wanted pills of quality, they were necessary.

'Whatever, I'll just make a single one for him,' Alex thought and started the process.

Just as he had expected, it did indeed take 15 minutes to fully add the missing energy from the ingredient. After doing so, he lost a significant portion of his Qi, leaving him with less than half his original Qi.

'Saint-rank ingredients require too much,' he thought to himself and went to work.

One by one, he put in the ingredients and started making the pill. The pill-making process was the second best thing he could do without making pill veins themselves.

It lacked the usage of teleportation and Pill-Splitting Qi, but other than that, it was perfect.

The pill finished forming a few minutes later and he pulled it out. '92%,' he thought. For a pill that he hadn't tried his hardest, these were anything but bad.

"I've finished the first pill," Alex said to the servant that was standing outside. The girl quickly walked away to pass along the information.

Not long after the family had returned to the alchemy room and Alex passed along the pill to him. "These are the sorts of pills that will be made," he said.

The family head placed the pill on the testing formation and saw the number 92% pop up on it.

"Amazing," he said with a look of awe in his eyes. "I cannot believe that there actually exists someone that can make pills with over 90% Harmony. If the entire Continent were to learn of this, you can only imagine how much insanity we would witness just so they could get you to make some pills for them."

"I wouldn't doubt it," Alex said.

The man quickly put the pill into a bottle and stored it in a storage bag. "Although, I have to ask," the man said. "How much of this incredible result?"

"Hmm," Alex thought for a moment. "It's hard to quantify in numbers. You can give a bad alchemist the best of recipes and ingredients, and he will still make bad pills. "

"But, if you give a good alchemist some mediocre recipe, he would still struggle to make anything good. So, I would say they are sort of half-and-half. It's the mix of two that makes it possible to make such a pill," Alex said.

"I see," the man said. "So I was right."

"Right? About what?" Alex asked.

The man looked towards him. "I am right in that I don't necessarily need an exclusive Alchemist. I just need a few to make pills following a perfect recipe. They will all make the same quality of pills as you," he said.

"You're not wrong," Alex said. "Although, finding perfect recipes are harder than just asking for it."

"You have one," the man said. "I just need that recipe."

"I'm afraid mine is not for sale," Alex said.

"Who said anything about selling?" the man asked. "We are going to trade it."

"I don't want anything though," Alex said.

"Oh," the man turned towards Alex. "Not even freedom?"

Suddenly, a barrier arose from all around the alchemy room, which the family head barely managed to walk out of.

"Let us begin our discussion on how long you want to stay inside that room," the man said. "Don't worry, I've got days to waste here."

Alex looked around the room at the perfectly formed barrier. It was a strong barrier that anyone that wasn't in the upper realms of the Saint Core realm would be trapped inside.

The purple barrier originated from the many formation flags that were part of the Alchemy room, the same formation flags that Alex had thought were peculiar early on.

"That's not the expression I was hoping to see," the family head said. "You don't seem worried."

"I'm the last thing that should be worried in this transaction," he said. "As long as you don't have the recipe, I will be safe, isn't that right?"

Besides, Alex had already noticed that there were formation flags there that were specifically worked to trap someone. He had stayed there knowing that.

"You're not wrong," the man said. "I do need to keep you safe until I get the recipe, but I can still make you work for me until you are ready to give me the recipe."

"You think that just because you can use some recipes you are a good alchemist," the man said. "No, that makes you a mediocre alchemist with a good recipe. Once I get my hands on it, you will be nothing."

Chapter 1029 Dual Lightning

"You seem angry," Alex said. "Is it because I hurt your son? I don't even think that counts as hurting. I could've taken his limb in that instance, and I would've been justified to do so with how disrespectful he was to not just me but everyone around me."

"No, I'm not angry about my stupid son. Sooner or later he will learn and change his ways. I was the same before," the man said. "The reason I'm angry is that you refuse to sell me the recipe."

"I don't see why you should be angry because of that," Alex said. "It's not like I stole it from you and won't give it back. In the first place, why do you want it so bad? Is there a reason why a family head like you would want to advance so fast? You should take it slow, and enjoy your life."

"Shut your damn mouth. You don't know what my life is like. You don't know how much pressure one faces when they hold such a high position without having a cultivation base to back it up," he said. "I have to agree to everything the others say and rarely get my own say in my own household out of fear of the others walking away."

"Once I'm strong, I won't have to worry about any of that at all," he said. His eyes dropped to his hand and he looked at the pill bottle. The pill there was going to make his dreams come true.

"I'll go cultivate for now. You can spend some time to think what you should do in your situation," the man said. He turned to his subordinate and said, "Keep an eye on him. Give him a set of ingredients one at a time each time he makes a pill. And if he's ready to make the transaction, call me. I'll be in my room."

"Yes, senior," the other man said and stood outside the barrier, besides the door.

The family had walked away while the other man remained. He turned around towards Alex. "You have 2 more sets of ingredients right? Please make those first," he said and turned around.

Alex chuckled and bit and sat down. He sat in front of the fire thinking as to what he should do next now.

'It shouldn't take that long to go through the entire Wasteland, right?' he thought. Looking at the map again, the Wasteland was but only a fourth of the entire continent, and given how the north was filled with beasts, it was likely that if he was going to find his father, it was going to be down south.

'I should start from those mountains on this side of the continent and make my way south slowly,' he thought.

Alex couldn't think of a better way to find his father.

"Yeah, I should do that," he thought. "As for ingredients, I don't really need many. I have enough to make enough healing pills for anyone in the Wastelands."

Thinking so, Alex stood up. There was no more need to stay inside here.

With but a thought he concealed himself and left behind a copy of himself that seemed to be cultivating. In aura, shape, and sight, there was nothing that could distinguish that it was Alex.

As such, when he quickly teleported out of the room, the man standing outside did not notice his arrival at all.

The moment he was out, Alex used multiple Heaven's Impacts on the man, hitting him with a mental attack that quickly incapacitated him.

The mental defense artifact that the man had was easily broken through. Still, with a saint realm mental strength, it was unlikely the man was going to stay down for more than a few minutes.

He needed to act quickly.

"I can't leave without taking anything for trying to capture me, right?" he thought and quickly took the man's storage bags.

Then, he teleported away, leaving the Huang household without anyone's notice. He teleported outside the house, arriving in a random alleyway before quickly making his way to the Alchemy shop.

Alex bought everything he could there with his money and left the place.

The Huang family would be in shambles very soon. The family head would leave his cultivation session with a massive smile on his face after seeing the effectiveness of the new pill.

However, when he would go to check on Alex, he would find nothing but disappointment and anger in knowing that he had escaped.

He would raise hell trying to find Alex, but by that time, Alex would've left far away.

* * * * *

A day or two later, Alex arrived back in the Wasteland. He could've come here far earlier, but he had to spend some time searching for his father through the various tribes that were set up on the way.

Since he didn't find him, he made his way back to the Wasteland.

Since it took him 2 days to get here, Alex was low on Qi. Coming through a place with absolutely no Qi at all, he needed to take some days off before he could go out again.

Alex made his way out to the ocean, teleporting each time so he wasn't caught by some strong sea beast.

Thankfully, he made it to an island with relative ease and he sat down to cultivate once more.

"Hmm, maybe I should eat my own pill to cultivate. I do need to get stronger even faster," he thought. Since he had the ingredients for quite a few pills, he needed to use them.

For now, he could only cultivate since there was nothing he could do without Qi.

Alex sped up his cultivation until he had half of his Qi back. That was all that was needed for now as he needed to quickly make the pill.

He pulled out the Sun's Womb and started preparing 2 sets of ingredients for when he was going to be making the pill.

It took about an hour and a half to completely prepare the ingredients, and by the time he was done, he was all but out of Qi.

Alex took a few deep breaths and cultivated for a bit before getting ready to make the pills.

He pulled out a set of formation flags that he had bought in Eastwatch city and quickly set up the formation.

When the formation was done, a fire blossomed at the center of the formation, on top of which Alex put the Sun's Womb.

He used his Dao of heat to quickly bring the heat of both fire and cauldron to the appropriate level. Once they were both more or less ready, he began.

One by one, he placed in the ingredients in pairs and started processing them. Since he had been doing this for so long, it felt very easy to him.

The ingredients turned to powder at a steady rate that was neither fast nor slow, Alex kept the consistency and his Dao helped a lot towards it.

He was soon at the end phase of the process where he would have to form the pill from the powder. So, to do that, he used his Pill-Splitting Qi which entered the cauldron and started making forming the pill.

The pile of powder was split into two sections which quickly formed the two pills, and as the energy was driven into the newly formed pill, the sky above him started darkening.

'It's starting,' he thought as he looked at the massive storm brewing in the sky. Just then, he noticed something peculiar about this storm.

"Is it stronger?" he thought. He didn't know why, but the lightning flashes in the sky looked stronger than every other time he had witnessed it.

Granted, all the times he had seen the pill cloud were inside rooms where he couldn't see the lightning from the start. Now that he was in the open, maybe this was how it was usually.

But still, it continued to feel weird for him.

Alex put his Qi into the cauldron and placed it around the pills to protect them. Then, the lightning flashed and the bolt struck his cauldron.

The Sun's Womb was an amazing Saint rank cauldron so there was no way it was going to break. The lightning entered the cauldron and struck the pill, but his energy easily protected it.

However, just before Alex could take a bit to be ready for the next lightning bolt, another lightning bolt of the same intensity dropped from the sky.

Alex hastily used what Qi was inside and protected the pill. Thankfully, the lightning didn't harm the pills at all.

He got ready for another one, but it seemed it was going to take a few seconds more. He took a deep breath and put in more Qi this time than necessary.

At the same time, he wondered why there were two lightning bolts. Were there already two Pill Veins on the pill inside?

He quickly looked at the pills he was protecting and saw that the pill only had a single pill vein. However, just as the confusion of the situation hit him, he also saw something else.

The 2nd pill had a pill vein too.

"Woah! No way," he thought and quickly looked up at the sky. "No wonder there are two bolts of lightning. No wonder it feels so weird."

Both of the pills in his cauldron at the moment we're going through pill tribulation. That was the reason why there were two lightning bolts striking the cauldron one after another.

Chapter 1030 Eating The Pill

The next 2 lightning bolts struck his cauldron again, hitting the layer of protection around the pill before dissipating.

Alex protected his pills from another two lightning strikes, but the upcoming ones were going to be stronger.

While he was certain his Qi could still defend it, he wanted to be sure. So, instead of Qi, he pulled out his blood aura from his body.

The blood aura entered the Sun's Womb and made another protective layer around the pills.

The 3rd pair of lightning bolts struck the cauldron again, and Alex protected his pills once again.

Soon after, as the 4th pair of lightning bolts prepared to fall, Alex put in some more blood Qi and protected them the best he could.

When the lightning struck the pill and he managed to protect it, Alex immediately pulled the pills out. His blood aura was still slightly stronger, but there was no guarantee that it was strong enough to survive a single one of the 5th strikes, let alone two.

Alex took the pills and looked at them. The pills had 4 different lightning scars on them, each one of which was uniquely shaped. He could tell that this was a fantastic pill and was as effective as eating at least 3 or 4 of the 90% harmony version of the pill.

He kept one of them in the pill bottle and then ate the other one. As soon as it entered his body, Alex could tell the difference between a normal pill and a pill with a pill vein.

The difference between a pill with a pill vein and one without it would be the difference between swords that were made with tempered metal and swords that were made without any tempered metal.

They were simply incomparable.

As the energy in the pill started diffusing into his body, Alex quickly stored everything that was outside in his storage ring and started cultivating.

Using the new energy, Alex started using the Immortal version of his Five Yang Divine path technique to quickly cultivate.

The movement of Qi in his body was normal, but the rate at which his body was drawing in Qi from the outside was extraordinary. His already wide meridians were bulging as they struggled to contain the amount of Qi he was getting.

The pill allowed him to draw in Qi at a rate that made his meridians full each time, and his Dantian had to work extra hard to quickly process through all the newly brought in Qi.

Soon enough, the dantian was getting full as well, so each time Qi was being added to his dantian, the dantian was compressing the Qi, even more, trying to reach a high state of Qi.

It wasn't very good at that, so it would still lose a lot of Qi in the end. However, overall it was still an incredible improvement for Alex.

His cultivation speed had increased by over 20 times with just a single pill he made in just 2 hours.

With 2 hours and a few Saint rank ingredients, he was doing 20 days' worth of cultivation in a single day. This was a speed that had likely not been seen in this world for the past few thousand years.

Alex continued his cultivation and soon enough he fell into a rhythm where he could do it without worrying.

It took nearly 2 days for the pill's effect to wear off, and in that time, he cultivated over 40 days' worth of it.

As the effect of the pill wore off, Alex felt the backlash that came from eating the pill. His meridians were slightly sore and his dantian was weak.

Judging by the 'backlash', he wouldn't be able to cultivate for the next 5 or so days at least.

Alex was fine with that. It was still on average what it would take him 33 days to achieve. With that sort of speed, he could reach the Saint Condensation 9th Realm in less than a month.

'I can use the 5 days of downtime I get to go look for father while using the rest to cultivate,' Alex thought. That was surely the best method out of all.

As his cultivation came to a stop, Alex began cultivating the Demon Eyes and the Undying Physique. These two would take him half a day, but they were so easy to do that he had already established a muscle memory for both of them.

Alex immediately started cultivating the Undying physique first as that was the way to get Whisker back quickly.

Whisker's body had already reformed, but there was still a bit of healing left to be done by his own Undying physique which was slowly siphoning off Alex's Qi.

At normal times, this siphon worked slowly, but when Alex cultivated the Undying Physique, it improved the connection significantly enough that Whisker could heal even faster.

As he did so, Alex remembered about the other person that needed to quickly regain what he had lost.

It had been a while since Alex had seen him, so he decided to go and check if anything had changed.

As the Undying Physique was being cultivated, Alex entered his own mind and arrived in the Spiritual Sea, flying above the deep water below him.

"How long has it been since I've come here?" he thought. The last time he came here was after leaving the crater in the north of Wasteland where he had fallen. He had quickly come to check on Godslayer at the time.

Godslayer had given his all to fight against Xue Kuangren, allowing Alex to break off his Tribulation warding pendant. After that, he had gone dormant.

That time when Alex had come to check on him, Godslayer's crystal body was clear without the black flame that forever burned at the center.

Alex could tell at the time that Godslayer wasn't going to come back anytime soon, so he had left this place and never come back.

"Geez, how long has it been since I was here?" he thought to himself. "3 months?" That felt like the right amount of time.

The silver threads that floated in the air from the silver mountain were barely there back then, but now they were taking over the entire sky.

"I'll have to clean that up soon," Alex thought, but for now he had to check on Godslayer.

He floated next to the crystal ball that had hovered down to just over the water. He picked up the crystal ball and looked inside. There was the tiniest bit of flame inside but it didn't seem to burn at all.

"Well, that's still better than last time," Alex thought to himself. He tried thinking of ways in which he could help Godslayer at the moment. The only way he could think of was to provide some Death and Darkness aura which he could feed on.

'Maybe I can go around searching for some Death aura. That is the only thing I can gather anyway,' he thought.

However, just then remembered something. "Wait, didn't he use to become stronger from the beast cores I ate? He could gather what he destroyed in here, right?" Alex thought. "Can I maybe get some beast cores and see if that helps him in any way?"

That wasn't a bad idea in Alex's eyes. Even if it didn't work, he could still use the beast's core to improve himself, the body to make pills, and the blood to improve his own blood.

"That settles it then," Alex thought. "I'm going to go kill some beasts."

Since that was the case, he was most likely going to hate to wait a few more days before he went to search for his father again.

'Maybe I should wait until I've broken through before going to search for my father,' Alex thought. However, in the end, he decided to do it all simultaneously. There was no reason to waste that much more time.

"Let's go kill some beasts," Alex thought and left Godslayer.

He was about to leave when he saw the silver threads floating in the sky like a swarm of bees near a hive.

"Urgh!" Alex couldn't help but make a hateful sound when he saw that. It was going to take so long to fully clear it all from the sky, and why? There wasn't even a point in cleaning up these threads anyway.

Still, who knew what bad things could happen if he let it be? Since collecting the silver threads had worked for the last 25 years of his life, there was no point in not doing it again.

"The mountain is definitely getting smaller though," he thought. "Maybe I will see something inside of it when it's all gone."

Alex hoped to see anything from this mysterious silver mountain that had been staying freely in his mind for the last 25 years.

He slowly floated up to the mountain and landed on the peak. He raised his hand to grab onto one of the silver threads.

As he did, the silver thread turned into silver light before vanishing into his body.

Other silver threads floated nearby Alex, but he was too shocked at the moment to do anything at all. He slowly brought the hand he had just used before him as he looked at it with shock.

Unbelieving what he had just sensed, he quickly grabbed onto more silver threads and absorbed them. However, each time he did so, he got the same exact result.

He was finally starting to gain an understanding of what these silver threads were.

"That... that's Space aura."

Chapter 1031 Squid

Alex absorbed it again and again, and every single time he felt the space aura from the silver thread.

"How is this possible?" he couldn't help but ask himself.

How long has this mountain been with him? It was a day before he graduated from the Tiger sect that he had gotten this.

All this time, he had wondered what it was. He had even stopped caring at some point because he wasn't getting any answer from anywhere.

And now he was learning about what it was? He grabbed some more threads and absorbed the Space aura in them.

It was weird, to say the least.

"Why now?" Alex wondered.

If he thought back, there had been some subtle improvements in Space since the very start for him.

The first time he had ever manipulated space was the day when he killed the girl that was teleporting in the Demon realm.

He had no idea what he had done there, but that was when he started showing signs.

The next time was when he noticed space being manipulated. It had been in the royal palace in the Radiant city where he felt something happening in the Beast realm.

After that, it was in the Beast realm when he woke up one day after absorbing a lot of these threads that he was consciously starting to notice the change in space.

After that, it had been a rather swift journey as he learned more and more about the space laws right until today.

"But why today?" Alex asked himself. He had been absorbing these threads for the last 25 years, so it didn't make sense for him to only just notice it, did it?

"When did I last absorb it?" he thought. It had to be a few days prior to when he made the final pill for the madman to heal himself.

"Something must have happened between that day and today," Alex thought. "What happ—"

Alex paused for a moment. "Ah! Space Dao. I learned the Dao of space after my last time. Is that it? Is that why I'm sensing this? I can sense it because I'm not just absorbing it, but I'm understanding it as well."

That made perfect sense to Alex. With the understanding that came with Dao of Space, he was able to tell whether or not there was anything Space related within himself as well.

"Still, this thing either must not be space or be very stable space for me to not notice until now," he thought. "Either way, if this is what has been helping me in understanding Space laws then I should continue absorbing the threads. I can't leave any behind."

With that thought, Alex went around his mental space, gathering all the threads that still floated in the sky.

It took him a while before he was done. Then, he came back outside to his body that was still cultivating the Undying physique.

The world got silent as night fell. The only sound was that of the trees rustling or the waves of the ocean crashing onto the island in the distance.

Alex continued cultivating for the entire night and only finished it the next morning.

He opened his eyes and got up. "5 days," he thought to himself. That was the amount of time required before he could cultivate again.

"Should I really go find my father right now? Or should I consider helping Godslayer first?" he thought.

There was another problem that he was starting to come across the more he got closer to the day he needed to leave for the wasteland.

"That's a massive place that I will have to fly through and scan every single person I come across," Alex thought. "Do I go around walking if I run out of Qi?"

There were two methods to not have this problem in the first place. One was to make some Saint rank pills which he could eat to gain some Qi.

Or, he could use some beast cores in the same way. For that, however, he would have to kill a lot of beasts.

"I was going to do that anyway since I need to provide Godslayer with some energy too," Alex thought. This was a good way to test his fighting capabilities after not being able to fight for the last 10 years.

He flew out of the island and went to the ocean where he had to fight the beasts. That was quite dangerous as he had no idea just what sort of beasts lay in here.

If he accidentally caught the attention of a strong beast, he would be in danger. So, instead of searching for beasts, Alex decided to let the beast find him instead.

He flew around the sky in a small area and soon enough a spiritual sense caught onto him. Judging by the strength, Alex was sure he could fight it.

A beast came out of the water, one which Alex had never seen or heard of before. The beast was massive at nearly 5 meters long. It looked to have crab hands with pincers, but its body was that of a trout.

The beast flew into the sky and snipped at Alex with its pincers.

Alex sensed the beast's cultivation base before even it came close, so he was certain that he could defeat the beast.

At the 8th Saint Condensation realm, he had the power of an 8th Saint Foundation realm expert. On the other hand, the beast was only at the 5th Saint Foundation realm, so fighting it was rather easy.

Alex dodged the pincers and pulled out at midnight. He poured Yin Qi into the sword and slashed at the fish.

In a single strike, the fish's body was gravely wounded with death and darkness aura entering its body. The wound on its body grew black as if infected and the beast cried.

"You damn bastard!" it shouted. Hearing a fish speak felt surreal to Alex, but only because this was the first time he was seeing an aquatic beast in the first place. Otherwise, he was used to seeing beasts be able to speak.

"I might have baited you here, but you came to kill me anyway. Don't go crying when you die."

Alex swung his sword again, and the fish was cut in half.

Space twisted as Alex pulled on the fish's remains and put them into his storage ring. For the beast core in the corpse, he could check that once he was done. For now, he needed to go find some more—

Alex saw a gigantic tentacle shoot out of the water as it rose to hit him. He teleported just in time and arrived some distance away, but it seemed the beast that was attacking him could teleport as well.

The beast wasn't using any dao, but rather skills that came with its bloodline. The tentacle came out once more from the water and shot at Alex.

Alex slashed as hard as he could, trying to cut the tentacle. However, when the tentacle slammed onto his sword, he knew that he had made a mistake.

The tentacle slammed onto his body, sending him flying into the sky.

Alex felt and sensed his broken bones. The attack just now from the monster was enough to harm his body which currently had Sword Qi and standard Qi protecting him on top of body cultivation.

Alex fell into an arc, and even as he fell, his wounds were already healing. The cut-up wounds had healed up and the broken bones were half-mended.

Just a few more seconds and he was going to be healed.

However, it didn't seem like he had much time. He teleported immediately, running away from the current location and back to the island that was in the distance.

Alex landed on the island and frowned slightly. There was no Qi in this place. However, that wasn't the problem he should be focusing on at the moment.

"Those beasts… will they come onto the land?" Alex wondered. He hadn't seen any beast come up to the land. If they could do it, the land would be filled with those beasts anyway.

However, as if to disprove his theory, a giant tentacled squid jumped out of the water and onto the land.

"You're quite strong," Alex said when he sensed the beast's cultivation base. "I guess I will have to play it safe too."

Blood poured out of Alex's body, pooling around him to form armor. At the same time, the blood dripped from his hand onto Midnight, forming a coating around it powered by blood aura.

The beast looked confused a bit. The beast wasn't used to seeing such a sudden difference in fighting ability, not to mention the blood aura itself was quite care.

The beast slammed its tentacles once again, this time sending shockwaves through the air.

Alex struck back with his own sword. With the Sword aura and Blood aura helping midnight, the attack easily blocked off the Squid's attack.

Finally, he looked at the Squid properly and saw that it had rather hard skin with scales growing on it.

The squid had 2 eyes that stared at him viciously, with 2 tentacles and 8 different arms. As for its cultivation base, it was a Saint Core 4th realm beast.

'Shit!' Alex thought when he finally sensed its strength. 'This is going to be hard to beat.'

He had no idea how strong his blood aura was, but it was definitely not this strong. In which case, all he could do was pray that his understanding of Dao would be the thing that saved him in the upcoming fight.

Chapter 1032 Fighting The Squid

Alex teleported behind the squid and slashed it as hard as he could. The Sword aura from his sword struck the beast in closed range as his blood aura did the majority of the damage.

A thin blue line appeared on its back as a few lines of blue blood came out of it. At the same time, the squid's tentacle moved at an impossible speed and hit Alex.

Alex's blood armor stopped most of the damage, but he still felt the blow that sent him flying backward.

Alex stopped for a moment and at the same time teleported again. The place where he had been got destroyed by the Squid's attack.

He arrived somewhere else. Once he found his footing again, he jumped back to fighting the squid.

He arrived in front of the squid and quickly dodged through its 8 arms while stabbing it through its body.

However, it was so strong that Alex's sword barely went inside at all. A tentacle came flying from the side, so Alex left the sword and jumped back.

At the same time, a thin blood thread was attached to the sword which he yanked on to dislodge the sword.

However, midnight seemed to be stuck quite badly and it would need something else for him to get it out.

More blood poured out of him as he got ready to fight.

"I really do have to use my Dao or this is unwinnable," he thought.

Suddenly, a vast amount of blue color filled his vision. The water Qi that he was blue to his vision was slowly coming out of the beast's body and going behind it. At the same time, water flew out of the ocean and created multiple rings around the squid which seemed to be working as a sort of defense.

Alex tried sending a blood bullet toward the beast, but the spinning rings of water quickly destroyed it.

The beast's tentacle moved again, coming towards him. Since he was looking directly at the beast, his eyes could clearly follow the tentacle's path toward him.

His blood turned into a sort of dagger that he slowly moved upwards as if trying to cut something that was there. At the same time, space aura gathered around his blade and both the Dao of Space and the Dao of Cutting worked at once.

The powerful blood blade cut right it time as the tentacle arrived and cut the tentacle right through the center.

The tentacle split up vertically into two different halves, and one-half of the tentacle still landed on Alex. He felt the force behind the attack as even his armor found it hard to stop all the pain.

Alex spun through the air, falling onto some bushes near the beach of the island.

At the same time, the beast attacked once more, this time sending a gust of water toward him. The water came at him like a pillar thrown at him.

He managed to dodge at the last moment by teleporting and the beast still attacked him mere moments after he appeared.

The split tentacle slammed at him.

Alex didn't get a chance to dodge as he had dodged just now. Instead, his blood armor opened up like vines that grabbed onto the beast's tentacle, latching himself onto it to not get thrown far away.

Alex coughed up blood, but he was right next to the beast. That was all he needed.

Using the moment of surprise, Alex used his True Fire dao to create a ball of fire right in front of the squid's face.

There was no Qi on this island, so he had to use his own remaining Qi to make the fire far away.

The water rings around the squid immediately got to work to protect itself from the fire, but Alex gave it no chance. He pushed the Qi from inside of him and shouted,

"Explode!"

The explosion rang loud as if it were a tribulation lightning coming down to strike someone that the heavens feared.

Alex felt his own explosion send a shockwave back at him as he was sent flying away backward. Trees were uprooted and the ground cleared up.

A massive crater was left at the center of the explosion with both Alex and the squid sent flying to either side.

Alex slowly tried to get up, but his body was too broken to move. He had to wait a few moments. He spread his senses and looked for the beast, only to find it down on the ground like him.

The explosion had truly been very strong and it seemed the squid which was closest had suffered a far worse fate.

One of its tentacles was nowhere to be found, along with 3 of its arms. The front of its face was burnt and charred with blue blood spilling out from some of the burnt locations.

The water rings that were protecting it previously were nowhere to be found at all. They had all been destroyed by the explosion.

Alex found Midnight a few paces away from the squid, which had seemingly fallen off during the explosion.

"Urghh! It's losing too much blood," he thought as he tried to get up. "I shouldn't use the explosion again. I need its blood."

The squid also moved at the same time, but the wounds on its body were quite severe. So, Alex was quite faster than it.

Alex was still bleeding from many places, but the important parts of his body, mostly his bones had been healed, so he was ready to fight again.

He teleported next to the beast and grabbed midnight before swinging at it.

The beast used what little strength it had to send its barely functioning tentacle at him, which Alex easily cut apart with how weak it was.

Then, he jumped on top of the beast and jammed his sword into one of the open wounds the beast, the only one that he could attack and not have to worry about having his sword stuck.

The squid struggled for a moment but Alex started creating a massive amount of death aura directly into the squid's body, delaying its regenerative properties a lot.

The squid's remaining arms tried to grab onto Alex, its Qi trying to use some technique, but it was feeble right now. Suffering from the full brunt of the explosion, the squid was already at death's door.

The squid wouldn't die from the death aura itself, but it would be so incredibly sick that if not healed soon and it wound would get worse and worse by the day. At the end, it would die from untreated and unhealed wounds.

That was later in the future though, and Alex neither had the time to think about the future or any will to let the squid go until it was strong in the future.

He jammed the sword deeper into the Squid before carving it open with all the Space and Cutting dao he could use.

The squid's head was wide open as blood gushed out. Alex quickly took the squid into his storage ring and finally sighed as relief filled him.

"That was a close one," he thought to himself. If not for the timely explosion, he would've lost today's battle. Had that been the case, he wasn't sure he could defeat the beast so easily.

"Well, that's that," he thought and got up. As he did, he looked away from where he was towards the center of the mountain.

During his battle, he had noticed something up there that had surprised him. However, now that he was thinking about it, it made perfect sense for something like that to be here.

Alex stopped his Qi from being wasted anymore and kept the wounds on his body as he walked towards the center of the island.

When he reached there, in a small cave with an opening at the top, there was a multicolored fire burning at the center.

"There's Phoenix flames here too, huh? I wonder how it got here," he thought. He didn't think it was the tribal folks as they could never come here. So it had to be the cultivators then.

"So that's why this place doesn't have any Qi," he thought. "Thank god I still have some or I wouldn't be able to leave here at all."

Alex stayed by the fire as the wounds on his skin slowly healed from being next to the phoenix flames. It was neither as fast nor as painless as when his undying body was healing him, but the fire was still healing him quite well.

Within half an hour, all the wounds on his body was gone and he was fully healed. He moved around a bit to confirm it, and once he was sure he sat back down as he remembered something.

"Does that count as body cultivating?" he wondered. To cultivate one's body, one needed to get beaten up badly and then heal from it.

Alex had known that, but he had never really thought about body cultivation as it was something that simply happened on its own with Pearl around.

However, with Pearl gone, he was starting to see many things in different light. Body cultivation was one of those very things.

"Wait, I can heal very easily here though," he thought. "Not only is there fire here, I also have my Undying body to heal me back from any of the wounds."

As the thought grew in him, he couldn't help but get more and more excited. "Doesn't that mean that I can body cultivate easily?"

Chapter 1033 Blood Squid

Alex left the island with the Phoenix fire. While Phoenix fire was good, it wasn't as helpful for him at the moment since his own Qi could heal him far more effectively.

He did wish to try and learn how to make Phoenix fire, but even with his True Fire Dao, he could see absolutely no way of creating the fire.

He could create a fire that burned blue, purple, red, and orange simultaneously, just like a Phoenix fire would, but it would not have the all-burning trait that the Phoenix fire did and did not heal at all.

Alex wasn't disappointed by the result, however, as it would be impossible for him to do something that a heavenly beast could only do. He would have been disappointed if he had Phoenix's blood in him, but since he didn't, there was still a chance for him to be able to make Phoenix fire just yet.

All he had to do was follow his bond with Scarlet to the Sunborn Sanctuary and see if any of the Phoenixes there were willing to supply him with a bit of blood.

However, that was still a while in the future. For now, he had other things to worry about.

Alex flew through the ocean, searching for another place to stay at. The islands on the eastern side of the wastelands were all spread far apart and going from one to another wasn't as simple as beasts roaming the ocean very frequently.

Alex had to fight 2 different beasts before he reached an island where he could use Qi again.

As soon as he arrived, he found a place for himself to stay.

This island was one of the bigger ones and had some beasts, but none were strong enough for Alex to fear them.

He jumped onto the crown of a giant tree where he would be staying for the next few days.

Alex brought out the Sun's womb and the first thing he did was cut up his own arm to fill it with his blood. The Squid core was too good to not use as a Blood beast.

Once he was done filling the cauldron partially with his blood, he proceeded to bring out the four beast corpses that he had placed into his storage ring.

He quickly took out the beast cores from all 4 of them and let the body continue bleeding. Once it fully bled, and the ground where it was placed was muddy with blood, Alex stepped down and started absorbing the blood.

Blood Absorption took a few hours for him to complete. By the end, the blood on the ground was barely producing any aura for him to use.

Once that was done, Alex's blood became slightly stronger. He went back to the tree and started cultivating his Eyes. He would have to wait a bit longer before he could cultivate his body, or use more blood.

Night fell and halfway through the night, Alex switched back to using the Undying Physique again.

The next day, Alex did the same thing. He gathered a bit of his blood again and went back to cultivating again. He would take some breaks to go around the giant island and find some alchemy ingredients, but mostly he would just cultivate his eyes or his physique.

His Undying Physique had already reached a point where he could heal cut-off limbs, but it still took a few minutes to do so. Anyone that had learned about that would be quite jealous of him, but Alex knew he could go for more, so he wanted more.

He wanted to reach a point where his body parts could regenerate mere moments after being cut.

4 days went by and Alex spent it all doing nothing but the same thing over and over. By now, he had barely any Qi left in his body.

All of his Qi was used up by his Undying Physique as it regenerated his blood quite quickly too. He could've restored it by eating a beast core, but he wanted to wait until he had some Qi.

He didn't want to use the core on himself, but rather use it for Godslayer.

On the 5th day, Alex placed the squid's beast core into the cauldron that was filled to the brim with blood and activated the technique.

The blood churned as it moved around the cauldron, like waves in the ocean. The power in the blood and the soul in the core fought each other for a good while before the blood aura simply overwhelmed the core.

Then, the core absorbed the blood aura, slowly forming a massive beast that came out of the cauldron.

The Blood Squid that formed from his blood was just as large as the real one, looking down on him at 5 meters of height.

It had all the same features as the real one, and now all Alex had to do was test to see if it has the strength of the real one as well.

A while later when his blood aura was improved again, he called out his blood armor and asked the Squid to hit him.

When the attack did land, Alex noticed that the squid was not as strong as the real one. It was slightly weaker, maybe by half a realm's worth.

Given how badly he was hurt when fighting that beast, a slightly weaker squid was still quite strong. Alex understood the reason for it being weaker was because his blood aura was weaker than the Squid's cultivation base.

He was already lucky that the Squid's core didn't fail to form a blood beast. After all, cores that were stronger than one's blood aura had lower and lower chances of forming a blood beast.

"I guess absorbing those blood before starting helped me even if it was just a little," Alex thought.

Now that he was done with the Squid, he moved on to another beast core. However, he wasn't planning on making a blood beast out of this one, but rather eating it.

Alex cleaned up the core and quickly swallowed it. As it reached his stomach, he felt the Qi in the core slowly dissolve. However, the Qi was still held together by a spiritual force that was but the remaining will of the beast he had killed.

At the same time, Alex's mind was assaulted by the same beast, so he went back into his mental space.

A crab-like fish flew in the air, the first beast of the 4 he had killed recently. The beast started fighting back as soon as he got in, the fight was anything but hard.

In the mental space, all one could use was their spiritual energy, and a dead beast's spiritual energy was rarely as strong. Not to mention, Alex's own spiritual energy was absurdly stronger than anyone in his own cultivation realm.

Alex beat up the beast enough that its mental strength faded and what little energy had formed its consciousness here dissipated away. Normally, Alex would absorb this energy as it would add to his own mental energy slightly.

However, right now, he needed to let Godslayer absorb this.

He flew next to Godslayer's body and grabbed it to bring it back. He moved his body around where the beast's body had dissolved and hoped that worked.

Surprisingly, it did. Godslayer's body naturally attracted such energy which he absorbed to improve upon. However, the absorption process was too slow.

Alex left the crystal sphere hovering around as it absorbed what was around him. However, after a while, yellow fog emerged from the sea below to consume it all.

"I don't know if it will do me good leaving it all like that. Seems like a waste," he said to Godslayer. "Don't worry, I will be eating more soon to help you."

Alex came out of his mental space and felt the Qi that was being held back start to flow through his entire body. Most of the Qi found the shortest path to the dantian, but some still make it to all the parts of his body.

"I feel so full," he thought to himself.

To move his body a little, he called out to the Squid and started fighting with it. At first, he tried fighting without any Blood armor, but soon he realized just how bad an idea it was.

He was getting beat up so hard that it felt worse than when he fought the real thing. At least for the real one, he could attack back. He couldn't even attack this blood beast for fear of ruining it.

However, as he got beat up, he also healed, which slowly improved his body. It wasn't long before Alex realized that not only was this a good training session, but it was also a good way to hurt his body before it healed.

As long as he asked the blood squid to hold back a little, it was just the right amount of force to hurt him without going overboard.

He fought with the squid for nearly half a day before he was bloody and blue. He had stopped his Undying physique from working just until now, so when he allowed it again, his body visibly healed at a very fast rate.

Since he had no missing body parts, it took no more than half a minute to fully heal.

However, he had spent quite a bit of Qi while healing, so he had to go cultivate again.

He sat on the crown of the tree once again and took out the 4-veined pill from before as he got ready to cultivate all over again.

Chapter 1034 Searching Continued

2 Days later, Alex finished his cultivation. He was getting closer to his goal of breaking through to the next realm.

After finishing his cultivation, he went out to fight again. He had the squid with him this time around, so he wasn't very scared about meeting something strong.

In the worst-case scenario, he could sacrifice the blood beasts to go and fend off his enemy while he ran away.

Alex fought a few different beasts that were strong, but not as strong as the Squid he killed. If he wanted to fight some stronger beasts, he would have to move away from the main continent where the Qi was siphoned off to burn the Phoenix flames eternally.

"I can find stronger beasts later," he thought and went back to the island again. Since he couldn't cultivate for the next 5 days or so, Alex cultivated the Demon Eyes and Undying physique for the next two days while gathering blood.

2 days later, he felt his right shoulder plate buzz a little as Whisker came back out.

Whisker jumped out from behind him and onto his palm.

'Did it work?' Whisker asked with his spiritual sense.

Alex smiled. "Yes, it worked. You did great back there," he said. To Whisker, the last thing he had done was destroy the formation flag that kept the lightning formation running in the Lightning Peninsula, a moment after which he died at the hands of the madman.

"It's been about over 3 months since then," Alex told him. "A lot of things have happened."

Alex told Whisker everything that happened after his fight with the madman.

Whisker worried for Pearl, but Alex was sure that Pearl was fine. At the very least, he was alive.

Alex spent the next 3 days either fighting or gathering materials. He also had his beasts beat him so he could body cultivate a lot.

"Do you want to do it too, Whisker? You can heal easily so you'll get stronger," Alex said. However, Whisker did not like fighting or being hurt so he refused to take part.

Alex made another two pills, of which only one came out a 100% pill. He upgraded it up to having 4 pill veins, but given how his blood aura was getting steadily better, it wouldn't be long before he could reach 5 pill veins as well.

Alex spent another 2 days cultivating, which was worth 40 days of normal cultivation.

"My cultivation base is reaching close to peak," he said to himself. "A few more of these and I can break through."

However, he couldn't wait around for that. He would have to cultivate when he could, but for now, he needed to go look for his father.

"Let's go."

Alex flew from the island and immediately turned invisible. Whisker rode inside of his robes and as a result, he became invisible too.

With no cultivation aura or any other aura for the matter, the beasts in the ocean didn't find him so easily.

However, a few spiritual senses did cross him from time to time. A few beasts sprang up each time to kill him for food, but a single hit from Alex was enough to kill most.

The stronger ones rarely bothered coming out for something they weren't sure was even worth their time.

Alex arrived at the edge of the Wastelands and continued flying through the coast, sticking to the region that was right at the edge of the small body of water that separated the Wastelands and the rest of the Southern Continent on the map.

As he flew through the sky, he stopped from time to time to check on any group of people he found. Tribes and Oases took longer to search as there were a lot of people to search through.

He was by the mountain ranges where the barrier to stop the tribal people was set up, so from time to time, he would sense cultivators as well.

However, most that were stationed there were too weak to notice his spiritual sense, so Alex could continue his search without any pauses in his journey.

Due to how slow he was, it took him way more than just 5 days to search through everything in a single line from east to west of the southernmost locations of the Wastelands.

Alex had to do it east to west, or west to east so that he could stop to cultivate on either side of the Wastelands which was the only place to find Qi.

If he spent too long in the Wastelands, he would most likely miss the optimal time to cultivate, while also having to unnecessarily eat the beast cores, which reduced in effectiveness the more Alex ate them.

Unfortunately, Alex did not find his father in search, so he had to do it all over again. This time, his searched range was a single straight line from west to east, slightly away from the place where he previously searched.

Before that, however, he had to spend some 3 days cultivating again.

Alex found a random piece of land to the west that had Qi in it and started making some pills.

This time around, he made nearly 5 4-veined pills using the ingredients he had previously prepared while he was on the other side of the continent.

He cultivated using one of those pills and spent another day cultivating his Undying Physique and his Demon eyes.

Once done, he got up to go back to search for his father again.

However, before he did, he flew up into the sky and looked towards the west.

"Just how far away is it? I can't even see anything that far away," he thought. He remembered having the same experience outside of the Demon realm when he tried to look for the Southern Continent and didn't find anything.

While he should have been able to see something that was far away, his vision was still blurred by all the white haze and light refraction that was caused due to the ocean water heating up.

"Well, it's not like I can just fly there even if I did see it anyway," Alex thought and turned around. With just how weak he was, he was never going to be able to make it even halfway there.

"I need to continue becoming stronger!" he thought.

He then turned around and left back towards the Wasteland.

He spent another week trying to find his father, but once again, he was unable to. He would have to keep on searching for a long while.

Alex went back towards the west a few days after reaching the east and once again didn't find what he was looking for. He arrived on an island where he could cultivate and decided to take a bit of a break.

He spent a few days cultivating and then a few more days fighting. He fought some sea beasts to help himself train while also gathering some more beast cores and blood to absorb.

He also had his own blood beasts fight him so he could improve his body cultivation as well.

Whisker on the other hand wanted to do nothing. He didn't have to cultivate, and neither did he have to learn how to fight since he was never going to.

Seeing that, Alex gave him a task. Whisker was to make True rank pills and make it so that they were Heaven grade each time around.

Whisker hadn't had many chances to make pills, so it was a bit hard for him to just go back to making them. Even when Alex was confined by the old man, Whisker rarely got to make pills.

Most of his time was spent on learning about the ingredients, and the recipes, or simply learning how Alchemy worked in general.

After a week or so, Alex finally left the place again, sweeping through new parts as he made his way to the eastern side of the Wasteland again.

This was already the fourth time, and even so, he couldn't find his father at all. At this point, he was starting to worry that something might have happened to him.

What if...

"No, don't think about that," Alex told himself. "He is fine."

Alex arrived at the eastern seas again and cultivated for a while. After 2 days when he stopped, he didn't immediately get back.

First, he would have to break through.

He sat in the grasslands of a small island and closed his eyes as he heard nothing but the waves and the winds.

He slowly pulled out the Qi from his dantian as it moved around his body through the various meridians, becoming denser at each turn.

As he made the Qi even denser, at some point it was simply so thick that it had difficulty moving around in his dantian.

As a wave of energy rushed through him, Alex realized he had broken through to the 9th realm of Saint Condensation.

It had been 14 years since he broke through to the Saint realm, and in just those few years, he had somehow managed to break through 8 different times.

5 of those had been hasty cultivation due to the madman's urging, but the rest had been stable cultivation which Alex was very proud of.

Around the same time, Whisker had also broken through to the True Disciple 9th realm and was just a little far away from reaching the True Master realm.

"And I can reach the Saint Foundation realm very soon," Alex said to himself. "We will have to keep working hard, Whisker."

Chapter 1035 Anxiety

5 months went by and Alex did not find his father at all.

He scoured the entire Wasteland, going from east to west, from north to south, from the Maroon bay to the Sun's End bay; he scoured every single place in the Wasteland that had humans in it, and he did not find his father at all.

There were a few places in the northern part of the Wastelands where the entire tribe was actually just filled with beasts that had killed them or made them leave, and that made more fear grow in Alex.

His anxiety about his father was increasing day by day and even while he knew that was a weakness that his Inner demon would use against him, he couldn't help but worry.

What else could he do but worry anyway? This was the place his father had come to and he wasn't here.

After 5 months, Alex had to stop searching. Since he had gone to every location, twice even for a few, he had to give up on finding his father at the moment.

The fear in his heart grew day by day to the point where he was going to hurt himself while cultivating if he continued. He needed to take a small break from it all and spend some time on himself.

He secluded himself on an island that was more north than any place he had been to on the eastern side of the ocean.

He was so north that if he flew up a hundred meters or so, he could clearly see the Central continent in the far distance.

Alex did not cultivate during this break of his. He instead spent his time making pills or teaching Whisker how to make them.

He fought a few beasts here and there, but most of the time, he would just sit somewhere to work on his own mental state.

While he worked on calming his heart, Whisker would be on the side trying to use everything that Alex had taught him before.

From time to time, he would open his eyes to answer Whisker about some problems he was facing or teach him some new things, but most of the time, he spent meditating on his own problems.

He tried to make sense of what had most likely happened to his father after coming to the Southern Continent nearly 3 decades ago.

His father had apparently arrived at a place without any plant or human life, which would have to have been definitely in the Wasteland. After that, since he was told to find a city by his mother, his father would've found a tribe.

Even if he didn't know what to do, there should have been many other players here that would have taught him.

They would've certainly helped him. Although, there was a chance they too were helpless since the 'game' had ended just the day after his father joined it.

Even then, Alex was certain he would have joined a tribe. His father had a natural tan from working in the sun all day long, so he would've been accepted by any tribe without question.

Given how hard-working his father was, he would have definitely worked to become stronger, especially so he could find himself and his mother.

'It's not just him,' Alex thought. 'Many other people would have wanted to find their families too, so they would have done something right?'

Alex thought of what he would want to do in that case.

"They would try to go to the south certainly," he thought. Even in the case that most of them weren't aware, there would be people that would tell them about the south and how people could cultivate there.

"Did my father go to the south too?" he thought.

Alex wondered what would happen if his father had wanted to go south in that condition. Wouldn't they just reject him? He saw no reason why anyone would let his father go anywhere out of the Wastelands.

"What if somebody helped them?" Alex thought. He had seen a few ships around the Maroon bay and the Sun's End bay, which implied that people knew about ships.

Could they have taken the ship through the ocean to go south when they were rejected? That was the thought that Alex was starting to get.

"He must have," he thought. "So... he must be somewhere south. But on which side? And when?"

So many years had passed that even if they did go south, they most likely hadn't simply remained at the closest locations like the Eastwatch city or some other similar places.

"Finding them will be hard even if they are indeed there," Alex thought.

Unlike the Wastelands, he couldn't just go searching for his father around the rest of the Southern Continent. The number of people, the number of cities, the laws and regulations as well as just basic human decency would not allow him to go looking through everyone in the rest of the Southern Continent.

He just wouldn't be able to do what he did with the Wasteland. He needed to change his approach to finding his father.

He thought of a few ways. He thought of getting the Insight Pavilion on his side for finding his father or having a couple of other people help find him.

He even thought of employing a painter to find his father by drawing a portrait of him.

But, Alex didn't like any of the ideas.

The Insight pavilion only gathered information and did not go out looking for it on its own. There was no way they would change their stance just for him.

And finding people to help him wouldn't work quite as well since no one would know what to look for exactly. Alex himself didn't know what his father would look like now that 30 or so years had passed since he last saw him.

That was the same problem with finding a painter too.

All in all, the more he thought about it, the more impossible it seemed for Alex to be able to find his father.

"So I will have to change my method," he said to himself as a thought came to him. "If finding him is impossible for me, then I should work to make it possible for him to find me."

There was only one thing he could do now. Be such a big name in the Southern Continent that no one living there would not know about him.

When his father did eventually find learn about him, then he would come to find him on his own.

"So... Alchemy it is then," he thought. That was the only way to make a name for himself in the least amount of time possible. The only other way would be to show his capabilities as a cultivator, but that would cause more harm than good.

It was easy to offend people when you showed off your strength since there needed someone you showed your strength to. As such, Alex decided to stick with Alchemy where it was nearly impossible to offend someone directly.

"Still, I'm a bit too weak," Alex thought. "I will need to become stronger than I am right now if I want to make a name for myself just for the sake of security."

He finally stood up from where he sat. "I will need to confirm something first," he thought to himself.

"Come on, Whisker. Let's head over to the South. I need to go to the Insight Pavilion."

It took Alex 2 days to fly in between the islands as he made his way through the ocean while dodging the many beasts that would be out to kill him the moment they saw him.

He also stopped around to fight some beasts if they were just around his own strength or weaker and gathered them up. He would absorb their blood later to improve his own.

He arrived at Hiddenbay city and quickly went up to the Insight pavilion.

"How may I help you, fellow Daoist?" the girl at the soundproof booth asked him.

"I want to learn about tribal folks coming from the north using boats," Alex said.

"What exactly do you want to learn about it?" the girl asked.

"I want to know all the details there are to it. I want to know if they do come or not, and if they do, I want to know when they did, and where. I want all the details," Alex said.

"Sure," the girl said and started searching through their information bank. A few minutes later she acquired the information and put it on a talisman. "This is all the information available for you."

The price for the information was merely 140 True Spirit stones. When Alex heard the price, he frowned. He wasn't frowning because the price was high, but rather it was low. Which most likely meant that the information there wasn't very much.

Still, he walked outside and read it all.

People did come from the north using boats from time to time and they were usually sent back through the gates towards the south.

The talisman had information on where and when most of the boats had arrived, but aside from that, there wasn't much information.

There was also a good number of boats that did arrive but simply were never recorded because they managed to escape the authority and live here.

As such, the talisman wasn't very helpful for Alex in finding his father.

What it was helpful for was letting Alex know that there was a huge chance that his father did come here and was not sent back. So, everything he had planned until this point was worth it.

"Time to work towards it then."

Chapter 1036 Weekly Routine

Alex arrived back on another island, free of any human meddling as he was going to cultivate until the Saint foundation realm.

For him, that was the stage at which he could consider himself strong enough to do what he wanted without others blocking his path.

He would love to get stronger too, but he needed to start making a name for himself so that his father could find him.

"Come, you should watch me make some pills to learn from me," Alex told Whisker who was by his side.

He brought out a bunch of ingredients, all of which he had prepared during the many months he hadn't cultivated.

Then he brought out the Sun's Womb and started making pills.

Whisker watched from the side as every single time Alex finished making a pill, a storm would gather in the sky and strike down on them.

Whisker knew that this was happening because of Pill vein but he would still run away from time to time just in case the lightning struck him too.

This continued for about 4 days with some pauses in between where Alex had to restore his blood aura as well as his Qi. Once done, he would continue until he couldn't.

5 days later, he now had a total of 27 95% harmony and above pills as well as 32 4-veined pills. Thanks to the occasional double lightning strikes, he had managed to make quite a bit.

'With these, I should be able to go for over a year easily,' he thought. Then, he ate one of the pills and started cultivating.

The pill helped him improve quickly, which was exactly what he needed. Time passed by day by day and soon weeks went by and then months.

Alex's weeks were separated as thus. For the first 2 days, he ate the pill and cultivated.

Then, he would spend the 3rd day focusing on Undying Physique and Demon Eyes.

For the 4th and 5th days, he would go out and fight beasts to get their beast cores and corpses.

On the 6th day, he would use the blood he had gathered throughout the week to form a new beast. On the same day, he would also absorb the blood aura of the dead beast's blood and get stronger with it.

Finally, on the 7th day, he would let his blood beast beat him up as badly as it could without killing him.

While he healed, he would teach some new things to Whisker, which he would use to train his own Alchemy knowledge for the rest of the 6 days.

Over a year passed doing just the same. Alex ate the final pill he had and started cultivating once again.

The next 2 days went by in a breeze as he absorbed every bit of Qi from the air. By now, his Qi had reached a point where it was so thick that even viscous would no longer define it as well.

If Alex didn't know any better, he would've thought that he must have made some sort of mistake during his cultivation. But, since he knew that this was a normal process before one reached the Saint Foundation realm, he wasn't worried.

2 days later, when he finished the cultivation, he went straight to cultivating his Undying Physique and Demon eyes, which he also finished in a day.

Then, he left the island to go fight some beasts. Instead of moving towards the continent, he moved away from it, going towards the ocean where stronger beasts were.

Since his blood aura had gotten stronger, and since he had so many blood beasts with him, he felt safe.

Still, he did not go very far away just so he could remain within enough distance to run away if needed.

Alex pulled out Midnight and waited for some beast to take the bait. Once they did, he started fighting.

This was where most of his training came for the last year and a half. He used many different techniques while constantly trying to improve his own sword.

Since he knew that it was intended that he needed to improve more than anything, he worked on that. Once his Sword Intent got stronger, the rest of it, which was the sword Qi and sword Aura, would also get stronger as a result.

Alex's sword aura was now slightly stronger than his Qi, still falling quite a bit of way behind his blood aura.

He even used mental attacks, usually the spiritual sword, but that wasn't very useful against the beasts he was used to fighting. Most of them could simply shrug it off.

As for the ones it did work on, normal attacks alone were enough to beat it.

However, while everything improved, his body cultivation lagged behind quite a lot. When he realized that he could hurt himself and heal himself over and over to improve, he was quite happy.

However, only now was he understanding a normal body cultivator's pain as he was only just realizing just how long he had to keep it going before he even improved a bit.

From time to time, Alex even wondered if he was wasting time on it. All he had to do was find Pearl and he could get everything he was working for right now just by staying next to him.

However, same as right now, there would be times in the future when he couldn't stay with Pearl and would have to cultivate on his own. At that time, he would most likely be disappointed by the speed given just how slow it was.

As such, he found it better to continue training his body right now. It's not like it was useless anyway. It was just slow. He could work with slow if it meant improvement at some level.

Alex returned back to the island to see Whisker still working on his pills. He was starting to make Heaven-grade pills using Alex's recipes and lessons. There were still ways to go as he couldn't make them every single time, but this was still far from what anyone would expect a mouse to be able to do.

Alex left him be and moved on to make the new blood beast. For today, it was a Saint Core realm 2 beast he had killed 2 days ago.

He placed the beast's core into the cauldron and started forming another blood beast.

An hour later, there was a Blood octopus standing before him with its wide head and 8 long tentacles.

Alex kept the octopus and started absorbing the blood from its body and various other beasts he killed during the last 2 days.

Once his blood had advanced just the slightest amount, he pulled out the Blood God's Manual and brought out 5 of the strongest beasts he had been keeping in there.

"Come one Whisker, time to fight," he said and moved away.

Whisker, who was ready for this, walked out to the field as well. Since Alex was going to focus on getting beat up while also trying to improve his own fighting method at the same time, he needed Whisker to control the beasts to fight him.

Due to their bond, Whisker had plenty of control over the beasts, his authority only beaten by Pearl or Scarlet, and their's by Alex himself.

Pearl and Scarlet had initiated the bond on their own while Alex was unconscious, so as a result their bond was one of mutual, unlike Whisker, whose was one of a servant.

Still, in the other two's absence, he was the only authority that could help the blood beast's limited intelligence understand what they were supposed to do.

Whisker commanded the Squid to start attacking with its right tentacle. Then the bird was to fly at Alex with its talons.

The snake monster moved at the same time to slam its tail on Alex, who was already busy with the Squid and the bird.

The octopus also attacked with multiple tentacles, trying to grab Alex if it could.

The flying fish threw its entire body on Alex, trying to make use of its physical strength.

Alex fought the beasts empty-handed while keeping most of his attention on dodging rather than fighting back.

His evasive abilities were getting stronger by the day and if it continued, it would be hard for the beasts in the ocean to attack him.

That was of course until they got tired of using their limbs and decided to use their Qi. Since the Blood beasts held no abilities of their own, there was no training Alex could do with these beasts on that front.

Still, he enjoyed the current training. Getting beat up hurt, but the happiness that came afterward when his wounds healed was something he was so used to that he was almost addicted to it.

After the battle was over, and Alex was beaten black and blue, he stayed next to Whisker to teach him about Alchemy, while he himself slowly healed.

He taught Whisker a few different things today and hoped he took in mind everything. He watched Whisker make a few more pills before ignoring him for the most part.

Then, the next day arrived, and with it, the entire weekly cycle refreshed again.

Except, this time he was out of Qi and had no way to get some more such pills quickly since he was lacking in money as well.

But, the good news there was that he would no longer need any such pills on this island before.

Alex sat down and closed his eyes to begin cultivating as he prepared himself for the breakthrough that was going to happen any hour now.

Chapter 1037 Foundations

The air rippled around the island as the Qi rushed into Alex from all directions.

The Qi in his dantian was ever so thicker, and now it was reaching the level where it was starting to turn solid even.

The Qi was starting to crystallize to form small flakes of crystal in his dantian that he had never seen before. But Alex still kept going, pulling more and more Qi from the surroundings to improve his cultivation base.

As he pushed, the points of crystallization helped the other Qi crystallize as well, forming a structure.

The structure soon found its way to the walls of the dantian, attaching to them. Those crystals soon touched each other, forming a complex web of crystals like a house filled with spiders next.

At the crystal pillars formed, there remained a massive gap in the dantian as most of the Qi had gone into developing those very pillars.

Alex had done it. He had formed the foundations of his cultivation base, which was the requirement for one entering the Saint Foundation realm.

Having formed the foundations, it could be said that Alex was in the Saint Foundation realm.

He could see the gaps in his dantian where he could store more Qi, but before he could see if that was possible, Alex lost himself to a dark world where his mind muddled and his thoughts ran astray.

He forgot what he was doing. He forgot where he was. Everything he remembered felt like mere information to him, rather than memories.

At the same time, a voice spoke to him, one that felt eerily like his own.

"How does it feel to be fatherless?" the voice asked.

Alex felt a sense of anxiety hit him when he heard that. His father... was his father dead? Didn't he deduce that he was gone to the South?

"That is just you lying to yourself. You know deep in your heart that no one that goes there stays there. He is dead."

Was that true? Was he lying to himself? He was lying to himself, wasn't he? But, there was still a chance his father was alive.

"Give up. He is dead. You are better off trying to find a way back to Pearl. But then... by the time you reach him, he will die too, ripped apart by the winds you left him in."

"No... that's not true," Alex finally spoke. But instead of confidence, his voice was filled with hesitation and denial.

"You know it is true. Your little White Tiger will die soon, and there will be nothing you can do about it."

"You are a weakling who always has to run away. You ran away from the Western Continent. You ran away from the Northern Continent. What will you do next? Run away from the Southern Continent too? Where will you go next? The Eastern Continent?"

"You are such a weakling that your little Vermilion bird left you the moment she could. She did not want to be associated with someone like you. Just wait, a few months later, she will bring back her family and force you to destroy your bond."

"Where will you go next when the Immortal Phoenixes come for you?"

"You lost your mother, then your aunt, the Pearl, and now your father. Hell, you lost everything you have ever owned too. Soon, you will lose the little birdie too. What will you have after that? Just that little mouse that's even more of a coward than you."

"Whisker is not a coward!" Alex spoke back in anger. "He is a good child that gives it his all to learn what I teach him. So what if he doesn't want to fight? If he doesn't want to, then he doesn't have to. Not as long as I am here."

"As you said, I lost a lot of things, but those are only temporary. I will get them back. What do I really need to get them back? Just a bit more of a cultivation base right? I can get that easily. If you think I will remain weak forever, you underestimate me."

"And yes, you are right. I did run from those two places. But not anymore. I do not know who you are, but I will tell you this. From today onward, I, Alex, will never run away from a foe, no matter how strong they are."

The darkness remained silent for a bit before laughing. "Hehehe~ and what about you dead father?" it asked.

"There is a good chance he is not dead," Alex said.

"There is a good chance he is dead," the voice replied.

"It does not matter whether he is dead or alive. It does not change what I must do. If he is alive, I will find him and reunite our family. If he is dead, I will find his corpse and give him the burial he deserves."

"His death will not stop me. I am his son, and as his son, it is my duty to do what he has always told me to. I must always keep moving forward."

The voice did not speak anything else and slowly, Alex's mind cleared up. The realization that it was his Inner Demon talking to him came to Alex just as everything was starting to grow hazy.

Soon, he forgot all of what he talked about with his Inner Demon, but the conviction he felt was not gone from his heart yet.

He could tell what he wanted to do.

He opened his eyes just as the breakthrough was completed. He had now entered the Saint Foundation realm.

The crystal web of solid Qi in his dantian was proof that he was in the Saint Foundation realm.

The yang and yin orbs that were in his dantian continued floating around each other in one of the larger pockets between the structures. It was too much of a coincidence for that to happen, so Alex was sure that the Qi couldn't attack itself around them.

Alex continued looking at the pillars and wondered, "how does it work exactly, now that I don't have any moving Qi?"

He used a simple technique and saw that the crystalline structure melted to give him the Qi he needed.

"Oh, that's how," he thought. He tried a few more times, but for some reason, it got progressively harder to use his Qi. Also, for some reason, it felt to him as if he didn't have any Qi at all.

"Am I perhaps not supposed to use the pillars?" he wondered. That would make sense as you wouldn't want to destroy the 'foundation' of this realm.

"I should continue cultivating a little more."

Once he started cultivating again, Qi flowed into him, some turning into the crystal pillars again, while most remained out in the open as the dense Qi they were.

"Will they not crystallize or do I wait for the next realm for that to happen?" he thought.

He finished cultivating not long after and stood up. "Come on, Whisker," he called to Whisker who was not far away from him.

"It's about time the Southern Continent knows my name too."

Chapter 1038 City Of Many Flowers

The Central continent was close, or at least it looked close to where Alex was at. If he were to fly for half a day, it was possible he would reach it.

However, he wasn't sure just how far he could even make it. Even forgetting about the beasts that roamed the ocean that would not let him get anywhere close, the Qi wall that surrounded the central continent itself would be another obstacle the answer to which Alex did not have at all.

He didn't know how big the wall of Qi was, so teleporting in would not be helpful either. Alex would have to find some other way once he could.

For now, it was time to leave.

He flew away late at night and arrived at Hiddenbay city early morning. He quickly went to the Insight Pavilion and asked for every bit of info he could find on the Southern Continent.

He wanted to know its geographical feature, its political system, and even where the bigger cities were and what they were famous for.

Once he learned all of that, he decided on a place to go.

Towards the bottom left of the map, Alex could see a giant lake right by the edge of the ocean. If not for the small strip of land, one could mistake it for a bay as well.

The lake was known as the Floral lake, and the city next to it was the Many Flower city.

The lake was surrounded by flowers, and as such the name was given that.

Alex saw a small piece of land at the center of the lake and realized there was something there. "Oh, so that's where it is," he thought and flew over to the closest city.

Once at the city, he could make use of a Teleportation formation to go to the City of Many Flowers. He had to go through multiple teleportation formations before he finally arrived in the city.

The moment Alex walked out of the city, he was immediately met with a fresh smell of flowers. He looked around and saw flowers of all sorts growing in every part of the city.

The sides of the roads, the empty plots, and even the roofs of many houses had flowers growing on them. And to Alex's surprise, most of them were actual Alchemy ingredients.

"No wonder the information said this was the best place to practice Alchemy. There are so many ingredients just lying by the side of the road. Do people not care?" he thought and he walked to the side to pick one of the flowers.

"Hey! What are you doing?" someone spoke up just before he could pluck any flower.

Alex stopped and looked around to see a light-green-robed man look at him with hateful eyes. "Sorry? Do you need something?" he asked.

"What do you think you're doing? Don't you know that is the Flowerhall sect's property?" the man asked.

"The Flowerhall sect's property? This flower?" Alex asked with surprise. He had read about the Flowerhall sect. They were one of the 5 sects whose ancestors were in the council of 10.

Their presence alone was one of the reasons why this city of Many Flowers was considered one of the biggest cities in the entire Southern Continent.

That, and the thing at the center of the lake.

"Sorry, brother. I didn't know that. I just arrived at this place," Alex said and moved away from the flower to another patch away from that place.

"Stop!" the man said again. "Why are you trying to do it again?"

Alex paused. "I thought you said that flower patch was the Flowerhall's property. Is it that this patch of flowers is also their property?" he asked.

"Of course, it is," the man said. "Every single flower you see in here that is not growing on someone's property belongs to the Flowerhall sect."

"That's... quite selfish," Alex said as he stepped away from the flower patch.

"It is what it is, brother. Now please don't pick any flowers or you will have to pay a large fine," the young man said.

Alex nodded. "I'll make sure to do that," he said and looked around. "I'm looking for the Alchemy Association that is apparently here in this city. Would you happen to know about it?"

"Oh, do you want some pills made? Can I help you with that? I'm an alchemist too," the young man said proudly.

"Oh, I'm sorry, but I'm not looking to make any pills. I simply want to join the association to make pills," Alex said.

"Are you an alchemist too, brother?" the young man asked.

"I am," Alex said. "Would you mind showing me the way?"

"Sure, I was going there right now," the young man said.

Alex walked alongside the young man as they went through the city.

The city was massive, nearly 3 kilometers wide in every direction and that was just the main market. Outside the main city was the residential area that went on for so much more distance.

Alex looked at the map again and noticed that the Flowerhall sect was right at the corner of a narrow piece of land that was next to the Floral sea.

"You must come from quite far away," the young man said.

"Uh... yeah. I did," Alex said as he continued looking around. There was a small plot of land that they walked past that didn't have anything built on it. And coincidentally, there was another plot of land that didn't have anything made on it either.

The land went downhill after that, and as a result, Alex could see the massive lake in the distance that would be called a sea in its own right.

The view passed quickly, but it was nice knowing just how far away from the lake he was at currently. It wouldn't be too hard to pinpoint himself on the map now either.

"By the way, what's your name, brother?" the young man asked. "I am—"

Before the young man could finish his words, a massive bell rang through the entire city.

DING~ DONG~ DING~

Immediately, the people that were walking around on the street started running away. Some walked into random houses, while others simply took off.

The markets that were open either closed their doors and windows or used formation barriers to protect their shops and houses.

Alex looked around confused and a little worried. "Should we... run away or something?" he asked.

"Are you allergic to something?" the young man asked.

"Not that I know of," Alex said.

"Then you'll be fine. The most that will happen is you'll get dirty, but the Association has a place where you can clean up," the young man said.

"Clean up... from what?" Alex asked.

At the exact same moment, the entire world turned yellow.

Alex looked in awe as millions upon millions of pollen flew through the air going everywhere at an incredibly fast speed.

It stopped just as quickly as it came, but when it did, the world was entirely yellow with the pollen covering everything in a thick layer.

"What... what was that?" Alex asked with a confused look.

The young man dusted off what he could and spoke. "That was the Forbidden Orchard spilling out its pollen."

"Pollen from the Forbidden Orchard?" Alex asked as he looked toward the direction of the lake because that was where it was.

At the center of the lake was a small piece of land, and on that land was the opening to the secret realm known as the Forbidden Orchard.

"Does it do this all the time?" Alex asked.

"From time to time. The time frame gets smaller the closer it is to the opening of the secret realm," the young man said.

Alex dusted himself off as well. "The Forbidden Orchard is about to open?" he asked.

"No, it opened 2 years ago, so there is still a year or two before it opens up again. You will have to wait for the pollen blast to get more frequent before it fully opens up," the young man said.

"I see," Alex said. He had no idea there was such a thing. "Do people go in when it opens? They do, right?" he asked.

"They do, but not everyone is allowed to," the young man said.

"As its name implies, it is forbidden for most people to enter the realm. Only the Flowerhall sect has the authority to send in whoever they want, and by some association, the Alchemy Association is allowed as well, albeit in a limited number," the young man said. "If you are thinking about going in, it might be better if you give up. Only the best of the best Saint Alchemists have a chance to go in from the Association."

"I should be fine then," Alex said.

"Oh, do you consider yourself a good alchemist, brother?" the young man asked.

"No, I consider myself the best," Alex said.

The young man showed a surprised look before laughing. "Haha, I like your confidence, brother. I was interrupted before, so I forgot to introduce myself."

"My name is Harry Summers, what's your name?" the young man asked.

"Oh," Alex showed a surprised look when he heard the name. "I didn't expect you to be using your real name."

"I never had a fake name like most people here," the young man replied. "Are you a player too?"

"I am," Alex said. "My name is Alex, Alex Benton. It's a pleasure to meet with a fellow player."

Chapter 1039 Registration

Alex and Harry soon arrived at the Alchemy Association. Alex was immediately surprised to see that similar to a sect, this place had a gate before having to go inside.

He walked in with the other young man and looked around. There was a massive open space with people in there that were being lectured by someone.

On the other side were people that were playing around with each other. There were multiple buildings inside, each of which seemed to be for different departments of Alchemy.

"What... exactly is this place?" Alex couldn't help but ask. The information he had gotten told him that it was the best place for Alchemists. Aside from that, there was nothing written on the talisman he got.

Alex hadn't specifically asked for anything on Alchemy either, so the fact that he had learned of this place from the other information was already something. Now that he was here, he wished he had asked a little first.

'This is nothing like any guilds back in the western continent,' he thought.

"This is the Alchemy Association of course," Harry said from the side. "Why are you surprised? Did you not know about it?"

"No," Alex said as he looked around. "I just came here because it had alchemy in the title really."

"Haha!" Harry couldn't help but laugh. "Don't worry, it's not that hard. Just... imagine a school where the students can get employed to work there. That's what this is. Kinda like those medical colleges back at home."

'School... how the hell is that supposed to explain anything to me?' Alex thought and shook his head. "So what exactly is done here? They teach only Alchemy or medicinal pastes too?"

"No one needs to learn about medicinal pastes to know how to make it. You can do that normally with just a recipe and the ingredients. Here, you are taught about the various aspects of making pills. Even those that are not exactly apparent to aspiring Alchemists," Harry said.

"Things that are not apparent? Can you give me some examples?" Alex asked.

"You're a Saint Alchemist, so you should know that making pills drains your spiritual energy. Most of these newcomers don't know that, and they end up pushing themselves too far," Harry said. "Or, the fact that there is such a thing as a specialty when it comes to making pills. Pills whose energy aligns with your spiritual roots are easier to make, that sort of thing."

"I see..." Alex said. He did not know the last bit of information at all. How could he though? He never got an opportunity to experience that.

"I will need to go to the pill-making hall soon, so let me go take you to the registration room," Harry said and took Alex to one of the buildings.

"Senior, I have someone that wants to join the association," Harry said as he pushed Alex up to the front.

"Hmm? A new student?" the man at the registration looked up at Alex. He was an older gentleman with a higher Saint Condensation cultivation base.

"No, not a student," Alex said. "I'm looking to work and make pills."

"He's a Saint Alchemist, senior," Harry said. "He doesn't need to go through learning."

The man looked at Alex from head to toe. and asked, "You're a Saint Alchemist?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"How good?" the man asked.

"Very," Alex replied.

"What would you say is your average Harmony when making a pill?" the man asked.

"Average... let's see," Alex thought for a bit. "If I'm not given time to prepare, I would say somewhere between 60% to 70%. If I was given a bit of time, 80% and over, and if given a very long time to prepare and some extra ingredients, then over 90% each time."

Hearing Alex's answer both the man at the registration and Harry were slack-jawed. "Ha... Ha, brother, nice joke," Harry said meekly. "However, you should be truthful when answering while registering."

"I am not lying," Alex said and looked at the man that was responsible for registering him.

The man shook his head. "You should answer for Saint rank pills," the man said. "I will ask you again, what Harmony do your pills, Saint Rank pills, reach on average?"

"My answer is still the same, senior," Alex said to the old man.

The old man frowned a bit. He wasn't sure what he could do at the moment. What did one do when someone exclaimed that they could do the impossible?

"Either you are the worst liar I have ever seen who will very quickly humiliate himself, or I am going to see a miracle that I have never seen before in my thousand-year life. Either way, today is not going to be boring it seems," the old man said as he put aside the register in front of him and stood up.

"Come with me," the man said and walked away.

Alex walked along with the old man.

"See you later, brother. I'll be in the Pill-making building," Harry said and turned around to leave.

"No, you come with us too," the man called Harry.

"Huh? But I need to go do my job, senior," Harry said.

"You were the one that brought him here. It's your responsibility to see it through to the end," the man said. "Besides, on the off chance that whatever he said is true, I need someone else to witness it alongside me so I don't have to test him once again with some other people."

Harry sighed when he heard that. "Sure, why not?" he said and walked over.

The three of them went over to an Alchemy room with quite a few formations laid around.

"Make a pill in front of us," the older man said.

"Sure, where are the ingredients?" Alex asked.

"You are to use your own ingredients," the old man said. "If you don't, then you can buy some from us."

Alex frowned. "I have neither the ingredients nor the money for it. What do I do now?" he asked.

"You don't have any ingredients or money? That's quite problematic," the old man said. "We can lend you the ingredients, but you will have to pay us back somehow if you fail. Do you have anything that I can use as collateral for the time being?"

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. He brought out midnight and held it next to the old man.

When the old man moved his hands to grab it, Alex pulled it back a little. "Let us talk about what I need to do first before I give away my sword," he said.

"Sure,' the old man said. "You are going to have to make the best pill you can. Depending on how good the pill turns out to be, you will get employed by the association."

"What's the minimum I must get?" Alex asked.

"25%, but it is encouraged that you make a really high-grade pill because we advertise your name by writing the names of the various pills you have worked on along with the highest harmony you've reached in each," the old man said.

Alex thought for a bit and asked, "Do I have a choice in what pill I get to make right now?" he asked.

"Depending on whether we have the ingredients or not, yes," the old man said.

"Good," Alex said as he handed Midnight to the old man. "I want the ingredients for the Fairy's Touch pill."

"Going with a healing pill, huh? Not bad," the old man said as he took Midnight. The moment he grabbed the hilt, the sword dropped to the floor, and the old man along with it.

"Aaagh! What the hell?" the old man cried out as he tried to pull the sword up, but he couldn't. "Why the hell is this thing so heavy?"

Alex quickly pulled Midnight up and freed the old man. "Are you okay?" he asked with a confused look. How was a saint realm expert finding a mere 16 tons of metal heavy? Sure if he was unprepared it would make sense, but not after still falling.

"Do you have some cultivation problems?" Alex asked.

"Of course not. Why is your sword so heavy?" he asked.

"It's only 16 tons," Alex said as he moved it around.

"The hell it is," the old man exclaimed. "That's close to 100 tons."

"Uh... no?" Alex said.

Suddenly, a thought came to him. A memory of a sword that was too heavy to pick up. He remembered the truth behind its heaviness. It wasn't heavy because it had a lot of weight to it, but rather because the nascent sword spirit inside of it did not recognize the person holding it as its master.

'Is midnight acting up because it doesn't accept the old man as worthy of holding him?' he thought. That was a fascinating thought to Alex. He couldn't help but smile when he realized that Midnight was growing so well.

If only Memory was here, it could have grown just as well. Alas...

"I'll just keep the sword here for collateral if you don't want to hold it," Alex said. "Now please bring me the ingredients of the Fairy's Touch pill."

"Okay," the old man said and sent a message. Within 2 minutes, a young man came running with the ingredients.

The old man took the ingredients and handed it over. "You can start anytime you want. Any pill you make will be sold, and 50% of the profit will be given to you for this pill if you succeed. Afterward, you can negotiate for what you want."

Chapter 1040 Making The Fairy's Touch

"Do you have a time limit or can I prepare some things before I start making the pills?" Alex asked.

"I would prefer if you start right away. I don't want to spend my entire day here in this room waiting for you to prepare," the old man said.

Alex looked at the 12 ingredients and turned towards the old man. "It will take an hour at best to prepare. An hour and a half at most to make the pill," he said. "If you can give me that, I can make a 90% pill."

The old man hesitated a bit. On one hand, that was a lot of time. But on the other hand, he really wanted to see if the young man in front of him could do something like that.

"Fine, go ahead. We can wait," the old man said. Harry wanted to object to the decision. At the very least, he wanted to leave the room to go make some pills of his own. However, he too was very interested in where Alex got all of his confidence from, so he stayed behind.

Alex got to work immediately. He brought out one of the ingredients and started improving the energy inside of it. The Supreme Elemental Accord worked its magic and made the ingredient as good as it could possibly become.

The two alchemists to the side watched Alex work with confused looks on their faces. They had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but they found it awkward to just ask him.

An hour went by and Alex finally finished improving the ingredients. He brought out the Sun's Womb and placed it on top of the burning flame.

"Oh, is that the Sun's Womb?" the old man asked with an amused look.

"You know this cauldron, senior?" Alex asked.

"It's a cauldron with some fame," the old man said.

"Oh... that must be a good cauldron then," Harry said.

"Not... really, no. I mean, it is good, but that's not why it's famous," the old man said. "It is said that a couple dozen thousand years ago, one of the alchemists from that time was a massive fanatic of the Phoenixes and wanted to learn how to create and control Phoenix fire."

"He did whatever he could for that, and even made this cauldron resemble the color of the Phoenix flames. It is said that to please the Phoenix, he vowed to make a pill that would resemble the sun itself," the old man said. "To birth a sun, he named his cauldron the Sun's Womb."

"Woah! What happened to that senior? What about the pill?" Harry asked.

"He died of old age, I believe. As for his pill, he was obviously never going to be able to make one," the old man said. "He did make a glowing pill, so that's something I suppose."

"I see," Alex said and looked away. He needed to focus on the pill. His hands moved and the ingredient in it disappeared. The two Saints looked at him with shocked looks and were even more shocked when they noticed the ingredient appear inside the cauldron all of a sudden.

"A teleportation technique? Woah, that's so useful. I should learn that," Harry said softly.

"I... don't think that was a technique," the other man said softly.

"Not a technique? What do you mean?" Harry asked.

The old man turned around. "Have you learned about Dao yet?" he asked.

"I have," Harry said before his eyes went wide. "No way! That was Dao just now?"

Unlike the Northern continent, the other continents had no easy method of learning Dao. As such, knowledge of Dao wasn't as widespread as it should have been.

Alex put in more ingredients and followed the recipe in his mind. One after another, the ingredients turned into powder, releasing an absurd amount of energy.

"That's bonkers. How can there be so much energy in those ingredients?" Harry asked.

"I... I don't know. I've never seen anything like this," the old man said. "It's like he somehow got the most freshly plucked ingredients all around. That too of the best age."

"Senior... I don't think he was joking about it when he said he could make those high-grade pills. He might actually do it," Harry said.

"There are still places where he could falter," the old man said. "He could make some mistakes while trying to form the pill or when putting energy into it. For his sake, I hope he doesn't fail."

As the two talked, Alex moved on to the next stage.

He Qi reached out from his body and touched the powder in the cauldron. At the same time, Alex's spiritual sense focused on the minute particles and their shape. He knew what shape he had to go for, so he quickly used the Qi he released to form a small, packed combination of particles.

Once Alex told his Qi what exactly to do, the Profound Revolution of Myriad Combination worked to find the same types of particles and combined them in the same way as well as they could.

Alex waited for the process to end on its own. Once it was over, he removed the lid of the cauldron and brought out the pill from inside.

He held the pill in his palm and smiled slightly when he sensed it.

"There we go, just as I said," he said and looked towards the old man to the side.

The old man was extremely curious at the moment so quickly rushed up to Alex. "Quickly, place it on the formation. I want to see just how good it is," he said.

Alex nodded and put the pill on top of the formation. Harry got a little curious as well and came in closer to check.

When he did, the number finally showed up.

94%.

Both the old man and Harry lost their minds collectively. "That's... just how is that possible?" the old man asked.

"I... don't know. Can someone even be that good?" Harry asked.

The old man quickly brought out a pill tester. "Here, place your pill in here," the old man said.

Alex nodded and placed the pill into the pill tester. The result was still the same. He had truly made a 94% pill.

"Dear lord... I can't believe it, but it's true," the old man said. "You really did it."

"I told you I could, senior," he said as he slowly stood up. "I can register now, right?"

The old man shook his head in amazement. "If you can't, I don't know who can," he said as he walked out. "Come, I will need you to register yourself."

Harry followed behind Alex with a dumb look on his face while Alex followed the old man to the registration table.

Alex was made to fill out some information, including his Qi aura. Once done, he was now officially an Alchemist of the Alchemy Association.

"Here, can you fill this up as well?" the old man handed him a talisman.

"What's this?" Alex asked as he read what was written inside.

"It's a small list to curate the type of pills you want to make so that we can get you the proper customers. Here is a list of rules and regulations about the association. Let me know if you want to stay in the association, I can get you a room as well, but it will cost you," the old man said.

"Okay, let me fill this up first," Alex said and looked into the talisman. The talisman asked many detailed questions regarding his pill-making expertise.

For example, Alex could list out the pills he was familiar with and could make it well. It also asked him to list out the types of pills he could make or the type of energy he was most comfortable with when making a pill.

Alex ignored the rest for now and only listed out all the Saint rank pills whose recipes he had improved back in the Northern Continent.

"Here," Alex handed the talisman back.

The old man checked the talisman and nodded. "The customers have no proof that you can make these pills, so they will be taking a risk when they reach for you to make one of these pills. Make sure you are not overestimating yourself as that would actually harm your own reputation," he said.

"Thank you for the advice, senior, but I have indeed only listed out the pills I am good with," he said. "As for the other pills, I might eventually learn... I can add to the lists later, right?"

"Of course, you can always change this list. But to deter alchemists from making the changes too frequently, there is a substantial fee to do so," he said.

"I see, thank you for the information," Alex said.

"I suggest you just make the pill itself instead of trying to manually update the information," the old man said. "You can learn more from the talisman I gave you earlier."

"I will do so, senior," Alex said and clutched the talisman. "About that room, I would like one."

"Great," the old man said and handed Alex his room's key. "Don't worry about the money, I will cut it from the sales of this pill. As far as I can tell, this alone will make you a small fortune."

"I look forward to it," Alex said. Harry left to show Alex the way to his room while the old man placed the pill on sale for everyone to see.

When the city saw a 94% Saint rank healing pill being sold, it caused no less commotion than if the Forbidden Orchard was opening.

Chapter 1041 The Leader

A young woman appeared outside of a room and waited. She didn't know how long she would have to wait, but she did so regardless.

After a few hours, the door finally opened and an old man with a face full of white hair and a head full of nothing walked out.

"Master!" she bowed the moment the old man walked out.

"Shu'er, you've been waiting for me?" the old man asked.

"Yes master, something has happened," she said immediately.

"Bad news?" the old man asked with a frown on his face.

"Probably not, but it is quite detrimental news to all the alchemists," she said before bringing out a talisman. "This just appeared a few hours ago."

The old man frowned the moment he read the information. "Who else knows of it?" he asked.

"Given that it was broadcasted outside the purchase area, I would say everyone," the girl said. "The news has most likely spread through the entire city."

"That's... What about the Alchemists?" the old man asked.

"I... assume they know too," the girl said.

"That's... bad. I hope they're not demotivated all of a sudden," the old man said as he read the talisman again. "Alex... that's not a normal name, is it?"

"That's definitely one of those players," the girl said. "I have confirmed it with a few other players and they say it's a common name where they come from."

"I will go to my office, bring me Yuan Tailin. He's the one that tested this person," the old man said.

"Yes, master," the girl said and left.

The old man walked towards his office while frowning a little. In a place where one could barely make 60% pill even when they did their best, someone coming and making 94% pill all of a sudden would make them feel horrible about themselves.

As the head of the Alchemy Association, he needed to do something about it.

He walked into his office, and not long after a man named Yuan Tailin appeared in his room.

"Yuan, is this report true?" he asked.

"About the new Alchemist, leader? That's absolutely true," he said. "I watched him do it with my own eyes, and even had a witness with me."

Tell me everything you saw.

Tailin explained everything that happened to the old man.

"An hour of preparation for a single pill?" the old man asked with a surprised look on his face. "Did he give a reasoning why so long?"

"I did not ask, leader. I only waited for him to do it because he said he could do it beforehand," Tailin said.

"So it was not a fluke either," the leader thought. "Has he made another pill?"

"No," Tailin said. "I sent him to his room and told him he could start tomorrow."

"I would have loved to see him make some more pills. What about the pill he made? Where is it?" the old man asked.

"I'm afraid I already sold it, master. The moment I put it up, the crowd went crazy and started bidding on it as if it were an auction," Tailin said.

"So, someone bought it?" the old man asked.

"Yes, someone bought it for 90 thousand True Spirit stones," Tailin said.

"Someone paid 90 thousand for a single pill?" the old man gave a surprised look. "That's... so much."

"It is a pill with 94% harmony, leader. It will barely cause any problems for you and it will heal you from the most extreme of injuries too," Tailin said.

"It is, but still..." the old man found it hard to agree with the price. He wasn't trying to undermine the work needed to reach such a high harmony. He simply felt that there wasn't much difference between a pill at the 80% harmony and the 94% harmony level.

Even a 70% harmony pill wouldn't be that much worse than what it did. As such, the value of the pill seemed almost negligible to his eyes. But then, he had never seen a 94% before, so he may have been wrong.

"Thank you, Tailin. You may leave," the old man said and let Tailin go. After Tailin left, the old man started looking up the different statistics for the past few hours to see what sort of changes had come to the association.

As he had worried, there was a significant decrease in people trying to buy pills today, and it had happened right after Alex's information was made public.

Not only that, many of the alchemists had called it quits for the day to make sense of what had happened today. He just hoped that they weren't feeling bad about themselves. It would be bad for the association if their morale took a hit.

Still, he couldn't help but be a little happy that his association had recruited such a priceless treasure. Even if the Fairy's touch was the only pill Alex could make, as long as he made it to be over 90% each time, his name would spread far and wide throughout the continent, making more and more people come for him to make pills.

Because of that, more customers would come to the association, which could never go wrong.

"Shu'er, can you try and find any information on this new alchemist? Where he came from and why I do not know about him at all," the old man asked.

"I will try my best to bring it to you quickly, master," the girl who was by the door, left once she heard the command.

"I should try asking him directly too," the old man thought and walked out. He left the building and walked towards the residential building inside the compound where the Alchemists usually lived.

He arrived on the floor where Alex was staying and saw a massive line of people that included many students and working alchemists. Not only that, even other top members of the association were there.

"You guys are already here, huh?" he asked as he walked through the crowd. The crowd split up the moment they saw him and greeted him.

The old man nodded toward the rest and walked up to the 3 elders that were outside the door. "What's wrong? Is he not inside?" he asked.

"He is, but he's not opening," one of the other elders said.

"Well, he might be scared with you all hounding outside his door all day," the old man said with a chuckle in his voice.

"Now he will be more scared with you to hound on him too then," one of the female elders said with a mocking look on her face.

All 4 of them suddenly started laughing.

"Alright, everyone, please go back to your rooms or get back to work. You will see the new Alchemist tomorrow anyway," the leader said.

The crowd had to leave unwillingly as they couldn't defy their leader's order. Only the 3 elders and the leader remained outside.

The leader knocked on the door again.

"Don't bother. I don't think he's coming out," one of the elders said. "We're just waiting for the sake of waiting at this po—"

The door opened and Alex walked out. He looked at the four older people and bowed a little. "Greetings, seniors. Was there something you needed from this junior?"

The four of them showed quite a bit of shock when they saw him.

"So young..." the female elder couldn't help but say.

"Ahem, I am the leader of the Association, Ru Jiuxen and these are my colleagues and member of the association's board. We would like to talk with you a little if you don't mind," the leader said.

"Oh, of course. Please come on in, senior," Alex said and walked in. The leaders walked into the room that was mostly plain with a bed to the side, a closet on the other side, and another room for cultivation or making pills in one's free time.

"I'm sorry, I recently broke into the Foundation realm so I had to cultivate a bit to stabilize my foundation. I must have made you all wait for quite a while," he said.

"It's fine," the leader said. "We shouldn't have come without notifying you first anyway. But, because of what you did, we just couldn't stop ourselves."

"So, what did you want to talk about, senior?" Alex asked.

"You should know what we really want to talk about, shouldn't you?" one of the elders asked.

Alex smiled. "If it is about how I managed to make the pill, then I must say that is a secret that I can't just give away," he said.

"Of course," the leader said. "We weren't expecting to learn anything regarding that today. We just want to learn more about you. For instance, where are you from? I don't think I've ever heard of an alchemist like you. I would have definitely tried to lure you away if you were famous."

Alex smiled. "I don't have much fame before this. I came from another continent, so it is understandable that you won't know about me," he said.

"Oh, another continent? You flew in here with someone?" the leader asked.

"No, I was a victim of a teleportation malfunction and was sent to the wasteland. I had to find my way here. I have tried to go back, but I just can't seem to find a way," Alex said.

"Of course," the leader said while nodding his head. "It will be hard to travel in between continents unless you use the intercontinental formation or some expensive ships with concealment and defensive functionalities."

Chapter 1042 First Day

"Oh… they can travel like that? Do you happen to know how much they cost?" Alex asked.

"You shouldn't bother thinking about it. They need Saint-ranked spirit stones even to run it. Unless you belong to a massive sect, those are impossible to come by," the leader said.

"I would still like to buy one if I can," Alex said. "As long as I can sell pills to afford it, I would like to buy them."

"I don't know if anyone is selling any, so the cost will fall on the person selling, but it will easily be in the millions I'm sure," the leader said.

"I see, I will have to wait around for one of them popping up then," Alex said.

"Anyway, since you are not from this continent, what are your plans here?" the leader asked. "Do you plan on staying here, or will you try and find a way back?"

"I would love to go back, but I have something to do in this place. As long as I am done with that, I can leave," Alex told them.

"Do you need some help?" the old man asked.

"I would love some," Alex said. "I'm trying to find a man that most likely came here from the Wastelands through some boat. Would you mind sending the message out that I'm looking for him?"

"Hmm… finding a person huh?" the leader thought. He was starting to feel bad for just giving out some help since there was a very high chance that Alex would just leave once he was done.

However, since he had already asked him, he couldn't go back to his work. "Fine, I will get some people to put out the message that you are looking for this person. Do you have any information we can go by?" the old man asked.

"Yes, here," Alex quickly pulled out a talisman. "I was intending to get an investigator of my own, but you probably have better connections than me, senior."

"Alright, I will send it out later," the leader said. "For now, tell us a little more about yourself. Whatever you feel comfortable with sharing."

"How old are you exactly? You look very young," another one of the elders asked.

"Age… huh? I believe I am 45 years old currently," Alex said after a short mental calculation.

"No way! Only 45?" the old man exclaimed.

"Holy! You can most likely enter in the Sundering Sanctum if you wanted to. That's how young you are," the older woman spoke.

"The Sundering Sanctum?" Alex was a little curious. He remembered hearing about that before, as one of the two secret realms in this world along with the Forbidden Orchard.

"Let's not talk about something that won't happen for another 4 years," the old man said. "So, you say you are 45 years old. Does that mean you were 15 years old when you came to this world?"

"15?" Alex asked with a surprised look on his face. Had it really been 30 years since he started his cultivation journey? It had.

"No, I was 18. I spent some time in a place with some time manipulation and ended up missing a few years," Alex said truthfully.

"Oh… there's something like that? Which continent is that in?" one of the men asked.

"Its not a place I can just talk about, forgive me," Alex said.

"Okay, let's talk about your alchemy. Can you tell us how you are able to make a 94% pill? How can someone make such a good pill in such little time?" the old man asked.

"I'm sure you know how, senior," Alex said. "No matter how talented an alchemist is, they are never going to be able to make a good pill unless they have a good recipe. On the contrary, even a bad Alchemist can do quite well if the recipe is good."

"Oh, are you saying you have a good recipe?" the old man asked. "How did you come by them?"

"That's not something I feel comfortable talking about," Alex said. "Forgive me."

"Okay, okay," the leader said. "We can talk about other things."

The group continued talking for half an hour or so. In that time, they asked many questions, but they barely got any substantial answers regarding what they actually wanted to know.

Since they couldn't force Alex to answer, they had to leave regretfully.

Alex learned a few things of his own. He understood the structure of the organization he was involved in a little more.

As it turned out, there was a committee of 10 people, mimicking the Council of 10 that governed the Southern Continent from the Sunborn Sanctuary.

These 10 people were elders of the association that had either risen up in rank or bought their way in and were now allowed to have a say in the decision that was made going forward.

The leader was more of a figurehead than anything, and while he did have more rights than others in normal situations, when it came to the really important matter, he would have to come to a conclusion with the other 9 committee members.

The association mostly included people from the Flowerhall sect as they were the ones that came here looking for a job after they reached the age of 60 or entered the True Lord realm.

The association was divided into a few different parts, each of which worked in its own way.

There was a group that was there for mostly teaching. They were the group where the students went to learn about Alchemy.

The other group was the Alchemists that made the actual pills that the customers wanted.

There was a group that was mostly focused on taking care of the Alchemy garden in the association.

The Swine group was involved in taking care of Pill Swines that new pills were tested on, which was made by another group of alchemists whose job was to come up with new pills, regardless of their usefulness.

There were also a few buildings for research, management, registrations, and sales, but they weren't as clearly divided as these other 5 were.

Alex cultivated for the entire night and left his room early the next morning. His work hours were 8 to 4, so he had to be there sooner than that.

Alex arrived at the pill-making building where he found a staff member to help him on his first day.

The staff member showed a rather shocked expression when they learned who he was and were more than happy to help him.

Alex was taken to his room where he would be making pills for the entire day.

The staff member walked out and came back not long after. Then, he handed over a talisman with a very long list.

"What is this?" Alex asked as he read the talisman. There were many pill names there, all of which were what he listed as being capable of making.

"These are all the requests that came for you, senior," the True realm staff member spoke.

"So many," Alex thought. "They are all willing to pay over 50 thousand spirit stones., so it's good, but aren't there like 100 pills listed here? And they all demand over 90% in harmony. I cannot make all of these today."

"You don't have to make the all in a day, senior. The people who listed these did so knowing that it could take up to a month before the pill was made," the staff member said.

"Ah, that makes it so much easier. If I have 30 days then… I will have to make 3 a day, don't I? That's quite easy." Alex said. "So, what do I do? Choose one?"

"Yes, senior," the young man said.

"Okay, start from whoever came first. Let's go in chronological order," Alex said and picked another Fairy's touch pill which was what he was known for.

"I will bring the ingredients right away, senior," the young man said and left.

Alex waited around for a few minutes before the young man came back with a bag full of ingredients.

"Thank you."

The young man left the room and Alex started preparing the pill. Since the customer wanted a pill with over 90%, he was going to have to give him one, so he needed to prepare quite well.

It took him a little less time than yesterday after cultivating overnight and could thus finish preparing it all just a few minutes earlier.

Then, he made the pill again.

It took him barely 12 minutes to complete making the pill. Once done, he placed it in a pill bottle and called the previous staff.

"Here, I'm done with the pill, bring another set of ingredients," Alex said and started cultivating a little while he waited.

The young man left the room and quickly made his way to the staff room. He was more than interested in learning the result of the pill after knowing who he was working for today.

He had the pill officially tested by someone who worked in sales and verified the product as being what the customer wanted.

Both of them were shocked at the result, but they managed to keep their composure and continue their job.

The sale order was completed and now they had to wait for the customer to come to pick it up.

At the same time, a small change appeared in the information board where one could learn about the various pills and Alchemists that worked on them.

Alex's name was there alongside other newer names and under his name was a single pill he had made it until now.

However, that one pill had 94% written next to it, which many people there were focusing on.

However, just this moment, the 94% changed into 95%, sending the entire crowd in a craze again.

One time might have been a fluke, but twice? That was no fluke at all. Even the people that were skeptical about Alex were starting to have doubts in their own skepticism. If this continued, they would have no choice but to trust in Alex.

People came and went, but everyone's eyes were on the information board outside the sales department. Half a day later, it changed again.

This time, it wasn't the 95% that changed, no. Another pill name appeared next to Alex's name, and this one got 95% as well.

Now, there was no doubt that Alex was most likely the best alchemist on this entire continent.

Alex was done about 5 different pills by the end of the day before he left his room. When he did, he saw Harry standing outside.

"Oh, hey there," Alex greeted him, but Harry seemed to be in no mood for casual talk.

"Alex, I need to ask you something," he said.

"Uhh… sure," Alex said.

Harry took a deep breath. "Can you teach me about Combinations and Structure?"

Chapter 1043 Accusation

Alex looked at Harry with a strange expression on his face. "You know about Combinations and Structure?" he asked.

"I've known it for a long time," Harry said. "I know you have to have knowledge of it to progress in your pill's harmony level. But no matter how much I try, I just can't seem to use what I learn in my pills."

"I've tried following the rules when making the pills, but they never take effect," Harry said.

"Hmm, is this a common knowledge here? Does everyone know about it?" Alex asked.

"No, as far as I am aware, only I know of this. I got an alchemy book in my treasure box when I joined the game and have made use of it since then," Harry said.

"I see," Alex said. "I wouldn't mind teaching you, but I don't think I can do it so soon. How about the weekends? You must be free then too right? I can teach you a bit around that time."

Harry got happy. "Thank you," he said and walked away.

Alex returned back to his room thinking about how he was going to teach Harry. He didn't mind teaching him obviously, but he also didn't want him to know that he knew way too much.

"I'll have to do it in moderation," he thought and got into his room.

Once inside, he focused the rest of the day and night on cultivation. While he was cultivating, Whisker would be to the side making pills all night.

Alex still hadn't received his money yet. That would happen at the end of the week when everything was calculated and everyone was given their share of the profit.

When that happened, Alex thought of getting the ingredients for the cultivation pill again. However, he couldn't make the pill here at all. In which case, he would have to take a month or two leave to go out into the sea where no one could witness the lightning that came with making pill veins.

Alex got up early next morning and went to check on Whisker. He had been making steady progress in all the pills and was getting closer and closer to making True rank pills that consistently reached over 60%.

Since Alex hadn't taught him the Supreme Elemental Accord technique, which he couldn't even learn due to his lack of 7 elemental spiritual roots, he was in fact working with normal ingredients. So, reaching 60% was already doing way better than most of the alchemists that would be of his cultivation base.

If one were to add age to the equation, Whisker would be one of the most talented alchemists under the age of 25. When added in the fact that he was a beast, it would be hard to argue that he wasn't amazing.

"Well, he did learn from me," Alex thought to himself and quietly laughed.

Once he was done judging Whisker's progress with Alchemy, he took Whisker and went toward the pill making building.

As he was going there, he felt a talisman buzz in his storage ring. He quickly pulled it out.

The talisman was a communication talisman given to him by the leader of the association just in case Alex ever wanted to ask something. At the same time, it was also a two way talisman, so Alex was the one receiving a message.

Alex quickly read it and put on a confused look. "Why outside?" he wondered and started walking towards the front of the association, outside of the gate.

There was already a crowd there, so Alex wonder what it could have been about that the leader wanted him to come out. 'Do the people want to see what I look like?' he wondered.

He walked up to the crowd and immediately someone shouted out loud. "That's him, that's the bastard!"

Alex looked towards where the voice came from and realized what the problem was. "I see, so its you," he said when he saw the man standing in the middle of the crowd.

The family head of the Huang family had come all the way to the city of Many Flowers after learning about Alex.

"That's really him? I wouldn't have thought the new alchemist would be such a criminal."

"I wonder how someone like him can be that good."

"He must have stolen the knowledge from someone else as well."

The various people in the crowd, especially ones that were jealous of Alex and would love nothing but to see his downfall started voicing their opinions.

"Young man, he is accusing you of stealing and running, is that true," the association leader asked.

"Uh... kind of," Alex said. "He's not lying, but he isn't telling you the whole thing. You should wait a bit before you make any judgment."

He walked towards the family head. "So, what can I do for you, brother Huang?" he asked.

"Bastard! I am here today to get back my justice," the family head shouted. At the same time, a few of the people from the Huang family moved up front together to threaten Alex.

However, to Alex's eyes, they were simply too weak to be of any threat to him.

"Justice, you say? May I ask you to clarify?" Alex said.

"You know damn well what I'm talking about. Just because you changed your name doesn't mean your crime washes away as well," the family head said. "Listen up everyone, this man promised to make me pills to help my cultivation. He asked me to buy him many ingredients. When I did, he made me a single pill."

"I took the pill and went to cultivate, but when I returned, he had already beaten up my man that was standing guard and had run away with not just the ingredients but even my cauldron I had lent him."

"He stole so much from me, I demand that we punish him for it. At the very least, we must cripple him," the family head said furiously.

"Yeah, we must cripple him."

"Punish him!"

A few people started shouting in the crowd. However, there were more people that didn't think with their emotions.

"Isn't crippling too intense?"

"We can't cripple such an amazing alchemist. That would be a crime against humanity."

"I'm sure sir alchemist can make the pills for senior, or just pay back what he stole with some added interest as punishment."

Alex remained quiet as he heard everyone speak. He wanted to see just how far the family head would go. And as expected, the family head did start speaking again.

"Friends, you don't need to worry about losing a valuable asset to humanity. The valuable asset isn't him, but rather his recipes that he uses to make the pills. As long as we have those recipes, any of the alchemists here can reach the same level as him," the family head said.

The people were persuaded a little by his words. They started thinking of Alex as not someone valuable but rather someone holding something of value.

Still, they believed crippling someone like Alex was going a bit too far.

The association leader stepped forward and everyone calmed down. "Brother Huang, I'm afraid you are wrong with your words there," he said.

"Huh? What do you mean?" he asked.

"An alchemist doesn't suddenly get better just because he has a good recipe. There are a lot of factors involved when making a pill. Even I doubt I can make any pill reach the same height as young Alex here can even if you give me the recipe," he said. "I'm sure the recipe helps him a lot, but that's not the only thing."

"What? No way, but he said..." the family head looked at Alex. "Bastard, I can't believe you lied to me regarding that too. Either way, it doesn't matter. I demand justice."

"Sigh, what do you have to say about this, young man," the leader asked. Everyone turned to look at Alex.

"Well, first of all, I would like the family head to say everything that happened back then, not just the part that fit his narrative," Alex said. "Please stop holding back information. Since you want justice, you have to tell people everything that has happened."

"What? I have nothing more to say," the family head said.

"So you are not going to say everything?" Alex asked. "Then let me tell everyone exactly what happened."

He looked at the crowd. "This man gifted me a cauldron so that I would come to his house. I did not steal the cauldron. I accepted his request and went to his house to make him some pills, which I did."

"I made him one pill to show him that I could. However, he wasn't there for the pill. He was there for my recipe. When I made the pill, he imprisoned me and told me that the only way to get out would be to sell him the recipe, which I obviously refused."

"He left to give me time to think, but I didn't need to. I beat up the person that standing guard and stole what he had on him. I must say I was incredibly poor at the time, so I needed that money."

"After that, I left the city and never saw him again until today. If you think fighting back against someone that tries to imprison you is deserving of punishment, then go ahead, punish me," Alex said.

The crowd quietened down.

"He's lying," the family head said. "Don't listen to him."

"Am I?" Alex asked. "Then prove it. Make an oath saying that every word that came out of your mouth was the truth. I will do the same as well. Do you agree?"

Chapter 1044 A Good Amount

"An oath? Why should we trust your words? You could very well lie!"

"Yeah, words mean nothing to us. You stole from the family head."

"Don't expect us to believe you just because you speak an oath!"

The few people around the family head that were waiting to talk negatively about Alex took the opportunity to slam him again. They were mere civilians and people of little note, so they weren't aware of the Oath.

However, it was impossible that someone like the Family head would be unaware of heavenly oaths. His face drained of color when he heard Alex say that.

Alex could see that the man had not expected him to know about the oaths at all. 'Oaths must be knowledge that's not so easily shared around here,' he thought.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" the leader asked. "You know what you are trying to do, right?"

"Of course," Alex said. "I have nothing to worry about after all, I won't be lying. As long as the family head speaks the truth, he shouldn't have to worry either."

The family head was fidgeting at the moment. He was racking his brain to get out of the situation, but there was nothing he could do that wouldn't make him look guilty at all.

"You are just trying to hurt me before your own crime is revealed. I won't fall for that," the family head said. He was grasping at whatever branch he could to hang on to the notion of Alex being a thief and a criminal in this instance.

Even as he did, the public perception was already changing. Just refusing such a simple thing to prove the accusation meant that the old man had something to hide, and anyone who mattered in the current situation knew about it.

The various alchemists, committee members, and elders from the Flowerhall sect that had come to request some pills were seeing through the family head's facade.

"Brother, you have said so much earlier, was there any lie in there?" the association leader asked.

The family head was having a hard time keeping hold of his own thoughts. "Ahem, I might have exaggerated about the cauldron. It's true that I had gifted it to him, but that was because I was hoping he would help me make pills that would help me with my cultivation."

"I promise with the heavens as my witness, this person beat up my man, stole my ingredients, and ran away while I was not there," the family head said.

But, people could already hear his twisting his words. After all, that was exactly what Alex had said as well, and the family head was only removing some aspects from it that suited him.

"Young man, you should clear it up. Make the oath so we know what is true," the leader said.

"Yes," Alex said. "I make an oath to the heavens that everything I have said regarding this situation is true. I was imprisoned by this man who told me the only way he would release me was to sell him my recipe. I ran away while he wasn't around by defeating the person that was standing guard and took everything that man had on him, which included the ingredients as well."

The Saints looked to the sky to see any changes, but there were none.

"Family head, do you have anything to say?" the leader asked.

"I... I..." the man looked around in confusion. "This man took my stuff. I demand that he return it or at the very least pay me back."

"And what about the fact that you tried to imprison me? What punishment should there be for someone that does that?" Alex asked.

"I... I wasn't imprisoning you. I only wanted to persuade you to—"

"That's enough farce for today," Alex said. "Seniors, I'm sorry you had to witness this joke of a person's act. As for the Huang family, I have something for you to say."

"With heaven as my witness, I made this oath today. I will never again knowingly make a pill for anyone part of the Huang family," Alex said.

Everyone in the area felt an invisible power slowly path through them before locking onto Alex. The oath was settled and there was no way to remove it ever again.

Since it was a one-sided oath with no conditions for breaking it, Alex would have to forever hold true to this oath or the heavens would strike him down.

The Huang family looked at him with a surprised faces. They could tell that their family head was already losing this argument and was being proven that he was lying, and now the world's best alchemist had promised to never make a pill for them anymore.

The people were distraught.

The family head himself was shocked, but he still had some hope. "I-I don't need you to make me a pill. There are million other alchemists that will help me," he shouted out loud.

"Great," Alex said. "Have fun getting them to make pills for you. Goodbye."

He turned around and left, leaving everyone to watch dumbly. The crowd dispersed when he realized there was nothing more to be said. Alex had proven his innocence somehow using oaths, and even while he had technically stolen, he was also imprisoned in the first place so there was no way anyone would hold him accountable.

The leader looked at the stunned family head and smiled at him. "Please feel free to request some pills to be made while you are here. Farewell."

He turned around and left as well. One after another, everyone left the family head alone and went away.

The family head who had been humiliated could only curse Alex in anger, and in the end, he had to leave as well.

Alex returned to his task like everyone else and the day came to a close. He returned to his room the same as yesterday and started cultivating.

3 days went by once again with him doing nothing but making pills. By now, he was popular for being able to make 3 different types of pills, all of which had reached upwards of 90% each time.

It wasn't just the customers that were excited, even the alchemists were happy when they saw Alex. They would greet him with a hearty smile and ask for some hints or tidbits of information that could help them in their alchemy journey.

Unfortunately, Alex couldn't help them since he didn't know much about them. Still, he didn't outright refuse them and only said he was busy right now.

The end of the week came around and with that came his payment. Alex was looking forward to seeing just how much his pills had been sold for.

He wasn't aware of the sales side of things, so the payment was definitely going to be a surprise for him.

'Let's see, unlike the first pill, every other pill only has a 10% cut on it, so I should still get a lot, even if it is just 90% of the actual earnings,' he thought. The association would take a cut away even after that which would be a flat rate for the room he was staying in the various other facilities the association provided.

All in all, it wasn't that much money for him.

The door opened and an old man walked in. "Ah, Alchemist Alex, it's good to meet you finally," the old man said as he took out a storage bag from his person. "Here is your earnings for the week. Please sign this talisman with your Qi so we can confirm you did get your earnings."

"Sure," Alex said and quickly checked the storage bag. He saw a massive amount of spirit stones that made his head hurt for a second. It was just too many to just count. He quickly signed the talisman with his Qi and asked, "how many spirit stones are here?"

The old man laughed. "You must have earned a lot," he said. "I'm afraid I do not know, but there is a talisman in there that should have detailed information on everything."

The old man left after that and Alex quickly opened up a storage bag to find the talisman. When he read the talisman, his eyes went wide.

"Woah... 1.8 Million spirit stones?" he thought as he looked at the amount. It was even True Spirit stones. That was so many.

"And it's just a week's worth of money," he thought. He couldn't imagine just how much richer he could become if he did this for an entire year. He would become so very rich.

He stayed in his alchemy room looking at his money while giddy in happiness. He wasn't leaving, even though it had already been long past his day's end.

Harry found him in the room and walked in. "Oh thank god, you're still here," he said as he walked in. "You look happy? You earned a lot or what?"

"It's not a bad amount," Alex said as he put aside his storage bag. "Sorry, did you need something?"

"Oh, I was just making sure you remember what you said to me," Harry said.

"What I said to you?" Alex asked. "Ah! The teaching part, yes I remember. We can have our lesson tomorrow. Uhh... why don't you come by my room tomorrow early morning and I can teach you for a few hours. How does that sound?"

Harry smiled. "That sounds great," he said. "See you tomorrow then."

Chapter 1045 Teaching

Harry arrived outside of Alex's room early in the morning, so Alex quickly asked Whisker to stop making pills and go back into his beast space.

Once he was gone, he finally opened the door and let Harry in.

"Alright, I'm excited to learn this thing. Let's start," he said the moment he entered. Alex chuckled a bit and led him to the Alchemy room.

"So, where do we start?" Harry asked.

"Uh, would you mind telling me what you know in the first place so I can maybe start from there?" Alex said.

"Sure," Harry said and started explaining what he knew.

Harry basically understood everything that was basic knowledge about Structure and Combinations. He knew that the individual specks of powder formed different structures and that when combined together properly, they made a pill better.

He was confused about the specifics of everything, however. He did not understand what exactly the combined form should be or what an individual speck of powder even looked like most of the time.

He didn't understand how anyone was supposed to keep track of the millions of specks of powder that formed when making a pill.

And most of all, Alex realized that he did not understand why a pill would be good just because it followed those rules.

Alex thought about everything and started understanding just what it was that he had to teach.

"Can you tell me when you reached the Saint realm? Like how many years it has been?" Alex asked.

"Uh… ahem, unlike others I focused too much on Alchemy so I was quite slow," Harry said with an embarrassed face. "I only reached the Saint realm about 12 years ago, and it has taken me that long to reach my current cultivation base."

"Saint Condensation 4th realm isn't that bad," Alex said and asked something else. "How comfortable are you in using your spiritual sense?"

"Oh, you might not know this since you are not from here, but our Spiritual senses are quite awesome," Harry said. "We start off early on with this small flower that gives us a Spiritual sense without having to reach the saint realm. That was one of the reasons why I never really sought it out as much as I should have."

'Oh,' he thought to himself. 'City of Many Flowers… that makes sense.'

Alex thought for a bit and moved his hands. The pill that Whisker was making before he had to stop halfway flew out of the Sun's womb, which was just powder at the moment.

"Can you see the individual speck of this?" he asked.

"Individual speck of this powder?" Harry asked. "Uh… I can if I force hard enough. But only right now though, I can't keep track of them when they are in a cauldron."

Alex nodded. "Well that's because you aren't supposed to," he said as he dusted off the powder. "Inside a cauldron, you are supposed to use pill-forming techniques which can help you make pills on their own. There are some that require you to be able to see inside the cauldron at the individual specks, but they are not as demanding as they sound."

"Oh… so I don't have to worry about them?" he asked with a look of clarity as if he understood something finally.

"No, you are meant to rely on some sort of technique. Of course, that probably wasn't true in the past, but others have worked hard to make techniques so we don't have to," Alex said.

"Regarding Structures, there's not much I can really teach you. Every ingredient can have hundreds of different structures depending on the heat, direction of spin, and the speed of it moving in a cauldron."

"If you really care about the shapes, you will have to spend time learning everything on your own by making them," Alex said.

"Or you can just look at a book and learn," Harry said.

"Uhhh… you can do that, but I'm not sure many people would note it down in a book. Do they?" Alex asked.

"Oh, the book I got has the majority of it covered in drawings that are about the structures of some rare ingredients that you wouldn't want to test on yourself because you might not find another one," Harry said.

Alex got a little curious. "Mind if I take a look?" He had a way of finding all the structure for an ingredient if he had 3 of its variations, but he would rather not waste a rare ingredient if he could just learn the information from somewhere else.

"Sure, here you go." Harry brought out the book and handed it over to Alex.

Alex looked at the title of the book. "Internal Pill Shapes - A collection of Studies on Structure and Combinations"

He flipped the page and on the first page, there were two words written on it. He read the words with a confused look on his face. "Spicy Gourd? Is that the author's name?" he asked.

"Ahem, that's just something I wrote. Please skip that and go next," Harry said and flipped the page himself.

Alex looked through the front half of the book was a basic explanation of Structure and Combinations, but it wasn't a book meant for thorough explanations.

It was more so there to give the reader an idea about Structures and Combinations, rather than teaching it to them. What was there was just a precursor to the various different shapes with different ingredients.

Alex looked at the first ingredient, a Foghorn Tree's fruit. He closed his eyes and looked through his sea of knowledge to find that name.

'Foghorn Tree's fruit… can be used for anti-inflammatory medicines. Can be used for burns, and can be used as an ingredient to pills to make a very specific antidote that came from getting stabbed by a Foghorn Tree's thorn. Foghorn trees themselves are very common, but they rarely flower to even produce fruits.'

He recalled all the information he had on that and opened his eyes with a surprised look. 'It's an Immortal rank ingredient,' he thought.

The thorns of the Foxhorn Tree weren't very harmful, but they did cause a lot of rash and itching that normal Immortal rank pills couldn't relieve, and thus one had to make a pill using the Tree's fruit.

Otherwise, their best bet would be to find an Immortal-rank antidote pill with a few pill veins.

He turned through the pages and saw many more drawings of shapes of many different ingredients. The drawings were small enough that the author had managed to cram hundreds of different variations of a single ingredient.

There were about 50 different ingredients in total, and as far as Alex knew, they were all incredibly rare.

Once he was done reading through it all, he handed the book back to Harry and started explaining to him about Combinations.

"For Combinations, you must remember that it's all about reducing the empty space in a pill. The more compact the combination you can make, the better," he explained.

"Wait…" Harry thought for a bit. "Does that mean I will have to know the structures for all the ingredients?"

"Yes," Alex said. "Not just the ingredient either, you will need to know the shapes of the exact way in which the ingredient will be used to release the same amount of energy."

"Damn, that's… that's tough," he thought. "Yeah, it involves a lot of repetitive practice."

Alex taught him various other little tidbits he knew about Structure and Combinations before going on to the main part of that piece of knowledge that Harry did not have at all.

"And to get the best result when making a pill, you want to make the most symmetrical shape," Alex explained. "The better the symmetry, the higher your pill's grade will be."

"Woah…" Harry said as he learned that information. "That's really a lot to take in a single day."

"It can get overwhelming at first, but you will get used to it in time. For now, I suggest starting with common-rank pills whose ingredients you can easily find. Once you have done that, move on to True rank pills, and then by the time you reach Saint rank pills, you will get used to it," Alex said.

"You must have practiced this for many years then," Harry said. "Did you get a similar book as mine from your treasure box?"

"Uh… yeah, it was an alchemy book as well," Alex said.

"Ooh, do you mind if I read it?" Harry asked.

Alex shook his head. "Sorry, I learned it through the game and the book disappeared. I do not have it anymore," he said.

"Oh… that sucks," Harry said. "Still, it must have helped you a lot. When did you start learning about Structures and Combinations?"

Alex recalled back to the first time he learned about this information. It was back in the royal library in Cardinal City in the Crimson Empire. He had read a book that was written by the Royal Alchemist.

"It's been 30 years or so, I believe," Alex said.

"Oh, so you started around the same time as me," Harry said. "I guess you were just better at learning than me."

"No, I just got information that you didn't know about," Alex said. "You would've done amazingly by now had you been given the same information I had been given by someone early on."

"I see," Harry said.

Alex taught a little more and showed him a few examples by making a few pills in front of him.

Once he was done, Harry left the room and Alex was finally free to do what he wanted to on his day off.

Chapter 1046 Noisy, Shut Up!

Alex left the association and walked out to the city. He hadn't got the opportunity to see the various sights of the city when he arrived last time, so he was planning to use this time to do that.

The city was truly very beautiful with flowers blooming on every single patch of land where there was dirt.

The city smelled nothing but fantastic with all the floral scent that the wind carried around. Alex walked through the streets looking at the various vendors and even bought a few things using his newly made fortune.

Clothes were the things he needed to buy the most as they would often tear up during fights or even just simple practice sessions.

Aside from that, Alex stocked up on wooden boxes, pill bottles, empty talisman papers, inks, formation plates, and various other items that he had lost when he came over to the Southern Continent.

Many of the things he lost were irreplaceable, but the ones that were, Alex replaced them.

"Let's go to a weapons store," he said to Whisker, who was sitting inside his robes, and walked along.

The artifact store sold swords, which was what Alex was looking for. As of right now, he only had midnight, and as such he was incapable of using the 21 Sword Array in any of his battles.

With the various other attacks he had, he didn't really need to use that attack, but it was nice having options.

Besides, he had always been planning on using that precise skill to help him learn more about the Dao of techniques, which was one of his goals for the recent future.

If he could learn that, it would open up various different opportunities for him in both normal cultivation techniques and Alchemy.

The 20 different swords Alex bought were all similar in size to the Midnight and as such were easier to make work together.

He looked at Armor and various other artifacts, but none looked as appealing to him. Armor was useless to someone like him who had the Blood armor, and mental defensive artifacts were in general quite useless for Saint realm cultivators as they could easily destroy it.

The materials to make actual mental defensive artifacts that stopped a Saint's attack were near impossible to find after all.

Alex looked at the other artifacts too and bought a few just because he had the money too. Even if he didn't use it, he could give it to his mother, aunt, or his father when he got back to them all.

After leaving the artifact store, Alex went to a restaurant of some fame in the city to try out their delicacy. He sat down on an empty seat and looked at the menu.

"Oh, most of the special ones involve rare flowers only grown around this city," Alex said as he read what was written. "And they say they are good for your health. That one is good for the liver, and this one for the heart."

He went through his knowledge base to see if the claims made in the menu were actually things that the flowers could do for real. "Eh, close enough I guess," he thought. The restaurant was exaggerating, but they weren't wrong in what the flowers and fruits did.

Alex didn't care about it though. He was here just for the taste anyway.

He quickly ordered his food and waited around for it to come. The waiter returned immediately with some appetizers, but the main course would take some time.

"Come, let's eat," Alex said. Whisker came out of his robe and went by the plate to start eating.

The appetizers were a bunch of Graddus fruits that were cut up and boiled in a broth made up of Star Ember flower petals along with Crystal Ginseng.

Every bite he took of the fruit not only had the enhanced taste of the fruit, but also the smell of the flower alongside it.

"Wow, this tastes so good," Alex said out loud. Whisker nodded in agreement and continued eating. Alex went for another bite, but just then he heard a scream.

"AAAH!"

He quickly turned around to see a bunch of girls that were screaming while pointing at him. "There's a rat in this restaurant. Eww!"

The other customers also pointed it out and started saying things. The staff had heard the scream as well and were already on their way to Alex's desk.

Alex looked dumbly at what was happening.

"We apologize for letting a rat into this establishment sir. Please forgive us," the staff said and started prepping some sort of attack to capture Whisker.

"Wait! Wait!" Alex quickly stopped the man. "This is my pet beast. He's eating with me."

The staff paused. "A pet beast? A rat?" he asked. He was a little confused. He could not understand why anyone would make a rat their pet.

"Yes, this is my pet beast," Alex repeated. "You don't have to apologize. You didn't make a mistake. He's just here because I want him to eat with me."

"Uhh..." the staff was a little confused as to what to say. There was something wrong here, but he didn't know how to approach it.

"Uh, dear customer," an older man came up to them. "If this is your pet beast, then would you mind putting it away? It is making the other customers feel disgusted to eat with it out."

Alex looked at them with a rather offended look. "I would not," he said. "This is my pet beast and he's like a brother to me. Please don't call my brother disgusting."

The old man frowned. "Customer, please consider the situation. The other customers will lose their stomachs if they see a rat in the restaurant. Please consider putting it away," the old man asked.

Alex frowned as well. He was slightly angry at how the old man was addressing Whisker, but at the same time, the old man was being as polite as he could, making it impossible for Alex to start saying anything rude in return.

He sighed in the end. "Come Whisker, you can stay in my robes," he said. Whisker ran up to Alex and got into his robes where Alex handed him a small piece of the fruit.

Whisker ate the fruit while Alex looked at the old man. "That's fine, right? He's not in view so that it won't be problematic," he asked.

The old man had only nodded when the other customers started speaking again.

"Oh my god, he's still feeding the rat."

"So disgusting."

"Why are the restaurant owners not just throwing them out."

"God, I can't understand how some people function."

The old man's face turned awkward again. Somehow, the other customers weren't satisfied with the rat being out of sight. However, since Alex had already done what he had asked, it felt awkward to ask him to take it even further.

Still, the will of the majority took precedence for him, so he had to speak again.

"Would it be possible for you to put your beast back in its—"

"HE!" Alex said. "Not it, he. He is my brother, and I will not have you call him as anything else. I already put him in my robes, but since the others are still complaining, screw them."

Alex brought out Whisker again and placed him on the table. "Eat freely," he said.

Whisker nodded and started eating. At the same time, the restaurant was starting to get noisy. The customers were speaking all sorts of things, all negative, and all driven towards Alex and the restaurant.

The old man didn't know what to do anymore. The only thing he could do now asked Alex to leave in hopes of calming the crowd.

However, before he could do so, Alex spoke. "So noisy." He put on a disgusted face. "Whisker, tell them to shut up."

The old man was suddenly confused and looked towards the rat. Whisker was confused as well and looked at Alex.

"I can't speak," he replied using his spiritual sense.

"You are speaking right now," Alex told him.

Whisker paused for a moment and finally understood what Alex was saying.

Suddenly, a wave of spiritual sense spread out from Whisker, reaching all the different corners of the room and reaching into everyone's mind.

"My brother says you are all noisy. Shut up!"

No sound was made out loud, but the words reverberated in their mind, stunning everyone into silence.

The only ones that would come to eat in a restaurant like this were usually mortals or weak cultivators who still needed sustenance. It was rare that a high-ranking cultivator came to a place like this.

However, today one had, and the people had heard words spoken directly into their minds.

"S-Saint realm!" one of the wiser cultivators said as they immediately recognized Spiritual sense.

"Saint realm?"

"No way!"

"That rat?"

The people didn't believe it, but when they remembered the words being spoken directly into their heads, they had little doubts.

Realizing that what they were doing was actually courting their own death, they quietly turned back and quickly finished their meal before leaving the restaurant.

Alex on the other hand took all the time in the world, enjoying the various appetizers, main dish, and dessert along with Whisker.

Once he was done an hour or so later, he finally left the restaurant.

The restaurant owners insisted on not being paid, but in the end, Alex still handed them their money.

After that, he left to visit more of the city, arriving by the Floral Lake at the end of the day.

Chapter 1047 Artificial Scarcity

The surface of the Floral lake was filled with flowers and flower petals. Some of the flowers were aquatic plants that had grown in the lake, but most of the flower and petal was actually something the wind had blown here.

Hidden beyond the flower and petals was muddy yellow water, that was certainly polluted by the various waves of pollen that flew out from the platform at the center, the Forbidden Orchard.

There were warnings around the side of the lake telling people to not enter the lake or drink its water as it was filled with poisonous pollens which couldn't be separated from regular pollen, so Alex stood away as he watched it.

He had spent such a long time going around the city before coming here that he was just in time to see the sunset over the lake.

When he watched the colors of the setting sun and the purple sky, he couldn't help but think about Scarlet.

He wondered how she was doing. He could sense her somewhere towards the northeast, but it was a vague feeling at best.

Sometimes, he wondered if he should just break their bond and be done with it. However, it just felt wrong to break a bond with the descendant of the Vermilion bird. There was always a chance she could come back anyway.

Alex returned back to the association after sunset and started cultivating once more. Whisker left to practice Alchemy again and so the night passed.

The next day was also free, and Alex used this day to improve his body. His blood beast beat him up all day in the room and by the end of the day, he healed back and gained some minor improvement to his body.

Then, the work week started again, and it was time for Alex to make pills for the next 5 days.

Alex was ready for it.

The week went by in a flash. There were still many pills for him to make that were on the list, so he continued making them at work.

When he was off, he would improve his own cultivation base or his body cultivation.

After that, another week began.

Alex continued this day after day, week after week for 3 months as he amassed millions of spirit stones.

However, around the end of the 3 months, he started noticing a problem with what he was doing.

By now, he had 9 different pills in his repertoire that he could reach above 90% with, so the customers knew they could trust him with almost any pill.

However, not all of his clients were rich enough to afford things that only cost above 50 thousand spirit stones each time.

If they bought a consumable item of that price so frequently, they would go broke very soon. As for the rest of the customers, they didn't even bother looking for Alex as he was too expensive for them.

As a result, after the hype of 90% harmony pills died down, Alex stopped getting many pill requests altogether, and he would be lucky if he had a single day where those were the only orders.

Now, there was a time in his schedule when he had nothing to do at all, and for some reason that sucked very much.

It was only the third day of the week, but he had no more pills to make for some reason. There were other alchemists that had tons of pills being requested of them each time, but he was the only one with not a single request.

And as it turned out, the others had noticed as well.

The association leader came around to voice his concerns. He was less worried about Alex not doing anything and more so that he would leave if he didn't find anything to do.

"What do you think we should do? What do you find easy?" the leader asked.

Alex thought for a moment. "Uh... I suppose the only way is to stop making such high-grade pills, right?" he asked.

"Yes, but... that feels wrong," the leader said.

"And I can't just take the request for low-grade pills and make it as well as I can either," Alex said. "The people will start requesting only me to make the pills."

"Yeah, that's true as well," the leader said. "The main problem here is that you have become very costly to employ. What do we do? Maybe lower the price a bit"

Alex thought for a bit. "No, that serves the same purpose as making low-grade pills. They will pay less for more and they will all expect me to make their pills." He thought for a bit longer and asked, "how about limiting the amounts I can make in a week?"

The leader thought for a moment. "Will that work?" he asked. "You are already getting so much lesser than you did just a few months ago. Limiting the weekly amount shouldn't do anything."

"Then... if we can't limit the amount, we should limit the time," Alex said.

"Oh... what do you suggest?" the leader asked curiously.

"What if... I can only make pills for one week every month or two. Maybe even every 3 months. And there will be a number of pills that will limit how much they can get," Alex said. "By creating an artificial scarcity, the people should come back to buy my pills since they won't have any other opportunity to buy them."

The leader nodded as he thought. "I can't confirm whether you are allowed to do this right now. It's too major of a decision for me to make alone. Let me get back to you by tomorrow after I'm done discussing with the committee members," the leader said.

"Sure, senior," Alex said.

"Alright, see you later." The leader turned around to leave. But Alex stopped him.

"Senior! There was something I wanted to ask," Alex said.

"Hmm? What is it?" the leader asked.

"About my father... has there been any information?" he asked.

"Oh... that," the leader said with a disappointed look and shook his head. "Nothing as of now. The people are still searching for various people that either go by the name Graham or have a son named Alex, but they haven't been able to find anything. They will still keep searching, but it might take much longer or at worse..."

"It's fine, please keep on searching," Alex said. "Whatever knowledge you can find will be plenty," Alex said.

He was left alone after that to do whatever he wanted while the leader went to have the meeting with the committee members.

After a bit of talk, the committee came to the conclusion that it was in fact in their best interest to limit the opportunity to get pills from Alex as his value would be lost.

After every 3 months, there would be a single week where Alex would make exactly 50 different pills, and everyone would have an opportunity to employ him.

After confirming this information, the leader went over to Alex and informed him of this. After learning that, Alex didn't have anything to do for 3 more months.

So, he decided to take a small vacation and go make some more pills for himself.

Chapter 1048 More Pills

Alex arrived at the edge of the continent and flew away to find a place where no one would see him. He was flying towards one of the islands that were adjacent to the Wasteland that still had Qi in it.

His purpose in come here was just one thing. He wanted to make pills.

He could've made normal pills back in the Alchemy association, but he wanted to make pills with Pill veins. For that, he would have to cause pill clouds to form every single time, which would lead the association as well as most of the Southern Continent to figure out the fact that he could do that.

If it were any other time in the past, Alex would've wondered in his current situation if there was a way to use that to make his name spread faster throughout the Southern Continent in hopes of finding his father.

However, that was not what the current him thought. He had learned his lesson from the madman that kept him imprisoned for nearly 10 years, so he wouldn't show off the pill veins if he could help it.

Who knew what sort of monsters lurked in the shadows of the Southern Continent that would catch him and force him to make pills for them?

They didn't even have to be False Immortals. Even Saint Soul realm cultivators could force him to work for them, and he did not wish to do that.

Besides, making 90% and above pills was enough to send his name reverberating throughout the Southern Continent. Most would likely not even know what Pill veins actually did to appreciate it.

He could imagine a scene where a customer would refuse to pay for a pill because it did not have any Harmony when checked by the pill tester.

Alex made a small area where he could sit and cultivate for the next 3 months while also making pills all the time.

He had bought many ingredients with his fortune for the last 3 months and had used his technique to improve those ingredients to their best. Now, all that was left was for him to make the pills.

Alex brought out Whisker. At the same time, he brought out his Blood Beasts so they could help him gather some more blood in the time it took for him to make the pills.

"Can you go with them and make them gather some blood for me? I will have to focus on the pill so you can do the job," Alex told Whisker.

Whisker didn't like fighting himself, but he was okay with making others fight. He accepted the request and went along with the nearly 100 Blood beasts that Alex had been able to gather for the past year and more.

Most of the Blood beasts, even the ones that were weaker had become stronger in the meantime after Alex gave them his blood to absorb. They hadn't become as strong as the newer ones, but they were getting there.

Alex imagined he could help them reach there after half a year or so of providing blood to them. That was without counting the days when he would gather blood to make a new blood beast.

Alex watched Whisker and the Blood Beasts leave and smiled. He wasn't really worried about the blood beasts getting into trouble with how strong they were at the moment.

Even if they did get into trouble and Whisker was targeted, there was no reason to worry about him as he would revive easily.

As for the Blood Beasts, it would suck to lose them, but Alex could always make more.

Once they were gone to the sea, Alex started cultivating. He spent a few hours reaching his peak condition, and once he was satisfied with his state, he brought out the Sun's Womb to start making pills again.

There were various pills he had to make this time around, including healing pills, antidote pills, and Qi-restoring pills, but the majority of the ingredients were still for pills that would help him cultivate faster.

Alex began by heating up the cauldron and started tossing in ingredients two at a time. He was so used to making this pill now that he could do it without using his spiritual sense and still end up with a Heaven-grade pill.

The rest of the ingredients went in one by one and once he was done, he employed his Pill Splitting technique.

The small pile of powder split into two and started forming spheres that absorbed the energy. As all the energy was gathered, the sky started to get dark all of a sudden, and sounds of thunder could be heard.

Alex smiled when he realized that it was a double thunder, which meant that both his pills had reached 100%.

He used his Qi to protect the pills for the first 3 rounds of lightning strikes. As a Saint foundation realm cultivator, his Qi was as strong as a Saint Core realm cultivator, allowing him the ability to stop up to 4 rounds of lightning strikes.

However, since it was double lightning, he did not trust himself to be able to stop them. So, after the 3rd round, he switched to his blood aura.

By now, his Blood aura was way past the 5th realm of Saint Core in terms of strength, so it could block even the 5th round of lightning strikes. However, he had to be very careful since there were 2 different strikes that happened concurrently.

Once the 5 rounds of double lightning strikes were done, Alex quickly pulled his pills out and quelled the pill cloud above his head.

He looked at the two 5-veined pills and smiled. This was only the first pill he had made and he had already reached the ability to make 5-veined pills.

"Great," he thought and put the pills aside as he continued making more of them.

He could only make 10 such pills before he had to stop. Making pills with pill veins, especially ones with 5 of them took quite a lot out of him mentally.

The mental fatigue that came with making these pills was not something that he could just ignore. He had to stop and cultivate for a while before starting again.

Alex decided to make use of the pill immediately and ate it. Instantly, his cultivation speed improved by a few dozen, going as far as to be 50 times more effective than last time.

Meaning this time around, it was far better and helped him a lot more in cultivating more. Alex was done around 2 and a half days later when the effect of the pills slowly dwindled to nothing, and the fatigue in his meridians became apparent.

They had worked overtime, so he needed to stop putting too much load on them.

Alex went back to making pills again as they didn't require much in terms of Qi. He continued for half a day before stopping when his mental fatigue reached its highest.

With neither pill to make nor time to cultivate his Qi, he began cultivating his Undying Physique as well as his Demon eyes.

Once he was done and his mental fatigue had disappeared, he started making pills once again.

Alex's time was spent almost all in the same place. The only time he didn't have to cultivate or make pills was when Whisker would return with cauldrons full of carcasses and blood.

His only time away from cultivating or alchemy was when he absorbed that blood. He kept the beast cores and even ate one. Then, he went back to making more pills.

The nearly 250 sets of ingredients he had brought along this time around were used up by the time it was halfway through the third month.

He had made the pills sparingly, spent a bunch of the time cultivating, and still ended up finishing them early.

Of the 250 sets, he ended up making about 180 of them into 5-veined pills. Not all of his sessions had double lightning, but the majority did, which he was happy about.

Once Alex was done, he focused mostly on cultivating. Then, a week or so later, he called back Whisker and the rest of his beasts.

Whisker returned with a bunch more blood and carcass. Alex accepted it gratefully and was about to use it again when he noticed something.

"Hmm?" he narrowed his eyes as he looked at the various blood beasts that were around him. There were a few blood beasts that had died in the 3 months he had spent making pills, but that was not what he was staring at currently.

It was barely noticeable on the newer blood beasts, but he could sense it on the weaker ones for sure.

For some reason, the blood beasts had gotten stronger. The stronger ones weren't that much stronger, but the weaker ones were stronger by a realm or two.

"What happened? Why are they stronger?" Alex asked Whisker. Whisker didn't know what to say, so Alex asked him to tell him everything that happened.

"Wait... they drank the dead beasts' blood almost every time after they killed one? Do they get stronger by absorbing the blood of something other than me?" Alex asked curiously.

He picked one of the weaker beasts to test out this theory and made it drink the blood that was gathered for him.

As it drank, Alex could sense the blood aura in the beast getting stronger by the second. By the time it had drank all the blood, the beast had definitely grown stronger.

Chapter 1049 A Week Of Pills

Alex returned back to the city of Many Flowers a couple of days later just in time for his quad-annual pill-making week.

Since he had planned for this before he left, he was here in time for it.

Alex handed over the various pills list and what they did to the association so that they could start a marketing campaign for him where the people would know exactly what pills they were getting.

The people had been starving for his pills, so when they realized he was back, they hopped onto the opportunity to get some pills.

However, they realized that something weird was happening this time around as the association announced that they wouldn't be buying pills this time around.

The confusion only lifted after the association revealed that there were only 100 different pills that could be made, and thus 100 different spots would be auctioned off, which was the only way to get your pills.

As long as you bought the slot, you didn't have to worry about buying ingredients or paying for the pill itself. Of course, the slot itself was going to sell for quite a lot.

Alex spent his days in leisure while the association did all the work for him. Instead, he cultivated using the new pills he had made as he waited for everything to be finalized.

A week later, the auctions were done and all 100 slots were sold at a rather high price. The owners of those slots noted what pills they wanted to be made, so Alex got ready to make them for them.

Alex didn't work like an employee of the association, where he would go to the alchemy building and make pills.

Instead, he was handed over the ingredients directly and he would make pills in his own room in a relaxed state. He was given exactly a week to make all pills, which was easily possible for Alex.

Since there were obviously duplicate pills to make, he could reach above 90%, going as close as 98% with his Pill Splitting technique.

In a single day, he could do somewhere between 20 and 30 pills with half a day to spare to recharge, which meant he could make all the pills in just 4 days.

Of course, the latter pills were more singular, so he had to make one at a time, using up the rest of the days of the week.

When he was done, he handed the pills to the association. The association would need a few days to finalize the sales, and after it was done, Alex would get his share of the earnings.

3 days later, Alex was called to the main building of the Association where the Leader's office as well as the various committee members stayed during their time there.

He arrived in a room with all 10 of them and greeted them before sitting on an empty chair.

"Fantastic work, young brother. We have had nothing but praise from the customers for the pills that you made," one of the committee members said.

"Thank you," Alex said with a small smile.

"Here's your share of the profit," the leader said and handed him a storage bag. Alex opened the storage bag and was a little surprised to see how much he had made.

"That's... 2.3 Million spirit stones? It's quite a lot more than I was expecting it to be," Alex said. "Especially since there was so much spending on our end."

"Yes, there was a lot of spending done during the marketing, the auction, and even when we had to use our own ingredients, but even then we earned enough that you get to leave with that," the leader said. "The quad-annual event was a success, and we will have to do it once again in 3 months. I hope you're not too drained because of it."

"Oh, no no," Alex said while shaking his head. "I can make pills for years on end and not feel drained, as long as I can switch up what pills I make."

"Good, we will look forward to the next event in 3 months. For now, we have 2 things to discuss with you, I hope you won't mind," the leader said.

"Sure, I have nothing else to do anyway, so we can talk as long as we want," Alex said.

"So, the first order of topic is simple," the leader said. "We have a position in the committee opening up soon. Brother Ku over here will be retiring in a few months, so while we were going through candidates that would be good for the committee, your name was brought up quite a few times. So, what do you say?"

Alex was surprised that he was being offered something so big. "That's... quite a proposition you have dropped on me," he said as he considered the offer.

"Take your time, you can let us know your answer in a day or two if you would like to think it through," one of the committee members said. "Being a member of the committee comes with a certain level of influence and benefits that you would not want to miss at all."

"Yes, take your time," the leader said. "Let me speak of the next topic—"

"I'm sorry, but I will have to reject your offer," Alex said suddenly.

"Sorry? You don't want to join the committee?" the leader asked.

"No," Alex said. "I'm comfortable with where I am at in the association and don't want to go any further. Plus, I am someone that might leave at any time after I find the person I'm looking for, so it feels wrong to join a committee as well. That's why I must reject."

"You can take your time and think young man," one of the committee members said.

"No, I have thought of it, and I don't think I will be joining. Thank you for the opportunity, but I'm sure there are better prospects out there for this position," Alex said.

"If you say so," the leader said with a slightly disappointed face. "We won't make any decision for the next week or two, so if you do change your mind you can let me know. For now, let's move on to the second thing I wanted to discuss about."

The leader brought out a talisman and showed it to the people in the group there. "I had a message delivered to me by the Flowerhall sect today. Apparently, senior Qiu Jianhong has expressed his wish to employ alchemist Alex to make some pills for him and his colleagues," the leader said.

Alex's eyes narrowed a bit. "Qiu Jianhong... where do I know that name from?" he asked as he tried to go through his memory.

"That's the ancestor of the Flowerhall sect who is in the council of 10 in the Sunborn Sanctuary," one of them told him.

"OH! Right. I remember now," Alex said. "That senior is requesting for me to make some pills for him?"

"Yes," the leader. "Apparently, they tried to request you a few months ago, but you were unavailable at the time. And after you came, they missed the opportunity to buy the slots during the event. So they now request that you make some pills for them outside of the event."

"That sounds fair," Alex said. "Besides, they are too influential to just reject right? We should accept their request. Please message them to ask what pills they want and I can make it for them."

"Um, actually... they don't want you to make the pills here," the leader said. "They in fact want you to go to them where they can interact with you and have you make the pills for them as they need it."

Alex frowned a little when he heard that. "Um... I don't want to sound disrespectful, but is there a chance here that they are trying to force me to make pills for them forever? I have had it happen to me before, and I do not trust people as much after that," he said.

"Ah, the thing with the Huang family? No, that's not possible. These are the 10 of the strongest cultivators in all of the Southern continent and they are who keep this world at peace after the Phoenix went to sleep," the leader said. "Besides, they are a council, so they technically have rivals and oppositions in there who will definitely help you if you ever are trapped by someone else."

"I see," Alex said. He didn't feel much better, but his suspicion dropped a little.

"Besides, I don't think this is an opportunity you can just let go. Not everyone gets to go to the Sunborn Sanctuary like you are," the leader.

"Wait... the Sunborn Sanctuary?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "I thought it was a place you were not allowed to go."

"You can if you are invited by the council. After all, they make all the law."

"I see, I would love to go there if I have the chance," Alex said.

"Then, should I accept their offer?" the leader asked.

"Yes, please accept it," Alex said. "I will look forward to the day I get to go there."

"Great, I will let the Flowerhall sect know of our intentions and they will contact their ancestor to give them our answer. You should expect to leave within the week."

The leader kept away the talisman. "That should conclude our meeting today. You may return back to your task."

"Then I will take my leave." Alex stood up and left the room, slightly excited at the fact that he would be by the Phoenix's domain in just a couple of days.

Chapter 1050 Qiu Jianhong

Alex was told that Qiu Jianhong, the ancestor of the Flowerhall sanctuary would come to get him personally.

All but a few teleportation formations in the Sunborn Sanctuary were still working and the ones that did work didn't lead to the city of Many Flowers.

Also, going into the Sunborn Sanctuary itself required a special type of access that the council members could only grant, so the ancestor had to come on his own.

A few days later, Alex stood in the lounge area of the Flowerhall sect where he waited for the ancestor to arrive.

The Flowerhall sect was right next to the Floral lake, so he could see the flowery water all day long if he just stayed there.

He looked at the Stone platform at the center of the lake and couldn't help but wonder about it.

"Do you know when that place might open up, senior?" Alex asked the woman that was sitting opposite him.

"The Forbidden Orchard? By our estimation, it will be another year at the very least, and a year and a half at the most," the woman said. She was named Qiu Hanyu and was the current sect master of the Flowerhall sect.

She was also the great-niece of the ancestor that was coming today, making her a blood relative of someone in the Council of 10.

"Do you wish to enter the Orchard?" the sect master asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I've been curious about what's inside for a while now seeing as how much pollen gets spewed out every now and then."

"I'm certain you will be surprised when you do enter, but I hope you don't expect anything too great. In the end, what you will find are all plants after all," the sect master said.

"I understand," Alex replied.

The two of them talked for a while before Alex sensed the arrival of a strong cultivation base. He turned around to see a bald man with a face full of beards wearing a yellow robe walk towards them.

"Granduncle, welcome back," the sect master stood up and greeted.

"Haha, little Hanyu, how are you doing? I hope you're doing well," the old man spoke with a loud voice and a face full of smiles.

"I'm doing quite well, granduncle," she said. "You must be tired from the journey."

"What tired, I just took a small ride. That's nothing for me," he said and turned towards Alex. "Who might this young man be? So young and already a Saint Foundation realm cultivator."

"This young man is the one you are looking for. He is Alex, the Alchemist that you came here for," the sect master said.

"What? No way!" the old man showed a little surprised look. "But you're so young."

"Thank you for the compliment, senior," Alex cupped his fists and bowed a little. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

"No, seriously, how old are you? You are quite young," the elder said.

"I am 46 years old," Alex said truthfully.

"Seriously? Only 46?" the old man asked. "Little Hanyu, are you sure he is the Alchemist that I requested? Isn't he a little too young?"

The sect master chuckled a bit. "It is in fact surprising to learn of alchemist Alex's age and youth, but that does not take away from his ability as an Alchemist. He is after all the best alchemist in the continent right now, maybe even one of the best in the entire world."

"Seriously, it's so hard to imagine," the man said. "I'm sorry if I'm being disrespectful in any way, it's just truly unimaginable that someone who hasn't even reached the age of 50 has gained so much achievement in Alchemy."

"I do not find any disrespect in your words, senior," Alex said. "In fact, I take them as nothing but a compliment."

"Haha, I quite like you," the man said. "So, are you ready to leave?"

"Yes. I can leave anytime you want to leave," Alex said.

"Great! Let's go," the old man said and turned to leave.

"Eh?, Granduncle, you won't be staying for a bit?" the sect master asked.

"I'm afraid I can't," the man said. "The others have been very excited about the prospect of having high-level pills being made for them. If I waste any more seconds here, they will skin me alive. So I will be leaving right now."

"Alright, please do come around from time to time," the woman said.

"Okay, okay," the man said. "Come on, little brother. Let's go."

He walked away and Alex quickly followed behind him. They reached an open area where there was a ship that had landed in a field of flowers.

"Do you like using a boat or do you prefer flying on your own?" the man asked.

"I'm fine with either," Alex said.

"Good, because I would have told you that you weren't allowed to fly on your own," the man said and jumped onto his boat.

Alex got onto it as well and asked, "I'm not allowed to fly on my own? Is there a flying restriction along the way where we are going?"

"No," the man said. "It's just that the mountain range that surrounds the Sunborn Sanctuary is filled with beasts that are very strong and will most likely hurt you if they see you flying through it."

Alex was a little surprised. "And it will be fine if we are on a boat?" he asked.

"Not really, but I will be by your side, and I'm stronger than any beast there so you will be fine," the man said.

'Then can't I jump fly too?' Alex thought but didn't voice his opinion.

The boat flew off and away from the city of Many flowers, going further and further away from the colorful place and into ones that were more of so just green.

The city of Many Flowers was at the very bottom left edge of the map while the Sunborn Sanctuary was towards the middle of the continent. So, even when they were flying on a Saint-ranked ship, it was still going to take them over 5 hours just to reach there.

"Is there a reason why we are not using the Teleportation formation, senior?" Alex asked. "I heard that a person from the Council of 10 could take me in through the formation."

"Hmm? Oh, no. That's a small bit of misinformation that has spread around that we don't bother correcting," the man said. "The teleportation formations only accept people whose Qi has been recorded inside the Sanctuary, so if we were to teleport, I would be accepted, but you would be rejected."

"The main problem here is that I cannot add your Qi into the record without taking you there myself first. Once I've done that, you should be able to teleport in and out into the few sect teleportation formations around the continent."

"I see," Alex nodded as he heard that. It made sense somewhat.

"Tell me about yourself. I want to learn how a young man like you can become such a talent in Alchemy," the man asked.

Alex nodded and explained as plainly as he could while hiding the most important information.

"Right, I forgot you players, or whatever you're called are very talented," the man said. "Still, you have had quite a journey. To think that you came from another continent. Which continent did you come from exactly?"

Alex was about to lie as usual and say the Northern Continent, but he paused. The man in front of him looked pretty frank and cheerful, so he wondered if he could ask something that he had been wanting to know about for a long time. A question he regretted not asking directly in the Northern Continent.

"From the Western continent," he said. "I came across a teleportation formation that sent me to the Wasteland."

"Western Continent? It's doing so well that it can raise someone like you?" the man asked with a surprised look on his face.

"It's... doing fine. I was luckier of the bunch as to where I got to cultivate," Alex said. "Senior, there is something I learned a long time ago, that I have been wondering about. I hope you will clarify this for me."

"Sure, what is it?" the man asked.

"It's regarding the invasion of the Western Continent," Alex said. "You were a part of it, right?"

The man's face grew a little serious. "You know about that?" he asked.

"I do," Alex said. "Would you mind telling me why you did that?"

The man hesitated for a bit and sighed. "We didn't have much of a choice at the time. Or maybe we did, but we chose to take the easy way out."

"What happened that you didn't have any choice?" Alex asked.

"This knowledge goes back to something that I have taken an oath to not talk about, so I am unable to clarify everything, but around 4000? No, 5000 years ago, we were in desperate need of spirit veins, so when the Eastern Continent approached us with the proposition to invade the Western Continent, we jumped on it," he said.

"The Eastern continent proposed it first?" Alex asked.

"Yes, and we accepted the proposition along with the Northern continent saying we are doing it for the good of the world, but mostly it was to use the opportunity to take away the Spirit veins," the man said.

"Why did you need so many spirit veins?" Alex asked.

"Do you know about the barrier that stops the Wasteland from the mainland?" the man asked.

"Yes, I've been there," Alex said.

"We needed spirit veins to run exactly that barrier," the man said. "We desperately needed it back then and we chose to take it from another continent than use the ones in our own."

Chapter 1051 The Barrier

"You took part in it personally?" Alex asked with a serious face.

"All 10 of us did, along with many others," Qiu Jianhong said. "We're not proud of it, but yeah, we did what we thought we needed to do."

"You thought you needed to kill people from another continent?" Alex asked. He remembered about Puma and the others talking about how they had lost their parents to the attack by the rest of the continent.

"We only killed to protect ourselves," the man said. "Yes, we were there to steal things and were in the wrong. We understood this, so there was one thing we made sure to do, and that is to never kill another person unless it was in self-defense. Even then, we would hurt them at most and let them live."

"Many still died, both from that side and our own," the man said with a saddened tone in his voice.

Alex stayed silent. There was just not enough information about what had happened 5 thousand years ago in the Luminance empire as the royal family had changed just a thousand or so years ago. Most of the records from the past were either destroyed or were not accessible to Alex.

All he learned, he had learned from the beasts and they told him the tales of people dying left and right. However, since there were 3 different continents involved in this matter, there was a chance that it was the other two that were so aggressive.

Also, he couldn't just refute the man given his status, so Alex chose to stay quiet regarding that.

"The barrier in the north, you set that up from the spirit veins you robbed from the Western Continent?" he asked.

"Yes, all of it," the man said. "That was what we went there for anyway."

"All so you could stop a few body cultivators from coming to this side?" Alex asked.

"No, of course not. Stopping the people was not our intention, it was just the result. What we really intended was for them to stop trying to spread the Phoenix flames," the man said.

"Could you not stop something that simple? They were just weak body cultivators after all," Alex said.

"The flame is dangerous. If it ever gets out of control it can destroy everything. If we allowed them in, those people who learned the strength of Phoenix flames were certain to do something like that by accident. In the end, we chose to just exclude them altogether," the man said.

"Is it really that dangerous?" Alex asked. "Can't you just extinguish the Flame? Surely you have someone with Fire dao right?"

"Fire dao doesn't work on Phoenix flames. The only thing you can do is control its intensity by a certain degree. In the end, it will still continue to burn. The only way to stop Phoenix flames is by having the Phoenix itself extinguish it, but ever since... oh, that's tricky," the man said as he placed his palm on the chest.

Beads of sweat formed on his face as he breathed in and out rather quickly. "Nearly broke my oath."

'Ever since... the phoenix went to seclusion? He's talking about after the battle right?' Alex thought. He wanted to think about it more but there was something else that he had learned about that he couldn't make sense of either.

'Fire Dao doesn't work on Phoenix flames?' he thought. That was most definitely not true. He had used it multiple times in different places. It most certainly worked.

'Is it because I have a True Fire dao?' he wondered. 'Or is it my connection to Scarlet?'

Even if it was either of those things, then he was certainly one of the very few people in the world, maybe even the only one who could control Phoenix fire and extinguish it all by himself.

"Do you have any more questions?" the man asked.

"No, senior. Thank you for answering everything," Alex said.

"I don't know how much you care about us repaying the Western continent, but if we ever get an opportunity, we would do it. Especially if there comes a day when we no longer have to have the barrier in the north keep on going," the man said.

Alex's eyes perked up. 'I can make that happen right now,' he thought to himself. However, he didn't know what sort of trouble that could cause him.

What if they decide to get rid of him because he had the power to control phoenix flames? Or they realize that he had bonded with a phoenix which was considered taboo for some reason.

So, he kept quiet for now and nodded to the man, while looking around at the passing scenery.

The mainland of the Southern continent was far greener than what the wasteland, making one think they weren't even part of the same continent.

After a few hours of travel by air, Alex saw large mountains in the distance and realized that they were the mountains that surrounded the Sunborn Sanctuary.

A few spiritual senses passed through him from beasts that were obviously stronger than him, but not by much.

None of the senses felt like they belonged to a Saint Soul realm beast, and Alex was pretty confident he could survive the attack of anything below that just by the virtue of his teleportation dao and his blood aura.

He may need to sacrifice a few of his beasts in order to secure his escape, but that was not a problem for him.

The beasts did not approach them as the old man next to him made apparent his cultivation base as they flew.

Alex himself was surprised when he sensed it. 'That's... high in the Saint soul realm,' he thought. 'Maybe even Saint Transformation realm.'

They weren't lying when they said that the people in the council of 10 were the strongest in the entire continent.

He kept quiet for a while and looked a the passing mountains. From time to time, he would see flying birds that got as high as their ship, but they still never approached them.

"Look, can you see it?" the man next to him suddenly said.

Alex looked to where he was pointing and saw a barrier far away in vibrant blue color, which was certainly appearing that way only to his eyes. "Are we there?" he asked.

"Yes, right past that barrier," the man said.

Alex kept watching as the barrier got closer and closer. "Didn't you say that people without any registered aura couldn't enter?" he asked. "You are sure this won't just knock me back right?"

"Huh? Oh no, there is no barrier that stops anyone from entering normally. It's only for teleportation that there is a restriction. What this barrier will do is let us know whenever someone enters the city," the man said.

Alex felt the cool barrier go past him and a few seconds later a bunch of spiritual senses flew out toward him. Truly, if someone were to try and sneak into the sanctuary, someone would notice them immediately.

Alex then looked in front of him and was surprised at just how massive the city was, far beyond what he could have ever imagined at all.

"Welcome to the most important place in the entire continent, the Sunborn Sanctuary."

Chapter 1052 Sunborn Sanctuary

In front of Alex was a sprawling city, carved onto the side of the mountains itself, that cascaded down to the flatter lands. The city was full of houses and trees intermixed with more people than Alex could ever imagine.

As far as Alex could see, there were houses and open lands and rivers all around him. It was enough to say that the Sunborn Sanctuary by itself was about the size of a normal country.

With nearly a hundred kilometers in radius, the city was certainly not a small piece

Alex's eyes moved towards the mountain where the city seemed to end. There were 7 mountains in total that were like that and they all formed a rough circle where a massive piece of the metal dome was installed.

The dome was littered with runes and formations on it for various purposes, but for some reason, none of them seemed to be activated.

"That dome... is that where the Phoenix is currently?" Alex asked.

"That dome is the true Sanctuary as you seemed to have guessed, and yes that is where lord Phoenix is resting," the man said.

Just then, 9 different figures flew into the sky, 5 men and 4 women. Each one of them had a cultivation base that was definitely no longer in the Saint Soul realm.

'Damn,' Alex thought as he realized who was approaching.

The 9 figures stopped in front of them, all with a wide array of expressions on their faces. Some were surprised, some were confused, and some were just happy to see him arrive.

"You don't have to ask. Yes, he looks young, and yes, he is young. But he is definitely the alchemist," Qiu Jianhong said before anyone else could question Alex's legitimacy again.

"Of course, I knew that. I heard he was a young man, but I didn't expect him to be this young," one of the women said. "Hello little brother, I hope you are having a lovely day."

"My greetings to all seniors," Alex said as he cupped his hands and bowed slightly in front of everyone.

"Let me introduce you to everyone," Qiu Jianhong spoke as he pointed to the lady that just spoke.

"This is Ren Guanting, someone belonging to the Ren family of the Spiritsong city," he said. The woman wore a white robe with black floral patterns all over it. Her hair was fully black, and long that was tied at two parts in front of her.

"This is Gong Liuxian, an elder of the Cloud Fire sect." Gong Liuxian was a shorter man with two long mustaches that were black, contrasting the other white hair that was his beard and the remaining hair on his head. He wore light blue robes with white in many places.

"This is Huang Chen, an ancestor of the Huang family." Huang Chen looked like someone that was transitioning from being a middle-aged man to an elderly. He still had a head full of hair and wore purple robes.

"This is Hou Xinya, a previous sect leader of Dawn's Light sect." Hou Xinya was a tall and lean man, who surprisingly didn't look as old. He was one of the younger-looking people in the group. His clothes were yellow and orange with sun embroidery at various places.

"This is Kang Xuefeng, an ancestor of the Kang family in Sureheart city. If you ever need any ores for a cauldron or anything, this is the man you want to ask. His family owns the majority of the mountains in the Sunless lands and thus mines the most ores from there," Qiu Jianhong said.

"That's not really true," Kang Xuefeng said. "It's been ages since I had anything to do with the Kang family. I'm stuck here for so long that everyone that I ever knew is already dead."

The man's eyes were dull, so Alex believed that he truly was all alone. He wrote green robes and was the only one with such color, so he stood out.

"Yes, yes," Qiu Jianghong said and pointed towards one of the other 3 remaining women in the group.

"This is Liang Shufen, from the Liang family, and that is Yao Ning, from the Yao family."

Liang Shufen wore pink robes with frills all around them, making her look exceptionally pretty in that dress. Her face looked quite cute too, despite the clear age visible in them.

Yao Ning on the other hand was an old woman, through and through. Her hair was all white, and her face fully of wrinkles to the point where it was hard to distinguish which folds her eyes went to. She wore simple brown robes and was surprisingly the one who seemed the strongest to Alex.

"This is a previous elder of the Rising Phoenix sect, Tan Yang." Tan Yang was a clean-shaven man from head to chin. He had no outer expression on his face and his body itself wasn't of any note either. He wore normal black and white robe and was the most irremarkable person in the whole group.

"And finally, from the Jade Fire sect, we have Lei Zhong."

"Good to see you," the woman spoke. She wore a cloth that was cyan in color and looked slightly old as well.

Alex looked at each of the members of the council of 10 and bowed towards them once again. "It is a pleasure to meet you all, seniors," he said.

"Let's go somewhere else to talk," Qiu Jianhong said and the rest of them nodded before flying downwards.

Alex looked around at the massive city as he flew down and noticed many people looking up at them. Surprisingly, they all bowed down toward the 10 people that he was flying with.

'So they are popular enough that the normal civilians know of them, huh?' he thought.

They landed in front of a giant building that seemed to be built by the best mason from all around the continent. Every single piece of stone that went into making the mansion in front of him was immaculate.

"What is this place?" Alex asked as he looked at the giant building. "It looks like a palace."

"That's because it is a palace," Yao Ning said. "It's the Palace of the Vermilion Bird."

"Huh? Didn't he live in the Sunborn Sanctuary?" Alex asked.

"No, this is just a fake palace where lord Phoenix greets guests or makes proclamations for the continent, or used to," she said. "Sunborn Sanctuary is their true home though."

"I see," Alex said. He had been to a place like this before. The Palace of the White Tiger was similar as well.

There was a massive palace, a mansion built for accepting guests and other various people, but the real family members of the White Tiger lived underground in the place that was the actual Palace.

They walked inside and Alex saw that the place was kept clean despite the fact that no one should stay in the place.

He saw servants and maids walking by who would stop to bow toward the 10. Alex got curious and asked the council members, "Are you making these people keep the castle clean for no reason, or do you accept guests and other people?" he asked. "Or are you just keeping it clean for the day when the Phoenix comes out of hibernation?"

Ren Guanting released a peal of laughter when she heard that, and the rest chuckled a little as well.

"None of what you said was accurate at all," Huang Chen said. "The truth is, we all stay in this palace, which is why they keep it clean."

"Oh," Alex said with a surprised face as he looked around. "I should've guessed that. But it is still surprising to hear you all live together."

"This is a giant palace. Us living together just means we share this palace which still gives us plenty of privacy," Lei Zhong said.

"I see," Alex said. He checked the architecture of the palace and tried to compare it with the palace of the white tiger, but it was too different to compare.

While the White Tiger had a motif of Gold and White, the Phoenix seemed to have a motif of Purple and Red.

In the case of the White Tiger, the White denoted their names and the Gold denoted their supreme Metal roots. By the same logic, in the case of the Vermilion bird, its name should denote Purple and its supreme roots should denote Red.

Fire for red made sense to Alex, but then... Vermilion wasn't purple at all. In fact, it was red too. Then what did the purple denote?

It could be the color of the Pheonix flames, but Phoenix flames had other colors such as orange, blue, and yellow too.

'Am I wrong in trying to find a reason for the colors?' Alex wondered. It was very well possible that one of the first Phoenix that came to this world loved the color Purple which was why there was the color.

He shook his head and stopped thinking about it.

They arrived in the palace hall where there were seats along either side of the hall, leading to the end with the massive seat of purple and red, on which sat a golden crown with various different jewels embedded in it.

"Did the Phoenix wear a crown?" Alex asked.

"When dealing with matters as the ruler of the continent, yes," one of the council members said.

"Sit on any of the other seats," Liang Shufen said. "We can't wait to talk about the pills we want you to make."

Chapter 1053 List Of Pills

"Sure, let's talk about the pills then," Alex said. He could see the excitement on everyone's faces and didn't want to waste any time. "However, there is a small problem that won't let me help one of you."

"Huh? What do you mean?" Qiu Jianhong asked.

"It's regarding senior Huang," Alex said. "You're probably unaware since you've remained in here, but I've had a bit of a scuffle with the Huang family."

Huang Chen looked slightly perplexed. "What sort of a scuffle do you mean, little brother?" he asked.

"I come from a different continent, the Western continent, and when I first arrived on the mainland, I needed to sell pills for some money. The Huang family's head realized this and requested me to make a pill for him to improve his cultivation speed. I agreed, not knowing that he actually wanted me to sell him my recipes."

"He tried to imprison me after I told him I wasn't willing."

Huang Chen's eyes narrowed. "Who is the current head? How could he do something like that while being the head of the family?" he asked angrily.

"Actually, I never bothered learning his name. After all, I left the place after he tried to imprison me, and along with that, I took away the ingredients he was going to force me to make pills with," Alex said.

"Good thing you left," the man said. "Those bastards trying to tarnish the name my brother created."

"Actually, it doesn't end there," Alex said. "A year later, when I joined the Alchemy Association and made a name for myself with my pills, he came to the association and tried to defame me. It didn't go his way obviously, but in the process, I felt forced to speak an oath."

"Wh-what oath?" Huang Chen asked.

"I made an Oath that I would never make a pill for any Huang family member in the future," Alex said. "My apologies senior, but I was angry at the time and never expected you to request my pills as well. However, as Oaths go, I am going to have to follow it and thus cannot make any pills you request."

Huang Chen's happiness was snuffed out in seconds after hearing the words that left Alex's mouth.

"No way... but we've waited for so long just for your... this can't be happening," Huang Chen said.

"Young brother, you must have left yourself a way out, right? Surely you didn't make an oath without conditions," Yao Ning said.

"No, I was very angry at that time and I made the oath not realizing that I would have to be in such a situation," Alex said.

"No way," Liang Shufen said with her hand to her mouth. "Is there no way for brother Huang to get a pill?"

"Actually, there are two ways, although I'm not sure how effective they may be," Alex said. "I've never had this oath tested against me before, so I apologize if what I suggest may not work."

"What is it? What must I do?" Huang Chen asked.

"The first method is the worse one and the one that is most likely supposed to work," Alex said.

"Tell me, as long as it is physically possible, I will do it," Huang Chen said.

"You will have to renounce your connection to the Huang family, senior," Alex said. "As long as you are not part of the Huang family, I'm sure I won't face any restrictions from my oath."

"That..." Huang Chen paused. "I can't do that. That's my family, my identity. I can't give up on my name. That's the same as giving up on my ancestors."

"I know, senior," Alex said. "That's why I said it is the worse one."

"What's the other one then?" Huang Chen asked.

"I... I do not know much about oaths to know if they will work, but when I made the Oath against the Huang family, I promised never to make a pill for them knowingly. So, as long as I don't know... that will work right?" Alex asked.

Huang Chen's eyes went wide. "Wait, tell me the oath exactly, word for word," he asked.

"These were my words if I remember correctly," Alex said. "With heaven as my witness, I made this oath today. I will never again knowingly make a pill for anyone that is part of the Huang family."

"Hahaha! The heavens have favored me," Huang Chen shouted. "Thank you young brother for your generous oath."

"Will that help?" Alex asked.

"Yes, yes," Huang Chen said. "But I should probably not talk about that. I will keep myself out of the conversation for now."

The others realized what he had to do as well and continued the conversations on their own.

They started listing off a bunch of different types of pills they wanted to be made. They left the specific pill for Alex and only asked if he had any of those pills at all.

For ease, Alex handed them a talisman with all the pills he could make and what they did. The 10 could then ask for the pills they wanted from that list.

The group read the list with excited expressions as they knew they were getting pills with over 90% harmony. That was something they would've never expected to get in their entire life, so it was a momentous occasion certainly.

After a few minutes of reading through the list and trying to figure out what they wanted exactly, one of them turned towards Alex and asked, "Are these all the pills you can make?"

"I can make any pills that I have the recipe to, but these are the ones I can guarantee will be over 90% harmony," Alex said.

"No other hidden pills that you might be keeping to yourself? It's okay if you don't want to answer," another one said.

"No, I do have a few others, but they do the same thing as the others pill in the list and they do it worse, so I choose not to include them," Alex said. "Why? Did you want pills with effects that are not in there?"

"Actually, yes," Qiu Jianhong said. "There are indeed pills that we wish you can help us with."

"I will see what I can do," Alex said. "What sort of effects do you want? It will be easier if you have recipes to begin with."

"Oh, we do have for one of them," Ren Guanting said. "Brother Tan, you have the recipe, right?"

"Ah, yes. Here," Tan Yang quickly pulled out a recipe and handed it over to Alex. "Do you think you can make a good pill with this recipe? It doesn't have to reach 90% harmony, but it will certainly help if it can reach at least 60% or better. We're getting old and having pill poisoning at this age is not really good for us."

Alex looked at the recipe for a pill with no name at all. It only listed the ingredients and the directions to make the pill.

He closed his eyes and started going through the names on the list and seeing what sort of ingredients they were.

The others kept quiet seeing that Alex was deep in this thought and didn't want to disturb him at all.

The first ingredient on the list was a flower that would numb one's body. The second was a bark from a tree that would improve one's muscles.

The third was a beast's liver which would inflame one's meridians and force them to grow slightly.

As such, Alex went through the entire list of ingredients and learned what they all did. After that, he tried to make sense of what the ingredient would do together when their energy was mixed in a certain way.

"It's... a pill that will give you a burst of power?" Alex questioned. "No, that's not right. It gives you temporary strength, but it's of a defensive kind. Wind? No, wood."

"Resistance then? Resistance to wood?" Alex questioned before finally landing on an answer. "It's a pill to give one a small burst of resistance to lightning, isn't it?"

The entire group of 10 looked awestruck at seeing Alex figure out the purpose of the pill in less than 10 minutes despite the recipe having no indication of what it was about.

"How did you know?" one of them asked. "Have you seen the recipe before perchance?"

"Of course not," Alex said. "I just brute-forced my way to find the answer since I know what the ingredients themselves do."

He saw the faces of the 10 who still couldn't believe it. "It's not as impressive as you might be thinking," he said.

"No, it definitely is," Tan Yang said. "It took my family generations to figure out what it did exactly as there were no apparent changes when one ate that pill. It was only after someone ate it during a lightning storm that we figured it out."

"I see," Alex said. "Your family held this recipe from generations ago to forget what it meant? I didn't expect the Tan family to go so far back."

"No, our family doesn't go as far back, just a dozen thousand or so years back," Tan Yang said. "The recipe has indeed been with our family for a long time, but it wasn't made by our family. We most likely acquired it from someone who acquired it from that place."

"That place?" Alex asked.

"You know," Tan Yang said. "The Sundering Sanctum."

"Oh, the secret realm. I have only heard of it. Does it house a lot of hidden treasure?" Alex asked. He wondered if it was similar to the Demon realm back in the Western Continent.

"We believe it used to, but not anymore," Yao Ning said. "Now it's just a crumbling piece of space we send our best and brightest to test themselves."

Chapter 1054 Strong Indivduals

"Someone got it from the Sundering Sanctum?" Alex asked as he looked at the recipe in his hands.

"Yes," Tan Yang said.

"And the Sundering Sanctum is crumbling, you said? It's not safe anymore?" Alex asked. He was quite curious about what he had heard.

"No, it is safe, as long as you make sure that you don't go to certain places. It's easy to figure out once you're in there," Yao Ning said.

"I see, I suppose I should go and see for myself when it opens up someday soon. I can, right?" he asked.

"As long as you are not over 200 years old, you can enter. If you are, then you have to be a Saint realm cultivator to go in. It's a general rule we made to limit the number of people that would want to enter," Liang Shufen said.

"Ah, you made the rules? I see," Alex said.

"Yes, we make all the decisions for this continent after all," Gong Liuxian said. "Although, we should stop talking about the Sundering Sanctum and talk about that lightning pill. What do you think about the pill? Can you make a good one?"

Alex looked at the ingredients again and said, "the ingredients seem common enough. This Jade Starwood resin might be a little hard to obtain, but I've seen the others being used in the association. As long as we can get the resin, I can make them."

"Don't worry about the resin, we have gathered enough in the five millennia we've spent here," one of the 10 said. "We have all the ingredients you will need."

"Oh," Alex got a little excited when he heard that. "How many ingredients would you say you have exactly? If there are more than you need, then I might have a way to further improve the pill."

"Oh, these are all the Jade Starwood resin we have, so given this amount, that is the number of ingredients we have," Tan Yang said.

Alex took the massive jar and looked inside to see the resin filled to the brim. He calculated a little and smiled. "I will have to waste a bit of this for testing purposes, but after I'm done, I think I can make about 15 or maybe even 20 pills. I can't be sure about the amount right now."

"Oh, as long as you can make 10 of them, we will be fine," Ren Guanting said.

"Only 10? One each?" Alex asked with a confused look. Why would you only want one? Wouldn't you want as many as you can have?

Just then a thought came across his mind and his eyes narrowed. "Are you going to be using this pill eventually when you are ready to break through to the Immortal realms and will have to survive the lightning tribulation?" he asked.

"Oh, you know about it? That makes things easy. Yes, we are requesting this pill in preparation for breaking through to the Immortal realms," the 10 said.

"Aren't you guys still quite far away from reaching the point of breaking through?" he asked. As he looked around, he was only met with smug looks from every one of them.

"No way," Alex said. "Are all your cultivation bases in the Upper Saint Transformation realm?"

"You shouldn't ask other people their cultivation base so easily young man, it's considered rude," one of them said with a smiling face, which was anything but a 'no' to his question.

Alex couldn't help but be surprised at the fact that he had been sensing their cultivation base wrong this entire time. Either that or they were deliberately letting him sense their cultivation base was weaker than it actually was.

"How close would you say you are to breaking through to the Immortal realm? 10 years? 20?" he asked.

The 10 in the group suddenly started laughing out loud when they heard that question. "Young man, we were already in the late Saint Soul realm five millennia ago when we formed the council. We have slowly improved our cultivation base, but it will certainly take at least a thousand more years before any of us can try and breakthrough at all," one of them said.

Alex was still in awe. After all, he never thought he would be in the presence of 10 different Saint Transformation realm cultivators.

After all, neither the Western Continent nor the Northern continent had such a cultivator.

Western Continent was a weak continent, so it was obvious why it wouldn't have one. As for the Northern Continent. Alex remembered the madman talking about the many ancestors from the other sects he had to kill because they attacked him so many times.

It was likely that the Northern continent would also have the same, if not more cultivators in the Saint Transformation realm, had it not been for the madman's terror.

"Are you sure this pill will work for lightning tribulation?" Alex asked. "As far as I understand this only works for normal lightning."

"We... can't be sure, but we are hopeful that it will work," one of them said. "After all, how different can a tribulation lightning really be from normal lightning?"

Alex's eyes narrowed. "It's very different," he said. "Have you never tribulation lightning?"

"How could we? We've never tried breaking through to the Immortal realms before. And as far as we know, no one has in the last 10 thousand years," another one said.

"Why do you ask it like that? Have you seen tribulation lightning?" Yao Ning asked.

"I have," Alex said. "After all, I had to go through the tribulation after learning a dao before entering the Saint realm."

"WHAT?!" the 10 of them were surprised. Even Huang Chen, who was trying to not speak at all to not influence Alex's decision to make pills, couldn't help but shout in surprise.

"You've gone through lightning tribulation before?" they couldn't help but ask to confirm.

"Yes," Alex said. "Anyone who learns a dao must go through it before they can enter the next major realm, right?"

"That's true, but... you learned a Dao before entering the Saint realm?" another person asked.

"Yes, Heat dao," Alex said. "It's what has helped me partly in making such good pills."New n0vel chapters are published on

"Woah, amazing," they couldn't help but say. "Wait, so are lightning tribulations really that different from normal lightning?"

"As far as I'm aware, yes," Alex said. "Although I cannot say with confidence that what you are trying to do won't work. It's possible that this pill can fend off a bit of damage from the lightning. But I suggest preparing as if there was no pill anyway."

"I suppose we must do that now," Kang Xuefeng said. "Sigh, we were probably expecting breaking through to the Immortal realm to be easy somehow. Of course, it won't be."

They all shook their head in disappointment.

"Anyway, I will still make this pill," Alex said. "What other pills do you want?"

"Is it possible to have a pill that will help you in learning dao?" they asked. "Something that will improve your comprehension or talent in general."

Alex frowned a little. "I don't think I can improve your comprehension ability regarding some dao. Even if it were possible, I don't have that capability, but..." he paused a little.

"But what?" the 10 got curious.

Alex thought for a bit. "I can't say right now as I don't want to give you hope. I can think of an effect that will help you in learning dao that you are close to learning, but I do not know how I can make such a pill. I will definitely need quite a long time."

Alex was imagining a pill that when consumed would put one in a trance the same way the flower scent back in the dao mountain did. As long as he could put that effect into a pill, people would no longer have to worry about problems in learning Dao.

"Sigh, this is definitely going to be one of my most ambitious tasks yet. I may even be trying to chew what I can't swallow," Alex said softly. It was a similar feeling to trying to learn the Dao of techniques, as he didn't even know where exactly to begin.

However, considering that he was making steady progress in that, he believed himself capable of at least getting somewhere with the Dao teaching pill too.

"Take all the time you need," the 10 said. "We have hundreds of years to live still."

"Thank you. I will see what I can do about it," Alex said. "Do you have any other pill requests? Feel free to ask."

The group shook their head as they were done with the requests. However, just then, Lei Zhong spoke up.

"Actually, I do have one question," he said. "I wouldn't even be asking this to you had you not proved yourself to be a master Alchemist."

"Is it a hard question? Please ask freely as long as it is related to alchemy. If I can't answer you, I will tell you," Alex said.

"So..." the man hesitated a bit. "Is there a way to improve one's spiritual roots?"

The others were surprised at the question as they never even thought about it.

Alex's eyes narrowed a bit. "There are ways to improve one's spiritual roots with pills, but I am not aware of them," he said. "The recipe I have only worked for people in the True realms."

"So you can't do it?" the man asked.

"No," Alex replied.

"What if you had half a recipe?" the man asked.

"Half a recipe?" Alex got curious. "Do you have one?"

Chapter 1055 The City

"This is something our Jade Fire sect most likely salvaged from the Sundering Sanctum as well," Lei Zhong said as he brought out a simple piece of paper. Just like Tan Yang's paper, this listed down a recipe too, only this had half a recipe.

There were 6 ingredients on the list and was halfway cut before anything else could be told. However, it did have a name at the top and exactly what the pill did.

Water Elemental Enhancement pill - Improves one's Water Spiritual root.

"Woah," Alex couldn't help but say when he saw the pill.

"Brother Lei, you never told us you had a pill recipe like that," Liang Shufen said.

"I didn't find the need to," Lei Zhong said. "After all, this was half the recipe and that was useless on its own."New n0vel chapters are published on

The others nodded since they understood that without Alex they wouldn't have brought up the recipe either.

"Do you think you can do it?" Lei Zhong turned to Alex and asked excitedly.

Alex frowned a little. "I'm not sure," he said with a hesitating voice. "I've never made a pill like this before after all. I will try my best to come up with the rest of the recipe, but please don't expect me to complete it."

"No, no, it's fine if you can't do it. I am asking a lot after all," Lei Zhong said. "Just try your best and see where you go. Do focus on the other pills though, as they are definitely a priority."

"I will," Alex said.

"Let us make a list of the pills we will be needing then," Qiu Jianhong said. "Sister Yao, can you take our young friend out for a while so we can discuss this?"

Yao Ning's eyes drifted toward Huang Chen for a moment and she nodded. "Yes, it will be easier if he's out," she said. "Come, young man. Let me show you around the city."

Alex nodded and walked out with her. Along the way, he wondered how he could help them with the pills.

The lightning pill would be easy and would only take a day or two to completely fix the recipe, but the rest would be hard.

The Dao pill would certainly take a long time to figure out and finding out the rest of the ingredients for the water pill would be hard as well.

'Can I help them with the Earth pill too?' he wondered. Certainly, he could try something with it, whether it was using pill veins or other methods.

"Are you thinking about the pills?" the old woman asked.

"Sorry? Ah, yes. It's hard not to think about them when I've been asked to make such unique pills," Alex said.

"Ah, sorry about that. We should have considered whether you could or not before placing it all on you," the old woman said.

"Oh, no no, I wasn't complaining," Alex quickly said. "I was merely stating what was in my mind. I do love a good challenge, and these few pills you guys have asked me to make are anything but."

"Well, as long as you are not overwhelmed, we are happy," the old woman said. "Focus on the pills you can make for now, and leave the rest for later. You can take as many years as you can for the rest. We're not going anywhere for another thousand years at least."

Alex nodded. They walked out to the city with wide roads with people walking through it as if it were a busy day.

The people stopped to greet the old woman, and from that Alex realized that the old woman frequently went around the city talking with people.

"You like to go around and meddle with the mortals a lot?" Alex asked.

"It's not just me, every one of us does that," the old woman said. "Aside from cultivating, there's not much to do here anyway."

"What about going back to your family and friends? Even though it has been a while, I'm sure there are some still around, are they not?" he asked.

"No, I'm an old woman and I was one of the better cultivators, so everyone who I've known is dead by now," she said. "It's not just me either, most of us have no one close to going back to, so we choose to just stay here."

"You don't think of going back to your family to help them improve?" Alex asked. "Or maybe stay as their guardian?"

"I sometimes have those fleeting thoughts, but they disappear as quickly as they come. Even if I did want to, I am no longer capable of going that anyway," she said.

"Huh? Why not?" Alex asked.

"Because of our oath," the old woman said. "The 10 of us made an oath which forces us to stay in this city and cannot leave for anything unless the majority of us can agree that what we are leaving for is a good cause."

"So you can't just leave because you want to? Did you have to consult before senior Qiu went to get me today?" he asked.

"Of course," the old woman said. "And that was one of the things we all agreed was necessary for us. Speaking of which, come, let me take you to register your aura into our formation's memory so you can teleport in and out without worry."

The two continued walking through the streets, but the woman had certainly taken a turn. After a while, they were forced to fly as it turned out where they were going was on the other side of the 50 kilometers wide metal dome that was the real Sunborn Sanctuary.

Flying so close to the metal dome, Alex finally saw the dome clearly. He hadn't paid attention to it previously, but now he did.

"Is that… supposed to represent a Sun?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the old woman said. "Most of the things you will find here are all about suns and fire. They don't call it the Sunborn Sanctuary for no reason."

Alex looked up at the sky towards the sun and then back down at the dome. "How old is this thing exactly?" he asked.

"The dome? Who knows? They say it's been here since the phoenix first came to rule us, however long ago that was," she said.

'90 thousand years ago,' Alex thought and looked at the dome again.

He tried to view inside, but the metal dome was solid enough to stop him from seeing anything, not even Qi. As for his spirit, he did not dare use it for fear of angering the many phoenixes and phoenix descendants that may be inside.

So, he wordlessly made his way toward the other side of the dome. When he crossed it, he came face to face with something he should have known would be here, but never expected to see it.

The Intercontinental Teleportation formation.

"That's the Intercontinental Teleportation formation, right?" he asked just to make sure.

"Yes, that is it. How do you know about it?" the old woman asked. "We try to keep it a secret if possible."

"I learned about them back in the Western continent. They say there was one there in the past, but there isn't anymore," Alex said.

"Jianhong did tell us a bit about your origin. Is the history easily accessible for anyone to read in the other continent?" the old woman asked. "Does it call us monsters?"

Alex looked towards her and thought he saw a face of regret. "It's not simple information you can just learn," he said. "I had to learn it myself from whatever remained of the White Tiger's legacy. They said that the Intercontinental teleportation was one of the things that were destroyed and taken as resources during the war."

"That's true alright. The Dragon Emperor did not leave anything behind at all," the old woman said.

"Since it's not there, I suppose sending me back using the teleportation formation isn't possible either?" he asked.

"It's not," the old woman said. "We wouldn't know how to without a location to send you. You would need the same formation masters that created these, but many say those were immortals of the heaven, so I don't think we ourselves can do it."

"I guessed that," Alex said. There were many other teleportation formations there as well, all of which lead to different cities in the Southern Continent.

The old woman made Alex insert his Qi into a formation so that it could be recorded. Using this Qi, if he ever did go into the Wasteland, he could now come back through the mountain, passing through the barrier as well.

Once they were done, the woman insisted on taking Alex on a tour of the rest of the city which he accepted.

Along the way, he saw the community that had formed in this small self-contained city. There was minimum outsider influence, and while it didn't fully develop, it managed to remain quite peaceful.

Alex visited the many shops, saw the many landmarks, and met the fantastic people of the city.

After that, the two of them flew back toward the palace so Alex could start making pills for them.

As they flew, Alex remembered everything they talked about today and wondered something. "Senior, the oath that you made, did you leave a condition too?" he asked.

He remembered the others asking him if he left a condition or not. He wanted to learn if they were speaking out of knowledge or experience.

"We did, of course," the woman said.

"Oh, what was it?" Alex asked.

The woman smiled. "I'm sorry, but that's part of the oath itself," she said. "but, I suspect that the day our Oath does end will be our last."

Chapter 1056 Making The Pills

"Die? What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"Nothing, you don't have to worry about it," the old woman said and kept on flying.

Alex was curious but he didn't ask any further as it didn't look like she was going to answer at all. He looked away from the old woman and towards everything around him. He saw the metal dome again and wondered why Scarlet wasn't here yet.

He could sense her somewhere to the northeast vaguely, but that was about it.

They returned back to the palace where the old woman was handed the list of pills Alex was supposed to make.

"Let me add the pills I need in here and we will start grabbing the ingredients," Yao Ning said. "You can go rest in your room in the meanwhile. Jianhong, show the young man his room."

"Come." Jianhong took Alex through the outer halls of the palace until they reached a guest room. The room was extravagant with golden pills and designs all around, with beds the size of actual rooms, and furniture which seemed to cost a fortune.

"This is the guest room. We will either have to make some changes to this place so you can make pills, or you will have to go out to an Alchemy shop where they have pill-making rooms. What do you think?" they asked.

"I will take your offer to have it built here. I won't have to lose focus on different things by having to move in and out just to try something," Alex said.

"Sure, we will have it done tomorrow morning," the man said. "You should rest for now."

"Senior!" Alex called him out quickly.

"Hmm?" the man turned around. "What is it?"

"It's about my payment," Alex said.

"Don't worry about your payment. We will pay you generously. Whatever harmony you get on your pill, we will pay you that many thousand True spirit stones, maybe even Saint Spirit stones itself if that is what you want," the old man said.

"Thank you, but I wanted to talk about something else," Alex said. "I was wondering if I could get paid back with help."

"A help? What sort?" the old man asked.

"I have a person that I'm looking for in the Southern Continent. He was supposed to have come to the Wastelands, but I couldn't find him there, which meant that he had most likely come here, but I can't seem to find him at all. I have been looking for him with the help of the Alchemy Association, but no one can find him at all," Alex said. "I was hoping you could use some of your influence to help search for him."

"I don't see how we can be of any additional help if the Alchemy Association is already helping you with it," the old man said.

"I'm sure you will be," Alex said. "The problem is I suspect they are not giving it their all to find the person."

"Not giving it their all?" the old man asked. "What makes you say that?"

"Nothing, it's just a suspicion because it's been 6 months and they still haven't found him. I suspect that they are not giving their all in hope that they can keep me there longer. I hope I'm wrong, but I can't just place all my hopes on them. I need help from elsewhere as well," Alex said.

"Hmm, so you worry that they aren't doing what you're asking them to do, or worse hiding the truth from you," the old man said. "Who exactly are you looking for?"

Alex hesitated a bit before sighing and revealing the truth. "I'm looking for my father," he said. "Just like me, he was a player too."

"Ah, your father," the old man finally realized why Alex was so worried. "Okay, give me as much information as you can, I will try something."

"Thank you, senior," Alex said. "I promise to not take a single spirit stone now that you are doing this for me."

"Nonsense, that's just added bonus. You will still get paid," the old man said. "Stop worrying and just rest for now. You should have a clear mind before you start making pills."

"Yes," Alex said and retreated into his room. The old man left, and Alex sat on the bed alone as he wondered about his father again.

Dark thoughts appeared in his mind, and while usually, he would be quite worried he was thinking like that, he was reaching a point where he had just expected that to be the truth.

He kept his hopes high, but his expectations were at an all-time low.

"I should really just rest," Alex thought and started cultivating. There was nothing else to do for the entire night.

The next morning a few of the 10 came along with other cultivators to help build formations and pits for where Alex was going to make his pills.

Alex watched as they worked in less than an hour and finished everything. Most of the work was something he could've done himself, but there was no way he could have done it this quickly.

"Here," the old woman Yao Ning handed him a talisman. "These are all the pills we need. And here are the ingredients. Please go from the top when making pills. Those are the ones we need urgently. As for the rest, you can take your time with it."

Alex nodded and looked at the list. The ones that they were asking for urgently were cultivation pills, similar to what Alex had made for himself. Only, this wasn't going to have any pill veins in them.

He could make some for them, but when he thought about the pill cloud, the questions, and the possible greed that would show up from it, he thought it better to stay in his hands and make pills that were less than 100% harmonious.

The group that had come left him alone, so he started working. With the ingredients, he had to spend quite a lot of time improving them so he could waste no time.

It took him the whole day to improve the ingredients and once he was done, he was all out of Qi. One of the 10 came to check on his progress and was disappointed to learn that Alex hadn't even started making the pill, but after hearing his assurance that he would hand over the urgent pills within the week, they returned without any remark.

Alex took out one of the pills from his storage ring and ate it. It was the pill for improving his cultivation and he ate it for the moment.

He wouldn't be able to do anything else for the next 2 days, but he was okay with that. In the meanwhile, he left Whisker to go and practice making pills in his stead.

For the next two days Alex cultivated as well as he could, and after the pill's effect wore off, he finally stopped and went on to start making the pills for the council members.

Alex made 2 pills at a time, making a small mistake here and there so they wouldn't reach 100%. Each pill came out to be around 95% and he was happy with that.

He spent the entire day making nearly 40 such pills with a lot of breaks in between. He was also mentally fatigued by the end and needed to take a break. Once he could no longer continue, he took the pills he made and went to find one of the council members.

"Senior Kang!" He met Kang Xuefeng first so he called him.

"Hmm? Do you need something, young man?" the man asked.

"Oh, I made some of the pills you requested. Should I hand them over to you, or?" he asked.

"You are done with some pills? Did they come out good?" he asked.

"Yes, they are all in the 90% and above range," Alex said. "Do you want to check?"

"I would like to check, yes," the old man said and took the storage bag. He checked the pills and was surprised to see that there were 40 different pills in there.

"Wait, you made 40 pills in just 4 days? And they are all over 90% in harmony? How?" he couldn't help but ask. "You must be very tired from working endlessly. You should go and get rested, you can leave the pills with me. I will distribute them."

"Thank you, senior," Alex said. "Is it okay if I go out to the city for a bit?"

"Um, sure? I don't see why you have to ask," the old man said.

"Huh? Oh, I didn't know if you wanted me to stay in here until I've finished making the pills or something," Alex quickly said. He shook his head in slightly hidden frustration.

He had been forced to make pills without being able to go anywhere in the presence of stronger folks that he forgot he was free for a moment.

"I will go out for a while then, please pass those pills along to the rest of the seniors," Alex said and walked out of the palace.

It was already evening time, so he needed to be quick. The place he was going to go most likely still functioned even at night, but he wanted to be careful and go there while he was certain it would still be open.

"If I remember correctly, it's on the other side of the dome isn't it?" Alex thought as he remembered back to the various places he had gone to in the city and started flying in that direction.

Chapter 1057 Buying Information In Advance

Alex arrived in front of a building just around the time the sun was going down.

"Great, I wasn't mistaken at all," he thought as he read the name on the board at the front.

The Insight Pavilion.

He walked in and saw a few people in soundproof boots buying information from the pavilion. Alex looked around and found a person who worked in the building.

"Excuse me, I want to talk with someone with some authority in this place," Alex said.

The man who was there for security purposes looked at Alex for a second before asking, "For what purposes, may I ask?"

"I want to buy information that is not available yet," Alex said.

The man was confused. "Buy information that is not available? Uh… wait around, I will call someone."

A few minutes later, a man with a bald head and cultivation base in the early Saint Condensation realm walked down the stairs after being called.

"Who?" he asked, and the security pointed toward Alex.

The man turned towards Alex and his eyes narrowed. Even if he didn't know who he was, he could sense Alex's cultivation base and realized that he had a guest in the building.

"Greetings senior, how may I help you?" he asked as he cupped his fist in front of Alex.

"I want to buy information from your pavilion that isn't available at the moment," Alex said.

"Um, can you elaborate a bit more?" the man asked.

Alex nodded. "There will most likely be many people in the future that will try to learn about me through your pavilion all over the continent. I want you to record the faces of everyone who tries to do so," he said.

"Ah, I see," the man said after realizing what Alex was trying to do. "Just your information, senior? Or is it your faction?"

Alex raised his eyebrows as he realized he wasn't the first one with such an idea. 'So there are other people who preemptively try and buy information of people who had tried to look up information about them, huh?' he thought.New n0vel chapters are published on

"No, it's just me," Alex said.

"I see," the man said. "Please come with me so we can better discuss this elsewhere."

The man took Alex up the stairs to a lounge area where he served him some tea before beginning the conversation.

"So, this is going to cost a bit senior, I hope you are prepared. I will list off these prices," he said.

"Sure, go ahead," Alex said.

"So, since you are trying to intercept information about you being taken out, for a single person, our price will be lower," the man said. "We have two types of systems you can buy. One is where we charge you per information intercepted and you will have to pay by post. This one is what I will suggest if you don't believe many people will look for you."

"There is still a price to pay at the start, but most of the price will have to be paid in post for each piece of information. The initial investment in this way will be 10 thousand True Spirit stones a year, followed by 100 True spirit stones per information of yours that was requested," the man said.

"If you don't want to go this route and know your information will be requested a lot, I suggest going with the prepaid plan where you will have to pay 120 thousand True spirit stones at the start, and all information after that will be given to you at a monthly basis without any additional charge," the man said.

Alex nodded as he heard the numbers. "Will you sell the information that I have bought this sort of system in your pavilion?" Alex asked.

The old man chuckled a bit. "We sell information here senior. As long as someone wants to learn it, we sell it for a price. However, for a price we can also hide it," he said.

"No need," Alex said. "I will take the yearly prepaid plan. I want to pay you everything for the year."

"Oh, you must be expecting many people to look you up," the old man said.

"That's the hope," Alex said. "So, what do I do now?"

"Uhh, let us prepare a contract to be signed. After that, we will be done," the old man said.

Alex nodded and waited for the contract to be prepared. A person walked in with two pieces of talisman and handed them over.

Alex took both the talisman and saw the contract that was written in there.

"Please give some of the required information in there so we can know exactly who you are senior," the man said.

Alex nodded and wrote the information into the talisman. Once done, he handed over both the talisman and let the old man check it.

The old man looked through his head and suddenly exclaimed. "Ah! Are you the alchemist who can make those amazing pills senior?" he asked.

Alex nodded. "I am," he said.

"It is a pleasure to have met you, senior. I didn't know you were in the city," he said.

"I have some work," Alex said. "Are we done?"

The old man checked the contract quickly and nodded. "We're almost done, senior. All that is left is for us both to place our Qi into it," he said.

The old man placed his Qi on both of the talismans which glowed slightly and handed it over to Alex. Alex did the same and placed his Qi into the talisman as well.

The talisman pulses with light for a moment before going dormant. Alex split the two talismans apart and handed one over to the man while he kept the other one. He also brought out 120 thousand True spirit stones and gave them to the man.

"Thank you for working with us, senior," the old man said to send Alex off.

Alex nodded and was about to leave when he thought of something. "Do you have an image recording talisman?" he asked.

"Image recording talisman? I do, senior. Why do you ask?" the old man asked.

"Record my image please," Alex said.

The old man was confused a little but did as asked. A moment later, he had a talisman in his hand that had the perfect depiction of Alex that no one else would be able to find anywhere.

"If someone tries and look for my information, give that image away freely," Alex said.

"Sorry?" the old man was surprised. "You want us to willingly give away information?"

"Yes," Alex said. " And don't ask them for money in return. I will pay you some more if that's what you want."

"You can just pay us for the cost of the talisman senior," the man said.

Alex nodded and handed a few more thousand True spirit stones. "Remember, tell them you have my image and give them away free if they ask for it," he said.

"I will make sure that's made aware senior," the old man said.

Alex nodded. "I will leave for now. I will be back in a month to get the list of people who are looking for me," he said.

"We will have that ready for you senior. You can take it from any of our branches," he said.

Alex bowed a little and left the building.

By the time he was out of the pavilion, it was already dark outside. The sun had set and thus the many lanterns and artifacts had started glowing by the side of the road.

Alex flew through the sky as he hoped what he had done today would give him some result.

He had asked the association leader for help in finding his father, and that hadn't resulted in anything for the past 6 months. He had also asked Qiu Jianhong a few days ago for help as well, but at some level, he knew he couldn't trust him either.

In the end, he had to rely on himself to find his father. With what he had done today, if anyone ever wanted to search for his information, they would be recorded by the pavilion.

Alex now hoped that if his father was still alive, he would go to this place as well and find out about him. With his free image being distributed, his father would definitely recognize him.

After that, all that would be left would be for him to get that information from the pavilion and then go and find his father.

That would be the perfect scenario.

Alex hoped, no, prayed for it.

He returned back to the palace and went on to cultivate his physique and eyes. The next morning, he went on to make more pills.

Over the course of the next 2 weeks, he made pills daily and finished everything that was requested of him but the lightning pills.

The lightning pills required a bit of recipe correction so he spent another week doing that, after which he was finally done.

Alex handed over all the pills over to the council who couldn't help but be shocked.

"You finished all of this in less than a month?" Yao Ning asked.

"Of course," Alex said. "Since seniors wanted me to make the pills, I had to give it my best."

They nodded and looked through the pills. "All the pills are really here," they said.

"Oh, what about the other pills? Any ideas?" Lei Zhong asked.

"I haven't had the time to think about them, but I will start now. Since I will need a lot of ingredients for research alone, I hope you seniors will help me in that regard."

Chapter 1058 Working On Upgrades

Alex lay on his bed as many thoughts went through his head.

The council members had asked him for 2 more pills, which he couldn't make at the moment at. For Alex, it was 3 pills he needed to make.

A pill that would help learn Dao, a pill that would improve Water spiritual roots, and a pill that would improve Earth spiritual roots.

If possible, he would want to make one for all spiritual roots, but that was too ambitious, even for him.

"The Earth one might be the easiest," Alex thought. "I already have a recipe for the True pills, so it's only a matter of improving that to a Saint rank level. If not that, maybe I can make a 9-veined True pill which would work as a normal Saint rank pill?"

At the very least, he knew what he had to do for the Earth pill. For the Water one, he only had half a recipe, so he needed to make up the rest of the ingredients without knowing what they should do.

"That will be hard," he thought. "Even then, at least I already have half the work done for me."

Alex got frustrated when he thought about the Dao pill. "How the hell am I even going to make something like that?" he thought.

If anything, it would have to be something that emulated what he experienced in the lake at the top of the dao mountain, or the fruit he ate back in the eastern mountains of the Western continent.

"I should bother with that once I'm done with the other two pills," Alex thought and simply stopped caring about the Dao pill for now.

Of the two remaining pills, Alex wanted to try out the Earth pill first. If he could make one with pill veins, then he wouldn't have to bother with improving it.

As for the ingredients, he was sure he could find almost everything on this continent, but a single one.

"Can I even find Corrosive Willow in this continent?" Alex wondered. That was one of the plants that were very rare as the only willow plant was in the poison swamp in the Western Continent.

"Where do I find a poison swamp?" he wondered. He knew it didn't necessarily have to be in that sort of environment, but then one had to rear it on his own to make it grow elsewhere.

As far as he knew, Corrosive Willow was not on the market at all. "May the council knows something," he thought and walked out.

He went to find someone and met the tall Hou Xinya wearing his recognizable yellow and orange robe from Dawn's Light sect.

"How can I help you?" the old man asked.

"I'm looking for some ingredients. I know I told you guys to find as many water-type and earth-type ingredients before, but now I need these ingredients specifically," Alex said.

"Sure, I can add it to the list of the things you want," the old man said as he read the list of ingredients.

"No, these have to be the top priority," Alex said. "Please do this as quickly as you can, and sorry if I disturbed your cultivation session."

"No, it's alright. I haven't started yet. I'm one of the 2 people that didn't go to cultivate in case we were needed," the old man said. "Don't worry about these. I will get these immediately."

"Thank you," Alex said and returned to his room.

He did what he could without any ingredients to practice with, but it wasn't very helpful. Which was why he was very excited to learn that the ingredients had arrived just a day later.

"Are you sure these are the ingredients you wanted? It doesn't seem right," the old man said.

"What's wrong with them?" Alex asked.

"They are all True rank ingredients. They won't work on us," the old man said.

"Oh, I'm going to use them to find their Saint rank equivalent. That way, I can make the Earth spiritual root improving pill that I told you I had the recipe for," Alex said.

"Oh," the man got excited for a second before getting dejected. "Well, that's disappointing then."

"Sorry? Why is that disappointing?" Alex asked.

"One of the ingredients you asked for didn't come at all," the old man said. "Apparently it doesn't exist at all?"

Alex sighed when he heard that. "It must be the willow then. Sigh, I have found a single plant before in the other continent and I stripped it clean. I had a few remaining, but…"

He couldn't help but sigh every time he remembered losing all of the ingredients he had gathered. Had it not been for the madman, he would've still had it. But then, had it not been for the madman then nothing here would be happening anyway.

"I will see what I can do without it," Alex said dejectedly and turned around to leave.

"Wait, young man," the old man said. "Did you say it exists? It really does?"

"Yes, I've used it to make the pill before," Alex said.

"If you can guarantee that it exists then we might have a way," the old man said.

"Oh, what way?" Alex asked.

"They say that the Forbidden orchard houses every plant that has ever grown in this world," the old man said. "There is a chance that you might find something in there."

Alex's eyes widened. "The Corrosive Willow grows in a mostly toxic environment. Do you know if there's something like that in the Forbidden Orchard?" he asked.

"Yes, there is. There are places with poison, places with only water, desert, mountain peaks, deep gorge, places without sun, places without Qi, and everything else in between," the old man said. "The people who made that place knew what they were doing for sure."

"If there really is such a variety in there, then maybe I can find something in there," Alex said. "Thank you for informing me of that, senior."

Alex returned to his room after taking the ingredients. While he hadn't received everything, he received the ones he needed, so he could start upgrading the recipe to saint rank if he could.

"How should I go about this then," Alex wondered. There were a few things he had learned about how to downgrade ingredients, so he had to use similar methods for sure.New n0vel chapters are published on

If it was the old Alex, he would have to use his 'feeling' of the energy in the pill and find something that matched.

However, now he had a much better choice.

Alex picked one of the pills and closed his eyes to sense it properly. As expected, the majority of the energy in that ingredient was the Earth energy.

About 1% of the remaining energy was another 5 energy. As this was a True rank Earth ingredient, this one would not have Metal energy at all.

As for a similar Saint rank ingredient, it wouldn't have Water energy on top of not having metal energy.

"Now, I just need to figure out the ratio the final ingredient will become if I were to replace this ingredient's water energy with earth energy too," Alex thought.

It took him a moment to figure that out as the amount of water energy in there was so incredibly minuscule that simply sensing it alone was a hard task.

Fortunately, his Dao of Five Elements helped him in being keener about the energy and thus Alex figured out what he needed to look for in the Saint rank ingredient.

The other aspects of the ingredients like what they did and what they were came second to this. With just this information, Alex could be sure as long as he came across an ingredient of this exact ratio of energy, he could replace it as a Saint ingredient.

Now that one ingredient was done, it was time to figure out the ratio of everything.

Alex was surprised at how quickly everything went. In just half an hour, he was done realizing all the necessary information about the ingredients that he would need to improve the recipe to saint rank.

The only thing left was to go through all the ingredients that he would get a few days later and try them too.

Then, after he hopefully finds the Corrosive Willow in the Forbidden Orchard, he would be able to make the pill to improve Earth's spiritual root of everyone that was in the Saint realm and below.

"Woah, that's amazing," he thought to himself. He couldn't help but wonder just how much such a pill would sell for.

"No, stop daydreaming," he told himself. There was still a chance that he couldn't find the willow, in that case, he needed to know by context what sort of ingredient was missing.

To know that, he would need to have some other recipe at hand.

"Sigh, I will have to work on the water one now," Alex thought to himself. But he had to wait for a bit before he got the ingredients for that.

Alex decided to spend the next two days cultivating again and so he did. With the pill he ate, the cultivation speed was raised to the maximum and he managed to cultivate 50 days' worth of cultivation in just two days.

Once he was done, he left his room to go find the elders.

Huang Chen was the other one that wasn't cultivating, so he was the one that handed Alex the storage bag. "Here, everything we could get our hands on has arrived for you."

Chapter 1059 Awake

There were millions of ingredients out there, of which Alex was somehow sure he knew all of them. He wasn't sure why he was so sure, but he was. The alchemy god's knowledge gave him the confidence that every single plant out there was in his mind.

So, when he tried to think about the various different plants and their parts that could help him in making some pills, it was practically impossible without spending months and months just thinking about it.

As such, Alex found it easier to actually test out ingredients by himself, which gave him ample opportunity to see if they were usable or not.

He separated the 6 ingredients for the Water pill he knew about and kept them aside. Then, he took the rest of the ingredients he had acquired and separated them into Earth and Water-type ingredients.

Now that he had done this, he had to start somewhere. As he thought of which one he had to start with, his head started hurting from the confusion.

For the water pill, he needed to find the rest of the ingredients. To find those ingredients, he needed to first know what exactly a similar pill did inside one's body to improve their spiritual roots.

He needed to know the exact effect so he could replicate something similar to it.

For the earth pill, to randomly know which ingredient he could use instead of the willow, all he had to do was get an idea of just what sort of ingredients were used normally, in which case he needed a recipe to refer to.

If he only had the Earth pill, he thought he could find the water pill, and if he only had the water pill, he could somehow get an idea for the earth pill too.

However, he knew neither, and as such he couldn't make progress on either.

Alex paused for a bit. "Maybe I don't need to know about the pills?" he wondered. After all, he had improved his spiritual roots before, and not all had been through pills.

His Metal spiritual root had improved thanks to the White Tiger's blood essence. His Yang Spiritual root had improved thanks to the Nine Yang Divine Fruit, and finally, his Yin Spiritual root had improved thanks to the frigid yin bead he had found in the Icy hell region of the Western Continent.

The only regretful thing about it all was that Alex was either unconscious, not himself, or simply unable to focus on what was happening when he was undergoing the improvement.

However, there was another.

His fire spiritual root's improvement came as the result of a technique that gathered energy from the fire treasures outside and improved his fire spiritual root.

"If I can somehow use a pill to mimic what I did with the technique then…" Alex was a little excited about finally finding a way to possibly improve his other spiritual roots.

The best part about this wasn't that Alex was fully awake when he had improved his Fire spiritual root, but rather he could do it again and see exactly what it was that happened.

Without hesitation, he sat down and used the Fire Spiritual root improvement technique in the third level of his Flame Mastery Technique.

He closed his eyes and sensed his Qi stir in his dantian.

The many crystal-like foundations in his dantian were larger in amount each time his dantian was fully melted as the Qi rushed out of it.

He sensed the Qi goes through his Fire Spiritual root and try to pull the fire energy from the surrounding. However, since there wasn't anything there, nothing happened instead.

Alex quickly stopped after getting all that he needed from this small test.

He opened his eyes as he recorded down his new understanding of what the pill must definitely do. "When the pill is eaten, the energy from it must go into respective spiritual root through the specific path that allows for Qi to be absorbed," he thought.

Finding out exactly which ingredients or a mix of ingredients would do that would definitely take some time, but what did he have if not time?

Until he could somehow find his father, and then somehow find a way back to Pearl, he was stuck on this continent.

Alex started testing out the various ingredients with Earth energy in them. For now, he needed to find the equivalent ingredients for the upgraded recipe.

There were thousands of different types of ingredients, which all would take him multiple days, even months to go through.

Without any hesitation, he locked himself up in the room and did it endlessly. The only time he would stop would be two days a week which he would instead spend on cultivation, but the rest of the days were spent on finding exactly the ingredients.

After about 20 or so days, Alex was done finding all but one ingredient for the Earth pill.

As for the final ingredient, Alex went through all the available ingredients, trying to find the perfect one that fits it.

He made many pills using various ingredients in between the other real ingredients using a similar recipe to what the True rank Earth pill used.

He tried it for 5 days before Alex had to stop. He was simply trying things without any information.

He knew what the pill's effect had to be, but none of the pills had the effect he wanted. Most of the pills simply turned out useless due to having nothing but Earth energy in it, while the others while usable, didn't have any useful effects.

"I can't do it on my own," Alex thought. He needed to wait until he could find and check just what sort of ingredient a Corrosive Willow was. As long as he got the elemental constitution of the ingredient, the ratio of the energy in it, he could continue this pill.

After that project had to be shelved, for now, Alex began with the Water pill again. However, this one was far more difficult than the Earth one.

To start with, he didn't even know how many more ingredients it was he needed. 5 more? 10 more? Who knew?

Pretty soon, it was clear that this pill was infinitely harder than the last one.

"Urghh! I give up," Alex said out loud. "I can't do this until I get a pill as a reference."

It was better to just wait for the Forbidden Orchard to open up and try it afterward.

"I should leave."

"Leave? You can leave now?" a voice spoke to him.

Alex immediately stood up in surprise. "Godslayer? You're awake?" he asked.

"Yes… I have been for a few days now," Godslayer said. "It has taken me a while to try and make sense of what has been happening."

"I'm glad you are finally awake," Alex said excitedly. He went into his spiritual sea and floated next to Godslayer whose flames had rekindled to the levels they were before.

"How are you feeling?" Alex asked.

"Not good, but not bad either," Godslayer said. "Like the first time you took everything from me."

"Oh," Alex said. "Well, thank you for helping me back there."

"Back there? Does that mean you succeeded?" Godslayer asked.

"Yes, we succeeded in running away," Alex said.

"Then why are you still imprisoned? I haven't seen you leave the room since I woke up," Godslayer said.

"I'm not imprisoned," Alex said. "I'm helping some seniors with some pills."

"I see," Godslayer said. "So, what happened to the old man? Did he die like we hoped or did you receive some assistance?"

"He died," Alex said. "Or at least I think he did. He was already near death by the 8th lightning bolt, the 9th one should have killed him."

"Well, if you say so," Godslayer said. "And then? What happened after that?"

Alex's mood turned a little sour. He sighed and explained everything he could.

"What? That little cat is missing? And you haven't tried to find him?" Godslayer asked.

"I can't," Alex said. "As I mentioned, I'm on a different continent. Without a way to go to the Central continent, I have no way of getting back to him."

"And you can't do anything to speed that up?" Godsalyer asked.

"Not that I know of," Alex said. "Even if I do reach the Central continent, I can't enter it due to the protection around it. As far as I'm aware, only Immortals and above can enter it."

"That sucks for you then," Godslayer said. "At least you are safe. You can find another beast in the future if you can't find that little cat."

"No, I will find Pearl. He's not a pet I'm just going to give up on," Alex said.

"Hah! You do you then," Godslayer said. "Alright, let me rest now. Go back and continue making those pills."

Alex nodded and was about to leave when he saw the silver mountain in his periphery. "Wait, I wanted to ask something. You know about that silver mountain, don't you?"

Godslayer looked at it and frowned a little. "Don't make me talk about it," he said in a sour mood.

"Why?" Alex asked. "I have realized that this entire mountain is nothing but solidified Space aura or something like that. I just wanted to learn more about it."

"Of course it is. You consumed a goddamn space stone after all," Godslayer said.

"Space stone? Is that what it is called?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it's a Space stone. It's a piece of stone with space in it. It is what is used to make storage rings, like the one you have," Godslayer said.

Chapter 1060 Information

Alex gave a surprised look. He quickly looked at his right hand, but he wore no ring inside his own mind. But still, he could visualize it. The golden ring with the ruby on top was where he kept all of his items.

"Wait, that stone the same as the one I somehow took in?" Alex couldn't help but ask. "They are of different colors though."

"The one in your ring was modified to work as a storage vessel and as such corrupted. Normal space stones are purely silver in color," Godslayer said.

"I see," Alex said. "So, on the outside, you can use it as a storage vessel, but once you use them, they end up giving space aura to you?"

"Hah!" Godslayer couldn't help but get angry when hearing that. Not just angry for himself, but for everyone out there that would love to be able to consume a space stone.

"You are one of the few abnormal people who can take in a space stone. Do you really think it is that easy?" he asked angrily.

"Oh, sorry. I thought it was something common in the immortal realms," Alex said. "There are only a few out there who can do it? Who are they?"

Godslayer remembered the answer and couldn't help but get even angrier. "Those bastards in the goddamn Sky God's palace. Don't remind me of them," he said.

Alex was taken aback. 'Another god? Is that why he is so ticked off?' he thought. He tried remembering the different gods Godslayer had talked about, but he couldn't remember any Sky gods.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Was the Sky God involved in capturing you?" Alex asked. "Was he there with the Sword God?"

Godslayer grumbled. "No, the Sky God just trapped me in her treasury for who knows how long," he said. "I just want to kill them all."

"I see," Alex said. He didn't want to get Godslayer angry, so he decided to leave for now. Since he got more than what he had come here for there was no reason to stay any longer.

"Well, goodbye then. Rest for now, and tell me if you want some more energy. I can go and gather some death aura from dying people if that helps," he said.

"Sure, if you want to make me stronger, you can go ahead," Godslayer said and went back to slumber.

Alex nodded and looked at the silver threads that flew in the sky above him. "Space stone, huh? At least I know what it is now,' he thought.

He came out of his mind and checked his ring as well. He smiled after finally learning a bit more about the world and left his room.

He went to find something. Lei Zhong and Yao Ning were the two that weren't cultivating this time around, so he met them.

"You can't continue?" Yao Ning asked with a disappointed look. "Is there any way we can help? We can give you more resources for the experiment."

Alex shook his head. "I've hit a stone wall. If I want to break through, I will have to wait until I find something in the Forbidden Orchard. If I do find what I am looking for there, I can all but guarantee a pill that will help improve your Earth spiritual root, considering you have it that is."

"Alright, we will look forward to it then," Lei Zhong said. "How long before the Orchard opens this time around?"

"Well, it is my first time, so I don't know much about it, but I have heard that it will open within the year. Maybe even in just 6 months," Alex said.

"Oh, that's fast," Lei Zhong said. "So we will just have to wait a year at most? That's far less than what we were all expecting."

"To be honest, I don't think it will take that long for me to make the spiritual root-improving pill once I am able to break through this barrier I'm facing," Alex said. "However, the real problem is the dao pill. I don't even know where to start."

"Just focus on the Spiritual root pill for now. After all, having a better spiritual root is automatically better for Dao in the long term anyway," Yao Ning said.

"Yes, senior. I will do just that," Alex said. "Since I have nothing else to do in this city, I plan on leaving tomorrow. I hope it is alright."

"Of course," Yao Ning said. "Feel free to return anytime you want. Your aid has been incredibly helpful, so we can't get enough of it."

Alex nodded. "If you will excuse me, seniors, I have somewhere I need to go for now," he said and left.

Alex walked out of the palace and flew away. His current destination was the Insight pavilion. As it had been over a month since he last went there, they had most likely already prepared his information package based on who looked him up.

Alex arrived in front of the building a few minutes later and entered it. He called the manager of this place again, and the bald old man took him to a private lounge area.

"I thought you would have come earlier. We prepared your information 4 days ago," the old man said as he sat down on his chair.

"I wanted to but I've been a little busy lately," Alex said as he sat down on another seat as well.

"Of course, of course," the old man said. "One does not get to your level without busying yourself every day."

"So, where is it?" Alex asked.

"Ah! Right here." The old man quickly brought out a storage bag and handed it over to Alex. "You were right in buying the package you did. You are looked up to so much."

Alex looked inside the storage bag and saw over a thousand different talismans. "Oh wow, thousands of people looked me up," he said.

"Hmm? No, each talisman holds about a dozen different people's information. In fact, tens of thousands of people searched for you. I don't know how you are going to learn anything from it, but I hope you do," the old man said.

Alex was a little surprised, but when he thought about it, he didn't need to be surprised at all. 'At least my plan to be famous is definitely working,' he thought.

He pulled out a talisman just to see what it held and looked into it.

The first person on the list was someone with no name. The talisman had no image attached to it either, so basically, the person searching for him was anonymous to Alex.

What was included however was exactly what sort of information the person had searched for.

From looking at the information, Alex figured out that the person only wanted to learn when the next time he made pills would be again.

He looked another one up and this person just wanted to look up what sort of pills he made and if he really was as good as everyone said he was.

Another person wanted to check if he was still in the Alchemy Association or if he left that place already.

The next person was the first person with some identity in the records. While he did not have a name, he was said to be a man from Dawn's Light sect.

Alex looked at the rest of the information in that talisman and there was nothing in there that could be considered extraordinary information.

'Well, there are tens of thousands of it to go through anyway,' he thought and put back the talisman.

"Thank you for this," he told the old man.

"Of course. It's a pleasure to work for you senior," the old man said.

Alex stood up to leave and stopped. "Don't bother making this for me next month. I don't know where I will be on the continent, so I will have it prepared from wherever I am," he said.

"Oh, as you wish, senior," the old man replied. "You can go to any of our branches and get it prepared within the hour."

Alex nodded and left the building.

Now that his task here was done, he saw no more point in staying in this city.

He went back to the palace and told the two elders that he would be leaving the next day. The two of them understood and agreed.

Alex went back to his room for the rest of the night where he cultivated in preparation for the next day.

After a whole night of cultivating, he finally left in the morning.

Instead of flying through the sky, he decided to use the teleportation formation to get out of this place.

The teleportation formations were all gathered around the same location near the gigantic Intercontinental Teleportation formations. Alex arrived there and went on to buy a ticket.

"What city would you like to go to, senior?" the girl in the reception asked.

"Umm," Alex thought for a bit. He had assumed that he would be going back to the City of Many Flowers but now that he thought about it, there was still more than a month's worth of time before had to go back there.

So, he decided on going somewhere else.

"What's the closest city in that direction I can go to?" Alex asked.

The girl looked in the direction he was pointing at and showed it on a map. "You can go to Blindheart city here. That's the closest city with a teleportation formation that is connected to here," she said.

"Sure," Alex said. "Then I will go to Blindheart city."

Chapter 1061 Ancestor's Request

"Senior, someone left this for you." A woman passed along a piece of talisman to the leader of the Alchemy Association. The leader took the talisman and read it quickly.

"Sigh, failure again," he said softly.

"Is everything alright, senior?" the woman asked.

"Oh, no. Everything is alright. You can leave, thank you," the leader said and sent her away. After the woman left, the leader sat back on his chair and read the talisman again.

The talisman had come from a group of investigators he had employed to find Alex's father. Every month they sent him all their findings up to now and every time it had been a failure. This time was no different.

'He has to be dead, right? What other explanation could there be?' he wondered. If as Alex had mentioned, the man had not been returned back to the wasteland, then he had to have been found already.

It did not make sense why someone would not be found otherwise. As per Alex, the chances of the person being a cultivator were down to almost nothing anyway.

However, the old man did not find the heart to tell Alex that. After all, he was working here just so he could find him.

"Sigh, I'll let them keep working and hope that they end up finding him somehow." Once the old man thought of that, he went on with his day, not giving any other thought to the matter.

* * * * *

A middle-aged man with a rough beard pushed open a metal door and walked into a room full of similar furniture. He had bought one of Alex's pills and had thus been in deep cultivation for the last month.

He would have been in much longer cultivation had it not been for whatever the somewhat urgent situation was that called him out there.

His spiritual sense reached all around the mansion and found the person he was looking for. The other person realized that she was being called and quickly went into his room.

"Brother, you are finally out," the middle-aged woman said as soon as she walked into his room.

"I thought I left you to handle everything. Why would you need to call me out?" the man asked with angry grunts hidden all over his sentence.

"The situation called for it," the woman said, not bothering with her brother's tone of voice as he had always been like that since they were a child.

"What sort of situation was it that you couldn't just handle it?" the man asked.

"The ancestor sent us a message."

The man's eyes went from disinterest to absolute glee in just a matter of seconds. "The ancestor? Really?" he asked, excited like a child who was promised that they were going to get the toy they had asked for so long.

"Don't get too excited," the woman said as she knew what sort of message it was. "It's not good news."

The old man didn't care, however. Their ancestor had acted like they weren't related for the longest time, so getting a message now meant that there was something they wanted. As long as he could fulfill that, he could get on the good side of his ancestors and hopefully get the opportunity to speak a few words to influence their decisions about the world.

As it stood, there was nothing they could do to influence their ancestor, and only had to act as they could so they could keep up the facade of having a rich background and important figures hiding in the shadows.

That was how they had managed to continue holding the conglomerate that had been created since ancient times after all.

"Such auspicious news, you should have called me sooner," the man said with his personality entirely changed to that of a happy man.

The woman frowned but said nothing. Her brother would understand when he read the information. So, she simply handed him the talisman with the information on it.

The man took the talisman and started reading it. "There's nothing bad here at all," he said. "The ancestor just wants us to help find someone, right? We can do that."

"Keep reading," the woman said.

"Okay," the man said and continued reading.

The talisman included their ancestor's urge to help him find a person on someone else's behalf. That, someone, was Alex, which was information available in the talisman, but it was mentioned to not use his name outside.

The information went on to ask for their help in finding a man that was important to Alex.

The old man saw no problem until here. After all, what problem was there really? He could help not just his ancestor with this, but also an incredible Alchemist. Having an alchemist like that owe you one was ever cultivating man's dream.

However, the problem came after that.

After that point was what held the information on the person they were supposed to be finding.

A middle-aged man named Graham Benton, with black hair, a muscular body, most likely tanned, little or no cultivation base, most likely a body cultivator, and came from the wasteland using unconventional means.

Below that info was an image of what Graham was supposed to look like.

The old man knew the face all too well.

"No… the ancestor wants us to find him?" the old man shouted. "Why him?"

"He's someone close to the alchemist, it seems," the old woman said. "Judging by a bit of information I have acquired, the alchemist goes by the name Alex Benton. At best, they are friends that happen to share the same last name, but at worst…"

"They are family," the old man realized, and with that, a deep sense of dread pricked his spine. "No… no, this can't be happening."

"Do we tell them what we know?" the old woman asked.

"The hell we will. Do you think when the alchemist and our ancestor find out what we've done, they will only say thank you and return?" he shouted. "NO! We will be dead the very next day."

"Then what do we do?" the old woman asked.

The old man wracked his brain trying to think of something to do, but there was no situation where they came out on top here.

It wasn't just the alchemist or their ancestor either, if the world found out what they had done, they would be in much deeper trouble.

The old man had to make a decision, and he made the one that made the most sense right now. "We will have to hide the information," the man said. "Hide it forever."

He nodded as he spoke to himself before suddenly jerking his head toward his sister. "Who else knows of this?" he asked.

"Uhh… the searches? A few of the family members, but—"

"No, not the searches. Why would I care about the search? I'm talking about that body cultivator. Who else knows in this house?" he asked.

"Uhh… I believe there are about 10 or 12. We always use the same people after all," the old woman said.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Good, bring them all here," he said. "We need to make sure this information never gets out."

The old woman nodded. It was the best choice they had right now. "And what about the others that are searching for him?"

"The others?" he asked.

"Yes, I've been contacted by a few other families and sects who were also notified by their own ancestors to commence this search. It's a search of a way larger scale than we can ever imagine," the old woman said.

"Goddammit, woman! Tell me that earlier," the old man cried out in anger. "Everyone is accepting the search?"

"Yes, they are just about as happy as you were 2 minutes ago," the girl said.

"Fuck!" the old man couldn't help but curse. "What can we do now?"

"I… I have a plan," the old woman said. "It's a horrible plan, but… I don't see what other choices we have."

"What plan?" the old man asked.

"We… uhh… we kill the alchemist," she said.

"Kill the alchemist?" the old man was stunned. "But… but he makes such good pills. Do you know how comfortable my cultivation was for the pas—"

"Do you care about our family's survival or not?" the woman shouted at her brother this time.

The old man got a little more alert and nodded. "Yes… yes, we must kill him," the man said. "Or… force him to stop the searches?" The old man truly couldn't think of killing the Alchemist that made the best pills in the world.

"Fine, we can make him speak an oath or something. If that fails, then he dies," the old woman said. "How do we do that though? How do you kill the most sought-after person in the entire continent?"

The old man thought too. "Assassins are the way to go, but we can't do it out in the open. Even the ancestors are on his side. If they work together, I'm certain they will figure it out in no time," he said. "We will have to do it in a place where the signs can be easily erased."

The old woman's eyes narrowed as she understood the meaning behind those words. "Somewhere secretive, like a secret realm," she said.

"Yes," the old man said. "But not just any one. It has to be one where we can not only kill him but get rid of the body too if the need arises."

"Then we have the perfect secret realm opening for that in 2 years, don't we?" she asked.

"Yes," the old man nodded. "Once the Sundering Sanctum opens, our troubles will have ended."

Chapter 1062 Carriage Ride

Alex arrived in Blindheart City early in the morning when the city started to wake up. He got out of the place and walked around the city.

There was nothing really that seemed to be done in the city, so he only roamed it without ever stopping anywhere.

After going around the city for a while, he finally stopped in front of a carriage that was filling up with people ready to leave.

"Where is this carriage heading?" Alex asked.

"To the Spiritsong City, brother," the man at the head of the carriage said.

'Spiritsong,' Alex thought as he placed the city on the map. It was in the mountains northeast of the Sunborn Sanctuary and was home to the Ren family.

"Sure, why not," Alex thought and got on the carriage.

The inside of the carriage was much larger than he could have expected, fitting nearly 20 different people at once with room for more if need be.

There were a few couples, lone riders, and various other people on the trip along with Alex. Alex smiled and gave a nod before sitting on a seat.

The other people nodded him back in greeting but did nothing else to start a conversation, so Alex let it be.

A man in his early 40s walked into the carriage as well and looked at the empty seats that were in there. "Hey, are there more people coming?" he asked the carriage driver.

"I'm sure there is sir. Please sit around, we will leave as soon as it is all filled up," the driver said.

"Sigh, hurry up," he said before getting onto a seat close to Alex.

Alex looked at the man and was surprised to find that he was a Saint realm cultivator too.

"You seem to be in a hurry, my friend," Alex said.

The man looked towards him and was surprised to notice that Alex had a saint realm cultivation base as well.

"I… am," the man said slowly. "What are you doing in this carriage?"

"Me? I'm just relaxing as I make my way around to new places," Alex said. "What about you?"

"I'm on my way to the city to fight," the man said still quite curious as to why Alex was there. "I'm sorry, are you poor?"

"Poor? No, I wouldn't say that," Alex said slightly surprisedly. "What makes you ask that?"

"Well… I don't see why someone would take the carriage if they are not poor," the man said.

"As I said, I'm just taking it slow while I travel," Alex said. "Are you here because you're poor?" He couldn't understand how someone in the Saint realm could be poor at all. Even if he was, why would he need to take the carriage when he could fly to wherever he wanted to?

"Ahem! Yes, I'm lacking a bit of money," the man admitted. "I made the wrong bet on my match last week and lost everything. I barely had enough to buy healing pills."

"Your… match?" Alex asked with a confused look on his face.

"Yes, my match," the man said and was surprised to see Alex still confused. "You know… the match in the Battle Hall?"New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex tried to remember those words, but nothing came to his mind. "I'm sorry, I've not been around long enough to know what that is," he said.

"You don't know about the Battle Hall in Spiritsong city? Have you been living under a rock or what? It's all the craze amongst the cultivators that are looking to show off their skills," the man said.

"Oh, so it's like a competition?" Alex asked.

"More like a place where you get matched up with random opponents to fight with," the man said. "I'm surprised you haven't heard about it."

"I'm afraid I have not," Alex said. "So wait, I can understand that you are out of money, but then why are you not flying to the city? You seem to be in a hurry anyway."

The man hesitated a bit. "My match is tomorrow and this carriage is most likely going to take all day. I just want it to reach there in time. As for why I'm not going there on my own, it's because I need to cultivate for a while."

"Since I don't have any money on me, I was hoping to use this opportunity to cultivate for the entire day before I reach there. If I go to the city right now, there aren't any places I can go to cultivate in peace," the man said.

"I see, then please go ahead, don't let me bother you anymore," Alex said.

"Thank you," the man said and closed his eyes to start cultivating. 3 more people walked into the carriage afterward and the carriage finally continued.

Alex was surprised at how fast the carriage was. He had been expecting a simple carriage, but it seemed this one was pulled by a tamed beast, making it incredibly fast.

Still, it would take him some time to reach Spiritsong city.

'The Battle Hall, huh? Sounds like a fun place,' he thought. He was interested in the place now that he knew he could randomly fight someone. He could absolutely learn from the experience there, making it worth his while.

Since he had so much waiting to do anyway, he decided to take advantage of his time here.

"But, that has to come later," Alex thought to himself. "I should be going somewhere else for now."

The carriage continued moving through the streets that were filled with other people and carriages that were moving all the same.

It looked like a highway and was thus a busy street that made its way to and from various different cities. Alex felt the breeze that came in through the window which he was using to look at the outside world

The road ran through open farmland, then through the sides of some mountain, and finally through a large forest.

The forest was full of trees that reached incredible heights. From his position, Alex couldn't even see the top of the trees at all.

The sun was getting low as it was getting closer to nighttime. Once the night was over, only then would they reach their destination in the pits of the mountain.

The carriage continued down its path into another open space before going into another forest. It was already nighttime by now and the sky was dark with only a sliver of the moon visible through the cloudy night.

As the carriage moved, Alex felt it get closer and closer. Then, at a certain point, he sent a message to the driver at the front.

"I'm getting off here!"

Without anyone else realizing it, he teleported out of the carriage directly deep into the forest. He watched the carriage continue far away from him and looked back into the forest as he started walking deeper into it.

Whisker appeared on his shoulders a moment later as he too looked around. "Do you think you can recognize any plants that can be used in Alchemy here?" he asked.

Whisker had some knowledge regarding the various plants so he started looking around the forest with his spiritual sense. He pointed at various places around him to show different plants and named a few.

"That's correct, that one is a 2-leaved thornbill plant as you can see from the leaves, that one is indeed a Puffed Twilight flower, but it is too young so we should leave it for now," Alex explained everything that was right and wrong with Whisker's explanations.

The two of them went along as Whisker jumped out of his shoulders to go bring back some ingredients from time to time. Alex put the ingredients into his storage ring so that Whisker could use it later.

After going far enough, Alex stopped Whisker from looking at any more ingredients, and instead he started focusing on what was around him.

"Weird," Alex thought as he looked around. He walked a bit further into the forest following what he was sensing but he couldn't find what he was looking for.

"Is she not here?" he thought as he looked around.

His bond with Scarlet told him that Scarlet was around here, which was why he had come here in the first place to meet her.

She had left so suddenly that Alex wanted to learn more, so he had come here trying to find her. However, from what he could see, she wasn't here at all.

In his entire sense, he couldn't find her at all.

"Is my sense wrong?" Alex thought. However, that couldn't be the case at all.

She had to be here, but he couldn't find her at all. "Is she hiding?" he thought and tried to look around at the aura in the air, but there was nothing indicative of Scarlet anywhere.

"Is she really not here… or is she hiding somewhere my eyes and senses can't reach?"

With that thought, Alex released his spiritual sense again. However, instead of searching for Scarlet, he searched for something else.

And as he expected, in the direction where his bond was telling him Scarlet was, there was a patch of space that wasn't normal.

It was more warped than the rest of the other spaces around that place.

"A spatial pocket," Alex said with a smile on his face as he understood what he was looking at. "A secret realm."

He walked close to the normal-looking space and lifted his hands towards it. A moment later, a rift opened right in front of him, creating an opening that led to the secret realm.

Chapter 1063 The Secret Realm

Alex appeared inside the secret realm, in a field that was entirely forest.

As soon as he entered, a spiritual sense landed on him and he smiled. "So you really are here," he spoke out loud.

"How? How did you get here?" Scarlet's voice came from far away before she herself flew and arrived next to him.

"I have my ways," Ning said as he looked at the giant Phoenix that was towering over him. "Damn, do all Heavenly beasts cultivate that fast? I wonder if Pearl can reach your speed once he too evolves into a proper White Tiger."

Scarlet had grown massive now. She had not only managed to grow but also had reached the Saint Condensation realm in the time they had been separated.

Alex couldn't make sense of how someone could cultivate that fast, except for assigning it to the fact that she was a heavenly beast that had a bloodline that was blessed by a true god.

"How did you find me?" she asked him again.

"I just followed our bond," Alex said. "I had some free time, so I came to see what exactly you were doing. Seems like you were just cultivating."

"And how did you enter this place? No one but us is supposed to know this place exists," she said.

"Is that so?" Alex said as he looked around. Now that he looked at it, the space in here was quite stable. So stable that unless he was looking for it, he would've most likely missed its existence entirely.

"I suppose I'm lucky that I have learned the Dao of Space then. I would have not been able to enter without it," he said. "Anyway, how are you doing? You seemed pretty excited when you ran away from me."

"No, I wasn't," Scarlet quickly said. "I just… I needed to cultivate back then. Since it didn't look like you could enter at all, I had to make a choice."

"Well, you could've just asked. You left without even telling me," Alex said.

"That's… sorry. I was way too focused on trying to enter. I needed to cultivate," she said.

"Well, I don't really blame you," Alex said. "It's my fault for thinking all of my bonded beasts would be loyal to me since both Pearl and Whisker are quite loyal."

"Hey! I'm not… never mind," Scarlet didn't speak anymore.

Alex chuckled a bit and looked around. "So, what really is this place? Does no one else really know about it? I can't even sense any other beasts in here."

"No, no one else knows this. The first Vermillion bird that came to… um, was the ruler of this continent found this place on a random tour," she said. "He gave the information to each subsequent ruler and their family and we've all known about this forever."

"You don't have to hide about the immortal worlds, I know about them," Alex said. "I would like to learn more though. Where do the Phoenix and the rest of the other beasts come from?"

"Um, I don't know if I should be talking about those things to you," Scarlet said. "I'm still suspicious of who exactly you are."

"Huh? Why would you be suspicious of me? You bonded with me, remember?" Alex asked.

"Yes, which is suspicious to me. I wasn't as intelligent back then, but to bond with you, it was definitely because I was attracted to you for some reason," she said.

"Oh?" Alex was surprised. "You're not going to say it's because I'm handsome, right? That doesn't feel right."

"No, of course not," she said. "It's the feeling I get from you, like… like there is something familiar about you."

"You feel that way? Is that why you bonded with me?" Alex asked.

"Yes," she said. "Bonding was just a side effect of the familiarity. It's not what I feel though, it's what all Phoenixes should feel around you."

"Um, is it because of the White Tiger's bloodline? I told you I have that, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, you did. But it's not that," she said. "It's something else that I can't make sense of."

"Well, let me know when it makes sense," Alex said. "Anyway, why are you here? Why haven't you gone home yet?"

"I… I can't," Scarlet said, almost afraid.

"Why not?" Alex asked.New n0vel chapters are published on

"I… I'm afraid they won't let me enter," she said.

"Why would they not?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "Their daughter is coming home. It would be stupid of them to stop you from even going back home."

Scarlet hesitated and kept her mouth shut.

"Are you scared?" Alex asked.

"The last time I was going to go home, they instead pushed me away to the Wasteland. I'm afraid this time will be the same if I were to enter as I am," Scarlet said.

"How long ago was this?" Alex asked.

"Hmm… I don't know," Scarlet said. "10 years ago maybe? You have to remember I wasn't of the right mind to remember time passing."

"10 years? They let their daughters roam the outside world for 10 years? What sort of parents are they?" Alex asked. "Also, what are you exactly? An outcast? The worst of the pack?"

"I'm not an outcast. I just… I… " Scarlet's head drooped a bit. "I may have hurt some people while I still wasn't right of mind. It was definitely not intentional, but I guess they were afraid I would do it even more."

"Well, normal parents take in their child and teach them, but I don't know what sort of fucked up parents a Phoenix has," Alex said as he shook his head. "So, what do you want to do this time? You want to go home right?" he asked.

"Of course," she said. "This time, I'm going to cultivate every single waking moment and get strong enough to fight off anyone that tries to stop me from going home."

Alex laughed when he heard that. "That's the spirit," he said. "Fight them all. Want my help?"

Scarlet got curious. "How can you help?" she said as she looked at his cultivation base. "You're strong, but not enough to fight them."

"No, no, not that sort of help," Alex said, nearly sweating in fear. He would never think of fighting the phoenixes even if it was for someone like Scarlet.

They wouldn't kill their daughter even if she came fighting, but they would definitely kill a random person that was not only coming to fight them but had also bonded with their daughter.

"I can give you these," Alex said as he brought out a small bottle.

"What's that?" Scarlet asked curiously.

"Look inside," Alex said and opened the bottle.

Scarlet looked in and her eyes went wide. "No way! Are those—"

"Pills."

"—Pill veins," Scarlet said.

Alex was a little surprised. "You know about pill veins?" he asked. That wasn't knowledge that was so easily available.

"Of course," Scarlet said excitedly. "My mother used to make me these all the time back at home."

"Really?" Alex looked surprised.

"Yes, where did you get these?" Scarlet asked.

"I made them," Alex said proudly.

"No way," Scarlet said with a distrustful look on her face.

"Did I not tell you before?" Alex asked. "I'm a master alchemist. Had you stuck with me back then, not only could you have started cultivating just days later, you could've also gotten to enjoy these for the next two years that you were gone."

"But you decided to leave me so you got nothing. Call that the heavens repaying you back for leaving me," Alex said.

Scarlet looked worried when she heard that. "I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean to leave you. I just needed to find a place with Qi quickly. I thought you would go back to searching for your father or something. How was I supposed to know you would go out to cultivate too."

"I don't mind it, you don't have to worry," Alex said. "Here, there are 10 pills that can help you cultivate quickly for the next 2 and a half months, you should eat one each week."

Scarlet looked inside the bottle again. "All of these have 5 pill veins. Are you really that good?" she asked. "How does one even learn to be that good in this world? That too without reaching the Immortal realm?"

"I… don't know what to say to you but that I am just that good when it comes to alchemy," Alex said. "It's a mixture of hard work and luck so I can understand why there aren't others in this world that can reach the same level."

"Alright, I'll believe you," Scarlet said. "I will pay you back for these once I'm back home."

"You don't have to pay me anything," Alex said. "Although… if you can put a good word in for me, I want some Phoenix blood if possible. The White Tiger's blood essence helped improve my Metal spiritual root, so I'm hoping the Vermilion Bird's blood can do the same for my Fire spiritual root."

Scarlet looked confused but still nodded. "I've never heard of something like that, but if that's what you want then I will consider it," she said.

"Thank you," Alex said.

Scarlet nodded and moved away to cultivate. With the new pills she had received, her cultivation would go much smoother than before.

Alex sat down next to a random tree to and brought out a bunch of talismans from his storage ring.

Now that he finally had some free time to himself, he was going to look through the list that was given to him by the Insight Pavilion. If he was lucky, he would find some clue to his father there.

Chapter 1064 Fire

Alex looked through the talisman but nowhere did he find any relevant information. Most of the people who collected his information were unnamed, and those that were were useless to him as he was searching for his father.

Most of these people wanted to know where he was, where his next pills would be made, and many other sorts of information that he was surprised they even asked.

Some even tried to look up if he had any family members, usually a wife so they could search for some way to get their daughters married to him.

Alex shook his head in frustration but continued reading through it all. After all, that was what he paid for anyway.

"Sigh, there's nothing here," he said as he finally finished looking through it all. He turned towards Scarlet who was cultivating not far away and decided to cultivate himself.

He brought out a pill of his own and ate it. For the next two days, he cultivated without giving any other thought to what was happening in his surrounding.

Given how secure this place was, he wouldn't even have to worry about someone else disturbing him at all.

Scarlet was resting while he finished cultivating. He slowly stood up and looked around.

"You done?" Scarlet asked.

"Yes," Alex nodded. "You seem to have been done for a while now."

"Of course," she said. "I couldn't continue since your pill left me with sore meridians. It will take a day or two to heal and then I can continue again."

"Yeah, it does that," Alex said. "But it's very fast, isn't it?"

"Yes, I was quite surprised at how fast it was," Scarlet said with a surprised look on her face. "Thank you for the pills again."

"It's fine," Alex said. "Anyway, what is your plan now? Just sit here and cultivate until you're strong enough?"

"Yes, that's the plan," Scarlet said. "It will take many years, but with your pills, it will be slightly faster."

"I wouldn't doubt it," Alex said. "Since you won't be going anywhere then I will be leaving. There is apparently a place where I can fight people, so I'm going to use that as training."

"Fighting? I can fight you<" Scarlet said.

Alex chuckled and shook his head. "Maybe later. You're too weak right now."

Scarlet was a bit offended. "I may be weak, but I'm still a Heavenly beast at the end of the day. My cultivation base is way better than those in the same realm as me. Come, fight me and you will see that one's cultivation base isn't everything in this world," she said proudly.

Alex couldn't help but smile. "Oh, is that so?" he asked. "Fine then, come attack me."

"Okay, get ready," Scarlet said and immediately took off flying. She came down swooping through the air and flapped her wings. Instantly, winds picked up all around Alex that tried to cut him up.

He stood where he was and protected himself with his Qi. His body could handle that bit of damage, but he didn't want to ruin his clothes at the moment.

Scarlet saw this and cried out loud. A Phoenix screech reached Alex, making his head hurt slightly. But with a bit of focus, he could use his own spiritual energy to stop her voice from hurting him.

Scarlet was once again surprised to see her action useless. She flapped her wing and disappeared from in front of Alex, moving very quickly with her movement technique to appear behind Alex, but by that time, Alex himself had already turned around and looked at her with a smile on his face.

Scarlet was shocked and backed off. "What? How did you see me? You shouldn't be this fast," she said.

"I have my ways," Alex said. "Is that all you can do?"

Scarlet was ticked off. She flew once more and started sending down a barrage of Qi attacks, all of which Alex fended off rather easily.

He was quite surprised to find that Scarlet was strong enough to improve her strength by nearly 3 realms, reaching close to Saint Condensation 9th realm, but that wasn't able to hurt Alex at all.

Even if he was a normal cultivator with a 1st realm Saint Foundation cultivator, it wouldn't have hurt him at all.

He couldn't help but give her a mocking smile. "See? You're weak. You can't hurt me at all," he said.

"You!" Scarlet got even angrier this time. While in mid-air, she suddenly burst into fire, surprising Alex as he got on guard.

"Let's see how you can deal with this," she said as she started shooting down the fire that was burning all around her.

Alex saw the fire and freaked out. "Hey! That's Phoenix fire. Don't use that so easily," he shouted as he got out of the way of the attack.

"Haha! I knew you would lose to it," She shouted at him. "I win!"

Alex frowned. Suddenly, the air around him moved as all fire in his vicinity started growing smaller and smaller until nothing remained. Even the fire that burned around Scarlet herself grew smaller and smaller.

"What? Intent?" she was surprised. She fought back with her own intent to keep her fire going, and surprisingly she beat Alex, keeping her fire alight.

"Don't use Phoenix fire," Alex scolded her from where he was. "You can do so much dama—" He stopped.

Scarlet chuckled. "What damage?" she asked.

Alex looked around in shock as the fire he had extinguished had left almost no damage at all. A patch of grass and some branches of a few trees had burned off, but nothing else was destroyed.

"Wait, what?" he looked around with a confused look. "But how?"

"A Phoenix has full control of Phoenix fire," Scarlet said. "They can choose whether it heals or burns. I intended for it to deal small damage just now. Even if we had fought for another 3 hours, the most we would've lost would have been a few trees."

"Really?" Alex couldn't believe it. "But then, what about the wasteland? That fire is so dangerous and also heals so much. Are you saying the phoenix whose fire it was intended for it to be that way?"

"No," Scarlet said. "One can intend it to act that way, but that is unattended Phoenix fire. Unattended ones have no restraint and are very dangerous since no one else but a Phoenix can extinguish them. And… for some reason you."

"I have learned True Fire dao," Alex said to explain.

"WHAT? You have such a rare dao?" Scarlet said. "No wonder you are so proficient at getting rid of my flames. Had my mind not been stronger, you would have definitely gotten rid of my own fire too."

"Well, your mind is quite strong too," Alex said. "Now that we're talking about it, I wanted to ask something. Do you know why I can't create Phoenix flames? I can emulate them perfectly, but I can't emulate the healing factor or the ever-burning factor."

Scarlet looked at the fire that Alex had created on his hand and was surprised to see just how similar it was to a Phoenix flame. "But of course," she said. "To summon Phoenix flames, you need the bloodline aura of a Phoenix. If similar to the White Tiger, you had a Vermilion bird's bloodline in you too, then you might be able to create them. Might."

"Oh, that makes me want phoenix blood even more," Alex said.

Scarlet listened to his words and sighed. "Well, anyway you are too strong for me. You were correct," she said.

Alex couldn't help but laugh when she admitted to being weaker. "Alright, have fun cultivating here, I will leave now."

"Um… bring me more pills you come next time okay?" she asked.

"Sure," Alex said. "But what's in it for me?"

"You want money?" Scarlet asked. "I don't have any on me."

"It can be anything," Alex said.

Scarlet fell into thought for a bit. "Okay, I can't pay you just yet, but once I can return home, I swear I will pay you for it all," she said. "Not just the pill, but for bringing me all the way here too."

Alex smiled. "Alright, I will be waiting for it then. Goodbye for now."

Scarlet nodded and watched as Alex opened a spatial door to go outside. Once he was gone, she sighed and went back to cultivating.

Alex appeared outside the secret realm in the middle of the day and quickly flew over the forest to see where the highway was.

Once he found it, he followed it and flew towards Spiritsong city. It took him no more than an hour to reach the city that was high in the mountains.

Alex landed and looked at the city in front of him. While most of the city was on the slope of the mountain, slowly moving up, the major buildings and powers were on the flattened top that was nearly a kilometer wide all around.

Alex could see many massive buildings and an entirely separate area that only had residential buildings.

"That must be the Ren family's mansion," Alex thought. He searched around and quickly found the Battle Hall where he could register to fight.

However, before he went in, there was a slight problem. "Won't they come to bother me to make pills if they know who I am?" he thought.

If he wanted to fight without any worries and without having the others bother him every other moment, he needed to hide his identity here.

"I guess I'm Yu Ming again then."

Chapter 1065 Battle Hall

After deciding on what he wanted to do, Alex went to an Alchemy shop to buy a few ingredients. The Alchemy shop was towards the lower level of the mountain, so he had to walk all the way back down.

After buying the required ingredients, he bought himself a place to stay and started making some pills. Over the course of the day and then night, Alex finished making a few high-harmony pills that he would most likely be needing in the Battle Hall.

Once he was done, he took one of the pills and ate it. Within the next moment, his facial muscles started moving. His hair turned slightly browner and a small stubble appeared on his chin.

A few moments later, he looked like a completely different man with absolutely no resemblance to Alex at all. Even his age seemed to be a bit older judging by just his face.

Once he was fully changed, Alex took out a set of clothes and changed to look different.

"Whisker, come out!"

Whisker jumped out of his right shoulder and looked at him with a confused look. He knew that he was looking at him, but for some reason, he couldn't recognize him at all.

"You changed?" he asked through his bond.

"Temporarily," Alex said. "I will have to be this person for the next month or so."

Alex made sure that there was no problem with how he looked by looking at himself through Whisker's eyes and finally nodded to himself.

"Good, we can go now," he said.

He walked out of the room after putting Whisker back into his beast space and walked up the mountain toward the plateau again.

This time, he walked directly into the Battle Hall and was surprised at how dark this place was. There were little to no windows after passing through the main door and the inner reception area was massive with tall ceilings and far-apart walls.

Sounds echoed continuously as the many people that were here spoke over each other, creating a cacophony.

Alex ignored everyone and spoke to the receptionist directly. "Hi, I am here to participate in some matches, what should I do?" he asked.

"If you want to participate, please fill up this form and pay the amount written at the bottom," the girl said and handed over a talisman.

Alex nodded and looked at the talisman. Surprisingly, the talisman didn't ask for much information. All it wanted was his name and his cultivation base. There was other information to fill up too, but they weren't necessary to fill so Alex left them blank.

At the bottom, he saw the price.

Every single cultivation base realm had a price attached to it. For Alex's case, a Saint Foundation realm cultivator had to pay 25 thousand True Spirit stones.

Alex frowned a bit when he saw the amount it wanted. However, he handed over the money anyway since that was what he had come here for. Besides, that much money wasn't much of a problem to him anyway.

Once he paid the price, the receptionist called someone to take him to another room for some tests.

A middle-aged saint walked out and greeted him. "Greetings, brother. I am Ren Jurong. Will you please come with me?" he asked.

Alex nodded and walked along with him, going away from the hallway that was so full of people.

"You charge quite a lot, don't you?" Alex asked.

"The fee? That's nothing. I'm sure you will make it back in a match or two with proper luck," the man said.

Alex nodded with some new understanding. "So where are we going?" he asked.

"Do you know much about the inner workings of the Battle Hall?" the man asked.

"I'm afraid not. I only heard about it a few days ago," Alex said.

"I see. Well, either way, I am going to tell you the various rules of this place," the man said as he reached a room.

Inside the room was a giant formation on the ground which seemed active. Alex tried to look at the formation to see what it did, but before he could get a good look, the man spoke, "Please step on the formation."

Alex frowned a little. "What is this?" he asked.

"It's a formation that will record your aura and also check your cultivation base to make sure you didn't lie," he said. "We here at the Battle Hall take things very seriously and we can't let a bad matchup take place due to the other person's lies."

"I see," Alex said and got onto the formation. He could now see that the man wasn't lying and that it was what he said it was.

He stood on the formation and let it learn about him. A few moments later, the energy was no longer there and he walked off.

The man looked at the new information and nodded. "Your information is correct, brother Yu," he said. "However, would you reconsider putting in more information? You don't have to if you don't want to, but it would certainly help us."

"I have nothing else to add," Alex said. "Although, if possible can I request fighters that are in the Saint Core realm?"

"That's… not possible. You are too weak," the man said.

"I'm not," Alex replied, but the man wouldn't believe him at all.

"You can't choose your own opponent, the Hall will do it for you," the man said. "There are a few other rules that I will now tell you."

The rules in the Battle Hall were quite simple. Every time he wanted to fight, Alex had to come and notify it to the staff. The staff would then try to find the perfect match for him and would notify him when it was available.New n0vel chapters are published on

While notifying for a request to battle, the person had to also put some money in advance so that if he ever did miss it, the Hall could pay the winner for not getting to fight that day.

Fighters could also bet some money before the match. Each bet made would be doubled for them by the Hall if they won.

For Saint realm fighters, there would be no audience and no referee. One side would have to stop when they knew they were losing. This was a rule since there weren't many people that could referee a fight between two Saint realm cultivators without any issue.

The fighters were obviously not allowed to cripple, dismember, or kill their opponent. Any long-lasting injury would require the other person to heal them of it, and if they couldn't, the Hall would ban them and release their information out to the world.

Alex was surprised at how brutal the place was in regard to breaking rules. He didn't really mind his information being public, but he could imagine just how devastating it would be for others to know that the sect or the family of the person you hurt was coming after you.

"So only two fighters will be present? No audience at all?" Alex asked.

"No," the man said. "Most Saint ranked fighters wish to not show their skills in public so it is done in private instead. The Audience will still be notified of your fight half an hour earlier, so they can bet all they want then."

"I see, that makes sense," Alex said. "Is that why there are so many people out there?"

"Yes," the man said. "Most people go watch the fight between the True realm cultivators, but some still remain to bet on the Saint realm matches. That was what you saw outside."

"I see," Alex said. "I wish to fight then."

"Please leave us a method of communication and 20 thousand True spirit stones. We will notify you once we find an opponent for you," the man said. "Since you are just starting out and we don't know much about you, your match should be confirmed relatively soon. Please be on the lookout for our notification and don't leave the city."

"Sure," Alex said and brought out a communication talisman as well as the required amount of money. "I'm expecting to hear from you in a few days."

"You will, brother Yu," the man said.

Alex nodded and walked away from the place, coming out into the main hall again. He could now hear the crowd again, but this time it didn't seem as much of a mess as before.

Since he knew that they were betting on some matches, Alex could hear them adding to more bids, or complaining about how bad the bid was. They were even complaining about how some bids didn't have as good a return on the win.

Alex looked at the board with a lot of lists and information. He could see who was fighting who and when.

The Saint realm side of things was mostly blank, but there were still 3 more matches that were going to take place today.

Alex was slightly curious, so he stayed for two of the 3 matches to see how it went.

He was frustrated very quickly when he realized that he could neither hear nor see their fights in any manner. If not for the ground vibrating from time to time, he would've doubted that either of those two was even fighting.

After watching absolutely nothing, Alex left the Battle Hall and went back to his room where he began cultivating.

A day later, he was notified that his first battle had been set. 2 days later, around 10 in the morning would be when he fought his unnamed opponent.

Chapter 1066 Added Rules

Alex arrived at the Battle Hall half an hour before his match was to begin. He met with someone who had been waiting for him and went along with her to a place inside the Hall.

The girl took him through a hallway with no natural light, bringing him to a waiting room.

Only after he sat down to wait did the woman leave and Ren Jurong entered. "I am happy to see that you are here. Would you like to know who your opponent is?" he asked.

Alex shrugged. "Sure, who is it?" he asked.

"Gong Buxiao," the man said.

Alex showed absolutely no reaction to the name, and that surprised the man a little. "Are you not worried?" he asked.

"Why should I be? I don't even know what that is," Alex said.

"Huh, I would've thought you would have done more research on the possible opponents," the man said. "You must not be here to earn, but to just have fun."

"I'm here just to train," Alex said. "Fighting humans is different from fighting beasts, and I've been lacking that experience for a while now."

"I see," the man said. "Now that you've heard of your opponent, would you like to wager on whether you will win or not?"

"No, it's alright. As I said, I'm not here for the money," Alex said.

"I understand. Then please wait here for a while. We will call you as soon as the current fight ends," the man said.

Alex nodded and relaxed a bit as he waited for the next battle. He knew that the first few were going to be easy for him. Since no one believed that he could fight Saint Core realm cultivators, his opponent would be incredibly weak for him.

But, it wasn't like he couldn't use that to his advantage. His blood aura, Qi, and sword aura were strong, but his body was still not that good.

He hadn't tested it enough to know, but he was certain that it was about Saint Condensation 8th realm in terms of strength. If he were to only use physical attacks, he wondered if he could win it.

A few minutes later, Ren Jurong arrived to call him to the fighting arena. Alex nodded and went along with him.

Alex arrived in a massive room with sunlight gleaming through the sky. The walls were tall and far apart, but there was no ceiling. However, there was something gleaming in midair, like a barrier.

It took Alex a few moments to figure out that there was a vision-obscuring formation that stopped the outside folks from peeping in. The walls were full of formations that made them sturdy enough to block a Saint realm cultivator's attack, and they also blocked spiritual sense from going in and out.

On the other side, another staff walked out, and behind him followed a girl with twin tails wearing blue and yellow robes.

Alex sensed her cultivation base and could tell that she had the exact same cultivation base as his.

Which was to say that she was weaker than him.

"Here, please fight on your own terms but do start within the next 10 minutes. Here is your talisman. Whoever breaks this is considered to have lost," the man he had come with said and walked up.

"That's it? No one is going to make sure that the victory is fair?" Alex asked.

"All victories are fair here," the man said and walked away.

Alex was surprised at the level of disregard for the fairness of the fight and couldn't help but wonder if they in fact indirectly motivated one to cheat.

Whatever, he thought and looked at the talisman in his hands. He was to destroy it to declare his loss. Since that would be unnecessary, he stowed it away.

The girl walked into the middle of the arena after the staff with her left her too.

"You new?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "How do we begin?"

"Don't be in such a hurry to fight," she said. "Do you have any additional rules you want to propose?"

"None," Alex said. "Why? Do you have any?"

"Yes," the girl said. "I'm practicing some archery skills, so for the first 5 minutes don't attack me and just block or dodge. I need to get used to my new skill."

Alex thought about it for a bit and shrugged. "Sure, I'm okay with it as long as the attacks aren't intended to make me lose," he said. "Then after 5 minutes, I get to attack?"

"Yes," the girl said. "Do you have any you want to add?"

Alex thought for a bit. "Yes," he said after he thought of something. "If I can hit you on your body 5 times, consider it a loss."

"On my body?" she asked with a confused look on her face. "Won't I be dead if I take that many attacks directly to my body?"

"Don't worry, they will be weak," Alex said. "Besides, you can always give up if it gets too dangerous."

The girl nodded. "Fine, let's work with those rules then," she said and brought out a bronze-colored bow with a silver string and beautiful red flowers growing on each end of the bow.

"I'm starting," she said and pulled the string back. A green arrow coalesced from nothing, appearing on her bow. Once she pulled it far enough, she let it go.

Alex had already pulled out Midnight by this point as he got ready for the attack. The moment the arrow left the bow, he swung his sword.

Using nothing but just his body cultivation, he struck the arrow as hard as he could. But of course, an attack from a Saint Foundation realm cultivator was not something his body could so easily fight against.New n0vel chapters are published on

With nearly 2 realms of difference, he was sent flying back nearly 10 paces before he caught himself.

"Are you okay?" the girl asked. She was both worried and confused at the sight of Alex getting sent back.

"I'm fine, please continue," Alex said. He understood that he couldn't take her attacks head-on.

The girl shot once again, this time striking with a red-colored arrow that she had created. Alex was a little curious about the arrow's color, but he focused more on its speed.

To his Demon Eyes, the arrow flew at an incredibly slow speed. However, his body wasn't fast enough to move along with his vision.

He struck the arrow again, this time a little to the side. Instead of attacking it head-on, he slightly moved the arrow in another direction so it wouldn't hit him.

It was a little hard to time correctly, but he had done it. The flame arrow flew quite far behind him and struck the wall.

A giant explosion rang inside the arena, but when the fires died down, the walls were intact. The formations on those walls weren't something that was so easily destroyed by either of them.

Alex turned around and waited for more attacks to come.

One by one, the woman shot arrow after arrow, all with energy belonging to one of the 5 different elements, surprising Alex quite a lot. People with such spiritual roots were supposed to have a hard time in cultivation, but here she was, a Saint Foundation realm cultivator.

Alex struggled a little during the attacks. With just his body cultivation, he couldn't block the attacks, so he had to instead dodge most of them.

After 5 minutes of doing that, he finally stopped and spoke to her. "Your five minutes are up. Are you ready to fight properly this time?" he asked.

"Oh," the girl said with a surprised look on her face. "Yes, let's fight."

"Good, here I come then," Alex said and dashed forward.

With nothing but just his body cultivation, his speed wasn't that fast. The girl could see him coming and pulled her bowstring as another power coalesced on it.

However, when Alex saw the color, he was surprised. The girl let go of the arrow, and a lightning arrow came flying toward Alex.

Alex immediately dodged to the side, losing some momentum in the process. At the same time, the girl pulled her string again, preparing another arrow.

Alex dashed back towards her and dodged another arrow that was much harder to dodge because of how close he was getting.

The third arrow appeared again when she pulled her bow and this time Alex was right in front of her.

He saw her let go of her bowstring and realized that he couldn't dodge it in time at all. A bit of Sword Intent appeared on his sword as she struck the girl right as the arrow left her bow.

A massive explosion rang in the arena, sending both of them backward because of how close they were to it.

The girl fell on her back with ringing ears. She could only use her senses to see what was happening, and before she could realize it, Alex was already next to her.

The girl spun to the side to dodge and pulled her bowstring at the same time before shooting another arrow out.

However, Alex had been ready for it and thus barely dodged it as he ran up to her. He swung from the side, and the girl put up her bow to stop the attack.

The sword and the bow clashed, and Midnight left a nick on the girl's bow. She tried to push it away, but Alex spun quickly, bringing Midnight from the other side.

This time, he struck her in the chest with all the force he had. He struck her in the armor and thus she was fine, but a hit was a hit.

"One," Alex told her. "4 more to go."

Chapter 1067 Easy Fights

Alex understood something from his current exchange. His body was way too weak to fight against the girl on its own.

If he wanted to win this match, he needed to help his body just a little bit.

He started using some Qi to improve his speed and defense. As for overall strength, he was okay with not doing much damage to the girl. After all, there was an alternate way to win for him.

Alex stepped back and let the girl get ready again, and once she was back up, he attacked.

The girl pulled her bowstring, only to realize that Alex was so much faster now. She could keep up, but it was definitely harder this time around.

Alex moved through the stage in a weird pattern to throw her off her aim, but the girl was way too good of an archer to get thrown off by something like that.

She let go of her bowstring and a fiery arrow came flying toward him. Alex struck it to parry it, but the girl used this opportunity to move as well.

She flew backward while sending a gust of air toward him. As soon as Alex diverted the arrow, he was hit with an unbelievably strong gust of wind which made it hard to move forward.

The woman now had a barrier created in front of her and was readying her next attack behind it.

Alex saw that and got ready to intercept it.

Another lightning arrow left her bow, but this time it turned into a snake that flew through the air toward him.

Alex was ready to stop it, but the snake split into 5 different snakes that fell all around him. The moment they landed, they formed a sort of cage that imprisoned him.

"Huh? Not bad," he said to himself after seeing that attack. He struck the cage with a single strike and broke free.

He dashed back toward the woman and dodged another attack before landing a strike on the barrier in front of her. The barrier was sturdy, but Alex's attack was strong for just that moment and easily broke apart the barrier.

The girl yelped in surprise, but Alex's sword was already on top of her, hitting her shoulder while she wasn't ready to protect herself.

Alex stopped and moved back. "That's two," he said, reminding the girl.

The girl couldn't help but get slightly annoyed and immediately shot out more arrows toward him, sending a barrage of attacks to keep him occupied.

Alex blocked and dodged through the many attacks to go hit the girl again.

By now, he was starting to get a hang of the fight's dynamics and he understood when he could hit the girl and when he could not.

With both speed and defense on his side, he easily overwhelmed the girl for the rest of the match.

After he landed the final hit on the girl, he stepped back and smiled. "You lost," he said. "Please destroy the talisman."

The girl frowned and pulled out her talisman. However, before she could crush it, she stopped and looked toward Alex.

"First tell me, why did you not use your skills in our fight?" she asked.

"I just didn't want to. This was just training for me," he said.

"Are you saying that I'm so weak that you can win without giving it your all?" she asked.

"Unfortunately, that is what I'm saying," Alex said. "I can understand if that offends you, I will ask the staff to find stronger opponents for me."

The girl thought for a bit and said, "Attack me normally. I want to see how strong you are," she said.

Alex paused for a bit. "Are you not going to follow through on our rules?" he asked.

"I will after I understand why you decided to not use everything you had on me," she said.

Alex shrugged. "Fine," he said. Suddenly, his swords glowed white with sword Aura rising from all around him. The girl was shocked to see Sword Aura as Alex had only been using Sword Intent a few times throughout their match.

Alex casually swung his sword and let the Sword Aura fly through the stage toward the girl at a moderate speed.

The girl felt the oncoming attack and was beyond terrified when she sensed just how strong it was.

"Saint Foundation 6th realm!" she shouted and got out of the way quickly to dodge the attack. The Sword slash struck the wall behind her, making a loud sound in the process.

"You ready to give up now?" Alex asked.

The girl quickly nodded and crushed the talisman she had.

Alex bowed a little. "Thank you for fighting with me. If you can, please tell the staff that I am too strong for someone like you so I can be matched up with someone stronger," he said.

The girl mindlessly nodded and the two staff from before walked into the arena.

"Congratulations on your win, brother Yu. Please come with me," Ren Jurong said and took Alex away. Alex walked with him to the room he had been in previously and sat down.

"Here is what you have managed to earn from today's battle," He said as he handed the storage bag to him. Alex looked at the money inside and gave no more thought to it, since it was just the deposit he and the girl had to make before the fight.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Would you like to rest for the next few days, or would you like to fight again?" the man asked.

"I would like to fight again," Alex said. "But please find someone stronger, much stronger. It would be best if the person is a Saint Core realm cultivator."

"The Battle Hall chooses what opponent you will be fighting at its own discretion," the man said. "But your suggestion will be considered as well."

Alex nodded and stood up. "Please notify me when my next match is. I will return for now," he said and walked away.

He left the Battle Hall and went back to his place of temporary residence where he cultivated for 2 more days before his next match was finalized.

Alex arrived on the day of the match and was once again taken to a waiting room by the staff that seemed to have been assigned to him.

"Who's my opponent this time?" Alex asked.

"Zi Zenping," the man said.

"Is he strong?" Alex asked.

"I'm afraid I cannot tell you that right now," the man said.

"I hope the person is strong so I can have a proper fight," Alex said. He was given the offer to bid on the battle, but Alex refused again. After all, he wasn't here for the money.

After waiting for a while, Alex went to the fighting arena where he saw his next opponent.

His opponent was an older man with Saint Foundation 1st realm cultivation base.

"Wait, he's weak. I thought I would be matched with someone stronger," Alex said to the man next to him.

"As I said, brother Yu. The matches are set by the Hall. You cannot ask for one and get it," he said.

"I thought my suggestions were heard," Alex said.

"They are, but the fighters are usually biased or wrong about their own strength, so we set the matches on our own," the man said. "If you do keep on winning, we will set you up with stronger opponents. For now, here is your talisman."

Alex was slightly annoyed, but he said nothing. He waited for the other two to leave and fought his opponent again.

The man used a sword and had a rather elusive fighting style. Alex found this a much better opponent than his last one, so he fought to his heart's content.

However, even then, it didn't feel right to fight without giving it his all. He started wondering if fighting beasts really was the only way to scratch that itch.

He won against the man rather easily in the end and walked away with another sum of money he didn't care about and a request for a stronger opponent. Preferably one that was in the Saint Core realm.

The staff assigned to him gave the same answer again. Alex left with frustration and went back to his place to cultivate while waiting for his next fight.

It was getting close to the time when he had to go back to make his pills again as it had already been nearly 3 months since the last time. So, at best, he had about 2 more battles to go through before he had to return.

He was starting to believe now that it was a mistake to have joined here. He shouldn't have been so hopeful of a place like this at all.

"No, I still have one card to play," Alex thought. A day later, he was notified of his next match.

Alex went to the Battle Hall 30 minutes prior to his match and was taken to the room where he waited.

His next opponent was mentioned to him and Alex sighed. He had done some research in the last two days and he knew how strong this man was supposed to be.

And it was not Saint Core realm.

"You will be able to fight any minute now," the staff told him.

"Good," Alex said. "I want to bid on myself this time."

"Oh, sure," the staff said excitedly. "How much would you like to big?"

Alex took out a storage bag and handed it to the man. "11.5 Million True Spirit stones," he said. "You will double it if I win, right?"

Chapter 1068 One Strike

Ren Jurong's hand shook as he held the storage bag full of such a massive amount of storage bag.

"Brother Yu, I would like to advise you against doing so. You won't get it back if you lose your match to—"

"You don't have to worry about that," Alex said. "Just bid it. That's what I want."

"But—"

"No buts," Alex said. "Or are you trying to refuse me for some reason? Can your establishment not pay this measly amount?"

The man got straighter. "Of course, we can pay. I was just trying to caution you against throwing away such an amount of money. We have many customers who bid wrong and get angry at us."

"Don't worry, I'm sane of mind. Even if I lose it, I have ways to bring more," Alex said. "Now, please go ahead and bid it. We should be leaving for the fight soon."

"Yes," the man said. "However, since you are bidding so much money at once, you will have to comply with some rules."

"What rules?" Alex asked. "There weren't any rules additional rules from what I remember previously."

"No, these rules don't take effect until one side of the fight bids such an exorbitant amount of money," the man said.

"Let's hear it then," Alex said.

"To ensure that this is not an exploitation of the hall's rules, your match will be viewed by a single referee of ours. He won't interfere at all, but he will make sure that nothing nefarious goes on between the two contestants."

"Also, your opponent will have to wear a talisman on their head so that you cannot speak to them through your spiritual sense," the man said.

"Anything else?" Alex asked.

"No, that is all. These two rules will take effect when someone bids over a million Spirit stones at once. Are you still intending to go ahead with the bid?" the man asked.

"Of course," Alex said. "Please, bid it all."

"I will do as you say then."

The man left the room and didn't return for a very long time. Alex wondered what sort of talk he must have been having with the people that ran this place and couldn't help but chuckle at the headache he would be causing them soon enough.

The man returned after a while and told him that it was time for his match.

Alex nodded and walked off with him. They arrived at the arena and instead of 4, there were 5 people in there this time around. The two staff along with the two fighters had come, but a referee had also come to watch over their fight.

Alex nodded to the man as a greeting and walked onto the stage.

"They are making me wear this stupid thing," the nearly elderly man that was his opponent spoke up. "Youngster, you must be quite rich to bring them out."

Alex looked at the talisman on the old man's forehead and smiled. "I'm sorry you have to wear that," he said.

"Haha! Don't be," the old man said. "I'm actually glad to be wearing this."

"Oh?" Alex was a little surprised.

"I get to keep whatever amount you bid once I win after all," the man said and started laughing loudly.

Alex took the talisman he was handed by the staff and pocketed it. He wouldn't be needing it anyway.

The referee walked to the edge of the arena and stood next to the wall. They weren't here to referee their fight, but rather whatever else went on between them after all.

"Let's fight, kiddo. I want that money of yours," the old man said as the other staff members started leaving.

"I'm sorry," Alex said as he brought out midnight. "You must've waited quite a lot of days for this match. You were unfortunately matched with me."

"I'll see about that," the man said and brought out a spear as he charged, but before he could get close, Alex swung his sword.

A massive Sword Aura, much more powerful than anything he had used in these matches before flew directly at the old man.

The old man was surprised and tried to dodge, but the attack was too fast and too strong. The spear he held broke into two and the man himself was sent flying with a long gash around his shoulder.

Fortunately for him, most of the attack was blocked by his armor. Still, the pain that shot through his body from the wound on his shoulder alone was enough to make him scream.

Had the attack landed when it was meant to, he would have died.

"You tried to kill me!" the old man shouted.

"No, I didn't," Alex said with his sword down. He knew he wouldn't have to attack again now.

"YOU WENT FOR MY NECK!" the old man shouted. "Had I not moved, I would have died."

"I know," Alex said. "That's why I used such a weak attack. I gave you ample time to dodge so that I don't hit any of your vitals."

"What?" the old man couldn't believe what he had just heard. "What did you say? That... that was a weak attack?"

"Of course," Alex said. "If you don't believe me, I can use my normal attack too."

Alex readied his sword to attack. The wind around him picked up, making his clothes flap in the violent wind. His Qi peaked and the old man could feel the devastation that would come if he were to try and face the attack.

"I yield!" he shouted as he brought out his talisman and crush it. "Don't attack, I give up."

The aura around Alex disappeared as if nothing and he put his sword back into his storage ring.

"Thank you for your time," Alex said and bowed toward the old man. Then, he turned around and left.

The man held his shoulder in pain and quickly pulled out some healing pills of his own to eat. Once he started healing, he walked away too.

Alex felt bad about leaving the old man bloody, but he didn't have any healing pills on him that he could just give away. Every single pill was above 90% in harmony, and giving a single one would clue people in on who he was, even if it didn't outright reveal it.

The man was coming in just as Alex was walking out, so they met at the doorway out of the arena.

"Brother Yu, you won?" he asked. His eyes drifted towards the referee to see if there was any sort of problem with the fights.

The referee was walking up to Alex as well.

"Jurong, have this person's cultivation base tested again. Make sure he isn't concealing anything," the referee said. "He is too strong for what his cultivation base is showing."

"Right away, senior brother," the man said and looked at Alex weirdly.

Alex just shrugged in return. "I told you, I'm stronger than you think. Let's go test me again?"

The man nodded and took Alex through the hallway, back to the room where he was tested again.

However, no matter how thoroughly the man tested him, there was no way that Alex was anything other than a Saint Foundation 1st realm cultivator.

"Can we leave now?" Alex asked.

"Yes, please come with me," the man said and took Alex back to the waiting room. After taking him there, the man left for a while, leaving Alex all alone.

Alex waited around for a few minutes before the man returned with a storage bag. He handed it over with unsteady hands and looked quite sour doing so.

Alex looked into the storage bag and while he couldn't count so many spirit stones at once, he could tell that the number had about doubled for sure.

"Thank you," Alex said. "I didn't realize it was this easy to earn money here. If my opponent happens to be weak next time as well, I wouldn't mind doubling it."

Alex showed the storage bag to the man, making him quite anxious. "Here, 20 thousand for my next match's deposit. Please call me when you have found an opponent for me."

With that, Alex left the Battle Hall and returned to his residence.

After the stunt he had pulled today, it was certain that his next opponent was going to be strong. Even if not for the threat of losing an astounding amount of money, the referee in his match should relay what had happened to the heads of the Hall.

That was why Alex had revealed so much of his strength after all.

He let Whisker come out and be free in his room while he took out a talisman from his storage ring. Someone had sent him a message not long ago and he hadn't had the time to check.

"Oh, it's the leader," Alex said and read the message. "Haha, he thinks I might have forgotten about the pills."

Alex put away the talisman and started cultivating. He had many things to focus on, so he couldn't waste any time.

For the next 3 days, he continued with his cultivation of Qi, physique, and eyes. It was only on the 4th day that his new match was finalized.

"Finally," Alex thought. "2 more days, and I would have had to forfeit the match."

He needed to return to the City of Many Flowers soon, so he was glad that his next match had been set.

And if the people managing the Battle Hall were any smart, they would certainly pick the hardest opponent for him so he couldn't bid and win so much money.

"Finally, I get to do what I came here for."

Chapter 1069 Yao Bujiang

Alex arrived at the Battle Hall again. This time around, he was hopeful that he was going to get a rather strong fighter to train against.

"Who is my opponent this time around?" he asked the man that was assigned to him.

"Yao Bujiang," the man said.

"Yao Bujiang…" he went through the list of names he had learned about previously, and if the information was right, then this person was most definitely someone either in the late Saint Foundation realm or early Saint Core realm.

Alex nodded and gave an appreciative smile. "Yao… like the Yao family?" he inquired.

"That information is not ours to reveal," the man said.

A while later, Alex left with the man to go to the arena where he met his opponent.

Yao Bujiang was a tall man with long flowing hair. He looked young, almost as young as Alex himself, but someone's physical feature was never a good judgment of their age with cultivators anyway.

He wore blue and orange robes and brought out a sword as he got ready.

Alex looked at the man's cultivation base and smiled. 'Saint Core 1st realm. Finally,' he thought.

The man was instead surprised. "Has there been a mistake?" he asked the staff member who could only tell him that there was no mistake.

"But… he can't be my opponent, right? He's too weak," the man said.

"Worry not, brother Yao. The Hall hasn't made any mistakes," the staff member assigned to him said and walked away.

After that, only Alex and the man were remaining.

"I hope they didn't make a mistake for your sake," the man said with a sigh.

"Don't worry, they haven't," Alex said as he brought out Midnight as well.

"So, do you have any rules before you want to start?" the man asked.

Alex shook his head. "We can start as it is," he said.

"Good, let us begin then."

The man's sword suddenly lit up with Sword Qi as he slashed it in front of him with his single hand.

Alex covered his own sword with Sword Qi and targeted the incoming attack. The two Sword Qi slashes struck each other in midair with neither of them winning against the other one.

Alex realized that his Sword Qi was obviously stronger than his opponents but with their cultivation bases so high, that was going to make little difference.

The man was surprised to see the result of their match. He hadn't expected to meet someone this strong with such a low cultivation base at all.

'Is his Sword Qi very strong?' he wondered.

He used his sword Qi again and slashed, which Alex blocked again. After this time, Alex dashed forward and went on the offensive.

The man dashed a moment later and the two of them clashed in midair. Alex swung his sword with both hands, but the man only swung with one. As a result, he was on the weaker side during this clash.

He was pushed back a bit and he couldn't help but put on a surprised expression.

"You're strong," he couldn't help but say. "I'm sorry I underestimated you."

Another sword appeared on the man's left hand and he got comfortable with it as if he had been using it for a long time.

He crossed his arms and slashed the two swords, sending an X-shaped sword slash toward Alex.

Alex's sword turned green with white layered on top of it. He let go of the sword slash which struck the incoming attack, creating a massive explosion midair that made the formations around the room flicker.

The force of the explosion alone was enough to be devastating for someone that wasn't in the Saint realm yet.

Alex got ready to send out another attack only to realize that the man had moved ahead of him. He employed some sort of movement technique to quickly appear next to Alex and swung his sword.

Alex swung his sword too and blocked the first sword, but before he could realize that he had blocked the sword, another one came from the other side.

The movement of the sword was slow to his eyes, but his body couldn't keep up. He was too slow to move his body, but his Qi wasn't.

A barrier appeared next to him that blocked the sword. It was a rather weak barrier and the man's attack was definitely stronger, but that little instance of buffer allowed him to get out of the way of the attack.

Without stopping, he got back on the attack. He swung his sword at the man, who used both his swords to stop it. He was pushed back a little and Alex moved back as well, creating a gap between the two of them.

The man tried to lower the gap between them, but before he could move, Alex's sword came from above.

He wanted to stop it, but he was a little scared this time around. After all, it was nearly 10 meters long and a meter wide.

He jumped back, even more, to dodge and send some metal sword slashes to stall for time.

Alex, however, didn't give him much resting time. He used his massive sword to continuously attack the man, forcing him to use his movement skill, multiple attack skills, and a few defensive skills.

A metal barrier shattered and the man moved out of the way. He struck Alex's sword, but the sword was sturdy enough that he couldn't even put a scratch on it.

Starforged Tungsten was a naturally tough ore that was hard to mine, to begin with. Having a sword made out of its purest form, tempered to perfection, and then Blood refined would certainly create something that was impossibly strong.

Midnight shrunk instantly and then grew again as Alex swung at the man again.

The man was starting to get annoyed by the fight as it was barely even a fight for him with how frustrating the sword was.

Every attack he did would either be blocked by the sword or destroyed by it. The sword also let Alex fight from a distance away without coming victim to the man's two swords and that was causing him to slowly lose the match.

"Fine, you asked for it," the man said and jumped back away from Midnight. Alex was about to continue when his Demon Eyes saw something.

A massive amount of golden light poured out of the man's body, surprising him quite a lot.

'Golden light… metal Qi?' he wondered.

The Qi converged on itself around the man's body as it started becoming visible to the naked eye.

Under normal circumstances, Alex would have attacked the man to stop him from using whatever skill he was using, but now wasn't such a case. Since he had come here to fight strong individuals he couldn't otherwise, he decided to wait and see what the man was going to do.

The golden light formed some sort of spherical prison around the man and out of that sphere came 4 different appendages, all of which looked like flexible arms with swords instead of a normal palms.

The man was now controlling 4 swords instead of two and his body was giant enough that Alex couldn't just stay away and fight with his giant sword.

Alex swung his sword and sent a sword Qi slash toward the man when he thought the object was done forming.

The man saw the incoming attack and swung one of the 4 arms of the sphere which stopped the attack with rather ease.

Alex frowned a bit and sent out a few more slashes, but each one of them was stopped by the 4 arms. Not a single one got anywhere close to the sphere at all, let alone the man.

"What's that? Some sort of defensive technique?" Alex asked the man. He was genuinely curious about it.

"Huh? Do you not know about our family's signature skill?" the man asked.

"I'm afraid not," Alex said. "But that does make it all the more fun.

He sent out a few more attacks, but every single one of them was blocked by the giant arms.

'How can I beat him?' Alex thought. There had to be a way for sure. He looked around with his Demon Eyes and saw something.

There was Metal Qi coming out of the man constantly which was aiding the sphere. Each time he attacked or was attacked, the Metal Qi in his body would reforge it.

If Alex wanted to win this thing, he need to attack so hard that either the sphere broke, or attack so much that the regeneration couldn't keep up at all.New n0vel chapters are published on

"I've been meaning to practice this for a while, anyway," he thought as he threw Midnight into the sky.

The man watched in confusion for a second and was surprised as Alex brought out 20 new swords that also flew in the sky.

There were 3 at the front, 6 at the back, and 12 behind them.

The 21 Sword Array was his strongest normal attack. He had stronger Dao and Blood Aura based attacks, but amongst the ones that anyone could use, this was the strongest skill.

Not only was it a sword-based attack, which meant that he could use his Sword Aura on it, but there were also 21 different swords in this attack, each adding onto the damage enough to make a difference.

The swords started spinning in the sky like a drill as Alex prepared to attack the man and his spherical encampment with arms coming out of them.

He poured in Sword Intent to start with and sent it forward to attack.

Chapter 1070 Terrifying Combination

Yao Bujiang prepared for the attack. He didn't know how strong it would be compared to the previous attacks, but for some reason, the current one looked stronger.

Alex threw the swords at the four-armed metal Qi barrier and attacked it.

One of the sword arms moved to block it, but Alex's swords ground through it, destroying it rather violently.

The man flinched at the sudden destruction of one of his arms and used the other arm to strike back.

Alex ground through it as well, but by the time the first arm had reforged itself. The arm attacked back along with a third arm and the 21 swords were pushed back.

Alex controlled the swords, making sure to feel every single thing he could about them. The way they moved, the way they amplified each other's powers, the way his Qi made them work together. Everything.

He kept the offensive on the sword arms while trying to understand it all. If he got good at it at some point, he could get closer to understanding how any of the various cultivation techniques worked.

The man was frustrated with the attack's strength on Alex's side. He had added 3 arms to his attack and yet he couldn't destroy them at all.

All he could do was force them to stay at bay. At some point, he knew he was going to lose all of his Qi and that would be the end of the match.

He didn't want to lose.

In what could only be considered an idiotic move to most people, the man stopped defending the attack and left himself wide open to Alex's swords.

Alex was surprised. His sword arms were clearly there, yet the man had for some reason given up. Was there some sort of technique he was going to use now? Or was he going to attack at the cost of his own safety?

Even as Alex thought those things, he let the swords fly onto the man. The spherical barrier that protected him would certainly bear the majority of the damage, leaving the man safe in the end.

As such, Alex slammed the 21 swords onto the spherical barrier and—

The swords were suddenly thrown backward towards Alex in a disarray. They flew towards him so fast that he would have believed they were his opponent's swords, had he not felt his Qi connection to them.

He quickly moved both his hands, separating the 21 swords that flew towards him before merging them together to form the 21 Sword Array.

'What happened?' he thought. He couldn't make sense of the situation just now. Had his attacks been hijacked by the man? Were his swords under his control for a moment? What had happened?

Alex reached out and grabbed onto Midnight before using the Penta Sword strike. 5 illusory swords flew away from him, attacking the young man in the distance.

At the same time, he placed the sword onto the array and sent it flying again.

The man moved his sword arms, cutting away the illusory swords before the rest of the 21 swords appeared next to him.

Just like last time, the sword's arms tried to stop it, but not even a few seconds later, the man let go.

The swords flew onto the man and struck the barrier again. However, once again, the swords were sent back at him.

Alex controlled the sword again and frowned. 'What the hell is going on?' he thought. Was there something he was missing?

He prepared the 21 Sword Array again, but this time he was going to test what the man was doing.

His senses were ready to sense anything abnormal, and so the swords flew at the arms again. This time, the man didn't even bother blocking at all.

He just let the swords attack the body directly.

The swords fell onto the young man's barrier, but before they could reach it, they stopped. Alex stopped it just before they reached the barrier.

And then, he sensed what was going on.

Alex couldn't make sense of exactly what was going on, but he could sense in general what exactly was happening in this match.

"That is some interesting Dao you have there," he said. At the same time, he sent out just one sword on the barrier, which was sent again, but very weakly.

"I see," Alex said. "Whatever and however I attack, you send it back with the same force and speed. It's almost like... you're reflecting the attack back onto the opponent."

The other man looked surprised and annoyed. "I can't believe you guessed my Dao of Reflection so easily," he said. "But guessing won't help you much at all."

"A defensive barrier that not only protects the user but also reflects back the attacker's own attack. That's some terrifying combination for sure," he said. "But, I wonder what sort of limitations it has."

"You've made me quite curious now." He brought back the sword and put them down. Given that the man could reflect all attacks, his swords were only going to be problematic to him.

He needed to use some other ways instead.

He moved his hand in front of him and 10 different tongues of fire hovered where his hands went. The man looked confused and got on guard.

Alex took the first ball of fire and shot it at his opponent. The ball of fire landed on one of the sword arms, but before it could get anywhere, Alex used his own dao.

"Explode!"

A violet explosion sent ripples through the man's spherical barrier. He put on an unhappy expression as he had lost two of his sword arms at once and had to regrow them instead.

Before they could grow back, however, another ball of fire arrived in front of him which went on to explode as well.

Another 2 arms that had moved forward to stop the attack had been broken. Then the next fireball came. Only, it didn't come alone.

Right behind it was another. Alex had sent them one after another. The man got ready to absorb the damage and maybe even reflect it if he got the chance, but before he could do anything, the first ball of fire moved over his head outside of the barrier and reached behind him.

At the same time, the first one reached in front of him.

"Explode!"

Two explosions sent shockwaves through the man's barrier from either side. The barrier turned illusory and even almost disappeared completely.

The man looked at Alex and realized he couldn't fight him with a skill where he became the sitting target instead of the attacker.

The Yao family's secret technique was meant to make a person a one-man army. With a barrier for defense with multiple sword arms coming out, you were supposed to be able to fight multiple people at once.

However, that came with the condition that you had to stay in one place without moving and fighting. If there was ever an opponent that was strong at all, he would only be limiting himself.

In his current case, it was.

"You have some fine Dao yourself," he said annoyedly. He was already annoyed that someone with such a weak cultivation base could fight someone so high up their league, and now even his Dao was strong.

"Thank you," Alex replied. "Your's is not bad either. It could be better if you could use it at different places at the same time, but that probably needs a much better Intent than what you have."

The man grunted. He didn't know much about Intents, but what he did know, he knew that Alex was right about the problem.

"Shall we continue?" Alex asked.

"No, your explosion skills are way too strong for me to fight against," the man said.

"What if I promise not to use my explosion skills? That was only for testing your Dao, I came here to train so easily that beating you with my own Dao won't help me if the rest of my skills can't carry along," Alex said.

"Certainly," the man said. "Especially in places where Dao won't aid you."

Alex frowned a little when he heard that. "A place where Dao can't be used? Does that even exist?" he asked.

Even in a place like the Wasteland, where there was absolutely no Qi, one could still use Dao so long as they have Qi within them. It certainly wouldn't be as strong as a place with Qi, but it was still usable.

"Of course it exists," the man said. "Have you never been into the Sundering Sanctum?"

Alex's eyes narrowed. "You can't use Dao in the Sundering Sanctum?" he asked.

"Amongst other things, yes," the man said. "Anyway, let us continue the battle. I came here to fight, so I will return after I've had my fill."

"Sure," Alex said as he held onto Midnight. "Come at me."

The two of them fought for another half an hour, using different techniques at each other and learning from them.

Once it was all done, Alex decided to take the loss for today. He had come here to learn and win battles without Dao or Blood aura, so since he had certainly lost in that aspect, he let the other man have his win.

"Thank you, brother Yao, I hope to get matched up with you again," Alex said and walked away.

He left the Battle Hall without setting up his next match as it would take some time for sure.

Instead, he now needed to start on his journey back to the City of Many Flowers. But before that, he decided to make a small visit to the Phoenix.

Chapter 1071 Kill It

Alex arrived outside the secret realm and cut a hole in it to walk in. The hole fixed itself behind him and he was free to continue.

"You returned," Scarlet said when she saw him.

"How are you doing? Are yo— Woah!" he was surprised when he got close to her. In the month he had been away, Scarlet was already a realm higher than the last time.

"Did you break through already? That's seriously fast," he said.

"Yes, I wanted to say thank you," she said. "These pills are seriously amazing. I'm already on my way to breaking through to the next realm. If my calculations are correct, I should be able to break through to the Saint Foundation realm in under 5 months.

"That's…" Alex couldn't believe it at all. "That's seriously amazing."

"Isn't it?" She asked. "Anyway, you got any more of the pills? I'm already down 6."

"Down 6? Didn't I give those pills to you just a month ago? You were supposed to take one a week," he said.

"I'm a Vermilion Bird. My body has natural healing properties. The exhaustion in my body wears off far faster than yours does," she said proudly.

Alex frowned slightly. His body was supposed to heal that way as well, but for some reason, the swelling on his meridian from his pill didn't count as injury for some reason.

It was also true that meridians didn't heal as well as the rest of one's body since they were so used to all the different Qi. They needed to be resilient to any type of Qi, and as a result, usually responded slowly to healing Qi as well.

But of course, that also meant they responded quite well against poisons too. This was why there were poisons and toxins that were crafted especially for the meridian.

"Alright, here you go." Alex pulled out a pill bottle and handed it to her. "There are 20 pills in there. Use them sparingly this time around."

"Thank you!" Scarlet said excitedly as he took the pill bottle. The pills suddenly vanished from her wings, giving Alex a surprise.

"Hmm?" he looked at her from top to bottom. "Do you have a storage bag on you? Where did you get it?"

"Huh? Oh… uhh," Scarlet looked around frantically. "Y-yes, yes," she said.

Alex looked at her and it was clear she was lying. "Where did the pill bottle go? Are you wearing some sort of storage artifact? Do you have a ring on you too?" he asked, showing off his own.

Scarlet looked at his fingers confusedly before noticing the ring on them. She had seen it before, but like everyone else, she hadn't given it much thought at all.

"Aah! A storage ring. How do you have one? Where did you get it from?" she asked.

"I found it in a desert," Alex said. "Do you have one as well?"

"I…" Scarlet hesitated to answer.

Alex wanted to urge her to answer when suddenly something very bad that he hadn't anticipated happened.

"THAT'S A GODDAMN PHOENIX!" Godslayer shouted in his head as loudly as he could. "KILL THAT GODDAMN PHOENIX."

"Ugh!" Alex groaned a little as the sound came out of nowhere. "I know that's a Phoenix. Please stop talking."

"Huh? Me? Okay," Scarlet said.

"No not you, I'm—"

"That's a phoenix. Kill it. Kill it now. Give me your body, and I will kill it," Godslayer shouted in his head. "Come on. Give me your body so I can kill it. It's weak right now so we should be able to kill it at once."

Alex tried to ignore Godslayer, but his incessant screams were starting to annoy him a lot. "I need to leave," he said. "I will see you sometime later. Goodbye."

He ran away immediately, letting Scarlet look around in confusion as to what had just happened. She waited for a while, but Alex didn't return at all.

So, she instead decided to continue cultivating. She brought out a pill bottle with only 4 pills in it and ate one. She put back the pill bottle and continued cultivating.

Alex arrived outside the secret realm, away from the Phoenix that was making Godslayer go mad.

"What are we out? Go back so we can kill the Phoenix," he said.

"Stop!" Alex shouted. "We're not killing the phoenix. She's a friend."

"What?" Godslayer asked in shock. He couldn't believe it. "Why would you be friends with a phoenix?" The exasperation in his voice was proof enough.

"Why not?" Alex asked. "What's wrong with being friends with a Phoenix? Or for that matter, what's wrong with being friends with a White Tiger, or a Black Tortoise, or an Azure Dragon?"

"They are all the ones that are blessed by the gods. We need to kill them all," Godslayer said.

"Why?" Alex asked. "What did the beasts do so wrong that they need to be killed?"

"They are bles—"

"Blessed by the gods? That's it?" Alex asked.

Godslayer didn't understand. "What more reason do you need?" he asked.

"Alright, let me ask you then. Why is it bad for them to be blessed by god? Or rather, I should ask why are the gods themselves bad?" he asked.

"They are bad people, obviously," Godslayer said.

"And why is that?" Alex asked.

For some reason, he didn't feel like letting Godslayer get away with his usual answer 'because they are gods.'

Before, he had Pearl who was bonded to him. However, Pearl had no physical features of a White Tiger, so he could get away with not being one.

However, having bonded with Scarlet, it would be hard to not hide the fact that she was a Phoenix. And every time Godslayer did see her, he would have a fit.

That would be incredibly annoying, so he decided to come to some sort of conclusion today.

"Th-they are blessed by the gods. Haven't I told you before how bad the gods are?" Godslayer asked.

"Yes, you have," Alex said. "You have told me how terrible they are that they call themselves god for being some of the strongest humans in the world. You have told me how terrible they are for capturing you when you went around killing them."

"Have you ever stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, it's not the gods that are bad, but rather you who is bad? Maybe that's why they are so against you?" Alex asked.

"No, but… they are gods. They are bad. They are horrible," he said.

"What were you doing when you were captured?" Alex asked.

"What?" Godslayer asked. "Oh, uh… I was on my way to kill the new Formation god."

"Sigh, and what did the Formation god do that was so bad that you had to go kill him?" Alex asked.

"He… he called himself a god," Godslayer said.

Alex sighed. "I really thought you were improving the last 20 years with me, but it seems you have really gone nowhere. You have lost the anger you initially held, but not your irrational hate for the gods," he said.

"But they are bad. They had done terrible things," Godslayer said.

"What terrible things have gods done other than be a god?" Alex asked.

"They kill people," Godslayer said.

"Okay, that is bad under general context," Alex said.

"See?" Godslayer said.

"But so do you," he said.New n0vel chapters are published on

"N-no, I don't kill anyone that is not a god or didn't deserve it," Godslayer said.

"Oh? And who was it that was ready to kill a young man they just possessed? Care to remind me?" Alex asked.

"Uh…" Godslayer had no answer.

"It is true that some Gods are bad. Maybe most of them are even, I don't know," Alex said. "But you can't just go hating on them just because they call themselves one. You need to find a reason. You need to put away this irrational hate of yours."

"No, but… this is who I am," Godslayer said. "If I don't slay gods, then who am I?"

"You can be anyone," Alex said. "What do you want to be?"

"The Godkiller!" Godslayer said.

Alex sighed. "Alright, this is not working. I might have made a really big jump. Okay, baby steps."

He thought for a bit and asked, "Circling back on topic, why do you want to kill a phoenix?"

"Because they are blessed by the gods," Godslayer said.

"And you want to kill gods because?" Alex asked.

"Because they are bad and they are fake," Godslayer said.

"Oh, but wasn't the god that blessed the phoenix a true god? Was that not what you said to be more? You did say that there are only 2 gods out there that are the true ones. The one who blessed the 4 beasts and the one who blessed the 3 plants. Are you saying you want to kill these gods too?" Alex asked.

"No," Godslayer said. "They are already dead."

"Oh," Alex was surprised. He had expected those gods to be alive still. "Doesn't matter. If they were alive, would you kill them?"

"Of course, they are gods," he said.

"But they are not bad gods, are they? And they are definitely not fake," he said.

"Well… they are still gods, so I must kill them… right?" Godslayer asked.

Alex smiled at the question. Finally, he had gotten through, even if just a tiny bit.

"Just dwell on it for a day or two and answer me. Do the true gods deserve to be killed just as well as the fake ones do?" Alex asked. "After you come to a conclusion, think about whether some beasts and plants deserve to be killed just because they were blessed by some god, even when they were most likely forced."

"I hope you have some good revelations."

Chapter 1072 Quad Annual Pill Making

Alex arrived back at the Alchemy association. He met up with the leader as soon as he got there.

"Where were you? I thought you were coming much earlier," he said worriedly.

"Oh, sorry about that. I had to stop by somewhere for a bit, and they took some time," he said. "Anyway, how is it going? Are the slots finalized yet?"

"We're all but done," the man said. "The slots have been sold, so we only need to wait for them to let us know what pill it is that we need to make."

"I see," Alex said. "So it will take a day more at least?"

"Yes," the leader said.

"Alright, I will go for now. I have something to do today," Alex said and turned around to leave. "Oh, any news on the searches?"

"No, none of the investigators have found anything. None of them have found any clues to any boat that may have come here without being found by someone," the leader said. "Can I ask? Is his Graham fellow your brother?"

"My father," Alex said. "Please continue searching. Take the pay from my cut for whatever is needed." He left without waiting for the leader to say anything else. He was in a bit of a hurry anyway.

After leaving Scarlet's secret realm and dealing with Godslayer's tantrum, Alex visited the Blindheart city's Insight pavilion to get the end-of-the-month report on everyone that had searched for him.

Because it was the month of his slots opening, the searches had grown a lot more and as such there was more for him to look through.

He would need an entire day and more if he wanted to completely read through it all.

"Hey! Alex, wait up!" someone spoke.

Alex turned around and found Harry not far behind him. "Hey, I haven't seen you in a while," he said.

"Of course you haven't, you are never around anymore," Harry said.

"True," Alex said. "Anyway, how's everything going?"

"Fine, I suppose," Harry said. "Listen, after our lesson so many months ago, I started trying to understand it and improve myself. I used one of the pills you make and have done whatever I can to improve it. But I somehow still can't seem to go over 70% for that pill. Can you check what's going on or if I misunderstood something?"

"Sure, after I'm done with the pills I will have to make this week, I will take a look at it," Alex said.

"Thanks, I can't wait," Harry said and walked away.

Alex himself walked back to his dorm room which he hadn't visited in the last 3 months and settled down.

He lay on his bed and brought out the talisman one by one as he read through them all. It was a mindless task that he had to pay barely any attention to, but it was important as it might hide clues from his father.

So, he read through it with half a mind while the other half wandered on its own to who knew where.

He continued doing this for nearly 6 hours when he read something curious. "Hmm?" he looked at the information. Someone had tried to check how Graham and Alex were related. He had also at the same time checked if Alex had any other family members.

"Hao Mingzhe?" Alex read the name of the person who had checked his name. "How does he… Oh, from the Rising Phoenix sect, no wonder."

He got a little happy knowing that Tan Yang had contacted his sect and had asked them to help find his father as per his request.

As he continued reading, it wasn't just Tan Yang who had done that, everyone had. The Yao family, the Kang family, the Liang family, Dawn's Light sect, the Cloud Fire sect, and the Jade fire sect. Even the Huang family seemed to have received a message from Huang Chen, despite how much he hated the new family leader.

Alex finished looking through the rest of the talismans. While they didn't have any useful information, he was happy knowing that there were many people out there looking for his father.

The next day came and he was handed a list of pills he was to make. He had a day to prepare before he started making the pills.

Alex spent the day improving whatever ingredients he could while he waited for the next day to arrive. When it did, he spent the next whole week just making the pills.

The pills were very simple to make for him at this point. They were so simple that he was starting to make over 4 pills at once.

Since he didn't have to worry about using his Pill Splitting Qi, he could easily form those many pills.

The ingredient improvement was what took the majority of his time. The pill themselves were done in about a day's worth time in total.

Once he was done, Alex sent out the pills and waited for the earnings to come in.

Harry came over a day or two later and sat down with Alex to learn a few things. He showed what he had learned and Alex found a few mistakes along the way which he helped point out.

Harry still wasn't using a good pill-forming technique, and that was something essential. Alex didn't give out his own, but he did tell him to get a good one.

A cultivator could only be so good. They couldn't focus on every detail of the pill when making it. Sometimes, they had to leave some techniques that were there because others had gone through the same thing and found something better.

After he was done teaching, Alex went to the leader to take what he had earned and decided to leave once again.

"You're leaving already?" the leader asked with a curious expression.

"Yeah, well I don't really have anything to do here, do I?" he asked.

"No, but… where will you even go?" the leader asked him.

"Oh, I've been going to the Battle Hall in Spiritsong city to practice. I will be returning there again," he said.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Spiritsong city? You're fighting there?" the leader asked with a concerned face. "Why are you fighting?"

"I just want to," Alex said. "Don't worry, I'll be fine."

"I'm gonna worry anyway without star alchemist fighting like a ruffian," the leader said. "Didn't you say something about having to work on some pills for the council? What about those? Please don't tell me you are taking things lightly. It's the council, you can't do something like that."

"No, no, I'm not taking things lightly, everything is alright. I'm simply waiting for the secret realm to open so I can find a crucial ingredient before I can start. Right, when do you think that will be?" Alex asked.

"I can't really tell you honestly. Might be a month or 3 months or 6. But, we will know when it is about to happen after it blasts out pollen twice in a single day. You should have 3 days or so to return when that happens," the leader said.

"Great, let me know when that is," Alex said. "I can't miss it."

Chapter 1073 Yusong Muzhou

The next 3 months went by in a flash for Alex. All he did in those 3 months were fight one after another, always finding Saint Core realm cultivators to fight against.

At the same time, he also worked on himself in between his fights, improving his physical body as well as he could while also cultivating as well as he could.

By now, he was on the verge of breaking through to the 2nd realm of the Saint Foundation realm and it had barely been 9 months since he broke through to the Saint Foundation realm itself.

The pills he had been eating were beyond amazing.

"I should stop fighting so much," Alex thought. "I should go out and improve my blood aura too."

While improving his fighting technique, Qi, Sword Aura, and physical body was great for him, it was no lie that his greatest strength lay in his blood aura and his understanding of Dao.

He couldn't stop focusing on them just because he had enough for now. After he was done making the pills for the elders in the Council, Alex decided to take some days off to go and make some more blood beasts while also trying to understand some new Dao with the new pill he would have made by then.

'There are so many pills out there that I don't even know about,' he thought to himself. Over the course of the many fights, he had come to learn about many different Daos that one could use.

Dao of Reflection, Dao of Swiftness, Dao of Stagnation, Dao of Rust, Dao of Mist, and many more.

He sat down thinking about the many things he had learned and had planned on doing in the future when his storage ring gave a small buzz.

He quickly took out the buzzing talisman from inside it and looked at what was written on it. "Oh, they found my next opponent," he thought. This would be his last opponent before he had to leave back to the Alchemy Association again.

"I wonder if it will be someone I've already fought against, or someone new," he wondered.

He would know that on the day of the match, and he found out when he was there.

"Yusong Muzhou?" Alex looked at the man confusedly when he was given the name. As far as he could remember, he couldn't remember this person in the list of names he frequently learned about to keep up on what sort of opponents the Battle Hall gave him.New n0vel chapters are published on

If he wasn't wrong, this was likely someone that had recently joined. "He's a newcomer?" Alex asked.

"Freshly joined," the staff said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, let's see what sort of person gets to go up against me on their first day."

"Please come with me. The battle arena is prepared."

Alex nodded and walked along with him to arrive at the arena. He walked up the stage and watched a person walk up the stage.

"Hm? Oh, it's a girl," he realized. "Sounded like a guy's name though."

As she got closer, Alex saw one thing and couldn't help but be surprised. "Wait… dark skin?" he thought when he saw her. "Someone from the Wasteland?"

He was very confused when he saw that. "How can someone from the Wasteland be here?" he asked himself.

Wastelanders were made to stay on the other side of the barrier at all times. That was why it was so hard to find his father since there was really no one from the Wastelands on this side of the map. And yet, he randomly met someone here today? And that person was a Saint realm cultivator too?

The girl took the talisman given to her and tried to stick it inside the sash of her robes, only to realize that her robes didn't have any sash.

She then put it inside her robe itself and looked at Alex. "Additional rules or Nah?" she asked.

"None for me," he said with many thoughts going through his head. "Would you mind answering a few questions for me?"

"What?" she asked with a rough voice.

"Are you from the Wasteland?" he asked.

"Not your business," the girl said.

Alex was taken aback, but he didn't stop asking. "Can you tell me when you came to this side? You don't have to tell me how if you want to hide that."

"Again, none of your business," the girl said. "Now shut up. I'm here to fight."

With that said, the girl suddenly jumped at him with no weapons but just her open hands.

Alex put up his arms to block and was punched directly on the wrists. A clear crack could be heard as he was sent flying back into the wall at the back.

He crashed on the wall, which was untouched due to the formations on it, and fell to the ground. He tried to push himself up, only to have his arms slip out on the wrist and tumble over.

"Argh!" he grunted slightly and checked his arms to see the broken wrist.

"Of course," he said softly. "A body cultivator. A strong one at that too."

"Tsk. I told these bastards I wanted someone strong. I knew they wouldn't listen to me," the girl said.

"Hehehe," Alex couldn't help but chuckle at the remark, catching the girl's attention.

"What's so funny?" she asked.

"I was angry for the same reason not long ago," he said. "I had to threaten them with bidding forever to run them dry at the level they were keeping me. It was only then that they assigned me to stronger fighters."

"Stronger?" the girl looked confused. She tried to look at something using her spiritual sense, which came out of her like a tidal wave.

Alex felt the burden of her spiritual sense and pushed it back, a little surprised that she wasn't really controlling it well.

"Huh? How the hell are you only Saint Foundation realm? Are you hiding your cultivation base?" she asked. "I thought you weren't supposed to hide it here."

"None of your business, was it?" Alex asked with a mocking face.

The girl snorted. "Fine, just tear off your talisman so we can leave. You can't fight with your broken limb anyway," she said.

"Oh? What broken limb?" Alex asked, showing his unhurt wrists as he walked back on the stage.

"What?" the girl said slowly. "I clearly saw it break. Did I see wrong?"

"Could be," Alex said. "So, were we not going to fight?"

The girl gave a menacing smile. "You want to fight? I'll give you a fight!" she said and dashed at him again.

This time, Alex had learned his lesson. He knew that he couldn't block her attacks at all.

So, when the slow punch moved through his vision, he used his arms to push it slightly outwards so that her punch missed.

At the same time, he punched back at her in the guts.

"Aah!" the girl cried out in pain as she moved backward. "What's going on? How did you suddenly get so strong?"

"What do you mean?" Alex asked. "I've always been this strong."

His attacks definitely weren't as strong as the girl he was fighting. Her body was stronger than his for sure and with her cultivation base being equivalent to his, her overall power was higher.

However, his punches still hurt her. So, the victor here wouldn't be the one who punched the hardest, but rather the one whose punch actually landed.

Alex was going to give her a hard time with that.

The girl jumped back at him and attacked him, but Alex barely managed to get out of the way.

He moved his head as the punch arrived and punched her left side. While she was distracted, his left hand moved and punched her in the face.

When the punch landed, his expression changed and he moved back, but the girl continued attacking him without stopping.

She wasn't letting up at all. Alex continued dodging and attacking. Somehow, he had fallen into her tempo and was fighting hand-to-hand combat, even though he could fight with a sword all the same.

However, he didn't want to do that right now. It was rare that you got to fight against a weaponless close combat fighter, much less a Body cultivator.

Although, the girl wasn't the best at fighting close combat fights. She had speed and strength at her side, but there was absolutely no skill when it came to fighting.

All she did was throw straightforward punches and kicks which were rather easy to dodge.

She continued attacking for a long time while constantly eating the punches that were thrown at her body without flinching at all.

However, after not landing a single hit on Alex for nearly 10 minutes, she decided not to fight anymore.

Alex punched her out of nowhere in her face, sending her flying away this time around as she had stopped trying to stand her ground.

The girl slid along the floor of the stage and stood up. "You win, hurray!" she said sarcastically as she brought out a talisman and crushed it.

Alex was surprised to see that he had won so easily. 'I should let them know that she is stronger than me,' he thought.

He looked down at his fist and remembered the weird feeling he felt. He pinched his own cheeks to check and was even weirded out.

"Do body cultivators' muscles get so strong normally if they don't Qi cultivate?" he wondered. His was certainly quite soft still.

He shook his head and cleared his mind as he walked out of the arena.

Chapter 1074 Heavenly Silkworm

Alex arrived back in the city of Many Flowers again and couldn't help but be surprised when he saw the massive amount of pollen all over the city.

It seemed that the Orchard had just blasted out pollen once again today. He wondered how frequently it was happening now that it was 3 months since the last time he was here.

Alex walked straight to the Alchemy Association to find out. Before he could even enter, the person that was on guard noticed him and stopped him.

"Alchemist Alex, you're finally back. The leader has asked me to tell you that you need to go see him urgently," the guard said.

"Oh, thank you. I'll go see him right away," Alex said and continued. He was planning on doing that anyway, but now he was curious why he was being called.

"Senior, you wanted to see me?" Alex asked as he walked in.

"Oh, you're finally back. I knew I shouldn't have been worried," the leader said.

"I wouldn't miss any of it," he said. "So, what's so urgent that you wanted to see me just as I came back?"

"It's this." The old man pulled out something from his storage bag and handed it to Alex. "We received it yesterday."

Alex looked at the box he was getting and got curious. When he finally saw it, his eyes went wide.

The box itself was nothing special, but the text on top of it was everything to Alex at the moment.

'To only be opened by Alchemy Alex. This box contains information on Graham Benton.'

"No way!" Alex said as he looked at the leader. "Your investigators actually found something?"

"No," the leader quickly shook his head. "As I said, we received it yesterday. We have no idea who this came from."

"Hmm, could it be the 10 sects and families?" Alex asked. "I've asked the council to help me in the search, so I know their sects and families have begun the searches as well."

"Hmm, maybe," the leader said, slightly surprised that Alex was able to get the 10 council members to do something for them.

"Have you checked inside?" he asked as he started unwrapping the box.

"No, but I did check it to make sure there wasn't anything else in there and found that there is a talisman. As for what's written in the talisman, I did not read," he said.

"Oh, right," Alex said and stopped. He was so excited about learning about his father that he didn't even think to check what was inside. What if this was a nefarious joke by someone? Maybe a rival alchemist hated him and wanted him to stop making the pills every 3 months?

The timing surely made sense.

He slowly sent his spiritual sense into the box and saw the Talisman that the leader was talking about.

However, it was wrapped in some sort of thread that was disturbing his spiritual sense from entering. He could see the talisman itself, but trying to read into it was pretty much impossible.

"What is this?" Alex couldn't help but ask. "I've never seen a thread like this."

"Hmm?" The leader checked as well and gasped. "No way, that's a Heavenly Silkworm's silk thread."

"Heavenly Silkworm? what's that?" Alex asked.

"It's a very rare creature that is supposed to be extinct in this continent. The thread itself also is supposed to be very rare. A Heavenly Silkworm's thread can block one's spiritual sense from passing through it," the leader said.

"Woah," Alex couldn't help but be surprised. "How strong must the creature be to produce a thread that can disturb one's spiritual sense?"

The leader shook his head. "The creature isn't strong at all since it cannot cultivate," he said. "I don't know much about them to tell you everything, but they are supposed to have some sort of food that doesn't exist anymore in this continent, which is why they have gone extinct."

"So… they are just like Seeking Mouse," he said. "No cultivation, but very good at doing one thing."

Alex got even more curious as to what information the talisman was hiding if the sender would use something so precious.New n0vel chapters are published on

He quickly opened the box and pulled out the talisman. He let the box drop and started pulling out the threads that were wrapped around the talisman.

"Well, this itself is a great find," Alex said as he kept the small loom of thread he had just gathered and put it into his storage ring.

Then, he finally checked what the talisman had for him.

'Hello, Alchemist Alex. I hope this letter finds you quickly. I know you are a great Alchemist, so I would like to ask you to hand over all the different recipes that you have advertised.'

"What the hell?" Alex's happiness went away at once when he read the talisman. He continued reading.

'You might be angry right now and want to destroy this talisman in anger, but I suggest you don't do anything like that. The talisman is laced with a powder which is the only thing that can save you now that you have released the odorless, colorless poison from the box.'

'I'm sorry if there were anyone beside you, as they are most likely going to die.'

THUMP~

The leader fell to the floor with a loud thump as he started fidgeting and frothing at the mouth.

"SHIT!" Alex cried out the minute he realized that he had been poisoned.

He grabbed the old man and pulled him up to check on him. He was frothing so much that he couldn't breathe anymore.

His veins were starting to show and his lip was turning purple as well.

Alex used his Qi to slam the door shut and quickly took the talisman to scrape off whatever powder it had before feeding it to the old man immediately. He himself had no need for it as no poison could affect him at all.

The froth stopped appearing after a few seconds and the old man's breathing got calm and he stopped moving like a fish out of water.

"Phew!"

He quickly had the Yang Qi in his own dantian go through his entire body once to make sure there was no poison in this system anymore. At the same time, he burned the box that came with the talisman so that the poison there was completely gone as well.

"Shit, someone actually tried to poison me," he thought and read the talisman again. He had left off halfway through because of the leader, so he had to continue from there.

'The powder is not an antidote, it will only delay the effects of the poison. There is no antidote for this poison with you, we've tried them all, so don't even bother.'

'If you want to live, leave the compounds wearing a blue robe with a red hat on your head. Just walk straight out of the city and we will get you. I pray that you don't die before you eat the antidote.'

"Bastards! They are still in the city, aren't they?" he thought. He looked back at the leader again and saw that he wasn't getting up.

'He's still poisoned,' he thought. He brought out an antidote pill and fed it to the leader, but he did not wake up at all.

"They weren't lying," he thought. "But that's not all the antidote pills I have."

He brought out another antidote pill. Only this time, this pill had 5 lightning scars on it.

He quickly fed it to the old man and waited.

At first, it didn't seem like anything had happened, but slowly, the old man's eyes moved and he woke up.

He slowly got up from the floor in a daze and watched the foam on the floor where he had just been in.

"What happened?" he asked with a confused look.

"You were poisoned," Alex said. "How are you feeling?"

"Uh… great?" he thought. For some reason, he was feeling very good.

"That's a relief," he said. "Someone tried to poison me to get my recipes. Thankfully, I had an antidote on me."

"Really?" the leader asked as he looked around. "I'm going to go ask who it was that gave that box."

"No, wait," Alex shouted. "The room is still full of poison. Don't open it just yet."

The leader was slightly scared and backed off. "What should we do now?" he asked.

"I was hoping you would have some idea," Alex said as he looked around. "I'm sure phoenix fire could burn it all, but there is nowhere we can get that, is there?"

The leader shook his head. "Phoenix fire is dangerous, so any remaining fire had already been isolated and snuffed out by the council members," he said.

Alex nodded. "Well, then… I might have a way."

"What are you going to do?" the leader asked.

"I am not very sure myself," Alex said. "I have never done this since I was healed, so… well, I hope this works."

As soon as he said that, a violent amount of Qi erupted from his body, forcing the leader away from him.

The various formations in the room started lighting up, but Alex didn't notice them.

He kept forcing out as much Qi as he could and in just a few minutes, the entire room was filled with his Qi.

It wasn't just any Qi, however. It was his strongest Qi that could destroy all poison, venom, and toxin in his body. Now, he was using it outside to do the same.

Alex had filled the entire room with his Yang Qi.

Chapter 1075 So Stupid

The leader watched in surprise, not understanding what was happening at all but knowing that whatever it was, was very unconventional.

Alex filled the room with Yang Qi for a while, which inadvertently tried to activate some of the formations in the room. However, they were so scattered and unfocused that none of the formations actually activated at all.

He forced the Qi to stay out while also pumping out more just to be safe for a few more minutes before letting it all go. The Yang Qi remained in the air for a while but slowly dissipated.

It would later come into contact with the Yin energy that was prevalent during the nighttime and turn into normal Qi.

"What did you do exactly?" the leader asked.

"I tried to destroy the poison," Alex said. "I'm not sure if it worked though. How do we find out?"

"I ask someone to bring a pill swine," the leader said and sent a message. A few minutes later, someone was outside the door with a pill swine.

"How do we get it in?" the leader asked since he didn't want to open the door at all.

"Leave that to me," Alex said. He instantly disappeared outside his room and appeared back inside with the pill swine.

"Wh-what the hell was that?" the leader couldn't help but ask.

"Teleportation skill," Alex said. "Now, let's see."

He let the pill swine stay in the room and even let it go around licking the desks and walls before finally confirming that the poison was all gone from the room.

"You can open the door now," he said and let the pill swine walk outside.

The pill swine was taken away and the leader closed the door again.

"We need to find out who would do something like this. Could it be an alchemist?" the leader asked.

"Maybe, but it could be just about anyone now that I think about it," Alex said. "My recipes are very wanted after all. Many think that they would be able to make a fortune just by having it."

"I will go ask the person who brought this," the leader said and turned to leave.

"No, wait," Alex said. "They wouldn't have left any clue. They were smart enough and rich enough to distract us with the silk threads. We cannot underestimate whoever it is."

The leader became quiet because he knew Alex was right. "Then what do we do?" he asked.

Alex took the talisman and handed it over. The leader read it and his eyes narrowed. "No, it's too dangerous. We can't let you do this," he said.

"I can't let anyone get away with trying to kill me," he said. "This person also knows about my father, so I have to get him."

The leader felt conflicted. "But what if this person is too strong? What if their original purpose is to kill you?" he asked.

"Well, maybe, but I still have to go," Alex said.

The leader sighed. "Fine, I'm coming with you," he said.

"No, you cannot," Alex said. "They might have people outside watching us constantly. If you do leave, they will notice and tip off the person. Besides, you're not that strong yourself."

The leader wanted to argue but he couldn't. He was quite weak after all.

"Don't worry, I don't plan on going without any backup," he said.

Half an hour later, Alex wore a blue robe and a red hat and started walking out of the city.

He looked around, trying to find anyone that might be following him, but he didn't see anyone like that.

He continued walking and went outside of the city too, but no one came. 'How far am I supposed to walk?' he thought.

He continued walking until he was in the forest. "Is there no one waiting for me?" he thought. "What's going—"

"I can't believe you really came," A voice spoke from somewhere.

Alex instantly turned around and tried to look using his spiritual sense. It was hard, but he found someone hiding amidst the tree as if they were leaves themselves.

'Such an amazing concealment ability,' Alex thought.

The man jumped down from the tree and looked at him curiously. "You actually came," he said.

"Of course, I need the antidote for the poison," Alex said as he looked at the man.

The man wore a mostly green robe that was perfect for blending in with the trees. His hair was tied in a ponytail and half his face was covered with a golden mask.

The other half of his face was terrifying. It was a decrepit face that seemed to have rotted to the bone, and all of it was just as green as his own robes.

"I know you came here for the antidote, but how did you survive the poison long enough to eat the powder in the talisman?" he asked. "You weren't meant to succeed in that."

Alex looked surprised. 'He wanted to kill me, why?' he thought.

"Why would you want to kill me when you want the recipes?" he asked.

"I didn't," the man said. "But now that you are here, let's have them. I'm sure I will earn a lot once I hand it over."

"Where's the antidote?" Alex asked, looking desperate.

"Hehehe, just wait. I'm starting to enjoy this," the man said.

Alex wanted to attack the guy and incapacitate him, but he seemed to be a Saint Core 4th realm cultivator.

If he wanted to defeat him, he would have to use a blood aura. However, the man would certainly react before he could, so Alex needed to be careful.

"Here are the recipes you wanted," Alex said as he pulled out some talismans and handed them over. "Now give me my antidote."

"Oh?" the man quickly looked at the recipes and nodded to himself. "I will be rich with this."

'So, not an alchemist,' Alex thought. The recipes he had handed were the non-improved versions of the pill, and somehow the man hadn't realized.

"Hehehe, so stupid. So goddamn stupid. That's why you need external experiences too," the man said while almost giggling to himself. "Don't you know that when you give your kidnapper what they want, then they have no reason to keep you alive?"

"What do you me—"

The man pulled a long and thin needle and thrust it at Alex's heart. Alex saw the man move quickly, even to his own eyes. However, he still managed to react and move just slightly enough that the needle instead went a bit away from his heart.

"Huh? Not bad on protecting your heart, but you have to be stupid to think I wouldn't have poison on this needle," the man said.

"I know," Alex said. "And you are definitely stupid to let me do exactly what I have wanted to do this whole time."

Blood burst out of where he was attacked and it wrapped around the needle and the man's hands.

The man tried to let go, but Alex's blood constricted his hand from moving. At the same time, blood poured from all over him as it formed an armor around him, covering not just his chest, but also his face and legs.

"What the hell are you bastard?" the man shouted and tried to pull the needle or even just his hands, but it didn't work.

He then tried to push it instead, but even that didn't work.

His left hand moved as he tried to punch Alex in the head. Alex was slow enough that his punch actually even landed.

However, just because he was slow didn't mean that he was weak. The place where he was struck gave not even a feeling of being hit to Alex as the armor had absorbed all the damage.

At the same time, the blood on his head moved as well. It traveled up the man's left arm, constricting it too in the process.

Then, from his head and his chest, his blood flowed out into the man's body, completely covering him in what looked like a very thin bloody net.

Alex used his blood to straighten the man and keep him steady in the air. He rubbed his chest a little, but the little hole had already been healed.

As for the poison, that was the most useless part of the attack anyway.

"Now that our positions have changed, let me ask some questions," Alex said. "I know you think you're being smart by not giving me what I want, but trust me, that will only make it better for me as I get to enact my revenge one finger at a time."

"First question," Alex said. "Why are you trying to kill me?"

"Go to hell, bastard!" the man said in between grunts.

"Oh, that's not what I wanted to hear."

Instantly, Alex's blood moved and the index finger on the man's left hand came out as easily as a twig on a branch.

The man tried to shout, but Alex used his blood to grasp his throat to keep him from screaming. "I want you to answer me using your spiritual sense now. Why did you come here to kill me?"

The man didn't speak at all. "Okay, I see you love losing fingers then. There goes another one."

The man grunted internally, but he couldn't produce any loud sounds at all. His screams had all been internal.

"Alright, if you don't want to answer that, I have another question," Alex said. "How do you know the Graham Benton?"

The man looked at Alex with anger and fear as he knew that he was going to lose all of his fingers today, and then his life.

Chapter 1076 Jade-Faced

Another finger came off the man and he tried to cry in pain. However, Alex's blood kept his mouth shut by crushing his throat with it.

Alex had the thought of collecting his blood for himself, but after seeing the blood that flowed out of the man, he decided not to.

It had a tinge of green in it after all.

"Tsk, what the hell did you actually do to have such blood? Not to mention your face is so ruined too," Alex said.

The man didn't speak at all, so Alex cut off another one of his fingers. "Do you like pain?" he asked. "Is that why you are remaining silent? Why don't you just answer me so we can be done with this?"

"You won't have an easy death!" the man finally spoke through his spiritual sense.

"Is that what you want to say to me right now?" Alex asked, cutting off another finger. "Just answer the damn question."

"Hehe, you want an answer?" the man asked. "Here is your answer. I was here to kill you because I was s-- se--"

The man's face turned strained. His blood vessels popped and green blood glowed out of the left side of his face that had already rotted to the bone.

"What are you saying?" Alex asked. "Speak clearly."

"S-- se-- se--"

The man's eyes became green with bloodshot, shocking Alex. Alex slowly backed away, not knowing what exactly was happening, but he wanted to stay away from it.

"Se-- se-- sent..."

The man stopped struggling. His eyes looked wide as green blood dripped out of them, and his blood vessel started to soften into his skin.

His entire body stopped moving and even his chest stopped moving. The man had died, just like that.

"He... he's dead?" he questioned. He wasn't sure. He couldn't be, as he had never seen someone die in this fashion. "But how?"

He walked towards the body and touched it. There wasn't a single shred of death aura in his body. This man was nowhere near a dying state and somehow he had died at once.

Alex feared what had caused it and backed away even further. He took back his blood as well and stayed the hell away from the man's body in fear.

"What did he say? Sent?" Alex thought. "He wasn't the one that wanted to kill me? Was he working for someone else?"

Suddenly, he sensed a spiritual sense going over him and turned around in fear. However, a moment later, he sighed in relief as the help he had planned on bringing was here finally.

The Flowerhall Sect's leader, Qiu Hanyu had come by herself, led here by Whisker who was with her. Whisker jumped from her hands and onto Alex after seeing him.

"Thank you for coming here," Alex said with a grateful look.

"You don't have to thank me. I would've wanted to come here on my own anyway," she said. She was naturally worried about Alex after hearing that he had been poisoned.

If she let him die, it would be a massive loss to the entire continent after all. Even her granduncle was relying on him.

"Are you okay? Are you hurt? I see blood on you," she said worriedly.

"It's alright," Alex said. "I've already eaten a healing pill, and I've killed the one that was trying to poison me."

"You killed him?" she asked while turning her head to look at the dead man. Up until now, she was focused on Alex as that had been her main source of concern.

However, now that she could see that he was fine, she turned over to look at the dead man on the ground.

Her eyes went to the green blood around the man before even looking at him. She was surprised and disgusted, but no other reactions came from her.

However, when she looked at the face, her eyes went wide in fear.

She backed off immediately and sent a mound of earth at the body to immediately drag it into the ground. At the same time, she used fire attacks to burn the mound as it heat up and started to solidify, and then melt.

She only took a sigh of relief after she was certain that the dead man's body had burned to nothing.

Alex looked at her curiously due to her reaction. "Do you know that per--"

"Stay away from me!" she shouted. "Eat an antidote pill right now."

Alex was surprised and quickly took out an antidote pill to eat. He didn't know what was going on but understood that the sect leader was worried about being poisoned.

After eating one, he handed another one to her. "Here, you should eat one too if you're so afraid," he said.

The sect leader nodded and ate it without hesitation.

"So you know who that is?" he asked.

"The Jade-Faced Assassin they call him," she said. "He's a master of poison, each of which is so dangerous that it can kill saints and mortals all the same. He is said to be so passionate about poison arts so much that he even tries it on himself."

"He makes sure to eat their antidotes, but the side effects usually remain. His green blood and messed up face are a sign of it," she said. "If you were to remove his golden mask, you would've seen a green face, hence his name, the Jade-Faced assassin."

"He's an assassin of much fame then," Alex said.

"He's very infamous amongst the people with high status as he only goes after people that could be considered high profile, like you," she said.

"He wanted to kill me?" Alex asked. "No wait, he's an assassin. So he took up a job?"

"Yes," she said. "How did you kill him? He should have been strong."

"He was," Alex said. "But he overestimated his poison. I had already taken in antidotes after the last event so his poisons didn't work on me. While he thought his poison was working on me, I managed to get him by surprise and beat him."

"I tried to ask him some questions, but he just died," Alex said.

"Just died? How?" the sect leader asked.

"I'm still confused," Alex said. "He was trying to answer my question saying that he was sent here by someone, but before he could get halfway through it... he... died."

Even as Alex explained what had happened, he realized what must have happened.

"He tried to tell you who sent him? Impossible. People like him are always made to speak oaths so they never tell the truth. The employers never like to be known and the assassins are fine that way too," she said.

"But if he did try to..."

The sect leader's face went blank. "He would die. He would die halfway through while trying to tell you," She said.

"Which is what happened," Alex said blankly. "So his answering me meant his death. That bastard, he answered me just so he could die. I shouldn't have asked him that question at all."

Alex regretted that he didn't ask about his father instead. How the hell would an assassin ever know about his father at all?

'This is hurting my brain,' he thought.

The Heavenly Silkworm's silk thread, the assassin that was infamous even amongst the Saint realms, and the knowledge about his father.

Whoever employed him had to be so rich and powerful that they could have access to all three of those.

'And he wasn't after my pill recipes either, that was just a ruse,' he thought. 'His main objective was to kill me. Why would anyone that powerful would want to kill me?'

Up until now, Alex hadn't done anything that would make it worth killing him. Unless they were an assassin with great jealousy, Alex didn't see anyone employing an assassin just to kill him.

Besides, a normal alchemist didn't even fit the criteria.

The assassin's employer had to be rich and they needed to have connections. However, most of all, they needed to know about him and his father.

'The Alchemy Association's leader doesn't give out my information while having people search for him, and I never search about my own father when I'm at the Insight Pavilion,' he thought.

Then, the only other ones that knew about him and his father, and fit the other criteria were the 10 Council members and their sects and families.

'Someone from that group wants to kill me,' he thought. 'And I need to know why.'

Alex looked at the unsettled Qiu Hanyu and started to get suspicious. 'Is she acting right now? Is she the one who sent him? Is that why she burned the body so quickly so that I don't find any evidence?' he thought.

Both reasonable and unreasonable suspicions grew in his head as he understood the implications of what it meant to be a target of an assassination attempt.

'I will have to be careful at every moment now. I do not know where my enemies are anymore.'

"We should return now," he said and turned around to leave. He knew now that he needed to stay away from anyone, even the 10 elders of the Council, as anyone from there could be his enemy.

'Maybe it's the Huang family,' Alex thought as he walked. 'That makes perfect sense, considering our grudge.'

His oath against that family would have definitely created a grudge that couldn't be quelled so easily, so it was highly likely that they were the ones behind this event.

However, Alex couldn't stop doubting the others. Unless he had concrete evidence as to who it was, he would have to be suspicious of everyone.

'This is going to be annoying now.'

Chapter 1077 The Dark Room

Alex returned to the Alchemy association and went to talk to the leader. He told him what had happened and asked a few questions as to who else knew about his father.

It didn't take long for the leader to come to the same conclusion as Alex that one of the 10 sects and families were trying to have him killed, maybe even multiple ones.

"Go and rest for now. I will let you know when the slots are all filled in. Also, I will increase the security around here," he said.

Alex nodded. He wondered if it was time to let 'Alex' die and live as 'Yu Ming'.

'No, I have way too much going on as Alex to disappear right now,' he thought. 'Father won't find me if I'm gone.'

Alex went to his room with the thoughts still in his head. He couldn't get it out of his head that there was someone out there that wanted him dead.

Once he reached the room, he remembered something and brought out a storage bag from his clothes. He wiped the little blood that was on it and pulled out a talisman from inside of it.

This was the talisman from the Insight Pavilion he was supposed to get monthly. He hadn't checked the one for the previous month, so this was it.

He started reading them one by one and overnight, he was done with it all. He didn't find anything important once again, but reading this gave him another sense of security.

"You people from the big sects and families love asking about me," he thought. "Sooner or later, you will slip up and ask something you weren't supposed to. I will just have to wait for that moment."

He put the talismans back into the bag and went out to get the list of pills.

Within a week, he was once again done making all the pills and got his portion of the sales income as well.

The leader handed him his money and asked, "Do you plan on leaving again? You will have to do it in secret."

"No, I don't think I'll leave now," Alex said. "Not only is it dangerous, but the Orchard is also going to open up soon. I will need to stick around for that."

"I do believe that's a good idea," the leader said. "But are you sure you still want to make pills for the council members? Even while knowing that they might..."

"What else can I do?" Alex asked. "I can't ignore the biggest players in this continent just because one of them might be against me. I can't antagonize them any further, can I?"

"No, you're right. You will have to do this," the leader said. "But you'll have to be very careful. This is much more than just jealousy at play here in my eyes."

"Yes, someone is angry at me for some reason, and I will have to figure out why."

The leader heard that and hesitated a little. "There's another thing you might want to learn about," he said.

"Hmm? What's that?" Alex asked.

"It's been over a month since I've received messages from the investigators I've put on the task of finding your father. None of them had tried to contact me since," he said. "In all likelihood... they may have died as well."

* * * * * *

In a dull room devoid of the most light, a woman walked in with a fearsome gait. She looked around the room and at the table in front of her and slammed on fist on the table lightly.

Even so, the table cracked and the room shook with the sound of the slam.

"What did the table do to you?" a voice spoke from the other side of the room as a figure walked in.

"Nothing," the girl said. "I was just slightly annoyed. I thought I was holding back, but apparently, I was not."

"Hehe, is this the last one?" the man asked.

"I have another from 2 thousand years ago, but it will take some time to reach a level where it can be of use to me," the girl said. "I should try and get more though. The other ones are not working as well anymore. It took a while to kill those people."

"You really are a sly, old bastard," the man said jokingly. "Anyway, what is making you so annoyed?"

The man's hands moved and the table slowly fixed itself, the cracks in the wood slowly disappearing.

"Damn Jade isn't communicating at all," the girl said. "It's been a while since he left to gather information on the target, so he should have returned by now. Instead, he's nowhere to be found."

"Hm? Jade went to gather information?" the man asked with a surprised look. "I wasn't aware of this."

"Well, you were busy cultivating, so the 6 of us decided on our own," the girl said. "You were outnumbered anyway."

"And you sent Jade?" the man asked.

"Of course," the girl replied. "His concealment technique is the best amongst all of us. He's the best at the task."

"That he is, but... he's also unhinged. Do you think he will wait after he sees a target? One that is supposed to be this weak too," the man said.

"It's not like he was attacked," the girl said. "I just read about how the pills were made for the event of this month. The alchemist is fine. Besides, he knows that it is better to have the alchemist say the oath rather than kill him. We just have to force him to stop this search, right?"

"Hmm... call Jade back. We still have enough time before the day when we actually attack him," he said. "If Jade attacks now and the council is alerted, we are doomed."

"Goddammit, I just told you I'm annoyed because he's not contacting us at all," the girl said as she slammed the table, breaking it again. "What the hell do you want us to do?"

The man gave a soft smile and walked forward, dragging his hand along the table whose wood slowly regrew to fix itself.

"If you can't contact Jade, then go and find him. That's a better idea than staying here, don't you think?" the man asked with his gentle voice, but the sound brought terror to the girl's face.

"Fine, fine, stop it," she said and stood up. "I'll go find him, you don't have to get angry."

"Good," the man said. "At the same time, call back the other 4 as well. We can't waste our time going around for random targets. We have a high-profile target with connections to the council. We will have to do this very carefully."

"Got it," the girl nodded and turned around to leave.

"And old man, I need your all on this job," the man said.

"All?" the girl asked with a bit of surprise on her face.

"Yes, all," the man said. "It's the Sundering Sanctum we will be facing. Who knows what sort of obstacle we will be facing there? The more there are of us, the better."

"Fine," the girl said and continued walking.

The man nodded to himself and turned around to go to the room where he had come from.

Chapter 1078 The Orchard Opens

Tiny waves crashed alongside the shore of the lake as pulses of energy flowed out from the center of the lake.

Alex and many others stood by the shoreline, looking at the flower petals and leaves being pushed toward them.

It had been 2 months since he had been a target of assassination. Since then, no one had come to assassinate him, but Alex still stayed in the Alchemy Association the entire time in fear.

He mostly stayed in his room, working on the spiritual root or dao pills, but just as before he was still stuck on a wall, unable to move forward.

Hopefully, that was going to change in the next week.

Today was the day the Forbidden Orchard was going to open, and he was ready to enter.

He was standing by the shore of the Floral lake in the Flowerhall sect.

Next to him were about 24 different people. All of them either belonged to the Flowerhall sect or did at one point in time. If they weren't in the Flowerhall sect, then they were in the Alchemy Association for sure.

About 6 of those 25 were from the Alchemy association and surprisingly, or maybe not that surprisingly, Harry was going to be entering too.

"I swear, Alex, if not for you, I wouldn't have been able to come here at all," he said softly while standing next to him.

Alex smiled and didn't say anything.

After his lessons, Harry practiced for the last year to continuously improve his pill-making skills. As such, he had become one of the fastest up-and-coming alchemists in the association.

Harry was always good as an alchemist, and the only thing he was missing was a fundamental concept of pill-making. Once he got that from Alex, his growth was unstoppable.

Aside from the two, the others weren't as good an alchemist. Instead, they were gardeners that were adept at raising plants as well as recognizing them.

If Alex didn't have the knowledge base in him planted by the Alchemy god's book, these would have been the most exceptional people to enter the orchard today.

On the Flowerhall Sect's side, there were many of their own disciples and a few elders going in. From what Alex could see, all of them were in the True realm, aside from the elders.

'15 and 4,' Alex thought. 'I suppose that's enough elders for a group of disciples.'

From what he had heard, there were a few species of insects inside the Orchard, most of which were butterflies and bees.

They were left alone due to how helpful they were to the ecosystem inside the Orchard.

Aside from them, there were no animals that could threaten any of them at all. All they had to be careful of then were the plants.

Just earlier, the sect leader had given a speech talking about how they had to stay away from the carnivorous plants, plants with lots of vines, and poisonous plants.

"By the way, are you taking part in the competition?" Harry asked. "I feel like I should test myself."

"I don't think I will," Alex said. "Especially against juniors."

It was the first time Alex didn't feel weird calling True realm cultivators juniors. After all, most of these disciples were about 40 years of age, while he was already hitting 50.

"I remember being in their place long ago when the orchard opened. I did get to enter at that time, but I wasn't that interested in learning about ingredients so I could never win the competition," Harry said. "However, now that I have learned a bit, I want to do it."

"You want to compete against these juniors?" Alex asked.

"No, that's why I'm asking you," Harry said. "I want to compete with you."

Alex chuckled a bit. "As long as you won't cry after losing," he said.

"Haha! You've spent so much time learning how to make pills, I doubt you are that good with ingredients," Harry said.

The competition was simple. Once inside, the disciples had to find as many species of plants and identify them and an ingredient that came from them. After identifying, you had to bring back the ingredient as well for proof.

Whoever could record the most and bring back evidence won.

Since the Forbidden Orchard was different from other secret realms, the Flowerhall sect had created a small competition to make the task of gathering ingredients more fun for the disciples.

At the same time, they would be careful about what they were finding and how they would acquire them by having to either look up the information in their books or ask their elders what was assigned to them.

That way, they wouldn't accidentally touch or remove something they weren't supposed to.

The orchard suddenly blasted another round of pollen, sending it flying all around it. The wave of pollen hit Alex and the others as well, but it was blocked by an illusory barrier right before it could touch them.

"Just a few more minutes, and then I can open it," Qiu Hanyu said from the front and turned around.

"So, I assume you all know what you should do and what you shouldn't do, right?" she asked.

Everyone nodded in understanding.

She turned to Alex and said, "I know you have been given full freedom to do whatever you want inside, but please try to leave the plants and trees alone if they are the only species inside. We wouldn't want to lose something that's rare."

"Of course," Alex said. "I will try to be careful about what I take and what I don't."

"No, please take as much as you want. My Granduncle will scold me if I put any more restrictions on you other than that," she said.

After saying that, she reiterated the rules again to the rest of them just in case.

The orchard pulsed for one last time before it started buzzing unnaturally. "It's ready," Harry said softly from next to Alex.

"Let's go, we can open it now," the sect leader said.

Alex flew along with the other 25 people and flew up to the platform at the center of the lake. The platform looked small from afar, but up close, it could fit about 50 people on it without enough room for everyone to do jumping jacks.

The sect leader brought out a sort of medallion and raised it towards the small, silver slit in space that continued to buzz.

Then, the medallion shined and the formation below them activated amplifying the slit in the space, opening it fully.

"Go," the sect leader said. "I will close it after you enter. Be sure to be here in the next 7 days when I will open it again. Don't get lost inside, it will just cost us resources to open it out of time if we have to go in and find you."

The group nodded and one by one, everyone started walking in. Alex's group was the last to walk in.

As soon as he entered, Alex was hit by a wave of fragrance that he would not be able to find anywhere but here. The sweet smell of flowers and fruits was something that threatened to overwhelm his senses.

It was only a moment later that he could focus and ignore the smells.

The slit in space behind him closed, but Alex could feel it still behind him. Not only that, he could feel air slowly being pulled out of the portal as well.

Pollen flew in with the wind, but they were too large to enter the slit that was basically nonexistent at this point.

Slowly, the pollen would gather there for a long time before so much was gathered that it burst through a weakened slit and spread around the lake and city outside.

Alex ignored the slit behind him and looked ahead at the massive hill that was completely filled with flowers, herbs, and shrubs.

He could see a few trees here and there, but mostly the plants didn't grow higher than his waist in height in this location at least.

"Well, good luck to you. I will go work on my list," Harry said and left his side to immediately go further away from the group of juniors that had started gathering and recording ingredients right from in front of them.New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex looked further away and thought of where to go.

"Brother Alex, do you need some help?" one of the four gardeners asked him.

Alex turned around to look at the gardener and shook his head. "It's alright, I am fine on my own. Please don't let my presence disturb you," he said.

"There is no disturbance here," another one said. "Please just let us know and we will help you in finding what you want. We have been here many times before after all."

"Oh, right," Alex said. He needed to take into account that most of these were from the Flowerhall sect after all.

Alex thought for a second and asked the gardeners, "Then, do you happen to know where the poisonous plants are?"

"Uhh, it should be in that direction beyond a mountain," one of them said.

"Why don't I take you there?" another one of them said.

"No, it's alright. Please focus on your work, I can go there myself," Alex said and left. He didn't want anyone by his side to see how good he was with the plants.

After reaching a little further away, Alex brought out Whisker and had him pick the ingredients for him.

This was a perfect time to teach Whisker, so he wasn't going to miss it.

Chapter 1079 How To Pick Your Lily

"Just collect what you know, I will tell you what you missed," Alex said. That was the only way he could think of teaching Whisker at all.

There were simply too many plants here to sit down and start explaining it all one by one. All he could do was give a name and explain about it once they had left the secret realm.

While Whisker collected the ingredients, Alex looked around at the secret realm. He had learned it was large before, but he wasn't aware of just how large it was. He was using his spiritual sense and he couldn't even see the poison plants that were supposed to be beyond the mountain.

Hell, even the mountain was barely in his range, which was beyond the hill he was walking on.

'So big,' he thought. He always knew that the secret realms were large, but the space inside was rarely ever a thing for concern.

However, since this was a space filled with nothing but rare plants, all of which could be an ingredient for some sort of pill.

Alex stopped for a second and looked to his left to find a plant that was a moderately rare ingredient in a healing pill. Since it wasn't that hard to find, Alex didn't have to worry about making it extinct.

The ingredient of the plant that was useful was the roots. The plant outside of the ground itself wasn't that useful at all.

So, with a simple chop of his hand, he cut the plant from the stem. Then, he pushed his straightened hand into the earth and pulled out the clump of roots and dirt that were entangled together.

It would take some time if he were to sit and clean it, so Alex just placed it all into his storage bag without any care. He would rather gather more right now than waste time trying to store it perfectly.

In any case, it wasn't like the loss of energy in the plants was going to affect his pills in any way.

He continued walking through the pathway, gathering only the Saint-ranked ingredients. Whisker was gathering everything he could find as in a way this was a test to see how he could do.

Alex told him the names of various plants that he wasn't aware of before. It took him nearly 15 minutes before he was up the hill. When he finally reached it, he couldn't help but be awed by what he was seeing.

Beyond the hill was a wide array of ecosystems. There was another patch of plants just like the ones he had crossed before. At the feet of the hill was a flowing river, and beyond the river was a forest that was full of flowers and fruits.

Beyond that, Alex could see a giant mountain that was one of many that staggered around the secret realm. Some of those mountains even had some ice on the top.

Alex turned around and looked at where he had come from. He had asked about the poison area and had been pointed in this direction. So, he hadn't given much thought to the other directions.

However, now that he was looking at it, the secret realm went as far on the other side as it did on this side.

And each and every single patch of land he could see was filled with trees or flowers.

Alex turned around and walked down the hill. His first course of action was obviously to find the Corrosive Willow tree. Once he had found that, he could take his time going anywhere.

He was only making it down the hill for half a minute before his eyes fell on something. "Woah!" he shouted in surprise. "Spirit Cleansing Lily!"

He had been told that there was Spirit Cleansing Lily available in this city before buying Harry, but for some reason, he hadn't been expecting to find it.

He looked around him more carefully and he found dozens of these flowers that were simply there, waiting to be plucked.

Whisker walked up to the flower and looked around. "How do I pick this flower?" he asked. He remembered using these flowers 2 times after his intelligence had increased by a certain amount.

"I don't know," Alex said. He could exactly which flower he was supposed to pick, but he could not help Whisker pick it by himself as Alex didn't know how he did it.

Alex had always just done it based on a feeling. Was there even a real way?

'Is there any information in my head?' Alex wondered. He had never actually checked for the Spirit Cleansing Lily once the knowledge base in his head was unlocked for him after entering the Saint realm.

"Let's see…" he read through the information before landing up on the answer that he so desperately wanted.

"Oh, you use your spiritual sense?" Alex couldn't help but be surprised. He was taken aback by the revelation of how one could pick Spirit Cleansing Lily.

"Spiritual sense?" Whisker asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Apparently you scan the flowers with your spiritual sense as deep as you can. On one of the flowers, you will notice an abnormality because of the existence of an energy that the others don't. If you're good enough, you will notice it and be able to find out exactly what you need to pick."

"Oh," Whisker said and started looking through the flowers. At the same time, Alex tried to understand how he was doing it back when he didn't have spiritual sense the first time he had gathered these.

'No, I'm looking at it wrongly,' Alex thought. 'The important part here isn't that you can sense the energy with your spiritual sense, but rather there is energy in there. It's likely that the Intent hidden in me was searching for that.'

Energy… Alex wondered if that worked as well.

Suddenly, his purple pupils widened as the focus in his eyes changed. At the same time, his vision was filled with a multitude of colors that became hard to distinguish immediately.New n0vel chapters are published on

There were just too many plants around him and their energy were mixed together quite well. Alex got closer to the flower and ignored everything but the flowers.

After a bit of luck, he could see the flowers without much obstruction from the other energies in which case he saw what he had wanted.

Most of the flowers had a very dim and vague white color to them. It was the color of energy that had no elements in it. However, one of the flowers had a very bright white color that threatened to outshine every other flower in the group.

"Is this the flower?" Whisker asked, pointing at the one Alex was looking at right now.

Alex smiled. "Yep, that's the one," he said.

Whisker got happy and noted down the flower before taking it for himself. The rest of the flowers on the flower bed did not wilt immediately. That meant that Alex and Whisker had gotten it correct and were thus able to pick the Spirit Cleansing Lily without anyone else's help.

"Do you want to keep it?" Alex asked Whisker who was putting the flower into the storage bag that was tied to his chest.

Whisker nodded and put it in.

"Do you know who you will give it to?" Alex asked.

"To brother's father," Whisker said. "After we find him."

Alex unintentionally let out a wide smile. "Thank you, Whisker."

They then went around the hill trying to find other Spirit Cleansing Lilies. It would be best to have 3 or more of them at all times.

After half an hour of collecting what they could, Alex and Whisker got down from the hill and flew across the river, arriving in front of the forest.

There were flowers and fruits that covered the trees in the forest, so both he and Whisker got to collecting everything they could.

He slowly made his way toward the mountain on the other side, but in the process, he stripped the trees clean of anything worth stripping.

He found fruits, leaves, bark, sap, seeds, wood, root, and other various things that could help him with his alchemy.

Whisker ran about the trees, collecting as many things as he could as well, while Alex explained to him when he didn't recognize something.

Butterflies flew with the wind while bees buzzed all around him. He could see beehives all over the place and knew that some of this honey was definitely going to be useful.

He found some easy-to-harvest honey that was made by the bees directly on the inside of a tree. The ones that hung by the tree were not something he could harvest as they would include him having to destroy them due to his lack of idea on how to harvest them exactly.

At least they still had a place to go back to in the trees even if he did take away most of the honey.

Alex spent so much time in the forest gathering the various stuff that it was dark by the time he was ready to go out of it.

The sun had set below the mountains so he was walking in shadows right now. He walked up the mountain that was also full of trees, but not as much as the forest below it.

He took what he could from there and arrived at the peak of the mountain a while later. Then, he looked down from it and saw an expanse of flatlands.

And just as he had been told, the Poisonous plants were in the flatlands, below the mountain.

Chapter 1080 Finding Willow

Alex flew down the mountain, letting Whisker gather whatever he could on the mountain itself. Whisker didn't have Alex's poison resistance, so he would most likely die just entering the field around the plants.

He could have waited for Whisker to finish before taking him in as well, but he was here for one thing and he wanted to complete it as soon as he could.

He arrived next to the field of poisonous plants and immediately sent his spiritual sense out all around him to search for the one thing he was here for.

A moment later, he smiled as he saw it.

The Corrosive Willow.

"Well, that was easy," Alex thought. He stepped into the stale, pungent air that was full of poisons and toxins and made his way toward the plant that was far away. He picked what he could from around him, but he didn't stop on his path toward the willow.

Rather, he didn't stop on his path toward the willows. There were multiple of them scattered around the field, and Alex was going to go through at least a third of them and strip it clean.

He could imagine the money he would be making if he sold the Earth's spiritual root-improving pill to the world. It wouldn't sell as well as a Saint rank pill likely would, but for what it would cost him, it would sell phenomenally.

Alex finally arrived in front of the dead-looking tree with no flowers at all. Its bark was corrosive, and the sap it produced was even more poisonous.

So, he took out Midnight and started carving the tree to collect the very same bark.

Midnight had an amazing edge. It wasn't as good as the strongest sword he had previously, but it was definitely better than everything else. Not only had his Dao of sharpness and cutting helped improve its edge, but also the tiny soul inside of it was helping it be even sharper.

Alex stripped the tree clean and placed everything into his storage ring. Once done, he went for another one that was not far away.

He only stopped collecting it after going through 5 of such trees.

He held a piece of the bark in his hand and closed his eyes. He sensed the energy in it and especially its internal structure to see how it was.

"I see," he thought. "So it was that type of ingredient. Hmm, it should be much easier to make the Saint rank pill now."

At the very least, Alex was certain that within the next year, he would have completely made the Saint rank earth pill. Maybe he would even be halfway done with the Water pill as well.

He happily put the last fragment of the bark into his storage and started gathering the other ingredients. The poisonous section of the secret realm was something no one really wanted to come to, so it was overflowing with ingredients that he could take back with him.

After spending no less than 6 hours in there, he finally left the field. He walked back towards Whisker, while constantly sending pulses of Yang Qi throughout his body to make sure the poisons around him were no longer there.

Whisker had already gone somewhere a little further away in the last 6 hours, so Alex had to fly for a little longer to reach him.

Just as he was flying, he heard a cry from down below him.

Alex looked down to see an elder from the sect being attacked by some sort of plant that was full of vines.

It was grabbing the elder, dragging him, lashing at him, and even going as far as to rip him in two.

Alex swooped down from the sky and slashed the vines before turning towards the plant. The plant withdrew all of its vines after being attacked and no longer tried to fight.

"Are you okay?" Alex asked the elder.

"Y-yes, I'm fine," the elder said with heavy breaths. "Thank you for saving me, brother Alex."

"Leave now, don't stand around here," he said. "Also, focus on where you are and what you are doing. Use your spiritual sense before going anywhere just in case. You never know what sort of plants you might come across."

"Yes," the elder said before looking through his storage bag. "Brother Alex, do you have any poison-removing pills?"

"Poison?" Alex asked and looked back at the vine plant. Was that plant a poison plant too? He learned what it was and then learned more about it.

'Ah, it has a slight toxin,' he thought. 'It should only numb his legs for a while, but I suppose he had disciples to look after.'

Alex brought out a simple antidote pill and handed it to the elder. "Eat it, and leave from here," he said.

"Thank you," the elder said and ate his pill.

Alex flew away to go meet up with Whisker, leaving the elder behind. The elder slowly stood up and dusted himself off before looking in Alex's direction.

A small smirk appeared on his face and he took out a talisman to write something.

"Target is either used to dealing with poison or has been recently conditioned to. It is possible that Jade had gone out of his way to contact the target, maybe even kill him. It is possible that he was dealt with, which is why he's been missing for the last 2 months."

Once the elder wrote that down, he put away the talisman and started walking away from the place he had purposefully come to.

Alex met up with Whisker a bit further away and started gathering the ingredients himself. Since he had found the thing he had come looking for, all he needed to do was wait for the portal to open so he could go back.

Of course, he wasn't going to just wait around. He was thrown into a gold mine, and the last thing he was going to do was try and get out immediately.

Alex and Whisker, together, went around gathering so many ingredients in such little time, that Alex wondered if he ever had this many ingredients with him, ever.

Just a day's harvest here outshined a month's work back in the Beast's realm when he was trying to find the other demon realm.

Alex's days were filled with satisfaction, with the occasional dashes of disappointment.

He would be extremely happy gathering the many ingredients from one place and moving on to the other to do the same. But, from time to time, he would come across places that people had been through already.

While they would still have left ingredients behind just because they didn't know they were ingredients, it wasted quite a bit of his time.

As the days passed by, this would continue to increase, and that frustrated Alex.

It had been 3 days since they had entered the secret realm and he was still continuing to collect the ingredient. Whisker went in and out of his beast space to rest, but Alex hadn't gotten the chance to.

"I should rest too," he thought to himself. He decided on settling down at the next location and cultivating for a while. It had been some days since he had cultivated, so that was a good idea.

He saw an opening in the forest he was in, beyond which it was all a patch of grassland. He made his way in that direction, but suddenly, he stopped.

His eyes moved slowly to the right of where he was and he couldn't help but be shocked.

"No way!" he thought.

He quickly ran towards what he saw and stood in front of it with wide eyes. In front of him were two plants that were entwined into a single one.

There was a tree made of wood; thick, robust, and sturdy. It was not very big, but it was strong and that was all it needed to be.

Then there was a climber; thin, flimsy, and weak. The climber plant was too weak to grow without any support, but that was why there was a sturdy tree.

Surprisingly, the two plants grew from the same root, and most likely the same seed.

The two plants mixed with each other, and both of their leaves were the same as well. At the end of a branch where a climber ended as well, there grew a creamy white fruit with a lot of white dots all over it.

Alex looked in awe at the plant and the fruit. He remembered seeing this plant long ago, but that wasn't his main thought at the moment.

His main source of awe and focus was the fruit he was looking at.

"The Divine Devil's Fruit," he thought. He would have never guessed that he would ever be able to see something like this. He would have expected that he could only see it after he went to the hegemonies where Shen Jing grew it.

'A Divine Devil's fruit,' Alex thought in awe. 'Another Demonic Plant's descendant.' He had never personally eaten the fruit himself, but he had seen both pearl and his mother eat it.

The Mortal Cleansing once went through after eating this was very much worth it in his eyes.

"I should take it for everyone else," Alex thought to himself. There were nearly 20 different fruits on the tree, but Alex knew that just as there was a trick to picking a Spirit Cleansing Lily, there was a trick to picking the Divine Devil's fruit as well.

If he ignored it and picked the fruit regardless, he would end up destroying it.

Chapter 1081 World Defying

The Divine Devil's fruit wasn't as bad as the Spirit Cleansing lily in terms of difficulty on when and how to pick it.

The how part was incredibly simple. You just picked it like any other fruit. There was no specific way on how to pick it, just when.

For a Divine Devil's fruit to be usable, you must pick it when it is between 120 years and 123 years old. Any fruit picked out of that range was useless.

If picked too early, you would end up with something that would actually poison you. That was what had happened to the city lord's mother. If not for him having accidentally made a pill that could help her sweat out the filth in her body, she would've forever been in a coma.

If picked too late, however, while you would still end up with a useless fruit when it came to Mortal Cleansing, you could plant it to grow a new Divine Devil's plant and grow more fruit.

If it were a place with constant visits, one could keep track of all the fruits that grew in there and figure out when one should pick them. However, due to the nature of this place, no one could keep track of anything at all.

That was considering they even knew it.

Alex went next to one of the black and white fruit and placed his hand on it. Thanks to the knowledge he had, he could easily figure out how old the fruit was.

'39 years,' he thought and left the fruit. That was too young to be of any use. '159 years, I can plant this somewhere outside.'

He took the fruit and stored it before moving on to the next one.

After 3 such more fruits, he finally found one that was 121 years old. "Nice," he thought and picked it, storing it separately from the rest.

He went through the rest as well and found 3 more that you could eat and about 7 that you could plant. Even if he found ones that could not be eaten, Alex would've considered his current findings an absolute win.

He note down the rest of the fruits and their years in a talisman so that he could give it to others that would benefit from it. Why waste such a treasure after all?

Once he was done, he and Whisker left the forest and moved to the grassland outside where he sat down to cultivate.

Alex cultivated until the sun was part of the way into the sky. It had been more than 8 hours since he stopped and so he was now on the move again, to find different ingredients and treasures.

He met up with a few different people along the way and grimaced when he saw the lack of ingredients in the area.

He went to some other place and found other ingredients.

One such place was a flower field that grew many different types of flowers. However, there was a single flower there that caught Alex's eye.

"Wait, is that?"

He quickly ran up to it and as he did its scent hit him. "It really is," he said excitedly. "Whisker look, it's the Soul Elucidating Tulip."

The Soul Elucidating Tulips was a flower whose scent would cause one to lose their normal thought process, trancing one to think about something for a very long time.

It was the flower that made Dao mountain what it was.

Alex learned about the flower and realized that the scent wasn't the only thing that could force one to learn a dao. Even consuming the flower petals would force one to do the same, perhaps with a stronger effect as well.

If Alex could add some other ingredients to it to enhance its effect, it was most likely that he could make the Dao pill that the 10 council members had asked of him.

It would be very helpful if he could do that.

He started collecting the various flowers that were spread all around the field along with Whisker. He found hundreds of such flowers and was incredibly happy.

Once he got everything he wanted, he left that area as well.

Another few days passed and the day had come for the secret realm to open again. Alex needed to finish what he could here and make his way towards the center where the gate would open.

He had collected what he could already. He had been to the end of the river where he found various different flowers and fruits with Water Qi in them.

He had been to a rather rocky location where he found ingredients with Earth Qi in them. These would all be of extreme help to him in making the ingredients for the two pills in the next few months.

Alex looked around the field where he was in and shook his head in disappointment. There was barely anything here at all.

"Come on Whisker, we need to leave," Alex said. Whisker grumbled a bit, asking for a few more minutes so he could gather what remaining ingredients were here before they could leave.

Alex nodded and helped him with the task. After doing what they could, they started making their way back toward the gate.

The path back wasn't that long. It was just two mountains away. Alex and Whisker crossed the river to get to the first mountain. Once crossing the river, there was a small but thick forest with tall trees full of leaves.

He checked the area with his spiritual sense to see what was left behind by those that had come here before him. As he expected, there were still many things here that the people simply didn't know were an ingredient.

Heck, even he himself didn't know what sort of pills those ingredients could help in. All he knew was that they would.

"Should we stop by?" Alex asked. Whisker nodded, but Alex wasn't sure if he wanted to. There was no time to waste as the secret realm's gate would open at any time.

"Let me check if there is anything worth taking. If there is, we will get it, otherwise, we leave," Alex said to Whisker, but it was mostly for himself.

His spiritual sense spread around the forest, searching for anything of value. There were other spiritual senses that passed him in this time, some most likely wondering why he wasn't leaving, but Alex ignored them for the moment.

"I can't seem to find anything that's so good that we have to stop," Alex said to Whisker who was sitting inside his robes. "I think it will be better to just—"

He stopped. He had noticed something that was... well, he wasn't sure.

"What is that?" he thought. There was something in him that moved him towards this thing, surprising himself. It had been a while since his feeling for an ingredient had been this bad. He thought he was jaded to it by now, but it seemed he was not.

Of course, it would be stupid to think a mere Saint realm cultivator like him could overpower the intent of someone that was called a god.

Alex slowly floated down to check on it. He arrived next to a massive tree with roots that came out of the ground. The tree was thick and alive, not that he cared about that at the moment. It was not the tree that was calling him either, but something growing on it like parasites.

Mushrooms.

Along the bottom of the tree, a place where sunlight barely fell and the mist from the river constantly flowed in, there was a mossy patch on the tree and the ground where many pure white mushrooms were growing.

It was certainly a surprise for him that something like this was even growing. After all, the description that was given for it in his head was way too ridiculous to trust at all.

According to the information, the mushroom was called a World Defying Mushroom. The name was grand for something like a mushroom, but if what he was learning was correct, then it was definitely deserving of that name.

A World Defying Mushroom was an ingredient that could be used in any and every pill-making session. The mushroom itself wasn't an ingredient, but it could be used nonetheless.

The mushroom had no elemental energy of its own, but it could copy others. Like a blank canvas, it could take an ingredient and copy its energy to become just like the ingredient.

That alone was a terrifying ability, making the mushroom incredibly useful as it could copy ingredients that were very, very rare. However, there was only so much energy it could transform itself to, and even if it could copy ingredients, it couldn't do so for very long.

After a while, it would lose energy and end up as a useless item. Aside from that, there was also the problem of the mushroom having a different composition which made the recipes not work anymore.

But, there was something else it could do that was incredible. Since the mushroom was capable of copying energy, it could copy finalized energy too.

That was to say, at the end of a pill-making session, if the ingredients used were of poor quality, you could put one of these into the cauldron, and suddenly you would have additional energy floating around, all created by the mushroom.

As long as you kept the mushroom's powder separate, you could collect the energy onto the pill, gaining a very much successful pill with a very high harmony.

Any alchemist would kill to be able to get that.

Chapter 1082 Picking Mushrooms

Alex couldn't wait to take all of the mushrooms that were there. There were hundreds of them scattered around the tree and even further around the forest which was giving him an incredible sense of happiness.

Now, even if he hadn't improved the ingredients itself, he could still make a pill that could most likely bring forth the pill clouds.

"I should be leaving quick, so I can't waste my time anymore," he thought and grabbed the closest mushroom to pick it. However, just as he grabbed it, the mushroom suddenly turned murky white in color and adopted patches of yellow and black all over it.

Alex stepped backward in surprise. "What the hell?" he thought. "Why did it suddenly change color?"

He understood that the mushroom could copy energy from other ingredients, but that should have been it right? Could it copy from a cultivator as well after coming into contact with them?

"The color doesn't make any sense though," he thought. "My Qi has no elemental attribute to it. Or is it actually taking the Yin and Yang energy that is mixed into my Qi separately? Can it even do that?"

The information on the uses of the pill had nothing about it, so Alex went on to look at the rest of the information it had.

More accurately, the way to pick it without ruining it.

"Oh, I see," he thought with a blank look on his face. As unique as the mushroom was, the way to pick it was also equally unique.

First of all, you were absolutely not allowed to touch it by hand, even less using your Qi. You needed to use items that did not have any sort of energy in them.

Artifacts were out of the list of things you could use as they mostly contained Qi. Instead, you could use normal tools, especially ones created by mortals using metals that weren't affected by Qi.

As long as you could use something that was not affected by any Qi or the 7 elements, you were fine. As for after actually picking it, there was less threat as the mushroom went dormant unless kept around something that had a lot of energy.

Alex frowned a little. 'Do I even have anything like that?' he wondered. The answer was obviously no.

He couldn't use his hands or Qi as they were affected by the yin and yang in his body, and similarly, Midnight couldn't be used as well as it was affected by yin as well.

There was no tool with him he could really use, but thankfully, he didn't need tools.

His hand moved as the dao of cutting took over it. At the same time, he manipulated space to use it alongside the Dao of space to make a small separation of space that moved along, separating the other things in its path.

The distance Alex could send this wasn't very high, and it also took more out of him mentally due to having to use two dao together, instead of one after another.

However, doing that helped him correctly cut the mushroom by its stem and he now had a pure white mushroom.

Alex hesitated to grab it in fear that he might ruin it again, but what use was that fear when the Alchemy God's knowledge had told him it would not?

He grabbed the now cut-off mushroom and looked at it. "Truly world-defying," he thought. He wondered what sort of energy structure an ingredient of this type must have, so he used his Dao to check the energy composition in the mushroom.

Alex's eyes opened wide in shock when he learned the answer.

Nothing. The was no energy in there that he could check.

His brows raised in shock, but the shock wasn't there because the mushroom didn't have any energy in it. That could never be true after all. Everything in this world had energy, this one just wasn't one of the 7 elemental energies he could easily check.

However, there weren't that many things with this sort of lack of energy types. In fact, he could name only 3 other ones, and with the addition of this mushroom, the list had grown to 4.

"The Three Demonic Plants," he thought as his eyes became the widest they had in a very long time. "I found another descendant of the Three Demonic Plants."

Alex was sure of it. This made his discovery here even more worth it.

"I wonder which one of the four shares a common ancestor," he thought. Since there were 4 of them, there had to be a common thread for at least two of them.

The four plants he was talking about were obviously the Spirit Cleansing Lily, the Divine Devil's fruit, the World Defying Mushroom, and finally, the seed of the World Tree."

'They do share the word 'world' in them, so maybe that's the one,' Alex thought. He looked at the mushroom in his hand with awe on his face that had grown even more now.

"Oh no, I should probably keep you," he thought and stored the mushroom in a separate storage bag. As it was now, he didn't dare keep them in the same place as the other ingredients which was his storage ring.

Alex cut off a few more of the mushrooms and stored them as well. "Sigh, it's going to take a while," he thought. "I hope I make it in time."

He cut off some more and stored them as well. After doing this for a while, he stopped at one point as he held the mushroom in his hands.

"Will it ruin with just being in my hand?" he wondered. Since he had to use Qi to put it in and out of the storage bag, he wondered if that would affect it at all.

A minute passed, but nothing changed at all. He was safe with keeping the mushroom as after it was separated from its roots, it wasn't as harsh to the surrounding.

"My palms must not be releasing that much Qi," he thought and looked at his own hands. His vision changed slightly as his Demon Eyes worked to show him barely any black and yellow colors moving in his arm.

'There's not much here,' he thought. Even the surrounding didn't have much energy, which was most likely why it thrived here.

Right then, they sensed someone coming closer and quickly turned around to look at who it was.

"Brother Alex, what are you doing here? You should be leaving," the man said.

"Oh, hey harry," Alex said. "Yeah, I should be leaving. Just give me a few minutes."

Alex saw the green, blue, and dull brown colors floating around Harry and was worried that he would affect the mushroom with his presence.

"What are you even doing here?" Harry asked. "Are you picking those mushrooms, brother Alex?"

"Yes, that is what I'm doing," Alex said.

"Let me help you," Harry said and moved forward but Alex stopped him.

"I will do it on my own," Alex said.

"Okay then," Harry said. "Ah right, how're your ingredients coming along? I hope you're taking our competition seriously. I will be angry if you weren't."

"No, I'm doing my share of the task," Alex said. He wasn't picking any mushrooms at the moment as he couldn't show his cutting dao or his space dao.

"Ah, great then," Harry said. "Finish this quickly, I'll go out and wait for you."

Harry started to leave, but Alex spoke quickly. "Wait, there's something I have to ask you," he said.

"Oh? What is it brother Alex?" Harry asked.

"Actually, I'm still a bit confused about the Composition and Structure you were telling me about beforehand. Do you think you can teach me some more about it once we leave?" he asked.

"Oh sure," Harry said. "Anything you want, brother Alex. But we really should be leaving soon."

Alex nodded. Then, he attacked.

Harry didn't realize when Alex moved, only when he struck. His chest felt a sudden pain from the strike and in the next instance, he was nowhere near where he was in the forest.

He was somewhere on the other side of the river outside the forest and Alex was with him, his hand still in contact with his chest.

Harry fell back in pain and struggled to stand up straight with the incredible amount of pain his face showed. "What the hell, brother Alex? Why did you attack me?" he asked.

"I was trying to kill you, but it seems you are stronger than you appear to be," Alex said as he brought out midnight. He was sad that he couldn't use his blood aura, but that might have alerted him to his intentions.

That and he had to get away from the mushroom before the fight broke out so he didn't affect the mushrooms by the aura around him.

"Kill me? But why?" Harry asked with a frustrated look on his face. "I thought of you as my brother."

"Stop the act," Alex said. "Who are you exactly? An assassin? Are you friends with the Jade-Faced Assassin?"

Harry's eyes shined slightly when he heard the information, but his face never gave away the pained expression. "What? No, I'm Harry," he said. "Have you gone mad, brother Alex?"

"You fell for my question," Alex said. "It was I who taught Harry, not the other way around. You can drop the act, you've been found out."

Harry's pained face suddenly disappeared as he stood straight with a smirk on his face. He spread his arms wide as if in surrender.

"Congratulations, you got me."

Chapter 1083 Battle Against The Unknown Man

Alex tightened his grip around Midnight, ready to strike at any moment. His opponent, however, seemed rather lax even though he was standing there with a sword.

"I must admit, I never thought I would be caught by you, that too so early on," the man said. "I was planning on sticking with you for a year at the very least."

Alex's eyes narrowed when he heard that. 'For a year? He wasn't planning to assassinate me?' he wondered. Regardless, he was going to get some answers.

"Tell me, what did I do wrong?" the man asked, still looking and sounding like Harry. "Surely you didn't randomly ask me the question. Something must have made you suspicious."

"Harry doesn't call me brother Alex. He just says Alex, like every back in our homeland," Alex said.

The man's eyes widened. "That's it? That was all that took to give me away?" he asked in shock. "No way! You're lying."

"That, and the fact that you have a Water spiritual root. Harry doesn't have that," he said. The blue aura around him when he first showed up had made Alex suspicious.

"You can tell I have a water spiritual root? How?" the man asked.

"How about I ask some questions instead?" Alex said. "Who are you and why are you after me?"

"I can't go around giving away my identity," the man smiled. "As for why I'm after you, I was given the task to observe you, and find out more about you, so we can use it in due time."

"Are you an assassin? Like the Jade Faced assassin," Alex asked.

"How do you know about him?" the man asked. "He wasn't supposed to have shown himself."

Alex kept quiet, not daring to answer him.

"Did you kill him? Considering you know who he is, I will assume that you managed to kill him," the man said. "Well, that idiot deserves it. He must've tried to kill you. He's very impulsive, you know. He was supposed to be observing, but instead, I have to take over his job."

The moment he said that Alex realized that he was an assassin as well and moved. He struck the man with his sword, slashing right in front of his chest.

The man's cultivation base suddenly increased, reaching the Saint Core realm in an instant. It went even higher and stopped increasing after ending on the Saint Core 6th realm.

He placed his hands up and caught Midnight by the flat side using his two palms. "Woah! Woah! Don't go attacking someone so suddenly," the man said. "I'm not your enemy, at least not yet."

"You are an assassin," Alex said. "You will die all the same."

The man tried to pull away Alex's sword, but he found that hard. Instead, he was forced back as the sword suddenly glowed in black light and Alex used the God-Rending Death Blade skill in his sword.

The black flash of light struck the man on his chest, tearing his robes, and revealed the armor that was inside of it. The armor had some signs of damage from the attack he had just taken.

"Shit!" the man cried out as he moved backward. "You really do plan on fighting me, huh? I suppose since you've seen me, I must fight back as well. At the very least, I can't let you tell the others what I am up to."

"Who sent you? Who wants you to kill me?" Alex asked.

"I'm not telling you." The man smiled and pulled out a spear of his own. "Killing you is not our priority, but that's not out of the option."

"Who is we?" Alex asked.

"We are the Dark Phoenix," the man said. "The one and only."

Alex was surprised that he was so readily revealing the information when he was hiding everything else.

The man looked around the secret realm. "Well, it is not really the ideal place, but I suppose this will have to do. It's better than the outside world anyway," he said.

Suddenly, the man moved as his spear struck out an attack where 100 different illusory spears came flying at him.

Alex sent out a Yang palm with his left hand but quickly realized that it was too weak. The man's cultivation base was just too strong for him to take the man out with common ways.

Thinking this, his blood poured out of his body, forming a protective armor around him. Dozens of spears landed on him, but only a few of them actually hurt.

The rest was blocked by the armor.

Blood poured out from the cuts where he was hit, but even that healed quickly. As for the blood, it entered the armor, reinvigorating it.

The man looked with shock and a little bit of disgust in his eyes. "What the hell is that?" he asked. He had never seen one use blood aura at all.

"Your demise," Alex said and dashed forward. He teleported next to the man, surprising him again, and attacked. The man moved his spear as well, striking straight ahead.

Alex saw the spear come at him, and with it, a wave of Spear Qi that was coating it. He moved his head to the side barely enough to dodge the attack and his sword which was enhanced by his blood landed on the man's chest.

Alex felt the armor crack even more as the man was sent flying to the left. He stopped a few dozen of meters away before grabbing his chest on the left with a pained expression.

"Why the hell are you so strong?" the man grunted in pain. Never in his wildest dream was the man expecting Alex to be this strong at all.

However, instead of getting an answer, he was hit with another attack.

An explosion appeared behind him, sending the robes on his back to tatters, while propelling him forward, toward Alex's sword.

He struck out with his own spear that was filled with Water Qi. A water serpent flew out from his spear, attacking Alex, but Alex used the dao of cutting to slice the serpent into two while moving to attack the man in front.

The sword and spear clashed, and the man felt the weight of Alex's attack. It wasn't just his attack that had weight to it, but his sword itself was heavy as well.

This was not there on their first clash.

'I thought he was just supposed to be an alchemist,' the man thought.

Alex struck a few more times with his sword, forcing the man to move further and further back. Then, he slashed from the top, making the man either have to block or dodge entirely.

Going with the flow of the fight, the man decided to stop. The sword clanged on the man's spear shaft which was fully made up of metal. The attack was heavy, but he was somehow stopping it for now.

However, he noticed something wrong all of a sudden. There was a sudden burst of hot air hitting his face, even though there was no fire around him. It was only a moment later that he felt the heat with his own hand.

It was only then that he realized that Alex was heating the metal of his spear and that too at an incredible rate.

Alex pulled back his sword and struck again. Only this time his sword grew to an incredible size that blotted out the sun in the man's vision.

It struck down very hard while the man was still focused on the heat of his spear. The sword slammed the spear and suddenly broke it in two.

"NO!" the man shouted as the sword slammed onto him as well, sending him crashing onto the ground. The man created a small crater from which he pulled his greatly hurt body.

He looked at Alex in the sky, now with fear very visible in his eyes. He had thought that with the difference in their cultivation base he would be free to do anything, however, he was only now that he was realizing the cost of that assumption.

'I need to leave and let them know about this monster,' he thought, his chest bleeding profusely from the cracks in his armor. Just then, something dropped to his left with a slam that shook the ground.

Then, something else dropped to his right. And then to the front, to the back, and 3 more all around him.

The man quickly checked with his spiritual sense, only to be surprised and struck with more fear.

There were now 7 crimson beasts all around him, all with an aura that screamed dangerous to him, and they were all looking at him.

Alex came from the top and looked down at him in his crimson armor that reeked of blood to the assassin.

The man looked around and was quickly face to face with the truth that there was no running. The only thing he could do here and fight and kill Alex, or die trying. He wasn't ready to die trying.

"No, no, no," he started saying softly. "It's not supposed to go like this. I wasn't supposed to be fighting you, I'm only here to observe."

The man was losing it as he faced death on a day that was supposed to be conflict-free.

"You must have spoken an oath as well, so I won't ask you much," Alex said. "Just tell me what you can, and I might just let you live as a cripple."

The man almost spilled everything, but his oath forced him to hold back. He could push against this force, but it would end up killing him instead.

It was death by Alex, or death by his Oath. he saw no other way out of here alive. If he was going to be dead either way, he would die a third way.

He smiled a crazy smile as he said, "I guess this is all I can do."

Then, he exploded.

Chapter 1084 Core Explosion

Qiu Hanyu tapped her shoes on the floor of the stone platform with impatience. She looked at the 23 people beside her and couldn't help but be even more frustrated the longer it went.

"Just where the hell are they? Did they forget?" she asked. Her annoyance made the other people not want to answer just so they wouldn't be caught in her anger.

Harry looked around and through the open door that lead to the secret realm and was a little worried. 'Where is he?' he wondered.

It wasn't just Alex that was missing, there was one of the four people from the Alchemy association that had entered with them as well but had yet to come out.

The sect leader entered the portal for a second and spread her spiritual sense all around to check on Alex and the other person, but no matter how far she spread it, neither Alex nor the other person was in her vicinity.

With the lack of knowledge of where they were, she couldn't even go away to check it. She especially couldn't because she was the only one capable of opening the gate on the outside. If she were to be stuck here, it was likely that they would forever be stuck in this land.

She walked back out and checked the remaining period of time before the gate closed. "Just 2 more minutes," she said. "Goddamn, these two. They better not make me have to open the gate afterward."

She waited for a minute more when suddenly she noticed something. There was a violent change in aura somewhere in the secret realm that she could sense.

It wasn't just her. All the saints that were standing there could feel it.

"Someone's fighting," she said with a darkened expression. "Are those two in a fight?"

She wanted to go in and check, but the portal was going to close at any moment now.

"I'll go in and check," Harry said.

The sect leader frowned for a bit and nodded. "We'll have to open the gate anyway it seems. You should—"

Suddenly, a massive sound came from inside that shook the very space around them. The ground shuddered and so did the cultivators standing on it.

The True realm cultivators fell to the ground in fear at the aura that was just released, and even the elders couldn't help but show shock on their faces.

"That…" the sect leader spoke with eyes wide open. "That was a Core Explosion! Someone exploded their Golden Core."

If someone had to go so far as to explode their golden core, then things were serious. And if someone was caught in the vicinity, she didn't expect anyone to be able to make it out alive after that.

They all stood in shock, unable to say a word, and in their shock and hesitancy, the gate closed.

The sect leader finally spoke. "Get everyone out of here," she said in a serious tone. "I will have to go in and check."

* * * * * * * *

All colors from around the man vanished all of a sudden as it was consumed by the man's body. Alex saw the shift in color and was surprised, wondering what he had just done.

However, at the next moment, his vision exploded with color again, horribly bright color.

Alex felt the shockwave hit him the moment he saw the color. Before he could do anything else, the remainder of the explosion hit him.

The blast shot Alex into the sky, half dazed, half unconscious. Terrible pain flared all over his body with even Alex unsure of where they originated.

A few seconds later, he hit the ground with a massive impact, creating a small crater.

Alex tried to move his body, but all he could do was involuntarily cough up blood. He tried to move his arm, but neither of his arms was there with him.

His right leg was torn from the knee as well.

He used his spiritual sense to check the rest of the damage and was horrified by what he saw.

Aside from the missing limb, his skin was in tatters, even muscles destroyed, with bones showing in some places like his chest.

His nose was completely destroyed with the skins on his face split at various different places, bleeding profusely.

He couldn't even if his left eye was okay or not as he couldn't even open it.

He tried to breathe, forcing his chest to move up and down. Slowly, air filled his lungs again and he coughed out more blood that was filling his chest.

Alex tried to ignore all the terrible pain and concentrated on his chest. He used his blood manipulation to try and pull the blood out of his lungs.

The blood flowed out through his throat and fell onto his chest, where it started seeping into his chest.

His breathing became easier and finally, he could focus a little more. Fortunately, his dantian wasn't hurt, so the Qi in his body started moving quickly to heal him.

His Undying Physique worked as best as it could and he started growing the part of his body that had gone missing.

Alex lay on the ground in pain while his body healed bit by bit. A few minutes later, it was finally fully healed.

He stood up from where he was and checked himself. His clothes were barely on him and most of his body parts were regrown, so he was all but naked.

His hands had blown away as well, so the ring on his finger had gone somewhere as well. Fortunately, the body parts that had been ripped off were still around in chunks, so when he used his spiritual sense, he quickly found it.

It was a kilometer away from where he was, out on a hill away from the flatland where they were fighting.

Alex called out Whisker and had him go retrieve it. At the same time, he checked his sides and saw that his storage bags hadn't taken any damage.

He sighed and looked toward the direction where the explosion had happened. That was not an explosion he had ever seen in his life before.

"That… that must have been what they call a Core Explosion," Alex thought. "He exploded the core in his dantian so he could kill me in a suicide attack."

Alex sighed once more and looked around. The blood beasts that he had brought out to corner him were dead. They were some of his best beasts and they were gone just like that.

'I will have to go get some more,' he thought. He looked around for a bit and put out his hand. Midnight flew into his grip and Alex checked it. As expected, his sword had no damage on it.

"His storage bag must have been destroyed in the explosion as well," Alex thought. "Shame, I could have learned something about the assassins."

He couldn't help but shake his head.

Whisker returned not long after and Alex ate a healing pill that was in his ring just in case. Then, he pulled out the storage bag where he was keeping the World Defying Mushroom.

Seeing that they weren't damaged during the fight, he went back to the forest to gather some more.

He left Whisker there to look around just in case he missed something. He had scanned around as well as he could, but he was definitely in shock, he hoped he really did miss something.

About 10 minutes later, he was done collecting all the mushrooms. By then, Whisker was back as well, and together they flew towards the gate in the center of the secret realm.

Alas, before he could even reach the center, he could see that the gate had already closed. He had been late.

* * * * * *

Everyone but the sect leader and a few key elders of the Flowerhall sect were on the platform outside the Forbidden Orchard.

It had taken them some time to send everyone away and prepare a spirit vein so that they could open the gate for an extended period of time.

The spirit vein that was connected to the platform would have been enough to open the gate normally, but with what they had sensed inside, they felt that they needed something stronger to keep it open for a long while.

An elder flew out of the lake and landed on the platform while rubbing the water from his face. "I've attached the extra spirit vein to the ends of the original one. We should be ready to go," he said.

"Good," the sect leader said. She then pulled out her medallion and fiddled with it for a moment to open the gate. However, right as she was about to activate, she heard a buzz to her left.

They all did.

Quickly, they turned around to look at what was making that noise, and couldn't help but be surprised to see a bit of light shining from the crack that was supposed to have fully closed.

In the slit of the closed gate, they could see a few fingers peeking through. They extended further before half of the hand was outside the slit.

The people gathered there looked in shock and were ready to take action if needed.

In the next moment, their eyes went wide in shock.

The two hands grabbed either side of the gate and pulled it apart like someone was opening a curtain. The gate was wide open and Alex walked through in a rough state.

He looked around at the elders and sect leaders that were gathered and bowed a little.

"My apologies for being late. Something had come up that needed taking care of."

Chapter 1085 Back To The Association

"Y-you... how did you?" one of the elders asked with a trembling finger pointed towards the closing gate behind Alex.

Alex looked back at the gate and turned back around to say, "I have my ways."

The sect master was dumbfounded as well, but she quickly got a hold of her emotions. "What happened inside? We sensed someone dying," she said.

"Someone did," Alex said. "I would like to speak in a little more private scenario if possible."

The sect leader frowned and looked at the elders beside her. He gestured for them to leave and everyone flew away.

"So, tell me what happened," the sect leader asked. "Did you kill the other person? That's not a crime I can help you get away with."

"I did kill the other person, but you don't have to worry. It was no crime," Alex said. "The other person was an assassin that had gone in to observe me for some reason. He seemed to be part of the same group as the Jade-Faced assassin."

The sect leader looked around hurriedly before speaking in a lower voice. "Another assassin? Who was it this time?" she asked.

"I am not sure," Alex said. "He was wearing Harry's face when I met him, so he really could be anyone."

"Dammit! I will have to consult with Granduncle about this. He told me to just look over you after the first assassination. He won't be happy after hearing you were the target of another one," she said.

"I technically wasn't a target of an assassination today," Alex said. "He said he was there to just observe. I think they want something from me, so they are waiting for some reason."

"Alright, we will talk about this later. You seem to have gone through a rough day for now. Go take some rest, I will let the council elders know about what happened here," the sect leader said.

Alex thought for a bit if that could go bad in any way, but he ignored that thought. He was already a target of an assassination, how much worse could it even get?

"Oh right, I forgot to mention one thing," Alex said right before he left. "This man I fought, mentioned that he was part of something known as the Dark Phoenix. Do you have any idea what that is?"

"The dark phoenix?" the sect leader's eyes went wide in surprise. "No way! You are being targeted by the Dark Phoenix? I must let granduncle know about it immediately."

Alex saw the urgency in the sect leader's eyes and frowned. "Are they what I think they are?" he asked.

"They are an assassin group, one that has lasted for a very long time. Unlike other assassins, this group is known to have very few members, but each one of them is deadly in their own way," the sect leader said. "I see, the Jade-Faced Assassin must have been from this group as well."

Alex nodded. "So the best assassin group in the entire continent is after me?" he asked.

"The best assassins are after you... dear lord," the sect leader realized how much more severe the situation was, much more than what she had thought. "Go back, I will contact the council elders. They will make a decision for you."

Alex didn't show any other emotion and simply nodded before flying away. Whatever it was he was going to have to do next really didn't matter to him at the moment.

As long as they didn't stop him from being able to make pills, train, or find his father, he was up for anything.

Alex arrived back on the shore of the lake in the Flowerhall sect and found a few people waiting for him.

"Alex! You're back," Harry said with a worried look. "Are you alright? We heard some explosions."

"I'm fine," Alex said. "I wasn't hurt."

"I see," Harry said.

Alex sneakily used his eyes to see Harry's aura colors and finally relaxed a little. It really was him.

"What do we do now?" Alex asked.

"Well, you came back. Is the other alchemist not coming?" Harry asked. He was trying to learn if he was the one that had exploded for some reason.

"He's not," Alex said. "We should return."

Harry hesitated for a bit and nodded. There was nothing else for them to do anyway. Everyone else had already returned, so he should be returning as well.

They walked out of the sect and made their way through the streets to return back to the association.

Harry tried to ask what happened inside, but Alex dodged the questions as best as he could. He didn't want to talk about it with anyone except the leader for now.

Instead, to occupy Harry's mind from getting overly curious, Alex asked, "oh right, what about our competition? How many ingredients did you prepare?"

"Hah! You actually have the guts to bring that up huh? You must have acquired enough to be the one to bring it up," Harry said.

"I found a few," Alex said, not giving away anything else.

"Fine, bring yours out and I'll bring mine. We will check each other's," Harry said.

Alex nodded and handed over a talisman and a storage bag, and took the same things handed over to him by Harry.

He started checking through the talisman list and was quite surprised. 'He managed to find so many,' he thought.

There was a number on the top that tallied up everything noted in the talisman, and that number came out to be 9,563. It was quite a lot of ingredients to have gathered in just 7 days, but only about 5 percent of that number was Saint rank ingredients.

About 30 percent were True rank ingredients, and the rest were common ingredients.

"This is quite good," Alex said as he looked through the names on the list. He was really just interested in the Saint rank ingredients, so he looked at them only. "You did amazing."

Harry smiled with a proud face. "You did not bad yourself either," he said, handing back the storage bag and talisman. "8 thousand is not a bad number at all, especially for someone that is new to all of this."

Alex smiled. "I tried my best," he said.

"Although, I didn't see that Willow tree being listed here," Harry said. "Does that mean you failed to get it? That was the one thing you wanted to get in there, right?"

Alex gave a surprised look. "Oh, silly me. I was so excited about finding the willow that I forgot to note it down," he said. "Although, I wouldn't win against your list with just 1 more ingredient."

"Of course not," Harry said as he patted Alex's shoulders. "But I'm happy that you found what you went in looking for. You don't have to win every competition you face anyway."

Alex smiled and nodded. He didn't feel that bad about losing the competition at all. Rather, he didn't feel bad at all. He was instead very happy.

'Hear that Whisker? You nearly collected as many ingredients as an actual human alchemist. That should tell you how good you are,' Alex said to the little guy hiding in his robes.

Whisker made some small sound of happiness and Alex placed the storage bag back into his robes, handing it over to him.

After all, these were just the ingredients Whisker had found after all.

Alex himself hadn't bothered making a list at all. After all, he was there to only get Saint-ranked ingredients and maybe a few True rank ingredients if they were usable in a recipe.

Even then, he had collected about 2300 ingredients alone. If he had gone all out, 20 thousand wouldn't have been a hard number to reach.

The two of them finally arrived at the association and Alex went over to the leader who was expecting him.

"Are you okay? I heard there was an explosion inside. Did you have a fight with Han Nixie?" the leader asked.

"Who?" Alex gave a confused look.

"Han Nixie. You know, the guy who exploded himself inside the secret realm," the leader said. "They told me it was a Core explosion, and he was the only one in there with a core amongst you two."

"Oh, that's who he went in as," Alex said, finally understanding a little.

"Went in as? What are you talking about?" the leader asked.

"How old would you say this Han fellow is? How long has he been in this association?" Alex asked.

"Um, he was a later generation than me in the Flowerhall sect, and he joined here right after graduation, so about 600 years? Give or take," the leader said.

"I see," Alex said. "I don't know who this Han Nixie person is exactly, but the man that died inside wasn't him. It was an assassin that came to observe me after the Jade Faced assassin died."

"What?" the leader stood up from his chair. "An assassin?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"A Saint core one at that," he said.

Alex continued nodding.

The leader was flabbergasted. "There are more after you then," he said. "Wait, how did you escape him? Rather, how did you force him to a point where he had to destroy his own core? He must've been desperate to do so," he said.

"I've told you this before, but I'm stronger than I look," Alex said. "I'll tell you more later. For now, check on this Han Nixie fellow. He was either killed and replaced, or he is being detained someplace. You will need to find out."

The leader nodded. "What about you?" he asked.

"I... I will get some rest," Alex said. "Then, I will have to spend a lot of time making the pills now that I have the ingredients I need."

Chapter 1086 A Few Changes

Alex was called over by the leader the next day.

"You were right," he said the moment he entered the room. "We found Alchemist Han dead and buried in the corner of the garden. If we hadn't searched for it explicitly, we would have never found his corpse."

Alex gave a grim look and said nothing. This proved that someone was out there waiting to kill him, and they were going as far as they could to try and figure out more about him.

But why?

"Sect leader Qiu messages me earlier. Senior Qiu Jianhong will be here at any moment to take you to the Sunborn Sanctuary. You are not to leave or meet with anyone until then."

Alex nodded. "I understand," he said. He was still not sure if he could trust the council members at all, but at the very least, not all of them would be trying to kill him. With their strength, he would be safe there than anywhere else.

"What about the event? Will we be canceling that?" Alex asked.

"We have to, don't we?" the leader asked. He didn't feel good about ending something so important to the association, but he didn't feel like he had any other choice at all. Especially with Alex's life on the line.

"Very well, let's end it," Alex said. "We can stop this for a few years at least and see if it all blows over. Hopefully, by then I will have found my father and a way out of this continent."

The leader was disappointed to hear that Alex still wanted to leave this continent. But there wasn't anything he could say, so he kept quiet.

Alex talked with the leader for a few more minutes and by then the old man had arrived.

Both Alex and the leader went out to greet the senior from the council, and Alex got onto his boat before flying away.

"Tsk. Whatever did you do to get a target on your head?" the senior couldn't help but ask.

"Who knows," Alex said. "I don't remember offending anybody-well, that's not true." He sighed when he remembered the Huang family and his oath against them.

"It must have been the Huang family if anyone," Alex said. "They are the only ones that could possibly have any resentment against me."

"No, its not them," the old man said.

"Huh? How do you know?" Alex asked.

"After learning about your conflict, once he was done cultivating, brother Huang returned to his family to give them a piece of his mind. The current family head has changed as well and they have been ordered to not create any more conflict. I doubt it's any of them honestly."

Alex gave a thoughtful look. "I didn't hear about this," he said.

"They've been keeping this under wraps for now. This sort of information is devastating for them, especially in the hands of their rivals in the business, so they will hide the change until the family has stabilized a bit more," the seniors said.

"I see," Alex said.

"Besides, I don't think the Huang family has nearly enough money to commission people from the Dark Phoenix to assassinate you. Their family isn't as rich as they hope to be," Qiu Jianhong said.

"So it is someone rich," Alex asked.

"Yes," the old man said.

Alex nodded. The old man didn't know about the additional information that Alex had, so he didn't realize that Alex's suspects had gone from 20 to 18. Maybe even 17 if the Flowerhall Sect truly wasn't part of it.

'Someone rich and with connections,' Alex thought. It could be any of the 17 if he was to ignore the other 3.

'I'll have to research a bit more,' Alex thought.

The two soon reached another city where the teleportation formation had been ready for them.

They got on top of the formation and at the next moment, they were both in the Sunborn Sanctuary. They flew over to the palace where Alex hadn't been for nearly half a year.

He met up with the elders that were there who told him that he would be safe in the palace. Alex wouldn't have doubted that, but he knew a few pieces of information that were keeping him from fully believing in them all.

He retreated back to the room he had before so he could make some pills. They let him do what he wanted, but also requested some other pills for their cultivation. They had used up quite a lot of them and were only now realizing just how good they were.

Alex agreed to their requests and retreated to his room where he rested for a while, and then began his long alchemy session.

* * * * * * *

A woman wearing a dull robe with a hooded face walked through the morning crowd to go somewhere.

There was a small bee flying in front of her, and while most people would've swatted such a bug away, she showed no reaction to it.

In fact, she even looked at it from time to time to see if it was still there.

She went where the bee did, following it through the crowd. Finally, she arrived at a carriage station where people got onto large carriages to go to a different city.

The bee went through an open door in the carriage and the woman walked into it as well. She climbed up the carriage and found herself an empty seat.

As for the bee, it was nowhere to be found at all. She tried searching for it with just her eyes, but it wasn't visible.

There were a dozen or so people in the carriage and they either rested or talked to other people. Not a single one seemed to be paying attention to her at all.

The carriage started moving. It left the city to go to the next one.

Five minutes passed and the woman saw nothing. No signs or anything. She was starting to believe that she had done something wrong when a middle-aged man in front of her dropped something to the ground.

Before she could see what it was, she smelled something... weird and immediately stopped breathing. The people around her noticed it as well, but they were very late. Before they could realize it, they were unconscious.

"No need to hold your breath, this smoke only makes non-saints unconscious. You are fine," the middle-aged man said. He crushed the small grass that was burning on the carriage floor and tossed it out the window.

"We have 10 minutes," he said.

The woman frowned a little when she heard that. "Why did you contact us?" she asked. "I thought that pink-haired girl said that we would only communicate with talismans until the job was done."

"That was the plan, yes," the man in front of her said. "But things have changed a little."

"What has changed?" the woman asked.

"For one, the importance of the target has changed," the man said. "He is now worth a lot more than he previously did."

"What?" the girl said in an angry tone while keeping her voice barely above a whisper. "Why would his worth change? He was already valued very high to begin with."

"Yes, I won't deny that, but his value had increased even more," the man said. "After all, either he or someone around him has managed to take out 2 of the assassins we sent after him. Do you know what that means?"

The woman's eyes went wide. "I thought all 7 of your members were supposed to be some of the best assassins. How could 2 of you have died?" she asked.

"They did," the man said. "The Faceless Assassin was supposed to have contacted us 3 days ago, but there is a rumor in the Flowerhall sect that not everyone who entered the orchard this time around managed to come out. We suspect that he died in there."

"What? We ordered you not to do anything until way later," the woman said.

"We weren't doing anything but gathering information. However, Faceless still died, which means he was likely caught and had to fight back," he said. "As for the other one, Jade hasn't been in contact since we put him on the task nearly 3 months ago. Considering him anything other than dead would be a mistake at this point."

"So..." the woman asked.

"So, the price is going to have to increase again," the man said. "There are only 5 of us remaining, so both we and the target are worth more now. That is... if you still wish to continue."

The woman thought for a bit and shook her head. The loss would be too great at this point to go back on the assassination attempt.

"No, keep at it," she said. "But the actual assassination has to happen in the Sanctum itself. Anywhere else would cause too many questions to be asked."

"Speaking of which," the man said. "The council members have taken him away. We don't know if we will ever see him again or not."

"What? No way!" the woman practically shouted this time around. Fortunately, no one woke up.

"The target is inside the Sunborn Sanctuary and... I don't suppose you want us to sneak in to kill him?" he asked.

"No," the woman said.

"Then unless he comes out, it will be hard," the man said. "Also, since the old foggies are involved, we are going to have to go underground to not get caught. We will come out when the sanctum opens but until then... you better hope the target will be there too."

The woman thought very hard for a minute or so before saying, "Don't worry about him. I'll find a way to get him there."

She had a plan in her mind for that.

Chapter 1087 Upgraded Pill

Alex finished making the pills for the elder and handed it over to them. Once done, he finally started working on the True rank pill for the Earth Spiritual Root.

There wasn't much for him to do here but just make the pill once. It took him maybe 15 minutes to be done with it, and after that came the actual task.

He took the True rank pill and ate it. When he did, he felt the energy from the pill dissipate in his stomach, mix into his blood vessels, and find their way to his dantian.

Once there, they then moved to his Earth spiritual root where they began affecting it. However, since his root was already improved by them once, they didn't really affect it anymore. Not to mention the fact that the energy in the pill itself was way too weak for it to be effective anyway.

Having refreshed his memories on the pill, especially with his improved senses, he now had to translate everything to the Saint rank. Meaning the energy he felt, the ingredients he used, everything would have to be ranked up to the same level as a Saint rank pill.

'Let's see...' he thought as he felt the energy in the willow. He quickly got the energy constitution of the willow and used that information to find similar saint-rank ingredients.

There were tons of ingredients in his storage bag, some he was given by the council members, and some he found himself in the Orchard.

It took him the entire day to go through the whole the many earth element ingredient he had before he found about 6 ingredients that sort of made sense to be a better version of Willow's bark.

The only problem now was finding out which one of the 6 was truly the best one. Even amongst the 6, there were 2 very close ingredients that Alex started with.

He made the pills with just those two pills at first while being as close to the original recipe as possible.

The shape of the powder wasn't something he had learned yet, so he couldn't do it as well as he would have wanted it to. In the end, the first pill came out to be around 59%.

"That's alright, I should focus on figuring out whether the pill works or not before fixing the pill itself," he thought. That was slightly problematic for sure as he couldn't guarantee whether or not the pill did anything bad to him.

"Sigh, I will have to make a Nullifying pill for this as well," he thought. Before making those, he made the rest of the pills with the remaining 5 ingredients, each of which came out to be about the same range as the first one.

By the time he was done making all the pills, he felt tired. More tired than he would have been normally just making the pills. The mental exhaustion from having to sort through the many ingredients was hitting him harder than he had expected.

He sat on his bed and ate a cultivation pill before starting to cultivate. For the next 2 days, he spent the entire time just cultivating. He could feel that he was getting so close to breaking through once again.

'Not even a year has passed since the last time and yet...' he thought.

Once he was done cultivating, Alex got back to work. He prepared his ingredients to make the second-best Saint Nullifying pill he could make since pill veins were out of the question at the moment.

Saint Nullifying pills were immensely volatile and could get destroyed at any moment if one was not careful. So, Alex had to make sure he was very careful while he made it.

He made sure to move the ingredients no more than they were required and even after he did, he carefully controlled the energy before combining them all to make a pill.

The moment he completed making the pill, he immediately took the pill bottle that was next to him and dumped the pill inside directly into his mouth.

He swallowed the pill and quickly brought out the Saint Nullifying pill as he got ready to use it. He closed his eyes and felt the energy that was inside his belly at the moment.

The energy released from the pill made its way into his bloodstream. From there, they would go to the locations where his blood vessels and meridians were connected. Using the meridians, they would then go to his dantian and—

Something went wrong.

The energy went right past the meridian and continued down his bloodstream to go somewhere else.

Instantly, Alex at the pill in his hand and used its energy as fast as he could. The nullifying energy flowed through his body, countering every other energy in him. Within seconds, the energy from the Earth pill was completely destroyed by the nullifying pill.

Alex felt very drained when all the energy in his body was gone. "That wasn't right," he thought. The nullifying pill had gotten rid of more energy than just the pill, so he didn't want to start right away.

He spent a bit of time trying to understand what went wrong and what the pill was actually trying to do. He got some idea, but the only way to know if they were real was to test them completely on himself or on pill swine. He would rather do it on pill swine than himself.

After a while, once his meridians weren't so drained of Qi, he started making the Saint Nullifying pill once again.

He kept the 2nd pill ready to eat and finished making the nullifying pill. As soon as he was done, he ate the Earth element pill. Once again, the energy from the pill entered his bloodstream and he watched where it went.

It went through his vessels and right at where it was supposed to take the turn to enter his meridians... it did. It went through his meridians down to his dantian.

Alex slowly placed the nullifying pill in his mouth, ready at any moment. He felt the energy reach his dantian through the non-elemental spiritual root, and once it was inside, it started moving toward the Earth elemental spiritual root.

Alex swallowed the nullifying pill right before it was about to take effect and canceled out the energy that was in his dantian, even getting rid of some of the Qi that was inside of him.

"Phew!" Alex took a deep breath as that was way too close for him to be comfortable at the moment. If he had let it go any further, his spiritual roots would have been improved, that too by a pill that was barely in the Heaven grade.

However, even with that, he couldn't stop a smile from appearing on his face.

"I did it!" he thought.

He looked at the other 4 pills he still had to check and wondered if he should try them out as well.

Since there was nothing wrong with doing so, he spent the rest of the day testing them. In the end, the 2nd pill was the only one that worked. As such, that became the new Saint Earth Spiritual Root enhancing pill.

Once he was done completing the recipe, his next task was to improve said recipe so that he could make one with pill veins in them.

It took Alex about 2 days to completely learn the various powdered structure and form a composition that worked best for that recipe.

Once he was done, he started making the pills. He made the pills day after day for the entire week until he no longer had any ingredients for the pill anymore.

Only then did he leave his room and met up with the two elders that were currently out.

"Senior Liang, senior Hou," Alex greeted the elders.

The two elders looked at Alex and smiled. "Did you need something little brother?" they asked.

"I have a pill here that I believe you guys will like," Alex said as he brought out the storage bag that was full of pills.

"What pill is this? Is this the water spiritual root one?" Liang asked.

Alex shook his head. "I will still have to work on that," he said. "But this is not that different from it. These are pills that will improve your Earth spiritual roots. I do not know how many of you have it, but this will help any of you who have it a lot."

"Wait, did you really end up making these?" Hou Xinya couldn't help but put on a surprised face.

"Yes, senior," Alex said. "It's a shame I took such a long time, but at least it's here."

"What? Nonsense. You took what? 5 months? That's nothing," Liang Shufen said. "You could have brought this to us a decade later and we would have told you that you didn't have to hurry."

Alex gave a small smile and thanked them for their kind words. "Please share it with the others," he said. "Also, I was hoping you could help me with selling the rest. I can't leave the city, so I don't know how to do it myself."

"Don't worry, we will do it," Liang Shufen said.

"Thank you," Alex said. "Now, if you will excuse me, I have a small thing I've been ignoring for some time that I will have to attend to."

Hou Xinya gave a weird look. "Are you leaving the palace?" he asked.

Alex nodded. "I need to go to the Insight pavilion."

Chapter 1088 Zhu Shaofan

Liang Shufen was probably the prettiest of the four female council members with her pink robes that were full of frills, and a smile forever tugged at her fair face.

Her age showed through the small hint of wrinkles on her face, but that did not stop people from staring at her on the streets with wide grins as they greeted her.

"You're quite popular, senior," Alex said. "Not even senior Yao got this much of a greeting from the people."

"It's less about popularity, and more about sister Yao being slightly unapproachable due to her look," she said. "They see an old woman that they know is strong and try not to bother her if possible. Still, I'm sure she gets a lot of greetings too."

Alex nodded. She wasn't wrong.

They walked through the streets of the city as they made their way towards the insight pavilion.

Alex had wanted to go there alone, but the seniors insisted on at least one of them going along for his protection, so he had let her come along.

"Aren't you excited to take your pill, senior?" Alex asked. "I'm sure you could've let me come here alone while you improved your spiritual sense."

"Haha, you're not getting rid of us that easily," Liang Shufen said with laughter in her voice. "Besides, I don't have earth spiritual root, so that pill is useless to me."

"Oh, I see," Alex said. He quickly used his Demon Eyes to check, and as she had explained, she did not have any muddy brown colors around her. He did see quite a lot of blue, however.

"Then I'll try to make the water pill as soon as I can, senior," he said.

"Oh, that will certainly help me a lot," she said, not realizing that his words weren't coincidental at all.

They soon reached the pavilion and Alex walked in. He asked to see the one that managed this pavilion and waited for the old, bald man to come down to stairs.

The man came down not even 10 seconds later, surprising Alex, and behind him was a slightly younger man who looked like he was 40 years old at best in mortal years.

The bald man stepped aside and let the middle-aged man walk up front.

"Sister Liang, it has been a while," the man said with a small bow.

"Oh, little brother Zhu! I didn't realize you had come back to the city," she said. "I wasn't expecting to see you here today."

"Certainly my presence won't ruin your day, would it?" he asked with a small smile.

Liang Shufen chuckled as well. "Don't try to be cheeky now," she said.

The man laughed and looked at Alex before giving him a greeting with his hands cupped. "You must be the famous Alchemist Alex. I've seen your faces too many times in the recordings, but they fail to capture all of your handsomeness," he said.

"Your words are kind, senior," Alex said.

"This is Zhu Shaofan," Liang Shufen explained. "The owner of the Insight pavilion."

"Ah!" Alex exclaimed when he heard that. "My apologies, senior. I'm ignorant and didn't know who you were."

"You aren't ignorant," the man said. "I simply like to stay out of the public's eyes. I never cared much for the public's perception of me. Besides, with the establishment I have managed to create, I've come to learn just how troublesome it can be to have your information so easily available for others."

Alex nodded. These past couple of months he had been slightly regretful of giving away his image to be spread throughout the continent in hopes of finding his father.

That was what had made it so easy for the assassins to target him.

If he was given the chance to do it all over again, he would certainly still do it just for the sake of finding his father, but he would be careful to use some other faces in most public scenarios.

"So, what are you guys here for? Are you looking for something?" the man asked.

"I have a package bought to gather information monthly, I am here to get it," Alex said.

"Oh," the man turned towards the bald man that was staying to the side. "Please set it up for our little friend."

"Right away, senior," the old man said and walked away.

"Let me treat you to some tea while we wait for it to be prepared," the man said and took them upstairs.

They sat down on some fancy chairs and started drinking tea. Alex was a little surprised by the taste of the tea and realized that he was actually drinking coffee.

"Where did you find this?" he asked.

"The black tea? I found a group of people making these and took the product from them. It doesn't have any nutritional value to a cultivator, but it does taste quite good with some sugar in it," he said as he drank.

Alex nodded. He wasn't really a coffee drinker back when he was a mortal, but the times he did, he remembered liking it.

"So, when did you come back?" Liang Shufen asked.

"Uhh... about a month ago, I believe," he said. "Brother Gong was there to greet me when I came."

"I see," the woman said. She sensed his aura and smiled. "You've grown quite strong too."

"Haha, yes I have," the man said. "And it is all thanks to little brother Alex here. I've bought a few of his pills and they have been immensely helpful in recent times."

"I know, right?" Liang Shufen asked. "We must have done something right to have such a blessing fall on us."

"Indeed," the man said as his smile disappeared a bit. "But I doubt our bad deeds will ever be outweighed."

"They will," Liang Shufen said. "At least, I believe they will."

The man smiled again. "Ever the optimist you are, sister Liang," he said.

They talked for a few more minutes about a few more stuff, of which Alex only understood half. Then, the old man came with the prepared talismans and handed them over.

"Alright, you got your thing. We should return now," the woman said.

Alex nodded and stood up to leave.

"Young brother Alex, I wanted to ask you something," the man suddenly said.

"Yes? What is it, senior?" he asked.

"So, there's been a rumor spreading recently that I wanted to ask if it's true or not," the man said.

Alex's eyes narrowed when he heard that. Had the assassination attempts on him become public knowledge now?

"I hear that you won't be making pills indefinitely, is that true?" the man asked.

"Oh, where did you hear that senior?" Alex asked.

"There are rumors that the Alchemy Association won't be holding the quarterly event with you, and with you being here, I'm worried that is true," he said.

Alex sighed. "I'm afraid that it is, senior," he said. "I won't be making pills for a long while."

"I see, that's a shame," the man said with a downtrodden expression. "I was looking forward to it as well."

"He can't help it," Liang Shufen said. "The Dark Phoenix assassins are after him."

"What?" the man's eyes narrowed. "Those bastards are after him?"

"Yes, so we can't help but hide him here," the woman said. "As a result, he won't be making pills for the public for a very long time."

"I see," the man said with conflicted emotion.

Alex was simply surprised that the woman was giving out the information so freely. Shouldn't the knowledge of him being a target from those assassins be hidden or something, at the very least from the literal owner of the biggest information trading agency in the goddamn continent?

Going around giving away the information was telling the assassins that he knew who they were and that they were after him. That would certainly give them the advantage and let them know that he had killed two of their members already.

"So you are protecting him, huh?" the man asked.

"Yes, that's all we can do for now. Going after those bastards would be useless after all. Who knows who they even are?" the woman said.

"That is true," the man said. Suddenly, his eyes widened. "Little brother, I might not be able to help protect you, but I should be able to still help you."

"Oh, and how is that, senior?" Alex asked.

"Give me some time. Maybe a couple of weeks or maybe even months. I will gather the most comprehensive piece of information about the Dark Phoenix I can, especially their assassins, and hand it over to you," he said. "Even if it won't help you fight them, you should be able to not get caught off guard."

"Oh!" Alex thought when he heard that. He had thought of buying information on them, but he was trying to not give away information that he knew they were after him. But, if he got it through a middleman, that would certainly be helpful.

"Thank you, senior. I will really appreciate it," Alex said. "In return, please let me make a few pills for you. Just tell me what you want and I will have them prepared within the week."

"Really?" the man was excited. "I just need the cultivation pills and maybe a few healing pills that's all."

Alex nodded.

"Also," the man continued. "Don't worry about your information leaking. As of today, I will keep a tight grip on your information. Anything that hasn't already been shared will no longer be shared around."

Alex gave a grateful smile. "That would be truly helpful, senior."

Chapter 1089 Test Number 1

"Was it a good idea?" Alex asked. "Giving away my information so frivolously?"

"To little Zhu? That's alright," Liang Shufen said. "Don't worry about that."

Alex couldn't help but worry. "You trust him enough to give away such crucial information?" he asked.

"Of course," she said. "He's one of us after all, or at least in a way he is."

"One of us? Meaning... the council?" he asked.

"Yes," the woman said. "You can think of him as the phantom 11th member of the council that never was."

"Can I ask you to elaborate a little bit more?" he asked.

"Hmm, let's see what I can tell you," she said. "Little Zhu comes from the Zhu family, although I'm not sure if that family even exists anymore. He was there thousands of years ago during the time when we formed the council. He was one of us and could have become one of us right now, except he didn't join."

"He's not known to the public as anything other than the founder of the Insight Pavillion now though," she said. "He's made sure to not be associated with us so he can keep his free lifestyle."

"What was his reasoning for not joining? If I may ask." Alex was getting a little curious now.

"Let's see... for one, he was too weak at the time. He was merely a Saint core realm cultivator and... he simply happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. He got roped into what we had to do and as such, you can even say he was forced to make the oath with us," she said. "As for the other one, he might have thought that we-"

The old woman suddenly clutched her throat. "Oops, can't say that," she said with nervous laughter. Her oath had tightened its grip around her just then.

Alex noticed it but acted like he didn't. "Was he there when you went to attack the Western continent?" he asked.

"He wasn't there during the decision-making. He liked to stay in the mountains to the north where his home was," she said. "But since the plan involved bringing spirit veins for the place around his home, he went along as well. Well, many did. Most didn't have a choice."

Alex solemnly walked as he listened to her.

"And he opened the Insight Pavilion afterward?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, it was... a few years after we invaded the western continent, I believe," she said. "He was smart to have done that. Look at how big it is now."

Alex nodded. That was indeed smart.

"So I won't have to worry about him spreading the news of me being here?" he asked.

"Is that what you were worried about?" she asked. "Don't be worried then. Little Zhu is an honorable man. At the very least, he will keep his word. Besides, those bastards most likely already know about you being here."

"Really?" Alex was surprised.

The woman nodded. "You did teleport here, after all. People would have seen you and spread your information already. Not like we're hiding your presence here anyway," she said.

Alex nodded when he heard that. It was indeed true that the dark phoenix most likely already knew about him.

They returned back to the palace where Alex returned to his room to start looking through the talismans. He looked through the ones that had names in it so it would be easier for him. Looking at the ones without names would be useless for him anyway.

He didn't expect the dark phoenix assassins to use the information from the Insight Pavilion, but he did expect the people that commissioned them to.

At the very least, he hoped that they weren't aware that he knew who they might be.

The Dawn Immortal sect, the Jade Fire sect, The Yao family, the Kang family, and others. Alex especially took notice of them when looking through the talismans, but nothing came out of it in the end.

"I will just have to keep at it," he thought and put everything aside to start with the pills.

He relaxed for a bit to get his headspace in order before he brought out the ingredients. There were 6 water ingredients already on the recipe that he was supposed to use, but Alex was starting to wonder if he should confine himself to half a recipe or not.

He had tested half the recipe and had realized that the way the energies mixed together was totally different than the one for the earth pill. Which was to say that he couldn't just mimic that pill and fill in the blanks on the recipe.

Since that was the case, he had 2 ways to proceed from here at the moment, neither of which he was sure would work.

Either, he could continue down this path and try to figure out the remaining ingredients.

Or, he could discard the recipe completely and do everything by himself by using the earth pill's recipe as a model and copying it exactly, except with ingredients with water energy.

He wasn't sure if that would work, but he was happy to have that idea in case the first one didn't work.

"Sigh, it's going to take a while," he thought. Then, he began the tedious task.

He brought out every single water ingredient and checked its energy constitution. Once he knew about it all, he then tried to formulate a recipe in which the energy reacted with each other.

As he thought about the reaction, his mind worked in mysterious ways to quickly think of how the energy interacted with itself.

His Dao of Five Elemental Interaction was helping him in coming up with answers that would have otherwise taken hours to think of. Maybe he would even have to use the ingredients to learn about it.

Still, there was just too much to think about. A single ingredient could have a different rate at which its energy was diffused out of it. Every single variation of this diffusion would lead to a variation of energy that would have to react to another variation, making it infinitely hard to calculate with so many variables.

Just a week later, Alex had to stop as simply thinking about the energy wasn't working for him. Not only was there just too much to think about, but even if he did think about it, he still didn't know what the pill would do in the end.

He had a general idea, but it was still better to check for himself.

Alex brought out the cauldron and chose one of the combinations in his head that he was sure gave stable energy in the end.

He did not care about following the recipe properly, only having the resulting energy be usable. Even if it turned out to be less than 20% harmony, he was fine with it.

The first 6 ingredients and recipe were with him, so he followed it quickly. Once that was done, Alex followed his own made-up recipe.

Since there were ingredients that he hadn't worked with before, he had to adjust to their energy release rate on the go. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Still, in the end, he managed to create a combination of water energy that could be put into a pill.

And so he did.

He quickly formed a pill with his newly found recipe and looked at it. With the pill in his hand, he could feel the energy structure in it, not that he could learn anything from just that.

He would need a lot more experience for that to work.

"Do I eat it?" he wondered. He could eat it with a Saint Nullifying pill, but doing so for every pill out there would be very complicated. Instead, he wanted to get through with the various pill he would be making without stopping at all.

"Can I use a pill swine?" he thought. Pill swine were very close to humans in their physiological makeup, but not all of them had water spiritual roots, so getting just those ones would be hard.

"Well that's not my problem to worry about," he thought and went out to request exactly that.

The swine were brought along the next day and kept behind the palace. Alex hadn't been to this place yet, so coming here was a new experience for him.

The small garden that was behind the palace wasn't anything special, but the giant, bronze dome that was beyond the garden was.

He saw some sort of giant door near the dome that was the path to inside the actual Sunborn Sanctuary.

Unfortunately, he had to ignore it for now. Not that he could open it even if he had the time for it.

Alex went up to the pill swine that were kept there, wasting no more time. He fed the pill he had to the swine and let his senses go deep into the swine as far as he could.

To his surprise, the swine were easy to see through with his senses due to their pitiful cultivation. He saw the water energy go through its body and go towards the core-like dantian at its navel area.

However, after going there, it disappeared. He saw nothing come out towards the pill swine's water spiritual root. The energy was absorbed by the swine, and turned into Qi for it to use to break through.

This one had been a failure.

But, he wasn't expecting it to be a success anyway so he was fine with it. He was simply going to have to try over and over again.

Chapter 1090 Test Number ???

It didn't take Alex long to realize just how much time he was going to have to spend on this one pill. He was thankful that he had realized that very early, so the months he would have to spend in his room working on it would no longer affect him as much.

Day after day, week after week, Alex continued trying out different pills he made the swine eat almost daily.

The only freedom he was even getting from this was when he was making pills for the others, or getting his information sent to him from the insight pavilion. Other than that, he spent every single day making these very pills.

Each variation brought out a different result and each result needed checking. However, no matter how much he checked, none of the pills actually worked at all.

He went through all the pill swine that were brought here and had to replace them too. Still, he wasn't successful.

At some point, Alex decided to stop what he was doing and try out his other method. He wanted to make a pill from scratch to follow the earth pill's recipe.

However, not even a month later he was forced to stop. Unfortunately, the two energies were fundamentally different and too unique to try and copy what one did for the other.

He was trying to use equivalent ingredients for each recipe to copy it. Instead of Earth energy, it would be Water. Instead of Metal and Water missing, it would be Wood and Fire, leaving Earth and Metal energy which would be the equivalent of Wood and Fire for the Earth ingredient.

He found a few such ingredients and was happy to start working on them when he noticed something. The water ingredient equivalent of an earth ingredient did not have anything in common at all.

Those two ingredients did something completely different from each other and had zero connections between them.

When Alex realized this, he was frustrated. He was frustrated that he had to go back to the first method, which was basically trial and error.

At least, he was getting better at it.

His mental simulation of a pill being made with the recipe at hand was getting improved by what he was doing. Experimenting with every possible variation he was thinking of made it easier for him to iron out the few errors his mental simulations had.

He was getting to the point where finding errors between the pill in his mind and the pill in his hand.

After months of experimentation, he was starting to have to rely less and less on actual pills, and with each answer, he was getting closer and closer to the correct one.

More time passed and he broke through to Saint Foundation 2nd realm at this time, but for some reason, he couldn't find himself to be excited about it. His days had been consumed by this one pill and he worked towards it all the time.

He was more excited about the fact that he was getting ever so closer to the water spiritual root pill.

It had been nearly 400 days since he started working on it, and on this day, after thousands of different variations, Alex came upon one that just felt right.

There were about 7 additional ingredients for this recipe in addition to the 6 that were already there.

He got very excited about it and quickly started making it. He still struggled with making the pill due to his lack of experience with the ingredients that were involved, but that did not stop him from doing his best to make the pill.

About 15 minutes later, he had a pill ready to be used. He instantly teleported outside the palace and ran up to a pill swine that was being kept there.

He fed the pill to the swine and excitedly waited for the energy in the pill to make its way through the swine's body.

It went through its meridian down to its core-like dantian. Most of the pills failed here as they were either absorbed by the dantian or flew out to either do something else or cause havoc on the swine's body.

Alex waited patiently. For a moment, it looked like he failed again, however, a moment later, the water energy burst out of the dantian and into the swine's spiritual roots.

It lingered there for a moment before disappearing completely.

Alex's eyes went wide when he realized that the spiritual root had absorbed the water energy... and had improved.

The water spiritual root had improved because of his pill.

"Yes!" he couldn't help but exclaim in happiness. So many days of work, torturous days had finally paid off.

He had found the recipe.

He checked the swine for a bit longer and waited to see if there would be any lingering changes that came with the pill. There were none.

Immediately, rejuvenated by the discovery, Alex returned back to his room and made the pill again.

The pill came out to be around 43%, nothing good in his eyes, but it was still good enough for him to test with.

This was the final test that would tell him how good the pill was. He knew the pill worked, he just wanted to know to what extent, and see if there was anything else it did to a human that it didn't do to a pill swine.

While pill swine were almost the same as humans, the 'almost' made all the difference. He needed to make sure one could use the pill even as a human.

He quickly cleared his cauldron and brought out a separate group of ingredients. This one was going to be used to make a Saint Nullifying pill for himself.

He wasted no time and made the pill. It took some time since this was a pill he couldn't hurry with, but he still made it relatively quickly.

Once the pill was ready, he ate the water pill in his hands and brought out the nullifying pill as he got ready for the water pill to take effect.

Similar to the earth pill, the water pill also diffused into his bloodstream and found its way through his meridians going down to his dantian. Unlike a swine's dantian, Alex's was clear and could be seen through, a sign that he was in the Saint realm.

He saw the energy go through his Qi nearly unobstructed and came back out through either water spiritual roots.

Alex quickly swallowed the pill in his hand before the water energy could take effect. He sensed the water energy start its process to improve the spiritual root, but before it could do so, the volatile energy from the nullifying pill quickly erased the water energy, leaving simply neutral energy behind.

The neutral energy didn't do anything helpful or harmful, so Alex quickly circulated it out of the spiritual room and pushed it into his dantian.

His dantian had grown a bit stronger now, having thicker crystal pillars made up of Qi, so they could store a bit more Qi as well.

Alex ignored that for now and simply held a satisfied smile. It worked exactly as intended.

"I should finish it all quickly," he thought and started working on the recipe.

He had the recipe, so now it was time to improve it. Surprisingly, he was done with it before he could even realize it.

He had been working nonstop for so long that this small stretch of time went by in a flash for him. Now that he was done with it, he finally had the perfect recipe.

So, it was time to make the pills.

Alex wasn't sure just how many of the pills he was supposed to make, so he decided to do the same thing as he had done with his earth pills.

He was going to make as many as he could with the ingredients he had, and then sell them. He had received a hefty sum of money for the last ones he had sold, so these ones should sell quite well too.

He started making the pills and a day or two later, he was done with it. There weren't many ingredients for him to work on, so he was done quite quickly.

Now that he was done, he left his room.

Kang Xuefeng and Gong Liuxian were meditating in a lounge area in the palace when they noticed Alex's arrival. These were the two people that were not in deep cultivation as they were in charge of taking care of the continents in case of some emergency.

"Senior Kang, Senior Gong," Alex called out as he walked in.

"Young man, what are you doing here?" Kang Xuefeng asked. "Do you need something?"

"No, I'm here to give you these," Alex said as he handed over a storage bag to the old men.

"Hm? What's this?" one of them asked.

"It's the pills I've been working on," he said. "The one that improves your water spiritual roots."

"I see-wait, you did it?" old man Kang couldn't believe it.

"No way! You finished the recipe?" Gong Liuxian asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Where is senior Lei? He will be happy to know that his broken recipe is now full."

"He's in deep cultivation, and won't be out for another 8 months," old man Kang said. "But don't worry, his excitement won't dwindle when he finds out about the pill."

Alex nodded. "Please give it to the others who can make use of it," he said. "As for the rest, can you help me sell them?

Chapter 1091 The Red Haired Assassin

"You made the Earth pill and the Water pill," Gong Liuxian said. "You truly are amazing, young man."

"Does this mean you will start on the dao pill next?" the other man asked excitedly.

Alex gave an awkward smile as an answer. "To be honest senior, I don't want to work on any pills for a very long time now, especially new ones," he said. "So it will take me a while before I get to that pill."

"Oh, that's... well, take your time. There's no hurry," the old man said.

Since the pills were handed over, Alex decided to return back to his room.

He spent the next several days going through everything he thought he had missed. He read the talismans from the insight pavilion that included the information for anyone that was looking for his information.

Surprisingly -not that it should have been-there wasn't much information to look through. Most who were curious about him for the first 3 months or even 6 months had died off in the latter months, leaving not many that were still trying to learn about him.

There was still a lot of information, but it was closer to what would've been 5 months' worth, instead of the 15 he had missed.

Alex wasn't mad about that though. Having less information meant that only the ones that really wanted to know about him would look for him and that would help try and find the ones that wanted him assassinated.

He was still getting a few questions about if Graham was related to him in some ways or not. This meant that despite the investigators that the leader of the Alchemy association had put up to the work had died, there were still others that were working on it.

"Must be the sects and families," Alex thought. It was easy to guess that the council member's tasks wouldn't be ignored by their relatives and disciples.

Still, there was a question as to the fact if one of them was actually trying to find his father or not.

If they were going to go so far as to give that information to the assassins to use against him, then there was likely no reason for them to continue with that task. Although they could be trying to find his father to try and use him against him, he could never forget about that angle.

He then looked at details of the assassins that were given to him by Zhu Shaofan and read it.

There were 7 different assassins, and not all of them had titles attached to them.

Alex's eyes went to the Jade-Faced Assassin who was more infamous of the bunch. He quickly read through the assassin's details and saw just how much he liked poison.

The remaining 6 assassins were the ones Alex didn't know about.

He went from the start. The leader.

The leader of the Dark Pheonix was a person no one knew about. He was a secretive man with barely any information at all. The information read that he was most likely behind a killing of a big figure from the Jade Fire sect, and thus was thought to use a whip as his weapon because of the markings.

Another assassin was one that liked to use explosives, mostly talismans, and pills. Alex remembered the young man that did the same during their fights back in the Tiger sect. How long ago was that?

The explosion-using assassin was pictured to be some old man, although it was likely he would never appear with such a face in the public.

The third one was someone who could apparently freely change his facial features and go wherever he liked.

"Oh, that's the one I fought, wasn't it?" Alex thought. He nodded his head thinking just how credible this piece of information was. The nearly 11th member of the council had gone far and beyond with the information he had gathered.

Another one was a fiery assassin with bright red hair that seemed to have a smoldering personality around her. This one didn't have a name or a description, but just that one image of her.

Alex was surprised at how beautiful this assassin looked. He would've even admired her beauty with a better outlook had she not been coming for his head.

The image showed her surrounded by deadly fire as well as a group of shadowy figures that weren't visible at all.

Alex could tell that this was most likely a scene of a battle and that this was one of her assassination attempts.

The last two assassins were twins that had done some heinous crimes and were on the run. It was suspected that the leader of the Dark Phoenix assassins had recruited them a long time ago and was using them.

Zhu Shaofan made a notice that nothing on the list was final, so Alex had to be careful, but Alex still appreciated the information.

Given how he was right on at least two of them, he could at least be sure that he was correct on at least some of the others as well.

'So I know who to look out for,' Alex thought.

He looked through the list again, just to see if he missed something, and his eyes fell on the red-haired woman again.

He shook his head. With her beauty, she could have obtained so many things that normal people wouldn't be able to, however, she was using it to kill people instead. What a waste.

Alex closed the talisman and put it away. Then, he sat there on his bed... doing nothing.

How long had it been since he had done... nothing? He couldn't remember. Even before coming here, he was testing out the various ingredients in the alchemy association, and before that, he was worried about the assassination attempt.

Perhaps the only time he had sat down doing nothing was back in the Spiritsong city when he waited for his turn of the match to come along so he could fight.

He missed that a little. He had thought he was making some steady progress there, but he was robbed of that. Now, he was trapped in a place with people that may be the ones who he needed protection from.

Alex sighed. 'I can't stay here anymore. I need to leave,' he thought. He knew that was not the best idea right now, but he had to do it.

There were two things that he desperately needed to do that he couldn't do while he stayed in the palace.

First, he couldn't make the spiritual root-improving pills for himself.

Sure he could eat the ones he had made, but he would rather eat the ones with pill veins in them. If possible, he wanted ones with 6 pill veins in them. However, to have 6 pill veins, he needed a strong power to protect his pill from the 6th lightning bolt.

That brought him to the 2nd reason why he needed to leave. He needed to improve his blood aura. For the past year or two, his blood aura had stagnated and hadn't improved.

The only kills he had yet that he possibly have gotten the blood from were the two assassins.

However, the first one was a man that was poisoned to the core and was later immediately burned to death, leaving no blood for Alex to use.

As for the second one, he had exploded himself, once again making it impossible for Alex to use his blood.

Alex desperately wanted to improve his blood aura to prepare himself against the rest of the assassins that would most likely be coming for him.

In the process, he also wanted to get some more blood beasts for himself.

During his fight with the faceless assassin a year ago, he used 7 of his best blood beasts to stop him from leaving, which forced the man to blow his core and destroy his blood beasts.

So, Alex was looking to gain a few more of them as well.

There was also another reason, although he didn't feel like this was making him act this way at all. He wanted to go get some more of the cultivation pills for Scarlet.

If she could have high cultivation, she could most likely help him too. Although, he wasn't putting much hope there. He was sure he was bound to get disappointed anyway.

Alex left his room to go talk to the two seniors that were awake at the moment. He met them and told them that he wanted to leave this place to go train and improve himself.

However, as expected, both of the two old men were adamant about him staying back. He tried to argue that he would be fine outside since he would be hiding his face and all, but the old men simply didn't trust him.

A part of him believed they were doing this for his good, however, another more suspicious part couldn't help but suspect that they were trying to keep him here so they knew where their target was.

Even if not that, they simply wanted him here just because he was so good at making the pills they need.

Alex needed to find a way out.

So, that night he concealed himself as well as he could using his technique and left his room with a new face. He went outside the palace and then walked through the city as a mortal.

The teleportation formations would know who he was, so he instead decided to go through the forest in the mountains that were the closest to him.

The beasts were there, but he trusted his concealment and escape capabilities. By the time the sun was out in the sky, he was already far away from the Sunborn Sanctuary.

Chapter 1092 The First Shadow

Even as Alex arrived at one of the eastern cities of the Southern continent, he couldn't help but wonder if he had made some sort of mistake.

He had left on what could only be taken as an impulse and had not thought of how it would affect other people's lives.

He had left a letter behind explaining that the council members shouldn't try and find him and keep the illusion that he was still hidden in his room.

He hoped that would keep unnecessary people from trying to find him.

The city he was in currently was named the Sundering city, also known as the First Shadow.

Alex looked at the massive tower-like spire that rose to the sky at the east and understood why the city was called what it was called.

Due to how tall the spire was, before the sunlight even fell on this city, it would fall on the spire and its shadow would fall into these lands that wouldn't leave until the sun was really high in the sky.

It was already late in the day so there was enough sunlight for him to use.

"Are you new here, uhh... senior?" a woman spoke from the side. Alex could see that she was aged and had a bit of cultivation base, but not much.

'Organ tempering realm... 9th realm at that,' Alex thought.

"I am new," Alex said. "What is your name?"

"Hm, it's Chu Pinqing," the woman said, surprised that he was asking her name suddenly.

"Is that your real name?" Alex asked.

The woman gave a surprised look but did not answer.

"Don't worry, I'm just trying to learn if you are a player or not," Alex said.

"I... am," she said with a curious look on her face. "How did you know, senior?"

"I have my way," Alex said. "You don't have to call me senior, just call me little brother."

"Okay," the woman said. "Then little brother, do you need a tour of the town? I know a lot about this place and can give you a thorough tour of it. It will only cost you 3 True spirit stones an hour."

Alex couldn't help but smile. "Sure, go on ahead," he said and went along with her as he handed a single True spirit stone to her.

The woman was excited and started telling him about the city.

At first, he was just happy to help a player, but he wasn't expecting him to have so much information about the city, especially with her cultivation base.

His first shock came not even 3 minutes later after the woman started explaining stuff.

The tall spire to the east had surprised Alex sure, but what shocked him more was when he learned the name of the thing he was looking at.

He was looking at the Sundering Sanctum.

"That's the Sundering Sanctum? No wonder the city is called what it is," Alex said. Sundering City was a good name for a place that held the Sundering Sanctum.

Although, one thing didn't make sense at all. Sundering Sanctum was a secret realm, so why was he looking at it outside?

The woman had an answer for that too. "While that is the Sundering Sanctum, it's only a part of it," she said. "I don't know much about the mechanics behind what is happening there, but I've heard seniors say that the space inside is crumbling and things are either being destroyed or being sent out here."

"This spire is said to belong to the main tower in the sanctum and is just an upper half of it, while the main rooms of the tower itself are hidden inside the secret realm," she said.

"I see..." Alex said as he watched the spire. The woman was really coming in handy to understand what was going on. "Do you know when this is going to open up?"

"531 days," she said without any hesitation.

Alex was a little taken aback. "Are you sure? That's a very specific number," he said.

"I am sure," she said. "The experts know how to check the date of the sanctum's opening. While the number might be vague at the start, it becomes increasingly certain as it closes in and by now they are absolutely certain."

"However, if by any chance the number I've said is wrong, please take it up with those experts who gave us that guarantee," she said.

Alex couldn't help but chuckle when he heard that.

The woman took him through the market area, letting him know which store sold what and what did not. Alex looked through the stores and ended up going into an Alchemy store to buy a few ingredients.

Once he was done, he walked back out and went along with the woman as she took him through more of the city.

The woman took him through some bizarre pieces of land, mostly a garden that apparently belonged to a past mayor of this city that was split up into multiple pieces of land.

Many thousand years ago, when the Sundering sanctum was still fine, the mayor of this city at the time had made his residence next to the sanctum's entrance and had made a garden around it.

Years later, when the sanctum started bleeding out space, the spire appeared, separating the garden into various many parts that were suddenly far away from each other.

Although it had created a bit of terror at the time, the ruler from that time had deemed this normal and had told the people to preserve this garden as a reminder.

Now, this was a tourist attraction of sorts.

Alex looked at the spire from up close, even though it was still hundreds of meters away. '531 days' he thought. 'Will I be here then?'

That was a question the answer to which he did not have. He would love to be here, but the situation with the assassins made it so that he would definitely have to skip it.

That was a shame for certain.

"After it opens and closes, do you have any idea on when it opens again?" he asked.

"10 years? 12? You cannot be certain, but it is around that time," the woman said.

"I see," Alex said. 'Guess I'll have to go in at that time then. Although, hopefully, I will already find a way out of this place by then.'

They went around the city for a little while longer and Alex came across a massive, almost industrial building towards the southern part of the city.

"Kang Mega Workshop?" Alex read the name of the building. "Kang... Ah, the one that mines that metals."

It had been a while since he had thought about the metals from the Sunless lands. He had thought of going there to mine some metals for himself but had later planned against it.

'Although, now should be a perfect time for that,' he thought. However, he quickly got rid of the idea. The last thing he should be doing right now is being in places where he would have to be around strong people all the time.

'They own those lands, right? It's not like the Endless tunnel where you could mine as much as you wanted to,' he thought.

He was quickly disillusioned with the idea of mining more. Besides, what was he even going to do with them? Make some more swords? He already had them.

After that, there wasn't much to look at in the city, so he let the woman go. It was getting quite late anyway.

"Here, for your services," Alex handed her a few spirit stones.

The woman thanked him but she could feel her hands bulge a little while holding them. She looked down at the amount and was shocked.

There should have been about 8 spirit stones for the 3 hours she had spent showing around the city, but instead, there were about 20-something.

"Little brother, you—"

She looked up to tell him, but Alex was already mixed with the crowd, nowhere to be seen anymore.

She still looked for him for a minute or two, but seeing that he was gone, a small smile appeared on her face as she pocketed that money.

She decided to go buy some of those tasty dishes from the restaurant that she wouldn't normally buy due to how little she made.

Today she had received a hefty tip, and she was going to use it to feed her children.

Alex walked out of the Sundering city. He was only there to buy some alchemy ingredients but had ended up spending a few more hours than necessary to go on a tour led by that woman.

Now that the tour was over, it was time for him to go back on track.

He left the Sundering City and flew north. He sat on his boat as he spent his time improving his ingredients while waiting to see the Eastwatch city in the distance.

He reached the city around midnight and continued flying. The city was just a milestone for him to know where he was going after all.

He reached the Hiddenbay city that he had been to so many times and then went out of it into the ocean.

He hid the boat and flew on his own, being alert at every step. Even if he was close to the coast, there was nothing that said the stronger sea beasts wouldn't come here.

Just as he expected, a gigantic fish with tentacles for a beard flew out.

Alex looked at the beast with a Saint Core 4th realm cultivation base and smiled. His first fight in a long time had arrived.

Chapter 1093 Returning

A group of a dozen or so people walked in a straight line through a rocky pathway, led by a buff man at the front. They were all carrying various tools on their shoulders as they walked along.

They were unusually chattery this day, partly because they had just finished working, and partly because while they were working, the sun had decided to show its face.

"Ahh, what a wonderful day, isn't it?" one of them asked. "Look at the sun, look at the ocean, the gentle sea breeze. Ah~ it is to die for."

"Hey now, don't go dying just yet," one of the other men said. "We will only have to carry your body back."

"We could just dig right here and bury him, no need to take his body back," another one said.

"Oi! You all are looking forward to my death, are you?" the man shouted in an apparently angry tone, but everyone there was joking anyway, so he quickly end up laughing.

They all did.

All except the leader.

"Leader, you should laugh a bit too," one of the men said.

"If I find something absolutely hilarious, I will make sure to let you guys know," the leader said and continued walking.

The group gave an awkward smile to each other, shrugged, and continued on.

The road was muddy for a small patch in front of them, so they would have to be careful walking through this patch. Falling wouldn't hurt them, but it was better to keep their clothes clean anyway.

Washing them was a hassle that none wanted to waste their time on.

It wasn't that fresh water was hard to find or that the ocean was too dangerous to go to, it really was just that time was something of a luxury, and none of them wanted to waste it washing clothes.

If possible, they would rather use it to grow stronger.

One of the men slipped and fell onto the mud despite his careful consideration of every step. The other men laughed and pulled him up.

"Goddammit," The man cried out. "Now I'll have to wash it." He grumbled a bit.

"It's just dunking your clothes in water and rinsing them. It shouldn't take you very long," the leader said from the front. Although, he too knew that these men would rather use that time training.

"If only we could fly too," the grumbling man said and continued walking.

If only they could fly.

About 15 minutes later, the group reached their place of residence, but before they could go wash up, a pair of men and women arrived in front of them.

"Damn cultivators," one of them said under his breath.

"Sshh! They can hear you," another one said.

The cultivators did hear them but gave no heed to those words. Instead, they looked toward the leader.

"You, come with us," one of them said.

"Me?" the leader was surprised that he was chosen. "What do you want?"

"Stop asking questions and just follow," the two cultivators said and turned around to leave.

The leader said nothing and walked, following the two cultivators towards a rather fabulous camp that was made at the edge, towards the shore.

He walked past another tent from where he could feel the slight heat of the sacred flames that burned within it.

The three of them finally reached the tent that was… the leader couldn't immediately think of a word for it.

From the outside, it was gorgeous, a work of art. However, on the inside, it was bleak and dreary, as if he was attending a funeral all of a sudden.

"Sit!" the male cultivator said and the leader sat on the chair that was in the middle of the tent.

The two cultivators also took their seats while the female brought out something and said, "Let us begin."

* * * * * * *

It had been close to 500 days since Alex had left the Sunborn Sanctuary. He had broken through to the Saint Foundation 2nd realm while in there, and now, he was going to break through once again.

He felt the energy in his body get denser and denser until the Qi started crystallizing around the pillars that were already there.

He kept at it for a few more minutes and once as much of the Qi as he could contain in his dantian crystallized, he understood that he had successfully broken through to the Saint Foundation 3rd realm.

"Wow, a third of my dantian is filled with these crystals," he thought to himself. He wondered if his entire dantian would be one giant crystal by the end, that would only melt to give him Qi when he desired.

Fortunately, the crystals didn't hamper the spinning yin and yang energy at the bottom of his dantian, but for some reason, he got the feeling that they never would be hampered at all.

He sat there cultivating for a few more hours, trying to stabilize himself as well as he could. In the meantime, Whisker returned from his hunt where Ning had sent all of his blood beasts to go train, grow, and bring him some cores and blood.

Another giant container of blood appeared in front of Alex, one that didn't sicken him at just its smell.

One of the fish blood beasts lowered its long fins and Whisker jumped out of it, holding a storage bag.

Alex looked inside and found about 9 different beast cores in there. Not a bad harvest at all.

"You did well," he said as he recalled all the blood beasts into the Blood god's manual. "I don't think you will have to work anymore. I plan on returning now that I've broken through."

Whisker had died twice already in the time he was here. Each time he died, Alex had to leave and control the blood beasts and maybe even aid them in battle.

However, it had been over 200 days since he had last died, so Alex decided to not take his chances with Whisker.

Alex quickly checked Whisker's cultivation base. Due to his lack of time to practice the Undying Physique, he had shown no improvement at all.

While that only meant that the out-of-reach 3rd stage of his Undying body was still out of reach for him, in Whisker's case, it meant that he wasn't cultivating much.

He was reaching closer and closer to the True King realm, but between focusing on the pills and cultivation, and sending Whisker to go hunt with his Blood beasts, Whisker's cultivation base hadn't improved as quickly as it should have.

'I have time,' he made an excuse for himself for his lack of effort. But then again, his effort was focused on himself, the non-immortal that would die if killed, unlike Whisker.

Being free to train as he wanted to and make pills as he wanted to was fun, but now he had to return.

Right after absorbing all of the blood in front of him.

Alex quickly returned to the main continent from the islands he was on, but instead of making his way to the Sunborn Sanctuary directly, he first made his way to the secret realm that was actually a 'secret' realm.

He tore a hole in space and walked in to find the phoenix sleeping peacefully in the sun.

She opened his eyes at his arrival and like a pet who was happy to see its owner after a long day, jumped at him, obviously looking for treats.

"Did you already finish the pills I made you?" Alex asked with a very surprised look on his face.

"No, but I'm down to my last two," Scarlet said.

Alex sighed but said nothing. He bought out two pill bottles and handed them to her. "Cultivating and breaking through very quickly didn't work out as intended for a lot of us, resulting in a very bad cultivation base and a high chance of going through Qi deviation. I hope you've thought about that," he said.

"Yes, yes," Scarlet said as she took the pills. "No need to worry about that."

She opened the bottle and looked at the pills inside with a bright smile on her face. However, just then it stopped for a second as she focused on something.

Then, she gasped.

"There are 6 veins on these pills," she said.

"Of course," Alex said. "I reached that level months ago."

"How many months?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit and replied. "It was about a month after I visited you to give you the pill last time," he said.

"What?! You could've waited and I would've received these amazing pills then?" she asked.

Alex simply shrugged. "I would've been late if I had waited that long you know," he said. "After I was capable of that, I made my spiritual root-improving pills and ate them. Then, I went on a training spree for an entire month. I don't think you could've waited that long."

"N-no," she said with a slightly sad face. "Well, whatever. It's here now, so I can use it."

Alex chuckled at her cheerful expression. However, while he could laugh at that, what he could not laugh at was her cultivation base.

'Dear god, she's already so much stronger than me,' he thought. If Alex hadn't missed a shipment of pills while he was holed up in the Sunborn Sanctuary, she would've most likely been stronger even.

Either way, Saint Core's 6th realm made her way too strong. He would have trouble fighting her normally at that level. His Dao would barely give him an edge in a fight against her, and if he wanted to defeat her easily, he would have to rely on his blood aura.

'It's a good thing I'm an ally,' he thought as he sat down beside her to talk before leaving back to the Sunborn Sanctuary.

Chapter 1094 Scolding

Alex returned back to the Sunborn Sanctuary through the teleportation formations. He still had his other face, one that no one recognized, but his aura wasn't something that he could change.

So, the moment he was back in the city, the elders were immediately alerted to his presence. Before he could even walk out of the formation, several spiritual senses landed on him, some of them furiously asking him to return to the palace.

Alex sighed. What else could he do but agree with these people? After all, they were the ones that were trying to keep him safe.

He returned back to the palace, of course concealing himself as well as he could, and was confronted with all 10 of the council members.

"Uh… greetings, seniors," he said as he ate a pill that stripped away his made-up face.

"Is that all you have to say?" Liang Shufen asked with a frown on her face. She did not look as pretty when she was frowning.

"Umm… I'm sorry for leaving so suddenly?" Alex questioned if that was what they wanted to hear.

"Where have you been all this time?" Gong Liuxian asked.

"Somewhere without any humans," Alex said. "I made sure to not be seen by anyone, so I went to one of the islands off the coast of the continent."

"You went into the ocean?" one of them suddenly shouted. "Why not just give yourself to the assassins if you are so willing to die?"

Alex did not know what to say. They weren't wrong about the danger of that place, but they weren't aware of his power either. Hell, they probably didn't even know that he could fight people an entire minor realm above his own.

He wanted it to stay that way, so he didn't bother explaining.

"I have ways of staying safe, senior," he replied.

That did nothing to quench their rage at all. He was given an earful by each and every one of the elders on why what he did had been so stupid.

Alex knew that too, but he had his reasons to leave, so he didn't feel bad afterward. Besides, he was kind enough to leave a note before he left, which reduced his feeling of guilt by a lot.

"Do you plan on escaping anymore?" Yao Ning asked.

Against this old woman, the oldest of everyone here, Alex couldn't help but feel like a child. Even though he was his own independent man, somehow being asked such a thing by someone that was thousands of years old made him feel like he was talking to his own mother.

That made him feel like he was still under her care. While most would feel angry at being treated like a child, Alex felt a warmth in his heart.

He gave a wide smile and said, "unless it is absolutely necessary, I don't plan on doing anything reckless anytime soon," he said.

"Good," the old woman said. "Now, come on in. You must have been on a long journey. You look tired."

Alex nodded and entered the palace.

"By the way, what are you all doing out here? I would've assumed that you would be cultivating. Surely you didn't divine that I would be arriving here today, did you?" he asked.

"Why are we all not cultivating? Why do you think?" one of them asked in an annoyed tone.

Alex thought for a bit. "Wait, did you guys run out of pills?" he asked.

"Of course we did," another one said. "You didn't make that many once you started working on that water-improving pill, and once you finished it, you ran away."

"Oh… right," Alex said as he finally remembered. The days from when he had made so many of those pills were mixed together, so he didn't realize it had been earlier on that he had made those pills for them.

"Right, how were those water pills?" he asked. "Senior Lei, you should be the one that was the most excited about it, right?"

"Ahem, I would say sister Liang here was more excited than me," the old man said. "But that is not to say I wasn't very excited either. Our spiritual roots have improved a significant amount, so you have our thanks for that."

Alex nodded. He knew about the improvement they spoke of. Oh, he knew it way better than they did.

Wood and Water were Alex's worst spiritual roots, so when he ate the 6 veined pills, his Water spiritual root suddenly jumped up in quality, going from inferior to superior in a matter of minutes.

It had easily surpassed his Earth spiritual root, placing itself quite high, but still below his Fire spiritual root, which itself was below Yin, which was below the supreme roots of Yang and Metal.

Of course, once he ate the Earth pill, his Earth Spiritual root had become better than his water one. That was to be expected.

He ate multiple of those pills, but more than one wasn't necessary.

"Why don't you seniors give me 3 days? I will make those cultivation pills for you all and you can go back to cultivating," he said.

The group didn't argue and simply nodded. As much as they wanted to punish him for leaving, they couldn't argue that they needed his pills.

"Fine, you get off the hook this time around," one of them said. "But if you leave us again, expect us to remain friendly. We will imprison you if that's what it takes to keep you safe."

Alex chuckled a bit and thanked them before going back to the room that he couldn't help but find familiar.

He rested a bit and immediately got to work on those pills.

Making those pills didn't take very long. With 4 pills in a single cauldron, the only thing that took him too long was to improve the ingredients of those pills.

He could have used his World Defying mushrooms for them to add to the lack of energy, but he wanted to keep it for a time when he needed the energy immediately.

He finished making the pills not long after and handed them off to the elders.

Everyone was excited to get a new set of pills, so they thanked him and handed him two talismans.

"What are these?" Alex asked as he looked into the storage bags. The first one was full of spirit stones, which confused him slightly.

"That one contains the money you made from selling the water pill. You left too early to get your money back," Qiu Jianhong explained. "As for the other one, that is what was sent for you while you were gone. To keep up the appearance of you being here, we took it all without question."

Alex nodded and looked into the second bag. It was all full of talismans from the Insight pavilion. It seemed that they were still sending those talismans for him.

Although, It did look like there were quite a bit less. Did he need to repay the Insight pavilion? He was sure he bought a 2-year package after he had made those earth pills. But that was definitely over 2 years ago.

'I must go renew that. No wonder I didn't get as much,' he thought. His eyes fell on something in the storage bag that wasn't a talisman at all.

'What's that?' he wondered and pulled it out. The moment it was out of the storage bag, his body grew tense. He looked at what was inside and that made him even tenser.

He involuntarily moved away from it and that caught the elders' attention.

"What is it?" they asked.

"Poison… maybe?" Alex said with some hesitation.

The others immediately got serious as well.

"Are you sure?" they asked, ready to destroy it. But Alex suddenly shook his head. He let go of the momentary fear that took over him and pulled the package back towards him.

It was the same type of box as the one he had received from Jade Assassin, the one that had poison in it. So, he had assumed that this one might have poison in it as well.

But the Jade-Faced assassin was dead, so this was most likely not it.

'What if it's an explosive,' Alex thought. He knew one of the remaining 5 assassins was an old man that liked using explosives.

"I'll take this outside in case it is something dangerous," Alex said and flew out of the palace into the sky.

He floated away from the box as he used his Qi to open it. When the box opened, nothing happened at all. Except, a single piece of talisman that was slightly wrapped in a thread flew out of it.

Alex checked the box with his spiritual sense and then burned it just in case. Then, he took the talisman and unwrapped it as he flew down to the elders.

"How did you get this box?" he asked as the talisman was unraveled.

"It was sent to you by your association leader," one of them said. "We saw that it was a one-use talisman inside, so we didn't check it.

Alex nodded and took the talisman to his forehead as he looked into it to see what was written.

However, this was not a text talisman. This was one that could record stuff, and it had a recording.

A big, buff man sat on a chair inside a dark room. His face was rough and old, and he didn't seem to be in the best of mood, but that face was all that was needed to shake Alex to his core.

The elders saw Alex's face drain in color as he softly muttered a word.

"Father?"

Chapter 1095 Reason To Go

"My name is Graham," the man in the recording started speaking. "I'm surprised you people actually care about my name. None of you bothered asking me that before."

The room Graham was in was dark and with barely any furniture. The only thing there was the chair Graham was sitting in and that alone told Alex nothing of where his father was or what he was doing.

"Why do you two keep speaking in my head?" Graham asked. "It's annoying, just use your words."

Alex couldn't hear anything other than his father, so he realized that the ones that were recording the scene were cultivators that had spiritual sense. In all likelihood, they were people in the Saint realm.

Alex started getting excited and Happy. Finally, he found his father. Those years of investigations had paid off. Someone had finally found—

'Wait,' he thought. There was something wrong here. The box that this information had come with had been way too similar to the one sent to him by an assassin before.

An assassin who knew about his father.

There was a conspiracy going on in here that Alex wanted to find out more about it.

"This is a farce. Why the hell would I tell you my wife's name?" his father suddenly got angry. "You bastards deserve nothing from me."

'He's angry,' Alex realized. 'He's not in a good situation. Where is he?'

Just then, Alex saw his father's eyes go wide. "How do you know my son's name?" Graham spoke in the recording. "Bastards! What have you done with my son?"

His father jumped towards the people recording, but he saw a hand suddenly move from the right and force his father down with their Qi.

Alex felt a pang of anger when he saw that. They were treating his father like a prisoner. No worse, they were treating his father like a slave.

His father must have heard something in the recording that made him stop struggling. "I can meet my son?" he asked. "When? Where? How?"

He waited for an answer and frowned. "What the hell is the Sundering Sanctum?" he asked.

"Yes, I will go there. If I can meet my son, I will go to this damned Sanctum all you like," his father spoke.

A very distorted, hoarse voice finally spoke in the end. "If you want to meet your father, he will be entering the Sanctum too. You can meet him there."

The recording ended after that, not a single word more. Suddenly, the talisman burst into fire in his hand, but Alex wasn't in the headspace to care about a little burn in his hand.

His mind was going crazy trying to understand everything that was happening.

"Are you okay, young man? Your hand is burning," one of the elders said as they came to put out the fire. However, when they saw the clean hand that wasn't hurt in the slightest, they were slightly surprised.

It didn't look like he was protecting himself, so his skin not being burned was certainly not an everyday scene for them.

"What's wrong? You look worried," the old woman Yao Ning said.

"I-I am," Alex said, his voice quivering a little. He was finding it hard to keep himself from shaking, both in anger and fear.

"What did that talisman say?" another one of them asked.

"It was a recording," Alex said. "Of my father."

"Your father? Someone found him?" the elders asked.

Alex shook his head. "I don't think he was found," he said. "He looked fine physically, but the anger he had... my father doesn't get angry so easily, so he must hate them very much to get angry like the way he did in the recording. I think he's being kept somewhere, against his will."

"Whether that's to extort me of my recipes, or to use against me, I don't know," Alex said. "But one thing is certain, whoever it is that knows about my father, they want me to go to the Sundering Sanctum."

"What? You can't go there. That's a dangerous place where we can't keep you safe," one of them said.

"Yeah, if you go there, you will be away from us for months," another one said. "That is too long a time period to keep you away from us."

"You guys can't enter the Sundering Sanctum?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "Is there a sort of restriction or did you make an oath?"

"It's just too dangerous," one of them said. "Even us 10 are not entirely safe in there because of the uniqueness of that place."

Alex nodded. "But I must go either way," he said. "This is my one chance to find my father. They mentioned he was going to be there, but I highly doubt it. They will instead send the assassins after me, I'm sure of that. I will get my answer from those assassins if no one else."

He looked at the elders and saw that they were about to argue against him again, trying to keep him from going, especially since the chance of his father being there was none anyway.

"Seniors, I know you are looking out for me, and I appreciate that. However, this is my father we are talking about. The only reason I have not bothered finding a way out of this continent is that I had yet to find my father. So, if you think you can keep me from going after this one thread I've found in years, you underestimate my motivation."

The 10 old men and women looked at each other, not knowing what to say. They couldn't understand the urgency and importance of the task the same way as Alex felt it, but they could respect it.

"Fine, but you will have to be very careful," one of them said.

Alex nodded. "I know," he said. "I'm not looking to die just yet. I have too many things that depend on me to just go and die."

"Alright, let's plan what you can do then."

The 11 of them went back into the palace and started talking. At the same time, they sent a message to the association leader back in the City of Many Flowers to ask where he acquired the package from.

When the reply came, Alex couldn't help but sigh. The leader had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.

'It's definitely the assassins then,' he thought.

He continued talking with the elders who told him more about the Sanctum so he could prepare.

Alex learned about the Sanctum's history and how it was a normal secret realm with a massive towering Sanctum in the center of the secret realm.

However, as time passed, the secret realm began shrinking and after a while, the Sanctum was all that remained.

Now, even that was showing signs of coming out.

He returned back to his room after the conversation.

"Someone must have not properly set up the space-stabilizing formation," Godslayer spoke suddenly as soon they were back in his room.

"You're up?" Alex asked with a hint of surprise in his voice. He was awake most of the time these days but chose to go back to sleep as there was nothing else to do for him. "What do you mean by space stabilizing formation?"

"That's what you need to keep a spatial pocket from collapsing if it is not originally a very stable one," Godslayer said.

"So someone set up the formation badly? You can tell that just from the little information?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Godslayer said. "Unless something external is interfering with the spatial pocket, which is impossible to happen in this realms of mortal, there will only ever be two reasons why a spatial pocket will collapse."

"First, someone set up the Space stabilizing formation badly," Godslayer said. "Second, someone didn't set it up at all."

"In the case of the second one, if there was no such formation, the space, once started, would crumble to become nothing in a matter of hours. However, since it's crumbling but very slowly, it is absolutely because the Space stabilizing formation is not performing as well as it should," Godslayer said.

"So, it's keeping the space inside from crumbling as much as it can, but its not working as well. Is that it?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Godslayer said. "You will have to be careful when you go on such journeys. If the space is crumbling, it's certain to leave cracks even on the space that hasn't already crumbled yet. Those cracks can be very sharp and tear you to pieces before you even know it."

Alex nodded. He knew how sharp space could be. He was not going to mess with it.

"However, with your Dao, I don't think you will have to worry much about the space cracks," Godslayer said. "However, if there are cracks and crumbling space, that means there are likely void gates that have formed in there too. You will have to be extremely careful not to fall into those."

"Void gates?" Alex was surprised and confused. "What's that?"

"Void gates, it's what the name suggests," Godslayer said. "It's a gate that leads to the void.'

"What's... a void?" Alex asked curiously.

"It's a dimension outside of our own reality, one that is very hard to reach," Godslayer said. "But if there are cracks in space there, it's likely there will be gates opening to them."

"Dimension that can only be reached from a cracked space?" Alex's eyes went wide when he realized what he was referring to. "That thing from back in the Ancient Battlefield?"

"You've seen the void?" Godslayer's voice held some shock in it as he spoke.

"I think so," Alex said. "I have looked into a world of silver and purple past a crack in space, that left me with a deep sense of dread."

"Yup," Godslayer said. "That's the void alright."

Chapter 1096 Journey To The Sanctum

Alex visited Zhu Shaofan, who happened to be preparing to leave for the Sanctum as well. He asked if he found any more information on the Dark Phoenix assassins, but Zhu Shaofan couldn't help him at all.

The assassins had become silent for the last two and a half years, so there was nothing more to add to what was already given to him.

"You're going to the Sanctum too?" Lei Zhong who was with Alex at the moment asked.

"Yes, brother Lei," the man said.

"Why are you going?" Lei Zhong asked with a curious face.

"It's been a while since I've been there, and I wanted to go check it out. Also, I have a few employees that need teaching on how to gather accurate and unbiased information. I believe the Sanctum will be a great opportunity for that."

"That does sound like a good place to teach your employees," Lei Zhong said.

"Yes, with all the Saints and all that, they will also learn to recognize the faces of the important figures, helping us gather better information in general. Speaking of which, are you going to the sanctum as well, young man? Almost everyone your age will be going to prove themselves."

"I—" Alex hesitated for a bit.

"Oh, right. Of course," the man interrupted him. "My apologies, I was so excited that I momentarily forgot about your condition. It would've been great to see your alchemy skills being used in the

"Well, lucky for you he is going too," Lei Zhong said.

"Oh, really?" Zhu Shaofan asked excitedly. "That's great news, but aren't you worried about the Dark Phoenixes?"

"It's unavoidable," Lei Zhong said.

"Is that so?" the owner of the Insight pavilion didn't ask anymore. "Oh, when do you plan on leaving? We can leave together."

"Tomorrow morning," Alex said. "I want to have to stay outside as little as possible."

"Hmm, I was planning to leave right now... but I guess I can wait," he said. "Let's leave together tomorrow."

"Oh, that's an excellent idea!" Lei Zhong said suddenly. "We've been wondering how to help him stay out of the spotlight. Why don't you take him in our stead?"

"Is that a good idea? Most people don't know about me, so they will flock to him even more than they would if any of you are there to ward him off," he said.

"No, he will be changing his face, so they won't really notice him," Lei Zhong said. "That way, he will be safer with you than with us. Besides, it's better if we don't leave at all. It's better to give the illusion that he is still in the sanctuary."

"That's... actually not a bad idea, brother Lei," he said. "Alright, young man. I will come by to pick you up tomorrow morning. Be ready to leave."

"Understood, senior," Alex said.

He returned back to the palace and prepared for tomorrow. He made a few pills for himself that could come in handy. The elders gave him a bunch of treasures to use just in case, which he kept as well.

Then he brought out a 6 veined pill. "It's going to probably take months, so I should use these pills," he thought and ate the first one.

As soon as he ate it, his facial structures started shifting and his hair changed to a different color. His skin color became even fairer than it already was and his purple eyes changed to brown with a hint of green.

His Qi was of course still the same, but that was the least of his worries.

After checking everything, he started cultivating for the night and when the time came in the morning, he left.

The 10 council members didn't leave with him, there was no need to. After all, he was with the 11th almost-member of the council. They would be surprised if there was anyone out there stronger than Zhu Shaofan in the continent, not counting themselves.

Alex and Zhu Shaofan teleported to a city called Blooming city that was to the east of them. The teleportation formations from the sanctuary weren't connected to the Sundering city, so they had to come here first.

"Are we not teleporting directly from here?" Alex asked when Zhu Shaofan started walking out of the circle.

"Oh, we are, but I need to pick up a few of the employees here. I am in charge of them this time around," Zhu Shaofan said.

Alex shrugged and walked out with Zhu Shaofan before going to the Insight pavilion. There, he found a group of people, 12 in total, standing around.

"Senior, you're finally here," one of them spoke.

Alex saw the one that spoke, a girl with... large proportion. 'They can get that big?' he thought with a hint of surprise that he was unable to hide from his face.

The girl wore a simple pink robe, one that did not belong to the pavilion at all. The other 11 behind her did, and all of them seemed to be in the True realm.

The girl, however, was a Saint. And not just any Saint, but a Saint Core realm cultivator. That certainly surprised Alex a lot.

'But she's so young,' he thought.

"Xue'er, sorry to keep you guys waiting," Zhu Shaofan spoke to the girl. "Someone delayed me from coming yesterday." He gestured towards Alex.

"Oh, hello," the girl saw Alex and quickly greeted him. Her deep black hair fell forward as she bowed a little.

"This is Xue'er," Zhu Shaofan explained. "She's one of my earliest clerks, but now she's moved through the ranks in my organization and is one of the people that handle it all."

Alex gave a nod of understanding.

"Xue'er, this is—"

"Yu Ming," Alex said as he bowed in greeting. "Nice to meet you, sister Xue."

"It is my pleasure to meet you, brother Yu," the girl replied quickly. She was starting to get slightly pink in the face from what Alex could see.

'Is she... blushing?' Alex thought with a surprised look.

"You chose too handsome of a face," Zhu Shaofan nudged him a little.

Alex was very confused. 'What the hell is happening here?' he thought. Had he really chosen a very good-looking face? Certainly not. He wasn't getting the same reaction from the other girls behind this one.

"Hehe, I'm messing with you," Zhu Shaofan said as he pat him on the back with a bit of strength. "Xue'er is just very shy around men, especially ones her own age and new to her. She will stop being so shy after you spend some time with her."

"Shouldn't we be leaving, senior?" Alex asked.

"Oh right," he looked back at the 11 and asked, "is this all?"

"Yes," the girl said. "We should go quickly. Everyone else has already arrived in the Sundering City and is asking where you are."

"Okay, let's leave," Zhu Shaofan said and started walking. The girl passed by Alex and nodded slightly as she continued walking.

The other 11 followed but didn't dare make any sound at all. With 3 Saints in front of them, they didn't want to disturb them at all.

After a few minutes, they were all gone from that place and arrived in the teleportation building in the Sundering City.

Alex knew where this was as he had taken a thorough tour of this place back when he had come here more than a year ago.

He walked out into a shadowy land that still lived without much light. He turned to look at the behemoth of a spire that towered over the land, still casting the first shadow.

"They must have all already gathered," Zhu Shaofan said. "The sanctum must be opening any minute now."

That had been Alex's plan to stay out here as little as needed. He looked around the city, trying to look for something, anything that could give him some hints.

He was here to learn about his father, so he wanted something out of this visit.

They made their way through the shadowy land until they arrived at the gardens with thousands of other people, all of which were mostly in the Saint realm.

Alex was very shocked to see that. This was a bigger number than the ones that gathered for the Dao mountain's opening back in the Northern Continent.

Obviously, not everyone went to Dao mountain, but that did not make the shock of seeing nearly 5 thousand Saints all in one place any lesser. And all of them were going to enter the Sanctuary?

'No,' Alex thought. He was told this before. A lot of these here are elders or seniors of people that actually want to enter. They were here just to look after that person.

'Still, half of them are going to enter,' he thought. That was still a massive number.

He felt Zhu Shaofan's spiritual sense emerge and search around. He was so strong that he could do so without offending anyone.

"Ah, there they are. Come on guys," he said as he walked towards the other group of people from the Insight pavilion.

Alex saw nearly a hundred different people, all led by multiple saints. The saints greeted Zhu Shaofan the moment he arrived and made way for him to go towards the center so he could hide from everyone.

Alex looked around at the many people and paused for a second when he saw a familiar face.

'What was her name?' he thought. 'Yusong Muzhou? Does she work here too?'

It was the dark-skinned, body cultivator woman he had fought back against in the Battle hall that he believed had come from the Wastelands. She seemed to be entering the Sanctum as well.

'I see,' he thought. 'I'm going to see some familiar faces here, aren't I?'

Chapter 1097 The Sanctum Calls

As Alex looked around the shadowed land at various different people that were there, Zhu Shaofan started handing out envelopes to a few of the saints that were there.

"The Sanctum will open at any moment now, so we don't have much time. Go and memorize who you will be keeping an eye on," he said.

The few saints nodded and left, vanishing into the crowd of other saints.

"What's that?" Alex asked.

"Hmm? It's a list of people for them to gather information on," Zhu Shaofan said. "Sure they will be going in to prove themselves, but that doesn't mean we can't gather a few bits of information when we have the chance."

"You're gathering information about these saints?" Alex asked with a look of surprise. He hadn't expected them to be this forthright with gathering information.

"Of course, I'm in the business of selling information, so I must keep a stock of new ones for the people that want it," he said. "For example, they say that the Yao family's youngster, Yao Bujiang has managed to learn a rather unique Dao, but no one can confidently tell what it is. They will help me bring back those sorts of information."

"I see," Alex said. "Have you gathered my information too?"

"Of course," the man said. "But don't worry, I won't release it until all of this fiasco is over."

"I appreciate that," Alex said blankly and continued looking around the crowd.

He was absolutely certain that his father wasn't here... but a human heart was a fickle thing. It couldn't help but hope even when the chances were zero.

He hoped at least, if not his father, then he would find something else. Something that could help him lead to some answer.

Unfortunately, he couldn't go out to look on his own. He didn't want people to even notice him here. Who knew where the assassins could be hiding?

The people that had gone out returned and Xue'er affirmed that they had all memorized it.

Zhu Shaofan gave a big smile. "Alright, it should be opening any minute now," he said as he looked towards the massive spire that looked like it was right in front of them, but was rather far away.

"You all, start moving closer. When you feel an aura pulling you in, accept it. It will be looking for your approval to bring you in," he said.

"Understood, senior," everyone said and walked towards the Spire. It wasn't just them, but everyone who was going to join was doing so.

Alex slowly began walking as well. He saw the many saints that went closer to the spire and even a few True realm cultivators.

Alex knew there would be True realm cultivators that wanted to try it out as well. After all, not everything in the sanctum came down to one's might. There was a chance for a self-tempering realm cultivator to be the one to succeed in the sanctum.

Of course, that chance was almost non-existent. Not just them, even True realm cultivators would have a very, very low chance.

Still, some of these people wanted to try it out, mostly the True realm ones. That was why the 10 council elders had made a rule to limit people to those under 200 years old if they are not in the Saint realm yet.

It would give the people that wanted to go in a chance, but the majority would still need to stay out.

That said, 'Some' True realm cultivators still came to be thousands of them easily. It seemed they were staying away from the Saints beforehand, but now that the time was approaching, they went in.

Alex looked around at the crowd, trying to look for his father, one of the assassins, or the other thing he was searching for.

He kept an eye on the crowd while wondering what he was going to do inside the sanctum itself.

The sanctum was a sort of competition set between thousands of competitors. It was a large tower, separated into so many floors that no one had an idea of how many there were, just that there were most likely multiple rooms on the same floor.

Each one of the rooms had people perform something in it. Most of the tasks were unique to the rooms, but it was possible they repeated as well.

You followed the rules of each of the tasks and competed to complete them. Only a select group of those who completed the tasks could advance to the next floor.

If you failed, you went back all the way to the first floor and started all over again.

The elders had said that there were multiple ways to go through the floors, as there were multiple pathways. As they had suspected, each floor held multiple rooms, so one didn't have to go through the same pathway if they didn't want to.

It was said that in the past the first person to reach a new floor in the current iteration of the competition earned a treasure. However, after the space inside had started crumbling, no one got anything.

Now, the only way to prove yourself was to reach the topmost floor and be the one to activate the device that teleported everyone out. Once that happened, the sanctum would go into a hibernation of sorts and it would be years before it was ready to be open again.

It was said that the last time the Sanctum had opened, it was completed by someone from the Jade Fire sect, and it had taken them exactly 8 months and 12 days.

So, Alex understood that this was likely going to take a lot out of his time out here. However, if that meant he could find his father, he was willing to do anything.

Alex suddenly felt a fluctuation of space and turned toward the massive spire. 'It's happening,' he thought.

It was only a few seconds later that the other people, even the strong ones like Zhu Shaofan or the family heads and sect leaders of the various top families and sects of the southern continent sensed it.

Alex felt the pulse of energy touch him and it seemed to be asking if he wanted to come in.

He looked around and saw people disappear one after another. Everyone had been waiting for this, so they entered without hesitation.

As the people disappeared, the surrounding crowd got thinner and thinner. 'I should go in too,' he thought and was about to turn around when he noticed something.

His eyes widened, his vision zooming as far as he could. He looked at a man to his left that was walking away from the spire. More accurately, he looked at a ring on his finger. A golden ring with a gem on it that had spirals carved around it.

Alex had seen that ring before, and it had been very recent as well.

In the recording of his father that had been sent to him, there was a moment where his father got up in anger and a hand appeared to force him back down. Alex hadn't noticed it before, but upon replaying what he had seen in his head, he had noticed a ring on the hand that had emerged in the recording.

This was the same ring.

He had been looking for it ever since he had arrived here, and he had found it.

'That's the bastard that knows about my father,' Alex thought and turned around to go after the man who was flying away.

He too was going to fly away when a person walked right up to him and smiled.

Alex stood stunned when he saw the man that was smiling at him. It was his father. Before he could say anything, the man spoke up, "Where are you going, son? Aren't you going to come in with me?"

Alex was way too flabbergasted to make sense of anything. His father was actually here? Was this real?

He never expected his father to be here, and for him to... Alex paused. His father had a cultivation base in the Saint Core realm.

That was definitely not correct based on the recording he had seen. "Who are you?" Alex asked angrily.

The man just smiled and suddenly disappeared from in front of him. He had gone into the sanctum.

Alex turned to follow him, but then remembered the man with the ring. He turned towards the man who would likely give him more information, but to his bad luck, he had already flown away somewhere.

"Fuck!" Alex shouted out in anger, earning a few glances from the people around him. He looked into the sky, trying to find the man that was there, but there were too many people for him to see anything at all.

"Dammit!" he shouted and turned around towards the sanctum.

The man had flown away, but Alex had seen him. He had seen his face. He could find him later. For now, he needed to find his father's imposter that had just entered the Sanctum.

He had seen his father enough to impersonate him, so that meant he definitely had an idea about him. He could force the answer out of that person.

Alex felt the pulsing spatial energy around him that waited for his intent. He gave it the answer it desired. Then, he was sucked away by the Sanctum like everyone else around him.

Alex found himself in a massive room with many, many people, so he immediately spread his spiritual sense to find his father. But of course, there was a problem.

Spiritual sense didn't work on the first floor.

Chapter 1098 The First Floor

Alex looked around at the thousands of people in the same room as the one he was in.

This was the first floor, the lowest floor in the sanctum, the floor where one couldn't use their spiritual sense at all.

He tried searching for his father's imposter, but he couldn't find someone like that with just his vision where there were so many others here that he could use to hide behind.

'He knew me,' Alex thought. 'How did he know me?'

Alex had gone out of his way to hide by changing his face, however that didn't seem to work at all. His father's imposter had seen right through him.

'The only ones who know about my current face are the 10 elders and Zhu Shaofan. Was it one of them?' he thought.

He looked around once more, searching for people who were looking at him. It didn't look like anyone was looking at him at all.

He quickly reached into his storage ring and pulled out another two pills. One of them got rid of his current face, and the second one gave him a new face.

Since his face had been found, his best course of action right now was to change it and continue moving. The imposter most likely had already moved away from this place after all.

Alex quickly ate the two pills and appeared with a new face that was very plain looking. No one would even pay attention to him with such a face.

Once he was changed, he looked around, wondering what he was supposed to be doing next.

The large stone room was high and wide. The entire room was glowing softly from all around them, giving a somewhat natural light to the place.

The nearly 200-meter-wide circular room had 5 massive open doors that had a curtain of blue light blocking one from seeing what was beyond that point.

Alex looked at the top of each gate and was slightly surprised.

He was told that the various floors had multiple pathways out, each of which was represented by a symbol at the top of the doors that one had to remember to know which one they had entered and which one they hadn't.

Alex had been expecting to see the same symbols on top of these gates, but what he saw instead were numbers. One through Five were all on top of the gates, but not a single person there seemed to have realized that.

After all, the words on the gate were written in Human language.

Since this was previously a demon world, Human language was foreign, and the many people that entered here beforehand would only consider these things symbols.

Of course, to a Saint realm cultivator, having something be Symbols instead of numbers didn't make it any harder. With this memory, they were able to remember everything in detail.

However, this did tell Alex one thing.

This sanctum was created by a Human, probably the first group of settlers that were brought here along with the four Heavenly beasts.

Alex didn't spend any more time on that thought though. It was a matter of the past, and he needed to focus on the present.

Since he didn't know which room was which, he went for the one that was numbered 1.

He looked around the room one more time for his father's imposter and after not finding him, he entered the room.

As soon as he entered, he heard a jumbled mess of sounds coming at him from every direction. The people in the room moved around, used techniques, and made so much noise that Alex found it hard to focus on anything.

He looked at the people running all around the room trying to catch something that was flying around the room.

His vision slowed down and he noticed that there were multiple small balls of light that flew very unpredictably. As he followed one of them, his vision was led to the floating words in the air that he had missed due to the mess of a room this was.

Capture the Light.

'Oh, is that how we go through this floor?' Alex thought. He looked around to see the ball of lights float around once again.

He reached out his hand to grab it, but as he got closer, the small ball of light floated away from him, as if it were repelled by his hand.

He tried again, and once again the ball floated far from him.

Alex frowned slightly. The ball of light wasn't very fast and one could easily grab it as long as they were in the Saint realm. However, its ability to push itself off of someone made it hard for anyone here to grab it.

People were running around, but the closer they got, the further the fall would push itself out of their way.

Alex even saw people using techniques to try and keep the ball of light stationary, but that didn't work at all.

Alex used his own Qi to test and his result was the same. He quickly ran after the balls of light like everyone else and had to stop after half a minute as it didn't work at all.

It was like he was trying to fish for an eggshell that had fallen into his cracked egg. The light constantly moved away from him no matter how fast he got close to it.

"What the hell am I supposed to do?" Alex wanted to shout out in frustration and was even going to. However, no voice came out from him. He was surprised and wanted to see what was happening to him, but of course, his spiritual sense still wasn't working at all.

There was something missing with his vocal cords and Alex wanted to force through it to be able to speak.

But before even doing so, the fact that he couldn't speak confused him. He had heard plenty of people speaking outside, so it was only this room where people couldn't speak at all.

'Does speaking makes this easier somehow?' he wondered.

Not everyone in the room was failing of course. Bit by bit, people were leaving the room. Alex didn't know how they managed to grab the light, but at least he knew it was possible.

'They don't want us to sense something, that much is understandable. But they don't want us to talk too?' Alex thought. 'Do they not want to let us communicate with each other?'

As he thought that, a few more people were leaving. Surprisingly, he managed to see one of the people that was leaving.

Alex saw him reach out his hand and grabbed the light very easily. He was surprised and then his eyes narrowed.

'There has to be a trick to this,' Alex thought. 'Are they using some technique?'

He didn't have his spiritual sense to see that, but he did have something else that could help him. His Demon eyes.

He activated his eyes with a little hesitant look on his face. With so many hundreds of people, with so many different techniques, the room was most likely going to be filled to the brim with colors that were going to overwhelm him slightly.

Still, he used it, and… the room was surprisingly mostly filled with a milky white color, a representation of the neutral energy.

He was surprised at how much of it there was. He could see the ball of lights as slightly larger white-colored orbs that flew within the milky white energy.

When someone tried to reach for it, Alex saw the white fog come into contact with the color that was being released by the person's body and was not mixing together at all.

The white aura rejected any other elemental aura and since the ball of light always stayed in the white aura, it never came into contact with anything at all.

'I see,' he thought as he looked at himself. Yellow, Gold, Black, Red, Blue, and Brown auras floated out of his constantly. He couldn't help it since his Qi constantly passed through all of his spiritual roots, these aura were constantly created.

'So if I can get rid of them…' he thought as he employed his Immortal Concealment technique. The technique didn't get rid of his aura, but it did hide it all inside of his body, containing them from leaking.

As he did, he lost the colors that were coming out of him and the white fog slowly floated toward him. Within them were a few of the ball of lights that came in as well.

Alex reached out and easily grabbed the light. The moment he did so, he was teleported away.

Before he could realize it, he was on a floor that looked eerily similar to the first floor. Except, on this one, his spiritual sense naturally flowed out of him.

He could use it.

He carefully spread his senses around the room so as no not to bring anyone's attention toward him. He searched for the imposter, but he couldn't find the man at all.

He walked towards one of the open spaces and sat down on the stone floor. He decided not to leave this place at all.

After all, anyone on the first floor was going to have to go through this room to go to the next one, so he wanted to intercept the man there.New n0vel chapters are published on

As long as he got the man, he didn't need to bother going through this entire sanctum and could just wait for someone to send him out.

Chapter 1099 Second Floor

Alex waited for a long time before he came to accept the fact that the man wasn't going to come around at all.

It had been at least an entire day, so it was obvious at it point.

There were a few possibilities. One was that the man had already entered one of the rooms before Alex had even come here. Another one was that the man was still back on his floor, waiting to find a way to come up to this floor.

But it was most likely that the third possibility was the most likely. The man had already changed his face back to his normal one and thus it would be impossible for Alex to find him.

"They only wanted to draw me in here," he thought. "I doubt they want to continue using my father's face since it would make them an obvious target for me. Especially since they know I can change my face."

In the end, there was nothing Alex could do right now. He couldn't find the man, so he needed to continue with the floors.

Since his father wasn't here, maybe it was better if he went up the floors quickly and left Sanctum. He had another lead, after all, one that was likely better than these assassins.

Alex looked around and decided to go into the room marked with the number 1.

He walked up to the bluish barrier on the door and passed through it. When he came out of the other side, he was greeted by a crowd of people who were… doing nothing?

He wondered why and he was immediately awarded the answer.

In front of the group of people, there were massive spider webs, or at least they looked like spider webs. Instead, they were silver cracks that had formed on reality itself. Like a broken mirror, the crack made it impossible to see the image behind it clearly.

Alex saw the fractured space and frowned.

The elders had told him that when he saw the crumbling space of the sanctum, he would've known it immediately. He didn't expect the crumbling space to look so… terrifying.

It wasn't just him. Every single saint that was here for the first time was transfixed by the shattering space. The ones that had been here before simply grumbled.

"Dammit, I will have to start all over again!" they spoke in frustration and left through the gate.

Alex watched them leave with a weird look on his face. He had to leave the same way too now that it turned out this room was unusable.

However, doing so would not send him back to where he had just come from. Instead, backing out of a room you had entered sent you back to the first floor, where you had to go through everything all over again.

It wasn't a simple reason why this place sometimes took months and months to leave.

'Fortunately, I'm just on the second floor,' Alex thought. It would have been even more annoying if I was higher on the floors.'

"In some ways, that's quite pretty, don't you think?" someone spoke not far away from him.

Alex looked at the plain woman in her gray robes with a weird look and ignored her.

"Oh, are you not going to answer?" the woman asked.

Alex frowned. "What do you want?" he asked. He didn't think it was possible for this woman to be an assassin since he had already changed his face, but he still couldn't help but be paranoid.

"I just want an answer," she said. "Do you think that is pretty too?"

Alex looked towards the cracked space in front of everyone and said, "Yes, I suppose it's quite pretty."

"Oh, really?" the girl asked with an excited look on her face. "You're not lying right?"

"Why would I be lying?" Alex asked.

"Then promise that you're telling the truth," she said in a playful manner.

"I have no reason to," Alex said and turned to look at the spatial crack again. He wondered if he could learn more about Space from this place. Although, for some reason, he was finding it hard to sense the aura in here.

It was a weird feeling for certain.

"Ehhh! Come on! It's just a simple promise," the girl said.

"Leave me," Alex shouted at her and moved away.

"Tsk! So brass. And here I thought I could give you some information about your father," she said.

Alex suddenly turned around and looked at her with a shocked face. "What did you say?" he asked.

"Hehe, that got your attention so easily. Do you want to know about your father, Alex?" the girl asked.

Alex's eyes turned dark as he glared at her. So she was an assassin after all.

"Gosh, you don't have to glare at me like that," she said. "What are you going to do? Cut me to pieces with your stare?"

"No, I'll use my sword for that," Alex said. "That I can promise you."

"Haha! You have a nice sense of humor, don't you?" the girl said. "Using a sword to cut me in this place? so funny."

Alex frowned slightly. That was right. He couldn't use his sword here, since he couldn't bring it out in the first place.

The rooms with crumbling spaces cut off his access to any of the other spaces as well. Unless he could force the spatial aura around him to move away, he couldn't bring out his sword at all.

At the same time, he was starting to realize that he couldn't use his Dao in this place either. At least not the external help of the dao.

He could still use the dao, but he would have to only use his Qi. Alex tried forcing the spatial aura inside of him to move around his ting to free it from the outside space's force.

'Will I run out of space aura if I do this?' he couldn't help but wonder. There was still a lot of it in his mental space, but that took a lot of time to use up. As for what was in his body, he wasn't sure.

He could feel his sword and be ready to pull it out when the girl spoke again.

"Well, I'm not here to fight you anyway," she said.

"What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"I'm here to make you a proposition, in place of my employer," she said.

"What proposition?" Alex asked.

"Stop looking for your father and forget about him. Make an oath that you will do so in front of one of us, and we Dark Phoenix will never target you again. Well, not unless we have another employer. You have 2 months of time to think about it, or until someone completes the sanctum if that comes to be earlier," she said.

"I don't need any time," Alex said. "My answer is simple. I refuse."

The girl shrugged. "As I said, you have time, just think about it," she said. "Also, don't try to fight me please, you are very weak. I might just kill you accidentally, which is not my plan."

Alex could see people turning to look at him and the woman, wondering what was happening. Should he shout it out? Tell them who these people are so that maybe they would help in the battle?

'No, they have my father. If I make a mistake…' He decided against it. Still, he continued staring at the woman. He was going to kill her himself.

Only, he wanted to figure out who she exactly was.

There were 5 assassins remaining. One was the older man that loved using explosives. Another was the leader, who he knew nothing about.

There was the red-haired woman, the one that he had truly taken notice of.

And finally, there were the twins. Was she one of the twins? He couldn't tell. She could also be the red-haired woman wearing different clothes, but that seemed impossible as he wasn't seeing any fire aura coming out of her body.

The one in the information was surrounded by fire.

Then… was this the leader?

"Where is my father?" Alex asked.

"Why do you even ask that?" the girl said. "You know there's no point, right?"

Alex frowned. "You were not the one that impersonated my father, were you?" he asked. "You said you had other people in here with you."

"Of course," the girl said. "We came prepared."

"Good," Alex said as he finally pulled out Midnight in the middle of the crowd surprising everyone. "Then I can kill you without hesitation."

The girl showed a look of surprise and even a bit of confusion, but she didn't show any fear at all. She still believed that she had the upper hand if they were to fight.

"Hey! What the hell are you doing?" one of the crowd shouted.

"He's trying to kill that girl," someone else said.

"If you two have a grudge against each other, go solve it outside. Don't make this place your battlefield," they said. "Or we will throw you in there."

Alex turned to look towards the spatial cracks where they pointed and making use of that opportunity, the girl ran through the gate.

"Shit!" Alex said as he ran through the gate, following her. He arrived on the first floor, his spiritual sense was immediately suppressed.

Still, he stood up and looked around. He barely managed to get a glimpse of the woman eating something as she entered Gate 3.

He wasted no time and followed her to enter Gate 3 as well. He wasn't planning on stopping before he killed her or got an answer.

Chapter 1100 Going Up The Floors

Alex found himself in a new room with people that were either leaving the room or simply standing still as if frozen.

However, upon closer inspection, he saw that they were just looking at something high above them.

Alex didn't immediately check to see what it was but instead looked around at the people that were closest to him.

He was trying to look for the girl, but he had already seen that she had eaten a pill, so he expected her to have a change of face. However, she couldn't have changed her robes so quickly. So, he searched for anyone wearing plain gray robes.

Unfortunately for him, there were simply way too many people wearing such clothes.

'Dammit!' he thought. He activated his demon eyes to see if he could recognize her by the colors around her, but there were too many people, each with similar colors coming out of them.

There was also the possibility that she escaped the moment he entered without him realizing it. That was very frustrating to think about.

Just then, he noticed something else. There was a small string of aura or Qi that was connected to everyone coming from the ceiling. He followed the thread of Qi and looked to the ceiling and saw something floating in the air.

An illusory image of an ingredient floated for everyone to see.

"Pinkfrost Jade pears?" he spoke softly when he saw the fruit that was high in the air.

Suddenly, the image changed to something else, and at the same time, he teleported out of the room to the second floor.

"That's it?" Alex thought and grumbled for a second. He should have stayed and tried to find the girl.

A few people looked towards him, some even glaring when they saw the sword in his hand. He frowned a little and put it into his storage ring.

There were not as many people as he would've expected to be on the 2nd floor. 'I did wait for a day, so they had a bit of a headstart. They must be on the higher floors,' he thought.

He thought of moving along but stopped. 'Is there even a point?' he thought. He sat down on the floor of the 2nd floor and sighed.

'Make an oath to never search for my father... why?' he wondered. He finally had a bit of free time to try and figure out what was happening.

'Not search for my father... is this actually not about me? Or are they trying to mess with me?' he thought. The Faceless assassin had also said something similar to their plan not being about killing him, that was only to happen when their first plan didn't work.

Was their first plan to make him say this oath? But why? What was his father to these people that they were forcing him to stop looking for him?

'It must have something to do with his constitution or talent,' Alex thought. 'They must think he's a unique existence and are keeping him somewhere. That recording must have been from his place of capture.'

Alex was slowly understanding that these people were never trying to kill him for who he was or what he was doing, but rather who his father was. They were trying to stop him from finding his father.

'That's it, isn't it?' he thought. 'That's why those investigators were killed. They didn't want me to find my father.'

There was still a chance that he was wrong and the reason was something else, but for now, that was the reason he was going to work under the assumption of

'Will they kill my father if I push them too hard?' Alex wondered. While it was possible that they wanted something from his father, it was also possible that they would kill him just because they couldn't have him as well.

"The chances are low, but I can't discard the possibility," Alex thought. He took a deep breath and shook his head.

'Now is not the time for this,' he thought. Since he now somewhat understood the motive around which his enemies were working, they were going to wait for him to give his answer.

Since he knew what his answer was, he could also know what the result of this answer would be. "Assassination," he thought. "I'm going to be killed to stop me from looking for my father."

The situation was always dangerous, but it suddenly felt more real somehow. 'I need to get out of this place quickly.' He thought.

Since the deadline was for 2 months, Alex decided to complete the tower before that. If he could be the one that completed the tower, he would not have to worry about having to give any answer or falling victim to the assassination.

'I can do it in less than 2 months, right?' Alex thought and stood up.

There were 45 different floors from what he had heard, and he was going to complete all of them as soon as he could.

Alex stood up and looked at the various doors to the rooms once again. Gate 1 was crumbling, so he had to go for Gate 2 this time around.

Gate 2 was darkened, and so were the others. He had to wait before he went in there.

'Dark gates... that means this is a task that requires a specific number of people, right?' he thought.

Sometimes, the rooms only accepted a certain amount of people per task and the rest had to wait outside before the task inside was completed.

It seemed all the rooms on the 2nd floor were like that. The only reason he was even able to enter the 1st room was that the room was destroyed for the most part.

It took 10 minutes before the 2nd gate was open and Alex managed to sneak in despite the people waiting already.

As soon as he entered, he looked to the top to see what this room was all about.

Choose a Side and pull the rope to your side.

"What?"

He finally looked down and saw that the room was separated into two sides with a rope made up of Qi at the center. There were specific places for everyone to stand at.

He walked up to one of the empty ones and grabbed the rope. "Is this tug of war? Do I pull now?" he thought. But the rope was stiff and rigid. It didn't look like it could be pulled on just yet.

He was also feeling a slight pressure on him that was keeping him from using his Qi excessively.

'So they don't want us to use any external technique,' he thought. 'Fine, I'm just going to pull then.'

He waited for the rest of the people to get into their position and then the room finally started flashing with symbols.

It counted down from 5, but of course, Alex was the only one who knew that. He grabbed it tightly and got ready to pull

4,3,2, and then 1.

As soon as the rigid rope felt slightly softer, he pulled on it with everything he had, along with the 29 different people beside him.

The rope lurched, coming over to his side of the room instantly. He didn't know how much of that was because of him, but it happened nonetheless.

Unlike the last group, they did not have to spend a very long time trying to pull the rope to their side.

Every single person in that room suddenly felt themselves being taken away again.

Alex and the other 29 would be taken to the 3rd floor, while the rest would go to the 1st floor to restart it all over again.

He arrived on the third floor, with about a few hundred people in it. And from the looks of it, they had all been waiting here for quite a while.

There were 5 rooms once more, and only 4 of them had actual gates that had darkened. The final one had nothing but silvery white light coming from the inside.

'Another room with fractured space,' he thought. He hoped that wasn't the case for each of the floors he went up on. If somehow there was a floor that was completely cracked with no way of going up, he wouldn't know what to do.

A few more people popped up, but the gates still remained closed. Alex sat down and waited for the gates to open up.

People flocked to the first gate that opened, so by the time he got a chance to enter any other one of the gates, nearly 2 hours had passed.

When he went in, it turned out that the room was a competition of strength. 50 people had come in, and according to the words floating in the air, only 20 would be moving on.

A puppet stood at the center of the room and everyone was supposed to attack it one by one.

A light fell on someone asking them to attack the puppet. The person attacked and the light moved onto someone else.

Apparently, they weren't going to learn who attacked the hardest until it was all over.

Nearly 30 people later, Alex finally got his chance. He wasted no time and threw a metal punch at the puppet.

The light moved around and a while later everyone was done.

Then, the room dimmed a little for a few seconds, and 20 lights shined on the 20 winners. Alex was one of them.

They all felt the teleportation aura capture them, and then they were teleported.

When the 20 of them reappeared, everyone including Alex was on the 4th floor.

Chapter 1101 Playground

The room Alex entered on the 4th floor had a movement speed test. Whoever was the fastest got to go to the next floor.

Surprisingly only 10 people got to enter this room, out of which 3 passed and the rest failed.

Alex easily passed this room, mostly by cheating as he did not run the entire course, but rather teleported to the finish line and became the winner.

The others did not like what he did, but what could they really do? The losers were sent back to the first floor while the winners were sent to the 5th floor.

Alex appeared with the other 2 people and looked around in surprise at the lack of people on the 5th floor. Unlike the lower floors where there were hundreds of people at any given time, this floor barely had a dozen of them, and that too only because they were either resting or waiting for someone else to come join them.

Alex looked around and saw a massive black pillar at the center of the room, with no other visible rooms on any of the floors at all.

From the looks of it, there was only one thing to do on this floor.

Give the pillar your blood.

"It wants my blood?" Alex thought as he stared at the floating text next to the black pillar. The other people were somewhat surprised to read the words as well.

However, they wasted no time as they cut their palm or fingers and dabbed the blood onto the black pillar. Then, they were taken away.

"Such a simple way to go up a floor," Alex thought. There wasn't even any competition.

But why was it asking for his blood? Was there some sinister reason?

"Hey Godslayer, can you make any sense of this?" he asked.

"Hmm?" Godslayer asked. "Make sense of what?"

"This, why does this thing want my blood?" Alex asked.

"What do you mean?" Godslayer asked. "Where are we?"

"Were you sleeping again? Wake up! We're in the Sundering Sanctum, and I'm surrounded by assassins that I can't even find," Alex said. "And now this pillar is asking me for my blood. Do you have any idea why that might be?"

"How should I know?" Godslayer asked.

Alex sighed. That was a useless conversation. At least he was awake now.

"Don't sleep. I might need your help on the upper floors," Alex said.

He walked over to the pillar and a bit of his blood flowed out from his palm which he placed on the black pillar as well. His blood was absorbed by the pillar and then he teleported up a floor.

On the 6th floor, Alex saw nearly a thousand different people, all of who were waiting for the doors to open. This floor had 3 rooms in total, of which 1 seemed to have been destroyed by the crumbling space, leaving just the other 2 to go through.

As such, there were a lot of people waiting in a queue.

"How long do I have to wait?" he couldn't help but ask.

"A few hours for sure, maybe even a few days," a voice spoke from behind him.

Alex quickly turned around to see a man standing behind him. He hesitated as he looked at the perfectly dressed man with a gentle smile on his face.

He did not trust such a man, especially with the assassins running amok.

Alex got on guard, but then he noticed something. Something... was off about this man.

"What the fuck?" he couldn't help but curse when he saw that the man's body... was illusory. He was practically see-through.

"Are you... a ghost? No, a soul? What are you?" Alex asked.

"That's not a soul," Godslayer answered.

"I am the spirit of this place, master White Tiger," the man said. "I would like to humbly welcome you to this playground."

'Master White Tiger?' Alex was surprised.

"Why is he calling you a White Tiger?" Godslayer asked with a confused voice.

"Not the time," Alex said. He looked towards the spirit and asked, "What do you mean by spirit of this place? Are you like a departed soul that is still haunting this place?"

"Of course not, stupid," Godslayer shouted in his head. "He's the spirit of this artifact."

Alex wondered for a moment if he heard it correctly. "Wait... an Artifact spirit? What artifact?" he asked as he looked around. A slow realization dawned on him when he looked around.

"No way!"

"This tower is indeed an artifact created by a genius Artificer," the spirit said. "It's been passed through many owners for a long time before it came into the hand of my last master."

"Holy shit! Such a massive thing is an artifact?" he couldn't help but be surprised. How was an entire 45-floor tall tower just an artifact?

"Stop it. You're making it evident that you're a frog in a well. Such artifacts are nothing in the Immortal worlds," Godslayer said.

Alex collected himself a bit and asked a question. "Who is your master?"

"He went by the name of Guan Xi," the spirit said.

"Anything else?" Alex asked.

"My last master had neither a named origin nor an eventful life. I'm afraid anything more would not help one such as yourself, master White Tiger," the spirit said.

"White Tiger... you tested my blood," Alex said. "So you know about the White tigers?"

"Of course, who doesn't know about one of the four kings of the beasts," the spirit said.

"You have the White Tiger's blood?" Godslayer asked.

"Yes," Alex said, not able to keep the secret any longer. "Now don't go on an angry rant about how they are bad. I don't have time for that."

"But... urgh," Godslayer grumbled and didn't say anything.

Alex finally looked back at the artifact spirit and asked, "why did you test our blood? Is that relevant to some rooms on the upper floors?"

"No," the spirit said. "The blood is not relevant to the competition itself."

"Then why?" Alex asked.

"Because my last owner was adamant about not handing me over to the demons, so I wanted to fulfill his wishes," the spirit said.

"Not handing you to the demons?... what?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I am searching the blood of anyone that comes in so that I can find those who do not have the demon's bloodline," the spirit said. "I'm fulfilling my previous owner's wish by searching for a new owner that is not a demon."

Alex's eyes went wide. "This artifact is in need of a new owner?" he asked.

"I'm afraid I require a new owner so that they may fix me. If left like this for long enough, I will most likely be forever lost to the void," the spirit said.

Alex was a little surprised to hear that. He wouldn't have ever thought of owning something like this, but if he was being given the opportunity, he would definitely accept it.

"Do you show yourself to everyone or just the ones that have what it takes to be the new owner?" Alex asked.

"I show myself to neither," the figure said. "I showed myself to you because that is what I must do in the presence of someone from the White Tiger family."

"Does that mean I am eligible to take you as my treasure?" Alex asked.

"If that is what you wish," the spirit said.

Alex smiled widely. 'Screw the rest of the floors. I can just leave this place right now,' he thought.

"Fine, how do I make you my treasure?" Alex asked. "Do I give you some of my blood essences?"

"Oh..." the spirit was a little taken aback. "I cannot allow you to take me just yet."

"Huh? But you said..."

"You have to complete all the floors and activate the formation on the 45th floor," the spirit said. "That is what my previous owner wanted my new owner to be able to do."

"Wait... so I have to complete all the floors and then you will become my treasure?" Alex asked. "We can't do it right now?"

"I'm afraid not," the spirit said.

Alex sighed. He was so enthusiastic about leaving too.

"Fine," Alex said. "I'll get you soon enough. Although, tell me. What are you good at? Can you fight? Or trap people in here?"

The spirit gave him a blank look. "Master White Tiger, I am not an artifact to be used in battle," it said.

"Where are you used then? For training?" Alex asked.

"For recreational or competitive games," the spirit said. "I told you before, this is a playground. It was created by the immortals for the mortals to be used as it is being used right now."

Alex couldn't hide the disappointed feeling from his voice when he said, "That's it?"

"I'm afraid so," the spirit.

He shook his head. 'Whatever, if I can make this my artifact, this aids me in escaping early,' he thought.

He looked at the spirit and asked, "Can you help me in this competition then? To get an edge on my opponents?"

The spirit smiled. "I cannot," he said. "I have to remain unbiased."

"Can you tell me which rooms have what then?" Alex asked.

The spirit shook his head.

"Tell me where the space is crumbling?" he asked.

The spirit shook his head again.

"What can you do then?" Alex asked.

"I can wish you the best of luck," the spirit said with a wide smile on his face.

Alex sighed. "Thanks, I guess," he said.

"Please wait for your turn to come and complete the floors as quickly as you can," the spirit said. "I'm rooting for you."

Then, it disappeared.

Chapter 1102 Riddles

A small beam of light that fell onto Alex and other various people let them know that they were the ones that were allowed to enter this time around.

Alex could wait and go to the next room when that opened, but since he had no idea what either of the rooms was, he went into the first room he was allowed into.

The room was one meant to test one's accuracy. Each one of them was given a small rock that they had to strike at the target. Whoever could hit the center of the target won.

Being able to teleport around objects once again came in handy as his piece of rock landed on the center each and every single turn they played.

About 10 such turns, a small portion of them were sent to the next floor.

Alex waited around and went into another one of the rooms on that floor and passed it. Then, he went to the 8th floor, which he passed as well.

From the day he had entered this sanctum, about 5 or so days had already passed, and he had only just arrived on the 9th floor.

He waited around for about half a day before it was his turn to enter the room.

When he entered, he saw a few spots where he could stand in. 'What is this about?' he wondered as he walked over to an empty spot.

Once everyone was in the spot, a voice boomed through the room.

"There will be 5 riddles asked in this room now. The 5 amongst you that can answer each of the riddles get to leave," the voice spoke. "You will have 5 seconds to answer."

'That's the spirit's voice,' Alex thought. 'But it sounds pre-recorded.'

He quickly looked around and saw that there were 20 of them, and... most of them were not happy at all.

"Urgh! We'll have to go back now," someone said.

"Goddamn riddles."

"My grandfather says this is impossible."

Several others made similar remarks, leading Alex to believe that he might have made a mistake coming to this room somehow.

"First riddle," the voice spoke. "What comes after the Sense but before the Spirit?"

'The what?' Alex was confused. 'After sense and before spirit?'

He thought for a moment. 'Sense... uhh, spiritual sense? That starts at the Saint Condensation realm. Spirit could be referring to the Nascent soul then? That comes in the Saint soul realm. So between Condensation and Soul...'

He had two choices he could guess from, so he went along with the one that made sense for him.

"Core!" he answered, for Saint core realm.

The room gave no response at all. His answer was incorrect.

A few of the others tried their answer too, but not a single one of them was correct.

"No Answer," the voice said, letting everyone know they were wrong.

"Second riddle. If you have a Weapon, a Dao, or a Spirit, you can use me. What am I?"

Alex did not know the answer to this one either. He thought the answer was 'an attack', but apparently, that was wrong.

A few of the people in the room walked out the gate, wasting no time in this room at all. They knew better than to stay around.

The others, however, still wanted to try their luck.

"No answer," the voice said again, not to anyone's surprise.

"Third riddle. I Ascend to an Origin that Transcends to a Spirit. What am I?"

Alex did not even bother answering this one. He simply had no idea what it was talking about at all.

From what he could see, since the artifact was one created in the Immortal World, the answer it was asking was too much for someone that was from a mortal world.

He wondered if like everyone else in the room, he should walk away as well.

"No Answer," the voice spoke.

A few more people left this time around. Now that Alex looked at it, barely 10 people remained in the room. The riddles were way too hard.

"Fourth riddle," the voice spoke. "I have no start and I have no end. I am eternity and infinity itself, what am I?"

Alex tried thinking of some proper answers, but he couldn't think of one immediately. One did come to mind a few seconds later to him.

"The world!" Alex shouted along with many other people who had come to the same conclusion as him. However, the spirit didn't seem to accept the answer as correct.

"What? That's not correct?" Alex thought. "Eternity and Infinity... wait... can this be... the void?"

"That's obviously the void," Godslayer said from his mind.

"It is?" Alex thought. "The Voi--"

"No Answer," the voice said.

He was a bit too slow. The 5 seconds had already passed by the time he had answered.

"Shit! You should have told me earlier," Alex said.

"I didn't think you would be needing my help. All of those questions were so easy too," Godslayer said.

"Fifth riddle," the voice said.

Alex felt like going into his mind and punching that little sword spirit, but he didn't have the time to go into an angry fit at the moment. He needed to hear the next riddle.

"Everyone looks up to us, and wishes upon us, yet we do not exist. What are we?" the voice asked.

'Looks up to us... do not exist,' Alex thought. 'False gods? No, wishes.'

"It's obviously—" Godslayer said.

"Stars!" Alex answered.

"—stars. Yes, I was going to say that," Godslayer said.

"Correct!" the voice spoke finally.

Alex felt the energy from the room teleport him as he was sent to the next floor over.

The moment he appeared in the other room, he let out a big sigh and slumped to the ground. "That was hard," he thought to himself.

"That was so easy though," Godslayer said.

"Screw you. I know I'm from a lower realm, stop reminding me every time," Alex said angrily.

"Oh, right," Godsslayer said. "You should have asked for my help early on then."

Alex wanted to shout at him but decided not to bother with that right now. He was on the 10th floor, finally.

He looked around and saw almost no people around once again.

'Just like the 5th floor,' he thought and looked towards the middle of the room to find another black pillar standing.

"Punch the pillar without using any Qi. You will be sent back to the 1st floor if you use a single bit of Qi." Alex read the words that floated on top of the room.

"That's it? Just punch the pillar?" Alex was surprised.

"That spirit must be trying to keep the ones without any physical body from going up," Godslayer said.

"Hmm, I suppose other souls and spirits could come and take part too," Alex thought. Now that he knew it, he walked up to the pillar and punched it lightly.

The pillar buzzed a little bit and a small light fell on top of him. The next thing he knew, he was being teleported away.

The 10th floor was just that simple, and after doing what it said, he was now on the 11th floor.

'This is good progress,' Alex thought. 'At this rate, I should be on the 40th floor in the next month or so."

Chapter 1103 Ball Fight

Alex entered another room on the 12th floor.

He walked in to find a simple setup. 3 balls of light hung high in the air with words floating above them.

Alex found himself unable to go any further due to a barrier that surrounded the center area and he could only move around the barrier.

The 10 people that entered with him walked around as they read the simple words.

"Throw these balls at the other people whoever gets hit gets teleported out?" Alex was surprised to read that. He was expecting to grab the ball to leave, but it turned out you had to hit it. "Reflected balls do not count."

Alex looked around, prepared to catch any one of the balls. He waited for a moment and the numbers showed up for a countdown.

3,2,1. The barrier dropped.

Alex immediately teleported next to the balls and grabbed one of them. He tried to grab another one, but it moved away from him.

He didn't try to grab any other as people arrived next to him. He moved to the corner of the room, his spiritual sense looking at everyone.

And everyone else was looking at him as well.

He found one person slightly distracted as they were trying to find someone to throw their ball of light at.

Alex decided to attack that person. He used his teleportation powers on the ball of light and threw it at the person, but to his surprise, the ball didn't hit him at all.

It instead bent itself away from the person, moving in a random direction between two other people who easily dodged it.

"What?" Alex couldn't help but shout out in surprise. That was not a normal moment. Even the person himself looked shocked as if he did not anticipate what was going to happen.

"Shit," Alex thought. "Are those balls not supposed to hit the ones that hold them?"

The room said nothing about that, and now he lost one of the balls.

Someone else got his balls, and people came to a standstill. Everyone looked around worriedly as the ones without balls feared getting hit by one, while the ones with the ball didn't want to throw theirs as doing so would leave them vulnerable to one.

They all looked around for a few good seconds until one of the cultivators, a middle-aged man with a scarred face looked at one of the people with the balls.

"Either use it or give it to me if you're not gonna use it," the man shouted. The three people with the balls looked at each other, none of whom wanted to throw the ball.

The man suddenly dashed forward towards the closest person to him and struck out with an outstretched finger.

The person was surprised, but not caught off guard like the scarred man would hope to be.

The young man with the ball dodged to the side and threw his ball at the scarred man, but the scarred man had been ready for this. He suddenly stopped and moved back to dodge the ball.

He then quickly ran back and grabbed the ball that was on the floor. "Not bad, thank you," the middle-aged man said as he looked at the rest of them.

"Don't worry about me," the man said. "Have fun with the two balls. I will join you guys in a bit."

The man then turned around and smiled at Alex.

Alex looked at him, at first with a confused look, and then he realized. He had been found out once again.

"You were waiting for me to come here," he said as he looked at the man and checked his cultivation base. He slowly took out something from his storage ring while looking at the man in the eye, to hopefully distract him long enough.

"Of course, I was waiting," the man said. "We can't let you get too high without getting an answer."

Alex frowned. The man had a cultivation base of Saint Core 8th realm. That was very strong when compared to most of the people in the Southern Continent, but Alex was certain he could kill him.

Only, he was worried this man would run away before he got to do so.

"Who are you? Are you one of the twins?" he asked. "Or are you the old man that likes explosives?"

"Hehe, you sure do know about that huh," the man said. "Answering you that would be revealing about our organization, so I will keep quiet for now. How about you talk instead? It's been 7 days since we first contacted you. Do you have any answer?"

"Are you going to come to ask me that after every week?" Alex asked.

"Of course, young man," the scarred man said. "Now come on. Tell me quickly so we can be done with this."

Alex frowned as he slowly moved away from the man.

The man was surprised and looked to the side. He quickly moved and stopped in front of the gate that let one get out of the room.

"Oh, but you're not going anywhere before you answer," the man said.

"I don't care about leaving," Alex said as he brought out his sword. "I was just trying to stop you from leaving."

He rushed forward and slashed down as hard as he could.

The man was slightly surprised by his speed, but even at his strongest, Alex could barely put out enough energy to rival a Saint Core 5th realm cultivator. His sword aura and body cultivation barely raised it that high.

That sort of strength was not enough to beat someone whose cultivation base was in the Saint Core 8th realm.

The man easily dodged the slash and kicked the sword to the side. Alex felt the heaviness of the attack even when it landed on his sword, but he wasn't afraid.

He attacked once again, and the man dodged this one as well.

"You're annoying," the man said and punched Alex, hitting him right in the chest. However, by that point, Alex's blood had already covered the inside of his robe, forming an armor that could not be seen at all.

Alex felt the power of the strike, but it was muffled enough that he didn't feel much pain from it. So, he smiled instead as his blood coated his sword.

The man was surprised when he saw that.

"How are you—"

Alex's sword moved again, and the man dodged again. However, Alex had already appeared behind him and thrust his sword through the man's back.

The sword came out of his chest, but the stab was not lethal. It had struck the right side of his chest, so while very painful, a few pills could solve the problem.

However, before the man could reach for his pills, another sword appeared in his hand, one made with blood.

It cut the man's right arm clean off.

Alex felt something off about both of the wounds when he struck the man, but he couldn't immediately put a finger on it.

The man cried out in pain, but he got to his pills. He was reaching for it with his left arm after all.

His right arm, however, was the one that held the ball of light which he could have used to send Alex back to the first floor.

The man realized that Alex was too strong. They had made a mistake. He needed to run. He looked at the gate outside, but that was guarded by Alex.

So, he turned towards the other people who had grouped up away from the fight. "You! Hit me with the ball now!" he shouted.

Even with a sword sticking out of his chest, and a missing arm, the man's cultivation base demanded respect from them that these weaker cultivators could not deny.

One of them slowly lifted their hands to throw the ball at the man, but Alex spoke just then.

"If you think you can run away from me, then you overestimate yourself, assassin," he said.

"QUICKLY!" the man shouted.

Alex slowly lifted his hand as he felt his connection with his sword.

"THROW IT AT ME! QUICKL—"

"Expand!"

Midnight suddenly grew to nearly 10 times its size as it split the man's body vertically. It fell to the floor with a rather loud bang, and Alex went up to it to pick it up.

"Good riddance," he thought as he picked up the sword, but just then he noticed something.

The man's body, even when torn in half and a few other bits, there was no blood on the floor at all. Not a drop of blood had dripped from the corpse.

'That's right,' Alex thought. That was what was wrong with the wounds when he had attacked. The man hadn't dropped a single drop of blood even when stabbed through the chest or when his arm was cut off.

He lowered himself a little to look at the dead body and was horrified when he realized that the person he had just killed, had been a corpse, to begin with.

"How... how can that be?" he couldn't help but ask. But, in the back of his head, he knew how this could be.

A corpse that was walking could only mean one of two things.

Either a Nascent soul was controlling the body, which it wasn't since no nascent soul came out of the body.

Or, it was the second option, one where not an entire soul, but only a part of it controlled the body.

Looking at the dead body, Alex was sure that the assassin that he had just killed... had actually been a clone.

Chapter 1104 Punishment

An old man sat cultivating with a woman next to him to keep guard for him.

Suddenly, the old man opened his eyes and vomited out a mouthful of blood as he groaned in pain.

The woman was surprised. "What's wrong? What happened?" she asked, but not in a very loud voice so as to not draw the attention of the people around her.

The old man wiped his face and sat straight with an angry look on his face. "My soul was a little hurt," he said.

"Your soul?" the woman asked. "How? One of the challenges?"

"No, it was our target," the man said. "I died."

The woman couldn't help but narrow her eyes in surprise. "What the hell? How could you die?" she asked.

"He's strong, very strong," the old man said. "He must have been hiding his cultivation base. We were duped."

"Are you sure?" the woman asked. "We tested his cultivation base, he wasn't really hiding anything."

"What? Then are you saying that he was fighting beyond his—"

The man paused. "Wait a minute," he said. "I remember fighting a Saint Foundation realm bastard in the Battle Hall when I went to test that new body. He was so strong that he beat my new body, even though it was an entire cultivation realm higher than his. Dammit, that must have been this bastard."

The woman didn't know what to say. "Anyway, who died? The good-looking one?" she asked.

"No, the one with the scar," the man said. "The good one is with Kun Chongren."

"And the new one?" the girl asked.

"With Mei'er," the man said. "One of the other two I'm keeping on the 2nd floor to follow him if he fails, while with the other one, I'm trying my best to go up the floor. Now, let me be. I need to concentrate on them."

"Don't overexert yourself. Tell the other two about the development. Don't let them get caught off guard," the girl said.

The old man nodded. "I will," he said. "But since you are the one in charge of this mission here, you need to make a choice now."

The girl frowned when she heard that. "What choice?" she asked.

"Unless we all manage to do the impossible and catch him as a group in this sanctum, I doubt he is ever going to agree to make the oath," the old man said. "In that case, we will have to start confronting him with the intention to kill."

The girl's frown suddenly changed to a smile, a nasty one at that. "Finally," she said. "I was getting annoyed by this farce."

The old man sighed. "So I guess I know what to tell them, right?" he asked.

"Of course," the girl said. "Let them know that we are no longer following the target. It is a hunt. The order is to kill on sight."

The old man nodded. "Just the way I like it."

* * * * * * *

Alex wasn't aware of what had changed in the assassins, but he had some guesses.

Until now, he had killed both the Jade-Faced assassin and the Faceless assassin on his own before they could relay any sort of information.

However, because he had killed a clone just now, the main body was bound to have now learned about his strength. After all, one could only ever consciously control a clone created using a dead person's body.

If this clone had been created the other way, he would not have been a corpse. Better yet, he wouldn't even have been able to cultivate to the point he had.

Which meant that the assassins now knew everything.

'Going forward, they won't underestimate me anymore,' Alex thought. 'I can't let down my guard now.'

He arrived on the 13th floor and saw that the four different gates were darkened. So, he sat by the side, waiting.

"Master White Tiger," the spirit appeared by Alex's side, scaring him for a moment. He nearly cut the spirit because of how jumpy he was from being on guard.

"What is it?" Alex asked after calming down a little.

"I see that you've killed someone on the previous floor," the spirit said.

Alex frowned almost imperceptibly. "Is that a problem?" he asked.

"Somewhat," the spirit said. "This is a playground, where the mortals come to play and train. This is not a place for death and unnecessary violence. Please don't kill people in here."

"I couldn't help it," Alex said. "They were assassins that are after me. I can promise you that I was not the one to start that fight."

"Hmm, that man did approach you first," the spirit said.

"So, am I being punished or something?" Alex asked.

"No, I understand that it could not be helped," the spirit said. "I'm sorry to have disturbed you then."

The spirit turned to leave.

"Wait," Alex said quickly.

"How can I help you, Master White Tiger?" the spirit asked.

"What happens if I kill someone else?" he asked.

The spirit gave a slightly surprised look. "Are you planning to kill someone else?" he asked.

"In defense, yes," Alex said. "As I said, there are assassins after me, and I suspect there will be many of them who I will have to kill. Will I be in trouble for killing too many?"

"Normally, yes," the spirit said. "But if they are assassins as you say, I can give you a way out of the punishment."

Alex's eyes shined when he heard that. "How?" he asked.

"If the other person agrees to the fight before you get into one, I can turn a blind eye to the killings," the spirit said.

Alex slowly nodded when he heard that. "So... I have to turn my random fights into a duel then," he said.

"Yes, that way with both the parties agreed to the fight, there will be no repercussions to the battle," the spirit said.

Alex smiled when he heard that. "That's perfect," he said.

The spirit smiled too. "Can I leave now, master White Tiger," the spirit asked.

Alex almost nodded, but he stopped. There were a few more questions he wanted to ask. "What is the punishment for killing the participants?" he asked. "If they weren't assassin and I'm killing a random individual for my pleasure, that is when I am punished, correct?"

"That is correct," the spirit said. "If you are caught murdering for no reason, I cannot do anything but disqualify you from participating in this competition."

Alex was not expecting that sort of punishment.

The spirit saw his face and gave a blank smile. "I do not have the authority to hurt any of the participants, so the only thing I can do is disqualify them and sent them out of this playground."

"I see-wait, send them out of the playground?" Alex's eyes went wide. "Are you saying I can leave this place any time I want?"

"Um, yes. You can," the spirit said. "There's no point in keeping you here if you've already given up on the competition."

"Holy shit!" Alex thought. "Are you saying I could have left at any moment I wanted to?"

"Yes," the spirit said. "Do you want to?"

Alex did want that. He really did want to leave this place as soon as possib—

"You're misunderstanding his words," Godslayer said from his mind. "You're going to get us both killed."

Alex paused. "What do you mean? How?" he asked.

"The playground is the treasure that is this tower," Godslayer said. "It does not refer to the secret realm we are in."

"Oh... right," Alex thought. "Someone put this thing inside this secret realm. I keep forgetting that there was more to this secret realm than just this tower."

"Yes," Godslayer said. "And if you are sent out of this tower, you're still in this secret realm. However, by now the secret realm has already crumbled up, and all that's remained of it is—"

"The void," Alex answered with a terrified look on his face. He gulped a little and took a few breaths in. "Holy shit, I really did nearly kill all of us."

"Tell the spirit the outside is all void so that he stops throwing others out after they give up," Godslayer said.

Alex quickly turned around to the spirit. "Have you been sending people out of this tower because they have given up?" he asked.

"No, not lately," the spirit said. "I've only been getting demon-blooded individuals for a long time, so I've stopped caring about them for the most part, as per my late master's orders."

"Good," Alex said. "The outside is all crumbled space and is most likely a void now. If you send the people out, they will die. Don't do that anymore."

"Understood," the spirit said. "Although... I have been doing that with the corpses. Is that alright?"

"That should be fine," Alex said. "There's been a lot of deaths here?"

"Yes," the spirit said. "Most are unintentional, which I don't punish."

"What about the intentional ones?" Alex asked.

"They do get punished," the spirit said. "Except for the ones that happen in the rooms I cannot see."

"The crumbling ones?" Alex asked.

The spirit nodded.

"Well, you cannot tell whether it was intentional or not, so I don't blame you," Alex said. "So the clone I just killed was thrown into the void outside, right?"

"Yes," the spirit said.

"I see, thank you for telling me all that," Alex said.

"Anything you want, Master White Tiger," The spirit said. "May I leave now?"

"Yes, go on. Don't let me keep you," Alex said and the spirit disappeared.

Alex turned around and looked back at the gates in front of him. It was time to wait for a while longer.

Chapter 1105 Illusions

The room Alex entered on the 13th floor was one where a massive formation diagram hovered in the air. There was a simple description of the formation to the side, and the challenge was to figure out what was wrong with either the design or the description.

Alex got lucky with not many there having any knowledge about formations, so he managed to answer the 2nd one correctly and moved up a floor.

On the 14th floor, he waited for his turn and entered a room where the challenge was dueled between two people randomly chosen by the room. To Alex's surprise, half of the 20 people that entered this room were allowed to go up.

Depending on the lottery, some of them could move up without having to break a sweat. Unfortunately for Alex, he wasn't so lucky.

His opponent was a 2-foot-tall woman with a Saint Core cultivation base. Unlike many others before him, he couldn't just swing an arm and be done with the fight.

"Are you not giving up?" the tall woman asked him when she saw him preparing to fight.

"Of course not," Alex said. "I'm here to win."

The woman smiled and brought out an axe of all things. Alex was surprised but he brought out midnight as well.

The two of them clashed for a while, with Alex on the defense for the first half of the fight.

This battle was too coincidental to be with an assassin, but he still defended for most of the fight to see if she was one or not.

Once he was sure that she was not, he went on the offensive. With his cultivation base, he barely edged her out in the battle. The woman was very surprised by his fighting capabilities and she couldn't help but try to learn more about him.

"What's your name?" she asked. "Do you want to join our sect? Our Rising Phoenix sect is one of the best in the continent. You should join us."

Alex rejected her proposal each time she asked, and then beat her in the end. Then, he was teleported to the next floor.

The 15th floor.

He stood in front of yet another black pillar. "Is there going to be a black pillar every 5th floor or what?" he couldn't help but ask.

Most of his knowledge regarding the sanctum had been from the elders who had never come here since long before the space had started crumbling. The only thing they could tell him was hearsay in the first place.

As such, there was a lot of information that Alex didn't have. While he was fine with it for the most part as he had the important information on how to stay safe, his knowledge on how to proceed through the floor was quite lacking.

"Use some Qi on the black pillar," Alex read what was written next to it. He couldn't help but sigh after reading it. "Let's get this over with."

He walked up to the pillar and poured a little bit of Qi into it. Then, he was teleported to the 16th floor.

The number of people on this floor was almost negligible. With only a hundred or so remaining and 3 usable rooms, Alex was sure his turn would come within the hour.

And as he expected, he did get to enter very quickly. 20 people including him, entered one of the rooms and were given the challenge of the room through a voice.

"The challenge of this room is to find the human amongst you," the voice said.

'What?' Alex thought and looked around. Almost all of them were just as confused as each other, but some of them seemed to know what was up.

"Your image will be copied to create 10 different illusory clones, who will all be walking around as realistically as possible. Your task is to figure out which one of them is not the illusion."

"You will have 3 chances in total. If you guess the human, you will be teleported away to the upper floor, but if you guess the illusion, you will be sent back to the first floor."

Alex thought he understood what was up.

"For this challenge, you will not be allowed to use your spiritual sense," the voice spoke. Suddenly, everyone found themselves unable to use their spiritual sense anymore. That made a few people nervous as they didn't know what to do anymore.

"And you are not allowed to attack the person at all," the voice said. "To choose, simply place your arm on the person you think is real."

"We will begin in 5 seconds."

Everyone got ready and 5 seconds later, they were teleported. Suddenly, they arrived scattered around the room with other various illusions of themselves walking around the room.

There were 11 of them each, and with 20 people, there were enough to fill the whole room and to massively confuse everyone.

The people looked around, trying to figure out who was the illusion and who was real. Without their spiritual sense, it was a little hard, but they were sure they could find someone.

One of the girls looked around, trying her hardest to act normal. He walked around, as everyone did, and fit in the best she could.

As she walked, one of the people in front of her looked slightly agitated. Then, she saw him move and place his hand on someone, but his hand fell through the illusion.

'Yes!' the girl thought and grabbed that person instead, however her hand fell through that person too.

'Shit!' she thought as she realized that she had been found. Someone else grabbed her behind and that person won.

Everyone in the room saw what happened and couldn't help but be surprised that the illusions were playing tricks on them.

After the person that just won was teleported away, the girl and all of her illusions suddenly teleported all across the room, and people could no longer tell which one of her was real again.

Alex watched from the edge of the room, sitting on the floor as the people walked right past him.

He used his eyes to see who was who, but everyone had the same aura around them so it was impossible to discern. Still, he was sure they would give away some sort of hint. If not, he could make them give some hints.

For now, he just watched to see if there was something other tricks these illusions could play.

'How are they all acting so real?' Alex wondered. 'Are they perhaps copying someone from the past that went through these?'

It was either that or the person who created this tower was so talented that he could add such real, human intelligence to these things.

His 11 illusions walked around the room, confusing people as much as anybody else. He watched each reaction he could see, each minor movement. And from time to time, someone stood out or they moved to grab someone. But he just didn't want to risk it.

He waited for a little longer, and by now 3 people had left for the upper floor and 6 were sent back to the first floor.

So, there were 10 people for him to find.

'No need to wait anymore I guess,' he thought.

As everyone looked around, one of the Alex there moved his hand and grabbed onto the person closest to him. The people waited for just the faintest moment to see how he would react, but instead, that Alex turned around and grabbed someone else.

His hand passed through that person as well. Then another, and another.

People were surprised and confused. They didn't understand what was happening at all. Either the illusion was going out of control, or the room had stopped working.

Alex grabbed 5 more people. For the first 4, his hands passed through their body. However, in the 5th person, the man's body moved through his hand.

Alex's face turned to a grin as he found the person and the illusion that he had created vanished.

Instead, a hand grabbed onto the person from behind as Alex came out of invisibility.

All this time, he had been using his Yang clone to not get caught while he himself had been sitting to the side, invisible to the eyes and senses.

This was the perfect place for him to do so with people not being able to use their spiritual sense, and so he took the chance easily go through this match.

The other 10 Alex suddenly vanished, and he was sent onto the next floor over.

"Agh!" he stretched a bit when he arrived on the 17th floor. "I should have done that from the beginning."

He looked around as the not many people once again, and after an hour entered one of the open rooms.

The task for this floor was simple on paper. One had to walk around the room in a circle around the edges while a formation put pressure on them with its aura.

The more they walked, the more pressure they would be under. The 3 people of the 10 that moved the furthest would be the ones to win this challenge.

With how his body worked under pressure, giving him power from deep within to fight against it, Alex easily won the challenge and moved on to the 18th floor.

His speed was quite good now, and he was nearly halfway through the tower. But, the challenges were certainly going to get harder from here on out, so he was ready for it all.

After an hour or two, he was allowed entrance to another room on the 18th floor and he went in.

Chapter 1106 Insects

When Alex entered the 18th floor, he was a little surprised to see cracks in space at the end of the room and was worried that he would have to turn back.

However, it turned out that the main portion of the room that made the challenges possible hadn't been damaged, so the climb was still on for him.

He looked around, wondering what he was supposed to do here when a voice spoke and told the all to walk over to one of the spots marked around the edges of the room.

There were exactly 20 different spots market, but 4 were not accessible at all due to how the spatial cracks had formed in the room. Fortunately, the spirit had realized that and had only allowed 16 people to enter.

Alex walked up to the spot and suddenly, something changed about the room. Something so imperceptible that he couldn't tell from just a glance at all.

His spiritual sense was being suppressed by something, allowing him no more than 3 meters of vision around him, so he couldn't tell that way either. But, he still had one more trick up his sleeves.

He used his Demon Eyes and suddenly everything became crystal clear. In front of him was a massive maze that spanned the entire room. The colorful maze was made up of Qi, so he could see it.

However, simply seeing it didn't help him. He couldn't find a solution from where he stood.

"In front of you is an invisible maze that you will have to get to the center of. You may use any tricks you can that do not touch the walls of this invisible maze. If you touch the walls or another competitor, you lose. The first 5 to get to the center of this wall will win," the voice said.

"You may begin!"

Alex ran in head first while others used their limited spiritual sense to search for the walls. The invisible walls were not invisible to him at all, so he ran through the maze faster than anyone else.

He wanted to teleport, but the spatial crack was making it hard to use any dao for some reason. He could teleport close with his own Qi, but not to the center of the room, that was for sure.

He got lost a few times and had to backtrack a bunch, but in the end, he managed to get to the center before anyone else.

"Nice!" he thought to himself as he was taken away from this room to the next.

On the 19th floor, Alex arrived to see only a handful of people waiting around. It seemed Alex's turn would come rather fast this time around.

He decided to sit down and wait for his turn when he sensed something.

'Killing intent,' Alex realized as he quickly turned towards a corner of the room where a person was looking at him with a massive grin on his face.

The man was wearing a different hat, a different set of clothes, and was even hiding his face as much as possible, but Alex would recognize his father's face anywhere.

He had found the damn imposter.

The man lifted his head, revealing his face fully as he threw off his hat to the side. He made a gesture for Alex to follow and walked over to another room.

Alex frowned, not knowing what to do. That was an assassin for sure, but was following him a good idea?

Just then, one of the doors opened, and Alex was allowed to enter, but… his heart simply didn't want to go there.

He wanted to kill this man that was impersonating him.

So, without caring if this was a good or a bad idea, Alex walked over to the room the man had gone to and entered through the gate.

On the other side of the gate were a single person and a room full of spatial cracks that stayed there like spider webs.

The man still had his father's face and he turned around to look at him.

"Son, I have missed you," the man said, but he could not hide his killing intent at all.

"Cut the crap," Alex said. "How did you know what my father looks like? Where did you get that information?"

"Oh, do you really think I'm going to tell you?" the man asked.

"If you won't tell me that, then you can die," Alex said. He reached for his sword in his ring, but he noticed something.

Another killing intent.

He spread his spiritual sense just in time to see a young man behind him that was slashing his sword at him.

Alex dodged, but he was slightly cut in his arm. Without hesitation, he quickly drew the blood he just lost and turned it into a dagger before throwing it at the man.

The two of them tried to stop the attack but were blown away when the attack hit them. The young man moved barely in time to take the entire attack, instead of letting the one with his father's face get hit.

He died instantly, but once again, he didn't bleed.

Somewhere else, an elderly man coughed up blood again. "Goddamn, his blood is strong. We have to be careful of his blood," he said.

"You died again?" the girl next to him asked.

"Yeah, I tried to save Kun Chongren," he said.

"Is he safe?" she asked.

"For now," the old man said. "I will relay the information to everyone."

The girl nodded. "Let's just hope he can get the job done."

Back in the shattered room on the 19th floor, Alex finally brought out midnight as he looked at his father's imposter.

The man was down, and Alex used this moment to attack him.

However, before he could do anything else, the man opened his robes and a thousand different insects flew out from in him, filling the room entirely.

They were insects of various varieties. Some were hornets, some were bees, and some were even flying beetles.

Alex stepped back, slightly confused. He had never fought insects before, so he wasn't aware of what he was supposed to be doing here.

He slashed, sending out a golden sword attack toward the insects.

Suddenly, the beetles amongst the insects got together to form a sort of defensive array that protected the other insects from the attack.

"What?" Alex couldn't help but shout in surprise when he realized that his attack had actually been blocked, by a bunch of insects at that. That had never happened to him before.

"Hehe, people always discriminate against these poor little fellows just because they are weak," the man said. "But they too can show you that they are strong. They too hold power in numbers that you can't comprehend."

Alex frowned. He had already covered his body with his blood and now he was coating his sword as well.

The man didn't hesitate to attack at that moment. Even as the beetles were separating, the hornets flew towards him. Alex threw out various attacks, but the hornets managed to dodge them all and came to sting him.

Suddenly, Alex lifted his left hand and threw out fire from it like a flamethrower. A fire that burned with such high heat that most of the hornets were either burned or flew away.

The man pulled back his insects when he saw that fire.

The burning hornets still flew close to him, but they were too weak now to attack.

Just then, Alex heard something that made him stop. Some of the insects were beating their wings at a specific frequency that was causing his head to ache.

He was finding it hard to concentrate on the attack and using this opportunity, many of the hornets had come to attack him.

The hornets stuck him in many places that weren't covered by his armor. While his skin was strong, the hornets were stronger and managed to easily penetrate it.

Alex wasn't worried about any poison, but it turned out that the hornets were actually draining his Qi from the various places they were stabbing him in.

Alex moved around, attacking without looking, but the buzzing sound was still too mind-numbing to fight against. His body continuously cleansed the headache that was being caused by the sound, but somehow the sound was still reapplying the headache.

Alex felt the hornet draining more and more Qi, and at some point, mosquitoes had come to drain away his blood. If he let it go on any further, there would be some major danger.

Alex stabbed his sword onto the floor and use his fire again. This time, instead of targeting any of the insects, he targeted himself.

His body burned so hotly that his skin started getting charred. Alex cried out in pain, but his body was also being healed in the process.

The insects on him either died or flew away, and even the man controlling them frowned. "How goddamn hot is that fire? Normal fire shouldn't be doing this," he said.

Alex finally took his sword and stood up again. The buzzing was annoying for sure, and he couldn't tell where it was coming from.

So, he roared loudly.

Shockwaves moved out from in front of him and attacked everything in the area in front of him. The attack itself was very weak compared to what else he could use, but this was the best one that could attack an entire area, especially right now when he couldn't use any dao.

However, that was enough to send the insects out of the symphony.

Alex finally lost his headache entirely and glared at the man. It was time for his counter attack.

Chapter 1107 Finishing The Fight

Alex finally stopped hurting from his own fire now that the disorienting buzz was gone. The fire still burned around him, but he controlled the heat from transferring onto himself.

The insect-controlling man looked fully in shock at what he was witnessing, and Alex used this opportunity to burn the insects that were in front of him.

He barely singed the wings off a few insects before the man moved them from harm's way. At the same time, the beetles formed a barrier that stopped the fire from burning them.

The man realized that he was in trouble, so he made the insects start buzzing again, but by that point, Alex had made two small earplugs with his blood which he put into his ears. Without any sound, the buzzing noise could no longer affect him.

He let go of the fire around him and showed his fully unhurt body. His hair was burned off all around his body, but he didn't mind that. He had a pill for that anyway.

His blood had lost a lot of its aura, so he needed to finish this fight quickly, or else he would have to run away.

He tried to call for the Blood God's Manual. With the help of his blood beasts, he could win these fights. However, no matter how hard he called for it, the book never came out.

'What the hell?' He was worried now.

The spatial cracks had taken over more than half the room, so he couldn't run around to try and disperse the insects either.

'What the hell is happening?' he thought. He could use his Dao, couldn't bring out his blood god's manual, or even use normal teleportation here.

He had tried the Flickering Shadows technique, so teleport to the man's shadows, but that hadn't worked at all.

'Space here is weird,' he thought. 'I need to be careful.'

The hornets and mosquitoes attacked, and at the same time the man brought out a sword of his own.

Alex stepped back, dodging the insects as he sent out a yellow palm attack. The attack barely did anything to the insects, but he used this opportunity to pour out some blood from his body.

He couldn't use the blood armor as that wasted too much of his blood aura at once. So he reluctantly resorted to simply using a little bit of his blood to preserve the rest of the aura.

The blood bead shot out at incredible speed, going through the beasts to attack the man on the other side, but the man dodged in time. The beads embedded themselves into the wall, and could not be brought back in time.

Alex frowned. What else could he do? These insects were too many to use his blood, the hornets and mosquitoes stole his Qi and blood, and the beetles stopped his attacks too easily.

On top of that, the location he was in, he couldn't fight to his full potential at all.

'Should I run?' he thought. That was the only way out of this fight for him at the moment.

The buzzing got louder suddenly, and even through his plug, he could start to hear it. The headache was slight this time around, but he could feel it.

"Screw off!" He shouted and searched for exactly where the noise was coming from. He saw the stationary bees and dragonfly in the distance that was causing all the buzzing.

Alex thought of attacking them, but the beetles would stop it. He thought of roaring, but instead, another thought came to his head.

'It is the man that is controlling these insects,' he thought. 'I need to make him stop.'

His eyes moved towards the man. "Do you think you are the only one that can cause headaches?" he asked.

The man frowned and suddenly he felt a splitting headache. "Argh!" he cried out and fell to the floor.

When he fell, the symphony of the bees and dragonflies also stopped as they got out of tune.

Alex saw the opportunity and struck again. "Stop it!" the man cried out as his head hurt again. "Defend me!"

The beetles suddenly moved away from the rest of the bugs and landed on the man, covering him entirely with their body.

Alex used Heaven's Impact one more time, but this time around, the beetles buzzed slightly, but nothing happened.

"Not bad," the man said. "But if that is all you have, then you will have to die."

Alex looked at the man and smiled. "If your defensive insects are gone, how are you going to protect the rest of them?" he asked.

He took his sword and jumped into battle. With his left hand, he burned anything that came before him, and with his left, he cut any insect.

With the beetles gone, his Sword aura was now hurting the weaker insects.

The insects in the air were either hurt by his sword aura or burned by his fire. The man wanted to help his insects, but he couldn't remove the beetles from around him, or else he would be attacked.

In the end, he was forced to call back his remaining insects, and then he was face to face with Alex.

Fear grew in his heart. He had thought that he could win against Alex, as he had done with all of his previous targets by making them unable to move and then sucking their Qi and blood dry.

However, that didn't work for him at all.

The man readied his own sword, but he knew that would not be enough. His eyes moved toward the gate and decided to make a run for it.

However, he was too slow.

A small tongue of fire appeared in front of him which immediately exploded. The damage from the explosion wasn't strong, but it sent him flying backward into the wall.

He was disoriented for a single second, and Alex used that opportunity to put a sword through the only part of his body that wasn't covered in the beetles.

His eyes.

The sword came out of the other side and struck the wall behind the man. Alex swung it to the side, destroying the man's skull and killing him right there.

As soon as the man's body fell, the insects on his body started wandering aimlessly. The beetles also left him, many flying into the spatial cracks and easily getting cut in half.

Alex slumped down and sighed.

"That was annoying," he thought to himself. This fight could've ended a long time ago if he hadn't been fighting in this room. Sadly, he was so he couldn't do anything about that.

"Should I wait here... or should I leave?" he wondered. On one hand, there could be assassins waiting for him on the first floor, but on the other hand, someone might be coming here right now.

Alex looked at the other corpse in the room, the one that did not bleed at all. 'Another clone,' he thought. 'How many are there?'

He looked at the blood flowing from the other corpse. "I can't waste that," he said as he sat down to absorb it all.

He had to make it quick though, so he wasted no time and started his absorption technique.

While he absorbed the blood, he took the dead man's storage bag and looked through it.

He found some spirit stones, some pills, poisons, and a bunch of food for his insects. At the same time, he also found a bunch of talismans, which he looked through.

Most of them were talismans where he had recorded his understanding of earth dao that Alex did not want to read through, and the others were communication talismans, one he could use, but there was no point since they would already know he was dead.

Still, Alex kept it all just in case, and while he did, he found another talisman that he could tell what it did by looking at the runes on it.

It was similar to a bunch of talismans he was carrying himself.

Without hesitation, he activated it and found the talisman pointing toward him. This was a talisman that was meant to find him through his aura.

Alex frowned. "So that is how they have been finding me despite my changed face," he thought. "Changing face was useless, to begin with."

However, he was still confused. "How did they get my aura? Was it the Faceless assassin?" he thought. With how close to Alex the assassin had gotten, it was possible that he was the one that did this, but it didn't make sense to gather his aura if they never knew he was going to be changing faces.

"Who else could it be though?" he thought.

Since just thinking wouldn't give him any concrete answer and would only make him suspicious of the people that were already suspicious, he decided to stop thinking about this topic for now.

"I should leave," he thought and became prepared to be attacked when he returned.

Before he left though, he turned to look at the corpses and the many insects that were in the room.

He threw the corpse into the shattered space where they were easily cut apart and vanished from the normal space. As for the insects, while he was curious how they could help him, these insects just weren't good enough for him.

He would rather learn to control better ones if he ever found any. For now, they would have to stay behind.

With everything done, he turned around and left through the gate, and arrived on the first floor.

Chapter 1108 Information Sharing

Alex was surprised at how crowded the 1st floor was. He couldn't use his spiritual sense, so he couldn't tell how many people there were, but there had to be at least a third of the people that had entered the sanctum.

That made sense too, given that everyone who failed was dumped back here.

He looked around and saw dejected people who had failed once again. Nearly 10 days had passed since they had come here, and they were still on the first floor.

Compared to the person that was said to have completed the entire thing in just 15 days, they were too slow.

Still, when compared to the average time taken, they were barely getting started.

Alex looked around carefully. Without his spiritual sense, it would be hard to tell if someone was looking at him or had a talisman in their hand. If they got the jump on him while he was distracted, it would be very bad.

He thought of leaving, but someone approached him. Alex nearly took out his sword before he realized that this was a very weak person.

"Hey, little brother. What floor did you drop from? I don't think I've seen you here during the past few days," the Saint Condensation realm female cultivator said.

"19th floor," Alex said. "Why?"

"Woah! 19th? That's tough, little brother. It must suck to reach so high and have to come back down here," she said while she shook her head. "What sort of challenge did you lose to?"

"None. I entered a room with spatial cracks. Had to leave," he said.

"Dear lord, that's even worse. At least losing would mean that you did something wrong, but having to come down with no fault of your own is just... sigh," the woman shook her head. "Anyway, let's talk about the floors below the 19th floor."

Alex was very confused by why the woman had approached him and was even going to ask her about it when 3 other people approached him at the same time.

He took out his sword this time, just to be safe, and the three people stopped in their tracks.

"Woah, Woah, Woah, we mean you no harm brother," one of them said while holding their hands up.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"Please don't answer her. I will pay you 200 True spirit stones for the information," someone said.

"What?" Alex looked confused. Just then, he saw one of the women in the group of three was someone he had seen outside in the group with Zhu Shaofan.

"You're someone from the Insight Pavilion, aren't you?" he asked. "What are you doing here? Aren't you supposed to be finding information on your target?"

"Oh, senior brother knows about me?" the girl said excitedly. She quickly brought out a talisman and waved it around. "I've already done what I needed to do."

Alex looked at the talisman for a bit and asked, "does senior Zhu Shaofan find the target for you or do you do it on your own?"

"The other times we did it on our own, but this time around he found our target. Since you know about us so much, brother, does that mean you'll answer me?"

"Tell me what you want first," Alex asked.

"Brother, we are gathering information about the rooms and challenges on each floor. Do you think you can tell us what you know?" she asked.

"AH!" Alex spoke out loud as he finally understood what was happening. "Selling information huh? Even in such a place. Why aren't you guys going up to find out yourself?"

The group looked at each other and shook their head. "That's a bad idea. We know we will fail, so there is no point," one of them said. "We came here to make money in the first place."

Alex nodded when he heard that. "Well, I can't tell you what to do or what not to," he said. "What information do you have?"

"Uhh... we have most information until floor 22," the girl from the Insight Pavilion said. "People from further above have come down, but they don't share that information with us at all."

"That's understandable," Alex said. "Alright, give me what you have information on and I will tell you all the floors I've been through."

The girl's eyes went wide with happiness and she thanked him while bringing out talismans to record.

Alex stared at her for a bit while the others reluctantly left, knowing that they wouldn't get anything out of there.

The girl took out another talisman. "This costs 2000 True spirit stones, normally, but I will give it to you for free since you are going to tell me everything," she said.

Alex nodded and started explaining all the rooms he had been to. He didn't really have any reason to hold back, so he explained everything.

The girl recorded it all, some of which were new to her. She thanked him profusely and gave him the talisman before leaving away to sell her product or to gather some more information.

Alex looked at the talisman in his hand and read it a bit. From what he could see, 19 seemed doable, and 20 seemed special enough that he didn't need to know about 21 and 22.

"Hmm, that was handy," he thought to himself and left the 1st floor.

He quickly walked towards the 1st room to his left and grabbed onto a floating light the moment he entered. He was sent to the 2nd floor where his spiritual was usable once more.

He spread his spiritual sense around, but he didn't look for anyone or anything. Doing so would alert anyone that was trying to find him.

Instead, Alex looked towards the door that was darkened and thought of waiting for it to open up.

That was the room with the tug of war, so he believed he could pass it easily. But, he also needed to cultivate, since he was lacking in Qi.

He could eat a pill to restore his Qi reserve, but it would not be as good as normal cultivation, which would make the Qi he had gathered to be crystallized.

So, he decided to cultivate for a bit. He went to the edge of the massive room and sat down as he closed his eyes and cultivated. He let his spiritual sense linger around, but he didn't consciously look for anyone.

After a while, he even took his spiritual sense back as if he had fallen into a deep cultivation session, one that would only usually happen in closed cultivation.

He sat there in a deep cultivation base for nearly half a day, during which time many people came and left.

Alex was getting the rest he deserved.

As he continued cultivating, one man in a corner moved his eyes towards him from time to time. Until now, he had expected Alex to continue on to the upper floors in which case he would follow him, but it didn't look like he was going to.

He was just a clone, so the main body had already given out the information to the leader of their group. So, all he had to do was for her to make a decision before doing anything.

And she had made one.

He was to take the opportunity to poison him. There was a poisoned needle with him that he could use to prick Alex. As long as he could stop him from going for some antidote afterward, he was set.

He looked around a bit and then stared at Alex as inconspicuously as possible. He then slowly stood up and walked around the room, never going directly in Alex's direction but moving closer nonetheless.

When he was as close as 10 meters from Alex, he made his move. With this distance, Alex wouldn't be able to stop him after being caught off guard. And with him being in deep cultivation, this was going to be easy.

The man suddenly dashed towards Alex as quickly as he could, but before he could reach him, a hand grabbed his throat, stopping him in his tracks.

"Such obvious bait and you still bite," Alex spoke with disdain in his voice. Something landed on his shoulders just then and Alex looked toward it.

"Good job, Whiskers," he said.

While Alex was presenting himself as the bait, Whisker was high up in the ceiling with his cultivation base concealed. He was looking down on all of them on the 2nd floor, and through his eyes, Alex was as well.

For the past 12 hours, he had been tracking every single person that came and left. But more than them, he was tracking those that simply did not leave at all.

This man had been one of them, so when he started moving towards him, Alex knew he was an assassin as well. The attack in the end wasn't even needed.

Alex felt the man's throat. "No heartbeat," he said to himself. "Can you even be considered a human being without a heartbeat? You're more a puppet than a clone."

The man struggled, but he really wasn't the fighting type. His cultivation base was very weak, and he was kept here just as an observer.

"Come on," Alex said and dragged him away. "Killing you here will only make the spirit angry."

He took the man through the open gate to the crumbling room and tossed the man to one corner.

He crouched and looked the man in his eyes as he asked, "You can hear this, can't you?" he smiled. "I'm coming for you all."

That was the last thing the clone saw and heard before its head was caved into the tower's wall and its body tossed into the infinite cracks in the room.

Chapter 1109 Skipping Floors

Alex arrived on the 19th floor again.

It took him exactly 8 days to get here without stopping. The upper floors were faster to get through, but the lower floors took way too long because of how many people there were.

It took half a day most of the time just for his turn to enter the rooms.

He followed the same path as before as that was easier. He had some idea about what the other rooms had, but going there would be too risky as he couldn't necessarily win in those rooms.

Surprisingly, he got to skip floors 5, 10, and 15 as the things he had to do on that floor were a one-time task. The spirit itself explained that to him.

Now that he had gone through all the lower floors and was back on the one he had first had to go back from, he continued on his journey.

He knew what the next room was, so he entered it without hesitation.

This was a room where they tested one's reflex.

All the people were made to stand on one side of the room that was split by a barrier. On the other side of the barrier was nothing.

"Stand next to the barrier," the voice explained. "In a few moments, a ball of light will appear on the other side of the barrier. Touch the barrier as soon as you see it. This will be done for the next 10 minutes. The 5 with the least average time taken to touch the barrier will get to move on to the next floor."

Alex nodded and got ready, his vision moving rapidly as he looked for the balls that would appear on the other side.

"Begin."

No ball appeared immediately, but everyone was on their toes waiting for it.

The moment the ball appeared, everyone's hands moved. They were all already close to the barrier, so everyone touched at practically the same time.

The sanctum of course had the finer details of what had happened. The ball of light disappeared and everyone returned to waiting again.

When the light returned, they slammed against the barrier.

This happened for the next 10 minutes and finally, the winners were revealed.

Alex was easily one of the winners. With his dynamic vision being as good as it was, his hands moved before others even registered the fact that the light ball had appeared in their vision.

He was the first one to touch the barrier each time, and each time he won. So, when he was sent to the next floor, he wasn't surprised at all.

Alex looked around the 20th floor. The first thing he did after coming to any floor was search for the assassins. He looked for people's expressions when they noticed he had come.

No one seemed to be emoting anything at all in this room.

"Let's get this done with," he thought and turned towards the many rooms that were around the floor.

It seemed that about 3 of the 10 rooms had been destroyed by the crumbling space, but the remaining 7 were fine.

People waited for the gates of the 7 rooms to open up, and so did Alex.

As was the case with every 5th floor, floor 20 was unique as well. It was easier to pass like every other 5th floor, but this time around, it was not so simple.

Only one person could enter each of the rooms, so Alex had to wait for a long time before he got to enter.

When he entered, he saw that it was a rather small room, with a glowing wall in front of him.

A voice spoke, "Attack the wall with all you've got. If your attack is strong enough to match your cultivation base, you can continue moving up."

"Hmm," Alex thought and sent out a simple attack that landed on the wall. His attack was easily stronger than his cultivation base.

"You pass," the voice said. "But you have a chance to skip the next floor. If your attack is stronger than the cultivation base by a realm, you skip the next floor. If you fail, however, you will be sent back to the first floor. Choose."

"I will attack," Alex said.

"Go ahead."

Alex attacked once again, easily passing.

"Would you like to try again? This time around, you will have to attack with something stronger than your cultivation base by 2 realms. You can skip the next 2 floors."

"Yes," Alex said and attacked again.

Once again he was successful. With his Saint Foundation 3rd realm cultivation base, he could bring out a strength that was equivalent to the Saint Core 3rd realm cultivation base.

As such, these tasks were very easy for him.

"Would you like to try again?" the voice asked. "This time around, you will have to attack with something stronger than your cultivation base by 5 realms. You can skip the next 3 floors."

"Woah, 5 realms?" Alex was surprised at the sudden jump in requirements.

"You can choose to skip the next 2 floors if you don't want to," the voice said.

"No, I will attack," Alex said and attacked once more. Since his attack was stronger than Saint Foundation's 8th realm, he easily passed.

"Would you like to try again?" the voice asked one more time. "This time around, you will have to attack with something stronger than your cultivation base by 10 realms. You can skip the next 4 floors."

"10 realms..." Alex paused. "That's... Saint Core 4th realm."

That jump in requirement surprised him once again.

"I can do it," he said and attacked once again. This time around, however, it was no simple attack. He put his body, sword, and Qi into one attack as he struck the wall in front of him.

He passed the requirement by just 1 realm and passed the challenge.

"Would you like to try again?" the voice spoke once again. "This time around, you will have to attack with something stronger than your cultivation base by 20 realms. You can skip the next 5 floors."

"Okay, no, I can't do that. I'm fine with what I've achieved," Alex said. 20 realms higher than his current cultivation base was Saint Soul 5th realm. He would not try that even if he had a fraction of his current intelligence. Even if he added his blood aura into the equation, he would still come a few realms short of the requirement.

"Congratulations on skipping the next 4 floors," the voice spoke and Alex teleported away. When he reappeared, he was on the 25th floor.

He looked around quickly to search for any assassins he might catch in the act. Unfortunately for him, everyone turned around to look at him. There were barely a few dozen people here, so everyone turned to see when a new one came around.

This was an unfamiliar place for him since his recent start, so he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do there. He looked towards the front and saw a single room that was occupied.

There were two other rooms, but they seemed to have been damaged. So, he sat down and looked around at the people that were there as he waited for his turn.

Every single one of them was strong by comparison, each well into their Saint realm. Not a single True realm cultivator had made their way up here, even though there wasn't anything actively fighting against their way.

The gate opened up and a single person entered.

Each 5th floor was a solo challenge, so Alex wondered what this one was. A few people trickled into the 25th floor while a steady line of them left the floor.

After about an hour of waiting around, it was his turn to enter.

Once again, there was a wall in front of him in the small room, similar to the one from the 20th floor.

The voice spoke once again.

"If you can endure the upcoming spiritual attack that is meant for someone around your cultivation base, you pass," the voice said. "You cannot use any of your tools for this."

Alex gave a look of understanding when he heard that. 'That is simple enough,' he thought and got ready for the attack.

He strengthened his mental defenses as well as he could by keeping his spiritual energy active and ready to fight back.

Suddenly, without any warning, the attack landed on him. It felt like Heaven's Impact, only stronger for some reason.

It was definitely a better skill than Heaven's Impact, that was for sure.

The splitting headache lasted for a few seconds before Alex was back on his feet, ready for another one.

"You pass."

He was taken aback when he suddenly felt the teleportation aura that sent him up the floor.

He arrived on the 26th floor, very surprised by the fact that he could not skip the next 5 floors, as he had done on the 20th floor.

Given the way the last challenge was constructed, he was sure that was the case. However, it had turned out to not be the case.

Since there was nothing he could do about it, he decided not to give much thought to the whole thing at all.

"So, how many people are—"

He teleported away just as a sword passed through where he was standing before. Alex reappeared and attacked with his own sword.

However, the man easily blocked his attack.

'Saint Core 9th realm,' Alex thought as he quickly checked the cultivation base of his attacker.

He looked at the person who attacked him and was surprised to see that he had a very pale face and body.

"My god, just how many clones are you guys using?"

Chapter 1110 Duel

The man attacked once again, but Alex teleported far away enough to easily dodge him.

"Don't run, bastard!" the man shouted.

"Are you really a clone? You sure do look like it," Alex said. "But then again, you could just be naturally pale."

"So what if this body is not my real one? I can kill you even with this," the man said.

Alex smiled slightly. "What's wrong? Why are you so angry towards me?" he asked. "Are you angry because I killed your other bodies?"

"If I can kill you, losing those bodies will be worth it," the man said.

Alex's smile got brighter. 'So it really is just one person controlling all these bodies,' he thought. He wondered how much of his soul he must have hurt to put into these bodies.

And since he killed those bodies, he wondered just how much damage the main body's soul had taken.

"Do you really want to kill me?" Alex asked.

"Of course!" the man said viciously. "At any cost."

"Then let's have a duel," Alex said. "Come attack me if you agree to it."

The man suddenly charged towards Alex, but Alex wasn't worried.

"Spirit, you heard that, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, Master White Tiger," the spirit appeared out of nowhere, surprising the man.

The man tried to move back in caution, but a teleportation power took over him, one that he could not stop at all. Alex felt the same power and was teleported away.

The three of them appeared in a different area of the tower, one Alex didn't recognize at all.

"Where is this?" Alex asked.

"The 43rd floor," the spirit said. "No one has come close to this floor, so I brought you here to have your duel. Please continue. I will return after one of you has died to bring you back to your floor."

Alex smiled as the spirit vanished away.

"Now, we can fight without any worry," he said.

The man looked worried, but now was not the time for that. He readied his sword and prepared to attack.

Before he could move, however, an attack landed on him out of nowhere. A fist made up of spiritual energy hit him directly in the head, making his head hurt for a second.

As he was recovering, another Heaven's Impact landed on him, with the same effect on the man. He could not even move at all.

Alex sent one Heaven's Impact after another, making the man completely useless and unable to fight at all.

"Stop this!" the man shouted when he could finally catch a break, but Alex's unrelenting attacks continued with barely any of those breaks.

Alex didn't know much about souls and connections to clones. He had had one, but he never got to control it at all.

So, he didn't know just how much of his attack was hurting the main body at all. However, since this was a 'puppet' clone, the main body had to be controlling this. Thus, he wondered if his attack was hurting the main body. If not the main body, at least the connection between the two.

To his surprise, he was doing something. The man in front of him would go from having a pained expression to none at all for a few seconds, before coming back with a pained one.New n0vel chapters are published on

The main body's mind must have been in pain, which was causing him to be unable to focus on the clone for a few seconds at a time.

The clone completely lost its expression and seemed to have been abandoned at some point.

Alex shook his head and walked up to the man before stabbing him in the chest. Suddenly, the man's eyes came awake as he looked at Alex with the most fury he had seen in a while.

"I… I told you," the man said with a grunting voice. "I will kill you… at any cost."

Alex frowned for a second, not understanding what he meant. However, at the next moment, his eyes went wide as he teleported away to a corner.

"Spirit! Come save me," he said.

"The duel is not over, Master White Tiger," the spirit's voice spoke from somewhere.

"Fuck you!" Alex cried out as he brought out a few talismans and sent it in front of him. Now that he wasn't fighting in a location where he had a problem accessing his storage ring, he could freely use the talismans that had been given to him by the elders.

At the same time, he brought out a few formations plates and threw them in front of him. Then, he used every single defensive technique he had.

And then, the explosion came.

The talismans were torn to shreds, the barrier shattered in a flash. His own techniques were torn down like a house of cards as he took the rest of the explosion directly.

He was already next to the wall, so he was instead crushed onto it.

His Blood armor was the only thing that managed to survive the blast, which he had focused all on his head and torso.

The rest of his body was… not there anymore.

He fell to the ground, as just a torso with a head. Even the blood armor slowly dripped away from his body as he lost his consciousness.

* * * * * * *

Somewhere on a different floor, an old man collapsed on the ground.

"Hey! Hey! Are you okay? Get up!" the girl next to him spoke, but the old man seemed to have fallen unconscious.

At the same time, on another floor, a woman fell unconscious as well. The girl next to her tried to wake her up, but the woman would not wake up no matter what.

Back on the floor with the old man and the leader of this assassination mission, something small and blue rose up from the old man's body.

The girl looked at it with wide eyes as she realized what had happened. A soft and weak voice entered her mind.

'My… my soul is very weak. Take me… to the girl,' the nascent soul of the old man said.

The girl looked at the Nascent soul with disdain, not wanting to help this weakling who couldn't even kill a Saint Foundation realm brat. However, if their leader figured out that he could be saved and she didn't, she would be in some big trouble.

So, she quickly brought out a jar of some sort and placed the small, blue soul into the jar. At the same time, she ransacked his body for everything he owned and stood up from the floor.

She looked at one of the rooms in the distance that had just opened up and finally, after so many days decided to enter it.

On the other floor, the girl held the collapsed woman and kept her to the side. Until further instruction from the leader, she would keep the girl here with her.

* * * * * * *

When Alex regained consciousness again, his body had healed. His arms and legs were back to normal, completely restored. The Undying physique had done its job.

Although, he wasn't sure how much time he had lost here.

"Goddammit! Another Core Explosion," he thought. He had now been victim to two Core Explosions, each one from two different assassins. This one was even more violent than the last one despite Alex's preparation.

The difference in cultivation base meant the explosion would hit harder.

Alex looked around and found Midnight in a corner. He couldn't help but chuckle when he saw the sword.

"At least you are sturdy enough to handle the damage from the explosion," Alex said as he picked it up. "Maybe I should have made you larger and used you as a shield."

Alex got a faint feeling that the sword was rejecting that idea of his.

"Alright, alright, I won't do that," he said and put it back into his storage ring, which too was to the side.

"Master White Tiger, now that your duel is completed, are you ready to leave?" the spirit appeared suddenly and asked.

"Why did you not save me when I asked?" Alex asked.

"You were still in the middle of the duel, as your opponent hadn't given up," the spirit said. "Protecting you would mean showing bias, and I am trying my best to be as unbiased as possible."

Alex sighed. He took a deep breath and released it. He couldn't get angry at the spirit for that. "Fine, I get it."

"Then, are you ready to leave?" the spirit asked.

"Let me dress up first," Alex said and brought out a set of clothes. Having to change his clothes after every fight was starting to get annoying. He was going to have to find a rather strong set of robes sometime soon in the future.

Once he was dressed, he was returned to the 26th floor where there was no one in the area at all.

"Hmm, have people not passed the last floor?" he wondered. "To be fair, that was quite a strong attack, so you have to have a good cultivation base to endure that."

He looked toward the rooms in front of him and one of them was open. Wasting no more time, he walked into the room.

A couple of people turned to look towards him when they noticed him enter. They were a little surprised by his cultivation base, but they didn't show it on their face at all.

"Welcome," one of them said as they sat on one of the 8 different platforms that were laid out around the room.

Alex looked around and sat 3 of those platforms was still empty.

"I hope you're not in any sort of a hurry," the young man said. "Because you will have to wait for a while before we get started."

Chapter 1111 Bring Out The Tools

Alex recognized the young man. He was Yao Bujiang, the one with the reflection dao that he had fought in the battle hall a few years ago.

He looked at the other 3 people as well, and each one of them was very strong. To have reached this high, they needed to have a cultivation base that was strong enough to survive through all the trials and challenges.

"Do you know what the challenge is by chance?" Alex asked.

"Don't be in a hurry," the young man said. "You will find out soon enough."

Another man entered a few minutes later, and a woman came in nearly half an hour after that. Finally, another 15 minutes later the final person entered the room, and the gate closed.

At the same time, the room started speaking.

"This is the Alchemy challenge," the voice said, making many of the competitors frown immediately. Alchemy was the last thing they wanted to have to go through as they weren't very familiar with it.

Alex was also surprised that this was an Alchemy competition. But his surprise came more towards the fact that such a competition would be impossible to hold without ingredients and cauldrons.

A few of the others didn't seem surprised at all, as if they had been through this already.

'So it had to be a slightly different one,' he thought. As he expected, this was not a traditional Alchemy competition.

"I will name a pill and what it does, as well as the final energy held within it. Then, I will show you three different recipes, of which 2 of them will have 1 ingredient changed."

"You will have to figure out the correct recipe," the voice said. "There will be 5 such questions, and you will get an hour for each pill. You will have access to my knowledge of said ingredients, so the only thing being tested here is your knowledge of Alchemy, not your experience or luck."

"The first 3 with the correct answers will be sent to the next floor."

"Also, anyone who gets an answer wrong will be eliminated," the voice said. "If you end the challenge with no answer, you will be allowed to take the challenge again."

"You will be eliminated automatically after 3 consecutive challenges."

Alex was surprised for a second before he remembered something he was told in passing.

From floors 20 to 40, there were rarely any floors that sent the participants down to the first floor. It instead kept them there to take part in the challenge again.

That was one of the ways to keep a steady number of people on a floor without having the upper floors have to wait forever for any participants to come.

"Now, let us begin with the first one."

Three recipes appeared in the air, each of which looked normal at first glance.

"The pill is called Heaven's Strength pill. When eaten, it strengthens one's body to produce physical strength to the same level as your cultivation realm. After 30 minutes of consumption, you will lose all bodily control for the entire next day."

"The final energy of the pill is Metal."

That was all the voice said and left the 8 people in the room to figure out the answer to this question.

Alex had never seen or heard of this pill before, so he too was at the same starting point as everyone.

However, his speed at deduction and understanding of alchemy would leave these people behind soon enough.

He looked through the first recipe and closed his eyes. He read the names of the ingredients, the order, and the instruction. Then, he started formulating a simulation in his head of how those would work.

However, it wasn't long before he realized that he hadn't worked with some of these ingredients, so formulating a simulation wasn't exactly easy.

"Argh! Screw it," he thought and suddenly brought out a cauldron. The other contestant looked at him weirdly, almost not wanting to believe what they were seeing.

Alex looked into his storage bag and quickly brought out the ingredients. After visiting the Forbidden Orchard, he had every single ingredient mentioned in the first recipe.

Every other contestant couldn't help but be slackjawed when he started a fire underneath the cauldron and started making the pill.

"Wait, no, that's cheating, isn't it?" one of them asked.

"Is he an actual Alchemist?" another one asked.

"Let's see if he can come up with the answer," someone else said. "We might be able to use it in the next rounds."

The remaining didn't speak, but they were in an equal amount of disbelief for sure.

Alex didn't care for finesse or quality or even getting a proper pill. He simply followed the recipe as was written in front of him.

As he reached the end of the recipe, he suddenly stopped and tossed everything out.

Then, he looked at the second recipe and started making that too.

A few of the people in the group realized that the first one was not the correct recipe and continued watching Alex as discretely as possible, hoping to get the answer before he could.

Alex started on the 2nd pill as well, and as he got close to the end, he shook his head and discarded it as well.

"The third recipe!" one of them said immediately.

"Wrong!" the voice said and the person who answered was sent back to the first floor.

The others hesitated to answer anything else, and that nearly made Alex break out into a fit of laughter.

"The first one," he said.

"Correct."

Alex smiled as the teleportation power started gathering around him. He quickly put everything into his storage and left the room.

When he arrived on the next floor, he couldn't help but be surprised at how easy that challenge was.

His first pill had resulted in a Metal energy, and with the ingredients involved, he was half-sure that it was correct. However, making the pill and then testing it was not his luxury, so he decided to test the remaining two before he did something like that.

His second pill had resulted in wood energy, which told Alex that it was the wrong one.

He had to still check the third one, but someone gave him the answer to that question by assuming it was the answer to the ultimate question.

With both options gone, he knew the first one was the answer.

He looked around his location and saw an open gate once again. In fact, there were 3 such doors, each one of which was open.

Alex wasn't sure which one he had to enter and looked around at all 3. As he looked, he noticed something he hadn't noticed on the earlier floors at all.

Above each one of the doors, there was an indicator of how many of the slots in those rooms were filled up. Of the 3 rooms, only the first one had people in it, and 3 out of 5 of those slots were filled up.

Alex walked into the 1st room.

3 people were already in there, and Alex quickly checked them all.

They were all in the Saint realm, but only in the Condensation and Foundation realm. None of these people were Saint core realm at all, and that made Alex a bit relieved.

He looked around the room and saw that there were no spots like the earlier floor. The 3 people in the room were all either sitting on the floor or leaning against the wall.

Alex went and sat by the side as he waited for the final person to enter the room.

Alex was surprised when Yao Bujiang walked in as well.

"Hey, brother. That was an amazing show you did on the floor," the man said. "To think we would have an actual alchemist make the pills. That was wild."

Alex looked at him with a surprised look on his face. "Did brother manage to find an answer too?" he asked.

The man shook his head. "Nah, I was annoyed and decided to leave, so I gave a random answer. Turned out I was right, so I got to come here," he said. "I sure was lucky."

"Please stand in the lit-up area," the room's voice said suddenly. Everyone walked over to one of the 5 spots, and as soon as they did, a barrier sprung up behind them, about 3 meters away from the wall.

"If you touch or pass the barrier behind you, you lose," the voice said. "You can take part in the next round if you lose. 3 consecutive losses will eliminate you."

"The last person standing within the circle will get to go to the next floor."

"Begin."

Alex took a moment to take in what was being said and saw that someone was charging for him.

'Send them outside the barrier,' he thought. He understood what needed to be done. He quickly teleported away from the girl and appeared somewhere else.

Yao Bujiang barely noticed Alex's presence, but by the time he could do anything, Alex had used his teleportation dao on him and sent him out of the barrier.

"Sorry, you're the strongest here," Alex said toward the man and turned to look at the rest of the people in the room.

Now that he had taken care of the strongest person, taking care of these was no work at all.

Half a minute later, he was teleported to the 28th floor, where he walked into the room with the most people in it.

Chapter 1112 Puppet Battle

Alex was the last person to enter the room, so the challenge began the moment he was in.

"This is the Puppet fighting challenge," the voice said as it began explaining the challenge of this room. "You will each be assigned a single puppet, each of which has the same strength. You will be randomly assigned an opponent, and you two will have to fight until one of you gets the required amount of points."

"Hits below the elbow and knee won't give you any points. Hits on the thigh and arm give you 1 point. Hit to the torso gives you 2 points, and finally, hit to the head gives you 3 points."

"A single loss means you can't fight until the next challenge. You will have to win twice to move on. Finally, 3 consecutive challenges lost will send you back to the first floor."

"Please connect with your puppet."

A puppet appeared in front of everyone and they were all given time to connect with it.

Alex looked at the puppet, a 6-foot-tall humanoid piece of wood that seemed to have limber limbs and flexible joints.

'How does one connect with a puppet again?' he thought. He had never done it before, but he did know how it was done.

Every puppet had a core that required a master. To control a puppet without using your Qi, you have to connect with this core using your spiritual sense.

It was akin to forming a bond with a beast, but unlike that bond, this thing barely took a fraction of your soul. The best part was, one could take back that part at any moment.

Of course, if the puppet was destroyed for some reason, that part of your soul would be destroyed as well.

Alex reached out his spiritual sense and touched the core of his puppet.

The puppet was conveniently colored in black and white, to represent the arms and legs that could get hit without worrying about losing a point.

He let his spiritual sense linger on the core for a few seconds before trying to call to it to join it. The core easily accepted him as the new owner, and Alex found himself with a puppet he could control.

He moved his arm and the puppet followed him. He moved his leg and the puppet followed him as well.

"Wait no, I need to control without moving myself," he thought. He tried to control it for a bit, but he found it a bit difficult. It was definitely not something he was supposed to be able to do on the first try.

Once everyone had bonded with a puppet, they were made to stand near a corner along with their puppet.

Of the 8, two people were told to bring their puppets to the front. Then, they began fighting.

The fight would last for either 10 minutes or until someone ends up with 100 points.

Alex watched from where he stood as the two puppets fought each other. One of them had a better method of controlling the puppet than the other one, so they were easily getting hits in.

Hits to the face, the chest, the stomach, the back-everything was cleanly pulled off, and before 5 minutes even passed, the better one had won the round.

'Have they practiced before this?' Alex wondered. They were here before he came, so it was possible that the person had been practicing for the last round or two.

Another two people were called over, and their puppets started fighting as well. These two seemed equally talented at controlling, so the battle boiled down to simply who was better at fighting, rather than who was better at controlling a puppet.

The fight continued for 10 minutes without anyone winning, so when time passed, the one with the most points won.

Alex was next in line, so he sent out his puppet. The puppet moved rather awkwardly, but he was starting to get the hang of it.

When the fight began, he controlled it the best he could.

Since he couldn't see through the puppet's eyes, he had to rely on his own senses to control the puppet. It was a little awkward, but he was doing quite well for a beginner.

Unfortunately for him, however, his opponent turned out to be someone with experience. It wasn't even a minute in that Alex realized he was going to lose this round for sure.

So, instead of going for attacks or trying to win, he tried to delay the round as long as possible, while he got used to controlling the puppet. At the end of it, when he eventually lost, he didn't feel as bad as he would have otherwise felt.

The fights went on for 3 more rounds after him, and the 2 losers were immediately sent down to the 1st floor as they had been here for the last 3 challenges.

The 2 winners were sent up to the next floor as well. The puppets disappeared as part of his soul returned to him.

Then, they were forced to wait for 4 new people to come.

2 people came almost immediately, but the other 2 took nearly an hour to come. Once they were there, the entire thing began again.

The explanation came again, and the puppets were presented to them. Alex immediately took the puppet under his control and started moving it around.

He felt very comfortable this time around and got ready for the challenge.

Two people were called out first, whose puppets fought each other. One of them had experience as they were repeating, so the newcomer lost rather easily.

Alex was the 2nd one called, so he sent his puppet up to the challenge.

The puppet got into a fighting stance and the fight began.

The opponent came with a punch, so Alex ducked and gave the puppet an uppercut. As the puppet was thrown into the air, he kicked it in the back.

The puppet fell to the ground and white its owner tried to make it get back up, Alex punched the puppet relentlessly while it was down and easily won the round.

'I got lucky,' he thought. The owner was someone new and couldn't control his puppet. He looked to the ceiling and wondered if it really was luck, or was the spirit forcing older people to fight against newer ones so they could go to round two.

Whatever the reason was, Alex didn't care. He was only here to fight after all.

The other people were done fighting, and Alex was called once again, this time to fight the first round's winner.

The two puppets got ready and the fight began.

The opponent moved with two arms in a cross. It dashed towards him, so Alex had to jump to the side and punch.

The puppet quickly blocked the attack with its own, however, and punched back. Alex took the punch to the chest and used his other hand to grab the punching arm. Then, he pulled the arm and punched the puppet in the face before moving backward.

The score was 2 to 3 with Alex winning.

Alex attacked this time, starting with a kick. He tried to hit the puppet on the side of its chest while its arms were up, but the puppet realized and quickly brought down its arms to block.

Alex frowned. He needed to make his puppet react faster, but to do that, he needed to be able to see faster.

At the angle he was in, the fight was blocked by his own puppet's body and he could only view it with his spiritual sense.

Alex moved his puppet back, getting hit on his thigh in the process, and moved to the side. The other puppet followed, but at least now he could see everything.

He saw the most minuscule flinching of the puppet's left arm and realized it was going to attack. His own puppet's right arm moved to place its arm on top of its own.

When the puppet fully moved its arm, Alex used the action to propel his own arms toward its face.

The person controlling the puppet was surprised. He couldn't tell what had just happened.

Alex saw the left get start moving, so he went for the right one. As the left foot lifted, he swooped its right foot, making the puppet fall.

Then, he gave a few good hits to its face and chest before dodging to the side as its leg came attacking.

With his vision aiding him a lot, the fight became rather easy after that. Although he didn't get all 100 points, he did manage to gain a 60 points lead over his opponent, winning the match at 10 minutes.

After he had won, he had to wait for the next fight.

Once that was done, he and the new winner were sent to the next floor. On the 29th floor, Alex looked at the room that only had 2 spots left.

Without hesitation, both he and the new guy entered that room.

Alex found himself suddenly unable to use his spiritual sense, and then the explanation came.

"You will have to fight against your opponent without being able to see or hear where they are."

The challenge was weird, but Alex was sure he could win it.

The audience got to see everything, but the challenges inside a barrier seemed to be unaware of each other's position.

They threw their attacks randomly, hoping to hit someone.

Alex couldn't help but smile when he saw how the match would be played out.

"This is as good as done."

Chapter 1113 Continued Climbing

The 29th floor was very easy for Alex, as he once again got to cheat his way to victory.

Before he was called to the battle, he left behind Whisker, who could watch everything that was happening from outside.

And since Whisker could see it, he could too.

He easily beat his opponent in a single strike. He waited until it was his turn again, and he beat his opponent then too.

After he won it all, he was sent to the next floor.

The 30th floor.

Alex looked around on the 30th floor. There were not that many people here at all. There were 5 different rooms here and everyone seemed to have entered them already.

'Another 5th floor,' he thought. 'So this one should be a solo one too.'

"Let's see what this one is," he thought and went to one of the rooms that just opened up.

When he entered the room, he saw the same small room as he did on the 20th and 25th floors. There was a glowing wall in front of him, reminding him of the previous floors as well.

A voice spoke, "An attack of the same strength as your Cultivation base will be launched from this wall. Defend it with all you've got. If you can defend against that attack, you will get to move up."

"Okay," Alex thought and prepared himself. A few seconds later, the wall launched some sort of glowing projectile at him with the strength of Saint Foundation 3rd realm.

He easily blocked the attacks with his arms crossed in front of his chest. He moved his arms around a bit after the attack disappeared and waited for himself to be teleported.

"You pass," the voice said. "But you have a chance to skip the next floor. If you can defend against an attack that is stronger than your cultivation base by a realm, you can skip the next floor. If you fail, however, you will be sent back to the first floor. Choose."

"Oh! It's a skipping floor," Alex thought with surprise. He had gotten to skip 21 through 24 floors thanks to the challenge on the 20th floor. The 30th seemed to be a similar one as well.

"Go ahead."

He got his guard up as another attack landed on him. He easily defended against that as well.

"Would you like to try again? This time around, you will have to defend against an attack that is stronger than your cultivation base by 2 realms. You can skip the next 2 floors if you are successful."

"Yes," Alex said and defended again.

Once again he was successful. His body alone was strong enough to defend against the first two attacks, and the third attack merely needed him to use a bit of Qi

At this rate, he was going to get to skip another 4 floors.

"Would you like to try again?" the voice asked. "This time around, you will have to defend against an attack that is stronger than your cultivation base by 5 realms. You can skip the next 3 floors."

"Of course," Alex said and defended once more. Since this attack was Saint Foundation 8th realm in strength, he had to use his Qi to stop it. If not for that, he would not have been able to do so as well.

"Would you like to try again?" the voice asked one more time. "This time around, you will have to defend against an attack that is stronger than your cultivation base by 10 realms. You can skip the next 4 floors."

"10 realms..." Alex paused. "Can I defend against Saint Core 4th realm?" Definitely not with his Qi and body alone.

A blood armor formed around him as he accepted the challenge.

"I can do it," he said. A very strong that could deter some of the strongest people in the tower currently landed on him and he himself was surprised at how easily he defended against it.

He could defend against attacks from early Saint Soul realm cultivators, so this really was nothing.

"Would you like you to try again?" the voice spoke once again. "This time around, you will have to defend against an attack that is stronger than your cultivation base by 20 realms. You can skip the next 5 floors."

Alex was tempted for sure, but even with everything he had, he knew he couldn't defend against the attack of a Saint Soul 5th realm cultivator.

He had been destroyed by a Saint Core realm cultivator exploding, this was definitely even stronger.

He shook his head. "This is it. I would like to leave," he said.

"Congratulations on skipping the next 4 floors," the spirit said. "You will now be taken to the 35th floor."

As the voice said that, Alex was teleported to the 35th floor, with no one there at all.

'I'm not the first here, am I?' he thought as he looked around.

There were 5 rooms on that floor, of which 3 seemed to be inaccessible. Even from where he was, he could already see the cracks outside of those rooms.

'It's getting worse?' he thought to himself.

The other two rooms were both open, so Alex went to one of them. He arrived in a massive room, similar to the ones from the other floors, not something that he expected to be on another 5th floor.

In the center was a puppet.

'Another puppet challenge?' he thought.

"Fight the puppet for the next 10 minutes without losing," the voice said. "It will have your cultivation base."

"Hmm?" Alex was surprised.

"The fight will begin now." Without any other warning, the puppet suddenly moved towards him.

Alex jumped backward and dodged the attack, but suddenly a fire-breathing snake shot out from the puppet's hands.

Alex took out a sword and cut the fire snake, and shot a palm attack of his own. The puppet took the palm attack directly and didn't even take a single scratch as damage.

"Oh, not bad," he thought. He shot out a few sword slashes, which the puppet somehow easily destroyed despite the attacks supposedly being only as strong as his cultivation base.

It then punched and Alex punched too. The two punches clashed, making the room vibrate with so much energy that the walls started softly shining with the formations hidden within it.

'That's definitely my cultivation realm of strength,' he thought. 'But its defense is immeasurable in return.'

As he thought about it, that made sense. The test was supposed to run for 10 minutes, so getting destroyed in the very first minute was probably not what the creator wanted from this thing.

As he was thinking that, a mental attack struck him out of nowhere, distracting him from his thoughts.

"Dammit!" Alex cried out with some annoyance. It didn't hurt, but it definitely didn't feel good. He struck back with his own mental attack, but who knew how that worked against a puppet?

It probably did nothing.

He continued fighting it for the next 10 minutes, throwing everything he could at it, while dodging all the same.

In the end, 10 minutes passed easily and he was given way to the next floor.

So, Alex left and arrived on the 36th floor.

Chapter 1114 A Simple Path

There were 4 people waiting for him in one of the rooms on the 36th floor.

Alex entered and found that each one of these people was thousands of years old elders that were in the Saint Core realm.

When they saw Alex, who was just in the Saint Foundation realm, they couldn't help but be slightly surprised.

Alex greeted the 4 people and went to sit by one of the 8 spots marked on the floor on one side. He realized that his spiritual sense was suppressed as well. Not fully suppressed, but enough to make it mostly useless.

"Do any of you seniors know what we are supposed to be doing here?" he asked.

All of them shrugged. "No idea," they said. "We've been waiting for someone to come so we can get started on it."

Alex couldn't help but be surprised. "Are you all the first 4 to get here?" he asked.

"We're not sure, but we do think so," one of them said.

Alex nodded to himself in realization. It seemed he would have to wait for a long time before someone came again.

He brought out Whisker to keep guard and started cultivating. He hadn't been cultivating properly for a long time, so he took the time to do so.

He had a sinking suspicion that it would take at least 2 days before the challenge in this room would start.

So, he cultivated. They all did.

Alas, Alex's suspicion turned out to be wrong, only in the other direction. It didn't take 2 days for the room to get filled up, it took 9.

He was bored out of his mind before it was finally time for the challenge to begin. He was beginning to understand why it would take so many months for the Sanctum to be completed by someone.

Alex stood up as the voice called for them to be ready.

"The challenge is simple. The first 3 to go through that door on the other side in the next 24 hours get to go up the floor."

The voice stopped speaking after that.

Everyone looked at each other, slightly confused if that was all it was to the challenge. To get to the other side in just 24 hours.

'Why 24 hours?' Alex wondered. 'There must be something going on here.'

One of the people amongst them wasn't hesitant at all and started walking. As soon as he took a single step forward, however, he stopped and fell to his knee.

He said something, but for some reason, no one could hear it at all.

Alex gulped once and stepped in as well. As soon as he did, he felt something wash over him. After that, he couldn't remember why he was standing.

Every memory felt vague, every feeling distant. He looked in front of him and a small white cat scuttled along on the edge of his vision.

"Pearl?" he couldn't help but be surprised. "Is that you, Pearl?"

Pearl turned around and gave him a wide smile before running towards him. Alex got to the floor and immediately gave him a hug.

"I can't believe I finally found you. Where have you been all this time?" he asked. Just as he asked that, something felt wrong.

"Why am I asking where you have been?" he asked. "You should have been with me all this time, right?"

Even as he held Pearl, some part of his mind started giving him a deep sense of discomfort. Something was wrong.

He quickly let go of Pearl. "No, Pearl is in the Central continent. Why is he in the central continent?" he tried to remember, but the answers wouldn't come to him.

"Al, you're making Pearl cry. Don't do that," someone spoke as they came from behind him and held onto pearl, softly petting his back.

Alex looked at his mother and couldn't help but feel a tear roll down his face. "Huh? Why am I crying?" he asked himself.

"Say sorry to Pearl," Helen said.

"Oh, right. Sorry, Pearl. I don't know what came upon me," he said while shaking his head.

"Don't be like that son," a man's voice came from the front. "You need to take care of your pets well. Didn't I teach you that?"

"Father!" Alex couldn't help but feel like a child in front of this man. "Yes, yes you did. I'm sorry. I'll take care of them properly."

"Yes, take care of all of them," his father said.

"Yes," Alex nodded furiously. "I'll take care of Pearl, I'll take care of Whisker, and I'll take care of..."

He paused. He had another pet, and he could remember her. Scarlet, the phoenix. But she wasn't with him, was she? She was in the Southern Continent, while he was with Pearl in...

He quickly stood back up with a fearful look on his face. "Where am I?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" his father asked. "You're back home, on the farm."

"No," Alex said. "I can feel Qi. Our home doesn't have Qi."

"What are you saying, son?" his mother asked. "We're in the Flowing Brush sect of course. Do you want to meet my master?"

"Qin Shan?" Alex asked. He suddenly grabbed his head. "No, this is not the Western Continent. This is... this is the Southern Continent. Someone is playing tricks with me."

"Son—"

"No!" Alex shouted. "Stop this!"

His intent, along with his spiritual energy, overpowered the Illusory Dream formation that was playing tricks on his mind. He felt coolness pass through his head as he could finally think properly.

The illusions tried to pierce through his intent that was keeping them at bay, but Alex didn't let it. He pushed through them instead, seeing through them clearly, moving toward the door on the other side.

The illusions all but disappeared by the time he reached the edge of the formation, and once he passed through, his mother, father, and Pearl all disappeared at once.

Alex looked back at the formation now that he was outside of it and took a deep breath. "I'll get back to you all very soon."

He turned around and walked through the door.

Alex arrived on the 37th floor, slightly surprised that someone was already there. It was one of the challengers from the previous challenge.

"Oh, someone finally passed," the woman said.

"Finally?" Alex asked.

"It's been 6 hours since the last challenge started," she said. "But of course, you wouldn't know that if you were affected by it."

"Oh," Alex said with a bit of a surprised look on his face. "I didn't realize such a long time had passed."

"Yeah, well. What can you do?" the woman said. "Did you use a talisman or an artifact?"

"Neither," Alex said.

"Neither?" the woman was surprised. "Then you must have quite a formidable mindset to have been able to go through that."

Alex smiled slightly. He wasn't sure if it was his formidable mindset, or his body constantly removing any sort of effect from his mind and body.

It was most likely a mix of the two now that Alex was thinking about it.

"Anyway, which room do you want to go to next? We are the first ones here," she said.

"Oh, right," Alex thought. "I haven't been choosing really. I usually go with whichever one is open."

"What about when all are open?" she asked.

"The first one," Alex pointed to the door to the left.

"Yeah, why bother choosing when it is all chance based anyway," she said and walked towards the room.

Alex looked above the room as he followed, and realized that it was a room that required 8 people to take part. The others weren't any better, so there was no problem with him entering.

After he entered, he saw that spots were lying around the room in a circle, and Alex went to go sit on one towards one side of the wall.

He sighed when he realized that he was going to have to wait again. He feared that it would take a very long time before his wait was over.

Alex was so sure about it, that he brought out one of his pills and ate it as he started cultivating. The pill would leave him unable to cultivate for the next 5 days after he was done, but there wasn't really any need for that anyway.

Nearly 20 days passed before the room was filled. It would of course only take this long since it was the very first time, but still, having to be the one that waited was not a pleasant feeling for Alex.

After everyone was finally in the room, the room started speaking.

"This challenge will require you to fight against each other," the voice said. Two platforms appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the room, each of which had some sort of podium on it.

"You will be called in pairs to come and stand on each of these podiums. Using these, you will be able to launch a simple elemental attack. The attacks will have the same amount of power no matter who is controlling."

"The first person of the two to strike the other person's podium 20 times with an elemental attack will win."

"Be careful of how the attacks interact with each other. These attacks do not have intent behind them, so they will definitely interact with each other," the voice said.

"Oh!" Alex realized what the challenge was asking of them. It was asking for them to be good at understanding Elemental Interaction.

It was a good challenge for him since he had learned a freaking dao about it.

Chapter 1115 Colors

Alex was the first to be called to the platform, with another person who was to be his opponent.

Once he arrived, he saw that there were 5 small formations on the podium, each of which he could press to throw out a different elemental attack.

"Start!"

As soon as the voice said that, Alex used the Metal attack.

A projectile of no color flew out from his podium, shooting toward the other side. He looked to the other side and saw another projectile flying towards him, that too of no color at all.

When they collided, A flash of blue shined suddenly, and the resulting projectile hit Alex's podium.

'Shit!' Alex thought. He had realized that a water attack was flying towards him and had tried to send out a fire attack of his own to stop it, but it looked like there was an internal cooldown to the podium so that one couldn't continuously send out attacks.

'That was unlucky,' he thought as he shook his head.

He had chosen Metal on a whim, and his opponent had most likely chosen water on a whim as well. When they collided, the Water element was empowered by the Metal element, making the water attack come hit him.

'So I not only need to send out an attack, but I also have to be careful of what I send out, huh?' he thought.

This felt like a Rock-Paper-Scissor challenge in a sense. From what he could guess since each attack had the same power, each element of the same strength, there was going to be 3 results for each interaction possible.

First, his energy would Empower his opponent's, giving his opponent the point.

Second, his energy would Ruin his opponent's, giving him the point.

Finally, they would both choose the same element, and neither of them would get a point.

'But this is definitely not luck based,' he thought. 'Such high into the tower, they are definitely expecting at least some of us to be able to do something.'

Alex suddenly felt a spiritual sense barely lingering around him, not trying to alert him at all. However, he could still sense it rather easily.

'Right, we can check what the other person is going to choose too,' Alex thought. It wasn't a game of elements at all. It was a game of knowing your opponent's next move.

An illusory hourglass appeared in front of them suddenly. "If you don't fire off another attack within this time, you won't be able to fire one at all," the voice said.

Alex saw the sand fall through the hourglass and smiled. 'So it's a game to see who can remain unmoving the longest too,' he thought.

His Elemental Interaction understanding wasn't very useful here, but he didn't care for that. He was having fun.

He openly let his spiritual sense spread around his opponent's podium, letting them know that he was seeing their every move.

His opponent did the same. The both of them waited until the last grain of sand fell from the hourglass.

Then, without having any time to think, they randomly activated two of the formations.

Two white blobs of attacks flew at each other and slammed. A flash of green shined, and it landed on the opponent's podium this time around, giving Alex a point.

Alex smiled. He had gotten lucky.

Still, that made his opponent hesitate a little. They couldn't help but wonder if that had been intentional.

This was definitely a mind game.

Alex decided to have some more fun. He decided to take it a little further.

Suddenly, he took in his spiritual sense, letting his opponent see everything clearly without any obstruction. His opponent on the other hand couldn't help but be surprised that he wasn't looking at what he was choosing at all.

And that made them suspicious.

Alex had both his hands on the podium, ready to press one of the buttons there. Then, he looked towards the hourglass that flipped again.

They were on a timer once more.

He looked straight at his opponent, smiling in the process. His hands were on the podium, but his spiritual sense was nowhere.

His opponent was sure that he couldn't see what they were going to choose at all, but they couldn't help but be hesitant about what Alex was doing.

Still, as the timer reached nearly zero, they pressed something, and their podium attacked.

Alex pressed something as well, attacking back. A flash of red shined and the opponent was hit again.

"What?!" his opponent couldn't help but shout in surprise. "How did you know?"

Alex smiled, saying nothing.

He waited for the timer to start again, and when it hit nearly zero, as soon as his opponent's attack was released, he pressed one of the formations.

With a flash of blue, his opponent lost again.

His opponent couldn't understand at all. They had no idea what was happening.

Alex was having the time of his life as his demon eyes saw everything from the movement of the grain of sand to the color of the attack that was launched.

He didn't even need to know what was pressed as he always did know, just by what the attack was.

His decision to take back his spiritual sense was just to screw with his opponent's understanding of how he was doing this, and that was enough to make his opponent wonder if he was cheating.

A few minutes later, he won and went back to his spot.

'That was rather fun,' he thought. 'It would be more fun if we could truly make it random.'

Of course, in a competitive situation, no one was going to agree to play fair with him. And neither had he.

3 more games were played, some of which were rather close, unlike his.

Then, he was called once again, to fight another of that had won. He easily won against that person without messing up a single time.

Once he had won twice, he was sent to the upper floor.

Alex arrived on the floor and paused. He realized that he was the first one to arrive here.

'Just 2 more floors,' he thought. After he was done with this and the 39th floor, he would be able to enter the 40th floor, from which point on it was all solo challenges. Then, he was going to easily win it all.

Alex looked at the only 2 rooms that were usable and obviously chose the first one to the left.

He went there and started waiting, and sometime later, the other winner from his previous challenge came as well.

Together, they had to wait for the next 30 days before the 8 spots were all filled up and the challenge was ready to begin.

"This is a painting challenge," the voice said. "Please draw on the canvas in front of you the best painting you can within the hour. Every color you need can be changed using the formation."

Alex looked at the white canvas in front of him and a few brushes next to it. Then, to the side, there was a small formation that glowed with a soft black color.

'Why painting?' he thought. He felt somewhat annoyed. 'I've never painted at all.'

Still, since that was the challenge, he had to do it. He sighed and thought of a scene to draw. He remembered the view he saw, standing in the middle of one of the flower fields in the Forbidden Orchard, and started drawing that.

He could freely change the color he needed for the scene with just a simple movement on the formation next to him, and with that, he didn't even need to dip the brush in paint, like he knew painters did.

However, all the features wouldn't stop him from making the art appear very ugly. He had absolutely no idea how drawings were even made in the first place.

"That's as good as I can do in the first round I guess," he thought and stopped painting.

The 1-hour timer ended, and everyone's painting on the canvas suddenly vanished. Instead, it was replaced by 7 other smaller paintings.

"Rank the paintings you see in front of you from 1 to 7. 1 is the best, and 7 is the worst," the voice said. "You may write the number on the painting itself."

Alex nodded and looked through the paintings.

'Damn,' he thought. At least half of the paintings there were better than his. What the hell had he even done this past hour to come up with such a bad painting as his?

He was definitely going to get last place, wasn't he?

Once he ranked the pictures in front of him, the paintings were showcased in the middle, with everyone's overall ranking.

He came 7th.

2 of the 8 people were sent to the next floor, while Alex had to now wait for 2 more people to come in before they started the next round.

2 days passed and the next 2 people were here. Everyone was told the same thing again and this time, Alex decided to go with something a little less complex than a flower field. That had too many colors for him.

He decided to go with something just black and white.

He thought of another scenery. 7 frozen mountain peaks that were illuminated by the silver moonlight.

He drew it as carefully as he could. In the end, it came out as garbage once again.

He failed this round as well.

The final round started 3 days later, and Alex drew the scene of Pearl breaking through to the saint realm in the Lightning Tribulation.

He managed to get to the 5th place this time around, but that wasn't enough at all.

With 3 losses, he was unfortunately sent back to the first floor.

Chapter 1116 Reclimbing

"Fuck!" Alex couldn't help but curse when he got back to the first floor. He was the one that had chosen the room to go into and somehow had ended up with the worst room for himself.

He wanted to say it was unfair, but it really wasn't. Each room was fair to someone and unfair to others. That was how the entire sanctum functioned.

Hell, that was why there were multiple pathways to the top in the first place. So that the contenders had a fair chance to make it up to the top floor, as fair as one could get with luck involved at least.

Alex sighed, but this was no place to be worrying about anything. He needed to continue going up the floors.

A few people tried to ask him about the floors, but he refused to answer them. Instead, he walked over to the first room on the floor and started his journey again.

Along the way, he found out that it had been over 3 months since they had entered the sanctum. He knew it was right, but for some reason, it didn't feel like such a long time had passed.

He practically rushed his way through the rest of the floors, going into rooms he was used to and winning there.

2nd floor, 3rd floor, 4th floor, 6th floor. He went past them quite fast. Not as many people were challenging the tower anymore after losing so many times, so he got the opportunity to go up even faster.

He slowed back down around the 15th floor again as the people who were trying to go up had started to increase in number around here.

Still, that only meant a few days of delay.

Alex arrived on the 20th floor about 5 days later after restarting and was surprised that he had to go through it again.

He skipped the next 4 floors again and asked the spirit on why he had to redo it there but not the earlier floors.

The reason was apparently that everyone can do the 5th, 10th, and 15th floor since it was the most basic way to find a cultivator.

For the rest of them, however, there was a chance that it could be cheated on the pass-through. You could use what was definitely not your skill to skip the floor the first time around, so to weed those cheaters out, they were made to do it all over again.

Alex understood what he was trying to say and thought that was the right approach. His speed slowed down a little from 26 to 29, but it was nowhere near as bad as it was the last time he was here.

Since over 2 months had passed since the last time he was here, the number of people on this floor had saturated. Given the way the floor worked now, the wait actually came from having to wait for the rooms to be empty, rather than full like the last time.

Alchemy battle, Battle royale, Puppet battle, and Blind battle— Alex completed it all with relative ease as he had done it all the last time around and had a bit of practice.

Then, he skipped up to the 35th floor using the Endurance test on the 30th floor.

All this time as he made his way up the tower, there had been a single question on his mind.

Where were the assassins?

As far as he was aware, there were supposed to be 4 more left. He had killed the insect-controlling assassin and 3 clones.

So, by his understanding, there was the Clone's main body, the girl he met at the very start of the competition, and then…

He wasn't sure who the next two were. Since he didn't know anything about their leader, of of the last ones could be the leader, and the other assassin was most likely the red-haired, fiery chick.

But then something didn't make sense at all.

"The hell?" he thought. Had he perhaps not counted right? Or were there simply more assassins than he realized? What if the Dark Phoenix did not have 7 assassins, but more?

"I can think about it after I leave," he thought and continued on with the next challenges.

The 36th challenge was the one that required him to walk straight to his destination while walking through an illusory dream formation that spoke sweet nothings to him.

This time around, with how ready he was for the formation, it didn't work for him at all. He passed the 36th floor and arrived on the 37th floor where he waited for the Elemental battle room to be free.

He was so happy that he didn't have to wait weeks for these rooms to be filled up and instead it only took a day at most.

The Elemental battle was the easiest for him because of his Demon eyes and he got to go to the 38th floor.

Alex arrived at the 38th floor and looked at the first room. He saw that it was open with only 2 more people required.

He then looked at the other one that was open with only 3 people inside, asking for 5 more.

Without hesitation, he went to the 2nd room. He did not want to go through the Painting challenge again.

He was sure that with his talent, after a couple of tries, or even a single session with a master painter, he would learn a lot and his painting skills would improve by many realms.

However, he did not have such luxury at the current time, so he had to take his chances and go with the other one.

Alex walked into the other room, even if it still needed 5 more people to begin. Or 4, now that he was in.

He walked into the room and saw the spots lying around. He was meant to sit on one of the 5 remainings.

He looked at the 3 people in the room and nodded toward them. He was surprised to see these people there.

One of the girls was a plain girl with green robes, who merely glanced at Alex before focusing on her own meditation.

The other girl was a small girl with pink hair and bright blue robes. She gave a small smile to Alex and nodded back to him before looking away.

However, it wasn't these two that surprised him at all.

It was the third girl. It was the tribal girl he had fought in the battle hall, who he had also seen outside the sanctum.

He nodded toward her, but his surprise made him look at her for a second too long. At that time, his memory flashed back to the time when he fought her hand-to-hand.

There was a mystery for him at that time why her body had been so rigid at all. Body cultivators were strong, but her muscles felt very stiff.

When he saw the very well-hidden killing intent in her eyes, he realized what the reasoning was for that time.

Rigor Mortis. Her muscles were tough because it was a dead body.

"Oh fuck," he said softly. "Another clone."

The girl suddenly dashed out of her spot and started attacking Alex. Alex jumped back, but she easily reached him.

Her cultivation base was strong, at least in the Saint Core realm.

"How are you alive?" she demanded. "I killed you."

Alex blocked her punch and gave a swift kick before answering. "Oh, and did you stay around to check if that really happened?" he asked.

"You could not have survived a Core Explosion," she shouted and continued attacking. Alex could defeat her at any time, but he needed to call the spirit to take them elsewhere.

"Do you want to fight me so bad?" he asked, but the girl didn't answer. 'Did she learn from last time?'

"Y-you guys," the pink-haired girl stammered a little. "We-we cannot fight. P-Please, stop fighting."

Her voice came out like a plea and one could hear the desperation and fear in her voice.

"Please, stop fighting," she said and stood up to go stop them. However, before she could move two steps, she tripped over her own foot and fell face-first onto the ground.

"Ouch!" she shouted and slowly got up. When she did, everyone in the room saw her two huge breasts fall out of her robe, fully visible to them all.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Aaaah! Don't look!" she shouted as she immediately turned around to hide it. However, the damage was done.

Not to her, to Alex.

He was distracted for a split second, and at that moment, a single needle was lodged through his rib that the dark-skinned clone had managed to sneakily attack him with.

Alex was sent flying along the walls of the room and fell on the other side. He slowly got up and immediately palmed the kick from the clone before spinning around to kick her away as well.

"My body is stronger than you might think," he said as he pulled the thin needle from his ribs and smelled it slightly.

"Hmm… poison huh?" he thought and smiled back. "That was not a bad idea. You knew you couldn't beat me, so you went for a poison attack while I was distracted."

His grin turned even larger as he replied. "Sucks for you though. If poison worked on me, the Jade-Faced Assassin wouldn't have died so easily at my hands," he said.

Then, he turned towards the big-breasted petite girl. "That was a nice trick. That charming technique of yours," he said.

"Can't believe I came across two assassins at the same time."

Chapter 1117 Fighting The Girls

"Wh-what are you saying?" the pink-haired girl asked. She blinked a few times, slightly blushing as well.

"Acting coy, huh? You're a pro for sure," Alex said. "Is this how you catch your victim?"

The dark-skinned girl came to attack at the same time, but Alex easily blocked her attacks before sending her backward.

'I can't kill her normally,' he realized. His attacks were strong, but even if he used his sword aura, he wasn't sure that he could hurt her at all.

Her physical body was almost as strong as her cultivation base, and together, they were quickly strong.

The pink-haired girl looked like she was about to cry. She even dropped a few tears as she looked at Alex. "I can't believe you called me an assassin just because I was trying to get you two to stop fighting," she said.

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "If that's the case, then you won't mind if your friend here dies, will you?"

Midnight appeared on his hand and Alex used the skill on the sword without hesitation. Yin energy flowed into the blade as it was suddenly filled with a Death and Darkness aura.

God Rending Death Blade came striking down at the dark-skinned girl, but the pink-haired girl didn't move at all. She made absolutely no sign of helping at all, surprising Alex and almost making him think that he had made the wrong assumption.

However, just then a strong gust of wind struck him from the other side, smashing him into the wall to the side. The wind was strong enough that it ripped off the robe he was wearing and showed the blood armor that he had underneath.

"Dammit, not another robe," Alex said as he slowly got up from the ground. However, before he was fully standing, a green blur caught up to him and a wing blade struck his blood armor.

The attack wasn't strong enough to leave any dent in the armor itself, but it was definitely strong enough to weaken the strength of his blood aura, even if just by a little bit.

"What the hell?" Alex shouted as he teleported to the side and looked at the green blur that returned to becoming just a human.

"You too?" Alex asked, exasperated when he saw the third and final girl in the room attack him as well.

"Of course," the girl said.

"Ahhh!" Alex finally realized. "You're the girl I met on the first day, weren't you? The one that gave me an ultimatum. What happened to that by the way? 2 months passed, but you didn't come to ask me for any answer at all. I was even planning on giving you a written answer, carved directly onto your body with my sword."

The girl frowned. "You were right," she spoke to the dark-skinned girl. "He's definitely strong. "Xue Mei, come. We're killing him together."

"Okay!" the pink-haired girl said as she softly ran toward the other two, her breasts freely bouncing as she did so.

She turned to look at Alex and gave a shy smile. "Like what you see?"

"No, not really," Alex said. "If you think I'm going to think you are pretty when you're literally trying to kill me, you must've been around a lot of weirdos. Or worse yet, you yourself are one."

The girl's smile faded a little and she was about to bite back when the green-robed girl looked at her. "Don't forget the mission," she said.

The pink-haired girl looked at the green-robed girl and cowered a bit. That was expected, however, as the green-robed girl seemed to be a Saint Soul realm cultivator.

'That's... going to be tough,' Alex thought as she finally revealed her cultivation base.

"We'll be done with this mission right here and now," the green-robed girl said. The other girls nodded.

Suddenly, they attacked again.

The dark-skinned girl moved first, hurling in with her body cultivation. The pink-haired girl did something to use a technique that was certainly a mental attack of some sort.

Her charms weren't working like they were supposed to, and instead, they were only hurting Alex.

The third girl, the strongest one, didn't move at all until she did. Her very first burst of movement came at such a terrifying speed that it barely even registered to Alex's demon eyes.

He barely managed to move his head to the side as a small dagger cut his cheek and part of his ear. Alex quickly realized that there was something bad about her movement technique that he couldn't understand at all.

He quickly crafted a helmet as well and reacted just in time when the clone girl attacked him.

Without hesitation, he let a terrible fire out of his palm, burning her while she was close. The green-robed girl tried to help, but before she could, something exploded next to her, sending her flying toward the wall in the distance.

The pink-haired girl was caught in the attack too and was knocked back as well.

Alex looked towards the dark-skinned girl and used all his intent to make the fire burn hotter and hotter. The girl shouted in pain, but for some reason, she didn't die at all.

At the same time, a carnivorous plant grew from the ground and ate her completely. Alex was surprised that he lost connection with his flames.

Another such plant grew out from next to the green-robed girl, which spits out the charred dark-skinned girl she was completely burnt, but was somehow alive, albeit shouting out of her mind with the pain.

The green-robed girl pulled out a pill and threw it onto the burnt girl's mouth who quickly swallowed it. She healed, albeit not completely, and was ready to fight again.

Alex got ready to burn them all, and so were the girls ready to fight when suddenly something appeared.

The tower's spirit appeared in between them and looked at each other.

"I have noticed that you are trying to kill each other, even though that is not allowed in the tower," the spirit said. "Can I take it as admission to the fact that you wish to duel each other to the death?"

"Yes," Alex said without hesitation.

The green-robed girl was about to agree too when the dark-skinned girl stopped her. "No, the last time I agreed, that thing took me to someplace else where he killed me. He must be planning something, which is why he is agreeing so easily."

The green-robed girl nodded her head. "No, we won't go anywhere," she said.

"Then will you please not fight? If you kill someone, I will have to disqualify you," the spirit said.

"That's alright," the girls said.

Alex frowned. That's not how this conversation was supposed to go at all. The girls were supposed to accept and he was going to fight them freely, without holding back at all, unlike what he had been doing until now.

"Spirit, you're screwing me over again," Alex said.

"But Master White Tiger, they don't want to fight at all, so we can't hold a duel," the spirit said.

"Of course, they want to fight me," Alex said. "They are here to kill me."

"They said no, so I can't help you," the spirit said as it disappeared.

Alex looked with wide eyes and the girls were surprised as well.

"Let's kill him quickly before that thing returns," the pink-haired girl said.

The green-haired girl nodded. "I will fight him, you two work on distracting him," she said.

"Got it, sister Li," the pink-haired girl said.

The green-robed girl turned into a blur again, barely being seen at all to the normal eyes. Even Alex's eyes were having a hard time following her as she appeared right in front of him.

He tried to react in time by cutting the space where she stood, but before he could do that, the girl suddenly vanished.

Everyone was confused, but then a second later they vanished as well.

Alex arrived at a different room with the girls while the Spirit stood next to them with a smile.

"How was my acting, Master White Tiger? These girls were certainly deceived into falling for my trap, weren't they?" he asked.

Alex looked at him with a weird look on his face. "What trap?" he asked.

"I acted like I was gone so they would fight you, and in doing so accept your duel. That is what—"

An attack passed through the spirit's body.

"-you wanted right?" the spirit asked.

Alex hesitated to say that his acting was very stupid and totally not required, but since he had helped him, he said nothing of that sort. "Thank you, that was much appreciated," he said.

"Of course, anything for you, Master White Tiger," the spirit said and slowly turned around to the green-robed girl who just attacked him.

"Little girl, I am an Immortal spirit. Mere attacks from a mortal won't do anything to hurt me at all," he said. "I suggest you try not to anger me."

The girl slowly backed away as the Spirit's words terrified her. She couldn't imagine just powerful an Immortal spirit would be.

"Anyway, this is the 44th floor, so no one should be coming here for a while. Have fun with your duel. Bye," the spirit said as it disappeared again.

Alex looked at the three girls and prepared to fight when something caught his eye from the corner of his vision.

His spiritual sense hadn't noticed it, but when he turned to look in that general direction, he saw cracks in space that slowly tore away more than just the walls of the room they were in.

And that was not all.

In those cracks, Alex could see multiple head-sized holes that gave him a clear view of what was past those cracks.

The world of silver and purple.

The Void.

Chapter 1118 Battle On The 44th Floor

The purple and silver world beyond the cracks was fascinating, but that only brought some anger from within Alex.

'Goddamn spirit, why did you bring me to a place where Dao won't work?' he couldn't help but ask.

While Alex was distracted by the view of the Void, the green-robed girl moved. She rushed toward Alex, trying to attack him as a blur once more.

However, for some reason, she could not produce the same speed as before and Alex managed to react in time to dodge her attack.

He looked back at her with a weird look on his face. "What happened to your speed?" he asked. He looked around the room and an answer came to him. "Was that a Dao? Were you using a Dao this entire time?"

That explained how she was so fast, despite having never seen anything in the Saint Soul realm be that fast.

"Your fire was a Dao too, wasn't it?" the girl asked. "You won't be able to use it either."

"Be careful of his blood," the dark-skinned girl said. "His blood is strong."

"We'll just have to make him use up his blood aura, that's all," the green-robed girl said. "There's a convenient place for us to dump his body too once we are done."

"What about that thing from before? It saw us," the pink-haired girl asked.

"We'll let the leader worry about it later," the girl said. "We can go into hiding if it reveals what happened here."

The other two girls nodded. "Now, don't try to attack him yourself. I will do the actual fighting, you two just aid me from the side," the green-robed girl said and started attacking Alex.

A few vines grew out of nowhere that tried to crush Alex. Alex tried to cut it with his sword, but the vines were too strong for anything he used that wasn't his blood.

He had to coat his sword with his blood before he could use it to cut the vines. At the same time, another attack fell on him from another side.

A wind slice struck him in the armor, pushing him a little back, but not hurting him at all.

Alex endured the force and swung his sword in the direction of the girls. His blood flew out of his sword, moving as a projectile that would crush anything in its path.

The girl used a technique and a tree with a thick trunk grew in front of her that took the majority of the attack from the blood. Alex's attack fell the tree, but the remaining energy wasn't enough to hurt the girls.

The Saint Soul realm woman struck the blood attack and sent it in the direction of the cracked space where it spread into a thousand different drops and lost connection to Alex.New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex frowned and coated his sword with blood again. 'I can't do this many times,' he thought. 'I will soon run out of blood.'

He thought of how he could approach this fight, but before he could come up with anything, the pink-haired girl moved to the front and showed off her breasts again. As soon as Alex saw it, she used a technique that was meant to infatuate him with her.

Alex felt only pain at the technique being used.

"Fuck off!" he shouted at her as he sent out a Heaven's Impact. The pink-haired girl lost consciousness for a split second, and Alex launched another attack.

Another tree appeared that blocked his attack, and the dark-skinned girl pulled back the pink-haired girl from harm's way.

The girl came back to consciousness with a small headache. "What the hell is happening?" she couldn't help but ask. "How is this not working? It works with every man."

"Maybe he's different," the dark-skinned girl said with a serious face. "Maybe he's not into girls at all, which is why your charm isn't working at all. It's definitely working on me."

Alex was caught off guard. "Hey! Don't go making me gay just because your charm doesn't work on me. It's only that I've seen a girl far prettier than you, so none of your beauty amounts to anything in my eyes."

Two of the girls frowned at the same time when they heard that. "I'm going to kill him," the pink-haired girl said.

Without any shame, she dropped all of her robes and appeared naked. She felt not the least bit of shame as she started making full use of her naked body to start charming Alex.

Alex couldn't help but frown at the sight of that. The sight didn't work on him entirely, but he was still a man, so the pain got bigger even if he did avoid being charmed entirely.

He dropped his sword and created two blood daggers that he threw at the two girls that were not naked.

The green-robed girl created another tree to stop the attack, but with two daggers coming her way, she needed to focus more. The daggers flew towards both the girls even when they were moving around.

As they were trying to defend, Alex hit all three of them with Heaven's Impact.

The dark-skinned girl and naked pink-haired girl were hit the hardest, while the green-robed girl barely lost her vision for a split second.

At that time, however, Alex had moved and was rushing toward them. The green-robed girl had to stop the two blood daggers and Alex.

She knew she couldn't just defend herself and had to actually fight back now if she wanted to save her friends. So, she was forced to use a skill that would use a lot of Qi at once.

A lightning bolt flew from her palm that struck one of the daggers, while the tree that she grew stopped the other one halfway, while the remaining attack hit the dark-skinned girl.

The dark-skinned girl immediately fell unconscious from the dual attack, and Alex was rushing toward her to make use of this moment.

The green-robed girl moved to defend her, but with how much she had to do just before, she was a step late to defending the unconscious dark-skinned girl.

She could only hope that his thick skin would save the old man from Alex's attack.

Alex arrived right on top of the dark-skinned girl and simply punched her in the chest.

The green-robed girl created a vine from where Alex was to kill him once and for all. Saving the old man was already too late, so in exchange for taking a shot at him, Alex would now have to suffer an attack from her.

Alex's punch landed on the dark-skinned girl's chest piercing her chest easily, while sharp vines pierced through Alex's body easily.

The girl was surprised that she had succeeded. However, it had been too easy.

Alex's body suddenly disappeared into specks of light and the green-robed girl's eyes went wide.

"What! A fake?" she couldn't help but should.

She quickly spread her sense around and it told her where the real Alex was. She turned around just in time to see Alex materialize from thin air as his concealment ability was deactivated.

The green-robed girl's eyes went wide when she saw what he had done.

Two blood daggers were in Alex's hands, each piercing through the naked girl's body. One through the chest at the front and another from the back of her head.

Alex looked towards the green-robed girl's surprised face and moved his dagger down and up from her head and chest, splitting her chest and head vertically, leaving no chance for her to be alive.

He pulled the daggers out and grinned. "Good riddance, right? I can finally fight without any distractions," he said.

Without any other words, he jumped toward the green-robed girl.

The girl couldn't use any of her weapons or treasures, so she was in as much trouble as Alex was when it came ot fighting. However, because Alex had his blood techniques and Midnight, he was in a far better spot than her.

The girl ignored defending the dark-skinned girl. The old man could die for all she cared. For now, her own life was in a precarious situation, so she needed to focus all of herself on it.

Without the need for defense, she forced Alex into a one-on-one fight that neither of them could win.

The girl's attacks were almost as strong as his own blood attacks, and Alex's blood armor was able to defend against most of the girl's attacks.

The fight dragged on for nearly 15 minutes as neither one of them got the upper hand.

Alex didn't care for the dark-skinned girl that was unconscious. As long as he could defeat this girl, he could win. So, he gave his all to fight her.

However, after 15 minutes of non-stop attacks, something happened that the girl had been waiting for from the very beginning.

As soon as the girl noticed, she sent a wind slash toward Alex.

Alex quickly used the blood sword on his left hand to attack the wind slice, but to his surprise, it was his sword that was completely destroyed.

The wind slice continued forward, landing on part of his left hand, which was too weak to defend against a Saint Soul realm attack.

His arm was chopped off, falling to the side.

"Hah!" the girl said, heavily breathing. "You've finally weakened enough that you can't stop my attacks now. I can finally kill you."

Alex looked slightly agitated as he realized she was correct. Within a second, his arm grew back, surprising the girl very much.

"You're right," he said while frowning a little. "I will have to switch it up then."

Chapter 1119 Victory?

Alex put Midnight into his storage ring. He didn't find any use for it now that he was weaker than the woman to the point that his blood attacks were doing nothing to stop her attack.

He still had enough blood in him to survive another 30 minutes of battle if he were to use it all, but after that, he would have not a single useful drop of blood remaining in his body.

His undying physique also restored his blood, but that blood never held any blood aura. That came from the blood that was created by his bone marrow, and that took a long time.

'It's all or nothing then,' Alex thought.

He could think of only two ways where he had any chance of victory in this battle at all.

That was something he came to understand after looking at the facts in front of him.

The green-robed woman had been fighting for a while now, so she was bound to be running out of Qi. Given that she didn't have access to her storage bag, she couldn't use any Qi replenishing pill she may have.

As for Alex, he was running out of blood aura, but his Qi was as full as ever. He had been barely using any of it at all, so he had an excess amount of it.

He could only find victory if he made use of this Qi.

The first path to victory was simple, and Alex chose this one to start with.

His blood armor suddenly liquidized to flow into his arm where it formed two long blades. At the same time, more blood came out from within him to replace the armor.

His armor while strong, was mostly for a show at the moment. The only part it truly protected was his dantian, his heart, and his head. Everywhere else from his chest, to his stomach was formed with a weaker blood aura that certainly couldn't protect him at all.

After all that was ready, he shot forward.

The girl was resting for 2 seconds after cutting off Alex's arms before she was attacked again. This time, he jumped towards her with his blood blades.

She attacked immediately without waiting. Another wind slice flew through the air, targeting Alex's body. However, he shifted at the last moment, so that it was only his arm that was cut off once again.

Even as his arm was cut off, he continued moving forward, and the blood blade that was on his arm, flew back towards him as his newly grown arm grabbed onto it and swung at the green-robed lady that was in front of him right now.

A massive tree appeared right in front of her that blocked the attack and a pair of vines appeared from the ground to grab Alex.

Alex jumped backward, but the vines were too fast and grabbed onto his ankles. Without blinking an eye, he cut off his leg and moved back.

By the time he landed, his leg had grown back as well.

The woman looked at him with a horrified face. "How is that possible? What are you? A monster?" she asked. She had never seen someone regenerate that fast. Not even eating pills could make someone regenerate that fast.

So what the hell was this?

Alex frowned slightly. 'That certainly uses quite a lot of Qi,' he thought. He hadn't lost this many body parts within such a small interval, so he was surprised at the overall loss of Qi.

It wasn't a large amount by any means, but it was certainly not a small amount either. He would have to be careful not to overdo it.

He jumped back towards her again, going into closed combat.

His plan was simple. Fight her up close and force her to use as much Qi as possible while trying to land a hit on her with the blood swords.

The woman retaliated with her own attack, which Alex dodged while taking some damage. He jumped back in and made her use more Qi before gaining some distance.

He waited for her to use another ranged attack, and once he dodged that, he went back to her with his two weaker blood blades in hand.

He swung the swords again, but this time a tree root slammed onto his back. He grunted as he was pushed forward more than he wanted to and fell straight onto the path of an incoming attack.

Alex tried to move, but it was too late.

A strong bolt of lightning fell onto him, hurting him despite the armor. The armor cracked in all places but the ones where it was the strongest.

Alex cried out in pain as the lightning burned his body all around. As his body fell uncontrollably toward the ground where the girl launched one of the strongest wind blade attacks yet.

The wind blade struck him and cut his body in half, right from his waist, barely a few centimeters below his dantian.

His body flopped onto the ground in two parts, but the girl wasn't done. Something grew out of the ground and swallowed both parts of Alex.

The carnivorous plant chewed onto Alex's body, slowly dissolving him in its toxin.

The girl finally sat back down in relief as Alex was eaten by her plant. She checked her Qi reserve which was starting to get pitifully low and knew she had not more than a few more attacks in her.

"Old man, are you awake yet?" the girl asked in a tired voice. "We're done here."

"This body… won't survive for long," the dark-skinned girl said as blood trailed from her lips. "Find me another one."

"You're already dying," the girl said. "Your soul is all but dead. There are no people here with a weaker spirit than yours. You are at death's door. Just give up, old man. It will be easier that way."

The green-robed girl turned back towards the dark-skinned girl. She slowly walked toward her and pulled out the bloody dagger that was jammed into her chest.

"I will tell the leader that you died in battle," she said as she brought the dagger high above.

"No, no! Don't kill me. I can live," the dark-skinned woman shouted.

"You've lived too long."

The old man's soul tried to leave the dark-skinned girl's body, but before he could, the green-robed girl jammed the dagger onto the girl's dantian, killing the old man's soul along with the body.

She let go of the dagger and slumped back. "Leader… will get angry," she thought. "So many died. He will have to restart once again."

"That's quite cruel of you," Alex spoke from behind her.

The girl quickly released her sense only to find that Alex had arrived next to her. His hands were empty to her eyes, but to her senses, they held a sword.

He swung it right across her chest.

For a second, the girl thought she was dead. However, she realized that nothing had happened.

"You bastard! How are you still alive?" she shouted as she brought out roots from the ground to attack him. However, the roots that came out were barely strong at all.

Alex casually struck them and they were destroyed.

"What?" the girl couldn't help but ask in surprise. "How did you?"

"So, that makes it what? 5? 5 members of the Dark Phoenix assassin group dead," Alex said. "Thanks for helping me kill one of them at least."

The girl heard those words, but her mind was too jumbled at the moment to listen to them. Multiple questions floated in her head, none of which had an answer.

Why was he alive? How did he regenerate? Why was he not eaten by her plant? What did he do to her? How did he block her attack so easily?

"What is that sword?" she asked.

"This?" Alex lifted the spiritual sword in his hand. "This is my 2nd method of killing you. I'm glad that it works… although you seem to be recovering already."

"I'll kill you!" she grunted.

"Didn't you already? And look what that resulted in," he said.

The girl frowned. She was angry but she had no idea how she could beat him now. He was like a cockroach that came back no matter how many times he was killed, so needed to make sure she killed him properly this time around.

'Am I really going to do this?' she thought. It was a desperate move, so she didn't plan on using it just yet.

At the same time, Alex jumped at her with his invisible sword and started swinging it around.

With each hit, he was weakening the girl's mental connection to her body. That resulted in her not being able to use as much of her body as she could, which then resulted in her not being able to use as much of her Qi.

She could alleviate this by using her own spiritual energy to drive away the effects, but she hadn't realized it yet.

Alex kept attacking, waiting for her to completely run out of Qi before he could kill her. As long as she had her qi, he knew no attack of his could ever hurt her even a single bit.

The woman tried to fight back, but she couldn't use her Qi as well as she wanted. So, as the fight prolonged, she started getting more and more desperate.

In her desperation, she took the only route she thought was the best for her in her current situation.

Alex sensed what was happening and couldn't help but exclaim, "Shit!"

She was going to blow up her body.

Chapter 1120 Demon

"Not again!" Alex shouted as he looked for a place to hide, but there was no such place at all. At least, not to hide.

"Spirit? Have I won?" he asked.

"No, master White Tiger," the spirit spoke from somewhere.

"Goddammit!" Alex cried out in anger. He looked towards the right and saw the cracks in space as well as the void.

"If I can…"

There was no time to think. He dashed forward as quickly as he could and arrived next to the girl's body which was prime for an explosion.

For some reason, her body was already dropping to the ground, but he couldn't guess why. He grabbed the and tossed her towards the fractured space.

The body exploded just as it reached the fractured space and Alex jumped next to the dead dark-skinned girl's body before putting it up as cover.

That barely did anything as the explosion shattered the girl's body into a million pieces, all of which shot onto his own body like shrapnel.

Then, the explosion reached him and it all turned black.

A small, white object flew out from the corner of the room. "Dammit, I nearly killed myself," the girl's voice came out of the white object.

It was her Nascent soul that she had tossed out before her body had exploded. She had tried to run as far as she could, and even then she had taken a lot of damage.

'At least I survived,' she thought. She looked towards Alex who had nearly turned into a pulp and then towards the side where her body had exploded.

She could see that the cracks had grown larger here and the thing beyond the cracks was more and more visible.

'What is that thing really? It's so eerie,' she thought as she looked at the void. It was somehow dazzling and terrifying at the same time.

"Oh right, I should complete the mission," she thought. The last part of the mission, after killing the suspect was to get rid of the body.

Although, she wasn't sure what body there would be after such a massive—

She turned around back at Alex just in time to see his body wriggling. Bones grew out from the dust and muscle fibers soon filled it up.

The girl's eyes went wide as Alex's body slowly reformed itself.

"No…" the girl said softly. "That's not possible. He has to be a demon of legends. How the hell does he keep coming back to life? He should be dead."

In less than 10 minutes, his body was back to normal, surprising the girl to no end.

However, even when his body was back, he seemed to still be unconscious.

"Wait… he survived, but he's still out," she thought as an idea floated into her head. "If I use this opportunity… I can take his body, his body which cannot die."

Without hesitation, she jumped into his body and soon found her mental self inside Alex's spiritual sea.

Godslayer flew aimlessly atop Alex's spiritual sea, half-worried, and half-bored with what was happening.

"Not again. How do you keep falling unconscious every single time?" he grumbled a bit, but he still stayed there, waiting for him to wake up. He was ready to take over for him if Alex needed some help.

His help wouldn't be worth as much since he had lost a lot of his power compared to what he had been before, but he was sure he could still aid a bit.

Suddenly, he sensed something and turned around.

The crystal ball with the black flame in it saw the woman that had managed to sneak in there.

"Who are you?" Godslayer asked as he looked at her closely. "Are you the little brat he was just fighting?"

"Another soul?" the girl looked at Godslayer with a weird look on her face. "Is that how he's been able to come back to life? You must be the soul that has been teaching the young man weird skills."

"Hahaha, soul you say. That's why I say this world is full of frogs that live in the well. Can't even tell the difference between a soul and a—"

"I won't hear your words, you demon," the girl said. "What have you done with his spiritual sea? What is that mountain? Is that an artifact to bring him back to life?"

"I am no demon, stupid girl," Godslayer said as he slowly moved toward her. "Why did you come here?"

"I—"

"Let me guess," Godslayer interrupted her. "It must be so you can take over his body, isn't it? Well, as someone who tried it before and failed, let me give you this advice, little girl. Give up. You can't take over his body."

The girl looked at Godslayer with a smirk and asked, "Was that meant to threaten me into leaving? Demon, you can't make me leave this easily. I will kill you and then kill that kid. Then, I will forever live on."

"I'm not a demon!" Godslayer shouted in an agitated voice. "Hey boy, are you going to kill her or not?"

Alex was still unconscious, so there was no answer at all.

"He's not going to answer you," the girl said. "He's been using some sort of spiritual attack for a while and has definitely run low on spiritual energy. With him unconscious, this is the perfect time for me to take over his body."

Godslayer sighed. "Fine," he said. "I guess I will do it then."

Suddenly, black fog rolled out of him as he was quickly clad in it. It flowed out towards the girl so quickly that she didn't even realize that she had all been surrounded by the fog.

"What is this?" she shouted and tried using her abilities, but the fog ate it all over, destroying everything in it.

"Nice talking to you, little girl," Godslayer said and then the girl died.

The black fog rolled back into him, disappearing completely, instead of sticking around him like the black goo it used to.

"That was a nice meal," he thought. "My strength grew quite a bit too. I knew eating Nascent souls was far better than some remnant spiritual impression from a beast. I should ask the kid to get me some more of them to repay me for my help here today."

Satisfied, he turned around and went back to aimlessly floating around Alex's spiritual world.

Alex woke up sometime later and slowly got up as he looked around in a daze. He remembered a second later what had happened and was surprised that he had even survived such an explosion.

"Did my last-minute idea of throwing the body into the void work?" he wondered. He looked towards the cracked space and his eyes went wide.

The cracks had grown further and seemed more dangerous now.

They filled up a third of the room from what Alex could see and the gaps in them that led to the void were large enough for a human child to fit through without touching any of the sides.

"Holy… isn't that bad?" he couldn't help but ask.

"That's fine for now," a voice spoke from next to him.

Alex looked towards the Spirit that had just arrived. "Why do you always leave me to die?" he asked. "Can't you just save me?"

"I must adhere to the rules, master White Tiger," he said. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you."

Alex sighed but said nothing he looked around. "Where did the…" he looked for the pink-haired girl's clothes. "Must've been destroyed."

He then searched for the other two girls' clothes, but they were not there too. "Dammit, all that battle, and I can't even get any reward in the end? All their clothes are gone," he shouted.

The spirit looked at him weirdly. "You… wanted their clothes as victory loot, Master White Tiger?" it asked.

"What?" Alex looked at him. "No, not their clothes. I wanted their storage bag, which they keep in their clothes. Dammit, not a single one remained."

"Ah, I see," the spirit said. "Well, what can you do? The girl did explode her physical body."

"Right, she did," Alex said. "She was a Saint Soul realm cultivator. What happened to her soul? Is she still alive?"

"No, she is dead," the spirit said. "I will be taking you back now."

Alex absentmindedly nodded and was teleported back outside the floor he had just left.

"There you go, you're back on the 39th floor," the spirit said.

Alex slowly nodded as he looked at the two rooms that were there. "Wait," he paused when he realized what the spirit had just said.

"39th?" he asked.

"Mhm," the spirit nodded.

"I left the 38th floor," Alex said.

"No, you left the 39th floor," the spirit said.

"No, I left the 38th floor," Alex said. "I did the battle against the puppet on 35, walked through a dream-illusion formation on 36, and completed the elements battle on 37. Now it's the 38th floor, with the painting in that room, and whatever it is on the room."

"Ah!" the spirit said. "I see where the confusion is. You are right on all accounts except the fact that you are on the 38th floor. In fact, you skipped the 38th floor, Master white Tiger."

"I… skipped it? Why?" he asked.

"Because I don't have access to it anymore," the spirit said. "The formation there has been completely destroyed, so anyone who passes the 37th floor gets sent directly to the 39th floor."

Alex looked at the spirit in awe. "Does that mean I was one challenge away from reaching the 40th floor?" he asked.

"Yes," the spirit said cheerfully. "Good luck on the rest of the way, Master White Tiger. I sincerely hope you complete all the challenges soon. Goodbye."

Chapter 1121 The Final Few Floors

Alex entered the other room once again and had to wait 12 days or so before it was filled up. The people naturally gravitated towards the room that had more people, so it was natural it would take this place such a long time to enter.

The voice of the room started speaking once more and they were all told the challenge for this room.

A bunch of light gathered at the center as things floated in the air. Alex recognized them for what they were.

Runes.

"You have 20 runes here," the voice said. "Using only the runes available here, make a talisman design that can absorb a sword attack in it to be used for later."

Alex and the rest of the people in the room were surprised when they heard that. "That's possible?" he couldn't help but wonder.

He knew normal attacks could be stored in talismans, but sword attacks were different, especially if you were to include Intent and Qi into the mix.

Just like every else, he too was given a piece of talisman to draw the design into.

A timer appeared in front of all of them and from what he could see, there were 30 minutes on the clock.

He looked away and started working.

'Take in a sword attack,' Alex thought. 'I will need the Storage rune, combine that with the Capture rune. The attack will have to be preserved, so the Preserve rune should be helpful. I can't let the attack hit the talisman, so I need a distance rune.'

He started working on the talisman, just like everyone else in the room.

Alex had practiced runes after he entered the Saint realm just for a short period of time when he was under the imprisonment of the False Immortal.

That hadn't been that comprehensive of practice, so he didn't have as much knowledge on it as he would've hoped to have gathered by now.

Still, seeing as how many of the people here didn't even have a single clue how runes worked, he had high hopes of passing.

These people had only ever bought talismans, and never really delved into how the talismans did the things they bought them to do. As long as it worked, they were fine with it.

Alex came across a few complications as this particular sort of design was not something he had worked with as much, so it took some outside thinking to solve them.

In the end, about 20 minutes later, he was finally done. He submitted the result and the voice spoke.

"You have passed."

The people around him looked at him with weird looks on their faces, almost unbelieving that someone had done it.

Alex himself had a bright smile on his face as he happily went up the floor and entered the 40th floor.

The floor looked empty, aside from 2 people that seemed to be in deep cultivation. There seemed to be a single room in the center of the room, while everyone else was made to stay outside.

Alex could see the cracked space far behind the room and shook his head. He didn't know how long it was going to take to continue moving, so he found himself a place to stay and cultivate.

He didn't eat a pill or anything, but the cultivation still felt so very fast. Perhaps because he barely had any Qi left, it felt like getting to drink chilled water after a hot day of work.

He relished the experience that lasted for a few minutes before he was back to cultivating normally.

He wondered what the task of this floor was. As another 5th floor, the 40th floor was bound to be special. As the last 5th floor with a challenge in it, he wondered if it was something very difficult.

He didn't doubt there was something he would be bad at when compared to what a normal cultivator was supposed to be capable of, but he still couldn't help but be slightly nervous.

If he failed here, coming up would take a long time, and in that time, someone might already have completed all the floors.

The door opened a few hours later and one of the people went through it. He continued cultivating and in that time 2 more people arrived on the floor, who found a place to stay.

Alex suspected everyone he saw now to be part of the assassins, but it didn't look like they were.

After waiting for some more time, the door opened.

He stood up and went up to the door. As soon as he passed through it, the door was closed behind him and the dark room glowed just enough to show the outline of a massive humanoid status.

The statue moved a bit, surprising Alex. He got on guard, ready to block if it were to attack him.

"WHO DARES WAKE ME FROM MY DEEP SLUMBER? WHO DARES STEP FOOT IN MY DOMAIN?" the statue thundered with a deep voice that sent the words reverberating through the room.

Alex gulped a little, wondering if the 40th floor was going to be the deadliest floor yet. He reached into the storage ring, ready to take out Midnight, although he wasn't sure how helpful that would be.

"SUCH AN ACT OF DISRESPECT SHALL NOT GO UNPUNISHED!" the voice continued. "ANSWER ME, CRETIN, OR I SHALL HAVE YOUR TONGUE PULLED OUT AND-oh, Master White Tiger, it's you."

The deep voice suddenly changed to a soft, sweet voice that belonged to the spirit.

Alex let go of the breath he was holding. "Spirit? Is that you?" he asked.

The lights returned in the room. "Yes, it's me, Master White Tiger. I'm happy to see you have finally arrived here," he said.

"That voice just now..."

"That's something I do to make the challengers feel danger and judge their actions," the spirit said. "Forgive my actions if they seemed disrespectful just now."

The attitude from the spirit was a complete turnaround from the monster he was expecting to fight a moment ago.

Alex relaxed a little. "Geez, I thought I was going to have to fight you," he said.

"Oh, you won't have to fight me on this floor," the spirit said.

"Then what am I supposed to do in here?" Alex asked as he looked around the room. "It's so small compared to the other rooms. Was I supposed to not be threatened by you?"

"That's where it would start," the spirit said. "Once you passed, I would check your potential and decide whether to pass you or fail you from there."

"Sorry, check my potential?" Alex asked. "You base the result on that?"

"Yes," the spirit said.

"And you expect people to be able to change their potential when they come back here?" he asked.

"Of course not," the spirit said. "If you fail in any of the following 5 floors, you fail the overall challenge, master White Tiger."

"What?" Alex shouted in surprise. He wasn't told that at all, most likely because they didn't expect him to ever get this high.

"Does everyone know this?" he asked.

"They would after I told them now," the spirit said. "But there have been people who have known this before coming here."

"I see," Alex said. At least he got to know it now. Nothing could've changed in the result anyway.

"So, how do you test my potential?" Alex asked. "Is there a formation or an artifact?"

"I don't need to," the spirit said. "I have information on everything you are capable of, so I know how much potential you hold Master White Tiger. You have already passed."

"Oh..." Alex wasn't expecting that at all. "So... I move up now?"

"Not yet," the spirit said. "We will have to wait until the ones above us are done."

"You can't have more than one on a single floor above?" he asked.

"I had to make the 41st floor one due to reasons, but every floor above that is a solo challenge floor that takes up the entire floor. So, while there are ones above you, you can't continue," the spirit said. "That is until someone fails in any of the rounds, but at this stage, it's quite hard to find someone like that."

"I see," Alex said softly. "So, how long do I have to wait here?"

"Usually that depends on the 42nd floor," the spirit said. "Since that is the floor that can take days to pass."

"Oh, what's in there?" Alex asked.

The spirit only smiled instead of answering. "That's for you to find out," it said. "Oh, and speaking of which, looks like someone failed on the 41st floor. Up you go then."

Alex felt the teleportation power envelop him and found himself on the next floor. He found himself in a dark room, not even on a wide floor.

"Use a Dao, or you will fail."

"A Dao?" Alex was surprised. He looked around and was glad that there were no spatial cracks in this room. If there was, he would have definitely failed.

He wasted no time and used a fire Dao. The Qi from the atmosphere moved towards him to prove that he was in fact using a Dao.

"You have passed."

He passed, but he still had to wait for whoever was on the floors above him to pass as well.

'This is my one and only chance,' he thought.

He waited for a while and was eventually sent to the 42nd floor. He looked around at the floor with some more spatial cracks in the distance.

And then the voice spoke.

"Sit down and start cultivating."

Chapter 1122 One Last Battle

Alex did as the voice said. He sat down on the cold stone floor, taking a glance at the shattered space for a brief moment before closing his eyes to start cultivating.

He wondered if he was being judged on the usage of his cultivation method, but that didn't sound very fair at all.

Or maybe the floor was trying to judge just how long he could go on cultivating without taking a break. That would be fair.

The spirit had said that this floor took the longest for each person, so Alex was almost certain that was what was happening here.

'I can continue for months,' he thought. 'I wonder if I will pass as long as I cultivate for a f—'

"What a worthless cultivation base!" a voice that sounded like his own spoke in his ears.

Alex nearly stopped cultivating, wondering if there was someone here, but he caught himself in time and stopped.

He softly released his spiritual sense, but no one else was on the floor.

"What a pitiful spiritual sense!" the voice spoke again.

Alex could swear it came from inside of himself like his mind was playing tricks on him. 'I must be hallucinating then.'

"Your parents must despite having you as their son," the voice said.

"Can you keep quiet, please? I'm trying to cultivate," Alex spoke. He didn't know what else to do. His body didn't seem to be cleansing whatever hallucination this was, so he had to deal with it himself.

"No girl will ever love you. They could never love a pitiful man like you," the voice said.

'Is that meant to rile me up?' he wondered. The voice spoke to him, but Alex ignored it as much as he could. He tried to talk to it sometimes just to alleviate his own boredom, but the voice seemed only to be interested in insulting him.

So, Alex let it speak.

He could tell his mind was muddled slightly, but he could think clearly enough that he could tell the time that was passing. He was also sure that he now knew what the purpose of this challenge was.

"You will never have any of your hopes and dreams come true," the voice said.

"And you…" Alex replied. "Are a pitiful excuse for an Inner Demon. So, can you keep quiet, please? I'm trying to cultivate here."

The voice didn't stop, but Alex wasn't bothered in the slightest. Sometime later, the voice said something else.

"You pass."

Then, Alex was teleported to the next floor.

"That was simple," he thought. He wondered if it was because he had been through so many of these already that a fake Inner Demon didn't even do him anything.

He arrived on the 43rd floor with cracks everywhere near the wall, and some of them even held small holes that showed the void that lay beyond.

"Prepare yourself for your tribulation!" the voice spoke.

"Tribulation?" Alex asked as he looked towards the ceiling. He was most definitely sure what was coming next.

He wondered how strong the lightning strikes were going to be, but since he had no idea, he prepared for the worst.

The first lightning strike came a moment later and struck him in the chest. Surprisingly, it did nothing at all.

'That's so weak,' he thought. The lighting wasn't even as strong as his cultivation base, which was far weaker than what he was capable of.

The 2nd lightning bolt dropped and struck him. It was a little stronger, but not as much. For a normal person though, this would've been the point where they would start getting serious about their defense.

The 3rd strike was stronger than his cultivation base by a small amount and the 4th one nearly reached the next cultivation realm.

The 5th one was definitely stronger than his cultivation base, but that didn't really mean anything to Alex.

'My real tribulation somehow knew what my Qi was capable of and always reached that amount in just 9 lightning strikes. This thing probably can't do that, can it?' he thought.

The next few lightning strikes weren't anything serious either so he easily passed the rest of the tribulation.

When it ended, he was made to go up the floor again. He arrived on the 44th floor, the floor where he had killed those three girls just days ago.

There was not a single hint of damage anywhere at all, except for the gaping holes of the shattering space in the distance.

Alex looked around, wondering what his next challenge was. If he was not wrong, this was his final challenge.

'It's all been so easy since I reached the 40th floor,' he thought. 'Dao, Inner Demon, the tribulation. I'm sure many have passed that already as well. So why haven't they passed this final trial?'

Just as he asked that himself, something appeared in front of him.

A puppet.

Alex waited for the voice to say anything at all, but he was surprised when the puppet started speaking instead.

"I'm glad you've finally made it to your last hurdle, Master White Tiger." The spirit's voice came from the puppet. "But, that does not mean you've succeeded just yet."

"Spirit?" Alex asked. "What's the challenge?"

"It's simple," the spirit said. "You have to fight me."

"I see," Alex said. He had expected something like that after seeing the puppet. "And many people fail here?"

"Almost everyone fails here," the spirit said.

Alex frowned slightly. "Alright, let's see what I have to deal with then," he said.

"Please beware, master White Tiger," the spirit said. "I will not be holding back at all."

Alex nodded and readied himself. He got on guard, ready to fight. Then, the spirit made the first move.

The move itself was very simple. It was a simple Qi projectile thrown from its fist. It had no elaborate form or effect, but even then Alex couldn't help but frown.

Because the power behind the attack was at Saint Soul 4th realm, which was beyond what he could reach with the strongest skills he could use right now.

Alex did not hesitate to dodge at all and the attack hit the wall behind him. "Are you trying to kill me or what?" he asked. "You're using quite a strong skill there."New n0vel chapters are published on

"I've seen how you fight, master White Tiger. I have seen how everyone who enters the tower fights. I see how strong they are, what they are capable of," the spirit said.

"You can make your way up the other floors by relying on your overwhelming ability, but you can't rely on that in here. My power has been attuned exactly to the level that you have never reached, and unless you can overcome that, you will not be going past this floor."

Alex frowned when he heard that. "So, I can only go past you once I've beaten you?" he asked.

"You cannot beat me," the spirit said.

"Then how do you expect me to pass?" he asked.

"By fighting me," the spirit said.

"How long do I have to fight you then?" Alex asked.

"Until you give up," the spirit said. "That's enough talk, master White Tiger. Let's begin our battle."

Chapter 1123 Giving It His All

Alex knew he was in trouble. Given the fact that even his blood aura could not possibly rival the current monster of a puppet in front of him, he had no way of surviving this battle at all.

The puppet started the attack with a simple dash, but that simple dash alone was so fast that without his Demon Eyes, Alex would not have noticed it. He jumped to the side and sent out a yellow palm strike toward the puppet.

The puppet simply flew through the palm attack and came to attack Alex.

Alex continued running, trying not to use his blood aura for as long as possible. The moment he created armor and was attacked, a massive amount of his blood aura would disappear. He would have to use a massive amount of aura to keep it working at its best to stop all of the puppet's attacks.

Also, he had a feeling that the puppet wouldn't use attacks that could not be dodged. After all, he definitely wasn't going to be killing him.

The puppet continued attacking his non-vital areas with strong attacks that could be dodged, so that added to Alex's theory about it, but that still didn't help him much at all.

The puppet was giving him time to dodge, so Alex did. But that meant he was only ever dodging.

His attacks were weak against the puppet and his movement speed wasn't fast enough to keep the puppet on edge.

Every second of the fight, the puppet was right behind him, and Alex didn't get a single second of freedom.

He didn't even have the time to think as he continuously ran around.

He tried fighting back a few times during the next 5 minutes when he used blood projectiles to attack the puppet.

The puppet was slowed down by the attack, but not enough to make an impact overall. If he wanted to do something, he would need something stronger than just that projectile.

'What can I really do here?' he wondered. 'He is strong in each aspect of a cultivation battle. He's faster, stronger, more durable, and even seems to be a better fighter than me.'

'What does he want me to do? Does he want me to overcome my own strength? Become the strongest I've ever been? I can't do that. I just broke through a few months ago, and without anyone's blood, my blood aura won't be that good either,' he thought. 'There have to be some other winning criteria here.'

He continued dodging for a few more minutes, but the longer the time passed, the more agitated Alex became. There was no hint as to how long the fight was supposed to take place before he was disqualified.

As far as he was aware, it would stop after he ran out of Qi and could no longer fight, which at the rate he was going would be in just another 10 minutes.

He wasn't even sure that was the real amount of time, and for all knew, it could be just 10 minutes, which would end in just a couple of more minutes.

Either way, he didn't have much time.

'I must be missing something,' he thought.

Just then, he remembered something. 'Could it be?'

An idea was forming in his head, but he couldn't act on it yet. It had to be done after he had no other choice.

And for now, he still had choices.

"Let's get rid of them."

Alex stopped running as Blood Armor formed around his body. At the same time, two blood swords appeared in his hands and he started fighting with them.

There was no more running for him at all. He was going to fight, or lose trying.

The puppet looked a little surprised but didn't act strange. It got into close combat with Alex as Alex used all the strength he could in these strikes.

Alex struck as hard as he could, but the puppet wasn't hurt at all. He dodged the puppet's next attack and struck from the side.

He backed off a bit before throwing the sword at the puppet and pulled it back before going in for more attacks.

He continued fighting that way, but even that didn't work.

'What else do I have?' he thought.

Blood poured out of every surface of his body as it pooled in front of him. Then, swords started growing out of it one by one.

By the end, he had 21 swords in front of him, and they all flew above him in an array.

Alex quickly added his sword aura into it, and then he used the 21 Sword Array technique to attack.

The swords started spinning around and attacked the puppet as hard as they could.

The puppet took the attacks easily with not a single scratch on it, but the spirit couldn't help but say, "that was the strongest attack you've used yet master White Tiger. Not bad. But that's still nowhere near good enough for you to win against me."

Alex frowned. He was now more or less completely out of blood aura. If even his strongest attack didn't work, then maybe he didn't have a way to win.

'I still have one more choice,' he thought. He quickly pulled out Midnight and held it ready to attack. Then, he called for help. "Godslayer, can you help me?"

"I was waiting for you to say that."

Godslayer flew out of Alex as a clump of black veins in him, moved from the side of his head, down his shoulders into his arm, and finally into Midnight.

"Move aside kid, I'm here to save the day," Godslayer said as he firmly became part of Midnight temporarily.

"Play along, Midnight," Alex said softly and started forcing all of his remaining Qi into the sword. The sword glowed with black light and soon black smoke drifted down from it.

"Alright, do it," Godslayer said. "This is my best."

Alex nodded and attacked.

God Rending Death Blade.

The black slash that easily warped space around it flew directly to the puppet controlled by the spirit and landed on it.

The puppet was pushed back nearly 2 steps before it stopped and looked back at Alex. "That was... strong," the spirit said. "Very strong. How...?"

Godslayer went back into Alex's spiritual sea and Alex took a deep breath, his arm hurting a little from the attack he released just now.

"Even that wasn't enough, huh?" he asked.

"No," the spirit said. "But this is far stronger than anything you've shown me until now. I must say, I'm impressed."

"Does that mean I pass?" Alex asked.

"Unfortunately, not," the spirit said. "Do you have any more tricks you can use? I would love to see what you do next."

"If I could use Dao, then maybe," Alex said. "But without it, there's really just one more thing I can do."

"What is it?" the spirit asked.

"Give up," Alex said as he relaxed. "I give up."

"Are you sure, master White Tiger? You've come way too far to simply give up. Are you sure you don't want to try something more?" the spirit asked.

"I have nothing else," Alex said. "I gave everything I had, and nothing worked, so all I can do is give up."

"I see," the spirit said as it appeared out of the puppet with a bright smile on its face. "Congratulations, Master White Tiger. You have passed."

Alex smiled when he heard that, a smile of relief.

The spirit looked at the smile with a slightly surprised look. "Did you realize?" it asked.

"I guessed, halfway through," Alex said. "But I wasn't entirely sure, so I decided to do whatever I could else before giving up."

"You did well to try everything beforehand," the spirit said. "I would've failed you had you simply given up without trying everything."

"Most fail that way?" Alex asked.

"Both people that have come here before you have given up very early into the battle, which is why I disqualified them," the spirit said. "Most of them are that way, but there are also people who fight and fight and fight, never knowing when to give up. I disqualify them too."

"It is only when someone like you comes, who tries their best, but knows when to give up that I finally pass them," the spirit said.

"I see," Alex said, surprised. "So, I'm the 3rd person that has come up here?"

"Yes," the spirit said. "People usually lose in the 41st and 42nd floor, where they either don't have a dao or can't cultivate while being troubled by an Inner Demon."

Alex nodded. "So, am I done with the challenges? I've won, right?" he asked.

"Yes," the spirit said. "But you have one final thing to do."

Teleportation power surrounded him and he suddenly found himself in another room.

"Welcome to the 45th floor, master White Tiger," the spirit spoke. "This is the final floor."

Alex looked at the spirit in front of him, but his eyes fell on the thing behind him.

The 45th floor was small, much smaller than any of the floors before him, and one of the sides of the floor had been completely destroyed.

However, Alex saw no spatial cracks in here, like all the floors before. Instead, there was just a gaping hole on the destroyed side of the room, and beyond it was nothing but the swirling energy of silver and purple.

The massive hole led to the void.

The spirit pointed towards a podium that was at the very edge of the floor, on the gap.

"There lies the formation that you can activate to complete your climb," the system said. "Press that, and everyone will be sent back outside."

Chapter 1124 Pocket

"So I just activate the formation and I'm done here?" Alex asked to confirm.

"Yes," the spirit said.

"Will I be sent out along with everyone else too?" he asked.

"Yes," the spirit said.

"Then… what about the treasure? I thought I would get to become the new owner," Alex said.

"You do have my approval for it… but I'm not sure you can do it right now, master White Tiger," the spirit said. "The tower is an Immortal Treasure, so refining it will take a rather long time."

"Can I at least try?" Alex asked.

"Sure," the spirit said. "How about I keep you here after you succeed? That way I can check and see if you can refine the treasure right now. Although the right period would be after you break through to the Immortal realms."

"I see," Alex said. "Is that why you haven't had an owner yet?"

"Well, that and the rule that my new owner can't have demon blood in them," the spirit said. "Although there have been a surprising number of Humans in the last 2 or 3 times I opened the playground. It was quite surprising how the numbers increased."

"Alright, I will go activate it," Alex said. "Even though it looks like I will die just going near it."

"The Void does look scary," the spirit said. "Especially the fact there is no opening to the void, it's just there like we're in it."

"Stop scaring me even more," Alex said and started walking towards the small podium next to the void.

As he did, he noticed small cracks along the floor that lead to the podium. He stopped for a moment to make sure they were not spatial cracks and lightly stepped through them to go near the podium.

He arrived next to the podium and was immediately entranced by the void beyond where he was. His eye couldn't tell how far the swirling lights he was seeing were at all.

One second they looked as if they were a hundred kilometers away, and in the next second they looked like they were 10 meters away.

The whole experience was very surreal to Alex, far more so than staring at them through a small crack in space. Now, he felt like he was inside the void.

"Master White Tiger, look ou—"

Alex heard the Spirit's shout and was brought back from his trance just in time to notice the floor slip right from under him.

He flew backward immediately, arriving inside the room, but the floor he had been standing on had crumbled and fallen through the void. Along with that, the podium where the small formation lay.

"Damn," Alex thought. "That was close. Thanks for warning me, spirit. I was too lost in my own thou— spirit?"

Alex looked around the room but he saw no sign of the spirit at all. "Spirit? Where did you go?" he called for him, but there was no answer.

He heard a bit more crumbling and saw the floor at the edges was falling into the void. Alex couldn't help but be worried now.

"Spirit, are you really not there?" he asked. "This better not be a sick joke of yours."

However, after not getting any answers this time around, Alex was certain of one thing. He had lost connections to the Spirit.

Meaning, this entire room had lost connection to the spirit and all the other functionalities of the room had most likely gone as well.

"Wait, how do I get out of here then?" Alex asked. He looked around, but he could think of nothing at all.

"Are you stuck?" Godslayer asked after realizing there were some problems.

"I think so," Alex said as he walked around a little. "The spirit can't hear me, and the formation that is supposed to send us all out is broken."

"So you are stuck here forever?" Godslayer asked.

"Hopefully not," Alex said. "But I don't know how I can get out of here if the spirit can't help me."

"What about the others? Can they do something?" Godslayer asked.

"I don't know," Alex said as he thought a little. "Such a small formation on the podium was definitely not the formation that was meant to teleport us all out. It was most likely the trigger."

"As for the actual formation, it can't be on this floor either. It is likely on each floor since they all have teleportation formations from what I've experienced. If not, then it's at the base of the tower, and will be used on everyone in the tower."

"So you're safe?" Godslayer asked.

"No, that doesn't help us at all. There is a very high chance that the floor can't see us currently. We are now what floor 38 is. We're completely cut off from the tower. So, even if everyone gets to leave, we will still have to stay back."

Godslayer looked around through Alex's eyes, trying to make sense of the situation himself. "Then I guess we are stuck."

"You sound like you came to terms with the situation rather quickly," Alex said.

"It might surprise you, but this is not the first time I was stuck somewhere I didn't want to be for a very long period of time," Godslayer said.

Alex nearly chuckled. "But this time you're in a mortal body. You sure you want to relax so much?"

Godslayer grunted. He didn't like being reminded that Alex's life was tied to his own now.

"What about this floor? Can you cut through it?" Godslayer asked.

"It's tough, but I can try," Alex said. He tried to bring out Midnight, but then realized how hard it was. He tried to force out the space aura in him, but he could barely bring out any at all.

"Damn, why is it suddenly so hard? It wasn't that hard on the previous floors," he said.

"That's because you were still outside the Void until then," Godslayer said. "But now, you are fully inside it. Look, that's why there are no spatial fractures here at all."

Alex looked around in shock. "I'm in the Void?" he asked. "Isn't that the opening to the void?"

"No, an opening to a void is always a crack in space," Godslayer said. "Basically, you're in a pocket of Void, I think that's what they call it."

"Pocket?" Alex asked.

"Void is mostly an ever-moving blob of space and time from what I know," Godslayer said. "But at some places, there form pockets where the energy does not touch. These pockets are all around the void, constantly moving around. If you don't move along with it, you get swallowed by the energies."

Alex gulped. "What happens if you are swallowed by the energy?" he asked.

"I don't know," Godslayer said. "You will have to ask someone with more knowledge about the void."

"Okay," Alex said. "So wait, you said we are in a pocket right now, right? So is this pocket moving too?"

"No," Godslayer said. "These pockets also form in other places, primarily being the portals to our dimension."

Alex thought and bit and remembered his own experiments with the Void. The void was fine for a small distance, but then it ripped everything away.

"I see, we are in the void," Alex said softly. "I should have known when my spiritual sense stopped working long ago."

Alex was about to make a blood sword when he paused. "Wait, didn't you say we're in a pocket in the void?" he asked.

"Yes," Godslayer answered. "What about it?"

"Then how will breaking through this floor help us at all?" he asked.

"I can't say for certain, but since you were not in the void on the other floor, there are likely spatial cracks running in this very floor, separating this floor from the other one," Godslayer said.

"I see," Alex said. He brought out a blood sword and started attacking the floor. However, he soon realized that the floor was way too tough for him. Whatever the material was, it was likely Immortal rank, and so a Saint like him couldn't destroy it at all.

"What now?" Alex asked.

Godslayer thought for a moment. "I have an idea," he said. "Force out as much Spatial aura as you can and try to pull open the spatial cracks inside the floor."

"But I can't push out spatial aura at all," Alex said.

"But you could bring it out before, right?" Godslayer asked.

"A little," he said. "Like barely thick enough to make me look like I'm wearing an oversized glove."

"Still try," Godslayer said.

Alex nodded and tried to push out his space aura, but it simply couldn't penetrate far into the floor. He tried multiple times but failed all the same.

"Dammit!" he thought. "It's not working. Why the hell is it so hard to push out my space aura here?"

"You're trying to fight the space energy that has been in the void since primordial times. Of course, it's going to fight back and make it hard on you," Godslayer said. "Dammit, you were so close. If only you could directly grab onto the cracks, then maybe you would have had a chance."

Alex nodded and paused. "Wait, I might have a way," he said as he slowly made his way to the edge.

"What? Are you trying to kill yourself?" Godslayer asked.

"Wait for a second," Alex said while slowly making his way to the very edge that had crumbled away just moments ago. He made sure to be very careful as he slowly lay on the floor and moved his head out of the edge and down below.

"Look!" Alex said excitedly as he gestured at what was below him.

Surrounded by an energy of purple and silver, there were a few random cracks in the Void that lead back to the tower.

To the 44th floor.

Chapter 1125 Through The Crack

Godslayer saw the small cracks in space as well and realized that there were segments of the void that led to the inner tower.

"That exists huh?" he asked.

"Yeah," Alex said. "It used to be small before, but it expanded after that Saint Soul realm girl exploded her body. I threw it into the cracks after all. Maybe that's why this place crumbled, because of me."

Alex couldn't help but think that he had brought it all on himself. "Anyway, what do you think? That works right?"

"That's not a bad idea," Godslayer said. "If you can get there."

"I don't know how, that's for sure," Alex said. "Can I fly in the void?"

"Haven't you already?" Godslayer asked.

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. He had flown away when the floor had first crumbled. "So can I fly up to the cracks?" he asked.

"That... should be possible," Godslayer said, but he didn't sound very knowledgeable on the matter.

"If only I could teleport directly," Alex said, lamenting a little. "Do you know why I can't use any dao in void? Or even just around it."

"No one knows for certain, but I do know what most people believe to be true," Godslayer said cryptically.

"Which is?" Alex asked.

"Qi doesn't belong to this dimension," Godslayer said. "It did not originate from here, so the heavens had no ruling here. Since the heavens can't rule here, the Dao has no effect here too."

Alex heard it and mulled over it for a bit. "I see," he said. "You sure do know a lot."

"I come from the higher realms boy," Godslayer said. "My knowledge might not amount to much there, but it's still quite a lot for a mere mortal from a lower realm."

"I understand," Alex said and looked down at the cracks again. He used some Qi to make sure he could use Qi still. That didn't seem to have any blockade at all, although he would have to be careful about using up his Qi a lot.

"So, should we start?" Alex said.

"Let's make sure you know what you're doing," Godslayer said. Together, they talked to make sure they knew what they were going to deal with at every step of the way.

The distance between him and the cracks was somewhere between 20 and 30 meters. So, there was a high chance that each of the two places had its own separate pockets.

They were always the same distance from each other, but unless there was another pocket connecting the two pockets, he could forever be lost in the void.

"Are we sure it's not one giant pocket?" Alex asked.

"No," Godslayer said. "We have to work under the assumption that the pockets are separate. Otherwise, you would be open to a nasty surprise."

"That's true," Alex said. "How do we check that though."

"Hmm... throw something at the crack. If it goes smoothly, you are free to go," Godslayer said.

Alex nodded and looked around for something to throw. There was nothing at all for him to throw. The only thing with him was the storage ring.

"Urgh!" he sighed a quickly created a blood blade. He was already out of blood aura, so having to make so many of these things was problematic for him.

He leaned down carefully again and threw the blood blade as hard as he could. The blade flew smoothly through the 20 meters or so distance and entered through the largest crack in the middle.

"Nice!" Alex thought. "It's all one pocket."

"Good," Godslayer said. "Now go."

Alex jumped from the crumbling floor and flew straight toward the crack. He made sure to look around to make sure nothing else was coming to obstruct him, and before getting too close he threw another dagger.

Right behind the dagger, he followed up on the crack.

"Alright, cover yourself up in as much space aura as you can and widen the gap," Godslayer said.

Alex nodded and quickly pulled out as much space aura as he could from inside of himself and coated his arm. He appeared next to the crack and grabbed it on each side. He could see people fighting inside, but the cracks in space on the inside made it a bit too hard to see.

He ignored the sight and started pulling the cracks wide open. He pulled it wider and wider and wider until he could enter the place.

However, it wasn't done yet. He could enter inside, but the cracks in were still there, which were troublesome for him.

He carefully stepped into the 44th floor, and as soon as he did, the space aura he had been producing suddenly burst out of him to cover his entire body now that he was out of the void. Still, there was enough pressure on him that he couldn't freely use it outside.

But, he didn't need to.

Alex slowly walked forward, careful at every step. He couldn't use any dao to close the space cracks, but he could use his aura to move them aside.

He made use of the aura in him and parted the cracks away so he could walk through it. He needed to be very careful, as he wouldn't even realize when he lost his body parts.

Fortunately, the opening to the void was towards the front of the cracks, so he didn't have much to deal with.

When he finally managed to navigate outside of all the cracks, he looked at the puppet and the woman whose eyes had gone wide in disbelief.

"Who... who are you?" the woman asked, fearfully.

"Master White Tiger, You're back!" the spirit shouted.

Alex ignored the woman and looked at the puppet. "Spirit, why is there another fight?" he asked. "Why did you not send them all back?"

"I'm sorry, master White Tiger. I didn't know what to do," the spirit said. "The platform collapsed and my formations were gone. I had to think, so I decided to think about how to save you while fighting this young lady who had made it up here."

"Well, stop the fight then," Alex said. "I've already won. It's time to send everyone out."

"Absolutely," the spirit said. "But I don't have that authority."

Alex paused. "What?" he asked.

The spirit nodded. "I don't have the authority to send them out," it said.

"But you're the spirit of the tower," Alex said.

"Yes, I can send them out of the tower, but I don't suppose that's where you want me to send everyone, do you?" the spirit asked.

Alex frowned a little when he realized the spirit was correct. The tower and the secret realm were two different things, and the spirit was in charge of only one of it.

"That podium," Alex said. "It lead to some sort of formation, didn't it?"

"It did," the spirit said. "It activated a formation at the base of the tower from what I remember."

"Remember?" Alex asked. "You don't know for sure?"

The spirit shook its head. "I can't go there," it said.

"Why?" Alex asked curiously.

"I don't know," the spirit said. "I simply can't go there."

Alex frowned a little. "Whatever, let's go there anyway," he said. "We need to send everyone out of here."

The spirit nodded. "Let us go to the first floor then," it said and suddenly the three in the room disappeared, appearing in the midst of everyone on the first floor.

No one really batted an eye when they appeared at all. The Spirit had concealed itself from everyone's eyes so they couldn't even see it.

"This is not the base floor, is it?" Alex asked.

"No, it's one floor below us," the spirit said.

"Can you turn off the spiritual sense blocking formation so I can see what's below?" Alex asked.

The spirit shook his head. "The first floor's formation is on the base floor as well. You would have to go there to turn that off," it said.

Alex frowned. "Fine, I'll do it myself," he said and brought out Whisker. "Whisker, see if you can swim into this rock."

Whisker nodded and jumped onto the floor and used his earth movement technique. Using the technique, Whisker could go into any earthen surface and move there for a small period of time.

Alex followed Whisker with his senses and gave him directions of where to go, which was basically down below.

Whisker swam through what felt like 30 meters of rock before plopping down from the ceiling of another floor below them.

"Look around," Alex told Whisker, and Whisker started looking around with his eyes. His senses still didn't work, so Alex was left with just the visual data to go by.

However, that alone was enough.

He saw multiple different formation flags at the bottom of the floor that was working concurrently.

"I see it," he said. "You sure you won't be coming?"

"I just can't, Master White Tiger," the spirit said. "Something there keeps me at bay. Maybe there's some sort of formation running that's not letting me come."

"You've been very helpful to me these days, Spirit," Alex said with a very sarcastic voice.

"Oh, that's an honor to hear, master White Tiger," the spirit said enthusiastically.

Alex shook his head and sighed. "Nevermind," he said. "I'm going in."

"Good luck," the Spirit said.

Alex nodded and felt where Whisker was. He approximated the distance between them and then the dao of teleportation filled him in.

In the next moment, he vanished, arriving right next to Whisker.

"Good job," he said to the little mouse, who squeaked in happiness. Whisker went back into his beast space and Alex finally looked around.

"So, what do we have here?"

Chapter 1126 The Many Formations

Alex looked around in the small room that was somehow being lit up even though there was no source of light. It was as if the walls themselves were emitting lights in small amounts, all of which together became enough to light up the room.

The room consisted of various formation flags laid all around it with a small elevated surface at the center. Alex looked at the number of formation flags and couldn't help but sigh. "I guess you need this many to run something like this tower," he thought.

He walked up slowly so as to not disturb something and arrived next to a formation flag. He looked at it for a moment and was slightly confused.

"Hmm?" he thought and walked over to another one, which also gave him the same result.

"Most of these formation flags are actually just Saint-ranked formations," he said. He had been expecting Immortal ranked formation, but to see that it was actually all Saint ranked, was surprising.

"Or maybe it shouldn't be," Alex thought. He looked around a bit and realized that he had still been making some mistakes in his assumptions about the tower.

The tower wasn't a massive building run by a formation. It was an artifact, and the most common way to add functionalities to an artifact was by using Qi lines.

"There are Qi lines in the walls, not formations," Alex thought. He looked back at the formation flags, "So that means they serve a different purpose from what it was intended for the tower."

He went back to one of the formations and looked at what it did. He noted down the formation patterns and found the other formation flags of the same formation. Once he was done noting down all the patterns, he drew a formation on a piece of paper and tried to figure out what it did.

There were between 4 and 6 base formations in each one of these Saint-ranked formations, so Alex had to find which of the base formations they were. Sometimes this task was easy, but most of the other times it felt impossible because the base formations would overlap each other, making it hard to discern whether there were strokes hidden in other strokes or not.

The first thing Alex did was search for the base formations that connected this formation to the main formation that was most likely outside of this building, possibly in the ground beneath where the Spirit vein was.

Once he was done, he then had to go through other base formation designs that could fit into the entire formation.

At least one good thing about base formations was that there was that one base formation could never be the subset of another base formation.

So Alex didn't have to worry about whether a formation could be this one or that one. He could easily figure it out all.

He worked on it for a few minutes and stopped. "Hmm, so this is the formation that is supplying the tower with constant Qi, huh?" he thought.

Since the tower was an artifact, it was technically supposed to be powered by an Immortal who owned it. However, since there was no one here to control it, the last owner had most likely set up a few formations to help the tower gain Qi from the spirit vein in the secret realm.

Next, Alex looked at another formation.

He took his time and came up with an answer for this one as well. This was a repairing formation that would help the tower repair any problem it came across, such as broken puppets or rooms. It didn't help much but was still better than nothing.

Especially for something that was supposed to be run with Immortal Qi.

He looked at the third formation and after a bit of research realized that it was a formation that blocked people's spiritual senses.

"Oh, this is the one," the thought. "Should I... stop this?"

There were so many people that were staying around on the first floor that would immediately know what was happening down there if he did that.

"No, let's send them all back first," he thought.

He walked over to the next set of formation flags, but along the way, he passed through the elevated floor. He looked at it in passing and stopped in his step when he saw something there.

Embedded onto the floor itself was a small hexagonal wooden plate with something carved onto the top. Alex tried to read what that said, but it didn't look like it was something that was meant to be read.

Given that it was in neither the human nor the demon language, Alex was sure this was just a design choice.

He tried to pick up the wooden plate, and it came off easily. There was a small hole at the top to put a small string through, and that made Alex wonder if this was some sort of necklace.

He tried pouring his Qi into it, but it didn't look like it was an artifact at all.

"Huh?" he thought. He placed it back where it was and continued.

The fourth formation seemed to be the one that was responsible for sending everyone out of this secret realm.

"Alright, let's do that."

He started pouring Qi into the formation and soon enough he felt the power of teleportation take over him. He was sure everyone else was feeling the same as well.

Alex poured out some of his own space aura and fought against the feeling. He continued pouring in the Qi for a while and finally stopped after a while.

The teleportation power disappeared and Alex didn't have to struggle anymore.

"Whisker," he called out.

Whisker came out of his space once again and looked at Alex for instruction. "Can you go up there and check if anyone is still is still in the tower?"

Whisker nodded and flew to the ceiling before diving into the stone. He made his way to the top and arrived on the first floor.

Alex looked through Whisker's eyes and saw that no one was there anymore.

He quickly walked over to the formation that was getting rid of his spiritual sense and knocked it down. As soon as that was down, the suppression of his spiritual sense lifted, and he could see everything with his senses once again.

He teleported out of the room back onto the first floor where he met up with the Spirit again.

"Master White Tiger, you did it!" the spirit said excitedly.

"Yeah, I did," Alex said. "Is everyone gone?"

"I'm not sure," the spirit said. "A few people had entered the rooms that I couldn't see in and haven't come back at all."

"Take Whisker here and make them return then," Alex said. "I need to go search for something."

"Okay," the spirit accepted the task and left with Whisker.

Alex returned back to the base floor where he spread his spiritual sense and started looking around for something.

The last formation in the room turned out to be something that was meant to make the tower inaccessible for a long period of time after it was opened once. It was attached to the formation that sent everyone out, so since Alex had activated that, the other formation had activated as well and no one could enter anymore.

Whisker and the spirit returned with the unfortunate news that the people that had entered had already died. Alex shrugged. He didn't know who they were, so he didn't feel bad at all.

"Are you done, master White Tiger?" the spirit asked.

"Not yet," Alex said with a slight frown on his face. "The formation I'm looking for isn't here. It must be somewhere outside the tower."

"What formation are you looking for, master Whiter Tiger?" the spirit asked.

"The Space stabilizing formation," Alex said.

"I'm sorry, I'm not aware of any such formations," the spirit said. "I barely only know that there are even formations on the base floor."

"Not your fault," Alex said and thought for a bit. "What are the chances that the space outside of this tower is a complete void?"

"You told me it was all void, didn't you?" the spirit asked.

"I did, but it can't all be void," Alex said. "At the very least, there should be some space where the spirit vein is still there, or the formations wouldn't work. There has to be some small bit of space before the void."

"Maybe," the spirit said. "But the space would still all be cracked, given how close they are to most of the rooms on the floor."

"Yes," Alex said. "But I only care about the small space. As long as I can get there and go down to where the formation is, I could find the problem and fix it."

"That's not a bad idea in of itself, but when you add the spatial cracks, there is a high chance you'll die," the spirit said.

"Well, thankfully we have someone here who can't," Alex said. "Whisker, come on. You have more job to do."

Whisker nodded.

"I didn't find any formation that is stopping you from entering. Are you sure you can't come along?" Alex asked.

The spirit tried and shook its head. "I can't."

"Well, we'll see more about it later then," Alex said and teleported down to the base floor again.

He used his spiritual sense, but of course, it couldn't penetrate the walls. Thankfully, Whisker could pass through it with his technique.

"Alright, go straight below us," Alex said. "I will guide you each step of the way."

Chapter 1127 Gift

Whisker went through the walls and appeared outside, right at the edge of the tower. He looked at what was around him and Alex got all the information.

There were cracks in space everywhere around him, but there was a gap between the tower and the cracks that Whisker could navigate through.

Whisker needed to go straight below, but Alex wasn't sure how much more the tower went on before one could out. Because of that, he had to first send Whisker outside safely and then send him below.

It turned out that the base of the tower was still quite high in the air, so Whisker had to go down for a couple hundred more meters before he reached the ground.

Towards the ground, he stopped on the ground and used his spiritual sense to look around.

"Go around the tower, carefully," Alex said. Whisker nodded and started moving. He scurried along the side of the tower, hugging it at every step so as to not hurt himself on some spatial fractures by accident.

"Stop!" Alex said when he noticed something through Whisker's spiritual sense. "To your right, about 20 meters into the floor. Do you see that?"

Whisker sensed the ground and nodded. He saw a formation flag that was intact there. It didn't look like there were any spatial fractures, so he went down.

He arrived in front of the formation flag and Alex checked it carefully.

He quickly copied the design down and tried to map out as much of the overall design as he could. He wanted to see if this was the space stabilizing formation or not, and find out how many more flags there would be out there.

'Not enough information,' he thought. "Continue along."

Whisker ran out of the ground and appeared back outside where he started walking again.

The tower seemed to be the only thing remaining in this secret realm, so Whisker had a faster time going around.

There was some fractured space that had moved onto the tower, and in those cases, Whisker had to fly around it and continue.

Alex kept searching for the formation flags as he had a general idea of where it would be. He found 2 more and added them to the design.

As he worked on the formation design, Whisker found another one.

Alex let Whisker get to it himself when he realized something was off about this formation flag. He stopped what he was doing and focused on it.

"It's slanted," he realized. "It's not straight. Whisker, try and see if you can push it straight."

Whisker went up to the formation flag and started pushing it.

As soon as he did, Alex felt the space shudder a bit. "More, some more," he said and kept an eye on how stable the space was in here.

As soon as the weird feeling of being inside a secret realm returned to him, he stopped Whisker. "That's it, stop," he said.

Whisker stopped and moved away. The formation flag stayed upright and the space stabilized. Whisker came back outside, and as soon as he did, Alex could see that the shattered space had started healing again.

It wasn't immediately okay to walk around, but it was much better than before, and the chance of propagating was most like gone. It would continue to heal before it was fully stabilized, at which point whenever the people were called back in, they would most likely appear outside the tower, if there was any space there at all.

Alex called back Whisker and went to tell the spirit what had happened.

"That's fantastic news," the spirit said. "I also noticed that have access to the 38th floor now. Although most of it is still broken and needs fixing."

"Now, tell me how I can refine this treasure easily," Alex asked.

"Well, it's as you would do all treasures," the spirit said. "Give it a bit of your Qi and use your blood essence. Although, given the massive size, I'm not sure you can do it so easily."

"That's… that's going to take me a long time," Alex said. "Is there no easier option?"

"There's no shortcut, master White Tiger," the spirit said.

Alex frowned a little. He did in fact want to try and get this treasure, but if the spirit was correct, he would have to stay in here for a very long time to do so, especially since it was an Immortal treasure.

He didn't have that sort of time. He had already wasted 5 months fighting the assassins, he now needed to go find his father.

"Urgh!" he thought. "Fine! I'll do it later. When will you open next? 10 to 12 years?"

"I believe there is a part of the tower outside the secret realm, right?" the spirit asked.

Alex nodded.

"Why don't refine the treasure from the outside? Whenever you are free that is," the spirit said. "I would really want to have you as my new master, so I will try to not resist as well as I can."

"Oh," Alex said. "That's not a bad idea. I could come through the secret realm directly too, but that might be dangerous for a while."

He thought for a bit longer and nodded. "Yeah, I think I'll do that. That sounds like the best way for me right now."

"I'm happy that you're satisfied with that, master White Tiger," the spirit said.

"I mean, what can you really do about it?" Alex said with a disappointed look. "Anyway, I should be going."

"I see," the spirit said. "Before you leave, master White Tiger. Since you did not receive anything despite going through all the trouble, even helping to save my life, please let me give you something to take away."

"Oh," Alex was surprised. "What is it? Is it one of the gifts that you're supposed to give for every floor?"

"Oh no," the spirit said. "I don't have those anymore. Those were all gone so long ago and without anyone to add more, we have nothing to give."

"So what is it?" Alex asked.

The spirit waved its hand and something appeared in front of Alex.

Alex looked at the thing in front of him with a surprised look. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"Please, take it," the spirit said. "This is my thank you."

"I…" Alex was flabbergasted. "Thank you," he said as he took the gift.

The spirit told him a few things about the gift that he needed to know about before he could use it properly.

Alex realized that it wasn't a simple gift as it had restrictions, but it was still quite the gift for him.

Alex prepared to leave, but before he did so, he had to change his face again. After his last face-to-face encounter with an explosion, his pill had lost its effect, so people could see his real face now.

The woman was most likely telling her people who she saw come in through the cracks on the 44th floor.

"Have a safe journey, master White Tiger," the spirit bid him goodbye.

"I'll see you in the future when I take over the tower then," Alex said and teleported back to the base floor where he activated the formation that sent him back out.

Not much time had passed since everyone had come out of the tower, so there was still a huge amount of people there. They were all leaving, but some were wondering if the one who won the challenge was going to reveal themselves.

Alex quietly moved away from the place, intermingling with the other people.

"Young man, here," a voice spoke into his head. Alex recognized the voice and looked in that direction.

Very far away was a single person who smiled and waved at him.

Alex looked at the man and walked towards him. "Senior Zhu, you're still here," he asked.

"Of course, I'm waiting for you," Zhu Shaofan said. "So, how did it go? Did you do well?"

"Yes, I did," Alex said. "I even got something from the Sanctum, a gift."

"Oh," Zhu Shaofen's eyes widened. "I didn't know the Sanctum still gave gifts."

"It did, but people saw me take it, so I had to give it over to someone for safekeeping," Alex said. "Can you call sister Xue? She has it."

Zhu Shaofan's face changed almost imperceptibly, and he shook his head. "Xue'er is already gone," he said.

"So early? She only just got out, didn't she?" Alex asked. "And she had my item too."

"She didn't tell me," Zhu Shaofan said. "Let's go catch up to her group."

"No," Alex said. "Please call her here."

"It's easier if we go there ourselves," Zhu Shaofan said. "I can fly much faster."

"No, I feel much safer staying here," Alex said.

Zhu Shaofan paused and gave him a weird look. "What do you mean 'safer'?" he asked. "Do you think I'll hurt you?"

Alex said nothing.

"Wow! You think so, don't you?" Zhu Shaofan said. "Why would you think that?"

Alex pulled out a talisman. "This is the exact same type of paper your insight pavilion uses, wasn't it?" he asked. "This is what the assassins were using to track me down."

"So?" Zhu Shaofan said. "Our pavilion isn't exclusive to using those papers."

"Maybe," Alex said. "But it sure as hell was convenient for an assassin to come with us on the way here. We even went out of our way to get her."

"Are you saying Xue'er is an assassin?" Zhu Shaofan asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"There's no way that's true," Zhu Shaofan said.

"Are you saying she came out of the Sanctum then?" Alex asked. "Call her here right away and let me find out I was wrong."

"Yes, she did," Zhu Shaofan said. "Whatever assassin you met, it must have been a coincidence that she was just like Xue'er."

"Oh! Was it a coincidence that the assassin was also called Xue Mei and had very similar proportions and attitude to her?" Alex asked. "Now that you mention it, there are an awful lot of coincidences aren't there?"

"Was it a coincidence that from the list of assassins you gave me, aside from the first two that were already dead by the time, not a single one of them matched?" Alex asked.

"Was it a coincidence that you came back to the Sunborn Sanctuary right after the elders had taken me back there?" he asked. "Or the fact that two of the assassins were taking orders from you before we went in."

"Or the fact that you tried to make me fall for a charmer when we first met her," Alex said.

"What are you trying to get at?" Zhu Shaofan asked.

Alex looked him dead in the eyes and asked, "You are the leader of the Dark Phoenix assassins, aren't you?"

Chapter 1128 Result Of The Oath

Zhu Shaofan thought for a bit and asked, "Did you know that I am forbidden to kill people?"

Alex was slightly confused. "What?" he asked.

"You heard me right. I'm forbidden to kill people," he said. "It's not just me of course. All 11 of us are forbidden from killing anyone. That was a result of the oath we spoke all those years ago."

"You're avoiding my question," he said.

"I am, of course," Zhu Shaofan said. "You're accusing me of being an assassin, so I have to give you this explanation so you can understand properly."

Alex frowned, but there were enough people around him, so he felt relatively safe. "Go on," he said.

Zhu Shaofan smiled. "My oath was something I didn't take part to say. I was pretty much forced into it," he said. "Just because the incident happened to take place near where I lived at the time, I was forced to be part of it."

"The incident?" Alex asked.

Zhu Shaofan nodded. "I can't go into more details than I already have. And I have gone into more than I'm allowed to already," he said.

"I didn't join the council of course. Why would I? I was forced to speak such a nonsense oath that stopped me from killing people, and then they wanted me to stay in the capital until… no, I didn't want to join them. In fact, I hated them so much for what they did," Zhu Shaofan said.

Alex was surprised. "You hate the 10 elders?" he asked.

"Hated, in the past, " Zhu Shaofan said. "I hold some resentment, but it's not something I can't just bury. It was just that I believed they were the reason behind the incident at the time and hated them."

"It turned out that they were more of a reaction that the continent needed at the time. I didn't know, I just saw what I saw and made my own judgment. I was also pretty ticked off from being forced into the oath to hide what they did."

"I thought I would get over it soon enough, but no, fate didn't want me to," he said. "The 10 elders became the center of attention as they took over the ruling of the continent, while little me who never chose the spotlight was forgotten entirely. I didn't mind at the time, but then those bastards attacked me and my family."

"I fought back, but I could never truly harm them. Any time I tried to use my power, the oath would stop me, forcefully making me stop mid-attack." Zhu Shaofan's face was slowly changing. "So many of my people died that day yet I couldn't even harm the enemy. I… I was useless."

"I asked the elders for help, but they ignored my call for help because the skirmish was small in their eyes and the ones that had died were not big enough to warrant their attention. All they did was gave a strong stern to the bastards and made them not attack us again."

"That didn't satisfy me at all. I wanted those bastards dead, but I couldn't do it. So, I decided to commission a few assassins for the task. Unfortunately, it turned out there weren't many strong assassins at the time at all. Every single one of them was a wimpy little bitch that only knew how to talk big."

"That was when I got the idea. If I wanted these bastards dead, I needed to do it all myself. So, I decided to form my own assassin group who could kill for me," he said.

Alex's eyes went wide. "You're confessing?" he asked.

"Of course," Zhu Shaofan said. "Anyway, I decided to form my own assassins group, but of course, I didn't know how to do that. I didn't even know who was strong or who was cruel enough to kill people."

"That was when ht perfect opportunity showed itself. You see, we got to go to the Western Continent, where we attacked them and stole their resources," he said. "I found the people I wanted in my group, and I also found something else."

"After we returned, I opened the Dark Phoenix assassins group. I employed the assassins and trained them. Since they were bloodthirsty, they killed those bastards that had come to attack my family all those years ago. Oh, that was a glorious night for me."

"The night sky was stormy and dark, lit up vaguely in the north by… ah, that was wonderful," Zhu Shaofan said.

Alex didn't say anything. He could understand the mentality of taking revenge on someone who has hurt you and your family but reveling in it was not something he could relate to.

"So that's it? You are the leader of the Dark Phoenix assassins," Alex said.

"Yes, of course," Zhu Shaofan said. "The group itself has gone through multiple iterations by now. Most either died during a mission or died while cultivating. There was one group that even died because of infighting. But I continued adding people bit by bit."

"I will have to add some more now," he said. "It's been a while since I've had to change all 6 people entirely. But if they were weak enough to die, then who cares right?"

Alex ignored the question. "Why are you telling me all this?" he asked.

"Because I don't need to hide anything anymore. Come on, ask me what you want, I don't have to hide anything."

Alex's eyes narrowed for a second. "Who hired your group to kill me?" he asked.

"I have an oath, remember? I can't say," Zhu Shaofan said. "What I can say is the thing I skipped over before. The thing I learned about in the Western Continent."

"All this time I thought I was so sad that I couldn't kill anyone anymore and that I was likely going to be a very bad cultivator too, only to realize I was wrong. You see, I was entirely mistaken about the oath."

Alex frowned. "What are you trying to say?" he asked.

"You see, it turned out that the oath I spoke had a bit more condition to it than I initially thought. When I was fighting in the Western Continent, I could kill people that was a surprise."

"It was then that I found out that my oath did stop me from killing people, but only the people that were from the Southern Continent. As long as someone was from outside, I could kill them easily," he said. "So, let me ask you. Where do you come from again?"

Alex scoffed. "Is that a threat? Are you going to kill me with everyone watching?" he asked.

"Of course, I can't kill you while everyone watching," Zhu Shaofan said. "But why do you think anyone is even watching?"

Alex quickly turned around and saw that no one was really looking at him at all. He tried to figure out why, but before he could vines burst out of the ground and grabbed him.

He tried to break through them, but they were too strong.

"I realized you had killed everyone inside, so I had already planned to kill you right here, and had made the preparations for it all," he said. "It took me some time to activate. Fortunately, you are a fantastic listener. You gave me enough time to activate the formation without you finding out."

"You can't call out to anyone, and no one can really see you in here at all," he said. "And my cultivation base is simply too strong for you to run away from me."

Alex struggled against the vines and they were indeed too strong. 'I should have checked for traps,' he thought. But he could have never imagined that he would try to kill him so publicly.

"Well, I would say there's no hard feeling, but you did kill 6 people I had to nurture for over a century, so I'm going to enjoy this if you don't mind," Zhu Shaofan said.

"Like hell you will," Alex shouted. He immediately used his teleportation dao and Qi filled inside him and a place far away in the middle of the people.

Zhu Shaofan's eyes narrowed. 'Something's wrong,' he thought. "You're not getting away!"

Even as Alex was teleporting away, something came from behind him and hit him right in the back of his neck.

Instantly, Alex saw the world spin for a second as his head rotated far enough that he saw his own headless body stand there for a moment. In the next moment, his body was teleported away, while his head fell to the ground.

Then, his eyes went white and he died.

Alex's headless body plopped outside far away in the middle of the group of people, all of whom stepped away in surprise.

Some of them were horrified at how horribly he had died, no one expected foul play at all. If anything, they expected this to be a dead body that had just come out of the Sanctum as well.New n0vel chapters are published on

Zhu Shaofan took Alex's head and nodded. His face had changed back to his normal face after being ripped off from his neck and was relatively unharmed above the neck.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk," he thought to himself. "I was even hoping you could accept their oath so that the Southern Continent didn't have to lose such a gem like you. But in the end, you killed people that were under me, and I don't take that lightly."

"I wished I could have obtained your recipes, but I suppose someone from those people will get it," he said. "Whatever, as long as I get the pills I'm fine. Time for me to take your head to them and gain my reward."

Chapter 1129 Blackout

The crowd gathered around Alex's headless body and wondered what they were supposed to do there. They had to wait for the city to make some arrangements or at least have the acquaintances of the dead person take the body away.

"Can anyone identify who this is?" someone asked.

"I don't know any sect that wears this sort of robes," another person said.

"Maybe his storage bag has some identification?" somebody added. A few people agreed that they should check who it was.

One of them was about to move up front when the corpse spasmed all of a sudden. A Saint Foundation cultivation base erupted from the body and people backed off.

"Get away, the body might be exploding," a few people said.

"Should we destroy it?" another person added.

However, before anyone could attack, the cultivation base retreated back and everything calmed down. Then, from the neck where the head was gone, bones and muscles started wriggling.

Slowly, it grew out in the shape of a head and more things started growing on it. Tendons, veins, skin, eyes, and even brain, everything grew back to the way it was before he had lost his head.

"HAAAH!" Alex took a deep breath in as he stopped up from the ground. Immediately a sword appeared in his hand and he got ready to fight.

His body had gone into a fight or flight mode and he looked around, delirious, and tried to figure out what was happening.

"It's alright, young man. We're not going to hurt you," one of the people said and Alex looked toward him.

He gulped a little and breathed in a few more times before he started calming down a little.

"Hey! What's happening out there? Why did you blackout again?" Godslayer's voice cried from inside his head.

Alex's mind was too jumbled to make any sense of what had just happened.

"Hey, isn't that… no, that is. That's Alchemist Alex. I've seen his face before," someone said.

"Alchemist Alex? The one that stopped making pills?" someone else asked.

"You're right. That is him," someone else said.

Alex was still struggling to form coherent thoughts in his head, but for now, he decided to run away.

He didn't even care what direction it was. He simply flew off. People thought of following him, but no one acted on him.

"Wasn't he dead?" someone asked.

"I thought so too, but his head grew out. Is that even possible?" another person asked.

"Could it be a pill? He is a master Alchemist," someone else said.

Far away, a woman looked towards the saints that were gathered around her. "That was him," she said. "That was the guy that entered the 44th floor while I was fighting," she said.

"Are you sure?" the people asked.

"Yes," the girl said. "He came in through the cracks in space and told the puppet I was fighting that he had won. The puppet acknowledged it as a fact and the next moment we were back on the first floor without me ever getting the chance to fully finish our battle."

"I see," one of the elders said. "Then it's settled then. It was Alchemist Alex who completed the Sundering Sanctum's challenges this time around."

It wouldn't be long before more people learn of that fact.

Alex flew silently, gathering the thoughts in his head. Godslayer still asked a lot of questions, but he waited until he had everything working again.

"I died," he told to Godslayer. "Well, at least as dead as a headless man can be before I regenerated back."

"What?" Godslayer couldn't help but ask. "You were headless?"

"I think so," he said. "Some of the people in the crowd also seemed surprised that my head grew back. Holy shit, I didn't even know that was possible."

"So that blackout I felt was your head disappearing?" Godslayer asked.

"I think so," Alex said. "How did it feel?"

"Like I was in a space devoid of anything, just like last time," Godslayer said.

Alex couldn't help but show a surprised expression. "Just like last time?" he asked. "When?"

"Back when that girl exploded her body. This happened back then too," Godslayer said.

"Geez, was my head gone back then too?" he thought. Now that he thought about it, it made sense. After all, that was a Saint Soul realm cultivator's body exploding after all, and by that point, Alex didn't have any defenses at all.

"So I can live even without my head, huh?" Alex thought. "That makes sense. The Undying physique's second stage does say that as long as I have Qi, I will come back to life."

He gently felt the dantian in his body. If what he was thinking was right, then this was now the most important organ of his body.

Not his heart, not his brain. The dantian.

"I will have to be careful," he said.

"So… you can regenerate?" Godslayer asked in a somber tone. "Even from such a massive attack?"

"Yes, my physique technique helps me," Alex said.

Godslayer thought about something and asked, "You called it the Undying Physique, right?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Undying… how did you get this physique exactly?" Godslayer said.

"From the previous user of the physique," Alex said, not adding more right now.

"Was he… the Undying God?" Godslayer asked.

Alex was surprised. "You know about him too?" he asked.

"Only by name," Godslayer said in a serious tone.

This felt different from all the other times he had talked about a god. Most times he would sound angry and rabid, but this time, his voice was different.

'Has he changed?' Alex wondered. He would be very happy if Godslayer could stop being an annoyance every time something god-related was brought into the conversation.

"That was perhaps the only god from the demons that I know of," Godslayer said.

"Do you not feel angry?" Alex asked. "I took a god's physique, you know."

"You have a lot of things from various gods. There's no point in me getting angry over one more," Godslayer said.

Alex smiled. "It's nice to see that you have progressed," he said. "Now can we go back to talking about how I almost died?"

"Sure," Godslayer said.

"I'm curious, how are you still alive? My head was cut off your know? I would assume you would be gone since my Spiritual sea would have gone with my head," Alex said.

"Of the two you have, for now, the dantian is attached to your physical body," Godslayer said. "Your spiritual sea is attached to your spirit. As long as your spirit remains, the spiritual sea remains as well," Godslayer answered.

"So, I will be fine as long as my dantian is fine, right? I can regenerate as long as I have Qi," Alex said. "Is there a chance of my spirit being harmed right now? Will too much damage to my physical body deteriorate my spirit by any chance?"

"Your spirit is attached to your body for now, so there is a chance. But if your body grows, your spirit should grow as well. Once your reach the Saint Core realm, however, the spirit will separate from your body and form itself a cocoon in your dantian, a core."

"Once it breaks through that cocoon and becomes a nascent soul, your spirit will have separated itself from your physical body. At that time, they can be separately attacked and damaged," Godslayer said.

"So… as long as my dantian is safe for now, I'm safe," Alex said.

"It sure seems that way," Godslayer replied.

Alex asked a few more questions and once he got the answers, he began thinking about Zhu Shaofan.

That man had managed to stay under the many elders' noses and ran his assassin organization. Alex wondered why he even opened an information organization, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense.

Having your own organization to gather and parse information was very convenient for assassins as they could get any information they wanted at any time. Not only that, it was a great way to proactively hide information about themselves. If they were the biggest in the game, they could make any information disappear.

Just like how Zhu Shaofan had managed to make his own name disappear from almost everything in history. Barely any people remembered him anymore at all.

"He killed me, or at least I hope he thinks so," Alex said. "If he thinks I'm dead, he will go to the employers to get his reward. I wonder where he will be going."

Alex had a list in his head, and he had a few suspects in his head already. "I should be more proactive now that I know how I can find the person who can lead me to my father," he thought.

For that, however, he needed help. And the only help he could get right now was from the elders.

Alex decided to return back to the Sunborn Sanctuary as quickly as he could.

He stopped flying and looked around. "Where the hell am I even?" he thought. He had been flying so aimlessly for a while now and only now he had realized that he was in the middle of nowhere.

He released his spiritual sense that reached over a dozen kilometers wide instantly and saw a group of people on a road. He flew towards those people and asked for directions before flying towards the closest city from where he was.

Once he was in the city, he took the teleportation formation and was now on his way back to the Sunborn Sanctuary.

Chapter 1130 Blood-Tainted Lead

Alex arrived back in the Sanctuary and immediately rushed to the palace to speak with the elders.

He went in rushing and met two of the elders that came to intercept him, thinking he was someone else.

"Young man? You're back already?" Yao Ning asked when she saw him. Hou Xinya was surprised as well.

"What happened in the Sanctum? Did you find your father?" Hou Xinya asked him.

"Forget my father, the entire Dark Phoenix group was waiting for me there," he said.

"What? Are you fine? Are you hurt?" Yao Ning asked worriedly.

"Not really," Alex said. "I was nearly killed, by none other than Zhu Shaofan. Turns out, he's the leader of the Dark Phoenix assassins group."

The two elders looked at him with a confused look.

"I can make an oath if you want," Alex said.

The other two looked at him suspiciously. "Zhu Shaofan nearly killed you?" they asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"How did you survive?" they asked.

"He thought he killed me, so he left," Alex said, not bothering to tell anymore. "I'm sorry, I don't have time for this. That man thinks he's killed me and is most likely on his way to get his payment. Can either of you come with me to go catch him? I can't do it alone."

The two hesitated a little. "Wait for a while. Once the others are out, we can discuss it, and then we can go," Yao Ning said.

Alex frowned for a second and only then remembered that the members of the Council couldn't leave the capital unless they all previously agreed to it.

"Is it true that you guys can't kill anyone on this continent?" Alex asked.

The two elders frowned a bit. "How do you know that?" they asked.

"Zhu Shaofan told me," Alex said. "He told me that the oath you had him makes stopped him from killing people. He said his family members were attacked once in the past and he had to watch helplessly since he couldn't kill his enemies. He has been despising you since then."

The two elders thought for a bit and remembered the past. "That can't be... but he seemed so..."

"He established the assassin group just so he could kill people he didn't like," Alex said. "He told me that and then revealed to me that he could kill people, as long as they were not from this continent, just before he went for my head."

The elders heard him and slowly realized that everything added up. The truth was still not decided in their minds, but the evidence was there for now.

"We can't leave right now, but it doesn't look like there's a hurry," the old woman said. "We will call everyone out and make a decision to leave. Just wait for a while."

"But we might miss out on the people that are trying to kill me," Alex said.

"Have you figured out who they are?" Yao Ning asked.

Alex hesitated for a bit. He reached into his storage and prepared his new gift just in case it was needed.

"I have a good idea," he said. "It's someone strong and rich enough to employ the Dark Pheonix group, and someone who also knows the connection between me and my father."

"Who?" Hou Xinya asked.

"All 10 of you and your families," Alex said. "You all are my suspicion."

The old woman's eyes widened for a second before narrowing for a second. "So you have been suspicious of us," she said. "I would be too."

Alex was a little surprised. "I would've expected you to get angry, and maybe even throw a fit as to how disrespectful I was being."

Hou Xinya was halfway there, but he quelled his rage.

"I had a guess," the old woman said. "Back when you mentioned that someone had sent you a visual recording of your father, I wondered why they would do such a thing. Rather, I wondered how they even knew who your father was. And the Heaven Silk thread, that's not a common item."

Alex nodded. "That's why almost all of you were under my suspicion," he said.

The old woman nodded. "But not all of us are your enemies, the 10 of us are certainly not. We old people have been holed up here for generations, and everything we do, we do for the sake of the Southern Continent. It's part of our oath that can only be broken under a single condition that hasn't been fulfilled yet."

Alex gave a thoughtful look. "So... it's the sects or families then," he said. He didn't trust her words entirely, but it was better for him to start with the families and sects anyway. His father was most likely being held hostage by them after all.

"You now have 10 groups of enemies in your mind," the old woman said. "Even if we leave right now, we won't get to them all before Zhu Shaofan would get to them. The chance of us and Zhu Shaofan being there at the same time is near impossible after all."

Alex thought for a bit. "I do have a way," he said. "I just need the Saints of each of these places to gather together for a bit."

"Alright, then just wait for a while. We will for everyone to come out, then we will have a meeting, and then we can leave," the old woman said

Hou Xinya nodded behind her, as that was the most appropriate response to this. Anything else would be reactionary and thus not very well thought out.

"Also, someone sent this to you about 3 months ago. I think they were trying to poison you again," Yao Ning said as she tossed a wooden box to Alex.

Alex grabbed the box and was surprised that it was slightly heavy. "This has poison?" he asked.

"Something poisonous," she said.

"You've opened it?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the old woman said. "Lei Zhong got it and it's well packaged, so unless you break it open, you won't be poisoned."

Alex slowly opened the body and found something wrapped inside of it, something heavy. Used his senses to look past the wrapping and saw that it was an ore.

A reddish-white ore that Alex didn't know anything about.

"This ore is poisonous?" Alex asked curiously.

"Apparently," the old woman said. "The ore is toxic and remains that way until it's turned to metal. I didn't know about it until sister Lei told me, which she heard from old man Kang."

"You can obtain the Blood-tainted Lead, a crimson metal that is very unique and expensive because of how durable and how rare it is. That little ore alone should cost you upwards of tens of thousands of spirit stones," the old woman finished.

"How did you get this?" Alex asked.

"It was put outside the Alchemy Association with your name on it, just like the box you got from before," she said.

Alex frowned. 'This doesn't make sense,' he thought. 'Why would anyone send this to me? That too 3 months ago. I was already inside the Sanctum by that time, so I would have most likely been considered dead at the time with 4 different assassins coming after me.'

"Anyway, you should throw that ore," the old woman said.

"No, I'll keep it," Alex said. "Please have the rest of the seniors leave their cultivation as quickly as they can."

Once he said that, Alex went to his room while thinking about the ore he had received. Why had he received another blatant murder attempt on his life while he wasn't even around?

'Is it not a murder attempt then?' he wondered.

If it was not, then what did the ore represent? Alex looked at the box, the wrappings, everything, but there was nothing written on it at all.

'Blood-tainted Lead,' he thought. 'A rare ore that's also so toxic that I was warned about it.'

Alex paused. He quickly went to his room and opened the box. And then, he tried to crush the ore with his palm. He couldn't really feel anything from the ore in terms of its toxicity, but he did notice how incredibly crumbly the ore was.

Of course, he could crumble it so easily because of his strength as the ore itself wouldn't normally crumble, but with an ore this brittle, the powder would get everywhere.

As he went down that thought process, something struck him.

"Can it be?" he wondered.

He quickly left his room and went to find the two elders.

"Young man, why are you out right now?" Yao Ning asked.

"I... I think I have an idea," he said.

"An idea?" the old woman asked.

"Can either of you leave right now?" he asked.

"Didn't we plan to leave after everyone is out?" the old woman asked.

"I can't wait," Alex said. "I will be leaving soon and going to Sureheart city."

The old woman's eyes narrowed. "Because of the ore?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I believe it came from there, but I'm not sure they had any malicious intent behind it."

The old woman frowned. "Can't you just wait? It might be dangerous," she said.

"Don't worry, I won't go near anywhere that is dangerous," he said.

The old woman still tried to stop him, but Alex had already made up his mind. He left the palace that very second and made his way to the teleportation formation.

Very soon, he arrived at Sureheart city which was one of the most northwestern cities of the entire continent, not counting the Wastelands.

He looked at the mountains the city was surrounded by and a massive mansion that was built there.

That was his goal today.

Chapter 1131 Going Into The Mansion

Alex arrived outside of the mansion, with Whisker prominently standing on his shoulder. He looked around very observantly while Alex acted very leisurely.

He held a small cloth bag in his hand and nothing else.

"I would like to see the patriarch of the family, please," Alex said.

The guards at the front of the mansion looked at him and felt his aura. While strong, Alex didn't have the same level of strength to make them call the patriarch out just like that.

"May we ask who you are brother?" the guard asked.

"I am Alex. You may know me as the Alchemist that gained a bit of fame a few years back. I am here on an order from senior Kang Xuefeng himself," he said.

The guards took not even a moment to recognize him after he had said his name. "Please wait a moment, brother," the man said and quickly notified someone.

A person flew out of the house at a terrifying speed and appeared in front of Alex. He looked at Alex for a moment and bowed.

"It is our pleasure to have you come to our mansion, alchemist Alex," the man said. "I am Kang Reushen, please come in."

Alex smiled lightly and followed him. He looked around the mansion as he walked in. The mansion was in the mountains, so there was no flat land. Everything was on an incline, and they had to walk up steps to even get to the mansion.

"Brother Reushen, you are not the patriarch, are you?" Alex asked.

"Oh no," the man said. "Our patriarch is still in the Sundering City. He's waiting for our family members to come out of the Sundering Sanctum. I am his nephew."

"I see," Alex said. "You have a rather huge business in the Sundering City, don't you? I remember seeing the Kang family metal workhouse there."

"Yes. Ah, speaking of which, did you not enter the Sundering Sanctum, brother Alex? I thought you..." the man stopped speaking.

"Sorry? What did you think?" Alex asked.

"Ah, never mind," the man said.

"Oh," Alex said and he continued turning his head around. "I did enter the sanctum, and I did come out as well. Everyone is out already. They should be returning any time soon now."

"I see..." the man said. They entered the house and Alex saw a lot of furniture and statues made up of different types of metal. One of those was the crimson metal that Alex was sure was the Blood-tainted Lead.

"Are the toxins in that removed after you have refined them completely?" Alex asked.

"Not entirely, but it is mild enough that you are fine even if you touch it indefinitely," the man said.

Alex was then taken to a room where he sat on a couch. Whisker was still on his shoulders, looking around the room, and the man couldn't help but wonder what the deal was with the mouse.

Whisker's cultivation base was so subdued that he couldn't even tell what it exactly was. Although, it was small enough that he didn't bother thinking about him after that.

"What is that, if I may ask," the man asked, pointing to the small cloth in Alex's hand. He hadn't tried to use his spiritual sense, as that would be rather rude.

"This," Alex undid the knots and presented the item. "This is a Blood-tainted lead ore that was sent to me about 3 months ago. Does your family sell ores, by the way, brother Reushen?"

The man looked at Ore suspiciously. "We do, occasionally," he said. "But we sell the metal itself most of the time."

"Well, then can you perhaps help me find the bastard that was trying to poison me with these toxins? I was hoping your family would keep records," Alex said.

"We do, but... there is nothing to tell us where that ore came from, so it's a little hard," the man said.

"That's understandable," Alex said. "But any help would be appreciated. I know you guys have already indulged me with my requests before, especially helping with the search and all, but I still have to ask this favor of you."

The man thought for a bit and nodded. "Please hand it over to us, and we will find out as soon as we can," he said.

Alex nodded and handed the ore. "By the way, how is the search coming along?" he asked. "Did you find any hints as to where he is?"

"Search? oh! I don't think there has been any success. The man you've had us find is impossible to find, brother Alex," the man said.

Alex thought of what else he could say to maybe make the man slip up about anything he knew. He tried seeing if he knew about the relationship just now, but that was a bust.

'Maybe I can...'

Just then, he noticed something. The man had brought out a talisman and was looking into it. He was talking with someone and his eyes tried not to look at him, but Alex could see him trying to look at him.

He put away the talisman and faced Alex. "By the way, I hope this is not disrespectful, but you said you were sent here by our ancestor, right?" the man asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Is there any proof by any chance?" he asked.

"Proof?" Alex asked. "I'm afraid I don't. I was given a verbal order to come and present that ore to you since your family would have the most knowledge of it."

"I see," the man said. "Then, how about just proving that you are in fact, Alchemist Alex? Can you?"

Alex's eyes narrowed a bit. "I don't understand what you mean," he said.

The man brought out a spear and pointed it toward Alex. "I'm saying that you have been found out, fraudster. Daring to come into our house, acting like someone else. Tell us, who really are you?" he asked.

Alex was even more confused. "What do you mean? I am Alex," he said.

"No way," the man said. "I just received a message from my uncle. The Alchemist Alex has died."

Alex's expression changed when he heard that. "How does he know I died?" he asked.

"It doesn't matter," the man said. "You will reveal yourself. Depending on your motive, you may or may not walk out of our house alive."

Multiple people had already arrived from outside after hearing a commotion and were entering the room. Their aura was so strong that Whisker had already cowered into a timid position.

Alex, however, sat there with a smile.

"What I want, you say," Alex said. "There is just one thing I want."

The man looked forward to finding out. "Say it," he said.

"I want you to tell me if you know where my father is," he said. "Make an oath, if you don't know where my father is."

Everyone in the room looked at him weirdly.

"I don't know who you think you are, but you are dying all the same now," the man said and immediately rushed forward to stab him with his spear.

Alex stood there unmoving and let the spear stab him.

CLANG~

The spear slammed onto his chest, but that was not the sound someone would've made if they had a metal spear slammed onto them.

Alex grabbed the spear before the man could come out of his shock. "Now, do you mind doing what I said? Make an oath that you do not know where my father is," he said.

The man tried to pull his spear back, but it stayed rigid in Alex's hands.

The man was very confused and worried. Alex's cultivation base was not that strong, while he was Saint Core 8th realm, and somehow he was losing in this man.

A man came attacking him from the left and Whisker immediately teleported away to the corner of the room.

The attack landed on Alex directly on the head, but Alex didn't budge even a little bit. He instead pulled the spear and with it, the man holding it slammed that onto the other man.

The two men were thrown out of the room as they went crashing through hallways. Alex followed behind them, with Whisker cowardly moving as well. He went up to the man who was on the floor, unclear about what had happened right then.

He grabbed onto the man's neck and started choking it. "Then, he looked around towards the others that were gathered around him, way too horrified to attack."

"Was it one of you that sent me the Blood-tainted lead ore?" he asked as he looked around.

Part of his body had turned slightly illusory, giving them an even more fearful sight.

"I- I did," one man walked forward from the group. He was thin and timid looking and was even quivering a little as he moved forward.

"Why did you send it to me?" Alex asked.

"He..." the man tried to point to the other man on the floor that Alex was choking currently. The man was trying to fight back, but somehow not a single one of his attacks was affecting him.

However, the attacks were taking chunks off of his body, making him look even more terrifying.

"Forget about him. I'm not holding him so tightly that he can't speak. As long as he makes the oath that he doesn't know where my father is, I will let him go," Alex said.

The man hesitated for a moment and spoke, "he can't."

Alex's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"He can't make that oath," the man said.

Alex understood "So you are saying he knows where he is," he said as he turned towards the man.

Chapter 1132 Immortal Rank

Kang Reushen looked up and saw Alex, whose face now had parts missing in it. The missing part were all white, and it made it look like his bones were showing through his face.

"Apparently you know where my father is," Alex said. He undid the choke and instead pressed on his stomach with his leg. "You have 3 seconds to tell me where my father is, or make an Oath that you do not know anything regarding my father."

"1..."

"2..."

"I can't! I have spoken an oath to never speak about him," the man shouted at the last moment.

"What?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I can't tell you even if I do know," the man said.

"Alright," Alex said. "Then did you know about the assassination attempts on my life?"

The man didn't speak.

"Answer me!" Alex shouted.

"I did not!" the man said.

"You know what to do," Alex said. "Speak the oath."

The man's face went white. "I lied. I did!" he said.

"Who was it?" he asked.

"I can't tell you!" he said.

"Was it someone from your house?" Alex asked.

"I... I can't tell you!" the man shouted even more.

"That's the same as telling me," Alex said. "I didn't kill you before because you said you have an oath stopping you from speaking about my father. But, now I ask you, were you involved in what is happening with him?"

The man shook his head furiously.

"Don't just shake your head," Alex said. "Speak the oath. Tell me that you were neither involved with what is happening with my father, nor were you involved in my assassination."

Alex pressed his leg on the man's stomach, stopping him from trying to even more. The others watched with a horrified face, and some even tried to attack, but none of their attacks budged Alex.

The only thing they did was slowly reveal the thing that hid beneath the facade of his image.

"Who dares come to my house and cause a commotion?!" a man's deep voice reverberated throughout the house as he came out onto the hallway where the fight was taking place.

Alex saw the man, but he wasn't worried. Instead, he started his counting.

"1!"

Kang Reushen looked horrified. "Grandfather, help me!" he shouted toward the old man who had just appeared.

The old man charged Alex with a sickle in his hand and directly went for the throat.

"2!"

The sickle landed on Alex's neck, and the remaining energy from the sickle destroyed 5 of the rooms next to them. However, the old man's eyes went wide as the sickle didn't even nick the surface of where it had landed.

The pristine white surface was extraordinarily clear.

"3!"

Alex slammed his foot down onto the man's stomach, destroying his dantian in a single stomp. The man cried out in pain, but Alex didn't care about it.

He leg pushed even further down, crushing the man's entrails onto the floor itself. The man's cried remained for a few more seconds before it disappeared.

The old man's eyes were wide in shock, not just because his grandson had just died in front of him, not just because his attack had been stopped by someone whose cultivation base felt nowhere near as strong as his own, but also because he finally saw what had stopped his attack.

A white puppet.

The puppet moved it's arm and grabbed onto the sickle that was on its neck and crushed it so easily that one would mistaken the sickle for being made up of sand.

"Tell me, did you have a hand in this?" Alex asked as he looked at the old man as well.

The voice was coming from a talisman that was attached to the puppet's face, so even though the old man knew he wasn't talking to someone directly, it still felt like that to him.

"Who are you? Why did you kill my grandson?" the man asked with unhidden rage and anger.

"You descendants have put a bounty on my head, sending assassins to kill me, just so they can hide where my father is," Alex said. "Do you know where my father is?"

The puppet slowly moved towards him.

"Who are you?" the man slowly backed away.

The puppet dashed instantly before the old man could get too far away and grabbed onto the old man's throat as well.

"My name is Alex, I am an alchemist. Tell me whether you know about my father or not?" Alex asked.

"I... I don't know who you are or who your father is," the old man said.

"Make an oath, or I will kill you too," Alex said.

"I swear, I don't know anything about you or your father," the man shouted.

The puppet dropped the old man and turned its eyeless head towards the timid man from before, the one that had sent him the Blood-tainted lead in the first place.

"You! Come with me, you will be explaining everything to me now," Alex said.

The man timidly walked up to the puppet and it grabbed onto his clothes. Whisker jumped onto the puppet's shoulders from somewhere and sat there, looking around.

His was the eye that Alex was seeing through after all.

The 10 council elders will be coming very soon, and you will have to answer to them why one of their own families is trying to kill someone they are trying to protect.

The old man's eyes were filled with anger and fear, and that helped him stay on his hand. A few other older people arrived on the scene, but the old man stopped them from approaching.

Approaching the puppet was death after all.

"To anyone else that was involved in all of this, you will all die, that's my promise."

The puppet turned around and pulled the timid old man before going out of the house.

Alex appeared out of nowhere and teleported them all away. Then, he quickly set up a formation to hide himself and the man.

He looked at the puppet next to him and nodded to himself. The gift from the tower had been way too incredible and he was more than happy with what he had received.

An Immortal rank puppet.

Unfortunately, there were no Immortal grade spirit stones, so it couldn't function to its fullest capabilities, but the puppet itself was no different from having a physical body that was as strong as an Immortal.

As long as he could get to his enemies with it, he could beat them.

He kept the puppet around just in case he needed it. Then, he turned towards the man. "Now, time for you to tell me everything you know," he said.

The man quickly nodded. "There are things I cannot speak of due to my oaths, so please forgive me on that. I will have to speak around it, so I hope you can understand," he said.

Alex thought seriously for a while and asked. "You are snitching on your own family members. This has already lead to a death and will most likely lead to many more. Why are you doing this?"

"B-because I believe what they are doing is not right," the man said.

Alex saw the man's resolve and nodded. "Go ahead then. As long as I get the information I need, I won't mind," he said.

Chapter 1133 The Kang Family's Mines

The man started. "Our family's mine business has been going on for a very long time, and in that time we have employed many people to mine for us," he said. "We found various different Ore veins that we started mining."

"One of them was the Blood-tainted Lead," the man said.

"At first, we thought nothing of this ore, as it was not that different from any other. However, slowly it came to light that anyone who spends too long of a time with the ore would die due to the toxicity."

"When the toxicity was first found out, the family stopped mining this ore entirely and moved on to the rest of the ores. However, as time continued, one of our ancestors decided to check the metal that got mined from it and refined it. When the metal formed, he was surprised at the strength the metal had and just how much superior it was to the other metals in those veins."

"The first time the metal was auctioned off, a single sword formed from it with no additional properties sold for over 300 thousand True spirit stones. When they realized that they were sitting on a fortune, they went back to it once more."

Alex listened to the man. He wanted to tell the man to speed up his story so he could get to the point early, but he also wanted to hear the entire story, so he let him be for now.

"This time, however, there was a problem. As the knowledge about the toxicity of the ore itself was public for those who wanted to find out, no one wanted to work in the mines."

"Our family had to employ criminals so they could test the working environment for us. We figured out that as long as people worked while wearing protective talismans and artifacts, they would be fine."

"Of course, those artifacts and talismans had to be constantly changed as they would be ruined in less than a month, and that amounted to a lot of spending that wouldn't be required for any other type of Ore."

"Still, our family continued because there was no other choice. Even if the spending was a lot, the profit was still better than the other metals. Of course, if they could reduce the spending, they would, but for now, they had to continue as they were."

"That was until a few hundred years ago when we realized something else about the toxins. The toxins you see didn't care about your cultivation base. As long as it got to you, it would destroy you all the same."

"However, it did care about your physical strength, and it wouldn't affect you based on how strong your physical body was," the man said.

Alex's eyes went wide. "So, body cultivators are perfect for this job. Is that it?" he asked.

The man said nothing and thought for a bit. "Someone with a strong body could go anywhere from 5 to 10 years of mining without being affected by toxins. People with stronger cultivation bases went on for much longer."

Alex thought for a bit and spoke, "How does your patriarch hire these body cultivators? Does he capture anyone who tried to get here by boat?"

The man looked at Alex and thought in his head the words he could and could not speak. "Anyone who comes from the Wasteland to the Mainland is found out by the people living around the shore almost immediately. The chances of them being not caught are near to nothing."

"Then how is your patriarch getting his hands on the body cultivators?" Alex asked. "If you can't use the ones that come here then... is he taking them straight from the wasteland?"

The man's eyes widened slightly, but he said nothing.

"He's abducting them isn't he?" Alex asked. "Given that my father seems to be in some sort of captivity, is your patriarch making him work on your mine as a slave? ANSWER ME!"

The man jumped a little and shivered. "I... I cannot speak on this matter, please forgive me," he said.

"Where is this mine? The Sunless lands?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the man said quickly.

"Alright, let's leave," Alex said.

"Where... where are we going?" the man asked.

"You are going to another city and will wait until one of the 10 elders come for you. I will go explain everything to the elders and you will tell them the remaining. Someone should follow you back to the mansion to learn more."

Alex hadn't learned everything he wanted from the man, but he saw that the man couldn't tell him about the one thing he really wanted to know about.

His father.

Whatever he learned, he had understood from the context. As for the rest, he would have to go find on his own.

He left with the man and arrived in another city that had a direct teleportation formation to the Sunborn Sanctuary. He told the man to stay there and went back to the palace.

Yao Ning and Huo Xinya were still the only two people out while the rest were in deep cultivation.

"You're back. Finally," the old woman said.

"Why were you gone to the Sureheart city?" the old man asked.

"The Kang Family is after me," Alex said. "They have my father working for them in their mine, and don't want me to find him."

"Huh? What are you talking about?" the old man asked.

"It was the Kang Family?" the old woman asked with a surprised expression.

"Can we leave? I need to go and find the Patriarch of the Kang family," he said.

"We can leave, yes," the old woman said. "It will take a while for the others to wake up, so we were planning to leave a little later. But if you need the help now, let's go."

Alex felt relieved that he didn't have to explain anymore.

"Senior Huo, there is a Kang family member that snitched on their family's wrongdoing. He is waiting for you outside the teleportation building in Graystone city. Can you go and learn from him what you can, while taking care of whatever is needed in the Kang family mansion?"

The old man thought for a moment and nodded. "Sure," he said.

"Huh? Are we not going to the Kang family?" the old woman asked.

"No, the patriarch of the Kang family is in the Sundering city. He's been there for months now, waiting for the good news of my death, which he seems to have gotten some time ago," Alex said.

"He thinks you're dead?" The old woman asked.

"Not anymore though," Alex said. "Even if he were to not believe the masses, his family must have already sent him the message that I killed his nephew."

"You did what?" the old woman asked.

Alex shrugged. "He attacked first."

The teleportation formation worked one after another, as they were each teleported to two different cities.

Alex and the old women passed through the teleportation formation once more and arrived in the Sundering City.

Without stopping, they flew out of the building, with the old woman spreading her spiritual sense in every single direction.

A few seconds later, she spoke. "He's not here."

"Who? The patriarch?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the old woman said. "Let's find out some more."

The two of them arrived at the Kang Family metalworks and very soon someone walked out as he had already sensed the spiritual sense.

When he did walk out, he couldn't recognize who the old lady was as the 10 council members hadn't appeared in public for a very long time. He could tell she was very strong, but that was the end of it.

Alex on the other hand was immediately recognized. And as such, the man knew that the youth that was standing in front of him was someone who had just murdered one of his family members.

"Who are you?" Yao Ning asked the man who had appeared. Her cultivation base pressured him to the point that the young man struggled to stand.

"I am Kang Huoshin," the man said.

"Where is Kang Ganxu?" the woman asked.

The man's eyes widened slightly. "He's not here," he said.

"Then where is he?" the old woman asked.

The man hesitated for a bit, trying to find a way to not answer.

"Young man, do you know who I am?" the old woman asked.

The man shook his head.

"I am Yao Ning, an ancestor of the Yao family," she said. "I am one of the 10 council members, and with one word I can make your entire family line end right now. So, do not test my patience and answer right now."

The man's eyes went wide as he finally realized who he was speaking to. "I- I will answer," he said. "The patriarch and the rest flew over to the mines."

Alex's eyes narrowed. "They went to the Sunless lands? Why?" he asked.

"I... I..."

"Speak!" the old woman shouted at him.

"H-he said... he said he was going to get rid of some evidence," the man said.

Alex suddenly grabbed onto the man's throat, surprising the old woman. "Are you saying he's going to kill my father and the rest?" he asked.

The man gulped and slowly nodded.

"How long ago did he leave?" Alex asked.

"A-about 10 minutes ago," the man said.

"10 minutes," Alex thought. He tossed the man aside and looked back at the old woman. "We should be able to make it in time if we hurry. Let's go."

"No," the old woman said, with a bit of hesitation in her voice. "I can't go."

Chapter 1134 The Sunless Lands

"What are you talking about?" Alex asked. "We don't have much time."

"No, I truly cannot leave with you, young man," the old woman said. "Unless all 10 of us make the decision, I cannot leave the Southern Continent. That is an oath we spoke."

"What?" Alex was angered by this absurd oath. "Are you saying you can't go with me to the Sunless lands?"

"No," the old woman said with a saddened face.

"Fine," Alex said. "Then I will go on my own."

He was about to leave when he thought of something and turned towards the man that was on the floor. "Did Zhu Shaofan come here earlier?" he asked.

"I... I do not know who that is," the man said.

"Did anyone come to meet your patriarch?" Alex asked.

"Oh, yes. Someone did," the man said.

"Where is that man?" Alex asked.

"I... I don't know. He was with the patriarch until he was not," the man said.

Alex frowned for a second and turned towards the old woman. "He can't leave the continent either right?" he asked.

The old woman frowned. "No, his oath does not include that. There is a chance that he will have left as well," she said.

Alex frowned. If that man was there as well, he would definitely kill Alex once again. "Then I will have to hope that he didn't," he said. "I'm leaving."

Alex shot off without saying anything any longer and flew toward the east as fast as he could.

The sun was starting to set by this point and the night sky was almost visible to the east with the moon showing up on the horizon.

Using a general estimation of where he was supposed to go, Alex started flying as fast as he could.

His speed was fast, but not as fast as a Saint Soul realm cultivator. Given that the patriarch of the Kang family was most likely one, or maybe even owned a boat artifact that could reach a very fast speed, he had to give it his all.

While his speed wasn't fast, Alex could reach the Sunless lands faster by simply lowering the distance he needed to fly.

The best way for that was to constantly teleport as he flew.

Alex blinked out of existence and appeared some 700 meters away, from where he continued flying. His speed never dropped, but he did manage to skip over 500 meters of distance every single time.

He did so multiple times and could feel the strain of using Dao multiple times. The usage of Intent strained his mind, so he had to put some gap in between the jumps.

As he got close to the ocean, Alex started worrying about Zhu Shaofan. Even without him, it would be him alone, fighting against a bona fide Saint Soul realm cultivator. If he was any strong, Alex would be in serious trouble.

He thought for a moment and brought out something from his storage ring.

A talisman.

He quickly passed on a message telling the recipient exactly what was happening and what he was doing.

"Come help me if you can."

He put away the talisman and focused completely on the task in front of him. He teleported multiple times and felt the burden of the dao on him, but he didn't let that stop him at all.

His spiritual sense spread wide as he continued flying through the dark waters, while his cultivation base disappeared as he hid as well as he could so that the aquatic beasts didn't find him right now.

Alex didn't know how much further he had to fly. The Sunless lands were far enough from the continent that the elders didn't consider them to be part of the continent.

Alex wondered if he could even make it in time. He was starting to doubt himself.

Then, he sensed something. A group of people was flying on a boat rather leisurely as they made their way towards the Sunless lands as well.

Alex saw the group with his spiritual sense, but it took a while before someone from the group noticed him due to his concealed cultivation base.

Alex saw the 10 or so people that were on the boat, each one of who had a cultivation base that was well in the upper Saint Core realm, or even in the Saint Soul realm.

Alex sensed the strongest person there, a Saint Soul 6th realm cultivator, who looked at him through the boat that had gotten close.

His eyes went wide when he saw who it was.

A voice reverberated in his head, but it was one that came from a woman, rather than a man.

"You little bastard!" she shouted. "You killed my son. I will have my revenge."

Alex was surprised for a second and understood. Given that he had killed the Patriarch's nephew, she was most likely his sister or his sister-in-law.

"Just you wait," she continued speaking. "I will have you watch as we kill your father."

"Men, capture him!" the woman shouted.

The boat slowed down to intercept Alex and 7 people flew out of the ship.

Alex looked at the number of people and frowned. 7 people wouldn't be a problem for him if it wasn't on top of the ocean.

Any sort of battle here would not only slow him down to reach his father, but it would also alert the sea beasts, which would cost him even more time.

Alex frowned, but he didn't stop. He flew directly toward the people and saw them bring out weapons one after another.

As he got close, Alex lit a small fire in his and sent it flying forward. The people got ready to attack it, but before they could, Alex poured as much energy into it as he could.

'Explode!'

The ball of fire suddenly exploded into a brilliant ball of light that struck all 7 of the cultivators and even rocked the boat slightly.

Alex dodged the shockwave from the explosion on this side and teleported to the other side where he was hit by it. Using the shockwave as a push, he continued flying, forgetting about the people behind him for now.

He hoped the beasts would delay them for a while so he could get to his father as soon as he could.

He flew some more, nearly 2 more hours at his current speed with the constant teleportation before he saw something in the distance.

The moon had disappeared long ago from the horizon, hidden behind the relentless clouds that covered this part of the ocean.

Thunder and lightning sounded from even this far away and Alex could already feel some raindrops hit him even this far away.

As he got closer, the rain got just that furious. That let him know that he had just about reached the Sunless lands.

The Sunless lands were a group of 9 islands with a few smaller islands that were almost always covered with clouds. It didn't always rain, but that wasn't a rare sight either.

As the lands rarely saw the sun, they were named as such.

The Kang family owned most of these islands, and the mines in it were theirs to excavate.

Alex wasn't sure which one of the 9 mainlands his father would be in, so he had to search for each one. His spiritual sense reached the maximum distance it could, and even then it could hardly cover any part of the islands.

Finding his father would be hard if he wanted to do it in time.

Alex had to think of some other way to find him, especially since he probably didn't have a cultivation base.

Alex thought for a bit and came up with an idea. It was obvious that his father and anyone else that would be in those mines was not there legally. They were enslaved and that is what the Kang Patriarch was trying to hide.

Also, the Blood-tainted lead was better mined by people with stronger bodies so that the toxin didn't ruin it so quickly.

Using these two facts, Alex could understand that whoever was in charge of guarding these people had to be both very close and reliable for the Patriarch to use and at the same time strong enough to put a bunch of angry slaves in their place.

'Reliable and strong,' Alex thought. 'I'm looking for a strong cultivator from the Kang family.'

With his search requirement shifted to finding cultivators, it was a much easier task for Alex. Immediately, his spiritual sense searched the lands before him as he found people with a strong cultivation base.

Saint realms were somewhere he could start from, but he needed someone stronger, at least in the Foundation realm if not the Core realm.

He moved from one island to another, and by the third island, he noticed something. On the edge of one of the islands, there was a small set of tents and crude houses built.

Near there was someone with a cultivation base that was midway through the Saint Core realm. He didn't look like a guard but the head of security.

Alex wondered if this was the person he was looking for when he saw something on the person.

A ring was prominently on his finger, one that Alex could never forget.

"That's the bastard!" Alex thought. His father was most certainly on this island, most likely amongst the group of people that were in another tent.

Before Alex could search for him, however, the man looked in his direction and brought out a spear from his storage.

He pointed it toward a man that was next to him that Alex had missed.

Alex saw the man and his eyes narrowed with murderous intent.

"Get your weapon off of my father."

Chapter 1135 Abducted

"I was notified you would be arriving," the man on the ground started speaking after seeing Alex. "I did not expect you to come here so quickly."

Alex pulled out Midnight and got ready to fight. "Drop the spear," he said once more.

"Hah! I have heard you are strong enough to kill Reushen, so I know I shouldn't fight you. But if you force my hands, my spear with go through this man's head," the man shouted back. "Men, prepare to fight."

The few Saint cultivators that were on the island readied themselves to fight and capture Alex.

Alex looked at his father who seemed to be unconscious at the moment. These people had most likely drugged him to make him controllable while Alex was coming here.

Alex thought so and looked back at the man.

"You were the man that recorded my father and sent the talisman to me, aren't you?" he asked.

The man frowned. "How do you know that?" he asked. He was surprised that he was found out.

"You don't need to know how," Alex said as his sword started glowing pale white as Sword Qi flowed onto it. "All you need to know is that for the past half a year, I've been looking forward to finding you. Once I did, I would kill you."

"Thank you for placing yourself in front of me to die."

Alex prepared to send an attack as he poured energy into his sword.

The man smirked. His spear inched ever so closer to Alex's father's head, threatening to send it through if Alex dared launch the attack at all.

"Try it. Then we can see what's faster. My spear, or your—"

Alex slashed.

The man saw a white colored sword slash fly out of the sword. The moment he saw that he quickly moved his spear to kill Alex's father. However, instantly, the sword slash appeared in front of him.

With nothing more needed, the sword slash cut the man in two, dropping the halves of his body to either side.

Alex appeared next to his body the next moment and immediately burned it, turning it into ash a moment later.

He quickly held his father before he dropped to the ground and looked at the others that were on the island.

"Leave or you will be the next ones to die."

The Saints were already weaker than Alex appeared to be, so after seeing him effortlessly cut the strongest person there in half, they ran away without question.

After they were all gone, Alex finally took a deep breath and let himself appear weaker.

"Dammit!" he thought to himself. He had just used the Dao of Cutting and Dao of Teleportation together on that attack, so it had put a burden on him.

Normally, the burden would be small enough to make him uncomfortable only, but it appeared that this land had no Qi at all, so the Dao he used all came from himself, and that made the burden increase even more.

He ignored the thought and looked at his father.

He could feel his father's tough and rough body. He looked noticeably older, somewhere in his late 50s, but his physique hadn't changed as much. It was just what Alex remembered him to look like for the most part.

This was most definitely his father.

He quickly used his spiritual sense to check him and didn't find anything wrong with him that could be found out immediately.

He carried him and took him to the tent that was nearby. He walked through the tent's opening and saw the nearly 100 people that were inside, surrounding a phoenix flame that was at the center.

They looked at him with weird looks on their face.

Alex saw these men and women, all of whom still had dirt and mud on their clothes and bodies. He saw the red dirt on their bodies and frowned.

"Who are you??" one of them asked. "What are you doing with our leader?"

Alex looked at the man asking the question and asked one in return, "how long have you guys been here?"

He slowly placed his father down and lay him on the floor.

The man gave a frowning look and answered, "about 3 hours. What? Is it time to go back to the tent already?'

"No, I didn't mean that," Alex said. "Don't worry, I'm not with those other people. I'm here to save him, and if I can make it out fine, you guys will be safe too."

"Huh? You're not with the others?" one of them asked quickly.

"No," Alex said. "You can go out and check. The person in charge of keeping you in check is dead outside."

A few men instantly stood up and went to check. In the meantime, Alex pulled out an antidote pill and fed it to his father.

"Holy shit! It's true," one of them said. "No one is outside, and there is a patch of burning ground with bones in it."

Everyone was shocked to hear that and one of them asked with a quivering voice. "Are… are you really going to save us?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I'm sorry you had to go through this. Can you tell me how long ago you were abducted?"

"About 5 years ago for me."

"20 for me."

"I've been here for over 16 years."

Alex heard every one of them and it seemed that each person was brought here less than 2 decades ago. That didn't mean that the Kang family had only started doing their dirty work 2 decades ago, but rather that everyone before that had already died.

"You guys were abducted by them, weren't you?" Alex asked.

Everyone nodded.

"Is this abduction not well known in the Wastelands? I never heard about it when I was there, and no one really brought it up to the people in the north," Alex said.

"How could they?" one of them said with clear hatred hidden in his voice. "No one was ever left behind to make any complaints."

Alex's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"They attacked our entire tribe," a woman said. "They attacked us and waited for us to come out to fight them. Then they judged which one of us was the strongest and captured us. As for the rest, they let us watch as they killed them all. My brother, my mother, my father, my husband, my children, my friends, my family— I had to watch everyone die before they brought me here."

Alex couldn't help but feel the same anger as her when he heard that.

"These monsters don't even leave children alive. They destroy everything and make it out to look like a beast horde attack and leave," a man said.

"You guys must have fought back, right?" Alex asked.

"We did," another person said. "Most people tried to fight, but no one can defeat them. We would have most likely killed ourselves by now if we hadn't seen a ray of hope. A chance to escape."

The man pointed towards Alex's father.

"Him? Why?" Alex asked.

"Leader is strong, and…" the man paused. "Let's just say unlike the other hundreds of people who killed themselves to relieve themselves from their misery, we stuck around in hopes of revenge."

Alex saw that these people were still careful about something. But it seemed that they thought that his father would be the one to save them in the end.

Just then, Graham started coughing as he spat out a red spit. For a moment, Alex thought he was bleeding internally, but when he saw closer, he could see the specks of red in the spit.

It was the dust from the Blood-stained Lead ore.

"What happened? What the hell did that bastard give me to drink?" Graham asked as his vision slowly returned to him.

He looked to the side and saw Alex. For a while, he simply looked at him, not understanding who he was looking at exactly.

However, when he saw Alex's almost crying face, his eyes went wide. "A-Alex?" he asked.

Alex looked at him softly. "Father!"

Before Alex could say anything, Graham immediately grabbed him into a hug. Alex was surprised for a moment, but he quickly hugged back as well.

Graham let go and looked at him. "Is… is it really you?" he asked.

"Yes, it's me, father," Alex said as he wiped his tears. "I finally found you."

"Alex, how… what are you doing here?" Graham asked. "Did they get you too? Did those bastards capture you?"

"No, they didn't," Alex said. "I came here on my own after learning you were here."

Graham's eyes widened. "You… you came here? Why?" he asked loudly. "Alex, you shouldn't have come here. This is not a good place to be. How did you come? Can you leave? You should leave before they find out."

"It's alright father," Alex said. "I know what sort of place this is. I came here exactly because I knew what sort of place this is. I came here to save you from all of this."

"You came here to save me?" Graham asked.

"Yes, I—" Alex paused. "They're here."

Alex walked out of the tent and the others followed him. "Stay inside, this might get dangerous," he said.

20 or so people flew in the sky with many others flying over from the other islands. The Patriarch of the Kang family looked down at him with his men behind him.

"Good, you've had your wish fulfilled. You've met your father," he said. "Now, you can be together as I send both you and your father to the afterlife."

Chapter 1136 Not Again

The rain seemed to have stopped at some point, but the sky was still dark. Yet everything was still clearly visible in the sky.

Alex frowned a little when he saw the many people floating in the sky. That was problematic for him after all. So long as they were in the sky, there was no way for his puppet to get to them.

The puppet couldn't fly, and if Alex wanted to control it, he would have to spend way too much attention on it, leaving himself vulnerable for the most part.

So, unfortunately, he couldn't use the puppet for this fight outdoors. Still, he brought out the puppet and placed Whisker next to it.

"Protect these people from random attacks, okay?" Alex said. He brought out a bunch of formation flags and threw them on the ground. Immediately, a strong formation formed out of it.

"Everyone, stay inside here and don't leave. You will be safe as long as you stay in there," Alex said. "Father, you need to get inside as well."

"What are you doing?" Graham asked. "Alex, we need to run away."

"No," Alex said. "I've ran away too many times. Not again."

Every time he was up against someone strong, he had to run away. He ran away from the Beast realm when he had gone back to take Pearl. He had to run away from the Demon realm when the Saints came to kill him, and then he had to run away from the Northern Continent when the mad immortal sought to kill him.

Each time he had run away, and each time he had lost something.

He lost connections to his sect and friends. He had lost connection to his mother. He had lost connection to his aunt. He had lost connection to Pearl.

'Not again!' Alex said to himself.

"Alex!" his father shouted. "Son, back away. This is not a fight for you. Just leave."

"Father," Alex said as he looked back. "Remember what you used to say? What grandfather used to say?"

Graham looked confused.

"We don't run away. Whether we are beaten or hurt, we endure it and we stand up. Then, we keep moving forward," Alex said. "Just wait, father. I will make you proud."

Alex turned around and slowly walked away, going closer toward his enemy that had now reached nearly 50 in number.

Graham watched in shock as he realized that his son was not the naive son they had kept protected from the world. He had grown in the many years they were apart and was not an entirely different person.

He was no longer a boy, but a man. He didn't know whether he should be happy that he had turned out this way, or sad that he missed it all.

The patriarch looked at Alex and shook his head. "How I wished for it all to not end like this. I even gave you a way out. All you had to do was say a simple oath and you could've lived," the man said. "It's a shame that we will be losing our greatest alchemist now."

Alex smirked. "I don't really see what you're planning to do here," he said. "You've already been found out by the elders. What are you really going to achieve by killing me?"

"We can always tell them we didn't do it," the patriarch said. "If you and everyone here were to die, we can simply say you tried to fight with us and died. As for those behind you, no one even knows they exist. Their death won't even be questioned."

"How do you plan to get away with it if they ask you to speak the oaths?" Alex asked.

"I don't know," the old man said. "We will either be left alone, or we will get into trouble in the end. Either way, it will all be your fault, and killing you here is simply taking revenge before it happens."

"I see," Alex said. "Well, I never wanted you to get caught either. I would rather kill you all here myself."

"Brother, stop talking so much. Just kill him already," the older woman next to the patriarch spoke. "He killed my son. You have to make his father watch him die. I won't be happy otherwise."

"Fine, fine," the patriarch said as he brought out a crimson spear. "This is the end of the line for you, Alchemist Alex. If you have any words to say, speak them now."

Alex looked at the 50 people in the sky and said, "I do have something to say. Will all of these people you've brought along with you be fighting as well?"

The patriarch was confused. "Of course not. I alone am enough for you," he said.

"Having fun all by yourself, huh? That's not very nice," Alex said. "I believe they all should be allowed to have fun. They have come so far to kill me and the rest of us after all."

A crimson book floated out of him, making the people in the group look at him curiously.

"Let us all play together."

The book unfurled and landed on the 4th page titled 'Blood Beast'.

"Come out."

One after another, red beads floated out of the book and landed all around Alex in different locations. Everyone wondered what they were for a second before the first beast appeared.

A crimson eagle with a wingspan of over 6 meters. It stood tall with its glowing red eyes and looked at the people in the sky.

Then another beast appeared.

A crimson snake that was nearly a meter wide and 15 meters long. It slithered a bit before coiling on itself and looking at the people in the sky once again.

Then another beast appeared.

And another.

And another.

One by one, the beads turned into crimson beasts. Each one of them was massive, and each one of them was strong.

From the sea, the land, the air-Alex had every type of beast one could ask for, all of which together amounted to over 100 such beasts.

And each one had a cultivation base of over the Saint Core 6th realm, with some even reaching cultivation of base of Saint Soul realm.

Alex's own blood armor appeared on his body as he prepared his sword by drowning it in his own blood.

After all, it wasn't the beasts that were the strongest here. It was his blood aura.

The beasts reached a maximum of Saint Soul 2nd realm but his own blood aura reached Saint Soul 3rd realm. Together with all of his techniques and skills, he was sure he could fight them all.

As everyone watched in awe, both friends and enemies, the blood beasts started moving. They didn't immediately go and fight but rather moved to specific locations on the ground as per Alex's mental instructions.

Once they were all in place, it could be used. The thing that he had learned so many years ago, but rarely got the chance to ever use at all.

Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array.

It was an array technique that Alex had thought was useless for the longest time as it was only useful with soldiers and armies. However, now that he had his own little army, it could be used.

Alex looked at the men in the sky.

"Attack."

Chapter 1137 Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array

The Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array was an array formation Alex had learned back in Silvermoon city, near the Ancient Battlefield in the Northern Continent. He had bought it from an auction and had used it at the time to refine his intent.

At that time, he was certain that there would never come a time when he would ever use this technique, as he never saw himself being in an army, commanding soldiers of his own.

However, after he started gaining Blood Beasts, his mind slowly shifted back towards using this array.

Whenever he was on the islands to make pills or train, he would always remember to practice this array. It had only taken him a short time to realize just how valuable this thing was.

And today, he was going to show its value for everyone to see.

The hundred different beasts moved all at once in unison. They stuck to the array and flew into the sky to fight everyone that Alex had assigned as their enemy.

The beasts that were closer to them appeared first and attacked. The people in the sky tried to fight back, but it didn't take them too long to realize how weak they were.

About 40 of the 50 people were weaker than any single beast they were fighting against. Having to fight 2 or more was not what they had signed up for.

Before the fight could even properly start, many of them were injured, with one of them dying in a single strike.

The other beasts got closer as well and panic started to spread through the group of people there.

"Fight, you fools," the patriarch shouted at everyone to grab their attention, but that didn't work. Most of his people weren't able to fight at all.

Only the few Saint realm cultivators could actually put up any sort of fight at all. The patriarch looked around worried and quickly brought out a talisman to call for more aid. There were still people in the nearby islands that were staying there because he hadn't thought they would be needed.

However, now that he was looking at how things were going, he would need all the help he could get.

He noticed Alex flying towards him to fight, so he got ready to counter. He guessed that is he could kill Alex, he could most likely get rid of these bloody beasts as well. However, before the two of them could clash, his sister moved towards Alex. He tried to stop her, but he saw 3 different beasts come and attack her.

His sister didn't seem to be paying attention to the beasts as her mind was only on killing Alex, so he moved to protect her by fighting off those beasts.

The patriarch's sister had a crazy look on her face as she flew toward Alex. "I will not let you live another second!" she shouted as her palms started burning with flames.

Then, she shot it at Alex like a flamethrower.

The fire fell from the sky, falling towards Alex who hadn't expected to be fighting the crazy woman. He was making his way towards the patriarch, but it seemed he had to stop for this fight first.

He put his arms up and blocked the fire. He didn't even need to use any Qi at all. With just a bit of Intent and Dao, the fire couldn't hurt him at all.

Alex defended himself and then sent an attack flying toward the woman.

The woman, while crazy, realized that Alex had stopped her attack and knew that something was wrong. She made the right choice to dodge the attack and attack with her fire spray once more.

Alex blocked that fire too and only defended this time around.

He had to pay attention to over a hundred different beasts right now and that was quite hard for him. He didn't have to pay attention to their every move, but he needed to make sure that they were in the array.

If they weren't, his chance of victory today would be almost nothing.

He spent a second or two to make sure they were in an array, and then took control of the fire in front of him.

The woman was surprised that her control over her own fire had been stripped away and tried to take it back. However, before she could, Alex sent it back toward her.

The woman created a fire lotus in front of her and sent it down toward the attack Alex had sent back.

Since both of them were her own attack, they struck each other and created an explosive result that canceled each other out.

Alex noticed 3 of his best beasts being fought away by the patriarch and moved to stop it. He teleported right next to them, sending one of them to take his spot in the array.

The patriarch saw him appear and charged at him with his spear. Alex readied his own sword and clashed.

The two of them struck each other, creating a clash that sent them both flying backward.

Alex took the majority of the force, but he quickly brushed it off.

As for the Patriarch, he was stunned for a few seconds. He could not understand how Alex was so strong at all. He stood there in the sky, wide-eyed.

"How are you so strong?" he asked.

Before Alex could even think of answering, the crazy woman flew from the side and struck him once again.

Fire burst right where Alex was and it consumed the sky in front of her.

"Brother, attack him with me," the woman shouted and the patriarch finally got out of his stupor and jumped in with her to attack.

However, when the flame disappeared, Alex was nowhere to be seen in front of them. In fact, he had appeared behind the two of them and he struck with his sword as hard as he could.

The two turned around in time to see a sword with a black glow strike them.

God Rending Death Blade.

"Soften!" the man shouted instantly as he placed his spear in front of the attack. The black sword struck the crimson spear, and at the same time, a blue aura appeared from within the patriarch.

Alex was surprised when he felt his sword slow down significantly. Not only that, his attack seemed to have dropped in power by a lot as well.

"What?" he couldn't help but speak out in surprise. 'What was that?'

He quickly backed away and looked at the patriarch with caution.

"This little brat," the woman spoke. "Be careful, brother. He seems to be able to teleport freely. Must be sort of skill."

"Don't tell me to be careful when I'm the one that just protected the two of us," the patriarch said. "Prepare your attacks. We will end it now."

The woman nodded and a fire aura blossomed around her. At the same time, a water aura appeared around the patriarch.

Alex stayed behind with his 3 beasts slowly coming towards him to help him fight. He looked around at the battlefield and saw that his beasts were doing a good job, but more people were starting to come in and the number advantage that he had was slowly reducing.

He was sure his beasts would still win, but if he lost too many in the process that would be a major problem for him right now.

After all, the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array improved one's strength based on their number.

With 10 soldiers in the array with a single commander, their overall strength would improve by a single realm.

With 100, their overall strength would improve by 2 realms.

Alex was currently using these 100 blood beasts to improve his overall power by 2 realms. As such, his Saint Soul 3rd realm blood aura was becoming Saint Soul 5th realm in terms of what he could output.

With a bit from his Qi, body, and Sword Qi, his overall power would come close to the 6th realm, which was what the old man had right now.

However, if he were to lose too many of his blood beasts, or the battle was to prolong for too long, his blood aura would lose its power and he would no longer be able to fight as well.

He prepared his sword and looked at the two in front of him. Then he charged at them.

Along with him, an eagle, an octopus, and a lizard blood beast charged as well. Their blood aura was weaker than Alex's, but with the array's aid, they were also around Saint Soul 3rd or 4th realm in strength.

The woman in front of them lit up a fire in the shape of a lotus again and sent it downward.

Alex could feel the force from the fire and knew it was strong. He tried to control the lotus, but it was too far away. Due to the lack of Qi in the atmosphere, he couldn't use his Dao as effectively.

Alex would've gotten rid of the phoenix flames by now, but that would mean that his opponent would no longer be in the boat as him, unable to use their dao to the fullest.

So, instead of using his dao on the lotus, he sent the eagle first.

The eagle increased its flying speed by a lot and zipped through the sky as it appeared close to the lotus.

The woman quickly activated her technique, exploding the lotus next to the eagle. The eagle also attacked, it's wings creating a massive wind attack that struck the lotus as it exploded.

The explosion lit up the night sky, and Alex used the opportunity to sneak in an attack.

Chapter 1138 Losing Control

Alex used the opportunity of the explosion to teleport behind the woman. If he could get rid of her, he would have an easier time fighting the patriarch.

He broke the array in doing so and his strength wasn't as strong as it had just moments ago. Even then, it was enough for the woman who he attacked as hard as he could.

The woman hadn't realized he was behind her at all. Her focus was still on the explosion in front of her, but the patriarch sensed him.

Immediately, a water aura erupted from him as it covered both him and his sister. At the next moment, Alex felt his strength disappear.

He was feeling a resistance that was softening all the attack that was going out of him. The attack landed on the woman, but it wasn't strong enough to harm her at all.

She immediately turned around and used her fire Dao to try and burn him. Alex teleported at once to avoid that and appeared back in his position for the array.

Alex frowned. "Godslayer, just what the hell is that Dao?" he asked.

"Looks like some water Dao to me," Godslayer said. "Must be Dao of softness. I did hear the man saying something like that earlier."

"Dao of softness," Alex thought. "Can I even beat him if he constantly weakens every attack I send his way?"

Alex was sure if he put his intent into it, he could find a way to attack them, but right now, his mind was spread way too thin to use his intent so effectively.

Just focusing on the fight itself was taking a lot out of him.

'Please finish the fights quickly,' he hoped. Once his beasts finished their battles, they could fall into formations, letting him fight without having to think much about their position in the array.

"Stop getting distracted," the Patriarch said. "We need to kill him quickly and then the rest. We don't know what is going on back in the continent. The council elders are most likely going to execute us, so we might have to change our faces and hide for a while."

"Hnng," the woman grumbled. "Fine. He's strong, so help me kill him."

The battle resumed as both the siblings fought Alex and his 3 beasts. The battle shook the sky and rocked the earth.

The people sitting inside the formations watched in shock as they had never seen anything this crazy in all their life.

"Your sure that's your son, leader?" one of them asked.

"He is, but I don't think he got any of that from me," Graham said.

Whisker stood on top of the white puppet as he looked up at the battle as well. He was a cowardly rat, so he wouldn't have gotten into the fight even if his cultivation base matched the people fighting.

But, somehow it felt wrong for him to not help Alex even a little. All he could do was sit there and watch.

The cut-up space repaired itself a few seconds later, but the same could not be said of the matter the space would have separated.

However, even as a slash that could cut space itself, the slash was weakened by the softness Dao that the patriarch was using.

He destroyed the incoming attack with a water snake attack and launched another attack at the lizard blood beast.

The lizard wasn't as quick and didn't manage to dodge in time. It took the full-force attack of a Saint Soul 6th realm cultivator and was hurt quite a lot.

The octopus attacked with its tentacles and the woman created some more flames to ward off that attack.

Alex attacked at the same time again, sending out blood bullets, and the Eagle attacked, sweeping in with its talons.

The patriarch weakened Alex's attacks and destroyed them, while his sister once again fought back the eagle.

The patriarch took the opportunity to launch another attack that Alex couldn't react to. He sent mist out from around him, reducing everyone's visibility.

Alex could still see with his spiritual sense, but the same could not be said of the blood beasts.

A massive blue spear attacked flew through the sky and hit the Eagle right in its side that it couldn't see coming at all.

The eagle fell through the battlefield, leaving Alex and 2 more beasts.

Alex didn't even have time to frown as another attack came for him. He fought off that attack, but then they attacked another one.

Alex tried to control his two blood beasts to tell them where the enemies were, but controlling them, on top of managing the array was very hard for him.

On top of that, with the mist out, the two siblings continuously attacked Alex from all sides, never letting him catch a breath at all.

Due to all the attacks, the array was starting to slip through his hands. His control was getting worse and as a result, he was starting to get weaker.

He fought back as much as he could while trying to keep his blood beasts in order. They were winning their own respective fights as they easily overpowered their enemies.

However, that alone wasn't enough. As Alex moved, they needed to be able to move along with him to form an array and if they didn't, the array would fall apart.

And as the array fell apart, the blood beasts got weaker, making the fight easy on the enemy's side. When that happened, the blood beasts were beaten back, making the array falter more and more.

The cascading effect piled up on itself, making the problem worse.

Alex felt his power reduce by a single realm as less than 100 beasts were in array now. And he could feel even that getting worse.

When the number reached less than 10, he would be in serious trouble.

The two beasts with him were getting beaten badly and he himself was getting hurt as well. The attacks that were landing on him were hurting him quite a lot more than they were just beforehand.

This was getting troublesome.

The Kang family patriarch noticed Alex's lack of strength and sent 20 different water spears flying toward him.

Alex managed to dodge most, but one still hit him in the thigh, piercing through it.

"Argh!" Alex grunted as he felt the pain. A fire burst out in front of him, landing on his face.

It didn't hurt as bad as the spear, but it still singed his face.

Alex tried to teleport away or use attacks to stall for time while he fixed the array, but his opponents were smart and they didn't let him have a single moment of freedom.

He was bombarded with attacks, where his focus was entirely on protecting himself. Alex was saving as much Blood Aura as he could, but even that seemed to start to run out soon enough.

He needed to do something, maybe bring the puppet to fight, but he couldn't even do that right now. Not that that would help in the first place.

The puppet simply wouldn't be able to fight on its own in midair, and if he was there, he would be in just as much trouble as now.

'What do I do?' Alex thought. His heart grew distressed, but not a single idea came to his head.

He continued trying to bring the beasts into the array, but he simply couldn't focus at all. If he wasn't paying attention to the two siblings' attacks, he was going to die.

The people on the ground watched in horror. Everyone, including and especially Graham, had a terrified look on their face as they realized that their savior was going to die.

Graham got out of his stupor and banged on the barrier he was in. "How do I get out of this? I need to save my son," he shouted.

He tried attacking it, but it didn't work. The others tried to join in and help Graham, but none of them could do so.

Whisker was afraid of the battle in the sky and was cowering behind the puppet, but right now, he feared for his brother more than anything.

His deep-rooted fear was one thing, but the fear of death, the fear that knowing if Alex died, he would die as well terrified him.

For most people and animals, that sort of fear would make them unable to act, making them stunned. However, for some reason, it brought out a fire inside Whisker.

A will to save, a will to help.

His body quivered, but he fought through it. 'I should help,' he thought. 'I can help.'

He reigned in his fear and jumped from the puppet, flying into the sky. He got close to the nearest blood beast and jumped on top of him.

"Brother, fear not. I am here to help," Whisker spoke out loud.

The moment Alex heard that he felt as if he had suddenly lost all pressure from within him. The burden that was on top of him for the longest time had just disappeared.

"Whisker, take control," Alex shouted.

Whisker nodded and sent his spiritual sense everywhere, connecting to each of the Blood beasts in the area. He also connected to Alex who was against the two Saint Soul realm cultivators as well.

Then, he became the leader as he used the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array.

Chapter 1139 Battling The Siblings

Alex felt rejuvenated as his power increased by 2 realms once again. He felt refreshed, all of his mental burdens disappearing in a flash. With Whisker in control of the array, he no longer had to worry about it.

He was finally free to fight these two with everything he had got.

20 blood swords appeared on top of him with Midnight at the front, making it 21. The swords started spinning, and Alex attacked with them.

The two men and women tried to stop the attack, but they were surprised at how strong it was. Alex's attack was way too strong for the woman, and the man was barely stopping it.

The swords continued barraging them, not letting them move at all. The patriarch fought it back, but he had to continuously have to use his Dao.

Alex angled the attack toward the woman rather than the patriarch as taking care of her first would give him ample opportunity to fight him.

The old man realized that as well and did all he could to stop him.

"Disrupt his attacks while I deal with him," the patriarch shouted. The old woman nodded and joined her hands in front of her.

A symbol of fire appeared in the air, one that read 'Flame Destruction', and the woman sent the symbol downward.

Alex created a flame of his own, one that was much more powerful than her's and sent it flying up at the symbol.

The two attacks struck each other, creating an explosion in the sky. The explosive force was directed towards the woman more than Alex, and she had to use her defensive skill to block it.

The man also defended a bit and at the same time sensed something.

Alex had disappeared once more, appearing behind the two of them. The man responded in time and quickly turned around to stop Alex's attack.

Alex felt his fist lose energy even as he punched at the woman with spiky blood knuckles.

"Brother!" the woman shouted out loud.

The man turned around just in time to notice what he had done wrong.

"NO!" he shouted and watched in horror as the swords he had moved his eyes away from had ripped through his softness Dao. They ripped apart his sister's body right in front of her, coming out on the other side with bloody chunks attached to them.

Not even her Nascent soul survived the attack at all.

Alex teleported back to his original location and brought back his swords. He breathed in and out quickly as he felt some mental pain.

"Nice," he thought. "So it can work."

He was worried that Intent alone wouldn't be enough to overpower the Dao that the old man was using, but actually using it had shown that it did.

The old man was most likely used to his teleportation by now, so he had used himself as the bait. The real attack had been the swords he had sending forward all along.

Alex looked at the swords flying next to him and frowned slightly. The attack had worked, but it had also made his blood aura slightly weaker.

"You bastard!" the old man shouted and came flying at him.

Alex quickly threw his swords at the Patriarch. Since Alex had no more hindrance, he focused all he could on this one fight.

The Patriarch was definitely stronger, and his softness Dao was strong, but Alex understood that his intent on using his own Dao was stronger than his enemy's, he was capable of practically rendering the defensive Dao useless.

The employed guards and people from the Kang family that were initially fighting had slowly reduced in number to almost nothing.

They had either run away or had died to the blood beasts. Now, most of the blood beasts were staying around, doing nothing other than adding to the array.

Alex's battle got more and more intense, and both of them started running out of their powers.

The old man was running out of Qi, and Alex was running out of his blood aura. If things continued, he would definitely lose.

'I need to find a way to get close,' Alex thought.

He jumped back into the fight and started fighting more aggressively. The old man fought too. The anger of every single loss he had felt today made him want to rip apart Alex with his own two hands.

The swords and spears clashed for a while before Alex saw an opportunity.

The old man stabbed his spear toward him with a blue glow around it. Alex saw the spear coming and didn't move.

The spear stabbed through his body, coming out on the other side of his chest. There was a massive hole in the middle of his chest.

"Hahaha!" the old man shouted when he finally saw that. "I got you, bastard!"

The people at the ground gasped in shock and fell silent. "ALEX!" Graham shouted with all his might as he couldn't believe that his son had died in front of his eyes.

Alex couldn't even cough up any blood. His lungs had been fully destroyed. His breathing had stopped, and from what he could tell, his heart had also stopped.

The old man's eyes were feral as he got happy that he got his revenge. "This is what you deserve, you bastard," he said.

Alex's dull eyes slowly moved towards him and he smiled. He grabbed the spear and thrust it deeper into his body, pulling himself closer to the old man.

He grabbed the old man by the throat. The old man quickly used his softness Dao to soften any attack he was about to use, but there was no real attack here.

Except, the old man suddenly felt a chill as something entered his body through his throat. His body felt weak and helpless, and he was forced to attack Alex to send him away.

Alex was sent flying, but he managed to catch himself in midair. His wounded chest slowly healed, and he looked at the man with a bright smile.

"How does it feel?" he asked.

"What? What did you do to me?" the old man asked. He felt sick to his core as if he was diseased or something. "Did you poison me? Bastard!"

Alex only smiled, telling nothing. If he told the old man that he had poured in death aura into him, he might figure out that healing pills would help get rid of the problem.

The old man reached for something in his storage bag, and Alex teleported instantly next to him. He sliced the air in front of him and cut the space apart.

The old man found it difficult to reach into his storage bag.

"Damn you!" the old man shouted and sent another attack flying towards Alex who was right next to him.

Alex used the last bit of his blood to create blood armor to protect himself from the attack. At the same time, he reached to his forehead and cut it open.

Thick, crimson blood poured from his forehead and it pooled on his palm.

This was his last shot at possibly defeating the old man, so he decided to give it his all.

He decided to use his Blood Essence.

Chapter 1140 3 Drops

Alex felt a big sense of fatigue hit him the moment he pulled out his blood essence. His whole body seemed to want to go limp, but he fought through that feeling.

The old man saw something was wrong and decided to fight back. His spear glowed with Spear Qi and multiple water spears formed around him.

Alex did not do anything with his few drops of blood essence. They floated in his hand in 3 distinct blobs as he prepared to attack.

The old man attacked first, sending his real spear along with the water spear flying through the air toward Alex.

Alex took the first drop of blood and attacked with it.

The drop of blood flew through the air striking the spear that was flying toward him. The moment the two crashed, a large explosion marred the sky in blue light that seemed to blind everyone with a blue light.

The explosion surprised the old man too as he was forced back by the shockwave. He couldn't believe just how strong that attack from Alex was.

And he remembered that he had 2 more of the same attack.

'No...' he thought. He was already feeling completely unwell because of what Alex had done just moments before, so if he were to continue fighting... 'I will die.'

Instead of trying to fight, he decided to run away. He turned around to flee, but he suddenly struck something in the air, like a barrier.

He looked around, but there was no barrier. If anything, the space itself was blocking him from moving away.

The blue light from the explosion died down, and the old man saw Alex inching towards him with the remaining two blood beads.

"No! Stop. We can talk. Please, I can pay you if you want me to," the man started bargaining for his life.

"I don't care," Alex said as he let the second bead fly. The bead flew through the air and struck the space barrier that Alex had prepared to keep the old man there.

As easily as hitting a puff of smoke, the blood bead flew through the blocked space. The old man used his dao immediately, but that held absolutely no value in front of Alex's blood bead.

The bead struck the old man's head, exploding it in an instant. The bloody chucks of the old man's head sprayed into the sky, while his remaining torso fell straight to the ground.

The old man was dead, but Alex didn't relax just yet. He knew what happened when he killed a Saint Soul realm cultivator.

A small bluish-white spirit floated out of the old man's navel area. It looked around for a moment, confused. However, the moment it saw Alex, it remembered everything.

"You goddamn bastard!" the man shouted. "Die!"

Suddenly, the Qi in the old man's body started growing volatile all of a sudden and Alex realized what was happening.

He was going to blow up his own body.

Alex had experienced Core Explosion twice, and a Saint Soul body explosion once. He could not say he liked any of the experience at all.

The old man threw his body away with what little power his nascent soul had. It flew in an arc, going not toward Alex, but rather between him and the slaves that were behind him.

Alex's eyes narrowed in anger as he flew to intercept the attack. He appeared in front of the body and grabbed it.

The old man was way too happy to see that. If Alex was touching his body, then his death was all but guaranteed.

The body suddenly exploded, but the explosion itself came from behind the old man's soul, rather than in front of Alex.

Right before the body had exploded, Alex had teleported the body behind the old man. The explosion hurt the old man's soul, nearly destroying it in the process.

The old man's soul involuntarily flew through the sky, appearing near Alex. He tried to stop himself, but Alex was ready for him.

Alex fought through the explosion's shockwave and a small blood dagger appeared in his hand. It was a dagger he had created with his last drop of blood.

The dagger stabbed into the nascent soul directly on the soul's forehead. The old man cried out in pain as his white body tore itself apart under Alex's dagger.

Alex watched in surprise at how easily the nascent soul had died to his blood dagger. It basically burned away.

'That was... something,' he thought.

"Brother, we won!" Whisker's voice came from the side, letting making Alex realize that he had won. The fight was over.

He looked around in surprise and saw that his beasts had indeed already finished their battle.

"So it's finally over," he thought and slowly flew down. He had his Qi, but his blood aura, blood essence, and even mental fatigue were at their worst state ever.

He landed next to Whisker and rubbed his head lightly. "You did good," he said.

Whisker smiled and jumped onto Alex's body. Alex looked around and brought out the Blood God's Manual which the blood beasts flew back into.

Then, he walked towards his father and canceled the barrier that was keeping them all in.

The moment the barrier was down, Graham ran up to Alex and grabbed him. "Al, are you okay? Are you hurt?" he asked in a very worried voice.

"I'm fine, father," Alex said. "Just... just a little tired."

"Wait, let me take you to the Sacred flames. You can heal there," Graham said.

Alex didn't mind that. "Sure," he said. "I guess I can stay there for—"

"Wow, not only are you not dead, you're strong enough to kill them all too, huh?" A voice spoke from the sky.

Alex looked up immediately, but he couldn't see anyone there. He used his spiritual sense, and he barely grasped something that existed in the air not far away from him, and yet not at the same time.

He did recognize the voice, however, and he quickly got back up.

"Have you come to kill me again?" Alex asked as he looked in the direction where he was certain Zhu Shaofan was hiding.

Zhu Shaofan showed himself, revealing himself to everyone. Alex could now see him in the sky, but he still struggled to sense the man.

It was only a few moments later that he realized that he was wearing some sort of waistband that was made up of the Heavenly Silkworm's silk threads.

Alex glared at him after realizing that they had all received the silkworm threads from him.

"Come on, don't look at me like that," the man said as he looked around. "Oh hey! You found your father. Congratulations."

"Screw off with your fake pleasantries," Alex said. "If you want to fight, then come fight."

"Woah, I'm not here to fight. Why would I fight you anyway?" the man asked. "I was paid for my stuff, so I have no reason to kill you really. Well, unless you give me one."

Alex didn't say anything.

"You did kill all of my people," Zhu Shaofan said. "So, I will give you one opportunity to rectify that."

"What? You want me to bring them back to life?" Alex asked.

"Haha, of course not," Zhu Shaofan said. "I want you to join me."

Chapter 1141 Answers

"Join you?" Alex couldn't help but grow curious when he heard that. "Surely you don't mean your little assassins group, do you? You should know your little act is up."

"Haha!" Zhu Shaofan chuckled. "I knew you had told them the moment I heard you were alive. I don't know how you do it, but it's certainly a neat trick I must say. I mean, to regrow a head? That surely can't be done with just some pills right? Anyway, what's your answer?"

"Didn't you hear me? Your assassins group has been found out. The elders know about you," Alex said.

"And what will they do? Kill me?" Zhu Shaofan chuckled. "I thought I told you that they can't kill anyone on the continent. Every single one of them is stuck following a stupid oath they forced upon themselves. So long as the oath remains, they cannot kill me. So, what will your answer be?"

Alex frowned. His father and the others were vulnerable at the moment. Heck, even he was vulnerable. If he refused to accept the deal, he would just kill him again.

'What should I do?' he thought.

"Come on, hurry up," the man said. "I don't have the time. Those old bastards will come at any time."

Alex couldn't think of what else he could do right now. He had to accept the deal if only to save his father and himself right now. He had to delay as much as he could.

"Fine," he said. "I accept your deal."

Alex knew what was going to happen next. He was going to have to swear an oath and he was going to refuse it, and then the old man was going to get angry.

It was all plainly laid out in front of him.

But, things didn't go in the way Alex anticipated.

"Great!" the man said. "Now you are the first member of the Dark Phoenix. Do you know any other 5 I can employ as well?"

Alex frowned once more. Something weird was going on. He guessed it was a ploy to get him to lower his guard so that he could attack him at just the right moment.

But Alex couldn't understand why that would be necessary. Each moment he was given to breathe was a moment closer to him recovering. A moment closer to the elders deciding to come to save him.

"I don't have any such names," Alex said, playing along with his games for now.

"Hmm, no worries. I remember the Azure Imperium searching for someone not long ago. I should get them," the man said. "As for the rest, I have quite a few years on me to decide."

Alex said nothing and everyone around him was silent as well.

"I suppose I shouldn't be wasting any more time. We should leave," the man said.

Alex half-nodded.

"Oh right," the man stopped moving and looked at Alex. "You should know that the Dark Phoenix group is very secretive and our information can't be that easily distributed. Please kill everyone that knows that you are a part of it now."

Alex gave a disgusted look. "That was your play?" he asked. "Were you just wasting time?"

"Are you not going to kill them?" the man asked.

"What do you think?" Alex asked.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk. And here I thought I found another member," the man said. "Well, if you're not going to be it, then I guess you should just die."

Alex sense something move in the ground suddenly. He could sense it approaching fast.

A massive root grew out of the ground and stuck both Alex and Graham that were standing next to each other.

Suddenly, the puppet moved and appeared in front of Alex, blocking the roots from hitting him.

Zhu Shaofan gave a surprised look. "A puppet that can stop my attacks? Now that is interesting," he said. "You really are very interesting, aren't you?"

Alex said nothing as he fully focused on controlling the puppet in front of him. The opponent in front of him was faster than the speed puppet could produce with Alex at the control.

The puppet's reflexes also depended on Alex, so that was another problem.

"Seriously, how you do have it all? Such good Alchemy knowledge, a puppet of such strength, the blood of such high strength, and a body that doesn't seem to die," the man said. "Come on, tell me."

"You can kill me, but you won't get the answer," Alex said as he prepared for another fight. He pulled out a few pills and ate them to recover the best he could, but these were never going to be enough.

"Kill you? I'm not going to kill you until I have the answer to what makes you so great," the man said. "These people, however. I don't mind killing them."

Alex's eyes widened. "Fight me you coward!" he shouted.

"Oh, I don't think I will," the man said. "Let's start with your father, shall we?"

Alex noticed a wind blade flying towards them out of nowhere. His demon eyes were working overtime to notice every single movement of energy to see what his next attack was going to be.

He saw the blade and put the puppet on task to stop it. The puppet punched the blade and the blade disappeared into a bunch of green energy.

The man looked at the puppet with a slightly deeper frown. "Strong," he said. "I bet it can kill me if it can get to me too."

Alex didn't say anything, but he was feeling afraid that Zhu Shaofan had realized that his puppet was capable of killing him.

"I should watch myself, then," he said.

Alex noticed a green aura trailing beneath his feet, falling onto the ground. The man activated a technique and suddenly something grew out from the ground.

Alex was surprised that it wasn't attacking him, but rather Zhu Shaofan. It was a massive carnivorous planet that swallowed him.

Alex remembered the wood energy girl from the sanctum and knew what was most likely going to happen next.

He immediately turned around and hit his father with his palm. Waves of energy burst into his father and suddenly he teleported away.

From behind him, Zhu Shaofan appeared with a sword in hand, ready to stab his father.

Zhu Shaofan was surprised that Alex had noticed him at all. The next moment, the puppet came next to him to punch him.

The man realized he had screwed up quite badly. So, he quickly used something.

Wind burst out from him, moving in all directions around him. Alex felt the air around him grow thick and viscous as he found it hard to move through.

The puppet was also slowed down quite a lot and that gave the man ample opportunity to escape back into the sky

"That puppet is truly terrifying," he said as he took a deep breath. He had been forced to use his dao, and was thus feeling quite bad about himself.

"I suppose I shouldn't come attack in person then," he said. "You still have the chance to give me what I want, young Alex. You have enough time until every single one of these people dies."

A bunch of wind blades appeared in front of him, sending the wind blades in all directions.

Alex's eyes went wide in horror and he suddenly brought out the Blood God's Manual. Without hesitation, he pulled out as many of the beasts inside as he could and sent them all in the direction of the wind blades.

The blades struck the beasts and were destroyed. The shockwaves still hit the people below, and while some were hurt, most were just fine.

Alex felt his heart bleed watching the many blood beasts he had cultivated die just like that, but there wasn't anything he could do. Saving these men was a task he simply couldn't skimp out on.

The rest of the beasts flew out to crash onto the rest of the flying blades as well.

"Whisker!" Alex said, and Whisker jumped onto the puppet's back. At the next moment, Alex sent both the puppet and Whisker into the sky.

The moment they appeared in the sky, above Zhu Shaofan, Alex noticed where he was through Whisker's vision.

Zhu Shaofan noticed that as well and stopped to save himself. He created a massive field of wind that resisted the puppet's approach.

He noticed the rat on top of the puppet and realized that the rat had some important role to play here as well.

Without hesitation, he sent a strong attack flying toward the puppet and Whisker. The puppet was struck on the chest, and it hit Whisker as well.

Whisker died immediately and the puppet could no longer target the man as it fell freely through the air now that Alex couldn't see where Zhu Shaofan was.

"That was close," Zhu Shaofan's voice appeared from beyond the bloody mist that had filled the sky by now. "That is a very good technique you use there, that teleportation. You nearly got me."

The mist cleared and Zhu Shaofan could be seen once again. "But, what now?" he asked as he started at Alex's frowning face. "Your beasts are dead and I don't think you have any more of them. So, your only choice is to watch them die or give me the answers I want."

Alex looked at him with his frowning face and suddenly, the frown turned to a smile. "I do have one last option," he said. "I have a friend."

A massive fire blasted out of nowhere, hitting Zhu Shaofan square in the back.

From beyond the fire appeared Scarlet who flapped her massive burning wings in the black sky.

"Hope I'm not too late."

Chapter 1142 Fiery

The many people watched in awe as the Phoenix flew down next to Alex.

"You came," Alex said, finally relaxing a little.

"Of course," Scarlet said. "You made it sound so important after all. If I let you die after all the help you've given me, my Inner Demon would haunt me till the end of time."

Alex smiled, simply happy that she was here.

"But, it seems your enemy is more problematic than I imagined," she said as she turned to the sky where the slightly singed Zhu Shaofan flew up. "A Saint Transformation 4th realm cultivator... this is annoying."

Alex looked towards her. "What's your cultivation base?" he asked. He found it hard to determine her exact cultivation as she seemed far stronger than him at the moment.

"Saint Transformation 1st realm," she said.

Alex was surprised. 'So strong,' he thought. But, it was still weaker than Zhu Shaofan. "Can you beat him?" he asked.

"Depends," Scarlet said.

"On?" Alex asked.

"His bloodline," she said.

Alex didn't immediately understand how that could affect the battle, but he didn't get to think about it as Zhu Shaofan's next words caught his attention.

Zhu Shaofan was looking below him from the sky at Scarlet with wide eyes.

"You..." he said, his voice slow and deep. "How... how are you here?"

Scarlet looked up in confusion. "I am here to defend my friend," she said.

"How the hell are you here?" Zhu Shaofan shouted the question again. "You should be dead."

Scarlet's eyes narrowed this time around. "Ah, I see..." she said. "So you were there too."

"You can't be alive!" the man shouted. He tried speaking some more but he couldn't find a way to voice the words as they were stuck in his throat by the oath.

"You say that like you saw me die," Scarlet said.

"I--" Zhu Shaofan paused as the oath grabbed his throat once more, stopping him from speaking anymore.

"Scarlet, what's going on?" Alex asked.

"I'll explain later," Scarlet said. "Let me defeat him first."

He calmed down a little and looked at Scarlet again. His eyes narrowed as he noticed something that his immediate shock had stopped him from seeing. "Wait, no. You're not her," he said. "You're too weak."

"Weak?" Scarlet asked. "Come fight me and you'll see who's weak."

"I see," Zhu Shaofan said. "You must be her child. I wasn't aware there was a child."

Scarlet scoffed at the man.

"For your mother's sake, I shall let you live. Leave now and I won't attack you," he said. "I'm sure you want revenge for what your mother went through and I completely understand why you deserve it. What happened to her was... just leave."

"I told you I came to save my friends. I am not leaving this place until I am certain they are safe," Scarlet said.

Zhu Shaofan looked noticeably agitated. "Why won't you just leave? I'm giving you a way out. Don't make me kill you!" he shouted.

"Don't worry," she said. "You can't even if you want to."

Scarlet suddenly took to the skies, moving at a speed that left afterimages for the normal people that were looking at her.

The trail of fire she left behind burned with all covers of the phoenix flame.

"Sacred flames!" one of them shouted.

"Is that... a holy bird?" another one asked.

"Son, what is going on? What is that?" Graham asked.

"That is Scarlet, a friend of mine," Alex said. "I don't think we have much to worry about now."

Scarlet sent out flame attacks from her body, all of which burned through Zhu Shaofan's plants. His wind attacks did barely anything to stop her flames, so he had to go on a retreat throughout the battle.

He managed to sneak in an attack from time to time and hit Scarlet. Scarlet's body was hurt, but her flames immediately healed her, bringing her back to being able to fight once again.

"You damn bird!" Zhu Shaofan shouted. "I gave you a way out and yet you didn't take it. Fine, you can die now."

He waved his arm around him and was immediately surrounded by a bunch of wood Qi that formed green motes of light in the night.

He then sends it flying through the air at an incredible speed.

Scarlet saw the attack and stopped. Suddenly, a fire grew out of her chest, slowly encompassing her entire body as it hardened into an illogical solid flame armor.

The attacks hit her, but the armor stopped all of the attacks. She then retaliated with her own attack, a massive fiery claw that went swooping down at the man.

Zhu Shaofan used his dao to slow down her attack, but his mere intent wasn't able to overpower Scarlet, whose Intent was most likely one of the strongest in this entire realm.

It was certainly the strongest on this continent, and as such the fiery claw landed on the man, burning him.

Zhu Shaofan managed to extinguish the Phoenix fire that burned on him, but before long another fire started burning once again.

Scarlet's Qi was just as strong as his own Qi, so the attack was hurting him quite a lot. The fire burned around him and his dao seemed incapable of helping him as well.

If this went on for too long, he would die. He needed to either beat her quickly or find a way out of there.

"What's wrong?" Scarlet asked as she flew into the sky, launching one attack after another at Zhu Shaofan. "I thought you were strong. Come on, show me your strength."

She waited for him to respond, but Zhu Shaofan simply wasn't in the sort of situation where he could do so. He was burning from the outside, his flesh cooking on his bone.

He let out his attacks all around him without a care for who he was hitting at the moment. Some went to the sky, some to the ocean, and some to the land.

Scarlet stopped however many she could that were in the general direction of the humans while sending back her own attacks that hit Zhu Shaofan.

Alex watched in surprise at the difference in power between the two fighters in the sky. He had never imagined that the bird that was nothing more than a mindless little bird just 5 years ago was now strong enough to kill the leader of the strongest assassin group on the continent.

Alex knew he had no hand in her knowledge or talent, and most of what she had achieved was on her own. The only thing he did was give her a few pills to help her cultivate, and somehow that made him feel like he had some help in her current standing.

Thinking so, he couldn't help but feel pride at the bird that Scarlet had grown to become.

Zhu Shaofan stopped attacking as the pain got too bad for him to continue attacking. His body burned, his Qi burned and even his spirit seemed to burn.

He lost his mind to the pain for a long time before he seemed to find a small gap of clear thought where he realized what he needed to do.

He needed to run away.

Using that single moment of thought, he flew through the cloudy night sky while constantly burning in Phoenix fire. His screams sounded louder than the occasional thunder and lightning.

Scarlet stopped when she noticed that he was running away.

"Oh, so he doesn't have it after all," she spoke softly. "Otherwise, he would've used it."

Alex flew to the sky next to her. "What's happening?" he asked. "Are you letting him get away?"

He looked to the distance where Zhu Shaotian had run off to. He was still burning and in pain, so his speed was slow, but he was still getting away.

"Is he going to burn to death?" Alex asked.

"No," Scarlet said. "I don't have that good control over my flames at such a distance. He will be able to extinguish it if he tries to."

"Then what?" Alex asked. "Are you letting him get away?"

"Get away?" Scarlet chuckled. "How is he getting away? He's still in my sight, isn't he?"

Alex was slightly confused. "What are you--" his words stopped in his mouth as deep fear grew inside of him in an instant.

"Oh," Scarlet looked at him. "You might want to back away for this one."

Alex quickly flew back and watched in surprise as he realized what he was watching. This was the first time he was seeing it for sure.

When someone reached the final realm in a major realm, after a certain way through the realm, their Qi would start to change.

A certain way into the Mind Tempering realm, one could start to convert their Common Qi to True Qi.

A certain way into the True Emperor realm, one could start to convert their True Qi to Saint Qi.

Now, Alex was seeing someone in the Saint Transformation realm, who had converted a tiny bit of their Saint Qi into Immortal Qi.

That was to say, this would be the first Immortal attack he would have ever seen in his life, and it was coming from his own bonded beast.

A tempestuous wind moved around Scarlet as she prepared for her attack. She had a very small amount of Immortal Qi, and even then it was causing such a phenomenon.

Godslayer watched through Alex's eyes as well and spoke in a somber tone. "It has been a while since I've seen a phoenix use this attack."

"What attack is it?" Alex asked.

"Fiery Shard of the Primordial Sun."

Chapter 1143 Run Away

A blinding white fire burned around Scarlet, one that dwarfed any other color that she could have probably used.

Alex had gotten far, as per her instruction, and somehow he was still feeling the heat. Worse of all, he couldn't do anything about it.

He had the True Fire Dao, and he could stop the heat from burning him slightly. He could only wonder how hot it actually was.

At some point, he stopped seeing Scarlet at all with all the blinding light. Even his spiritual sense was burning away when it got close to her. The power of an Immortal attack was all too much for a mortal like him.

Everyone on the ground moved as far as they could from her, and even then they could feel the heat and were blinded by the light.

They closed their eyes, but the light was still bright enough to go through their eyelids. They had to put their arms up to properly block the light.

Alex fortunately only had to close his eyes to not be completely blinded by the light.

He heard a single phoenix screech, loud and high, and then… everything returned to darkness.

Alex was the first to recover his eyesight and he opened it. As soon as he did, he saw the blinding white light flying through the sky, illuminating the sky and the water as it flew through the air toward Zhu Shaofan who was burning in the distance.

Alex didn't see what happened as the bright light was the only thing he could see in the distance. Then a second later, it exploded into a massive plume of fire that rose to the sky.

The entire world lit up as if it was daytime and even the mortals could see everything as clear as day.

A few seconds later, the bright light slowly vanished, and all that remained of light were the stars in the sky that burned bright.

Because of how hot the attack had been, even the clouds had disappeared from the area.

"Fiery Shard of the Primordial Sun," Alex thought to himself as he watched in stun. That was most definitely an attack fit for its name.

He didn't even look to check if Zhu Shaofan was alive or not at all. If he had a way to survive that, then he deserved to survive. However, it was impossible for him to be anything but ash at the moment.

Alex looked back at Scarlet whose solid fire armor had disappeared. The flames on her body disappeared as well, turning her back into a normal colorful bird.

It wasn't just that, however. She seemed weakened somehow after that attack and was hardly able to control herself.

Alex quickly flew up to her and grabbed her as she lost altitude. Scarlet let herself be grabbed and simply took the chance to catch her breath.

Alex dropped her to the ground and let her rest there. "Are you okay?" he asked.

"Yes," Scarlet said weakly. "I'm fine. I just didn't expect the attack to take so much out of me."

"It was a strong attack," Alex said. "An immortal attack would definitely be too much for a mortal like you."

"Well, it shouldn't be since it's my attack," Scarlet said. "It's just that I am cultivating too fast and my physical body isn't keeping up with my cultivation base."

"Huh?" Alex was surprised. "Are you saying your foundation is weak?"

"Pretty much," Scarlet said. "I mean, you saw me. I cultivated to this realm in just a few years. You should have known that."

"Well… I assumed that was what a Vermilion bird was able to do," Alex said. "Here, eat this healing pill. It should help a bit."

"Thank you." Scarlet quickly ate the pill and felt a bit better, but the fatigue didn't disappear so easily.

She looked at Alex and saw him staring at the stars. "What's wrong? Have you never seen the open sky before?" she asked.

"Huh? No, I wasn't looking at the sky," he said. "I was just checking to see if you would have to suffer from Heavenly Judgment now that you used an attack with Immortal Qi… but it looks like you're fine."

"Of course," Scarlet said. "It only comes where you are not playing by the rules. An Immortal in a Mortal world would get struck by the Judgment, but I'm still a mortal. Even if I somehow used an attack with Divine Qi, I would be fine, since it came from a mortal."

"Oh," Alex said. "I thought what mattered was the Qi, but it makes sense that it's the owner of the Qi that the heavens would care about."

Scarlet nodded. "Your troubles are over, right?" she asked.

"I believe so," Alex said as he sighed. "I'm tired as well. Let's rest a bit and we can leave this place. Although… I need to take them with me somehow. I don't know how I can do that."

"Well, can you find the way on your own? I need to leave quickly," Scarlet said. "I can't be found out. Oh yeah, make sure you don't tell anyone I was here, okay? Make those people not tell anyone either. Make them swear an oath if they have to."

"What's wrong?" Alex asked. "Why are you so worried?"

"My existence can't be known until I am stronger," the phoenix said. "Don't let anyone know I—"

Her words stopped in her mouth as she slowly turned to the side. Alex looked in the direction she was looking at and saw a massive boat, larger than anything he had ever seen in his entire life flying through the air.

It came in his direction but was still too far away for his senses to notice it. However, Scarlet seemed to have noticed it already.

"No!" she said in a somber voice. "No, they're coming."

"What?" Alex turned to look at her. "Who's coming?"

Scarlet tried flying, but she was way too weak. "They're coming for me. I need to run away," she said.

"What? Who's coming?" Alex asked.

"No time to answer, help me get away," Scarlet said.

Alex started fearing when he heard her. If Scarlet was afraid then it must have been somebody strong.

"Get into your beast space. You can hide there," Alex said. Since the two were still bonded, she could easily hide.

"No," Scarlet said. "They know I'm here. If they don't see me run away, they will torture you all to get their answer most likely."

Alex started fearing. "What can you do then?" he asked.

Scarlet's eyes moved around, trying to think of something, but she couldn't. "I'm sorry," she said. "But it seems this is as far as I can go. Run away while you can. They won't go after you since they are probably here for me."

Alex feared and turned around to look at his father and the others. "Father, take them and run away from here. Take the others too," he said.

"Al, what's going on?" Graham asked.

"More enemies," Alex said. "Please get away from here."

The others started moving the moment they heard those words, but Graham didn't move. "Can you fight them?" he asked.

Alex smiled. "Yes," he said with an assuring look on his face.

Graham looked at Alex with a complicated look. "You've grown so much since we've been separated," he said. "I can't even tell if you're lying or not anymore."

Alex's smile dropped a little. "Father, please. Save them," he said.

Graham nodded. "Save yourself," he said. "There is no disgrace in running away."

Alex nodded, but in his heart, he knew he most likely wouldn't. Not while his friend was here with him.

Scarlet looked at him and realize that he was staying. "What are you doing?" she asked. "They are going to kill you."

"You saved me and my father earlier," Alex said. "Let me help you now."

The puppet came to the front and stood before Alex. Alex had enough Qi to use it, so he wasn't very afraid.

"You will die," Scarlet said.

"Unless you are a fallen power that I'm helping restore, I don't think I have to worry about death," Alex said half-jokingly. "Sorry, not the time to be joking. That was a divined prophecy for me that I heard, which told me how I was going to die."

He turned around to see Scarlet looking at him with a stunned look on her face.

"What?" Alex asked before realizing. "Oh no… really?"

"Remember how you want to meet my parents and all?" Scarlet asked.

"Yeah," Alex said. "I'm still hoping your father won't kill me when he learns you bonded with me. Although, his oath should stop him from doing so."

"Yeah, about that," Scarlet said. "I don't have any parents."

Alex frowned slightly before remembering Zhu Shaofan's words. "Wait… is this about your mother being dead?" he asked.

"No, she's not dead," Scarlet said. "I never had one here to begin with."

Alex was confused. "What are you saying?" he asked.

"It wasn't my mother that died," Scarlet said. "It was me. I was the one that died."

Alex's eyes went wide.

"And the ones that killed me all those years ago, they are the ones that are coming here right now," Scarlet said.

Alex was stunned for a second by the information he had just heard. "You were killed?"

"By them," Scarlet said as she stared at the distance where the ship was still flying towards them.

Alex looked towards the boat which had finally entered the range of his sense. And his eyebrows widened as he realized that the ones that were coming were the 10 elders from the Council.

Chapter 1144 Threat

"You must be wrong," Alex said. "Those are the good elders. They are the ones that have been helping me all this time."

"No, I'm certain. They are the ones that killed me," Scarlet said. "I didn't remember the other one's face, but these 10, I remember very well. I am certain I fought them before I died."

Alex couldn't make sense of that still. "Why do you keep saying you died?" he asked. "You are clearly alive."

"Us phoenixes when we die, we go through rebirth. I was born again, and that is why I say that I died," she said.

Alex looked at her with wide eyes. "Why would they kill you though?" he asked. "What use can—"

Alex paused. The council elders told everyone that the phoenixes were secluded and used that opportunity to rule over the continent. Was that it?

"Are there other phoenixes in the Sunborn Sanctuary?" Alex asked.

"No," Scarlet said. "I was the only one that came here. I was the only one to rule the Southern Continent."

Alex's eyes went wide. "You were the Immortal phoenix of this land?" he asked.

"Yes," Scarlet said. "And those bastards killed me."

Alex was confused. Something about this all didn't make sense to him at all. "How did they kill you? Weren't you supposed to be an Immortal?"

"I don't know," Scarlet said. "I have very vague memories from the time right before I died. All I remember is a flash of pain and an image of those 10 standing in front of me with their attacks ready. I remember trying to run away from the fight and then… nothing. The next thing I knew, I was born again."

"Ever since then, I instinctively knew that I had to get strong and get my revenge. I did my best to get out of the wasteland so I could cultivate, but… it seems all of it was for naught."

Alex looked back towards the boat that was approaching, but the 10 figures on it were already leaving the boat before it had even arrived.

Alex put the puppet ahead of him, ready to fight if it came to that. He waited until the 10 were up close and looked at them all.

Not a single one of them was looking at him at all. They were all staring at Scarlet. They were all surprised to see her alive.

"I can't believe it," Liang Zhufen spoke as she looked at Scarlet.

"So those texts were right," Qiu Jianhong said.

"A phoenix really can come back to life after dying," Yao Ning spoke with a shocked look on her face. "Then that means…"

Scarlet's face was angered when she saw her murderers.

Lei Zhong looked at her with a frown on her face. "Wait, wait, wait. Let's not get too hasty. We don't know if that is her or not. Look at her, she so… weak."

"Must be the rebirth," Tan Yang said. "Did the texts say anything about losing cultivation base?"

"Don't think so," Ren Guanting said. "But then again, those were written by humans, so who can really tell."

One of them turned to look at Alex finally. "What are you doing with her?" they asked. "What's with the puppet?"

Alex didn't answer. "Why are you here?" he asked in return.

"Huh?" they were confused. "We came here to save you. Why else would we come?"

"Don't lie," Scarlet shouted. "We know very well why you are here. You are here to kill me, just like you did so many years ago."

The 10 elder's faces suddenly changed.

"Wait… is it really you?" Yao Ning asked, her face pale from shock.

"Yes, it's me, the one that died, the one you killed," Scarlet said. "I have come back to kill you all."

The moment the 10 heard that they immediately moved.

Alex couldn't even react to their speed as even his Demon eyes had difficulty tracking their movement. His eyes trailed behind them, reaching them only after they had landed on the ground.

Scarlet got ready to fight with what she had left as well and got ready to attack. However, before she could attack, she stopped.

She looked in front of her with confusion and anger inside her. "What are you doing?" she asked.

Alex was confused as well.

The 10 elders had landed on the ground, but they weren't approaching at all. Instead, they were all kneeling on one knee with their head bowed toward Scarlet.

"Please kill us insolent servants for what we did, lady Phoenix," they all spoke in unison.

"Wh-what?" Scarlet didn't know how to respond at all. "What are you doing?"

"We are asking to be punished for our transgression, lady Phoenix," Liang Shufen said.

Scarlet watched them with a confused look on her face, and Alex was confused as well.

"What… what are you saying?" Scarlet asked. "Are you saying that you regret it now? You didn't seem that regretful when you killed me."

"We didn't know you would die, lady Phoenix. What we did, we have regretted all this time," Huo Xinya said.

"Hah!" Scarlet shouted. "Do you expect me to believe such an obvious lie?"

"It is no lie, lady Phoenix," Yao Ning spoke. "We dare not lie before the rightful ruler of the Southern Continent."

"Not lie?" Scarlet asked. "Do you honestly think I will believe that you didn't expect me to die when you murdered me?"

The elders finally reacted with an expression that was stoic. They were confused.

"Murder you?" one of them asked.

"Lady Phoenix, we would never murder you," another one said. "We could not live with ourselves if we killed our own ruler."

"You seem plenty alive for someone who says that," Scarlet said.

"That is because we didn't kill you," Yao Ning said. "Our actions still led to your death, so we have been waiting for your return, lady Phoenix. We have been waiting for you to deliver the punishment on us yourself."

Scarlet didn't understand what was happening. She wondered if they were waiting to see if she was hiding her strength before they were certain they could kill her.

"You say you didn't kill me?" Scarlet asked.

"Yes," Yao Ning said.

"But you were there when I died, weren't you?" she asked.

"We were," Yao Ning replied.

"What were you doing there then?" Scarlet asked.

Yao Ning hesitated a bit before looking at Scarlet. "Do… do you not remember?" she asked.

Scarlet's heart started beating faster. "Remember what?" she asked.

Yao Ning's eyes widened slightly before narrowing as she bowed again. "Yes, it was us who killed you. Please kill us, lady Phoenix."

The rest of them realized as well and quickly repeated the same line.

Alex noticed something wrong, and obviously, so did Scarlet.

"Do I not remember what?" Scarlet asked. "Answer me!"

Yao Ning flinched a bit. "It is best if we don't answer that, lady Phoenix," she said. "If you don't remember, then it is best we keep it that way."

"You bastards!" Scarlet shouted. "Just kill me if you are here to kill me. Stop playing these games with me."

"There is no game here, lady Phoenix," Yao Ning replied.

"You keep calling me your lady," Scarlet said. "If you truly think of me that way, then answer my question. The night of my death, what were you doing there?"

Yao Ning hesitated a bit.

"This is my order," Scarlet said.

Yao Ning gritted her teeth and finally answered. "We were there to save the Southern Continent and everyone that lived here."

Scarlet was confused. "What?" she asked.

Yao Ning and the rest did not dare breathe at the time.

"What are you talking about?" she asked. "Why would be saving the Southern Continent and its people? What threat was there?"

Alex looked at the elders and realized what was happening. He slowly turned towards Scarlet as she demanded they answer her at once.

"It was you, lady Phoenix," Huang Chen answered instead of the old Yao Ning. "We were there to protect the Southern Continent from you."

Scarlet's eyes went wide in shock. "No, that's not true," she said. "Why would I ever be a threat to my own domain and people?"

She questioned them on the outside, but on the inside, she remembered the feeling, the distinct emotion she felt before her death.

She had hurt a lot of people and that was why she was chased away from her home. She had told Alex that it was done by her family, but in reality, she knew it was done by these people.

But she never understood why she would ever feel that when she loved the people of these lands so much. What reason would there ever be to hurt them?

She wondered if this was an emotion that she felt for letting down the people of the Southern continent because she had died when she should have remained to protect them.

However, deep down, she knew that wasn't true. She could distinguish what emotion she was feeling very well. She might not have kept a memory of the event with her, but she had kept the emotion.

Her body visibly shook as she realized that they weren't lying to her at all. They were telling the truth.

"I don't remember any of this," she said. "Tell me what happened back then."

"Lady phoenix, if you do not remember then it is better we kee—"

"TELL! ME! WHAT! HAPPENED! FROM! THE! BEGINNING!" she shouted at them.

The 10 collectively flinched and Yao Ning took it upon herself to follow her command.

"If we were to really tell you everything from the beginning, Lady Phoenix, you must tell us what is the last thing you remember?" Yao Ning asked. "What was your last proper memory from before your death over 5,000 years ago?"

Chapter 1145 A Recounting Of Old Memories

"Five thousand years ago?" Scarlet asked with a confused look on her face. "What about five thousand years ago? I was doing nothing at the time."

She looked around and watched everyone's faces. "I came out to make some changes to the rules and help provide Phoenix flames from time to time, but that's it," she said. "I didn't do anything else noteworthy for a long time."

Yao Ning was slightly confused as well. "But... is that your final proper memory, lady phoenix?" she asked.

"No," Scarlet said. "My proper memory is one from around... I don't know, maybe a few dozen years ago? Or maybe a century or two ago. But those memories aren't very noteworthy either."

Alex tried to make sense of things but something wasn't right. The timeline was off.

"Lady Phoenix," Yao Ning spoke. "You died, not a century or two ago, but rather Five thousand years ago."

Scarlet's eyes went wide. "What? That's can't be. How could I have died Five thousand years ago when I was only reborn a dozen years ago? The most an Immortal realm Phoenix like me should have taken to be reborn was just a few dozen years or a couple of centuries at best. You are lying," she said.

"No, we're not," Yao Ning and the rest said.

"They're not," Alex said. "This continent has been missing a Phoenix for the past 5 thousand years. That much is for certain."

"But..." Scarlet looked desperate. "It can't be. It's not possible for me to have lost so many years."

"Maybe it was a special case," Alex said, thinking for a bit. "5 thousand years ago... something does come to my mind now that I think about it."

"Please let me explain to you what happened, lady Phoenix. Maybe that will shed some light on the reason why you took over 5 thousand years to be reborn," Yao Ning said.

"Yes," Scarlet said. "Explain it to me, from the very start."

Yao Ning nodded. "It all started one day Five thousand years ago... when the disaster struck. We received a bunch of distress messages as well as felt the change that had happened in the world."

Alex's eyes narrowed when he heard that. He had pretty much guessed that this was most likely the case, so now he was listening to what more details he could hear from that time.

"The Sunborn Sanctuary was alerted to something... weird happening in the Central continent and you called for the best of us to help you during that period."

"We gathered in the Sunborn Sanctuary late afternoon and did what we could to help the people that were running away through the Intercontinental Teleportation formation. Apparently, something big was happening," Yao Ning said.

"What... what happened to the Central Continent?" Scarlet asked.

"On the inside? No one but you could know that lady Phoenix," Yao Ning said. "But a ferocious Qi barrier had appeared out of nowhere on the outside, blocking off all entry and exit from that area. Even the Teleportation formations didn't work, they still don't."

"Once you realized something was very wrong, you flew away to the Central continent as fast as you could," Yao Ning said. "And then... we waited for you to come back."

Scarlet took a deep breath. "Then?"

"Then... you returned around 6 hours later. When you did—"

"Wait, 6 hours later? What about the Central continent? What happened there?" Scarlet asked.

"We don't have any reliable information, but from what we learned, the ruler of the Western Continent, the White Tiger decided to become the only ruler of the world. He apparently did that by taking over the Central continent first, where all the Teleportation formations were."

"We are told that you bravely fought against the White Tiger, along with the other two rulers of the Northern and the Eastern continent. You successfully killed the White Tiger, saving the entire world in the process, but you also seemed to have been hurt in the process," Yao Ning said.

"The White Tiger tried to take over the world?" Scarlet's eyes narrowed. "That can't be true. Why the hell would he ever try to usurp us?"

"We don't know, lady Phoenix, but that is what we heard," Yao Ning said.

"What you heard is bullshit," Alex said. "I don't know who twisted the events, but what you heard is not true."

Everyone looked at Alex in surprise, including Scarlet. "What do you know?" she asked.

"Some... thing appeared in the Central continent and created the Qi mess we see now. The distress was there and you all did leave to see what it was. Apparently, you, the Tortoise, the Snake, and the Dragon reached there around the same time. You waited for the Tiger, but the Tiger was already fighting the monster inside," Alex explained.

"Monster? What monster?" the Phoenix asked.

"I don't know," Alex said. "Senior Xuan Luhei said it was a humanoid being with no cultivation base that fought all 5 of you at the same time when you were inside. However, even when fighting together, you could not win at all."

Scarlet's eyes narrowed. "Xuan Luhei?" she asked. "He told you what happened?"

"Yes," Alex said. "And he's very angry about the misinformation regarding the White Tiger. Apparently, the White Tiger saved the four of you by letting you escape while he fought off the monster."

"Senior described the 2 minutes event they felt as being one of the most terrifying experiences of his entire life. He said he felt like the world was caving on itself. Then, 2 minutes later, the feeling vanished, and both the White Tiger and the monster were dead."

"So... that White Tiger really is dead," Scarlet couldn't believe it at all.

Alex looked to the elders. "The White Tiger saved this world, sacrificing himself to defeat the monsters, and you repaid his sacrifice by raiding his domain, killing his people, and looting what little he had," he said.

The elder's face went pale with horror when they heard that. "Th-that can't be true," they said. "That's not what we were told."

"You were told the White Tiger was behind everything," Scarlet said as she looked at the elders.

The elders quickly nodded.

"And who told you that?" she asked.

"It... it was the Dragon Emperor. He told us that and asked us to help him get revenge against the White Tigers by attacking them," the elders said.

Scarlet's face was full of disdain. "You believed some half-dragon who clearly had ulterior motives," she said. "Shame on you."

The elders dropped their faces in shame, not daring to look at her. Scarlet turned towards Alex, who was looking at the entire situation without much emotion on his face.

"When did you meet Luhei?" She asked.

"About..." Alex thought for a bit, surprising himself by the answer he had come up with. "20 years ago now. He was hiding in this domain because he's hurt and can't heal himself because of the lack of Qi."

Scarlet nodded and turned towards the elders. "Did you really do what he said you did?" she asked. "Did you raid the Western Continent, killing its people?"

"We... we had no choice but to raid, lady Phoenix," they said. "We required the resources. It was that, or we let the entire Southern Continent go to ruin as a wasteland."

"Because of the Phoenix flames in the Wasteland," Alex said, remembering what Qiu Jianhong had told him. "You went to the Western Continent to get Spirit veins to create a barrier to stop people from coming in."

"To stop people that would bring Phoenix flames in. There is a difference there," the elders said.

"I have so many questions about the Wasteland myself, like how it came to be in the first place. Last I remembered, it was just a desert, nothing else. And now, it's nothing but a place where you can't even cultivate," Scarlet said.

The elders hesitated to answer the question, and before they could, Scarlet turned towards Alex. "Can you give me a proper recounting of what happened after the White Tiger sacrificed itself?" she asked.

"Let's see," Alex said. "Senior Luhei said he was separated from his brother when they flew out of the terrifying barrier. He was hurt and had exerted himself, so he had to hide in the secret realm. The dragon went to the Western Continent to tell the White Tiger's family that he had sacrificed himself, before returning to the Western Continent to heal himself."

"Of the 5 beasts, you are the only one I lack knowledge of. I do not know what happened to you after you flew away from the Central continent," Alex said.

"I should be able to fill in on that," Yao Ning spoke. "Lady Phoenix, I do not know what happened exactly, but you took 6 hours to return back from the Central continent."

"We were alerted from the north that you had been seen flying through the ocean to the east. But you weren't... okay. You weren't yourself at all," she said. "You were very hurt and... we didn't realize it at the time but... you were dying."

Scarlet looked at Yao Ning, waiting for her to explain further.

"We got the report a little too late," she said. "By the time we left to intercept you, you had already crossed all the way from the desert to the mountains. That was when we saw your... state."

"What state?" Scarlet asked.

"You... were hurt and bleeding," Yao Ning said. "But it was not normal at all."

"How so?"

Yao Ning hesitated a little. "You were not only bleeding blood, but you were also bleeding Phoenix fire."

Chapter 1146 Requiem

"I was... what?" Scarlet asked.

"I can't really describe it, lady Phoenix. Your body was covered in Phoenix fire and it was dripping down from you, like liquid," Yao Ning said.

"My armor... something must have broken through it," Scarlet said. "Was it the monster?"

"We are not sure," Yao Ning said. "But... because you were bleeding fire and you were flying towards your home... everything in your path was also burning in fire."

Scarlet paused when she heard that and her eyes went wide. "You aren't saying..."

"You were burning everything and everyone on your path with Phoenix fire, one that you did not seem to have control over at all," Yao Ning said. "And since you have come from the Wasteland... it was the wasteland where everyone was suffering from your flames."

"Had you continued... you would have burned the people in the mountains and then... the capital," Yao Ning said.

Scarlet's eyes were wide, tears seemingly rolling down her eyes as the emotion resurfaced once more. The feelings she felt before her rebirth. She felt pain and guilt for hurting others, ones she did not want to hurt at all.

"And we had gone there to protect the Southern Continent from--"

"Me," Scarlet said, as she finally understood that they were telling the truth. They really were there to save the continent, and not to kill her.

"Wait, so how did I die?" Scarlet asked.

"We arrived to stop you, lady Phoenix," they said. "But you didn't seem to be in a situation where you could talk. You tried to fight through us, but... you were so very weak at the time. The only thing that was strong about you was the bleeding fire that fell from you, but you didn't seem to have any control over that."

"We fought for a while, and while we did not mean to hurt you at all, we most likely led to the reason why you were," Yao Ning said. "You see... something happened after we started fighting for a while."

"What? What happened?" Scarlet asked.

"I don't know how to explain this... but there was a storm that night. It was a starry night, and yet the storm appeared out of nowhere as if someone was trying to break through to Immortality," the old woman said. "And then... a single bolt of lightning struck you."

Scarlet was a mess already, and even then she could understand what must have happened.

"Heavenly Judgment," Alex said. "You must have used up Immortal Qi during your battle with the monster. You ended up triggering the Heavenly Judgment, just like senior Luhei."

Scarlet couldn't even speak as she quietly processed everything she had heard. She tried to process the feelings she felt, the emotions that were there again.

"Whatever it was," Yao Ning continued, "It was enough to make you run away from the place. We tried to follow you, but the attack had left us disoriented, even though we weren't the target at all."

"You flew away from us, fire raining below you once again," she said. "We followed a little later, watching you fly aimlessly. The fire... burned the people of the desert. We tried to save as many as we could, but we couldn't do much. We were in danger ourselves."

"After that, we heard a blast one last time," she said. "And then... you had died."

Scarlet's emotions were too much for her to handle and she burst out crying. "I... I killed them," she said. "I killed all of them"

"Lady Phoenix, you didn't mean to do it," another one of the elders spoke. "The blame cannot be with you. We shouldn't have tried stopping you in the first place. We should have helped you, instead of being in your way."

"That's right. We were the ones at fault. We were the ones that led you to your death. Please kill us for our insolence and forget about the past," another one said.

Scarlet didn't listen to anyone as she wallowed in her own devastated emotions.

Alex looked at her and didn't know how to help her at all. He stood next to her and softly rubbed her back.

The rest of the elders didn't know what else they could say. They were mostly surprised by how close Alex was to Scarlet in the first place. They really wanted to learn how they knew each other, but this was not the time to be questioning things.

Alex turned towards the elders and asked, "You said a lot of things today that should have been stopped by your oaths. What happened?"

"Our oaths? They are no more," one of them said. "Our oaths lasted until our ruler returned back to us. Now that she has, the oath has no hold on us."

"There were a lot of things in the oath weren't there? Even Zhu Shaofan was involved somehow," Alex said.

"Our oath primarily was made to stop people from learning about lady Phoenix's death, and to rule the Continent in her stead until she returned," Yao Ning explained. "We spoke the oath amongst the 10 of us, and Zhu Shaofan, who was not far away from the location where the battle had taken place."

"He wasn't part of the battle, but he was there," She explained. "We forced him to make the same oaths as us. He was not to reveal her death, and was to never do anything to harm the people of the continent. He had no interest in ruling, so we didn't force him to take that oath."

"After that, we returned to the Sunborn Sanctuary, where we distributed the rumor that our ruler had gone into deep cultivation and that we would be ruling. We made some more oaths when there such as never leaving the Continent or even the Capital without the other's approval, never doing anything that would be harmful to the continent, always staying there, waiting for our ruler to return."

"Now that she has, the purpose of our oaths has been completed," she finished.

Alex thought on it for a bit and nodded. 'So that was it,' he thought. Their oaths had caused quite a bit of problem for him many times, annoying him most other times. However, now that he saw the situation from their perspective, it made a lot of sense.

One could argue what they did wasn't the best way to go about after losing a ruler of your continent, but that was still better than nothing.

The Wasteland was burning and the others were without a leader. They became what the continent needed them to be.

"The wasteland," Alex asked. "Did it turn to a wasteland after..."

"Yes," Yao Ning said. "It used to be a desert with not many resources, but people still lived there, they cultivated there. After the flames got there, however, it all changed."

"The disaster caused chaos for a long time. But in that chaos, people realized that the flames healed them as well. They realized they could heal easily and thus a few started training their bodies."

"The flames were then taken around the desert to give other people the flames as well. Soon enough, the entire Wasteland was burning with Phoenix fire, including places that didn't have anyone around."

"Some people tried to bring the flame over to this side as well, which was why we needed to quickly set a barrier to stop them from coming over here. The people weren't stopped from coming, but rather it was the flames we tried to stop," she explained.

"But you still sent them back when they got there," Alex said.

"We had to," Yao Ning said. "There are a few places in the Southern Continent where the Phoenix fire still burns. It's controlled with formations and is used to heal people. Most of the people that came from the Wasteland tried to steal the flames, some nearly succeeding."

"In the end, we had to stop all of them from coming here entirely to stop any disaster from happening. It continued happening even after that, but since they were escorted away," she said. "It sounds bad, I know, but we couldn't think of any other way at all. Without a phoenix, we couldn't let phoenix fire spread around the mainland the same way it had in the Wasteland."

Alex couldn't deny that. Had the phoenix fire arrived on the mainland, he could only imagine the horror as it burned everything down.

He turned to look at Scarlet who was still a sobbing mess.

"Hey," he spoke up. "It's alright. You didn't mean to do what you did. It was all a horrible situation no one had any control over, you included."

"But... but what if I did?" Scarlet asked. "I probably had a choice between dying and killing them all while trying to save myself. And yet I still chose to go down that path. I, of all, chose not to die."

Alex thought for a bit.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Don't you guys have to make an oath or something before coming here, how you can't kill anyone?" Alex asked. "Does that oath trigger a lightning strike?"

"That's..." Scarlet paused. "No, it doesn't. Oaths just silently kill you."

"Then you didn't kill anyone intentionally," Alex said. "You probably weren't even in your right mind at the time."

"But, I still feel the guilt. I've felt it all this time, and now I know why I do," Scarlet said. "That either means whatever they are saying is not true... or, that I really did know what was happening and I still chose to let it happen."

Alex didn't know what to say to that. He couldn't understand her feelings at all. There was no way anyone could.

He thought for a moment and asked, "Why did your rebirth take 5 thousand years?"

"Wh-what?" Scarlet turned towards him.

Alex gave her a look, asking for answers.

"I... I don't know," she said. "Maybe it was because I was killed by a Heavenly Judgment, or maybe because the desert had lost all of its Qi."

"Wait... you didn't die to a Heavenly Judgment," Yao Ning said. "There was no thunder at all when you died."

Both Scarlet and Alex looked toward her at the same time. "But you said there was a blast," Scarlet said.

"Not a thunderous one," Yao Ning said. "It was a fiery blast that radiated light all around. The aura was also... strangely warm."

"Warm aura?" Scarlet looked confused for a second before her eyes went wide. "Requiem of the Phoenix Song."

Her words made everyone curious, but Scarlet didn't explain herself. Thankfully, someone within Alex could tell him exactly what it was.

"Requiem of the Phoenix Song," Godslayer repeated. "If I recall correctly, it is one of the forbidden skills used by a phoenix to burn its body, Qi, mind, and its very essence in order to heal as many people as they can."

"Only a few phoenixes ever dare use this technique as using it is a suicide with very little guarantee of rebirth."

Chapter 1147 Feng Nuanhuo

Scarlet felt a sense of relief that almost made her feel guilty again, as she didn't feel like she deserved to not be hurt by the guilt she felt over the death of the people she killed.

However, she couldn't deny the relief she felt as she realized that in her last moment, she had decided to help everyone around her and maybe die forever in the process, instead of saving herself while everyone died.

She had used the forbidden technique, the Requiem of the Phoenix Song, which meant that she had absolutely done the most she could.

"You were in pain and desperate," Alex started speaking. "Most likely out of your mind. You instinctively wanted to go back home to protect yourself but you were stopped."

"Then, you were struck by the lightning and ran away. In the process, you gained a moment of clarity. You saw what was happening around you and felt the pain and guilt of having killed everyone. It consumed you."

"You don't remember the desperation you felt, you don't remember the fear of dying, but you do remember the pain and guilt, that's because that was the only emotion that truly stuck you."

"The fear and desperation were no longer with you, as you cared more for the people that were in pain than yourself. Then, you sacrificed yourself for them, killing yourself so you could heal them."

"You saved a lot of people from dying that night so many years ago," Alex said. "You should focus on that, and not the emotions you feel. Separate the fact from the feeling."

Scarlet nodded slightly, and even while she felt a bit better, the pain was still there. A dull, numbing pain that made her feel like she deserved the pain.

"I did something bad," Scarlet said. "Even though I did not intend for it, I did. I hurt a lot of people in the process. But I can't let that bring me down."

"Yes," Alex said. "For your sake, for the people's sake, you need to keep moving on."

The other elders spoke in the same vein, trying to revitalize the phoenix's will at the moment.

Scarlet nodded and slowly stood tall. "I'm done wallowing around," she said. "I have been missing from my domain for the last 5 thousand years. I shall return now, so the people can know that they can live in peace."

All the 10 elders immediately smiled, happy to see that their lady had returned.

"Will you punish us now that you are going to return back, lady Phoenix?" Yao Ning asked. "We deserve to be punished."

"Punish you for what?" Scarlet asked. "For trying to protect my people? For trying to do the right thing? Do you think of me as someone so cruel as to help the only ones that truly care about me?"

The elders quickly shook their heads. "But it was because of us that you had to die," one of them said.

"No, I killed myself," Scarlet said. "I gave up my life to save as many as I could. It's a good thing I was lucky and managed to go through rebirth. Otherwise, you would have been stuck here without another ruler for the next 6 thousand-wait no, for the next thousand years, maybe less."

"Oh," the group was surprised. "Another Phoenix would have come in the next millennia?"

"Yes," Scarlet said. "I think I'm right with how much time has passed now."

"I believe you are," Alex said. "Anyway, I think it is about time we leave this place."

He took back the puppet and put it into his storage ring and spread his spiritual sense to find his father and the rest who had gone into the caves to protect themselves.

He called them all back now that the trouble had ended.

"Right, what happened with the Kang family head? Wasn't he coming here?" Yao Ning asked.

"He's dead," Alex said. He pointed around the few remains of their bodies that had been scattered throughout the fields.

"Oh, you... killed them already?" the elders looked around in surprise. "Did lady Phoenix help you?"

"In the end, yes," Alex said.

"I see," they said. "Then that attack in the ocean earlier, that must have been you right, Lady Phoenix?"

"It was I," Scarlet said as she slumped a bit. Now that she knew there was nothing to worry about, she let the fatigue take over her.

"Then that bastard died the way he deserved," Yao Ning said. "For what he had done, he deserved to be burned by the lady."

"Oh," Alex said. "The Kang patriarch didn't burn. I killed him myself. Scarlet actually killed Zhu Shaofan."

"Zhu Shaofan?"

"Scarlet?"

The different elders latched onto different pieces of information.

"Why are you calling lady Phoenix, Scarlet?" Yao Ning asked.

"Well... uhh..." Alex didn't know exactly how to explain the fact that he had given a new name to the ruler of the Continent that had once been an Immortal that had lived for tens of thousands of years.

"He gave me that name," Scarlet said herself. "He found me when I was weak and helped me. I didn't have much memory or intelligence at the time, and he gave me the name."

"Oh," the elders didn't say anything.

Alex turned towards Scarlet and asked, "What's your real name?"

"My parents named me Nuanhuo," Scarlet said. "My family name is Feng, so my real name is Feng Nuanhuo."

Alex nodded as he heard that. "Feng Nuanhuo, huh?" he spoke softly.

"I would much prefer if you continue to call me Scarlet, however," Scarlet said. "I've grown somewhat attached to it."

"Oh, sure," Alex said.

"So... little Zhu really did come here trying to kill you, huh?" Yao Ning asked.

"Yes," Alex replied. "Had it not been for her, I would've died."

"Oh, uhh..." Yao Ning hesitated for a bit. "I don't think it is right to refer to lady phoenix that way, you know. She is the ruler of the continent."

"Right," Alex said slowly. He was wondering about the same thing for a while now. Since he had now learned that Scarlet was the ruler of the continent, was it right for him to keep the bond?

Or was he actually supposed to get rid of the bond? Maybe he didn't even need to care about it at all. After leaving this place, he assumed that Scarlet herself would bring forth the idea.

He wondered if he should be the one to start the conversation about it when they all noticed the people walking the down the mountain, coming towards them.

Alex's father was way ahead of everyone, running as fast as he could to come toward Alex. He arrived as close as he could before stopping and looking at everyone.

He wondered if they were enemies.

"It's alright, father," Alex said. "They are here to help us."

Graham walked up to Alex and hugged him. "Thank god you're alive," he said. "I have never been more worried in my life than today."

Alex smiled. "I was very worried about you as well, father," he said. "But it is all over now. We can all get away from here."

Chapter 1148 Father-Son Conversation

Everyone was made to get on the ship while the elders went around the island to look for what else they could find.

They would be taking a few hours as they planned on going through all 9 major islands and the smaller ones to search for what other problems could be in the Sunless lands.

This would take them some time, which they could be using to go back, but Alex was actually thankful for this. Thanks to the extra time, he could talk with his father, without all the other headaches that would come with having to deal with the aftermath of this battle.

Even if he wouldn't have to do much, he would still have to explain them as much as he knew. So, this free time was very much appreciated.

Alex not only talked with his father, but he also treated them all at the same time.

"Are you really a doctor?" Graham asked.

"Yes, I am," Alex said as he took his father's hand. He placed his fingers on the wrist and checked his pulse. They felt fine on touch alone.

"How did you learn to be a doctor? Did you go through a course or something?" Graham asked.

"Uhh... something like that, yes," Alex said. He found it hard to explain that he simply learned a few books and was now very good at being a doctor. His father might not trust him to heal him if he told him to got to be a doctor without working as hard as others would.

"I knew you would make it big in life," Graham said. "A doctor. My son is a doctor."

Alex found it comical that after everything that had happened, his father focused on the fact that he was actually a doctor.

He sent a bit of Qi through his father's body and along with it his spiritual sense. "Hmm, there is quite a bit of the dust from the lead ore in your system," he said. "How long did you have to work here?"

"I don't know," Graham said. "They took me from the tribe I was in around 20 years ago."

Alex stopped and looked at his father. "You've been here for 20 years?" he asked, rage building up in his eyes and voice.

"Yes," Graham said. "But you don't need to worry about that now. It's all over."

"Still..." Alex found it hard to quell his anger.

Graham looked at his son solemnly for a second and asked, "You killed so many people today. Do you... feel nothing?"

"No," Alex said. "It's hard to feel something about it when I've had to kill to survive for a long time. To live in this world, having a kind heart usually gets you killed."

"I know," Graham said. "I've had to kill a few too, but... I hoped at least you wouldn't have to. Sigh, I guess what is done is done."

Alex stopped checking on his father. "Your body needs to be treated properly. There is a lot of toxin building up in your system. If you don't do something about it, it will be harmful to you in the future," he said.

"Of course," Graham said. "I know that. That's why those bastards made me do it in the first place. Those cowards couldn't get in there themselves and made us do it. I was the strongest of them all, so I was the one forced the most by them as well."

Alex thought for a bit and asked, "how strong are you?"

"How?" Graham gave an inquisitive look. "How am I supposed to answer that? Is there a way to even quantify your strength?"

"Of course," Alex said. "You just compare it to your... cultivation base... of course."

His father didn't have cultivation, so of course he wouldn't know how strong his body was. He would only know that it was stronger than someone else.

"Well, let's test it then," Alex said. "Let's see if you're stronger than me or not."

He placed his left arm up and asked his father to hit it as hard as he could.

"Hard?" Graham was appalled by the suggestion. "You've just had a very hard battle to go through. Of course, I'm not hitting you."

"It's fine, just hit me," Alex said. "It might even help in the diagnosis of your condition."

Graham hesitated for a bit.

"Look, I'm a cultivator. It's fine," Alex said. "Just hit me. Even if you hurt me, I can heal."

"Well..." Graham thought for a bit and sighed. "Fine."

Alex smiled and let his father hit him.

Graham didn't have much technique for his punch, but it still came at him very fast. Alex felt the strike land and was surprised at how strong his father was.

His hand was sent backward, nearly breaking at the elbow.

"Wow," He said as he shook his hand a bit as it healed. "That's not bad. That's... about Saint Core 3rd realm or 4th realm from what I can tell."

"Oh," Graham said. "Is that good?"

"Good? That's very good," Alex said. "Most people would go their entire life and their body would never be this good. Now, all you have to do is cultivate a bit and you'll be fine."

"O-okay," Graham said.

"Your body must have stopped you from feeling the effects of the toxin. Here, eat this and we can go check up on the rest of your people," Alex said as he handed his father a pill.

As Alex checked on the people, the father-son duo talked about various different things.

"I'm happy that I finally found you," Graham said. "Now, if only we can find your mother too, our family can be reunited. I hope she's fine."

"Oh, I know where mother is," Alex said. "She's fine, don't worry."

"You do? Is she here?" Graham asked.

Alex shook his head. "She is in the Western Continent, far across the ocean. I found her 5 years or so after the game ended. I stayed with her for another 7 years before I was forced to leave."

"Oh," Graham said. "Is she fine?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I'm sure she's doing fine. Although, it has been over 20 years since I last saw her as well."

"Oh... can we go meet her? Across the ocean?" Graham asked. "You can fly now, right? Can you take me there with you?"

Alex hesitated a bit. "I'm not sure I can do that," he said. "The ocean is way too dangerous. This place around the lands isn't as dangerous, but the further you go, the stronger the beasts are there that roam the sea floor."

"It is impossible to go there unless you are very strong, or have a ship that can properly conceal itself from the beasts," Alex said. "I am not strong enough to do that myself at the moment. As for the boat... I'll ask around and see what they have. Hopefully, we can go back."

Graham nodded. "I can't wait to see her. I hope she hasn't thought of me as dead already," he said.

"Haha, don't worry, she wouldn't have," Alex said. "I'm sure she knows both of us are alive. Speaking of alive, I met aunt as well."

"Huh? You met Liz?" Graham asked.

"Yes, she's in the Northern Continent," Alex said. "It's been 15 years since I've seen her, but I'm sure we can meet her again if we can go back to mother. Also, sister Hannah is apparently in the Eastern Continent, but I haven't met her, so I'm not sure what's going on with her."

"We can go there after we meet with your mother and Liz," Graham said. "What about Rob?"

"No clue," Alex said. "I'll try and see if he's in this continent, but if not, we'll have to search the other continents."

"You've been to so many continents, huh?" Graham said. "How many are even there?"

"Five, in total," Alex said. "We're in the southern one. There's one in east, west, and north, and a last one in the center of the map, kind of like this."

Alex made a simple map with his fire in front of him. "Don't look at the shapes, I'm sure they are not accurate, but this is about right."

"I see," Graham said. "And... where are we right now?"

"Uhh... somewhere around here," Alex said as he pointed to the southeastern portion of the Southern Continent, around the waters where the Sunless lands were."

"So, we have to go here, here, and then... here, right?" Graham asked. "If we can, yes."

"Good," Graham said. "Let's go there as soon as we can."

Alex agreed as well. He would want nothing more than to meet with them all. "We will also have to go there," he said as he pointed at the Central continent.

"Why there?" Graham asked.

"I have a friend there," Alex said. "I lost him there more than 5 years ago, and I need to find a way to go in there to save him."

"Okay, then you should go there too," Graham said.

Alex nodded. He continued checking the rest of the slaves for toxins in their bodies and stopped after going through everyone.

It took some time, but in that time, he found at least 2 dozen people that were a step away from being at death's door.

There was some death aura building up in them already, so he got rid of it, and gave them some healing pills and an antidote pill.

He didn't have many antidote pills, so he was planning on mass-producing them once he got back to the mainland. After that, he could heal every single one of the people here.

Chapter 1149 Returning

The elders returned not long after and the ship took off. The ship had some concealment capabilities, but not enough to hide it from the senses of the beasts below.

Of course, the beasts here weren't strong enough to threaten a ship full of Saint Transformation realm cultivators.

Scarlet was towards the front of the deck and was speaking with the elders, and Alex was a little behind, talking with his father.

"It took you 5 days to find someone?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "You must've been incredibly hungry."

"I was," Graham said. "Had the Goldflame tribe members not found me, I would've most likely become unable to even move if it had been a few days later. Given how many beasts there were around, I would have died."

"But the Goldflame tribe found you," Alex said. "You stayed with them for long?"

"Yes," Graham said, getting slightly sad in the process. "I had no idea what was going on, so I lived my new life as well as I could. I thought of going out to look for you, but… I didn't know how I could even start."

"And then… about 7 years later, those bastards came and took me away," Graham said. "And they killed everyone else in the tribe."

Alex stayed quiet. He could feel his father's rage, so he let him be angry. At that time, he thought about something.

"You must have been very strong at the time for them to take you," Alex said.

"Huh? Oh yes," Graham said. "I was one of the best in the tribe."

"In only 7 years?" Alex asked.

"Yeah," Graham said. "I don't know how that is possible, but everyone in the tribe was surprised at my improvement too. They joked around about how I would soon be the leader of the tribe and stuff. Now that I think about it, they might not have been joking."

"Did you improve after coming here?" Alex asked.

"A bit," Graham said. "But I don't think I improved a whole lot since I didn't get to train."

Alex wondered if that was true. There was a suspicion in his heart that had grown in him after what Shen Jing had told him all those years ago.

"Father, after I was born, did you ever try to have another child?" he asked. "A brother or sister for me."

Graham looked at him. "Why are you asking that?" he asked.

"Just curious, I guess," Alex said.

Graham sighed. "We did," he said. "Of course we did. We had to. Out in the middle of nowhere, you would be lonely. And we also wanted another child. There was nothing much to do for us in the farm, so we had the time to care for another."

"However, fate didn't have such plans for us. After you were born, we were never successful at all," he said. "Hell, it took us so many tries to even get you conceived. Father was worried he would die without a grandchild. He was less irritable after Hannah was born though."

Alex nodded. 'So he was right,' he thought. His father and mother both had such incredible talent and constitutions that heaven didn't want them to procreate.

Which was to say, his father was special too.

'I'll have to check later on,' Alex thought.

He stood up and stretched a bit. It had been such a long day today that he almost forgot how long it had been.

It was only today that he had gone into the void. It was only today that he had come back from the void. It was today that he came out of the sanctum, killed someone in the Kang family, and then killed so many more in the Sunless lands.

'I will have to rest for a long time after arriving,' Alex thought.

"I'll go talk to them for a bit," he said as he walked towards the elders and Scarlet. He arrived next to them and sat down as he heard tidbits of what they were talking about.

The elders didn't show many reactions to his arrival and kept talking. Alex realized that they were talking about the major events that had happened in the Southern Continent while Scarlet was away.

Alex listened to most of it and found that most events they talked about were political in nature. Very few were actually related to non-political events, one of which was the Sundering Sanctum.

"The sanctum has been getting worse and worse over the years. The space inside is crumbling way too much. We're afraid that a few centuries down the line, it won't even be usable," one of the elders explained.

"What can we do?" Scarlet asked. "I don't have much knowledge of secret realms and formations. I can't help you with that. If it can persist for another thousand years, the next phoenix that will arrive might bring some helpers of her own to aid you all."

The elders were dejected at the answer, but it was understandable.

"Oh, don't worry about the Sanctum," Alex spoke from the side. "I've fixed it already."

"You've… fixed it?" the elders looked at him weirdly.

"Yes," Alex said. "The problem with it was that one of its space-stabilizing formation poles was slightly leaning in the wrong direction. Once I fixed that, it stopped destabilizing. It might even be properly usable in just the next 2 decades, although the rooms that have already been destroyed won't be."

The elders looked at him in shock. "You fixed the problem of the crumbling space?" they asked. "Why did you not tell us?"

Alex simply pointed behind him toward his father. "Priorities," he said. "Besides, the information isn't very important to you anyway, because I'll be taking over the sanctum very soon."

The group looked at him weirdly, not understanding what he meant. Even Scarlet was somewhat surprised.

"I'll explain it to you when I have done what I say I will do," Alex said, not bothering to explain everything just yet. "Anyway, you don't have to worry about it."

"O-okay," the elders said, trying to think of what else they could mention.

"What about the barrier?" Alex asked. "It can go down now, right?'

"Uhh… can it?" the elders asked. "If we can get rid of the Phoenix fire from being spread, then yes. But, I'm not sure if the current her can—"

"I could do it when I didn't even have any cultivation base," she said. "Making every single one of the flames go out is within my ability. In fact, even he can do it if he chooses to."

The elders looked toward Alex with a surprised looks on their faces again. "You can get rid of the Phoenix fire?" they asked.

Alex nodded.

"How?" they asked.

"Fire Dao," Alex said. "No wait, it's actually because of her."

The elders looked at Scarlet for a moment, before turning back to Alex. "What do you mean?" they asked.

"Oh, haven't you told them yet?" he asked her.

"Haven't had the time," Scarlet said.

"What… are you two talking about?" the elders asked.

"I have bonded with Scarlet," Alex said. "She's my bonded beast."

The elders looked at Alex with almost no change in expression at all. It was hard for them to understand what Alex was saying as they weren't expecting that to be the case at all.

However, as time passed and they gathered each of the words' meanings, they finally understood what he meant.

"You can't do that!" one of the elders said.

"This isn't right," another one said.

"You must end the bond right now," another one said.

The elders spoke one after another, about how this shouldn't have been done, and how Alex should immediately free Scarlet from her bonds.

However, before Alex could even answer, Scarlet spoke up. "Shut up, you lot. I did what I did myself. No one forced me to," she said. "The bond stays up."

They all looked at Scarlet in awe. "But lady Phoenix, you—"

"No one is allowed to talk about this matter again," Scarlet gave them the order.

The elders wanted to still talk about it, but they didn't want to go over her orders.

Alex looked at Scarlet with a weird look as well. "I thought you would want to get rid of this bond now that you've got your wish of going back home," he said.

"I have," Scarlet said. "But that doesn't mean everything is over."

Alex looked curiously. "What else is remaining?" he asked.

"There's still the mystery of why I am bonded to you," she asked. "There has to be a reason I felt the need to bond with you, a reason why I felt safe doing that, and it most definitely isn't because of your White Tiger's bloodline. There's something else going on with your body."

"There's actually quite a lot going with my body," Alex said. "I'm afraid you'll have to specify."

"I don't know," Scarlet said. "There's something up with your body and it's familiar to my very being. I'm sure I'm not crazy, so until I find out what is going on, I have absolutely no intention of breaking this bond."

"I see," Alex said slowly. "How long do you think it will take you to find out?"

"A thousand years," Scarlet said without hesitation.

"A thousand ye— wait, isn't that when you're going back to your other world?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I am," Scarlet said. "And I plan on taking you with me. If I can get my elders to look at what's going on with you, I'm sure I'll find my answer."

Chapter 1150 Rebirth

"Are you sure I will go with you?" Alex asked.

"Of course you will," Scarlet said. "I'll drag you with me even if you don't want to."

Alex chuckled a bit. "That's not what I meant," he said. "Do you know how old I am?"

Scarlet looked at him for a bit. "Uhh... 2 thousand years old? No, wait, 1,500," she said.

"Lady Phoenix, young Alex is one of the players we told you about earlier," the elders said. "He can't be older than a century."

"What? No way," Scarlet shouted. "That sort of cultivation speed is considered decent even in the higher realms."

"All the players are like that," the elders said. "They are terrifyingly talented."

"Most of us are, for sure," Alex said. "Which is to say, I will probably reach immortality before it is your time to leave."

"But why?" Scarlet asked. "Why are the players suddenly so talented?"

"Because we're humans," Alex said.

The elders looked at him with a slightly confused looks. "What are you talking about?" they asked.

"You probably won't understand, and I don't want to tell you for your own sake," Alex said. If they learned about how being a hybrid was very bad for one's talent, they would most likely grow some sort of complex, which would hurt them during their breakthrough to Immortality.

"Scarlet will understand," Alex said and turned towards her. "Don't you?"

Scarlet looked at him for a bit before speaking through their bond. "Are you saying you do not have demon blood in you?" she asked.

Alex nodded. "Absolutely none," he said.

"But how?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit and sighed. "For that, I'll have to explain to you about players, which will take some time. Let's talk about it later," he said. "I might even have an idea about why you want to remain bonded to me, but I don't want to talk about it out here in front of them."

Scarlet was curious, but she let the matter go for now. "Sure," she said.

"So, what else is left for you to tell me about?" she asked the elders.

The elders looked around and shook their heads. "I suppose there's nothing that pops out in our heads. Do you have any questions you want to ask us about?" they asked Scarlet.

Scarlet shook her head as she had no more questions, but Alex did.

"I have something," he said. "What was up with the Northern lights? It was a big deal in the Wasteland, but no one seems to even care about it here at all."

"The northern lights?" the elders looked around at each other, looking for some answers. They shook their head as they had no idea what he was talking about.

"It was apparently in the desert in the north, and every night it glowed bright like a second sun. It disappeared some dozen or so years ago, sending the beasts that were gathered around it in a fury to attack the tribes there."

"Ah!" one of the elders realized what he was talking about. "Is that what the tribes call it?"

"You know about it?" Scarlet was curious as well.

"Of course," the elder said. "It was your dead body, lady Phoenix."

"What?"

"Oh!"

The two people gave two separate reactions to the old man's answer. Scarlet understood what was going on, while Alex was very confused.

"That makes sense," Scarlet said.

"What makes sense?" Alex asked. "Can you elaborate?"

"I was going through a rebirth," Scarlet said. "The light everyone saw was my burning body, which took thousands of years to burn fully, because of how weak my flames most likely were."

"Your body was burning for five thousand years?" Alex couldn't believe it. "How are you reborn if your body continues burning? Actually, tell me how rebirth works entirely."

"Sure," Scarlet said. "It's simple. When I am dying, I can choose to go through rebirth. If I don't choose it, the chances depend on how much Qi or blood essence I have remaining. Most of the time, it's enough to go through rebirth."

"When I start the process, my body starts burning and fueling the rebirth process, slowly reverting my body to what I was long ago. The more of the fuel I have, the faster it gets."

"The process is supposed to be not more than a century or two, but this time around, I probably had very little blood essence to burn, so my body had to spend a very long time reverting itself back to the point where I was just a young little chick again."

"Those people probably saw my burning body from afar and called it the light that you were talking about," Scarlet said.

"I see," Alex said as he thought for a moment. "I suppose that makes sense now that I hear it. Then, does that mean you were reborn there in the desert and were there for so many years?"

"Yeah," Scarlet said. "Fortunately I can thrive off of the sun, so I was fine. If I needed actual food for sustenance, I would've most likely died."

"I hadn't even realized that your body had stopped burning, Lady Phoenix," one of the elders said. "Had we known, we would have most likely gone out looking for you."

The others nodded in agreement.

"Whatever, it's fine," Scarlet said and looked toward Alex. "What's wrong? Did you not like my explanation or what?"

"Well, more like I am confused by your explanation," he said. "When you said rebirth, I assumed you would randomly be born to some other beast or your soul would escape and a body would grow around your soul. But what you said was completely different. Your body reverts back, is it?"

"Yes," Scarlet said. "It reverts back to how it was when I was just born."

"Okay, so are you becoming a new one, or are you turning back your time?" Alex asked.

"That's the question, isn't it?" Scarlet asked. "Even we don't know what it is exactly, but popular belief is that we're turning back time, instead of growing a new body, if that is what you're asking."

"Popular belief amongst the phoenix?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Scarlet said.

"Can you tell me why they believe that?" Alex asked.

"Simple," Scarlet said. "Because us Phoenix have the ability to sense Time aura."

Alex was stunned for a moment. "What?" he asked in surprise.

"You heard me right," Scarlet said. "Phoenixes have the ability to sense the Time aura, so we believe being able to revert time back for our body at death's door is a blessing given to us. It works in line with what the other 3 beasts got as well."

Alex was too stunned to say anything. 'Sense Time aura,' he thought. "Do you think I have a chance at learning how to sense the Time aura too?"

"It's... possible, but highly unlikely," Scarlet said. "To be able to sense Time aura or Space aura, you need to be born with the talent to do so. If not, you will have to spend thousands of years trying to sense it in a place that is thick with Time aura. Even then, there is no guarantee that you can actually sense it."

Chapter 1151 Return To The Palace

Alex remembered when his aunt filled a room with Time aura and he was inside of it, trying to sense it. He had not been able to do it at all.

He was on the Ancient battlefield for over two years as well, and he had not been able to sense the Time aura at all. So, that probably meant that he was never going to be able to unless he spent years as Scarlet mentioned.

'Well, we'll see about that in the future,' Alex thought and forgot about the matter.

"So, did I arrive where you died?" Alex asked. "I always assumed the crater that formed was because of me, but I also knew that wasn't possible at all since I teleported here, instead of flying in."

"I don't think you arrived there, actually," Scarlet said. "I somewhat remember flying around and noticing your arrival somewhere not far away from there. I had to drag you back to where I was reborn since that was the only place with fire."

"Oh," Alex said, slightly surprised. "I have always assumed it was my Qi that healed me, but now that I think about it, I suppose the fire healing me makes more sense."

Scarlet nodded.

"Anyway, what are your plans on the Phoenix flames that are spread all throughout the Wasteland?" Alex asked.

"What do you mean?" Scarlet asked.

"I was wondering if you'll get rid of it all now that you're back," Alex said. "Get rid of the fire, get the continent back to how it was."

"Uh... no, I don't think that will be necessary," Scarlet said. "The people of the Wasteland have already gotten used to living that way, so we will let them be. However, we will give them the option to turn their land into a place that can sustain cultivation."

"I see," Alex said. "Then you'll have to go around and survey the people a bit."

"I guess," Scarlet said. "Nothing to worry about. I have people that will do it for me."

Alex chuckled. "I suppose that benefit comes with being a ruler of the entire continent," he said. "Question, how does the Azure Dragon rule his continent? He doesn't rule it at all, right?"

"Huh? Uh... yeah, he lets the little human rule it," Scarlet said. "Why?"

"That means of all the four different beasts, you are the only one that actually rules the continent you were sent to rule," Alex said. "I suppose it's better to say you did since none of you are around to help."

"The White Tiger is dead, the Tortoise is in hiding because he is hurt and is afraid the Heavenly Judgment will kill him, the Dragon is in hiding too, you were going through a rebirth, and who knows where the snake is," Alex said.

"You really know a lot more than you should, don't you?" Scarlet asked.

"I suppose I'm just that much more curious," Alex said. "The only thing that fascinates me more than learning about the continent rulers, is finding out who created the game that sent us all here."

"Does that mean we'll jump on your list of curious topics if you know where to find this game creator?" Scarlet asked.

"Oh, I know where to find him. It's just impossible to go there as I am," he said.

"Where?" Scarlet asked curiously.

Alex looked around and saw the faces of the elders and sighed. "I'm afraid I don't want to say it out in the open," he said. "I will tell you once we are alone."

"Fine," Scarlet said.

Alex felt the first rays of sun hit the back of his head and glow the deck bright. At the same time, he looked in the distance and saw the massive shoreline of the continent.

"We're here," Alex said softly and everyone turned around to look in the distance.

The slaves in the back started cheering and crying as the fact that they were saved became more real for them with the sun out. Alex walked back to his father, who also was getting emotional with everyone else.

"We are finally free," someone shouted, and everyone shouted after him.

"Where... where are we going next?" Graham asked.

"Uhh... probably the capital at the center of the continent. That... should take about half a day at least," Alex said as he judged the speed of the ship.

"Although..." just as he said that, the ship started slowing down. It fully came to a stop once it was on land, on top of a city.

"Let's go down. We'll find a place for everyone to stay for now. They'll probably have to set up a tent," Yao Ning said and was the first to go down.

The rest of the elders followed suit and the boat slowly started lowering. Scarlet moved to the edge of the ship and looked down at the open ground where the ship was landing.

Not far away from there, people were starting to gather up as they were curious about exactly what was happening. When they saw Scarlet on top of the ship, everyone started wondering the same question.

Had the Phoenixes finally come out of their closed cultivation?

Alex quickly jumped off the ship and met with one of the elders. "We're stopping here?" he asked. It was so far away from the capital that it just didn't feel right for him.

"We'll have to give them all a place to stay for now. We'll get them to rest while we deal with more pressing matters," the elder said while gesturing toward Scarlet.

Alex nodded. He had hoped they would all be taken back to the Sunborn Sanctuary, but that wasn't going to happen. He should have guessed that much at least.

A few people gathered, people in the Saint realm, and the elders gave them the orders to look after these groups of people.

When they heard the orders being given by the 10 council members, while in the presence of the noble phoenix, they were more than happy to comply.

Within minutes, people were bringing out massive tents and setting up formations to help them.

The tribal folks came off the ship one by one as they looked at the massive city with tall buildings with wide eyes. They had spent the majority of their lives living in small huts and then spent another large chunk working in the mines. So, seeing such a city was truly glorious for them.

Once the tents had started being placed, the elders decided to leave. "Let's go. We will teleport directly to the capital," one of the elders said.

"Can my father come?" Alex asked.

"Uhh..." the elders hesitated a bit. "His Qi isn't recorded in the capital's formation, so..."

"Qi? Look at him, he has no cultivation base at all," Alex said.

"Oh, right," the elders realized. "Weird, not even a single realm."

"There was never any Qi anywhere he went," Alex said.

"Then, yeah, he can come," the elders said. "Mortals don't have to be on the list to get in."

Alex nodded and brought his father along with him.

Graham wanted to stay behind with his friends, but he also wanted to go with Alex. So, he was a little conflicted at the moment.

"Don't worry," Alex said. "Once we're done with Scarlet, we will return back here. I still need to make their pills, which I will need ingredients from some other place."

"We're coming back?" Graham asked. "Well, then I suppose I can go with you."

The elders walked slowly at the front, surrounding Scarlet who was in her largest form possible. She was nearly 3 meters tall and everywhere she walked, the people bent their knee in respect.

There were cheers in the city, and news of the phoenix's return would spread throughout the continent at any moment now.

Alex watched the people who were happy, surprised, shocked, and feeling every other feeling in between. These people really were waiting for the Phoenix to return for a very long time.

The group reached the teleportation formation and left the city they were in. All 13 of them arrived in the Sunborn Sanctuary at once and walked out.

Everyone there too was surprised and started cheering for Scarlet's return.

Scarlet smiled and walked through the crowd once more, going back towards the palace. Since the palace was so far away, they flew back through the city and arrived at the palace not long after.

"Oh, the palace is still here," Scarlet said as she remembered the place.

"We've kept everything as is," the elders said.

Scarlet nodded. "I can see that," she said. Her spiritual sense was all around the palace. "Wait, what's up with the pigs at the back?"

"Pigs?" the elders were confused for a moment. "Oh wait, those are pill swine. He was making pills and needed it to test the pills."

"Oh, what sort of pills?" Scarlet asked.

"Ones that will improve your Earth and Water spiritual roots," Alex said.

Scarlet looked back at him with a surprised look on her face. "You never mentioned you were working on those," she said.

"I wanted to forget about it. It took me over a year to find the perfect ingredients to make it," Alex said. "You don't want it, right?"

"Nah, it's useless for me," Scarlet said.

"Of course," Alex said. Heavenly beasts always only had a single type of spiritual root in them after all.

Scarlet walked around a bit and turned to Alex. "Go get your father settled. I will enter the dome soon, and I want you to come with me. I want those answers you've been teasing me about."

Chapter 1152 Enter The Dome

Alex took his father to one of the guest rooms in the palace and called for some servants to bring some food for his father.

"You're going somewhere?" Graham asked.

"Yeah, I'll be with Scarlet for a bit," Alex said. "Just eat what they bring you and rest. I will make some pills for your friends later on, and after everything is over, I will teach you about cultivation and whatnot. You will have to start on that journey."

Graham nodded. "Alright, I will rest," he said and lay on the bed.

Alex smiled and turned around to leave. He arrived in the palace hall where Scarlet was with the elders.

"Oh, you're here," Scarlet said, making everyone stop talking. "Let's go."

"But lady Phoenix, we have to—"

"Fine, fine, do it tomorrow. I'm tired and would like to go rest," she said as she flew away from the hall.

"Understood," the elders bowed toward her and said nothing more.

"What was that about?" Alex asked.

"A pain in the butt, if you ask me," Scarlet said. "Damn, I didn't realize how annoying it was being a ruler. Probably because I never really understood what it felt like not having to work at all. Ah, it was so good."

"Hey, you don't get to slack off," Alex said.

"Everyone else does," Scarlet said as she flew away. "Anyway, let's go to my home."

"You don't consider this your home, huh?" Alex asked.

"Of course not," Scarlet said. "This is just a front for the people that want to see a proper palace for a proper ruler. At least that was what my senior told me before leaving. Anyway, let's leave."

Alex nodded and walked to the massive garden in the back. His pill swine were still here, which reminded him that he still had one more pill to make for them.

"Sigh, that dao pill is going to be very annoying to figure out," he said.

"The what?" Scarlet turned around.

"Nothing, just thinking about some pills I will have to make in the near future," Alex said.

"I see," Scarlet said. "Forget about that though, let's go in."

The dome shuddered suddenly, and the massive gate that Alex had seen before started sliding open. The gate was about 10 meters tall and 10 meters wide, and from what Alex could see, nearly a meter thick.

He could also notice formations drawn directly onto the metal gate, which had now slid away entirely.

Scarlet entered through the gate, and Alex walked in too. From the outside, he could not see anything inside at all. It was as if all light was blocked from coming out of the dome.

As he passed through the veil of darkness, he arrived in the light. A brilliant, red light that seemed to give off so much heat that had Alex's body not been attuned to withstanding heat, he would've had to start using his Dao.

"Woah!" he said as he saw the green landscape that surrounded molten lava that went from one side of the dome to the other.

There were no houses to stay in, no buildings to work in. Everything was out in the open, and that surprised Alex very much. Even so, he couldn't voice it as he was stunned by the land inside the dome.

He looked up at the dome itself, which seemed very translucent, with barely any light passing through. That was enough for Alex to see the world, however.

There was a lake in the forest to his left, one that was at the base of a waterfall. The middle area that was full of lava was nothing more than a single line of land, confusing him with how it even came to be.

His best guess was a formation of some sort.

He looked at the bed of flowers to the other side of the magma line, and then at the center where a massive piece of rock stood directly in the molten lava, not affected by the heat at all.

"Is that where you stay?" Alex asked when he saw the rock.

"That's where I go to cultivate, yes," Scarlet said. "You want a tour of the place?"

"Absolutely," Alex said. "But, shouldn't you first open the dome up, and let in some light?"

"Oh, the dome is already open," Scarlet said.

Alex looked up once more. "No, it isn't," he said.

"Well, not like that," Scarlet said. "The dome can't be opened as the gate did. I say openly because it's letting all the light through without stopping almost all of it.

Alex was still confused. "Then why isn't it as bright?" he asked.

"Uh... there," Scarlet pointed to one side of the place, that was the starting line where the magma was.

When Alex looked in the direction she pointed at, he saw something rather curious. A small area in the magma was glowing very brightly as if a flashlight was shining in that area.

When Alex looked carefully, he realized that sunlight from all around the dome was hitting that place.

"Oh," he said as he quickly looked up. Now that he was looking more carefully and was actually searching for it, he could see most of the sunlight had actually bent after they entered through the dome and were converging onto a very, very small area, heating that place to a high temperature.

'All that energy in one place,' Alex thought as he looked at the 50-kilometer-wide dome in shock. 'No wonder it is all molten.'

"You like staying around magma, is it?" he asked.

"Sunlight is good for our body," Scarlet said. "Not only is it good sustenance, if we can have enough of it, but we can also actually improve our physical body too. Although, it's not as easy as those damn tigers, it's still quite good."

"That's a common trait of the Phoenix? Surviving off of sunlight?" Alex asked.

"Common in the Phoenixes at least," Scarlet said. "There are others with phoenix blood that may necessarily be a phoenix, who can also have that trait."

"I see," Alex said. "That's quite a good trait to have."

"Alright. Come on. Let me take you on that tour," Scarlet said and the two of them moved toward the forest.

They toured for a short time, going through most of the locations inside this location. There were actually some buildings on the very another side of the dome, along with another gate that led directly to the Intercontinental Teleportation formations.

After being done with it all, Scarlet brought Alex to the massive rock on the magma.

Alex looked to one side and saw that the converging sunlight had come halfway to the stone they were on already. He wondered just how hot it was going to be if it actually fell on them.

"Okay, now that we are done, you can start explaining," Scarlet said.

"Where do I start?" Alex asked as he sat beside her.

"Hmm, start with what you know about why you think I was tempted to bond with you," Scarlet said.

"Alright," Alex said. "I'm not sure about this so this is just a guess, but I believe it has something to do with my body's constitution."

"Hmm? Explain," Scarlet said.

"I got the idea after hearing about your attack and now your own physical trait," Alex said. "Phoenixes seem to be connected with the sun somehow. Do you have any idea why that is?"

Scarlet thought for a bit and answered. "There is a belief in the Phoenix clan that when we were blessed with our powers, the god that blessed us broke off a part of the sun and put it in our body."

"Our bodies were too weak to handle it, so we lost most of the sun, which later turned into the moon, but we still remain a shard of the sun," Scarlet said. "Of course, that's complete bull crap, but that is what is believed."

"I see," Alex said. "Well, I believe the connection I have found is that I have the Sun God's Div-no, Celestial Yang body."

"Okay," Scarlet said while nodding her head. "What's that?"

Alex hesitated a bit. "Have you never heard of the Sun God either?" he asked.

Scarlet shook her head. "I don't think such a god exists," she said.

"I told you before kid, Sun God doesn't exist," Godslayer said from his mental space.

"But that is my body," Alex said. "It has something to do with the sun, which is why I thought you were tempted to bond with me."

"Ah, I see. I can see how it would make sense," Scarlet said. "So your body is related to the sun huh?"

Alex nodded.

"What can it do?" Scarlet asked.

"Uhh, quite a few things," Alex said. "Let's see... I can devour any pill or poison or even beast cores and completely get rid of everything but the energy in it. Meaning, I can never be poisoned either. I can... collect yang to improve my Qi, which is why my current Qi is so much stronger than my cultivation base. My Yang Qi can also activate any formation or script as well. I can also consume someone's spirit and improve my mental strength."

Alex wondered if there was something else that he could do because of his constitution that others couldn't. "Oh right, weirdly enough, I can read the human language, without having ever learned or even seen it before in my life. That is the weirdest of all surely."

Scarlet looked at him with narrowed eyes for a full minute, unnerving Alex in the process, before finally speaking. "None of those sound like they have anything to do with the sun though."

"What exactly can your body do that is related to the sun?"

Chapter 1153 Nine Yang Court

Alex was stunned at the question posed to him by the phoenix. What could his body do that was related to the sun at all?

He had never thought about that question, so he had no idea what to say at all. "I suppose my body is full of Yang, just like the sun?" he said.

"That I can understand," Scarlet said. "But can your body heal while in the sun?"

"No," Alex replied.

"Uh, can it get stronger in the sun or faster?" she asked.

"No," Alex said again.

"So, do you get any sort of benefit while the sun is out that you do not get at night time?" she asked.

"N—no," Alex said. "But my body has Yang Qi though."

"And my body has Fire Qi," Scarlet said.

"Isn't Yang close enough to Fire?" Alex asked.

"They appear to be, but they're entirely different. You can't take two types of elements and say it's the same. Do you think Water is the same as Yin? If so what are the same as Earth, Metal, and Wood?"

Alex shrunk a little. "I don't know," he said. "That's the only idea I had."

"Sun God's Celestial Yang body," Scarlet said out loud. "I don't know who this sun god is or was, but it sounds like you have a body that has to do with Yang, more than it has to do with Sun."

"I..." Alex sighed a little. He couldn't argue at all. "I thought because it had the word sun, it might be the case."

"Just because it has a name, doesn't mean it is that thing," Scarlet said. "Besides, how did you even find out that name? I swear I've never heard of it before."

"I... read it from my game system," Alex said. Even as he said it, he couldn't help but understand the possibility of the game lying to him.

"What's a game system?" Scarlet asked.

"When we were sent here, we had some visual things that would appear in front of us that only we could see. It had a bunch of information about us, which we used to learn about our cultivation base, Spiritual roots, and talents. It also included our body, and mine was called Sun God's Divine Yang Body at the time."

"It was a Divine grade body at the time, which evolved to the Celestial grade after I ate a Nine Yang Divine fruit. Considering what it said—"

"Hold on! Hold On!" Scarlet shouted quickly. "What did you say you ate?"

"Uhh, Nine Yang Divine Fruit," Alex said. "Why?"

"Can you describe it?" Scarlet asked curiously.

"I mean, not visually, but it was so strong that it suppressed an entire area to be without Qi and barely any spiritual energy at all. Anyone who walked into its radius would become a mortal."

"It also shined so bright that the night would look like day, but that was around the end when the fruit was fully ripe. I didn't have my eyesight or any other feeling at the time. I only remember eating the fruit and then I woke up later, fully healed," Alex said.

"You were injured?" Scarlet asked. "Actually, that doesn't matter. Did you eat a fruit of the Nine Yang Divine Tree? No way!"

"I did," Alex said. "I even have the-never mind. Do you know anything about the fruit?"

He felt very sad when he remembered all the items he had lost in the battle against the false immortal. The Nine Yang Divine fruit's seed and 3 of the tree's leaves had been a few of the things he had lost with them.

Worst of all, he hadn't lost it in a place like the Northern Continent, where one could pick it up and keep it after his battle was over. It was lost in the dammed Qi barrier of the Central Continent that would rip everything to shred.

"Did this fruit also get named the same way your body was named or...?" Scarlet asked.

"Oh no, I know its name because it's a fruit," Alex said. "I have the Alchemy God's Knowledge in here, and I can name any and every plant in the world."

"I find that impossible to believe," Scarlet said. "How is there another Nine Yang Divine Tree in this world?"

Alex was getting more and more curious as well. He had searched a bit about the fruit while he was back in the Beast realm in the western continent, and neither the World Tree's seed nor the Nine Yang Divine fruit had resulted in any information.

"Can you tell me why that is important? The fruit I mean," Alex said.

"That plant is treated as the Nine Yang court's god. I can't imagine what they would do if they ever find out that there is another one of the plants out there," Scarlet said.

"Who are the Nine Yang court?" Alex asked.

"They are one of the oldest human organizations in the world. Their past dates back to a time that a normal person can't even imagine," Scarlet said. "It is said that... it is said that their organization was actually established way before the Eternal War even started. As for its purpose... nobody really knows."

"Before the Eternal War?" Alex asked with a shocked look on his face. "When did that start exactly?"

"That information is so old that even I am not qualified to learn about it. You might just have to be in the Divine realm to even learn about it, maybe even Celestial, who knows," Scarlet said. "It was definitely hundreds of thousands of years ago, that's for sure."

"Anyway, where's that tree?" Scarlet asked. "We should tell the Nine Yang court about it before they think this world tried to hide it from them. They are such a strict group of people that they would go to war with the Heavenly beasts if they believed we were hiding it in this world on purpose."

"Uhh..." Alex hesitated for a bit. "It's... not there anymore. After I ate the fruit, the plant was destroyed."

"Oh," Scarlet said with a surprised face. "Okay, that makes it better. The Nine Yang court won't come for this world then if they never find there's another one of their trees here."

"Uhh..." Alex hesitated once again.

"What?" Scarlet asked.

"What if..." he thought for a bit. "What if there were only one tree? What if over a thousand years ago, a bunch of stuff fell from the stars in a meteor shower, and the Nine Yang Divine tree happened to be one of those things?"

"What... are you saying?" Scarlet asked.

"What I'm saying is... what if the fruit I ate, came from the tree that was supposed to be with the Nine Yang court, but somehow it came down here," Alex said. "It wouldn't be the only thing here as many other immortal items fell down as well, including the Blood God's Manual, the Ocean God's Teardrop, and many Immortal and Divine grade cultivation techniques."

"And including all that, the Nine Yang Divine Tree. What if it belonged to the Nine Yang Court?"

Scarlet's eyes went wide and she started fearing. "If... if that were the case and people were to ever find out, then... the Nine Yang Court would definitely punish the one that resulted in it coming here, and... the one that destroyed it."

Alex couldn't help but give a terrified smile at the answer. "Uhh, so it's better if we don't let the cat out of the box, huh?"

"You will definitely have to hide it with all of your life," Scarlet said as she thought about it. "I will have to remove this information from my head too. Dear god, this is scary."

"Le-let's not talk about it then," Alex said. "Let's never talk about it. Uhh... let's talk about my body again. I learned about it from the information that was given to me by the creator of the game that sent us here."

"Right, game and creator, yes. Understandable," Scarlet said as she nodded her head, but Alex could see her head wasn't there at all.

"Yes," he said. "It was because of the creator that I thought my body was the reason why you decided to bond with me."

"I see," Scarlet said. "Did you not consider the creator lying then?"

"Never," Alex said. "I... had no reason to, really."

"You've never met this creator, right? So why do you trust him so much?" Scarlet asked.

"I don't know," Alex said. "I suppose I just do."

"Yeah, unless you can find him, you won't know what is true, and what is not," Scarlet said. "But you did mention that you know where he is, right?"

"Yes," Alex said. "In the Central Continent."

"There's a realm that is named like th-wait, Central Continent?" Scarlet was surprised. "Our Central Continent?"

"The same one we can't enter to right now," Alex said. "That is where we come from."

"Huh? Wait, what?" Scarlet was confused. "Those people outside said players came from another world, because of how good their talent was."

"No, they all come from the Central continent. It's an entirely different world in there, and we were snuck out of the place with the old teleportation formations that are still in there. The creator of our game made it happen."

"I am so confused right now," Scarlet said.

"I can understand," Alex said. "Our talent comes from the fact that we are humans without Demon blood mixed into us, which is why everyone is so talented."

"No, wait," Scarlet said. "I'm so confused. Please explain everything from the beginning to me."

Chapter 1154 Immortality And Mortality

Alex explained everything he could to Scarlet. He explained his origin, his journey, and the next goal he wanted to achieve.

Scarlet was surprised at just how ridiculous it all was, and how Alex really had only been cultivating for no more than 30 years until now.

"That's one hell of a story," she said while still trying to put together the information she heard. "So, the Western Continent had items that don't belong here?"

"Yes," Alex said. "Including this ring."

"I see," Scarlet said. "I was wondering how you got those. As long as we hide the fact that the Nine Yang Divine Tree was here, we should be fine."

"Yeah, we should definitely hide that," Alex said. "What about the rest?"

"What other things exactly are there?" Scarlet asked.

"Uh... there's the black stele, the yin orb that I ate, the Blood God's manual that I have, and Ocean God's legacy treasure," Alex said. "I don't think I'm aware of any other. The people must be hiding the rest.'

Scarlet nodded. "I would love to see what else there are," she said. "Unfortunately..."

"Hmm? You want to go?" Alex asked. "Then we should go. I want to go find my mother too. We can take my father."

Scarlet shook her head. "The way I am right now, we will die out there in less than a day," she said.

Alex nodded. "I know," he said. "That's why we go on a ship."

"I don't believe we have any ship," Scarlet said. "At least not one that can make the travel between Southern Continent and the Western Continent. That's the largest expanse of water, and not many ships can travel through it."

"But there has to be some right?" Alex asked.

"I never really had any use for them, and with the existence of the teleportation formation, no one really had any need as well," Scarlet said.

"Then what about when the elders went to the Western Continent to rob it?" Alex asked.

"That I believe they used the ships given to them by the Eastern Continent, so it was taken back," Scarlet said.

"I... see," Alex said "but we can still go soon right? As soon as you get a little stronger?"

Scarlet shook her head. "I can't," she said.

"Why not? If you're strong, you won't have to worry about the beasts," Alex said.

"No, but I will have to worry about my oath," she said.

Alex frowned. "What oath?" he asked.

"To protect the worlds we come to, we make an oath to never kill the people here, and to never go to another ruler's land without the ruler present," Scarlet said. "This means I can go to the Northern Continent and the Eastern Continent, but because the White Tiger is not present in the Western Continent, I cannot go. Not just me, even the Dragon or the Tortoise can't go there either."

Alex felt a little dejected when he heard that.

"Is there no way for you to go there at all?" he asked. "Even if you're inside of the beast space?"

"That... I do not know," Scarlet said. "But I would definitely not want to test it."

"Alright," Alex said. "Uhh. do you not have any treasures with you then? One that you brought here from your home world? There should be some there that should help us, right?"

"No," Scarlet said. "I mean, I do, but I don't have access to it right now."

"Is it locked away somewhere? Can we go there? I might have a way to open it if it's a formation or script," Alex said.

Scarlet chuckled a bit. "It's not a place you can access at all," she said. "Unless... no, that would be stupid."

"When will you have access?" Alex asked.

"When I reach the Immortal Realm once more," Scarlet said.

"Oh right," Alex remembered. "You used to be an Immortal. You know what it feels like to break through to Immortality. Can you tell me anything that I might get to use? Any hints that would help me?"

"Uhh..." Scarlet hesitated for a bit. "We try not to tell people about Immortality. It... it can make them fail."

"Hmm?" Alex was surprised. "That... I feel like someone told me something similar before. It might have been the panther."

"Well, it was a smart panther then," Scarlet said. "The thing about Immortality is... it's different from what a mortal expects of Immortality."

"What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"You sure you want to know?" Scarlet asked.

"Absolutely," he said.

Scarlet sighed and asked. "What's the first thing you think of when you hear the word Immortality?"

"Umm... that I won't die," Alex said.

"And do you think Immortals can't die?" Scarlet asked.

Alex shook his head. He knew of Immortals that had died. Hell, there were 7 different people's fragmented memories in his head that he knew had already died.

One had to rip out their spirit and memories to pass along the Undying Physique technique as their inheritance. None of the Undying Gods had lived after their spirit was hurt.

Even the White Tiger had died.

"No, they die," Alex said. "But that's only when you get killed or poisoned or that stuff, right?"

"Yes," Scarlet said. "But... uhh, I don't know if I should tell you or not. This might end up helping your inner demon very much, which is why I'm hesitating."

Alex hesitated to ask for her to continue as well when he heard that. "It's... something bad?" he asked.

"Kinda, yes," Scarlet said. "Should I still say it?"

Alex thought for a bit. Was he going to give up on his chance to learn about the Immortal realm? Most definitely not.

"Tell me," Alex said. "I'm ready to hear it."

Scarlet thought for a bit and nodded. "Fine, I'll tell you," she said. "The truth is, when you reach Immortality, you stop growing in age and can thus essentially live forever. Your lifespan becomes infinite."

Alex nodded as that was to be expected.

"Buuuut, Immortality is not something the heavens can allow one to keep," Scarlet said. "That is not the natural order of life after all. So, from time to time, the heavens will attack you with tribulation lightning. You cannot stop it, and you cannot hide from it. The only thing you can potentially do is move it back by a few years. But for that, you will have to break through to the next realm."

"The higher your realm is, the later the heavens will come after you. But they will come. As such, your mortality rate actually goes up way high once you reach the Immortal realm," Scarlet finished.

Alex's eyes were wide. "The heavens not only judge us before we enter the Immortal realm but after we reach it as well?" he asked.

Scarlet nodded.

"And people die from this easily?" he asked.

"If you don't have something special about you like a strong technique, or strong artifacts, the chances of dying is over 60%," Scarlet mentioned.

"And... how often does this tribulation lightning come? You make it sound like it's often," Alex said fearfully.

"There's no fixed time period, but it is about 10 thousand years after reaching Immortality," Scarlet said.

Alex was a little taken aback. "Wait, 10 thousand? You worried me for no reason," he said.

"Yes, it's not scary at first," Scarlet said. "But the more you survive it, the stronger the lighting becomes. Unless you can continue breaking through your cultivation realms, at some point, the lightning would get too much for you and you will die."

"I don't see why this is so scary though," Alex said. "You just have to continue breaking through and you will be fine."

"You say that, but what about people whose cultivation speed isn't the best?" Scarlet asked. "A normal person takes 10 to 20 years to break through in their early Saint realm. Later on, it reaches anywhere between 2 to 3 centuries for each realm. The ones out there won't reach Immortality for the next thousand years minimum."

"Imagine that sort of speed, but you are actually an immortal now. Cultivation speed drops so much that the average cultivation speed amongst people who don't belong to big clans and families is anywhere between a thousand and 2 thousand years. And that's just for the start."

"As they progress, their speed lowers. At that point, the heaven catches up to them very quickly," Scarlet said. "I imagine you are not very scared about this, but for normal people, the knowledge that reaching Immortality is just finalizing their mortality is an unbearable knowledge. If they learn about it, their Inner Demons get a very powerful weapon to use during their breakthrough to immortality."

"And if that manages to get into their head when the lightning comes, they won't survive," Scarlet said.

"I understand," Alex said. He thought about his family and if he should be worried about them by any chance. However, almost all players had better talent than most mortals, so there was nothing for him to worry about.

"That was some fascinating information," Alex said. "Thank you."

"You are happy that I told you Immortality does not make you Immortal, huh?" Scarlet asked with a chuckle.

"I can imagine the shock one would feel when they learn about this information after they reach the immortal realm. I am actually very happy to have learned about it now," he said. "Thank you for telling me about this."

"Well, if you're happy then it's fine, I suppose," Scarlet said.

Then she looked to the side. "Oh, the beam is here. Do you want to leave the place? Or can you handle the heat?"

Chapter 1155 A Weird Feeling

Alex looked to his right and saw the brilliantly shining magma that was due to the concentrated light from the massive dome.

A fresh line of lava was left behind by the beam and it was now approaching them.

"You can leave if you want," Scarlet said.

"I should be fine with my dao, but... how hot can it get?" Alex asked.

"Very hot," Scarlet said. "Hot enough to melt most of the clothes you are wearing. Maybe even your body, down to its bones."

"Not even my Dao can stop it?" Alex asked with a surprised look on his face.

"Well, not normally," Scarlet said and suddenly started chuckling. "Don't worry, you'll be fine."

"Oh," Alex was taken aback. "You were joking?"

"No, I was telling the truth," she said. "The heat is definitely something that cannot be handled by someone like you. Even the Immortal me couldn't handle it, and I am a goddamn phoenix."

"Uhh, then shouldn't we move?" he asked.

"No, we have a way to handle the heat," she said. "Although, I should make sure it is still working."

She quickly spread her spiritual sense and checked something. "Okay, it's working fine," she said.

Alex didn't understand what was going on, but the beam was getting incredibly close to them. As it arrived right next to the massive piece of rock they were on, something happened that surprised Alex.

He couldn't tell what it was exactly, but there was a unique feeling about whatever was happening.

The rock they were on suddenly moved, placing itself a few meters to the side of the concentrated beam of sunlight. He expected an incredible amount of heat to hit him suddenly, but to his surprise, the heat was warm at best.

Before he could think of what was happening, the piece of rock suddenly started glowing. It was not just soaking in the heat, but also the light that was falling on it.

Then, it released all the sunlight inside the dome.

The sunlight spread far and wide, brightening the entire sanctuary.

"This is a Sunstone," Scarlet explained. "It can take in heat and light, and spread it out everywhere. It's usually used by regular people to place it on their home's roof so it can light up the room in the daytime. It is especially useful for underground, where sunlight can't get to so easily."

"But us phoenixes use it a little differently," She said. "We need the sun to improve our body, so we gather all the light from an area. But, that ends up causing the mess you see. So to rectify that problem, we use a massive piece of the sunstone to redistribute the light."

"That way, the plants, and animals inside can also get some sunlight, and not all is wasted... well, most of the time," she said.

Alex nodded as he heard that. He looked at the bright sanctuary where everything he could see was in the light.

"So this is the real Sunborn Sanctuary, huh?" he said. "Born of the sun, makes sense."

"It does," Scarlet said. "I didn't come up with that name though, it was my predecessor. So I can't really take credit."

She lay down on the stone and closed her eyes as she felt the gentle sunlight hit her. "Ah, I've missed this," she said with a small smile on her face.

Alex felt the sunlight too and it was quite hot if any normal person were there. However, to him, it felt warm. It prompted the question in him if his body really had anything to do with the sun since even this much sun wasn't doing anything to him.

'So it must really be about the yang then,' he thought.

Scarlet had gone completely quiet, so he was on his own. Now that he was finally done with being surprised by his situation, he started noticing the weird feeling he was having once again.

'What is this?' he wondered. His senses couldn't tell him anything. He looked towards Scarlet and nothing was wrong with her either.

"It feels so weird," he said softly, trying to figure out what was going on.

"What feels weird?" Scarlet asked without opening her eyes.

"I can't tell," he said. "I can only sense it. It feels like..."

He remembered a time when he had a similar experience, where he felt something he couldn't explain, and he later learned what exactly it was.

"Did something happen to the space around here?" Alex asked. But before Scarlet could even answer, he shook his head. "No, this is not space acting weird at all. It's something else."

Scarlet's eyes finally opened, and when they did, it was wide. "When exactly did you start feeling this?" she asked.

"Just now, when the platform moved into the beam," Alex said. "Does it have anything to do with the sun?"

Scarlet's eyes remained wide. "Let me know if it disappears okay?" she said and did something. The platform moved away from the beam of light, and with it, the feeling disappeared as well.

"Oh, it's gone," Alex said, a little surprised. "So it had to do with the sunlight then."

"No," Scarlet said. "What about now?"

The platform remained where it was, but the feeling returned once again.

"It's back," Alex said. "Wit, so it's not the sunlight?"

Scarlet's shock made it hard for her to speak at all. She simply couldn't believe that such a thing was happening at all.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"Look, what do you see?" she said as she pointed toward the distance.

"Huh?" Alex turned around and saw that she was pointing at the waterfall that was far away. "I see the waterfall."

"No, look closely," Scarlet said.

Alex nodded and focused even more. After looking for just 2 seconds, he realized what was going on.

"Wait... what?" he asked, completely confused as the waterfall wasn't moving at all. "Why is the waterfall not moving?

"It is moving," Scarlet said. "It's just that we are moving way faster than it is, so it looks stationary to us."

"Moving way faster than..." Alex seemed to have realized something as well, so he quickly turned back around. "Wait, are you saying that we are in a time dilation?"

"Yes," Scarlet said. "The outside world is effectively frozen for us because of a formation I activated. When I get rid of it—"

The feeling disappeared from Alex.

"The outside world moves again," she finished.

Alex looked back at the waterfall that was flowing normally now. There was no more time difference, and there was no more feeling.

"Are you saying that what I am feeling... was time?" he asked.

"I believe so," Scarlet said. She activated the formation once more and the feeling returned. "You can feel it too, then. Just like me."

"I... can," Alex said, very surprised. The platform went back into the sun where the sunlight slowed down enough for it to just be warm, instead of blisteringly hot. It only now made sense to him why that was the case at all.

"But... how?" he asked. "Didn't you say someone couldn't sense time aura unless they were born with the talent?"

"I did," Scarlet said. "Without the talent, you could try for thousands upon thousands of years, and still not figure it out. If you can sense it then that means you have the talent for it. Congratulations."

Alex did not feel happy at all, only confused. "I wasn't," he said. "I definitely wasn't born with the talent to sense time being messed around with. I have been to many places such as this, and this is the only time I have ever sensed it."

"Really?" Scarlet asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I can think of 4 separate instances where I spent a lot of time in places with slowed down time. One of them was even the result of a time dao application."

"Then... I don't know," Scarlet said. "Maybe it was something you could always do, but only just got the ability for it?"

"That doesn't sound right," he said. "I don't think I've done anything unique lately to warrant a sudden ability to sense time itself."

"Yeah, well, I don't know what else to say," she said. "If you weren't always able to do it, then something changed in between back then and now, which gave you the ability. Can you think of any such instances?"

"Hmm... let's see," Alex thought. His last experience with time aura had to be on the Ancestral battlefield. After that, he was captured by the old madman.

'Did the madman do something? No,' he thought. After the fight, he crashed into the Qi wall surrounding the Central continent, which he didn't find to be possible to teach him either.

"Then..." his eyes widened as he realized something. "I bonded with you."

"What?" Scarlet asked.

"I bonded with you, and you have the ability to sense time. So, maybe by association, I have the ability to sense time as well?" he asked.

"That's... how could that be possible?" Scarlet asked.

"Maybe it can," Alex said. "I have a strong physical body because Pearl can cultivate and that somehow cultivates my body. Whisker has a cultivation base all because I cultivate. Maybe in that way, because I am bonded to you, I now have your ability to sense time."

"That... I've never heard of something like that being possible at all," Scarlet said. "Sharing abilities between bonds is not a concept I'm knowledgeable about at all."

"Really?" Alex asked. "Can others not do that?"

"No," she said. "As far as I know, you're the only one who can do that."

Chapter 1156 Purple

Alex and Scarlet discussed for a bit to figure out just exactly how he had become able to sense Time aura at all. They came up with a few reasonings, but none of them held any ground at all.

It was not because he had a family member that could do it. It was not because he had entered the void where time and space were amalgamated into something indescribable.

And it was definitely not because Alex had suddenly learned a new skill overnight.

So, whether it made any sense or not, Scarlet had to accept that she was the reason Alex could now sense Time.

"I didn't imagine I would be able to do such a thing so soon," he said. "I expected to have to wait many, many years before I could do such a thing."

"I wouldn't have expected you to ever be able to do it at all," she said.

"Hehe, I can now sense both Time and Space," Alex said while unable to hide his giddiness at the news.

"Don't get too happy so suddenly," Scarlet said. "Just because you can sense time, doesn't mean you can use it so easily. Sensing it is only the beginning. You will have to learn a whole lot more about it before you can do anything."

Alex nodded. "That I understand," he said. "It took me over 2 decades to be able to sense and use Space aura, and that was with the help of the Space stone. I assume Time aura will take much longer than that."

"You are underestimating just how long it will take," Scarlet said. "Time and Space maybe talked together, but don't mistake them to be similar. They are worlds apart."

"I suppose," Alex said with a thoughtful look. "Oh right, is there something like a Time stone, just like a space stone?"

"There's no such thing," Scarlet said. "Space is far more prevalent than Time. If you want to learn more about time, you will have to spend some time around places with dense time aura."

"How dense are we speaking?" Alex asked.

"Dense enough to affect time on its own," Scarlet said.

"Maybe the Ancient Battlefield can help me," Alex thought. "But it will be a while before I return there."

"Are we done?" Scarlet asked. "Because I would very much love to bathe in this sunlight please."

"Oh, sure. I have things of my own to do as well," Alex said and turned to leave. However, before going out, he stopped. "Is it safe to just jump out? My body won't tear itself apart because of the time difference inside and outside, right?"

"Huh? No," Scarlet said. "Your body naturally changes speed when you go out of a time field. You don't have to worry about one body part moving faster than the other."

"Oh, good," Alex said and flew away from the glowing rock. He landed some distance away from the lava and turned around to look at Scarlet.

From his perspective, the concentrated beam of light was hitting her with very high intensity, but he knew what it was like inside, so he knew she had nothing to worry about.

'I must be stuck in her sight for hours, even though I only stayed here for a minute or two,' he thought. Then, he finally turned around and left the dome.

The door opened for him when he reached the gate and he went back outside, to the backyard of the palace.

He looked to the side. "Right, pills," he thought when he saw the swine again. It had already been half a day since he had returned, so he should be getting started anytime now.

He walked back into the palace and went to check on his father. When he arrived, he found a few maids outside of his father's guest room.

"Senior has finished his meal and has told us to tell you that he is going to sleep for now," the woman said.

"I see," Alex said. "You guys don't have to stay around here. You can go do other more important tasks too."

"Taking care of the guests is one of our most important tasks," the maid said.

"Ah, is that so? Um… let him know where to find me once he wakes up, okay?" Alex said and left the area.

He walked back towards his own room, and on the way, he walked past the throne room where the elders were gathered and seemed to be working with a lot of other servants.

He popped inside the throne room and looked around. "What's going on?" he asked.

Liang Shufen, who had seen him walk in, answered. "Preparation, for tomorrow," she said.

"For tomorrow? What's tomorrow?" he asked.

She looked at him weirdly for a second before shaking her head. "Coronation, of course," she said.

Alex was surprised for a second. "Why?" he asked. "Isn't she already the—"

Before he could speak fully, she placed her hands in front of her mouth before shushing him.

"Don't tell anyone about that," she said quickly using his spiritual sense.

"What's… going on?" he asked.

"We are making it look like Lady Phoenix is actually the descendant of our previous phoenix lord. We're making the people believe that she is a new phoenix and not an old one that died and came back weaker. This helps her a lot as people are more accepting of a new ruler than an old one that abandoned them," Liang Shufen said.

"Ah, I see," Alex nodded as he finally understood. "She knows about it, right?"

"Yes," Liang Shufen said. "We're preparing this room as this is where she will be crowned the ruler of the continent."

Alex nodded as well and looked around the room as he took in the changes. They were changing old seats, and curtains and such. The servants were taking it all outside one by one.

As he looked, he noticed two things that made him think for a bit.

"Where's the crown?" he asked.

"Brother Huang and Sister Ren took it to clean it for tomorrow," Liang Shufen said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, I will let you continue working then. I have some pills of my own to make as well."

"Sure," she said. "But don't spend too much time on it though. You probably want to see the coronation happen as well, right?"

"I mean, I'm not really looking forward to it, if I have to be honest," Alex said. "It's just a formality anyway, but I guess I can be there. I'll try not to miss it."

"Do whatever you want to do," Liang Shufen said and Alex left.

As he walked out, his mind wandered back to the 2nd thing that he had seen in the room, which was a bit surprising for him.

The curtains had been changed behind the throne and it was once again in red and purple colors, the color of the Vermilion Bird.

When Alex had come here over 3 years ago, he had wondered what purple and red meant. He could understand that Red meant Fire, or it just referred to the color Vermilion, but purple was something he couldn't get a grasp on in terms of the element.

However, after today, he had new information that helped him formulate an understanding of the color, that he would have otherwise not known before.

"Time," he thought to himself. "Purple means time."

It made sense since the Phoenixes were able to sense time aura as well as given the fact that the Void was an amalgamation of silver and purple, representing space and time.

"That's one mystery solved," he thought as he returned back to his room.

As soon as he was back, he went straight to his bed and lay down on it. The soft bed embraced him as he let it take all the fatigue away.

'Such a long day,' he thought to himself remembering everything from the Void to getting out of the Sanctum to finding his father in the Sunless land to finding that Scarlet was actually the immortal phoenix that was sent here to rule over the people.

"No, I can't just rest right now," he thought as he got back up. There was so much for him to do after all.

The first thing he did was assess the damage he had received from his fight today. He checked on Whisker and Whisker was still dead.

'He's got plenty of Qi this time around,' Alex thought. 'Should take no more than a day to return.'

Then, he called out the Blood God's Manual. The manual appeared in front of him, coming out from wherever it hid in his body.

The manual opened to the 4th page and Alex looked inside. As soon as he did, he couldn't help but sigh.

"So many died," he thought with a sad look on his face. He had sacrificed his blood beasts to soak up the attacks that were thrown down at the people he was saving, and while that was a noble cause for their death, he was still slightly mad that he had to do it.

"Over 80 of them died, huh?" he thought. "I should get some more in the future."

When he thought about that, the sadness lessened a bit. There were many beasts out there in the ocean, just waiting for him to retrieve their cores and make better blood beasts.

"I should improve my blood even more as well," he thought. He then closed his books and pulled out the Sun's Womb.

It was time to make some pills.

Chapter 1157 A Short Alchemy Session

Alex sat back in front of the furnace where the Sun's Womb was and thought about the pill he had to make.

He was going to have to make some antidote pills for the toxins in the people he had brought back, but that wasn't going to solve all their problems.

The toxin was one thing, and the source was another.

His pills could get rid of the toxicity in their body, but it could not get rid of the red dust that had gotten into them. And there was no way leaving a large amount of minuscule rock and metal particles was in any way a good thing at all.

He had to think of a way to remove those somehow as well.

'But how can I do it?' he wondered. He couldn't make pills that could just destroy the lead powder, so he had to think of another way.

"Maybe someone has some ideas?" he thought. He wasn't the only one that had to be working on helping them after all, so he could try and get other more experienced doctors to help him.

'Yeah, I should think about it later,' he thought and focused on the task at hand.

He needed to make around 80 or so antidote pills, given that he had healed many of the others already.

'That will take some time,' he thought, but he wasn't in any hurry. He took out what ingredients he had and started working on it.

Alex hadn't cultivated yet, but he had eaten a pill to restore his Qi. That Qi wouldn't be as good as the Qi he would gather from cultivation, but that was only in the context of battles and breakthroughs.

For alchemy, he could use any sort of Qi as long as it didn't mess with the pills and allowed him to control the energy and powder inside.

The Sun's Womb was hot, so he started putting in the ingredients one by one. He did not bother improving the ingredients to become their best self as he wasn't going for pill veins at all.

He simply needed good ingredients that could achieve a Heaven-grade or maybe even an Immortal-grade pill. As long as he could acquire that, the people could get rid of their toxins.

The ingredients he was using were quite expensive, and if he hadn't found them in the Forbidden Orchard, he would be losing about a million spirit stones worth of ingredients.

When turned into a heaven-grade pill, the antidote would go on to cost around 10 to 15 thousand True spirit stones. While that wasn't necessarily high for purchasing just a few times, if one had to do it month after month, buying up to 200 different pills each time, he could see why the Kang Family would resort to not using workers that required the help.

It did not make their actions justifiable, but it did explain why they did what they did, no matter how horrible it was.

His ingredients went into the cauldron in batches, with about 4 of the same ingredients going in at once as he wanted to make 4 different pills at once.

The Sun's Womb was large enough to handle the amount, and even fatigued, Alex had enough of his mental faculties to not make any unnecessary mistakes.

He was getting done with the first pill when he noticed that the energy in the cauldron was quite high but not as much as he would want it to be. It was enough for a Heaven grade, even a high Heaven grade at that, but it wouldn't reach anywhere close to an Immortal grade.

However, he really wanted an Immortal grade if he was so goddamn close to it already. It was a difference between 70% and 75%, and it was just numbered at the end of the day, but for some reason the alchemist in him really wanted the pills to reach the next grade.

'Sigh, so stupid,' he thought to himself and pulled out something from his storage and looked at it for a moment.

It was a small, white mushroom that he never really got the chance to use as often as he would like to.

The World Defying Mushrooms were capable of replicating any energy they came into contact with, so Alex was going to use them to increase the amount of energy that was in the cauldron.

The mushroom went into the cauldron, and after coming into contact with the heat for a bit, slowly started diffusing its energy into the cauldron.

The energy mixed into the energy of the cauldron, changing into it and not even 5 second later, Alex had an additional portion of energy that would not be there unless he was using really good ingredients.

With this much energy, even after not using proper techniques to form each individual pill, he would end up with very highly sought-after pills.

He continued for a bit longer and the pills came out, each over 75%, just as he expected.

'Damn, these mushrooms definitely are something,' Alex thought as he put the pills into a ceramic bottle. 'I should go and check if more of it is open soon. I wonder if they'll let me in.'

From what he understood, it should be anytime now that the Forbidden Orchard was open again. While he hadn't had the time to keep track of how often the pollen explosion was happening in the City of Many flowers, he could guarantee that the orchard would open any day.

If his luck were so bad, it might even have opened and closed already.

"3 years isn't nearly enough to grow something like this, most likely," he thought. "I should give it some more time."

Once everything was ready, he went on to make more of the pills.

He made 4 pills at once each time around and just 3 hours later, he had a bit more than 50 pills ready. He felt not so good continuing, but he wanted to keep going since there were 30 or so more to go.

He was in the midst of another batch of pills when his father knocked on the door. "Alex, are you inside?" he asked.

Alex opened the door and his father walked in. Graham saw his son sitting in front of the fire, and for a split second wondered if he was healing himself in the Phoenix fire.

However, there were no such colors to the flame, so he could only be confused as to what he was doing.

"3 more minutes, father," Alex said and concentrated on the pill. He was mentally fatigued enough by now that he didn't believe he could hold a conversation while making 4 pills at once, so he had to prioritize the pills.

After he was done with the pills, he finally took the cauldron off the heat and put it into his storage ring.

He turned around to his father. "How are you feeling?" he asked. "Are you well rested?"

"I am," Graham said. "What were you doing just now? Were those pills?"

"Yes, I was making pills for your friends," Alex said.

"You can make pills? How does that work?" Graham asked, very curious about it all.

Alex smiled. "Come on, sit down. I will explain everything to you."

Chapter 1158 Preparations

Alex and Graham talked for hours and hours, long after the sun went down and the night took over the land.

Alex did most of the talking as he was the one that had to explain to his father not just about what cultivation was, but also the inner details of everything that a cultivator would need to know about.

Alex knew he was overloading his father's mind with information, but his father kept asking him questions and he kept explaining. By the end, Graham had already forgotten over 80% of the information he had learned from his son, but Alex didn't find it a waste at all.

The time they were spending was precious father-son time that Alex had lost after becoming a cultivator. Now that he was finally getting it, even if he spent it doing the most mundane task, he would still find the time spent worth it.

"So, I can be a cultivator too, right?" Graham asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Well... there's not always a guarantee, so it is better if we test it."

He had no spiritual root testing formations on him, so he asked a few of the palace servants to help him find one that could work on regular mortals.

Not even 5 minutes later, a servant was outside his door with the formation plate and Alex brought it in.

"Place your palm on the plate. It will send some Qi into your body. You might feel some tingling or maybe even some pain, try not to avoid it or force it away. Accept it all, and it will be fine," Alex said.

Graham nodded and did as Alex said. The Qi moved into his body, and the most he felt was a cool sensation going throughout his body. There was no pain or tingling as Alex mentioned.

A minute later, the Qi came back out of his body and the formation started lightning up, showing exactly what Spiritual root Graham had.

"These colors... they are the elements you told me about?" Graham asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Why are there only 5?" he asked.

"That's how it usually is," Alex said. "Not everyone has all 7. As far as I know, Yin and Yang are the most notoriously hard-to-find Spiritual roots and very few people have it."

"So what do I have?" Graham asked.

"Look here, you see how the Brown and Green are so strong? That means your Earth and Wood spiritual roots are quite strong. It's impossible to say how good they are exactly, but you can judge them based on their differences from the other colors."

"Next you have your Water root, which is slightly worse, but not that bad. Finally, your Fire and Metal roots are frankly... trash. I have a way to fix the Fire root, but Metal... I will have to find a way," Alex said.

"So... can I cultivate?" Graham asked.

"Huh? Oh yes. Absolutely. As long as you have a single one of these colors, you are able to cultivate," Alex said. "That is one of the reasons why the players I tell you about can't cultivate. Those clones weren't given a proper spiritual root, only ending up with regular meridians that couldn't go through Meridian Tempering realm."

"I see," Graham said. "This spiritual root, it's a physical thing in our body right?"

"Yes, it's around your navel area," Alex said.

"Then, can you transplant it into other people to donate to them so they can cultivate it?" Graham asked.

"Uhh..." Alex was stumped by the question. "Actually, I do not know the answer to that. I would normally say no, but the world is still full of so many mysteries that it is possible that such a thing is possible."

"I can confidently say that it is not something you can do in this world. Maybe in the Immortal realms," Alex said.

Graham didn't say anything as he kept watching the colors on the plate that was starting to vanish.

"So, what should I do now? I need a technique right?" Graham asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I don't have a good one on me. I'll try finding one for you after the event tomorrow. Quite a few big shots should be gathered, so I could ask them to help me find the best cultivation techniques for you."

"I would have given you my own, but you don't have a yin or yang spiritual root."

Graham shook his head. "There is no need for you to hurry about all of this. Take your time. You do say it will be a while before I can see your mother again, so I feel like I have all the time in the world to prepare for it," he said.

"I'll do the best I can," Alex said. "By the way, you don't remember what the system wrote for your information, do you?"

"I barely even remember what the system looked like, let alone remember what it said," Graham said.

"Sigh, it would be so much easier if we just knew what your body constitution was called. We could ask Scarlet or Godslayer about it," Alex said softly. "No matter, I will run some tests on my own."

Graham didn't understand what he meant really, so he just nodded.

"You don't remember any specific reason why your body got strong, right?" Alex asked.

"No," Graham said. "Even back home, I was quite strong. Not to this level, but I was strong. People were surprised that I looked like a bodybuilder without ever going to the gym. I would tell people it's because I worked on the farm, but the truth was I was made to work after my father found out I was strong."

"It's definitely your body's constitution's work then. It must improve your physical strength drastically quicker than other people," Alex said. "Whatever, I will learn it all once I run the tests. You'll have to have cultivation for that though, so I should get you to do that as quickly as possible as well."

"As I said, you can take your time," Graham said.

Alex sighed. "I know, but I still want to make you cultivate quickly. I'm worried that because of your age, the more we delay, the worse it is. Although, your body cultivation definitely should help you a lot, so maybe I'm worrying for nothing."

"You definitely are worrying way too much about way too many things at once," Graham said. "Start with the little steps. What's the first thing you need to do? Find me a cultivation technique so I can get started, right? Until you can do it, you should calm down."

"Yeah, I will have to find you that fi-- Wait, no. There's something else you can do. I nearly forgot," Alex thought as he fished into his storage ring and brought out a black and white fruit, which he showed his father.

"What's this? An alchemy ingredient?" Graham asked.

"No," Alex said. "This is a Divine Devil fruit. It's something that can make you go through mortal cleansing, which is very good for someone that wants to cultivate."

As he explained that, he wondered if he should give one to Scarlet as well. Maybe Whisker would love it too. He had 4 Divine Devil fruits, so he had to be careful how he used it.

"Oh," Graham said. "Why is good?"

"A mortal's body is full of filth and waste that gets accumulated in their body over time. When they start cultivating, those filths interfere with the movement of Qi in your body," Alex explained. "If you eat that fruit, the energy in it will basically push all of that filth out of your body in one go, making you as clean as a newborn baby."

"Ooh, sounds nice," Graham said. "Get rid of all my body's filth, huh? So it can get rid of the lead dust too?"

"Yes, it can get rid of ever--" Alex paused, and then his eyes went wide. "Holy shit! Why didn't I think of that?"

"Think of what?" Graham was surprised as well when he saw his son surprised.

"The dust, I can push it out of your body," he said. "I can push it out of everyone's bodies."

"I'm not following," Graham said. "Are you talking about my friends?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I am making pills to treat the toxins in their body, but I was wondering how I could get the dust itself out of their body. I finally have an idea now."

"I see," Graham said. "So you're going to feed them all this fruit?"

"What? No! I only have 4 of them," Alex said, actually horrified that his father was putting up such a proposition. "There are people who have lived for thousands of years that have only heard of these fruits in fairy tales. I cannot just hand it out to a bunch of tribal people who will under all circumstances just go back to body cultivating around phoenix fire."

Graham was a little surprised that Alex was saying something that sounded so selfish, but the number quickly put things into perspective.

"Then why would you say you finally know how to treat them?" he asked.

"Well, that's because over 3 decades ago, I had somehow managed to make a pill that could easily make someone sweat out profusely from their body."

"If I make those people eat that pill, I can force out the lead dust from their body while treating their toxins as well. That way, I can completely heal them all.

"Oh," Graham said excitedly. "That sounds amazing."

Chapter 1159 Preparation

After his father left to let him rest, Alex spent the rest of the night cultivating. He finally felt the fatigue he had built up slowly fade away overnight as he gathered Qi through his cultivation.

He felt some of the Qi disappear from his body as it went to Whisker. Judging by the rate of his Qi being taken in, Whisker would have his body by the morning.

Alex switched to cultivating the Undying physique sometime before dawn and that helped Whisker's body form even faster.

Once Whisker was finally back, he moved on to cultivating his Demon Eyes. He knew that it would take him a long time to reach the next stage of the Demon Eyes, but he really wanted to reach there as fast as he could.

Once he was done cultivating, he left his room and went to go find his father. His father had woken up long ago and was sitting in his room, not knowing what to do the entire time.

At least in the tribes and even in the Sunless lands, there was always something to do. He could carry some water back for others, wash his clothes, or simply stay around the Scared flames to heal.

But in the palace, he could do no such thing. With a word, clean water and clothes would arrive on his doorstep in minutes. He was going to start cultivating soon, so there was no point in sitting by a Phoenix flame. There wasn't even any there, to begin with.

He lay in his bed, thinking about his future now that he was free, and all he could do was smile as he understood that he was now a free man with a future in front of him.

All the anger and grudge he had built up over the year had been somehow all expunged in a single day by none other than his own son.

He heard a knock on the door and got up quickly.

"Father, it's me," Alex spoke.

"Come in," Graham spoke from inside.

Alex walked in, wearing a rather dashing set of robes that did not look like it would be comfortable to be in.

"What are you wearing?" his father asked looking at the robes that had all the colors fo the sacred flames.

"They gave me this to wear," he said. "Apparently I have to dress nicely for the ceremonies. They asked me to give this to you too."

"For the Phoenix's crowning?" Graham asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Everyone from the continent is going to be here, and given who I am, many will want to talk to me. So, the elders made me dress nicely."

"Well... I don't think I'm the best judge for that," Graham said as he shook his head. "I value comfort more than aesthetics after all."

"Me too," Alex said. "But these are surprisingly nice too. Too open around the sleeves for me to want to fight in, but walking around in them is not so bad."

"Alright, give me mine. I'll get dressed too."

Graham dressed up quickly and walked out into the hall with Alex. He looked around at the rushing people that zoomed past him and Alex.

"Everyone seems to be busy," he said. "They must really hold this event in high regard."

"The continent and its 20-something billion people are getting a new ruler in their eyes. I would assume such an event is taken in high regard," Alex said.

He walked through the hallways until he came out on the hall that led to the outside of the palace.

Massive formations were shining brightly outside that made all sorts of different barriers outside the palace.

There was a large, open space prepared with a stage in the center.

"I thought the event was going to happen inside the palace. Is it not?" Graham asked.

"It is," Alex said. "The outside is so Scarlet can address the people after she's been crowned. Many people will have come from everywhere, so not letting them see her wouldn't be the best choice for her."

"I see," Graham said.

Someone coughed behind the two of them, grabbing their attention. Alex turned around and met the eyes of an older man with a strong cultivation base.

"Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but... are you the Alchemist Alex?" the old man asked.

"That is me," Alex said as he looked at the man closely. "Is senior Ren Niechen"

"Oh? Alchemist Alex knows of me?" the old man acted surprised. "I am indeed Ren Niechen. I am surprised you knew about me."

"Who wouldn't know about the Ren family patriarch," Alex said. "How may I help you, senior?"

"I—" the man paused when he looked to the side and saw Graham. He puzzled for a bit before realizing it. "Ah! Is this not the person who you were looking for, Alchemist Alex? You found him?"

"Yes, senior," Alex said. "This is my father, Graham."

"Graham..." the man spoke the name softly and understood that he was a player too. "You have raised a fantastic child, brother Graham. You must be very proud."

"I sure am," Graham said. While that was the truth, he was still confused by the remark from the old man. 'Proud for what exactly?'

He wondered if Alex was being praised for the strength he showed the other day. Maybe he was considered a talented cultivator by all. He had surely made it sound that way.

"Oh right," the old man remembered. "Alchemist Alex, do you happen to know when you can start making pills? This old man has been waiting for you to sell your pills for years now. After using your pill, I just can't find myself using the other pills. They are all nothing but garbage in my eyes."

"Don't call other people's hard work garbage, you senile old fart," someone spoke from the side as they came towards the group.

"If I'm a senile old fart, then you are a living corpse," the old man retorted.

"Hehe, look at him going mad just because of a few words. It sure is easy to get into your skin," the man said.

This man was old as well, just about the same age as the Ren family patriarch, and had a similar cultivation base as well.

"Junior Alex greets senior Fang Chuangki," Alex bowed a little.

"I'm honored that you know my name, Alchemist Alex," the man said.

Alex sighed internally. These old people really liked acting like this whenever they were recognized. Being the sect leader of the Cloud Fire sect, it was obvious Alex would recognize him.

He had remembered most of the people from all the different big sects and families, especially the ones that had looked him up in the Insight Pavilion.

Alex knew this man was here to ask him for his pills too. But before he could answer, someone else joined in.

It was a middle-aged man with a thick beard and a relatively low cultivation base. He greeted the other two seniors first and then Alex.

"Huang Daisheng greets Alchemist Alex," the man said.

'Huang...' Alex thought. "Are you the new Huang family head?"

"That is indeed I," the man said. "I know what happened back then with the previous family head wasn't the best, and would like to request you to forgive our family for the actions of a stupid man."

Alex crossed his arms. "Even if I do forgive your family, my oath still remains. You will never get a pill from me," he said.

"That is a curse I am willing to bear so long as Alchemist Alex doesn't hold a grudge against us," the man said.

"I have none," he said. "Senior Huang took care of my grudge on my behalf. You can rest assured I will not come after you or your family."

"Thank you," the man said and stepped away.

The two old men watched him leave for a few seconds, before immediately going back to asking him about the pills.

"I plan on making them soon," he said. "I can neither guarantee the time, nor the amount I will be making, but I will do it within the next 3 months."

"Oh!" the two old men were very happy. "We will be looking forward to the next pill then, Alchemist Alex."

Alex smiled and watched as the two walked away, quarreling with themselves once again. It looked like they were used to it and neither took the other one's words as an offense."

Alex and Graham left the place to visit more of the area that was prepared for everyone to come into. He met with a lot more important people.

Most of them wanted to learn about when he would be making his next set of pills, but some were genuinely just happy to meet him.

Alex continued walking around and saw a group of people walk in through the barrier checkpoint on one side.

"Oh, leader," Alex said when he saw the Alchemy Association leader walk into the room. Along with him were Harry and a few other alchemists. A little further behind them was the Flowerhall sect's leader.

"Young man, congratulations on finding your father," the man said as soon as he saw Alex. The others greeted and congratulated him as well.

Alex thanked them and introduced his father to them as well.

"It's been so long since you were away," the leader said before getting closer to whisper. "Dark Phoenix isn't a problem anymore, right?"

"No, no," Alex said. "No problem."

"Great!" the leader said. "Does that mean you'll be returning to the association?"

"Uhh... yeah," Alex said. "I have some small tasks here at the palace, but once I'm done, I can return. We can even restart our quad-annual pill-selling events again."

Chapter 1160 The Coronation

Alex was approached by even more people before the ceremony had started. The high-profile individuals who either remembered him or were reminded of him came to speak to him all the time.

It had reached to a point where Alex just wanted to go invisible and not have to meet anyone else.

However, he wasn't the only one suffering from these sorts of problems. Everyone from the Alchemy Association was.

They were all getting recognized left and right as well, albeit not as much as Alex himself.

Harry was surprisingly quite popular as well now. He seemed to have been doing quite well for himself.

"Sounds like life has been good for you for the past few years," Alex said to Harry.

"Haha, yeah," Harry said while softly scratching his head. "Because of what you taught me, my skills have improved by not a small amount. The pills I make have become so much better and they sell like no one else can do what I can."

"Congrats," Alex said. "You deserve it."

"Thanks," Harry said. "Although, the biggest factor for my success is actually you not being able to make pills. But since you are going to return, I'm probably going to go back into the shadows soon."

"Stop underestimating yourself," Alex told him. "You have learned as much as you can, and you practice just as hard as anyone else. You are so focused on your craft that you didn't even bother going to the Sanctum, did you?"

Harry shook his head.

"So, don't worry about me returning, and just do what you do. You'll still sell just the same and people will continue speaking your name just the name," Alex said.

"Of course," Harry said chuckling a bit. "I am not going to get demotivated into not making pills just because you are coming back. In fact, I see that as an opportunity to compare myself to you, and maybe even learn something from you."

Alex gave a small smile when he heard that.

The Association leader was talking with Alex's father and was surprised at just how little he knew about everything. Even if nothing, he had assumed Alex's father to have some knowledge of Alchemy, which he had transferred over to Alex while he was young.

However, as it turned out, that was perhaps the farthest from the truth. The man didn't even understand the concept of Alchemy properly.

They were all talking when a commotion grabbed their attention. Alex turned around to see the people part ways to let the 10 elders walk outside.

"Everyone," Yao Ning addressed the people that stood there. "The coronation is about to start. Anyone who has a Saint Soul cultivation base or higher, or was invited to view the coronation, you may now come to the Palace hall."

The people who heard the announcement happily started walking away from their friends and families to go into the palace.

"We should go too," Alex said. "Are you going in leader?"

The Association leader nodded. "I have been invited indeed, so I should go. You lot stay around," he said.

Alex, Graham, and the association leader walked into the Palace afterward.

There were servants standing in the hallways, directing everyone to the Throne room. The Throne room had been prepared the entire day for this occasion, and somehow even this felt cramped.

Alex found a small empty place towards the wall on the left. Even after they sat, the people kept pouring into the room and not long after, it was all filled up completely.

Even the elders sighed when they realized that there were just so many more people than they had realized. This small throne room wasn't going to be enough at all.

Still, they decided to go with it. Since the ceremony would take no more than 10 minutes at best, these people could stay cramped for that long.

There was someone other than the 10 elders officiating today's ceremony. He was an ancestor from some other big sect that had only come out from closed cultivation after reaching the Saint Transformation realm.

The elders considered themselves servants to their lord, so they all would want to crown her. However, they couldn't decide who amongst themselves should have the honors, so they had given this new individual the opportunity to be the one.

Everyone waited for a few minutes, talking to themselves. But when the doors opened again, they all quietened down.

The phoenix's majestic aura spread through the room the moment she appeared outside the door. People were awed in amazement and Alex was surprised that Scarlet was actually putting on a show at all.

She was purposefully exaggerating her aura, and it was working. Everyone watched her with reverence in their eyes and followed her every moment as she walked through the door and made her way to the altar at the end of the room.

The people moved to the sides and allowed Scarlet to move to the front. When she did, they started bowing toward her as she walked in between them.

Scarlet walked halfway through to the altar at the end when she stopped suddenly. Her actions confused everyone and even the 10 elders weren't sure what she was doing.

Scarlet's spiritual sense spread through the room suddenly, and it landed on Alex a moment later.

Her head turned towards him and after he saw her gaze, she moved her head in a gesture.

Alex was confused by the gesture. 'What?' he mouthed.

Scarlet gestured once more, but Alex didn't understand again.

"I'm saying walk with me," Scarlet spoke directly into his mind this time around.

"Oh..." Alex said and paused, unsure if he should do it. As far as he knew, the two of them were supposed to hide their connection for a while longer, so that the people wouldn't be offended by having a ruler that was actually someone else's apparent servant.

"Come!" Scarlet spoke out loud this time around, and Alex couldn't stop any longer. He teleported out of the crowd and appeared next to her, surprising everyone who hadn't noticed who she was talking to.

Most people noticed immediately who it was, although that didn't lessen their confusion at all.

"Are you sure this is right?" Alex asked softly.

"You and I are bonded in spirit. You are no different from a family to me now. If my family won't be at the altar when I get crowned, won't that be sad?" she asked.

Alex was surprised she thought that way, given how little time they had actually spent with each other. "Fine, let's go," he said.

The two of them walked through the narrow opening in the hall and arrived at the altar that was prepared for this very ceremony, right in front of the throne.

Alex walked to the side and let Scarlet stand in front of all, proudly.

The old man that was officiating the ceremony walked up front and started addressing the crowd.

"Brothers and Sisters, friends and families. We are gathered today on the most important occasion of the past 5 millennia. As we all know, the Southern Continent was ruled by the phoenixes for long before our records say."

The man started talking and he did not stop. He spoke of the past about the continent and the phoenixes' roles in them. He talked about how for so long they had not been in the presence of one, and how they were now going to return back to the days when another phoenix would rule them.

Everyone in the crowd had already thought of this on their own. No one wanted the old man to reiterate everything they had thought of back to them. However, no one had the right, nor the courage to tell the old man to move it quickly.

So, the old man spoke for the next 5 minutes, and they all listened to him without a single word.

"Today, we shall receive a new ruler. Please, bring out the crown."

A few of the elders walked to the front, holding a large cushion of sorts with a large crown on top. It was surprisingly large, to the point Alex wondered if it was even the same crown he had seen before.

However, he understood that the crown must have been made with metal compounding, allowing for it to change in shape easily, without losing any durability at all.

It was most like made that way to accommodate any head on top of which it would lay.

The elders brought it out in front of the old man who took the large crown in his hand without actually touching it. He was slightly surprised at how heavy it was, but he didn't let it show.

He turned around and looked at Scarlet who stood proudly behind him.

"O' Great Phoenix. Forever shine your brightness in this world and thwart away the darkness that may plague it. You are the holy one and you alone are divine."

He held out the crown higher towards Scarlet, who dropped her head a little to let the man reach it.

The man slowly moved the crown and placed it on top of Scarlet's head.

"With the power vested in me by the people of this continent, I now pronounce you, Feng Nuanhuo, Ruler of the Southern Continent."

Scarlet raised her head up high and stared in front of her and saw everyone bow at the waist. She alone stood up high and was reminded of the day when she had witnessed it once more.

She had once again become the Ruler of the Southern Continent.

Chapter 1161 The Ruler Of The Southern Continent

"ALL HAIL THE RULER!"

"ALL HAIL THE RULER!"

The people viewing the coronation chanted all at the same time as the crown was placed on Scarlet's head.

She stood tall in front of everyone with not a single emotion on her face to betray what she was feeling or thinking on the inside.

Her eyes drifted across the room, looking at all the different people that were in there, and then closed them. Then, she reopened them and moved.

The chant stopped awkwardly as no one was sure what was going on. Scarlet was supposed to be giving a small speech of her own to the people after her coronation, so it was unexpected.

The 10 elders ran beside her and secretly asked what she was doing.

"I will address everyone at once," Scarlet said as she walked out of the door.

The elders were confused, but they at least knew what was going on. Two of them stayed behind and addressed the throne room.

"Her Majesty, the Pheonix is going to be addressing the entire continent at once. Please go outside if you wish to hear her speech," the elders said.

People started leaving one after another, and Alex walked out as well. The elders grabbed him as he left the room and brought him along with them to the stage where Scarlet stood tall in the sunlight.

Her crown glistened with colors of gold, red, blue, purple, and orange. Even so, it couldn't overshadow the majesty that came with Scarlet herself.

She stood up high, waiting for the people to gather.

The people on the outside were excited to see the Phoenix after she had been crowned and were more than excited to cheer for her.

Once more, another chant could be heard from the crowd around Scarlet. Only this time around, there were so many people that the air shook with each utter of the chant.

They chanted so loudly that their words could likely be heard from the other side of the dome.

"You're going to address them this quickly?" Alex asked softly after he got up on the stage next to Scarlet.

"The sooner the better," Scarlet said.

Alex sensed some sort of distress in her voice. She was nervous for some reason.

"What's wrong? Are you alright?" he asked. "You sound nervous."

"Do I?" she asked, before taking a deep breath. "How about now?"

"That's better," Alex said. "But why were you nervous? You're already the ruler, so you should be fine, right? Or did you not remember to write the speech"

"I haven't written anything," Scarlet said. "I spent way too long just deciding, so I didn't have the time to write anything."

"Deciding?"

"People are gathering, your majesty," one of the elders spoke as they all gathered behind Scarlet. They looked in front of them and saw nearly 10 thousand different individuals gathered in the area around the palace.

Beyond that, the entire capital city was completely covered in random people as well, who were viewing the ceremony from massive screen formations that were laid around the city.

Scarlet noticed that people had started to slow down with the cheer and the people that were coming out of the palace had already gathered in the yard outside.

She took a single step forward and everyone stopped making a noise. They all looked at her, silently, waiting for her to start speaking.

Alex felt unnerved by such a sudden silence. He couldn't imagine having to address this many people at once. But, he wasn't worried about Scarlet at all. She had done this before, a long time ago, so she would be used to it.

"Watch out for anyone that might try to attack her highness," one of the elders spoke into his mind, reminding him that not all that were gathered here were necessarily here to watch her ascend the throne.

There were most likely some here that were hoping that she wouldn't take the throne at all. After all, the freedom that came with not having a proper ruler was not something a few people could suddenly get rid of.

Alex doubted such a small group of people would make a scene, but he still couldn't leave it to chance. He looked around the crowd for any disappointed or angry faces, but it was hard to tell how someone was feeling or what they were thinking from the way they looked.

Scarlet viewed the crowd one last time, took a deep breath, and then started speaking.

"People of the Southern Continent. I, Feng Nuanhuo, a phoenix, am the ruler of the Southern Continent."

Everyone cheered when they heard her, cheering for nearly 10 seconds before Scarlet gestured for them to stop with her wings.

"Right now, the purpose of me being on this stage is to make you feel happy and better about having me as your new ruler by promising you many good things in the future that may or may not be capable of performing."

"However, I am not here today to do that to you," Scarlet said. "Today, I'm here to speak the truth."

"Your majesty?" a few of the elders felt warnings blare in their heads from what Scarlet was talking about. Alex was surprised too and he couldn't help but wonder what she was talking about.

"The truth is simple," Scarlet said. "You do not have a new Ruler. I, Feng Nuanhuo have been your ruler for the past 14 thousand years."

"Huh?"

"What?"

"What is going on?"

"What is her majesty talking about?"

Everyone except for the ones on top of the stage was confused about what Scarlet was talking about. Nothing about it all made sense to them at all.

One by one, the people started requesting an explanation, while the elders were fully working on controlling the damage. They requested Scarlet to speak sweet nonsense to the people, but she had gone and started giving them the bitter truth.

"What I said is correct. I came to this continent 14 thousand years ago to replace the Phoenix before me as the ruler of this continent. So, for the past 14 millennia, I have been your ruler."

"I ruled over this continent for 9 thousand years. However, 5 thousand years ago, due to some accident, I was forced to stop ruling over you, and these 10 had to temporarily step in to keep the continent from being doomed without a ruler."

"I'm sure many of you were dissatisfied when you learned that your rulers, the phoenixes were hiding inside the metal dome. However, that was never true."

"The truth is, the reason you have these 10 ruling over you for the past 5 thousand years is that I have been dead for that very long."

Scarlet's words confused even more people, but they did not ask her to continue this time around as they waited for her to do so on her own, and she did.

"For the past 5 thousand years, there has been no Phoenix ruling over you. All of that was because the only phoenix that was on this continent for the past 14 thousand years was me."

"Then, when I died, my throne was left vacant for 5 thousand years."

The crowd looked at each other, trying to digest this new piece of information. They weren't sure how to process it all.

From what they had heard before, it usually sounded like the Phoenixes had abandoned them and gone into hiding. However, they were now learning that the Phoenix had died, and had then gone through rebirth.

Which was to say that she would've been their ruler, even without the ceremony to make her their ruler.

Alex watched Scarlet fully give away all the secrets that was supposed to be bad for the succession to the throne.

"I will be honest," Scarlet said. "I had no idea 5 thousand years had passed by the time I was completely done with rebirth."

"For me, it felt like I was gone for 10 years. But for you, I had gone for 5 thousand years, and all that time, the throne was empty," Scarlet said. "If you despise me for that, I would understand."

"However, I am not here to simply talk to you about what I have done wrong in the past, but rather what I will do right in the future."

"I might be strong, or I might be Immortal. But that does not mean that I will forever remain on this continent. Either it will be my time to leave, or somehow, I might die again."

"Or I might just feel bored of ruling over a bunch of humans. Whatever the case, if anything happens to me, making me unable to rule properly, you will all once again become without a ruler."

"And I do not want you to be left in such a situation ever again. So, I have decided to fix that today," Scarlet said. "I have decided to follow in the footsteps of those from the rulers from the other continent and have taken an inspiration in the way that they rule."

Alex felt a sudden coolness in his mind that he had never felt before in his life. This sort of unnatural coolness couldn't possibly be something that he was simply imagining.

So, he reached for his head to see what it was. When he did, his eyes went wide. Spiritual sense rolled out of him as he used it to check what was happening.

Then, he saw the crown.

It lay on his head.

"This is Alex," Scarlet spoke. "From today onwards, in my absence, he will be the Ruler of the Southern Continent."

Chapter 1162 Backlash

Even with the coolness, Alex felt in his mind, he found it hard to think of just what exactly had happened.

The only thing he could think of was the divination from over 15 years ago. The one that showed him a vision of a crown that laid on his head.

A second divination had come true.

The crowd wasn't as stunned as Alex, so they immediately started talking within themselves to make sense of what they had just heard and seen.

If it were only the words, they could've imagined that the phoenix spoke wrongly, but seeing her put her own crown on Alex's head solidified her statement as to exactly what it was she wanted here.

Without a single say from anyone in the crowd, Alex had just become another Ruler of the Southern Continent.

The people didn't know how to feel about it all. "Your Majesty, what are you saying?" the elders quickly walked up to Scarlet and asked her.

"What?" Scarlet looked at them. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No, that's…" the elders themselves weren't sure what to make of the situation. "Is this the right thing to do, your Majesty?"

"Why would it not be?" Scarlet asked.

"We don't know," the elders said. "It's just that such a thing is unprecedented. You should consider it for a while before making a decision."

"Do you think I made my decision on a whim?" Scarlet asked. "I have spent all the time I had since yesterday on this one decision, and I have decided to make Alex the ruler whenever I am absent. Even in my presence, he will be the second highest authority of the continent."

The elders quickly shook their heads. "If you have given your decision some thought, we have no complaints at all," one of them said.

Scarlet nodded and turned towards Alex.

"You don't seem thrilled to suddenly be named a king," she said.

Alex finally got out of his stupor and looked at Scarlet. "Why did you not tell me you were going to do something so reckless," he said.

"Why should I? My decision wouldn't have changed either way," she said.

"Why me?" Alex asked.

"Isn't it obvious? Because we are bonded," Scarlet said.

A few people that were close to the stage heard the conversation and were more than surprised by what they heard. Within moments, the gossip found legs and made its way around the crowd.

Soon enough, everyone was talking about exactly that very information.

Scarlet noticed the rumor that was spreading and decided to stop it at once. "I have bonded with this young human, that is true," she said.

"Isn't that biased?"

"Why him? There are many better candidates."

People started complaining finally, and no one could stop anyone from speaking out of their turn. The elders tried to make them stop, but Scarlet stopped them. She let the crowd vent out their anger and frustration.

Instead, she turned back to Alex again who seemed ready to question her again.

"They are right," he said. "Why did you make such a biased judgment? Why me?"

"I am not biased," Scarlet said. "Even without our bond, even if I had only ever heard of you, I would have chosen you. Your accomplishments are not something anyone can imagine doing. You alone are worthy in this entire continent."

"Maybe," Alex said. "But what about the main problem? The fact that I'm not from this continent. At some point, I will have to leave this place and return."

"I know," Scarlet said. "You told me so. Did you think I made such an important decision without thinking about that?"

"So you knew I would leave and you still decided to make me a king?" Alex asked.

"When you say return, what is the name of the place you will be returning to?" Scarlet asked.

Alex frowned for a second. "That's…" he found it hard to speak the name of a place that he considered he was returning to.

For a moment he thought of the Central continent, but that wasn't right. Pearl was there, and his old house was, but that was now a place he could only ever say he was visiting, not returning.

As for the Western Continent, he could say he was returning to that place too, but where exactly in that continent was it?

He thought of the Hong Wu sect and the Tiger sect, but they were places he had left behind long ago. That place held his memories, not his home.

As for the Beast realm or the Luminance Empire, there was really only one place he would be returning to there. It was to his mother.

Wherever his mother was, he would go there.

But then… couldn't he just bring his mother to the Southern Continent?

"You told me you don't have a house to go back to, you only have a family. You can easily have your family members gather in this continent, can't you?" Scarlet asked. "You already have two here, you only need to bring the rest."

Alex slowly nodded when he heard that. That was the truth, no matter how he viewed it. His home was where his family was, so as long as they were there, he would forever remain in the Southern Continent, with no need to leave the place

Alex couldn't help but sigh in the end. "I have no interest to rule, nor do I have the ability to do so. Even then, if you want me to become the ruler, then I shall do it," he said.

"Leaders and Rulers aren't born with the ability to lead and rule. They are made by the teachings and actions of those around them. You might not have the ability to rule right now, but in just a few years, you would be making decisions that only a ruler can make. I guarantee you at least that."

Alex didn't doubt that, but still. It simply felt wrong for him to become a ruler. He didn't feel like he deserved it.

"You fought and survived people that were nearly 30 realms higher than you. Why are you suddenly scared of just having to make a few decisions?" Scarlet asked.

Alex thought about it for a second and sighed. "When you put it like that, I might really be overreacting," he said. He took a deep breath as he remembered the divination.

Was he afraid of becoming a ruler because that would make a second divination come true? Was he trying to fight fate so he could make sure the divinations could also turn out to be wrong?

Now that he thought about it, he had always feared the one prophecy that told him when he would die.

He would die when helping a fallen power restore itself. Was he afraid that Scarlet was that power?

'What's done is done,' he thought. 'If the divinations are to come true, they will. I can't stop it.'

"Alright, I am willing to become the ruler," Alex said with a straight back as he looked at Scarlet.

Scarlet smiled and turned towards the crowd that was still talking amongst themselves, clearly unsatisfied.

"You all must believe that I made a biased choice today?" Scarlet asked.

The crowd quietened down. They all believed so, but no one wanted to be the one to say it to their new ruler.

"You are right," Scarlet said. "It is a biased choice. However, the bias is not based on my closeness with the young man, but rather my understanding of what he can and cannot do."

The crowd was confused slightly, so they let her continue.

"Who here can fight someone more than 3 realms higher than their own cultivation base?" Scarlet asked.

The crowd looked at each other, trying to find a face that would match the question, but there wasn't any.

"Alex here can fight someone 10 realms higher than his cultivation base," she said.

Sounds of awe and surprise sounded from all over the yard as people were made aware of the fact.

"10 realms? That shouldn't be possible," someone said, and the others hummed or nodded in agreement.

"You!" Scarlet pointed to a certain middle-aged man, who had a cultivation base of Saint Core 3rd realm. "Do you disagree with my decision?"

The old man being singled out by the phoenix immediately started sweating profusely. He had been vocal about the disagreement, but he thought he had been hiding quite well.

"O-of course not, your Majesty," the man said.

"No, you have been," Scarlet said. "I have heard your voice. I have heard everyone's voice. So, I shall give you a chance to undo my decision."

"You will fight him in front of us all for exactly 3 clashes. If Alex loses, I will take back my decision to make him a ruler as well," she said. "Do you agree?"

The man was put in a tough position as he didn't want to offend anyone, but from the glares of the many people around him, he was forced to accept the battle.

"And if I lose?" he asked.

"Nothing," Scarlet said. "I will still let you all complain."

"I agree to the fight," the man said immediately after hearing that.

"Must we do this?" Alex asked Scarlet quietly.

"The only way to prove your legitimacy is by showing others how strong you are," she said. "Now, go ahead and fight him."

"Fine," Alex said and stepped away from the stage and flew into the sky. The man followed behind a moment later, and soon enough the two were in front of each other, ready to battle.

Chapter 1163 The Three Attacks

The man bowed to Alex, who bowed back.

"My apologies for being against what was presented to us by her Majesty. I promise I won't say a single thing if you can prove yourself," the man said.

"My apologies for it coming out of the blue too," Alex said. "I'm sure there was a better way for all of this to go down, but unfortunately we ended up having to fight for it."

The man bowed. "Let us begin then."

Alex nodded and stood in front of the man. "Please begin."

The man looked at him weirdly, and so did the crowd that was below. "I believe it is only right for the weaker one of us to start," the man said.

"I agree," Alex replied. "That is why I am letting you go first."

The man felt a pang of anger that he quickly let go of. "Very well, if that is what you wish," he said.

His hands moved in front of him and suddenly water appeared from all around the atmosphere as it gathered into an unstable mass in front of the man.

Blue aura gathered around it that got bright enough to be visible in daylight. Then, he shot the water toward Alex.

Alex saw the water flying in his direction and moved a single hand in front of him. A layer of fire appeared on his hand that grew to extreme temperature in an instant.

When the ball of water arrived next to him, he simply caught it, as if it were a small piece of rock someone had tossed at him.

The water immediately fizzled out from within his fiery arm, which itself vanished, leaving pristine skin that didn't have any damage.

"Would you like to go again?" Alex asked the man.

The crowd watched in silence and awe at the sight above them. The weaker ones in the crowd started assuming that the man had been a plant in the crowd, to make Alex look stronger.

However, the stronger ones, the ones who mattered, could see that the man hadn't held back much in his attack and that Alex had just as easily destroyed it.

This was a genuine match with a genuine outcome, and that surprised them even more so than normal people.

"That was Fire Dao, right?" someone asked softly.

"I thought I sensed it," another man said.

"He isn't hiding his cultivation base at all," another person said. "Is that what he can do normally?"

"He can fight so well on top of making amazing pills?" someone else said. "I wonder what else he can do."

The man in the sky was in awe as well for a few seconds before reacting to Alex's words. "Yes, I will attack again."

He didn't understand how Alex had outdone him despite being 10 realms below him. Was it dao? If that was the case, then he couldn't mess around.

This time around, the man brought out a sword. It was a thin blue sword with white edges that seemed to give off cold energy.

The man poured Qi into his blade and suddenly Alex could feel the change in temperature from all the way where he was.

'That's not a normal attack,' he realized. He could feel the world moving to aid the man.

'Ice dao or Cold Dao?' Alex wondered. He didn't know much about Water Qi to accurately tell which dao did what, but he could be sure that it was one of the two.

He brought out his sword as well, which he started flooding with fire Qi. At the same time, he used his True Fire dao on the sword that he was going to add to the attack.

The man slashed without warning, sending such a cold attack toward him that it left behind snowflakes in the air. It came flying toward Alex in a blue slash, and Alex slashed back.

The fiery aura in his sword exploded as it devoured the cold attack almost instantly. The attack continued on, reaching the middle-aged man who was forced to block it.

He was pushed back a step or two in the air, and he quickly looked back to see that his attack hadn't even reached Alex this time around.

"No way!" he shouted out loud in shock.

The people below him were shocked as well.

"That's two attacks," Alex said while standing calmly in the air. "There's only one last remaining."

The man took a deep breath and calmed down his heart. "Yes, I will attack."

"I'm sorry, but I can't let you," Alex said as his sword glowed a brilliant white light that covered him entirely.

"Sword Aura!" people started shouting when they saw it. They couldn't believe that someone so young as Alex had learned something like that. After all, Sword aura wasn't something that one could just learn.

And from what they could see, Alex had been in possession of such a skill for a long time now. He was used to having a Sword Aura.

"Unlike you," Alex continued. "If I don't win this battle, I will have to step down as a ruler. So forgive me if I go a little overboard with this attack."

The air whipped around Alex as energy filled his sword to a point that even the 10 elders on the stage were surprised. They had never seen how strong Alex was on his own, and had only ever known about his feats after the fact.

Today, however, they were seeing it on their own.

His opponent moved as well. A swirling blue energy appeared in front of him as it began to solidify. As long as he could defend this attack, he could at least tie the match. If neither of them won, the man would still come out victorious due to the way conditions of the duel.

However, even as he thought that he could feel the air around Alex. Something felt... wrong. Something felt dangerous.

He had never seen a dao like this, but he could tell it was a strong one. So, created multiple such defensive skills to stop Alex's attack.

Alex slowly opened his eyes and spoke. "Here I go."

Then, he slashed.

The brilliant white energy flew through the air at a rather slow speed. It was fast for most, but the stronger individuals could tell that the attack focused more on its power than its speed.

The man could have dodged the attack, but doing so wasn't the right thing to do here. Since this was a duel, he had to survive the attack.

He strengthened his frozen, swirling barriers even more and pushed it forth as the attack landed on the shield.

At that very moment, the attack landed on the first barrier, and all 7 of the newly formed barrier split apart at once.

The attack suffered basically no pushback as it flew toward the man up front. The man's eyes went wide in shock and tried to fly away, but it was too late.

Somehow, the attack had appeared right in front of him, and it was going to kill him.

"I'm... dead!" the man thought.

Just then, something appeared in front of him. A flash of red shined and the attack disappeared.

When he finally focused his attention in front of him, he could see Alex standing there. He had somehow flown in between him and his attack

He smiled at the man. "My apologies for going overboard. I should have known better than to not hold back more," he said.

"Hold back... more?" the man was shocked. Did that mean that Alex had held back, even after using that terrifying attack?

The man gulped and immediately bowed in front of him. "Thank you for saving me," he said. "Your Majesty."

Alex was a little taken aback by the sudden royal address. He wasn't expecting that.

"Thank you for humoring her Majesty's demand," Alex said and bowed the man back before flying back down towards the Scarlet.

"Good job," Scarlet said with a smug little smile on her face. Alex simply shrugged and said nothing.

Scarlet then turned back towards the group of people in her eyesight. "So, does anyone else have any more complaints?" she asked.

Not a single soul made a peep when the question was asked. There was no way they would oppose the throne when the new Ruler had proved himself to be a force to be reckoned with.

"You all may know your new Ruler as an alchemy master. He is the best alchemist in the entire continent, nay, the entire world," she spoke. "But that is not all he's good in."

"As you just saw, he is also highly capable of fighting someone strong. He is so strong, that he killed 6 out of the 7 Dark Phoenix assassins that were after him, all by himself."

The crowd was only starting to discuss it when Scarlet continued. "Just the day before, Alex came out of the Sundering Sanctum as the one who completed it. Not only that, on the same day, he went to the Kang family and singlehandedly destroyed most of the family, and killed many of their members for all the wrongs that I'm sure you are familiar with by now."

"On top of all that, he is only 50 years old," Scarlet said. "Do you have a better candidate to be your King?"

Not a single person could even deny that Alex was worthy.

A voice sounded from amongst the group. "All hail King Alex!"

The other people slowly spoke as well. "All hail King Alex!"

Alex watched around as the crowd unanimously started chanting his name, calling him the King.

"All hail King Alex."

Chapter 1164 First Decree

The people complained no more after seeing Alex's abilities. Hearing about his feats made them even more certain that he was the right for the job.

So, after chanting his name and calling him his Majesty, the people were sent away from the palace.

Only a few were left behind, all of whom were from big families and sects. They were necessary to be kept there so they could talk about the future of the continent going forward.

Graham walked up to Alex who was getting down from the stage and couldn't help but simply stare at him with awe on his face.

"You are a King now?" Graham asked with a stunned voice.

"It seems so," Alex said, not knowing how to respond at all.

"Did you know this was going to happen?" Graham asked.

"No, I only just found out, like the rest," he said. "Scarlet had planned for it since yesterday it seems, but she didn't bother to tell me."

"Are you... okay with it?" Graham asked awkwardly.

"I'm... fine. It will take a few days for the reality to settle in, but I think I can handle it," Alex said. "You don't have to be worried about me."

"I'm not worried about you at all. I know I have nothing to worry for," Graham said. "I'm just wondering... since you are a King now... does that make me royalty?"

Alex couldn't help but chuckle. "I'm sure it does, father. Come, let us go in," he said.

The group walked back into the palace hall where the seats were laid for the ceremony. Since there was no time to switch it back to how it normally was, everyone found a random place to sit.

Graham sat towards the back since he didn't have much to do in this assembly. The other family and sect leaders sat towards the middle, and 10 elders sat at the front.

Alex was wondering for a moment where exactly he was supposed to be sitting, but the question was answered when Scarlet asked the elders to put another seat right next to her.

He went up and sat down next to her.

Everyone stood up at once and bowed toward the two of them before sitting back down.

"So, do you have any topics to discuss? I am curious what my first decree will be about after coming back to the throne after 5 thousand years," Scarlet said.

The group looked at each other. "Is there anything you would like to change about how the continent is lead right now?" one of the elders asked.

"Not really," Scarlet said. "The gears seem to have fallen in place nicely and the continent seems to be running quite fine even without an overall ruler. I'm sure there is stuff here and there we can improve, but it's not something I can just decide on a single day."

"Yes, your Majesty," the people said.

"Then how about dealing with the Wasteland? The people there need to know who their true ruler is as well," another one said.

"That won't be necessary for now. We haven't helped them in 5 thousand years. Suddenly going there to say that they are under someone else simply doesn't feel right with me. We will help them, but I think it's better to just give them the freedom they already have," Scarlet said.

"We will have to improve foreign relations. We had to lessen our contact with the Eastern or Northern continent for a very long time so they didn't know you were absent, your Majesty. Now that you are back, we should go ahead and start improving it again," another person said.

"No," Scarlet said. "I do not wish to contact any foreign power until I've grown stronger. I can't let them know that I haven't reached a high enough cultivation base."

"We can have his Majesty meet the foreign in your stead, your Majesty," someone else mentioned.

"Hmm," Scarlet gave the idea some thought and looked at Alex. After looking at him, however, she quickly shook her head. "He only just became a King. While he is royalty, he doesn't have the attitude or the arrogance of one. Until he learns to present himself as royalty, I can't have him leave for diplomacy missions."

"Besides, it's not like we can just go to the other continents, right? The Teleportation formations don't work like they used to," Scarlet said.

"We can still go from here to the other continent, your Majesty," one of the elders said. "It just costs a lot."

"How much would you estimate it costs?" Scarlet asked.

"We've tried it once to go to the Eastern continent, and... it cost nearly half of a normal-sized Saint spirit vein to teleport about 20 people to the other continent," the elder said.

"That's a lot, isn't it? We don't have that sort of resources to simply waste on a diplomacy mission," Scarlet said. "We don't have ships that can travel the ocean to the Eastern Continent, do we?"

"There are, but they are quite dangerous to use. Their concealment capabilities are nearly nowhere as good as the ones from the Eastern Continent," the elder said.

"Then this topic ends here. I will try to reach the Immortal realm as soon as I can," Scarlet said. "Once I do, we should have about 3 boats we can make use of. Okay, what else?"

The group gave some more thought, but no one could really think of any pressing matters that needed the Ruler's urgent care.

"How about... closing the barrier in the north?" Alex asked. "The spirit veins there were stolen from the Western continent and are being used to stop the tribal folks from entering."

"Since both of those actions don't reflect well on the continent, we should close the barrier and return the spirit veins to the Western continent," Alex said.

"Hmm, you're right," Scarlet said. "We can't return it just yet, but we do have to stop using the barrier."

"We should," Alex said.

"Fine, let this be my first decree then," Scarlet said. "Dismantle the barrier to the north and gather all Spirit vein there that do not belong to us."

"Yes, your Majesty," the 10 elders bowed.

Scarlet nodded. "As for the rest of what we should be talking about, I don't see any of you have any more problems that need my attention, so we will end this meeting today. Try to list out all the things that are wrong that I will have to look over in the future. I will see to it when I'm free."

"Yes, your Majesty."

"Leave now. I wish to speak with Alex alone," Scarlet said.

"Yes, your Majesty," the elders and the other leaders said as they all bowed toward Scarlet and then toward Alex before leaving.

Alex nodded slightly and watched them all leave. Graham gave a small nod and left the room as well.

Scarlet waited for everyone to leave before opening her mouth. "That was wrong," she said.

"Sorry?" Alex asked.

"The topic you brought up," Scarlet said. "That was wrong."

Alex frowned slightly. "Are you saying I shouldn't have brought up the topic?" he asked.

"No," Scarlet said. "You bringing up the topic makes you look like you care more about the Western Continent than the Southern."

She turned to look towards Alex. "It might not have sunk into you yet, but this is the fact now. You are a human King of the Southern Continent. Everything you do, everything you say, it should all be from the perspective of the King, not of the person behind the title."

"You saying that we should get rid of the barrier is good, but saying that we should do it so we can return it to the Western continent makes it sound like you care more about the Western continent than your own."

Alex dropped his head in thought. "You're right," he said. "I should have worded it better."

"Yes," Scarlet said. She placed her wings on him and patted him a bit.

"Don't worry, you weren't so obvious either. I don't think many caught on at all. Just be careful next time. As a King, every word that comes out of your mouth should be one that you have carefully thought of it beforehand."

"After all, each and every single word of yours now has the power to change the fate and destiny of others. A single word can make a begger the richest man in the city, or it can turn a rich merchant into a beggar," Scarlet said.

"Don't worry too much for now. I'm sure the 10 will find some texts to help you soon. I will remain outside for a while, so you won't have to bother with being a good ruler just yet."

"However, very soon, I will enter closed cultivation so I can fix my rushed cultivation base. At that time, you will have to remain outside and become the ruler this continent needs."

"I hope that you will be ready by then."

Alex straightened himself. "Don't worry, I will be ready. I will give you my word on this."

Scarlet smiled. "Don't be so stiff. You're the second most important person in the continent now, you can enjoy everything you want," she said.

Alex smiled. "I will try to," he said.

"Oh, speaking of which, have you ever seen spirit veins in person?" Scarlet asked.

"In part," Alex said. "Not the whole thing, no."

"You wanna see?" she asked.

"You mean..."

Scarlet nodded. "I will send you with the others tomorrow. There, you can get rid of the barrier and take away all the spirit veins yourself."

Chapter 1165 Purelake Qi Absorption Method

Alex walked out of the throne room and two of the elders suddenly walked next to him. He was surprised for a moment. "Do you need something, seniors?" he asked.

"No, your Majesty," the elders said. "We are merely walking next to you."

"Why?" he asked.

"You are now a King. We cannot let you walk around on your own. Us servants must be with you at all times," the two of them explained.

"It's fine, you know," Alex said. "I'm used to being alone. I can call for you if I need your help."

"Please let us accompany you wherever you go, your Majesty. We will feel better if we are around you whenever you might need something," the two said.

"Can't I at least be alone in the palace itself?" Alex asked.

"If that is your wish, then yes," the two said.

Alex nodded. "Please let me be by myself for a while. In the meantime, if you do want to do something, please help me find a bunch of cultivation methods so I can get my father started on with cultivation."

"Yes, your Majesty. I will immediately go find whatever is needed for his highness," one of the elders said.

Alex nodded and let them get away.

"I'll be in my room for now," he said.

"Your Majesty, you can't stay in that place anymore. We will prepare you a better room fit for a King," the elder said.

"Oh, is that room ready?" Alex asked.

"N-no, not yet," the elder said.

Alex smiled. "Then I shall be content with what I have. Please let me know when the room is ready," he said.

The elder nodded.

Alex nodded back and walked away from the place with his father. Graham was still in shock, so the two of them didn't say anything until they reached the guest room Alex was staying in for now.

"I didn't get the time to ask, but did you consume the Divine Devil's fruit?" he asked.

Graham shook his head. "It got late yesterday, so I didn't have the time. I will be eating it today," he said.

Alex nodded. "I should be able to find some good cultivation methods for you soon. Once that happens, you will need to use another thing, a lily. Although, I believe someone else would prefer to give it to you," he said.

"Someone... else? Who?" Graham asked.

A small light flashed from Alex's shoulders and Whisker appeared in front of him. Graham looked at Whisker and remembered him from the battle.

"This mouse... it was in the battle too," Graham said.

"This is Whisker," Alex said. "He's been with me for a while now and has been helping me with finding you. If not for him, I would've likely died in the battle the other day."

"Brother's father is safe?" Whisker asked with his spiritual sense.

"Yes," Alex said. "We saved him."

He put his hand forward and placed it next to Graham so he could see Whisker better. "He's not a normal mouse. You can speak with him, he'll speak back."

"Speak... back? A mouse?" Graham was surprised.

Alex smiled and nudged Whisker. "Whisker, say hello," he said.

"Hello, Brother's father," Whisker spoke aloud into Graham's mind.

Graham was taken aback by the sudden voice in his head, but he understood that it was the mouse speaking.

"He-hello," Graham said. "Your name is Whisker, right?"

"Yes," Whisker said. "What is brother's father's name?"

"My name? It's Graham."

Alex smiled seeing the two interacting. "Whisker, you don't have to continue calling him 'brother's father', just call him father from now on."

"Oh... okay," Whisker said. "Are you well, Father? Do you want a pill?"

"A... a pill?" Graham looked at the little mouse. "You're going to get me a pill?"

"No," Whisker said. "I'll make you one."

"M-make a pill?" Graham was surprised. "Isn't that... hard? Isn't being an alchemist a hard job?"

"He's a talented little mouse," Alex said. "He doesn't have much talent in fighting, but he's not bad when it comes to stuff like alchemy and formations."

He then turned to Whisker. "Don't worry about father. He's fine," he said. "He doesn't need a pill but, his friends do. Help me make some of those pills instead."

"What pills?" Whisker asked.

"It's... hmm, you don't know about it," Alex said. "Let me write the recipe down."

He took out a talisman and noted down the recipe for the pill that made a person sweat profusely.

'I wonder if body cultivators need something stronger,' Alex thought. The recipe he had written down was for Common pills, so he wasn't sure what a body cultivator with strength in the True realms needed.

'I will find out after feeding them,' he thought. It was just a common pill either way, so it wouldn't be a problem if it didn't work.

"Try and see if you can make a pill with this. You've never tried this recipe before, but it shouldn't be that hard," Alex said.

"Where are the ingredients?" Whisker asked.

Alex brought out a pile of ingredients and put it to the side, along with a cauldron he brought out for Whisker.

"Don't worry, father. I will make these pills to heal your friends," Whisker said and got to work.

Alex looked at Whisker and back to his father. "I will start too," he said.

"Okay, work," Graham said. "I will leave you for now."

"Where will you go?" Alex asked curiously.

"Anywhere I want," Graham said. "As the King's father, people shouldn't bother me as much, will they?"

"I don't think they will," Alex said. "Go on. I will finish these pills quickly."

Graham nodded. "Don't overdo yourself," he said and left.

After he was gone, Alex focused entirely on making pills and spent the next 2 hours completely making all the remaining antidote pills.

After he was done, he looked over at Whisker who was hard at work as well. His pills were coming to be somewhere between 40% and 60% in harmony. Given how bad the recipe itself most likely was, that was a great feat for Whisker.

But then again, he was making a Common pill as a True rank alchemist, so he was bound to do something good.

Alex decided to help him, so he started making the pills on his own as well. With each pill he made, he realized just how bad his recipe was.

There were so many places for improvement, but there just wasn't any time for it. He had to make the normal pills to test the people.

Alex made upto 8 pills at once using two different cauldrons. He could've gone up to 12, but he didn't want to have an aching head by the end of this.

Sometime around the evening, someone knocked on his door.

Alex was just about to finish the pills, so he made the person stay out for a few minutes. Once done, he finally called the person inside.

Yao Ning walked in with a storage bag in her hand. She smelled the aromatic scents in the air and looked at Alex sitting with 3 cauldrons around him.

"Were you making pills, your Majesty?" she asked.

Alex slumped back. "Yes," he said. "Those people we saved still need treatment, so I was making some pills that would help them."

"Did you spend the entire day making it, your Majesty? You should at least rest on the day you became a King," Yao Ning said.

"It's fine, I was worried anyway," he said. "So, why are you here?"

"Oh right. I was told you were looking for these," she said as she handed him the storage bag.

"Cultivation methods huh? Yes, I wanted my father to start cultivating," Alex said. "Do you have any suggestions?"

"How about your Yao family's cultivation method? It was a prize one of my elders got back when they entered the Sanctum a long time ago," the old woman said.

Alex thought for a bit. "Isn't the Yao family known for their Metal arts? My father's Metal spiritual root is one of the worst. I don't think that's a good idea," he said.

"Oh, what spiritual roots does his highness have?" the old woman asked.

"Wood, Water, and Earth," Alex said as he looked around.

"Wood, Water, and Earth..." the old woman repeated to herself. "A cultivation method that only has those 3 spiritual roots, huh?"

"Oh, no," Alex quickly explained. "He has all 5 roots, but those are the best."

"Oh, if he has all 5 roots, then... he should use the Liang family's cultivation method. They are known for their 5 roots after all," the old woman said.

"Is that so?" Alex said. "Is it here in this bag?"

"It should be," the old woman said. "It's called the Purelake Qi Absorption Method."

Alex nodded and searched for a few seconds before pulling out the manual. "Isn't Purelake the city where the Liang family is located? Is the manual named after the city?"

"No, the lake is named after the manual when the Liang Family settled there about 9 thousand years ago," the old woman said.

"I see," Alex said. "Then I shall be using this. Since it's only for the Common realm, I shouldn't worry about finding the best methods just yet."

The old woman agreed.

"Thank you for bringing these to me," Alex said.

"It's my pleasure, your Majesty," the old woman said.

"Also, I need something done tomorrow while I am gone to the north," Alex said.

"What do you need?" the old woman asked.

Alex brought out all the pills and handed them to her. "I will be needing your help in having these delivered to the people we saved. They will have to eat these pills."

Chapter 1166 Spirit Vein

"Your Majesty, we are ready to leave," Hou Xinya of the 10 Elders reported to Scarlet.

Scarlet nodded. "Take your time with the job," she said. "And look after Alex. Make sure he understands he is royalty now."

"Yes, your Majesty," the man said and retreated away from the throne room.

Scarlet slumped on the throne with 4 more of the 10 elders around her. "I'm sure I was sending 4 of you to the North. Where are the other 2?" she asked.

"Sister Ren is in the east following his Majesty's order to provide the pills he had made to the people he saved. As for brother Kang, he is busy dealing with the death in his family. Given the situation of the Kang family, I'm sure he would be away for a while," one of them answered.

"I see," Scarlet said. "Let him have as much time as he needs."

The group nodded.

"Now, for the matter, I gathered you all here," Scarlet said. "I never thought it would be possible, but it seems there are people in this realm crazy enough to go attack another continent. So, for safety reasons, I want you guys to start recruiting strong individuals that can help maintain peace during peaceful times, and go to war during warring times."

"I want to build an army."

* * * * *

Whisker sat on top of Graham's shoulders, looking over the people that were gathered in front of them.

Ren Guanting was by their side, but she was staying a step behind Graham as he was a person with more authority than her in this situation, due to him being a royal.

While she had a say in stuff, she would have to normally stay out of what Graham would say and do.

Fortunately for her, Graham didn't care much about power and authority. As long as he was free, he would want others to be free from having stayed under someone else.

"Are you guys doing well?" Graham asked his friends he had been with for the longest of times.

"We haven't been better," they answered.

"Leader, we heard the news, is it true that your son became the ruler of this land?" one of them asked.

Graham gave a smile and nodded. "That's true," he said.

"Woah! You must be really proud then," the people said with wide smiles on their faces too.

Graham couldn't hide the smug look on his face that every parent got when others talked about their children's success. "I'm very proud," he said.

"What about me?" Whisker asked.

"Haha, I'm proud of you too, Whisker," Graham said as he pet the mouse with a finger.

"And brother Pearl too?" Whisker asked.

"Yes, I'm proud of everyone," Graham said. "Alright, it's time for you guys to take your pills."

Graham turned around and nodded to Ren Guanting who had been waiting for this. She walked forward, with the dozen or so people that had come with her and started handing out the antidote pill.

Once that was done, she would start handing over the pill that would make them sweat. Alex had mentioned to her how that pill could most likely work due to the strength of these body cultivators, and if something bad happened by chance, she was to let him know immediately.

* * * * *

"Deactivate the barrier," Alex ordered.

"Yes, your Majesty," the 4 elders spoke, standing next to many others that were here with them to aid them.

The massive barrier in front of them shined for a split second before dispersing slowly like a popped bubble. The motes of light drifted in the air for a few seconds before disappearing completely.

Alex watched as the wall dividing the Wasteland and the Mainland of the Southern Continent finally disappeared.

"There will be voices of concerns and worries everywhere. Make sure to let everyone know exactly what it is we are doing," Alex said.

"Yes, your Majesty," the others responded.

"Make sure the notice goes to the Wasteland too. Make sure to let them know that they are welcome to come to the mainland if they so please too," Alex said. "But also make sure they know that there is no sacred flame for them to easily find here."

"Understood, your Majesty," they said.

"Alright, let us begin harvesting the spirit veins. Do elders remember which ones belong to us, and which ones don't?" Alex asked.

"We do, your Majesty," the 4 elders answer.

"Go ahead, show me," Alex said.

One of the elders flew toward one of the mountains on the mountain range in front of them. They closed their eyes and used only their sense to see everything. After a few seconds, they managed to locate the first Spirit veins.

"Here I go," the elder said and put their hand in front of them in the air as if grabbing something illusory in front of them.

The entire mountain shuddered and started shedding rocks and dirt on top of it. The trees toppled, and many nearby humans most likely sensed some earthquakes as well.

The elder clenched their fist even harder and gestured to pull something out.

Alex looked down and saw something white pop out of the ground. A 3-meter wide strip of crystalline concentrated Qi started floating into the air, and with it, the rest of it showed up as well.

Alex remembered seeing a spirit vein back in the Beast realm, where the palace was built below one that had the capability to hide immortals. It was the glowing crystal stalactite when viewed from close up, but from far away, it looked like a long glowing worm.

As the elder pulled more out, Alex saw the worm start to branch out into multiple directions that then branched into more directions. It was like the root of a tree, where there was a primary root, and from the primary root came secondary and tertiary roots.

Or more accurately, it was like the veins in a human body, that split from the main veins into multiple smaller veins.

'Ah, no wonder it's called a Spirit vein,' Alex thought. He continued watching as the spirit vein was pulled more and more, and Alex could see that the main vein was multiple kilometers long. The only reason it took not so much land here was that it was coiled around in the ground, most likely placed that way.

"Spirit veins are extremely delicate, your Majesty," one of the elders explained. "They are resilient to stress and can handle any attack that even a Saint Transformation realm cultivator could send its way, but they are brittle and the slightest bit of bend beyond a certain degree could snap them instantly."

Alex nodded as he heard that. "What happens if that happens?" he asked. "Does the spirit vein become useless? Does it turn to Spirit stones?"

"Yes, but not immediately," the elder said. "To turn into spirit stones, a spirit vein must stop growing and evolving. Only after not doing anything for a long time can the spirit vein turn to spirit stones."

"Then?" Alex asked.

"If you snap a spirit vein in half, not counting the thousands of small shards of crystals that would drop from it, the two main halves of the spirit vein will become fundamentally different from the original one," the elder said.

"Fundamentally different? Can you elaborate?" Alex asked.

"I mean to say that the spirit veins no longer have the same energy or aura as the original one. They don't have the same concentration of Qi, so—"

"So, the formations and scripts made with the original Spirit vein stop working, is that it?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the elder said. "You would have to start all over again, and that is just so you can use the few dozen years you have with the broken spirit veins before they turn into spirit stones."

"I see," Alex said. "So we have to be careful when pulling it out of the ground huh."

"Yes, but only the main vein. It won't matter much if the branches break off," the elder said.

Alex nodded. "I wish to try one for myself," he said.

"Let me find you one after this vein is pulled, your Majesty," the elder said.

Alex nodded and watched the elder finish pulling the entirety of the spirit vein into the air.

Everyone in the area immediately found the air growing thick with Saint Qi. The spirit vein diffused slowly when underground, but in the air, it was very fast.

Alex's eyes glowed purple for a moment as he used his Demon eyes to see what was happening exactly with the Qi in the air. When he did, he was surprised that he wasn't seeing exactly what he thought he would.

The multicolored Qi was being pumped out from the spirit vein, but about a third of the Qi that was being pumped out was going back into the spirit vein, along the Qi in the air.

Alex was surprised to see a field of Qi that circled back on itself in the air. 'Spirit vein absorbs Qi and evolves,' Alex thought as he recalled what he learned. 'If it didn't absorb the Qi, it wouldn't grow. So, I shouldn't be surprised seeing this.'

Even though he thought that he had assumed a spirit vein to only be pumping out Qi, so he was a little surprised for sure.

The elder sent out a spiritual bag toward on end of the spirit vein. Immediately it landed on the end of the main vein and started swallowing the spirit vein.

Within a minute, the entirety of the spirit vein in the air was swallowed into the storage bag.

Alex looked at the storage bag and nodded. "Let's continue with the rest."

Chapter 1167 Treasure Room

Alex felt the energy underground and grabbed onto the tail end of one of the spirit veins using his Qi.

He flexed his muscles and suddenly the tip of the main vein showed its face out of the ground. As soon as Alex saw that it was out, he pulled it out even more and the entire vein started coming out of the ground.

The white crystalline spirit vein was entirely uprooted a minute later and hung in the air. Alex felt the strain of having to hold something so strong with his own Qi, especially because the vein was sending out its own Qi, disturbing his own.

However, he had done it a couple of times today, so he had ready for it. He took the free storage bag that was prepared and sent it down onto the tail end of the main vein.

As soon as it reached the spirit vein, it started dragging in all of the spirit veins that was in the air, and not even a minute later, it was all gone.

The storage bag came flying back to Alex who held it in his hand and nodded to himself. He turned around towards the elders. "That was the last of it, right?" he asked.

"Yes, your majesty," one of the elders answered.

Alex looked at the destroyed land. "Do we bother planting some trees here, or what?" he asked.

"You don't have to worry about this, your Majesty. The trees will grow on their own in a few years," one of them answered.

"I see," Alex said. "How many did we get in the end?"

"We took all 56 spirit veins that were here," one of them said and put forth a pile of storage bags. Since the spirit veins were large and full of Qi, they couldn't be stored together at all or one would most likely destroy the other.

On top of that, the chances of the veins entangling were high as well, so it was better to keep them separate. Besides, they were large enough that there were barely any storage bags that could keep more than one spirit vein anyway.

Alex took all 56 bags and kept them inside his robes. His robes bulged around his waist, but no one said anything about it.

"What else do we have to do here?" Alex asked.

"There's nothing that needs your attention here, your Majesty," the elders said. "We can take care of the rest."

"Good. I will return then," Alex said.

He wanted to return on his own to let the elders do their job, but the elders ended up insisting that they follow him back. They would come back later to do the few things that were remaining.

Alex tried to argue, but it was more annoying to argue with them than to just let them come with him, so he did.

He returned back to the palace late in the evening and went to find Scarlet to tell her that he was done.

"Oh, you're back?" Scarlet asked from atop the sunstone where she was resting for the time being. "Did you get it all?"

"Yes," Alex said. "Where do I keep these? In the dome?"

"No, just place it all in the Treasure room in the palace," Scarlet said.

"There's a treasure room?" Alex asked with a surprised look on his face.

"Of course, there is," Scarlet said. "It's a palace after all. If a palace doesn't have a treasure room, then where would we keep all the valuable items?"

"I don't think I've seen it," Alex said.

"That's the point, isn't it?" Scarlet asked. "If anyone can find it, then it's not a very good treasure room."

"Makes sense," Alex said. "Where is it then? I'll go store these."

"Those elders should know the location, ask them," Scarlet said.

Alex nodded. "Alright, I'll do that," he said.

"By the way," Scarlet said. "I've decided to form a royal army. Can you take care of handling the logistics of it?"

"The logistics? I don't know if I'm right for the job though. Shouldn't one of the elders be better for this?" he asked.

"Oh, they will do all the job. You will only be there to approve or disapprove stuff. The continent needs them, but I don't want to deal with it at all," Scarlet said.

Alex sighed. "Did you really appoint me as the King just so you don't have to do the annoying work?" he asked.

"Of course," Scarlet said as she laughed. "Why would I make you a King if I was going to do everything on my own?"

"Damn you," Alex said. "I'm going to the treasure room. I'll see you later."

"Okay," Scarlet said. She watched Alex walk away and thought she was forgetting something important that she had to tell him but couldn't remember it immediately.

"Ah! I forgot to tell him how to open the room," she thought. "Whatever, he will come back when he fails."

Alex found one of the elders and asked them to lead him to the treasure room.

The path to the treasure room was simple but definitely surprising. One could only go to it through the throne room using a hidden door behind the throne itself.

"It's right through here, your Majesty" the elder showed the empty wall in front of him.

"Thank you," Alex said and looked at the wall. There were no signs of formations at all, but when looking through his demon eyes, he could see that it was hidden very well. Even with his demon eyes, he could only see a faint energy aura coming out of the wall.

He placed his palm on the wall and poured his Qi into it.

"Your Majesty, you can't just—"

The elder was going to warn him not to try and unlock the formation, but seeing how nothing happened, the elder stopped halfway through his sentence.

"What did you say?" he asked.

The elder looked surprised and confused. "Why did the formation not attack you?" he couldn't help but ask. One couldn't just pour Qi into a formation after all, especially on one that required something else to activate it.

There were defensive mechanisms to these sorts of formations that were more of a seal. However, seeing as nothing happened to Alex, the elder couldn't understand what was going on.

Alex frowned too. He had activated the formation that locked the door, but he was missing the key.

'Is it Phoenix blood?' he wondered. To enter the treasure room back in the White Tiger's realm, he needed White Tiger's blood. However, he didn't have the Phoenix blood at all.

"Do I need to go back and ask Scarlet to help me open this?" he asked.

"Your Majesty, the crown," the elder said. "Wear the crown and you will be able to open it."

"Oh!" Alex said and quickly brought out the crown. Scarlet had let him keep it, so he did. He placed the crown on his head and suddenly felt a coolness as his mind felt refreshed.

"Whoever made this crown is very talented for sure," Alex said softly.

The elder didn't say anything as he didn't know the crown's origins. The crown definitely preceded him by thousands of years at least.

Alex placed his palm back on the door and poured his Qi. This time around, the door made a humming sound as it slowly vanished into nothing.

Alex saw the opening and walked in. The opening led to a long hallway that was nearly 200 meters long and ended up in another room that had a door of its own.

Alex opened that door too and finally, he could enter the treasure room.

The treasure room of a palace was by no means a normal place. It was a 20-meter wide room that was about 2 floors high and had various sorts of treasures that were gathered throughout the ages, be it from techniques to weapons to all sorts of different items.

Alex was overwhelmed for a bit by the number of things in the room. The elder that had followed behind him was surprised even more so.

He couldn't help but want to browse through everything that was there.

"Your majesty, you should take these armors for yourself. I don't recall seeing you wear armor ever," the elder said.

"Maybe," Alex said. It was definitely a good idea to do that. He looked at the swords and they weren't bad either.

There were formation designs, talisman scripts, and even some pill recipes there that may come to use sometime in the future.

Not only that, he even saw various different pills that were kept there.

Fortunately, everything in the room was named, or else Alex would have no idea what was what.

He found an empty corner and placed all 56 storage bags there before taking out a talisman to write exactly what it was.

After storing it, he went around the treasure room to see if he could take something. Given that he was the king, he doubted anyone would mind.

He took an armor that he desperately needed. Then, he took a few defensive and offensive talismans as well. After that, he learned the various different scripts and blueprints as well as some of the pill recipes.

He found a defensive technique, something that he had been lacking for a very long time. He had been using the same defensive technique he had learned back in the Crimson Empire, so it was about time to change them.

He wasn't lacking offensive techniques though, so he didn't take any of those.

As he looked around for a while longer, his eyes fell on something. When he read the description, he couldn't help but be surprised that something like that existed at all.

"This is not bad," Alex thought as he took the item too.

Chapter 1168 Mental Defense

The elder with Alex wondered why he took a set of robes with him when there were so many other treasures that should have caught his eye.

"Your majesty, is there something unique about that robe?" he couldn't help but be curious about it.

"Yes," Alex said as he handed the talisman with the information about the robe to the old man.

The elder took the talisman and read through it calmly. However, by the end of it, his eyes wide as a duck's egg.

"How... how can something like this exist?" he couldn't help but ask.

"I don't know," Alex said. "Which is why I'm so surprised too."

He pulled the cloth a bit and found it really resilient. "It is also very durable. I shouldn't have any problem fighting in it," he said.

"You should definitely wear it, your Majesty," the elder said. "That is perhaps the best thing in this room."

Alex nodded. He felt the same as well.

He kept the robe in his storage and looked through the rest of the stuff. He came across a few treasures for mental protection and tested how strong they were.

Of them, only a single necklace showed any sign of being worth it. Given the strength of his own spiritual energy, he could defend against any mental attacks that the other artifacts could.

This necklace, however, could defend Saint Transformation realm of mental attacks, which he wasn't yet capable of.

"Can you use a mental attack on me?" Alex asked the elder.

"Attack you, your Majesty?" the elder said with wide eyes. "I could never."

"No, please. I want to test something," Alex said.

"But how could I attack you, your Majesty? If I were to hurt you by some chance, I could never—"

"It's an order," Alex said sternly. He needed to test the before and after results of a spiritual attack on whether he was wearing the necklace or not.

The elder sighed in the end and complied with the order. "I'm not the best at using mental attacks, but still, please be careful," he said and launched an attack at Alex.

Alex braced himself for the mental pain that was going to come next. He was ready for the head-pounding pain and only hoped that he didn't faint.

He had pride in his own spiritual energy, but this was a Saint Transformation realm cultivator that he was going up against. Pride did little to stop an attack of such might.

Alex waited for the attack to hit, and waited, and waited. However, the attack never came at all.

"What are you doing?" he asked. "Attack me already."

"Huh?" the elder was surprised. "But... I did. I already attacked you. How are you not hurt?"

"What?" Alex was confused now. "You didn't attack me at all. I didn't even feel anything."

"But I did," the elder said softly. "I must've made a mistake, your highness. Let me do it again."

Alex prepared himself and watched the elder ready his attack as well. However, once again, the attack didn't come.

"You weren't hurt?" the elder asked.

"You attacked already?" Alex was surprised. "How come I don't feel any—"

His words paused as his eyes slowly moved upward. He reached up with his hand and pulled down the crown on his head.

The coolness he felt in his mind disappeared instantly, leaving him with what felt like a drowsy mind.

"Uhh... try again," Alex said.

The elder nodded. He launched an attack, and Alex definitely felt this one. "Argh!" he cried out in pain and stumbled a bit as he fell to the ground. His vision went black for a few seconds before it slowly came back to him.

It took him about 10 seconds to slowly get back up and even then his head hurt quite a bit. He shook his head and half a minute later, the pain finally subsided.

He reached for the necklace and wore it. "Can you do it again?" he asked.

The elder nodded and attacked.

The necklace suddenly vibrated and stopped the mental attack from reaching him. It couldn't completely protect him, but what did remain of the attack was of no worry to Alex. His spiritual energy easily destroyed the remaining attack, leaving him unharmed.

"Not bad," he thought as he touched the necklace. "However, it is nowhere near as good as this crown."

Alex placed the crown back on his head and immediately felt the difference of night and day when it came to how the crown affected his mind.

The coolness took away any remaining pain he was feeling. "Damn, why did no one tell me that the crown was a mental defense artifact?" he asked.

"We... weren't aware," the elder said. "We don't know much about the crown after all."

"You didn't experiment while you were with it? You have 5 thousand years to do so," Alex said.

"It is a crown that belongs to the ruler of the continent, we didn't dare touch it except for when it needed cleaning," the elder said.

"I see," Alex said as he touched the crown. "I can't just wear it wherever I go, so I think I will keep the necklace too."

Afterward, he searched the treasure room for a few more things, but nothing substantial stood out to him. He did notice a very large amount of spirit stones kept in a few storage bags in one corner, which could be used to fund whatever idea it was that Scarlet and the rest required.

'The royal army can certainly use it,' he thought.

Alex left the treasure room, very satisfied, and closed everything. With the formation working again, no one could tell that the throne room led to the Treasure room at all.

"Your majesty, your father has returned," someone reported to him.

"Ah, good," Alex said and went over to where his father was. He was resting in one of the rooms along with Ren Guanting who had gone out with him.

Whisker jumped onto his shoulder the moment he entered the room, and elder Ren stood up to greet him.

"How did it go?" Alex asked. "Any complications?"

"None, your majesty," the elder said. "We had the people take both pills one after another. The antidote pill healed them from the toxins, and the sweating pill made them sweat out all the red dust in their body."

"Oh," Alex was surprised. "The sweating pills actually worked on the body cultivators? I would've assumed that it wouldn't."

"They took some time to work on the stronger body cultivators, but it did work in the end," the elder said.

"I see," Alex said. "Maybe that's how it works on body cultivators."

"Now that they are healed, do you have any plans on what we should do with them?" the elder asked.

Alex thought for a bit. "Do you know what we should do, father?" he asked.

"Send them home," Graham said. "While I don't believe anyone has an actual home to return to, just sending them to the Wasteland where they can live as a tribe should be enough. That is what they had been wishing for the longest time while they were kept on that godforsaken island."

Alex gave some thought to the suggestion and nodded. "Give those people two choices. They can stay here and cultivate as they like. We will give them some resources to get started."

"However, if they choose to, they can return to the Wasteland where there should be locations with Phoenix fire that don't have people living in it yet," Alex said.

"As you say, your Majesty," elder Ren said.

"You may leave, elder."

Ren Guanting bowed and walked away from the room.

"You really have quite a bit of power, don't you?" Graham said while showing a surprised face. "I would've never assumed somebody strong like her could ever listen to you."

"These 10 elders are loyal to the throne, so they are very respectful of me," Alex said. "As long as I don't cross some sort of boundary, they should be willing to help me with everything they can."

Graham nodded. "Anyway, I'm feeling exhausted for some reason. I will go rest in a bit," he said.

"Oh right, before you go," Alex spoke as he brought out something and handed it over to his father. "You should learn this technique. You have already gone through Mortal Cleansing, so you will need to start cultivating soon. This technique will help you with that."

"Oh, really?" Graham said excitedly as he took the Purelake Qi Absorption Method. He flipped the book and started reading. However, as he went along, his smile turned to a frown.

Alex frowned as well when he saw that. "Is... something wrong? Do you not like the book?" he asked.

Graham gave an awkward look as he turned to his son. "Forget about not liking the book, I can't even read it. What language is this written in?" he asked.

"It's the demon lan-ah, I forgot. You don't know the language of this world," Alex said as he slapped his forehead. "You will need to learn how to read and write the language of this world."

"That will take some time, won't it?" Graham asked. "You can't just learn a language in a short time."

"You can if you have an eidetic memory," Alex said. "Here's what we'll do. Whisker will stay with you and read everything that is written in that book, so you can start cultivating immediately."

"Once you can cultivate, you will use this Spirit Cleansing Lily and open your Spiritual sea. After that, learning anything, including the language, will be a piece of cake."

Chapter 1169 The Logistics

"Uhh... this pill and this pill." A young man pointed at two different pills that were showcased under formation barriers.

"Antidotes, again?" the seller asked. "Did the last few pills not work either?"

The young man gave a sad smile and shook his head. "None of them seem to work, so I have to keep on trying with new ones," he said as he looked through the various pills that were on show. "Are there any that are not on display?"

"No, I wouldn't dare hide pills from a customer when I could be selling them," the seller said.

"I see," the young man said sadly. "How much for the pills?'

"52 thousand true spirit stones," the seller said.

The young man gave a dry laugh when he heard that. "So expensive," he said softly as he fished for some spirit stones.

"It's a fair price, young man," the seller said. "I wouldn't try to profit off of someone's illness. It wouldn't sit right with my conscience."

"No, no, I'm not blaming you," the young man quickly said. "It's just that I'm used to having these pills cost less than what I'm paying right now."

"That's not possible unless you can get the alchemist himself to give you a discount," the seller quickly said.

The young man smiled. "I suppose. My family has a few good alchemists, so I never had to buy the pills myself. My father is the best at making them," he said.

"Oh, your father can make pills too? Why don't you just have him make some for you then?" the seller asked.

"I... don't really talk with him anymore," the young man said. "He had taught me quite a bit about alchemy when I was a child, but... I wasn't really into learning at the time. I regret it right now."

The seller didn't respond. "If only you could ask the King to try and look after your injury, he could maybe help you out," he said.

"The king?" the young man gave a weird look. "Does the new Phoenix ruler know about pills?"

"No, not lord Phoenix," the seller said. "The King, Alex."

The young man gave a confused look. "Who's Alex?" he asked.

"Have you not heard the news?" the seller asked with wide eyes. "In her Coronation event, lord Phoenix appointed the Alchemist Alex as the new King of the continent."

"Oh," the young man said with a surprised expression. "The Southern Continent has a change in rulership as well, huh?"

"Yes, after such a long time," the seller said.

"I see, and this king Alex is a great Alchemist?" the young man asked.

"The best in the world," the seller said.

"Haha, that's quite the boast. How good are his pills?" the young man asked.

"I hear most of his pills go above 90% in harmony, many even reaching 95%. Tell me they aren't good," the seller said proudly.

"I see, that's not bad for someone th—" the young man paused. "Wait, over 95%?"

The seller nodded after seeing the shock on the young man's face.

The young man was indeed very shocked. He had never expected there to be someone in this world that could make pills nearly as great as his father.

'Should I talk with him about the antidote?' he wondered before quickly shaking his head. 'I can't let anyone know I'm here. They will go to him first if any.'

"Here's you go," the young man paid for the pills with 50 thousand Spirit stones. "Thank you for the pill."

"Come anytime," the seller waved him away.

The young man put up his scarf and hid his face as he walked through the streets of the busy city. He reached a small tavern and walked in to go to his room.

He stood in front of the room and flexed his aura a bit before opening the door.

As soon as he walked in, a head turned in his direction. "I'm back," the young man said unenthusiastically.

The head followed where he walked and didn't miss any movement of the young man. The young man turned and looked at the woman that was sitting quietly on the bed.

She wore pink robes with a white veil that went over her head. An orange mask covered her face with absolutely no opening for her to see, breathe, or eat from.

The young man walked up to the woman and grabbed her hand.

"I am back," he spoke as he wrote the words on her hand with his finger.

The woman nodded after feeling the word. She used her Qi to create a set of words in the air.

"Did I get more..." the man read the words and quickly answered her back by writing on her palm again. "Yes, I got more pills."

He placed the two pills on her palm.

"Which one first?" the woman wrote in the air.

"Any," the man wrote back.

The woman nodded and lifted her mask to eat the first pill. She waited for a while and then ate the second one. After she was done with both, she shook her head.

The young man didn't even have it in him to feel dejected as another pill didn't work to cure her poison. At this point, the young man was feeling desperate.

"Should we... just go back?" he asked, but of course, there was no answer. The woman couldn't hear him at all after all.

The young man thought for a bit and quickly shook his head. "I can't go back. Not after..."

Since going back to his father wasn't an option, he wondered if he should go find the King of this continent. 'How do I possibly talk with someone so high profile as the king? I would have to reveal my own identity. I can't possibly do that,' he thought.

That wasn't a choice either.

In the end, the young man had nothing else he could do. He held the woman's hand and spoke, "Don't worry, I'll fix this somehow. I will take you back and heal you, even if that means I will have to stand up to father. Don't worry."

The woman stroked his head while he sat there wondering how long it will be in the future before their lives would finally return back to some form of normality again.

* * * * * *

Alex sat with wide eyes as he read the cost of keeping and maintaining a mere 5000 people army.

"Are you sure these numbers are not common spirit stones? There's no way it could be True spirit stones, right?" he asked.

"That's the correct number, your highness," the elder that had brought him the information said.

"How can 5 thousand people cost us this many spirit stones for just a year?" Alex asked.

"Ahem," the elder coughed a little. "That's monthly, not yearly."

"What?!" Alex's eyes went wide when he heard that. "This can't possibly be monthly."

"I am afraid it is, your majesty," the elder said. "1000 of those would be Saint realm cultivators after all, with the remaining 4000 being no less than a True King realm cultivator."

"Even then," Alex said. "These numbers sound simply absurd. I mean, 800 Million Spirit stones per month?"

"That is the requirement if we want to have a well-maintained army, your majesty," the elder said.

Alex scratched his head as he read through the numbers that made up everything.

"Salary, housing, training, talismans, formations, pills, weapons, clothing," he read through it all. "There's just so much. Is there no way to reduce these numbers?"

"There... is a way, but it is going to cost us a lot initially while being beneficial in the long run," the elder said.

"What is it?" Alex asked excitedly.

"You see, since most of the cost comes from stuff like pills and talismans, instead of buying them from somewhere, how about establishing royal institutes whose main purpose would be to make these items," the elder said. "If we get too many, we can even turn it into an actual business, bringing in some income."

"I see," Alex said. "That's not a bad idea, but it is going to cost us a bit early on, huh?"

"That's right, your Majesty," the elder said.

Alex fell into some thought. "Establishing those institutes does feel like the best way of going about this issue, but then, we have to hire them too, don't we? That's another hassle," he said.

The elder said nothing and let Alex speak out his thoughts for the moment.

"We can exclude salary, housing, and clothing for the time being as there's no need to change them exactly."

"We can even remove weapons for the time being as well since a weapon isn't necessarily something that can be considered monthly. Once they get one, there would be no reason to change it so quickly."

"As for training, that is one place we cannot slack off at all, so the cost there remains."

"So, pills, formations, and talismans are the only thing we can save cost on, isn't it?" Alex thought. "Very well, it sounds like creating an institute for it is the best way to go about it."

"It does," the elder said. "So, should I tally up the costs for these institutes as well?"

"Yes, please do so," Alex said. "Also, you can start spreading the message that the royal family is looking to hire Alchemists, Talisman makers, and Formation designers. We will be hiring them no matter what in the end, so we might as well get started."

"Yes, your Majesty," the elder said.

"Also," Alex continued. "Just to make it more enticing to the ones that might not want to join, tell them that the ones that join will gain monthly tutelage from me. That should help make the bigger names want to join as well."

Chapter 1170 An Evening Walk

To a cultivator, a month was supposed to be a very short period of time that would usually just pass before one could even realize it had passed.

However, to Alex, the month following his ascendence to royalty felt like the longest month in recent memory.

His days were no longer monotonous where he could spend them doing the same thing over and over, simply losing himself to time.

Instead, he was forced to look at different problems every day, not letting each day blend into the other to not feel the passage of time.

"That will be all, your Majesty," the elder finished reporting everything to Alex.

"Thank you," Alex said while on his throne and sent the elder away. He slumped a bit after the elder was gone.

'So the tests for the production institutes are tomorrow, huh?' he thought. It had been a month since it was advertised that the royal palace was looking to hire many Alchemists, Talisman makers, and Formation designers. And finally, they were here to take the test that would help them join.

He needed to be ready for that tomorrow.

'Damn Scarlet, she's making me do everything,' he thought as he got off the throne and stretched. It had been a long day and finally, it all came to an end. He couldn't wait to go back and cultivate.

He left the throne room and made his way to his father's room. After knocking twice, his father's spiritual sense noticed him and he opened the door.

Alex walked through and went in to find his father learning how to read and write the demon language along with Whisker. It had been an entire month, so he was good enough that if given the time, he could read and write anything.

Still, it didn't come to him naturally, so he practiced a bit.

"Are you done?" Graham asked.

"Yeah, I just got done," Alex said. "What about you? Did you cultivate today?"

"I did," Graham said. "But once again, it's very slow."

Alex felt his father's cultivation base and nodded. He was merely in the Skin Tempering 3rd realm despite cultivating for an entire month.

It was impossible to tell if he was just bad at cultivating or if there was something wrong with his body.

He had asked Scarlet to check, but even she couldn't tell what was wrong with his father.

'It's not like he is practicing with bad technique or even rushing,' Alex thought. 'And I've also given him the best pills he can use right now, so why is his cultivation base so slow?'

It was impossible to tell exactly what the reason was, but at least his father could continue with his body cultivation.

According to Scarlet, one didn't necessarily have to have Qi cultivation to be immortal. You could also take the physical cultivation route to immortality. Although, that was significantly worse for the cultivator since advancing their body cultivation was extremely difficult in the Immortal realm without any sort of natural treasures.

'She said it was rare, but not impossible to do, so I can relax for now,' he thought.

"Did you go meet your friends?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I did," Graham said. "But most of them have already returned to the desert to live their life without any more twists and turns. They just want to live a simple life now."

Alex nodded. He wouldn't mind a simple life right now either.

He talked with his father for a few more minutes before walking out. Whisker remained with his father to keep him company, so Alex was all alone.

He thought of returning to his room, but instead, he decided to leave the palace. If he were to tell someone he was going out, the elders would have 3 people follow him immediately.

So instead, he simply sneaked out of the palace without letting anyone know.

With the skills and treasures he had on him, no one could even realize that he had left the palace right now.

He pulled out a small straw hat from his storage ring and wore it on his head. The hat drooped just enough to hide his face if he looked slightly downward. Without anyone specifically trying to see his face, they wouldn't be able to.

He walked through the evening crowd of the city that all rushed around buying and selling stuff, or returning from work. There were restaurants that were busy serving food to the mortal early in the evening.

Alex smiled softly and decided to try out some mortal food.

He kept his hat and sat alone at a table as the food came. There weren't many tables in the restaurant, so some people came and sat at the same table as him, without a single clue as to who he was.

Alex quite liked that.

He silently ate his food while listening to the conversation of the many around him. It sounded like quite a few of them were excited about the tests tomorrow that was going to be broadcast.

'I did promise monthly tutelage to the alchemists that will join,' he thought. He could understand why it was so popular.

He left the restaurant after he was finished and continued with his walk. The number of people walking around reduced significantly as time went on.

The air chilled a bit as well, and Alex found the lonely walk quite entrancing. He had needed this change of pace to refresh himself.

As he walked, he finally felt that he was free enough to think of what he needed to do next. Not just as a King, but also as himself.

"Scarlet is taking her time fixing her rushed cultivation," he thought. "So, it will be a while before she can reach the immortal realm to unlock whatever storage it is that needs Immortal Qi. Without her reaching the Immortal realm or reaching anywhere close to it, I can forget about her taking me away too."

Even if she did take just him back to the Western Continent somehow, he would still have trouble coming back from there. With the responsibility he was handed, he couldn't just leave the Southern Continent for years before he was strong enough either.

"So, I have to do what I need to before I have a chance of leaving this place," he thought. This meant, the following years of his were going to be filled with a lot of cultivation, a lot of training, a lot of pill making, and most definitely a lot of meditation to learn some more dao.

He knew exactly what dao he wanted to learn next, and even had some rough idea of how he was going to achieve it.

"I probably don't have to hide my alchemy skills, so it will definitely be easier," he thought.

He continued walking through the city and walked past the Insight Pavilion that was still working.

The pavilion was under new management now, becoming the Royal Insight Pavilion. With Zhu Shaofan dead, there was no one else to take over it, so Alex decided to use it for himself.

He went around the city for an hour or two more and finally returned to the palace, retreating into his royal chambers to wait for the next day to begin.

Chapter 1171 Empty Seat

Alex held 45 swords in the air, collectively. They moved as if they were all one sword, but they didn't feel like a single sword at all.

They were each their own thing that he had to hold with his Qi. They did not feel like they should if they were just an upgraded version of the 21 Sword Array.

This was not the technique he wanted to use.

"Qi, Pathway, and Intent, these 3 things need to be correct for a technique to work properly," Alex thought. "The Qi is fine since I'm upgrading the technique, and the Intent is there since I know what I want to do. So, the problem I am having really is just the pathway."

Alex took a deep breath and used the technique once more, this time pulling his Qi out from a slightly different pathway from before.

When the Qi flew out, it did nothing, like the previous hundreds of times. He couldn't help but sigh as he let the swords drop to the ground.

"I have millions of different path permutations to go through before I land on one that works," he thought to himself. That was going to take a very long time for certain.

He sensed someone walking into the backyard, so he quickly put away all the swords and turned around.

Qiu Jianhong walked up to him and bowed a little. "Your Majesty, the tests will be beginning at any time soon. Do you intend to watch it by any chance?" he asked.

"Oh, it's starting?" Alex asked with an excited look. "Yes, I've been looking forward to it. Who is hosting the tests?"

"I will be responsible for the Alchemy tests. Sister Liang will be responsible for the Talisman tests, and brother Huang will be responsible for the formation tests. There will be other experts that will help with the tests, but us 3 will be the main ones," Qiu Jianhong answered.

"I see," Alex said as he walked up to the elder. He brought out something from his storage ring and handed it to the old man.

"I will go change and be ready for the tests," he said. "Add this to the Alchemy tests prize."

"What... is this?" the old man asked.

"You can read it and see for yourself," Alex said and walked away. He didn't stay behind to see the look of shock that would appear on the old man's face not even a moment later.

Alex went to his father first and asked him if he wanted to see the tests.

"Sounds fun," Graham said. "I hear the entire city is looking forward to it. I will be watching it too."

Alex nodded. "I will have them prepare seats for you too then," he said and walked away. He went to his royal chambers, one that was larger than even the throne room. There was no one in the room as he didn't allow anyone to come in, so he was alone here.

He quickly changed into a robe that was laced with jade and gold. The elders called it a robe fit for the King. He didn't like wearing something this flashy, but as a King, he felt like he had no choice.

They were teaching him a bit about how to be a King, and one of the main lessons was that to be a King, you must first look the part.

If he didn't look like a King, no one would take him for a King at all.

After wearing the flashy robes, he walked out of the palace, along with a bunch of elders as he prepared to go over to the open grounds to the east of the city where the tests were being held.

"Is her Majesty not coming?" one of the elders asked him.

"No, Scarlet is busy fixing her cultivation base. She won't be coming out for a while," Alex said.

The elders said nothing and prepared a small ship with the colors of the Vermillion bird. Alex rode the ship, along with everyone else from the palace, and left.

They arrived at the test location, surrounded by thousands and thousands of people, all of whom started cheering the moment they saw him arrive.

'Time to get to work,' Alex thought and stood up. He put a giant smile on his face and waved at the many people that were all looking at him from below.

The elders saw him acting like a King and smiled. Their teachings were working.

"How long do I have to do this?" Alex asked without moving his lips.

"Just a little longer, your Majesty," the elders said, barely holding in their smiles.

The ship hovered next to where the seats were prepared for him, and Alex exited it, going straight over to where the seats were.

Alex sat down on his seat, his father seating close by too. The seat next to him was empty, however, and no one seemed to come to sit in it.

"You guys prepared a seat for Scarlet too?" he asked.

"Yes, your Majesty," one of the elders said.

"You shouldn't have bothered, but whatever," Alex said.

"We do have to prepare one, if only just for formality's sake," another elder said.

"I understand," Alex said. "Scarlet is still the real Ruler. She should have a seat prepared, even if she doesn't come."

"Ahem, it's not necessarily for her Majesty alone," another elder said.

Alex gave a confused look and turned towards the seat to his left. "If not for Scarlet, then who?" he asked.

"The Queen," the elders said.

Alex was taken aback for a second. "The... Queen? and you're not talking about Scarlet, right?" he asked.

"Are you planning on marrying her Majesty by any chance?" one of the elders asked.

"Of course not," Alex said. "I'm just bonded with her. Besides, she is a beast, I'm a human. It wouldn't work even if we wanted to."

The elders looked at each other. "Maybe not right now, but her Majesty can turn to a human when she reaches the Immortal realm," they said.

"Human? Ah! Right," Alex said. "I had forgotten that Immortals are capable of that. How do you guys know that?"

"We've seen her Majesty's human form a long time ago," one of the elders said.

"Oh, what does she look like?" he asked curiously.

"A fiery woman with a beautiful face and bright red hair that you can't keep your eyes off of. Honestly, once you see her, you will be smitten, your Majesty," the elders said.

"Is that so..." Alex thought. He imagined what she would look like as a human. Fiery personality, beautiful skin, and red... hair.

Alex's face changed from one full of imagination to one full of confusion. He quickly brought out something and looked into it.

It was the talisman that Zhu Shaofan had given him to misdirect him regarding the assassins that he would have to look out for.

One of those assassins, the red-haired one, looked exactly like Scarlet's description. Not only that, the one in the picture was even fighting with fire Qi.

'Ah, smitten huh?' he thought. 'Zhu Shaofan must've seen her face too then. He must've been so smitten by her beauty that he simply couldn't forget her and even dared put her in something like this.'

'Beauty,' Alex thought. If he was to talk about beauty, there was only one girl that he would consider truly beautiful. Everyone else, the best they could do was come second.

He didn't know who she was, or if she was alive either, but the woman in his memories, the one that had given the first Undying God the physique skill, that was the one woman that he considered truly beautiful.

No one else's beauty could compare in his eyes. 'I hope this doesn't end up becoming a problem when I do end up searching for a partner,' he thought.

After becoming someone with a very good understanding of the human body at a physical level and having dealt with a lot of women's bodies when he worked as a doctor, he already wasn't swayed by the female specimen.

Now that normal beauty couldn't affect him either, Alex wondered if he had to perhaps let himself fall to someone's charm to finally love someone.

'I hope I can find love normally,' he thought. Still, the thought of love and marriage was not something he had the luxury of thinking about right now. They were something he had to leave for the future him.

"Your Majesty, you should try and find a wife as soon as you can, so that the continent can have a Queen too. Not only that, you need to leave behind heirs so that if you had to stop being a King for some reason, there can be someone else to take your spot," one of the elders said.

Alex shook his head. "I'm not going to marry someone haphazardly just so I can leave behind an heir," he said. "What do you think is going to happen to me? I can only think of two things."

"I will either die, or I will ascend," he said. "If I die, Scarlet can choose to remove this position or choose another person as the new King."

"If I end up reaching the Immortal realm and ascend, do you really expect me to leave behind any children I would've had by then? No, I would take them all with me to the Immortal realm. In that case, you will once again have to rely on Scarlet."

He turned towards the elders. "What I'm saying is, don't bother me about finding a Queen."

Chapter 1172 Proof

"Welcome to the Royal tests," Yao Ning stood at the front of the stage and started speaking.

"We will now be holding the public tests to choose the ones that will be entering our Royal institutes. There are exactly 200 different spots for each profession, with 50 of them being for Saint realm cultivators."

"We will take in more if we get more, but our main priority will be to check your talent and potential, not your cultivation base," the elder spoke. "So everyone will have a fair chance."

"For the ones that end up being accepted, you will be given various rewards."

"For the Talisman makers, you will all receive monthly tutelage from master Liang Shufen," Yao Ning gestured to the pretty elder that was standing next to her.

"For the Formation designers, you will all receive monthly tutelage from master Huang Chen," she gestured to the man that was standing on her other side.

"Finally, for the Alchemists who manage to pass our tests today, you will all receive monthly tutelage from his Majesty, Alex himself."

Alex smiled and waved as the crowd cheered for him after hearing his name.

Yao Ning waited for the crowd to calm down a bit while reading what was written in the talisman that was provided to her by Qiu Jianhong that was next to her as well.

She wasn't sure if this was the right thing to do or not, but since Alex had asked for it, she had to do it.

"Also, since his Majesty is generous, he has decided to add another reward for the Alchemsits to motivate you all to work harder," she said as she took a deep breath to read the next part.

"Any Alchemist that ends up having the top 3 best results today, you may either request a pill recipe from his Majesty or request him to improve upon a recipe you already have," she said. "To give context to the reward, his Majesty guarantees that any of these recipes that you get will be capable of creating pills that reach 100% Harmony."

The atmosphere in the crowd shifted as it went from one of excitement and happiness to one of doubt and confusion. They could understand if the rewards were recipes that reached 90% or over, as it was evident that the King was able to do that.

However, the difference between 90%, or even just 99% and 100% was a difference between heaven and earth.

No matter how trusting the crowd was of their King, they couldn't just trust that he could make 100% harmony pills.

"Your Majesty, did you promise that reward?" one of the elders that were by his side asked him.

"I did," Alex said as he looked around. "This was not the reaction I was expecting when I thought of giving this as a reward."

"I mean… you did promise something nonsensical, your Majesty," the elder said.

Alex stared at the elder. "Are you calling my reward Nonsensical?" he asked.

"Of course not, your Majesty," the elder quickly stepped back. "I misspoke."

Alex stood up.

"Your Majesty?" the elders looked at him. He flew up to Yao Ning and the others who were speaking.

"Since it had come to this, I can't just let the people think I'm a liar or a fraud," he said.

"Your Majesty?" the 4 elders watched as Alex didn't stop by them, but rather moved onto the testing platforms that were prepared. They tried to follow him down, but Alex stopped them.

Instead, he turned towards the crowd and smiled. "I hope you are all prepared to witness something that you will rarely witness in your entire life," he said.

Sun's Womb flew out from his storage ring and it landed on one of the stoves.

"Is his Majesty going to make pills?"

"Maybe he's trying to prove us wrong."

The crowd could guess what he was trying to do, but even then they couldn't trust him. So, they simply sat and watched the show.

Alex took a deep breath as he waited for the cauldron to heat up. He smiled lightly knowing that he had seen this coming.

Had he not, why else would he have prepared the ingredients beforehand?

He opened his eyes and pulled out the first pair of ingredients. The ingredients disappeared from his hand, confusing everyone for a moment.

Only the stronger cultivators had realized that he had teleported the ingredients into the cauldron.

Alex's Qi moved the two ingredients together. Since he didn't have to bother keeping track of the powders, he didn't have to bother with separating the ingredient either. Then, he brought out the second pair of ingredients.

"What ingredients are those?"

"Where are they even going? I don't see the lid moving at all."

"Is that the start of that one healing pill?"

Everyone talked amongst themselves as they watched Alex put in the third pair of ingredients.

One after another, Alex continued putting ingredients into the cauldron, slowly turning it all into powder. Everything went fine without any problem. However, even then, none of the people in the crowd seem to trust him on his words.

In fact, he could tell that even the elders were deciding on whether to come and take him away before he humiliated himself any further.

Alex simply chuckled and shook his head.

Once all the ingredients were inside the cauldron and he had finished making them all into powder, it was time for the real show.

The Pill-splitting Qi flowed out of his body as it entered the cauldron as easily as it would through the air. The Qi landed on the powder and started separating it into two.

Once the two pills formed and the energy was drawn into them, Alex felt the result of his alchemy.

Two, perfect pills.

"Perfection cannot exist under heaven without you having to fight for it," Alex said loud enough that everyone could hear it. "To be perfect is to fight against the heavens."

"What is he saying?"

"I don't know."

"We can't be perfect?"

The regular crowd was confused. However, the stronger ones in them could see some truth in Alex's words, even though they didn't understand exactly what he was talking about.

However, as they wondered, their faces quickly changed as they looked up at the sky where the bright, open day had somehow turned cloudy in a matter of seconds.

"What's… happening?" someone asked.

"Lightning Tribulation? Who's breaking through?" another person asked.

The elders realized what was happening immediately.

Inside the dome, Scarlet's eyes opened for a brief moment as she stared in a certain direction. "That brat… he really brought out the pill cloud here, huh?" he thought. "Pill cloud in such a lower realm, even if I was wrong about what I felt from him, there is absolutely no harm in me bonding with him."

The dark clouds roiled around in the sky, occasionally shining with bright lights on the inside.

Alex looked at the sky. "My Pills are perfect," he spoke. "And the heavens can't stand for it."

The first bolt of lightning fell on the cauldron, hitting the two pills inside. However, his Qi was strong enough to stop it. A subsequent bolt fell right afterward, which he defended against as well.

"Pills with 100% harmony are perfect. As such, they can't exist at all," Alex said. "Which is why I promised a recipe that can reach 100% harmony, not make a pill that has 100% harmony, because that pill is impossible."

The crowd was transfixed on Alex to even bother looking at each other right now.

"However, as I said before, you don't have to let the heavens destroy perfection. You can fight for it too," he said.

Another two bolts of lightning fell on his cauldron, making the crowd jump in fear once again.

"Of course, the heavens aren't so cruel as to only want to destroy perfection either," Alex said. "What they do is create a trial where they wish to destroy your perfection. If you are weak, you have to let them destroy it."

"However, if you are strong, you can use the heavens to temper your pill."

Another two lightning strikes fell on his pills, which he protected. He opened the lid and pulled out the two pills.

He could've let them go through 3 more sets of lightning strikes, but he believed he had accomplished what he had come down here to do.

He tossed the pills in the direction of the elders.

Yao Ning and Qiu Jianhong both caught one of each pill. "Elders, if you would do me the honor of testing those pills," Alex said.

The elders gulped as they saw the pill in their hands. The aura they felt from the pill in their hand was nothing like what Alex had made for them before.

Had he been holding back all this time?

Whatever the situation was, the two elders quickly walked up to the testing formations in front of them.

Each of them put the two pills in a formation. After merely a few seconds of passing, the result was out for the world to see.

100% Harmony.

The noise started slow, but by the time Alex had decided to explain what was happening, the noise was so loud that he couldn't even find the moment to start speaking.

He wanted to explain how this wasn't a 100% harmony pill, but rather a 3-Veined pill, which was infinitely better, but no one seemed to care for that.

Alex couldn't help but smile and let the people live in ignorance for now.

"I hope I have proven that I can indeed give you all the recipes that can help you," Alex said. "As such, I will no longer delay the tests. Please begin."

Chapter 1173 The Tests

Alex watched the tests proceed from the seats that were prepared for him. He had advised on what sort of tests should be conducted, and some of his advice was taken into careful consideration.

Since his knowledge of competitions and tests came from the Western Continent alone, that was what most of the tests ended up looking like.

The crowd screamed in joy whenever something fun happened during the tests. Whether it was when someone figured out a formation in just 4 minutes, when someone created a talisman that could block a Saint Core realm cultivator's attack, or even if someone made a Heaven-grade pill in just 8 minutes, the crowd would go wild in cheer.

Alex could feel the excitement in the air, but somehow it didn't transfer to him at all.

"Your majesty, are you not entertained?" one of the elders asked.

"Not really," Alex said. "I mean, it's fun to watch, but nearly not as fun to be the one in the tests."

"I don't think anyone that is taking the tests right now would be able to empathize with you, your Majesty," the elder said.

"I suppose," Alex said. "There is a level of stress involved when it comes to something so important. I remember when I had problems making pills. I was sure I was going to fail back then."

"You had problems making pills?" the elders were surprised.

"External factors caused me to fail in making good pills," Alex said. "It was a long time ago now."

"I see," the elders said.

No one spoke any longer and simply watched the tests on the stage. As time passed, the people with low scores that would have absolutely no chance of winning were slowly sent away.

Even people who wished to leave could leave as well.

The sun went down, but the bright lights in the area made it no less illuminating. The night bode no problems to the tests that were happening, not slowing them down in the least.

The city was still alive even at midnight, around which the final 200 winners were decided.

The Formation and Talisman tests ended after that. However, the Alchemy tests could still go on since the reward was for just 3 people.

"Should we end it here and use the points they already have as a basis for the reward, or do you wish to continue this any further?" the elders asked him.

Alex thought for a bit as he stared at the people that had passed the test. They all seemed tired and would like nothing more than to stop making pills.

However, there was no better chance than when an Alchemist was fatigued to check just how well they could adjust to external pressure.

He reached into his storage ring and pulled out a talisman. "Prepare 2000 different sets of ingredients for this recipe," he said to the elder. "Also, project this recipe into the sky so that they can read it. Give them no more than 20 minutes to prepare before they have to start making that pill. They now all have a chance to earn 1000 additional points."

The recipe Alex had given the elder was one for a True rank pill. The pill itself was something all of the alchemists here would've made before, but they definitely had not used the recipe he had given them.

So, that helped make it easier to test just how quickly these alchemists could adapt to a new technique as well.

The elders got to work immediately, preparing all the ingredients as he ordered them to.

Not even half an hour later, the competition had started to see just who would be the one to get the perfect recipes from Alex.

Alex now had some time to spend, so he relaxed a bit. 'Harry didn't join huh?' he thought. 'I suppose he's doing well enough that he doesn't need to join the royal alchemists.'

"Elder Qiu," Alex called out to Qiu Jianhong.

"Yes, your Majesty?" the old man came up to him.

"Did you learn from your grandniece on when the Forbidden Orchard is opening again?" he asked.

"Ah, yes I did," the elder said. "According to her, the Orchard opened 3 months ago, so you missed it, your Majesty."

"I missed it, huh?" Alex thought.

"I can tell her to forcefully open the Orchard if there is something specific you want to get, your Majesty," the elder said quickly.

"No, there's nothing I want," he said. "I just wanted to go and gather what I could find. Maybe I should go there anyway. I can just tear open an entrance wherever I want."

The elders gave a dry smile when they heard that. They had learned about Alex's ability to manipulate space, but that did not make them easy whenever he made comments like this.

"Ahem, your Majesty," Qiu Jianhong spoke. "That probably wouldn't be a good idea. Since the orchard opened 3 months ago, most of the ingredients would have been taken away already. There's no point in going there now."

Alex chuckled a bit when he heard that. "You truly overestimate the ability of those who entered to recognize rare ingredients," he said. "Forget about it, I'm not going anyway."

"Speaking of ingredients, your Majesty," another elder spoke. "Have you made any plans for the pills that would help us in learning new Dao?"

"Argh! Don't remind me of that, please," Alex said. "I hate just thinking about how much work that is going to be."

"Is it hard?" they asked.

"It's damn near impossible. I don't even know where to start," Alex said. "Just wait until these tests are over. I will start when I have more time to spare."

"Yes, your Majesty," the elders quickly said.

"Right, when is the test for the royal army?" Alex asked.

"Um, it's half a month away. We will hold it once these production institutes are up and running," the elders said. "I hear many fighters from all over the continent are coming here to fight and enter the royal army."

Alex nodded when he heard that. "That sounds fun," he said softly.

"Your Majesty?" the elders turned toward him.

"Nothing," he said. "As you were."

The alchemists on the stage made one pill after another. They had no more than 2 hours to make all the pills, so they had to work very hard, especially since they were under stress from having worked for nearly an entire day.

The competition came to an end when the final pill was made and tested. Then the results were tallied up.

The 3 winners were 2 men and 1 woman. The men were both from reputable families that were known for being good in Alchemy. The woman, however, seemed to have learned Alchemy on her own.

If Alex wasn't wrong, then that girl was most definitely a player who had received some sort of book on Alchemy, which she had used to progress this far.

"You may come forward and request the recipes from his Majesty," the elder told the 3.

One by one, the three stepped up and spoke their demand. The two men asked for a recipe for a healing pill and a cultivation pill. The woman, however, gave him a recipe of her own instead.

"Please improve this."

Chapter 1174 Thoughts

Alex took the recipe that the girl handed over to him. He read the talisman and was a little surprised that nothing aside from the recipe itself was written on it.

His eyes narrowed as he started thoroughly reading it all.

The ingredients that were being used were some of the rarest ingredients one could find. If he were to search through the entire continent right now, he would not be able to gather more than 100 sets of ingredients.

Also, the collection of ingredients was quite unique too. He had never seen such conflicting ingredients being used in a single pill before.

The people waited quietly for Alex to speak, but Alex was lost in thought while he read the talisman.

The woman started getting a bit anxious. Had she shown her hand a bit more than it was necessary? Maybe she should have asked for some other recipes as the two men had. She worried that she had lost a chance to gain something from the greatest Alchemist in the world by giving him something that he had never even heard of before.

Alex's eyes suddenly opened with a shine to them. A strange smile hung on his lips as he turned toward the woman in front of him. "May I ask how you came in possession of this recipe?" he asked.

"That… that was one of the examples for pills that were listed in a book I got," she said.

"I see," Alex said as he looked at the recipe with obvious awe. "I never expected there to exist a pill that could make you immune to all forms of mental attack, even if it is for just a few hours at a time."

The woman quickly looked up at Alex with wide eyes. "You… can tell what the recipe is about, your Majesty?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Thank you for bringing such an amazing recipe to me. Would you mind telling me what its name is?"

The woman shook her head. "The book did not list its name, only what it could do," she said.

"I see." He handed her back the recipe. "Your reward, I will have to work on it for a few days. Please expect to obtain it in a week's worth of time," he said.

"Please take as much time as you need, your Majesty. I am in no hurry," she said.

Alex nodded. "Also, would you mind if I make some pills of my own from this recipe? I promise I won't sell them. That right will only remain with you," he said.

"Your Majesty, it will be my honor to have you make pills using a recipe I provided," the woman quickly said.

"Thank you," Alex said. "You may leave now."

The woman nodded and walked away from the stage.

Alex stood there for a few seconds before turning around to go back on stage. The elder moved forward and announced the tests over. The crowd started to scatter away and everyone went their own way.

"Your Majesty, shall we leave?" the elders asked.

"Yes," Alex said and got onto the royal ship that took him back to the palace.

"Good work today," Graham said as he patted him on his shoulders. Alex smiled and nodded to his father.

"It's late. I will go and rest. You should do the same, father," Alex said.

"Yes," Graham said.

"Come on, Whisker. Let father be by himself for now," Alex said and called back Whisker.

Whisker jumped onto his shoulders and sat there. "Now that father can read and write, you must feel like you don't have anything else to do, don't you?" Alex asked.

Whisker quickly shook his head. Alex chuckled. "I'm giving you a job anyway," he said. "The backyard of the palace is bare and empty. You will have to grow some flowers there now."

"Flowers?" Whisker asked him.

"Yes, I want you to learn about gardening and raising plants," Alex said. "Or, you can learn how to fight too."

"I want to grow flowers," Whisker quickly said.

Alex chuckled a bit. "Alright, flowers it is."

He returned back to his room but was surprised to find that someone was already in there.

"You finally decided to leave the dome?" he asked as he looked at the fiery bird in front of him.

"I'm just taking a little break," Scarlet said. "You woke me up front my deep cultivation anyway."

"I did?" Alex asked.

"The pill cloud. I couldn't focus after that," she said.

"Ah, I see," he said. "So, what brings you here? You want to know what's happening with your people and domain?"

"No," Scarlet said. "I want to know what's happening with you."

"Hm? What do you mean? Oh, if it's about being a King, then don't worry. I'm adjusting to it quite nicely," Alex said.

"No, not about being a King, but rather about being an Alchemist," Scarlet said. "You revealed pill cloud. Are you… okay with that?"

"Uhh… yeah, I'm okay," Alex said.

Scarlet looked at him closely. "Are you sure?" She asked. "If I recall correctly, you went all the way out into the ocean just so you could hide the pill clouds. And yet, now you showed it off in front of everyone. Are you sure you're okay with this?"

Alex thought for a bit. "I'm sure," he said. He looked at Scarlet and shrugged. He walked up to the bed and sat on it next to her.

"It wasn't an impulsive action by any means," he said. "I have given it some thought before."

"What sorts of thoughts?" Scarlet asked.

Alex thought for a bit.

"I have felt like I was alone for a very long time. I had people around me, but it felt like it was me against the world. I have been hunted multiple times for my capabilities, so I am quick to hide it from others."

"I had someone trying to take over my body. I had people attacking me so they could steal my techniques or use my blood. I even had a False Immortal that captured me and kept me captive for 10 years just because I was very good at making pills."

"Due to all of these events, I became very wary of revealing the full scope of my abilities if it wasn't needed. People might say that I was a wolf in sheep's clothing, but the truth was I was just hiding from others because I couldn't trust them."

"Even when I trusted people, it was never a complete trust. Add onto that the problem with finding father and the assassins, I could only hide my abilities here as well," Alex said.

Scarlet nodded as she listened to him. "So, what changed?" she asked.

"I can't tell what exactly changed as there were too many of them recently. Only thing I can say if that for some reason, it feels like that feeling I had of being alone is gone. I have my father, I have Whisker, and I have you. To add onto it, you made me a King, and now I have the elders, and the entire continent full of people."

"For the first time in my life, since my master died, I feel like I am surrounded by people I can trust. For the first time, I feel like I belong somewhere."

"Not only do I feel like I belong somewhere after a very long time, but now I also feel obliged to help everyone to the best of my abilities."

"After careful consideration, I decided to help everyone by using the Alchemy knowledge I have."

"I wish to not only reveal what I can do but also spread it around," Alex said. "Today was just the beginning. Slowly, I will give away my knowledge to everyone so they can improve themselves."

"I mean, what's the point of keeping all this knowledge to myself anyway? The best it can do is make me better than others or make me some money, and the worst it can do is put a target on my back for others to come after me."

"What's the point of being better or rich when I am now a King?" Alex asked. "Certainly there's no reason to continue to keep a target on my back."

"Instead, if it can help elevate the level of alchemy in this continent, It would help everyone in the long run by improving the standards of pills while lowering their price. If I can make something like that happen, I would gladly give away all the knowledge I have."

Scarlet looked at him weirdly. "I thought you were simply showing off as a King, but I did not expect you to be so thoughtful instead," she said.

"Me neither, honestly," Alex said. "But somehow being responsible for billions of lives makes you look at things in a different way, doesn't it?"

Scarlet chuckled a bit. "It sure does," she said, reminiscing the days when she had just come to this world and was starting to become a ruler. She hadn't expected to do anything big for this world but somehow had ended up helping them a lot.

"I'm happy that the burden I put on you has strengthened you instead of crushing you," Scarlet said. She quickly shook her head. "Anyway, since I'm going to be active for a few days, is there anything you want my help with?"

Alex thought for a bit. "Actually, there is something I've been meaning to do for a while now," he said. "Would you be willing to go up north with me tomorrow?"

Chapter 1175 North

Alex flew towards the north on a ship that had some concealment capabilities.

It was the ship the elders had taken to the Sunless lands, and today he had asked them for it.

Scarlet was there with him as well, as he had requested her to come with him just in case.

'Isn't this quite extravagant?' Alex thought as he controlled the ship. 'How do they even begin to think of making ships that can run using Saint spirit stones, and not True Spirit stones? Those are so incredibly hard to come by.'

He shook his head and walked up to the deck from where he watched the Wasteland fly past him.

The speed was quite fast that despite leaving just two hours ago, the two of them had already crossed half of the Wasteland. In just 2 more hours, they would be at the very north.

"Where exactly are we going?" Scarlet asked.

"You don't have to worry for now," Alex said. "I just want to test something."

"Test?" Scarlet asked.

Alex nodded but didn't elaborate. It was still morning when the two of them passed by one of the locations Alex had wanted to pass by.

"What's this?" Scarlet asked with a confused look. "Why are we in the place I was reborn?"

"You said you dragged me from somewhere else, right?" Alex asked.

Scarlet nodded.

"I want to see if there are anything that was teleported along with me by some chance," he said.

"I don't get what you're trying to say," Scarlet said.

"Do you remember where it was you dragged me from?" he asked.

Scarlet shook her head. "How could I know? I was a baby phoenix with limited intelligence. All I remember is a loud noise and sand flying in the air. Other than that, I only remember dragging you here."

"I see," Alex said. "Either way, it must be close by. Help me search for anything you can find in the sand."

Scarlet gave him a weird look but still accepted his request. Her spiritual sense left her mind like a giant ocean wave that blasted out from her.

Alex used his spiritual sense too, but in front of Scarlet's, his was barely any strength at all.

If his spiritual sense reached over 15 kilometers in range, Scarlet's easily reached past that.

It was so far away, that Alex couldn't even tell based on his own spiritual sense.

With the two of them there, they started searching for whatever they could find.

Alex remembered there being a lot of items floating around in the Qi wall of the Central continent. His swords, pills, two seeds, ingredients, ores, and many other things.

After that, he teleported here. If any of the items had come with him by some happenstance, he would be more than happy.

He didn't expect to find anything really, but even so, he couldn't help but be disappointed when he really didn't find anything.

"There's nothing here," Scarlet said. "Are you sure your items weren't destroyed in the tempestuous Qi that is supposed to be around the central continent?"

Alex's head drooped in sadness. "That must be what happened," he said with a sad look on his face. He had thought that he had come to terms with the loss, but it seemed he really hadn't.

'If nothing, I wish I could've at least saved that,' Alex thought. There was one thing he felt guilty about more than his own cauldron or the seed of World Tree or the Nine Yang Divine tree.

That was the beast core of Pearl's mother. He had received it so long ago and had kept it around for so long in hopes of giving it to Pearl, but in the end, he had lost it.

He took a deep breath and shook his head. 'Stop being sad. You have work to do,' he told himself.

"You can stop now, we're leaving," he said.

The ship started flying away from the crater which was the reason for the birth of so many strong beasts as well as the source of the Northern Lights for so many years.

"Are you done? Are we returning?" Scarlet asked.

"Returning? That was just a side trip," Alex said. "Our main destination is still ahead of us."

Scarlet's eyes narrowed. "Just where are you taking me exactly?" she asked.

Alex looked in his direction and smiled. "We're going to the Central continent," he said.

Scarlet watched the ocean in the distance come closer. Her face held a blank expression as she took in the words that Alex had just spoken.

"Wait, wait, wait… we're going to the Central Continent?" she asked.

Alex nodded.

The phoenix's eyes were wide open in shock. "Are you trying to die? Am I going to have to die again?" she asked.

"What are you talking about? Why would I want to die?" Alex asked.

"Then why the hell are we going to the Central continent? There is no way we can go past the ocean. Even if we somehow manage to cross the ocean without any strong beast finding us, how do you intend to enter through the Qi barrier?" she asked.

Alex couldn't help but chuckle at her response. "I don't," he said. "Stop worrying, I'm just trying to go as far as we can in this boat."

"As far as we can?" Scarlet asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I don't think we can even make it very far away, but making it even just halfway there would be a huge help to me. Which is why I brought you here actually."

"In case there are some strong beasts that end up finding us, you can help me escape," Alex said. "The most I can fight are Saint Soul realm beasts, but you can fight Saint Transformation realm beasts too."

Scarlet didn't speak for a while as she thought about what he said. "Just what are you planning exactly?" she asked.

"Nothing big," Alex said. "I just want to check up on Pearl."

"Check? On that little cat of yours?" Scarlet asked.

Alex nodded. He felt a faint sense of where Pearl was in the distance. It wasn't strong enough to be significant yet, but it was much stronger than back on the Mainland. With this much feeling, he could confidently tell that Pearl was in the Central continent for sure.

"Oh, that's the continent, isn't it?" Alex asked as he pointed in the distance.

Scarlet turned around to see, but she couldn't see anything really. Not only was the continent far enough that it appeared tiny, but the diffused light in the air also made it almost impossible to make out what was on the other side.

"I don't see anything," she said.

"I do," Alex said. If not for his eyes, he wouldn't have been able to see either.

His vision changed for a moment as he checked the energy in the air. There was a white haze of sparse energy in the air, that covered his vision like fog in the morning.

However, even through that fog, he could see the bright light in the distance that lit up like a lantern in the fog.

"Be careful," Alex said. "We're entering the ocean territory. Be sure to send anything away if it does sense us."

Scarlet nodded and got fully alert.

Alex kept the boat flying as fast as it could while keeping the concealment as well as he could.

'Should I have come by myself?' he wondered a few times as his concealment technique would most likely be enough to traverse the ocean, but he was still scared of being caught, so just in case, he had brought Scarlet along.

"They're getting stronger," Scarlet said as she sensed the beasts in the ocean.

"The bond is getting stronger too," Alex said as he spent every bit of attention on the bond. He tried calling for Pearl a few times, but he got nothing back.

So, he kept going.

"Stop!" Scarlet shouted the moment she sensed something in the distance. They were barely more than a quarter of the way to the Central continent, but even then something had appeared.

Multiple tentacles flew into the air as it tried to knock the ship. Alex controlled the ship and dodged the attack. However, he found no way of proceeding past this beast.

Scarlet flew out and started fighting the beast, but the beast was simply too strong for her.

"We need to leave," she said. Not only was her opponent strong, but the fight would attract more beasts toward them soon.

Alex hesitated a bit. He had come so far, but to just return without any result didn't sit right with him.

However, seeing as Scarlet was struggling with the beast, he couldn't be selfish right now.

"I'm turning it around," he said and quickly turned around. Scarlet fought the beast to free herself for a moment to retreat.

Alex had just that moment right now. "Pearl," he spoke through his bond. "Just wait for me. I'll definitely come for you."

Scarlet jumped onto the boat and the two flew away.

Alex felt a little sad as they had to leave without any result. However, before he was too far away, he sensed something.

It was a vague feeling that couldn't even be made sense of, but it had come from Pearl.

Alex didn't know if Pearl had heard his words or not, but his feelings had most certainly reached him.

And now, Pearl's feelings had come to him as well.

A smile formed on his face now that he knew Pearl was okay and waiting for him. With these two pieces of information in hand, Alex felt the newfound motivation to try and get stronger so he could enter the continent as soon as he could.

Chapter 1176 Jai Heiyun

After returning from the north, Scarlet went back to some more deep cultivation.

As for Alex, he was left to handle the continent once more. There wasn't anything important to handle in the next week or two, so he was rather happy.

However, after that, tests would be held to form the new royal army. He had to be there for that. At the same time, he also had to tutor the Alchemists who would have settled down by then.

'Let's just spend the next two weeks doing what I want,' he thought. What he wanted was to train without interruption.

45 swords flew in the air as Alex once again continued his task to find the best pathway to form an array of 45 swords. With Intent and Qi already fixed, he just had to find the pathway.

Alex spent what free time he could find on this array. With the 21 Sword Array as a base, he was sure he wouldn't need as much work to make it work. After all with how the array worked, adding 24 more swords was a natural progression.

If he had instead added some different amount of swords or tried to change the number of swords per layer, it would result in a vastly different pathway for sure.

'I'll have to go through it all to understand how each thing affects the rest,' he thought. 'Not only that, I will have to try out all 4 types of skills.'

He had a lot of work cut out for him, so he wasted no time practicing.

Time passed and the capital once again became a mass of cheers and celebrations. This time around, the celebration was even more fierce as opposed to people with specific skills in Alchemy, Talismans, or Formations like last time, just about anyone could join the royal army, so long as they were fit for the job.

One of the elders came up to Alex and started explaining what they planned on doing during the tests and afterward.

"There is a competition afterward?" Alex asked with a surprised look on his face.

"Yes, your Majesty. Just for the saints," the elder said.

"What's the point of the competition? Do you have rewards prepared?" Alex asked.

"We have just about everything prepared for the winners to choose from. Whatever it is that they want, they can get," the elder said.

"Including pills with 100% Harmony?" Alex asked.

The elder gave a dry smile. "We were hoping you could help us with that," the elder said.

"Sigh, fine," Alex said. "When is it starting?"

"In… less than 2 hours from now. The arena we've prepared must be getting filled up right now," the elder said.

Alex nodded. "Let me know when it's time to leave. For now, can you call over that female Alchemist from last time?" he asked.

"Yes, I will call her right away," the elder said and left.

Alex walked over to the throne room and sat on the throne as he waited. Just 10 minutes later, the girl walked into the room.

"I, Jai Heiyun, have arrived, your Majesty," the girl said as soon as she entered the throne room.

Alex looked at her deep bow with a peculiar look on his face and smiled. "Get up," he said.

The girl quickly raised her head and looked at Alex.

"Here," Alex tossed a talisman in her direction.

The girl caught the talisman and was confused for a moment. However, when she guessed what it could be, she quickly checked to see if she was right or not.

When she saw the recipe that was written on the talisman, her eyes went wide. "Your Majesty, did you improve the recipe?" she asked.

Alex smiled and tossed her a small pill bottle. The girl looked at the pill and saw various pill veins on it. However, she didn't understand the importance of the pill veins enough to make a ruckus over seeing 6 of them at once.

"Did you make this pill?" she asked.

"I made it using that recipe, test it," Alex said.

"No, no. If you made it, that's enough for me, your Majesty. I don't dare doubt your words," the girl said before quickly bowing toward him.

The elders to the side smiled when they saw that. Alex himself couldn't hide a few chuckles. "I'm not a tyrant. You can see and check if the reward is to your liking or not," he said. "You can complain if it is not."

The girl slowly looked back up. "Does that mean I can really test it?"

"Yes," Alex said.

The girl smiled and quickly brought out a pill tester to test the new pill. The pill immediately showed a harmony of 100%, surprising the girl.

"Thank you, your Majesty," she said once again. She put the pill back in the bottle and tried to return it. However, Alex let her have it as a gift on top of the reward.

After that, the girl left the throne room.

"Do you think she can make a 100% harmony pill now that she has the recipe?" one of the elders asked.

"Has there been a new 100% harmony pill made from the recipes I have already distributed?" Alex asked.New n0vel chapters are published on

The elders quickly shook their heads.

"There's your answer," Alex said.

"Is there a reason why these people can't reach the same level with their Alchemy as you can, your Majesty?" one of the elders asked.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "I just happen to have a lot of knowledge and skills that are required for someone to properly make a high-grade pill."

Alex could pass down his knowledge, he could pass down his skills, but he couldn't pass down his Dao or his talent, two things that helped made his alchemy a lot easier.

He also couldn't give someone else the Intent that was in his mind that held most of the answers.

Not only that, even amongst his skills, there were ones that others simply couldn't use. One of them was the Supreme Elemental Accord, which required a person to have all 7 elemental spiritual roots to add energy to an ingredient.

Without that, the chances of making a pill with perfect ingredients were astronomically low.

'I can probably pass down the pill-splitting Qi, though,' Alex thought. He wondered if he should do that. Given that he had planned to not keep anything to himself, he decided to pass it along as well.

'By the time I pass it along, it will be useless to me anyway,' Alex thought, or at least he hoped.

The elders didn't ask many questions and one by one they started leaving.

"Your majesty, it's time for us to leave." The final two elders told them and with them, he went away.

Alex once again wore his flashy royal robes as he made his way to the arena that was prepared for the tests.

The people cried and cheered at his arrival, and Alex waved at them as he passed. He got off the ship and went into the tall tower that was prepared for him and the rest to watch the test in peace.

Once he was settled, the tests were finally begun.

Chapter 1177 Fun

The tests involved going through various hurdles that reminded Alex of the Sanctum.

Not only did one have to be strong enough to pass the test, they had to be intelligent, resourceful, adaptive, and most of all, courageous.

They were also tested on their knowledge as well as their past. Each individual that was going through the test had to eat a Truth Seeking pill to confess anything wrong that they had done in the past.

Depending on the truth that was heard, they could easily be failed.

The tests took a very long time, but they were all entertaining. Because most tests were made to be like a competition of sorts, with points to distribute, the crowd immensely enjoyed the show.

Alex enjoyed it quite a bit as well. Watching so many different people go through various tasks, if nothing, was entertaining. It was like watching a reality show back at home.

"What do you think, your Majesty?" one of the elders asked. "Do any of them catch your eyes?"

"Hmm, I'm not sure,' Alex said. "I once fought that young man from the Yao family in the Battle Arena. I think his unique Dao gives him quite a bit of an advantage."

"Is that so?" Yao Ning spoke as she looked at the young man from her family. "He doesn't have the highest cultivation base, but he is still one of the best."

"Right, was Saint Core 9th realm really the highest cultivation base?" Alex asked. "Some of them are hiding it, aren't they?"

"They most certainly are," the elders said. "We crafted the formation knowing that they would want to hide their cultivation base. If they believe they are good enough to be accepted while they hide their cultivation base, then who are we to tell them otherwise."

"True," Alex said. "Oh right, that guy over there is doing good just because of his items. If he loses those items, he is useless. Are the tests taking that into account?"

"Yes, your Majesty," the elders said. "There are tests where the artifacts have to be taken off, so there's no need to worry."

"Mm," he nodded.

The test continued for the entire night and through most of the morning. With how many people there were, they simply couldn't rush through all the tests.

"Your Majesty, there's still an entire day's worth of tests left. We will only be done tomorrow morning," the elder said. "Do you perhaps wish to leave?"

"No, I can stay here and watch," Alex said. "It's fun anyway. Besides, I want to make sure I am here for the actual competition to start."

"Oh, are you looking forward to the Competition, your Majesty?" the elders asked.

"Very much so," Alex said.

"You must really want to watch them fight, don't you?" the elders asked.

Alex smiled at them and went back to watching the tests. The elders didn't question his silence at all.

The unique tests continued for much longer, surprising Alex with just how much thought was put into the various tests.

"How did you guys even come up with so many ideas?" Alex asked. "It's like you tried to make another Sundering Sanctum without the Sanctum."

"That was actually the inspiration, your Majesty," the elders said. "We wanted to have unique tests that the participants had to work to get through."

"Instead of just having simple tests, we wanted to make tests that gave us the same result through a different scenario. Of course, that sounds redundant since the result would be the same, but the difference it tests is bound to cause confusion in the participants. We're testing them to deal with confusion as well," the elders said.

"I see," Alex said and continued watching the tests.

He stroked his royal robes while making random remarks about the participants or the contents of the test.

Soon enough, another day passed and the tests were finally coming to a close.

"Please wait for a while so we can announce the results of the tests," the elders said and converged to talk for a bit.

There wasn't much to talk about as they had already decided on who to pass and who to fail based on the points that the participants had received that were hidden from them.

The current meeting was only to see if there were someone exceptional that they missed, or if there was someone really bad that somehow managed to make it through.

After careful consideration, the elders released the first of the two lists.

"Here are the True realm cultivators who have passed," the elders said as they pointed to the sky.

The large screen in the sky flashed with 4 thousand different names, all of which had a number to the side, that was their registration number.

The people who had passed cheered while the ones that failed were saddened.

The elders waited a few minutes before they spoke again. "Here are the Saint realm cultivators who have passed!"

A list with 860 people flashed in the sky.

"What's going on?" Alex asked. "Only 860?"

"I'm afraid so, your Majesty," one of them said. "More didn't join, and we have to have a bottom line on who could join and who couldn't, so it ended up this way. I'm sure with can reach 1000 once we held more tests."

"Sigh, forget about it. This many is still quite good," Alex said. "Just 2 dozen years ago, I couldn't even have imagined 86 Saints in a single place, let alone 860. This number is quite nice."

"Thank you, your Majesty," the elders said.

As everyone cheered once again, Alex fell into thought.

"Tell me how you're planning to hold the competition exactly?" he asked.

"It's like this," the elder started explaining what they had intended for the competition. It was a simple competition with fighters fighting against each other to climb through the ranks like any other competition.

Alex heard everything and nodded his head. He thought for a moment and released his spiritual sense as if to search for something.

"What are you looking for, your Majesty?" one of the elders asked.

"I'm looking for someone," Alex said but did not elaborate upon it.

"Looking for who exactly?" the elders asked.

"It's better if you don't know," Alex said. "Ah! Found them."

The elders were confused, but they sensed Alex's spiritual sense go down around the arena where the competition was being held.

"What did you do, your Majesty?" one of them asked.

"You'll find out once you announce the competition. Don't forget your work just yet," he said.

"Ah! Yes," the hosting Elder said. He went up ahead and announced the next phase of the test.

"Since your tests are now complete, all 860 individuals will now have a chance to register for a competition that we will be holding. Based on the results, over a hundred of you can choose from various treasures that were taken directly from the royal treasury," the elder announced.

The crowd went into a cheering frenzy once again, and the new Royal army proceeded to get both excited and nervous about the upcoming competition.

"They will start at any minute now, so go register if you want to join," the elders said.

The group of people lined up, ready to join. Not all of them lined up, but there were enough for the competition to last another day or two.

Alex watched them all and smiled as he brought out something.

The elders noticed the pill and the formation plate that he had brought out. "What are those, your Majesty?" they asked.

"I'm going to use these," Alex said and placed some spirit stones under the formation plate. He placed the plate on the ground and looked at the pill for a moment.

"Your majesty? What are you doing?" the elders couldn't help but ask.

"Remember when you asked if I was having fun watching the tests half a month ago?" Alex asked. "Do you remember my answer then?"

"Uhh… yes," one of the elders said. "You said…"

The elder paused. He frowned a little as he remembered exactly what Alex had said. Not only he, the rest that had been there all remembered exactly what he had said.

Alex pointed at the formation plate beneath him. "That's a formation that will cause you to have intense spiritual pain," he said. "Make sure to destroy it immediately."

He then ate the pill in his hand and swallowed it. As soon as he did, his body and face slowly shifted.

"Your Majesty, you can't—"

Suddenly, the formation activated, causing all the elders in the surrounding to feel intense spiritual pain. They couldn't use their spiritual sense and had to look through their blurred vision as they saw Alex's body disappear from plain sight.

"I'm gonna go have some fun."

One of the elders managed to destroy the formation plate, but by then it was too late.

All that remained on the throne was a simple royal robe. Alex himself was nowhere to be found.

"Your majesty?" the elders called for him, but there was no answer at all. They released their spiritual sense to search for him, but they couldn't find him either.

"Where is he?" Yao Ning asked as she searched around, but there were too many to search through.

They all turned towards the crowd of saints that were registering for the competition. The various saints wore various robes of different colors and types. With such diversity, it was impossible to find someone that would be intentionally hiding amongst the group.

"He's changed his face and has mixed into the group," the elders said. "I don't think we will be able to figure out which of these is him anytime soon."

Chapter 1178 Competition

Alex registered for the fight. As for who he registered the fight as the elders couldn't guess at all.

His choice had been a middle-aged man who didn't stand out much, and with thousands of people that participated in the tests at the same time, the elders couldn't possibly remember him.

He freely moved in the crowd with a new face and clothes and went somewhere to spend time while the competition started.

'How many participated? 490?' he stared at the number where the fighters had registered. That was less than he would have expected to join, but still significant enough that there were going to be multiple rounds for sure.

'I might actually be kicked before I can go through all the rounds,' Alex thought.

He had taken up a disguise because he didn't want people to hesitate when they fought him. Neither the elders nor the fighters would ever give it their all to the match if they thought their match included the King of the continent.

However, as a result of taking up a disguise, he couldn't reveal that it was him either. Meaning, he couldn't use his signature skills or show strong daos and various other things just to be safe.

He was going to have to use his less useful skills to fight.

'This is either going to be very fun, or I'm going to regret even doing this,' he thought as he stretched while he waited.

A while later, the competition finally began. A few numbers were called out at the start to freely pass them over to the next round without fighting. They did it so due to the irregular number of participants, so they had to give free wins to a few to make the numbers even out for the competition.

They called the numbers randomly to create suspense and tension.

4 fights took place at the same time so as to get things moving. The crowd could choose to view any of the 4 matches as they pleased.

The first 8 fighters went onto the stage and started fighting.

Alex watched the atmosphere change as everyone cheered for the fighters. He smiled seeing the people happy.

The fighters on stage weren't fairly chosen, so most of them had a large gap in their cultivation base, causing the fights to end rather early.

Within an hour, over a hundred people went through their fights, surprising Alex. The swiftness of the competition was something he hadn't expected at all.

Of course, there were some battles that lasted minutes upon minutes, but those were rare. Even when they did last that long, a victor would be determined rather quickly.

As the fights continued, his number was finally called.

He walked onto the stage, along with his opponent. He looked at his opponent and realized it was a Saint Condensation 8th realm cultivator.

The girl looked like she was the 40s and seemed rather nervous about the fight. She could already sense Alex's cultivation base and was determined that she was going to lose.

Still, she would give it her all.

The battle started with the woman sending a saber slash in Alex's direction. Alex dodged the attack with barely any effort and created metal lines from his fingers that he sent in the girl's direction.

The entrapment wires didn't hit the woman, so she wasn't captured by his skill at all.

Alex then created metal daggers which he sent flying in the girl's direction.

Since he was making techniques on the go with his Supreme Metal roots and his Metal dao, the techniques could never reach the potency that a normal technique would have if it was perfected over a long period of time.

Still, those attacks were currently too strong for the woman in front of him.

The daggers flew through the air with surprising speed, catching the woman off guard. The woman stopped all the daggers with her saber, but she was pushed backward with each attack.

Any more and she would go out of bounds.

The woman stopped the last dagger and immediately moved forward. Her saber glowed bright white with Saber Intent, which she used the moment she saw that Alex wasn't attacking.

Alex dashed when he saw it too. He didn't dodge the attack, but rather dashed into it.

The saber slash flew at him with incredible ferocity, but he didn't show any fear. Instead, he coated his hand in metal Qi and punched the incoming attack.

The Saber Intent was destroyed at once, sending the light scattering in all directions. At the same time, Alex punched once more.

The punch created a fist-shaped metal energy that flew through the air toward the woman who hadn't expected another attack to be coming her way.

She couldn't even dodge the attack as it was very swift. The only thing she could do was hold up her saber to block it, but that wasn't enough at all.

The blast sent her flying through the air until she landed outside the boundary.

Alex stood straight and bowed toward the elder after his victory was announced. He walked down the stage and went to one corner to wait for his next fight to come around.

'That was easy,' he thought. He wondered if the others would be the same. 'They didn't realize it was me, did they?'

From the looks of it, they weren't aware at all. But who could tell really?

The remaining fighters fought over the course of the next 4 hours, and finally, the next set of fighters was determined.

They took a small break to look over everything before starting the next fights.

Alex waited for his turn, and by the time he was called, the sun was already shining brightly in the sky to the east.

He walked onto the stage to find his next opponent was a Saint Foundation 8th realm fighter.

The man looked young in the face and seemed to use a spear.

Alex stood in front of him with a slight frown on his face. He was sure the elders couldn't tell exactly what his cultivation base was right now, but it should definitely not appear as strong as the man in front of him.

He couldn't help but wonder if he could win this match, while not appearing suspicious at all.

The battle started at once, but neither of the two attacked.

Alex didn't attack because he wanted his opponent to take the first move. Since he was definitely not going to be defeated, he wanted to see how he would approach.

As for his opponent, he couldn't figure out Alex's cultivation base, so he was just being cautious.

In the end, the two of them ended up doing nothing. So, the two of them attacked at the same moment they realized they might have an opening.

Alex used his Iron Fist Punch at his opponent who had used a spear attack. The two attacks clashed in midair, creating a momentary explosion, the shockwaves of which hit both of them.

Neither of them could get the upper hand in the clash at all.

Alex sneaked a glance a the elder that was refereeing the match. 'He hasn't suspected anything,' he thought.

His opponent stabbed in the air 15 times, sending 15 different illusory spears flying in his direction.

Alex put his two palms in front of him, both of which touched the wrist. Water energy swirled around his palm like a ball which he quickly spun in front of him.

The blob of water energy spun out to become a thin mass of swirling Qi that was in fact a barrier technique of great defense.

Alex's Water Spiritual root had become good enough now that he could rely on Water techniques too, just as much as he could rely on Metal and Yang techniques.

The 15 illusory spears landed on the swirling barrier and were sent flying in random directions instead of simply being blocked. So, even after the attacks had landed, the barrier was still active and strong enough to block many more attacks,

'Nice,' Alex thought. This was one of the techniques he had picked in the treasury that he had managed to learn. He had guessed how useful it could be at the time, but he didn't expect the result to be better than he imagined.

His opponent realized that his attacks were blocked and were surprised. He showed some anger and attacked again, this time using Spear Qi with his attacks.

Right around the same time, water Qi gathered all around Alex, forming small blobs of water that froze immediately. There were over 20 such ice blobs that floated around him. The ice grew to become icicles that pointed in his opponent's direction.

The moment his opponent attacked, he sent the icicles flying as well.

With so many icicles, the attacks easily destroyed his opponents' attacks and forced him to use his defensive techniques.

He felt the force behind the ice spears and was surprised. However, this was not the time for that. When he looked back up, he saw many of the same ice spears in the air around Alex

The Infinite Heavenly Ice Spear art wasn't named as such for nothing. As long as he had Qi and the ability to do so, Alex could keep sending icicles at his opponent without ever stopping.

The ice spears sprayed through the battlefield, forcing his opponent to use every single skill and treasure he had on him, and even then he couldn't see a way to victory at all.

In the end, he was forced to give up as he had been thoroughly beaten.

Having passed another match, Alex was sent through to the next round.

Chapter 1179 More Fun

Alex arrived on the stage for his 3rd match. With 128 remaining candidates, the 64 different matches were now being held 2 at a time.

Alex's opponent this time around was a weaker man who he easily beat after a few rounds of attacks. His Ice Spears was too strong for the man to handle and as such he lost entirely.

He went back and waited and was finally called onto the 4th match.

Alex paused when he saw his next opponent. He couldn't help but frown a little when he saw the person's cultivation base.

'Saint core 6th realm,' he thought. 'That's... tough.'

He could certainly fight against someone like this with his blood aura, but using that would be certainly a dead giveaway of who he was.

'I will be fine,' he thought and got ready.

His opponent brought out a sword and started attacking the moment the match began. He sent slashes flying at Alex with quite a bit of ferocity.

Alex was surprised at how aggressive the man was with his attacks. He immediately used his Ice Spears and shot down the sword slashes.

He was still on the losing end after the clash, but he had stood his ground against the man.

The man was surprised that Alex didn't immediately lose at all. He had assumed Alex was weaker, so even if he stopped the attacks, the shockwaves and feedback from those alone should have knocked him back.

However, he was still standing as if nothing was bothering him at all. 'Did I mistake his cultivation base?' the man wondered.

Alex continued attacking with his icicles, sending them all in the man's direction. However, the man used his defensive skill to block all the attacks.

The two of them went back and forth for a bit before the man realized that he had to actually give it his all if he wanted to win here.

He took a deep breath and sent a strong sword slash in Alex's direction.

Alex could sense the strength of the attack and targeted it with his icicles. The many icicles landed on the single slash and the energies in them caused an explosion.

Alex prepared for the shockwave from the explosion, but before that could come, the sword slash came flying in his direction.

At the last second, he dodged to the side to get out of the attack's path. "What?" he couldn't help but be surprised.

'How was that slash suddenly so strong?' he wondered.

The man saw that his attacks had become successful and smiled. He immediately started slashing once again, sending multiple swords slashes flying in Alex's direction.

Alex sent his own icicles to strike them down, but once again, the sword slashes still flew in his direction. He managed to dodge it once again, but the situation wasn't looking good for him.

Each one of the slashes not only was strong due to Qi and Intent but there was something else in them that improved their strength.

'Dao of Cutting,' Alex realized. The sword slashes were exceptionally sharp and thus were far stronger than he had imagined they would be.

'He's going to cut through everything I can throw at him with how weak my Qi is,' Alex realized. If he wanted to win, he had to use a Dao of his own.

A sword flew out from his storage, not Midnight, and he quickly used it to send a slash of his own. The slash hit another attack the man had sent flying and stopped it cleanly.

'What?' the man looked surprised for a second.

He sent flying more sword slashes, but each one was stopped by Alex's own slashes.

"No way!" he blurted out as he realized that Alex was using the same dao as him. The Dao of Cutting. 'Damn him, he still had more to show.'

The man continued attacking, but none of them were able to do anything. In fact, as Alex started adding Sword Intent to his attacks, they got stronger.

The man finally felt a resistance that he hadn't since the start of the fight. Then the resistance increased when Sword Intent changed to Sword Qi.

He was now the one blocking instead of attacking. Each attack forced him back step by step. He tried hard to use other defensive skills or movement skills, but he couldn't get away from the attacks.

Then, Alex used his Sword Aura, and that marked the end for the man.

The elder himself had to show up to block the attack, as not only was the attack strength, but it also had the Dao of Cutting in it, which would've killed the man, instead of simply sending him flying.

Alex stopped once the man had lost and smiled a little before bowing toward the elder. He turned around to leave the stage, but before he did, he heard the elder's voice in his head.

'Are you having fun, your Majesty?' he asked.

Alex quickly turned around to look at the elder and realized he had been caught. He paused for a second as he didn't know what to do now. Did he give up? Was he going to be taken back to the stage?

'You can have some more fun if you want to,' the elder said. 'We won't stop you.'

Alex felt a smile form on his face on its own. He nodded toward the elder in thanks and walked away.

Once he was away, he looked toward the elders on the stage and saw a few of them looking toward him.

'How did they know it was me?' he wondered. He had definitely not used any skills that were in his regular repertoire.

He wanted to know, so he decided to ask. He went invisible and teleported back on stage.

"How did you recognize me?" he asked. "Was it my sword skill? My concealment skill? How did I give myself up?"

The elders were surprised at his sudden arrival and had to look for him for a second before realizing he couldn't be seen.

"Your majesty," one of them said. "I think you forgot where we are right now."

"Where we are?" Alex looked around. "The arena?"

"No, the city," the elder said.

Alex was confused. "How does that—"

"Do you remember what you needed to do when you first came to this city?" the elders asked.

"I..." Alex's eyes widened. "Wait, wasn't the Aura Detecting formation around the city already deactivated?"

The elders smiled. "It was, but we reactivated it. We couldn't let our King disappear without our knowledge, so we had to know. Since the formation holds your aura, it was easy to find you."

"Tsk! And here I thought you used some great logic based on limited knowledge of what I was showing. Turns out you just used the formation," Alex said. He sighed for a bit and shook his head.

"Forget about it, I'm going back to fight," he said.

"Have fun, your Majesty," the elders said.

Alex looked back at them for a second before shaking his head and teleporting away. He arrived back in the crowd and waited for his turn to arrive.

With the number of people that were still fighting, that would be any time now.

Chapter 1180 Rewards

Alex's fun didn't last very long.

He managed to go through the next round just fine, but on the round after that, he ended up fighting against someone with a high Saint Soul realm cultivation base.

That person was strong enough to be the leader of the entire royal army, and as such Alex had to finally give up.

He returned back to the stage, as Alex, and sat down on the throne.

"Did you have your fun, your Majesty?" the elders asked.

"Enough," Alex said. "You guys didn't purposefully put me up against such a strong person, did you?"

The elder gave a dry smile. "We had to, your Majesty," the elders said. "While it was fine when there were many people, with only 16 remaining now, your fake identity would cause a lot of problems."

"I see," Alex said. "I should have thought about that before going headfirst into the competition. Thank you for getting me back."

The elders smiled and returned to watching the competition.

The competition went through its rounds very quickly, and in the end, the winners were decided.

The top 3 included 3 men, each from one of the 10 major sects and families.

"Finally, it's over," Alex said. "Let them have their rewards, and we can leave after that."

The elders nodded and prepared for the rewards to be distributed. The winners would go in order and pick what they wanted for themselves.

"Oh right, the person I told to not participate, he will come looking for this later. Can you hand it to him?" Alex said as he took out a small pill bottle.

"What's this?" the elders asked as they opened the pill bottle and found two pills inside of it.

"It's a pill that accelerates your cultivation speed," Alex said.

"It has those pill veins you talk about, your Majesty," the elder who took the bottle said. "How much does it improve your cultivation speed?"

"Hmm, it has 5 pill veins, right?" he asked. "Then around 50 times."

"""50 TIMES?!!"""

All the elders cried out in surprise at the same time.

Alex looked at them and smiled. "Why? You want it?" he asked.

The elders gulped and looked at the pill. "Th-there must be something wrong with this pill. What's the downside of the speed?" the elders asked.

"It overwhelms your meridians for 2 entire days, so you end up with about a week afterward where you can't cultivate at all," Alex said. "Unless you have some other cultivation technique where your swollen meridian pathways won't be used."

The elders watched him in absolute shock. "That's it?" they asked.

Alex nodded and chuckled a bit. "I'll make some for you all later, don't worry," he said. "This time, they will even be better."

"Thank you, your Majesty!" the elders all bowed toward him. Alex smiled and told them to get back up.

Once the winners took their rewards, everyone was sent their own way. It was late into the day, so it was time for everyone to return.

Alex returned back to the palace with the elders and decided on what immediate work needed his attention.

"I'll address the Royal army tomorrow. It would be better if Scarlet was here, but she's still busy," he said. "After that, please alert the Alchemists that I will be giving them their lesson tomorrow as well. It would be better to do that as soon as possible."

"After that..."

Alex mentioned everything he had thought of doing the next day and even the following days to the elders.

The elders nodded and left, leaving Alex by himself.

Alex returned to his royal chambers and immediately started cultivating. It was been a while since he had entered the Saint Foundation 3rd realm, so he was preparing for another breakthrough, although that seemed quite far away still.

He woke up the next morning and after spending some time training his sword skill, he went over to the training field where the entire 5000 different royal army soldiers were stationed.

As soon as he appeared with an elder, the entire crowd of 5 thousand got quiet and orderly.

"I welcome you all to the Royal Army. From today onward, you will be the first line of defense for the continent against any external or internal threat that may come it's way."

"As someone who still has a lot to learn, I won't lecture you on what you should and shouldn't be doing. I'm sure you all have already spoken the oaths, so I will skip directly to what matters."

Whisker appeared on his shoulders, which Alex showed in front of the entire army.

"From today onward, you will be split into 40 different groups, each with 125 different soldiers in it. 25 of them will be Saint realm cultivators, while the remaining hundred will be the rest."

"And this little friend right here will be your leader for the time being."

The army looked around with confused looks on their faces. They couldn't understand possibly what Alex was talking about.

How could they? There was no way for any of them to guess exactly what Alex had planned on doing with the 125 soldiers in each group, as they had no idea about Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array.

After thinking a bit, Alex had decided that he wanted to teach the army the array. The army itself didn't need to learn the technique, they only needed to practice it.

The one who needed to learn the technique was the main controller of the array. For now, only Alex or Whisker could possibly be this controller, but with so many Saint realm cultivators, Alex wanted to have them be the controller as well.

He could imagine 125 individuals in a group with 2 cultivation realm worth of energy added onto them all.

In fact, he could even imagine 5000 individuals as a collective, all of whom had 3 cultivation realm worth of energy added onto them. Alex truly looked forward to it all.

Whisker was already told what he had to do and how he had to teach it, so he left Whisker with the army.

His father would be by his side at all times, so Alex wasn't very worried about Whisker being cowardly in front of so many faces. Not to mention, Whisker was showing signs of getting more confident in himself. Although that confidence never showed itself when it came to active battle.

After the talk with the army was done, Alex went over to the new building where the royal alchemists did their work.

All 200 people were here and ready for him to teach them his understanding, so they had been waiting for his arrival since early morning.

Alex found himself being taken to a large garden with enough space to handle over a thousand different people.

He sat on a podium, while 200 alchemists sat on the meadow in front of him.

They all excitedly watched him as they waited for him to start giving away his teaching.

Alex hadn't planned much on exactly what he was going to teach, so he simply decided to teach them exactly what they were curious about.

How to make a pill with 100% harmony.

Chapter 1181 Linlin

Alex took a deep breath and felt the Qi flow up out of his dantian, through a specific pathway that he had predetermined.

He held the Intent of what he wanted to do as he pulled it out and let it flow into the 45 swords that flew above him.

When they landed on the swords, the 45 swords suddenly started spinning with a great power added to them that was never there in the 2 months he had been practicing.

Alex's eyes went wide, but he didn't let the surprise ruin the moment. He let the sword fly and hit the large stone pillar in front of him.

The swords struck the pillar and the pillar flashed with bright light from the formation that was on it.

Saint Core 4th realm. Those words were written on the pillar after they took the attack from the swords.

The swords all clanged onto the floor as Alex realized that he had finally done it.

"Yes!" he shouted out loud in excitement. His shout made a girl turn towards him in surprise. She had been with Whisker, helping him tend the garden which he had just started to grow.

Alex let himself fall to the floor with a wide smile on his face. "I finally took my first step into improving a skill on my own," he thought.

He lay there recalling exactly what he had done and then spent a few more minutes trying to understand exactly why the swords had formed an array like the 21 Swords Array technique.

The specific understanding of what exactly had happened was too much for the current him, but he did feel like he glimpsed some knowledge that would be helpful later.

'I should go for another technique where I Control something, so I have something from the same beginning pathway to compare,' Alex thought.

Alex decided to learn a new sword skill that was of the absolute worst grade.

"Linlin!" Alex called out.

"Yes, your Majesty?" the girl who was in the garden answered.

She wore bright red and purple servant robes for the Royal family and had her hair tied in a bun. She wore no jewelry or ornaments and looked very simple and plain. However, that only made her beauty stand out even more.

The girl was named Lin Yunlin. She was a Saint from a small family that was the lord of a small city to the south of the Capital. She had been the prized possession of the Lin family, and after some small tests, was allowed to become Alex's personal maid.

Her work involved managing Alex's schedule and work and listening to his demands. She stayed with him from day to night and only left when there was nothing more for him to do.

She was, by the nature of her work, a replacement for the Elders who couldn't be around Alex all the time due to having works of their own.

"Request a skill where I have to control a sword or more at the same time," Alex said. "The worse the skill the better."

Linlin looked confused for a second. "I beg your pardon, your Majesty. Did you say you wanted a bad skill?" she asked.

Despite being way older than him, Linlin somehow still looked youthful and still in her late 20s.

"You heard me right," he said. "The worst skill. I will start practicing Alchemy now, so prepare it by the end of the day."

"Yes, your Majesty," the girl bowed and left.

Alex left for his Alchemy training. There wasn't much work to do these days as the elders did most of the low-level stuff, and reported back to him at the end of the day. As such, he had a lot of free time during the day.

After entering his Alchemy room, Alex started his 6-hour-long alchemy training where he tried to figure out the recipe that could be used to make the pill that could help with learning a Dao.

He had already figured out what he needed to do to achieve the result. He would have to make the Soul Elucidating Tulip's scent become more potent and help make it instantly put someone in a trance.

Now, he needed to learn how he could do it.

The Alchemy training involved him figuring out that very thing. He learned about more ingredients he had, simulated possible recipes using the ingredients, and tried making the pill itself.

He didn't even know where to start, so even after a month of trials, he was nowhere at all in terms of improvements.

Given how long the spiritual roots improvement pills had taken him, he doubted he could make the pill in just a year or two without some sort of miracle.

'I'm just going to have to continue working hard at it,' he thought.

After 6 hours, he walked out of the room and found Linlin standing by. "Here's the skill book you requested, your majesty," she said and handed over a small book.

Alex flipped through the book and closed his eyes for a second. "Wow, that's bad," he thought.

The girl looked at him weirdly for a second. "Did you learn it already?" she asked.

"Of course," Alex said. "There's not much in it to learn after all."

"But still…"

Alex walked away to test the skill and Linlin quickly followed him. "The elders have gathered in the throne room with their reports," she said.

"Oh, I suppose I can put off testing the skills for later then," he said and walked toward the throne room.

The elders stood to greet Alex as he walked through the hall and sat on the throne on the other side.

Then, they started reporting what was happening all around the continent.

"The army is in the final phase of their training," one of the elders said. "After a while, we should be able to start deploying them all around the continent."

"How soon do you think we can do that?" Alex asked.

"If no problem occurs, we can do it in less than a month. We should be able to do it within two months for sure," he said.

"Distribute them all equally," Alex said.

The elder nodded, but another elder stood up. "Your Majesty, I believe we need to put more on the eastern side."

"Hmm? Why the East?" Alex asked.

"For some reason, activities in the east have increased a lot. We're seeing more people from the Eastern continent come in. With the barrier no longer there to stop them from entering however they pleased, we now need to put our forces on the entire eastern front," the elder said.

Alex thought for a bit. "How much would you say the activities have increased?" he asked.

"If we used to get 20 people going in and out every year, we're now getting over 100 people doing so," the elder said. "And that is just the recorded number. Who knows how many more are there."

Alex frowned a bit. "I know the Eastern Continent is close but isn't there still enough distance for it to be a dangerous travel path? How are people coming in so easily?"

"With a high enough cultivation base and a strong enough Dao, travel isn't impossible," the elder said.

"So everyone coming have a strong cultivation base then," Alex said.

"That or they bring many artifacts with them to aid in their travels," the elder replied.

"Hmm, some of these people might end up having some malicious intentions. We should do as you say and put more on the eastern side," Alex said. "Put 15 of the 40 groups in the east. You may do with the rest as you see fit."

"Yes, your Majesty," the elder said.

Alex wondered if it were simply on his own, could he go to the Eastern continent? He most likely could with the concealment capabilities he had.

However, a King going to another Continent without their invitation or a prior arrangement wouldn't be taken lightly at all. After all, his actions now were the continent's actions.

As such, his going anywhere could be taken as an invasion if he weren't careful.

'Why is the only continent that I can go to the only one that is controlled by an emperor?' he wondered. If it were someplace like the Northern Continent, then he could have freely gone there without worrying about what his presence would mean.

'Sigh, I don't have time for these visits,' he thought. 'I need to focus on finding a way back to Pearl or back to the Western Continent.'

He sat around listening to a few more reports and after he heard it all, the meeting ended.

Alex left with Linlin to go back out into the backyard to practice a bit. It was evening time with the sun finally set in the sky.

He took out two swords and controlled them in the sky. He couldn't help but show an incredulous look at exactly how bad the technique he had learned previously was.

"How is my output worse than what I'm putting into the attack?" he thought as he looked at the result. He was actually happy at how bad it really was.

Because of this, when he finally did improve, the result would be obvious.

"Linlin, you may return now. I will be training for a while and will go to my chambers afterward," he said.

"Please do not leave the palace without letting me know, your Majesty," the girl said before bowing. "Good night."

Alex chuckled a bit after hearing her and shook his head. Then, he started focusing on the technique and practicing to improve it.

Chapter 1182 Emergency Guests

Alex opened his eyes after a night of cultivation. His cultivation base of Saint Foundation 5th realm showed some improvement after having broken through a couple of weeks ago.

He left the room and found Linlin waiting for him. He turned to leave for his morning practice, but before he could go, Linlin called out for him.

"Your Majesty, one moment please," she said.

Alex stopped and turned around. "What is it?" he asked.

"Are you going to practice today as well?" she asked.

"Of course," Alex said. "What else will I be doing?"

"Don't you want to take a day off to celebrate?" she asked. "Today's your 3 years anniversary of being a King after all."

Alex paused. "Do kings really celebrate something like that?" he asked.

"I… am not sure," the girl said. "But we celebrated the last two, so shouldn't we celebrate this year as well?"

"Forget about it," he said. "There's no point in celebrating such a thing. But… if people want to, let them. I won't stop anyone from celebrating Scarlet's coronation just because I don't want mine to be."

Linlin smiled. "Thank you, your Majesty."

She went on to prepare for whatever celebration she thought best while Alex went to the backyard to train.

As soon as he went to the backyard, he found that someone else was already there.

"Oh, father. What are you doing awake this early in the morning?" Alex asked.

"Oh, hey son," Graham said as he stopped practicing the sword skill Alex had given him. "I broke through last night, so I came here to practice a bit to help stabilize myself."

"Oh, congratulations father," Alex said while he sensed his father's cultivation base. "You entered Meridian Tempering realm. That's fantastic."

"Hehe, it's alright," Graham said.

Alex nodded and watched and checked his father's cultivation base again. 'Nothing's wrong with it,' he thought. 'It's stable enough.'

He still wasn't sure what was wrong with his father's cultivation base. As far as he was aware, there was nothing wrong with his body to cause him to have such a slow cultivation speed despite the many fabulous pills and formations.

However, there had to be a reason why it was happening. However, since he couldn't learn what it was, he was forced to have his father slug through cultivation.

"Do you want to test your skills on me?" Alex asked.

"Can I?" Graham asked excitedly and controlled the sword in front of him. The sword flew in the air and started moving in certain ways that were not natural at all.

That was the skill behind the sword which Alex had read himself to improve it. He pulled out his own sword and blocked his father's sword.

He stayed on the defensive while his father used every skill in his arsenal. They stopped finally when Alex decided that he should be training.

"I will stay around with Whisker then," Graham said and left the area.

Once his father was gone, Alex fully trained his skills while trying new ways to do the same thing.

By now, he had learned a few things that were helpful in understanding how he could any techniques.

There was a surprising complexity that came with stronger skills that Alex hadn't connected the dots of until now. The stronger a skill was, the longer it had to travel in his meridians.

There were millions of tiny pathways inside the human body where the Qi could flow. There were major meridians that the Qi could go straight through and it would come out weak.

However, if the Qi traveled through the smaller meridians, taking its time to come out, then somehow it became stronger.

Also, bringing out Qi from both sides of the dantian was much better than bringing it out from just one side. As it turned out, the symmetry of one's meridians affected the strength of the skills as well.

Alex had learned 3 new common grade skills and had upgraded all of them to at least Heaven grade. He still had to find ways to improve it further, but that would take even more time.

For now, he was focusing on the other types of skills. Since he knew a bit about skills that controlled stuff, he wanted to learn about skills that created stuff.

He had many such skills, so it was easy to find any that he wanted to improve. There were many that he had learned that he wanted to improve, but only two would be the easiest since they were the worst.

The first one was something he named 'Golden Fist Strike'. It was when he covered his fist in metal Qi and punched someone. At the moment of impact, the physical damage would hit the person first, and then the Qi would explode, dealing secondary damage after the first.

He stopped using this technique after Shen Jing had told him how bad they were due to his lack of understanding of how techniques worked.

His second skill, which he also stopped using due to Shen Jing, was the skill where he used his Fire and Yang Qi to create a small sun.

Now that he was starting to understand a little more about techniques, he planned on improving the two.

He spent the next 3 hours using the various meridians in his body to improve the 'Golden Fist Strike' technique. Since it was a different beginning pathway, he needed some time to adjust to the new pathways to understand what should go where.

Even after 3 hours, there were barely any signs of progress at all. However, that was to be expected. After all, there was no way he could learn something in a single day.New n0vel chapters are published on

'I should stop,' he thought. He decided to proceed with his pills training. He was getting somewhere with his research on his Dao pill. While he felt like there was still a way to go, he had figured out a majority of the ingredients he would be needing.

'Just a year more,' he thought. 'I should be able to do it in a year.'

Alex walked away from the open area where he was training and walked into the flower garden that Whisker was responsible for.

While many flowers grew here, Alex found it more appropriate to call it an Alchemy garden, as all plants that grew here, were slightly rare ingredients.

"Oh, this flower blossomed quite well," Alex said as he squatted next to a flower. "You didn't even need my help this time around."

Whisker gave a happy smile when he heard the compliment.

Alex checked the flower and it was growing healthily. If it weren't healthy, or if it was finding some difficulty while growing, Alex could easily find out the problem and treat it. He could also easily speed up its growth or help the plants overcome their growth obstacles.

However, Whisker didn't have the Dao of Plant Growth, and even then he had created such an amazing garden.

"Do you want something? Some seeds maybe?" Alex asked.

"Can we go to the big garden again?" Whisker asked.

"The Forbidden Orchard?" Alex asked. "I'm afraid you will have to wait for a year more."

"Your Majesty!" Linlin came running into the garden.

Alex was surprised to see Linlin running in the palace at all. No matter how important something was, she always found the time to be graceful. However, she wasn't being so at the moment.

"Is something wrong?" Alex asked worriedly. "Is someone hurt?"

The girl arrived in front of Alex and quickly shook his head. "No one is hurt," she said before pointing toward the palace. "You have guests."

Alex sighed in relief. "Don't run like that then," he said. "I nearly thought there was some sort of emergency."

"It is sort of an emergency, your Majesty," the girl said. "You… you have guests waiting for you."

Alex frowned a little. "What sort of guests make you say that?" he asked. "Who exactly is here for it to be an emergency?"

"The guests who have come to see you right now… are from the eastern continent," the girl said. "They are members of the Azure Imperium."

"What?" Alex's eyes went wide. "What are the Azure Imperium people doing in the southern Continent?"

He remembered a time some 7 years ago when he saw the group last time as well. 'What are they doing here?' he wondered, just as he did all those years ago.

"Fine, let's go meet them," Alex said and walked into the palace.

Linlin quickly followed him and brought out his royal robes before putting them on him as he walked. Alex wore the robes and brought out his crown before putting it on his head.

The door to the throne room opened and everyone in the room stood up to greet him.

Alex walked over to the throne and sat down. "I hear we have guests from the Eastern Continent," he said as he looked at the men in the center of the throne room.

Each one was stronger than the next, with each having a cultivation base in the upper Saint Soul realm. Not only that, the leader with a thick beard and mustache seemed to have a Saint Transformation realm cultivation base as well.

He wore green and blue robes with white linings all around him, the same as everyone else.

"Greetings, King of the Southern Continent," the man moved toward Alex and bowed. The rest of his group bowed as well.

"Mhmm," Alex nodded. "And who might you all be?"

"I am Long Jianyu, commander of the Scale Legion of the Azure Imperium," the man spoke. "I have come today under the orders of the Dragon Emperor to request something from you, King Alex."

Chapter 1183 Trip

Alex observed the man that called himself Long Jianyu, commander of the Scale Legion of the Azure Imperium. His Demon Eyes showed exactly how strong the individual in front of him was.

'That's quite the strong Wood energy,' Alex thought. He looked at the few people around him and each one of them was strong as well.

"Please tell me what it is that the Dragon Emperor requests of someone like me who only just became a ruler," Alex said.

Long Jianyu bowed and spoke, "His Majesty has heard of your achievements in the field of Alchemy. So, he wishes to set up a small trip for your alchemists where they can exchange knowledge with our own Alchemists."

"Oh," Alex gave a surprised look. He hadn't expected such a request. "Does his Majesty really wish for our Alchemists to visit the Eastern Continent? From what I know, the Alchemy in the Eastern Continent is much better than ours."

"Ahem, that might have been the case in the past, your Majesty," Long Jianyu quickly spoke. "However, after you have started spreading your knowledge, the Southern Continent's Alchemy knowledge has improved a lot as well. I dare say it is now comparable to the Alchemy in the Eastern Continent."

Alex raised an eyebrow and nodded. "So, this trip. Do you have any specifics regarding it?" he asked.

"Uh, yes," Long Jianyu quickly spoke. "We hope to bring at least 10 different Saint Alchemists and 40 different True Alchemists on this journey. The exchange itself will probably last for 10 years, so it will be a long trip."

"10 years," Alex spoke. "That's quite long. Surely you don't expect them to waste their precious time like this. What do our Alchemists get from this?"

"We are prepared to provide a vast amount of treasure and resources. We promise to give them the best of treatments and will fulfill any of their needs for the time they remain in the Eastern Continent," the man quickly said.

Alex thought for a bit. The exchange itself wasn't that bad an idea, but he needed these alchemists right now. He couldn't afford to let go of them since the royal army desperately needed many pills themselves.

"There's one more thing," Long Jianyu spoke up. "His Majesty hopes that you, King Alex, can make it into the trip as well."

Alex showed no expression for the moment, but his heart beat fast. There it was, the invitation to the Eastern Continent, just as he had hoped for. He was ready to accept the request, but he had to think a bit more.

A few elders came to him to discuss a few things, and Alex took the time to thoroughly think it all through.

Finally, he came to a conclusion.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Unfortunately, we require the alchemists right now more than we can afford to let them go. They have only started learning from me too, so I need to keep them here with me."

"Oh," Long Jianyu said with a disappointed look. "Could I maybe ask your Majesty to reconsider?"

"There's nothing to reconsider. As you most likely know, I took up this crown merely 3 years ago. I still have many things to do on this continent, and many things to learn. Just like me, my Alchemists have still space to improve a lot as well. They cannot afford to leave right now as their learning is in the most important phase."

Long Jinayu waited for Alex to continue, but Alex didn't say anything. "I see," he said. "That's a shame then. I will relay this information to his Majesty."

"How about 10 years later?" Alex suddenly asked.

"I beg your pardon, your Majesty?" Long Jianyu said.

"10 years. Could you perhaps wait 10 years so I can teach my Alchemists to become even better? At the same time, I should finally be free to leave as I wish as well. Would that be alright with his Majesty?" Alex asked.

Long Jianyu gave a small smile. "While I cannot presume what his Majesty's answer will be, I do believe he will accept it," he said. "I shall return and relay these messages right away."

"You may do so," Alex said.

The group got ready to leave.

"However," Alex spoke, making the soldiers stop in their path. They quickly turned around towards Alex.

"Is something wrong, your Majesty?" Long Jianyu asked.

"No, nothing is wrong," Alex said. "Since you are already here, I was hoping you could give me some answer instead."

"Answers, your Majesty?" Long Jianyu asked. "What sort of answers?"

"For example, What are you doing here?" Alex asked.

"Here? As in the palace?" Long Jianyu asked, looking confused as he had just explained everything.

"No, the Southern Continent," Alex said.

"We came to deliver the message, your Majesty," Long Jianyu quickly said.

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "Did your Emperor request this from you a decade ago when your soldiers came to the Southern Continent too? Woah, the Dragon Emperor must be a fantastic seer to have seen so far into the future."

Long Jianyu's face twitched a bit and he tried to hide it with a smile. "Of course not, your Majesty. We had our reasons for coming here before," he said.

"What reasons?" Alex asked.

"Umm... they are quite private reasons, your Majesty. I hope you won—"

"Are you saying you won't tell me what you're doing on my own land?" Alex asked. His face held a small smile, but within that smile hid an intent that only Long Jianyu could feel.

Long Jianyu was strong, and as such didn't feel much fear from Alex at all. However, Alex was a king and he couldn't fight a king. If he did, the Phoenix would most likely come and kill him.

"Not only did the soldiers from another continent come here, but they also won't even tell us what they are here for. I must say I do not feel safe in such a situation. I must ask for an answer immediately, lest you force me to feed you a Truthseeking pill for my own safety," Alex said.

The elders around him stood up and all looked toward the man in the center. Long Jianyu might have been strong, but he couldn't possibly fight 10 Saint Transformation realm cultivators at once.

He needed to de-escalate the situation somehow.

"I will answer, your Majesty," he quickly said. "We were here looking for some people who ran away."

Alex's eyes widened. "Runaways?" he asked. "May I know who?"

"I'm sorry, but I cannot tell you who we are looking for," the man said. "The individuals' identities are quite confidential to the empire. Please understand."

"Alright," Alex said. "Did you find them?"

"No, we did not, your Majesty," Long Jianyu said. "In fact, we might have been wrong about their arrival here. They may have instead gone to the Northern Continent."

"I see," Alex said. "Will you be searching for them still?"

"No, we are done searching. We've spent the last decade searching, so there is no point anymore," the man said.

Alex nodded. "In that case, you may leave."

Long Jianyu and the rest bowed one last time and greeted them all farewell as they left the throne room.

Chapter 1184 Immortal Grade Skills

Someone from the Eastern Continent returned a few months later to deliver the news that the Dragon Emperor would be happy to receive both the Alchemists and Alex 10 years later.

With the date set for 10 years in the future, Alex spent some of the time he had teaching the alchemists.

The rest still went into improving his techniques or trying to make the new pills.

He continued with both of them, along with his cultivation base, and before he knew it, another 6 years had passed.

The continent improved a lot in these past 6 years. In fact, since he had taken up the throne nearly a decade ago, the Southern Continent had found a newfound strength that wasn't there before at all.

With all the improvement he had done through his alchemy teachings, his royal alchemists were now easily making pills in the Immortal grade.

In fact, most of them easily crossed 80%, some even reaching 90%. However, they still found it hard to fill the final gap.

Alex had given them everything technique and knowledge he could, including the Pill-Splitting Qi, but these people were still not capable of overcoming the final hurdle.

The lack of Fire dao as well as the lack of perfect ingredients caused these people to not have the pills reach their full potential. However, even without them, they were still the best pills the world had ever seen.

The two best Alchemists, right behind Alex, were Harry and Jai Heiyun. Harry was still in the Alchemy Association, but Alex had called him over a few times to teach him along with his alchemists. As for Jai Heiyun, she was simply spectacular as an alchemist. If he were not here, she would definitely have been the best of the entire continent.

As such, Alex had decided to put her as the head of the Royal Alchemists, making her the Senior Royal Alchemist that everyone looked up to.

In the years after its setup, both the royal institutes and the royal army had more people joining them every year. By now, Alex didn't even know how many people there were in each of them.

He simply let the others bother about the statistics of it all.

The only thing he really cared about was that the institutes he had set up were now started to pay back for themselves, and were in fact even profiting in some cases.

Scarlet had improved a lot in the years as well. She had completely fixed her cultivation base as it no longer held signs of having rushed through. Alex's pills had helped her a lot, which she appreciated.

Starting last year, she had finally started focusing on improving her cultivation base, rather than just fixing it.

Very soon, she would break through to the Saint Transformation 2nd realm, and then the 3rd and more.

It was much slower than Alex had hoped her cultivation speed would be, but he stayed quiet and let her take her time.

Since she was the only one who could possibly take him all the way to the Western Continent, he did not wish to force her to speed up her cultivation speed at the risk of going through Qi Deviation.

Alex sometimes wondered if he should just ask for one of those ships from the Dragon Emperor that would help him ride throughout the world without being caught by any beasts in the ocean.

There wasn't much improvement in the years aside from that. He had reached Saint Foundation 8th realm, his father had reached Mind Tempering 8th realm, and Whisker was on the verge of becoming a Saint.

None of these results felt noteworthy in Alex's eyes. Especially his father's results were the worst ones.

Thankfully, Alex had forced his father to stop focusing on Qi cultivation for now and start to cultivate his body.

He would regularly train his body by getting beat up to the verge of death, and healing it with the Phoenix fire Scarlet specifically left for him. Using that, Graham had managed to reach all the way to the Saint Soul realm in terms of physical strength.

Even Scarlet was surprised when she realized how strong Alex's father had become. There was no doubt in anyone's mind now that Graham had some special constitution that helped with body cultivation, but at the loss of Qi cultivation instead.

Alex stood in front of the stone pillar with closed eyes as he prepared his attack. A golden fist covered his own fist and he punched.New n0vel chapters are published on

The fist landed on the stone pillar, and then the fist exploded into bright light.

Saint Core 9th realm.

Alex nodded to himself when he saw the level his Golden Fist Strike had reached in the past years. It was now comparable to an Immortal grade skill, although Alex didn't know how to improve it to Divine or even Celestial grade.

That probably took a lot of time, so he didn't even bother, and moved on to other techniques.

His sun now burned hot and bright, but he wasn't yet sure just how he could use it. He had created the sun to aid his Flickering Shadows technique, but it had been a while since he had to use that technique, as his normal teleportation Dao was much better.

'There will come a time when the sun will be helpful,' he believed in himself.

Alex had gone on to improve most of the techniques he had, while also improving the new ones he had learned.

The Twin Sword's Flight, Swirling Water Defense, and the Static Slash, along with almost all of the rest of his skills had improved to Immortal rank in terms of strength.

He had personally found different pathways, complicated ones, for each of his techniques, and had thus managed to make them stronger.

The time it took to do so got smaller and smaller with time as he gained more and more information from all the changes he had made to the technique.

He was now so experienced in improving techniques, that if he got a Common grade technique right now, he could make it to reach Immortal grade in a single month, maybe even less if the technique happens to do something similar to his other techniques.

He had learned so much already that there weren't many ways he could learn more about it, other than trying to turn the skills into Divine grade or higher. However, that would take a long time.

"God, how do I know so much and have yet to learn its dao?" Alex wondered. "Am I missing something?"

He had tried gaining the dao a couple of times, even trying to fall asleep to the scent of the Soul Elucidating Tulips, but it didn't work. The tulips were nowhere near as potent as the small pool of water at the top of Dao Mountain.

'I definitely need the pill,' Alex thought. Thankfully, he was very close to figuring out that too.

If everything went well, he was certain that he would be able to figure out the pill recipe within the month, if not within the week.

At that point, he would've done everything he had set out to do after he had become the King of the Southern Continent.

Chapter 1185 The Pill

Alex felt confident that this was it. He had tried so many different recipes and so many different ingredients, but none of them felt as good as the current one he was making.

After a dozen minutes or so of making the pill, Alex was done with it.

He brought out the pill and ate it without any hesitation. Since the pill did nothing to harm his dantian or meridians, he showed no fear of what else it could do.

Since he already knew it was a pill that affected one's mind, he had no reason to worry about the rest of his body.

Alex closed his eyes and let the pill affect him. As he let it do its thing, he slowly felt his head grow heavy and drowsy, as if he wanted to sleep right away.

However, instead of falling asleep, he simply just fell into a trance. He didn't realize that he had fallen into a trance and let his mind freely wander about the many things it had to think about.

He was suddenly woken up by loud banging on his door.

Alex slowly opened his eyes, confused for a second as to where he was. 'My alchemy room? What was I doing... right, the pill.' He started remembering bits and pieces from when he had made his pills.

The doors were banged on once more, pulling Alex's attention toward it from the pills. "Who is it?" he asked.

"Your Majesty, are you alright?" a voice spoke.

"Elder Yao?" Alex felt confused. "Is that you?"

"Your Majesty, please open the door," the old woman sounded desperate.

Alex quickly stood up and opened the door to find Linlin and many of the elders outside his door, confusing him even more. "Is... everything alright?" he asked.

"That's what we should be asking you, your Majesty," the elders said. "Are you alright? Are you hurt? Is your cultivation base alright?"

"My cultivation base?" Alex looked at them weirdly. "It's fine. Why wouldn't it be fine?"

The elders were the ones confused this time around. "Then, did you break through? I can't sense any change," Yao Ning said.

"I didn't break through," Alex said. "What is going on with you people? Just say what you want directly."

"You failed to comprehend a Dao," a voice spoke from the hallway. Scarlet walked up to his room as well, and everyone moved to make way for her.

Alex was surprised when he heard that. "I... failed to comprehend a Dao?" he asked.

Scarlet nodded. "These people are mistaking the worldly laws dropping for you breaking through," she said. "What happened? Was your comprehension not enough?"

"Comprehension? I don't know," Alex said. "I didn't even realize I was learning a dao at all. I just ate my new pill and... Ah, I must've fallen into a trance."

The crowd looked at him with surprised faces.

"You can all return without worrying. I'll see you in the throne room in the evening," Alex said.

"Your Majesty," Linlin spoke. "It's midnight right now."

"What?" Alex looked at them with a surprised look on his face. "Did... did I fall in a trance for 12 hours?"

They all nodded. "It was around evening time that the worldly laws descended and only left a couple of minutes ago," Scarlet said.

"I see," Alex said. 'I was learning a Dao? How come I didn't realize it at all?'

"Your Majesty," one of the elders called out. "Did you say... you made a pill?"

Alex smiled. "Yes, I made a pill to help you all learn Dao," he said. "It won't help you comprehend dao, but it will help you fall into a trance which will make it very easy for you to proceed from there. I will improve it in the next 2 days and then start making a bunch of it. Once I'm done, I will hand over the recipe to Jai Heiyun, and she can start making them for the rest."

"Your Majesty!" the elders smiled the biggest they had in a while as they bowed many times over.

"Alright, alright. Go back. I'm sorry for disturbing you all at midnight," Alex said, sending them away.

Scarlet stayed behind and walked into the room. "What Dao was it?" she asked. "It felt profound, way more profound than any Fire dao I've learned."

"I think it's the Dao of Technique," Alex said. "I don't know what else it could be if not it."

"Ah, the one you've been obsessed with recently," Scarlet said. "I can't believe you actually brought the Worldly laws down for it. That's one complicated Dao, you know?"

"Is that so?" Alex said. "You don't know it, do you?"

"I could never begin to try and learn that dao. One has to either be very talented, very dedicated or have a large amount of free time on their hand, which I never did," Scarlet said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, I'll make sure to give you the best pills so you can learn the True Fire Dao sometime soon."

"I wish," Scarlet said. "Rest for now and focus on that pill. I will take care of the rest of the stuff for the next week."

Alex nodded and watched Scarlet leave. Once she was gone, he closed his eyes and sat in front of the furnace as he tried to remember what he was thinking when he had fallen in the trance.

A few pieces of information came floating back to him, a few thoughts he most likely had when he was in a trance. 'I was definitely thinking about the Dao of techniques,' he thought. 'And from the sound of it, I was close to learning it too. Did I make a mistake somewhere, or...'

A thought came to Alex. "Was the pill I made perhaps not potent enough?" he thought. "Did I wake up a bit too early? Thinking back on it, what percentage was the pill's harmony even?"

He had been in so much of a hurry that he hadn't cared about the little things that he should have.

"Whatever, I will focus on improving the recipe for now," he thought. He stopped thinking about the pill and Dao and started cultivating for the rest of the night.

He woke up late in the morning, but that did not stop him from immediately starting on the pill. With the ingredients and recipe practically carved into his brain, he easily improved the recipe after a couple of tries.

The perfect recipe was written down on a talisman 2 days later as Alex finally finished refining it to its highest potential.

Once he was done, he rested for a while longer to restore his cultivation base. Once his cultivation base was back, he wasted no time and started making pills one by one.

That day, lightning struck the palace over a hundred times. The people in the city would look toward the palace every time the lightning struck, but instead of being scared, they would smile.

'His Majesty is making another perfect pill,' they would think everything the lightning struck the palace.

The elders and the rest waited for the lightning bolts to stop dropping. The moment it stopped, they all excitedly waited for their King to come out.

After all, he had finally finished making the pill that would help them learn some precious Dao.

Chapter 1186 New Dao

"Alchemist Jai, how have you been?" Alex asked as he watched Jai Heiyu walk into the room.

"Your Majesty," the girl quickly bowed. "I have been doing very good, thanks to your grace."

"I'm happy to hear that," Alex said. "Come sit, I have something to say to you."

The girl quickly walked up to the empty chair in front of Alex and sat down. "Your Majesty, you could've called me to the palace. You didn't have to come here at all."

"It's alright, I've been holed up in that place for a long time, so I needed some fresh air," Alex said. "Besides, I wanted to come and see how my favorite alchemists were doing."

Jai Heiyun gave a bashful smile and nodded. "We've all been doing great, your Majesty," she said. "Speaking of great, what is happening in the palace, your majesty? It feels like someone is breaking through each day there."

"Haha, it does, doesn't it?" Alex asked. "Actually, that's why I'm here."

Alex brought out a talisman and handed it over to Jai Heiyun. The girl took the talisman and read it.

"Soul Trancing pills? That's the first time I've ever heard of a pill like this," she said.

"I would hope so," Alex said. "I only just came up with it a week ago."

"Oh, you came up with this recipe, your Majesty? It must've been hard," the girl said. "I don't think I've ever interacted with 3 of the ingredients on this list."

Alex nodded. "It was hard. That's a culmination of 9 years of work right there," he said.

"9 years?" the girl looked surprised, as she should be. "And you are just handing it over to me, your majesty?"

"What else should I do with it then? Keep it locked up so only I can benefit from it?" Alex asked.

The girl was sure that was the correct thing to do, but she didn't say it out loud. She wasn't a King, so she didn't understand what would be going on through the head of someone like that.

"What does it do exactly?" the girl asked. "This Soul Trancing pill."

"It puts you into a trance where you become the closest you will ever be to learning a Dao," Alex said. "That's what you have been sensing in the palace for the last week. Centuries of understanding amplified by a single day of comprehension, making everyone learn Dao one after another."

"Woah," the girl said. "This is such an amazing pill. I can't believe you are going to give it away to just anyone."

"Just anyone?" Alex asked. "I'm giving it to you, Senior Royal Alchemist. You will learn that recipe and teach 10 of your fellow Alchemists. Then, you will make the Soul Trancing pills for everyone in the army. That's nearly a thousand pills for each person, so you better prepare."

"I won't disappoint you, your Majesty," the girl said quickly.

"I don't doubt it," Alex said. "Right, how's the technique coming along? Have they learned it yet?"

Jai Heiyun shook her head. "It's simply too complicated for everyone to learn it, your Majesty. Even though it's nearly been a decade since we were handed the Pill Splitting Qi technique, there are still more than half of us that can't use it properly while making pills at all."

"Not to mention the fact that using double the amount of ingredients messes up so much of the recipe that it's impossible for many to even do it properly without the Dao of Heat," Jai Heiyun said while sighing a little. "But don't worry, your Majesty. I will only have the best of the best work on this pill. I will promise to only make pills over 90% in harmony."

Alex smiled at her determination. "Keep working hard, miss Jai," he said. "I will be returning now."

"Returning? So soon, your Majesty?" the girl asked.

"I have to," Alex said. "Actually, the truth is that I haven't eaten that pill yet as I wanted to let the others have a go at it first. However, it looks like things are dying down, so I want to eat the pill myself too."

"I see," Jai Heiyun said. "Then I wish you a successful Dao comprehension, your Majesty."

Alex smiled and stood up. "Work hard, as you will be representing our Alchemists in the Eastern Continent in 3 years," he said. "Goodbye."

Alex left the Alchemy Institute and returned back to the palace where all the elders were coming out closed cultivation after learning a Dao or two one after another.

They all greeted Alex as he walked in, explaining to him what Dao they learned.

Dao of Cold, Dao of Metal, Dao of Stagnation, Dao of Heaviness, Dao of Water, Dao of Wind, Dao of Mist, and maybe more Daos that he hadn't even heard of before, he was now hearing that the elders had learned them.

He congratulated the elders and went to the backyard. He brought out his sword and started training his techniques. He wanted to feel what was going on in his body when he used the technique. He wanted to feel the pathway his Qi took, and understand why that was the correct one.

He used many different attacks, and many different techniques, and it all felt the same. He had done it all a thousand times, so he knew what he would feel and what he knew.

So, after making sure that he knew everything he needed to know, Alex quickly sat on the ground and took out a 6-veined Soul Trancing pill which he ate without stopping.

He felt the pill release its energy inside his stomach and soon enough he was starting to feel drowsy once again. He tried to keep his wits even when tranced, but that wasn't possible at all.

He was too much in a trance to be able to do anything.

Alex had no way of knowing what he would think when he took the pill, which was why he had bothered training so much beforehand. He hoped that this would help him get his mind on track, and it did.

He started thinking about the different skills, their Qi, their pathway, and the intent behind them.

The world stirred a bit as the worldly laws moved a little. It was faint enough at first that no one noticed, but as time went on, it started becoming more and more obvious.

Scarlet felt the profoundness of the Dao Alex was learning and shook her head. 'This kid really is something,' she thought.

The elders sensed the worldly laws as well and wondered who was trying to comprehend a Dao.

There were still many in the palace that could do so.

The Worldly laws hovered in the sky for a couple of hours, and by that time everyone was aware that it was Alex who was trying to comprehend it. They made no sound and left him alone to comprehend the dao on his own.

Alex subconsciously started learning aspects of the Dao that he had previously not even imagined would be part of it. There were little things that he had simply looked over or didn't think were as important, which he was now realizing were actually very important.

He slowly learned bit by bit, comprehending again what he had thought he had already comprehended, and comprehending even more new things.

The elders and the rest were left stumped as they watched the Worldly laws hover in the air for 2 whole days without moving a bit. Even Scarlet was agitated as to whether Alex was going to learn it this time around or not.

However, after half a day more, she got the answer.

The world seemed to darken in the eyes of many Saints as they sensed a strong wave of Worldly laws descending onto the land. They had never sensed something this strong, so they were left wide-eyed and open-mouthed as they watched the descent fall on the Palace.

"Who could've learned that?"

"It must've been her Majesty."

"Yes, I can't imagine who else could learn something like that."

Not many people even guessed Alex could have learned such a strong dao.

The worldly laws remained on the ground for a couple of minutes longer before leaving away. When they were gone, Alex finally opened his eyes.

He was now fully conscious, and in his head was an understanding of techniques that he hadn't before.

"I… did it?" he thought. He hadn't realized what he had done during the trance. It was like someone else took over for him when he was in the trance.

"Haha, I succeeded. I didn't fail this time around," Alex said happily.

"Congratulations," Scarlet said as she walked out of the dome. "I was worried you would fail this time around too, but it seems my worry was for nothing."

"Thank you," Alex said excitedly.

The elders came to the backyard as well and started congratulating Alex. This had been a one-of-a-kind event for them as they hadn't felt a dao this strong ever. "What sort of Dao did you learn, your Majesty?" they asked.

"It's…" Alex paused. He tried to find words to explain what he had learned, but it was so complex that his words wouldn't be enough at all. "In Essence, the Dao helps me improve techniques and modify them as I want to their fullest capability."

The elders were surprised, but not as much as they would've been had he learned a dao that helped with fighting. He shook his head.

"I wish to test the Dao. Please leave me alone for a bit," Alex said.

The group nodded and left. Once alone, Alex started testing out what his new Dao helped him do.

Chapter 1187 Skill Improvement

The Iron Fist Punch skill was a Heaven grade skill, which in the last decade Alex had managed to improve to the Immortal grade. Doing so, the technique's strength had improved by a tiny amount, enough to be noticeable. However, in the last hour, Alex had used his new Dao to improve the technique even further, finding better ways to use it.

He spent the last few hours looking into himself to see the movement of his Qi. The improvement itself came surprisingly easy to him now. He knew what sort of path his skills needed to take to be improved. In addition, the world helped him follow the right path too, by aiding him in the movement of Qi through his body.

That way, Alex had been able to improve his technique very quickly, compared to taking months at a time before.

He used the new technique finally and was surprised to find that it did not improve as well as he would've hoped it to.

He was disappointed by the fact that his skill had actually not improved much at all. The improvement was so small that it wouldn't have mattered had he not improved it in the first place.

The worse part of it all was that Alex knew that this was the best he could do. This was the best the world could do for him. For the Iron Fist Punch, this was the best technique could be.

Alex was disappointed at first, but the disappointment slowly faded away as he understood the truth.

Skills couldn't be infinitely improved. They could be degraded to the point where they were pretty much useless, but when it came to improving, there was a steep plateau the skills hit once they became sufficiently improved.

The strength of a skill depended primarily on 3 different things.

The first one was the quality of Qi used to use the skill. This was perhaps the most important aspect of skill as even the trashiest of trash skills could do something good if used with a sufficiently strong Qi.

The second was the amount of Qi. This wasn't as important as after a certain amount of Qi, the skill didn't become any stronger at all.

Finally, it was the efficiency of the pathway for the technique. The more efficient the pathway was, the better it was for the technique. Efficient didn't necessarily mean the fastest way, just the one where the Qi lost the least strength while flowing out.

There was a limit to how efficient something could be after reaching the peak.

That was what had happened to his Iron Fist Punch. After upgrading it to just past Immortal grade, it had become the most efficient it had been and could no longer be improved.

If he really wanted to improve this technique in any way, the only method he had was the change the technique entirely, and that was not what he wanted to do at all.

"I will have to see what I can improve and how much," he thought. "I really might have to change the techniques to do entirely different things if I want them to become stronger."

Fortunately, Dao of Technique aided him in that as well. Even without trying it out, Alex knew that by using this new Dao he could change the techniques in any way he wanted.

Although, he wasn't certain if he could do it in a short amount of time at all. He would have to experiment some more.

"What should I improve next? Maybe the Palm of the S—" Alex stopped speaking as his head turned in a certain direction. "What was that?"

He felt a fluctuation in space that caught his attention. He couldn't tell if the fluctuations were strong and far away, or moderate but very close.

His spiritual sense rolled in that direction, pushing to the best it could, but he couldn't see anything. His spiritual sense couldn't even cross halfway through the dome, and the fluctuations definitely came from beyond it.

"Linlin, something is happening on the other side of the Dome. Can you take an elder and go immediately?" he asked the girl that was waiting on him in the garden.

"Yes, your Majesty," Linlin obeyed immediately.

Alex went back to the palace as he didn't feel like working on his techniques at the moment. He wanted to first know that everything was alright before trying it all out.New n0vel chapters are published on

Besides, it was already late in the afternoon, so he couldn't just sit around doing nothing. He went to the throne room and waited for more information to come in.

He waited a few minutes before someone rushed in.

"Linlin, what's going on?" he asked.

"Your majesty, so-someone came to the capital through the Teleportation formation," the girl said.

"What's so surprising about that? Everyone comes in through the teleportation formations," Alex said.

"No no no no no," the girl quickly shook her head. "The big one. The one nobody uses."

Alex's eyes narrowed as he realized what she was talking about. "The Intercontinental Teleportation formation?" Alex asked as he quickly stood up.

Linlin nodded aggressively. "Someone came through that," she said. "She says… she says she wants to speak with her Majesty."

"Scarlet? Why? Did you ask?" Alex questioned.

Linlin shook her head. "She won't tell us at all," she said. "The elders are very suspicious of her so they are holding her for now."

Alex frowned a little. "Where did she come from? Did the Dragon emperor send her by any chance?" he asked.

"That… that's the suspicious part, your Majesty," Linlin said while holding a confused look on her face. "She says she's from the Central continent."

"The Central continent?" Alex felt his heart beat faster when he thought of the possibility. He rushed out of the palace before Linlin could even answer him and flew in the direction of the formations.

He flew over the dome and very quickly saw the 10 elders flying toward him while surrounding a single person in the middle.

Alex saw the girl they were keeping. She was tall and slender and wore a jade-green robe. Her silky black hair flowed in the wind. As for her face, it held a frown on it.

Alex looked at the face and realized it was the same.

He flew quickly and soon enough the elders noticed. They all stopped and greeted him as he appeared. The girl's eyes perked up a little when she heard them greet Alex as 'his Majesty'.

Alex arrived in front of them, but he didn't greet the elders back at all. His focus right now was on the girl in front of him. The girl he had seen such a long time ago. The girl who he had waited to see once again in many years.

The girl whose face he so clearly remembered.

"Sister Hao Ya, it's you, right?" Alex asked.

The girl's face went through many different emotions and she couldn't believe someone actually recognized her. "How do you know who I am?" the girl asked while looking closely at Alex. She felt she had seen him before somewhere.

"It's you!" she shouted. "You're the one that broke the game, aren't you?"

Chapter 1188 Request

The elders watched the two with confused faces. "Your Majesty, do you know her by any chance?"

"Your Majesty?" Hao Ya looked back at Alex with a shocked look of her own. "What's… going on?"

"Please leave her, she's not someone suspicious," Alex said.

"But your Majesty, she says she came from the Central Continent," one of the elders said. "She's clearly lying."

Alex looked at the girl and wondered why she was openly revealing that information. Was it perhaps…

"Sister Hao, I hear you were looking for Scarlet. Unfortunately, she isn't available right now, but if I may be of any help, please tell me," Alex said.

"Why did they call you Your Majesty?" Hao Ya asked.

"What else would we call him?" one of the elders asked. "He is the King of the Southern Continent, appointed by her Majesty herself."

Hao Ya's eyes went wide. "So, you are the King instead of the Phoenix?" she asked. "Then please help me."

"Let's go back to the palace so we can talk," Alex said and left with the group. The elders looked surprised and confused the whole way through and Hao Ya stared at Alex's back, wondering how he could have gotten here.

As for Alex, he had way too many emotions going through him at the moment. His mind wandered into multitudes of possibilities, each of which he had to reel in so as not to disappoint himself.

They all arrived at the palace and Alex quickly made his way to the throne room. As soon as they all entered, Alex turned toward the elders.

"Please leave us alone for a bit," he said.

"But your majesty, you ca—"

"It's an order. Everyone, please leave," Alex said.

The elders looked worried, but they had no choice since their king had given them a direct order. "We'll be right outside if you need us, your Majesty."

Alex nodded and watched them walk out. After the door closed, he turned toward the girl who had been staring at him this entire time. "It's good to see you, sister Hao. How have you been?" he asked with a gentle smile on his face.

Hao Ya didn't speak for a while as she continued staring at his face. "You look so young," she said. "Unlike your other body."

Alex perked up when he heard that. "My other body? You mean my clone?" he asked.

"How do you know he's a clone?" Hao Ya asked. "That's not supposed to be something you know about."

"I figured it out a while ago," Alex said.

Hao Ya nodded. "I see. Well, Your clone is an old man now. I saw him a few months ago, which is why its so weird seeing you so young," she said. "Damn, I did not expect to see you here at all. What the hell are you even doing here? Didn't I tell you to stay in the Wes—"

Hao Ya quickly stopped her mouth from speaking any further and quickly bowed. "My apologies, your Majesty. I did not see my place and became rude to you," she said.

"No, no, no. It's alright. I don't mind," Alex said. "It's refreshing when I hear someone not be respectful to me for one. Please don't bow toward me."

Hao Ya slowly looked back up. "Are you sure? I can't afford to make anyone angry," she said.

Alex chuckled a little. "I'm not angry," he said.

"Sigh, thank god," she said. "I would've been in deep trouble if you somehow refused to help me."

"Help you with what exactly, if I may ask?" Alex asked curiously.

Hao Ya took a deep breath. "I need your help in sending back all the players that want to go back home," she said. "I need you to gather everyone that wishes to return."

Alex had been waiting to hear something exactly like that, but even then he nearly stumbled due to the shock. "Are you ready to take us all back? Is the Creator ready to bring us back?" he asked.

"Are you looking forward to returning?" Hao Ya couldn't help but be surprised. "Why would you want to return, when you are a King and can have a much better life here?"

"Because my brother is in that continent," Alex said.

"Your brother?" Hao Ya looked to the side with a thoughtful look. "I don't remember hearing about junior sister having an Uncle. Do you really have a brother?"

"Sorry, my bonded beast. He's like a brother to me," Alex said.

"Wait, is that the White Cat?" Hao Ya asked.

"Yes, how do you know?" Alex asked.

"I think I remember hearing about it not too long ago," Hao Ya said. "He's a special case since he managed to get in through the Qi barrier somehow."

"How is he? Is he fine? Is he hurt?" Alex asked, sounding very desperate.

Hao Ya smiled and shook her head. "He's fine, from what I hear. Sorry, I was in the Northern Continent for most of the last decade, so I only know bits and pieces as to what is going on with the cat, but I do believe he's with your clone right now."

Alex felt weird hearing that Pearl was with his other body. He couldn't help but smile, however, since he knew that Pearl hadn't been alone this whole time. A sense of relief passed over him that had been gnawing at him for the past decade and a half.

"So, you will help me, right?" Hao Ya asked.

"Of course, sister Hao," Alex said. "I will help you with everything I can. Please tell me exactly what you need."

"I just need your help in spreading the news around that the players can return back if they want to," she said. "Not everyone will want to, and that's alright."

Alex nodded. "I will relay the message overnight and bring them all here somehow. It will take a few days certainly, so I hope you will stick around," he said.

"Yes, I will," Hao Ya said. "This is the first continent we are helping, so I need to be here from start to end to make sure nothing goes wrong."

"Oh, you haven't done it anywhere else?" Alex asked.

Hao Ya shook her head. "I only just found the last bits of resources from the Northern Continent a few years ago. Damn sects didn't want to let me go through their treasury so I could search for it," she said.

"But you managed to get it in the end?" Alex asked.

"Of course," Hao Ya said. "I had to show off a few artifacts, and that did the job." She looked rather proud when she said that.

Alex glanced at her cultivation base and was surprised at how strong she was. 'Saint Soul 6th realm. She was Saint Core when I last saw her, wasn't she?' he thought.

"You came here telling people that you were from the Central continent. Are you not worried that someone nefarious might want to go and disrupt the peace for the mortals?" Alex asked.

"And who would dare?" Hao Ya asked. "The whole world might come and they still wouldn't dare. Not while my master is around."

Alex smiled. "I'm getting more and more curious about this master of yours," he said. "I hope I will get a chance to meet the creator when I return."

Chapter 1189 The Order

Alex was a little bummed that Hao Ya didn't want to talk about her master at all. Until she got permission from him, she wouldn't say anything about him to Alex at all.

As for his Clone, she didn't seem to know much about him, so Alex didn't bother asking anymore. He would meet him and Pearl when he returned.

"Don't worry about Master," Hao Ya said. "He's too interested in your body constitution to not give you the time of the day. Besides, there are other reasons why he will have to let you see him."

"Other reasons? Like what?" Alex asked.

Hao Ya was about to answer but stopped. Instead, she put on a smug smile on her face. "What's the hurry? Just sit around, everything will be clear in time," she said. "Now, tell me what you are doing here when I made it very clear last time that you had to wait around in the Western Continent. What would we do if you had died?"

"We? Does your master care if we live or die?" Alex asked.

"Of course he does," Hao Ya said. "The reason he sent you all out here in the first place is that—"

She stopped herself from speaking anymore. "Nevermind," she said as she shook her head.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "He made us play the game for some reason?" he asked. "What reason?"

"Nevermind, I said. He will tell you if he thinks you deserve to know the answer," she said while crossing her arm. She sneaked some glances toward Alex who kept looking at her. "Have… have you learned any Dao?"

"Yes, some," Alex said.

"Good, you might be of some help in the end, after all," she said.

"You're not going to tell me what you mean by that, are you?" Alex asked.

"Ask my master those questions when you meet him. I am not going to answer any of your questions regarding him," Hao Ya said.

Alex sighed in the end and gave up. "Fine, let me go give the orders. We should have people gathered by the end of the week," he said.

He left the room and found the elders waiting outside the room.

"Your majesty, are you alright?"

"Are you hurt?"

"Did she do anything to you?"

They asked questions in a barrage that Alex quickly ignored. "I have a new task for you all, an emergency task," he said.

He explained the scenario and exactly what was happening. The elders were shocked to hear that they had to gather hundreds of thousands of players from all around the continent so they could go back home.

It wasn't just the mainland either. People had to go over to the Wasteland as well and bring them back.

"Deploy the army for this task. It has to be of ultimate priority at the moment," Alex said.

The elders understood the seriousness of the situation and nodded. However, they acted as if they were hesitating for some reason. "What's going on? Just speak your mind," Alex said.

One of the elders spoke to break the awkwardness. "Will you be returning as well, your Majesty?" the elder asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "But only temporarily."

"Can you really go back just temporarily?" the elder asked. "Isn't your home… far away?" they asked while pointing to the sky.

Alex couldn't help but chuckle a bit. "No, that's just a misconception you all came up with on your own," he said. "My home is where the lady inside came from."

"The lady? But she says she came from the Central Continent," the elders said.

"That's right," Alex said. "I come from the Central continent. It's a little hard to explain right now, so I will do it later. Follow my orders for now."

"Yes, Your Majesty," they all spoke at once and left.

"Linlin, please prepare a room for our guest," Alex said to the girl.

"Yes, your Majesty," she said and left.

Alex returned back to the throne room and found Hao Ya looking all around. "Since you have a week or so to spare, I hope you can stay around. Last time you left the moment you got what you want, so I didn't get to ask a lot of questions."

"What do you want to learn about? I don't know much since I've been focusing on fixing the formations you broke," she said.

"I will ask the relevant questions to the creator himself as it looks like he might have more answers than you," Alex said. "For now, I just want to learn about what's going on back in the Central continent. It's been over 40 years since I left home. I was just wondering if things have stayed the same or if it has changed drastically."

Hao Ya sighed for a moment and spoke, "Things have changed, but not to the point where it is unrecognizable. Due to what you did, well we can't blame you really, it was your clone after all. Either way, due to what happened, normal development halted entirely for a couple of years as people suddenly lost all sense of motivation regarding anything."

"Schools and colleges had to shut down for months. People didn't show up to work. Etc, etc. It was surreal for the first year after the game's ending. But, people soon got back on their feet and the world started moving."

"There were other problems, primarily master's fault, that caused the world to slow down for some other reason, but 40 years later, the problems have all but disappeared," Hao Ya said.

"I see," Alex said. "Hearing about it just doesn't help at all when I know I will see it in a week. Oh right, when I do go, I can come back, right?"

"Yes," Hao Ya said. "But the formations won't work that many times due to the lack of resources. We will give everyone a chance to try and live their life back in their home for a year or so, and if they don't like it, they can return. That's what they deserve anyway."

Alex nodded. "Right, anything we need to be careful about? These people are strong. What if they cause trouble after returning?" he asked.

"Hmm, we should ask everyone to vent away their Qi before returning," Hao Ya said. "Although, there is nothing we can do about people with strong bodies, and will just have to hope that they don't cause any trouble."

Alex nodded as he heard that. "Trust that people won't abuse their powers," he said as he sighed. "That's going to be hard."

"That's the only choice we have anyway," Hao Ya said. "The peop—"

Hao Ya quickly turned around as a small metal ball flew out from her robes. The metal ball expanded into four segments that flew around her, creating a barrier that protected her completely.

"You have good senses, little girl," a voice spoke from outside the throne room.

Hao Ya seemed ready to fight, but Alex moved in front of her and gestured for her to calm down.

"Scarlet, you're scaring her," Alex said.

Scarlet peaked her head through the door and then her body entered the room. Hao Ya looked at the Phoenix that had entered the room with wide eyes for a moment before quickly realizing who she was.

She put aside the defensive artifact and bowed at the waist. "It is an honor to meet you, Immortal Phoenix," she said.

"You may rise," Scarlet said.

Hao Ya hesitated for a split second before she stopped bowing. She looked at the Phoenix with clear questions in her eyes. Most burning of which was definitely why the Immortal Phoenix did not feel immortal to her senses.

Hao Ya could tell that the Phoenix had a Saint realm cultivation base and that confused her greatly.

Scarlet's eyes moved from the girl to the defensive artifact that she had just put away. "That's not a normal treasure that one such as you should have," she said. "Who are you, girl?"

"I am Hao Ya, Immortal Phoenix. I come from the Central Continent in hope of requesting you to help gather the ones you know as players, so we can send them all back home," Hao Ya said. "Please hear my request and grant it to me, Immortal Phoenix."

"The players?" Scarlet's eyes shined.

"She's the creator's disciple," Alex explained. "She's here to send us all back home. As such, I will be leaving for some time too. Can you take over until I come back?"

"Take over? Did you forget that you are taking over for me?" Scarlet asked. "Also, no. I won't be ruling."

Alex frowned a little. "Why? What's wrong?" he asked.

"What's wrong? Obviously, I want to visit this Creator too. It can't be only you that wants to meet him, right?" she asked.

"Oh, so you will be going with us too?" Alex asked with a weird look on his face. "What do we do about the continent then?"

"Those 10 can take over it," Scarlet said. "They handle it all already anyhow."

Alex nodded. "Sure, we can do that," he said. He turned to Hao Ya who still found herself unable to react to the situation and asked, "Your master wouldn't mind if Scarlet here comes with us, right?"

"Scarlet… is that… NO! No, I… I don't think he'll mind," she said.

"Great," Alex said. "You must be tired right now. I'm sorry I'm taking so much of your time. My assistant should have prepared a room for you. Please go and rest. We can talk about everything else later."

Hao Ya hastily agreed and bowed her way out of the room before being taken away to her room to rest. Today had been more eventful for her than she had imagined it would be.

Chapter 1190 Leaving

In just a day, the Southern Continent was engulfed in the raging fire that was the news of players finally getting to return back to where they came from.

It wasn't just the players that were happy with the news, but also people that were not players. After all, it was clear that players were vastly more talented than regular people, these regular people wanted nothing more than to not have to see the players again.New n0vel chapters are published on

Of course, the truly successful players didn't even give going back a thought. They had already lived the majority of their life here and had friends and families that they would've wanted to get rid of just so they could go back to a life that they didn't even remember that well.

There were others, however, who were more than happy to learn that they could go back. They rushed through the continent, with the help of the Royal army, to reach the capital as soon as they could.

In just 3 days, over 120 thousand individuals were gathered in the Sunborn Sanctuary, and the number was steadily growing.

In 4 days, it reached 140 thousand, and in 5 days, it reached 150 thousand. That seemed to be as many people as were going to come. Still, Alex decided to wait 2 more days as he initially planned for it all to take an entire week.

"Just over 150 thousand," Hao Ya said softly. "The people who came to the Southern Continent should have numbered over 600 thousand. Now, there's less than a fourth of it."

"Is that bad by any chance?" Alex asked.

"No, I was just making an observation," Hao Ya said. "Although that does makes one wonder just how many refused to come back... and just how many can no longer come back."

Alex spent the remaining 2 days doing something he thought was worth it. He had to use up one of the spirit veins he was planning on taking back to the Western continent, but it was for good reason, so he didn't feel any guilt.

He only wished that the work he had done wasn't at waste at all.

In the remaining 2 days, a few people had still come, but the number didn't increase by much. However, the excitement and nervousness in the air grew with every moment.

Soon, the time to leave was arriving, so everyone gathered around the Intercontinental Teleportation formation.

The formation itself was large enough to handle about 20 thousand people at once, so they would have to do multiple teleportations to send everyone away.

If not for the royal army that was keeping peace right now, people would've already stormed the formation to go away immediately.

"You guys decided to go?" Alex asked Jai Heiyun and Harry who were sticking together. Thanks to being one of the best alchemists on the continent, the two had managed to form a friendship that even Alex couldn't have thought about.

"Just to check," Harry said. "We have no plan on staying."

"You are absolutely sure we can return, right your Majesty?" Jai Heiyun asked. "I only want to visit my home, I don't want to be stuck there."

"No, we will return," Alex said. "I'm confident. You don't have to worry."

"I can't believe I'm actually going back," Harry said. "I wonder if anyone is still around. I wonder how things have changed."

Alex thought the same himself. He left to prepare a few more things and returned to Scarlet who was with his father.

"Father, I'm glad you agreed to go visit home," Alex asked.

"Yes," Graham said. "Even though your mother isn't back there, I still want to visit. If nothing, I want to visit my parent's graves one last time."

Alex nodded. "We should go then," he said.

Scarlet stood tall next to them as she looked toward Hao Ya who was flying in the sky with some sort of artifact.

"That young lady has a lot of precious artifacts," she said. "Her master is no normal person."

Alex looked at Hao Ya as well and couldn't help but wonder once more about the creator. 'Just a little longer,' he thought.

After Hao Ya was done with whatever test she was doing, she put the artifacts away and started speaking.

"I will now explain something that you will all have to very carefully listen to," she said.

Alex was curious about what she wanted to talk about as well, so he let her speak.

"First of all, the place you are returning to, your home, is actually the Central Continent. That is where you were from, and that is where you will now go," she explained.

The crowd became a mess of questions and confusion. The noise they were making made it almost impossible to discern what they were talking about.

"QUIET!" Scarlet spoke in a booming voice, quelling every question and inquiry in a single second.

Hao Ya bowed toward Scarlet and started speaking again. She explained where the players came from, she explained that quite a bit of time had passed.

She prepared them to be disappointed and she prepared them to not be emotional in any way. She prepared them to be civil about everything and not hurt the mortals in any way. She prepared them to arrive just about anywhere and have to find their own way around the land.

Most of all, she prepared them to never try to leave the place while they were there. After all, the Qi barrier around their homeland was so strong that it would easily destroy anyone that tried to leave.

Once she said everything she needed to say, she moved away from the teleportation formation and said something into Alex's mind.

Alex nodded and ordered the royal army to slowly let people in. One by one, people walked onto the platform from the crowd, slowly filling the Teleportation formation.

Once they were all there, Alex ordered the elders to activate the formation.

The formation whizzed for a few seconds, which was enough time for Alex to get pessimistic about the whole thing 3 times over.

However, when the space actually fluctuated strongly, Alex smiled as he understood that the formation was working. The teleportation had now started.

A second later, the 20 thousand different people on top of the formation disappeared at once, teleported to the Central Continent.

Once they were gone, they waited for about 10 minutes before letting another 20 thousand people get onto the formation. Once they were there, they teleported away too.

Chunk by chunk, the people in the crowd disappeared, sent back to their homes. After most of them were gone, with about 12 thousand people remaining, Alex and the rest finally boarded the formation.

He stood next to his father and Scarlet and took a deep breath. Hao Ya came to stand next to him as well.

"Thank you," she said in a small voice.

"You don't have to thank me," Alex said. "I did it for myself anyway."

Scarlet gestured for the elders to start the formation.

"You must be looking forward to meeting your Clone and daughter," Hao Ya said.

The teleportation powers amped up as space fluctuated to take them away. Even as they were taken away, Alex couldn't help but give a surprised look toward Hao Ya.

"I have a daughter?"

Chapter 1191 Flying Home

Alex felt the teleportation aura take over him as the space around them was warped away to a new location. This was the first time Alex had ever felt something so strong, so he was quite surprised by the effect of the space.

However, that surprise wasn't nearly as big as learning the fact that he now had a daughter.

Just as he was about to give the information some more thought, he felt the space warm once more and they were then teleported once again.

"What?" he looked around weirdly and found himself standing in an open field along with everyone that had teleported along with him.

"Why did we teleport twice?" he couldn't help but ask.

"Hmm? You noticed that?" Hao Ya asked with a surprised look. "The first teleportation sends you to the Intercontinental formation, but since that's in master's place, he prepared this smaller teleportation field to send you all away from it."

"I see," Alex said. "So... we're finally back."

He looked at the open field with hundreds of thousands of people still gathered. They were all looking around, awkwardly, not knowing what to do right now.

Alex decided to take the lead and flew into the air. "Everyone, please find your own way home. You will have a year to stay around. After a year, if you are not satisfied and would like to return, that will be arranged as well," he said.

Hao Ya nodded and watched everyone leave.

Scarlet looked around. "Wow, this place really does not have any Qi at all," she said. "Actually, it's more than just not having any Qi. It's like the Qi in my body is slowly being driven out of me."

"You have to be careful, your Majesty. Any Qi you let out will leave your body immediately, driven away to the Qi barrier. You need to keep it all stored," Hao Ya said.

"Why is that?" Scarlet asked. "Is this some sort of formation?"

Hao Ya shook her head. "It has something to do with Intent. My master can explain it way better than I could ever hope to imagine," she said.

Scarlet nodded. "Should we go meet him then?" she asked.

"Uh, I'll have to ask him," Hao Ya said and pulled out something from her storage ring. Alex looked at the artifact, no technology, and gave a curious look.

"Is that a smartphone?" he asked. "You use a smartphone?"

"Qi is quite scarce here, so we try not to use it if possible," she said. "Besides, this does the same thing as a talisman, if not better, so why not use it?"

She started calling a number and everyone could hear the phone ring on the other side. Scarlet was the only one who didn't understand what was happening, but she kept quiet.

"Hao Ya? Did you return?" a man's voice could be heard from the other side.

"Master, yes I just came back," Hao Ya answered. "Actually, I came back with the Immortal Phoenix from the Southern Continent along with the human King. They want to meet with you."

"The phoenix wants to meet with me?" the man's voice spoke. "Hmm, sure let the phoenix come. I'm sure our friend here will love to meet it too. As for the human, I don't think there is any reason for me to meet him. Tell him I refuse."

Alex's face darkened when he heard that. He had been looking forward to meeting with this man and suddenly being refused didn't feel so good.

Hao Ya saw his face change as well and quickly gestured for him to calm down before whispering into the phone. "The human is actually Alex Benton, the guy that destroyed everything. You know, Ma--"

"ALEX? The one with the Sun God's body?" the man's voice seemed to have gone up an octave. "Why didn't you say so before? Bring him. Bring them all quickly."

"Okay, I will do so," Hao Ya said with a wide smile on her face. She ended the call and gave them a thumbs up. "Everything is set. Should we leave now?"

Alex gave a sigh of relief and was about to nod when he stopped. He quickly shook his head. "I'm sorry. However much I may want to meet with your master, I have other priorities before that. I will need to go find my brother first and then I can do whatever else I want to," he said.

"Oh, the cat, right?" Hao Ya said. "Sure, go do that. It's not like my master is going anywhere. I will just tell him you'll be late by a day or two. That sounds good, right?"

"Yes, thank you," Alex said as he bowed a little. "Also, you mentioned something about me having a daughter. Did you mean my clone has a daughter?"

"Uh, yeah. I was talking about your clone's daughter. She's your daughter too now," Hao Ya said.

"Is it okay to say she's my daughter? Niece might sound better," Alex said.

"I have a Granddaughter?" Graham couldn't help but ask with a surprised look on his face. He had been keeping quiet all this time, but hearing that his son had a daughter made him speak up immediately.

Hao Ya smiled. "You'll learn everything once you go back, won't you?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Will you be coming, Scarlet?"

"No, I want to go meet her master," Scarlet said. "I don't think I will have anything to do at your place. You will bring the cat tomorrow anyway, right?"

"Yes," Alex said. "Then, I'll be leaving now."

Alex bowed to both of them and walked away from the field with his father. However, after walking for a few seconds, Graham stopped.

"Um, Where are we exactly?" he asked. "Do you know where we have to go?"

Hao Ya chuckled a bit from far away. "You're in Pineroot city. There's a map posted over there for everyone. Go look at it and see where you have to go," she said.

"Thank you," Alex said once again. He turned toward his father. "You can check the map if you want, but I know where we are supposed to go."

"We seem to be in the central area, so we will have to fly northwest from here," Graham said.

Alex looked in the direction Graham mentioned. "That seems to be the right direction," he said as he felt his bond with Pearl pulse in the distance. "Let's fly home right away."

"Are you sure we should fly? Didn't that girl say we should rather not use our Qi if we can afford to?" Graham asked.

"It's fine, father. I have a lot of pills which I can quickly eat to get back by Qi if I need it," Alex said. "Besides, I don't see how else we are going back. Surely you don't want to run all the way back, right? It's not like we have money to use public transportation."

"I suppose," Graham said. "Fine, let's take the sky then."

Alex nodded and lifted his father in the air with his Qi. However, just a few seconds after lifting him, Alex realized that he couldn't fly that way.

"I see, she did say any Qi that is out," Alex whispered to himself.

"What's wrong?" Graham asked.

"Nothing, it just looks like flying is a bit complicated here, especially if I want to bring someone along with me," Alex said. The Qi he used to carry his father has quickly swept away for some reason, sent out of the area immediately. 'This was what she was talking about, huh?'

"Can you not fly with me then?" Graham asked.

"No, no. I can," Alex said. "I just have to grab you is all."

Alex flew above his father and lifted him by the arm before flying away. He had a mental map of where he was, so he flew in the direction he knew was correct. He used the sky and sun to guess the correct direction and continued flying for a while.

Just an hour or so later, he had already crossed 2 major cities, surprising him quite a lot.

"This place is so small," he said. "Was it always this small?"

From what he could tell, he was already half an hour away from his destination. Were the map he was following of the Southern Continent, he would have still been many hours away from his destination.

"You've never visited these places, so you never knew how big they actually were," Graham said as he too watched the scenery while he hung in the sky.

Alex flew until he saw a vast forest full of maple trees. Just past the forest was Mapleleaf city. It had changed to a point where even his father couldn't really recognize the place, but Graham still managed to figure out where they were based on how the roads were.

"There, that red house. We need to take that road," Graham said.

Alex smiled and simply flew in the direction his father said as that was the right one. The roads were supposed to have turned to gravel at some point, but they never did. They were still paved all the way through, confusing Graham for a moment.

However, when he saw the vast forest in the distance, he knew that they were in the right place. "We're here," he said. "Hopefully, our house hasn't changed much."

"There, I see it," Alex said. It was still far away, but he could already sense the closeness of the bond.

And with his Demon Eyes, he could also see the house.

A minute later, they arrived.

Chapter 1192 Reunion

Alex and Graham looked at their old house. It did not look like their house anymore at all. It seemed to have been entirely renovated, to the point that the original design was barely present at all.

The farm seemed to have been expanded a lot more, but for some reason, no one was working at all, aside from whatever machinery was in there.

Alex slowly dropped his father on the side of the road and landed next to him. He looked at his house from the outside and started feeling nervous and a little bit of anxiety.

However, before his emotions could take over a lot of him, he saw something in the distance. Something moved in the distance, faster than sound itself as it dashed toward the two of them.

Alex's nervousness and anxiety all disappeared, replaced by a sense of happiness.

"Pearl!" he shouted at the sight of the white cat that came toward him.

"Brother!" Pearl shouted and jumped at him.

Alex grabbed the massive beast in the air and was thrown to the ground by the momentum.

"Pearl!"

"Brother!"

Alex hugged the massive beast tightly as he felt his eyes start to moisten. "I've missed you so much," he said.

"I've missed you a lot too, brother," Pearl said.

Graham watched his son and the new beast hug each other for a while and smiled. "Is this the young beast you were telling me so much about?" he asked.

"Yes, father. This is—"

"Father?" Pearl shouted in surprise. "How… how are you…?"

"Hmm? You recognize me?" Graham was surprised.

"Father?"

"Alex?"

Two distinct voices came from the direction of their houses, prompting both Alex and Graham to turn around.

When they did, they saw an elderly couple standing by the driveway, both of whom seemed to have been quite shocked by their arrival.

Alex looked at the two individuals. The man was old with half a head full of more gray hair than white. He seemed to have lost the rest of his hair, and his skin had lost most of its elasticity.

The woman was a little better, but not by much. Her hair was fully white and she held onto the man for support.

The four people looked at each other with surprised and awkward faces. Alex stared at the old man, knowing who he exactly was.

The old man, however, couldn't keep his eyes off of Graham. He seemed to be more surprised at seeing Graham than seeing his other self.

The woman, however, did look at both of them equally.

"H-hi," Alex said. "I've been looking forward to meeting you."

A single drop of tear streamed down the old man's face before he looked around and saw Alex. "Yes, hi. Hello. Uh… welcome home," he said. "They… they said it would be a while before they got to the Northern Continent. I did not expect you to be here so quickly."

"Hmm? I was on the Southern Continent. They started there," Alex said.

"I see," the old man said. He turned toward Graham. "I… I do not know if you consider me your son or not, but I consider you my father. I am happy to see you once again after all this time."

"All this time? I should have a clone here too, right? Where is he?" Graham asked.

"Father, he… he passed away a long time ago," the old man said. "It's been more than 20 years already."

"I see," Graham said.

"Honey, we can't talk on the street," the old woman said. "Alex, father, please come with us."

"Oh right, please come. This is your house, so don't feel shy or anything," the old man said.

"Come brother, I will show you the way," Pearl said as he walked by Alex as they all walked in.

Alex pet Pearl as he walked by his side. Pearl was nearly as tall as him even while on all fours, which surprised him quite a bit.

"Why are you so big? Do you like staying big now?" Alex asked.

"No, I can't change back," Pearl said. "I don't have any Qi at all."

"Oh, I see," Alex said. "Right, are you wounded? Are you hurt? Do you want to eat some pills? I have many pills. Let me get one for you."

Pearl laughed a little. "I'm fine, brother. I'm not wounded anymore," he said. "That was a long time ago."

"I-is that so?" Alex asked. "I'm sorry I couldn't come earlier. I tried to, but I just couldn't find a way to."

"I understand, brother," Pearl said. "I know how impossible it is to get in here. I don't blame you for not coming earlier, so please don't blame yourself."

Alex still couldn't help but feel bad for leaving him here for so long, but at least he hadn't been alone this whole time.

Graham looked at the fields by the side of the house. "How are you taking care of such a large land by yourself at your age?" he asked.

"Hmm? Oh, no. I don't do anything," the old man explained. "I have people hired to work for me."

"Oh, why don't I see them?" Graham asked.

"I've sent them all home," the old man said. "They won't return for a while."

"Why? Do you not need to look after the plants?" Graham asked.

"I had to," the old man said. "After all, today is the day everyone was returning, so I had to send everyone back so they could meet their parents and friends and relatives that they lost to the game years ago."

"Wait, they publicized our arrival?" Alex asked.

The old man nodded. "They prepared us for the influx of people returning. I don't think how else it could've been handled," he said.

"I see," Alex said.

"Come on, now. Don't stand around outside," the old woman said. "Honey, take them to the living room. I will prepare some tea."

"Yes, dear," the old man said. "Follow me, please."

Alex and Graham followed the old Alex into the house and came upon a large living room with open windows.

Alex sat on a couch and Pearl sat by the side. The old Alex sat opposite him, but Graham didn't sit immediately. Instead, he noticed some pictures hanging by the wall and walked over to them.

"Is that… me?" he asked, looking at an older version of him.

"That is father, yes," the old Alex said. "By his side is mother too."

Graham looked at the framed picture of the smiling old woman as well. "And where's your mother?" he asked.

"She has already passed away too," the old Alex said. "She died a few years after father passed away."

"How… did they die?" Graham asked.

"Father died from overwork," Old Alex said. "He… was stubborn and did not want to admit that he couldn't work as hard as he used to. Even though he knew his body wasn't as strong, he still tried to work every day."

"In the end, the fatigue got to him." As old Alex spoke, tears started streaming down his face as he remembered the day from over 2 decades ago.

"It was nighttime by the time anyone found him in the field. By that time, he had already passed away," Old Alex said. "As for mother, she died of cancer a few years after."

"That's…" Alex didn't know what to say. "My condolences. Was the cancer not curable?"

"No," old Alex said. "It showed up out of nowhere and her body couldn't keep up with the treatment."

"That's—"

"That's normal," he continued. "It's actually way more frequent than you might be thinking. With how bad our bodies are, many older people regularly die of diseases. Our generation got to get used to our body a little better, but we're not sure how much it has adapted. If anything, we also might just find out we have cancer tomorrow and just die."

"No, you won't," Alex said. "I am here now, and I won't let you die so easily. If nothing, I can at least give you pills to improve your body and increase your longevity by a lot."

"Haha, I'm happy to hear that," old Alex said. He turned to look at his father who was still viewing the pictures.

"We don't have that many pictures on the wall, but we do have many saved on the computer. I can show you them later, father," old Alex said.

Graham walked away from the pictures and came back to the couch.

The old woman returned with a tray full of cups and handed tea to everyone. Alex looked at the old woman and found himself a little puzzled.

"I shouldn't know who you are, should I?" he asked the old woman.

"What do you mean?" the old woman asked.

"You look familiar, even though I know I never met any girl before I started playing the game," Alex said.

"Brother, she is the clone of that lady from the village," Pearl quickly said.

"From the village? What village?" Alex asked.

"The one from the Northern Continent. The one you went to right after you got there," Pearl said.

'The one I went to?'

"AH!" Alex remembered. "Fan Li, that was her name. She must've been your real body. Wait no, she was a clone too."

"I died while playing the game, so I don't have a real body anymore," the old woman said. "Since you took some time to remember me, I suppose I did not leave much of an impression."

"Not very much, I'm afraid," Alex said. "May I know your name?"

"Ah," the old woman said. "My apologies. I forgot you weren't aware of me yet. I am Emily, Alex's— I mean, my Alex's wife."

Chapter 1193 Ronron

"It's a beautiful house," Graham said. "Did you use the money you made from the game to make this?"

"Ah, yes. The old house was… well, old, and small. We needed more rooms, so I decided to destroy the old one and replace it with a bigger, better one," the old Alex said. "I tried to keep the aesthetics of the old one, but it's been so many years that I don't think you can find the semblance of the old house at all."

"To be honest, I don't think I would know even if there was," Graham said. "It's been quite a while since I last saw home after all. I'm surprised you even came back at all. With the money you said you had made, I would've assumed you would've stayed away from this place that was so far away from the rest of the world."

"Honestly, that was what I was thinking at all. A few years past the game's abrupt end, I lived in the city and was fine doing so. However, I would regularly get calls from mother complaining how father wasn't listening to her at all and was doing everything by himself, despite no longer being capable of."

"By the time I was 24, I decided to come back and help you set up the farm with workers. I had intended to come back temporarily, but I liked the quietness of the countryside I had grown up to. So, I decided to stay here permanently and help manage the many fields."

"Besides, it was not like I had to make more money. I was making enough from all the investments I had made, and the farm would earn us enough as well," the older Alex said.

"I married Emily a year after that, and we love living in this place," he said.

"It truly is a wonderful place," the old woman said.

Alex nodded and looked around the place. He felt the nostalgia too, but he had been away for too long to now want to live in a place like this.

"Oh right, Where have you been, father?" the older Alex asked. "Were you really in the Southern Continent?"

"Yes," Graham said. "Alex here only found me less than a decade ago. Oh right, you have a mother too, in the Western Continent."

"Yes, Pearl told us," the older Alex said. "And Aunt Liz in the Northern Continent. You haven't been to the Eastern Continent yet, right? That's where sister Hannah said she was."

"Oh right, how is she doing? And Liz, and Rob too," Graham asked.

"Uncle Rob and Liz died about a decade ago. Sister Hannah died a little before that in a car accident," the older Alex said.

The two father-son's eyes sharpened with shock. "They are all dead?" Alex asked. "How did the two die?"

"Uncle Rob and Aunt Liz divorced a decade after the game ended. Aunt Liz had suddenly started aging all of a sudden and she couldn't handle it mentally. She started showing abnormal behaviors and had to quickly be put in a psychiatric facility after their divorce."

"Uncle Rob is said to have died from cancer too, although none of us were at his funeral. As for Aunt Liz… she simply couldn't handle her changed self and… she committed suicide," Alex said.

The two remained dumbfounded at the information.

"Sister Hannah never managed to conceive a child, so after her death, her husband moved elsewhere, and we lost communication," older Alex said.

"I heard you found Pearl and took care of him. Thank you," Alex bowed to the couple sitting in front of me.

"You don't have to thank us. We didn't do anything," the older Alex said. "Besides, it was actually Pearl who found us."

"Oh, he found you? How?" Alex asked.

"I can sense him, brother," Pearl said. "After you were gone, I tried to follow you, but it turned out he was the one I sensed and arrived near here."

"I was surprised to find him in the middle of the night. He had crashed right outside where the Qi barrier is. The crater there is as large as his mother made back then," the older Alex said.

"How… how hurt was he?" Alex asked.New n0vel chapters are published on

The older Alex took a deep breath. "Very. He had major blood loss, he had lost most of his skin, and…" the old man paused.

"And…?" Alex asked.

The old man sighed. "And he burned through his spiritual roots and bloodline to make it out of the barrier."

"What?!" Alex stood up suddenly. He turned around to Pearl. "Is that true?" he asked.

"Y-yes," Pearl said meekly. "I… I seem to have used whatever I could at that time to save myself. I… I don't think I can follow you on your journey, brother."

Alex was still shocked to hear the first set of news, that he almost didn't register what Pearl told him next. "Wh-what do you mean you can't follow me? It-it's just blood and spiritual roots," he said. "You are a White Tiger, you can create the lost blood on your own. As for your spiritual root, I will help you improve it with time. Don't worry."

"I'm afraid it's not that simple," the older Alex said. "He didn't just use the Bloodline or the spiritual roots, he basically sacrificed them for his own survival."

"It's not just that he has low White Tiger blood, but rather that he burned through the source inside him that makes more White Tiger blood. Similarly, he also hurt his Spiritual root to the point where it cannot function nearly as well as an average spiritual root could function."

"All in all, without some sort of miracle, Pearl now has zero chances of entering the Immortal realm," the older Alex said.

Alex took a deep breath to not let the guilt and rage inside of him show immediately. "How do you know all that? You should not be able to make such a comprehensive diagnosis," he said as he crouched by Pearl, doing his own test.

He let his Qi flow inside Pearl to test him. Most of the Qi he was bringing out was quickly being pushed to the Qi barrier, but even then Alex didn't stop.

"Of course, it wasn't me who did the diagnosis," the older Alex said. "It was Ronron's master."

Alex frowned a little. "Who is this Ronron?" he asked. "And who is their master?"

The older Alex gave a weird look and looked to his wife, who seemed surprised as well. "Did you… not meet with the senior yet? I assumed you had come after meeting him," he said.

Alex frowned. "Are you talking about…"

"The game's Creator," the older Alex said. "He was the one that checked on Pearl. Have you not met him yet?"

"No, I have not," Alex said with a stunned look. "You've met him?"

The couple nodded. "A couple of times," Emily answered. "I think it's 4 times in total."

"How did you meet him?" Alex asked. He simply couldn't comprehend that someone like his clone could even possibly be able to meet someone like that. "Do other people meet the creator too? Does he like coming out every so often to meet the mortals?"

"No, no," the older Alex said. "He is a very seclusive person. The fact that we managed to meet him 4 times is already a lot. Almost no one else has even met him once."

"Then how?" Alex asked.

"Because of Ronron, of course," Emily said. "He is Ronron's master."

"Ronron? Who is—" Alex paused for a moment. He only then remembered that he had heard about everyone in the family but one other person.

"Ronron is our daughter," the older Alex said. "She has been a disciple under the senior for quite some time now."

"Right! I have a granddaughter, don't I?" Graham asked as he looked around. "I completely forgot about her as soon as I saw the house. Where is she? Is she shy and hiding in her room?"

"Oh, no," Emily quickly said. "Ronron is not home right now. She's staying at her master's place. Senior came to take her about 2 weeks ago, saying that soon there would be a lot of people coming back to this place and he didn't want to risk her being around some potentially harmful people."

"Ronron… that's her name?" Alex asked. "Ronron Benton?"

"Oh no," the older Alex quickly said. "Her name is Maron. We call her Ronron lovingly."

"Maron… that's…"

"I named her after master," the older Alex said. "I was still saddened for a long time after my master's death, and knowing that the world I left behind was a real one didn't help at all. It was only after Ronron was born that I managed to lose some of that sadness as she filled my life with sunlight and happiness."

Alex started remembering his master as well, and while most other times he would've been saddened after remembering her, this time he smiled. "Maron… that's a nice name," he said.

The couple nodded.

"Sigh, here I was hoping to meet her immediately. Alas, it seems I will have to wait," Graham said. "We are going to meet this senior tomorrow, right?"

"Yes, father," Alex said. He turned around to the couple. "Speaking of which, why is she a disciple exactly? I can't seem to think of any reason."

"Oh, it was because of what happened during Maron's birth," the older Alex said. "There was a massive hurricane and the sky seemed to split in the middle of the night."

"The senior came just as she was born and said that the phenomenon meant that she was someone that would be born once in a lifetime. That was the first time we met him."

Chapter 1194 Birth Omens

"Sorry, phenomenon? What does that have to do with your daughter's birth?" Alex couldn't help but ask.

"Apparently it was related to our daughter being born. The phenomenon had only happened because Ronron was coming to this world," the older Alex said. "At least that was what the senior said that night."

"He arrived as she was born and held her in his arm for a moment before saying that he would take her as his disciple. It honestly took me a while to even understand what was happening," the older Alex said.

"In fact, he wanted to take Ronron away right then and there to teach her by himself. I had to argue with him for a while to keep our daughter. He agreed to not take her right then but said that he would absolutely do so when she hit 16."

"We could only agree at the time, but thankfully it turned out to be a great decision. The senior treats Ronron like his own child. No, it sometimes feels like he treats her better than he would his own daughter. He definitely treats her better than his other disciple, the girl named Hao Ya."

"That's... surprising," Alex said. "Did he really say that it was her birth that caused that phenomenon?"

"Mhm," Emily nodded.

Alex still couldn't believe it. However, there were too many things in this world that happened regardless of his belief.

"It's called a Birth Omen," a voice spoke in his head. "It's rare and infrequent, but it happens all the time in the immortal worlds, although with different intensity. From what I am hearing, it sounds like your clone's daughter caused quite the phenomenon. She must have been born with something amazing, whether it be talent, fate, or body constitution."

Alex was surprised to hear Godslayer's voice, but he heard him completely. "Birth Omen? So it's true, huh? Does it always happen to such people? Or is that dependent on the situation too?"

"It always happens if someone is born against heaven's will," Godslayer said. "Although, the phenomenon usually consists of switching weather, which most people usually ignore and can't recognize."

"I see," Alex said. 'People born against heaven's will. Isn't that what Shen Jing said I was?'

When two people with extraordinary gifts got together, they usually had trouble giving birth to a child because of how much heaven was against it. The couple would have to fight against heaven to be able to give birth to someone with their gifts, which was what the phenomenon most likely represented.

"That reminds me of when you were born too, Alex," Graham suddenly spoke. "The day you were born was so hot that it caused several wildfires around the world. It was recorded as the hottest day of the century. I distinctly remember coming home from the hospital with your mother and having to immediately go work on the field so that the plants didn't die from the severe lack of water."

"Did something like that actually happen?" Alex asked with a surprised expression.

"Yes," Graham said. "If not for already having chosen Alex and Alice as your potential name back then, I would've most likely named you Sunny."

Graham laughed by himself while Alex fell into his own thought. Given the information, it made sense that he caused some sort of phenomenon, but it was still surprising to hear from his father.

'They did fight against heaven to give birth to me,' Alex thought. 'It would be more surprising if nothing had happened despite my gifts.'

As he thought about that, another thought came to him. "Hmm? Wait for a second. That doesn't make any sense," he said.

The 3 suddenly looked toward him with curious looks. "What doesn't make sense?" the older Alex asked.

"The senior,' Alex said. "He said that your daughter was someone that was born once in a lifetime, right?"

"Yes," the older Alex said. "I don't remember much from back then, but that is definitely what he said."

"What's so special about Ronron?" Alex asked.

"I don't understand myself, but the senior says she is talented and has an almost impossible-to-have physique," the older Alex said.

That was the part confusing Alex more than anything. "How does she have a good talent and physique?" he asked. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you two have none of that?"

The two looked at each other and back at Alex. "I see where you are getting at," the older Alex said with a sigh in his voice.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked.

"We had the exact same concern back then as well, and we asked the senior about it. We too wanted to know how the two of us could ever give birth to someone like Ronron," the older Alex said. "And... this was what the senior said to us back then."

Alex and Graham got closer to the old man to hear what he had to say.

"Apparently, she is more your daughter than mine," the old man said.

No one spoke for a while until Alex broke the silence. "What?" he hadn't expected to hear what he heard at all. "What do you mean she's my daughter and not yours?"

"Please ask the senior to explain it, because we don't understand it either. The only thing we know is that she did not receive anything from the two of us, but rather you and the real Emily," the older Alex said. "Basically, biologically she is your daughter."

Alex was stunned for a few seconds as he didn't know what to say. Even Graham was dumbfounded by the information.

'Godslayer, how can the child born to the clones belong to me?' he asked.

"That's... not something I have knowledge about," Godslayer said. "It doesn't sound impossible, but it's definitely a challenging task even in the Immortal realm."

"I see," Alex said. "I'm more and more curious as to just who the senior really is."

"Enough of that," Graham said. "Do you have a picture of Ronron? Let me see, please."

"Yes, father," Emily said and quickly took out a phone before bringing out her daughter's picture.

Alex looked over as well and saw a young lady in a pink dress standing by a tree branch full of flowers. She had her hair in a ponytail and wore a single expensive-looking necklace on her neck.

Her wide smile made her fair skin seem even brighter than it actually was.

"She looks no older than 20 years old," Alex said. "When was this picture taken?"

"Uhh about 2 months ago. She came back because her master would be busy for a while, and I took that picture out by the field where that tree grows," Emily said. "She looks really young, doesn't she? Sigh, I sometimes wonder if she would look younger if we had let her start her cultivation even earlier."

"She is already cultivating?" Alex was surprised. "In here?"

"The senior has a way," the older Alex said.

"How old is she supposed to be in this picture, by the way?" Graham asked.

"She is currently 28 years old," the older Alex said. "Although she doesn't like it when people remind her of her age, so don't bring this up in front of her when you meet her, okay?"

Alex nodded while looking at the picture. He still found it impossible to believe that the young lady in the picture was biologically his daughter.

He had a daughter.

'I haven't even gotten together with a woman yet and I already have a daughter? What sort of sick joke is this?' he thought.

He looked at several other pictures of Ronron, at which time Emily went to prepare some food.

"Let's go eat something. We can continue talking in the kitchen," the older Alex said.

Alex and Graham didn't need to eat, but since they were home after a long time, they didn't refuse.

Pearl came to eat as well. Without any Qi to sustain him, food was the only thing he could eat to survive.

"Right, how did your wounds heal exactly? Was it the senior?" Alex asked Pearl.

"Yes, Senior came at that time and helped him," the older Alex said.

"Did you call him?" Alex asked.

"No, he came on his own. He said he sensed something crossing the Qi Barrier and wanted to see exactly what could do such a thing. When he saw that it was Pearl, he was quite surprised since Pearl didn't have the cultivation base or the physical strength to do such a thing."

"It was only after a bit more testing that he came to the conclusion that Pearl had unconsciously sacrificed his bloodline and spiritual root to protect himself," the older Alex said.

Alex couldn't help but feel guilty. "I'm sorry, Pearl. You had to go through such a thing because of me," he said.

"It's fine, brother," Pearl said with a big smile. However, that did nothing to calm Alex's heart. He still felt the pain and sadness and was sure that Pearl was disappointed too.

"No, I will find a way to fix this. Just wait," Alex said with determination in his voice.

"Actually, the senior did say that there was a way," the older Alex said. "Only, it would in all likelihood lead to Pearl's death."

"What? What way?" Alex asked.

"The same way I, no we tried to stop Pearl from going through because there was a possibility of death. Now, that possibility is astronomically high," the older Alex said.

Alex's eyes went wide. "Wait, are you saying that..."

"Yes," the older Alex said. "If Pearl ever wants to go back to how he was, or maybe even better, then he will have to go through the ritual in the White Tiger's Palace and hopefully evolve."

Chapter 1195 Healing

"Evolve?" Alex asked with a stunned look on his face. "But... that's so dangerous. Even more so now."

"I'm afraid so," the older Alex said. "But that is the only way the senior told me about it. Maybe there are other ways, but I do not know of them yet."

Alex gave a thoughtful look. "I'll ask the senior when I see him. You guys don't need to worry about it. I alone will bear that burden," he said.

The room got a little quiet after he said that. Emily put the food on the table and sighed. "Alright, enough brooding. You can think about everything later, but for now, you need to eat," she said.

Alex shook his head and got rid of any foreign thoughts. "What did you cook?" he asked as he looked around. "I haven't eaten anything in years, so this all looks appetizing."

The couple looked at each other with weird looks on their face and back to Alex. "You don't eat that often, do you?" he asked.

"I don't really need food to survive after all. It's more of a preference on my end," he said. "I try to go out and taste a few things, but it's been so busy at the palace for the past few years that I haven't gotten the chance to eat anything at all."

"Oh, that's not very good," Emily said. "You're working in a palace right now? Poor you, they must work you to the bone. Can you not ask for lower tasks at least? You should have some free time for yourself."

"No, I'm alright. No one is forcing me to do anything. I'm doing it all of my own volition," Alex said.

"Well, I hope you're getting something out of the job to be doing it so religiously. If there's nothing to be gained, however, you should just leave the job," the older Alex said.

"Well, it's not exactly a job I can leave whenever I want," Alex said. "If I want to leave, I would have to find a good replacement first."

"Are the replacements hard to find?" Emily asked. "What do you do exactly? Pearl says you are amazing at making pills, so is your job to make pills for the royal family or something?"

Graham tried to hide his laughter, but the situation was too funny for him to be able to hold it back at all. Alex smiled a little too, confusing the couple even more.

Even Pearl looked confused as to why exactly they were laughing.

"Actually, I don't work for the royal family," Alex said. "I am the royal family."

The older Alex and Emily weren't sure they heard him correctly. "Did you say you are the royal family?" the older Alex asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "More precisely, I am the King of the Southern Continent."

"HUH?!" Pearl suddenly got up with a surprised voice. "Brother, what are you talking about?"

"Right, what are you saying? You're a king?" Emily asked.

"Yeah, it's a long story, but the gist of the matter is I happened to become the King of the Southern Continent about a decade ago," Alex said.

"No, you don't get to just tell us the gist," Emily said as she sat down on her chair as well. "You have nowhere to be, so tell us everything."

"O-okay," Alex said, a little surprised at how aggressive the old woman was. "Uh, where should I start exactly?"

"We know most of what happened until you had to escape from the Northern Continent with Pearl," the older Alex said.

"I've told them everything," Pearl said.

"Okay, so let me start with what happened after Pearl and I were separated at the Qi Barrier."

Alex started telling the story while eating the food that was laid out for them.

Everyone but Graham listened to the story with obvious curiosity. Graham on the other hand was more curious about the food on the table.

He couldn't believe how nostalgic it all tasted. 'Helen must've taught them her recipes,' he thought while happily consuming the food.

He ignored the many gasps and cries from the other 3 and finished eating everything even before Alex was halfway done with the story.

He waited for the story to end, but after realizing it was still some time away, he stood up to go grab some more food.

Emily tried to help him, but he made he sit and listen to the story while he got the food. With another serving of food, he took his time this time around and finished it just as the story ended as well.

"That was when sister Hao Ya came to the Southern Continent and asked for our help to bring everyone back. It took a week to gather everyone, and here we are," Alex said.

"Father, you suffered a lot," Pearl said.

"It's alright," Graham said. "I suffered so I can meet my family again, and look where I am."

Emily had been in tears when she heard about Graham's situation and was still wiping them. As for the older Alex, he could only feel anger.

"I'm glad they are all dead," he said. "They deserved to die. How dare they... argh."

"Are you alright?" Alex asked when he saw his clone suddenly stop speaking.

"I'm fine. My head hurts when I get angry. I've gotten too old," the older Alex said.

"Hmm, wait for a second," Alex said and looked through his storage ring to find a few pills. "Here, eat these. They will help heal any physical problems or injuries you may have."

"Aren't these precious?" the older Alex asked.

"Do you think that's something I would care about right now?" Alex asked.

"Thank you," Emily said and took the pill bottle.

Alex took out another bottle and pulled out a pill. "Here, Pearl. Eat one, just in case," he said.

Pearl nodded and took the pill. They all ate the pill, and the two older folks immediately felt an immediate change in their body.

"Argh!" the older Alex cried out as he spat out something solid from his mouth. "What the hell?"

"Is that your tooth's crown?" Emily asked with wide eyes. "Wait, my teeth. They grew back."

"Yeah, even my wisdom teeth are back, and they don't hurt anymore," the older Alex said.

"What is this?" Emily immediately closed her eyes and opened them again. "Woah! I can see even without my glasses. Honey, look, I can see clearly."

"Me too, hahaha!" the older Alex laughed as well. "I think my hearing got better too."

"I feel like I'm young again," Emily shouted.

Alex watched the two regain the proper bodily functions that they had lost with old age. His healing pills had easily brought back everything they had lost. He smiled and watched the two get more and more shocked as they found more and more of their problems gone, some of which they didn't even know were there.

"How about you guys rest for a bit? You should let your body adapt to what you just got back," Alex said. "The energy in the pill also needs to settle."

"Okay," Emily said. "What will you two be doing instead?"

"I will go look around the farm," Graham said.

"I will come with you, father," Alex said and the two of them left.

Chapter 1196 The Void

Graham and Alex walked through the fields, looking at everything that was growing.

"This looks much better than when I was taking care of it all alone," he said. "He really did quite an amazing job with the field."

"Everything looks easy, to be honest," Alex said. "From water to pesticides. Even the animals are given food through the system setup. It seems the workers are there to help with the rest, but the farm can survive a few days with minimal care."

"It's quite amazing how the world has come to change in the past 40 years," Graham said.

"It's changed a… lot," Alex said as he slowly looked toward the forest. He could hear the wind picking up all of a sudden, reminding him of something from the past.

'That's right,' he thought. 'I used to hear the winds howl every night before I went to sleep. Is that it?'

Alex's Demon Eyes shined purple as he looked at the world with a different light. There was nothing different in the area at all as no aura or Qi could remain there at all. However, when he lifted his head slightly to look past the trees, he saw something else.

Like an ocean of colors, the nebulous cloud of Qi moved like a behemoth in the sky. Alex felt a sense of fear when he saw the amount of Qi that was in those clouds.

'That's probably more Qi than over 100 spirit veins combined,' he thought. And they were all gathered in just that one little spot on the horizon.

The massive cloud of Qi went around the land, and it was the Qi that was left behind that was the Qi barrier.

'We would've died if we had come across that, wouldn't we?' Alex thought. He was sure that thing was strong enough to kill even Immortals if they weren't careful enough.

He saw the massive cloud pass by and leave behind a calmer, but still terrifying barrier of Qi that would destroy anything that tried to get close to it.

"Father, stay here for a moment, okay? I need to go check something," Alex said and walked away.

Graham was a little confused, but he didn't say anything.

Alex walked through the forest at the edge of what was his previous world. He now knew that the world was far vaster than this, but he still felt weird coming to the very edge.

'Void,' he thought to himself as he laughed about it. He continued walking until he came upon a land with no trees at all. The land there was completely destroyed, which meant that the Qi came as far as there.

However, right now, it was over a kilometer away from him. Alex stopped his Demon Eyes and his vision switched from one full of color, to one of nothing.

With the Qi no longer visible, he could see just how far the broken land went on. It was dozens and dozens of kilometers in the least. And this was the tail end of what went around the land, destroying everything.

Alex stepped back a bit, not daring to step on a land that had no trees at all. He continued watching the area until half an hour later he heard the wind pick up once again.

'It's already made a round?' Alex thought. He stepped back even more and watched the gust of Qi come through the land once again, tearing through everything.

Alex took out a sword from his storage and threw it into the gust of Qi. The sword immediately struck the Qi and was hit by it from every direction.

Alex watched as the violent Qi destroyed the sword within less than a minute of being there. With such a destructive force, he got less and less hopeful that any of his items from back then had even survived at all.

He sighed and walked back.

He met with his father and after going through the farm a little more, they returned back to the house.

The four of them talked once again, this time about how the older Alex and Emily met in the first place.New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex was very enamored by the story of what would've happened to him had he not been sent away to a distant land.

Graham enjoyed the entire story thoroughly, while Pearl slept the entire way through. He had apparently heard the story multiple times and no longer cared much to hear it.

By the time they stopped talking, it was time for dinner already. Afterward, Alex and Graham sat in the living room watching TV to catch up on the world.

The two older folks tried to stay up late as well, but it was impossible for them to stay awake for a long. Alex sent the two of them to sleep and stayed there watching everything about the world.

The news in the media was all about how everyone had come back from outside the void. It seemed people had become a way of existence outside the central continent now, and that was making waves in the news right now.

There were several interviews with several different people to learn more about the outer world, and many times Alex even heard his own name come up.

He cycled through the channels until there was nothing to watch, and at that point, he used the smartphone left behind by his clone to look up more stuff.

By the time the sun had come up, he had learned many things about this new world.

The older Alex and Emily woke up early to take care of the farm. Pearl also went with them to help with the farm as there were no workers at the moment to help the old couple.

Graham and Alex moved as well, and in about an hour, they had done everything. It would've taken significantly less time if Alex could use his Qi as well as he wanted, but since he did not, he had to stick to physical work.

Emily prepared some breakfast afterward and they all ate together once again.

"Will you go to meet Ronron's master today?" Emily asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I've been looking forward to meeting with him for 4 decades now. I delayed it by a day yesterday so I could come here and meet Pearl, but I don't think I can waste any more time."

"I see," Emily said. "Will Father be going too?"

"I should, shouldn't I?" Graham asked. "I mean, I don't need to meet this senior, but I do want to meet with my granddaughter."

"Why don't you stay here, father?" Alex asked. "It's easier for me to go by myself. Pearl will have to stay anyway, so why don't you spend some time with him?"

"What about my granddaughter then?" Graham asked.

"I can bring her back," Alex said. "The senior only took her because he was worried someone would attack her, but with me and you around, I don't think he would mind us bringing her back."

"Hmm," Graham gave it some thought. "Sure, I can take the time to go to the cemetery. I still have to visit Father and Mother's graves."

"That settles it then," Alex said. "I will leave on my own."

Chapter 1197 A Man Surnamed Yang

Alex flew through the sky and even saw quite a few people flying on their own. It seemed people were either moving around or were simply enjoying their homes from the sky.

He ignored those people and flew on his own, going in the direction where he sensed Scarlet. He flew for 2 hours before arriving close to Scarlet. He could sense her nearby.

He looked around in search of her and noticed a massive mansion in the distance that looked like it had a lot of trees around it. That was where he sensed Scarlet was.

He found the location a little weird and activated his Demon Eyes. It was then that he noticed all of the trees were actually illusions created through what was most likely a formation.

'What?' Alex looked shocked when he noticed that. 'How is an illusory formation active? Shouldn't the Qi be getting thrown into the Qi barrier?'

He slowed down and landed outside of the mansion. He looked at the gate and couldn't find any sort of bell to ring.

"Scarlet, I'm--"

The gate opened on its own without anyone being there.

"--here," he finished letting Scarlet know, but it seemed that wasn't necessary.

"Senior says you can come in and find us in the backyard," Scarlet's words flowed into him through their bond.

Alex was a little surprised to hear that. 'She's calling him senior too?' he thought. That was not what he would've expected from a previously Immortal beast.

He walked in through the gate and along the driveway. He wanted to go around the house to go directly to the backyard, but he couldn't see any way to do so. There was no way to go around the house, which meant he had to go through it.

Alex slowly pushed open the main door, which easily opened up. Then, he spread his spiritual sense around the house and found a path through the house that led him to the backyard.

However, in that search, he also noticed a room that gave giving away some obvious space aura, which caught his attention.

He wondered if he should check what it was, but immediately got rid of the idea. He was in someone else's house, someone who was most likely an Immortal of higher rank than Scarlet even was. If he were to accidentally offend that person, he was as good as dead.

Alex ignored that room and walked the path he had found and went to the back of the house. He walked through one final door and arrived outside in a massive garden.

The backyard was an open meadow with flower bushes around the side, but nothing in the middle. There wasn't even any simple chair or table setup as many noble houses would have.

Instead, all he saw was a pond in the distance, and in front of it were 3 individuals.

Alex recognized Scarlet and Hao Ya immediately, but the final individual, a man was not someone he had seen before.

Hao Ya noticed Alex and quickly came up to him. "Come, my master has been waiting for you for a while now," she said.

Alex nodded and walked toward the man in the distance. At the same time, the man walked toward him too, leaving Scarlet by the pond.

The man wore a pure white robe that was without a single blemish on it. He looked middle-aged, about what a mortal would look in their 40s, but he had a clean-shaven face, making him appear quite handsome, which was aided by his tall height as well.

He held a smile as he stopped in front of Alex.

"Master, this is Alex," Hao Ya said. "Alex, meet my master."

"Greetings. I did not expect to be able to meet you this early," the man spoke in a gentle voice. "I'm happy to see that you are doing well."

Alex bowed toward the man. "It is an honor to meet you, senior," he said.

The man looked at Alex curiously for a few seconds and smiled. "Saint Foundation 9th realm," the man said. "In just a little over 40 years, that is definitely not something one can normally do, even if they have the best talent and body to go along with it."

"You flatter me, senior," Alex said. "There are several people who have done better than me."

"There are several people with a higher cultivation base than you, yes. I won't deny that," the man said. "However, a higher cultivation base doesn't necessarily mean better, does it? You should know that more than anybody."

Alex slowly looked up at the man. "You can tell?"

"That little birdie told me," the man said. "I'm truly surprised that there is someone who can bring out a cultivation prowess that is 9 realms higher than his own. Even back where I come from, I have never seen or heard of someone being able to bring out that much strength from their cultivation base."

Alex was a little surprised at how smoothly everything was going. He had expected things to be awkward for the first few minutes, but the man didn't seem to worry about awkwardness at all. In fact, Alex could swear that he was seeing actual fascination in the man's eyes.

"I am honored to hear such compliments from you, Senior," Alex said and bowed once more.

"Ugh! Come on, don't be like that. Speak freely, as you would to a friend," the man said.

Alex hesitated a bit, wondering if he should or not. Hopefully, it was not a test of any sort.

"Then, may I know what your name is, Senior?" Alex asked.

The man in the white robe smiled. "Hmm, I wonder if I should tell you," he said amusedly. "I have been called by many names in the short span of time I've spent in this realm, one of the more popular ones being Neil Ambers. However, since it is you, I shall let you use my real surname, Yang."

"Thank you, senior Yang," Alex said.

The man tilted his head to the side with obvious laughter hidden behind his smile. "I was hoping to get some sort of reaction, but it seems I overestimated my popularity a bit," he said.

Alex looked confused. "I'm... sorry?"

"You're not much of a history guy, are you?" he asked.

"History? I try to learn what is essential, but I wouldn't say I know many things," Alex said.

"Shows," the man said. "You didn't even react to my other name."

"Your other name? Neil Ambers?" Alex asked. "Is that a fake name you gave yourself in this world? I'm sorry if I'm missing some sort of significance to the name."

"Don't worry about it. It's just one of the more popular names I have used throughout the last 700 years to help your ancestors whenever they needed my help. I had to help keep them from killing themselves after they came to this land from far away," the man said.

Alex's eyes narrowed in surprise. "From far away? Wait, are you saying my ancestors originated someplace else?" he asked.

"Hmm? Of course," the man surnamed Yang said. "I thought you would've guessed that by now. That birdie told me you know a lot of things that normal cultivators of this world do not. Did you never put the facts together?"

Alex's eyes went wide as they looked around the backyard while his mind worked to sort out different information.

5 thousand years ago, the battle that involved the Heavenly beasts caused the phenomenon of the Qi barrier to form. From that point onward, all Qi in this land had most likely disappeared, and from what the Tortoise had told him, everyone had evacuated long before the changes had happened.

With such a terrible Qi barrier stopping everything from entering afterward, how did his people come to be?

Alex had most likely thought of the exact question many times, but he never gave it enough thought to confuse him previously.

However, now that he was really thinking about it, the facts did not flow as well as they should.

5 thousand years ago, there were no humans, and then suddenly 600 or 700 years ago, humanity came to exist in this world. How could that be?

The only possible answer was exactly what the man had said. They had come from outside the Qi barrier.

However, that posed another problem. Given how talented and gifted the individuals inside the Qi barrier were, they couldn't have possibly come from one of the four other continents at all.

Since no one inside this world had demon blood in them, none of his ancestors could have possibly been from this world, or any world with demons in them.

Which meant, they had come from another world, one that was full of gifted humans.

"An Immortal land," Alex thought to himself and looked back up. "We came from a realm that is not this, didn't we? We came from a world full of human-blooded individuals. I cannot think of why anyone would move to this sort of place, but that is where we came from, isn't it?"

The man surnamed Yang smiled. "You understand now," he said. "Yes, your ancestors did come from a land that is not this. However, you are mistaken about where they came from."

"Please enlighten me, senior," Alex said.

"You are mistaken through no fault of your own. It's simply something that should be impossible in the first place," the man said. "You see, I know of every realm that exists in our world. However, your ancestors came from one that I had never even heard of."

"They came from a planet called Earth."

Chapter 1198 Malfunction

"Earth? Like the grade?" Alex asked.

"No, no, not like the grade. They happen to share the name, but this is something completely different," the man said. "This is a planet that does not exist in our world."

"I'm confused, senior," Alex said. "How can this place not exist in our world? We came from this planet called Earth, didn't we? In the first place, what even is a planet?"

The man chuckled and shook his head. "Honestly, what you're asking is far beyond my own understanding as well. Uhh... let's start with the small stuff before we get into the bigger stuff."

"So, what is a planet you ask? Basically, a planet is a world just like our own, only it is spherical in shape and humans live all around it. Imagine a world in the shape of the sun or the moon, and the people living around it. That is a planet."

Alex was surprised. In all his life, he had only ever known about the worlds being a plane. However, he was now hearing about a world of a different shape than his own, and it was even a world his ancestors had apparently come from.

"Are there planets in this world too, senior?" he asked.

"No, there are none," the man said. "Every world out there is a flat plane. There is no such thing as a planet that exists in this world."

Alex frowned. "Then how do you know that this place that goes by the name of Earth is a planet?" he asked.

"From your ancestors," the man said.

"From... my ancestors?" Alex was surprised.

"I was here when your ancestors arrived. Well, arrived is not the right word. I should say... misplaced," the man said. "After they came, they were in a disarray, so I had to help them. While doing so, I came to learn their language and soon enough learned a lot of things about them."

"The world they came from resembles the modern-day world. They had cars and trains just like our own, and maybe even more. Their world was developed, but they seem to have troubles of their own."

"Those people spoke of monsters that would come through void gates and fighters who could kill them. They swore that most of them had similar powers, but I never saw that."

"They never truly understood that the world that they had come to was different from the ones they had previously been in, and after I was sure they could not go back, I decided to help them get settled here."

"Unfortunately, as a wounded man without much Qi in me, I couldn't do many things. As such, not many years after they came here, your ancestors started fighting on their own. The war lasted decades before any peace was in this world again."

"By that time, those people had destroyed most of their history themselves. I had only later realized just how much had been destroyed. Fortunately, I had a few things saved beforehand for research, and they now remain in the Archaic National Museum of the Global building in Pinewood city."

Alex could only nod as he listened to the man speak. "So... the reason we don't know where we came from is that we got rid of all knowledge of it?" he asked.

"Yes," the man said. "Also, for mortals 600 years is enough time to lose a lot of knowledge about the past, especially when your source of history happens to be an important resource."

"Destroyed buildings were used as rocks, broken machinery was scraped for metals, etc. Such things happened all around. It was some time before they found any ore deposits and such, so they didn't have to use old stuff," the man said. "But of course, by that time, almost everything was gone."

"I came out occasionally to help them, mostly with helping them learn about the limits of this world, like how they couldn't go out of the natural boundary of this place or they would die. Quite a few died while testing, and they finally started believing that there was a void they would fall into out there," the man said.

I see," Alex said. "You must've suffered throughout the years."

The man didn't say anything.

"There are many things I'm still confused about that information, but one thing sticks out more than the others," Alex said. "What did you mean by the people were misplaced?"

The man sighed. "Your ancestors were victims of an accident that was never meant to bring them here at all. It all just... happened, and they came here," he said.

Alex looked at the man curiously, waiting for more information, and the man seemed to be somehow pressured into answering more.

"It all began when I tried to leave this realm," the man said. "I had come here unintentionally as well and wanted to leave this place. I had been hiding in this continent due to its nature, and fortunately, there were teleportation formations here already."

"All I had to do was change it so that instead of teleporting me to one of the continents outside, it teleported me to where I came from."

"I spent nearly a hundred years fixing the teleportation formation, doing whatever I could to make it work, and when it finally did, I used it. I was going to connect the space in this realm with one from a higher realm and go there."

"However, that was when the accident happened. As it turned out, there was an opening on this land, one that connected to the planet Earth. My formation malfunctioned, connecting to this opening, and sucked in a majority of the people from Earth."

"So, when I say they were misplaced, I mean they were stolen from their home world by me due to my formation malfunctioning. I felt very guilty at the time, not only because people were brought here, but also because quite a few died in the process. I tried my best to fix it, but I could never send them back through the opening no matter how hard I tried."

"In the end, I had to give up and help them settle here," the man said with a drooping face. He seemed to be truly pained by this incident.

"Then, my ancestors never intended to come here?" Alex asked. "They were brought because of the accident?"

"Because of my accident, yes," the man said.

Alex didn't know what to say. Was he supposed to get angry here? Or was he to try and console the man by saying that he never meant for it to happen? In the end, he knew that even though something bad had happened to his ancestors, that was the reason he was born in the first place.

"If not for those specific set of events, I wouldn't be here right now," Alex said softly. "Although, I'm curious senior. Why was there an opening here that connected to Earth?"

"Sigh, I only came to learn about it recently too, but not long before I had arrived in this world, someone had created the opening here to travel to Earth," the man said.

A vague guess floated in Alex's head. "H-how long ago?" he asked.

The man shrugged. "Some 5000 years ago."

Chapter 1199 The Sun God

No matter how Alex tried to understand the implications of what he had just heard, he couldn't come up with any understandable conclusions.

"This event... did it happen before or after the beasts fought the humanoid monster 5 thousand years ago?" he asked.

The man surnamed Yang looked at Alex with a dry smile. "That was the event 5 thousand years ago," he said.

Alex felt his heart skip a beat when he heard that. "Then the opening to Earth, was it created by the humanoid monster that fought the beasts?" he asked.

"It was," the man said. "Right after this Qi barrier was created, he created that very opening and went to your ancestor's world known as Earth."

Alex was slackjawed for a while. "What sort of creature is capable of opening a doorway in space that leads to a world that doesn't exist?" he asked.

The man gave a dry laugh. "If anyone could do it, it's him," he said.

Alex looked at the man with a curious look. "Do you know who it was?" he asked. "Do you happen to know the identity of the monster that fought the beasts?"

"He... is not someone you need to know about," the man said.

"He?" Alex asked with a surprised expression. "It was a man?"

"No, it wasn't," the man said. "He was... no, I can't say." The man shook his head furiously and gulped a few times while looking around him from time to time.

"Are you... afraid of this monster, senior?" Alex asked.

"Hehe, who wouldn't?" the man asked.

"Do you need to be afraid?" Alex asked. "If even the beasts could fight against that being, then you should be strong enough to defeat him too, right?"

"Defeat? Him? Are you crazy?" the man asked. "Do you think the beasts defeated that thing? I told you, he went to Earth. His intention had always been to leave. Had he wanted to defeat the beasts, not a single one of them would've made it out of this place alive."

"They were simply beaten up because they were an annoyance to him for getting in his way," the man said. "Someone who can do something as grand as pushing the Qi on this continent to form a wall wouldn't simply die to the beasts."

"So, it really was that being who created the Qi barrier huh?" Alex said.

"Yes," the man said. "And his Intent still remains in this world, continuously pushing all Qi out of here."

The man looked around with a terrified look on his face that he couldn't hide at all. He quickly shook his head and looked back toward Alex. "Now, please stop asking me about this incident. I do not feel comfortable speaking anything related to this being."

Seeing how agitated the man had become about the topic, Alex decided to drop it. However, he could still feel waves of shock in his heart from the information he had received.

'Then... did the White Tiger die for nothing?' he thought. 'Did it not even manage to kill the monster after sacrificing itself? That is what it means if the monster managed to make that opening right?'

Hao Ya felt uncomfortable with the sudden silence and spoke up. "Right, Alex. You have other questions for my master, right? Ask away. He is willing to answer everything."

The man looked toward Hao Ya and chuckled a little before turning back toward Alex. "Yes, you can ask me anything. I don't know if I will answer it all or not, but I guarantee you I won't be offended at all," he said.

Alex looked up from his stupor and quickly thought of what to ask. "Uhh..." he couldn't immediately ask anything. It wasn't so much that he had no questions, but rather he couldn't choose one from the many that he had in his mind.

He looked around trying to think of one that he immediately wanted to know about and happened to see Scarlet in the distance who seemed to be speaking on her own for some reason by the lake.

"Oh right, sun!" Alex said.

"Sun?" Hao Ya asked.

"My body," Alex said quickly. "Senior, when I first started the game, it said my body is called the Sun God's Divine Yang body, and yet no one seems to know what that is at all. No one even knows what a Sun God is."

"Oh, is that what you're most curious about?" the man asked. "I would've assumed you would first ask why I had you all play the game."

"Well, that too," Alex said.

The man nodded. "I understand, you are curious about a lot of things. I would too," he said. "Let's see. Regarding your body, the reason no one knows about your body is because of two things.

"The first is the fact that it has rarely ever appeared as it has with you. It has been named many different things before for the various properties it holds."

"The Extreme Yang body, the Heaven Devouring body, the Earth Consuming body, the Poison's Bane constitution, Qi Stealing body, Serene Mind Constitution, etc. Throughout history, whenever people would be born with your body, they would immediately be named one of the names that were more popular."

"They were never named what your body is truly named because no one knows about the name itself. I only happened to learn of the name after reading through an archaic record I found in my master's library," he said. "That book held the name for your body, and the significance it held."

"Significance?" Alex asked. "What sort of significance?"

"That brings me to the second reason why no one knows about your body," the man said. "And that is the fact that the being known as the Sun God has disappeared from history, except for the very few records that have lasted since ancient times."

"Wait, so the Sun God really existed?" Alex asked with a surprised face.

"He did," the man said.

"And the records of his existence were erased?" Alex asked.

"No, not erased. They simply disappeared to time itself," the man said. "After all, the being known as the Sun God lived so long in the past that we don't even have a complete record of him. All we know is that he simply wasn't there anymore when he was needed the most."

"Why was he needed?" Alex asked.

"Because of the war," the man said. "There was a large war that happened a lot of time ago, and just before the war, the Sun God disappeared."

"The Eternal war?" Alex asked.

The man was taken aback a bit. "You know about that? Well, that makes things simple then," he said. "Yes, the Sun God disappeared before the Eternal War began. No records of him can be found afterward."

"I see," Alex said. "So that's why no one knows about them at all."

"No, people still know about them," the man said. "They just don't know the name."

"Huh?" Alex asked. "People know about them?"

"Yes," the man said. "The Sun God and the Moon Goddess are well known everywhere, albeit not by their names. You must have heard about them too, haven't you?"

"After all, it is them they are talking about when the people refer to the two True gods."

Chapter 1200 Thief

The True Gods.

Thanks to Shen Jing, Godslayer, and the beasts from the Beast Realm, Alex had come to learn a bit about the True Gods.

They were two real gods, unlike the false gods that were simply called such. They were the ones that were responsible for blessing the 4 divine beasts and creating the 3 demonic plants.

He couldn't be sure which god was responsible for which, but he could guess. He saw Scarlet and remembered how she mentioned the feeling she got from him. That and the fact that her body favored the sun more than anything.

If what Alex had heard just now was correct, along with every bit of information he had, then it would be correct of him to assume that the god that had blessed the Heavenly Beasts was the Sun God.

Alex couldn't help but gulp in surprise and shock.

"M-my body... is that of a True God?" he asked.

"More of a mere imitation," the man said. "The Sun God disappeared, but the impression he left behind in the world did not. As such, from time to time, people would be born with an imitation of their body."

"Most of those would be of a quality that was nothing to speak of, but you were born with one that could be considered to be one of the best imitations of the Sun God's body. Good enough to be considered a divine grade body."

"And then you somehow evolved it," the man said with clear amazement in his eyes. "That's an entirely different problem that I have to deal with somehow."

"It's a problem that that I evolved my body?" Alex asked.

"It would be depending on your character, but from what I've seen and what I've heard, you are very much not problematic at all," he said. "Had you instead been someone who let their power get to their head, I would've killed you the moment you walked in here. Something like the Sun God's body cannot be allowed in the hands of someone who would only misuse it."

Alex took a step back out of sheer instinct.

"Don't worry," the man said. "As I mentioned, you are more than good enough to have a power like that. In fact, I had happy that you grew up to be who you are today. The problem I talked about has nothing to do with your body, but rather how you evolved it."

"I... ate the Yang fruit," Alex said.

"You ate the Nine Yang Divine fruit," the man said.

Alex's eyes went wide. He quickly turned to Scarlet in the distance who wasn't paying attention to them at all. 'Did she tell him? We were supposed to be keeping it a secret, weren't we?'

"Why are you looking toward the phoenix?" the man asked.

"Nothing," Alex quickly said. "Nine Yang Divine fruit... that's the name of the fruit I ate?"

"Yes," the man said with a sigh. "I thought it would be fine leaving it be here, but who knew someone like you would come around to consume it for yourself? Urgh, I shouldn't have stolen it. I'm an idiot."

Hao Ya was surprised to hear her master call himself an idiot.

Alex was surprised as well, but for completely different reasons. "Wait... senior, what do you mean by you stole it? Were you the one that brought the tree here?"

"Urgh! Don't remind me, please. I hope master can save me from this somehow," he said. "I would've been fine if the plant was still alive, but now that it's dead... urgh."

Alex couldn't believe what he was seeing. The senior that seemed greater than heaven was crouching in front of him with his head in his arms. He stared for quite a while before quickly shaking his head.

"So you were the one who brought the plant here? I had assumed it had come with the meteor shower," Alex said.

"Huh? Meteor shower? What's that about?" Hao Ya asked.

"Oh, about a thousand or more years ago in the Western continent, there was a night when the sky was lit up with meteors that fell from the sky. What they assumed were meteors at the time actually turned out to be precious weapons, tools, books, plants, etc. I had thought that the plant whose fruit I ate had come in that shower as well, but it seems it was senior who brought it here instead," Alex said.

"Oh," Hao Ya said with a blank face before turning to her master and back to Alex. "Actually, you are correct. That plant did come in that event you call the meteor shower."

"Huh?" Alex looked at her weirdly. "But your master said—"

"My master... is the one who caused that meteor shower," Hao Ya said.

"WHAT!?"

Alex was hearing so many surprising things today that he felt like he needed a pill to calm his heart before it failed.

"Senior was the reason behind the Meteor shower?" Alex asked.

"Oh, that. Uh, yeah, it was me," the man said.

"How did that happen?" Alex asked.

"Well, I was trying to run away from my master's place after stealing everything from there but was caught at the last second before I could teleport somewhere else. My master tried to pull out everything I had in my storage and she did manage to do it, but I also managed to activate the formation to take me to a random realm."

"At the same time, I took the items with me as I teleported away, and when I came here, they were out of my control, thrown everywhere in this world where I was not welcome. I was also hurt, so I spent my time in hiding here, healing myself."

"I never knew the mortals referred to my disaster as a meteor shower," the man said with laughter in his voice.

The man turned around to see Alex's shocked expression. "Don't be too surprised, I heard something similar happened to you too. I heard you were teleporting with quite a few items when you hit the Qi wall here and had to lose everything," he said.

"I did," Alex said blankly. "Senior, you stole stuff from your master?"

"Yes," the man said straightforwardly before realizing what he had said. "Wait, I'm not a thief. I just stole stuff."

Alex's eyes narrowed.

"No, I mean I stole, but profiting from the stealing was not my intention. It was meant for something bigger, something grander than I or the things I stole," the man said. "I had good reasons to steal those items."

"I don't doubt you, senior," Alex said with a bow.

"You don't trust me, do you?" the man said. "Of course, why would you? I wouldn't trust me either."

"No, no," Alex said quickly. "I'm sure you had reasons, senior. I don't doubt your words. I'm simply wondering what reasons they could be to force a disciple to steal his master's stuff."

"No, not my master's stuff. I wouldn't dare," the man quickly said. "I only stole what my master was safekeeping in her place. They didn't belong to her at all, but rather the entire human race."

Alex's eyes narrowed when he heard that. "Your master's place held items that belonged to the entire human race?" he asked in surprise. "Where is this place?"

The man gave a smug look. "It's a realm known as the Sky God's Palace. My master is the current Sky God."

Chapter 1201 God Summit

"The Sky God?" Alex gave a surprised look.

The man nodded happily. "Yes, I'm a disciple of the Sky God," he said.

"Wow, you're a disciple of a god," Alex said. "Then you must be very powerful, senior."

"I don't like to toot my own horn, but I'm not too shabby I suppose," the man said as he rubbed his nose in pride.

Alex nodded as he took in the information and felt a little confused. 'The Sky God... I've heard that name before, haven't I?' he thought.

He wondered where it was that he had heard about it. Had he learned about it back in the Sanctum? He didn't think so.

But he had definitely heard it more recently, so maybe it was from Scarlet. However, he couldn't remember a conversation where the Sky God had come up.

'Then it has to be--'

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck..."

As if chanting for his survival, Godslayer's voice rang in his head loud and clear. He could hear the surprise and fear in his voice as well, which was particularly surprising.

'He's not disgusted or angry about the god talk, but rather frightened?' Alex wondered. That was when he remembered where he had first heard of the Sky God.

"That's right," he said in his head. "You were trapped in the Sky God's treasury weren't you?"

"Don't let that man know I'm here," Godslayer said. "My current self is too weak, and if he manages to get his hands on me, I will have to go back to that hellish place where I will have to spend another hundred thousand years trapped with nowhere to go."

'I see what's happening,' Alex thought. He looked back at the man in front of him and asked, "Senior, you said you robbed your master's place, right?"

"Yes," the man said.

"You took everything there?" Alex asked. "And did everything get brought to this realm?"

"Hmm, I don't know about everything, but I did bring most of it. Of course, I lost a lot of it during my crash landing, but I have managed to take a few backs already, and Hao Ya here has also brought a few for me."

"I simply couldn't search for the rest so I gave up. It wasn't like it would go anywhere with how weak everyone was," the man said.

"I see," Alex said. 'So he is the reason Godslayer came here.'

"Don't worry, I won't let him take you. Try not to make it obvious you are there though," Alex said to Godslayer.

"Mhm," Godslayer voiced and stayed quiet after that.

"You wear my ring, so you must have a few of my items as well, don't you?" the man asked.

"Oh... uhh," Alex looked at his ring. "So this ring is yours too huh, senior?"

"That was the one my master managed to strip from me when I was teleporting. It's the one that the items scattered from. Was there anything in there at all?" he asked.

"Uhh, I did find one thing, but I lost it during my own teleportation disaster," Alex said. "It's now filled with my own stuff."

"Is that so?" the man said with a disappointed look on his face. "It's a shame then. I was hoping to find an item that I still haven't found."

"What item is that?" Alex asked.

"It's the seed of the World Tree," the man said. "Perhaps amongst all the items I brought here, it is the most important one. If you don't have it then, it must be somewhere in the Western Continent."

Alex's heart skipped a beat when he heard that. 'The seed of the World Tree was that important?' he thought. He hesitated to tell the man the fate of the world tree. He was worried that he would kill him if he found out that it was destroyed because of him.

Alex needed to quickly change the topic.

"Why did you do it, senior? The stealing I mean. You said you had a reason. If it's not too rude, would you please tell me?" Alex said.

The man sighed. "It won't make sense to you unless you know more information," he said as he rubbed his forehead. "I don't even know where to begin."

He sat down on the grass on his own, and Alex followed suit. Hao Ya sat down as well with quite a curious look on her face.

Her master had never tried to explain to her the reason why he had stolen the items from his master's palace, and for some reason, he was about to explain it to Alex.

Why? Was Alex that important to him? More than his own disciple?

Hao Ya felt slightly angry, but she did not let it show on her face and simply listened to what her master had to say.

"I do not know if you know this yet or not, but the Sky God isn't a normal god. They are the ones that make rules for all of humanity. In essence, the Sky God's Palace is the equivalent of a royal palace but for all humans. In the same way, the Sky God is the Emperor of all of Humanity."

"This is the place that determines the fate of all humans as Gods gather every few dozen millennia to make decisions. As a result, many powerful organizations and families around the many realms end up handing over their precious artifacts and items to the Sky God for both safekeeping and showcasing it to the entire world."

"That is what I stole, and that is why I say I stole from Humanity."

"As for why I stole it, it all leads back to a God Summit that happened a few years before my arrival here."

"The gods from all around the many realms gathered for another meeting to make decisions. However, during this particular summit, an idea was brought forth, a radical idea that would bring forth a lot of death and suffering."

Alex's eyes narrowed. "What sort of idea, senior?" he asked.

"The idea was simple," the man said. "The gods... wanted to restart the war against the demons. They wanted to bring back the Eternal war."

"What? Why would they want that?" Hao Ya shouted in anger.

"Was your master the one that brought forth this idea?" Alex asked.

"No, my master was actually against this idea," the man said. "However, because of an incident a long time ago, as well as her relatively new status as the Sky God, her words no longer hold as much weight as a Sky God's words should."

"So, while she refused to accept the idea, she couldn't dismiss it entirely. The ones that brought up the idea desired to restart the war again," the man said.

"Why would they want to bring back all the pain and suffering?" Alex asked. "Unless... they have something to gain from the war."

"They do," the man said. "They stand to gain something that is slowly depleting from the world faster than these people could hope to keep it."

"What is?" Alex asked curiously.

The man put on a grim look as he stared directly into Alex's eyes and answered.

"Qi."

Chapter 1202 The World Tree

"Qi?" both Alex and Hao Ya spoke at the same time.

"What do you mean by that, master? Qi is depleting?" Hao Ya asked.

"We're running out of Qi?" Alex asked.

The man looked troubled. "Yes, we are," he said. "Qi is not something that's infinite. There is a finite amount and day by day, we are running low on it," he said.

Alex stood there with wide eyes, unable to comprehend the statement. "How... how can that be?" he asked.

"Why can it not?" the man asked. "Qi is a resource too. And like every other resource, it runs out as well."

"Then... aren't we doomed?" Alex asked. If the world, no, all worlds were running out of Qi then... how was he to cultivate endlessly?

"It's not as bad as it sounds," the man said. "You have no reason to worry just yet."

"Can you elaborate, senior?" he asked.

"It's like this," the man said. "There was always a finite amount of Qi. Even finite, the amount is so incredibly massive, that you likely can't comprehend it. And what's more, the Qi will never disappear at all."

"It will change forms for a while, get stored in a spirit vein, or get absorbed by something, but it will never be destroyed. Eventually, after they all disappear, the Qi will return to how it was," the man said.

"So... what's the problem?" Alex asked.

"Time," the man said. "Time is what is causing all this problem. It will take time for the Qi to turn back to Qi again. It will take time for the resources to be found. It will take time before the ones at the top find enough Qi to get higher."

Alex nodded as he thought about it. He could understand the theory behind what was being said, although there were still questions floating in his head. Unlike those questions, however, there was a separate question he wanted an answer to now.

"If time is what is needed then... how will the war help? Are they trying to lower the number of beings that will use Qi? Are they controlling the population to reduce the usage of Qi?" he asked.

"That's a result, but not the intention of these gods at all," the man said. "Doing so wouldn't help them increase the amount of Qi that exists, which is their main problem right now."

"Then why? Why would the gods want to start a war if what they want is Qi?" Alex asked.

The man smiled meekly. "Because that is the best way to actively turn stored Qi into usable Qi," he said.

"How?" Hao Ya asked. "Will the spirit veins and natural treasures dissipate Qi faster if there is a war?"

"Of course not," the man said. "Where do you think the most Qi is stored in our world? In Spirit veins? No. In natural treasures? Again, no. Then where can it be?"

Hao Ya and Alex both looked at each other, trying to guess the answer. Alex turned back towards the man and thought by himself.

'War... if a war is involved then...'

"NO WAY!" he shouted. "The cultivators."

The man nodded. "Exactly. It is the cultivators that have the most Qi in their bodies. Individually, they can never compare to stuff like Spirit veins or natural treasures. But collectively, there is a lot of Qi out there in the cultivators, be it Human, Demon, Beasts, or even Plants."

"Imagine a Divine realm cultivator who had been gathering Qi in his body, improving it for over a hundred thousand years. Imagine how much Qi would be gathered in that one Divine realm cultivator's body?"

"If you somehow manage to kill that person then... you suddenly have a lot of Qi available to you as the stored Qi in the corpse will quickly turn back to usable Qi," the man said. "Kill a thousand... and you suddenly have enough Qi to raise another 1000 of your own people as Divine realm cultivator. Kill people with higher cultivation, and then they have Qi for themselves."

"And the Gods want to start a war because they think killing people will restore enough Qi to help elevate their own cultivation base?" Alex asked. "Those bastards!"

The man looked surprised at the sudden cussing of gods. "Uhh, don't say it out loud even if you think so inside," he said. "You never know who or what is listening."

"Yes, you're right. Sorry, I got worked up because of that," Alex said with a bow.

"It's fine," he said. "Also, that is not the only reason the gods really want to start a war again. They want to attack the demons because they want something else from them.

"What else could they want?" Alex asked with anger still audible in his voice.

"They want a method that only the elder demons know about," the man said. "They want to know how one could plant and thus grow a World Tree."

Alex's eyes narrowed. "The World Tree? Why the World Tree?" he asked.

"Because of the specific property that a World Tree holds," the man said. "The World Tree is capable of converting sunlight and moonlight into Qi."

"Wait... what?" Alex was stunned for a moment. "Are you saying... the World Tree is capable of creating Qi?"

"Yes, but it's only temporary Qi. It doesn't last forever," the man said. "However, because it works with both sunlight and moonlight, around the world tree is an everlasting area with plenty of Qi for one to cultivate and reach higher realms easily."

"That was how the demons managed to push us, humans, to the brink of losing in the Eternal War. Was it not for a sneak attack on their World Tree that destroyed it, we would've never won at all," the man said.New n0vel chapters are published on

"And now they want to plant a World Tree of their own so they can enjoy its benefits," Alex said.

"Why don't they just ask the demons?" Hao Ya asked. "Why go through a war just to learn something?"

"Because the demons do not know that there exists a seed of the World Tree," the man said. "If they did, we would be forced to give it back based on the treaty we signed when the war ended."

"They would live on their own in a few realms, giving up the others, but they wanted in return everything that was taken from them," the man said. "When making the list of things they wanted back, they left a clause that if they come to find anything that belongs to them still exists, they would want it back as well."

"Which... is why the war is the only time they can ask such a question," the man said.

"Is that why you stole the seed, master?" Hao Ya asked.

"Yes," the man said. "Everything else I stole was just a distraction. Something to keep them occupied while I took away the seed. My master knew that too, so she targeted the ring where the seed was. Thankfully, I managed to bring it back with me. Although, I'm not sure where it could be right now."

Alex had already stopped caring about the information about the war and was instead lost in his thoughts about the World Tree's seeds.

"Senior," he said, unable to hide his guilt anymore. "I had the World Tree's seed before, but I lost it. It was the one item that was in the ring that I lost. It has most likely been destroyed by the Qi barrier. I'm sorry."

"You... you lost the World Tree's seed? In the Qi wall?" The man asked loudly.

"Yes," Alex said while drooping his head. "I apologize, senior."

"Hahaha!" the man suddenly laughed. "Why apologize? This is great news."

"Great news? How?" Alex asked.

"Do you know how thick the World Tree's seed's skin is? There is no way it was destroyed by mere Saint Qi," the man said. "If what you said is true, then the World Tree's seed is still out here waiting for us."

Alex stopped for a moment. "Then... there's a chance that the seed isn't destroyed?" he asked.

"A chance? It's pretty much a guarantee," the man said. "The seed is something that Divine Realm cultivators failed to destroy when they first got it. Something like that won't be so easily destroyed in this realm."

Alex hesitated to feel relief just yet. "Then, can we recover it?" he asked.

"Yes," the man said. "Do you know exactly where you dropped it?"

Alex thought for a bit and shook his head. "I have no clue where it was that I appeared when I was teleported here," he said. "I was immediately hurt by the Qi barrier."

"Hmm, then I will have to search everywhere," the man said.

Alex felt a wave of spiritual sense flow around him. The might of the spiritual sense nearly made him balance himself even while he was on the ground already.

The man had tried to be gentle with how he used his spiritual sense, and even then he had ended up frightening Alex and Hao Ya.

Even Scarlet turned around from next to the lake when she sensed the movement of the senior's spiritual sense. Even the thing in the lake could sense it and shuddered.

The man closed his eyes and focused on searching for the World Tree's seed with everything he had. His sense reached deep into every nook and corner of the Qi wall, looking even into the Qi itself.

Alex and the rest waited silently for as long as it took for the man in front of them to finish doing his job.

The man opened his eyes 10 minutes later and looked at Alex.

"I can't find it."

Chapter 1203 The Other Self

"So... it's destroyed," Alex said. "Sigh, it's all my fault. Although, it might be for the best so that the gods can't start a war once again. "

"No, it's not destroyed. It can't be destroyed. It's just not there," the man said. "Are you sure it was with you when you teleported away? You didn't leave it behind when you were running away, right?"

"I... I'm not sure," Alex said. "I wasn't in the right state of mind to remember what I was taking, but I'm certain I tried to take away what I thought was important, so I had most definitely taken it."

"Hmm, but there is a chance that you left it behind, right?" the man asked.

"I suppose," Alex said.

"That's not possible, master," Hao Ya said. "I've been to the sect treasury of all 5 major sects in the Northern Continent. Not a single one of them had anything resembling a large, solid seed."

"I also somewhat remember them talking about the aftermath of the battle that he was involved in. All 5 of the sects had decided to not take away anything that was left behind, and instead used it so they could be distributed to the up-and-coming alchemists."

Alex looked at Hao Ya curiously. "They're using my pills and ingredients to improve their level of alchemy?" he asked.

Hao Ya nodded. "Well, they're not yours anymore I suppose, since the reserve was all but gone when I left there 2 years ago," she said. "All that was left behind were a few ingredients and a cauldron no one could use because of how heavy it was."

Alex's eyes went wide. "My cauldron is there?" he asked.

Hao Ya was surprised. "That's your cauldron too?" she asked.

"Yes, I made it myself using 160 tons of various metals including 100 tons of Starforged Tungsten," he said. "Thank god. I thought I had lost the cauldron too along with everything in the Qi barrier, but I left it behind by mistake. That's one more good news I've heard today."

"Congratulations," the senior said to Alex. "Although, if what you said is true, then you didn't have much need for worry at all. Starforged Tungsten is quite strong and can survive through a lot of damage before being broken completely."

"Is it?" Alex asked. "I know it is strong but, my cauldron was an alloy, so it was less durable than normal Starforged Tungsten. I made it so that it was more resistant to heat instead of other physical damages."

"That's understandable," the man said. "But even so, the cauldron would've survived the Qi wall long enough to either fall in or out of it. That's what I checked right now with the World Tree's seed too."

"Oh, right. I wonder why I didn't think of that," Alex thought. "So there is land outside the Qi barrier too?"

"A small patch, yes," the man said, but it is still dozens of kilometers wide, so anything that falls out wouldn't just fall into the ocean."

"I see," Alex said. "Uhh... then did you find anything else during your search?"

"Hmm? I didn't see anything at all," the man said. "The rest of your stuff has most likely been destroyed."

"I see," Alex said as he rubbed his chin. "But I had about 20 different swords made from Starforged Tungsten too. Could those have been destroyed as well? You said the metal was strong enough to survive until it gets thrown out of either side, right?"

"Swords? I didn't see any swords," the man said.

"Really? I should've brought them with me though," Alex said. "Even if not all, a few should have come with me. Can I ask you to check again?"

"Sure, but are you sure you didn't take them with you to the Southern Continent?" the man asked.

"No, I'm sure. I checked where I landed with Scarlet and we didn't find a single thing at all. Given how far away from civilization that place was, no one else could've taken my stuff either."

"And as I said, nothing other than Alchemy stuff was back in the Northern Continent," Hao Ya said.

"Hmm, that's curious. Let me check again," the man said and used his spiritual sense once more to look for any of the 20 swords that Alex might have lost here.

Since the swords were smaller and harder to find, it took the man some more time to look through them. Alex waited patiently for a bit.

He heard a few footsteps and looked to the side to find Scarlet walking toward him. Next to her was a young man wearing a blue robe with bright blue hair.

"What's going on? What are you guys talking about?" she asked.

"Nothing," Alex said. "Senior is trying to help me find my sword if they are here. What were you doing over there for so long?"

"Oh, I was talking with senior," Scarlet said pointing to the man next to her. "I was going to introduce you after you came over to me, but it looks like you didn't plan on doing that at all, so I brought him here."

She turned to the man. "This is Alex, the boy I was telling you about," she said. "He's the one who brought news about you to me."

"It's good to meet you, young man," the blue-haired man said. "I heard you met my other self."

Alex was confused about what that meant for a second, but he quickly got up and bowed. "Greetings senior." While bowing, he wondered if he had met this person's clone before, given that he said he had met his other self.

However, he couldn't guess who he was at all. He had never seen a blue-haired person like this at all. "Who's he?" he asked Scarlet secretly, who was surprised a bit before remembering.

"Ah! you can't tell by his cultivation base?" she asked. "This is senior Xuan Luhei."

"Xuan Luhei?" Alex's eyes narrowed for a second. "The Black..."

His eyes widened as realization dawned on him as to who he was looking at. 'Ah! The Snake!'

"I'm sorry I didn't recognize you sooner, senior," Alex said as he bowed deeper.

"It's alright. I don't see how you could've recognized me when I'm in my human form," the snake said. "I don't like meeting humans while in my beast form, so the problem lies with me anyway."

"No, no. I should've recognized you just by your Immortal cultivation base," Alex said. He looked at the man closely and asked, "Are you hurt too, senior? Just like the other senior?"

"No, no, I'm alright," the snake said. "I was never hurt. I was just hiding here."

"Oh, I was going to make you a pill to heal you if you weren't already healed," he said. "It's good that you were healed. Then I will find a way to get my pills to the other senior. He was waiting for a thousand years to pass before he got to go back home before healing, but I should be able to help him now."

"No need," the man said. "He has already been healed.."

"Oh... huh?" Alex gave a curious look. "He's already healed?"

"You don't have to worry about the senior in the secret realm. He has healed already," Hao Ya said. "Although, he's still hiding away because of the Heavenly Judgment."

"Same as me," the snake said. "I've been staying here because the Intent here masks my existence quite well. If I were to go out, I would have to face a chance of death, which I don't want to do."

"Wait, why are you here, senior?" Alex asked. "Did you come back after leaving back then?"

"Leaving?" the snake chuckled. "I never left. Or more accurately, I couldn't leave. I was too weak after our battle, and after making just a quarter of the way through the Qi wall, I realized that I would die before I made it all the way out."

"I did what was right at the time and flew back in to heal myself. However, after healing myself, I realized that I was beginning to be attacked by the Heavenly Judgment. Thankfully, it didn't come at all because I was in here."

"Oh," Alex said. "So the reason you didn't go back was that you were afraid of the Heavenly Judgment?"

"Yes," the snake said. "We pushed ourselves so hard during the battle that all of us should've been the target of Heavenly Judgment."

"I see," Alex said. He didn't know what to say after that. 'Should I ask for some blood?'

However, he quickly got rid of the idea. Not only would it be rude, he hadn't done anything for the beast for him to give him something so valuable.

Besides, it was better for him to get the blood essence from someone far stronger. That was the reason why he hadn't bothered asking Scarlet for her blood essence as well.

"You must've been lonely out here all alone for so long," Alex said.

"Not really," the snake said. "I hibernated for as long as I could, and only woke up when senior here came. Then, I moved here along with him and after that, there has been not a moment of loneliness."

Alex was about to say something when he felt the spiritual sense from the man rush back into him.

"I can't find anything," the man said as he opened his eyes. "Are you absolutely sure they didn't go with you to the Southern Continent?"

"I'm sure, senior," Alex said. "The only thing I had on me there was a sword in my hand, a storage ring on my finger, and a book inside my body."

"Inside your body?" the man's eyes narrowed. "What book?"

Chapter 1204 Space

Alex called out to his book and the Blood God's Manual came out from inside him.

"This book," he said as he showed the manual to everyone that was standing around them. Scarlet wasn't surprised at all as she had seen it enough times, and neither Hao Ya nor the snake realized the importance of the book.

However, the man surnamed Yang was beyond shocked at the sight of the book.

"Th-that's the Blood God's Manual. Where did that come from?" he asked.

"I've bonded to it, senior," Alex said. "I've been using this book to improve my blood aura and help me in battles."

"You had the Blood God's manual huh?" the man said. "But where did it come from?"

"I found it after killing some people that were after me for my blood," Alex said. "They got it from the meteor shower I assume."

"No, where did it come from?" the man asked again.

"I'm... not following you, senior," Alex said. "Was it not you who brought this book to this realm?'

"Yes, it was me," the man said. "I'm asking where did the book come from right now. You didn't bring it out from your storage ring, and I didn't see it come out from a storage bag."

"Oh, that's what you meant," Alex said and looked at the book. "I honestly don't know where this book goes when I keep it senior. I think it's in my blood, given that it has to do with the blood."

"No," the man said and frowned a bit. "How would an artifact of that size without the ability to shrink stay in your blood?"

"I don't know where else it could be then," Alex said. "I've tried following it, but I can't seem to at all."

"Hmm, come here," the man called him.

Alex walked right next to the man and sat down. The man took the book from Alex's hand and looked at it for a second. "Call it back," he said.

Alex nodded and called the book back. The book zoomed into his body, disappearing as it always did.

The man's eyes widened when he saw that. "Call it out again," he said.

Alex nodded and pulled out the book, which surprised the man again. The Snake and Pheonix were starting to notice what was happening and came close to watch as well.

The man thought for a bit and closed his eyes while placing a palm on Alex's chest. He waited for a few seconds and Alex felt spiritual sense slowly enter his body.

"Call it back again," he said.

Alex nodded and called the book back. He tried to see what the senior was looking for, so he followed the book with his sense as well.

However, after just entering his body, he lost track of the book which had seemingly vanished, like it always did.

The man's eyes opened wide as he let go of Alex.

"Unbelievable!" he said softly while his eyes found it difficult to focus on anything.

"Master? What's going on?" Hao Ya asked.

"Senior, what's happening?" Scarlet asked with a worried look on her face.

The snake got closer and looked toward the man. "Senior, that looks like... but it can't be, can it?" he asked. "He's still in the saint realm."

"He is, but he's somehow done it," the man said with a shocked expression on his face only deepening with time.

"Senior, am I alright? Is something wrong with me?" Alex asked worriedly as well.

"Alright? You are more than alright," the man said.

"Then what's going on?" he asked.

The man took a deep breath while the snake could only put on a face of incredulity. "I don't know how you managed to do it, but you have somehow opened up your Soul Space."

Scarlet gasped the moment she heard what they had said. "Bu-but how? He's not an Immortal yet," she said.

"I don't know yet," the man said. "Only he can answer that question."

Alex looked at the 3 of them, confused out of his mind as to what they were talking about. "Senior, what is this soul space you talk about? And why is it strange that I have it?" he asked.

"A soul space is a small space that exists in one's body. Everyone has it, just like everyone has a Dantian or a Spiritual sea. In the same way, there is a requirement on how one can open it as well," the man said.

"What requirement?" Alex asked.

"Your Soul Space only opens up when you reach the Immortal realm," the man said. "Given how it is open right now, however, something weird is going on."

"I have never heard of anyone opening a Soul space before entering the Immortal realm," the snake said as he thought to himself.

"I have," Scarlet said. "If we have our Soul space open before we die, we can be reborn with the ability to access it. Although, we can't really bring out anything that is already in there, and can only use a fraction of the space until we reach the Immortal realm again."

"I don't see how that is relevant here," the man said. "He's neither a phoenix nor is he an Immortal."

"Have you died before?" the snake asked.

"I have," Alex said. "But I could store and retrieve that book long before I had died."

"You've died?" Hao Ya asked with a surprised look.

"I have," Alex said.

"How are you alive then?" she asked.

"I got better," Alex said.

"We're getting sidetracked," the snake said. "Senior, have you ever heard of someone being able to open a Soul Space before entering the Immortal realm?"

The man thought for a bit, but he could only shake his head. "No, no one should be able to do that," he said.

"What about your master? Could she do it?" Scarlet asked. "I remember hearing that Sky Gods have a rather unique Soul Space."

"Even if the Sky God has the strongest understanding of space, they still have to wait until they reach the Immortal realm before they can open up their Soul Space," the man said. "It is true that they can improve it later using..."

The man paused for a moment and looked up at Alex. His mind raced a bit and he came up with a question.

"You... you know the Space dao, don't you?" he asked.

"I do," Alex said.

"How did you learn to sense Space?" the man asked.

"I... I think it was because of the Space stone I consumed," Alex said.

"I knew it!" the man shouted, before stopping. "Wait, what do you mean by 'consume'?"

"I took the space stone in somehow, and it now floats in the Spiritual space, or at least its aura," Alex said.

"Let me check," the man said, not believing Alex at all.

"NO!" Alex shouted abruptly. "Ahem, I mean, I don't feel comfortable letting someone into my mind. I'm sorry senior."

"But I need to check if you really have a space stone in your mind," the man said.

"I can promise you it is, senior. The silver color and the space aura I feel from it is without a doubt from the Space stone," he said.

"Hmm, did the space stone help open your Soul space?" the man couldn't help but ask. "Maybe it did, but the bigger question now is how were you able to consume it?"

"Maybe it was because of my body?" Alex said.

"No, that can't be," the man said as he thought to himself. 'Sun God's body has no record of being able to use space, let alone consume it. And without even unconsciously sensing space, he couldn't have taken in the Space stone. Is he lying?'

He remembered what his master had told him about using Space stone to improve one's soul space. He also remembered reading various records on this topic, so he was quite knowledgeable in that regard.

"The space stone, were there any changes before and after you consumed it?" the man asked to figure out if Alex really was talking about a space stone.

"Uhh... it grew in size after it was inside my mind," Alex said. "Like a lot. Although, it's dissipating faster and faster now and only two-thirds of the original size remain."

"Hmm, that is what a space stone is," the man said. "How big was it at the start?"

"At the start?" Alex thought for a bit and showed a size with his two hands. "Like this big? About the size of a watermelon."

"I see," the man said. "Then it must've been smaller than the one on that ring. Did it really only deplete by a third despite it being so many years?"

"Huh? Oh no," Alex said quickly. "I meant it was the size of a watermelon on the outside at the start. When it got inside my mind, it increased to the size of a massive mountain."

The man looked at him blankly for a second before screaming, "HUH?" His sudden scream scared the few that were around him.

"It was the size of a mountain? How did you find such a large space sto-- no, don't tell me..."

"It came down in the Meteor shower too, senior," Alex said.

"You absolute ... hrmm... you used a space stone that was meant to be used to run Inter realm teleportation formations for hundreds of thousands of years, just so you could open up your Soul Space?" the man asked.

"Uhh... I'm sorry?" Alex said. "I didn't know what I was doing at the time senior."

The man was about to shout again when he stopped as his face went blank. "Wait for a second, if you use that large of a space stone to unlock your Soul Space then... how big is your Soul Space right now?"

Chapter 1205 The Soul Space

Before Alex could ask what the man meant, the man quickly placed his palm on Alex's chest and closed his eyes.

Alex felt the spiritual sense enter his body once again and vanish.

"What are yo—"

"Shh!" the man interrupted him. "I'm checking something."

Alex didn't speak henceforth and neither did the rest of the people around him. They all watched silently, wondering to themselves what sort of thing they were about to hear given how shocked the senior sounded.

About 2 minutes later, the senior finally opened his eyes with a look that one could say meant that he was shocked, but in truth, the look was closer to him being horrified.

"Th-this... how is this possible?" he spoke to himself.

"Is something strange with his soul space, senior?" Scarlet asked. "Did the Space stone he consumed affect it somehow?"

"It did," the man said. "I'm not even sure if that word can encapsulate what has just happened."

"Senior, please explain to me just exactly what is happening with my soul space. Is it weird? Is it full of yang or something because of my body?" he asked.

"No, no, nothing that weird is happening at all," the man said. "All that has happened is that the space that should normally be inside of a Space stone has been added onto your soul space."

"All the space?" Alex asked with widened eyes. He looked at the ring in his finger and remembered how large that space was. It was the size of at least a few skyscrapers, if not more.

If he were to judge based on that, then the size of his soul space must at least be the size of thousands upon thousands of skyscrapers. Alex felt sweat dripping down the side of his face when he imagined that.

'If placed side by side, that would be the size of a goddamn city,' he thought to himself. Was there really a space inside his body that big that he had no idea about?

"I've never seen a space so large in my life," the man spoke again.

"How big is it senior?" the snake asked. "Compared to a recently ascended Immortal, how spacious is it?"

"Hehe," the man chuckled lightly. "That is no different than comparing candlelight to the sunlight. How big can an Immortal Ascendance 1st realm cultivator's soul space even be? It's about 10 to 20 cubic meters at best. Even one at peak of the Immortal realm, just a step away from the Divine realm would rarely have a soul space larger than 10 thousand cubic meters."

"However, this young man... his Soul Space is so large that... I don't even know how large it is," the man said.

"Huh?" Alex quickly looked at the man. "Is it not a few kilometers wide?"

"A few kilometers? It's more than a few kilometers," the man said.

Alex was confused. "I judged the size based on the stone in the ring. Was I mistaken to do so?" he asked.

"The ring?" the man looked at the ring on Alex's finger. "That is a bad way to judge the actual space in a space stone. The constraints space has to go through in the presence of Qi and this world ends up making a space stone exhibit way less space than it actually holds."

"Even then, we only end up using a fraction of it when forming a storage artifact. The worse we use it, the darker its color becomes. That red stone on your finger is a product of failure, at least in the sense that something better is theoretically possible," the man said.

"Then... did I end up using the entire space in the space stone I consumed?" Alex asked.

"Maybe not all, but quite a large chunk for sure," the man said. "As it stands, I cannot tell how large your soul space is."

"Huh?" Alex couldn't help but be confused a bit. "But your sense, it's so strong and is most definitely far-reaching right?"

"It is, and even then I cannot tell how large your soul space is," the man said.

"Not even a guess?" Alex asked.

"Not a guess, but I can give you a definite answer as to the lowest it can be," the man said. Everyone got closer to listen to him speak.

"At the very least, your soul space is larger... than the Central Continent," the man said. "And that is a very conservative estimation."

The 2 beasts and 1 girl around them gasped when they heard the senior's estimation. As for Alex, his mind broke the moment he tried to comprehend the size inside of him.

"Did... did you say larger than the Central Continent?" Alex asked. "I didn't mishear you, right?"

"No, you did not," the man said. "It is larger than the Central Continent without a doubt. In fact, it might even be larger than every other individual continent in this realm."

Alex finally gulped as his face went blank with understanding. He had thought the size would be the size of a city and was shocked. Hearing that it was actually the size of the continent made his heart skip beats every time he thought about it.

And the size of continents was also an underestimation, as per the senior himself. Then how large was it actually? What was even the use of having such a large space inside him?

"I have another piece of news about your soul space," the senior said. "You might find it to be good news too."

"Please, tell me senior," Alex quickly asked.

"When I was checking your space just now, I found multiple things floating around in there," he said. "It's possible that during your desperate moment, you took everything you could into your Soul space. Which is why it is nowhere to be found at all."

"Huh?" Alex looked back up. "Sorry, are you saying the items I thought I lost are inside of me right now?"

The man nodded. "That is exactly what I mean," he said.

"Wait, so I didn't lose any items?" Alex asked. "I saved them all?"

"It seems so," the man said. "Although, I cannot tell if you saved all or not. I still can't find the World Tree's Seed inside of you, but given how large your soul space is, it is likely outside the reach of my Spiritual sense."

"I see," Alex said. "How do we know if it is in there then? Is there a way?"

"Only you will have a complete knowledge of what is in your soul space, regardless of your size," the senior said. "Although, it will take a while. With your current spiritual sense, you won't even be able to sense your soul space, let alone take what is inside of you out. Although you might be able to store stuff if you use your Space dao."

"I see," Alex said. "What about my Blood God's Manual? I can take it in and out."

"That's because you are bonded to the item in a way you can't bond to many items. You've pretty much blood-refined the artifact, which is why you can do it so easily," he said.

"Oh, so if it is that level of bond, then I can put something in and out?" Alex asked curiously. "Then, can I use this sword of mine too?"

Alex brought out Midnight and showed it to the man. The man looked at the sword silently for a bit before showing a surprised look.

"You actually put your soul into that sword, huh? How did you learn to do that?" the man asked curiously.

"Uhh... I got it from a cultivator I fought," Alex said while trying to arouse as little suspicion as possible. "Can you guarantee that I can put it in and out of my soul space?"

"Yes," the man said. "Although, I would love to see if you can put it in or not in the first place."

"Uhh... maybe I shouldn't experiment so quickly before I learn a bit more about soul space," Alex said.

"That would be wise," the man said.

Alex nodded. "You said I have to have a strong spiritual sense, right?" he asked. "How strong would it have to be?"

The man thought for a moment. "It's hard to tell really," he said. "Normally, you would definitely need to have reached the immortal realm, but given that you do have the Dao of space and are more attuned to sensing space, it might not take that long for you."

"In fact, as soon as your soul strengthens a bit, you might be able to use it easily," the man said.

"As soon as my Soul strengthens?" Alex mused a bit. "So, the Saint Soul realm?"

"Yes," the man said. "Maybe even faster if your spiritual sense manages to gain a significant jump in power before that too."

"I see," Alex said. "Thank you for telling me that, senior."

The man smiled. "So, do you want me to take out what is in your Soul space right now? It will hurt you a bit, but I can do it," he said.

"Oh! You can, senior?" Alex asked excitedly. "I would love it if you could do that. What do I have in there right now?"

"I saw a few swords as you mentioned, a few cauldrons, some ingredients, talismans, a whip, a mask, a few formation pla—"

"Wait, my mask is there?" Alex asked hurriedly.

"Hmm? Yeah, it's there. Why?" the man asked.

"It's a mask that can help me improve my Spiritual sense, senior," Alex said. "Haha, I can't believe I have it."

"Oh, good for you," the man said. "So, should I begin?"

Chapter 1206 Reasons

Alex waited with bated breath as he felt the spiritual sense of the senior in front of him tear into his body.

To pull something out of someone else's space, one either had to have a very strong understanding of a specific type of space dao that related to space in a confined form or simply have strength way higher than the one that you were stealing from.

It seemed to him that the senior in front of him was not aware of the Dao, and was thus forced to use the brute force method of stealing from another Soul space.

'There is still some Space dao in there,' Alex thought. He could sense the space aura that came along with the senior's senses.

The man wasn't lying when he said that this was going to hurt. Alex could feel the ripping pain in his chest, but he didn't let it show on his face.

Fortunately, the pain wasn't at a level where he couldn't tolerate it at all. Although, he did feel it at a spiritual level, which was quite weird. It was most likely because the senior was using his spiritual sense to look into him.

Alex suddenly heard a thud and quickly looked in the direction of the sound to find a sword there. It was a dark, metallic sword with sparkling bits available sparingly all around it.

Before he could say anything, something else appeared there. A cauldron.

Alex recognized the cauldron as one of the ones that the mad immortal had given him so he could practice making pills with pill veins. He had stopped using those cauldrons after he had prepared Memory and had stored everything in his storage after that.

A small box popped out as well, one which included some type of ingredients. Then a pill, and then a formation plate.

One after another, items started popping out of his soul space.

Something else popped out that caught Alex's attention. It was a Saint rank Whip of crimson color that Alex hadn't seen in over 2 decades.

'My Whip,' he thought. He hadn't had much use for the whip anymore, but he still found it quite nostalgic to see something that he had thought he had lost forever.

Then, the white mask fell out. The Saint-ranked mask was not only something he had been missing for the past decade and a half, but it was also something that he had needed to improve his spiritual power.

Unfortunately, without the mask, he had fallen a lot behind in his spiritual strength. Thankfully, now that he had it, he could continue again.

A few more pills, ingredients, and other items popped out as well after that, but the rate at which they were coming out had slowed down to a point where it simply felt like nothing was coming out at all.

One last thing popped out and Alex shuddered as the spiritual sense from the senior reeled out from within him.

"Sigh, it's so massive that I can't believe it took me so much time to bring everything out," he said as he took a deep breath. "I still can't believe how vast your soul space is."

Alex took some deep breaths to calm the headache he got from the spiritual pain. It took him a few seconds to bring it down to a level where he could ignore it completely.

"I'm sure there are still a few things I missed because I couldn't reach for them, but I got out everything I could," the man said.

Alex nodded. "I'm still missing a few things. Some swords, the World Tree seed, another—" he paused when his eyes fell on something.

"Hmm?" he pulled the item next to him. It was the final item that had come out of his soul space, which he seemed to have missed.

"Oh, I still have this," he thought to himself when he saw it.

"What's that?" Scarlet asked, looking at his hand.

"It's a medallion," Alex said. "It gives me authority over a secret realm in the Western Continent. I actually forgot this thing even existed, to be honest."

"It's something important then?" the snake asked.

"Uhh... not really," Alex said. "I should have grown past the point where something like this could be useful to me. Although..."

He remembered something that he had nearly forgotten. "Now that I think about it, I still have some business in that secret realm," he said. "Thank you, senior, for getting this all out for me."

"It's alright. It's barely any work at all," he said as he looked around. "You do have quite a few alchemy ingredients, I must say. Is the Alchemy God's Knowledge helping you well?"

Alex was taken aback a bit. "Senior, you know that I have the Alchemy God's Knowledge?" he asked.

"Of course," the man said. "I knew that the person with the Sun God's body had taken the Alchemy God's Knowledge. It was the only skill I was certain no one would be able to use. Yet you somehow managed to take it, so I was surprised."

"Oh... was I not supposed to get it?" Alex asked.

"No, no. I just never expected someone to fulfill the requirements given how rare it is," the man said. "A person had to be born with all 7 spiritual roots for them to even hope to learn this technique."

"I see," Alex said. "Are 7 spiritual roots that rare in all the realms?"

"I would say they are as rare as Celestial-grade body constitutions," the man said.

"Then... was the Alchemy god born with 7 spiritual roots, just like me?" Alex asked.

"I do not know if he did or not," the senior said. "The Alchemy god your knowledge comes from died in the Eternal War a couple hundred thousand years ago, so not much information about his early days remains, I'm afraid."

"I see," Alex said.

'Was he a different one from the Alchemy god Godslayer said he killed?' he couldn't help but wonder.

"Sigh, I remember a time when I looked forward to meeting you just because you managed to learn that skill. Looking back at it, however, that reason gets pushed down to like 3rd on the list of reasons why I wanted to meet you after everything else."

"Oh, what are the other 2 reasons?" Alex asked.

"Well, the 2nd reason is because of your Celestial grade body that you managed to evolve after eating a Nine Yang Divine Fruit," the man said.

"And the main reason being?" Alex asked.

The man looked at him and smiled slightly. "No need to hurry. You'll find out in due time."

Alex waited for him to speak some more, but the man simply stayed quiet. The sudden silence in the group felt a bit awkward, so Alex started collecting the rest of his stuff that had fallen around him.

He took everything and put it inside his storage ring. After he was done, he turned to the senior. "Do I have to return this ring to you, senior?" he asked.

"You can if you want to," the man said. "But I was planning on letting you keep it until you can use your soul space properly."

"Thank you."

Chapter 1207 Go Back Home

Alex asked a few more questions regarding Soul Space while he looked through his own items to make sure they were alright.

Given how long everything had remained hidden in the darkness of his own soul space, he wondered if any of the items had gone bad.

Fortunately, aside from a few common and true rank ingredients, everything was fine.

The senior asked Alex some questions regarding how he managed to get everywhere around the world. While Pearl had given them an explanation of everything, it was still Alex that held most of the information regarding everything.

The senior was surprised to hear that he had consumed the Yin bead. It was apparently something the humans had taken from the Demons after winning the war, and due to the frigid nature of the bead had kept it contained in Pure Yin water, inside of another artifact.

It seemed that the outer artifact had broken while the teleportation, throwing the yin water and the bead into the Icy Hell region of the Western continent.

He was curious how Alex was able to survive at all, but after learning that the yang source of the Nine Yang Divine fruit was still inside of him, he finally understood.

"You got lucky," the man said. "Your body almost couldn't handle the energy inside the fruit. It could've turned nasty had you let it go for a long time."

"I feel lucky too," Alex said. He continued with his story about how he had to run away from the Western Continent and arrived in the Black Tortoise's domain. The Snake was more than happy to learn more about his brother, even though he had heard everything he needed to already.

Alex skimmed over his time in the Northern Continent, telling even less about what he had to experience in the Mad Immortal's grasp.

Then he spoke of his time in the Southern Realm, ending with how he became a king. Once he finished telling everything he thought was okay for him to tell, he stopped.

"I see," the man said. "I had hoped you would've stayed put in the city Hao Ya found you, but somehow the adventure has helped you a lot more than I could've imagined."

"Yes," Alex nodded.

"But you must be missing the Western Continent then," the man said. "You must be more than excited to go there."

"I am," Alex said. "I was hoping you would let me go with Sister Hao Ya."

"Hmm, sure. I have no problem with that," the man said. "I would actually appreciate the helping hand. I have to use the teleportation formation anyway, so the more people I can send with it, the better for me."

"Oh, then... can I go to the Northern Continent as well?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, sure," the man said. "It's in 2 days, so you have to be ready by then."

"2 days? So quick," Alex said.

"We have to be quick," the man said. "Some families need reuniting, so the faster the better."

"Ah, right. So, the Northern Continent is first, huh?" Alex said. "I suppose you're doing it by distance then? Meaning Eastern Continent is 2nd and Western Continent is the last one we will have to go to."

"No, we can't go to the Eastern Continent," Hao Ya said.

"Hm? Why?" Alex asked curiously.

"We can't access the Teleportation formation in the Eastern Continent at all," she said. "And I can't even get an audience with the damn Emperor. They keep rejecting me."

"Eastern Continent is a dense region. It will take a while before we can get to it," the senior said. "For now, we focus on the two that we can actually go to."

Alex nodded as a question formed in his head. "If you are working this hard to bring them all back, why did you send us all out to the world in the first place, senior?" he asked. "What was the reason you threw us out into the harsh cultivation world."

"Sigh, I knew this question was coming, but it doesn't make it any easier to answer," the man said. "Actually, the reason is... very simple, and actually very selfish too."

"Selfish?" Alex asked.

The man nodded. "The reason I did all this is that... I wanted to go back home," he said.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand," Alex said as he looked around to see if anyone else was as confused as him. Hao Ya and the Snake weren't looking anywhere but toward the ground, as if trying to look away from him.

Scarlet sighed as well, seemingly as if she had already learned what was happening.

"It is as I said," the man spoke again. "I wanted to go back home, back to the Sky God's realm, which was why I did what I did."

"How does sending us out into the world possibly help you with that?" Alex asked. "I can't wrap my head around this, senior."

"It doesn't work so quickly. It was something that I was prepared to wait at least a thousand years before it happened," the man said. "Before someone amongst you entered the Immortal realm."

"Immortality? That's what you were waiting for?" Alex asked. He tried to think of how one of them reaching Immortality would ever help them.

The senior answered it before Alex could realize the answer himself. "When you reach the Immortal realm, the world pushes you out of the realm when it can no longer hold you here. At that time, you can also take a few people along with you. Most people usually take their family with them if they want to," the senior said. "I intended for someone like that to take me with them when they ascended out of this realm."

Alex looked at the man with a stunned expression as he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You... You disrupted everyone's life... just so you can find one person who can take you home?" he asked.

"There's a little more to it, but that is the gist of it," the man said with a guilty expression.

"Why would you do that?" Alex asked. He started feeling agitated when he heard the actual reason behind this man's reason as to why everyone inside this small world had to go out into a world where it was kill or be killed. The reason why so many people died out there and had to suffer with a terrible body inside here.

"I... I wanted to go back. I can't spend my life here at all," the man said. "However, at the same time, I can't go back normally. With how many enemies I've made by stealing everything my master was keeping for the human race."

"If anyone knows I've returned, they'll first ask me to return what I stole from them. When I inevitably can't for many people, I will be killed in return, and I do not want to die," the man said.

Alex frowned. "How will going with an immortal help you there then?" he asked.

"It will help because people won't be looking out for Immortal ascendants to find me amongst their group. Even if they do, when an immortal ascends, they are randomly teleported to some weaker locations where they can thrive instead of being sent to a place with a lot of strong folks."

"That way, I will be able to sneak back into the Immortal realms without anyone finding me."

Chapter 1208 Guilt

A part of Alex kept telling him to try and not offend the senior, but the part that was controlling him right now couldn't help but get annoyed and angry at the reasoning behind the senior's action.

He could understand the motive behind his action. He had wanted to go back home, not be stuck in a world that was not his.

If Alex was in the same situation, he would definitely be desperate as well and look towards using similar means to reach his goal.

However, disrupting and tearing apart the lives and relationships of millions of mortals would never be the way he could ever choose. That was simply immoral and unethical.

"I still don't understand," he said. "What's wrong with taking the normal way back? Is it that difficult?"

"It is," the senior replied. "The act in itself isn't any difficult at all. I simply have to ask one of them to lend me their teleportation token so I could go back to a higher world."

"However, doing so would send me to a predesignated inter-realm teleportation formation, which would have people looking after it. If they find me there, I would be dead too," he said. "I had to use a method where no one could find me. I had to go along with a newly ascended Immortal."

Alex frowned even more. "If that's the case, why did you have to use everyone? You just needed a single person. Couldn't you have just found a single person to help you? You didn't need to destroy the lives of so many for your selfish intentions."

"I did," the man said. "I did start with one, long ago. However, that boy died just a few decades after he started on his cultivation journey."

"Hao Ya here is the second disciple I took in this place. I had thought of doing the same with her, but I was worried that she would die too. Even if she died, there would be so many others that could help me, but I didn't want to go through the same loss as I did with Jian'er."

"Besides, with her alone, I would have to start over if she died. As they say, I couldn't put all my eggs in one basket," the man said.

"Then why not find a few more to help you? You didn't have to go after everyone, right?" Alex asked.

"That was the difficult part," the man said. "I did think of that, but searching through so many humans would take me forever, especially since I wanted people with good body constitutions, spiritual roots, and talents."

"With tens of millions of you around, and with the lack of Qi in this place, searching through each of you was pretty much an impossible option. That was why... I decided to test everyone at once."

"I would have to spend give up on a lot of my remaining Divine spirit stones, but if I could get everyone out there somehow then I could test them all at once," the man said. "That was what I did by establishing the game. I sent everyone out there so I could see who was the one that could help me. As you said, I disrupted the lives of so many people, but that was the only way I could get what I needed."

"My original plan was to let everyone play for a few years where they would adjust to the world slowly. I did not expect many to just go ahead carelessly and lose their life because they really thought they were playing a game," the man said.

"You made our clones control us. We weren't even in control at all the entire time," Alex nearly screamed at the man.

"I know," the man said. "Since I couldn't bring anyone back after sending them out there, I needed a way to make them think they were still in the game. The only way I could think of doing so was to actually have someone here to control someone out there."

"I couldn't get real people to control others, so I had to make clones for them. It was also in some ways my atonement for what I knew is my wrongdoing. I hoped I could make up for the bad I had done by at least giving people a life to live in here," the man said.

"I was planning on letting the clone control the real bodies for a few years wherein they would either be bored with the game or leave. Then, I would let the real soul take the body back with all the experience the clone soul had gotten for it."

"That way, I could let someone live a normal life inside here, while also having them not be shocked about being out there."

"After a certain amount of time, I was going to reveal to them all what was happening, wherein I would give them the option to return back if they wished to," the man said. "However, all those plans went out the window when you ate the Nine Yang Divine fruit."

"The connections I was keeping established with everyone was using a person's soul connection as a medium so that the Qi wouldn't be disrupted by the intent in here. The moment your clone decided to eat the fruit out there, the Yang energy in that fruit flowed toward your clone."

"Your clone would've died out here had it only been your soul connection. However, since the massive formations I had set up for everything to work were stronger, it attracted the energy that was coming in, and ended up being burned by the Yang energy."

"I had to spend hours stopping the violent Yang energy and barely managed to save a few things. With my last ditch effort, I gave back control of every soul out there, back to their original bodies."

The man looked at Alex who was clearly trying to hide his anger. "Get angry, I won't blame you," he said. "I know what I did was wrong. I simply couldn't see any other way at the time. In fact, I still don't see how differently I could've done things, to be honest."

"If I had to do it all over, I would probably go the same route," the man said. "Maybe I would write more stories about cultivation so more people would know what to do. I only wrote a few and hoped people's imaginations would help with the rest."

"Maybe I would write a guide to help everyone through the world. Sigh, regretting is not going to be of any help now, is it?" the man asked.

"I'm trying to fix what I broke," the man said. "I'm trying to bring back everyone who has been lost outside for far too long and giving them their home back."

"It won't suddenly make everything better, but if I can help at least one person out there who I've screwed over, I could leave this realm feeling a little bit less guilty than I already am," the man said.

Alex listened to him speak and sighed. He was still feeling angry, but anger wasn't fix anything.

"While I can't forgive what you did, I can see that you are at least trying to make amends," Alex said. "Since I was part of the reason behind all of this, I will definitely help you fix it as much as possible."

Chapter 1209 Chambers

"Thank you," the senior said.

Alex nodded once and didn't speak after that.

The 5 of them remained silent for a while, with no one saying anything.

Alex and the senior simply didn't have anything to say after that, while the others didn't know what to say.

The silence was broken by Hao Ya. "Master, you need to prepare for the Northern Continent," she said.

"Oh, right," the man said and quickly stood up. He looked at Scarlet and Alex. "Do you two want to stick around? Or do you want to leave?"

"I'm going to stick around," Alex said. "I still haven't done everything I came here to do."

"What else do you have to— Oh, right," the man remembered. "Come, she's cultivating inside right now. You can meet her there."

Alex nodded and stood up as well. He walked away with the senior, going back to the mansion he had come out of. Hao Ya followed behind them as well, going into the mansion along with them.

Alex quickly understood where he was going. It was the separate space that he had felt when coming into the mansion.

As expected, he arrived in front of the two massive doors and the man stood in front of it. He was about to open the door, but stopped.

"Uhh… try not to touch anything in there, okay?" he asked.

"I won't," Alex said.

The man sighed a bit after hearing the lingering anger in Alex's voice and turned around to open the door. He pushed the door open, and Alex's eyes went wide when he sensed what was inside.

"Qi?" he couldn't help but ask.

"Come on in," the man said and walked in.

Alex quickly walked into the room and found out that it was filled with Qi. Not only that, the space aura was quite thick in this place.

"Is this a spatial pocket?" he asked.

"In a sense," the man said. "It's not a natural one. I created this place with various formations. It's no different from a natural spatial pocket, except for the fact that it does not have an edge to it.

"If anything, the walls are the edge of this space," the man said.

"How large is it?" Alex asked, sensing the vastness of space in here. He could check for himself, but he didn't feel that it was right to use his spiritual sense here.

"A few kilometers wide," the man said.

"That's big," Alex said softly. He closed his eyes and sensed everything that was around him.

"Why is there Qi in here? Shouldn't it be sent to the Qi barrier?" Alex asked. "Or is it because it's inside this space that it is not disappearing?"

"No, that's not it," the man said. "Even if there was a natural spatial pocket here, the Qi would still escape it because of how strong the Intent behind it is."

"Then?" Alex asked.

"That's exactly it. There is no such intent in this room," the man said.

Alex was slightly confused. "Why would there not be such intent here? Was it because this place was made afterward?" he asked.

"No, that would still have the intent flow through," the man said.

"Then?" Alex asked.

"The reason there is no Intent here is that I'm fighting back against it with my own intent," the man said.

"You can do that?" Alex was surprised. "But I thought the Intent came from someone very strong. Won't you get spiritually hurt if you try to fight the intent of someone so strong?"

"Normally, yes," the man said. "But there are 2 different things going on here which is allowing me to do this."

"First, the Intent behind the Qi wall itself is over 5 thousand years old. As with everything, Intent slowly whittles down with time as well, especially if the intent's originator is no longer around to back it."

"Secondly, I'm only stopping the intent from working in this very small room. While the Intent might be strong, I can handle it for just this small room," the man said. "You shouldn't try it though. You will most likely die if you try."

Alex nodded. He wasn't planning on doing so anyway. "So that's why there is Qi here, huh? And you can use the Qi to cultivate as well?" he asked.

"Not so much," the man said. "While there is Qi here, it's not very dense since its from a single spirit vein. I have multiple spirit veins here, but almost all of them are attached to the teleportation formation, as well as the many formations I was using as the system for the game."

Alex nodded when he heard that. This truly was a very unique room and he was glad he came here. He looked around the room, finally actively observing what was inside of here. He was hoping to see his clone's daughter immediately, but it seemed she wasn't close by.

He saw something next to him instead that was covered with some sort of dark cloth.

"What's that?" he asked. It wasn't just that either. There were many such large objects that were hidden with black clothes, all of which had similar shapes.

At a single glance, he could see thousands of such objects in his periphery.

"You want to see?" the man asked and walked over to it before pulling down the cloth that seemed to have been gathering dust for years.

Alex stepped back a bit as he heard something fall. A few pieces of glass fell to next his feet, clattering a bit. He looked at the glass and the back at the object in front of him that was uncovered.

It was a cylindrical glass chamber with metal plates covering its top and bottom, with tubes coming into the glass. The glass had mostly been shattered and it didn't look like the object had been in use for a long time.

Alex found it hard to tell exactly what he was looking at. Was it some kind of glass container?

Given that it was nearly 3 meters tall and a meter wide, he knew it was something important.

"What is this?" he asked.

"It is an Incubation Chamber," the man said.

"Incubation Chamber?" Alex asked. "What were you incuba—"

He realized something and turned quickly back toward the chamber. Now that he was looking at it again, it had the perfect size to fit a human in it.New n0vel chapters are published on

"This is where I made the clones," the man said.

Alex couldn't hide his awe at all as he looked at the incubation chamber where the clones were made. He quickly turned around and looked at the thousands of such chambers that were hidden beneath the dark clothes that were now covered in a layer of dust.

"Did every single clone that was created get made here?" he asked the man.

"Every single one," the man said.

"How?" Alex asked. "Did you have clones of every single human prepared before they even joined the game? How did you have the clones prepared for every single person that wanted to play the game?"

"Oh, that's simple," the man said. "I didn't. I didn't have any clones prepared. I made the clones concurrently as the people joined the game."

Chapter 1210 Unique Eyes

"How did you manage to do it so quickly?" Alex asked. "Can you grow a clone in a matter of seconds?"

"Growing a clone takes time, regardless of the quality of the clone you are making. However, it does take significantly less time if the quality is low and you're willing to skip out on a few of the organs a clone might have. For example, their spiritual roots."

"On average, it took me about a month to fully grow a person to their adult size in this incubation chamber," the man said. "That was of course in the chamber. In reality, it only took me on average 10 minutes to fully grow a human."

"Speeding up time in the chambers and slowing down time for everyone who had to go through the customization option before the game began, I was able to prepare clones of everyone with ample time," the man said. "Although, there was a point during the start where the number of people joining was so high that I simply couldn't do anything but say we needed time."

"I see," Alex said. "So that's how the clones came to be."

"Yes," the man said.

The man started walking away and Alex looked at the chamber one last time before walking behind him.

"So the chambers are useless now?" he asked.

"Uhh... it can still be used, but not in the same way I had prepared before. Honestly, it had taken me at least 5 decades to fully prepare everything before, so I don't want to do it all over again," the man said.

"How does it work exactly? Making clones I mean. What sort of resources do you use?" Alex asked.

"You take some blood from someone and use that with some techniques that help you turn it into an embryo. Ones that happens, they stay in the water in those chambers where nutrients are slowly fed through the tubes into the water. The formations on top and bottom of those chambers help with speeding up the absorption of the ingredients by the embryo."

"As for resources exactly, there isn't really any requirement per se. It's just that the better the organic resource you use, the better the clone ends up being," the man said. "I mostly used fruits, flowers, vegetables, any sort of degradable junk, even manure to be used as resources. If you really are planning on making a clone though, you need to use high-grade alchemy ingredients for sure."

"I don't," Alex said. "Making clones hurts your soul right? I don't want to give away more than I already have."

"That's not wrong," the man said as he nodded. "Fortunately, it's still during a time when your soul has plenty of chance to grow."

"I hope so," Alex said.

They walked next to a massive stone platform that could only be the Intercontinental Teleportation formation.

"So it's in here, huh?" Alex said. "It's a single formation for all continents?"

"Yeah," the man said. "You can only use it one at a time."

"How did you manage to teleport everyone out of here?" Alex asked. "When you needed to send them out there to play the game."

"Uhh, I would wait for people to gather up and would send them to the other continents randomly," the man said. "I would have more than a hundred coming in every few minutes, so I would group those people up and send them to wherever I could."

"Western continent just happened to be one you didn't really want to choose, huh?" Alex asked.

"I mean, it's far away. It's near twice the distance away in comparison to the Eastern continent which is already the second farthest continent from here. I only sent people there when I had a particularly large group prior that I had sent to the other continents."

"I didn't want to overcrowd those other continents, so I would choose to send the rest of the Western Continent," he said. "If I could choose to not have to send people to the Western continent, I would, but I really needed to send everyone, everywhere. That was the only way to be certain that I tried my best."

Alex shook his head. "When will we be going to the Western continent?" he asked. "In 2 weeks?"

"A few days after you return from the Northern Continent," the man said. "Why?"

"How do you plan on teleporting those people back here?" Alex asked. "As far as I know, the Western Continent does not have an Intercontinental Teleportation formation."

"Oh, don't worry about it. It does have one," the man said.

Alex gave a surprised look. "It does? But I'm very sure that the Teleportation formation was destroyed and looted during the invasion there. How can there be one?" he asked.

"There is," the man said. "As I said, don't worry about it."

The man started walking away, and Alex followed him.

Alex wasn't really worried, so much as he was confused. Were the reports from the 10 elders about the details of the invasion exaggerated? That shouldn't have been the case.

As Alex wondered what was going on, he saw the senior stop walking and stopped himself. That was when he noticed that he had arrived in front of a small platform, and on that platform was a girl.

The girl was currently cultivating. She sat in a lotus formation, wearing a green and white robe, with her hair in a ponytail.

Alex could see some semblance of Emily's features on the girl's face. He was sure others would see his features in it as well.

The girl breathed in and out slowly, seemingly unaware of the people that had arrived next to her.

"Ronron," the senior spoke. "I know you know we're here."

"Master, I'm cultivating. Please don't disturb me," the girl said, without opening her eyes.

"Ronron, you have a visitor," the senior said.

"Oh," the girl said. "Who?"

She finally opened her eyes to look at who had arrived, and as she did, Alex saw her eyes.

Such unique eyes.

Her right eye glowed with a bright green iris, while her left eye glowed with a pale silver iris. And they both stared right at him.

The girl's eyes brightened to be nearly twice as big when she saw Alex. Even if she had never met him before, she had seen her father's pictures and knew what he looked like.

"P-papa?" she called with a surprised voice. "How are you young again?"

"Hello, Ronron," Alex spoke. "It's nice to finally meet you."

"Huh?" the girl was confused and looked at the senior. "Is that... not my father?"

"He is your father," the man said. "Just the one you've never met before. Remember what I told you about your father before?"

The girl nodded for a moment before shock filled her face as she truly remembered what he had told her. She turned around toward Alex, who was still smiling at her.

She gulped once before speaking, "H-hello, father," she said.

Alex shook his head. "You don't have to call me father if you don't want to," he said quickly.

"But I have to," the girl said as she snuck a glance toward the senior next to her. "After all, you are my biological father."

Chapter 1211 Surrogate

The girl acted a little awkward when meeting Alex for the first time. She understood that he was different from her father, so the experience was very unique and not so pleasant for her.

Especially because she understood the importance of his existence. After all, biologically speaking, she knew that it was him who was her real father.

Alex was confused about that aspect too. His clone had told him the same thing and now the young girl in front of him was telling him the same thing as well.

"Can you explain to me why she and my clone think that I am her biological father?" Alex asked using his spiritual sense.

The man heard it and gave a reply with his spiritual sense as well.

"Back when I first made clones, there was one thing I was worried about more than anything else. It was the fact that sending genuinely talented folks out into the world full of not-so-talented ones, I would soon cause the uniqueness of these humans to dissipate."

"Just like it happened with everyone in this realm, over time the humans would get together with the not-so-talented folks and pass down children who will come out being overall weaker than everyone."

"I tried very hard to overcome this problem for a while, and that was when I came up with the idea," the man said. "Since I could not affect who got together with who on the outside, I would have to use the ones that were still here."

"Meaning, I used the clones to give birth to children that would belong to the original bodies," the man said.

Alex's eyes widened. "Is that sort of thing even possible?" he asked.

"It's not impossible," the man said. "But it's very hard to get right. Also, I couldn't do it with just anyone either. I had to focus on those that were truly worth having their lineage pass down."

"That came out to be about 5% of the total population. So, for them, I set up a system where part of the clone's reproductive system would actually be from the real person."

"For men, I had a small part of their organ create the seeds of the Original body that would be stored up over time, which would only be released when it understood the person's intention to have a child."

"As for the female, it was a little harder, but I managed to do something similar somehow by simply storing their eggs," the man said.

"So... to sum it all up, you ended up making our clones surrogate parents for our children, is that right?" Alex asked. "Her mother was in fact a surrogate mother to her real mother who is now dead."

"Uhh... yes, that's basically it," the man said. "Only for the first children though. Not all of them."

Alex sighed after their spiritual talk was over and turned to look at the girl. "Come here, Maron, let me take a look at you," he said.

The girl quickly nodded and walked up to Alex.

Alex looked at her closely and smiled. "I would've tried to come here sooner if I knew about you, sorry," he said.

"N-no, father. It's alright," the girl said. "It was master's fault anyway for you not knowing about me at all."

Alex nodded. "At least, I got to meet you now," he said. "I can't believe I have a daughter, one that's as pretty as you even," he said.

"Hehe," Maron gave a small laugh.

"Can I call you Ronron too?" Alex asked.

"Yes, please call me that, father," she quickly said.

The awkwardness was still there, the more she talked the less it became. Alex looked at her eyes closely once again and was surprised by how unique they were.

"Why are your eyes so different? Are you practicing some sort of eye technique?" he asked.

"No, I'm not," the girl shook her head. "These are just my normal eyes that I was born with."

"Green and Silver? I have rarely ever seen green eyes, let alone silver. I don't have either of those colors, and I don't believe your mother has it either, so how do you have it?"

"That..." the girl glanced at her master, seemingly asking for some help.

"You can tell him. He's your father, you can do whatever you think is right," the man said.

The girl nodded and looked back at Alex. "My eyes are of this color because of the body I was born with, or at least that's what master says," she said.

Alex got curious when he heard that. "And... what body is that?" he asked.

The girl looked at the man one last time and answered, "The Sky God's physique," she said.

It took Alex a moment to realize what she had said and understand its importance. Even then, he wasn't sure he truly understood the importance of those words.

"The Sky God's physique?" Alex looked at the senior. "Is this... the same Sky God as the one that is your master?"

"The very same," the man said. "Very few people in the many realms are born with this sort of physique, and your daughter happens to be one of them. You could not believe my surprise when I saw the omen that led to her birth. For a moment I had believed my master had found me."

"Then it must be a very good body," Alex said. "What grade is it?"

"It's a Divine grade body," the man said. "It could actually be a Celestial grade body, but the disadvantages of the body pull it back a grade."

"Disadvantages? What sort?" Alex asked worriedly.

"First of all, because of her physique, she could never form spiritual roots of the other elements. Meaning, she only has a Wood spiritual root. She doesn't even have meridians for neutral Qi. Everything Qi in her body is wood Qi."

"Secondly, because all of her meridians and Qi have a wood affinity, she cannot cultivate normally and can only do so when using formations or natural treasures with a lot of wood affinity."

"With just these two problems, any person with a Sky God's physique very quickly lags behind their peers when it comes to cultivation, and most of the time dies before they even reach the Immortal realm," the man said.

"I see," Alex said. That was certainly a problem, but he wasn't worried. Not only was there a senior —who was definitely in the Divine realm-discipling her, he was there too. He would do what was needed to get his daughter the resources she needed.

"I'm assuming that the body must also have a lot of good to make it to the Divine realm despite all the flaws," Alex said.

"It does," the man said. "Look at her eyes again. She had a green right eye, but she also has a silver left eye. Do you know what that means?"

"Silver... space?" Alex asked. "You mentioned your master having prowess in Space."

"Yes," the man said excitedly. "Anyone born with the Sky God's physique has a natural affinity to Space and can easily sense and learn from its mysteries. That is one of the reasons why I always keep her in this place where I have the space expanded."

"I am sure she will learn the Space dao very soon."

Chapter 1212 Unique Meridians

"It's not just Space either," the senior continued. "Because of her Wood Spiritual root, she will also be a master of the Wood daos, especially the ones related to Wind."

"I see," Alex said. "That's the Sky God's physique huh?"

"Kid, I thought you would be the only one that would surprise me, but now even your own kid is surprising me. How many gods do you need in your family? Are you trying to anger me so much that I die?" Godslayer asked, although his voice held not much anger in it at all.

Alex nearly chuckled out loud hearing the defeated voice of Godslayer but quickly held it in. He looked at his daughter once again and sensed her cultivation base.

Based on how slowly she should have been cultivating, he was surprised that she had managed to even enter the True realms. Although, she was only a True Disciple realm cultivator.

"So she will soon be a master of space, right?" Alex asked. "Her grandaunt has a body that can help her master Time dao, and now she can master space."

"And I have the Sun God's body, and I now know my cousin has a Celestial grade body too. Do you know what's happening with our family? Why we are born with such bodies?" Alex asked.

"I'm afraid I do not know," the man said. "I have been quite curious about your family after learning that the girl with the only Celestial body at the time was your cousin from your father's side too. I tried to look into your past after I took her in, but the details are not there anymore."

"Whatever history you have, it's all been erased to time, and unfortunately, I cannot do anything about it," the man said.

Alex felt slightly disappointed not getting an answer about that. "Ah, right. Everyone born on my father's side of the family has a very good body constitution, so I'm wondering if my father does too," he said. "However, because of how his cultivation has been, I'm worried that might not be the case."

"Hmm? What do you mean? What's going on with his cultivation?" the senior asked.

"It's been nearly a decade since he started cultivating, and he has yet to enter the True realms," Alex said. "That's extremely slow for someone in our family, isn't it?"

"Hmm, are you sure he's cultivating properly? With proper cultivation techniques, using formations and such?" the man asked.

"I make him six-veined cultivation pills every time he has to cultivate. I'm sure resource is not the problem here, senior," he said.

"You can make six-veined pills?" the man asked with a surprised look.

"Can we talk about my father please?" Alex asked.

"Oh yeah, sure," the man said. "Uhh... if that pill isn't helping him then... uhh... maybe he doesn't have the talent like everyone else? Maybe the bodies and talents skipped a generation in his case."

"That shouldn't be the case," Alex said. "While his Qi cultivation is quite bad, he actually has amazing body cultivation."

"Without even trying to body cultivate, he has managed to reach the Saint Soul realm with his body alone," Alex said.

The senior suddenly got serious when he heard that. "What? His body cultivation is that high without working for it?" he couldn't help but ask.

"Yes, without any resources other than phoenix fire too," Alex said.

"Hmm..." the man fell into thought for a bit.

Maron looked around curiously. "What's going on? Are you talking about my grandfather? I have a grandfather?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex told her. "He wanted to come with me today, but I stopped him. You can meet him later after we go back."

"Your father," the man asked. "Is there anything wrong with his body?"

"Wrong?" Alex got a little scared and started to think. "Uhh, no. Nothing's wrong as far as I can tell."

"Are you sure?" the man asked. "Because the only possibility for his case to exist is if he has unique meridians."

"Unique meridians?" Alex got worried. "Unique how? Is that bad?"

"It's not bad... exactly," the man said. "Unique Meridians simply mean that the meridians work in a way that is very unique to the person and that person alone. While everyone has different meridians, they usually function in a similar manner."

"However, for someone with unique meridians, the way they work cannot be replicated by anyone else. The problem with Unique meridians is that there are no techniques that are meant for them. Any and every technique, even the most basic ones do not work for them and they have to struggle to have it work even just a little bit."

"As such, it's very bad for cultivation as it will take the person at least 10 times or even more effort and time to cultivate with Qi compared to a normal person."

"That is a problem someone with Unique meridians has to go through. However, as if to compensate for this restriction, the heaven allows their body to strengthen faster, nearly as fast as they are slow with Qi cultivation."

"It is yet unsure if Unique meridians can be considered a type of body constitution, but it is no different from one. If I'm not wrong about it, then your father happens to be one of the very few unlucky folks with a set of unique meridians."

Alex couldn't help but think back to when he helped his father clear his toxins. He tried to remember if his meridians at that time were so vastly different than normal people. Unfortunately, he hadn't paid that much attention to the meridians at the time, so he wasn't sure.

"I will have to check his meridians once we go back to the house," Alex said. "I will check if his meridians are indeed unique or not."

"I'm sure it is, based on just the fact that he easily body cultivates," the senior said.

"I hope so too," Alex said.

The man looked around and nodded. "Alright, I'm going to go fix up the teleportation formation, have it work for the Northern Continent. What do you plan on doing?" he asked.

"I... I am probably going home for now. Ronron, you should come with me too. Your grandfather is very excited to meet you," Alex said.

"Oh! Master, can I go?" Maron asked the senior.

"Sure, you can go. I brought you back here to keep you safe from the others, but with your father around, I don't think that will be necessary," the senior said.

"Yes!" the girl said excitedly. "Father, let's go."

Alex smiled and looked back at the senior. "I will come back in 3 days then," he said.

"I will have Hao Ya here message you the time when you'll be leaving. Bring along as many people that will want to leave as you can. The more you bring, the less I will feel the resources are being wasted," the senior said.

"I will see who I can bring along," Alex said and bowed toward the senior one last time before turning around.

He looked at his daughter next to him who was very excited and couldn't help but pat her on her head.

"Let's go."

Chapter 1213 Ready To Leave

Alex walked out of the large room with Maron and Hao Ya and went over to the backyard to find Scarlet.

She was still talking with the Snake senior in their absence.

"Scarlet," Alex called out. "Look who it is."

Scarlet turned around to see Maron standing next to Alex, and even without the introduction, she could see the resemblance.

"Ah, this must be the daughter everyone was talking about," Scarlet said and walked close up close to them.

Maron's eyes went wide seeing the glowing bird that almost looked like it was in eternal flames. She gulped a bit and bowed slowly.

"A phoenix," she said slowly under her breath. She quickly got a hold of herself and bowed toward the bird. "It's nice to meet you, senior."

"It's nice to meet you, child," Scarlet said. "I'm bonded with your father, so you can call me Aunt Scarlet if you like."

"B-bonded?" the girl was surprised to hear that. She looked towards Alex with a shocked expression, unbelieving that her biological father had actually bonded with the Phoenix.

"What? Do you not want to call me aunt?" Scarlet asked. "I thought you would like it."

"No, no, I like it," Maron said quickly. "You have a pretty name, aunt Scarlet."

"Is that so?" Scarlet asked. "Your father gave it to me as well. I've been using it since I like it so much."

"Child, don't be so nervous," the snake senior spoke. "She is not a scary person at all. You can be yourself around her."

"Yes, senior Xuan," Maron said.

"We're going to go home now," Alex told Scarlet. "What do you want to do? Do you want to stay here with senior Xuan or would you like to come with us? You can meet Pearl too."

"Hmm, I would love to come definitely," Scarlet said and turned around. "What about you, senior? Have you gone around this land to see how it is?"

"Actually... I haven't really," the snake said. "I find myself alone most of the time with no one willing to leave at all."

"The senior has to stay here to keep the Intent in his secret room empowered almost all the time. Hao Ya is mostly outside, working to fix the mistakes and help her master."

"As for Ronron here, she ends up spending all the time with her master so she can cultivate," the snake said. "As such, I've never had anyone who could take me around. However, it feels like this is the perfect time for me to do so, so if you are willing, I would like to come with your young man."

Alex gave a wide smile. "It would be my pleasure, senior," he said. "What about your Sister Hao, do you want to come with us for a few days?"

Hao Ya shook her head. "Maybe next time," she said. "For now, I need to help master with whatever he may need."

"I see, that's a shame," Alex said. "Next time then, we'll leave for now."

Hao Ya nodded and led the four to the gates of the mansion. Alex walked outside of the gates where the illusory formation was and could once again see the dense trees that apparently made the entirety of the land inside.

"Uhh, can you fly, senior?" Alex asked the Snake. "I'm not sure if you have Immortal Qi or not."

"Fly?" Ronron was the one that answered instead of the snake. "Why would we fly, father? Do you know how hard it is to get Qi in this place?"

"Oh, right," Alex said. "Hmm, I can take all of you with me then. Scarlet, you can fly on your own, I will carry Ronron and senior with me."

Scarlet shook her head. "I don't feel like flying," she said as her body suddenly shrunk to a size where she was no different from a regular bird. She landed on Alex's shoulder and said, "you can take me with you too now."

Alex felt a little irritated. "Why are you so lazy nowadays? You won't even look after your place most of the time," he said.

"Of course," Scarlet said. "That's what you are here for, so I don't have to do anything."

Alex wanted to retort, but Maron quickly spoke. "Father, let's not fly. It's a waste of resources anyway," she said.

"Then how do we go back?" Alex asked.

"How else?" Maron asked. "We use the trains of course."

"Oh," Alex said. "Do you have money?"

Ronron quickly reached into her storage bag and pulled out a small black card. "I have all the money we need right here," she said as she showed off her credit card.

Unfortunately for her, none of the people here truly knew the significance of the black credit card she held in her hands.

"Oh, that's good then," Alex said. "Let's go take the trains then. Is it far?"

Ronron pouted a little as she put her card back into her pocket. "No, it's just around the corner," she said. "Let me show you the way."

She walked in front with the two men and a bird following her. Alex looked around the location to see how changed the modern world was, and the snake looked around to see just how different everything was all together.

The snake was very surprised by all the different architecture. He had been here for over 5 thousand years, and yet this was the first time he was seeing it all in person.

Scarlet was the same as the Snake as well, only she hadn't been here for long enough to develop a burning curiosity like him.

They all arrived at the train station shortly after, and Maron bought 3 separate tickets to Mapleleaf station. Once she bought the ticket, they all went over to wait for the train to arrive.

A few people sent glances toward their group because of how different their clothes were, but with everything happening the past 2 days, they didn't even care much at all

The train arrived not even a minute later and Scarlet could only stare at it. "What is that thing?" she asked.

"It's called a train," Alex explained. "It runs on electricity and is very fast. This one, in particular, is actually one of the fastest things in here."

"Oh," Scarlet said.

"I've wanted to get into these train things for a long time," the snake said.

Alex nodded. "I've only been on a train once before and I don't remember how that went at all," he said.

"Huh? You've only been on a train once, father?" Ronron asked with a surprised look. "That can't be right."

"It is," Alex said. "Do you not know that I was homeschooled? I only used a train when I had to go to the university when I turned 18."

"Wow," Ronron spoke. "I knew you had lived a sheltered life, but that is something of its own."

"Alright, enough talking," Alex said. "If we don't board it quickly, it will leave."

Ronron nodded and let the group into the train before quickly finding their seats. They sat on two seats facing each other with the Snake sitting on one side alone, and Ronron sitting next to her father on the other side who had Scarlet on his shoulders.

After that, they just waited for the train to start moving again.

Chapter 1214 The Train Ride

The train started moving just a minute later and soon they were rushing through the midday heat.

Alex looked outside at the passing fields and houses and was very surprised. "So slow, I remember it being faster for some reason," he said softly.

"This is slow, father?" Ronron asked. "Are you used to traveling faster than this?"

"Yes, my boat can travel faster than this," Alex said. "If only controlling the boat wasn't an issue here, we could've taken that too."

"It is very slow," Scarlet said. "Given all your talk, I was expecting a speed on part with some Immortal rank flying boats."

"I haven't moved much for over 5 thousand years, so this is plenty of speed for me," the snake said.

Ronron looked at the three of them with obvious surprise and curiosity. "Father, is the outside world that much better than in here?" she asked.

"Better? Umm... I wouldn't exactly say better. They are a bit too different to judge which one is better than the other, but the outside world is large, so you will end up seeing many different things that you might end up liking a lot more than this."

"there may even be worlds just like this one. Who knows?" Alex said.

"Wow, Master rarely tells me anything about the outer world. Do you think I will get to see it someday?" Ronron asked.

"I don't see why not?" Alex said. "Are you curious about the outer world?"

"Yes, absolutely," Ronron nodded.

"Hmm, then I'll see if I can take you out there somehow. Maybe I can talk the senior into letting you go to the Northern Continent, or maybe the Western continent if not that," Alex said.

"Will you do that for me father?" Ronron asked excitedly. "Thank you." She hugged him excitedly from the side, making him feel a type of happiness he never knew existed.

'Is this what it's like to be a father?' he wondered.

A woman came by their section of the train collecting tickets. She came over to their seats and Ronron quickly pulled out 3 tickets.

"Oh, are you guys from the outside as well?" the woman asked politely.

"These two are, not me," Ronron said.

"I see," the woman said. "Welcome back. I hope you two have fun here." She spoke politely, so the others nodded back at her.

The woman was about to leave after checking the tickets when she noticed Scarlet on Alex's shoulders by the window.

"Ah, would you like some tissues to clean up after your parrot, sir? Just in case," the girl asked.

"Clean up?" Alex was taken aback for a moment and looked at Scarlet. "That won't be necessary at all."

"Yeah, that won't be necessary," Scarlet quickly replied too. She felt offended to be treated like a regular pet.

"Oh wow, your parrot speaks so clearly. You must have trained it a lot, sir," the woman said. "Take care then."

Before anyone could say anything, the woman moved on to check more of the tickets, leaving Scarlet stunned for a few seconds.

The Snake openly laughed while Alex giggled a bit under his breath too. Ronron wasn't sure if she was supposed to laugh or not at all. Instead, she felt scared that the Phoenix would start attacking people out of anger.

"That little..."

"Leave her be," Alex said. "Besides, you deserve it."

"What? Why do I deserve to be treated like an everyday pet?" Scarlet asked angrily.

"Who told you to become small like this and ride on my shoulder? We could've been flying back home right now, and it was because of you that we had to take the train," Alex said.

Scarlet wanted to speak back, but Ronron quickly spoke up. "Please calm your anger, aunt Scarlet. That poor woman doesn't know about you so she got mistaken,' she said. "Please leave her be."

Scarlet sighed and looked the other way to watch the scenery pass by outside.

The others also looked out the window to see the world that could only exist in a place like this. Alex and the rest asked Ronron about a few different things about the world to understand it even more.

About halfway through the ride, Ronron took out a smartphone from her storage bag and called back home to ask her father to come to pick them up.

"Oh, he'll come to pick us up?" Alex asked.

"Yes, Papa will be leaving soon," Ronron said. "He should be by the station by the time we get there."

"Can't we just take a cab?" Alex asked. "Why give him trouble?"

"It's no trouble," Ronron said. "Papa likes going on a ride on his little truck once in a while anyway."

"Oh, that's good then," Alex said.

Ronron nodded and looked around once more at everyone that was present. A part of her still found it hard to believe that she had finally met her real father that she had been hearing about for so long. Another part of her found it hard to believe that that father was bonded with one of the strongest beings in the world.

That was not counting her uncle Pearl who also had the possibility of reaching the same status.

"Wait, aunt Scarlet," she called out. "Your family rules the Southern Continent, right?"

Scarlet turned around. "Yes," she said. "Why?"

"Is the ruler someone close to you? Are they your direct family?" she asked.

Alex turned to look at Ronron weirdly and realized that she had made the same mistake he had met when he first met Scarlet.

"She is not related to the ruler of the Southern continent," Alex quickly explained.

"Oh," Ronron said. "I see. Well, you don't always have to be related, I guess."

"No, no," Alex said quickly. "She's not related, because she is the ruler of the Southern Continent."

"I see, that's not bad eith—" Ronron paused as the words that she heard seemed to mean something other than what she had been hoping for.

"I'm sorry, what?" she asked.

Alex smiled at the reaction.

The snake gave a weird look as well. "Did you not realize?" he asked. "Scarlet is a ruler too, just like me."

"Bu-but she's not an Immortal. How?" Ronron asked.

"She died and was reborn about 25 years ago. In fact, she is younger than you if we are going for technicality," Alex said.

"Wow," Ronron couldn't help but say. "So you are bonded with the ruler of the Southern Continent, father. That's amazing."

"It's... something. It would be amazing if I didn't have so much responsibility out of nowhere because someone got too lazy to rule their own land by themselves," Alex said.

"Hey! I needed time to fix my cultivation base, okay? And I made you a king, so what? You've been enjoying it quite a lot, haven't you? You wouldn't have gotten any of that if I hadn't done it," Scarlet said.

Ronron's eyes went wide once more when she heard the two of them. "Wait, what does she mean by making you a king?" she asked.

"Exactly what it sounds like," Alex said. "I'm the King of the Southern Continent. Oh, since you're my daughter, you're now the princess of the Southern Continent too. How does that sound?"

"I'm... a princess?"

Maron's world seemed to break with every conversation she was having with this new father of hers. Not only was he bonded with the ruler, but he was also a ruler himself.

And now she was a princess out of nowhere?

She slumped back in her seat and had to take some time to process everything. The rest of them let her take the time she needed.

She got over her shock a few minutes later and went back to asking many questions about almost everything she was curious about her father and Scarlet, as well as the outside world.

The train finally stopped some time later and they walked out of the station. The older Alex was waiting for them outside with a small truck that he had come on.

The older Alex was surprised to see someone other than the two he had been expecting. He had come for his daughter and the real Alex, but he hadn't expected to see a new man with them.

Judging from how he was dressed, the man definitely wasn't normal, but he couldn't tell who it was at all.

Ronron ran up to him and hugged him.

"Who... is he?" he asked as Ronron got off him.

"Papa, this is the snake senior that lives in my master's pond. He's the snake half of the ruler of the Northern Continent," Ronron quickly explained.

"Ah!" the older Alex realized. "It's nice to finally meet you, senior."

"I see," the snake looked at the older Alex and back at the real one. "Your clone is a lot older than I expected him to be honest, given how young you are."

"Mortals here can't cultivate, so it's understandable," Alex said.

"You should make them some pills to improve their longevity," the snake said. "Although, I don't know how long a mortal's age can be improved with just longevity pills."

"A thousand years should be possible, maybe even more depending on the ingredients. We'll see," Alex said.

The snake turned around to the older Alex and nodded. "Greetings, you've raised a wonderful child."

"Ah, uh... yes. Thank you, senior," the older Alex quickly replied.

"Also, this is aunt Scarlet. She's a Vermilion bird and is actually bonded with father," Ronron quickly said. "Believe it or not, she is the ruler of the Southern Continent, and thus father is also the King of the Southern Continent."

Chapter 1215 Back Home

The older Alex looked at his daughter and smiled a bit. "I know child, we talked about it all yesterday," he said.

He then turned to Scarlet and bowed. "Greetings, senior Scarlet. I'm the clone of the Alex you are bonded with."

"I had heard about you," the little bird on Alex's shoulders spoke. "Let us go to your home instead of talking here in the open."

"Ah, yes. We should..." the older Alex turned around to look at his truck which could only hold 3 people at the front. One of them would have to sit on the back.

"Umm..."

Alex looked at what the problem was and realized the situation. "Don't mind me. I can sit anywhere," he said and walked up to the truck before jumping on its roof, instead of the open back. "Let senior Luhei sit with Ronron inside. Scarlet can stay with me."

"What? I want to stay inside too," Scarlet said.

"Okay, go with Ronron then," Alex said.

Scarlet immediately flew and went up to Ronron and sat by her shoulder. Ronron was a little surprised and scared for a moment as she was now holding the ruler of a continent on her shoulder.

"You guys get in, we can leave," Alex said.

"Right, please come in, senior," the older Alex said before quickly taking them to the truck.

Ronron walked behind them and stopped for a moment. "Papa, are you alright? You look different today," she said.

"Different? Different how?" the older Alex asked.

"Umm, more active, I guess. You aren't moving as you used to," she said.

"Oh, that, Hahaha," the older Alex laughed. "He gave us a healing pill, and it healed everything that was wrong with our body, from my bones to my joints to my teeth. I feel young again now."

"Is that so?" she asked. "Ah right! I forgot father was an alchemist."

"Right, right," the older Alex said. "I'm starting the truck now, be careful up there."

"Don't worry about him," Scarlet said. "He could get hit by the train we came in and he wouldn't even have a scratch on him."

"Of course," the older Alex said. He started the truck and started driving.

Coming here yesterday, Alex had flown in the sky, barely seeing anything that was down here. However, now that he was looking from a normal angle, he could see how much different the city had become.

He remembered coming here once in a while with his father on his deliveries, and none of the houses from back then really existed anymore.

Almost everything seemed to have something added to it or was completely rebuilt. The group talked inside the truck, but Alex found himself lost in his own thoughts up above.

He didn't even realize when they had reached the farm at all. He only got out of his thoughts when the truck stopped and he lurched forward.

He jumped and landed in front of the truck and waited for everyone to come out. Once they were all out, he went to the house with them.

Before they could even enter, Graham came running out the front door with a massive smile on his face. "Where's my granddaughter? Where is she?" he asked.

Whisker, who was staying on his shoulder, also squeaked a bit, asking to see his brother's daughter.

Ronron was surprised to see that Graham barely looked like a middle-aged man. Not old enough to be someone that she would consider a grandfather.

"Ronron, greet your grandfather," the older Alex said softly.

Ronron quickly walked forward and bowed deeply. "Hello, grandfather. It's nice to meet you," she said.

She looked up and was surprised to see that Graham was full of tears.

"G-grandfather, are you okay?" she asked.

"Hah," Graham quickly wiped away his tears. "Stop being so stiff and call me Grandpa or something. Come, give me a hug first."

Whisker squeaked too.

Ronron quickly walked up and embraced her grandfather. Graham hugged her while wiping his tears at the same time. "Look at you, you're so beautiful. You remind me of grandma when she was young. She was so beautiful too."

"She still is, father," Alex said from the front.

"Of-of course," Graham quickly said. "But Ronron here is definitely prettier."

"Hehe, thank you grandfa-Grandpa," she said with a wide smile.

"Oh dear, look. Whisker is excited to meet you too," Graham said as he took Whisker from his shoulders. "Say hello, whisker."

Ronron looked at the little mouse with a curious look, expecting nothing from it. However, when she heard the word "hello" sound in her head, she was taken aback.

"Wh-what? That mouse talked," she said quickly.

"Of course, I can talk," Whisker said. "Also, don't call me a mouse. You should call me Uncle Whisker."

He had heard from Pearl that Ronron called him uncle Pearl, so he had been waiting to ask that of her.

"Un-Uncle Whisker," Ronron said, still with a surprised look on her face. "How are you speaking in my head? Are you a Saint beast?"

"No, your father gave me a lily to unlock my spiritual sea," Whisker said. "Do you want one? I will ask one from him."

"My father?" Ronron turned around to look at Alex. "Who is this senior?"

"That's Whisker, another one of my bonded beasts," Alex explained.

"Another one?" Ronron was surprised. "How many do you have?"

"That's the last one," Alex said.

"Is he... like someone belonging to one of the heavenly beasts too? Like aunt Scarlet or Uncle Pearl?" she asked.

"Hmm? No, no, Whisker is nothing like that. He's a Seeking Mouse that is able to cultivate, that's all," Alex said. Of course, there was more to him than that, but he didn't want to go into details right now.

"Father, you should meet senior Luhei here," Alex said as he introduced his father to the snake.

The group went through a round of introduction before everyone knew who each other was.

Ronron went into the house to meet her mother who was busy in the kitchen and started helping her there.

Pearl walked up to Alex and looked at Scarlet who was on his shoulders.

"Is this the cat you were talking about so much?" Scarlet asked. "He's kinda cute."

"Pearl, meet Scarlet. She's a phoenix and the ruler of the Southern Continent," Alex introduced her.

"Greetings, senior," Pearl said.

"Hmm, what's wrong with you? Why are you so weak?" she asked.

"He had to give up the power in his bloodline and spiritual root to keep himself alive while in the Qi barrier, so he is rather weak now," Alex explained.

"I see," Scarlet said. "That means he lost a lot of potentials then. He's no different from a normal beast now that he doesn't have the White Tiger's blood in him."

Alex sighed when he heard that. "I'm hoping the ritual or whatever the White Tigers have that helps evolve someone with their bloodline into a White Tiger will be able to restore his potential," he said.

"Hmm, I'm not sure if it can, if what you said is true," Scarlet said, giving Alex a scare. "You have to be careful though, such evolution rituals usually end up killing the beast inside, so only do it when you are absolutely sure you want it."

Chapter 1216 Spending Some Time

Alex stopped worrying about Pearl right this moment. He had plenty of time to worry about when there weren't so many people around him.

Instead, he enjoyed the time he had around him.

Scarlet and senior Luhei went around the farm to check it out, while Alex and Graham stayed behind talking with Ronron to get to know her better.

Time passed and night fell. Once it was night, the two old mortals went to sleep, while the rest were fine without it.

They all sat around talking to each other until the morning came. Once it was morning, the older couple woke up and everyone went to help with the farm.

After a while, Ronron decided to take everyone to see some new movie that was popular right now. She drove them to the city where they spent their time at the movies.

They went around the city before returning back home after a wonderful time. The next day passed in a similar way as well.

Except, instead of returning home at night, Ronron had a different idea.

"Father, I hear there is a festival going around outside of the city, do you want to go see it?" she asked.

"Festival?" Alex mused to himself. "Sure, do you have spare money?"

"I told you, I have the card," she said.

"Will the card work in a festival?" Alex asked.

"They have the ticket system now, so yes a card works, let's go," she said and got everyone to get on the truck immediately.

There were way too many people to fit in the truck, so people had to sit in the back too.

While Whisker could stay wherever he wanted to, Graham and Pearl weren't capable of such a thing at all. As such, they had to choose who got to sit where.

The Snake let Graham sit in the front with his Granddaughter, while the rest of them stayed in the back.

Scarlet wasn't very picky this time around, so she too stayed behind as well.

Pearl took up most of the space, however. Due to his lack of ability to change his size freely due to the lack of Qi, he could only stay as a large cat.

Once everyone was ready, Ronron started driving and soon they were all on their way outside the city where the festival was being held.

Ronron parked in an empty spot and quickly ran off to get some tickets. She came back with a massive roll on her hand, surprising everyone that was there.

"Just how many tickets did you get?" Alex asked with a confused look.

"300 dollars worth," she said. "Why?"

"300?" both Alex and Graham's eyes went wide. "Isn't that... a little excessive?"

"It's just 300," Ronron shrugged. "Oh right, you guys are still living in the past. It's been 40 years, the world has moved on a lot and money has become less valuable. Inflation they call it. Come quickly or we will miss it."

Alex sighed and said nothing else. He walked in with everyone else and started enjoying the festival as well.

The festival was a lot different from the ones he remembered, mostly because most things seemed to have been digitalized. There were screens everywhere, even if it was just to advertise things to the people that came here.

The people around them acted rather weirdly as they walked. Not only were they all dressed in weird clothes, but there was also a massive cat along with them, which they didn't know what to do about.

If it were actually any other beast, they might have been terrified, but Pearl looked like a giant kitten, so they found him more cute than terrifying. Still, they didn't approach him on the off chance.

"Ooh, father! Do you want to try that?" she asked while pointing at a stall that was running a game where you had to get rings onto a standing stick. The smaller the ring you used, the better the reward you got.

Alex looked at the people trying out the game and realized they were cultivators too. He found it funny that they were trying to cheat the system by using Qi manipulation, but they were failing to do so as any Qi that left their body usually went out of their control thanks to the intent in this place.

"Sure, let's try that," he said. He walked over once the two people left and Ronron paid for some tickets for them to play.

"Are you guys cultivators too?" the owner of the stall asked with an awkward look on his face.

"Yes," Alex said. "Why do you ask?"

"Um... can you guys not play this please?" he asked. "You people are too good at this game. I have been losing money running this stall for the last two days."

Alex couldn't help but chuckle when he heard that. "Don't worry, even if we win, we won't take anything," he said.

"Will you?" the man asked excitedly.

"What? No! Father, I want that huge bear," Ronron quickly interjected.

"Uhh... maybe 1 then," Alex turned towards the man.

The man could only put on a sad face as he couldn't reject a customer now that they had come. If words got out, his business would die faster than it already was.

"Here you go," the man gave them the rings and Alex started throwing.

He rarely did things without Qi, so he wasn't sure how accurate he was going to be. However, the years of experience pretty much cemented themselves into him so that even without Qi, he never missed a single thing.

Every single ring he threw went onto the same pole. Even the one that was only slightly larger than the diameter of the stick easily went in.

Ronron was surprised to see such a performance as she wasn't very used to seeing stuff like that at all. "Father, you are so good at this," she said excitedly.

"It's more so that every cultivator is just too good at normal tasks," Alex said.

The stall owner took out the teddy bear from the stalls and dejectedly handed it over to Alex.

"Here you go," Alex handed it over to Ronron. "This is my first gift as a father. I will make sure to give you many more."

"It's so cute," Ronron cried out. "Thank you, father."

"Hold on, let your grandpa get you something too," Graham said as he moved up front.

The stall owner nearly went pale from imagining how much money he was going to lose right here with the crowd.

"Father, why don't you get something from a different staff? Let the gentleman here keep his business running," Alex said.

"Sure, that's fine with me," he said. "But I still want to play even if I don't want anything."

He turned around to his granddaughter, "Ronron, pay some for me too, will you?"

"Okay, grandpa," Ronron quickly answered and paid the stall owner some tickets to let Graham play.

After that, she played herself as well, and senior Luhei wanted to play a bit. Even Scarlet got a few throws in with her beak, which surprised the stall owner to no end.

After they were all satisfied with the stall, they left without taking anything else from the stall owner despite winning it all and went on to enjoy the rest of the festival.

Chapter 1217 The Next Continent

Alex and the rest went around the festival trying out the many games and entertainments that were around them.

They stayed there until late into the night and returned home way past midnight. The older couple had already gone to sleep by the time they returned.

Alex rested with the rest even though they didn't really need one, but it was still quite good to refresh one's mental state. They spent the rest of the night doing simple things as well and by the time it was morning, Ronron had already received a call that asked Alex and the rest to go to them.

It was time for them to leave for the Northern Continent.

After the other two woke up, they informed them that they were leaving, so the older Alex drove them all to the train station in the morning.

Alex had thought of leaving behind Pearl to help the older couple, but since the workers were going to be returning any day now, they didn't need that help at all.

So, he took both Pearl and Whisker with him. Not only them, but even his father was also coming around this time. Graham wasn't going to be of much use in the Northern Continent, but that wasn't why he was taking him there anyway.

He simply wanted his father to visit the land of ice, something that he rarely got to see ever in his life.

The 3 humans and 4 beasts took the train ride back to the senior's place where Hao Ya welcomed them in.

Ronron took her grandfather through the mansion to introduce him to her master while the rest slowly followed behind.

The senior was already inside the room ready, so everyone went in there as well. Ronron quickly introduced her grandfather and Graham talked with the senior for a bit.

Alex waited for their conversation to end before going to talk with the senior himself.

"Hey, you're taking your father with you?" the senior asked.

"Yes," Alex nodded. "I want him to meet his sister."

"That's not too bad," the senior said. "But Ronron says that she wants to go too. Did you say you were gonna take her?"

"I was hoping I could do that," Alex said. "She's been wishing of going to the outside world for so long, that I think I should take her to the Northern Continent. It's one of the weaker continents after all, and with the group we have, we won't have anything to fear there."

"That's true, but..." the senior hesitated a bit. "I'm very worried that something might happen to her."

"I will be there, and so will Scarlet. We will be fine," Alex said.

"Yes, but..." the man hesitated quite a bit.

"Is something wrong, senior?" Alex asked seeing as it did look like something was wrong.

"Here's the thing," the man spoke. "With your daughter having the Sky God's physique, she is now eligible to inherit my master's throne if she is able to reach a high level of cultivation base, which I'm sure she will."

"At the same time, because she has that potential, bringing her along with me to the Sky God's palace is my one hope at redeeming myself in my master's eyes even if the rest of humanity still considers me the worst person to exist out there. However, if your daughter gets into some trouble, I will be in trouble as well, so I have to be very careful about where and how she is."

"Senior," Alex spoke. "Do you think I will let my own daughter get hurt?"

"No, I don't believe you will, but there's still a chance that you—"

"Nothing is going to happen," Alex said. "In the first place, none of the elders there have anything against me. In fact, they will most likely treat me even better than they already did because I managed to kill the Mad Immortal plaguing their life."

"Even if they somehow forgot everything I did and are hostile to me, they still won't do anything to me since I am a king from another continent. Attacking me or my family will bring the war to their lands, which I'm sure they don't want. As a princess, Ronron will be safe wherever she goes in the Northern Continent."

"Secondly, keeping someone locked up in a dark room is no way to help them grow. Do you want the next Sky God to be someone who is a sheltered child that does not know the outside world at all?" Alex asked.

The senior sighed. "No, that... would be bad. The other candidates will most likely win against her if that were to happen," he said.

"Yes, so please don't worry about it. I am going to take my daughter to see the outer world that she is so desperate to see," Alex said.

The senior took a deep breath and nodded. "Fine, I will allow it," he said.

"Thank you," Alex said. The senior was about to walk away when Alex stopped him.

"Actually, I was hoping you would help me with something senior," Alex said. A small light flashed from his left arm and Pearl appeared to his left.

"Oh, hey little guy, you're going too?" the senior asked.

"Yes," Pearl nodded his head.

"I wanted to ask you about him," Alex said. "I heard that you said he ended up burning away his bloodline and spiritual root to save himself and that the only way to get it back is to evolve into a White Tiger, is that true?"

"Yes, I did say that," the senior said. "Unfortunately, this little fellow ruined his talents in order to save himself and can only bring them back through those extreme measures."

Alex frowned when he heard that. "Is there no other way?" he asked. "Is there no pill or anything that can instantly fix it for him, instead of having to evolve? There is a very high chance that he might die if he tries to go through the evolving process, and I can't have that."

The senior shook his head. "Unless you can find some high Divine rank or even Celestial rank alchemists, It's pretty much impossible," he said.

"But that will..." the amount of time it would take for him to reach that level, even if it was to just ask someone for the pill would take a ridiculously large amount of time.

Was letting Pearl go through the ritual the only option he had?

'God, I hope the beast in the beast realm has some answers for me,' Alex thought. There was a near-impossible chance that they had anything other than what the senior and Scarlet had already told him, but if there was the slightest chance that Alex could skip out on letting Pearl go through the ritual to get back his talents, he most definitely would.

"Alright everyone, get on top of the teleportation formation now," the senior said and one by one everyone but the Snake got on top of it.

"You sure you don't want to come along, senior?" Ronron asked the Snake. "We're going to where your brother is, right?"

The snake shook his head. "I can maybe survive a single lightning strike from the Heavenly Judgment. If I go out now, I will be dead before I can meet my brother. We will both have to leave this realm at the same time so that we can leave this world together, and for that, we need to not die when the lightning hits us. So, I can't leave just yet."

"I see," Ronron said. "Okay, stay well."

"Remember, let Hao Ya handle any complications that might come up and just try to help her out in general. I will be waiting for you all to return back with a lot of people in a week or two from now. Okay?" the senior asked.

"Understood," Alex and the rest said.

The senior nodded. "Good luck!"

He activated the formation and in the next moment, Alex felt a tremendous amount of force twist the space around him that generated the teleportation aura. Then, when it was fully powered up, they all vanished in a single second, arriving in open land with no roof above them.

There was a level of chill in the air that wasn't there just a moment ago. Alex looked around the location and they were definitely in the Northern Continent. He remembered this teleportation formation from back then.

"Woah!" both Ronron and Graham looked around in awe at the location they had arrived at.

The surrounding was mostly flat, and there wasn't much to the ground aside from it being a little barren. There were trees around, but not to the same level as the Sunborn Sanctuary or the Central Continent.

"This place is amazing," Ronron said as she looked at the open sky. "The Qi here is so strong too."

Alex smiled and pat her head a little. "There are places with far denser Qi than this. I will take you there too in the future," he said.

"What do we do now?" Graham asked. "Do you know where to go, son?"

"I do," Alex said and sensed some movement from close by. "But it might be better just to wait. Someone's found us already."

A few people wearing red and royal blue robes came up to the group with weapons in their hands. They were disciples of the ancient sects that were here to guard the teleportation formation.

When they saw the group, they stopped and the strongest person in the group shouted.

"Introduce yourselves, and your intention behind coming here."

Chapter 1218 The Cuts

"We're people from the Central Continent. My name is Hao Ya and I've met with your elders before on a matter. Please contact someone with authority here so we can meet them again," Hao Ya spoke up politely.

"Did she say Central continent?"

"That's a lie, right?"

"They must belong to the Eastern or the Southern continent."

"Elders, huh?" the person that had asked the question narrowed his eyes. "That might be difficult to arrange for a few days. All of our elders are over at the Alchemy Peninsula to enjoy this year's Alchemy tournament."

"Alchemy peninsula?" Alex got a little curious. "Is that what they call the lightning peninsula now? I don't remember there being any other peninsula here."

"Yes, the lightning peninsula has been renamed to the Alchemy Peninsula ever since the lightning there disappeared," the man floating in the sky said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, since everyone seems to be there already, then let's just go there. We don't even have to gather them or anything."

"That might be the quickest then," Hao Ya said.

"You guys go there," Scarlet suddenly spoke. "I'll go check on senior Luhei."

"Oh, do you know where to go? Can you get into the secret realm without my help?" Alex asked.

"Senior Luhei already taught me how to enter, so don't worry," Scarlet said and suddenly jumped off his shoulder.

Instantly, her size grew over 10 times, and soon enough she towered over each and every person that was there.

The people that were flying in the sky were also frightened due to the sudden change and prepared to attack just in case. However, before they could hope to do so, Alex sent out Heaven's Impact for all of them, attacking everyone in the sky at once.

Everyone that was flying in the sky suddenly lost consciousness and fell to the ground. At this time, Scarlet flew away from the group, flying north toward the Domain of the Ruler.

Alex grabbed the people that had fallen and laid them on the ground gently.

"Alright, we have what we need, so let's go," he said and brought out a ship from his storage ring.

"Ooh! Is that a flying boat, father? Can we fly on it?" Ronron asked excitedly.

"Yes," Alex said. "Have you ever flown before?"

"A couple of times by myself, but it was always inside that room, so I don't know if that counts or not."

"You can fly however you like in this place," Alex said. "However, first let's go meet up with the elders. We will have enough time for you to do everything you've ever wanted in here."

Ronron quickly nodded. "Okay," he said and got onto the boat that Alex had brought out.

Graham and Hao Ya also got into the boat, and finally, Alex entered. Pearl jumped next to them as well and all of them were ready to leave.

Feeling Qi for the first time in a long time, Pearl immediately started cultivating.

"Oh yeah, the cuts you see on me are fine. They're nothing to worry about," he quickly told the group so that they didn't freak out when they saw it.

With Pealr cultivating right next to him, it was inevitable that they would witness it.

"What cuts?" Ronron asked curiously.

"It will come up soon," Alex answered and focused on steering the boat for now.

The group was confused, but they didn't say anything at all. They simply waited to see what these cuts were. Alex waited too.

However, no matter how long he waited, no cuts appeared on his body at all. That confused Alex quite a bit. He turned around to look at Pearl to make sure he was cultivating, which he was.

"Hmm? My body must be just that much stronger than his now that I don't even get affected," Alex said. It had happened before when his body had surpassed Pearl's cultivation base, there were barely any cuts on his body at all.

However, even then there were some cuts around him, no matter how minor. This worried Alex. Was something wrong?

It took a minute or so for him to realize exactly what was happening. When he did, he couldn't help but feel very bad and disappointed with the situation.

Pearl no longer had the White Tiger's bloodline at all. As such, he no longer had access to the skill White Tiger's Dominating body, which when resonated with Alex's body would cause him to involuntarily practice the technique.

Since Pearl couldn't use that technique now, Alex couldn't either. As a result, he no longer had any cuts to worry about.

He wouldn't worry much about it at all normally, as he had other ways of improving his physical body now. However, when he realized just what it meant for Pearl, he was saddened.

If Pearl couldn't cultivate this technique at all, then he was not capable of improving his body just by cultivating it. He had lost access to that set of skills entirely and Alex couldn't help but blame himself for it.

However, no matter how much guilt he felt, no matter how much pain he suffered because of it, it wouldn't help fix Pearl's problem. This only pushed him further and further towards making Pearl go through the ritual so he could evolve.

And that fact only served to depress Alex even more.

"Where are the cuts father?" Ronron asked. "Is everything alright?"

"Everything is fine," Alex said with a soft smile. "Don't worry. It's better if the cuts don't show up for me."

Ronron gave a bright smile back which helped lessen the current pain he felt. He turned around and focused on the situation at hand.

Very soon, they were flying past the Blazing Earth sect which was where his aunt was most likely currently at.

Alex stopped for a moment and quickly went to ask if he could meet his aunt there. The people there were surprised that he was even who he said he was, and very quickly a person came out of the sect gates.

The figure was a middle-aged man whose eyes went wide the moment he saw Alex.

"Yu Ming?" he asked with a surprised look when he saw that.

"Oh, Sect master Bai, how are you doing?" Alex asked.

"YU MING? Is... is this really you?" he asked once more. He couldn't believe that he was seeing the same young man from over 25 years ago who had been abducted right under their noses.

"It is me, senior," Alex said with a smile. "I was hoping to find my Aunt. Is she in there?"

"Your aunt? Oh, Elder Li Zhumei? She's not here. She's participating in the Alchemy tournament being held over at the—"

"Alchemy Peninsula? Thanks, senior, I will head over there right now," Alex said and turned around before flying onto the boat in the sky.

"Wait, where were you before this? How did you—"

"Senior, I will come back soon with all the answers, please just wait patiently," Alex said and took off with the boat.

The sect leader of the Blazing Earth sect was left bewildered for a while, but soon a smile appeared on his face. Their savior had in fact survived and had returned back to them.

'I must ask elder Li to force him to join our sect by whatever means, even if it means that I have to give up my seat,' the man thought before walking back into his sect.

Chapter 1219 The Alchemy Peninsula

The lightning peninsula had changed a lot in the past 15-plus years since the lightning had stopped covering the sky.

The land had transformed into one full of growing trees and plants, and beasts from all around the land had moved in there as well.

People had yet to migrate completely as they were still afraid of the lightning strikes that fell previously. They didn't know what the cause of the lightning strike was, so they were more than scared to move just in case it all started again.

There was a giant arena established in the center of a massive flower field that was actually an alchemy garden established here as this was now the Alchemy peninsula.

People were gathered in the arena as the alchemy tournament was being held in this location.

People from various sects, families, and organizations had come here to take part or watch the Alchemy tournament, which was held by the Five ancient sects.

The judges were from the Five Ancient sects as well and they were sitting around, watching everything take place.

"Lady Li is not even 100 years old, is she?" someone from the Nether Poison sect asked an older woman that was sitting close by.

"Of course," the old lady said. "She still has a decade or two before she reaches that age."

The old lady was Tai Guan, Liz's master. She proudly watched her disciple make pills on the arena down below, just as she had for years after years ever since the tournament had been established.

At first, she wasn't very good at making pills at all. However, slowly over the years, she had improved to the point that she was better than most alchemists that had been practicing for centuries.

With just 15 years of training, she was starting to rank very high amongst all the cultivators in the entire continent.

Tai Guan had asked her disciple about how she got good at Alchemy many times, but she had never gotten any answers back. However, she knew it had to do with Alex most likely. She could see no other way in which she could've gotten better.

'Hopefully, she wins a spot in the top 5 once again. Maybe even top 3,' the old lady hoped.

The people cheered from everywhere as the many participants in the arena made as good a pill as they could.

Liz was somewhere in the middle, focusing on the pills herself.

Yes, she had received some knowledge from Alex on alchemy back when she had first met him. However, she couldn't read it immediately as Alchemy was still shunned at the time. Even 10 years later, she couldn't begin to study it just yet as the Mad Immortal was still around.

However, after the Mad Immortal had died and Alchemy was encouraged by everyone, she finally started learning it.

In 15 years, she was confident in making any sort of pill of reasonable quality.

She finished making the pill and took it out to have it checked. Her pill had reached a comfortable 62% in harmony, which was much better than what most people could reach here.

Once she was done, she walked away to the waiting area. As she did, she noticed the cauldron that was kept on a pedestal.

It was a heavy cauldron, made mostly with the Starforged Tungsten that was found in the endless tunnel. There had apparently been many cauldrons during the aftermath of what had happened 15 years ago, and all of them had already been distributed away.

This one, however, was kept here because no one could seem to find a way to take it away at all. Not only was it extremely heavy, apparently it was also extremely arrogant, not that Liz understood what that really meant.

'Everything Alex left behind was already taken away. I need to at least not let them take this away as well. So, I must get the first place this time around no matter what it takes. I need to gain permission to do so,' Liz thought to herself.

Suddenly, she saw the cauldron shake a little.

"Huh?" she thought for a moment. She wasn't sure if she was seeing things or not. However, it moved once more and she was sure the cauldron was definitely shaking.

'Earthquake? No,' she thought, and yet the cauldron kept moving somehow. 'What's going on?'

By now, some other people were starting to notice as well and were pointing toward it. Not only that, the cauldron shook more and more visibly, and very soon everyone became aware of the phenomenon that was happening.

Five elders from the five different sects gathered around the cauldron to try and figure out what was happening, and yet none of them could realize exactly what was going on at all.

They were conversing amongst themselves to see if they could come up with a reason when they suddenly heard someone speak up from up above.

"Excuse me? Would you seniors mind moving away from my cauldron? He's a little shy around people."

Everyone looked up to the sky to see who the voice belonged to. When they did, they saw Alex slowly float down from the sky with a smile on his face.

"Yu Ming?" one of the women there asked with a surprised look on her face.

Alex looked at the woman and smiled even brighter. "Elder Xuan, how do you do? It's been a while, hasn't it? How's the Frozen Heart sect doing these days?" he asked.

"Yu Ming! You're still alive?" another man asked.

"Oh, hey senior Huang. Yes, I haven't died. I was just somewhere else," Alex said as he landed in between them.

The five of them watched with wide eyes as they couldn't believe that Alex was alive and back after so many years. Many questions ran through their head, but somehow they weren't getting able to get their questions across at all.

"Please excuse me for a moment," Alex smiled and made the group move back a few steps.

He walked up to the cauldron on the pedestal and smiled as he touched its surface. "Hey, Memory! Did you miss me?" he asked.

As if to answer him, the cauldron shook a little.

"Yeah, I missed you too. I'm sorry I left you behind. I should've made sure to take you along with me," Alex said. "Thankfully, I'm back now, and I'm never going to leave you ever again."

The cauldron suddenly shrunk in size as it flew into Alex's storage, surprising every single person there.

"That is your cauldron?" one of the elders asked.

"Yes, I made this cauldron while I was here. I had to leave it behind because of some problems, but I'm back here again to take it," Alex said. "I hear you have made this cauldron a prize for the Alchemy competition you hold. I'm sorry, but I fear that will have to change now."

"Of-of course," the elders quickly said. "It's yours, we can never take it."

"Thank you," Alex said and turned around to look for his aunt who was way too stunned to realize that she was actually seeing her nephew.

"Aunt Liz!" Alex shouted while waving his hand. "I'm back, and look who I brought along with me."

Chapter 1220 Request

"Who?" Liz looked to the side, but she couldn't see anyone. A second later, however, a small boat floated into the arena with a few people on top of it.

Liz saw 3 different people and a cat, but her attention was pulled by a single one on top of it.

"Brother?" her eyes went wide.

"Liz!" Graham couldn't help but shout softly as emotions filled his voice. The boat lowered, and before it could even land, Graham jumped off to see his little sister.

"Brother? How? Did Alex find you?" Liz hurriedly asked.

"Yes, he did," Graham said as he wiped his tears.

"I... I can't believe it," Liz said as tears flowed down her eyes too. "I'm so happy!" She immediately hugged her brother, who hugged her back as well.

The elders looked at them with surprised expressions. "Brother? That's her brother?" they couldn't help but ask curiously.

For someone like Liz, who was well on her way into the Saint Foundation realm before the age of 100, it was surprising for her brother to show up who didn't even have a True realm cultivation base.

They couldn't believe just how weak he was.

"I remember something about her brother most likely being in the desert in the Southern Continent, that is probably why he is so weak," Tai Guan quickly said.

"Father," Alex called out. "We might have to cut the reunion a little short. How about we wait until we're done with our business here."

"Oh, okay," Graham said and moved to the side. "Do your thing."

Alex nodded and looked back to Hao Ya who came forward.

The few elders that were there looked closely to see who it was.

"Ah! Its you," a few of the elders recognized her, while a few didn't.

"Who is she?" they asked.

"Don't you remember? The girl that forced our sect to open up our treasury?" one of them said.

"It was this girl? I had never seen her face, so I didn't know."

Hao Ya stepped in front of them all and bowed softly. "Seniors, I have come back with a request. I hope you will lend me your ears for a moment," she said.

"What is it?" one of them asked. "Do you plan on robbing us once again?" They were still very hostile to her as she had gained unlimited access to their treasury and had taken away a lot of things that would be considered priceless treasures to the sects.

"I do not need anything material from you or your sect," Hao Ya said. "I came to request you to help in gathering individuals you otherwise know as players so I can take them back home."

"What? Players?" the elders were confused for a second. "What do you mean by sending them home? Are you going to send them back to their realm?"

"No, the players come from the Central continent, and I am here to take them back," Hao Ya said.

Her voice was loud enough that the crowd that had quietened down could clearly hear her every word. When they listened to her, a small group of people couldn't help but be stunned by what she was talking about.

"Our... home?"

"We can go back?"

"We have a home?"

The players that had lived thinking they were stuck inside of a game or had thought that they could never see their home again were wildly surprised by the sudden information that they could go back.

"What are you talking about?" one of the elders there asked. "What do you mean by people living in the Central continent? There's no way that is true."

"It is true, seniors," Hao Ya said. "That is where I have come from to request your aid in helping send back everyone. All you have to do is relay the information around and help people get to the Intercontinental Telportation formation as quickly as they can."

"How can we trust you?" another Elder asked.

"Please trust her, elders," Alex said as he came close to them as well. "It is indeed true that we just came from the Central continent to help take people back in case they want to."

"You came from the Central continent?" Lady Xuan asked.

"Yes, that is where my home is," Alex said.

"You've been in the Central continent this whole time? How?" Lady Xuan asked.

"No, actually I was in the Southern Continent this whole time. I teleported there on accident and have been staying there for the past 15 years," Alex said. "I returned to the Central Continent 3 days ago, and have come here today to ask you to help others find their home just like I did."

"Well..." the elders looked at each other. "We will have to discuss it a bit more amongst ourselves."

"Please do," Hao Ya said. "But I must implore you to make a decision as quickly as possible. It is best if we don't have to spend more than a week on this matter."

"Alright, alright," the elders said and waved her away.

The alchemy tournament had to come to a halt for a while as something important had come up. Even most of the alchemists there no longer wanted to keep participating if they had a chance to go home.

Not everyone knew just yet if they wanted to return or not. Not everyone had a bad life here, but they still would give it some thought since it was their home after all.

Alex walked up to his aunt with a big smile. "Aunt Liz, how have you been?" he asked.

Liz immediately hugged him. "Thank god you weren't dead. I- I knew you wouldn't die," she said as she cried.

"I'm sorry I couldn't even say goodbye when I left. Everything happened so... suddenly," Alex said.

"It's fine. You've returned, and somehow you've even found your father this time around. I'm very happy to see you both," Liz said.

"Oh, it's not just father," Alex said and gestured toward the boat.

Ronron who didn't know what to do with so many cultivators around was busy looking at everyone curiously. When she saw Alex's gesture, she quickly jumped out of the boat and ran toward him.

"Ronron, this is my aunt, Elizabeth. You can call her Liz for short," Alex introduced her.

Ronron quickly bowed, her ponytail flipping in front of her in the process. "Greetings, grandaunt Liz. I am Maron. You can call me Ronron too," she quickly said.

"Grand... aunt?" Liz's face filled with confusion for a moment as she didn't understand what that meant at all.

"Hehe, isn't my granddaughter cute?" Graham asked.

"Granddaughter?" Liz's eyes went wide as she realized what was happening. Her eyes went from Graham to Ronron then to Alex.

"She's your daughter?" she shouted in disbelief, catching the attention of a few of the elders that were discussing the situation.

"Huh? Whose daughter?" Tai Guan asked.

"Yu Ming's?" Lady Xuan was curious as well.

Alex smiled. "Yes, she's my daughter," he said, shocking not just his aunt, but everyone in the arena who knew anything in the least about him.

Liz was still the most shocked after all and she couldn't help but ask, "When did you get married?"

Chapter 1221 Yu Ronron

"Yu Ming, did you get married?" Lady Xuan asked.

"When did you get married?" Tai Guan asked.

Even Huang Xinyi wanted to learn some more.

Alex was a figure that wasn't born so very often. His talent in not just Alchemy, but also in cultivation, in general, made him one of the greatest people they had ever met. Not to mention, the amount of Dao he had learned in front of them was enough to make them want to keep him as close to them as possible.

A friendly relationship was one thing, but if they could somehow make him join them, that would elevate each of their statuses to a whole another level. Their hope of reaching that status had just been rekindled, but if he was married, it was likely that he had settled somewhere already.

If that was the case, then they were too late. Which was why they needed to confirm with him before deciding on what to do next.

"Oh, no, I'm not married," Alex said.

p√†–ød√°-≈à·¥èŒΩ√™Œπ.—Å√≥–ú Liz's eyes narrowed. "Then... you had a daughter without getting married?" she whispered. "With who?"

"No, no. I haven't met with any woman," Alex said. "She's just my daughter because... how do I explain this?"

Ronron and Graham chuckled at the side watching Alex struggle to explain exactly what was going on without going into a long-winded explanation of the situation.

"Is she adopted?" Lady Xuan asked.

"No, I'm her biological father," Alex said.

"How old is this lady?" Tai Guan asked.

"I'm 28, senior," Ronron quickly answered.

"28? Yu Ming, weren't you in the Northern Continent 28 years ago?" Tai Guan asked.

"28 years ago... that was around the time he entered the Saint realm, I believe," Lady Xuan said as she remembered the past. "Wait, when did you have the time to have a child? Were you hiding her?"

"She's the child of my clone," Alex explained. "Although, biologically I am the real father."

"You have a clone?"

"What clone?"

Everyone was very confused, but Alex didn't bother explaining at all.

"Seniors, please spend your time making the decision about the players. It's more important to me that we see them return than anything else," Alex said.

The elders grumbled a little and nodded before moving away to make a decision. With them away, Alex took Liz and the rest and went over to their boat before flying outside the arena.

Huang Xinyi quickly flew out of the arena.

"Yu Ming," he quickly called out. "The Blue Spring sect is close by, why don't we head over there for now? You can rest there while we can make our decision," the man said.

"Oh, that would be wonderful. Thank you, senior," Alex said and nodded toward the group.

Huang Xinyi smile and went back to the other elders to make tell them that they could go to his sect.

Both Ronron and Graham were quite confused by the various elders they had met.

"Father, why do they keep calling you Yu Ming?" she asked.

"Oh, because that's my name," Alex said. "Or was. It's the name I got when I first joined the game and used it successively to hide the fact that I was a player so almost everyone in this continent and the Western Continent knows me as Yu Ming. Very few know my actual name."

"Yeah, that's the same with me," Liz explained. "I go by Li Zhumei here. It's easier to mix with society if you have a name that matched their naming conventions."

"Ooh, should I get one too then?" Ronron asked.

"Uh... I don't think you need one," Alex said. "You were named after my master, so Ronron is already close enough."

"Oh," Ronron said. "What about my surname then?"

"Since you're my daughter, you should take mine. Call yourself Yu Ronron," Alex said.

"Yu Ronron," Ronron said to herself before giving a big smile and a thumbs up. "I like it, father."

"Aww, my little Grandniece is so cute," Liz said while pinching Ronron's cheeks.

"Grandaunt, you aren't any less pretty either," she said. "How are you so young looking? I heard you started cultivating late in your age."

Alex got close to Ronron and whispered into her ears, "Don't tell anyone, but your grandaunt has a Celestial-grade body as well."

"AHH! A celes—"

Alex covered her mouth before she could sound out the words. "I said don't tell anyone," he said.

Ronron nodded and Alex let go of her mouth. "Does my master know?" she asked.

"I don't think so," Alex said. "I didn't tell him, so he probably doesn't know. He thinks only I and her daughter have that body."

"Oh right, Aunt Hannah is grandaunt's daughter, isn't she?" Ronron said. "I only just made the connection."

"Right, Alex," Liz quickly spoke. "Any news on Hannah or Rob?"

Alex shook his head. "I have yet to go to the Eastern Continent, so I can't tell you anything about sister. As for uncle Rob, I can only say that he is not in the Southern Continent," he said.

"Are you sure?" Liz asked as her glint of hope she had started vanishing once again.

"I'm sure," Alex said.

"He's not here either," she said. "I'm worried about those two."

"I can't say anything about Uncle Rob, but I promise you I will find information on Sister Hannah soon," Alex said.

"Can you?" Liz asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "In about 3 years, I will be sending an expedition to the Eastern Continent with a few of my people. I will have them search around for sister Hannah."

"Oh, thank you," Liz said.

"Wait, you're sending an expedition to the Eastern Continent? Why?" Hao Ya was curious.

"The Azure Imperium has sent us a request to transfer a few of our alchemists so we can exchange knowledge and information. The leader of the Scale legion came by himself and told me it was the Dragon Emperor's idea," Alex said.

"The Dragon Emperor?" Hao Ya asked with a few thoughts floating in her head. "That's good."

"What is?" Alex asked, wondering what she had just thought of.

"I haven't been able to meet with the Dragon Emperor or anyone of worth in the Eastern Continent, so it is hard for me to gain access to the Teleportation formation to send everyone back."

"However, if I were to go along with the expedition group, I'm sure my chances would be much higher than me just randomly teleporting over there and hoping to get an audience," Hao Ya said.

"That is true," Alex said. "Then do you want to go on that expedition too?"

"Yes," Hao Ya said. "Make me a guard or something. Whatever works?"

"I'll see what we can do after all of this is over," Alex said.

Hao Ya nodded.

The group of elders flew over and brought out a bigger ship. "Yu Ming, why don't you all come over here so we can go together," Huang Xinyi spoke.

"Thank you, senior," Alex said and looked at his group. "Let's go."

Hao Ya and Pearl quickly flew off to the boat while Liz had to help her brother fly over.

"Can you fly on your own?" Alex asked Ronron.

"Let me try," Ronron said and slowly flew to the boat, faltering a few times before finally landing. Alex landed next to her as well.

Then, since everyone was there, the ship took off.

Chapter 1222 Matt

"So, Yu Ming. Can you tell us how you defeated Xue Kuangren?" the elders that were on the boat asked.

"Oh, it was quite simple actually," Alex said. "I did as he asked."

"You did… as he asked?" the people looked around curiously.

"Yes," Alex said. "He wanted me to make him a healing pill, so I did. Once he was healed, the lightning tribulation he had half done continued and the final two lightning strikes killed him."

"What?" the elders were surprised. "He wasn't done with his lightning tribulation? And here we thought he was arrogant and randomly started trying to break through once more."

"No, it was because I healed him," Alex said. "That was why I healed him in the first place."

"How did you heal him though?" one of the elders from the Heaven's Frost sect asked.

"Right, Saint pills shouldn't work on him or the many alchemists he had taken hostage would have healed him completely," the elder said.

"Of course," Alex said. "But I'm sure senior Tai here should have told you guys already that I don't make normal Saint pills, hasn't she?"

The elders looked around and nodded. They had heard of the pill cloud that had formed but beyond that, they knew nothing.

"Did you… improve your alchemy skills while you were inside?" the elders asked.

"Actually, I did," Alex said. "I wouldn't necessarily say my skills improved, but my knowledge about a few things definitely did, which quite helped me in making the pills I needed."

The elders were jubilant hearing this.

"Young man, do you want to return to the sect?" Lady Xuan asked. "The Frozen Heart sect welcomes you every time."

"What are you talking about?" Huang Xinyi said before turning around to Alex. "Come to our sect. You need beast cores if I remember correctly. We have a lot of those laying around."

"We can teach you everything we know about poison," the Nether Poison sect's leader spoke, trying to persuade Alex too. He knew he didn't have any connection with Alex, but he tried what he could.

"He's my disciple's nephew. If anywhere, he will come with us," Tai Guan said. "Isn't that right, Yu Ming?"

They all turned toward Alex to hear his answer.

Alex simply smiled. "Well, let me start by clearing one thing. My name is not Yu Ming. It's just something I had to use because I didn't want people to know my real name."

"My real name is Alex, and I hope you can call me so from now on," he said.

"Oh," the elders were a little surprised, but not enough to see how that was relevant to their question.

"Secondly…"

Alex reached into his storage ring and pulled out something that finally caught the eyes of all the elders.

The gleaming, golden crown made them speechless as they watched it settle on top of Alex's head.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner, but I am actually the King of the Southern Continent, and as such, There is no way I can join any of your sects."

The elders as well as Liz remained stunned for an entire minute without anyone saying anything.

"You're joking, right?" Liz was the first to break the silence.

"No, I'm not," Alex said.

"He is the King," Graham said. "He became one about a decade ago, the after he found me, actually."

"H-how?" Tai Guan asked with a quivering voice.

Alex smiled, saying nothing else.

"My prophecy," Liz spoke. "The one with the crown, was that… this?" She looked at Alex's crown and was pretty sure that this was what it was.

"Maybe," Alex said. "It definitely was mine."

Liz's face remained blank. "So the prophecies do come true," she said.

Alex hesitated a bit to agree with her even though he knew 2 of the 6 divinations he had received had already come true.

After all, one of them was a divination about his death.

If all prophecies were true, then the one about his death was true as well, and he did not like that idea at all.

"What's this about prophecies, father?" Ronron asked. "How did you receive this prophecy?"

"There's a place in the east that can do it," Alex said.

"I don't suggest you do it," Hao Ya quickly said. "Divinations can be good, but they also can be bad. If you end up receiving bad divinations, it usually ruins your life because your perception of what you would be capable of in the future changes."

"Not to mention it's near impossible to find a seer that can do proper divinations," Hao Ya said.

"Did master say these things?" Ronron asked.

"Yes," Hao Ya said. "Unless the seer has a very good grasp of the Time Dao, it is a good idea to not trust their words."

"Time dao?" Alex asked. "Divination is related to the time dao?"

"Somewhat," Hao Ya said. "I'm not sure if it's fully related or not, but having a good grasp of time is certainly helpful if someone wants to see the future."

Alex turned toward his aunt. "You have learned the Time Dao right?" he asked.

"I have," Liz said. "Are you saying… I should learn how to do divinations?"

"That's your decision really," Alex said. "But it seems you have a choice that most wouldn't."

Liz thought about it for a few seconds and decided to leave the decision for the future.

The ship flew for an hour or two more before they arrived in the Blue Spring sect. Huang Xinyi called out a couple, who were there to escort Alex and the rest to their quarters while the elders made their decision.

Ma Tianxin and Ren Xiuyin stood outside where the ship landed as they were here to escort the guests. However, when they saw who the guest was, they couldn't hide their shock at all.

"B-brother Yu Ming?" Ma Tianxian looked at the boat with an open mouth.

"Brother Ma, Sister Xiuyin, how is it going?" Alex asked as he simply waved.

Huang Xinyi quickly went to the two couples and whispered something to them. Their shock only grew larger when they heard what Huang Xinyi had to say.

Ma Tianxin's posture grew stiff and he quickly bowed down. "Welcome, your Majesty," he quickly said.

"Aw, come on. You don't have to be like that," Alex said. "I already get that enough in the Southern Continent. You don't have to call me that as well."

"But… we have to," Ren Xiuyin said. "After all, you are—"

"Please, I insist," Alex said.

The couple looked at each other and nodded. "Okay, brother Yu," Ma Tianxin said.

"Oh, and please call me Alex, that's my real name," Alex said.

"Your real name?" Ma Tianxin looked quite surprised. "Alex… you're a player?"

Alex nodded.

"I am a player too," Ma Tianxin said.

"I know," Alex said with a smile. "You hadn't gotten rid of your speech pattern, so I recognized it quite easily."

"Oh," Ma Tianxin said. "I see. Alex, huh? Call me Matt, then."

"Oh, is that your real name as well?" Alex asked.

"It is," Ma Tianxin said. "Although, I suppose Ma Tianxin is more authentic now."

"Dear we shouldn't keep them outside for so long," Ren Xiuyin said and turned toward the group. "Please follow us, we will take you to a place where you can stay."

"Thank you," Alex said and the group walked away with the two couples. He noticed the speech between the two and was a little surprised.

"You two got married? He asked.

"Yes," Ma Tianxin said. "About 5 years ago."

"Congratulations," Alex said. "Any children?"

"No," Ma Tianxin said. "It's too early for us."

"I see," Alex said.

"Father, are you embarrassed you have a daughter?" Ronron asked.

"Fa-father?" Ma Tianxin quickly turned around. "That's your… daughter?"

"She is," Alex said. "Ronron, greet your seniors."

"Greetings, Uncle Ma, Aunt Ren," Ronron bowed a little.

"Your daughter is so pretty," Ren Xiuyin said.

"She is, isn't she?" Alex asked while patting Ronron's head.

The group was taken to a rather fancy room Alex wondered if he would have been brought here had he not been a King. 'The title sure does come with a lot of benefits,' he thought.

The group settled down and the two couples left. Hao Ya was taken away as well to speak with the elders regarding the mass teleportation of players.

Alex and his family were left alone, so they caught up on things. They talked about what they had been doing all this time, where they had been, and such.

Liz was more than happy to see not just her nephew that she had found and lost, but also her brother. If now she found her husband and daughter, she wouldn't want anything else from life.

pǎпdǎ Йᴏνê1,сòМ A few hours later, Hao Ya entered the room with a gloomy look and walked directly toward Alex.

"Can you come with me?" she asked.

"What's the matter?" Alex asked.

"There's a slight problem that I need your help with," she said and walked away.

Alex followed her to a room full of people with status so high that had he not been a king, he would have to bow in front of everyone.

The figures gathered here were sect leaders, ancestors, and strong individuals with a lot of say in the happenings of the Northern Continent.

And all of them were gathered in the room to talk about sending the players back to where they had come from.

And from what Alex could see, they hadn't come to a conclusion at all.

Chapter 1223 An Exchange

"Elders, seniors, have you come to a decision yet?" Alex asked as he walked into the room with Hao Ya.

He walked up to an empty chair in the room and sat down with Hao Ya sitting next to him.

"Who is this?" one of the people asked seeing Alex come in so nonchalantly.

"This is Yu Ming... er, Alex. He is the one that freed us from Xue Kuangren," one of the elders explained.

"Oh, it's him?" a few of them looked at him curiously.

Alex looked around, waiting for someone to answer first.

"We have," Lady Xuan said. "We told this young lady that we cannot agree to this request at all."

Alex was a little surprised, but not very much. He had expected some obstacles to the task after all.

'Of course, it won't be as easy,' he thought. "May I ask why you refused?"

"Accepting your request is no different than slicing off our arm with our own swords," Lady Xuan explained. "The people that you say come from the Central continent have mixed themselves very well with our normal lives."

"They are part of the infrastructure that runs the Northern Continent. They are some of the best members a sect or guild has trained in the last 5 decades. Letting someone like that simply return back home after we've put so much in raising them, that's simply a loss that we can't bear."

Alex nodded.

His elders had told him the same when he had given the order too. They had been worried that people who had been given so much would be simply sent away without any reward for training them.

However, Alex was certain of one thing.

"I can promise you, anyone who has made anything with their life here will not want to stay back home at all," Alex said. "I'm sure sister Hao here is explained to you, but everyone who wants to return can return a year later. The ones you care about the most, those will return for sure."

"Not all of them though, isn't that right?" one of the men asked. He wore a robe that didn't belong to any of the 5 ancient sects, so Alex wasn't sure who he represented.

Still, he answered. "You are not wrong, senior. It is true that no matter how much of a life they have made here, some would still want to stay back in the Central continent. But, don't you think it's good to give them the choice? If you want someone to stay with you, don't you want their full loyalty?"

"If somehow tomorrow they find out that you were the reason the person was denied of the opportunity to return back to their home, not even given a choice to go back to their family they must have been missing for the past 5 decades, would they still be loyal to whatever sect or group it is that you run?" Alex asked.

The man's face darkened a bit. "Are you saying you are going to spread around the word that we denied them an opportunity to return?" the man asked. "I see that as a threat boy, and I don't do well against threats."

Alex gave the man a plain smile. "It was more of an advice and a small plea to show some humanity, but you can see it as a threat if that's what you want to see it as. I don't deny anyone the opportunity to make a choice for themselves," he said.

The man's face darkened and he was about to retort when Tia Guan cut him off. "The problem isn't that we don't want to do it," the woman said. "It's that we would be at a loss if we do so. However, if there was a way to minimize the loss, then we could be persuaded to do so."

"I see," Alex said as he got a little thoughtful. He scratched his chin for a moment as the rest of them watched him carefully.

"Use your authority as a King maybe?" Hao Ya suggested with her spiritual sense.

Alex nearly chuckled when he heard that. "On a foreign land that's not my own?" he asked. "I may be a recently crowned king, but even I know what a king can and cannot do."

He then turned around to Lady Xuan and spoke. "Lady Xuan, since I was once a part of your sect, it isn't an understatement to say that you are the one I trust and respect the most."

The woman was a little surprised and grateful to hear that.

"So, I would like you to do me the honor of testing this pill," he said as he pulled out a random pill and tossed it toward her.

The woman hurried caught the pill and looked at it. She saw the light green pill with an earthy aroma as well as a few random lightning strike-shaped lines across it.

She curiously brought out a pill tester that she carried around and put the pill inside the vessel.

Everyone around her looked at the pill tester with burning curiosity as well. After all, they knew Alex was an alchemist that had been taken away by Xue Kuangren, so he must've been quite the amazing one.

Lady Xuan was sure she knew how good he was since he had made pills for her for an entire year. She was curious to see how much he had evolved

Tai Guan and Bai Qiyi were the only ones there that had remotely any idea of what he was capable of in that room.

However, when the pill tester showed the number 100, even they couldn't help but let their jaw drop to the floor.

The entire room went dead silent for a few seconds as even Hao Ya couldn't hide her amazement.

"100... this is a pill with 100% harmony," Lady Xuan spoke softly. "H-how is it possible?"

"Is it fake?" someone asked.

"How could it fake my pill tester?" Lady Xuan asked, shutting up the person. "Y-Yu Ming... er... Alex, are you giving us this pill in exchange for letting the players go home?"

"We don't accept it," a person quickly spoke. "A single pill isn't worth so many talented individuals."

Alex smiled. "Of course not," he said. "I was only showing you what my pills are capable of. That one is a healing pill that I give to you in thanks for letting me stay in the sect for a year back then."

"I request that you don't use it haphazardly as it holds the powers to even possibly heal an Immortal himself," he said.

The woman's hand quivered seeing the naked pill in her hand that had probably lost value just because she had touched it. She quickly put out a pill bottle and put it inside and immediately hid it in her storage bag.

"If that is not what you are offering, then what is?" one of the elders asked.

Alex reached into his storage bag and pulled out 3 different recipes.

"I have 3 pill recipes here, all of which hold the potential to reach 100% harmony," he said. "This is what I'm offering to you."

He threw out the first recipe that fell into the hands of Huang Xinyi. He slowly read through the recipe and his eyes went wide.

"Is this... real?" he asked.

"Absolutely," Alex said. "I have no reason to lie here."

"What does it say?" one of the elders asked.

"This..." Huang Xinyi looked at the other and said, "This is a recipe for a pill that can help improve a person's Water Spiritual root."

"WHAT?"

The entire crowd spoke at almost the same time. They looked back at Alex to see if it was true or not. Seeing Alex's relaxed expression, they could only trust that it was real.

Alex then tossed the second pill recipe to Tai Guan, who quickly caught it and read it.

"Th-this one improves Earth Spiritual root," the woman said with a shocked expression. She couldn't believe that there could possibly be a pill out there that could do such a thing.

Hao Ya was looking around shocked as she couldn't believe Alex had recipes for such pills. How come he had never told her or even given her any of these?

Finally, Alex tossed the last recipe over to Lady Xuan.

Lady Xuan, who had just had to test a 100% harmony pill couldn't imagine what wonders the talisman in her hands held. She slowly let her spiritual sense sink into the talisman and read what was written.

Her shock came so abruptly that she stood up from her seat in shock. "This... this can't be," she shouted.

"It is," Alex said.

"B-But how?" she asked.

The others got curious now.

"What is it? Another Spiritual Root improving pill? Just tell us which one it is for. Fire, Metal, or Wood?" the group asked.

"It's... not a pill for spiritual roots," Lady Xuan said slowly. "It's... a pill to help you learn Dao."

"Huh?" the group was surprised... and confused.

"Help us learn a dao?"

Lady Xuan looked at the pill. "The main component of this pill... is the Soul Elucidating Tulips," she said.

Alex nodded. "That recipe took me a decade to come up with," he said. "It uses the Soul Elucidating Tulips to create a pill that puts you in a similar trance to the one you would fall into in the Dao mountain."

"Except, unlike the Dao mountain, it won't come around only once a year," Alex said.

The group watched not in shock, but horror this time around at what had come across them. It scared them that there could be a pill out there with this much potential and they hadn't even heard about it.

"Not only that," Alex explained. "Depending on how well the pill you've made is, you can have pills that are more effective than the pond at the top of the Dao Mountain itself."

"I give you all these three recipes in exchange for accepting our request," Alex said. "How does that sound?"

Chapter 1224 Another Request

Everyone in the room was lost in their own thoughts, daydreaming of a time when they had multiple Dao learned thanks to the pill recipe they had received.

"So," Alex spoke to grab their attention again. "Do you guys accept the exchange or not?"

"We..." Tai Guan wanted to speak, but she couldn't speak on behalf of others. She turned towards her fellow Saint Soul realm cultivators and hoped they were of the same mind as she was.

Lady Xuan was fully on board from the look on her face, but she needed to hear someone else speak as well.

"Should I leave so you can discuss?" Alex asked the group.

"We do need to discuss this," the few elders spoke. "Can you two please leave for the moment?"

"Sure," Alex said and stood up to leave.

Hao Ya quickly grabbed his arm and stopped him. "What about your recipe?" she asked. "You need to take it back for now, don't you?"

"Take it back? No, there's no need," Alex said as he looked toward the elders that had it. "I'm sure the seniors will all come to a wise conclusion so they can make use of the recipe."

He turned around without looking at the elders and walked away with Hao Ya following behind him. However, before he went past the door, he stopped and turned around.

"I'm afraid we've already wasted the entire day on this, so in order to hurry it all up, please come to a decision in the next 10 minutes," Alex said. "If you don't, I will have to ask someone with more authority than you to make the decision for you."

"What is that supposed to mean?" one of the seniors asked with a gloomy look on their face.

"You damn boy, did you threaten us once again?" the man that had bickered with Alex previously spoke. "We don't even know if these damn pills of yours work or not yet. Do you then dare tell us to make a decision in just 10 minutes?"

"I do," Alex said. "You shouldn't be talking with me, but with each other."

The man crossed his arm. "I refuse," he said. "You can take your damn pills back."

Alex narrowed his eyes as he looked at him. He then stared at the rest of the people in the room. "Is that everyone's decision?" he asked.

"NO!" everyone shouted almost immediately.

Alex turned around to the man and smiled, "I hope you learn how little your words hold weight in this room. I'll be back in 10 minutes then."

He turned around and left the room, closing the door behind him.

Hao Ya was very curious about everything. "Why did you leave the pill recipes inside? If you sold them pills instead of recipes, you could have gotten the same result I believe, and you could have made money in the future too," she said.

"I could," Alex said. "But I don't have any particular need for money, really. Besides, the Northern Continent is quite behind the Southern and Eastern Continent due to the False Immortal, and I don't think it would be fair to try and leech off of their situation."

"Besides, these seniors helped me a lot when I wasn't very influential yet, so I am trying to pay them back for it," Alex said.

"Is... that so?" Hao Ya asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I would've given them the recipe even if I were just visiting. In a way, I'm profiting right now from the recipes as I'm gaining something in return for it, which I was not hoping for."

"Do you really care about these people that much?" Hao Ya asked.

"Not... care, exactly. More like grateful," Alex said. "Think of it as I'm repaying them for everything they have done for me."

"I see," Hao Ya said. "Then I won't say anything."

They waited outside for a while before the door opened on its own before the 10 minutes had passed.

Alex walked in and smiled. "Have you all come to a decision?" he asked.

"We have decided to agree to your request, if you agree to one more of our requests as well," Lady Xuan spoke up.

"Oh? On top of the pill recipes?" Alex asked. "Are you sure?"

"I know we're asking more than we deserve, but this feels like the time to do so," lady Xuan said.

"Is that so? Then please say what it is," Alex said. "If it's feasible, I shall accept it."

Lady Xuan looked briefly at everyone around her and nodded before looking back at Alex. "We are hoping that you will teach our alchemists a few things about alchemy so that they can improve from your knowledge," she said.

She immediately bowed in front of Alex. "Please, this is a request from all of us," she said.

The other elders and seniors also got up and bowed toward Alex.

Alex looked at all of the, including the man that had talked back to him before. It seemed that they had talked some sense into him and he was now following in the other's footsteps.

Alex waited a while before answering, making them think that it was a rather hard decision.

"Gather everyone you can from all over the Northern Continent who wants to leave. At the same time, gather your alchemists as well. You will have a week to do so, and on the final day of the week, I shall hold an Alchemy conference here for whoever will want to listen to me."

"Does that work for you?" he asked.

"Yes!" the elders quickly nodded. "Thank you."

"Alright, I will be returning now. Please get to work immediately," he said and turned to leave.

"What were you going to do if we had refused?" Huang Xinyi asked. He had been curious ever since Alex had said so.

Alex turned back and smiled at him. "I'm sure you know who I mean when I say someone with more authority than you,' he said, waved them goodbye, and walked away.

"Dear god," lady Xuan couldn't help but say. "That kid was going to ask the Ruler to make the decision for us, wasn't he?"

"Do you think he knows the ruler?" Tai Guan asked.

"Who knows," Huang Xinyi said. "He's not someone we can judge through our normal understanding of the world. It is possible that he has already met the ruler."

"He was coming from the Land of Xue when we first met him. It's not impossible," Lady Xuan said.

"Phew! It's a good thing we could even bargain the alchemy lesson. Thankfully he wasn't offended at all," Tai Guan said.

The man that had argued with Alex came up to the group. "Seniors, I still don't understand why we have to be so respectful to that little brat. Did you see how disrespectful he was? He didn't even greet anyone after walking in."

"And yet you let him walk all over you," the man said.

"He did, and we didn't stop him," lady Xuan said. "Is that not enough of an answer for you?"

The man couldn't help but show a tinge of fear when he heard that but he still couldn't understand. "Why though? Neither he nor that girl was any strong at all."

"He doesn't need strength," Huang Xinyi said. "If you had offended him enough and he had wanted to kill you today, we would have aided him in the matter. Do you understand? If you do, go back and relay the information that needs to be relayed."

The group immediately disbanded as everyone went their own way to spread the news that the players had a chance to go visit their homes.

Chapter 1225 Father

Alex went outside with his family the next day to roam the city since Ronron had never been to one outside of the Central Continent.

She played in the snow for a bit before letting the group go to the city.

She was like a child in a candy shop, curiously looking at every single shop and trying to buy whatever she could get her hands on.

"Father, I want that," she pointed at a small plate armor that was hanging outside one of the shops.

"Do you even know if that is good?" Alex asked her.

"No, but it looks pretty," Ronron said.

"It is, isn't it," Liz asked. "Let me buy my grandniece that armor."

"Really, grandaunt? Thank you!" Ronron jumped up and down excitedly.

"You shouldn't buy stuff just because they look pretty. You need to buy them because they are useful," Alex told her.

"So what?" Ronron said. "I'm a princess, aren't I? Shouldn't princesses look pretty?"

"That..." Alex couldn't find a retort. "Then let's find you stuff that is both pretty and useful."

"Oh, right. Let's search for those," Ronron said.

They went around the city buying various things, but Ronron didn't really find anything that she liked that was both pretty and useful.

The city simply didn't have such a thing ready to sell at all.

"What do we do now?" Ronron asked. "Do we go to a different city?"

"We can," Alex said. "I want to go meet senior Luhei today anyway, so we can try and see if there are cities along the way that sell what you would like."

"Okay," Ronron said excitedly. "But are you sure those cities will have what we are looking for?"

"We can only tell after looking through them, can't we?" Alex asked.

"If you really want useful items, you can't bother with these normal shops, little girl," Liz said. "You actually need to go visit an auction. They sell the best of the best items there."

"Auction?" Ronron's eyes shined when she heard that word. "Father! Can we go to an Auction please?"

"Auction?" Alex looked around. "They don't take place whenever. There is usually a time and a place for these things."

"Please, please, please!" Ronron nearly begged him.

"Come on. You have to do it now," Liz said from the side.

"Sigh, alright. Let me ask the sect master to check if there are any auctions taking place today or tomorrow," Alex said.

"Thank you!" Ronron nearly jumped over them in excitement.

The group turned to go back to the Blue Spring sect. Ronron walked ahead with Graham looking at the many shops again, while Liz followed behind them with Alex.

"Having a daughter isn't easy, is it?" she asked.

"I don't know, aunt," Alex said. "I can't say for sure since I didn't raise her."

"Trust me, it is," Liz said. "Hannah was a pain to take care of for the longest time, especially with Rob busy at his job all day. It's a miracle she came out as good as she did."

Alex smiled at her aunt.

"Are you going to have her call you Dad soon?" Liz asked.

"Dad? She calls me father, isn't that good enough?" Alex asked.

"Father is super stiff. It makes it seem like the two of you aren't close at all," Liz said.

"That's not false though. It feels wrong to even call myself her father. I feel like I don't deserve it at all," Alex said.

"You can't blame yourself for that," Liz said. "You didn't know about her until you met her, right? It's not your fault."

Alex nodded. "But her calling me Father isn't bad, is it? I call Father, Father," he said.

"Yeah, I don't know where brother and sister Helen went wrong, but they should have changed your speech pattern long ago. It's probably because your grandpa wanted us to refer to him as Father too, so it stuck with brother," Liz said.

"I see," Alex thought. "I will have a talk with her about it soon. For now, I will let her just call me Father. It helps distinguish which one of us she is referring to."

"Sure, you do you," Liz said. "Where's Pearl, by the way? Inside his beast space?"

"Yes," Alex nodded. "He finished cultivating early in the morning, so I let him rest inside the beast space. It helps him quite a lot."

"Poor kid," Liz said. "You must do whatever you can to fix his problems, okay?"

"I will," Alex said with a soft smile. "Oh right, I've been meaning to ask you about some things, aunt Liz. Have you talked with your master?"

"My master? About what?" Liz asked.

"About leaving the Blazing Earth sect," Alex said. "Leaving the Northern continent and come live with us in the Southern Continent."

Liz stopped in her footsteps. "Right..." she said softly as he eyes wandered around a bit. "I hadn't given it much thought at all."

"Are you unsure if you want to leave or not?" Alex asked.

"I'm sure I want to leave," Liz quickly said. "Or at least I think I am, but I don't know. As I said, I didn't really give it any thought."

"You must come with us, Aunt Liz," Alex said.

"But..." Liz felt a little sad. Not only would she have to leave the people she had gotten so close to, she also felt like she was betraying the trust and help all those people had given her which had brought her to where she was.

"I should talk with my master," she said softly.

"Please do," Alex said. "I don't want them to cause any problem when it is time for us to leave."

They all finally returned back to the Blue Spring sect, and with Ronron's constant insistence, Alex found the sect leader and got him to find out if there was any auction being held around the continent.

"I'll send you someone with that information very soon," Huang Xinyi said and left.

An hour later, Ma Tianxin arrived at his door with the talisman that contained said information.

"Here is the information you requested," Ma Tianxin handed over the talisman.

"Thank you," Alex said as he took the talisman. "How are your preparations going?"

"Uhh... well enough," Ma Tianxin said. "It took a bit to convince father-in-law to let Xiuyin come with me, but I've succeeded in that, so we should be leaving together when the time comes."

"Great," Alex said and sent him away.

Alex returned to the room with the excited Ronron urgently asking him to look through the information.

Alex chuckled a bit and read through the talisman.

The talisman consisted of information about every single auction that was going to be held within the next 24 hours.

Alex looked through the list and judged which one would have the best items based on the cities they were in. Not only that, but he also had to judge it based on if the city was on the way to senior Luhei or not.

"Oh, there's this auction opening," he said out loud. It wasn't on the way, but it was certainly one of the best for sure.

"A little detour won't hurt us," he thought.

"Where are we going, father?" Ronron asked.

Alex looked at her and answered. "We're going to Silvermoon city."

Chapter 1226 Returning To Silvermoon City

Alex and the group left the Blue Spring sect in the afternoon and made their way Southwest.

The Silvermoon city was on the way, and beyond it was the Blazing Earth sect where Liz had to go to speak with her master.

They could have taken a simple teleportation formation to go to any city they wanted to, but because the auction was going to start tomorrow, Alex had decided to take it slow.

He didn't want to stay in the city for too long at all, and on top of that, he wanted to show the scenery of the Northern Continent to his father and his daughter.

"Wow, it's snowing," Ronron said as she looked at the overcast sky with heavy snowfall. There was a small barrier around the boat they were in, so the snow couldn't get in at all, but they still saw it clearly with how slow the boat was moving.

They watched the scenery change from one full of ice and snow, to one that had less of it. Then when they arrived at Silvermoon city, there was almost no snow at all.

The five of them got off and looked around the city.

"It's a big city," Graham said as he looked around. "Not as big as your capital, but still quite big."

"The entire city used to be a single sect, belonging to something called the Snow Immortal sect," Alex explained. "The sect was destroyed over 8 thousand years ago and their land became the Silvermoon city."

"You guys go in," Hao Ya said. "I will need to leave and go to the Teleportation formation. Make sure it can send everyone back and all."

"Are you sure you don't want to stay?" Alex asked.

"I rested the entire day yesterday," Hao Ya said. "I need to work now."

"Actually, let me come along with you," Liz said. "I should go back and speak to my master as soon as possible."

Alex nodded. "Father, do you want to go to the auction?" he asked.

"No, not particularly," Graham said. "I'm just following you guys."

"Then you should go with aunt," he said. "After I'm done here, I will take Ronron to meet senior Luhei and come find you in the Blazing Earth sect. That sect has Body Cultivators, so you might end up having something in common with the people there."

"Oh, is that so?" Graham said. "Then I will go with Liz. Make sure you guys don't get caught up somewhere."

"We won't," Alex said.

"Goodbye Grandpa, grandaunt, sister Hao," Ronron quickly waved them goodbye.

The three of them left on their own, leaving behind Ronron and Alex to go into the city alone.

As soon as Alex went into the city, he found something was different about it all.

"Wow, there are so many people," he thought to himself. "How are there so many?"

"Did they all come for the auction?" Ronron asked.

"I don't know," Alex said. "Maybe? It can't be that these are all players that want to go back though."

"Who cares? Let's just go to the auction, father," Ronron said.

"The auction is tomorrow morning at 10," Alex said. "We still have some 9 hours before that."

"Uhh... what do we do then?" Ronron asked.

"Do you feel tired?" Alex asked.

"Not particularly," Ronron said. "I am a cultivator too, you know. I can go on for days without resting at all."

"Hmm, then do you want to go around the city and see what they have?" Alex asked.

"Ooh, can we?" Ronron got excited. "Let's go, father."

Alex smiled. "Let's go then."

The two of them went around the city touring it all. There were various things in the city that Ronron liked, so Alex bought her everything she laid her eyes on.

Alex also went into all of the alchemy stores, confusing Ronron quite a bit.

"Why are we going to the Alchemy stores? Do you want to buy some pills?" she asked with a confused expression. After all, her father was supposed to be someone that was one of the best at making pills himself.

"No, I'm not looking to make a pill. I'm searching for some ingredients, but it's hard to find because of how sought after it is," Alex said.

"What ingredient?" Ronron asked.

"It's called a Blood Revitalizing Ginger," Alex said. "It's used to make a True Rejuvenating pill, which is what I want to make."

"True Rejuvenating pill? What does that do?" Ronron asked.

"It can improve someone's longevity by quite a few years, depending on how strong they are. It's not very effective for someone in the True realm or even the common realm, but for someone that is a mortal, the pill can improve their lives by nearly a thousand years."

"A THOUSAND YEARS?!" Ronron's eyes went wide.

"Uhuh," Alex said.

"A-and you're making these for..."

"Obviously for your parents, who else?" Alex said.

Ronron slowly started tearing up when she heard that.

"Hey, you don't have to cry," Alex said as he quickly wiped her tears.

Ronron quickly hugged him in the middle of the shop, surprising Alex. "Thank you, father."

Alex smiled and stroked her head for a bit. "Alright, you can stop now. You'll make my clothes wet," he said.

"Hehe," Ronron chuckled and moved away from him. She wiped her tears while Alex went on searching for the ingredients.

They went around a few shops, but nowhere did they find the ingredients.

"Hmm, they might have to wait a year or so," Alex said. "I know there are a lot back in the Southern Continent, so I can use the ones there to make it."

"I don't think there is a hurry right now, father," Ronron said.

The sun was starting to come up from the east by the time the two of them had gone through all the shops in the city.

"Do you want something to eat? You haven't tasted what this world's food is like, have you?" Alex asked.

"Of course not," Ronron said. "Are we going to a restaurant?"

"Yes," Alex said and took her to a restaurant close by.

He wanted a separate place for himself and his daughter on some of the private upper floors of the restaurant, but to his surprise, there wasn't any place available on the upper floors at all.

"I'm sorry, senior. You will have to wait if you insist on using the upper floors. Otherwise, we do have a table open right here," the young man said.

"What do you think?" Alex turned around to Ronron. "You can make the choice."

Ronron got a little close to Alex. "Do the upper floors get better food?" she asked.

"No, senior. The food is all the same, everywhere. We do not discriminate amongst our customers," the young man answered quickly.

"Oh, then we should just sit right here, father," Ronron said.

"Alright, take us to the table," Alex said.

The young man took the two of them to the table where they looked through the menu.

"By the way, do you know why there are so many people in this city?" Alex asked.

"Oh, that's because everyone in the Ancient Battlefield was called out abruptly so that the players or whatever can return to their place," the young man said. "It only happened today, so the city is filled to the brim."

"I see," Alex said. "Thank you for answering."

Then, he let Ronron order what she wanted to eat and waited for the food to arrive.

Chapter 1227 To The Auction

"I want this meat dish, and this soup, and this uhh... whatever this is, and this dessert, and ooh also this drink. Does this have alcohol? I'm bad with alcohol. But maybe I should try it, so this drink too. And these side dishes, and this meat bun, 2 of them."

Ronron excitedly ordered everything she could get her eyes on the menu. She wasn't very good at reading the demon language just yet, so she had to order based on what little she could understand from the menu she was presented.

The waiter hurriedly wrote down everything she was asking for with sweat dripping down his forehead. He had never seen someone order so much food with only 2 people eating.

"Make everything double so my father can eat too," she said.

"Double?!" the waiter looked at her as if she was crazy.

Alex rubbed his forehead as the foot was in fact too much. It wasn't like they were having a feast or anything. This was supposed to be a breakfast.

"Can you even eat all that? You will get stuffed," he told her.

"Does it matter? I will just destroy the food in my body if it's too much to make room for more," she said.

Alex sighed in the end. "Bring what she said. You can take your time and do it one at a time. We will probably be here for a while," he told the waiter.

The waiter nodded and quickly left.

Ronron looked around as she waited and watched the crowd in awe. Seeing how the cultivators went about their day was quite interesting for her.

"Father, weren't you popular here before?" she asked. "Aunt Liz said that you were so popular that you had to spend weeks here going to visit different people because they wanted to become friends with you."

"I was, why?" Alex asked.

"How many years ago was it?" she asked.

"Uhh... about 30 years ago, I would say," Alex said as he thought. "Maybe a little less than that."

"Is that enough time for people to forget you here?" she asked. "Aren't cultivators supposed to live forever and remember everything? Then how come no one is surprised to see you at all?"

"Ah, well 2 reasons mainly," Alex said. "First of all, when I was becoming popular here, I wore a mask to hide my face. So they know me more by the mask than my face."

"And secondly... can you tell how strong I am right now?" he asked.

Ronron gave a confused look and looked at him. "How am I supposed to tell? You are way stronger than me so I have no idea," she said.

"Well, the same would happen to the others all well," Alex said. "Because my cultivation base is currently concealed so well that barely anyone can even tell that I am a Saint realm cultivator."

"Oh," Ronron wasn't expecting that answer at all. "Can you teach me that technique?"

"Sure," Alex said. "I have many techniques to teach you, which I will after I return from the Western Continent."

"Thank you, father," Ronron nearly shouted out loud.

The food arrived one after another and the two of them took their time eating it. The food was delicious but not enough to be surprised by it for Alex, but to Ronron, this was the best thing she had eaten since she was born.

The flavor of the meat, the sweetness of the dessert, the blissful pain the wine left behind on her throat, all of it was an experience that she enjoyed way more than she would have thought she would.

The dishes came one after another and the two of them ate them like there was no tomorrow. Alex even brought out Pearl and Whisker to let them try the food a bit before sending them back.

It was only 2 hours later did the two of them finally finish eating everything.

"Urghh... I shouldn't have ordered so much," Ronron said as she slumped on her chair.

"Come on, get up. you're fine," Alex said.

"No, I really ate too much, father. I can't move," she said in a lethargic manner.

"Okay, then burn your food," Alex said. "You said you would do that right?"

"But it was so good. I don't want to get rid of it," Ronron said.

Alex chuckled a bit. "Then do you want me to carry you on my back?" he asked.

She suddenly got up. "Of course not," she said with a small pout on her face. "Fine, I'm burning it."

She closed her eyes and the food inside of her was destroyed by the Qi as nothing remained at all.

She opened her eyes and took a deep breath afterward. "Alright, let's leave."

Alex finally got up and went on to pay for the food. Their total came up to around 10 thousand spirit stones, which surprised both of them quite a bit.

Ronron was surprised at how expensive it was, and Alex was surprised at how cheap it was. He quickly paid for the food and left.

Ronron walked behind him, getting out of the restaurant and walking in the direction of the Auction house that was supposed to open up in a little more than an hour from now.

The auction house wasn't very far away, however, and it would only take them about 20 minutes to get there at best.

"Hmm?" Alex made a soft sound.

"Hm? What's wrong, father?" Ronron asked.

"Nothing," Alex said. "Just a bunch of people following us."

"Following us? Why?" she asked.

"Because we spent quite a bit of money," Alex said.

"Should we tell the police? Err... no, what do they have here? Guards?" Ronron asked.

"There should be some sort of patrol group formed from the disciples of the 5 major sects. But that won't be necessary at all," Alex said.

The ones following were weaklings after all.

* * * * * *

The group of 3 young men silently followed the two people up front.

"That girl must be a spoiled brat, asking for so much money from the man," one of them said.

"Look at him, that's probably her brother. He does whatever she says, no wonder she is spoiled," another one said.

"Are you sure we can loot them?" the third one asked. "The girl was weak, but I can't tell how strong the man is."

"Do you think he would need to eat if he was strong? Besides, strong men wouldn't get their food in the lower floors. I bet he is just acting strong because of the money. What we need to be careful about is if they have any guards. Don't be seen okay?" the first man said.

"Look," the second man pointed. "That's the auction house. Damn it, are they going to spend it all in the auction house? What if the items they buy are useless?"

"Doesn't matter, we can sell those items back," the first man said. "Alright, let's enter the auction house ourselves too."

* * * * *

Alex and Ronron arrived at the auction house that had quite a line waiting for it to open. He could sense quite a few strong individuals, all of whom seem to be ready for it to open as well.

'The Ancient Battlefield was opened yesterday, so everyone must have come out,' he thought. 'It might not be so easy to buy things cheaply if they all decide to bet on the stuff.'

Ultimately, it would all boil down to who had more money in the end, so Alex wasn't worried at all. After all, who here possibly walked around with a few dozen million spirit stones in their storage bag?

He walked up to one of the people from the auction house to get himself a seat inside.

"Hi, is it too late to join the auction?" Alex asked.

"You cannot put up any items for the auction anymore, but you can join it if your intention is to only purchase and not sell," the person said.

"Oh, yes that's what I wanted. Can I have a VIP room?" Alex asked.

"Sorry, senior, all VIP rooms have already been booked. We only have seats in the main hall and that too at the back. Unfortunately, you have arrived too late to reserve any good seats," the person said.

"Ah, I see. My bad," Alex said. "Can we have two of those seats then?"

"Of course," the person said and brought out two metal tickets with numbers on it. "These will be your chairs."

Alex paid the small fee for entering the auction house and took the tickets. He went back to where Ronron was and showed her the ticket.

"I got us a seat at the back. We were late to get the good seats," he said.

"Will that put us at a disadvantage?" Ronron asked curiously.

"Not really. It's all the same," Alex said. "It's just that people like to stay at the front to see what is being sold more clearly. You won't be able to use your spiritual sense on the items, so you are left with your normal eyesight."

"I have good eyesight," Ronron said proudly. "They are so good that my master says I can see Wood aura and Spatial aura with my two eyes later on if I can get to a high enough cultivation realm."

"Oh, is that so?" Alex asked. 'That sounds like a weaker version of Demon eyes though. Maybe I should teach everyone the Demon eyes too. It will be a pain to make that paste though.'

The two of them stayed there for a bit more time before the auction let them all get in. Alex and Ronron went to find their seats toward the back of the hall and once they were settled, they waited for the auction to begin.

Chapter 1228 Ronron's First Auction Experience

Even while she was on one of the last few rows of the auction hall, Ronron's excitement was nowhere near low at all. She was like a child that constantly moved around her seat, looking at everything she was witnessing for the first time with an air of innocence that was hard to come by.

Seeing her like that only improved Alex's mood and soon enough he started smiling too.

It took a while for the auction to start at which time the hall was finally fully filled. Once everyone was there, the curtains at the front opened up, allowing everyone to know that the auction had begun.

A woman in a bright red dress walked out from behind the stage and started introducing herself to the audience. Once she was done with the formalities, the first item was brought out to be auctioned off.

"How does it work? Do I tell them I want to buy it or..." Ronron asked.

"Do you not know how an auction works?" Alex asked. "You should have seen some back home, right?"

"I probably did, but I don't really remember how it all works. I've been training with my master for the past decade, so I'm a little lost on the modern life too," she said.

"I see," Alex said. "You must've lost a lot of friends too then."

"Eh, not really. I always knew there was nothing for me after high school, so I never really made any friends at all. I did have some, but none were close enough to use the word lost for them" she said.

"I see," Alex said. "Well, the auction is quite simple. In a moment, the woman up there will tell you the starting price of the item. Then everyone will start bidding on it with a number that's higher than the starting price. Each bid must be higher than the last one by a set amount of spirit stones, which the woman will tell you."

"So I can't just increase my bid by 1?" Ronron asked.

Alex shook his head. "That's not allowed. They might even kick you out for disturbing the auction if you do that," he said. "Also, you can't increase it by a random arbitrary number. While not against the rules of the auction, it's better if you keep your bid on a nice-sounding number."

"I see," Ronron said excitedly.

The first item on the auction was a simple defensive talisman that could stop a single Saint Condensation realm cultivator's attack. It was quite a good item for anyone in the True realm who was used to being in conflict with Saint realm cultivators.

Especially for people that frequently went to the Ancient Battlefield where one couldn't tell just what sort of enemy one would meet inside.

"You don't need this one right?" Alex asked.

"No, master has given me way better artifacts," Ronron said softly.

"Good, you can learn how the auction takes place then," Alex said and waited for the bidding to start.

As soon as the woman allowed for it, the people all around the hall started bidding one after another, even speaking on top of each other.

Ronron's eyes widened in surprise at the chaos that had been created in the room in just a matter of seconds. She was surprised that the cultivators weren't as orderly as they appeared beforehand.

The order came to the hall a few seconds later when the early bids died down and the bids started becoming higher and higher in amount.

"You don't have to hurry to bid. You can let others go for a bit before you put your own bid up," Alex explained to her.

"Do we just say the number? Is there no system to bid systematically?" Ronron asked.

"No, whoever has more money here places their bids and wins. That's what an auction is," Alex said.

The talisman was quickly sold and the second item was brought forth.

The second item was a pink robe made with many different frills on it, and many different glittering jewels that made it ever so fascinating.

Alex didn't even have to look at Ronron to know that she was going to bid on this thing. Given how early in the auction this was, he knew it wasn't anything good, but since his daughter wanted to bid on it, he wouldn't say anything.

"The bidding starts at 80 True Spirit stones, and each bid must be a True spirit stone or more than the last one. Begin."

Ronron joined in on the bidding despite Alex's teaching and started shouting one number after another.

Each time she heard a different number, she would shout a number that was higher than that.

Soon enough, the bidding came to around 120 and the competition lessened. Even so, there were still a few people that were bidding on it.

One by one, the bidding increased slowly but surely.

Ronron started frowning a little. "They aren't giving up at all," she said.

"Do you want to give up?" Alex asked.

"No, look how pretty that is. It's so much better than what I'm wearing," she said with a pout.

"Then show them that you mean it," Alex said.

"Huh? How?" she asked.

"Increase the bid by a large number. Instead of increasing it by 1, increase it by 5," Alex explained.

"Oh, I can do that?" Ronron was surprised.

"Quickly, if that woman up there counts to 3, you won't get to bid anymore," Alex told her.

"Oh," Ronron quickly turned around. "145."

"146," another voice shouted.

"147," another voice followed behind that."

"155," Ronron shouted.

The voices hesitated a bit. One of them bid 156, but Ronron quickly retaliated with 160. Realizing that no clothes, however pretty, could be worth that much, the voices stopped bidding, and 3 gavel hits later, Ronron became the proud owner of a pretty pink dress.

"I can't wait to see it," she said and looked around the room for someone to bring the dress to her.

Alex chuckled a little. "You won't get anything right now. You'll get it all once the auction is over and you pay them the money for everything you bought," he said.

"Oh," she said, a little disappointed. "You sure do know a lot about auctions, father. You must have been to a lot of them."

"I have," Alex said. "I especially had to go to many different ones in the Luminance Empire because I had to find a near-impossible to find ginseng so I could regrow an arm I had lost."

"Woah," Ronron was surprised. "No wonder you're so experienced about auctions. Did you learn it all from that experience?"

"No, someone had to teach me how it all worked at the start," Alex said.

"Oh? Who?" Ronron asked.

"The person you are named after," Alex said, reminiscing a bit about the past. "Ma Rong, my first master."

Ronron became silent for a bit. "Papa used to say the same when I was younger," she said.

"Of course," Alex said. "The memories I have of her are the ones your father made. Sometimes, I wonder if I should get angry that he robbed away my time with her. But then I realize that all the experiences and memories are still with me, so it's all the same regardless."

"You must miss her a lot," Ronron said.

Alex nodded. "Every time I think of a recipe or make a pill, I see her face in my mind. Outside of my own family, she is probably the one I love the most."

He quickly shook his head and smiled a little. "I got a little sentimental there, didn't I? I'm sorry," he said.

"No, no, it's alright," Ronron said. "It's actually quite good to see that you have that sort of side too."

"Haha, of course, I do," Alex said. "Did you think I was an emotionless monster or what?"

"No, no, that's not what I meant," Ronron quickly said. "It's just that master said that cultivators are used to death and pain, so a lot of them grow callous to this sort of stuff and don't feel anything anymore."

"I can't say he's wrong, but he's not right either," Alex said. "Cultivators do feel stuff when the ones in pain are their loved ones. Sure some become heartless, but that's not true for all of them."

"I see," Ronron said.

The auction continued with more and more items being auctioned off. Ronron managed to get her hands on every single one of the items she wanted the buy.

Whether it was formations, more dresses, special cultivation books, or anything. Even if she didn't need it herself, but thought someone else would like it, she bought it.

Thankfully, they were still in the first half of the auction, so nothing could be considered expensive to Alex.

Alex wasn't particularly excited about anything and waited for the second half to begin. However, just when he thought it was getting boring, the woman walked out with a tray, on top of which was a single item he immediately recognized.

"Ronron," he said softly.

"Hmm?" Ronron turned around.

He looked into her eyes and said, "You have to get this."

"Huh?" Ronron turned around to see what it was and was confused for a moment. However, the confusion quickly vanished when the woman introduced the item.

"Here we have the final item on display before we move onto Saint rank items," she said as she showed off the small ginger piece on the tray.

"This is the Blood Revitalizing Ginger."

Chapter 1229 Greed

"Wait... isn't this one that papa and mama need?" Ronron asked seriously.

"Yes, this is it," Alex said. "If you can't get it now, I won't have to wait a year to find it when I return to the Southern Continent."

"I'll do my best, father," Ronron said with a resolute look.

The woman explained a few more things about the item in front of her to explain what it did so more people would be interested in the item.

The amount of Blood Revitalizing Ginger there was on the tray was enough to make at least 5 different pills and could improve 5 different True realm cultivator's lives by a couple of hundred years.

Once the woman was done explaining, she started the bidding.

Immediately, many people threw out numbers that quickly reached double the base price of the item in the auction. The auction hall wanted them to pay 300 True spirit stones for the item because of how rare and valuable it was, and it crossed 600 in less than a minute.

During all this time, Ronron waited without betting as she let the others bring the price high first.

After it all slowed down a bit, she bid her own amount. 820 True spirit stones.

Immediately, her call was outbid by someone else, who was then outbid a second later. Ronron looked in the direction of the voices with a stern look.

"Father, should we explain to them why we want it? They might let it go for us," she said to Alex.

"Hmm... I don't know," Alex said. "Threats are not allowed at all in the auction house, but maybe trying to persuade them could be allowed."

"Are you not sure?" Ronron asked.

pŒ±–ødŒ± –ô·¥èŒΩ√™|,—Å√≤–ú "Each auction house has its own rule, and I haven't been to this one in over 30 years, so I'm not really sure," Alex said.

"Oh, then I won't say anything," Ronron said and went on bidding.

The bids slowed down around 1000 true spirit stones and came to a staggering halt at around 1200 true spirit stones.

However, there was someone in the VIP room who kept bidding against Ronron no matter how much she bid. She even used the tactic Alex taught her, to increase her bid by a large amount, but that didn't help at all.

The bidding continued for nearly 2 more minutes as the bid reached over 1500 True spirit stones, over 5 times the base price.

"Young lady," a voice came from the VIP rooms. "Would you please consider backing down from this bid? I would love to buy this."

Ronron was surprised to hear someone speak, and someone old at that. Her heart faltered for a bit, wondering what she did.

Bidding for the item was good, but if it was very important to someone else then...

"Do you care about a random person more or your parents?" Alex asked.

"Of course, I care about my parents," Ronron said quickly. "But... that person..."

"This is what it means to be callous and heartless in the cultivation world. You are out for yourself. You help others when you can and that's fine, but when you have to choose between them and yourself, you always choose yourself."

"After all, the main driving factor for a cultivator is his greed. A greed to live all the years you can, greed to own everything, greed to become stronger than everyone. If you want to become a cultivator, show some greed," Alex said.

Ronron was a little shocked to hear the words, but she quickly nodded. "Greed, huh? I'll be greedy then."

"1600 True spirit stones," he announced her bid.

Alex smiled.

"Young girl, are you really not going to let this old man have what he wants?" the man in the VIP room spoke again.

"Sir," Ronron spoke. "You are in the VIP room, so you must be rich, right?"

"Somewhat, yes," the old man's voice came.

"Then please stop wasting both of our time and just bid. This is an auction, the one with more money wins here," she told the man.

The man remained silent for a moment and finally spoke.

"1700 True spirit stones."

Ronron's eyes widened a bit. She turned to her father with a panicked look. After all, the man had just increased the price by an entire 100 True Spirit stones.

Alex nodded slightly, telling her to not back down.

"1800 True spirit stones."

The crowd gasped a little in surprise, mostly because by now they had checked who it was that was making the bid and had realized that it was a girl who had only recently stepped in the True realms.

And somehow she was making bids that involved hundreds and hundreds of True Spirit stones at once.

"1900 True spirit stones."

"2000 True spirit stones."

The bid went back and forth for a bit.

"3500 True Spirit stones," Ronron said after a few bids, directly jumping way high with the price of the ingredients.

Alex shook his head internally, but he didn't let Ronron notice anything. 3500 for a True rank ingredient was stupid by any imagination of the word.

People would laugh at someone if they heard the person had done such a thing. However, since it was his own daughter and since the ingredient was something they needed, he didn't stop her.

The man in the VIP room did stop, however, since he realized how much of a waste this would be if he kept going.

In the end, the ginger was won over by Ronron who cheered excitedly.

"Now, we'll be moving on to the 2nd half of our auction," the woman said and left the stage.

Once she left, quite a few people in the hall started leaving the auction too. Ronron looked around half-curious and half-worried.

"What's happening?" she asked Alex.

"We're moving onto Saint-ranked items," Alex said.

"So?" Ronron asked.

"So, it's going to get very, very expensive now," he said. "The auction before this was simply child's play to what's coming in terms of price. Most of these people won't be able to buy any of it, so they are leaving instead."

"Oh..." Ronron thought. "I see."

A much more beautiful woman came from behind the stage with a clear Saint realm cultivation base erupting from her. She started introducing herself and restarted the auction once again.

She explained whatever was needed as the first item was slowly brought out.

"This is it," Alex said. "They should have quite the items on this half, so you should bid more frequently."

"Really? That woman said everything is going to cost over 10,000 True spirit stones though," Ronron said.

Alex chuckled and shook his head. "I told you it's going to get expensive. I'll let you know if I'm running out of money. Just bid on what you like, except for pills. You don't need to bid on pills," he said.

"Of course," Ronron said. "I'm not stupid."

The woman introduced the first item of the second half of the auction.

"Here we have a skill book for our first item," she said. "It's a skill called Golden Spears of Heaven, which allows a person to create 4 illusory spears with metal energy and control it as they see fit."

Alex didn't even hesitate as he leaned over and whispered, "buy it."

Chapter 1230 Expensive

Ronron was a little surprised that Alex wanted to buy a technique that sounded so simple. "Do you not have many offensive techniques, father? If you don't, I can ask master to lend you some," she said.

"No, I have enough," Alex said. "I just want this because I believe I want to try something with it."

"Hmm, okay," Ronron said.

The bidding started and everyone started saying out loud their bid.

Alex sat there thinking about what he was going to do. His plan was simple for the most part. He was going to take the Golden Spears of Heaven and somehow mix it with the Iron fist technique of his that he used so much.

With the Dao of techniques, he could start to mix and merge many techniques together so long as they were compatible. He wasn't yet sure how effective techniques of multiple elements would be, but since both of these two techniques were Metal related, he was sure he could achieve it.

He could have simply used his control over Metal energy to formulate a technique of his own that did the same thing, but that would require him quite a few days of time to improve it to the same level as this technique would provide him.

While the Dao helped him improve the techniques faster, he was certain that it would still take him weeks if not months to take the technique to its peak, and that was time that Alex didn't want to bother with.

The bidding had started with 25 thousand True spirit stones which had certainly surprised Ronron quite a bit. That was an amount that she had never even seen, and yet there were people out here that were bidding on it like it was nothing.

Soon, the amount reached over 50 thousand and it kept going. It only stopped once it reached 65 thousand true spirit stones, which Ronron got.

She looked around at the hall where people were looking at her with weird expressions on their faces.

"Are we spending too much money by any chance?" Ronron asked. "That was more than I spent in the entire first half."

Alex shrugged. "Not really," he said. "This is what I used to make for selling a single pill in the southern continent. And that was before I became a King. No matter how much I spend, it won't be much at all."

He could imagine right now what sort of expression she would make if she ever figured out how much he had to pay to keep the Royal army well maintained for just a month.

A few more items went by, of which Ronron managed to get about half them, and that was only because the others were something she did not want at all.

Something else was brought out, the first weapon for the 2nd half of the auction, which was a bow made up of the Starforged Tungsten.

Alex saw that item and made a peculiar face. 'Right, I should get some of those metals,' he thought.

Ronron saw the bow and wondered if she should get it or not. "That looks quite nice," she said. "Should I get it?"

Alex looked at her and asked, "Do you know how to use a bow?"

"Not... really, but I don't know how to use any weapons really, so I have nothing to lose. Also, I do have a skill that lets me make arrows," she said. "So it could be useful."

"Hmm... buy it then," Alex said. "It's made from a good metal. Although not much of it is used in it, it still can help you quite a bit. If nothing, you can use the bow as a training weapon."

Ronron nodded. "Okay," she said and waited for the woman to stop explaining so much about the bow. Once the explanations were over, the bidding started at 60 thousand true spirit stones.

Ronron tried her best to outbid everyone while not going overboard with the amount. In the end, she managed to get the bow for 110 thousand true spirit stones.

This was the first item that she had managed to get without the price basically doubling.

The next few items were some talismans and pills which she stood out. There were quite a few of them, and each one was sold for a preposterous price which continued surprising Ronron quite a bit.

"Then next item is a set of 10 pills that can be taken in advance to counter any poison, venom, or toxins that you might get afflicted with later. It is a very good defensive pill to take if you are going somewhere dangerous."

pŒ±–ødŒ±-≈à·¥èŒΩ√™|¬∑—Å√≥–ú "Since the pill recipe is private, you can only get these pills right here, so make sure to get them," the woman spoke.

She mentioned the harmony level of all 10 pills and then gave the base price for all 10 pills at once.

240 thousand True spirit stones.

As soon as she allowed it, the bidding war started with quite the frenzy.

Ronron looked around with surprise as no one showed this sort of reaction when the previous items were being sold.

"What is up with the reaction, father?" she asked.

"It's a rare pill that one cannot just make, so everyone is very agitated to get their hands on it," Alex said.

"Is it a rare pill because it's a secret recipe?" Ronron asked.

Alex nodded. "Someone, maybe even a player, must have been holding onto some pill recipes for a while now. Since Alchemy was effectively banned previously, they couldn't really make the pills, but now that it's being spread around with full force, people are coming out from hiding and selling all sorts of pills."

"This must be one of the better pills, which is why everyone is so excited about it," Alex said.

"I see," Ronron said. "I wonder what they would do if they knew you could make this pill just like that."

"Huh? What do you mean?" Alex asked.

Ronron gave a confused look. "What's so confusing about what I said?" she asked.

"I can't make that pill," he said.

"Huh? You can't?" Ronron asked. "But... aren't you like really good at alchemy."

"Just because I'm good at alchemy doesn't mean that I know every single recipe out there. I would have to try for years to be able to make a pill that can do the same thing as that," he said.

"Huh? Then... isn't this an amazing pill?" Ronron asked.

"Of course, it is," Alex said. "Every single antidote pill I have is just that, an antidote. It is always something you take after you have been inflicted with the poison. There is not a single pill I have that can protect you from one."

"I see," Ronron said. "If you are inflicted with some strong poison that kills you in no time, this sort of pill would come quite in handy."

"It will," Alex said. "Which is why I'm very curious about its recipe right now."

"What do we do? Do we go searching for the person who put these pills up for auction?" Ronron asked.

"No need for that," Alex said. "I am capable of finding a recipe from a pill alone. All you have to do now is buy those pills."

Chapter 1231 Auction Final

Ronron tried her best to buy those pills even if they cost a lot. She ended up bidding over 400 thousand True spirit stones for just those pills, which she herself was surprised with.

It wasn't just her as no one expected a young lady sitting at the very last seat of the auction hall to buy so many items.

Some of them wondered how she was so rich.

Some wondered if she even had any money on her.

Some wondered what sect she belonged to.

Some wondered why she didn't just get a VIP seat.

Every single person that was still in the auction hall thought something about Ronron as she had made it very clear that when it came to bidding, she was going to be a force to be reckoned with.

It wasn't just the guests either, even the auction hall was worried about her. They were worried that she didn't have the money.

However, before anyone could even come to ask her about it, Alex had already sent them away.

The next few items were sold quite quickly. They were mostly ingredients and raw materials, which Ronron knew would come in handy, so she bought it all.

She especially bought any wood treasure as that would help her cultivate quite a bit. Aside from that she bought spirit wines that her master would most likely love.

Being in the central continent for over a thousand years, she was sure he would love something like this if she brought it back for her.

Other than her master, she also bought a few defensive items for her own parents, as well as some other artifacts that she could give to the rest of her family.

She knew she had a grandmother to meet who knew a lot about talismans, so she planned on buying a few things for her as well.

Pearl got a few trinkets to wear that would protect him as well, and so did Whisker.

In the end, most of the items that were sold in the second half of the auction had been bought by Ronron.

The final item being sold in today's auction was brought out from behind the stage and placed in front of the woman.

The woman backed off a few steps and smiled at the crowd. "I'm sure this is what most of you have come for," she said as she snapped her finger and the box opened up wide.

As soon as it was opened, the entire crowd went silent as the atmosphere chilled a little. Alex's eyes narrowed immediately when he felt the aura that was coming from the box.

'That's... death aura,' he thought seriously. He couldn't believe there was something out there with such a strong death aura. When using his Demon Eyes, his entire vision went black from the amount of aura that was being produced.

"Not just death," a voice spoke in his head. "It's darkness too."

"Is it?" Alex asked. He could sense death, but darkness was still quite a bit away for him.

"This is the Sword of Death," the woman said. "As you might already know, this is the sword that Gong Lufui used to rampage in the town of Evernight in the State of Bing, destroying the Lost Light sect overnight."

"Gong Lufui went missing afterward, and no one could find him. However, a few days ago, he came to us and asked us to help sell the sword since he no longer needed it."

"Gong Lufui was a nobody looking for revenge, and this was the sword that helped him get his revenge, so guests should know just how good this sword is."

"We won't waste another minute. The bidding will start at 800 thousand True spirit stones, and each successive increase must be over 5 thousand true spirit stones," the woman said. "Please, begin."

The crowd went into a frenzy to bid on the sword. A sword that could make a nobody strong enough to destroy a sect was not a simple matter.

Everyone wanted it, even if they had no use for it just yet.please visit

"Sword of Death, what a terrible name," Ronron said with a disgusted look.

"That's probably something people named it to make it sound better," Alex said as he looked at the sword. It was a simple sword design-wise, but the aura was quite strong.

"It's almost like I'm looking at an amateur version of myself," Godslayer said.

"You're not wrong," Alex said. "Death and Darkness, that's your thing... and yet, here we are with a sword that's not different."

"This is probably one of the many replicas made of me," Godslayer said. "There were many that tried to make a sword that was like me, but one they could control."

"Did they fail?" Alex asked.

"Of course," Godslayer said. "Most people underestimate Death and Darkness aura when together. You can get strong with it and fight for a few months or years, but slowly, the aura takes over your body, eating it from the inside."

"That's why I had to switch hosts every so often because their bodies would give up after a while. Human beings aren't built to handle a lot of Death and Darkness, even if they understand its dao."

Alex nodded softly. "Do I count amongst them? Probably not right?" he asked.

Godslayer grumbled a bit before answering. "No, your body has Yang that is way too potent. Any death and darkness aura you gather is immediately destroyed," he said.

Alex nodded again. "Thought so," he said. "So, are we getting this sword or not?"

"Of course, we are," Godslayer said. "It will make for a fantastic meal."

Alex smiled and turned toward Ronron. "Can you get me that sword?" he asked.

"You want that sword, father?" Ronron asked with a surprised look on her face. "Do you... want to use it?"

"No, I'm going to destroy it," Alex said.

"Oh, okay," Ronron said. "You can count on me."

She turned around toward the stage and shouted her number. "1 Million!" she said.

The bid had only reached halfway through the 900 thousand range when it suddenly jumped to a million. The crowd sighed when they realized the girl was taking part in this bid as well.

The people in the hall immediately backed off, but the ones in the VIP room didn't. After all, this was a sword that helped a nobody gain fame overnight.

The bid continued increasing one after another, but Ronron wasn't backing down at all. She increased the amount every time someone spoke, surprising people with her tenacity.

On the inside, she was a little worried that she was spending so much money, but on the outside, she continued bidding higher and higher.

In the end, the auction ended with 1.75 Million true spirit stones as the final bid of the auction, by none other than Ronron.

When the final gavel hit the table, the sword was sold.

"That was the last item being sold in today's auction. Thank you all for coming today, and I hope you will all come again."

The woman left the stage and people started walking away.

Alex stood up as well. "Come on, time to go get what we bought."

Chapter 1232 Acquainted

Ronron's mouth remained gaping open as she watched Alex pull out over 5 million True spirit stones to pay the old man in front of him.

Even the old man himself was beyond surprised to see such an amount coming from a young man and woman that he knew absolutely nothing about.

"Is it all there?" Alex asked his daughter.

Ronron nodded listlessly as she looked at everything that was inside the two different storage bags.

Alex took the storage bag and pulled out a few items that were for himself, mainly the Golden Spears of Heaven technique, the poison immunity pill, and the sword named the Sword of Death.

"Shall we get going?" he said as he stood up to leave.

"Dear guest," the old man in front of him quickly stood up. "Would like to get early information on the items we are auctioning next time around? We can also prepare VIP rooms for the two of you if you wish to."

"No need," Alex said before Ronron could even say anything. "This is most likely the last time you will ever see me here. Good day."

He walked away from the room with Ronron quickly following behind him. The two walked out of the auction house and then made their way out of the city now that their job here was done.

"How was it?" Alex asked. "Did you find your first auction experience exciting?"

"It was, father," Ronron said. "Although, since it felt like I had an unending source of money, I couldn't feel the intensity in bidding since I knew I was always going to win."

Alex chuckled a bit. "You can do so in the future," he said. "Although, this auction will teach you one thing for sure."

"Will? I still haven't learned it yet?" Ronron asked. "What is it?"

"Why you shouldn't always go out in an auction house."

Ronron got curious about what he meant. After all, it was he that gave her the money and permission to do so.

They left the city and appeared out in the open ground where the snow still covered the land.

"Where are we going next? To meet senior Luhei?' Ronron asked.

"Yes, but that's only after we deal with them," Alex said as he turned around to see the many people that had followed them outside the city.

A single puppet flew out of his storage bag which caught Ronron and jumped away to a safe location. At the same time, Whisker came out and went with the puppet to look after Ronron should the need arise.

Unfortunately, he couldn't call Pearl in this current situation as that would just be one more person he would have to keep safe if he did.

The many old men and women landed in front of Alex and sneaked a glance toward Ronron who was far behind him.

They looked a little confused as they couldn't sense anything impressive from him at all.

"Are you with that girl over there?" one of them asked.

"Yes, I am," Alex said. "May I ask why you guys are after my daughter?"

"You know damn well why," one of them said. "You were there in the auction house with her."

"I was, that is why I am curious why you guys are after my daughter," Alex said. "After all, she did nothing there that was either disrespectful or illegal, so you have no reason to be here."

"You are outside the city wall, friend," one of them said. "The only law here is that of the jungle, and in the presence of the strong, a weakling holding onto a treasure is the worst crime they can do."

"Take out the Sword of Death, young man. We will leave after we take it," someone else said.

"You surely don't expect me to hand over such a valuable sword just because you say so, do you?" Alex asked. "How about this, anyone who can pay me 3 Million True spirit stones can take the sword."

"You are treading on a path that will only lead to death, my friend," one of the stronger men said.please visit

"I can assure you, I am not," Alex said. "Also, please do not call me friend. The best we have ever been is acquainted. I do not recall calling you my friend."

The man was taken back a bit. "Have we met before?" he asked.

"We have," Alex said and looked toward some of the other people there. "I have met with quite a few of you here."

The people looked around with confused looks. "I don't remember meeting you, ever," the man said.

"Of course," Alex said. "That's expected as you never saw my face."

A white mask appeared on Alex's palm which he slowly brought to his face. The mask allowed him to see clearly from the inside, but from the outside, it looked completely white and opaque.

A few people suddenly got serious as they recognized the mask. One of them remembered meeting him in the Ancient Battlefield over 25 years ago. "You... you're Yu Ming," he said.

"I see you remember me," Alex spoke.

"Yu Ming?" another person thought. "Isn't that... the guy who learned Sword Aura while in True realm?"

"That Yu Ming?"

The people realized who he was one after another. Those that didn't know were soon told by the others who did.

"Wait, he's the one that took away the cauldron in the Alchemy Peninsula 2 days ago. That was the name the elders there called the person," another person spoke.

Ronron was surprised at how popular her father was. Alex was surprised at how little his popularity was here.

'Did the senior hide my involvement in killing the madman?' he wondered. 'Not to mention, none of them are aware of what I did in the Dao mountain too.'

He was sure now that there was something done to stop his name from being spread around more than it already had.

'Not that it matters really,' he thought.

He looked at the people around him who started to calm down a little.

"So, now that you are aware of who I am, please leave," Alex said. "We have to be away now and I don't want any bother."

"Stop!" one of the people shouted. "Did you really think just because you are acquainted with us, we will leave you be? You have the Sword of Death, and for that, you will have to stay back until we get our hands on it."

Multiple people pulled out weapons all of a sudden and a few of them even prepared some attacks they were going to throw at any moment.

Ronron worried for her father at the back. She couldn't tell one Saint from another, so she wasn't sure who was stronger here.

Alex reached for his mask once more.

"A decade, was it? No, maybe 9 years," he spoke softly as he pulled down his mask. "Yes, it was 9 years."

As he pulled down his mask, the people's faces changed as they saw a wide smile appear on Alex's face.

"It has been over 9 years since I got to fight someone seriously," he said as he flexed his Saint Foundation 9th realm aura.

"Come at me. I'm going to enjoy this more than I should."

[A/N: I've started a new book called Dawn of the Battle Nova. Please read it if you have the time for it. This is my entry for WSA 2023, and I will be writing it alongside my other two books going forward.

I promise that the new book won't take away my time from this book as I've already cut down the release rate of my other book to accommodate that.]

Chapter 1233 Battle

Ronron was safe with Whisker and his Immortal puppet. Not to mention, her master had most likely given her some life-saving treasures, so Alex had nothing to worry about.

Still, he needed to keep the fight focused on him so nobody had any funny ideas.

He reached into his storage ring and brought out the long box that immediately made everyone put on a serious face. The death and darkness aura that came from the Sword of Death was no small thing to these cultivators.

"Hey! You better not think of using that sword," Godslayer spoke in his mind. "I need every bit of the aura in that sword."

"Don't worry, it's only bait," Alex told him. Then, he looked at the crowd that was ready to hound on him for the sword.

"I will give this sword to anyone that can get their hands on it first," he said. The crowd was obviously a little skeptical, but they still slowly walked forward to get it.

Alex smiled and tossed it in front of him too, making the people rush toward it all of a sudden.

However, before they could reach it, a small formation plate appeared on top of the box which immediately activated to form a small half-sphere barrier around itself and the sword below it.

At the same time, a larger barrier formed that completely surrounded Alex and the rest and was large enough for everyone to fight on.

Alex smiled at the people. "Go on, take it," he said, clearly mocking every single one of them.

"You bastard!" one of the people couldn't stop his anger and let go of the attack he had been preparing for a while.

A large bell-shaped green attack flew in Alex's direction.

Alex stood where he was and only punched the bell when it arrived in front of him. He used no Qi in his attack and still the bell was completely destroyed in a single attack without Alex feeling any backlash from it.

The crowd looked confused for a moment.

How did he do it? The attack just now was from a Saint Core realm cultivator and Alex somehow destroyed it with his attack.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked. "Are you guys just going to stand there? If you won't come at me, then let me do it."

He started walking toward the group step by step, making the other people feel forced to start fighting.

One of the men slashed his sword in Alex's direction and sent out a Water attack that was empowered by Sword Qi.

Another person forced swords out of his fire Qi and sent them flying in Alex's direction as well.

By the time the third person began his attack, Alex had already dashed forward. He punched in the air, sending a single metal punch in their direction.

It slammed onto the incoming sword slash and destroyed it. At the same time, Alex moved his arm to the side and grabbed the fire sword, turning it into his own attack before sending it back in the direction where it came from.

He then sent out a palm attack in the direction where the third attack was just starting, defeating both the attack and the attacker in a single palm strike.

Then, he paused for a second and looked around at the people who were shocked and not doing anything.

"What's wrong? Are you all planning to die without trying?" Alex asked.

"Yo-you won't kill us," one of them said. "You can't kill us."

"Do you want you to bet your life on it?"

Alex's words sent fear through each and everyone that was stuck inside the barrier. The people had already tried to run out, but they had learned that the barrier was tough and that they needed to find a better way.please visit

"Let's fight him together," someone said.

"Yes, if we work together, we should be able to kill him," another person said.

"He's rich too. How do we split the loot?" someone else asked.

Alex appeared in the middle of their group. "How about you make that decision after you kill me?"

A girl reacted at the same time, stabbing him with her spear that grew in size as it approached him.

Alex put his palm in the way, which was stabbed by the spear. The spear surprisingly managed to pierce through his skin, albeit not very much.

"Oh, that's not a bad weapon," Alex said as he grabbed onto the spear and lurched it toward him. The woman came flying with the spear, who he hit with his other palm to throw her far away.

He then pulled the spear out and quickly placed it behind his back to stop the axe from falling on his back.

"I see," he said softly. "I must be slightly wary of your weapons huh? Looks like most of it is made from tungsten. Makes sense.'

Alex then spun around, spinning the spear with him as he stopped three different attacks with it before stopping.

"Well that sucks," he said a little disappointed. "It's a good spear, but I don't really know how to use it. Whatever, I'll just keep it."

He put the spear into his storage ring. "Hmm?" he thought when he saw something in there and pulled it out.

A book came out from his ring. "Oh, I might be able to use this spear though," he said while stepping to the right, letting the sword slash through empty air.

He kicked the side of the falling sword and sent it flying away with the person that attacked. He then formed a golden barrier behind him to stop the fire attack from landing on him.

He snapped his finger, exploding the fire that he had just stopped, strong enough that even his golden barrier was broken completely.

The people started panicking as they realized how strong Alex was. If they weren't fighting with everything they had, they were going to die for sure.

Everyone launched various attacks at Alex for the entire next minute while all Alex did was dodge them and send a few attacks of his own back at them.

He was fighting back, but there was no ferocity to them at all. It was almost as if... he was playing a small game with little kids while being distracted by his own work.

"What... is he doing?" one of them couldn't help but ask.

"What book is that? What is he reading?" someone asked.

Just then, Alex closed the book and tossed it toward the group where one of them caught it. They read the title with surprised expressions on their face.

"The Golden Spears of Heaven?" the man spoke the name.

"Isn't that... the technique he just bought? Why is he giving it away?" someone else asked, not understanding what was happening.

"It's perfect that you guys are here," Alex said with a loud voice, catching everyone's attention. "You are the perfect set of targets for me to try my new skill on."

He put his two hands in front of him, with the palms facing upward. As he did, metal energy condensed around him, taking the shape of 4 spears, each one of which he could control independently.

"No way!" one of the men shouted. "Did he... did he just learn a new skill while fighting us?"

Chapter 1234 Threat

The four spears flew around Alex, each independently controlled by him.

'That's a little bad,' he thought. Unlike the octopus skill from the Yao family where you controlled 4 different limbs all at once while remaining in a simple spherical barrier, this technique had no defensive aspect to it at all.

All you did was control the four spears while also focusing on defense at the same time.

"Whatever, let's try it out."

He sent the spears flying in four different directions, each of which attacked four different people.

The four of them fought the spear with the aid of their friends and quickly destroyed the four spears.

Alex made four more and sent them to attack. He was judging the strength, durability, and other various properties of the spears he was making.

It was a Heaven Grade skill, so it wasn't weak at all. However, having to control all four of them made it a little worse than it really was.

If you were fighting a single person, the spears could help quite a bit, but if you were fighting many at once like Alex was right now, the technique wasn't very useful.

'Yeah, I should change it and merge it with my metal fist. I wonder how much time that will take,' Alex wondered.

Alex forgot about the spear and went to fight in closed combat. He hit a person on the chin, breaking their jaw before turning around and slamming his forehead into another man's chest.

He pulled out his fire whip and lashed it at the incoming spear attack, the clashing of which brought a fire explosion between them.

He then pulled his Whip back and wrapped it around the lion that was trying to sneak behind him and slammed it onto the ground.

The whip unwrapped and Alex swung in around him, attacking 3 incoming attacks at once. Then he snapped the whip at the person swinging an ax at him.

The snap tore off the man's arm clean off at the elbow and also destroyed his ax at the same time.

Fire blossomed from the whip which he used to send out multiple fire attacks in all directions, attacking everyone at once.

They fought for a few more minutes against Alex, but none came close to even touching him, let alone hurting him. They were all beaten, bloody, and bruised, with a few of them even losing body parts.

A few of them fell to the ground and rolled in pain as they could no longer handle the fight at all.

"Please forgive us," one of the men shouted.

"Please, don't kill us."

One after another, the people stopped fighting and simply gave up. They bowed in front of Alex to make him stop.

Alex only frowned. He wasn't really satisfied with the fight at all. Even though they were weaker, he had hoped the number would pose somewhat of a threat, but because of how strong he was, nothing of that sort happened at all.

'I need to find someone that's stronger if I want to seriously fight,' he thought. He wondered if he should ask Scarlet to fight him after they returned to the Southern Continent.

She couldn't fight him before because she was trying to fix her rushed cultivation base, but now that she was fine, she could totally help him with fighting.

He looked at the people in front of him and shook his head. "You were going to kill me to get that sword, weren't you?" he asked. "Should I let you all go just like that?"

The people shuddered a little and didn't raise their heads at all.

"Fine, I will let you leave," Alex said. "Only after you leave behind something of yours."

"What?" the Saints looked up in worry.please visit

"Leave behind a treasure that's worth your life," Alex said. "If you care too much about your treasures, leave behind both your arms."

"I will give you all a minute to do so. If you don't, you will leave behind your corpse," Alex said with a solemn look.

The group looked around, worriedly. Was he really going to make everyone here do that? Was he so keen on making an enemy out of every single one of them?

Sure he could beat them, but could he beat the people behind them? Was he not afraid?

"You all think I'm joking, don't you?" Alex asked. "Fine, this should let you know I'm serious."

"I make an oath to the heaven. In the next minute, if the saints inside this barrier do not leave a valuable treasure or cut off their own two hands, I will kill them. If I don't, the heaven may destroy me."

The sky rumbled as if accepting Alex's oath.

Fear gripped the hearts of every single saint inside the barrier. After all, Alex had not only made an oath to kill them but to die if he failed to do so.

That showed how serious the situation was.

One after another, items flew out of the various people's storage bags. Their treasures were valuable, but not as much as their life.

However, a few of them didn't have any treasure that they could consider valuable at all. So, instead, they cut off their own arms and presented them to Alex.

Alex waited and watched as time slowly ticked away. His eyes went over each and every single one of the saints, including the ones that were in pain.

He knew everyone had heard his oaths, so all he could do was wait.

He had no intention of killing any one of them. He didn't even have any intention of fighting any one of them. But that was only if they walked away after learning who he was.

Even after recognizing him, these people decided to attack him and his daughter, so he couldn't just let them off easily.

The death threat was just that, a threat, and making them lose one of their treasures was just a simple punishment. The only reason he made an oath was to make sure both he and his enemies didn't try to walk out from this conflict as if nothing had happened.

A minute passed by and Alex saw the many items in front of him as well as a few hands. He took the various treasures that were offered and looked at them.

Not a single Saint had left behind anything so he nodded. He felt the knot in his heart fade away as the oath ended with him gaining everything.

He then put the treasures inside his storage bag and looked at the crowd.

"Leave."

The barrier ended and both the formation plate and the sword went back to Alex. The crowd wasted no time running away from the place and within moments, the place where they fought was empty, aside from a few hands on the ground.

Alex's spiritual sense reached the 3 young men that were hiding far away, looking at the conflict.

"Try and change soon or you will one day find yourself following someone that will kill you for less," he told them.

The young men that had been following Alex since the restaurant was scared witless and immediately ran away.

Finally, Alex turned toward his daughter and smiled.

"Shall we leave then?"

Chapter 1235 Meeting Someone

Ronron stared blankly at Alex, who focused on the items he had gotten from the people just before.

They sat on the boat that flew north with the snow blasting past them because of the snowstorm that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

"Tsk! Nothing good," Alex thought. Not even the Starforged Tungsten weapons were any good as it was usually mixed with some other metal to make an alloy instead because of just how expensive the Tungsten was by itself.

"Father," Ronron called.

"Hmm?" Alex turned around toward her and was surprised to see her expressionless face. "Are you alright? Were you hurt?"

"No, I'm not hurt," Ronron quickly answered. "Father, have you killed people before?"

"Of course," Alex said. "Did your papa not tell you about our adventures while he was controlling my body? He killed people back then too."

"I see," Ronron said, her eyes wandering about the boat, unable to focus on anything at all. "No wonder you were so casual when you were going to kill them all. You probably didn't even blink when you beat them or had them cut off their own arms."

Tears were pooling up in her eyes, ready to drop at a moment's notice. She was trying her best to stop them, but the reality of things was that her father and by extension her papa were murderers, ones that wouldn't blink an eye if they had to take someone else's life.

Alex realized what was happening and walked up to her. He sat down beside her and pat her on her head a few times.

"It's alright, that's just how this world is," Alex said. "I wasn't like this when I started. I remember my first kill was actually a corpse that was being controlled by someone else. When I killed that person back then, I couldn't believe what I had done."

"I cursed at myself for killing someone. It wasn't just that time either. Even after my first kill, I was hesitant when it came to killing or hurting people."

"However, the longer you live, the more you realize, if you don't deal with your enemies when you have the chance, you will be the one that will regret it in the future. So, if I ever believe a person is dangerous and can harm me, I don't feel an ounce of emotion at their death."

"To be honest, I wish I wasn't like this, but I can't change myself at all. Time has done it for me," Alex said. "I hope you don't have to go through the same things, but I worry you will. So, I will tell you right now. If you have an enemy and you ever worry they will cause you pain and suffering, kill them. That is the only way to survive in a cultivation world."

Ronron didn't know what to say, so she only nodded and looked down as tears fell onto the deck of the boat they were flying on.

It took her a while to calm her emotions down and she finally came to terms with the fact that the world she lived in and the world she was going to live in were completely different and she couldn't judge someone from another world based on her beliefs from her world.

"I'm sorry, father. I judged you even though I didn't have the right to," she spoke.

"Don't worry about it," Alex said. "Besides, your father isn't as bloodthirsty as he might seem. If it weren't because they threatened you, I would have let them off after a little beating."

Ronron gave a small smile and nodded.

"Look, we're coming up on the Endless Tunnels," Alex pointed below him.

"Endless Tunnels?" Ronron looked below her at the massive mountain range they were approaching. "Why is it called that?"

"There is a vein of Starforged Tungsten below these mountains that is going to take forever for the people of this continent to get through. The original intention was to create a tunnel through this mountain range, but because it would take forever, it's called the Endless Tunnel."

"Oh," Ronron spoke as she looked down.

"That city right there is where I learned how to make a sword," Alex said. "I wonder if the senior that taught me it is still there."

"Do you want to go meet him?" Ronron asked.

"Not really," Alex said. "It was over 30 years ago, so I don't really feel like I need to. But I do want to go into the tunnel and get some of those metals for myself. They will make for some amazing artifacts."

They flew over the mountain, going from one state to the other. They were now in the state that was owned by the Heaven's Frost sect, the state where the domain of the ruler was located.

"It's just a little further ahead if I remember correctly," Alex said.

"Senior Luhei comes from around here?" Ronron asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "But before him, I want you to meet someone else."

Ronron was curious about who this other person was and waited patiently for them to show up. The snowstorm was fading this far up north, so it was getting easier for her to see through everything now.

As Alex flew, he noticed a group of people flying in his direction on a giant ship. He looked at the people on the boat and realized that he recognized quite a few of them.

"Oh, what a coincidence," Alex said softly. "They are already on their way. It seems they heard about the news too."

Alex steered his ship in the direction of the incoming ship, forcing both of them to slow down quite a bit.please visit

One of the people in the group stood up and bowed toward Alex. "Greetings, senior. Can we help you with anything?" he asked.

"Brother Fan, it's me," Alex said. "Don't you recognize me?"

The middle-aged man narrowed his eyes to look at Alex more clearly, but there was no way he could recognize him at all.

"Ah, my bad," Alex said and brought out his white mask which he wore for a few seconds, before taking it off. "Do you remember me now?"

"You're..." the man's eyes widened in surprise.

"Yu Ming," someone else said. Most people from that group remembered them.

"It's nice to see you all again," Alex said. "Are you on your way to the Teleportation formation?"

The man's eyes widened slightly in surprise. "How did you know?" he asked.

"Where else would a group of players be heading to," Alex said with a slight chuckle and looked around. "Where is sister Li? I don't see her."

Fan Yanshi's face suddenly changed a bit when Alex said that. "Fan Li... she... she passed away over a decade ago," he said with a sorrowful voice.

"What?" Alex's face turned blank for a second. "What do you mean? How did she pass away?"

Fan Yanshi shook his head. "Complications during childbirth," he said. "Her body grew frail during her pregnancy and she died during delivery."

"I see," Alex said with a solemn face. "My condolences to you, brother Fan. What about the child?"

"Lilin, say hello to uncle here," Fan Yanshi spoke and a young girl, barely 10 years old slowly moved next to him.

"Hello, uncle," the little girl spoke. She had the looks of her mother, which even Ronron felt was familiar.

"Hello," Alex said with a wide smile. "Oh right, this is my daughter, Maron. Ronron, you should greet them too."

"Hello," Ronron said while bowing a little in the other people's direction.

"Your daughter?" Fan Yanshi was surprised. "She's already so grown up."

"Isn't she?" Alex chuckled a little. "Anyway, I shouldn't stop you guys. I will find you guys before we teleport away."

"Bye, Llin."

The little girl waved goodbye and the two boats moved away from each other.

"What was that, father?" Ronron asked with an unreadable expression.

"Those were the first group of humans I met when I got here. They let me stay in their village for quite some time, so I got familiar with them back then," Alex said.

"No, that's not what I meant," Ronron said. "That girl... she..."

"You noticed it too?" Alex asked.

Ronron nodded.

"Her mother, the woman they said died during childbirth, is your mother's other clone," Alex said. "After her original body died, your mother rejoined the game, and in doing so put another clone of herself into this world."

"I was hoping to let you meet her so you could see how your mother was while young, but it seems fate is not with us this time around," Alex said while shaking his head. "What a shame."

"That girl... is she... my half-sister?" Ronron asked.

"Half-sister, cousin, who knows what you should call her, but all I know is that she can be considered your blood relative as well," Alex said. "Unfortunately, it seems she was born without a spiritual root as well, just like her parents. It will be better for her to lead a normal life in the Central continent than to live here."

Ronron was too stunned to say anything else. She knew she had a father out there somewhere and had prepared for it. However, a sister that came out of nowhere wasn't something she could prepare for.

"What should I do?" Ronron asked.

"Let's decide that later," Alex said. "We will meet them again. For now, we are close to Senior Luhei's place. Let's go there first and meet him. After we do that, we can return with Scarlet and prepare for our return to the Central Continent."

Chapter 1236 Meeting Senior Luhei Again

The two of them flew through the snow-filled land for an hour more before they arrived at a small monument that stood tall and was full of scripts that were used by the demons.

"Here we are," Alex said and got off the ship.

Ronron jumped off as well, and slowly floated down onto the snow. She stepped on the snow, not sinking even the slightest amount at all.

"Grab my hand," Alex put forth his hand and Ronron grabbed it. Then, the two of them suddenly disappeared from where they stood, arriving on top of a giant, circular script that worked at the gate of this place.

"Woah!" Ronron said in surprise when she saw the place. The sky was overcast with thick clouds in here making the land much darker than it should be.

Snow filled the bottom half of most of the peaks. However, the top half of the peaks remained dark rocks with some orange glow that came from the magma within them.

"This is... so beautiful," Ronron said.

"This is one of the Demon's hiding realms," Alex said. "Back during the war many thousand years ago, they used to remain here and go out to fight outside."

"The fights took place all over this continent from what I know, but the only remnant of those fights that still remains here is the Ancient Battlefield we flew past outside of the Silvermoon city," Alex explained it all to his daughter.

"Woah, this place has such a history huh?" she said as she looked around.

"After the war ended, the representative of the Black Tortoise that was meant to rule this continent made this place his home and they have been remaining here ever since," Alex explained.

His eyes faltered for a moment before he smiled. "Let's go, Scarlet is waiting for us with senior Luhei," he said.

The two of them flew up, with Ronron struggling a bit to control herself at such a high altitude. They flew slowly until they went past 4 more mountains, and arrived on the small snowy mound, on top of which was Scarlet.

"Why the hell are you so late?" she shouted. "You were supposed to come here as soon as you told everyone what was happening."

"Sorry, sorry, I had to take a few detours since Ronron had never seen this side of life yet," Alex said.

"Oh," Scarlet said as she realized. "How do you like it, little girl?"

"It's quite different, to say the least," she said.

Suddenly, the snow mound they were on moved as a giant head popped out from one side of it, making Ronron shout in fear reactively.

"You've come again, young man," the Black Tortoise spoke.

"I should have come earlier, senior, forgive me," Alex said.

"I don't mind," the Black Tortoise said. "In fact, I like the peace and quiet."

"Ronron, this is senior Luhei," Alex introduced.

"O-oh!" she only then realized that it wasn't a random beast but rather the main reason they were here for. "Forgive me for my disrespectful attitude, senior. I am Maron. I have been acquainted with your other self for the past decade and more."

"Is that so?" the Tortoise looked at her a bit.

"She's the senior's disciple, so it is true," Scarlet said.

"Oh? Oh!" The tortoise was quite surprised when he heard that. Suddenly, the mound Alex and the rest were standing on vanishes all of a sudden as they all fell to the ground along with the snow that was on the mound.

Alex quickly grabbed his daughter and hovered while Scarlet flapped her wings a little.

"Let us know before you transform," Scarlet said.

"Sorry, sorry," the tortoise that had just become human spoke. He had short black hair and looked surprisingly similar to the Snake after he had become human as well.

"Woah, you look just like your brother," Ronron said.

"Of course, we are brothers," the tortoise said.

"I hear you are healed, senior. Congratulations," Alex said.

"Ah, yes, I am," he said.

"How did you heal if I may ask?" Alex got curious.

"You may not," the tortoise said.

"Oh," Alex was a little taken aback at the refusal. "I'm sorry if I was being rude."

"No, no, it's not a matter of whether you were rude or not. It's just that I don't know if I should talk about him or not," the tortoise said. He looked towards Scarlet and asked, "should I?"

"I don't know," Scarlet said. "This thing is very confusing. I still refuse to believe it's true at all."

"What are you guys talking about?" Alex asked.

"Forget about it, I'm sure you will find out soon on your own," Scarlet said.

"Yeah, forget about it, young man. Now, you managed to make a Phoenix bond with you. I don't know if I should congratulate you, or pray that you don't die when her seniors find out," the tortoise said.

"Sorry... what?" Alex asked.

"Father's going to die?" Ronron panicked a little.

"Don't tease him," Scarlet said quickly. "Don't worry, I won't let them kill you. They will definitely be more curious about you than angry."

"So there is a chance?" Alex asked with a worried look.

"Yes, but not a lot," Scarlet said. "As I said, don't worry."

Alex couldn't help but worry.

"Anyway, I'm glad to see you're doing fine, young man. Actually, you're doing more than fine. You have a daughter that's a disciple to a disciple of the Sky God. Even if you did nothing, you will make it far in life with just that," the tortoise said.

"Thank you, senior," Alex said awkwardly.

The Tortoise started asking about a few more things about the outer world and what had changed there. Now that Alex had been to 4 of the 5 continents, he had a lot more authority to speak on this matter than he did back then when he had just come from the Western Continent.

He told the Tortoise what he could, and the Tortoise realized that the world that was slowly falling into mediocrity had been reborn thanks to the actions of the senior that let fresh human blood flow through the world once again.

With many new talents coming out of nowhere, the world was much more competitive than it was back then.

The group talked for a while before Alex asked for a leave and flew away from them. He then arrived on the final mountain of the secret realm, standing in front of a giant patch of ice that seemed to have somehow reformed after so many years.

Unlike last time, however, the ice wasn't strong at all. So, with a simple thought, Alex changed the temperature of the ice, melting it within seconds, and walked inside of the cave.

He arrived by the massive circular script on the ground that was the teleportation script that could lead back to the Western Continent.

"Does it still work?" he wondered and used it. He felt the teleportation aura move around him, but there was no target, so it didn't work.

'Is the teleportation script on the other side truly destroyed? Or do I just have the wrong timing once again?' he wondered. Whatever it was, he would find out soon.

After looking around for a few minutes later, he left the cave and flew back to his group.

It was time to leave this place, and then prepare to leave the Northern Continent.

Chapter 1237 The Endless Tunnel

After saying goodbye to the Tortoise, the group of 3 went outside the secret realm to go back and complete the remaining task.

"You know what he was not telling me, right?" Alex asked.

Scarlet nodded. "Yes," she said. "I don't see how it matters to you though. Either we, I will see if it's true or not very soon."

Seeing the serious expression on Scarlet's face, Alex didn't continue the conversation.

"Where do we go now?" Scarlet asked. "Those ponds where you can see the future?"

Alex looked at Scarlet for a bit and then toward Ronron. "No, we won't be going there," he said. Knowing the future, even one that was very unlikely to happen felt like a curse that Alex didn't want others to get inflicted with.

One of his prophecies had already made him reluctant to help others on multiple occasions simply because he wondered if that was the event that would cause his death.

He didn't know if he should explain or not why they shouldn't be going there when Alex felt something buzz in his storage ring.

He pulled out a talisman and noticed that his aunt had sent him a message.

"Come to my sect as soon as you can. It doesn't look like the elders are going to let me go so easily."

Alex sighed when he read that. "That should have been obvious," he thought to himself and put the talisman back.

"We're going to the Blazing Earth sect," Alex said and pulled out his ship. "Although, they can wait for half a day while we take out detours."

The three got onto the ship and flew in the direction of the Blazing Earth sect. And if they just changed direction by a little bit, they would arrive at the Endless Tunnel.

This time, instead of going over them, Alex was going to go into them. He was on the other side of the Endless Tunnel this time around and landed outside the tunnel on his ship.

"Can you become small for a bit, so we can go through?" Alex asked.

"Fine," Scarlet said and became the size of a parrot once more, landing on Alex's shoulders.

Then Alex and Ronron got off the ship and went over to the opening of the tunnel where the disciples of the Heaven's Frost sect were keeping guard.

"Please hand over your storage bags before you go in. You can use this storage bag to carry whatever it is you think you will require inside instead," the disciple told them. Alex handed over his storage bags without any hesitation, but Ronron was a bit worried.

"Just transfer the items over," Alex said.

Ronron shook her head. "I can't. The items are tied to this storage bag. They are set up to attack whoever changes their space," she said.

"I see," Alex said. "Give me that storage bag for a moment."

Ronron handed it over to him. Alex took the storage bag and immediately turned around to hand it over to the person that was waiting for it. "Here you go," he said and tossed it into the box.

"Father!" Ronron spoke in a horrified tone. "You can't do that."

"Don't worry, you'll get it back when we leave half a day later," Alex told her.

The disciple closely checked for any other storage bag they may have been hiding, but he couldn't find any. So, he handed over 2 empty storage bags and let them go in.

Alex walked away in strides, but Ronron was a little saddened. She couldn't believe that her father had just given away the storage bag without even letting her know beforehand.

What was she going to do if the storage bag was looted somehow and her master's items were lost?

"Stop being so gloomy," Alex said as he walked a little further into the cave.

"How can you say that when you just gave away my storage bag?" Ronron asked.

"He didn't," Scarlet said and turned around toward Alex. "You looked like a professional thief just then."

"Did I? Haha," Alex laughed a little.

Ronron looked at the two of them with a confused look. "What's... going on?" she asked.

"Here," Alex reached up next to him where half his arm vanished. When he pulled his arm back, a storage bag came back along with it.

"What? What was that?" Ronron asked in surprise.

He tossed her the storage bag. "Did you really think I would give away something so important so easily?" he asked her.

"But... I saw you give it to her," Ronron said.

"That was a storage bag he stole from the box and changed with yours. He hid yours in a fold in space next to him," Scarlet explained. "To think you can now move folded space along, that should have required quite a bit of talent."

"Talent and concentration," Alex said. "I didn't move the folded space but rather teleported it around. Using both the Dao of Space and Teleportation at the same time turns out to be quite harder than I thought."

"Stop underselling yourself," Scarlet said. "Let's focus on the task now that we are here. What do we do now?"

"Let's find a corner we can work on for now," Alex said and spread his spiritual sense through the many pathways inside the cave until he found one they could work on.

He followed the path until he arrived at the location and brought out a formation place before placing it down to stop others from coming in.

"Right, let's get to it then," he said. "Time to mine this ore in front of us."

Scarlet stood where she was and Ronron looked confused. "Mine with what? Did you bring any tools?" she asked.

"Ah, you can't mine it yet," Alex said. "It's too tough for you. It would take Saints hours to knock down a fist-sized ore from this place."

"It's that tough, huh?" Scarlet asked. "How do you expect to mine it then?"

Alex rubbed his head for a little bit. "It would've been so much easier if I had the sword," he said softly. He was sure that sword wasn't lost at all and was instead still floating somewhere in his soul space, along with many other items of his which he had still to find.

"Should I start hitting it or what?" Scarlet asked, seeing that he wasn't answering her at all.

"No, I think I have a better Idea," Alex said.

"Oh, let's hear it then," Scarlet said.

"Ronron, go stay against the wall and take out your defensive treasures," Alex said.

"What?" Ronron asked in surprise.

"Scarlet, protect Ronron from the heat," he said.

"What? What heat?" Scarlet asked.

"We don't have time to waste on attacking this wall to break it off as much as we can," he said. "So, I'm going to melt it instead."

"Oh... oh!" Scarlet realized what was happening. "That thing will need a very high temperature though. Will you be alright?"

"I'll be fine," Alex said. "I have the perfect dao for it after all."

Scarlet flew and landed next to Ronron, immediately creating a wall of phoenix fire around her.

Once Alex saw they were ready, he put up both his palm toward the wall and started heating it up to the point that the ore would melt like snow in the sun.

Chapter 1238 The Blazing Earth Sect

The black wall started giving off heat as Alex slowly used his dao to increase its temperature. He tried his best to limit the heat within the wall itself, but he couldn't stop it from spreading through all the walls of the cave, rather than just a small portion of it.

He tried his best to send the heat back into the wall, but since he was already focusing on melting the ore, he couldn't divert his intent to the other parts as well.

Thankfully, Scarlet was there to help him. All she did was stay where she was and lower the temperature of the wall around her so that the heat didn't reach any other side of the mountain.

As the wall heated up, it started glowing a warm orange glow. Then, as he continued adding on the heat, it glowed bright red and started slowly dripping down the wall.

Alex used his True Fire Dao to the best of his ability to make the ore even more liquid than it already was, while also reducing the amount of heat his body was suffering due to being close to such a bright molten metal.

If not for using his dao to stop himself, Alex would've already burned away most of his clothes the first few seconds he started working on it.

It only took a few more minutes before the wall started dripping like molten candlewax and fell to the ground.

Alex quickly brought out Memory and increased its size to collect the molten ore. Because Memory was specifically made with the components that were used in forges that melted this very ore, the molten ore wouldn't cause any problem at all.

Scarlet did her best to cool everything down except for the giant hole in the wall that was melting at the moment. Ronron was beyond surprised at just what was happening right now.

Her father was melting the wall in front of them and yet she couldn't feel a single change in the temperature around her. She was extremely impressed by both her father and Scarlet's control over the heat and wondered if she could ever reach such a level too.

By the time Alex was done with it all, there was a massive hole in the middle of the wall, large enough to be a new pathway through the tunnel itself.

He looked down at the amount of metal he had collected and he himself was quite surprised.

"That's probably over 500 tons right there," he thought to himself. With that much ore, he could gain about 200 tons of Starforged Tungsten. With that, he could make many swords and other artifacts he wanted to make.

'This had taken me about 4 weeks to collect so much,' he thought. 'And now, it only took me an hour at most.'

He took the cauldron and started rapidly cooling the molten ore inside of it. He wasn't worried about the ore being stuck to the cauldron after cooling down as he could just expand the size of the cauldron, even more, to easily take out the ores from inside of it.

It took him a few minutes and a lot of Qi to fully cool down the cauldron full of ore. Once he was done, he put it all inside his storage ring and brought out Midnight.

"What are you doing now?" Scarlet asked with a weird look on her face.

"Those people waiting outside will be expecting us to bring out some ores, so if we go out without any, they will start getting suspicious and that will be annoying."

He turned around and struck the edges of the giant hole in the wall. After a few hits, quite a bit of it came loose. After taking that and the ones that had dripped onto the ground, Alex decided it was time to leave.

Outside the mine, the disciples working to take away the ore took away half from both of their storage bags before returning their own storage bags to them.

After that, they flew away from the Endless tunnel, making their way to the Blazing Earth sect.

It didn't take them more than an hour of time to reach the Blazing Earth Sect since Alex sped up his boat as fast as it could go.

As soon as they arrived, they got off the ship and went to meet Liz and the rest.

Liz and Graham had been waiting for him to arrive before they continued any talk with the elders.

So, Alex and Ronron were quickly taken by the two to another room where the elders had been waiting for them.

Alex entered the room first before the rest followed him inside.

He saw Tai Guan, Bai Qiyi, as well as other elders that he hadn't seen before. However, judging from their cultivation base, they weren't nobodies at all.

'These must be the ancestors that no longer actively work in the sect,' Alex thought.

"Welcome, King of the Southern Continent," the elders and ancestors all bowed toward him.

Alex nodded and sat down on a seat that was prepared for him. "I hear you guys aren't letting my aunt leave. Is that true?" he asked.

"That is in fact true," Tai Guan said. "We cannot let her leave the sect after how much the sect had spent to train her and help her reach where she is now."

Alex nodded. "That is true, but do you really want to keep her here against her will?" he asked. "You do realize that with me being a King, she is now a princess of the Southern Continent too, right? Do you really wish to hold the princess of a continent hostage?"

The many people in the room suddenly broke out in sweats when they heard that. They had considered this to be a problem, but they did not expect Alex to bring it up as soon as he walked in.

"You do know that I can just take her away if I want to, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Bai Qiyi said. "However, we were hoping you would not."

"You were hoping to be compensated with something in return for all the resources you've used up for my aunt, is that it?" Alex asked.

The elders couldn't hide the answer from their faces. That was what they wanted; A compensation that is worth enough to replace his aunt.

"To be honest, yes, that is what we want," one of the older men said. "While we will be saddened to see such a talent get taken away, we know that we cannot hold her here, especially given her status now. However, if we can get something in return for letting her go, we will highly appreciate the gesture."

Alex stayed silent for a bit as he looked around.

"Al, can you help them? I don't want them to be at a loss after I leave too," Liz said.

"Son, can't you do something?" Graham asked.

Alex looked toward the group. "Let me guess, you want some other pill recipes aside from the 3 I gave you, don't you?" he asked.

"We can't deny that you have the best recipes out there," the ancestors said.

"Well, that sucks for you since I won't be giving you anything alchemy related at all," Alex said. "However, what I give you will most likely be something far better for your sect than just some lousy pill."

Chapter 1239 Compensation

"L-lousy pill?" the elders couldn't be surprised to hear him call his own pills lousy, especially given that they had heard about his pills reaching 100%. What could it be that he was going to give them that was better than those pills?

Alex suddenly stood up. "Let's go outside, I need your help to find the perfect location for it, headmaster," he said.

"Perfect place? What sort of place might you be looking for?" Bai Qiyi asked.

"Hmm, it should be a place that is controlled by the sect, but a place without much activity if possible," Alex said. "But it also must be easily accessible to students who want to go there, so no forbidden sections."

"We... have a few of those places," Bai Qiyi said.

"Would you consider the mounds around the sect one of such?" Alex asked.

Bai Qiyi thought for a bit. "Yeah, it surely would," he said.

"And do any of the mounds have Spirit veins under them? Or even close to them," Alex asked.

"I believe so," Bai Qiyi said. "Even if there is not, we can place one in there if needed. We have spare veins after all."

"Spare veins... let me guess, it's from your attack on the Western Continent?" Alex asked.

"Uhh... yes," the sect leader said. "I believe that's where it came from."

"May I ask why your ancestors participated in the war?" Alex asked. "It surely wasn't because you thought the people of the Western Continent deserved the punishment, right?"

Bai Qiyi looked around for his ancestors to answer. After all, he had only just become the sect master a century ago and didn't have much knowledge of the past.

"We... we needed resources to grow our sects," one of the ancestors said. "Most of our previous ancestors had died while fighting Xue Kuangren, so we were forced to find resources to help ourselves. The war just happened to be something that helped us."

"I see," Alex said. "Let's move on."

If it was a decade ago, he might have tried and persuade these people to give back what they stole from the Western Continent, but now that he was the King of the Southern Continent, he had no right to speak on behalf of them.

So, unless someone from the Western Continent itself came to ask them for it, they were most likely never going to return the items.

Alex walked out of the room and soon everyone followed him. The sect master ordered one of the people next to him to bring a spirit vein from the treasury just in case they needed it.

"What exactly are you planning on doing, Yu M-I mean, Alex?" Tai Guan asked.

"You said you had to use a lot of resources to help my aunt become what she is today, right?" he said. "Now, while I cannot give you the resources back myself, I can make it so you save a similar amount of resources in the future. Most likely you will save a lot more than anything you could ever spend on my aunt."

The ancestors got more and more curious now.

"What exactly is it though?" Tai Guan asked as she couldn't contain her curiosity.

"You'll find out soon enough," Alex said.

They arrived outside the sect walls, in front of one of the 12 massive natural rock pillars, on top of which the disciples of the sect trained every morning.

Since it was evening right now, no one was currently training here, making it the perfect time for everyone to do what they wanted to do.

"Choose a location here," Alex said. "I would suggest making it a spot everyone can go to regardless of where it is they are training."

"Uhh... then that place? Between the two pillars?" one of the ancestors pointed. It was the closest location on average from every single pillar while also being just outside the sect walls.

"Is there a spirit vein here? If not, you should place one here," Alex told them.

The ancestors nodded and immediately started checking the location. They did sense that there was a spirit vein, but it was a common spirit vein, which Alex couldn't really work with.

"Change it," he told them.

A few ancestors immediately got to work as they took out the common spirit vein from the ground and replaced it with a Saint spirit vein.

The replacement took no more than 15 minutes as multiple ancestors quickly got the work done. Once the dirt was replaced and everything was back to normal.

Everyone looked nervously, waiting for Alex to do whatever it was he was going to do. The ancestors were curious about what it was he was doing and nervous that it would not be as good as getting another pill recipe.

Alex walked away from the group and arrived on top of the land that was just refilled. He looked around for a few seconds to find a perfect spot and looked at his shoulder before nodding.

The ancestors were surprised when the bird that was sitting on his shoulder suddenly moved. The bird flapped its wings once and out of nowhere burned a colorful fire in front of Alex.

The ancestors were entranced by the fire, but they weren't sure what to make of it. Was that it? Was the fire what was better than a lousy pill?

Graham and Hao Ya realized what was happening, but the rest of them, including Liz and Ronron, were equally unaware.

"What is this?" Bai Qiyi couldn't help but ask.

"Oh, I thought you would recognize it," Alex said. "Do you not?"

The ancestors shook their heads.

"This is Phoenix fire," Alex explained.

Immediately, the faces of the many ancestors changed from confusion to shock as they realized what they were looking at.

"Tha-that's Phoenix fire?" one of them asked.

"Yes," Alex said "I'm sure you know what a phoenix fire is capable of right?"

"It can destroy almost anything and can also heal any injuries," one of them spoke. The ones that didn't know about it were finally realizing what it was.

"Yes, but not this one," Alex said. "I do not wish to give you a weapon that you can use against someone else, so this fire won't destroy anything, so long as you don't touch it. All it will do is heal whatever injuries one may have. It's useful, right?"

The ancestors couldn't help but nod.

"But... how did that fire just get here?" one of them asked. "Is that bird on your shoulder... a Phoenix?"

Alex smiled. "I don't think you can keep hiding anymore," he said.

The group was a little confused about who he was talking to when the bird on Alex's shoulder suddenly grew in size and landed in front of them all.

Scarlet's body slowly started glowing, gaining many colors that were the same as that of the fire behind her. She stood tall and proud, and her cultivation base pulsed around her.

The ancestors watched in shock as they finally realized that they were in the presence of a noble Phoenix, which also happened to be one of the beings with the strongest cultivation base they had ever seen.

"Let me introduce her to you," Alex said. "This is Feng Nuanhuo, otherwise also known as Scarlet, and she is the Phoenix Ruler of the Southern Continent."

Chapter 1240 Devour

The ancestors all fell to their knees when they realized who was in front of them.

"Your majesty," they shouted all at once. "It's an honor to meet you."

Scarlet looked at the lot and nodded slightly for them to get back up, but the group remained on their knees.

"You deal with them," she spoke all of a sudden and vanished from the air. When the group saw where she had vanished, their eyes widened to a point where they nearly fell out of their socket.

"W-w-where d-did her Majesty go?" one of them asked.

"She doesn't like strangers that much, so she went back to her beast space to avoid you guys," Alex said simply.

However, those words were anything but simple to the ears of the many ancestors here. When they heard that she had gone back to her beast space, that could only mean one thing.

pαпdα`noνɐ1`сoМ Alex had bonded with the Phoenix.

Only now did they understand why he was the King of the Southern Continent. Only now did they fully realize just who they were talking with.

"Your majesty, please forgive us for any disrespect we may have shown you," the ancestors spoke before the sect leader and the rest could.

"I don't feel disrespected," Alex said. "You may all get back up."

The ancestors slowly stood up.

"Now that I've given you all that you wanted, let us leave," he said and started walking away.

"Your majesty," Bai Qiyi quickly called out to him. "If you don't mind, can you explain why you say that this Phoenix fire is better than some pills? As far as I understand, doesn't it do the same thing as a healing pill? As for resources, we are spending an entire Spirit vein on this. Even if it is better, I don't see how it can be so much better than just a pill."

Alex stopped and looked at the sect leader for a bit before saying, "what do you think is unique to your sect that the other 4 sects don't have?" he asked.

"Unique? You mean our landscape?" one of the ancestors asked. The Blazing Earth sect was in the state of Re, which was the only state that didn't have snowfall like the other 4 after all.

"No, not your landscape," Alex said. "I'm talking about your sect's feature. The Nether Poison sect has its poison, the Blue Spring sect has its beast taming, what does your sect have?"

"Oh, Body cultivators," Bai Qiyi answered. "What about them?"

"Do you know how the people in the Southern Continent cultivate their bodies?" Alex asked.

The sect master's eyes moved from Alex to the fire before understanding what he was talking about. "I see," he said. "Do they use the Phoenix fire to heal themselves?"

"Yes," Alex said. "How many resources do your disciples use to heal after training? How many resources can you save if they could get beat up as badly as they wanted and healed within a few hours simply by staying in front of this fire? Do you not think it's better than any pill I could've given you?"

The ancestors looked at each other, not knowing what to say. It was true that with this fire, they would save on resources for body cultivation, but in the first place, the number of disciples that body cultivated had already gone down quite a bit.

At this point, it all felt like a waste to the ancestors.

"How strong can one even get as a body cultivator?" one of the ancestors asked.

"Do you want an example?" Alex asked.

"Are you talking about yourself?" Tai Guan asked. "Weren't you strong as a body cultivator even before?"

"I was, and I'm not talking about myself," Alex said. "I'm talking about my father."

"Me?" Graham was surprised. "Do you want me to show them how strong I am?"

"Yes, father. Uhh... why don't you punch him?" Alex said, pointing to an old ancestor with a cultivation base Saint Soul 4th realm.

"Please be on guard or you might hurt yourself," Alex told the old man.

The old man looked back suspiciously as he wasn't sure what to do. He looked at the other ancestors who nodded and walked away.

"Alright, let me see how strong you really are," the ancestor said and used a defensive technique.

Graham dashed forward, leaving massive gouges on earth as he pushed against it to arrive in front of the old man in an instant.

The old man was surprised at the speed Graham showed, even when he didn't even have a proper cultivation base.

The punch landed on the defensive technique the old man had put up and caused an explosion that sent dust flying hundreds of meters around the two fighters.

The punch had created a crater around the two of them as if a meteor had landed where they stood.

The Ancestor was physically fine, but mentally he was shaken. He didn't imagine that Alex's father could ever be this strong at all.ραпdα `nᴏνɐ| сom

Even if he was stronger by quite a bit, this was just physical strength. If he had a cultivation base as well... how strong could he have been?

"Do you understand now?" Alex asked the ancestor. "Your disciples can reach this level if they try, that too without spending a spirit stone on any resources aside from this single spirit vein."

"Is that enough compensation for all the resources your sect spent on my aunt?" he asked.

"Yes, it's more than enough," Tai Guan spoke immediately. "Thank you, Alex-- no, your Majesty."

The other ancestors nodded as well.

"Then, let us go back. Set up a tent around here and make sure no one extinguishes it or anything. Not that anyone should be able to but it's still better to be careful," Alex cautioned the others.

Once everything was settled, they returned back to the sect to rest for the time being.

Ronron finally had some free time to look through what she had bought from the auctions. She brought out one thing after another and started handing it out to the others.

She brought a flexible armor for her grandfather, a mental defense artifact for Pearl, a very tough, but pretty female robe for her aunt, a small pouch one could wear around their neck for Whisker, and pretty jewelry for Hao Ya.

Alex got some alchemy ingredients, which he was more than happy with.

The group happily talked to each other for quite a while until it was deep into the night. The sect had brought them some strong wine to drink, and Alex shared it with his family during that time.

Afterward, everyone left to go to their own room to cultivate and rest. Alex was a little worn out as well, especially after what he had done in the Endless Tunnel.

He needed to rest for a bit, especially since he had quite a few things to do after he had rested.

He cultivated the entire night with Pearl cultivating next to him. Then, after a night of cultivation, he sent both Pearl and Whisker away from the room.

At the same time, he asked Scarlet to leave as well.

"What are you doing that you won't even let me stay inside the beast space?" Scarlet asked.

"The room is going to fill with Death aura soon, so I don't want any one of you to be around it," he said.

"And you are okay with it?" Scarlet asked curiously.

"I have the Death Dao, remember? The aura can't harm me," he reminded her.

"Oh, right. Alright then, I'll go stay with your daughter for now," Scarlet said and called Ronron before going away with her.

Alex closed all the doors and set up a formation so that the aura wouldn't leak outside the room. Then, he brought out the wooden box that gave off the death and darkness aura.

"Good, good, let me eat it quickly," Godslayers impatient voice called out for him from inside his head.

"Okay, how are you going to eat it?" Alex asked.

"Just grab the sword and don't let go of it. I need to send most of myself into it and then I can devour it from the inside," Godslayer said.

"Alright," Alex said and grabbed onto the sword. Immediately, he felt the strong death aura coming up from the sword.

"This isn't better than the death aura of the Mad Immortal, right?" he asked Godslayer.

"No, it's better," Godslayer said. "The Death aura I got from the mad immortal was just that, death aura. However, this is both death and darkness aura, so I get an equal ratio of what can help me improve."

"So, while in terms of strength, it's quite bad, it's better in terms of helping me gain back my strength from the past," Godslayer said.

"I see," Alex nodded. "Eat it then."

"I can't wait to."

Alex felt Godslayer move out of his spiritual sea and move down his body until it reached the sword. He tightened his grip as Godslayer went into the sword and started devouring it from the inside.

It took only 20 or so minutes, but the aura in the sword was completely gone in that time period. Godslayer also devoured the aura that had escaped the sword and was in the wood and room.

After eating it all, it crept back up Alex's arm and went into his mind.

"That was amazing," he said softly. "I'm going to sleep for a couple of days now. Don't bother me unless it is very important."

Godslayer stopped talking after that, and Alex was left alone in the room with a normal sword in the end.

Chapter 1241 Direct Disciple

Alex took out the Blood Revitalizing Ginger and cut it up into 5 different pieces. He then used his Supreme Elemental Accord skill to put energy into the ginger to ready it up for when he was going to have to make the pill.

After the ginseng, he spent some time focusing on the other ingredients and once everything was done, he took out Memory and proceeded with making the True Rejuvenating pills.

The True Rejuvenating pill recipe was one of the many True rank pill recipes he had improved while he was still in the Western Continent. So, it was quite easy for him to make the pill that reached 100% without any effort.

However, when he did reach 100%, something weird happened inside the cauldron. The pills that had reached 100% harmony simply dissipated some of their energy to reach a lower level.

Alex sighed when he saw that happen. He had known about this for a long time, over a decade in fact, however, each time it happened, he couldn't help but sigh at the waste.

The truth of the matter was that True rank pills could not reach 100%, let alone have pill veins.

Alex had tried it with many different pills, both Common and True rank, but none seemed to stay in 100% at all. The pill clouds never formed for these pills at all and instead they simply lost a bit of energy.

There was no information in his mind as to why this was, only that he wasn't doing anything wrong. This was all natural.

"I should ask the senior about this too," he thought.

After finishing the pills, he stored them and spent a few minutes organizing his thoughts on what he was going to do now.

He wanted to spend some time trying to improve or change some of his techniques, but that would take quite a time, so he couldn't do that here.

"Sigh, why did I have to learn the dao right before I was going to leave?" he thought to himself. "I can't even make use of the Dao yet."

He shook his head and left the room. He only had a few days here, so he was going to spend it with his family.

Alex went and met with his family. After some time, he decided to go and check out the Forever Isles, which were a set of islands to the south of the Northern Continent.

The group went from island to island, checking out the scenery of the islands and the ocean. No one predicted the amount of shock Ronron would've felt when she saw the oceans.

She knew about them, hearing about them from her master. However, seeing the real thing was still the most incredible thing she had ever seen.

"How... just how is there so much water? And how deep does this go?" she couldn't help but ask.

"If master isn't wrong, then the ocean is at least a dozen kilometers deep," Hao Ya answered.

"Woah, is that so?" Even Alex was surprised. He knew it was deep, but not that deep. Due to his fear of the beasts that lurked on the sea floor, he had never actually tried to scan the ocean at all.

So, hearing the number came as quite a surprise to him as well.

After going from island to island the entire day, the group finally came to the end of the Forever Isles.

Alex pointed to the south in surprise and spoke, "Look, that's the Central Continent. It's about the same distance away as the Southern Continent huh?" he thought.

"Huh? Where?" everyone tried to look in the direction that Alex pointed to, but there was nothing they could see there at all.

"Can't you see?" he asked. "It's..."

He paused for a second. "Nevermind, your eyes aren't good enough to see those things yet," he said. "I will try and see if I can improve them. I will have to make a paste for that."

The others only nodded to Alex's words, not really understanding what he was talking about.

They returned back to the Blazing Earth sect a while later, just in time for Alex's massive alchemy lesson. The venue had been prepared outside of the Blazing Earth sect due to its closeness with the Teleportation formation, as well as the fact that Alex had been staying there for a while.

"You're back," Lady Xuan spoke from a group of elders that had been waiting for him restlessly. They were worried he wasn't going to make it in time, but he had.

"Is everything ready?" Alex asked.

"Yes, everyone had already arrived, and we can start the lesson in 2 hours," Tai Guan said.

Alex nodded. He thought for a bit and asked, "do they know who is giving the lesson?"

"Yes," Lady Xaun said. "We've mentioned that you are a player and have quite the knowledge of Alchemy."

"Do they know my name too? And what I look like?" Alex asked.

"We've mentioned your name, but we have mentioned nothing about what you look like. Should we?" someone asked.

"No, I would like to remain faceless if possible," Alex said. "I don't like the idea of being stopped by everyone wherever I go if they know who I am."

He brought out the white mask and wore it. "I shall give my lesson while wearing this," he said. "Let's go prepare for it."

* * * * *

Ronron clung to Hao Ya's arm as they walked around the many tents that had been prepared around the desolate landscape in preparation for everyone going back to their home.

"Even though we are apprentice sisters, we don't really get to spend some time together, do we?" she asked Hao Ya.

Hao Ya smiled. "Of course, I'm busy with master's tasks and you are busy cultivating. It's a miracle that you are even here at all," she said.

"Master gives you a lot of work, doesn't he?" Ronron asked. "You should complain. I will stand by you if you do."

Hao Ya nearly laughed out loud. "Stop it. It's my responsibility as his disciple to help him with his tasks," she said.

"Well, I am his disciple too, but he never really gives me any tasks," Ronron said. "He most likely won't give me any even after I get strong, will he?"

"You know how it is," Hao Ya said. "You are too important for master to send out on errands. Besides, I don't think he sees you as a disciple even though he treats you as one."

Ronron nodded her head. "I'm going to stop being his disciple soon, aren't I?" she asked.

"If all goes well, yes," Hao Ya said. "If master can go back to his master with you, then you will become a direct disciple of the Sky God. At that point, you will outrank master too. That's probably why he treats you so well too because he knows it's all bound to happen."

Ronron nodded. "Sky God, huh? I wonder what sort of person she is," she thought.

"Alright, stop thinking about all of that," Hao Ya said. "Look around and check the people. I can't recognize this half-sister of yours, can I?"

"Oh, right," Ronron said and started focusing on the people around her. She went around the camps with Hao Ya before coming across a group of people in which there was the little girl that she had been looking for.

Fan Yanshi looked at the two girls that had appeared before him. "Oh, aren't you brother Yu Ming's daughter?" he asked with a blank expression on his face. "What are you doing here?"

"Hello, senior. Are you doing alright?" Ronron asked before turning around to the little girl next to him. "Hello, Lilin, do you remember me?"

The little girl stepped behind her father, hiding from the two girls.

"I'm sorry, she's been seeing new faces these past couple of days, so she's a little afraid," Fan Yanshi said. "Anyway, where is brother Yu Ming?"

"Father is busy," Ronron said.

"Oh, then what are you doing here?" Fan Yanshi asked.

Ronron didn't know how to explain what she had to explain. Seeing her hesitate, Hao Ya took the lead.

"Your wife, her name was Emily, right?" she asked.

Fan Yanshi's eyes widened in shock before retreating a bit in fear. "How... do you know?" he asked.

"Do you know why you are so bad at cultivation?" Hao Ya asked. "Why you were born with such a bad body? I'm sorry to break it to you, but you are a clone of the Original you that has already died."

"What?" Fan Yanshi looked in shock.

"That's the truth," Hao Ya said. "I will be explaining this all to everyone in a few hours, but just know that both you and your wife were clones of the real people that died."

"What are you talking about?" Fan Yanshi couldn't understand.

"Your Emily was a clone, just like you," Hao Ya said. "This right here is the daughter of another Emily, that is also the clone of the one that died."

"... huh?"

"So, by relation, she is that girl's half-sister," Hao Ya explained. "She came here to meet her and explain it to you."

"No... what?"

Ronron squatted down next to them. "It's true, senior. I am Emily's daughter from the Central continent, the one you call home. I didn't know about it at all, but it seems my father realized that I might have family up north, which was why he brought me there a few days ago."

Ronron then looked at the little girl behind her father. "Lilin, do you want to come out and play with your big sister? Here, I have some treats for you."

Chapter 1242 Time To Leave

Alex finished his alchemy lecture nearly half a day later. Since the level of alchemy knowledge in the Northern Continent was so low, he had to start from very basic knowledge before proceeding to advanced stuff.

So, a lecture that should have taken no more than 4 hours, ended up taking nearly 12.

He walked toward the group of elders that were happily waiting for him to come down.

"That should be enough, right?" he asked.

"Enough, it's more than enough," one of the elders said. "Thank you so much for teaching our alchemists so much about alchemy. I'm sure most of them didn't even know half of what you said existed at all."

"It's only obvious," Alex said. "Alchemy had to be suppressed before, so there wasn't a lot of growth, and over the past few thousand years, the knowledge slowly disappeared as no one was putting it into effect."

The elders nodded. "Once again, thank you for everything you've done."

"Thank you."

Everyone spoke all at once. Alex smiled behind his white mask and spoke, "if you are happy with it all, then please prepare for our departure. We'll be leaving at sunrise."

Many of the elders nodded and scattered away to fulfill his request. Only a single elder stayed behind and looked at him with solemn eyes.

"You are going to leave once again, huh?" lady Xuan asked. "I wonder how many times it is that I am going to have to watch you leave."

Alex took off his mask and gave a soft smile, not saying anything.

"Will you ever come back after leaving?" she asked.

"Are you asking that of Yu Ming or Alex?" he asked.

"Both?" Lady Xuan said.

"Yu Ming is no more, and will likely never return to you or anyone else in the Northern Continent. Alex is the king of the Southern Continent, and as such may return from time to time in the future. However, you should know what it would mean for a king to visit," he said.

"I see," Lady Xuan said. "So there is absolutely no chance of you ever becoming a member of our sect again, huh?"

Alex shook his head. "It's simply impossible now," he said. "Still, I won't forget the help you and your sect have provided, senior. For that, I will forever remain grateful."

"After I became a King, it's rare that I bow to anyone anymore. So, this might be the last time I do so for someone in the Northern continent. Please accept it."

Alex gave a short bow to the woman.

"You don't have to bow, I understand," the woman hurriedly said, but Alex still fully did his bow before looking back up.

The woman hesitated on what to do before bowing herself. "Thank you for everything you have done too. You say you are grateful to us, but you do not understand just how grateful the entirety of the Northern Continent is to you. It is thanks to you that it has finally had a chance to walk out of the shadow of the Snow Immortal sect, and will finally get to blossom to its true potential."

Alex's smile got brighter. "I can't wait to see it blossom into something beautiful," he said. "Until then, farewell."

He turned around and left the place, leaving behind the woman with a look that was a mixture of happiness and sadness.

Alex looked to the sky far away and saw Hao Ya fly into the air. She was about to begin telling everyone exactly what it was they could expect, exactly what it was they were going to have to deal with.

She was there to break their hopes now, rather than let them keep them for much longer and be in much more pain when they broke once they reached their destination.

Your parents are dead. Your friends are no longer there. Your home isn't your home anymore. The one you loved most likely loves someone else.

You are nothing but a clone.

These sorts of things were a necessity to tell the people before they went back so that when they did, they would have an objective view of reality instead of one they see through their own twisted hope.

Alex ignored her words and went on to find Hao Ya who he knew should be with Fan Yanshi. He found the three with Ronron playing with her younger sister or cousin, while Fan Yanshi was fully invested in the words of the lady in the sky.

"Father!" Ronron quickly waved him over.

"Oh, she's not shy anymore," Alex said.

"Of course," Ronron said. "It would be a surprise if she were to still be shy after she ate so many of the sweets I bought from that other city."

"Brother Yu-no, what was it? Alex?" Fan Yanshi spoke. "You left us that knowledge so many years ago that if we just held out for a bit longer... we could go home."

Alex paused for a second and remembered, he did do that. "Yes, I did," he said.

"I was so excited for this day for the past 3 decades, and this day has finally come," Fan Yanshi said. "So why don't I feel happy anymore?"

Alex could see the sadness on Fan Yanshi's face.

"She says that we will be going home, but she also says that we are clones, someone that never really existed in that place at all," he said. "So... is it still our home?"

"Of course," Alex said. "It doesn't matter what is the truth or what isn't in this case. If you think the world in your memories is your home, then it is your home."

Fan Yanshi sighed. "There will be another me in there, wouldn't there?" he asked. "Where will I have to go instead?"

"I... I can't tell you for certain right now," Alex said. "However, if you end up without a home in there, contact me. I will help you find one."

Fan Yanshi gave a meek little smile. "Thank you."

Hao Ya finished her speech in the air and came down to land next to Alex. "We're ready," she said.

"The sun is about to rise. We should all get ready to leave," he said.

The group lined up and walked toward the Teleportation formation one by one. Just like the one in the Southern Continent, this formation could handle about 20 thousand people at once as well.

Given the number of people that had gathered, it would take them about 7 different times to send them all back.

Alex met up with the rest of his family and waited for the teleportations to begin. He saw tears and heard sniffling from his aunt and understand that she just had a heartfelt goodbye with her sect.

Graham tried to console her, but he couldn't stop her from crying at all, so he let her be.

Ronron held onto Lilin in her arms and talked with her as a big sister. Meanwhile, Fan Yanshi stood by their side as well, but his face was completely blank with no emotion in it.

Hao Ya stood a little away with her arms crossed, waiting for it all to begin.

Alex looked to his left as the first rays of sunlight fell onto the land. Then, the teleportations began.

Chapter 1243 A Few Questions

Alex and the rest teleported back into the open field where they had been sent before. He looked around for his family who had been standing by him.

"Finally, I'm back," Liz couldn't help but say as she looked around the modern world that she had missed so much.

"Brother Fan, actually, I should probably call you Frank since you're back. You know where you're supposed to go right?" Alex asked.

"I do," he said with a solemn face. He looked around the old world that looked foreign to him now.

Alex turned to his daughter. "Can you buy a couple of phones and give one to Frank? Get one for grandpa and grandaunt too," he said.

"Okay, I'll get one for you too," Ronron said and walked away from the field with her new younger sister.

"Don't worry… uh, uncle Frank. If you end up not having a home, you can come live with us on our farm. The place is massive and will have enough place for you and little sister," Ronron said.

Frank looked at her. "This farm... it's where another Emily lives, right?" he asked.

Ronron nodded.

"Then I don't think I can go there," Frank said. "I can't live in a place where I'm constantly reminded of my wife only to remember she's already gone."

"Oh… okay," Ronron said.

"I will need to leave. I need to go meet my master," Hao Ya said. "I will see you guys later then."

"Wait," Alex quickly spoke up. "Ronron, take everyone home. I will come there later."

He called out Pearl and Whisker too and sent them with his family. Pearl was now a small cat, so he easily fit in anyone's arm or shoulders, and could thus be easily taken around too.

Alex left with Hao Ya to go to Senior Yang's place. He had a few questions to ask him that he had thought of in the past week as well as let Scarlet talk with Senior Luhei about his brother.

They arrived at the mansion after a few minutes of flying and entered. Hao Ya quickly went into the separated room to find her master and tell him the teleportations were complete.

Alex went to the backyard and spoke with senior Luhei along with Scarlet for a bit before the senior walked back out.

"I hear you were a lot of help during this travel," the senior said. "Thank you for helping Hao Ya with the task."

"It was nothing really," Alex said. "I just did what I could to help the players get back home."

"I hear you had to give up a few pills," the senior said. "Please accept my gratitude."

Alex felt weird hearing such politeness from a person that was no different from a god to everyone in this world. He smiled slightly and bowed.

"How long do you think it will take you to send us to the Western Continent?" Alex asked.

"No time at all," the man said. "I can send you all right now if I want to."

"Oh, really?" Alex asked with a surprised expression.

"Yes," the old man said. "Unfortunately, while the Western continent does have a new teleportation formation, it hadn't been tested or even properly tuned to teleport people yet. So, I will have to send you all randomly this time around, which I can do any time."

"Randomly? As in we won't know where we will appear?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I'm afraid that's what it means," the senior said. "I will try to send you all as close as possible, but I can't guarantee it since the fine-tuning I have done before was destroyed when the Yang energy burned it all."

"I will have to go off of what I remember," the senior said. "But don't worry, I know the gist of where I will have to send you exactly. You will most likely appear on the western side of the continent, near some large cities."

"I see, that helps I suppose," Alex said.

"Anyway, you should go and relax for a few days. I will let you know if I think it's time," the senior said.

"Actually, senior, I wanted to ask a few things of you that I did not get to ask last time around," he said.

"Oh, what sort?" the senior asked.New n0vel chapters are published on

"My first question is regarding Pearl actually," Alex said. "You said that he had destroyed his Bloodline, right? What if I give him mine? I also have the White Tiger's blood essence flowing in me. If I were to give him that part of me, will he heal?"

The senior shook his head. "I do not know if that will help restore his bloodline or not, but even if it does work, it still won't help your beast at all," the senior said.

"Why not?" Alex asked.

"A White Tiger is known for its two aspects," the senior said. "It's exceptional techniques that are passed down through the generations via their bloodline. And their Supreme Spiritual roots that they are born with."

"Actually, all Heavenly beasts are like that. They have skills and techniques that are passed down via their bloodline and a Supreme Spiritual root. If they lack even one aspect of it, they can never be considered a heavenly beast, do you know why?"

Alex shook his head.

"Because you can't use one without the other," the senior said. "The skills that are passed down through the bloodline require a Supreme root to use it."

"Let's say you do give your cat your part of the White Tiger's blood Essence, it will still be missing the most important aspect to make use of that bloodline, the Spiritual root," the senior said. "As I mentioned, he not only lost his bloodline but also his Spiritual root when he saved himself."

"I have no idea why he did that, or even how he knew to do so, but he did, and now he is in this situation. So, what you are suggesting will not help your cat at all," the senior said.

"But… can't the White Tiger's bloodline improve one's spiritual root to a Supreme level? It did for my Metal root. It should do the same for Pearl too, right?" Alex asked.

"White Tiger's blood doesn't have that sort of powers," the senior chuckled. "If they did, they would be hunted left and right. do you know how many people would kill to have a Supreme Spiritual root? It takes multiple celestial-grade treasures to give yourself one."

Alex got a little depressed. "So, my option really is to force him through evolution, huh?" he thought.

The senior nodded before pausing for a second. "Wait, what did you mean by your spiritual root improved? How?" the senior asked.

"Oh, after I ingested a big drop of White Tiger's Blood Essence," Alex said to the senior.

"White Tiger's blood essence helped evolve your spiritual root? really?" the senior checked Alex's body and was surprised. "Is it because of your body?"

"Is it?" Alex asked.

"Maybe," the senior said. "To think the White Tigers were so bold as to keep a treasure of such high importance in a place like this. They must've been out of their minds. I'm surprised you got away with it at all."

"Huh? Treasure?" Alex shook his head. "There was no treasure. I got that Blood Essence from Pearl's mother after she died."

The senior paused for a moment. "From Pearl's mother? Isn't she—" the man stopped as a few thoughts moved through his head and his eyes went wide from something he understood.

A curious look appeared on his face as he looked at Alex.

"Pearl's mother, was she a White Tiger?" he asked.

Alex thought for a bit and shook his head. "Not that I know of," he said. "I hear that beasts have a chance of keeping their features after evolving to a White Tiger. If that was the case, then she should be."

"When did you meet her? It was before my system was destroyed, right?" he asked frantically.

"Yes, it was before that," Alex said.

"What was her species?" the man asked.

"Uhh… a White Cat," Alex remembered.

"Not a White Tiger?" the man asked.

"No, not a White Tiger," Alex replied.

"Then… perhaps she never…" the man thought and suddenly started laughing out loud like a crazy man.

"If that Blood Essence really did come from his mother, then you might just have a chance to help him."

Chapter 1244 The Three Treasures

Alex was a little confused as to what the senior was talking about.

"I have nothing to worry about? Why? Because the blood came from his mother?" he asked the senior.

"Not just that," the senior said. "It's a little more complicated, and unfortunately, I'm not the one that holds the entirety of the information either. So, I can't really explain it to you in detail as to what exactly it is I'm saying."

"However, if what I'm understanding is correct, the chances of your cat evolving have improved infinitely," the senior said. "In fact, it will be surprising if he fails after you have given him back his the White Tiger's blood that you have in you."

"Alright," Alex said. "I will do it. How do I take out the Blood Essence from within me?"

"Unfortunately, I do not know how," the senior said. "The Heavenly beasts remain outside of matter of Humans and Demons as their own separate species, so we don't interact as much. Because of that, we don't know much about them as they are very secretive."

Alex nodded. It was because of their neutrality that they were sent to rule over these lands in the first place.

"Then? What do I do?" Alex asked.

"The White Tigers should know what to do. When you go to the Western Continent, visit them. There should be someone there that should be able to do it," the senior said.

"I see," Alex said. 'Will the Puma be able to do it?' he hoped so.

"Thank you, senior," he said. "You have no idea how much this thought has tormented me for the past week and a half."

"Do you have anything else to ask?" the senior asked.

"Of course," Alex said and quickly thought up some more questions to ask the senior. "Right, I wanted to ask you about pill veins."

"Pill veins? What about it?" the senior asked.

"I can't seem to form pill clouds out of Common and True pills at all. Am I doing anything wrong? Or is that just how it is?" he asked.

"Oh, that's just how it is," the senior said. "You can't form pill veins with Common and True pills the same way you can't form pill souls with Saint and Immortal rank pills."

"There needs to be a level of energy in a pill to create such phenomenons, which only comes at various levels," the senior said.

"I see," Alex said. "What's a Pill Soul?"

"It's when your pill forms a soul," the senior said. "Kind of like an artifact spirit."

"Ah, I see," Alex said. "There's such a thing huh? I didn't know about it at all."

"Really? Even after you got the Alchemy god's book?" the senior asked.

"Well, the knowledge he has is blocked behind layers of intent that loosen up every time I break through to a major realm," Alex said. "Until then, I have to get my information from other sources, like you."

"I see," the senior said and brought out a book. "So that's why there was nothing remaining inside this book huh?"

Alex looked at the book curiously and was surprised when he saw the name. "Alchemy God's Knowledge? How do you have that book? Is this a copy?" he asked.

"No, this is the original," the senior said.

"Then... did I get a fake one? That can't be," Alex said.

"No, you got this book. When you decided to learn it, I had it sent back here," the senior said.

"Was it not destroyed when I learned it? It disappeared from my storage bag," Alex said with a shocked look.

"Oh, did you not realize what happened yet? Every time someone learned something using my system, I had the information sent directly into their minds, while the book itself was sent back to me so it could go back into the pile of books that I could send with others," the senior said.

"You teleported it back here?" Alex asked.

"Yes, the same way I teleported back the spirit stones everyone sold," the senior said.

"I see," Alex said. "How did it work though? How did you just teach someone something?"

"It required some creative thinking, but I managed to do it in the end," the senior said. "I had to make a formation that forced intent into someone's mind and I only gathered books with a sufficient amount of intent."

"Also, I don't know if you knew it or not, but not all books could be just learned, especially ones that were not related to battle," the senior said.

"So I learned that book because it had Intent in it?" Alex asked.

The senior nodded. "This book is useless now that the intent behind it is inside of you," he said as he tossed it to Alex. "Still, it's a good memento of the Alchemy God, so keep it safe with you."

Alex grabbed the book and looked at it. He quickly flipped through the book and found that what was written inside of it was simple information about Alchemy that even someone who knew nothing about it could figure out on his own after a few months of practice.

The book was never what was important at all. It was the person who had stored his intent into it.

"There are no other copies like this, right?" Alex asked.

"Uhh... I don't believe so," the senior said after thinking a bit.

"Then... does that mean that I now hold the highest level of information any alchemist can hold in all the realms?" Alex asked. His heart started beating faster and faster as he realized that only he had the Alchemy God's teaching.

"Do you really think so?" the senior asked as he smiled a bit.

Alex felt a little embarrassed that his thinking had gone that way. "Am I mistaken, perhaps?" he asked.

"I won't say that you are wrong in thinking that you have a very high knowledge of Alchemy even though you have a lot of layers to still unlock in your mind," the senior said.

"However, you have to think of one thing exactly. The knowledge inside of you comes from the Alchemy god, but where did Alchemy God get his knowledge from?"

Alex paused for a bit as he realized that he hadn't even considered that question. In his mind, the Alchemy god just... existed. He never gave any thought to how he trained, or where he learned anything from.

"Where?" Alex asked slowly.

The senior smiled. "It is said that the Alchemy God came across 3 treasures when he was but a nobody. These treasures took him to the peak of Alchemy which no one had yet reached to this point," he said. "It was because of these treasures that he became what he was and wrote the book that you now hold."

"Oh, what are these treasures? where are they?" Alex asked curiously.

"We only know about one. After the Alchemy God's death, these three treasures disappeared, with no one knowing where any of it was."

"A few years after the war ended, however, someone appeared with the ability to make any pill they wanted and went on to become the current Alchemy god. After his ascension to Godhood, the current Alchemy God revealed that he held one of the three treasures."

Alex was beyond intrigued by this information. "What is the treasure?" he asked.

"The treasure is a book artifact known as The Book of Endless Recipes."

Chapter 1245 Take A Break

"The Book of Endless Recipes?"

Alex couldn't help but be fascinated by the name alone. "What does this book do exactly?" he asked.

"We're not sure, but Alchemy God did imply that the book was capable of providing him with any and all recipes, allowing him to make whatever type of pill he wanted," the senior said.

"Woah, any and all recipes? That's..." Alex could only imagine what he could do if he had the knowledge of every single pill that could exist. Life would be so much easier if that were the case.

"That's... quite amazing," he said. "What about the other 2 treasures?"

"We do not know what the other two treasures are," the senior said. "The records from back then are lacking and given the fact that the first Alchemy God was a secretive person, to begin with, there isn't much I can tell you."

"I see," Alex thought. "Well, this is quite a bit of information too."

The man shrugged. "What else do you want to know?" he asked.

Alex thought for a bit and asked the man about his divinations as well as the divination well in the Northern Continent, but the senior couldn't help him at all.

He told Alex the same thing Godslayer had said back then. He did not have to trust these divinations at all.

However, Alex found it hard to believe either of these two. After all, of the 6 different divinations he had received, 2 of them had already come true.

If he wasn't mistaken, then the third one was also starting to come true as well.

"Oh right, that reminds me, wasn't your aunt supposed to come along with you this time? The one with the time powers?" the senior asked.

"She did," Alex said. "She should be on the way back to her home right now with my father."

"Oh, would you mind bringing her here? A person capable of manipulating time can be very helpful to aid me with my work," the senior said.

"I will see what I can do," Alex said. "It should take a few days though for her to get over her emotions of losing her home and life."

"Ah, yes. Let her take her time," the senior said. "By the way, do you intend to take Ronron to the Western continent too?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I want her to meet her grandmother there, so I should take her with me."

"That's... good, but I'm a little worried that you will be scattered when you teleport away," the senior said.

"Hmm, I don't think you will have to worry about us scattering much," Alex said. "Depending on the power of the Teleportation aura, I should be capable of helping up stick together for the most part. After all, I have learned the Dao of Teleportation."

"Oh! Right, I forgot," the senior said. "Then I don't think I will have much to worry about at all."

Alex nodded. "I will take my leave for now," he said. "I will come back in 3 days after we've rested a bit and then we can leave for the Western Continent."

"Alright, I will wait for you all then," the senior said.

Alex walked back to Scarlet to see if she wanted to leave as well.

"I know where to go. I will go there later with senior here if he wishes to," Scarlet said. "For now, I will stay here."

"Alright then," Alex said and turned to leave. He saw Hao Ya standing by her master and wondered for a moment.

"Sister Hao, if you don't have anything else to do, why don't you come with me and my family to relax on our farm for the next 3 days? You've worked a lot and surely you want to get away from it all," he asked.

Hao Ya hadn't even thought about that. She turned to her Master who nodded. "He's right. You should take a break. You've worked without a break for so very long," he said.

"Should I?" she wondered.

"You should," Alex told her.

"Alright then," Hao Ya said. "I will take a break."

The two of them left the mansion and arrived outside. "Can you call Ronron and see if they've already left by any chance?" he asked.

"Sure," Hao Ya said and called Ronron.

Alex took the phone once she picked up and asked where she was. "Oh, I'm in the train station. I'm sending away grandpa and grandaunt to her home right now," Ronron said.

"Oh, then stay in the station and wait, we will be there in a few minutes," Alex told her and hung up.

The two of them reached the train station about 10 minutes later and found Ronron sitting by a bench with Pearl in her lap and Whisker on her head.

"Whisker? Didn't you go with father?" Alex asked after arriving.

Whisker shook his head.

"Grandpa said he wanted Whisker to stay with me. He had no reason to go with him anyway," Ronron answered.

"I suppose," Alex thought. "What about Frank and Lilin?"

"Oh, they left early. I got them their ticket, which turned out to be free actually, and got them a phone as you said before sending them away," Ronron explained.

"Where were they going?" Alex asked.

"To Peachpit city in the west," Ronron said. "He said he had a home there, but I'm worried he won't have one."

"Don't worry about him, he's an adult and can handle himself," Alex said. "Oh right, did you see Matt? He should have come with his wife."

"That guy from the big sect? I remember seeing him get here a few batches before our own," Ronron said. "He must have taken the train to the other train station that was closest to them. I came here because it was so crowded there."

"I see," Alex said. "Well, let's not worry about them then. Go buy 3 tickets and we can leave."

"3? Is big sis coming along too?" Ronron asked with wide eyes.

"Yes, I'm coming along," Hao Ya said.

"Wow! Did you finally complain to master like I said you should? Let me know if you want me to say something too," Ronron said.

Hao Ya smiled a bit. "I didn't need to do such a thing," she said. "He told me to go as soon as your father brought up the topic of vacation."

"Ooh, nice. Thank you father, you have no idea how long it must have been before sister Hao had a chance to take a break," Ronron said.

"I understand, now go get us the ticket," Alex said.

Ronron giggled and ran away to the counter while Alex sat by Pearl. "I think I found a way to help you, buddy," he said.

"Huh? Help me? How?" Pearl asked curiously.

"It involves the ritual for evolution back in the beast realm," Alex told him. "The senior says the chances of success will be high, but I'm still not convinc--"

"Will I become strong again if I succeed?" Pearl asked.

"If it works, absolutely," Alex said.

"Then I will do it," Pearl said with a firm resolution. "Help me get there, brother."

"I will," Alex said. "3 days later, the first thing we will do after going to the Western Continent is go to the Beast Realm and ask them for help with your ritual."

Chapter 1246 To The Western Continent

The three days passed in the blink of an eye.

Liz had returned to the farm a day later and spent some time with the old Alex and Emily. The two old people felt very youthful not only with their elders around them but also because of the pill they ate.

While the True Rejuvenating pill didn't give them back their youth in terms of appearance, it did make them way more physically capable than they were last time around.

Alex explained to them that their life had improved by a thousand years or so, and the only way it would decrease was if they got sick and needed healing. Although, that wasn't possible as far as Alex was around.

The group enjoyed their time around each other, with even Hao Ya acting like she was family for the rest of the days.

Then, after the third day, everyone got ready to leave, including the older Alex. He had wanted to go back to the Crimson Empire his whole life, and Alex accepted his request when he made it.

Only Emily was left behind on the farm, but with so many workers there, she wouldn't be lonely at all.

With the older Alex coming, they had to take a train ride to the senior's place, where they arrived a few hours later.

The senior looked at everyone that had come and was quite surprised. "Oh, are you planning on going too?" he asked older Alex.

"Yes, senior," the older Alex answered.

"Papa wants to go see his old sect and friends," Ronron answered from the side.

"Ah, I see," the senior said. He looked around until his eyes fell on Liz. "Are you Alex's aunt?"

"I am, senior," Liz bowed a little. "Greetings."New n0vel chapters are published on

The senior nodded in greeting as well. "I hear you have learned Time Dao. Can you show me?" he asked.

"Uh... sure," Liz said and used her time powers a little. The senior didn't move at all and only felt what was happening. From the outside, it looked like he sometimes moved very quickly and sometimes he didn't move at all.

Liz stopped. "Is that enough?" she asked.

"That's... amazing," the senior couldn't help but say. "Alex said that your time power has to do with your body, is that true?"

Liz nodded. "I believe so. It's called the Profound Temporal Celestial body," he said.

"CELESTIAL?!" the senior's voice jumped a few octaves in surprise since he couldn't believe that the girl in front of him held a Celestial body.

"Wait, it's your daughter that holds a Celestial body too, right?" the senior asked.

"I've heard so," Liz said, and the others confirmed.

"H-how does your family keep doing this?" the senior couldn't help but ask. He breathed in and out a bit before calming down. "Please come with me, I have to test a few things with your powers."

Liz nodded and walked away with the senior as well as Hao Ya who had heard about it as well. As for the rest, they waited around in the backyard for it to be all done.

It took them about half an hour for their talk to be over before they walked out.

"It's time to leave," the senior finally said.

The group felt a bit anxious when they heard him. After all, unlike the Northern Continent, the Western Continent held an entirely different grade of importance in the heart of most of these people.

To the two Alex, it was the place they thought of as their home. It was a place where they could help Pearl, and it was the place where their mother was currently at.

The rest were also anxious because of Helen as well as the fact that the only sects Alex ever joined remained there.

They all followed the senior back to the room where the teleportation formation was and stood on top of it.

The group included two Alex, Graham, Ronron, Pearl, Liz, Hao Ya, and surprisingly, Scarlet. Alex didn't notice her at first but when he realized she was there, he was a little confused.

"Scarlet, you should leave the platform," Alex said.

"Why? I am going too," she said.

"But... you can't go," Alex said. "Isn't that part of the oath?"

"Don't worry about me," Scarlet said with a serious expression. "I know what I am doing."

Alex was still a little worried, but her words helped him calm down a little. 'If she knows what she's doing then, she must know she can go,' he thought. 'Then... is she bypassing the oath somehow?'

"Okay, everything except the destination is ready," the senior said. "Tell me where I should send you. I can do anywhere aside from the secret realms."

"Oh... uh..." Alex was about to answer, but he couldn't come up with a destination at all. "Where should we go first?" he asked the rest of the people there.

"What does it matter, father?" Ronron asked. "Aren't we going to go everywhere in the end anyhow?"

"It matters because we have two choices and either choice will delay the other destination by a lot," Alex said. "My sect lies in the Crimson Empire while Mother should be in the Flowing Brush sect of the Luminance Empire."

"Whichever place we go first, we will have to go through the Beast realm," Alex explained. "But because Pearl will have to be treated in the Beast Realm, it will take some time to go to the other place."

"Hao Ya and I will have to go to the Beast realm quickly either way, so I won't matter to us," Liz said. "We have to deal with the Teleportation formations there."

"Oh," Alex thought. "Then... let's go to the Crimson Empire first. I can't delay Pearl's evolution either, so I will go to the Beast realm and immediately leave for mother as soon as I can from there. We can meet back in the sect."

Since it was settled, the senior put in the destination as the Crimson Empire. "Be ready, I will activate it now," he said.

Alex nodded. He used his Space dao and separated a chunk of space from the rest of the space around him. The chunk of space was large and fit everyone inside of it.

Alex hoped that the teleportation saw this space as a single entity so that when it randomly teleported everyone around, it randomly teleported the single large space and not everyone it in.

The teleportation aura filled the platform in an instant, and just as Alex expected, it accepted the large chunk of space as a single entity.

Alex had done this before back when he was teleported from the Northern Continent to the Southern Continent. He had expanded his space so he could teleport away with everyone and everything around him.

With his space bubble working as intended, he let the teleportation aura capture their bubble and send them away.

In a flash of light, the group disappeared and reappeared somewhere inside a forest. Water dripped from the dense trees as a result of the rain that seemed to be falling right now.

The bubble Alex had created was still around so the water never got to them. He looked around and checked the people he had come with.

"No one separated right?" Alex asked.

The group counted themselves and they were all here.

"Where are we?" Ronron asked. "This looks like a forest."

"We must be in the Southern forest," Alex explained. "It's part of the beast realm, but outside of their secret realm."

"Where do we go now then?" one of them asked.

Alex pulled out a compass and checked the direction. "Let's go south for now and see where we are exactly. Once we know, we will know where to go," he said.

The group followed the compass south until they came to a road that was clearly used daily. Alex spread his spiritual sense around and found a few carriages that were going away and coming in their direction.

"We will know in a bit," he said.

The carriages and caravans were afraid of bandits, so when they saw a group of people waiting for them next to the road, just outside of the forest, they immediately walked out with weapons and techniques ready to be used whenever needed.

"Please relax, we're not bandits," Alex explained. "We just want to know which direction the Cardinal City is."

The guards didn't trust the lot at all and didn't answer for a moment, waiting for their leader to answer instead.

The carriage door opened and a figure walked out from inside. He had long, flaming red hair and looked a few years older than Alex did right now.

He looked at the group with narrowed eyes, which landed on Alex for a few seconds too long. "You look familiar," the man said. "Are you... Yu Ming?"

"Oh, I didn't expect to see you here, brother Yang. How's everything going?" Alex asked with a bright smile.

"Oh," the older Alex recognized the young man as well. "Is that... Yang Ma?"

"He is," Alex said. "I heard you left the sect after you graduated, brother Yang. I'm glad to see you're doing quite well."

"So... It really is you," Yang Ma said with a weird look on his face. "Stand down, he's not a bandit."

The guards put down their weapons and waited for more orders.

"What are you doing by the forest?" Yang Ma asked.

"Oh, we just came to the Crimson Empire and arrived in the forest," Alex explained. "Would you mind telling me the direction of the Cardinal City, brother Yang?"

"Get in," Yang Ma spoke. "I'm on my way to the city right now. I'll take you there."

Chapter 1247 Destinations

Alex looked to his left in the direction where the carriage was headed to. If the carriage was coming from the east and heading toward Cardinal City, then it appeared that he had arrived in the Eastern Regions of the Crimson Empire.

He hadn't been to these places before.

"You will take us to the Cardinal City?" Alex asked. "Thank you, brother Ma."

Alex looked at the group behind him and gestured for them to get on.

Yang Ma looked at the people behind Alex and asked, "Who are they? You really aren't doing banditry, are you? I heard you left the Crimson Empire, but I'm starting to doubt it now."

"Haha, these are my family and friends. This is my father and his sister. This one is a friend, and this right here is my daughter," Alex explained.

"And... who's that?" Yang Ma pointed to the only person Alex hadn't introduced.

"Well, how do I explain this? That's me," Alex said. "Well, my clone."

"Your clone?" Yang Ma's eyes narrowed.

"Yes," Alex said. "Actually, it was him you met all those years ago, not me. Technically speaking you should be talking to him, but I'm afraid he doesn't have that good a memory, unlike me."

Yang Ma couldn't understand what was happening at all. "Let's get inside for now. We're blocking the road," he said and settled the group in various carriages.

Alex got into the carriage with Yang Ma, while the rest were scattered throughout the various carriages.

"So, how's life going, brother Yang? I hope it's good," Alex said as he settled in the carriage.

"It's alright," Yang Ma said.

"How long has it been since we've seen each other? I don't think I saw you after I graduated, have I?" he asked.

"I believe that was the last time," Yang Ma said. "Did you even return after that time?"

"I did once about a decade later," Alex said. "But, it's been over 30 years since then too. I wonder how the sects have changed since then."

"So, you really just came to the Empire?" Yang Ma asked. "What were you doing in the other Empire beyond the forest?"

"Oh, I wasn't there at all," Alex said. "I went to different continents and was stuck there most of the time. I only recently found a way to come back which is why I'm here."

"Different Continents?" Yang Ma was surprised. "Are you saying you've left the Western Continent?"

"I have," Alex said. "I actually came from the Central Continent. Do you know about the Central continent?"

"I have heard a few things from my Grandfather, nothing else," Yang Ma said.

"Your grandfather? Oh right, he was a Saint too, wasn't he?" Alex thought. "I remember master saying something about your family being one of the more powerful ones in the Empire."

"Of course," Yang Ma said proudly. "We are the Yang family after all."

Alex nodded. "So, what are you doing right now, brother Yang? What's this carriage about?" he asked.

"I handle my family's merchant business. I'm delivering a few goods to the capital right now," Yang Ma said. "It shouldn't take more than an hour or two now. We're close."

"I see."

Alex remembered having negative feelings about this person long ago, but somehow none of that remained anymore. Any feelings, negative or positive about him had been washed away with time.

He looked at Yang Ma again and didn't know if he was fast or slow given that he had only just reached the True Lord's 8th realm.

For someone close to 70 years old, he should be considered slow, but given that this was the Crimson Empire, Alex couldn't be sure. It was after all one of the worst places for cultivators due to its severe lack of high-grade spirit veins.

"You got married?" Yang Ma asked curiously.

"No," Alex said. "My daughter is actually my clone's daughter, he's the one that got married."

"Why did you make a clone?" Yang Ma asked.

"Haha, he was made without my knowledge," Alex said. "It's too much to try and explain right now. Very soon, there should be announcements that spread all over the empire. That should help explain a bit."

Yang Ma nodded. "Whatever reason it may be... welcome back," he said.

Alex smiled. "Thank you, brother Yang."

The carriage arrived outside the Cardinal city and stopped as there was a long line of carriages that were trying to enter the Cardinal city.

"It will take a while to enter the city, huh?" Alex asked.

"Half an hour or so," Yang Ma said.

"I see, then... I think it will be better if I get off right here then," Alex said.

"You're not going to enter the city?" Yang Ma asked.

"I might," Alex said. "My main intention for coming here is because I can now know where I have to go to go to Scarlet city."

"I see," Yang Ma said. "My journey is to the city alone, I'm afraid. I will have to return once I'm done with my business."

"No worries, brother Yang. Thank you for bringing us here," Alex said. He reached into his storage ring and pulled out a pill bottle.

"Please take these pills," Alex said. "I haven't seen you in a long time, so you may consider this a gift. If not, consider this my way of saying thanks for helping us today."

Yang Ma hesitated to take the pills. After all, all he had done was give him a ride.

"Don't hesitate to take it, brother Yang, you should know how good my pills are," Alex said. "These pills can help you or your grandfather improve your cultivation speed by a lot. Use them very carefully."

Yang Ma finally sighed and took the pills. "I can't reject something so precious, thank you."

Alex smiled and got off the carriage. The others had already gotten off before him as he had told them to do so already.

"I'll see you around, brother Yang. Goodbye."

Alex walked away with his group, leaving Yang Ma by himself to wonder what he really had been doing all this time.

To him, Alex was an enigma, that came out of nowhere and left as early. "Did he lose his cultivation base? Or was it just so high that I didn't even notice it?" Yang Ma wondered. Whatever it was, Yang Ma understood that the two of them stood in a different league from each other, and it was very much likely that he was never going to see Alex ever again.

Alex arrived by the gate of the Cardinal City and looked back at his group. "Sister Hao, do we go and tell the Emperor about gathering people to send them back?" he asked.

"No, we need to fix the formation first. We will let the players know after everything is ready," Hao Ya said.

"Alright," Alex said. "Then we should split."

The group gave a weird look. "Split?" Ronron asked.

"Yeah, I will go with Sister Hao to the Beast realm to fix the formation and help Pearl. The rest of you will go to Scarlet city," Alex explained. "I can also quickly go over to the Luminance empire and bring mother back."

"Sounds good," Liz said. "But I will have to come with you. The senior said I am needed to speed up the process of fixing the formation with my time dao."

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "I guess you should come with us then. What about you, Scarlet? What do you—"

"Obviously I'm coming with you," she said, not even letting him finish his sentence.

"I see, obviously," he said. "I guess that's it then."

Alex, Pearl, Liz, Hao Ya, and Scarlet were in the group that would go to the formation to get it fixed. Meanwhile, Ronron, Graham, and Old Alex would have to go to Scarlet city on their own.

"Uhh... this is annoying," Alex thought. "You guys don't really have a very high cultivation base."

"It should be fine though," Graham said. "I can protect them."

"Yes, but not if the fight takes place in the sky," Alex said and brought out the Blood God's Manual. He pulled out a beast from inside the book, a four-horned Ocean snake that was completely made up of blood.

At the same time, he brought out Whisker as well. "Whisker, you will have to go with them. You are in charge of protecting them with this snake, okay?" he asked.

Whisker nodded.

Alex reached for the snake and suddenly the snake changed its size rapidly, shrinking not only in size but in shape as well. It took the form of a small sphere that looked no different from a beast's core.

"Use it only when needed, okay?" Alex said. "You guys can't revert it back at all. Also, don't use it when Whisker is not around. He is the only one that can control it at all."

"Got it, father," Ronron said and took the blood core. "So, where do we go now?"

"Your papa will tell you. He should be remembering everything now," Alex said, pointing at the older Alex that was looking around in amusement and disbelief.

"I believe I do remember," he said. "We need to head west from here, don't we?"

"Yes," Alex said and pulled out a ship. "Take this and go. We won't be needing ships, so you guys take it."

"Thank you, father," Ronron said quickly got onto the ship with Whisker. Graham and the other Alex got on as well.

"Alright, head out now. We will hopefully be back very soon," Alex said and waved them goodbye.

After the group left, Alex turned to his remaining group. "Shall we?"

Chapter 1248 Nervous And Anxious

Graham, Ronron, and the Older Alex flew on the small boat that Alex had lent them. They flew through the air, not fast or slow, following the pathway on the ground.

There were not many people flying on boats like theirs, but even the ones that did couldn't help but look at them as they easily passed by each and every one of them.

Their boat was just too fast even when it was not flying at its fastest speed. Graham was surprised at how slow everything was around him.

Ronron wasn't really surprised as she didn't yet know much about the world outside of her own to judge the difference. Alex had told her this was one of the worst places to be in if one wanted to cultivate, but that didn't help her understand much of the place.

The older Alex was simply shocked at how fast his own boat was. He looked around as the world zoomed past him in a blur. The flashes of trees nearby made him dizzy from how fast they went by.

He had to focus on the land far away or on the ship itself so he didn't get a headache.

"Do you know where to stop, Uncle Whisker?" Ronron asked.

Whisker thought for a moment and shook his head. He looked toward the older Alex for an answer, but the old man simply wasn't paying attention at all.

Ronron giggled a bit. "Uncle Whisker, you should slow down or we will never know if we got there or not," she said.

Whisker nodded and slowed down the ship a bit, enough so that even the older Alex could tell what he was looking at.

"Can you tell where we are, papa?" she asked.

The older Alex finally looked around, but he only saw trees and maybe a few villages along the way. "Uhh... I don't remember any of this," he said. "We should reach a city or something so I can tell where I am exactly."

The group nodded and followed the road as they waited for the first city on their journey to show up.

The older Alex looked around, wondering how nothing seemed to have changed at all and even then it all looked so... foreign to him.

Graham looked around as well, but he was nowhere nearly as fascinated as Alex was. He was used to the cultivation world. The only difference between the places he had been to and this one was the fact that this one had weaker Qi in the air.

"Grandpa, why didn't you go to find grandma with father? Isn't that why you came here?" Ronron asked.

"I wanted to, but... I got a feeling that if I went there, I still wouldn't see her for a long time. Alex has been talking about Pearl, so I'm afraid he will spend a lot of his time there and won't get to go find grandma soon enough. Without him, I wouldn't even know where to go and be stuck with him."

"Since I was going to have to come here anyway, I decided to come and meet with the people that Alex considers as close as family," Graham said.

"I see," Ronron said. "I wonder if father and the rest reached their destination by now. They said it was close by, so with their speed, it should have taken them no time at all."

"Who knows," Graham said and looked ahead. "Oh, there's a city there. Whisker, slow down by that city, okay?"

Whisker did as was asked of him and slowed down as they got closer. Old Alex looked at the city and shook his head. "I don't remember this city and it's far away from the forest. Scarlet City is pretty much attached to the forest. Let's keep going," he said.

Whisker sped up the boat once again and flew until they reached the next city and the city after that.

2 hours and a few cities later, they arrived in another city that gave the old Alex a feeling that he had been here before. "Wait... this might be... what was its name?" the old Alex tried to remember the name of the city.

"Do you know this one, papa?" Ronron asked.

"I do, it's the city right before the Scarlet city. I remember this city's sect's sect leader being present in my first-ever auction house," the old Alex said.

"Oh, then we are close by," Ronron said.

The boat continued and soon they passed by a massive patch of open land that didn't seem natural at all.

"The Gap," the old Alex remembered. "This was where I was taken away by the beasts to their realm."

The old memories were coming back to him in bits and pieces. "We're close by," he said. He got more and more anxious as they got closer and closer to the city.

Then, finally, in the distance, they all saw the massive walls of a massive city right next to the Southern Forest.

The group had arrived at Scarlet city.

Whisker slowed down the ship until it came to a halt right outside the city gates. The three of them got off the ship and finally, Whisker jumped out as well.

The ground was wet from the rain that had only just stopped and the smell of rain hadn't left the air either. The green trees and grass followed by a massive gray wall was a contrast that the old Alex only ever remembered in his memories.

"I never realized how big this was," he spoke softly.

Ronron took the ship into her bag and looked at her father. "Are you alright, papa? You seem nervous," she asked.

"I am nervous," the older Alex said as he breathed in a little. He looked around at the many people that were gathered outside. Were there always this many people?

He saw flashes of yellow and green robes coming in and out of the gates, making him feel more nervous and anxious about it all.

"Let's go in," Graham said and walked up to the line of people that were there to go into the city.

After a while, they arrived at the gate and the person by the gate asked for some identifications or some silver coins in exchange for going in.

The older Alex remembered the time he had to kill a beast to try and afford those coins. Now, his daughter simply took out a spirit stone and handed it over.

"Don't worry about the change," Ronron said and walked ahead. "Come on, let's go."

Graham and old Alex walked in behind her.

"Woah!" the older Alex couldn't help but say when he saw the inside. Not only was the inside completely different from his memories, but it also seemed to be quite developed as well.

So many things had changed that he couldn't even tell which road he was supposed to do.

"Where do we go now?" Graham asked while looking around the place as well. Ronron did so too, and so did Whisker who was standing on her head.

"Have you been here before, uncle Whisker?" Ronron asked.

Whisker nodded. "I was very young back then so I don't remember anything," he spoke in her ears.

Old Alex thought for a bit. There were two different places he could go to. He decided to go first to the one where he would be happy rather than sad.

"Let's take this road," he said. "We should go to the Tiger sect first. If we follow the wall south, we should arrive by the sect."

Chapter 1249 The Real One

The old Alex arrived outside the golden gates of the Tiger sect. He couldn't remember if it was always golden or if they had changed the colors sometime later.

He looked at the mini market that was run by the sect outside of the gates and smiled at how many people there were. That was certainly a larger number, wasn't it?

He stepped forward and walked up to the guards that were in front of the sect. The guards naturally stepped forward to stop him from entering and asked, "what might you be here for?"

"Is elder Wen Cheng still here? I'm his disciple," Alex said.

The guards looked at each other and then back at the gray-haired Alex. "Elder Wen Cheng certainly is around, but are you really his disciple, senior? You don't seem to have any cultivation base, so we're sorry that we have to doubt you," one of them said.

"I am," the older Alex said with a smile when he heard that Wen Cheng was still around.

"Alright, what's your name? We will call him," the two guards said.

"Yes, my name is Alex or Yu Ming. You can use whichever one. He should know both," the older Alex said.

The guards paused. "Yu Ming? You?" they looked at him, clearly not believing him. "We've seen senior Yu Ming before. He's not some old man like you. Please don't waste our sect's time if you are just going to be lying."

"No, please. I am Yu Ming," the older Alex said. "Believe me, please. Just call my master and he'll make it clear."

"Go away, old man. We don't have time for your lies. If you are truly Yu Ming, then bring out your alumni badge," the guards said.

"I... I don't have that," the older Alex said. Even the real Alex didn't have that badge as it had been lost during his fight with the mad immortal. It was yet unsure if he had it in his soul space or not.

"Then please leave, senior. Don't make us kick you out," the guards said.

"But I'm not lying. Please just call my master," older Alex said.

"Hey, let my father in. He's come a long way to meet his master," Ronron spoke as she couldn't stand it all either.

"Young lady, we cannot let you in just because—"

Whisker jumped down from Ronron's shoulders and flared his cultivation base. The two guards instantly fell on their butts as the fear of death emerged from deep within their hearts.

The peak of the True realms was not something the two could handle. With merely a True Disciple or True Master realm cultivation base, the two could only cower in fear in front of the terrifying little mouse.

"Do what they say right now!" Whisker spoke directly in their mind and the two of them immediately called for Wen Cheng.

A few minutes later, an older middle-aged man arrived at the gate in a hurry. He looked at the three before him and was confused for a few seconds.

The older Alex saw the man that looked younger than him and couldn't help but tear up. "Master!" he spoke out and immediately fell to his knees. "This disciple greets you, master."

Wen Cheng gulped a little when he saw the gray-haired Alex. "Alex?" he called out in confusion. "Is that you?"

"It's me, master," the older Alex looked up, tears dripping down his face. "I'm so happy I finally got to see you."

The last time Alex had seen his master, he had lost an arm in the fight up in the sect leader's mountain in the Hong Wu sect. After that, he had followed his master's killer into the Forbidden Fields. And after that, he was gone, never to see this world ever again, or so he had believed all this time.

He had only heard about what had happened afterward from Pearl, but that was still over a decade ago, and hearing about something wasn't nearly as good as seeing it with one's own eyes.

"It's... it's really you?" Wen Cheng couldn't help but be surprised. He quickly grabbed Alex by his shoulders and pulled him up. "Alex, what happened to you? Are you hurt? Were you crippled? Why are you so old?"

Wen Cheng's worry was clear in his eyes and that made Alex happy. However, he couldn't help but wonder if he would worry all the same when he found out he was just a clone.

"Nothing happened to me, master," he said. "I'm just... not the Alex you remember."

"... what?" Wen Cheng was confused.

"The Alex you are used to, that's not me. I'm... a clone of his, one without a cultivation base. I..." the older Alex couldn't think of what to say.

"Oh!" Wen Cheng finally understood. "You are the one he talked about, the one that controlled his body, aren't you?"

"Yes, that was me," Old Alex said.

"Then... you are the real Alex that was my disciple," Wen Cheng said. "And you've finally come back."

Wen Cheng hugged the old Alex in a tight grip. "Welcome back."

The older Alex couldn't help but get more sentimental when he heard that. He always considered himself the fake one ever since he figured out what was happening.

He had always thought his master would see him as a fraud that had taken over their disciple's body than the disciple himself. However, hearing his master call him 'the real one' stripped away all of the fear and doubt that had been plaguing his mind all this time.

"Master!" he shouted and hugged him back as he started crying. Wen Cheng wipes his tears as well.

Ronron sniffled a little behind them as the emotions were getting to her as well. Not even Graham could remain stoic.

The master-disciple remained in a hug for a long time as years of built-up emotions were flushed out in a single hug.

Old Alex couldn't think of a single thing that could happen today that would make him happier than he was right now.

Chapter 1250 As Beautiful As Ever

Old Alex let go of his master and wiped his tears away. "How are you doing, master? Are you alright? I hear your arm was healed. Is it okay?" he asked one question after another.

"Haha, you don't have to worry about me at all," Wen Cheng said. "We're doing perfectly fine." His eyes then moved to the back at the two people as well as the mouse.

Wen Cheng's eyes narrowed when he saw the mouse. "Is that... Whisker?" he asked.

"Woah!" Whisker couldn't help but speak into everyone's mind in surprise. "Brother's master knows me. Why does he know me?"

Wen Cheng himself was surprised to hear the voice of the mouse in his head. "You don't remember me, do you? Alex had us meet-wait if you're here then..."

"Alex isn't here but he will be soon," the older Alex said. "He has urgent business in the Beast realm, so he will be here in a few more days."

"I see," Wen Cheng said. "And... who are they?"

"Oh, right. I forgot to introduce you," the older Alex said. "Master, this is me and Alex's father."

"Greetings. My name is Graham," Graham bowed a little. "I heard you took care of my son when he was here. Thank you."

"No, no, he's the one that's taking care of us," Wen Cheng said in a simple voice before his eyes went wide. "Wait, Father?"

"Hmm? Yes, I'm their father," Graham said.

Wen Cheng immediately pulled out a talisman and spoke into it.

The three of them looked weirdly at Wen Cheng, but they couldn't tell what he was doing.

The older Alex continued. "Master, this is my daughter, Maron."

"Greetings, senior. Please call me Ronron," Ronron bowed in front of her father's master.

"Your... daughter?" Wen Cheng couldn't believe it. "You... you have a daughter?"

"Of course, master," Old Alex said. "Do you have any children yet, master? You shouldn't be the sect leader now, so you should have more free time, right?"

"I... I do, but I don't have any children. I only just got married a few years ago," Wen Cheng said blankly. He turned to look at Ronron. "How old are you, child?"

"28, senior," Ronron said.

"Wow... 28. I really couldn't imagine you have a child that early, but I suppose the world we lived in was very different, wasn't it?" Wen Cheng asked.

"It was, master," older Alex said.

"It was no wonder you had no common sense back then. What made sense here wasn't common to you at all," Wen Cheng said.

The older Alex smiled a bit. "Right, master. Are senior sister and brother here?" he asked.

"Yes. They are—"

Before Wen Cheng could finish his words, a strong gust of wind struck them all as someone arrived by their side at a very fast speed.

Ronron hid her father from the dust while Wen Cheng simply pulled up his robe to hide his face.

Graham, however, remained unmoved, with his eyes wide open. In fact, they were wider than they ever could be.

He saw who stood before him, a woman wearing a bright yellow robe with long black hair. She looked beautiful, just as beautiful as the day he had lost her.

"Helen..." Graham spoke softly, unable to believe that she was here.

"Honey!"

Helen jumped into Graham's embrace before he could say anything else. "You're here," she spoke as tears fell down her face. "You're really here."

Graham felt tears flow down his face as well. "I am," he said with a bit of a sniffle. "I am finally here."

Helen embraced her husband in a strong hug and didn't let go of him at all, almost as if he would vanish the moment she let go, just like a dream.

"Honey," Graham spoke. "I'm not the only one who's here."

"Hm?" Helen finally opened her eyes and looked at the other people who were there. "Whisker? Is that y—"

She recognized the little mouse, but her words stopped when she saw an old man that looked like her son.

"That's..."

"M-mother," the older Alex couldn't help but speak through his tears. The last time he had seen his mother was her on deathbed in a hospital gown with sunken cheeks and a bald head, while she fought hard against the painful cancer in a losing battle.

He had watched her take her final breath over two decades ago, and now he got to see her all over again. More alive than ever, more beautiful than ever.

Not only was she lively and pretty, but she also looked younger than she ever was.

"Alex?" Helen couldn't help but be shocked to see her son as an old man. "H-how... what happened to you?"

"That's not the Alex you're thinking of," Graham said softly. "He's the Alex that remained in the Central Continent, his clone."

"Oh..." Helen said. "But... he's still our child, right?"

"Every bit of it," Graham said.

"Al," Helen said and went ahead to hug him.

"Mother!" the older Alex cried once more, his tears unending. "I... I thought... I thought I would never get to see you again. I... I thought you were gone forever."

Helen smiled a little and stroked his gray hair. "Sshh, don't cry. I'm here, aren't I? I'm not gone. You don't have to cry anymore." That only served to make him cry even harder.

Even Helen herself could only cry when she thought about his situation. Ronron was a bawling mess as well.

"Mother!" Whisker spoke and jumped onto her. "Mother, do you remember me?"

"Whisker, you can speak?" Helen asked in surprise. "Of course, I remember you. Why wouldn't I?"

"Woah! Everyone remembers me. I wonder why I don't remember anyone. I must have been very young back then," Whisker couldn't help but think.

Helen smiled and pat the little mouse on its head. She moved away from the older Alex and pat him as well.

"Grandma," Ronron stepped forward and hugged her as soon as she let go.

"G-grandma?" Helen's eyes went wide. "Wait... what?"

"Mother, that's my daughter," Alex quickly explained. "Ronron, introduce yourself first."

"Right," Ronron let go. "My name is Maron. Everyone calls me Ronron." After finishing her introduction, she went back and hugged Helen again.

"Oh... I'm... a grandma?" Helen couldn't help but speak to herself in surprise.

"I felt the same when I found out about 2 weeks ago," Graham said from behind her.

"Let me take a look at you, my child," Helen said and Ronron moved a little away from her. "Wow, my granddaughter is so very pretty."

"Just like you, grandma," Ronron quickly said.

"Oh, and she even knows how to make me happy," Helen said while pinching her granddaughter's cheeks. She kissed her on the forehead and hugged her once again.

"Right, how are you guys here? Did you come by yourself?" Helen asked.

"No, Father brought us," Ronron said.

"Father?" Helen looked toward the Older Alex who quickly shook his head.

"Alex is here as well," Graham said. "So are Liz and Pearl, but they have an urgent business in the Beast realm, so they will be back after a few days."

"Urgent business? What sort?" Helen couldn't help but ask.

"Don't worry," Graham said, not wanting to tell her. "We'll hear from them soon enough."

Wen Cheng stepped forward. "Come on in," he said to the group. "Let's get you guys settled in. I'll let Meimei and Xun'er know that you are here. They will be elated to see you all."

Chapter 1251 No Longer Empty

While the other group had gone ahead to the Scarlet city, Alex's group had made their way to the southern regions of the Southern Forest.

They flew by themselves for a while, going toward the teleportation platform that was outside of the Beast realm.

Pearl had started out with them, but soon enough everyone realized that he couldn't keep up at all. With how weak his current cultivation was as compared to everyone else, Alex took Pearl back into his beast space so they delayed no longer.

"How long do you think it will take?" Alex asked. "Will we be done in a month?"

"It's hard to tell. It could be faster or slower," Hao Ya said. "The thing is, because we do not know the exact distance between the two formations as the records have already been lost for millennia now, we will have to go through a lot of trial and error to figure it out."

"If we're lucky, it could be a day. If we're not, it could even take 6 months. Fortunately, your aunt is here, so we can use her powers to increase our efficiency and do a lot of those trials in a very short amount of time," Hao Ya said.

"I see."

He wondered how long it would take for Pearl to evolve if he could at all. He wondered if, in that time, he could go find his mother in the Luminance empire at that time.

As they arrived closer, his eyes narrowed as he saw something from far away.

"Beasts?" he spoke softly with a confused look. As the group got closer, a wave of spiritual sense passed through them all, surprising Alex and the rest.

"Saint beasts?" Alex thought. "How are there saint beasts in the Southern Forest?"

Even finding a peak True realm beast was impossible in the Southern Forest, and somehow there were Saint beasts out here. And they all seemed quite strong as well.

The beast flew into the sky to intercept them. One of them was a golden-furred gorilla, and the other one was a bear with black and white stripes all over it.

Alex was ready to fight the beasts, but before he could do anything, the beasts bowed immediately.

"We are honored to be in your presence, blessed Phoenix," the two beasts spoke at once.

Scarlet flew to the front and looked at the two beasts with curious looks. "Since you can recognize me, I will assume you are not from around here. Let your master know that I am here and that I have brought along a few humans that wish to make use of the Intercontinental Teleportation formation," she spoke.

"Right away," the two bowed toward Scarlet and moved down to the platform. Alex saw a talisman fly out of one of the beast's storage bags which it used to contact someone inside the beast realm.

'Master?' Alex couldn't help but be surprised. 'Surely she couldn't mean...'

A deep sense of worry appeared in Alex's heart. He quickly turned toward Scarlet only to see her serious face. "Scarlet, what do you mean by a master?" he asked.

"What do you think I mean?" she asked. "The throne that has been empty for the past 5 thousand years has been occupied once more. The Western Continent once again has a ruler."

"What?" Alex couldn't help but be surprised. "How do you know that?"

"Senior Luhei told me," Scarlet said simply. "That's why I am here, after all, to check if what he said was true."

Alex felt his heart skip a beat. He remembered the small bit of information he had received a long time ago.

Back when Pearl had first been brought to the Beast realm, he was told that within the next 100 years, another ruler would come if the throne remained empty for much longer.

The beasts were worried that the prideful nature of this new ruler would bring forth war over the lost resources of the Western Continent. That was why they wanted Pearl to become the new ruler, to keep the peace.

However, it seemed that even though not even 50 years had passed, another ruler was already here. Was he as bad as everyone assumed the next one would be? Alex didn't know, but he sure hoped not.

He worried what that would mean for him and Pearl too. Because he had the White Tiger's bloodline, would that cause problems today? Would Pearl even be allowed to go through the ritual?

Alex suddenly felt as if everything was about to go very wrong. He took a deep breath and prepared himself as someone appeared on top of the teleportation formation.

A snow leopard with very light-yellow fur and a deep black spot had appeared before them. "Greetings," the snow leopard spoke. "May I ask if you're lady Nuanhuo?"

Hearing the snow leopard's voice, Alex was surprised that it was actually a female.

"You recognize me?" Scarlet was a little surprised.

"My apologies, senior Nuanhuo. It was my lord who guessed who you might be," the leopard spoke.

"I see, and who might you be?" Scarlet asked.

"I am called Han Kexiu, I am my lord's third wife," the leopard spoke. She looked at everyone apart from Scarlet as well. "Our lord is waiting for you in the throne room. Please, follow me."

Scarlet was the first one to go down to the formation with Hao Ya a little behind. Liz followed the two and Alex was the last to arrive.

When he arrived, he couldn't help but instinctively try and figure out the cultivation base of the beast in front of him. When he did, he felt her cultivation as deep as an abyss that his senses couldn't see the end of.

Without a doubt in his mind, Alex knew that the leopard in front of him was most definitely an Immortal cultivator.

"Let us go," lady Han spoke. The teleportation formation activated instantly, sending all of them into the Beast realm.

Alex arrived in the familiar underground cave of the beast realm. The crystalline stalactite over them still glowed a bright white light into the room. The room looked familiar to Alex, but the aura within it was anything but.

He could sense many, many saint beasts roaming the palace, each one stronger than the other. The number of different cultivation bases he was sensing from where he was felt absurd to him.

Never in his life had he sensed such a large amount of strong beasts in a single place.

"Please, follow me," the leopard said and began walking. The group followed lady Han and went along with her through the various hallways.

Multiple beasts dropped to their knees and bowed as they moved across, each one of which was in the Saint realm.

Alex looked around him in half-wonder, half-worry. His heart grew more and more anxious.

Lady Han arrived outside the throne room and stepped to the side. "Please, get in."

The door to the throne room opened and Scarlet walked in along with the two other girls. Alex followed behind and stood beside the two.

The throne room which used to always be empty was filled to the brim this time around, with all sorts of beasts sitting on the seats that were so vacant back then.

And it wasn't just feline beasts either. Monkey, Zebra, Bear, Deer, and all sorts of beasts were present, all of which could be described with a single word.

His eyes fell on a White Cat that sat on one of the seats and was surprised. "Lady Ren?" He had believed that she had died during the Heavenly Judgment, so why was she here?

"So, it really was true," Scarlet spoke all of a sudden, grabbing Alex's attention. He looked toward her and saw her staring straight ahead.

So, he looked ahead as well.

There were 3 seats in the front. One for the heir, one for the Lady, and one for the Lord.

The seat for the heir was empty.

On the seat for the Lady sat a brown-furred, white stripped Lynx that looked very majestic in her own way. She wore a golden robe that draped all over her body.

Alex's eyes then moved onto the seat for the Lord, and on that seat, he was surprised to find not a beast, but a man.

The man had a handsome face, framed perfectly by his flowing golden hair that came to his shoulders. He wore a pure white robe and had two spherical earrings on him, each of which had spikes all over it.

Alex's eyes went wide in surprise as he couldn't believe what he was seeing at all.

"B-Brother Shen?" he blurted out without even thinking.

"Yo!" Shen Jing spoke from atop the throne, with a wide smile.

Scarlet turned to Alex with a weird look on her face. "Brother Shen?" she asked.

"That's brother Shen Jing," Alex said quickly. "What... what are you doing here? Why are you on the throne?"

Alex didn't even have time to process anything before Scarlet turned back toward the throne and spoke.

"Shen Jing, huh? You could've at least tried a little harder when coming up with a fake name," she said.

"I wasn't really intending to use it for more than a few minutes, so I just used what I randomly thought of at the time," the man said.

"Scarlet, what are you talking about?" Alex asked, as suspicions grew in his heart that he knew what was happening.

"That is not Shen Jing. He is the White Tiger that came with us all those years ago, Bai Jingshen," Scarlet said. "The one that had supposedly died in the Central Continent over 5000 years ago."

Chapter 1252 Pearl's Situation

Shen Jing was in fact the Ruler of the Western Continent, the White Tiger known as Bai Jingshen.

This information was way too large for Alex to digest at once.

He had trained with this man, no— this beast, for nearly a decade, and never in that time had he ever realized that he was actually with someone of this caliber.

All this time, he had expected Shen Jing to be someone important from the Hegemony to the west, but to think he wasn't even from this realm.

"3 people I've been looking forward to meeting are all here at once. I am very happy to see you all," the beast said from his throne.

"Bai Jingshen, I demand you explain everything to me right now," Scarlet said in an angry tone. "How the hell are you still alive?"

The beasts around the palace hall suddenly got agitated.

"Hey! Just because you're a phoenix doesn't mean you can—"

"Shut up," Bai Jingshen's voice roared through the palace hall. "Do not be rude to my guests."

The beasts trembled in fear and nodded before crouching down and not speaking again.

Bai Jingshen turned back around and smiled. "It's been a while little Hao, is your master doing okay?"

"Master is perfectly fine, senior," Hao Ya spoke respectfully.

"Since you are here, then you must have come for the teleportation formation. You should go ahead and get started with it. I'm afraid I must accompany these two for a little while longer," he said. He then turned around to the Lynx that sat next to him. "Dear, can you take her to it?"

"Of course, my lord," the Lynx said and got off her seat. As she did, her body turned into that of a young woman with brown hair, wearing a golden robe.

She smiled at Hao Ya, and said, "Shall we?"

"Yes, senior," Hao Ya said. "Little Sis, we should go."

She pulled away Liz from the group and took her with the Lynx. Once they left, Bai Jingshen looked around the throne room and spoke, "Everyone but concubine Ren leave as well."

The beasts around the room nodded and walked out of the room one by one, leaving only four people in the room.

Ren Xiao got off from her seat and looked at Alex with a slight smile. "How have you been doing, young man? How is Pearl?" she asked.

"I've been doing quite alright, lady Ren," Alex bowed in her direction. "As for Pearl…"

Bai Jingshen got up a little. "What's wrong? What's wrong with Pearl?" he asked in a concerned voice.

"Well… see for yourself," Alex said and brought out Pearl.

Pearl came out in a flash of light and landed in the middle of the throne room. He looked around in confusion for a second before noticing the giant White Cat that stood next to him.

"Grandmother?" he asked in surprise. He quickly ran up to her. "Grandmother, you are alive!"

"Of course I am alive," Ren Xiao said with a warm smile while she pet her great-grandson. "Did you think I was dead?"

"Well… brother said the last time he saw you… you were hit by the lightning, so…"

"Ah," Ren Xiao realized. "I'm perfectly fine, my child. You don't have to worry about me."

"What's wrong with you?"

Pearl heard a voice speak from next to him and turned around to find Shen Jing standing next to him. "Huh? Old man, you're back? What are you doing here?" he asked in a surprised voice.

"Pearl, you can't call him that. He is your great-grandfather," Ren Xiao spoke.

"Huh? G-great-grandfather? What? How?" Pearl was just as shocked as Alex had been and still was after finding out Shen Jing's true identity.

Bai Jingshen crouched next to Pearl and frowned as he thoroughly checked his body. "What's going on?" he asked. "Why is his bloodline so weak?"

"What?" Ren Xiao was surprised. She quickly tried to sense the White Tiger's blood in Pearl, and she too couldn't find it at all.

"What happened to you?" Bai Jingshen asked worriedly.

"I… I lost it," Pearl said.

"We got caught up in the Central Continent's Qi wall while trying to escape a false immortal. Pearl and I were separated, and he had to overwork his bloodline and Spiritual root to save himself," Alex said. "He saved himself in the end, but he ended up losing it too much for it. He no longer has a bloodline and his spiritual root is in a very bad condition too."New n0vel chapters are published on

Bai Jingshen's face twisted in anger. "How could you let that happen?" he shouted. "You were supposed to take care of him!"

"My lord, please calm down," Ren Xiao quickly spoke up.

"Old man, don't shout at my brother," Pearl quickly spoke. "He did nothing wrong. He was kidnapped by a madman who could kill him at any time and was forced to make pills for him. The fact that I am alive now is because he managed to save me."

"You should be thanking him, not scolding," Pearl said.

Bai Jingshen looked at Pearl and then at Alex and then back at Pearl. He breathed in and out to calm himself down. He crouched next to Pearl again and looked at him again.

"I guess it's alright as long as you are alive, that's all that matters," Bai Jingshen spoke. "You are in the Saint realm, so you should be able to live for a long time. When it's time for me to go back in another thousand years, I will take you with me back to the Blessed Sun realm."

"Brother Sh— no, Senior Bai," Alex quickly spoke up. "Senior Yang said that we can heal him. As long as we make him go through the ritual where he can evolve to a White Tiger, he will be fine."

Bai Jingshen shook his head. "He can't survive the ritual without the White Tiger's blood in him," he said. "The ritual's main function is to force your body to absorb all of the White Tiger's blood inside of one so that they can produce the blood by themselves even if they lose it. Only then would they become a real White Tiger."

"Without the White Tiger's blood in him, there will be nothing for his body to absorb, and the ritual will only kill him in the end," Bai Jingshen said.

"I see," Alex said. "But it will work as long as he has the White Tiger's blood in him, right? The senior said that we should be able to take out the Blood Essence inside of me and it should help Pearl. Apparently, it will work because the Blood Essence in me belongs to his mother."

Bai Jingshen paused for a moment and looked at Alex. "You are willing to do that?" he asked, almost worried for some reason.

Alex nodded. "As long as it will work, I will do it," he said.

"It will work," Bai Jingshen said. "There's no doubt about it, but that would mean you would lose a significant portion of your strength, and as you might have already guessed, you will no longer be able to body cultivate through Pearl like you're used to."

"I'm fine with that," Alex said. "it's just a few drops of blood after all. I am willing to lose much more than that if it can restore Pearl's talent and potential."

Chapter 1253 Master

"Just a few drops of blood, huh?" Bai Jingshen nearly laughed out loud. "I wonder if you would say the same if you knew the significance of those few drops of blood."

"Significance?" Alex got curious. "It's just White Tiger's blood anyway. If I ever want it again, I'm sure I can get it some other way."

"Can you?" Bai Jingshen smiled at Alex mysteriously.

"What do you mean? Why can't I?" he asked. "Is it White Tiger's blood? I know it's rare here, but if I ascend, I should have many ways to get it, right? Whether it be by using money, or maybe even other nefarious means if need be."

"I'm afraid if you lose this blood now, you will never get a White Tiger's blood essence this good," Bai Jingshen said and then he spoke directly into Alex's mind. "After all, these few drops of Blood Essence are comparable to the Blood Essence of the progenitor of the White Tiger, the very one that was blessed by the gods."

"What?" Alex shouted out loud in disbelief.

"Tell, do you still wish to depart from it?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"How can th—"

"Yes or no," Bai Jingshen asked.

"Yes, absolutely," Alex said. "I was just curious how his mother got it."

"How indeed." He gave a mysterious smile. "Correct answer, by the way. Had you refused, I would have forcefully taken it away from you."

Alex shuddered a bit. He knew this beast would absolutely do that. He had seen what he was capable of even against people he wasn't supposed to kill.

"But, are you sure, senior Bai?" Alex asked. "That it is that good."

"What happened the first time Pearl devoured the blood essence?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"He puked it out," Alex said.

"Do you know why?" Bai Jingshen asked. "It was because his body wasn't capable of handling such a powerful blood essence just then. Even just look at yourself, you took the Blood Essence once and suddenly you gained a Supreme Metal root. Do you know how incredibly difficult it is to gain such a root?"

"Do you think some random blood Essence can do that? No, it did because of how special it was," Bai Jingshen explained.

Alex remained stunned for a few moments. All these years he had looked forward to taking in the Blood Essence of the other beasts, would that have not helped him?

'How did a White Cat give me blood essence belonging to the White Tiger's progenitor? That doesn't make any sense at all,' he thought.

"Xiao'er, can you take Pearl and have him thoroughly checked to see what problems he has? Have the others meet him as well," Bai Jingshen said. "I must remain here and answer someone's questions or she might burn down this whole palace."

He turned to look at Scarlet who seemed to be controlling her fury to the best of her ability and failing at it.

"As your say, my lord," Ren Xiao said and took Pearl with her.

Now, only Alex, Scarlet, and Bai Jingshen remained in the room.

Bai Jingshen turned around to Scarlet and smiled. "Last time I went to check on you, you were nothing but an egg. When were you born?" he asked.

"Over 2 decades ago," Scarlet answered. "Last I heard you were supposed to be dead. How are you still alive?"

"Who told you I was dead?" Bai Jingshen asked while moving back toward his throne.

"Everyone did," Scarlet said. "They said you were supposed to have died. Even senior Luhei was surprised that you were alive."

"Tsk, tsk, tsk. If you want to learn about me, you should ask the question directly to me. How can you go and ask the others about me?" Bai Jingshen shook his head in disappointment.

"BAI JINGSHEN!" Scarlet shouted furiously.

"Sorry, sorry, I was just joking," the man chuckled a bit and sat down on his throne. "Well, even if I'm not joking, I don't know what to tell you. I never died. You all just assumed I was dead."

Both Alex and Scarlet frowned when they heard that. What was going on?

"Well, everyone just assumed I died, and my first wife took advantage of that to make it look like I had died," he said. "She was supposed to rule in my absence, but she took advantage of the situation to make it look like I was dead so she could have another ruler come in my place."

"She truly understands just how much I hate responsibilities," he smiled to himself.

"You're not making any sense," Scarlet said. "Everything coming out of your mouth sounds like gibberish to me. Tell me clearly, if you weren't dead then what were you doing all this time?"

"I was having the best two days of my life," Bai Jingshen said. "In a place called Earth, the planet his ancestors came from."

"What?"

"WHAT?"

Both Scarlet and Alex blurted out the same word, but one spoke it in confusion while the other in astonishment.

Scarlet didn't understand what he meant, while Alex couldn't believe what he said.

"You've been to Earth?" he couldn't help but ask.

Bai Jingshen nodded. "For all of 2 and a half days, which was 5 thousand years in this universe," he said.

"What's Earth? What are you guys talking about?" Scarlet asked.

"My ancestors come from a world that is not our own apparently," Alex explained. "Senior Yang said it was a different world where the realms are spherical and people called it a planet or something."

"Oh, he told you, did he?" Bai Jingshen asked. "Then yeah, I was on Earth this whole time."

Alex was slightly confused about it too. "How did you go to Earth? Did you take the same pathway the monster took to go there?" he asked.

He remembered that the monster had wanted to go back to Earth and had even opened a pathway to it.

"Monster?" Bai Jingshen gave a confused look.

"The one you fought," Alex said. "You don't remember it? The one that appeared in the Central Contiennt and caused the Qi barrier."

"HEY!" Bai Jingshen shouted. "You can't just go calling someone's master a monster."

Alex blinked for a few seconds. "Sorry… master?"

Bai Jingshen nodded. "That was my master," he said.

Scarlet was puzzled as well. "What do you mean, master?" she asked. "Since when did you have a master?"

"Since I was a cub," Bai Jingshen said. "Are you jealous that you don't have a master as good as mine?"

"You bastard! That damn master of yours nearly killed us. No, he did kill us," Scarlet shouted at him.

"No, you killed yourself," Bai Jingshen said. "You guys attacked him without even asking what he was doing there, and he didn't even fight back. How can you say he killed you?"

"We fought to help you," Scarlet shouted back. "You were already fighting with him, so why would we sit back and ask questions."

"I… I wasn't fighting him," Bai Jingshen looked away for a bit. "It was just a spar. You misunderstood the situation."

"What bullshit is this?" Scarlet couldn't control her anger. "You were sparring? We nearly killed ourselves because you were sparring?"

"Sorry?" Bai Jingshen said.

Scarlet seethed in anger. "Explain in all to me from the beginning," she said.

"Well, okay," Bai Jingshen said. "I remember sensing some disturbance all of a sudden and went to go check the Central Continent which already had a barrier around it."

"I entered and found my master there with someone else. My master said that he was leaving this world and that this would be the last time I saw him. Since I always admired my master, I wanted to spar with him before he left."

"Suffice it to say, I easily lost against my master. Just then, you all came at the time and saw the beaten-up me and thought my master was attacking me."

"I tried to stop you guys, but you wouldn't listen. In the end, you ended up hurting and left," he finished.

"And then?" Scarlet asked.

"Then what? Then my master opened a pathway to Earth and I went along with him," Bai Jingshen said. "I never knew what happened to you guys."

"How did you come back?" she asked.

"Oh, well… I wasn't supposed to be back yet. I was supposed to stay there for 3 more days, but someone wanted to go back home and ended up dragging a majority of the humans from Earth into this world"

"My master sent me back to make sure everyone was okay here, but centuries had passed already by the time I returned, so I had nothing to do. Everyone was already settled," he said.

"Your master," Alex asked. "What… was he? Was he a human or not?"

"Hmm, he has a human body, but he won't classify as one," Bai Jingshen said. "He's like a spirit controlling a human body, but not really. That's the best way I can explain it to you."

Alex was still confused by the explanation. "Senior Yang was scared to tell me who he was," he asked. "Can you not tell me either?"

"About my master? I can," Bai Jingshen said. "The humans just don't dare talk about him because the last time they offended him, my master ended up killing 7 different gods in the God Summit. That only too because the remaining ran away in fear."

Alex took a deep breath in fear when he heard that.

Scarlet's eyes widened as she realized who he was talking about.

"Are you saying the man we fought was…"

"Yes," Bai Jingshen nodded. "My master's name is Ning Ruogong, the Sage of Ten Thousand treasures, or more infamously known as the Godkiller."

Chapter 1254 A Task

"Godkiller?"

Alex was surprised, but not as much as he should have been since he didn't know much about the being. Still, to have a name like Godkiller, he couldn't be a normal person.

Scarlet was the one truly shocked. "Wait, no. That can't be," she said. "Godkiller is supposed to have died already. He died in the Sky God's palace, didn't he?"

"Master faked his death to leave behind that life of his," Bai Jingshen said. "He was done with what he had wanted to do here and was only going to live the rest of his life in peace before it was time for him to leave."

"But, I suppose he failed in that aspect," Bai Jingshen chuckled a bit. "You see there was something I was quite curious about after I came back."

"I had been gone for over 5 thousand years and my wife had left this place vacant not long after that. Yet, not a single one dared send someone to check on this place to see what was going on."

"I only found out after I had my audience with the ancestors of my clan that the higher-ups all knew that my master had faked his death. They were simply too scared to not go along with it."

"It seemed they had also found out through some seers that he had arrived in this world too, but never left anywhere else," Bai Jingshen said. "So, they believed that it was him who killed me. That was why no one was sent to check on my absence or take revenge for my death."

"That is also why no one from any immortal realms dares come to this place to look for the senior. It's not because they don't know he's here. There are simply too many seers out there for him to hide from them. It's because to them, Godkiller is staying in this realm, and offending him with their arrival is the last thing any of them want to do."

"So, despite his wish to go back into the Immortal realms, the senior is in fact the safest in this world."

Alex thought he understood what was going on, but the information was still a bit too out of nowhere to get it all.

Scarlet, however, seemed to understand everything.

"No wonder," she thought. "Immortals used to come back from time to time, but I hear no one has come in the past 5 thousand years. It must be because of that too."

"Heh, they nearly didn't let me come back either," Bai Jingshen said. "I had to convince them that I was his disciple."

"How did you do it?" Scarlet asked.

"Simple. I defeated them in a battle," Bai Jingshen said.

"I see," Scarlet said blankly. She thought for a bit and wondered if she could still be angry. The one that had nearly killed them was Godkiller. She had got to meet the one and only Godkiller.

"How long do you think it will take you to ascend to the Immortal realm again?" Bai Jingshen asked. "You're quite weak right now."

"I'll be fine," Scarlet said. "There's no one stronger than me in my continent, so I'm fine."

"I see," Bai Jingshen said. "Well, that's good, but you should still speed up your cultivation as much as you can. Focus only on it for the next few years."

"Okay," Scarlet said with a weird expression.

"The same goes for you too," he said, turning to Alex. "No, it goes doubly for you. Your cultivation base is very weak right now for what you will need to do soon."

"What I will need to do?" Alex asked. "What will I need to do?"

"I have a task for you, and I want it done as soon as you can," Bai Jingshen said.

"He's the King of the Southern Continent. He won't work for you," Scarlet said. "If you want something done by him, you have to ask me first."

"Huh?" Bai Jingshen's eyes widened in surprise. "You're the King of the Southern Continent?"

"Yes, senior," Alex said.

"I see, no wonder you two were together," he said. "How did that happen, Nuanhuo?"

"I bonded with him shortly after I was reborn," she said. "Since I didn't want the burden of ruling alone, I made him a king so I could laze around."

"You bonded with him and didn't cancel the bond?" Bai Jingshen asked with a smile. "Then you must have sensed it too."

Scarlet hesitated a bit. He had been trying to not go fully into detail, but he was simply too good.

"Yes, I did," she said.

"Did you find out what it was?" he asked.

"He has a lesser body of the god that blessed us four heavenly beasts," she said with a sigh.

Bai Jingshen's eyes went wide in happiness. "I knew it," he said gleefully. "I'm now all but certain that you really are the one that my master told me about. Only you will be the person who can find out the truth of this world."

"The one Godkiller is waiting for?" Scarlet asked in surprise. "What does that mean?"

"I can't tell you, I'm afraid," Bai Jingshen said. "Master put some weird bind on me forbidding me from ever telling anyone anything about what I know of the truth. I only know that my master is waiting for someone who will understand the truth of this world, and I non believe that it is you."

Alex was taken aback a bit. The Godkiller was waiting for him? Why? What was the truth?

"How are you certain?" Scarlet asked.

"Senior Hei Yun told me before we left that even though I do not want any responsibility, the greatest one will be thrust upon me," Bai Jingshen said. "I never truly understood what he meant that day, but after coming back to this world and understanding what I must do, I now believe I understand."

"My responsibility is to train him and help him grow," Bai Jingshen said, gesturing to Alex. "That was part of the reason why I didn't immediately kill him when I first met him."

"K-kill me?" Alex was taken aback. "Why?"

"Why?" Bai Jingshen got angry. "I come back to this world after going for all of 2 days, only to find out that the granddaughter I only saw as an infant was dead, my great-grandchild was stolen away, and my woman left half dead in front of my own palace."

"Do you think I wouldn't be right to kill you?" Bai Jingshen asked.

Alex gulped a bit. There wasn't anything he could say to refute that.

"I only stopped because I saw how happy Pearl was with you. And… I remembered what my master told me after meeting you, so instead of killing you, I tested you a bit. You only live today because you survived my test back then," Bai Jingshen said.

"I see. I'm sorry senior, for everything that happened back then. I was worried everyone was going to send Pearl to his death by forcing him to go through the ritual and had to take him away."

"As for lady Ren, that was… I couldn't help her even if I wanted to. The Heavenly Judgment is not something I can stop," Alex said. "As for Pearl's mother, I only put her out of her misery at her request. I can't be said to be the one that killed her. Her killers—"

"Her killers are in the Eastern Continent, I know," Bai Jingshen said. "That's why I wanted you to find them. That was the task I was going to give you."

"Find her killers?" Alex asked. "Will I even be able to?"

"Isn't it obvious who her killers are?" Bai Jingshen asked with disdain on his face. "It's someone affiliated with the royal family of the Eastern Continent. The sword that had stabbed my Granddaughter has the insignia of the Azure Imperium. You just need to figure out who the sword belongs to."

Alex nodded. "I see, that does make sense," he thought. "But may I ask why you are giving me this task instead of doing it yourself? As you said, I'm weak right now, so you should be much faster at doing it all by yourself."

"I would if I could," Bai Jingshen said in an annoyed manner. "But I can't, that's why I am asking you to do it."

"You can't?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "Oh, right. I forgot you guys can't kill any humans."

"Oh I can kill them," Bai Jingshen said. "Our oaths have exceptions too where we can kill people. We were sent here to maintain peace in this land, which sometimes requires us to take lives as well."

"Then?" Alex got confused.

"It's not that I can't kill them, it's that I can't even reach them in the first place," Bai Jingshen said.

"What are you talking about?" Even Scarlet was confused by what she was hearing. "Just go and find the killers. What's so hard about that?"

Bai Jingshen turned toward her and said, "So Xuan Luhei and the senior aren't aware of this either, are they?" he asked.

"Aware of what?" Scarlet asked.

"It's understandable, even I only recently because confident that my first assessment was correct," he said.

"What are you talking about?" Scarlet asked angrily.

"I can't go to the Eastern Continent," he said. "Neither can you or the tortoise. Our oaths won't let us anymore."

"What are you—" Scarlet paused when she realized what he was talking about. Even Alex had an inkling of what might have happened.

"That's right," he said. "The ruler of the Eastern Continent, the Azure Dragon Qing Tianchui, is dead."

Chapter 1255 Hei Yun

"What? The Azure Dragon is dead?" Scarlet asked. "When? How?"

"I do not know when or how," Bai Jingshen said. "I only know that he had died before I came back half a century ago."

"Did he die to Heavenly Judgment?" Scarlet asked. "He should have overexerted himself like us and fallen to it as well."

"Maybe," Bai Jingshen said. "I don't know what happened. All I know is I can't go in because he's dead and thus can't find out what's going on there. Because of how strong the cultivators in the Eastern continent are, I can't even send in my people."

"They will immediately find out what is going on and increase their security. I instead need someone to sneak into the continent for me and figure out what they can. And I believe he will be the perfect candidate for that."

The two heavenly beasts looked at Alex.

"But, isn't it dangerous?" he asked. "I don't have nearly as good a cultivation base as I would require."

"I'm afraid not," Bai Jingshen said. "That's why I am asking you to improve your cultivation as soon as you can, because of the ones that have any stake in this, you are the only one that I can send."

"Will you do this for Pearl?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"Yes," Alex said without even having a think for a second. He would do it so Pearl could have his revenge.

"Thank you," Bai Jingshen said. "To tell you the truth, I am afraid of sending you there because of how important you are. However, if the person my master is waiting for is truly you, then you won't die. Not until you find the truth."

Alex remained quiet for a few seconds, thinking to himself. "You can't tell me anything about the truth? Or how I am supposed to find it?" he asked.

"Nope, not even a hint," Bai Jingshen said. "But I can tell you that you have already received a hint, just by merely coming to my palace."

"...what?" Alex was confused.

Bai Jingshen didn't elaborate. "If you are the one who's supposed to find it, then you will find it. Don't worry," he said.

"How are you so certain that I will?" Alex asked.

"Because my master told me that the Divination God divined that the person who will find the truth will come from this realm," Bai Jingshen said.

"The Divination god?" Alex asked with a surprised face. "Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm pretty sure," Bai Jingshen said. "I don't see why he would lie about something like that when he needed my master's help to go away with him."

"The Divination god isn't dead?" Scarlet asked. "He's supposed to have died many years ago, isn't he?"

"No, he didn't. He is on Earth right now, finally free from his ability to see anything and everything from the future. To the poor man, his divination ability was more a curse than a blessing."

"Wait, are you saying the Divination God is alive, and that he left with you?" Scarlet asked.

"I told you guys, didn't I? My master and I left with someone else called Hei Yun. That's the Divination god," he said.

"But... how could people not have known he's alive?" Scarlet asked.

"I don't know," Bai Jingshen said. "He was the most capable of understanding fate, so he might have known how to hide from it as well. I hear he was hiding in this realm ever since the war ended, waiting for Master to come and take him away."

"Is that so..." Scarlet thought.

Alex's mind had already moved away from the conversation as his heart started beating faster and faster. He remembered Godslayer's words when he said that the Divination god was the best at seeing the future.

He remembered the wells from the Northern Continent. He remembered the prophecies.

When two unworthy hands meet a stone, the Truth shall reveal itself.

The prophecy spoke of a truth that he did not know about. However, hearing the same words being repeated by Bai Jingshen, Alex became more and more certain that he actually might be the one that Godkiller was waiting for.

However, if that was true then... there was another prophecy he needed to worry about.

You hold the Key to a fallen power. You shall help restore that fallen power, and that shall be your death.

If the Divination god was as good as everyone claimed, then one of two things was true. Either he wasn't the one that Godkiller was waiting for, or he was going to die helping someone.

The third prophecy seemed so useless to even consider at this point, as the first two determined everything for him.

"What's wrong?" Bai Jingshen's voice spoke from right next to him. At some point, he had arrived in front of him and was looking at him curiously.

"N-nothing," Alex said and shook his head.

"Alright," Bai Jingshen said. "You are probably tired, but let's go get the White Tiger's blood out of you. Also, I let you keep it so you could give it to Pearl, but I would like to take it back now. Please hand over my granddaughter's core."

"Your granddaughter's... oh," Alex remembered. "I... I don't have it anymore."

"Huh?" Bai Jingshen's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

"I... I lost it, senior," he said.

"How could you lose it? It belonged to Pearl's mother," Bai Jingshen shouted at him.

Alex shuddered a little and bowed. "I'm sorry, senior," he said. "I lost it when I tried to run away from the false immortal that I had to fight. I have either lost it for good, or it is inside my Soul space. Given its importance, I would love to hope it's inside of my soul space."

"Your soul space?" Bai Jingshen's anger diminished a little. "How did you know you had one? Nuanhuo shouldn't be nearly strong enough to sense it."

"Oh, uh... Senior Yang sensed it and told me," Alex said. "Did you know about it?"

"Haha, of course, I knew about it," Bai Jingshen said. "Don't you remember when I told you that you had something in you as a True realm cultivator that only Immortals could have? I was talking about your Soul space. If I remember correctly, it was quite large. Has it grown by any chance?"

"I'm not sure," Alex said. "Senior Yang couldn't tell how large it was, so it's hard for me to even know if it increases or not."

"Woah, really? I knew it was large, but to think it was so large," Bai Jingshen said. "So, when can you check it? Do I have to wait until you're immortal?"

"Senior Yang said I would have to wait until my spiritual sense is strong enough to pierce through the walls of my own Soul space, so it will most likely be around when I enter the Saint Soul realm," Alex answered.

"Saint soul realm, huh? That will require you to fight through two Inner Demons," Bai Jingshen said. "Do you think you can do it? After what you have learned today."

"I can," Alex said. "Even if I'm afraid, my Inner Demon can't get to me."

"Good," Bai Jingshen said. "Let's go help Pearl and reduce the number of things your Demon can use against you."

Chapter 1256 Blood

Alex, Scarlet, and Bai Jingshen left the throne room. As they did, Alex once again noticed the murals around the room but didn't give them much thought.

"Oh right, what happened to the Ocean God's teardrop that you took?" Alex asked. "Did you already hand it over?"

"I gave it to my clan's elders. I don't know what they did with it just yet, but they will most likely return it to the Ocean God's people. They can track where it is after all," he said.

"I see," Alex thought. "Wait, so everyone should know that their stuff is in this world, right? The only reason they're not here is that they are afraid."

"Not exactly," Bai Jingshen said. "Not everyone knows. Only the important ones. Also, not everyone who lost something has someone to care about their stuff as the Ocean God did. Most people that end up becoming strong are usually who tread the path of cultivation alone, and thus have no one to care for their stuff once they die. I assume many of the items here are as such."

Alex felt a little better hearing that. He wouldn't want multiple gods after him just because he used what he had found here.

They arrived outside another massive room that Alex had never been to. A group of female felines gathered around Pearl and were talking with each other.

"My lord." The group of felines greeted Bai Jingshen the moment they saw him walk in.

"You're all here, good," Bai Jingshen said. "Meet my wives and concubines."

Bai Jingshen started introducing the lot to Alex and Scarlet. The main wife, the Lynx, was called Shu Shiren. She was the only one in her human form and bowed to the two of them when she was introduced.

The 2nd wife was a lioness named Gu Xiaomo. She was the tallest from what they could tell

The 3rd wife was the snow leopard they had met earlier, Han Keixu.

The 4th wife was a dark wildcat named Xiang Yibai.

The 5th one was the first of the 3 concubines, a puma named Wen Meirin.

The 6th one was an actual tiger with orange fur and black stripes, named Luo Beihan.

The 7th and last one was the white cat that Alex was so familiar with, Ren Xiao.

Alex greeted everyone as they were introduced and they greeted him back as well. He saw how they treated Pearl and smiled a little before looking around.

"Senior, where are your descendants?" he asked.

"Oh, I left them behind," Bai Jingshen said. "Every single one of them is over 5 thousand years old at the very least and some of them are even Immortals, so it didn't feel right bringing them here."

"I see," Alex thought.

"Get the bloodline bath ready and have Pearl prep for it. I will be back in a while and we will start Pearl's evolution," Bai Jingshen said.

"My lord," the females got scared all of a sudden. "This child doesn't have much blood—"

"I know," Bai Jingshen said. "Don't worry about it, I know what I'm doing. I will be back in a bit with what he needs."

He turned around and walked away.

"See you in a bit, Pearl," Alex said and walked away as well. They went down the hallway, underneath the crystal's light, and arrived at another section of the underground palace that Alex hadn't been to before.

He simply hadn't been allowed to move around these places.

"Alright, let us start," Bai Jingshen said after stopping.

"What do I have to do?" Alex asked.

"Something dangerous," Bai Jingshen said. "Give me as much blood as you can and also as many drops of your own Blood Essence as you can. The more there is, the more drops of White Tiger's blood essence I can pull out from it."

Alex hesitated a bit. "My… own blood essence?" he asked. He had assumed that Bai Jingshen was going to do something simple like using some skill to pull out the white tiger's blood from his body directly.

However, if he had to take everything out, then…

"I won't lie to you, it's dangerous," Bai Jingshen said. "Especially since it can also affect your cultivation in the short term until your body forms more blood essence."

Alex sighed. "I will do it," he said. He took out midnight and cut his own wrist. His hand started bleeding profusely, while he did his best to control his body's regenerative capabilities to not immediately heal from this cut.

As his body bled, Bai Jingshen caught the blood midair with his own Qi and was surprised at how much vitality his blood had.

"This is more than just the White Tiger's blood," he said softly. "How is your blood so strong?"

Alex didn't answer as he concentrated on not healing as much as he could. He felt his body drained of blood and even though he got dizzy for a second or two.

Because he was stopping his undying physique from working, his body couldn't even produce blood fast enough to replace the one that he was losing.

Both the Phoenix and the White Tiger were surprised at how much blood was pouring out of the young human's body.

"Alex, you'll die at this rate," Scarlet said. "Stop."

"Young man, that's enough," Bai Jingshen said. He too was worried for Alex, albeit for different reasons than Scarlet.

Alex's lips had chapped, his skin was super pale and his flesh seemed sunken in. His eyes refused to focus and all of a sudden, his mind went blank.

As soon as he fell unconscious, his body could finally heal once more and regenerate the blood that he had lost. His complexion got better immediately and the wound on his arm was healed before either of them realized.

Scarlet checked on Alex and was surprised that he was already healing so much. She knew about his undying physique, but she had never seen it in action this well.

Even Bai Jingshen was surprised when he saw that Alex looked like nothing was wrong with him just a few seconds later.

Alex opened his eyes and slowly got up. He still felt the dizziness, but it was much better than before now. "How long was I out for?" he asked.

"All of 8 seconds," Scarlet said. "You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm mostly fine," he said and looked at the blood in front of him. He could feel the strength of the blood that floated in the air. While he hadn't had the chance to go improve his bloodline in recent years, it was still the strongest tool in his arsenal.

He got back up and looked toward Bai Jingshen. "Do you want my Blood Essence separately or should I just drop it onto that?" he asked.

"Huh? Oh, right," Bai Jingshen freed himself from the shock he was feeling and looked at the floating blob of blood. "Give it to me separately. Because of how strong this blood is, I think I might have a better use for it."

"A better use?" Alex asked.

Bai Jingshen nodded. "Instead of separating just the White Tiger's blood from this, I'm going to place it all into the bath so Pearl can absorb everything from here directly. That should help him quite a bit," he said.

"Hmm, okay," Alex said. He could be sure that Bai Jingshen wouldn't do something that was bad for Pearl.

Then, he reached for his own forehead and worked on pulling out the few drops of blood essence he had in him.

A few seconds later, multiple deep crimson droplets floated together in front of Alex.

Alex felt like his age had increased by nearly 10 years when he parted with his blood essence.

Bai Jingshen let Scarlet handle the other blood while he took care of the dozen or so droplets that had come out of Alex's forehead.

"Are you going to give it all to Pearl too?" Alex asked with a short breath.

"No, the Essence needs to be just White Tiger's," he said. "Anything else and it will cause problems during the evolution process."

"I see," Alex said.

Bai Jingshen did something that made the world around him shudder for a second. Alex couldn't tell what was happening, but whatever it was, it was strong.

Then, he felt a pulsing sensation coming from Bai Jingshen himself and realized that it was his own blood aura.

Bai Jingshen didn't have the ability to control their blood aura, but as a beast, he had the ability to at least control his own bloodline.

A dozen drops of blood essence jiggled around each time a pulse went through them.

'He's trying to resonate his own blood with the blood essence to separate just the White Tiger's blood,' Alex thought. 'No wonder Senior Yang said he couldn't do it. It had to be a White Tiger.'

Suddenly, Alex felt an aura overshadow every single thought he had. As if the blood essence had suddenly awakened, the power that was hidden within Alex's blood essence showed itself to the world, and the world saw how terrifying it was.

It wasn't just Alex or Scarlet who had felt this, but the entire palace was in chaos over the sudden suppressive aura that had appeared.

Alex could barely breathe over this aura as he watched 7 perfect droplets of blood separate themselves from the dozen droplets that were floating in the air.

Those 7 droplets arrived next to Bai Jingshen and he let the rest of the droplets drop to the ground.

"Finally," he said as he watched the 7 perfect droplets of blood essence. "If the world knew what was in my hand right now, I could only imagine the war that they would fight to get their hands on it."

Chapter 1257 The Pool

The terrifying aura from the few drops of blood essence had disappeared, leaving only pristine crimson drops floating aimlessly on top of Bai Jingshen's palm.

"I never realized these drops were that strong," Alex said softly. He couldn't believe something so powerful was inside of him and had remained dormant this entire time.

"My master gifted this to my granddaughter when we first met her. These drops of blood hold the bloodline of the first White Tiger in them," Bai Jingshen said. "Even just absorbing part of it, Pearl was able to use almost every single skill that was passed down through the bloodline. I can only wonder if he will be as strong as me."

Alex looked at the man in front of him with a curious look before asking, "did your master give you these as well?"

"Of course," Bai Jingshen said. "There's a reason why I am as strong as I am. Of my generation, I am the strongest."

"The hell you are," Scarlet said from the side. "If you were anything above average, none of your ancestors would ever send you down here to rule over a random piece of land. They know you aren't helpful, so they let you handle the responsibility, the same as me, senior Luhei, and Tianchui."

"You're not wrong there," the tiger said. "They sent me here because I am basically useless to them there. However, that was by design. I just wanted to hide my powers and enjoy my life. Although, that backfired when they sent me here."

Alex was surprised to see this side of the person he thought he knew. "Should we get that to Pearl?" he reminded.

"Oh, right. Let's go," the tiger walked away with the normal blood and blood essence. He took them through another few winding hallways before arriving somewhere Alex had once again never been to before.

However, this time, this place looked far more important than just a few rooms here and there.

The room was dark with the final few crystals ending just past the doorway. The room was illuminated at the door, but beyond that, there was not much light.

Bai Jingshen's wives were already there, preparing the fountain with a tiger's head sculpture on one end that seemed to glow red from the inside.

"What is that?" Alex couldn't help but ask curiously.

"Probably some sort of bloodline artifact that creates White Tiger's blood inside of it," Scarlet said from the side. "We have something like that back home too. The blood isn't that good, but its enough to help someone evolve into a heavenly beast."

"I see," Alex said.

"The blood in here is basically going to force anyone that goes in here to defend themselves from its attack. The only way to defend it is with your own blood aura," Bai Jingshen explained.

"Since most will end up losing given that this is mostly White Tiger's blood, the one that is inside either dies or is forced to evolve with their bloodline as well to fight against this force."

"The weaker ones that don't have enough bloodline in them can't evolve and most certainly die. However, if you do have it, you have the potential to evolve, and become a White Tiger."

A constant flow of blood seemed to fall into the pool below which was getting filled up very slowly. Bai Jingshen went ahead and dropped the large amount of blood that he had brought into the pool as well.

He then turned around toward Pearl and crouched before him. "Revert back to your normal size," he said.

Pearl nodded and changed, turning back into a giant White Cat that was barely any smaller than the ones around him.

"Take these. It might hurt a little, but bear it, okay?" Bai Jingshen said.

Pearl nodded. He opened his mouth and the 7 drops flew into him, absorbed by his body. He instantly felt the flaring pain throughout his body as his body tried to retake what it had lost.

It forcefully absorbed every single bit of the blood essence, even though it hurt Pearl to do so, and unlike the last time he had eaten it, he did not puke back any of the blood.

Alex was still feeling very drained after losing all of his blood, but even so, he felt bad seeing Pearl in pain.

'Hang in there, Pearl. You can do it.'

Bai Jingshen tried to remain stoic, but his tapping feet made it apparent that he was very worried as well. He too was worried for Pearl, not to mention his 7 partners.

Lady Ren wanted to help Pearl, but she had to stay where she was. She couldn't help anyway after all.

Pearl didn't cry, shout, or many any noise because of the pain. He simply stood there, taking all the pain with gritted teeth until it was all over.

He felt weak when the pain left him and at the same time very tired. "Go into the pool," Bai Jingshen breathed out in relief and spoke immediately.

Pearl weakly nodded and walked over to the pool before jumping into it. The pool wasn't deep at and only came about halfway up Pearl's body.

Pearl crouched until nothing but his head was above the pool of blood.

"You guys should leave," Bai Jingshen spoke to everyone in the room. "I will leave after I start the process."

The women nodded and left. Scarlet walked out as well.

Alex tried to leave, but he couldn't find the heart to move away from Pearl, knowing how much pain he was going to be in.

"Don't worry, brother," Pearl spoke softly. "I will be alright. I will come back stronger than ever."

Alex took a deep breath and smiled. "I'll wait for you," he said. "Good luck, Pearl." He finally walked back out of the room.

The door slammed behind him and Bai Jingshen started.

Alex waited outside the room for a while, waiting for the white tiger to walk out. In the meantime, he tried to check his blood and was surprised at how weak it had become.

"I've... completely lost the White Tiger's bloodline from within me, haven't I?" he asked Scarlet who was next to him.

"Yes," she said. "I can't sense the tiniest bit of it in you."

Alex felt a little weird hearing that. He had the White tiger's bloodline from basically the start of his cultivation journey. It was something he had acquired so early on that he never thought he could lose it.

It had put him through some tough times as well as some easier times. However, he had now lost it and would likely not gain it back again. Especially because no other blood essence could ever compare to it.

Bai Jingshen walked out after a while and saw Alex standing there. "You don't have to wait here," he said. "It will take a while before he can succeed," he said.

"How long... do you think it will take?" Alex asked.

"Hard to tell," the beast said. "His is a weird case as both he and the blood essence he is using is something that has never been put through such an ordeal before."

"So, it can take anywhere from a week, to a month to a year. It could even take a decade. As long as Pearl doesn't die, it will continue forever until he evolves, so only time can truly tell."

Chapter 1258 The Upper Garden

Alex went into a room to rest. Due to the loss of his Blood Essence, he needed to rest or else he wouldn't be able to function properly at all.

He cultivated in the room for a while, before he felt slightly better. It would take a long time before he could feel as good as he always did, however.

A while later, he heard a knock on the door. Releasing his spiritual sense, he realized who it was that waited for him outside.

He quickly opened the door and looked at the giant black Jaguar that stood outside. He smiled when he saw her.

"Sister Yao, it's great to see you again," he said jubilantly.

"Hehe, it's great to see you too, young man. I heard you came, so I hurried here," Yao Jia said. "How have you been?"

"Nothing less than great," he said. "Where's senior Yao?"

"Father is in closed cultivation," she said.

"Oh, is he nearing some breakthrough?" Alex asked.

"No, not breakthrough. It's just that he hasn't had the time to cultivate before since he had to look after the palace in the lord's absence. However, now that the lord is back and has brought so many people with him, he doesn't need to remain outside for so long and has gone into closed cultivation."

"I see," Alex said. "You've gotten quite strong as well. Saint Condensation 4th realm, huh?"

"Oh, you can tell? You must've grown very strong as well then," Yao Jia replied.

"Somewhat," Alex said. He wasn't surprised that she couldn't tell his cultivation base, as no one normally could.

"Oh, was I disturbing you? I heard you were here and came to visit, but maybe I should have waited until you were out," she said.

"Oh, no. It's alright. I should be leaving as well," Alex said.

"Leaving? Are you going somewhere?" Yao Jia asked.

"Yes, to the Luminance empire," Alex said. "I need to go get my mother from there."

"But... your mother isn't in the Luminance empire though," Yao Jia said. "She's in the Crimson Empire."

Alex paused for a second. "What? She's in the Crimson Empire? How?" he couldn't help but ask.

"Well, after you were gone, father took many seniors to the Luminance empire to kill the ones that were responsible for your and young lord's disappearance," she said. "Once he was done with that, he waited for you two to come back with your mother. But when they realized you weren't coming back, he brought your mother here to keep her safe."

"After the lord returned and the number of beasts increased, your mother decided not to stay here anymore and went to the Crimson empire. She said she had people there that she knew," Yao Jia said.

"Oh," Alex thought. "So... father and the rest must have met her already then."

He wondered for a second what he needed to do next. Should he still go to the Luminance Empire and finish what he had remaining, or delay that for some other time?

"I should have to go there anyway later on, so maybe I should do both at the same time," he thought.

"Do you know where Scarlet is?" Alex asked her.

"Who's... Scarlet?" Yao Jia asked.

"Nuanhuo, the Phoenix that I came with," Alex said.

"Oh! Lady Phoenix is with the lord in the upper garden. You should find them there," Yao Jia said.

"Oh, let's go," Alex said and started walking away. Yao Jia followed behind him and walked until they came across the door that led upstairs.

There were guards at the door, none of whom knew if they should let Alex walk free or not. They were about to stop him, but before they could, they were ordered to let him go.

Alex continued without stopping and arrived outside at the beautifully maintained garden. It was late in the morning, so the sun was up in the sky, shining brilliantly on everything.

Scarlet rested on the meadow, enjoying the sun. Next to her was a massive tiger with white fur and black stripes. His size was much larger than Alex had expected or hoped.

The tiger turned around and saw Alex. "Are you done with your cultivation?" he asked.

"Yes, senior," Alex said.

"Don't call me senior," the tiger said. "It doesn't feel right. Just call me what you used to call me."

Alex paused for a second, taken aback. "Do you want me to call you brother Shen?" he asked.

"Why not? It's not like that's not part of my name," he said. "Come, sit down."

Alex nodded and sat down next to the two of them. Yao Jia walked up as well and crouched next to the two of them.

"Shouldn't you be cultivating?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"I—"

"I just left my room, my lord. Let me enjoy the sun for a bit," Yao Jia grumbled when she heard the white tiger.

Alex was surprised for a moment and realized that Bai Jingshen wasn't talking to him at all.

"If you don't reach the Immortal realm by the time I need to leave, I will leave you here and only take your father," Bai Jingshen said.

"Why?" Yao Jia shouted. "That's not fair, my lord. I'm trying my best. I already reached the Saint realm, didn't I?"

"How old are you again?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"Uhh... a 100 years old," Yao Jia said.

"In real years," Bai Jingshen asked.

Yao Jia hesitated a bit. "Nearly 600 years," she said.

"See? You wasted so much time reaching the Saint realms. You have much better talent than your father, and yet you are slower than him," Bai Jingshen said.

"Well... that's just because I spent most of my time in the rooms with slowed time, my lord," Yao Jia said.

"None of which are rooms that are cultivation related, are they?" he asked.

"N-no," Yao Jia said in a hesitating voice.

"Either way, you need to focus on your cultivation soon," Bai Jingshen said. "Okay?" He pet her on her head a few times.

"How are you feeling?" Scarlet turned around to Alex and asked.

"Much better than yesterday, but still not as well," Alex said.

"You likely won't feel as good as you did. You will have to adapt with this weaker self of yours," Scarlet said. "Well, it's just your blood anyway. You can fix that later on."

"Yeah, I might have to go to the ocean after I return," Alex said. "I haven't been there for a while, so it's about time."

"The ocean? Why?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"To gather blood," Alex said. "Oh, you might not know this, but I can use blood aura. I can also absorb other's blood to get stronger too."

"Oh, you can use blood aura? That's not very common," Bai Jignshen said and thought for a bit. "Can you use any blood or does it have to come from aquatic beasts?"

"No, it can be any beast's or human's. I only use the aquatic beasts because they are usually the least intelligent of all the beings that I can get blood from," Alex said. "That way I can keep my conscience clean."

Bai Jingshen nodded. "Does the blood have to be from a dead beast? Does it have to be Blood Essence?" he asked.

"No, it just needs to be normal blood from anywhere," Alex said.

"Then you don't need to bother with going to the ocean," Bai Jingshen said. "I'm sure I can help you regarding it much, much faster."

Chapter 1259 Authority

"Are you going to request the beasts to give me their blood?" Alex asked.

"That's exactly what I thought of," Bai Jingshen said. "Even if you get just a cup of blood from a single beast, together with thousands of beasts, wouldn't that be a lot of blood to improve your own?"

"It would," Alex said as he thought about it. "Not only my blood, but I can improve my cultivation base with it as well."

"Cultivation base?" Bai Jingshen was surprised. "How exactly?"

"My Blood Absorption technique allows for one of two things. I can either improve my blood aura to make it stronger, or I can improve my cultivation base," Alex said. "Depending on how weak my blood has become, I will have to go with one of the two."

"Hmm, then it seems I will have to hurry up," Bai Jingshen said. "How did you learn to use blood aura though, I'm very curious. Actually, I'm curious about everything that happened in my absence. Tell it all to me."

Alex nodded and spoke of what he remembered. He went through the story of his past and with each new event, Bai Jingshen and Yao Jia reacted as if they were watching a play of some sort.

Not even Bai Jingshen could see some of the twists and turns coming and was surprised to hear about it all.

"No wonder you reached the different continents," Bai Jingshen spoke softly. "I can't tell if you got lucky or unlucky, having to leave behind one land and go to a new one each time."

"It's pretty unlucky at the moment, but overall, it's quite lucky, I suppose," Alex said.

"It helped you more than it harmed you, but the same couldn't be said of Pearl," Bai Jingshen said. "But it should be alright once he evolves now."

Alex nodded. The speed at which Pearl evolved all depended on Pearl himself, so there was nothing for him to do either. All he could do was hope and pray that he was successful.

"So you actually did end up learning the Dao of Technique, huh?" Bai Jingshen asked. "It's a very hard dao to grasp, and you somehow did it. I'm impressed."

"You have that dao too, don't you Brother Shen?" Alex asked.

"Of course, but it took me thousands of years before I learned it," Bai Jingshen said. "You haven't even lived a century, so it is truly very impressive."

Alex nodded. "I could only do it because you told me such a dao even existed. Had I not known about it, I could never have learned it. Without your help, I wouldn't even know that Intent was necessary to use techniques at all," he said.

"That's enough humbleness from you. Everyone knows about this stuff, but not everyone can learn it. Just take the praise when I'm giving it to you," Bai Jingshen said with an annoyed voice.

Alex chuckled a bit. "By the way, brother Shen, I'm a little curious about your journey too. How was it on Earth? When did you come back? I hope you can tell at least something," he said.

"My journey, huh? It was quite fascinating, to say the least, but mostly because the world itself was in a very fascinating state," Bai Jingshen said. He went on to explain his time on Earth as well as the weird things he saw there.

Stuff like Mana and people's awakening powers were something he hadn't come across before and he explained it with great enthusiasm.

Alex and Scarlet were surprised to hear that there were beings there that could easily destroy every single god that lived inside of this world without any effort.

"Are we safe?" Alex asked. "Can't they just come in?"

"No one has the power to travel in between the two universes, except for people like my master who are rare to the point that almost no one else will ever come in," Bai Jingshen explained. "Also, according to my master, the two universes have drifted apart, so even he will have to go through a great amount of trouble to make it here again."

"Not to mention, because of the time difference, you will be hundreds of thousands of years old before someone else like that comes through again," Bai Jingshen explained.

He continued his story, explaining how a part of Earth was destroyed, all of its people gone. Those were the people that had appeared in the Central continent all those years ago and were Alex's ancestors.

"I came as soon as I could after helping everyone, but even then it was too late," he said. "Over 600 years had already passed by the time I had arrived back here. When I did, I saw that everything was as good as it could be and I wasn't needed."

"I met up with the senior after that and talked with him for a bit. To be honest, I hated him quite a bit for what he did to your people, still do. Forcing them all to cultivate is one thing, baiting them into doing so without them even knowing what cultivation even is even worse."

Alex couldn't disagree. He hadn't forgiven the senior for what he had. He wasn't sure he ever could. However, as a person who was still so very weak, he couldn't even show the entirety of his hatred.

"But I suppose you can empathize with him," he said. "You must've been desperate to go back home when you were stuck somewhere as well, weren't you?"

Alex sighed when he heard that. "I can't deny that," he said.

"Anyway, to continue my story, I talked with the senior for a bit and understood what was going on," Bai Jingshen said. "I can't help but regret coming here a little too late though. Had I left Earth even just a few minutes earlier, I probably could've come here in time to stop Ren Xiao from being targeted by Heavenly Judgment, or maybe stop my granddaughter from dying."

"Once I came and found her wounded, I helped her a bit and left to find Pearl. I was going to take him away from you, but then… I realized at that time, I sensed the aura from you. Not only did you have the White Tiger's bloodline which I wanted to know how I also sensed some sort of familiarity toward you that ran blood deep."

"I could tell it came from my own bloodline, one that is no different from the first White Tiger, so I waited. Soon enough, I came to understand that you were the one that my master is waiting for," Bai Jingshen said.

"Are you sure you're okay with that information being public?" Alex asked. "The one about your bloodline."

"Uhh… it doesn't matter," Bai Jingshen said. "It's already public anyway."

"Really?" Scarlet asked. "And here I thought I was going to bring some juicy information back to my family."

Bai Jingshen laughed a bit. "No, they know already. I might have gone a bit overboard this time around so that I could come back. There is no one in the land of the Blessed Sun that does not know what has happened."

"Land of the Blessed Sun, you mentioned that a long time ago," Alex said. "That's your home, right?"

"It's the realm we come from," Bai Jingshen said. "It's a realm of beasts with very few humans living in it. We remain outside of humans or demons, and don't get into conflict with either if we can help it."

"Don't worry, I will take you there when it's time for me to leave," Scarlet said.

Alex said nothing.

"Oh right, do you really not know when Tianchui died?" Scarlet asked. "Not even a hint?"

"No, I went to check on everyone a few years after I came back. I could see the tortoise was hurt, I knew the snake was hurt, and I saw you reverting back to an egg."

"But I couldn't sense the dragon at all. On top of that, I couldn't enter the continent either," Bai Jingshen said. "I was positive he was dead, but it wasn't until I went back and found out that he had never left the realm that I could be confident about it. As for when he died, we will have to ask someone from the Eastern Continent."

"He couldn't have died right after fighting the Godkiller, right?" Scarlet asked. "I hear he came here to announce your death to your wives and subordinates."

"Wait for a second," Alex thought. "How could he come here if you weren't here? Shouldn't your oaths disallow that?"

"It can, because when I left, I had made my first wife the ruler of this land, just like Scarlet did for you. Because of that, the Dragon could come here since a ruler was still on this land," Bai Jingshen said. "I can come to the Southern Continent too in Scarlet's absence, as long as you are there now."

"I see," Alex thought. "Wait, then shouldn't you be able to go to the Eastern Continent too? Since the Dragon Emperor is there?"

"No, it's a little different there. Unlike you or my wife, the Dragon Emperor doesn't hold direct authority from the Azure Dragons to rule the Eastern Continent," Bai Jingshen said.

"Only the first Dragon Emperor had the authority," Scarlet explained. "Everyone after that does not."

"I see," Alex said. "Do you guys happen to know why the first Dragon Emperor held the authority? Was the Azure Dragon tired of ruling and passed the trouble along to others as she did with me?"

"No," Scarlet said. "I believe the reason why the first Dragon Emperor was allowed to rule despite the Azure Dragon's presence is that he was the son of the Azure Dragon that was the ruler back then."

Chapter 1260 Human

Alex was taken aback a bit by this information. "Wait, how can that be?" he asked. "How can a beast have a human child?"

"They can if either of the parents is a human," Scarlet explained.

"I believe the first Azure Dragon was a male dragon that mated with most likely a demon of this world. It is very difficult for interspecies conception to occur, but not impossible," Bai Jingshen explained.

"But... it doesn't make sense physiologically, does it? I mean a beast and a human..." Alex hesitated to continue.

"It doesn't make sense if the beast is a beast," Bai Jingshen said. "In fact, it is pretty much impossible. However, what if the beast were not a beast?"

"... What?" Alex asked with a confused look.

"What if the beast were a human?" Bai Jingshen asked. "You do know what a beast can do when they reach the Immortal realm, right?"

"Oh... right," Alex thought. "So the Azure dragon turned to a human and had a child with a demon of this realm, and that was the first Dragon Emperor?"

"That is correct," Bai Jingshen said.

"Was the Dragon Emperor a human because his mother was a human?" Alex asked. "What if the genders were reversed and it was an Azure Dragon that gave birth to a human's child?"

"The child would still be a human," Bai Jingshen said. "They would have part of the beast's bloodline in them all the same. Actually, they are quite common in the Immortal realms since the distinction between a beast and a human gets muddled quite often due to everyone being able to take a human form whenever they want to. In fact, even plants can have children with humans or beasts, so long as they turn to a human."

"Plants can have children with beasts? And their children would be what?" Alex asked. "Plant or beast?"

Bai Jingshen chuckled. "A human," he said.

"Huh?" Alex was confused once again. "Why a human? None of the child's parents is a human."

"Oh, they are," Bai Jingshen said. "Any plant that manages to reach the Immortal realm after cultivating can permanently turn to a human if they chose to. Unlike beasts, there is no going back once they do so. Since at that point they are basically a human, their child would also be a human."

"Do you have any idea why the child is always a human?" Alex asked.

"Heaven's will," Bai Jingshen shrugged.

"We don't really know the reason, just that it is how it goes all the time," Scarlet said. "Of course, they are not fully human. Most of those children actually have the capabilities of half transforming into what their other half is."

Alex was curious to learn more about it all, as the more he learned, the more knowledge seemed to be unlocking in his mind from his medical information base that was locked behind the Alchemy God's intent.

"What about two beasts? What if one of the parents takes a human form?" Alex asked.

"In a beast's case, even if they take human form, they still end up giving birth to a beast," Bai Jingshen said. "Basically, a human child is born every time there is a human involved. Whether that human is a human, a demon, or a transformed plant, it doesn't matter."

"So the beasts have no benefits when mating in human form, do they?" Alex asked.

"There is a small one," Bai Jingshen said. "You've seen my wives. Can you tell what's common about them?"

"Common?" Alex thought for a bit. "The fact that they are all felines?"

"Exactly," Bai Jingshen said. "The reason they are all felines is that they are the closest in bloodline to the White Tiger and can thus potentially carry down the bloodline by giving birth to an actual White Tiger."

"If I were to marry anyone else that is not similar in species to me, the chances of me passing down my bloodline becomes basically zero," he said. "However, I could increase the chance, even if by a little bit, if I were to become a human. That is one advantage, however infinitesimal, that beasts have if they become human."

"As he said, it's infinitesimal so it's not even that useful," Scarlet said. "It's not that you can't have children if two beasts aren't close in species, just that their children would be incredibly mediocre and most likely wouldn't carry the bloodline of either parent. So, it's always better to just find someone from your own species."

"I see," Alex said. He had learned quite a lot today that he hadn't even expected to learn. "So the first Dragon Emperor, he isn't a half-Azure Dragon, is he?"

"No, it would be a big deal if he was, since he would be the first human to hold the bloodline of one of the Heavenly beasts," Bai Jingshen said. "He would be no different from you, who until now held the White Tiger's bloodline."

"His case is different, isn't it?" Scarlet asked. "He didn't absorb the White Tiger's blood, but only made use of it."

"He was a step away from absorbing it," Bai Jingshen said. "If not, he wouldn't have been able to make use of the White Tiger's Dominating Body that Pearl cultivated."

"I see," Scarlet thought.

Alex remained there, thinking for a bit. A few footsteps appeared from nearby as a couple of folks walked out.

Hao Ya and Liz walked beside the 2nd and 3rd wives of Bai Jingshen.

"Oh, you guys are out?" Alex asked. "How's the formation?"

"Terrible," Hao Ya said. "It's a good formation, but the way it's set up is going to take me a bit to make it work with the formation back at Master's place. It will only be afterward that I can even start testing if they can communicate with each other or not."

"How long will that take?" Alex asked.

"As soon as I can get my hands on a few things. I came here to request senior to help me find these things," Hao Ya handed over a talisman to Bai Jingshen.

Bai Jingshen shook his head and one of his wives took it instead. "Forgive me, but my husband doesn't like reading," she said. "Should I do as she says?"

"Is there anything in there that's hard to get?" Bai Jingshen asked.

The snow leopard read through the list and nodded. "Everything is available in the treasury and isn't of much value either," she said.

"Give it to her then," Bai Jingshen said.

"As you command, my lord," the snow leopard said and walked away with her sister.

"Do you still need me?" Liz asked.

"It's probably better if you don't help me right now and instead save it for the test later," Hao Ya said. "I will need quite a bit of time to just think what to do and that will cause you to unnecessarily exhaust yourself. Don't worry, I can complete this in a week, and then you can be of help."

"Okay," Liz said.

"Oh, if you don't need her, then can she leave with me?" Alex asked. "Aunt Liz, it turns out my mother is already where father and the rest went to. If we go there, we can meet her today."

"Really? You already know where she is?" Liz asked in surprise.

Alex nodded. "We should leave as soon as we can."

Chapter 1261 Wench

After talking with the White Tiger for a little longer and requesting a few things he hoped to get from him, Alex left the Beast realm.

He promised to be back in just a few days, as he had to bring back his aunt there to help with the formation as soon as it was ready to teleport across the ocean.

He hoped Pearl would be out by then, but he kept his expectations low. He would be ready for anything from a month to a year. Any longer than that, however, would be rather worrisome for him.

After arriving outside the beast realm, Alex took out a boat and immediately the aunt and nephew were on their way to the Scarlet city.

Alex arrived outside the Scarlet city sometime later and without stopping directly teleported into the city.

Liz was surprised to find herself inside the city all of a sudden, but then Alex suddenly released his spiritual sense, searching for where everyone was.

His spiritual sense was now wide enough that he could see almost everything in the city. He immediately found his father and mother in the Tiger sect, but who was this other person?

He walked with his aunt and quickly arrived by the Tiger Sect. He entered through the gates, without the guards being able to stop him at all.

On the way to the mountain where the Tiger sect disciples lived, there was a small crowd forming that seemed to belong to the people he recognized.

He saw his father, his mother, his daughter, his clone, his master, his senior sister and brother, and a few other faces that he recognized.

However, amongst them was one face that he didn't recognize at all and that seemed to be the person everyone was gathering around.

"Please calm down, senior Feng. We can talk it out," Wen Cheng tried to speak, but the thin man with long black hair and grayish-blue robes didn't seem to calm down at all.

"No, we're not talking about this. I demand an answer right now," the man shouted. "It's either me or him."

"There is no you, senior Feng. Why do you continue deluding yourself?" Helen asked.

"You accepted all of those presents I brought you, and now you say you have a husband?" the man shouted. "Do you believe I can accept that?"

"I only took those gifts because it's rude not to. I told you multiple times that I had no interest in you and that I was already married," Helen said. "You were the one that didn't accept it, senior Feng. I told you my husband would come back to me, and yet it was you who held the delusions."

"No, you could've rejected me straight up, but you didn't. That's because you knew you wanted to keep me as a backup in case your husband never returned," the man said.

Helen shook her head. "There is something seriously wrong with your head," she said. "The reason I said nothing is because I was scared of you. You might kill me if I rejected you outright. That's why I tried to distance myself from you, but you kept advancing."

"Please, my wife wants nothing to do with you, just leave," Graham spoke. He had been holding back for a while, not out of his own volition either, but he was starting to get overly ticked off.

Helen tried to pull him back, but he was rigid like a pillar that couldn't be moved at all.

"You bastard! You think you can tell me what to do?" the man shouted. "That wench tol—"

The man didn't realize when he had been punched. He didn't even realize that he had flown nearly 100 meters away, landing perfectly with his neck on Alex's hand.

He looked around in a daze for a moment, not understanding what had just happened. Then, the pain followed.

The man cried and coughed as blood dripped out of his mouth along with a few teeth. Not only that, he couldn't even close his mouth as his lower jaw had been completely destroyed.

The man tried to speak, but without a jaw, that was pretty much impossible.

"Alex?" Helen finally noticed his arrival and spoke in surprise. Then, she saw the woman standing next to him. "Liz?"

"Sister Helen," Liz spoke and ran up to Helen to give her a hug. Helen hugged her blankly, as the meeting was unexpected. She was told that they would come a little later after all.

"Alex!" the others noticed him after Helen as well.

Alex ignored them for now and looked at the man he was holding. He still held him by the neck, so he turned the man toward him and looked at his broken jaw.

"Oh no, you shouldn't have done that, father," Alex spoke while the man still cried in pain. He looked toward Alex from time to time, but he was too focused on his own injury to care about what was happening.

"I did wrong?" Graham looked confused.

"Yes," Alex said. "You shouldn't hit someone so hard. You destroyed all his nerves before his face even took any damage. Had you held back a bit, you wouldn't have destroyed the main nerves and he would be in much more pain than this."

The man tried to hit Alex's arm to free himself, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't escape Alex at all.

"Let go of me," his voice flowed through his spiritual sense into Alex.

"And why should I do that?" Alex asked. "Oh, I recognize you. You are one of the Saints that was there when I was taken away by the beasts, weren't you?"

The man paused for a bit before he recognized who he was looking at. "It's you!" he spoke.

"Yes," Alex said. "Unfortunately for you, you called my mother a wench."

His palm gripped tighter around the man's neck and slowly it started to hurt a lot. "What are you doing?" he shouted and tried to take out a weapon from his storage bag.

However, before he could do anything, Space and Cutting dao joined together for a split second and attacked the man.

Both of his arms were cut off right away, falling to the ground.

Alex pulled the man close to him and spoke, "Go on. Call my mother a wench again," he said.

The man couldn't say anything but cry louder as the pain overwhelmed him. It had been a very, very long time since he had felt pain, let alone see his own blood. However, somehow not only was he in pain, but his jaw was completely broken and his hands were also cut off as well.

Alex got ready to attack once more, but Helen ran next to him and stopped his arm.

"That's enough," she said. "You've already hurt him enough."

Alex looked and the man and shook his head. "Fine," he said. "Be grateful, you fool. You won't have to suffer much longer because my mother is kind, unlike the rest of us."

He tossed the man away and in doing so, the man disappeared from everyone's view.

Alex finally turned toward his mother and smiled. "I'm sorry you had to wait so long for me to come back," he said.

"Better late than never," Helen said and hugged her son tightly.

Chapter 1262 Married

Alex's mother and the rest had been getting ready to visit the Hong Wu sect when they had been stopped by the man surnamed Feng, who had taken a liking to his mother ever since he had decided to become a guest elder for both the Tiger sect and the Hong Wu sect.

After the lord's return, she wanted to leave the beast realm. However, she couldn't go back to the Luminous empire as there would most likely be enemies of her son that would want to take revenge.

Instead, she came over to this side to live with her son's friends and close acquaintances.

After arriving in the Scarlet city, Helen started aiding the two sects by becoming their guest elder who could make almost anything.

Even the Alchemists over at the Hong Wu sect were surprised by her alchemy, even though it wasn't even her strongest suit.

She could make formations too, but her strongest suit still remained talismans. Despite the lack of proper resources on this side, she could still make amazing talismans that quickly made her popular all over the empire.

The Hong Wu sect was already popular for its amazing quality pills, but adding onto that the amazing talismans and sometimes even better pills made the city just that more popular.

That was one of the reasons why so many people had come to the city over the last 30 years, increasing even more over the last decade.

When the Emperor found out that she could also make saint pills, her status grew even more.

Helen made a few pills for the Emperor once or twice a year due to the severe lack of resources on this side. Via the emperor, the other two saints came to know her as well.

The man surnamed Feng was in the Saint Foundation realm, an entire realm above the Saint Condensation realm that Helen had only recently entered. As such, she was polite and respectful to the senior without being overly direct.

However, that caused the man to have the misconception that she was interested in him just as he was interested in her. Even when she casually mentioned about waiting for her son or husband, the man didn't truly believe her.

When he found out that it was actually true today, he had come to create a ruckus. Only, he hadn't expected to be beaten so badly.

"I hope he doesn't end up becoming a problem," Alex spoke as he looked in the direction when he had thrown him away. He was still inside the city as Alex's teleportation dao didn't exceed more than a kilometer of distance without external help.

His spiritual sense had already reached the man and he had threatened him too, but who knew what would happen.

He turned around to look at the people from the Tiger sect and smiled. He bowed toward Wen Cheng and spoke, "Greetings, master."

"You finally came," Wen Cheng said with a wide smile and open arms. "Welcome back. We've been waiting for you."

Alex smiled and accepted the hug from his master. He then turned to his senior sister and brothers and greeted them too.

Luo Mei and Liu Xun both hugged him once after another.

"You guys look the same," Alex said. "Yet, so very different."

Luo Mei smiled. "Same goes for you, little brother," she said.

"I hear you've got quite the status now," Liu Xun said. "Should we be changing how we address you?"

"I would prefer if you ignored my status and treat me like the younger brother I am," Alex said. He then looked around at the crowd that had gathered and greeted them as well.

He didn't recognize all of them, but he did recognize a few of them. That was enough for him to speak to them for a bit before they all left.

Alex then had them meet his aunt as well. After the greetings were passed along, Helen finally spoke.

"We were on our way to the Hong Wu sect, but now that you've just arrived…" Helen paused.

Alex looked at them and at his clone who seemed anxious to go and smiled. "Let us go then," he said. He turned around to his master and senior disciples and said, "Is it alright if I come back later?"

"Sure, sure," Wen Cheng said. "Alex, I mean that Alex has been wanting to go there ever since they arrived here yesterday."

"Oh yeah, how do we even address you two? You clearly aren't like normal clones who its two bodies with one mind," Luo Mei said. "But calling you both Alex is annoying because you won't know who we're talking about."

"Uhh… you can do names like First Alex and Second Alex," Alex said.

"And who's first and who's second?" Luo Mei asked.

"I'm obviously first," Alex said. "He's a clone, he should be second."

"But he's the one we met first," Liu Xun added.

"Well… no, I mean kind of? You met him in soul, but it was still my body," Alex said.

"So? Who's first? The body or the soul?" Luo Mei asked.

"Fine, let's not call ourselves that," Alex said and shook his head. "You can continue calling him Alex and refer to me as Yu Ming if you need to distinguish between the two of us."

"Oh, so simple, huh?" Wen Cheng thought. "How come I didn't think of it?"

"Anyway, I don't see brother Du around," Alex said. "Where is he?"

"My husband is training his disciples around the crater," Luo Mei said.

Alex's eyes widened. "Husband? So you guys got married?" he asked with an excited look.

"Hehe, it was 2 decades ago," Luo Mei said.

"Oh, congratulations, sister," Alex said. "I'm happy for you."

"You shouldn't just be happy for me," Luo Mei said.

Alex looked confused. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"I'm not just the one that got married," she said pointing to the side with her eyes.

Alex followed her eyes and looked at the man standing in front of him. He gasped in surprise. "Master? You got married?" he asked.

"Why did you gasp? Is it that surprising? Did you think I would be single for life?" Wen Cheng asked, prompting a burst of laughter from around the group.

"No, no, I was just surprised," he said. "When did you marry?"

"Just a few years ago," Wen Cheng said. "It hasn't been that long."

"Yeah, but that's only because he took his sweet time to ask her to marry. I told you, master, you should have done that ages ago," Luo Mei said.

"Shut it," Wen Cheng said.

"Oh, who did you get married to?" Alex asked. "Someone from the sect?"

"No, not from our sect or any sect," Luo Mei said. "But I think you know her. Even Alex remembered her after mentioning a few things about her."

Alex got curious. "Who?" he asked.

"It's someone pretty from the Pink Cloud Auction house," Luo Mei said.

"Pink Cloud Auction…" Alex's eyes went wide when he remembered a female figure from the auction house, the one that he used to visit so many times to sell his pills when he was still part of the Hong Wu sect.

"No way!" he gasped once again in surprise. "Lady Cai Ping?"

"Uhuh! So you do remember," Luo Mei said.

"I do," Alex said. "So you married lady Cai, huh? Should I be calling her mistress Cai now? How does it work?"

"Just senior Cai or Lady Cai is fine," Luo Mei said. "I myself call her senior Cai, while senior brother calls her Lady Cai."

"I see," Alex said. "Then I suppose congratulations are in order for you too, master. Wait, I can't give empty congratulations on such occasions. Here, take this temporary gift for now. I will try and prepare something better when I have the time."

Alex handed two pill bottles along with two talismans, one of each to both Wen Cheng and Luo Mei.

"The bottle contains various types of pills that can help you in various scenarios, the descriptions of which I've written down on that talisman. I prepared them in advance since I expected to have to give away pills to people I met here, but I didn't think it would be you two who would get it first," he said.

He then turned toward his senior brother. "Are you married too, brother?" he asked.

"No, but I do have a fiancee, so I should be getting married soon as well," he said. "Does that mean I'm not getting any pills?"

"You can have one if you want, but I have better pills that I can give to you once I have some time to sit down and see what you would need," Alex said.

"Oh, then I will choose to wait," Liu Xun said. "You better have a pill that can push me directly to the Saint realm. I'm hoping you to be at least that good by now."

Even knowing that his senior brother was joking, Alex could only give a dry laugh at the ridiculousness of the pill he was suggesting. If such a pill existed, it wouldn't be in this realm at all.

"You guys should leave now," Wen Cheng said. "We will come by your mother's house later tonight and we can talk there. I'll make sure to bring my wife along as well."

"Oh, I'll look forward to it," Alex said. "I'll see you all later then."

He turned around and started walking out of the sect with the rest of his family.

Chapter 1263 The Hong Wu Sect

"Father, are you sure it will be alright? What if that man comes again?" Ronron asked.

"You have your master's treasures don't you?" he asked. "You will be safe. There's the blood core I gave you as well."

Ronron nodded.

"Where is Pearl, by the way?" Helen asked.

"He's in the Beast realm trying to evolve," Alex said. "He should be staying there for a while, I don't know how long."

"Oh! Did you meet the new beasts that came there? They had a scary aura. I didn't want to stay there after seeing them," Helen said.

"I guess they are scary," Alex said.

"I don't remember much about the beast realm but there was that one beast that threw me out. What was it?" the older Alex asked.

"The puma," Alex remembered. "I didn't see him this time around. He must have been in closed cultivation as well," Alex said

"I see," the older Alex said. "I remember hating him a lot."

The family of six talked with each other for the better part of the 20 minutes it took them to reach the other side of the massive city where the Hong Wu sect lay.

When they arrived, the guards immediately bowed to Helen and called her a Guest Elder. Thanks to her, they could all walk in without any problem.

The older Alex could feel tears filling his eyes as he saw the outer disciple mountain remain the same as it was all those years ago. He remembered walking up this dirt road to the side of the mountain before going down to the sect valley.

The disciples wore a light green robes and watched the group of six walk past them. They bowed toward Helen when they saw her. She was way too big of a figure in the sect to not be recognized by the outer disciples.

"Who's the current leader of the sect?" Alex asked.

"It's a woman named Shao Chun," Helen said. "Do you know her?"

"Shao Chun?" Alex thought for a bit but he didn't remember such a name. "I don't think I know her, is she new?"

"No, she's apparently been here for the past 70 years apparently. It's weird you don't know her," "Martial Uncle," Alex spoke happily and walked down the road to meet the man.

The older Alex felt a wave of anxiousness hit him as he realized who he was looking at.

Helen said.

"It's not like I know every elder," Alex said. They continued walking down the mountain toward the valley when Alex saw someone waiting at the gate to the valley.

A man that seemed to be in his late 30s had a shocked expression on his face as he stared in their direction.

Helen smiled and said, "I told him I was coming and that there was a surprise for him so he had to wait there for me."

The man looked at Alex and couldn't believe it. "Martial Nephew?" he asked.

"Martial Uncle," Alex spoke happily and walked down the road to meet the man.

The older Alex felt a wave of anxiousness hit him as he realized who he was looking at.

It was Lang Shun, Ma Rong's junior disciple brother.

He nervously watched Lang Shun and Alex greet and hug each other happily. They talked for a few moments before everyone walked up to them.

"Sister Helen, you should have warned me about this," Lang Shun said. "I wasn't ready for this."

"You're still not ready," Helen said and turned toward the old Alex. "Guess who this is."

Lang Shun looked at the older Alex and frowned a little. He looked familiar to him, but he couldn't remember where he had seen him. That was surprising to him because he was supposed to have perfect memory.

"Who is this?" he asked.

"Remember that one time I told you the truth about the players?" Helen asked. "The one where I said our bodies were controlled by minds that were elsewhere?"

"I do remember that," Lang Shun said. "You said something about clones back then. Is… he a clone?"

"He's my clone, martial Uncle," Alex spoke. "He was one that was in control of my body when the master took me in as her disciple."

"Martial Uncle," the older Alex walked forward and bowed. "I'm glad to see you're doing alright."

"You're… Alex too?" Lang Shun was a little perplexed, surprised, and quite thoroughly confused.

Alex had to explain properly what was going on and how this Alex had been living a normal life in the Central continent.

Lang Shun turned his head towards Ronron in surprise. "That's your daughter?" he asked.

"Yes, martial uncle," the older Alex said while gesturing for Ronron to come out. "Her name is Maron. I named her after master."

"Ma Ron?" Lang Shun asked.

"It's all one word. Maron," Ronron quickly said. "Greetings."

"Wow, your daughter is already so grown up, and she's even in the True realm," Lang Shun couldn't help but be surprised.

Alex introduced the rest of his family to Lang Shun as well.

He turned back to both Alex and said, "I'm glad both of you got to come back, even though it has been so long since you did."

"I'm glad too, Martial Uncle," the older Alex said.

After talking there for a while, Lang Shun asked them to come along with him so they could talk in the elder's hall.

The group looked around at the valley as they walked away. The various different buildings that were available around the valley seemed to have changed drastically over the last 3 decades Alex hadn't been there.

To everyone else, it looked completely new.

Alex noticed a massive black stone that had words written all over it, some of which constantly changed. It was the Contribution ranking and the first person on the list was someone named Kong Yumin.

"Are the disciples these days good?" Alex asked. "I assume the level of alchemy has gone up a lot."

"Yes, it's gone up quite a lot," Lang Shun said. "Not only do we have more diverse recipes, elder He has been giving us quite a bit of knowledge on improving the pills, so the level of alchemy for even the disciples has become better."

"They also have medicinal pastes for most ordinary requirements, so they are forced to make better pills as a result, so the public can only be satisfied with the best of the best pills," Helen said.

"I see," Alex said. "So, that Kong Yumin should be quite good at pills."

"She is," Lang Shun said. "Last I remember, she could make Immortal-grade pills on occasion. They are only common pills, but it's still quite a feat. Her True pills are only a little worse, but she's getting there."

Alex looked surprised. "That is truly quite a feat. How is she so good?" he asked.

"Guest elder He is quite biased toward her," Lang Shun said with a chuckle in his voice. "You will understand why when you meet her later."

Alex was a little confused but he decided to not care about it. He continued asking a little more about the sect and came to learn quite a lot.

Hong Wu sect was now the best sect in terms of Alchemy and due to its popularity, was also one of the better sects when it came to just strength.

It had steadily grown to become one of the best sects in the entire empire, even better than the Tiger sect. The Tiger sect was strong and well-known, but it was nowhere close to the Hong Wu sect in terms of popularity.

The Hong Wu sect was now the main sect any and all youngsters from all around the empire wished to join, which had forced the Hong Wu sect to make its entrance exams harder, which forced only the best of the best to get through as well, improving the overall standard of the sect by that much more.

Due to the improvement in pills as well as the talent of the students that joined, the disciples had started breaking through the realms fast enough to still remain a disciple since they broke through to the True realms in just a year or two.

As such, the Hong Wu sect was forced to increase the threshold of graduation from entering the True Realms to entering the True Master realm. There were talks of maybe increasing it to the True Lord realm, but that hadn't been decided yet.

For alchemists, they now had to make a Heaven Grade true pill to graduate early, if they had at least been a disciple for at least 3 years. Otherwise, 20 years was how long they could remain a disciple before graduating.

Alex asked about the sect leader and found out that she had been there since long before he had even arrived. She was one of the numbered elders during his master's time and was Lang Shun's senior by a few years.

With the other elders growing old, she had ended up becoming the sect leader after all this time. Her Alchemy skills weren't that good, but her understanding of Alchemy, and more importantly, her leadership skills were more than good enough to be the leader.

"Where's Grand Elder?" Alex asked. "I wish to meet him as well."

Lang Shun stopped. "Oh… Master passed away," he said with a solemn face.

It took Alex a moment to register what he had just heard. "Grand elder… passed away?" he asked. "He had just entered the True Emperor realm when I was last here."

"That was over 30 years ago," Lang Shun said. "Thanks to you, he had managed to improve his life span by a bit, but around 9 years ago, he tried to force a breakthrough because of his ending life span and ended up suffering another Qi Deviation that killed him."

Chapter 1264 Meeting Old Friends

"It isn't very surprising since he had already suffered a Qi Deviation before that had become a problem to his longevity. The only reason he even entered the True Emperor realm was thanks to your pills and his longevity had improved a little."

"He had gotten lucky that time around, but... this time he wasn't," Lang Shun said. "After the Qi Deviation, he entered another final closed cultivation to try and breakthrough, but we were informed that he had died during that."

"I see," Alex said. He couldn't help but feel quite sad about it. "And your father, martial uncle. Is he alright?"

"Oh yes, my father is doing perfectly fine. He now lives in Maroon city over to the west. There aren't many people living there, so he enjoys his easy life in a small city where he occasionally makes pills for people," Lang Shun said.

They arrived at the elder's hall and everyone entered. Lang Shun called for some people and one by one they came.

The first to enter was a woman with long flowing hair and bright skin. Her face held no smile, but she was still quite pretty without it.

"Elder Lang, why did you call for me? Do you require some—" her eyes fell on the group that was in the room, especially on Alex.

"Yu Ming?" she asked, her face finally showing some emotion. "Wh-when did you get here?"

"Sister Zhou Mei, I did not expect you to be the first one to arrive. How are you doing?" Alex asked her.

"I'm... I'm doing fine, great even," she said. "How are you doing? You've been gone for nearly 3 decades when you said you would be gone for just half a year or a year at best."

"Oh, I did, didn't I?" Alex gave an awkward smile. "I'm sorry, I ended up getting teleported somewhere I couldn't return from. I have now and I even brought a few people along with me."

The Older Alex couldn't help but be in awe at the person he was looking at. He hadn't realized that he had completely forgotten about her until the very moment Alex spoke of her name. Only the did the memory of a talented girl that was the disciple of the 2nd and 3rd elder come to his mind.

Alex introduced the older Alex to Zhou Mei who had a hard time believing what she was hearing. It took her a moment to get over the disbelief and started talking with him as well. After that, Alex went around introducing his family to her.

They talked with Zhou Mei for a bit, making some small talk in the process. Zhou Mei seemed quite comfortable about it all, especially since she seemed to be close with his mother as well.

Another pair of footsteps rang through the hallway as someone else appeared. "Aaarh!" a screeching voice suddenly filled the room as the woman that appeared ran towards Alex the moment she saw him.

"Mingming! You're back!" she hugged him even while he was seated and only let go of him after a few seconds. She placed her palms on her waist and looked angry. "Where were you all this time? Why didn't you come sooner?"

"It's good to see you, Fanfan," Alex spoke to the newcomer. "How have you been doing?"

"Aside from being extremely angry right now, I'm doing fine," she said before turning her head toward the others. "Who are they?"

"Believe it or not, that's Yu Ming too," Zhou Mei said, pointing at the older Alex.

"What do you mean, Meimei?" Fan Ruogang couldn't understand. Unlike Zhou Mei, it took her a while to believe that the older Alex was also an Alex.

Wan Li walked in during the explanation and was surprised to not just see Alex, but also hear that the older one was him as well.

Fan Ruogang held onto Wan Li's arm and pulled her inside. "Do you believe it, that's Yu Ming too," she said.

"It's certainly unbelievable, but not beyond the realm of possibility," Wan Li said while looking at the older Alex.

"But it's still surprising, isn't it?" Fan Ruogang asked while starting up a conversation with the older Alex to get to know him better.

They talked for a while before a group of footsteps sounded from the hallway. The group turned to see 3 people enter the room.

Of them, two were a middle-aged couple, while the third one was a child.

Alex immediately recognized the couple and was even surprised. What surprised him more was the child in front of them that looked quite similar to the two of them.

"Brother Yu? You're back?"

Kong Yuhan was more than surprised to see Alex in front of him. Zhou Mi gasped in surprise as well when she recognized Alex.

"Brother Kong, Sister Mi, how have you been doing?" he asked.

"Great, great," Kong Yuhan said as he walked inside. "How have you been brother Yu? It's been such a long time that if not for our memories, I would've most likely forgotten how you even looked."

Alex smiled a little. "And who is this?" he asked, looking at the young girl that barely looked like she was 16 years old.

"Oh, this is our daughter," Kong Yuhan said. "Yumin, this is brother Yu Ming. He is the guest elder's son."

"Oh! Greetings, senior Yu Ming," the girl bowed in front of him.

"Yumin, huh?" Alex asked with a puzzled face. "Your name sounds similar to mine. How are you, Yumin?"

"I am doing very good, senior Yu Ming," she answered.

"Hmm, her name is similar to your's isn't it?" Kong Yuhan thought. "What a coincidence."

"She has been following your Alchemy teachings that you left behind for her parents ever since she was born and even I help her a lot of times. Thanks to that and her own hard work, she's managed to reach the top of the current generation of disciples," Helen explained.

Then she turned toward the girl. "Come here Yumin, I want you to meet someone else," Helen called for her and introduced Ronron to her.

Kong Yuhan was surprised that Alex had a daughter, and then he was surprised there was another Alex entirely.

Alex cleared the confusion and also mentioned what his real name was to them. After that, the group fell into a talk that lasted nearly an entire hour.

During this time, Alex explained in brief why he couldn't have come back so many years ago and why it was only now that he was back.

"Your alchemy must have reached another level now, hasn't it?" Zhou Mei asked.

"I wouldn't be surprised if he can make Immortal pills with his eyes closed now," Wan Li said from the side.

Alex smiled. "I will give you a demonstration to show where my alchemy skills have reached later on," he said.

He then turned his head and looked toward the hallway where another person appeared. She was an old older figure, a person in her mid-40s from how she looked. As soon as she appeared, everyone turned to her and bowed.

The woman bowed toward Helen once and then turned to Alex. "Greetings, senior. I am Shao Chun, the current sect leader of the Hong Wu sect."

Chapter 1265 Take Away

Alex looked at the woman that had appeared in the room. She wore dark green robes and had shiny black hair that was tied in a bun behind her head.

She bowed in front of the group, especially at Alex who she seemed to recognize the moment she came into the room.

"Greetings," Alex spoke. "And you do not have to call me a senior."

"My apologies, but I am not close to you like the rest of them are, so I cannot bring myself to call you by your name," Shao Chun said. "And I call your mother 'senior' as well, and based on strength alone, I hear you are far beyond her, so I cannot think of anything else I can call you."

"My name is Alex. It's enough to just call me that," Alex said. "It's nice to meet you, sect leader."

"I can't just call you just by your name," the woman said. "I shall continue calling you senior Alex."

Alex sighed. "Very well," he said.

The woman looked around the room and looked at the many people. "Senior Alex, is your reason for coming here just a simple visit or…?" she asked.

"Partly for visit," Alex said.

"Partly?" the woman seemed a little confused. "May I ask what the other reasons are?"

Alex looked at the woman. "Is there something in mind that you were hoping I'm here for?" he asked.

"Not hoping exactly," she said. "I was more so expecting to hear that you came here for your mother. I am expecting you to take her away, am I wrong?"

"You're not wrong," Alex said. "But there's more."

"More?" the woman got curious.

"If they accept, I am willing to take away everyone here and bring them somewhere else," he said.

The woman wasn't expecting that at all and was taken aback. "I beg your pardon?" she asked. "You want to take everyone here away?"

"Are you talking about us?" Wan Li asked.

"Where do you want to take us, Mingming?" Fan Ruogang asked.

The others were surprised and a little hesitant even. Alex looked at Lang Shun and the rest, "I will give you time to think about it and only ask you once I have everything ready. By that time, you will have all the information you could want to make the decision and I will respect any decision you make."

"Where will we be going to if you take us away?" Zhou Mei asked.

"As I mentioned previously, I currently live in the Southern Continent, so I will be taking you there," Alex said. "It's a very faraway place, so you will have to make your choice carefully."

"How long do we have to make the decision?" Kong Yuhan asked.

"Don't worry, you have plenty of time. You might even choose to not go after I'm done with what I came here to do," he said.

"What exactly did you come here to do?" Shao Chun asked.

"Well, first of all, I came to visit my master's grave," Alex said. "After that… well, are you willing to give me full authority over the sect so I can make some changes?"

"Full… authority?" the woman frowned for a moment. That was something that she couldn't give so easily, especially because Alex was an outsider at the moment.

"Are you not willing?" Alex asked.

"Please forgive me, but that is a decision I cannot make alone despite being the sect leader. If you'll excuse me, I will gather the elders to discuss this topic," Shao Chun said and turned to walk away.

"Feel free to take your time," Alex spoke to the leaving sect leader. "We will be by our master's grave while you do so. Also, I can make this promise to you. You will most definitely not be disappointed by what I do after I gain full authority."

The woman stopped for a second, nodded, and walked away while pulling out a medallion.

Lang Shun, Zhou Mei, Wan Li, and Fan Ruogang immediately received a message on their medallion, asking them and every other numbered elder to gather in the Elder's hall immediately.

"Please excuse us," Zhou Mei said and left with the other two.

"I will see you guys later," Lang Shun said and walked away.

Kong Yuhan and Zhou Mi remained with the rest, making Alex and the others look at them. "Do you not need to go, brother Kong?" Alex asked.

"Haha, I'm not a numbered elder, not yet," he said.

"Me neither," Zhou Mi said.

"You two should go and visit your master," Helen said. "We will stay here and wait for you guys to return."

Alex and the older Alex walked away from the room.

The two of them went through the valley, making their way toward the Alchemy garden on the left. As they went there, the older Alex slowed down a little and looked to the right.

"That's… where I stayed, isn't it?" he asked.

Alex looked to the side and realized that he was passing by the sect leader's mountain. "Yes, that's where we lived. I can see that our old house is still there. Do you want to check it out?" he asked.

"Can we go? Isn't the pathway to the mountain guarded?" the older Alex asked.

"Don't worry about that," Alex said and grabbed the older Alex. "Let's go."

The two of them teleported at once, arriving someway up the mountain. The older Alex was disoriented for a moment, but Alex quickly saw the house where he had lived all those years ago.

It hadn't been exactly him that had lived there, but the memories and experience made it so that it was.

The older Alex noticed it as well and made his way toward it.

"Oh, someone is living there," Alex said as they reached outside.

The older Alex nodded when he saw the smoke coming out of the room's chimney. Someone was making pills in there and they shouldn't be disturbing that person.

Alex checked who it was through his spiritual sense and saw a young man inside. "Must be the sect leader's disciple," he said. He could see the rest of the building and smiled a little.

Nothing had changed in there at all. Everything looked the same as it was all those years ago.

He watched the older Alex with a soft smile on his face as he reminisced the time of his past that he had all but forgotten. The flashes of memories that returned to him regarding this place made him happier than visiting the place itself.

"Let's go back," he said after a few moments. "This isn't our place anymore."

Alex nodded and took the older Alex back down to the base of the mountain. From there, they walked over to the alchemy garden that was constantly guarded. New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex could already feel the thick yin energy in the air around him. He brought out a bit of Yang Qi and covered the older Alex so that his mortal body wouldn't be affected by the Yin Gathering tree he had planted so many years ago, which seemed to have grown to become such a large tree.

The elders gave them free access before they had even asked for it. They were already ordered to do so, so they had no hesitation.

The two Alex walked in and immediately got weird looks from the disciples that were inside. The Alchemy mountain was filled with females that came to cultivate their yin arts, just as Ma Rong had intended all those years ago.

If she were alive, she would have been cultivating under this very tree as well.

The yin aura manifested itself as a thick fog that covered the entire atmosphere. While Alex could see everything more or less clearly, the older Alex with his mortal body couldn't even see past 10 meters away from him.

As they climbed higher, the visibility got worse and worse until he could only see 5 meters away from him.

A few girls tried to stop them and question why two men were there, but they were easily persuaded to let them be when Alex told them that the sect leader had agreed to it.

They seemed to trust the sect leader a lot.

"There," Alex pointed ahead of him and the older Alex looked as well. He couldn't see anything just yet, but as he walked, a small headstone appeared.

Alex saw the headstone and felt his heart grow empty all of a sudden. When he saw past the headstone, there was another mound of land that seemed like a grave as well.

'Grandmaster?' Alex thought, but there was no gravestone, so he didn't believe it was his grandmaster that was buried there.

When he thought about who else it could be, he quickly realized that something was missing. 'Master's pet,' he thought. The snake that was together with Ma Rong was missing.

'I see,' Alex thought. The snake had died as well.

For the past 4 and a half decades, the snake had looked after his master's grave, but during that time, it had also passed away.

Alex sighed, not knowing what to think.

The older Alex didn't seem to care about any of it at all. He took a few steps forward and fell to his knees in from of the grave.

Tears started flowing down his eyes and he planted his forehead on the ground. "Master, please forgive your unfilial disciple for not coming to visit you sooner," he shouted as loudly as he could with regret evident in his voice.

Alex walked next to the older Alex and knelt as well before planting his forehead on the ground.

"I have returned once again, master," he said. "I'm sorry I kept you waiting for so long."

Chapter 1266 Resonance

The older Alex started speaking first.

"This is the first time I have come here since the funeral, isn't it?" he asked. "I wish I could have come sooner. How have you been doing, master? Are you having fun in the afterlife? Or have you reincarnated already?"

"If you did, I hope you are born as the daughter of someone important like a king or an emperor so you never have to work a day in your life again," he said. "Although, I would love it if when I die, I can be your disciple once again in the next life."

"Do you want to hear how I've been living master? You would have probably worried that I was going to have a hard time, but I didn't," he said. "I have a beautiful wife and an even more beautiful daughter. I can only say that I've been blessed, master. I'm sure you would feel nothing but happiness seeing my life right now."

"And there would be nothing that would make me happier than to see you again," he said. Tears overflowed from his eyes, filling the cracks of his wrinkled skin as they flowed down his cheeks.

Alex patted the old man on his back, consoling him while letting him shed his tears. Unlike him, the old man had never had the chance to speak what he had in his heart for all these years.

The old man started talking about his life and how she had influenced it. He told her that he was a better person today because of her.

Alex nodded as well. He started talking about his own time away as well. It had been 3 decades since he had last come here and there were plenty of stories to tell her about those times.

He didn't have much in his heart that burdened him, unlike the old man, but talking to his master still made him feel relieved.

"It's not a lie when he says you've influenced our lives heavily, master," Alex spoke. "Did you know, every time I visit an auction house, I think about the time you took me to my first auction."

"When I practice Alchemy, I remember your teaching. When talking to strangers, it's your words that remind me to be wary of them, to not show my hands when I'm up against an enemy."

"Following your and master Wen Cheng's teaching has led me to a status far beyond either of you could've ever imagined," he said. "Do you believe it, master? I'm a king, now. King!"

"It's the greatest achievement anyone could have achieved," he said. "I only wished you were here to see that, master."

"Master!" the old man started screaming once more as he cried like he hadn't since his mother's funeral.

Alex couldn't help but tear up hearing the old man's screams as well. He looked up to not let the tears flow, but they fell down his face inevitably.

"Why aren't you here, master? Why did you have to die? Was it my fault?" the older Alex asked.

"I wish you were here, master," Alex said and silently cried as well.

Albeit the same person, the two of them were never similar to each other at all. However, for the first time in their life, they had cried together for the same reason.

They shed tears, one after another, and felt the same emotion at the same time. For the first time, they were closer to each other than they had ever been before.

For the first time since they existed as two, they were the same in mind and body. And thus, for the first time, their souls resonated as if the two Alex were truly just one.

Alex saw two visions at the same time, one clear, one blurry.

In the clear vision, he was looking at his clone who was knelt beside him with his master's grave in front of him.

In the blurry vision, he was looking directly at his master's grave in front of him. He was looking through his clone's eyes.

Then, he heard the man's thoughts, he felt the man's feelings, and soon, he started seeing his memories.

* * * * *

Alex looked around nervously while he stood next to a priest by himself. There was a space in front of him and beyond that were a few girls that stood wearing similar pink clothes.

He recognized one of the girls that stood on the other side. What was her name? Sarah, right? Why did he know that name?

Many people were staying in two groups. He saw his parents, uncle and aunt, and his cousin. Then he saw another older woman on the other side that he felt he was close with.

He heard cheers and turned in that direction to see a young Emily walk out in a white gown.

Was that a wedding dress? Of course, it was, what else could it be? It was his wedding after all.

'No, not mine,' Alex thought. He had been through such memories before where he nearly believe he was someone he wasn't. He hadn't died over 100 times in the volcano just to forget who he was seeing someone else's memories.

Still, that was not to say that it wasn't hard to dissociate himself from the memories. He decided to let it play out and soon he was sucked back into believing it was his memory.

Emily walked up to the altar and he smelled the sweet scent of rose from her clothes. Was that what he remembered from back then?

The next portion was a blur in his mind and all he remembered was the kiss and then the memory vanished.

'What's next?' Alex thought.

He saw a memory of his honeymoon where they had gone to the snow resort in the snowy mountains of Plumroot city.

He saw his father working hard in the fields.

He saw Hannah's wedding and who she was married to.

He saw a memory of a very sick Emily that he had to take care of over the night.

Another memory surfaced of a sick Emily, only this time she was slightly older and the memory was a happy one. That was the day they found out that after years of trying, Emily was finally pregnant.

Alex saw the Birth Omen that he had heard about. The sky churned and the winds roared.

He saw the memory of the first time he held his daughter in his hand.

The memories continued. He saw a memory of finding his father in the field. He remembered the first time his daughter walked on her own.

He remembered the first day of his daughter's school life. He remembered the last day his mother breathed in that hospital room.

More and more memories flashed through Alex until he had seen everything that the other him deemed important enough to remember.

* * * * * * *

Alex could probably still see more memories if he wanted to, but… that was not him, was it? This was his clone's life. Even though he had seen it and knew what happened in it, it was not one that he had experienced.

As such, unlike the times his clone had spent in his body, he knew for certain that whatever he saw was not his life.

They were different people and they should remain different.

Alex pulled his consciousness out of his clone's body and shook his head.

He realized that he had now gained the ability to peek into his clone's mind and look through his eyes. Controlling him was not a possibility unless he could suppress the soul itself somehow.

However, Alex couldn't think why he would need to do that. He decided to never do that again and let his clone keep his privacy.

The older Alex hadn't realized at all what had happened. He was still crying all the same in front of his master's grave.

Alex sighed and sat down with a solemn look on his face. His emotions were in slight disarray due to the memories, so he couldn't feel just sadness anymore.

So, he sat there and waited for his clone to pour out his grief onto their master's grave.

Alex looked at the tree that had grown so much since the time he had come back. The Yin Gathering tree's seed was something his master had bought and he had helped her plant it.

He wondered if the essence of his master's yin was absorbed by this plant. After all, she did have a great yin body.

He even guessed that it was a Celestial-grade body.

A Celestial grade Yin body, which had likely evolved from a Divine grade one when she entered the Forbidden Fields.

'How strong would master have been had she not gotten into Alchemy?' he wondered. 'Would she have become a strong fighter? Would she have still been alive if that was the case?'

Alex wondered if she had made a mistake in her life by joining an Alchemy sect. However, thinking about it, if she hadn't joined an alchemy sect, then she would have never been his master.

He smiled a bit when he realized that.

The older Alex had calmed down by now and only sniffled a bit here and there.

"Let us return," Alex said to the old man who nodded.

The older Alex turned toward the gave and bowed. "We will be leaving for now, master, but we'll be back later. I want to talk with you plenty more times," he said.

Alex bowed toward her grave and well and walked away.

The two walked down the alchemy mountain and went back to the Elder's Hall. By the time they got there, the sect master had talked with the elders, and together they had come to a decision.

Alex was to gain full authority of the sect until they decided otherwise.

Chapter 1267 Ronron's First Battle

Alex was given a metal medallion that gave him the highest authority over the sect that not even the sect leader had.

If he wanted to, he could even expel disciples or even fire the elders. They knew they couldn't stop him if he wanted to, so they gave him everything he needed.

Alex took the medallion he was handed by Shao Chun and nodded. "It reminds me of when the master gave me full authority back when I was just a disciple," he said and chuckled a bit.

"I remember that somewhat," Shao Chun said. "I was there when that decision was made. Can you tell us what you wish to do at the start?"

"Honestly, I don't really know what I'm going to do," he said. "I have some general idea, but I will have to think for a while and see what I can work with."

"Tomorrow, then?" she asked.

"Sure, I will have thought of something by tomorrow," Alex said. "Honestly, there are a bunch of recipes that I will have to write down so I can pass them along to the sect, and that will take some time."

"Please, take as much time as you will need," the woman said with excitement that she couldn't hide at all.

She let Alex be after that, and Alex took the time to go around the sect with his family. His mother knew the place, but the rest of his family had never been there, so they tried to familiarize themselves.

Even the older Alex didn't know about some of these places, especially the Forbidden Fields that was no more. In its stead was a massive grassland that had many buildings and fighting platforms that had been set up.

Some disciples were training on top of those platforms and seeing that, Ronron could only imagine what it would be like to enter a sect.

"Do you want to fight them?" he asked.

"Wh-what?" she flustered a bit when asked. "You want me to fight them?"

"I'm asking if you want to," Alex said. "It will be just some training. I will try and find someone that can match your cultivation base."

"Can I?" she asked nervously.

"Right, my granddaughter hasn't had the chance to feel what it's like to be a sect disciple, has she?" Helen asked. "Do you want to know?"

"I mean... sure?" she said.

"Alright, starting tomorrow, you will enroll in the Hong Wu sect," Helen said. "We should have enough time for her to experience it all, shouldn't we?"

"It will take a month or so," Liz said. "It's going to take an especially long time since the formation is on the other side of the secret realm, so time is the last thing you will lack here."

"That settles it then," Helen said. "For now, let's get you someone to fight against."

Without even Alex having to do anything, Helen went out by herself and searched for someone appropriate to fight Ronron. Since this was her first fight, Helen found a girl that had similar cultivation as Ronron and asked her to help fight her.

The girl was more than happy to accept the request from the guest elder. She was told to be more of a teacher than a fighter and that was exactly what she did.

As soon as the two of them started fighting, Alex realized two things that surprised him quite a bit.

The first thing he realized was that his daughter could not fight at all. She did not have the awareness a fighter was supposed to have and was rather uncoordinated when she got flustered too.

She had no fighting style at all, which was what surprised him the most. Having trained under the senior Yang for the past 10 years, he had assumed he had taught her how to fight, but it seemed that the only thing she had been taught was how to cultivate and how use skills.

She was good at using skills, but just not good at using them at the right time. She needed a lot of training if she wanted to win any fight.

However, even without fighting experience, Ronron was probably going to win the current fight, which was the second thing that surprised him.

Ronron was strong.

She had no fighting experience and she could only use Wood Qi, but she was still very strong. That was because as she fought her opponent, Alex could see that her output was far stronger than her opponent's.

She could fight people well above her own cultivation realm, just like Alex. Alex didn't know how far above, but it was at least 4 realms based on how the other girl reacted to the skills that she had to block.

The fight continued for a while longer and Alex not only had to care for his daughter's well-being in this fight but also the other girl's. If the other girl wasn't careful, there was a large chance that she would receive a terrible injury.

Ronron was quick to catch on to things and by the end of the fight, she was starting to slowly erase the problems that were causing her to mess up.

Little by little, even without a weapon or a fighting style, just by using her skills properly, she started winning the fight.

The fight ended when Alex appeared on stage and blocked a single vine strike her daughter had sent her opponent's way.

Her opponent had made a mistake at the last second and couldn't use a defensive technique in time.

"Well done," he said. "You won."

Ronron looked at him with a blank face. "I... won?" she asked before her face turned to all smiles. "I won! I did it father, I won."

"Grandma! Grandpa!" she shouted as she ran down the stage.

Alex checked the other girl while Ronron celebrated with the family. After they were done celebrating, he took them to check the rest of the sect.

They arrived next to a bustling river that had a bridge over it that lead to people on the other side of the grassland.

The place that used to be a desert now had trees and grass growing on it. People also stayed on the other side of the river, which gave even Alex a surprise.

The Older Alex couldn't believe that the desert he remembered wasn't there anymore. How things changed in just 50 years.

Alex stared into the distance and saw the desert that still remained. From what he could tell, the desertification was reverting itself and it was doing so starting with the Forbidden Fields and making its way to where the Nine Yang Divine tree was previously located.

Alex remembered the tree and the location. He remembered the ocean there as well. That place had been an important place to him.

That was the place where he had gained his freedom.

When he thought of the location, an idea came to his mind. 'Maybe,' he thought. He had been searching for a place where he could act on his plans, but he couldn't find anywhere he liked.

However, now that he was here, it was obvious to him that this should have been his choice from the very first day.

"This is it," he said to himself. "I should get the materials ready."

Chapter 1268 Evening Gathering

"Sorry we're late," Wen Cheng said as he walked into the house. "Hmm? Oh, we're the first one to come?"

"Master, come in," Alex said and saw the woman next to him. "Senior Cai Ping, greetings."

"Alchemist Yu," the woman greeted. "I didn't think I would get to meet you so soon. I only just recently found out that you disciplined under my husband as well."

"Oh, I thought more people knew that," Alex said.

"Only the people from the sect knew that," Wen Cheng said. "People from the outside were mostly unsure of everything."

"I see," Alex said. "Anyway, senior Cai. How have you been doing these days? Last I saw you was some 5 decades ago, wasn't it?"

"I've been doing fine," the woman spoke. "The years have been mostly mundane, but I managed to get promoted to becoming the head of the Pink Cloud auction house of this city, so my days have passed by without becoming too boring."

"How did you guys meet?" Alex asked. "Or rather, how did you get close?"

"Well, since Luo Mei returned and Liu Xun got promoted from his post, I couldn't find anything to do in the sect at all. I wasn't planning on taking another disciple, so I instead started handling outside relations."

"As a result, I had to frequently visit the various auction houses. Being the best one there is, I had to visit the Pink Cloud auction house the most. We were acquainted for a long time, but meeting week after week got us closer."

"Then, one day I decided to ask her to marry me and she accepted," Wen Cheng said happily.

Alex smiled. "Once again, congratulations on the marriage," he said.

He took the two of them into the house and let them talk with the rest of his family.

After leaving the Hong Wu sect around the evening, they had come to the small house that his mother stayed in.

Alex only considered it small based on the places he was used to living these days, and in truth, the house was far larger than even the mansion back on the farm.

Once his master and Cai Ping settled in, another pair arrived outside the door. Alex quickly opened the door and smiled widely when he saw his senior sister and her husband.

"Brother Yuhan!" he shouted and stopped. "No wait. Brother-in-law!" He opened his arms wide and went in for a hug.

Du Yuhan wasn't expecting any of that at all, so when he was hugged, he involuntarily tried to push Alex away. Unfortunately for him, Alex was simply too strong to be pushed away by a True King realm cultivator like him.

Alex let go of him a second later and turned around to see his senior sister snickering a little. "What?" he asked.

"He was nervous about meeting you again after so long and the first thing you do is hug him. Look at how flustered he's gotten," Luo Mei said and held onto Du Yuhan's hands. "I told you. He hasn't changed much. He's still the same person."

"I guess so," Du Yuhan said and turned to Alex. "I hear you went through quite a bit of trouble to get back here. Have you been doing alright?"

"I'm splendid," Alex said. "What about you, brother-in-law? How have you been? You've been treating my senior sister well, right?"

"I don't think I can even treat her wrong if I wanted to," he said. "She has her master and senior brother to fall back on if I ever did anything to hurt her."

"Now she has another brother too," Alex said. "Come on in, you must've heard there's another me too, right? Let me take you to meet him."

The three of them entered and joined the group. They started talking within themselves and after a while, Liu Xun joined them as well.

The group started asking Alex questions about his travels, and although he had spoken about them multiple times just that day already, he still told them all about it all over again.

They had known where he had been to these past few decades from his family, but hearing about his journey and how he got there was interesting on its own. Hearing how he became a King was even more surprising to them.

"Right, where's Scarlet?" Graham asked. "I thought you would bring her to introduce her to your mother."

"I was planning to, but she is more interested in being with the White Tiger right now. She must be curious about her home, so she couldn't come with us this time around," he said. "I will probably bring her the next time I come back."

"You are going to leave again?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I need to take aunt back there to help with the teleportation formation, while I, myself, have to be there for Pearl. On top of that, I have a few things I have to take care of on the other side and only then can I really be free to stay here without any worry."

"Are you going to the Luminance empire?" Helen asked. "Can I go there too?"

"You want to go back there?" he asked.

"I need to meet my master. He helped me so much, so I should at least thank him before I leave, shouldn't I?" Helen asked. "I also wish to see the sect one last time."

"Hmm, that should be fine," Alex said. "I will take you too then."

"Oh... will you be going there tomorrow?" Luo Mei asked.

"No, we have about a week before we need to return," Alex said. "I will be spending the next week between the two sects."

"By the way, young brother," Liu Xun asked. "Do you have anything interesting that you can give us? Some unique pills you found on your journey?"

Alex smiled and even chuckled a bit. "Of course I do," he said. "Let's see... these two pills should help you the most."

He brought out two pill bottles and started handing around the pills throughout the room. Aside from Graham, his clone, and his daughter, everyone else got the pills and looked at them curiously to try and figure out what they were.

"These pills improve your Earth spiritual root and Water Spiritual root. If you have either of those roots, you should eat the corresponding pill and cultivate tonight," Alex explained.

"They do what?" Cai Ping looked at the pill with a surprised look on her face. "How can that be?"

The others weren't very surprised as they had seen a similar pill before.

"Well, this one is not for me," Luo Mei said and handed back one of the pills. As she only had a Superior water spiritual root, she didn't need the pill to improve her nonexistent earth spiritual root.

Even the water pill wouldn't help her much because of how good her Water spiritual root was, to begin with, but she still took it.

The rest of them accepted the pill and were more than fascinated with it.

"What are these lines?" Wen Cheng asked while pointing at the pill veins.

"Those are called Pill Veins," Alex explained. "You don't have to worry about those for now. Just eat the pills after you return tonight."

Chapter 1269 Ronron's Morning

Ronron opened her eyes early in the morning as her cultivation session came to an end. She could almost see the slight bit of green in the air around her that blinked in and out of existence in her vision.

She was sitting inside a formation created by her master that was used to separate just the wood energy from all the energy that was inside the formation.

Most of the time, there would be some sort of Wood elemental treasure that she had inside the formation, but this time around, it was just regular Qi that was being filtered with the formation.

As such, she didn't have that much wood Qi to cultivate with and her night-long cultivation session hadn't had much effect on her.

She closed the formation plate and walked out of the room she was in. She looked around the corridor and heard some sounds coming from outside.

She walked out and saw her father training in the front yard of the house. He was playing around with the golden spears that he had learned to make back in the Northern Continent.

"What are you doing father? Are you not cultivating?" she asked as she walked outside.

Alex stopped practicing his skills for a second and looked toward Ronron. "I'm just training," he said.

"Training? Those spears? I thought you were already good with those," she said.

"I am, but I am training for something else. I'm trying to merge two techniques, and for that, I need to learn as much as I can about this one technique," Alex said.

"Okay," Ronron responded simply, not understanding what exactly it was that he meant by it all. Merging techniques? What would that exactly achieve?

She wondered if she should train as well.

"What are you doing so early? Did you not sleep?" Alex asked.

"No, I was cultivating," Ronron said. "Besides, it's already morning. You can't really call it early."

"It's still early," Alex said. "Go back and rest for a bit."

"No, I can't," Ronron said. "I need to get ready. Grandma is taking me to get enrolled into the sect."

"Oh right, I nearly forgot about that," Alex said. "Do you need anything before you go?"

"No, I'm alright," Ronron said. "Besides, isn't it better to not be prepared for it if what I want is experience?"

"You're right," Alex said. "Still, take Whisker with you."

The small, gray mouse jumped out of Alex's shoulders and jumped onto Ronron's shoulders.

"But... I thought I was supposed to experience it all alone," Ronron said.

"He won't involve himself with anything," Alex said. "He's simply there for protection. That saint might still come back for some revenge, so I must be ready for it all. Do you still have that blood core I gave you?"

"Yes, it's in my storage bag," Ronron said.

"Good," Alex said. "Also, tell grandma to take you to the Tiger sect instead of the Hong Wu sect. I don't know how good Hong Wu sect's combat division is, but it's definitely worse than the Tiger sect since the Tiger sect exclusively focuses on one's cultivation."

Ronron nodded. "Okay," she said and walked away with Whisker. She went over to her Papa's room, but he was still sleeping, so she let him be.

"Oh, grandaunt, you're up early too," she said when she saw Liz.

"So are you. What are you doing outside?" Liz asked.

"Father is training outside. I was just with him," Ronron said.

"That little... he can't just enjoy a few days without doing something, can he?" Liz spoke with an angry look. "I need to give him a piece of my mind."

Liz stormed off, leaving Ronron by herself. Ronron shrugged and walked away to find her grandma.

She found her grandma along with her grandpa in their room. "Grandma~! Grandpa~! Good morning," Ronron spoke as she entered the room.

"Good morning, Ronron," Helen spoke.

"Good morning," Graham responded as well.

"You guys are up already too, huh?" Ronron said. "Does no one besides papa sleep in this family?"

The two grandparents chuckled at her question. "That's just how cultivators are. We don't need sleep and can go without it forever as simple cultivation easily replaces sleep for all of us. Stay in these places long enough and you will realize that too."

"Is that so?" Ronron asked. "Oh right, when are we going to the sect? Father told me that it's better if I enrolled in the Tiger sect instead of the Hong Wu sect. He says that sect is a better fit for me."

Helen frowned a little. "Did he say why it's a better fit?" she asked.

"Yes, he said it's a better sect if I intend to completely focus on cultivation alone," Ronron said.

"Then he's wrong," Helen said. "He knows nothing about the current situation of the sects in detail to make such decisions. Hong Wu sect is better for you."

"Is that so?" Ronron asked. She didn't really care which sect it was. As long as she got to enter one, she would be more than happy. "When do we leave?"

"Are you that desperate to leave?" Graham asked while laughing a little.

"I've never experienced what it's like to be in a sect, so I'm very much looking forward to it, Grandpa," she said. "It must be something special since so many people join one."

"Hmm, I don't know," Graham said. "I never joined a sect before."

"Really? Do you want to join one with me then? You might be able to join just by saying you started cultivating very late," Ronron said.

"No, no, I have no intention of joining any sect. You go and have fun," he said.

"Okay," Ronron said and turned to her grandma. "So, when do we leave?"

"Go tell everyone goodbye. You likely won't see them for an entire month once you join," Helen said.

"Okay," Ronron excitedly said and walked away from the room.

Helen was surprised to see her granddaughter leave the room excitedly. "Was she excited at the prospect of never having to see us again?" she asked.

"No, she's just excited about getting to join a sect," Graham said.

"But she didn't even react to the fact that she won't be seeing us for over a month," Helen said.

"Why would she?" Graham said. "After all, she's used to spending her time away from her family for months on end."

Ronron went around to say goodbye. She went back to the front yard to see if her father was being scolded by his aunt, but somehow he had instead gotten his aunt to train with him instead.

"What happened to just enjoying the days?" she thought to herself. She said her goodbyes to the two before going to her father's room.

She woke her up and told him what she was doing.

"Don't worry about me and go. I will be fine," the older Alex told her.

"You won't be lonely, right papa?" she asked.

"How can I be lonely? I have so many people around me," the older Alex said.

"Okay, then I will see you in a month," Ronron said and went back to her grandma's room.

Helen had been waiting for her to return. Once she was back, the two of them left for the Hong Wu sect where Ronron was going to enroll in the combat section of the sect for the next month.

Chapter 1270 Returning

With Ronron off to the sect with his mother, and his clone and aunt off to the city with his father, Alex was alone in the house and finally had some time to work on the pills.

He had spent the previous night going through what he needed to do while he was here. There were mainly three things he thought he needed to do, one of which he wanted to do before he left for the Luminance Empire.

The first one was to provide some alchemy lectures in the Hong Wu sect, which would help everyone evolve into better Alchemists.

The second one was to provide pill recipes that he had perfected over the course of the past few decades.

Finally, the third thing he needed to do, he decided to do so immediately.

Unlike the Hong Wu sect, Alex hadn't had the authority to make changes to the TIger sect, so he had to start with the Hong Wu sect.

He left the house and went over to the Hong Wu sect where he met up with the sect leader Shao Chun to discuss a few things.

"You... you are really going to do this?" she asked with an expression on her face that was beyond just shocked.

She couldn't imagine something like this was even possible for someone to have and walk around with. Were the lands beyond the ocean that much better than just anyone could walk around with these things?

"Where do you think is the best place for it?" Alex asked.

"I... " Shao Chun had to make the decision very carefully. "Past the river."

"Past the river? Are you sure?" Alex asked.

"Absolutely," she said. "That is the best place."

"Alright," Alex said. "Then I shall head over there and get started in a few minutes. Please inform the disciples to not cross the river in the meantime.'

"Right away," Shao Chun said and got to work.

Alex went by a few minutes later and the entire area past the river in the Forbidden Fields was devoid of any students.

Shao Chun flew in the distance and watched Alex. Alex carefully checked the ground below him before he could start.

There were a few requirements for the type of land for it to work. The land had to be soft, there shouldn't be any pockets of water underneath and finally, there shouldn't be another spirit vein down below.

After all, what Alex was going to do was place a saint spirit vein of his own into the ground below.

Shao Chun had chosen this location since it was the furthest away from any civilization and could thus be used by the sect before the Qi in the saint spirit vein could reach elsewhere.

The ground below had restored itself not long ago from being a desert, but the deep underground was still mostly dry and fluffy, without any massive rocks in it.

And because of the Nine Yang Divine Tree's dominating aura, all spirit veins in the area seemed to have been destroyed in the thousand years it had taken for the fruit to ripen.

As such, the ground below was perfect.

Alex placed his palm facing the ground and pushed the air. The ground below him caved as a large plume of sand flew into the sky, surprising everyone. He flexed his palm a little, testing out if he had lost any strength.

From what he could see, getting rid of his White Tiger's blood hadn't negatively affected him in any way other than simply his blood aura, which was now just a few realms above his own cultivation base.

Besides his physical body, his blood was now the second worst among his 5 types of strength.

Sword Aura came in third in overall strength and his Qi came in 2nd with his cultivation base being equivalent to a Saint Core 9th realm in terms of strength.

Finally, it was his Dao that was the main source of his strength at the moment.

Alex pulled out one of the many storage bags he had brought along from the Southern Continent. All of these bags contained spirit veins that he had brought back to return to the Western Continent.

Ever since he had learned about the war that took place between the Western Continent and the other 3 continents, he had felt bad about the Western Continent having to lose so much during the war.

When in Southern Continent, he had stripped away the stolen saint spirit veins so he could return them to the Western Continent when he had the chance. Now that he had, he had brought back the 56 saint spirit veins so he could give it back to the Western Continent.

However, before he came back, he had come across another problem with returning the spirit veins.

Who exactly did he return them to?

The Western Continent wasn't under a single rule, so he couldn't return it to just one group. Then did he return half to the Crimson Empire and a half to the Luminance empire?

That would make sense but one needed it more than the other. So he had wondered if he should give the Crimson Empire more veins than the Luminance empire.

Also, what about the beast realm? The beast realm was a significant portion of the land in the Western Continent and they were the true rulers too, but they held no power anymore either.

All these problems had caused Alex quite a bit of a headache as there was no one else to make the decision for him.

That was of course until Alex returned and found out that the Western Continent did in fact have someone that could represent all of it.

Bai Jingshen.

So, he returned the spirit veins to Bai Jingshen. However, the white tiger didn't want those spirit veins at all. The beast realm hadn't lost many saint spirit veins, so he didn't need it back.

"Then what do I do with it?" Alex had asked him. The answer he got back was almost mind-opening for him.

"Do whatever you want."

Whatever he wanted. Alex hadn't considered he could do what he wanted with these spirit veins as he didn't believe they were his own. However, now that the ruler of the continent had given him permission, he was doing whatever he wanted with these spirit veins.

The long, white worm-like spirit veins with myriad different roots came out of the storage bag and fell to the ground below him where he had made a hole just before.

There needed to be no order to the way a spirit vein was placed, so Alex simply placed it in the hole and quickly covered the hole.

Once it was covered, he floated down to the ground and waited for it. Shao Chun landed next to him as well and looked around. "Is it done?" she asked.

"Hmm..." Alex didn't immediately answer and waited for it. The sect leader was worried that something had gone wrong, but seeing Alex suddenly smile, she retracted her worry.

"It's done," he said. "It has started giving off Saint Qi."

Shao Chun's eyes went wide in surprise. She knew what was happening, but she still couldn't believe that it had happened.

"Congratulations," Alex said. "Now you and the rest have a chance to enter the Saint realm as well."

Chapter 1271 Helping The Sects

Shao Chun and the rest of the elders were still in disbelief that they now had a Saint spirit vein in their own backyard that would help them reach heights that only a handful of people could have reached in the Crimson Empire.

They thanked Alex profusely and thanked their own good sense to let Alex do what he wanted.

After planting the spirit vein, Alex then gave away pill recipes to the sect for free. He didn't ask for anything in return at all. He simply gave it to them because he wanted to.

He wanted the sect he once belonged to achieve a lot in the future. He wished to do the same for the Tiger Sect as well, but there wasn't much he could do to help the Tiger sect improve itself. He could give them some techniques, but that was about it.

After giving away the recipes, he then proceeded to give a lecture on Alchemy to the rest of the elders of the sect. He didn't want to give lectures to the disciples as there were so many of them.

Instead, he decided to give the lecture to the elders who would then pass it along to the disciples on their own.

His lectures lasted two days, and after that, he was done with everything he could do for the Hong Wu sect. Not only had the lectures been about Alchemy, but he had also given them knowledge on how to grow ingredients well.

He had that knowledge as well, so he passed it along. Along with that, he also gave them some formation blueprints that would make for an amazing formation to improve a garden's efficiency in growing plants, just like the 5 elemental formation that was around one of the Alchemy gardens that he had brought back from the Southern forest so many years ago.

After he was done, he left the Hong Wu sect for the time being and went over to the Tiger sect.

He hadn't visited the Tiger sect in the 3 days he had been in the Scarlet city. His time was mostly spent on the Hong Wu sect and with his master and the rest coming to visit them daily, he saw no reason to immediately go there.

Still, he had to go there eventually as he had to do a few things in that sect too. He didn't beat around the bush and instead directly told the current sect master of the Tiger sect what he planned on doing.

The current sect master of the Tiger sect was a middle-aged man that had joined the sect some 2 decades back. Normally, one couldn't become the sect master of any sect in that short of a time frame, but because of how the Tiger sect functioned, anyone with the strongest disciple could become the sect master.

Just like the Hong Wu sect, the Tiger sect also increased the cultivation threshold at which a disciple graduated from the sect. One had to now break through the True Disciple realm and enter the True Master realm to no longer remain a disciple of the sect.

As for age, they had to be 40 years or younger. Anyone above that age would automatically graduate.

The current prime disciple was someone who was about 36 years old and had a cultivation base at the end of the True Disciple realm.

People in the sect were all but certain that the prime disciple hadn't broken through to the True Master's realm yet just so he could keep his master at the sect master position for as long as he could.

In the remaining time, he hoped his master would find another disciple that could quickly reach the status of a prime disciple.

Alex spoke to the sect master directly and told him about the Saint spirit vein.

The middle-aged man did not trust Alex at all in the beginning. Even if he was the guest elder's son, something like Saint Spirit vein was still unbelievable to the man.

It took minutes of explanation from Wen Cheng, Luo Mei, and the rest for the sect master to realize that Alex wasn't lying at all. He could achieve what he wanted to do.

"Are you serious, senior?" the man asked. "Will you really put a Saint spirit vein in our sect?"

"Yes," Alex nodded.

The sect master was skeptical about it still. "Why?" he asked.

Wen Cheng sighed. "My disciple doesn't have any ulterior motive. He's just doing it because he was part of this sect at one point," he explained.

"That's right," Luo Mei nodded. "My little brother is just trying to help the sect."

Du Yuhan and Liu Xun made similar arguments, and finally, the sect master was coming around to accept what Alex was saying.

"If you can really do it, then do it," the sect master said. "But are you sure you want nothing in return? Just getting it for free feels... wrong for some reason."

Alex thought for a bit. "Actually, I was planning on taking something away anyway, but if it helps calm your anxiety, why don't we make a trade then?" he asked.

"Trade? What sort?" the sect master asked.

"I will give your sect a Saint Spirit vein. In exchange, I want something of yours too," Alex said.

"What do you want, senior?" the sect master asked. He couldn't imagine there was anything in the sect that he could compare with a Saint spirit vein. That would just be absurd.

"I want the thing that formed the crater," Alex said. "I want the Black stele at the center of your sect crater."

"Huh?" the sect master looked confused. "Black Stele? Do you mean the thing that is behind that formation?"

"Yes, that's exactly what I want," Alex said.

The sect master got curious now. Why was it that Alex wanted the black stele? What exactly was the black stele and why was it hidden inside a formation?

The sect master had arrived after the black stele was put into a formation, so he hadn't ever seen it before and had only heard of it.

Also, from what he had heard of it, it was just a random black stone that was in this land long before the Tiger sect was even formed.

Was there some history there that he did not know about? Should he actually refuse the offer?

As the sect leader thought that, he caught Alex's eyes who simply smiled at him.

'What are you thinking trying to deny a Saint realm cultivator,' he cursed at himself.

"I would love to make this deal with you, senior," the sect master said. "Thank you for giving us a Saint Spirit vein."

Alex smiled. "Great," he said. "I shall start my work tonight when the disciples have gone back."

He then left to look around the sect with his master who showed him all the new stuff that had come around since he had disappeared all those years ago.

The tour lasted until late into the night when Alex finally started to act on his promise. He pulled out a storage bag and from within it pulled out the Saint spirit vein.

The many elders stood around the sect crater and watched Alex begin.

Chapter 1272 Threading The Needle

Planting the Saint spirit vein in the Tiger Sect was a difficult endeavor. Unlike the other side of the river in the Forbidden Fields, the section of the Tiger sect where he was going to place the Saint spirit vein already had another spirit vein in it.

As such, if he wanted to easily place the Saint spirit vein, he would have to take out the other spirit veins that were already in the ground and replace them with the Saint spirit vein.

However, if Alex could do that, it wouldn't be a difficult endeavor at all.

He knew what was going to happen from the beginning, but seeing it for himself was still annoying to Alex. He used his spiritual sense to check the underground status of the sect and recorded all the various twists and turns the True spirit vein was positioned inside the ground.

Alex carefully pulled out all the dirt from around the spirit vein, not touching any of it in the process.

The task itself wasn't hard at all, but it took some time. Nearly 20 minutes later, Alex finally relaxed a little as almost all the dirt that he could pull out from the ground was outside.

The many elders from around the sect looked at the open ground where everything but the spirit veins had been pulled away from. They were surprised that Alex had even taken away the many stages that were used for fighting during the process.

Alex looked at the spirit vein and frowned.

It would've been so much easier if he could take it all away, but unfortunately, he couldn't do that. After all, there were so many formations around the sect that were currently running thanks to this very spirit vein.

If he took away the spirit vein right now, every single formation would immediately stop working, causing a problem that wouldn't be small in any way, especially when there were so many disciples that were currently inside their homes and many different halls that were relying on these very formations.

Instead, Alex had to thread the needle. He had to send the Saint spirit vein in through the True spirit vein without disturbing it all that much.

He had a level of flexibility on how much he could move the True spirit vein before the formations completely stopped working.

He got started as soon as he could and sent the tip of the Saint spirit vein through the gaps in the ground.

The Saint spirit vein was a bit larger than the True spirit vein, not that size was ever a factor in the quality of spirit veins. Larger spirit veins simply held more Qi in them.

He slowly snuck in the Saint spirit veins, pushing aside the True spirit vein slightly when needed, and forcing the saint Spirit vein itself to bulge a bit if needed.

After nearly an hour-long methodical insertion of the spirit vein into the ground with the other spirit vein, Alex was done.

He wiped his forehead, even though there was no sweat, and turned to look at the elders. "I'm done," he spoke. "You guys can do the rest."

Since the only task remaining was to put back the dirt and place the different fighting stages he had moved, the elders could do it themselves.

Wen Cheng flew toward Alex with a rather shocked expression on his face. "I have never before seen a naked spirit vein," he said. "You must have become very strong to be able to do so."

"Compared to the Saints in the other continents, my current cultivation base is considered average actually," Alex said. "Although the power I can produce with this cultivation base is still better than average."

"What? I can't even sense what your cultivation base is, and it is considered average?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Saint spirit veins are very easily available in the other continents, so the difference in cultivation base is the same as well," Alex said. "That makes cultivation so much easier that you can find a dime a dozen saints over there."

Wen Cheng made a confused look. "A what a dozen?" he asked.

"A dime," Alex said before he realized what he was saying. "Sorry, it's a phrase from the Central continent. I meant there are many Saints in the other continents."

He shook his head to get his mind back on what was happening in front of him. After the recent Soul resonance where he had seen his clone's memories, he frequently recalled those memories, especially the ones from his university days as well as from when Ronron grew up.

He wanted to know what he had missed, what he could never gain again. In doing so, his vocabulary had been affected a bit as well.

It wasn't affected very much, but once in a while, he spoke things that the people around him didn't understand.

"I see," Wen Cheng said. "You did say there were many of them before too."

"Oh right, have you made the decision yet? You're coming with me, right?" Alex asked.

"Most likely, but I can't make the decision alone," Wen Cheng said. "I will have to hear from my wife too and see if she agrees. She will need a few days to decide."

"Take your time," Alex said. "We should have at least 2 more weeks. If you decide to leave with me, you can use the remaining time to say goodbye."

Wen Cheng nodded. "I know," he said.

"You should leave now, master," Alex said. "And keep the other elders away from me."

"Hm? Is something bad going to happen?" Wen Cheng asked.

"Most likely not, but it's better to be cautious," Alex said. "Especially because the intent from it is not going to be very weak."

Wen Cheng nodded and left while Alex dropped down to where the black stele was located.

With a single flick of his wrist, the formations that covered the black stele in an opaque barrier disappeared completely.

The black stele, which was more iridescent than it was simply black, finally showed itself for the first time in the past 3 decades.

The last time it was visible was when Alex had crafted this very formation to hide its appearance.

He immediately closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths to prepare himself.

Previously, he could remain unworried in the face of this stele because he hadn't learned the Human language yet and could only learn anything when he relied on his spiritual sense to translate the words for him.

Since he had now already learned the Human language, simply opening his eyes and looking at the stele was going to be enough for those words to attack him.

He had felt the terror of the Intent behind this piece of rock before, so he wanted to be as prepared as he could be.

The Black Stele contained a skill that helped him create weapons using his spiritual energy. However, that wasn't it. There was more to the skill that he hadn't learned yet.

That was the main reason he was here. He wanted to learn more about this skill.

So, he took a deep breath and opened his eyes to look at the massive black stele that stood before him.

Chapter 1273 Sword

As soon as Alex's eyes fell on the Black Stele, he unintentionally read some of the words that were on it. As that happened, an Intent seemed to enter his mind to fight him.

Alex fought back with his own Intent and easily defeated it. Still, feeling how strong the Intent of the god that had created this black stele was, he couldn't help but feel nervous about what would happen when he seriously decided to read it.

For that, he first needed to pull the black stele out of the ground first.

Alex had yet to check just how large this black stele was underneath the ground. Because of the Intent, he didn't dare use his spiritual sense recklessly around it. He would just have to pull it out and check for himself how large the black stele actually was.

He flew up and grabbed the black stele with his Qi. Fortunately, the Intent didn't attack in this instance. It seemed it was designed to only fight back when someone was trying to learn the technique that was written on it.

Alex grabbed it tightly and pulled it upward. The ground shuddered as for the first time in over a thousand years, the black stele was being moved.

Alex immediately felt the weight of the object he was holding and was surprised. It was so dense and heavy, that it was a surprise it hadn't sunken even more in the ground.

Alex exerted all the force in his body and pulled on the black stele. He even used his weaker blood aura to wrap it around the stele to pull it better.

While pulling it up, he also simultaneously started moving around the dirt near the stele. The looser the ground became, the easier it became to pull the stele upward.

Bit by bit, the stele started lifting itself from the ground. The weight of stele was heavy, but just enough so that Alex could handle it.

The weight didn't surprise him, but the side of the stele definitely did.

As he pulled the stele upward, he realized that it wasn't just a large piece of rock that was stuck to the ground. It was a long piece of rock.

Not only was it long, it was also in the shape of a sword, which surprised Alex. What was above the ground all this time was nothing more than just half a hilt of the massive sword.

There was no cross guard, but the design of the sword was clear enough that even with half of it still in the ground, Alex could tell what it was.

"What are you doing?" a voice spoke in his head.

"Later, I need to focus," Alex said, ignoring Godslayer for the moment while he continued pulling on the sword.

"Hmm… I was wondering what disturbed my sweet sleep," Godslayer spoke with a hint of hatred in his voice. "It was this thing."

Alex could hear Godslayer, but he ignored it the best he could while he continued pulling. Finally, minutes later, the entirety of the black stone stele, which was actually a black stone sword was revealed.

The massive stone sword was about 2 meters in thickness, 4 meters in width, and nearly 80 meters long. Made with some very dense material, the black sword was a very heavy object that shook the ground as it lay flat.

The sword seemed to have words on only one side, so Alex was free to admire the beauty and craftsmanship of the object in front of him.

"Wow!" he couldn't help but say. "It's not an actual sword, is it? It looks fake, but I don't know much about the gods to accurately tell that."

Having come alongside the senior Yang, this thing was definitely in the Sky God's treasury. Meaning, it was something very important, most definitely belonging to either a strong faction or someone important.

"I can't feel any Qi. It must be fake," He spoke softly.

"Of course, it's not a real sword," Godslayer said. "What are you, an idiot?"

"Go easy on me. I'm not very knowledgeable about the immortal realms. I've seen books eat blood and wells that accurately predict the future. At this point, anything is possible," Alex said.

Godslayer couldn't retort that. "Well, it's not a weapon or an artifact. It's no different than a piece of paper that someone wrote on," he said. "Except that someone is a god and gods like being fancy for no reason."

"Is that so?" Alex asked while he touched the side of the sword. "Maybe there was an advantage to using this."

"Well, he probably chose this material because it was long-lasting. Turning it into the shape of a sword was entirely unnecessary though," Godslayer said. "Well, what could you expect from him."

"Him? This belonged to a man?" Alex asked. "What was he? What was his title?"

"Hmm… was it the Sword god? No, the Weapons god. It was the Weapons god that was always together with the Sword god," Godslayer said. "He was one of the ones I hated the most."

"The Weapons god? How does one become a weapons god?" Alex asked. "Do you have to learn every single weapon?"

"Pretty much," Godslayer said. "Well, gods can simply claim to be a god of something, which can be proven after a few tests. Unless there is someone to counter their claim, they usually end up being named as one, so we can't tell if this person was really as good at using every single weapon or not."

"For all we know, nobody could have claimed they could win against him and he got the name as such," Godslayer said.

"That makes sense, I suppose," Alex said. "He was your enemy too?"

"Yes," Godslayer said. "One of the ones I most despised."

"Do you know why?" Alex asked. "Why you despised him?"

"I—"

Godslayer paused as a few memories flashed through his mind. Not a single one of the images was any bit intelligible, but somehow the emotions they had had still came through and the hatred Godslayer felt increased tenfold.

"I don't know why," Godslayer said. "I simply hate him."

"You hate every god," Alex said.

"No, this one is different," he said. "I don't know why… but this one feels personal."

Alex was surprised to hear that. Personal was not a word that he expected Godslayer to use to describe his hatred. After all, his hatred towards the gods was always irrational.

However, hearing that it was personal, Alex couldn't help but wonder if it was in fact rational hate.

"I want to kill him all over again," Godslayer said with an angry voice.

"Again?" Alex was surprised. "This god is dead?"

"Most definitely," Godslayer said. "I can't remember much from those times, but if what I am thinking is correct, then he was one of my first victims."

"Wait, didn't you say he used to be with the Sword god a lot? If he died ages ago, then did the Sword god live long enough to capture you?" Alex asked.

"Capture me? No," Godslayer said. "I killed that Sword god. The one that captured me is a different one."

"Ah, different one, I see" Alex nodded. "You've really killed quite a lot, huh?"

He wanted to learn more from Godslayer, but Godslayer didn't have anything more to say about the Weapons god. After all, there wasn't much he remembered anyway from that far back.

"Is there going to be a lot of Intents attacking your spiritual world soon?" Godslayer asked. "I want to go back to sleep."

"I'm sorry," Alex said. "But I plan on learning whatever technique lies in here as soon as I can. You might have to stay awake for a little longer."

"Hmm, this thing has a technique in it, huh?" Godslayer asked. "I'm curious what sort of technique it is for the Weapons God to personally write it into something near indestructible while filling it with an immense amount of his Intent."

"So am I," Alex said. "Hearing that he's the Weapons god scares me a bit since he must have a very strong Intent. However, given that he died many years ago, I can only hope that his Intent has faded enough that I can read the words on this without worrying."

"Dammit!" Godslayer grumbled. "I just got some of my powers back, and I already have to use it for you once again, don't I?"

"Hopefully not," Alex said with a slight chuckle. "Hopefully I can learn it all on my own without needing your help."

He turned around and jumped, landing on the massive stone. He was standing on the hilt of the sword and looked down to read the words that were carved onto it.

He had read this part of the stone years ago, but still, he reread it. Not only did he want to see if he missed something, but he also wanted to make sure there wasn't anything here that was hidden behind the Intent.

In case there was some important detail that could only be unlocked once he defeated the Intent, he couldn't skip over the stuff.

So, from the very start, he started reading.

The moment his eyes fell on the words and he read them, he felt the Intent fly out of the text and attack him. He struggled to keep himself straight as the power of the Intent was stronger than what he was prepared for.

Still, just because it was strong, he didn't look away. Instead, he fought back and within seconds destroyed the Intent with his own.

Seeing that defeating the Intent was only difficult and not impossible, Alex started to work faster and faster, reading through everything that was written on the hilt of the sword in just the first 15 minutes.

Chapter 1274 Spiritual Providence

After reading through the hilt, Alex still was capable enough to read through most of the blade of the sword.

He started reading, focusing only on the words of the blade as well as understanding the meaning behind it. He couldn't just look at the words and try to understand them later by remembering everything.

Because the Intent tended to imprint itself onto one's mind, Alex would have to doubly fight back against the intent if he tried to learn it later.

As such, even if it was a bit harder, he had to learn everything at once.

Alex wasn't just fighting back the Intent on the blade either. He was using it as a whetting stone for his own Intent to get it to become sharper and stronger than it already was.

If he could handle it all to a certain extent, his Intent would improve by leaps and bounds. And if his Intent improved a lot, so would his usage of Dao.

Beads of sweat dropped from his body while his back was entirely drenched. He stood there with his jaw clenched as he struggled to read the words on the sword.

No one was around, as per his instruction, but if they were, they would currently see an Alex with veins popping all over his face and neck.

This felt way more straining than back when he had learned the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array or when he had tried to recall this book from memory.

Having to directly combat the Intent of a god, albeit a false one for this long was just as hard, if not harder than what one would expect.

Alex moved down the sword, an inch at a time, as he slowly read everything while understanding it all.

By the time he was on the last few lines that were carved onto the black sword, Alex had all but understood the technique that was in there completely.

The technique written in the sword was called Spiritual Providence. It was a technique that was divided into 3 different stages, all of which could be learned at any time without having to worry about one's cultivation base.

The only requirement for the technique was that one had a robust spiritual sea and a great talent to make use of the spiritual energy in that spiritual sea.

Spiritual Providence as a technique was used using weapons.

The first stage, which Alex hadn't even learned yet, required one layer of their spiritual sense on top of their weapon to use as an additional attack with every swing of their sword.

Until now, Alex had only been learning how to shape the spiritual weapon. To complete the first stage, he had to now layer that illusory weapon on top of his real weapon.

He had been surprised to find that what he had learned until now and had taught so many of his friends, wasn't even half of the first stage of three stages.

The attacks made using these techniques bypassed the physical body and attacked the spirit itself in most cases. None of the attacks were necessarily damaging, but they were capable of temporarily stopping the connection between the spirit and the body at the point of impact such that anything below that point was all but paralyzed.

Alex had seen this happen himself when he used the spiritual sword alone. Now, he could use both the spiritual sword and his normal sword at once, and have the same effect on his enemies, if not better.

The second stage of Spiritual Providence simply taught one how to layer their spiritual energy on the attacks themselves that flew out of their weapons.

In Alex's case, any sword slashes or swings that did not involve the sword itself physically attacking his enemies could also have a spiritual element to the attacks.

It was a simple change from the first to the second stage, but the application of the technique improved so much that the two stages deserved to be separate.

The third stage, which Alex was close to finishing, was quite weird. It did not seem to follow a pattern with the first or second stage, and instead simply taught how to create a barrier using the spiritual energy that was already on the sword to block spiritual attacks that was directed at him.

Alex thought it was weird, but he didn't have the luxury to wonder why. He was still facing the final remaining bit of Intent from the sword that was still attacking his mind.

Godslayer was still awake and was looking outside through Alex's eyes. He had not only stayed awake because it was impossible to sleep in a situation where the spiritual sea he remained it could crumble at any moment from the Intent of the weapon's god.

He was also staying awake because he was worried about Alex.

Worry was not an emotion he would have ever thought he would feel for other people. He had worried a lot of times in the past, but it had always been for himself.

Never had he seen the human he was controlling get hurt and get worried that he might be in pain. That sort of thought never even crossed his mind as he used hundreds if not thousands of people's bodies to launch attacks on unsuspecting gods.

However, for the first time, he was worried about Alex, albeit just a little bit.

'Why am I worried?' Godslayer wondered. Had something changed? What had happened to his cold self that wanted nothing more than destruction before? Had he changed this much in just half a century?

He knew about the properties of the Death and Darkness aura. They were bad to a human, but they weren't good to objects either.

Anything with too much death aura or darkness aura was usually considered a bad thing. Darkness in particular was known to ruin humans and artifacts by corrupting them and changing their mindset to be laxer on themselves and strip away any ethics and morality that kept them restrained.

Godslayer basically bathed in Darkness aura every day for thousands and thousands of years when he was in his prime. However, after being imprisoned for so long, his Darkness aura had all but vanished.

When Alex absorbed it all back when he had first tried to take over his body, that was the first time he had been without it. That was perhaps the first time ever since he had been created that he had been able to think clearly.

Now that he had spent a few years without much darkness aura to corrupt him, he was starting to learn and grow. For the first time in his life, he was starting to not obsess about killing gods.

He hadn't learned it on his own of course. Alex had to teach him to not obsess over gods like he always did.

There was still part of him that wanted to go kill gods as soon as he heard their names, but there was now enough of him that could restrain him.

He did not want to admit it to Alex, but thanks to him, he was growing again after so many millennia. As such, he was also starting to form a bond with him and was thus worried about him when he saw the state of his spiritual sea.

Alex felt like he could keep going, but he was at the last of his mental capacity to still create as much Intent as he was to fight back the sword's Intent.

His mind didn't register any of the warnings his body gave as he got closer to the end. Perhaps because the finish line was so close, Alex started getting desperate and somehow it became even harder to fight the Intent.

Still, he didn't give up. He continued fighting the Intent until the very last word of Spiritual Providence.

The moment he read the last word, he immediately used what mental capacity he had to grab all of the swords at once with his Qi and put it into his storage ring so that no one else could read it.

After he was done, he stopped trying so hard, and as his body relaxed, the fatigue and pain that had gathered in such a small period of time all came back to him at once.

The moment he felt everything, his eyes went white and his body collapsed to the ground. He had fallen unconscious.

Everything seemed dark to Godslayer as Alex himself wasn't seeing anything right now. He worried for a moment that Alex had been hurt. However, when he saw the Spiritual sea grow tranquil again, he understood that the fight against the Weapon God's Intent was finally over.

What little damage the spiritual sea had taken was starting to heal, telling Godslayer that there was nothing to worry about at all.

Godslayer returned to the side of the silver mountain that hung in the air and went back to his long sleep.

Alex woke up on the ground sometime early in the morning. He woke up and looked around to find out that nobody had come for him in the entire time he had remained on the ground.

He had ordered everyone to stay back, and it seemed that they had done it even after Alex was unconscious. He didn't know whether to praise their obedience or insult it.

He shook his head and cleaned himself of any dirt before looking at the surroundings properly. The Black Stele, the staple of the Tiger sect, was gone from the crater it had formed, and it was with him now.

Now that he was done with what he wanted from this sect, it was time to let them be and do his own thing.

Chapter 1275 Training

"Hmm... it's also capable of defending an artifact spirit from taking any damage," Alex thought as he carefully checked through the technique after he left the Tiger sect.

He was more than surprised with how good Spiritual Providence was, and yet it kpet on surprising him even more. Bits and pieces of the technique that weren't outright stated were starting to make sense to Alex when they did not before this.

The technique was also something that was completely different from normal Qi techniques as it used Spiritual Energy to function, and thus could not be improved or changed using Alex's own Dao of Techniques.

He stood in his mother's front yard and practiced with Midnight in his hand while a white sword only visible to someone's spiritual sense tried to layer itself upon it.

Alex could create the sword and even place it upon Midnight, but when he moved the two, there were delays between the movement that caused problems.

It wasn't like Alex had to move a sword with his hand and a sword with his mind at the same time, but it still took his full attention to keep the layered spiritual sword on Midnight. Otherwise, the two swords split themselves, or the spiritual sword simply dissipated afterward.

"This isn't something I can learn in a single day, is it?" he thought to himself.

For now, it was going to be just him that was going to be learning this technique. Because he had to fight the Intent once more and write it all down for his family and friends if they wanted to learn it, he was fine with making them wait.

He practiced for the entire day and even by the end he was barely anywhere close to being completely good at the first stage. He could make it work if he gave it all his complete attention, but that wouldn't fly in a true battle.

He needed to be so good at the technique, that it was but a muscle memory to him that he could do without thinking.

The second stage was likely to be problematic for him if he was struggling with the first, but the third was still viable given how different it was.

But he didn't have time to practice that right now.

As he was practicing, he heard someone in front of the front gate trying to grab his attention.

Alex turned and found an old man standing there, looking at him with a wide smile. He had never seen this person before, so seeing him smile too friendly at him made him curious as to who he was.

"Can I help you?" Alex asked.

"Yes, please," the old man said. "This must be Alchemist He Lin's house, right? I'm looking for someone named Yu Ming. I'm wondering if that is you, young man."

"That is indeed me," Alex said, his curiosity increasing even more. "May I know who you are?"

"Ah! I am but a humble messenger of his majesty who has come here upon his request," the old man said. "His Majesty has heard of your arrival to the Scarlet City and wishes for you to go visit him in the Cardinal City."

"Ah, you're from the royal family, huh?" Alex said. "Sure, I'll visit it."

"Thank you," the old man said. "Will you be leaving today or tomorrow?"

"More like a week later," Alex said. "I have a reason to meet your emperor, so I will visit him when I have the time for it."

The messenger was surprised. "But his majesty wishes for you to meet him as soon as possible," he said. "You should be leaving today, but his majesty has allowed for you to leave tomorrow as well. However, a week later is entirely not reasonable."

"I'm afraid your emperor is going to have to find reason in it," Alex said. "Tell him I'll find him myself, but it won't be anytime soon."

After saying that, he went back into the house, leaving the messenger dumbfounded and unable to think of what to do.

He quickly sent a message back explaining just what had happened and finally received another order. "Let him do as he pleases. Don't offend him and swiftly return back."

The old man finally left the front of the house and left back for the capital city.

Alex spent the next day with his father and the rest, going around the city as he hadn't done so before. It took him half a day of time to go through most of the city and see all the things that were there.

He also had to search for ingredients for 2 separate things that he wanted to do as soon as possible.

One of them was making the paste for the Demon Eyes, which he could delay even after they returned to the Southern Continent.

The other one, however, was the most important thing he could do while he was here, and he did not want to waste any time before doing it.

Still, he didn't find most things he needed and was going to have to rely on either Bai Jingshen or the Luminance empire to ait him.

The older Alex that was with them also suddenly spoke.

"I'm planning on going to the west to sister's home so she can say goodbye to her family," the older Alex said. "Father will be leaving with me as well. What do you think?"

Alex nodded. "That's a good idea," he said. "Let Uncle Keng and Aunt Nangong know about the situation as well. They won't come most likely, but present the offer to them all the same. If possible, sister Luo Xing should hear about this as well."

He had presented the idea of moving to the Southern Continent with him to everyone, and almost everyone on the Tiger sect's side of things had accepted it. His Master, Cai Ping, his sister, and Du Yuhan were all but guaranteed to go with him.

His brother Liu Xun on the other hand still hadn't made a decision. He had a fiancee here who he apparently loved very much. His fiancee had a family who she couldn't leave, so Liu Xun was having trouble making any decision.

On the Hong Wu sect's side of things, it was still unsure who exactly was going to leave and who was going to stay. The only person confirmed to leave for now was his martial uncle who had nothing keeping him attached to the sect except for his loyalty to it.

The next day, a few people gathered to say goodbye to the ones that were going to be leaving for a while.

Alex, Liz, and Helen were ready to leave for the Beast realm. Graham wanted to come along as well, but in Alex's absence, he was the strongest one here and had to thus stay to protect his children and grandchild.

Ronron was still in the sect, so she couldn't come and many of the others had responsibilities as well, so the number of people there to say goodbye wasn't that many.

It wasn't like the three were going to be leaving for a long time either, so there was no point in saying goodbye.

After a short farewell, the three people flew away from the city, going toward the forest to the south. From there, they got onto Alex's boat and flew toward the Beast realm.

Chapter 1276 Transaction

Alex arrived outside the Beast realm with his mother and aunt, and the beasts that were keeping guard let them go in after a beast came out to get them.

After they entered, they were taken to Bai Jingshen himself, who was chilling in the garden again, alongside his 7 wives and concubines. Scarlet was there as well close to them.

"You are back," Bai Jingshen said as soon as Alex and the rest arrived in the garden. "Oh, and you've brought your mother back this time around."

"Greetings, seniors," Helen bowed toward the ruler of the Western Continent and his wives.

"You haven't improved since you left," Bai Jingshen said. "If that was the case, you shouldn't have left at all."

"It's... it's alright," Helen said.

"Mother," Alex called out and brought her over to Scarlet. "This is Scarlet, the phoenix I told you about."

"Oh," Helen reacted quickly. She bowed once more. "Greetings, senior. I am Alex's mother, Helen."

Scarlet looked toward Helen and got up. "Greetings," she spoke. "You do not have to call me senior. I am bonded with your son, so we can be considered as close as a family."

"Then..."

"Just call me Scarlet," Scarlet said. "Your husband does so anyway. Speaking of which, where is your father, Alex? And your daughter?"

"They're in the city with my clone. They won't be coming until the end," Alex explained. He quickly turned around to Bai Jingshen and asked, "How's Pearl? Any news?"

The White Tiger shook his head. "He hasn't come out yet," he said.

"Any idea when he will come out then?" Alex asked.

"Can't tell," Bai Jingshen said.

"Do you not know how far along he's progressed?" Alex asked.

"That's... not how evolution works in this case," Bai Jingshen said. "If it were normal evolution, he would have slowly progressed through the evolution. But since he is trying to do it forcefully, the evolution will be almost instantaneous. As for when it will be, that is something only a seer would be able to divine."

"I see," Alex said. "So it basically all up to luck, huh?"

He sighed a little but didn't lose hope. He knew Pearl and he knew how hard-working he was. He wasn't going to give up so easily and would definitely come out sooner or later.

Bai Jingshen watched Alex's face grow resolute after hearing the news and smiled slightly. "Right, here you go," he said while bringing out some things.

Alex looked at what was brought out and his eyes widened slightly. "You found it?" he asked excitedly.

"It was a little hard to find, but I did so in the end," Bai Jingshen said. "I had to send my beasts throughout the land to search for one of that ingredient."

Alex took the pile of boxes that Bai Jingshen had given him and looked through each of them to check through the ingredients. Every single one of the ingredients he needed was all there, including something he could not find in the Southern Continent at all.

"Thank you," Alex said sincerely.

Bai Jingshen nodded and gestured to the pile of ingredients. "What are they for exactly? Some sort of pills?" he asked.

"Pills? No, they're not for pills," Alex said. "I'm going to make pastes out of them."

Bai Jingshen paused for a moment and even Scarlet turned her head. Liz and Helen looked confused as well.

"Why are you making a paste? Pills are obviously superior," Bai Jingshen said.

"Yes, but what I'm doing requires pastes instead of pills," Alex said.

"What exactly are you doing?" Scarlet asked. She was quite curious as well.

Alex took a moment to quickly go through his head to see if it was a good idea to tell what he was going to do. In the end, he saw no reason to hide it.

"I'm going to help my family learn an eye skill that will improve their eyes massively," Alex said.

"Hmm, an eye technique huh? Not bad," Bai Jingshen said. "Is it good?"

"Very," Alex said.

"Can I learn it too then?" Bai Jingshen asked.

Alex paused for a second again. "I'm not sure if you can learn it. It requires one to destroy their eyes using this paste and heal them back to become much better than it originally was. The technique primarily works on human and devil eyes, so I'm not sure if beasts can use it or not," he said.

"Don't worry," Bai Jingshen said. "I will simply remain in my human form while I make use of that paste. That's assuming it works on me at all."

"Hmm, this paste might be too weak for you," Alex said. "It's better if you skip it until I try and find some Immortal ingredients that can be used as substitutes to improve the level of the paste. You can give it a go then."

"Hmm, if I am going to need pastes corresponding to my cultivation base, then I'm going to have to wait for a long time," Bai Jingshen said.

"Hopefully, I can go to the Immortal realms soon. By the time you can go back to your land of the Blessed Sun, I should have done it all," Alex said.

"I still doubt it, but I suppose it won't hurt to just wait and see if you can do what you said," Bai Jingshen said. "Anyway, now that I've given you what you want, time for you to keep your end of the promise."

"Don't worry, brother Shen. I will make all the pills you need. In fact, I am going to make such good pills that you will definitely want more from me in the future," Alex said proudly.

"Well, you are already quite proud of your pill it seems. Whether your pride is justified or not, we'll see," Bai Jingshen said. "Nuanhuo has told me your alchemy level has increased quite a lot since the days I was with you, so I'm curious to see what sort of pills you will make."

"Okay," Alex said. "I will make one soon."

"Not one," Bai Jingshen said. "I have all the ingredients prepared, so you should make as many as you can."

"Oh," Alex was surprised. "Do you want me to make them as right now?"

"The sooner you do the better," Bai Jingshen said. "In fact, the sooner you make them..."

Bai Jingshen pulled out something from his storage artifact and put it in front of him.

"... the sooner you will get this."

Alex didn't even have to look at it before his nose caught a hint of what it was. The thick scent of blood drifted around the air, letting everyone know what it was.

"This is... did you really gather all the blood?" Alex asked.

"I asked every Saint beast to give me as much blood as they could. At the same time, my wives and I gave some of our own blood as well," Bai Jingshen said. "How good will this do for you?"

Alex couldn't help but smile when he saw that.

"It's great," Alex said. "Blood without Blood Essence is significantly worse than Blood with Blood Essence, but the overall quality of this should still be way better than what I'm used to since it has 8 different Immortal's blood in here."

Chapter 1277 Making Pills

Alex was shown the way to a room that had been prepared for Alchemy. The one that brought him there was Luo Beihan, the 2nd concubine of Bai Jingshen who was in her human form at the moment.

She wore a simple orange robe with black stripes all over it, seemingly generated out of nothing to fit her tiger aesthetics.

"Here is the room," the woman said. "It is made according to my request, so there may be things you won't like in there. Please let me know if such a thing does happen."

"I will," Alex said and looked around. The formations on the floor were simple Saint rank formations and not immortal rank formations as he had hoped from them, which disappointed Alex a little.

'I suppose it would be stupid to make an immortal rank formation since it won't be able to run on Saint Qi,' he thought.

"Do you need a cauldron, young man?" the woman asked.

"No, It's alright. I have my own," Alex said and looked around the room to see what he could immediately figure out.

"You have the flame control formation there, the elemental control formation there. You can improve your ingredients over there on that formation. You can even get that formation's aid in helping take automatic control if you feel like taking a break, although I advise not using it. It usually leads to the pills turning out bad," the woman explained.

"Thank you, senior, but I won't be needing any of these things. I will be fine as long as I just have the fire," Alex said.

"Oh... okay," the woman said. "Here are the ingredients just like you said. I'll be back later to check on your progress."

"Thank you," Alex said and sent her away.

He closed the door and sat in front of the formation that created fire. That was the only one he was going to need after all. Still, he appreciated the rest of the formations that were set there.

'I can see how they are useful to the average alchemy enthusiast,' he thought. He activated the formation for fire and pulled out Memory from his storage ring.

"Finally, I will get to make some real pills with you," Alex said and pulled out the ingredients.

There were 3 types of pills that had been requested of him. They were pills that improved one's cultivation speed, pills that healed a person, and pills that got rid of poisons.

These were the only 3 types of pills that the White Tiger had requested of him. While only 3 types of pills, the sheer number that was requested of him was going to take Alex at least a week to finish. And that was if he didn't lose any energy.

If he was being realistic, it was going to take him about 10 days in total.

He started separating the ingredients according to the recipes, and once everything was done, he finally started.

* * * * * *

Liz had already left with another wife of Bai Jingshen to be taken to where Hao Ya was currently at. She was going to help with the Teleportation formation that was some distance outside of the palace.

She had been there last time too and was going there once again today.

Helen stayed with Scarlet, talking with her about various things that she wanted to know about.

Bai Jingshen talked with them as well as he had nothing to do at the time. Inwardly, he was very worried about Pearl and couldn't focus on anything else. However, he also knew that there was nothing he could do for Pearl right now.

As a result, he was stuck between knowing there was nothing he could do and wanting to do nothing else.

"How good is your alchemy skill, young lady?" Bai Jingshen asked. "Can you help your son?"

"I wouldn't say it's great," Helen said honestly. "I'm only a new Saint and I haven't had much experience making pills, so I don't think I can compare to my son. At the very least, I won't be of much help to him."

"Hmm, I thought you could help him so he can leave early," Bai Jingshen said. "I would make Beihan make the pills, but she can't use Immortal Qi in this world, or she will be in trouble too."

"How good are your concubine's alchemy skills?" Scarlet asked. "Is it as good as Alex's?"

"I don't know his skill just yet, but my wife can make Immortal-grade pills easily. Making pills with 80% to 90% harmony is something she does on a daily basis actually," Bai Jingshen said proudly. "She's not comparable to actual alchemists, but compared to those of this world, she's infinitely better."

Scarlet couldn't hold in the chuckle. "I can see where you are coming from," she said. "But I'm afraid you are underestimating the alchemists of this world a little too much. It seems you forgot that most of them in this world have knowledge that can only be found in the Immortal realms."

"Hmm, you're right," Bai Jingshen said. "I did not consider that. Are you saying the young man Alex can reach the same level in pill-making as my concubine?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"Reach the same level as your wife?" Scarlet scoffed at those words. "Alex can—"

Scarlet's words paused in her mouth as she looked up. Bai Jingshen was already looking up and a few of his wives and concubine also noticed it around the same time.

Helen was confused as to what they were looking at. She looked up at the sky, but there was nothing there at all.

However, a moment later, as if out of nowhere, the thick black cloud covered the entire sky with lightning scattering throughout.

Bai Jingshen got a little alert immediately, surprised to see Heavenly Judgment appear out of nowhere. "What's going on? Why is Heavenly Judgment—"He paused for a second when he realized that the strength of the lightning in the sky was nowhere close to being as strong as Heavenly Judgment lightning.

"No, wait. Is that...?"

"Pill clouds," Scarlet explained. "The young man you sent inside to make pills for you can create pill clouds."

"But... how?" Bai Jingshen was truly surprised. "Don't you need extremely good ingredients to create Pill clouds?"

Scarlet shrugged. "Don't ask me. I don't know how he does things," she said.

The first lightning strike struck down from heaven and Bai Jingshen clearly saw it being blocked by Alex inside the alchemy room.

Another two lightning strikes fell from the sky as well and were easily blocked by Alex.

"3 pills veins," Luo Beihan spoke. As an alchemist of some practice, she knew how difficult it was to reach where Alex had, not to mention continue growing from there.

"He's not even halfway through the Saint realm and he can make pills with pill veins, huh?" she couldn't help but think in surprise.

2 more lightning strikes fell from the sky and only then did the cloud disappear. Alex had put a stop to the pill cloud at that point, stopping the lightning as well.

Bai Jingshen looked at the dissipating clouds and couldn't help but put on an excited smile. "I made the right choice asking him to make pills for us," he said softly. "I can only imagine the quality pills he will continue to produce."

Chapter 1278 Obstacles For Pill Clouds

As time progressed, pill clouds continued to form multiple times within the same hour, confusing, exciting, and bewildering everyone but Scarlet who was used to it by now.

"No way! How does he keep doing this?" Bai Jingshen asked. He had been excited about the prospect of making free use of an alchemist who could form pill clouds, but the extent to which it had reached was beyond his wildest imagination.

"This... this is impossible," Luo Beihan who was next to them commented. The other wives and concubines nodded as well, but they weren't as knowledgeable in the ways of alchemy so they didn't comment much.

As the lightning strikes continued, Bai Jingshen was getting way too curious to not speak up.

"Nuanhuo, tell me. You must know. How is he doing it?" he asked Scarlet.

The phoenix simply shrugged. "I don't know, I never bothered to learn. As far as I can remember, he's always been able to make pill clouds. The pills he got me always had the pill veins," she said

"What? He's been able to do this since before you two met?" the White tiger was even more surprised. "And is it always this consistent?"

"Yep, once he starts, the sky stays cloudy for the rest of the day. The people in our capital have already gotten used to the random lightning strikes that happen any and all the time," she explained.

"Is... is what my son doing that great?" Helen asked. All of this was very new to her, but seeing how the group was reacting, she couldn't help but feel proud.

"Great doesn't even begin to explain just how good what he is doing is," Luo Beihan explained. "Even in the Immortal realms, being able to produce pill clouds is a sign of an experienced alchemist. Even with all the best conditions, only 1 in every 1000 alchemists can produce such a result."

"1 in 1000?" Scarlet was surprised. "That doesn't sound that hard then."

"No, it doesn't," Luo Beihan explained. "But that's because it really isn't that hard for an experienced alchemist if the criteria are met."

"Elaborate a little more," Bai Jingshen asked.

"Okay, if we are to assume that an alchemist can make no mistake when following a perfect recipe, then there will still be 2 things that will hinder him from making a perfect pill."

"The first obstacle will be finding ingredients that are teeming with energy in it. If the ingredient isn't like that, it's quite hard to make pills with a very high harmony."

"The second obstacle is the act of forming the pill itself in the end. If you make a mistake there, even if you had perfect ingredients, you can still fail to make a pill with very high harmony."

"It is only when both of these problems are taken care of that one can make pills that form pill clouds," Luo Beihan said.

"There are a few ways to get rid of the problems. In the instance of the 2nd problem, you can find a good pill-forming technique that can help you on its own. Most people end up using techniques that allow you to make 4 or more pills at once so that the chances of having a single pill that reaches 100% harmony is increased by just that much."

"I don't know what sort of technique the young man is using inside, but I don't think it's that far off," she said. "But to begin with, this problem isn't that hard to take care of. It's the first one."

"The problem with ingredients is that it is very, very rare to find ingredients that are teeming with energy. As far as I'm aware, there are only two ways to get them. You either have to be at the perfect place at the perfect time to find the ingredients naturally, or you have to artificially inject energy into the ingredients."

"And that's where the problem is," she said. "You can't manipulate an energy to inject into an ingredient if you don't have a basic dao of that element."

"I simply can't imagine how that young man is possibly injecting energy into the ingredients I gave him. Could he have a basic dao of all 7 of the elements?" she wondered.

"No way," Scarlet said. "He only has a Fire Dao and a Metal Dao. He doesn't have the other 5 Daos."

"Then... no, how is he doing it?" the beast couldn't comprehend.

"Are you sure there is no other way?" Bai Jingshen asked. "What if you have a spiritual root of that element, but not the dao?"

"It wouldn't work. The energy a spiritual root produces is specific to that person alone. His energy can never match the energy of an ingredient even when it is the same. You can only do so with a Dao," the woman said.

"But he doesn't have all the Dao," Scarlet said.

"That... I don't know what's going on then," the beast said. The more she explained how it worked to the others, the less she understood what could be happening herself.

She could understand that Alex might have a good pill-forming technique, but how was he tackling the problem of the ingredients? She knew for a fact that the ingredients she had given were barely good enough to produce pills with 85% harmony.

"Well, then there's only one way to find out," Bai Jingshen said. "The young man can tell us himself."

They watched the lightning strikes stop after a few minutes and Alex walked out to the garden where everyone had been waiting for him.

The dark clouds had left the sky and the sun finally shined, albeit from the very west.

"Oh, it's already late afternoon," Alex said with a surprised look. "I didn't realize I had been inside for so long."

"Are you doing well? Are you overexerting yourself?" Bai Jingshen asked after he walked.

"Overexerting? No, not in the least. I can keep going for another whole day," Alex said.

"Is that so," the White Tiger seemed amazed. "Alright, we called you here to explain what is going on. How are you causing so many pill clouds to form one after another?"

"I have only formed pill clouds on 10 different instances, young man, and that was over the course of thousands of years. You have beaten my record in just a day alone. How are you doing this?" the female tiger asked.

"I'm just doing what I do normally, I guess," Alex said. "I don't know what to tell you guys other than that."

"Beihan here explained to us that pill clouds are difficult to form without a good set of ingredients, which you don't have. How are you circumventing this problem to make lightning fall one after another?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"Oh, that's simple," Alex said. "I'm using World Defying Mushrooms."

"World... what?" Luo Beihan looked confused and so did most of the people there.

"World Defying Mushrooms?" Bai Jingshen thought for a bit. "I've heard that before somewhere."

"It was in the book I read to you once, my lord," the Lynx, Bai Jingshen's first wife spoke. "World Defying Mushroom is a mutated descendant of the World Tree. It's a mushroom with neutral energy that can copy any energy it comes into contact with upon being heated and adds to that energy."

"That's right," Alex said. "I'm using the mushroom each time I make the pills, so the lack of energy in the ingredients is taken care of easily."

"Such a thing exists?" Luo Beihan couldn't help but ask.

"It's a very rare ingredient from what I can remember reading," the lynx explained. "Most alchemists don't even know about it because it's just that impossible to find."

Alex nodded when he heard that. It was indeed very rare. Even in the Forbidden Orchard, he could only find very few mushrooms nowadays.

"And you're spending those mushrooms to make pills for us?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"I found a place with quite a few of those mushrooms, so I can afford to use them," Alex explained.

"I see," Bai Jingshen said. "Thank you for taking the extra step that you didn't have to. Thanks to you, my subjects can now enjoy 5-veined pills."

"It's nothing, brother Shen," Alex said. "It's a shame I couldn't get them 6-veined pills like I normally made.'

"Hmm? 6 veined pills?" Bai Jingshen's eyes narrowed. "What's stopping you from making those right now?"

"Oh, 6 veined pills require me to handle Saint Soul realm lightning strikes. I could handle them when I had my blood essence before, but after I gave it away, I have to rely on my cultivation base right now. Even that I'm finding to be a little worse than normal, but not by much."

Bai Jingshen's eyes narrowed. "Wait, are you saying that if you improve your cultivation base or your blood aura, you can make better pills?" he asked.

"Uhh... I would have to have a Saint Soul realm strength again for it to be possible, but yes," Alex said.

Bai Jingshen brought out the pool of blood he had once again. "If that is so then stop making pills. You have made enough for today," he said. "Go into closed cultivation right now and use this pool of blood to improve as much as you can."

"Really?" Alex asked excitedly.

"I need a guarantee that you can make 6-veined pills if I give you this though," Bai Jingshen asked.

"I guarantee it, brother Shen," Alex said. He was only a single cultivation realm away from that anyhow.

"Very well then. Go ahead. We will be waiting for you to be done with it," Bai Jingshen said.

Alex thanked the white tiger and was taken away to a secret room to cultivate for as long as he could.

Chapter 1279 Blood Absorption

Alex walked away with the blood that was stored in some sort of limitless gourd that Bai Jingshen gave him. He was taken to a separate room that was apparently meant for cultivation.

As soon as he walked into the room, some sort of formation activated, and an aura that he barely could feel started appearing around him.

"Time manipulation?" he couldn't help but ask when he walked in.

"Huh? How do you know that?" the leopard who brought him there was surprised that he knew that at all.

"I can feel it," Alex said. "I can tell whenever there is time manipulation happening in the surrounding."

"Wow," the female beast couldn't help but say. "I guess that makes sense since your aunt can do the same."

It wasn't why he could do what he could do, but Alex didn't bother to make her understand. "You can take your time cultivating in this room. Time moves faster here than it does outside, so you can cultivate for a long time here while only a few days will have passed outside," the leopard explained.

"I see, thank you senior," Alex said and sat inside.

The room locked up and the time aura thickened. Alex tried to see if he could do something with the aura but quickly realized he was way too oblivious about time to make any sort of progress in learning about it.

So, he ignored the aura and focused on the task before him.

He pulled out Memory and increased its size by a large amount. There was a lot of blood in the gourd, so he needed a place to pool it all up before he began.

He started filling the cauldron with all the blood inside and stopped around halfway through when he realized there was just too much to absorb at once. He needed to do it little by little.

He put the gourd aside and pulled out the Blood God's manual from his soul space. After it appeared, he flipped the book to the 1st page. This was the first time he was going to absorb blood not just to improve his own blood aura, but also his cultivation base.

The book had clear instructions on how to do so, so he needed to reread it once to make sure he understood what he was doing.

Once he read through it all, he placed the book back into his soul space and started using the absorption technique.

Slowly, the blood aura that was within the blood and in the air by this point was slowly pulled into Alex's body. At the same time, Alex used the aura to improve his own blood and cultivation base.

He focused on the absorption technique to the best of his ability to improve both at the same time, but to his surprise, the blood aura that was going into him started disappearing.

He worried at first that he was doing something wrong. Since this was the first time he tried to purposefully improve his cultivation base with such a strong pool of blood while obviously having a much weaker blood aura and cultivation base, he thought something had gone wrong.

However, a moment later, he started feeling better than ever before. It felt as if he had been sick his whole life without realizing and just today the sickness had been healed and he was healthy again.

The feeling confused Alex for a bit until he realized what was happening.

"Oh, my blood essences are reforming," he thought. The blood aura from the blood in front of him was first directly fixing the main issue of his body.

Without a vigorous blood essence, neither his blood nor his cultivation base could ever go through much improvement. As such, his body started using this instance of him cultivating to improve upon that first.

Second after second, minute after minute, Alex continued absorbing the blood aura without stopping while letting his body use it all up.

Hours passed in the blink of an eye but he was nowhere done with absorbing even just the blood in the cauldron in front of him. He took a small break from the constant absorption and used the time to prepare himself for what was going to happen soon enough.

After he was done resting for a few hours, he started once again.

Alex couldn't tell how long it had been before he was unable to draw out any more of the blood aura from the pool of blood in front of him. Without any use for it anymore, he got rid of the blood and filled up the cauldron halfway through once more.

Then he started once again.

It was only after this session of absorption that Alex felt that something other than his Blood Essence was getting improved. It seemed he had finally fully fixed the problem of his absent Blood Essence and now he can focus on the rest of it.

Alex put half of what he absorbed into his cultivation and the other half into improving his blood aura.

While his blood aura had no problem improving, his cultivation base wasn't so easy to improve quickly.

The blood aura he took in was being converted back into his most basic form, Qi. As the Qi started accumulating in his dantian, it crystallized more and more.

When he had reached Saint Foundation 9th realm, 90% of his dantian had already crystallized, with crystal pillars covering the entirety of it. The yin and yang sources inside his dantian had also been encased inside these pillars by now, although that didn't seem to affect it at all.

Now that he was cultivating to improve his cultivation base, more crystalline structures formed in his dantian, threatening to fill it up completely.

Alex focused as much as he could on completely crystallizing the Qi at that moment. Using the fresh third batch of blood, he was able to do so without any worry of running out of the blood aura.

As he absorbed more and more, and the dantian was now completely crystallized into a single ball rather than many different pillars crisscrossing inside, Alex had finally touched onto the step in his cultivation journey where his spirit that was currently tied to his body slowly separated itself from it.

The separated spirit moved into the dantian's crystal ball while still leaving a small connection with the body so that it could move back if it needed to.

Once the spirit landed inside the crystal ball, the next phase of his cultivation realm began.

The white crystal started shrinking all of a sudden, separating itself from the walls of his dantian. It was a slow and tedious process, but as Alex continued cultivating, the crystal continued shrinking.

As it shrank, the white crystal gained some slight yellow color to it. The more it shrank, the more yellow it became.

By the time the crystal was but a tenth of its original size, it had turned completely golden.

A Golden Core had formed inside of his dantian.

Alex was now but a step away from entering the Saint Core realm, and that was when the final step in the journey began.

Without any warning, the Inner Demon started its assault on Alex's mind.

Chapter 1280 Multiple Tries

﻿

The Inner Demon began its fierce attack on Alex's psyche by trying to rile him up using words that could make Alex feel like there was some truth to them.

There wasn't much the Inner Demon could use to attack Alex, he had taken care of most things already on his own. The only thing remaining was Pearl, and the Inner Demon hammered away at that part of his mind.

It constantly told him just how much of a mistake it was to send Pearl to the ritual room when he knew he was going to die.

However, Alex found it easy to not listen to the Inner Demon this time around. Why would he? He had Immortals and Divinities telling him that it would be fine, and he trusted Pearl more than anyone else to succeed through it all.

The blood that was in him now was given to his mother by someone that the gods were afraid of. It would be a miracle for Pearl to fail at this point.

The only other target for the Inner Demon was that Alex was most likely going to die given the prophecies he had heard. However, if that was bound to happen, there was no way Alex could change any of that. If he could, he would, so there wasn't much to think on that side either.

The Inner Demon tried to tell Alex that he wasn't the one that the truth of this world was waiting for, but then again, why would Alex care about that? If he was, he would be happy to learn something, if he wasn't, he would happy to not bear the burden. Either way, he would be happy with the outcome.

The Inner Demon vanished not long after in what was the easiest battle Alex had ever fought with it. He himself was surprised that he had completed the hurdle so easily.

The feeling of power filled his body as he finally landed with both feet on the Saint Core realm. However, that was not the end at all.

In fact, it was only the beginning.

Now that there was no more Inner Demon to worry about, Alex went all out with his cultivation, even eating cultivation pills to aid him throughout the time when he was closed inside the room.

Time passed slowly and fast for Alex, making him completely oblivious as to just how long had passed outside or inside. All he knew was to replace the blood in the cauldron every few days and continue.

His cultivation base slowly improved with his blood aura taking the lead thanks to the gap in his cultivation when he was breaking through. It was stronger than the cultivation by a decent gap and continued to stay ahead, even though the cultivation base followed behind.

After what felt like a very long time, Alex changed the blood inside the cauldron for the final time.

The last stretch of the journey should have been easy for him, or so he had thought. However, when the blood poured into the cauldron, every single cell in his body told him to run away.

This was not the blood of something ordinary at all. All of the 8 immortal's blood had been the last to pour and it was all inside the cauldron right now. And the aura it produced terrified Alex. He wasn't even sure if he could tame the aura at all, let alone absorb it.

However, now that he was here, he wasn't going to stop at all.

Even if his body was going to break apart from trying to absorb it, he was going to do it all.

* * * * *

Liz and Hao Ya were busy with their work, trying to fix the formation.

"Alright, another talisman," Hao Ya asked and placed it into the massive formation. Once the talisman was placed there, she asked the beast that was controlling the formation to activate it.

The formation activated for a split second to send away the talisman that was on top of it. Once the talisman was gone, they waited for a minute or two to see what happened.

After seeing no response from the formation at that time, Hao Ya was sure she had failed once again.

As soon as the failure was apparent, Liz put up a bubble of sped-up time around the formation and them.

"Let me try a little to the right this time around," she said and went on to work on the formation's setting to change the teleportation location slightly away from where it was just now.

She needed to do it enough time until the talisman teleported around where her master was. So, after spending nearly an hour changing the distance and direction a bit more, she tried again.

Liz put down the time bubble, and another talisman was sent away once again with no response from the other side.

"A little further this time around," Hao Ya told herself and tried again.

Liz did her best to form a bubble around them whenever they weren't using the formation. That way, they could move in sped-up time so that there was virtually no time wasted in between each use of the formation.

Liz's bubble had been a massive support to the group. Time moved so quickly inside of it that to the people outside it looked like they were nothing but a blur.

She was single-handedly speeding up time in a large area by the amount that would require multiple saint spirit veins working with multiple time-speeding formations to do at the same time.

Everyone involved there was more than surprised by just how amazing she was at slowing down time. Even Hao Ya felt envious of Liz's body constitution and how useful it was.

"Aren't you tired?" Hao Ya asked.

"Me?" Liz looked at her. "A little, but I can keep going for another day straight. It's already been so many days that I've grown used to the being fatigued by now."

"Alright then," Hao Ya said and worked on the formation again.

They kept at it for almost a day before they decided to take a break.

"It doesn't look like it's reached again," Hao Ya said. "Let's go take a break. You need to cultivate overnight to be at your best tomorrow."

Liz nodded. "I'll do as you sa—"

Everyone quickly turned around as the formation behind them activated on its own for a second. They quickly turned around to find the formation empty, except for a single talisman at the center.

Hao Ya stuck where she was while Liz was the one that moved on ahead and grabbed the talisman. She read through it with a surprised face.

Hao Ya finally reacted and asked, "What does it say? Quickly!" she urged Liz to answer, who complied easily.

"It's just a single sentence," Liz said. "It says 'Good job, Hao Ya'."

Hao Ya's face broke into a smile when she heard that. "We did it!" she shouted.

Liz couldn't believe it. "Really?" she asked.

"Master got our talisman and sent back a message. We really did it," Hao Ya said. "Finally, we are ready to send everyone back home."

"Then…"

Hao Ya nodded. "It's time to spread the word," she said. "It's time to call all the players here so they can be sent home."

Chapter 1281 At The Same Time

Blood Aura was nothing more than just Qi. It was Qi that had transformed inside a human or beast's body and embedded itself into one's blood thanks to the Blood Essence.

Blood Aura could not be freely converted into Qi, but it was possible if one used some techniques that allowed for it. This usually applied to blood aura outside of one's body, but there were secret techniques or forbidden ones that allowed for the blood aura in one's own body to be changed into Qi.

However, that was something very rare and only a handful of techniques existed that made it possible for someone to use it like that.

Conversely, no techniques existed that could turn Qi into a blood aura. It took time for the Qi in one's body or the surroundings to be absorbed by the Blood Essence to turn into blood aura.

There were techniques that could speed up the process, even by just a bit. However, none were significant enough to say that they made enough of a difference in the conversion. At least, not to the point where it could be useful in a moment of need such as a life-threatening moment.

However, just because there was no technique to do so did not mean that it could not be done.

Aside from body constitutions that allowed for something like that, there was a single way to convert Qi into Blood Aura.

And that was...

* * * * * * *

Bai Jingshen stayed in his massive quarter doing nothing as he couldn't even cultivate. There was no Qi in this realm that could help him cultivate at all, so all he could do was spend time with his wives and concubines.

However, at the moment, he was alone. He had wanted to be alone.

That was because he wanted to see just what was going to happen, or if something even was going to happen.

For the past week, the heavens acted as if they would descend multiple times. There were only two instances where that sort of phenomenon could happen.

The first possibility was that someone had tried to learn a Dao and had failed. Bai Jingshen didn't believe that was the case here at all. He would imagine a person would stop after the second or third failure and try something later.

So, the only other possibility was that someone was breaking through to a higher realm.

Breaking through and learning a dao brought about a similar phenomenon. It was why many people mistook someone for breaking through when in fact they had learned a dao.

The phenomenon was happening once more in front of Bai Jingshen and he understood that someone was breaking through to the next realm.

He also understood that someone was none other than Alex.

Normally, he wouldn't be curious about someone breaking through at all, however, this instance was unique. After all, he had never seen someone do it multiple times in such a short time while also knowing they were fine with breaking through without stopping.

Because doing so gave one an opportunity that most people wouldn't get in a lifetime.

Because he had been breaking through multiple times in the short period, he had felt the heavens descend multiple times in the short period.

Because the heavens were also the worldly laws, Alex got to take a peek into them multiple times.

Because of that, Bai Jingshen could only imagine if what he was thinking was going to happen at all. He had wondered if that would happen multiple times during the past few days when the phenomenon had occurred.

However, it looked like it was only today that it was going to happen.

"It's starting," he said to himself with quite a bit of surprise. It wasn't every day that someone got to see someone learn a dao due to getting to take a peak into the worldly laws multiple times.

Bai Jingshen could only watch excitedly as the worldly laws descended and remained there for a while. He tried to look into it, to see which of the law it was that was being taken from and learned.

However, it didn't look like it was a law that he understood at all. Alex was learning a dao that he had no idea about.

Around the palace and even beyond it, the beasts were surprised to see that someone was learning a dao. It wasn't every day they got to see that either here.

Liz and Hao Ya had only just returned from the location of the formation when they too noticed it.

"Someone's learning a dao," Hao Ya couldn't help but say.

"Hmm, learning a dao without going to the Dao mountain is not an easy task," Liz said. "I wonder if it's Alex that's doing it."

"Another one, huh?" Scarlet looked to the sky with nothing but shock in her eyes. "At this rate, he's going to catch up to me very soon."

Helen could only imagine what was even happening. She knew about Dao, but she had yet to learn a single one. So, she could only watch and pray that her son succeeded in learning the dao.

* * * * *

Alex was having the weirdest sensation right now. Never before had he tried to break through and learn dao at the same time.

He would've assumed that splitting his attention to either would cause him to fail both, however, there seemed to be harmony in what he was doing.

Learning the dao seemed to make his breakthrough easier while breaking through seemed to make learning the dao easier.

Thanks to both sides aiding each other, Alex was easily getting across both hurdles at the same time.

The worldly laws seemed to transcend space and time, completely disregarding the time manipulation in the room to make contact with Alex.

His golden core that was in his dantian had grown each time he broke through. By now, it was less than half the size of the dantian and was only growing to become half the size as the breakthrough was underway.

With each breakthrough, the connection his spirit held with his body was getting thinner and thinner. More and more of it was dragged into his golden core, where it would remain until it was time to break free as a beautiful nascent soul.

At the same time, Alex was peeking past the veil of worldly laws, unraveling the one thread of the loom he had caught on to. With each passing instance, he was learning more and more.

Blood aura and Qi were the very same thing in essence, and yet it wasn't easy for them to take the form of each other.

Blood aura required extremely rare or dangerous techniques to turn into Qi, and Qi could not be converted into blood aura unless the person had a physique that allowed for it.

However, Alex was now learning how to do exactly that without the help of any body constitution or forbidden techniques.

The moment he learned that which was hidden in the veiled worldly laws, his golden reached a size that was exactly half the size of his dantian.

As such in one single moment, Alex reached the Saint Core 5th realm and also learned the Dao of Blood Aura.

Chapter 1282 New Plan

Learning the Dao of Blood Aura made it easy for Alex to absorb the remaining immortal blood as quickly as he could. The aura behind the blood without any intent was no longer capable of threatening him as it did before.

Alex walked out of the room sometime later and was surprised to see Bai Jingshen waiting for him outside.

"Brother Shen? What are you doing here?" he couldn't help but ask.

"I was waiting for you to come out," Bai Jingshen said. "I wanted to ask a few questions."

"Oh, okay," Alex said.

Bai Jingshen carefully looked at Alex and nodded to himself. "You don't feel anything wrong with your body, do you? You did breakthrough 5 times in a row in a small period of time," he said

"I'm... mostly fine," Alex said. "I probably need to spend a few weeks or even months cultivating to make sure there are no problems, but there isn't anything wrong with the cultivation base itself."

"It was probably because absorbing so much blood was a daring task, it sort of fixed most of the problems that came with breaking through too quickly."

Bai Jingshen nodded after hearing that. "That's a relief," he said. "It would be bad if you made cracks in your foundation at this stage."

"I know, brother Shen. I would've stopped if I had felt something was wrong," Alex said.

"Oh yeah, congratulations on learning a new dao," Bai Jingshen said. "If you don't mind, what dao did you learn exactly?"

"It's the dao of Blood aura," Alex explained. "I should be thanking you for that actually. If not for the immortal blood that was almost impossible to absorb, I wouldn't have to force myself into trying so hard. Because of that, I ended up learning the mysteries behind the blood aura and now learned its dao."

Bai Jingshen was surprised to hear that. "I thought it was only the worldly laws that helped you, but I'm happy to hear I could be of some help too," he said. "Did you absorb all of it?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I absorbed the most I could into my cultivation base and absorbed the rest into my blood. Although, I'm not certain I absorbed it all. There was just too much and I might have missed a lot of it."

"As long as you absorbed the most you could, that's fine," Bai Jingshen said. "Alright, come with me and rest a little."

Alex nodded and walked along with Bai Jingshen as he was taken to the garden aboveground.

"Is Pearl..."

"Not yet," Bai Jingshen said. "It seems he wants to take his sweet time."

Alex felt a little dejected when he heard that. "How long was I inside exactly?" he asked.

"Uhh... about a week or so," Bai Jingshen said.

"Huh..." Alex thought. He felt as if he was in there for months. It was truly something to cultivate in rooms with intense time dilation. "Do you know why everyone doesn't just cultivate in rooms with time dilation, Brother Shen? That seems like an obvious choice."

"Because your progress would mostly remain the same," Bai Jingshen said. "Just think about what you need to cultivate. There are 2."

Alex thought for a moment. As he did, the answer to his question suddenly became obvious.

"Ah, I see," he said. "Qi takes time to get into a room, huh?"

Bai Jingshen nodded in response.

Cultivating in a room where time moved faster than it did outside was not fruitful since you would quickly run out of Qi in the room and the Qi outside wouldn't be able to replace it in time.

As a result, even if you could cultivate faster, the resource necessary for cultivation itself remained the same overall.

Unless you had a lot of spirit stones or treasures to aid your cultivation, cultivating in such conditions made little to no difference at all.

'No wonder no one really uses it,' he thought. 'Even a saint will have to use thousands of saint spirit stones to make any use out of the sped-up time.'

Cultivating in such a way was a drain on resources when others could gain the same result without using any. Alex himself could only make use of the sped-up time because he had so much blood to make use of.

"Oh right, the teleport formation was fixed yesterday. We are ready to send everyone away," Bai Jingshen said.

"Is that so," Alex said. "Has anyone been sent to inform the humans about it?"

"We are going to today," Bai Jingshen. "Hao Ya is ready to leave to talk with the humans in the Crimson Empire. I will most likely go and talk with the human from the Luminance empire."

"Do you want to go yourself?" Alex asked with a surprised look.

"Not really," Bai Jingshen said. "But I just thought it might be the quickest way."

"Oh, then you don't have to bother. I'm going to the Luminance Empire anyway, so I can do that while I am there," Alex said.

"Are you sure?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Although, I might have to stop making pills for a while."

"Don't worry about the pills," Bai Jingshen said. "There will be plenty of time to make those after you come back. After all, it isn't so easy to gather all the humans from those two backwater empires. It will take days for the news to even travel everywhere and weeks for everyone to gather back here."

Alex nodded in understanding. He knew it would take a long time from the very start. They had planned for all of it after all.

The two talked while they arrived out in the outer garden. Helen, Scarlet, and the others were waiting for Alex to come out.

"Wow! You really did break through to the Saint Core 5th realm huh?" Scarlet couldn't help but say. "Is your foundation stable?"

"Stable enough," Alex answered.

"What was that dao?" Hao Ya couldn't help but ask. "You did learn a dao, right?"

"Yes, dao of Blood Aura," Alex explained.

"Blood aura?" Neither Liz nor Hao Ya understood what it meant to know dao of such an aura. "Is it useful?"

"It's useful to me," Alex said. "I can't tell how useful it can be in battle just yet, but I have no doubts it will be."

"It's a unique dao for sure," Scarlet said.

"Anyway, I heard you two were able to fix the teleportation formation," Alex said. "We got a message back from senior Yang?"

"Yes, we are ready to go," Hao Ya said. "I'm going over to talk to the emperor of the empire in the north."

"We?" Alex looked around. "Oh, are you going too, Aunt Liz?"

Liz nodded. "After we're done informing, I'll go stay with Ronron and the rest until you guys return," she said.

"Alright," Alex said. "That might be for the best."

As they talked for a bit, a plan started forming. Alex and Helen were going to go to the Luminance Empire while Liz and Hao Ya would deal with the Crimson Empire.

Once they were all prepared, they got ready to leave as soon as possible.

"I'm coming with you," Scarlet said and became as small as a parrot before climbing onto Alex's shoulders. "I've been here too long and I want to see what the rest of this continent looks like."

"Sure," Alex said. "Let's go."

Chapter 1283 Radiant City

Alex, Scarlet, and Helen walked out of the formation they had just teleported to.

"It's good to be back," Helen said as she looked at the jungle she had been around quite a few times by now. "The Riverweed town is just ahead of us, right?"

Alex nodded. The name took him back to the first time he had come to the Luminance empire. After having spent a few days cultivating in the forest, he had walked out to the Riverweed town where he had learned most of the things he needed to about the Luminance empire.

There he had learned about geography, cities, people, and culture of the Luminance Empire. It was also this city where he had met Bai Jingshen or as he had introduced himself back then, Shen Jing before they went on an adventure of their own.

"Do you want to visit the town?" Helen asked.

"No," Alex said. "I'm afraid we don't have that luxury. We will need to go to the Radiant City as soon as we can so that the news spreads faster."

Helen nodded as she thought that was their best course of action as well. "Should we find a city with a teleport then?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit and shook his head. "We don't know how long it will take to teleport," he said. "As far as I remember, they have a fixed schedule for which city they can teleport to. I think it is better if we just fly our way to the Radiant City."

"Just hurry up already," Scarlet spoke with an annoyed face. She still stood on Alex's shoulders like she always did while impatiently waiting for the two to start moving.

Alex pulled out his boat and got on top of it before flying away. The boat flew quickly through the air at a speed that could only be reached by someone high up in the Saint realm.

However, even this speed was nothing compared to what Bai Jingshen could move at while carrying him. 'God, how did I not realize he was an Immortal back then?' he wondered to himself. In hindsight, everything seemed so obvious.

The land below them moved by in a blur while even the mountains far away moved at a relatively quick speed. Most people didn't even notice that someone had flown past them because of how fast they were going.

Few saints that were staying in the cities that were along the way did notice them. However, because of how fast it all was, they did not dare come out to stop it. They did not want to risk their life just to see who it was.

Alex didn't know where the Radiant city was exactly direction-wise, so he couldn't beeline to the city. Instead, he had to take a slightly longer path wherein he had to fix his route multiple times before he was actually headed towards the Radiant city.

It was close to evening by the time the three had arrived outside of the city.

Alex quickly got out boat along with his mother and made his way into the city. They easily walked into the city without anyone stopping them at all.

As they walked, Alex saw the many Lightsworns that walked the streets of the Radiant City. They were the people that kept peace and order in the city as they worked directly under the Emperor himself.

Alex looked around at the city where nothing seemed to have changed and yet everything was so different. Both he and his mother couldn't help but be surprised by all of this.

Without stopping anywhere, they arrived by the royal palace. As expected, the two of them were stopped by the guards, not allowing them to walk inside immediately.

"Let your emperor know that the King and Ruler of the Southern Continent are here to see him," Alex said to the guards.

As expected, the guards looked at him weirdly, not trusting his words at all. The fault didn't lie with them as what Alex had claimed was clearly nonsensical to them after all. There was no way for any of them to either believe or even verify if what was said was true at all.

"Huh?" a voice spoke from not far away. "Brother Yu Ming? Is that you?"

Alex and Helen turned around to see a young woman in purple Wei clan robes standing not far away from them. The young woman stared at Alex, trying to figure out if he was who she was thinking he was.

Alex looked at the young woman as well and tried to remember if he had ever seen this woman before. His eyes brightened in surprise when he finally recognized who it was.

"Are you... Fang Shurin?" he asked the young woman in front of me.

"Woah, is it really you, brother?" she asked as she quickly rushed in close. "I would have never thought I would get to see you again. They said you had most likely died in the Demon realm."

The young woman was clearly shocked to see him alive and well.

"No, I managed to survive," Alex said. "How are you doing, Shurin? I can't believe you've grown so much in just 3 decades. I nearly didn't recognize you."

The young woman smiled happily.

Fang Shurin had been the first person Alex had met in the palace aside from the Emperor and Princess Xumei. She had been his servant while he was the royal alchemist and helped him with anything and everything he asked for.

Back then, she was barely a teenager who had started cultivation at a young age. So even at that age, she looked particularly young. However, now that over 3 decades had passed since then, it seemed as though she had grown quite a lot in that time.

She had become a fine young woman.

"When did you come back, brother Yu?" she asked curiously. "Where have you been this entire time?"

The guards were listening to their conversation as well, and as Alex's fake name was thrown around, they started understanding just who they were talking to.

The young man named Yu Ming had been a legend in the Luminance empire. He had appeared just as quickly as he had disappeared, and in that short time, he had managed to rock the entire empire.

Yu Ming was a Heaven rank Talisman creator, Heaven rank Formation master, and most importantly, the first Immortal rank Alchemist, whose pills had shocked the world.

These guards remembered the Alchemy competition vividly and how amazing the final pill had been.

Not only that, but they also remembered the combat competition that had taken place that year before the incident where the young alchemist had taken 3rd place, despite many stronger cultivators being around at the time.

And then after that, it was because of his absence that so many sect leaders and family heads had died at the hands of those beasts that brought nothing but terror to the empire.

The guards quickly bowed toward Alex. "We're sorry for not recognizing you, senior. Please wait around, we will go relay the information right now."

One of the guards left at once to go tell their emperor that their legend had returned.

Chapter 1284 The Message

While the guard went to inform the emperor, Alex and Helen struck up a conversation with Shurin.

Shurin spoke more than the two combined, clearly curious about what both of them had been doing this entire time. She didn't know Helen like she did Alex, but even so, she had met Helen back when she had stayed in the palace for a couple of days.

Shurin could not believe it at all when Alex told her that he was in not one, not two, but rather 3 different continents in just the past 30 years. That sort of information wasn't something that could be digested so easily at all, especially by someone who hadn't left the capital city their entire life.

Shurin asked a few more questions to find out more, but before Alex could answer, the guard returned. And with him was another familiar face.

Alex turned towards the woman that had appeared and smiled. "Princess Xumei, I see you're doing quite well," he said as he looked at the woman who couldn't hide her shock at all.

Wei Xumei hadn't changed much in the past 30 years. She had already been a young adult when Alex had met her, and in the last 3 decades, she seemed to have gotten older by just a couple of years. That was nowhere near enough to make her look different from what she did usually.

"Alchemist Yu, you really did return," she said, still very shocked to see his in front of her. "I had not believed the news when I had heard it."

"It's good to see you, Princess Xumei," Alex said.

Helen greeted her as well and was greeted back.

"Please come with me," the princess said and quickly walked away. Alex and Helen followed her, with Shurin quickly leaving them and going her own way.

Alex looked around the palace and noticed that nothing much had changed here at all, and yet the fancy stuff that looked so expensive back then no longer seemed fancy at all.

While the palace hadn't changed at all, Alex had. He now lived in a palace as well, and one that looked far more extravagant than this one. As a result, nothing looked amazing to him anymore.

They arrived outside the throne room and stood in front of the shut-down door. Xumei knocked on the door and the door suddenly opened up.

Xumei walked into the throne room with Alex and his mother right behind her. It wasn't just the Emperor that was in the room. Along with him, there were many ministers and court officials in the room as well, all of whom seemed to be curious to see Alex.

They all stared at him, not sparing a single glance at Helen who was behind him or even Scarlet who was on his shoulder.

"Your majesty," the princess bowed a bit toward her father and moved to the side so he could see Alex fully.

"Greetings," Alex spoke first.

The emperor watched in absolute shock that someone who had disappeared in the Demon realm so long ago had returned alive. The court officials were quite surprised too, however, something else caught their attention.

"Hey! Bow in front of the Emperor," one of them said. As soon as that one spoke, the rest followed along, saying the same thing as well.

Helen naturally started bowing, but Alex stopped her before she completed her full bow. Just half a bow would suffice in her case. In his case, he wouldn't even bow.

The ministers and court officials got even rowdier seeing that Alex was completely ignoring the lot of them and was simply smiling toward the front at the emperor, who couldn't think of what to do.

In the end, Alex sighed. "I'm assuming the guard that was supposed to be bringing you the message of my arrival didn't give you the one that I wanted to pass along, did he?" he asked the emperor.

"What... what was the message?" the emperor asked.

"It doesn't matter, your majesty," one of the officials spoke. "No message can stop someone from respecting you as you deserve."

Alex ignored the cries of the ones around him and simply stared at the emperor who sat on his throne.

"I am Alex, King of the Southern Continent," he said simply.

The sound from around the room vanished completely for a few seconds before laughter burst into the scene from every direction. None of the people could believe at all that Alex was the king.

The princess couldn't understand what was happening at all. She didn't laugh as the ministers did, but just the same as them, she didn't believe his words either.

King of the Southern Continent? How was she to believe such a thing? There was no way to go to the Southern Continent in the first place.

The Emperor was in a similar situation as the princess, except, he knew a thing or two more than everyone else, and that made him want to believe what Alex was saying.

Alex turned to look at the people that were clearly laughing at him while mocking what he was saying. He smiled back at them and suddenly his cultivation aura burst forth throughout the room.

The people around him were tossed out of their seats and sent crashing into the wall. Only the princess and emperor were exempt from his attack. His aura kept the officials stuck to the wall, while he simply looked at the Emperor in front of him.

"Do you trust that I am the King of the Southern Continent?" he asked the emperor. The emperor didn't even have to look around to nod. He felt slightly terrified at the aura that was around the room.

The strength hidden behind the cultivation base that Alex had just shown was not something he could hope to compete against.

"King of the Southern Continent," the emperor called out. "Would you be kind enough to let go of my subjects?"

"Sure," Alex said and loosened his cultivation aura. As they fell, however, he grabbed onto each one of them and tossed them out of the room.

Once everyone was out of the room, he closed the door and looked at the emperor. "Finally, we can talk in private," he said.

The emperor didn't know what to say. "Congratulations, your majesty," he said.

"Thank you," Alex said. "Although, I'm surprised you believed me so easily. Are you not doubtful?"

"I wouldn't dare be," the man said. "Anyone who is so close to that person can't be lying about something important like this."

"That person?" Alex got a little curious. "Who are you talking about?"

"The one you came with you all those years ago," the emperor said. "The one that stole my daughter's healing crystal."

"Ah, brother Shen," Alex thought before his eyes narrowed. "You know what he is?"

The emperor nodded.

"How long have you known it for?" Alex asked.

"Ever since he revealed himself to me all those years ago when we first met," the emperor said. "He showed me exactly who he was, and it was then I remembered the words my father left behind back then that we are not the true rulers of this land."

Chapter 1285 Status Of The Sects And Clans

Whenever the emperor of the Luminance empire changed, there was one thing constant. They were always told that they were not the true ruler of this land.

This land did not belong to them or any other human. In fact, it belonged to the beast. It was a truth that every emperor learned when they became an emperor. However, there wasn't much use to learning this truth as the beasts never came to retake their land.

However, 30 years ago, Bai Jingshen had arrived in the Radiant City to find Alex, and during that time he had revealed himself to the emperor.

The Ruler of the entire Western Continent, the White Tiger, the one whose land the emperor ruled, was none other than he himself.

"I see you have found out the truth as well," the emperor said to Alex. "You don't seem surprised."

"I found out half a month ago," Alex said. "Didn't you have an oath telling you to not reveal who he was?"

"That oath ended years ago," the emperor said. "I am free to divulge his information as I wish. Of course, I am not stupid enough to go for it. Speaking of which, I would like to apologize for what happened to you back then. I should have been more forceful and authoritative to stop those people from attacking you."

"Just because I couldn't reveal who had your backing, those people got ahead of themselves and attacked you," the emperor said. "And for that, I'm sorry."

Alex gave no reaction to the apology. It was something he deserved after all. "I heard the beasts attacked these sects and clans. How are they doing now?"

"The Broken Ravine sect and Glory's Edge sect have fallen from grace. They are no longer the powerhouses they used to be," the emperor said. "The Han clan, Zhou clan, and to some extent, the Jin clan have managed to get back to their original standing. They had some losses in the financial investment after losing so many saints at once, but they managed to carry through those tough times."

"The Song clan and Fu clan, however, have not recovered at all. In fact, the Song clan was ambushed by their enemies on multiple occasions and had to suffer a lot of losses."

"Those two clans aren't even considered one of the big clans anymore," the Emperor said.

"Oh, have any other families taken their place then?" Alex asked.

"There are a few that are close, but none can be said to have replaced them just yet. Those families have to beat each other as well before they are considered one of the big ones."

"I see," Alex said. He had thought he would be happy to hear about the downfall of these families, but to his surprise, he didn't even care at all. In fact, he might even have felt a little bad about the rest of the people in those families.

After all, they were the ones being punished for a crime they had nothing to do with.

"I can't say I want any revenge now, not that I can since almost every that tried to kill me is now dead," Alex said to the Emperor.

"It probably wouldn't suit you, if you really are the King of the Southern Continent," the emperor said.

Alex smiled a little. While the emperor said he believed, it was clear that he still had doubts that he was the King just as he said.

"I don't know if it would suit me or not," Alex said. "What do you say, Scarlet? Would it be wrong of me to try and get my revenge now if I could?"

"I don't see anything wrong with that," Scarlet spoke. "Why should you not get your revenge just because you're stronger? One of the reasons people get stronger in the first place is to get revenge on those that have wronged them in the past."

"I agree with her," Alex said to the Emperor.

The Emperor looked curiously at the bird on Alex's shoulder. He had seen the bird since the moment they had entered. However, because he could barely sense any cultivation base of hers, he had assumed it was a weak bird.

However, when he heard it speak, the contradicting information made him confused.

The bird was weak, but only saint realm beasts could talk like a human. What exactly was going on?

"What is this bird? if I may ask," the emperor slowly questioned.

"Oh, I'm sorry I didn't introduce her sooner," Alex said. "This is Scarlet, a Vermillion Bird. Just like Bai Jingshen, she is the Ruler of the Southern Continent, the one that made me the king."

As if on command, Scarlet flew off Alex's shoulders and quickly grew to her natural size. Her fiery body was covered in phoenix flames, glowing the entire room. Her aura revealed itself and the emperor couldn't help but feel his nascent soul tremble in her presence.

He was already a 2nd realm Saint Soul cultivator, and yet the cultivation base of the beast in front of him seemed like a peak he could not hope to climb in his lifetime.

He slowly got up from his seat and fell to his knees before kowtowing in front of Scarlet.

"My deepest apologies for not recognizing you sooner," the Emperor quickly spoke. He quickly gestured for the princess to bow as well, and she did.

Scarlet seemed unimpressed. "Don't mind me, I'm just here to sightsee," she said and turned back into her small form, the flames on her body disappearing at the same time as she landed on Alex's shoulders.

The emperor knelt for long enough before getting back to his throne. "I am humbled by your presence in my throne room," he said.

"Speaking of which," Alex quickly interjected. "I came here to ask you to do something. If it helps, it's a direct order from the White Tiger."

The emperor's eyes narrowed. "What is it that he wishes for me to do?" he asked.

"You know about the Players, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I'm aware of them," the Emperor said.

"Good. The order is to pass along a message to the rest of the empire so that you can gather all of these players by the northern forest as soon as you can."

"Gather the players?" the emperor was surprised. "May I ask why?"

"That's because we're sending the players back home," Alex explained. "That is the message you will be passing along. Any player that wishes to return back to their home can gather up north by the Riverweed City."

"There is a teleportation formation there that will take them all back home, just like how they were teleported here in the first place," Alex said.

The emperor couldn't help but put on an amazed expression. The princess was quite surprised too.

"The players... they actually have a home they came from?" the Emperor asked.

Alex nodded. "There is a small piece of land in the Central continent where a small population of mortals lives on their own, ignorant about the outer world. That is the place where all of the players came from. That is where I came from."

"And now, I'm here to take them all back home."

Chapter 1286 Apology

After explaining in detail how it all worked with sending the players back to their home, Alex and his mother were requested to stay in the palace for the night.

Since it was already dark, the two decided to take the emperor up on his offer.

The princess took away Helen while Alex remained to answer a few of the Emperor's questions while the emperor himself answered a few more questions of his own.

Alex was simply curious about what was going on with the Luminance empire to see if there were any big changes that he would be interested to hear about.

From what he heard, almost everything was the same in essence. Of course, things had changed underneath the veil, but overall the empire functioned the same.

The only thing of interest Alex even heard about was something mysterious going on in the Broken Ravine sect. Apparently, people there had been dying a little too often these days. However, when sent to check what was going on, the Lightsworns couldn't find anything, so the Emperor was just as puzzled as anyone.

"Hmm, I'll check it out," Alex half-promised and left after that. He followed the princess who had come to take him again and went toward the guest room that was prepared for him.

The princess was curious herself and started asking questions too. Unlike her father, however, there were no reservations about the questions that she asked.

Alex wasn't offended by the questions at all. In fact, he found it relieving that someone was overlooking his status as a king in a non-disrespectful way and asking him stuff that people would otherwise be afraid to ask.

Her very first question was regarding how Alex became a King, which even the Emperor hadn't questioned.

Alex gave a short answer, satiating her curiosity. Or so he thought. Answering her question only made the princess more curious, which caused her to ask even more questions than she had planned to ask.

Alex was answering her questions when he paused for a second and look in front of him.

In the hallway they were walking in was a man standing in front of them. He wore a purple robe that belonged to the Wei royal family, but Alex knew this man was not from the Wei family at all.

Which was why he was so confused to see the man here in the first place.

"Is that you, brother Zhou?" Alex asked.

Zhou Ren stared in absolute awe as he could not believe that he was looking at the man he had once assumed dead.

"Alchemist Zhou, what are you doing here?" the princess asked.

"I..." The man couldn't find it in himself to answer the question as most of the logical side of his brain was busy searching for an answer as to why Alex was alive at all.

"Did you come to greet him?" the princess asked.

"Huh? Ah, yes," Zhou Ren quickly said. He cupped his fist and gave a deep bow toward Alex. "Greetings, brother Yu. I'm happy to see that the news I received wasn't a lie. You truly are alive."

"I am," Alex said mysteriously, not giving away almost any emotion on his face.

Zhou Ren went from a formal bow to an informal one quickly, only this time instead of a greeting, he apologized.

"I will like to apologize for what my family did to you on my father's behalf," the man who seemed to have aged quite a lot despite reaching the Saint realm said.

"Your father is dead, isn't he?" Alex asked.

"He is," Zhou Ren said without hiding. "But that does not clear the wrongdoings he did against you."

Zhou Tianqiu, along with a few more saints from the Zhou family had been part of the people that had attacked Alex back in the Demon Realm all those years ago. Despite his father's part in it, however, Zhou Ren had nothing to do with the attack.

The entire time, he was busy trying to further himself inside the Demon realm and had only later learned about what had transpired without him realizing.

By the time he had realized, the beasts had launched their attacks on the families and sects involved, and his father had left the clan to run away as far as he could.

Even then, the beasts had found him and delivered his torn-apart corpse back to them.

"You sound sincere enough, brother Zhou," Alex said. "I shall accept your apology. I did not expect to get an apology, so this is quite refreshing. Don't worry, I wasn't planning on attacking your clan or anything in the first place."

"I don't care," Zhou Ren said. "I've left the family already. I only wished to apologize for what was clearly wrong."

Alex was a little surprised to hear Zhou Ren speaking like this. Had he always been like this, or had time changed him to be a better person?

"Why did you leave your clan?" Alex asked. "I would've assumed you would be the clan head after your father's death."

"My uncle, the Saint Alchemist, is the new clan head," Zhou Ren said. "Besides, I couldn't live there with all those hypocrites."

"Hypocrites?" Alex asked.

Zhou Ren nodded. "My father couldn't attack you without the other ancestors and family elders' approval. The fact that so many elders had gone to the Demon realm in the first place was because the family as a whole had come to the conclusion that attacking you to extract your knowledge was the right choice."

"However, when the tables turned, those very same ancestors turned on my father to ask him to die for their sake. Because they did not want to face the wrath of the beasts, they made my father out to be a scapegoat while they remained there happily as if they had no part in it at all."

"After I found out the truth a few years after my father's death, I couldn't live there at all," Zhou Ren said. "So, I left the family and went out to do my own thing. One thing led to another, and I'm not one of the Royal alchemists for the royal family."

"I see," Alex said. He was surprised to hear Zhou Ren's story and perhaps even a little sad for him. He hadn't been part of everything as he had explained, and yet he had suffered from it as well.

He was a victim in all of it as well, even if not as big as Alex himself.

"You must have perfected your alchemy, even more, to be accepted as the Royal Alchemist," Alex said.

Zhou Ren gave a small smile. "Aside from you, I was already one of the best alchemists in our generation. There was not much for me to improve," he said.

Alex smiled back as well. "That's good to hear," he said. "Anyway, I'm glad to have met you again, Brother Zhou. This might be our very last meeting, but I'm happy to see you are doing well."

"Thank you," Zhou Ren said. "I'm happy to see you are doing well as well."

"Farewell."

Alex left Zhou Ren and walked away with the princess to go to his room. Come the next morning, he would leave, and it would be a very long time before he saw this man again.

Chapter 1287 Meeting Qin Shan Again

Alex asked what had happened to Xue Meirong and Gu Zhanrou.

Xue Meirong was the daughter of Xue Mufan, the other of the two Saint Alchemists that were around when Alex was here over 30 years ago.

Gu Zhanrou on the other hand was someone who had managed to beat Xue Meirong in a small competition Alex had held and had managed to become the Royal Alchemist after him.

They had both shown tremendous talent in the Alchemy competition that Alex had won, so now that he learned what Zhou Ren was up to, he wanted to learn what the other two were up to as well.

It turned out that Xue Meirong was an elder in the Falling Lotus sect, working along with her father to make the sect the best Alchemy sect in the empire.

Gu Zhanrou had returned back to her own sect, which was also trying to compete against the Falling Lotus sect to become the best Alchemy sect.

As of now, the Falling Lotus sect was winning, but it wasn't ahead by that much.

Alex also asked about a few other people and learned about them.

The gardener, Wei Ruoran, who had taught him how to grow plants and rear for them had ended up overcoming his Qi deviation and had broken through to the Saint realm in what was the biggest spectacle anyone had produced to enter the Saint realm.

Because he had learned a dao, the man had to go through lightning tribulation to successfully become a Saint realm expert.

Alex wanted to greet him and thank him for what he had done for him, but unfortunately, it turned out that the man was currently in closed cultivation.

Aside from him, Alex asked a bit about the various prince and princesses that he had gotten to know during his stay. After he got everything he wanted, he let the princess go and cultivated for the night

Tomorrow morning, he left the royal palace with his mother and made his way to the Dawnspring city that was to the southeast.

It took him nowhere near as much time as it had taken him when he had come to the Radiant city from the north.

Due to the short distance, Alex and Helen arrived outside the city before they even knew it. Along the way, Alex saw the Han family's ancestral ground with many people currently training outside in the sun.

He wondered how Han Daiyu was doing. The beefy young girl who liked using her hammer had most likely entered the Saint realm, given how close to it she was all those years ago. Since the Han family was one of the ones that attacked Alex however, he did not wish to go meet them directly.

He skipped the city as well, flying over it to go to the Flowing Brush sect. They arrived at the top of the mountain peak where the gate was and landed.

The few people there were surprised to see someone come and got a little hesitant and apprehensive.

Alex walked up front and everyone looked at him. However, no one remembered what Alex looked like, so they didn't react in the way Alex expected them to.

On the other hand, when his mother walked forward, they all immediately greeted her, calling her elder Hei in the process.

Alex was surprised to see that there were people here that remembered her amongst the guards even though she had already left the sect over 2 decades ago. She must've been pretty popular in her sect before she left.

But, they didn't recognize Alex at all.

They waited outside for a few minutes before the two of them sensed a group coming flying toward them. They both looked in that direction and saw 5 people, of which only 2 were in the Saint realm.

"Disciple Hei greets master and elders," Helen spoke immediately, bowing toward the people that had arrived.

Alex recognized none from the group except for Qin Shan, who was his mother's master. The last time he had seen him was when he left his mother in the sect before he made his way to the Demon realm.

"Lin'er, you're back?" Qin Shan couldn't help but ask in surprise. "Are you alright? Did the beasts kick you out?"

Helen smiled softly after hearing her master's worry. "No, master. I came at my own discretion. It had been so long and I wanted to meet you."

"Is that so? Then I have nothing to—"

Qin Shan's eyes moved toward Alex who was a little further away. Because he couldn't sense any aura from Alex, he had completely overlooked his presence. However, now that he had noticed him, his shock only grew exponentially.

"Aah! Yu Ming? That's you, right?" Qin Shan asked.

"It's good to meet you again, senior Qin," Alex spoke, bowing slightly toward his mother's master.

"You... you survived?" Qin Shan asked, unbelieving of his own eyes. "Lin'er, your son came back. I-I can't believe this. I'm so happy for you."

"Yes, master," Helen said with a bright smile. "Not only him, I found my husband as well, and I also have a granddaughter now."

"What?" Qin Shan's surprises were truly unending.

The other elders were surprised to hear what Qin Shan said as well since they knew who Helen's son was. Immediately, they started congratulating the two as well and brought them inside the sect.

Helen and Qin Shan immediately started asking about each other, trying to learn what had happened to each other in the time they were separated.

Alex was brought into the conversation a few times as well and was asked how he survived at all with the Saints trying to kill him. Alex told them that he was teleported away from this continent to the next one.

The people there were surprised to hear that there was a way to visit other continents. Most of them had to even make an effort to remember there were other continents. Because of how uncommon the topic was, it had been centuries since the last time they had to think about that knowledge.

"Oh right, Lin'er. You are a player, aren't you?" Qin Shan asked. "There is news going around that the players can be sent back home. Apparently, if you go to the Lightsworns in the city, they will help you go back to your home. I don't know how true that is, but you and your son should try that."

Helen smiled. "I know that, master. I and my son were the ones that had the emperor spread this message," she said.

"Oh... is that so?" Qin Shan was surprised. "Then... do you not plan on staying here for long?"

Helen shook her head. "I only came for a small visit, master," she said. "I don't know how long I'll stay, but at most, it will be a day or two."

"Is that so," Qin Shan was a little disappointed.

"Yes, I'll be going home, master," she said. "After that, it's unlikely that I will be returning to the Western Continent for a long time."

"I see..." Qin Shan got a little sad. "Well, I suppose I can't expect you to come back just because you're my disciple. As long as you are happy, that will be enough for me."

Chapter 1288 To The South

Alex came to learn a bit about Han Diayu of the Han family and Liang Qiu of the Heaven's Peak sect. Both were girls that Alex had done some business with before while he was in the Dawnspring city as they were the ones that had brought him the pill recipes that improved his Earth Spiritual root.

Liang Qiu was also the girl that had taken second place in the tournament whereas Alex had taken third place.

From what Alex learned, both of them had entered the Saint realm about 10 years ago. Qin Shan wasn't aware how much stronger they were now as he hadn't met them in a while since both of them were now elders of their respective families and sect.

He didn't doubt that they were both stronger than the public believed them to be as they were some of the most talented individuals this empire had seen in a long time.

Another person that Alex didn't expect to hear about, but simply did because of Qin Shan's long talk was Tian Ye. The fatty Talisman expert was more talented than his mother when it came to talismans, and was the person that made Alex call him Uncle.

While Alex didn't care about the man particularly, he was still happy to hear that he had become the sect leader of the Demon's Whisper sect, which was considered the best talisman sect in the entire empire.

Alex and Helen spent the entire day talking with Qin Shan and the other elders of the sect.

During that time, Alex gave his mother's master a few talismans that contained more knowledge about talismans than the Luminance empire most likely did.

Even more than that, he gave them knowledge about scripts, which was clearly missing from the empire. With the help of scripts, they would certainly become a household name throughout the empire with people seeking them out from far and about.

Around evening, Alex and Helen finally caught a break from all the catching up and were sent to guest houses that were more glamorous than any building Alex remembered in this sect.

They had certainly upgraded a few things in the time he was gone.

Alex cultivated for an entire night, fixing the few problems his cultivation base still had due to him sprinting through the first few realms of the Saint Core realm.

The very next morning, Alex left the Flowing Brush sect and made his way south. He had been looking forward to going there as soon as he could, and having to waste 2 days on other things hadn't made him happy at all.

Without his mother, Alex flew as fast as he could with Scarlet by his side. She looked at the world around them as they flew past everything in the blink of an eye.

"It's not that different from the Southern Continent," She said to Alex.

"Yeah, but there's nowhere near enough Qi to help Saints grow," Alex said.

"I wasn't really talking about how dense the Qi was," Scarlet said. "But you're not wrong. With how weak the Qi is, it's a surprise it can sustain so many saints. The sects and clans must have dedicated Saint spirit vein under their territory."

"Most of them do," Alex explained.

As they flew, the Scarlet saw the ocean on the left side get closer and closer to them the further south they got.

"Are we moving east?" Scarlet asked.

"No, the land is just narrow towards the south compared to the north. So, even while we have been relatively straight this whole time, we've still gotten close to the ocean," he said.

"Hmm, even the ocean is much weaker around here," she noticed.

"Is that so?" Alex was surprised to hear. He checked too and it was true.

He had always thought the ocean had more Qi than the land, but now that he had some other oceans to compare it to, he realized that even this ocean was very much weaker by comparison.

"Where are we going exactly?" Scarlet asked. "You haven't mentioned anything yet."

"Have I not?" Alex asked. "We're going to the Demon realm. The one I teleported from to the Northern Continent."

"Ah, that place."

Alex had learned after asking Qin Shan that the last time the Demon realm had opened was 2 years ago. Which meant that it had been over 32 years exactly since he had left the Western Continent.

That was a long time he was away from his people, but that also helped him improve as a cultivator. What had happened to him back then was both a boon and curse at the same time.

"There it is," he said when he saw the small island with its small granite monument in the center. Scarlet didn't see it yet, but she believed Alex due to how good his eyes were.

Soon enough even she saw it.

A few kilometers past the main continent, there was a small island full of green grass that humans rarely visited.

The most they came around here was for about 10 days every 10 years, which was 2 years ago, so no one had visited this place in a long time.

Alex landed on the island and looked around, smelling the salty scent of the ocean, brought in by the fresh breeze that blew past the morning haze.

"Let's go," Alex said and walked over to the monument that had scripts carved all over it with a single 'Demon' written at the top.

He took out the Demon realm's authority medallion and wore it. Then, he placed his palm on the monument and poured Qi into it.

As soon as he did, a strong spatial aura blocked him from teleporting away. Alex found it quite weird. 'This happened last time too,' he thought. 'So I really can't just wear it, huh?'

In the next moment, he started pouring a little Qi into the medallion as well. As soon as the medallion got hold of his Qi, it activated, putting out a small force that removed the spatial lock that was placed on him.

Then, the teleportation aura grabbed onto him. Alex extended it a little and put Scarlet within it as well.

In the next moment, the two of them were teleported away to inside the Demon realm.

"Oh," Alex spoke before he even carefully looked at where he was. "I just had to activate the medallion to stop the formation huh?"

He found out that the medallion was linked to every single formation, and all he had to do was think to stop it or start it.

Alex thought it and the spatial aura around them that would force them to teleport away were gone. Now, the Demon realm was no different than the ten days when it was open.

"Can you take a tour of this place on your own?" Alex asked. "I have something to do of my own."

Scarlet didn't ask and simply flew away.

After Alex was free, he too flew away, going in the direction of the third mountain. He arrived at the top of the mountain and looked at the script below him.

After a simple wave of his hand, he was teleported inside to the hidden chamber where there still remained an enemy of his that needed to be taken care of.

Chapter 1289 Fu Clan Patriarch

The Fu Clan patriarch had been stuck inside the room for a month, still seething in a fury over his grandson's death. He hadn't even gotten the opportunity to bury his grandson since he was stuck inside the chamber.

He had tried attacking his way out, but to his surprise, the defenses of the room were way too strong for him to do so. He could only seethe in fury and wait for something to happen.

The first day he was inside, he tried his best to call for aid. The second day he continued calling for aid as well, but along with that, he tried other means to get out.

After a week or so passed with him being inside, he hoped the Demon Realm would send him out since it was about time for the Demon Realm to close again. When that happened, everyone was sent outside.

However, even a day past the destined day, nothing happened. The old man had since then stopped doing anything and simply sat down to cultivate.

He would cultivate in the room next door, but the corpse there unsettled him. It also made him wonder if he was going to just die here, like him. Would his body turn to bones before someone found him too?

Just to keep these sorts of thoughts off his mind, he had to stay out of that room. He also worried about what happened to his people outside. Had the beast they were capturing been freed? Hopefully not.

Hopefully, someone had managed to catch the young man and used him as a barter to not get attacked by the beast. If no one, the old man had faith that the Song Family's patriarch could do it. She was unnaturally strong thanks to her blood aura usage after all.

So, the old man got rid of most thoughts and started cultivating. He was used to deep cultivation that would go on for years on end. Spending a year or two just cultivating was pass time for him.

So, he did the same here too. He closed his eyes and focused on cultivating. However, after just half a month had passed since he started his deep cultivation, he felt a disturbance in the Qi in the room and opened his eyes.

Just as he did, he saw the black-robed youth teleport into the room.

Alex arrived inside the chamber and was immediately weirded out by the massive amount of Time aura in the air around him.

"It's so thick," he thought as he felt the aura. "No wonder time moves so slowly here."

He only had to simply think while activating the medallion and the script controlling the time aura immediately vanished. To Alex's surprise, he didn't only deactivate the time scripts for this chamber, but also the many sped-up cultivation caves that were in the 3rd mountain.

"You!" the old man immediately stood up when he saw Alex come in. "Did the others send you to free me? Unfortunately, I have no plans on leaving here with you alive. You killed my grandson, so you will die all the same."

In the old man's mind, there was only one reason Alex would come here right now. He had lost and was captured before being forced by the ones he was captured by to free him.

'It must have been the Song family patriarch,' he thought. 'I will have to apologize to her later for killing someone with blood as strong as his.'

He did not care that the Song family patriarch was going to get angry with him for killing him. His mind was completely taken over by his anger to make any wise decisions.

All he wanted was to kill the one that killed his grandson.

"Who's Fu Xiran to you?" Alex asked the old man.

The old man's eyes immediately narrowed when he heard that. "How do you know my granddaughter's name?" he asked. "She already died a decade ago."

"Technically, she died 40 years ago," Alex corrected him. "And the reason I know about her is that I killed her."

The old man couldn't help but get confused when he heard that. "You... killed Xiran?" he asked.

"I cut her body in half when she was escaping with her talisman," Alex said. "Didn't her separated body get teleported outside?"

The old man's anger returned, only this time with more intensity. "Are you saying you killed Xiran too?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "So, you have two grandchildren to avenge now. Come kill me."

"You bastard!" the old man's fury reached its peak as even without his intention, a wave of spiritual attack flew out of him, attacking everything in every direction.

It was a rolling wave of energy that moved like a wave in the ocean, sweeping away things that were in its path.

Alex simply stood still as the attack crashed onto him. He felt a burden on his mind, but it wasn't something he could handle.

All he had to do was enforce the spiritual energy in his own spiritual sea and the attack wouldn't affect him at all.

The old man dashed forward will every intent to kill Alex. He didn't use any weapon he simply punched Alex in the chest as hard as he could.

His original plan with Alex did not involve killing him at all. There was so much more he wanted from Alex just like everyone else did.

However, those wants could not stand in front of his need to take revenge for his children. So, he punched Alex in the chest.

A True Emperor 4th realm cultivator like Alex wouldn't even have any bones remaining after such a strong hit from someone in the early Saint Core realm. Or so the old man thought.

However, when the punch landed, all that happened was the old man felt his own bones crack. Alex on the other hand wasn't even pushed back at all.

"Is that all you've got?" Alex asked with a sneer on his face.

The old man ignored his fist which was in pain and looked at Alex with a horrified face. What was it? A formation? A talisman? Some sort of defensive artifact? What was it?

How was someone so weak capable of stopping his attack? No, not just stopping, how was someone so weak capable of hurting him back?

"How?" he couldn't help but speak out loud.

"How?" Alex repeated. "Well, let me show you."

The veil that concealed his cultivation base lifted at once as the Saint Core 5th realm aura spread throughout the room at once.

The old man's body shuddered when he felt a cultivation base that was not only stronger than him but far more potent as well.

While his senses told him this was a Saint Core realm cultivation base, the pressure it put on his body was completely different.

"H-how? How are you so strong?" the man asked. "You... have you been hiding your cultivation all this time?"

"Are you hearing yourself, old man?" Alex asked. "Do you think I would run from here if I was so strong?"

"Then... how?" he asked.

"It's been 3 decades since you've been stuck here, old man," Alex said. "You were strong back then, so I had no choice but to leave you here."

"However, now that I'm stronger, I've come back for my revenge," he said. "Since you've made me wait so long for this, I'm going to have to get some interest on top of that too."

Chapter 1290 Truths

﻿

The old man couldn't believe that over 30 years had passed since he was trapped in this room. No, he refused to believe it.

After all, he had only spent no more than a month here.

"You're lying," the old man said. "There's no way such a long time could have passed without me realizing it."

"I told you already," Alex said. "It's been 40 years since your granddaughter died and 30 years since your grandson died. I've grown strong in that time. Whether you believe it or not, I don't care."

Alex started moving, going closer to the old man.

The old man took a step back in fear, however, his steps were heavy and slow because of Alex's aura that stopped him from doing anything sudden.

The old man's survival instincts kicked in pretty soon and he started sending out a barrage of attacks at Alex. However, not a single one of those attacks landed on him at all.

Alex simply swatted them away before they even reached him.

The old man tried to run into the other room, but he found himself unable to move through the door. Even though the door was open and there was nothing stopping him from entering, he was still blocked by something invisible.

"Don't bother trying to run. I've already cut off the space in this room so there's nowhere for you to go," he said. "Now, I don't have much time, so I will need to speed up my revenge."

He reached into his storage ring and pulled out a pill bottle. He took a pill and walked next to the frozen old man before grabbing his face. He opened his mouth forcefully and shoved the pill into him.

Once the pill started taking effect, he let go of the man.

"What did you do to me? Did you poison me?" the old man asked. "Bastard, I'll kill you."

"What's your wife's name?" Alex asked.

"Han Yinxue," the man answered immediately before realizing what he had done. "What… what did you do to me?"

"Alright, the Saint Truth Seeking pill has taken effect," Alex said. "It will wear off fast, so I will have to quickly ask my question."

"First of all, how many Spiritual energy-related books did you find during the meteor shower over a millennia ago?" Alex asked.

The man tried to place his hand on his mouth so he couldn't answer, but his mouth moved on its own.

"2!"

"What are the names?" Alex asked.

The old man tried to stop himself, even going so far as to bang his own head on the floor. However, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't find himself able to stop answering the questions.

"Spiritual Rolling Waves and Spirit Search," the man answered.

Alex's eyes narrowed when he heard the answer. 'That's it,' he thought. 'That's what I'm looking for.'

"What is Spirit Search?" he asked.

The old man struggled, but he gave the information in the end. "It's a technique that allows you to read through someone's memories as long as you are inside their spiritual sea as a spiritual avatar."

'Bingo!' Alex thought.

"And where is the book or talisman for this technique?" Alex quickly asked.

"With me," the man said. He could not even think of stopping himself this time around.

Alex only smiled at the revelation.

The old man realized what was going to happen next. Alex was going to steal from him and take away his book on Spirit Search.

'I won't let him,' he thought. He immediately reached for the storage bag on his waist. At the very least, he was going to destroy it so Alex couldn't get his hands on it.

However, before he could do anything, four golden spears flew at an incredible speed, each of which hit all 4 limbs of the old man.

The spears sent the man into the wall, pinning him there. Alex made a simple gesture and took away the old man's storage bags.

"You bastard! If you're going to kill me, then just kill me," he shouted. "Stop humiliating me."

Alex looked at him and made a thinking face before shaking his head. "Nah, that would be too simple," he said. "I told you, I'm here for revenge with some interest on top. Killing you right away wouldn't be as satisfying."

He took the storage bag and opened it. Inside were various stuff from simple pills to formation flags. He ignored most items and searched for books or talismans.

As he did, he found the first book. He skimmed over a bit to see what it was about and learned that it was an advanced book on formations that even Saints could learn from.

"Oh," he was a little surprised. "I forgot you had quite the knowledge on formation too. That's right, your grandson was the one who taught me how to activate non-metallic formations in the first place. Not that I needed it thanks to my physique."

The old man grunted in pain. He tried to pull his arm away from the wall, but the golden spears were stuck in the wall quite tightly.

Alex put aside the formation book for now and searched for the others. He found the Spiritual Rolling Waves technique pretty soon. It was a technique that allowed one to send out a massive wave of spiritual energy, like the one the old man had used just moments ago.

It was a good technique as it would allow him to use his spiritual attack in a wide area, unlike Heaven's Impact which only targeted a single person each time.

"That's a nice technique," Alex thought and put it aside as well. He continued searching through the storage bag until he finally found it.

"There it is," he spoke out loud, letting the old man hear it as he brought out the book called Spirit Search.

Alex was quite familiar with this technique as he had been the victim of it twice until now.

The first time was because of Fu Zexi who had kidnapped him after the annual tournament in the Cardinal City and had taken him to the forest where he had looked through his memories.

It was only thanks to Zexi's weak avatar and his own devouring ability that Alex had managed to survive through that.

The second time had been when Fu Tao had tried to sneak a peak into his secrets when he was attacked in this very secret realm. Alex had allowed him to see what he wanted to and then subsequently killed him by devouring his avatar.

Both of these instances were ones that Alex had hated for different reasons. For the first one, he was helpless and had barely made out alive. For the second one, he felt like he was betrayed by someone he thought he could call his brother.

However, enough time had passed by now that those events were nothing but distant memories to him. All he remembered at the moment was the impression the skill had made on him.

And now, he had the same skill in his hand. To top it all off, the perfect lab rat was waiting for him to try out the technique on right in front of him.

Chapter 1291 Spirit Search

"You bastard! Kill me," the man shouted. "Kill me if you dare."

"Ssh! Did no one ever teach you to keep quiet while someone is reading close by, old man?" Alex asked and ignored the old man while reading the Spirit Search book.

'Hmm, it's a little more complicated than I had assumed,' he thought. 'So I'm not really searching through one's memories, more so forcing them to recall stuff and see what they recalled, huh?'

He had some idea of how this technique worked, but reading the explanation directly from the source made it much clearer.

"Hmm, I can't upgrade this or even do anything with it, can I?" he thought. "Spiritual energy has an entirely different way in which it functions."

He continued reading for a little longer before he closed the book. "Alright then, let's give this a try," he said and walked toward the old man.

"Huh?" the old man was confused for a second. He had stopped struggling against the golden spear a while ago as he couldn't free himself from it. He had tried different attacks, but the spears were way too strong somehow.

He could only guess that it was thanks to Alex's absurd ability to fight realms over his cultivation base which was causing all this.

"What are you doing?" the old man asked as Alex got closer and closer.

"What do you mean?" Alex asked. "I told you, I'm going to use the Spirit Search on you. You're the little lab rat that I'm going to experiment with."

"What? But how can you use it?" the man struggled. "You only just got the book today."

"Yes, and I learned it," Alex said. "Is that so surprising?"

The old man felt his heart beat faster and faster. Was what he said true? Had he really learned a technique that was sent down from the heavens in less than an hour?

'Just what sort of monster did we offend?'

Alex placed his palm on the old man's head and smiled. "Try not to block it, or you might end up hurting your spirit," he said.

pŒ±ndŒ±---noŒΩ…ê1,—Åo–ú In the next moment, the old man felt a splitting pain in his head as if someone had grabbed his brain from two sides and was ripping it apart.

The pain was unbearable for a few moments, and then everything disappeared.

The old man felt his mind grow serene. He slowly looked around at the open sky and realized he had appeared inside his own Spiritual sea.

Not far away from him, Alex had appeared as well with a body formed entirely of spiritual energy.

"Hmm, I'm surprised how small this is," he said as he looked around.

"You! You dare use my own technique on me?" the man shouted. "Now that you are in my spiritual sea, don't even think of leaving."

The man started launching a barrage of attacks that came flying toward Alex. Alex put up a simple Swirling Water barrier that blocked all of the attacks.

He then sent out one of his own, a metal fist attack.

The fist-shaped attack flew toward the old man and hit the barrier he had put up. The two attacks collided and Alex won, but his attack lost so much energy that it didn't harm the old man at all.

Still, the old man's eyes went wide in shock. "This... Metal?" he couldn't help but speak with a shocked expression.

"You! How did you do that?" the old man asked. Even in the face of danger, his curiosity took over him.

"Hmm? Do what?" Alex asked.

"How do your attacks have an elemental affinity?" the man asked. "That should be impossible."

"Ah, right," Alex thought as he remembered. "It does have that, doesn't it?"

It had been a long time since he had fought a human inside his spiritual sea, so he had forgotten that his spiritual energy was quite unique to others.

Even when normal people used attacks in their spiritual sea, the only energy they could use there would be spiritual energy. As a result, those attacks would only be attacks with normal spiritual energy, even if visually they looked different.

However, for some reason, Alex was able to affect the elements of the attacks he was using. Neither the old man nor Alex could understand why.

Alex wasn't as surprised as the old man, so he sent out a barrage of attacks this time around. He kept an eye on the energy level of the sea below him to see when he could go for the man.

After attacking for a while, the old man was finally at the end of the road with no more spiritual energy to use.

Alex also was close to being out of spiritual energy, but he still had enough to survive or maybe even go out if needed.

Finally, he arrived in front of the old man who couldn't keep his body straight. His mind was hazy with little to no thoughts at all. He could barely tell what was happening around him, let alone do something about it.

Alex finally grabbed the man's head and used the Spirit Search technique. Immediately, he started seeing a hazy world in which he was grabbing his own head.

'It's working,' he thought. He was seeing what the old man was seeing.

"Who is your father?" Alex asked as a test question.

A vision of an old man floated into his mind. The old man was truly old and almost decrepit when he entered closed cultivation. That was the last thing the old man remembered about his father.

"Who do you admire the most?" Alex asked again.

Alex saw the image of a young man. He looked somewhat similar to Fu Tao, but quite different at the same time. He saw the young man wave goodbye and fly away somewhere.

Alex got a little curious.

"Who is this person?" he asked.

An answer came to his mind. This young man was his older brother, one that he had never seen again after that moment.

Alex was a little surprised when he realized who the man exactly was. 'That's the first Emperor of the Crimson Empire, isn't he?' he thought. 'The man that unified the Shattered kingdoms that were left behind by the other continent's war on this land and formed the empire.'

Alex hadn't expected to see that person.

"Do you have any secret treasures?" Alex quickly asked another question.

He got an answer, but it wasn't a very good answer. There were some things back in the Fu clan's treasury, but nothing of what he saw could make him want any of it at all.

Alex asked a few more questions to the man, who could only think about the question to answer.

'This does drain quite a bit of energy,' Alex thought. 'I can't do this any longer.'

Since he had no more need from the old man, he let go of his head and grabbed him by his throat. He squeezed the man as hard as he could until the old man's spirit simply died and disappeared in a bunch of glittering light.

The spiritual sea started crumbling as soon as the spirit died, and Alex quickly left the place, going back into his own body.

Chapter 1292 Ashes

Alex stood up and looked at the old man's body in front of him. The old man had died, his spirit completely gone.

However, his body was still alive. His blood still flowed, his heart still beat, and his dantian still held a golden core in it.

All that was different was that his consciousness no longer was present in his mind. It was like the body was in a coma, except for one which he had no chance of returning from.

'I wonder how long it will take for his body to die without a mind,' Alex thought. A life without an Intent, even an unconscious one would certainly not live for long.

Zexi had died by the time Alex had woken up after devouring him. As a saint realm, the old man's body would most likely stop functioning in just a few days as well.

pŒ±ndŒ±---noŒΩ…ê1,—Åo–ú He shook his head and sighed. He wasn't going to wait for that long.

With a flick of his wrist, a small tongue of fire landed on the man's body and immediately started burning with a heat that could melt even the Starforged Tungsten easily.

The body turned into nothing in just a few seconds, leaving behind not even the ashes of the dead man.

Once he was done, Alex turned around to leave the room.

Just before he left, however, Alex noticed the door to the side of the room and remembered something. He walked through the room, arriving on the other side.

There, he found a skeleton corpse that he had left behind all those years ago.

The corpse of the 8th Undying God.

Alex remembered the face of the illusory man that had helped him during the inheritance. He remembered the person whose memories he still held.

He couldn't help but bow to the corpse before walking into the room.

"I'm sorry I left you here like this, senior," he said softly and picked up the black-robed skeleton. "You must have known you were dying back then, didn't you? You wouldn't have left the inheritance behind otherwise given how much it harms one's spirit."

He carried the skeleton out of the cultivation room and into the main chamber. He used the script on the wall and teleported out of the Time Palace.

He sensed Scarlet in the distance but didn't call for her. He wanted to give a small funeral to the 8th Undying God and he wanted to be alone while he did so.

He flew into the forest to gather up a few sticks and branches. Once he had enough, he arrived outside of the Undying Hall on top of the 5th mountain where he placed the many woods in a simple pyre and placed the Undying God's corpse on top.

Then, he burned one edge of the pyre and stepped back to watch it all catch fire. The black robe caught flame soon enough which burned away to reveal the skeleton inside.

Alex fed the flames his Qi so that it burned hotter and turned the skeleton into ash as well.

After about half an hour, everything had burned to ash. Alex gathered up the ashes and spread them down the valley toward the forest in the distance.

He watched as the wind blew the ashes throughout the demon realm.

"Who was that?" Scarlet spoke from behind him.

"A senior," Alex said without explaining much about their relationship. "He died a long time ago when the Eternal War was still a thing. I decided to give him a funeral today."

"I see," she said. "And the other thing you wanted to do. Did you do it?"

"Yeah, I took care of it," Alex said. "How is the secret realm? It's good, right?"

"It's alright," Scarlet said. "It could be better."

Alex couldn't help but smile. "It's hard to please someone that lived in the immortal lands, isn't it?" he asked.

"Whatever! Are we leaving now?" she asked.

"Uhh, sure," Alex said. "But, I have one more thing to check."

Alex quickly flew away with Scarlet following behind her. He arrived at the 6th mountain of the demon realm, the one known as the North Mountain.

This was the mountain that had allowed him to teleport away from this place and save his life, the mountain that sent him to the Northern Continent.

However, when he arrived at the location, his eyes went wide in surprise. The mountain was no longer there. Everything seemed to have been destroyed, most likely by some saints.

Alex sent his spiritual sense and looked inside the rubble to check for the script inside. As he expected, the script had been completely destroyed.

"No wonder you can't teleport back," he spoke softly. "If this script was fine, I could've come back here a long time ago."

"Is that the teleportation script?" Scarlet asked. "Is there any way to fix it?"

"No, not without a ton of work," Alex said. "You will need to resonate the two scripts to link them, and without knowing the resonance of the script in the secret realm in the Northern Continent, it's impossible."

"I see," Scarlet said. "So, this place is bound to stay this way forever huh?"

"I'm afraid so," Alex said. "At least it's bound to stay this way for the foreseeable future."

After roaming the secret realm around them a little more, Alex activated all the scripts he had shut down previously and let the teleportation aura send him out.

He arrived outside with Scarlet right next to him. He took off the medallion and stared at it for a few seconds.

"Do I need it?" he wondered himself. "There's little to no chance that I will ever be returning here, so I can't imagine needing this."

Still, in a way, Alex owned the demon realm, so he didn't want to give away the medallion just yet. If it was ever necessary for the future, he wouldn't want to regret having thrown it away.

"No point in caring right now," he thought and around. He brought out a boat from his storage ring and flew away with Scarlet, not even glancing at the things he had left behind.

He flew straight into the mainland, wasting absolutely no time anywhere. Looking at the sun, he could tell that it wasn't even noon right now.

He had been quite early with his work today, so he had enough time to do something else before he returned back to his mother.

"Let's take a little detour," Alex said and changed the direction of the boat. Scarlet wondered where they were going, not that she cared for any place specific. She was just here to roam,s o any place was a welcome one for her.

As for Alex, he had a destination in mind, one that apparently had weird things happening there. He was curious as to exactly what was happening, so he was going to have to check it out for himself.

As such, Alex and Scarlet arrived outside the Lightborn city, landing at the bottom of a massive span of mountains that spread far and wide.

This mountain range held one of the bigger sects of the Empire, the Broken Ravine sect. It had something weird happening recently, so, Alex was more than interested to see what was happening inside of this sect exactly.

Chapter 1293 Broken Ravine Sect

The guards at the front got alert when they saw Alex walk up to them.

Alex introduced himself as someone who came on behalf of the emperor to check on the mysterious deaths that were apparently happening inside this sect.

The guards quickly called for someone important and that person arrived a few minutes later.

"Greetings, fellow Daoist. I am the third elder Yuo Jianshuang," the new person introduced himself. "I hear you were sent by the emperor to investigate the deaths. Were the past investigations not conclusive?"

The pale-faced man was quite lean with thin hair that he had tied in a bun. He wore a robe that shifted from green to blue from up to down.

"If it were conclusive, it wouldn't still be mysterious deaths, would it?" Alex asked while his eyes narrowed curiously. "And I wouldn't have to have come here either."

"I suppose that makes sense," the man said. "Are you from the royal family? You don't seem like a Lightsworn to me."

"I asked the Emperor for a favor and he asked me for one, that's all," Alex said with an unfocused face. He seemed to be searching for something.

"Ah, is that so?" the man was surprised. He moved his two hands to gesture to Alex to go inside. "Please come with me—"

Alex's hand suddenly moved and grabbed the man by his wrist. The man tried to pull away, but Alex's grip was tight.

"What? What are you doing?" the man's face changed. "Let go of me."

The guards saw the situation and tried to move it, but for some reason, a golden barrier appeared in front of them, stopping them from advancing.

"Don't move," Alex told the third elder. "I'm searching for something."

He closed his eyes and tried his best to feel something. "It's hidden quite well," he said to himself. "Is this the cause of the deaths?"

"What- what are you talking about?" the man asked.

"There's something inside of your body that will kill you very soon if I don't deal with it," Alex said. "I'll be sending my Qi into your body. Don't resist me or it will only hurt you."

Alex used the man's veins on his wrist to send in his Qi. The third elder felt a warm energy flow into him. He tried to instinctively resist this alien Qi, but he quickly got a hold of himself and let him do what he wanted to.

The third elder could already tell just by his grip that Alex was too strong for him and resisting him wouldn't be a good idea at all. Instead, he had called for help just in case something bad happened.

People were already rushing in his direction.

"Hmm?" Alex suddenly made a sound. "Ah! It's hiding inside his dantian."

Suddenly, the man felt something move inside of his dantian and flow out from him. It hurt a bit as it was rushed out completely from within his body.

It came out of his wrist, a vile inky-black Qi that simply disappeared into Alex. As soon as this black stuff was gone, color returned to the pale-faced old man.

The man felt as if life had flowed back into him, his breathing getting a lot easier, his body invigorated.

"What did you do to me?" he couldn't help but ask. "What was that black stuff?"

"Do you know about death aura?" Alex asked the man.

"Death aura?" the man shook his head. "There's an aura of death?"

"Basically," Alex said. "It was festering inside of your dantian. Cultivate with it enough and it will slowly spread to all parts of your body. Or rather, it already had. You will need to consume a lot of healing pills afterward or the death aura might return."

A group of people flew out of the sect, with a woman in the lead.

"Who dares attack one of our own?" the woman shouted out loud as soon as she arrived.

"Sect leader, it was a mistake," the man turned around to explain. "He wasn't attacking me, I was mistaken."

The woman's face changed slightly. "Huh? You said you were in danger," she said.

"I did, but it turns out I was not. Fellow Daoist here was trying to help me, and I mistook his grace for hostility," the man said.

"Third elder!" the woman shouted suddenly. She felt embarrassed that she had come with so many people, only to threaten someone who was helping her people.

"My apologies, fellow Daoist," the woman said. "We were under the impression that you were here to cause trouble."

"I'm not offended," Alex said and looked around at them. He tried to feel the death aura from this group as well, and to his surprise, if he focused hard enough, he could sense it in them as well."

"You!" one of the people in the group called out suddenly. "Are you... Yu Ming?"

The moment the words 'Yu Ming' flew out of the man's mouth, the entire group flinched. To these people, the name Yu Ming was like a curse.

It was because of this Yu Ming that their previous sect leader had taken away so many of their talented elders, only to be slaughtered in the Demon realm.

It was because of him that their sect leader was slaughtered right in front of their sect by a beast while they could only stay back and watch.

It was because of him that their sect had gone downhill the past couple of decades and was having a hard time getting back on track.

"Yu Ming? Isn't he dead?" the woman asked. She looked closely at Alex and realized that his face did in fact look similar to the young man that she had learned was dead.

Was that not true?

"Are you really Yu Ming?" she asked.

"I am," Alex said. "I would appreciate it if you used my real name Alex though as I've introduced myself to your guards."

The woman wasted no time and quickly bowed toward him. "I would like to humbly apologize to you for what our sect master did in the past. You did not deserve what had happened to you. Please tell us if we can do anything to help."

Even if everyone in the Broken Ravine sect believed that everything bad had happened because of Yu Ming, they still wouldn't openly offend him.

They were way too scared of the beast that had Alex's back.

"It's alright," Alex said. "Your sect leader died, so I have no grudge against the other elders and disciples."

eŒ±glesn·¥èŒΩel Alex slowly looked at the man that had recognized him first. The man had a sunken face with dark circles around his eyes as if he hadn't slept for days. His body looked like it lacked sustenance as well, while his head was completely shaved as if to hide his thinning hair.

"Oh, I almost didn't recognize you there, brother Guo Chiang," Alex spoke with a surprised expression. "How have you been doing?"

3 decades back, Guo Chiang used to be the strongest person in the younger generation. During their quarterfinal battle, this was the man that had defeated Alex in a single attack using his Sword Aura.

He always looked pale and deathly in the past, and so did his master that was the sect leader back then. It was only now that Alex realized that it was because of the death aura inside of them.

Chapter 1294 The Ravine

'They are all suffering by death aura for some reason,' Alex thought as he looked at everyone that had now landed next to him. The amount of death aura in each person was minuscule in comparison to someone like the Mad immortal who could fuel Godslayer to become a powerhouse for a single attack.

But, the death aura had hidden so deep inside their dantian that normal pills couldn't help them relieve it at all. Every time they cultivated, they would draw from that death aura, passing it along to the rest of their body.

That was why everyone from this sect looked so deathly in the first place. They all were cultivating with death aura without realizing it.

"I'm here under the Emperor's request to check the mysterious deaths. Would you mind taking me inside?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the sect leader quickly said. "You all can return. I will take care of our guest."

The group all flew away, leaving behind only Alex and the sect leader.

"What would you like to do now, fellow Daoist?" she asked.

The woman was only in the Saint Foundation realm and hadn't even entered the Saint Core realm yet. She was rather weak when compared to the previous sect leader, which was one of the reasons why the sect was slowly degrading over time.

"I am not exactly sure," Alex said. "Would you mind explaining about the sect and how the people that had died until now are connected?"

"Of course," the woman said. "It's no secret anyway."

She soon started explaining the history of the Broken Ravine sect.

The history of the Broken Ravine sect was one that even the sect leader couldn't tell was true or not. It was a story passed down since long time ago, but there were no records of the story, so it was hard to verify it.

According to her, before the sect ever came into existence, this place used to be a normal mountain range. At some point in the past, however, a fight took place close by that was of proportion that had never been seen in this world in present times.

That was a fight of Immortals.

No one knew who exactly the two figures were, but one of them was said to be a swordsman. And, he had killed his opponent right here in this mountain range using an attack that had destroyed half of the mountain range.

In a place of what should be tall mountains, all that remained was a deep ravine carved out by the attack of said Immortal.

The sect had formed on top of this mountain range many, many years after and was thus named the Broken Ravine sect because of the geography of this place.

Alex remembered learning something similar a long time ago only in less detail. The woman continued her explanation of how the sect was and how the disciples were. She went into some detail about the Outer sect, Inner sect, and Core sect.

Alex nodded as he listened while looking around the sect as they walked in to question some elders and disciples if they knew anything. The gate lead directly to all three different disciple sects, which made it easier for everyone.

As Alex walked, he noticed a young woman walking by with the smallest hint of death aura inside her. Another disciple walked past and they had the same too. Everyone had a death aura, and Alex needed to figure out where it came from.

As he walked, he noticed someone that did not have a death aura at all.

"Oh?" he stopped and looked at the young man. "Young man, can you come here?"

The young man turned and saw the sect leader with Alex. He quickly bowed and walked up to the two. "How may I help you senior?" he asked.

"How long have you been in this sect?" Alex asked the young man.

"12 years, senior," the young man answered after thinking for a few seconds.

Alex turned to look at the sect leader. "Is that a long time in the sect?" he asked.

"That's... about average for a disciple. They usually spend about 20 to 30 years before graduating, so he must be a new Inner Disciple," she said.

"So, he's not a new disciple, is he?" Alex asked. "Can you tell me a bit about yourself in this sect?"

The young man introduced himself and told Alex about what his daily life was like in the sect. The young man was a formation expect and wanted to become one of the best in the sect.

He worked hard every day and rarely ever trained to be anything other than a formation expert.

The young man walked away, leaving the two of them there afterward. "Did you learn anything from him?" the sect leader asked.

"Not really," Alex said. "Let's ask some other ones too."

As the sect leader brought him deeper and deeper into the sect, Alex learned more and more about the disciples and what they did. Some of them had a death aura in them, some had not.

Soon, the commonalities amongst the ones that did became so clear that the sect leader herself felt fear for her entire sect.

Every single person that had ever gone down the ravine to train had been affected by it. Everyone that did go down there was the best of the best of the sect.

"The ravine is the problem?" the sect leader refused to believe it. "But we've been training there since centuries ago. It can't be true that it is causing all the problems, can it?"

eŒ±glesn·¥èŒΩel "All signs point to it being the problem," Alex said. "I will find out for sure after I go check it out myself. Can you tell me why you send people down to the ravine in the first place? Are there resources down there? Or is the Qi denser there?"

"None of that," the woman said. She hesitated a little bit, unable to come to a conclusion on whether she should answer it or not.

"I can't help you if you don't tell me anything," Alex said.

The woman sighed in the end and explained. "The Ravine is filled with a sword aura left behind by the immortal figure of the past. We use it to train our cultivator to form their own Sword Intent, Qi, and hopefully, Sword Aura."

"Hmm, that's right," Alex remembered. "Brother Guo Chiang used Sword Aura against me during our battle to defeat me with a single strike. He wasn't even a Saint back then. Was this where he learned it all?"

"Guo Chiang is one of our strongest right now," the woman said. "He's our 2nd Elder in the sect."

"Is that so," Alex said. "Anyway, I'll have to go to the ravine. For the time being, call back everyone so they don't burden my investigation."

"Sure," the woman said. "If the ravine has some problem that is harming our elders and disciples, then I couldn't be happier to help."

Soon, the order went out and people came out of the ravine in droves. Some complained, but with the sect leader handling the process, the complaints died down soon enough.

"It's ready," she said.

Alex arrived at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the massive ravine that was in front of him. It was here that he was going to have to find the source of the Death aura and destroy it.

Chapter 1295 Darkness

Alex jumped down into the ravine, the sword aura moving around him. He could feel the intent behind the attack that had left the sword aura. It was a mixture of killing intent with cutting intent.

The swordsman that was responsible for this had cut down the entire mountain range to form a ravine with just his Sword, so it was overflowing with sword aura.

Even generations later, the ravine still lingered with the same aura, albeit far weaker than what was probably used all those years ago.

"Can you sense the death aura?" Scarlet asked.

Alex slowly landed down in the ravine where the sunlight only reached the ground because it was noon. The cliff-like walls protruding from the mountains cut up mountains around him and wouldn't allow for sunlight to reach here at any other time.

His vision shifted so that he started seeing more than just the ordinary world. Colors flooded his vision, one of every shade. However, the one that was most prominent was the white one.

The sword aura was the only thing he could see.

"I don't think I can find it," he said while trying his best. "The Sword aura is much stronger than the death energy, so it's quite impossible unless I'm close to the source."

He quickly reached into his mind and called out to Godslayer who was sleeping.

"What?" Godslayer asked in an annoyed voice. "Why are you bothering me?"

"Are you still absorbing the energy you took from that replica of yours?" Alex asked.

"You woke me up just to ask that?" Godslayer's voice sounded even more annoyed.

"No. Look at where we are," Alex said. "This place is overflowing with sword aura, but there is something that is producing Death aura in here. I need your help locating it. You are more attuned with death aura than I am."

"Hmm, death aura?" Godslayer's attention was finally piqued. "Where?"

"I need your help to find it," Alex said. He explained the general present situation to Godslayer, who could only come up with a single answer.

"If it's hiding death aura inside people's dantian, then it has intelligence," he said. "You have to be careful."

Alex nodded.

The ravine was narrow with barely 20 meters of width at the base. However, it was very, very long, with numerous cracks along the side that one could stay in.

Alex quickly flew over to the very end of the ravine further than which there was no sword aura. Then, he turned around and slowly made his way to the other side.

There was a small stream in the ravine, barely deep enough to reach one's shin. There were very few insects and absolutely no animals. Plants grew along the side of the walls, of which very few seemed to hold any special properties.

Due to the abundance of sword aura, life simply wasn't thriving as much as it should have.

Alex continued down the river, his senses heightened to the extreme.

"It's quite weird now that I think about it," Alex said and asked Godslayer. "I mostly just find Death aura. Why is Darkness aura so hard to come by?"

"Death is a common occurrence. Everyone dies including beasts and plants. As they die, the Qi in their body slowly changes, turning to Death aura, which makes it so easily available," Godslayer said. "But darkness, on the other hand, isn't easy to come by because it can't have many sources."

"Is it because most places aren't truly dark?" Alex asked. "Because most places have light, darkness cannot fester."

"No, that's just what darkness truly is," Godslayer said. "What you're describing falls more under shadows than darkness."

"True darkness is not the absence of light in a physical sense, but the lack of kindness, morality, or even justice. It is the aura of human corruption."

"True darkness can only grow in the hearts of ones who have been wronged, and those who seek to right this wrong by giving up that which made them kind and moral. When these people let themselves be corrupted by evil, that is when darkness truly forms."

"That is also why the presence of an absurd amount of darkness corrupts people, why they forget themselves and become evil," Godslayer explained. "Darkness once acquired is easily fueled. Once corrupted, anyone can feed the darkness, which makes them stronger than they ever were."

"It then becomes a power that powers itself, and that is how anyone that is corrupted by darkness usually ends up dying. Because they don't realize that something cannot be created from nothing."

"The darkness that powers them comes from themselves. When nothing is left in their body to power the darkness, the corrupted individuals die," Godslayer explained. "That was why I had to continue changing hosts so much back when I was corrupted by darkness too. Because I always ran out of the fuel to power my darkness."

"Darkness brings them down to death's door, which inadvertently also powers me."

"That is also why you can't find Darkness aura so easily, for anything that has unrestrained darkness usually ends up burning itself away to death," Godslayer explained.

"I see," Alex said. Understanding what Godslayer said gave him a new perspective on life. "Darkness isn't something to vie for, is it?"

He continued walking through the ravine with Scarlet on his shoulders. Scarlet was on the lookout for anything, but due to her lack of understanding of Death aura, she couldn't be of much help.

Thankfully, Godslayer was looking out just the same as well.

"Stop!" Godslayer shouted all of a sudden, surprising Alex. A second later, Alex sensed it as well.

He barely noticed it from the corner of his vision, but a small black aura had weaved itself through the sword aura and entered his body.

Before he could react, it had settled itself into his dantian.

"What the hell?" he couldn't help but be surprised. "How was it able to conceal itself so well until the end?"

"I don't know," Godslayer said. "Is it strong?"

Alex closed his eyes and looked into his dantian. With a thought, the golden core in his dantian produced a bit of Qi that it was holding. This Qi was fully yellow in color and was the most potent Yang Qi Alex had produced in a long time.

In the next moment, the death aura simply vanished, like a drop of water on a red-hot iron.

"Scarlet," Alex called out. "Let me check your dantian."

"Huh? Why?" Scarlet asked.

"You might have been infected by the death aura too," Alex said. With Scarlet's allowed, he checked her dantian using his Qi and spiritual sense.

A moment later, he cleared away the death aura in Scarlet's body. "It might be better if you went away for a while, Scarlet. I can handle death aura, but I can't protect you from it," he said.

"But you need me," Scarlet said. "I'm stronger than you."

"If it's strong, I'll call you out," he said. "For now, you need to hide."

Scarlet grumbled for a moment and quickly disappeared into the tattoo that was her beast space. Once she was gone, Alex finally focused on his surrounding.

"It came from nearby, didn't it?" he asked.

"Yes, it's nearby," Godslayer said. "Move around a little. We should be able to find it soon."

Chapter 1296 Creation

Alex walked around the area for a little while before Godslayer finally tracked down the source of the death aura.

"There, in that crevice. There's something there." With Godslayer's message, Alex quickly looked in that direction. Sure enough, he could also sense something in there.

A flash of black would appear in his vision from time to time before hiding itself. Alex finally released his Demon Eyes and looked at the crevice with normal vision.

Since whatever inside was most likely conscious, he had to be careful in his approach.

He took slow steps when moving toward it, concealing himself as much as possible so that he wouldn't stand out in the sea of sword aura.

He walked into the crevice itself and finally, he could clearly sense the death aura.

'So strong,' he thought. The temperature in this place was several degrees lower than what was outside due to the abundance of death aura, which was nothing but Yin Qi in the first place.

"Hmm?" Alex noticed something in the crevice, not on the ground or the corner, but attached to the wall about 2 meters above him. It was a small object that seemed to be made of stone, metal, and wood all at the same time.

The texture was smooth and rough at the same time, making it look very weird to Alex. 'What's going on?' he couldn't help but ask himself.

The object wasn't changing at all but to all of his senses, it did.

As he looked closer, he saw its shape more clearly. It looked like a statue of a man sitting crosslegged with his palms together in a praying pose, carved to perfection.

It was small, but at the same time, it was full of Death aura.

Godslayer looked at the thing closely, feeling the death aura himself. He could tell something was up with the idol that was stuck to the wall. But what?

Was it the death aura in the idol? He didn't think so. Was it then the idol itself that was giving him some weird feeling?

'What am I missing?' Godslayer thought. Then, he noticed something that even someone from the immortal lands wouldn't recognize so easily.

The idol he was looking at somehow both existed and didn't at the same time.

"Holy.... Shit!" Godslayer couldn't help but say when he finally realized what the Idol was. "Is that... a Divine Creation?"

"A what?" Alex asked. He couldn't tell what Godslayer meant, but it did sound amazing. Having Divine in its name, it was most likely not something so simple.

"But how can such a thing have aura attached to it? It's not supposed to accept any aura at all," Godslayer spoke to himself. As he did, he realized something. "Wait, didn't you say someone was killed here previously?"

"Huh? Yeah, some immortal killed another immortal, or so the legend goes," Alex explained.

"Hmm... maybe it was not the immortals that fought that day," Godslayer said. "But rather... Divinities."

"What?" Alex suddenly freaked out. "A divinity? That thing up there belongs to someone in the Divine realm?"

Alex moved back a bit. The Divine realm was something he couldn't even hope to reach as he was right now. He hadn't even reached the Immortal realm, while the Divine realm was even higher than that.

The only person from the Divine realm he had ever seen was senior Yang back in the Central continent, and there was no doubt as to just how strong he was.

eŒ±glesn·¥èŒΩel "How is this possible," Godslayer continued speaking to himself. "A Divine Creation should not hold any aura in it. It's not supposed to work like that. In the first place, how can it be still here if its creator died."

The facts contradicted each other, or so Godslayer thought. When he slowed down and thought about what were facts and what were rumors, the answer became clear.

It was a fact that what he was looking at was a Divine Creation. It was a fact that the Idol held death aura in it. It was a fact that when the Idol's creator died, it disappeared as well.

What was not a fact but only a rumor was that the Immortal that was said to have created this ravine had killed his opponent.

But what if... what if he had not? What if his opponent was still alive?

Of course, it would be impossible for someone to remain as they were without their Divine creation. When separated from their Divine Creation, someone would lose all concept of themselves, and be nothing more than a zombie acting only on instinct. Such a person would certainly die every single time.

To make sure that sort of thing never happened, Divinites had to never let out their Divine Creation outside their body, or at least keep it close by.

Or... in the case when they lose their body...

"They have to hide inside their Divine Creation," Godslayer slowly spoke to himself.

"Young man," he called out to Alex when he was certain as to what was going on. "Be careful. That idol up there, it holds within it the spirit of a Divinity."

Alex's face paled when he heard that. Without hesitation, he stepped out of the crack in fear and tried to run away just to be safe.

"Stop," Godslayer said. "You don't have to leave."

"Are you sure?" Alex asked, stopping some distance away. "If what you're saying is true, then I have to leave."

"I'm certain what I'm saying is true," Godslayer said. "But, things might not be as serious as it sounds."

"What do you mean?" Alex asked while calming down a little.

"If what I said was to be taken at face value, and the spirit held any sort of intention to harm us, it would have killed us already," Godslayer said. "That, or the spirit would've tried to take your body or any other humans that have come here."

"You're not wrong," Alex said. "It's only sending some Death aura into everyone that comes across."

"It's probably doing so instinctively. It's either a defense mechanism to kill anyone who comes by or it's trying to send its spirit into them, but all that's coming out is Death aura."

"There's probably one of two things happening right now," Godslayer said. "The first possibility is that the divine spirit is hiding within its creation, bidding for the time it can come back alive."

"However, I don't believe that's the case. A divine spirit, even if it were hiding would have died to Heavenly Judgment a long time ago in this realm."

"What I think is really happening is that the divine spirit is all but dead. It has lost its concept of self and is only hanging along to life because it's inside of its creation."

"That also explains why there is so much death aura in that idol. Something is quite literally dying inside," Godslayer explained.

Alex thought for a moment about what Godslayer had said and asked, "How certain are you about this?"

"Trust me. I know a thing or two about death," Godslayer replied. "That spirit inside that Idol is dying. If we can kill it completely and isolate that Death aura so that it doesn't run wild, then it can become the perfect food for me that should last me a long time."

Chapter 1297 A Vessel

﻿

"Destroy the Divine spirit, huh?" Alex asked. "I think it's better to call Brother Shen here. We might need him in case something goes wrong."

"No, no need to call anyone," Godslayer said. "You can do it yourself."

"But it's a Divine spirit. Isn't it better to be careful when we're trying to mess with it?" Alex asked. "Besides, I doubt I can get rid of it on my own. Even weak, it must be much stronger than me."

"No, it's not strong," Godslayer said. "Rather, the spirit should be so weak that you can get rid of it without even trying."

"No way!" Alex said. "We can't be that lucky right?"

"We're not," Godslayer said. "The real problem comes after we erase the spirit. Because a Divine creation disappears after its creator dies, we will have a massive amount of concentrated death aura on our hands without a vessel."

"More likely than not, it will immediately spread throughout the ravine and even further away to the point it will cause a major catastrophe," Godslayer said.

"So… we need a vessel for the moment when the spirit and the creation disappear, right?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Godslayer said. "Do you have any idea what we can use?"

"I have a few swords made from Starforged Tungsten. Will that work?" Alex asked. "They're nowhere near as good as Midnight though."

"A sword, huh?" Godslayer thought for a moment. "It could work— no, it won't work. We need something else."

"Huh? Is the Starforged Tungsten, not a good enough material?" Alex asked.

"No, it's a good material, but the sword simply won't be good enough to hold all the death aura left behind here. We will need something that is either stronger or larger. What else do you have?" Godslayer asked.

"I have some ores, but I was planning to make some swords with it. Should I smelt it?" Alex asked. There was Memory that was most likely large enough, but he didn't want to use it if possible.

"You have so many things from the immortal lands, right? Bring something out," Godslayer said.

"Even if you say that…" Alex hesitated a little. What could he bring out exactly? Most of what he got from the Immortal lands were knowledge or skills. There were barely any items that could be used.

His first thought was the sword that Godslayer had been in, but that sword was still somewhere inside his soul space, so that wouldn't work. His second thought was to use the Stone sword that contained the Spiritual Providence technique.

The stone sword was large and was made up of a material that was chosen by the Weapons god. It was certainly not something so simple.

However, Alex didn't want to use it. He had already made a plan to return it to Senior Yang since he had no more use for it, and the senior could use it when he returned to the Sky God's palace in the future.

Any little thing that could help him be forgiven would help Ronron just that much more in becoming the next Sky God.

But then again, was there something else he could use?

'Urgh, I left the puppet behind with Ronron,' Alex thought. 'Maybe that could've been used.'

In the end, there was nothing he could use at all. He owned nothing that could—

"Wait a second," he thought to himself. "Could it work?"

He quickly brought out something, which floated in front of his eyes, through which Godslayer saw the item as well.

"Oh, that's perfect," Godslayer said.

What floated in front of them was the Blood God's Manual. As an artifact created by the gods, it was certainly made with one of the best materials.

Also, with how large his Soul space was, the chances of the artifact with death aura contaminating the other things in his soul space was virtually non-existent.

He could also easily pull out the artifact in case it caused trouble inside his soul space.

"Hmm… I hope it won't ruin the artifact though," Alex said.

"It won't. The artifact isn't a living thing that can be affected by death aura. If it does end up causing problems, we can change it later on," Godslayer said. He seemed overly excited to get started with the things since the death aura in there would feed him and help him grow back to his original strength for a long time.

Alex took a moment to come to terms with using the book artifact. The book itself was only used as a storage artifact for his blood beasts. It also conveniently fixed any weaker beasts just by him pouring some blood of his into it.

He wasn't worried about the blood beasts, however. What he was worried he would ruin were the 3 pages that he still had to unlock. Because he didn't know what they did, there was a chance.

In the end, however, he had nothing else he could use to contain all of the death aurae, so he could only agree.

"Fine, let's start," he said. "What do I do first?"

"Bring the idol out of the wall for now," Godslayer said.

Alex nodded and walked back into the crevice before appearing in front of the idol. He floated in the air next to it and reached for it with his hand.

The idol seemed to react to his arm, hiding what little death aura it was producing. Alex grabbed onto the idol and pulled it out.

Surprisingly, the idol had quite a weight. At the very least, it was as heavy as Midnight was.

'Is it true weight? Or is it just how it's reacting to me?' he wondered.

"Alright, the next two steps are crucial and you can't mess them up," Godslayer said. "Send your spiritual sense into Creation and destroy the spirit that is inside. As soon as that happens, constrain the aura to that region and place it into the Manual."

"You must make sure it happens at once or we could lose some of the death aurae," Godslayer said.

"Don't worry, I think I know what to do," Alex said.

At once, he used his Dao of Space to separate the space surrounding the Idol and him. With that separation, he used his spiritual sense on the Idol itself.

He didn't know what he was to expect, but when his senses entered the Creation, he realized just how much death aura was inside of it.

If it were something physical, the pressure buildup would have caused it to explode by now.

'Find the spirit,' he thought and went through the death aura to search for what the spirit could be.

At the center of the dark death aura, there was a small crystal-like fragment that seemed to be on the verge of disappearing.

'Is that the spirit?' Alex wondered. He poked it with his spiritual sense and found the fragment moving away as if to protect itself.

'This is it,' Alex thought and used the full force of his spiritual sense. The tiny fragment of crystal suddenly broke into a million pieces with no difficulty at all.

At the same time, the idol he was holding vanished into thin air as if it never existed.

The very next moment, a battle started between Alex and the death aura that was released all of a sudden.

The Blood God's Manual appeared in the center of it all as Alex started forcing the death aura into the book.

Using two Daos at once was hard. Using two Daos that had nothing to do with each other at once were many times harder.

While Alex used his Dao of Space to separate the space around him, he also had to use his Dao of Death to control the aura in front of him.

The Blood God's Manual started shaking all of a sudden. Alex could feel something inside the manual rejecting this onslaught of Death aura that he was trying to push into it.

'Shit! I forgot about the spirit inside the book itself,' Alex thought. Now, he had to split his attention to calm down the spirit as well.

He tried to use his spiritual sense to calm it down, but it wouldn't listen to him at all. His intent didn't work and his connection with the manual certainly didn't.

Alex started getting frustrated as he couldn't even think what exactly he could do. 'God, I hope this works,' he thought.

Suddenly, he placed his palm onto the book's cover and started bleeding. As soon as the sweet blood touched the leather cover of the Blood God's manual, a mouth opened up on the front cover at started sucking away the blood.

While the book was distracted, Alex forced the Death aura into it, which as he had hoped worked. He did this for a few minutes before pulling back his arm.

He thought the book was satisfied with his blood. However, the moment he let go, the spirit in the book started whining again, rejecting the blood aura.

Alex had to unfortunately let it suck more of his blood to quell its anger.

Dao of Space, Dao of Death, and now feeding his blood to a book, Alex worked on multiple tasks at once, putting quite a strain on his focus.

At the next moment, he had to use one more Dao.

He used the Dao of Blood Aura to transform his Qi into Blood aura so that the new blood his Undying physique was creating could also be just as tasty for the book.

Alex had to continue performing these 4 tasks all at once for nearly half an hour before all of the death aurae inside of that space were fully gone.

Only then was the job done and he could finally stop.

Chapter 1298 Return

Alex was breathless for a few moments while he held the book in his hands. He was also severely lacking in Qi and blood at the moment, which made him feel even more tired.

'It ate so much blood that I thought another page would open up for a moment,' he thought.

The Blood God's Manual now held an unimaginable amount of death aura, which it wasn't letting go of at all. It was the perfect vessel to keep it contained until necessary.

"Amazing," Godslayer said. "Let me know when you find some Darkness aura too. I can only consume the two of them together and grow. Alright, I'm going back to sleep now."

Godslayer's excited voice quietened down, leaving Alex alone in the ravine.

Alex spent a few minutes cultivating to get back what little Qi he could for the time being. Once done, he called out to Scarlet to let her know that he was done.

"What was it? How did you do it?" Scarlet got curious.

"It was just some object with a lot of death aura. I took away the death aura, and it's fixed now," he said.

He had to lie about the Divine creation as mentioning it would cause more problems than solve it. If by some chance it led to the discovery of Godslayer inside of him, the senior from the Central continent might end up destroying him while he was weak.

As much as a problem Godslayer was to others, he also solved a lot of things for Alex. Also, in the years he had lived with him, he had come to appreciate the sword spirit which had grown quite a lot.

"Let's leave," he said and flew out of the ravine. The sect leader and many other elders were patiently waiting for him to come out. When he did, they silently waited for him to say something.

"It's done. You guys should be free to learn the sword aura without killing yourself now," Alex said.

The sect leader gave a deep sigh of relief. "Thank you so much," she said. "I can't imagine how I can ever repay you."

"You don't have to do anything," Alex said. "As I said earlier, I'm doing this because of a favor I owe the Emperor."

"Ah right, gather up your disciples and elders so I can get rid of the aura inside of them."

A few minutes later, there was a line of people waiting for him to help them.

Alex cultivated while he worked on their death aura. About a few of the way through, he had already started realizing that he wasn't needed here at all.

In fact, the death aura was starting to disappear. Perhaps it was because of the disappearance of the divine spirit that the death aura no longer seemed to hide inside their dantian as well.

So, Alex decided to not help the one that did not need his help urgently. He called the ones that were on the death door and started treating them only.

Alex left the Broken Ravine sect sometime late afternoon after he removed the death aura hiding in everyone.

He stopped by the Lightsong City which was close by to see what was happening with the players.

Once he learned that they were all properly being transferred, either using massive boats or in burst with the teleportation formation, he made his way toward the radiant city to meet the emperor once more.

It was evening once more when he arrived at the Radiant City. The sun had gone down when he was led to the Throne room.

"You're back already. I thought I wouldn't be seeing you for a long time," the emperor said.

"I was planning on coming a few days later initially, but I decided to move that forward a little bit," Alex said. "I got rid of the problem in the Broken Ravine sect. There was something that was causing them to die early. It has been fixed now."

"Oh," the Emperor hadn't expected that. "Thank you."

Alex nodded and reached into his robes before bringing out a handful of storage bags. He judged the number for a bit and decided that much was right.

He tossed it at the emperor who swiftly caught it and gave it a curious look. "What... are these?" he asked, looking at the 20 different storage bags.

"Look inside," Alex said and waited for the emperor's reaction.

As expected, the emperor's eyes went wide when he suddenly stood up. "This!" he shouted out loud.

He had expected to get some pills or alchemy recipes given who Alex was, but what he saw was something he would never have expected.

He looked at another one and another one. By the time he was done with all 20, his surprise had disappeared and all that remained was fear.

Fear that he was about to get into a debt that he couldn't possibly repay.

"Why did you give me 20 Saint Spirit veins?" the emperor asked. "Do you want something in return?"

Alex chuckled a bit. "No, I need nothing," he said. "I'm simply returning them to you since it belongs here."

The emperor was a little confused. "It belongs here?" he asked. "What do you mean by that?"

"Ah," Alex realized something. "You don't know about the war from over 4 thousand years ago, do you? If I remember correctly, the Wei clan became the royal family only over a thousand years ago."

"War?" the emperor asked. "What war?"

Alex gave a small explanation of the war that had ravaged this place in the past and how they had lost almost all of their Saint Spirit veins.

It was only after the explanation that he fully understood that Alex was returning it to him.

"Why?" he asked. "You could've kept it and made use of it to improve your own kingdom."

"Yes, but I wouldn't feel right doing so," Alex said. "In a sense, I always felt indebted to the Western Continent, both this and the other empire. So, if I had made use of those spirit veins, I would've only ever felt guilt."

"Instead, I'm returning them to you, and with this, the debt I feel I owe will have been paid as well," Alex said.

With this, he will have cut off most of his connection to the Western Continent.

"Do whatever you want with it," Alex said. "My job here is done."

The emperor himself showed Alex to the gate from where Alex swiftly departed. Late evening, Alex arrived at the Flowing Brush sect and met up with his mother who was with Qin Shan.

After talking for a while, Alex gave him a Saint Spirit vein as well.

"This is for all you've done for my mother in my absence," he told the old man. "Thank you, senior Qin."

Qin Shan couldn't help but be surprised by what he had received. He was sad that his disciples were going to be leaving for a long time, but he had gotten something in exchange that would help improve the rest of his sect's disciples.

Alex and Helen stayed there for the night, and the very next morning, they said their farewells and returned back to the Beast realm.

Chapter 1299 Loss And Gain

Alex arrived back in the Beast realm and told Bai Jingshen that he had done it.

"Alright, I will have beasts stationed and waiting for the people to come," he said. "Once there are enough for them, we can let them in."

Alex nodded. He looked to the side, trying to sense Pearl's connection to him, but perhaps because of what was happening to him, he couldn't sense it at all.

He felt like he had no need to ask what was going on with him, but he still did as hearing would help him feel relieved.

"You're going to return to the Crimson Empire?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"Yes, I have some tasks to complete there. Speaking of which, are the materials I asked for ready?" Alex asked.

"My wives should have the. I'll ask them to get it to you," Bai Jingshen said.

"Great," Alex said. "Do we know how the migration is going for the players in the north?"

"Hao'er came here yesterday and I've sent some beast to aid with the migration. I can't tell how long it will take, but it shouldn't take that long, maybe 2 weeks," Bai Jingshen said.

Alex thought for a bit. "2 weeks huh. I hope Pearl can get out by that time," he said.

"What will you do if he doesn't come out in time? Will you wait for him?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"No, I'll leave," Alex said nochalantly.

Bai Jingshen was a little surprised by that attitude. "I thought you cared quite a lot about Pearl," he said. "Why do you want to leave suddenly?"

"Because I can come back at any time to get him," Alex said.

"Hmm? How? Are you planning to ask the senior from Sky God's palace to send you here?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"I could do that," Alex said. "But I won't, since I have my own plans. Anyway, I think I will finish making the pills for you first, Brother Shen. I should be done in a week. After that, I can go back."

"I'll send your mother back first then," Bai Jingshen said. "She can go spend some time with her family."

Alex nodded. "I will get started with the pills then."

Alex quickly left for the alchemy room with the ingredients given to him by one of Bai Jingshen's wives and started making the pills.

A few minutes later, lightning bolts struck the palace multiple times. Bai Jingshen had seen it before, but he still was surprised to see someone in such a weak realm manage to form pill clouds.

He counted the number of lightning bolts that fell from heaven. Previously, after 5 lightning bolts, the pill clouds would disappear.

However, this time around, even after the 5th lightning bolt struck the palace, the pill cloud still hung around.

The White Tiger felt gleeful knowing that the next lightning bolt was coming down as well. As the 6th lightning bolt struck the palace, he was happy to know that most of his pills were going to have 6 pill veins.

The most a pill could have was 9 pill veins. As such, a pill with 6 pill veins was more than half as good as the most perfect a saint pill could be.

And his beasts were going to grow using these very pills.

However, as he thought that, the White Tiger's face changed as shock filled him. He quickly looked up in surprise as he realized the pill clouds hadn't disappeared at all.

"Another one? 7th pill vein?" the tiger looked flabbergasted.

7 pill veins were just 1 more pill vein than 6, but 1 pill vein was that much harder to get and made that much more impact. With 7 pill veins, the pill was that much closer to the perfection that was physically possible for a Saint pill.

The 7th lightning bolt struck the palace, surprising anyone that was keeping track of the numbers.

"That young man... just 10 days ago he was making 5 veined pills, and now he's making 7—"

The tiger's words stopped in his mouth when he slowly realized that the pill clouds had yet to disappear.

"What? How is this possible?" he could only say in surprise.

As far as he was aware, the strength required to stop the lightning bolts was either half of that realm or over that realm.

A Saint Condensation realm cultivator, if he formed a pill cloud, required the 5th realm of cultivation to stop a single lightning bolt. To stop the 2nd lightning bolt, he needed to reach the Saint Foundation realm.

Similarly, the 3rd lightning bolt required Saint Foundation 5th realm, and the 4th one required cultivation above the Saint Foundation realm.

Considering that, the 6th pill vein required a cultivation base higher than the Saint Core realm. The 7th pill vein required a cultivation base of Saint Soul 5th realm.

As for the 8th one, it required a cultivation base above the Saint Soul realm.

It required the Saint Transformation realm.

"How... how does the young man have a cultivation prowess of Saint Transformation realm?" the tiger couldn't help but ask himself. It simply didn't make any sense that someone who had just reached the Saint Core 5th realm could have such a high cultivation prowess.

There was no way Alex could just have an entire cultivation realm and a half with what he strength he had currently.

Then...

"His Blood aura?" Bai Jingshen wondered. That was the only possibility that remained, and after giving some thought to it, he came to the conclusion that that was indeed the case.

The 8th lightning bolt fell onto the palace and disappeared. A moment after, the pill clouds disappeared as well.

As long as the final lightning bolt had been stopped, Alex will have made an 8-veined pill.

In the absence of the very best, one couldn't find a pill greater than this.

* * * * *

Alex took a deep breath after he finished making the 8-veined pill. He sighed in relief after realizing that he hadn't made a mistake with the risk he had just taken.

On the 7th lightning bolt, he was already surprised that his Qi alone could stop it. So, he decided to give the next bolt a try with his Qi and Blood aura.

The combined power his Qi and Blood aura produced was barely enough to protect the pill. Had he not added the Qi, his blood aura alone wouldn't have been capable of stopping the bolt alone.

"I probably shouldn't try the 8th bolt if I end up making double lightning each time," he thought in slight fear.

Still, it was quite a surprise to learn that his blood aura had become this strong. After all, when he had first given the White Tiger's blood essence back, it had reduced to a point where it was barely any stronger than his Qi.

And now, it was reaching heights that calling its current power stronger than the peak of the Saint Soul realm wouldn't be a lie.

"The prophecy said that I would lose a power that someone else would gain. That was probably it talking about Pearl and me," he thought. "The prophecy makes it sound like I was going to come out of it worse than I started. However, I instead became stronger than ever."

"Maybe I shouldn't give the prophecies much thought at all. They probably aren't painting the full picture in the first place."

Alex felt a little better after thinking about it in that way. Even if the prophecy was correct, it most likely never held the entire truth in it.

He smiled and got back to work again.

For the next week or so, he continued making pills one after the other. The palace resounded with lightning bolts almost the entire time, with only a few long breaks between them when Alex had to cultivate.

The lightning bolts either dropped 7 times or 8 times, depending on whether only one lightning bolt was falling or two at once.

After the week had passed, Alex finally walked out from inside the room with a bag full of pills.

"Here," Alex handed the pills to the lady Tiger that seemed to have been waiting for him.

"How many did you make?" the tiger couldn't help but ask.

"Uh... I lost count," Alex said. "About 1200 pills I believe. About 30% of them are above 95% in harmony. Of the remaining, they have 7 and 8 pill veins. As for the number, it should be half and half."

"I see," the Tiger could barely show any emotion but surprise. She had barely ever produced a pill with pill veins, and here was a human child that wasn't even a century old and could make over 800 pills with pill veins.

"I will take them," she said. "You can go and meet our lord in the garden. He has the materials you were looking for."

Alex nodded and walked away from the underground to the garden where Bai Jingshen was staying with Scarlet. It had been over a week of cloudy days and nights, so they were ecstatic to find the sun shining bright in the sky.

"You're finally out?" the White Tiger asked.

Alex nodded. "I hear you have the materials I asked for," he said.

"Here," Bai Jingshen tossed it to Alex. "What are you going to use it for exactly?"

"I will keep it a secret for now since I'm not sure I can succeed or not," Alex said. "But if I do succeed, it will make things so much simpler for the both of us."

"Oh?" the White Tiger looked curious. "Alright, I'll wait for it then."

Chapter 1300 Old Figures

Alex walked out of the teleportation formation and was surprised to immediately feel a lot of cultivation bases around him, albeit very weak ones.

With a wave of his spiritual sense, he saw quite a few humans already gathering outside, not very far away from them.

'They're already here, huh?' he thought.

He flew away from the location to go back to the Scarlet City. However, just a few minutes after flying, he remembered something.

'Oh right, the Emperor wanted to talk to me, didn't he?' he thought. 'Since he's so close by, I should go and meet him.'

Alex immediately changed his direction and flew in the direction of the Cardinal City, which took him no more than a single hour to reach.

As soon as he arrived, he flew directly to the palace with no one stopping him at all. He practically intruded on the palace, but he still remained outside the main building waiting for someone to come.

The guards gathered and were ready to attack, but none of them could do so without any orders, which required someone big.

A man walked out of the palace and arrived in front of Alex. He bowed a little in front of Alex and asked, "Greetings, senior. May I know who you are? And why you have come to our palace?"

"Oh, if it isn't the crown prince," Alex said with a somewhat surprised tone. "Your father requested my presence some time ago. I was busy back then, so I could only come right now."

"His royal majesty did?" the crown prince was surprised. "And... your name?"

Alex simply smiled. "Just come out. You should have recognized me already," he said.

A moment later, the Emperor of the Crimson Empire, Fu Zexian walked out of the palace.

"When Brother Feng had told me, I couldn't believe it, but you really have grown strong. So strong that I can't even tell how strong you are," the emperor spoke while constantly trying to gauge Alex's strength and failing.

The man himself had only just reached the Saint Foundation 7th realm, so he really couldn't feel Alex's cultivation base even if he wanted to.

Alex wanted to start up a small talk when he sensed two different spiritual sense land on him, each one of which was stronger than the emperor.

Alex's eyes went slightly wide in surprise as a smile formed on his face. "Now that's interesting," he said. "I had always wondered back when I was around as to what happened to you two. As expected, you haven't kicked the bucket yet."

The emperor felt a bit afraid when he heard how Alex was talking.

"Please, let's go in," he quickly said and took Alex inside.

Alex walked through the palace of the royal family of the Crimson Empire. He remembered how incredibly fascinated he was the first time he had come around.

And now, there was nothing here that made him even raise an eyebrow.

He was taken to a room at the end of the hallway that was the fanciest room he had seen in all of the palaces.

He wasn't even brought here the last time around when he had stayed here for a week or so.

After he entered, he met with two men that had been waiting for him.

One of them was an old man with gray-white hair that looked quite old. The other was a man with some gray hair, but mostly he looked middle-aged at best.

Both of them had a cultivation base just below the Saint Core realm. They seemed to have been lacking the Qi the breakthrough to the next realm.

Alex nodded a little toward the two men and looked for a seat. Somehow, this seemed to have offended the man with the gray hair.

"Young man, shouldn't you properly greet your seniors?" he asked. "You aren't allowed to sit until you do."

"Oh? Is that so?" Alex asked and sat down on the empty chair. "What are you going to do if I don't?"

The gray-haired man got angry, but the half-gray man quickly stopped him from speaking any further. "Father, it's alright. Just let it be," the man said before turning around to Alex.

"I'm sorry about my father. He's just a little angry that the last kid that came here not only disrespected him but also defeated him easily when he asked for a battle," the man quickly said.

"What? I didn't lose!" the man shouted. "That fight didn't count since I couldn't even touch her."

"Grandfather, please," the emperor spoke. "Do not disrespect the guest."

The old man finally calmed down.

The gray-haired old man was Fu Qiong, the man who unified the Shattered Kingdom into the Crimson Empire.

Alex still remembered the younger version that he saw in the Fu Clan head's memory more than a week ago.

This was the man that was supposed to be the Fu clan's head, but fate had brought him over to this side where he still had managed to make something out of himself.

The other man was his son, the previous emperor of the Crimson Empire.

Both of them were people that were only remembered in history books. Almost everyone believed they had died for some reason, but here they were, healthier than ever.

"Ah, so he met up with sister Hao Ya too, huh? Well, you would be stupid to try and fight her. She's in the Saint Soul realm after all," Alex said.

The three men suddenly gulped in response. "S-saint soul realm?" the emperor asked. "Wasn't she in the Saint Core realm?"

"No," Alex said. "Well, it's the same thing to you guys anyway. It was stupid to try and fight her."

The two men looked at Fu Qiong who could only look down in shame.

"So, what did you call me here for? You sent someone to find me a while ago," he asked.

"Oh, we just wanted to meet you," the emperor said. "Brother Feng told us you were strong, so I got curious. Also, given that the last time you came around, you introduced the concept of medicinal pastes and also gave the sects the recipes to make pills that restored one's limbs and other body parts, I was hoping if you had something like that."

The emperor for sure was expecting something from him.

Alex chuckled a bit. "I have nothing of value that I can give you that I haven't already given to the Hong Wu sect. Wait for a month or two, and the new pills should be surfacing soon in the market," he said.

"Is... is that so?" the emperor got a little disappointed. He was expecting a bit too much apparently.

"Although," Alex suddenly spoke, causing him to look back in anticipation. "I do have some things I can give you, which you should like much more than any pills I can give you guys."

"Oh? What is it?" the emperor asked.

Alex quickly brought out the many storage bags and tossed them at the emperor and his father and grandfather.

Each one of them held the bags with a confused look. Then, they took a look inside.

"You now have 30 Saint spirit veins that can improve the cultivation base of this empire by a lot," Alex said. 'That should be plenty right?"

Chapter 1301 Murder

﻿

The 3 Saints couldn't believe their eyes and senses at all. Seeing 30 Saint spirit veins when the entirety of Crimson Empire had no more than 6 was simply too shocking to them.

"I am not giving it to you so you can use it for yourself," Alex said. "This was taken from the Western Continent many thousand years ago and I'm just returning it to you."

"Make sure to put it to good use, spread it throughout the empire. That way, the empire can grow. If your level reaches that of the Luminance empire, you can even start a trade between the two empires."

"Although I wouldn't suggest doing that so soon. You would easily be taken advantage of because of your weakness."

The three aimlessly nodded to themselves when they heard Alex.

"So, was there anything else you wanted from me?" Alex asked.

"N-no, nothing," the Emperor quickly said. "Actually, how long do you plan on staying here?"

"I'll leave along with the players. I hope you are giving it your all to gather all the players from every nook and corner of the continent," Alex said. "If I find you slacking, I will come back and take those away."

The emperor gulped and shook his head. "We're doing everything to the best of our ability," he quickly said. "Thank you."

Alex nodded. "Where's Princess Wuying? I wanted to meet her now that I'm here," he said.

"Wuying already got married to the Feng family's young master. She now lives in Burgundy City in the east," the emperor quickly said.

There was a time when he had wondered if he could marry off his daughter to Alex but had decided not to. He wondered where she could be if that had happened so many years ago.

"Oh, good for her," Alex said. "Then… I guess I'll just meet senior Lai Qing and return back to the sect then."

As Alex stood up to leave, the emperor's eyes widened a little while his body posture slumped a bit.

Alex noticed that and turned around. "What is going on?" he asked.

"Have you not heard?" the emperor asked.

"Heard what?" Alex asked.

"The Royal Alchemist passed away 8 years ago," the emperor said.

"What?" Alex's eyes narrowed. "Senior Lai Qing passed away? How? He was so healthy when I last saw him."

"He was never healthy," the Emperor said. "He was an old man that used pills to appear young. Due to how many pills he consumed, his body was filled with alchemy waste we assume."

Alex remembered when he had first left the Crimson Empire. He had met with the Royal alchemist back then who had told him about his life.

He was a young man without talent who had acquired an alchemy book and had spent centuries trying to learn everything. He had become the best at Alchemy in the empire, but at the same time, he had also become very old.

The man wanted his youth back, so he constantly used Face Changing pills to look young. It seemed that all those pills that weren't of high quality got to the old man.

"That… sucks," he said. His master had died, then his grandmaster. Now, even the one senior that he used to know had died too.

"How did he die? I hope he passed away peacefully in his sleep," Alex said.

"I… wouldn't say he died peacefully," the emperor said. "As far as we know, it was a murder. Someone killed him, but as for who, we don't know."

"It was murder?" Alex's eyes narrowed as he felt slight anger bubble inside his heart. "Tell me what you know about the murdered. Anything."

"We don't know anything aside from the fact that he was someone unique," the emperor said. "Not only did he have a unique power, but he was also strong enough to be in the Saint realm and also most likely close to the man."

Alex frowned a bit. "Who falls under these conditions?" he asked.

"That's the thing. No one does," the emperor said. "There is no one in the saint realm that unique, especially when regarding someone that was even in the empire that day."

"Are you sure this murderer was close to the senior?" Alex asked.

"He had to be. That or he just found the opportunity and killed the royal alchemist when he was finally going to break through to the Saint realm," the emperor said. "Poor guy. He had failed once before, so we had hoped he would pass this time around. Instead, some bastard came out of nowhere and killed him."

Alex frowned a bit. "You said something was unique about this person that killed him, right? What was so unique?" he asked.

"Well, he's unique in the way that no Saint in the Crimson Empire can use the attacks he did," the Emperor said. "I mean, if there was someone that could use such strong lightning attacks, we would've known by now."

Alex only nodded once when he stopped. "Wait, lighting attacks?" he asked. "Are you saying senior Lai Qing died from lightning strikes?"

"Yes," the emperor said.

"I see," Alex said with a sigh of relief. The bit of anger in his heart dissipated, replaced by the bitter-sweet feeling of knowing that the Royal Alchemist had managed to learn a dao.

However, that had backfired on the poor old man, killing him when he tried to enter the Saint realm.

"He wasn't murdered," Alex said. "It was just… an unfortunate event."

"He wasn't murdered?" the three saints were curious about what happened, so Alex explained it in simple terms.

"Dao? I see," Fu Qiong said. "The elders in our clan always talked about that thing. I was too young when I left to know what that is exactly."

"We should tell the royal alchemist this," the emperor said. "He will be at peace after hearing it."

"The Royal Alchemist? You already have another one?" Alex asked.

"It has been 8 years," the emperor said. "We had to choose a new one at some point."

"I see," Alex said. "Are they a good one?"

"They're one of the best we've got," the emperor said. "Actually, you might know him too. It's Alchemist Huang Fu."

"Huang Fu? Ah! Senior Lai Qing's disciple?" Alex remembered. "So he is the Royal Alchemist now, huh? Good for him."

"So, we should tell him about this right?" the Emperor asked.

"No need," Alex said. "I will go tell him. I wish to meet him before I leave too."

"Sure, I'll have someone call for—"

"No, I'll visit him myself and then leave. Where is he?" Alex asked.

After getting the location, he made his way to the Alchemy guild at the center of the town where Huang Fu was apparently giving lessons to the alchemists.

Alex waited until he was done and met up with him. It had been a long time since they had met, and with them not being close to each other initially, there wasn't much for Alex to talk to him about.

He gave his condolences and explained what had happened to his master most likely. Learning what had happened for his master to die that day gave the man a cathartic relief that he so desperately needed.

"If you ever need anything, or wish to learn about some pill recipes that I have left behind, you can go to the Hong Wu sect and ask for it, Brother Huang," Alex said. "I will tell them to give it to you under the condition that you don't spread it around."

"Thank you," Huang Fu said with a small smile on his face.

"It's nothing. I wanted to pay my debt to your master," Alex said while touching his left arm. "Without him, it would have taken me practically forever to have gained back my left arm. Without it, who knows what sort of troubles I would've gotten into."

"Anyway, I should be leaving now. It was great to see you, brother Huang," Alex said and left the guild.

He walked through the city for a few minutes, looking at everything to gauge just what had changed in the city.

After reaching some distance away, he quickly took flight and left the city. After a few hours, he arrived at the Scarlet City.

Alex smiled when he finally saw it after so many weeks.

"I can finally get started with what I've been wanting to do for so long."

Chapter 1302 A Surprise In The Making

Alex met up with his family and friends after returning to Scarlet City.

His mother had returned a week ago, so she was spending time with his father and the rest.

Liz had stayed in the Scarlet City for a bit before leaving to see the rest of the Crimson Empire, along with Hao Ya, who wanted to make sure the news was traveling as quickly as possible.

Ronron had fun being in the sect and was slowly working her way up the sect's ranking even though she was only a new disciple there.

She had tried her hands at Alchemy while in the sect, only to quickly realized that her Wood Qi was very bad for performing alchemy as it empowered Fire Qi in the cauldron, destabilizing most of the energy in it.

Whisker had suggested letting him make the pills instead of her, but Ronron didn't want to cheat, so she was stuck with being unable to make any pills.

As such, she had focused on just the rest of the sect, which focused on combat and cultivation.

The old Alex had been to the Rubyroad city and had returned after meeting and letting Luo Mei and Du Yuhan say their goodbyes to them.

As such, they were ready to leave.

Wen Cheng and Cai Ping were ready to leave as well. Cai Ping had sold almost everything she owned that she didn't need, including the auction house.

As for Wen Cheng, he had already mostly retired from the sect, so all he had to do was tell the other elders what he was planning to do.

Those elders were more than happy to see Wen Cheng go on to better lands with his disciple.

Unfortunately, Liu Xun did not wish to leave at all. Despite the Southern Continent providing much better opportunities, he was happy in the Crimson Empire.

He had no big dreams of becoming one of the best or needing the power for revenge. He was just a simple man on a simple cultivation journey, and he was happy staying behind with his family and his fiancee who he was planning on marrying soon.

On the side of the Hong Wu sect, no one but his Martial Uncle was ready to leave. Everyone else was still hesitant about leaving their family and going overseas on a whim.

After all, despite being friends with Alex, he was nothing more than a person they spent some time with over 40 years ago.

"Martial Nephew, everyone is already leaving for the capital. Should we not leave as well?" Lang Shun asked Alex. He was worried that he was going to miss the timing to go to the other continent.

"Don't worry, Martial uncle," Alex said. "We're not in any hurry. I still need to wait for everyone to make their decisions."

"You should ask them to make a decision as soon as they can then. Have you even talked to them after returning?" Lang Shun asked. "As far as I know, you've been holed up in your room for the past 3 days since you came back."

"That's because I'm working on something," Alex said. "I need it to persuade the others after all."

"What are you working on?" Lang Shun asked curiously.

"Hehe, do you want to know?" Alex asked. "Then why don't you help me with it?"

The man could only get more curious. "Alright, I will help. What do you need me to do?" he asked.

"Let's go to the desert."

Alex took Lang Shun and flew to the north. A journey that took him over 2 days on foot when he couldn't use Qi all those years ago, took him no more than 2 hours to arrive now.

After arriving, Alex quickly searched for a good place to start working.

"What are we doing exactly?" Lang Shun asked.

"Well, first of all, we're giving this place its own Qi," Alex said. "You should fly high, Martial Uncle," Alex said as he flew too.

Lang Shun was only wondering what was going to happen when an explosion sent a massive amount of sand flying into the sky.

Lang Shun had to use his spiritual sense to see through the cloud of sand and saw Alex bringing out a storage bag.

When he was only wondering what was in the storage bag, a massive spirit vein flew out from within it, that very clearly was the same rank as the one he had placed beyond the river back in the sect.

"Saint spirit vein?" Lang Shun asked with a surprised look. "What are you doing with this spirit vein? Don't place it so far north. No one visits here."

"I know," Alex said. "That's exactly why I'm placing it here. Because no one will come here."

He quickly started placing the spirit vein in the hole he had just created. Without anything to worry about when placing the spirit vein, he was able to quickly complete the task in a matter of minutes.

He covered up the sand that was no longer flying in the air, disrupting his vision.

"Are you going to tell me what you are planning?" Lang Shun asked.

"Martial uncle, don't you know it's much more fun to not know what's going to happen than be aware of it the entire time?" Alex asked.

"I suppose, but that depends on whether what's going to happen is good or not. I don't want to spend the entire time being curious for you to just plant some trees or something in the sand," Lang Shun said.

'Plant some trees on top of the Spirit vein, huh?' Alex thought and thought about the 2 spirit vein he still had with him. He had been planning to give them back, but... maybe he should take them away with him.

After all, he had helped the continent quite a lot already.

"Don't worry," Alex said. "It will be worth the wait."

Lang Shun watched as Alex brought out a bunch of formation rods and started planting them around a large area. The formations activated a few minutes later.

"What sort of formation is this?" Lang Shun asked.

"Concealing and Barrier formations," Alex said. "No one without the authority should be able to get inside."

After saying that, Alex went inside.

Lang Shun wanted to go in too, but the formation blocked him. Apparently, he wasn't authorized to go in.

He called for Alex, but Alex simply told him to wait.

So, he waited. He waited for hours.

Night fell and the moon shined its bright silver light onto the bright sand. Still, Alex showed no signs of showing up.

Only when the sun rose did Alex fly out of the formation barrier.

"Phew, that was so much tougher than I thought it would be," he said. "Oh, you're still here. Good. I thought I would have to go back and get you."

"Of course, I'm still here," Lang Shun said. "You told me to wait."

"Still," Alex gave a sheepish smile. "Anyway, take this." He tossed a small metal token to Lang Shun. "It will allow you to walk in through the barrier. Come, see what I've been doing."

Lang Shun nodded and walked in through the barrier.

Chapter 1303 Lang Shun's First Time

As soon as he walked through the barrier, Lang Shun arrived inside where there was nothing but a simple circular stone slab on the sand below.

He looked at the stone slab with something carved on top of them, which wasn't formation lines. "What are they?" Lang Shun asked as the many carvings on top of the stone slab.

"Those are runes," Alex explained. "The ones you usually write on the talisman. You can write them on objects too and have them work not very differently from formations."

"Is... that so?" he asked. "So what does this do?"

"Come, I'll show you," Alex said and landed on top of the stone slab. He waited for his martial uncle to land too before starting.

"Does this work?" Lang Shun asked as he looked around.

Alex paused for a moment and looked at his uncle. "Actually... I don't know," he said. "This is my first time using this, so I suppose we will find out together if it works or not."

"What? You don't know—"

Alex activated the script before Lang Shun could finish complaining. The stone slab shined bright for a moment, almost blinding Lang Shun.

Then, at the next moment, the light vanished.

Lang Shun was crouched next to Alex with his head in his arms. He was too scared to look out at all.

"A-are we okay? Did it work?" he asked.

"Yes, it worked. You can open your eyes now," Alex said.

Lang Shun slowly opened his eyes to see what was going on. He didn't know what the scripts were going to do. Was it going to form a fire barrier? Or sprout a fountain of water in the desert.

Maybe it was a training ground or some sort. He had absolutely no idea.

When he did finally see what was happening. His confusion increased even more.

He was standing on top of the stone slab still, but the things around him were different. The sand had somehow turned into a large patch of grass, or so he thought.

However, the massive building that was a small distance away from them made him feel his first assessment was incorrect.

There were trees around him, and for some reason, there was a small shed full of pill swines.

Alex walked away from the stone slab while Lang Shun could only look around in wonder. When he slowly turned around while looking at everything, his eyes finally fell on something that was behind him this entire time.

There was a massive metal wall that seemed to go high up before disappearing somewhere.

"Martial Nephew, d-did we teleport somewhere?" Lang Shun asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "And we were successful. Had the script been a little worse and we had some problems while teleporting, you wouldn't stop vomiting at all."

"I teleported..." The man gulped when he heard that. This was the first time in his entire life that he had ever teleported. He had been anxiously looking forward to the day when he would finally get to teleport. However, it had happened without him even knowing about it.

Lang Shun took a few deep breaths before looking around once more. "Where are we exactly?" he asked. "This is not the Beast realm, is it? Or is this the Luminance Empire?"

"Oh no. This isn't—"

"Your Majesty!" a girl ran in his direction the moment she saw him and arrived in front of him in a moment.

"Your majesty? Is that really you? Did you come back already? Why did you come back so soon?" the girl asked.

"Hey, Linlin. How've you been?" Alex asked.

"Didn't you say you were going for a year, your majesty? Is there something wrong? How did you even return?" she asked.

"I'll explain later," Alex said. "I'm not really back, so don't tell the others."

"Ah! They already know," Linlin said. "I notified them as soon as I saw you."

"Your Majesty?" Old Lady Yao was the first to arrive, followed by the 7 others in the palace.

"Your majesty!" they all bowed toward Alex as soon as they saw him.

Lang Shun saw what was happening in front of him and was beyond shocked. He could feel the people in front of him, each one stronger than anyone he had seen before. And yet, they were all bowing in front of Alex.

'Majesty?' he thought. 'Can it be?'

"Martial Nephew," he called out to Alex. "Are we... in the Southern Continent?"

The group of people looked surprised when they heard the person behind Alex call him 'Martial Nephew'.

"Yes, Martial Uncle. We are in the Southern Continent," Alex said. "More accurately, we're in my palace."

Lang Shun was truly shocked when he heard that. He could only look around the place in awe while trying to understand the reality of the situation.

"Oh right, nearly forgot."

Alex waved his hand and Scarlet flew out of her beast space.

"Hmm?" she quickly realized where she was and changed back to her regular size again. "We're back? How?"

She looked around at the people.

"Your Majesty!" the group of people bowed even deeper this time.

"What's going on? How are we back already?" Scarlet asked.

"I made a teleportation script connecting our palace to the northern desert of the Western Continent," Alex explained.

"You did?" Scarlet was surprised. "Is that what you were planning on doing for so long?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I didn't have the material for it though, so I had to wait for Brother Shen to find it."

Scarlet was slightly dumbfounded. "I can't believe you made a teleportation formation joining two continents. I had thought only people with extensive knowledge of formations could do that. Doesn't that put the Intercontinental formations out of commission then?"

"First of all, as I said, Teleportation script, not a formation. I'm using runes here," Alex explained. "Second of all, the way they work is completely different too."

"What do you mean?" Scarlet asked.

"The script is far from optimized and with my limited knowledge it will take me ages to do so," Alex said. "Unlike the Teleportation formations, which can be used multiple times without worry, if we use this teleportation script in short succession, it will draw out so much energy from the spirit vein it is connected to that we will end up with a spirit stone mine."

"How many times can we use it then?" Scarlet asked.

"I would say 3 times a day," Alex said. "Any more and it would definitely destroy the spirit vein it is attached to. We also shouldn't use it more than 10 times a year either, so there's that."

"That's... not bad," Scarlet said. "Where did you even learn to make this stuff? After all, we had to bring people to make a teleportation formation here."

"I took the script design from the teleportation platform in senior Luhei's place. As for how I made it work, I had learned that over 3 decades ago when I had first arrived in the northern continent."

"I see," Scarlet said. "So, you must be going back then."

"Yes," Alex said. "What about you? I don't think you have a reason to go back."

"No, I'm going back. I don't want to waste my chance to converse with the senior. I'm going to make every moment count," Scarlet said.

"Very well then, let's go back."

Chapter 1304 Goodbye

"Your Majesty, are you leaving already?" Old lady Yao asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Why? Is there something important you need to tell me?"

"Yes," the old lady said. "The Scale Legion's commander, Long Jianyu came over again. He said he wanted to make sure our promises were being kept."

"About the Alchemy exchange? Of course, it's being kept. Why would he have to ask that," Alex said. "Besides, why is he even here? Did he not leave yet?"

"He has left a few times, but the army itself hasn't. They just haven't done anything that would be worth mentioning so we haven't reported it to you," the old lady said.

"Hmm, we'll talk about it in detail when I come back in a few days," Alex said. "Oh yeah, I will be bringing a lot of my friends, including my master, so make the best preparations you can."

"As you say, your Majesty," the group nodded.

"Let's go," Alex said and walked on top of the stone slab. Lang Shun hadn't left the slab at all, so he was ready to leave.

Once Scarlet landed on it too, the three of them teleported away, arriving back on the Western continent a moment later.

Lang Shun made sure to not blink this time around, but with all the bright light, he couldn't even tell when the teleportation happened. He was in one place in one moment, and in the next moment, he was in another place.

'So quick,' he thought.

"Since I've made the teleportation platform, I think it's time we make sure who's coming and who's not," Alex said.

Alex wasn't going to give the opportunity to everyone. Only 5 people were given this opportunity.

Wan Li, Zhou Mei, Fan Ruogang, Zhou Mi and Kong Yuhan. Kong Yumin would also come if they accepted as well.

After returning to the sect, he immediately asked them for their opinions. He didn't tell anyone about the teleportation platform just yet and instead made them think they would be going with the rest.

Kong Yuhan and Zhou Mi decided to go on the spot. They had been thinking for a while, and they decided it was the best thing for their daughter.

Wan Li had nothing to do in the Hong Wu sect, so he was ready to leave. However, because Fan Ruogang was still hesitant to just up and leave, they couldn't immediately make any decision.

It was only after a long night of argument and decision-making that they finally decided to leave.

Zhou Mei on the other hand refused to leave. Ever since she was an orphan, it was this sect that had taken her in and raised her.

Her sister had a family and had to do the best for her family, but she herself had no such obligations. The only obligation she had was to the sect.

Also, after one of her masters had killed the other one, she had been a wreck at that time too. It was the sect that had helped her get through that time in her life.

As such, she always knew that her fate would be tied to the sect. So, she decided to stay behind.

Alex respected her decision and did not coerce her with any hopes or dreams. With the saint spirit veins, the Western Continent would also soon reach the same status as any of the other continents.

Alex had thought of extending the invitation to Luo Xing as well, but Luo Mei's parents needed at least one daughter to remain in the empire with them.

Once the final group was selected, everyone was ready to leave. Alex had them say their goodbyes to their respective sects.

It wasn't just them. Helen and Ronron were going to leave as well.

Since they were leaving for good, Alex returned back to her master's grave for one last goodbye.

Everyone that wanted to come here had already come here, so it was just him remaining.

"I sometimes think that you're still looking after us from the afterlife, Master, but I hope more than anything that you've already left it and have been reborn again," Alex said.

"I'm leaving, master. I no longer have any connections remaining in this empire, so I most likely won't be returning any time soon. So I hope that in our absence, you aren't alone either."

Alex knew that with nothing keeping him tied to the sect and the people here, even if he did return, he wouldn't care to visit them anymore.

The Hong Wu sect and the Tiger sect he knew were no longer around, so there was no longer any reason for him to remain here.

Alex bowed toward his master's grave one last time and left the alchemy valley. Once he was outside, he left the sect and arrived outside the Scarlet City with everyone.

"Sister Hao, you have a boat right?" he asked.

"Yes," Hao Ya said. "Are we using my boat?"

"Please take my family to the Beast Realm. I'm going to take the rest to the Southern Continent," Alex said.

"Huh? How?" Hao Ya asked.

"Hehe, I made a teleportation script that connects to the Southern Continent," Alex said. "Anyway, I'll see you guys later then."

Alex brought out his own boat and placed all 10 people on it before flying away. He directly flew to the edge of the continent where the ocean met the sand.

Some of these people hadn't known such a place existed at all. To them, the unending ocean in front of them was something they had never seen before.

Most of them gasped in surprise when they saw it.

"Everyone, grab these," Alex said and handed over a bunch of tokens that were required to get in through the barrier. None of the people aside from Lang Shun even realized that there was a formation there because of how well it was concealed.

The platform inside was quite small but just big enough that all of them managed to fit inside of it.

"Everyone ready?" Alex asked.

A few heads nodded while the rest were too nervous to give any sort of answer right away.

"Here we go," Alex said and activated the formation. A blinding light covered them all and in the next moment, they teleported away.

They arrived on the other side, the Southern Continent in the blink of an eye. Shock and surprise filled the faces of everyone that had teleported for the first time.

Soon enough, Linlin and a few other elders arrived very soon after their arrival and brought them into the palace.

The 10 people were like villagers, finally seeing a big city for the first time. Everywhere they walked, they stared at the things for at least a few seconds before moving on to the next amazing thing they saw.

Alex introduced everyone to the elders. "Linlin bring some refreshments please."

"Yes, your majesty," Linlin said and walked away.

"I thought I understood how it was when you said you were a King, but this..." Wen Cheng looked around in awe. "This is beyond anything I could've ever imagined."

Alex smiled. "You haven't seen anything yet, master. Come, there is so much more for you all to see."

Chapter 1305 Return

﻿

"So, what's the deal with Long Jianyu anyway?" Alex asked.

After his master and friends were settled in, Alex had come to the throne room where he learned what was happening in the period he was gone.

It hadn't been long, not even two months, but due to the massive change that had happened, he needed to listen to the reports.

"I think he's worried because so many people left the continent at once," One of the elders said. "That was why he came to confirm that the Alchemy Exchange is still happening."

Alex nodded when he heard about it. It was a normal suspicion to have with so many people missing in such a small amount of time.

"They should know what's happening, so there's nothing to worry about. Besides, we have plenty of alchemists remaining for the exchange to happen," Alex said. "Anything else happens in the time?"

"Hmm, the Sundering Sanctum is about to open soon. Would you be interested in that?" another elder asked.

"Ah, the sanctum," Alex thought. "I need to go there, but it will have to wait for now. What about the Forbidden Orchard? When is that opening?"

"We… are not aware of that," the elders said. "The last time it opened was 2 years ago, so it should be soon."

"Hmm, I wonder if I can make it back in time to go there," Alex thought. "Probably not. Have the people gather as much as they can. Tell the alchemy association that they must make sure to grab the Divine Devil's fruit that might have reached maturity. I've left them a list of their ages, so it shouldn't be a difficult task."

"What else have you got for me?"

The elders gave some detailed information on the things that were happening. Because so many people had left, the continent was in a bit of a shamble when it came to being productive.

That was to be expected after all.

"It will only be a year. Most will return, maybe even more. Have them deal with it for the time being," Alex said. "If that is all, I'll let the rest for you to deal with."

Alex left the elders to deal with whatever else problem there was and went to meet up with his master and the rest.

"How are you guys doing? Are you fitting in well?" Alex asked.

"Fitting in… I'm not sure that applies just yet," Luo Mei said. "Just the Qi alone is so thick in this place that I don't think we can fit here for another few months at least."

"Everyone in the palace is so strong," Wen Cheng said. "I just saw a couple of servants and each one of them was in the True Emperor realm. Hell, a few might have even been saints."

Alex smiled. "It will definitely take some time to get used to it all then, I suppose. I'll have Linlin gather some cultivation books for every one of you so you can get started with better techniques. You can also ask for some weapons, but I'm not sure what you can get."

"As for a place to stay in, I don't know if it's right to keep you all in the palace but do stay here as a guest until I return. I'll ask the others to help you get settled in," Alex said.

"Until you return? How long will that be?" Kong Yuhan asked.

"Hmm, probably a year from now," Alex said. "I'll make the most I can back in my homeland and return."

"A year huh?" Wan Li thought. "I doubt we can get used to everything before you return."

"I'm sure you can," Alex said. "You all have quite the talents, so it shouldn't take that long. Go around the city and see what you like. I'm sure you'll find things to do soon enough, and that should get you to become familiar with this place."

Alex spoke with them for a while longer, while trying to explain the most important things to care about in this place.

It took them a day to get settled in the palace. The next day, Alex took them through the city under disguise, letting them get a feel of the people that lived there.

Seeing strong people at every turn made them feel like ants, but Alex assured them that they would reach great heights soon as well.

After returning, he handed them various pills to cultivate while he was gone. He didn't tell him anything about how good the pills exactly were, other than the fact that they shouldn't try to sell it.

"I'll have Martial Uncle, Brother Wan, and sister Fan join the Royal Alchemy guild. Little Yumin should remain here and learn what she can for now."

"I'll have the elders search for some small auction house to accept senior Cai to become an auctioneer there. You'll need a lot of knowledge for that though."

"The rest of you, I suggest you don't try to do anything and just cultivate for now. I'll have some of the elders help you train. Linlin should be able to help in regards to that as well."

The group nodded.

"Alright, that's it for now. I'll be leaving soon. Ask the elders for anything you want, they should give it to you," Alex said.

He said his goodbyes again and went back to the Western Continent through the teleportation platform.

After arriving back, he directly flew toward the beast realm.

Arriving near the beast realm, Alex watched in surprise as he saw people being escorted onto the teleportation formation before being sent inside.

Most of the people were scared of the beasts surrounding them, so none of them acted out or was defiant at all. They all followed the orders of the beasts and were sent in one by one.

'So it's already started,' he thought.

He went in after a group was sent and arrived inside the palace. He quickly sensed everyone and went up to them.

Most of them were in the upper garden, talking to each other with nothing else to do.

"It sure took you some time to come back," Bai Jingshen said as Alex walked into the garden.

"I had to help settle in master and the rest in the palace," Alex said. "Scarlet must've told you about the platform then."

"She did," Bai Jingshen said. "And I'm surprised you could even do that."

"If those saint demons from so long ago could do it, then surely I can as well," Alex said. "Is Pearl not out yet?"

"Doesn't seem like he'll be doing that anytime soon," Bai Jingshen said. "But I'm not worried. I'm sure he'll be able to do it."

Alex nodded. "I've faith in him," he said. "He can take all the time he needs."

"I hope he does it soon," Bai Jingshen said. "At least, before this Alchemy Exchange of yours that I hear about."

Alex said nothing. If possible, he wouldn't want to take Pearl to the Eastern Continent. After all, his mother had been attacked and nearly killed by possibly someone from the Royal family. Who knew what danger lurked for Pearl there?

However, he wouldn't stop him if he wanted to go. That was his decision to make after all.

"When are we leaving, sister Hao?" Alex asked.

"Once everyone has been brought in, we will leave," she said.

The next few days passed by in a blur as they did nothing but wait. None of them, not even Hao Ya had anything to do, so they simply just relaxed.

After enough time passed, every player from both empires was in the beast realm.

To Alex's surprise, there were only about 40 thousand people here, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands that were on the other continents. And this was with most people wanting to return.

It only went on to prove just how much the Western Continent was ignored when the senior was teleporting people around when he first made the game.

Hao Ya went on to do her work. She flew into the sky and started explaining everything they would need to hear before going back, just as she had on the other continents.

"You'll be returning to the Southern Continent in a year's time, right?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Hmm, come here once you return and settle things there," he said. "You can take the sword that's there at that time. You will most likely need it to find out what happened in that continent that led to my granddaughter's death."

Alex nodded. "I'll make sure to find out the truth no matter what."

Bai Jingshen nodded. "Thank you," he said. "See you later then."

He turned around and walked away to be with his wives. Alex bid his farewell and walked to the top of the teleportation platform with his family.

They, along with many other people, were the first ones to be teleported. The formation activated and in the next moment, the entire group vanished.

They arrived back in the field where they always arrived. Hao Ya quickly told everyone to move away to make room for the other people that would be teleporting soon.

Helen looked around at the familiar buildings that she only remembered in her memories of memories. "Finally," she said softly. "I'm finally back."

The cities were ready for them all to return, so when they did, everyone started finding ways to go back to where they belonged.

"Should we visit the senior first?" Alex asked. "We can return home after we meet him."

Chapter 1306 Few Days Of Normal Life

The very first thing someone did after returning to Senior Yang's mansion was Ronron telling him about what she did as a disciple in the sect for a month.

She laid out her entire month-long story for her master to hear. Senior Yang seemed slightly worried that she was left alone, but mostly he was happy to see her happy.

Alex introduced his mother to the senior, who gave him an earful of scolding for separating her from her family in the first place.

Alex was definitely surprised to see his mother ignore their age difference and scold the man.

Senior Yang took the words without getting angry or feeling insulted. He knew what he had done wrong from the start, but that was the only way he could have done things from the start. If given the chance, he would do it all over again.

"I brought back this stone sword full of intent back," Alex said. He didn't pull it out immediately as that would cause problems for the ones that could read. He also didn't name the stone as that would bring up questions as to why he knew the name.

"Oh, that's not bad," the man said. "In terms of importance, that's one of the 5 important things I was missing from that ring."

"What are the other 4?" Alex asked.

"Well, there's the World Tree's seed, the Nine Yang Divine tree, the Frigid Yin bead, and... " the senior paused. "Wait no, only 3. The last one was destroyed too, wasn't it?"

"Let's see, you took away the Blood God's manual, the white tiger took way the Ocean God's teardrop, and the only other important thing there was the nightmarish sword spirit which the white tiger told me you destroyed long ago."

'Godslayer?' Alex thought.

"So, yeah, I suppose it's 4, not 5," the man said. "Of course, there are various other important things, but none are important enough that they would kill me for losing them, although I surely will have to compensate them for it once I return somehow."

"Speaking of returning, have you decided when you'll return everyone?" Alex asked.

"After exactly a year of everyone returning," the senior said. "That should be enough time right? Actually, no I should do it based on where people want to go. Since the cultivation world has been revealed, the normal people who are not happy with their life won't want to live here anymore."

"As such, they will be trying to leave as well. I will have to aid with that too," the senior said.

There would definitely be a lot more left than the ones that came with them.

"There is something you can do," Alex said. He suggested an idea that the senior could choose to use or not.

"A worldwide poll huh? I don't see how that wouldn't work," the senior said. "Although, we can't do it right now. Doing it 8 months later should be fine. We can give a 1 month period where they vote where they want to go. Using that information, we can decide which continent would be the first to leave."

After a bit more talk, the group decided to go back home for now.

The old Emily had been waiting for everyone to come back for over a month now. Even with people working in the farm, she was feeling lonely.

However, with so many people returning, she wasn't going to be lonely anymore. She knew it was going the day of their arrival, so she had prepared a feast for everyone.

Helen hit it off immediately with Emily, and the two Mother-in-law and Daughter-in-law became close friends. Emily had been quite close to the other Helen that had died of cancer, so she couldn't be happier to meet this one.

A lot had changed about the house for Helen, but in some ways, everything was still the same.

If anything had truly changed, it was the people.

She remembered cooking food for no more than 3 people every day. It was only on rare occasions when Liz came to visit with her family that she had to cook more than usual.

However, even without extra guests, she and Emily had to cook for 9 people in total, of which 2 were actual beasts. Of course, she was more than happy to have so many people in the house.

After all, the more there were the merrier it was.

After spending a few days back at home, the family decided to go on a vacation around their small world.

Alex also wanted to use the time to see what was happening with the people of this world.

They went to resorts, amusement parks, operas, museums, and whatnot. They visited any place with any importance or popularity.

Alex met Ma Tianxin one of the times and saw that he was enjoying his vacations with his wife.

He met Harry too, who was spending quality time with what Alex could only guess were his families, one that had grown old without him.

He thought he would meet Jai Heiyun too, but the girl was nowhere to be found.

After their vacation was done, Alex spent some time looking for Fan Yanshi with Ronron.

It was becoming more and more clear that after the year passed, Ronron would be leaving for the Southern Continent with everyone. So, while she could, she wanted to be with her half-sister.

Fan Yanshi wasn't doing the best. It had turned out that he had a clone here, who had already grown old and had children. They had welcomed him and his daughter into the house, but after a few months, he had decided to leave.

He was a hardworking man, so finding labor wasn't that difficult. For his daughter, he had to start earning money after all.

Alex pitied the man, but there wasn't anything he could do for him. At least, not right now. He did give the two father and daughter a pill each.

He told Fan Yanshi to eat it right away. As for the other pill, he was to keep it until his daughter was at least 16 years old.

It would be many years before the man found out that what he had eaten was actually a True Rejuvenating pill that had effectively improved their lifespan by over 500 years, maybe even a thousand years.

After giving away the pill, Alex now only had 1 such pill remaining, and he wondered to who he should give it.

There wasn't anyone he had in mind that he could give it to, so he decided to think about it later.

The world was surprisingly civil, despite so many cultivators coming back to this world. There were a few skirmishes here and there, but since almost everyone lost their Qi because they were reckless with it or just because the Intent stripped it away from them over time, they were no different than normal humans.

In fact, the only people that were any special here were the body cultivators, who did not need much to live and were generally happy with anything.

After enough time passed, the worldwide poll was finally put up. This poll would decide the date and the order in which the people would be sent back to the other continents.

The few days of what seemed like a normal life for many people was finally coming to an end.

Chapter 1307 End Of A Saga

﻿

Liz came back crying from one of her trips where she had gone to meet someone she had found on the Internet.

As it had turned out, the person she was meeting had been good friends with her husband Rob, who had died during a sect invasion.

People had created a site where one could put up pictures of their loved ones and see if someone else recognized them. Liz had put Rob's picture up on a whim, and someone had recognized him.

The family mourned for a full week before things slowly became normal again. However, it still took Liz quite some time to get over her husband's death.

Alex spent some time with senior Yang, learning about a few more things from him. He even acquired a technique that would allow him to convert low-grade spirit stones into a higher-grade ones simply by using the technique.

Alex wasn't sure how useful the technique would be just yet, but he was sure he could make some use of it in the future. The technique had no name as it was apparently something the senior had read from a nameless book. Still, he called it the 'Qi Grade Upgrade technique' which was more than enough to explain what the technique did, despite being a rather mediocre name.

Sometime later, the results of the poll that was created were finally out. It was somewhat surprising to see how easily the Southern Continent won on the poll.

Only those that had a family or close relations with people in the Western Continent decided to return back there.

Of the people from the Northern Continent, only half of them decided to return back to that continent as well.

The majority of the people, even ones that weren't originally from any of the three continents decided to go to the Southern Continent.

It was a combination of reasons that led to this decision for most people. For one, Southern Continent was the safest continent from what the people could tell. It was also the most advanced with many strong people. It wasn't forever cold either, like the Northern continent.

Most importantly, the quality of pills found in the Southern Continent was many times better than any of the other continents. Also, given that their King was a person like them, they didn't have to worry about being mistreated either.

Once it was clear that the people going to the Southern Continent would be sent first, people started making preparations. 2 months later, they all found out where they had to go to find the Teleportation formation.

Unlike when they arrived, while going back they had to go through the main formation, which was in Senior Yang's mansion. So, Hao Ya and Liz had already returned to the mansion to help out the senior with preparing for the massive number of people entering the building.

Back at home, Alex and the rest prepared to leave as well.

"I still can't believe this," Fan Yanshi said, looking at the massive farm and mansion. "Are you really giving this all to me?"

Just 3 days ago, Alex had gone and brought him back along with his daughter after making him fully quit his current laborious job.

He had no idea why he was made to do that, but now that he was here, he was finally understanding it all. He was being given everything that Alex and his family owned.

"There's no point in us keeping it anymore," Emily said. "Now that we've all decided to leave this place, we will likely never return at all. So, we need someone to take care of this place."

"We have no other family members alive that aren't leaving with us. The closest ones we could think of was you, so we chose you," the older Alex said.

"I… I don't know how to thank you." The man started crying while his little daughter tugged on his clothes to stop him from crying.

Ronron crouched in front of the little girl. "Lilin, I'll be leaving now. Don't forget about your older sister, okay?" she asked with a little smile.

The girl nodded.

Emily talked to the little girl as well. In a way, this was her child too. So, when it came to leaving her, she found it difficult, but in the end, she had to leave her with her father.

"We'll be leaving now, take care," Alex said. Then, everyone got into the small van they had reserved and left.

Emily and Ronron wiped their tears a bit. Some of it was for little Lilin, while some of it was for the house they would be leaving.

Helen and Graham looked back as well with a bittersweet look in their eyes. They were sad they were leaving, but they were happy where they would be leaving to.

Of the two Alex, one teared up a bit, while the other one was simply happy that he was taking all of his family with him.

"I wish we could bring along little Lilin," Ronron said.

"Her father doesn't want to leave this place, so we can't help it," Alex said. "Without any spiritual roots, her life wouldn't be all that better in the other continent either. She would instead be one of the many mortals that had to look up to so many cultivators."

"But still…" Ronron had no argument to make. She simply didn't like the fact that she had to leave her sister behind. "At least she will grow up in the same house I did."

The group took the train, and half a day later they were outside of senior Yang's mansion.

The number of people that were streaming into his house was perhaps enough to fill an entire city. With nearly a million people wanting to go to the Southern Continent, it was going to take quite a lot of time to transfer them over.

Alex and his family were allowed entry through a different path, all because of what was happening inside the mansion.

As soon as one entered the mansion grounds, they immediately fell into a trance that made them follow the simple path to the teleportation formation inside.

"In a day or two, I'll start teleporting the people away. I will need you to go there first and prepare your people to handle the influx of newcomers," the senior said.

Alex nodded. "I'll do that," he said. "Will sister Hao be coming with us?"

The man shook his head. "She'll have to stay behind and do the same in the other two continents. I'll send her once everything is ready."

"We have 2 years before we go to the Eastern Continent, so it is better the sooner she comes so we can prepare," Alex said.

The senior nodded. "What if the emperor doesn't accept?" the senior asked. "I'm worried he really won't accept."

"I don't think we need to worry about that right now," Alex said. "That's something we can figure out after the emperor rejects. I might have a few things to bribe him, but time will tell if he accepts or not."

The senior nodded. "If only I or the others could go there," he said softly.

Alex went on to talk with senior Luhei before leaving while Ronron came to her master.

"Master, you aren't angry that I'm leaving, right?" she asked.

"Haha, of course not," the man said while stroking her hair. "You've grown up, and I can't keep you confined for long. I need to let you spread your wings and experience the outside life if I want you to fly and grow."

After a small goodbye, Ronron walked away from him. Liz also talked to the senior for a bit, thanking him for the book she was given.

They all gathered over the teleportation foundation, ready to leave.

Alex looked around him at his family, all of whom he was taking with him back to his continent. After so many years, everyone was back together.

Almost everyone.

There were still two more people missing. Pearl and Hannah.

'I found him, but I still can't take him back just yet,' he thought. Still, he knew Pearl was doing his best. It would only be a matter of time before he came back to him as well.

"Are you all ready?" the senior asked.

Everyone nodded.

"Alright, here I go," the senior said and started activating the formation.

Alex and the rest felt the aura of teleportation take over them.

"Good luck."

That was the last thing they heard before they were teleported away.

They arrived in the Southern Continent on the other side of the teleportation formation. The moment the soldiers and staff around the teleportation formation saw Scarlet and Alex, they immediately bowed.

"Welcome back, your Majesty!" the entire group spoke at once.

Alex looked at the place that had been waiting for him, for his family. He turned around to the rest of his family with a big smile on his face.

"Welcome to my Kingdom!"

Thus ended a saga of Alex's life, one where he was finally freed from his ties from both the Western Continent and the Central Continent.

His new life in the Southern Continent with his friends and families would signal the beginning of a whole new saga.

As for what this saga would bring to his life, only fate could answer that question.

[End of Book 4: Fire and Crown]

* * * * * *

[Extras]

The blood burned on Pearl's body, both on the outside and inside. How many days had it been since it had started? 10? 20?

He didn't remember.

His mind had gone blank for so long that he no longer perceived time at all. All he could tell was that he was hurting.

He was hurting and he wanted it to stop.

He had forgotten where he was, where he had come from, and where he was going. Why was he here? Why was he in pain?

All conscious thoughts seemed foreign to him at this point. Even screaming in pain was not something he could do.

His fur was no longer white as he had been bathing in the fountain and his own blood for nearly a year. In fact, it looked more black than red with how thick the blood was.

'Why am I here?' a thought finally came to his head. A conscious one.

'I'll wait for you!' a small memory flashed from deep in his mind. 'Good Luck, Pearl.'

'Brother?' he thought. He remembered the last words that Alex had spoken to him, right before he had come to this room.

'I love you, my son.' He heard the whispers of a dying beast that licked him with love even as she died. A memory that was hidden so far in his mind that he was surprised he even remembered it at all.

'Mother?' he thought with pain building up in his heart.

'You must survive, Shouchuang.' Another memory floated in his head, one spoken by a beast whose voice was loud like that of a thousand lightning strikes.

'…who?' Pearl did not remember this beast at all. "Who?" he asked, out loud.

'Survive and Live!'

His eyes opened wide, shining bright yellow in the darkness of the room.

"I will survive," he shouted with gritting teeth. "I will live."

* * * * *

A young man and woman stood on the beach of an island. In front of them was a cave, the insides of which shined with some light, purple and silver to be exact.

"Are you ready?" the young man wrote on the palm of the young woman standing next to him.

Unlike the young man's simple attire, the young woman wore a pink robe with a white veil that covered her face. Through the white veil, one could see an orange mask that had no openings for any orifices.

The girl nodded in response to the question.

The young man took her palm with his left hand. With his right, he brought out a sword that was Ivory white in color and had an indent near its handle.

He pulled her into the cave and arrived in front of the thing that was glowing inside.

A Voidgate.

The Voidgate was small, barely large enough to fit a child. Through it, the young man could see a world that was an amalgamation of purple and silver lights.

Trying to squeeze through this Voidgate would mean certain death. However, the young man had no such fear.

He activated the sword in his hand and put it into the Voidgate. From there, he simply pushed it downward.

As if a searing hot knife on a stick of butter, the boundary of the Void Gate simply melted and became larger. Large enough to fit two people.

"Time to return," he spoke to himself. He took a deep breath before pulling the woman close to him. He grabbed her by the waist and then walked ahead with her.

Then, the two of them disappeared into the Voidgate, gone to a land far away.

* * * * *

A man sat in a bright room, working in front of a cauldron full of ingredients, surrounded by formations all around him aiding him in his task.

He wore a deep blue robe, accentuating the long blue hair on his head that fell straight behind him like a waterfall.

He silently worked on the pill he was making, giving nothing about his emotions away through his face at all times.

The pill came out a second later, which he placed on the formation next to him.

97%.

Finally, the man frowned, the only emotion he had shown since the beginning. He had worked with the best ingredients, using the best recipe and the best technique, aided by some of the best formations this world had seen.

Even then, he could never reach 100%.

He walked out of the room and saw a woman who had been bowing in front of the room for who knew how long.

"What is it?" the blue-haired man asked.

"Commander Jianyu has sent us a message," the woman said. "The people that left the Southern Continent have started returning. In fact, more have returned than the ones that left."

"Is that so?" the man asked. "So there really is a civilization hidden beyond those walls of violent Qi, huh?"

"It would appear so," the woman said.

"Tell the commander to keep me updated," the man said and walked away.

The woman continued bowing toward the man as he left.

"As you say, your Majesty."

Chapter 1308 First Three Tasks

A few months had passed since Alex returned to the Southern Continent with his family.

When the many elders and servants in the palace realized that Alex had returned with his family, they were all surprised and ecstatic about it.

When the elders realized that he had a daughter too, they were even more ecstatic. They were all worried about heirs and bloodlines, so knowing there was one, they were very happy.

However, when they learned that she would be leaving for the Immortal lands just the same as Alex without ever getting married or producing an heir, they were saddened again.

Alex thought of proposing the idea of having his clone produce an heir for the throne. However, because their children would end up not being able to cultivate, he couldn't make that decision.

In the end, the elders were once again forced to accept the truth that their king might leave no heir.

Alex's master and the rest were still in the palace when he returned. So, after he was back, he prepared places for them all to stay.

They themselves didn't feel it right to stay there forever either and were ready to move away. They could have stayed there forever, but they would've forever been a guest and they didn't like that.

It took them a bit of getting into after moving away into homes that were in the city close to the palace.

Alex's family also needed some time to settle into the palace.

Most of them couldn't believe just how extravagant the palace was. They had been to the White Tiger's underground palace, but that palace wasn't any good compared to this place.

The upper palace might have been comparable, but they were never let inside there. Ronron was perhaps the most excited of all to see the palace.

She kept asking the elders what this was and what that was. The elders were surprisingly not annoyed by her behavior either.

To them, she was just a naive young child and they were more than happy to teach her everything.

"Your Highness, why don't we have a teacher come and teach you about everything?" one of the elders suggested. "That way you will quickly learn everything important from history to geography to just normal etiquette."

"Oh! Let's do that," Ronron said excitedly. "Can my parents join in on that too? And my grandma too, and grandaunt."

"Yes, everyone can join," the elder said. "I would teach it to you myself, but I am a little busy, unfortunately."

"It's understandable," Ronron said. "We did come with over a million people. Your elders must have your hand full with dealing with them."

The elders nodded.

While his family was being taught various things, Alex moved on to do his own things.

The very first thing he did was listen to every report on what had happened in the time he was gone.

He and Scarlet listened to everything and made decisions that the elders could not. They also made decisions on what to do with the many people that had just arrived.

A million different mouths were suddenly created, so they needed food and resources too.

Alex and Scarlet decided to turn the mountain range to the north, which separated the mainland continent from the wasteland, into a farming range that not only grew mortal foods but also many resources itself.

The land where the 56 spirit veins were dug out still didn't have many things growing, so Alex chose that area.

Once that whole thing was taken care of on his end, Alex went on to check his military and the royal guilds.

The army had once again increased in number from the last time he was around. It grew over the year as each year more and more joined, but this time around there was a significant increase.

Perhaps because so many people had left this time around, the elders had decided to add an extra few, bringing the total number of people in the military to above 10 thousand, of which 1400 were Saint realm cultivators.

The Alchemy, Formation, and Talisman halls were similar too. Many people had joined them as well to match the increment in the army. After all, their primary purpose was to craft pills, formations, and talismans for the people in the army.

Jai Heiyun was back in the alchemy guild and was working her damn hardest for the time she had missed while she was away.

Apparently, she had spent most of the time with her clone's children who were old enough to have their own children as well. She didn't bother going around, looking at different places, and spent all the time she had in her old house.

She had treated that as a vacation, so now that she was back, she needed to work her damn hardest.

Seeing her enthusiasm, Alex finally decided to work on his own problems as well.

Due to the sudden arrival of Hao Ya, he stopped many things that he was supposed to do after he made the Dao pill and learned the Dao of Techniques.

Due to the nature of the central continent, he couldn't practice anything there either, so he was finally getting the time to.

There were quite a few things he had to do, but for now, he focused on 3 different ones.

First, he would use the Dao of Techniques for their intended purpose. He was going to change a technique to fit him better.

And the technique he was going to change was none other than the Pill Splitting Qi. That was the technique that allowed him to split the powder in a cauldron into two halves, and then pour all the energy into it to form 2 perfect pills.

The thing he wanted to do was to change the technique so that he would instead of having to use 2 sets of ingredients, he could only use 1.

He would have to change what he called this technique afterward as there would no longer be any splitting involved in the process. That he could delay until after he had changed the technique.

The next thing he wanted to do was make a new pill recipe.

Jai Heiyun had brought him an interesting pill when she had first joined them. The Saint Spirit Immunity pill gave someone immunity against all forms of spiritual attacks for a small period of time.

Then, there was the nameless pill he bought in the auction in the Northern continent. The pill was a True rank pill that one took in advance to protect themselves against most poisons out there.

What Alex wanted to do was to either downgrade the ingredients of the Saint Spirit Immunity pill to create a True Spirit Immunity pill for his many True realm cultivators in his army. Or, he wanted to upgrade the True realm pre-eaten antidote pill.

Given the importance, Alex decided to go with the Antidote pill first.

Finally, there was the matter of Demon Eyes. He had gathered the ingredients for the paste thanks to Bai Jinghsen, so he was going to have to make those and give them to his family as well.

Once he was done with these 3 things, only then could he move on to the many other things he needed to do.

Chapter 1309 Saint Poison Neutralizing Pill

The easiest thing for Alex to do was make the pastes. All he had to do was take the ingredients and crush them together until they were fine and slightly runny.

Alex prepared the paste inside Memory at its largest size, so there was more than enough paste for most of the people in his family.

He also wrote down the Demon Eyes technique and handed it over to all 4 of his family members that could currently cultivate it.

Alex would have loved to give the technique to Whisker, but as a beast, he could not learn that technique even if he wanted to. Not that he would need to, given that he was a Seeking mouse and had one of the best senses in the entire world.

Their species were so good at finding things in their surroundings and understanding the environment they were in that the heavens had made it impossible for them to cultivate instead.

After finishing the paste, Alex handed it over to his family. That included his Mother, Father, his aunt Liz, and Ronron. The two clones couldn't cultivate, so they were excluded.

He explained to them how they would have to be blind for a long time after they started using this.

In Alex's case, he had been blind for a little over 2 years. And that was with his having the Undying Physique where he healed far faster than the regular person.

In his family's case, it would most likely take them many more years than that. Alex was hopeful that Scarlet's fire would help them quite a bit, but he couldn't rely on it as well.

After understanding what they were going to go through, Helen was the first to accept.

"We can still use our Spiritual sense, can't we? We should be able to see around us then," she asked.

"You can," Alex said. "I will also have elders find you all a seeking mouse so you can use its eyes to see instead. Although, you most likely won't need that unless there is something you really need your eyes for."

After hearing the explanation, all 4 of them decided to do it.

Alex helped everyone put the paste in their eyes. He was surprised by their scream when their eyes were destroyed by the paste in order to reform them.

He had forgotten how painful it was. Or rather, he never knew how painful it was. His pain tolerance had always been at an inhuman level ever since he started body cultivating along with Pearl.

Not only that, he had only recently been killed over a hundred times by being drowned in lava when he had used the paste for the first time.

As a result, the pain he had felt at the time was what he had described to his family members in passing as mild. It was not mild at all.

Even Graham grunted in pain as the paste destroyed his eyes. It was only after their eyes were completely destroyed that they stopped hurting.

Alex quickly pulled out some blindfolds he had prepared and helped tie them around their heads, covering their eyes and keeping the paste stuck to their eyes.

"You have to do it once a month from now on until this paste ends," Alex explained. Everyone nodded as they were using their spiritual sense to look at everything.

"Good," Alex said. "You can it on your own from now on then."

Once he had helped his family, he moved on to his other 2 tasks.

The pill splitting Qi and the antidote pill itself were something that he could only understand while making those pills.

In a way, he could do two things at once. However, when it came to changing them, he had to do it separately.

Alex focused on the ingredients first.

He only had the pill itself, so it took him a while to figure out the ingredients that were used to make the pills. Thankfully, it wasn't so complicated as Alex knew how to reverse engineer a pill recipe out of a pill.

It was one of the knowledge he had gained alongside the Supreme Elemental Accord when he first reached the Saint realm. Using the smell, the taste, the color, the elements, and even the effect of the pill, he could narrow down the list of ingredients that made those pills.

Once he was down to just a few ingredients, he could just try to make them and figure out what the recipe was.

The shape of the powder and the elemental energy of the pill helped quite a lot in understanding what the recipe might be.

The energy resulted was based on the strength of the two energy before it mixed together. Learning the strength of the energy helped Alex determine just what sort of temperature the ingredient must have been used under.

The shape helped determine the speed and rotation the ingredient must have gone through. Using these two pieces of information, one could with some level of certainty figure out just what the recipe was.

Once the recipe was ready, everything became even easier.

Alex had a habit of upgrading ingredients for the next tier of pills, he was certain he could do it quickly. Once he had the recipe and ingredients figured out, it didn't take him long at all.

There was one main thing that Alex needed to learn about the recipe. That was how the ingredients affected each other each time they were put into the cauldron while following the recipe.

The knowledge about the energy interaction was what he had already learned about.

Once he learned that, he could do some mental simulations with Saint rank ingredients and see if they followed the same pattern.

From there, it was just a bunch of trial and error for him to get to the ingredients he needed. He also knew a bunch of ingredients that could be substituted just because they were very commonly used in antidote pills.

As such, it became even easier for him to complete it all.

A month after he started, Alex had prepared the first Saint-ranked version of that pills. It was only a 62% harmony pill, but that was only a start.

As long as he had the recipe, it didn't even take him a few days to improve it. Once the final product was ready, the heavens announced its arrival by banging the lightning gong 8 times in a row.

Alex ate the pill and felt the energy flow into his body and disappear. The energy from the pill had become dormant while waiting for any type of poison or toxin to enter his body.

Alex's knowledge ate a poison and the energy immediately fought against it. After a few experimentations, he figured out that the energy of the pill lasted inside one's body for no more than 2 weeks.

Even an 8-veined antidote pill didn't last longer than that, although it did stop way more poison than the normal ones did.

"It's a very good pill," Alex thought. "Certainly I can't leave it be nameless."

He thought for a bit and came up with a simple name for the pill.

"The Saint Poison Neutralizing Pill."

Chapter 1310 Splitting The Splitting Technique

After Alex prepared the Saint Poison Neutralizing pill, he finally moved on to the Pill Splitting Qi. He hadn't left it for the last or anything. He had been consciously observing how it worked while making the pill.

So, now that the pill was done with, he could just sit back and use what he learned to improve it.

The pill-splitting Qi did exactly 3 things one after another.

First, it split the powder in the cauldron into two equal halves.

Second, they then took each pile of powder and turned them into a spherical shape. It didn't just make a spherical shape at all but also made sure to have the Structure and Composition of the pill be as best as it could.

Third, they pulled the energy in the cauldron into the pills using some sort of vortex created by his Qi.

The second thing the technique did was the most important part that Alex could not mess up, followed by the vortex. As for the first one, he did not need it. For now.

It was a complex problem that Alex was trying to solve and even as he started, he could already tell that it was going to take him months to complete this.

Even with the Dao of technique, making a completely new technique out of an existing one was not something he was sure he was capable of.

To start off, Alex had memorized the route the Qi took while coming out of his body. He knew how to use the technique, so there wasn't much to it. The only thing about this route was just how many minor meridians the Qi had to go through before coming out.

The Qi started at the neutral spiritual root as the Qi had no elemental affinity to it. It then went through one of the four major meridians that each spiritual root had, the one that made the Qi control physical stuff with it.

Since the Pill Splitting Qi did not create something, help cultivate, or reinforce something that already exists, it could only go through that major meridian.

Since forming the pill from the powder and pouring energy into did not require any of the other 3 major meridians, Alex could be sure from the start that just which one he was supposed to start with.

There were two directions Alex could go from here.

The first method could take anywhere between a few days or a few years to get the result Alex wanted.

The second method would take a few months for sure, but it would definitely not take a year at all, even with how complex the technique was.

The first method included him brute forcing his way into finding the technique. Of course, it wouldn't just be brute forcing as he knew thanks to his experiments and the Dao to which Meridian did that.

Unfortunately, given that the pill splitting Qi was a complex technique that combined 3 separate similarly complex techniques into one, even just separating the 2 techniques was difficult.

Even with what knowledge he had about the meridians and pathways, he still needed to go through the millions of possible combinations of pathways to test it all out.

Fortunately, his Dao would help him a lot here. His Qi would never have to make the complete route for him to know whether or not the technique would do what he intended to do based on the pathway it was on.

Meaning, he wouldn't have to wait for the Qi to release out of his body and waste his time. He could instead immediately move on to the next series of pathways.

It also helped a ton since he could reuse the same Qi over and over without having to waste it. It sped up the process a lot.

With this method, Alex could cut down the time required to find the technique.

Without the dao, Alex could maybe do a thousand different tries in a single day, which would take him nearly 3 years to go through the million different possibilities.

With the dao, Alex could certainly do over ten thousand, if not more tests, that too without using much Qi. The only Qi he would use would be a few bits of Qi that the heavens would take away as a cost for using the Dao.

Every Dao had its cost, so Alex didn't care much for it.

Going through this direction, Alex had millions of possibilities to try. He could find the technique in just a few thousand tries if he was lucky, or it could take millions if he was not.

As a result, this method of finding the technique was a gamble.

The second method was far less of a gamble.

Since the pill splitting Qi started with separating the powder into two halves, Alex could just try and figure out that part of the technique.

Given how simple the technique was, it would take Alex no more than a week, if even that to figure out the technique behind splitting the powder.

Once he had that technique, he could compare it against the actual Pill-splitting Qi, and contrast the two to figure out what sort of pathways would work the best for the second and third part of the technique.

This would most definitely take Alex some time to figure out exactly how to remove the First part of the technique without removing the second and the third, giving him an understanding of the possible pathways to achieve what he wanted.

The possible pathways there would amount to no more than a tenth of that of the first method, giving Alex an advantage. There was also an element of gambling here, but it was so small that it couldn't even be called that.

Alex thought for a bit as to exactly what he wanted to do.

If he were in some sort of a hurry or a deadline, Alex would definitely choose to gamble. However, given that he had ample time, he decided to go with the 2nd method.

There was another reason why he wanted to go for the 2nd method, but that was way too advanced for him to just try out without first learning more about the Dao of techniques.

Once he figured out more, he would then decide whether to try his hand at what he had planned as well.

After his preparations were made, Alex began his task.

He spent the majority of the time of the day figuring out the first half of the problem. Removing the splitting part of the technique from the whole technique turned out more difficult than he imagined.

He had improved some techniques before, so he knew it wasn't supposed to be this difficult, so the only reason he could give was that the technique he was trying to change was just that complex.

Alex had a suspicion that he was trying to change a Divine grade technique, if not a Celestial grade. He wouldn't even be surprised if it was actually a God-grade technique given how incredible it was.

After finally figuring out what remained after removing the first part of the technique, Alex now only had to test about a million or 2 different possibilities.

Around a million possibilities and 7 months in total later, Alex finally got the technique he wanted so badly.

From now on, he could make pills with pill veins with just a single set of ingredients.

Chapter 1311 A Quick Trip To The Orchard

Alex trained his newfound technique and started making pills.

On his first try, he made a pill that reached 8 veins just as he had hoped. However, after making subsequent pills, he ended up with a slight problem.

The problem wouldn't be much of a bother to him, but to others, it would definitely be a major problem.

The energy in the cauldron was no longer potent enough to make a 100% pill all the time. As long as Alex was careful when making the pills from the very start, he wouldn't have much of a problem in this regard.

Even when he made a pill that didn't have enough energy to reach 100%, he could simply add a single World Defying Mushroom into the cauldron, and he would have more than enough energy to reach what he wanted.

As for others, they would have no chance from the start since they didn't have any World Defying Mushroom.

Alex was running out on his reserve of the mushroom, so he left for the City of Many Flowers along with Linlin and Ronron who wanted to come as well.

Alex had Ronron put on a veil that covered her face for the most part and made it hard to see through. He wanted to give her a mask to wear as well, but Ronron refused it saying that she did not find masks fashionable at all.

"This place we're going to, it's full of flowers right?" Ronron asked.

"Yes, your Highness," Linlin answered. "The City of Many Flowers is known for its exquisite beauty and flowers that grow at every corner of the street."

"Aww, I want to see it too," Ronron said. "My senses are barely large enough to see anything."

"You'll have to make do with it," Alex said.

Ronron grumbled slightly. "Whatever," she said.

"Have you been learning everything about the continent?" Alex asked. "Who are the important figures in the City of Many Flowers?"

"Huh? Oh... that's... Qiu Hanyu of the Flowerhall sect and... Jin Tianma of the Alchemy Association?" Ronron asked.

"Good, you've been studying well," Alex said. They arrived sometime later at the City of Many Flowers and got off their ship. Another ship close by stopped as well as a handful of guards flew out of it and surrounded Alex and the two girls, protecting them.

Alex had insisted that he didn't need any protection, but the Elders refused to let him go anywhere without the guards. The Scale Legion of the Eastern Continent was still around, so they took every precaution they could.

Given that none of them were even in the Saint Soul realm, Alex doubted they could be of any help if he truly needed one.

"Your majesty!" a few people walked up to them and bowed deeply.

"Sect leader Qiu, Association leader, how have you two been?" Alex asked.

"We've been doing great, your majesty!" the two answered one after another.

"You haven't met my daughter yet, I assume," Alex said. "This is Maron."

"Princess Maron," the sect elder Qiu spoke immediately. "It is our pleasure to see you in the flesh."

Ronron felt a little awkward but she was used to people calling her that and had learned the proper etiquette before.

She bowed slightly, saying nothing while doing so.

"I hear the Orchard opened in my absence," Alex said immediately, not letting her feel any more awkward being in the focus. "Any sign when it will be opening next?"

"The pollen burst has been slow as of yet, your majesty," the sect leader answered. "I doubt it will open within the next year."

"I see," Alex said. "I guess I have no choice but to open it myself then."

The group present nodded. Both of them wanted to take Alex to their respective place to serve him, but Alex wanted none of that.

Instead, he decided to simply go to the orchard. He was a little too busy after all.

Arriving on top of the platform in the middle of the lake, Alex could feel the spatial pocket hiding right in front of him.

"Can you sense it?" he asked his daughter.

Ronron tried a bit, but she couldn't tell anything. "No, Spatial Sense is still off for me. I can only tell when there is a change in space or there is spatial manipulation. I can probably tell there has been a change once I'm inside though. As for being like you, I will need the Dao."

Alex nodded. "Later, after you enter the Saint realm," he said. He had explained the reason to Ronronr already so Ronron was staying passively without asking for any help.

Gaining a Dao in the True realms made you strong, but it also made breaking through difficult with the Inner Demon and the Lightning Tribulation.

At the very least, Alex did not want Ronron to learn any dao until she reached the True Emperor realm.

Alex reached out and made a cutting gesture in front of him. The space tore itself into two, opening a pathway into the orchard.

He walked into it, and looked back, keeping it open for the others to walk in. It wasn't just him or Ronron and Linlin that were going to enter the orchard, but also quite a few of the people from the Flowerhall sect and the Alchemy Association that had been ready to come here ever since Alex let them know that he was coming.

One by one people entered. Ronron and Linlin entered first, followed by the royal guard. Only after that did the members from the sect and association come in.

Harry walked in as well and greeted Alex. They talked for a while before Harry had to go and find whatever ingredients he could.

Unlike the normal openings, when Alex opened the orchard, it stayed open until he wanted to. So, if he came here for a single ingredient, then they had that amount of time to look for whatever they could find.

Alex took his time. It had been a while since he had such free time, so he spent as much time as he could on the inside, just enjoying the Forbidden Orchard.

Whisker was out as well, looking at everything around them. He spent more time with the family, so he had come here with Ronron rather than Alex. When he saw different ingredients, he jumped down to collect them from time to time.

The only person who couldn't truly see everything was Ronron, who was annoyed a bit whenever someone made any sound of getting amazed by something far away.

Alex went around with the rest, gathering what he thought was necessary, leaving the rest for Whisker to gather. He went through the field of Spirit Cleansing Lilies, went past the jungle with the Divine Devil's fruit, and arrived in the damp land next to the river where the World Defying Mushroom grew.

He kept the people far away so as to not pollute the mushroom, while he used his Space dao to cut it and gather it.

He did it slowly, taking his time. After he was done, he took a long way back to the gate and waited for people to gather. Once they were all there, he opened the spatial door once again and they all walked back out.

Chapter 1312 Alter And Combine

After the Pill Splitting Qi, Alex decided to focus on his various techniques to not just improve them, but also alter them to make them more impactful.

As of yet, there was really only just one method of alteration that he was hoping to do. That was combining two techniques into one.

There were complicated procedures when trying to combine two techniques into one. So, to have as little difficulty as possible, Alex started with the two techniques that were close to each other.

He wanted to combine the Iron Fist technique and the Golden Spears technique. Given that both of the techniques had something related to Creation major meridian, and that creation coming from a Metal spiritual root made it easy to combine the two techniques.

He had been training how to do that for a few days back in the Western Continent, but he had to stop due to his work there.

There was not much point in training in the Central continent either. After returning to the Southern Continent, he had been busy elsewhere, so he was only getting to go back to it now.

Alex had improved both techniques to the peak, so all he needed to do was combine them.

To combine them, he needed to go through the same process he had with the Pill Splitting Qi. He needed to separate the technique into individual steps that it had and then combine the parts he needed.

From the Iron Fist Punch technique, Alex didn't want to keep the fist shape of the attack, but he wanted the force that came at the end that sent the attack flying.

For the Golden Spear technique, he wanted to create all four of the spear but instead of having to control them, he wanted them to automatically shoot off in front of him at the target.

After subtracting one part from the first technique and adding the other part to the second technique for nearly 3 weeks, Alex came up with a new technique.

He practiced it on the Immortal Puppet in front of him.

He punched into the air while using his technique. All of a sudden, 4 spears made up of Metal Qi formed in the air and instantly shot toward the puppet in front of him.

Each spear was strong on its own, so 4 attacking at the same time had quite the strength behind it. At the very least, it was no different than being attacked by 4 Iron Fist punches at once.

Alex was more than happy with the technique he had come up with using the two old ones. He called the new technique Golden Spear Punch and moved on to other similar techniques.

There weren't many techniques that were similar enough to the two to combine them.

Alex combined the sword strikes Elusive Heavenly Sword with the Static Slash he had acquired from the Palace treasury after becoming the king. He only formed a single slashing technique that shot out a lightning slash, which Alex called the Heavenly Static Slash.

Alex made up a fire technique that he could shoot forward. He improved it to its peak and combined it with the explosion technique he had learned from the dao and created another new technique, which he called the Bursting Blaze.

Alex made up another technique using the 21 Sword Array as a base. He found it hard to change the technique when he tried adding swords that broke the array's sequence. The sequence he found was the number of swords that needed to be put in each layer.

3, 6, 12, 21, 33, 48... and so on was the sequence he needed to follow. Alex got up to the 6th layer, which in total asked for 123 swords. However, he found it hard to collect that many swords for now, so Alex moved it down to the 5th number, which used a total of 75 swords.

75 Sword Array was what Alex came up with as the name for the technique. He moved on from it once he was done with it.

Alex tried to take the Golden Spear Punch and mix it with his Penta-Sword technique of his, but the two techniques were a little too different for him to possibly combine them at once.

Once he was done with similar techniques, Alex moved on to converting techniques into different techniques that did the same thing but used a different Elemental Qi instead.

There was a very easy technique for Alex to start with in this one. He had the 5 Elemental Barrier, which formed a barrier using the 5 normal elements. All Alex wanted to do was add Yang and Yin into the barrier as well, turning it into the 7-Elemental Barrier.

It took him a month to go through various possibilities before adding the two elemental Qi into the barrier to form it. Alex had succeeded, but that was only the beginning

He had made the barrier, but the barrier was in no way as strong as it could be.

The strongest defensive barrier technique Alex had was the Swirling Water Shield technique which spun a bunch of water Qi in a curved barrier that instead of just stopping an attack, it deflected it, making the barrier use up much less energy and stay intact that much longer.

Now, Alex had to try and slowly made a spiral barrier for each element and then add it all together to form a single technique.

This was the hardest task Alex took on since the Pill Splitting Qi. It took him such a long time to complete it, that in the meantime, the Sundering Sanctum opened and closed.

There was no winner this time around, and Alex had to go there himself to get everyone out as the formation at the top of the artifact was broken and no one could come out on their own.

After sending everyone out, Alex spent some time talking with the spirit in there and some more time refining the playground. It was going to take a long time before he got anywhere at all with it.

Alex returned back to the palace and completed the technique that he had been trying for so long. After months, the technique was finally perfected, with all 7 elements working together in a swirl to form a barrier.

He named it the All Swirling Elemental Shield.

Once he was done, Alex tested the shield around a bit and noticed that it was strong against all elemental attacks, with the strength varying depending on the strength of his own Spiritual roots.

After that, Alex decided to focus on making more Blood Beasts. He was handed over some Saint beast cores by Bai Jingshen upon asking and also had gathered his own from throughout the Southern Continent.

He had been gathering his blood during all these months, so there was no doubt that he had enough blood to form dozens of blood beasts, but he worried that it was going to take a lot of time.

There were only so many months before the people from the Eastern Continent would arrive to take them. Before that, Alex had to go to the Western Continent to meet Bai Jingshen as well as Pearl.

As Alex thought that, he looked over to his left arm instinctively to check on Pearl's tattoo.

To his utter dismay, the tattoo on his arm had completely vanished.

Chapter 1313 Pearl

The moment Alex saw that the paw print on his left bicep was gone, he immediately jumped into action.

He spread his spiritual sense in a wide area, locating many of the important people in the palace. "I'm going away for a while. I'll be back soon," he told them.

Then, he teleported away, arriving on top of the teleportation platform behind the palace. He activated the script without hesitation and in the next moment he was gone.

Alex arrived in the northern desert of the Western Continent and immediately flew away from there, moving in the direction of the Beast realm.

His speed was far faster than any boat artifact he could use, and as such he would arrive by the Beast realm in just an hour.

Alex checked his arm again, to make sure he wasn't mistaken. He even hoped he was. However, the mark was still gone, which meant... Alex didn't want to think about what that meant.

He continued flying for a while, keeping all thoughts away from him at the moment, and arrived by the teleportation platform outside of the secret realm.

He flew down and quickly asked the beasts there to let him in. After contacting someone inside, Alex was finally taken in.

As soon as Alex arrived in the underground palace, he had to follow a beast who was taking him to Bai Jingshen. Alex was in a hurry, but he couldn't overstep his boundaries.

He wasn't taken to the Throne room, but rather to the palace hall where he arrived and entered. As soon as he entered, he saw Bai Jingshen in his massive beast form, sitting on top of a large chair.

Next to him were his 7 women who were sitting to the side, seemingly waiting for Alex to come.

Then, Alex saw the 9th beast in the group.

"Pearl!" Alex called out as soon as he saw the white-furred beast with golden eyes.

"Brother!" Pearl shouted and ran off toward Alex. He jumped onto Alex, hugging him in the process. "You finally came, brother."

Alex hugged the giant Pearl with his arms not even reaching halfway around his body. "You scared me," he said, holding him tightly. "I thought you were dead."

Pearl let go of Alex. "Dead? Why?" he asked.

Alex quickly showed his bicep. "Your beast space is gone, so I thought you had died," he said. "I was so worried, but you're still alive, so everything is fine."

"You only noticed it was gone now?" Bai Jingshen was gone.

"Ah, brother Shen," Alex quickly spoke. "Greetings." He turned to the others as well as greeted them. "My apologies, I was in such a rush that i—"

"It's fine," Bai Jingshen said with a bit of a chuckle in his voice. "I would have been worried if you weren't so emotionally occupied with seeing Pearl."

Alex nodded and looked back at Pearl. He stared at him for a few moments with a confused look on his face. Pearl's cultivation base seemed to have gotten a little better, and his aura seemed stronger, but there were no other changes that were apparent to him.

"He... evolved, didn't he?" he asked.

"He did, but he didn't change physically," Bai Jingshen said. "It's a common occurrence in beasts that have a very strong impression of who they are. So, when they evolve, they remain the same."

"But mistake not, this Pearl is completely different than the Pearl you used to know. His strength, skill, talent, everything is on a level beyond that of a regular beast. After all, he is now a bonafide Heavenly beast with a bloodline comparable to that of the progenitor of the White Tiger."

Alex felt a chill pass through him when he remotely realized just how important that made Pearl.

"So everything is fixed, right?" Alex asked. "His bloodline is great and his spiritual root is fine?"

"His bloodline is greater than ever, and his spiritual roots are back to being how they were before he ruined it in the Central Continent," Bai Jingshen said.

"I see, that's a relief," Alex said and a small smile formed on his face. "You did it, Pearl. I knew you could do it."

Pearl gave a smile as well.

"Were you busy? Why didn't you come sooner?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"I was busy," Alex said. "I only recently became free and was going to move on to my next work, which was when I noticed that the tattoo was gone."

"So," he turned toward Bai Jingshen. "Can you tell me why the tattoo is gone? Not only that, but I also can't feel Pearl even though he is right in front of him. Is it why I think it is?"

Bai Jingshen shrugged. "You seem to have realized already. It's simple, isn't it? You two lost your bond."

Alex knew that was most definitely the answer, but he was still surprised. "We both lost our bond?" he asked. "I didn't initiate it, so does that mean Pearl broke the bond with me?"

He found it hard to believe Pearl would do something like that.

"No," Bai Jingshen said. "You could say it happened on its own, or if you want someone to blame, blame the heavens."

"I... don't understand," Alex said, hoping for a better explanation than that.

"Simply speaking, your bond was with Pearl, the White Cat. What he became after evolving was a White Tiger. Since he's an entirely different being, the Pearl you were bonded with no longer exists in Heaven's eyes. So, the bond broke. Does that make sense?" Bai Jingshe asked.

"Uh... yeah, actually that makes a lot of sense," Alex said. "So Pearl really did evolve into something else other than what he was before, huh?"

He smiled and pet Pearl a little. As he did, he noticed something.

"Huh?" Alex got curious. For one thing, Pearl's muscles were far stronger than they were before, but that wasn't what surprised Alex. What surprised him was Pearl's skin.

As he pet him, he noticed the skin underneath the fur, which didn't seem to be some plain skin at all. Instead, it looked like there was some black pattern across his skin.

It was only on his body, and couldn't be seen that easily even with the fur moved. The markings were also quite disconnected, so it didn't seem like they were something recognizable.

"What is this?" Alex asked Bai Jingshen.

Bai Jingshen looked closely and shook his head. "I don't know. This is the first time I saw this," he said trying to understand what it was.

The female beasts looked at the black spots and were surprised. "Maybe his skin got the black stripes of a tiger, but not entirely?" one of them asked.

"It could be the black spots or patches of a normal leopard or a clouded leopard," one of the women said. "Maybe from his father?"

"Maybe it was something in this young man's blood that affected the evolution process," another one answered.

Not a single one could truly come up with a satisfactory answer, so they all gave up in the end.

"If we don't know, then there's no point in figuring out. I'll have them look up what it could be later. For now, since you are here you might as well tell me when you are leaving for the Eastern Continent," Bai Jingshen asked.

Alex thought for a bit and answered.

"There should be less than half a year before we leave."

Chapter 1314 The Treasury

"Half a year, huh? I guess we don't have much time then," Bai Jingshen said. "Come with me, you two."

Bai Jingshen walked outside with Pearl and Alex following behind him. As they walked through the hallway, Alex checked Pearl's cultivation base. He was very much close to entering the Saint Foundation realm.

Pearl had his cultivation base slowed down due to having to spend a decade and a half in a place without any cultivation potential. Due to the evolution, his cultivation base had shot up, but he still had to continue from then on.

'I wonder how fast his cultivation speed will be from now on,' Alex wondered.

There were a few other tests he wanted to do with Pearl as soon as possible, with the main one being if Pearl cultivating still forced him to body cultivate or not. The obvious answer was no, but he still wanted to test it before being certain.

"Here we are," Bai Jingshen said, arriving in front of a large door with a formation carved onto it. "You recognize this door, don't you?"

Alex felt awkward at the question and gave a small smile instead.

They had arrived in front of the treasury, the very same one Alex had found Godslayer in, and had proceeded to destroy his way through the palace that very nearly led to Ren Xiao's death.

"You wanna try opening it?" Bai Jingshen asked.

Alex quickly shook his head.

The white tiger laughed and placed his palm on the formation before pouring Qi onto the seal. "You wouldn't have been able to open it even if you wanted to," he said. "This formation requires the person to have a very strong concentration of White Tiger's bloodline in their system."

"You made it through last time, but this time around, it would be impossible for you," Bai Jingshen said.

Alex nodded. His Qi was capable of running any formation and script regardless of whether or not he was pouring his Qi as it was required. While others would need to use a token of some sort, he could activate a formation or script without it.

However, when it came to formations with seals on them that asked for a specific thing, he couldn't do anything even if he could activate it.

That was why despite activating the treasury door back in his own palace, he still needed the crown's help to open it.

After Bai Jingshen, Alex and Pearl walked in.

The last time Alex had come, there were only two swords in this place, of which he had taken one. However, this time around, the treasury was completely filled up with many different items and objects.

"Woah!" Alex said, quite surprised at the stuff inside the treasury. He had been inside his own treasury, but it was nowhere near as good as this.

"There is so much stuff," he couldn't help but say.

"I brought a lot of things back with me when I was gone," Bai Jingshen said. "Most of these things are for the others. There's nothing here that I would truly count as... incredible."

"Ah, is that so," Alex couldn't help but say.

"Oh, wait," Bai Jingshen said and looked around. "There is one thing that I brought back for Pearl. I forgot I kept it here."

He reached for some corner and pulled out a box. He opened the wooden box and pulled out something metallic from inside of it.

It was a sort of bracelet, which he tossed toward Pearl.

Pearl caught it and looked at it curiously.

Alex looked at it too. At first, he couldn't see what was so good about this bracelet. Was it a defensive item maybe that Pearl was going to use?

As he thought that, his eyes caught on something blue or violet. "Hmm?" he looked closely at the small blue crystal. He felt like he knew what that was, that crystal.

"No way!" he shouted the moment he realized. "Is that... a space stone?"

"We just call it a storage artifact, but yes that stone in it is the Space stone," Bai Jingshen said.

Alex looked at the ring on his own finger. "They are of separate color, huh?" he asked. "I remember the senior saying the color was a result of corruption or something. Is the color random?"

"The color isn't random," Bai Jingshen said. "It's usually a good measure of how much of the space in the space stone you've managed to turn into usable space in the ring."

"If I'm not wrong, it starts off with colorless or white where it is full of space aura and no space. Then it goes yellow, green, blue, purple, and red. There are some people that say black is the highest grade one, but I've never seen one," Bai Jingshen said.

"So, blue stones are average huh?" Alex said. "Senior said even red ones weren't very good though."

"Honestly, Space stones are a mystery to me. I only know it has space energy which can be turned to normal space," Bai Jingshen said and helped Pearl wear the bracelet.

"You'll have to spend your days refining it okay? I took it from the treasury without asking, so I don't know who it belonged to before. You will have to take care," he told Pearl.

Pearl nodded and looked at the bracelet on his arm with fascination. What was even more fascinating was that the bracelet slowly changed color, turning transparent until it looked like the white fur on Pearl's arm.

"Alright, now where is it?" Bai Jingshen looked around again and found the sword that he had been looking for. "Come."

Alex went along with him and arrived in front of a small pedestal that was kept in the corner of the room. On it was a thin and long sword with a red handle, silver crossguard, and a fully black blade.

The blade itself, now that Alex was looking at it, was made up of not metal, but rather some form of crystalline rock. He had never really noticed that before, but now he did.

On the base of the blade itself was a small indentation made by something that was carved on it.

The Azure Imperium's Insignia.

This was the sword that had been in Pearl's mother's body when they had somehow arrived on the Western Continent. This was the sword that Alex had pulled from her body to let her die. This was the sword that let them know who exactly their enemy was.

"It's time for you to find who the owner of the sword was," Bai Jingshen said. He turned toward Pearl. "It's time for you to find who killed your mother."

Pearl was surprised but he quickly got serious and nodded. "I will definitely find them," he said.

Bai Jingshen grabbed the sword and tossed it at Alex.

Alex caught the sword reactively, not letting it fall to the ground. As soon as he grabbed it, he felt a force on him that came from the half-formed spirit in the sword, not unlike his own Midnight.

Alex poured some of his Qi into the sword to calm it down fully. It took a while, but Alex got it to stop struggling so much.

The moment the sword stopped struggling, Alex noticed something else about the sword.

"Space aura?"

Chapter 1315 Bond Of Equals

"Space Aura?" Pearl asked when he heard Alex speak.

"This sword has space aura in it?" Bai Jingshen asked with a curious look.

"Yes," Alex said. "It's faint though, very faint. If I wasn't holding it, I wouldn't even have noticed."

Alex wondered what the reason was for the sword to have a space aura. Unable to come up with any reasonable assumptions, he stopped thinking about it.

"Even with the spirit somewhat tamed, it's still quite heavy," Alex said, moving the sword around. "Although, I get a feeling that this sword isn't very much used for fighting."

"It has the insignia of the Azure Empire, so I would assume it's more of a celebratory sword than an actual one used for fighting," Bai Jingshen said. "Still, we can't dismiss the fact that it could be a sword used for fighting."

Alex continued looking at the sword. "I don't think I can just ask the Dragon Emperor who this sword belongs to, can I?" he asked.

"No, I suppose you cannot," Bai Jingshen said.

"Hmm, this might be annoying then," Alex thought. "To begin with, If the emperor himself is the one who owns this sword belongs to, then... wait, what do I do then?"

"Kill him," Bai Jingshen said.

Alex gave an awkward smile. "I don't know if I'm capable of such a thing just yet," he said. "I assume the Dragon Emperor would be a strong Saint Transformation figure at the very least."

"Maybe," Bai Jingshen said. "As far as I can remember, it has been nearly 10 millennia since he became the Emperor. If he is still healthy enough to rule a continent, then his strength cannot be underestimated."

Alex was a little surprised. This was the first time someone had mentioned how long ago the Dragon Emperor had taken up the crown.

"You once told me that you knew saints who lived 10 thousand years. Was that in this realm or the Immortal realms?" Alex asked.

"I was speaking about the Immortal realms," Bai Jingshen said. "There aren't nearly any good elixirs in this realm that can aid your longevity that much."

"Then how is the Dragon Emperor living so long?" Alex asked.

"Body Cultivation," the White Tiger said non-nonchalantly. "He has a strong body on top of having a high cultivation base. That's the only way for someone to live so long and remain healthy."

"I see," Alex said, understanding a little more.

"Let's leave."

They walked away from the treasury that closed behind them. They walked and went back to the palace hall where Bai Jingshen's women were still seated.

They talked for a bit as Alex talked about what he had been doing while he was away. Alex explained what he could, Luo Beihan that there was a technique that could help them make perfect pills.

"Wait, do you think I could learn that technique as well?" she asked.

Alex didn't even hesitate. "Of course," he said. "I'm not really sure if beasts can do it or not, but you should be able to."

He brought out a talisman and handed it over to the tiger. The tiger was beyond excited to learn that her alchemy skills were going to get much better with just that one technique. After all, it was a technique belonging to the Alchemy God himself.

He had already given a few pill recipes, but he still wanted to give them the Saint Poison Neutralizing pill so that the beast could remain safe.

In return, Bai Jingshen gave him something as well.

He placed his energy into Alex's body as he settled a technique in there. Alex watched in surprise and remembered the roar from so long ago that had saved him from the attack that the dead 8th Undying God's remaining spirit had launched on him.

"How do you do that?" Alex asked with a slightly surprised face.

"It's simple," Bai Jingshen said. "You just leave a bit of your energy in the other person with an intent attached to it. If your Intent is strong enough, you can do it."

"I see," Alex said. "What will this thing you left in me do?"

"It's a Defensive skill," Bai Jingshen said. "It should defend you from almost anything in this world, even if Immortals themselves were to descend."

"A Defensive skill, huh?" Alex thought. "What about an offensive one?"

"I can't," Bai Jingshen said.

"A problem with your Intent?" Alex asked.

"Hah! I wish," Bai Jingshen said. "At least that way I would have a way to change it and get better. No, the problem is with my oath. I made an oath not to harm any humans or demons in this world."

"If I were to leave an offensive Intent in you and it were to accidentally attack someone, that person would die. In that case, I would be in a lot of trouble," Bai Jingshen said.

"Ah, that makes sense," Alex said. "If there were no such clause, you would have been able to get your revenge. That's a shame."

"It is no shame at all," Bai Jingshen said. "I don't want revenge. I just want the killer to pay for it. As for revenge, I'll leave it to Pearl since he is more directly involved in all of this than I am."

Pearl's face grew resolute. "I'll definitely get revenge for Mother's death," he said. "Even if that is the last thing I do."

Bai Jingshen patted him on his head. "That shouldn't be the last thing you do. That should be the first of many things that will do in the future," he said.

Pearl nodded slightly.

Alex waited for the heartwarming moment to end before speaking. "I should be leaving," he said.

"Leaving? So soon?" Bai Jingshen was surprised.

"I think I have spent enough time already. I have many things to do as well before the people from the Eastern Continent arrive in a few months," Alex said.

"I see," Bai Jingshen said. "So you're going to leave without even forming a new bond with Pearl?"

"Ah!" Alex remembered. "Right, I nearly forgot."

He turned towards Pearl and asked, "Pearl, do you want to form a new bond with me?"

"Of course," Pearl said, with an almost angry look on his face that Alex even thought to ask.

"Uhh..." he looked toward Bai Jingshen. "What do I do exactly? I only know how to make a master-servant bond. All the other times I've gone through a bond of Equals has been when I'm unconscious."

"It's simple," Bai Jingshen said. "Bring out a single drop of your Essence and give it to Pearl. As long as you provide your blood, Pearl can choose to bond to you on his own as an equal."

"I see," Alex said and reached out to his forehead. A small cut appeared from where a single drop of blood flew out. His forehead closed back and Alex presented the blood to Pearl.

Pearl licked the blood midair and suddenly Alex felt his spirit stir a little. His left arm itched a little while he started feeling Pearl through a new connection again.

When the large paw print returned to his body on his left bicep, the bond of Equals was completed.

Chapter 1316 Arrival

"Same place huh?" Alex thought, looking at the paw print through his spiritual sense. The mark was a little different though with the paw having sharp fingernails coming out this time around.

Pearl disappeared into it for a moment before coming back out. "It is done," he said. He looked toward Bai Jingshen who nodded.

Ren Xiao came up and licked Pearl. "You were worried, weren't you?" she asked. "See? There was no reason to worry. It always works."

Pearl nodded as well.

Ren Xiao looked toward Alex and handed him a talisman. "We've tried our best to think of as much as we can about the Eastern Continent, especially the Beast Paradise there. However, whatever we remember are all from over 5 thousand years ago, and we haven't been able to send anyone since our lord has returned."

"As such, that is all the information we could gather for you," she said.

"Right, there was this thing as well," Bai Jingshen said. He was so uninterested in anything that had text in it that he had nearly sent them away without giving them the talisman he had asked his women to prepare a long time ago."

"Information on the Eastern Continent?" Alex's eyes widened slightly and he grabbed it. He looked through it briefly, checking the topics if nothing else.

There were a few topics on the structure of the empire, the many prolific houses, the amazing sects, and the various regions that had been separated, each of which was ruled by a ruler of their own.

Even just a glimpse of the continent was enough to let Alex know just how old it was, and just how strong the continent was altogether.

There was also information on the family of beasts that Pearl's grandmother was married into. The information in there was a lot, but it was all from 5 millennia ago. Alex had to remember that every time he read it.

He stopped reading and placed the talisman into his ring. He now had the information about the continent, the sword that was the key, and the reason why they had to go there.

Now, all that was remaining was to go back and prepare.

After a heartfelt goodbye, Alex and Pearl left the secret realm and flew past the Cardinal City, going straight north to where the teleportation formation was.

"Woah!" Pearl couldn't help but shout when he flew on his own in the air for the first time in a very long time.

Even when flying on his own previously, he had to be helped by others, or others had to slow down for him. His cultivation base was in truly poor conditions and so he had to make do with what he had after destroying his spiritual root and bloodline.

However, now that he had gained both, he could feel the speed and strength that came with a proper cultivation base.

Pearl wasn't fast enough that he could outspeed Alex. He couldn't. The gap between them was just too much.

He was only fast when compared to his own previous self. And the difference in speed was very stark.

Alex watched Pearl enjoy his flight as he slowed down for him. Instead of an hour or two, it took them 3 hours and some to reach the very edge of the Western Continent.

Alex handed Pearl a token and they both entered. After a short burst of light, they teleported to the Southern Continent.

Alex walked off the platform, thinking not much about it as he wanted to go tell his family and friends about Pearl's return.

However, when he realized that Pearl hadn't moved, he stopped and looked back.

Pearl stared around the place, looking at the trees, the garden, the metal dome, and the palace not far away.

"So this is where you stayed, huh brother?" he asked, looking around. "This is what the Southern Continent is like."

"Oh... right," Alex thought. Pearl had never been to the Southern Continent. He had been with Pearl to the other continents and had come back, so Alex was mixing up his time in the Southern Continent, and his time with Pearl was almost similar.

"Hehe," he chuckled a little. "Come, there's so much more for you to see."

Alex took Pearl into the Palace. The elders, Linlin, and a few guards had already gathered and come to find him when they realized he had arrived back.

However, when they saw what was next to him, they froze.

"Your Majesty," Linlin was the first to call him out. "You shouldn't go out like that without any protection. What would we do if something were to happen to you?"

"I was only in the Western Continent," Alex said. "Do you fear that Commander Jianyu and his fleet would get me there as well?"

"No, but... whatever," Linlin gave up. "Anyway, who is this?"

"This is the one that I've told you guys about for a long time," Alex said. "Meet my brother and beast, Pearl."

The group looked at Pearl with surprise as they realized who they were looking at. "This is Pearl? The cat you told us about?" one of them asked.

"Exactly!" Alex said. "I told you I would get him back sometime soon. He was who I went to get this time around."

"I see," one of the male elders said. "But... why did you say he was a cat?"

"Because he is a cat," Alex said without thinking much.

"But... he looks more like a tiger than a cat," someone said. "Are you sure he's a cat and not a tiger?"

"What?" Alex quickly looked at Pearl. "What are you guys talking about? He obviously looks like a ca-actually, wait."

Alex surprised himself when he noticed something. He moved slightly further away from Pearl and looked at him entirely.

To his eyes, he could still see that Pearl had the features of a cat, but overall, he had started looking more like a tiger than anything.

"Wow!" Alex said.

Pearl looking like a tiger had more to do with his body than his face. Before evolution, his body was slim and slender like a cat. However, after evolution, his body had a lot of muscles and it showed through the fur.

Despite having a cat-like facial feature, his overall body made him look more tiger than anything.

"You guys are right," he couldn't help but say. "From a distance, you totally mistake him for a tiger."

"I am a tiger," Pearl said. "I'm no longer a cat, aren't I? If anything, I'm a tiger that looks like a cat."

Alex slapped his forehead as he had forgotten something so simple. "Right. You're a White Tiger now, not a White Cat," he said.

"White Tiger, huh?" A voice came from in front of them all where the doors of the dome had opened silently. Scarlet flew out and landed next to Pearl.

She was still taller than Pearl overall, but their sizes could be considered to be the same.

"I must say congratulations are in order for both of you two and a welcome for you," she said to Pearl.

"Scarlet," Pearl turned and smiled toward her. "How are you?"

Scarlet gave a small smile. "You should add 'big sister' to that," she said.

"Big sister? But weren't you born after me?" Pearl asked. "I should be big brother, shouldn't I?"

"No, I was reborn. Not born," Scarlet started saying.

Seeing the two larger-than-life beasts —one the ruler of a continent and the other the great-grandchild of another ruler-bickering about who was older, made the tiny humans feel something terribly off about the entire situation.

"Stop it you two," Alex got in between. "Pearl is older in physical age, and Scarlet is older in mental age."

"Oh, so it's a tie?" Pearl asked.

"No, Scarlet had a higher cultivation base than you, so she's the senior. She's also the ruler of a continent, so call her big sister," Alex said.

"Aww... okay," Pearl said and turned around with a massive smile on his face. "I'm happy to see you again, big sister Scarlet."

Scarlet lost all anger in her thought after seeing that dumb smile on Pearl's face. She chuckled a bit and smiled as well while petting him with her wings.

"I'm happy to see you too," she said.

Alex smiled after seeing the two reconcile. "Come on Pearl. You have many more people to meet."

Chapter 1317 Preparation

It had been half a year since Pearl's return.

His family and friends had been more than happy to see Pearl back and Pearl was happy to see them too. While Alex was away, busy with his own things, Pearl spent his time with the others, just like Whisker.

Alex didn't waste his time either. Since they were going to the other continent soon, he spent most of his time making pills that would be helpful. He also improved the techniques he had combined to the greatest possible level and practiced them with Scarlet.

Scarlet won easily as Alex had nowhere near enough strength to even harm her, but the difference in strength and speed did help him get more and more used to the power.

He did various other things as well, such as learning the many skills that used spiritual energy, all of which he had brought back from the Western Continent. He had made quite a few more blood beasts as well and finally had improved his cultivation base to the Saint Core 6th realm.

Whisker and Pearl had also shown quite the improvement in the time he had spent by himself.

Pearl entered the Saint Foundation realm fully and was on his way to the next realm. Whisker had also entered the Saint realm as well.

Alex had taught him a little about making Saint pills, but his overall Qi wasn't strong enough to handle most Saint ingredients, so he had refrained from making them after the first few.

Around a month before the promised date, Commander Long Jianyu arrived at the palace to help prepare for the exchange.

"We can leave anytime you wish, your Majesty," the man said. "We have ships ready to live with us if you wish to, or you can take the teleportation formation as well. Our people in the empire will be ready to accept you."

"Thank you, commander Jianyu," Alex said. "As to which mode of transportation we will be using, we'll have to think. While teleporting would be the better choice, I really do wish to see how one travels the ocean as I must say I'm inexperienced in that regard."

"Whatever you choose, we can accommodate to your wishes, your Majesty," the man said.

"Please enjoy your time in the capital. I'll send someone to message you when I've set the date," Alex said.

After the man was gone, Alex gathered his elders and started to discuss what they should be doing.

"There's no way there is an ambush waiting for us, is there?" Alex asked. He was partly paranoid because he himself was going to find someone in the royal family that was most likely responsible for Pearl's mother's death.

Also, he hadn't had a pleasant experience when someone wanted to make use of his alchemy skills previously, so he wanted to be sure that there would be no danger.

"I... don't think there's much danger, your majesty," the elders said, a bit unsure why Alex was even thinking as such. "This is an inter-continental exchange program. If they dared attack guests from our continent, they would have to fear the wrath of Her Majesty."

"Hmm, you're right," Alex said. Even though Scarlet wasn't as strong as she was an Immortal, the other people didn't know that. So, even if she couldn't help him, she could be a threat to anyone that wanted to mess with them.

"Still, I'm planning to go through the ocean so that I know everything before I get to Dragon City," Alex said.

"Hmm, it would be wise for sure," one of the elders said. There was also the problem that without the Central continent as a connecting hub, the direct teleportation to the Eastern Continent was far enough that it would suck out enough energy from the Saint Spirit vein to immediately kill it.

It would no longer be capable of drawing in Qi on its own and instead would become a mine of spirit stone.

They started making plans on who got to go next. It was quickly apparent that everyone wanted to go to the other continent as not only would they be free from work, but they would also be able to treat it as a vacation.

"Are you guys sure you want to go?" Alex asked. "You will have to look after me since there's no telling when I'll decide to sneak away into the cities and maybe even far beyond that."

As soon as they heard that, the elders got hesitant. They did not want to look after Alex at all as he gave them a headache with his impulsive acts.

After a bit more discussion, two elders were chosen to leave with Alex.

Elder Yao Ning and Elder Liang Shufen were chosen to go with him to the Eastern Continent. Both of them were female elders, but each one was chosen for a different reason.

Elder Yao was chosen for her strength. She was the oldest, wisest, and most certainly the strongest of them all.

Elder Liang Shufen was on the lower side when it came to age, but that helped with making her one of the more pleasing elders to look at. As such, they decided to send her with them in hopes that her beauty could be of some help... somewhere.

After the elders were chosen, Alex made a trip to the Royal Alchemists to see who would be going.

He was going to take exactly 20 of them, with Jai Heiyun being the group leader. He thought for a bit and asked her to gather Alchemists from all cultivation bases that were at least in the True realms.

Jai Heiyun arrived at the palace a few days later with the information in hand. She had chosen 3 of each from each of the True realms, 2 from Saint Condensation, 2 from Saint Foundation, and herself from the Saint Core realm.

She saw no point in choosing anyone from the Saint Soul realm, and neither did Alex.

"This will do," Alex told her. "I've decided on the date. Tell everyone, we will be leaving in exactly 15 days, so have them prepare. It will be a long time before they will be back to their friends and families."

"Yes, your majesty," she said and left.

Alex spent the remaining time with his own friends and family as well. Most of them were still blind, but that hadn't hurt them at all in their daily lives.

Thanks to a few cultivation methods that the senior Yang had given most of them, almost every one of them had increased their cultivation speed by leaps and bounds.

All except for his father.

"I'll find something for you too father," Alex told the man. "If nothing else, I will make one for you after all of this is over."

"Don't worry about me," Graham said. "I already have everything I can ask for. Focus on yourself."

Alex nodded. He spent the next few days in delight, talking to his family. Then, it was time to leave.

He gathered up the 20 alchemists early in the morning and gave them a few instructions and a bit more before bringing them all to the teleportation area where Jianyu was already ready to take them to where his soldiers were at.

Chapter 1318 Take Off

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The Alchemy exchange was going to last a total of 20 years. That was the time that had been set between the two continents.

At this time, the 20 alchemists that Alex had taken with him would work together with the alchemists from the Eastern Continent, teaching each other and growing together.

Alex was sure how many of those 20 years he would be spending there, but he would spend as many as needed. After all, he had 2 tasks he had to do over there.

First, he had to figure out who the person that had killed Pearl's mother was.

Second, he had to find his cousin Hannah.

"Don't worry, Aunt Liz. I'll definitely find her," Alex told her while he was with his family, saying his goodbyes.

Everyone was present, except Scarlet. They needed Scarlet to remain hidden so they could keep the fact that she wasn't as powerful. If Commander Jianyu saw her and realized that she was in fact only in the Saint Transformation realm, he couldn't imagine what would happen.

He was dealing with the same person that had planned to rob the Western Continent after the White Tiger there had died. If he realized the Phoenix was weak as well… well, Alex didn't want to let him find out that.

He said his heartfelt goodbye to his family and subjects, promising to come visit them soon again.

Helen cried as she had only found her son again after being separated for over 30 years, and he was going to be away for another 20 years once more.

After all, had been said and done, Alex got on the teleportation formation, along with the two elders, 20 Alchemists, and 20 alchemist assistants. The assistants were there to help the alchemist and learn from them to become proper alchemists themselves.

They were also there to guard them, but that was more of a secondary task they had to do, aside from assisting.

The ones for Jai Heiyun and the other 4 Saints however were definitely more guard than assistant.

After Commander Jianyu got onto the teleportation formation, Alex gave the command and they all teleported.

They arrived at Eastwatch city, the main city where travelers from other continents came from. Alex looked around, reminiscing a bit about the place he had come to so many years ago.

This was the place where the Huang family was situated, and this was where he had stolen from the family head back then and run away. The person in charge had already been changed, but the Huang family still feared Alex, desperately hoping that he didn't hold any grudges.

"I had once seen your people roaming this place, searching for something," Alex said, turning toward the commander. "You've never mentioned who or what you were searching for. Can you still not tell me?"

"I'm afraid I cannot, your Majesty," the commander said.

Alex nodded. He didn't press the man as he had most likely been asked by the Dragon Emperor to keep everything a secret. Still, he wondered what they were searching for that they couldn't find in the dozens of years they had been here.

"Are you still searching, or will every one of your soldiers be returning along with us?" Alex asked.

"Most will be staying," the commander said. "I hope that doesn't anger you, your majesty."

"No, no, it's alright with me. As long as you follow the law and remain civil, I have no qualms," Alex said. They were already being kept an eye on anyway.

"This way, your majesty," the commander showed him the way. "My men are waiting by the shore."

Alex and the others walked for a while, surrounded by normal citizens who recognized his gold-laced royal robes and started chanting his name.

He smiled and waved as he went past the people, making his way to the beach where 2 enormous ships had been waiting for them.

The ships were colored in bright azure blue with a golden dragon wrapped around a sword, that was the insignia of the Azure Imperium.

"Two ships?" Alex asked. "Surely a single ship has enough space for us, right? There are not even 50 of us."

"We had two prepared in case Your Majesty wanted to leave on a separate ship from the others," the commander replied.

"Thank you for your thoughtfulness, I don't mind being in the presence of my people. We can use just one ship."

The commander nodded and walked up to the ship that was sitting in the sand and with a flick of his wrist, he put it away.

"Your majesty, we are ready to take you all on board," the commander said.

Alex nodded and flew, with the two elders flying behind him. The other 40 people followed behind them and one by one landed on the ship's deck.

Everyone looked around at the metal ship which looked almost as if everything was made from a single sheet of metal. The deck of the ship was about 20 meters wide at the widest part and 5 meters at the narrowest.

The entire ship was about 100 meters long and was tall enough that Alex didn't doubt there were more places to stay below deck. The small rooms that he could see on the deck were only the start of it.

There were formations that were clearly carved onto the metal ship, some of which Alex recognized, some which he had never seen before.

He could stay there and try to decipher the formations, but he decided to do so later.

"Let me show you to your quarters," the commander said and took Alex into the living quarters that were prepared for soldiers to live.

There were a few fancy rooms where the VIPs were kept under the deck, and Alex was taken there. The elders were given rooms on either side of his and they were shown the various functionalities of the room.

There were formations to change the temperature of the room, to turn the side of the wall invisible to see everything outside. There was a Qi gathering formation where one could put space stones to generate Qi to use it.

There were also surprisingly recording talismans with recordings already in them that could be used to entertain oneself while they were there.

'This is quite the place,' Alex thought, looking around.

"The ship will take off in 5 minutes, if that is alright with you, your majesty," the commander said.

"Please, do it whenever you see fit," Alex said.

"Then, you can relax here or go to the upper deck whenever you feel like it. I will return back to work," the commander said and left.

Alex nodded and decided to stay back for a moment. There wasn't any reason for him to stay here other than cultivate, but there was something important he thought he had to do before he could feel safe.

He needed to find out if there were some formations or scripts that were there to spy on him while he was there. He wouldn't feel free to do whatever he wanted inside here unless he knew for a fact that he was free.

He called out Whisker and had him look around. While Alex's eye could see a whole lot of things, Whisker's whiskers were infinitely better.

A Seeking mouse could see, hear, sense, and even taste things through their whiskers. It was all different from when they did it with the respective organs, but it was close enough and worked quite well.

Temperature, Air density, Humidity, Concentration of Qi, the smell of the air, the taste of whatever was on it; Whisker could take in every piece of information.

Alex usually didn't accept this information being sent to him through their bond, but this time he did. And together, they searched the room for any hidden formations or scripts or even hidden compartments.

After searching for a while, Alex found nothing at all. The room was safe for him to be in. He sat on the bed, finally relaxed, knowing that he was free.

Suddenly, Alex felt the ship lurch. A formation activated, surprisingly making him unable to feel the effect of inertia. He also activated another formation, one which made the metal wall next to him invisible.

Alex saw the ship lift off the sand and slowly go high into the sky. "I can't remain inside to watch this," he said and got off the bed.

Whisker jumped onto his shoulders and sneaked into his robes where he hid.

Alex wished Pearl could come out as well, but he didn't want to tip off anyone that he had a White Tiger with him. Even mistakenly, he didn't want them to know that he had a White Cat with him.

Alex wasn't sure which of the people from the Azure Imperium were responsible for his mother's death, so he had to go in expecting everyone was involved. That included commander Jianyu who he spoke so pleasantly with.

The commander was far stronger than Alex, so he couldn't ask him anything, lest he spoke something wrong that brewed conflict with them.

Conversely, he also didn't want to give them man something he could hold against him either in the form of a favor or blackmail. That was also one of the reasons why Alex had told all the alchemists and elders about finding Hannah but had no plans of asking the Dragon Emperor to help him do so.

Alex arrived on the deck of the ship again, where a few alchemists and assistants were already gathered.

They were all watching the ship take off and go beyond into the ocean, which was something they had until now thought as untraversable.

Chapter 1319 Tens Of Millions

The ship took off, flying into the ocean at a reasonable pace. The speed could be comparable to what a peak Saint Foundation realm expert could fly in.

While that was slow by Alex and most other stronger people's standard, it was still fast enough that no one had any problem with it.

Alex tried to look in the distance through the ocean but he couldn't see anything else in the far distance. Close by, there were quite a few small islands they were passing through, but the distant lands hid themselves in a haze that Alex couldn't see even with his Demon Eyes.

If he activated the eyes, it would make it harder to see as all he could see would be colors and nothing else.

He heard 'wow' and 'woah' coming from the alchemists and assistants that had clearly never been around the ocean, let alone fly on top of it.

They were as close to the edge of the ship as they could be without disturbing the many soldiers that were standing around the deck of the ship on either side.

They were intimidating, and no one dared get too close to them. Fortunately, they were far apart enough that the people could see even past them.

"Your Majesty, did you decide to watch us take off too?" the commander asked as he walked up to Alex. He had finished giving his orders, so there wasn't much to do at the moment.

"Yes, I assumed it would be enjoyable," Alex said.

"If you haven't been on the ocean, I can guarantee it will be enjoyable," the commander said. "Please come to the front. You can watch more clearly from there."

The commander took Alex to the bow of the ship from where Alex could see everything far more clearly without any obstruction to his view.

The scenery didn't move him as it did the others who had never been to the ocean. Still, he couldn't deny the majesty of seeing the world at such a height.

"I hope we are properly concealed," Alex asked.

"You do not have to worry, Your Majesty," the commander answered. "We have illusion, noise canceling, and concealment formations working all the time. Anything outside of this ship won't even notice we're there as long as we keep this speed."

"Keep this speed?" Alex asked with a slightly curious look.

The commander nodded. "We discovered a long time ago that there is a sweet spot at which the ship's speed, the amount of spirit stones necessary and the forces acting against the formations is just what we want," the captain said. "I won't bore you with the details, but I will say that this is the most efficient speed."

"Hmm," Alex thought for a moment. "So will we have to change the speed if some weather anomaly were to occur on the way?"

"We will, but that won't be due to the formations. Its just for the safety of the crew," the commander said. "The forces that act against the formations are pockets of Qi in the air that is something brought along by the air in the sea. It sometimes disrupts the formations, and can give us away."

"Which is why we have to slow down so that we can instead divert all the spirit stones into the formations to keep use hidden," the commander said.

"Ah, I see," Alex said, finally understanding a little. "And at this speed, how long do you think it will take us to reach the Eastern Continent?"

"Approximately 2 weeks," the commander said.

"2 weeks?" Alex was a little taken back. He knew all continents were far apart and that the speed of the ship wasn't necessarily that fast, but the commander's words still came as a surprise.

The commander noticed Alex's surprise as well, but didn't say anything. "Most people spend their life in their own continents, never going out to the deep water, so they don't know just how large the ocean is."

"If I had to make an estimation based on the Southern Continent, you should be able to fit at least 5 of your continents in the ocean reaching to the Eastern Continents," the commander said.

"5 huh?" Alex finally got a mental picture of how large the oceans were and even then he wouldn't truly be able to tell unless he saw it all on his own.

There had only been one time when he had actually flew across at least half the continent and that had been back when he had run away from the Sunborn Sanctuary when he wasn't even a king.

It was at that time that he had realized how wide the continent truly was. On a ship where the speed was far smaller than what he could output back then, he could understand whay it was going to take them so long.

The commander told Alex a few more small, but definitely not unimportant trivia that he had gathered throughout his time in the Scale Legion.

The shortest distance between any of the four continents was between the Ivory region of the Eastern Continent and the Shuang province of the Northern Continent. If the Central continent was to be counted, it would obviously be the Central Continent to the North of Wasteland.

There were tens of millions of islands on the ocean, which came as quite the surprise to Alex. He would've expected tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands. But hearing that there were tens of millions of them was truly mind blowing.

The only reason no one knew about this was because none of these islands were inhabited. At least, not by humans. There were many islands that had monsters that occupied it as their own reason, which the humans obviously wouldn't know about.

The commander promised that the would see a lot of islands even far from the continent, as islands didn't always cluster around the continents.

There were even islands bigger than the Sunless lands, which always made it into the Southern Continent's maps.

Another thing Alex learned was that the ocean had more Qi than any land. Alex was surprised about this fact too, but giving it some thought, it felt obvious to him now.

There was more ocean than land in this realm, and while Spirit veins had been sought and used up in most cases, the ones underwater had remained untouched for the most part.

The water also was capable of holding in Qi far more than the air, making the depths of the ocean far more infused with Qi than any other.

"You can enjoy your time here, your Majesty," the Commander said. "You won't have to worry about anything attacking us thanks to the concealment, but if something somehow manages to see us, I have the soldiers looking out for an attack at all times."

'Is that what they are doing?' Alex thought, looking around at the soldiers that were standing at the edge of the boat, looking down.

"You can go back to doing what you have to, commander Jianyu," Alex said. Once the commander left, Alex walked back to the center of the deck and sat next to Jai Heiyun and her female assistant.

"So, have you come up with any good plans yet, Sister Hao?"

Chapter 1320 Sailing Through The Storm

Hao Ya had arrived in the Southern Continent some 4 months ago and had spent her time away from the palace to not arouse any suspicion.

She had spent the past 4 months learning some alchemy on her own so that she could have a purpose on the ship on the way to the Eastern Continent that would not immediately arouse suspicion.

She had somehow managed to hide her cultivation base to a degree that Alex couldn't sense through at all, and she also had her face changed to an extent that made her unrecognizable.

Alex had thought she had used some sort of pill to change her appearance, but it had turned out that she was actually using scripts to change it.

When Alex asked a bit more, he was surprised to learn that she had scripts drawn all over her body using Qi, which was giving her this new appearance. Given that the scripts were drawn by a Divine realm cultivator, it wasn't something that would so easily be destroyed either.

Alex was also surprised to learn that it was the same method by which all the Players had different features from what they truly looked like. There were also many other such scripts that the man had put on them before he sent each one outside.

The only difference between that and this was that while he was using some sort of formations or scripts to create the scripts on those players, for Hao Ya he was directly making it himself.

So, it would stick through a lot more than just those 'ready-made' scripts and work a lot better too. It wasn't just appearance scripts that the senior had put on her, but a whole lot more.

As it stood, it seemed that the senior had spent most of the Divine Qi he had managed to gather in the past few decades since he had last spent it all getting rid of the Yang backlash from when he had eaten the fruit.

Alex sat and spoke to Jai Heiyun, but he secretly spoke to Hao Ya as well, who was next to her, acting as her assistant.

"I have no idea," Hao Ya said. "The last time I went there, they didn't even let me see the Emperor, so I don't know how to see him. If only I knew whether it was the Emperor's choice not to see me or the other people's."

Alex nodded in response. That would indeed be quite a bit of help if he knew what the Emperor was like from the start.

If anything, he had to go in expecting a petty emperor who got angry at every little bit of remark he thought of as disrespectful. He had to tread carefully in the future.

On the outside, he talked with Jai Heiyun about how excited she was to go to the other continent and what she was looking forward to. On the inside, he went through whatever plans that Hao Ya had made.

Their plans, in the end, could be defined in two separate points.

One. Find out if the Emperor is a good man.

Two. If he is, ask him to let the Players go. If not, bribe him with something he might want.

Alex was visiting as the king of a Continent, so he couldn't do that, so Hao Ya had to be responsible for it all. She was senior Yang's messenger, and as it was he that screwed everything up, he had to be responsible.

Hao Ya had brought a few artifacts and talismans that the emperor might want. They weren't sure how much it would help, but they had to try with those.

After talking there for a bit, Alex moved on to the other alchemists and talked with them so as to not arouse any suspicion.

After he was done talking, he stood close to the edge and watched the water and islands move past them.

Soon, the sun went down the horizon and as night came on, they saw the clouds fill up the sky, ready to rain.

Many of the alchemists went back indoors, and after looking around for a while, so did Alex.

He wasn't afraid of lightning or anything, he had fought lightning far stronger than these ones every day. However, he was still aware of the fact that such weather phenomena could cause problems in the ship's concealment, which could attract monsters, so he left the deck for the soldiers and commanders to work freely without having to worry about him.

Alex simply went back into his room and watched the storm from the transparent wall.

The storm lasted for some time, with lightning strikes falling all around them, but never on them.

Alex had recognized a formation that created a barrier that did not attract lightning at all. It was its sole purpose, and it seemed it was working.

The storm lasted even as morning came around. This time, it started raining hails. The hails pelted the barrier and the side of the ship, but they were small enough that it didn't matter.

Alex saw a cyclone in the distance, and once he even saw two beasts fighting within the storm. Although, he couldn't see what exactly those two beasts were.

He had also seen various other beasts in the many islands that he flew past. The islands were surprisingly large, just as the commander had mentioned them.

There were islands that were as small as just a small mound of land with 2 trees growing on it, but there were also islands that were large enough where the entirety of the humans in the Central continent could live in.

There were other islands that were in clusters, which were named archipelago according to the commander.

Whenever he was above deck, Alex would talk to the commander, trying to understand whatever he could about the ocean.

The commander, whether because Alex was polite, or because he was a king, he always gave a generous bit of information.

"I wonder if there are experts that are living on one of these islands," Alex said.

"There most likely are," the commander said. There was no doubt in the way he spoke, even though his answer itself wasn't a confirmation.

"There are many experts that go missing, who had most likely made home in one of these islands," the commander said. "At least the ones from the Eastern Continent do."

"Also, I wouldn't really say they come this far out into the ocean, but they certainly will remain in close cultivation in islands that are close enough to the continent so that they can go in if they needed help."

"I see," Alex said. "You really do know a lot, don't you commander?"

"Haha, it's just something I've learned while on the job. I've been in the Scale Legion for quite some time, so it's obvious that I would learn a lot."

Alex nodded after hearing that.

"Scale Legion," Alex spoke. "That's... one of the 5 Legions of the Azure Imperium, isn't it? I tried to find information on the Eastern Continent, but all I ended up with was information from 5 thousand years ago when the teleportation between continents halted."

"I was wondering if the general information about the Eastern Continent I have from back then still applies."

Chapter 1321 General Information On The Eastern Continent

The commander took a moment to analyze the situation and think if he was being asked something he shouldn't answer. Of course, talking about the continent's inner workings would be bad, but... if it were just general stuff that Alex could learn by asking even a 10-year-old kid, then he didn't see what was wrong with that.

"Rather than what you've gathered, let me tell you how it is myself," the man said.

He started speaking and Alex listened.

The Eastern Continent was larger in size than the mainland Southern Continent but was smaller if you counted the Wasteland as well.

However, despite its size, it was clustered with a lot of spirit veins, making it one of the most Qi-dense locations in the entire world. That was how they were able to produce Saint realm cultivators that were nearly 10 times the amount of the Southern Continent.

While the population was also slightly larger, what helped the Eastern Continent the most was the severe lack of uninhabitable places. There weren't many places in the Eastern Continent where civilization couldn't be found, whereas, in the other continents, there were plenty of places that were barren for a very long distance.

The Northern Continent was notorious for this especially due to the nature of the continent. Not many wanted to live in the chilling cold environment where plants refused to grow.

The Southern Continent was also similar in that the Wasteland was truly a waste due to the lack of spirit veins being used.

The Western Continent was a different sort of problem entirely.

Thanks to the great population density and enough Qi to provide for them all, the Eastern Continent had managed to far outpace the other continents in this development.

However, due to this exact same reason, the Azure Imperium alone wasn't capable of governing the entire continent by itself and needed help from others.

Because of this, the very first Dragon Emperor divided the continent into 7 specific regions, each of which was a Vassal Kingdom ruled by its own ruler that was under the Dragon Emperor.

The 7 kingdoms were named the Ivory Kingdom, the Gold Kingdom, the Silver Kingdom, the Emerald Kingdom, the Ebony Kingdom, the Beast Paradise, and finally the Azure Kingdom.

The Azure Kingdom was where the Dragon Capital was, but it wasn't what ruled that kingdom. The Azure Kingdom had its own king as well, a close relative of the Dragon Emperor who reported back to the Azure Imperium.

Alex had already learned about these names from Hao Ya, but going through the records that were in the Palace, he had learned that these places were previously had names such as the Lin Kingdom, or the Shu Kingdom.

To show that he truly did not know anything about the Eastern Continent, Alex asked when these places did not exist.

"The Lin Empire, huh? That was a thing when I was a kid. However... uhh... they were all executed long ago because the kingdoms decided to conspire to attack the emperor," the man said. "Thankfully, the emperor's spies in those kingdoms relayed the information back to the emperor, and the rebellion was purged before it even started."

"Now, to make sure that no ruler finds in them the will to take over the empire, the kingdoms are given names that do not involve a family name. Gold, Silver, Ivory, they were all chosen by his Majesty so that even as a ruler, the Kings could not make use of their names."

Alex was surprised. "Is that so?" he couldn't help but genuinely ask. 'So at some point between 5 thousand years ago and now, the Kingdoms were purged and replaced with other rulers, huh?'

He wondered why they even thought of rebelling against the Emperor. Was the emperor planning on doing something that they were against? Did they not like the idea of attacking the Western Continent?

Or did the Kings simply want to stop being Vassal kingdoms? Or perhaps the Azure Dragon had died thousands of years ago, and the kings saw an opportunity.

Many possibilities ran through Alex's head, and he had to consciously make those conspiracies stop before focusing on the topic at hand.

"I assume the Beast Paradise did not take part? Or was it also involved, but the name was left as is because it didn't need to be changed?" Alex asked.

"No, the Beast Paradise did not take part. Well, the Beast Paradise doesn't really take part in anything. It's the only kingdom in the empire that the Emperor doesn't truly rule."

"The Beast Paradise was created by the first Azure Dragon that visited the Eastern Continent so that the beasts could live in peace without being hunted every day. They are separate from the overall politics of the empire."

"The only reason they even count as a Vassal kingdom is that the King of the beast there still pays taxes every decade to the Empire, as set up in the rules thousands of years ago," the commander said

"I see," Alex said, nodding his head. "If it's the Beast Paradise, then does the Azure Dragon stay there?"

Alex looked into the man's eyes, waiting for his answers.

"No, his Majesty has his own secret realm where he lives in," the commander said. "Although it is at the border of the Azure Kingdom and the Beast realm, just a few distances away from the Dragon Capital."

"Oh, I wonder if I can meet him as a representative of the Phoenix ruler," Alex said with excitement in his voice.

"Hmm, I'm not sure," the Commander said. "His Majesty, the ruler, did say that no one was allowed inside his secret realm without permission, so it will be hard. But his Majesty can communicate with him, so you can ask him when the time comes."

"I see," Alex said. "I will have to request the Dragon Emperor then."

Alex stopped himself from frowning after the small interaction. He had tried to see how the commander would react after hearing him talk about the dead dragon. He wanted to see if he would hide it, or reveal it, but to his surprise, he acted as if nothing had happened to the Dragon.

Either he was terrifyingly good at hiding his emotions, or he had absolutely no idea that the Azure Dragon was already dead.

"You've been in the military for quite some time then?" Alex asked. "I don't suppose you were made the commander just because of your connections."

"If that were true, I wouldn't have to have worked so hard to get where I am," the man explained. "We have to do our best to reach where we are."

Talking a bit about himself, the man delved into the military of the Azure Imperium.

Aside from the Scale Legion, there were 4 other legions, that were the Head Legion, the Talon Legion, the Body Legion, and the Tail Legion.

Each Legion of the army held a variable number of individuals, going anywhere from 200 to 100 thousand.

The numbers were so different because the tasks of the Legion were so different.

The Scale Legion's task involved going outside of the empire to do what they needed to do. There were a lot of islands around the Eastern Continent, and while the Scale Legion usually hung around those islands, it also took up tasks where it went out into the ocean under the empire's order.

The Body Legion had the most amount of soldiers in it, and its main task was keeping general peace over the continent. They were anything from city guards to merchant guards, depending on what they had to do.

The Tail Legion only had a few thousand individuals in it, and its task was to sit in reserve in case any of the other Legions required individuals to replace them for a while.

The Talon Legion was the main fighting force of the army and every one strong was involved in it. Each soldier in that Legion was a bonafide fighter, who had gone through many trials and tribulations to get where they were. These people were almost never involved in anything unless the Emperor needed to fight someone.

Finally, the Head Legion was a small group of elites that were specifically hand-picked to be around the Emperor and the royal family at all times. They were also the head of all Legions and gave orders to each legion when direct orders from Emperor were not required.

The various kingdoms had no army or guards of their own and had to simply utilize the members of the Body Legion.

Hearing the number of soldiers alone on the Eastern Continent blew Alex's mind. Not all of those people were Saint realm cultivators, but even then compared to his own puny army of 10 thousand soldiers, the Eastern Continent's army was a massive threat.

The Commander continued to explain a bit more about the Legions and how they were named after the Azure Dragon, but Alex had already understood that by context alone.

Moving on with his explanations, he talked about the various places in the Eastern Continent that he considered attractions that one had to visit at least once.

He also mentioned in passing the fact that there were at least 30 different secret realms in the Eastern Continent, of which 5 could only be accessed by Saint realm cultivators, 12 could be accessed by the True realm cultivators, and the rest were for Common realm cultivators to use.

"How are there so many of them?" Alex couldn't help but ask in surprise.

"They were made by the first Dragon Emperor," the Commander said. "They say that the first Dragon Emperor was a master at controlling space itself."

Chapter 1322 The Many Hidden Realms

"The first Dragon Emperor was a master of Space?" Alex asked with a somewhat surprised face.

The first Dragon Emperor was the human-dragon hybrid that was born to the first Azure Dragon that had come to become the ruler of this continent. From what Alex had gathered, the first Dragon Emperor had left behind no records of death, which led Alex to assume that he had broken through to the Immortal realm and left this place long ago.

It was that, or the Azure Dragon took him away when he left. That event would've happened so far in the past that there really was no way for any information to remain that long without proper care.

"Yes," the commander answered rather enthusiastically, with a surprising amount of child-like glee in his voice when he spoke about the first Dragon Emperor.

"There were many spatial pockets in the Eastern Continent, which weren't being used at all. So the Dragon Emperor, with some help from the Azure Dragon of that time, created the many challenges that Saints can go through to improve themselves," he said.

"I see," Alex said. "So the Dragon Emperor made those many secret realms, huh?"

"Yes," the commander said.

"I assume you've been to a few," Alex asked.

"I have, to all of them," the commander said. "Do you wish to challenge yourself in these secret realms, Your Majesty?"

"I don't see why not," Alex said. "My cultivation base is still low enough that I can't be considered an expert amongst the Saints, so it might do me well to go through them."

"I assume Your Majesty has a competitive spirit by nature, so I suggest you visit the Endless Shadow Abyss of the Emerald Kingdom, and the Transcendent Martial Ground of the Silver Kingdom," the Commander said.

Alex looked at the man weirdly. "Endless Shadow Abyss?" he asked. "That sounds like a place where one goes to get lost forever. Surely that's not your intention, is it?"

"Huh? No, absolutely not," the commander panicked a little. "Endless Shadow Abyss is actually one of the safest secret realms for everyone. Even Common Realm cultivators can go there and be safe."

"Oh, then why is it called what it is?" Alex asked.

"It's just that there is no light in that realm," the commander said. "So it is called that."

"No light?" Alex asked. "That's it? The name is unnecessarily scary then, isn't it?"

"Well... uhh... you could say that," the commander said. "But it was named that way since it was created, so I don't have any say in what it's called."

"I wasn't asking you to change it," Alex chuckled a bit. "Are those two the only ones I can go to?"

"Well, there is the Harmonious Balance Haven, but I don't know if you would like that or not," the man said. "There is... oh, I nearly forgot. There is one secret realm that was specifically designed for non-fighters such as you. I think you would love it, your Majesty."

"Do you mean for Alchemists?" Alex asked.

"Alchemists, Formation masters, Talisman crafters, musicians, painters, anyone," the man said. "I don't know if you would need to go through that, though. I assume you already are at the peak of what you can do."

"I... can take a look. It's never good to push away opportunities just because you think you know everything. Who knows, maybe you can actually learn something," Alex said.

"That's true, your Majesty," the commander said. "If you're going for all, you might as well go for the Boundless Enlightenment Domain."

"That sounds like a place where I can learn Dao," Alex said with an expectant look.

"Yes," the commander said. "That is indeed its main purpose, or at least it was supposed to be."

"What do you mean by that?" Alex asked with a weird expression on his face.

"Well... people don't use the realm for what it is supposed to be used for," the commander said. "It's become more of a... tourism spot than anything."

"Why is that?" Alex asked.

"That's becau—"

"Commander!" one soldier shouted suddenly, catching his attention. The commander quickly turned around and looked at the soldier only to see that he was pointing somewhere out in the front.

The commander quickly turned around a saw small black dots on the horizon that he couldn't make out just yet.

Alex's attention was caught as well and he looked around to see what they were pointing at. When he turned, he saw a bunch of beasts, all the same, flying in the sky in the distance.

They were too far for his spiritual sense to reach, but his eyes could see them.

"Is there a problem?" he asked seeing the commander's serious face.

"Somewhat," the commander said. "Excuse me, your majesty. I'll have to go handle this. Please go back to your room as things may get a little dangerous for a while."

The commander left before Alex could even ask what exactly was going on. Alex turned around toward the flock of flying beasts and wondered if they were going to attack the ship.

The ship changed its direction ever so slightly so that they were moving away from the massive group of birds. However, at the speed they were going, any simple change in direction required quite a lot of Qi, so the commander had to use as little as he could to get away from those beasts.

Around 5 minutes passed and only then did the commander come back on the deck, looking in the distance.

"Did you not go inside, your Majesty?" he asked. "It really could've gotten dangerous."

"I was thinking of going inside when the danger finally did come," Alex said. "What danger is it anyway?"

"Well... hopefully we won't get to see it as it is just that dangerous," the commander said with a small smile on his face.

The ship went further past the flock of beasts that were far off to the side. However, just as they had passed it, something happened.

Everyone suddenly felt a fluctuation in the air as the Qi shifted. Then, the ocean churned as something flew out of it, massive and hungry.

The giant 6-armed, feathered water beast was nearly 3 times larger than the boat they were on, and the leviathan of a beast flew into the sky and opened its jaw to swallow half the flock of beasts in a single bite.

Everyone from Alex, the Commander, the soldiers, and even the Alchemists and their assistant watched as the giant beast moved its 6 long limbs to catch the many beasts that tried to fly away from it.

Some managed to escape away, but most still ended up in the beast's belly.

The massive beast roared, the snake-like body of its coiling in the sky as it did so. The roar of the beast was so powerful that it shook the ship that was in the air, even dozens of kilometers away.

Then, everyone on the ship felt the beast's spiritual sense move past them. And then it landed on them, locating them.

Its head turned, its snake-like eyes looking for them but not finding them.

"Commander?" Alex asked, a little worried.

"Men!" the Commander suddenly shouted for his soldiers on the ship as he pulled a sword out from his storage. "Get ready! We are going to fight the Wyrm."

Chapter 1323 6-Armed Feathered Water Wyrm

'Wyrm?' Alex's eyes widened slightly and narrowed as he understood that the situation was most likely more dangerous than it appeared to already be.

He had only recently been made aware of what Wyrms were. They were snake-like beasts, with or without arms, that shared a bloodline of the Azure Dragons.

There were snakes, lizards, and even birds that had the Azure Dragon's bloodline in them, but nothing was closer in purity than the Wyrms themselves.

Of course, they only held the bloodline, just some part of it, and they were rarely capable of evolving. In a way, they were to the Azure Dragons, what Pearl was just years ago to the White Tigers.

However, something was missing from what Alex could see.

'Wyrms are supposed to have the Dragon whiskers, are they not?' he thought. 'And those arms? Wyrms shouldn't have that many limbs, not to mention they have feathers.'

Even if the beast was a Wyrn, it had to have a heavily diluted Azure Dragon blood in it, making it just slightly less terrifying than what it could have been.

Still, that was the leviathan of a beast that had just devoured the many Saint-beasts that were flying in the sky. It was still a terrifying beast to be found by.

The commander quickly flew out with the soldiers, all totaling about 40, aside from the 5 that remained on the ship so that they could take care of it if needed.

The commander checked the beast's cultivation base. It was a Saint Transformation 6th realm cultivation beast, that was clearly far superior to everyone present on the ship.

The 6-armed Feathered Water Wyrm stopped a few hundred meters before the commander and looked at him.

"Giving yourself up to become my food so I can spare the ones behind you?" the Wyrm asked in a high-pitched voice. The voice sounded grating to everyone's ears, but the Saints stood tall throughout it.

"Senior, we are members of the Azure Imperium, serving the Dragon Emperor who serves the Azure Dragon himself. Please provide us with a passage through your region. We do not want any conflict," the commander said.

His first and foremost priority here was everyone's safety, so the least he could do before fighting was just ask. He was 2 realms weaker than the Wyrm, so he was a little worried.

He knew he could fight the Wyrm without dying, but if his men started dying in the process, that would be a problem.

While the commander talked, the soldiers were already getting into a formation, the men and women making three groups of 13 from the 39 people that were there.

The 3 groups moved away from each other, staying equidistance away from each other.

Alex could see that they were starting some sort of battle array that was going to help them get stronger most likely.

"I wonder how good it is compared to the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array," he wondered to himself. The two elders were next to him, urging him to get to safety. The alchemists and others were all sent to their safety, and only the three of them remained outside."

"Your majesty, you should really get to safety quickly," Liang Shufen spoke from his side.

"If that beast gets through, is there any safe place to hide in the ship?" Alex asked the elder. He knew himself that it was dangerous, but anything that was dangerous to him now could not be defended by the ship.

Besides, he had his own ways of saving himself if it truly came to that. For now, he enjoyed the show that was being put on by the commander Long Jianyu.

"The Azure Dragon's followers?" the wyrm's eyes shifted for a moment as it was scared at the name. But it quickly got a hold of itself and looked strong. "Unless senior himself comes and vouches for you, I will not believe you"

The commander frowned. "Does that mean you're not letting us go?" he asked, his body slowly powered up by the array that his Legion was helping him with.

"If I came flying through your land's sky, would you have let me fly past, or would you have attacked me?" the Wyrm asked.

"I would've tried to stop you and understand if you were a threat to our people or not. If you were, I would've attacked you, but if you weren't I would've let you go without fighting," the commander answered.

"Well..." the Wyrm spoke. "It's a shame that's not the way I see you. I don't see if you are a danger or not. I see if you are food or not. Given how high your cultivation base is, you will make for a delicious meal."

The Wyrm licked its lips with his forked tongue, ready to fight.

"You damn Wyrm," the Commander shouted. "You dare show arrogance, in front of the mighty Dragons?"

Suddenly an illusory dragon formed behind the Commander, which seemed to be forming from the energy that was put out by the 3 groups of 13 soldiers.

This was the Battle Array that was being set up this whole time. Once it was set, the battle began.

The sky thundered as the Saint Transformation realm man and beast started fighting each other very close by.

Each one of their attacks sends the clouds rolling away. The shockwaves from the attack brightened the many invisible barriers that were protecting them from the outside situation.

The soldiers that were on the outside were directly facing these forces but they hung on.

Long Jianyu swung his sword, sending an attack that was filled with a rather strong Sword Intent.

The Wyrm created a water barrier that stopped the attack, creating another strong explosion in the sky. The place where the attack landed suddenly burst out with vines all around that sought to capture the ones that Jianyu wanted to.

The Wyrm simply roared and the vines were immediately destroyed.

The Wyrm then attacked, sending 3 dragon-shaped water attacks flying in the commander's direction.

The commander stopped it, but it took some strength on his end. He wasted no time and immediately went in to attack the Wyrm again.

He used a Dao, as vines appeared out of nowhere again that tried to bind the Wyrm. Alex didn't recognize the dao, but he did recognize it being used.

The Wyrm's body gleamed, its feathered body turning solid, almost as if it was encased in ice. The ice shattered, and with the shattered ice, it destroyed the pieces of vines that were trying to constrict it.

The commander frowned a bit. He was strong, but if things went on like this, he didn't know how much longer he could keep it going.

The Wyrm was stubborn as well. Even though it wasn't winning at all, it still fought. The arrogance it felt from being the strongest beast around this region for ages was not something the beast could just swallow and let the ship go past it.

Alex watched from the ship as the fight between the Commander and the Wyrm continued on for a while longer, and from the looks of it, neither one was going to win any time soon.

Chapter 1324 The Wyrm's Desperate Attack

The battle lasted for another 2 hours with not a single victor coming out from either side. The Wyrm was strong as it was a Saint Transformation 6th realm beast, and the Commander was strong because he had the strength of nearly 40 different soldiers behind him.

However, anyone that wasn't an active participant in this battle could see that the fight was coming to an end very soon.

The two sides had attacked each other for so long that each side had lost a lot of their strength and was soon going to be running out of Qi to even continue the fight.

The Scale Legion's battle array was either highly inefficient or the people in that group were having to spend way too much energy to constantly save themselves from the shockwaves and blasts that came from fighting the Wyrm.

The Wyrm was also running out of Qi. Out here in the sky, it wasn't doing as well as it probably could've had the battle take place in the ocean.

Both of the fighters noticed this as well.

"Men, give me all you have," the commander shouted. "This is our only chance."

"YES COMMANDER!" everyone shouted at once, giving everything of what they had to the Commander, making him that much stronger, but for just a single attack.

As soon as he had the power, the commander initiated the attack, giving the Wyrm absolutely no time to run away or use some technique.

His sword glowed with bright white light, but it did not come from his Sword Qi. Instead, the light zapped a bit, letting everyone realize what it was.

A lightning attack, and a very strong one at that.

The commander pulled his sword back and stabbed forward. The lightning left the blade, zigzagging through the air, lighting everything in its path as it moved toward the wyrm.

As it flew, it took the shape of a dragon with its mouth wide open as if it wanted to devour the Wyrm whole.

The Wyrm panicked as it sensed the strength of the attack, but it did not shy away from the attack. Instead, it used an attack of its own.

Ice crystals formed around the beast coalescing in front of it as it formed a strong barrier. It was using the Ice Dao it had learned to form a strong barrier in front of it, using not only its own Qi, but the Qi from the surrounding to power up its shield.

The lightning dragon struck the barrier that had formed and broken it into pieces after a bit of struggle, but in doing so, it had reduced in strength by so much that the Wyrm wasn't even wounded a little.

It came out angry from the lightning strikes, its feathers burned a little at best.

"You damn human!" it cried out. "You... You actually..."

The Wyrm knew that they were fighting seriously, but it had never considered death to be part of the outcome at all. With how long it had survived as the one who ruled this section of the ocean for thousands of years, death was not a concept it thought much of.

Would it die in the future? Yes. Was its death close? The Wyrm was sure it could go on another few thousand years before even having to think about that. Not to mention, there was a chance, however slim, that it would even become an Immortal.

As such when the attack came, one that if he wasn't careful had the strength to kill him instantly, he got mad.

He got mad at the 40 different people standing in front of it. It got so mad that it was going to kill all of them, right then and there.

The Commander had lost a lot of his strength, becoming weaker than how he was originally. The battle array was doing little to help the commander now.

His body was haggard as he watched what the wyrm did next.

The heaven and earth seemed angry all of a sudden as the air itself began to shake and fear from what was happening.

It seemed to shift around everyone as if something strong had appeared n the surrounding. Even the people standing inside the boat got concerned as they too could sense it all.

The two Elders standing around Alex got concerned, and Alex's face changed as well. He had sensed this sort of power before. Only one time.

As the Wyrm's body radiated blue, and an enormous blue wyrm spirit appeared behind it, everyone knew that the Wyrm was using its Immortal Qi.

Since Saint Qi turned to Immortal Qi somewhere around Saint Transformation's 5th realm on average, the Wyrm had to have enough Qi to send out a truly strong attack.

The 40-some soldiers started backing up as they were scared now. They had expected this outcome, but they had hoped the commander would defeat the beast before it came to this.

They even had a secret technique when push came to shove, and yet... it was all for naught.

Water tendrils formed around the Wyrm as it used its Immortal Qi to form an attack that had at least 20 different water snakes, all working together to become a massive attack.

Alex looked at the attack and frowned. "I believe they are going to die at this rate," he said.

"I believe so as well," Yao Ning answered.

"We should help them," Alex said.

"As you say, your Majesty," the old woman bowed.

The Wyrm launched its attack, sending the water snakes flying directly at the commander and his men.

The commander tried to muster his attack, but he had absolutely no strength to do any such thing at the moment. All he could do was watch as the attack destroyed him and everyone else.

He closed his eyes and accepted his fate.

He heard a loud bang and loud cries from behind him. Water splashed onto him, but it came from the top, not the front. Then, he heard a sigh.

He slowly opened his eyes and saw a large golden barrier in front of him. Next to him was the person who had created the barrier.

Yao Ning stood next to him with her arm stretched outward, towards the barrier. Her face seemed without any emotion, maybe a bit annoyed but that was it.

She had stopped an attack with Immortal Qi with just a barrier.

'No,' the commander realized. 'It's not just a barrier. It's a barrier with immortal Qi in it.'

The barrier had cracks, but that was all it had. Aside from cracks, it had no problems defending against another normal attack.

"Are you alright?" the old woman turned toward the Commander and asked.

"Y-yes," the commander said quickly while coming out of his stupor. He checked the old woman with his senses and only then did he realize just how strong this woman in front of him was.

'Saint Transformation 7th realm,' he thought.

This woman was strong enough to become one of the head members of the Head Legion itself were she to ever consider joining the Azure Imperium.

"As a representative of the Eastern Continent, you shouldn't have started this fight when you had so many guests to protect. It doesn't look very good on you."

Chapter 1325 Hundred Arms Golden Sphere Technique

Yao Ning was the oldest human living on the Southern Continent at the moment, and similarly, she was also the strongest.

At Saint Transformation 7th realm, there was not a single person stronger than her. Her cultivation base had also improved a lot in the past few years thanks to Alex's veined pills.

She had come with Alex for the sole purpose of protecting him. When the commander left to fight, she had stayed behind assuming that he would be enough. However, seeing as he had failed and everyone was in danger, she had to step in.

The commander took a deep breath and released an equally deep sigh of relief.

"Thank you, senior for helping us," he said, bowing a bit toward Yao Ning.

Yao Ning nodded. "Go back and take your men with you. I will take care of this," the old woman said before turning toward the wyrm that seemed to fail to realize what had just happened.

It had not even seen the old woman arrive before the man, let alone use her techniques. How had she gotten there so quickly? Was she always there?

Yao Ning turned toward the Wyrm. "Had you just let us be, none of this would be happening to you," she said as golden Qi released from her body slowly filling the air around her as if forming a bubble with it.

The golden bubble completely covered her as the outer layer formed a strong barrier.

"Now that you've dared to try and kill us, I will be killing you instead," the old woman said as the golden bubble released 8 different limbs from its body, each of which turned into golden swords at the end.

Yao Ning had all the limbs under her control, and she began her attacks.

The technique Yao Ning had just used, the Hundred Arms Golden Sphere technique, was the signature skill of the Yao family that had been passed down for generations.

Alex saw the old woman use that skill with quite a bit of admiration in his eyes. The last time he had seen this technique was nearly a decade and a half ago when he fought Yao Bujiang in the Battle Arena that was controlled by the Ren family.

He had used this very same technique, only he had used 4 arms against Alex, while the old woman Yao used 8. From what Alex knew, doubling the number of arms used was a terrifyingly difficult task that only got exponentially harder each time.

Youths of the Yao family started with no arms, then one, then two, and then four. Most didn't even reach four, so the fact that Yao Ning could do 8 went on to show just how much of a prodigy she was from the family.

The 8 arms of the golden barrier worked flawlessly as they moved with such grace that one couldn't even tell just how dangerous those arms were.

The arms moved, releasing bursts of attacks flying toward the Wyrm. The Wyrm defended as well as it could, but not only had it used up its Immortal Qi, even its regular Qi was close to running out.

The threat of death went from being surreal to real all of a sudden as any of the next few attacks could kill it.

The Wyrm fought back, sending out attacks of its own, but not a single one of them did anything to the old woman at all. All of its attacks was simply defended by the golden barrier.

Even when it tried to sneak an attack past the woman, the golden arms easily stopped it.

The old woman was like a chef, showing masterful skills in the kitchen, while the Wyrm was the ingredient lying on the cutting board. And it was about to be cut.

'No,' it thought. 'No, I can't die.'

The Wyrm was on its last life, its body bleeding all over, its blue feathers stained red. It no longer thought of its domain, its pride, or even the dangers that lurked below the ocean in the state it was in.

In its mind, running away into the ocean was the only way for it to survive. So, the Wyrm turned around and instantly started diving down.

"No you don't," Yao Ning said as all 8 of the arms around her came together to make a strong attack. Right before she was about to attack, however, she stopped.

The Wyrm didn't notice that. It was simply too focused on running toward the ocean. So, when it saw a young man on his way down, it couldn't care enough to be cautious.

"Surely you don't think you can just leave, do you?" Alex asked with Midnight in hand. His sword glowed white, black, and silver, all at the same time. There were also two other aura on his sword that was hidden to the naked eyes.

Combined with his physical strength, this was the strongest attack the current Alex could use.

The Wyrm noticed Alex's attack as well, but by that time, it was simply too late.

God Rending Death Blade.

Alex flew himself, arriving at the Wyrm in an instant. He struck the head of the heavily wounded Wyrm and at that very moment, the Wyrm realized that it had been too careless.

Alex's physical strength wasn't much, considering it was only around Saint Core 1st realm at the moment even after years of body cultivation.

His sword aura was also not that strong. It used to be very strong previously, but given how much everything else had improved, the other aspects of his fighting strength had caught up and surpassed the strength of his Sword Aura in some cases.

Currently, his Sword Aura was capable of producing strength around the peak of the Saint Core realm.

Unlike them, however, his Qi was plenty strong. At Saint Core 6th realm, his Qi could produce a strength comparable to the average attack of a Saint Soul 6th realm. Adding onto that strength provided by his Yin Qi when put through Midnight to use the God Rending Death Blade technique, it even went a step beyond to reach the Saint Soul 7th realm in strength.

The silver light surrounding his sword had been Space aura, as he was using the dao of Space and dao of Cutting together to form a spatial blade, the attributes of which he had put into this very skill.

Combined with the force from a Saint Transformation 1st realm equivalent Blood aura, the overall strength of his attack had improved to reach a realm beyond what he had ever been able to produce.

Adding onto all that the Spiritual attack he had learned from the Spiritual Providence technique, this had most definitely been his strongest attack to date without any external help.

What that meant when it came to the Wyrm was that in a single strike, Alex cut through the Wyrm from its head to its tail like a fish fillet.

Not even a Nascent soul remained after Alex's attack.

He turned around and quickly took the beast's body into his storage ring. A body like that of the Wyrm could be considered a treasure on its own.

But what Alex considered to truly be the treasure here was the Beast Core of the Wyrm. With enough time, he would have a blood Wyrm of his own.

Chapter 1326 Closing In

Alex flew back up with the old woman looking down on him with a rather angry look.

"Your majesty! We can't protect you if you keep doing this," she said. "You need to stay in the ship where you're safe."

"Uh... sorry," he said.

"Sorry isn't going to cut it," Yao Ning said. "Do you know what would've happened if the beast had gotten you?"

"It's alright," Alex said. "I wanted the Wyrm's body."

"I could've gotten that for you. I was ready to kill it anyway," the old woman said.

Alex smiled as the two of them returned with Yao Ning having a frowning face. After returning, Liang Shufen joined Yao Ning and started scolding Alex. She didn't go overboard with the scolding as Alex was still their King, but the old lady Yao seemed to have no such fear.

Alex ignored most of their words and turned toward the Commander who was finding it hard to believe what had happened out there.

Old Lady Yao had defeated the beast so easily, and then Alex had even killed the beast himself. He tried feeling Alex's cultivation base, but it wasn't that strong. Was the beast just that weakened?

In the first place, how did he arrive all the way down there?

"Thank you for your hard work, commander," Alex said.

"Please, your majesty, you're embarrassing me," the commander said. "I barely did anything. It was all you in the end."

"No, no, you might not have won against that beast, but that certainly doesn't mean you did nothing," Alex said. "I doubt Elder Yao could've had such an easy time had you and your men not weakened it so much. Seriously, thank you."

The commander finally nodded. "Thank you for saving us," he said. His men behind him bowed all at the same time as well.

The ship began moving again, and the commander and his men ate some pills to get treated. Alex went ahead and checked the commander a bit to show some concern. The commander was thankful and he was very verbal about it.

The alchemists and assistants came out from their rooms now that the danger was over. They had hidden, praying that they wouldn't die here, only to find out that they had nothing to worry about.

Even Alex wasn't aware of that, so they couldn't be blamed. Alex had been worried that they were going to get hurt too. In fact, he was ready to teleport the entire boat, regardless of what it would cost him to use his dao on that sort of scale.

However, he had only relaxed when he realized that the old woman wasn't phased from the very start. When he had asked her, she told him that she could defeat it if she had to.

That was why Alex had teleported her right in front of the commander at the last moment to save them all.

After things returned back to normal, Alex walked to the bow of the ship and watched the serene water go past them all.

The ocean below was a brilliant shade of azure, reflecting the vibrant hues of the sky above. The water's surface rippled and sparkled with sunlight, captivating everyone with its ethereal beauty.

There was marine life, not just beasts that lived in the ocean. From time to time, Alex would see regular, coreless fishes jump out of the ocean, moving as quickly as they could toward some unknown destination.

Time passed and soon night came. However, Alex still stayed there, watching the life below.

The islands flew past him, with hundreds of beasts that he could see even from there. There were volcanic mountains in some locations where lava constantly flowed from the side.

There were waves in the ocean. Most were small, but some reached nearly 20 meters high. Alex watched as one wave submerged an entire island before the water receded enough that he could see the destroyed trees again.

The weather phenomena were a sight to see too. From storm to hail, to rain, to even snow sometimes.

There were also times when the entire sky would turn into a rain of lightning like the Lightning Peninsula from the Northern Continent used to be.

Even more time passed as the people on the ship got used to being on the ship. They lived normally, coming to the deck to socialize when they wanted to, before going back to their rooms to learn and cultivate.

There were beasts that found them from time to time, but none of them were nearly as strong as the Wyrm and were easily taken care of.

Before they knew it, 2 weeks had passed.

The islands in the ocean were starting to get larger now, and the number of strong beasts was quickly dropping in number. They were getting closer and closer to the Eastern Continent.

Alex walked up to the Commander, who was standing in the front of the ship. "How long before we arrive?" he asked.

"Our destination is the Greatwind region of the Silver Kingdom, so I would say about half a day. Maybe slightly longer? We should arrive before sunrise though," the commander said. "We will land near the Blightwind city and take the teleportation formation from there, so we will be reaching our destination soon."

Alex nodded after hearing that. "Half a day huh?" he said. "Then... I will finally be in the Eastern Continent."

Once he arrived, he would have visited to all 5 continents of this realm. Once he explored that continent, there wouldn't be much remaining for him to do in this world anymore.

Suddenly, a massive spiritual sense passed through the whole boat. Something strong had found them again.

* * * * *

In a dark room, a man sat cultivating. His hair was unkempt, his beard scraggly. His hair and beard, along with his mustache covered so much of his face that it wasn't even visible.

He wore torn robes that barely covered him but did great to show off his muscular body. He had forgotten how long he had been cultivating here, just that it had been a while now.

His eyes opened wide when he felt something. He pulled out a small artifact from his storage bag, that told him something that caught his attention.

The old man walked out of the cave and looked in a certain direction where he tried to find something in the sky against the night sky. He couldn't see anything

So, to help him see what was there, he released his spiritual sense in that direction.

He didn't expect much this time around either. He had been doing this for quite a while now, and he knew what to expect most of the time.

Most times, it would just be a person or two flying to and from the continent. Those were not the thing he was looking out for.

However, when he noticed that what was flying was a ship, his attention instantly sharpened. When he saw that the ship actually had an insignia of the Azure Imperium on it, his eyes narrowed in seriousness.

This was what he had been looking out for. His wait here hadn't been in vain at all. A moment later, the man was already flying into the sky, going after the ship.

Chapter 1327 The Old Man

"Another beast?" Alex asked, not understanding what was happening. He, along with everyone else had released their spiritual sense, and it reached nowhere near far enough to cover anything that could've used its spiritual sense on them.

Then, something flew into the range of their senses. Before they knew it, it was already near them.

Elder Yao and Commander Jianyu moved at the same time, arriving outside the ship one after another to intercept the person who had come.

The man stopped a few dozen meters from the two, his hair and beard scraggly, his robes mostly torn.

"Who are you?" the commander asked.

The old man stayed quiet and simply looked around. They could see his eyes as well as sense his spiritual sense move through them, as if looking for something.

Alex frowned a little and stepped in front of the many alchemists just in case they needed to be protected.

"Let me into your ship," the man said with a hoarse voice.

"That's not happening until you introduce yourself," the commander said. Even if he knew he was weak, he wouldn't do something to jeopardize the safety of his guests.

"Fellow Daoist, we are guests from the Southern Continent on our way to the Eastern Continent," Yao Ning said. "Would you please tell us why you have come here?"

She could tell that the man in front of her was as strong as her, if not more. She couldn't afford to start a fight here.

The old man finally turned his head towards the woman, away from whatever else he was looking at. His eyes narrowed with a slight hint of confusion to them. "The Southern Continent? What is someone like that doing here?" he asked.

"We are part of the Alchemy Exchange that His Majesty of the Southern Continent and the Emperor of the Eastern Continent set up," Yao Ning said.

The old man seemed to be thinking something for a few seconds before he spoke again. "So this boat is coming from the Southern Continent?"

"Yes," Yao Ning said.

"Then move and let me into your ship," the man said.

Yao Ning frowned. "I'm sorry, Fellow Daoist, but I cannot agree to that. I have to keep in mind the safety of everyone on the ship," she said. "If you continue insisting, I will have to force you away."

She got ready to fight, and so did Long Jianyu.

The old man noticed that and sighed. "Let me into the boat and I promise to not hurt a single soul in there. If I even so much as hurt someone, let the heaven strike me dead," he said.

Everyone felt turbulence in the air as the oath made by the man was instantly accepted. Yao Ning frowned as she didn't know what to do. Long Jianyu was following her in this instance, so he was stupefied as well.

"Let him in," Alex said, walking up to the edge of the ship.

"But your Majesty—"

"Do it," Alex said, nodding towards Yao Ning.

The old woman thought for a moment and quickly nodded. "Fellow Daoist, please come in," she said, moving back into the ship.

Long Jianyu stood confused for a moment, but it didn't take him too long to see what was happening. He went back onto the ship as well and waited for the old man to walk in.

The old man could barely see the image of the ship with his eyes. He had to use his spiritual sense to look at the rest.

He slowly flew into the ship, the barriers doing little to keep him outside. When he entered, he finally saw everyone inside, most of who weren't present on the deck yet.

"How can we help you, senior?" Alex asked.

The old man looked at him. "Who are you?" he asked.

"This is His Majesty Alex, King of the Southern Continent," Yao Ning quickly introduced him.

"King of the Southern Continent?" the man's eyes widened in surprise. "I apologize for the scene I've caused, your Majesty."

The old man was surprisingly respectful for the disrespect he had shown during most of his interaction here. However, that was most likely to be expected from someone so high in cultivation that nothing else mattered to them.

"As long as I and my subjects are unharmed, I don't mind what is happening," Alex said. "May I know what you want to do here? Do you want us to take you along?"

"No," the old man said. He turned towards the commander. "Lower your ship's defenses, all of them."

"What? No, I won't do that," the commander quickly said.

"Do it or I'll destroy this ship to make it happen myself," the old man said.

Everyone frowned at the threat. He had made an oath not to hurt anyone, but he had said nothing about the ship.

The reason Alex had even brought him onto the ship was because he had said the oath to not hurt anyone if he was let in. Alex wanted to put the oath into effect as soon as he could so that he could protect everyone.

However, if the ship were to be destroyed, would the oath still work? He wasn't sure. Logic said that they would still be safe, but his heart feared something else.

"Can you tell us what you wish to do with the ship's defenses lowered?" Alex asked. "I'm afraid we might put ourselves in danger if we do so."

"As I said, your Majesty," the old man spoke in his hoarse voice. "I have absolutely no intention of harming anyone here. I just wish to check a few things, which I can only do when the ship's defenses are lowered, one way or another."

Alex still frowned, but he couldn't see another way out of this situation. He could have Yao Ning fight him on the ship since he couldn't attack her back now, but that would still leave him free to destroy the ship.

And with the strength he had, there was no chance the ship could survive at all.

"Commander, do as he says," Alex said. The man could destroy the ship after the defenses were lowered too, but that would lead to the same result, so there wasn't much merit in worrying too much.

The commander hated that he had to do this, but he saw no other choice as well. "Fine," he said and pulled out something.

A moment passed, and suddenly all formation started lowering. In fact, the commander had to start using his Qi to keep the boat afloat even.

The man spread his spiritual sense, looking for something. "Are all of the defenses down?" he asked the Commander.

"Yes," the commander said.

"I need a definite answer," the old man said. "Swear that to the heavens."

The commander grumbled a bit under his breath and did something else. It seemed he hadn't lowered all formations. "I did it," he said. "I swear to the heavens that all the defenses are down."

The old man wasted no time and sent his spiritual sense into the boat. He could see the many people who were scared and terrified of his senses. However, the man didn't seem to care for them.

He looked thoroughly for another minute or so before withdrawing his spiritual sense. "Thank you for your time," he said. "Please be safe on your journey."

Then, the man left the ship and flew away, leaving everyone in a daze.

Chapter 1328 The Eastern Continent

"That's it?" Liang Shufen couldn't help but ask as the old man disappeared somewhere in the horizon.

The whole thing felt very surreal, with the old man coming out of nowhere, demanding something so outrageous, and then leaving all of a sudden.

"I don't think we need to stay here any longer," Alex said. "Commander, we should leave before any other trouble arises."

"Yes," the commander said and quickly put back all the defenses and flew the ship.

Even as they flew away, the group couldn't help but think of how weird the experience had been.

"That must've been one of the hidden masters you were talking about that cultivates outside in these islands," Alex said.

"Maybe," the commander said.

"Do you know who he is by any chance?" Alex asked. "Have you recognized him now that he's been here so close?"

"No," the commander said. "I'm trying to think of old men that are equally as strong, but its hard to say. Especially given the fact that this man could've been hiding here for centuries and may have even faked his death to come here."

"Under those circumstances, it's pretty much impossible to tell anything," the commander said.

"Hmm," Alex gave the statement some thought. He could see that the commander was just as confused as anyone else, so he didn't suspect that he was hiding anything. "Oh, does the ship have secret compartments? Or does your ship hold some treasure?"

"Umm... no, none," the commander said. "I dropped all the defenses as he asked, so there was nothing I could hide in here even if I wanted to."

"That's true," Alex said. "I'll go talk with my people then. They seem plenty scared by the encounter."

"I apologize that you had to go through something like this again, your majesty," the commander said as Alex left.

Something was bugging Alex about the whole ordeal. What was the old man looking for exactly?

There were some hints, but not enough for Alex to go on at the moment. He returned back to his assistants who were all calming themselves down. Some had even taken a pill to remove their anxiety.

"Are you guys alright?" Alex asked the group, most of whom nodded, but there were some who shook their head.

"It's alright," Alex said. "He's gone. You guys can relax."

After talking to the alchemists for a while, he returned to the bow of the ship where he looked out for any other such instance.

As the ship got closer and closer to its destination, the number of islands was slowly increasing as well. Larger and larger islands passed by the group, all of whom looked down with great curiosity.

Someone of the islands was even inhabited by humans, surprising the group. They had built giant cities and were a full-fledged society.

The sun had started to come up, making it more clear for everyone to see the things below. The number of cities increased by a significant number, with some islands having more than just one.

There were other islands that were close enough that they had a bridge forming between them, connecting every single island in that archipelago.

As the ship continued flying forward, Alex could see a giant island on the horizon. He could see the continent. He waited patiently for the ship to reach there, but there was something to cross beforehand.

A line of soldiers stayed in floating ships that were there to check any ships that went in and out of the continent. And they were dense enough to cover the entire shoreline.

The ship moved forward confidently and the commander came up to the front before slowly bringing the ship to a half in front of them.

A man flew out of the ship from the other side, a man with a clean-shaven face and his hair tied in a ponytail.

"Commander Jianyu, you've finally arrived," the man said.

"Commander Beiquan," the commander greeted back. "Have you been waiting for us?"

"For two days," the man named Beiquan said. "Why were you so late?"

"We had some trouble in the ocean. A couple of beasts decided to fight us, we had to take a bit of detour, and one man even stopped us for something," the commander said. "This was more troublesome than most other times."

"I see," the man said before looking beyond the commander toward Alex and the others. "Ah, those must be the people from the Southern Continent."

"Ah, yes. Let me introduce you to him," the commander said and brought the man over to Alex and the rest.

The man was called Jin Beiquan and was one of the commanders of the Scale Legion. The Scale Legions' task was to deal with things outside of the continent, so they mostly stayed guard around the perimeter to make sure no one sneaked in without letting them know who they were.

Alex and the rest greeted the man and finally, they were let sent on their way with more soldiers added for protection.

"Welcome to the Eastern Continent, your Majesty," the commander said as they entered the air space of the continent itself.

The massive continent showed its face to them. The flat lands in front of them, the mountain range in the distance. Everywhere their eyes reached, they could see tiny hints of civilization at each instance.

"We're in the Silver Kingdom right now, the Greatwind region within it," the commander explained where they were. "It covers a vast land on the western side of it and is named after the strong winds that flow in from the ocean to the west in summer."

"Within it, we're going to the Blightwind City. You will see a patch of land soon that is completely deserted because of a plague that was blown in by the wind that caused all the plants to die. Fortunately, people still managed to change the tide against the plague in time and formed a city here, and named it after that."

He gave some trivia knowledge about where they were going. As the man had told him, there was indeed a path of land in front that looked like it belonged to the desert.

A bit further away, Alex saw the city in the distance. Past the deserted-looking region was a city full of rivers and ponds all around it.

There were many people fishing in the rivers and ponds, and many bridges going past them. There were children playing in the water, cultivators flying on top of it all.

There was no wall surrounding anything as the city simply began at one place and went on as far as it could.

There was a massive building at the center, which the Commander said most likely belonged to the mayor of the city.

If Alex was not wrong, that house was better than either palace he had been to in the Western Continent.

'Amazing,' he couldn't help but say.

The people watched as the ship arrived and landed outside of their city. Everyone noticed who the ship belonged to and made sure to not cause any problems.

As the ship landed, the formations were shut down one by one. As the barriers started to disappear, the atmosphere of the Eastern Continent finally entered the ship.

And only then were the people from the Southern Continent introduced to the dense Qi that was everywhere in the Eastern Continent.

Chapter 1329 News Board

"It's so strong," Yao Ning couldn't help but say. "No wonder people here reach Saint realm so easily."

"It truly is something," Liang Shufen said. "I haven't sensed air this potent with Qi in all my life."

"This is comparable to some places I've been to," Alex said, looking around. The beast realm and the ancient sects of the Northern Continent were similar to this. His palace was slightly weaker, but not by much.

However, this was just a random city at the edge of the continent. He could only imagine how much stronger the Qi would get when they got in closer to the center.

A few carriages seemed to have been prepared as everyone got on it and went towards where the teleportation formation was.

Alex watched out of the window, watching everyone outside who was watching him. They first crossed a bridge, and he could see the people in the ocean looking back at them.

Kids that looked as if they were 12 years old had a cultivation base already. Teenagers were at the peak of the common realm, and some were even in the true realm. Most adults were in the True realm entirely.

Alex saw a few Saint realms too on his way to teleportation formation.

He observed their cultivation base, their clothes, their mannerisms, and many other things on the road.

The people of the Eastern Continent wore robes just like them, but they seemed to have quite a few things hanging from their clothes, like little trinkets or a small piece of cloth.

The women wore colorful dresses, with patterns or flowers or other prints on their robes. Their sleeves were mostly flimsy and transparent, which seemed to be the fashion these days.

They also seemed to wear quite a lot of jewelry that wasn't even artifacts.

The people here were slightly scared of the soldiers it seemed, but that was to be expected of anyone anywhere. Even if you did nothing wrong, seeing a soldier would freak you out most of the time.

The architecture of this city was quite amazing too. The inner they went, the more compact the city became. The roads were large all the same, but they started to look better and better, all covered in walking stones.

They were so uniformly placed that the carriage didn't even rattle as they rode on top of it.

"Commander, how would you rank this city overall when compared to all the other cities of the empire?" Alex asked.

"Rank?" the commander thought. "Let's see, it would say it's a little below average. It might have been average if there was at least a large sect or something close by, but as far as I know, there isn't much of that here."

"Still, if I were to rank it just a place to live in, it's definitely above average," the commander said.

"I see," Alex said as he looked around. "It sure does seem like a place to stay in."

After a bit more time on the carriage, the carriage arrived in front of a place that was wide and open. Alex could see the teleportation formation from where he was and it seemed no one was using it at the moment.

"Surely you didn't reserve the teleportation formation for us, did you?" Alex asked.

"You are our precious guests, your Majesty," the commander said. "This is the least we can do to not inconvenience you."

Alex gave a smile, not feeling like saying anything to that. If someone important came to his continent, he would do the same as well.

Alex moved to the side, along with the elders as he waited for the rest of the carriage to stop one by one and the alchemists to get off it slowly.

As he waited, his eyes wandered around the place, looking at the designs of the buildings that weren't that different from the other continents. These people were so strong that they probably hadn't had to change anything in ages, so it was obvious that this place would remain similar to everything.

Even if something did break, no one would want to rebuild something into an aesthetic that didn't fit the city just due to fear of being singled out by others.

Still, there were a lot more buildings with curved, slanted roofs like pagodas than he was used to. This place hadn't seen a change in ages for sure.

As he was looking around, his eyes moved towards the sky where he saw something he hadn't noticed before. A giant floating cube was in the sky, with screens on each side that were showing something the same on each of the screens.

From what Alex could see, it was mostly words, but there were images there from time to time as well.

"What's that?" he asked the commander, pointing toward this cube.

The commander looked up and said, "Oh, that's just a formation we use to broadcast news to the people everywhere. It's all connected throughout the empire, and shows everyone the same news."

"News," Alex was surprised to hear that. It was like a newspaper from the central continent or even the internet. Except, one didn't have to go look for it, as it was always here.

"Yes, there's a group of people in the capital that gather news from throughout the day and verify it, then send it to every city in the continent to show it like this."

"It's a recent thing that we've set up after getting some suggestions from a few Players, so we implemented it," the man said.

"Ah, you took ideas from Players, huh? Not bad," Alex said. It made a little more sense now. He continued looking at the cube and the words that flashed on it.

'Teng Xuegang of the Realms Beyond school has recently broken through to the Saint Transformation 2nd realm at the young age of 1200 years.'

A young man could be seen in the image, standing in a regal pose with his strong and fit body, and a long weapon strapped horizontally behind his waist, which was hard to make out based on the fuzzy image.

'Fang Yimu of the Cloud Iron sect, who emerged victorious in this year's opening of the Eternal Shadow Abyss, has commented that she wishes to go back again to prove to everyone that it was not a fluke.'

The image following that news was of a slightly older woman with tanned skin, with long flowing black hair that had gold and jewels all over her head and neck. She was wearing a fashionable white and black robe and held a very thin sword in her hand that was hard to make out in the image alone.

The text shifted to something else this time.

'The envoy from the Southern Continent that includes the King of the Southern Continent, Alex Benton, as well as 20 great alchemists under him have arrived in the Great Wind region. They should be reaching the Dragon Capital very soon as well.'

There were no images this time around.

"Oh, they already know about us," Yao Ning pointed. "We just came. How do they know about us?"

The commander gave a sheepish laugh. "News travels fast here, I'm afraid," he said. He then saw that every one of the alchemists had arrived and was standing, so he turned to Alex.

"Your Majesty, we should leave now."

Chapter 1330 Long Fangyu

Alex, the two elders, 20 Alchemists, 20 assistants, and the commander got onto the large teleportation formation that could easily fit 2000 people inside of it.

Alex was quite surprised at the size of the teleportation formations as most other continents had rather small formations that could take maybe 200 people at once.

Alex could also see just how old the formation was from the slowly fading surface of where he was standing. It wouldn't be long before these people had to fix this formation, but since it was made up of metal, they were probably used to it.

Between Metal and Stone, Metal had the advantage of not having to worry about how the Qi was being delivered to it as it was capable of equally distributing all Qi it was given.

As such, the people could also fix it whenever it broke by just asking someone with the Metal dao for help. A person like that could quickly fix up the places where it was broken within an hour.

The formation was activated and Alex felt the teleportation aura grab onto him. The next second, he was teleported away.

As soon as Alex arrived on the other side, he noticed 3 distinct things.

First, the Qi around him was much, much thicker than what he was used to. In fact, it was thicker than anywhere he had been in all the world, including the White Tiger's palace, The Demon realm where the Black Tortoise lived, and Scarlet's dome.

Second, the people around him were a lot stronger than him, and there were many of them. Alex wasn't even there for 2 seconds, and he could already sense at least 4 Saint transformation realm cultivators, who weren't even hiding their cultivation base.

Alex didn't think this was a ploy to intimidate him and the others, but rather that they were all simply used to being around people with similar strength to them so they had no reason to hide anything.

Finally, there were many people waiting for them. Astoundingly many. And each one of them looked rather important too, going by their clothes.

"Your Royal Highness," the commander spoke all of a sudden when he saw someone important in the crowd.

He got off the formation and gave a deep bow toward a man that looked about as old as Bai Jingshen did in his human form. He looked to be in his 30s, but Alex had no way of telling just how old this man was.

'Is this the Emperor?' he wondered. There was a very old image of the Dragon Emperor, and the man that stood before him looked somewhat like him. He wore regal clothes with azure dragon embroidery all over them and had a small patch of beard just like the image Alex saw.

However, he wasn't called 'Majesty', but rather, 'Highness' so it couldn't be the emperor at all.

"Thank you, Commander Jianyu. You will be greatly rewarded for bringing our important guests through such a treacherous route," the young man said as he opened a golden paper fan with a blue dragon inside of it that almost looked like it moved around the fan.

The commander thanked the man and moved away to the side as his job here was done.

A very old man with a thick white beard and a dark birthmark on the left side of his face was the first to speak to him.

"Welcome to the Dragon Capital, your Majesty King Alex, and our friends from the Southern Continent," the old man spoke. "This humble one is Long Huogang, and I would like to introduce His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince of the Azure Imperium, Long Fanyu."

"My warmest welcomes to you and your people, King Alex," the crown prince spoke and bowed toward Alex and the others in respect.

The others behind him bowed as well and spoke words of welcome.

"My warmest greetings as well, Crown Prince Fangyu," Alex spoke to the man that was not the Dragon Emperor, but his son.

"We have carriages ready to take you away, King Alex. If you and others would follow me," the Crown Prince said and showed them all the way out of the building.

Alex nodded and started walking, the two elders walking on either side of him. Behind them, the rest followed.

Yao Ning had a blank look on her face, her wrinkled face giving away no emotion for anyone else to read.

Liang Shufen was bright, happy, and full of smiles, enchanting many of the people that were around them.

Alex on the other hand looked handsome and regal with the royal robes he wore that had many phoenix-like birds embroidered onto them. His long jet-black hair flowed in the wind as he walked.

As soon as they were out of the building, Alex and the others saw a large number of people, either on the street or in the houses, that were gathered there to just see them.

Alex and the rest were made to walk through a large, empty space when going to the large carriages that were prepared for them.

The crowd cheered at the sight of them, but Alex wasn't sure if the cheer was for him or the crown prince in front of him who was waving his hands around at the many people around him.

From what he could tell, it was the both of them, but the crown prince was definitely being cheered for more.

The smiling man who waved to his subjects looked ever the more king-like than anyone else Alex had seen till now, and he was still only a prince.

The carriage they were getting on was truly large with the middle portions entirely open so everyone could see outside and inside all the same. It wasn't a carriage that was made with people's privacy in mind at all.

Alex got on first, sitting towards the front with Yao Ning and Liang Shufen on either side of him. The 40 other people came in with Hao Ya sitting away from them, trying to be as inconspicuous as she could be.

The crown prince finally got in last, walking to the front of sitting down opposite Alex. The old man named Long Huogong had also entered along with him as well as a number of people that Alex wasn't introduced to yet.

He checked the two people's cultivation bases and could tell that the prince was around Saint Transformation 4th realm, while the old man next to him was much stronger than Saint Transformation 6th realm.

The others were around the same range as well.

The crown prince looked outside and waved at the crowd once more before speaking to the rider at the front to move the carriage.

The carriage smoothly started moving and soon they were going through an open road that was cleared for the day just for them.

"May I ask where we are heading to right now?" Alex asked the Crown Prince. "Are we heading to the Palace?"

"I'm afraid it will take a while before we can go to the palace," the prince said. "Right now, we're heading to the Royal School of Alchemy where everyone has been eagerly waiting for your arrival."

Chapter 1331 Criteria

"The Royal School of Alchemy was created ages ago and is one of the most prestigious institutions in all of the empire," the old man next to the Crown Prince started explaining. "It is one of the 10 Great institutions that is under the Royal Imperial family, and is most certainly one of the most well regarded."

"10 huh?" Alex asked, somewhat interested. "I would like to hear more about them."

"Don't worry, your Majesty," the old man said. "We will take you to each of the institutions later to visit."

Alex smiled and nodded. "I look forward to it," he said. "By the way, I've been wondering something. I had assumed that it would be the Emperor himself that would pick us up. Is that not the case? Is he waiting for us in the Royal School?"

"Ah, no," the Crown Prince answered. "His Majesty miscalculated your time of arrival and is in an alchemy session that should last for another half a day. He was supposed to come to take you all to the Royal School, but due to that, I had come instead of His Majesty."

"Although, since it's only half a day, by the time noon comes around, he should be out," the Crown Prince said.

"I see, I can wait that long," Alex said and started looking outside of the carriage at the capital.

The buildings on either side of the road had a pagoda-like aesthetic that was more prevalent here than anywhere else in the world. The buildings were large, and tall going on for several stories. The buildings were close to each other, with no gap between them in most cases.

And yet, they never appeared crowded or congested because of how big they were and how spacious the roads were. You could have 50 carriages moving side by side at the same time and you would still have enough space for people to walk on the sidelines.

Compared to the Sunborn Sanctuary, which had wide roads, but not as wide as they were more so meant for humans walking through them, this road was definitely made with carriages in mind.

Not only that, it seemed there was an airway in the sky as well, which was meant to be followed anytime one wanted to fly around in their boats.

Alex could see boats of similar sizes in the distance flying around and could tell that there were some regulations as to what was allowed to fly in the city and where.

Alex could see the News Boards in the sky at several intervals, this time not a cube but rather a large spherical body made up of hexagonal shapes, all of which showed the same news all over.

They showed Alex's arrival.

His pictures floated in the sky for everyone to see, which meant that it was also shown to the entire continent. If he wasn't wrong, within the day everyone in the Eastern Continent would be aware of what he looked like.

Alex secretly frowned at the realization that he wouldn't be able to do secretly what he had been wanting to do. Anywhere he went, people would know who he was.

'Would a face change be the answer?' he thought, but then there would still be royals keeping track of him, so maybe it was never going to work in the first place.

As Alex continued to think and look outside at what the various buildings were, the Crown prince spoke up.

"Your Majesty, I heard something that I'm not sure is true or not. Would you mind clearing up my confusion?" the Crown Prince asked.

"What is it about? I am happy to clear any confusion," Alex said.

"When you were crowned King and the news traveled to us sometime later, one of the pieces of information on that piece of news was that you were rather young."

"I can see that the information back then was true, but they were never clear on just how young you are," the Crown Prince asked. "Would you mind clearing it up for me?"

"Sure," Alex said. "I am... let's see..." He had to give it a bit of thought as it had been a while since he had kept track of his own age.

"I believe I am a little over 60 years old, but haven't yet reached 65 years," Alex said. "My age gets a little hard to determine because I've spent so many years cultivating that the months just blend in together in my mind."

He looked at the Crown Prince after answering, wondering why he wasn't talking, only to see the absolutely flabbergasted look on the Crown Prince's face.

It wasn't just him, but even the other people from the Eastern Continent were extremely surprised at his age.

The two elders next to Alex shook their heads as well. They knew the answer, but it was still quite shocking.

"S-surely you are jesting, right your Majesty? 60 years is a bit..." The Crown Prince didn't want to outright call him a liar, but that was also what he wanted to do.

"Did Your Highness not realize that I am also one of the many players by my name?" Alex asked. "Given that info, you should know I'm not lying."

The Crown Prince's smile faded when he realized that it made sense. While not all players were great at cultivating, the number of players that had made a name for themselves in a short period of time was truly something significant.

If Alex truly was a player as they had all guessed, and not someone using a player's name to hide himself, then a Saint Core 6th realm, 60-year-old king was truly something fearsome.

In time, he would surely reach the same level as the Dragon Emperor if not better. The crown prince and the rest easily realized that.

"You are truly great, your Majesty," the Crown Prince spoke. "At your age, I remember I had only just reached the Saint realm. It's taken me over 2 thousand years to reach where I am after that."

"In your case, it will probably just take you 200 years to reach where I am," the Crown Prince said.

"You overestimate my talent," Alex said. "I was only lucky in finding treasures that helped my explosive growth."

"Some say Luck is a talent as well," the Crown Prince spoke and thought of what else he could talk about.

"You aren't married, are you your Majesty?" the Crown Prince asked.

"No, I'm afraid not," Alex said. "Are you married, your Highness?"

"I am not, but I do have a fiancee," the Crown Prince said.

"I see. Congratulations," Alex said to the prince.

The Crown Prince smiled back and said, "Are you not interested in marriage, your Majesty?" he asked.

Alex paused for a moment and said, "I am, but I haven't found one regardless of how hard I've tried. It is so hard to find a Queen that can fit my criteria."

The Crown Prince's eyes widened as he saw an opportunity to form a connection between the two continents. At the same time, the two elders on the side of Alex couldn't help but react to the nonsense.

The Crown Prince was all smiles as he asked, "Just what exactly are these stringent criteria, your majesty?"

Chapter 1332 The Royal School Of Alchemy

Alex was adamant about not getting a Queen, even if he had the responsibility to produce an heir that would rule the continent once he was gone.

There were reasons he didn't want a queen, one of which he told the elders very clearly. It was because he would never leave his family behind even if he got an heir.

There were also other reasons that they weren't aware of, but they were very aware that they absolutely could not bring up the topic without him getting angry for some reason.

So, when he said that he just hadn't found a good enough woman to become the Queen, they were immediately confused and somewhat angry even.

How could he find a good enough woman when he didn't even bother to search for one? Still, the two elders kept their composure and watched out things would turn out. After all, they knew Alex wouldn't lie in such a situation for no reason.

"My criteria, huh? I actually haven't made a proper list, but let's see..." Alex gave it a thought.

"First of all, I care very much for the looks, so they have to be pretty. Not very pretty, but enough to make heads turn," Alex said.

The Crown Prince nodded with understanding. "A Queen needs to be able to make heads turn. That's expected," he said.

"Yes, and she needs to have a good personality too, but I can let it aside if it's just good enough and the other criteria are matched," he said.

The Crown Prince nodded again. "True, true. While personality is important, a person can always change. You can teach the Queen to change her behavior if it's problematic," he said.

"Right?" Alex asked. "Your Highness does get me."

The Crown Prince smiled. "What more, Your Majesty? Surely those two aren't the only Criteria," he said.

"Of course not," Alex said. "They also have to be a very strong cultivator. I'm speaking at least the Saint Core realm, if not the Saint Soul realm."

"That high?" the Crown Prince was surprised. "That will drop the number of possible choices to a fraction of the original. I doubt there are many that fit your choices in the Southern Continent, your majesty. Even amongst the group you've brought, I can only see a single one that fits the criteria."

Alex nodded. "Yes, but I don't have to just choose my Queen from just the Southern Continent, do I?" he asked.

"True," the Crown Prince said. "The Eastern Continent certainly has a large number of female cultivators that fit your criteria. If your Majesty likes, I can even introduce a few to you. There are Imperial Princesses that fall under your criteria very well."

"Oh, but I'm not done," Alex said, cutting off the Crown Prince. "She also has to be well educated, needs to know a lot of things, needs to be proficient in taking care of oneself and others in case required."

The Crown Prince was taken aback, but he let Alex ramble.

"And finally, and most importantly," Alex said. "She has to be young."

"Of-of course, that's a given," the Crown Prince quickly said. "We have young ladies that fit your description quite well."

Alex's eyes narrowed. "They have to be very young," he said.

The Crown Prince's face went blank as he looked around for a moment before asking, "Do... do you mean they have to be..." he whispered, "a child?"

Alex made an annoyed face. "Of course not. What are you saying, your Highness," he said. "I just meant young in age, like me."

"Oh, right right right," the Crown Prince gave a quick nod as if asking for forgiveness. "Yes, you need a young queen, just like... you."

As the meanings of the words were finally understood by the Crown Prince, his eyes widened in shock.

"Your Majesty," he said. "I... I don't think there are many that can fall into your criteria."

"Yeah, that's the problem, isn't it?" Alex said with a sigh. "You can see why I don't have a Queen."

"Yes," the Crown Prince said. "You are truly stringent with the criteria for who you accept as your Queen. With such restrictions, the only ones who can even have a chance to become your Queen are... the female Players."

As the Crown Prince spoke those words, his eyes narrowed slightly. Was that it? Was that what this young King was trying to ask for without asking for it directly?

Did he want to marry a Player from the Eastern Continent? Was that what this whole talk was about?

"Were there no ladies that fell into this category in the Southern Continent?" the Crown Prince asked.

"There were a few, but I didn't like them enough to make them my Queen," Alex said. "I'm hoping I have a better chance here in the Eastern Continent."

"You might," the Crown Prince said. "If you truly are serious about it all, I can help you find some ladies that fit your criteria. It will take some time, but I should be able to do it."

Alex's smile went wide. "Great! I might finally get a Queen then," he said. "I will look forward to it."

The Crown Prince spoke a little and went back to talking about regular questions about Alex. Seeing an opportunity, elder Liang quickly spoke to him with her spiritual sense.

"What's going on, Your Majesty? Why are you asking for a Queen?" she asked. "Are you really looking for one? It will be better to get find one in the Southern Continent if you really are."

"Of course, I'm not," Alex answered back. "Why would I be looking for a wife when I have so many things to deal with right now."

"That's what I thought," the elder said. "But then why did you say all that?"

"Why else?" Alex asked. "I'm obviously trying to find my cousin."

"Ah!" the elder finally realized. "Right, I forgot that was one of the things we were supposed to do. My apologies."

The elder remained silent and Alex made small talk with the Crown Prince the rest of the way through.

A few minutes later, Alex saw a large wall covering a massive building in the distance, on the gate of which he could read the words 'The Royal School of Alchemy'.

They had arrived at the place where many citizens were standing on either side of the gate, making a long pathway for them to walk through. They were all there to see Alex and the rest.

The gates of the school opened and the carriage slowly went through amidst cheers of welcome. The Crown Prince smiled at everyone and waved at them as they were driven into the giant compound of the Royal School.

The road lead straight to the massive building in the distance with pagoda-like features, painted in red and gold, and roofs that curved toward the sky.

On either side of the road were gardens that even without being knowledgeable could tell that it was an important location of the school

Alex saw the many flowers and plants growing in the garden and was immediately aware of the fact that it was an Alchemy garden.

It probably wasn't one of the more important ones as it was kept in the front, but it was still an Alchemy garden nonetheless and was in a way an identity of the school itself.

Past the garden, down the road, the carriage finally stopped outside of the building.

"Let us get off, your Majesty," the Crown Prince said and was the first to get off.

Alex nodded and walked after the Crown Prince, stepping onto the clean red carpet that was laid there for them.

After Alex and the elders got off, the others also got off one by one, standing in a group behind Alex.

The small group of people that were waiting for them walked up to them and bowed. "Welcome to the Royal School of Alchemy, your Majesty King Alex," the woman at the front spoke up. "We would like to thank you for coming all this way to allow us and our disciples to share knowledge and learn from each other."

The woman that spoke was an old woman with fluffy white hair on her head in a bun. She had little to no wrinkles despite her age and wore exquisite red robes with some, black, and gold in them.

She wore 3 golden necklaces as well as a single golden ornament on her forehead.

"Let me introduce her to you, Your Majesty," the Crown Prince said. "This is Elder Hu Manyin, the headmaster of this Royal School."

"Greetings, Elder Hu. Thank you for having us here," Alex said to the older woman. "I hope my alchemists won't trouble you much."

"No, no, your Majesty," the woman quickly spoke. "It is no trouble at all. In fact, it is a pleasure to have you all here. I can guarantee that I speak for everyone else when I say I look forward to the next 2 decades."

Alex smiled.

"Let me introduce you to the rest here," the Crown Prince said and started introducing the rest of the important people.

There weren't many that Alex had to remember aside from the headmaster herself, and maybe the vice headmaster who was a thin, old man with long white hair.

"Please come with us, your Majesty," the old woman said. "Let us show you the various facilities that we have in this school. I promise you that you will not be disappointed."

Alex smiled and spoke. "I look forward to seeing everything."

Chapter 1333 Level System

﻿

Alex walked through the massive hallway that led to the inside of the buildings the schooling actually happened.

The area of the entire school was so large that Alex would be surprised if the school didn't stretch for at least a few kilometers in every direction.

They arrived on the other side of the front building that led to a massive open ground where the alchemists sat and cultivated or rested in between their lessons, or even just had fun with their friends.

Alex and the rest behind him saw the open ground and were quite impressed at how much was being given to the disciples here.

Back in the Southern Continent, while the Royal Alchemy guild wasn't necessarily small, it could never compete with how grand this place was.

"There are many elders in the academy who teach students who wish to learn," the old woman said. "We don't assign disciples to any elders, but rather let their reputation gather the students for them."

"We test our disciples for 10 different levels with increasing difficulty in each case, and only after they pass the 9th level can they graduate from our school. If they end up remaining in a single level for a certain period of time, we expel them," the old woman said. "This creates a very competitive atmosphere in the school while also not putting the disciples head to head against each other, and instead lets them help each other."

"That's quite the nice system," Alex said. "Our own Royal Alchemy guild is small with about 500 members right now, so they all learn together and don't have many distinctions as of now."

"With that small number, you can't make many distinctions anyway," the old woman said. "We, on the other hand, have about 70 thousand disciples, so we are forced to do so. Also, it's something that apparently the Immortals do too, so we follow it."

Alex and the rest were taken aback by the statement. "The Immortals?" he asked.

"We're talking about our ruler, the Azure Dragon," the Crown Prince intervened. "They sometimes tell us how it is done in the realms above and we follow it. This system in particular was taught by the Azure Dragon that left 30 millennia ago."

"Oh! The school has been going on for that long, huh?" Alex commented.

"It has actually been going on for much longer. The Royal School itself was established by the first Dragon Emperor and it taught everything in a single school."

"As people started joining in more and more, they had to separate it into individual schools somewhere in between. As for when exactly, we don't have any factual information."

"I see," Alex said. "You mentioned you have 70 thousand disciples just in this school. Do you allow just anyone to join?"

"Yes," the old woman said. "Anyone can join and anyone can leave whenever they want. We don't make any discrimination between who can learn and who can't, or what they do after leaving. As long as they are capable of reaching the first level set in this school, they can join."

"And what does this first level require?" Alex asked.

"The person has to recognize about 1000 of the thousands of different ingredients we have in display at the testing facility and make a common pill with 40% or more harmony in a single try," the old woman said.

"40%? Just to even enter the school?" Alex asked in surprise. "Most people that are just starting to make pills can't do that, can they?"

"No, but that is what we ask of them," the old woman said. "If we allowed everyone to enter just because they wanted to, we would be overrun the moment we open for admission each year."

"Ah, yes. That is true," Alex said. Still, 40% was quite the requirement to even enter. He could only wonder what the rest of them were.

The group carried on looking through the various buildings and the alchemy rooms they were all provided. There was an in-school shop where everything was sold for spirit stones and bought from them as well.

The 20 alchemists behind them made remarks on how good everything looked, and how useful it would be to have these things back home as well.

Alex noted alchemists walking past them with badges on their chests that read their level.

As they went through most of the buildings, Alex realized that most of the levels were below 7. He barely saw anyone at level 7, and there wasn't a single person in level 8 at all.

So, he got a little curious.

"Do you not have level 8 and above people?" he asked.

"We have a few," the headmaster said. "If I'm not wrong, we currently have about 10 people that have reached level 8. As for 9, we have 3 only."

"Oh, so there are, huh?" Alex said. "I don't see any though."

"Most of them are older cultivators, so they spend most of their time cultivating or training in seclusion. The higher their level, the more grace period they have to level up to the next level."

"For someone in level 8, we give them 1000 years to level up, and for someone on level 9, they have 3000 years," the headmaster said.

"A thousand, huh?" Alex asked. "May I ask what the criteria are for reaching level 9 that you have to give them a thousand years to train?"

"Recognize every single ingredient you are asked about, have a perfect knowledge of at least 500 different Saint recipes, and make 100 Saint rank pills that are in the Heaven-grade within a single day, of which at least 1 should be Immortal grade pills," the old woman said. "If you can do that without making a single mistake, you pass."

"That's a difficult set of rules," Alex said. "I can see why only 3 people have made it that far."

In the history of the school, there have never been more than a hundred such alchemists.

"That is to be expected," Alex said. "And all 3 of those alchemists are in seclusion, huh? I hope they will at least come out of seclusion in the next 20 years so the alchemists I brought along with me can learn from them."

"I'm sure they will," the woman said. "Besides, only two of them are in closed cultivation right now. We have one walking around with us right now."

"Hmm?" Alex was a little surprised and looked around to see if he could see someone with a badge that had 9 written on it. "I don't see anyone like that."

"She's talking about me, your Majesty," the Crown Prince spoke.

Alex turned around with a surprised look on his face. "Oh! You're an alchemist too, your Highness?" he asked.

"Haha, yes. It is one of the things I like to brag about myself," the Crown Prince said with a sheepish smile.

"I'm impressed," Alex said.

"It's nothing compared to what I've heard you can do, Your Majesty," the Crown Prince said.

"Even if you compare yourself to me, we can clearly see that you are an amazing alchemist, Your Highness," Alex said. "Although, I must say I'm surprised that someone like you would try to become an Alchemist. Would you mind telling me why?"

Chapter 1334 End Of Tour

"The reason why I became an alchemist? It's simple really," the Crown Prince said. "I just wanted to follow in the footsteps of my father."

"Footsteps of your father?" Alex was a bit surprised. "Are you saying the Dragon Emperor dabbles in alchemy too?"

"Dabbles isn't the correct term here, I'm afraid," the old woman said from the side with a face that said she was proud of what she was speaking about. "Not many people know about this, but His Majesty is actually the best Alchemist in all the Empire."

"The best Alchemist?" Alex couldn't help but feel a little skeptical about her words. After all, they were coming from a woman who would obviously talk well about the emperor of the empire she lived in.

"Yes," the Crown Prince responded from the side. "Which is why I'm trying my best to follow in his footsteps."

"But you say he is the best alchemist. Does that mean you haven't reached his level yet?" Alex asked.

"No," the Crown Prince said. "I doubt I can truly ever reach his level. After all, his Majesty is the only person in the past 10 thousand decades to reach the 10th Level in this school and graduate from the school."

Alex was genuinely astonished by this information. "Wait, so no one else has reached Level 10?" he couldn't help but ask. "What about the Headmaster and the rest of the elders?"

"Haha, most of us were expelled after not being able to pass the 7th or 8th level," the woman said with a slight smile. "Of course, while I say expelled, I would like to make it clear that there is no negative connotation to this term when it comes to the Royal Schools."

"If you are expelled, it just means that you were unable to reach the next level that was required. That still made you someone capable of more than what your current level required."

"Most people that enter the 6th level go on to become important alchemy figures in other countries. 7th or 8th and they can join this school to become elders here," the older woman said. "I myself was once a 9th-level alchemist. But I've never managed to reach the 10th level even now as His Majesty has."

"Sounds like it is rather difficult to reach level 10. Would you mind telling me what the requirements for reaching that level are?" Alex asked.

"Of course," the older woman said. "There are two requirements. First, you have to come up with your own Saint rank pill that has never before been seen in this empire."

"And second, you have to make that pill 3 times in a row, each pill ending at 90% harmony or above."

"90% harmony?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the older woman said.

"3 times in a row?" he asked again.

"I know," the woman said. "It's difficult."

Alex struggled to keep a normal face. 'That's it?' he thought. He had been expecting something extravagant like making pills for as long as one could or even making pills without using any formations. What turned out to be the actual requirements felt... very lackluster.

Of course, he understood that it was only him that felt this way. The ones behind him could not compare to the feats that the Dragon Emperor had achieved.

After all, while individually, the two tasks were simple enough under the right circumstances or even through just sheer luck, you needed more than that to be capable of doing them at the same time.

Not only was coming up with a new pill recipe hard, but coming up with one that was efficient enough to make a pill over 90% harmony, while also dealing with problems of ingredients and techniques as such was also almost impossible for most alchemists.

Even if they could, then making that sort of pill 3 times in a row was near impossible as well.

'Although even with all that said, it's still impressive how far the Dragon Emperor has reached. I wonder if he had help from the Azure Dragon,' Alex wondered.

He spoke a few words of compliment for formalities sake and then continued going through the school to look at the rest of the stuff.

There were more faculties, more gardens, and more alchemy rooms. There were libraries with books of all kinds and a training ground to train while you were there. They finally arrived in the dorm room that on the eastern side of the school, an entire wing of which was emptied to make rooms for the alchemists from the Eastern Continent.

"We have prepared guests for all 20 of the alchemists that have come today. They have been through a long journey, so it might be better to let them rest for today," the old woman said.

Alex nodded and told the others to go rest. Elder Liang was made to stay here for today and Alex would come visit tomorrow to get her back.

For now, he was going to leave.

"How strict is the school actually?" Alex asked. "Can they leave to go around the city if they want?"

"Oh, of course," the old woman said. "Most of our disciples don't even come to the classes anymore and instead learn on their own in their place. Anyone can go in and out at any time they want as long as they have a nameplate belonging to the school."

"I see," Alex said. "I didn't sense any such formations. Were they closed for today?"

"Yes, your Majesty," the woman said. "Making the nameplate is a rather difficult job right at the moment without the person, so we had to shut it down for today."

"Now that you are here, we can prepare one from every one of you," the woman said.

"Great!" Alex smiled. "As long as my alchemists don't have to be holed up in the school, I am happy."

He turned to leave, not before giving Hao Ya a simple nod. With this, she could go around the city without any worry.

As they walked away from the dorm, the Crown Prince spoke. "Your Majesty, I must say I was surprised when I heard Royal Father mention the Alchemy Exchange program he was planning with you."

"I wasn't aware of anything about you at that point, so I didn't understand why he wanted to do it. However, after hearing what you were rumored to be capable of, I looked forward to the day you arrived, and now you have."

"So, if it isn't so much to ask, would you mind showing off your skills a bit?" the prince asked.

"My skills huh?" Alex thought for a moment. "Sure, why not. Let's head to an alchemy room then."

"Oh, you are okay with this?" the Crown Prince asked. "Haha, let's head on over to the north. There are better alchemy rooms there."

"No," Alex said. "It's fine if we do it here. Wasn't that building full of empty rooms earlier? Let's go there."

Alex pointed to a nearby building and started walking. The rest followed and a minute later they arrived.

"What pills should I make?" Alex asked as he walked into the room and looked around. "Bring me anything you wish for me to make. I will do my best with that."

Chapter 1335 Tiankong

﻿

Alex sat in front of the fire and brought out Memory. As memory started heating, he looked at the prince who was waiting with the storage bag full of ingredients.

"Here you go, your Majesty," the man said and handed it over to Alex. "We have provided a recipe in case you are not familiar with the pill you will be making."

Alex looked through the ingredients with a slight surprise on his face. "Oh, a Saint Body Regeneration Pill, huh? That takes me back," he spoke softly.

It was the same pill Alex had to downgrade so many years ago when one of his arms was missing. Finding the Blood Spirit Ginseng had been such a difficult task for him back then, and yet somehow here it was. Two at that.

"It's alright, I know this recipe. I can start," Alex said. "Would you all mind leaving the room?"

"Yes, your Majesty," they all said and left, despite some wanting to watch it all happen.

Alex started preparing the pill. The fire heat up the cauldron in front of him and soon enough it was ready for the first ingredient.

The group stayed outside, with nothing better to do than wait for Alex to finish making the pill.

The old lady Yao was alone with the others, who had started speaking amongst themselves with their spiritual sense. She couldn't tell what they were saying of course, but she could guess.

It was either a talk about how they wished to see what was happening inside or wonder how they could even tell if what he was going to do was real or not. She expected a lot of distrust from these people.

"Elder Yao," the Crown Prince spoke to her.

"Yes, your Highness," the elder spoke in a respectful tone.

"Would you mind telling us how good His Majesty's pills are?" the Crown Prince asked. "We simply can't contain our anticipation."

"How good?" the old woman thought for a moment. "I believe that His Majesty stands at the pinnacle of pill-making in this world. There should be no one capable of making pills as good as his."

"Oh!" the group was surprised at the old woman's wild claims. They didn't outright call her crazy, but they certainly thought as much. "You have quite a lot of faith in His Majesty, don't you?"

"It's not about faith, your Highness," she said. "It's about witnessing miracles and learning to live with them as a commonplace occurrence. Please sit tight, your Highness. You'll bear witness to a miracle soon as well."

The clouds rumbled as the sunny day soon became overcast. The group frowned, wondering what was happening. However, as the day got darker and darker with the storm clouds, they were fearing something was happening.

"Your miracle is here, your Highness," Yao Nigh said.

A single bolt of lightning fell from the sky, hitting the building. However. To the group's surprise, the building wasn't destroyed at all. It was as if the lightning never touched the building despite so very clearly striking it.

"What… what's going on?" the others couldn't help but freak out. The Prince on the other hand simply looked at the satisfied smile of the old woman and couldn't help but gulp and turn around toward the door, waiting for it to open.

* * * * *

Somewhere in the distance, a middle-aged man was in a room, making pills. His long blue hair drooped around his blue robes.

He had a flower in his hand, ready to drop into the cauldron. However, when he sensed what he did, his concentration broke and the ingredients inside got lightly burnt.

It was damaged a little, but such little damage could barely reduce the harmony by 2% at most. However, that 2% made it clear that the pill wasn't going to be the best. So, he destroyed the ingredients inside and let the formation clean up his cauldron.

"What is happening?" he thought, focusing on the events outside. "Why is there a pill cloud here? Did they… arrive already?"

The middle-aged man opened the door and left.

* * * *

Alex walked out of the room to the scene he had been expecting to see. Yao Ning was calm and collected, but the rest could barely hide their surprise and slight fear of him.

"Here you go," he said, tossing the pill bottle in the Crown Prince's direction.

The prince caught the pill bottle, not yet aware of its importance. "Did you do it, your Majesty?" he asked, opening the pill bottle. The sweet scent of the pill drifted on around the group, making everyone curious.

"You have the pill in your hand. Why don't you see?" Alex asked.

The prince nodded and took out the pill. Just by the color of the pill, he could tell that he was looking at a Saint Body Regeneration pill. However, something was wrong with it.

Was the pill damaged?

"Did the pill crack?" he asked, looking closely at the lightning-like scar on the side of the pill.

"Your Highness," the headmaster to his side called for him with a pill tester in her hand.

"Oh right," the Prince remembered and placed the pill inside the pill tester and waited for the number to appear on it.

Within a second, the result was ready for everyone to see. "Wh-what?" the Prince couldn't help but look at the number with a blank look on his face.

100%.

As always, a pill with pill veins showed 100% harmony in the pill tester. The prince simply couldn't believe it.

Even the people behind him couldn't believe it. After all, how could someone possibly be able to make a pill that was this good?

"Surely the pill tester is not broken, right?" the Crown Prince asked before pulling out one of his own and testing the pill. Of course, the result was the same.

Only then was the Prince forced to accept the truth. There truly was a pill with perfect harmony on his palm right now.

"I… I remember hearing the news that you were a great alchemist, your Majesty," he said. "I believe I also heard that you were capable of this exact thing, but I doubted the news."

"Now I see that I had no reason to doubt you at all."

"No, it makes sense you would doubt me," Alex said. "After all, I know how hard it is to create a pill that can reach this level. The amount of things that have to go perfectly is almost too much for a normal alchemist."

"Still, you are capable of it, your Majesty," the old woman said. "Thank you for showing us that one can indeed create a pill with 100% harmony."

"You guys are mistaken."

Someone spoke from right next to them.

Alex's eyes widened as he quickly looked to the side and saw the new man that had arrived next to them.

It was a tall man that was nearly a head taller than Alex. His stark blue hair and robe were almost too distracting, and within his face that looked old and young at the same time, one could see the passage of time.

This man had been alive for a long time.

'How?' Alex wondered. 'I couldn't sense his arrival at all.'

"Your Majesty!" the rest of the group bowed down immediately at the presence of the man.

'Your… Majesty?' Alex couldn't believe it. The man in front of him, the man that had arrived just now was the Dragon Emperor.

"You guys are wrong," the Dragon Emperor explained before taking the pill for himself. He pulled open the stopper and poured the pill out before looking at it.

"I was correct," he said, looking at the lightning scar on the pill. "You truly are capable of creating pills with pill veins."

"Ah! King Alex," the Crown prince quickly spoke up. "This is my father, his Royal Majesty, the Dragon Emperor, Long Tiankong."

Alex cupped his hands in greetings. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you, your Majesty," he said.

"You do not have to refer to me as that," the Dragon Emperor said. "We are both monarchs here. You can refer to me as you please."

"Oh, very well then, Dragon Emperor," Alex said. "You can just call me Alex as well. You do not need to add a King to my name."

"King?" the Emperor looked at him. "Not an Emperor?"

"I'm afraid so," Alex said.

"But you rule over an entire continent," the Dragon Emperor said. "Her Majesty decided I would be a King, so I am a King. There is nothing I can do about it."

The Dragon Emperor nodded. "A king huh… that's…"

"Your Majesty… what did you mean by we were wrong?" the Crown Prince asked the question everyone wanted to ask.

"I've taught you before, haven't I?" the Dragon Emperor said. "That when you make a perfect pill, you call the Pill cloud. This is the result of reaching that point. This is not a 100% pill as those do not exist on their own."

"This is a 1-veined pill, which you stopped at even if you could've gone for much longer. With your cultivation base, I'm sure you could've at least reached 5 pill veins. At least, that's what the information I have on Pill veins says."

"You are correct," Alex said. "I simply stopped as I didn't want to scare your subjects. The citizens might have thought that something terrible was happening here."

"I see," the Dragon Emperor said. "Since I have seen you make pills with pill veins, I will cut to the chase, Alex."

Alex's eyes perked up. "Go ahead."

"I would like you to teach me how I too can make pills with pill veins."

Chapter 1336 The Dragon Palace

"That is the main reason why I called you here in the first place. It was so that I too could learn how one can call the pill clouds, how one can make a pill that can reach the realm beyond just the Harmony," the Dragon Emperor said.

Alex gave a small smile while thinking what his next words should be. Should he accept the request? Should he reject it?

As he thought, he realized that any choices he made here would always make him think it was the wrong one.

"You put me in quite a tight spot," he said. "While I do not wish to refuse your request, I'm afraid I also cannot accept it so handily. After all, it is not one thing that allows me to reach this level of Alchemy, but many."

"I cannot give away so many of my secrets now, can I?" he asked.

The Dragon Emperor frowned for a few seconds and sighed. "I suppose I did put you in a difficult spot," he said as he pushed back on his blue hair. "I apologize."

"My apologies I could not give you what you wanted as well," Alex said.

The Dragon Emperor closed the pill bottle and handed it back to Alex. Then, he looked toward Yao Ning and said, "It has been a while since we last met, hasn't it?"

"Nearly 5 millennias, your Majesty," Yao Ning said.

"I hope you and the others in Southern Continent are doing well. Congratulations on your ruler's return," the Dragon Emperor said.

"Thank you, your Majesty," old Yao responded.

From what Yao Ning and the others had told Alex, the Dragon Emperor was aware of the fact that the Phoenix was no longer active in the Southern Continent when he had first arrived to suggest attacking the Western Continent.

What he had mistakenly thought, however, was that like the other rulers, she too had hidden herself after the traumatic battle and was in hiding so she could heal.

The thought never even crossed his head that she could've died, and given how the 10 elders were actively telling everyone that the Phoenixes had gone into seclusion, he had no reason to believe otherwise.

Alex was to keep up this lie as well so that no one would figure out that Scarlet had in fact been reborn.

"I'm sorry I couldn't come to welcome you all. I didn't realize you would be coming so early. Please come with me so we can go to the palace; you guys must be tired," the Dragon Emperor said.

Alex nodded. "Let us do that," he said.

"Fangyu, remain here and see if our guests require anything else. Make sure to provide them with anything they require. You can return to the palace tonight," the Dragon Emperor ordered his son.

"Yes, Father. I will handle everything."

Alex and Yao Ning then walked away with the Dragon Emperor, leaving the small group of people there.

The old woman that was the headmaster of the Royal School of Alchemy still couldn't believe what was happening. The Dragon Emperor, the person that was the biggest authority of alchemy itself in the Eastern Continent was asking for help from someone else.

Someone else was surprisingly the greatest Alchemist they had ever seen.

"Headmaster," the vice headmaster called out to her softly. "Does this not mean that the King of the Southern Continent is also a Level 10 Alchemist?"

"Maybe," the woman said. "If we are only focusing on what he just did, then he is certainly even greater than that. However... we do not know for sure if he is capable of making new pills. That is an entirely different topic on its own, you see."

"That is true," the vice headmaster responded.

The Crown Prince was also in much daze over what had just happened and frowned slightly. "They refused Father's request," he said softly.

"That they did, your Highness," the old man that was his bodyguard said.

"I am sure Father is not happy right now," he said.

"Unfortunately, I don't think His Majesty can do anything in this instance even if he is unhappy," the old man said. "He is against the sovereign of another continent after all."

"Yeah," the Crown Prince said. "Still... he can be quite impulsive."

They then walked away from outside of the alchemy room to deal with whatever new problems may arise.

* * * * *

Very soon, Alex and the others were flying through the skies of the Dragon Capital, looking at the scenery of the city from above it.

Alex could see how the capital was set up finally. He saw massive grounds of open land to his left, like that of the school he was just at.

To his right was a compact city, with buildings that were large and close together, roads that were wide, and skies that were equally as much road as anything else.

There were news boards at every corner of the street, and flying boats flew around without anyone's intervention.

He was heading towards the east, to a place he could already see from the distance. If Alex was not wrong, that was the Imperial Palace.

The palace looked like a bunch of different pagoda-like buildings mixed together to make up a massive building. It was tall with multiple stories, and wide with many buildings attached to it on the outside.

It sat in the middle of a lake, with a bit of water surrounding it on all sides and a single bridge connecting it to the rest of the city.

As they arrived, Alex also noticed something else in the vicinity. Just outside of the palace, there was a massive stone slab with intricate details carved onto it.

'So the Teleportation formation was this close, huh?' he thought.

They landed outside the palace but beyond the bridge. There seemed to be no formation guarding the palace at all, just thousands of soldiers that were all in the Saint realm.

That was a little surprising to Alex.

"Your Majesty," an old man in a blue robe came out and bowed.

"Guqing, these are our guests from the Southern Continent," the Dragon Emperor said. "Prepare the Swan courtyard for our guests."

"Yes, your Majesty," the man said before turning towards the two.

"Come, let's go in," the Dragon Emperor said, taking the two of them with him into the palace.

Alex walked through the main door and was immediately met with a hallway that was more detailed and exquisite than anything he had ever seen. There were patterns on the pillars and ceilings, furniture on either side, and even lanterns that were all amazing.

They all looked extremely archaic, for something that was so well maintained. The Dragon Emperor walked through the main hallway, arriving at a hall in the distance.

"Your Majesty," a woman bowed a little as soon as the Dragon Emperor walked into the hallway.

Alex looked at the woman in her light blue robe and was surprised at how young she was compared to everyone else that he had seen around the Dragon Emperor. She had the face of a commoner, even though her cultivation base was in the Saint realm. She also looked quite shy and had the attitude of someone that was well below the standing of anyone here.

"Yuxie, these two are our guests from the Southern Continent," the Dragon Emperor told the woman.

"Greetings, honored guests, and welcome to the Eastern Continent," she spoke.

"Thank you," Alex said with a slight bow.

"This is Xiang Yuxie," the Dragon Emperor introduced her. "She is the current empress of the Empire."

Alex's eyes widened in surprise as he quickly looked at the woman again. Her attitude did not hold what needed to be there for an Empress. She didn't look confident in herself and instead seemed more like a servant than anything.

"My apologies," Alex quickly said. "I didn't recognize you at all. It's a pleasure to have met you, your Majesty."

"It is fine if you don't recognize her," the Dragon Emperor said. "You don't need to give mind to it. Yuxie, leave us alone."

"Yes, your Majesty," the woman said and left.

The Dragon Emperor sat on a couch next to him and offered Alex and Yao Nng to do the same as well.

"I was surprised how young you looked, but I'm surprised the Empress looks even younger," Alex said. "She looks almost as young as the Crown Prince himself."

"That is because she is in fact younger than Fangyu himself," the Dragon Emperor said.

"I'm sorry?" Alex said. "She's younger than her son?"

"Stepson," the Emperor said. "Yuxie is not my first wife, but rather my second wife. My first wife, the previous Empress died a few decades ago of a disease that I couldn't cure."

"I had never thought of remarrying, but the court officials forced me into marrying someone so the empire could at least have an empress."

"I don't take concubines, so I had to find someone to marry. Since I didn't care who it was, I simply chose one of the first women I saw and married her. She's only been an empress for a couple of decades, so you can see it in her mannerisms."

"I see," Alex said. "My condolences for her Majesty's death. It must have been hard on you."

"I handled it alright," the Emperor said.

"And your son? I hope the Crown Prince handled it well too," Alex said.

"He did," the Emperor said. "But... never mind. Let us move away from this topic. I do not wish to talk about this anymore."

"I'm sorry. I must have made you remember some difficult memories."

Chapter 1337 Trade

The Dragon Emperor started some small talk asking about how Alex got to be the king, about his family, and what he wanted to do.

Alex replied back, answering as openly about everything that was public knowledge already. He asked a few questions as well, none too intruding, and got some answers back.

He could tell that the Dragon Emperor was very much uninterested in this conversation but was keeping up the act so that he could please him. Well, Alex was doing the same as well, so he didn't mind.

The conversation went through different topics, allowing Alex to understand a little more about what was going on through this continent. Although, it seemed that the Dragon Emperor wasn't interested in his own empire either, and rather left it to the others to take care of.

He was only interested in being the emperor and having the power that came with being the emperor. Alex could understand that somewhat. Being alive for that long, one would be uninterested in a lot of things after a while.

"Is it really true that you've been alive for nearly 10 thousand years," Alex asked the man.

"Hmm, has it been?" the Emperor thought. "I don't remember if I'm 10 thousand years old or not, but it has certainly been over 9 thousand years, so you can't be considered wrong."

"I'm curious about something. Why have you not broken through to the Immortal realms?" Alex asked. "Do you have a complication with your cultivation base?"

"No," the man said. "I have no problem. I can break through any time I want to."

"Oh! Then... there must be a reason why you still stay here," Alex said. "Is it for your children?"

"No," the Dragon Emperor said, looking toward the ceiling as if he were looking at the stars themselves. "It's because once I leave, I will be back to being the same weak person I was so many years ago."

Alex's eyes narrowed.

"You're afraid of there being others that are stronger than you?" Alex asked.

"Aren't you?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "Imagine you spent the majority of your life being the strongest person, only to end up as someone weak again. Don't you fear that?"

"No," Alex said, almost out of instinct before giving it a little thought. "Actually, yes. I do fear being weak. But... that doesn't necessarily mean that I will be weak forever."

"It will be a new land with new opportunities, wouldn't it?" Alex asked. "Surely with your capabilities, it wouldn't take you too long to at the very least not be a bottom feeder."

"Maybe, maybe not," the Emperor said. "The reason I became so strong so quickly was because I had opportunities. Born as the first prince of an empire helps you a lot, you know."

"All of which I won't have when I leave. When I leave, I will be all alone as well. Weak and alone, and there will hardly be a way to improve from that point," he said.

Alex didn't know what to say. Should he even say anything? Was there even a point in trying to convince this man?

"Of course," the Emperor continued. "If I had other ways of my own to improve myself once I went up there, or treasures that would aid me, I could certainly leave, can't I?"

"What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"Pill veins," the Emperor said. "If I was capable of making pill veins, I could be considered an important person. I could make my way into big sects, and be considered one of their talents. That way, I wouldn't have to search for opportunities myself. The others would provide it for me."

Yao Ning stared blindly from the side while Alex fell into a contemplation over the emperor's words.

"Certainly," he said. "That could be possible. Even so, I cannot simply hand over my secrets, Dragon Emperor. I hope you know that much at least."

The Dragon Emperor stared at Alex for a good while before shaking his head. "While I hoped for it, I never expected you to hand over your things on your own," he said. "I will make a proper trade with you."

"Trade what exactly, Emperor?" Alex asked. "As I mentioned before, I have multiple techniques and talents that help me with this. I'm not even sure I can even guarantee that you can form the pill clouds."

"You don't have to worry about much. Just give me exactly what I need. Give me as many things as there are, and I'll trade you for each of them for the value that each of them is worth," the Dragon emperor said.

Alex frowned a bit and looked toward Yao Ning who seemed troubled more than him.

"I... cannot make this decision right now. Would you mind if I discuss it with my elder?" he asked.

"No, no, please go on ahead. After all, your alchemy skills can be considered one of your continent's top secrets. I do not wish to have you make the decision without any thought," the Dragon Emperor said.

Alex nodded. "I'll do that," he said and stood up to leave.

"Guqing, is the Swan courtyard ready?" the Dragon Emperor called for the old man that Alex had met outside.

"Yes, your majesty," the old man walked in from outside.

"Good," he said and turned toward Alex. "You have had a long journey, so please rest."

"Thank you," Alex said.

"But..." the Dragon Emperor continued. "Please do come up with an answer by the end of the show match that our alchemists will be having in 3 days."

Alex paused for a second. A deadline? He wanted to refuse just one principal to stick it up to someone who was giving him a deadline for something he should be happy to even get.

However, this wasn't the sort of man he could act that way against.

"I will try my best to come to a conclusion by that time," he said and walked away.

He walked away from the room while Yao Ning remained for a second longer, bowing toward the Dragon Emperor before she left as well.

The old man with a head full of white hair that went by the name of Guqing showed them through the palace.

Alex was a bit surprised that given how large the palace was, and given how much upkeep it needed, he hadn't seen anyone at all.

"Senior Guqing," Alex called out to him as they walked.

The old man seemed to freak out when he heard that. "Your majesty! Please do not call this humble servant a 'senior'. I do not deserve that level of respect from a monarch."

"Oh..." Alex was taken aback at his reaction. "It's alright. You are a senior in age. Can you tell me why I haven't seen any servants in this palace? There should be many here, shouldn't there?"

"The servants are here, your Majesty. They simply leave when they are made aware of our presence," the old man said. "They will return back as soon as we are gone from these corridors."

"I see." Alex nodded to himself.

They walked past a small open ground and arrived at a small courtyard that had big words written at the front gate.

Swan Courtyard.

Chapter 1338 Swan Courtyard

Two beautiful sculptures of a swan were placed on either side of the gate, making an archway with their long necks that acted as the gate into the Swan courtyard.

The walls surrounding the courtyard were entirely white, like the feathers of a swan and the building beyond the walls was the same design of buildings as he had seen everywhere. Slanted roofs with arched tips, all in the color of black and red.

All in all, the building looked exquisite.

Alex and Yao Ning walked into the courtyard with a few servants already waiting for them, the main of which seemed to be a young woman seemingly in her mid-20s wearing a higher grade of blue robe than the other female servants around her.

"This is one of our head servants, Huang Bingyue. You may request of her anything you need in the palace, your Majesty," Guqing said.

"I will," Alex said.

Guqing nodded. "I'll leave you two guests then. Bingyue, take care of their needs," the old man said.

"As you say, your Imperial Highness," the woman bowed as the old man left.

Alex looked back at the man and then turned around toward the woman that stood in front of him, still bowing.

"Highness?" he asked. "He's part of the royal family too?"

"Lord Long Guqing has the royal blood in him, but is not part of the direct royal line," the woman explained.

"Ah, I see," Alex said. "Show us to our quarters."

"As you wish, your Majesty," the woman said. She walked in, Alex and Yao Ning following her closely.

The courtyard was in a square shape, with the buildings around the outside and an open yard on the inside. There was a tree growing in the middle with no leaves on it, next to a small pond surrounded by decently sized rocks.

The house itself was mostly made out of wood from what Alex could tell, with even the floor beneath them being wood. However, given how it made absolutely no sound while they walked, Alex could tell that it was not normal wood at all.

If he got to examine it, he could probably even find its name right now.

There was some swan imagery, whether it be carved onto the pillars, or drawn onto the wall, which made Alex quite curious why they were going so heavy on the swan stuff.

"Is there a reason why this courtyard is called the Swan Courtyard?" he asked. "It seems quite important from what I can see."

"The Dragon Palace has a total of 7 major courtyards, all named and designed after 7 different beasts that were said to have come from the heavens along with the first Azure Dragon himself as his subordinates," the woman explained.

"7 beasts, huh?" Alex thought. That was a low number in his mind, but given that the Vermillion Birds and Black Turtles didn't even come with any, that was at least something.

"Can you name the 7 beasts?" he asked.

"Yes, of course," the woman said. "As you know, there was a Swan. There was also an Elephant, a Lizard, an Eagle, a Deer, a Lion, and an Ox. There were many other beasts that came with them, but these 7 were the strong ones and had left an impact on the first Dragon Emperor who built this palace."

Alex paused for a second when he heard the list of beasts. "Did these beasts live in the Beast Paradise by any chance?" he asked.

"I do not have knowledge of whether they did or not, but I am certain their descendants did," the woman said. "One of the reasons why the Beast Paradise was made in the first place was so that the Azure Dragon's subordinates' descendants could have an easy life away from the humans."

Alex nodded when he heard that. He didn't say anything else, but the woman continued explaining a few things that she thought needed explanations.

She explained how the Swan courtyard was the best of the 7 courtyards despite being one of the 7 subordinates. She also explained how the only person to ever live here was one of the previous kings that ruled part of the Eastern Continent while under the Dragon Empire.

A King of the Lin Kingdom that was now destroyed and turned into the Ebony Kingdom.

The woman finally took Alex to her room, wherein he let her return to her duties and told her to leave them alone for some time.

After the woman left, Alex did a thorough search of the room to see if they were spying on him before finally speaking what he was thinking.

"So the Lion that Pearl's grandmother was married to must have been a descendant of the Lion that came with the Azure Dragon," he said. "No wonder they were from a big family and could afford to marry someone like her."

"Your Majesty, you are concerned about the wrong thing here, aren't you?" Yao Ning asked with a slightly frowning face. "We have a bigger problem to deal with."

Alex sighed. "We do, don't we?" he said. "What do you suggest, elder Yao? Should we do as he says and hand him what I have?"

"No, we cannot, your Majesty," the woman said immediately. There was no doubt in her mind that there was no way they could do that.

However, Alex didn't trust her words right now. She was too heavily biased to give any sound suggestions. She needed to think about this a little, and so did he.

"The main problem we have right now is the consequence that would come if we don't do what he says," Alex said. "I do not know if the Emperor knows or not about whether Scarlet and the others cannot come here."

"If he does, he would have no worry attacking us," Alex said.

"But we can't just hand it away," the old woman said.

"That we cannot," Alex said. "But he did say a trade, so maybe I can get something in return for giving him what he wants. Ugh, I still don't want to give him anything though."

Alex was certain that this man had a hand in killing Pearl's mother. Even if he wasn't, and the sword just happened to belong to someone from this massive empire, the man was still a threat.

This was the man that had attacked the Western Continent while they were down after all.

"Then, what do you suggest, your Majesty?" Yao Ning asked.

"Well... I don't know. I can't decide anything right now," he sighed. "Well, I got us 3 days to think about this, so let's take our time. There is no hurry."

Yao Ning had no response to that. She knew how dangerous the Dragon Emperor was and thus found it hard to defy him as well.

"Let us rest for now then, your Majesty," she said. "We can discuss this tomorrow or even the day after that once little sister Liang is back from the Royal School of Alchemy."

Alex nodded. "You should rest too, elder Yao. We have only just arrived on the Eastern Continent with 20 years to spend here. We have a long stay here ahead of us."

Chapter 1339 Planning

Alex sat in his room, with Whisker and Pearl by his side.

Pearl had black fur on him at the moment, and his body was leaner, looking more like a black cat than anything.

If anyone did see him, Alex made sure that they mistake him for something else than a White Cat or a White Tiger.

"What can you give him if you really have to?" Pearl asked. He looked at Alex curiously now that he had explained the situation to the two beasts.

"Let's see," Alex thought for a bit. "There are 5 things important when it comes to improving your pills. Can you tell me what those are, Whisker?"

Whisker nodded. "Ingredients, recipe, temperature and control, cauldron, and finally the pill-forming technique itself," he said out loud.

Now that Whisker was a Saint beast himself, he could easily speak out loud as any other Saint beast would once they reached the same realm.

"Correct," Alex said. "Those are the 5 things we need. Of that, I cannot help the Emperor with controlling the ingredients or the flames, not that he would need any with all the formations and scripts helping him. He might himself even have a Dao of Heat."

"Given the level of pill he normally makes, I don't think controlling energy is much of a problem either. Not to mention that there's no way his cauldron is any worse than mine. Which means I should be able to aid him on the other 3 parts," Alex said.

"First is ingredients. I cannot give him good ingredients, but I can tell him about the World Defying Mushrooms," Alex said. "That should immediately help improve the energy level of the average pills he makes."

"Do we really have to give him information about the World Defying mushrooms?" Pearl asked. "Given how good his pills already are, shouldn't he have other methods of acquiring perfect ingredients?"

"You're not wrong, but this is important," Alex said. "The more levels we add to why my alchemy is so good, the longer we can delay giving him everything. Even if I agree to give him that information, I don't have to give it to him immediately and can delay for as long as I like."

Pearl nodded when he heard the answer. This method was the one that would help them the most, even if this wasn't what they wanted to do.

"For the second part, the recipe, we might be able to give him some," Alex said. "But I'm not sure how much we can give him. Actually, I'm not sure how much he even needs."

"Even if he needs nothing, we can still try to sell some to him. He would definitely like a thing or two for sure. Worst comes to worst, I'll tell him about Composition and Structure."

"Brother, you can't do that. That will mean you'll give away one of the most important knowledge you have of Alchemy," Whisker said.

"I have a suspicion that he already knows that," Alex said. "Even if he doesn't, it won't matter much if he already has the recipes."

"Then... there is the final pill-making task itself," Alex said. "I can give him the Profound Revolution of Myriad Combination technique first, before giving him the single pill version of the Pill-splitting technique. If I can delay it long enough, I can even split the technique into two and give him two versions."

"That's..." Pearl sighed. He couldn't come up with a better idea himself, so he didn't say anything about what Alex had come up with.

If that was what was needed for them to survive in this foreign continent, then so be it.

"When do we find out about Mother then?" Pearl asked.

"It will take some time," Alex said. "I can't just pull out the sword and ask, you know."

Pearl nodded.

Alex smiled and rubbed his back. "Don't worry, we'll find your mother's killer for sure," he said. "They shouldn't be far away."

Pearl nodded.

Someone knocked on the door, and immediately both Pearl and Whisker disappeared into Alex's body. Alex looked outside, peering through the wall to see Yao Ning bowing outside.

"What is it, elder Yao?" he asked.

"His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince is here to see you. Will you be accepting him?" the old woman asked.

"Oh, Prince Fangyu?" Alex asked. "Yeah, I'll meet him."

The door opened and the old woman walked in while waiting for the prince to come as well. The prince came in a minute later with a wide smile on his face.

"Your majesty," the prince said as he walked in. "I hope you're finding the Swan Courtyard to your liking."

"It's quite good, I must say," Alex said with a smile. "And your family's hospitality had been unmatched."

"Haha, I love to hear that," the prince said. "I came to notify to you that your alchemists have settled in quite nicely into the school."

"Ah, I see. Thank you," Alex said.

"It's a pleasure to be of assistance, your Majesty," the prince said. "I had asked Elder Shufen to come with me as well, but she said that she had to stay there for today."

Alex nodded. "I gave her that order, so she had chosen to fulfill it," he said.

"Then she should be coming tomorrow," the prince said. "Speaking of tomorrow, your Alchemists should be getting their nameplates tomorrow, but they won't be enrolled into the school right away."

"Oh?" Alex was a little surprised. "Why is that, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Welling, enrolling into the school mostly needs one to pass through the level 1 test, which I'm sure your alchemists would have passed without question. However, they would then have to walk around with Level 1 badges, unless they decided to take a test of the higher levels."

Alex was confused. "What's wrong with that?" he asked.

"Nothing," the Crown Prince said quickly. "Only we wanted to keep their talent a secret until the day of the show match where they will reveal their knowledge and talent."

"I see," Alex said. "That makes sense. The match is the day after tomorrow, isn't it?"

"Yes," the Prince said.

'The last day until when I'm supposed to give my answer,' he thought, remembering the Dragon Emperor's words.

"Thank you for notifying me of these things," Alex said.

"It was no problem, your Majesty," the prince said. "By the way, have the people provided you with refreshments or some snacks?"

"Snacks? No, it's not needed," Alex said.

"What?" the crown prince seemed surprised. "You must try the delicacies our chefs make, your majesty. They make some of the best food in the entire world."

"Oh..." Alex got a little curious now.

"If that is the case then... sure. Why not?" Alex said. "Have your head chef make the best snack for me. Let's try what it's all about."

"Oh, we don't have a head chef, but I'll ask the others to make the food for you. They are equally as talented," the prince said.

"Did your head chef quit?" Alex asked.

"Haha, no," the prince said. "He's just away, roaming around the continent right now."

"Oh, he must be trying to come up with new recipes then," Alex said.

"No," the prince said. "He is actually out there looking after my brother, the second prince."`

Chapter 1340 The Next Day

"The second prince?" Alex asked. "He's not around?"

"No," the Crown Prince said. "He's not the Crown Prince so he doesn't have any responsibility. He's a free spirit and is currently traveling around the continent along with our head chef."

"I see," Alex said. "Why the head chef though? Wouldn't it be better to have a guard or some other strong people go with him?"

"Oh, the head chef is strong," the prince said. "He is one of the strongest people we have, so we let him go along with my brother."

"A chef, huh?" Alex asked, quite surprised. "How many brothers do you have, by the way?"

"2," the Crown Prince said. "My 2nd brother, and my half-brother that was born only a few years ago to the Empress."

"Ah, I see," Alex said.

The Crown Prince nodded. "So, should I tell the chefs to bring you some snacks?" he asked.

"Oh yes," Alex said. "Please do."

The Crown Prince nodded. "I will let them know. I will be leaving now, your Majesty. Rest well."

The prince bowed and left.

Sometime later, the head servant lady arrived with the snacks which Alex tried out. He was pleasantly surprised by the food, not just because it tasted good, but because it helped a cultivator just that much.

The food energized them, freshened their mind, and sharpened their focus. It was just the food you wanted when the day was getting long and tedious to get you back on track.

Once he ate his food, Alex started cultivating. He cultivated for the entire night, focusing on many different parts as he was so used to now.

It wasn't just Qi he cultivated, but also body and mind as well.

His white mask that improved his spiritual sense was now usually at level 6, which placed quite the burden on anyone wearing it. While on his face, the mask hurt him to the point that he could barely focus on cultivating the other things as well.

He could have placed it on Level 7 as well, but after learning the Dao of Technique, Alex had figured out something that he should have figured out a long time ago.

Because his Five Yang Divine Path technique used Yang Qi to cultivate, and his Undying Physique used Yin Qi to cultivate, as long as he was focused enough, he could actually cultivate both of those at the same time.

However, it took incredible focus on his end to move such vastly different Qi, through such vastly different meridian routes that were required to cultivate. Which was why he had to take the mask down a notch during cultivation.

He was starting to get certain that he would be able to use the 9th level of the mask without even entering the Saint Transformation realm, which was amazing.

His Demon Eyes were coming along fine, but Alex had given up hope on it ever upgrading anytime soon. The thing that he had come to understand while helping his family and friends with the technique was that each level of the technique cost more and more time.

The first level cost him about 2 years to fully learn, and that was without even counting the time it took for his broken eyes to heal after he was done with the medicine.

The second level took him another 12 years or so after that. At that rate, Alex wouldn't be surprised if the third level took him more than a hundred years to learn with dedicated cultivation towards it.

The same went for the Undying physique as well.

Whisker's cultivation increased thanks to Alex as it was tied to his Undying physique technique, while Pearl cultivated on his own.

Alex was still dejected about the fact that he couldn't gain the benefits of a strong physical body now that Pearl had completely absorbed the White Tiger's blood.

Unless Alex found another few drops of White Tiger, which was equally as potent as the one he got before, if not more, then he doubted he could get the benefits he used to before.

After a night of intense cultivation sessions, Alex left his room with neither Pearl nor Whisker outside.

It was obvious why Pearl wouldn't have to be outside, but after giving some thought to the matter, he decided to not keep Whisker out as well. After all, a seeking mouse with a cultivation base would be harder to explain than a black cat.

Yao Ning met up with him outside and asked, "What plans do you have for today, your Majesty?"

"Tomorrow is the show match, so let's just go meet up with the Alchemists and give them some encouragement," Alex said. "We need to get elder Shufen too."

"Only that?" the elder asked. "I thought you would want to go roam the city>"

"I would," Alex said with a dry chuckle. "But it doesn't feel right to enjoy myself with the problem we have."

"Right, we still need to figure out what to do there," Elder Yao said.

Alex nodded. "Well, don't worry too much. We'll come up with something," he said. He hadn't told her that he had already decided to give in to the Dragon Emperor's demands, even if it was in batches.

He still wanted the elders to come up with a better solution that lets them still stay in the Eastern Continent so that they could search for his cousin and Pearl's mother's killers.

Alex looked at the talisman that he was provided by someone in the palace that contained the map of the Dragon Capital. Only now did Alex see just how the Drgaon Capital was set up.

The Dragon capital was separated into 3 areas.

The first was the Royal area, the second was the commercial area, and finally the residential area.

The capital itself was in a square shape, and the northeastern corner was the Royal area where the Palace, the Royal Schools, and various other royal facilities were located.

Then the majority of the middle portion, going from Northwest to Southeast was the commercial area. It was full of shopping districts and entertainment zones and needed a large area.

It was also where all the hotels were placed, and many people chose to live in that place. Still, the rest of the people lived in the Southwest region of the capital which was the residential area.

Alex had only seen the Royal and Commercial area until now, so he thought of visiting the Residential area to see if he could find his cousin there by any chance.

It was already going to be harder than finding a needle in a haystack, but given how popular his image was around the continent thanks to the Newsboard, there was a chance that Hannah herself would come and find him.

He was hoping for that too.

Alex arrived at the Royal School of Alchemy and was taken to his Alchemists by the headmaster herself. After meeting with the alchemists, he gave them some words of encouragement as well as a very serious order.

They were not to use the Pill-splitting Qi in the match tomorrow.

The alchemists nodded seriously, but the truth was, they couldn't use it even if they wanted to. Alex still had no idea just how difficult it was for a regular person to learn the Pill-splitting Qi after all.

Chapter 1341 Hanjue

Alex stayed with the alchemists, clearing some of their confusion while telling them what to do tomorrow.

After talking with them, he had a small conversation with Hao Ya and gave her the map of the capital to copy so that she could do her thing.

The conversation lasted for a while before Alex decided to head back. He left the school with Elder Yao and Shufen, going back toward the Dragon Palace.

As he did, he looked at the schools that he was passing by, the Royal School of Music and the Royal School of Puppetry. According to the map, these were the two schools between the palace and the Royal School of Alchemy.

Next to the school of Alchemy on the northern edge of the Dragon Capital were the other two schools, the Royal School of Talisman and the Royal School of Formation.

On the other side of the city in the east were the rest of the 5 schools. Starting from the one next to the palace were the Royal School of Cooking, Royal School of Painting, Royal School of Artifacts, Royal School of Beast Taming, and Royal School of Poison.

"Huh? They have cooking as a school too," Liang Shufen commented. "And it's right by the palace too. Do you think they make these people make food for them?"

"I don't know," Alex said. "But the chefs in the palace are most certainly from this place."

Alex wasn't surprised with most of the school, even though some had certainly been unexpected. The only ones that he was surprised had a Royal School for were Painting and Poison.

Painting didn't make sense to him a whole lot just because... what was the point? It was just colors on a canvas to him. That wasn't to say he didn't see the point of paintings, just that he didn't see the point of paintings as a subject that needed to be taught in a Royal school since it did nothing to help cultivators.

Poison also didn't make a whole lot of sense to him since wouldn't it be bad if everyone in the continent had access to knowledge about poisons? What would happen if a decently large fight were to break out? Wouldn't most people resort to poison?

Maybe Alex wasn't seeing the entire picture here.

"Still, I'm surprised there aren't many direct combat-based schools at all," Yao Ning said. "A school for Swords, Spears, Axes, Bows and Arrows, and other such weapons would help the continent a lot, wouldn't it?"

"Hmm," Alex thought. "Maybe, but I think it was more so that those schools would be redundant in a way. After all, sects and the army exists. They can learn to fight there."

"You're right, your Majesty," Liang Shufen said. "Maybe there was a backlash too from the various sects. If they started a combat school, they would lose all their disciples to it after all."

Alex shrugged, half agreeing to it, and half not caring why it was what it was.

"Let's just get tomorrow over with, and then we can go around sightseeing the various schools," he said and the two elders nodded.

After they arrived at the palace, the two Elders were led to the Swan Courtyard while Alex was taken somewhere else where the Dragon Emperor had been waiting for him.

He walked through the hallway, led by the old man Guqing. Right as he was about to arrive, a young man walked out of the room and stopped when he saw Alex.

He was a head smaller than Alex with youthful features that made him look quite naive and innocent. His clear eyes blinked twice while looking at the two.

He had almost no facial hair, and his eyes seemed a soft blue. His long black hair covered the front of his forehead and flowed along the side and back to his shoulders.

He looked at Alex for quite a while before looking at the old man Guqing.

"Your Royal Highness, this is King Alex of the Southern Continent," the old man introduced them quickly. "You should greet him."

"Oh," the prince straightened up and bowed toward Alex. "Greetings, your Majesty, King Alex. I am the third prince of the Empire, Long Hanjue."

"Greetings." Alex smiled at the young man. "How old are you, Prince Hanjue?"

"I'm 17, your Majesty," the young man said.

"Ah, 17 and entering the True realm. You are quite talented, young prince," Alex said. "I'm sure you'll grow up to become strong very soon."

The prince gave a small embarrassed smile and bowed before walking away.

Alex watched the young prince leave and turned around to enter the room with the emperor.

He entered and greeted the emperor before sitting opposite him. "Why did you call me? Did you want to have a talk?" he asked.

"I wanted to know if you've made your decision," the Dragon Emperor said.

"I've yet to decide," he said. "I told you, it's not a decision I can make lightly."

"But you have—"

"I know, I have until tomorrow," Alex cut him off. "I can guarantee you, I'll come to a decision by the time tomorrow's event comes to an end."

The emperor nodded. "I will thank you in advance for your decision," he said.

Alex's eyes narrowed. The emperor had already thought that Alex was going to hand over the information to him without him having to do anything.

"If that is all you called me here for, I would like to leave," Alex said and got up.

"I hear you're looking for a queen," the Emperor suddenly spoke.

Alex stopped in his tracks and turned around. "That is what I'm doing," he said as he turned around to look at the emperor. "Why? Did the prince already gather up a list?"

"May I ask why you want it especially to be players?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

"No reason," Alex said. "They just happen to be young like me. I wouldn't mind meeting up with girls that aren't players that fit the criteria."

"Why do you want a strong queen?" he asked. "Isn't it better to have a weaker queen?"

"How is it better to have a weaker queen?" Alex asked, curious.

"A strong queen will constantly be in a discourse with you, try to tell you what to do, refuse your orders when she feels like it," the emperor said. "Even when you tell her to do something that is for her benefit, you can't control her actions, and in the end..."

The emperor stopped talking as Alex heard a single sniffle.

The Dragon Emperor quickly wiped away whatever tears were forming in his eyes and took a deep breath. "My apologies. I shouldn't have said what I said. Please excuse me."

The emperor stood up and walked away in the other direction, disappearing into the hallway.

Alex stood there, stunned for a while as he realized that he had just seen the Dragon Emperor get emotional. Was that fake by any chance? To win him over maybe?

But it didn't feel fake. It felt real.

From what Alex could tell, the Dragon Emperor loved his first wife quite a lot and her death had affected him on a deeper level than Alex could have expected.

'Losing someone close to you, while time can heal the wounds, it can't remove the pain, can it?'

Chapter 1342 Kings And Queens

﻿

Alex and the Dragon Emperor left the palace in a carriage, while the rest of their people followed them in a different carriage.

The roads were open and empty as if cleared for this very occasion. There were lanterns flying in the sky even in day time and people from far and wide were cheering for them as they watched them go toward the Royal School.

Today was the day of the show match, so the most important figures of the capital were visiting there. The rest of them that weren't allowed in were going to watch what happened through the Newsboards throughout the continent.

The carriage stopped outside the school as the two monarchs got off at the same time. Barely any people were allowed to be around the two except for their personal guards and subjects.

Elder Yao and Elder Liang stayed a step behind Alex while Guqing as well as another woman stayed behind the Emperor.

They walked into the school and were greeted by the many people that were present in the open field. The headmaster and vice headmaster greeted both of them and showed them the way to a stage that was prepared for this particular event.

There were two main seats, with many other seats beside them. Alex and the Emperor sat beside each other while the other four stayed behind them in the 2nd row of chairs.

There were four different rows of chairs, each with about 10 different chairs in a row. Now that 6 of them were filled, the others were time to get filled as well.

The Crown Prince arrived with a woman in tow. The woman wore a beautiful green dress, with black hair filled with gold and jade. Jade earrings hung from her ears while a simple green veil that did nothing to hide her face lay over her face.

The Crown Prince greeted first and then the woman. The Crown Prince then proceeded to introduce the woman to Alex.

"Your Majesty, this is my soon-to-be wife, Zhan Luoyang," the Crown Prince said. The girl bowed as he said it.

Alex saw a golden badge on her shoulder now that she had come forward. It had a single number written on it.

9.

"Oh, a Level 9 Alchemist. It's a pleasure to meet you, lady Luoyang," Alex spoke.

"Haha, she's one of the other 2 level 9 alchemists in the school," the Crown Prince said with a proud look on his face.

"I must congratulate the both of you then," Alex said. "Please, sit."

The Crown prince sat on the other side of the Dragon Emperor while his fiancee sat beside him.

The next person to walk in was a group from the Azure Kingdom which was where the Dragon Capital was located. The king of the Azure Kingdom was a young man with a thin face and silky black hair.

He greeted himself with the name Long Weiyuan. Alex understood that this man was from a branch of the main royal family, most likely a cousin to the princes.

He went and sat on one of the two empty seats on the other side of the emperor.

The next person to introduce himself was a gigantic man that went by the name of Jin Xiaojian. He was the King of the Emerald Kingdom that lay to the east of the Azure Kingdom.

From the Silver Kingdom of the West hailed a queen with peach-colored hair. She introduced herself as Mao Yingtai and sat next to Jin Xiaojian, who was already sitting next to Alex.

From the Gold Kingdom that lay to the north of the Azure Kingdom came a man with a lean body and thin mustache. There was an air of elegance around him as he introduced himself.

"I am Tan Qiu of the Gold Kingdom, your Majesty," he said and bowed toward Alex before walking over to one of the 2 empty seats that were beside Alex.

A white-haired woman in a dazzling white robe landed gracefully on top of the stage. Her robe fluttered in the wind while her hair full of jewelry stayed where it was. She looked young enough to be in her 20s, while also looking old enough to be a grandmother.

Next to her arrived a man in a black robe. His muscular body was the first thing everyone noticed about him as he was nearly three times as wide as the woman he had arrived with.

"It is a pleasure to finally meet you after seeing your image for the last 2 days, your Majesty," the woman spoke. "I am Song Meifen, Queen of the Ivory Kingdom."

"I am Wan Deming, King of the Ebony Kingdom," the man did a short greeting.

"Greetings. It is a pleasure to meet you both," Alex said and bowed toward the two Kings. The kings went on to seat on either side of the row as those were the only two seats empty now.

People continued coming one by one, but they left as soon as they introduced themselves to Alex.

Many sects and family names were thrown at Alex which he didn't bother remembering at the moment.

Heavens Cleaver Sect, Huang family of the Silver Kingdom, Beast Supremacy Sect, Reallms Beyond Sect, the Northern Jin family, Cloud Iron Sect, Spears Peak Sect, Immortal Saint Pavillion, Tian family of the Gold kingdom, Ice Mist Palace, and many more.New n0vel chapters are published on

Those names were thrown at Alex one after another as he failed to understand the importance of the people as much as he did the sect itself. The names for him at the moment were just names, so unless he understood what was important about them, it would be hard for him to feel surprised by any of the names.

There were also commanders of the various legions of the army, as well as heads of the other schools that were present for the event.

As this was the first inter-continental for almost everyone in the Eastern Continent, it was treated as quite an important event. As such, all the important figures that could come had come.

More figures were staying amongst the crowd as only so many could sit on the stage.

Alex couldn't help but be surprised by a single fact that he should have gotten used to by now.

He was the weakest person that was there.

Each of the school headmasters, legion commanders, family heads, and sect leaders was all well into the Saint Transformation realm. Even the Crown Prince's Fiancee was in the 1st Saint Transformation realm.

'That's quite the strength,' he thought. There weren't as many people back in the Southern Continent that had this sort of strength.

The Dragon Emperor looked around and spoke, "Manyin, everyone that needs to come has come. Call in the participants. It's time to start the event."

"Yes, Your Majesty," the Headmaster said as she stood up and walked to the front of the platform, looking toward the open stage in front of her where the various staff of the school were ready to accept the participants.

"Bring them in!" she said.

The audience that was on either side of the stage looked towards the side where two separate doors opened, and one by one people started streaming out of it.

Chapter 1343 First Test

20 men and women walked in from the left, and 20 others walked in from the right.

The ones on the left wore robes of vermillion and purple, defining colors of the Southern Continent. The ones on the right wore robes of green and azure, defining colors of the Eastern Continent.

They arrived on the stage and stood on either side.

The stage was prepared with everything an alchemist would need and was divided into two halves in which the two groups of alchemists would perform alchemy and other tests in the competition.

The headmaster welcomed everyone and started explaining what was going on.

The alchemy competition was meant to show off the alchemy knowledge of each side, and there was no better way to do so than through an alchemy match.

However, it also wasn't possible to just have 20 of the best alchemists to fight against the ones that were brought, so the school had come up with a different system of choosing opponents for the ones that had come from the Southern Continent.

The opponents were chosen from the Alchemists in the School that was both close in age and cultivation base to each of the alchemists from the Southern Continent.

As such, the opponents that were chosen for them were all alchemists that could be considered their peers.

Alex's eyes narrowed as he looked at the very first person in the group of the Eastern continent's alchemists. A young man with blond hair stood with a proud face.

Alex looked for his badge, but it wasn't there at all. It was hidden for the sake of the competition.

He looked on the opposite side of the man and saw Jai Heiyun. He frowned slightly as the thought that this man had been chosen especially to match up against her.

Which meant that he was in the Saint Core realm, and was very young by comparison. He could be no older than 80 years at most. In the Eastern Continent, that was akin to being a teenager.

The headmaster began explaining the rules of the competition. Each person was handed a talisman with information about the requirements to level up through the various Alchemist levels in the school.

The alchemists had to go through each of the various different tests for the levels, including ingredient recognition, recipe learning, making pills, and pill creation.

Depending on their results in each of the tasks, they would all be handed ranks in today's competition.

The first of the competition was ingredient recognition. The 40 alchemists were made to come to the middle of the stage where a simple formation had been prepared.

20 alchemists stood on each side, opposite to their opponent as they were each handed a metal talisman.

Alex watched the stage as the explanation for what they were supposed to do was given to them.

"What do you think?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "Will your alchemists manage to a lot of ingredients?"

"Well, I can't say for sure," Alex said. "They should know a lot, but I do not know if a lot is enough or not at the moment.

The Dragon Emperor chuckled slightly. "How about we make a bet to see whose alchemists will score the most amongst?" he asked.

Alex chuckled lightly as well. "While I have great pride in my men, I cannot trust that they will win in all honestly. Be as good as they may, they have been learning properly only for the past decade. While your men, who know how long they've been learning for."

"Tsk, you should bet even if it's just for the fun of it," the Dragon Emperor said.

"Then I would be betting on a losing battle," Alex said. "Besides, even if we did bet, what would the stakes be? I'm half expecting you to just ask me for the things you are already asking for."

The Dragon Emperor didn't say anything in response to that allegation. "What about your choice? You said you'll give me one today," he asked.

"I mentioned I would give it to you by the end of the competition, didn't I?" Alex asked. "The event is only starting. Let's just wait for it all."

The Dragon Emperor shook his head and looked at the large screen that had appeared in the sky above them. On the screen were two lists of 20 names, one shaded in red, another in blue.

The 40 alchemist names had the number 0 next to them.

"Is that what's going to keep track of the scores?" Alex asked.

"Each correct guess into the medallion should give them a single point," the Dragon Emperor said.

"And the headmaster just mentioned that there are a total of 20 thousand ingredients," Alex said. "Depending on how long they will have to guess the ingredients, we might be here all day long. I'm afraid you probably won't get your answer today, Dragon Emperor."

The Dragon Emperor gave a small smirk. "As long as I get a satisfactory one at the end of the competition, I'm alright," he said.

The headmaster finished explaining the rest of the rules. Once everything was ready, she asked the contestants to prepare.

"Are you worried, your Majesty?" the king of the Emerald Kingdom asked.

"No," Alex said. "Even if my people lose, I'm certain they will put up a good fight."

The other kings gave words of encouragement as well after hearing what he said. However, from their tone, Alex could tell that not a single one of them believed that the Alchemists from the Southern Continent had any chance to win.

A small smile formed on Alex's face. 'Just you watch,' he thought.

The competition began and an ingredient teleported in front of Jai Heiyun who was the first of the 40 alchemists to receive her ingredient.

She had 2 seconds to completely look through the ingredient and try to recognize it. She wasted no time looking at the small blue flower bud that had only halfway bloomed.

'Blue Silk flower,' she recognized it in no time at all. When 2 seconds passed, the ingredient disappeared from in front of her, teleporting to the young man that was about 3 meters away from her.

She now had 1 second to write the name of the ingredient. She quickly wrote down the flower's name on the metal object in her hand.

Immediately a point was added to her name on the board. The moment she was done naming, the next ingredient arrived.

It was a vial of black powder with specks of white light shining from it once in a while.

'Starcoal Pollen,' she recognized it as well and wrote the name down as she waited for the next ingredient to come in.

When it did, she named it as well.

It wasn't just her. As the ingredients started passing to the next person in line, and then to the next one after them, the number on the scoreboard in the sky was increasing one by one with no one missing them at all.

Alex looked at the board, happy that the first few ingredients naming were going well. However, it was just for a while. The first half of the ingredients were probably easily recognizable ones.

The problem in the competition would most definitely come in the second half where naming the ingredients was going to become much, much more difficult.

Chapter 1344 Many Invitations

Half a day passed by with nothing interesting happening in the competition down below. Each person was accurately naming the ingredients that came their way, with only a few of the weaker alchemists missing out on the names of ingredients they had yet to interact with.

The people on the stage took this time to talk to each other, catch up or ask questions that they were curious about.

"If your Majesty is an alchemist as I've heard, surely you would want to come visit the Thousand Blossom Valley in our kingdom, right?" the king of the Emerald Kingdom asked. "It's one of the most remarkable places in the entire continent; definitely one of the two most highly sought-after places alongside the Endless Shadow Abyss."

"Oh," Alex responded. "Then I must visit that place."

"We do have the Cavern of Eternal Frost where one can improve their Yin arts. Even if your Majesty does not have any Yin arts, surely your subordinates do. You must come to visit us when the time is right," the white-robed Queen of the Ivory Kingdom spoke.

"Yin, huh? I'll have to think about it," Alex said. "I will most definitely like to see what sort of place it is though."

"Hehe, you should, your Majesty," the Queen said before turning to the peach-robed Queen of the Silver King. "Sister Yingtai, do you not wish to call His Majesty to your home domain?"

"I do wish to request his majesty visit us as well, but our kingdom boasts nothing worth visiting for at the moment at all. The Transcendent Martial Ground require another decade or so before they can open up, and they happen to be our only attraction," Mao Yingtai, the Queen of the Silver Kingdom spoke.

"Even if that is all there is for your Kingdom to offer, I will still visit it, Queen Yingtai. I will not discriminate amongst any of you," Alex said.

"Then I shall be waiting for you too, your Majesty," Long Weiyuan, King of the Azure kingdom said.

"You will definitely have to visit here first, your Majesty," the Crown Prince said. "The Azure Lake and the Boundless Enlightenment Domain are two places you want to go to as early as possible."

"I believe I have heard of the Boundless Enlightenment Domain before, but what importance does the Azure Lake hold, if you don't mind me asking," Alex said.

"The Azure Lake is at the heart of the Eastern Continent, made by the first Azure Dragon to commemorate their arrival and stay in this empire, or so the record says," the Dragon Emperor said. "It holds nothing other than a historical importance and an artificial beauty that you will be hard-pressed to find in this entire realm."

"I see," Alex said. 'Then I must visit this place as well."

Queen Meifen of the Ivory Kingdom was quite excited talking about all of this. "You should visit the Gold Kingdom too, your Majesty. Not only does it have the Golden Mountain range where 90% of the continent's gold comes from, but it also holds the Realm of Trials which alchemists such as you and other non-combat professionals can go through to improve yourself."

Tan Qiu looked toward Alex and bowed. "My kingdom also holds one of the most prominent auctions in all of the empire every 10 years, your majesty. The next one should be in less than half a decade. I would be honored if you do in fact come to the Gold Kingdom," he said.

"I will," Alex said. "I am very much excited about the prospects of visiting all of your Kingdoms."

"I'm not sure how much his majesty would be interested in the Celestial Peak or the Harmonious Balance Haven, but I would also appreciate it if you could come to the Ebony kingdom as well," Wan Deming said.

Alex affirmed to everyone that he would come to each and every one of their place in the future. While his words seemed like they were spoken for courtesy's sake, Alex truly did want to visit all of those places.

Not only did he want to visit those locations and secret realms, but he also wanted to go there as a method of distraction.

Alex's main purpose, outside of finding his cousin, was finding what happened to Pearl's parents. As a result, the first place he had to visit was the Beast Paradise.

However, going there directly would most definitely arouse suspicion, so he had decided to go to every single kingdom as a way to disguise the fact that he wanted to get to that particular location.

At the very least, the royal family shouldn't get suspicious that he had ulterior motives for coming to this place.

"Oh!"

"Wow!"

"So many!"

A bunch of soft murmurs sounded behind Alex, which he managed to hear clearly. He quickly looked up to see what they were talking about and saw that aside from Jai Heiyun and her opponent, everyone else had missed the current question.

There had been moments before when they had failed to recognize some ingredients, but the results had been scattered. Not everyone didn't recognize it all at once, but rather sporadically.

This time, however, 38 of the 40 people had messed up on the ingredients.

They were all devastated, but now wasn't the time to care for those things. They focused back on the task and continued naming the ingredients.

Every 3 seconds the scoreboard started changing numbers in a very chaotic fashion. Instead of everyone's number changing at once, now it was only a few people.

The difference between people who knew about the unique ingredients and people who had no idea what they were looking at was staggering.

Jai Heiyun and her opponent hadn't missed a single ingredient, naming all 11349 ingredients that had come before them. While the lowest number belonged to someone from the Southern Continent with only 8 thousand points.

8 thousand was an amazing achievement under a normal scenario, but it still meant that he had not recognized more than 3 thousand different ingredients.

He wasn't as alone as he felt though. His opponent, a girl, also had a terrible score, scoring barely 50 more points than him.

The competition continued even as night fell and the conversations around the stage stopped as everyone stared at the boards, looking for anyone's mistakes.

At the moment, the Eastern Continent was ahead by a very slight margin, but there was plenty of room for a comeback.

However, as time went on, the margin got wider and wider as Alex's alchemists made more and more mistakes.

He understood that the alchemists in the Eastern Continent specifically learned the ingredient names to pass these level tests, so they had a lot more knowledge than his alchemists did in general, but he still wanted them to pass.

At least Jai Heiyun hadn't made a single mistake until now. Even the rest of the Saint Alchemists had only made 20 mistakes among the four of them.

After all 20 thousand ingredients were given to them to name, the competition finally came to an end.

The Eastern Continent won against the Southern Continent with over 6 thousand difference in points by the end of it.

Alex was a little sad that they lost, but he was still happy in knowing that when just considering the 5 Saints, his alchemists had gotten a better result.

Chapter 1345 The Second Test

The various other Kings and important figures consoled Alex on the fact that there was no shame in losing to alchemists of the Eastern Continent. After all, Eastern Continent did have the best alchemy knowledge among all the other continents.

Alex smiled, thanking them for their words.

"Your alchemists are not bad," the Dragon Emperor said after the commotion was over. The alchemists on stage were made to rest for a bit before the next tests started.

"Our alchemists need to know all the ingredients so that they can pass the test. You don't have something like that at your place, do you?" he asked.

"No, we mostly just accept them based on their talent in pill-making," Alex said. "They are required to make a lot of pills, so we look for endurance and ability to make good pills. All other talents as an alchemist come second."

The Dragon Emperor nodded. "And yet the ones at the top did better than my own people," he said. "They might have lost the first competition, but they have certainly proven themselves."

Alex smiled at the Dragon Emperor's words. He thought the same.

Once the alchemists were done resting, the second test began. The alchemists were all handed different pill recipes as well as two sets of ingredients required for that recipe.

They all read through the recipe and realized that it was a recipe none of them had seen before.

The headmaster explained the next test. "Your task now is to learn the recipe in your hand as fast as you can and make a pill out of it. The time limit is 1 hour and it will start when someone makes the first pill. If no one makes any pill within the first hour, everyone will be disqualified."

"The winner will be based on the quality of the better pill of the two as well as the time that was taken. Begin."

The alchemists immediately started looking through the recipe, learning it.

Alex leaned on his arm, watching the competition.

"Is it boring," the Dragon Emperor asked. "Just watching and not getting to participate?"

"Hmm... well, I can't lie that it is," Alex said. "But joining will be more boring, I suppose. There's no point unless there is a challenge."

"I get you," the Dragon Emperor said. "I've been the same for quite some time too."

Alex looked at the Dragon Emperor. "Do you want to compete against me?" he asked.

The Dragon Emperor looked at him, considering the question for a moment before shaking his head. "You can make pill clouds, I cannot. You are already better than me," he said.

The many people that were around them were surprised to hear the Dragon Emperor say that Alex was better than him. They had known the young King was an Alchemist of great renown back in his continent, but they didn't expect him to be better than the Emperor.

They were now curious how well he could make a pill.

The competition down below took some time to get interesting. However, once someone made the first pill around the half an hour mark, which came out to be around 48%, the secondary timer activated which forced the rest of the alchemists to start working harder.

Multiple alchemists started making pills. While getting high-quality pills was good, it was necessary to do it fast. Were it any other time they could wait as long as they wanted. But right now was a competition and they had to follow the rules.

Still, there were a few people that just didn't bother because they knew that a high-quality pill would outweigh speed any time of the day.

Jai Heiyun read through the recipe multiple time, envisioning how she would make the pill. She did a mental simulation of how she would control the ingredients, how she would control the heat, what sort of timing she should vie for, etc.

Once she was done, she opened her eyes and looked around to see that everyone had already started and she was the last remaining alchemist that had yet to make any pill.

She looked at her opponent who was already busy making his pills as well. So, without wasting any time, she began.

The ingredients flew into the cauldron, one by one, as each ingredient turned to powder. The energy that was released from the ingredients was contained in the cauldron with the help of the many formations that were around the stage.

Heiyun proceeded to control the energy as it mixed and once everything was over, she employed the Profound Revolution of Myriad Combination technique to form the powder into a pill.

Once the pill was ready, she pulled it out.

From what she could tell just based on her instincts, she hadn't done the best that she could. The pill had most definitely come out bad.

She looked around her and saw that her opponent had already started making the 2nd pill. She looked at the sky and saw how he had done.

'65%?' she thought. Then, she placed her own pill into the formation to check its quality and saw the number that came out.

62%.

'I knew it,' she thought and started working again.

Alex looked through the list with a contemplative look. While the results that his alchemists had shown were good, they were still not as good as he had hoped.

Individually, there were quite a few of them that did well. However, collectively they were performing a little worse than their opponents.

Most of them had finished the 2nd pill so the result was starting to make itself clear.

The image flickered as results were added. Alex saw one of his alchemists achieve the same harmony as his opponent, but he had done it a minute later.

Similarly, another one of the alchemists had taken a bit more time but had done slightly better.

He ignored most of their results and only focused on the leader of his Alchemist guild, Jai Heiyun.

Her opponent was on the last pill and had finished as Alex watched him. He pulled out the pill and placed it onto the formation next to him as the result appeared in the sky.

72%. Jumping from 65% to 72% in just a single pill was quite impressive, and surprised many of the big names that were present.

"That young man is going to be important someday," one of the people said. "Does anyone know if he is already in a sect or not?"

Alex secretly shook his head as h heard them talk. He still believed in his own people, especially Jai Heiyun who had the second-best pill-forming technique he had.

Alex's attention snapped back to the stage as he saw her pull out her second pill. Spiritual senses were blocked off, so he couldn't exactly check how good the pill was, but from what he could see with his Demon Eyes, the pill held a lot of energy.

"Hmm," he smiled a bit. "Not bad for a second try."

Heiyun placed the pill on the formation and watched the result appear on the screen in the air.

77%.

She had managed to make an Immortal pill on the very second try.

Chapter 1346 The Third Test

With the emergence of the Immortal pill, Jai Heiyun had easily beaten every single one of the other 39 people that were on the test.

Her single pill was better than every other pill that was created today, giving her the first rank on the test. However, it wasn't an individual test and instead one taken as a group of 20.

So, the numbers still had to be tallied up.

However, anyone who was keeping track of the numbers was already aware of who had won.

"I must congratulate you on the win this time around," the Dragon Emperor said before the result was even announced.

"Well, my alchemists might not have a lot of time and experience, but they certainly make up for it with talents," Alex said. "Besides, yours weren't that bad either. Just a few more percentages here and there, and your alchemists would have won, instead of mine."

The other kings and queens started congratulating Alex as well. Still, this was no time to be happy yet. There were still another two tests to go.

The next test included making as many pills as possible, all of which had to be above a certain standard.

Both the pill and standards were chosen by the 40 alchemists in advance, so all they had to do was make them.

Each person's pill amount and how much they had to pass was also shown, which surprised most of the people as the ones from the Southern Continent had a generally higher level that they wanted to reach.

Most of the people behind Alex spoke of how the alchemists were trying too hard and would eventually lose. Alex, Yao Ning, and Liang Shufen could only laugh internally at their reaction.

Even the weakest alchemist from the Southern Continent was planning on making Immortal-grade pills, which made sense why people would be so surprised by it.

The ones high up amongst them wanted to make better pills. Jai Heiyun wanted to make as many Saint Qi gathering pills as she could, and she wanted to make all of them with at least 85% harmony to them.

If she could do that, she would be just a small task away from reaching Level 9, which would immediately put her as one of the greatest alchemy figures when compared to the entirety of the eastern continent.

The headmaster gave the go, and thus began another test that everyone was curious to watch, but not curious to sit through.

The alchemists used the ingredients they were provided and started making pills, while the people from around the continent only watched it intently.

As the test ran, most of the ones on stage started talking amongst themselves again, occasionally looking over at the test scores that were shown in the sky.

The test was going just as expected at the start with each alchemist performing to their greatest capacity. The target for most here was around 100, but they could keep going if they wanted to.

This went on for nearly 12 hours before people started showing signs of mistakes. One of the alchemists from the Eastern Continent failed to reach his desired goal.

After that, one by one people started failing. Most of them had already crossed the threshold required for a certain level, so they were very happy despite failing.

As more and more failed, the last remaining few were no more than 5.

Alex had a lot of trust in Jai Heiyun for being able to cross the 100-pill line that was partially required for level 9. There was also the requirement of having to know 500 different Saint recipes, which she already knew by now. Even if she didn't, she could learn it in no time.

As the test was coming to an end, another person failed, leaving only 4 in the competition. When another person failed and only 4 remained, the Dragon Emperor looked toward Alex.

"I am surprised," he said.

"What for?" Alex asked.

"Your alchemists, while not the best at recognizing ingredients just yet, are quite good when it comes to pill-making," he said.

"Ah, thank you," Alex nodded.

"That girl especially, she could probably give my son a run for his money," the Dragon Emperor said.

"She is quite good, isn't she?" Alex asked with a smile.

"Why don't you marry her?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "She seems like she fits the criteria from what I've heard."

"I've already decided against her," Alex said simply. "Her beauty is not to my liking."

"Oh," the Dragon Emperor said. "Your subjects must not chide you for not having a queen as much as they did me."

"I suppose they don't," Alex said.

"Anyway, I am surprised how good your alchemists are," the Dragon Emperor said. "Still, they will lose."

Alex nodded. "They will," he said. "But this isn't the last competition, is it? There's still one more from what the Headmaster said."

"It is over after this, I'm afraid," the Dragon Emperor said. "The next test was supposed to be one where they sit around and come up with a new pill. They were asked if they wanted to go through it, but all of them refused apparently."

Alex frowned a little. "I wasn't made aware of that," he said. "No, wait a minute. If it was decided that there wouldn't be another test after this, why wasn't that relayed beforehand."

"Because I told them not to," the Dragon Emperor said and finally turned toward Alex entirely. "I know you said you didn't want to take part in the competition because you don't have any worthy opponents. So what if I was the one that took part in?"

Alex frowned for a moment. "You want to take part in the competition?" he asked.

"Why not?" the Dragon Emperor said. "I know I can beat you when it comes to making multiple pills, and you can beat me when it comes to making higher-quality pills. However, we don't yet know who is better at making new pills with interesting effects."

"Don't you want to have a competition such as that?"

Alex looked at the emperor, ever so curious about what he was planning. However, he couldn't deny that his proposition was quite fun.

"Be honest, Emperor," Alex said. "You want something out of this, don't you? And it is not to prove that you have better alchemy knowledge than me."

The Emperor chuckled. "What makes you say that?" he asked.

"You can't ask for me to help improve you and try to prove that you're better than me at the same time," Alex said. "So, what is going on?"

The Emperor smiled and looked up at the scoreboard. Another alchemist had failed, leaving just 2 more to go.

"The end of the competition is up ahead," he said. "You told me when it would be the end, you would give me an answer to my request. So, what have you decided?"

Alex stayed silent for a while, looking at the Emperor who seemed certain that he was about to get what he wanted. He could only sigh when he saw that.

"Yes," he said. "I am willing to trade with you the knowledge that allows me to make pill clouds."

Chapter 1347 Bet Between The Monarchs

The Dragon Emperor's eyes widened in happiness the moment the words of agreement from Alex.

"Good!" he couldn't help but say out loud. "Very good."

The others around the stage looked curiously at what they were talking about, but hearing that they were most likely going to compete against each other fascinated them.

"I am glad that you came to that decision," the Emperor said, almost laughing out loud in happiness.

"Don't get too happy just yet," Alex said. "I will give you the information, but in chunks, and over the years."

"Huh?" the Emperor paused and looked at Alex. "What do you mean?"

"I told you before, didn't I?" Alex asked. "That I have multiple things that help me form pill clouds. I am planning on handing over this information over the coming years."

The Emperor frowned a bit.

"I have 4 different things that help me to make a pill as good as I can," Alex said. "I will give you these 4 ideas over the course of the next 20 years in trade for each one. I will be fair with you and allow you to choose whether or not to trade for each one of them after learning what they are."

The emperor gave a thoughtful look, his frown disappearing after hearing that.

"So if I find it useless, I don't have to trade for it, huh?" he thought. "Very well then, I accept."

"Oh, you're okay with it taking 20 years?" Alex asked.

"20 years might be a lot of time for you, but for me it is but a moment that will pass by in no time," the Emperor said.

"Great, but I have one more condition," Alex said.

The Emperor's smile faded a bit. "What is it now?" he asked.

"Well, I want you to promise that you will not share any of the knowledge I pass along to you for the next... uh... 100 years. I won't tell you what you can and can't do with the pills you make from the knowledge, only that you won't pass them along to someone else," Alex said.

The Crown Prince frowned this time. He had been expecting to get something good now that his father was getting it from Alex, but the sudden condition made his progress slow down by nearly 100 more years.

"Starting today, or starting 20 years later?" the emperor asked.

"Starting today," Alex said.

The Emperor nodded. "Fine," he said. "I accept those terms."

Alex smiled. All that was left now was to speak the oaths so that neither of them went back on their words.

"Now that we have come to an agreement, I want to add a bet into the mix, how about that?" the Emperor asked.

"Hmm? What sort?" Alex asked.

The Emperor looked toward the scoreboard in the sky and smiled. "The competition is coming to an end. That female alchemist of yours has won, it seems. But overall, your alchemists lost the 3rd competition."

Alex nodded. Their requirement had been a little lower overall, making not all of them gain the same amount of points.

"It seems so," Alex said. "But what about it?"

"Since this competition is over, I wish to start the next one between us. A pill recipe-making competition where each one has to make a new pill recipe and come up with the best pill," the Emperor said. "However, we will make a bet between us. A gamble on whoever wins."

Alex remained silent for a moment. "I'm listening."

The Emperor finally laid out what he wanted. "If I win, You will have to give 2 out of those 4 things you wanted to trade with me for free," he said.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "That's... okay. What about if I win?" he asked curiously.

"If you win, I will double the value of whatever I will give to you for everything I trade with you," the Emperor said. "And I won't limit it to the 4 things you wish to trade. You may add other things into the mix if you think I will like them."

The surrounding men and women looked at the two of them with a shocked look on their faces. Were they really going to see the two best alchemists of each continent, each one a ruler, go against each other in a competition?

"Alright, I accept," Alex said without hesitation. The two elders that sat behind him weren't worried either. In their eyes, there was no greater alchemist than their king.

No one there seemed to care when the result of the third test was out. The headmaster gave the announcement, and as soon as she did, the Emperor's words flew into her ears.

"Oh! Oh dear," she cried out in surprise when she heard what was going to happen. "We have a sudden announcement."

She turned around. "His Royal Majesty, the Dragon Emperor, and King Alex of the Southern Continent will be having an alchemy competition of their own. I'm sorry people, but we will have to end the current competition right here, with the victory going to the alchemists of the Eastern Continent."

The crowd cheered as it was their people that won. The ones from the Southern Continent weren't angry, as they had truly lost and they all knew it.

They were ready to work harder.

The group quickly left the stage, allowing the two Monarchs to walk onto the stage.

On one side stood a blue-robed middle-aged man with long blue hair that flowed behind him. On the other side stood a red-robed young man with long black hair that was just as long as the Emperor's.

Alex looked around the crowd and smiled at them. He made sure to give the crowd a good look at his face so his image would be spread around the continent so that his cousin would find him no matter where she was.

He turned back around toward the Emperor and asked, "Alright, how do we go about this? We need some sort of proof that we actually did create the pill and didn't just say we did."

"Hmm, I thought we were just going to speak an oath for that," the Emperor said. "Would that not work?"

Alex thought for a moment. "No, that would work," he said. "And that is the easiest way to go about it... but, aren't we trying to show off to each other how good our alchemy knowledge is? We should find a way that increases the difficulty and makes it entertaining at the same time."

"I see," the Emperor said. "I didn't think you would want this, but I have thought of ways to spice up our competition were it to happen."

"Oh, do share," Alex said, waiting for the Dragon Emperor to speak.

The Dragon Emperor spoke to Alex, but his voice was loud enough that everyone in the crowd clearly heard him. "Each one of us will choose 3 ingredients that the other one has to include in his pill no matter what," he said. "How does that sound? Great right?"

"That sounds great," Alex said. "As long as the ingredients we choose are Saint rank and not extraordinarily rare, I will accept that rule."

Chapter 1348 The Three Ingredients

"It's settled then," the Emperor said. "We will start our Pill-Creating competition right now. Headmaster, tell them the rest of the rules."

The headmaster nodded and started explaining the rules to the audience members. For the sake of saving some time, the competition between the two monarchs was going to take a maximum of 10 days.

Anyone who failed to make a pill in those 10 days would be disqualified. If both failed, a single day would be added. The days would continue to add up until one of them made a pill.

When that happened, the other person would get a single day to finish his pill or lose.

Once the explanation was done, the staff members of the school began preparing the stage for the two monarchs in different corners. At the same time, the headmaster started making up a list.

Both Alex and the Emperor were provided a list of ingredients that were available in the Royal School's storage.

They were now going to have to choose 3 ingredients each that would throw off the other person. They were both only allowed to choose ingredients that there was plenty of, none of which could be below Saint rank.

While Alex was only starting to give some thought to what to choose, the Emperor spoke up. "I'm done," he said.

Alex paused and looked up. "Already?" he asked.

The Emperor smirked. "I told you, I already had this idea before. As such, I had already thought of what ingredients I would choose too," he said.

"I see," Alex said. "Please wait a few minutes while I look through this list." He hadn't expected the Emperor to be so thorough in his preparation.

Alex looked through the entire list for a few minutes, not only to find the 3 ingredients but also to memorize what ingredients there were that he could use.

After looking through them, he chose 3 ingredients.

Scales of a Spotted fire lizard, a fire elemental ingredient that was known for its corrosive nature. Roots of a Green Squid flower plant, a wood elemental ingredient known for its hallucinative nature. And the seeds of a Great White lotus flower, a water elemental ingredient known to improve someone's lung capacity if taken daily in small amounts.

"I'm done," he said. Both of them chose the ingredients and let the headmaster know. The headmaster ordered two people to bring out the ingredients that were written down, who soon returned back with spiritual bags full of them.

The two people handed over the storage bags to the respective monarch.

Alex took the storage bag and looked at what was inside it. He recognized the three unique ingredients immediately.

The first ingredient barks of the Four-leaved tree, where every leaf was actually four leaves stuck to the same stalk. It was a neutral elemental ingredient that wasn't known for much, except for improving the effectiveness of some other ingredients in some very rare cases.

The second ingredient was the petal of a dark blue flower that Alex recognized as the Blue Onyx Daisy. From what Alex knew this petal was the same as the first one. It was a neutral elemental ingredient that wasn't known for much except for improving the effectiveness of a few ingredients when making a pill.

Alex frowned. 'No way,' he thought and looked at the last ingredient.

The third and final ingredient was a Purple limestone powder, which also was a neutral elemental ingredient with nothing notable to its nature, and only helped improve a small group of ingredients.

'That bastard!' he thought to himself as he looked at the Emperor who was looking at him with a smirk on his face.

"Good luck!" the Emperor said and walked away to a corner where he was going to work on his pill.

Alex grumbled internally but didn't let it show up on his face. He walked to one corner and sat down as multiple formations appeared around him.

He looked to the side at a small teleportation formation where he could request for ingredients that he needed.

Alex didn't need to use that right now. Right now, he needed to figure out how the hell he could get out of this predicament.

Being given 3 ingredients with neutral elements was already annoying, having none of them have any effects on their own was even more annoying. Normally, that would mean that Alex would have to look for other ingredients on the list to use as the main ingredients.

In that case, these 3 ingredients would have to be supplementary, which while still annoying to do, he could do.

However, the fact that all these ingredients did was improve just a few other types of ingredients meant that Alex would have a severely limited amount of ingredients that he was forced to use.

He did not have the same level of freedom as other neutral ingredients might provide. The difficulty had definitely gone up as a result.

'He came well prepared,' Alex thought. The Emperor had played a dirty trick on him while remaining under the rules. 'No point in getting angry. I need to figure out a pill soon.'

Since the two of them were going to be busy trying to come up with pills, that wasn't very entertaining for the audience.

So, some simple performances, such as battles, Qi controls, paintings, and other stuff that the audience would find entertaining were being put on show.

While the outside world was rowdy, the Emperor and Alex were lost in their own world, unaware of what was happening inside.

The world looked at them and was very surprised by their approach.

On one side, their Emperor had his cauldron on top of the fire, his hands moving in front of him as he put ingredient after ingredient to check on them.

On Alex's side, there was nothing happening at all. Alex had his eyes closed as if he was cultivating instead of trying to make a pill.

Many people were confused as to exactly what he was doing. Not even the elders from the Southern Continent knew what he was doing since they had never seen him come up with pills.

They were a little concerned about whether their king could complete the competition or not. Each time he had to come up with a pill, it had taken him years at a time.

This time, he was going to get 10 days at most. Was it going to be enough?

Alex sat in his little corner with his eyes closed, his mind going through the thousands of ingredients that were on the list and that were on him.

He had to first list out all the ingredients that would benefit from the three ingredients he had and then he could start from there.

Once he list them all out in his mind, he began looking for connections between those ingredients and what they did.

An entire day passed by in which he achieved absolutely nothing. The next day was the same where all he could do was mix and match the ingredients, trying to find complementary results.

Finally, on the third day, he saw a single connection between the ingredients that he could maybe make use of.

He found that the most common set of ingredients between the 3 separate lists of ingredients were ingredients with Water Elements in them.

Chapter 1349 The 10 Days

﻿

Having found a commonality between some of the ingredients, Alex decided to focus on that. It was a breakthrough in his attempt after 3 days, but it was going to take more than just that to make the pill.

He needed more.

If Alex was to be honest, making new pills wasn't hard at all. All you had to do was use different ingredients in a way that their elemental energy didn't become violent all of a sudden.

As long as one could maintain that and reach a level where the energy was stable, that could be considered a pill.

However, that pill was more than likely going to have an unusable effect. No one wanted a pill that grew your body hair by 2 centimeters everywhere. No one wanted a pill that could turn your muscles into bones.

A pill needed to have a good effect to be considered a good pill. So, considering what sort of ingredients he was being allowed to use, Alex decided to start by thinking of what a good effect the pill could have.

And it all needed to come from a majority of Water energy.

He started racking his brain for ideas.

The Emperor on the other hand had a rather smooth sailing from the start. With ingredients that actually did something, he was able to test them out with various other ingredients to see what they did.

He had some idea about what sort of pill he wanted to make with the ingredients, so he brought out similar ingredients to make them.

Unlike Alex, he had to practice with every ingredient to be able to tell how they interacted with each other. Even with 10 thousand years worth of experience, it just wasn't enough to know how two ingredients would react if he had never tried it before.

Outside of their small zone, the stage was filled with entertainment that kept the audience happy. They watched the two monarchs from time to time, but most of them had already considered the emperor to be the victor.

After all, he was the only one doing anything. Alex was just sitting there with his eyes closed. Even if he did start now, would he even make it?

The Emperor saw that too. He had been noticing that Alex wasn't doing anything for the past few days and was very happy with himself. His 3-day long preparation hadn't been for nothing.

Ever since he proposed to Alex the idea of teaching him how to bring out the Pill cloud, he had been planning to use this exact bet to get him to accept his trade should he reject it.

In the chance that he did accept, he was going to use this to make him trade his stuff to him for cheaper. As such, no matter what, he would come out on top in this trade.

He smiled to himself and continued. He had stumbled upon what he was going to be making, and now he was going to have to figure out how to make that pill. After that, he had to try out the various ways he could make the pill so that he could figure out which recipe gave the best result.

If he could make the primary pill by the time 5 days had passed, he could follow through with the rest in the next 5 days, winning the match. When that happened, Alex would simply lose without any more grace period in which he could finish his pill.New n0vel chapters are published on

Not that the emperor was worried about it. There was no way for him to finish the pill at all.

The emperor continued practicing the pill and finally ended up finishing it halfway through the 5th day. He quickly made a Saint Nullifying pill and tested his new pill on himself.

As soon as he felt the pill burn him from the inside, he quickly ate the nullifying pill and removed its effect.

"Great!" he spoke to himself with a smile. "I now have four and a half days to finish this."

He spent the rest half of the day cultivating. Having used up so much Qi the first 5 days, he needed this time to regain his Qi so he could continue on with the rest of the days.

His first pill had come out at 58% harmony. While others in the empire would consider it great, he considered it garbage.

The emperor experimented the entire next day and found one recipe that improved it to 69%. That was a good result, but it wasn't even an immortal-grade pill yet.

He tried some more.

Over the course of the next day, he experimented until he managed to make a pill that reached 76%. That was a great improvement to the previously immortal pill.

"That should be acceptable," he thought. He could take it slow now and see if he could still improve it. If he could, great. If he couldn't, that wasn't so bad, since he was going to win anyway.

He looked up to see if Alex was still sitting there with his eyes closed, and that was when he saw that Alex was working on some ingredients with his cauldron out.

The Emperor was a little surprised, but he wasn't afraid at all. After all, it was too late. There was no way for Alex to win this competition after starting on the 8th day.

Still, the Emperor watched to see what he was doing and couldn't help but sigh when he saw Alex only practice on single ingredients. That was a phase that the Emperor had gone through at the very beginning.

"Sigh, you shouldn't have taken my bet," the Emperor said and continued with his experimentation.

Even as he experimented, the Emperor got slower and slower as he felt there was no need to do so. Even on the 9th day, Alex was still practicing with ingredients.

Not only that, he would close his eyes and start meditating after each ingredient he practiced with.

"What the hell is he doing?" the emperor couldn't imagine at all.

The 10th and final day began, and the Emperor improved his pill once more. He managed to make a recipe that made a pill with 84% harmony. That was a greater number than he was hoping to achieve in just 10 days with random ingredients he hadn't even thought about.

He watched Alex who had his eyes closed for the longest time once again. He wasn't even making any pills this time around.

As the time continued ticking down, the Emperor understood that there was no more competition here. He had won.

He recorded everything he could about the pill on a talisman and handed the pill over to the headmaster who was going to handle it for fair judging.

Not that there needed to be one since he had most certainly won.

As the final hour came around, Alex finally moved and placed an ingredient into the cauldron.

"Is he still going?" the Emperor couldn't help but wonder. The world couldn't help but wonder.

However, as Alex started putting ingredients into the cauldron one after another, they all realized that he was indeed making a pill this time around.

"That's not going to be enough though," the Emperor thought. "I already won—"

The world darkened as if to intentionally cut off the Emperor's thoughts.

His face drained as he slowly looked up to see the storm cloud roll around on top of them with purple lightning flashing occasionally.

"No… no way!" the emperor thought. "Pill Clouds?"

Chapter 1350 Like That Day

Alex had started the competition by figuring out just the ingredients that worked with the given 3 ingredients and figuring out which ones he had.

Then, he went through each one of those ingredients to see if any of them could work as a main ingredient, or even work with each other at all. He also had to compare them with the rest of the ingredients he had.

It had taken him a while before he realized that doing so was going to take too much time. With over 20 thousand ingredients, trying to match each and every ingredient wasn't going to work at all.

He would have to look at things in sets and groups. That was when he recognized the fact that most of the ingredients that worked with the 3 initial ingredients had water energy in them.

After finding that, Alex started checking the properties of those ingredients and matching them to each other. It didn't take him long after that to start getting ideas for pills, but most of them weren't good enough for a competition like this. He needed something more.

It took him a day of doing so before he saw something in those ingredients that surprised him a little.

If he tweaked a few things here and there, he could use some more Water ingredients that he had already used in another pill and make it work like that pill.

'Can I do it?' Alex wondered. He had about 5 days remaining, so he had to start thinking very hard to go through his mind and focus on how the effects of the various ingredients would affect each other.

One ingredient had a small healing capability, another was filled to the brim with water energy so pure that it nearly made the ingredient Immortal rank. Another one affected one's body, making them slightly more aware of the water-energy around them.

Alex had to also include a metal ingredient to empower another water ingredient that he needed more effects out of, and two wood ingredients to weaken the effects of two other ingredients.

As Alex simulated what it would be like to make a pill out of those ingredients, to see how the effects would end up interacting with each other in various orders, he finally ended up on a permutation that left him with a stable energy combination.

And the effect of the resulting energy was exactly what he had wanted.

After all the mental work was done, on the 8th day, Alex finally opened his eyes and began making the pill.

The first pill was a test. There were multiple ingredients he hadn't used before, but he had some idea of how they could function, so he jumped straight into pill-making.

It took him merely 10 minutes to create a pill that had about 40% harmony. He didn't worry about the quality of the pill just yet. For now, he needed to make sure the effect that he had simulated was the one that he had managed to make.

The resulting energy was most definitely the same. As for the effect? He would have to check.

Alex ate the pill without hesitation and let it dissolve in his body on its own. As the energy dissolved, it started showing its effect.

He waited for a few moments it took to fully show the effect. When that happened, Alex couldn't help but open his eyes wide in surprise. 'I can't believe something like this can actually exist as well,' he thought.

But he had heard from the senior back in the Central Continent that pills only got more and more ridiculous in effect the more energy they had, so maybe this wasn't that bad.

Once he confirmed the pill worked, he ate a pill to nullify the effect of the previous pill and got to work.

He started making powders out of the ingredients he had never worked with before, and after doing that for 6 of the 13 ingredients necessary in that pill, he closed his eyes and began formulating the best pill recipe that could help him reach the highest harmony.

As he did that, he also began improving the energy in the ingredients of his pill using Supreme Elemental Accord. He could've used the mushrooms, but he wanted to people who were keeping track to see what he was capable of even without the mushrooms.

At some point, he noticed that the Emperor was done, and decided to take his time with making the pill. He waited until the very last hour before he finally began making the pill.

Having the perfect pill recipe and the perfect set of ingredients prepared, there was nothing left for Alex to do but make the perfect pill.

Mere minutes into starting the pill, he had already gathered the attention of every single person in the audience that was watching him to see what they would consider a desperate attempt on his part.

As Alex made the pill, he quickly reached the end of the process where he needed to form the pill. That was when he used the Vortex of Perfection skill.

Vortex of Perfection was what he had decided to call the Pill-splitting Qi that only now worked on a single pill. Using that technique, he was able to gather every single energy in the cauldron into the pill that formed inside the cauldron at the same time.

After all the energy was sucked in by the vortex, the sky darkened as pill clouds came out of nowhere. Almost no one except for a handful of people knew anything about pill clouds, so seeing such a phenomenon scared many people.

"What is going on?" the Queen of the Ivory kingdom asked.

"Lightning? Why?" the King of the Emerald Kingdom couldn't understand.

"It's like that one day from all those years ago," the Ebony Kingdom's King spoke as he looked up.

"Now that you mention it," the Silver Kingdom's Queen stared at the sky with a shocked expression as well. It did look similar to that day.

"It's called a pill cloud," the Crown Prince quickly explained. "It happens when one reaches 100% harmony in a pill."

As the Crown Prince explained the kings, queens, and other important figures of the continent, the first lightning bolt fell from the sky.

Most of the audience members jumped in their seats, afraid of the lightning strike. Most of them too remembered it very clearly.

However, they soon realized this was different. Once the lightning fell, they realized that it didn't have much power. At least, not enough to kill the King who it targeted.

As they were wondering what was going on, another lightning strike fell from the sky, surprising them. Was this going to fall a third time too?

The crowd wasn't surprised when the lightning strike fell for the third time as well. However, when it fell for the 4th time, they knew something entirely different was going on.

The lightning fell for the 5th time before the clouds started dissipating.

Then, Alex pulled out the 5-veined pill he had just created and placed it on a bottle before handing it over to the headmaster along with a talisman explaining everything.

With both of the monarch's pills completed, the competition was over.

Chapter 1351 The Pill's Effect

The two monarchs finally walked out of their corners moving toward each other in the center.

"Congratulations on finishing early," Alex said as he arrived next to the Emperor who had a weird look on his face.

"You managed to finish as well," the Emperor said. "I thought you were going to fail."

"Why would I have failed?" Alex asked. "Because of the ingredients, you gave me? No, it only helped me come up with an amazing pill."

Alex's bright smile served as a source of frustration for the emperor. He truly wanted to see him fail so that he could gain what he had without having to trade anything important for it.

However, seeing as that he had managed to make a pill, one with a pill cloud showing up, the Emperor started to get worried.

"What sort of pill did you make?" the Emperor asked.

"Isn't it better for everyone to find out at once?" Alex asked. "The headmaster should begin any moment now."

"Everyone, it is time for the judging," the headmaster said. "I have both of the majesties' pills in these two storage bags on my hand. I will choose at random and tell you what it is about."

"Please give it a score out of 100 on what you think about the effect of the pill," the headmaster said. "We will not be judging the quality of the pill itself."

Everyone nodded.

The only woman pulled out a talisman at random. She ignored the part that included the recipe for the pill and instead started with the description.

"This pill is a poison pill that when eaten or fed will corrode the person's flesh as soon as it dissolved in their body. Their body would melt from the inside, and even Qi will have a hard time containing it."

"As a pill its effect is also many times greater than what it would be if it were just a normal poison paste, giving it potency that was hard to achieve with normal poison."

"Since it was a specifically made poison pill rather than a naturally available poison, it will also require a pill specifically meant to counter it. Normal antidote pills may slow down its effects, but it will require a tailor-made pill to remove the effects completely."

"The ingredients required are also generally cheap and easily available, with the main ingredient Spotted Fire Lizard's scales being traded in from the Beast Paradise all the time," the headmaster spoke.

She turned toward the 6 kings and queens that sat on the stage and spoke. "Please score the pill between 1 and 100 in terms of how useful and usable it is."

The 6 kings thought to themselves and talked to each other to get their view on the pill.

Being a poison pill and a strong one at that, it could easily kill someone. However, for that to happen, you needed to be able to feed the pill to someone.

If you could do that forcefully, you would never need that pill at all. But then again, they were worried this pill could belong to the emperor, who they wouldn't want to anger by ranking it low.

After a series of talks, the kings came to a score of their own and wrote it down before handing it over to the old headmaster.

The headmaster took the scores and tallied them.

"The poison pill has achieved a total of 435 points out of a possible 600 total," the headmaster said. "That gives the pill an average of 72.5 points from each of the kings."

The audience cheered as they felt that the pill deserved that score. They were all more than happy about the pill's score, except for the Emperor himself.

He didn't show it on his face, but internally he frowned rather deeply. This was a pill he made without much work. He had expected Alex to lose, so he didn't think of putting more effort into making the pill.

Now, it was coming back to bite him. He knew that the pill didn't deserve such a score. As a poison pill, maybe. But as a pill in general, it wasn't one of the best.

Any pill you needed to feed someone without their knowledge or consent usually ranked pretty low in terms of scores if all it did was kill that person.

The Emperor looked toward Alex who was calm throughout it all. He had hoped for Alex to fail, but here he was.

'Well, I still have a chance,' he thought to himself. 'Let's see what sort of pill you have managed to make.'

The headmaster pulled out the second talisman.

"This is the other pill," the headmaster said as she started reading from the talisman again.

"This pill..."

She paused for a moment before carefully reading what it said. He eyes widened while her face drained color at a simple shock at what she had just read.

"Headmaster?" the Crown Prince called out to her. "Is everything okay?"

"Huh? Oh yes, yes," the woman said, but her eyes said something else.

"Okay, then please continue. We are waiting for the explanation," he said.

The woman nodded and looked at the talisman again before taking a deep breath. "This is a pill prime full of Water elements that when eaten... can temporarily turn your regular spiritual vein to Water Spiritual vein."

She paused for a moment, letting the words sink in for everyone.

The kings and other figures on the stage nodded for a second before their heads stopped moving and their faces grew serious.

"What did you say?" the Gold Kingdom's king's eyes narrowed as he spoke up on his own for the first time.

"It is as I say, your majesties," the old woman said. "This is a pill that can turn one's neutral spiritual roots into Water spiritual roots temporarily."

Everyone was too stunned to comment on it as they dwelled on what it meant to eat that pill.

Nearly every person in the world was born with a regular spiritual root that was capable of moving around normal Qi. Most also had other elemental spiritual Qi on top of that, but due to there being 7 possibilities, the chances of one having a Water spiritual root were generally low.

Because of that, many people weren't able to learn various skills and techniques that asked for one to have a Water spiritual root, which made them miss out on a lot of opportunities.

However, if what was being said was true, then it was possible for someone to be able to use Water Qi as well, as long as they were ready to temporarily give up on their normal Qi.

The Emerald Kingdom's king stood up and moved toward the old woman. "I have a Fire and Metal spiritual root, and have no Water spiritual root. Let me eat that pill and see if it really can do what you've said."

The king didn't even care that the pill could belong to the emperor anymore. The possibility of the pill itself made him move up.

The headmaster hesitated for a moment as the pill veins would easily give up the reality. At that time, the Emperor arrived next to them, making the King back off.

"Give me the pill," he said. "I will test it out."

Chapter 1352 End Of The Competition

The King and the headmaster backed off after giving the Emperor the storage bags. The Emperor took the talisman and started reading it. He looked through the ingredients and how they interacted before coming to the conclusion that it did in fact work.

Without hesitation, he took the pill out and ate it. He didn't even spend a moment looking at the 5 magnificent lightning scars on the pill that was called veins.

In the midst of everyone's gaze, the emperor stood there as the pill dissolved inside of him and the intense water energy inside of it started flowing through him looking to go to the dantian.

They stopped right outside of the emperor's dantian, where he only had 4 different spiritual roots. Other than the neutral spiritual root, one was a Fire Spiritual root, another a Wood Spiritual root, and finally a very weak Yang spiritual root.

The energy repelled itself from all the other types of elemental energy, falling into the one neutral spiritual root, where it slowly started transforming the neutral spiritual root to have a water attribute to it.

It took about 10 whole seconds for the change to happen, but given the significance of the change, the emperor did not care how long it took.

As soon as the change was completed, he tried using a technique he knew. His Qi flowed through his veins, coming out into the palm as Water Qi which genuinely surprised him.

The Qi flowed out, but it did nothing. His skill did not activate.

"Huh?" the Emperor frowned for a second. He tried again and again, but the technique didn't work at all.

"Techniques that require regular Qi won't activate with Water Qi," Alex said. "Unless you've trained a water technique, it won't necessarily help you."

"Then there is no use to this pill, is there?" the Emperor asked as he looked toward Alex who had just walked up.

"Come on now, Dragon Emperor. You know that to be wrong yourself. Just because it doesn't help you, won't mean that it won't help others," he said. "Test how strong your spiritual root is at the moment. It's nearly comparable to Superior Water spiritual root."

"Give the pill to someone who has been learning water attribute skills their whole life with inferior spiritual roots, and you will make him feel like he found a new life."

"Give the pill to someone without water spiritual root, and he can also learn to use important water-related skills from early on. Aren't most healing techniques water related? One wouldn't have to look for others to help heal them. They can always heal themselves."

The Emperor couldn't help but frown at the fact that Alex was correct. The sheer amount of possibility the pill opened up by the mere fact that anyone could now have Water Spiritual root whenever they wanted was insane.

Especially the fact that most had not even considered after hearing about the pills.

Having a water spiritual root meant that you could also learn Water Dao in due time. If that information were to be made public at the moment, the amount of chaos it would cause in the market would truly be insane.

The Emperor clutched his fist in annoyance, but he couldn't lie that a truly amazing pill had been created here today.

"I concede. My poison pill is nowhere near as good as the Water pill King Alex has won. It is his victory."

The announcement left the crowd in awe as they couldn't believe that their emperor had lost. Their emperor, a man who had reached the unthinkable Level 10 of Alchemy knowledge of the Eastern Continent, had failed against another king.

"Do you want to give your victory speech?" the Emperor asked.

Alex thought for a bit. "Sure, why not?" he said and looked toward the crowd.

"I am Alex Benton, King of the Southern Continent, the direct subordinate of her majesty the Phoenix herself," Alex started. "Thank you all for watching this small competition between our two continents."

"I hope this has served you all as motivation to improve yourself, especially to the alchemists out there. Please do not think you can't do it yourself. Just half a century ago, I used to be just a young farm boy, living in the Maplewood region of the Central Continent."

"After entering the game and being teleported out of the Central continent, I have managed to make it this far in just 50 years. I am certain you all can do so as well."

"Good luck."

Alex waved at them and turned around to see the other kings' confused looks.

"Your majesty," the Ivory Kingdom's Queen spoke. "What... do you mean you came from the Central Continent?"

"Exactly what I said," Alex replied. "Oh, has the news now come to here? I thought you would have all known by now."

"What news?" the other Kings asked curiously.

"That the players come from the Central continent. There is a small piece of land in the central continent where a settlement of humanity exists, completely unaware of the outer world. That is where we all came from, and 3 years ago, we got to return back."

The kings were confused and surprised at the same time. They hadn't expected that there was another world in the Central Continent.

The Emperor was somewhat surprised too. He had heard about people teleporting to the Central Continent, but he hadn't expected there to be an entire civilization.

So had all the different things that the players had mentioned not belonged to some higher realm? Was it really all just the Central Continent?

"I can tell you more if you want," Alex said. He was more than happy to let the people learn about the Central continent if he could. It would just make Hao Ya's work easier and also jog up a bunch of players into wanting to go back.

"Actually, your majesty, can you tell us about those lightning strikes? What were those?" one of the kings asked.

"It's called a pill cloud, and no, he will not teach you anything about it," the Emperor said. "He has only just accepted my trade offer to teach me to form the pill clouds in the first place."

"Manyin, end it now," he told the headmaster.

The headmaster bowed and left to announce to the audience about the competition coming to an end.

The crowd started leaving one by one and the people on the stage were also forced to leave. They bowed toward the Emperor and Alex as they left, most requesting Alex to visit them when he had the time.

The emperor watched them all leave and sighed. "The competition took more out of me than I expected it to," he said. "Let us leave now."

Alex nodded and walked along with the Emperor. The Crown Prince had already left with his fiancee, so it was just the Emperor and Alex, followed by their subordinates in another carriage as they returned back to the palace.

They both got off the carriage and the Emperor turned toward Alex. "You can go and rest for now, or we can act upon our agreement and start the trade right now. What do you say?"

Alex smiled. "Let's start the trade right away."

Chapter 1353 The Oaths

﻿

Alex and the Emperor arrived in a secluded room that Alex hadn't been to before. The dark room had little to no furniture, so the two monarchs stood around.

"So, let's get it done," Alex said.

The Emperor nodded. "Make the oath then," he said. "In 20 years' time, you will give me everything you can for me to make pill clouds."

Alex closed his eyes and thought through what he wanted to say.

"I swear to the heavens that in the next 20 years I will offer a trade for everything I have that can help you call the pill clouds, so long as you can offer me something worth double what I am offering back if we come to a settlement," Alex spoke.

The oath landed on Alex, but they didn't bind him just yet as the oath had yet to be completed. It was a two-sided oath and unless both sides agreed to the words that were being said on the oaths, it didn't activate.

The emperor gave the words some thought and spoke his own words. "I swear to the heavens that I will pay you for every offer I accept at double its value, and I shall not share them with anyone for the next 100 years if we come to a settlement," the Emperor finished.

Alex listened to the oath and nodded. "I agree."

"I agree as well."

The moment the Emperor spoke, the oath landed on the two of them, binding their words to heaven. Their agreement was finally done.

"Now that it's settled, will you start by trading something or do you intend to wait?" the Emperor asked.

"Yes," Alex said and reached around his storage ring for a while, gathering up the various stuff.

The Emperor looked at Alex's storage ring for a bit before looking at his own blue ring. "Did the Phoenix give you that ring?" he asked.

"Hmm? Oh yes," Alex said without paying much attention. He finally took out the stack of nearly 100 different talismans and handed it over to the emperor.

The Emperor looked confused for a moment. "What… is this?" he asked, wondering if they were some techniques.

"Pill recipes," Alex said.

The Emperor frowned for a moment. "Pill recipes?" he asked before quickly looking through the talisman and realizing that Alex wasn't lying. He frowned for a moment.

"I don't need pill recipes. I have plenty," he said, about to refuse.

"Yes," Alex said. "But do you have ones that are guaranteed to not have any error, with a potential to reach 100% harmony in each turn, so long as the other variables are perfect?"

The Emperor frowned for a bit. "Are you certain?" he asked.

He had a few recipes like that, brought over by the Azure Dragon the last time around, that had been passed down from his father. However, there weren't nearly enough of those that were brought back. Merely a dozen or so.

The other recipes were good, but they never gave a good enough result.

So, if Alex was telling the truth then these 100 pill recipes would help him improve a lot. In fact, they might be the biggest change for him overall to learn about Alchemy as he had more recipes to learn from.

He knew that these recipes weren't going to help him call pill clouds at all. He had reached 97% or even 98% in rare cases with the dozen perfect recipes that were brought back.

However, that still was a good start.

"How did you get these recipes?" he asked.

"I don't suppose I have to answer that question, do I?" Alex asked. "It isn't part of the agreement."

"No," the Emperor said. "No, you don't."

He started thinking of what he had that he would consider double to value of the offer he was being made. He couldn't even lie and make a low offer as the oath bound him into making only valid trade suggestions.

"I do not yet understand what you would consider as double the value of the recipes," he said. "Do you have any idea?"

Alex looked away for a bit, thinking to himself. "What about a visit to the Azure Dragon? I wonder if he will have some knowledge for me to prepare for my eventual breakthrough to the Immortal realms in the future."

The Emperor frowned a bit. "Don't the Phoenix have something like that for you?" he asked.

"Her Majesty has told me quite a bit about it, but I still wish to learn more if I can," Alex said. "It doesn't hurt to ask multiple immortals, does it?"

"No, it doesn't," the Emperor said. "But I'm afraid you cannot visit His Majesty. As you may have learned already, there was an attack in the Central continent long ago, where his majesty was injured just like your Phoenix and needed recuperation."

"He is still recuperating to this day, so I cannot allow entry for anyone," the Dragon Emperor said.

"I see," Alex said. "That's a shame."

That was quite the excuse that the Emperor had for the Dragon's absence. It was damn near the same thing the elders had told the entire world when Scarlet was missing.

He wondered if the emperor knew something was wrong back then too and if he was still playing the part of an oblivious emperor.

"Then I guess I will accept something else," Alex said.

The Emperor thought for a bit. "I will need some time to think of what I can pay you with. Please return back for now. I will send someone to get you when I know what I have I can give you," he said.

Alex nodded and left the room, going back to the Swan Courtyard where the two elders were waiting for him.

New n0vel chapters are published on

"Your majesty," Elder Yao quickly called for him as he entered. "How did it go? What did you trade for what?"

"I traded 100 of my recipes," he said. "Don't worry, I kept the better ones out of the trade and only gave the generic ones."

"And what did you get in return?" elder Liang asked.

"He doesn't have anything for me yet. He will decide what he wants to give me later, so we can relax for now," Alex said.

"I hope it is something good," the elder said.

"I hope so too," Alex said. "Alright, I'm gonna go rest for now. You two should go and cultivate as well. Now that we've finished what we wanted to do, we can go visit the other places in the city tomorrow."

The two elders nodded and bowed before leaving.

Alex went into his own room and sat on a seat before calling out Pearl and Whisker to have them cultivate along with them.

While he started cultivating, the Emperor was in his own room, alone, thinking of what he could trade for those recipes.

The problem wasn't that he didn't have anything valuable to trade for those recipes, but that he didn't want to give anything valuable that he owned.

After thinking for a long time, he came up with something that he believed was valuable enough for Alex to want to trade it with him.

Once he figured it out, he sent someone to let Alex know that he was ready to trade.

Chapter 1354 Dragon Medallion

﻿

"You've come," the Emperor looked at Alex as he walked in.

"Yes," Alex said. "I was just about to leave to roam the city when your message got to me. Have you finally decided what to give me?"

"Yes," the Dragon Emperor said and handed over something to Alex

Alex took the object and saw that it was a medallion made up of some sort of strong metal that looked a lot like silver. On the medallion was the emblem of the Azure Imperium, a single sword with the azure dragon coiling around it.

Alex poured some Qi into it, but nothing seemed to happen to it. "What is this?" he asked curiously.

"It's a Dragon Medallion," the Emperor said. "It gives you the highest authority in the continent aside from the Emperor and the Crown Prince, making you effectively the 3rd most important person."

Alex was a little surprised. "And you're giving this to me? In exchange for the pill?" he asked.

"Yes," the Emperor said. "On the condition that only you can use this. No one else."

Alex looked at the medallion for a bit. "Can I deploy your military with this?" he asked.

"Do you want to?" the Emperor asked.

"I'm just asking," Alex said with a bit of a chuckle.

"Yes, you can," the Emperor said. "You can deploy troops, change kings, and do whatever else you want in the continent. As I said, you have the third highest authority."

"Even above the other princes?" Alex couldn't help but ask.

"Even above both of my other sons, yes," the Emperor said. "But of course, you should know its not as free as you might be thinking to yourself. In the first place, you can't perform a lot of significant actions because they will be reported back to me or my son, and we will have complete control over if we accept that choice of yours or not."

"That makes sense," Alex said. "And what about the other kings? Can I make decisions for them as well?"

"Those kings can report back to us as well, so I don't really see the point of trying," the Emperor said.

"Then what exactly is the point of this thing?" Alex asked.

"It gives you freedom in all of the empire. To go anywhere you want without restriction, to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't conflict our rule," the Emperor said. "There are much more uses that I'm sure you can find out on your own."

"I can," Alex said, looking at the medallion with a curious look. This was definitely worth it for the 100 pill recipes according to the Emperor, but Alex wasn't sure if that was true or not.

"You also don't have to pay to enter a lot of different places that you otherwise might have to," the Emperor said.

"Alright, I will accept it," Alex said and pulled out the 100 talismans that he handed over to the emperor.

The oath buzzed between the two of them as it was partially fulfilled.

The Emperor sighed in relief. "Alright, I will now go into closed cultivation to learn more. If you need anything, which you shouldn't thanks to that medallion, talk with my son."

"Okay," Alex said. "Good luck on forming a pill cloud. I'll return when I have another thing to trade."

He walked away from the room, leaving the emperor to himself. With the Emperor going into closed cultivation to train his alchemy skill, Alex wondered how many years it would be before he saw the man again.

2 years? 5 years?

He would certainly use that time to explore the land.

He left the palace afterward, going out into the city. He wanted to visit the various schools, but he left that for the middle of the day. For now, he was going to visit the rest of the city and see how it differed in the Eastern Continent.

For one, it actually looked like the Dragon Capital had some city planning done with how it was set up and not just based on how people set up in the early days. That way, the city looked wide and open while also having enough space to take in everything.

Most the buildings still followed the same traditional pattern with the red tiled roofs that curved outwards onto a tip with its pagoda like features. There were various trees planted along the side of the road, each of which was there to improve the city's overall quality.

The city was prosperous, with regular stores and shops selling whatever a cultivator needed. It almost seemed like there were no mortals in the city.

Alex went through a few shops, seeing the quality of the items that were sold and was quite genuinely shocked.

Perhaps it was it was the capital of the entire continent, the items sold here were of generally extremely good quality. He had went through a few alchemy shops to find that most of the regular ingredients sold were capable of reaching more than 80% harmony with a good recipe.

In most other places, one would have to go to auctions and similar places to acquire such good ingredients.

Alex didn't have many things he wanted to buy, so he just window shopped for the day. After going around, looking at what sort of activities one could do in the city, he didn't find any that particularly interested him.

There were some recreational facilities and even some gambling houses, but Alex didn't find any interest in those.

So, he decided to finally visit one of the schools for the day. His choice of school to visit was the Poison school for the day.

He wanted to see how they dealt with the problem he had thought of.

The poison school was similar to the alchemy school in how it functioned. The school had levels to the teaching that was done there, each including requirements before every level.

The headmaster of that school, a middle-aged man with streaks of gray hair told Alex about everything that went on in the school, clearing up his confusion.

The poison arts required one to have a intensive knowledge about the poisons and how they interacted with each other. The poisons didn't simply belong to plants and animals, but also anything that could be synthetically created from other materials that were naturally found or made by the poison masters.

They were mostly taught to make 3 types of poisons. One that needed ingesting, one that needed breathing, and finally one that simply needed contact.

There were also some weirder poisons in how they needed to be applied, but those were the main there. And they were taught to each person that wanted to learn.

"How do you make sure what you're teaching isn't being used by the wrong person in the wrong place?" Alex asked the headmaster.

"Before each level, our students are made to swear an oath that they will not use what is taught here on anyone unless the order came from the royal family, or their life is in danger," the man said. "That way, we can stop our students from exploiting what they have learned here."

"I see," Alex said, nodding to himself as the words made sense. "Do you think I can test my poison knowledge to see what level I can reach?"

Chapter 1355 Level 10 Poison Master

The test to become a poison master was not that different from the tests the Alchemy school provided him with. He had to first spend some time recognizing the ingredient to see how capable he was, and then he had to go into making poisons.

There were several types of poisons with their own unique traits. Some poisons were lethal, some were not. Some were instant, and some took a long time.

Not all poisons were the same, but most could be treated with one or two specific antidote pills. However, when it came to specific poisons designed for a specific purpose, those were the ones that were the hardest to cure.

Alex made as many poisons as he knew from his various lessons. He had not only learned about poisons back in the Luminance Empire, taught by the Princess Xumei of the Royal Wei family, but also from the Nether Poison sect, who had provided him some things in secret for saving them from the mad immortal.

The treasury back in his own palace also contained a few different recipes for poisons, and along with what else was available in the continent, he had learned quite a lot about poison.

However, the knowledge about poison wasn't enough for the test. You also needed to know how to counter poisons, and those Alex had a hard time with.

Most of the time, he simply made pills that could destroy most poisons. Especially with the pill veins improving an antidote's potency by a lot, even poisons that couldn't be cured by them were.

However, here he wasn't allowed to do that and had to force himself to try and come up with a combination of natural ingredients that he could make an antidote out of that cured that very poison.

Thanks to his knowledge of alchemy ingredients, he knew a lot about how they would interact and how they could cure poisons, but it wasn't enough for him to do very well in the task.

Especially since alchemy ingredients and poison ingredients weren't completely interchangeable.

In the end, with everything he had learned about, Alex managed to reach Level 6 in the poison test. He could have gotten a lot higher had he been even slightly more knowledgeable in the topic or even had given himself some time to test it all out.

"Amazing," the headmaster said. "Not only do you have such incredible alchemy knowledge, you also have quite the knowledge in poison, your majesty."

"It's alright," Alex said. He wished it was a little more, but he didn't complain. It wasn't like he focused much on poisons anyway.

"So what I know is enough to bring me up to Level 6, huh?" he asked. "If I knew a bit more about different poisons, I could've entered Level 7, right?"

"Yes, your majesty," the man answered. "We can teach you everything you might want to know."

Alex thought for a bit. "Sure, I'll spend some time and learn here. I have nothing else to do anyway," he said. The elders behind him didn't mind at all.

"Great," the headmaster said excitedly. "Let's just have you speak the oaths and we can start teaching you the things."

"Oath?" Alex paused. "I don't want to speak the oaths. I just want to learn the information, nothing more."

"That's... not how it works I'm afraid, your majesty," the headmaster said. "It is a rule of the school that you must speak the oath before we let you learn from the school."

The elders frowned a bit. They did not want their king to be bound by any oaths that weren't necessary.

"Do the Emperor and Crown Prince have to speak the oaths too if they want to learn?" Alex asked.

The headmaster quickly shook his head. "They are way beyond us for us to force them to make such an oath," he said. "Besides the oath won't even stop the emperor since his words are the rule."

"Alright then, I won't say them either," Alex said as he brought out something. "This should stop you from asking me to do what you're saying right?"

The headmaster looked at the silver medallion with the insignia of the Dragon Emperor and was surprised. "The Dragon Medallion?" he looked back at Alex in shock. "Did... did his majesty give this to you?"

"Yes, just today. With this, I'm supposed to be just below the Dragon Emperor and the Crown Prince," Alex said.

"Then I have no authority to stop you from learning what you want from this school, your majesty," the headmaster bowed.

Alex finally smiled. "Great," he said. The medallion was already coming in handy. "Come, let me see what else I can learn here."

Alex went around the school, checking out where the rest of the buildings were, especially ones he would want to visit, like the library.

He also asked the headmaster a few other questions, which the middle-aged man answered without any hesitation.

"There are currently six Level 8 individuals and no Level 9 individual in the student body, but I and a few staff are Level 9 poison masters and quite a few of the staff are also at Level 8 and 7. " the headmaster said. "As for Level 10... I'm afraid we don't have those."

"None?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "Is it that hard to reach?"

"Rather than difficult, it's more like it's dangerous. To reach level 10, you must create a poison so potent that even a whiff of it can kill just about anyone."

"We had a Level 9 poison master try out a test to become a Level 10 poison master, and he ended up creating a poison so potent that he died from it right after making it."

"We had to evacuate the entire school back then so that they weren't affected either," the headmaster said.

"What?" Alex was surprised. "Was it that strong?"

"Yes," the headmaster nodded. "So we don't encourage people to go for Level 10. Thankfully his majesty came in time and took away the poison so we were fine, but we don't know what could have happened otherwise."

"Oh, the Emperor wasn't affected by the poison?" Alex asked, a bit surprised. Had he eaten some pill by chance?

"Oh, no. Not his majesty, the Emperor. I meant His Majesty, the Azure Dragon," the headmaster said. "He came out for a moment and quickly took away the poison so we weren't hurt."

Alex's eyes widened in shock when he heard that. "The Azure Dragon?" he asked.

"Yes," the headmaster said. "If not for his majesty coming out, we would have most likely been doomed. Even as wounded as he was, he took care of the poison."

Alex was very much surprised as what he heard didn't go in line with what he knew.

"When did this take place exactly?" he asked.

The headmaster thought for a moment and answered. "About 4 or 5 centuries ago," he said. "It's a short time ago for Saints like us."

The headmaster continued speaking, but Alex's mind wandered off elsewhere as soon as he heard the time.

'The Dragon was alive until just 5 centuries ago?' Alex thought. 'Then when the hell did he die?'

Chapter 1356 Cooking School

Alex left back for the palace afterward, constantly wondering about what he had learned.

The Azure Dragon was alive just 500 years ago, and he had been seen by regular folks. Has that been an illusion perhaps? To show the people that their ruler was still alive?

Alex didn't believe that was the case. Especially because the poison had been strong enough to kill the poison master himself. A regular saint could not have cleared that up in that case.

It had to be the Azure Dragon himself. But if that was the case then... he had to have been alive just 500 years ago.

Then... how was he dead?

The headmaster had told him the dragon was injured, so... maybe it had lived until now. But then... why was it dead now?

Surely the White Tiger wasn't wrong.

Alex thought for a while about this, but he eventually had to stop caring. He wasn't going to get the answer from just thinking, and asking wasn't going to work as the death of the Dragon wasn't made public yet.

Not that knowing when the dragon had died really affected any of Alex's plans in the first place.

He returned back to his room and decided to make some pills as he wanted to prepare some of the new pills from the recipe he had just come up with.

He let the palace staff know that there was going to be a lot of lightning going on on this side of the palace and that they had no reason to be scared. Once the people were alerted, Alex began making those pills.

He spent nearly 6 hours making the pills he now named Water Root Transforming Saint Pill. It was a long name, but it got the point across.

After getting done, he returned back to his room, only to find the head servant waiting in front of his room with a tray. There was a glass on the tray and some juice inside ot it that looked quite good.

"The elders asked me to prepare some refreshments for you, your majesty," the woman said. "Please have them."

"Thank you," Alex said and took the glass before drinking it all in one go. He truly felt refreshed, as if the deep coldness had touched deep inside of him, making him feel quite alive.

The mental fatigue that came with making pills for nearly 6 hours simply disappeared as the last gulp of the juice went down his throat.

"This is quite good," he said while he looked at the glass. "Huh? Maybe I should go visit the cooking school too. Thanks again."

He returned back to his room. "I will have to get some food made for Whisker and Pearl too at some later date," he thought to himself. "How do I make them not know it's for beasts though?"

Maybe he could just ask them for some generic food. That should still be quite good.

He cultivated for the rest of the day, and when tomorrow came around, he went back to the Poison school to learn a bit more throughout the day. He sent the elders back and learned about poisons and how to cure them on his own.

There were many students that were in the library, but none of them dared to come close to Alex as they all recognized who he was.

He was left alone as he learned what he could for the entirety of the week.

It was at the end of the week that he finally left and went back to the palace again to rest. This time around, he asked for some sort of meat to be cooked for his beasts.

Pearl and Whisker were quite happy that day.

The next day, Alex went to check out the school for cooking.

As a school, this one apparently had the least number of students, which made quite a lot of sense to Alex. Of the many schools, this was the one that made the least sense for a cultivator, even before the music school.

At least music helped you during fights. This one was only useless for when you weren't in battle, and even then there were pills that could do a lot better than cooking, certainly.

Still, he kept an open mind, willing to learn what it was that made this school even a school in the first place and went in. He met with the headmaster, a young woman who looked to be in her 30s, who gave him a small tour.

Alex had no intention of trying to test himself here, so he only learned what the headmaster told him.

His answers were quickly answered.

As it turned out, while the benefit of cooking was not all that much when compared to pills, they were also much easier to make at the same time.

Cooking didn't need perfect control like making pills did, so one could cook something as long as one could focus on the task and not lose track of what they were doing.

Anyone could become a cook this way. So, the only thing separating them was the amount of dedication that they put into learning the various recipes and the way the tastes interacted with each other.

It wasn't exactly the same as pills, as the cook cared very much about how the final product tasted and not just what it did.

"I'm assuming people don't have a hard time climbing through the levels?" Alex asked the headmaster.

"They do not," the headmaster said. "But they also don't spend their entire time learning to cook, so it kind of doesn't matter in the end. Most end up leaving after they think they are good enough, compared to other schools where they try to be the best."

"I see," Alex said, understanding a bit better. "If I may ask, what level are you?"

"I am level 9," the headmaster said. "A few people stick through and most actually end up at 8 or 9. The Palace accepts them, so most end up leaving at that point anyway."

"And the students?" Alex asked.

"We have one Level 8 who is going strong, but no one else," the headmaster said. "I can't tell when we'll get another Level 8 at all."

"I see," Alex said. "I hope you have more people enthusiastic about this profession then. Now that I've learned about it, it doesn't seem truly that bad."

"It isn't, your majesty," the headmaster said. "It's just looked down upon a lot by the regular people who don't know much."

Alex nodded. Just moments ago, he was the same as well.

"What about Level 10?" he asked. "If it's so easy, certainly someone must have reached Level 10, right?"

"Yes, one person has," the headmaster said excitedly. "Senior Zhou Linfan, the head chef of the palace. You can meet him in the pa... err... he's out with the second prince now that I think about it. But yeah, he reached Level 10."

"I see," Alex said. "Someone at least stuck through it all."

"Yes," the headmaster said.

Alex conversed with her for a bit longer as she showed him the whole school. After a while, he finally left the school once he was done learning what he wanted to.

Chapter 1357 Royal School Of Beast Taming

﻿

Nearly 3 months passed since the day Alex started going to the poison school. He learned what he could in those 3 months, becoming ever so learned about how poisons and their antidotes worked.

It was only when his knowledge rivaled that of a Level 8 poison master that Alex decided to no longer visit this place. He was done with what it had to offer.

To get any better than he had, he would have to practice on his own, and as such the school visits held no meaning anymore.

Alex had visited a few more places in this time, going around the city to take part in auctions or gambling houses. He also visited fighting arenas that one could pay to fight in, where others could watch and bet on him.

Seeing the level of the fighters there, Alex held no interest at all. Besides, it wouldn't fit a king like him to fight some regular person just to show his dominance.

He went over to the Alchemy school a few times, to see how they were doing. He also met up with Hao Ya, who was already gathering a few people to spread the news about the player's home being the central continent and that they should be allowed to go back.

Alex's small speech at the end of the alchemy competition had helped her cause quite a lot. She had mostly talked with those that were in the school itself, as well as those in the residential area.New n0vel chapters are published on

She knew that the population of players in the Eastern Continent was quite a lot, so the number of people she could find was also quite a lot. Most of them were weaker players, but there were also quite a few strong ones.

Finding the weaker ones didn't help her cause as much as finding stronger ones did, as weaker people had little to no voice in making the emperor move, even if they themselves were the ones that needed to leave the most.

At the same time, finding strong ones would help her a lot, but it could also backfire in her case as those would be the ones that wouldn't want to go back.

There was a delicate balance she had to find here through the hopefully kind hearts of the people.

After that, she would have to wait until the Emperor was out of his closed cultivation.

Alex continued visiting the other schools to learn about them. He had decided to take some classes in the artifact school at some point before visiting it, which he was going to go to last. There were still 2 other schools that had to visit, and he had decided to visit them both now that he was done with the Poison School.

The Royal School of Beast Taming had a headmaster that was surprisingly a long-beaked Crane. The crane had a name, Blackdot, apparently named by the man that had bonded him many millennia ago when he was just a young bird.

Now, he worked in the Royal School to help new cultivator meet and learn about beasts, as well as bond with each other.

"Is it that surprising, your majesty?" the bird asked. "Seeing a beast, instead of a human as the headmaster of this school?"

"Absolutely," Alex said. "But just because it's surprising, doesn't mean that it is necessarily something I hate or disapprove of. I mean, who am I to judge? Our ruler is a beast as well."

"Haha," the Crane laughed a bit. "I shouldn't have worried about visiting your Alchemy competition in that case. I thought I would ruin the mood and did not visit."

"I wouldn't have," Alex said with a bit of a chuckle in his voice.

"Then I apologize for assuming something about you that I shouldn't," the Crane said.

"Um, can we start the tour?" Alex asked.

The crane nodded and took Alex to see the school. The Royal School of Beast Taming was quite different from the other schools in that there weren't many buildings there.

Aside from some places for the students to stay and a few libraries and such, most of the rest of the area was just an open space where the people trained with their beasts.

There was also no level system in this school as anyone with a beast easily became a beast tamer.

"Everyone seems quite happy with each other," Alex said, looking around at the students that were running around the place. Most of them actually turned out to be little kids.

"We let youngsters come and meet with infant beasts that live in the school," the crane said. "Most are offsprings of beasts that remain in the school or those that have either been neglected by their parents or were just orphaned."

"We let the youngsters come and play around with the beasts, try to see if they're compatible so that they can maybe bond with each other," the crane said.

"This all seems quite a friendly environment," Alex said. "So I'm assuming there is no bond of servitude here."

"No," the crane shook his head. "While there are many that do that, we in this school only allow bonds of equals. If anyone is found forming a bond of servitude, we often force the person to break their bond and do it again."

"That's… something, I guess," Alex said as he looked around. "How many beasts does a person bond to on average?"

"On average?" the crane thought for a bit and answered. "I would say they mostly just bond one. But if you mean how much they can, then it's usually two. We discourage trying to go for even 3 as it thins out your spirit quite a bit, allowing for it to get damaged easily."

"Given how hard it is to heal a wounded spirit, we stay away from multiple bonds," the crane said.

And here was Alex who had spread his spirit into 6 directions already with his 3 beasts and 3 artifacts. He started worrying a little about his future.

The 8th Undying god had died due to some spirit injuries as well, so he needed to be careful.

"Do you have bonded beasts yourself, your Majesty?" the crane asked.

"I do," Alex said. "But they're quite shy and like to spend their time inside their beast space most of the time."

"Oh, you should force them to come out once in a while, your majesty. We also teach how to increase confidence in beasts by having them interact with other humans," the crane said.

"I'll think about it," Alex said. "Thank you for the tour."

Alex returned back to the palace afterward, leaving the school. That now only let the painting school that he had to visit.

After returning, he asked for a few glasses of refreshing juices to be brought over and had the elders as well as Pearl and Whisker drink it.

He was deciding to go make some pills as it had been quite a few days, when a servant came and passed along a message.

The crown prince wanted to meet him.

"Oh, send him in," Alex said and waited for the Crown prince to arrive while he placed Pearl and Whisker back into their beast space.

Chapter 1358 A List Of Four

Alex invited the Crown Prince in, letting him into his room where the other two elders had already arrived.

The crown prince had come to visit him a few times during the first month, and then twice in the 2nd month. In the third month, he visited not a single time.

He had yet to visit him this month either and at this point, Alex had simply stopped expecting for him to come. However, it seemed he had come this time around

"Your majesty," the crown prince bowed in his presence. "I hope you've been having fun. You must've felt alone with me and royal father being absent for quite a long time."

"I can't say I have been lonely, but I've certainly missed the occasional company, Prince Fangyu," Alex spoke.

"My apologies," the Crown Prince said. "But I hope you haven't been bored in this time, however. I heard you've been visiting quite a few of the royal schools."

"Yes, I have. I can't say I'm bored either. I have been having fun and learning quite a lot these days. They weren't lying when they said Eastern Continent is the most advanced. It truly deserves its reputation."

The Crown Prince smiled at the compliment. "Your words mean a lot to us, your majesty," he said.

"So, what brings you here? Just a little meet and greet?" Alex asked.

"Actually, no," the prince said. "I've actually been going around, looking for what you asked me to find."

Alex paused for a moment. "What I asked you to find?" he asked. He didn't remember asking the prince anything in the last 2 months that would explain his absence.

"Uhh... the queen candidates, your majesty?" the prince asked.

"Oh!" Alex only then realized what he meant. "Right, right. I thought you meant some ingredients or something."

"No, I was busy outside of my military hours looking for the perfect candidates for you, your Majesty," the Crown prince said as he brought out a few talismans. "Here are the ones I found. I'm certain you will like them."

Alex hesitated a bit, but quickly took the talismans and saw that there were 4 of them exactly.

"4?" he couldn't help but ask.

"Well, your requirements were quite stringent," the prince said with a bit of an awkward smile.

"Haha, right," Alex said and started looking into the talismans.

The first talisman had a girl whose name was Talia. She was clearly a player, and the prince had somehow managed to find her age to be less than 70 years as well.

She was from the Emerald Kingdom, with a cultivation base of the late Saint Core realm as of half a year ago when she appeared to take part in the Endless Shadow Abyss. She belonged to the Cloud Iron sect from the western parts of the Emerald Kingdom, where the major sect was set around the mountains.

Alex saw her image in the talisman. She was a short girl with thick black hair and a pair of gray eyes. She wore a green and white robe, while her hair held quite a few pearls on it.

The girl was quite pretty, even by Alex's standards. Not enough to make him feel anything, but he wouldn't be surprised if most regular men were smitten with her.

There was quite a few more description about her what weapon she used, what sort of techniques she had, and even if there were any rumors that she had any romantic partners.

None of that really mattered to Alex, but it was good to see the prince put thought into who he was suggesting.

Given the information, the girl was truly one of the more well-rounded, better females he had seen in a long time. However, there was one big flaw in her that made Alex frown.

She was not Hannah.

The entire reason why Alex had made the prince search for very young girls that were also powerful enough to be his equal was to find out if he could meet Hannah.

Given her body constitution, she should have been quite strong by now, so he expected her to be on the list.

Given that this Talia girl wasn't it, he moved on to the next talisman.

The next girl was someone named Ren Wujin.

This girl was taller than the previous girl, wore a red robe with falling petal designs all over it, and wore a golden mask on her head as a form of jewelry through which her bright blonde hair was tied up.

This girl was quite pretty as well and was apparently an adopted daughter of the Ren Family that existed in the Gold kingdom.

However, just like the other one, she wasn't Hannah that he was looking.

'Well, they seem to be using a different name, so maybe sister is doing the same as well,' Alex thought and pulled out another talisman.

This one had a tall girl that looked quite masculine in the way she dressed. She had dark black hair that was tied up in a ponytail behind her with a piece of ribbon.

While her dress was masculine, her face was ever so feminine. She also wore a lot of jewelry around her face that enhanced her beauty even more.

She wore milky blue robes with no additional design added to it, and from what he read, she was an elder in the Ice Mist Palace of the Ivory region.

Once again, this was another sect where only females were allowed to join. However, unlike the Frozen Heart sect of the Northern Continent, it didn't seem like the girls had any restrictions forced on them by either the sect or the cultivation method.

It was really just a sect that didn't want men to join them.

The girl's name was Su Railin, one of the more awkward names that Alex had heard until now, that he could guess was chosen by the girl herself without knowing much about the names of the outside world.

'Once again, not Hannah,' he thought and shook his head.

The final girl had a head full of red hair, immediately catching his attention. She wore a dark blue robe with long pink ribbons floating around her tied-up hair.

The jewelry that dangled from her hair shaped her pretty little face giving her quite the charm.

Her name was Layla and she was from the Immortal Saint Pavillion of the Ebony Kingdom. However, evident by her name, she wasn't Hannah either.

None of the 4 girls the prince had brought back was Hannah.

Alex started worrying that the worst-case scenario was true and that Hannah had died at some point since she was teleported here.

His Aunt Liz had just recently been heartbroken after learning of her husband Rob's death. She could not handle knowing that her daughter was dead too.

'No, I must find sister under all conditions,' Alex thought. He looked at the girls once again. While they weren't Hannah, they gave him a pretty good idea of what an average girl with strong talent could achieve.

What these girls could do, his sister could certainly do. If she was alive, she had certainly made a name for herself somewhere on the continent, even if the name she used wasn't her real one.

All Alex had to do now was go out and find her.

Chapter 1359 Royal School Of Painting

﻿

"So, you like anyone, your majesty?" the crown prince asked. He looked quite excited to hear Alex's response to the ladies he was presenting to him.

Alex smiled a bit and shook his head. "I can't tell from these talismans alone. I must visit them all and meet them in person before I make any judgment. They all might be who I am looking for, and so can none of them be it. Only time will tell," he said.

"Oh, right," the Crown Prince nodded. "When do you plan of going to meet with them?"

Alex looked at the talisman again and thought about the information he had gathered in the past 3 months regarding various things in the Eastern Continent.

One of that information was on when and where the various events were going to take place.

The next one was in the Emerald City.

"I'll go meet this Talia girl first," Alex said. "The Endless Shadow Abyss opens up in 6 months, right?"

"Yes, I believe so," the prince said. "Do you wish to meet her and then go to the abyss at the same time?"

"Why not? It sounds like it'll be fun," Alex said. He could also search for Hannah there.

The prince nodded. "I had thought you would be visiting the Azure Lake first, and maybe going to the Boundless Enlightenment domain to gather up some dao knowledge."

"I had thought of that, but I realized I could do that whenever I wanted to, but I need to take the chance with the Abyss right now to see what I'm capable of," Alex said.

"Hmm, when do you plan on leaving? I'll let King Jin know that you'll be visiting him soon," the prince said.

"No need," Alex replied. "There's still 6 months remaining. I can go at the last moment. I have quite a few things to do here anyway."

"Oh, uh… then please let me know when you plan to leave. I'll let King Jin know about it then," the prince said.

Alex nodded and thanked the prince.

The crown prince left the room after that, leaving Alex and the rest alone for the time being.

"Your Majesty, can we see those talismans?" Elder Yao asked.

"Why? So you can see if there's a suitable queen for the continent?" Alex asked.

The elders gulped, not saying anything. "It would be great if you could get an heir, your majesty," Elder Liang said. "Even if there is little to no chance you will leave them behind."

Alex sighed. "Would that even matter?" he asked. "What if the next phoenix just dissolves the human royal family after they come?"

"Umm… " the elders had no answer for that. They simply hoped that such a case wouldn't happen. They had spent the past 5 thousand years trying to fix a mistake that they thought they did, and as a result, they had come to greatly care about the Southern Continent.

Now, they wanted to do whatever it was in their power to keep it prosper, even if they wouldn't be here to see it happen.

Alex sent the elders away and went through the talismans once again before putting them away. He called Whisker and Pearl back out and continued cultivating along with the two of them.

He spent quite a lot of time cultivating, going well into the day before he finally got up to leave. He wanted to go and join the artifact school to learn there as soon as he could, so he decided to get done with the other remaining school that he had yet to go to.

The Royal School of Painting.

Alex arrived along with the elders who were curious about the school as well. Someone notified the headmaster of his arrival, and soon an older man in a graceful white robe walked out to welcome him.

He bowed to Alex, greeting him.

"It has been a while, your majesty," the old man said. "I had heard that you were going around the other schools, and I have been hoping you would come by this place eventually."

Alex smiled. The old man had been there that day during the alchemist competition along with many other people. While he hadn't talked to Alex, they had still greeted each other.

"I had planned to visit all the schools. This just took a while longer to get to," Alex said. "I was hoping you will give me a tour of the school, and help me understand the purpose of this place."

"Absolutely, your majesty," the man said. "Please come with me."

Alex walked in with the man.

The Royal School of Painting was mostly full of buildings all around. There weren't just many buildings but they were also quite tall.

Alex looked around as he entered the first building. There were a lot of different cultivators that were staring at the wall, looking at the paintings that hung by them.

He was quite surprised by the number of people that were there. "Where would you rank your school in terms of the number of students you have amongst the 10?" he asked.

"Amongst the other Royal Schools? Hmm, we certainly have more students than puppetry and beast taming, and given how few there are in the cooking school, I would say we come around 5th or 6th."

"The others are a bit more attractive to the students, so they end up going there," the headmaster said.

"I see," Alex said and walked around, looking at the paintings that the students were looking at. The paintings were quite beautiful from what Alex could tell, but… they weren't that great.

Alex didn't see the point of staring at them for so long. Were the students trying to learn from it?

"Does the school not teach their students how to paint?" Alex asked. "Or are they just looking at those paintings to try and get inspiration for their own work?"

"Them? No, they aren't doing either of those things," the headmaster explained. "They are actually trying to absorb whatever Intent is in the paintings to try and understand them in hopes that they learn something from them."

Alex paused for a moment when he heard that. "I'm sorry… Intent?" he asked looking around at the paintings on the wall. "Those paintings have intent?"

"Yes," the headmaster nodded. "The Intent of the painter is carved into those paintings, allowing the viewers to experience what the painter might be thinking or feeling, giving them a better understanding of the painting."

Alex was quite surprised. He slowly walked toward one of the paintings and looked at it for a while.

The painting on the wall was of a man sitting on top of a tree with a flute in his hand. The painting was okay at best in terms of quality, but the longer Alex stared at it, the more beautiful it seemed to become in his eyes.

The green leaves became luscious, the man's clothes fluttering in the wind. And soon enough, Alex felt like he could hear the sweet melody from the flute that the man in the painting played.

Alex's eyes widened in shock.

It was only now that he realized that paintings were one of the best ways to hone one's Intent.

Chapter 1360 Importance Of Paintings

"This painting doesn't have much Intent actually, your Majesty," the headmaster explained. "if you want to see ones with better Intent in them, I can take you to our hall of fame where the best of the best paintings are kept."

Alex slowly moved away from the painting still quite surprised. "That painting had quite the intent too," he said.

"Yes, but you have to spend some time concentrating on it to feel it," the headmaster said. "You can actually feel the intent from the good ones by just glancing at them."

Alex nodded and walked away.

"I wasn't aware that such a thing was possible," Alex said. "So you can train Intent with paintings too huh?"

Was that why the room for painting was on the highest of floors in the Sundering Sanctum? Were the immortals aware of how useful paintings could be?

Now that he thought about it? Was his paintings back then just bad or had he just not put any intent into what he was making?

Alex stopped thinking about the playground for now. He had other questions he wanted the answers to now.

"So the students can train their intent with their painting, huh? But is there a reason why they are being placed openly for others to see? You mentioned something about them trying to learn from the painting."

"Yes," the headmaster said. "Well, they're actually trying to learn from the Intent more precisely. Given that the intent comes from a cultivator, usually what they understand about a topic can also be learned from their intent."

"It's mostly impressions, but it's a lot more helpful than one might think," the headmaster said. "After all, with impressions one is not taught about the topic, but is considered to learn on his own."

The elders were a little puzzled as to what the man was talking about. Alex was the same for the first few seconds, but quickly a piece of information floated into his mind that he mostly didn't care about.

One could not learn a Dao if they were taught about it entirely. One had to search for the answers on their own if they wanted to learn the dao.

"Teaching is bad, but with impressions... one is still searching for the answer," Alex spoke softly. "Are you saying... most of these students are trying to learn a Dao right now?"

The headmaster smiled. "Haha, I don't even have to explain anything. Your majesty understands everything I'm trying to say before I even say it," he said.

The elders behind him were quite surprised as well. "You can learn Dao from paintings?" they asked.

"Oh yes," the headmaster said. "As long as the person who paints knows of that dao or has some ideas about it, they can put it into the painting with their intent which the other person can look at and read from."

"Of course, not all paintings have those, but even then there is a chance to learn from it," the headmaster said.

Alex frowned a little. Why were the other continents not aware of this?

He could understand the Western Continent losing every bit of knowledge about it in the last 5 thousand years. Hell, they didn't even know much about Dao.

However, what about the other two continents?

"Is this information a secret? It hasn't spread to the other continents yet," Alex said.

"Hmm, I wouldn't say they are a secret exactly, but I can see why the information isn't widespread," the headmaster said. "Even most of the people in the eastern continent don't believe this to be a good way to learn about Dao, especially because in the end, what we are doing is just an imitation of the actual thing."

"Imitation?" Alex asked. "Of what?"

"The Boundless Enlightenment Domain, of course," the headmaster said. "You must have heard about it by now, haven't you your majesty?"

"The Boundless Enlightenment Domain? The place that's supposed to teach you about Dao but people use it now as a tourist site?" he asked.

"Haha, yes, that's it," the headmaster laughed at the description. "The secret realm is actually filled with various paintings and other objects created with an intent to help people learn about the various Dao. As such, people would rather go there than try and learn here if they can."

"Oh! That realm has paintings too?" Alex asked.

"Amongst other things, yes. Paintings are actually the majority of what is there," the headmaster said.

"I see," Alex mused to himself. "Then I must visit that place soon. But then why are there students trying to learn Dao here?"

"Umm... " the headmaster hesitated a bit. "It's actually quite expensive to go there. They charge based on the days you want to stay inside and trying to learn Dao in a short time is not exactly a very easy task."

"So most of them spend what they can there, and then try to come here to follow through to learn whatever else they missed," the headmaster said.

"It's the same as going to a fancy restaurant to eat an expensive meal, only to then go to another cheaper restaurant to fill yourself up because you are still hungry by the end."

Alex chuckled a bit at the explanation. "I understand now," he said. "So the painting can help the painter hone their Intent, and it can help others learn Dao from it, huh? Honestly, I never imagined the paintings to be this good. Had I not come, I would have thought it to be a complete waste, this and the cooking school."

"I can assure you, they are not," the headmaster smiled. "If it was useless, this place would have been shut down ages ago."

Alex nodded.

"Also, painting is not just a way to hone your Intent, but it can also help in learning the dao for the painter themselves," the headmaster said. "It can be a form of meditation where you lose yourself in the paintings for hours and hours on end."

"While your hand and brush wander on the canvas, your mind can wander on the concept of what you are trying to learn. Honestly, it is one of the best ways to try and learn a Dao. Even more so than looking at paintings from others themselves I would say."

Alex gave a surprised look. That sounded quite good now that he thought about it. He had the Dao pills, but this wouldn't hurt to do either.

Learning Dao and honing Intent at the same time sounded quite good to him.

"I'm assuming one needs to have a talent in painting before they can start honing their intent," Alex said.

"They don't exactly need the talent to hone their intent," the Headmaster said. "While it can help, there have been objectively bad paintings with great intents to them. However, it does make it hard for the person looking at the painting to get a clear picture of what is going on, and as such the intent that comes through the painting can be a little confusing at times."

"I see," Alex said, thinking of learning some painting skills soon.

A building appeared in the distance just then, one that was more of a tower than anything.

"That is our Hall of Fame, your majesty," the man introduced the building. "That is where we keep the best of the best paintings that have been made throughout the entirety of our school's existence."

Chapter 1361 Hall Of Fame

Alex walked into the Hall of Fame as the mayor took him in. The elders followed behind him and arrived in a giant open room where very few paintings were hanging from the wall.

There was a circular set of stairs that went around the walls of this massive building, and along those very walls was where the paintings were.

"Right this way, your majesty," the headmaster said and took him to the stairs, where Alex could start his journey of viewing the paintings in the room.

"There are a total of 12 paintings in the Hall of Fame at the moment," the headmaster explained. "Each one better than the next. We will be starting off with the older ones and going halfway up to the stairs where the latest ones are."

Before they arrived at the first painting, the headmaster paused and turned around. "I must warn you your majesty, some of these paintings might be hard to view due to the subject of the painting itself and the Intent that accompanies it."

"If at any point you feel like you are hurt or disgusted by the feeling, simply close your eyes and look away. The Intent won't affect you if you stop looking at it," the headmaster said.

"Thank you for your concern, headmaster," Alex said. "I shall do as you say."

The headmaster nodded and took him to the first painting.

Alex glanced at the painting and started feeling a mix of warmth and heartache at the same time.

The painting was a picture of a small girl in a white dress with a bright smile, playing in a field of flowers. The entire painting looked so beautiful, and yet... the ones looking at it could only feel the sadness.

"This painting is called The Summer's Dream. It was painted by an excellent painter over 17 thousand years ago, and the subject of the painting is the painter's daughter, who he lost to some incurable physical conditions."

"He made this painting as a method of moving on from her death that had affected him so much at the time, but also as a way of never forgetting her."

"This is truly a masterpiece and is the painting that made the people at the time start the hall of fame to commemorate the painter at the time. He never made anything as good from what we can tell, but he certainly created precedence that allowed 11 different painters to send their names down the annuls of history.

Alex stared at the painting for a while, taking in everything. He thought he saw the flowers move in the wind, the girl swinging on the swing. He could hear happy, cheerful laughter from the girl and could tell that she was very loved.

This was a truly moving piece.

After looking at it for a while, they decided to move on.

The second painting was from 12 thousand years ago, a whole 5 thousand years after the first painting.

It was a piece called 'The War God's Fury', and it depicted a man killing an army of thousands of cultivators in a single strike.

Apparently, it was made by a man who once had to fight against an entire sect of cultivators to rescue the woman he loved that had been kidnapped. However, before he could rescue her, the sect killed the woman, earning the man's fury.

He had fought them all in a bloody life-and-death battle where he had killed them all. The painting obviously depicted a rather exaggerated version of the events, but it still managed to send across the feeling of fury and anger through the painting.

Alex could feel his heart beat faster as his own fighting spirit was touched on after looking at the painting.

He closed his eyes and calmed his feelings before opening them. "Truly magnificent," he said.

They moved on to the third painting and Alex stopped as he looked at it. As soon as he looked at it, an odd feeling had grown inside of him.

It was a painting of a mountain, nothing else. It was a single mountain on a white background that wasn't even properly colored in at all.

The mountain was without any greenery, so it was entirely brown in color, and it also wasn't the best-looking mountain at all.

However, the Intent that came through the painting was not something Alex had expected. Even more than the first two paintings, this was something else entirely.

"The piece is just called the mountain," the headmaster said. "It was created by a painter who—"

The headmaster stopped when he saw Alex put his hand up to make him stop. He didn't want a description now. He simply wanted to see this painting.

It was possible for him to tell what was happening here to some extent. This wasn't a painting made by a painter at all, but rather someone very amateur. However, the heart and soul they had put into this painting made it come out quite well.

And the Intent that was driven into the painting made this a masterpiece.

The elders and headmaster stopped looking at the painting and started looking at Alex instead. The headmaster above all was surprised to see Alex's reaction as he understood what it meant for someone to view this painting in particular with such high attention.

He slowly stepped back and asked the elders to step back with him. They left Alex alone to view the painting for a while.

Alex wasn't even aware of what was happening around him. He knew he was safe here, so he had completely focused on the painting itself.

The more he looked at the mountain, the more he thought he understood what it was trying to convey. The more he looked at the mountain, the more he understood the mystery surrounding it.

After staring at it without moving for nearly half an hour, Alex reached into his ring and pulled out a bottle. Then, he pulled out a pill from inside of it, one with 8 veins on it.

The elders immediately recognized the pill and were surprised at what Alex was planning on doing. As Alex ate the pill and sat down, the elders requested the headmaster to move even further away.

The headmaster was more than happy to comply. After all, it wasn't an uncommon scenario to see someone learn some mystery into the unknown after looking at that painting.

After all, that was why this was placed in the Hall of Fame in the first place, despite the obviously bad art in the painting itself.

The three stood there, watching Alex meditate on the knowledge he had just acquired. They were silent the whole time through, not speaking a single word from start to finish.

The headmaster had shut the building down, not allowing anyone from entering for the time being. He wasn't sure how long it would take for Alex to learn it, or if he could even learn it, but he was ready to give him as much time as he needed.

The three started sitting down and cultivating as well, waiting for Alex to be done.

A little less than a day later, the three of them looked up into the sky where they could feel the fluctuations in the aura.

The two elders felt nothing weird about the situation, other than thinking that their king was going to learn another Dao.

However, the headmaster of the school was a different case. He had seen people learn Dao from a painting, but it was never something that happened on a single day.

It took months, if not years to properly learn everything about a Dao before learning it. Had Alex been trying to learn this Dao for a long time and this was his lucky break?

It was possible, which would mean that he was lucky to have come here and witnessed this painting. However, if that was not the case then... had he just called down the worldly laws just by meditating for a single day?

The truth was in fact somewhere in between. Alex hadn't tried to learn this dao at all, but he had gained some insight into it for a while now after all the pills he had made that used this very element.

Coming here and seeing the painting was in fact a fortunate encounter that had helped him push himself that much further into looking into the mysteries of this Dao.

On top of that, an 8-veined Dao pill helped him a lot with processing the knowledge he had just learned, which allowed him to call the Worldly laws down so early.

The worldly laws descended onto Alex, helping him learn about the Dao. At the same time, Alex's mind grew lucid as the pill's effect wore off a lot, which allowed him to grasp the opportunity that was provided to him.

While he tried his best to learn the Dao, he also used the opportunity to start cultivating as this was the best moment to do so.

It had been a while since he had entered the 6th Saint Core realm, so it was about time for him to go that much further.

Half an hour later, the worldly laws descended back into heaven and its aura fully disappeared from the world afterward.

Alex took a deep breath and opened his eyes now that he was done with it.

Using the random coincidence as a catalyst for it, Alex had broken through to the 7th Saint Core realm.

And at the same time, he had also learned the Dao of Earth.

Chapter 1362 More Paintings

The headmaster couldn't hide his surprise as he congratulated Alex multiple times for breaking through and learning a Dao at the same time.

Alex gave a small smile, apologizing for causing a commotion.

After the few finished discussing, Alex allowed the elders to view the painting as well, but since neither of them needed to see it, they moved on.

The 4th painting, after the mountain, was a canvas with no paint at all. Alex was at first confused about what was going on, but the Intent of the painting made it somehow clear to him what it was.

Snow.

The canvas was supposed to be full of snow. He could feel the bone-chilling cold coming from the canvas that held nothing. Someone really had managed to place their intent on the pages without putting any paint in there.

Alex thought it was an incredible feat and looked to the headmaster for an answer.

"This is a painting from 9 thousand years ago called White. It depicts a snowstorm that his previous majesty and the majesty had to go through in the Northern Continent when they went to take part in the first InterContinental Competition.

"InterContinental Competition?" Alex looked at the Headmaster. "What's that?"

"It was a competition that only lasted a single time that took place in the Northern Continent. It was created to bridge the gap between the youths of the various continents if I'm not remembering wrong," the headmaster said. "Apparently the one who drew this painting had been part of that group."

"There was something like that in the past, huh? And it took place in the Northern Continent?" Alex asked. 9 thousand years ago would be when the Snow Immortal sect was still the ruler of the Northern Continent. He could see why the knowledge of that time was gone.

"Well, I am only letting you know what I know, so I can't really confirm the truth on this one, but I don't see why it could be a lie," the headmaster said. "Especially given this Intent. It's quite hard to fake an Intent, you know?"

"I see," Alex said. "But then... why was it a one-time thing? They should've continued it," Alex said.

"Well, that's because..." the headmaster hesitated a bit before speaking. "Sigh, it's apparently because the youths taken from the Eastern Continent were so strong that they defeated all the other competitors from the other 3 continents without a single loss. With that sort of result, they saw no reason to carry on the competition."

"Ah!" Alex chuckled a bit. "That actually makes a lot of sense. Thank you for telling me that."

The 5th painting in line was a piece from 8 thousand years ago called The Emperor's Ascent. It was a piece depicting the glorious day when Long Tiankong was crowned the Emperor of the continent after his father gave up the throne to enjoy the last of his life in peace.

The painting detailed the tremendous amount of people that were gathered in the square where the coronation had taken place, and even the silhouette of the Azure Dragon hung in the sky.

Cheers, Glory, Excitement. Alex could feel it all through the painting, reminding him of the day he himself became the King of the Southern Continent.

He could feel the aura of the dragon in the sky, blessing the new emperor's ascent to the throne.

"Not bad!" he said softly. "I kinda got to see his majesty's coronation." He chuckled a bit and moved on to the next painting.

The 6th painting was from 7 thousand years ago and depicted a person's battle against a sea monster. It was an incredible-looking piece of art that most definitely belonged in the hall.

The 7th painting made Alex feel like he was standing in an inferno. It was a painting that was drawn with the Fire Dao Intent woven into the paintings, so anyone who looked at it could feel the Intent of the Dao coming through it.

If Alex didn't have any Fire Dao right now, he might have learned it all right there.

The 8th painting was from 6 thousand years ago and depicted an execution.

"It's called 'When the Kingdom Dies'. It's a painting of the execution of the 5 kings that tried to dethrone his majesty 6 thousand years ago. From right to left, we have King Fang, Queen Fen, Queen Jang, King Lin, and King Xuang. All 5 kings were executed back then, their kingdoms replaced to mere colors, and new kings and queens placed on the throne."

Alex looked at the painting as the haunting sense of dread flowed from it. The crimson color on the canvas and the color of blood made him smell iron. The faceless crowd made him feel suffocated, and he could almost hear the cries of the kings and queens who were executed that day.

The raw emotions on the page weren't something Alex had expected to feel so deeply, but he did. He could almost sense the painter's lament at what had happened.

After viewing it for a little longer, they moved on to the 9th painting.

This painting depicted the Azure dragon and some raw sketches of a bird, snake, and tortoise, all of whom were standing in front of a dead white tiger.

"It's called 'The Oathbreaker'," the headmaster said. "It depicts the time when the White Tiger broke his oath to not interfere in this realm and tried to take over. Fortunately, his majesty, the Azure Dragon, and the other rulers of the continents went and defeated him."

"I see," Alex said, saying nothing more. It was neither the right time nor was he interested in revealing the truth of what happened to the world back then. They were free to believe what they wanted to.

Alex looked at it for a while, enjoying it as nothing more than a piece of painting. He moved on to the next one, and as soon as he looked at it, he nearly vomit himself.

The image depicted of the Dragon Emperor with a giant sword, swinging it around, killing a black panther beast in the process.

"This painting is known as the 'The Moment of Victory'," the headmaster said. "It depicts the war that took place in the Western Continent where all 3 continents joined together to go and destroy evil," the headmaster started explaining.

"It's the moment in the war against the Central continent where our emperor won a decisive battle against one of the White Tiger's subordinates. This was the battle that turned the tide against the beast, allowing us to fully defeat them back then."

Alex looked at the image that gave a feeling of excitement and glory. However, feeling those feelings while watching who was most likely the Black Jaguar's father wasn't that exciting or glorious in his eyes.

He would rather not look at this painting at all.

He nodded while the headmaster explained a bit more about the painting, but he wasn't listening at all. He was waiting for the next painting, so he walked up as long as soon as he could after the headmaster was done talking.

Then, they finally got onto the 11th painting.

Chapter 1363 Tian Honglui

The next painting in line, the 11th one was named 'The Players' Descent'.

Alex looked at the painting in a bit of confusion as there wasn't anything in that painting that made him think of players.

The painting was instead just a piece of art with a landscape view of the city, with the sky wide above it. In the sky was where the clouds were marked in lights of bright green and deep gold, surrounded by lightning that seemed to scar the sky itself.

The wind seemed to blow the clear clouds, while lightning snaked around it scattering through the sky. The golden light shined from nowhere and brightened everything in the vicinity.

The city was colored green and gold, reminding Alex of the cauldron his master had given him so long ago. The lightning seemed normal, not like when one was breaking through or forming pill clouds.

It also only remained in the sky, never falling down.

Alex could feel the awe and shock the painter had felt when he drew this. He had wanted to transfer all that he felt at the time into the painting and he had done so successfully.

The Intent was quite strong with this one and definitely gave a surreal feeling when looking at it. Alex could even feel his fear.

There was no elemental Dao aura from this one, which was a missed opportunity to better enhance the experience, but the Intent alone was enough to make it a masterpiece.

Alex stared at it for a while, and the headmaster finally spoke.

"Ah, the Player's Descent. One of our newest masterpieces," he said. "After over four thousand years, when everyone had stopped expecting masterpieces to exist, one person came and made this."

"A truly talented young painter from the Gold Kingdom, Tian Honglui of the Tian family."

"A young painter? This was made by someone young?" Alex asked.

"Yes, young," the headmaster said. "Although, by your majesty's standard, he might be quite old."

"How old is he?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, about 400 years old I believe," the headmaster said. "He's quite young for a Saint."

"He is," Alex said. As long as he stopped comparing humans from the central continent with these people, he could see how talented these folks were.

Alex looked back at the painting and said, "Explain to me what this is about."

"Right," the headmaster said. "The Players' Descent marks the day of the arrival of the players. The phenomenon that you see here heralded the arrival of those players. The painter was able to capture the exact feeling everyone had felt that day, a sense of awe and wonder, which is why it is in here."

"Oh," Alex said with a surprised look on his face. "It heralded the arrival of the players, you say."

"Indeed," the headmaster said. "This phenomenon appeared one day, and 2 days later we started getting Players. If that wasn't a signal for their arrival, I don't know what is."

Alex got curious and turned back toward the two elders who were equally confused. They shook their heads toward Alex, telling him no such thing had happened to them.

And from what he could remember no one talked about those things back in the Western Continent when he was just starting out too. Then why did such a thing happen here?

Alex fell into thought for a while, wondering about all the things that were different in the Eastern Continent from the other continents.

The number of players for one was certainly different. They singlehandedly had more players here than anywhere else in the other continent, holding way more than the other continents combined.

The Eastern Continent was also a way better place for one to grow, so it could be that the senior did something to prepare them for what was going to happen here.

Or maybe the Eastern Continent had somehow interacted with the teleportation formation? Causing some sort of phenomenon to occur before the players arrived.

Alex searched for answers, but it seemed like there weren't any. He shook his head confused and annoyed. "Let's move on," he said.

"Yes," the headmaster said and walked up front.

Alex walked too and before he could even look at the final painting, he could feel an aura that he hadn't felt in a very, very long time.

He looked at the painting as his eyes slowly started widening in shock.

The painting depicted of a single thing, a single giant white line that went from the sky to the ground in a single stroke. A lightning strike.

Just from the shape and size of the lightning, as well as the fear and destruction intent that came from the painting, he could tell that it was neither the Tribulation lightning nor the Pill Cloud lightning.

The painting he was looking at depicted what was most definitely a Heavenly Judgment lightning.

"Here we have another painting by our friend Tian Honglui. He was so talented that he managed to make not one but two paintings that made it into the Hall of Fame."

"This one is called the 'The Lightning God's Anger'. It depicts a rather weird instance that we are not sure what exactly it was," the headmaster said. "The empty sky suddenly turned dark and cloudy and the lightning bolt dropped from the heaven."

"Where did it drop?" Alex asked the headmaster.

"Hmm? I don't think we know exactly. But it was somewhere in the east of here," the headmaster said. "As you can probably tell from the lightning bolt, the aura of the lightning was so threatening that it scared so many."

"Even this artist himself didn't attempt to draw the lightning from that time for almost 5 years before he eventually couldn't hold himself back," the headmaster said.

Alex knew what the Heavenly Judgment lightning was as he had seen it happen to Ren Xiao firsthand. The elders knew what it was as well as they had seen it happen to Scarlet firsthand as well.

However, it didn't seem like any of these guys knew what exactly this lightning was.

"Was there a single lightning strike?" Alex asked.

"No, there were 3," the headmaster said with a surprised look. "How did you know, your majesty?"

Alex didn't answer. "And the date, when exactly did this happen?" he asked instead.

"The date?" the headmaster turned around and looked at the painting. "It was... ah, right. It was about 2 months after the events of his first painting. It's about that time frame, yeah."

"2 months after the players started coming into the game?" Alex repeated the man's words as a timeline slowly formed in his head.

Less than 2 months after the players had arrived on this continent, something had happened that had caused the Heavenly Judgment to fall, and if he didn't know any better, he would guarantee that the one that was hit by it was none other than the Azure Dragon.

That was to say, until about half a century ago, the Dragon was still alive.

However, that wasn't even what perplexed Alex the most. The thing that made his head hurt was the fact that this event was so incredibly close to when Pearl and his mother were sent to the Western Continent.

That was to say, the Azure Dragon might have been involved in some form in the attack that led to Pearl's mother dying at his hand.

Chapter 1364 Qi Lines

The Azure Imperium had a hand in Pearl's mother's death, and it happened around the same time the Azure Dragon had died.

'Was the Azure Dragon involved? Were the humans acting under the Dragon's orders?' Alex thought. He tried to make sense of the information and that was the only thing he could come up with right away.

Given that the Heavenly Judgment had fallen in the east, it was either in the Dragon's own secret realm, or towards the Beast Paradise where Pearl must have been born.

"What do you think, your majesty?" the headmaster asked. "Amazing, isn't it?"

Alex quickly stopped thinking for now and nodded. "Yes, it's quite amazing," he said.

"Yes, he's a gem, this Honglui kid," the headmaster said. "Truly one of the most amazing individuals in the entire continent."

"He is," Alex said. "I would love to meet this person."

"I'm sure he will meet you if you request for him, your majesty," the headmaster said.

Alex nodded. "I'll think about it. Thank you for showing us the Hall of Fame. This was truly quite an experience," he said.

"Haha, it was my pleasure, your majesty," the man replied happily.

Alex left the hall along with his elders and made his way back to the palace. He had no intention of visiting any other place today as a lot of things were on his mind.

Once he was in his room, he called out to Pearl and told him what he had witnessed in the 12th painting, the one that was called The Lightning God's Anger.

"Do you think the Azure Dragon had a hand in my mother's death?" Pearl asked.

"I think so, but it's hard to tell," Alex said. "In the first place, it could also be a coincidence that these two things were happening simultaneously, but I don't think it was."

Pearl stayed quiet, not knowing what to say.

"I think we have to find your grandmother first if we want to know anything more about your parents. If all is well, she should still be in the beast's paradise, but... with your mother being attacked, I can't tell."

Pearl nodded. "Either way, we cannot ask for any sort of help from anyone that is remotely connected to the Emperor and the royal family, right?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "We will have to do it all on our own. Let's see when we can go to the Beast Paradise. I will have to wait for a while so the emperor doesn't get suspicious of why I'm trying to visit that place right away."

"Where do we go next then?" Pearl asked.

"The Emerald Kingdom, as I told the Crown Prince," Alex said. "But before that... I have another school to visit, and learn some more."

Alex planned on visiting the Royal School of Artifacts.

He went there the very next day and quickly joined them. A normal person would have to take part in the test to at least reach Level 1 to become part of the school, but Alex got to join without it.

He was given a bit of an introduction to the school by the headmasters, and following that, Alex started learning how to make the artifacts.

This was the first time he was learning about making artifacts and not just about making swords and armor which was a smaller section of making artifacts.

Artifacts were a weird thing. Sometimes they were difficult to make. Sometimes they were not. It all depended on the material used to make the artifact as well as the addition made by the creator that added something onto the artifact.

The additions were usually made to allow for Qi to be accepted and then used by the artifacts in case their materials weren't able to. Such a thing could be achieved either by carving formations onto the materials that had made the artifact or by using Qi lines.

There was also an increasing number of people advocating for runes to be used instead after Scripts were made popular by the players.

They each had their own advantages and disadvantages to them and one could choose what they wanted for their artifacts based on what they needed it to do.

Qi Lines were carved directly into the object to just hold Qi. This was what was used most of the time as it was a path for Qi to enter an object and then be used as the maker wished.

It could also be deliberately made into shapes that could allow for things to happen that wouldn't require the user's intent. The shape of the Qi line was for each line, and the more complicated it was, the more things it could do.

In Midnight's case, Alex had made Qi lines inside of it with Godslayer's help such that when he poured Yin Qi into it, he could use the God-Rending Death Blade technique. If it was made into other shapes, he could probably use various other techniques.

And all it would require was for the user to pour in Qi. That was perhaps the biggest advantage of Qi lines when compared to the other two.

One did not have to worry about how they used their Qi to activate them. As long as the Qi flowed into it, it worked.

However, there was a reason why they weren't the only things used. In fact, there were 2 reasons for it.

First, the Qi lines needed to be in specific shapes, and as such you couldn't necessarily fit it all into a single object. For example, the Qi lines for armors wrapped around the armors while making various shapes.

That sort of shape just wouldn't fit on a sword. Similarly, a sword's long Qi lines wouldn't fit in armor either.

So, if one wanted their artifact to do something very specific, they needed to be aware of what sort of shape they would require and had little freedom regarding that.

Second, the Qi lines were permanent and you couldn't do anything about it. Every time you poured in Qi, the Qi lines would activate no matter what. So, if one ever needed something changed about the artifact, the only way to do it would be to break the artifact down and rebuild it.

Also, there was the fact that there wasn't that much information on Qi lines in this realm, so it couldn't be used to its full potential.

In opposition to that, there was a lot known about Formations and Scripts.

Formations could easily be replaced with another one and made to work differently if set up that way.

Scripts could do a lot more than either Formation or Qi lines could do with little material to work with.

Many items from Pill testers to flying boats used formations and scripts in them. They were widely popular for most things, but that was not to say they weren't without flaws.

Neither of those things could work on their own and always required spirit stones to activate them.

In formation's case, you couldn't even activate it if it wasn't metal. Anything else needed either careful pouring of Qi which was pretty much impossible0 or a direct connection to some other form that was connected to a spirit vein.

In the script's case, it simply couldn't be used without resonating spirit stones or veins with the object and was impossible to power up in the midst of battle if the spirit stones ran out.

Alex continued learning a lot more and very soon he started making things as well.

Chapter 1365 Making Artifacts

A month or so had passed since Alex had started learning about artifacts. He had mostly stuck to the knowledge part of the learning where he was making sure he knew all the materials and Qi lines he needed to know before making the artifact.

Today was the first day when he decided to make an artifact himself.

After a lot of deliberation of what he should make, he decided to start with something small, but useful.

A storage bag.

A storage bag consisted of exactly 1 material. A leather from any beast that could handle Qi lines.

Alex had a small circular piece of leather that was about 20 centimeters in diameter in front of him, and a random piece of string to tie the pouch.

The leather came from the skin of a Stringhorned Deer and was an above-average leather when it came to making storage pouches.

He remembered the method to make a storage bag.

First, he had to make circular Qi lines inside the leather while heating it up to make it possible. Then he had to tie up the pouch and plate it on the formation. Then, he needed to activate the formation.

He didn't have a formation, but he didn't need it. Compared to other people, Alex was going to have an easier time with this for sure.

He was in a private room, so he had nothing to worry about and started making the artifact.

First, he took the leather and started pouring Qi lines into it. The Qi lines were slightly complicated, but Alex found them easy to form. The heat required came from his Dao and it easily helped him keep the leather hot and highly flexible without burning it.

With the heat in control, he made multiple Qi lines through the entire leather. The more Qi lines he made, the larger the storage would be, so he only stopped when there was no more space.

Once he was done with making Qi lines, he let the leather rest and cool down as the Qi lines were set up. Alex sped up the process slightly, but not a lot as he didn't want the leather to start having cracks in it. That would destroy the entire thing.

After a few minutes, it completely cooled down, so Alex wrapped it around with the string, making it look like a normal storage pouch. However, it couldn't store in objects just yet.

It didn't have any space in it.

That was where the formation would come in, but Alex didn't need a formation to use space.

The moment he started using his Dao, the space inside the room started turning and twisting as it was slowly pinched and threaded into the storage bag.

At the same time, Alex started pouring Qi into the leather to activate the Qi lines in there.

As the Space went in, the Qi lines started holding onto it. That was a quirk of the beast leather that made it possible for Qi lines to be used in a certain fashion.

Each Qi line could only hold so much space, however, so after a while, it started rejecting Qi that was poured into it one by one.

Alex continued pouring in the Qi and space until the storage bag could no longer handle any more space. When he realized his Qi was being rejected due to the lack of any functional Qi lines, he stopped.

He also stopped dragging in the space. The moment he did so, the excess space burst out into the room, shaking it a bit before passing through the objects, replacing the space within them.

Alex ignored that and looked at the storage bag he had made.

The storage bag looked no different from the millions of other storage bags he had seen. The leather and strings' color were always different, but fundamentally, they were always just storage bags.

Alex then poured Qi into the storage bag and realized that it was surprisingly quite big. He had managed to add a bit more Qi lines than an average cultivator most likely could, so it turned out better than most.

The storage bag had enough space to hold something as large as two spirit veins coiled together. It was as big as one of the larger storage bags that could be bought in the market.

If Alex wanted to make a larger storage bag, he would have to use leather that could function much better with the Qi lines, as well as make more Qi lines, which would require the leather to be slightly larger.

Once he was done, he reviewed his work for a while before being satisfied with it.

Once that was over, he started moving on to bigger things one by one.

The next item Alex made a few days later was a pill tester. For a pill tester, whether it used fog or directly showed the harmony of the pill, he needed 3 things.

A glass container where the pill would go, a formation that actually tested the pill, and a small metal compartment that connected the two.

Alex could've used any sort of glass from outside, but he decided to make it on his own. He learned to forge glass and then blow it into shape. However, it was only later that he realized that he didn't need to do that sort of thing.

The glass came from sands which were part of Earth. And as someone who had recently learned the Dao of Earth, Alex could freely manipulate it to a certain degree to whatever shape he wanted it to be, as long as no one had any Qi or Intent acting on it.

Once he made the glass, he made the compartment that would attach to the glass. It required some Qi lines which he added and then moved on to making the formation, which was beyond simple. He carved the formation himself and attached it to the back of the glass where a metal compartment was already attached beforehand.

Once that was done, he placed the spirit stones into the metal compartment and closed it.

The formation remained idle when there was nothing to test. When a pill was finally placed, the Qi lines recognized something was different and took in QI around them and activated the formation that immediately gave the Harmony of the pill.

Alex tried it with the pills he had and found that it was quite accurate, which meant that another one of his artifacts was successful.

After a bit of testing, he agreed with the information he had learned about the lifetime of the pill vessel. It had said that on a single spirit stone, it could last for months of very active usage, and years of passive usage.

It seemed true.

Alex spent the next couple of months making bigger and bigger things, even going so far as to make swords that were just as good as Midnight, without the artifact spirit in them of course.

After he was certain he knew a lot, he finally decided to take a test and on the very first test, he surprised the teachers after reaching Level 6 at once.

Once he achieved that, Alex happily left the school as he had no longer much need for it.

Chapter 1366 Greenheart City

The Greenheart city of the Emerald Kingdom was its capital. Located around the center of the kingdom, it was one of the biggest cities in all of the empire.

Also, being located right next to the Beast Paradise as well as the fact that it had the Hundred Blossom Valley, it was also one of the main hubs where alchemists gathered to learn and share their craft with others.

Alex arrived outside of the city on a rather fast-flying boat that was used by the army on which he was escorted. After learning that he did not wish to use the teleportation formation and instead wanted to fly all the way here, the Crown Prince himself had ordered the men to send him here this way.

Alex landed outside of the city with 3 members of the army walking with him. 2 of them were of lower status, but one was a general who was made to guard Alex and the two Elders that had come with him.

"This is the Greenheart City, your majesty," the general said as they walked through the grassy land before arriving on the rocky path.

The general had introduced himself as General Fan of the Tail Legion, so Alex didn't really know what his full name was. Also, as a member of the Tail Legion, he was nothing but someone waiting to be put to use, and he finally was.

Alex looked around at the people that lined up to enter the heavily guarded capital of the Emerald Kingdom. He saw a few people looking at him and then pointing at him to show their friends and families.

"Sigh, I should have worn a different face for this exact reason," Alex thought as he was worried that the information about his arrival would quickly spread.

He had left his face as it was so that his cousin could know that he was here, but that still made him feel annoyed as he didn't wish to be treated as a King, but rather a normal person that would walk by this place.

Unfortunately, such a thing would never have been possible in the very first place.

As Alex walked toward Greenheart City, he saw a group of people that walked toward him.

"Wait, I thought they weren't supposed to know about my arrival," Alex turned to the general and asked.

"Hmm, his royal highness must have notified them of your arrival," the general said. "It's a good thing, your majesty. It's hard to tell what sort of problems we would face on our own. Having the King's help is very welcomed."

Alex sighed and put on a smile as he met with the king.

"Your Majesty, you're finally here," the jovial giant king of the Emerald Kingdom, Jin Xiaojian spoke up. "I had hoped you would come earlier, but this is fine as well."

"Greetings, King Jin," Alex greeted. "I'm sorry for not letting you know I was coming earlier. It must've been troublesome to find out at the last moment."

"Nonsense," the King said with a mighty laugh. "We have been prepared to receive you for the past 3 months since we knew you would come for the Endless Shadow Abyss."

Alex nodded. "That is part of the reason why I am here," he said.

"Hehe, you don't have to tell me the other reason, your majesty. I've already been notified about it," the King said. "She will come to the city soon for the Abyss's opening, so you can meet with her then."

Alex questioned what he was talking about for a second before realizing it. 'Talia' he thought. 'The prince must've told him about her.'

That was a little troublesome now that Alex thought about it. He hadn't really planned on talking to this girl if possible, but it seemed now he had to, even if for appearance's sake.

It would've been so much easier had the Dragon Emperor and his family not been so shady with their past actions. But, asking an Emperor of any sort to not be shady would be an impossible task.

One only had to look at how they had to survive in the family to become the Emperor before realizing what had shaped them to be what they were at the moment.

"I am looking forward to meeting her," Alex quickly replied to the King, who simply laughed out loud.

"I'm sure you'll find her delightful. Everyone in my Kingdom likes her, from old to poor. There is no one that will tell you that she isn't the perfect match," the man said.

Alex smiled. "We'll see," he said.

"Let us leave then, your majesty," he said and took Alex in.

Alex got onto a carriage that was previously prepared for him. Nearly 10 men rode in that carriage and Alex started speaking with the king while looking around at him city.

The Greenheart City looked a lot more... natural than the Dragon Capital appeared to be. It didn't look overly planned and instead what a city would come to be if people just settled in one place over time.

The buildings looked more or less similar to what he'd seen from the architecture of the Eastern Continent, only a lot greener as trees and plants were planted all across the sidepaths, giving the city a natural feel.

From what he could gather, it seemed that everything had been like this ever since the days of the Fang Kingdom that was there before this one.

After looking at the city, he closely looked at the king and his retainers. The King himself was at the upper realms of the Saint Soul realm, but his retainers were strong with both having above Saint Transformation 3rd realm cultivation base.

That was quite surprising to Alex to see a King that wasn't that strong. But then... neither was he, so he didn't bother asking.

Instead, he asked about how the king came to become a king.

"We were chosen from a young group of talents and put on the throne by the Emperor himself after the near-rebellion last time," the King said.

"I see," Alex said. He had learned about that info already, but he wanted to learn more.

"How does that work exactly? If you don't mind me asking," Alex said. "As in, is there a time period for how long you can be a king or is it forever?"

"It's... technically forever," the King said.

"Technically?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the king said. "There are a few instances where I will have to let go of the throne. Mostly 3 main ones."

"First, if the emperor wants me removed from the throne, I get removed. Well, I can't do anything about that one but just leave."

"Second, if I myself want to no longer be a King, I can step down from the throne, in which instance the Emperor will find someone else to replace me," the King said.

"Finally, if I were to ever wish to have kids, I will have to leave the throne as well," the King said. "We all swore an oath about all of this and there's really no way out of this."

Alex was a little surprised about that. "I can understand the first two, but... kids? Why?"

Chapter 1367 King Jin's Palace

"You aren't allowed to have children as a King?" Alex asked King Jin with a quizzing look on his face. This was one of the weirder things he had heard in recent times for certain.

In most other places, including his own, Kings, and Emperors would be heavily suggested, almost forced to reproduce so that they could have heirs.

And yet, to hear that such a thing was not what happened in the Kingdoms of the Eastern Continent was certainly weird.

The king shook his head in response to his question. "The moment any of the 6 of us wish to have offspring, we must put aside our crowns," he said. "That is the vow we made to His Majesty."

"But why?" Alex asked. "Did he give any reason?"

"No, not really," the King said. "We have a few speculations, but there is no concrete answer."

"What do you think the reason is?" Alex asked.

The king looked at Alex, and then at the two retainers he had by his side. Seeing them all, he wondered if it was a good idea to reveal the information. In the end, as long it didn't harm His Majesty, then he didn't see how it could be bad to share.

"Well, it most likely has to do with the previous kings who were thinking of rebelling against His Majesty," the King said. "It is said that one gets greedier when they have children. They no longer just have themselves to think about, but their offspring too. As a result, they start daring to defy and do things for themselves."

"His Majesty might believe that to be the reason why the previous kings tried to rebel against him," the King said. "As a result, he no longer allows the Kings who sit on the throne to have someone to change them."

"I... see," Alex said.

"Well, it could also be that he doesn't want the Kings to get distracted. That might be the case," the king said. "Either way, it's all speculative. I'm sure His Majesty had compelling reasons to stop us from having children."

"Do you want to have children?" Alex asked.

"Hm... that's not something I can answer right away," the King said. "I still wish to be a King for a long time, so I haven't really thought about it. Hehe, maybe I'll get a family once I too go to the Immortal lands."

The king's hearty laugh made everyone feel cheerful again.

While others moved on the front of the topic, Alex continued wondering why the Emperor would ever not want the Kings to have children. Was he really worried about another rebellion?

But that shouldn't be the case. As Alex could see, the two strong individuals next to the King were definitely not under him entirely. If he wasn't wrong, they were from the Head Legion and directly reported to the Emperor.

'Weird,' he thought and stopped wondering about it after a while. The carriage passed through multiple bridges and past a few gardens before arriving at a massive gate that lead to the King's palace.

The palace was fancy, just as fancy as Alex's own palace.

It was a large palace, nestled within lush emerald gardens that still managed to show off its awe-inspiring grandeur. Alex walked through the intricately carved wooden doors that held a golden figure of an Azure Dragon on them.

The insides of the building were made with white marble, and the walls were adorned with jade figures with green silk tapestries hung from the wall.

He could already smell some sweet aroma that permeated the air inside.

Alex looked around at everything he could see, most of which was green in color.

"Is there a reason why your kingdom is called the Emerald Kingdom?" Alex asked. "The information I received said that it was something that was made so you didn't have any connection to it in the name."

"Yeah, that's about it," the King said. "Also because of the Hundred Blossom Valley with all the greenery. The Emperor just chose the colors that matched some important features of the land."

"Oh, so the other kingdoms match their colors too?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the king said. "You'll see it in due time."

Alex was then taken to a hall where he sat and conversed in detail with the King about various things. The King was extremely friendly, as someone would have to be in front of an Alchemist as terrifyingly talented as Alex.

He tried to mix in a few hints of him wanting some pills from Alex, which Alex gave up in the end and promised to give a few pills to aid with cultivation.

After a few more hours of conversation, Alex retreated to the room that he would be staying in for the foreseeable future.

After a brief search of the room, he called out Pearl and Whisker. "Are we there?" Pearl asked, looking around the room.

"Yes, we're at the Emerald Kingdom," Alex told Pearl.

"And are we going to go to the Beast Paradise next?" Pearl asked. That was the plan they had made since it was quite close.

"We'll have to see. As long as I can make an excuse to go there, I will," Alex said. "Given how close it is to the Azure Dragon's secret realm, it might be a little harder than we are envisioning thought."

"No, I'm sure we'll succeed. We'll have to believe in ourselves," Alex said. "But that comes later. I have to spend the next upcoming month preparing to go into the Endless Shadow Abyss."

"Prepare well," a voice spoke from his mind. Godslayer had been listening to his conversation as well. He had woken up a long time ago and was now slowly helping Alex where the could.

There wasn't much for him to do, so he lay low for now, asking Alex to feed him a bit of the Death aura whenever he could. However, lately, he had started getting a little more active after hearing about something from Alex that had caught his attention.

"We should take it all away," he said. "We can't let any stay in there. I want it all."

"We will see how it works," Alex said. "I'm not even sure if the reports are correct or not."

"Doesn't matter," Godslayer said. "We'll try our best. The Endless Shadow Abyss's darkness aura must all be taken away."

Alex sighed. He had read in one of the books that the reason why Endless Shadow Abyss was called such was that it used Darkness aura to create the world.

Alex wasn't sure how strong the object that created the world was, but he was damn sure he would find it and have Godslayer consume it.

With both Darkness and Death aura being consumed at once, Godslayer would improve his strength to a level that hopefully rivaled when Alex first met him.

Afterward, Alex went back to cultivating with the rest of them, waiting for tomorrow to come so that he could go roam the city.

However, come morning, the King arrived outside his door with good news to deliver to him.

Thanks to the news of his arrival in Greenheart City, the elders at the Cloud Iron sect had hurried and sent over Talia, who had arrived in the city last night.

Chapter 1368 Emerald Vine Restaurant

﻿

"Your majesty, do your best. It will be great if you two can hit it off," Elder Liang excitedly spoke as Alex prepared to leave.

"Don't worry, elder Liang. I'm sure his majesty will capture young Talia's heart with his charm," the king said.

Alex turned around to look at both of their overly excited faces and sighed. Even Yao Ning held a small smile, hoping that Alex would truly

He shook his head and turned around, placing a mask on his face before walking out of the palace. The elder still wished him luck as he left and only stopped once he left the gate.

Alex walked through the busy street of the city that was starting to get a little less crowded as the morning was ending and midday was starting.

He made his way to the east of the town, toward the crossing on the 4th street. The King had set up their meeting location, and it had been a prestigious restaurant belonging to the Azure Imperium, but currently under the King himself.

The only staff members in the kitchen that was allowed there were people above Level 6 in cooking, so the food there always came out great.

Alex grumbled a little under his mask to himself. He did not want to go through with this at all. However, he had to show that there was some purpose as to why he was looking for strong, young girls so that he could quickly find his cousin.

He was already worried that his cousin wasn't trying to meet him in some way, with the worst possibilities playing out in his mind all the time, so he did not want to add regret to all of that by not doing the best he could at finding her.

If he couldn't find her by the time he was to leave this continent 20 years later, he was even prepared to ask the Emperor for some help in finding anything that was known about her.

His mind wandered to the things that were happening around him, keeping a mental note of all that went on in the city. He wanted to learn what he could from here to become a better king when he went back

Unlike the Dragon Capital, the Greenheart City had a surprising number of mortals living here. While surprising, Alex found it quite understandable as well. While it was still a capital, it was not the capital that everyone cultivator wanted to live in if they could.

Alex also saw multiple Alchemy and medicine stores, even more so than the Dragon Capital. As one of the hubs of alchemy, there truly was a lot going on in this city.

He arrived by 4th Street about 15 minutes later and took out a small token given to him by King Jin.

The token had a small ladle wrapped in vines, almost emulating the Azure Imperium's insignia, but in its own unique way. On the opposite side, it had two numbers.

Alex looked at the massive restaurant that was in front of him, on top of which rested the restaurant's emblem. Next to it was the restaurant's name written in a large text.

Emerald Vine Restaurant.

Alex walked up the stairs along with quite a few people that were going in and out of the restaurant and was greeted by two staff at the door.

Alex handed over the token to the guards, who seemed to realize the importance of it and immediately bowed.

"Show me the way," Alex said from within his mask.

The guards instantly nodded, calling a pair of female staff that came to take him. They were very respectful to him, which made a few people wonder who exactly he was.

Some made accurate guesses, but others simply wondered if he was one of the many important youths that would have started arriving for when the Endless Shadow Abyss was opened. New n0vel chapters are published on

Having no verifications, those guesses just remained as that.

Alex was taken to a side of the room that had a functioning elevator. These were one of the influences that the players had had on the empire at an architectural scale. Many such changes were happening around the continent, all of which were possible because the Players were strong and had a word in what happened in this world.

The places where the old ones were in control such as the Royal schools and sects hadn't yet chosen to make the changes, but the commercial buildings, especially tall ones, and especially ones that mortals visited had started accepting these changes.

Alex could hear an audible tone ring out every time he passed and floor, and he heard that tone 5 times. On the fifth ring, the doors opened, letting him walk out onto a large, open balcony-like area with a rather intimate table in the center.

And on the table was already seated a young woman with prettily tied black hair, who turned around with an expectant expression. Her expression died a bit when she saw Alex, but that was only because she couldn't really see him.

The female staff quickly walked out and started preparing Alex's seats before he even walked over. By the time he walked close to the girl, they had already walked back into the elevator.

Alex walked over to the girl, who still hesitated a bit, and removed his mask. As he did, the girl finally got to see his face and her expression improved drastically.

"Your majesty, I am Talia Hoffner, the disciple of Ming Wuling from the Cloud Iron sect," the girl immediately bowed and introduced herself. "I am honored that you are allowing me to meet you here today."

"You don't have to be so stiff, Miss Talia," Alex said as he cupped his hands in greeting. "It's good to finally see you as well. You are prettier than what I saw in the pictures."

The girl blushed a little. She wore a mostly green robe with a head full of gold jewelry and stark white pearls. She was an entire head shorter than Alex, but that only added to her charm.

Her gray eyes stuck out the most among her other physical traits, grabbing one's attention immediately.

As for her cultivation base, it was in the Saint Core 8th realm, a step above Alex. It had increased in the past 6 months since Alex had found her information, which was already from the Endless Shadow Abyss opening a year ago.

"You are very handsome yourself, your Majesty," the girl quickly said.

"Please sit," Alex said and let Talia sit back while he went over to the seat on the other side of the bare meter-long table and sat.

Talia was all smiles, excitement, and maybe even a bit of nervousness.

Alex got comfortable and decided to start with some small talk. However, before he could do that, the girl spoke immediately.

"Your majesty, if you don't mind, I have a confusion that I hope you can clear up," she quickly said.

"Sure, ask away," Alex said.

"Can you tell me how you know about me?" the girl asked. "I don't think I've done anything recently to be famous enough for you to be noticed by you or anyone important."

Alex was a little surprised. "Do you… not know why you're here?"

Chapter 1369 A Date With Talia

"I'm here because you wanted to meet me, didn't you?" the girl asked with a quizzing look on her face. "My master said that you wanted to see me, which is why I came."

"Did you not want to meet me for something?"

Alex was a little surprised. "So they didn't tell you why I wanted to meet you?" he asked.

"I... I just assumed it was because of something I did in the past. Or maybe... its embarrassing to say this but... maybe because I'm pretty?" she asked.

Alex chuckled a litle when he heard that. "So they did not tell you that I'm looking for a Queen?" he asked.

"Oh, are you? They only told me that—" Talia paused for a momenta as the realization of what she had just heard hit her.

"Q-queen?" she asked. "A-are you saying that you're here with me because I-am I going to a queen?"

"No, you're not," Alex said quickly to calm her down. "You're not the only choice, and I came here today to see how you are in person. Please, be yourself."

It felt bad to lead a girl on with hopes of something that she could never achieve, but Alex did so anyway.

The girl nodded and sat back on the chair with a somewhat astonished face. While Alex asked her to be herself, it was impossible for her now.

Just the prospect of being able to become the queen of an entire continent was something that she started thinking about, which caused her to be more nervous.

Alex waited for her to speak, and it took an entire minute before she calmed down enough to start speaking.

"So... I was chosen as the candidate to become a queen?" the girl asked just to make sure about it again.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Why me?" she asked without waiting.

Alex paused for a moment. "Uhh... I had a few criteria, and the Crown prince found you to be one of the few that matched what I wanted in my queen," he said.

"How small is the list?" the girl asked.

"5 people," Alex said.

"Can I ask who they are?" she asked.

"I don't know if I can answer that just for the other's privacy," he said.

"Okay, what makes us 5 different from the rest of the many girls that are clearly better than us?" she asked.

"Because you're a player," Alex said.

The girl finally paused her non-stop questioning. "P-player?" she asked. "That's it?"

"That's the criteria that cuts off most other people," Alex said. "To be more precise, I wanted someone that is just as young as me, and that ends up not being many people."

"Oh," the girl said. "I... am indeed young. Oh right, you are a player yourself, aren't you, your majesty?"

"I am," Alex answered. "I come from the Central COntinent, just as you all," he told her.

"The Central Continent," the girl thought. "I've heard of that. Is that really where we all came from?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I returned there about a few years ago, and so did everyone from the rest of the 3 continents. If you guys can make enough of a noise, you might get the Emperor to send you all back as well."

"Oh... well, I don't know if I want to go back," the girl said. "Its been so long, I do not see the point of going back at all."

"That's understandable," Alex said. "I only went back because I wanted to see how it had all changed for the most part."

"I see," the girl said. "And you got to come back?"

"Yes," Alex said. "We were allowed to. But... let's not talk about that for now. That's not what we're here for, are we?"

"Oh, right," the girl said.

Alex smiled a little. "Shall we order some food then."

They called for some staff and ordered a few dishes that caught their eyes before continuing the conversation.

Alex did what he thought was what someone looking for a wife would do and started asking questions about her likes and dislikes, about her interests, her dream, and whatever else he could think to ask her.

She asked him quite a few questions too. After the food arrived, their words slowed down a lot.

The food itself caught their attention nearly as much as they did each other. The staff had prepared the best of the best dishes for the two of them.

"Oh right, your majesty. You're an alchemist as well, right?" she asked. "I remember hearing about what you did in the competition... what was it a year ago?"

"I am," Alex said. "Did you not watch the broadcast?"

"I was in closed cultivation at that time," she said. "I had recently left the Hundred Blossom valley and was busy making pills of my own."

"Ah, you are an alchemist as well?" Alex asked with a surprised look. She hadn't mentioned it yet.

"No, I'm not," she said. "Well, I guess I am now. I recently started and it will take me a long time before I can get anywhere. I can barely make Earth grade Saint pills for now."

"I see,' Alex said. "Well, keep going at it. You'll do good I'm sure."

Talia didn't seem interested to talk about alchemy with him, which surprised Alex a bit. It didn't look like she wasn't interested in alchemy altogether, which made him think that she didn't talk about alchemy just because she was being considerate and didn't want to come off as someone that wanted something from him.

After a while, they finally decided to leave.

They went down the elevator together, and Alex pulled out his mask that he placed on his face. Talia noticed it and said nothing. She could understand the reason easily.

The door opened and the two of them walked out.

Most people were busy in their own world, but a few noticed Talia and recognized her. In the Emerald Kingdom, she was quite popular after all.

People noticed Alex too, but they couldn't tell who he was, especially since he had been wearing something very different from what he normally appeared in.

They walked outside, and the girl spoke up.

"Do you have any plans for the rest of the day, your majesty?" Talia asked after they were out.

"Hmm, no, none," Alex said.

"Oh, then... um... would you like to go somewhere with me? I promise it won't take longer than an hour," she said.

"Sure, I have time to spare," Alex said. "Where are we going?"

"Oh, its close by," she said. "Should I call for a carriage?"

"Whatever you want," Alex told her.

"Oh, then let's walk," she said. "Its good to walk after a hearty meal." She smiled and started walking ahead of him.

Alex followed behind her, curious where he was being taken to. He could sense someone following him already in the distance, and from what he could see, it was one of the king's guards.

It seemed he was there to look after him.

A few minutes later, Talia stopped by a large, but poor looking building close to the edge of the town. He looked at what the place was and was a little surprised to what it was.

An orphanage.

Chapter 1370 The Orphanage

﻿

"An Orphanage?" Alex asked. "What are we doing here?"

"I'm just meeting up with the kids," Talia said. "I come here every now and then when I have the time, so in a way, it's kind of a hobby of mine, I suppose."

"I see, let's enter then," Alex said and walked into the old orphanage with Talia.

As soon as they entered, the people inside greeted Talia. She seemed to come here enough times for people to recognize her.

"Sister Talia!" a few of the kids ran toward her in a jubilant manner.

"Oh wow, look at you all. You've grown so big," Talia said. "Just a little bit older and you guys can join the sects too. Which sect do you want to join?"

"The Cloud Iron sect."

"We want to follow you, sister Talia."

The kids answered.

From what Alex could tell, the kids were mortals with absolutely no cultivation base at all. "Why aren't they cultivating? Do the people here not teach them?" he asked the girl.

"No, the kids are sent to various sects when they reach 15 years of age, in which case they are taught there. Most sects want the kids they get to not have already started cultivating just in case there is a talent amongst them that could be ruined by having them cultivated by someone who's obviously not very experienced," the girl said.

Alex looked around the orphanage, seeing the many people that worked in it. Most of them were barely in True realms as anyone stronger than that would not waste their time in an orphanage.

"And you come here once a year you say?" Alex asked.

"I try to," Talia said. "Whenever I decide to come to the Endless Shadow Abyss's opening, I visit this place. I usually get around 1 week of time which I can spend with these kids, and I do that."

Alex gave that some thought. "I see," he said. "May I ask why you started this?"

Talia paused for a bit, hesitating to answer his question instinctively. "It's…" she forced herself to speak. "It's because I am an orphan as well and used to work in one even after I left."

"Oh," Alex was a little surprised.

"Yes," the girl said. "It might make you think less of me, but I don't wish to lie to you about who I am just so I can appear better in your mental image of myself."

Alex chuckled a bit. "I do not know why you would think that I would think less of someone for helping others," he said.New n0vel chapters are published on

"I thought you wouldn't like the part that I was an orphan," she said. "Most people think that orphans don't have manners or any sort of knowledge just because they lost their parents at a young age."

Alex got a little serious after hearing that. "I come from a farm in such a corner of our world that I had to be homeschooled just because the school was too far away," he said. "Just because I was lacking some knowledge about this world, people assumed I was dumb in general. I'm sure even my own master was frustrated by what I did."

"Of course, I wasn't dumb. Just lacking a bit of knowledge and experience, which my master helped me get. Once I did that, I improved a lot."

"I'm still far from better, but if you compare the current me to the one that had just started cultivating, you will find that were are miles apart."

"What I'm trying to say is, I don't judge people where they come from, only where they are," he said. "And where I see you right now is someone at the top, looking out for the young and helpless ones far below them, just so they could have a little easier time climbing to where you are."

"You are humble and kind, and nothing can take that away from you, especially not the fact that you are an orphan," Alex said. "I hope you can remember that and hold your head high the next time you talk about this conversation."

Talia's face showed a small sign of shock before her face glowed up with a bright smile. "Thank you, your majesty," she said. Despite the hours-long talk they had, this was the first time she felt seen and heard by him."

Alex smiled beneath the mask as well. "So, how does this work exactly?" he asked. "Do you just talk to them, or do you help them with something else as well?"

"Well… I just do what they ask me to do," Talia said, which usually ends up being playing some sort of games or telling them stories about my hunts, the sorts like that."

"Oh," Alex said. "That sounds fun."

"Doesn't it?" Talia said. "Let me gather up the kids, you can tell them a story."

She quickly left, leaving Alex alone to himself for the moment.

He watched her walk away and couldn't help but feel some sort of guilt… as well as a sense of loss over knowing that Talia could not ever be the queen.

She was certainly an incredible woman, and would perhaps even be a great queen. Of course, he didn't feel anything more than just a bit of fancy toward her attitude toward the people, which was why he thought so.

It would take a lot more than just that to make him fall for her, which he already knew was impossible. Still, he wouldn't mind taking her to the Southern Continent with him, just because of how she was.

A group of young children all walked out of the various room, gathering behind the orphanage.

Talia came a moment later and called him over. He quickly followed her outside where the kids were expectantly waiting for the two of them to start with a story.

Seeing Alex arrive, most of them looked at him in surprise as he still hadn't taken off the mask. Some of the kids were worried and only didn't freak out because Talia vouched for him.

There were about a hundred different kids in front of him, each of which ranged from 8 to 12 years old. He didn't see anyone that was younger or older.

Alex saw Talia being taken away by the staff for some reason, so he was left alone in front of the kids. He thought for a moment what he could tell them, and decided on one.

"Alright, who here wants to hear about all the amazing places that exist outside of the Eastern Continent?" he asked, suddenly getting a few curious looks and raised hands.

Seeing that enough of them were interested, he started. "To begin with, let me tell you about this amazing place that exists in the Southern Continent, known as the Sundering Sanctum."

"It is located in a place called the Sundering City, also known as the First Shadow…"

He told the kids what it was and what its purpose was. He didn't tell them what it was like to be inside or what he had experienced.

Hearing about something that they did not know about, made the kids feel way more excited to learn about what Alex was telling them, and he could see that.

So, Alex continued for a long time, waiting for Talia to come back.

Chapter 1371 Frosted Glacier Sect

Alex went from talking about the Sundering Sanctum, explaining what it was, to talk about the fiery volcanic landscape of the 13th Volcanic mountain in the Northern Continent.

The kids were more than excited to hear about the different places around the world.

As Alex continued talking about them, he noticed Talia quickly coming out to the back in a hurry, before slowing down as she put on a calm face.

"Are you guys having fun?" she asked.

"Yes, sister Talia," the young kids spoke at the same time.

"Great," Talia said. "But I'm afraid this is it."

"Huh? But we haven't heard anything yet," one of the kids said.

"This brother only just told us about 4 places," another one said.

"I see, but he is busy now, so he'll have to go," Talia said before quickly speaking to Alex with her spiritual sense. "I have some urgent business, your majesty. I will have to leave now."

"Oh, I see," Alex said.

"I'm sorry I have to leave like this," the girl said. "You must have taken out some time for me from your busy schedule. If it wasn't so urgent, I wouldn't be leaving."

"I understand," Alex said. "You can leave. I will stay behind with these kids for now. Let me know if I can be of any help."

"Thank you, your majesty," Talia said and quickly left the orphanage.

Alex went back to talking with the kids for a while, telling them more about the other continents and the various unique things about them.

He talked for another hour and a half when someone walked out into the yard. It was a young girl, barely a few years older than the kids that were around him.

She walked up to him with a frown on her face and stood right next to him, crossing her arm in an act of what looked like anger.

Alex looked at the young girl and stopped talking about the Endless Tunnel in the Northern Continent. "Can I help you?" he asked.

"Are you a coward?" the girl asked.

Alex paused for a bit. "What?" he asked.

"Why didn't you go with her?" she asked.

"Go with... Talia?" he asked.

"Yes, sister Talia. What sort of friend lets another friend walk to danger on their own?" the girl asked.

"Danger?" Alex straightened up. "What do you mean?"

The girl hesitated a bit hearing his serious tone. "You don't know?" she asked.

Alex shook his head. "I just met her today, so we aren't as close as you might think we are. So, she didn't really tell me anything other than that something urgent had come up," he said. "Can you tell me what it is?"

The girl nodded and got close to him to whisper. "It's about a few of our brothers and sisters that we haven't seen in a while now. Most usually return a few months after leaving, but there has been a group that hasn't returned."

"We tried contacting the sect but they... they just tell us that they are sick, which is why we haven't heard from them," the girl said. "But that should be true since they can't be sick for nearly an entire year.

Alex thought for a bit to try and understand the situation.

"So, you're worried that they might be hiding something from you all?" Alex asked.

The girl nodded. "Also, they will be coming here any time within the month to take more of us away, and we don't want to go with them."

"I see," Alex said. "Then I suppose I must make sure your sister isn't hurt in case it gets dangerous then."

He stood up and looked at the rest of them. "I'll be back in a day or two to tell you more about what I know," Alex said. "For now, it seems that I will have to leave."

Alex quickly walked away and the little girl followed him.

"Do you want my help? I can follow you," the girl said but Alex shook his head.

"Just tell me what the sect is that Talia might be going towards," Alex asked.

"Oh it's, umm... the Frosted Glacier sect," the girl said.

"Thanks, I will make sure to keep your sister safe," Alex said and walked out. As soon as he was out, he waved his finger, gesturing to someone close by.

The Saint Transformation rank guard that was sent to him by the king arrived next to him. "Your majesty?" he asked.

"You heard it all, didn't you?" he asked. "So you must know where I am going to go next."

"The Frosted Glacier sect is about an hour's travel away toward the south," the man said. "But I will request your majesty to not go there. Let us handle whatever the problem is."

Alex chuckled. "Are you kidding me? It's been over a year since I've been in a situation that might lead to some enjoyment. Let me have some fun," he said.

"But it might get dangerous, your majesty," the man said. "Please don't go."

"Nonsense," Alex said. "I've made up my mind. You said south, right? Let's go."

Alex flew without hesitation, and the guard followed him without any choice. He wondered if he should use some force to keep him back, but he didn't dare do something like that to a King.

So, he could only reluctantly follow.

"Frosted Glacier... is there an icy region in the south? I don't remember anything like that," Alex said.

"There is none. It is all forests and grassland over here, with a bit of desert toward the bottom. Even the islands in the Emerald Kingdom have no snow on them," the man said.

"Then? Why is it named as such? A technique?" Alex asked.

"No, no," the man said, thinking for a bit. "If I'm not wrong, it's because the person who created the sect, the founder, is actually someone who came here from the Northern Continent some 7 or 8 thousand years ago."

"Oh," Alex said with a curious look on his face. "Is he still alive?"

"News of his death wasn't made public," the man said. "but It has been just too long for someone like that to survive."

"True," Alex said. "So, it is someone else that's the sect leader now, huh?"

"A man named Lan Sikong," the guard said. "He's a new leader of the sect, who became one just in the last decade or so," the guard explained.

"I see," Alex said. "And is he a good guy? How's his character?"

"I can't really tell you, your majesty. I haven't met the man, only heard about him, and from what I hear, he is rather reclusive."

"And the kids from the orphanage? What are the chances that they are being mistreated?" he asked.

"Such cases pop up once in a while, but the empire wipes such sects and organizations from the face of the realm, so most don't dare do sort a thing," the guard said.

"But they still happen, don't they?" Alex asked.

"Some are a little too ambitious for their own good," the guard said.

"I see," Alex said. "Then, for the sake of these kids, I hope this Sikong fellow is not one of them then."

The guard nodded and continued following Alex as they flew towards the Frosted Glacier sect."

Chapter 1372 The Sect Leader

Alex flew for a while, going across the green landscape as he made his way toward the sect.

"Do you know why the sects get to even take these kids from the orphanage? Is there some form of contract between them?" he asked the guard that flew close behind him.

"The sects donate a yearly amount to the orphanages in all the cities. In return for doing that, they get to choose what children they can take with them to make their disciples," the guard said.

"The kingdom doesn't take care of the orphans?" Alex asked.

"The agreement between the sects and the orphanages was found to be a better choice than just having the kingdom take care of it," the guard said. "Because of how many sects there are that want a piece of the pie, they end up donating some good money to the orphanages."

"And there is a competition between them?" Alex asked.

"Sort of," the guard replied. "Whoever pays the most that year gets to have the first choice at one kid that that they want to take away, every other kid is then divided based on whatever the group of sect prefers."

"Such competitions end up with the orphanages getting donated a lot of money."

"I see," Alex said. "It's a good incentive, I suppose. Morally it feels like you're paying to buy someone, so I don't think I can ever think of copying such a strategy to my own continent."

The guard said nothing.

After flying for nearly an hour, the guard spoke. "It's about 2 minutes away in that direction," the guard pointed.

"We're close, huh," Alex said. "Get away from me for now. I want to go in here alone."

"But your majesty," the guard spoke. "It could be dangerous."

"You can come if it feels dangerous," Alex said. "I just don't want the sect to hide things when they notice you."

The guard frowned for a bit but said nothing in return. He slowed down, creating a gap between him and Alex.

Slowly, Alex drifted away from the guard, and by the time he arrived at what was the Frozen Glacier school, the guard was nowhere to be seen.

He slowly landed in front of the gate of the school and was stopped by the guards there. They looked at him with a confused look as they neither recognized his clothes, nor the mask he wore.

"Greetings, senior. May we know what your reason is for visiting?" one of the guards asked.

"I was on a date with a girl just a few hours ago, but she left in the middle of it to come here," Alex said. "I was wondering what she was doing, so I followed her here. Can you take me to her?"

The guards looked at each other, slight surprise clear in their eyes. "Who might it be that you are talking about?" the guard asked. "We have to keep our guest's privac—"

"I'm talking about Talia, the disciple of the Cloud Iron sect," Alex said. "I want you to take me to her."

"But... senior Talia is currently with the sect leader. I'm afraid I cannot take you to her," the guard said.

"Do you have the authority to stop me from entering, young man?" Alex asked. "Should you at least not ask your seniors before deciding if that's a good idea or not?"

The guards hesitated a bit. It was obvious that they could not let someone without any prior appointment into the sect without knowing who they were.

The guards didn't bother asking who he was as they didn't want to offend a senior by asking them to name themselves. However, now that Alex had said that, they held back no longer.

"What should we address you as, senior?" the guard asked. "I will notify the sect leader of your arrival and see if he wants to meet with you."

"You can address me as Talia's date," Alex said. "Since your sect leader is currently with her, she can tell him who I am if she wishes to."

The guards had no reason to hesitate, so they quickly messaged the sect leader. After waiting for a while, they got a response back.

"The sect leader will be out in a bit," the guard said.

Alex nodded and remained where he was, waiting for the man to come out.

Surprisingly, the man that came out was someone who looked like they were in their late 20s. "Is that the sect leader?" Alex asked the guards.

"Yes, that is our sect leader," the guards said. They bowed toward their sect leader and moved out of the way to let him meet Alex.

The young man arrived close enough for Alex to see that he was slightly taller than him.

"You must be sect leader Lan Sikong," Alex spoke up as he looked at the man.

"Can you take off your mask so I may see who it is beneath it?" the man asked.

"I'm afraid I can't do that. I'm wearing this mask precisely for people to not see who I am beneath it," Alex said.

"Okay, then may I know your name?" the young man asked.

"You may address me as Talia's date, as I had your guards tell you," Alex said.

The sect leader frowned a bit. "I wasn't aware that Talia courted men. I had believed she was too focused on her own self to court men at all," the sect leader said.

"Well, I only met her today, so I can't tell you how she is normally," Alex said.

"Then did you follow her because she left you?" the sect leader asked.

"No, I came because I was told by a kid in an orphanage that I shouldn't have left Talia alone," Alex said. "Now, may I know where Talia is?"

The sect leader looked at him for a few seconds and nodded. "She's over on the other side of the sect, taking care of sick children," he said.

"I see," Alex said. "Let me go meet her then."

The sect leader nodded and stepped aside for Alex to walk in. He followed behind Alex, showing him the way into the sect.

Alex looked around at the sect, somewhat surprised at how good the sect was overall. From architecture, to maintenance, to Qi density; everything was exactly what one would think when they thought of a large, powerful sect.

"You are quite young, sect leader," Alex said. "How did you come to this position?"

"Mostly luck," the sect leader said. "You could say I got lucky at every step and reached where I am today."

"I see," Alex said.

Alex noticed a severe lack of students walking around, which felt a little weird, but not enough for him to think of anything. There were enough walking around, so Alex didn't focus on that for the most part.

After walking for a while, he walked into a room where he finally saw Talia. Only, she was inside a barrier. Not only her, but many other people were inside of different barriers as well.

"What the hell is going on here?" Alex asked, confused.

"You will find out soon," the sect leader said as he pulled out a sword. "For now, you should move inside as well."

Chapter 1373 Fighting The Sect Leader

﻿

Alex looked at the formation of barriers that held many different people. He had been brought to some unknown corner of the sect, only to find these people captured here.

·ƈθm Talia was amongst them, and so were many other individuals, most of whom wore robes of the same variety as the ones from the Frosted Glacier sect.

"Get in," the sect leader said.

"What if I don't want to?" Alex asked.

"A weakling like you doesn't get many choices, unfortunately," the sect leader said before pricking Alex with the sword, pushing him forward.

Alex could see Talia saying something, shouting even, but he couldn't hear the words. It wasn't just her either, the others were speaking too, but Alex could hear no one.

He turned around, looking at the sect leader, who didn't fear him for in his eyes, Alex was weak.

The sect leader was in the late Saint Soul 5th realm, so he didn't find any reason to fear Alex. As such, even when he turned around, he was unphased.

"What exactly are you doing here?" Alex asked. "It doesn't look like something that the Kingdom or the Empire would ever let you continue. You have thought this through, haven't you?"

"What I am doing here is of no concern to you," the sect leader said. "Waste one more of my second and I will kill you."

"You're surely not doing this alone, are you?" Alex asked. "Did the other sect elders agree to whatever is happening here that you want to hide? It must be quite something to agree to walk down this evil path with you."

"That's it," the man said and swung his sword at Alex.

Midnight appeared on Alex's hand as he parried the sect leader's sword, surprising him with a strength that was beyond what he could sense. The sect leader stumbled a few steps behind before coming to a stop.

He looked at Alex and then at the sword in his hand.

"How… did you…?" the sect master found it hard to make sense of.

"How did I what?" Alex asked. "Take my sword out of my storage? Did you think I wouldn't have realized that there was something messing with space, making it hard to bring out your items?"

"How could you?" the man couldn't help but ask.

"Well… it's hard to explain," Alex said. "And you are the one that is supposed to be explaining here. What is going on?"

Before Alex could continue his words, he saw the sect leader prepare and attack him.

Shards of ice flew at him, pelting him without stopping. Alex did nothing but use his Jade Skin technique, and none of the attacks hurt him at all.

Then the sect leader sent out a gust toward him, carrying illusory flowers, all of which started falling on him. Once again, he easily protected himself by using the Jade Skin technique.

With the Jade Skin technique, his body became as strong as Saint Soul 7th realm, which was more than enough to handle the sect leader Sikong.

Alex didn't attack back immediately and instead just blocked the sect leader's attack. The sect leader couldn't help but frown when he realized that he couldn't hurt him at all.

"What… are you?" he asked.

"Just someone who wants you to answer a few questions," Alex said. "I won't kill you if you answer me seriously."

"To hell with your answers," the man shouted and quickly did something, that Alex concluded was requesting aid. As expected, 12 different individuals quickly appeared inside the room and surrounded Alex immediately.

Each individual was with a cultivation base of at least the peak of the Saint Soul realm, if not higher. Each one of them was stronger than the sect leader, with even the weakest one being able to fight toe to toe with Alex even if he went all out.

"Well, this is troublesome," Alex said as he looked around at the 13 men that had gathered around him. They were so strong that Alex would most likely have problems escaping without revealing his hands entirely.

"He's a weird fellow, kill him," the sect leader said.

"He's up to something, don't kill him," Alex said just as the sect leader said.

For a second everyone was confused. However, a moment later, something flew into the room, destroying it all as it did so.

The man that was guarding Alex, an officer of the Head Legion of the Azure Imperium, had arrived and was ready to fight now that Alex was in danger.

"You should leave, your majesty," the man said. "I will take care of this in your stead.

"Just take care of the other 12 if you can," Alex said. "I'll handle this sect leader."

The guard thought for a moment and nodded. He had seen Alex fight just now, so he wasn't as worried as he should have been. He knew how strong he was.

Alex looked toward the sect leader. "Now then, we can enjoy our battle without anyone ruining the moment, can't we?" he asked. He pointed up the sword and the sect leader realized that he had screwed up big time.

Immediately, Alex started attacking the sect leader, who could only remain on the defensive.

Alex sent a few slashes, one of which was his Heavenly Static Slash, sending a strong lightning bolt directly in the sect leader's direction.

The sect leader tried to fight back, but he was only standing target in front of Alex, despite his cultivation base which should have been clearly stronger. "Who the hell are you? How are you so strong?" the man shouted.

Alex paused. "Do you really wish to know?" he asked. "Very well then."

He pulled off his mask, revealing who it was under it. The sect leader looked at Alex for a few seconds, trying to comprehend exactly who it was that he was looking at before realizing who it was.

"King of the Southern Continent?" the man couldn't help but ask in surprise.

"That is me," Alex said. "Now, shall we continue?"

Fire Qi flowed into Midnight, giving it a slight red glow. Alex needed to add nothing else to the sword but that as he unleashed one of the other altered techniques that he hadn't been able to test in real combat for a while.

Once the sword was filled with Fire Qi, he swung it in the sect leader's direction, throwing a flaming slash at the sect leader.

The attack flew in an arc and landed on the sect leader who had already used techniques to protect himself. Even as he did so, the fire slash landed on him and the technique activated.

~BOOM!~

A Fiery explosion covered the sky, seen from many different locations. It was Alex's Burning Blaze technique that had made such a commotion. It was a technique that was created to cause an explosion, so Alex wasn't phased at all.

He looked for the smoke to settle as the sect leader barely handled himself while threatening to fall unconscious at each waking moment.

Alex smiled.

"Now that you are at the end of your ropes, please explain what exactly it is that you are doing here," he said.

Chapter 1374 Knowledge

The sect leader looked around, searching for a way to escape. He looked down and saw that the sect elders that were supposed to be protecting him were dying of the monster that Alex had brought along.

"King of Southern Continent," the man quickly spoke. "I want to make a deal with you."

Alex's eyes narrowed. "What deal?" he asked curiously.

"Let me live, protect me even if you can. If you do so, I will share with you the results of the experiments that I have been doing here," the man said.

"What have you been doing here?" Alex asked.

"I can't tell you unless you swear to protect me," the sect leader said.

"I can also just let you die, you know," Alex said. "I don't have to do anything."

"Then you'll miss out on potentially one of the greatest bits of knowledge that could make your life a whole lot better," the man said with a crazy smile. "Do you not want to learn what it is? Just promise you will protect me and I will let you know."

Alex couldn't help but smile. "You've got me rather curious now. I do wish to learn what it is," he said.

"Yes, just promise me that you will—"

Suddenly, something far stronger than anything he had sensed from Alex just yet covered him entirely, constricting his movements from head to toe.

"I said I was curious," Alex said as he reached into his storage and pulled out a pill bottle. "Not that I wanted to protect you."

"Wh-what are you—" the man tried to speak, but Alex's blood had wrapped around the man, limiting his movements, even his speech.

"You will tell me everything," Alex said as he placed the pill into the man's mouth. "Whether you like it or not."

He poured his Qi into the man's mouth and pushed the pill into his stomach.

Alex waited for a while as the pill took effect, and finally freed the man's face from his constrictions. He looked at the guard before who was still somewhat busy fighting, but it wouldn't be long before he finished.

He needed to see what important topic it was that the sect leader thought he could obtain his protection.

"First of all, are the children you said were sick from the orphanage safe?" Alex asked.

"No, they are sick," the man said uncontrollably.

"Oh, you weren't lying?" Alex was indeed a little surprised. "Why haven't you tried to treat them yet?"

"Because we need them sick and dying," the man said.

Alex frowned a bit. "What?" he asked in surprise. "Did you make the children sick purposefully?"

"Yes," the sect leader answered.

Alex felt a pang of anger build up when he heard that, but he calmed himself down. The fight below was close to end, so he needed to finish this question quickly too.

"Why use do you have by making them sick?" he asked.

"To follow through on the knowledge that I learned," the sect leader said.

"What knowledge?" Alex asked.

The man opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out of them. Instead, his face twisted in a grimace, as if Alex was squeezing him too hard.

Alex quickly made sure his blood wasn't constricting him too hard, and when he realized it wasn't, he wondered for a moment what was happening.

"Why aren't you answering? Tell me what the knowledge is?" he asked.

The man tried answering, but his face twisted in a grimace again. He was definitely trying to speak the truth, but something was stopping him.

"Did you speak an oath to not talk about it?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the man said.

"Then how were you going to tell me what you had learned?" Alex asked. "Do you have a book that gave you the knowledge??"

"No, I destroyed it. Only I know about it now," the sect leader said.

"And you can't tell me?" Alex asked.

"No," the man said.

"Well... that's problematic," Alex thought. He looked below at the situation while thinking about what it is that he could do.

"Is there anyone else that knows about whatever this knowledge is?" he asked the man.

"They know what it is about," the sect leader answered. "Only I know the knowledge itself."

"And do you know of any loopholes in your oath that I could exploit to get the knowledge out of you?" Alex asked.

"I can only pass along the information once I have done it to myself," the man said.

"Do it to yourself? So, it is something physical?" Alex asked. He wasn't getting any answer from the man so there was only one thing left to do.

An illusory sword formed from Alex's spiritual energy and he used it to cut all over the sect leader's body. All of a sudden, the sect leader felt his body go limp as he couldn't bring out even the tiniest amount of power.

The blood around him disappeared, and Alex took him back down to where the guard was killing the last person who had fought back. He had shown absolutely no mercy to anyone, killing even the weakest of them.

Alex looked around at the bloody ground and breathed out. "You didn't let anyone live?" he asked.

"I told you before, your majesty," the guard said. "The Azure Imperium smashes and culls every single sect or group that walks down an evil path. The fact that they tried to attack us meant that they deserved death."

Alex didn't say anything, simply nodding in response.

"It must have been hard," Alex said.

"Not at all," the guard said. "As a member of the Head Legion, if I couldn't destroy a sect of this level on my own, I wouldn't even be allowed to be a part of the Legion."

Alex could only give a dry laugh.

"Why is he still alive?" the guard asked, seeing the sect leader alive.

"I thought you would want the main culprit for questioning," Alex said.

"We have the others here that we can question," the guard said.

"Yeah... I'm not sure about that," Alex said. "Guard me for a few seconds, okay? I will need some protection."

"What do you mean?" the guard asked.

"Uhh... just protect me please," Alex said and sat down, with the sect leader sitting next to him uncontrollably. He brought out Whisker and kept him inside of his robes to let Alex know if something happened outside.

Then, using this spiritual energy, he tried to force his way into the sect leader's spiritual sea.

"Your majesty?" the guard realized what was happening, so he called for him. However, Alex didn't react at all.

Both Alex and the leader's bodies dropped listlessly on the ground, making the man panic as to what could have happened to them. Had the King just invaded another individual's spiritual sea?

He didn't know what to do. He stood there, wondering if he should let King Jin know, but then Alex had told him to protect him, so he did.

He paced around for a few minutes, not even bothering to rescue the people behind him. Then, a few minutes later, Alex's body moved as he slowly got back up.

The old man looked at Alex, only to see a look of shock and wide eyes on his face.

Chapter 1375 The Kids

"Your majesty, are you okay?" the man asked as he quickly walked up to Alex to help him up.

"No, no, I'm fine. Thanks for the help." Alex slowly got up, and the look of shock and surprise was still evident on his face.

The guard wondered what it was that got him so worked up. Was he hurt while inside the spiritual sea of the other person? "Why did you do that, your majesty?" he asked.

"Uhh... I became stupid for a moment, that's all," Alex said. He looked at the sect leader who was unconscious still. Having destroyed most of his spiritual energy, it would take him some time to wake up. "What do we do with this one?"

"Didn't you want to question him?" the man asked.

"No, not anymore," Alex said as he swiped away the storage bags on his body. "I don't think anyone who tortures children should be allowed to live. You can kill him."

The guard nodded and used a simple attack that vaporized the sect leader along with his nascent soul.

After seeing the man die, Alex looked around toward the captured individuals and searched for a way to turn down the barrier. He found a few formation flags which he ripped out of the ground, letting everyone out.

The people flew out the barriers in droves, thanking them profusely.

Talia was teary-eyed as she too came up to Alex and started thanking him.

Alex looked toward his guard and asked, "Can you handle this? I want to go look for the children," he said.

"As you wish, your Majesty," the man said and started asking the many men and women questions about what had happened in this place.

Talia quickly followed behind Alex to go and look for the children as well. "Why did you come here, your majesty?" she asked.

"There was a little girl who said you could be in trouble, so I came," Alex said. "It turns out she was right, so it was good that I came. Come on, let's go get those kids."

Talia nodded and followed, but she still had questions. "Do you know what he was doing with the kids? He captured me when I tried questioning them," she said.

"He... he was trying to kill them," Alex said. "For his own gain."

"K-kill?" Talia's eyes widened in fear. "Are you saying the kids are dead?"

"No... not yet," Alex said. "At least... not these ones."

Talia was a little confused. "What do you mean not these ones?" she asked.

"He needed those kids dead, but he also needed them a little older," Alex said. "He killed many other ones that were over 20 years old, but these new kids weren't of that age, so he simply let them be sick so that he could continue keeping them here, without the chance of them contacting the outside world."

"From what I learned, he was planning to announce that they were dead at the end of the year and hide their existence forever if he could. That was the sole reason why they are still alive, unlike many other ones," Alex said.

"What do you mean other ones?" Talia asked. "Which other ones?"

"The ones that came here before," Alex said. "The orphans that no longer had a connection with the orphanage. Those ones are all mostly dead."

Talia gasped in horror. "Are- are you saying that the ones from before... are dead?" she asked.

"I'm afraid so," Alex said.

Talia was so horrified that she started tearing up. "That... that bastard! He killed all those kids. Why did he do that?" she asked.

Alex looked at her for a moment and shook his head. "I do not know," he said. "I tried asking, but he had an oath to not talk about anything at all."

"Oh, so we'll never figure out what he wanted with them?" she asked.

"Maybe the people that were locked up know. Most of them seem to be elders of his sect," Alex said.

The girl nodded.

They arrived at the facility that Alex had learned about and quickly found the children, all of whom were hooked up to some sort of medical device.

Alex looked at it all for a few seconds and only got rid of them when he was sure that it wouldn't hurt them. Once the kids were up, he fed them a few pills that he had on his, which healed them back to normal over the course of a few minutes.

Talia looked over the children, making sure they were all taken care of. Most of them were weak and feeble, but they were healed thanks to Alex's pills.

"I'll have King Jin prepare good food to feed these kids once we are back," Alex said. "Let's leave."

They walked out back to where the guard was and saw that he was about done with questioning the people there.

"Did you get any useful information from them?" Alex asked. He still had his mask up, but most people seemed to have realized who he was, so they stood to the side, quiet while Alex asked his question.

"Somewhat," the guard said. "It's not very clear, but it seems the sect leader had found something in the sect treasury that he wanted to use. However, to do that he needed human sacrifices. These people were the ones that were against it, and as a result, they were imprisoned here."

"And they don't know what he was trying to achieve?" Alex asked.

"No, the sect leader apparently never really made it clear what he was trying to do. Only that he promised them great power if they followed him, which he made an oath to heaven to prove. I truly wonder what it was," the guard said, eying at the storage bag that Alex had taken with him.

Alex noticed that and threw the storage bag at the man. "I haven't taken anything out of here, so you can check for anything you want here," he said.

The guard hesitated for a moment and complied, looking through the storage bag. He found many things, but none of which seemed like what the was looking for.

"The sect leader already destroyed whatever it was that he learned so that he alone would know it," one of the elders that were now free answered.

"I see," the guard said. He tossed the storage bag back to Alex. "Forgive me, your majesty. But I had to check."

"I understand," Alex said.

"Also, thank you for coming here. Had you not, I wouldn't have realized what was happening here. Any longer and we would have had, no, we already have a genocide to deal with," the guard said.

"No problem," Alex said. "Anyway, I'm going to take these kids back to the orphanage. Will you be coming, or will you stay here for now?"

"I will have to stay back and deal with this until the person I have called comes. Forgive me, but can you wait until then?" he asked.

"Nope," Alex said and started walking away. "Come find me in the orphanage when you're done. Let's go, Talia."

Talia nodded, and along with the kids they made their way back from the Frosted Glacier sect.

Chapter 1376 A Pill To Erase

Alex and Talia arrived back in the orphanage with the twenty kids that they had rescued. Not all of these kids were from the orphanage in Greenheart City, but that was where they decided to take them anyway.

The 3 that were from there immediately hugged the guardians that they had missed so much and started crying, telling them about what had happened to them, what they had seen.

Dead bodies, flayed skin, bloody sheets, muscles cut open, bones pulled out. The kids were made to face horrors while inside that room that they were only now talking about.

Alex frowned when he heard their recollection of what they saw. He had seen those horrors way more vividly than them, but these were kids. They shouldn't be seeing things like this.

"I have a recipe for a pill known as the Memory Erasing pill which can help remove their recent memories," he said. "I don't have them made, but I should be able to cook up a few as long as we have ingredients."

"Pill that erases memory? Does it work?" Talia asked.

"I haven't tried it yet, actually. It was a recipe I found in my treasury, that I just forgot about since I didn't really need it," he said. "Also, it's a True pill, so it won't work on us, but it should work fine on the kids."

"What if they lose too much of their memory?" Talia asked.

"Even if they do, that is much better than them remembering everything, don't you think?" Alex asked.

Talia couldn't argue. "What are the ingredients? Let me see if I have some," she said.

"I have most," Alex said. "I... let's see... I need a Brighthorn Deer's antler powder, and some Wildsoot grass leaves."

"I have Wildsoot grass from the last time I went to the Hundred Blossom Valley. But not the powder," she said. "Hmm... maybe His Majesty has it."

"King Jin? I'll go ask him then," Alex said.

"Let me come with you."

The two left the orphanage after telling the guardians there what their plan was.

Going back to the palace took no time at all, as they hurried there. As soon as they reached, elder Yao and Liang quickly came out to meet Alex, but he kept them from speaking since he was in a hurry.

The King had already arrived, but he made no remarks seeing Alex and Talia together. He had received the news regarding the Frosted Glacier sect, so he was very serious at the moment.

"Did you come back from the sect?" the king asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Actually, I need some Brighthorn Deer's antler powder. Do you have any? I need it to make some pills for the kids."

"I'll have some brought to you right away," the King said. "Let me show you to the alchemy rooms."

Alex nodded and went along with the King to his alchemy rooms, which were just as fancy as the ones that Alex used back in the Swan courtyard. He walked inside and brought out 5 different cauldrons from inside his storage bag, placing them in five different locations where the fire could burn.

The King looked at it all a little weirdly, wondering if Alex was planning to use all those cauldrons at once.

"How many pills do you need, your majesty?" the King asked.

"20," Alex said.

Someone arrived with the antler powder, and the king gave the entirety to Alex. "Use as much as is required, your majesty," he said. "What other ingredients do you require?"

"None," Alex replied. "Can I get some privacy? I will begin now."

"Yes, of course."

The king quickly walked out, shutting the door behind him. Now that Alex was all alone, he brought out Whisker and gave a portion of the ingredients to him. "4 pills at once, okay?" he asked.

"I will," Whisker answered and took the ingredients to one of the cauldrons on the side.

Alex stuck to his side with 4 different cauldrons, in all of which he was going to make 4 pills each. Since the pill he needed was a True pill, he could easily control it at his level, and since reaching 100% did nothing for True pills, there was no point to try his hardest either. Just being the most efficient was enough in his eyes.

The first pile of ingredients came out, splitting into 16 different sections under Alex's spiritual sense as they all fell into the now-heated cauldron. Splitting his attention into 16 different individual sections, plus all the other attention that was required when making a pill certainly made it difficult, but given how easy it was to make True pills and the fact that he was making the same pill 16 times, it gave his mind a bit of room to relax.

He started turning the ingredients into a powder and then moved on to the 2nd ingredient. It didn't take long before all the ingredients were inside the cauldron, turning into powder.

Once he was done, he used broke the pile of powder into 4 specific sections simply based on feeling, on each of the 4 cauldrons. Then, one by one, he used his Vortex of Perfection technique on all of the different piles to create the best pill he could out of what he had ended up making up.

By the time he was finished, Whisker was still working on the 4 pills, which had just been powdered. Since he couldn't use the technique, Alex had to do it for him.

Once they were done, Alex walked out of the room with the 20 different pills ready in just under 10 minutes. King Jin and Talia were surprised to see him walk out so soon.

"Do you need something?" the king asked.

"More Wildsoot grass, your majesty?" Talia asked.

"What? No, I'm done," Alex said. "Let's go feed the kids."

They didn't believe Alex at all, but seeing him leave, they couldn't help but follow him. Soon, the three of them, including King Jin arrived at the orphanage where the kids were getting taken care of.

"Will the pills work?" Talia asked.

"Well, they will remove memories, I know that for sure. It's just a matter of how far back they work," Alex said and fed the first child. They waited for the pill to take effect and asked the child how old he was.

The young boy thought he was 12.

That was 2 years more than they wanted, but there wasn't anything they could do about it. Alex needed some experimentation if he wanted to make it more precise.

"That is enough," he said and fed the other kids the pills. Soon, all 20 of the kids had eaten the pill and had lost between 2 and 4 years' worth of their recent memories.

"Let the kids rest now," Alex said and walked away from them to let the guardians handle it.

"Thank you, your majesty," Talia said.

"It's not a problem. In fact, I am obligated to help when I can," he said. "What sort of person would I be if I just sat behind and let them be in pain."

Talia couldn't help but smile when she heard that.

"You are truly amazing, your majesty."

Chapter 1377 Transplant

Alex took Talia to a lone section of the orphanage and broke the news that she might not have wanted to hear.

"You are an amazing woman, Talia. Unfortunately, I can't find the two of us working at all," he lied.

Talia was a bit shocked to hear such a conclusion so early. "But we have only been on one date," Talia said. "Is it because I got captured?'

"What? No, no. It's just me," Alex said. "I just can't feel the spark between us two." That bit was certainly true. While Alex could sense that the two of them would make for a nice King and Queen, they certainly wouldn't make for a good couple.

And the sole reason for that was that Alex simply couldn't find himself being attracted to Talia. Maybe a few more days would've changed things, but he didn't want a Queen in the first place, so he let her down easily instead of taking her on multiple dates only to reject her after that.

"We can still be friends," Alex said with a soft smile. "I have planned to come here during my time stay in Greenheart City, so we will be meeting each other quite a bit."

"I see," Talia said with a dejected voice. "I will accept what you say, your majesty."

Alex gave a small bow and said, "I'll see you in a few days then." Then, he left back to the Palace.

He told the King and others that he was tired, so he went directly back to his room in the palace, not even stopping for his two elders. Once he entered his room, he shut down all forms of entry and sat down quietly when he could finally find peace.

Once he was seated, a voice spoke in his head.

"What's going on?" Godslayer asked. "You are a bit hasty today in everything you're doing. Is something wrong?"

"Is it that noticeable?" Alex asked.

"You came from that sect with children as soon as they were rescued and then made pills without much thought. Had there been something wrong with the pill, you could have harmed a kid," Godslayer said.

"I tried my best to prepare the best pills, but making it any better would've required tons of time, which I don't want to spend," Alex said.

"That's what I'm saying," Godslayer said loudly. "You are being too hasty today. Something happened back in that sect, right? Something that is causing you to be hasty."

"Yes, sort of," Alex said. "My mind is in turmoil and I'm doing my best to not freak out right now."

"What... did you find in that man's spiritual sea?" Godslayer asked.

"It's not what I found in his spiritual sea, but rather what I found in his memories," Alex said. "I went in so I could perform a Spirit Search. I saw it all, you know... his memories... of what he was doing."

Godslayer couldn't help but be curious. "What is it that's got you so riled up?" he asked.

"The knowledge that the guy was talking about was a vile one. It was a knowledge of transplant surgery to pass organs from one person to another," Alex said.

"Hmm? Isn't... that normal?" Godslayer asked.

"It is," Alex said. "Only, the organ that was being taught to transplant isn't."

"What was it?" Godslayer asked.

"Spiritual Roots."

Alex felt a sense of awe as he spoke it out loud. He still couldn't believe such a thing was possible, even though he had imagined it would be.

At the very least, he hadn't expected someone from this realm to have such info.

"What? You can transfer Spiritual roots?" Godslayer asked, equally surprised.

"So you didn't know either?" Alex asked.

"I never truly focused on such a thing, so no, I do not know," Godslayer said. "How did someone like him even manage to find something like that? Wasn't he practically a nobody?"

"He was," Alex said. "In a sense, they are all nobodies when compared to the grander scale of things. However, their founder wasn't."

"Founder?" Godslayer asked.

"Remember the mad immortal that captured us? The sect's founder was someone that left the Northern Continent 8 thousand years ago, right after that mad immortal had stopped his ascension."

"It seemed he was one of the many elders at the time that were involved in the attack on the Snow Immortal sect. Most of the others went and made the 5 Ancient sects, but he decided to leave and come to this place to live a different life."

"The knowledge of the Spiritual Root transplant was something that he had brought along after finding it from the Snow Immortal sect from what I read from the man's mind."

Godslayer frowned a bit. "That answers where the technique came here from, but how did it reach the Snow Immortal sect?"

Alex thought for a bit. That answer he didn't have, so he made two guesses. "The unlikely guess is the Snow Immortal sect's founder, the woman who returned from the Immortal realm gave them that technique."

"It's unlikely because?" Godslayer asked.

"Because there is no way such techniques are freely available in the upper realms, or you and anyone else would've heard about it already," Alex said. "I don't think even Scarlet knows of such a thing."

"Then? What's the other guess?" Godslayer asked.

"The Ancient Battlefield," Alex said without hesitation. "It was a location where immortals fought and died. Many of them likely dropped what they had, and this was one of that."

"So you think this one came from the Immortals? Hmm... that makes some sense," Godslayer said. "Which begs the question, why were the Immortals fighting in this world?"

Alex shrugged. "It was during the war, wasn't it?" he asked. The Undying God had been killed by an Immortal if he remembered right.

"It might have been during the war, but... it was still Immortals fighting. You know what happens when Immortals use too much power," Godslayer said.

"Heavenly Judgment, yes," Alex said. "But... surely there was a way they hid from it. That's what I thought happened this whole time. If the Immortals were never punished by the heavens for using Immortal Qi, then they must have had a way to hide from the heavens."

"That's not impossible," Godslayer said. "But what about when they use Dao? That calls upon Heaven itself to aid them. In that instance, there is no way for them to hide, is there?"

Alex frowned a bit. "That's... true," he said. "What do you think happened then if they weren't hiding from heaven?"

"Simple," Godslayer said. "The Heaven never targeted someone for using Immortal Qi. That's it."

Alex frowned. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"Why is there such a thing as Heavenly Judgment? It's because people are using strength that should not exist in this world, isn't it?" Godslayer said. "Then that means, if there was no Heavenly Judgment, then it is very much likely that the power they used already existed in this world."

Alex's eyes slowly widened. "Are you saying... there used to be Immortal Qi in this world?" he asked.

"Yes," Godslayer said. "There should have been. However, throughout the thousands and thousands of years... the Immortal Qi vanished from this world, leaving only Saint realms to be the peak of what cultivators could achieve."

Chapter 1378 Horrible

Alex gave Godslayer's words some thought to see if it could truly be possible that this world was once an immortal world as well.

The evidence he had provided certainly made it a possibility, now he just needed to find a reason why it no longer was. If it was once an immortal world, where had the Immortal Qi gone?

Two possibilities quickly came to Alex.

He was reminded of the situation of the Crimson Empire where barely anyone could reach the Saint realm, and that was all because almost all of the Saint rank spirit veins had been stolen away from there.

It could be a similar situation that the Immortal rank or even higher spirit veins there were, were all in fact stolen from this realm.

There was also the other possibility that instead of being stolen away, they had simply degraded into nothing.

One thing he knew for certain from senior Yang was the Qi did not replenish in any world naturally. The only way to do so was for whatever consumed the Qi to give it back into the world.

If that was the case, then it was possible that most of the Immortals that used Immortal Qi to cultivate simply left this world, or their corpses were taken away. What remained wasn't enough to form into Immortal spirit veins and slowly only Saint rank spirit veins remained.

Alex knew that it had to be a long time ago that this happened. He knew for a fact that when the 7th Undying God came to this world in her dying state, this was already a world where the peak was the Saint realm, and anyone who reached above that had to leave.

He quickly told Godslayer what he thought and how it could truly be possible.

"There might even have been a Divine rank spirit vein, although that is less likely," Godslayer said. "That divine realm cultivator over in the Eastern Continent might have just been hiding from heaven."

"Also, given that this place initially belonged to the Demons, it could be that the humans looted away what they could from this place, leaving it as barren as it is. Although, we will never be able to tell whether that is true or not."

Alex nodded after hearing that. "To think this place was an Immortal realm too," he whispered.

"Do you feel angry?" Godslayer asked. "Like you want to take back what was stolen from this world?"

"Should I?" Alex asked. "My ancestors aren't even from this world. Hell, they only came here 600 years ago. There are youngsters out here older than that. I don't think I even get a right to be angry if I'm honest."

"I suppose," Godslayer said. "Alright, we got distracted. Tell me about that transplant now. How does one do that? Can you really steal someone else's spiritual roots?"

"Yes, but it's a horrible process that I don't think I can go through. At least, I will have to be mentally prepared myself if I ever wanted to perform it myself," Alex said.

"You don't need the other spiritual roots, right?" Godslayer asked.

"No," Alex said. "But I can think of many that could use it."

"Alright, hurry up and tell me the process."

Alex did.

The process for the transplant was truly something only a madman could devise. It included preparing two humans for the procedure. One would be the donor, and the other the recipient.

Because the thing being transplanted were spiritual roots, one had to open up the donor entirely. They were fed a pill to stop their nerves from feeling anything and another pill to keep their internal organs working nonstop.I think you should take a look at

Then, they would cut them open.

Starting with the skin, the entire front half of the donor's skip was cut open carefully to not cut off any nerves, blood vessels, or meridians as much as possible.

Then, little by little, their muscles were picked away from their body. Once again one made sure not to cut away any nerves, blood vessels, or meridians.

Once the muscles were done with, the bones would be pried out from the donor's body. Then, anything else from all over the body that wasn't necessary for the donor to survive for just a few more hours was removed.

That included almost all organs in the human body. The only things that were still left were the brain, heart, lung, and the dantian.

Then, it was the recipient's turn to be worked on. The recipient too needed to have their skin removed, and a bit of their muscles cut out. More than that however wasn't needed.

Then, one would take cut off as much of the donor's spiritual roots as they were confident of transferring into the recipient, starting from the Dantian at the base and working through the rest of the meridians that came with the spiritual roots, including the blood vessels that were partly meridians.

Because there were millions of meridians, it was considered impossible. So, one usually chose to start with as few as possible. As for the rest, one simply hoped it would grow back normally once inside the other person's body.

The more spiritual root was planted into the recipient's body, the more chance there was of that spiritual root functioning properly. It could also function if placed improperly, but in those cases, the most readily available techniques would not work as the person wouldn't have the meridians in the order mentioned in those books.

Overall, it was a terrible method of transferring meridians from one person to another, a genuinely evil piece of knowledge that the sect leader of the Frosted Glacier sect was trying to use to empower his sect.

"That goddamn man," Alex said softly. "There is even a chance of the Spiritual root rejecting the new host, killing them if one isn't careful, but he simply didn't care. He experimented with his sect members to see how far one could go."

"What about the children? Why were they safe?" Godslayer asked.

"He needed adults. The kids' bodies hadn't finished developing entirely," Alex answered. "Had he operated on them, he would've gotten weaker spiritual roots. To be honest, he probably wanted them to reach the Meridian tempering realm as well."

A half-a-minute-long silence lingered between the two before Godslayer finally asked the question that the both of them were thinking about.

"So... are you going to use it?" he asked. "There are many people that can use it, aren't there?"

Alex didn't answer immediately.

"I know, both morally and ethically, it is the wrong thing to do. However, I do want to do it, partly for my own curiosity, and partly for others," Alex said. "I will have to give it a long thought and talk to others about it though. I can't rush into it headfirst like that idiot did."

"Right, be responsible with it," Godslayer said.

"I have to be," Alex said with a bit of a chuckle. "I was the one who forced him to unearth this problem anyway."

"You forced him?" Godslayer asked with a confused voice.

"Well, my pill did. Last year when I came up with the pill that turned one's normal spiritual root into Water Spiritual root, he kindled his wish to get more spiritual roots, which is why he pulled out the book that was in their treasury this entire time."

Chapter 1379 Reconstruct

"Don't let that knowledge bring you down. Do what you want to do, and only that," Godslayer advised. "Don't do something that will instead turn into your Inner Demon in the end. That is the last thing you want."

"Yes," Alex said. "I will only follow what my heart tells me to do. I'm not going to use this knowledge unless I know I am not doing the wrong thing."

"Good!" Godslayer said.

"Still, I will need to learn it all perfectly. Let me try to put together the entire book that the sect leader read. I got fragments at most and need to make sure what he understood from it was what was in the book," Alex said.

"Wasn't the book destroyed?" Godslayer asked.

"Yes. I'm going to see it from his memories and reconstruct it in my mind," Alex said and started doing so. Godslayer went silent and let Alex do what he wanted to do.

Alex not only reconstructed the book in his head from the hundreds of different flashes of memories he had seen in the sect leader's mind. That had been the second time he had used the Spirit Search technique, and it had been just as useful as previously.

It did, however, use up a lot of spiritual energy to do so.

He could unfortunately never use it on someone that was stronger than him when it came to mental strength.

Alex cultivated as well during this time, not wasting any time he had with him. More than a day passed before he opened his eyes again. By now, he had already gotten what he could from the sect leader's memories, and there wasn't anything significant that the sect leader had missed from what it seemed.

He spoke with his beasts for a while and went to meet with his elders who would be worried about him at the moment. He talked to them for a bit, getting rid of their worries, and then went to talk with the King.

The King was saddened to learn that it did not work between him and Talia. He proposed to arrange a few more dates if he wanted to, but Alex didn't want it, so he didn't force him.

The King was at least happy that he was choosing to stay as friends instead.

Alex then learned about what had happened to the Frosted Glacier sect after he had left.

Because the sect leader and most of the elders had died, the sect had no administration to handle itself. With a lot of the disciples and elders dying because of what the sect leader was doing, the remaining ones had run away the moment they learned of what had happened.

With few elders and no disciples remaining, the sect was disbanded, and its assets taken over by the Kingdom and the Empire.

The King had obtained half the assets and after talking with his officials, he had decided to donate what he had gotten to the many orphanages in the Kingdom so that they could have a better time raising the orphans.

According to the King, the Head Legion's members had also decided upon creating a temporary organization that would travel to all the different sects, families, and any large enough organization and see how they were treating its members.

They did not want people out here performing demonic practices that sacrificed human lives as if they were nothing.

"The Emperor didn't make that decision? The Head Legion did all by itself?" Alex asked.

"The Head Legion has full permission to do what they want as long as they all collectively believe it is the correct thing to do for the empire," the King answered. "They are the Head Legion for a reason because they can make decisions for the empire."

"I do remember hearing about that now that you say it," Alex mulled over the information.I think you should take a look at

"What do you wish to do now, your Majesty?" the King asked.

"It's been 2 days since the kids were brought back, so I think I will go and check on them," Alex said. "I need to make sure they don't have any other problems that they need treating."

"I will have the general come with you this time around. Since you're not going to go on a date, I hope you won't go there alone," the King said.

Alex chuckled a bit. "It's not like you let me go alone," he said. "You sent your own guard to watch after me."

The King smiled. "I'll let the general know then."

General Fan of the tail legion, the man that had come with him from the Dragon Capital finally got to do his job and was able to stay by his side.

"Thank you for allowing me to be of service to you again, your majesty," the man said quickly. "I swear I will not disappoint you."

"I don't think there is any disappointment to be made around me, General. You can relax a little."

The General smiled, but he still walked with a stiff posture as they went toward the Orphanage.

Alex was invited with a lot of greetings and gratitude from not just the people that ran the orphanage, but also the kids there themselves. The little girl that had first told him to go to Talia even thanked him for saving so many of them.

Alex couldn't help but feel happy learning that these kids were happy themselves.

Talia was already in the Orphanage, so she quickly came out and greeted Alex. "Your majesty, you're here early," she said. "And you're not wearing your mask?"

"I'm not going for a date this time around, so I have no reason to hide where I'm going this time around," Alex said with a smile.

Talia chuckled a bit and took him to check on the children that they had brought back.

Alex checked them thoroughly, to the best of his ability. He was a doctor, so he used his Qi to check through their meridians to see if that was hurt and then checked through their blood vessels for the rest of the organs.

Then, after checking through them with his spiritual sense, he was certain that there wasn't anything physically wrong with them. He also checked their mind and memories to make sure the pill didn't have any deteriorating effects and was thankful to find that it didn't.

Of course, a pill recipe stored in the treasury of the Phoenix Palace wouldn't be so bad that it left after-effects. By the end of the hour, he was certain the kids had nothing wrong.

Then, he went to the backyard and gathered the kids around to tell more stories of the places he had visited and what amazing places there were in the world.

Over the next few weeks, Alex visited this orphanage a few more times to tell his stories and share with them many pills that he made for the kids there himself.

Other times, he went around the city to look at what it had to offer. Talia volunteered to guide a few of those times, but most other times Alex was either with his elders or just alone.

Then, once those few weeks passed, it was time for him to leave as the Endless Shadow Abyss was just a few days away from opening.

Chapter 1380 Jade's Shadow

Alex flew toward the eastern shore of the Emerald Kingdom. Along with him were his two elders, General Fan, King Jin along with one of his two guards, a few of the kingdom's court officials, and Talia.

She had planned on teleporting there, but when she learned that Alex and the King were taking the ship, she decided to take the ship as well.

Flying past long stretches of grasslands, a few cities, and a whole lot of mountains, Alex could finally see the vast blue ocean in the distance.

It was late afternoon at the moment, so the sun was behind then. As such, Alex could clearly see the many islands that spread across the ocean. There were hundreds if not thousands that he could see just from on top of the ship from far away.

Not even the hazy landscape could stop him from seeing that. The vast expanse of the ocean went on for even more, but there wasn't anything to be seen at some point.

It was hard to tell how much further the ocean went on.

"Has anyone flown all the way to the east?" Alex asked the people on the ship.

"Many have," the only imperial guard, a man from the Head Legion answered. "At the very edge of this world, you will see the water curl a little, and then... there's nothing."

"Nothing, huh?" Alex asked. It was just as he had been told before.

At the edge of the realm, there was nothing at all. The world simply ended. What went on further was nothing but outer space, a place with no air, no qi, nothing.

Alex wanted to see that so desperately, but he had to be careful of the many strong beasts that lived in the ocean before he decided to go check on that. He would have to wait for a long while.

The ship flew past the mainland, going toward the many islands. The Endless Shadow Abyss was located on one of these islands after all.

They landed on a relatively normal-looking island that had a city built on it with enough people living to make it a decently sized city. It was the closest island to the Endless Shadow Abyss, so there were plenty of people living here.

They flew into the city after being checked by a member of the Scale Legion and landed directly inside the city.

The city was named after its island which was called Jade's Shadow. The island to its south was called the Endless Shadow island, which held the abyss.

Once they landed, everyone got off one by one. Talia thanked them for the ride here and quickly left to go meet with her sect that was already here.

It wasn't just the Cloud Iron sect that was here, but almost every conceivable sect in the entirety of the Eastern Continent was here to have their disciples take part in the competition that was held in the Endless Shadow Abyss.

Their plan wasn't to have them win or even just compete in the Endless Shadow Abyss, but to have them train inside of it. Due to the darkness inside the abyss, it made for the perfect place to hone ones's spiritual sense and the sect wanted their disciples to test it out for a while.

Alex walked with the King and was taken to a hotel that was the best of the best in terms of what was available in this location. One had to register for a room in this place months if not a whole year in advance if they wanted to get a room for this time period.I think you should take a look at

And yet, Alex and King Jin were given the best room at the very top of the hotel.

Alex entered the extravagant hotel and went into the elevator that was made available there as well. General Fan hit the very top button, and suddenly they were zoomed straight to the top of the hotel was over 50 floors tall, each floor consisting of over 50 rooms.

Once they arrived, they were each given a room on that floor as there were way too many to choose from. Alex went into the room of his choice and started settling.

The first thing he did before settling was check for anything that could spy on him. He had been thorough each time, so this time was no different as well. Once he made sure there was nothing, he finally relaxed and lay on the bed while calling out to his two beasts to relax with him.

Pearl immediately walked over to the open window and stuck his head out. He regularly ate the pill that Alex had created for him, so his fur was still black and so the chances of him being recognized were low, so Alex let him hang out by the window, looking at the outside city.

Whisker did the same after seeing Pearl do it and followed behind him to watch the city as well.

They saw the massive city with tall buildings that went on forever. They saw the massive span of the ocean that surrounded the island, unlike any other one that they had seen before.

They had seen many islands, but none that were this populated. It was a surprise just how far the humans have come after seeing how populated the island was. Even at the edge of the world, far from the main continent, people still thrived here.

There was a newsboard far below the hotel that Alex hadn't been made aware of before and only now knew thanks to Pearl and Whisker. He quickly walked over and looked at the newsboard to see what he could see they were talking about.

The newsboard mostly talked about all the different people that were coming over to Jade's Shadow Island. There were hundreds if not thousands of big sects, so having each one be individually named was quite something to Alex.

He saw sect names flash by, most of which he had never heard of before. The same went for the clan names as well as anything else that there were many of in the Eastern continent.

There were people's names as well, most of which belonged to talented individuals that had arrived to the island.

He looked through all of them still, wishing he could get some sort of hint on where his cousin was and what she was doing during this time. However, after a year of this, he knew that he was never going to get any sort of response from his sister.

Alex saw his own name pop up a couple of times before sighing and moving back to the bed where his beasts followed him.

He couldn't help but wonder if he should go in with his original face, use a different face, or simply just wear the mask in the abyss that would open in 2 days.

After some deliberation, he decided to go in with his own face as that was something that he had revealed multiple times in this face. Everyone on the island practically knew he was there, so there was no point in hiding it.

After the decision was made, Alex went on to relax a little more just by himself and his pets.

Chapter 1381 The Abyss Island

"Your majesty, would you like to visit the auction happening tomorrow?" King Jin asked him around evening time when they were together in one of the many rooms, looking down at the glowing city.

"Auction?" Alex asked. "Anything interesting there?"

"Here's the list of what is being sold," the King said, handing over a talisman to Alex.

Alex looked through the talisman, going over the various things that were there for auction. After going through it all, he shook his head.

"There's nothing here that makes me want to buy it. I'll skip this one," Alex said.

"Hmm, well it's no Gold Kingdom's auction for sure, but I thought you would be impressed by these techniques at least," the man said.

"Those techniques aren't bad, but I have enough already," Alex said.

"Then how about going just to see your competition for the day after tomorrow?" the King asked. "Most of the people that will participate in the abyss will be going there. You can gauge your opponents if you go. Most will be doing the same anyway."

Alex gave that suggestion some thought but still, he had no interest in going to the auction. "I'll skip this one. I'll have the elders go in my stead. They can buy what they see as interesting," he said.

"Very well," the King gave up.

The next day, the group left the hotel and went to the auction house while Alex remained in the hotel, using his mask to train as much as he could to improve his spiritual sense.

At some point later during the day, the group returned and Elder Liang started telling Alex about all the different people that she saw, and from the sound of it there seemed to be many people in the auction house.

"Over 40 thousand? Are you sure? That sounds excessive," Alex said.

"I swear!" the elder quickly said. "That's what King Jin told us. There are nearly 40 thousand people taking part tomorrow. There's a chance you won't win, your majesty."

"I was never in it to win. I'm just going to learn and have fun," Alex replied.

Once the night was over and the day came, they left as a small group and went down the elevator. Their presence in the lobby was immediately met with a bunch of gasps and awes as most hadn't expected to see not just the King but also the King of the Southern Continent at this place.

"He looks so much younger in person."

"Is he really a player? It means he is very young, right?"

"Hmm, he's powerful, but also not. I wonder how he became a King with that sort of strength."

The crowd whispered what they wanted to do, so Alex and the rest ignored them as they went toward the teleportation platform that would take them over to the next island where the abyss was. It would open up at any second now, so they had to hurry.

Once they arrived at the platform, everyone got into the teleportation platform and went over to the next island. It was only the people from big sects and families that did so, while the regular folks simply flew over.

The Endless Shadow island was not very large. It was a kilometer across and was relatively small, but there was enough land for all of them to get to.

There were only a few buildings prepared, which once again were used by big sects and families. Regular folks simply stayed in the open land, waiting for others to come out.

Once Alex and the rest reached the island, they heard that there was an hour or two before it would open up for real, so they decided to stay in one of those buildings.

The building took over a big section on one of the corners of the island and was filled to the brim with people in it. There were multiple floors to the resting area, all of which were people in it.

Alex looked around at the people that stared at him as he walked. They all wore robes of different colors and designs, and he could barely recognize any of them. There were even people that bore the emblem of the Azure Imperium, making Alex realize that members of the legions were here to participate.I think you should take a look at

Alex and the rest finally arrived on one of the upper floors where there was an open lobby with few people in it.

"You should go here, your majesty," King Jin advised.

Alex looked at the lobby and realized only youths were in this place. "Is this where the young talents gather?" he asked.

"That is exactly so," the King replied.

"Your majesty," a voice called out from the side, catching Alex's attention.

Talia came up and greeted him. "You came late, your Majesty," she said. "I almost believed you would miss it."

"Isn't there still an hour left?" Alex asked.

"Well... yeah, but we usually come here at least half a day beforehand," Talia said. "Maybe it's just us then."

"Little Talia, take care of His Majesty, okay? We'll leave for now," the king said.

"Yes, your Majesty. I will serve him well," Talia said with a bow.

"We'll hopefully see you a month later than, your majesty," King Jin said and walked away, leaving Alex with Talia.

Once they all left, Alex turned to the girl. "Are these all the talents of the Eastern Continent or what?" he asked, looking at the many people, most of whom were also looking at him, albeit not directly.

"Yes, but only the ones that find any purpose in this secret realm," Talia answered. "Most talented individuals would have come here dozens of times by now, so there is little point in them coming here. But they are still talents though."

"Understandable," Alex said and quickly counted the number. "There are nearly 150 people here and it's not even all the talents of the Eastern Continent huh? This is truly surprising."

"If this surprises you, your majesty, then you should know that there are multiple such locations where the talents like to remain with their sect members."

"Also, many talents don't even come into the building. They stay outside for the most part since they usually come alone and don't want to socialize. There are in fact way more talents than what you see in here."

Alex shook his head after hearing that. "The Eastern Continent truly is amazing," he said with a sigh.

"Talia," a voice called out to her from the side. "Is this..."

A woman arrived next to them, wearing the same robe as Talia. It was someone from the Cloud Iron sect.

The woman was slightly older with heavily tanned skin and black hair that glittered with gold and gems. A thin sword was strapped to her waist that she didn't keep in her storage bag.

Alex recognized this girl.

"Fang Yimu, correct?" he asked.

The girl's face widened in surprise. "And you must be King Alex. It is a pleasure to not just meet Your Majesty, but to be recognized by you as well," she said with a bow.

"You were victorious the last time the Abyss opened up. I remember reading your claim that you would be one again this time as well," Alex said. "Do you still believe it?"

"Absolutely, Your Majesty."

Chapter 1382 Into The Abyss

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Fang Yimu had a cultivation base of Saint Soul 3rd realm and was one of the stronger individuals in the lounge area at the moment. She was strong enough to become the strongest with just her cultivation base alone, and that made her strong with her spiritual sense too.

She stood proud in front of Alex, but not haughty. "Your Majesty must be looking forward to the competition. With your cultivation base, you should last quite a bit," she said.

"I naturally plan on being the last one to leave if possible," Alex said.

"I see," the girl said. "Then I must assume you as my rival in the match today. I was going to give you some suggestions, but it seems I shouldn't now."

"I guess that's my loss then," Alex replied.

The girl smiled. "By the way, I hear it didn't work out between you and sister Talia. I'm genuinely mortified to think you did not end up liking her. She's one of our sect's precious jewels," she said.

"That's life," Alex asked. "You could want things to go one way, but there is never any way to tell."

The girl nodded and Talia quickly reprimanded her with her spiritual sense.

"Oh, do you wish to meet the others here, your majesty? I'm sure people would love to talk to you," she said.

Alex looked around and saw the few people around him. "Who is important here?" he asked, staring at the many people. As he did, his eyes fell on a girl in the distance.

'That's…' he got a little serious when seeing her.

Fang Yimu seemed to have seen him notice her as well. "Does your majesty recognize Lady Su?" the girl asked.

"I see, so it is her," Alex said. "That's Su Railin, isn't it?"

Su Railin was another one of the girls from his list of 4 that he had been given. She wore a dark blue robe that looked masculine, but she herself looked feminine, aside from her ponytail.

"How do you know her, your majesty?" Fang Yimu asked.

"Oh no, I don't really know her. I have just heard of her name, that's all," Alex said. He did not want to meet her when it wasn't time yet. He was going to turn her down as a Queen as well, so there was no point in him trying for anything else just yet.

He would deal with her when he met her officially.

As he stood there, talking with Talia and Fang Yimu, a few other people came and tried to strike up a conversation with him. Alex talked with them for a while, but he never showed that he was interested in the talk or anything.

A couple of them even tried to give him tips on what he should do inside the abyss. However, Alex had read up on anything and everything that was available in the Royal libraries, so he didn't feel like he would need to.

Even Su Railin came and spoke a few words, but more than that she did not say anything. It seemed that she wasn't even aware of the arrangements that the Crown Prince had made just yet.

As they were talking, the island shook a bit, making everyone alert. "It's about to start," one of the youths in that room said.

"Let's go, your majesty," Fang Yimu was the one to speak to Alex at that moment and started walking. Talia followed her sect disciple sister and Alex followed the two of them.

They quickly made their way out of the building, going toward the center of the island where there stood a small well that was uncovered. Around the well was a large stone platform on top of which one could see formation lines.I think you should take a look at

This was the formation that sent people into the abyss.

A man flew on top of the well, wearing an azure uniform. This was the man that took care of the secret realm and was ordered by the empire to do so.

Taking care of the secret realm was a task that was passed to members of the royal family, so this man was most certainly someone from the extended royal family. He continued flying in his regal pose and looked around before speaking up.

"In case there are newcomers amongst you, let me go over the rules very quickly. Do not attack someone else inside of the abyss. If we find out that you broke this one rule, we will deal to you the same punishment that you deal to someone else. Also, we will ban you from every other secret realm in the continent."

The punishment for misbehaving was quite severe, so the newcomers who didn't know about it were a little surprised. There were surprisingly quite of them in the 40 thousand people that had gathered there.

"When you enter the abyss, you will find a piece of paper attached to your back. If you are found to have hidden or removed that piece of paper or are involved in taking someone else's paper out, you will immediately be disqualified for this year's opening of the Endless Shadow Abyss."

"To win, you will have to search for artifacts where you can write in the unique combination of numbers you find on your opponent's back. It will disqualify them."

"When everyone is gone, you will win."

The crowd looked at the man silently as they all got ready to enter.

"Last but not least, you won't be able to bring anything from your storage bag out inside of the abyss, so take out anything you might need right now."

The crowd rustled as many people started pulling out talismans and formations as well as artifacts from their storage bags. Alex thought of what he could bring from his storage ring, but he couldn't find anything important that he wanted to bring along.

As a result, he chose to bring nothing, unlike most people who at least had a talisman or two.

"Did you not prepare anything, your majesty?" Talia asked, as she too held a talisman and a formation plate.

"No, I didn't," Alex said. "But don't worry, I don't think I will need anything."

"If you think so," Fang Yimu spoke. "Good luck, your Majesty."

He bowed a little and walked away from the two, walking onto the stone platform. The man in the azure robes saw and nodded. "You may all come now."

As soon as he finished speaking, the people ran into the massive stone platform in droves. Then, once enough of it was filled, a blinding white light covered them all and suddenly, they vanished from where they were.

Barely any had been teleported away, so more joined, and they too were teleported away.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Let us go then," Alex said and walked with Talia, stepping onto the stone platform. He was pushed a little forward by the people that joined after him, and then he sensed the teleportation aura capturing him.

It seemed to capture each person individually, and then at the next moment, a flash of light came that took him away.

When Alex arrived on the other side, he opened his eyes to see where he was. However, all that he could see here was pitch-black darkness.

Chapter 1383 In The Darkness

Alex looked around inside the Endless Shadow Abyss. He tried to look for anything he could, but he had known that would be impossible before coming in.

The Endless Shadow Abyss was a secret realm where no light got through. Not only light, from what Alex could feel, but even gravity also seemed nonexistent in this place.

He wondered what sort of formations must have been active for this sort of phenomenon to take place inside the secret realm.

He hovered... somewhere and activated his Demon Eyes. Even with that, he could only see black, as the entirety of what he was in was primarily Yin aura, which always showed up as black, to begin with.

Knowing that it wasn't going to help, Alex released his spiritual sense to look around him. When he did, he realized another thing that he had previously learned about before coming in.

The spiritual sense was heavily restricted.

Alex's spiritual sense was now strong enough to reach nearly 30 kilometers, almost as good as a low Saint Transformation realm cultivator's spiritual sense. Even then, it had somehow been restricted down to no more than 30 meters around him.

It was nearly 1000 times smaller than its original size, so Alex assumed it was the same for others as well.

He quickly checked behind him at his back where a piece of paper had appeared on its own. And, on that piece of paper was written a long string of numbers with 15 different letters to it.

The number was unique to him and it was the thing that was going to send him out if someone found it. He knew there was no way to hide it or mask it, so the only way to not get caught was to catch the opponent instead and write their number down on the artifact.

He had to find such an artifact, however.

Alex finally paid attention to his outside world, his spiritual sense reaching the entirety of the 30 meters he could spread at the moment.

When he spread it fully, he saw many different things within it. There were some floating pieces of trash, some furniture, broken artifacts, and many other things that were there just to confuse people.

Alex even saw a floating piece of a mannequin that he initially thought was human. He was worried he would be found out that he nearly went in the other direction.

He drifted into the world without gravity for a few minutes, wondering how this all could have been created. The first Dragon Emperor had made it, yes, but he had received help from his father, the first Azure Dragon when creating this.

Alex floated around, feeling the weirdness of not knowing which direction down was. He could also feel the space around him act weirder than other secret realms as this one was constantly blocking one's storage from being accessed.

Alex flew toward what to him was forward and passed through the many debris-filled darkness. To his senses the darkness wasn't there at all, but only emptiness.

He saw a broken piece of a metal arm, a flying wooden board, a large formation rod, and a chunk of stone, and then he sensed spiritual sense.

Alex paused the moment he sensed the spiritual sense. It wasn't just him that sensed it, but the other person had as well. Without hesitation, he immediately backed away from the location, moving backward.

Thankfully, the person he sensed did the same.

'He must not have found an artifact. Good,' Alex thought. If either of them had found one of the artifacts that allowed people to write the other person's number into it, they would have followed the other person so they could eliminate them.

'I should find one for my own safety,' Alex thought.

"Oi, kid!" Godslayer's called from inside his spiritual sea. "What do you think you're doing?"I think you should take a look at

"Nothing really," Alex said. "Why?"

"Did you forget why we came here?" the spirit asked.

"N-no," Alex said awkwardly. He had been so entranced by the weirdness of this world that until Godslayer had called out to him, he hadn't remembered that he hadn't come here to play.

"Good," Godslayer said, not sensing the lie in those words. "Then let's go find it."

Alex nodded but then paused. "Wait, where do we go exactly?" he asked. "I can't see anything or sense anything here. Everything feels the same. I can't even tell where up or down is."

"Uhh..." Godslayer frowned for a bit. "I should be able to sense it... I think."

"If you get close?" Alex asked.

"Well, I can't sense it now, so it should be when we get close," Godslayer said. "How big is this place? Can't we go look around?"

"We can," Alex said. "Let's see if I can find it then. It should be similar to what we did in the ravine a few years ago."

Godslayer gave a soft hum of affirmation and stayed quiet afterward.

Alex stood where he was for a second, planning on what he needed to do. As he was going through his thoughts, a problem made itself apparent to him that he had to deal with somehow.

The constant suppression of spiritual sense was somehow affecting the rate of regeneration for his spiritual energy. Normally, he could have his spiritual sense around him at all times and never run out of spiritual energy as it would replenish at a faster rate than when it was used.

However, here, the replenishment speed wasn't very high. If he continued using his spiritual sense this way, he was going to run out sooner or later. Given that he was going to have to stay in here for over a month easily, he needed to conserve it.

Instantly, his spiritual sense reduced from 30 meters to 15 meters. Doing so, the rate of spiritual energy consumption was reduced to a fourth of what he was using up previously.

"I need to mark where I've been to," Alex said to himself and flew in the direction of the debris he saw around him. Then, he gathered up the debris and stuck them together as well as he could make a large enough object that could tell him that he had been to this place before.

Once that was set up, he flew away, going out in a random direction with the constant scrutinous observation of his surrounding.

A little forward, he collected the objects, doing the same thing, and continued forward.

As he moved forward. He sensed someone's spiritual sense. Alex stepped back a bit to move away from the person, but he sensed the spiritual sense following him even further.

"Shit!" Alex realized instantly that the person had found some artifact and was going to follow him now. His first instinct after learning that was to steal the artifact from the person and use it on him.

However, he knew that fighting wasn't allowed, and as such he had no way of taking the artifact from the other person without fighting for it.

When the spiritual sense then rushed toward him, Alex had no choice. He turned around and started running away to get as far as he could.

Chapter 1384 A Dagger

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The person that had caught Alex followed him the moment he sensed him running away. He sped up, trying to catch up to Alex, but he couldn't exactly catch up.

Alex flew in a random direction, with his spiritual sense constantly shifting through the debris around him, paying attention to everything since any of those could be another human. He couldn't miss them.

At the same time, he was also looking for anything that could help him stay in the secret realm for a bit longer.

At first, he panicked due to the sudden arrival of a threat, but once he started running away, he realized that the threat wasn't as big of a threat as he might have expected it to be.

To his relief, the person following him wasn't strong at all. If they were strong, they would have already caught up to him with the speed he was flying at.

Alex had deliberately slowed down after realizing this and had concluded that this person could not be stronger than the early Saint Core realm.

At the same time, this person's spiritual sense wasn't that large either. With only a dozen or so meters, it would take them a significant risk to grab onto Alex's numbers.

Alex flew around, letting the person tail him just enough that he didn't get close enough and get him. As he flew, his main concern was to not come into another person's domain.

This was difficult with over 40 thousand people being sent into the secret realm.

Alex wasn't sure how large this place was as no one who had come here before had ever managed to completely map the location. However, he knew that meeting a person every 5 minutes was a common thing here.

So, he was careful. His spiritual sense slightly increased around him, slowly moving from 15 to 20 meters in radius. One thing he didn't want was for the person following him suddenly increase his spiritual sense by forcing it to the extreme and getting his number.

As he was doing that, Alex came across another person in front of him and their spiritual senses collided at the same time.

For a moment, the both of them panicked and prepared to run in the other direction. However, when both of them noticed the object that was flying in between them, they knew that they had to run toward it.

A small dagger with runes carved all over the blade floated in between them, with a spirit stone attached to its hilt. Even without looking at it closely, anyone could tell that this was one of the artifacts that they were supposed to find.

"A Dagger?" Alex's face somewhat brightened when he saw that with his senses. It wasn't the best thing he could find, but it was something alright.

The other person ran for it, but Alex was faster. He teleported, arriving next to it in an instant, and grabbed onto the dagger.

At the same time, his spiritual sense landed on the girl that was coming for the dagger and he focused on the number in the back. Without hesitation, he wrote the number onto the dagger with his spiritual sense.

There were 3 slots to put the numbers inside the dagger, and one of them had just been used.

"Dammit!" the girl cried out, but even as she did, Alex sensed the familiar aura of teleportation gather around her as it sent her back outside into the island.

It hadn't even been half an hour since the competition began, and she was already out.

Alex felt somewhat bad for her, but this was not the time to lose focus. He immediately turned around and dashed toward the person that had been previously following him.

He saw a man's surprised face when he sensed Alex's spiritual sense reach him, but his spiritual sense hadn't reached Alex at all. It was then he realized that he had been following someone way stronger than he could manage.

He panicked, but he kept his wits and rushed forward to find Alex and see his number. However, by the time he did that, Alex had already seen his.

He wrote the number into the dagger and in the next moment the man was teleported away, leaving behind a simple bracer.I think you should take a look at

"Ugh!" Alex frowned the moment he saw it. "A bracer."

"What? Why do you sound so dejected?" Godslayer couldn't help but ask as it was looking at everything that was happening outside.

"A bracer is the worst thing you can find in this place," Alex answered. "Well, I guess finding something is better than nothing though."

"A bracer is bad?" Godslayer asked. "What about the dagger you found?"

"It's better than the bracer, but only slightly. It's still considered one of the worst 3 artifacts to find in this place," he explained.

He wore the bracer on his arm and started making a pile of debris around him to mark the place he had been to.

"The 3 worst? What do you mean?" Godslayer asked.

"Well, there are 7 types of artifacts that you can find in this place. 3 are bad, 3 are good, and 1 is just… godly."New n0vel chapters are published on

"This bracer for example allows me to write just 1 person's number on it. When I do, it becomes useless, and get taken out of this place. This dagger allows for 3 numbers, and it will also be taken away when I'm done with it."

"Finally, there is I believe a Hat that can be used to write 5 different numbers on it. The hat, along with the bracer and the dagger is considered as the 3 bad artifacts to find in this place."

"Which is quite funny as they are the only ones you can find in massive numbers. There should be hundreds, if not thousands of them floating around in this space, and are the ones that can be easily found," Alex explained.

"What? That old man outside didn't say that," Godslayer said.

"He didn't, and he won't," Alex said. "They leave it all for you to find on your own and come in with that information. If you fail, you can always try again next year after all."

"Hmm," Godslayer mulled. "If those three are the bad ones, then what is considered the good ones?"

"A shield, a mirror, and a necklace," Alex said. "Those are the good ones, with each one being increasingly better."

"The shield has 50 different slots, over 8 times better than the 3 bad ones combined. That's good and all, but then the Mirror has 200 slots, which is just… a lot."

"And finally, the necklace has a thousand different slots. If I'm not wrong, there should only be 5 of those hovering around in this place."

"Woah!" Godslayer couldn't help but react. "That's… that escalation is almost unfair to the unlucky ones."

"I suppose," Alex said. "But luck is a skill as well. Cultivators can rarely make it far in their journey without luck."

"You're not… wrong," Godslayer said. "So, if something with 1000 different slots is considered good, then what's godly?"

"A one-of-a-kind black, nameless book," Alex said. "It technically only has one slot from what I remember reading."

"One slot?" Godslayer asked. "Then how is it good?"

"It has a single slot, but every time you use the slot, it empties again. In a way, it has endless slots, making it the greatest artifact to find in this secret realm."

Chapter 1385 A Bittersweet Memory

﻿

"The ones you got are that bad, huh?" Godslayer couldn't help but say. "How many slots do you have?"

"2," Alex said. "One in the dagger, one in the bracer."

"Well, let's go find more then. How many of those shields and mirrors are there?" Godslayer asked.

"Not enough," Alex said as his spiritual sense kept at around 15 meters and searched through the darkness around him. "I don't think there is a specific number that anyone knows, but guesses are there are less than a hundred of each."

"That's still quite a lot," Godslayer said.

"For 40 thousand people? I'm not sure," Alex said.

Godslayer remained quiet for a bit. "Shit, you need to be careful then. How about you don't use those slots when you find the next person? Instead, you run away."

"Uhh… I can do that," Alex said. "I'm not sure if that is the right approach though, since they can have one of those artifacts you know. If I can get their name, I can send them away and their artifact will remain."

"Dammit! Why is this so annoying? I just want the Darkness aura," Godslayer said. "Then we'll do it this way. If you see someone, check if they have something. If they do, send them away. If they don't, run away."

Alex nodded. "That's the best compromise," he said.

The two of them talked as they flew. Most of Alex's attention was on the outside world, but he still kept up with Godslayer's questions and answered them.

"Why don't you hide your aura completely?" Godslayer asked. "If you do that, and remove your spiritual sense, people will think you're just an object, right?"

"I don't know about that. If they see my number, I'm doomed," Alex said.

"Then don't show your number," Godslayer shouted.

"One of the main rules is that our numbers must never be hidden. If it is, we will get disqualified," Alex said.

"URGH! Why is this so annoying?" Godslayer shouted.

Alex couldn't help but chuckle a bit. He moved a bit further and stopped when he sensed another spiritual sense. "Someone's here," he alerted Godslayer.

He waited to see the other person's response. If he came closer, he would have an artifact, if he ran away, he didn't have it.

The man came closer, letting Alex know that he had an artifact. Without hesitation, Alex flexed his spiritual sense to its peak to scan over the persona and see what he had.

When he did, he realized that it was a girl with a small talisman in front of her and absolutely no artifact with her. When he tried to check her number, he found his spiritual sense disrupting a little, becoming unable to take a proper look at her back where the number was.

Alex immediately ran in the opposite direction after realizing there was a problem. He couldn't see the girl's back, so he didn't want to risk her seeing his. Thankfully, the girl didn't follow.

"What's wrong?" Godslayer asked realizing that something was wrong.

"The girl, she had a talisman to disrupt someone's spiritual sense," Alex said.

"Wait, you can't see her number?" Godslayer asked.

"I could with a bit more focus, but it would've taken enough time for her to see mine as well. I didn't see any artifact on her, but I would rather not take that risk right now," he said.

"I see, good," Godslayer said. "There's no point in risking your number on the very first day."

Alex nodded and continued in a different direction, waiting for Godslayer to sense something.

"Is that allowed though?" Godslayer asked. "Isn't she hiding her number?"I think you should take a look at

"Not really," Alex answered. "It's more like instead of hiding, she simply turned off the light. We were never told that wasn't allowed."

"We were told that we aren't allowed to hide our numbers and that we aren't allowed to attack someone. Everything else was fair game from the start. That's why so many people had prepared talismans, formations, and artifacts from the very start."

"But…" Godslayer tried to argue, but he couldn't say anything. "Did you not bring anything?"

"Honestly, I had thought of bringing some artifacts but decided against it as I had expected that we would be on our way to absorbing the Darkness aura. Speaking of which, why aren't you doing it right now? Isn't it all around us?" Alex asked.

"This is more like the smell of a tasty dish. If I want to eat it, I have to find the food first," Godslayer said.

"I see," Alex said. He thought about his recent experience and fell into thought. Memories surfaced in his mind from so long ago that he had nearly forgotten such things had even happened.

He smiled a little remembering those memories, but he couldn't bring himself to fully smile as it was more bittersweet than anything.

Godslayer seemed to have noticed that as well.

"What's wrong? What are you thinking?" he asked.

"About my master," Alex said softly.

"Your master? The one that's alive or…"

"The other one," Alex said. "She died before I ever met you."

Godslayer remained silent for a bit. He had heard Alex talk about her a few times and knew that she had died not a pleasant death. Still, he couldn't stop his curiosity.

"Why now? Why are you suddenly remembering her?" he asked.

"Well, I was reminded of something after meeting that girl just now. It's a funny thought really," Alex said. "If my master had taken part in this competition, she would have won handily. There is absolutely no doubt about that."

"Huh?" Godslayer was a little surprised. "Isn't your master from that backward empire where people don't even reach the Saint realm? How would she win this thing at all? Did she manage to find some amazing technique that the idiot dropped?"

"No, not technique or artifacts or such," Alex spoke. "It was her body constitution that would have helped her win."

"Explain," Godslayer said.

"Well, you see, she had a Yin body, a Celestial Grade one at that. Toward the start when she evolved her body, she couldn't contain her Yin at all. So, she would be constantly exuding it, like I did Yang after I evolved too."New n0vel chapters are published on

"Her Yin, however, was so strong that anything that got close to her would lose all energy, including Spiritual energy. As a result, if you used your spiritual sense on her, she would be nothing but a void in your sense," Alex explained. "If she was here, no one would be able to see her and she would easily win this thing."

"That does sound strong actually," Godslayer said. "How did such a strong person die?"

"Misfortune," Alex said. "The Nine Yang Divine Tree's fruit managed to ripen at an unfortunate time, stripping her of all her Yin, allowing the enemy to poison her. If she had Qi, she would've definitely survived."

"I… see," Godslayer said. "And you mentioned that you went through the same thing?"

"The Yin imbalance? Yes," Alex said. "My body had a yang imbalance that took some time to control too."

"And did it give you some advantage against others?" Godslayer asked.

Alex paused for a moment. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"Your master couldn't be seen using Spiritual sense, right?" Godslayer asked. "What happened when people saw you through their spiritual sense?"

Chapter 1386 Imbalance

﻿

Alex stared blankly for a few seconds. He tried to come up with an answer for Godslayer, but… he couldn't remember any such event.

"I don't know," he answered in the end. "I don't know what happened."

"Hm? Didn't you say your constitutions were similar?' Godslayer asked.

"They were… I think…" Alex said. "I never really knew what master's body constitution was, aside from knowing it was a Yin body constitution. I never actually managed to find out anything else."

"Still, if your body reacted the same way her body did, then… there should be some similarity in what it did right?" Godslayer asked. "Are you sure you didn't show any sort of signs as to what it could have done?"

Alex fell into some thoughts. He had never really thought back to that part of his past, so he hadn't given any of what had happened back then much thought. Now that he was giving it some thought, he found some differences in what he thought was similar.

"Actually, Master's and my situation might have been a little different, now that I think about it," Alex said. "Master has a Yin body and her problem occurred when she absorbed a strong Yang in her body. Her body evolved when I took away that Yang."

"Unlike her, my body evolved when I ate the Nine Yang Divine fruit. Instead of being affected by the opposite energy, I was affected by the similar one."

"We both had imbalance after that and needed the opposite energy to control ourselves. While Master had no way of acquiring Yang energy, other than going out to find it in our sect's forbidden area."

"As for me, I had a cultivation technique that directly let me absorb Yin," Alex said. "Maybe that was why I never showed signs. Because I was constantly cultivating and suppressing the yang inside my body at all times."New n0vel chapters are published on

"Of course, I had to find the Five Yang Divine Path at that time, which made the matter worse, but I'm sure aside from the first time, I controlled it most of… the time…" his voice trailed off as he remembered the first night he practiced the technique.

He remembered the Yang energy he drew in that night like a vortex. His body was full of Yang already, so he couldn't absorb it all and instead, it only gathered around it. At that time, Luo Mei had rushed to him in worry that something was happening.

Because his mind was on this matter, his memory from that time surfaced again.

'Are you the cause of this?' she had asked him at the time when he had turned the whole house hot from the excess amount of Yang in there.

The memory that was hidden somewhere in the back of his mind was slowly revealing itself again and started playing as if a recording.

Luo Mei had come into his room that night, worried for his safety, and then said a couple of sentences. As the memory played itself in his mind, one of those sentences caught Alex's attention.

"Wait," he spoke out loud. "I do know what happens."

"Huh?" Godslayer was surprised to hear him shout all of a sudden after becoming silent for a while. "What do you know?" he asked.

"What happens when someone uses spiritual sense around me," Alex said. "My Yang burns up their spiritual sense."

"Oh," Godslayer said. "How did you figure that out?"

"My senior sister told me once when my Yang imbalance truly got out of control. I didn't give it a thought back then, but… she definitely said that."

"Your yang aura makes other people's spiritual sense burn?" Godslayer asked to confirm.

"Yes," Alex said. "As least… it did during the imbalance phase of my life. I don't think it has worked that way a single day when I had it under some sort of control, which happened to be most if not all the days I had the imbalance. It was only toward the end when I went to the Icy Hell that it had gotten very bad."

"Even then, I was controlling it to the best of my ability," Alex said.

"So… you don't know for certain what would have happened if you had let it be for real," Godslayer asked.I think you should take a look at

"No, but I trust my senior sister's words," Alex said.

"That's good and all, but you still need proof," Godslayer said.

"Sure," Alex said. "Let's get some proof then."

"How do you suggest we do that?" Godslayer asked. "You don't have that imbalance anymore."

"Yeah… but I should be able to emulate it," Alex said. Suddenly, his dantian stirred and a massive amount of Yang energy flowed out from inside of him, quickly covering his entire body in a thick layer of Yang Qi.

Even without a Yang Dao, his Supreme Yang spiritual root gave him excellent control over Yang Qi, allowing him to do what he did.

Alex felt the yang on him and frowned a little. He was covered in Yang, but it didn't feel enough. He needed more Yang. He needed better Yang.

There were two methods of acquiring that at the moment.

First, he could use the Immortal tier of the Five Yang Divine path. Until now, he had been using the Saint tier, which had allowed him to reach this far.

However, if he were to use the Immortal tier, he would attract stronger Yang Qi, which was what he needed. However, he wasn't sure if his body was capable of handling such strong Yang.

In fact, he wasn't even sure if there was any Yang surrounding him at the moment since he was in a place where Yin seemed to prevail.

As a result, he had to go with his second choice.

Alex reached into his body with his senses and touched onto the burning Yang source inside of his dantian that was hanging on the side of the massive golden core that had already formed.

He touched the Yang source and pulled Qi from it directly, making it help him even more than he himself already had.

A deep sense of coldness filled his dantian now that the Yang source and the Yin bead weren't balancing themselves, but it was only to a very small level. Alex could handle this quite easily.

Once he pulled the Yang from the Yang source, he finally felt it was adequate enough to be used for what he wanted.

"This should be enough," Alex said. He opened his eyes after sensing something and realized that even the darkness aura around him was slowly moving away from him.

Even when trying to, Alex was still leaking Yang Qi, just like all those years ago.

"Now you want to find a target to test?" Godslayer asked.

"Now we find a target to figure out if what I remember is correct or not," Alex said. "Let's go."

He moved through the darkness, searching for artifacts and people from around him. As he flew, he came across another bracer, which he hated but kept reluctantly.

Then a few minutes later, he came across a spiritual sense that wasn't retreating right at the very moment.

"We found our first test subject," Alex said to Godslayer. "Let's pray it doesn't become the last."

Chapter 1387 Testing

Alex slowly got fearful now that the time had come. His entire body was covered in Yang Qi, but he wasn't sure how it worked exactly just yet. He was trying to figure it out, and in doing so, he was risking his own survival inside of the abyss.

Had the suppressing space formation not been there, he would have called out Pearl or Whisker to check it for him, but to do so, he would have to use his space dao, which he did not want to do as that might end up being a violation of the rules as well.

As a result, this was the only way for him to test it.

He had his senses ready at his bracer to write down the number of the person he had come across. As the person didn't retreat, they were ready to write down his number for certain too.

Instantly, Alex's spiritual sense spread to over 45 meters in a split second, far surpassing his energy than what they could produce. At the same time, he saw their number and wrote it down on his bracer.

All of the digits, but the last one. He stopped before he wrote down the last digit as he needed to see how it worked.

The other person was an upside-down girl, whose flowing hair flailed in an unruly manner in the absence of gravity. Her face showed fear as the spiritual sense had touched her, while her spiritual sense hadn't touched her enemy.

She had a shield in her hand that she had luckily found when she arrived. She had only just written 2 names and still had 48 others remaining. Was she going to lose just like that?

Was she going to lose to someone she couldn't even reach?

Checking who the other person was was no longer a priority for her. As he had sensed her, she knew she had lost. However, after seeing as seconds passed without her being sent away, she realized something was wrong.

'Wait, does he not have one?' she wondered. Without waiting, she moved forward with her spiritual sense following the root of the strong user.

When she reached the center of the spiritual sense, suddenly she felt his mind in slight ache. Her spiritual sense felt hot and that hurt her. She tried to look at her opponent's face, but even that seemed impossible.

Her spiritual sense that was reaching her opponent seemed to dissipate when it got too close.

"What the hell is going on?" she couldn't help but complain. "What sort of artifact is he using?"

Not only was her spiritual sense not reaching her opponent to see his face or the number on his back, but she was also realizing that it was actually getting destroyed, and that was hurting her back.

Alex took deep breaths, waiting in nervousness for the spiritual sense to land directly on him. However, no matter how long he waited, the girl's spiritual sense never landed on him.

"It's... it's working," he said to Godslayer with a surprised look. "Haha, it truly is working."

"Really?" Godslayer couldn't help but ask.

"Yeah! Look, we're still here," Alex said.

"Wow," Godslayer exclaimed. "Well, for now, send the poor girl away."

"Oh, right," Alex remember and put the last digit into the bracer. Then, the teleportation aura grabbed onto the girl and sent her away. At the same time, the bracer he wrote the name on disappeared as well.

He celebrated again after the girl was gone and started reflecting on what he saw with his own senses as to what happened just beforehand.

When the girl's spiritual sense had come close, where his master's body would freeze it all so that it didn't even reach her, his body would burn it all up.

He let go of the Yang Qi around his body, letting his Dantian relax a little as well as letting some heat return to it. With the Yang source inside his dantian working away from the Yin bead, it had caused a bit of coldness.

While not dangerous, it sure as hell was annoying him to feel coldness in that part of his body when he hadn't felt cold in decades.I think you should take a look at

He tried Pulling the yang Qi back out and found how easily he could do that now that he knew what to do.

"I think our hypothesis is correct," Alex said. "When spiritual sense lands on me, it burns. Let's go try a few more times."

He flew away from the location and went on to find more people.

Only half a day had passed before he found the 4th person, but the fact that it took him half a day was something that Alex hadn't expected. With 40 thousand people already inside the abyss, he had expected people to be found left and right.

However, he also had to remember that many were sent outside already. If his record was anything to go by, nearly 30 thousand people had already been eliminated in half a day, with only 10 thousand remaining.

And, Alex had found another one.

The man used his spiritual sense to try and see Alex's number, but he couldn't sense it. Just like the girl, he too was having difficulty keeping his spiritual sense around Alex.

As such, he couldn't write Alex's number on the hat that he wore.

Alex had made sure that his hypothesis was correct and that other people did in fact suffer from damaged spiritual sense when they tried to look at him. So, it was time to send the man away.

Only, there was a problem.

Alex couldn't see the man's number either.

It seemed he was using an artifact that was clearly designed to save someone from other people's spiritual sense. It created a barrier around the man that his spiritual sense couldn't go past.

To Alex, he saw a large, shiny dome of energy that covered the young man. He couldn't penetrate the barrier with his spiritual sense at all.

Neither of the two could see each other's number at all.

Alex knew that people brought such artifacts, but it was kinda annoying when he really thought about it. They were using outer power to gain an advantage. But of course, who was he to complain?

He was using plenty of stuff that didn't belong to him at all.

"Let's move our separate way," the man's voice came from inside the barrier. "Neither of us is getting what we want, so let's just go our separate ways, and we can survive a bit longer."

"Good idea," Alex replied. "If neither of us can see the other's number, then we really should go the other way."

"Great," the man said. "It's good that you understa—"

"That is, if neither of us saw the other's number," Alex said. "Unfortunately for you, I have a method."

Alex teleported in an instant, arriving behind the man. His right hand moved, producing Yang Qi from it to send away the Shadow aura that was behind the man.

Then, with his left hand, he created a tongue of flame that was large enough to brighten everything in the area where there was no more shadow.

Then, Alex saw the number clearly written behind the man and wrote it onto his dagger. At the next moment, the man felt the teleportation aura grab onto him.

He teleported away, and so did Alex's dagger. And all that was left behind was the man's hat with 2 more free slots.

Chapter 1388 Searching Through The Darkness

A Hat with 2 slots, a Bracer, and a Shield with 48 slots; that was all Alex had at the moment in the form of artifacts that he could use to send away any person he ran into.

With his Yang Qi, he felt invincible at the moment. Since most people's spiritual sense would turn out useless against him when he forced out a lot of Yang Qi, he felt like he had nothing to worry about.

However, he knew there were 2 problems right now that could easily send him thrown out of the abyss if he wasn't careful.

First was his Yang Qi. Since there was barely any Yang Qi in the Abyss, he couldn't use it so frequently. If he used it too much, he would overwork the Yang source inside of his Dantian to the point where the Yin could take over the Yang.

If that happened, his body would certainly be in a very dangerous state.

As a result, using Yang Qi every time he met someone was out of the question. Instead, he needed to first see if he could catch them with his spiritual sense instead of using his Yang Qi to defend himself.

Secondly, even if he did use Yang Qi, there was no way he was invincible. Just like he had used the technique just now, there would definitely be others that were around who could easily see his number behind his back, just as he had done to the man just moments ago.

If someone managed to sneak behind him and catch him by surprise, he could lose.

As such, he still had to remain vigilant at all times.

"I wonder what else my body can do," Alex said.

"Isn't your body supposed to e well known?" Godslayer asked.

"Hmm... yes," Alex replied. "Not for its true name, but there are plenty of other names that it is known by. That's what the senior told me."

"Then there much be records about what your body can do," Godslayer said.

"The senior doesn't have it," Alex said. "I already asked him for it. The only unique thing about my body that he remembered was that I could devour stuff, but I already know I can do that."

"Hmm, but he's not the only one with the information," Godslayer said. "There should be many in the Immortal realm that have this knowledge. You'll just have to see it all there."

"In the Immortal realm, huh?" Alex couldn't help but chuckle. He didn't even know how long he would have to wait to go over there.

"Alright, you can think about your body later. Let's go find my food for now," Godslayer said.

"Sure, let's go," Alex said and flew in another random direction, not before gathering the debris around here to make sure he was leaving behind markings as to where he had been before.

Floating around the darkness, Alex moved everywhere he knew he hadn't been before. He marked the places he went to and moved further, all in hopes that Godslayer sensed whatever it was that created the shadow aura

As he moved, he realized that finding people was getting harder and harder by the hour. He met one other person in the entire day, who ran away from him the moment their spiritual senses came close to each other.

Alex continued flying for a while longer, coming across a few more people in the next few days, of which he managed to send almost all of them away.

He ended up spending the hat and the bracer, and 2 more slots in his shield. At the same time, he gained a dagger with all slots available and a single Bracer.

He let go of the people who ran away, as his primary reasoning wasn't to win here. However, no matter how much he moved through the shadows, he could not find anything that evoked Godslayer into finding out what the source of all this shadow was.

The days turned monotonous with only debris floating all around him in the darkness. Everything felt the same. Even time seemed still to him.I think you should take a look at

The only occasional break was when he found someone and had to pull out his Yang Qi to protect himself while getting rid of the ones that he met.

They all used whatever they could to disrupt one's spiritual sense to stop them from finding them, which Alex had to fight through to see their number.

At one point, he even met someone that completely threw him for a loop with what he was doing.

When their spiritual sense came into contact, Alex waited to see if the person would run away or come closer. When he moved toward him, Alex instantly put up his Yang Qi to block the man's spiritual sense.

Once his safety was confirmed, he moved on to getting the person's name. That was when he came across the problem.

The man was destroying his spiritual sense when it came too close. He had no talisman, no formation plate, and absolutely no artifact on him. Which meant that he was using a technique to do so.

From what Alex could sense, the man was using a spiritual technique to destroy his spiritual sense.

Since he was actively stopping his spiritual sense from getting close by fighting against it, Alex couldn't get the man's number.

With neither of them getting each other's numbers, they came to a standstill. Alex was surprised, and so was the man.

They stood there for a few seconds before the man decided to run away. Alex didn't follow him. He was just that much confused to do anything at the moment.

"Spiritual energy can be used to destroy Spiritual sense?" he couldn't help but ask. It was his first time experiencing something like that, so he was amazed.

Until now, the spiritual sense was used to harm other person's mind or disrupt it. Never had it been used to actually destroy spiritual sense itself, and the possibility of that had surprised Alex.

However, after thinking about it for a bit, he realized that there was no reason for him to believe it wasn't possible. After all, it was no different than the 3rd stage of his Spiritual Providence skill which allowed him to create a barrier with his spiritual energy when using a weapon.

A stage he had yet to master.

This was definitely the best place to train it when he thought about it, but given that he didn't have a weapon on him, he couldn't train on it. But, he wasn't disappointed about that. There were plenty of other places to improve himself on that.

He moved away from the location and went on to explore more of this dark world.

Days passed in which he found a few more people and eliminated most of them.

Then, halfway through the third week of being in the abyss with barely anyone around him, Godslayer suddenly reacted.

"Wait, it's close," he shouted in Alex's mind. "It's close, keep moving."

Alex got alert all of a sudden and moved straight forward in that direction.

"Close, we're close," Godslayer said.

Then, Alex paused. Not because he came across an object as he was hoping, but instead a person.

Chapter 1389 The Black Book

﻿

"It's right there," Godslayer said, but Alex didn't see anything at all. Instead, there was just a person, someone who he couldn't see because of some artifact they were using to disrupt his spiritual sense.

Alex immediately pulled out his Yang Qi and covered himself with it. Throughout the last 3 weeks, he had to use it less and less, so he had plenty of it to go around. So, he used it without the worry of running out.

Alex didn't know what was happening right now. He couldn't understand why a person would be something that created the shadow aura, but he had no reason to doubt Godslayer. He only moved closer to find him.

His spiritual senses wavered heavily as it tried to look at the person in front of him. At the same time, his opponent's spiritual sense was destroyed upon just touching the Yang Qi he was forced out on his body.

"What is it? I can't see!" Godslayer shouted in his mind excitedly.

Alex couldn't either, but he tried. He barely managed to see the face of the other person before they immediately ran away.New n0vel chapters are published on

"It's getting away!" Godslayer mentioned, but he didn't need to. Alex was already in pursuit. He blitzed through the darkness, following the spiritual sense of the person that was flying ahead of him.

When the person took away their spiritual sense, it was Godslayer who gave him instructions on where to go.

As Alex followed, he recalled the face that he saw. It was a young man named Zhan Lushin whom he had seen met in the lounge area of the gathering building.

If Alex wasn't mistaken, this person was from the same Zhan Family as the Crown Prince's fiance, Zhan Luoyang. He could even be directly related to the Crown Prince's fiance, which would make him an important figure in the city.

Alex continued chasing and soon enough he got close enough that he could keep track of him on his own. He still couldn't sense his number on the back, but he could at least tell where he was.

Simply following him was the most important task at the moment.

As the chasing continued, Alex passed through many spiritual senses that tried to latch onto him, but none succeeded. His Yang Qi simply destroyed any and all spiritual energy that landed on him.

Alex got ever so close to the man and wasn't caught off-guard by the random maneuvers he tried to do to get away from him.

As the distance between them remained consistent, Alex started to check the young man's number while chasing him.

His spiritual sense still wavered, but given enough time he could catch onto it. He kept his spiritual sense on him no matter what, and as a result, he managed to catch a glimpse of something he had not expected at all.

His speed slowed down momentarily out of shock, but he sped up again to catch up to the man.

"He has it," Alex told Godslayer. "It might be the cause of the Shadow Aura."

"What? What does he have?" Godslayer asked in a confused voice.

"The book. The black book," Alex shouted.

"The book? Wait, the one with endless slots?" Godslayer asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "And I think it just might be the source of the shadow aura here."

"Get it then," Godslayer said, but it wasn't so easy.

Anywhere else, he could have already attacked, but here he couldn't. He had to remain inoffensive while trying to get the guy's number. Alex continued wondering what exactly it was that he could do to get the number of someones that continued moving at such incredible speed.

His opponent was in the late Saint Core realm, so he definitely needed to find a quick method to end this chase here. If it continued, Alex would run out of Qi, and the Yang Qi around his body would dissipate to the point where it would become useless.

The moment that happened, he would lose any and all battles if someone managed to sneak up on him.I think you should take a look at

"If only he remained still. I could get rid of the Shadow aura enough to see with normal vision," Alex said to himself. As it stood, it felt impossible to catch the numbers on the man's back with how much it affected his spiritual sense. If the person stopped moving, he could get rid of him like he did the many other people just by arriving behind them and checking their numbers.

That, unfortunately, was impossible when someone was flying this quickly. He would have to find another way.

"Get close to him," Godslayer spoke after hearing him.

Alex paused for a moment, slowly understanding what Godslayer wanted. "Can you do it?" he asked.

"It's just Shadow Aura," Godslayer said. "It's a lesser version of Darkness aura. Trust me, I can do it easily."

"Okay, I trust you," Alex said.

Alex saw that the young man wasn't using his spiritual sense as it was all getting destroyed. As such, that gave him the perfect opportunity to hide himself.

His aura disappeared from his body as he became hollow to the senses of the young man who could no longer tell where Alex was. Still, he ran, never looking back.

Alex teleported, arriving right behind the young man so close that if he moved his arms around a bit more, he would've been able to hit Alex.

Alex was right on top of him with his eyes wide open. He still couldn't see anything, but that was only going to matter for a little longer. The moment he was there, Godslayer started his work.

Immediately the Shadow aura, which was incredibly low in amount compared to what it was in the book, was sucked into Alex, going to Godslayer inside of him.

At the same time, as the shadow dissipated, Alex got his change.

Spiritual sense suddenly washed all across Alex as the young man released it out of curiosity as to where he had gone.

For a moment the young man wasn't aware of what he was sensing, but seeing that Alex was on top of him, he panicked.

At the same time, Alex panicked too. His Yang Qi was low, so he was worried that he had been seen through. That was all he hoped to not be the case.

Whether it was or not, he couldn't sit still.

Instantly, Alex revealed light into the surrounding as he created a ball of fire on his hand that remained burning even as the two of them moved at incredible speed.

With that, he saw the number.

The young man rushed as well, but Alex was faster. The moment he saw the number on the man's back, he quickly wrote it into the shield that he had on him.

Once the entire number was added, the young man finally slowed down. At the next moment, he vanished.

Alex stopped flying and grabbed all the few artifacts that flew after the young man disappeared, including the black book that was exactly what he wanted.

Alex put aside everything and just grabbed the black book as that was all he wanted.

"Is this it?" he asked as he couldn't sense the aura.

"Yes," Godslayer said. "This is it." His voice sounded excited.

"Now keep holding it. I'm going to absorb it all away."

Chapter 1390 Shadow Aura

Godslayer began without hesitation.

Alex looked at the black book with his own eyes and slowly the blackness of the book was receding when viewed through his Demon Eyes.

Godslayer was absorbing every piece of Shadow aura that was on the book without leaving any behind, unintentionally collecting even the Shadow aura that was scattered in the abyss around him.

Of course, what was scattered could not be comparable to what was in the book itself.

Alex waited on full alert in hope that no one else arrived close by. He had been following the young man named Zhan Lushin for who knew how long, and he was afraid that he accidentally got someone else to tail him, like he did the young man.

Thankfully, no one came in the multiple hours that it took for Godslayer to collect everything inside of the black book. At some point, Alex even saw the physical textures of the book with his own eyes after lighting up a small fire.

"Ahh, finally done," Godslayer proclaimed, sounding extremely happy with himself in the end.

Alex look at the book and saw the lack of blackness with his Demon Eyes. "Are you fully done?" he asked.

"Yes, I collected everything," Godslayer said.

"Great!" Alex said. "That was easier than I thought it would be honestly. So, do you need some time to absorb it? Are you going to go to sleep?"

Godslayer paused a bit. "Actually... there is a small problem," he said.

Alex frowned a little. "What problem?" he asked in a worried tone.

"So... the thing is, since this isn't darkness aura, as you know by now, I cannot absorb it to make myself stronger," Godslayer said. "I can absorb it to make myself temporarily stronger, but it will not elevate me as a spirit."

"What's the problem exactly? That it is not Darkness aura?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, that's the main problem," Godslayer said.

Alex put on a disappointed look. "But you said this was going to help you. I thought you were going to get stronger from this," he said.

"I was, and I still can, but not in the way we hoped," Godslayer said. "I had expected the shadow aura to just have originated from Darkness aura, but turns out that is not true. It truly is shadow aura. Whoever placed the aura in the book managed to remove all intent from Darkness aura, keeping only the Shadow aura."

"So what does that mean? Did we fail?" Alex asked.

"No, we did not," Godslayer said. "We just... there is an extra step added to the process now, but..."

Alex waited for Godslayer to continue, but he didn't. "But what?" he asked.

"You will hate this part," Godslayer said.

"Come on! Spit it out. We're already this far enough," Alex said.

Godslayer sighed and spoke. "Here's the thing. The Shadow aura is now around me, and I can keep it around me for a long time, as long as your annoying yellow cloud doesn't come close ot it."

"Our initial plan was me hoping this was Darkness aura, in which case I could have absorbed that and Death aura at the same time to get stronger."

"However, now I need to first turn this Shadow Aura into Darkness aura. For that, I will need to add Intent into the Shadow arua."

Alex's anger calmed down a little. "That's it? Why didn't you say so before?" he asked. "I don't know why you said I would not approve of it. Just give it to me, I'll do it. It's just intent."I think you should take a look at

"No," Godslayer said loudly. "It is not JUST intent. Did you forget what Darkness aura is? Shadow aura is the aura formed in the absense of light."

"Darkness aura is that, but also the aura of corruption. The aura of grief and anger and cruelty and injustice. It is the aura of the darkness at the heart of people that have been wronged. It is the aura that grows when one gives up on morality."

"It is the aura of evil itself."

"To say that a Shadow aura needs an Intent to become a Darkness aura does not mean that you need simple intent. It means you need to feed it to someone who had been wronged. Someone who can fuel it."

"Someone who has suffered grief and injustice, and no longer sees anything wrong with becoming evil."

"To change Shadow Aura to Darkness aura, you need to find someone like that and then force the aura upon them. And then take it all away. That is the only way to create a Darkness aura."

"That... is the only thing, aside from Death aura that can empower me."

Both Alex and Godslayer remained silent for a while. "I will not ask you to find someone like that for me. I will keep this Shadow aura with me for now. It is plenty that I can use to aid you up to a certain level if required."

"Instead, let's just try and find an actual Darkness source. I am sure there are plenty out there," Godslayer said.

Alex remained quiet for a while and nodded. "Alright, let us do that," he said. He looked around the darkness that still lingered and asked, "What will happen now that you have taken away the source?"

"Nothing for a while," Godslayer said. "There is no light coming here as it is a spatial pocket that was designed that way. The Shadow aura will lessen over time, more if people use Yang Qi, but for a while, no one will notice that something is wrong with it."

"We should be able to avoid suspicion when the secret realm eventually fails a couple of centuries later," Godslayer.

"Oh, if that is all it takes then fine," Alex said. "Now that we've gotten what we came here for. Let us leave."

"Oh, will it be that easy?" Godslayer asked.

"Actually, it will be very simple," Alex said with a bit of a chuckle. "Just watch."

He threw the book aside and flew off in a direction where he had previously sensed spiritual senses. Those people had most likely moved away by now, but he hoped to find at least someone in the time being.

After flying straight for an hour, he finally sensed a spiritual sense. The moment he sensed it, he stopped and flew toward the person.

The young woman who was surprised by his sudden arrival panicked and immediately spread her spiritual sense all around him. She didn't even wait a second to see who he was or what he wanted.

She went directly for her number and wrote it onto the Mirror that she held in one of her arms, while the other one held a Spiritual sense dampening artifact.

The moment Alex's number was written, he felt the teleportation spell latch around him. When he sensed that, he couldn't help but smile.

"See? I told you it would be easy to leave," he said before turning toward the girl. "Thanks."

He disappeared, arriving on the stone platform that was formed around the well.

"So that's what you meant," Godslayer said. "I thought you were planning to win the whole thing."

Alex chuckled. "Is there really a need to do that though?" he asked. "I've gotten everything I wanted from the abyss, so there is no need to stay around."

Chapter 1391 End Of The Event

"Your Majesty," King Jin arrived next to the platform a few seconds after Alex arrived outside. "You came out?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I must say I made some mistake not preparing more."

"No, you did great your majesty," King Jin said. "For a first timer, you did amazing. Look, you are in the top 100."

Alex turned around to where the King was pointing and saw that he had arrived somewhere around 78th rank. He had stayed inside for 3 weeks at most, and that had resulted in him coming as high as 78.

"Oh, I actually did do well," he couldn't help but say. Had he actually tried, he would have most likely beaten the entire thing. But, Alex didn't worry about that.

In fact, it was better to not keep the attention on himself during these moments. The more lowkey he could remain in events such as this, the more he could move around without alerting the others.

"78 is not bad, right?" he asked.

"It's a respectable rank, especially when you consider that you were up against folks that had plenty of experience before you," the King said.

Alex nodded. "Where are the rest?" he asked.

"Waiting back at the building," the King said. "Let us leave."

Alex walked away with the King, quickly going over to where the other elders were waiting for him. He accepted their words of consolation, some saying that he could try again next year.

Alex accepted what they said and sat by them to wait for the remainder of the matches to finish.

He spoke about his experience inside the abyss with his two elders, explaining how everything was. He went through his journey there which was quite monotonous for the most part.

The surrounding individuals who could hear him were quite perplexed at the description as they remembered being very nervous and easily startled inside the abyss.

They had to be alert at every moment to make sure someone didn't sneak up on them. Given how weak their spiritual sense was when compared to the rest of the people that were in there the first time around, that could only be the experience everyone felt.

Most couldn't help but wonder if Alex was trying to show off and appear nonchalant while hiding what he had actually gone through.

Talia came out from the abyss a while later, ranking around 65. She arrived where the group was under King Jin's calling, and started talking about what had happened.

"I had a necklace!" she shouted. "But I ran out of spiritual stones in the end and my formation stopped working."

She sounded quite bitter. "I should have taken more out right here, but I thought 20 would be enough. I was wrong," she said.

"Is 65 not better than what you reached last year though?" the King asked.

"It is, your majesty, but I wanted more. Ugh, I should have taken 25 with me. Next year, I'll wear a robe with a lot of pockets to keep them on me," she said.

The group chuckled at her words.

"You did better than me, congratulations," Alex said in the end.

"I saw your rank, your Majesty. You did extremely well considering you had no idea what the Abyss even was just a year ago," she said. "For a first-timer, this sort of rank is beyond amazing."

"So everyone says," Alex smiled.

"Well, there's no point in you trying to win this anyway," the King said. "It's not like you need something that the winner gets, do you?"

"Fame, was that it?" Alex asked. "The entire continent finds out that it was your sect that stood victorious in the Abyss. There is no better advertisement for your sect than that, is there?"

"Yes," King Jin nodded. "Well, I also allow the top 100 free entry to the Hundred Blossom Valley as another piece of reward, but that doesn't matter much according to the ranking. Not that many accept either."

"They don't?" Alex was a little surprised.

"Not many know about plants, so they find it unnecessary to go there. They wouldn't benefit from going there, so they don't," the King said.I think you should take a look at

"Of course," Alex nodded.

The group continued waiting for more and more people to come out until only 5 remained.

Xue Xiulan of the Beast Supremacy Sect.

Luo Bohan of the Spears Peak sect.

Cui Qiaopan of the True Gold Palace.

Su Railin of the Ice Mist Palace.

And finally, Fang Yimu of the Cloud Iron sect.

Once these 5 remained, the crowd waited in anticipation as each person sent out meant another one would get that much closer to winning it all.

25 days had passed since the entire thing began and it was the day the first of the 5 were sent out.

Cui Qiaopan, a tiny but older woman came out from the Abyss. Everyone saw her disappointment, which she tried to hide by quickly leaving the platform.

A day later, another person came out.

Luo Bohan, a young man from the Spears Peak sect arrived on the platform and quickly turned around to look back at the ranking that hung in the air. Realizing that he was 4th, he cursed loudly before walking away.

Only 3 remained, and for 2 days no one came out. Then, Su Railan was sent out. The girl from the Ice Mist Palace looked at her ranking, clicked her tongue, and left.

Now, only two remained.

The crowd watched expectantly, wondering who the next person to win would be. Would it be Xue Xiulan? Or would last year's champion, Fang Yimu remain victorious yet again?

Everyone was on the edge of their seat as the last result was ready to come out. Time passed slowly for the expectant ones, especially those from the Cloud Iron sect and the Beast Supremacy sect.

A month had already passed, but neither came out still. And yet, no one had lost their enthusiasm to see the victor.

Then, at once, two people arrived on the platform at the same time. Xue Xiulan and Fang Yimu had both arrived.

One a victor, another not.

The only way to tell was to look at the rankings.

Everyone's eyes turned to the rankings as they updated at once. Xue Xiulan, the young man from the Beast Supremacy sect looked to his left and saw Fang Yimu.

Seeing her, his eyes unfocused for a second out of confusion before reality hit him. He turned his head toward the ranking and then he saw it.

His name was in the second place.

Fang Yimu looked around, a little fearful for a moment, but she had experienced coming out at once before. She quickly turned toward the ranking as a smile formed on her face.

She raised her fists to the sky and screamed in celebration. "WOOHOO!" She had returned victorious from the Abyss yet again.

She immediately ran to where the Cloud Iron sect was gathered to celebrate with them her victory.

The older man from the Royal family arrived once everyone was out.

"The Endless Shadow Abyss shall now be closed again. You may all leave now," he said. "I will see you all next year."

With that, the secret realm was closed for another year, and everyone readied themselves to go back to where they came from.

Chapter 1392 Mossbloom City

"Congratulations, your Majesty. I hear you ended up in the top 100," Fang Yimu came to speak with Alex before she and Talia were to leave with the sect.

"I should be congratulating you for the victory instead," Alex said. "That was a job well done."

"Well, of course," the girl said with a prideful face. "I told you I would win, didn't I?"

"I'm curious," Alex asked. "Did you use any artifact or something to win?"

"Artifact? I carry some with me inside, but I did not win thanks to it," she said. "It is a spiritual technique that has been passed down through our sect that only the prime disciple is allowed to learn."

"I see," Alex said. "It is a shame I never got to see that technique."

"If you want, I can show it to you," she said.

Alex shook his head. "Maybe some other time," he said. "I assume you plan on winning next year too?"

"Actually, no," Fang Yimu spoke. "I won't be returning after this. I've won twice, and it has proven to me that in a battle of spiritual sense, I will emerge victorious."

"However, it is only when the battle's main focus is on the spiritual sense. Being a cultivator is more than just Spiritual sense, so I need to improve myself in other aspects as well. As such, I will be focusing my time now on improving what I have neglected until now," she said. "Both in combat aspect as well as alchemy."

"Oh, you were an alchemist?" Alex asked.

Fang Yimu chuckled a bit. "Your Majesty, I was the prime disciple of the Cloud Iron sect of the Emerald Kingdom. We know nothing if not alchemy. Almost everyone in our sect has some level of knowledge of alchemy. I especially have practiced it a lot more."

"Oh," Alex was surprised. He turned toward Talia. "Does that mean you were never a Prime Disciple?"

Talia shook her head. "I might end up becoming one at some point, but to be a prime disciple, you need to be at least 500 years old. I'm not even 70, you know," she said.

"That's quite funny," Alex said. "What age do you guys stop being a student?"

"A thousand years," Fang Yimu answered. "Before that, if you end up reaching the Saint Core realm, you can instead accept to be an elder. Although, before the arrival of players, that was a rather difficult scenario for many."

"I can guess that," Alex said.

"Your Majesty, we should be leaving soon," Yao Ning said from the side, reminding him of their departure.

"We should be leaving too," Fang Yimu said.

"Will you be coming to the Hundred Blossom Valley, your majesty?" Talia asked.

"I do plan on going there. Although, I do not know when I will," he said.

"Oh, if it is alright with you, can we go together?" Talia asked. "You are an amazing alchemist, so we might learn something from you."

"Together huh?" Alex rubbed his chin as if in thought. "Sure, I don't see any problem with that."

"Great!" Talia exclaimed. "Then, let us meet in Greenheart city in 3 months' time. We will enter the Hundred Blossom Valley at that time. Both senior sister Fang and I have acquired 1 month of free entry, so we will be using it wisely then."I think you should take a look at

"Okay," Alex said. "I shall meet you two ladies in 3 months then. Take care until then."

"Farewell, your majesty," Fang Yimu bowed a little.

"See you later," Talia waved goodbye and the two girls left quickly, going back to where their sect was.

Alex turned around and went to where the elders and the King had been waiting for him. "Let us leave then."

They all nodded and went back to the teleportation formation that sent them back to Jade's Shadow Island which was next to the Abyss island.

They returned back to the hotel to rest for a few days before they were to leave from this place.

In the days that passed, the number of people in the city dropped by a massive amount, to the point that it felt like a ghost town at moments.

When they all felt rested, the King and the rest decided to leave as well. They teleported back to Greenheart City and went back to the palace.

Alex spent a few days in the palace and realized that if he was going to wait there without doing anything, he was going to get bored.

So, after a bit of deliberation, he decided to leave the place to roam the rest of the kingdom. King Jin was more than happy to show him around, but Alex asked to go roam it on his own with his elders.

The only person that did come with him was General Fan that was sent as his protection. While Alex didn't need protection, he didn't refuse, just in case it placed him under higher scrutiny from the emperor.

He started his journey by heading to the southernmost city that stood right at the border of the Ebony mountains.

Mossbloom City was at the base of the Ebony Mountain Range, of which 3 tall mountains cupped the city from 3 different sides, placing the city half a year in shadows, and the rest of the year with maybe 5 hours of direct sunlight thanks to the geography.

Thanks to the remoteness of the city, as well as the not-so-great condition, very few people lived in this place. With a total population of around 80 thousand people, despite its large size, Mossbloom City was one of the least populated places in the entire continent that held the title 'City'.

As per its name, it was famous for the various mosses that grew all year round in the shadowy city where the condensation from the massive mountains flowed into the city.

Such moss was rather hard to acquire in normal conditions, and it was exactly what the people there harvested to sell and make a living.

Alex had chosen the city only because it was in the southernmost part of the kingdom, but he hadn't expected to come to such a fascinating city.

Very few people there recognized him, but no one tried to talk to him on their own. There weren't any strong cultivators living in this place, so they thought of Alex as someone they couldn't mess with.

They were rather hospitable still, with many starting a conversation with him when it was him that approached them. He got a guide to show him around the city and within the week, Alex had been to many of the places around the city that could be considered tourist spots.

He bought many of the mosses that grew there that were rather rare even in the Forbidden Orchard and paid a handsome fee for it.

He spent no more than a week in the city, but that was enough for the city to make an impression on him. Only when he thought he was done with the city did he finally decide to leave the place.

He got on a ship, rather than use the teleportation formation, and headed toward his next destination as per the map of the continent he was provided.

Sproutfield City.

Chapter 1393 Adventure Through The Emerald Kingdom

Sproutfield City was along the coastline and used water from the ocean to irrigate their fields after removing the salt from it to sell separately.

The entire city was covered in knee-deep water with boats and gondolas floating on top of them at every moment. The houses were built onto the ground, steadied by metal rods that dug deep into the earth.

They lifted the houses above the water.

The mortals were the ones that used the boats while the cultivators simply flew. Although, they still used a boat from time to time.

Alex sat on a gondola in the center along with the other three while a young guide steered their boat through the water.

The water fields had plants growing throughout most of them, with many only having only sprouted just recently. He could tell where the name of the city came from.

Despite all the water, Sproutfield City was one of the best cities in the entire continent for growing plants and herbs. There were thick trees to the west and north that had created a forest that had its roots in the water, and the massive fields grew anything and everything that was sowed.

"What's the population of this city?" Alex couldn't help but ask.

"Around 400 thousand people," the guide answered. "It increases during the major harvest in the summer."

Alex looked around at the growing plants and could feel how impressive the life force in all of them was. "Do the plants here grow faster than elsewhere?" he asked.

"Oh, does senior know something about growing plants?" the man asked excitedly. "Yes, plants in these waters only take two-thirds of the time as they would in other places. If they take normal time, they still come out better than they would in other places."

"After all, the water here is filled with Qi that comes directly from the Ocean."

Alex nodded. He had an inkling that was the case.

After taking the salt out from the water, which was harmful to the plants, what remained was tons and tons of Qi-enriched water, that the plants absorbed. This was so much better than plants naturally trying to absorb Qi directly from the earth or the air.

Alex stayed in the city for about a week. At that time, he visited the marketplace to buy various alchemy ingredients that have quite potent energy in them. He watched people sow and reap plants from the water using Qi techniques that make it all seem so seamless.

He went to see how they separated salt from the ocean water and found out that they had 3 different spirit veins dedicated to the process.

Two were there to purify the water of the salts, and one was there just to pump water in and out of the city. Barely any other cities even dared to do so as no one wanted to waste 3 separate spirit veins just to grow some plants.

Sproutfield City only did so because it was in the Emerald Kingdom, which was known for its plants and trees.

Alex tried local delicacies at various restaurants, through which he found out that the people living in these places liked their food a bit too salty. They were used to the salt since that was the main export of the town.

Once he explored it enough, he left exactly 7 days later to go to another city.

He visited Willowgrove City, and then Ivyhaven. Then, he moved on to the Vineyard City.

This was another special city that grew nothing but grapes and berries, turning them into wine at the end of the season.I think you should take a look at

Alex prepared his trip around this, going to other cities before coming here. He arrived just in time for the Wine festival, where the old wines were brought out to enjoy and the freshly picked grapes and berries were made into new wine that would be put away for future use.

The wines made here were stored inside a special formation that was used to push Qi into all of them. As such, by the time they came out, they became Spirit wine, the only type of wine that could affect a cultivator.

Alex decided to enjoy some. He drank a few glasses of the different types of wines, and after forcing his body not to burn away the toxins that affected him, he could enjoy the feeling of being tipsy.

This wasn't a feeling that came all the time, so he enjoyed it while he could.

The Wine festival lasted for a week and a half. Once that ended, Alex bought some wine from the city and left.

He went to Herbshire City then to Greenleaf City to Bramblethorn City. He went on to Verdantwood City, Jadefern City, ending up finally at Leafshade City.

This would be the last city he was going to visit as only 2 weeks from now, he had promised to enter the Hundred Blossom Valley.

Alex was stunned when he first saw the city from hundreds of kilometers away. It wasn't the city he saw precisely, but rather that which gave the city its name.

Leafshade. He saw the leaves that made the Shadow.

It wasn't that the leaves were massive, but rather they were many. He saw a massive tree that spread horizontally, growing on top of a lonely mountain, casting half the city in its shadow.

The tree itself wasn't very tall as it was wide, and it hung downward on all sides in the shape of an umbrella, with large vines dropping to the ground.

Alex only saw the houses and buildings near the foot of the mountain when he came close enough to the city.

The local people called it the Guardian Tree. However, Alex could tell that it was an overgrown Elder Banyan tree. The vines that fell from the tree were used in many aspects of everyday life in this place.

They were thick enough that there were multiple houses built along the sides of it without worry of it falling. The dried vines were also used for timber during the winter. The newly grown ones at the top were also used as ingredients for a medicinal paste that was widely used across the city.

The tree also gave off a heavy wood aura, making it a haven for anyone that wanted to absorb only that aura.

Alex spent his days cultivating in this place, trying to understand Wood aura to gain its dao. Unfortunately, he had some of the worst Wood Spiritual Roots, so he could not understand anything from the aura.

But he made a mental note to bring his daughter here one day so she could absorb it all. Ronron would love nothing more than this.

After spending some time in the city, he and the elders left, finally heading back to Greenheart City. Alex was told that there weren't any other unique cities to the south of the Capital unless he went to the ocean, so Alex didn't feel bad skipping all of them.

He arrived at Greenheart City just a few days before he was to enter the Hundred Blossom Valley.

He went to the Palace and met up with King Jin again, and spent the next few days waiting for the day when he would enter the valley.

Chapter 1394 Hundred Blossom Valley

The Hundred Blossom Valley was located to the east of Greenheart city, in between the Verdant mountain range and the Jadeborn mountain range. Snuggled in between them, the valley was over 20 kilometers wide, and 30 kilometers long.

Alex, Talia, Fang Yimu, and a few more from the Cloud Iron sect arrived on top of one of the mountains in the Verdant mountain range, looking directly below at the valley below.

The valley was divided into different square fields, each square completely covered on all sides by massive rivers that were carved to water the entire thing.

Each land piece was about 6 kilometers squared in the area and was large enough to build cities upon if one were to wish to do so.

Instead, it wall was used to grow different types of plants as would be required by the rest of the continent.

The mountain range that surrounded the valley was filled with hotels and lodges for guests that wished to come there. The Hundred Blossom Valley was as much as a tourist spot as it was a place to gather important ingredients for pills.

Couples came here to enjoy their time, families came to see the many plants, and alchemy enthusiasts came to find what ingredients they could for whatever pill it was that they needed to make.

Alex and the others had arrived a day ago and had gotten themselves a room at one of the hotels. There he had left his elders who would be of no use to him. General Fan had wanted to come as well, but Alex had let him stay behind as well.

King Jin was supposed to come with him, but for some reason he canceled the idea at the last moment. Given that it had happened after Alex had mentioned he was going to tour the place with the two girls, Alex had a suspicion that he had decided to drop the plan at the last second.

It was also why he believed his elders didn't force him to come with him despite being his guardians.

"It looks beautiful, doesn't it?" Talia asked with an excited look on her face.

"It does," Alex nodded.

"Your Majesty has incredible pill-making knowledge from what I remember seeing a year ago. How are your ingredients gathering capability?" Fang Yimu asked. "Do you rely on your subjects to gather the ingredients for you?"

"No," Alex said. "My ingredient-gathering ability is the best."

Fang Yimu chuckled at the wide grin Alex put on as he answered the question. She did not believe him at all, but she wouldn't say that to a king of another continent.

"Let us head over," Talia said and started flying down the mountain.

Alex flew down as well and the Fang Yimu followed. The rest that was with them followed as well, but they stayed further behind and would soon separate themselves from the group.

Alex's group of 3 landed in front of a bridge. On either side of the bridge stood two people with military robes that were there to take the fee of anyone that walked into the field.

Alex looked around and saw that each field had multiple bridges with people on it that were there to take tolls on everyone. Not only that, they could see people on giant boats in the sky that flew to keep watch of people in the field.

There were multiple of them, each quite strong from what Alex could sense. Most were at the late Saint Foundation realm or above, which made the fact that nearly a thousand such cultivators were here alone quite impressive.

The toll wasn't very expensive everything considered, but given that one had to pay for each field they entered, it would end up costing them a lot of money if they visited all 100 different fields.

Talia and Fang Yimu flashed some sort of badge that marked them as Top 100 in the Endless Shadow Abyss. Alex was given the same badge as well, but he didn't even have to bring it up.

The men immediately bowed at him as soon as they saw him.I think you should take a look at

"Oh," Alex was a little taken aback. "I wasn't expecting to be so easily recognized. Were you guys aware of my coming?"

"Yes, your Majesty," one of the guards answered quickly. "We were warned that you would be coming, so everyone is ready for you."

"I see," Alex said. "Well, it would be bad if everyone recognized me as you guys did."

A mask came from within his storage ring and landed on his face. The white mask changed as black patterns appeared on it. Alex placed it on his face and nodded toward the guards.

"Keep up the work," he said before walking onto the bridge.

The bridge was made up of wood and was nearly 20 meters across as it stood over the gentle river that flowed underneath it.

Alex looked to the side, trying to sense the Qi from the water, but there was none. "Hmm, they should have used the same technique as those people at Sproutfield City," he said out loud. "But of course, the ocean is too far for that I suppose."

He walked away and quickly joined the two girls as he landed on the first field of plants. He looked around and quickly realized something about the field he hadn't known before.

"Wait, these are all herbs?" he asked. "I don't see a single shrub or tree at all."

"These are all herbs, your majesty," Talia explained. "In fact, the 10 fields in the first row all grow herbs. Different kinds of it though."

"All herbs?" Alex couldn't help but ask. He hadn't read much about this place before. All he knew was that the Hundred Blossom name came from the Hundred fields that were used to grow plants in.

He wasn't aware of anything else that went in it.

"All 10 of these are herbs, huh?" he couldn't help but ask. "They must grow many types of it then."

"Yes," Talia said.

"Is there any system to it?" Alex asked. "As far as I can see, the herbs are random."

"Oh, uhh... no there is no system," Talia said.

"There used to be a system previously," Fang Yimu answered. "It was a long time ago when they separated plants based on what part of it would be critical as an alchemy ingredient. For example, the first three were used to grow herbs that had important leaves. Then the next three had important flowers and so on."

"However, that led to people abusing the system. Without knowing what they were taking, they would take any and all leaves and flowers, leaving the land barren in just a month or two."

"Due to that problem, it was changed so that along the entire 10 fields, any one of them could have herbs that give any sort of alchemy ingredient. If you don't know what you're looking for, you don't take it anymore," Fang Yimu finished.

"Also, it improved the earnings of this place by a lot, as people would now have to go through 10 different fields to find what they wanted, instead of just one."

"Since then, the Hundred Blossom Valley has truly blossomed to live up to its name."

Chapter 1395 Surprise

"Let us continue, your Majesty," Talia quickly said. "While you may have a lot of free time, we only have a month of it. If we don't use the month's time properly, we'll end up having to pay for the rest of the fields."

Alex looked around at the large piece of land. "Can you even finish going through this entire place in such a short amount of time?" he asked. "There are 100 different fields. You would have to visit 3 different fields a day to get to all of it."

"Wouldn't it be better to take your time and gather what you can? It's alright to pay for the rest."

"We can't," Talia said in a slightly panicked tone. "It costs 300 Saint Spirit stones just to visit a single field, and we can't stay here longer for a day or we will have to pay again. This is an amazing chance that we cannot give up."

"She is correct, your majesty," Fang Yimu spoke. "This place is a bit too expensive, even though it offers some of the best ingredients in all of the continent."

"I see," Alex said. "I wasn't aware of your ladies' dilemma. Let us not waste any more time then."

They nodded and walked onto the field of herbs.

Whisker showed his face from Alex's robe, still hidden from everyone, even the girls next to Alex. He looked around and started telling Alex what he wanted to get.

Alex chuckled and bit and picked what Whisker wanted him to get. He also picked what he wanted, which ended up being many of the ingredients that he saw as he passed by.

The girls picked up various ingredients as well, but as they did, they couldn't help but stare at the amount that Alex had picked up.

"Your majesty, do you recognize what you're gathering?" Fang Yimu couldn't help but ask.

"This? Of course," Alex said. "Who wouldn't recognize a patch of Bluefrost grass? Its iconic frozen-blue shade is impossible to miss."

He picked the blue grass as he spoke and placed it into a small wooden box before putting it all back into his storage ring. He looked toward the patch next to him and smiled.

"Oh, they have the Sunspot leaves as well," he said and reached for the small green plant with big leaves that had yellow spots all over them.

Then he looked at the red grass next to it. "Blood Dill, huh? I hear it's good for cooking. I won't be needed that," he said and walked away from it.

The girls stared slackjawed at how easily he named all the herbs. They were even more shocked as he continued doing it even as he walked away.

"There's a Thunderbolt grass, a Heavenly Silvermoon herb, ooh... they have the Serpentbane grass as well."

Alex walked around even more. "Crimson Bamboo shoot should be helpful in some instances. As for this Sacred Tiger lily... uhh... sure, why not?"

The girls followed him in a daze as Alex named plants that they hadn't even heard of before. Fang Yimu knew a lot more than Talia, but even she was surprised that Alex named 2 herbs that he only remembered based on their looks.

As they continued, Alex came across a path of Spirit Cleansing Lily. He had little use for a lily right now, but not taking them when he had the opportunity simply felt wrong.

So, he reached down toward the plant and plucked one of them.

Fang Yimu reacted too late when she saw him do that. She wanted to warn him that he couldn't pick one of these so randomly and instead needed an artifact.

But even as she tried to do so, her voice stuck to her throat as Alex placed the Spirit Cleansing Lily into his storage ring, but the patch of flower didn't wilt.

"Huh?" the girls couldn't understand why the flowers didn't immediately wilt as they would when someone picked the flowers randomly.I think you should take a look at

Her eyes widened in shock when she realized that the reason it didn't wilt at all was because Alex had in fact picked the right one.

"You got the right one?" she couldn't help but ask. She was so shocked that she even forgot to address him with respect.

"Hmm? Of course," Alex said. "Want to see me do it again?"

He reached down to another flower patch of the Spirit Cleansing lily and picked out one more Spirit Cleansing lily, leaving the flower bed intact.

"No way," she couldn't help but say in surprise.

"The remaining flowers will wilt in a day or two, and if it is lucky, from it will grow another bed of Spirit Cleansing Lily in the future," Alex explained. He didn't explain how he managed to do it, however.

He walked away, leaving the shocked girls behind who immediately started pestering him with questions that Alex had to answer in the end.

"I told you guys. I am an alchemist with great knowledge. Just because you didn't believe me in the start doesn't mean that I was hiding it from you," he said.

"But... because you are good at making pills, doesn't mean you are good at recognizing and picking ingredients in the wild. Right sister?" Talia asked.

"Yes," Fang Yimu said. "It isn't as simple as seeing an ingredient on its own and naming what it is. In the wild, you have to know what the tree looks like, what the leaves look like."

"You recognized useful roots of herbs by just looking at their leaves. You plucked fruit hiding underneath the leaves by looking at the stem. That isn't something that you simply know just because you are a good alchemist."

"It takes an immense amount of knowledge and experience to see a plant and recognize what ingredient it has."

"Tell us, your Majesty. Have you worked in alchemy gardens as a caretaker before? You only know this sort of thing when you do that," Fang Yimu said.

"Alchemy garden, huh?" Alex thought back to his early day as an alchemist. "I did work in an Alchemy garden when I was young. It was quite a peaceful time, actually."

"See? That's why you know. I can't believe you were this good at gathering ingredients. Makes me wonder what else you are hiding," Fang Yimu said.

Alex chuckled a bit. "To tell you the truth, I actually learned it from a book I received when I first became a player. That was what taught me and helped me become as good as I am today."

"Book?" Fang Yimu's eyes widened. "What book?"

Alex shrugged. "It was destroyed long ago. It was so many years ago that I don't even properly remember its name, just what was written inside," he said.

"So there isn't any chance of us learning from the book?" Talia asked.

"I'm afraid not," Alex said. "But you guys don't have to. You are already good enough as is, and you can only grow from here. You have many years in front of you to keep improving."

The two girls nodded.

"Alright, let's keep moving," Alex said. "It was you two who told me that we needed to get through all the fields in a month, wasn't it?"

Chapter 1396 Inspired

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Alex and the group arrived at the last of the 10 herb fields. They had sped up their journey as much as they could, and even with Alex taking as many herbs as he could find, it had only taken them 3 days to get here.

And the day was barely halfway done. There could still go to another two fields if they tried their best.

They had to cross another small stream of water to get here as they did with almost all the fields.

Each field had a toll guard, but they were allowed in freely. There were quite a few people in every field, but very few were gathered in one place, so the area was empty the majority of the time.

When they did meet people, most would just greet and walk past them. Everyone was busy gathering their own stuff.

As Alex gathered, Fang Yimu watched him pick up the herbs and couldn't help but get curious.

"Your majesty, I have been meaning to ask something for the past 3 days," she said.

"What is it?" Alex asked, turning around to look at her through his patterned mask.

"So… I can tell that you are picking whatever you can find," she said. "But… is there more reason to it? Surely you aren't taking whatever you can get your hands on, right?"

"I am," Alex said. It was just that simple. He was used to taking most of what grew when he found it, and the habit hadn't gone away, and neither would it any time soon.

"Really? I thought as a King you would have no need to do this," she said.

"Well, I wouldn't normally," Alex said. "But recently, I've been inspired by some of the events that have taken place around me. To be truthful, it is something that has stuck in the back of my head for the entire year, but only during this 3 months tour I took through the many cities that I realized what it was that I wanted to do."

The girls got curious. "What is it that you want to do, your majesty?" Talia asked.

Alex smiled and said, "That's a secret."

The girls frowned. "Can you not tell us?" Fang Yimu asked.New n0vel chapters are published on

"I'm afraid not. It's just too important to just give it away randomly. But… what I can tell you is for what I am planning, I have no idea what I am going to need."

"As a result, my best course of action is to get whatever it is that I can from this field. So, that is what I am doing. I'm hopeful that I will be successful in what I am planning," Alex said.

"Ooh, I am very curious about what it is that you want to do, your majesty," Talia said. "Would you mind telling us if you ever achieve it?"

"Hmm, sure," Alex said. "Although that would require for me to still be here by that time."

"Oh, will it take a long time?" Talia asked.

"I have absolutely no idea how long any of this will take, but due to my relative lack of expertise in that field, I will assume that it could take anywhere from a decade to a century."

"If my luck is ever so horrendously bad, it may even take over a millennium. Maybe I will become an Immortal before I am done with what I have in mind," he said.

"Woah," the two girls couldn't help but be surprised at the words.

"You seem to be planning something great, your majesty," Fang Yimu.

"Immortal realm…" Talia was simply fascinated by those words. "Is that even possible at all?"I think you should take a look at

"It certainly is," Alex said. "Especially to you, Talia. As a player, you have incredible talent that most that were born native in these continents do not."

"Is that so?" Talia couldn't help but say. "I will have to try my best then."

Fang Yimu felt a pang of jealousy at the fact that they were both players and had thus so many more years ahead of them to improve themselves.

She, however, was already hundreds of years old. She wouldn't have the same opportunity as these two would. "Speaking of that, will you be leaving soon, your majesty? I thought you would be staying for a while."

"20 years," Alex said. "Err… I guess that is less than 19 now. I will remain until the exchange event is completed."

"Is there a chance that you return after that?" Talia asked.

"Maybe, maybe not," Alex said. "I have no idea about the future right now."

The two girls nodded.

"Come on, let's continue. You guys don't want to end up having to rush through the last fields, do you?" Alex asked.

"No," the girls said and once again started picking up the herbs that they came across and recognized.

Alex taught them about a few of the more important herbs he knew about and the two girls listened closely. He taught them what they were, what they did, what sort of pills they could be used in, how they could recognize it, and what the best method of removing it from the entire plant was.

Around the time night fell, they were done with that field of herbs and it was time to move on to another one.

They crossed the boat as the water below reflected a slightly distorted reflection of the silver moon that hung above in the sky.

The stars glittered in the sky, and while most saw them as nothing more than just that, Alex looked at them in hopes that one day he would go to those lands as well.

After crossing the bridge, they arrived on the second of the ten rows of the Hundred Blossom Valley which contained 10 rows again.

Alex looked at what was in front of him and nodded. "So, this time it is Shrubs, huh?" he asked. "I can't wait to see what the rest of them are."

They went onto the 11th field and Alex started gathering what he could get.

Whisker asked for what he wanted through the robes, and Alex complied, but he primarily focused on ingredients that would help him.

Amongst them, while he could get everything, he had to speed through the Hundred Blossom Valley for the sake of these two girls.

So, he focused only on one primary type of ingredient for now. He focused on ingredients with a lot of Wood energy.

His plan, at least for the first part was rather simple. He was going to gather as many Wood ingredients as he could and make a pill out of it that he could use to improve the Spiritual Root.

Out of all his spiritual roots, Wood had been the worst one, and it had become so very apparent in the Leafshade City where the wood energy had been abundant, but he couldn't make proper use of it due to his lack of a strong Wood Spiritual Root.

If he could gather these ingredients and make a pill that managed to improve his Wood Spiritual root, that would improve his overall level by that very much.

After all, compared to all the different spiritual roots he had, the Wood Spiritual root was the worst out of all of them.

Chapter 1397 The 10 Rows Of Fields

The Hundred Blossom Valley was separated into 10 rows, each row housing a different type of plant.

The types they had separated it under needed to be both broad and specific at the same time. Judging from what Alex had been through in the last 15 days, they had generally managed to do exactly that.

The first row had been herbs. It contained anything from grasses, weeds, and tiny bamboo trees to small patches of flowers like the Spirit Cleansing Lily.

Once past that row, they arrived at the 2nd row which was full of shrubs.

These were plants that were much taller than herbs and were a little woody. Tall bushes of flowers, trees of berries, and almost anything that didn't grow to become a large tree grew here.

Leaves, fruits, flowers, roots, even the stalks; anything and everything here could end up being important alchemy ingredients and Alex took whatever he could get his hands on.

Once they were done with that, they moved to the 3rd row of the fields that were filled with ferns. They were tiny plants that didn't bear any fruits or flowers and their only use was their leaves, branches, or their roots.

Choosing what was useful though was generally difficult amongst these for anyone that didn't know about them, and the people in the sky that were there to guard the valley were generally more aggressive against those in this section of the valley.

With fewer choices to make, they couldn't let people take the entire plant and had to make sure no one was abusing the system to leave there with something they had no idea about.

There were many types of ferns, but in general, there were a lot fewer variants for them and as such, Alex didn't have to spend a lot of time in this row.

The fourth row had tall, massive trees. They were tall and full of leaves that gave shade to the entire fields. Coming into this row of the valley, Alex and the rest read a single rule that was written on them.

Aside from the fruit and flowers that grew on the trees, they were not allowed to take anything else. Anything else that grew on the trees was systematically harvested by the ones that ran the valley.

Instead, what they were allowed to take was what these giant trees were grown for.

Mosses.

The large threes were there to provide shade to the mosses that grew in there. On the edges of the field, the mosses that grew there were in general ones that require sunlight to grow.

However, as most mosses did not require sunlight, they grew in the deeper parts of the giant forest where the shade was plenty.

Alex and the girl had remained there for some time, but probably the least amount of time in all.

Alex especially was the one that wanted to get out of this place as he required next to none of the mosses that grew here thanks to the ones he found in the Mossbloom city.

Once they left there, they arrived at one of the more fascinating locations of the Hundred Blossom Valley.

The 6th field had in fact not been a field at all. Instead, it was a giant lake that was 2 kilometers wide and 30 kilometers long. Everyone that came here flew above the lake and looked through them using their spiritual sense.

He and the girls searched through the lake, finding many aquatic plants that only grew here. There very various types of lotus flowers, water lilies, plants that grew underneath the water, and mosses on the sides of the giant rocks that were ready for everyone to harvest.

Most of the plants here were heavy on Water energy, which was not something that Alex really wanted, but he got it anyway. He flew through the lake, spending more than 2 days going through it all while finding whatever important plants he could.

Once he was through everything, he stepped onto the 6th row of fields.

This was full of fungi, or more accurately, just mushrooms.I think you should take a look at

Flat blue mushroom with white dots, a plain red mushroom, a green mushroom with a pointed tip, a mushroom in the shape of a sword, pink mushroom with giant yellow circles.

Any and all types of mushrooms could be found in this open land and most of them were overwhelming the two girls as recognizing them was rather difficult for the both of them.

Alex, however, recognized every single one of the mushrooms, albeit he wasn't aware of what every single one of them did. It would take him a few seconds to retrieve the information from his memory if he was ever asked.

He gathered what mushroom he could, shaking it a little to release the spores as he did so. Many people were instructed to do so, and most followed.

Today was the 16th day of their journey and the girls were starting to get a little tired from the monotonous journey of having to gather ingredients. Alex, however, did not mind any of it and was ever so happy to do it as required.

He explained to the girls what the mushrooms were as he picked them up. The explanation wasn't just for the girls, but also for Whisker who was inside his robes.

Since he was in the Saint Realm now, Whisker needed to know a lot more about alchemy ingredients that Alex hadn't fully taught him. He had taught him what he could, but most of it had ended up being knowledge about True rank ingredients, rather than Saint rank ingredients.

Now, he was helping him catch up on the remaining knowledge and the Hundred Blossom Valley had been amazing for that.

As he was explaining the various mushrooms, Alex paused and looked in the distance. Fang Yimu looked as well, and Talia a second later.

Not far from them, merely a hundred meters away, a man was in tears and seemed to be begging a group of people who only shook their heads and sent him away. The man moved and went to another group of people.

Those group of people shook their heads as well and sent the man away.

Before they realized it, the man had ended up going through the many people in between them and had arrived in front of the group.

Alex had his mask on, so the man naturally looked away from him and into the eyes of the two girls. He was in tears when he spoke up.

"D-do any of you Daoists know what a Flameborn Nightbane is?" the man asked, while in tears.

The girls looked at each other and shook their heads as well.

"Never heard of it," Fang Yimu said.

"Yeah, I haven't heard of the name either," Talia said as well.

The man's face fell at the words. "Thank you for your time," he said and turned to leave.

"I've heard of it," Alex spoke, making the man stop in his tracks.

The man turned around with a shocked look on his face. "You have?" he asked.

"It's a poisonous plant, known for its deceptive look," Alex said. "What about it?"

The man's eyes widened. "Fellow Daoist! I beg of you. Please help me."

Chapter 1398 The 7th Row

"What do you want?" Alex asked the man.

"Can you recognize the Flameborn Nightsbane, brother?" the man asked.

"I can," Alex said.

"Would you mind finding it for me?" the man asked. "I am in desperate need of it."

"I don't," Alex said. "But you must tell us what you need it for."

"It is to save my daughter," the man said. "She has come down with a condition that could only be cured with a certain pill, but the pill requires that one ingredient."

"To save your daughter? Alright, I accept," Alex said. "But, isn't that a poisonous plant? I don't think I've seen a single poisonous plant yet."

"Oh, the 8th row of fields are all poisonous plants," Talia explained. "You can find almost everything there."

"Oh," Alex said. "Will you girls remain here then? I will go with him and see what I can find."

"Sure, your—"

"Great!" Alex cut them off. "If I don't come back in time, I will wait for you on the rightmost field's gate."

The girls nodded and Alex left. The man followed him as well, surprisingly swiftly and the two of them traversed through the mushroom field, to go to the next one.

The man looked middle-aged and just old enough to be a father. He had a somewhat handsome face and a well-maintained body.

He didn't have the highest cultivation base, but a Saint Core 3rd realm was decent enough anywhere.

They arrived on the toll bridge where the man brought out a lot of spirit stones to pay to the man.

"Don't worry, brother. I'll pay for yours too," the man said and was about the pay Alex's portion of the feed too.

But Alex quickly pulled out a badge and showed it to the guards who let him in easily.

The man paused for a bit in confusion and looked at Alex.

"Come on, we don't have much time, do we?" Alex asked the man.

"Right," the man said and handed over the fee before running after Alex.

They both arrived on the 7th field, and Alex had to take a moment to take it all in.

All around him were plants that moved around, their body turning at impossible angles. Vines, roots, everything seemed to move in this place, all of which had just one intention.

To kill whoever came and feed on them.

"Carnivorous plants," Alex said in surprise. "Is that what the 7th row is all covered in?"

"Yes," the man said. "The next one is the poison one."

The man continued moving and Alex followed behind him.

Alex looked around at the various plants, quite fascinated by all of the. It wasn't every day that one got to see kilometers after kilometer of carnivorous plants.

It was a surprise to him how many plants fell under this category.

When someone spoke of Carnivorous plants, one would think about something such as a Flytrap. They would imagine a giant plant with a part that looked like a mouth that would eat their victims directly.

However, that wasn't always the case.

There were plants out there that did not do that but instead used their vines and roots to strangle their victims and use their bodies as nutrients.I think you should take a look at

Plants that used roots might directly drag their victim underground, suffocate and kill it, and then absorb the nutrients from that.

Plants that used vines would strangle their victim, killing them quickly and ripping them apart to drop the remains around their roots. The dead body parts would then decay and provide nutrients.

Even before that, they would lure other animals using the meat of their victim and kill them as well to gain more nutrients.

There were also plants that either dropped their hard fruit on their target or send their razor-sharp leaves to cut them up.

One of the trees even used its branches to try and swat its victim.

Since Alex was in their field now, he was the victim of the sense of the many plants. They attacked him, all with the intention to kill.

As for Alex, he couldn't fight back. At least, not as freely as he could have.

There were obvious restrictions even in this place, and one of the more important ones was that they weren't allowed to kill the plants, no matter the situation.

There were people in the sky, ready to notify someone if one of the people down there were in trouble. Before that, no one was allowed to kill freely.

They could, however, gather ingredients from these plants.

Which was exactly what Alex did. He brought out a Midnight-like sword and cut through the many plants that tried to attack him.

He cut the rots, the vines, and the branches. He passed through trees that used luring pheromones to attract their victims and gathered the flowers and saps that created the pheromone.

He gathered the fruits and leaves that were sent down to kill him.

All in all, before he even got to the other side, he had gathered quite a few plants from this field.

The man that came with him seemed to have no interest in gathering at all. He simply dodged where he could and made his way through the many plants effortlessly.

Alex couldn't help but find that weird. 'I need to be careful it's not a trap,' he thought. At the very least, he could tell there was something suspicious about the guy that he couldn't put a finger on it.

The tears he produced seemed genuine, but who could tell if he hadn't used something to make himself cry? 'Is he planning something?' Alex couldn't help but wonder.

Whether he was or not, it wouldn't hurt to be careful.

They arrived at the bridge past the many carnivorous plants and went through it. Finally, they arrived on the 8th row.

The Fields of Poisonous Plants.

Alex looked to the left and counted the bridges parallel to the one he just walked through. '3,' he thought. 'So I must be on on the 4th field.'

Now that he knew what he was he could get started.

He looked around at the variety of plants that had no rhyme or reason as to why they were here, except for the fact that they were poisonous.

Alex stopped in front of them all and looked at the man. "I will need some time to find everything, so we will have to slow it down."

"Whatever you need. Take your time," the man said. He was in a hurry, but he didn't want to ask him to speed up.

"If I may ask," Alex spoke. "What happened to your daughter?"

"An accident," the man said. "She went through Qi deviation while practicing a primarily yin-based cultivation technique and ended up entering a coma."

"I found an alchemist to figure out what had happened to her, and he did. But he said that to heal her, I would need a list of ingredients, of which the Flameborn Nightsbane was the only one I couldn't acquire in the market."

"I came with the alchemist in hopes of finding that ingredient here, but it was only later that we realized that we couldn't recognize the ingredient at all," the man said. "As such, I was forced to look for others to help us, and found you."

Chapter 1399 Searching For The Nightsbane

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Alex listened to the man's short explanation of why he was there and couldn't help but wonder about something.

"You can recognize them, right? You knew that they were deceptive in nature, so you must know what they look like," the man asked Alex with an expectant look.

Alex looked at the man and saw a pleading look that only a father could have when they were worried about his daughter. Trap or not, there was little chance that this wasn't a father that wanted to do something for his daughter.

"I've never seen the plant myself," Alex said. The words immediately made the man's face fall. But before he could speak again, Alex continued.

"But I do know what they look like and can recognize them despite their deceptive nature. You don't have to worry about that," he said. "I only hope that they actually are in this place."

"We will be in a lot of trouble if there are none," Alex said and started walking, with the man following behind him.

"Wait a moment," the man said as he quickly showed an artifact that he wore around his neck. "Are you wearing one of these?"

Alex looked at the necklace, wondering for a moment as to what it was before realizing it. "Is that to protect yourself from the poison?" he asked.

"Yes," the man said. "You'll be in deep trouble if you're not wearing one."

"No problem," Alex said. "This mask of mine protects me from airborne poison. As long as I don't touch anything in here, I will be fine."

"Oh," the man said and nodded. "Let's continue then."

Alex nodded and continued walking. He started looking around with his spiritual sense, looking at the hundreds of poisonous plants that were around him. He had to fight himself to ignore every instinct that was carved into his body to stop and gather these plants.

It pained his heart to walk away, leaving them behind as he didn't have the time for that. He needed to get through the entire 10 valleys, find the alchemist that was going to make a pill for this man, and finally could he enjoy this place on his own.

His senses spread around him, the man doing the same as he looked for the Flameborn Nightsbane plant.

As per the name, the Flameborn Nighstbane was a plant that Alex knew just from knowledge to be a dark plant with red spots to it. The useful part of the plants was its leaves which led to those red spots.

However, before being picked from the plant, the leaves weren't dark green with red spots. They were instead bright green with large yellow spots which would only contract and darken when picked away.

That alone would've been fine, but the leaves had a tendency to crumble on themselves to the point where it looked more like a barely ripening fruit than a leaf. That made it extra difficult to recognize the plant.

Alex was on the 4th of the 10 fields and it took him nearly 3 hours to go through it all at a very rapid pace.

"It's not in this field," he said and looked at the man. "I'm going to go to the 1st one and look from there. Wait here for me to come back."

"I'll come with you," the man said.

"But you'll have to pay the fee many times to get through the toll bridge," Alex told the man.

"Doesn't matter," the man said. "The cost is of no concern to me. As long as my daughter's life can be saved, I'm ready to spend everything that I have."

Alex paused and didn't feel like refusing any more. "Very well, follow along then."

They moved to the 3rd field, where Alex started checking everything once again. There were more poisonous plants here, all asking him to take a piece of them, but Alex was too busy to care.

In his head, he was looking for only 2 things. I think you should take a look at

Either green leaves with yellow spots, or green fruits that looked somewhat ripened. The Flameborn Nightsbane could be as either, so he needed to look out for either.

He also needed to look out for dark green leaves with red spots, but only when they were separated from the plant. Otherwise, just the first two would do.

The man started getting nervous, and Alex sensed it.

"Where is the alchemist you came with?" he asked, trying to take away his focus from the situation to stop him from panicking.

"I left him in the 10th field, all the way over there. We realized we couldn't find the plant after searching this entire area," the man said.

"He didn't come with you?" Alex asked.

"It costs too much for him to come with me," the man said. "I alone was enough for that matter. Besides, he insisted to stay and search for the plants."New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex nodded and searched for the plant. The two grew quiet and Alex got time to think through things that he had been already thinking for the past few hours.

"May I ask what exactly it was that your daughter used that caused her to fall into the coma? You mentioned that it was a normal Qi deviation, correct?" he asked.

"Yes," the man said.

"Qi deviation leads to a person falling into a coma?" Alex asked. He hadn't heard of that before.

Injury? Yes. Death, even more so. But coma? That didn't feel right. "Are you sure it was Qi Deviation?" he asked.

The man paused for a moment, remaining silent which cause Alex to feel awkward. He turned around to look at the man and saw a hesitating face.

"It… is possible that she absorbed something in order to advance in her cultivation base, which led to her falling into a coma," he said.

"Oh, you didn't mention that before," Alex said.

"I'm sorry, but I didn't see why I had to tell you that to you," the man said. "I don't even know who you are really, other than the fact that you're trying to help me."

"I completely understand," Alex said. "But while it is true that I don't need to know everything, I am also now capable of passing along knowledge because you told me that."

The man frowned. "What do you mean? What can you tell me?" he asked.

"Flameborn Nightsbane… it's not an ingredient that can deal with problems in Yin Qi deviation. Unless there is something that I still do not know about your daughter's situation, the alchemist that you are trusting is lying to you about needing this ingredient."

The man paused.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"Flameborn Nightbane is a plant that is primarily a Fire elemental ingredient. On top of that, it is a poison in itself, that if not neutralized can kill anyone that consumes it."

"While it is possible that a pill made using that can neutralize Yin Qi if there is a strong Yang energy ingredient in the recipe, if it is instead the main ingredient of the pill, it certainly won't be capable of removing any Yin-based problems from your daughter."

"After all, no matter how strong a Fire energy might be, if it encounters Yin energy of similar grade, it will always lose."

Chapter 1400 Anger And Frustration

The man's eyes shifted around multiple times before he thought of something. "Is my alchemist lying to me?" he asked.

"No," Alex said. "I'm just asking if you are sure that you're putting your daughter's life in the hands of the right alchemist or not."

"Is there a chance he's lying?" he asked.

"Yes, there is a chance," Alex said. "But... as I said, there could also be a chance that he isn't lying if the pill he is making has a strong ingredient with vital Yang energy in it."

"There are none," the man said without stopping.

"Hmm?" Alex looked at the man curiously.

"There is no strong Yang energy in the list of ingredients for the pill that young man is making," the man said. "I had thought the Flameborn Nightsbane might be what was needed, but... if what you're saying about the ingredient is true then... was he lying to me?"

The man's eyes burned with instant fury as he wanted to go back and kill the alchemist that had suggested he come here and help him find that ingredient.

"Maybe he wasn't lying," Alex said. "Maybe there is something different that is wrong with your daughter. Do you know what?"

"I don't," the man said. "I don't know what happened to my daughter at all. My wife won't tell me. She just says that she is dealing with it while not telling me what it is that she is even doing."

"She spends days in her sect letting our daughter remain in a coma forever. So, I got too fed up with her crap and stole my daughter away from her to heal her."

"I had no idea what is wrong with her, so I took her to the few alchemists I knew, but they didn't know either. That was when I met this young alchemist, who said he could make a pill for me that will most certainly cure her."

"I took the chances and came here with him," the man said. "Oh god! I have been duped, haven't I? He lied to me, just to get here."

"Get a hold of yourself," Alex said. "I might be wrong here. We still don't know. I'm just telling you what I know."

"But... there is no strong Yang ingredient as you said," the man said.

"May I know the recipe?" Alex asked.

The man shook his head. "Even if he was lying for his own gain, I cannot in my right mind give you a recipe that belongs to someone else.

Alex shrugged. It was wrong of him to ask in the first place.

"Maybe the alchemist just saw something that was wrong with your daughter's condition that you don't know. As you mentioned, you aren't aware of what happened to her, correct?" he asked.

The man shook his head.

"You're right," the man said. "I'll confront him when I get to him. For now, let us find the plant just in case."

They returned to searching for the plant but even after going through the 3rd field, they found nothing.

Then, they moved on to the 2nd field, and 3 hours later onto the first.

Alex looked around fully alert at all times, not only to find the plant but also for any suspicious activity. Although the chances of that were getting lower the more he was understanding the situation.

There were still parts of the story that the man told that didn't make sense to him, but he didn't ask him about it.

After searching through the 1st field as well Alex couldn't find the plant at all.I think you should take a look at

"Let's move on to 5th," he said.

5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th.

It took Alex way too many hours to get through the fields, and even after going through all, he couldn't find it at all.

They were both stumped at the lack of the plant and couldn't help but feel dejected. The man especially started feeling bad at the thought that his daughter may not be healed at all.

"There's still the last field," Alex reminded him and the both of them walked toward that field.

After crossing the toll bridge, they were on the final poisonous field, which was the last chance for Alex to find the plant. Alex walked around the field for an hour or so when the man suddenly spoke.

"There!" he pointed at something.

Alex wondered if the plant had been found by the man, but that was not the case. Instead, he had found a young man walking around the field, focused on the various plants that were around him.

"That's the alchemist I came with," he said before walking toward him.

Alex paused for a moment and quickly followed as well, walking next to the man as they went over to where the young alchemist was.

The young alchemist was a man that looked no older than 25 years old if he were a mortal. He had a cultivation base in the late Saint Foundation realm and wore a dull green robe.

His short hair had a single braid of long hair that hung along the side of his head, tied together at the end by something made up of gold.

He turned around at the noise and saw the man.

"Senior! Did you find it?" he asked excitedly when he noticed that he had come with someone else.

However, the man wasn't listening. He walked straight to the young man and grabbed him by the collars of his robe as he shouted at him.

"Did you lie to me?" he asked in a voice that made the young man's face fall with fear. "Did you lie to me?"

"Wh-what?" the young man was absolutely terrified. "What about you talking about?"

"Flameborn Nightsbane! This man says that it is not something that can cure problems with Yin Qi, and the pill you suggested does not have any Yang Qi to fight Yin Qi at all," the man shouted.

The people in the sky were already alerted that something was happening and were ready to float down. They could not let a conflict fester in the fields unless a fight broke out that destroyed the precious plants nearby.

The young man pushed against the man. "That's not true," he said. "I didn't lie. How the hell would he know if it can or not? I showed you the ingredient list, I told you it can do it."

"But it has nothing to fight Yin Qi," the man shouted.

Alex's spiritual sense spread toward the men in the sky and he told them to stay out of it for now. He brought out something when they looked toward him, and when they saw it, they immediately stopped, hovering over the group just in case.

The man turned toward Alex right after he put away the Dragon Medallion. "You weren't lying, were you?" he asked.

"Of course not," Alex said as he moved forward. "And let go of that alchemist. You still don't know if he's lying or not either. I know you are worried about your daughter, but don't get too emotional right now."

The man finally loosened his fists and took a deep breath to calm himself. He then looked at Alex and asked, "You seem to know a lot more about alchemy than I do. Can you tell me if he is lying or not?"

Chapter 1401 Yin Taming Pill

Alex looked at the terrified young man with a pitiful look, then back at the man who asked him the question.

"I'll try," he said and walked toward them. "Can you give me a bit of space so I can ask him the question?"

The man, still seething with anger, moved a bit away from the two and let them talk.

"What's your name?" Alex asked him.

"Wu Shun," the young man spoke, his voice still quivering slightly in fear.

"Okay, brother Wu Shun. Can you tell me why exactly you need the Flameborn Nightsbane?" Alex asked him.

"To heal his daughter," the young man pointed at the man.

"I understand that, but why that ingredient? What is the purpose of that ingredient?" he asked. "Because that ingredient is not able to deal with Yin problems."

"No, it can," the young man said adamantly. "It is written as such in my book, and my book hasn't made a mistake yet."

Alex was a little surprised. "Your book?" he asked.

"You damn youngster! You put my daughter's life at risk because of a book?" he shouted again.

Alex quickly moved to protect the young man and stopped the man from advancing. "Please, fellow Daoist. Let me figure out if he's in the wrong or not before you decide to listen to your impulses."

The man snorted and looked aside, leaving Alex to deal with the situation for now.

Alex turned back around and looked at the young man. "May I ask what sort of book is it? Is it a book with recipes?" he asked.

"It's an alchemy book that I got when I came here. It has a list of pill recipes for various pills that can be used in different scenarios."

"One of those pills is called the Yin Taming Pill, and Flameborn Nightsbane is one of its main ingredients," the young man said.

"Yin Taming pill?" Alex asked. He was simply no idea what sort of pill that was. There was another part of the young man's answer that had caught his attention.

"Are you a player?" Alex asked.

"I am," the young man said.

"I see, so you're young," Alex said. He looked back toward the man and back at the young man. "I do not know if you are trying to fool us or not—"

"I'm not!" the young man shouted."

"You didn't let me finish," Alex said. "I was going to say that I will choose to believe you in this instance. However, that belief is going to last just as much as that. You will have to prove to this brother here that you weren't trying to dupe him into finding the ingredient for your own benefit."

"You have to prove that you were doing it for his daughter."

"I am," the young man said. "How do I prove it? I will."

"Swear an oath that the pill you are making will cure my daughter," the man shouted.

The young man was about to speak when he stopped. "I can't do that," he said. The man was about to charge at him when the young man continued. "How can I make such an extreme oath? How am I supposed to know a pill that I've never made will cure your daughter?"

"There is a high likelihood it will, but that doesn't mean I can guarantee it," he said. "That is a preposterous oath to ask of someone to make."I think you should take a look at

Alex had to agree with the young man. That was an oath that no alchemist in their right mind would make. After all, not every problem was the same, so even if the pill one made was good, there was the slightest chance that it would not work on every single person.

The man was already angry again, but Alex spoke before he could act. "May I see the recipe for this Yin Taming pill?" he asked.

The young man looked at Alex. "Why? Why do you want my pill recipe?" he asked.

Alex sighed. "I'm trying to save you from getting beat up by this man, brother. Do you still want to ask why?" he asked. "I can just leave and let him deal with you."

"No," the young man said. "I'll show it to you. But only that recipe."

"Only that," Alex said. "I have no need for any other."

"Okay," the young man said. "Give me a minute." He took out an empty talisman and started writing into it the recipe for the pill that was called the Yin Taming Pill.

Once done, he passed it along to Alex who looked at it briefly. He had only read the description of the pill recipe when his hopes of it being any useful started to dwindle a little.

When he reached the ingredient, he put down the recipe and closed his eyes. "Give me a minute," he said. He focused on himself, trying to learn everything about the ingredients that were written in the recipe.

The man wondered what Alex was doing while the young man just stood by, looking at the man, hoping he wouldn't attack him instantly.

A few minutes passed and Alex opened his eyes. There was a curious look on his face that had come from reading the recipe.

"What's going on? Did you read the recipe? Is it true?" the man asked.

"The recipe is real," Alex said. "He wasn't lying."

The man paused. "Then..."

"However, it's a little hard to tell whether this recipe will work or not. You can try, but I wouldn't bet on it," Alex said.

The man's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean? What's wrong with the recipe?" he asked.

"Nothing is wrong with the recipe itself. It's just that... the pill he was trying to make is a Yin Taming pill. The recipe would make a pill that would, as the name suggests, tame the Yin that is most likely causing problems in your daughter's body."

"However, just because it tames it, doesn't mean it can destroy it," Alex said. "Again, I do not know what is going on with your daughter, so I cannot say for sure that this pill won't heal her, but I will tell you that the likelihood of it healing her completely is very low."

He then turned toward the young man. "Does it say in your book what this pill is primarily used for?" he asked.

"Yes, to deal with Yin problems," the young man said. "Including Qi deviation with Yin Qi, which his daughter went through."

Alex sighed. "Did it ever cross your mind that this was a pill that was supposed to be eaten when the person was going through Qi Deviation itself, not after it?" he asked.

"Uhh... what?" the young man asked.

"It's a Yin Taming pill. To tame your Yin when it is going out of control," Alex said. "It is not very useful once the damage is done."

"But... but his daughter's body is still full of yin. I'm sure it can be useful," the young man said.

Alex thought for a moment and turned around toward the man. "I can say for a fact that he wasn't trying to dupe you. Whatever he told you, he believed it, even if he might have been wrong."

"That said, we cannot find the Flameborn Nightsbane in this place and so there is no way to tell if the pill will even be helpful at all," Alex said. "Instead... can I ask if I can check on your daughter and see if I can heal her?"

Chapter 1402 The Girl In A Coma

The man looked at Alex with wide eyes. "Would you... would you do that for me?" he asked.

"Your daughter is in a coma. As an alchemist and a doctor, I cannot find it in me to ignore the situation. Especially when it looks like it can not be solved by just the two of you," he said.

The man immediately bowed. "Thank you, young man," he said, crying tears. He could tell by now that the young man he had accidentally brought along was no normal person.

He could tell from the start that he was someone special by the way he constantly hid his face in the mask. Which was why he never dared to ask what his name was.

Given that he was good at looking for ingredients, he could also tell that the young man was an alchemist. Given the special treatment he had received in these places where he could move around without having to pay, the young man almost believed he was someone from the Imperial family.

Maybe a person with close relation to his Majesty, and was thus allowed to use the Valley as he pleased.

"We will have to go back to the courtyard I've rented in the mountains. Will you come with me?" the man finally asked.

"Of course," Alex said.

"Let us leave then," the man said and started walking toward the edge of the 10th field on the 8th row. They could walk outside from there and then could go to where their courtyard was.

If they were anywhere else, they could have to fly up and leave the Valley. Once someone flew above where the guards were floating in their boats, they could not step back into the valley.

The three men arrived outside the Hundred Blossom Valley and quickly made their way toward the Verdant mountain range where the man had rented his courtyard.

He glared at Wu Shun the entire time, more annoyed than angry now. The trip here had been a waste of what they had come here for, but if Alex could save his daughter, he would consider it a success.

However, he found it hard to get his expectations high.

He spoke up to Alex as he needed him to know this before they arrived at the courtyard. "There's something I haven't mentioned to you just yet," he said. "It's about my daughter's condition."

Alex looked at the man. "What do I need to know?" he asked.

"That I am not sure what happened to her," he said.

Alex frowned. "Didn't you say she went through Qi Deviation?" he asked.

"Yes... but that is what my wife told me," he said. "I cannot for certain confirm that she really did go through Qi Deviation."

"Does he know?" Alex asked, pointing to the young man next to him.

"I know," the young man replied.

"I've told this to everyone I have taken my daughter to get healed," he said. "But I must tell you, none have succeeded. They all say that they never saw anything like this before. Which is why I've been struggling to deal with the problem."

"He gave me hope saying he could deal with it... but we can't even find the ingredients to test," the man said.

"I'm sorry, but I really did believe it would work," the young man said.

"That's alright," Alex quickly told the man. "You were never clear on what happened to your daughter, so I was going to check thoroughly from the start anyway. I will then see if I can deal with it."

"Thank you," the man said, but his hopes didn't rise at all. His hopes had been slammed many times before to hope for it again. He was simply going to see if it worked or not.

If it worked, that would be amazing. If it didn't, well... nothing would have changed then.

"Can I ask why your wife hasn't told you what happened to your daughter truly?" Alex asked. "You don't have to answer that if you don't want to."I think you should take a look at

"She probably did... I just don't trust her," the man gave a pitiful look. "It's not her fault in any way if she did lie, let's just keep it at that."

"Okay," Alex said.

They flew up a mountain and arrived outside an hour and quickly walked in. A few women greeted the man as he came in.

"Is my daughter alright? Has anything changed?" he asked.

"Nothing has changed since you left, my lord," the woman answered. "We've changed the talisman 3 times, and there was no problem."

"Good," the man said. "Tell everyone to stay away from that side of the house for a while, please. Then he turned to Alex and called him.

Alex walked with the man, going to the far back of the house, on the other side of the courtyard. They arrived in front of the room and the man opened the door.

Inside the room, on a bed at the center, was the young lady that was in a coma. She had soft white hair, a fair face, and looked incredibly young.

Alex walked into the room to check on her and noticed a dampness in the room that didn't make sense to him. He continued forward and arrived in front of the girl and looked at her closely.

She wore an entirely white robe and had a talisman on her chest for something that Alex couldn't immediately tell. What he could tell was that the girl was just in the True King realm, not in the Saint realm as he had expected her to be given that they were searching for a Saint rank plant.

"How old is she?" he asked the man.

"She is..." the man paused for a moment. "25 years old."

"Oh," Alex's eyes widened in surprise. That was very young, much younger than he had been expecting at all.

"Did none of the True rank pills heal her?" he asked the father.

"No," the man answered. "Even Saint Rank pills did nothing at all. I do not know what is happening to her. Maybe her Yin is too violent."

Alex nodded a little. He took her hand and tried to see what was wrong with her, but for some reason, he found his Qi obstructed for some reason. He tried to figure out why and realized it was the talisman.

"What's this talisman for?" he asked.

"To keep her Yin contained," the father answered.

"Is it okay to remove it?" Alex asked.

"I don't think it harms her," the father said. "As long as you are fine with the yin, then it should be okay."

"I will be okay," he said and reached for the talisman before ripping it away.

The moment the talisman left her body, the yin that it contained sprung up violently and covered the area. Within moments, the bed was covered in ice and it seeped below them, covering the floor in ice as well.

Within seconds, the temperature in the room dropped by many degrees, making everyone feel cold and desolate in there.

Alex stepped back a little in surprise and so did the other two men. Unlike the two men, however, Alex gulped at the sight he saw before him.

He had seen something like this before. A long time ago.

Chapter 1403 Method To Treat

Misty breaths filled the air as the three men stood silent for a while. Two waited for Alex to do something, while Alex himself was silent because the scene in front of him looked so very familiar.

"Fellow Daoist,' the girl's father spoke. "Is everything alright?"

Alex finally came out of his stupor and looked toward the father. "I'm sorry, I started remembering something similar to this," he said.

"You've seen this happen before?" the man asked. He felt hope budding inside of him which any other time he would've squashed.

"Once, and I can't tell if this is similar or not. Most likely not," he said. "I'm sorry I wasted some time. Let me start right now."

Alex walked close to the girl and felt not violent, but rather an intense Yin flow come out of her. It was simply so intense that to normal people the intensity looked violent.

Alex crouched next to the bed and took the girl's hands again. The white-haired girl's listless hands felt so incredibly cold at just the slightest touch.

Anyone normal that held it for too long would get affected by the yin in her body.

Her cultivation was still only True realm and yet the Yin she produced was enough to make Saints shudder at her presence. Perhaps that was the reason why she had gone into a coma.

Her body simply wasn't equipped to handle the intense Yin and that was most likely why she had gone into Qi deviation.

Alex sent his spiritual sense into her arm to check her body, but the moment he did so his eyes widened in surprise and he himself stood back a bit in fear.

"What! What's wrong?" the man asked.

The other alchemist was confused as well.

Alex did not answer and quickly released his spiritual sense to look around the room. He saw the walls, the bed, the two men, and the girl. He also sensed the intense Yin around them, but it posed little threat to his spiritual sense.

'But then why?' he asked himself as he moved back to the girl and used his spiritual sense to look into her body. The moment it entered, it simply disappeared.

It was no different than looking into the Void where the spiritual sense vanished at its touch. However, that wasn't what Alex equated the experience to.

He equated it to the same familiar scenario from a long time ago.

It was very similar to what had happened with his master, Ma Rong.

There were differences, of course, which he quickly latched on to. His master was never ill with Yin, but rather with Yang. It was only after she had been healed that the surrounding started freezing over.

She also had a Yin aura surrounding her that made it impossible to use any spiritual sense or Qi around her. In this girl's case, it was only inside her body.

Once he made himself aware of the differences, he finally stopped thinking about his master and started focusing on the problem at hand. He needed to heal the girl somehow.

He thought of making a Yang heavy pill for a moment, but he remembered something. He quickly reached for her arm and poured some neutral Qi into it. The moment the Qi entered, Alex lost all control of it as it was consumed by the Yin.

"I see," he said, finally understanding a little. "No wonder pills didn't work on her. All energy dies inside her body."

"What?" the girl's father asked.

"Her body is filled with Yin. No pill out there is going to be able to work on her unless with deal with the Yin itself," he said.I think you should take a look at

"But..." the man panicked. "There is no one who can deal with the Yin. My wife is perhaps the most talented person when it comes to Yin energy, and even she couldn't do anything about our daughter."

"Is that so?" Alex asked, a little surprised to hear that his wife was such a great person. 'Who is this man?' he wondered.

Alex thought for a bit given the lack of every other possible way to heal her, there were only two that he could think of.

"There are only two ways to heal her properly," Alex said. "Either we introduce a lot of Yang into her body to deal with the Yin, or we directly take Yin out of her body to remove it from her body."

The two men heard that and the alchemist spoke. "But no pill works on her. Most of them had most definitely been Yang pill I assume. How are you going to put Yang Qi into her?"

"I have a way," Alex said, but he didn't say anymore as he thought for a bit.

"How... how strong would the Yang need to be?" the man asked with a hesitating face. "My daughter has a Yin body constitution. Would it not be a problem if we introduce Yang?"

"She does?" Alex looked surprised for a moment before turning around toward the girl. 'Of course, she does.'

"Yes," the man said. "Not only that, she cultivates a very strong Yin technique, so if we introduce Yang haphazardly, won't it be a problem?"

Alex nodded. "It could be a problem," he said.

"Also, Yin and Yang don't necessarily cancel each other out all the time, do they? Sometimes, they can also get violent and instead become chaotic in nature. What if that happens inside my daughter's body?"

Alex gave an awkward smile. "I guess that is out of option then," he said. He had already halfway thrown the option out the window the moment he understood that it was going to be his Yang Qi that was going to enter a True realm girl's body.

Such strong Yang Qi would burn the girl's body from the inside while making its way to the Dantian where the Yin was most likely concentrated. He couldn't do that.

"I will have to drag the Yin out then," he said.

The father looked surprised. "Can you?" he asked.

Alex thought for a bit. "I can't guarantee yet," he said. "I've never done it before, but I will have to try."

"Her yin is strong. Won't you get hurt?" the man asked.

"Don't worry about that," Alex said. "I am more than equipped to handle some Yin."

He sat beside the girl for a moment and wondered what he was going to have to do. After a moment of thought, he landed on the idea of using the Undying cultivation technique to absorb the Yin Qi.

After making the decision, he closed his eyes and started using the technique. Immediately, the Undying technique started absorbing Yin from the surroundings to empower his body, and it was so much more fruitful this time around.

While Qi dealt with his body, he finally took the girl's hand to take Yin away from her as well.

Nothing happened at first as there was too much Yin in the surrounding for his body to pull from her. However, after patiently cultivating for an hour or so, once the Yin in the room started lowering, every bit of Yin in the girl's body started moving toward Alex.

Everything was going according to his plan.

Chapter 1404 Connection

As Alex started collecting the Yin Qi, the coldness in the room lowered a lot and the ice around the bed and floor started melting, turning back to water that dampened the floorboard even more.

This had happened before when the talisman could no longer maintain the girl's Yin and had to be replaced, and it was the first time the father was seeing anything remotely close to that without any talisman.

He could tell that whatever Alex was doing, even if it wasn't working, was definitely producing a positive result.

He moved backward, pulling the young man with him as they went all the way back to stand by the wall, leaving Alex a larger working space in the room.

Alex continued absorbing Yin through the girl, pulling what he could from her wrist that he clutched tightly. When he felt the flow of Yin slow down, he looked to see if Yin had run out or something.

It was too fast for that to happen, but he still wondered. After checking with his spiritual sense, he could tell that it was only her arm that he had managed to remove the Yin Qi from, and even that was slowly filling up.

Alex grabbed her other arm as well and started absorbing the Yin Qi from that arm as well. The Yin started flowing back as fast as it did at the start again, and his Undying physique improved a lot more.

This was most definitely more beneficial to him than over 50 days of normal cultivating, he reckoned as he continued absorbing the Yin Qi.

Once the speed from both arms slowed down, Alex realized that he had to absorb it from everywhere. However, he didn't want to do that. There was little point in going around the limbs, collecting Yin, only for them to be filled again.

It could be done surely, but that would take way too long, especially if the girl was capable of generating more Yin Qi somehow.

Instead, Alex decided to go straight for the source.

He left the girl's two hands and moved toward her dantian where the source of all Qi was most definitely going to be. He placed his two palms on top of it and started absorbing the Yin Qi.

At first, the rate at which he absorbed increased from before again as he was directly touching the dantian. But aside from that, nothing much happened.

However a minute or two after he started pulling in the Yin Qi, something happened. The Yin Qi that he was absorbing seemed to suddenly change.

What he absorbed next was something else. Something cold, something dark. What Alex absorbed was still Yin Qi, but it was a grade entirely different from what he was so used to.

The coldness that permeated through his body was too much for even the Undying physique technique to completely absorb. When the remaining Qi flowed through his body back to his Dantian, he felt a connection form between the girl and himself.

The connection... he had felt it before. It was so long ago that he had even forgotten it had happened, but it happening again reminded him of the day he returned back to the Hong Wu sect to find his master unconscious.

There he had absorbed Yang Qi from her to save her, and in doing so, once all the Yang Qi was gone, he had absorbed her Yin Qi.

That was when he had first felt the connection he was currently feeling. That time, the connection had been so short that he didn't even know what he felt exactly.

But now, he could sense it completely.

There was a connection between him and this girl. Not one that was recent, but one from a long time ago. The connection felt archaic, melancholic even.

And what terrified Alex the most was that the connection wasn't even between him and the girl. It was between his body and her body. It was a connection as old as time itself.

Understanding that, a single thought came to Alex's mind.

'Moon Goddess!' I think you should take a look at

He felt shocked and surprised and stopped the Undying technique out of pure instinct. However, the Yin didn't stop flowing into him.

He was confused for a moment as to what was happening, but then he realized that he had woken something that had until now remained in slumber.

The Yin bead in his dantian rejoiced as it devoured the Yin that flowed into Alex's body. It had come alive when it first tasted the Yin Qi that made it into his dantian, and now it hungered for more.

Using their connection as a pathway, it dragged Yin Qi out of the girl's body, which she had no control over.

Alex thought of moving away from the girl, but he stopped himself from doing so. If the Yin bead was taking away her Yin, then it was the best way to treat her Yin problem.

So, he stayed where he was, letting it absorb all the yin from her. As if it had been holding back until now, after Alex's permission to absorb, it pulled Yin even faster from her body.

The deep connection he felt with her continued, even going so far as to give him a false sense of attraction toward the girl. He shook his head, getting the annoying thoughts out of himself while trying to not give in to them.

The few minutes that followed felt like torture as the connection seemed to want one and only one thing. It wanted the two of them to get together.

But Alex persisted. He focused on what he felt was more important in this scenario. If what he guessed wasn't wrong, then this girl had the Moon Goddess's body. If the connection he felt was anything to go by and what he realized was true, then that could only mean one thing.

Ma Rong had the Moon Goddess's body as well.

His master had one of the greatest physical constitutions any person could have had, and they had all thought it was a simple 'Yin body constitution'.

Not that anyone knew who the Moon Goddess even was to give her body the correct name it deserved.

Alex's mind was in disarray as he tried to figure out just what it meant for this girl to have the same body as his master's.

She was only 25 years old, which meant she was born years after his master had died. Was it just a case of someone being born with the same body as someone else...

Or was it something more?

Bai Jingshen had revealed to him long ago that reincarnation was a real thing that he had learned from his own master.

That made Alex wonder. Was this the same thing?

Was this girl the reincarnation of Ma Rong?

Before he could come up with an answer, the supply of Yin coming from the girl suddenly cut off and the Yin bead stopped pulling anymore.

All the Yin in the girl's body had been taken away and what was left was a girl without any of it.

Alex lifted his hand finally as the connection between them disappeared. When it did, Alex felt something else happen inside him.

His body turned cold from the inside and within moments Alex realized what had happened.

The Yin bead was now stronger than before, and as such, the Yin and Yang in his dantian had a sudden imbalance.

Chapter 1405 A Higher Grade

The moment the cold overwhelmed Alex, he realized that the Yin bead had gained an upper hand on the Yang source that was in his body.

He didn't understand why that was, as both the Yang and Yin sources were both so strong that some little yin from a True realm girl should not have been able to affect it at all.

But it had, and now Alex had to deal with it.

He needed to add some Yang into his body to counteract the Yin that had caused the imbalance. He quickly got away from the girl and realized he needed to get away from this room.

Even with what he had done, this room was still full of weak Yin energy, and that wouldn't be of any help to him at all. Alex quickly walked outside.

The father tried to follow him, to find out what had happened, but Alex was too much in a hurry to say anything. If he let what was happening to continue, he had a feeling that the same thing that happened to his master would happen to him as well.

The excess Yin would cause him to go into a coma, which would require someone with Yin to steal it away from him. The girl could do it probably, but who knew how long it would take for her to wake up.

He couldn't take those chances.

"Stay in the room and look after your daughter," he said as he rushed to the yard in the center of the courtyard. "Don't worry about me. Just look after her."

He didn't even look back when he said that. He simply didn't care.

The sun was slightly lower in the sky at the moment after a long day, so Yang energy in the surrounding was reaching the highest it would for a while now.

He sat on the grass and quickly started cultivating. He needed to absorb some Yang Qi and have it quell the Yin that was acting out. As soon as he started cultivating, Yang Qi flowed into him.

With the Five Yang Divine Path's techniques, he could absorb Yang Qi at a speed that was simply abnormal. With his wide meridians, the Yang simply flowed into his dantian without any problems at all.

Alex quietly cultivated, absorbing as much Yang as he could, that he was taking directly from the surrounding area.

However, his face turned to a frown when he realized that it wasn't working. His plan to absorb Yang Qi to quell Yin was not working at all. The Yin, as he had known from the start, was at a grade that was simply not the same as anything else Alex had known before.

So, the Saint grade Yang Qi that he collected in his body was not capable of quelling it at all. It was simply too weak.

However, Alex wasn't worried at all. In fact, his face grew determined as he planned on doing something that he had been looking forward to since a long time ago but wasn't sure what the right time for that would be.

The meridian pathway in his body that the Qi moved through to create an absorption aura suddenly shifted as they all took even more complicated pathways than before.

Doing so, something changed in the cultivation method that made it even more torturous for Alex.

Suddenly, the Yang Qi he had been pulling into his body nearly sped up tenfold while the quality of the also started improving. It grew hotter, hotter than ever, but Alex's body could handle it, even though it hurt the meridian it traveled through as that complicated and thin meridian wasn't used to taking this much Qi through them.I think you should take a look at

Alex had known it would hurt, and he had known it would be difficult to cultivate starting on as he wasn't used to it at all. The new cultivation method was complicated and it would take him some time to get used to it.

For now, the Five Yang Divine Path's Immortal rank cultivation technique was the only thing that Alex could turn to, and he did. Now, he could only hope it helped.

With the sort of quantity that came with the new cultivation method, it would take him very little time to fill up his large Dantian inside of him.

Even if the initial time it took to get to the Dantian was much longer, overall it was a much superior technique.

The new Yang Qi, which had formed from weaker Yang Qi coalescing, was much stronger than before. So, when it arrived inside of his Dantian, instead of mixing into the Golden Core that covered most of his body, it remained on its own, away from everything.

However, because of how large Alex's Golden Core was at the moment, there was little room for everything else. So, when more Yang Qi started coming in, they soon started moving toward the two Yin and Yang sources that were imbalanced.

Alex hoped dearly that something happened as he paid all of his attention to pulling in Yang Qi and looked at his dantian.

As he watched, the Yang Qi got closer and closer to the two sources. It finally came into contact with the Yang source, but to Alex's horror, it didn't mix with the Yang source at all.

He was terrified that his last hope wasn't going to work as he had intended. However, when it came to the Yin bead instead, it did go toward it and even touched it.

The moment the Yang Qi touched the Yin bead, they neutralized themselves, turning into strong, but neutral Qi. The Yin in the Yin bead lessened a little bit, but barely enough to make a dent in it overall.

Alex would have to cultivate a whole lot more.

Her meridians hurt as they were being used for a technique that was not supposed to be used until he reached the Immortal rank, but Alex had no choice. Thankfully, he had practiced a few things to expand his meridians as much as he could, so he was suffering way less than he truly would have.

The Yang had a steady flow to his Dantian where it continued to neutralize the Yin Qi. Alex cultivated for half an hour in total before he had to stop. The Immortal rank cultivation technique simply hurt his meridians way too much for him to continue without rest.

The Yin in his body had lessened a bit from what he had seen, but not to the point where he was still out of danger. The coldness was low, but it was there. He would have to continue again once his meridians got some rest.

Half an hour later, Alex continued.

He collected the strong Yang Qi again, sending it to his dantian where it start neutralizing the Yin Qi again.

Even after night fell, Alex continued doing what he did. During the night, his technique would pull normal Qi in the absence of Yang, so he had to pull out a few yang ingredients and crush them to create Yang around him.

As he cultivated infrequently, checking on his status in between mini-cultivation sessions, he realized a few things that scared him... and a few that excited him.

Chapter 1406 Scared And Excited

In between the cultivation sessions, Alex had come across a problem that scared him. And the problem was that the Yin bead hadn't truly gone dormant.

He wasn't sure what exactly happened, but the Yin bead would pull Qi from his Golden Core, pulling it into itself to generate more Yin Qi.

So, when he took a break from absorbing Yang Qi, the bead would make more Yin Qi when he wasn't fighting it.

Thankfully, the rate at which it happened was so low that it wouldn't even go through 10% of his total Qi capacity in an entire day if he left it as is. When it did go through the 10% of Qi, the amount it would produce would be just 1% in return, but the Yin that did come out would be a grade above normal.

1% or 2% wouldn't do much for Alex, but if he was to go on a few days without cultivating, then the Yin Qi would start causing trouble.

That was the part of the situation surrounding the Yin bead that frightened him. However, it wasn't all bad that came from this situation at all.

One of the minor benefits that he gained from this was that his Qi in his Golden Core was continuously pulled away from it, waiting to be replaced.

Since a Golden Core needed to be continuously washed away and refined with new Qi to improve it, to grow it, the created an opportunity for that to happen, even while Alex wasn't cultivating at all.

As long as he didn't let the Yin Qi build up a lot and took care of it, he could benefit from letting it steal away his Qi to turn to Yin Qi.

And that was only a minor benefit. The Major benefit was something else.

When Alex cultivated the new Yang technique, the Yang he collected would be at a grade not dissimilar to the Yin that the Yin bead would produce. So, when they interacted together, they created neutral Qi that had no other attributes.

However, this wasn't just any normal Qi at all. It was a neutral Qi that was far beyond any neutral Qi that he could collect on his own as it was the result of two very strong extremes of Qi.

And, when this neutral Qi formed in his dantian, unlike the Yang Qi, it knew exactly where to go.

It went to his Golden Core and started improving it, expanding it. The rate at which it refined the Golden core was nearly 20 times as fast as normal. Since the neutral Qi that formed was a mixture of both the strong Yang Qi and Yin Qi that were individually over 10 times stronger, the resulting Qi would be 10 times stronger as well, with the quantity being the combined quantity of both of the Qi.

With such a quality Qi, his Golden Core which was so close to crossing the threshold and becoming 80% as large as the dantian itself, grew insanely quickly.

It didn't look like he was going to reach the threshold right away, but it wouldn't take him more than a week to do so at this rate.

That was a concept more than terrifying to imagine for Alex as it hadn't even been close to a year since he had last broken through.

The veined pills had certainly helped speed up his cultivation in the last decade, which had helped him get so much stronger so quickly. He couldn't help but imagine what would happen if he used them with this new technique.

After thinking for a bit, Alex didn't consider it as good of an idea as he had initially thought. It was still going to be 10 times as helpful as the new Qi would be that much more helpful, but it wasn't going to be as helpful without the Yin Qi that took time to form.

He cultivated over the course of the night and finally managed to erase all the Yin Qi that the Yin bead had formed. It would continue to remain minimally active, and that was fine with Alex.

He could just cultivate when he had the time and wouldn't have to worry about it. He wondered if he could perhaps make pills to counter it, but finding ingredients with such strong energy would certainly be impossible.I think you should take a look at

By the time he had opened his eyes again, the sun had come back up. He had spent a day searching for the Nightsbane, and a day here. It would take the two girls he had come here with to reach the poison fields where he had promised them he would meet, so he wasn't worried right away.

He stood up from where he sat and looked down in surprise to see most of the grass around him had dried up completely. Had his Yang Qi been that strong?

With no more worry to deal with, he stood a step to go toward the room where the girl was. When he remembered the girl, the worry in his heart returned again.

He had momentarily forgotten about her as his own problem had taken precedence. He couldn't take another step as he feared what was in that other room.

Was that a young girl that he had never seen before? Or was that his master, reincarnated into another body once she died?

And was that truly the Moon Goddess or not? The connection made him feel that it was, but he couldn't tell. He had no idea what the Moon Goddess was supposed to be like.

However, given the connection that his body felt, he had no doubt that it was indeed her. So, was his master truly the previous incarnation of the Moon Goddess?

He didn't know how to feel about all of this. It was all too sudden and confusing and he hoped to just get away from it all. However, he couldn't even bring himself to leave.

What if that was his master? He couldn't just leave if he could meet her again.

Finding the courage in himself to meet his master, Alex moved again, going back to the room. He entered and found the father on a stool, sitting next to his daughter's bed. It didn't look like she was still awake.

"Where is the other guy?" Alex asked.

"I sent him to his room," the father said. "He doesn't need to remain here. I can look after my daughter while she rests."

"How is she doing," Alex asked.

"She's still in a coma, but the Yin problem has vanished completely," he said. He stood up and gave a deep bow. "Thank you for healing my daughter."

Alex smiled. "That's alright," he said. He remembered that it had taken his master quite a few days to come out of the coma as well.

"Stay with her for a while. She might remain in a coma for a few more days. We'll have to see if she needs a pill a few days later," he said.

"I see," the man said. "About the payment. How much do you—"

"SENIOR!" a voice from outside as the young alchemist came running in urgently.

"Why are you shouting?" the man asked angrily.

"She's here," the young man pointed outside. "Your wife. She's here."

Chapter 1407 Ice Mist Palace

Alex walked outside, behind the father who left once he heard that his wife was coming. Once outside, Alex looked to the sky and saw not one woman, but instead an entire army worth come into the courtyard.

There were at least 40 people there, and all of them were in the Saint Foundation realm or above, the ones at the front being at the Saint Transformation realm.

They all wore crystal blue and white robes, that had multiple layers to them and wore precious golden jewelries on their head. Each and every one of them looked like a beauty, but the ones at the front were especially so.

Alex looked at one of them in the front, recognizing her. It took him a moment to recall her name, but he did.

Bing Zheshuang, sect master of the Ice Mist Palace.

She looked young enough to be in her early 30s, but it was hard to say if it was her cultivation that made her look young, or her cultivation technique.

"Changying!" the woman next to the sect master spoke up. "Where is our daugher?"

She had a fair face with small nose and red lips. Her black hair was tied behind her, hiding with layers of white veils that were attached to her head using gold and gems embroided hair clips.

She looked no younger or older than the sect leader and now that Alex was looking at her closely, no different either. It was the way the two women dressed that made them appeared unique, but in reality, they were the same.

They were twins.

The young alchemist was hiding behind the man, scared out of his life. In his defense anyone would be scared if the sect master of the Ice Mist Palace took her entire upper echelon and came to confront them.

This was the sect that birthed Song Meifen, the Queen of the Ivory Kingdom, and as such were the most important sect in all of the Ivory region.

Alex looked at the man next to him that the woman had referred to as 'Changying' and got curious if he was from the Ivory Kingdom as well.

It would make sense if he was, seeing at the mother was from that place.

"Why have you people come?" the man asked in a low tone as he stared at everyone.

To Alex's surprise, no one immediately answered back at all. They all looked tense, the sect leader even more so.

Only the woman that was the girl's mother didn't seem tensed in any way other than the worry she felt for her daughter. "Changying! Answer me! Where is our daughter?" she asked.

"Healed and resting," the man said. "Something you refused to do."

"What?" the sect master stepped forward in surprise. "Is... is little Shumi truly healed?"

"Of course," the man said. "Her Yin is all gone and he is much better. She is still in a coma, but she will regain her consciousness eventually."

A small murmur stirred amidst the crowd as they all found it hard to believe.

"Brother-in-law, please do not lie if you are just saying it to send us away. It will only break my sister's heart even more when you take away the hope you just gave her."

"I do not lie," he said. "Unlike you, who said you were healing my daughter and did nothing."

"We did," the man's wife shouted. "Of course we did! You think I would let my daughter stay in a coma forever without doing anything? Every hour I was in a worry, thinking of ways to heal my daughter, but nothing worked."

"Hmph! You didn't try hard enough then," the man said. "How was it then that I healed our daughter in just half a month when you let her remain in a coma for over half a year. You didn't care for our daughter and chose to not heal her."

"You! How can you say that?" the woman started tearing up. "How could you be so hurtful? I... I shouldn't have married you at all. I thought you had changed, that you were no longer your old self... but I was wrong. You are still the same old man that has something wrong in his head."I think you should take a look at

"I wish, I never—"

The sect master acted, holding back her sister before she said anything more. She pushed her back before moving forward herself.

"If little Shumi is healed, then may I take a look at her and see?" the sect master asked.

The man thought for a bit and answered. "You may look, but you can't take her away. I don't trust you lot to take care of her."

"Oh, we will take her away," the sect master said. "Why do you think I came prepared?"

The man looked at the 40 women who all seemed determined to fight him and smiled, "You count this as prepared?" he asked with a sneer on his face.

The sect master smiled. "If this isn't enough, I have already contacted her Majesty and have let her know what is happening. She had most likely contacted his majesty Jin here and there should be more soldiers coming to aid us. Will that be plenty?"

The man hesitated. He wasn't worried about the fighting part at all. He was worried that he would get the Legion involved. If the Body Legion got involved, he would be in a big trouble.

After all, they had promised to imprison him the next time he caused any problems to them.

"Aren't we all getting a little hasty here?" Alex spoke up. "There is no reason to fight when we should be celebrating instead. The young lady inside has been healed of her Yin ailment. We shouldn't be at each other's throat on such occasion, right?"

The sect master turned her head and looked toward Alex. "And who might you be?" she asked.

"This is the great Alchemy that saved my daughter," the man said. "Treat him with respect."

"Oh, an alchemist," the sect leader's eyes warmed up. "You are the one who healed little Shumi? I thank you for your help. Still, I must make sure that she is truly healed. May I see her?"

"Sure," Alex spoke. "The young girl is resting inside."

The man looked toward Alex and frowned. "Why are you letting her in?" he asked.

"Is she going to poison her?" Alex asked.

"No, but—"

"Harm her? Hurt her? Give her disease?" Alex asked.

"No, she—"

"Is she not the little girl's aunt?" Alex asked.

"She is," the man said.

"Then I'm sure she means no harm," Alex said. "If you're so worried about your daughter, just go in with her."

The man thought for a moment and nodded. "Alright, let's go in," he said.

The other woman quickly ran forward and went in without waiting for any of them. She was way too worried about her daughter to care what the two men had to say. Once in, she looked at the bed where her daughter lay, resting with a calm face and finally accepted that her daughter had indeed been healed.

Once she realized the truth, she wept tears of happiness as she lay next to her daughter.

Chapter 1408 Fate

The sect master and the father entered the room after the woman. The father remained a bit further away from the bed, letting the two sisters hover around their daughter and niece while grumpily looking at them.

He still believed that they hadn't tried hard enough and Alex had to tell him the truth.

"I do not mean to sound arrogant when I say this, but there is very much likely no one in this world that could have treated your daughter. No one except me," Alex said.

"In... in this world?" the man looked toward Alex.

Alex nodded.

Anyone could have absorbed the few bits of Yin in her body, but the stronger Yin in her dantian, the one that had caused her to collapse into a coma was most definitely something that no one could have taken away.

Only Alex, with his Yang body, could have handled the Yin enough to take it into his Dantian. Anyone else would have frozen their entire body before the Yin reached their dantian.

The Yin Bead had helped, but that was only to quickly take the Yin out of her. Even without it, Alex could have taken it all away.

He couldn't tell what would have happened to him in that case. Would the Yin still cause imbalance? He could most definitely control the Yin with his new Yang cultivation technique, so he probably would have had nothing to worry about.

"Are you sure there is no one else that could have helped?" the man asked again.

Alex shook his head. "Her Yin was just that strong," he said.

"I see," the man said. He didn't know whether what he was saying was an exaggeration or not, but the past half a month that he had tried to desperately get his daughter healed sure made it feel like it was all impossible.

"Then it must have been fate that put you in my path that I managed to find you," the man said. "I am lucky."

"Fate... huh?" Alex thought. Was it fate that brought him here today? Was it fate that got the two together?

Was it fate that brought him and his master together all those years ago?

Was it all fate? Or were these just coincidences?

"She truly has been healed," the sect master took a few steps back and wiped her tears. "I cannot believe it."

"I told you two women already that she's been healed," the man said.

The sect master ignored her. "How is she then? Is she going to wake up soon?" she asked.

Alex thought for a bit. That was when he realized that he hadn't checked the girl at all. He knew that a newly evolved body took a while to fully awaken from the coma.

It had taken Alex 5 days before he had woken up, and his master had taken a few days as well. As for how long it would take the girl, it couldn't be more than a week either.

Still, he decided to check her just in case.

He went up to her and took her wrist before sending his spiritual sense through his meridian and blood vessels to look through her entire body. This time around, there was no Yin in her body that instantly stopped it all from working.

He checked through the entire body and nodded. "There is nothing wrong with her. At worst, her body lacks a bit of energy. She had been fighting the Yin for some time, so it will require her body a few days to realize that the fight is no more."

"Once the body redirects the rest of her energy into aiding her, she will wake up. Just prepare a bunch of pills just in case she wakes up weak," he said.

"Is that so?" the sect master said. "Thank you."

"Thank you, sir Alchemist," the girl's mother said sincerely to him.I think you should take a look at

"It's alright, look after your daughter for now," he said.

He walked away and went back to being next to the father. The two women then prepared to take the young girl away.

"Hey! What are you doing?" the man shouted. "I told you, I'm not letting my daughter go with you lot."

"Brother-in-law!" the sect master's eyes narrowed in anger while the yin aura in her body radiated.

"Changying!" the mother shouted at the same time as her Yin aura radiated as well.

The two sisters were both in the Saint Transformation realm. The sect mater was in Saint Transformation 3rd realm, while the sister was in Saint Transformation 1st realm.

The man said nothing, but he didn't stand back against this either. His Saint Core realm cultivation base that he had been radiating around Alex and the rest stripped away like a veil as a much stronger aura filled him.

Like a candle flame replaced by a bonfire, Saint Transformation 4th realm aura filled the room.

Alex had expected the man to be strong; it was obvious. But he had no way of anticipating that it could be this strong.

The many women outside immediately started preparing to fight the moment they sensed the change in the situation as well. Any moment, the three would start to fight.

"Are you guys insane?" Alex shouted, his voice cutting through the dense aura, surprising the 3 saints. "You are going to bring out such a strong aura in front of a little girl in the True realm. Do you want her to forever remain in a coma?"

The moment they heard that, everyone's aura instantly vanished. They pulled it all back, even hiding it more than before.

"Is... is she alright?" the mother asked.

"She's fine," Alex said. "But be careful around a patient. You guys have lived long enough to know this much."

The three nodded and looked at each other.

"Brother-in-law, I must take little Shumi back. Even the Body Legion will be here in an hour or two to take her away with me. Will you still stop us?" she asked.

The man hesitated. "But you guys didn't heal her. You—" he paused as he remembered what Alex had said about no one being able to heal the girl.

He had a realization that he might have been wrong this whole time and that he had been too hasty in his judgment of the situation.

He had always been hasty.

"May I suggest something?" Alex spoke up. "Since senior Changying here wants to stay with his daughter to look after her health, why don't you take her back after she's woken up and he knows it?"

"We can't do that. We've taken too many away from the sect," the woman said.

"Then... why not take him there?" he asked. "Certainly that is possible, right?"

"Take him... to the Ice Mist Palace?" the sect master hesitated

"Sir Alchemist, the Ice Mist Palace is a place for only girls to be in," the man said himself.

"It's just a rule," Alex said. "Every rule has exceptions. They will make exceptions for you if you can persuade them."

"I knew of an all-girls sect too," Alex said. "But the moment they needed something from me, they cared not for my gender and took me in as their alchemist without hesitation."

Chapter 1409 Payment

The sect master of the Ice Mist Palace looked at the man for a moment and thought as to what she would have to go through to fight against this madman just to take away the girl.

She would most likely survive, and it was a doubt that he would truly hurt Taizhen too. But what about the other girls that were here? She had brought the older ones with more experience, but even then... she couldn't risk anything in here.

She looked toward her sister who was glaring at her husband and wanted to curse her for marrying this crazy man when she told her not to so many times. In the end, she married him and there was nothing she could do.

It wasn't like nothing good had come out of the marriage. Little Shumi had been born to her sister thanks to the marriage, and that had been one of the greatest occasions in the Ice Mist Palace.

What's more, the man had agreed to let her be the disciple there without any conditions. He had changed for the better at that time.

Now, however, seeing his daughter in the condition she was in, she could understand why he would go back to being the same eccentric maniac as he previously was.

"I will allow you a 1-month duration where you can stay in the Ice Mist Palace to look after your daughter," Bing Zheshuang spoke out loud. "After the months's end, if you find that little Shumi has been healed and she had no more problems, you will have to leave. Do you agree?"

The man looked at her in a bit of surprise as he never thought she would compromise. Since she did, he took up the deal. "I agree," he said. "But what if she doesn't wake up at that time? What do I do then?"

"Then..." the woman thought for a moment and answered. "Then, I'll increase the days by 2 weeks each time, until Shumi is healed. Also, I will let you be in charge of healing her if she isn't healed by then."

The younger twin looked up in surprise. "Sister..." she spoke softly.

The sect master gave a look of grimace. "We followed the rules as much as we can, and ended up allowing a father to not care for his daughter in her moment of illness. This is the least we can do," she said.

She quickly turned back around and spoke, "You will either have to live in the main palace and never leave until it is time, or you will have to find a place outside of the sect. Your choice," the sect master said.

"Whatever you want," the man said. He simply didn't care. "I will be staying next to my daughter until she's healed anyway."

"Good, it's a deal then," she said. "Don't you dare go back on it, Changying!"

"I won't," the man said.

The sect master nodded. "Then I will take back Shumi with me. Will you be staying here or will you be coming with me?" she asked.

"I will go wherever my daughter is, obviously," he said.

"Let us go then," the sect master started moving while the young girl was taken out by the mother. The man followed behind them, quickly running after her daughter while remaining a step behind them all.

Alex felt a little weird watching them leave. What should he do here? Should he stop them until she's healed? Should he use his authority to make them stop?

He wanted to learn about whether or not the girl was his master even more than whether or not she had the Moon Goddess's body. Somehow, what should have been more important felt less so than the other to him.

By the time he moved, they had all left and gathered up at the courtyard, ready to leave.

The young alchemist wanted to leave with them too, but seeing the ladies from the Ice Mist Palace who were used to staying by themselves, he hesitated.

Would they kill him if he tried to go with them? It was probably better if he stayed behind and left on his own. Less chance of him being murdered in the middle of nowhere because one of the ladies thought he looked her wrong.I think you should take a look at

The man walked back from the courtyard and the young man saw hope. Maybe he would take him with him.

"Sir Alchemist," the man spoke.

"" YES?"" Both Alex and the young man spoke at once, and the young man realized instantly that it wasn't him that was being called. He looked away and stepped to the side, while the man looked to speak toward him.

"I was about to ask you for payment when we got sidetracked," he said. "So... about the payment, how should I pay you? Do you want spirit stones, or should I pay you in other forms?"

"I don't need your payment," Alex said. The Yin he acquired from the girl had been payment enough. But of course, he wouldn't tell that to them.

"That can't be," he said. "Not only did you spend your precious free days at the valley here instead to heal my daughter. Surely you must want something in return."

Alex chuckled a bit. "Can you give me something if I ask for it?" he asked.

"I... I can try," the man said.

Alex chuckled. "No, I do not want anything," he said. "Well, if anything, I do want to want to meet with your daughter once she's been healed. I might have some business with her."

"Business? What sort of business?" the man asked.

"I don't know just yet," Alex said. "I'll know when she's awake. For now, you can leave."

"Sir Alchemist," the sect master walked forward. "The Ice Mist Palace cannot let a debt remain unpaid. Please tell us what you wish in return for removing little Shumi's yin and we shall pay it."

"As I just told him, I do not want any payment. If anything, I wish to meet her when the young girl is awake. That's all," he said.

The sect master hesitated a bit. "May I ask why you wish to meet her? What this business of yours that you mentioned might be," she asked.

"I cannot tell you," Alex said. "I'll just have to ask you to keep the gates open when I do come sometime in the future."

The sect master didn't know what to say. "We might have opened our gates for him, but sir Alchemist, we cannot do the same for you, a man. Even as the sect master, I must follow the rules too."

"I understand," Alex said. "I also understand that there are exceptions. How about this? I will arrive at your gates sometime in the future. Then, you can choose to let me in or pay me what you think is worth the service I provided. Is that alright?"

"O-okay," the sect master said, a little weirded out. "May we know your name then?"

"You can call me... Yu Ming," Alex said.

"Alchemist Yu, thank you again for treating my niece," the sect master said. "I shall wait for you to come to our sect in the future. I will repay you then."

After bowing once, the sect master turned around and flew away with the rest of the women from the sect, with the man flying at the front, along with his daughter and wife.

Chapter 1410 Trade

"Something happened, didn't it?" Godslayer's voice spoke once everyone left.

"You were watching?" Alex asked.

"I woke up because of the crazy Yang you started pulling in. I was scared it might come for me like that yellow fog of yours did," he said.

"You should be fine though, right?" Alex asked.

"I am," Godslayer said. "Are you going to tell me what happened?"

Alex thought for a bit and looked to his right. "In a bit," he said and walked forward to stop the young alchemist that was ready to leave alone. He placed his hands around the young man in a friendly manner and asked, "Are you planning on leaving?"

"Uh, Brother... Yu!" he remembered. "Yes, I was just leaving. I have nothing more to do here."

"I see, but surely you can stay behind for a bit right?" Alex asked. "I wish to make some trade."

"Trade?" the young man asked. "What do you want to trade, brother?"

"You have a book full of ingredients, you mentioned. I want to trade for it," Alex said.

"You... you want to trade for my book?" the young man asked. "I'm afraid I can't do that. It's my book and I won't give it away."

"I'm not asking for the whole book," Alex said. "I'm only asking for the recipes inside of it, and I will make a fair trade."

"What fair trade?" the young man asked. "Senior, you cannot give me anything that can make me sell the recipes inside of my book. I know what they're worth. I won't be giving them away."

Alex had to accept that the young man, while not that good at Alchemy, knew what he was talking about. He smiled a bit and let him go.

"Alright, you can leave if you want," he said. "But I want to ask before you leave if you know who the best alchemist in this continent is."

"What stupid question is that?" the young man asked. "It is obviously his majesty, the Dragon Emperor."

"Is he?" Alex asked. "Right now, is it still the Dragon Emperor?"

The young man paused for a while. "No, this time around it's—"

As he spoke, Alex took off his mask, revealing his face to the young man.

"It's... YOU!" he shouted out loud as his eyes widened in surprise. It was impossible to tell if he was answering the question or if he had just recognized Alex.

Alex put the mask back on. "Can I take that exclamation as a sign that you recognize me?" he asked.

"Y- y- y- y- you! You are the alchemist that-no! You are the King of the Southern Continent! The one that won against his Majesty," he practically shouted.

Alex looked around, making sure there wasn't anyone that saw him, and spoke back to the young man.

"I am willing to trade with you," he said. "I will buy the recipes in that book, and in its stead, I can teach you alchemy that will help you reach close to the same level as me. I cannot promise that you will reach the same level as me, but I can promise that you will reach the same level as the Dragon Emperor."

The young man's eyes were wide enough from the start that it was difficult to say if he even processed anything that Alex said. However, after a moment of not speaking, he quickly thought to react and started saying something.I think you should take a look at

"Uhh... I'll be at the same level as the Emperor? I heard he's Level 10, the only Level 10 alchemist in the continent. That's impossible for me, isn't it? I can't imagine why that would be something I can reach," he said and looked up at Alex. "Can I really do that?"

Alex smiled, but his face was hidden behind the mask. "Yes, I can promise you will reach the same level as the Emperor. Although I will say this much. It will be hard to make pills on the same level as the Emperor consistently simply due to the lack of perfect ingredients. You will make pills as good as him, but not very frequently," he said.

"Then I'll agree," the young man quickly said. "Are you going to take me in as your student?"

Alex was taken aback a bit. "Student?" he hadn't expected someone to take him as a master. Although he certainly was old and strong enough to be one. Still, to be a master to a Saint Foundation realm cultivator that was the same age as him wasn't what he wanted right now.

"No," he said. "I am not looking to take students right now. What we will do is simply trade. I will give you what you need, and you will give me what I need."

"Okay," the man said with a dejected look.

"Don't worry, I'm not going to hide information from you," Alex said. "Oh, and one more thing. There is another condition, which I'm not sure you can fulfill or not."

"Wh-what requirement?" the young man asked.

"I will need you to move to the Southern continent with me when I leave this continent in less than 19 years," Alex said. "Can you do that?"

"Leave the land? Sure. I have nothing keeping me here," the young man said.

Alex narrowed his eyes at how quickly he accepted. "You... don't have any family here?" he asked.

The young man shook his head. "No family," he said. "Had a sister before, but haven't seen her since the game began. Don't know where she is, or if she even played the game."

Alex remained quiet for a moment. "She's not in the Eastern Continent?" he asked.

"Don't think so," the young man said. "I didn't find her during the Great Search."

"The Great Search... that was when everyone started searching for their people after the game ended, wasn't it? Did you not find your sister then?" he asked.

"No," the young man said with a dejected look.

"I see. Well, she must have either remained in the real world, or just gone to one of the other three continents," Alex said. "You'll know if there is ever a chance to go back."

The young man didn't know how to feel about that. Happy? Joyful? It had been 50 years since he had seen his sister. Truth was, he didn't even remember what her face looked like completely. Just fragments of them here and there.

"I'm sure she's been doing fine either way. She's my elder sister after all," the young man said. "Anyway, I accept your offer... err Your Majesty?"

"Good. Let's make an oath to make sure that both of us remain true to our side," Alex said. "And so you don't reveal my secrets to anyone else."

"I agree," the young man said. "Your majesty." He added belatedly.

The two made an oath and once the oath settled in them, it was confirmed.

"Alright, that's settled then," Alex said. "For now, go to the Dragon Capital and enter the Alchemy school. There you can meet with my people. Take this and tell them I sent you there to learn. They will get you started on any basics that you might not know."

"Once I'm done with the matters I have here, I will return there and give you the knowledge we agreed upon. Then, and only then, I will take the things you promised me."

Chapter 1411 Simple Talk

"Moon Goddess?" Godslayer asked. His voice was filled with understandable surprise as well as a healthy level of skepticism. "How do you know it's the Moon Goddess's body? Didn't you say the kid was unconscious the entire time?"

"A feeling," Alex said.

"A feeling?" Godslayer sounded angry. "You're basing such an important piece of information... on a hunch?"

"No, not a hunch," Alex said. "A feeling. I'm speaking in the literal sense. I felt a connection with the girl like... like our bodies wanted to be together."

"Like... copulate?" Godslayer asked. "Are you sure that wasn't just because the girl was... you know, beautiful? Have you been with a woman before?"

"No," Alex said, a little bashful about answering the question. "But that wasn't the point I was trying to make. It wasn't me that wanted it, but my body. And I'm not even sure if it's copulation or not."

"I mean... it would make sense when you think about it," Godslayer said. "There are sects out there that focus solely on dual cultivation between two people, usually ones with yang and yin. So maybe that's what your body wanted."

Alex wasn't sure that was it, but at the same time... it did feel like that.

"Well, ignoring everything else. Imagine if she does have the Moon Goddess's body. Does that cause any problems?" he asked.

"Don't think so," Godslayer said. "It's not like the Sun God's body is doing anything more, is it?"

"Well... true," Alex said. "You're taking it surprisingly well, I must say. I'm happy about how much you've improved."

"What? At the God talk?" Godslayer asked. "We're talking about True gods. I was never at odds against them."

"What about the fake ones? Do you still want to kill them?" Alex asked.

"Kill the fake gods? Maybe... not," Godslayer said in a soft voice. "Actually, who am I kidding? Of course, I want to kill them. Who am I if not someone that slays gods?"

"Uhh... is that still improvement?" Alex asked.

"It is," Godslayer said. "I only want to kill specific gods. Not all of them."'

"Ooh, that is certainly an improvement," Alex said. "Which ones? The ones that trapped you?"

"The ones... no, not those ones. Although I would be certainly happy to fight against them, there are others that I want to kill if I can," Godslayer said. "The Weapons God used to be one of them. And there are a few more."

"Which ones?" Alex got curious.

"I'll tell you when I think you're strong enough to handle them," Godslayer said, changing the topic. "For now, let's go back to the Moon Goddess. So she might have the Moon Goddess's body. Are you going to try and get together with her?"

"She's 25, younger than my daughter," Alex said.

"Well... it's not like she's gonna stay 25 forever," Godslayer said. "And I'm not telling you to go for her right now. I'm just asking if you will."

"Probably not," Alex said. "It just... wouldn't feel right if I did."

"She's 25. She's an adult already. Or you can wait a hundred years if that makes it easier for you," Godslayer said.

"Actually, I don't think that would make it easier," Alex said. "Since that is really not the main problem."

"What is it then?"

"Godslayer, do you believe in fate?" Alex asked.

"Fate?" Godslayer thought for a bit. "I'm not really sure, actually. There is evidence that seers can predict the future accurately if things are isolated, so maybe there is fate. Or maybe that's just how things are supposed to proceed."I think you should take a look at

"Fate, destiny, they probably exist if you really think about it," Godslayer said. "I don't think I can really answer that question to your liking. Why did you ask?"

"It has to do with reincarnation," Alex said. "Do you believe in it?"

"Reincarnation? Not really," Godslayer said. "If there was, there would be evidence amongst the trillions of people that exist in this world, wouldn't it?"

"Bai Jingshen said it was real," Alex said.

"Why does it matter?" Godslayer asked.

"Because that girl has the same body constitution my master had," Alex said. "The one I told you about a few months ago. The Yin constitution. It's the exact same."

"Are you serious?" Godslayer asked.

"Yes!" Alex said. That's why I'm so confused and so reluctant to do anything."

"Well... I guess that is understandable," Godslayer said. "So you believe this girl is your master's reincarnation because she has the same constitution as your master?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"Hmm... then doesn't that mean that every single Sun God's body that has appeared in the past hundreds of thousands of years is also you?" Godslayer asked. "Do you think you have past lives out there that you can learn about?"

"I don't know," Alex said. "Maybe?"

"You must be thinking it was fate for you two to meet," Godslayer said. "Maybe that's true, but maybe that's false. Let's think of it this way, if it was your fate to meet this girl and your master, would you want something else to have happened?"

"No... absolutely not," Alex said. "I would never want to not meet my master."

"Great," Godlsayer said. "You can stop worrying about it for now. We'll ask someone that knows more about this than us when we get the time.

"Yeah," Alex nodded. "I will have to ask either Senior Yang or Bai Jingshen. Hopefully, one of the two know that information. Thanks, I needed to tell that to someone. It would have made me go mad if I didn't most likely."

"Sure, that's alright," Godslayer said. "Since you seem to have received a benefit from this encounter, try and break through quickly, and find me some Darkness aura. I can't wait to absorb both that and the Death aura in your book."

"I'll try my best," Alex said.

Once Godslayer stopped speaking, he finally flew through the sky, flying directly toward the Hundred Blossom Valley. There, he quickly saw the two girls who were fighting some plants in the 7th Field which was covered with carnivorous plants.

Alex flipped his Dragon medallion at the people who were trying to stop him and quickly landed next to them.

They turned around and were surprised to see him there. "Your majesty, you're back!" Talia said.

"Yes, I'm back," he said. "How are you guys doing? Are you on time?"

"Yes," Fang Yimu said. "Thanks to Your Majesty's help, we've been able to be faster than before. The Mushrooms were a little difficult since you left, but this one has been easy. There aren't many varieties of plants that want to kill you."

"Great," Alex said. "I sort of missed the mushrooms, so I'll have to go back. But it seems I can continue properly through here."

"Did you deal with the problems that the man came with?" Talia asked.

"No, I couldn't find him the ingredients he wanted," Alex said. "But I did help him by solving his problem directly. His daughter was sick and I helped heal him. Took me a bit longer than I thought it would, but I'm back now."

"Let us move through these fields as quickly as we can, so that you ladies can finish it all in time."

Chapter 1412 Leaving The Hundred Blossom Valley

Alex went along with the two ladies for the rest of their remaining days in this place gathering the ingredients and teaching them about a few more. They easily went past the 7th Field full of carnivorous plants to the 8th Field of Poisonous plants.

Alex finally got to gather the many ingredients he saw the last time he was here. Most of the ingredients he saw were still there, so he happily gathered them, leaving whatever he didn't need for the girls to take.

He surprisingly found the Flameborn Nightsbane as well. It was towards the end of the 10th poisonous field, the one that he hadn't checked because they had met up with the young alchemist, Wu Shun.

Past the poisonous field was the desert landscape for desert plants to grow. It wasn't just desert plants, but any plants that needed a little amount of water to grow that could be found here.

Not that it would've been useful had he found it earlier.

Alex went through the fields, gathering what he could, once again focusing mostly on ingredients that had Wood energy to them. The desert fields were spacious with many plants that did not want to be near another one.

As such, it didn't take them very long to go through this field and arrive at the last one.

The last one was less specific than the other fields. It looked like it was originally made for actual trees with thick trunks, but seeing the climbers and the other plants that were growing beneath those giant trees, it had ended up becoming a hodgepodge of plants that was simply a place to find any and all plants that they couldn't find in the other fields.

This was a much denser field, so it took Alex and the rest a lot of time to get through. It was good since the girls had 5 days left in their month-long journey and had to spend it all somehow.

They took their time going from one field to another at a rate of 2 fields a day.

Alex didn't find many new plants here that he hadn't already seen back in the Forbidden Orchard. This place was quite small when compared to the Forbidden Orchard, just better well maintained.

Still, he found important Wood ingredients here that would come in handy for sure.

Once the 5 days ended, it was time for the girls to leave or else they would have to pay more to stay. Thanks to Alex's help, they had gone through all the fields fast enough that they didn't need to linger there any longer anyhow.

"Thank you, your majesty," Fang Yimu bowed next to the bridge that sent them out of the fields. "If not for you, we would not have been able to gain as many ingredients as we did this time around."

"That's alright," Alex said. "I had fun."

Talia bowed as well. "Will we get to meet you again?" she asked.

"Certainly," Alex said. "I'm not sure where you will meet me next though. I don't know where I'm going to be myself."

"Will you be participating in any of the other events around the continent? We might meet there," Fang Yimu mentioned.

"I plan to visit all if I can," Alex said. "Which ones are there again, outside of the remaining 4 secret realms?"

"There's the Golden Auction, the Cave of Frost opening, the Continental Tournament, the Azure Festival... uhh," Fang Yimu tried to think for some more.

"There's the Celestial Peak, but it's constantly open so I'm not sure if it counts," Talia mentioned.

"That's... quite a lot to be honest," Alex said. "I've heard about those too, but I don't know if I can make it to all. I'll have to see when they open. If I do end up going, I'm sure you'll find out. We can meet there again."

"Yes, your majesty," the girls said together.

"Farewell."I think you should take a look at

Alex turned around and walked back into the valley after sending them away. He had a few fields to still go through. He took his time moving back through the 10th field, going into the desert area.

There, he moved to the Poisonous area where he spent a bit of time searching through if he missed something. Then, he went to the fields of carnivorous plants as he had definitely missed a few fields here.

He spent a day roaming the entire 10 fields, getting what he missed. It didn't take him long to go through it all and once he was done, he finally went back to the fields with mushroom.

He hadn't even roamed half of it when he had been called to the man's aid. So, he went through it from the start, looking for what he could have missed.

He found what he could in the first few that he could and started gathering more mushrooms in the remaining fields.

To his surprise, on the 7th field, he found the World Defying Mushrooms.

"Woah! They have it here too?" he wondered in surprise. This was definitely something he couldn't miss out on. He started gathering the mushrooms and saw a few of them that had already been tainted with people's energy.

There was also a lot that had been taken away, which made Alex wonder what they were going to use it for. Surely they hadn't gotten the clean mushrooms, right? Or did they know how they were supposed to pick these mushrooms?

No one came when Alex gathered the mushrooms, so he freely used his space powers to cut through the mushrooms, gathering them all.

He left about half of it behind as he didn't want to take everything. It wasn't his place to take it all after all.

Not that the ones he left behind were of much use to him anyway. They were either young or tainted. Their only use would be to spread and grow some more.

He went through the remaining fields and finally left the Hundred Blossom Valley, and left it, going back to where the elders were waiting for him.

It had been more than a month since he had gone into the Valley, so they were a little worried. However, they needn't be as Alex returned just a few days later.

The elders immediately started questioning why he took so long, why he decided to stay back when the Cloud Iron sect had already left. Alex told the two about the girl he had to help heal, not mentioning who or where she was from.

After realizing they had been worried for nothing, the group prepared to go back to King Jin's palace.

King Jin had been waiting for their return. He was more than happy to see Alex again and wanted to talk to him about his haul at the Hundred Blossom Valley, hoping to learn something from him.

Unfortunately, Alex didn't have the sort of time.

"I'm sorry, I'm in a bit of a hurry. I can sense my cultivation reaching a bottleneck and must work toward it," Alex said. "I will talk to you about it after I leave."

"Of course," the King said, showing an understanding.

"Thank you," Alex said. "In the meantime, would you mind contacting the Crown Prince?"

"Sure," the man said. "What do you want me to tell him?"

"Ask him if it is possible for me to go see the Beast Paradise in the near future."

Chapter 1413 Breakthrough

Alex had cultivated in small bursts throughout his time in the Hundred Blossom Valley, which he had to do to keep a handle on his Yin Qi that built up inside the dantian.

A day of Qi buildup would disappear in just a few minutes of cultivation, so it was easy enough for him to do it.

However, when he felt that he didn't need to do it all the time, he stopped towards the end of it. The few days he remained there hadn't been bothersome, but once he left, the build-up had reached a limit that he needed to go for a long cultivation period.

He could tell that he was also going to break through soon, so he decided to enter closed cultivation as soon as he could.

He told King Jin what he had to do before disappearing into his room and started cultivating. Immediately, a tremendous amount of Yang Qi gathered onto him, turning into the higher grade of Qi as they entered his dantian.

There, it immediately fought with the Yin Qi and started forming neutral Qi that flowed back into the Dantian, refining it even more so.

He struggled for a bit with the strong Yang Qi and stopped an hour later when he couldn't handle it anymore. There was still a lot of Yin Qi, but he could rest now without worrying about what would happen to him.

Once he felt ready, he started cultivating again.

It took about 3 short cultivation sessions before Alex got rid of all the yin Qi. Once it was gone, he could go back to cultivating normally.

He didn't just cultivate, of course. He also improved his body, eyes, and spiritual energy. At the same time, he started learning the Wood ingredients in order to make a pill that would improve his Wood Spiritual Roots.

Since he had no help this time around, unlike the time with Water and Earth pills, it would certainly take him a lot longer than he could expect.

Since he couldn't spend every day on this, it would take much longer than anything before. Maybe just as long as it had taken him for the Dao pill.

Pearl and Whisker were right there with him, training with him. Pearl was close to entering the Saint Foundation realm, so Alex helped him.

Due to Pearl's Dao knowledge, he would be assaulted by an Inner Demon. Even knowing that Pearl bravely entered cultivation to break through.

Alex had no idea what he went through in there, but when he came out, he had broken through to the Saint Foundation 1st realm.

Whisker was excited to see that and wanted to break through himself. However, having no real way of cultivating himself, on top of having a rather average talent, he couldn't even break through past the Saint Condensation 2nd realm he had reached a long time ago.

Alex cultivated for nearly a month after that before he was ready to break through as well. His breakthrough came suddenly and passed just as quickly as well.

All he had to do when he reached the bottleneck was to think of breaking through and try it. With his talent and preparation, he easily did it.

Now, the Golden Core in his dantian was starting to fill 80% of the entire thing. Once it grew to 90%, he would be in the Saint Core 9th realm, and when it reached 100%, he would finally move on to the next realm.

Alex looked forward to that.

After a day or two of cultivating to stabilize his cultivation base, Alex walked out of closed cultivation and went to meet up with his elders.

They congratulated Alex for his breakthrough, and soon the others in the palace came as well.

King Jin happily spoke to Alex. "Congratulations, your majesty. You broke through successfully," he said.

"Thank you," Alex said. "It took some time, but yes."

"Ah, how jealous I am," he said. "If only I could break through so easily like you too. May I ask how you broke through twice in a row?"

"Twice in a row?" Alex was a little confused. "Ah, no, no. I didn't. My beast broke through with me."

"Your beast?" the King looked surprised. He hadn't known that Alex had a beast with him.

"Yeah," Alex said. "I would introduce you to him, but he's quite shy and doesn't want to come out."

"That makes sense," the King said. "I was a little confused when I thought you broke through but your cultivation base only went up by one. I was foolish."

"How long was I in closed cultivation?" Alex asked. "Two months?"

"A month and 22 days," Lady Yao quickly mentioned.

"I see," Alex said. '4 months before it will be 2 years since I came to this continent. I should go meet the alchemists soon.'

"Oh right, your majesty," King Jin spoke. "His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince replied to your request."I think you should take a look at

"My request? About the Beast Paradise?" Alex got interested in the topic.

"Yes," the King said. "He replied about a month ago. He said that you could go, but it will have to be a few months later."

"How many months later?" Alex asked.

"About 8? No, 7 now," the King said. "The Prince said that he needed some ingredients from the Beast Paradise himself for some pills he was planning to make and said that he was going to go there on his own."

"If you wish, you could join in 7 months later in his journey."

Alex frowned a little. "I can't go there on my own?" he asked.

The King hesitated a bit. "It's like this, your majesty," he spoke. "Ever since some time ago, the beasts have stopped being friendly for some reason and had completely stopped allowing people to go through their borders."

"Why?" Alex asked curiously.

"Honestly, I think it's because of your people," the King said.

"My people-oh, the players," Alex realized. "Did the players do something?"

"I'm not really sure. But around the time when the players started to grow a lot, there were instances of some stronger ones going to the Beast Paradise to hunt the beasts. While many that tried were killed, people still came."

"So, they closed the Beast Paradise entirely and now only do trades around the border and exclusively with the few merchants that are allowed to go to its borders to trade things that come out of there," he said.

"If the rumors are true, even the Crown prince won't get to enter simply. He will be escorted. Only his Majesty should have the authority to go in and out without worrying about the consequences."

"I see," Alex said. That part of history wasn't written in the books. Was it because it was recent?

He wanted to curse the people for making the situation like this for him, but then again, he too had killed many such beasts himself, all to improve himself.

So he really couldn't do anything.

"Then... 7 months later it is," he said. "Can you contact the Prince and tell him that I wish to go in there with him?

"Of course," the King complied.

Alex now needed to think of how he could spend the next 7 months. Did he go back to the Capital and spend his time there, or did he just roam around this land?

Since there wasn't much he could do back in the capital right now, he decided to roam the cities of the Emerald Kingdom, as he had in the recent past.

Before that, King Jin had truly wanted to gain some Alchemy lessons from Alex, so Alex decided to teach him a bit.

The man had been more than helpful to him on multiple occasions, so he didn't feel it bad to teach him a bit. He kept the more important knowledge to himself, but even the ones that he didn't hide were new information to the King who easily gobbled it all up.

Jin Xiaojian was a competent alchemist on his own, reaching Level 7 long ago when he had been in the Royal School of Alchemy. It was partly also his proficiency in Alchemy that had gotten him this position anyway.

They all had something in them that adhered to that Kingdom. He was an alchemist, Mao Yingtai was an excellent fighter, Tan Qiu was a merchant, and so on.

King Jin could make pills in the Immortal grades regularly, but not consistently. After Alex taught him a little more about how the pills worked and how symmetry was important, his level in Alchemy was sure to improve.

Alongside that, Alex left him 5 different generic pill recipes that would certainly help him improve even more.

The man tried making pills with the new recipe and his average harmony on all those pills went up by nearly 7%. If he worked even harder, it would go up even more in the future.

After spending a month on just this, Alex finally decided to leave Greenheart City for good.

He would probably return in the future, but it was impossible to say when. King Jin wanted to come with him and try to learn more from him, but he had a kingdom to rule, so he couldn't rule.

Reluctantly, he said his goodbyes, letting Alex roam the remaining cities.

Alex went through the rest of the northern cities, visiting the unique places in the 6 months of time that he had.

Then, 6 months later, he arrived at Brightfalls City, where he was to wait for the Prince who would be arriving there any day.

Chapter 1414 Brightfalls City

"Your majesty," the Crown Prince Fanyu spoke up in great delight when he saw Alex. "It is so good to see you again after so long."

"Prince Fangyu," Alex smiled at the man. "How have you been doing?"

"Great," the Crown Prince answered.

They were inside a luxurious room in Brightfalls City, with its window facing directly to the Brightfalls that gave this city its name.

The Brightfalls was a massive waterfall that was nearly 2 kilometers wide, the water in which flowed from the beast region to the north.

The water fell from such a height that it turned fizzy and white on the way down, and as a result, caused it to light up the surrounding area with white light due to its massive area.

The city, at least the part that was facing the falls, was completely white, with even the roads getting as bright as the sun on a cloudy day.

It was an incredible sight.

The light from the Brightfalls entered Alex's room and painted the walls in white light as well. It was a natural source of light and thus they did not need to use any lanterns during the day.

"How has your trip around the Emerald Kingdom been, your Majesty?" the Crown prince asked. "Are you enjoying our empire?"

"It has been incredible," Alex said. "So many unique cities, so many unique cultures. I think I will be tired of the next city I visit, but each one entertains me so much that I never do. Truly, it's an amazing land with amazing people."

The Crown Prince laughed out loud in pride. "It truly is," he said. "I should visit it all some times in the future."

"Oh, have you not?" Alex asked the man. "I would imagine the Crown Prince would have gone through his entire Empire at least one."

"That's not such an easy task, is it?" the Crown prince asked. "Surely your Majesty haven't been through all the cities in the Southern Continent too."

"No," Alex told the truth. "But I've only been alive for less than 70 years. Compared to me, you have had a lot more time."

The Crown Prince sighed. "Fair enough," he chuckled a bit. "Truth is, I don't really like visiting other places. I don't like new places, so I try to stay in the Capital whenever I can. I only leave when I'm forced to."

"Huh?" Alex chuckled. "You're the complete opposite of your brother, aren't you?"

The crown prince gave a sheepish look. "Why do you say that?" he asked.

"Well, he likes touring, doesn't he? You mentioned that he has been on a tour of the empire for a long time, didn't you?" Alex asked.

"Ah, right," the prince said. "But that isn't really because he likes touring, really. It's just that he doesn't have anything else to do."

"Nothing else to do? As a prince?" Alex asked.

"I'm the Crown prince, so most responsibilities fall upon me. The only thing that could be his is the Azure throne for the Azure kingdom or a high-ranking spot in the Head Legion. But he has never been the type who wants to lead, so he was never forced to."

"As a result, he has nothing to do in the capital," he said. "He goes around the world, doing what he wants."

"Does he not come home?" Alex asked.

"He hasn't in a while," the Crown prince said. "But as the Prince of the Empire, he has nothing to worry about."I think you should take a look at

"I suppose," Alex said. "You also mentioned he has an important figure protecting him?"

"Senior Linfan, our head chef, yes," the Crown Prince nodded.

"I see," Alex said. "I wonder if I'll meet him on my journey. Do you know where he is right now?"

"Hmm," the Crown prince thought for a bit. "I believe he was somewhere in the Silver Kingdom the last time he sent us any sort of notice. It was a year ago, so I am not sure if he's still there."

"I see," Alex said. "Let me know if he wants to meet me. I'm curious about him."

"Surely," the Crown Prince said. "Anyway, let us move away from this discussion. I'm actually curious why you wanted to enter the Beast Paradise, your majesty."

"Why not?" Alex asked with a smile. "It's an interesting place with nothing but intelligent beasts. There are not many places in this world like that, are there?"

"I suppose not," the Crown prince said. "It's a shame you were half a century late. Had you somehow come earlier, you wouldn't have to be in such an awkward situation to enter that land."

"I was merely a teenage half a century ago, prince," Alex said. "I'm not sure a young me that was a mortal would have been lucky to have come to a forest full of beasts."

"Ah, right," the Crown prince shook his head. "It is so difficult to imagine that someone like you is so young. Truly, I'm very jealous of your talents, your majesty."

Alex smiled. "So, what is truly going on with the Beasts Paradise? Why have they closed their borders?" he asked.

"Honestly," the crown prince sighed. "I'm not sure. Most people will tell you the reason is because of the players that came and attacked the land."

"While that could be true, it's a mystery why they did it for so long. I mean, the players have integrated into the society, so why haven't they opened it already, I'm not sure," the Crown Prince said. "Unfortunately, I do not have the authority to command them to answer me, so I am as oblivious as anyone else."

"Huh?" Alex was a little surprised. "What do you mean you cannot ask them? Do they not respect you, the Crown Prince?"

Fangyu shook his head. "While I may be a Crown prince of the Empire, the Beasts Paradise isn't truly part of the Empire, so they get to refuse me," he said. "It's a weird situation. We call it part of the Empire and tell everyone the same, but the top brass knows that's not it."

"I'm confused. Would you mind being more clear about it?" Alex asked.

The Crown Prince nodded. "The truth is, since the Beasts Paradise is something that is formed by the former subordinates of the first Azure Dragon and their family, they have a claim to sovereignty in that land."

"At the same time, they are also a part of the empire. So the situation has come to be where while they are under the empire, they are still their own free region."

"The only one they answer to is the person on the Dragon throne, my father," The Crown Prince said. "So, if you really want to learn more about the Beast paradise, you will have to ask my father."

"Or... I could ask the beasts themselves," Alex said. "Right?"

"I wouldn't get my hopes up, your majesty," he said. "These beasts don't really like humans all that well."

Alex nodded. "I am fine with disappointment. At least I won't regret not asking," he said. "So, when do we leave?"

"Later in the evening I will go notify the beasts that I am here, and tomorrow at dawn, we should be able to leave for it."

Chapter 1415 Beast Paradise

After a night of cultivation, Alex prepared early to leave for the Beast Paradise.

He was more than surprised that his request had been accepted. Even more so, he was surprised that he would get to leave this early into his time on the continent.

Just a little over 2 years had passed and he was on his way to the Beast Paradise.

"What do I do?" Pearl asked, confused a lot by the situation. "Should I hide myself? Or should I show myself?"

Alex thought for a bit. "Hide yourself for now," he said. "I will call you out if I need you to reveal yourself. I don't want to give away the fact that a White Tiger is alive in this land. Who knows what lies they have been fed by the Emperor."

Pearl nodded. "There is a chance that they blame my grandpa for the Azure Dragon's death, don't they?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "So, we will have to tread carefully. We'll try to get as much information out of them as we can while giving as little as possible."

Pearl nodded. He turned into a flash of light as he disappeared into the Beast space, but even there, Alex could sense that he was very anxious and scared, and even a little excited to meet his actual grandfather and grandmother.

Alex walked out of his room, going to meet the others as it was close to dawn.

People were gathered outside, not to go along with them, but to give them a farewell.

As unfortunate as it was, no one aside from the Crown Prince and Alex was allowed to go into the land of the beasts. Truth be told, Alex liked it this way.

The fewer people there were, the more he had the chance of doing things unnoticed.

"You will need to take care of yourself, your majesty," Elder Liang said. "We won't be there to protect you, so it is all up to you."

"Don't worry," Alex said. "I won't be rash"

"Try to come out as early as you can," Yao Ning said. "Don't make us wait for too long or we will get anxious."

"I'm not going in there to fight the beasts. I'm just going on a friendly visit. I will come when I'm done exploring all that I'm allowed to," Alex said. "Don't worry and just cultivate. The next time I see you lot, I want to see you have broken through to the next realm."

"What? That's impossible," Elder Liang complained. "It's not like us old folks can break through whenever we want to.

"We'll try our best," Yao Ning said and simply bowed. "Have a great journey."

Alex said his farewell and walked away with the Crown Prince. They arrived outside of the hotel they were staying at and flew over the Brightfalls waterfall to arrive on top of the massive river that flowed out of the Beast Paradise.

The sun started to come out from the east, so they continued along and flew on their own for a few kilometers before they arrived near an area that had strong beasts waiting for anyone that came by.

They sat at a fort created on a giant tree that was over 30 meters tall and just as wide with branches twisting in every direction.

There were multiple such small forts created along the side of the entire region with beasts staying as a guard.

There were human soldiers way ahead of this that already stopped everyone from coming, except for a few merchants that were specifically allowed.I think you should take a look at

Today, however, they were sent to pick just two humans.

One was the son of the Emperor on the Dragon throne, and another was a King that was directly under the Vermilion bird. Even if they disliked humans in general, they would be respectful here.

"Welcome, guests," a Swan with pure white feathers and a brilliant orange beak spoke to the two of them with a male voice. The Swan's feather was almost translucent to the point that when the first ray of sun hit his feathers, it spread around him as if the bird was glowing on his own.

"Greetings," the Crown Prince spoke. "I am Long Fangyu, the Crown Prince of the Dragon Imperium. His Majesty here is the King of the Southern Continent, Alex Benton."

"Greetings," Alex said as he cupped his hands.

The Swan unfurled his wings and bowed a little to both of them. "I am called Jian Kugong. I was sent here to take you all to our leader," he said. "Please, follow me."

He flapped his wings and started flying. Alex and the Crown Prince started flying behind it, going into the large forest that covered most of the Beast Paradise.

Alex was a little surprised to see the beast's cultivation base. A Saint Soul realm beast was always a rare sight, and he couldn't believe that one had been sent just to be their guide.

He could also tell how much intelligence this beast had, which likely meant that its bloodline was a very strong one.

He remembered the Swan courtyard back in the Dragon Palace, which had been formed in honor of the Swan which was one of the 7 beasts that had come along with the first Azure Dragon.

'Could it be one of its descendants?' he wondered. There was a major possibility.

Alex's attention was immediately pulled away after just flying a few hundred meters into the forest. He could sense the many alchemy ingredients around him, which both confused and surprised him.

There were so many of them here that he nearly believed it was an alchemy garden that he was passing through.

He looked around at the thick forest and realized that due to the lack of human interference, it had grown to a point where it was full of resources and the resources were not being used efficiently.

He didn't say anything about it and simply flew along with the Swan silently as the only sound he heard was the wind moving through the forest and the swan flapping his wings.

He looked below at the river that flowed through the forest. It was a big one and multiple such streams flowed from the Beast Paradise that gathered at the end of it and fell as the waterfall there.

"Where does this water come from?" Alex asked. "Is there a source in the north?"

"There are snow mountains in the north. During the winter, it snows there, filling them to the peak. During the summer, they melt and make the river that you see below you," the Swan said.

"I see," Alex said. Not every place had such a system for getting water. Both Southern Continent and Western Continent survived mostly on rainwater as well as spring water.

They saw multiple beasts as they flew and flew close to a large pond that formed from one of the streams. He could see many beasts relaxing next to the pond, bathing in the warm sunlight that had just started creeping through the forest.

"How long will it take us to reach the leader?" Alex asked.

"If you do not wish to sightsee, we can speed up and reach there in half a day," the Swan answered. "What should we do?"

Chapter 1416 The 7 Colonies

Alex decided to take his time going through the valley. He was in no hurry at all, so he would rather take a gander at the scenic mountains and valleys that were completely filled with plant life.

A couple of hours into the journey, Alex saw an open space with beasts flying in the sky and enjoying the sunlight on the ground.

There was a massive open space with a river flowing through the middle, and the beasts on either side. They were enjoying their time along with their younger ones.

Some of the beasts saw them and many started looking up as a result to gaze at them. It had been a while since they had seen humans.

Alex looked at the trees surrounding the small grassland and showed a little surprised expression.

"Do these beasts below us not have houses?" he asked.

In the Beast Realm back in the Southern Continent, many of the beasts had houses. They weren't as detailed as human houses almost always, but they were houses. They were built with wood and planks, with rooms in them.

There were so many of them there that seeing not a single one here made him feel a little awkward.

He knew not every beast had these. The Demonic Beasts Forest in the Northern Continent certainly didn't have that as those beasts were less intelligent overall.

However, he at least thought that this, a forest that was closely related to the Azure Dragon would have that at the very least. The one controlled by White Tiger did after all.

"These are wild beasts, left to their own devices. What they do or do not do is of no concern to us," the Swan said. "There are ones that decide to build houses, but it seems intelligence is lacking amongst these ones."

Alex looked at the Swan after he heard the answer. He thought for a bit and asked, "May I ask what you mean by Wild? As far as I can tell, they are beasts that can cultivate, and there were even 3 Saints down there. Do you still call them wild?"

"Wild here doesn't necessarily mean wild in the normal term, your Majesty," the Crown Prince spoke up. "It also means lawless, left to their own means."

"Ah," Alex finally understood. "Wild, I see."

But that only made him more curious about other things. "Does this land have no rules then?" he asked. "No law?"

"These ones don't," the Swan mentioned. "But our seven colonies most definitely do."

"I'm not sure you know this or not, your Majesty, but when the first Azure Dragon came from the sky, he brought with him 7 main subordinates."

"While they were here, those beasts procreated and left descendants behind that each rule a single colony," the Crown Prince answered. "Outside of those 7 colonies, the land is lawless."

"I see," Alex said. "May I ask why you decided not to put a law in this place? As far as I am aware, you guys hold the sovereignty to this land."

"We do, and all of this falls under the jurisdiction of the 7 Leaders. But even after that, we let almost everything remain lawless," the girl said. "After all, that is the natural order of this land. We cannot hope to maintain it if we start putting restrictions on what a beast can and cannot do."

"To begin with, how do we make laws for the rest of the beasts to follow when many don't even have a concept of law?" the Swan said. "A beast needs to have an incredible bloodline to be intelligent enough to understand the laws."

"Most beasts need to enter Saint realm to gain intelligence. Even then, they can't control their primal instincts. Given that most beasts have a really low cultivation base or no cultivation base, it is an impossibility to make rules that everyone will follow."

"You are correct," Alex said, agreeing with the swan. Unlike humans that only took a few years and no cultivation base to be intelligent, the beasts took forever to do that.I think you should take a look at

It wasn't just either. Bloodline was a huge factor in intelligence as well.

That was why most aquatic beasts were so quick to attack someone as they only followed their instincts and never their intellect.

"And of course, there is the problem of diversity too," the swan said. "Unlike humans, who are all basically the same species, how do you make laws for something so diverse as a forest full of animals?"

"Do you make hunting not allowed, thereby starving an entire chunk of the population?"

"Do you make flying illegal, thereby making it impossible for birds to go anywhere?"

"Do you make destroying herbs illegal, starving the herbivores?"

"Do you make killing not allowed, and effectively stop the only method of cultivation for nearly 99% of all beasts that are in this forest?"

The Swan's question stumped both the humans at once. The Crown Prince hadn't properly heard the reasoning for the lawless nature of the land, and had chalked it up to just beasts being beasts.

However, after hearing this, he realized that the lawlessness was actually created out of necessity. Or else, the entire ecosystem of the beasts would disappear.

Alex nodded as well, understanding more about the intent of the beasts. "Then I expect the 7 colonies to be lawful? Are they as strict as human lands, or a little less?" he asked.

"To be honest, I do not know how lawful or strict the human land is myself, but from what I've heard, its about the same," the swan saying. "No killing, no stealing, no making it hard to live, etc, etc."

"I suppose the only thing we don't have to worry about is the economy," the Swan said. "We don't have spirit stones that we trade for things. We use natural material that we find."

"Everyone is free to go out and get what they want to, so there is no need for a single currency that controls all."

"Do you guys not use spirit stones?" Alex asked.

"We do, but it is not different from the plants we find or the material we discover. It is considered no different," the Swan said.

"And where exactly are we going right now?" Alex asked. "One of the 7 colonies?"

The Swan nodded. "With the Emperor's son coming and with another King's arrival, our 7 Leaders have gathered in the Lizard Colony, and that is where I am taking you."

Alex was happy to hear that. 'The Lizard colony, huh?' he thought. He wished it was a different one, but there wasn't much he could argue here.

He talked with the Swan for a bit longer, trying to understand a bit more about the world that he had entered. As they talked, the topic slowly went toward one that Alex wasn't certain if he could ask or not.

After thinking for a while, he didn't see anything wrong with questioning that.

"I heard that your leaders closed the border of this land half a century ago. May I ask why they did that?" he asked.

The Swan thought for a moment and shook his head. "We had a large amount of humans come hunt the beasts in these lands and it was causing problems. So, we decided to close this land for the beasts to reproduce and recover."

Chapter 1417 Trade

Alex didn't believe that. The Crown Prince knew he didn't believe that as well.

He had already been told that this wasn't true, and this was in fact something that was a lie that was told since they didn't want the truth to come out.

As for what the truth was, Alex was looking forward to knowing it. He wanted to know if the players really did have anything to do with it, or if it in fact had everything to do with the Azure Dragon that died around the same time.

Alex was almost certain that was the reason more so than anything. The timing fit, although the reasoning did not.

Why would the beasts close their border?

Realizing that he was wasting his time trying to come up with an answer, he stopped wondering. He looked toward the prince who flew next to him.

"How many times have you been here, prince?" he asked.

"A few times, but not the long way," he said.

"The long way?" Alex gave a confused look. "Do you mean there was a shorter way than this?"

"A teleportation formation," the Crown Prince said. "There was one that linked this place directly to a location behind the capital that was only accessible to our family."

"However, when humans were no longer allowed, the formation was stopped effectively, cutting off our method of short travel to their lands," the prince explained.

"Ah, that would've been the perfect way to come here," Alex said. "I suppose this isn't bad either. I do get to see much of the Beast Paradise, which was my intention in coming here for anyway."

Alex started asking other questions, mostly about how far the jurisdiction of each colony went on for, if the beasts had absolute authority over their own colony, how the outside trade worked, etc.

Alex was given the answers directly.

The colonies were overall ruled by the laws made by the 7 Leaders. The 7 Leaders always came from 7 important families of beasts and were changed only when a leader no longer wanted to work, or when they were unable to.

It was not so different from the 10 council elders back in the Southern Continent.

The 7 Leaders maintained the same law in their own colony, but they were the only Leader when it came to it. If another leader came to that colony, except for certain scenarios, they would have to accept the other one's authority.

The trading system between the Beast Paradise and the humans was a weird one.

It wasn't a normal trade situation as every trade happened in bulk.

Before going to trade, each colony would provide the same amount of materials to the pile that would be traded. They did so every month for 5 months in a row.

The items they gave away included anything from a piece of shiny rock to their own fur and feathers. Anything a human would buy, they would give up for the trade.

Once everything was gathered, and all 7 colonies had provided equal worth of materials, they were taken to trade.

Over the course of the next few weeks, they would trade the items they had with the merchants. They would sell what they could, and what they couldn't, they threw away as waste as it wouldn't be sold.

The things that they would usually buy were talismans, cultivation and technique books for beasts, formation flags and plates, pills and pastes, and various other items that they liked.I think you should take a look at

Once the trade was done, the newly traded items were taken back to distribute amongst the crowd.

This happened once every six months, so the residents of the colony got excited every time the trade was done. After all, that meant that they finally got to see the things that they had gotten from the trade.

The things that were traded for were always a surprise to everyone but the ones that were involved, so it was a fun time for many.

The 7 Leaders sat down and distributed what they had gotten amongst everyone as they all reaped the benefits of the trade together.

"That's an interesting system," Alex said. "Did it start before the border was closed or after?"

"It's always been like that," the swan answered. "We are always in need of resources that aren't natural, so we've traded for it all the time."

"Hmm, do you not have beasts that came to do those things as well?" Alex asked.

"We do," the swan answered. "But they could never hope to be as good as the humans who started learning so much earlier than most of us could hope to. You can't teach something to most of the beasts as they wouldn't even be wise until they entered the Saint realm."

"Ah, yes. That is true," Alex said. He turned around toward the crown prince. "Speaking of trade, what exactly is it that you're looking for here, prince? Is it something that is not traded normally?"

"I'm afraid not," the prince said. "Your majesty might know this. It's a blood marrow from the limb of a 6-Eyed Deer."

"6 Eyed Deer's bone marrow you say?" Alex thought for a bit. He went through his mind to see what that was.

Unlike plants, the beast half of the information in his mind wasn't so easily accessible. He had to give himself a bit of time to think through before he found what he was looking for.

The bone marrow of the 6-Eyed Deer had a heavy Wood aura, on top of having a blood aura in it. If used properly, it was capable of producing a lot of energy that was useful for the growth of something.

"Are you trying to grow something? Or maybe heal it?" Alex asked.

The Crown Prince stared at Alex with an absolutely shocked look. "How... how did you know?" he asked.

"There is no other need for the blood marrow but in something that could aid another thing to grow. I guessed what it was based on that," Alex said.

"Wow, you truly are incredible at this, your majesty," the Crown Prince said. "Yes, I am indeed trying to find it for a similar reason. Well, it's my fiancee that needs it. I simply came to find it."

"Ah, lady Luoyang. But why?" Alex asked. "There are hundreds of pills that heal people already."

"It's not really to make a pill that heals people, but rather to create a new pill from scratch," he said. "This is her way of trying to take a step closer to the 10th Level which requires one to make their own pill."

"Ah! That makes sense," Alex said. "Lady Luoyang decided to go with a healing pill huh? Is it accepted even if the pill make isn't very useful?"

"It's only the success in making a new pill that matters, not the pill itself. She's made many Common and True pills, and now she's trying her hands at a Saint pill."

"If she succeeds, she would be half of the way through to the final Level as an alchemist," the Crown Prince said. "After that, all she will require to reach Level 10 is to learn how to make 90% pills."

"Then, the Eastern Continent will have 2 Level 10 Alchemists."

Chapter 1418 The Lizard Colony

The Crown Prince seemed quite proud of his fiancee's progress. His grin was very wide when he talked about her.

"What about you?" Alex asked. "Do you not wish to reach Level 10 as well? Follow in your father's footsteps and all."

"I do. Of course, I do," the prince said. "But sadly I do not have the time for it right now. With all the military stuff that I'm forced to look after, I don't really have much time in the day."

"Haha, you're more busy as a crown prince than I have ever been as a King," Alex said.

The Crown Prince chuckled awkwardly. "With father going into closed cultivation, the rest of the continent's well being falls under my shoulder. I was supposed to come here to get what I wanted nearly an year ago, but because of everything I had to keep pushing it all back. You saw how long you had to wait."

"I did," Alex said. "You made me wait for so long I nearly broke through again."

The Crown Prince chuckled at what he believed was just a joke. "But you don't have to worry about me, your Majesty," he said. "Sooner or later, I will reach Level 10 too. And for that, I will have you to thank."

"Hmm?" Alex was taken back a little. "Thank me? Why?"

"Because of your deal with my father," the prince said. "Thanks to that, I will be able to acquire the same knowledge my father does."

"You'll have to wait 100 years, you know?" Alex asked.

"Just a century, your majesty. I spent longer between Level 5 and 6. If 100 years is all it takes for me to go from Level 9 to 10, then I will be more than happy to."

Alex didn't know what to say, not that there was anything to say. He had agreed to this since in that amount of time, his own alchemists would grow and learn so much more than these two father son would.

"I'll look forward to your ascension to Level 10 in a century's time then," Alex said. "Have you made a new pill yet?"

"Yes, I've made one," the Crown prince said. "A simple pill to dampen your own emotions. Not that useful though."

"Oh, then it truly is just the other half remaining then," Alex said. "Then you are already a step beyond your own fiancee."

"Haha, I didn't want to sound ostentatious," the Crown prince said. They talked for a while about various mundane things that they wanted to.

Somewhere around noon, Alex decided that he had seen everything he had wanted from the wild and asked the Swan to speed up.

They flew for a while longer. Even at the fastest, they were told it would take them half a day to reach the colonies and they weren't being lied to.

Midnight had passed by the time they arrived at the colony that they were flying towards for nearly 18 hours.

Coming closer, they saw the colony for afar. Not only was the moon hung high in the sky, the colony itself was bright with lanterns and what not that made it look like a normal city.

There was no walls or anything surrounding the colony. Instead what separated the colony from the forest was a large area of farmland that they seemed to be using to grow some food.

Beyond the farmland were a large bunch of houses, all of which were made up of wood and didn't look very aesthetically appealing. They were of different shapes and sizes, all meant to accommodate the beasts those houses belonged to.

At the center of the colony was a patch of land with green grass growing on it with a pond at the very middle.

There were a few beasts that rested outside in the grass and many looked up to see who had come.

The swam landed outside the colony and looked toward the two. "This is the Lizard Colony. We're here," he said.

Alex looked in awe while the Crown Prince didn't show much amazement at the place as he had been there before.

The swan quickly notified someone, and before Alex could take it all in, a few beasts walked out from inside the village.

They seemed to have been waiting for them and quickly arrived to accept them.

Alex saw nearly a dozen or so beasts that came, but only 7 of them stood at the front. I think you should take a look at

"Welcome to my Colony," a Lizard slowly crawled out front from even the seven. It sounded masculine from what the two heard of it and saw that it was a sleek Lizard with smooth, scaled skin.

The scales on its body went from different shades of blue to different shades of green.

"I am Hua Xiyi," the Lizard spoke up. "The leader of the colony."

Alex bowed a little in greeting.

"Senior Xiyi, greetings," the Crown prince bowed. "Do you remember me?"

"Of course, a young prince," the Lizard said, bringing its tongue out to speak to him. "How could I ever forget about our future Emperor?"

The Crown Prince gave a chuckle.

"Let me introduce you all to him," the Crown Prince spoke. "This is Alex, King of the Southern Continent."

The beasts made a collective sound that was either them being surprised or them being confused. It was hard to tell.

"Welcome, King Alex. We've heard about you a lot," the beasts said.

"Oh, news of my arrival has reached here as well?" he asked. "I must say I'm flattered to know that you know of me."

"We heard it in passing a year ago from the traders that came to us. They said you have incredible Alchemy talent and are also very young. That made us curious about you and we learned as much as we can."

"I'm happy to hear you seniors have been curious about me," Alex said.

"We have," the Lizard said. "But there is a confusion that I must ask you to clear."

"Please, go ahead," Alex said.

"How did you become the King of the Southern Continent? Did something happen to her majesty the Vermilion Bird that you had to take over?" the Lizard asked.

"No," Alex said. "I didn't take over anything. I was crowned a king by Her Majesty to help her take care of the continent in her absence. I am very much her subordinate."

"Huh?"

"Oh!"

And another sound exclaiming surprise could be heard from the group, especially the 7.

"Her majesty crowned you to be a king?" the Lizard asked.

"She did," Alex answered.

The Lizard seemed perplexed for some reason. "Does that mean her Majesty is healed from her battle 5 thousand years ago?"

Alex was surprised they knew about it, but then every important figure in the Eastern Continent probably knew about it, and these beasts were no exception.

"Oh, you guys must not have heard about it," the Crown Prince spoke up. "The phoenix ruler in Southern Continent healed and came out to rule again over a decade ago. That was when his Majesty was crowned a King as well."

"Oh, so her Majesty is back, huh," the Lizard said. "I see. That's good news to hear."

Finally, the Lizard looked at the two and spoke up.

"Please come into the colony."

Chapter 1419 The 6

The other 6 Lord of the remaining 6 colonies did not introduce themselves and simply followed the Lizard.

On the far left was a deer. It was a slender deer with a graceful antler that was large with bioluminescent vines growing in between them. What truly surprised Alex about the beast was that it had 6 eyes on its head.

'This is the 6-eyed deer that prince is talking about?' he wondered. The question now was whether this deer was going to give up its leg on its own, or if so, how was the Prince going to trade it for its legs?

That was something he was looking forward to seeing it taken care of.

A large swan walked next to it, it's iridescent feather gleaming in myriad colors from the light refracted from the various lanterns outside of the houses, as well as the light that came off from the deer's antlers.

It was a majestic creature and seemed even more so than the Swan that he came to this place with.

Next to the swan was an Ox. It had three horns on its head, both with an intense metallic sheen to it, like a trident growing out from it. It was a powerful Ox with a muscular build and golden fur adding to his majesty.

On the very right walked a massive white elephant with blue tattoos all over it. Alex wasn't sure if they were tattoos it got after being born or if it was born with it.

The white elephant had two massive tusks that curved over its head, and a trunk that it twisted around and lay rested on top of the trunks.

It was larger than any beast out here, nearly as tall as the houses around them, and yet it walked so softly, causing almost no vibrations on the ground.

The skins of its body were wrinkled and hanging, showing off its age, which was significantly older than most other beasts that were with it.

Next to it was an Eagle with sharp golden eyes and a body that had a patch of white at the head and the rest of it entirely blue. It was a weird color for a bird, but not something out of the ordinary really.

It was a fierce beast and Alex felt an aura around it that made it look almost threatening for some reason. He wondered why that was.

Finally, the last of the 7, was the Golden Lion. A beast with majestic golden fur, an even brighter mane, and a body that seemed to be carved out of marble by a master craftsman.

Alex looked at this beast the most out of all as this was the most important one to him in all of this land, for it was the Golden Lions that Bai Jingshen had married off his daughter to.

If he was going to find anything about her or even see her, it was his best bet as of yet.

The Colony looked no different from the ground as it did from the sky. Alex could only see more of how badly made the houses were.

There were no architects or engineers to build a good house amongst the beasts so they made do with what they had.

A few younger beasts got close to see the humans that had arrived in their colony, and the two men just smiled at the young beasts, most of which run away.

Alex walked, taking in everything as the Lizard explained about his Colony.

He pridefully spoke of how rich the Qi here was, how they had no shortage of natural Qi treasures in the forest, and how strong everyone's bloodline in the colony was.

Alex conveyed his awe to the lizard every few steps, praising the things he saw in the colony.

"This is truly incredible," Alex said. "Are all colonies like that?"

"They are..." the Lizard paused and looked at the 6 other beasts that hadn't spoken until now. He coughed once and said, "They have their differences, but each one is unique and thus cannot be compared."I think you should take a look at

"I see," Alex said, acting as if he did not see the other beasts start to get angry at the Lizard's consistent praise of its own colony while nearly bringing down theirs.

The 6 hadn't spoken up until now as they were beneath the Lizard in his colony. They shut up and let him take the lead, for now.

They hadn't spoken at all, but Alex did notice the Eagle of all looking back at him with a look that he couldn't grasp. He wasn't well versed in the facial expressions of every type of beast after all.

Still, he was curious why it stared at him so much more than the others. Surely it didn't know him from anywhere. Or was there something on him that it was curious about?

Ignoring that, Alex continued until they finally entered a large building that the Lizard brought them over to.

As soon as they entered, something seemed to have shifted amongst the group that confused Alex for a second.

As if finding new life, the 6 other beasts stood straighter and walked with dignity, unlike just a second ago.

They walked din further and saw a bunch of platforms for the beasts to sit on and realized what was going on.

'Ah, this must be one of the locations in the colony where all of them are equal,' he thought. Everywhere else, they had to be subservient to the Lizard in his colony, but in this hall, they were all Leaders.

Once they all took a seat, Alex and the Crown prince took a seat as well. They sat down in front of them and the crown prince spoke up first.

"Thank you for letting us come, seniors. I truly appreciate it," the Crown prince said.

"Thank you for letting me come as well. I believe it was short notice, so it must have been a little difficult to accept me," Alex said.

"Haha, no it's fine," the giant lizard said. "Since we're here. Let me first introduce you to my fellow Leaders. This—"

"No," the Eagle interrupted. "Before we go on, I want this man to answer me something."

"Hmm?" the Lizard looked surprised and the other beasts turned toward it as well. "What do you want to say, sister Ying?"

The Eagle jumped down from its platform and stared at Alex so closely that he thought she was looking into his soul.

"You... how many beasts have you killed?" she asked. "How many beasts did you have to kill to gain a blood aura so strong?"

Alex's eyes widened. 'She can sense my blood aura?' he thought in surprise. He had assumed that blood aura couldn't be sensed, and yet...

'No, she must've seen it. Her eyes look weird,' Alex thought.

"I won't lie," Alex said. "I've killed my fair share of beasts. Is that a problem?"

"How many?" the Eagle asked. "Is that why you're here? To kill some more for your own improvement?"

"Ah, you're mistaken about something," Alex said. "While I have killed beasts, what you sense about me is not something I gained from killing beasts. But rather, it is something I acquired from a group of beasts for providing my services."

Chapter 1420 Shi Guyong

"You were given the blood aura you have as a gift?" the blue Eagle asked. "Do you expect us to believe that?"

"I would hope you would," Alex said. "That is the truth after all."

"What service did you ever provide?" the Eagle asked. "To whom?"

"There were beasts in my journey that required some pills. So, in exchange for allowing giving me some of their blood, I agreed to help them."

"Pills you say," the Elephant spoke up in a feminine voice. "Are you saying that the beasts were interested in your pills?" she asked.

"Of course," Alex said. "It might sound arrogant of me, but I promise you that in all 5 continents, there are no more than a dozen beings that will reject my pills."

"That's quite the boast," the male lion spoke up, his voice surprisingly young compared to everyone that Alex had heard as of yet.

"It's not a lie, seniors," the Crown Prince spoke. "His Majesty King Alex and my royal father has a small alchemy competition two years ago, and my father lost the match. Senior here is truly the greatest living alchemist in the whole world."

The beasts finally calmed down a bit.

"So, did you not kill beasts?" the Eagle asked. "Did you not come here to kill some more too?"

Alex sighed. "I assure you, senior. My intention in coming here is merely to know more about this place and to gain what knowledge I can from your seniors," he said. "I will be happy to gain any strength I can from here, but I won't ever kill for it. At worst, I will trade for pills for some blood."

"Hmm," the Deer spoke in another feminine voice. "Does that answer your question, sister Ying?"

"I... guess so," the Eagle said, jumping back onto the platform where it had come down from.

"Haha, now that we've calmed down, let me introduce the rest of us properly," the Lizard said. "As I mentioned before, I am Hua Xiyi, leader of the Lizard colony."

"This is Xiang Taikong, the Leader of the Elephant colony," the lizard said, pointing to the white Elephant next to him. The Elephant bowed a little and the two men followed suit.

"This is Tian Jiguang, leader of the Swan colony," the Lizard introduced the swan.

"It's a pleasure to have you here with us, guests," the Swan bowed a little, its feminine voice soothing the two men. The gleaming light from its feather had gotten stronger than before now that it was inside the bright room.

"This is Lu Youmei, leader of the Deer Colony." The 6-Eyed Deer gave a slight bow.

"Over here, we have Ying Aoxiang. Sister Ying already made a show of her character, so you know what she is like," the Lizard said.

"My apologies. I saw your intense blood aura and was worried that you were here for a different reason than normal," she said.

"Sister Ying cares for not only the beasts from her Eagle colony but also beasts outside of it, so you should be able to understand why she is so concerned with this."

"Of course," Alex said, bowing a little in her direction.

"That right there is Niu Jianding, leader of the Ox Colony. He is the fiercest leader amongst us, so try not to get on his bad side," the Lizard chuckled.

"Please do not listen to him," the Ox spoke. "I do not hold malice against anyone for minor reasons."

Alex smiled at the ox.

"And finally, this is Zhu Xiongwei," the Lizard explained. "Oh, young prince haven't met him either, have you?"

"No, this is my first time meeting, senior Shi," the Crown Prince said. "You must have become a leader recently senior. I congratulate you on becoming a leader."

"Haha, it's nothing," the Lion said in its young voice. "You don't have to congratulate me."

"I must," the Crown Prince said. "Last time I came here... what was it? 300 years ago? The leader was still senior Guyong. It must have changed in between."

"Yes, it did," the Lion said.

"When did you become a Leader?" the Crown Prince asked.I think you should take a look at

"It was about half a century ago," the lion said.

"Wasn't it around the time we shut down the borders?" the Ox asked.

"Yeah, it was," the Deer affirmed.

"Oh," the Crown Prince said. "Where is senior Guyong then? He wasn't old enough to leave the group from what I remember. Was he?"

"He was not," the Lizard said, hesitating a little.

"My uncle passed away," the Lion finally said. "Due to some cultivation complications, he ended up passing away, and I was made the Leader."

"Ah, my condolences," the prince quickly said.

"My condolences as well," Alex said.

"It's alright. It's been a while, and... I've gotten used to it," the Lion said with a smile that wasn't genuine at all.

Alex looked at the lion, slightly concerned about something.

If what they were talking about was true, then there was a possibility that he had considered something wrong. All this time, he had a single assumption.

The Azure Dragon had died 50 years ago and it had died due to a Heavenly Judgment lightning.

It was a conclusion he had come to 2 years ago after visiting the Hall of Fame in the Painting school. There, he had seen a painting that depicted a lightning strike, and based on the people who had witnessed the strike from the capital, everyone had said that it came from the Northeast.

But... if the previous Leader of the Lion colony really had died 50 years ago, and if he were to assume he had died while trying to break through to the Immortal realms then... did that not fit the scenario of the painting?

In the first place, was Alex sure it was Heavenly Judgment? What if it was a Tribulation lightning?

He was basing his knowledge on people who knew neither, so it could be that they didn't give him a perfect impression of what had truly happened.

But... if that was the case, then... when had the Azure Dragon died?

Bai Jingshen's inability to come to this continent made it apparent that Dragon had in fact died over 50 years ago, and his not finding him up in the Immortal realm confirmed it.

If that was to be considered then... how had the Dragon died?

It was still very much likely that Alex's first assumption was the correct one. But just because the second one was less likely, it didn't mean that he could let go of the possibility.

As he was thinking about the death of the Lion, Alex paused for a moment and looked up at the Lion in front of him.

"If you don't mind, may I ask what the full name of the previous leader was?" Alex asked.

"Uncle's full name?" the Lion asked, a little confused. "It was Shi Guyong. Why do you ask?"

"Just asking," Alex said with a smile, but he wasn't happy at all.

'Shit!' Alex thought. He was completely blindsided by this information as his mind had been focused on the other thing.

'Dammit,' he thought. 'What the hell am I supposed to do now?'

One of the few things he hoped would be of help when coming to this continent had just disappeared after he found that Shi Guyong was dead.

After all, he was the Golden Lion that Bai Meirong, Pearl's grandmother and Bai Jingshen's daughter, had been married to.

He was Pearl's maternal grandfather, and he was dead.

Chapter 1421 The Ropes

They had come here to find out more about Pearl's mother, to see if they could avenge her. However, the very first thing they found out was that her father was dead.

Not only that, he had died 50 years ago, around the same time when Pearl and his Mother had flown over to the Western Continent.

Around the same time, the Lightning had struck someone in this area. Around the same time, the Beasts paradise had closed its borders.

If he were to believe his first hypothesis, then it was around the same time that the Azure Dragon had died as well.

Around the same time, players had started joining the game.

How much of this was coincidence? How much of it was not? Alex believed that a few of these could really be coincidences. But he refused to believe that all of it was.

There were things going on here that he needed to learn more about.

Clearly enough, he needed more information.

He looked at the 7 beast, especially the lion and frowned. Could he ask them directly? Would the question be too much?

What if they were involved in it all too? What if they had gotten together and killed the Shi family, killing Pearl's mother and grandfather?

'Wait no, the sword means the Azure Imperium was involved,' he thought remembering the sword in his storage ring. He had yet to bring it out in this continent as doing so would be the same as giving away who he was.

'Even if they weren't involved in attacking Pearl and his mother, they could have been involved in attacking his grandfather,' he thought. 'Or did he fail breaking through?'

Things were getting confusing now. A single possibility that he held had now branched off into different direction with none seeming too out there to not be a possibility.

'I will need to gather some facts first,' he thought. 'The more facts I have, the better it is.'

The very first fact that he wanted a confirmation on was whether Pearl's grandfather was close to breaking through to the Immortal realm or not. He was over 5 thousand years old, so there was a possibility, but Alex still wanted to find out properly.

He looked at the seven beasts and finally realized what it was that felt so odd aout the beasts that had been bugging him this whole time.

He realized that... he couldn't sense any cultivation base from them at all.

That wasn't exactly correct. He could sense their cultivation aura and could tell that they were high in the Saint realm, but aside from that, there was no specificity to their aura.

It was what people felt when he used his concealment technique. Were they doing the same? He wanted to know.

"I'm sorry if I shouldn't be asking this, but I'm getting a little curious about something," he spoke up.

"Go on," the Lizard spoke. "If you shouldn't be talking about it, we'll let you know."

"Thank you," Alex said. "What I wanted to know is why I can sense your cultivation aura, but I can't tell what it is exactly. Are you using some sort of technique or artifacts?"

"Oh!" the Elephant spoke. "Because of this."

Her trunk moved around to something next to her neck and she pulled out something thick to show off to Alex that was not visible beforehand at all.

Alex looked closely and frowned for a moment as all he saw was a rope of some sort. However, when his spiritual sense landed on it, it dissipated instantly. I think you should take a look at

"Oh!" Alex realized immediately what it was that he was looking at. "That's... that's the Heavenly Silkworm's thread, isn't it? It's so big."

He saw how large the thread that went around the Elephant was and was surprised by it. He looked around at the other beasts and started noticing more and more threads woven into ropes.

The deers antler, the Ox's tail, the Lizard's arms, the Swan's wings, the Eagle's talons, and the Lion's mane.

Each of these beasts was wearing a Heavenly Silkworm's thread that was thick enough to be a rope. Even a single palm long thread cost a fortune out there and these beasts were wearing it as an accessory?

"Wait, Heavenly Silkworm's thread can hide cultivation aura? This is the first time I'm hearing about this," Alex said. "I was told that it only stopped Spiritual energy."

"If you have a lot of it, it can start to affect all sorts of energy," the Eagle said. "It's quite amazing."

"How do you have so much of it?" he asked. "Do you trade for it? I don't remember seeing any outside."

"Oh, no. We do not trade for it," the Ox said. "We have our own Heavenly Silkworms that we raise and get the silk from."

"Wow! You have your own silkworms, huh? That's amazing," Alex said. He tried to sense their cultivation base even through the threads, but it didn't seem like it was working.

Would it be too much to ask them to take it off so he could see what their cultivation base was underneath?

For the sake of not appearing suspicious, Alex decided to ask the burning questions in his mind later, and for now actively participated in the conversation with the beasts.

They talked for a while, asking the Crown Prince how the Emperor was and asking Alex how the Phoenix was. They didn't seem familiar with who she was, but they seemed to revere every heavenly beast at the same level instead of just the Azure Dragon.

They asked him about his age and his journey, all of which Alex had to mostly lie with some interweaving truth to make them trust him.

He did tell them that he had a beast but didn't show any to them. If he did, it would be Whisker, and he didn't want to show off his Saint realm cultivation yet.

At least not in front of the Crown Prince.

Through the Crown Prince, Alex got to know that the Emperor was still in closed cultivation, and wouldn't come out for a year at least.

"So, young prince," the Deer spoke up. "I hear you are here for one of my kin."

"Ah, yes Leader Lu," the Crown Prince spoke. "I'm making a pill and through some research, I've come to find that bone marrow from a 6-Eyed Deer would be a perfect ingredient for my next pill."

"That's quite the requirement for a pill," the 6-Eyed Deer said. "You do realize that giving away that much would weaken us quite a bit right?"

"I do, leader Lu," the Crown Prince said. "Which is why I've brought gifts for any one of your kin that is willing to go along with this stupid plan of mine."

"Haha, I'll have ot see who is stupid in my Colony then," the Deer said. "Would you like to leave now or after the sun comes up?"

"Let's leave after the sun is up," the Crown Prince said before turning to Alex. "Will you be coming with me, your Majesty?"

Alex thought for a bit and looked at the Lizard. "If Senior Hua is willing, I would like to stay in the colony for a while longer. I feel as though I have many things to learn from him."

Chapter 1422 Heavenly Mulberry Tree

The beasts and men talked for a long time before they left. It was morning when they walked out and the Crown Prince left for the Deer colony along with Lu Youmei, the Deer Leader.

The other 5 leaders left soon after as well, asking Alex to visit them soon. Alex wasn't sure if they were truly interested in him coming to their colonies or not, but he sure as hell was going to use the opportunity.

"Let me show you around the colony," the Lizard said and took Alex with him to go visit the rest of the colony.

The beasts were up early morning and the young ones gawked at Alex as he walked through the colony. He looked around at the poorly made houses, the large trees that gave shade, and the giant pool in the middle of the colony.

The fields outside the colony grew a mix of food and readily sought-after alchemy and talisman ink ingredients. He was taken around to show more of the colony and the many beasts that lived there.

From what Alex could see, the beasts that were the most here were reptiles like lizards, snakes, and crocodiles, but there was also every other variety of beasts.

Most had lived here since their birth, but many came from the other colonies as well. Not only that, there were others that were wild at first and sought refuge in this place.

Other beasts knew to not come here and thus it was a safe space.

The colony was surprisingly way smaller than anything Alex could've ever expected. He had imagined something large like cities in the other locations, but this was more of a village at best.

Showing around, the Lizard leader took him to a small shed where the Heavenly silkworms were kept. It was under constant guard who also fed the worms.

"Each colony has them?" Alex asked.

"All," the Lizard said. "We share around our resources, and thus these little worms are shared around too."

"I'm curious," Alex said. "What is so special about them that they don't exist anywhere else? Or do you just have a monopoly on this and refuse to sell give it around?"

"Hmm, both," the lizard said. "We do have a monopoly and don't spread it around, but that is not the only reason why you won't find these worms elsewhere."

"They are special silkworms that only eat the Heavenly Mulberry tree leaves," the man explained. "These are special trees that don't grow just anywhere and need a special way to grow it."

"Heavenly Mulberry tree?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the Lizard said. "Don't expect me to give away more secrets though. Hahaha!"

The lizard left the shed where the silkworms were kept and started walking. Alex looked at the shed once and walked away, following the lizard while his mind quickly found the information he was looking for.

The Heavenly Mulberry tree was named as such because it was a mulberry tree that the Heavenly Silkworms loved to eat the leaves from.

It was a special mulberry tree that was fed on the manure of beasts that ate various different herbs. Most beasts with high cultivation bases never ate anything, so it was mostly ones with low cultivation that even bothered to eat herbs full of energy.

Since they couldn't digest it all, they left manure that was surprisingly full of energy. These manures were used to grow the Heavenly Mulberry tree and those leaves would then be consumed by the silkworms, and would then lay the silk threads.

There was surprisingly a lot of information on the mulberry leaves in his mind despite their lack of use as an ingredient for alchemy.

Now understanding its usage, Alex went on with the lizard.

After going through the colony, Alex was given a simple room to stay in while he was there. He entered and immediately set up a few simple formations to hide himself from outside notice.

Pearl came out in a flash of light, looking around at the room. "Is this the Beast Paradise?" he asked the moment he was out.I think you should take a look at

"Yes," Alex said. "I have... bad news."

Pearl looked at him, confused. "What bad news?" he asked.

"I found out last night that your grandfather, Shi Guyong, died half a century ago," Alex relayed the information.

"... what?" Pearl looked at him with a blank look. "My grandfather is dead?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I do not know yet how he died or what happened, but I will try to find out soon."

"What about Grandmother?" Pearl asked.

"I do not know," Alex said. "I am currently in one of the 7 colonies in the Beast realm, ruled by a Lizard. We will need to go to the Lion's Colony, where another Golden Lion is currently a leader."

"If I'm not mistaken, he is a cousin to your mother, so you are somewhat related," Alex said. "I don't know if I can have you meet him or not though."

"Why not?" Pearl asked.

"Because I'm worried that he might be involved in your grandfather's murder," Alex said. "I still don't know how he died, or if someone was involved in his death. I don't know if your grandmother is alive or not."

"So, I need to remain vigilant of everyone here, just in case they all are somehow involved," Alex said.

Pearl got quiet for a while. "Can we force my Uncle or whoever he is to speak?" he asked. "I'm sure he has information."

"Hmm," Alex thought. "I don't know what his cultivation base is though. We'll be taking risks if we try."

"Will we get anywhere if we play it safe?" Pearl asked. "I think it is time to take some risks for sure."

Alex gave it some thought. "If we are going to even think of doing such a thing, we'll need to be stronger. I'll need to be stronger," he said. "I'll need to get some blood from the beasts."

"Let's do it," Pearl said. "Even if everything goes wrong, we can at least know who was involved in mother's death."

Alex nodded. "Alright, I'll do something about it," he said and they stopped talking about it. Right now, it was time to get stronger.

Alex cultivated, getting ever so closer to his breakthrough. If he let the Yin in his dantian fester for a while longer, he could certainly reach the next realm in just a month or so.

After he was done with the cultivation with both Pearl and Whisker, he walked out of the room and went to find the Lizard.

The Lizard did nothing but go around the colony, enjoying his time. He stayed by the pond with others and basked in the sunlight.

Alex went up to him and asked, "Senior, would you mind if I were to ask everyone here for something?"

"Hmm? What do want to ask?" the Lizard inquired.

"As I mentioned the day before, I made pills for beasts that gave me their blood. Would it be okay if I were to do the same thing here as well?" he asked.

"Our blood for pill?" the Lizard asked and looked around for a bit before turning back toward Alex. "Unfortunately, we have no need for pills. Thank you for your concern though."

Chapter 1423 A Little Bit Of Lightning

Alex was taken aback a little at the refusal. "You... refuse?" he asked. "But these are good pills, senior."

"What need do we beasts have for strong pills?" the Lizard asked. "Besides, we get good pills from the traders all the time. I can assure you, we do not lack pills."

Alex wanted to speak again, but the Lizard cut him off. "I know you want our blood to improve yourself, but it just isn't going to happen. It's simply impossible for you to buy something like that with just mere pills; ones mind you that we already have."

"May the ones from the other colony will accept it, but I won't," the Lizard said.

"Can I not ask the beasts directly?" Alex asked. "What if they wish to—"

"No," the Lizard said. "In my colony, everyone will follow my rules. If all you wish is blood, go find it somewhere else."

Alex was stumped for a few seconds. He wasn't expecting an outright rejection at all. He couldn't even ask the other beasts it seemed.

He was a little surprised at the rudeness and turned around to leave. He had nothing to do here.

The lizard watched Alex leave and smirked to himself. He was a cunning fellow. While he acted as if he was wise and kind on the outside, on the inside, he has a sly personality and did not want someone else to profit off of him if he could allow for it.

After learning that Alex could improve himself through other beasts' blood, he was a little envious. In his envy, he decided to not help him at all.

"Hmph," he spoke softly. "He will leave soon enough. You better not give him anything for the pills. We have no need for the pills."

The few beasts that were around them nodded.

The lizard continued laying on the sun for a while longer when the sun suddenly disappeared.

"Hmm?" the Lizard opened his eyes and looked up to see dark clouds filling the sky. "It's about to rain, we better—"

Before he could finish its words, a lightning bolt fell from the sky, landing somewhere in the colony. The Lizard quickly jumped up, surprised and fearful of the lightning.

He had been scared of lightning for a while now, and this one happening this close to him cared for him even more.

"Leave, go to your house. Hide!" the Lizard shouted, quickly rushing to his house where there were defensive formations to protect himself. He heard another thunderous strike and felt fearful.

He could tell these were no ordinary strikes of lightning and that scared him.

He was scared that these might be the same lightning that he saw all those years ago, one that left him terrified.

He flinched as he felt another loud sound of lightning falling from the sky. He tried his best to control himself, but the next bolt of lightning scared him even further.

'It's getting stronger?' he thought. He couldn't imagine how it was getting stronger at all.

And how had there been 4 bolts of lightning already?

Another lightning strike fell, one even stronger than before and he was even more terrified now.

He had no idea what was happening. The last time lightning strikes had scared him this much, there had only been 3 of them. However, with 5 this time, and all so close, he was supremely terrified to even go anywhere.

Even with all his cultivation base, the lizard did not want to face the lightning that might come for him. He stayed inside his house for a while before he realized that the lightning strikes had stopped.

He slowly walked out of his house in trepidation and looked around at the bright sunny day.

"What?" he couldn't understand what had just happened. How was the land sunny all of a sudden?

He walked out and looked in the direction where the lightning seemed to have struck. He thought for a second where that was and realized what had happened.

"Oh no," he thought. "That human. He must've died."I think you should take a look at

He quickly flew over to where Alex was staying and was about to burst through the house when the door opened on its own and Alex walked out, completely unharmed.

"Y-you, you're alive?" the Lizard asked.

"Of course, senior," Alex said. "Why wouldn't I be?"

"But... that lightning, it didn't kill you?" he asked.

"Hmm? Is the lightning supposed to kill me for some reason?" he asked with a confused look.

"But the... wait, no. This one was weaker," he mumbled to himself. "How are you unhurt still? Did the lightning not strike here?"

The lizard looked through the house and was surprised to see the lack of damage as well. It was as if the lightning was an illusion, brought forth from his fear.

But that was not the case. There had been lightning. He wasn't hallucinating it.

"What happened to the lightning strike?" he asked.

"Oh, the Pill cloud lightning?" Alex asked. "I blocked it to make my pill."

"Your... pill?" the lizard was simply unable to realize what he was talking about.

"Yes," Alex said. "My pill."

He showed the pill bottle that he was holding in his hands to the lizard. He opened the bottle and let the pill flow out with 5 clear lightning scars on it.

"Do you know about pill veins, senior?" Alex asked.

"Pill veins?" the lizard looked up at Alex.

Alex nodded. "When a pill reaches 100% harmony, it calls the pill clouds that you saw earlier. If you can defend the pill from the strikes, you get a pill with those scars known as pill veins. The more veins there are, the better the pill will be."

The Lizard looked at Alex with a doubtful look. "So that lightning... it wasn't anything dangerous?" he asked.

"Of course not, senior. I wouldn't dare do something like that if it was dangerous," Alex said. "I only wished to make a pill so I could continue cultivating."

The Lizard looked at the pill in his hand. "This is a pill for cultivating?" he asked. Now that he was looking at it, it was indeed a pill that improved one's cultivation speed. He had a few of those before.

However, the speed they gave was never truly worth their price, especially since the beasts had nothing to do but cultivate all day in this place.

Still... the smell and the aura that came from the pill, it was more intense than anything he had ever felt.

"Hmm, it looks like senior doesn't believe my words," Alex said. "Why don't you try it then? I'll let you see why I am the best alchemist in the entire realm."

"You're giving me this pill?" the Lizard asked.

"Consider this my payment in return for you letting me stay in this colony," Alex said and bowed. "I'll see you in a few days, senior."

Alex closed the door without saying anything else and left the Lizard alone outside with the pill in his hand.

The lizard looked at the pill for a while before he decided to see just how good the pill was for the human to boast so much.

'Hmph! I'll see if it's good or not,' the lizard thought and returned back to his home where he took the pill and started cultivating.

Chapter 1424 Business

Alex did nothing productive for the next 2 days aside from cultivating in his room all day long. He didn't even make a single pill as he already had all that he needed.

He cultivated with his beasts for the next 2 days, and then on the third day, he waited.

There were two possibilities in what was going to happen next, and Alex was ready for either of them. He stayed there in the room, alone for a while.

And then, the Lizard finally came back.

Alex waited for him to knock on the door before walking out.

"Oh, senior! You're back?" he asked with a surprised look.

"Y-yes, I am back. I'm sorry I left you alone for two days," the man said.

"It's alright," Alex said. "Now that you are out, I can finally ask you."

"Ask me? Ask me what?" the Lizard spoke curiously. He had wanted to speak up first, but since Alex wanted to speak, he let him.

"I wanted to ask if you could have someone take me to the closest colony," Alex said. "I plan on leaving this place."

"What?" the Lizard's eyes widened. "Why? Why would you want to leave this early?"

"Huh?" Alex stared at the lizard. "I thought you didn't want me here. Isn't that why you refused to allow me to carry out my business here? If can understand if you hate it. I will leave."

"What? No, who said that?" the Lizard said.

"You did," Alex said. "Since you don't seem to like me or want me to stay here, I will leave this place. I'm sorry I was a problem to you."

"No, no, no, no, no," the Lizard said. "I- I don't hate you. Who said that? No. I was just saying we didn't need your pills because we had enough. Bu—"

"Yeah, I understand that," Alex said. "Since you have enough pills, I will go and ask the others who will hopefully buy it from me."

"Wait," the Lizard stopped him from leaving. "Let me finish what I was about to say. I apologize, I was mistaken."

Alex turned back around, holding himself from grinning, and looked at the beast. "What did you say senior?"

"I said I apologize. Your pills are amazing, and I would love to buy them if I can. Please, don't leave," the lizard said.

"Hmm, are you sure senior?" Alex asked. "You don't have to force yourself to lie."

"Please stop acting innocent," the Lizard said. "I get it. Your pill is good. I will buy it. Just stop this."

Alex was taken back a little. So he had been seen through? Maybe he needed more lessons on how to make his acting more believable.

"Okay," Alex said. "Then can I run my business here?" I think you should take a look at

"Yes," the Lizard said. "Do what you want. It's your choice now."

Alex finally showed his grin. "Thank you for coming to an understanding, senior. Would you like to be my first customer then?" he asked.

"Hmm? What do I need to do?" the lizard asked.

"It's simple really," Alex said. "You will have to bring me ingredients to make the pills. I will give you a list of ingredients for different pills, and you can judge what you can get based on that."

"Once you get the ingredients, I will make the pill for you. The price for making the pill will be something precious."

"It can be Saint ingredients, or spirit stones, or anything, but I will take 2 main things as the most precious of all."

"The blood of a living beast that is in the Saint realm, or the Beast core of a dead one. I will let everyone decide which ones they want to use. The decision is up to you as well."

Alex pulled out the list of ingredients and handed it to the Lizard. "I have everything prepared. I have a few ingredients to make around 5 more pills, so I will get started on that. Once you bring back the ingredients, I will make even more."

The lizard grumbled, having fallen right into his trap. "You wanted this to happen from the very start," he said. "Fine, I'll get your damn ingredients. As for the payment, I can't guarantee what you'll get."

"I will wait for any that I can get," Alex said and smiled toward the Lizard, who in turn hated Alex even more. "Also, can you let everyone know that there is going to be a constant lightning strike here and they have nothing to worry about at all?"

"Huh? More lightning strikes?" the Lizard seemed worried. "But why?"

"That's how the veins are formed. If you want veins, there has to be lightning," he said.

"Alright, do what you want. I'll let them know," the Lizard said and walked away.

Alex returned to his room and started making the few pills that he had promised. He had so many ingredients that he hadn't used because he was constantly on a tour of the Emerald Kingdom.

What time he did have during those times had been spent on learning the Wood ingredients as they were his main priority. That was to say, he didn't lack ingredients at all.

Still, he was going to make someone else pay to bring the ingredients to him now.

He wouldn't have minded using his own, but with the stunt, the Lizard pulled off, he no longer wanted to.

He finished making the 5 pills he had mentioned. About 15 minutes after he was done, a young Saint Beast came up to his house and handed over a few ingredients that they had in their storage already.

Along with that, they also brought a few of the things that Alex asked for.

Alex saw a small wooden bucket full of blood as well as 2 beast cores. Judging from the aura of the cores, neither one of the beasts had been in the Saint Core realm before it had died.

"That's good enough for starters," he thought and started preparing the ingredients for the pills he was going to start making soon enough.

Chapter 1425 Improvement

Alex received a lot of ingredients from the beasts over the course of the next few days, of which over 80% he turned into pills with pill veins.

Some of the ingredients were so poorly kept in their storages that Alex would have to spend hours improving them with his Supreme Elemental Accord, which he didn't want to do.

The pills he made more than satisfied the old lizard, who happily came back to Alex to give him more and more ingredients.

When Alex said that he was planning on leaving soon now that resources here would start to run dry, the Lizard started bringing better items to entice him to stay.

Of the items he got, Alex received in total nearly 200 liters of Saint Beast blood, and around 30 different cores, 3 of which were from Saint Soul realm beasts.

He hadn't expected much from them, but he had ended up gaining quite a bit. In exchange for a few hours of pill making, that was more than what he could have asked for.

He absorbed the blood aura the moment he was done with making the pills and as for the core, he had turned around 4 of them into Blood Beasts by now, all of which had strength around the middle of the Saint Soul realm.

With the difference in the quality of the beast cores and the blood aura that he had, he could only push up the powers of the blood beast by that much.

Due to his Dao of Blood Aura which allowed him to convert Qi into Blood Aura, Alex could make Blood Beasts every day if he wanted to.

However, due to his Qi naturally running out and him not being able to cultivate for a few days after eating one of the cultivation pills, he only did it so frequently.

One of the few things he had learned about beast blood during this time was the fact that the beasts that he had already made beforehand weren't as good as the ones he made before.

When his blood aura was around Saint Soul 1st realm's equivalent in strength and he used the core of a Saint Condensation 1st realm beast, the most he would be able to bring that beast up was in between Saint Foundation 5th realm and Saint Core 1st realm.

If his blood aura then improved to Saint Transformation 1st realm, he would be able to improve the blood beast to Saint Core 5th realm at best.

However, in the same scenario, if he were to take a new Saint Condensation 1st realm beast core and used it to make another blood beast, the beast would always have a strength over the Saint Core 5th realm, few even going as high as Saint Soul realm itself.

As a result, it was always better to make new blood beasts, rather than keep using the old ones.

He hadn't had much of a chance to gain the core that he wanted to turn into Blood beasts, but now he did, and so he made them.

Nearly a month passed of Alex doing nothing but making pills, making blood beasts, and cultivating.

Then, at the end of that month, he reached the pinnacle of what he could with Saint Core 8th realm.

So, that very night, he broke through.

Alex felt a surge of power in him that was only so much stronger than the last realm but had a clear difference at the same time.

"Saint Core 9th realm," he thought to himself. It was a shock to him just how incredible his speed had been for cultivation lately.

After he reached Saint realm, his speed was supposed to have slowed down to a crawl. Spending multiple years to break through any realm was considered normal at this stage.

Even then, thanks to his own talent, amazing skills, and pill, he managed to make it faster.

When he reached Saint Foundation realm, he had assumed it was going to slow down. And yet, he made pills with Pill veins which made his cultivation speed even faster.

As his pills continued getting better, they continued improving as well.

However, when he broke through to the Saint Core realm, he had imagined that it was going to be exceptionally slower for him than at any other time.

And he was used to it.

However, with a lucky or maybe even fateful encounter with the young girl that he assumed had the Moon Goddess' body, his speed had grown even more now.

"Just 8 months," he thought to himself. It had been exactly 8 months since he broke through to the 8th realm. And 8 months later, he had broken through to the 9th realm.

This was a speed he wasn't anticipating without using any external treasures at all.

Neither Pearl nor Whisker were even close to breaking through once again, and he had. That was simply incredible.

That wasn't to say Pearl's cultivation was slow at all. He was way faster than any other person he had yet seen.

With the White Tiger's Dominating Body technique, not only was his cultivation base increasing, but so was his body cultivation.

Alex was jealous of the past him that had the White Tiger's bloodline and could cultivate with Pearl to improve himself. Now that the White Tiger's bloodline was no longer in him, he couldn't do anything.

It wasn't like he hadn't tried asking Pearl to give him his bloodline if he could. He had, but it simply hadn't worked at all.

From what Alex could tell unless Pearl gave up the 10 drops of blood essence that made him what he was, he could never regain the bloodline again.

As a result, Alex gave up on the idea of ever gaining either the White Tiger's bloodline or the Vermillion Bird's bloodline.

If he ever really did want one, he would have to kill a truly strong heavenly beast with a cultivation base he couldn't even name yet. Only then would it most likely work.

Alex went to find the Lizard leader to tell him that it was time for him to leave. He wanted to go around to the other colonies and visit them.

It was clear to Alex that the colony had nothing more to offer in terms of blood and cores, so it was time to leave.

"What? You're leaving?" the Lizard looked in surprise. "But it had only been a month. You need to stay for at least a year."

"I need to leave," Alex said. "Truth is, you guys are running out of resources and I also want to visit the other locations. Not to mention I have so much of the Eastern Continent itself to go around."

"But... just a few more days. I just want a few more pills, thats all," the Lizard said. Desperately. "I can get you whatever you want. I can even get you the Heavenly Silkthreads. Do you want some?"

"Silk threads?" Alex was intrigued. "Those do sound fun, but what about the Silk worms themselves?"

"Silkworms?" the lizard looked offended. "No!"

Alex shrugged. "Just think about it," he said. "Also, I wouldn't mind selling some more pills if you are willing to let me in on the secret as well."

Chapter 1426 More Trades

"What secret?" the Lizard looked at Alex with a confused look. "What are you talking about?"

"The Beast Paradise closed about 50 years ago. I wish to learn why," Alex said. "If you tell me, I will make you 50 pills of any variety that you want, each with 5 pill veins.

"Okay," the Lizard said simply. "We closed it because the new humans were getting aggressive and killing our beasts. We closed it to keep the natural order of the wild without unnecessary deaths."

"Oh," Alex gave a surprised face. "That's it, huh?"

"Of course," the Lizard said. "Should I give you the pills I want now or later along with the ingredients?"

"You can give it to me whenever you speak an oath saying that is the only reason you did so," Alex said.

The Lizard looked at Alex with a grim look. "Young man, do not tempt me," he said. "I will kill if you try to make a joke out of this."

"It was never a joke," Alex said. "I simply wish to learn the truth. You are free to refuse to tell me. If you do want to tell me the truth, you have to simply speak the oath. I also have Truth Seeking pills that we can use to bring the truth out of you, but... I wouldn't dare disrespect a senior with that sort of pill."

The lizard glared. "I told you what you wanted to know. Now make me my pill," he threatened Alex.

"The agreement was that I would make you the pills after you told me the truth,' Alex said. "Have you told me the truth?"

"I should really kill you and be done with you for this disrespect. No one dares not follow my own words in my colony," the Lizard said, his voice getting deeper and the air around it thicker.

Alex could feel the aura around him crushing him from all sides as a strong pressure landed on him. He felt discomfort for a few seconds, and then a warm Yang energy flowed out of his dantian, on its own.

The energy from his body didn't help him fight against the incoming pressure, but it did remove the discomfort, allowing him to remain standing without worry.

He stood tall in front of the lizard, unbothered by the Saint Transformation realm aura that was pressuring him.

'So definitely in the Saint Transformation realm as expected,' Alex thought. 'But how much higher?'

The Heavenly Silk threads were ever so good at hiding the other person's cultivation base. Alex wanted some for himself.

The lizard looked surprised to see that Alex was budging even a bit. Anyone else would be collapsed to the ground, but he barely showed any reaction at all.

Surprised, he stopped.

"Senior, just say no if you don't want to tell me. It's fine," Alex said. "I was merely curious."

He decided not to push it. He could ask the other 6 leaders for some information if he really wanted it. However, just the aggression from the lizard alone told Alex that they really were hiding something.

As for what it was, he could only guess it was related to either the death of Pearl's Grandfather or the Azure Dragon himself.

The lizard said nothing, but its wide eyes said enough.

"How about I extend the same thing to the Heavenly Silkworms as well?" he asked. "In exchange for a single one of them, I will make you 10 different pills of your choice."

The lizard contemplated on the offer for a while, not even making a sound the whole time. He made Alex wait for nearly 5 minutes which he took to come to a decision.

"Fine!" he said. "2 silkworms for 20 pills."

"Great!" Alex said with an excited look on his face. "I'll be waiting for the list then."

"You do know that the silkworms won't survive without any food right?" the lizard asked. "And it will only eat the mulberry leaves."

"Uhh..." Alex thought for a moment. "Yes? So I will have to get the leaves too, won't I?"

The lizard grinned. "And the leaves are not cheap either," he said.

Alex narrowed his eyes. "How expensive would you say they are?"

"Each leaf for a pill," the lizard said. "That's it."

"Each leaf for a pill? No way," Alex said. "It's fine then. I don't need them."

"What?" the Lizard got worried. "But you need the leaves to feed the silkworms."

"I know," Alex said. "But I won't buy it. It's simply too expensive."

The Lizard thought for a bit. "2 leaves for a pill then?" he asked.

"No, too expensive," Alex said.

"3?" the Lizard asked. "They will be enough to feed the silkworms for a month."

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "But still, it's a bit too expensive. I'm sorry, I won't be buying that."

"Fine," the lizard said angrily. "Then I won't be selling the Silkworms either."

"Okay," Alex said. "Then I suppose I'll have to leave for the next colony and hope the leader there will accept my request."

"Dammit, young man. Are you trying to make me angry?" he asked. "If you continue this, I will kill you."

"And will you dare face the wrath of a Vermilion Bird as well?" Alex asked the lizard, who quickly cowered at the words.

It thought for a moment and was about to answer when it realized it was better to not say anything.

"2 silkworms and 100 leaves for 40 pills," the Lizard said.

Alex thought for a bit. If he continued this any longer, he was most likely not going to get any silkworms from here. "Alright, I accept it," he said.

"Bring me anything else you can alongside that, and I will make you all the pills I can in the next couple of weeks after that, I will have to leave this place."

The Lizard sighed in the end. "Fine, you can leave once you are done," he said. "I will have them get you the list and ingredients for now."

"Thank you, senior," Alex said and returned back to his room.

Once inside, he set up all of his formations again and finally released a sigh of relief. He had been worried that he was going to get hurt angering the Lizard, but thankfully he was let go.

"Trying to sell me a single mulberry leaf for a pill? Hah! He must think I'm stupid," Alex thought with a chuckle. "He might actually kill me if he ever found out what I did."

He brought out a large wooden box from his storage and opened it to see the hundreds of mulberry leaves he had in there.

Over the last month, he had sent Whisker away every time he made a pill. During that time, Whisker would steal just 1 leaf and return without ever being seen.

With the techniques Whisker had, as long as he wasn't being searched for constantly, he could easily sneak around without being noticed.

Alex sat down, ready to make the next set of pills when he realized he had a problem that he hadn't thought about at all.

"Where am I going to keep the Silkworms?"

Chapter 1427 Storage Pouch

Alex took out a thick hide of a beast and lay it on the floor in front of him. He cleared out the translucent feathers from the hide and pulled out a random cauldron before putting the now featherless hide in there.

He then brought out a select few ingredients and placed them all into the cauldron as well, crushed to pastes and powders first.

Alex then filled the entire thing with water and placed it in a low-heat furnace. It would take some time for the hide to soak in the properties of the ingredients that he used and until he was done with them, he couldn't turn it into proper leather.

He focused on making pills in the meantime, letting the thunderous roar fill the skies and the Colony once again. He made about four different pills before he was sent the list of the pills that the Lizard wanted, along with the ingredients to get started with.

The hide needed to cure in the low heat for the entire night, so Alex let it be. Once it was done, he took out the hide that was now soft by absorbing all the liquid and brought out a hammer and anvil.

He placed the soaked hide on the anvil and used a sword to scrape away the scales on the hide. Once he did so, he hammered away, pushing out the liquid from the leather as much as he could before he was to start the next process.

Alongside that, he also had to make it all flat and uniform. There was only so much thickness that he could work with for the next stage after all.

Once he was done, he put the hammer and anvil aside, before bringing out the cauldron again. Except he was going to use it not in the way a cauldron was intended to be used.

He turned the cauldron cover, starting a fire on the inside rather than the outside. It was sure to ruin a cauldron for anything alchemy related, but since this was a spare cauldron, Alex had no worries.

Once the cauldron was sufficiently heated up, Alex lay the now thin hide on it and waited for the heat to slowly do its work. The next time he took it off, it would become proper leather.

Alex left it alone, occasionally checking on it, but other than that doing nothing at all. He went back to making pills to fulfill the lizard's request.

An entire day later, Alex finally went back to check on the leather. When he saw that it was ready, he prepared a cold water bath and dunked the leather in to quickly stop the heat and set it.

When he took it out of the water, amidst the steaming water was the leather he had just prepared. He left the leather rest for a bit and finally started working on it.

He carved out as large of a circle as he could from the leather and laid it flat in front of him

Then, he started working on it.

First, he took the circular leather and started pouring Qi lines into it. He heated up his own Qi and sent it around the leather to carve through it without damaging any other part of the leather.

With the heat in control, he made multiple Qi lines through the entire leather. He continued until there was no possible way for him to add any more.

Once he was done with making Qi lines, he let the round leather rest and cool down while the Qi lines were set up. He let it be and went to make the rest of the pills.

After an hour or so, it had completely cooled down. Alex took it and wrapped it around with the string, making it look like a pouch. The entire process was similar to making storage pouches which Alex was used to.

The pouch is ready, and just like storage pouches, this one would require space too. He could use his Dao of space to add space into the pouch, just like he had with storage pouches, but that wouldn't work this time around.

This pouch needed a bit more than just space, unfortunately.

There was a formation plate that could be used, which Alex didn't have. However, making it took barely any time at all for him.

He was going for Saint formations, so he made a Saint ranked Formation plate that could easily garner over 70% easily.

Once done, he placed the pouch over the formation plate and used his Yang Qi on it. Metal formations themselves required no consideration for symmetry or ratio of the amount of Qi, but only for a spirit stone to power it.

Alex instead was using his Yang Qi, which easily activated the formation.

The moment the formation activated, he felt a disturbance in space itself. Not only that, there was disturbance in the air around him as well.

Then, a moment later, both space and air was sucked into the pouch not just from the top, but from the sides as well. The entire pouch was permeable, so the space and air were sucked in front the side as well.

Alex checked the Qi lines, seeing how many of it was in use the entire time. The space was attatched ot these Qi lines so only the amount that it could hold could be taken in.

After waiting for a few minutes, Alex finally stopped the formation. The space and air were both inside the pouch, exactly how he wanted it to be.

He stored away everything and just looked at the pouch. It was going to be hard to judge it on its own. He needed something to go in.

He was about to start experimentation when he sensed someone outside. He quickly went out and found the Lizard standing there.

"Hmm? Why are you here, senior?" Alex asked.

"What were you doing?" the Lizard asked.

"Me? Nothing really," Alex said.

The Lizard narrowed its eyes. "You're lying, why?" he asked. "I sensed the Space aura that you used. You were doing something."

Alex looked at he beast with a surprised look. "You... sensed space aura?" he asked. "How?"

"I have the Azure Dragon's blood in me. Sensing space is natural for me," he said.

"Oh, I see," Alex said. "Can you do anything else with this ability?"

The Lizard frowned a bit. "No," he said in an annoyed voice. "Now tell me what you were doing!"

"I was making this," Alex said, showing off the pouch.

The lizard looked at it for a moment and looked back at Alex. "You can make these too?" he asked.

"I have some practice," Alex said. "Not a whole lot though."

"Does it work?" the Lizard asked.

"No idea," Alex said. "I haven't had the time to check."

"Let's see if it works then," the Lizard said and called over someone.

A beast arrived, but not alone. He had brought over two small golden silkeworms.

"Heavenly Silkworms!" Alex said, finally having seen it for the first time so close.

The Lizard took it and handed both of them over to Alex. "Try it."

Alex looked at the silkworms in his hands and after a bit of preparation, he sent them away.

The Silkworms disappeared, going into the pouch. Alex checked their status and saw that they were fine.

Finally, he smiled, happy that he had managed to successfully create a Beast pouch from start to finish.

Chapter 1428 The Deer Colony

The beast pouch worked perfectly. It was perhaps even one of the best beast pouches that was available in all of the world right now, not counting the ones that came from outside.

The most important reason for that was the ingredient Alex had used. It wasn't just as hide that he had used to make the pouch, but rather the hide of the dead 6-Winged Feathered Water Wyrm that he had killed when coming to the Eastern Continent.

With leather from such a beast like that, the leather was incredibly tough and durable, as well as being able to absorb so much energy from the other ingredients that it truly made one of the best beast pouches.

The space inside the pouch was large and spacious. Alex dropped a few mulberry leaves for the silkworms to enjoy and went about his day making pills.

The pills he needed to make for the Lizard colony were slowly coming to an end, and a week later, he was all done with it.

Now, it was time for him to leave.

He met up with the Lizard, who had prepared the beast that would be taking him away. It was a small snake in the Saint Core realm that should have been large usually but seemed to have changed its size for no reason.

"Come back," the Lizard said. "I will prepare more stuff for you."

"I'll see if I can, senior," Alex replied and flew away.

He followed the snake and went away. His next visit was the Deer Colony. From what the snake told him, the Deer colony would take just a few hours to reach.

Alex took his time, looking at the scenery of the land as he flew by. He saw many beasts and many trees, all unique in their own way.

There were so many alchemy ingredients there, but he didn't want to gather any of them. Instead, he just enjoyed his time, not having to make any pills for the first time in a few days.

It took Alex about 5 hours in total to reach the Deer colony. When he arrived, he quickly surveyed the location.

The deer colony lived next to a massive river that flowed from the north to the south. On either side of it were the many houses that were built facing the river which was the colony.

On one side of the river was a massive grassland that went out for a few dozen kilometers. On the other side was a large forest that also went on for a long while.

Between them and the houses were the many fields that were growing with food for the beasts and materials for the trade. Alex even saw a few mulberry trees growing there.

Alex landed outside the village alongside the snake and walked up to the Deer that had appeared to welcome him.

"Welcome to my humble Colony, King Alex," the Deer said. "It took you some time to get here."

"My apologies," Alex said. "I was stuck in senior Hua's Colony for a certain reason. Now that it is over, I can finally come."

"He complained about you quite a lot, you know," the Deer said. "And yet when we asked him to send you to our Colony if he doesn't want to, he always said that he couldn't do that. I'm curious why he didn't let you go."

"Probably our business," Alex said.

"What business, if I may be so bold to ask," the Deer said.

"Uhh... how about we don't talk about it right now?" Alex said. "I would like to enjoy a day or two here before I do something like that. Worry not, I won't show any bias amongst all 7 leaders. I just wish to rest for a while."I think you should take a look at

"You must be truly tired from doing something that you don't even want to speak about it," the Deer said. "Very well, come with me."

The Deer took Alex and walked him toward a house. Alex looked on either side at the houses that were once again not that well built.

Someone quickly flew toward them and Alex turned around to see who it was. When he saw the person, he was surprised.

"Crown Prince?" Alex called out.

"Your Majesty!" the Crown Prince spoke. "You took quite some time coming here. Why did you take so long?"

"Stuff happened," Alex said. "What are you still doing here? I had assumed that you had left and just forgot to tell me about it."

"Of course not," the Crown Prince said. "I'm still here. I haven't done what I came here to do."

"Oh, you haven't received the bone marrow yet?" Alex asked.

"I did," the Crown prince said happily. "It took some time to convince one of them, but I managed to in the end. Letting them know that I was the next Emperor helped quite a bit."

Alex smiled. "So, now that you've received it, are you leaving?" he asked.

"I will, in a few days," the Crown Prince said. "I needed to let the bone marrow sit on the sun for a week or so before it was ready to use, so I remained here for the past 10 days."

"I just got done with it and decided to leave after a few days. I was in fact planning on coming over to the Lizard Colony to see if you were leaving as well," the Crown Prince said. "But... it doesn't look like you want to leave so soon."

"I don't plan on leaving until I've thoroughly visited all 7 Colonies," Alex said. "I have no idea when I will next get to visit this place."

"Makes sense," the Crown Prince said, nodding to himself before seeing the Deer and the rest around Alex. "Ah, I must have stopped you guys on your tour. Let us carry on."

"It wasn't really a tour," the Deer said. "I was simply showing him to his residence for however long he will be staying with us."

Alex was then taken to his room by the Deer and was left to rest for the remaining day and night. He was quite tired, so he used the opportunity to truly rest for the entire day.

The next day, he was taken on a tour of the Colony by the Deer, along with the Crown Prince, and was shown the many things that the colony had to offer.

Alongside that, Alex spent the next 2 days talking with the Crown prince about various things and was reminded that he couldn't stay in there for too long.

In just a year and a half, the Golden Auction, the Continent's most anticipated auction would take place. Even before that, the Golden Mountain range would be open everywhere and was a place that Alex would not want to miss.

Alex promised to get out of this place before that. He had other things he needed to take care of anyway.

3 days later, the Crown Prince left the Colony and was taken out of the Beast realm. He was gone and would not come back for a long time.

Alex had rested long enough as well. So, he brought out the talisman he had prepared and handed it over to the Deer leader along with a single pill for him to test.

Chapter 1429 The Other Colonies

Alex stayed in the Deer Colony for precisely 29 days.

Thanks to him being efficient about everything, he managed to have the beasts prepare everything in advance that they wanted to get.

Alex made the pills for them and they were happy to get it. The Deer especially was more happy than anyone else as he hadn't broken through in such a long time and he finally got to see some chance at that.

Alex also received 3 Heavenly Silkworms after showing that the Lizard had indeed caved in and given him some in exchange for 10 pills each.

Seeing that someone else had already made the mistake of giving away the silkworms, the Deer had no qualms in doing so as well.

Aside from that Alex also gained blood from the many beasts that lived in the Deer colony, giving him a boost in Blood Aura that was enough to send him to the Peak of Saint Transformation 1st realm.

Now, he could make 8-veined pills without using anything other than just his blood aura. A colony more and it would jump into the 2nd realm for sure.

As for beast cores, he received over 20 of them. It was less than what the Lizard gave him, which was nearly 30, but it was a good number too.

Aside from making pills, Alex didn't really do anything else in the Deer colony. He proposed the exact same thing he had done to the Lizard. He would make 50 pills for just saying the real reason why the Beast Paradise was locked up.

Unfortunately, the Deer didn't answer as well. The Deer was much more well behaved compared to the Lizard, and even then he got a little annoyed at the question.

Alex knew not to ask anymore and left the topic behind.

Once everything he had wanted to do there was done, he left the place as well.

He arrived at the blue eagle's Colony that was built on top of giant trees like tree houses. Most of the beasts that lived with the Eagle were also flying beasts, as well as a group of weak beasts that the Eagle seemed.

The Eagle, despite her attitude, had the most gentle heart of all. She took care of all the beasts in her colony like families rather than members of colonies.

She was once again worried about Alex's blood aura, which had grown, but once Alex handed her the talisman with his trade offer, she finally calmed down.

Since the Eagle colony's beasts were on the weaker side, while they improved Alex's Blood aura to the 2nd realm, that was all he reached. She didn't even have beast cores to hand over.

The Eagle also refused to hand over any silkworms or information from 50 years ago, but she did give him some mulberry leaves for free so he could keep the 5 silkworms he did have alive before he found a way to feed them.

Alex quite liked this eagle. So, he started making more than the amount of pills as he promised, including letting Whisker make many True rank pills for the beasts that were going.

40 days later, before leaving the colony, Alex handed over the pills to the Eagle who was simply too surprised. She didn't want anything like this, and Alex didn't want her refusal.

So, he left the Colony with the Eagle still holding onto the pills.

The next stop in the journey was the Ox's Colony. The big, muscular ox was a simple fellow who didn't care much for the world around him and did nothing but have fun.I think you should take a look at

The Colony was at the foot of a snow mountain, but there was enough heat on the ground that normal plants grew without worry.

Alex was surprised to find that this continent too had volcanic ice mountains that had magma flowing beneath the ground, heating it up, the soot giving it nutrients.

The Ox gave him 3 Silkworms as well as a lot of blood from the various beasts in his colony and himself. Alongside that, the Ox also gave him 37 Beast cores, highest in any colony yet.

The Ox was tight-lipped as well, not telling Alex anything about what happened in the past. Alex had hoped this one would give him some information, but it was the same old refusal.

At this point, Alex wondered if they simply weren't allowed to say anything rather than refusing to say anything. He started becoming worried that there was likely an internal oath pact that they had made, like the 10 council members had made in the Southern Continent during Scarlet's absence.

They could have made a similar oath in the Azure Dragon's absence as well.

After spending a month and a half in that colony, Alex moved on to the next one belonging to the swan.

The Swan's colony was on water. It was on a giant lake where the swan and many birds as well as aquatic creatures called their home. For beast that didn't live in water, houses were built all around the lake, which was also surrounded by many forests and fields where they grew food.

For beasts that wanted to live on the water, but couldn't do so without constantly flying, they made houses on boats that simply floated around the giant lake.

Alex was given residence on one of these boats as well. After resting for a day or two, he gave the Swan the talisman as well, and the Swan was more than happy to gain new pills.

Alex moved to the land when making the pills, so as to not terrify every single animals that stayed in the pool during the lightning strikes.

He made the pills for over a month and in return, he was given over 30 beast cores, 3 Silk worms and finally enough blood for Alex to make a substantial way into the Saint Transformation 2nd realm.

As for the question of why the Beast realm was closed, that remained unanswered.

Alex went to the Elephant Colony after that, as it was the one that the Swan sent him to.

The Elephant Colony was in the middle of a large grassland, surrounded by massive trees in the distance.

They had simple houses, but most of the beasts here liked to remain in the open. Alex enjoyed his time with the elephants that were friendly and were more than happy to help him with anything other than answering why the beast realm was closed.

Alex made many pills for the Elephants, while gaining a lot back as well. He gained over 50 beast cores and 8 Silk worms. Along with that, since the beasts were also massive in size, he received a lot and lot of blood from them.

That blood was enough to push Alex's blood aura to the very peak of the Saint Transformation 2nd realm.

8 months had passed since Alex had arrived in the Beast Paradise and in that time, he had once again gotten close to breaking through to the next realm. It would still take some time, however, so Alex decided to go to the next location that he had been wanting to visit since the day he arrived in this place.

The Lion Colony.

Chapter 1430 The Lion Colony

"Welcome, King Alex," Zhu Xiongwei, the Golden Lion, Leader of the Lion Colony warmly welcomed Alex into his colony.

For the past 8 months, he had heard from one leader after another about how well Alex's pills had helped them and was very excited to finally get Alex in his own colony.

Alex smiled and greeted back the lion. "It's great to see you, Leader Zhu," he said. "It's been a while."

"It has, hasn't it," the Lion said warmly. "Come, come. You must be tired from the journey. Let me take you to your place."

Alex nodded and walked into the lion's colony.

The Lion Colony was located in a thin forest surrounded by trees with golden leaves on them that made it look like it was forever autumn.

The sparse forest had many houses built in it, most of which to Alex's surprise were as good as human houses. The houses were not only made with wood, but stones and other materials as well. They were also painted in various colors, each brightly standing out amongst the others.

It was also quite large, larger than all the other Colonies, which was another thing that surprised Alex.

"It almost looks like a human town," he said. "I surprised how much of a human touch this place has."

"Of course it does," the Lion said. "We had humans build this after all."

"Humans came here to build stuff?" Alex asked.

"Yes," the Lion said. "But it was a senior of ours that did so, over thousands of year ago. We've only maintained what was done back then."

The lion sighed. "But of course, it won't happen again until we open the borders," he said.

Alex thought of something that he hadn't asked anyone else yet. "When will it open?" he asked. He had been so concerned about it being closed that he hadn't even thought of it opening up.

"I don't really know," the lion said. "The other leaders are my seniors, so even when we are equal in standings, they don't tell me much about their plans on opening the place."

"Oh," Alex said. "Do they not treat you as well because you are young?"

"No, that's not it," the Lion said. "I just don't think anyone has planned anything. We closed it because we had to, but no one really wants to talk about opening it again, I believe. And as the youngest one, I don't really want to bring up this topic."

"I see," Alex said. "Do you know why it was closed in the first place?"

The Lion chuckled. "Do I get 50 pills for answering that?" he asked. "They said you would ask me that."

Alex's eyes widened a bit in surprise. "I see," he said, giving a foolish smile. "My curiosity has made my name go around the place."

"Curiosity huh?" the Lion said. "One might just think you want something out of that information."

"Of course not," Alex quickly said. "I was truly curious."

He looked around the Colony and the various beasts that lived there. There were an assortment of beasts in the Colony, from reptiles to birds to mammals and all sorts of other creatures in between those classifications.

The only type of beasts that there were barely of was aquatic, which was absent due to the lack of a nearby water source.

Alex was brought to a nice looking house with walls that were colored in white and green. He walked in along with the Lion, arriving at a courtyard after a couple of walks.

"This is a nice place," Alex said.

"It is, isn't it?" the Lion said proudly. "This is where our guests live. You can stay here for however long you like."

"Thank you," Alex said. I think you should take a look at

The lion nodded. "By the way, how long do you intend to stay here?" he asked.

"Hmm... I have about half a year before I need to be somewhere important. Before that, I have another few places to visit. So, I will most likely staying here for a month," Alex said. "2 at the most."

"Oh! Good," the Lion said. "Then I most likely won't have to worry about not managing to make a lot of pills then."

Alex smiled. "I will make you all the pills you will want, Leader Zhu," he said.

"When do we start then?" the Lion asked.

Alex brought out a pill from his storage ring and handed it over to the Lion. "Why don't you test out how the pill is first?" he suggested. "I will rest in the meantime. Once you are done cultivating, you can come to me with the ingredients and treasures you have, and we can start."

Alex handed over the talisman as well that recorded all the different ingredients for the various types of pills, as well as the list of things he wanted in return, and how much he was willing to pay for them.

"Are they really handing over Heavenly Silkworms to you?" the Lion asked, seeing the list.

"Yes," Alex said, opening his Beast pouch which held nearly 2 dozen Silkworms at this point.

"Wow! They really are doing that, huh?" the lion said. "I suppose I will have to prepare that too, then."

The lion left after that, gone to cultivate on his own while asking the other beasts to prepare various things for him so that he could make Alex create some more pills for him.

Alex turned around and looked at the gigantic courtyard with a golden tree in the center. He walked into the courtyard, going up to the golden tree to see it.

He checked the leaves and realized it was sharp as a blade and yet flimsy as a thin sheet of silk. He remembered seeing a tree like this in the Demon realm once. He wondered if it was still there.

He left the tree and went inside a room that was prepared for him and quickly set up a safe space for himself using various different formations plates.

Pearl flew out of his beast space after everything was prepared. He looked around the room for a moment and back at Alex. "Are we... here?" he asked.

"Yes, we're finally here," Alex said.

"Can I go out and see?" Pearl asked.

"I'm not sure that's a good idea," Alex said. "Just look at the recording for now."

Whisker walked out of Alex's robes, wrapped in a few strands of Heavenely Silk, carrying a talisman in his hand.

"Here," he said. "I recorded everything I saw and sensed with my whiskers."

"Thank you," Pearl said and took the recording. He started looking through it and quickly finished everything.

He put it down and had a solemn look on his face. "So... this is where my grandma married and came to," he said. "This... is where my mother was born."

"Yes," Alex said.

Pearl stood expressionless for a few minutes before looking toward Alex. "Do you know what happened yet?" he asked. "Why my mother was attacked? Why grandpa died?"

"I don't know," Alex said. "I just got here. Don't worry, I will research what I can in the next coming days."

"Please, brother," Pearl said. "Try to find something, anything. I'm sure you can."

Chapter 1431 Shi Meiyong

Alex left to roam the colony a day after he was done resting. He was with Whisker who recorded everything for Pearl and went around meeting the various beasts that could talk to him.

He asked about the history of the colony, how they came to live here, and how they were treated when they came.

On the basis of learning about historical knowledge, Alex gathered a bit of information that, when combined with what he had been given by Ren Xiao, revealed a larger picture of this place.

The Shi family had always been the true rulers of the Lion Colony ever since the first Azure Dragon had come to this realm. For ages, their descendants had looked after the people of this land while the ones that got old ones either broke through to the Immortal realm and left this land, or died trying.

Even the previous leader, Shi Guyong had tried to break through and had ended up dying to the tribulation lightning. There were many that still remembered that moment.

It was only after that that Guyong became the leader of the Colony. He had been a leader of the colony for the past 4 thousand or so years, before dying himself due to a Qi deviation.

As for who would take over his place as the leader, everyone unanimously chose the Golden Lion that lived, Zhu Xiongwei.

After learning what he could, Alex returned to his home and brought out Pearl.

"What did you find?" Pearl asked the moment he came out. He had been anxious the entire time and truly wanted to know whatever he could from this location.

"I... learned your mother's name," Alex said. "Shi Meiyong, daughter of Shi Guyong and Bai Meirong."

"Shi... Meiyong," Pearl worded out the name himself. "That... was my mother's name?"

Alex nodded with a smile and went up next to Pearl to pet him a little. He rubbed his back while remembering the giant white cat that had appeared in the Southern Forest of the Crimson Empire so many years ago.

She had been on death's door and yet she had protected her child. Pearl had been way too young to remember any of that.

"What else?" Pearl asked. "What else did you find?"

"That's the weird part," Alex said. "Nothing. I found nothing else at all."

"Nothing?" Pearl turned to look at him in confusion.

"Yeah," Alex said. "The beasts here talked a lot about your grandfather and even a bit about your grandmother, and yet... they know nothing about your mother."

"How can that be?" Pearl asked.

"I don't know," Alex said. "All they mentioned was that their Leader's daughter had disappeared a few thousand years ago, and since then they had never seen her at all."

"They would ask the leader, but they would never get a straight answer. As far as they were aware, she had died."

Pearl frowned. "But that can't be," he said. "I wouldn't have been born if she was dead."

"I know," Alex said. "That's the weird part I mentioned. Also, there's another weird thing that these beasts either don't realize or don't want to think about. It's... a bad news so prepare yourself."

"What's the news?" Pearl asked, solemn in his tone.

"Your grandmother is not alive as well," Alex said. "At some point around the time when your grandfather died... she died as well."

"Huh?" Pearl looked at Alex. "That can't be a coincidence."

"No," Alex said. "And then, the Leadership that was supposed to go to your mother moved to the current Leader, Zhu Xiongwei."I think you should take a look at

"Are you suggesting that it was him that killed my grandparents?" Pearl asked.

"There is a chance, which is why I mentioned it," Alex said. "But it is a small chance. Something else must've happened for sure."

"Is there no way to find out exactly what happened?" Pearl asked. "What if you use your technique to search the beast's brain?"

"That's not easy," Alex said. "In the first place, I do not know who knows what. One could know nothing and another could be hiding the truth, and I wouldn't be able to tell which one."

"Not only that, even if I did find someone who I know for sure knows the information, I would be leaving myself vulnerable in that scenario as well since my body would be alone."

"I can protect you," Pearl said quickly.

"I don't doubt you would try your hardest," Alex said. "But if I do manage to search their souls, that means I will either have to kill an innocent beast for no reason or get chased by all the beasts of this land as a single man. It's not a very good idea."

"Then?" Pearl asked. "What can we do?"

Alex thought for a bit. "There... is a way," he said. "It's not a very good way, but I might be able to get something done if it all goes right."

"What way?" Pearl asked.

"Let me check if it is viable first or not," Alex said. "I will need to make pills for a while first of all though."

Pearl wasn't sure what Alex was planning, but he trusted him.

The very next day, Alex started making the pills that were requested of him. He had received so many blood and beast cores that he easily could make many of them.

By now, his total number had increased by over 200, closing in on 250 blood beasts from the Beast paradise alone.

Adding in the number from before, he had enough blood beasts to reach 400.

Aside from that, Alex also improved his Blood aura, breaking past the barrier that kept him in Saint Transformation 2nd realm and finally reached the 3rd realm.

His cultivation base was also reaching close to a breakthrough, but once again he couldn't speed up this one. He needed to be very careful, so Alex did his best to ignore his instinct to break through and focused on stabilizing his core as much as he could.

He wasn't sure if that helped at all or not, but it wouldn't hurt to just try. It would instead most likely hurt if he didn't.

He made the pills as many as he can and the lion was more than happy to see Alex's products. He was more than happy to receive the 5 Veined pills, which improved his cultivation speed by such a drastic amount that he still worried that there was some sort of side effects waiting to show themselves.

Then, one night, Alex made a pill that surprised the Lion. The thing that surprised him was that the number of lightning for that very pill had struck 6 times instead of 5.

Alex walked out of his residence, haggard, and walked up to the Lion who had just arrived.

"Senior," he said. "I made this pill with 6 veins. Would you mind testing this and seeing how useful it is compared to the 5-veined pill? I think someone of high cultivation realm like you can see the differences better."

"A cultivation pill?" the Lion asked in surprise. "Sure. I just cultivated 2 days ago, so you'll have to wait for 3 days before I do it again, I think."

"That's alright, take your time," Alex said, sending away the Lion. Once he was gone, his face turned to a smile.

His initial plan had worked. Now, he needed to wait 3 days before his second plan.

Chapter 1432 Shi Mansion

Alex continued making pills for the next 3 days, letting the lightning strikes fall in his courtyard all day long, while at night he cultivated and rested.

This had become a form of routine for him at this point, which he followed a lot. Or so the beasts of this Colony were led to believe.

Just to be extra safe, Alex decided to wait for another day so that the Lion really did eat the pill and went into cultivation.

He made pills for all day, while also conserving his Qi as much as possible while doing so. So, when the night fell and the lightning stopped, he would still have a lot of Qi to work with.

The beasts all over the Colony believed that he had gone to sleep, but the truth was Alex was finally starting the second part of the plan he had made.

Now that the beasts were used to his routine, he was going to use the opportunity to do something they would never imagine he would ever do.

He was going to sneak into the abandoned Shi mansion.

Alex walked out into the dead of night, his body completely invisible and out of aura. People could still sense his aura if they focused a lot, but to stop even that from happening, he tied a lot of Heavenly Silk around his clothes.

Once everything was prepared, he left his courtyard.

The night seemed to be on his side as well since the cloud blocked the moon from shining its light in the night. Since the most the moon ever went dark was half of it, there was never a night that wasn't dark without the clouds in the sky.

There were nocturnal beasts that roamed the streets of the colony at night, so Alex had to walk around carefully. Fortunately, they didn't go around using their spiritual sense at all.

Alex slowly made it through the streets of the town-like Colony and made his way to the Shi mansion.

The Shi mansion was a place that was completely empty at this point. Its last residents were Shi Guyong and Bai Meirong, who had long since been dead.

Shi Guyong apparently had a sister too, whose son was the current leader. However, she died a long time ago as she wasn't very good at cultivation and had run out of longevity.

As such, the current Shi Mansion was without owner and was more of a historical monument of the colony, than an actual mansion.

Alex pulled out Whisker from his robes and dropped him into the ground. "See if there is anything I can't see," he said.

As a Seeking mouse, Whisker was far more adept at sneaking around and giving information back to Alex that he himself would not be able to gain on his own.

Even with his eyes glowing purple with Demon Eyes technique running, he could not see what Whisker's whiskers could.

His eyes saw a normal atmosphere with relatively dense Qi, but Whisker managed to sense a hidden formation that would activate the moment they got too close.

"Find out if it's a plate, pole, or a carving," Alex quickly told Whisker.

Whisker got to work and searched around without using his spiritual sense before answering back through their Beast bond.

"It's a pole. Should I disrupt it?" he asked.

"Do it," Alex said.

A few moments later, Alex saw a certain fluctuation in the energy where Whisker was and was surprised to realize that the running formation was actually already visible. It was just so mixed into the rest of the energy that he hadn't even realized it.

"Good work," Alex said. "Let go in."

He walked past where the formation previously was and quickly checked what sort of formation it was. Realizing that it was a formation to warn others of intruders, Alex sighed in relief.

He hadn't been caught.

"It seems we'll have to be extra careful," he said and let Whisker search for more.I think you should take a look at

It took the dismantling of 2 more formation poles, and going around another carved formation before Alex entered the house.

The mansion was bright yellow in color, a shade away from golden. The large hallways were made with the size of many saint beasts in consideration and had golden decorations all throughout the hall.

Whisker walked in first, with Alex behind him.

As they walked, Alex looked around at whatever he could see to get an idea of the house.

The hallways were with nothing but decorations, but the main hall had more than just that. Still with a golden decoration, the main hall also had massive paintings of various members of the Shi family as well as a massive painting of an Azure Dragon in the center.

It was impossible to say which Azure Dragon it was amongst the 6 that had come to this realm already.

The other paintings were mostly of Golden Lions, possibly the leaders of the family, and other various beasts that were married or born into the family.

Two of those paintings Alex noticed were of White Cats.

Both paintings were of young female White cats, but the first one was considerably older looking. The second one was young, with almost a kitten-like face, but with a body that seemed a little wrong for a cat.

It was almost like he was looking at a cat with a body that was more like a tiger.

'That's Pearl's mom,' Alex realized. 'That one must be her mother then, Bai Jingshen's daughter.'

"Any formations around here I should be worried about?" he asked Whisker.

Whisker shook his head. "We haven't been caught, so probably not," he said.

"I guess so," Alex said. "Try and see if you can find some sort of library or room with more pictures. We'll need what we can find."

"Okay," Whisker said and ran away.

Alex then called Pearl out.

Pearl landed right next to him and immediately pulled in as much of his aura as he could. He knew the concealment technique but not the invisibility technique.

He was with black fur at the moment, courtesy of Alex's pill with brown eyes, which was the result of a bit of medicinal paste that he had to put over his eyes.

He stood there for a moment in confusion before looking around at the many paintings in the room. He saw the painting with the massive Azure Dragon, the many Golden lions and various other beasts, and finally his gaze landed on the two White cats.

Immediately, he recognized his mother.

He had no recollections of his mother for the longest time. He knew she had died when he was just a kitten and that Alex had found him when she had died, but other than that, he hadn't thought much of her.

He learned to miss her a little when he was taken to the beast realm, and as he grew and learned more about his own past, he had grown angry for himself and for her.

Even then, he had little recollection of her.

However, during his evolution, he had heard his father's thunderous shout and his mother's gentle face.

The White Cat in the painting in front of him was the exact face he remembered from that memory. There was no doubt in his mind anymore. It truly was her.

Pearl's eyes teared up.

"Mother!"

Chapter 1433 Roaming The Mansion

This was the very first time Pearl had seen his mother so clearly. Even if it was only a painting from a long time ago, he was more than happy to see it

"She looks so young," Pearl said.

"Yes, that's because this was probably taken over 3 thousand years ago, back before she disappeared from this place."

"How old was she here then?" Pearl asked. "I... don't know. Given that she was born around the time Bai Jingshen left this place to go to earth, this must have been about a thousand years after that."

"It's hard to judge her age since it seems she was a talented beast from a young age and reached a high cultivation base very early on," Alex said.

Pearl nodded and looked at the picture for a few moments before moving his head to see the other White Cat. "Grandma," he said softly.

Alex nodded. "And that should be your grandfather," he said, pointing to the picture of the Lion next to the White Cat.

Pearl looked at both of the pictures at once and stared at them for a while. Alex let him be. Instead, he focused on Whisker, seeing what he was doing.

Whisker was scurrying down a different hallway, teleporting in between the walls to go into rooms and look for stuff.

There was a guest area, a living room, some sort of training room, and a lot of bedrooms for members of the family.

As he continued going through, he ended up in a room that was dimly lit on the inside. But, Whisker could see the many scrolls that were on a shelf.

Alex got excited to see that. "Check what they are about," he gave the command. "See if anything stands out."

Whisker nodded and started looking through the scrolls. He checked out the contents on a few different scrolls, and Alex turned back toward Pearl who seemed to be done looking at the picture.

"Are you done?" Alex asked.

Pearl nodded. "I find it weird that I'm in the home where my mother was born," he said. "Even more so the fact that I have to sneak in here."

"We don't have a choice," Alex said. "Everyone here is our enemy, we have to remain careful."

Pearl nodded. "Where's Whisker?" he asked.

"Looking through some scrolls," Alex said. "But it seems it's written in a language he can't understand."

"It's most likely the Beast language," Pearl said. "All the books in great grandfather's library are in that language if I'm not mistaken."

"I don't think you are mistaken," Alex said. "Yao Jia taught me the human language by translating it from the Beast language. Maybe the ones that come from the Land of the Blessed Sun all know Beast Language."

Beast language referred to the alphabet used by the Beasts, which was way less widely spread than the Human alphabet or Demon alphabet.

Even though everyone spoke the same language, the writing language was completely different. There were many other languages as well, like the ones mortals developed in seclusion, or the ones that humans in the Central Continent used.

However, they weren't spread beyond their own small group. Even then they spoke the same language.

The reason they spoke the same language was apparently due to Heaven's Will. The same will that taught beasts the spoken language when they reached the Saint realm.

Even if one wanted to divert their words, sooner or later, the Intent of the heavens would bring it back to where it started from.

"There's nothing there of use for us," Whisker said. "Leave and go check other rooms."

Whisker nodded and left the room to go for another one.I think you should take a look at

"What do we do now?" Pearl asked. "Do we just stand by and wait for Whisker?"

"That's all we can do," Alex said. "He is the only one of us with the strongest senses without even having to use any spiritual sense. He is biologically gifted as a Seeking mouse and thus—"

Alex's words stuck in his throat as his eyes went wide in shock. "No..." he said in disbelief.

"What happened?" Pearl asked, seeing Alex panic.

"We need to leave," Alex said and turned around. "Whisker is dead."

Immediately, he ran out of the house with Pearl behind him. But before he could even get far away, a massive barrier rose around the house while at the same time, a strong spiritual sense flew out from deep inside the house.

Even with his concealment technique, invisibility technique, and the Heavenly silk on his body, the Spiritual sense still caught sight of him and its user walked out less than a second later.

Pearl turned around and growled while Alex brought out Midnight in preparation. Then, they saw the Leader of the Lion Colony, Zhu Xiongwei appear in front of them.

He looked at Alex and Pearl with eyes filled with rage, but he kept a deep calm as he spoke. "May I ask why you are intruding into my Uncle's mansion," he asked.

Alex took a deep breath. "I just wanted to look around how it was inside," he said. 'Dammit! Why the hell is he here and not at his own home?'

"I don't think sneaking in after disabling so many of our formations counts as just wanting to visit," the Lion said. "Please give me a valid reason so that I do not kill you right here."

"When Her Majesty the Phoenix finds out you killed me, you will have to face her wrath," Alex said.

"I suppose that is true," the Lion said, still seething in anger. "But that is no valid reason for why I shouldn't beat you up."

The Lion growled loudly, his golden mane turning golden bright as a gigantic lion face fell down from the sky.

Pearl was about to attack back, but Alex stopped him. "He's too strong," Alex said. "You'll need to hide."

Pearl vanished into Alex's body while he prepared an attack. Filling his sword with Blood Aura, he sent a strong attack flying into the sky.

The attack collided with the lion's face and the collision shook the ground where Alex stood.

'Strong,' he couldn't help but think to himself.

The Lion was a new leader, but he wasn't chosen for no reason it seemed. He was strong, at least in the Saint Transformation 5th realm, judging from how his Saint Transformation 3rd realm blood aura with his Qi and Sword Aura failed to gain the upper hand in the collision.

Same as Alex, the Lion was surprised to see Alex completely fine as well. There was not a single scratch on him despite his attempt to break a few bones at the very least.

"You've been hiding your powers until now," he said. "Forcing people to think you're a weak little human. All that for what? To sneak into our Colony and steal things from us? How many other things have you stolen from the other colonies?"

Alex gave a serious look. "I have stolen nothing," he said. "I wasn't going to steal anything from here either."

"If not stealing then what were you doing here?" the Lion asked.

"I'm trying to find out something," Alex said.

"Find out what?" the Lion asked.

"I wanted to find out how the previous Leader of the Colony, Shi Guyong, died," Alex said.

Chapter 1434 Against The Lion

"What do you mean how my Uncle died?" the Lion asked. "He died due to Qi deviation."

"Did he?" Alex asked, getting more daring now that he had been caught. "Are you sure it was an accident and not a murder?"

The Lion's face fell when he heard that. "You..." he said in a low voice. "What do you know?"

Alex was surprised to see the change in attitude from just angry to serious rage. It seemed he had brought up a topic he shouldn't have.

However, that also gave Alex some idea that the Lion was clearly hiding from him something that he knew. Worst case scenario, the Lion was involved in his uncle's murder and was thus trying to hide information from everyone.

"What do you know?" the Lion shouted.

"I know you're not telling me the truth," Alex said.

"Tell me!" the Lion shouted. His roar created a visible golden ripple that flew toward Alex.

Alex quickly used the All Swirling Elemental Shield while his body bled to form armor on him.

The attack landed on his defensive combined technique and destroyed it, before landing on his body. Coupled with his physical strength, the Blood Armor was able to protect him completely, albeit losing a bit of the aura in a process that Alex quickly replenished.

"You will tell me what you know instead," Alex said and went in on the attack.

He threw out a punch to start, sending 4 golden spears flying toward the lion, who simply swatted it away. At that moment, Alex brought out swords from his ring, 75 of them as they formed his 75 Sword array.

The started spinning like a drill, powered by not only his Qi but also his Blood and Sword Aura. On top of that, he also added the Dao of Cutting into the attack, improving it all that more.

Midnight was at the front, taking charge as it flew toward the Lion.

The Lion frowned seeing the strong attack and his body started glowing golden. A sort of armor formed on his body, made using the strongest metal Qi he could produce at the moment.

'Metal Dao?' Alex realized. It seemed he had the same Dao as him as well.

The Swords slammed into the lion, who roared loudly, sending many swords backward.

Alex quickly pulled the swords back, realizing that his attack was nearly stronger than the Lion's defense.

The Lion realized the same as well and started throwing out attacks of his own. He swung his claws, throwing 3 golden slashes toward Alex.

Alex teleported at the last second, arriving behind the Tiger with a sword in his hand that had no matter or weight at all.

He swung it at the Lion's body, but the Lion suddenly pushed against the air and leaped away. He had managed to dodge Alex's attacks by activating his own movement technique at the last moment.

Alex gathered the 75 swords and sent them flying back toward the Lion.

The lion turned around and roared at the last second, disrupting the attack before it was going to land on his body.

The Lion then created a large golden bell in the air that landed on top of Alex. As it fell, he used another technique.

Alex looked above himself and sent the many swords into the air to destroy it. At the same time, he saw the Lion charging in for an attack.

Alex was about to attack the Lion when he paused for the briefest second. Without hesitation, he changed the attack into his All Swirling Elemental Shield and turned around to send out a flying-blood sword at the other Lion that had appeared behind him.I think you should take a look at

The Lion swung his claws, creating a sword out of Metal Qi this time around that fought against Alex's own Blood sword, and the two were destroyed.

"Not bad," the Lion couldn't help but say. "You actually saw through my double."

Alex grinned and felt glad that he saw the notice thanks to his Demon Eyes that the first lion was completely made out of Metal Qi.

"You nearly duped me too," Alex said and brought down his sword that he had sent flying into the air.

The Golden lion collected his Metal Qi into his arm and sent it above him, at the falling swords. The paw attack and the sword array landed, creating an explosion in the air that sent both Alex and Lion backward.

However, until the Lion, Alex was pushed back even more. He took a moment to gather himself, but the Lion was already next to him.

The Lion swung its claws, using another claw technique when Alex swung his arms in front of him. The claws and the Qi from the claw landed on the split space that Alex had created, stopping it momentarily.

The split space couldn't handle the force and shattered, returning back into one uniform space, but that had given Alex enough time to create a fire in front of him that exploded with an unimaginable force.

The Lion was sent flying backward, even if unhurt, and Alex took the moment to prepare his next attack.

The Lion got a hold of himself and quickly looked toward Alex before his eyes went wide.

The Swords had gathered in front of Alex again. Only this time, there were far more swords than before.

Seeing that 75 swords weren't enough, Alex brought out additional swords, even making some with Blood aura to compensate for the lacking number of swords.

A total of 123 swords flew in front of Alex in an array that was the strongest attack he could produce at the moment.

After some decent improvement in his cultivation base and his Spiritual energy, he could finally, barely, control 123 swords at once to fight against his opponent.

He focused on the swords, controlling them as he poured Blood aura and Sword aura into them. Then, he added the Dao of Cutting into them to make them all that much stronger.

The Lion roared, trying to disrupt Alex, and while he did so for a second by having Alex focus on defense, he couldn't do it for longer than that.

Once Alex added everything into the Sword Array, he sent it flying toward the Lion in the distance.

The Lion roared again, creating a massive bell in the sky that the attack struck. However, the 123 swords easily tore through the bell and landed on the Lion.

To Alex's surprise, the Lion was torn through as well, completely disappearing as if it were a...

"Fake!" Alex realized, but too late. He focused his senses and found the Lion, but it was already next to him.

The Lion slammed his paw onto his chest, tearing through his blood aura to dig into his body.

Alex felt the pain, but he teleported away to make some distance. Even as he did that, however, he felt something wrong with him.

He looked down and noticed his body slowly turning golden from where he was struck. It was only on the outside, but Alex couldn't stop it as half his body was encased in gold.

It would take him a moment to break through this, but it was not enough time.

In front of him, the Lion was preparing another attack. And this time around, he was using his Immortal Qi.

Chapter 1435 Roar

Half of Alex's body had been covered in gold, one which he couldn't remove in time. And on top of that, the Lion was now using his Immortal Qi to attack him.

If Alex couldn't do anything in time, he would most definitely not come out of this fight alive.

He teleported away, outside of the formation, still constrained by the gold that covered him. He tried flying away, but his speed wasn't as fast.

He made it outside of the colony, but that was barely far enough at all. The Lion's spiritual sense was on him and wasn't letting go at all.

Alex flexed his dantian, sending out as much Yang Qi as he could outside to cover his entire body. The Spiritual sense was destroyed thanks to that, and the gold that grew on his body was also slowly being burned away.

However, it was already too late.

The Lion's body turned ethereal with golden Qi glowing all around him as he became a golden entity that emanated extreme metal energy all around him.

Once the Lion's body was completely golden with nothing else to be seen with one's naked eyes, he was done preparing his attack and finally used it.

His body blazed through the night sky, leaving behind a golden trail as the Lion himself flew up to Alex to hit him with this attack.

Alex used his own skills.

Dao of Space, Dao of Metal, Dao of Earth, True Fire Dao, Dao of Teleportation, Heaven's Impact, 123 Sword Array, Golden Spear Punch, All Swirling Elemental Shield, Spiritual Providence, Blood Aura, Blood Armor, and Sword Aura.

He used everything he had, save for any formations and talismans that he wouldn't have time to bring out. The skills were used one after another in quick succession to protect himself as much as he could before the Lion even attacked.

The offensive attacks flew toward the Lion who flew at a speed that Alex could barely keep up with his eyes. The defensive attacks remained on him, as he prayed that they weren't destroyed.

The Lion slammed into the attacks that Alex had thrown out, and like a red hot metal striking against a piece of paper, it burst through every attack, destroying them all.

The swords fell in disarray, the spiritual attacks barely stopping the Lion. The Golden Spears were torn apart, while neither the Blood nor the Sword aura did anything to stop the Lion.

Even Alex's True Fire Dao was nothing more than a weak attack in front of the Immortal attack that the Lion used.

Before Alex could even realize what was happening, the Lion was already in front of him.

The multiple defensive barriers created using Dao of Space, Metal, Fire, and Earth were all shattered before the Lion even touched it.

The All Swirling Elemental Shield was destroyed in that attack as well. And then, the Lion's attack finally landed on the Blood Armor.

The Blood armor was the strongest defensive skill that Alex had at the moment, and when the Lion's attack landed on it, it was shredded in a single moment.

Nothing Alex could use and had used had brought out any sort of positive result in this clash. And as such, when his final defensive technique, the Blood Armor was destroyed, all that remained to protect Alex from the Lion's attack was his simple body cultivation, which was nowhere near strong enough to stop the Lion.

Alex saw it all happen clearly, with his Demon eyes, albeit barely. So, he also saw the moment the Lion's attack landed on him.

He was going to die.

ROAR!~

A giant golden ethereal tiger's head appeared from within Alex the moment the attack landed. It instantly stopped the lion's attack, sending him flying backward. The head moved out even more afterward as the entire body of the tiger appeared in full view of the lion whose attack had failed.

The lion was in a confused state as his speed and strength had been so high that he could barely keep up himself. So, when he was stopped, he wasn't aware of what had happened.I think you should take a look at

He looked up and finally saw the entire body of the White Tiger that stood before him.

Alex realized what had happened only after seeing the entire White Tiger. The Defensive skill that Bai Jingshen had put inside of him had activated at the very last moment he was about to die and had protected him from the Immortal Qi attack.

Bai Jingshen's ethereal body stood there, towering over both man and beast as he held his head up high, looking at no one in particular.

"This human is under my, Bai Jingshen's protection," the voice spoke. "Anyone who dares harm him shall suffer my wrath."

The voice boomed throughout the area as the weaker beasts in the surrounding froze in fear even when they understood nothing.

Alex stood in absolute shock as well. He had forgotten at the moment that Bai Jingshen had even put a defensive intent on him that was supposed to protect him in the extreme case of danger.

And thanks to that, he had lived right now.

However, it had been used up and couldn't be used anymore after this.

"No..." the Lion spoke in surprise and confusion. "That... was that really... Lord Bai Jingshen?"

Alex breathed in quietly trying to assess the situation. Was the fear of what happened here enough for him to get away without being attacked? Or was the Lion perhaps daring enough to continue his attacks even after that?

Alex wasn't sure if he should run away or try and figure out a compromise here where the Lion wouldn't attack him anymore.

"How old are you?" the Lion asked.

Alex looked at the lion's face and was surprised to see him lose all sense of anger at the moment.

"About 70 years old," Alex said.

"Then why do you have Lord Bai Jingshen's protection on you?" the Lion asked. "He's dead."

"He's not," Alex said. "Would I have the protection on me if he was dead?"

The Lion had no answer. "But..." he tried to make sense of what he was hearing, but nothing fell into place. "Why were we told that he was dead? It was even confirmed by His Majesty Qing Tianchui himself," the Lion said.

"The Azure Dragon?" Alex asked. "They were all mistaken. Bai Jingshen had gone somewhere, but he is back. He's been back for over half a century now."

"How do you know that?" the Lion asked. "Aren't you under Her Majesty Feng Nuanhuo? How are you acquainted with Lord Bai?"

"I was acquainted with him before I ever met Her Majesty," Alex said. "Why do you call the others His and Her Majesty, and yet you call Bai Jingshen nothing but just lord."

"Unlike the others, he is more than just a Heavenly beast to me," the Lion said. "He is my cousin's grandfather. In a way, we are related by marriage."

"Oh," Alex only just remembered that. "Then do you respect him?"

"Yes," the Lion said.

Alex wondered if he could make use of this opportunity. He wouldn't get another chance anyway.

"Then I insist that you answer my questions," Alex said, taking the chance. "I was sent here by Bai Jingshen to figure out the truth of what happened here 50 years ago."

Chapter 1436 News Of Death

The Lion looked at Alex with a doubtful expression. "How do I trust that you were sent by Lord Bai?" he asked. "Do you have any proof?"

"Proof?" Alex asked. "Was what you saw just now not proof enough? You saw Lord Bai himself."

The lion hesitated when he heard that. He couldn't argue against those words, but it simply felt wrong. Bai Jingshen was said to have died 5 millennia ago. If others were to be trusted, it was even said that he had tried to conquer the Central Continent.

However, there was an unspoken belief in the family that it was a lie. Zhu Xiongwei never knew why they trusted him so much, but they did and so did he.

Still, that didn't mean that he hadn't died. Hearing that he had come back was just too much for him to believe.

He wanted to believe that he had truly come back, but he needed to make sure he wasn't being lied to by someone that just now tried to steal from his deceased uncle's mansion.

"I need more proof," the lion said.

Alex thought for a bit and pulled out a talisman. "This was given to me by Bai Jingshen and his concubine, Ren Xiao, mother of Bai Meirong. Look at it," he said.

The lion looked at the talisman and was surprised to see information from over 5 thousand years ago, something that only those people would know about.

Even so, this wasn't much of a proof.

"I need something more concrete," the lion said. "You tried to sneak into my uncle's house for something. I can let you go if you worked under lord Bai's orders, but you will need to give me hard evidence."

Alex frowned. He didn't want to give him strong evidence just like that, but it seemed there wasn't much choice for him in this matter.

"Alright," Alex said. "I will give you the evidence you want. But, before I show it to you, you must make an oath to not speak of what you see to anyone else. Also, you will not attack me or my beasts."

"I already killed your mouse," the lion said.

"Doesn't matter. Make the oath," Alex said.

"Fine, I swear it," the Lion said. "I will not speak of anything I see here to a single human, beast, or plant. I will also not attack you or any beasts you have, as long as the evidence you bring forth explains well why you tried to sneak into my Uncle's mansion."

Alex felt the world stir a bit as the oath landed. He went over the words of the oath and after finding nothing that could be a loophole, he called out the proof.

Pearl appeared, still in his black fur because of the pill.

The lion looked at Pearl with a confused look. "What is this?" he asked. "Is this your evidence?"

"Wait a second," Alex said and brought out another pill that he gave to Pearl.

Pearl ate the pill and immediately, the effects of his previous pill were countered, washing away the blackness of his fur and bringing back the golden color of his eyes.

His fur turned entirely white, and with golden eyes, he looked so very similar to his mother in the portrait that they saw in the mansion.

The lion's eyes slowly widened. "What... what is this? Who is this?" he asked, a shocked expression clear in his eyes.

"This is Pearl," Alex said. "He is Shi Meiyong's son. He and I were sent here by Bai Jingshen to find out what happened to his mother that lead to her death and avenge it if we can."

The lion's expression disappeared when he heard all those information as if he had to process it all. The rest of the information was too much to begin with, but one stood out more than everything else.

"What... what do you mean when you say that you came here to avenge his mother's death?" the lion asked.

"Exactly what it sounds like," Alex said. "We came to find out who was involved in killing her and how it even came to be."

"But... but... you said his mother is Shi Meiyong. You said his mother is sister Meiyong!" the lion shouted.

"Yes," Alex said, a little confused. "What of it?"I think you should take a look at

"But that would mean... sister Meiyong is dead," the lion said. "Are you saying sister Meiyong is dead?"

"Oh," Alex's face softened a little. "Were you not aware of her death?"

"You're lying!" the lion shouted, his voice containing a force that attacked everything around him.

Alex quickly brought out his blood armor and blocked the attack. He was about to get ready for a fight when he realized he wasn't being attacked at all.

It was just the lion's way of coping with the news. Had it really been an attack, he would've died because of the oath.

"Swear it!" the lion asked him. "Swear that you're telling the truth. That he is sister Meiyong's son and that she is dead. I do not believe it."

"She is," Alex said. "I swear I am not lying. Pearl's mother, Shi Meiyong died in the Western Continent 50 years ago."

Feeling the oath settle onto Alex, the lion couldn't help but feel devastated. "She... she's really dead. Sister Meiyong is dead." His voice cracked as he spoke. His eyes began tearing up before he started crying all out.

Alex didn't know what to do at all after seeing the lion cry like that. The sound of sadness in his voice was overwhelming to both him and Pearl.

Pearl stepped closer to the lion and stood in front of him before speaking. "Were you close with my mother?" he asked the crying lion.

"Sister Meiyong took care of me when I was just a little cub. She... she's taught me everything I know. She took care of me ever since my mother died," the lion said. "She... she can't be dead. How... how did she die?"

"I don't know," Pearl said. "That's what I am here to find out. My great grandfather sent me and him to find out about the truth behind mother's death and possibly avenge her death if we can."

"Your... great grandfather?" the Lion looked at Pearl.

"Bai Jingshen," Pearl said.

The Lion's eyes went wide for a moment. "Is he... really back?" he asked.

"Yes," Pearl said.

"Then... why isn't he here?" the Lion asked. "Why hasn't he come to visit his family or avenge their death if he knows about it already?"

"He tried to," Alex said. "But he couldn't come."

"Couldn't?" the Lion asked.

"His oath wouldn't allow him to come here at all," Alex said.

"What oath?" the Lion asked angrily.

"The oath that makes him unable to visit another Heavenly Beast's land in his or her absence," Alex said.

"So?" the Lion asked. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"So, Bai Jingshen can't come here because the Azure Dragon is no longer here," he said.

"Huh?" the lion looked at Alex. "His majesty hasn't gone anywhere. He's still in his realm."

Alex's eyes narrowed. "Do you... not know?" he asked, quite surprised.

"Not know what?" the Lion asked.

"The Azure Dragon, Qing Tianchui... is already dead."

Chapter 1437 Servants

"... What?" the Lion asked, unsure if he heard Alex right.

"The Azure Dragon is not in his realm," Alex repeated. "He's actually dead already."

"That's... that's not possible," the Lion said. "Its the Azure Dragon. Why would he be dead? How could he even die?"

"I don't know why," Alex said. "But... it happened around the same time Pearl's mother died, and the same time senior Guyong seemed to have died. That also somehow happens to be at the same time as when the entire Beast Paradise closed itself."

"I'm sure you remember the 3 lightning strikes from around the same time as well before your Uncle died," Alex said.

"As long as you can confirm that the lightning strikes didn't happen here but around where the Azure Dragon lived, then I'm sure that lightning strike must have been a Heavenly Judgment lightning that killed the Azure Dragon."

"It..." the Lion's eyes went wide. "It really did come from his Majesty's general direction all those years ago. Did that really kill his Majesty?"

"We assume so," Pearl said.

"Is... is that lightning strike responsible for my sister's death as well? That's surely not the case."

"While the cause of deaths may not have happened at the same time, there are just too many coincidences for the events to not be related," Pearl said. "Uncle Xiongwei, please help us find Mother's murderer and bring her to justice."

The lion looked at Pearl with a strange look. Hearing the words 'uncle' from the White Tiger was not something he had expected at all.

"You really are sister Meiyong's son, huh?" the Lion said petting Pearl with his paw. He seemed incredibly happy to see his nephew whom he never knew existed.

While he did not replace his sister in heart, it did lessen the pain knowing that while she had died, she had left someone behind that he could care for.

"I didn't realize she had ever even found a husband. Is your father one of his Majesty's servants too?" the lion asked.

"Father?" Pearl asked, feeling ever so strange. He cared about his mother so much and wanted to avenge her death just that much as well. Yet, he never thought about his father at all.

It wasn't just him; no one around him brought up his father either. Bai Jingshen never said anything about his father and neither did Alex.

"I... do not know who my father is," Pearl said in the end.

The lion paused for a moment. "You don't know who your father is?" he asked. "How old were you when it all happened?"

"Young enough that I don't remember my mother either," Pearl said. "I barely remembered a fragment of a memory just a few years ago, and that's it."

"Dear god!" the lion exclaimed. "You must've been very young then."

The lion looked at Pearl and then Alex and finally took a deep breath. "Fine, come with me. I'll see how I can help you all. If possible, I want to take part in killing the person that was involved in my sister's death if that was a murder and not a normal death."

"Thank you," Alex said and followed the Lion back to the Colony that he was so far away from.

"Go back to your own thing, everyone," the lion said. "It was a misunderstanding."

The many beasts that were waiting to see what was going to happen between the two of them were somewhat disappointed to see that nothing came out of that fight.

They left, and Alex was taken back to the mansion.

"Where's my nephew?" the Lion asked after not seeing him.

"Inside his beast space," Alex said. "He's bonded to me, so he stays there for the most part."

"Let him out then," the Lion said.

Alex shook his head. "I won't bring him out where so many beasts can see him. His mother's enemies exist in this continent, so I have to be extra careful," he said.

The Lion landed inside the mansion and Alex walked in.

"You're safe to bring him out now," the lion said.

Alex nodded and brought out Pearl once again. Pearl looked around, trying to make sense of where he was.

The Lion walked to the end of the hallway, arriving at the large hall where he sat. He gestured for both Alex and Pearl to sit as well.

Once the two were seated, the lion spoke.

"So you two are certain sister Meiyong was murdered and didn't just die on her own?" the lion asked.

"Pearl's mother was halfway to her death, bloody, with a sword stuck to her body when I found her. She was also in the Western Continent, the entire realm away from where she should've been. So, I'm sure that she was murdered and didn't just die," Alex said.

"The Western Continent..." the Lion thought.

"Do you have any idea who the murderers might be?" the Lion asked. "We can ask the beasts in his Majesty's realm if you don't know."

"We... have a general idea of who is responsible," Alex said. "Just not who exactly or in what capacity."

"Who?" the Lion asked curiously.

"The Azure Imperium," Alex said. "I'm afraid the ones involved must be the Emperor of the Eastern Continent and his people. I haven't confirmed if he was involved directly or not, but that seems like the safest conclusion to draw from the situation."

"Same for the Azure Dragon, just because he is associated with the Azure Imperium in some way," Alex said. "Although, the more I'm staying here, the more I'm confused about how the Azure Dragon's death could be related to Pearl's mother dying."

"Actually... that makes perfect sense," the Lion said. "After all, sister Meiyong was amongst the few chosen ones that were sent to take care of his Majesty while he was sick."

"Huh?" both Alex and Pearl spoke up at the same time.

"Mother was chosen to take care of the Azure Dragon?" Pearl asked.

"Wait, was that why she went missing over 3 thousand years ago?" Alex asked.

The lion nodded. "I only found out later on, but because his majesty was wounded during his fight in the Central continent, he needed servants to take care of him. Sister Meiyong volunteered to help him, alongside many other beasts."

"They were all meant to stay with his Majesty for the next 4 thousand years until it was time for him to safely leave this realm," the lion said. "That must have been where she met your father as well, and where you were born."

Alex was surprised to hear that. That did explain why Pearl's mother was involved with the ones from the Azure Imperium in the first place. She was one of the Azure Dragon's servants.

"Wait!" Alex realized something. "Do you think it is possible that we can search for the other servants from the Azure Dragon's secret realm and ask them these questions?"

"You can try," the lion said. "Unfortunately, I cannot help you with this task."

"Hmm?" Alex looked at him. "Why not?"

"The Beast Paradise was closed off to never open up again for a long time. If I, a leader, were to freely move in and out, it would be a breach of trust between our region and the empire. As such, for that thing in particular, I will have to stay out of it."

Chapter 1438 More Questions

Alex kept quiet for a bit, thinking to himself of the things he just learned.

Pearl's mother wasn't in the Beast paradise when she was attacked. She was in the Azure Dragon's realm. That made it more obvious that the Azure Dragon's death was somehow related to Pearl's mother's death as well.

The question now was on which side of the conflict was the Azure Dragon?

Alex could see him being on either side.

He could have been a benevolent master, helping one of his servant during an attack. He could have showed himself to the heavens during that moment and brought on the wrath.

Or, he could be a hateful Heavenly Beast who realized that Pearl's mother had the White Tiger's blood essence in her on the same tier as that of the White Tiger progenitor, and wanted to kill her for that.

Although, the sword that killed her belonged to the Azure Imperium. 'Why would someone like the Azure Dragon need the help of puny Saints to kill a Saint beast?' Alex thought.

He gave it a bit of thought and remembered that the Heavenly Beasts weren't allowed to kill anyone from this realm. 'He would have required help to kill her if that was what he wanted,' Alex concluded.

It was still all hypothesis on his end. The thing he would need to figure out was who the sword belonged to in the Imperium, and how much the Emperor was involved.

At this point, Alex had already considered his involvement in the crime to be a fact. It was the rest he wasn't sure about.

Unfortunately, he couldn't just bring out the sword and ask people who it belonged to. Due to the insignia of the Azure Imperium being carved on it, it was obvious that this was a special sword and not just anyone would use it.

Also, given the fact that it had somewhat of a sword spirit inside of it made it harder for Alex to just bring it out in the open.

'If only I could meet someone that was inside the realm when the Azure Dragon died, I could—' Alex paused. He thought of something for a moment and quickly looked up at the Lion.

"Wait, something doesn't make sense," he said.

"Hmm?" the Lion looked at him. "What doesn't make sense?"

"If Pearl's mother was in the Azure Dragon's realm then... how did her parents die?" Alex asked. "I don't see how these two events could be related."

The Lion stared blankly at Alex for a moment. "Do you... not know how my uncle and aunt died?" he asked.

"No," Alex said. "Should I?"

"But... you said that their death wasn't an accident like Qi Deviation. You said there was something more," the Lion said.

"Yes, because of everything that has surrounded Pearl's mother's death, I said it couldn't be normal," he said.

"So you really don't know how he died?" the Lion asked.

"No," Alex said. "That's why I'm asking you."

The lion sighed. "I don't know," he said. "I thought you knew. That's why I attacked you in the first place. I thought you knew and were hiding from me."

"Of course not," Alex said. "I only found out he died after coming to the beast realm. It took me a while to learn that senior Bai Meirong was dead as well."

The Lion sighed even further. "I don't know what to tell you," he said. "I have no clue how they died at all. One day it was all normal, and the other day their corpses were found in the mansion."

"Nobody knows how they died or what killed them at all," the Lion said. "All I know is that they were dead, and there wasn't any sign of battle around either of them."

"That's... weird," Alex said. "And you have no idea if anyone could've attacked them?"

"No," the Lion said. "My uncle was strong. There is no one in this realm that could've silently killed him if he decided to ever put on a fight. Which was why the other leaders concluded that he went through Qi Deviation."

"It's completely unbelievable given the circumstances, but there isn't a better explanation at all," the Lion said.

All three of them fell into thoughts trying to connect the two events, but it was difficult.

"What are the chances that Pearl and his mother were the main target?" Alex asked. "Is it plausible to think they were just collateral damage?"

"That could be possible if what you said about the Azure Dragon is true," the Lion said. "But... given that my Uncle and Aunt were attacked as well, it is doubtful there wasn't any direct connection there."

Alex nodded. "About the Azure Dragon's death, will you be telling the other beast leaders now?" he asked.

The lion fell silent for a bit. "I don't think I have to," he said. "They might already know about it."

Alex's eyes widened. "You think they know?" he asked.

"That is what I would do if I knew our ruler was missing too," he said. "I would close all borders and wait for the next ruler to come. That is most likely what the other 6 planned. I only joined late and was kept out of it."

"That is possible," Alex said.

"Uncle," Pearl spoke up. "How did my grandparents die?"

The Lion shook his head. "As I just told you, I don't know. The circumstances surrounding their dea—"

"I'm not asking you how they died exactly," Pearl said. "I'm asking if you knew the exact cause of death. If their corpse was here, did you check to see what killed them?"

The Lion shook his head. "I... I don't know," he said. "The... the other Leaders came after they heard the news and helped with their funeral. I never even got the time to think of checking to see how they died."

Alex frowned. "Were they buried or cremated?" he asked.

"Cremated," the Lion said.

"Is that normal around here?" he asked.

"Cremation? Yes. The dead beasts are cremated all the time," the Lion said.

Alex frowned. "Tsk. Their bodies would've most likely not rot this fast given their cultivation base. I could've checked to see if their meridians were destroyed or if Qi had wrecked havoc in their body to cause Qi deviation."

"I'm... I'm sorry, I never thought to do that," the Lion said. "I should've done that."

"Do you think the other Leaders were trying to hide something?" Pearl asked.

"Who knows?" Alex said. "As it is right now, everything we know is just a conspiracy theory. Until something gets proven to be true, everything is possible."

Alex frowned on his own after saying what he did. He had come to the Eastern Continent with two mission.

First, he was going to find Pearl's mother's murderers and bring her to justice.

Seocnd, he was going to find sister Hannah and bring her back to his family.

3 years had passed since he came and he had made barely any progress on either mission of his. At this rate, he would get nowhere.

'Should I actually try and make a deal with the Dragon Emperor for answers the next time we trade stuff?' he couldn't help but think.

He decided not to be so rash for now. He had lost Bai Jingshen's protection, so his life wasn't as safe as it was previously. He had to tread carefully henceforth.

Chapter 1439 The Scrolls

"Is it possible for you to ask the other leaders to find out what happened back then?" Alex asked.

"I can try," the Lion said. "I can't guarantee if they will answer me or not though. If it was something I should've known, they would've told me already."

"Then... they are either involved in this conspiracy, or have made an oath to say nothing of what had happened," Alex said. "My elders back in the Southern Continent did the same while her Majesty was absent from the throne."

The Lion nodded. "We won't get any answers from just discussing this anymore. I will ask them when I have the time," he said to himself.

Alex nodded as well. "Let me know if you remember something else or find out something," he said.

"I will," the Lion said before pausing. "About that beast of yours... I'm sorry."

Alex didn't say anything about Whisker. "It's alright. It was my fault," he said.

"Still, I shouldn't have been so angry and hasty," he said.

"It's fine," Alex said. "Although, that reminds me. What were you doing here?"

"Cultivating," the lion said. "You said you wanted to figure out how good the new pill is, so I wanted to test my cultivation in this place. This mansion has one of the best formations, so it is quite useful to judge one's cultivation speed."

"Oh!" Alex said. It turned out it was his own preparation that had hampered his mission tonight. Still, it had done something quite good, so he couldn't complain.

"Come on," the Lion said. "Let me show the rest of the mansion to you."

"Oh, can we?" Alex asked.

"This mansion belongs to Pearl here technically. So yes, you can come to see the rest of it."

The Lion took them to see the rest of the mansion which was quite massive with many different rooms and halls. There was also an entire backyard that Alex hadn't seen from the sky.

After a while, they came across the room full of scrolls that Whisker had found, which he couldn't read at all.

"What are here?" Alex asked the Lion.

"These are records of the past for us to remember throughout the various generations," the lion said picking one up. He opened it and read it.

"This one is about Shi Jushun, the 4th leader of the Lion colony. He was born during the time of the 2nd Azure Dragon and was notably one of the strongest Golden lions of that generation."

He put the scroll back and opened another one.

"This speaks of the time when Shi Niangong, the 7th head of the Shi family was appointed to become the Leader of the Lion Colony after his father Shi Fexiong ascended to the Immortal realm."

He picked out another few scrolls and read them to Alex.

Alex couldn't tell if what he was reading was what was written on the piece of paper, but there was no reason for him to lie at all.

The records were of the various family members of the Shi Family, mostly involving the family head or the Colony leader of that time.

"This one speaks of Shi Rewei, the family head before Shi Guyong, and his journey to the Western Continent over 5 thousand years ago in order to find Uncle his wife."

"They met up with Lord Bai Jingshen's family and remained there for a while before returning with a bride for Uncle Guyong. That was when Aunt Meirong was married to this family."

"Hmm? I thought I heard that Senior Guyong had no parents when he married. Did I hear wrong?" he asked.

"Oh, Shi Rewei was not uncle's father. I believe he was his uncle," the Lion said. "The family head's role is passed down to the strongest person of that generation, which was my Uncle."

"He had quite the competition at that time given that Shi Rewei had many sons, but his uncle still emerged victorious. It's a shame he never had a child after sister Meiyong. He might have had a son that took over the family."

"Instead, I had to take over," the lion said.

"You're still a Golden Lion," Alex said.

"Yes, but I'm not part of the Shi Family," the Lion said. "I might think of myself as one, but that won't change the fact that my father's surname is Zhu and not Shi. Not that I would want to get rid of my own surname anyway."

The Lion went on to open a few more scrolls and say what was in them.

"Sister Meiyong was born just a few days before the incident at the Central continent. The news of lord Bai Jingshen's death is recorded here as well, but there are hints of doubt in this letter itself."

"They knew for some reason that lord Bai wasn't dead. I wonder how," the Lion said.

Neither Alex nor Pearl said anything. Both of them knew that before Bai Jingshen had left for earth, he had come here and thanks to his master's help, he had left behind the purest White Tiger's blood essence in Shi Meiyong's young body.

"This is it, I'm afraid," the Lion said. "This was the second last record before the record of how uncle and aunt died, which I had to write. This is it."

"Thank you for showing us all of this," Pearl said.

The lion rubbed Pearl's head. "This is your house. You don't have to thank me for showing something like this," he said. He then placed the scrolls on the shelf and walked out of the room.

"I will return back to cultivating. The pill you gave me will work well, won't it?" he asked.

"It will," Alex said.

"Good. You guys can stay around here if you want. I won't say anything this time around," the lion said.

"It's alright," Alex said. "I like the courtyard I was given. Besides, I have more pills to make later on, so for now I will have to cultivate."

"You still want to continue that?" the lion asked.

"I truly need all the resources I can get from here," he said to the Lion.

"Very well," the lion said. "Do what you want. I will come to visit you in 3 days then."

Alex nodded and left. He walked back with Pearl, talking about the things they had learned and witnessed today.

"I still can't figure out who attacked your mother precisely," Alex said. "Or who killed your grandfather."

Pearl thought for a moment. "Are you sure we're taking the right approach to all of this?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"We are trying to find WHO did all of what happened," Pearl said. "And we're failing to come up with any answers. How about asking different questions?"

"Like how your mother was attacked? Or why she was attacked?" Alex asked. "I've tried coming up with answers to that question and only one answer comes to mind."

"What answer?" Pearl asked.

"Your mother was attacked because the blood that was in her body was very precious and it got a few people greedy for it," Alex said. "To acquire that blood, she was attacked."

"As of now, that is the only answer I'm even remotely confident is the right one," Alex said. "As for the other answers, we will have to take our time with them."

Chapter 1440 Regression

It had been a few days since Pearl had left to remain with his uncle to see the rest of the Colony and just be together with him and learn about his mother and grandparents.

As for Alex, he spent his time making pills and cultivating.

After some time, he finally decided to do what he had gotten so close to doing over the last few days. He decided to break through to the Saint Soul realm.

Alex was very excited about the Saint Soul realm. There were so many things new that came with the Saint Soul realm that he was more than happy to experience.

After preparing everything, he closed his eyes and began his breakthrough.

Then, an unknown amount of time later, he opened his eyes again. His body ached uncomfortably while his head pounded with an unnatural thumping rhythm.

His core felt cold, and his dantian hurt a lot.

As for his cultivation base, it reached Saint Core 8th realm.

Alex took a few deep breaths to control himself and looked at his dantian again. The Golden Core inside of it had gotten smaller than it was before.

He sighed when he realized what had happened. His cultivation base had regressed a realm.

He had gone through Qi Deviation.

"Dammit!" he couldn't help but shout angrily. "What went wrong?"

Was it the worries that he already held that had gotten to him? Was it about Pearl's mother? About his sister? What was it?

What had the Inner Demon used against him this time around that it had affected him enough to make him go through Qi Deviation?

Unfortunately for him, there was no way for him to know anything about what went on with his Inner Demon. He didn't know what it said or how he reacted.

In the end, all he could do was accept the fact that his cultivation base had regressed and thus he needed to work on fixing it again.

"I was so close to Saint Soul realm too," he thought to himself before working on his cultivation base.

Fortunately, the damage wasn't as extreme as it could be. A month or two would be enough for him to reach the Saint Core 9th realm again and after that, another year to reach the Saint Soul realm.

Only... could he get there? What was the thing that the Demon used that caused him to fail this time around? Could he fix it without knowing what it was?

"Time to do what I did back then, I guess," Alex said taking a few deep breaths. "I need to accept all my shortcomings, all the possibilities."

"I need to accept that I might not be able to help Pearl get his revenge. I might not be able to help avenge senior Meiyong."

"I need to accept the fact that sister Hannah might already be dead."

Saying them alone was hard enough for him to accept. He could only wonder if he would be able to get over those feelings by the time he had to face his Inner Demon again.

"I got too complacent," Alex thought. "I never faced trouble with it once I reached the True Lord realm, so I thought it couldn't affect me."

He shook his head. "I need to do better," he thought. He would do better.

Alex cultivated for a while, stabilizing his cultivation base as much as he could at the moment, and then proceeded to cultivate his blood aura and make some more Blood Basts.

The lion had provided him with the most number of beast cores out of any other Colony just because of his connection with Pearl and Bai Jingshen. He had also given a lot more Blood than any other Colonies.

In exchange, Alex started exclusively making 6 Veined pills instead of 5 veined pills to give back to the Lion.

And that was how Alex spent a month and a half in the Lion's Colony. It was the longest he had stayed at any colony, coming close to 2 entire months.

At this time, he had reached back to the Saint Core 9th realm and was once again on his journey to reach the Saint Soul realm. As for if he would succeed now or not, he could only hope.

He tried his best to do what he could to prepare for it all, but the actual result wouldn't be apparent until he was done with the breakthrough and then opened his eyes.

There was still a year's worth of time before that happened, so Alex had no reason to worry about any of that at all.

He went over to the Shi family mansion where Pearl spent the majority of his time with his uncle. There, Alex found them in the garden at the back with the Lion talking about Pearl's mother.

"No one could come to the mansion without losing a thing or two before they left. When searching for it, they would usually find the item in your mother's room."

"She was quite the mischievous child my uncle used to say. She would be the one to steal everyone's stuff."

"And of course, no one could do anything to her since... who could do anything to the leader's daughter?"

"I never got to see that side of her. By the time I was born, she had already matured and was an adult who knew how to act well. I wish I had a chance to see that side of her though. I wish you got to see that too."

Pearl was so fully entranced in Lion's words that he didn't even notice Alex walk in. The Lion had to stop and look toward Alex for Pearl to realize.

"What brings you here so early in the morning?" the Lion asked.

"I wanted to come to let you know that I'm nearly done with all of your pills," Alex said. "In 2 days, I should be able to leave."

"Oh," the Lion looked surprised. "Does that mean Pearl will be leaving too?"

Alex looked at Pearl, letting him answer himself.

Pearl hesitated for a brief moment before nodding. "Yes, I will leave," he said. "I would love to stay here and learn more about my mother and my grandparents, but I have other things to do out there."

"I cannot stop the mission I was sent here to complete," he said. "So, I must leave."

"It's understandable," the Lion said. "It's a dangerous task, however, so you must be extremely careful."

Pearl nodded.

"Have the Colony Leaders agreed to your meeting yet?" Alex asked the Lion.

"Not yet," the Lion said. "I can't tell if they're genuine or are making excuses, but they continue saying that the pills you gave have made them all want to go into closed cultivation. Unless something big happens, I don't think they'll be leaving their colonies."

"Hmm," Alex thought for a bit. "We still have a lot of time. Let it happen when it does. You can always send us a message with what you find out."

"I might have to do that," the lion said.

"Anyway, I'll go back to finishing your pills. I'll see you when I'm done."

Alex returned back to the courtyard where he continued making the remaining pills. When it was all done, it was time for them to finally leave the Beast Paradise.

Chapter 1441 Return

Alex and Pearl were led to the edge of the Beast Paradise by the Lion himself. They were brought back to the bright falls where they said their farewell.

"I will try to find what I can," the Lion said. "You two take care of yourself in the meantime. Try not to exceed what you can do. If there was someone else instead of me in the Colony, you might have been dead right now."

Alex nodded. "We'll take extra caution, senior Zhu," he said.

"I won't die, Uncle," Pearl said resolutely.

"Good, I wouldn't want my only nephew to die trying to get revenge on his mother," the Lion said. "Your mother would've never wanted that."

Pearl nodded. "Farewell, Uncle," he said and turned around.

Alex bowed slightly toward the Lion and left.

Pearl quickly entered Alex's beast space once they were far enough. Even though his fur was of a different color, he hid. Who knew what sort of artifacts the Azure Imperium could have?

A single mistake and their entire mission would come falling apart.

Passing the Brightfalls, Alex quickly found his hotel and went up. His two elders and General Fan were there cultivating in their rooms when he arrived.

"Your Majesty, you're back!" elder Liang said the moment she saw Alex come in.

Yao Ning walked out of her room as well. "Your majesty," she cried out.

"Sorry I took so long to come back," Alex said. "I wasn't expecting to take nearly a year."

"We were worried something might've happened to you," the elder said.

"Really?" Alex asked with a bit of a chuckle. "You had nothing to worry about." He wasn't going to tell them about the time he nearly died.

"Were you not going to stay in for longer, your majesty?" Yao Ning asked. "The Crown Prince told us that you would most likely only come out when it is time for the Golden Kingdom's auction."

"Of course not. I wasn't going to stay in there for so long," Alex said. "I have other things to do here than just visit the Golden Kingdom."

Alex went to his room to rest and the elders followed him.

"How long do we have until the Golden Kingdom's auction again?" Alex asked the elders.

"According to General Fan, less than 5 months," Elder Liang said. "We should get a more accurate date around 3 months before the actual auction is supposed to start."

"Hmm, then we have plenty of time," Alex said.

"General Fan also says that we should go there before the auction. At least 2 months before," she said.

"What for?" Alex asked.

"Apparently it is a good idea to visit the Golden Mountain range and mine for gold there before the auction," Elder Liang said. "If we want to do it afterward, there would be way too many people there and that would be problematic."

"Hmm, I'll have to see if that works," Alex said. "I don't really want to rush into things one after another. I want to rest a little too."

"Of course," Yao Ning said. "We have many years to go to the Golden mountain if we miss this chance."

Alex nodded.

"Anything new happened while I was in there?" Alex asked. "Anything I should be aware of?"

"Hmm, nothing massive, I suppose?" elder Liang said.

"I think the most important thing that has happened in the last year or so is the significant rise in voices of the players that want to be sent back home," elder Yao said.

"Oh, the players want to return back home, do they?" Alex asked. "Not bad. It seems sister Hao's actions are showing quite the fruit."

"It is," elder Yao said. "And since most of the players are of such high talent, they can't even be ignored."

"So, what's going on with them then?" Alex asked.

"They are being told to wait," the elder said. "The Emperor is in closed cultivation, so they have no choice but to wait for him to come out before their voices can be heard."

"The Emperor is still in closed cultivation huh?" Alex said softly. "I wonder what he is actually trying to do. Surely he isn't cultivating as he has already reached the peak of what is possible. So he must be trying to judge the many pill recipes I gave him and is trying to find what it is that makes them so good."

The two elders said nothing.

"Okay, you two may leave," Alex said. "I will rest for a while, and tomorrow morning, we will leave."

"Where are we going to next, your Majesty?" Yao Ning asked.

"We're going back to the Dragon Capital for now. As for where after that, I'll have to think a little," he said.

The elders nodded and left the room, leaving Alex alone with his thoughts on what he was going to do in the future.

After thinking for a while, Alex realized that he couldn't make much plans as he wasn't aware of the opening time for the various competitions and secret realms, which was a very integral part of his adventure.

He definitely needed to learn more about them before making the future plans. However, he still knew what the most important part of next journey was going to have to be.

He remembered the white haired young girl that laid in the bed with ice around her. Thinking about her, his heart sank a little as he remembered that feeling.

"They never contacted me," Alex thought. "So that must mean that she has healed and is well. I will have to go visit her as soon as I can."

As for how much later the 'soon' was going to be, he would have to find out later.

Alex started cultivating afterward and the next morning, he left the hotel to return back to the Dragon Capital.

This time around, they directly teleported instead of flying to the Dragon Capital. It wasn't that Alex didn't want to fly back there, as he would be more than happy to see the land here and enjoy the scenery.

Instead, he was actually not allowed to fly through there. If he wanted to fly back, he would have to go take a detour to move around the location that they would come across if they went straight.

The Azure Dragon's Realm.

Alex was more than willing to visit the realm if he was allowed to. No, he HAD to visit it if he was allowed to. However, given that there were so many soldiers that constantly roamed the area, it was impossible for him to visit there.

"I will have to find another way then," he thought.

The long way around took way too long, so instead Alex decided to teleport back to the Dragon Capital.

After teleporting back to the Dragon Capital, Alex was reminded of just how dense and well maintained this city was.

He had teleported back to the same teleoprtatin house where he had first arrived over 3 years ago, and just like that time, there was a carriage waiting to take him and the elders to the Dragon Capital.

Alex and the others got into the carriage and made their way to the Dragon Palace.

Chapter 1442 Spirit Pill

Alex and the elders rested for a while after returning to the Dragon Palace.

Neither the Emperor nor the Crown Prince were there to welcome him back, and instead, it was the Emperor's servants that did so.

Alex somehow found it better that way since he didn't have to deal with the emperor or the crown prince and could instead do what he wanted to.

Late afternoon, he left the Dragon Palace and made his way toward the Royal School of Alchemy. It had been over 2 years since he had met up with these people, so it was more than important for him to see these people.

When the group of Alchemists found out that their King had returned, they were more than excited.

Every single one of the alchemists rushed out to greet him and Alex was happy to see them all as well.

Jai Heiyun was cultivating fine and had reached a high enough rank with her cultivation base. The rest were slowly coming along as well.

"I'm happy to see that you're all doing quite fine," Alex said. "How's your alchemy?"

"Our alchemy has been coming along well as well, your Majesty," Jai Heiyun said.

"Oh, good, good," Alex said. "What's the highest pill you've managed to make?"

"The best I've managed is 93%, your majesty," Jai Heiyun said. "But it was a fluke. My average high pill is around 85% these days."

"Not bad," Alex said. "You are all lacking a few skills that are keeping you down. Once you find those skills and perfect them, you will see explosive growth in your alchemy. How well is the pill-splitting Qi coming along for you all?"

Jai Heiyun gave a nervous smile. "Your majesty, that technique is truly impossible to master. I've tried so many times and yet I keep failing each time."

"Keep trying, and take it slow," Alex said. "Understand each pathway it is supposed to take by heart and that should be enough. I had an easier time with it because of certain reasons, so I won't say you are doing anything bad."

Jai Heiyun nodded.

After talking to the alchemists for a while, most of them left with only Hao Ya remaining behind.

"Sister Hao, I hear your work is going well," Alex said.

"Better than expected, honestly," Hao Ya said. "I don't know how long until the Emperor leaves his closed cultivation. Do you know when he will be coming out?"

"I can't say for certain, but it will be within the next 3 years," Alex said. "He will have to come out if he wants to learn about the mushrooms."

"The mushrooms?" Hao Ya asked.

"I'm planning on teaching him about the World Defying Mushrooms as my next offer for our trade," Alex said. "He will want to come out for that."

"Okay, so he will have to come out soon," Hao Ya said. "I will continue doing what I'm doing."

Alex nodded. "Try not to get caught," he said.

"Don't worry. Even if I get caught, I have many ways of escaping. Master made sure at the very least that I won't die here," Hao Ya said.

Alex sighed remembering that he didn't have something of that sort. Not anymore.

After talking to Hao Ya for a bit longer, Alex sent her back and left the area. This was only where the people from the Southern Continent were allowed to stay, so he wouldn't find what he wanted here.

After walking for a while, he arrived in front of a dorm and pulled out a talisman. He used the talisman for a few seconds, and within 3 seconds, someone came running out of the dorm.

"Your majesty," the young man said when he saw him. "You're finally here. I've been waiting for you for so long."

"Wu Shun," Alex spoke, looking at his robe. "Level 5, huh? Not bad."

"Right?" Wu Shun said. "I think I can reach Level 6 in just a month or two."

Alex smiled. "So, how's life? Have my alchemists treated you well?" he asked.

"Yes, they are wonderful. Sister Jai treats me like one of her own and is teaching me to the best of her abilities," the young man said.

"I'm happy to hear that," Alex said. "I will remain in the Dragon Capital for a week or two. In this time, I plan on holding up my end of the trade in these two weeks."

"I'm going to teach you everything you need to learn to reach the same level as the Dragon Emperor."

Wu Shun's eyes widened in glee as the time had come for what he had been waiting for since over a year and a half ago.

"Do you want my book nowe or later?" he asked in excitement.

"I am fine with either," Alex said. "As long as i—"

"Here!" the young man held up the precious book full of recipes.

Alex smiled and took it. He flipped through the book once to get an idea of what it had. His eyes shined when he realized what an amazing thing he had got his hands on.

"Rest well for today. We will start your lessons tomorrow," Alex said, and soon after left the school.

He went back to the Swan courtyard as quickly as he could and entered his room to privately view the book he had been given.

He opened the book again, this time slowly as he wanted to view it all. The first half of the book was nothing impressive at all.

It was full of recipes for Common and True rank pills, all of which were either useless to Alex or already had an alternative. Even if there weren't, he was already knowledgeable enough to create a pill with the same effects if he wanted to.

Doing the same thing out of Saint ranked pills would be a little more difficult, so he instead he read through the portion that wrote about the Saint ranked pill recipes.

The fun began for Alex when he viewed Immortal ranked pill recipes. There weren't much, just 7 of them, but each one was a useful one.

There were 2 healing pills, one for body, another for soul. There was one antidote pill for body. One pill to speed up cultivation, and another to help breakthrough in every realm in the Immortal realm.

The last 2 were quite the unique ones.

One of them was simply called the Spirit Pill. It enhanced the users Spiritual energy as well as improved his replenishment rate. Eating one before a battle would help one survive quite a lot, especially against cultivators with strong Spiritual energy.

Not only that, if you had strong Spiritual energy yourself, it would give you quite the edge as well.

Alex was quite excited after reading about this pill not because of the pill itself, but because of its effect. Now that he had the recipe, he could most likely downgrade the pill to create a Saint version of it.

With that, he could have another way to improve his battle strength in an instant.

Alex happily read through the pill's recipe and ingredients and took it to heart. Then, he flipped the page and started looking at the next pill recipe.

Chapter 1443 A Few Pill Recipes

Flipping the page, Alex saw the final Immortal pill recipe, one which was more unique than the last one.

It was a pill named Ten Thousand Earth pill. Once eaten, it gave the cultivator an imaginary weight of tens of thousands of tons. It didn't improve their defense much, but it improved their offensive strength by a lot, especially one's body cultivation.

Alex was quite surprised to see that there was something that could affect one's weight without actually affecting the person's real weight. He read through the recipe for a while before stopping.

The ingredients involved in it were ones that he had no idea about as well, just like the last one, so he wondered if he could even get to downgrading this in just a few years.

And if it took time, which one was better in his mind?

After thinking for a bit, he came to the conclusion that the first one was just that much better. Having a strong spirit that replenished just as quickly was definitely one of the more important aspects of the previous pill that was useful.

After looking at the two pills, he flipped the page, moving on to the Divine Ranked pills.

The higher rank one went, the more abstract a pill became. At the Divine rank, Alex didn't even know just what sort of pill one could get.

He was more than excited and looked at the descriptions of the first pill.

The first pill was a healing pill, which disappointed him a little. He wanted more than just healing pills. He wanted something that did much more, but this was all he was going to get for now.

The next pill was called the Spirit Creation pill. This was a little more unique for sure... but he had no idea what it did.

"Aids a cultivator in turning a Spirit into a Creation? What does that mean?" Alex thought for a second.

Creation... he knew this word. Remembering the idol that help the Death aura in the Broken Ravine sect, he knew a Creation was something a Divine realm cultivator could form.

"Then the spirit must be something similar too," he thought. If only the others would tell him what the Immortal and Divine realms were without the fear of overwhelming him and making him fear the future.

He sighed and read the next pill in the book which was the last of the Divine pills that was written.

"Divine True Fire pill?" his eyes narrowed a bit. "It grants a person the ability to use True Fire Dao for a certain period of time. Wait what?"

Alex read it once more to make sure he didn't read it wrong. "Huh? You can have pills that give you access to Dao?" he thought. Upon further consideration, he came to the conclusion that it was most likely not a Dao pill.

It was definitely something that used one's own Qi as a substitute for Qi that was provided by heaven, but that was already true for locations where Qi didn't exist.

He read that it left a person's meridian unusable due to the extreme Fire that it would create, but it was something that could be easily healed after a few months of cultivating.

This pill could be used either in combat or in production. Given how many uses True Fire dao had, more than enough people would make good use of it.

"Amazing," Alex couldn't help but say. He had no use for this pill, but just the fact that a pill of this sort existed meant that the possibilities for other Dao pills were there as well.

As long as he could have the talent for it, he could use any and all Dao without actually ever learning the Dao itself.

"Surely learning a Dao is better," Alex thought for a moment before his eyes narrowed. He read the talisman once more and his eyes widened once more with shock.

The pill's description had nothing about it requiring people to have Fire Meridian to be able to use the True Fire. Which meant that it most definitely made one's meridians capable of using Fire Qi.

Given that it also didn't mention the lack of ability to use neutral Qi, the Meridian was most definitely capable of using both Qi at once.

"Damn!" he couldn't help but say.

This was definitely one of the best pills she had read about until now.

Alex was a little sad that he had absolutely no way to downgrade this pill as the intent in his mind still held tightly onto Divine Ranked ingredients.

He recognized the names and what they looked like, but any more than that he would have to fight the Intent in his mind to access them, and he didn't want to do that.

He flipped the page and was surprised to see the end of Divine Pills. Instead, there was a single pill recipe on the last page of the book.

And it was a Celestial-ranked pill.

There was a single pill there, but given that it was a Celestial Ranked pill, it was most likely one of the strongest pill he had ever learned about.

Alex breathed in and out slowly, calming himself before laying his eyes on the name of the Celestial pill.

Celestial Tribulation Pill.

"Cultivators can eat this pill to manually trigger a... tribulation? What?" Alex couldn't help but be confused the moment he saw that. "Trigger a tribuation on your own? Why?"

He continued reading. "The tribulation triggered will be the next Immortality Tribulation one is supposed to face. You can face as many as you want, and in exchange, those tribulations will never arrive."

"The next tribulation after that will come at it expected period."

Alex thought for a bit. This was something he had learned about from Scarlet over a decade and a half ago.

When a person became an immortal, they needed to pay a toll to the heavens to remain an immortal. That toll was the tribulation lightning that they had to suffer from.

Every time you won against the tribulation lightning, it would return 10 millennias later stronger than before. If one remained complacent and didn't strive for a higher realm, the lightning tribulation would kill them the next time.

It wasn't as big of a problem as Alex initially thought, but that was only for the talented people who could breakthrough to higher realm with ease.

The weaker ones that barely broke through to the Immortal realm would most likely die in a few tribulation as breaking through in the Immortal realms was a difficult task for ones that struggled throuhg the Saint realms.

"So, if you are strong, and don't want to be bothered by the lightning every 10 thousand years, you eat this pill and be done with it in advance?" Alex thought.

Finally, it made some sense. "That must be it," he thought. "What a unique pill."

He looked at the recipe for that pill and memorized. It was so far away in his future that there was simply no point in trying to understand it just yet.

He would do so when the time came for him to do so. Until then, learning about it was enough.

Chapter 1444 Working Hard

Alex spent the next two weeks teaching Wu Shun about Alchemy. When he didn't do that, he spent his time on the Wood Spiritual pill that he had wanted to make for such a long time.

When he found himself at a block, he shifted his focus to the Spirit pill and tried to downgrade the ingredients.

This downgrade was the hardest downgrade Alex had to do until now. The most important part about downgrading was understanding an ingredient from the inside out and trying to find a lower version of it that did the same thing.

However, as there was no Immortal Ranked ingredient, it was a difficult task for him. Taking the knowledge about the pill from his memory was not the easiest way for him to improve it.

It was the difference between memorizing an answer for the test and understanding the context behind the question to naturally write an answer. One needed far less effort than the other one.

However, if you bothered to put in any effort, it paid off well when the questions were made to trick you.

Fortunately, of the pill's ingredients, 6 out of the 10 ingredients have Saint Ranked ingredients and thus could be either ignored or easily downgraded to True Ranked ingredients.

Comparing that to the Ten Thousand Earths pill which had 6 Immortal ranked ingredients, this was much better.

Alex became so busy with everything that he didn't even realize when the 2 weeks were over and he had finished teaching Wu Shun everything that he needed to know for now.

Wu Shun's understanding of Alchemy had improved to the point that if he took the test, he could easily pass Level 6. If he studied a bit more about the ingredients and experimented a lot with various pills, he could even reach Level 7 in a year or two.

"Thank you, your Majesty," the young man bowed when the final lesson was over. "Thank you for believing in me and teaching me so much about Alchemy."

"It was trade between the two of us. You do not have to thank me for something you paid to learn," Alex said.

"No, I must thank you," the young man said. "You have no idea how long I've struggled to become a decent alchemist, and now my dreams will come true. Please accept my gratitude," the young man said.

Alex smiled and patted him. "Do your best from now on. You are a member of my Southern Continent," he said and walked away.

Alex went to meet up with the other alchemists as well as Hao Ya before finally returning back to the palace to rest for the day.

Now that he was done with external matters, it was time to focus entirely on the Wood pill and also the downgrade.

For the next month and a half, Alex did nothing but focus his entire time on those two tasks alone.

He had already learned about the many wood ingredients since his time in the Hundred Blossom Valley. Now that he had practical knowledge of so many ingredients, all he did now was a mental simulation of how the various ingredients would react when used together in certain ways.

Alex also focused on some practical knowledge, but more than not he stuck to metal simulation.

Given how many wood ingredients there were, even hundreds of thousands or even millions of simulations wouldn't be enough at all.

It was truly going to take him such a long time.

In contrast, he was done with the 6 saint ingredients in the Spirit pill, which he wasn't sure yet was necessary to be downgraded or not.

He would have to do a few tests with those ingredients once he was done with downgrading the Immortal ingredient. That was what took more time than not.

After the month and a half he spent working on it, Alex was notified of something by his elders.

The time for the next Golden auction had been set. Which meant it was going to take place exactly 3 months later.

"So I have a month to go there, huh?" Alex asked. If he wanted to visit the Golden Mountain range, that was what he needed to do.

"Still there is a month," he thought. "And I'm getting nowhere with this."

There were only so many months he could spend in the Eastern Continent before it was time for him to go back to the Southern Continent.

Surely he couldn't spend it all holed up in this room. "I will have time for that later in the Southern Continent," Alex thought. "For now, I need to do what I can about everything else."

Deciding so, he finally left his room.

He met up with his elders and let them know that he was planning to leave.

"But your majesty, there is still a month before we need to go to the Gold Kingdom," Elder Liang said. "Do you wish to visit it this early?"

"We're not going to the Gold Kingdom," Alex said. Although he wanted to visit the Ice Mist Palace, he couldn't do so as well.

Instead, he wanted to go to a place that he had heard such high praises about.

"We're going to the Azure Kingdom's capital next," Alex said. "The Blueheart City."

Within a day, all the preparations that were necessary were made and Alex got ready to leave. The King on the other side was notified as well, and once again, Alex flew away from the Dragon Capital, making his way toward another Kingdom.

Unlike the Emerald Kingdom, the Azure Kingdom was nearby.

Technically, he was already inside the Azure Kingdom, but the Dragon Capital didn't count in its jurisdiction as it was its own thing, same for the Azure Dragon's realm.

They flew through the Azure Kingdom itself, viewing the many cities and forests as well as the beautiful rivers that were on the way.

It took them only 5 hours in total to fly to Blueheart city, and that was with taking their time.

The distance was nearly 3 times as small as the distance to the Greenheart city of the Emerald Kingdom, so it was why it all felt so relatively quick.

"General Fan, are all the kingdom capitals renamed?" Alex asked curiously. He had learned a few things about the Kingdoms, but they didn't mention anything about the names of the capitals.

Or if it did, he missed it.

"Yes, your majesty," the general said. "After the previous kings and queens were executed, to make the new kingdom be neutral, it was all renamed to neutral names."

"Each of the Kingdom was given a color to represent it and the same went for the capital."

Alex nodded. "So the Goldheart city of the Golden Kingdom wasn't a fluke either."

"Yes," the General said. "Neither is the Darkheart city of the Ebony kingdom, the Snowheart city of the Ivory kingdom, or the Silverheart city of the Silver Kingdom."

Alex nodded. "That's good to learn," he said.

He was really surprised at how thoroughly the previous kings and queens had their names wiped from history.

'They must've really offended the Emperor with their plan to overthrow him,' Alex thought. 'Just in case he is involved in the events with Pearl's mother, I will need to be extra careful around him."

Chapter 1445 Blueheart City

"Your Majesty, welcome to this one's humble kingdom," Long Weiyuan, the King of the Azure Kingdom spoke happily after seeing Alex and the rest arrived in the Blueheart city.

"King Weiyuan," Alex spoke. "It's been a while."

"It has indeed, your majesty," the king said. "How have you been?"

The thin man with silky black hair was full of smiles when meeting Alex again. He somehow looked both young and old at the same time.

It was as if he was an old man that was forcing himself to remain youthful using external means.

Alex knew that the 5 kings from the other kingdoms were killed and replaced. He wondered what the situation was with the king of the Azure Kingdom.

He hadn't read about it planning on going through a coup, so he assumed it was all the same from the very start. Except the name of the capital city changing to one that suited the changes that took place over 4 thousand years ago, he didn't expect anything else to have changed here.

Long Weiyuan was the son of the son of the sister of the Dragon Emperor before the current one. His mother was a direct cousin to the current Dragon Emperor and thus he had managed to find himself a throne in this kingdom.

The group got into a carriage and started making their way to the palace of the Azure King.

"What brought you here, your majesty?" Long Weiyuan asked. "I was quite surprised to hear that you would be coming."

"Can I not come?" Alex asked jokingly.

"You know that is not what I mean, your Majesty," the king said. "With the Gold Auction so close, I had assumed you wuld go there before coming here."

"That was my first thought as well," Alex said. "I had no intention of coming here at all, not this soon. But, when I thought about it more practically, I realized that I was going to be wasting my time in the Gold Kingdom if I went there this early."

"I didn't want to spend my time visiting random cities when I was just back from doing the same, so I wanted to do something more productive," Alex said. "And the closest location where I could be productive was here."

"I see," the King said. "Your highness much wish to enter the Boundless Enlightenment Domain."

Alex nodded. "That is what I wanted to do. I'm not sure how useful a month in there would be, but at least I would be using my time for something productive."

"Certainly," the King said. "The Enlightenment domain isn't really about the time you spend in there, so a month should be enough time for you to learn for there."

"I know that it depends on how well I understand what I view in there," Alex smiled. "It's just that I intend to view a lot of different things."

"I would suggest against that," the king said. "At least don't view all one after another. Its better to stick to one until you make some progress before moving to the next one."

"Of course," Alex said.

"Still, you will be spending a month in there," the king said. "I don't know if your Majesty is aware of this or not, but the Boundless Enlightenment Realm is very expensive ot go in and out, so most people only enter for a few days at most as it eats up a fortune."

"Not for me, right?" Alex smiled.

"Of course not," the King laughed along with the others.

They started talking about various things as Alex looked around at the city. It seemed people weren't aware of his arrival just yet, so the newsboard said nothing at all.

Instead, the news boards were full of news about the Golden Auction as it was being advertised a lot. It was relatively new news, so it was being spread as much as possible.

As they talked, the king suddenly stopped and pointed. "Look your majesty, that is the gem of our kingdom," he said.

Alex turned back and saw a massive sea-sized sapphire lake in the distance that glittered with the golden light of the morning.

"Is that..."

"The Azure Lake," the king said with a reverent look. "That is the lake that was created by the first Azure Dragon using secret treasures from the Immortal realm."

"If you ever feel your heart growing uneasy, I suggest you visit the lake, your Majesty. I'm certain the serene atmosphere will help you a lot," the king said.

"Is that so?" Alex said, looking at the Azure Lake from afar. "I will have to remember that then."

A few houses quickly passed by and blocked the view. The road winded away from that location and the lake was no longer viewable from where they were.

Since the lake was gone, their conversation went back to normal.

"Are you by chance married?" Alex asked the king.

"I am married," the king said. "Although I do not know if you will be able to meet the queen. She is in closed cultivation, and will be there for a few months."

"I see," Alex said as a thought grew in his head. "Do you have children then?"

"No," the king said.

Alex's eyes widened. "Are you perhaps not allowed to have children as well?" he asked. "Like the other kings?"

"Oh, no no, I have no such obligations," the king said. "I just feel like I am young. I do not wish to have children just yet. Maybe in a few centuries."

"I see," Alex said. 'So, it must just be the other kings that have this obligation. This king probably didn't have to give up on things like the other ones.'

He recognized the situation and stopped asking questions about it any further and started speaking about his own experience in the other kingdom.

"Oh, you went to the Beast Paradise? I hear they accept no humans anymore," the King said.

"I went with the Crown Prince and stayed there for 3 quarters of a year before returning two months ago," Alex said.

"Oh wait, the Crown Prince did mention that. I am stupid and forgot," the King said.

"Oh, has the Crown Prince been here? Last I heard, he was busy with some military stuff in the Ebony kingdom," Alex said.

"Yes, he came here about a year ago and mentioned it," the King said. "It was information in passing, so I didn't really think much of it at the time."

"I see," Alex said. 'The Crown Prince visits this place, huh?'

The carriage went on to a more sparse section of the city as it got closer to the Palace.

When they arrived at the palace, Alex noticed the Azure Dragon imagery that was used there as well. He walked through the gate with the King and made his way into the palace.

Just as he was entering, a woman came out from the palace, seemingly in a hurry.

She stopped when she saw Alex and the others. It took her a moment to recognize Alex before she quickly bowed.

"King Alex," she spoke with a hint of surprise in her voice. "My sincere greetings."

Alex smiled. "I did not expect to see you here at all, lady Zhan."

Chapter 1446 A Cup of Tea

Zhan Luoyang, daughter of the Zhan Family of the Ebony Kingdom, was the fiancee of the Crown Prince. If nothing went wrong, she was to be the next Empress of the entire Continent.

There was not a single person in the continent that wouldn't be polite to her, and the same went for Alex.

"My apologies. Had I known that you were coming, I might have left with the Azure King to welcome you," she said.

"Ah, that was my mistake. I apologize," the king said quickly. "Lady Zhan has been in somewhat of a closed cultivation these days, so I didn't think to bring her along."

"It's alright," Alex said. "I would be fine even if no one came to welcome me."

He looked at the woman in front of him once again and noticed something. "You seem to be in a hurry to go somewhere, lady Zhan. I hope I'm not stopping anything urgent."

"No, no," the woman said. "I was just on my way to the secret realm to gain some inspiration. I feel like I'm close to a breakthrough on something, but it seems hard to do so right now."

"Ah, I see," Alex said. "Please go ahead then. We can catch up on some other time."

Lady Zhan nodded. "Thank you, King Alex," she said. "If you are free, we can talk tomorrow morning."

"Sure," Alex said. "I shall make some time for you."

The woman nodded and bowed before leaving in a hurry.

"I should have mentioned to her that you were coming, but it all happened so quickly and..."

Alex chuckled a bit. "As I said, I don't mind," he said. "It was partially my fault that I didn't notify you about my arrival a few days in advance as well. Let us go in."

After they walked in, the King introduced Alex to a few more people before bringing him to a hall to talk about various things and continue their conversation from before.

"Is there any particular reason that you want to enter the Enlightenment realm, your majesty?" the king asked.

"None in particular at the moment, as I mentioned earlier," Alex said. "If anything I'm more so trying to find if I can get inspired to try to reach enlightenment in something."

"Reaching enlightenment just because you want to isn't that easy, but the treasures in the Enlightenment realm do help quite a lot," the king said. "I myself learned my first dao on a chance in the domain when I visited there for something else."

"I wanted to learn the Dao of water, but to my surprise, I gravitated toward the dao of Mist. Having spent my youth around the Azure Lake's mist, it came so naturally to me," the king said. "I will pray that your majesty has a similar experience as well."

Alex thanked the man but said nothing else. They talked for a while before Ning and the elders were led to their rooms that were inside the palace.

After finally getting some privacy, he rested for a bit. He called out Pearl and Whisker a bit after that and started cultivating.

After a night full of cultivation, he woke up in the morning to the call of his elders.

He walked out and found Elder Yao in front of his room. "We had a message from Lady Zhan that she will be waiting for you in the Garden. If you don't wish to see her, we can send a message."

"No," Alex said quickly. "I will go meet her right away."

Alex left the room and went to the palace garden where the morning sun was just shining its rays through the misty sky that surrounded them.

He was greeted with the sight of a large area full of flowers and various plants with birds and butterflies that covered it completely. In the center was an open space with a small stone platform with a roof for shading.

Lady Zhan sat on a chair as she drank from a cup that was sitting on the table next to her.

She turned around when she saw Alex walk out of the palace and smiled. "Your majesty, you accepted my request," she said.

"Good morning, lady Zhan," Alex spoke. "How could I not accept your request? You could say that I have been looking forward to this ever since you mentioned it yesterday."

The woman smiled, not taking it to heart. "It is a beautiful day isn't it?" she asked.

"It indeed is," Alex said. "Although, it is a bit too misty for my liking."

"Yes, but it does create a bit of a unique atmosphere. You will find it hard to find this sort of atmosphere in many places in the continent," she said.

Alex looked around. "I don't doubt you on that," he said.

The mists covered more of the sky than the group and had a bluish hue to them that wasn't all that natural at all. When the golden sunlight peered through them, they contrasted each other, truly creating quite the mood.

"You were in quite the urgency yesterday. I hope you dealt with whatever it was that caused the urgency," Alex said.

"I dealt with the urgency, although it will take me some time to deal with the source of the urgency itself," she said. "Tea?"

Alex look at the teapot and cup sitting on the table and nodded.

The woman swiped her hand, and Alex felt the dao of heat move around her fingers, heating up the teapot in an instant.

She then poured the steaming tea onto the cup and pushed it toward Alex. "It's my own brew that I perfected in the last few centuries. I hope you like it," she said.

Alex took a cup of tea and took a sip. Immediately, he tasted something so mystical and magical that he had never really tasted anywhere in all of his life.

Even the refreshments he received in the Dragon Palace could not compare to the cup of tea he drank right here.

"You must have spent over millennia perfecting this cup of tea," Alex said. "I have never tasted something so divine in my life."

"That is the highest compliment I could have received for my tea, your majesty," she said. "Thank you for your kind words."

"It's the truth," Alex said.

leave for the Gold Kingdom."

"Ah, will you be participating in just the Auction? Or will you be He took a sip of the tea again and looked around.

"What brings you to the Azure Kingdom, your majesty?" Lady Zhan asked.

"I'm here to visit the Boundless Enlightenment domain," he said. "See if I can learn something in the time I have before I need to leave for the Gold Kingdom."

"Ah, will you be participating in just the Auction? Or will you be there for the other two events as well?" she asked.

"Other two?" Alex asked with a confused look. "Isn't it just the gold mining? What other event is there?"

"Oh, does your majesty not know?" Lady Zhan said. "About 6 months after the auction is over, the secret realm there will open up, allowing you to enter it."

"Secret realm?" Alex was a little surprised. "Ah! Are you saying that the Realm of Trials will open up in around 9 months' time?"

Chapter 1447 Specific Pills

Realm of Trials, also sometimes known as the Production Trials, was another one of the 5 secret realms that the first Azure Dragon and his son, the Dragon Emperor had created for the saints of this realm

It was a realm where one went to test their production skills through various tests and trials to see how good they were.

Alex had been planning to go there to see how good his Alchemy skills were and to improve his other skills if he could.

"Thank you for letting me know," Alex said. "I can prepare better for my future with this knowledge."

"Your majesty must be looking forward to it then," Lady Zhan said.

"Of course. Are you not looking forward to it, lady Zhan?" Alex asked. "It sounds like something you would be excited about as you are an alchemist as well."

"I have entered that place since I was a child," Zhan Luoyang smiled as she said so. "I no longer have much use in going to those secret realms. Instead, I can focus on my current task better and not have to spend it in there."

"I see," Alex said. "What is your current task, if I may ask?"

Lady Zhan hesitated a bit before saying it out loud. "I'm trying to come up with a new pill and for that, I have to spend my time researching and trying to understand more about pills in general. I've been spending my time trying to gain some enlightenment in that regard, but it hasn't been of much help yet."

"I will have to spend a while trying to do so," she said.

"Ah!" Alex said. "You're trying to create a new pill, huh? That is somehow both easy and hard at the same time."

Lady Zhan nodded. "It is," she said. "Creating a random pill is not that hard. In fact, as long as you even understand in the least how pills work, you can create any random pill."

"But the moment you need it to do something specific, it becomes incredibly difficult," she said with a sigh. "Of course, your majesty probably doesn't have that sort of problem. You created that Water pill during the showcase in just 10 days."

Alex chuckled. "I may not look like it, but I too struggle with making pills," he said. "It's quite hard having a make a pill that does something specific."

"I'm trying to make one currently, and it's been over a year and a half and yet I feel like I'm going nowhere," Alex said. "I swear it is going to take me decades to create it at this rate."

"Oh!" Zhan Luoyang was a bit surprised. "You struggle with pills too, your majesty? I assumed you would be good enough to make any sort of pill that you wanted to."

"That is not the case," Alex said.

"What sort of pill are you trying to make anyway that is so hard to make?" the girl asked curiously.

Alex didn't hold back at all and told her exactly what he was doing. "I'm trying to make a pill that can improve the Wood Spiritual root of any person by a decent level," he said.

Zhan Luoyang stared with wide eyes for a moment. "Improve one's spiritual root?" she asked.

"Wood spiritual root," Alex said.

"Is it like the one you made in the showcase?" she asked. "How long will this one probably last?"

"Last?" Alex chuckled. "It will last forever. I'm trying to make a pill that can permanently turn even the worst spiritual root into a superior Wood Spiritual root. And that is taking a lot out of me."

"Wow!" the girl couldn't help but give a look of awe. "Making permanent improvements to your spiritual root... I wasn't even aware that was possible with Saint pills."

"It is," Alex said. "Of course, as I mentioned, this is going to take me a very long time before I get anywhere."

"Still, a long time to you is probably nothing to the rest of us," she said. "I hope I can make my pill that quickly as well."

Alex thought for a moment. "Now that I think about it, the crown prince went to the Beast paradise for you, didn't he? He brought you back the 6-Eyed deer's bone marrow?" he asked.

"Ah yes, his highness brought the bone marrow to me a year ago," she said.

"And you used it for the pill you are trying to make?" he asked her.

"Not yet," she said. "I'm still trying to figure out if I'm on the right track. There is only so much of the bone marrow that I can use before I run out of it."

"I remember hearing that you were trying to make some sort of healing pill, is that true?" Alex asked.

"Uhhh... not entirely correct, but that is the gist of the pill I'm trying to make," she said.

"Oh. What sort of pill is it, if you don't mind me asking," Alex said.

"Well, I'm trying to make a pill that is more of a hybrid of two types that one might be dealing with and heal their body at the same time."

of pills," she said. "I want my pills to both deal with poison or toxins that one might be dealing with and heal their body at the same time."

"Oh, so instead of having to use two pills, you can only use one?" Alex asked.

"Something like that, yes," the girl said. "But of course, I'm struggling with it a lot."

"Hmm, do you want my help?" Alex offered. He doubted she was going to take up on his offer to help.

After all, this was her test to create a pill on her own to reach Level 10 and wasn't going to let the possibility of someone else helping her to reach that level exist at all.

So, when Zhan Luoyang accepted his offer, Alex was more than surprised.

"Will you help me?" she asked excitedly.

"Uhh, yes," Alex said. "I meant what I said. I didn't expect you to accept my help though."

"I feel like I'm forced to," she said.

"Won't it cause problems with your level 10 test if I help you?" Alex asked.

"It doesn't matter. I will make some simple pills for that. I don't want to be stuck with this pill when it could be of so much help to the average person."

Alex smiled. "You are very kind, lady Zhan," he said. "Please, tell me how I can help you."

The girl brought out a talisman and started explaining what and how she was going about making this new pill.

Alex looked at the list of ingredients and asked, "Do you have any specific effect in mind? Or just a normal pill that does both healing and curing poison at once?"

"Hmm," the girl thought for a bit. "I would like it to remove the poison first and then heal and then once again try and do both at the same time if the problems still persists."

"That's... a lot of requirements for a single pill," Alex said. "That makes it quite the challenge. I do love a good challenge."

Alex looked at the list of ingredients for a few seconds and started coming up with changes that could hopefully send the research further in the direction of successfully creating a pill as Lady Zhan desired.

Chapter 1448 Onward to Enlightenment

"I see you are using the 3-leaved Glorious Vine roots for their properties of healing, but might I suggest using the 2-leaved Glorious Vine roots so that the intense Wood energy in it doesn't affect the Heavenly Fire Basil seeds," Alex said.

"I did think of that," Lady Zhan said. "But when I tried it, the energy in the 2-Leaved Glorious Vine roots is too weak to be of any effect. Unfortunately, I need every bit of strong energy I can."

"Hmm..." Alex gave it some thought. "Then it might be better to take out the 3-leaved Glorious Vine roots entirely."

"Take it out?" the girl said with a frown on her face. "But then we'll have to replace it with something that is similar to it and doesn't affect the Heavenly Fire Basil's seeds."

"I've been practicing with Wood ingredients for the past 2 years now, so I know enough about it right now to suggest you two ingredients," Alex said. "We can either use the Jade Gale Orchid's flower petals, or we can use the Emerald Spider Lily's stamens."

"Both have incredible healing energy, but they are mild enough that it won't affect the Basil seeds," Alex said.

"Jade Gale Orchid's flower petals?" Lady Zhan thought for a bit and brought out a flower petal from her storage bag and looked at it. She recalled everything she knew about that flower and nodded.

"You're right. They are quite similar," she said. "I'll have to check if it's energy is mild enough to work or not later one."

"Check the Emerald Spider Lily's stamen too," Alex said.

"I don't have them on me, so I'll have to go find the later on," she said.

"Here," Alex brought out a small wooden box. "I have some that I can give you. I've already come to the conclusion that I won't be needing this for a while, so you can use it."

"Ah, you don't have to give me anything, your majesty. I can go get it from the shops around here," she said quickly.

"I know you can," Alex said. "But that will cost you some precious time, and I have no use for it, just take it."

Lady Zhan nodded in the end and accepted it. She stored away both the ingredients and went back to talking about the pill recipe with Alex.

After talking to Lady Zhan, Alex had come to understand a few things about her.

First, it wasn't a fluke that she was a Level 9 alchemy master at all. Her knowledge of alchemy and her drive to learn more was perhaps the best of anyone else he had seen.

She was maybe even more driven in learning about alchemy, not for the sake of herself, but just to learn about it than even the likes of the Dragon Emperor himself.

She perhaps loved Alchemy more than Alex too.

She had been practicing alchemy since she was a child and had the best of the best tutors brought to her when she was in her family. Ever since childhood, her thirst to learn about alchemy had blossomed and now it had fruit into the alchemist she currently was.

When she started talking about alchemy, it became hard to steer away the conversation in another direction. He barely managed to learn that she and the Crown Prince fell in love with each other when they had to work together to make some sort of pills in the past and ended up deciding to get engaged.

As for their marriage, they hadn't decided on it just yet. It was more so the Crown Prince who had yet to make a proper decision due to how busy his current life was.

Her age wasn't something Alex had managed to discern just yet either, but by the way she was talking and with her cultivation base being in the Saint Transformation realm, she was certainly 3 or 4 millennia old.

After talking to her about alchemy for a while, 6 hours had passed in an instant, surprising Alex.

"Thank you so much for all of your help, your majesty," the woman said before standing up to leave. "I will test out everything you suggested. Would you mind if we meet a week or so later to judge my progress and see if I need something else?"

"Of course," Alex said. "I will be at the Enlightenment domain for quite some time now, but you can contact me when I'm back."

"Thank you," the girl said before walking away.

Alex sat there and looked at the garden for a few minutes before he decided to leave as well.

The king walked out of the palace just as Alex was returning. "Have you enjoyed your time with lady Zhan, your majesty?" the king asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "It seems she was making a new pill and it was fun to talk about."

around."

"Ah, that is not needed," Alex said. "I will be going to the "I'm gald," the King said. "Have you planned on what you will be doing next? If not, I can take you to the Azure Lake to show you around."

"Ah, that is not needed," Alex said. "I will be going to the Enlightenment domain next. I can visit the lake at some other time."

"I see," the king said. He looked outside to judge the time and said. "Its already past 1 in the afternoon, so you might want to hurry up, your majesty."

"Hmm? Why is that?" Alex asked.

"The teleportation formation to the secret realm activates twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. The one in the morning was at 9, and the next one will be at 3 in the after noon."

"If you wish to enter, then you will have to be there beforehand," the king said.

"Ah, I see. I wasn't aware of such schedule," Alex said.

The king nodded. "To be honest, you actually have to register to enter at least a day in advance, but they will make exceptions for you. Will you be entering all alone or will your elders be going as well?" he asked.

"There's is no problem if my elders enter, is there?" Alex asked.

"No, no problem," the King said. "Let us go and register the three of you."

Alex nodded and left the palace after a few minutes.

Elder Liang and Elder Yao were quite excited about the prospect of finding answers to mysteries that they had peered through for a long time but had never gained any substantial information back.

arrived at the location of the secret realm, which was surprisingly two large formation platform with a lot of soldiers surrounding it.

They excitedly left the palace in a carriage along with many other individuals that were there just to guard them on their way.

After riding the carriage for what felt like 15 minutes, they finally arrived at the location of the secret realm, which was surprisingly two large formation platform with a lot of soldiers surrounding it.

At the center of the two platform was a small building with a long line of individuals waiting to get registered to entered the secret realm.

Alex sensed the space aura around him and quickly recognized that the secret realm was inside of that building.

A man from their group left and went toward the building.

"Let us wait here, your majesty," the king said. "The time to enter will come soon enough."

Chapter 1449 Boundless Enlightenment Domain

Alex stood atop the stone formation, surrounded by his two elders while many other people gathered around as well.

He looked around at the formation to count the number of people there, and soon enough the number exceeded over 2 thousand.

A few people had noticed him and recognized him even before he got onto the formation, so when he was finally there, there were a lot of people that gossiped about him.

Each of the people there wore a talisman on their person, including Alex and the rest, and it was what the secret realm inside judged to see if you were eligible to stay there any longer.

Most people bought the talismans with a few days of eligibility in them. Alex and his elders had the special ones that allowed for infinite eligibility.

Alex ignored the people that gossiped and instead focused his attention on the other formation platform that was as of yet completely empty. He had expected people to be filling that up as well.

However, after thinking for a while, he came to the conclusion that this was a receiving formation and the people that had to leave the secret realm would be coming through that platform instead.

It was similar to the teleportation formations that were set up in the Luminance empire that he had used so many decades ago.

The formation started lighting up and everyone perked up.

Alex let the teleportation formation gather around him and sooner than later, he was teleported to the other side.

When Alex arrived on the other side, he was in an outdoor space just like the place outside with people walking around them.

There were many people that were flying as well, but most of them were members of the military and were here to keep folks civil and have them follow the rules.

Alex and the Elders got off the platform and looked around at the weird realm.

The Boundless Enlightenment Domain was just as its name suggested, boundless. The secret realm was so large and so wide that Alex couldn't even see it all easily.

He probably could reach the edge with his spiritual sense, but he didn't try it.

The secret realm right from the start was separated into two sections from what Alex could see.

One-half of the region was all about the elements. The 5 natural elements, the 2 higher elements, and a few other different types of auras one that a person could want to learn about covered one-half of the realm.

That would contain every single Dao pertaining to the elements.

On the other side was a region that was created specifically for the rest of the different dao and knowledge.

Alex looked around for a bit and nodded. "You guys don't have to stick around me. Go and learn what you can. I will be fine," he said.

"We can't leave you alone," Elder Liangg said.

"Will you be following me around to the alchemy section then?" he asked her. "I might stay there for the entire month."

"Urgh! Fine. But remember to call us when it is time for you to leave," Elder Liang said.

They left to their own choice of section, and Alex was free to roam the sections he wanted to. He thought for a bit about what he wanted to visit first.

Gaining Dao on Yang and Yin would be amazing if he could do it, but he wasn't sure there would be enough knowledge on such important energy here.

Even if just to check, he decided to visit that section when he could.

The Fire section was useless for him. As for the Metal section, there were still quite a few things for him to learn so that was another place he wanted to visit.

"Ah, I should learn about Earth and Water too," Alex thought. He had learned the Dao of Earth a few years ago, so wanted to see if there was anything else he could learn from it aside from the simple Dao.

As for the Water Dao, since he had a superior Water spiritual root, there was no harm in trying to check if he could learn that Dao as well.

He intended on visiting the Wood section as well, but there was little expectation in his heart that he was going to learn absolutely anything from there. At the very least, he wouldn't learn anything from here unless he came up with the pill first.

He turned around toward the other region and sighed. 'Will I even have time to visit that side?' he wondered. With how little time he had here, he was certain that he would have to wait until after the Realm of Trials to go to that side.

After making his decision, he left for the Yang section of the Enlightenment domain.

There was a formation barrier set up around each and every single location to keep in the aura and stop it from degrading way too quickly. He had learned that the items inside of this domain were switched around every time the next Azure Dragon came around.

'This must be at the worst stage possible then,' Alex thought.

His first visit was to a small glowing yellow rock that gave off yang energy. He stopped by it for a second and looked at it before coming to realize that he was looking at a Yang Jade.

Unlike the Yang Jade that he was used to finding back in the deserts beyond the Forbidden Fields, this one wasn't made from yang-affected Spirit stones, and instead was a spirit vein that was partially consumed by Yang energy.

Taken away like this, it was pretty much the same thing now.

He felt the yang energy and sighed. It was just not strong at all. There wasn't much he could learn from it and as a result, he had to leave that place.

The next 3 items, of which 2 were paintings, were also unable to evoke any feelings in Alex that he already wasn't familiar with.

He walked over to the next location which was another painting. Alex looked at the painting and saw that the entire painting was all yellow, with no other colors present at all.

He was confused for a moment, but when he kept staring at it, he realized that the one massive yellow painting was actually a combination of many different shades of yellow, each barely distinct from the other one, but enough so that there was an actual image for one that could view it.

The image was of a simple man that sat cross-legged with a bright yellow sun in the sky.

Alex kept staring at it and started feeling slightly uncomfortable for a moment. He started feeling hot for some reason.

With the Dao of heat and a body that was from the god of Yang, he had rarely felt hot in a long time. And somehow the image in front of him was evoking that feeling.

He stuck to the image to see if he could learn what was happening, but unfortunately, he couldn't peer into the truth that was hidden in that painting.

After realizing that he couldn't learn anything, Alex was forced to walk away from the painting, but not before making a mental note that he would return to this one.

Chapter 1450 Many Dao

The Yang section of the Boundless Enlightenment Domain did not have as many customers as it would be normal for anyone trying to learn a Dao.

Due to the number of people that had a Yang or Yin spiritual root being very low compared to the other spirit veins, it was normal for there to not be that many people in this section or the Yin section.

Alex visited the other regions of the Yang section, viewing the many different painting and objects that helped with enlightenment.

He saw a painting of a landscape with beams of light peering through the clouds. The golden beams of light illuminated the painting to the point that the dark room the painting was kept in was brightly illuminated as well.

Alex was surprised how this was possible at all. He tried to stay and learn some more, but he was forced to leave after many hours of staying without gaining any enlightenment from it.

He moved on to another section and found a rock that looked like a lady. Alex couldn't tell just what was happening when he first saw it, but after viewing it for long enough, he learned just enough from it to be able to tell that someone had created an illusion of a girl and pasted it onto the rock.

"Yang illusions?" he wondered. He had his own Yang clones, which were nothing more than illusions as well. If he understood how that worked, could he figure out this Dao by any chance?

Alex then went to a painting of a man on his deathbed. However, no matter who looked at the painting, they all had a single thought.

This man was not going to die today.

The Dao of Vitality that was used to create the painting was strong enough that it was affecting even people that didn't have Yang spiritual roots.

Alex stayed there for a long time to try and learn something, but he couldn't gain much either. However, compared to the other places, this had the most improvement of all.

Alex spent nearly 3 days going around the Yang section, trying to learn what he could from there. Within those 3 days, he learned as much as he could. If he had more days, he could have probably learned more, but the amount he would've learned then wouldn't have mattered much.

With only a month to stay here, he didn't have much time at all and instead had to go look around the region.

The next one after the Yang region was the Fire region.

Alex looked around there for a while to just see how the Dao was being provided and after seeing what he could, he left.

Having learned the True Fire Dao, there wasn't much for him to learn at all.

Next up was the Metal region.

The metal region was the one that Alex was looking forward to the most. He had already learned the Dao of Metal, the Dao of Sharpness, the Dao of Cutting, and the Dao of Malleability.

He wasn't aware of how many more Daos he had to learn in the Metal category, so he was quite excited here.

The first painting depicted the Dao of Metal and there wasn't much he could gain from it. He moved to the second one and it depicted the Dao of cutting, as a man cut a mountain in half in the painting.

Alex moved on to the third one and paused because this was the first unique one he came across.

He paused for a moment, wondering what he was looking at.

The third painting depicted a simple image of a sky with clouds, but there was something wrong with the image. He couldn't place his hand on it, but he could tell that something weird was going on with the pic.

He thought for a moment and continued watching silently, along with the many other people that were there as well.

Alex could feel the Intent in the painting and let it affect him. He tried to understand the Intent but it was difficult for him. There was something about the painting that he had still not managed to figure out.

He kept staring at the image for a bit before he thought he saw something. He stared more intently and a few minutes later realized what he was looking at.

'Ahhh!' he thought. 'It's not the image of a sky at all. It's the image of a lake or a pool of water.'

What he had been looking at was not a painting of a sky, but rather a reflection of a sky.

'The Dao of Reflection,' he thought. That was the same Dao that Elder Yao was familiar with. He remembered the young man from her clan using that dao in their fight, reflecting all attacks back to him.

'This is a strong Dao,' he thought.

He tried to understand the Dao now that he knew what he was looking at, but that didn't help at all. Realizing that it wasn't helpful at all, Alex sighed and left for another section.

The True Metal Dao wasn't low on the number of Dao at all. Aside from the ones he knew, there were various others like the Dao of Rust, the Dao of Magnetism, as well as a weird one known as the Dao of Alloy.

However, none of them came close to affecting Alex as the next one did.

The next object was not a painting. However, it was a piece of art.

A figure of a beast stood on top of a platform. The body of the beast was made entirely with a single thread of metal that was turned and twisted into various shapes to make the single giant statue of the beast.

Alex quickly realized that this was done to show the property that metals had where they could be made as thin as one wanted, and they would still be strong without breaking apart as any other material would.

He was quite familiar with this property of metals. Having become an Artifact forger, there were many times when he needed thin strings of metal to tie something or to form the structure for something.

the sky and let them know that he needed a safe space.

The people were used to this and quickly took Alex to the edge of He looked at the art piece in front of him and let its aura affect him. At the same time, he closed his eyes and thought of the numerous times he had done this with the metals.

As time went on, Alex stepped deeper and deeper into the mysteries. At some point, he stopped.

If he continued any further, he would fall into a trance right then and there. So, he quickly flagged down one of the people flying in the sky and let them know that he needed a safe space.

The people were used to this and quickly took Alex to the edge of the secret realm where many houses were built for this exact reason.

Alex was taken to one of the houses and quickly made to enter a room where he seated. He brought out his Dao pill and ate it before he was slowly sent into a trance where he began to think about the properties of metal just as he had before.

He was trying to learn the Dao of Ductility

Chapter 1451 Some Alone Time

Alex opened his eyes, having learned the Dao of Ductility.

It took him just a moment to quickly figure out the applications of the dao. Aside from making it vastly easier to create strings out of metals during artifact creations, he could also now make his Metal attacks thin without losing much damage.

It was the same with Dao of Malleability that he had learned so long ago.

As soon as he opened and stopped thinking about his Dao, Alex realized that the coldness he felt in his body had deepened. He felt the coldness for a while.

"6 days?" he thought. That was the amount of time that would have passed for his body to gather this much, Yin. It was hard to judge exactly as he didn't remember how much Yin his dantian had when he started learning about the Dao.

He had been so focused on it that he didn't took the effort to remember anything else.

"Surely 2 weeks haven't passed," he thought. He closed his eyes and started cultivating to get rid of the Yin Qi in his body.

Getting rid of the stronger Yin Qi took some time, and by the time he was done with it he remembered that he had missed his appointment with Lady Zhan.

"I told her we could meet just a week later," he thought and sighed. There wasn't anything else he could do. He would miss that meeting every single time if it meant learning a new dao.

He walked out and decided asked one of the attendants there the time. It was close enough to the time of one of the teleportation, so he left.

He walked out of the formation platform outside the secret realm some time later and quietly made his way back toward the palace.

There was someone that wanted to take him back, but Alex didn't let him. He wanted to go back alone.

It had been a while since he had found some time to himself, where he could just walk around the city without anyone else to follow him.

"How long has it been since I've been to a city?" he thought. He couldn't remember. "Has it been a year?"

The last time he could remember was the city before Brightfalls City in the Emerald Kingdom. And even those visits were with other people, guided by tour guides all the way through.

That was no fun at all. Not like this one.

He took a deep breath and walked on his own. At some point, he saw the sun slowly go down toward the west, shining what he realized was the water of the Azure Lake.

'Azure Lake,' he thought and decided to visit there too. It wouldn't take him that long to go there anyway.

He arrived at the city and walked through the sidepaths. Walking down the streets gave me a much better understanding of the city than a carriage ride could ever.

He walked around, looking at the various shops and stores he wasn't going to buy from. He sighed and continued walking.

He roamed the city all the way until night fell and finally decided to go to Azure Lake.

The Azure Lake would have been fit more to be called the Azure Sea. It was multiple kilometers wide, with the other shore of the lake barely visible because of how small it was.

Lanterns glowed all around the side of the lake, lighting up the shore for the people that visited at night.

Alex took a deep breath and immediately realized that there was something mixed into the air. He could tell from the distinct smell that it wasn't a normal smell at all.

He couldn't figure out just what the smell was, but he did figure out that it was of no harm. Instead, it gave a peaceful mind to anyone who breathed in this substance, giving them a serene calm that everyone boasted the lake had.

'I wasn't aware it was because of this air,' Alex thought. It was probably something that many of the higher-status people were aware of but were simply not talking about it.

Alex walked along the edge of the shore to try and find a source of the smell, but he couldn't. He could only imagine that it was something that the first Dragon Emperor and the Azure Dragon had used when making this artificial lake.

He walked around the lake thinking about various things, one of which was about the Daos that he wanted to learn.

He judged his own recent experience and came to a conclusion that he would have come to had he given it any more thought.

"I can't just learn Dao," he thought. "I cannot just force myself into learning the mysteries of the world."

That was what he had tried to do from the various paintings and objects he had seen in the secret realm.

"I will need to at least have some understanding of the subject before going in. That way, I can learn it easily," he thought. "Just like I did today."

After thinking for a bit, he nodded to himself and made sure to not try and look through everything that interested him more than just find out what they were.

The ones he truly had to spend his time on were the ones that he was already familiar with.

After coming up with the thought, he stopped giving much of his attention to the Dao and instead enjoyed his time at the Azure Lake.

It was a while before the Azure King came and found him.

"Your majesty! What are you doing here all alone?" he asked.

"Just checking the lake," Alex said. "Are you here to take me back?"

The King nodded. "I heard you left the secret realm all alone today. Did you succeed in learning the Dao?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "It was easy as I had learned about it for a long time now. All I needed to do was gain that dao."

"Ah! Congratulations," the king said. "It isn't easy for many to learn dao that easily. Your Majesty learning it in just 15 days of entering."

'15 days,' Alex thought.

"Did my Elders leave the secret realm?" he asked.

"Once, after 9 days," the king said. "They returned the very next day, so they should still be inside."

"I see," Alex said. "That's good to hear. Let them spend their time learning. We should be returning now."

The king nodded. "Let us returned then," he said and quickly took Alex back to the palace.

"Do you wish to stay and talk about your Dao, your Majesty?" the Kign asked after they entered the palace.

Alex smiled. "I would like to take my rest for now," he said, rejecting the king's offer. He was bout to leave when he remembered something.

"Ah! Can you let Lady Zhan know that I am free to talk with her tomorrow? I promised her a meeting a week ago, but I couldn't keep it at all."

"Oh!" the Azure King said with a startled voice. "Lady Zhan is no longer here, your majesty. She returned to her home in the Ebony Kingdom a week ago."

Chapter 1452 Learning About Other Daos

"Oh, Lady Zhan left already?" Alex asked in surprise. "I would have thought she would wait for me to discuss the pills with me."

"I believe she had some success in her pill," the king said.

"Oh, did she? Good for her," Alex said. "But then... why rush home? Is one of her family members sick or something?"

"I don't believe so," the King said, thinking for a bit.

"Well, that's not something for us to think about," Alex said. "I will go rest for now."

"As you wish, your Majesty," the king said.

Alex went to his room and cultivated overnight, even bringing out Pearl and Whisker to let them cultivate as well. He let them know about the insides of the secret realm and the new Dao he learned.

The very next day, he went back once again.

He found Yao Ning easily in the Metal section of the realm. As for Liang Shufen, he didn't find her at all.

She was either in an obscure location of the realm, looking at paintings and objects of weird importance, or she was in one of the rooms at the edges learning Dao.

Either way, Alex didn't worry about her and quickly went back to the Metal section to see if he could learn a lot more about the various Metal Dao.

Aside from the Dao of Magenetism, there turned out to be only a single dao from the Metal Dao that he had yet to learn about. To his surprise, it turned out to be the Dao of Conduction.

Alex already knew about the Dao of Heat Conduction, so he didn't think it would be that much harder to learn about the Dao of Conduction. However, he couldn't have been more wrong.

Not only did he need to be well-learned in the conduction of Heat in Metal to learn the Dao, he also needed to be well-learned in the conduction of Lightning in Metal.

Alex shook his head when he remembered that he did know about this dao beforehand. It had just been so long that he had forgotten about it.

Dao of Conduction was one of the Daos that Bai Jingshen had told Alex that he knew back when he appeared as Shen Jing.

After spending the entire day in the Metal section, Alex finally left and went to the next section, which was Wood.

From the very start, it was a question of whether he should even spend his time in this place at all. With how bad his Wood Spiritual root was, there was little point in trying to learn.

Still, Alex went in with little hope in his heart that he would get something out of this visit. If nothing, he could at least learn of a few Dao and maybe work toward it in the future.

The fact that Wood Dao had the most sub-Daos of all did not help Alex's cause at all.

Not only was Wood responsible for its own Dao, but it was also responsible for its variants such as Wind, Lightning, and even Sound.

Learning about the Dao of Wood and the Dao of plants was already hard enough. Adding things such as Gale, Rot, thunder, Music, Swiftness, Stillness and many other Dao made it almost impossible for Alex to understand much of what was going on at all.

Alex spent 2 days in the Wood section before leaving the place out of frustration.

The next section was the Earth section, and it was filled with Daos that Alex found easy to understand but hard to master.

Dao of Earth was something he had already learned about. So if he tried to for a few days, he was certain he could learn the Dao of Sand or Dao of Soil too.

But he didn't want to spend his few days here trying to gain the dao when he could do that when he was outside.

After learning as much as he could about the two Dao, he moved on to the more unfamiliar ones and tried to understand what they meant.

The Dao of Crystal was a dao pertaining to the quartz and other crystals that formed inside of the earth.

The Dao of Glass was a dao that was related to the Dao of Sand which could be used to turn to glass.

The Dao of Mineral was also a dao pertaining to minerals that formed inside of the earth.

The Dao of Gravity was the first dao that did not have to do with the physical appearance or property of Earth.

The Dao of Hardness was the dao that understood the Essence of being as durable as the rock itself.

The Dao of Heaviness was the dao that understood the Essence of being as Heavy as the mountains themselves.

After going through these various Daos in what took him 4 days, Alex walked out and went for the final section of the 5 elements, the Water section.

Alex knew absolutely nothing about Water dao. Having been born in a place where Oceans weren't a thing, he never really knew much about water.

Even now, there wasn't much he knew about water as he knew about Fire, Earth, Metal, or even Wood for that matter.

So, the trip through the Water section ended with gaining almost nothing out of it.

He learned a thing or two about the various daos that he could learn from them.

The Dao of Water, the Dao of Steam, the Dao of Ice, the Dao of Mist, and a few others. But he still struggled to understand the other ones that should have been so obvious to him.

'Later,' he thought to himself and walked out of the Water section.

In total, he had spent nearly 27 days inside of the secret realm already, and in 3 days, it would be time for him to leave.

With 3 days to go, Stanley entered the Yin section.

As soon as he was in there, he felt uncomfortable. Perhaps it was because of his body, or just because this was Yin, but he felt a weird atmosphere here that he didn't feel elsewhere.

As soon as he saw the very first item, he understood why that was.

On the very first object was a sealed corpse of a beast, slowly decaying. It was sealed inside a spherical glass contained, the beast being a large fox-type animal, based on what remaining hindlimbs he could see.

The beast was decaying, but it would never fully decay as it had been stopped in time, the decay lasting forever now.

However, it wasn't just decaying because it was dead either.

Alex could tell that the decay happened because of someone's Dao. He could feel a strong intent coming from the corpse that was decaying the beast.

'Dao of Decay,' Alex thought immediately. He didn't even have to really feel it or understand it to know what it was. He just knew that was what it was.

Decay.

He felt repulsed by the sight of the decay and the intent behind it. That was the weird atmosphere he had been feeling.

He shook his head and quickly walked away to the other parts of the Yin section.

The very next section he arrived at had a painting with a strong aura of Darkness.

Corruption was how Godslayer had described Darkness's aura. Corruption of everything that was good and moral.

Shadow darkens things, but Darkness corrupts them, that was what Alex needed to remember. He looked at the painting for a long time, trying to understand the corruption, to try and see the darkness.

Could he really understand anything from here? He wasn't sure, but he tried.

"What's going on? Darkness? Huh?" Godslayer woke up in a hurry as the Intent Alex took in entered his Spiritual sea.

"Ah, my bad. Weren't you asleep?" Alex asked.

"I was, but I woke up. Did you find the Darkness aura as I asked?" Godslayer asked.

"No, I was just looking at a painting drawn with the Intent that held Darkness aura," Alex said. "I'm trying to see if I can learn anything."

"You better not," Godslayer said immediately. "Unless you want to turn like me, unable to discern right from wrong, forever stuck with a single goal to kill all gods."

"Oh," Alex said. "But don't you still have that goal? Albeit a little less."

"No," Godslayer said. "My new goal isn't so much one-tracked. I'm not only looking for vengeance. To kill the ones that I know are my enemy... and to find out why they are."

Alex was surprised by the seriousness in Godslayer's voice. "You do not remember anything prior to your corruption?" he asked.

"Just bits and pieces, I think. Faces and names," Godslayer said. "Not something I want to talk about right now."

"Ah, okay," Alex said. He began explaining to Godslayer where he was and what he was doing.

After listening to him, Godslayer gave a single suggestion to Alex.

"Don't learn too many Daos before reaching immortality."

It took a bit of explaining from Godslayer, but Alex managed to understand what he meant.

Dao was something that made one able to cross the threshold to immortality. But it was also something that could be a crutch.

Each Dao had tribulation lightning associated with it that one would have to face. If Alex continued learning as many Dao as he could, he would have to face dozens of tribulation lightnings, each stronger than the last.

And that could be the thing that failed him from becoming an Immortal.

The heavens truly did not allow for something good to exist at all.

Alex accepted Godlsayers's advice, and after just briefly looking through the secret realm, he got out.

Chapter 1453 City Of Gold

"I hope you will be returning here again, your Majesty," Long Weiyuan said, standing in front of the flying boat that was ready to take away Alex and the others to the Gold Kingdom.

The Goldheart City was about a half-a-day ride from where they were right now, and the scenic route they were taking would most likely make it last longer.

Alex planned on having it take the entire day.

"Of course," Alex answered the Azure King. "I have many more Daos that I plan on learning from here."

After Godslayer's words, he had planned on no longer randomly learning many Daos. But he still wanted to learn a few that would aid him in the long run.

Learning Dao after becoming an Immortal was said to be a rather difficult task, but Alex was sure he could do it. It was more important to make sure that he made it to the Immortal Realm than anything else.

The ship flew away, making its way to the destination.

Along the path were many other cities that they had to fly over. Alex saw the various cities and was quite amazed by how different they all were from each other and from the cities in the Emerald Kingdom.

It took them nearly 11 hours to cross the Azure Kingdom and enter the land of the Gold Kingdom. It became apparent when they entered the Gold Kingdom as they had to pass a small mountain range that spanned all the way to the west.

From what Alex remembered of the map he saw, this mountain range would bend and end up becoming the mountain range that blocked off the Silver Kingdom from the rest of the kingdom.

The mountain range had a lot of vegetation and similarly also held a lot of beasts. There were enough beasts here despite the people that hunted them or tried to capture them to sell.

However, the ones that did so were people with weaker cultivation bases as the beasts here weren't particularly strong, especially when compared to a location like the Beast Paradise.

Crossing the mountain range, Alex saw a region that was somewhat sparse on trees. It wasn't exactly barren, but it wasn't fertile either from the looks of it.

From what the general that was with him said, this region's soil had a lot of metal in the soil, so they weren't very good for plants.

Alex had started feeling the drop in temperature at this point, and a bit later, he saw the first sign of snow.

The land was a little more fertile here and the snow was not as much. However, the further north they went, the more snowy it got.

At some point, they even came across a snowstorm. It wasn't dangerous enough to hamper their journey, but it did stop them from seeing anything around them.

The ship continued on its path as well-experienced soldiers flew it forward. When they came out on the other side of the snowstorm, one of the soldiers exclaimed.

"We are here!" she said. "Goldheart City."

Alex quickly looked up front as well and saw the city in the distance.

Surrounded by soaring mountains, in the middle of a thick settlement of snow, there lay a city that steped in golden splendor. The morning sun shined on the city, reflecting a deep golden light everywhere around it, making it look all that more mystical.

Alex stood and looked at the city more closely.

The city was large, surrounded in a nearly invisible barrier that stopped excessive snow from getting in. The inside of the city was dense with buildings, all of which were golden in color.

When he got close, he realized that it wasn't just golden in color, but rather that it was actual gold. The buildings were covered in gold.

In fact, the entire city was covered in nothing but gold at every place that it could be covered with gold.

"So this is Goldheart city, huh?" Alex said. "Also known as the city of Gold."

The ship landed in the snow where a path had been made by cultivators and carriage that regularly made their way to the city.

Alex got off and looked at the city that was in front of him. From this close, the magnificence of the city only increased in everyone's eyes.

The two elders next to him were also just as surprised.

Alex's eyes moved to the mountain that surrounded it to the north. The mountain looked non-descript. In fact, the entire mountain range was of barely any importance to anyone's eyes when the city of Gold stood in front of them.

However, any decently informed person would be interested in this mountain range and even place quite a bit of importance in this mountain range, which was what gave birth to the City of Gold.

After all, this was the Golden Mountain range. The mountain underneath which was a large gold vein that spanned hundreds of kilometers.

"Your majesty!" a man walked up to him and the others. "Welcome to this humble one's city."

"King Tan, it's nice to see you again," Alex said with a smile.

"It is a pleasure of this one to meet you again, your majesty. Thank you for gracing this one's kingdom," the Golden King said.

King of the Gold Kingdom, Tan Qiu was a lean man with a thin mustache. He didn't speak more than what was necessary and liked to remain unassuming.

The clothes he wore, while covered in gold, still somehow didn't made him look like a royal at all. His clothes were also a little baggy and gave no indication as to the king's physical shape on whether he was muscular or not.

The two members of the Head legion army greeted Alex as well as the elders behind him. Once the simple greeting were passed along, they all got onto a carriage to go to the palace.

As soon as they all entered the city's borders and entered the massive formation, Alex and the rest immediately felt the change in temperature.

The city was so much warmer on the inside.

"Are you running some sort of formation to generate heat in the city?" Alex asked immediately.

"No," Tan Qiu answered. "The city has a formation to keep heat, but not to generate it."

"Oh," Alex said. "Then this warmth, where does ti come from?"

"There is a layer of magma beneath this land that heats it up at all times. That is where we got it front," the King said. "The formation is made to stop that heat from leaking away too fast."

"Oh!" Alex said with a bit of a surprised look. "There is lava running underneath this region?" he couldn't help but ask.

"Yes," the king said.

"That's... something," Alex said. He wasn't surprised by the fact that lava was running underneath the ground here, but the fact that it happened here as well.

That was the exact thing that happened in the Northern Continent as well, which was where many people lived in.

"Are there many such regions in this land?" Alex asked.

"With lava flowing underneath the city?" the king asked. "Yes. In fact, every single major city here is exactly like that."

Chapter 1454 Into The Palace

Alex wondered what was the connection between the Northern Continent and the Eastern Continent. How was it that both of these continents had similar geographies in the colder regions?

Why was there, not a single hot region where lava flowed underneath a land, warming it up more than the other pieces of land?

The thing that concerned him more was that he had a certain feeling that these were not the only two places he knew where something like this happened. He had a feeling he saw something in the inheritance he received.

However, he didn't want to check it at all.

He ignored his concerns and looked around at the city.

Compared to most other cities he had been this, this one seemed a lot more cramped. The size of the roads was small, the houses stacked next to each other with not a bit of space in between.

The houses were all covered in gold as if liquid paint had been used to cover them. Other than that, golden drawings were inscribed where there wasn't any paint.

Golden this and golden that. It was all golden in this city, which had given it the name.

"You came at a very opportune moment, your majesty," one of the two guards of the King said. "Outsider population at Goldheart is at an all-year low. You will have a very easy time going through the Golden Mine."

"Your next month of mining should have no problem," the other guard said as well.

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "And the auction starts in 2 months, right? So I will have 2 months to go through the mine?"

"Yes, but I will suggest you do not spend more than a month inside the mountain. During the final month, people will start gathering for the Auction and the mountain is where they will go to visit every single time."

"I see," Alex said. "I will leave if I feel like I've stayed there enough. Speaking of Auction though, I'm very curious about this auction. Do you think it will have something for me too?"

"I..." The two guards hesitated a bit.

"I'm sure you will find something of interest in the Auction, your Majesty," the King spoke finally. "If not something of interest, I'm sure you will at least find entertainment."

Alex nodded. "That's not bad. I don't really believe there will be anything here that is going to be worth my attention. As long as I have a fun time, I will consider this a successful visit," he said.

It was a rather arrogant declaration in front of the King of the Golden Kingdom, but that was what he felt like, so there wasn't any reason for him to worry.

He doubted there was much in this city for him and he let them all know.

"Don't know the possibility just yet, your majesty," the King said. "You never know what you will come across here. Speaking about that, will you be participating in the auction by any chance?"

"Of course i-ah, you mean as the seller," Alex asked.

"Yes, as one of the people that provides for the auction. Do you have anything that you will get rid of that others will be happy to get their hands on?" the king asked.

Alex thought for a bit and shook his head. 'I'm afraid that I don't have anything on me that I can give away," he said. Anything he could, he would rather give to his own family.

"What about pills?" the king asked somewhat excitedly. "An alchemist like you would definitely make one of the best pills out there."

"That I can do," Alex said. "Sure, if I have some time, I cook up a few pills to sell to the others. I can add to people's enjoyment."

The king gave a small smile and nodded.

"I'm sure you will be more than happy to do it," he said. "It will be in the spirit of the auction."

Alex said nothing and looked around. He looked at the many houses and buildings and soon reached a river that was not a river.

A blue glacier flowed through the city, going perpendicular to the largest road in the city. It, along with the road, cut the city into four different. Quadrants.

The corner of the 2nd Quadrant was where the palace was.

Alex and the others were welcomed into the palace. The palace was also golden inside and outside, with more gold than anywhere else in the city.

Each piece of furniture, each door handle, and each painting frame were all made out of gold. It got to the point that Alex wondered if it was just a little too much.

The King took Alex to a hall where he provided him with some refreshments. The King didn't really seem to want to hold a conversation, but the other two heads weren't of the same mind.

They wanted to learn more about Alex and asked questions which Alex continued answering without much hesitation.

The king also tried to participate with questions of his own, but it was clear that he wasn't the social type at all. He would rather not have to deal with people if possible.

"Your majesty came from a long journey, so it would be wrong of us to keep you here for any further. Let me take you to your resting area," the king said.

King Tan himself stood up and led Alex and the two elders toward the guest rooms where they would be staying.

He showed the elders the room and took Alex to his.

Alex entered the room and saw more golden items. He could only sigh at the sight.

"Please rest for now, your majesty," the king said. "I will prepare for your trip to the mines in the next few days as per your wish."

"I can leave tomorrow," Alex said.

"Then I can have it set up for tomorrow," the king said. "Rest well, your majesty. You will be mining for a long time starting tomorrow."

Chapter 1455 The Gold Mine

"People consider the mining here to be a traditional thing more than actual labor," King Tan explained to Alex in a very unenthusiastic voice. "I do not know when it started, but it has been here for a very long time."

"I don't believe it was a tradition at the start. It was nothing but a way for people here to earn their living."

"At that time, the mine wasn't fully developed and they only mined the outside parts where there wasn't much gold. However, when they dug in deeper one day, they found that there was way more gold in there and hand the entire town dig here for days."

"The gold they dug was enough to bring them all out of poverty, to make them rich enough not just to buy their necessities, but to also buy resources that would help them on their cultivation journey."

"After that, the mining became even more intense and after some time, they didn't need to do much at all. They made the city better and started dragging in people from all over the continent to come and buy the gold here."

"The city had so much gold that they couldn't maintain the flow. So, at some point, the person that ruled the city at the time setup an event in which they could sell as much gold as they could."

"The event would last for a month and would bring the city all the riches they could ever want."

"After some time, the event no longer brought in as much people as most people already bought all the gold they could. Due to the abundance, the value of gold also lowered quite a bit."

"So, they had to think of other ways to bring in more people or else the city would go back to being poor again."

"That was when someone came up with the idea to charge people to mine for gold. In exchange, the person would be allowed to take away half the gold they mined. Since the city had an abundance of gold, this was a good way to bring not just a flow of money, but also a flow of tourist to the city."

"Since they would mine gold for the city, they were more than happy to let the others work for them. Of course, that meant that the event they had set up a few years earlier would now have to be stopped."

"Since everyone could now mine for gold on their own, barely anyone would come to an event where they could buy gold. That was simply idiotic."

"However, to the town, the event had become something to look forward to every year and they didn't want to let go of it. In an attempt to save it, they changed the event."

"Instead of selling just gold, they started selling whatever they could think of selling. This became an attraction for the tourists who came to the city as they would spend a month searching for whatever they could find."

"It became big enough that others came and started selling what they wanted right here. Soon enough, it became a festival for everyone to follow. It became difficult for people to follow every year, so it was changed to become every 10 years."

"Except, it would be much larger, much more important. At the same time, instead of just selling, it became an auction where anyone with money could buy it all."

"That is how the Golden auction came to be, and is now one of the most important events in all of time," the King said.

"Woah!" Alex exclaimed. "I wasn't aware there was such intricate history between the mining, the city, and the auction. This makes me appreciate it all the more."

"Yes," the king said. "This mine was what let us survive, so we all celebrate it by doing what they did. "We mine here and go to the auction afterwards."

"How many people do you think will be arriving?" Alex asked.

"Impossible to say," the king said. "There are so many that we will soon have to start setting up places for people to stay in. We will most likely hold smaller auctions outside the city too, leaving only the major ones on the inside."

"How many auctions will there even be?" Alex asked.

"About 70 different ones altogether," the King said. "You won't be visiting it all."

"I can guess that," Alex said. He looked at the snowless path he walked on to climb the mountain alongside the king, his elders and the few soldiers.

They arrived at the top of the mountain, at the mouth of the mine. "These people here will tell you everything you need to know about the mines. They are more aware of the inside than me, so I will let them take it from here."

"Thank you for your assistance, king Tan," Alex said. "You can let others handle it from here. You can go ahead and spend your time preparing for the Golden auction."

The king nodded and gestured Alex to continue to on.

Alex nodded back and turned to go along to the mouth of the mine where he could already feel a deep metal aura from inside the mine.

'There must be a huge deposit of gold here if they have been mining for ages and still haven't run out of it,' he thought.

"Welcome, your majesty," the man at the gate spoke up. "It is a pleasure of mine to have met you."

Alex looked at the young man and smiled. "What do we need to know about inside exactly?" he asked and looked at the other people that the other guards were handling. "Do I have to leave my storage bags at the gate too?"

"Of course not," the man said. "Who would dare ask your majesty to not get all the gold you can."

Alex smiled. "Alright, go on," he said, waiting for the man to continue speaking.

"There are mainly 3 rules that you have to remember and follow just for the sake of others," the man said.

"First, please do not fight inside the mine. I don't think this is very necessary as one would have to be an idiot to start a fight with you."

"Second, please set up a base where you will mine, and do not invade the spaces where others have already set up a base to mine."

"And finally, please mine in narrow paths. If you make a wide path, there is a chance of the mine collapsing, so for the sake of stability, keep the mine as constrained as possible."

Alex listened to the rules and nodded. "These aren't so bad," he said. "I can follow it easily."

"Thank you, your majesty," the man said. "You can go in whenever you wish now. I wish you all the best in your mining results."

Alex smiled. "You all got that right?" he asked his elders.

"Yes, your majesty," the two Elders said.

"Good," Alex said. "We will now enter."

He walked into the golden mine along with the two elders and quickly made his way deeper. After they went in, the 3 of them split up, going in their own direction.

Alex planned on being alone for the month he was here.

Chapter 1456 The Collapsed Wall

A week passed easily inside the mine where Alex actually spent his time mining.

He had set up a base deep inside the mine and had mined there for a week. As someone who had been to the Endless Tunnels where the strong Starforged Tungsten ore was damn near impossible to mine, the Golden mine felt like a walk in the park.

All he had to do was heat up the wall in front of him in a small radius up to a certain temperature and the gold would simply melt down the wall, forming clumps in the bottom.

Once the gold was out of the mine wall, Alex could use just a bit of Qi to strip the wall of any other material, clearing it up, and showing a new wall behind it.

He continued doing this for an entire week before he stopped. He had collected plenty of gold and he didn't feel like he needed any more of it.

The Yin Qi in his dantian was also piling up and he needed to take care of it.

Alex looked toward Pearl and Whisker that were next to him and asked, "Do you still want to continue mining?"

Pearl nodded. "I don't really want to cultivate, so I'll continue mining," he said.

Alex shrugged and let him. Whisker wanted to do so too, so the two beasts continued mining while Alex simply cultivated.

There wasn't much else to do inside the mine so he brought out some ingredients and started practicing with them. He still had the Wood pill to make and the Spirit pill to downgrade.

He continued making the pill, focusing every so often on the progress in the mine. The two beasts were strong enough that they could move the mines many meters in a single day.

Alex looked back and could see that they had moved hundreds of meters from the original portion. And there were hundreds and hundreds more meters to go up front.

Alex went back to cultivating and learning about the ingredients while the two beasts focused on mining.

Alex could vaguely tell that another 2 weeks had passed, in which time they had come another hundred meters further. It was only a week more before they were supposed to walk out.

However, the monotonous journey here ended when Pearl smashed the wall and it came crumbling down to reveal an opening on the other side.

Alex was surprised by the sound and looked toward the wall to see that it wasn't there anymore. What was there was dust and glittering gold in the air, illuminated by light coming from the other side.

It wasn't natural light, however, and was instead lantern light that hung from the ceiling. There was a more spacious room on the other side of the wall and in it sat a young man whose eyes were wide with surprise at the sudden collapse of the wall.

The young man seemed around the same age as Alex and had long braided hair coming down his side. He wore a golden robe that was completely covered in gold from head to toe.

He had a pretty face, which right now had an open mouth as the young man was in shock.

The young man was seated on a chair with a leg perched on top of his other leg. He held something in his hands that looked a lot like a brush.

Alex quickly stood up and cleared away his station before walking up front. He looked around the other side of the wall and realized that he had come crashing into the base of someone else.

"My apologies, brother," Alex said quickly. "I didn't realize that there was—"

Alex's words stuck to his mouth when he realized something. He looked at the man, especially his eyes. They were staring at something.

Alex looked in the direction of where he was looking and saw Pearl.

At first, Alex didn't think much. However, the very next moment he realized something that he should have worried about from the start.

Pearl's fur was white.

"Is that white... tiger yours?" the young man asked.

"Shit!" Alex realized he had made a mistake. Midnight flew out of his storage ring and he teleported next to the young man with the sword next to his neck.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait," the young man shouted in panic. "Don't kill me. Don't kill me."

Alex frowned a little. "Make an oath right away that you will never reveal to anyone what you saw here today," he said.

"I promise, I do. I don't know what you are talking about, but I will never tell anyone what happened here today. I promise," he quickly said.

Alex felt the oath slowly settle on the young man and finally sighed.

"Pearl, eat your pill please," Alex said.

"My pill?" Pearl asked before quickly looking down and seeing his own fur. "Oh!"

He quickly pulled out a pill from the storage bracelet he always wore and ate the pill. Within seconds, the white fur on his body turned slick and darkened to the point that it became black.

At that point, Pearl was barely recognizable from the white tiger he was just moments ago.

"Woah! That is so cool," the young man in the chair said. "Wait, don't kill me. I won't tell anyone."

Alex pulled away the swords and placed them into his storage bag. "I won't hurt you now that you have spoken the oath," he said. He moved forward and took Pearl into his beast storage.

It was better to keep him away.

Whisker climbed up onto him and settled on top of his shoulders, looking around from there. He looked back at the gold and wanted to gather them, but he had to wait for whatever was happening here to be done with.

Alex looked at the young man and frowned a little. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "You don't seem to be mining at all."

"I wasn't mining," the young man said, raising his hand to show the brush he held. "I was painting."

He looked to his right at the rubbed where his canvas lay.

"Oh, my apologies if my beasts caused your painting to be ruined," Alex quickly said.

"That's alright," the young man said. "I hadn't started yet."

"I see. That is good," Alex said. "What were you drawing exactly? The mine?"

"No, a mountain," the young man said.

"A mountain?" Alex asked with a confused look. "Why not draw it outside where you can see the mountain."

"I wanted the mountain to be made up of gold," the young man said.

"Okay..." Alex said. "You could just use golden paint to draw the mountain outside then."

"How am I supposed to understand what gold's aura is like if I stay outside?" the young man said. "I needed to be here to understand gold's aura, Metal's aura. Only by learning it all can I make my next masterpiece."

"A masterpiece that will certainly enter the Hall of Fame once again," the young man said.

"Once again?" Alex was a little surprised and turned curious. "May I know what your name is, brother?"

"Me?" the young man turned to Alex. "I am Tian Honglui. What is your name, brother?"

Chapter 1457 Tian Honglui

"You are Tian Honglui?" Alex asked the young man with an amazed expression on his face.

"Hehe, have you heard of me?" the young man asked in a gleeful expression.

"I have," Alex said. "I have seen both of your paintings in the Hall of Fame. The Player's Descent and the Lightning God's Anger."

"Oh, you've been to the Hall of Fame, brother?" the young man said with a slightly surprised face. "You must be someone important to have been let in there."

"You could say that," Alex said softly. "Do you not know who I am?"

"Nope!" the young man said. "Should I?" He looked Alex up to down, judging him for a moment. "I can't really place you from anywhere at all."

"I assume you haven't been up to date with the continent's news for the past 3 years then," Alex said.

"Oh no," the young man said. "I've barely left this place for the past 3 years."

"I suppose you can't make a masterpiece without putting in the work. I'm sorry my beasts disturbed you," Alex said.

"That's alright," the young man said. "I'll just go back to learning about the Metal aura."

Alex got a little curious. "What do you want to learn about the Metal aura?" he asked.

"Do you know about the metal aura?" the young man asked.

Alex moved his hands and Metal Qi flowed out of it to form a small image of a sword. At the same time, the Metal aura from around the room coalesced in his hand, adding intricacies to the sword that wasn't previously present.

"Woah! Is that... dao of Metal?" the young man asked. "Is that what is it?"

"It is," Alex said.

"Can you teach me about the Meatl aura, brother?" Tian Honglui asked.

"I can," Alex said. "But are you sure you want to learn it from me? If I teach you about it, it will be harder for you to learn the Dao."

"No, no. Don't teach me directly," the young man said. "Just use your aura so that it is stronger than the aura in the mine. If I can notice stronger Metal aura, then I'm sure I will learn Metal aura within 2 months."

Alex shrugged. "I can, but what can you do in return for me?" he asked.

"Uhh... what do you want from me, brother?" the young man asked. "Ooh, how about a painting? I have a few paintings with me that I can give to you in exchange for helping me."

"If not... I can always give you some money?" the young man said.

"No, I don't need your paintings or your money," Alex said. "Instead, I want your painting skills."

"My... skills?" the young man was a little confused.

"Yes," Alex said. "I want you to teach me how to paint."

"Oh, teaching... I'm not sure I'm the right person to teach anyone anyhting, brother," the young man said. "I don't really know what I'm doing really. I just do what I want and the thing comes out generally good."

"You can teach me whatever you want," Alex said. "Even if you fail to teach me altogether, I will accept that as my fault."

"Oh, okay then," the young man said. "But that will mean you will have to wait here for 2 months. Is that okay with you?"

"Yeah, that is fine with me," Alex said. "Except, wait. Why are we staying in here for 2 months?"

"To see if I can learn Metal aura enough to paint the golden mountain," the young man said.

"Yes, I understand that, but why 2 months?" Alex asked. "I have to leave this place in a week. I might be able to extend it to a month, but any more than that and I will miss the auction."

"Auction? Isn't that in 2 months?" the young man asked.

"No, it's in 5 weeks," Alex said.

"What!?" the young man suddenly got up from his seat. "Then I'm getting late. I must quickly draw the golden mountain, or else I won't have anything to sell."

The canvas flew out of the rubble, setting itself in front of the young man. The young man started clearing up the canvas and Alex went to seat on a giant rock next to him.

"Why are you in a hurry to complete it before the auction when you are looking to sent it to the Hall of Fame?" Alex asked.

"Hall of Fame?" the young man shook his head. "Not every painting gets into the hall of fame. I have made thousands of paintings and of those only 2 have made it, and those two are miralces by themselves."

"I can make paintings that are very good, but none that are worthy of the Hall of Fame. Its just that I try to make every single one as if they are going to be the next one, and that helps me do the best I can."

"I see," Alex said. "Your two paintings in the Hall of Fame were quite amazing. I will hope this Golden Mountain becomes as good."

"Thank you," the young man said. "And of course, if it doesn't, I'm still going to be rich selling it in the auction, so I have to do it before it starts."

"Ah, I see," Alex said. "I need to hurry along too. I have some pills to sell as well."

"Let us begin then," the young man said. "Can you show me your metal aura?"

"Sure," Alex said and brought out his Metal Qi while using the Dao of Metal with the strongest Intent he could manage at the moment.

The young man was a little suprrised and looked at Alex for a second. He didn't imainge that someone that was barely at the 9th realm of Saint Core realm could bring out such a strong aura.

He smiled after seeing that. "You might just make for a great painter," he said and started focussing on the aura in front of him. He didn't have much time to learn as much as he could.

Chapter 1458 Intent

Alex sent out a steady stream of Metal Qi while doing his best to keep the Intent as strong as he could. The first few minutes were fine, but after that, he started noticing strain in his body that came from applying too much Intent.

He got a wild mental pain similar to when he had to deal with Intent from outside.

'What's going on?' he wondered. He had never had to send out Intent for this long, and it seemed to be causing some problems. At the same time, he noticed for the first time that his intent was causing his Spiritual Energy to decrease by a decent amount.

It wouldn't be very noticeable if the Intent usage was short, but this long he noticed the lack in his Spiritual energy. Either the spiritual energy was dealing with the ramifications of him sending our Intent, or it was fueling the Intent itself.

Either way, his spiritual energy was depleting and his Intent was the cause for it.

The speed at which his Spiritual energy depleted was slow enough that Alex could go on for multiple days without any problem.

However, he wasn't sure if he could. Before that, he would certainly have to stop because of all the pain.

He continued for as long as he could before stopping. He had to.

"What happened?" the young man was taken aback when he noticed Alex stop just a few hours in. "Are you alright?"

"Yes, I'm alright," Alex said. "I used my Intent for a bit too long. I have a slight headache. Do you mind if he rest for a bit before we start?"

"Oh, sure," the young man said. "Did you overuse your Intent?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I thought I could keep it going for longer, but it seems I only had a few hours in me."

"Oh, were you not aware that you can't do that?" the young man asked.

"I've never pushed my Intent to the full for this long before," Alex said. "I had only ever used it in bursts."

"Oh," the young man said. "Yeah, this is what happens generally. Although I'm surprised that you don't know this when your intent is this strong. Didn't you ever notice it when you make pills for a long time?"

"Made pills for a long time?" Alex thought to himself. "What does that have to do with this?"

"Uhh... everything?" the young man said. "You make pills, which you do by using your intent to make it happen. You do it for too long, you get a headache because you overused your intent."

"You make formations, you use Intent when you carve something."

"You make talismans, you use Intent when you draw the runes."

"You make artifacts, you use Intent throughout the whole process."

"You make paintings, you use Intent when you put the paint on the canvas."

"Everything we do is fueled by intent. You raise your hand, that's Intent. You move your legs, that's Intent. You use your Qi, that's Intent."

"Most of the time, you won't notice it much, because the things you do don't require much Intent from your side at all. Even if they do, your Intent is strong enough that the requirement becomes minuscule to you."

"However, even then when you do it for a long time, you start feeling the loss of Intent. Fatigue, headache, sleepiness. These are all side effects of you using your Intent for a long time."

"When you use a lot of your Intent, it manifests in various different ways, all negative."

"When you used it as fast as you did just now, the lack of Intent manifested as mental pain," the young man said. "And that is why your head hurts."

Alex's eyes went wide in shock when he heard that. He couldn't believe what he had been just told.

He had been led to believe that Spiritual energy was just spent when making pills or other things. but to think that it had instead been Intent that he had been using, which had spent his spiritual energy.

It was a wild thought to be forced to think all of a sudden, but Alex did and he was more than captivated by the information. Intent... there was so much about it that he still wasn't aware of.

'If everything that happens is because of Intent... just what else can it do?' he wondered.

His knowledge of intent grew by a large magnitude that day, but because he had been taught the information, there was no chance for him to gain any Dao from it.

Alex wasn't sure there was even any Dao on Intent, to begin with.

"Relax and rest for a while, brother," Tian Honglui said. "I will try and understand what I can from the Metal aura that you showed me for the past few hours. They are certainly way stronger than your normal Metal aura that is available in this mine, so I should be able to learn a lot more from it."

Alex nodded and sat down. He began to cultivate in order to rest while the painter in front of him did the same and tried to understand the Metal Qi.

After a while, once Alex felt the mental pain subside to the point that there was none of it anymore, he began providing Metal Qi for the young man to learn from once more.

Tian Honglui did the best he could to learn what he could from the aura and went back to meditating when Alex inevitably ran out of Intent.

This happened for a while, almost 5 whole days, before the young man understood what he felt was enough.

"I think I can make my painting now," he said and brought out his paint board.

Alex opened his eyes to the side, fully rested, and looked at the young man. He quickly stood up when he realized that he was about to start making the mountain.

He took a deep breath and removed his presence as much as he could in order to not pull away the young man's focus.

Tian Honglui closed his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them back up, they were full of concentration. Then, the placed his brush on the canvas and drew a stroke.

Chapter 1459 Mountain Of Gold

A single stroke was left on the canvas with a golden color. The moment the brush left the paper, Tian Honglui drew another stroke on the other side, creating the initial sketch of the golden mountain.

While only partly into the Saint Core realm, the young man was certainly not the strongest person Alex had met, but the intent he was putting out was certainly something.

Alex could feel the stress each stroke took for the young man to make. He could feel the Intent of the young man to now draw a golden mountain, but rather a mountain of gold.

He was putting his all to make a painting that anyone could look at and tell that it was a painting of a mountain of gold.

Alex didn't just watch how the young man drew his painting. He consumed it.

He watched every stroke, every flick, and every little detail that went into drawing a painting.

A fast motion of hand, and a slow one. One where the brush merely touched on the canvas. One where the brush was pressed onto the canvas.

Alex looked at all of it.

And through it all, the young man produced as much Intent as he could.

The golden mountain slowly came to be. Once the base of the painting was made, the young man added details into it, showing not just the mountain but its shine and its shadows.

He added texture to the mountain, showing that the mountain wasn't a single piece of gold, but a large body with smaller golden rocks and stones scattered all around it.

He added clouds in the sky, showed where the sun was shining from. He added a river by the golden mountain and a forest at its base.

However, no matter what he added, all of them only added to the magnificence that was the golden mountain that stood tall at the center.

The young man added a few flying birds in the sky and stepped back with his arms spread to the side.

"I did it!" he said in absolute glee. "I made the Golden Mountain."

Alex felt the strong Metal aura coming from the golden mountain on the painting and was surprised just how much the young man had managed to learn without actually learning the Dao itself.

He took step back as well and saw the painting in its entirety and could feel the awe that came from the painting. He was more surprised than anything at how well the painting come to be.

"This... this is a masterpiece," he said.

"It is, isn't it?" the young man asked before quickly running back to the painting and activating some sort of formation that was on the back of the painting.

"What are you doing?" Alex asked.

"Activating a protective shield so that something doesn't accidentally destroys the painting," he said.

"Ah!" Alex thought and nodded. He watched as the young man packed up the painting and started trying to understand what he had just watched.

He hadn't been taught how to paint a painting at all. However, just now, he had been taught on how to make a masterpiece with Intent.

'Should I try?' he thought. He didn't think it would be too difficult to make a painting with a strong intent. Although, since he had already asked for a lesson, it would be better if he learned something before trying it out first.

"I am done, brother," the young man said. "I can leave now."

Alex nodded. It was still 2 days before it was time for him to leave, but there was nothing for him to do here anymore.

"Let us leave," Alex said and started walking out along with the young man.

They left the section of the mine and made it to the outside.

Tian Honglui took a deep breath of the fresh air. "Nothing like a breath that isn't filled with dusty smell or gold particles," he said. He walked toward the guards that were responsible for the storage bags and asked for his back.

After a few seconds, he was given back his storage bags and turned around toward Alex. "Did you get your bags, brother?" he asked.

Alex shook his head. "I didn't give them any to start with," he said and started walking away.

The young man looked at the guards who saw and heard everything and was surprised to see them no act at all when Alex walked away without taking anything.

The young man quickly ran up to Alex and whispered into his ears. "Did you give them the gold you got at least?" he asked.

"Why?" Alex asked. "Those are my gold now."

"Huh? No, I'm pretty sure that's not how it works," he said. "You need to give those gold back to them. Or else..."

"Or else what?" Alex asked, turning to look at the young man.

"Or else... I don't really know actually," he said. "I haven't ever seen anyone walk out of the mine without giving half of what they mined."

"First time for anything I guess," Alex said with a grin. It was fun teasing this young man, making him think he had seen someone do something illegal and yet completely fail to comprehend how he got away with it.

Alex had let the guard know that he was leaving on his own and to send his elders directly to the palace when they came out 2 days later.

"What do you even plan on doing with that much gold?" the young man continued.

"Whatever I want," Alex said. "Anyway, are you going to stop talking about it any time soon?"

"Oh, should I?" the young man asked. "Okay, I'll stop talking. Do you have anything you want to talk about?"

"Yes," Alex said. "About that painting of yours actually. It turned out great, but... is it Hall of Fame material?"

"I don't know," the young man said. "I will have to go and find out right now."

Alex smiled. "Mind if I come with you?"

Chapter 1460 Painting Guild

The young man led Alex into the city, walking amongst the severely crowded streets as they went toward a golden building with a giant set of words on the top.

Goldheart Painting Guild.

"Oh, a guild," Alex said softly. He knew about the guilds that existed throughout the continent, all of which belonged to the Imperial family.

He had seen almost all 10 different guilds with various levels of availability.

Painting Guild was one of the least available guilds in the entire continent because of how utterly useless it was for most people.

Tian Honglui entered proudly and was greeted by the ones that saw him. He greeted back and made his way inside.

Alex followed with him a step behind and the ones that saw him were simply speechless to even say anything. They couldn't trust their eyes and thus couldn't believe if the person they were seeing was truly the King of the Southern Continent or not.

It was made very clear nearly a month ago that Alex had arrived in the Gold Kingdom. That news had spread wide and nearly everyone knew about it.

So, everyone that saw Alex recognized him easily.

All, except Tian Honglui who had remained in the mountain and thus had no idea who he was.

The young man arrived in front of a room and knocked on the door. He waited for a moment before someone responded from inside, asking who it was.

"Senior, it's me, Honglui," the young man answered.

There was a few seconds of silence followed by a sudden opening of the door. An old man with long white hair walked out. "Honglui! You're back," he said quickly. "Did you do it?"

"Yes, but I'm not sure if I did it properly or not," he said. "Can you gather up some other painters so you can jud-senior? Where are you looking?"

He followed the old man's gaze and turned to see him looking at Alex who was standing at the side.

"Is that..."

"Oh, that's the person who helped me with the painting. He helped me understand Metal aura so I could make my painting," the young man said. "Let me introduce you to him. This is..."

Tian Honglui searched through his mind but no name came up. "Wait, I never asked you your name, did I?" he asked.

"No, you did not," Alex said.

"Ah! My apologies. I got distracted because of the painting I had to make," he said. "If it is not too much, would you mind introducing yourself?"

"You are King Alex, aren't you?" the old man asked.

Alex smiled. "I am," he said

"Your majesty," the old man immediately bowed toward Alex. "It is this one's pleasure to meet you. I never thought I would ever get to see you."

"Please straighten your back. I am not your king. You do not need to show me such respect," Alex said.

"No, I must," he said. "You are the messenger of her majesty the Phoenix. I cannot show any disrespect in your presence."

Alex found the old man quite intense but found it hard to tell him as such. "Please get back up."

Tian Honglui was still quite confused by all of what was happening. "You're... a King, brother?" he asked.

"I am," Alex said.

"You didn't—"

The old man slapped him in the back. "Don't call him brother. Call him 'your majesty'. He is a king," he said.

"Oh, you're right," the young man quickly said. "Your majesty is a king?"

"If I wasn't one, would you be calling me that?" Alex asked.

"Oh... so you are one?" he asked.

"Yes, I am," Alex said. "I am the king of the Southern Continent."

"Oh! That king. I remember now," the young man said. "No wonder. You didn't look like the other 6 Kings that I've met on some occasions."

"You have met the other kings, huh?" Alex asked.

"On occasions, yes," the young man said. "I can't believe I met a King from another Continent and didn't know about it."

"You need to start paying attention to news," the older man said.

"I will try," Tian Honglui said before turning to Alex. "Anyway, this is senior Ran. He... is the closest thing I will ever have to a teacher when it comes to painting."

"Oh," Alex said and turned to the old man. "You have taught him quite nicely, senior Ran."

"Of course not. It is all him doing it, I barely taught him anything," the old man said.

"Anyway, senior. I made the painting. Can you gather up the rest of the painters please? So they can judge my painting?" the young man asked.

"Sure, but it won't happen in a single day," the senior said. "It will take at least a week. Show me the painting first so we don't waste their time."

"Ah, right," The young man said and quiclky brought out the painting that he made. He placed it in front of the old man and instantly, the corridor was filled with an intense aura of metal that permeated out of the young man's Intent that he had carved into every stroke of the brush.

The strong aura made the old man falter a bit.

"This..." he couldn't help but say. "This is the best painting I have seen anyone make since your Lightning God's Anger."

The young man smiled. "Is it that good?" he asked. "Is it better?"

"It's..." the old man frowned a bit. "It is good, very good in fact. But... I'm not sure if I can say it is better or not. I can't een tell if it is good enough or not."

"If it was me, I would put it in the Hall of fame," the old man said. "But... since we need the other people's approval, we will have to wait."

"Oh, I see," the young man said. "Then I will wait."

He took away the painting. "It will take a week, correct?" he asked.

"Maybe more, not less," the young man said.

"Alright," the young man turned to Alex. "Your majesty wanted to learn about painting, correct? Come with me. I can help you get started."

Chapter 1461 First Painting

Tian Honglui brought Alex over to an empty room at the end of the hallway, one that was designed for the people of the painters to have someplace to focus.

The room itself wasn't very wide but there were many formations on the floor. Someone to block the sound from outside. Some to block out the vision.

There were even some that placed a painter in an illusory formation that made them think that they were in another place when they were not.

All of these formations were up to the painter to use, and Tian Honglui used none at all.

He pulled out a canvas and placed it in front of Alex before letting him sit at the center. "Have you ever painted before, your majesty?" the young man asked. "Do you have any experience?"

"The only experience I have with painting is the 3 times that I was forced to paint something in a secret realm and ended up failing each of those times. Aside from that, I have no experience," Alex said.

"Oh... so I can assume that you are a beginner," Tian Honglui said.

"If there is a level below that, you can assume that I am that," Alex said with a bit of a chuckle in his self-deprecating humor.

"Uhh... I will start from the beginning then," the young man said. "Before we even delve into the Intent stuff, which I doubt I will have to teach you, we will have to start with actual painting knowledge."

"There are methods and techniques to draw art, but I don't think those are the right way to go," the young man said. "Here, hold this."

He handed Alex a simple brush and then a palette. He brought out a few colors and poured them on the palette.

"To teach you how to draw," the young man said. "I think it is important that you draw something in the first place."

Alex frowned a bit. Was that truly the right approach? He wanted to object, but he let the young man do what he wanted to.

"Imagine a scene in your mind a very simple one," he said.

Alex closed his eyes, trying to find a simple scene in his head. Most of what he had in his head was so intense that barely anything felt like a simple scene to him.

After a few seconds, he landed on one. "I'm ready," he said. "Do you want to know what I'm thinking of?"

"No, don't tell me," the young man said. "I want it to be a surprise to me as well. Now, your majesty. Close your eyes again and look at the colors in that scene you see."

"Color..." Alex thought for a bit. "Black, blue, gold, yellow, and white."

Tian Honglui was a little surprised. "That's... that is not that many colors. Are you sure that is what you are seeing?"

"Yes, I'm certain. There is no other color here aside from this."

"Alright, then we can start," the young man said. "The first thing you need to see is what is in the background of your scene. What is the one thing that is the most prevalent?"

"The sky?" Alex asked

"Uhh... works," Tian Honglui said. "But are there no trees or lands? Those count as background too."

"Oh, I see," Alex said. "I do have something else then."

"Great! Let's draw just the outside of it," the young man said. "Just the outline. Think of what color that would be, try to make it with the colors in your palette, and draw it."

Alex didn't have to think at all. He simply dipped his brush into the black paint and drew a single stroke that went from the left of the canvas to the right, cutting the canvas in half.

"You used a bit too much paint there, your majesty," Tian Honglui said. "Whatever, you will learn about the amount once you're used to it. All that matters is that you make your first image."

"Now, look at that image and paint over everything that should be in the background. The sky, the ground, everything.

Alex nodded and thought for a bit before he started painting with the black paint, slowly making his way toward the bottom of the painting.

He stopped halfway through and started panting it blue from there. The black in the brush darkened the blue that was used at the start, but that worked to his advantage.

He finished painting the blue toward the bottom of the area which was still quite dark for being blue.

He left a small chunk at the bottom and looked at the top half. "How do I clean this?" he asked.

"You can use your Qi to pull away the paint or use the formation on the brush to do that if you don't think you can do it properly yourself," the young man said.

Alex nodded and used the formation that was in the brush. He hadn't realized that it was an artifact as well.

Once the paint was all gone, he looked at the upper half and then at the young man. "For sky blue, do I just mix blue and white? Or is there a better way to get it?" he asked.

"You can make a more authentic color of the sky by mixing various colors in different proportions, but that is color theory and it is quite complicated which you will have to learn on your own time."

"For now, since you are just trying to learn the basics of painting, you can do with blue and white," the young man said.

Alex mixed the two colors and created a sky blue color that wasn't exactly what he wanted, but what he had to work with right now.

He painted the sky to the best of his ability while trying to not make every part the same color. He made the further parts of the sky slightly whiter, to show not just the distance, but also the haze that was present in his memories.

Once the sky was done, he moved on to the only last part of the background that he remembered, the land.

All Alex remembered about the land was its charred black color, which shined in yellow light.

He took the black paint and filled the remaining bottom half while adding some white here and there to give it the texture of being charred and crusty.

Once he was done, he looked at it and thought for a bit. He knew where the yellow light was supposed to be, but he assumed that it was better to add the source before he added its light.

"I'm done with the background," Alex said.

Tian Honglui got close and looked at the painting, ignoring the obvious mistakes and only looking at what had been drawn.

"I can somewhat see what you are trying to make, but I'm not sure what this black part has to do with it," he said.

"It's not something anyone can understand," Alex said. "You had to be there to see it."

"I see," the young man said. "Then, your majesty, let us move on to the foreground element."

Alex nodded and cleaned the brush. Then, he dipped the brush in gold.

Chapter 1462 Mistakes

A bright blue sky with fluffy little clouds. The sky ended at the horizon in a haze and the ocean began in the same haze as well.

The dark, scary ocean felt cold. It brought a gloomy aura to the entire painting. The crusty, black ground didn't help in the least.

However, there was just one thing that would turn this gloomy, desolate atmosphere into a scene that would make one in awe of its majesty.

And that was the splash of Gold that Alex had just added to it.

A bright golden stroke landed in the ocean as it was dragged down to the land. Alex painted it a few times before stopping.

Tian Honglui got a bit curious as to what he was looking at. He looked at what Alex was doing and saw him bring out more golden paint and limbs to the golden shaft.

It was only then that he realized that Alex was drawing a tree.

Alex drew the trunk and the branches and then moved to the color yellow to fill in the leaves. He wasn't sure how to make the leaves look authentic, so he just spread the yellow around the top of the golden branches and acted as if that was all he had to do.

He took the least bit of yellow and started spreading it across the canvas in places where the light of the tree would reach. Once he was done, he stopped and put away both the canvas and the palette.

"This is it," Alex said. "This... is the scene in my mind."

This was his memory from the first time he opened his eyes in this world without another soul in his body. In a way, this was the very first thing he had ever seen.

"This looks good," the young man said. "This is actually decent for a newbie, your majesty."

Alex turned to the young man ad glared. "I know you know it's bad. Tell me what is wrong and how I can improve," he said. "Let's see if this method of yours actually works or not."

"Uhh... it works for sure," the young man said. "It worked for me."

"Okay, I'll trust you then," Alex said. "Go on. What's next?"

"Ah, right!" the young man said. "About your painting, I know I said you don't have to worry about colors, but I must get that out of the way."

"Your black is too black. There is no way water that far back becomes that black. Water so close shouldn't be so blue. The blue sky obviously seems fake and the clouds are never that white, not all the way through."

The young man spoke for a while, going into every single mistake that Alex made with the colors while painting. Alex wasn't even aware these were mistakes he could make, but he let the young man speak for a while.

"Alright, now that the color mistakes are out of the way," the young man said. "Your majesty, where exactly is the sun in this picture? Or the moon?"

"Uhh... it was morning midday, if I remember correctly, so it was up above me," Alex said. "It's in a location in the sky where I can't fit on the canvas."

"Okay, and I'm assuming the sun isn't clouded or anything," the young man asked.

"No," Alex said. "Did I miss something?"

"Where are the shadows?" the young man finally asked. "The water, the cracks in the ground, the tree, there is no shadow anywhere."

"Ah! I forgot about the shadows," Alex said, only now realizing why the painting looked so fake.

"Yes, you forgot the shadow," the young man said. "You seemed to realize that you needed to light up the atmosphere in certain colors like the yellow reflected from this tree onto the beach. But you didn't seem to realize about the shadow."

"Lighting and shading are some of the most important ways to make your painting look more detailed than it actually is," the young man said. "The ground should have had shadows, the tree should have had a shadow. Even the clouds should have had a shade underneath it."

"I see," Alex said. "That is something to remember, isn't it?"

"It is," the young man said. "There are more. I don't know if I should overwhelm you with it or not though."

"Hit me," Alex said. "I will take in all I can get right now. Tell me all the mistakes."

"Okay," the young man said. "Let's start with the absence of the clouds as reflections on the water then."

The young man continued talking a lot about Alex's painting, explaining to him what he had done wrong, and what he could have done right.

Reflections, shades of colors, light diffusion, ambient lighting, highlights.

Anything and everything he saw wrong in that painting, he told Alex about it.

Alex on the other hand absorbed everything he was told in its entirety. He didn't contemplate any mistakes right away and left that for later.

Once the young man was fully done explaining what had gone wrong, Alex finally spoke. "Thank you," he said. "I will now take my time and try to understand what I did wrong, and how I can improve."

"Please do, Your Majesty," the young man said.

Alex closed his eyes and was about to start thinking about his mistakes when he paused. "Wait, you never told me about my actual drawing skills. About those lines, about those strokes. Do they not matter?"

"They matter, very much," the young man said. "They just don't matter to you right now. As a starting painter, there isn't much I can't tell you about the strokes and lines that you can understand."

"I will have to teach you about them later and then I can tell you what you have done wrong," he said.

"I see," Alex said. "Then I shall try to think about the mistakes I made."

The young man nodded. "And while you do that, please think of another scene to draw. You will have to start another painting soon as well."

Chapter 1463 Cheap Copy

Alex painted two more scenes from his memories.

One scene was of him standing in the crater of the Southern Continent, the one he thought he had created, but was instead the crater where Scarlet had been reborn.

The scene was a simple one as there wasn't much to draw aside from a crater, some sand dunes, and a bright blue sky.

He got some praise from Tian Honglui for his painting and was also somewhat scolded because he chose another simple scene. The young man wanted to see him draw a difficult scene.

Alex made his next picture a little more complicated. It was the scene of him sitting inside a volcanic crater with magma surrounding him while snow fell from the sky.

It was the moment when he had received his Undying inheritance and that was the more complicated drawing he made.

The painting didn't come out as good as he wanted to. In fact, it had so many things he had to care about that overall, it was the worst of the three paintings he had made.

However, the young man didn't give him any flak for it being bad, only letting him know what mistakes he made.

"Now that you have an idea about how to paint something, your Majesty," the young man spoke. "I think it is time for you to try and learn on your own."

"On my own?" Alex asked. "It has been barely half a day since I started."

"I know," the young man said. "I'm not saying I won't be criticizing. I'm just saying that you should try and learn what you can by yourself before showing it to me. Of course, you are going to learn by looking at a professional's work."

The young man brought his own painting, one that depicted a simple scene of a busy market with people going about their daily life.

Alex looked at the painting and got a feeling of mundaneness. And in that mundane painting was a magnificence that only it could hold.

Alex could see steam coming out from the food stall and could smell the scent of flowers from the flower market at the front. He could hear the murmur of people at the front and could see how the detailed lives of many people had come together to become this.

Normal.

Alex shook his head, a little surprised that he was somewhat entranced by the painting. He looked at the painting once more and turned to the young man. "What exactly am I supposed to do?" he asked.

"Try and draw it one to one," the young man said. "Remember to figure out what is the background and foreground aspects on this one. Draw it as I've taught you before. Leave the details for the end."

Alex nodded and started drawing.

He copied the young man's painting starting from what was in the background. A sky and a road. After that, he added houses, stalls, and lamps.

He then added the people, only in simple shapes and colors. Once that was done, he added the colors.

He looked at the painting and saw every single person that was drawn. Every shade of color on his body. Every shadow, every highlight.

He copied it all and as he did so, he learned from it.

He finished detailing the people and detailed the houses as well. He then added the soft smoke and dust that he could see in the original painting and took a step back as he was done with the painting.

When he saw what he drew in its entirety, he was surprised this was his own work.

It was nowhere near close to what the young man's painting looked like, but the problem mostly came from the colors he couldn't accurately portray and the different widths of outlines that he couldn't force his brush to make.

It all was of the same size and that was what made it inferior in his eyes. Adding onto the fact that it didn't have the aura of the original one. It could only be a cheap copy.

Even then... he was still surprised as it had turned out way better than he could've ever expected.

"That's amazing!" the young man suddenly said.

"What?" Alex turned to look at him. "You think so too?"

"Yes," the young man said. "I'm surprised how quickly you picked up everything. You might not need that many days to learn it all actually."

Alex couldn't help but smile.

"There are a few obvious mistakes, but not the ones that I need to tell you about," the young man said.

"I'm surprised you like it," Alex said. "I thought you would consider this a cheap copy."

"It is a cheap copy," the young man said. "But it is a fantastic cheap copy that came from someone who has barely made any paintings. Your majesty, if you continue at this rate, you will most definitely end up becoming a painter in a year."

"In... a year?" Alex asked. Going by his shock and surprise, he had thought the young man would say it would take lesser time.

"Yes," the young man said excitedly, not understanding that Alex wasn't very enthusiastic about it taking a year to become a good painter. "It took me at least a hundred years before I became any good. Even if I had a good teacher, I would've at least taken 20 years in the least. Your Majesty is truly too talented."

"Oh!" Alex said, smiling now. "That's good. Let's not waste any of our precious time then. What do I do next?"

"Let's continue copying a few paintings and then drawing your own original one to see how much you learned," the young man said.

Alex nodded and continued on his painting journey.

He spent in the room for another day, painting every single moment. He did his best to learn as much as he could from the young man and applied it to his own painting.

By the end of the day, the young man was way too shocked to even say anything. Alex was just way too talented.

"That should be it for today, Your Majesty," the young man said. "You need to rest and learn on your own for a while to get good at it. You can try using your Intent to make some of the paintings, but I suggest not doing that for a while."

"Just focus on painting," the young man said.

"I see," Alex said. "I will. When will our next session be held?"

"Hmm, I don't know," the young man said. "It will depend on the date that is chosen for my painting's evaluation."

"I see," Alex said. "Since I hear it will take some time, why not do it the day before the evaluation? Once the training is done, we can go straight to evaluation."

"If that is what Your Majesty wishes then we shall do that," the young man said. "For now, you should read a few books on painting. I will get you some on the way out."

"Alright," Alex said. "I will need a few brushes and canvases too."

"I shall get them too," the young man said. "As for our next session, I will let you know when I will be ready to hold it."

Chapter 1464 Tired

Alex sat in the garden of the Gold King's Palace, staring at the beautiful flowers. He looked at a red flower that he wanted to draw and quickly opened a book to check its color again.

"3 parts white, 2 parts red, and..." he looked at the flower, carefully judging the shade of red it was. "And... a bit of blue and yellow."

He had an artifact next to him that was gifted to him by the Gold King when he told him that he was going to be learning how to paint.

It was an artifact to accurately combine colors and pour it out in a non-sticking ceramic bottle for Alex to use. It added in the combination of the paint as he wished and created the paint that flowed out into the ceramic bottle.

Alex dipped his paintbrush into the color and pulled it out before placing it in front of him, right next to the flower in his vision.

'That needed a bit more yellow,' he thought and used the color to paint the flower. A normal man wouldn't be able to judge the difference in the shade either way and a cultivator would have no idea that the flower was supposed to be of a different shade.

The only one that knew that he had made a mistake was Alex here, and he didn't care much about his mistake as he was trying to learn. There were hundreds of other flowers to continue learning from.

He drew the painting for a few more hours, with his two elders sitting by his side, waiting for him to stop. When he finally did, they praised him for it.

"That is amazing, your majesty," Yao Ning said.

"It is so accurate that it barely looks any different from reality," Liang Shufen said.

"Alright, you guys can tone down on the praises," Alex said. "I know it's good, but it's not a masterpiece yet."

Even though he said that he was still quite happy to see his painting. The progress he had made in the past week had been absolutely ridiculous. Especially after learning about colors and how different types of strokes created different types of lines, he had improved a lot.

Alex turned the formation on the canvas and saved the painting from any accidental damage by creating a shield around it.

"Are you done, your majesty?" the Gold King walked into the garden.

"Ah, King Tan," Alex spoke. "Yes, I was just getting done."

The Gold King came to the painting and nodded a few times before smiling. "As expected of Your Majesty. Your paintings have improved so incredibly quickly."

Alex smiled. He could tell that the King was being genuine in his praise.

"Thank you, King Tan," Alex said before putting away the painting. "Why did you come here? Was it to see my painting?"

"While I am excited to see your painting, that is not the reason why I have come here, your majesty," King said. "I was wondering if you still planned on selling anything in this auction or not."

"The time is getting close to when the auction houses need to stop taking in anything more so they can set up the list of items that they will be auctioning," the King asked.

"Stopping?" Alex narrowed his eyes in surprise. "I was under the impression that the auction was going to last for the whole month and one could join any time they could."

"While it is true the smaller auction houses will be taking items throughout the month, the bigger ones have such expensive products that they need to advertise it so that the people that come do arrive with their money."

"They don't like to be surprised with a random item that is presented in the middle of the auction that they are not aware of," the king said.

"I see. While I am the type to never know what an auction house is selling beforehand, I can understand that there are people that need to know about it," Alex said. "Very well. I will head over today with a few things to sell."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," the King said. "I will prepare my people to escort you."

The King turned around to leave, but Alex called out to him.

"King Tan," he quickly said. "I do not know if this is my place to speak or not, but... are you alright?"

The King turned around and gave a half-hearted smile to Alex. "I'm alright, Your Majesty," he said.

Alex stared at him for a while before saying, "You don't look alright. If you aren't feeling well, I might have a pill or two that might help you. Do you need some?"

"I'm..." the King sighed. "I'm just tired, that's all."

"Hmm, you look not as good for someone that's just tired," Alex said. "Here, take this pill just in case. It will cure almost any disease out there."

The King looked at the pill that he was being handed over and couldn't help but chuckle a little. "Thank you for trying to help me, your majesty," the king said. "But I'm not that kind of tired."

Alex was a little taken aback. "What kind of tired are you then?" he couldn't help but ask.

"The kind that is done with all the responsibilities. The kind that needs more than just fame, title, and power in his life."

"The kind that no longer wishes to be a King."

The King's face was all smiles when he said that.

"Wh-what?" Alex asked with a surprised look.

The King nodded. "I've been a king for a long time, your Majesty. And because of that, I haven't been able to make a family of my own. My peers are fine with that, but I am not."

"I am tired of being a King and all the restrictions that come with it. I am simply done with it all. The next time His Royal Majesty leaves his closed cultivation, I shall have him relieve me from the throne," the King said.

"Anyway, You don't have to worry about me, your Majesty," the King said and walked away.

Alex was left behind with a surprised face, along with the two elders who were equally as shocked. They had all thought that the king was unenthusiastic about everything, and it turned out they were right.

'He doesn't want to be a King anymore?' Alex thought. He could imagine why he would not want to be one after being one for such a long time.

There were many restrictions to being a King on this continent. Not only did you have to have a cultivation base lower than the Saint Transformation realm, you could never marry someone or have children with them.

The strong restrictions were fine for a youngster that was a king, but after millennia, these people that had grown old became less and less enthusiastic about being a king.

As a result, Alex could see why the Gold King had said what he had said. He no longer wanted to remain a king.

'And he can't even just quit,' Alex thought. 'He has to wait for the Dragon Emperor to take away his authority.'

Alex couldn't help but sigh on behalf of the gold king.

Chapter 1465 In The Auction House

Alex made his way to the largest auction house in the city, followed by his two elders and a few soldiers that were there to keep guard of him. He walked into the auction house with just his elders, surrounded by many sounds of praises and flattery.

The people in the auction house were more than happy to have Alex come to their auction house.

"To think we would have His Majesty himself grace our auction house, not as a guest, but as a seller is a blessing for all of us," one of the old men said.

"I cannot even fathom what His Majesty could have that he will be selling," one of the women said.

Alex walked along without a thought in the world, simply nodding and smiling until they took him to a room with a bit more privacy. Only 3 other people were there, compared to the dozens that had surrounded him outside.

"Would you mind introducing yourselves again?" Alex asked the three.

"I am, Hu Niuju the owner of this auction house, Your Majesty," an old man with a long nose and gray hair with widow's peak said.

"I am Bu Fengluo," the other man with black hair said. He wasn't as old as the owner, but there was still some age for him. "I am the manager of this auction house."

"I am Hu Biaolin," the last of the three, a girl with a beautiful face and bright smile spoke in a soft, sweet tone. Her voice was mesmerizing when she said, "I am the auctioneer of this auction house."

Alex smiled as the three bowed to him at once. "It's a pleasure to meet you all," he said. He turned to the girl and asked, "Since you have the same surname, I assume you are the owner's daughter?"

"I am, your majesty," the girl said respectfully. She showed no sign of nervousness when speaking to him at all. "I have trained my whole life to be an auctioneer and am happily one now."

"I see," Alex said. "Shall we get to the point then?"

The three were interested. "Please tell us, your majesty, what is it that you wish to sell?" the manager asked.

Alex reached into his storage ring and pulled out 7 pill bottles. "I'm sure you saw the lighting that repeatedly struck the palace in the past few days," he said. "This is the result of that."

The three of them were excited. It was obvious that Alex, as an alchemist, was going to bring out pills to sell. They would've been surprised if there were no pills involved, but they were quite surprised to see that there wasn't anything other than just pills.

Sure pills were great and the ones he made were exceptionally so, but... there were only so many pills that the auction could accept. If any of the pills were in the least bit unnecessary, they would have to refuse to sell them for the sake of their customers.

And yet, how could they refuse a King so easily? They felt slightly awkward, and the three did not speak at all.

Alex understood their situation and decided to give them some levity by telling them what the pills were.

"Let us start with the first pill here," he said, opening a pill bottle and taking a pill out of it. It was a blue pill with lightning scars on it, exactly 5 of them.

The 3 people looked at the pill with curious eyes. More so than the pill, they were curious about the pill veins, which they had never seen in a pill, ever in their life.

They were aware of it, thanks to the show that Alex had put on when he had first arrived in this continent, but this was their first time seeing these pill veins, so they were more than amazed by it.

"This is the Saint Lightning Resistance pill," Alex said, ignoring their awe. "Eating this gives you resistance to lightning up to a certain degree."

This was the pill that he had to finish the recipe for the 10 Elders when he was first brought along to the Sunborn Sanctuary all those years ago. He had since not only made pills multiple times but had also made ones that had 8 pill veins.

The ones he was presenting were with simply 5 pill veins and were thus a very bad one. This was no different than what he had given the beasts.

"Theory is, if you eat this, you will have a much easier time when breaking through to the Immortality realm as you will be able to fight the Tribulation lightning without taking much damage."

"What?" the owner was the first to react. "It can resist tribulation lightning?" he asked.

"That is the theory," Alex said. "It can block normal lightning, I've tried that, but I'm not sure about tribulation lightning. However, we can be certain that this recipe is 10s of thousands of years old, so it is possible that it can do what I say I can."

"So, Will this pill be possible to be sold in this place? Or will it cause a problem?" Alex asked.

The manager shook his head. "Cultivators will do anything to surpass Immortality. Just the possibility that this pill brings will make them buy it. We will happily accept that pill. It will be one of the best things we will be selling"

Alex chuckled a little. "I hope that is not true as this is the worst pill I will be selling today," he said, putting the pill back into the bottle. "There are 5 pills here, so record that."

The girl took the bottle and wrote a talisman with what Alex had said just now before wrapping it around the pill bottle.

Alex then brought the second bottle out and popped out a pill.

The pill had a soft, creamy white color, once again with the many veins. Alex presented the pill.

"This is the Saint Spirit Immunity Pill," Alex said. "If you eat this pill, you will be immune to all forms of Spiritual attacks for a certain amount of time."

This was the pill that Alex had received through Jai Heiyun in order to perfect it. She had used her reward to either receive a perfect pill recipe or to improve an existing recipe and that was how Alex had come to get it.

"It is originally meant to last for an hour or two, but with the pill veins, it can last for nearly 5 hours," he said. "However, this comes with the chance that the energy is exhausted if you are continuously bombarded with spiritual attacks."

"If you are not, however, this pill works fantastically."

The three were in shock. "It... makes you immune to spiritual attacks?" the owner asked.

"Completely," Alex said. "For the first two hours of eating the pill, you can forget about ever being hurt by a spiritual attack. The later hours are where it wears off, so you will have to be more careful there."

"Woah!" the owner said. "That is amazing. What about the drawback?"

"No drawbacks," Alex said. "Well, except for the fact that the pill has diminishing effects if eaten back to back."

"Incredible," the owner said. "Honey, write that down."

The owner's daughter wrote it all in a talisman and wrapped it around the pill bottle once Alex handed it over.

"This is the next pill," Alex said, bringing out another pill. This one had a jade green color to it with specks of black all over it in a uniform pattern. Streaks of black lightning scars covered it entirely, five of them in total.

"It is called the Saint Poison Neutralizing Pill," he said. "As you can imagine from the name, it is an antidote pill."

The three nodded, slightly surprised by the fact that Alex was deciding to pull out this pill after the last one. Why would he pull out an antidote after such an amazing pill?

"But of course," Alex continued. "This isn't a normal antidote pill. In fact, I do not believe it is even fair to call it an antidote as you will never be poisoned after eating this pill in the first place."

"This pill is something you eat beforehand and the energy settles in your body. Once you are affected by a poison, the energy in this pill can kill it even before it shows any effect," Alex said. "If you are ever to come across a pill that would kill you instantly, this is the pill that will help you survive."

This was a pill that Alex upgraded using a pill he had found in an auction in the Silvermoon City in the Northern Continent. It was Ronron that had bought it in his stead and he had upgraded the True rank pill to create this Saint pill.

"A precautionary pill," the manager said curiously. "And how many poisons can it protect you from?"

"I have yet to test it out entirely, however, from what I do know about poison, this level of pill will make you completely immune to any Level 8 poisons."

"It can also protect you completely against some Level 9 poisons, but it has to be on a case-by-case basis. As for Level 10, it is not possible to be sure, but we can just say it doesn't for the sake of it," Alex said.

"Even so, Level 8... "the owner said. "That would mean that all naturally available poisons and venoms can be stopped using this pill in advance."

Alex nodded. "It is good, isn't it?"

Chapter 1466 4 Pills

While the three were surprised by the three pills that Alex had provided, Alex pulled out another pill.

He showed them the pill, a blue sphere with lightning scars on them. Another 5 pill veins. The people from the auction house were getting numb to that shock by now.

Pill veins were no long that surprising to them.

"This is the Water Root Transformation pill," Alex said. "If you watched my contest with the Emperor, then I have nothing to explain do it?"

All three of them suddenly got up in surprise again. "This... this is the pill that you made back then, your majesty?" the owner asked.

"This is the pill that transforms your regular spiritual roots into Water spiritual roots, correct?" the manager asked.

"I have been fascinated about getting my hands on this pill for a while now," the girl said.

Alex smiled. "Since you all know exactly what this pill is, I see that I have no reason to explain anything to you at all. Yes, this is exactly what you said this is."

"As for further explanation, I guess it is important to know that this pill transformations your spiritual root for exactly 10 days," Alex said. "A regular one lasts for 2 days at most, but this can last up to 10 days."

"Of course, it will not last that long if you overwork the meridian," Alex said.

"Yes," the girl quickly said, writing down everything. "How many pills are in there, your majesty?"

"3," Alex said.

"I see," the girl wrote and quickly slapped the talisman around the pill bottle, moving it onto her side.

Alex brought another bottle out next, leaving only two behind.

He pulled out a pill from the bottle and showed it to the three. The pill was mostly yellow in color with specks of red around it.

The pill obviously had 5 pill veins as with everything else.

The three looked at the pill curiously, wondering what better pill could come out from the King of the Southern Continent.

Alex spoke up. "This is known as the Soul Trancing Pill," he said. "As the name suggests, it puts you in a trance."

The three looked at Alex with an awkward look on their face. Was that it? Was that all this pill did?

Alex looked at the three and laughed a little before continuing. "It puts you in a trance where your mind dwells on anything and everything it couldn't focus on before. It makes it extremely easier for anyone that has eaten this pill to achieve enlightenment."

"Oh," the owner said. "Is that true?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I have personally eaten this pill 3 times and all 3 times I have learned a Dao."

"Really?" the manager asked with an astonished face. His mouth gaped open as he couldn't formulate anything other than the question.

"Of course," Alex said. "What would I get from lying here?"

The three gulped and laughed awkwardly before looking at the pill. Alex put the pill back into the bottle.

"It is the type of pill that you eat toward the end of enlightenment. When you know a lot about something, but there's still something missing, something that seems to be hiding behind a thin veil, stopping you from seeing the whole truth."

"That is when you eat this pill. At that point, it is almost guaranteed that you will gain the dao," Alex said.

The three continued staring at Alex in awe as they heard about the pill. The manager and owner would have eaten it for themselves if not for the auction.

"Your majesty," the owner couldn't help himself but ask a question. "How much would you need to directly sell this pill to us?"

"To sell the pill?" Alex asked. "I'm not sure. It's not a pill that I've ever sold before."

"I wish to buy it. Just give me a number directly and I will buy it from you," the man said.

"I'm afraid I'm not sure how much I would sell it for," Alex said. He looked at the expectant look of the owner and thought for a bit.

"How much would a pill like this go for?" he asked. "What would the starting bid be?"

"For this pill?" the owner looked lightly curious and turned toward the manager. The manager closed his eyes and thought for a bit.

"We tend to lower the initial bid of the item so that we can get the people to start bidding," the manager said. "Even then, a pill like this would go on for at least 10 thousand Saint spirit stones as an initial bid."

"10 thousand?" Alex said slightly surprised. It had been a while since he had sold a pill through an auction, so he hadn't imagined it to be sold for so much.

He thought for a bit and then said, "I will put the cost for each pill for you at 100 thousand Saint Spirit stones then."

"What?" the owner paused for a moment, thinking that he had heard it wrong. Had he heard it wrong?

"Your majesty, did you say... 100 thousand?" the manager said.

"I did," Alex said. "Of course, I don't expect you to pay 100 thousand for each pill."

"Then?" the owner asked.

"Whatever the price of the pill you end up selling them for together, I will deduct them and sell 2 pills to you. That should give you the incentive to make the big go as much high as you possibly can."

"What... what if it crosses 100 thousand together?" the manager asked.

"Then I suppose you will be getting 2 Soul Trancing pills for free," he said. "Will that be enough?"

"Yes! Yes, your majesty!" the two men said at once.

The daughter quickly wrote up what she heard and put it on the pill bottle.

While the two men were still jubilated, Alex pulled out the last two pill bottles and opened them up to the three.

He pulled out a brown pill from one and a blue pill from another, presenting both pills at once.

"These are the two single pills that I will be selling a singular of," Alex said. "I want to call these my greatest creation yet, but that would be slightly false as I didn't create them myself."

"Still, the majority of it did come from me.

"This brown pill is the Saint Earth Spiritual Root Improvement Pill," Alex said. "And this blue pill is the Saint Water Spiritual Root Improvement Pill."

"If you eat this pill while you have the respective spiritual root, it will improve that root to become a Superior elemental root."

"You're joking," the owner said.

"Is what I'm saying funny to you?" Alex asked.

"No, but this... there is no way this is possible, right?" he asked.

"Why is it not?" Alex asked. "You already saw a pill that can turn a regular spiritual root into Water Spiritual root. What is wrong with one that can improve an existing one?"

"Then... " the manager was slackjawed. "Do-does it really improve it all the way to the Superior realm?"

"Yes," Alex said. "One for Earth and one for Water. There isn't much for me to describe."

He pushed the pills over toward the girl.

"Since this is over, I shall leave."

Chapter 1467 Honglui's Past

Alex presented all the paintings he had made during the past two weeks that he had been on his own. "How are they?" he asked.

Tian Honglui stood to his side, looking at the paintings with eyes full of awe. "Are you sure you have only been practicing for 2 weeks, your majesty? This is the art of someone that has at least been painting for a year or so."

"That good huh? I'm not sure if your flattering me or not, but I'll take the compliment," Alex said.

"No, no. No flattery at all. I mean what I said," he said. "Look at the paintings. You can see your talent in painting evolve throughout the paintings. You much have made practiced day and night."

"I did practice every day," Alex said.

"Amazing," Tian Honglui said again. "You don't need me to teach you must at all. You can just practice on your own and learn from now on."

"Still, I would love to hold this own training," Alex said.

"Very well," Tian Honglui said. "Let us make another painting then."

Alex nodded and brought out a canvas and his paints.

"I would like you to draw something you have never seen before," the young man said.

Alex nodded and came up with a random scenario in his head. "I have a simple picture in my mind," he said.

The young man nodded and let Alex draw. He watched the entire process of the drawing, seeing the blue sky, and the black, white, and blue background at the bottom.

The colors of the water come together to form an image of the lake with a goldfish jumping out of it. The shadow on the fish, the lighting. Everything was nearly impeccable.

As Alex drew, the young man couldn't help but give a fearful look at him. 'How is this just 2 weeks?' he wondered. Was Alex that good? Or was he just that good of a teacher?

He continued watching Alex draw and once he finished, he clapped. "Amazing, your majesty," he said. "Your ability to capture an image and put it on the canvas is incredible. The anatomy of the fish in the picture, the colors you have used, and the light passing through the water. Everything is absolutely incredible."

The young man could only praise Alex.

"Any problems with the painting?" Alex asked.

"I am unable to tell," the young man said. "There are no problems on a technical level at all. You can improve your painting skills, but those aren't problems that you can't sort out with a few months of training. In a year-no, less than a year, you will reach the same rank as an artist as most of the artists in this continent."

Alex smiled quite a lot at this time. He was happy to be praised like that. He had talent, talent to learn anything he wanted. But that didn't mean that he could do anything he wanted to.

He had to train and learn to be able to do that thing. Sure he had to train for less time than others, but that still didn't mean that he didn't have to give it his all.

He stepped back and looked at his painting again. It truly was quite good, wasn't it?

"When is the evaluation?" Alex asked.

"In an hour from now, I think," the young man said. "I'm quite nervous."

"Why be nervous? Even if you don't make it to the Hall of fame, you have managed to create an amazing painting. That level of skill is something I can only strive to reach in the future."

"Haha, I'm certain you will surpass me, your majesty," the young man said. "As long as you train, you will become the greatest painter in the entire world I assume."

Alex smiled. "I'm fine with just being the greatest Alchemist. You can keep the title of the greatest painter," he said.

The young man chuckled. "Thank you, your majesty," he said.

Alex nodded. "If you don't mind me asking. Have you always wanted to be a painter? How did you get started?" he asked.

"My mother was a painter," the young man said. "She was a painter and I admired her a lot. She used to teach me how to paint as a child and I liked that. When she passed in an accident during my childhood, I found out that painting was the only way I could find to connect with her."

"My father didn't like that," the young man said. "Coming from the Tian clan, he wanted me to follow him to be a leader, and there I was painting. He said that I could never become anything as a painter, like my mother. It got to a point where he destroyed all of the paintings in the house to discourage me, including the paintings my mother made."

"In my anger, I left my house to prove to my father that I would become something. I learned what I could in this city from the senior and then left for the capital where I learned even more."

"Once I spent centuries there, I finally managed to become a painter of fame and worth to my name," the young man said. "At that point, however, I had already lost the feeling of proving it to my father that I could become something."

"Still, the hatred I felt was still there for he had destroyed all that I cherished in that house. I haven't returned there once, and don't intend to return there anytime soon."

"So, now I'm just a painter that drifts through the continent, searching for the next thing to paint."

"I see," Alex said. "I'm sorry you had to go through something like that."

"It's alright. My emotions are not there anymore."

Alex nodded. "Anyway, let us get back to—"

Someone knocked on the door of the room.

"Senior Tian, are you in there?" someone asked.

"Yes," the young man answered.

"The elders have gathered in the judging hall," the person said. "They request your presence."

"Already?" Tian Honglui was a little surprised. He turned toward Alex and said, "Let us go, your Majesty."

Chapter 1468 The Evaluation

The room for the evaluation was set up in a lecture hall with cascading long steps that sloped upward. The students could sit here with their canvases out and learn from the lecturer while not blocking the views of the ones behind them.

At this moment, there were only 20 or so painters that were sitting here, waiting for the moment the painting was brought in.

Tian Honglui walked in and they all got alert as it was going to begin. When Alex walked in, they all stood up and bowed to greet him. They were all aware that he was coming in, so they had been prepared for his arrival.

Some of them talked to him, asking about his painting journey. Alex smiled and told them the basics without going into just how good he had gotten.

"We're here to judge Brother Tian's painting. Let's not make this about mine," he said and went on to stay at the top where he could see everything from.

Tian Honglui went to the stage alongside senior Ran and set up the spot where he would place the painting.

Senior Ran nodded at him and walked away, making his way to the back of the room, sitting next to Alex. He greeted him and stayed silent as he was to focus back on the young man.

Tian Honglui looked at the people in the crowd, at his colleagues and his peers. All his seniors.

He took a deep breath and bowed to them all. "Thank you all for coming to my painting's evaluation," he said. "I do not wish to waste your time more than I already have, so here it is."

He pulled out the painting and placed it on the spot.

Immediately, everyone focused on the painting. There were trees on the side, the river flowing at the bottom, grass moving in the wind, and clouds spreading across the big blue sky.

And yet, everyone's eyes immediately fell on the single thing in the middle of the painting, the Golden Mountain. Feeling the gold's aura permeating through the intent that was used to carve into the paper of the canvas.

Some men stood up to get a closer look, some remained in shock even more.

One thing was true for all of them, however. They all forgot that this was an evaluation and instead looked at the painting as an art piece to enjoy.

Senior Ran smiled a little as well, happy for the young man's success. He remembered when he came to find him, saying that he was his disciple's son. Hearing about his mother's passing away was sad enough, hearing how his father treated painting was even worse.

In part anger and part responsibility were what drove him to teach the young man all the basics of painting that his mother couldn't teach and sent him away to the Dragon Capital to learn more.

He could never have imagined that he would have turned out to be this successful as a painter. Now, his father begged in his footsteps to have him return to the family.

"What do you think, your Majesty?" he asked. "That painting is good, isn't it?"

"It is," Alex said. "Looking at it, I wonder if I made a mistake being present when it was made. I wonder what sort of excitement I could've gotten had I seen it for the first time as a finished product like I had with The Players' Descent and The Lightning God's Anger."

"I can see where you're coming from, but there is a different type of enjoyment when watching someone good at his craft do something phenomenally, isn't it?" the old man asked.

Alex smiled a little. "That is true," he said, staring back at the painting.

Tian Honglui stepped to the side and waited for the people to calm down a little. Once they were calmed down, they would begin the individual inspections.

2 painters went up and spoke nothing but praises regarding the painting before walking back to their seats.

The third painter stood up, walked up to the painting, and inspected it

Senior Ran perked up a little and seemed nervous. Alex noticed that and he noticed that Tian Honglui was nervous as well.

The man stared at the painting for an unusually long time, almost one and a half times as much as each of the first two took.

"Brother Tian," the man finally spoke up. "What was the intention behind you painting this?"

"My intentions? It was to draw a painting of a mountain made up of gold," Tian Honglui said simply.

"No, that is not what I'm asking," the man said. "I'm asking what your intention was to do with the painting once you finished it."

"To have it evaluated and sent to the capital if it is considered good enough for the hall of fame," Tian Honglui said.

"I see," the painter said, staring back at the painting. "I can see that you've put a lot of effort into this painting. Mind I ask if I can see the painting you will be selling in the auction, to see the difference?"

"Bastard!" senior Ran said quietly under his breath.

Alex looked at the man and wondered if he was trying to sabotage Honglui's painting. It definitely looked like it, but could he?

Honglui couldn't answer the question without lying and if he lied and was found out, that would be bad for his image. As a result, he could only tell the truth.

"I have not made any paintings to sell to the auction," he said.

"What?" the man asked. "But I was sure you were supposed to make one for the auction. As far as I know, tomorrow is the last day of giving your painting to the auction. Have you not prepared any?"

Tian Honlui frowned. He never thought he was going to be attacked from this direction.

"No, I have not," he said.

"Then... what were you planning to do with this painting if it didn't make the cut," the man asked.

"I was planning to sell it in the auction," Tian Honglui said.

"Ah! No wonder," the man said. "I can tell that you weren't truly serious when making this painting, and it shows."

"Senior Guan! Do not slander my effort in making this painting," Tian Honglui shouted.

"My apologies, my apologies," the man said as he quickly stepped away. "Anyway, I have said what I wanted to say. Congratulations on making such a good painting. I'm sure whoever buys it will be stoked to have it in the auction."

Once he was gone, a few others came and spoke, going over similar points as the man did. As time went on, every other painter would say the same point as the other one, claiming that there was not enough effort put into the work.

"What's going on?" Alex asked senior Ran.

"That's Senior Guan from the capital. He hates Honglui and is trying to downplay his efforts in order to not have another of his painting go into the Hall of Fame," senior Ran said.

"Why does he hate brother Tian?" Alex asked.

"Senior Guan is the vice headmaster of the Royal School of Painting. He is known for having many great disciples and thus when Tian refused to come under his tutelage, he was angered by him. When he made it to the Hal of Fame, that anger seems to have turned into Animosity."

"There have been 3 times that Honglui has made it close to the Hall of Fame, but this man and his students have stopped him each time."

"It was acceptable the fast 3 times as even Honglui knew it wasn't good enough, but this time, it truly one of the best paintings he has made," Senior Ran said. "And they are trying to stop it all again."

Alex nodded. "And you can't just invite him, can you?" he asked.

"No, his influence as a painter is way too big. Even the headmaster cannot ignore him," Senior Ran said.

As the two of them talked, the painters were done with individual inspections and returned to their seats.

Senior Ran got up and went down to the stage where he stood next to Tian Honglui. "Now that you've all judged it, it is time for voting," he said. "All in favor of putting The Golden Mountain in the Hall of Fame, please raise your hand."

Senior Ran raised his hand and looked through the room as everyone else raised their hands as well. He waited for more to raise, but they didn't.

When he saw 10 hands out of 21 painters had been raised, he couldn't help but feel bad.

"10. 10 hands were raised," he said. "All against placing the Golden Mountain in the Hall of Fame?"

The remaining 11 hands rose all at once.

Senior ran and looked through, hoping that someone would place their hands down, but no one did. Everyone here was indebted to Painter Guan and thus didn't do anything.

It was an 11 to 10 victory. A very close one.

"Such a shame," Senior Guan said. "A little more effort and it would've become a masterpiece worthy of the Hall of Fame."

Senior Ran felt his blood boil and was about to say something when he heard another voice.

"I think it's a masterpiece worthy of the Hall of Fame," Alex said, looking toward senior Guan, who quickly looked up.

"Your majesty?" he asked.

"I think it's a masterpiece," Alex said. "And since I am also technically in the room already, evaluating the painting, I would say my vote should count as well."

"I am in favor of placing this painting in the Hall of Fame."

Chapter 1469 The Final Verdict

The crowd of painters looked back in surprise toward Alex. Even Senior Ran and Tian Honglui were surprised at his words.

"Your majesty," Senior Ran spoke with a soft smile, seeing Alex try to help them. But it was already over.

"We are happy to hear Your Majesty loves young Honglui's paintings," Senior Guan said. "But unfortunately, you must be a painter to—"

"Be a painter to what?" Alex asked. "To judge the painting?"

Senior Guan tried to continue speaking but paused as he stared at Alex who stared back at him directly. "Are you saying that just because I am not as good as you all in putting colors on paper, I am not fit to judge the quality of one when it is put before me?"

"No, that's not what I mean," Senior Guan quickly said. "It's just that only painters of this continent are allowed to evaluate and judge it."

"If I'm not allowed to evaluate the painting then why was I let in?" Alex asked. "If I'm not fit to judge, then why was I made to stay?"

"I—" Senior Guan didn't know how to say what he wanted to say without offending the king. He took a moment to think and nodded. "You are right, your majesty," he said. "You are allowed to vote. Junior Ran, please include his Majesty's vote as well."

Senior Ran nodded and bowed toward Alex in thanks. However, that alone was not enough at all.

"The voting has changed from 10 in favor and 11 against it, to 11 in favor and 11 against it," Senior Ran said. "It has come to a tie."

Alex looked around. At least he had managed to make it a tie, instead of an outright failure. Surely that helped something, right?

Senior Ran could only frown. "Since it is a frown, we will have to gather another day to judge and evaluate it with a fresh mind," he said. "We must include a few more painters of Level 8 and higher levels."

"I'm afraid that is going to take 2 weeks," Senior Guan said. "We will have to gather another day."

He stood up and looked at Alex before bowing. "Will Your Majesty be visiting the evaluation another day as well?" he asked.

Alex looked up front at the young man and older man next to him and asked, "I will most definitely come," he said. "But, before you all leave, I wish for a question to be answered."

"What question might it be, your majesty?" Senior Guan asked.

"Do you always postpone the evaluation of a painting to some other day when it comes to a tie?" he asked.

"We try not to tie," the old man answered. "That is why we gather an odd number of painters to evaluate. If there does happen to be a tie due to some painter's reluctance to answer, then it is in fact moved on to another day."

"Is there no other method of breaking a tie right now?" he asked.

"There is none," the old man said. "Unless His Majesty the Emperor himself comes and tells us what to do, a tie is always broken by—"

"Great!" Alex said and quickly pulled out something before tossing it over to Senior Ran.

Senior Ran held what he was given and within moments his hands shivered by the weight of what he held.

"Your majesty!" He looked up, his hands wide open for everyone to see just what it was that he was holding.

When everyone saw what it was, their eyes went wide immediately as uncontrollable shock filled their hearts

"In the Dragon Emperor's absence, I shall use the authority he had given me to break this tie right now," Alex said. "The painting will go to the Hall of Fame."

Senior Guan gulped.

With the presence of the Dragon Medallion, there was nothing he could say that could counter Alex's words. As a holder of the Dragon Medallion, his words were only behind the Crown Prince and the Emperor himself in terms of importance.

Alex walked down the room, walking past the gazes of everyone that were there, and arrived on stage. He took the medallion from Senior Ran's hand and looked at Tian Honglui.

"Congratulations!" he said. "You are the only person to not have two, but three paintings in the Hall of Fame. Be proud."

He slapped the young man's shoulders a few times before walking away, leaving him on his own.

Tian Honglui was in shock for a moment as all hopes he had lost had come rushing back somehow. He was stunned beyond belief as he struggled to even realize if this was a fantasy or reality.

Senior Ran quickly nudged him, breaking him out of his stunned state, and forcing him to turn towards Alex.

He finally had to accept that what he had just witnessed was indeed reality and he quickly bowed in his direction. "Thank you, your majesty!" he shouted to Alex who was already walking down the hallway.

He smiled in happiness as what he had strived to achieve for the past several years finally came to fruition. He thanked Alex even as he was out of earshot.

Alex left the painter's guild, letting them deal with the hall of fame and all. He would meet up with the young man once everything around the painting and hall of fame was settled.

He felt like he had paid back what he owed to the young man for the past few weeks. Now that everything was done, he walked back to the Gold King's Palace to go spend his time in peace before the auction began.

He had quite a lot to do as well. Downgrade pills, make a wood pill, practice his painting, learn some—

Just as Alex was thinking about what he had to do, something happened that caught his attention.

At first, it was subtle and he couldn't even tell if it was even real. However, within minutes, it became apparent that his feelings weren't his imagination.

It wasn't just him either. Almost every strong individual around the world felt it to varying extents.

Something big was happening.

Chapter 1470 A Realm in Chaos

Alex turned around, looking to the west with a slightly confused look on his face. No one around him seemed to sense the fluctuations at all, but he did. He could sense it already.

His eyes narrowed and he zoned out everything around him, focusing only on the feeling he had right now.

Space.

As the feeling got stronger, he managed to figure out that it was indeed space that was being manipulated in the distance. And the manipulation was so vague that he could tell that it was not close at all, and strong enough that it was a manipulation on a massive scale.

He stared in disbelief wondering what was happening. The last time he had felt anything similar to this was when...

'When Bai Jingshen left for the Immortal lands!' Alex realized. What did that mean? Was someone leaving for the immortal lands? It was definitely not Scarlet as the feeling had come from the west, but then... was it the Black Tortoise?

Was he not supposed to leave some thousand years later when it was time for them to leave? The Snake wasn't even there yet.

'Is someone entering the Immortal realm then?' Alex wondered. If so who could it be?

He wondered what was happening, and many saints around the world wondered along with him. Most didn't even know that what was happening had to do with Space being manipulated.

Every other Saint could only wait in fear as they tried to figure something out.

* * * * *

In a certain location, a girl sat somewhere unknown to her. She knew she was in a room, but wasn't sure if the room was dark or bright. She couldn't tell if the temperature was hot or cold. She couldn't tell if it was a quiet location or loud, or if she smelled anything.

She couldn't even sense any cultivation bases despite being strong herself. Her sense of Qi was completely gone.

All she could sense was touch, and that too was very vague for her, as if it were a mortal's senses.

That had been her normal for so many years now that she wasn't even bothered by it now. She was used to having to rely on someone else for the past few decades.

No medicines helped her, not the ones she ate all those years ago or the ones she ate yesterday. At this point, she had completely given up on the idea of ever gaining her senses back.

However, for the first time today, she could sense something. Whatever it was, it was too strong for her to ignore. However, she could only wait for someone to tell her what was going on as she herself couldn't tell that at all.

* * * * *

Kings and Queens all stirred around the continent, each looking to their guards for answers. The strong members of the Head Legion, however, could provide no answers.

They themselves were just as befuddled as everyone else.

* * * * * *

The beasts in the Beast Paradise were scared, each trying to understand what was going on. The Lizard had some idea of what could be happening, but even that was way too vague.

A feeling alone wasn't going to confirm what he thought was the truth.

* * * * * *

The Aquatic beasts ran in fear, the stronger ones hiding in the deep. On an island, an old man walked out, looking in the direction of the north wondering to himself what it was that he was sensing.

He could not come up with an answer and as such, he could only stare.

* * * * * *

In a bright room, sitting in front of an Alchemy cauldron, the Dragon Emperor diligently made different pills. He had not only learned the recipes that could give him perfect pills, but he also had so many of them now that he believed he could understand the mystery behind the perfect pill.

He wasn't willing to wait for Alex to give everything to him if he could use this opportunity to learn it all himself.

He thought he understood what was going on, but needed a few more years for certain.

He was preparing to make another batch when suddenly he sensed the disturbance. He felt it deep in his blood.

'Is that... space?' he wondered. He could sense space, and thus he sensed the disturbance more clearly than most other saints. Not to mention, as someone who was a simple intention away from trying to break through to the Immortal realm, he had the strongest senses of all who were of this land.

And as such, he knew to fear what was happening. Something big was happening, and he did not wish to be a part of it until he knew he was safe. Until he was in the Immortal realms, he was not going to risk anything at all.

He told a few of his subordinates and had them check to see what was going on by giving them an accurate estimation of where it was happening.

* * * * * *

Scarlet sat on the platform made out of Sunstone in the center of the Sunborn Sanctuary. The stone still retained the sun's heat, glowing, giving back what it had absorbed.

She had been diligently cultivating for the past 3 years and had managed to break through some more times, now in the Saint Transformation 3rd realm, getting close to 4th.

Her eyes suddenly opened, looking around for a bit before focusing her senses in a certain direction.

She could feel what was happening and could tell it was big. However, her Saint realm senses were nowhere near strong enough for her to tell accurately what was going on.

She could only tell that whatever was happening was not in her continent at least. Given the direction thought... was it the Eastern Continent?

'I hope this has nothing to do with you, Alex,' she thought. 'I can only hope.'

* * * * * *

The Black Tortoise was sleeping inside the secret realm in the Domain of the Ruler when he woke up to the commotion as well.

His long head came out from his shell, looking to the east curiously.

"What is going on?" he wondered. It was a little difficult to tell exactly what was going on for him. Being inside a secret realm where the spaces were separated, he couldn't tell properly what was happening outside.

"Is someone breaking through to Immortality?" he wondered for a second. However, a moment later, he threw out the idea. There was nothing of what he was sensing that gave him the idea that someone was breaking through to Immortality.

Whatever it was though, he could tell was way too big for someone of this realm. "Are the other beasts moving?" he wondered.

He could only wait and see if he could get more answers.

* * * * * *

Bai Jingshen opened his eyes inside his room looking to the east. His senses were strong, stronger than anyone else in this world aside from a single person.

As such, he had a lot more information than the other Immortals in this world.

"My lord," one of his wives spoke in somewhat distress. "What is going on?"

"This... I want to say someone is ascending," another wife of his said. "But this is wrong."

"I can't sense what is happening clearly," Ren Xiao said worriedly and looked toward Bai Jingshen. "My lord, are my senses correct? Is this happening in the Eastern Continent?"

"It is," Bai Jingshen said with a serious look. He tried to sense what was happening as well, but it was somewhat difficult to paint a full picture.

"I'll try to see what is happening," he said and disappeared from there. Not long after, he appeared outside the Beast realm and looked toward the East.

His first instinct was to fly to where it was and see what was happening. However, after appearing outside, he was confident that whatever was happening, was happening in the Eastern Continent.

As a result, he could not go there at all.

He frowned a bit and wondered what it was that he could do, but there really was nothing he could do.

He could only hope that Alex and Pearl were safe from here.

His wives came out not long after as well, looking to the east. "What is happening, My Lord?" one of them asked.

Bai Jingshen grimaced at the question and finally answered.

"Someone has descended to this realm," he said. "And they have done so in a continent that has no protector at all."

* * * * *

"Senior!" Xuan Luhei, the snake, crawled out of the lake, quickly assuming the body of an adult man as he made his way toward Senior Yang in somewhat distress.

"Am I sensing it correctly?" he asked. "Is someone really descending to this realm?"

Senior Yang looked troubled at the situation. His eyes darted around, trying to figure out what to do.

The snake looked at him and was confused for a moment before realizing why he was troubled.

"Are they... here to take you?" the snake asked.

"I... I would assume so," the man said, not knowing what to do.

"But that would be breaking the Heavenly pact that the beasts have made with the humans and demons to bring peace to the lower worlds," the snake said.

"I fear the consequences of leaving me be here is far more than what they would have to suffer from breaking the treaty," Senior Yang said. "They are certainly more than happy to do it as if that means finding the World Tree's seed here."

"They are happy to do it so they can rekindle the flames of war."

"But how can they come here?" the snake asked. "Do they not fear this location?"

"I fear..." Senior Yang spoke with a solemn look. "I fear that they may have already figured out that the Godkiller is no longer here anymore."

Chapter 1471 Veil

"You're... you're going to get taken away?" the snake asked Senior Yang, unsure how to process this information.

"I probably will," Senior Yang said. "I have only so long before they realize that I am here. I will be taken away now, and given that I lost most of their treasures, I have my doubts whether I will survive henceforth or not."

"Senior!" the snake spoke, hearing the pessimistic tone in the man's voice.

"No need to worry I suppose," senior Yang said. "It was always coming. I was only wrong to hope that I would get to ride someone's Immortality out of here. I suppose I'm going back the normal way."

The snake worried. He wanted to use the talisman, which was meant to call for his clan to take him away in case of life and death urgency, to send the senior away and hide him.

However, it was the Tortoise that had held onto it. So he couldn't do anything.

The phoenix had yet to unlock her Soul Space so she couldn't provide him with her talisman either.

The Dragon-well, the Azure Dragon was dead. He couldn't help them at all. His soul space would take decades to decay before the things inside of it could be brought out. He could tear it out with his Immortal Qi if he was there, but that was dangerous for the current him.

As for the White Tiger, his talisman had already been used by his wives the first time he sent them away. As for going back again, he mentioned that he no longer required a talisman.

Something about his master giving him a better artifact.

The snake felt frustrated. He had heard the tales of wars and heard of the millions that had died in the past. Not just fighters that fought in the wars, but the casualties that involved innocents.

It was a horrible tale that he wished no one else would have to suffer from.

"Can't you do something?" he asked. "Maybe try to fight them?"

"I can," the man said. "But I've remained here for so long that I don't have enough Qi to fight with someone who has just come from the heavens. Besides, I will die even if I simply tried to—"

Senior Yang's eyes are unfocused instantly and stopped speaking. The snake quickly looked in the direction where the feeling had been coming from and stared.

"What's... going on?" the snake asked. "I cannot feel anything."

"They set up a veil," the senior said. "That's... why would they set up a veil?"

Senior Yang could not imagine why someone such as the people that had come down would set up a veil. Just the fact that they had set up a formation to create the veil was confusing enough given that it would anger the heavens.

But on top of that, setting up a veil wasn't necessary at all. He already knew he was there. What other necessity would there be for them to...

"Are they... hiding from the other realms?" he thought. "Are they trying to hide themselves from the demon realms?"

"Why would they try to do that?" the snake asked. "The humans own these realms. They don't have to hide from the demons. The only ones they would have to hide from are us, and we already know."

The snake realized something and became a little scared. "Are they going to kill us?" he asked.

"They won't," Senior Yang said. "Even if they do, they can't hope to do it quietly. You probably don't have to worry either, given that the Tortoise is the main body."

The snake nodded. "But it still takes a while to get my body back if I die, or so I've been told," he said. "And I will only remember what my brother remembers."

The senior nodded. "I suppose we can only wait and try to figure out what exactly is going on."

* * * * *

Godslayer sensed everything that happened before the veil was put into place. "That is definitely someone descending alright. Someone has come here from the outer realms, and the only ones that have the power to do so are the strong ones."

"The weaker ones can't come?" Alex asked.

"More like they don't have the resources to break through the heavenly barrier that keeps away people of stronger realms," Godslayer said. "The only way to not have to deal with the heavenly barrier is to actually travel through the space, but that is not so easy of a task either."

"What about the Void?" Alex asked.

"If there is a natural Voidgate, sure. But I don't know how someone would manage to create an artificial one at all," he said. "That sort of stuff is practically impossible."

"Is it really impossible?" Alex asked.

"Well, not Impossible, but highly probable because of the requirements," Godslayers said. "Whatever, these people didn't come from the validate. They came through teleportation formation. The only question is why they are here and why they are hiding?"

Alex wondered for a moment if they had come here to find Senior Yang, but quickly let go of the theory as it didn't seem right. He had a gut feeling that it was not correct.

Still, just in case, he was worried for the senior. There was quite a lot he wanted to learn from him still as his knowledge had increased so much after coming to the Eastern Continent.

There were so many more questions he wanted to ask about.

The elders around Alex were looking around in confusion as well. They could somewhat sense what was happening, but they couldn't tell anything at all.

All they could tell was that it wasn't someone fighting, breaking through, or learning a new dao.

"Could this be a Birth Omen of some sort, your Majesty?" Elder Yao asked.

"No, this is no Birth Omen. We would be lucky if this were something as simple as a Birth Omen," Alex said.

"Immortals from the Immortal realm have arrived in this world, so brazenly at that. We will now have to see what the future holds for us."

Chapter 1472 The Emperor's Command

"Immortal beings?" Elder Liang looked in surprise. "Plural?"

"I don't know how many just yet. Only that they have come and hidden themselves for some reason," Alex said. "I can't tell much from here. Let us return to the palace and see if the King has received any more information than us."

The two elders nodded and the three of them quickly returned to the palace. Alex went to find the King who was in his hall, surrounded by the other elders.

"Your Majesty, are you alright?" the King asked.

"I am fine," Alex said. "Do you have any idea what is going on out there?"

The King shook his head. "His Majesty has given out orders for everyone out there to send him what has happened. I'm sure we will learn soon enough."

Alex nodded. He was curious where the Immortals had even come down to. He wondered how far to the west this even went on for.

They waited for a bit for anyone to learn anything, but no new news came at all. The elders around the palace hall were in debate as to what exactly was going on, and Alex could see that no one truly knew about the Immortals that had descended. A few of them had thrown it out as a possibility though.

"Quiet!" the King quickly spoke. "I'm receiving communications from his majesty."

Everyone stopped the moment the king spoke and let him listen to the communication. The King placed the talisman on his forehead and listened to what he was told.

He slowly placed the talisman down while processing what he had heard.

"King Tan, what did the Emperor say?" Alex asked.

"I am told to take my guards and go visit the Ivory Kingdom," he said. "No one has managed to contact Queen Song just yet."

"The Ivory Kingdom?" Alex asked for a while in confusion. "Is that where... where you are going to go now?"

"Yes," the King said before quickly standing up.

"I will go too," Alex said.

"I'm sorry, Your Majesty, but I cannot take you along," the King said. "There is a chance that the Ivory Queen might be dead. There could be a danger. I do not wish to take you along with me."

"The King is right, your Majesty," one of the guards said. "We are not sure if we can protect you at all. Please understand our situation and don't force us to protect you."

"I will be fine," Alex said. "I have my own—"

His eyes wavered for a moment as he instinctively wanted to turn his head to the side as he sensed something else. He was not surprised to see that any of these people had sensed it at all.

After all, it was a Spatial manipulation that had just happened.

"You're right," he said. "I should not go. I should not place my people in danger for my own curiosity. It is not right of me."

"My apologies. I will not stop you from doing your duty anymore."

Alex turned around and walked away from the room, along with his two elders who had inquisitive looks of their own.

They quickly followed Alex as he went toward the garden.

"What happened kid?" Godslayer asked.

"I'm not confident, but... I think they left."

* * * * *

Bai Jingshen was standing next to Senior Yang in case he was needed there. "Did I sense that right?" he asked. "Did they just leave?"

"They left," Senior Yang said. "Or... at least someone did."

"But why?" the snake asked. "Were they not here for you?"

"Let's not get too hasty now," the man said. "It is true that someone left, but it is most likely the case that many more have remained behind. After all, we do not know how many came down."

"True," the snake said.

"There is another possibility though," Bai Jingshen said. "Given all the inconsistencies, I fear this might be the actual possibility."

"You feel the same?" Senior Yang asked. "I don't want to have hope, but I can't help but think it in the back of my head."

"What? What possibility?" the snake asked.

"It is possible that whoever came never intended to take Senior away," Bai Jingshen said. "It is possible... that they came here for something else entirely."

Senior Yang nodded. "Or... someone else entirely."

* * * * *

The Dragon Emperor sensed the chance in space as well, but he wasn't aware of what it meant. He did not have the same level of control and authority over Space as Alex did.

He contacted his vassals. "Something just changed. See if you can communicate with the Snowheart City or the area around it," he said. "If not, have Tan Qiu hurry up and see what is happening."

Once his people left, he waited there patiently, trying to learn what had happened. He waited there, not touching the alchemy ingredients in front of him, waiting for the time his talisman vibrated.

About an hour later, it did. He quickly listened to what was told, a bunch of information, and finally felt relieved when he was told that everything was alright

* * * *

Alex waited for a few hours on his own, painting something to get his mind off the worry. Then, the King returned some time after and gave him in general what had happened.

"I arrived way outside the capital to find a barrier covering most of the upper Ivory kingdom. I couldn't communicate inside at all, and couldn't tell what was happening."

"We tried to break through, but it didn't work. After a while, the Ivory Queen sent out a single piece of information."

"She said... Everything is alright, and the barrier would last for a year or so before it goes down. Until then, we will have no communication from inside there."

Alex looked at the man curiously. "No other messages? No inclination of what had happened?" he asked.

"None," he said. "We will have to wait for the barrier to go down before we learn anything else."

"Okay..." Alex thought. "I guess we'll have to wait for a year to find out what exactly happened then."

Chapter 1473 The Day before the Auction

Having delivered the news to Alex, the King returned to his quarters to rest after a rather stressful day.

Alex's hands hovered in front of the painting he was making and struggled to care about the painting at the moment having received the news.

It was all okay in the Ivory Kingdom. Could he believe that? That was certainly not possible, but what other choice did he have?

"Are you going to go check to see anything? Do you think you can stake into the barrier?" Godslayer asked.

"Are you kidding me?" Alex answered. "There are Immortals, maybe even Divinities that came down. And if my suspicion is correct, they are here for the senior. If they find the treasures on me, I will be dead."

"True," Godslayer said. "You're right. I don't want to get caught either. Don't go."

Alex was of the same mind, so he said nothing. He had talent, but he wasn't at the level yet where he could go up to potentially hostile immortals and come out alive.

"We'll see how it goes. If things get really bad, I'm sure Bai Jingshen will do something," he said. "Even if he was ready to lose me here, he wouldn't lose Pearl."

"Him not acting here means he is relatively sure that there isn't much harm to me as long as I don't do something stupid," he said. "Besides, there is a chance that whoever came down has already left, so I would be stupid to try and find them in that case."

"Let us ignore this for now," Alex said, speaking aloud so his two elders could hear him as well. "For now, let us focus on enjoying the upcoming auction. We will know what we need to know when the barrier finally drops in the Ivory kingdom."

The two elders nodded and stayed right there watching him. Even if he said what he did, they were too experienced to let Alex out of their sight. There had been too many times where he had gone out to do his own things after all.

Alex took a few breaths and finally focused back on the painting. He managed to get into the flow of the art in front of him once again and realized just how bad it was what he had drawn due to the interruption.

"You really can't lose your focus can you?" he spoke softly, continuing.

Once he was done, he left to go cultivate in his room.

A few days passed since the incident and everyone was made aware of what had happened in the Ivory Kingdom. They were all surprised to learn about the large barrier and worried.

However, thanks to Queen Song's only piece of message who said that everything was fine, people didn't devolve into mass hysteria that something like this could happen to them as well.

A day before the month-long auction was to begin, people had already arrived in the city, filling the streets as well as the snow outside.

Alex walked around the outside with his elders and other soldiers, looking at the festive environment that had been prepared out here.

So many tents of so many different colors were set up, each with space constricting formation in them to store more space inside than would be normal. Those sorts of tents could house dozens of times, if not more, as many people as they physically appeared capable to.

There were people gathered outside the tents, ready to enter the moment they were allowed to. Even though the auctions officially started tomorrow, they were all preparing to enter today.

Since there was no such thing as VIP seats in such auction houses, the people were forced into having to find a seat there themselves. And the further back they were, the less appealing the seats were to these people.

Alex had no such worries. The auction house he was going to was only for VIPs and no one else. Each VIP would get their own room, so he could roam the city for ages and still arrive at the auction house to have a place for him.

Even if he was not a King and just a lowly cultivator, as long as he had a VIP room, that would be the case.

"I wonder what sort of items they sell in these auction houses," Elder Liang said. "I wonder if they even get to Saint-ranked items at all."

"Some of these are definitely for lesser cultivators who will have no way of entering the bigger auctions, but most should be for the better ones."

"After all, what is the point in setting up an auction for a Dec-annual occasion, if only to set one to sell mediocre treasures," he said.

"Sure, but there could be treasures that the ones selling or buying don't consider treasures," Elder Liang said. "What if we miss it?"

"Elder Liang, there are hundreds of auctions being set up here. We are bound to miss every other good thing but the one we will be going to," Alex said. "We're bound to miss a lot of good stuff. Unfortunate as it may be, we can't be anywhere."

Liang Shufen sighed and nodded. "You are correct," she said. She sighed a little still, and Alex could understand her feeling. He was a little sad about having to miss various things as well.

"Let's leave," he said. "We should return to the palace and prepare to head over to the actual auction."

"We should do that," Yao Ning said and had the soldiers lead the way. Alex looked around as he walked back and arrived back in the palace a while later.

When he did, he found someone inside who he was surprised to see here.

"Lady Zhan?" he couldn't help but call out to the woman. "What are you doing here?"

Lady Zhan, who had been in the hall resting by herself looked around toward Alex. "Your Majesty," she quickly got up and bowed a little. "It's a pleasure to meet you again."

Chapter 1474 New Arrivals

"It is indeed a pleasure to meet you again as well," Alex said. "What are you doing here?"

"I arrived with His Highness for the auction," she said.

"Oh, the Crown Prince is here as well, is he?" Alex asked.

The girl nodded. "King Tan took His Highness somewhere to speak privately. They should be back in a bit," she said.

"I see," Alex said, sitting down on one of the chairs. "I'm sorry if I'm misremembering, but I believe you said that you couldn't visit the auction, didn't you?"

"Ahem," Lady Zhan looked a little embarrassed. "I did, didn't I?" she asked. "Well, I'm afraid things have changed a little and I now have time to visit the auction."

"You now have free time?" Alex asked, thinking for a moment. "Oh, the pill you were making, did you manage to fully make it? I remember hearing you were successful."

"Yes, I made the pill," she said.

"How was it?" Alex asked. "It was a rather difficult pill to make with strong ingredients that could easily cause the entire process to become invalid at a moment's notice. It was a success, then?"

"Well..." Lady Zhan hesitated a bit. "It was as much of a success as it was a failure."

Alex frowned a little. 'What does that mean?' he couldn't help but wonder to himself. "I'm sorry, Lady Zhan, but I must say I cannot of the private sort," she said.

"Oh, my apologies if I made you feel uncomfortable. You do not decipher the meaning of your words. Would you mind elaborating?"

The woman hesitated a little before shaking her head. "I'm sorry, Your Majesty, but I cannot speak any further on this matter. It... is of the private sort," she said.

"Oh, my apologies if I made you feel uncomfortable. You do not have to explain to me anything you do not wish you," Alex said. "Still, do not hesitate to me to ask for help if you need it. I will always be available."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," the woman said, smiling softly as she did so.

"Then, now that you have made that pill, will you be using it to try and strike the Level 10 barrier?" he asked.

"I... will probably not," she said. "It was not a pill I made on my own, so I cannot swear the oath that proves that requirement. I will have to devise another pill, one perhaps not as difficult."

"Good luck," Alex said.

Lady Zhan nodded.

As they continued talking, the King and the Crown Prince walked into the hallway a moment later.

"Your Majesty, you're back," the Crown Prince said with a big smile. "I haven't seen you in a while now."

"It has been a while, hasn't it?" Alex asked the Crown Prince. "How have you been doing, Prince Fangyu?"

"Not so great," the prince said. "With father in closed cultivation, I was forced to handle everything on his behalf. Unlike father, I also don't have anyone to share my workload with, so I'm stuck doing it all on my own."

"You have my sympathy," Alex said with a slight grin. He knew what it was like when the actual ruler decided to take the time off and dump it all on the other one.

"Oh right, I heard you helped my Luoyang when she was struggling with her pill. Thank you," the Crown Prince said.

"It's not a big matter. I just happened to be there and happened to be interested," Alex said. "It's more so for my own entertainment that I helped her with the pill."

The Crown prince smiled. "I wish I can one day reach such a level where I too could help others for my own entertainment," he said.

"I'm sure you'll reach such a level sooner than later," Alex said. "You just need a bit of time to try."

The Crown prince nodded.

As they talked, someone else arrived.

"Your Majesty!" the Emerald King said in a loud voice. "Your Highness, Brother Tan. You're all here. Lady Zhan, my greetings."

With the Emerald King's arrival, the place got a little rowdy. The man was successful in bringing an uplift to the conversation that the ones there otherwise could not.

Queen Mao Yingtai, of the Silver Kingdom arrived a little later, and they had already been notified that the other two Kings would not be coming at all.

So this was all that was going to be there for the time.

Queen Mao greeted everyone in his silvery white dress and sat down to talk with them. Her very first question as soon as she arrived was if they had more information about Queen Song and the happenings in the Ivory Kingdom.

Not a single one could answer her. They were all trying to ignore the issue and being reminded was not fun.

The giant barrier was still there and would be there for a while.

"The barrier will remain there for a year as we heard in Queen Song's message. All we can do for now is ignore it," the Crown Prince said.

"It's a shame that most of the important folks from the Ivory kingdom won't make it to the auctions this time around then," Queen Mao said with a sigh.

Alex thought for a bit. He realized that he wouldn't be seeing the girl with white hair either. The connection he had felt back then would need to be explored at a later date.

"Not all of Ivory Kingdom is caught in the barrier, it's fine," the Crown Prince said. "Those who can come will come. It's better for them to escape reality in this festive environment for a few days."

"And most that would come already came to mine in the golden mountain, correct? The ones left behind should be the ones that were already reluctant to come."

"You are correct, your Highness," the other kings said.

The group talked for a while, and after a while, Alex left his room. He cultivated overnight and when the morning came, he left for the auction along with the other Kings.

Chapter 1475 Auction Starts

Alex was escorted to his VIP room somewhere. He arrived in a massive room with no windows at all. Instead, there was a formation that projected an image of the auction in the air.

"Do we not get to see the auction directly?" he asked the woman that remained behind them as the doors were locked.

"I am afraid that is how things are done here, your Majesty," she spoke. "Because of how the size of the auction, and every guest being a VIP of equal importance to us, we decided that this was the best approach a long time ago."

"My words may not mean much to you, your Majesty, but I can assure you that you will not dislike this experience, different as it may be."

"I am glad to hear that at least," Alex said, sitting on a comfortable seat, leaning back with a leg perched on his knees. The two elders sat next to him and looked at the floating image of an empty stage by themselves.

"How long before the auction starts?" he asked.

"The time intended is in about 20 minutes, however, the auction will start once all the guests are ready and comfortable. If you wish for it to proceed, you can let me know so I may relay it to the house."

"Yes, we are ready," Alex said.

The woman nodded and quickly sent a message outside that this room was ready.

Alex looked around a bit at the room with his spiritual sense and tried to search for any flaws in the room. He was important enough that they could do something like that, but his senses found nothing.

He turned toward the woman and asked, "How much of what happens here do you relay to your higher-ups?"

"We have sworn an oath to never divulge a guest's secret of whatever they say in this room. So long as they don't do anything untoward to the staff, their secrets will die with us," the woman said.

Alex smiled. "May I ask you to speak the same oath again?" he asked.

The woman nodded and spoke to them. Alex listened to her words, and so did the elders. They searched for loopholes, and after finding that there weren't any, Alex felt a little more relieved.

The woman did wonder why he was being so secretive, but most of the ones with importance did the same, so she gave no thought to his request.

Then, to her surprise, a large beast appeared in the room.

A completely black Tiger.

The girl was beyond surprised to see a beast of that type. She had never seen a tiger without stripes of any sort, so she wondered if it was a very rare type of beast.

She even wondered where Alex could've found it. Aside from that, however, she said and did nothing.

Alex let Pearl sit on one of the empty seats while Whisker ran up to his shoulder and sat there, watching the empty screen.

In the time that took for the auction to start, the woman went over the basic etiquette of the auction, just in case.

Alex didn't have to listen to anything, but he did. The elders listened more intently as they would be the ones doing the purchasing.

The auction finally started as the young woman that Alex had seen a few weeks earlier appeared on the floating screen. She wore a bright red dress that fit tightly to her curves with no sleeves and cut off around the knee.

Her red dress was bedazzled with gold that seemed to be sewn into the fabric itself, the glittering lights making for a glamorous sight.

The woman had already been pretty before, but somehow the makeup she wore today made her look simply marvelous. Her hair was tied in a bun with a single hairpin keeping it there.

The hairpin had a head of a dragon on one side, and that alone could have been the most important item to be auctioned in many of the auction houses outside the city.

The young woman smiled and bowed deeply for a few seconds before standing up.

"Greetings guests. I am Hu Biaolin, your auctioneer for the day," she spoke with a voice that sounded smoother than a breeze in a grassland.

"It's finally getting started," Alex said with a small smile. "I wonder how low they are going to start with. The first item should still be a Saint-ranked item, correct?"

The two elders nodded.

The woman in the room was a little confused. "Your Majesty, did you not receive a talisman with the list of items prior to the auction?" she asked. "If you didn't, I have one—"

Alex stopped her with a gesture of his hand. "No, we got it," he said. "I simply didn't read it. I like being surprised at an auction. It's one of the last places where you never know what to expect. Except, you know that whatever you are presented with will be a treasure either way, so you expect a good surprise."

Yao Ning smiled at his response. "I think there are a few things you will like. One thing, in particular, should catch your eye," she said.

"Oh, is it a great treasure?" Ning asked excitedly.

"I wouldn't say great," she said. "At least not compared to what else we have. But it is one of the better for certain."

"I see," Alex said. "Oh right, I've been meaning to ask. Is my pill the best thing being sold?"

"No, the Dao pill is the second-best item being sold in the auction," she said. "The first... I'll let it be a surprise."

Alex nodded and looked back.

Hu Biaolin had spoken some customary speeches in preparation as a large object was brought out for the first auction.

The object was placed onto a platform. At the same time, something flickered in the space between him and the screen and an object appeared, hovering mid-air.

A large box with a cloth on top of it.

"Oh... interesting," he couldn't help but say. "Is this an image of what is being presented in the auction right now?"

"It is a replica image, that not only replicates the shape and color of the object but also reproduces its aura to its best capabilities," the woman said. "You may also freely view it from where you sit by simply turning it around in the air to get a better look."

"Nice," Alex couldn't help but say. No auction he had ever been to had let the guests get a closer look at the item in front of them, except that one time when Heaven's Impact was sold.

"Can I take this black cloth off?" Alex asked.

"My apologies, but you'll have to wait for the staff to take it off on the other end," she said.

"Very well," Alex said, returning his attention to the woman on screen who seemed to be looking directly at him when she spoke the next few sentences.

"Let us start the auction with the first item that we will be selling today," she spoke and gestured for the staff to take off the black cloth over the item.

Chapter 1476 Stallion and Gauntlet

The black cloth was removed to show the cage of the slumbering little horse. The horse's body was of silver color with not a single flaw anywhere in its body.

"This is a baby Silvermane Stallion," she explained. "As all of you most likely know, Silvermane Stallions are some of the fastest beasts both on land and in the sky."

"As if blessed by the wind, they can run with..."

The woman continued speaking and Alex looked at the little horse's replica floating in front of him. To his surprise, he could truly sense the fair amount of wood aura coming from the image.

"Quite nifty," he said, moving the image around for everyone to see. Whisker ran down to his thighs, looking at the beast while Pearl got closer.

"The little fellow is sedated, right?" Pearl asked.

"He is," the woman answered from behind.

"Who auctioned off this horse?" Alex asked out of curiosity. "Where did they even find a horse like this in the first place? The Beast Paradise has been closed for some time now."

He wasn't really expecting an answer and was just speaking to himself. However, the woman still answered him.

"This horse, along with a few other beasts that you will see in the upcoming days were beasts that were sold by the Royal School of Beast Taming."

Alex looked toward the girl. "The Royal Schools auction their stuff here too?" he couldn't help but ask in surprise.

"They do it just to be part of the festivities," the woman said. "They aren't looking to earn from these sales."

"I see," Alex said. "And are you allowed to reveal this information to me? Especially about the seller."

"The Royal School and various other guilds and organizations would rather they not be anonymous in the auction," the woman said. "Their names being spread around when asked helps them more than it hurts them. They would rather the people know where the item came from so they came back for more."

"Ah," Alex said. "Makes sense. I wasn't asked if I would want to remain anonymous or not."

"Individuals are all kept anonymous despite their choices," the woman said. "Although in your case... it might not help much."

Alex chuckled. "Of course, it won't," he said. He shook his head and turned back to the screen.

The explanation on the stallion seemed to have been over, and the auctioneer was moving on to the bidding.

"The bidding will start at 400 Saint Spirit stones," the woman said. "Please begin placing your bids."

Numbers suddenly appeared on the screen next to the woman, and it kept changing every single second.

500.

550.

600.

650.

700.

Alex sat back and looked at the screen with not much worry. He looked at his two elders and saw their expressions.

"Do either of you want this stallion?" he asked.

"No," Yao Ning said straightforwardly.

"We're too old to be rearing young beasts like that," Liang Shufen said. "It would find youngsters more than us."

"Youngsters... I wonder if Ronron would like this," Alex thought. "Do you think I should get it for Ronron?"

"Forgive me, Your Majesty, but isn't the Princess bound to leave for the higher world sooner rather than later? I'm sure there are dragons and phoenixes waiting for her to bond in the higher realm."

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. "You are correct," he said. "I shouldn't be thinking about buying this beast right now."

The bidding war went on for a while before it stopped at 1400 Saint Spirit Stones. The bid ended when no one bid anymore for a certain period.

The bid was set to end automatically, so there was no unfairness here at all.

participated in the auction a few times when he thought he could catch something good.

Once the bid ended, the cage with the stallion fawn was taken away, and replaced with something else.

Alex watched as all sorts of items were bid off. Formations, talismans, pills, whatnot. He didn't just watch either but also participated in the auction a few times when he thought he could catch something good.

"Next up, we have another great item that I know most of you have been waiting for," the girl said and turned toward the staff.

The cloth was lifted from the box, which was a square glass container, containing a metallic gauntlet that gleamed with the colors of blue and green, all shining in a gradient around the gauntlet.

Alex looked at the gauntlet with slight curiosity as it was not every day that you got to see an item being sold that could only be used in close combat. As cultivators could send out attacks that spanned cities, if not countries, the necessity for weapons for close combat was no longer there at all.

"This is the Dragonheart Gauntlet," the woman spoke, explaining the item to the guests. "It is made by master Guanxin of the Royal School of Artifact from the scales and skin of a Dragonborn lizard that was killed in the eastern ocean a few dozen decades ago."

"There is absolutely no metal involved when making this artifact. All that came from that very lizard," she explained. "The gauntlet is appraised to be a Saint-ranked Heaven-grade item and is something you will want to lighten your storage bags for."

The woman went on to explain more about the gauntlet while Alex looked at the gauntlet carefully back in his room.

He moved it from side to side, seeing the colors on the surface, the leather inside of it. As someone who could now be considered more than just an amateur at making artifacts, he was more than confident in the fact that he could never make a gauntlet this good with his current level of knowledge.

He needed more practice, and more experience to make something as great as this was. As he was now, he couldn't do it. He heard the woman's explanation of what it did out of focus and was surprised to hear that it had multiple uses.

"Woah!" he couldn't help but say when looking at the gauntlet more carefully after that. He hadn't realized it at first, but there were runes carved into the scales to provide the user with 3 different types of powers.

The first was simply weight. It added fake weight to one, giving them much stronger attacks altogether. It didn't just have to be punched, but even swords could be swung much better with them.

Aside from that, it also allowed one to shoot out a Wood energy punch that at around Saint Transformation 1st realm strength as well as use a defensive technique that helped them protect as well.

Alex wasn't impressed much by the product's last two skills, but the first two made it sound amazing to his ears. It increased one's weight to give damage to one's attacks.

The two skills weren't bad either, especially because they used spirit stones and didn't require the user's input to work.

Replacing them would be troublesome, but that was nothing as Saint Spirit stones would last the gauntlet for ages.

Alex thought a bit more about the first skill, and the more he thought about it the more it made sense to him.

"This will be the perfect artifact for Father."

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Chapter 1477 Mirror of Barren Truth

The bidding began at 2200 Saint spirit stones. That was an amount that a regular saint realm cultivator would take ages to collect and the last item of the first day was being sold at that price.

The price increase throughout the day had been gradual but significant. However, from this point it would slow down for certain, increasing by about 2000 Saint spirit stones at the most in a day.

Alex told the elders to bid without stopping and they did.

The item being sold was good. A Gauntlet with not one built-in technique, but three was certainly not something one could come by every day. As such, everyone bid on it.

They stopped bidding as the bidding continued, and past 4000 Saint spirit stones, no one truly wished to continue for longer. Alex, however, kept on, and at 4400, double the starting price of the gauntlet, he got it.

He smiled a bit, knowing that he had received something that was good, and waited for the next set of products to be brought out.

Instead of a product being brought out, the next thing that came out was a person. A woman with beautiful blue hair in a black dress. Her figure looked better than the current auctioneer too, more curvier. However, she wasn't as beautiful.

She introduced herself to everyone as the next auctioneer for the day while the first woman, Hu Biaolin, walked away from the stage, promising to return at a later date.

"Do the auctioneer keep changing?" Alex asked.

"They switch around every day for the entire month," the woman in the room answered. There are 7 of them, so there should be one for each day of the week."

"I see," Alex said and waited for the girl to introduce the next set of items.

The first item she brought out was a pendant with the ability to calm a person's spirit and defend them against another spiritual attack.

Alex checked the pendant around a bit and bid for it. However, when it became too expensive to bid, he stopped. There was no point in getting these, he thought.

He knew how they were made, so after a bit of practice, he could make one himself.

A few more normal items were sold after that. Pills, inks, formation plates, etc. Alex didn't find much attraction by any of the items. He did bid on a few but that was only for the sake of bidding.

He didn't receive them at all. It was only halfway through the day that he found another item that he wanted as desperately as he did the Dragonheart Gauntlet.

The item was an artifact named the Mirror of Barren Truth. It was apparently a very old artifact, made in times that no one knew about.

The woman started explaining the details of the artifact, and Alex looked at it, moving the mirror around his hand, checking the various things he could ascertain from it.

The Mirror of Barren Truth was an item that needed prep work. types of attacks thrown at it, so long as the energy inside of it was stronger than that of the attack, it would reflect the attack directly One had to fill the mirror with Energy in advance in one way or another and prepare it.

Once prepared, the mirror had the ability to reflect any and all types of attacks thrown at it, so long as the energy inside of it was stronger than that of the attack, it would reflect the attack directly at the one that launched it in the first place.

The most surprising part about that was the fact that it worked based on the Intent of the attack. As such, the reflected attack would always return to the one who intended for the attack to be fired.

"So even if it was an attack from a formation, it can reflect?" Alex asked curiously. That seemed to be true and was in a way quite busted.

"This seems incredible," Liang Shufen said softly. "I wonder why this item is being sold this early. Or are we perhaps missing something?"

Alex thought for a moment. "There are definitely flaws to the item," he said. "Ones that are quite glaring as well."

"What sort of flaws?" Liang Shufen asked.

"Imagine someone in the Saint Condensation rank finds this artifact and prepares it with his energy," Alex said. "That would have no effect on a real fight if his opponent happens to be stronger than him. After all, the item is only capable of reflecting attacks that are just as strong as the energy that was put into it."

"Oh, I thought of that," Elder Liang said. "But I was thinking of it more so in regards to myself. As someone in the Saint Transformation realm, especially since I have Immortal Qi… a bit of it at least, I could prepare it to protect me from any and all attack."

Alex's eyes widened slightly in surprise. "I… I hadn't thought of that," he said. That was true, wasn't it? With Immortal Qi, the mirror would end up becoming the greatest defensive item, even if it was for a single defense.

"Then it is probably because it is a single-use artifact in every battle that it is being sold this early. You also do need to prepare it for a while, so that's not very good, is it?" he asked. New n0vel chapters are published on

"I wonder how the reflection works," Elder Yao spoke, after remaining quiet for a bit. "I wonder if it reflects using the Dao or using some other mechanism."

"Hmm, I can't feel the Dao of Reflection coming from the item," Alex said softly.

"Me neither," the old woman said. "But it is possible that this image is not capable of replicating Dao's aura. If it could, the Boundless Enlightenment domain would end up meaningless.

"True," Alex said. "I assume you do not want this mirror though."

The old woman shook her head. She had the Dao of Reflection to help her with that.

"Very well then," Alex said. "Let me get it. Bid for it, however high it may go."

The bidding started at 3000 Saint spirit stones, and it went high. It ended at 8300 Saint Spirit Stones, with Alex as the new owner.

Chapter 1478 Inkbrush

In the following days, Alex bought many more things.

He bought some beautiful dresses for his mother and daughter, and seeds of some trees to plant in the house gardens for his various sect friends and elders.

He bought an impressive wind sword for his master and serene water armor for his senior sister.

He bought books with immortal stories from the Immortal worlds to read. Fiction they may be, they were quite important.

He bought books on talismans, formations, and artifacts, not just for himself but for his mother as well. She had nearly the same talent as him after all.

He bought an Impressive Wood treasure for his daughter, and more armor for his father to wear.

He bought impressive pill furnaces that were works of art for his subordinates as well as his friends from the Hong Wu sect.

He bought more weapons and more armor and many other things. But all of them were for his elders, family or friends, or subordinates. After the mirror, no item came forth that he wanted to buy for himself.

Until now.

On the 11th day of the auction, presented by a lady in a blue dress, came an item that Alex wanted to buy.

A brush.

The brush appeared to be a simple brush with a long handle and soft bristles at first.

The handle was of red and blue color, matching its name with an undulating pattern when one color tried to take over the other, but neither managed to ever truly mix.

The bristle was stark white, made from the fur of a thick yak, cured and tempered for years before it reached the softness it did.

It was no ordinary brush either. Named the Frostfire Inkbrush, the brush was a Saint-ranked artifact deemed as a multi-functional brush that could be used for more purposes than one.

As it was a brush, Alex's first thought had gone toward Painting, and had wanted to buy it just because of that. However, when the explanation for the brush came, he was more shocked than surprised.

It was made with 3 functions as intended for its use. The first was making paintings. As a brush, it was fabulous with colors, holding onto every single drop of paint, leaving only as much as intended by the users.

The brush was made using compounding, so it could change in size as one wished for it to as well. It could be large or small as per the user's wish, making for an amazing brush with amazing flexibility.

It could also retract its bristles into itself, as much as the user wanted. So one could draw thin or thick strokes as they wanted to.

Because of the ability to grow small as well as the ability to grow large, and the ability to retract bristles, the brush was also fantastic for making talismans.

When Alex heard the functionality of the brush, he nearly slapped his forehead. He was so distracted by the painting's possibility, that he managed to forget about its possibility in talismans.

So, he was more than a little surprised when he heard about it. However, that surprise could hold no candle to the surprise and awe he felt when he heard that the brush could also make Formations.

The bristles could retract into the brush entirely, leaving an opening for a nib to come out, that could not only be used to write, if need be, but also carve onto a metal plate or rod.

It was strong enough and sharp enough to carve through any metal alloys, even the stronger ones. That way, it could make perfect formations.

An all-in-one brush like that meant one didn't need to carry various things to make use of it.

Alex looked through the pen on the screen that appeared before him and wondered if anyone would want to buy it as much as he did.

There was a high chance that only a few of them did 2 or all 3 of the things that the brush was capable of. As such, Alex believed the brush was safely his item.

As expected, there weren't many bidders that bid for the pen. The bidding started at 6 thousand and it went up. Alex told the elders to continue bidding and they did until they won with a bid of 11 thousand and 330 Saint Spirit stones.

"Damn, that cost more than what some of my pills are going to be sold at," Alex said softly. The pen was a genuine find, so he didn't worry much about the money.

As a King, money was the last thing he had to worry about anyway.

The amount of Saint spirit stones that he had been given by the beasts throughout 7 different colonies had been enough for him to buy most of what he wanted with that money.

It was for the other few that he had to pull out from his own pockets.

Once the brush disappeared from the auction, other treasures took its place, each wanted to be sold with as high a bid as they could get.

Eternal Lotus Incense, an incense that helped users focus during meditation was sold for 8500 Saint Spirit stones.

Frostbloom Snowstone, a Yin aura natural treasure that could provide one with Yin aura whenever required, was sold for 9300 Saint Spirit stones.

Scroll of Alchemic Ingredients, a scroll that held the list of very rare ingredients, and what they did was sold for 12000 Saint Spirit stones.

One after another, piece by piece, treasures continued to be sold for another few days until Alex came across something else that he needed to buy.

A Fan of green color with drawings of clouds was presented to everyone.

"This is the Nine Clouds Wind fan," the auctioneer spoke. "It's not a fighting treasure, even though you may use it as one."

"A single movement of this fan causes winds to spring up out of it. But not ordinary wind," the woman said. "What comes out of it is in fact winds holding the truth of the Wind Dao. if you wish to learn the Dao of the Wind, you will definitely want to buy this."

Chapter 1479 Fan And Flask

Alex thought for a moment as he looked at the fan with the 9 different cloud patterns in front of him.

"This is a good treasure, isn't it?" he asked.

"Quite great," Yao Ning said, looking at the fan herself. "Quite useless for me, but for others it would be very useful."

"Yes," Liang Shufen said. "I can make good use of it."

"I can make use of it too if brother manages to make the pill that improves Wood spiritual roots," Pearl said.

"Me too," Whisker said excitedly.

The bid for the treasure began at 7000 Saint Spiritual stones and everyone bid on it to make it their own.

No one would ever buy the fan if all it did was some wind attack. However, since it released Wind with the aura of Dao of Wind, it made it so much easier for others to learn the Wind Dao.

As of yet, there was only 2 ways to learn the Wind Dao for anyone.

First, the hard way. They would have to try and understand the wind aura by being in places with either Wind with wood energy, or just in places with a breeze.

This would normally take decades for someone to even glimpse the smallest truth about the wind and would have to spend centuries to try and learn enough of the mysteries behind the wind to finally get some help from the Heavens to finish learning the Dao.

The second method was to visit the Boundless Enlightenment Domain and try to learn about Wind Dao from there. This was easier than doing it all on your own, but depending on a person's talent, it could still take them years to learn the Dao and one would only have so much money for it.

Also, the Boundless Enlightenment Domain was expensive because of all the treasures it hold. If one could just take out the Wind treasure, it would cost so much less.

Which was what the Fan was.

A Wind treasure designed to provide the aura of Wind Dao for people to learn from it. This was no different than having something from the Enlightenment domain for oneself, and many of their friends and families to use.

Alex bid on it hard. He had a daughter with a Wind-based physique and it was very important for him to gain this fan. He also wanted it for himself, so money was no longer of any concern to him at all.

The bid increased by a lot, going into 15000 Saint Spirit stones for the first time in the entire auction. They had touched such a high price and they were going beyond.

15200

15300

15500

15800

16000

The number on the screen flipped one after another, showing just how much people still wanted it.

Alex kept going for a while until it got close to 20 thousand.

"Should we still get it?" the elders asked.

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. "We should definitely get it," he said and made the bid.

20000.

The number stopped there for a moment before flipping through to 20100. Alex flipped it to 20200. The number stopped moving again and Alex felt the hesitation of the other buyer.

The number changed to 20300 and immediately changed to 20400. Alex kept going without stopping.

The other person waited a while longer than Alex thought and when he waited too long, the bidding ended.

Alex bought the Nine Clouds Wind fan for 20 thousand and 4 hundred Saint Spirits stones.

"We paid a bit too much, your majesty," Yao Ning said.

Alex hesitated a bit and nodded. "We indeed paid a bit too much for it," he said. "But it is worth it."

Yao Ning couldn't argue there.

The auction continued and more items were continued to be shown. Over half a month had already passed by now, and it had even been a few days into the other half.

On the 22nd day of the auction, Alex bought the Voidsand Hourglass. It was an hourglass to tell time by watching the black sand inside flow through the hourglass.

It wasn't any normal powder either. The Voidsand were powder made from pulverizing extremely rare pieces of stones known as Voidstone. It was something that existed by absorbing the void aura that flew out of a voidgate.

Such aura, infused within the sand, made it so that the sand was not affected by time at all. As such, when used inside an hourglass, it would never be affected by any sort of time manipulation at all.

That made this the perfect tool to measure time, especially during long sessions of cultivation. It would be scarily accurate, and for that alone, Alex bought the Voidsand Hourglass.

It did cost him another 14 thousand Saint Spirit stones, which wasn't cheap.

"How much money do we have?" Alex asked the elder.

"Of the money we brought over, we have about another 50 thousand Saint Spirit stones left," the elder said. "Most of it is in the form of True spirit stones."

"I see," Alex said. "We can buy a few more things for sure then."

On the 24th day came something else that was quite good, which caught Alex's attention.

Bottomless Jade Flask is what it was introduced as. It was a flask with a vast amount of space inside of it, which could hold in total a million liters of any liquid.

The Flask was advertised as something that could hold a lot of wine, but everyone understood that it could hold any other form of liquid as well.

The Flask had the capacity to draw in Qi from the surrounding, enriching the liquid that was inside of it. That made a Spirit wine all the more potent, and it also improved any other forms of liquid.

Alex thought for a bit if the flask was of any importance to him. Because of the nature of the flask, he could see where it could come in handy and desired to buy it.

The bidding started at exactly 10 thousand Saint Spirit stones.

Chapter 1480 Close To The Final Day

Alex paid exactly 19 thousand Saint Spirit stones for the Bottomless Jade Flask. The usage he could get out of the flask was way too important to not be willing to pay that much for it.

He was down a bit of money for sure now. He had to be careful about buying anything right now just in case what he could find at the end was very important.

At this point, he even wanted to learn what was going to be sold at the end, but he wanted it to be a surprise so he didn't ask anyone about it.

The auction continued for a few more days.

These days, due to the importance of the items being sold, the auctions took longer. Either that or the auction house was forced to fill the remaining time until the end of the month by forcing their auctioneer to slow down the sales.

3 things during this time caught Alex's attention.

The first was tea, which he could tell belonged to Lady Zhan. He wasn't aware how she had managed to have it be an item in the auction even though she had only just arrived the day before, but he couldn't think much about it.

There were many ways for her to do so, being the future empress of the land.

Alex remembered the taste of this tea and wanted to see how it was made. He wanted to find out the ingredients. However, it seemed that was not in his luck at all.

Due to the tea's attributes, it was sold so fast and at such a high amount that Alex simply couldn't pay for it at all.

The second thing that Alex found interesting in as a painting about a young man standing high and mighty in the middle of the room, even while surrounded by those that were bigger than him.

He smiled, realizing that this was a depiction of him. Tian Honglui had drawn this piece from what the auctioneer had mentioned and it was one of his best, according to the appraisers.

The painting's name was Eye of the Storm, representing Alex as the point of calm in the sea of chaos.

He wanted to buy this piece as well. However, with Tian Honglui's name now following his new title as the only person to ever have 3 paintings featured in the Royal School of Painting's Hall of Fame, the cost of the painting skyrocketed to over 20 thousand.

Alex could buy the painting if he wanted, but then he would be low for whatever was to come in the future.

He had to give up on the painting too.

Finally, on the 28th day, Alex was presented with a scroll of fighting techniques that caught his eye. It was called the Celestial Moonblade technique.

An obviously exaggerated technique that was capable of using the Yin in one's body to create an attack. Alex thought of buying this technique as he had no other Yin-based skill during any fight.

The only Yin-based attack he had would be the God-Rending Death Blade, but it was a skill that was carved into Midnight and was not a skill he could use with any other blade.

As such, this would be his first real Yin-based offensive technique.

Or so he had thought. When the price increased to go past 25 thousand, Alex was forced to give up. There was absolutely no way in hell he was ever going to pay for that technique when something better was hopefully on the way.

Alex would be absolutely mortified if whatever that was at the end of the auction turned out to be something he didn't want to purchase.

There would be nothing more sad than that to him. However, Yao Ning had hinted by now that whatever it was, he would absolutely love it. She had also hinted that it wouldn't just be him that loved it, but every single person out there.

As such, he gladly gave up on the offensive technique and waited the for whatever it was that was coming next.

Next, were his own pills.

Alex was surprised that it had taken this long for his pills to appear, given the weaker ones weren't that good when compared to everything that was sold.

However, the auction house had decided to sell all of his pills together, so there was nothing he could do about it.

And to his absolute surprise, each of his pills was being sold separately.

There were 5 Saint Lightning Resistance pills, and each one was going to be sold separately.

Hu Biaolin was back to becoming the auctioneer on the 29th day of the auction and would be one until the auction was over.

She started selling Lightning Resistance pills one by one, with the bids starting at 10 thousand.

Normally, no pill would ever be ranked that high, especially one with such a low use case. However, even then, due to the 5 pill veins, no one complained about the pill's cost and started buying the pills all at once.

The first of the five pills was sold at 22 thousand Saint Spirit stones. It was quite great for Alex.

'If only I could use this money to buy the other items,' he thought. But unfortunately, he couldn't. He also needed to make back the money he had spent to take it back to his own continent.

The second pill was sold at 21 thousand Saint Spirit stones, a little less than the second.

The third one was sold for 22 thousand Saint Spirit stones again, jumping back to the first pill's price.

It then increased again, going to 24 thousand Saint Spirit stones for the fourth pill.

For the last and final Saint Lightning Resistance pill, the big one broke through the 25 thousand Saint Spirit stones barrier, landing at 26500 Saint Spirit stones, which was surely the most expensive pill that had ever been sold in this world.

More exactly, it was the most expensive pill that had ever been sold in this world... yet.

Chapter 1481 Pill Auction

"Over a hundred thousand Saint Spirit stones with just the Lightning pill, your majesty," Liang Shufen said. "That is amazing. I could have never expected such a pill to get that many spirit stones."

"One can only wonder how much they would pay for a pill with a much higher number of pills veins," Yao Ning said. "I wonder if the order of the final two treasures would be switched around."

"No need to daydreaming," Alex said. "Let's focus on the auction for now. We still have 6 different types of pills left to sell."

The next pill in the sale was the Saint Spirit Immunity pill. He had given them 5 of these as well, so he was excited to see just how much they would sell for.

100% Harmony on the pill alone was something that no one got to seen before, and somehow they were now seeing pills with pill veins in sale. As such, no one wanted to give up on the pills and were ready to place all the money they had on them.

Alex looked at the numbers and quickly realized that there weren't that many people to pay money for this one pill, however.

It had probably to do with the fact that there were artifacts that did the same thing as well. However, while artifacts lost energy very quickly, this pill would last them for hours.

During a fight for life and death, that would be very important.

The very first of the spirit pills were sold for 19 thousand Saint spirit stones, a little less than what he had expected.

However, the following ones increased in sales as the bidding continued.

21000.

21500.

23500.

23800.

While these pills didn't cross the 25 thousand spirit stones threshold as the previous pill did, Alex was fine with that. After all, this was only the 2nd pill.

Getting 100 thousand Saint spirit stones with something whose ingredients weren't even that rare made him not feel bad at the loss in sales compared to the last one.

Alex wondered how the next pill would sell if this spirit pill earned less than the first one.

He had a hunch that it would sell more, but he would have to see.

The main important aspect of the third pill, the Saint Poison Neutralizing Pill, was that there weren't many ways to fend off a poison attack prior to being poisoned.

There were artifacts, formations, and talismans, but they had to be constantly running for them to work. There weren't that many things that would magically spring up from one's body and stop the poison before it affected them.

Even those were mostly to stop the poison from ever entering one's body. If someone managed to bypass them and poisoned the user, then the user would have no choice but to try and eat an antidote in a hurry.

If the poison was ever too strong, they would even die.

this pill averted that exact danger by being an antidote that you ate in advance. Not only that, it also worked with almost any poison out there. Even in the case of the most lethal poison out there, this pill would instantly block them, and that landed a lot better with the many buyers than the spirit pill.

The first pill alone was sold for 27000 Saint Spirit stones, easily breaking the 25000 threshold at the first sale.

The elders around Alex were more excited than he was when the bidding was concluded.

27000 was an amazing price for the pill, with an equally amazing effect.

The following 4 pills sold for even more.

28000

28600

29900

35000

The final bidding was quite intense in what seemed like a battle between two bidders. They each continued increasing the amount by 100 Saint Spirit stones from back at 30 thousand Saint Spirit stones and kept the back and forth going for another 40 times.

It was only when the bidding suddenly jumped by 1000 at the end the other party stopped and the bid was complete.

Alex had made way more than 130 thousand Saint Spirit stones this time around, a rather massive jump.

And it was only the 3rd pill.

There were more pills to come, even better ones.

The Water Root Transformation pillow is up next. As soon as it was introduced as the pill Alex had made back in the competition against the emperor, everyone was excited about that pill.

Due to its ability to turn one's regular Spirital root to Water Spiritual root for 10 days, Alex was sure that it would sell for quite a bit.

While he was correct in assuming that they would earn a lot due to just the bizarre nature of the pill, there was the problem that there were only 3 of the pills, compared to the 5 for the other one.

As such, the total sales of the pills barely crossed the 100 thousand Saint Spirit stones.

"I have hoped it would sell for much more than this," Yao Ning said. "But I suppose having a Water root for just 10 days isn't that attractive for most people."

"But it is useful for people with weak Water Spiritual root, isn't it? With this, they can learn Water Dao more easily thanks to having two different roots," Whisker said softly.

"That is true," Alex said. "But I believe the problem here isn't that the pill has very little usability when compared to say the poison neutralizing pill, but that what usability it does have become irrelevant for people that already know ahead."

"You're right, Your Majesty," Yao Ning said. "Everyone must be looking ahead for the Water and Earth Spiritual Root Improvement pill."

"Yes," Alex said. "Whatever, it still sold for quite a decent amount. That is the price most other items sold in this place."

"That's true," Yao Ning said.

Once the bidding for the pill was over, the auctioneer moved on to the 5th pill that she was selling.

The Soul Trancing Pill.

The Soul Trancing pill was guaranteed to be a hit from the start. A pill that put someone in a trance that only came to someone once in a lifetime was a chance no one wanted to give up on.

Furthermore, putting one in the same mental state one would need to be where one could gain enlightenment regarding the various nature of the world was even more lucrative for many.

Adding on to that the auction house guaranteed the enlightenment of a Dao, so long as one was close to it made it very much popular amongst all the people that were there.

When the bidding began at just 10 thousand Saint Spirit stones, as they had promised Alex it would, it quickly rose high and crossed 30 thousand in an instant.

It continued going up from there, slowly but steadily increasing in amount.

The people here knew that they weren't paying for a pill at all. They were paying for a Dao and would fork out however many Saint Spirit stones as they would have to.

No matter how much they paid, it would all be cheap for them. After all, one couldn't put a price on a Dao.

A Dao was a ticket to Immortality.

A Dao was priceless.

A Dao... sold at 69000 Saint spirit stones.

"Nice!" Alex couldn't help but say. "I would have been sad if it didn't even cross 50 thousand. This is great."

"It was bound to sell for a lot," Yao Ning said. "It is an amazing pill."

The others nodded. "Let's see how the next one sells. I hope it does better than the first one," Alex said.

The next pill quickly crossed the 30 thousand Saint spirit stones in a matter of seconds. It shot up past 40 thousand and only slowed down to around 50 thousand.

From the constant flipping of numbers, it was sure that there were quite a few people gunning for it. More than that, this was the only remaining pill that could help them acquire that Dao that they were so close to.

So, they were more than willing to go broke for it.

They could earn money later on. But Dao? That was not something they could acquire as easily.

The numbers shot past 60 thousand in a matter of minutes and a few minutes later it reached 70 thousand and crossed it

Alex looked at the difference in time before the numbers flipped and looked back at the woman that was in the room. "Is the auction increasing the timer in which the big must be made? I can feel it going slower than normal," he said.

"They do increase the timer as the amount increases," the woman said. "To give more time for the others to make a decision. Sometimes, they have to call other folks to request money and whatnot, so they need the time."

"Ah, right," Alex said. "Request for money. I completely forgot that was a possibility at all. I'll see if I need it."

He turned around and focused on the pill that was being sold.

The number had slowed down by now, reaching some 73000 when Alex focused back on it. It continued increasing, but it didn't look like there was much left for it to increase.

Dwindling, it stopped at 76200.

No one wanted to pay any more than that, and the bidding stopped.

Alex looked at the earning and smiled to himself. Together, he had earned nearly 140 thousand Saint spirit stones from just those 2 pills.

And he knew why they weren't bidding more.

That was because they were saving for the other two pills that were going to be sold next.

Chapter 1482 Final Pill Sales

The next two pills were introduced one after another with no gap in between.

Since the two pills were essentially the same, there was no point in introducing them separately.

"It's a shame really," Alex said, looking at the auctioneer presenting his pills. "I can't see or hear people's excitement from here. That is quite disappointing."

"Is it?" Yao Ning couldn't help but ask. "Don't you just like showing off?"

"Of course not," Alex said quickly. "I just like hearing people say nice things about my work." He smiled a little.

The two elders chuckled a little and looked back at the screen where the auction owner's daughter had stopped to let the guests process what they were about to buy.

She waited for a moment and spoke again. "Yes, you all heard it correctly. This pill does in fact improve the Spiritual root of those who eat it. It was created by the same person who created the previous pill that could give you a new spiritual root, so there shouldn't be any doubt that there is a pill out there that can improve it as well, right?"

She smiled and looked around as if looking at everyone. She waited for a moment or two before speaking again, where she started explaining the importance of a strong spiritual root for anyone that might yet be unaware.

Once she was done, she moved on to the actual bidding.

"First, we will be selling the Earth pill," she said. "To start, the bidding will start at 10 thousand Saint Spirit stones. As for how much you must increase it by, there is no lower limit here at all. You can increase it by however much you desire."

"Please begin."

As soon as she said that, the bidding took off. The numbers jumped from 10 thousand to 20 thousand, and then from 20 thousand to 30 thousand in an instant.

In the time it took for one to blink, it increased to 40 thousand and a second later it had crossed 50 thousand.

Everyone had known that the price of the pill was going to be expensive. As for how expensive, they were testing the waters slowly.

The price of the pill increased by another 10 thousand in just a few more seconds and before anyone knew it, it crossed 70 thousand as well.

Alex watched as the numbers flickered through and easily crossed what the Dao pill had brought him.

"Amazing," Liang Shufen couldn't help but say. "So much money. A single pill from here is going to be enough for an entire month's worth of finances for raising our army."

"That's true," Alex said. Even though the cost of raising an army had reduced by an incredible amount after having alchemists and other production houses that work solely for the army, it still cost them quite a bit with the increase in the number of soldiers.

Now, a single pill that was being sold was enough to earn as much as the army's resources for an entire month. That was quite something.

"And it's still going up," Yao Ning mentioned, looking at the cost as it quickly crossed 80 thousand. It improved even more, increasing slowly but erratically.

Due to the way the bidding had no rules, people were placing as many bids as they wanted to which didn't make the numbers look very fun to look at.

82485

83221

85450

86548

89403

90451

When it finally crossed the 90 thousand range, it started slowing down and the numbers changed less frequently.

Alex and the rest watched as the changes dropped even more around 95 thousand and started to improve only once in a while.

The amount was so high that it would take a while for the bidding to come to an end, so people had time to bid more.

The numbers grew still, but each time it did so, Alex and the others believed it would be the last time.

"97643. Just a little more and we'll reach 100 thousand," Elder Liang said. "Just a little more." She was more excited about the whole thing than Alex was.

As the number continued to grow, Alex felt something in his storage space vibrate. He quickly looked inside and pulled out a talisman.

It was the Emerald King.

"Your majesty, this is your pill, correct?" he asked Alex. "I wish to buy it, but I'm running out of money. Would you mind lending me some?"

Alex was a bit surprised at the message. "It is indeed mine," he said. "I'm surprised you came to me for money. Why not the Crown Prince or the other kings?"

"Because you are the only one right now that isn't bidding on the pill at all," the man said. "You are the only one I can ask."

Alex chuckled a little. "I'm trying to save for the final treasure, though," he said. "Do you have any suggestions?"

"How much do you have?" the man asked.

Alex looked at his elder and asked how much they had. After getting the number, he couldn't help but feel a little bad.

"Close to 70 thousand," he said. "I thought I was saving a lot, but I never realized how high it could go."

"With that amount, I doubt you could get the next item at all, your majesty," the Emerald King said.

Alex couldn't help but nod. "In that case, would you mind lending me your money instead?" he asked. "I might end up needing it now."

"My money?" the man looked at the screen at the growing number that reached so close to 100 thousand."

"I don't have much, your Majesty," he said. "I'm already taking money from the Silver Queen, who doesn't need either of the next two pills. I myself only have about 60 thousand."

Alex thought for a bit. "How about this?" he said. "Don't bid anymore, and instead I will sell you the pill for 50 thousand Saint Spirit stones instead."

"Really?" the excited voice of the Emerald King came through the talisman. "Thank you, your majesty. I will hand over the 50 thousand right now."

Alex nodded. "Thank you," he said and put the talisman back before looking up at the screen.

"What was that about?" Elder Yao asked.

"I got myself an additional 50 thousand Saint Spirit stones. We now have 120 thousand for the next item that will come up."

"Oh!" the Elder couldn't help but be surprised. "Great! I think we'll definitely need it, maybe even more."

"More?" Alex was surprised. "Just what is being auctioned-No, don't tell me."

He looked back at the pill that was being sold and looked forward to seeing where it went from there.

As if gaining new life, the bidding jumped, crossing 100 thousand in an instead. The number changed again, going up to 101 thousand.

"They're dealing in thousands now," Alex observed. "I wonder if they got financial help from somewhere."

"Either that, or they decided that they weren't going to buy the next two items," Elder Yao said. "A few people definitely made a bit of compromise here."

"I think so too," Elder Liang said as she excitedly watched the numbers go up even more.

103

104

105

106

107

The climb was slow but consistent, it only slowed down when it reached 110 thousand. Then, the climb became a little more infrequent.

It increased a few more times, arriving at 120 where the waiting between the bidding got atrociously long.

People had to wait for a whole minute before 120 changed to 121. Then a while later, it went up to 122.

No one knew when it was going to stop at all now. As it increased so slowly.

123 came and people waited for more. When it looked like that was going to be the last one, it changed to 124.

That made the next wait even more excruciatingly long. However, it still changed to 125.

The wait after 125 was just as long, if not longer, making everyone believe that it was the last one, but not being able to confirm that.

In the end, it turned out it was indeed the final bid as the pill sold for 125 thousand Saint Spirit Stones.

Alex's eyes were wide in surprise by the end. He had never expected his pills to sell for so much. This was an incredible amount of money.

And he could only imagine what the next one was going to be sold for.

The next one was the Water pill, which had a different set of people that had waited for it when the Earth pill was being sold.

This had a different set of buyers and as a result, the bidding war for this one was quite a lot as well.

In the end, after nearly 30 minutes of bidding, the pill ended up getting sold for 128 thousand Saint Spirit stones.

That was another incredible number that surprised Alex. In total, just two of his pills had made over 250 thousand Saint Spirit stones.

If he could only use those Spirit stones in the auction, that would've been incredible. However, he could only use what he had, and nothing else.

As a result, the next and final auction was going to be quite difficult for certain.

The auctioneer smiled at everyone and announced. "Up next, we will be bringing out our final item for the auction. Please look forward to it."

Alex watched the screen as something giant was brought out from inside hidden under a cloth.

Even from the cloth, however, he could see the shape of the item.

"Is that a furnace?" he wondered. "Or... a Cauldron?"

Chapter 1483 Mountain Crushing Sect

Alex looked at the item that was hauled out into the spotlight and saw the image of it floating in front of him.

Seeing that, he frowned a little. "Is this what you wanted me to wait for? A cauldron?" he asked Elder Yao.

"It is not a cauldron," the old woman said.

"A furnace then?" he asked curiously. "That's still not that—"

"It's not a furnace either. Please, just wait for the cloth to come off," the Elder said, looking back.

"Okay," Alex said, waiting for himself.

"I will not waste any more time as all of you will have been waiting for this," the auctioneer said. "Please, take a look."

The cloth finally lifted and everyone could see what was hidden under it.

Underneath the cloth was a large metal cauldron. Alex was about to comment on it when he noticed that it wasn't really a cauldron at all. It looked like one on a cursory glance, but when given more than just a glance, once recognized that it was just too tall to be a cauldron.

And too narrow as well.

Instead of being wide like a cauldron, it was instead more like a long cylindrical tube. He couldn't tell what that was at all.

The surface of the large object seemed to have a simple design of a golden color with some silver rims. There was a little bulge toward the middle of the metal tube, but other than that, there wasn't much design to the whole thing.

He tried to look inside, and that too had nothing at all.

He wanted to see things like Qi lines or Formation, but the picture didn't show it at all. The inside of it was empty as well, confusing him quite a bit.

"This is neither a cauldron, nor a furnace, but I do believe you have to put something in here... but what?" he wondered. The fact that it was coming at the end of the auction meant that it was no ordinary item for certain. But...

He moved his eyes from the image in front of him and looked at the image of the woman on the screen.

The object they had unveiled had actually been larger than the woman herself. "What exactly could this be?" he couldn't help but ask.

The others around him knew and were busy relishing the moment of his confusion before the item was finally revealed.

"The seller of this item is the Mountain Crushing sect," she spoke and waited for a few seconds.

Alex recognized the pause as an instant for the others to talk about the matter and got curious.

"Mountain Crushing sect? Can you tell me what importance that sect holds?" Alex asked the woman standing by the door.

The woman came forward and a little and spoke. "The Mountain Crushing sect used to be a large sect in the past that could be considered one of the strongest sects to ever exist in the Eastern Continent."

"However, during these days, they are nothing more than a memory. While they do exist, they are no longer considered the powerhouse they used to be," she said.

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. "So kind of like the Snow Immortal sect," he said softly.

The woman didn't understand what he meant and didn't reply. The other woman on the screen began speaking again.

"Yes, this is one of the items from the Mountain Crushing sect," she said. "And most importantly, this is the artifact that gave them the name that they hold today."

"This is the Mountain Crusher," the woman said and waited for everyone to take in this information. "Of course, that is not its original name. The original name it held had been lost to time as this artifact predates every single existence in this world."

"Even the Royal Family did not exist when it existed. It has existed for over a hundred thousand years," she said. "That's correct, this is an artifact that has lasted that long. The Mountain Crushing sect had merely acquired it."

This was new information for many, so the woman slowed down for them all to process. When it was time, she dropped the other news.

"And today, we will reveal for the first time what it truly is," she said. "This, the Mountain Crushing Artifact, is an Immortal artifact that use the Qi with, the one that Godslayer had come in was one as well.

was brought down from the heavens."

Alex perked up when he heard that. "Immortal artifact?" he couldn't help but ask. It wasn't every day that one got to see an Immortal artifact. As far as he could remember, he had only seen a handful of them at all.

He had a few Immortal techniques, but no artifacts. The only one that he had was the Blood God's Manual. There was a high chance that the sword he once had and had lost, the one which he couldn't use the Qi with, the one that Godslayer had come in was one as well.

But since it didn't accept Qi, he really didn't want to count it as once. Not to mention that he had lost it as well. It was probably somewhere around his Soul Space right now.

There was also the Playground, otherwise known as the Sundering Sanctum, but he had yet to make it his own. It would take some time after all.

"Immortal," he said softly and sighed. "That complicates things. How many people will want it will depend on how useful it is for anyone."

"It is useful for anyone willing to use it," Yao Ning said. "Anyone can use it. They wrote what it did in the advertisement, just now what it was."

"Anyone can use it?" Alex asked curiously.

"Anyone," the elder said.

Hearing the words, he felt a little strange. He looked at the item once again and turned around to the woman.

"The Mountain Crushing sect. What were they known for?" Alex asked.

The woman was about to answer when the auctioneer started speaking as if answering his question.

"As you all may or may not know, the Mountain Crushing sect was a sect that was known for their fighting strength where they could always defeat someone in their own realm with ease."

"Many of you may also know why that was," she said. "It was because they were not just normal cultivators at all. On top of being a Qi cultivator, they were also body cultivators."

"As such..."

Alex quickly zoned out the rest of what the woman said as soon as he heard the two words. Body Cultivators.

"That's... that's an artifact for body cultivation?" he couldn't help but ask.

"It is," the elder said.

"How does it work?" he asked.

The elder shook her head. "It wasn't explained," she said.

Alex frowned a little and turned toward the woman who was still by his side. "How did the Mountain Crushing sect fail?" he asked. "How did something so amazing lose its grace?"

"I... am not certain, your Majesty," she said. "All I know is that over time, fewer and fewer people from the sect came out as strong as the previous ones, and in time, they could no longer sustain a large sect. Anything that might have been the cause for that is beyond me."

"And now they're desperate enough to sell an Immortal artifact?" he thought. "Very well, I shall buy it then."

Chapter 1484 Flaw

﻿

"This artifact is what the Mountain Crushing sect used to cultivate their students to have bodies that were very strong," the auctioneer spoke. "All you have to do is sit inside this artifact, surrounded by a bunch of strong material and let them grind onto you, slowly making your body stronger and stronger."

"The objects you put in there, you will have to find on your own," the woman said. "But, we have been told that for someone with barely anybody's cultivation, even normal stones would be enough as long as you get rid of your Qi before using it.

"For energy, you will have to put your spirit stones right here," she said, pointing at the center of the artifact where the bulge was. She pushed onto something, opening a compartment to show everyone.

"You just have to put your spirit stones here, which will power a formation at the bottom of the artifact. Then, the entire content of the barrel will spin around you, grinding against you, making you spin to its whim as well."

"When you are done, you will have come back a stronger man than you went it," she said. She gave the people time to talk among themselves.

Yao Ning looked around to ask Alex his opinion about the artifact when she noticed that he was deep in thought.

"What are you thinking, your majesty?" she asked.

Alex stayed quiet for a few moments, taking his time before finally speaking. "There's something wrong with that artifact," he said.

"Something… wrong?" Yao Ning asked in surprise, turning to look at the artifact on the screen. "I'm afraid I don't see anything wrong with it. If you mean that it's old and broken, then I'm sure that's not the case."

"I'm sure the auction house won't sell an artifact without checking that it works prior to selling it," she said, turning to look at the woman. "Would it?"

"Heavens! No," the woman said quickly. "We test anything that is not a one-time use item like pills and talismans. We also don't test skill books just because it is not very possible to do so. Everything else, we test to the best of our capability."

"See?" the old woman told Alex.

Alex shook his head. "When I said that there's something wrong with the artifact, I didn't mean to imply that it didn't work, or that it was a fraudulent artifact. What I meant is that there is fundamentally a flaw in how it works which caused the slow decline in Body Cultivators in the Mountain Crushing sect."

"There's also the thing of how a sect with such strength and popularity could fall from grace so hard without going through something severely wrong that no one knew about."

"Do we know the actual reason why the sect is no longer as good as it used to be?" Alex asked the woman.

"No inside information has come out that is public yet. All we know is that the downfall was gradual," she said.

Alex thought for a moment. "Any chance of outside intervention? Like trade blockade or anything else," he asked.

"I doubt it," the woman said. "King Wan is from the Mountain Crushing sect, so he would have definitely acted if there was anything from the outside that was acting against the sect's will."

"King Wan?" Alex thought with a bit of surprise and remembered the black-robed King he met all those years ago. "Oh! Is the Mountain Crushing sect in the Ebony Kingdom?"

"It is, your Majesty," the woman said.

Alex thought for a moment and got rid of the idea of something from outside hurting the sect. This meant something much have happened on the inside that cost them to lose all the resources.

"Body cultivation does cost a lot," Alex said softly. "The cultivation part itself doesn't cost even that much, but… the healing part costs a lot."New n0vel chapters are published on

"Or it could be that they gave up because it hurts a lot. But I would doubt it if they could just jump into an artifact and not have to beat each other to near death for it."

"The people in the Northern Continent don't like becoming Body Cultivators because they don't have an easy method of healing due to their relative lack of healing treasures. The people in the Southern Continent don't like becoming Body Cultivators because they don't have an easy method of getting hurt."

"But in the Eastern Continent, healing pills should be easy to come by, and with this artifact, the Mountain Crushing sect should easily get the Body Cultivators coming out one after another."

"What could cause them to stop?" he wondered.

"Could it be that they couldn't keep the artifact running at all times? Like there is a limit on how many times you can use it in a day," Yao Ning proposed.

"Maybe," Alex said. "But I don't see how that could result in their downfall."

"We don't know that it is what led to their collapse though," Liang Shufen. "I don't see why we are treating this as the cause of their collapse."

"It was the cause of their rise," Alex said. "So it should have some hand in their collapse as well. Maybe not to the effect that we are thinking it does, but I guarantee you it definitely does."

"The question now is why," he asked.

The auctioneer spoke a moment later as she brought out something for everyone to see. A red book.

She waved the red book around before placing it on top of the artifact itself so that everyone could see what it was.

Alex saw the book appear in the image in front of him and looked at the book. "Mountain Crushing Artifact Manual?" he couldn't help but say in surprise.

He was shocked to see that it was in fact a manual.

"This here as you can see is a manual," the woman said. "This is something that will come with the purchase of the artifact as well."

"However, that is not why I showed you this," she said. "This manual contains all knowledge about the machine that the Mountain Crushing sect has gathered in its entirety."

"And right here, I am going to tell you all the flaws of this machine. The con that could make you all reconsider buying this."

"I understand that it is a weird thing for an auction house to do, to avert a buyer's wish to buy something," she said. "However, we believe that you deserve to know something about the machine that is its inherent flaw."

Alex perked up. He had realized that was the case, and so had quite a few others. Now he just wanted to see what the flaw was.

"As we have mentioned before, this artifact is originally an Immortal artifact. As such, it was designed for the immortals."

"That is not to say that it doesn't work with us mortals, but the energy it requires to use is not normal," she said.

"To run the artifact alone, you need at least a thousand Saint Spirit stones each time. And each time, it can only run for so long depending on how much weight the inside of the artifact holds."

Alex couldn't help but believe what he was hearing. "The Mountain Crushing sect fell from grace… just because this was a money-draining artifact?"

Chapter 1485 Desire

"So... it eats up a lot of spirit stones? That's it?" Yao Ning asked with a confused look. "It's bad, but... I don't think it matters a lot, does it?"

"Who knows?" Liang Shufen said. "Maybe we don't have all the information? Let's watch."

They all waited for the woman on stage to continue on, and she did.

"You might be wondering how much Spirit stones it eats up," she said. "We have the answer right here."

She took the book and flipped it a bit as she arrived at a page.

"The machine must have 1000 Saint Spirit stones of utmost quality before it can even start. If you do not have that many, add as much as you can to get it started."

"When started, considering the weight of an average person including normal rocks that aren't very heavy, it will run for a single day."

"If you add more weight, the time it will run for will reduce even more. At around a ton in total weight, the 1000 Saint Spirit stones will run the machine for barely an hour."

The girl stopped.

Alex and the other elders were stunned by the revelation.

"1000 Saint Spirit stones just to get it started?" Yao Ning was surprised. "Just how much resources did the Mountain Crushing sect waste to strengthen their students?"

"It's more than 1000 if the spirit stones are not in prime condition, which they rarely are," Liang Shufen couldn't help but say. "I believe we have found ourselves a rather nonsensical artifact."

Alex looked at the artifact and frowned a little. "Why did the Mountain Crushing sect lose fall from their grace?" he still questions. "Is it really because they used up all their resources?"

He found that a little hard to believe.

Unfortunately, he didn't have anyone here that could answer him.

'Not here,' he thought. He would have to ask this question some other time then.

"My apologies, your Majesty," Yao Ning said. "I wasn't aware that the artifact would turn out to be this sort. I don't think we can buy it anymore."

"What do you mean?" Alex asked. "I am going to buy it."

"But it eats a lot of money," she said.

"So? I'll make back that money," Alex said. "Do you know how desperate I have been to body cultivate? I feel like it has been ages since I properly improved my body. I am most definitely going to get this."

"But we have cheaper methods to cultivate back at home," Yao Ning said. "Don't you have those beasts that hit you to body cultivate?"

"I do," Alex said. "But it doesn't work as well. To be able to body cultivate, you need to be hurt from head to toe in every single surface so that it can grow back, stronger."

"The beasts usually just concentrate their attacks on one place, making body cultivation a little harder. It might have worked if they had a normal level of intelligence, but they don't. And I can't always ask Whisker to help me."

"Besides, this will do in an hour what they will take days," Alex said. "It would've been awesome if I got Pearl's blood essence, but it seems that his blood essence is too weak now."

"Unless I take the main blood essence, it won't work, and I'm not doing that," Alex said, petting Pearl's fur on the side.

"Still," Yao Ning spoke. "1000 Saint Spirit stones for a day is... it's a little too expensive. You will lose all of what you earned today in less than 3 years if you use it like that."

"Not to mention, we don't have that many Saint Spirit stones back in the Southern Continent," the Elder said. "Most of our Spirit stones are True Spirit stones, unlike here."

Alex nodded. "I understand your frustration completely," he said. "But I say we buy, so we buy. Even if we don't use it, do you not want our Continent to own an Immortal artifact as well?"

"I..." The elder couldn't argue against that. She did want one quite badly after all. Until their ruler broke back into the Immortal realm, they weren't going to get one any time soon.

Alex had been desperate for body cultivation as well. His Sword aura was quite weak as well, but he could increase it to the appropriate level with just a bit of training.

Since it was Intent that was the most important part of any level of Sword mastery, he only needed some time to change what was already his normal Intent into Intent for the sword.

Given that it was going to be even stronger, it was bound to take him quite a while, but that time was nowhere near atrocious enough in comparison to the speed at which his body cultivation was coming on.

Ever since Pearl's disappearance, his body cultivation has been continuing at a snail's pace and he could not continue like that anymore.

He needed a proper method to body cultivate, and this was it.

"This fulfills a dream I have had for quite a few years," Alex said. "We are getting it, one way or the other."

The elders saw the resolution on his face and said nothing. They agreed at that point and decided to buy it one way or another.

"While the words I have spoken just now discouraged some of you, I had to speak them to warn you all of its major flaw," the woman continued. "However, you will not need to be that scared of the flaw. While the artifact will only last for a day at most even at the lowest setting, a person has to remain no more than an hour in at a time."

"Since they would be wounded quite extremely, they will have to remain inside for an extremely small period of time before they have to come out to get healed."

"As a result, in a single day you can have over 20 people cultivate one after another," she said.

"So, if that has lessened your worries, shall we begin?"

Chapter 1486 Request

The bidding started at a rather high number, which surprised Alex quite a lot toward the start.

40 thousand Saint spirit stones.

In other words, enough spirit stones to last the machine for 40 days at the lowest possible setting. There was no way it was going to stay at 40 thousand spirit stones for any longer than a fraction of a second.

It didn't even take that long.

The moment Alex turned his head toward the bid counter, it flickered through numbers faster than mortal eyes could see.

Bids from 50,000 through 80,000 were essentially non-existent as everyone realized the big was going to cross 100 thousand without a doubt.

Alex waited for the numbers to slow down before he planned on bidding at all. When he saw it cross 100 thousand, his heart skipped a beat.

"Can you check how much money you have?" he asked the elders and checked his own. After adding each other's Spirit stones, minus the ones that they had to pay for next, the total came to be about 78 thousand.

With the 50,000 that the Emerald King had promised him, Alex was set for about 130 thousand Saint Spirit stones.

However, given the situation, he found that unlikely to be enough. The number was growing too fast and showed no signs of stopping at any moment.

As he watched the number move up from 110 thousand to 120 thousand, Alex knew he could not win this artifact at all. At least, not without a bit of help.

He thought for a moment about who to ask for help. When he landed on who he should ask first, his heart sank a bit in fear.

As far as he could tell, there was a single person in the entire auction house that he could ask for money that he knew could afford the thing.

That was the Crown Prince.

However at the same time, if the Crown Prince wanted this as well, there was not a single person he could ask money from that could have more than the Crown Prince.

Fearing what was going to happen next a bit, Alex pulled out his talisman and contacted the Crown Prince. He simply asked him if he was willing to help him with a bit of financial aid for the bidding. New n0vel chapters are published on

He hoped the answer that he was going hear was the Crown Prince's agreement to help him. The answer he did not want to hear was that the Crown Prince was against him in the bidding and would thus not help him.

And yet, somehow, the answer he got was neither of the two.

"I am no longer in the Gold Kingdom, Your Majesty," the Crown Prince replied half a minute later. "Something came up with the military, so I left early. I cannot help you with financial aid while I am away."

That was a shame… and a relief.

"Maybe the Gold King?" he wondered and messaged the Gold King.

"I am sorry, Your Majesty," the Gold King said. "I cannot help you. Alex paused, thinking for a while. Who could he ask?

"Maybe the Gold King?" he wondered and messaged the Gold King.

"I am sorry, Your Majesty," the Gold King said. "I cannot help you. You were a step late."

'A step late?' Alex wondered what that meant. 'Did someone else ask him?'

"I should've asked him faster," Alex thought with a sigh. He then pulled out another talisman and messaged the other person he could think of currently.

The Queen of the Silver Kingdom, Mao Yingtai.

He asked her the same thing he asked everyone. "Hope I'm not too late," he thought with a frustrated look on his face.

The Mountain Crushing artifact was so important to him, to continue growing as a cultivator. If he couldn't have it, it was going to be a sad day for sure.

The queen replied to the message with a short answer. "I'm sorry, Your Majesty," she said.

Alex couldn't help but sigh in disappointment. "Did someone get to you before me?" he asked back and quickly got a message back.

"Got to me?" the woman asked. "Your Majesty, I am bidding for the artifact myself. As the Queen of the Kingdom where lies the Transcendent Martial ground and where takes place the Continental Tournament, I must acquire it."

Alex frowned when he realized that he wasn't late or anything. She was just his competition.

"Did you ask the Gold King as well?" he asked.

"I did," the queen replied. "And King Jin, but he said he had already promised to lend you his spirit stones."

Alex didn't bother replying after that. He looked at the counter in the screen and it had long past crossed 140 thousand and was keeping a steady pace.

"This is going to go far above," Alex said, looking at the screen.

"What do we do now?" the Elders asked. "We don't have nearly enough to get the artifact."

"If only we could use the money I earned," Alex said. However, due to the possibility of the seller never receiving any money from the buyer, they did not allow for sellers to use money they did not yet have.

"Do we give up then?" Elder Liang asked, looking back at Alex.

Alex thought for a moment and said, "Let me try one last time. If that doesn't work, we give up."

He took out a talisman and called for someone he wasn't sure if he could rely on for financial aid or not. He didn't even know if the person was in the auction or not.

He asked the person if they were still in the auction house or not.

He waited for a few seconds and received a message back.

"I am still in the auction house, Your Majesty." Alex heard the voice that came from the talisman.

That was a step forward, but he was still nowhere.

"Are you trying to bid on the final item?" he asked.

"No," the other person replied.

Alex was happy but there was still one more step to go.

"Have you promised to lend anyone any spirit stones?" he asked.

"Not yet," the person replied.

Alex finally smiled as he saw a ray of hope. "Lady Zhan, would you mind lending me some?"

Chapter 1487 A Deal

"You wish me to lend you my Spirit stones, Your Majesty?" Lady Zhan asked from the other side.

"Yes, if you wouldn't mind it," Alex said.

"I don't mind," she said. "But... instead of lending you the spirit stones, would you mind if I buy something from you instead?"

"Buy from me?" Alex asked. "What... do you wish to buy?"

"The Spiritual Root Improving pills recipe and Soul Trancing pill recipe," the woman said.

Alex was a little taken back at the audacity of this woman to ask for something that was so obviously not something she should be asking for.

He didn't particularly mind the attempt though.

"Lady Zhan, you must understand that these pill recipes are quite important to me and they are my secret," Alex said. "I cannot just hand them over. I can hand over normal ones, but not these specific ones."

"I understand," the woman said. " But since Your Majesty needs the Spirit Stones, I was wondering if you would be willing to trade them for it."

"I'm afraid I cannot," Alex said. "The pills for Dao and Spiritual roots are something that I cannot pass along."

"That's... a shame," the woman said. "I was hoping you would say yes. I was even ready to make whatever Oath you would want me to make. In the end... it didn't work out. I guess I will have to be happy with the lower-grade recipes. The Spirit Immunity pill and the Poison Neutralizing pill, would you be happy to sell those?"

"That I am fine with," Alex said since he saw no problem with the two pills when compared to the Dao pill and the Spiritual root pill.

"So you will sell me those two?" the woman asked from the other side. "I will try and buy the other two sometime in the future if I can."

"Yes," Alex said. "I will sell you those two."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," the woman said in a happy tone from the other side. "Should we talk prince then?"

Alex paused when he heard the happiness in the woman's voice. She was a bit too happy for someone who didn't get what she wanted.

'Unless,' he thought as a possibility came to his mind. One that made him know that he had been outplayed.

"Wow!" he couldn't help but be impressed. "She was after those two recipes from the start, wasn't she?" he said softly to himself. "She really tried to lowball me only to make me later think the deal I landed on was much better for me."

Alex knew in his heart that had the woman asked him to buy the two pill recipes, he would have never agreed. However, making him think he was getting a solid deal out of this, she took from him something that he didn't want to but willingly gave.

He couldn't help but chuckle to himself and quickly spoke back in the talisman. "You better have a lot of money or something," he said. "The recipes are going to cost you a lot."

"Oh, let me check how much I have after everything I bought today," the woman said and went silent for a bit.

He looked at the bidding amount go past 160 thousand Saint Spirit stones when she replied back with a message.

"I have about 90 thousand Saint Spirit stones to give," she said. "Would that be enough for the two pill recipes?"

Alex thought for a bit and couldn't help but shake his head. "That's a little too cheap for the recipe itself, given that the recipe is what makes the pill reach over 90% Harmony under the hands of a talented alchemist."

"What if I were to make an oath that I wouldn't randomly sell the pills or the recipes to anyone? I can make an oath that I won't sell the pill recipe at all, and the pills I will only give to friends and families," she said.

Alex thought for a bit, but there wasn't much thinking he needed to do here. He was going to have to accept it if I wanted the other item.

"Very well, I will accept it," Alex said. "So, 90 thousand?"

"90 thousand," the woman replied back.

Alex put down the talisman. "I got ourselves another 90 thousand," he said. "We now have a little over 200 thousand."

"That is amazing news," elder Liang said excitedly. "It's just reached 160 thousand and is slowing down, so it should be quite enough."

"Let's hope so," Alex said and watched the numbers continue moving. He could only wonder how many more, just like him, had yet to start their bidding.

When the bidding started to slow down to around 170 thousand, it improved again as it shot to 180 thousand easily. It continued increasing and at this point, Alex joined in as well.

"So many sects and families would want this," Alex said softly. "We have to get this no matter what."

It continued increasing as the bid reached 190 thousand. As they all waited, the bidding reached 200 thousand.

200 thousand Saint Spirit stones.

That was an unfathomable amount of Saint Spirit stones for something that ate up even more Spirit stones on a daily basis.

The number continued increasing by a random sum, slowly reaching a level that made Alex fear once more.

It took its time, taking nearly 5 minutes to do so, but the bidding reached 210 thousand. Alex couldn't help but frown at this point.

He had less than 220 thousand Saint Spirit stones, so if it crossed that, he wouldn't be able to win at all.

Alex realized that if he truly wanted this artifact, he needed another help.

'But from who?' he thought. He thought about the various people and landed on Tian Honglui. He quickly sent him a message regarding the fact that he needed Saint Spirit stones.

However, Tian Honglui didn't reply at all. Alex couldn't get the last sum of money he would need.

As the bid crossed the 220 thousand Saint Spirit Stones mark some 10 minutes later, Alex knew that it was time to give up.

Chapter 1488 Something Unexpected

"So what?" Yao Ning asked. "Do we just give up?"

"What do we do then?" Alex asked. "We don't have enough money."

"But… to just give up…" Yao Ning couldn't help but frown a little. "Surely we can do something? Maybe Pearl has it?"

"Do you have any money, Pearl?" Alex asked.

"About a thousand spirit stones," Pearl said. "Nearly not enough now."

"See?" Alex said. "We don't have the money."

"I asked General Fan too. He doesn't have any at all," Liang Shufen said.

"What about those painters?" Yao Ning asked.

"I asked Tian Honglui and he was not here at all," Alex said.

"And his senior?" Yao Ning asked. "What was it, Ran?"

"Senior Ran?" Alex asked and wondered for a bit before shaking his head. "I don't have his talisman."

"That's… what do we do then?" Yao Ning asked.

"Well, we just wait and watch as someone else takes it away. Maybe hope along the way that it is the Silver Queen that takes it. If it's her, maybe we can ask her to lend it to us," Alex said.

"That may be all that we can do," Yao Ning said as she watched the bidding cross 225 thousand Saint Spirit stones. At that point, they were truly out of money and had no chance of winning.

The numbers slowed down quite a lot, increasing every minute or so. At this point, the bidding wouldn't end until after a minute or later.

Alex watched the bid slowly increase to 230 thousand. "When is this going to end?" he couldn't help but ask in a somewhat frustrated voice.

The Emerald King called to ask if he was still bidding. He was worried that he wouldn't get the pills he wanted. "I have stopped bidding, but I will still honor our deal, don't worry," he said.

The Emerald King was happy to hear that.

He expected Lady Zhan to be curious as well, but she had already bought the two recipes for 90 thousand Saint Spirit stones, so there wasn't much for her to worry about.

The Silver Queen reached out as well. "Are you still in the bidding, Your Majesty?" she asked.

"No, I have given up a long time ago," Alex said. "I do not have nearly enough money."

"Oh," the woman sounded happy. "I'm actually running low myself. There's some big sects that are slowly pushing their way through and now I don't have enough to win this with a guarantee."

"Would you mind lending some of those Spirit stones to me?" she asked. "I could use them."

Alex couldn't help but sigh. "Maybe I should ask her to lend me its usage for a long time," he said. That could be a good bargain here, and he was ready to do so when he sensed another talisman vibrate in his storage ring, he frowned a little.

He assumed that it was Lady Zhan who had contacted him, but when he pulled out the talisman, he couldn't help but be taken aback by the person who had contacted him.

The message was simple. "Do you have some spirit stones to lend?" the person asked.

However, seeing who it came from, Alex was confused a little. "I do have some, sister Hao," Alex said. "May I ask why you require it?"

"Good, good," Hao Ya said back, "I'm eyeing something at the end of this auction I am at and realized that the money I have isn't going to be enough."

"I'm sorry, you need spirit stones?" Alex asked full of surprise.

"Yes," Hao Ya said.

"Where are you at?" Alex asked.

"What do you mean where?" Hao Ya asked. "I'm in Goldheart City, in one of the auction houses. Are you not in this town? I thought you were here.

"No, I am here," Alex said with a confused look on his face. "When did you come here?"

"Like two days after the auction started," Hao Ya said. "We had reserved a place from the Dragon Capital, so I and Jai Heiyun came here. We were a little late though."

Alex couldn't believe it. "You didn't let me know you were coming?" he asked.

"I was going to contact you when I was here, but we were late by a few days, so we didn't contact you. I thought you would be busy with the auction."

"And now you contact?" Alex asked.

"I'm… running out of money buying these various things," Hao Ya said. "I am starting to think that the money I and Jai Heiyun brought isn't going to be enough tomorrow. Are you lending us your money or not?"

"Sure, sure," Alex said. "I have little use for this money anyway. How much do you need? I will send Elder Liang to you right now with the money."

"Oh, I need about… 30 thousand Saint Spirit stones?" Hao Ya said. She herself wasn't sure. "I'm buying a Fan with shadow aura that is an amazing concealing artifact. It's the final item being auctioned and I need to buy it."

"Sure," Alex said. "I'll send 50 thousand Saint Spirit stones right away then. I don't have much need for it here."

"Thank you," Hao Ya said. "Also, you don't have to hurry. The item is being sold off tomorrow, so you can take your time."

"Oh, okay," Alex said. "I will send it after I leave from here…" He paused for a moment as a thought passed through him. "Wait, you said tomorrow?"

"Yes, tomorrow," Hao Ya answered.

"So you don't need the money right now?" he asked.

"No," Hao Ya said.

Alex's eyes widened a little. "Sister Hao, how many Spirit stones do you have right now? Saint Spirit stones," he asked.

"Spirit stones? Well… me and little Jai together have around 30 thousand. Why do you ask?"

Alex's smile grew wide and happy. "Can you lend it to me for today instead?" he asked. "I will send you the stones after I'm done tomorrow."

Hao Ya took a moment longer than normal, but she replied in time.

"Sure," she said. "As long as I get the stones in time."

Alex nodded. "I promise you, you will get it in time," he said. "So that's 30 thousand Saint Spirit stones right?" New n0vel chapters are published on

The elders, Pearl, and Whisker were already looking at him with weird looks on their faces, expectant of whatever was happening currently.

"Yes, about 35 maybe," Hao Ya replied. "Do you want to come take now, or…"

Alex smiled. "I'll send Elder Liang right away," he said and turned off the talisman before handing it over to Liang Shufen.

"30 thousand Saint Spirit Stones just landed on our footsteps," Alex said excitedly. "You'll have to go meet sister Hao Ya and get the money from her."

"Righta way," the elder said and walked out of the room to get the money.

Alex sensed his talisman vibrate again. The Silver Queen was waiting for his answer. He picked up the talisman and gave an answer.

"My apologies, Queen Mao, but I'm afraid the situation has changed a little," he said. "I cannot lend you any money as I have acquired a bit myself."

"As such, I am back in the bidding war."

He put down the talisman and made his bid.

235,000 Saint Spirit Stones.

Chapter 1489 Maximum Bid

With Alex joining the bidding war, the speed at which the price rose increased once again. However, with how big the bid was, the speed at which it rose was still slow compared to all the other ones.

Alex saw the bid increase ever so slightly and could tell that however it was that bidding didn't have much money. He didn't wait and increased the bid again by the slightest amount.

"Your Majesty?" Yao Ning turned around when she saw how fast he was bidding. "Are you sure we shouldn't wait to see if there are others that can bid before we do?"

"No," Alex said. "Increase the bid by the slightest bit the moment the other person bids."

"Why such a hurry?" Pearl asked with a curious look on his face.

"Whoever it is that is bidding currently is running out of money, so they spend every moment they can to reconsider whether or not the price is worth it for the item they are paying."

"However, that time is also important for them to contact others and gain that tiniest bit of money to improve their bid. We cannot give them time to contact other people and ask for money."

"That's the reason why we must bid at every moment," Alex said as he bid again.

He increased the bid each time someone else bid and started the timer to the auction's end where he would get the item. That forced the others to start either bidding faster or giving up.

Alex watched the number rise and reach 238,000. He shook his head and increased it, sending it immediately to 240,000.

The sudden rise caused a stir amongst the bidders as they couldn't immediately match the bid. They had to take their time considering how much they wanted to spend.

The problem they faced was that the item they were bidding for was already a flawed product known to devour Saint Spirit stones. If they spent hundreds of thousands of Saint Spirit stones, only to have barely enough left to use it, it wouldn't be a very good trade.

They needed to consider both the cost of buying the artifact and the cost of using the artifact after all.

Not to mention, the sects were slightly worried about the fact that the Mountain Crushing sect had most likely fallen due to this very artifact. That caused them to hesitate to bid.

'Don't bid anymore,' Alex hoped. 240,000 was a lot, and he only had about 10 thousand more Saint Spirit stones at best. If someone increased it to reach 250,000, that would be problematic for him.

However, hopes rarely came true. The bids increased again, by a mere 20 Saint Spirit stones, but that gave the others time to search for more money.

Alex increased the bid by 50 and waited again.

Liang Shufen returned a few moments later and gave Alex the spirit stones. Alex looked at the spirit stones inside the storage bag.

He couldn't help but smile a bit when he saw that. "We might have enough now," he said. "Our 76,000, the Emerald King's 50,000, Lady Zhan's 90,000, and now sister Hao Ya's 35,000."

"We have 251 thousand Saint Spirit stones now?" Yao Ning asked.

Alex nodded. "A little more than that, but less than 252 thousand for sure," he said and increased the bid again. They were reaching close to 241 thousand, which meant he only had 10 thousand more Saint Spirit stones for the bid.

"I hope this is enough," he thought.

He increased the bid at his time to reach 241,000 and waited for someone to continue increasing. It took some time, but someone did increase.

Alex couldn't help but frown. 'They aren't giving up,' he thought and increased the bid again.

The Silver Queen contacted him again to ask if he was still bidding. She was getting desperate as well it seemed. She didn't seem to have much.

'Is she the only one that is bidding right now?' he wondered and watched the increment. It was hard to tell, but it looked like there were 2 more people other than him, not just one.

Some sect master was most certainly taking part. There were so many large sects in that Eastern Continent that Alex didn't even know which one it could be.

Nearly an hour passed in which the bids increased very slowly it took an hour for the bid to rise from 241,000 to 243,000.

"They aren't giving up, huh?" Liang Shufen asked.

"No, but I do think one of them gave up. It's only one other person and they are trying to save as much money as possible," Alex said.

"Should we increase by a large chunk and see how they respond?" Yao Ning asked.

"That might work, but they might also think that we're bluffing and continue increasing in small increments again," Alex said with a thoughtful look. "Oh, what the heck! Let's just do it."

He increased the next bid to jump directly to 245,000 Saint spirit stones.

The people around the auction house were no longer participating in the bidding, but they couldn't help but be extremely excited about the current bid. They had never expected the prices of items they bought here to cross 100,000 Saint Spirit stones, and yet they were looking at a number that was getting close to 250,000.

One could only imagine how happy the Mountain Crushing Sect was right now. The spirit stones they would obtain from this auction would be a fortune for them, which would be enough to raise themselves from the ground once again.

The auctioneer on the stage was equally excited as well. Given how much commission she would get from the auction her incredibly happy about the current price of the artifact.

She could only hold her breath and hope that it increased even more.

And it did. It jumped up by another tiny amount, but increase it did.

Alex frowned and increased it slightly again, only for the other person to increase it slightly again.

"That was fast," Yao Ning commented at the speed of the last bid.

"They're speeding up," Alex said with a frown. 'Did the Silver Queen find some help?'

That would be a bad turn of events if that were true.

Alex increased it immediately again and the other person increased it as well. When Alex increased it again, the other person increased the bid directly to 247,000, which surprised everyone present.

"What's... going on?" Yao Ning couldn't help but ask.

"Hmm, I think it's a bluff," Alex said. "They're running out of money like us, so they're increasing it by random numbers to scare us. There is no need to be scared at all."

He called their bluff and increased the bid to 248,000.

He waited for the other person to give up, but instead, they increased it to 249,000. He couldn't help but frown at that increase.

Alex increased it a little, jumping to 249,500. There was a long pause where it looked like Alex had won. However, at the very end, the other person increased it directly to 250,000.

At this point, he couldn't help but frown. He felt like he had no choice at all.

"Well," he said. "Here goes nothing."

He increased the bid to 251,000.

Chapter 1490 You Win Some, You Lose Some

﻿

At 251,000 Saint Spirit stones, there was barely any more that Alex could add. If his opponents added a few Saint Spirit stones, he may be able to add a little, but that was it.

Any more and he would lose.

252,000… and he would lose.

He wasn't the only one that knew so. Everyone in the room knew so. They had talked about it and thus they were all patiently, but anxiously waiting for the bidding to hopefully end.

They hoped to the best of their abilities that it did not increase at all.

Seconds passed that lasted as long as minutes for them. The sound in the room became so quiet that they could hear each other's breathing. Every flicker of light from the floating images made their heart sink a bit as they feared it was the number changing.

And yet, the number never changed. It remained the same for an entire minute and more.

There was no indication of when the bidding was going to end at all. They were still not aware of what the ratio of the time was in comparison to the current bid. As the bid it was now, it was minutes.

One thing became clear in this wait, however. Their competition in this bid was also in a bit of trouble.

It was as if the 250 thousand they put down was the final straw and anything more than that was simply idiocracy to spend on a money-spending machine.

Alex was the only one willing to spend more for it. Alas, he didn't have the money for it.

He didn't want to get any more happy, but it appeared as if he was on his way to winning the whole thing. As time passed by, each one of them grew more and more hopeful.

And when the hopes gathered to reach a crescendo, it shattered.

The number flickered and it went up to 252,000 Saint Spirit stones.

The bid increased.

They lost.

Alex slumped on his chair, defeated, dejected. This was not how he wanted to lose. With enough money to start an empire, and yet not enough to even buy an item in an auction bid.

The one that beat him to it was most likely the Queen of the Silver Kingdom too.

The Southern Continent had lost to a single Kingdom of the Eastern Continent. It wasn't fun being reminded of just how weak his own Continent was when compared to the Eastern Continent.

And somehow, his enemy was the Royal family of this very continent.

No one said anything to Alex for a while as they were all staring at the screen where the bid number had changed.

After a minute or so, Pearl finally moved. He placed his paws on Alex's shoulder. "Brother," he called out to him.

Alex tapped his paws without looking back. "It's alright," he said. "You win some, you lose some."

"No, brother," Pearl called out to him again.

"Your Majesty," the others called out as well.

"No, no, it's alright," Alex said as he sighed a little. "It would've been great to get it, but—"

"BROTHER!" Pearl shouted at him after he didn't respond the first two times.

Everyone there was a little surprised by the sudden shout, including Alex. Alex turned around to look at Pearl with a confused face. "What?" he asked.

"Did you count mine?" Pearl asked.

"What?" Alex asked, his mind barely understanding the question.

"My spirit stones. I have a thousand of them. Did you count mine earlier?" he asked.

Alex paused for a moment. His eyes moved around as he tried to recalculate everything in his mind. When he was done with it, his eyes went wide.

"No," he said with a weird look on his face. "I didn't."

1000 Spirit stones. That was the amount of spirit stones that Pearl had in his bracelet at the moment. And it was such a tiny amount in comparison that Alex had completely forgotten about it as well.

The 1000 spirit stones might as well not have existed when the bids were for HUNDREDS of them. And yet with this thousand, they had one more chance.

With this thousand they could bid again.

They didn't have enough for 253,000. But they damn certainly had enough for 252,500. And so, Alex did it.

No one was sure how long had passed since the bid had changed. None of them were sure if they were close or far from the bid ending.

However, none of that mattered now.

They did it and the timer reset.

Now, they sat there and watched.

Emotions from before riled up all of them once again. Hopes did too, but they sealed them. They had been disappointed the last time already, and they didn't want to go through it again.

And yet, that tiny bit of hope always trickled out no matter how much they tried to put a seal on it. No matter what they tried to do with their hope, they still hoped.

They hoped that the number wouldn't change.

They hoped that their opponent didn't have enough spirit stones.

They hoped that their hope wouldn't hurt them again.

And after suffering from those hopes for minutes, they saw the number flash again.New n0vel chapters are published on

Only this time, the number didn't flash to change. This time, it flashed to note that 252,500 was the amount that had become the final bid.

This time, their hopes were answered.

They won the bidding.

They won the auction.

The auctioneer on the screen smiled wider than she had ever before. "The Mountain Crushing Artifact has been sold!" she shouted for everyone to hear.

"Yes!" Liang Shufen was the first to get up and shout.

"We won!" Whisker jumped second. "Brother, we won."

Yao Ning turned around from her seat with a smile to look at Alex. "Congratulations, Your Majesty," she said.

Alex slumped back on his chair once more. Only this time, it wasn't from being defeated at all.

This time, he had won.

Chapter 1491 Auction’s End

Alex grabbed Pearl in a big hug as he thanked him for the final help. Had he not reminded him of the thousand spirit stones he had, it would have all been for naught.

As they celebrated, the woman told them to remain there while the auction made some calculations and tallies before doing everything else.

She told Alex to get ready to pay and to bring all the money he had on him at the moment.

Alex nodded and sent the two Elders to meet with Lady Zhan and the Emerald King to bring back what they were promised.

After they waited for half an hour, the door opened and someone handed the woman in the room a talisman, who handed it to Alex.

Alex looked at the talisman and his heart nearly sank in fear. He had spent nearly 400 thousand Saint Spirit stones throughout the entire month of the auction, and more than half of that was just the Mountain Crushing artifact.

Alex handed the list to the elders to make sure everything they bought was there, and once it was finalized, he handed over the money to the woman.

The woman counted the money she was handed with trembling hands as the amount she was holding was not something just anyone could come across.

She nodded and waited for someone to come collect the money. Once the money was gone, they had to wait for another while before 2 things arrived.

The first thing that arrived was their earnings. The woman handed the Storage bag to Alex who took it and opened it.

Inside the bag were so many Spirit stones that Alex sensed and felt overwhelmed for a second by the amount. He quickly closed it and opened it again to focus on it.

While half of his attention counted the spirit stones, the other half pulled out the talisman in the bag that listed down how much of the amount they were paid for was there and how much was taxed away.

The part of him that counted the pill couldn't help but be absolutely floored at how much he had just earned.

836,000 Saint Spirit stones.

Why in the hell was he so worried about just 252,000 spirit stones just moments earlier? The experience felt so surreal to him.

As he finished reading the talisman, he noticed that the amount he had earned was actually 781,000 not 836,000. Why was there a bit more Spirit stones in the storage bag than he should have received as per the talisman?

55 thousand Saint Spirit stones were not just something they could forget about. Had they made some sort of mistake?

When he was just getting confused, he realized what was happening.

Alex couldn't help but smile when he saw a small note at the end of the talisman reminding him that 2 Dao Pills had to be sold to both the auction house's owner and manager.

He did tell them that he would sell them the pills for whatever the pill would cost after taking away the bid from 100,000. It seemed that they were already trying to pay for it to get him to stick to his words.

Alex chuckled a little and pulled out a few pill bottles before passing over pills from one to another. Once done, he handed the bottle over to the woman.

"Give my gratitude to your manager and owner," Alex said once the girl took the pill bottle.

"This is for the owner and manager?" the woman asked.

"Yes," Alex said and handed another pill bottle to the woman. "This is my gratitude for dealing with us for the whole month."

The woman took the second pill bottle with more surprise. "This... is this for me?" she asked.

"Of course," Alex said. "Don't tell anyone I gave these to you though."

"I... I can't... I..." the woman couldn't speak. She didn't know what to say after getting the pill bottle. She didn't know what was inside the bottle, but even if it was just a single pill, she knew it would cost thousands and thousands of Saint Spirit stones.

That sort of money was not something that a woman like her could earn in a few years. It was something that would take her dozens of years to earn.

"Take it," Alex said. "I'm not taking it back."

The woman had no choice. She nodded and thanked him profusely.

"Your majesty, what's going on?" Yao Ning asked. The Elder, Pearl, and Whisker were getting confused slightly by the weirdness of the situation.

Alex tossed the storage bag to the older woman and let her find out herself. He simply sat as the bags were passed around the room and one by one everyone's face went wide in shock. Just like his.

After the storage bag returned to him, he passed along a portion over to the elders and Pearl as well as Whisker. Everyone refused at first, but Alex once again didn't care for their refusal.

He handed them all enough spirit stones to make their eyes pop out and had them shut up.

He took the remaining 600,000 Saint Spirit stones and put them into his storage ring with a feeling of unrealness in his heart.

That was a lot of money for him.

He remembered the time when his pills sold for a couple dozen common spirit stones and those were considered amazing.

And now, he was selling pills that cost tens of millions times more than those pills. It was an amazing feeling.

The door opened again and something was passed along. The woman came up to Alex and handed over a few different pouches.

Alex took them all and knew that they were the storage bags that contained the items they won in today's auction.

Alex looked through them and the very first item he searched for was the Mountain Crushing artifact.

Once he got that artifact, he let the elders check if everything they bought was there or not.

Once that was confirmed, they left the room.

Chapter 1492 Excited Checking

Alex walked out of the auction house and met up with the other kings as well as Lady Zhan. He thanked the two as soon as he met them, which was not surprising to the other two monarchs.

The Silver Queen had contacted everyone else most likely and by now they all knew who had won the artifact.

"Congratulations on winning the final bid, Your Majesty," she said.

Alex smiled. "You nearly beat me too, Queen Mao," he said. "I have to thank you that you stepped back at the last moment. I had no more spirit stones after that."

The Silver Queen's eyes looked at him in surprise and then it grew incredulous when she realized he wasn't lying. "So... I lost because I gave up?" she asked.

"Did you have any more to spend?" Alex asked.

The Silver Queen nodded. "I had just found someone to aid me after you refused to help me," she said. "But once the bid crossed 250 thousand, I thought it was better if I didn't continue."

"I see," Alex said. "I got lucky then. Thank you."

The woman didn't know what to say and sighed in the end. "Luck is a skill as well, I suppose," she said. "Congratulations all the same."

Alex smiled and they continued back to the palace. Along the way, Alex handed over 100,000 of the spirit stones he had to Elder Liang, who took it to the other auction house where Hao Ya and Jai Heiyun would still be vying for the final item in the auction.

He would meet with them when they walked out, but for now, he was more than excited to check on the items he had received up close.

Once they arrived at the palace, Alex first finished his with the two he had borrowed his money from.

To the Emerald King, he gave a few more pills than he had asked for.

To Lady Zhan, he gave the two pill recipes as he had promised. He made sure that she made an oath as she had said she would and then had her remember the recipe before destroying it.

At that point, he had nothing to worry about.

Once the both of them were dealt with, Alex walked into his room, along with the Elders who were as excited as him to watch the whole thing.

Whisker and Pearl were ready to watch the whole thing as well, so he didn't waste a single second.

He started with the tiny things. An earring for his mother, and a pink dress for his daughter. A sword for his sister and a bracelet for his master.

He pulled dozens of things out before anything of significance started coming out at all.

The first thing that came out was the Dragon Heart Gauntlet.

He put on the gauntlet and looked at it for a moment. The greenish blue scales on the gauntlet shined under the light of the room and glimmered light onto the walls like waves of water.

He placed a few spirit stones inside as instructed and activated the item. He attacked a dummy he placed in the distance with the technique that was carved into the scales.

The attack was barely any strong at all, but that was not why he bought this thing anyway. He used the second defensive skill as well, but that wasn't that good either.

Finally, he activated the third skill which increased his weight by a large amount. He felt heavy all of a sudden as if a weight had been put onto his whole body, distributed equally.

'Good,' he thought. He would've found it terrible had it only increased the weight on his arm.

"Father might not even notice the increase in weight," he said as he took it off and let the elders try it out. They were surprised by the weight much more than Alex could ever be.

Alex pulled out the next item from the bag which was his Frostfire Inkbrush. He handled the brush around in his hand, memorizing the weight, texture, and balance.

The swirling red and blue pattern on the shaft of the pen made it look far better than it actually was.

Alex put it to the side for others to check if they wanted to and brought out the next thing.

The Bottomless Jade Flask. Of course, it wasn't bottomless. But it did have a lot and lot of storage space it in, all meant to be for liquid.

He looked at the wines that were there and thought of making some in the flask too, but what was the point? He didn't really have the time to learn how to make wines anyway.

Maybe some other time.

He pulled out the next item which was a triple set of formation flags for a formation known as the Enriching Mists formation, meant for enriching alchemy gardens, which Alex intended to have back in his own Palace.

They were a set of masterfully designed formation flags that worked as if they were 3 different Saint Formations, when they were, in fact, a single one.

There was no way to test the flags, so he had to trust the auction house's words and put them aside.

He then brought out the Nine Clouds Wind Fan and gave it a flip. A subtle breeze moved through the room, carrying hints of understanding into the Wind Dao.

Alex did so again, stronger this time, and the Dao became a little more clear, albeit completely elusive to everyone in the room.

He looked at the fan with a bit of a smile and put it down on the bed as he would look at it in detail at some other time.

There were only two more items left for him to check now. One of them was obviously the Mountain Crushing artifact, which he was excited to check for sure.

But he was equally as excited to check the other artifact as well. So, he brought it out and let everyone see it.

The Mirror of Barren Truth

Chapter 1493 Mirror and Crusher

The Mirror of Barren Truth was surprisingly big. It was nearly a meter tall and half a meter wide. The mirror itself was smaller than that as a thick, golden frame made up a third of the entire thing.

At a glance, the mirror looked normal, but using his Demon Eyes, Alex could see the fine lines that were barely visible across the mirror itself.

Qi lines.

He held the mirror, not as heavy as he had expected, and felt the energy inside of it. There was barely any at all.

He was fascinated by the marvelous design and the talent that went into making such a thing. The auctioneer hadn't mentioned who had made this, and that was clear from looking at it too.

It was such an old item that barely anyone would've remembered who made it. It was even possible that this thing had lasted longer than many of the sects in the Eastern Continent.

Alex wondered if he could one day reach this level with his artifact-making skill as well. Not one where he copied what the others did, but made one for himself, with his own knowledge.

Like he made the various pills.

That was most likely going to take a lot of effort on his end. The effort he wasn't sure he wasn't to distribute onto artifacts.

He moved the mirror around on his hand and wondered if he should attack. Probably not. It didn't have any energy to reflect back his attack.

He stared at the mirror for a while longer, remembering that it too was decently expensive as well. Although, the one-time usage of it made it not so expensive.

He handed it over to Yao Ning, who stood there with a confused look on her face, not taking the mirror at all.

"Your Majesty, I have my own Reflection Dao," she said. "I don't need it."

"Oh, this isn't for you," Alex said. "I was simply hoping you would put some of your Qi in here. Make it strong for me."

"Oh, yes I will do that," Yao Ning said and quickly took the mirror. She looked at it carefully, and the others looked at it with her.

A defensive object that not only stopped an attack but also returned it to the enemy was quite the item after all.

As they were focused on the Mirror, Alex pulled out the final item in his storage bag.

The Mountain Crushing Artifact.

The Mountain Crushing Artifact was not its real name. Its real name had been lost to time, and would most likely remain lost for ages to come. Unless there was an immortal out there that recognized this item, this artifact would remain nameless.

He pulled out the artifact while the others were distracted and placed it on the ground with a heavy thud.

"Woah!" he couldn't help but say in surprise. The artifact was certainly very strong. As soon as the artifact was out, everyone stopped paying attention to the mirror and brought their focus to it.

They moved around it, touching the gold and silver outside, peering into the inside, and feeling the overall sturdiness of the artifact.

This was an immortal artifact and they were more than excited to view it.

They had seen Immortal artifacts before, of course. Alex's Blood God's Manual was it, and even his crown was one, albeit a very weak one. But, the elders weren't allowed to use any of it.

They could only look at him using it from afar. One, however, they were hopeful that they would get a chance to use it.

Alex had no intention of forming a bond with the artifact, so everyone could use it.

"Should we give it a go?" Liang Shufen asked excitedly. She somehow wanted to be the first to try, but at the same time was a bit too anxious to try it. After all, it did cost a bit too much.

"Who should start?" Alex asked.

"You should be the one, Your Majesty," the Elders said, but Alex didn't believe he should be the one. He would rather it not be him as he had other plans for himself.

Also, they would have to stop midway through, which he would not like. He looked at the Elders and thought if either of them would be good enough to go inside.

Yao Ning was old, so he didn't want to put her in. As for Liang Shufen, he felt that she should get some longer time with it.

Pearl didn't even need it, so he was out of the question. So in the end, his eyes fell on just one other being in the room.

Whisker.

Whisker looked at Alex for the briefest moment when he realized what was happening. He did not like it.

He immediately turned into a white light, trying to return to his beast space when Alex caught him halfway through.

As Whisker's master in the master-servant relationship they had, Alex could force Whisker to stay out if he wanted to. It would be impossible to do the same with Pearl as he could go in and out even when Alex forbade it.

As such, Whisker was stuck on Alex's hands with his large whiskers that quivered as he feared what was coming. Pain.

"Please don't put me in there, brother," Whisker said. "I don't want to get hurt."

"It is for you to get stronger. You're not being tortured," Alex told him.

"But it hurts," Whisker said.

"You will get used to it," Alex said.

"But why me? I don't have to fight," he said.

"It's so you don't die easily. We're also just testing," Alex said. "We won't use strong materials. Now, become as large as you can so that we can start."

Whisker wanted to continue grumbling, but he saw that he had no choice. In the end, he was forced to jump into the large artifact.

Alex had the elders collect enough rocks from the garden and other places before placing them in around Whisker.

Once everything was ready, Alex put a little over 1000 Saint Spirit stones and activated the artifact.

Chapter 1494 First Test

A soft hum could be heard as the artifact activated. The golden outlines outside the artifact glowed brightly as Whisker started freaking out a little.

"What's happening? I'm spinning," he shouted. The top of the artifact had shut completely with a lid that appeared from inside the artifact itself, so Alex had to use his spiritual sense to look inside.

Inside, Whisker was being moved around by forces that were not normal. Along with him, the garden rocks and pebbles were also moving around, spinning quickly.

"So that's how it works," Alex said as he saw the rocks hit Whisker while they moved. The rocks tumbled around the artifact and in doing so, they hit Whisker, tearing his body apart.

Or at least, that should have been the case, but Whisker was completely fine.

"Whisker! Hide your cultivation base," Alex said. "You need to be as mortal as you can for this."

Whisker freaked out even more and slowly did as he was told. When the aura around his body was gone, the rocks finally started causing damage. They hit him from all sides, bruising him, cutting him, causing him pain.

Alex nodded to himself and pulled out the book that the Mountain Crushing sect had left for whoever bought the artifact.

While Whisker went through body cultivation, he read through the book. There wasn't much for him to learn from the book that he could say was something he absolutely had to know.

They were mostly records of how long each person stayed inside and what sorts of results they had. It noted how long one had to stay in for the most efficient usage of the artifact.

As it ate a lot of Spirit stones, they had to know what was efficient and what was not. That was not really as important for Alex as he wouldn't be constantly switching the artifact around like they would in a sect.

There was other information in there to make whoever owned this artifact have an easier time. Alex only found 3 pieces of information that he was genuinely happy to learn beforehand.

First was a list of rocks and other hard materials that one could use at each body cultivation level. Normal garden rocks were apparently to be used for someone who had some physical strength and sturdiness.

If they were starting out for the first time, the manual advised that one should use wood instead, that too the normal kind.

"Oops," Alex said and checked on Whisker again. He didn't have to worry about him too. If he was in a lot of pain, Whisker could just use his cultivation base and he would be strong again.

The next point is that one should use small objects in the artifact. The smaller it was, the better it would work as the small objects would find better ways to reach places that a regular-sized rock or substance could not.

Alex decided to use very small pieces of items when he could.

The final piece of information said that the artifact worked even better when placed sideways instead of being made to stand up straight.

"Oh!" he was surprised to see that. He made the artifact fall sideways and laid it on its bulky end where it wobbled a bit as it spun everything on the inside.

The rest of the information was about precaution and how he couldn't use the item without anyone being nearby. Alex ignored them as they didn't apply for him. Even if he was terribly hurt, his body would heal itself.

Death was difficult from something like this unless he used some immortal materials, of which there were none in this world.

After finishing the book, he gave it to the elders to read. They would care more about the information than he did after all.

Then, all he could do was wait. He went back to the other items he had bought and tested them more thoroughly while he waited for Whisker to be done.

Whisker had stopped complaining a long time ago and was simply focusing on handling the pain. It felt a little bad letting him feel so much pain, but he had to. He wouldn't grow without it.

Besides, he had died multiple times already, so a little pain shouldn't be that problematic for him.

After 2 hours, Alex finally stopped the formation and waited for the objects inside to all come to a stop. Then, the top of the artifact opened on its own.

A weak Whisker crawled out of it, walking over the thousands of tiny pebbles, all of which were bloody. He was weak, extremely, and had lost a lot of blood.

He was so wounded that it was easier to point out which part of him was not. He crawled upto Alex, and Alex quickly grabbed him.

"You're fine," he said. "You did good."

He quickly checked the damage and was relieved that he wasn't too hurt. Then, he checked on the improvements to his body. That would have to be tested later on.

"We'll test you later," he said.

Whisker disappeared into his beast space. While Alex could feed him a healing pill, due to the Undying bloodline, Whisker could easily heal while he was inside his beast space by using up Alex's Qi.

"Now that we've tested how this artifact works, I think it's time I use it," Alex said. He looked toward the elders and said, "Unless either of you wants to use it too?"

"No, we are alright," Yao Ning said. "You use it first, your majesty,"

Alex nodded. "While I'm using it, find the items in that book to help facilitate your body cultivation later on."

"We will," the elders said.

"Then, please leave," Alex said. "I will start training now."

The elders nodded and left his room, leaving him with Pearl.

Pearl looked at the artifact and asked, "What will you use in it?"

Alex shrugged. "I thought of using the gold I got from the Golden Mountain at first," he said. "But I think there's a better choice here."

Chapter 1495 Pain

Alex got into the artifact after filling it with as many Spirit stones as he could. He had placed enough so that the artifact would run for over 2 days easily.

That was how long he wanted to cultivate.

Inside, he was surrounded by the pieces of rocks that he was using himself today. He could've used any sort of materials he wanted. It didn't just have to be rocks, but it could also be glasses, metals, wood, ceramics, anything.

As long as it was hard and somewhat sharp, it could work. However, no matter what materials it was that the book told him would be useful, Alex didn't believe it would be any more useful than what he had used already.

He had currently access to exactly 3 things. The first were normal rocks that Whisker had been using, there was no way he was going to use them, so they were out of the picture.

The second material was the nuggets of gold that he had mined from the Golden Mountain. While Gold was relatively strong, Alex didn't find it strong enough for his body.

Weak may he be, his body was still in the Saint Core realm. It was nearly realm below his normal cultivation base, sure, but it was still stronger than most people had.

So, Alex had to go for the final material he had.

Starforged Tungsten.

Starforged Tungsten was not just heavy, they were significantly difficult to manipulate normally as well because of their toughness. They were what Midnight, Memory, and the rest of his swords were made up of, so there was no doubt about its quality.

And what Alex was using today were nuggets of this very tungsten that he had yet to refine properly. These were somewhere between ore and raw metal due to the process he used to acquire them.

They were nearly fist-sized and were stacked up around him inside the artifact, ready to hurt him. Alex had smaller-sized pieces too, but this metal was so strong that he didn't want to take the chances at all.

He was going to start with just the large ones.

He took a deep breath and remembered how much he was spending on this artifact right now. Running the artifact with something this heavy for 2 days cost him over 10,000 Saint Spirit stones at once. That was enough to run him dry in just a few weeks if he used it continuously.

"I'll go poor if I have to spend this much each time," he thought to himself. If only he could use some other method of activation.

Curiously, he reached for the base of the artifact and touched it with his palm. He tried to feel the formation that was hidden underneath this and slowly added Qi into it.

His Yang Qi could activate normal formations, so he hoped this one would work as well. However, after just trying it once, he knew that wasn't going to work at all.

"Well, at least I tried," he thought. "I will have to wait until I have Immortal Qi too." He was going to have to wait until he was in the Saint Transformation realm before he tried it again.

"Screw it, let's just start," he thought and activated the artifact.

The top of the artifact closed up all of a sudden, making the inside dark. Alex tipped down the artifact as a whole horizontally and let the spin take him.

At first, the speed at which he spun wasn't that fast. However, as time went on, it started catching speed. A vortex seemed to form beneath his feet that dragged in all the metal nuggets from around Alex.

As it dragged it in, the pieces of the metal nuggets struck Alex. One after another they all started to hit him.

Alex was caught by the vortex as well and he spun along with it all. The nuggets and he spun around hitting each other. Alex felt the pain, but there wasn't as much damage as he had expected from it.

However, that was just the start it seemed. The vortex got even faster and the stones started hitting him even harder.

And then the pain began.

Alex felt the pain flare up all over his body as the intensity got stronger and stronger. It was reaching the point that was normally what he felt when he was with Pearl.

And the intensity was only getting harder. As he tumbled inside the massive artifact, he could feel the wetness of his skin and the smell of blood around him.

He could feel the pain that he hadn't in a very long time. It hurt so much, and it was only increasing.

Alex tumbled inside, getting dizzy from all the spinning. His body lost blood every second and every second his body regenerated, filling the blood back into his body.

Slowly, the blood from his body started wetting the outside so much that he could feel the droplets striking him.

Alex knew he needed to use them somehow, but all the pain and all the spinning caused him to be unable to do anything. He simply did nothing as he was pelleted continuously by the fist-sized rocks.

He suffered in silence for a long period of time. He knew how long he had set the artifact running for, but he couldn't tell what time it was at the moment. How long had he been feeling this pain?

He was reminded of the first time he went through body cultivation. The pain he felt then, the torture that caused him to feel scared of body cultivation altogether. That was the sort of pain he was feeling once more.

Only this time, he knew he had to take it all.

He opened his eyes sometime later as the artifact slowly stopped. The vortex slowed down and he could finally rest a little.

As he did, he saw a symbol on the inside of the lid slowly dim down to the point where he couldn't tell what it was.

Then, it all finally stopped.

Chapter 1496 Shadow Fan

Alex crawled out of the artifact, his body fully healed, but his mind still remembered the pain. He tried to stand up, but his legs shivered. Half of it was out of fear, and the other half out of the coldness that he felt in his dantian.

While his body used up his Qi to heal him and restore the blood he lost, the Yin in his body had made things worse than normal. In this empty dantian, the Yin was all he felt.

He quickly got into a meditating pose and started using the Five Yang Divine Path technique to draw in the strong Yang Qi from the surroundings. His body slowly calmed down afterwards and the Qi helped push away the coldness as well.

He looked back inside the artifact and saw that half of it was filled with his own blood. The pool of blood had submerged most of the metal ingots.

With a flick of his wrist, the blood flew out of the artifact, leaving only the metal inside. As it was all his own blood, it had a pretty strong blood aura.

Alex looked at it for a few seconds and wondered if there was a chance that he could absorb his own aura and get himself strong. He didn't even hesitate to try.

However, it ended up being impossible. "Thought so. Otherwise, it would've been too easy."

He took all the blood and placed it into the Bottomless Flask. The artifact was made to improve any liquid that he stored in there, but it was doubtful it could do the same with blood.

However, that wasn't really why Alex kept it there. He simply gathered the blood for the next time he was to use it to make Blood Beasts.

He put away the flask and the Mountain Crushing artifact and dressed up. Once dressed, he checked his own strength to see how strong he had become. Unfortunately, it was hard to test something like that on his own.

He would have to find something to test his strength on, that could also tell him how strong he was. "I should buy some strength testing artifact sometime later," he thought to himself. That was the only solution.

For now, even without any testing apparatus, he could feel that he had grown stronger... albeit by a little bit.

"I'll have to use a lot more spirit stones until I find another method to use this thing. Dammit, why doesn't my Qi work?" he wondered.

As he thought along the lines, another idea came to him. "Hmm... that might be possible," he thought. "But I'll have to test it later."

He did not want to go through the same thing just yet. "How long was I even in there?" he wondered and pulled out something.

The VoidSand Hourglass.

He looked at the time that the hourglass told him in accordance with the continuous flow of the Voids and inside of it and realized that over 2 days had passed.

"It didn't feel that long."

Alex went to find the elders. From them, he found out that the two kings had already left for their kingdom.

Even Lady Zhan had already left. She left before anyone as she carried not just her own items, but the items that the Crown Prince had bid on. She had to go provide it to him as soon as possible.

So, the only one that Alex could meet was the Gold King, who too was busy as he had to deal with problems that always came up after the month-long Golden auction.

There were fights that broke out, customers that couldn't pay what they bid, auction houses that didn't deliver the item that they promised, etc. He would have to deal with anything that got a little too big for his officers to handle.

"Use this for now," Alex said, giving the two elders the Mountain Crushing artifact. "Follow the book and don't let it run for too long. If you lose a lot of blood, eat these pills."

He tossed the elders a pill bottle.

"Where will you be going?" Liang Shufen asked.

"To meet with the girls."

Alex went to meet with Jai Heiyun and Hao Ya in a hotel room where they were staying.

"Your Majesty," Jai Heiyun got up and bowed, while Hao Ya remained mostly indifferent to Alex's arrival.

"What took you so long?" she asked.

"I used an artifact to train my body for the last 2 days," Alex said. "How have you guys been? Did you like the auction?"

"It was amazing, Your Majesty," Jai Heiyun said excitedly. "So many different items for sale. So many things that I didn't even know existed."

"Yeah? You should have seen the ones that were being sold on mine," he said. "Look at these?"

He showed off a few of the things he had bought, letting the two girls handle them. He didn't have the Mirror and the Mountain Crushing artifact on him, but everything else he did.

The girls were mostly fascinated by the Nine Clouds Wind Fan due to its ability to teach them Wind Dao. They gave little interest in the gauntlet and didn't even bother to look at the flask.

Jai Heiyun was interested in artifacts and talismans, so she showed interest in the Frostfire Inkbrush, but she didn't show more enthusiasm than that.

"What did you guys get?" Alex asked.

The girls showed off their own items that they had bought, and Alex's eyes fell on a Black Fan that sent off wisps of black smoke as it moved.

"Is this the fan that you guys asked me money to buy?" Alex asked.

"Yes, that's it," Hao Ya said. "Ended up costing us 77,000 Saint Spirit stones. So expensive. I'll find a way to pay it back, don't worry."

"No, no," Alex said. "Don't worry about the money. Consider it a gift from me for my daughter's senior sister. Whose is it anyway?"

"For now, we decided that I would keep it, but any one of us could use it if need be," Hao Ya said.

Alex took the fan, leaving behind a trail of black smoke and suddenly opened it. The opened fan let off more smoke, and Alex could see a hint of a demonic face painting onto the black body of the fan.

"Shadow," Alex said, sending the aura that the fan gave off. "... and Space?"

"Here, let me show you," Hao Ya said and took the fan from Alex's hands before quickly moving over to a corner of the room. She flicked open the fan and swung it toward Alex, sending out a long trail of black smoke at him.

Alex prepared himself, but the black smoke simply moved past him without doing anything to him.

However, a moment later, he felt space warp a little. The next moment, Hao Ya was standing behind him.

"It's a teleportation fan, that uses shadow aura," she said. "It's called the Silent Shadow Fan."

Alex turned around and looked behind her. "And it cost you 77 thousand Saint spirit stones?" he asked.

"Yes," Hao Ya said.

"This... this is just the Flickering Shadows technique, but slower," Alex asked.

"I can't use your Flickering Shadows technique," Hao Ya said. "I don't have Yin spiritual root."

"Oh, right," Alex said. "You have it, right?" He turned to ask Jai Heiyun.

"I do," Jai Heiyun said. "But I haven't been able to learn that technique yet. Haven't really given it much time." She gave a slightly awkward smile.

"That's alright," Alex said. "You find alchemy-related techniques to be of more importance, I understand that. But since you can use the technique, let Sister Hao take the fan."

Jai Heiyun nodded. "I've been of the same mind as well." She turned around to Hao Ya. "You really should take it."

"Are you sure? It's... It's so expensive though," Hao Ya said.

"You don't understand how rich I can be, sister Hao," Jai Heiyun said. "I can make pills for just a few days and I will have enough money to buy that fan all over again."

"Are you sure?" Hao Ya asked.

"She will have to make quite a few pills, but I'm sure she can do it," Alex said. "Take it."

Hao Ya hesitated no longer and kept the fan for herself.

Alex conversed with the girls for a while longer. He hadn't met up with the alchemists for the past half a year with how much time he had been spending by himself.

There was nothing new for him to learn, except for the fact that the young man named Wu Shun whom he had taught a few months ago had started showing some rapid improvements.

Alex was very glad to hear that.

"By the way, do you have any news on the Ivory Kingdom?" Hao Ya asked. "I heard something happened there, but everyone is so tight-lipped."

"There's a barrier around the place," Alex said. "Some Immortals came down, set it up, and... I think they left."

"Immortals?" Both of the girls got curious.

"Yes," Alex said. "Could even be more than just Immortals. I thought they were here for your Master, but they left without him, so I don't know."

"The barrier is said to stay there for a year or so, so I think we will know what really happened afterward," Alex said.

"Is that so..." Hao Ya said. "I can't contact my master, so I had no way of telling what was happening. I wonder if he is safe."

"I don't think you have to worry about him," Alex said. "They would have to do more than just that to get to him, considering how dangerous the path to the inside of the Central Continent is."

Chapter 1497 Artifact Creation and Testing

Alex returned an hour or two later, not before getting a few materials for an artifact, and found Liang Shufen keeping watch of the artifact as the old Yao Ning used the Mountain Crushing artifact.

"What did you guys use?" Alex asked her.

"We decided to go with normal rocks, like we did with Whisker," Liang Shufen said. "We do not yet know just how strong our bodies are, so we found it better to go with the safe choice."

"Good idea," Alex said. "You guys continue this. I will do something in my own room."

"What are you doing?" Liang Shufen asked.

"Making a simple artifact that I should have made a long time ago," Alex said, leaving the elder behind.

Alex brought out the materials he had bought, which consisted of some leather, some metals, and various other little things.

He started working on it immediately, while Pearl and Whisker were outside with him, looking at his work curiously.

"What are you making?" Pearl couldn't help but ask, seeing him work on the stuff.

"I don't want to tell you right now," Alex said, cutting the leader into thin strips with a sharp blade. "You'll find out if it works in the end."

Pearl shrugged and went to the side to sit and watch.

Whisker sat near Pearl too without asking anything as he watched what Alex was making too. They were both very curious as to what exactly he was doing, but none of it really made sense to them.

To be fair, even Alex didn't find it very easy to understand what he was doing too. He had never made an artifact of this type before, so all he was doing was hoping that he wasn't doing anything wrong.

He had a vision in mind, and he hoped that it was what he was making.

The leather was there just for the sake of holding the actual artifact in place while being a part of it, so Alex put in some Qi lines to make it durable.

Then, he went on to work on the metal.

The metal was going to be more formation than anything, so he brought out his Frostfire Inkbrush. This was the first time he was going to be using it, so he was a little excited.

With a bit of Qi, the bristles on the brush pulled back into the shaft, leaving behind a pen-like nib that was there for him to carve onto a metal. It was a formation carving pen after all.

Alex placed the tip on the metal and drew a circle on it. The smoothness with which the pen moved along the metal surprised him. It was as if he was carving on butter with a hot knife.

He didn't let the surprise throw him off and focused on what he was carving. Once he finished making the circle, he took a break to think of exactly what nodes he was going to draw.

After making sure he knew everything, he continued. 5 minutes later, he had a nearly perfect formation ready for him to use. Alex was satisfied with the formation plate and moved on to the rest of the artifact.

A place to store the spirit stones, a latch at the end of the leather straps, combine it all together with the formation plate... and he was done.

It took him until evening time to finish this, but he did. And he was happy with the result. "Let's test it," Alex said and wore the artifact.

The artifact looked like an octopus with a metal head where the formation plate remained and 8 leather arms that came out of it. Alex put the main body in front of him and latched on the 8 arms of the artifact behind him so that the metal plate remained tightly on his chest.

He checked any looseness on the straps, and after seeing that everything was alright, he was ready to begin.

"Come, let's test it," Alex said.

"Test what?" Pearl asked. "What is that?"

"It's an artifact to test the strength of your attacks," Alex said. "I didn't have any, so I made it."

"You made a formation plate, didn't you?" Whisker asked. "Why make an entire artifact out of it? Why not just use the formation plate?"

"Well... because it's not that easy to use when it's just a formation," Alex said. "That's why this formation is put on walls or wooden posts or puppets."

Alex just had to activate the formation once and the Qi lines would continuously keep it active, but at a very low rate of energy consumption until someone used it again.

"Whisker, are you healed?" Alex asked.

Whisker nodded. "All healed," he said. "Do you need me to test?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I need to tune this thing, and unfortunately, neither Pearl nor I have a normal cultivation base and instead need your help."

"Ah, okay," Whisker said and got down from where he was. "So... what do I do?"

"Just attack me," Alex said. "Your Saint Condensation 2nd realm should be enough."

Whisker nodded and did as told. He used a technique to send out a fiery attack that slammed into Alex.

Alex used moderate strength to balance himself so that he wasn't completely protecting the artifact. The formation took the hit while in calibration mode and Alex quickly put in what strength the current attack was.

After a few more tries, Alex was able to calibrate the whole thing. "Finally, it's done," he said. "Pearl, can you hit me? Just with your physical strength."

Pearl nodded and jammed his paw onto Alex. Alex was pushed back a little, but he managed to stop himself after just that. The formation on his chest lit up and showed a few words.

Saint Foundation 3rd Realm

"Haha, it works," Alex said. "Now attack me with all your strength."

Pearl blitzed the moment he heard that. His entire body glowed golden as he slammed his entire body onto Alex.

Alex barely managed to put up a defense at the last moment when he realized that without his defense up, he might actually be thrown off.

When Pearl slammed into him, Alex found that defending had been the right choice after all. While he wouldn't have been hurt from the attack, he would've still caused damage to the room.

Alex held off Pearl's attack and saw the glowing name written in front of the artifact.

Saint Core 1st realm

"Ooh, not bad," Alex said excitedly. "You're not exactly crossing the entire realm, but you're nearly there. I wonder if you have to train more or if this is it."

"This might be it," Pearl said. "I don't think I can go any stronger than this."

"7 realms... compared to my 9," Alex thought for a bit. "Honestly, that's still quite strong. Even Ronron can only do 4, although I hear she has yet to make full use of her body constitution."

Pearl nodded. "Anyway, is that how you are going to use that?" he asked, gesturing to the artifact on Alex's chest. "How are you going to test yourself."

"Using this guy," Alex said and brought out something. "I can test it by putting the thing on him."

Pearl and Whisker realized what he had planned from the start.

"I see," Pearl said. "No wonder you made those straps."

Next to Alex was his Immortal puppet.

Chapter 1498 Leaving

With the Immortal Puppet strapped up with the artifact, Alex tested out his strength. To his surprise, his physical strength had improved just after two days of body cultivation.

His body cultivation had improved by a realm, reaching Saint Core 2nd realm. He hadn't expected it to increase by such a large amount in just 2 days, but it had. That only went on to show just how good of an artifact the Mountain Crushing artifact was.

The next few days went by in a blur as Alex did nothing but train or cultivate all the time. It wasn't just him either. Pearl, Whisker, and the two Elders also cultivated all the time.

Pearl was the only one who didn't cultivate using the artifact.

In a few days, the Elder's body cultivation increased by a not-so-significant portion. They still hadn't gone through Mortal Cleansing, so it wasn't as effective as it was for Whisker.

Whisker had stopped whining after the first two times and now went in without question.

During this period, Jai Heiyun and Hao Ya returned back to the capital. He was going to see them again, however, in just a short few months.

With the Realm of Trials opening up in a few months, almost all of his alchemists were going to go there. Alex was planning to go to it when it opened.

For now, he was undecided about what it was that he wanted to do with the remaining few months. Before arriving in the Gold Kingdom, he had planned to visit the Ice Mist Palace. However, with the situation the Ivory kingdom was in, he couldn't go there right now.

After talking with his elders and even asking the Gold King for his suggestions, he ended up with two possible choices he could go with.

He could go back to the Azure Kingdom and continue trying to learn new Daos. Or, he could go roam the Gold Kingdom, and visit the various towns and cities for the next 5 or 6 months that it was going to take for the Realm of Trials to open up.

Learning new Daos was a good choice and all, but Alex prioritized visiting the different cities and towns. He had more to do than just learn new daos after all.

His cultivation had slowed down a little after going through Qi Deviation and it would take him a few more months to reach the peak of the Saint Core 9th realm.

And then… then he wasn't sure if he could break through or not. He had tried his best to prepare this time around, but that didn't mean much in the world of cultivation.

So, he chose to slow down his cultivation this time around. As long as he had ample time to prepare, he believed he could do it. He needed that amount of time to believe the things that he didn't want to believe in.

He needed to come to terms with the fact that he would most likely never know the true culprit behind Pearl's mother's murder, and the fact that his sister was most likely dead.

He had no other choice.

"Another tour it is then," Alex said. "Will be fun. Same as the Emerald Kingdom. I can continue practicing my painting skills in the other places as well."

3 days later, they were ready to leave.

"Please visit when you can, Your Majesty," the Gold King said. "I will hopefully be here at that time."

"Good luck on your thing too," Alex said. "I'm sure the Emperor will leave his closed cultivation at any moment now."

The Gold King nodded.

Now that the Golden Auction was over, he couldn't wait for the day when he would relinquish his title as the King of the Gold Kingdom.

Alex and the group left through the eastern gate of the city. Aside from his people, there was General Fan of the Tail legion and a few soldiers of his.

They took flight on a ship and made their way to the next city which was a few hours of air travel away.

The next city was called the Gildedreach. It was another city that grew big thanks to the Golden Mountain range being right next to it.

Just like Goldheart City, it too had cities that were full of gold in every location. However, this city was more so for actually mining gold than anything.

Unlike Goldheart City where gold mining was made to pass the time, this one was where people labored for it. As such, it wasn't a place most people would want to visit.

Alex and the rest wanted to just to see how they fared.

They were excited to visit the cities past that point too, ones where the Golden Mountain range didn't reach and were instead unique cities on their own having nothing to do with the gold.

Alex wanted that. He was a little fed up with the gold already.

As they flew, Yao Ning quickly looked to the side of the ship in a direction. "Something is wrong," she said.

Alex looked at her as well. "What do you mean?" he asked.

They were only halfway to the next city, and everything in between was either a desolate cold land or small towns and settlements near an active volcano.

"I think I sensed something from that side," Yao Ning said. "Maybe a beast? It showed its aura for a second before disappearing."

Alex's eyes changed, turning a deeper shade of purple. He looked in the direction Yao Ning mentioned and saw a multitude of colors that did not match the surroundings at all.

"There is something there," he said, looking at the aura. He could not sense the aura in the least, but the colors proved its existence. The colors remained unmoving and mostly hidden.

"I think there's a formation there," Alex said. "Someone must be hiding."

"An ambush?" Liang Shufen asked from the side.

"I don't know," Alex said. "They aren't moving at all. Maybe someone is cultivating there. That's most likely—"

Something slammed onto the ship from the side, sending them all hurdling to one part of the ship. At the same time, three individuals arrived on the ship and set up a formation that immediately captured Alex and only him.

Alex felt his cultivation base suppressed in an instant, becoming much weaker than it was.

The three men were inside with him as well, but they didn't seem affected at all. Alex looked at them and sensed that their cultivation base was in the mid-Saint Transformation realm.

The only one that could fight them here was Yao Ning and she was outside, striking at the barrier that had captured Alex.

One man moved forward with a blinding speed as soon as they were in and attacked Alex.

Alex tried to teleport away, but the space around him was constrained a little as well. He was too slow at teleporting away and the man got to him.

He instantly cut off Alex's right arm and grabbed it. "Got it," he shouted.

Alex looked in horror and confusion as his arm was tossed back to one of the people behind the man. He didn't understand what was happening until he saw the man take his ring from the cut-off arm.

'My ring!' he realized.

Alex forced his Intent and pushed away the constricting space around him. Then, he teleported right next to the man and reached for his ring. He used Heaven's Impact at the same time.

However, an artifact on the man's neck gave a slight ringing sound as it blocked the spiritual attack.

Before Alex could grab his ring, the man grabbed his hand. Alex could feel the strength in the man's fist and realized just how strong he was.

The man looked at Alex and his arm. A look of surprise spread through his face when he saw that he was grabbing the exact same arm that he had just dropped.

In mere seconds after being cut off, Alex's arm had grown back. That was the most fascinating thing that the man had ever seen.

"Interesting," the man couldn't help but say. "Is this a use of one of your pills too, Your Majesty?"

The two other men arrived by Alex's side as well. "We need to hurry. That woman will most likely break the formation soon," one of the men said.

"Don't worry," the man who had grabbed onto Alex said. "I used my Immortal Qi to activate the formation. It will take more than just a couple of hits from her to break through this. Unless she is willing to use Immortal Qi and risk her young king's life, she will stick to regular attacks."

It didn't take Alex long to realize that the situation was dire. Were they here to kill him? Or were they here for something else?

They were also way beyond his own strength, so he couldn't even fight back right now. The only thing that could possibly fight them was the Immortal Puppet, and that was inside the ring that they had just stolen.

"Don't worry about your ring, Your Majesty," the leader said. "You won't be far away from it. You are coming with us."

The man pulled out something from his own storage bag. The other two men brought it out as well.

Talismans.

Without hesitation, they crushed the talisman, and immediately space warped around them.

Alex felt the aura of Teleportation cover him. He tried to fight back, but if he did so, his ring would get taken away.

He couldn't allow that. As unfortunate as it was, he had to let it take him away.

A second later, the 3 men and Alex were teleported away.

Chapter 1499 Not Bandits

About 1300 Kilometers, northeast.

Alex knew exactly how far they had traveled and in what direction before he even arrived at the new destination. When he arrived, he looked around and saw that he was standing on top of a Teleportation formation.

'A receiving formation that can accept a teleportation through talisman,' Alex thought. That was some incredibly complex stuff that would take him years to learn how to make.

It was difficult to coordinate two completely different systems into working together. Whoever made this was extremely talented for sure.

They had arrived in a dark cave with cold floors and ceilings. The walls glowed with scripts and formations, that were of such number that it would take Alex some time to tell what their purpose was.

"I suggest you don't try to fight, Your Majesty," the leader said. "You'll find us not very receptive to bad manners."

Alex turned to look at the man and saw him smiling back at him.

He was a tall, muscular man with a squarish face and a roughly shaved patch of beard. His hair was unkempt for the most part, but it was short.

He wore a black dress with no feature about his dress at all. The other two men who followed him wore similar clothes as well.

One of them was a shorter man with a thin face and gray hair in a ponytail. The other man was just as tall as the leader, but very thin and with a long beard and mustache.

Alex looked at the leader's hand and the ring he held there. "You're too strong to be simply bandits, and you know who I am. I assume you were planning to kidnap me from the start?"

"That was the intention, yes," the man said. "We were after you, or at the very least your pills."

Alex said nothing. There was some confusion he had about the man that just didn't stick right with him.

First of all, they knew their flight path. The only person who would have known their flight path was either the Gold King or the Imperial Army. New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex doubted the Gold King would have anything to do with this, so it could be that this was the Imperial army that had done this. But then… There was little need for them to set up such an elaborate ruse.

Alex was already on the ship. Many of the army members were there as well. Couldn't they have just attacked him?

'Are they trying to not make the rest of the army look bad?' Alex wondered. 'Or maybe they are a secret group of the army that was sent here to steal his recipes.'

"How did you know where I was headed?" Alex asked.

"We had people follow you around," the man said simply. "We had people waiting on all sides. As long as you didn't teleport away, we would have caught you."

The man answered Alex's question rather freely. He seemed so nonchalant about it that Alex found it hard to believe that he was telling the truth. For all he knew, he could have been lied to.

'Are they from the army or just a random bunch of strong people who are trying to take advantage of me?' Alex felt either possibility had a high chance of being true.

The man started walking and one of the other men pointed a sword behind Alex's back, pushing him forward. Alex stepped down from the formation platform and followed him.

"I'm going to guess that you will not give me your name, will you?" Alex asked. "So, I might as well ask what pill you are hoping to find."

"My name? I do not mind giving it, but my colleagues fear repercussions of our name leaking, so I won't be telling you it for now," the man said. "As for the pills, we are interested in any that can help us."

The man turned around. "Can you tell us what pills you have?" he asked.

Alex stared at the man for a second and said, "Why do I have a feeling that you already know some of the pills I have?"

"Haha, no, no," the man laughed a little. "We saw the list of what was being sold on the auction and knew that the pills sold at the end were yours. "We were just hoping to get you to make some for us."

Alex continued walking with them. "Do you want me to make pills that aid you spiritually and protect you from poison?" he asked.

"And helps us learn new dao, improves our spiritual roots, maybe even makes us a pill that can help us reach straight for immortality," the man said with a grin. "No? That's alright. We'll settle with what we can get."

"You were at the auction then," Alex said.

"No, we just had the list of what was being sold," the man said. "Seeing the list of pills and everything, we knew we had to get you. We needed you to help us."

They arrived in front of a massive door.

"And why do you think I will be making pills for the three of you?" Alex asked.

The sword in his back poked him a little harder before stopping. The leader didn't turn around, and Alex could only hear the slightest hint of laughter in his breath.

"The three of us, you say?" the man asked and pushed open the door. "You will be making pills for all of us."

Behind the door was a large balcony, looking down into a massive hall down below. Alex walked up to the balcony and looked at the hall.

Tall pillars carved from the mountain itself rose to the top of the hall. White marble filled the floor to the edges of the hall. The hall barely had any furniture and had no decorations either.

However, it did not look barren at all. What it lacked in furniture and decorations, it made in the people that gathered there.

Dozens of people sat around the hall or walked past each other, each minding their own business. Alex felt their cultivation bases and a look of shock appeared on his face.

Every single person down there was a Saint and not just any saint. They all had a cultivation base of Saint Core or higher. This sort of strength was not something Alex had ever seen in such concentration.

This felt like a meeting of high-level cultivators, and not a normal one at that.

The men and women in the hall looked up dozens of meters high to see the four of them arrive. A few of them murmured when they saw the group and some even pointed at them.

Alex looked down with an array of confusing thoughts going around in his mind.

"You really aren't a group of random bandits," he said softly. "Just… just who are you people?"

"To say who we are would be to betray our purpose of existence," the man said. "We are a force that this empire needs right now, a change that it deserves."

"We are the ones who will free it from the shackles that have been put onto it, and we will do anything to make that happen."

Chapter 1500 Change

The words the leader had said struck a tone that he did not expect from his kidnappers. It sounded proud, and weirdly patriotic. As if he truly meant what he said.

They were here to free the empire from the shackles that it had at the moment. But then… what were those shackles?

"Let's get you to a place where you can get settled," the man said and slowly flew down.

Alex sighed inwardly and flew down, with the other 2 following behind him. He could sense all of their spiritual senses on him and knew that he had no way to run away at the moment.

Not that he wanted to. With the man holding his ring, he couldn't leave right now.

There were too many things of value in that ring that he could not just leave it be. Aside from the various pills, artifacts, and spirit stones, the ring held Midnight and Memory, two things he couldn't let be.

It also held the black sword with the Azure Imperium's insignia. If that thing got out, it would be terrible for him. If these people were somehow part of the military that the Emperor had sent out to steal his recipes, then that sword would most likely doom him.

For now, he had to remain behind so that he could get the ring.

As Alex and the rest landed, the man spoke up. "Greet the king folks. We got him," he said to the dozens of people on the floor who had stopped to look at them.

"Great work, brother."

"Are you guys hurt?"

"Someone check the formations. See that they work properly."

"We should send out scouts to see if anyone comes."

Various people spoke at once, all of whom sounded same-minded. They were all working in tandem with each other, for the same goal.

Alex felt the stare of the people surrounding him and looked back at them. This close, he could tell all of their cultivation bases much more clearly.

Each one of them was strong enough that they could easily defeat Pearl as he was right now. He could take on about three-fourths of them if he fought them individually, but there were more than enough fighters that could beat him single-handedly.

He counted the number of people he had to worry about, but then he remembered that others were waiting for him on other sides of the city and knew that there was more to this group than just these people.

'How big is their operation?' Alex wondered.

"This way, Your Majesty," the man said taking Alex in a direction to the side.

Alex followed the man, going away from the group of people. He looked around in the direction of the window to the side. Unfortunately, he couldn't see anything beyond a white haze.

The outside was covered in a barrier as well, which blocked all sight and aura. They were using it to hide their location.

The man brought out a talisman and handed it to Alex. Alex looked at the empty talisman and frowned. "What do you want me to do with this?" he asked.

"Write what you need here, and we will try to get it to you," the man said.

Alex stared at the man for a second and quickly wrote something before handing it over to him.

The man took the talisman and read it before chuckling a little. "I'm not giving you your ring back. Please write seriously. Cauldrons, ingredients, whatever you need."

"Are you expecting me to make pills?" Alex asked. "You should know better than to expect such things from a hostage of yours."

"I wasn't expecting you to," the man said. "I was simply hoping you would. Alas, if you don't then it doesn't hurt us. I just have to spend a few weeks or months and I will have all the pills you have in your ring."

"I expect you to have a lot of it," he said.

Alex said nothing. He was more surprised that this man knew about storage rings. That wasn't such an easy information to come around.

"What about after you get through my ring?" Alex asked. "What if you don't find anything?"

"We'll think about that when we get there," the man said. "But I don't think we'll have to." He gave Alex a knowing grin.

"And what if you do find something you want? Then what? What will you do with me when you no longer need me?" Alex asked.

"That we will think about when we get there as well. As long as you cooperate, you won't have anything to worry about," the man said. "As you said, we aren't bandits. We aren't in it to kill people."

"Well, I would hope you guys are prepared for when the Phoenix comes looking for me," he said. "You should know that she cares a lot about me."

"Oh, I'm sure that we don't have to worry about that," the man said and completely turned around to face Alex. "After all, she can't come to the Eastern Continent, can she?"

Alex hid every single emotion from showing up on his face, but it was hard to hide the shock he felt when he realized that the man knew about the oath. The man knew that the other Heavenly Beasts couldn't come to this continent. New n0vel chapters are published on

This man knew about the death of the Azure Dragon.

"Who are you people?" he couldn't help but ask.

"We do not have a name as of yet," the man said. "I'll make sure to let you know if we ever do end up with any."

Alex could only stare at the man, hoping he would say something more. But the man simply turned around and walked into the hallway.

Alex followed him with a million thoughts going around in his mind. A strong man such as him kidnapping him was already a confusing turn of events, and now Alex realized that he knew about the Azure Dragon's death as well as the Heavenly Pact.

This was no simple situation at all.

"Here you go," the man said, opening a room for Alex to get in. "This is a room that our alchemists use infrequently. You can use it as well."

Alex was made to walk in and look around.

There wasn't much in the room aside from a simple bed and some alchemy formations. He sighed a little and went to go sit on the bed.

While not as good as the ones he had been in recently, it wasn't bad at all. It was not a bed made for prisoners.

The room itself wasn't made for prisoners. These people had just made one of him for his pills.

"What now?" Alex asked.

"Well? Now you stay here. We'll get you a cauldron and whatnot to help you spend your time. It would be better if you could make pills for us, but I have a feeling you will refuse, so I will just take what I can from your ring for now."

"Why do you need the pills so much?" Alex asked.

"I told you, it's for a change—"

"Yes," Alex said. "What change? What will you do once you gain the strength you want?"

The man gave a nasty grin.

"Once we are strong, we are going to kill the Dragon Emperor."

Chapter 1501 Oathbreaker

"Kill the Dragon Emperor?"

Alex felt his heart skip a beat when he heard those words. He stared at the man in shock, trying to discern if any of it was a joke. However, his serious face made it plenty clear that it was not.

The man intended to kill the Dragon Emperor and he would go to any length to do it.

Even if it meant killing the ruler of another continent.

"You have quite the grand ambition," Alex said. "But… I'm not sure you will be able to do it the way you are right now. You will need much higher—"

Alex paused. He was about to say that they would need a much greater cultivation base than just this, but then he remembered that was the entire reason he was captured in the first place.

If not for that, he wouldn't have been here.

"Don't worry about our situation, Your Majesty," the man said. "You will just have to stay here until we have received the grand pills we are looking for." New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex frowned a little. "Do you plan on letting me leave if you receive those pills?" he asked.

"Of course," the man said, his smile returning back to a gentle one. "We have no qualms with you. I doubt you will be here by the time we are ready to do what we wish to do."

"So you're just going to let me go?" Alex asked. "Even though you told me what you have planned?"

"Nothing a simple oath can't fix," the man said. "Relax, Your Majesty. As long as you don't do anything stupid, you will leave here with all your limbs intact. Now, you should rest and give our requests some thought. As soon as you make us some pills, we will let you go."

The man turned around to leave, but Alex wasn't done yet. "Wait," he said. "One last question."

The man looked back curiously. "What is it?" he asked.

Alex looked at the man, then to his two companions to the side, and finally back at the man. "How do you know about the Azure Dragon's death?" he asked.

The eyes of the two at the back changed, and while the leader tried to keep a calm expression, his face changed ever so slightly as well.

"So, I was correct," the man said.

Alex was taken aback. "You… didn't know?" he asked, panicking that he had just revealed something he shouldn't have. But then, the man knew that Scarlet couldn't come here. So… what was going on?

"Oh, I knew," the man said. "I just wasn't sure if you were aware or not. I believed you did, and I was correct."

Alex frowned a little. "So? How do you know about his death?" he asked.

The man gave an angered look as he spoke. "I was there when he died."

For the briefest of moments, Alex believed he heard wrong. "What did you say?" he asked again to confirm.

"I said I was there when the Azure Dragon died," the man said loudly, and Alex knew he heard it correctly this time around.

Alex felt his breathing grow faster when he realized what he was hearing. Had he finally found someone that could help him get answers?

"Do you… know how he died?" Alex asked, unable to hide the curiosity and urgency in his voice. "I want to know. I will make any pill you want if you can answer me that."

The man was surprised to hear such straightforwardness from Alex. He was taken aback by the desperation. This was the most ample moment to get what he wanted. Alas…

"I can't," the man said. "I am unable to tell you how it happened," the man said.

"Unable?" Alex asked for a moment before realizing what could be the case. "An Oath?"

"I can only tell you that I even know about His Majesty's death because you already know it. It bypasses the restrictions of our oaths through an unseen loophole. However, even then I cannot tell you anything else about the matter involved in this," the man said.

"Not even a little?" Alex asked. "Not even—"

His words stuck to his throat when a strong spiritual sense crashed over him. It crashed over all of them.

Alex barely managed to protect himself by strengthening his spiritual sea, but even then, the strength of the spiritual sense was so much that it made him feel as if his soul was being torn apart.

The two men behind the leader grimaced, while the leader himself frowned quite a lot as well.

Then, the very next second the pressure on Alex lessened. It lessened for him and him only.

"This is bad," the man said. "We've been found."

Just as the man finished speaking, the world lost its color.

Alex felt the air still around him for the briefest of seconds as something cut through it all. He could feel the Dao he was familiar with—the Dao of cutting—tear through everything in the surroundings.

Then at the next moment, the top of half of the mountain was obliterated away, giving way for the open sky to shine its light down onto the ground.

Alex felt terror like never before. The strength he just saw, the intent he felt, and the fear in his heart were something he had never experienced before.

Even around Immortals and Divinities, this was something he had never felt before as they never used their techniques around him. Even dying 100 times hadn't evoked the same reaction from him as it just had.

He felt the aura of multiple individuals go out in that single strike. People cried in pain, some ran away with tattered bodies, and some ran away just a nascent souls.

Alex could feel the aura of teleportation pop up around him as they all ran away as fast as they could. Only a handful of them remained, and those too were the strongest of the strongest in the group.

Alex and every other man and woman in the group turned to the sky to look at the sole figure that stood there.

The person was a tall man with flowing blue hair, a slight goatee, and a majestic blue robe that matched his hair. He held a similarly blue spear that looked incredible even from afar.

"Shit," the leader of the group said under his breath. "I didn't think we would have to fight him this early."

The Dragon Emperor was here, and he was here to rescue Alex.

"Yating," the man spoke from the sky, his voice monotone without a shred of surprise or disdain. "To think you and your band of traitors would be here. What do you intend to do with the King of the Southern Continent."

The leader pulled out his sword and pointed at the Dragon Emperor in the sky. "We meet earlier than I would have liked to, but that is alright," the man said. "I can judge the distance between us right now and see how far I have to improve."

The man swung his sword, sending a large flaming lion that ran all the way to the sky where the Dragon Emperor stood still.

The Dragon Emperor simply swung his spear a little and the flaming lion disappeared altogether. Not a wisp of fire remained in the snowing sky.

"So, you truly have gone against me," the Dragon Emperor said. "To think you were once a man I trusted the most. How has time changed you so much that you would go against your own oath to forever serve me?"

"You know damn well why," the man shouted, pointing his sword at the Emperor once again. "You are the one responsible for me becoming this."

"What you have become is an oathbreaker," the Emperor said. "I had no hand in that."

"Oathbreaker?" the man chuckled a little with no laughter in his voice. "That's a nice little thing to call us, isn't it? Thank you for the name, Your Majesty. We were just looking for one."

"You hear it, fellow Daoists? Henceforth, we shall be known as the Oathbreakers."

Everyone in the area suddenly gave a hearty laugh as they brought out every treasure they had in their storage. With the Emperor here, they had only two choices.

Fight or Run.

They chose to fight.

"Come on, my friends," the man named Yating said. "Let us show him that oaths are not the only thing we can break."

"YAAAAH!" everyone shouted and took flight as they rushed to fight the Emperor.

The Emperor stood in the sky with a cold look on his face. "You will try."

Dozens of attacks flew at once, all aiming for the Emperor. One attack was a green flying serpent, another a green scythe. Another attack was a million flying embers, while another was a sword slash that seemed to tear space in its wake.

The Dragon Emperor didn't falter in the face of the many attacks and simply pulled out a shield from his storage ring. He held the shield in front of him and slammed his spear onto it.

The shield roared with the sound of distant thunders as a gigantic illusory dragon head appeared from it and devoured the dozens of attacks in a single bite.

The dragon's head exploded into a million different pieces after it swallowed the attacks, but none of the force it had absorbed went back to the Emperor.

The Emperor didn't even flinch in the face of the explosion and simply primed his spear. He was going to go in for an attack next.

Chapter 1502 An Epic Clash

Long Tiankong stared down at the dozens of people as he felt the aura of their cultivation base.

Saint Soul 8th realm.

Saint Soul 6th realm.

Saint Transformation 3rd realm.

His eyes shifted to the man he called Yating.

Saint Transformation 6th realm.

None of them were his enemies.

He held his Noble Dragon spear and pointed it down at the man in front of him. Wood energy rushed through his meridians, making it into his spear.

The Dragon Emperor wasn't even planning on using any skill of his own, but just the one that was in his spear. He also wasn't planning on using his Immortal Qi, just his normal Saint Qi.

Even so, the men and women on the ground felt nothing but dread. Death hung in the air, and at its center was the Dragon Emperor.

The world lost its color once again as the Dragon Emperor launched a single attack.

A singular bolt of lightning flew out of the Noble Dragon Spear, charging down on seemingly nobody. However, halfway through, the single bolt of lightning split into 5 different smaller bolts of lightning that struck 5 random individuals, including the man named Yating.

Every single one of the 5 people being attacked couldn't hold back at all. Without hesitation, they held out their treasures to stop the attack. Stronger ones that were not being attacked moved quickly and stood in front of the ones being attacked as they protected them as well.

Yating alone took on one of the bolts of lightning.

Alex looked in shock at the sky. The aura from the Dragon Emperor's attacks was one thing, but seeing the damage it caused was another.

Alex saw fractures in space being left behind by that one attack. Small splinters in space that took a second or two to heal were left behind where the lightning passed through.

Snow had stopped falling momentarily as most of it was blasted away from the surroundings.

He saw the attack land on the people on the ground and then heard the explosion. It was both blinding and deafening. The shockwave from the hit alone caused him to perspire from his brows.

He couldn't imagine a world where he could take this attack and survive it. Not as he was right now.

Alex watched the aftermath of that one attack. As the light faded and the dust settled, he saw two men on the ground, one of whom had lost his right arm. Other than that, they were mostly fine.

Everyone else had successfully managed to protect themselves from the attack of the Dragon Emperor.

A few of them returned attacks to the Dragon Emperor, but the Dragon Emperor didn't even use his shield this time around. He simply swung his spear once and the attack tore away the stronger attacks that were coming his way.

The weaker attacks landed on him, exploding on his face. The people who had attacked were surprised to see their attacks land on him. However, they weren't very excited about it. For they knew something about the Dragon Emperor that made him far stronger than a normal cultivator.

The Dragon Emperor came out of the attacks, practically unharmed. His body was as flawless as always, and he felt not even a tinge of pain at all the attacks that fell on him.

His body cultivation was simply too strong for him to care about those attacks.

The attackers grimaced. They had known that the Dragon Emperor's body was strong, but to think it was strong enough to take their attacks without any backlash from it.

He had destroyed the stronger attacks before letting the weaker ones strike him, but even then, the weaker ones together still reached the strength of the high Saint Soul realm.

That was to say that the Dragon Emperor's body cultivation was most definitely around the peak of Saint Soul realm. Perhaps even the start of the Saint Transformation realm.

The Emperor took his spear and attacked once again.

Blue lighting flew down from the sky, daring to attack many of them once again. Yating and a few others managed to protect themselves once again. However, they had to use their expensive treasures and they only had so many of them.

Any more and their treasures would most likely be destroyed. They only had so much durability after all.

Yating stood tall, staring back at the Emperor as if daring him to attack him even harder this time. At the same time, he was inwardly panicking, wondering not just how to run away, but also how they were found in the first place.

There was only one explanation for all of this, and it was Alex. The moment he had captured him, the Dragon Emperor had somehow found their hiding spot.

But how? He couldn't imagine. There were scripts and formations that ran constantly to hide them. The only way would be for Alex to have something that could pierce past their barriers and alert the Dragon Emperor.

The man looked at Alex with his spiritual sense and then back at the Dragon Emperor. Were the two of them close enough?

They could be, but there was something there that he could make use of at some other time. He got rid of the ring on his finger, as he feared this was how the Dragon Emperor had found him in the first place.

He tossed it back to Alex without looking, and Alex quickly caught it, putting it onto his finger. He let his spiritual sense slip into the ring and was happy to learn that it was fine. Nothing had been tampered with.

Then, he looked back at the man and felt his aura increasing.

The air whipped around him and burned as Fire Qi rushed out of him at an incredible speed. The other people around him looked at him and backed off.

The Dragon Emperor was about to prepare another attack and stopped when he sensed Yating preparing his own. And this was a strong one.

Yating was preparing his Immortal Qi.

The Dragon Emperor sensed fluctuations in the spiritual sense between the Saints there. They had communicated something to each other, but he didn't know what.

However, he couldn't focus on that. This was an Immortal attack. Even with his Peak Saint realm cultivation base and a physical body that was stronger than most saints here, he still couldn't take the attack made with Immortal Qi lightly.

He let go of the spear, placing it back into his storage ring. While the spear was incredible, it was not something that could handle Immortal Qi without any damage.

The Dragon Emperor did not want to harm his spear for no reason.

A green aura seeped through his skin, surrounding him in the air as it got thicker and thicker. Just as Yating was on the ground, the Dragon Emperor prepared his attack as well.

The space rippled around them, threatening to tear at any moment. The ripples of their fluctuations spread and forced everyone back.

Alex slowly backed off as well, as he did not want to be in the midst of a collision between two attacks. He didn't even want to be in the vicinity.

He flew as far as he could before he sensed the attacks being launched. He turned around, just in time to see everything happen.

On Yating's end, there was a flame arrow the size of a boat that flew into the sky.

On the Dragon Emperor's end, there was a green dragon head that roared and sent Dragon's breath down from the sky.

The two attacks launched at a fraction of a second. And in another fraction of a second, they clashed midway through in the sky.

The world lost not just its color this time around, but even its sounds. Alex felt nothing for a second or two before the colliding attacks exploded with such power that they leveled mountains around them.

His spiritual sense in that area was instantly destroyed and he felt a small mental backlash.

Alex felt his heart palpitate in fear at his imagination of what would have happened to him, had he stayed there. The ripple from the shockwave alone was enough to send him flying backward even further.

Alex currently had a cultivation base equivalent to that of the Peak of Saint Soul realm and had an even stronger blood aura. Still, he understood the damage he would've received had he been nearer.

The attacks would have torn him to shred and Alex doubted that even his Undying physique could bring him back from this one.

Alex felt the ripples of space and looked to see for cracks. To his surprise, he did not just feel the cracks in Space this time around. There was another aura hidden within it that he felt afterward.

A crack in Time.

He tried to focus on the space of impact and saw small instances of cracks in them through which the Void seemed to leak through. However, they closed just as quickly as it opened.

The sound finally arrived where he was. The loudness of it surprised him as the sound drowned everything else.

The chaos of Fire and Wood Qi flew up to him as well, but they didn't do much to him this time around. He was braced for them.

The aftermath of the attack finally made itself seen. The Dragon Emperor flew high in the sky still, he too breathing unevenly at the sight in front of him.

As for Yating, he wasn't there anymore at all. Alex tried to look for traces of him, but all he found were remnants of a teleportation aura.

It wasn't just him, there were multiple teleportation aura.

The entirety of the remaining Oathbreakers had teleported away.

Chapter 1503 Two Things

Alex was shaken even minutes after the collision of the two attacks had ended. He stood in the air, with his eyes wide, knowing that the entire northern half of the Eastern Continent had most likely felt these attacks.

A pool of water was left in the ground, with the snow overhead refusing to fall at all. The Intent of Yating's fire attack still lingered in the air, melting any snow that fell.

Alex only got out of his stupor after he saw the Dragon Emperor fly toward him.

The Dragon Emperor stopped mere meters away from him and looked at him. Alex felt a scan go through his body, and let it happen. Everything he had to hide was hidden after all.

"You seem alright," he said.

"I am alright," Alex replied, feeling the Dragon Emperor's aura and seeing barely any difference at all. He had not struggled in this fight whatsoever. "How did you find me?"

That was something Alex was curious about. From what he could tell about formations, even though he had no way to determine what they were about, it was clearly meant to hide themselves.

And yet, they had been found. That too in less than 15 minutes. Alex was curious as to what was going on.

"You have something of mine," the Dragon Emperor said. "I can follow that to you whenever I wish to."

Alex frowned a little and even felt slightly scared. 'Does he know about the sword?' he thought in panic.

The black sword with the Azure Imperium's insignia was something that no one should have known about, and yet... was the Dragon Emperor aware of it from the start?

"The Dragon Medallion," the Dragon Emperor said.

"What?" Alex asked, taken aback.

"The Medallion," the Dragon Emperor said. "That's how I found you. I knew the location of the medallion and teleported to the closest city before coming this way."

Alex stared at the Dragon Emperor for a few seconds before bringing out the Dragon Medallion. The blue-gold medallion with the Azure Imperium's insignia in the middle gleamed a little in the midday sunlight.

Alex stared at it for a few seconds and proceeded to ask the Emperor. "Do you own this or something? Have you bonded with it?"

"No, our family has a treasure to locate any of the medallions that get lost," the Dragon Emperor said. "As I've mentioned before, the Dragon Medallions authority outranks every single person in the continent aside from me and my son. So we cannot let it fall into the hands of those that would use it to cause harm."

"So, you are constantly checking where this is?" Alex asked.

"Not constantly," the Dragon Emperor said. "I only just checked today when my people frantically let me know that you were kidnapped by some strong bandits. Don't worry, I won't be checking it again. I only do so when in need."

"Okay," Alex said, placing the medallion back into his storage ring. He would have to do something about it later on.

"I have notified your people of your location," the Emperor said. "They should be teleporting to the closest city anytime soon."

Alex said nothing. "Who were those people?" he asked. He was very curious about everything that had happened from his getting kidnapped, to meeting the Yating fellow, to knowing that he was aware of the Dragon's death to the fight that came afterward.

"They were initially soldiers of mine," the Dragon Emperor said. "I do not know who most of them were, probably from the Tail reason. The stronger ones though were from the Head legion, and Yating was one of the more talented ones."

Alex listened intently.

"But then, sometime later, he decided to betray me and start his little band of bandits here," the Dragon Emperor said.

"But why?" Alex asked. "Did you do something wrong? He mentioned that he wanted to take my pills to become strong enough to kill you."

The Dragon Emperor shook his head. "I do not know why it is that he wishes to kill me, but worry not. This won't happen to you ever again. I do not take threats to myself simply. I will thwart them one way or another."

Alex didn't trust the Dragon Emperor. He had more or less always known that he wasn't a very good person, even when compared to normal cultivators who only thought about themselves. On top of that, with his own soldiers going against him, even wanting to kill him, that certainly meant he had done something.

'They were there when the Azure Dragon died,' Alex thought. Why were they there? To protect him from whatever was happening to him? Or were they there to kill him?

'Pearl's mother should have been there as well,' he thought suddenly. If his hunch was correct, Pearl and his Mother had run away around the same time the Dragon had died.

That would place the man named Yating right there when it must have happened. 'He will know more about this than anyone,' Alex thought. 'I will need to find him.'

The man seemed to have said an oath as to not reveal the Dragon's death, but that did not mean that the oath worked for Pearl's mother as well. If he could find him again, he could make him speak about the truth behind her death.

The situation around Pearl's mother had remained dark for a very long time. However, now that he had met the man, he saw an exit out of the tunnel. There was light in this darkness.

The man was his light.

"What are you thinking?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

"Just wondering how your soldiers could turn against you," he said. "Just wondering if mine will someday turn against me as well."

He did not tell the truth to the Emperor. The Emperor surely knew about the Dragon's death as well and was keeping it secret from the entire world. So, if he revealed that he knew it, then he might end up being in danger.

As Alex thought about this point, he remembered that the man named Yating knew that Scarlet could not come to the Eastern Continent because of the Dragon's death.

Then... since he was the Dragon Emperor's soldier once, did he know as well?

The thought scared Alex.

"Let us return then," he said to the Emperor, not wanting to further speak about this at all.

Alex started flying and as he did, he looked at the aftermath of the battle that the Emperor had left behind. With his very first attack, he had cleaved the mountain in half, revealing everything inside.

Alex wasn't sure if he could do something like this with just a single attack.

The Dragon Emperor nodded and started flying behind him as well, but it seemed he didn't wish to let go of the topic just yet. He wanted to learn about Yating's current situation as much as he wanted.

"What exactly did he want from you?" he asked.

"Pills," Alex said. "He apparently knew about the pills I sold back in the Golden auction, and wanted me to make more of those for him. All to use to kill you."

"He can't kill me," the Dragon Emperor said. "If things go according to plan, I will be long gone from this world before he can even become strong enough to do anything for me."

Alex looked at the Dragon Emperor in surprise. "You're planning to leave this world so soon?" he asked. "Didn't you wait for something?"

"2 things," the Dragon Emperor said. "First, to have an alchemy skill so great that I don't have to worry about being low on the food chain when I do end up being an Immortal."

Alex could understand the sentiment. The Emperor had mentioned this a long time ago as well. "What about the second one?" he asked.

The Emperor remained silent for a second. "The second one is not something I can tell you about. It's something private. It is taking a bit longer than normal, so it might be a while before I go away."

Alex wondered what it was that he wanted to do. Dao maybe?

He wondered what Daos the Emperor had at that moment. He could sense the Cutting Dao during the attack that leveled the mountain. Aside from that, the Emperor had mostly stuck to lightning attacks, which unfortunately fell under the Wood Dao.

As someone with a mediocre Wood spiritual root, he had no ability to sense any dao in those attacks, like he had sensed the Burning Dao and Heat Dao in the Oathbreakers' leader's attack.

"Do you know how long it has been since we last talked?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

Alex nodded. "Over 3 and a half years," he said.

The Dragon Emperor nodded as well. "I was busy learning from the recipe you gave me," he said. "I was in deep cultivation when I was forced to come out to help you."

Alex frowned a little, wondering what the Emperor was trying to say.

"So, would it be alright if we moved up our 2nd trade?" he asked. " I know we have another 2 and a half years to go for it, but I do not want my coming out to go to waste."

Alex thought for a moment and said, "If possible, I would like to stick with the routine."

"But I do not wish me coming out to be a waste," the Dragon Emperor reiterated.

"I think that's alright," Alex said. "I know something you can do to not make it a waste."

Chapter 1504 Qian Yanglin

Alex met up with his elders in the Snowpass city, which was nearly at the edge of the Eastern Continent. Just a few minutes of flight from here was the ocean toward the north. Toward the east, a couple of hours of flight would lead them to their Beast's Paradise.

Both Liang Shufen and Yao Ning breathed a sigh of relief when they saw Alex and couldn't help but speak out about their concerns. It hadn't even been half an hour since he had been taken away, and they were devastated at his kidnap.

"It's alright," Alex said. "I was never in any real danger. Besides, the Emperor saved me minutes after I was taken to the other location."

"But it could have been dangerous," Liang Shufen said. "We failed in saving you."

"It's alright," Alex said. "I'm fine and that's all that matters. Besides, I wasn't really ever in danger. I could've run away anytime I wanted to. I stuck around because the man had stolen my ring and I wanted it back."

While that was partially true, it wasn't an understatement to say that Alex had been afraid. When his arm had been cut off, he knew that he was in enough danger that he could lose his entire body.

After that, seeing the people using Immortal Qi as if it were nothing made him even more scared for his life. A single stray attack could have killed him back then.

While he didn't think getting out of the Oathbreakers' stronghold was particularly hard with his Dao of Space and Teleportation, running far enough away would still be problematic as he wasn't as proficient in running away.

Especially considering his captors were much stronger and faster than him.

However, he didn't let this fact be known to the elders. They would never forgive themselves if it ever came to that.

"If the Emperor saved you," Yao Ning spoke. "Then where is he?"

* * * * * *

The entirety of the Gold Kingdom and many from the other kingdoms were surprised to hear the dethroning of King Tan Qiu from the Gold Kingdom's throne.

After multiple millennia, he was no longer going to be the King, and someone else was going to take over him.

For the first time since the previous kings and queens were executed for treason and attempted coup, someone else was taking over as the Gold King.

The man to replace the Gold King was someone named Qian Yanglin, an alumnus of the True Gold sect, one of the biggest sects in the Gold Kingdom.

He was a tall man with a handsome look, whose past feats were spread around the continent like wildfire. 2-time winner of the Endless Shadow Abyss, 3rd in the Continental Tournament, a powerful fighter in the Transcendent Martial ground, and the Harmonious Balance Haven.

He was also a young man, barely 2 thousand years of age, and had a lot of talent running his sect before he left it a few decades ago. Now, he was going to be made the King of the Gold Kingdom.

It was 3 months later that the coronation officially happened. Many great individuals from all around the continent made their way to the Goldheart kingdom to watch the ascent of the new king.

All kings, great military figures, and many more were present there. Alex too had returned there after his 3 months of travel across the Gold Kingdom. The atmosphere was no less festive than 4 months ago when the Golden Auction was right around the corner.

The city was golden bright with lanterns floating all around. There were golden flags hung from every home, and people cheered the name of the new king.

They celebrated the arrival of the new King Qian Yanglin as the Emperor himself crowned the man. Everyone congratulated his ascent. Alex did so with a pill bottle full of pills.

The new king was more than happy to have received such a treasure and thanked Alex profusely.

Alex stepped to the side and let the others congratulate the man. The Emperor arrived at Alex's side and asked, "Well, congratulations. You successfully diverted my attention to some other thing. My time outside closed cultivation wasn't really a waste."

Alex smiled. "I'm happy to be of help," he said.

"Still, are you sure you do not wish to trade the second thing you planned on?" the man asked.

"Do you have something ready to trade for whatever I give you?" Alex asked.

"I'll have to see how important it is," the Emperor said. "I cannot prepare something of value without knowing what the value of the item I'm trading for is."

Alex nodded. That made some sense alright. "I'll let you know what it is when the time comes," he said. "2 and a half years later, or maybe 3 years later."

"Any specific date?" the Emperor asked. "I wish to enter closed cultivation for as long as is needed."

Alex thought for a bit and answered. "I hear the Cave of Frost opens up in about 3 more years," he said.

"I am not sure on the timeline, but that sounds about right," the Emperor said. "Although, I'm not sure if you'll get to enter this time around."

Alex nodded. There was a giant barrier around most of the Ivory kingdom after all. He wouldn't know if it would ever open up or not.

"If it doesn't open up, when do you propose we trade?" Alex asked.

"If it doesn't open up, trading with you would be the least of my worries," the Emperor said. "I will have to find a way to deal with the barrier somehow without making trouble for whoever created it."

"Do you have an idea of who it was?" Alex asked.

"Some immortal, surely," the Emperor said. "I'm just not sure why they were here yet."

For a moment, Alex wondered if whoever had come down was someone from the Azure Dragon's family. However, no such person would create a barrier and stay hidden. Not to mention, someone had left already.

"Well, whoever it is, as long as they let me enter the Cave of Frost, I'll be fine," Alex said.

"Why? Do you wish to enter it so bad?" the Emperor asked with a curious look.

"I do," Alex said. "I want to learn a bit about some Yin Dao if I can."

"You have a Yin spiritual root?" the Emperor asked.

Alex nodded. "I do," he said. "Hasn't been of much help though, aside from a few techniques, but it does come in handy when making pills."

"Then I suppose it is not a bad idea to enter the cave," the man said. "So, when do you plan to trade next if it opens up?"

"Right before the cave opens up," Alex said. "That sounds good."

"Let's do it after," the Emperor said. "It is never clear when the Cave opens up and it is only a rough knowledge for us. Your time inside won't be longer than a month at best, so it is better to do the trade afterward."

Alex shrugged. "Sounds fine to me," he said.

The Emperor nodded. "Then we will meet and trade after you come out of the Cave of Frost," he said. "I'll look forward to it."

Alex smiled. "I will too," he said. "I'll tell you now that while what I will be trading won't be as good as what I traded last time, and may not be of much help to you when it comes to improving the end result of a pill, it will improve the overall results on all pills."

The Emperor looked curiously. "Can you not tell what it is?" he asked. "Some sort of technique or knowledge?"

"No need to hurry," Alex said. "You'll find out in due time."

The Emperor sighed. "Sure," he said. "I'll leave for now then. I've stayed out for too long."

"Farewell," Alex said.

"Before I leave," the Emperor turned around. "Is there a chance I can persuade you to not call yourself a King? Emperor sounds better, doesn't it?"

"It does, but King is what my title is, given to me by her Highness the Phoenix," Alex said. "I cannot change it without her approval." He was confused as to why the Emperor even cared, but he didn't let it show on his face.

"Is that so?" the Emperor said. "I hope you change it soon then. Otherwise... anyway, farewell."

The Emperor flew away from the kingdom, immediately reaching a speed that left behind after images for everyone to see. Even Alex with his Demon Eyes could barely follow the blur that was the Emperor.

"Damn, he is so fast," Alex thought, looking at the sky where the Emperor had flown away from. He remembered the battle 3 months ago as well. "And he's strong."

Alex frowned as he remembered that the Dragon Emperor was most likely his and Pearl's enemy. "I can't dally around," he thought. "I'll have to get strong as soon as I can."

He was getting close to breaking through as well. Just a few more weeks and he would once again get close to breaking through to the Saint Soul realm.

"Ughh... but the Realm of Trials is opening soon," he thought. There was only a month or two at best remaining before the trial opened up. If he somehow failed during this breakthrough, then it was unlikely he would be ready to enter the trial.

Then, he would have to wait for another 10 years before it opened again.

"I suppose I'll have to delay it slightly enough that it takes place after the Realm of Trials is over."

Chapter 1505 Snowthorn Valley

2 more months passed during which period Alex improved his painting skills, and his body cultivation by a lot. His other improvements weren't as obvious, but they were there as well.

As he had expected, he was now at the peak of the Saint Core realm, just moments away from entering the Saint Soul realm. However, he didn't wish to enter just yet. He was going to go through the secret realm and then try his breakthrough.

His physical cultivation had reached halfway through the Saint Core realm as it was this and painting what he had focused most of his time on during the last few months.

He had also taken time to try and deal with the pill recipes that he had been wanting. He was getting close to none of them, but it was still good progress.

The Immortal pills especially would take longer from what he could tell. Just the fact that he had yet to properly check an Immortal ingredient caused problems, but he was dealing with it slowly using the knowledge he held in his mind. One's own experience was the best, but the Alchemy God's Knowledge was a close second as well.

The Wood Spiritual Root Improvement Pill was going to be done within a few years at most from what he had seen. By now, he had gone through every ingredient, and all that was left was for him to go through the many variations from the tens of thousands of ingredients in his head. That was what was going to take a lot of time.

Unfortunately, the Dao of Five Elemental Interaction didn't help him here as much as he would have hoped for it to do.

Beyond that, Alex trained Pearl and Whisker in his free time, not only helping them get better but also making sure his skills weren't rusted.

It had been years since he had properly fought anyone, so he made sure to keep himself active.

On the side of Daos, Alex had given up on learning at the moment. He would learn some when the time was right, but due to the fear of what learning many Daos would do to him, he no longer actively sought out Dao.

During this period, Alex also had the first time when the Heavenly Silkworms in his Beast storage had made silk for him to use. He had crafted some wooden housing for the silkworms to lay down their silk, and after taking it out, he had gotten enough tiny threads that could be woven together to make it just enough for a necklace.

It was still thin, no thicker than a few of his hairs together, but that was enough for it to work in disrupting people's spiritual sense on him. While it wasn't thick enough to completely block off People's perception on him like the beasts did, it was just enough for it to make it fluctuate around him.

They couldn't pin down his aura just as well. When used together with the Immortal Concealment technique of his, he became truly invisible to one's senses.

However, that wasn't what Alex wanted. He wanted to make it thick enough that he didn't have to use his concealment technique or his Yang Qi to hide himself.

Although at the rate the threads were being made, that was going to take a long time for sure. He was also going to have to find a way to get more Mulberry leaves.

He did have a way of course. He was given a seed of the Mulberry tree by the Golden Lion before he had left the Lion Colony in the Beast Paradise. However, as he was right now, he couldn't grow it anywhere.

If he was too late, he was afraid that his leaves were going to run out, and his silkworms were going to die. If worst came to pass, however, he had planned to plant the tree anywhere he could. That was good enough for the worst-case scenario.

Despite all the things he did, he had, of course, still enjoyed his tour of the Gold Kingdom.

He had visited the various cities of the Gold Kingdom. And while, unlike the Emerald Kingdom, there weren't as many unique places, he still loved his time around. Most of the cities were in desolate land or snow-filled ones, but there were a few ones that were fun to go through.

The desolate lands barely had any trees or plants, and the ones in the snow were always right on top of a magma vein that flowed underneath the city.

He had been through enough cities in the Gold Kingdom and now this was going to be his last one. After this, he was going to leave the Gold Kingdom and likely never return here again. At least not in the near future.

He was currently in Snowthorn Valley, the city where the Realm of Trials was going to be held. The city was in a valley, surrounded by large mountains and the secret realm was right in the center of it all.

It was surrounded by a large wall around a hexagonal building with multiple gates leading inside. Each of the doors led you to a separate secret realm.

Alex looked down from his hotel's living room window at the large building that was known as the Building of Trials. "Just 3 more days," he thought to himself.

"The alchemists are here," Yao Ning quickly told Alex.

"Oh," Alex replied. "That's quick."

"Sister Liang did not take her time. She brought all the alchemists as soon as she could."

A few minutes later, the alchemists had arrived in the hotel room as well. Alex went to meet them all to prepare them for the upcoming event. There were 21 alchemists there in total, including Wu Shun who had joined as well.

As none of them had come here before, they were all incredibly excited about the realm of trials. As a result, they couldn't wait for the day when it opened up.

Chapter 1506 Ren Wujin

Alex sat in a relatively empty room in a restaurant, waiting for someone. He hadn't ordered anything and was contemplating if he even wanted to bother with this meeting at all.

He had been so excited about the Realm of Trials just the other day, and there were still 2 more days to go, but the Crown Prince had contacted him this morning, reminding him of something that he did not want to be reminded about.

The Snowthorn Valley was home to a great family known as the Ren Family. They had tens of thousands of years of history and were known as one of the oldest families to still exist.

In recent times, they hadn't made much news at all. However, there was one news that had spread with relative importance that people would certainly have heard about, even if they did not care as much.

That was the fact that the current family leader of the Ren Family had adopted a young girl with incredible talent as his daughter. That girl's name was Ren Wujin.

She was known as the Golden Fox of the North, that was who he was here to see.

Ren Wujin was another one of the potential queens that the Crown Prince had searched for.

After Talia, Alex didn't care much about meeting anyone. He hadn't even wanted to meet Talia at all, since the reason he had asked for potential wives in the first place was to see if he could secretly find his sister Hannah.

However, knowing that none of the 4 that had been presented to him had been her, his interest in the girls was... nonexistent.

Alex sat in the empty room, slightly annoyed that the girl was late. He had arrived in time, and yet he was already made to wait 15 more minutes.

And he didn't like that it gave him time to spend on something that he wasn't ready for just yet. It gave him time to think about his sister, who he was starting to accept was dead already.

Each day he had spent dealing with the knowledge that she could be dead and there was no way for him to do anything if that was the case. Even the Dao of Death did not allow him to bring back the dead.

Coming to these meetings made specifically to find his sister undid that and it pained him to know that. Every time he looked at the names, even though he knew that these girls weren't her, there was a part of him deep inside that hoped that this was indeed her. He hoped that this was his sister with a different name and a different face.

He did not like having that hope. Hope was what gave way to disappointment and heartbreak, and that was what had caused his Qi deviation last time. He was absolutely sure of it.

He had wanted to refuse the Crown Prince's proposal this morning, but finding out that he had already told the Ren family about his wish, he couldn't refuse anymore.

As a result, he decided to let this meeting happen. He did make sure to tell the Crown Prince that he wasn't as excited about meeting these girls, so he no longer had to spend any time trying to fix these meetings.

As Alex sighed and waited, the door to his side and a woman walked in slowly. She immediately noticed Alex as soon as she walked in and was transfixed when she saw him. It truly was the King of the Southern Continent.

"Greetings, your majesty," the girl spoke. "I am Ren Wujin, and it is my pleasure to have finally met you."

The girl had a tall body with a beautiful face. Her golden hair was braided intricately with multiple golden ornaments hanging from them. On the side of her face was a golden fox mask that she placed there at all times.

Alex could tell at a glance that the mask was some sort of artifact as well. That was what had given her the moniker, Golden Fox of the North.

She wore a multilayered red robe with a falling golden leaves pattern through it all. The leaves were made with real gold threads and the red robe itself wasn't made with anything of lesser quality.

Alex stood up and greeted back. "Greetings, Lady Ren," he said. "It is nice to meet you too."

The girl smiled back and made her way toward the seat on the other side of the table.

"Please refer to me as just Wujin, Your Majesty," she said. "Also, My apologies if I was late. I wasn't made aware of this meeting until it was too late, so I had to take some time. I had only just come out of training."

"It's alright," Alex said. "It was only a few minutes."

The girl smiled back, but it held a bit of uncertainty that Alex could see through.

"Is something bothering you, Lady Wujin?" Alex asked curiously.

"I'm just a little curious, I suppose," the girl said. "I was told that you wanted to meet me, but we have never come across each other as far as I can tell, so I was wondering why you even wanted to meet me?"

"Ah," Alex realized. It was the same thing with Talia. "I see." He hesitated to explain for a brief period, but he had to. "I had let the Crown Prince know that I was looking for someone to make my queen, and the Crown Prince gave me a small list of potential candidates."

"You are one of them."

Ren Wujin frowned for a brief moment before gathering herself to a more lady-like state. "You... wish to test me to see if I am worthy of being your queen?"

Alex shook his head. "I'll be honest, I do not wish to give you any hope. I have no intention of taking you as my Queen or anyone else for that matter."

"I had given up on that idea after I met the first candidate, and decided to no longer go on these meetings. But, I forgot to relay that to the Crown Prince, and... well he set up another meeting for me."

"I apologize that it caused you to have to come here for no reason at all," Alex said as he sent forth something. "Please accept these pills as my apology."

The girl caught the bottle and looked inside with her spiritual sense. Her eyes widened the moment she saw 5 pill veins on every single one of those pills.

"These are..."

"Those pills will help you with your cultivation," Alex explained. "They are designed to help your training speed increase by nearly 20 times for a single cultivation session, which lasts around 2 days."

The woman's eyes widened even further and her breathing got uneven. Her shock was clear on her face. The golden mask on her head glowed slightly, but Alex caught its glow.

Then, the woman's face relaxed and her emotions lessened. She took a brief moment to collect herself.

"Please forgive me if I'm impudent for not refusing to take the pills," she said. "Thank you for these, your majesty."

Alex smiled. "Since we're already here, why not make use of our time properly? Would you care to tell me about yourself?"

Chapter 1507 The Spirit of the Alchemy Trial

Alex and the many alchemists stood in front of the Alchemy gate of the Realm of Trials. His 21 alchemists stood surrounding him, while the thousands and thousands of others were there as well.

And this was just for the alchemy trials.

Each of the 6 entryways was there for individual trials. Aside from alchemy trials, there were the Talisman trials, Formation trials, Artifact trials, Music trials, and Painting trials.

There were no cooking or poison trials as he would've expected the place to have, but it didn't. As for Beast taming and Puppetry, Alex could understand why those weren't there.

They didn't fall under production at all, which these trials were set to test.

From what Alex had heard about the trials, there were multiple tests inside, not unlike the tests back in the Sundering Sanctum, but this time thousands could take the test at once.

If they passed, they moved on to the next test. If they failed, they would be sent outside, in which case they would have to wait for their turn to come again to get tested.

Given that there were tens of thousands of people waiting, one would have to wait a while for their turn to come.

Due to the nature of Alex's status, his cultivators had been given double priority when it came to entering the trials. They would be the first ones to enter, and when they failed and left, they would get to enter again without having to wait in line. It would happen just twice, and after that they would have to wait as everyone else.

As for Alex himself, he had permanent priority. No matter how many times he failed, he would always get to enter when he wanted to.

There were soldiers all around the realm of trials that floated from the sky, looking down to make sure no one threatened or tried to overtake someone else's turn. They were very serious about it all.

Alex looked around to check if he would notice any faces. There weren't many that he recognized at all. There were Talia and Fang Yimu, who were standing with the rest of the alchemists from the Cloud Iron sect.

He had already met up with them and had spent some time yesterday. Today, they did not come to meet him and were instead focused on their own thing.

Aside from them, he noticed a few more people that he recognized but only by their faces. He had seen those people in passing in the Royal School of Alchemy a few times.

Most popular folks of the empire weren't involved in production, so there weren't many people here for him to meet. Not to mention, this section was just for the alchemy side of things. There were perhaps people with big names in one of the other 5 locations.

"Everyone has a decent amount of ingredients, right?" Alex asked his alchemists. "You will need to make pills inside, and you won't get anything inside."

"Yes, your majesty," the alchemists answered in unison.

Alex nodded when he heard that and turned back toward the gate that would open at any minute now.

From what he had heard, no person controlled the entry to the hall. It was instead a spirit inside that did so, similar to the Sundering Sanctum, once again.

And it seemed the spirit was ready to take in guests as the Realm of Trials officially opened with a buzz that went through the entire area.

People could feel the trials opening up and then, the people were allowed in. From outside the walls, the soldiers placed the people into a line and sent them inside.

Alex and his group were the first ones. They walked inside the wall and went in a straight line until they arrived inside the building.

As they walked, Alex could feel spatial fluctuations around the door. His eyes narrowed a little. Something was off about this secret realm.

Spatial pockets gave spatial fluctuations as well, but this one was different from the others. It did not feel like he was walking into a secret realm.

Instead, it felt as if he was walking into the production room inside Senior Yang's mansion.

'This is no secret realm,' he realized. 'Its expanded space, made to work similar to a secret realm.'

In essence, the two did the same thing. Only one was natural and one was man-made.

Alex's pupils glowed slightly purple as he looked at the aura around the area. A large formation was running in this place.

One by one, his alchemists started entering through the door. After they were all inside, Alex brought out Whisker and had him go through as well. He had wanted Whisker to take the trial as he was no weaker than any of them when it came to Alchemy.

Once Whisker walked through, he walked in as well, curious what it was all about.

As soon as Alex walked into the room, he arrived in an entirely dark room with no light whatsoever. Even when Alex tried to use some flames to light up the area, it was still dark. Not even his connection with Whisker remained other than just the normal connection through their bond.

He could see himself and the ground underneath his feet, but not his surroundings. He moved his hands around and felt some sort of barrier there.

'I see,' he thought. No wonder he couldn't see anything. The same barrier had stopped his spiritual sense from entering as well.

He looked at the ground in front of him and saw a set of formations there for him to run himself. He had known about this before. This was here for him to use as a furnaces and would have to be run using his own spirit stones.

The first Azure Dragon that had prepared this place had not wanted to waste more energy than he had to. With everything including the space expansion running with the help of the formation, it would dry up the spirit vein underneath if they started allowing thousands of individuals to use up the Qi from the same locations every decade as well.

His eyes shifted as colors flooded his vision. Before the person in front of him had appeared, he had already looked up.

The man appeared, an illusory figure with a glowing body. At first, Alex noticed nothing wrong with the man, but when he focused on him, he started noticing discrepancies that made the man... less human.

Short illusory horns that branched into 3 segments on either side. Green hair that flowed behind his back, as if drifting in the wind. Slit eyes with green pupils.

Momentarily, Alex had a thought that came from something he had heard a long time ago through Bai Jingshen when he was still Shen Jing to Alex.

"They are just like humans. The only difference is that some of them have horns as well as colorful eyes and hair."

Alex looked at the illusory figure that stood in front of him. Without even giving the figure a chance to say anything, he spoke out loud.

"Demon!"

The Illusory figure paused right as he was about to start. His eyes seemed to drift around before landing on Alex's body.

He stared at Alex for a moment before Alex felt a spiritual sense land on him.

"I am no demon."

Alex's face changed immediately on two counts.

First, he was surprised that the spirit was not a demon at all. That made Alex curious as to what it was, but before even that, he was way too surprised because of the second reason.

The spirit had just communicated with him via his spiritual sense, which Alex didn't know was possible at all. How could spirits use spiritual sense? How could they have spiritual energy?

That made no sense to Alex at all. He tried to understand just what was happening when he came upon a possibility that shocked him to his core.

His face shifted and he spoke in a low voice. "You're not a spirit," he said softly. "You're a nascent soul."

The man's eyes changed imperceptibly and a small smile appeared on his face. "Interesting," a voice flowed into Alex's mind once again. "This is the first time anyone has recognized that I am not a spirit in a very long time. But, I must disappoint you as I am no mere Nascent Soul."

"I am an Immortal Soul," the man said. "I shall talk with you later. For now, my duty forces me."

The man's eyes looked around as if looking around a large audience. Alex looked at the black walls around him. He realized that there were other alchemists that were around him.

He simply couldn't see them.

"My name is Qing Xiaolin," the man spoke. "I am trial master of the Alchemy Trial. You shall go through various trials today, all prepared to test your knowledge and skills of Alchemy."

The man explained things that most already knew about. He explained the purpose of this trial and how it was going to be held.

Alex wasn't listening to any of it at all. Instead, he focused on the very first words the man spoke to everyone. His name.

Qing Xiaolin. Qing.

Alex's eyes narrowed as he noticed something that he had ignored previously as he hadn't known to look for it.

Scales. He saw scales on the man's arm, that were somewhat hidden by his robes. After seeing the scales, the slit eyes and the forked horns started making sense.

This man was no demon after all.

He was the Immortal Soul of an Azure Dragon.

Chapter 1508 The Trials

The Dragon Immortal Soul gave out the first trial.

"List out all the ingredients you see before you."

Images of various ingredients appeared in front of him. Thousands of them. Without waiting, Alex began naming them all.

He had to tap into a floating image that surrounded him and use his spiritual sense or just his fingers to write the name onto it. If it was correct, the image flashed away.

He wasted no time and went through the images, naming them all swiftly. Green Sparrow's striped bone here, Two-leaved Garrow thorn leaves there.

A Half-ripe Flawed Serpent fruit. A root of the Stilt Lime tree. A Dark Grand mushroom.

Alex continued answering the ingredients as he saw them and within the next 10 minutes, he was done naming all of it. Once finished, he stopped and looked up at the Immortal Soul, who was also looking down at him.

There was a strange expression on the soul's face, surely caused by the fact that he had never seen someone complete the first trial this quickly. Or at least, that's what Alex believed.

He couldn't imagine someone outspeeding him when it came to ingredients.

The Immortal Soul said nothing, however, and continued waiting. There was a time limit of an hour on the test and so Alex had to wait along with everyone as well.

He felt a little bored, but there was nothing to do. He tried to feel how Whisker was doing and gained a little feedback through his bond that told him that he wasn't feeling bad at all.

That would suggest that he was doing good, not that Alex doubted it. Whisker's knowledge of ingredients came from Alex, so there was little chance he wasn't going to be able to name it all.

An hour passed in almost no time and when it was over, the Dragon's soul spoke. "Those who failed to name it all, you will now be sent out."

Alex hadn't seen what had happened, but if he were to trust the words of the people who went through this trial beforehand, the failed individuals had all been sent back outside.

Alex hoped that none of his alchemists had failed.

"Those who passed will now go to the next trial."

As soon as the soul finished speaking, the dark walls surrounding Alex changed colors ever so slightly, going black to dark red.

The next trial included a test where a Saint pill and its description were mentioned to the alchemists. Their task now was to figure out just which of the 3 recipes provided was the correct one.

Alex looked at the question and realized that he knew the pill. It was one of the healing pill recipes he knew. It wasn't the one he liked making as the one he made was of slightly higher quality.

He chose the correct answer without hesitation and the question switched to another pill. This time, it was a cultivation pill that improved one's speed. Alex had never seen this particular recipe before, so he had to take some time for this one.

But just 10 minutes later, he had gone through all 3 recipes and saw the flaws in the other 2. Only the one in the middle made any sense at all.

He picked it and the question changed again to another pill.

Alex looked at this one, a pill that made one resistant to fire aura. It took Alex 5 minutes to recognize the correct pill for this one as the recipes had mistakes very early on this time around.

He chose the correct recipe and tapped it.

After the third answer in a row, the questions disappeared and Alex knew he had passed once more.

The Dragon Soul didn't try to show it in his face, but he had noticed Alex's quick answers and was more or less surprised once more at the speed.

He had finished it in 15 minutes when the trial itself was to last for 3 more hours. He had taken way too little time for this test.

Alex wanted to speak with the Dragon Soul, wanting to ask questions he was curious about, but he also didn't want to offend the soul and get thrown out of the trial. So, he had waited for the soul to begin talking to him first.

Still, Alex couldn't help but ask Godslayer the same questions instead.

"Do you know that Beasts and Plants can turn to humans?" Godslayer asked him.

"Yes," Alex said. "Brother Bai Jingshen told me that most beasts and plants can turn to humans once they reach the Immortal realm."

"That's not just for the body," Godslayer said. "The beasts and plants' souls are the same as well. They can change to humanoid form or retain their beast form even while in Soul. This one is probably staying as a human to not scare the rest of you."

"I see," Alex said. That made a lot more sense now that Alex thought about it. His first assumption had been that souls could only ever be humanoid. That turned out to be false.

"Still, I didn't expect to see an Immortal Soul in the lower realms," Godslayer said. "I wonder why he is here. If it was anyone else, I would've assumed it was a prisoner, but this one is an Azure Dragon. I doubt the dragons would use other criminal dragons to teach youths from a backwater world."

Alex had no answer. Why would an Azure Dragon remain as a soul?

"Souls are vulnerable, right?" he asked.

"Very much so, especially when compared to a normal body," Godslayer said. "Souls can't use absorption techniques, so they have to rely on themselves to gather Qi. That always ends up being very slow."

"Also, if you use up too much Qi, you end up breaking your soul apart until there is nothing left," Godslayer said. "There is nothing but only downsides to remaining as a soul. He should be finding a body already. Why isn't he?"

Alex felt his heart skip a beat when he realized something. "Do you think he is trying to get one from the ones that enter this trial?" he asked.

Godslayer said nothing for a while. That was certainly a possibility and he didn't need to affirm that for Alex. Alex already knew so.

"Not that there isn't a good chance that he is doing this to find a good body to take over, I don't believe that is the case," Godslayer said. "After all, how long has this trial been going on for?"

"The secret realm itself?" Alex asked. "It was made by the first Azure Dragon… so… over 90 thousand years ago?"

"Is it possible that this man has been here for that long?" Godslayer asked.

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. He had seen very old records when trying to learn about the continent and this trial had always noted the 6 different spirits that inhabited it.

Unless the 6 spirits were replaced every few thousand years, these were most certainly the old ones. Which meant that the Dragon Soul had most likely been the trial master for the past tens of thousands of years.

"If he was after a body, he would've taken one by now," Alex said. "Was that what you were going for?"

"Yes," Godslayer said. "Besides, it seems he's testing your talent in alchemy. Taking over your body wouldn't help him in that. He can't read your mind with his new soul."

Alex nodded and said nothing. That still didn't answer why the Dragon Soul was there.

Alex noticed the Dragon Soul announcing something, but the voice didn't reach him at all. He only saw his face move, and from what Alex could tell, he was addressing other people.

"Oh," Alex looked around curiously. "Are we all taking the test in the same room?"

He didn't just mean the ones taking the 2nd trial as he was, but the others that were taking the 1st trial as well. That made sense.

He hadn't sensed himself being teleported away, so he had always been in the same room. If that was the case then the other people must have come to the same room and were only separated by these walls that Alex was surrounded by.

3 hours passed and the trial was over. The Dragon Soul addressed them again. The ones that failed were sent away, and the ones that passed remained.

The dark red walls glowed brighter, the red becoming more crimson. "We shall begin the next trial for you all."

'You all,' Alex noted. There were still other people, not that he had expected many to fail yet.

The next test was simple in concept. Once again, Alex and the rest of the participants were given the names of 13 ingredients along with a recipe and the pill that formed out of the recipe.

The only problem was, the recipe had 3 out of its 16 ingredients missing. The alchemists had to fill in the blanks and write down the correct recipe.

Alex looked at the list and closed his eyes, beginning a mental simulation of the pill. Since he already knew all the ingredients, as well as the limited number of ways they could be used in a recipe, this was barely a challenge for him.

He had spent years trying out every possibility of every ingredient to fit certain criteria to form a pill of his choice, and that had taught him exactly how to go about this trial.

5 minutes later, after going through multiple simulations, Alex had arrived at the correct one. Without hesitation, he wrote it down.

The Dragon Soul couldn't hide his surprise this time around as Alex passed quickly once more.

Chapter 1509 Pill Fire

The Dragon Soul was steadily getting more and more surprised with Alex with each trial he put forth. Finally, on the 7th trial where the few remaining participants had to make a pill as well as they could, he was surprised to see pill clouds forming in the sky.

Even being from the Azure Clan, it wasn't every day that one got to see pill clouds forming when someone made a pill. For such a thing to be commonplace, one would have to be in the Medicine realm.

So, when he saw Alex, a Saint Core realm cultivator making 5-veined pills, he couldn't stop his curiosity any further.

"Who are you?" he asked Alex directly, appearing inside the now blue walls. The red walls had changed to various shades of violet before slowly becoming blue over the course of the trials. That was a way for the Immortal soul to keep track of who was at what trial.

Alex looked up after having just finished making the healing pill. He hadn't even pulled the pill out of Memory when the Dragon's soul had arrived in front of him. Finally.

"Greetings, senior," Alex said respectfully. "My name is Alex Benton. I am the King of one of the continents of this world under the Vermillion Bird."

The Dragon soul said nothing immediately, but his spiritual sense did land on Alex. The soul was either not very strong, or it didn't mean to harm Alex since his senses on Alex were rather gentle.

The other possibility didn't even come across Alex's mind until the Dragon's soul asked a question. "Are you a reincarnation of an Alchemy master?" he asked. "Or did you perhaps take over the body of a young man as an old soul?"

Alex was surprised. Did the Dragon think he was someone important hiding in a nobody's body?

"Neither," he answered. "I haven't even formed my nascent soul yet. That's… coming up soon."

"Is that so?" the Dragon asked with a surprised look on his face. "Then… are you just a random person from this realm?"

"More or less, yes," Alex said.

"More or less?" the Dragon asked. "Why more or less?"

"I've had opportunities that a normal person wouldn't," Alex said. "As I've mentioned, I'm a King directly under a Vermillion bird after all."

"Is that so?" the Dragon looked at Alex curiously. "Then the skills you have… You learned them all on your own?"

Alex didn't know how to answer that as he didn't want to explain it all exactly. "More or less," he said once again.

"More or less," the Dragon soul repeated with a thoughtful look. "One moment."

He moved away from Alex, appeared back outside, and started saying something that Alex couldn't hear at all. He had gone back to address the trial as it was held.

After a few minutes, he returned.

"So, how did you learn to make pill clouds?" the Dragon asked as soon as he was back.

Alex was taken aback at the sudden questioning, but he showed little surprise in his expression. He hadn't expected the beast to ask such a question directly after returning.

"Uhh…" he couldn't come up with an answer immediately as he hadn't expected an Immortal soul to ask him such a question. "It's a couple of things working together," he explained.

"What sort of things?" the soul asked.

"Um, Daos, techniques, and perfect recipes, to say the least," Alex said.

The Dragon's soul touched his illusory chin as if thinking a little. He spent a few seconds in contemplation before speaking once more. "What sort of Daos?" he asked. "What Dao do you have?"

"Dao of Heat and Dao of Five Elemental Interaction, to begin with," Alex said. "Other fire-related Dao can be of help too… but that's about it."

"Hmm," the soul thought to himself. "Getting perfect recipes isn't that hard for me once I go back. What about techniques? What sort of techniques do you use?"

Alex hesitated a little. "Just some pill formation techniques," he said. "Surely an Immortal like you has some good ones, right?"

"I do," the soul said. "But what makes yours so different that you can make form pill clouds?"

Alex didn't know what to say. He was aware that making pill clouds was an incredibly difficult task that most alchemists could never do in their lives. The good ones only did so a few times in their life and only the most incredible ones could do it so often.

There were a few things working together to help him achieve that, of which he could not tell the soul about the Supreme Elemental Accord and the Vortex of Perfection technique that he had derived from the Pill Splitting Qi.

He couldn't keep the soul waiting, so he answered what he could. "I simply got lucky and got a few techniques that helped me get good pills. Once I used my Dao and trained a lot, I could make pills that could make pill clouds."

"Just that?" the Soul asked. "I can do that too. But my pills rarely go higher than 95%. I can never seem to go higher than that."

Alex was a tiny bit surprised that the soul could make such a good pill.

"What is the main issue for the last few percentages?" Alex asked. "Ingredients? Techniques? Recipe?"

"I doubt my problem is with the recipe," the soul said. "The recipe is rarely the problem in the higher realm. Everyone is talented enough to improve it to the best of its capability."

"As for techniques, I do have good techniques," the soul said, thinking to itself. "Maybe I could use some better ones. My Ingredients are surely not the problem though. I can guarantee that."

"And Dao?" Alex asked.

"Well… I don't have any good Dao suitable for making pills," the Dragon said. "But I shouldn't need it. I have my own pill fire, so it's not necessary."

"Pill Fire?" Alex asked curiously.

"Yes," the Soul said, not really paying the question much attention.

"What's… Pill Fire?" Alex asked again.

The Dragon was about to answer when he realized something. "Oh, right. The lesser worlds rarely have different types of flames, don't they?" he asked. "Have you never seen a fire that's not really… fire?"

Alex thought for a moment and asked. "Do Phoenix fire count?" he asked.

"Absolutely," the Dragon said. "It absolutely counts. Although, I wouldn't know how you would cultivate phoenix fire. It's not something that you can easily take."

'Take?' Alex thought. Was that possible? Could he take phoenix fire? Regardless of how strong it was?

Alex was reminded of the Zhou family at the moment. The family from the Luminance Empire in the Western continent could use a white fire that burned multiple times hotter than normal fire.

'They were born with white fire. It was in their bloodline,' Alex remembered. 'Just like Scarlet's bloodline gives her Phoenix fire.'

"I can get new fire easily?" Alex asked the soul.

"I wouldn't call it easily, but it's not very difficult either," the soul said. "Especially when you're rich."

Alex nodded. He had another thing he wanted to do when he reached the immortal realm. 'I should ask Scarlet about her fire first. Surely Phoneix Fire would be the best one to get.'

He quickly shook his head, realizing he was getting distracted, and looked a the soul in front of him. "So there isn't much I can help you with then," he said to the dragon soul.

"You can help me with the techniques," the Dragon said. "What techniques do you have?"

Alex frowned a little. "I have one for pill forming," he said. "Do you want it?"

"Is it really good?" the Dragon asked expectantly. "It's… decent."

"Can it help me form Pill Clouds?" the Dragon soul asked.

"I'm not sure, senior," Alex said. "You are much older than me, senior. Surely you know much more about it than me."

The soul got curious. "How old are you?" he asked.

"About 70 years old," Alex answered.

"SEVENTY YEARS OLD?!?!" the soul shouted. "You… you're so young. How are you so young? How can someone so young man pill clouds?" The dragon was certainly surprised.

"As I mentioned, I've had some opportunities come along my way," Alex said.

"This… this is incredible," the dragon said. "Give me the technique you used. I want to see if it's as good as you say."

Alex nodded and was about to bring out a talisman to give to the soul when he paused. "I can give it to you, senior," he said. "But what do I get in return?"

The dragon soul paused. "You want something in return? Being able to help me should be an honor to you," he said.

"Honor is good, but it's not what got me this far in life, senior," Alex said. "I will require something something of value in exchange. Surely an Azure Dragon such as yourself will have something of value with you that you can part with."

The Dragon paused for a second. "What did you say?" he asked. Before Alex could say anything, he spoke again. "Did you call me an Azure Dragon?"

Alex frowned a little, confused as to what was happening. Had he offended the Dragon somehow?

"Are you not one?" he asked.

"Why did you think I was?" the Dragon asked.

"Your name," Alex answered. "Qing. That is the surname of the Azure Dragons right?"

"It is," the Dragon said, suddenly bursting out into laughter. "But that doesn't mean everyone that has it is an Azure Dragon."

"If I were an Azure Dragon, why would I ever be in a lower world in the first place?"

Chapter 1510 Trade

Alex frowned a little after learning that he was wrong. Had he been mistaken? Godslayer made no sign of him being wrong. But then again, the one standing in front of him was just a soul.

"You're not an Azure Dragon?" he asked the soul again, looking his all over. "My apologies then, senior. I was just mistaken by your horns and your scales. The features made me think of a dragon, and adding on that name, I was sure you were an Azure Dragon."

"You were not wrong in your assumption all the way," the soul said. "Not all the way through at least."

Alex looked up at the soul, trying to discern what he was trying to say. The soul's expression gave away nothing at all, forcing him to speak up. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"I'm not an Azure Dragon, but I am a Dragon still," the soul said. "And I am from the very Qing family that houses the Azure Dragon."

Alex took a moment to process what the soul had said. "What?" he asked, a confused look taking over his face. "How can you be a—"

He paused.

Then, it finally clicked.

"Ah! You're a descendant of the Azure Dragons!!" he said out loud. "You just don't have the bloodline."

The Dragon soul gave an awkward smile when he heard that. "That… that is the case," he said, not knowing how to feel about the words that came from the young human in front of him who wouldn't know anything about him. The same words that had haunted him as nightmares for most of his life.

As a child of the Azure Dragon, one hoped to gain a bloodline belonging to the Azure Dragon as well. When one didn't, they still had a possibility to become one eventually if they happened to evolve somehow in the future.

"Thank you for telling me that, senior," Alex said.

The Dragon quickly shook away any thought about the past he had and returned to the present. "So, does knowing what I am make you less likely to trade with me?" he asked.

"Absolutely not," he said. "I don't judge who I trade with. Well, at least not when I don't know their personality."

"Then?" the Dragon asked. "You will trade with me?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"And the technique is a good one?" he asked. "Is it the main thing you use to make Pill Clouds?"

Alex hesitated at that moment. He hid any expression on his face, but he alone knew that it was not it. The technique he wanted to trade was the Profound Revolution of Myriad Combination technique.

As an Immortal technique, it was quite useful and thus anyone would like to have it. However, the moment he traded the technique and was forced to make another pill during the trial, he would be found out.

He couldn't trade away this technique at all.

Alex sighed internally at the end, grimacing at the thought of what he had to do. "Yes, it is the main thing I use to make pill clouds," he answered. "But, before I trade it away, I will require senior to make an oath that you will not trade the technique with anyone else. Ever."

The Dragon frowned a little. "I have to trade with a disadvantage?" he asked. "Why can't I just get what I trade for?"

"Because the technique I trade with you will be the one force that will make it possible for you to form pill clouds," Alex said. "Will that suffice?"

The Dragon didn't say anything. He was ready to make any kind of offer for the opportunity to learn how to make a pill that could form pill clouds.

"I'll say the oath," the Dragon said in the end. "But you have to tell me what it is that I'm speaking the oath for. What exactly is the technique going to do?"

Alex thought for a moment and explained the best he could without giving away anything about it that could clue in the soul as to what sort of technique it was.

After listening to Alex's words, the Dragon thought for a moment. "Let me see what I can trade you with," he said. "Give me some time."

Alex did.

The dragon went back to handling the trials, while Alex waited for the 3 hours of his own trial to come to an end.

It was such a long time that he didn't believe it would come to an end any time soon. Before it ended, the Dragon returned.

"Alright, I know what I am giving to you," he said. "A Saint pill recipe from the Immortal realm."

Alex narrowed his eyes. "I… have a lot of recipes, senior," he said. "I'm not sure I need another one. You will have to think of something else to trade with me."

"No, no, don't be so quick to dismiss it," the Dragon Soul said. "You haven't even heard what the pill is."

Alex nodded. "You're right," he said. "Please tell me what the pill is about, senior."

The Dragon smiled. "The pill I'm going to trade you with is one that will make you an Immortal," he said.

Alex thought for a moment that he had heard wrong. Had the Dragon really said what he had said?

"A pill that makes you an Immortal?" he was confused. "How is that even po—"

"Temporarily!" the Dragon quickly added. "Sorry. Temporarily. It doesn't permanently make you an immortal. I should have mentioned that."

"Oh!" Alex felt a little better hearing about the pill. It didn't sound so impossible. Taking the new information into context, he was thought. "That's amazing."

"Mhm." The Dragon nodded to Alex.

genuinely surprised by the existence of this pill.

"A pill that can give you the strength of an Immortal, huh?" Alex thought. "That's amazing."

"Mhm." The Dragon nodded to Alex.

"Any downsides?" Alex asked him. "It sounds too good to just improve your cultivation base by that amount. Some pills improve your cultivation base, but each one of them causes a problem afterward. What about this one? It must do something truly bad."

The Dragon's expression changed the slightest amount, which Alex failed to grasp. He thought for a moment and sighed. "Depending on the gap, it… It destroys most of your cultivation base," he said. "If you're close to reaching the Immortal realm, say you're in the Saint Transformation realm, then you probably will just drop a bunch of cultivation realm after going through Qi deviation."

"However, if you are weaker, say… barely starting at the Saint Soul realm, then you will wreck your body to the point where you will lose your cultivation base," the Dragon said.

Seeing Alex's face change told the Dragon that the trade wasn't going to go well. "I'll come up with something else to trade you with," the Dragon said. "Just wait for a bit for me to think of something. I don't have anything on me at the time, so I can only give you what I remember."

"No," Alex said quickly after thinking for a bit. He remembered the fight between the Dragon Emperor and the Oathbreakers. The two attacks at the end had made him scared in a way he had never been before.

"I will take it," Alex said. "I will take the pill recipe."

"Are you sure?" the Dragon asked. He had been trying to dupe Alex with the pill recipe as someone from a higher realm. However, hearing that he actually wanted the pill recipe made him frown.

"You… do you feel like you need this recipe?" he asked.

"For a worst-case scenario, yes," Alex said. "It's good to have it if I end up having nothing else to save myself in certain situations."

"But you'll destroy your body and cultivation," the Dragon said.

"Better than dying, don't you think?" he asked.

The Dragon nodded. "That is how you're supposed to think of it with this pill," he said. "I had assumed someone from the lower realm would not have the same mentality."

"Are you looking down on us, senior?" Alex asked with a smile.

The Dragon smiled back. "It seems I have," he said. "Give me an empty talisman. I'll write down the recipe for you."

Alex didn't hesitate and quickly brought out a talisman before handing it to the Dragon.

The Dragon levitated the talisman next to him and used his spiritual sense to write on that talisman. He held onto the talisman and looked at Alex. "Bring out your technique," he said.

"Please speak the oath first, senior," Alex said.

The Dragon thought for a moment and nodded. There was nothing he could lose from this anyway. "I vow to never reveal the pill-forming technique you will pass along to me," he said.

Alex waited and felt the familiar aura of the heavens lock onto the Dragon. He felt the oath fall into place and the Dragon's soul shuddered a little. "Are you fine with this?" he asked.

Alex nodded. "That works for me," he said and brought out a talisman that held the technique. He passed along the technique to the Dragon's soul and the dragon passed back the talisman that he held.

Alex took the talisman and quickly looked through the pill recipe. A few of the ingredients in there seemed hard to get, but mostly it was an actual recipe.

It would take him some time to tell if it did what the Dragon said it did or not.

"If you are somehow not able to break through to the Immortal realm by the time I am supposed to leave this place," the Dragon said. "Come find me. I'll take you back with me."

Chapter 1511 The Dragon's Reason

"That is an interesting proposition," Alex said to the Dragon soul. He made an expression of contemplating the offer in front of him, but there was no way he was going to accept it.

He was only thinking of how to lightly reject.

Even if there was a chance that he would never reach the Immortal realms on his own, which he knew with his talent was nearly impossible, there were still far better choices for who he would go to the Immortal lands with.

Scarlet was the first obvious choice with their bond, and then Bai Jingshen. However, if Pearl reached the Immortal realm before either of them were to leave, then he would go with Pearl.

There was no reason to accept the Dragon's offer right now.

After thinking for a bit, Alex asked the Dragon something. "How long do you plan on staying in this realm?" he asked.

The dragon thought for a bit and frowned. "To be honest… I do not know how long it has exactly been since I came here," he said. "Wait a minute."

He spent a short time counting the number of years where he had to work on the trail. "I have been here for nearly 75 thousand years. Maybe a little less," he said.

Alex couldn't help but let his feeling of shock show through his face. "75 thousand years?" he asked with his eyes widened. He put "I know they change every 15 thousand years, and the next cycle is going to end in less than a thousand years," Alex said. "Another the numbers together and came up with something. "You came here with the 2nd Azure Dragon?"

"Yes!" the Dragon said with a surprised look on his face. "You know when which ones came?"

"I know they change every 15 thousand years, and the next cycle is going to end in less than a thousand years," Alex said. "Another Azure Dragon should come then."

The Dragon soul nodded. "That is correct," he said.

"So… do you leave with the current one?" Alex asked, trying to discern the features in the soul's expression. He wanted to see if he had any knowledge of the outside world.

Especially when it came to the life and death of the Azure Dragon.

"No," the Dragon soul said. "I leave after 105 millennia. That is the deal I made before I came here."

"Deal?" Alex couldn't help but ask. "May I ask what sort of deal it was?"

"A simple one," the Dragon soul said. "Because I lost my body already, I needed a new one. As such, I was made to make a deal where if I remained here for 105 thousand years and tested the human's alchemy knowledge, I could go back and have the Azure Dragons make me a very strong body."

"Oh, is that why you agreed to this?" Alex asked with an understanding look. Internally, he couldn't fathom that someone was going to stay somewhere for 105 thousand years just so they could get a new body.

That was such a long amount of time that Alex couldn't even comprehend it entirely. He hadn't even lived for a hundred years, never make a body for myself that would fit me. But the Azure Dragons? Oh boy, do they have the resources?"

and the Dragon soul was waiting a hundred thousand, just as a soul.

"Yes," the Dragon answered Alex. "With the resources I have, I could never make a body for myself that would fit me. But the Azure Dragons? Oh boy, do they have the resources?"

Alex slowly nodded. "Is that so?" he said. "Your world sounds amazing, senior. But if it's going to take you 30 thousand years more to leave this place, I do not know how you could take me with you. I would either reach the Immortal realm myself by then or die trying."

The Dragon paused and then grimaced at the thought. "You are correct," he said. "I guess I didn't think of how long a Saint realm cultivator could live."

"It's okay, senior," Alex said. "Thank you for thinking about me at least."

The Dragon said nothing and simply nodded. "I suppose we have nothing else to talk about then. I will return to handling the trials—"

"Actually, senior!" Alex quickly interjected. "I have something else to ask of you."

The Dragon stopped in his tracks and looked at Alex. "What do you need to ask?"

Alex hesitated a bit, but he had to ask this. "Are you able to leave this place as you want?" he asked. "Maybe go outside for some time? I was wondering if—"

"If I could help you?" the Dragon asked before shaking his head. "Ignoring the fact that I am but only a soul, and that I am an Immortal in a lower realm, I have also spoken an oath to forever remain in this place and never intervene in the matters of the mortals."

"If you are in need of help, then I am afraid that I cannot help you."

Alex frowned a bit. "Even if the matter doesn't pertain to the mortals. Can you still not help me?"

The Dragon frowned a little. "I can never leave this place. That is the main obstacle here. No matter the type of conflict you are in, I cannot help you." New n0vel chapters are published on

'Dammit!' Alex said internally. It seemed he wouldn't get any help in regard to the Azure Dragon's death.

"Thank you anyway, senior," Alex bowed a little as he had nothing else to say.

"Are you still going to take part in the trial? You seem good enough to pass it all."

"Even if I'm good enough for it, I plan to sit through it all," Alex said.

The Dragon soul chuckled a bit. "Why did you even come here?" he asked. "If you knew you were good enough for this, I don't see the point of you coming to the trial. Is it to show off?"

Alex laughed along with the Dragon at the question. "Show off? No," he said. "As I said, I am not from the Eastern Continent, so this is my first time coming to this trial. I simply wanted to see how it was handled and what sort of tests were held here."

"Is that so?" the Dragon asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"But you knew you were going to do well, didn't you?" he asked.

"I didn't doubt it," Alex said. "Besides, my reason for coming here wasn't just for the Alchemy trials. I actually wanted to see how far I could go for all the trials, except the music ones."

"You want to test yourself on the other 5 trials?" the Dragon asked with a surprised look on his face. "That's quite daring. Are you good with the other professions?

"Not as good as I am in Alchemy, but I can say I'm decent," Alex said. "I'll have to see how well I do there."

The Dragon nodded. "Good luck on getting it all white then," he said. "I will leave you to it now."

The Dragon disappeared and arrived back outside where he started giving out other various trials to the many that were inside.

Alex looked at the talisman on his hand once the Dragon left him. He had tried to pay some attention to it while the Dragon was there, but it seemed impossible to fully focus on it with the Dragon looming over him.

Now, however, he could finally read through the entire talisman and see the pill he had obtained from the trade between the two.

The Forbidden Immortality Pill

Chapter 1512 Hardest Trial

Just as the Dragon had mentioned, the pill would grant one a fake Immortal cultivation realm that could give them the strength of a newly ascended Immortal. However, when used, the backlash alone would wreck one's body and soul.

Alex wasn't worried about having his body wrecked as much, but if his soul was hurt as well, that could be problematic.

'Well, it's a worst-case scenario pill in the end,' he thought. 'A forbidden pill, only to be eaten when you're about to die. There's no point in worrying about my body and soul at that point.'

He looked through the ingredients in the list and frowned a little. Most of the ingredients were fine, nothing hard to obtain even if they were considered rare.

But the main ingredient that made up the pill was something called a Fire Coral. Alex knew about the ingredient simply based on the name and what he had in his mind, nothing else.

He had never seen this ingredient in real life as it grew only in the deepest parts of the ocean, on top of a fire spirit vein.

Alex grimaced a little when reading that. The chances of making the pill had suddenly become minuscule. "I might have to ask Bai Jingshen for some help once I return," he thought to himself.

That was the only way he could think of acquiring it as he was now. The deep ocean was a scary place after all.

After some time, Alex was given another trial as well. In this one, he had to make a pill recipe using the ingredients listed and get as close as he could to telling what the pill would do.

This wasn't as hard for Alex, and he easily completed the task in a quarter of the hours allocated. When he passed the trial, the color around his wall changed once again, growing lighter.

The dark blue walls had changed to a shade of a lighter blue that could still go a shade or two lighter. When they were fully rid of all the colors, the wall would become entirely white, which was what the Dragon had wished him good luck on.

When the walls became white, it meant that the trial was over and that he had passed it all.

The next trial came earlier than the allocated time was entirely over. Either the participants had all left or had all passed. There was no in-between here.

The next trial was rather simple. It asked one to make multiple pills in the same cauldron. One would have to change recipes ever so slightly to deal with this, but Alex had gotten used to this for so long that he didn't even think about it at this point and just did it.

The speed at which he finished this one surprised the Dragon. Thankfully, Alex hadn't bothered to make pill clouds so he didn't show off a lot.

Once the pills were made, his walls became a light shade of blue that had nearly lost its color.

One more trial and he would be done.

Only, this was going to be the hardest one yet.

The trials were never made with the intention that there would be someone amongst the saints who could make pill clouds. It was never even made with the intention that someone could reach Immortal grade with their pills.

The quality of the pill was never the concern of the trials. Only the knowledge and skill to make them good enough.

So, it was true that even people without any skill to make the best pills had a chance at passing all the trials.

Still, there was a reason why barely anyone passed through all the trials. In the 75-thousand-year-old history of the secret realm, there was a reason why only a handful of people ever reached white.

And that had to do with the final trial that Alex was being given.

Alex's eyes widened in shock when he heard that final trial. He was asked to do something he wasn't even sure was possible. After all, he had never even thought of doing such a thing.

The trial demanded that he make two pills. That would be simple enough if he wasn't supposed to make two different pills, at the same time, and in the same cauldron.

Alex frowned at the thought of what he was going to have to do for this trial.

2 different pills in the same cauldron. What sort of maniac would do such a thing? The entire point of making a pill was to weave together the energies of different ingredients in one place so they produced different effects.

If you tried to make two pills at the same time, the energies would mix together, rendering a failure for both pills. So then why was it that the Dragon put this as the last challenge? Was it really possible?

Alex had 2 whole days to complete the challenge. He had already been in this place for nearly 3 days, so now having 2 days meant that he would be here for 5 days.

5 days each in 6 different trial rooms of the Realm of Trial meant that a single person could complete it all in a month at best. Given that the trial was supposed to run for only a month, one was never meant to go through it all.

'2 pills at once?' Alex asked himself. 'How do I do it?'

His heart was telling him to use pills that didn't need as many ingredients and were thus not as complicated. However, for some reason, his pride stopped him from choosing the pills for such a reason.

If such a thing was possible to be done, then he would do it with an everyday pill. He randomly chose a simple healing pill and a pill to improve one's cultivation speed.

Once he chose them, he looked through the two ingredients trying to find conflict between the two. But that didn't feel right again.

Alex saw two possibilities here.

The first possibility was that you were not supposed to be able to do this. In which case, the trial here was to know that it was impossible and thus not do anything. Alex didn't believe that was the case.

Then the second possibility would be that you were supposed to be able to do this, and you were supposed to be able to do it with any recipe you had.

"I will have to try with these two then," Alex spoke softly. Memory was on the furnace in front of him, ready to accept whatever ingredient he was to put in.

However, Alex couldn't bring himself to put in any of the ingredients. What did he put in first anyway? The Hanging pillar vine for the healing pill or the Silver Rite citrus peel for the cultivation pill?

Did it even matter?

He stayed there for a good half hour before coming to a conclusion.

"It doesn't matter," he thought. "My task right now is not to do it correctly, but to do it wrong and learn from it. There is no point in trying to do it correctly from the start when I've never done this before."

Thinking as such, Alex took the Hanging Pillar vine and put it into Memory to begin.

Chapter 1513 Success

Alex knew what the result would be the moment he put the two ingredients into the cauldron. Due to the difference in the temperature and the motion of the two ingredients according to their recipe, one of them had to burn while the other one barely cooked.

The energy released from the two ingredients wasn't what they should have been either. While the vine had released regular energy, the fruit had burnt and released its energy way too quickly.

Alex stopped and quickly threw away everything before clearing the cauldron.

"So, I can't send them in at once," he spoke out loud. He liked talking through what he was doing and it certainly helped him. "One at a time then?"

He tried.

He first threw in the vine and controlled it until it was reduced to nothing but powder with the energy in the cauldron. Then, he threw in the fruit.

The fruit turned into powder as well and its energy was released inside the cauldron. However, as he had expected it to happen, the moment the energy was released, it mixed with the energy from the vine, ruining both of them at the same time. This was not the way to go well.

Alex cleared the cauldron again, but this time he noticed that they were separate powders, neither of which was ruined. "So the Energy is the problem. Not the powder?" he wondered. "Does that mean that if I can keep the two energies separate somehow, it will be possible?"

He tried for the third time. He pulled out the two ingredients and did the same as before. Only, this time, he tried his best to use his Qi to keep the two energies separate from each other.

He made the energy from the vine remain on the upper section of the cauldron, while the energy from the fruit remained on the lower section. It was a somewhat difficult task, but it was certainly not impossible.

It didn't even burden him as much as he would've thought it would, but that simply meant he had stronger Intent now and could do more without losing much spiritual energy.

Once the two energies stopped mixing, it was time for the third ingredient, which would be the second ingredient for the healing pill.

Alex took out the ingredient and put it in, without a care in the world for making be good. However, the moment he put it in, he realized there was a problem. The energy at the bottom of the cauldron belonged to the ingredient that did not belong to the recipe that was for the ingredient he just put.

So, the moment he added it, he knew something was going to go wrong. And it did.

This try of his was a failure as the wrong ingredients mixed together, creating the wrong combination. He had to give up right then and there.

"That was wrong as well," Alex thought. "Then should I have put the fruit's energy on top? No, it would work for the 3rd ingredient, but the 4th one I put would be in the same problem."

That stumped him for a few seconds. He thought for a moment, trying to deduce what the core problem here was. And the answer was surprisingly simple.

Gravity.

Anything he threw in there would fall to the bottom where the heat was present from the fire. Normally, it all had to fall to the bottom as not all the cauldron would heat the same, at least not if you wanted to make the pill quickly.

However, with Dao of Heat, he wasn't limited to that. With his Dao of Heat, he could heat up the entire cauldron to the same temperature every time. It would certainly use a lot more Qi and Intent than normally, but that was possible.

So... he didn't have to have the ingredients ever fall to the bottom.

"I can have it at the top." Alex slowly came to the conclusion. "I can simply make one pill on the top half, and the other on the bottom half."

He resumed making his pill again, with newfound ideas to help him.

The vine went in first, and then the fruit. Together, they formed 2 different sections in the cauldron, the top and the bottom, where their energy had settled, kept from mixing together thanks to Alex's Qi and Intent.

Then, Alex sent in the third ingredient, processing it normally as it belonged in the recipe for the bottom pill. Once done, he put in the fourth ingredient, the 2nd ingredient for the top pill.

The ingredient teleported onto the top half of the cauldron and remained there. Then, Alex used his Dao to heat up the entire cauldron to the required temperature at once and did what he would have done at the bottom.

Once completed, the energy from the ingredient mixed with the energy on the upper half, perfectly mixed as it would have in a normal pill.

Alex smiled a little and continued. One after another, he alternated between the two recipes, making the pills. It took longer than it would have taken for him to make the pills back to back, but in the end, he did it.

Once after another, he put the two pills in the cauldron and pulled it out with a bright smile on his face. Neither of the pills was even close to touching the 90% range because of how much time he had wasted while making them, but he had done what the trial had asked for.

And so, the barely blue walls around him slowly turned white. He had passed the trial.

The Dragon floated down in front of him with an expecting look. "For a second I thought you were going to fail," he said. "I didn't realize you would have such trouble with this."

"I've never done something like this before," Alex said truthfully. "It took some time for me to know what to do."

"Well, it's just making pills normally, except you split the space inside your cauldron to make it appear as if there are two sections. Once you do it, you'll be able to do it all the time," the Dragon said.

Alex slowly nodded, slightly out of it as he looked at the two pills in his hands.

"Congratulations on finishing the trial. You can leave now," the Dragon said.

"Can I stay for a bit," Alex quickly said. "I feel like I need to spend some time on what I just learned."

"Hmm," the Dragon soul thought for a moment. "Alright, I'll give you an hour. Take what you learned and try to understand it. I can't keep you here for long, so you'll have to leave after that."

Alex nodded. "Thank you, senior."

The dragon nodded back and left him.

Alex remained in there, surrounded by the bright white walls as he looked down on his pills once again. Neither of the pills he made were up to par for him at all.

And he knew the reason. It was because he wasted time between the pills. Had he not done that, he could have made two different pills in the same cauldron at once.

So, he decided to do exactly that.

Chapter 1514 Weak Memory

The main problem with making two pills at once, from what Alex had come to realize after a bit of testing, was Heat. If you wanted to make two pills at once, and truly make it at once and not one after another or alternatively, then you needed to make it so that your cauldron had two different temperatures at once.

The upper half of the cauldron, where one pill would be made, would have to have a different temperature from the other half of the cauldron. That required one not just to have a Dao of Heat, but also a Dao of Heat Conduction to stop the heat from flowing from one section to the other.

On top of that, the different temperatures in the same cauldron would cause the cauldron to have a durability problem.

Alex worried Memory would start showing such problems as well. Unlike Midnight, which he had kept with himself for the past 2 decades, Memory had been lost to him for a majority of that time, and had started making pills with it half a decade ago.

As such, Memory hadn't grown much, and that scared Alex from putting it through harsh situations. Still, he needed to do this. He needed to try and he did.

And in the end, he succeeded. But not without finding that he couldn't do much more than what he had done, or else Memory wouldn't be able to handle it.

If the cauldron's physical body was damaged, Alex could maybe find a way to fix it. But if the budding spirit inside of it was damaged, he wasn't sure what he could do to fix that at all.

So, he decided to not overdo it at all.

A lightning bolt fell from the Pill Cloud at once, stopped by Alex. 4 more subsequent lightning bolts fell, which Alex stopped before stopping altogether. He brought out the two pills, of which one was in the upper 90s in terms of Harmony, and the other one had 5 lightning scars.

Once Alex had the two pills, he stopped to think about what he had done. He had made two pills in the same cauldron at the same time as if he were working with two different cauldrons.

It required a lot of mental focus and Intent as well as Qi, but there was still quite a lot for him to spare. Unfortunately, Memory couldn't handle much more, the spirit at least.

Splitting the cauldron into two sections, each of which had a different temperature strained Memory too much.

However, even though he decided to not strain Memory too much, he had achieved an epiphany regarding something and would now have to do just that.

"I'll have to improve your tolerance to outside temperature and stress, Memory," he said softly. "It will take you some time to get used to it, but when you're done, you'll become stronger." He spoke while caressing the side of the cauldron with gentle strokes.

Alex got a vague impression back from Memory, but it wasn't close to being anything informative. Still, that made Alex quite happy.

"Rest for now," he said. "We'll begin once I'm done with this trial."

He put Memory back into his storage ring and stood up. "I'll leave now," he spoke.

The dragon soul nodded. "I hope I'll see you in the future," he spoke.

"I'll try to come the next time it opens up again," Alex told the Dragon.

The Dragon nodded. "Thank you for the technique," he said. "I'll send you out now."

Alex thanked the Dragon soul one last time and let the teleportation aura grab onto him, sending him outside the building that housed the realm of trial. He arrived outside the walls, surrounded by bright, white light.

The moment the pillar of light vanished, and he reappeared to everyone, he could see the surprised faces that surrounded him.

"White light!" someone shouted.

"Someone passed all the trial!" another person shouted.

Soon enough, everyone in the surroundings heard their words and turned to look at Alex. A few people recognized him and the information spread like wildfire.

Within a minute, every single person standing on the side of the Alchemy trial knew that Alex, the king of the Southern Continent, had now passed the trial with a white color.

He had passed with the highest grade one could get. Something that very few people in the entire history of the Realm of Trials had passed.

Soldiers surrounded Alex as guards, giving him some space in the middle of the crowd. Before Alex could decide what to do next, someone quickly flew in.

"Your majesty!" the man shouted with an incredulous look and a voice inflection that told Alex that he was very much amazed by the scene he had put forth. "What an incredible sight! I didn't think that you would have passed the entire trial in a mere 4 days."

Alex looked at the handsome newcomer and smiled. "I only did what I was best at, King Qian," he answered. "I would say this was even expected of me."

"Of course," the new king of the Gold Empire spoke to him. "Still, this is quite incredible. Expectation is one thing, but the result itself can be amazing even with everything else added on top."

"The Gold Kingdom hasn't seen a white light from any of the 6 trials in what... 2 centuries now? The last one for Alchemy trials was... 3 centuries ago I believe. The Crown Prince's fiancee was the one who achieved a white rank at that time I believe. And before that... it was 6 millennia ago, with His Majesty himself."

Alex hadn't known this information about the trials before so he was surprised. 'So Lady Zhan went through this as well?' he thought. It wasn't that hard of a test, so it was understandable. What surprised him instead was that the Crown Prince hadn't done that.

He was supposed to be in Level 9, along with her as well.

"Thank you for the information, King Qian," Alex spoke. "But I must get back to the trials."

The king frowned a bit, surprised at Alex's words. "The trials? But you just completed it, with white light at that. There's no point in repeating the same trial over and over, Your Majesty."

"I never said I was doing the same thing, did I?" Alex asked.

The king was slightly taken aback. "You wish to go to another trial?" he asked.

"Absolutely," Alex said. "Aside from the Music trial, I'm going to enter all of it."

"Ah, I see," the man said. "I'll wish you luck then."

The king walked away afterward, leaving Alex to go to whatever trial it was that he wanted to.

Alex met up with his elders briefly after the king was gone to see how the other alchemists were doing.

"Most returned with indigo or blue lights," Liang Shufen said. "No one came back with any red. 3 came out a day ago with regular blue light."

"As far as I can tell, Jai Heiyun is still inside. If all goes well, she might get white light as well."

"I don't know," Alex said. "The final question was certainly quite difficult. Still, I wish her the best. For now, I think I'll head on over to the Formation trials."

Chapter 1515 From One Trial to Another

Make a circle with a 5-pointed star such that the points are touching the circle.

Make a formation to create fire and wind at the same time.

Draw a formation on the ground itself.

Draw a Saint formation in metal rods.

Link two Saint formations together.

These were the sorts of trials that Alex had to go through for his Formation trial.

The trial master here was another soul as well, but as to just what beast it was, Alex wasn't able to tell. Its name was also not something that helped him figure out its family at all.

As far as Alex could tell, the first Dragon Emperor had found someone good with formations and made a deal with them, disregarding just who they were.

As such, Alex couldn't find a way to talk with this soul at all. It was likely that he wouldn't get a chance to talk with it at all.

The Frostfire Inkbrush worked amazingly in Alex's hands, drawing the best formations it could. However, the extent of how good the formation would be was still in Alex's hands in the end.

And in the end, he wasn't good enough.

Having to divert his attention to two formations at once, crafting them side by side was not something Alex had ever trained at. He didn't even know what use such a skill would have, but the trial asked for it and he failed.

He did manage to make somewhat of a good formation, but it was not up to par for the trial master and thus he was sent out.

Alex flew back out in a light blue light, just 2 more passes away from reaching another white. His appearance didn't cause as much of a stir at first and only seemed to do so when people recognized him after the soldiers surrounded him once more.

The king did not come to congratulate him this time around. It seemed that light blue was not as impressive as white light.

The one who did come was Whisker. The Elders hadn't realized that he had let Whisker go through the trials on his own. So, when the barely blue light teleported him outside, they were all surprised.

Seeing a mouse come out of the trial wasn't an everyday occurrence.

Beasts took part in the trial sometimes, especially ones from the Beast Academies. However, after the Beast Paradise had closed itself, the number of beasts that showed up to the trials was barely any.

Not to mention, they were never good enough to nearly complete the entire challenge.

"You did good," Alex said after hearing how far Whisker had made it. "So you failed on the last trial, huh? Do you want to try it again?"

Whisker shook his head. "I don't have good enough control," Whisker said. "I will need to learn it before I do it again."

"You do need to have a strong Intent," Alex said. "I'll train you sometime later. Maybe even let you learn some Fire Dao as well. You're close to learning a few, right?"

"I've seen you use it quite a bit while making pills," Whisker said.

Alex smiled. "Good," he said. "If you don't want to go through any more trials for now, I understand."

Whisker couldn't be happier to not have to do something. He quickly disappeared into his own beast space and was no longer outside.

Once he was gone, the Elders finally stepped closer and started speaking again.

"It's a shame you didn't reach white again, your majesty," Yao Ning said. "We could've shown how incredible you were."

"Are you saying reaching light blue is not incredible?" Alex asked the elder.

"No, that is not what I meant," Yao Ning tried to explain, but Alex's laughter interrupted her.

"I'm joking," he said quickly. "I am somewhat disappointed I failed too. If I knew what I would've had to do beforehand, I might've passed that test too, entering the final trial. Alas, I failed."

"Do you think you could pass if you went in again?" Liang Shufen asked this time around.

Alex paused for a moment. "Maybe," he answered. "I doubt I would fail at the test I just failed at. I might fail at the next one, but who can say without me going through it all."

"Right? So—"

"Not now," Alex said without pausing. "I'll go through the rest of the trials and see where I end up with them. If I have the time at the end of it, which I most likely will have, I will go back to the ones I didn't pass entirely."

"That's... understandable," Yao Ning answered. "Do what you think is best, your majesty. We will trust your decision."

Alex nodded and decided to rest for a bit before going to the next trial. He could feel the coldness in his Dantian filling up and that needed to be contained.

At the same time, Pearl and Whisker hadn't cultivated for a while, so he needed to give them some time as well. They were all close to breaking through after all.

Alex especially was close to breaking through. A moment's thought would start his breakthrough. He was that close. However, he couldn't do it just yet. Somewhere deep in his heart, he knew that there were expectations in him that he needed to squash before he tried breaking through.

He could hope for his cousin to be alive, but keeping an expectation of it was dangerous. He was sure he had gotten rid of all of the things that his Inner Demon could attack him with, but he doubted he was correct there as well.

In the end, he could only wait. After the Realm of Trial was closed, he would try again. And he hoped he wouldn't fail that time around.

Two days later, once the effects of the cultivation pill wore off, Alex walked out of his hotel room again, walking directly toward the Talisman section of the Trial area.

As soon as he arrived, he was given main priority and was immediately sent inside to take part in the Talisman Trial.

Chapter 1516 Simple Failure

The trial for Talisman was surprisingly difficult. Alex was asked to do more than he had expected a good chunk of the way through the trial, and as such he was sent out.

He arrived in a flash of purple light that edged on being indigo. It was close to blue, but not quite yet.

Barely anyone gave him any attention when he arrived. No one cared for you when there was the slightest hint of red in your color.

People noticed Alex, but this time there was no fanfare. They had heard about his achievement in the Alchemy trials already, and the Formation trial's results were not hidden from them either.

They had paid attention when he had entered, but when he came out, no one bothered to care. He can't be good at everything he does, they thought. Some even voiced it out loud.

"He nearly made us think he was perfect," someone said not far away from Alex. He had tried to keep his words a whisper, but if he spoke it out loud, he had intended for Alex to hear it.

Anyone who wanted to have a private conversation wouldn't speak out loud like this and instead would use their spiritual sense.

"What was that purple? Indigo? That's better than halfway, isn't it? He did amazing in Alchemy and Formation, so the fact that he got this far in Talismans too makes him quite the talent," another person added. Their voice held little jealousy.

Various such conversations were held around Alex, but he ignored them. He looked back at the trial, intending to return immediately, but he couldn't.

There was a reason he had failed and going back right away would still mean failure for him when he got to the same trial again.

The talisman trial asked for more than just making talismans. It asked for scripts and runes that did not need to be placed onto a piece of paper to be activated.

That was quite easy for Alex. Behind Alchemy, this was what he assumed he was the best at. After all, his mother had received a book with detailed knowledge of Talismans and he had learned a lot from it.

That was another reason why being sent out this early didn't stick right with him. However, the trials had asked for more than just runes and scripts and making talismans.

It had asked him to make an ink, any ink, and then make a talisman with it that worked. Alex lacked the ingredients to make inks. New n0vel chapters are published on

He was never the type of man to learn how to make inks. His focus was on alchemy, so he focused on every aspect of alchemy. But for Talisman, he just focused on the runes and how to draw them perfectly on the paper.

As for the ink that he used to write in the talisman, he would just buy it from someone else who made it. That had been what had made him fail. That was why he had been sent out this early.

'I was doing so well too,' he thought. He looked through his ingredients again. There were quite a lot of it, but the ingredients for making talisman inks didn't overlap with alchemy ingredients all that often.

Alex knew a few ink recipes, but he was missing the ingredients for every single one. If he returned to the talisman trial once again, he would fail once again at the same trial.

He needed to buy some ingredients before going back in.

The elders soon found him and he told them what he wanted. The elders quickly got to it and returned with rather bad news.

"Everything in the city has been sold and nothing has been restocked yet," Yao Ning told him.

"It gets restocked every few days, but the amount of people here buy it the moment they get restocked," Liang Shufen added. "If we want one, we'll have to go to the next city."

Alex thought for a moment. "Go," he said. "Buy as much as you can. I don't need a lot, but just enough. It will take you some time, so in the meantime, I'll head on over to the Artifact creation."

He arrived inside the trial room half an hour later. He was first on the priority list, but he still had to wait for someone to come out of the trials before he went in.

After he was in, he was once again in a black room, as he had with all the different trials.

This time, the trial master was a human soul. Or so Alex thought until he saw the female's slit eyes. Nothing else looked beast-like in her physique, but the eyes told him that she was some sort of serpentine beast.

He even wondered if she was a descendant of the Azure Dragon, only so far removed from the bloodline that she barely held any of their physical traits.

She introduced herself as Shiu Longxiu, a name Alex knew he was only going to have to remember for now. She explained to the newcomers what they were going to have to do and how the trials would be held.

The first test was the simplest of all tests for an artifact master. They were supposed to make a simple storage bag. It didn't matter how good the bag was, only that it worked.

Alex started working on it immediately. He had prepared the leather beforehand, so all he needed to do right now was pour some Qi into the leather, make some Qi lines, and then use a formation to drag some of the space into the bag.

Even as he did what he was told, he wondered if it was a good idea to take away space from a room that was already being manipulated by formations. However, since the woman had asked for it, Alex trusted that she knew what she was doing.

And it seemed he was right to trust her.

The moment he was done dragging away the space, he felt the space around him expand just a little more. The formation that worked in the room was constantly working to restore the space in case of any disruption.

As a result, no one had to worry about space collapsing by a bunch of humans taking away a bit of it to make storage bags.

Alex saw his room light up bright red. He understood that he had passed and so he sat down and waited for the others to pass before the next test began.

Just 5 minutes later, his new trial was given.

Separate a metal from its ore.

That was an easy task for Alex. He didn't even have to use any specific blacksmithing techniques and neither did he have to use any forge.

He took out a gold ore and melted the gold right onto his hand, separating it so simply. He had wondered if he should use some materials on it to purify it more, but the light around the room lit up a bright red color, notifying him that he was done.

"That was simple," he thought. He put away the gold and waited for half an hour before the rest of the trials he would have to go through.

Chapter 1517 Re-Entering

The artifact trials were easy for the most part. There were some trials he struggled a bit on where he had to answer questions about different artifacts and how they could possibly have been made.

But after consulting with the knowledge he had gained while he was in the artifact school, he managed to come up with the answers that were satisfactory to the soul that governed the trials.

Alex went on for a long while, passing one trial after another until he came upon an impossible one that asked him to make a Whip with a water element attack crafted into it.

Alex was aware of how he could make a whip, and there was plenty of leather and metal in his storage to create one. However, he had no idea how one created Water element attacks in it at all.

He could create one for a sword, but he hadn't learned to make one for a whip. He tried his best for all the time that was given to him and he even tried adding the Qi lines from the sword into the whip, but that didn't work.

In the end, he failed.

Blue light surrounded him as he was teleported outside when the span of time allocated for the trial had passed. It wasn't just him. Nearly 20 other individuals had been teleported out as well.

All of them had failed the same test as Alex. He felt a little better knowing this. Seeing the situation, he could understand that not many passed the trial, if any. If they did, it would be because they know something that was not publically known.

Alex had only trained from what was available in the Royal School of Artifact. Even then, he had only learned the basics. He wasn't aware of everything that was in the school.

A few people glanced at him this time around, talking softly to each other. Alex ignored whatever they were going to say and directly went over to the hotel room to rest.

Over a week had passed since the last time he had cultivated, so he needed to cultivate once again. The coldness in his dantian was even more pronounced than the time he had come out of the Alchemy trials.

While he cultivated along with his beasts, the elders let him know that his request had been fulfilled. They had gone over two cities to find the ingredients he had asked for.

Alex happily accepted it when he left the other day and made his way back to the Trial of Talisman. As a person of the highest priority, he was quickly sent back in, and he arrived back in the black room where the trials were held.

The white soul of the deer-turned-human floated in the air, addressing some other people who were not them. It was only a minute later that he finally introduced himself once again.

It was the first time Alex had repeated the same trial, so it felt weird knowing what was to come. And what was to come, he passed splendidly.

The questions were all entirely different from the last time, but the essence of what was being tested was the same.

Create a talisman for protection. Create a talisman with these two runes. Find out what this talisman does. Alter this talisman to make it do something else with as few changes as you can.

It wasn't a free pass, but it was an easy path all the way to the trial that asked him to make some ink and make a talisman out of it. Each talisman had a unique purpose and a unique set of energy that made it work.

Most of them were neutral, but a lot of them had attributes like Fire, Water, and all other elements. It even included Space and Time, but only Space talismans were easy to get by.

Each of these required a different combination of ingredients to form an ink. It was the ink that gave the pattern to the runes, which would then use the Qi to do things that were governed by the heavens.

Each unique set of runes required a unique ink of its own to match it perfectly and bring out the best of its ability. Making a unique ink for each talisman was difficult.

Not only was it difficult to make so many different types of ink, it was nearly impossible to know what combination of ingredients created those inks. So, most resorted to using common ink with reduced effectiveness.

Most talented talisman makers knew how to switch up a few ingredients to improve the effectiveness of their ink, but it was not possible to make it absolutely perfect. At least, not without a ton of luck, or a heavenly fortune of some old Talisman maker.

Still, the normal inks that were made were still different for all types of talisman, and Alex knew that. His mother knew a lot more than him, but she had taught him what she knew back in the Luminance empire.

He hadn't had much time to improve on it, but he had that knowledge. So, he swiftly created a neutral ink that he knew would match the combination of runes he was going to draw next and made a talisman out of it.

He completed the trial, passing where he had failed last time, and waited for the next trial.

He reached dark blue after completing the next trial, blue with the one after that, and sky blue with another one.

For the second to last trial, Alex was made to make a single talisman with 100 different runes, each unique and working in tandem to do something of his choice. He had half a day to complete that, and given the difficulty, he started immediately.

He first chose an ink that would match fire energy talismans. For some reason, he wanted to make a talisman that had something to do with fire. Once he selected the ink, he needed to come up with a pattern.

He took his Frostfire Inkbrush and put the brush at the lowest possible setting before drawing on the empty talisman papers with thin lines.

There were a hundred different runes he had to draw. The ones that were important would have to be large, so the rest he would have to make as tiny as he could.

He had a solid idea of what he wanted with the talisman at this point so he started drawing runes without hesitation.

HOT. VIOLENT. 2 KILOMETERS. BIG. BRIGHT. WHITE.

He added small runes to describe the effect of the talisman. He drew lines to connect the runes that needed to work in tandem while leaving a large enough space at the center.

DELAY. 2 SECONDS. TARGET. STRAIGHT. TELEPORT. ATTACH. DEFEND. BARRIER. TRIGGER.

He wrote what the talisman had to do. He could feel weariness, his mental focus wavering a little. His Intent was being drawn out by the difficulty of the task.

He continued adding the smaller runes that were there just to make the number count while leaving a large enough area at the center where the actual important words would go.

FIRE. QI. HEAT. CONDUCTION. BURNING. MELTING. COMBUSTION. FLAMES. BOILING. REACTION.

He finished adding the important runes and then added the most important one in the center.

EXPLOSION.

Once he joined the runes together, he moved back, looking at the talisman in front of him. It was a talisman that he made based on the first Dao he had ever learned.

A Talisman for Explosion.

Chapter 1518 Final Test

The walls surrounding Alex changed to a barely blue color. Seeing the color, he was sure that he was on the verge of completing all the trials. All he had to do now was pass the final test.

He sat on the cold floor, wondering what the next test was going to be. He had a hunch that it was going to have to do with talisman again and not just runes or scripts.

The people of this world were more used to talismans, and most of the people who came to get tested were ones who were good at talismans. So testing any other skill was counter-productive.

The woman had already tested their knowledge of runes and scripts, so the final one had to be a talisman-based trial for certain.

He had to wait for a while longer than he had expected to. There seemed to be some participants remaining that were still trying to control the last trial. When they ended, either in victory or in failure, the female soul spoke once more.

"For the final trial, the two of you will have to make the same talisman once again," the Soul said. "Get your materials ready. You'll begin right away."

Alex frowned at the last trial. He disregarded the knowledge that there was only a single other person in the trials with him and focused on the main trial itself. Even as he brought out the ink and blank talisman paper, he wondered why the test was so easy.

Simply remaking the talisman he had already made, did the soul think he was tired or something? Alex placed the blank talisman in front of him and waited for the moment he was allowed to draw.

Since he had already made the talisman once, it was easy to repeat it. A talisman with 100 runes was hard to make the first time, but not after that. This would be a walk in the park… so long as there wasn't something the soul was hiding about the test.

"Begin!" she shouted, the chilling voice entering Alex's ears.

The moment he heard those words, he put the brush to the page and…

He couldn't move it.

He couldn't move any part of his body at all as his mind focused as best as it could against the mental assault that was pressuring him. There was no aura here at all, no Qi. It was all Spiritual energy and a very strong Intent, by none other than the female soul in front of it.

'No wonder,' Alex thought, grunting a little. He flared his own spiritual sense to protect his mind and used his Intent to fight off the woman's Intent. It was difficult.

Struggle was all he could do right now.

'No wonder the test was so easy,' he thought. 'Making the talisman wasn't even the real test. It's this.' Even as those thoughts crossed his mind, he had to refocus his attention on fighting back the woman.

He struggled for 2 whole minutes against the Immortal soul's Spiritual sense and Intent before he took in anything that was happening outside. The woman had spoken.

"This will go on until you drop unconscious or you make a talisman that is acceptable," the woman said. "You better get started."

Alex felt a pang of anger at the fact that an Immortal was showing off her senses against regular Saints. Were they supposed to be as strong as her? No. Then why was she going so hard?

Of course, those were just complaints born out of the struggle. In reality, he knew that the woman probably wasn't even trying. As an Immortal, she could probably destroy their spirit with a single attack. Her Intent alone would be able to do some permanent damage to someone even without any Qi or energy behind it.

After a few minutes of struggling, Alex felt the spiritual sense let off just a tiny bit. At first, he wondered why she was lessening her assault. But, after a bit of self-check using the small amount of focus he was free to use, he came to understand that the rate at which she was pushing on them, making him use up his Spiritual energy was exactly the same rate at which it was replenished.

That was to say that she wanted to keep doing this forever, so long as the two finalists could endure the mental strain. One could lose consciousness even if their Spiritual sea was full after all.

The little relief that the woman had given Alex was enough for him to open his eyes and look down at the talisman in front of him. He was on his hands and knees at this point, and he slowly got himself back into a position where he could start drawing the runes on the paper.

Nearly 10 minutes had passed, and not a single drop of ink had touched the paper. Alex struggled however much he could, and tried to create the first of the many runes in the talisman.

The runes were small, so he needed a lot more attention than normal. He wasn't sure if he could get them right now, but he had to do it anyway.

Only… he wondered if he didn't have to do it right away.

He paused and looked back at the soul who wasn't even paying attention to him. He waited for a moment, thinking through things, trying to make sense of what he was planning. He didn't see anything wrong with what he wanted to do here.

He stopped himself from drawing anything into the talisman and moved his body back before sitting up straight. He stared at the woman with intense eyes, fighting back her own Spiritual energy and Intent as best he could.

The woman finally noticed what he was doing. She was a little confused as to what was going on. The other finalist was still struggling, even though she had reduced her spiritual push on them so that she could replenish her spiritual energy and not run out in no time.

And yet, Alex was not struggling. At least, not to the level she had intended him to struggle. His spiritual energy's replenishment rate hadn't improved obviously, so what had made his time easier here was his Intent.

It was much stronger than the other finalist. To the point that he had freed himself from only focusing on his own survival and instead had the chance to do something else. He had the chance to draw the talisman.

She had no plan on increasing her spiritual pressure on either of them anymore, but Alex didn't know that. For all he knew, she could increase her pressure any time now. And yet he was doing nothing but fighting back her pressure while staring at her intently.

That was when she realized exactly what was happening. "This kid!!" she couldn't help but say in surprise. "Is he serious?"

She stared back at Alex and saw him struggling, but this struggle was not something that was born out of a sense of self-preservation, but rather out of a sense of improvement.

She realized at that moment that Alex was fighting against her Spiritual energy and Intent to improve his own spiritual energy and Intent.

Instead of completing the final trial, Alex was training.

Chapter 1519 Completing the Test

The woman floated in the vast empty room, surrounded by a thousand different humans, each focused on their own thing. Her Spiritual sense, which was so close to turning to Divine sense, was spread amongst all of the thousand individuals, checking each one of them.

That was how she kept track of their progress with the trials, along with the help of various formations that were set up. She had been doing this for thousands and thousands of years, so she was very experienced in exactly what she had to do.

However, even in these dozens and dozens of millennia of experience, there was not once when instead of completing the trial, someone had instead made her the source of their training.

That made the woman uncomfortable. She was put in a new spot where she did not know what she was supposed to do. Should she increase the spiritual strain on him to make it harder? Maybe lower it instead so he had nothing to train on? Or maybe she should just make him fail right away.

However, none of these felt right for her. As far as she could tell, he had broken no rules that she had set up, so she decided to let him do what he wanted to. 'Go on,' she thought to himself. 'I very much want to see how long you can continue it.'

Alex was somewhat struggling against the combined assault of Spiritual sense and Intent that came from the woman. Thankfully, his spiritual energy replenished at the same rate as that the woman was making him lose it.

Thanks to that, he didn't have to worry about running out of Spiritual energy halfway through this unexpected training method he had come across.

His Intent had been strong from the start for someone who was only at the peak of the Saint Core realm. However, that wasn't enough for him. After seeing what the fight between two high-level Saints looked like, he knew he needed to improve, wherever he could.

Since then, he had focused primarily on his body as that was what needed catching up. After his body, he trained his Intent through painting. Painting helped him improve his Intent, but there was a diminishing return with it.

Unless he got inspired to make something great, he couldn't improve his Intent a lot with it, only how to better use it.

However, with a clash of Intents like this, he could directly benefit from fighting against someone else's Intent. It was by far the best way to improve one's Intent after all.

Hours passed, but Alex kept up with it. He said nothing and did nothing as he stared at the soul that hovered in the distance and fought against her mental onslaught. He was getting somewhat tired, but he ignored it as much as he could. His main priority right now was to improve his Intent, even if that cost him a win in the trial.

He was certain his Intent was improving as time went on, but the fatigue countered his improvement and made it impossible to determine right away. The fatigue he felt was quite a lot as if he had spent hours making pills.

That was not so different after all, since making a pill or doing any of these sorts of activities cost one a strong Intent.

Alex had had ample time to wonder what the point of this final trial was, and he came to the conclusion that at the end of the trial, each one of the 6 trial sections created a test that measured one's intent.

For Talisman, it was the woman fighting against him directly, but in the Alchemy one, it was more subtle. There, the test had been to make 2 pills in one cauldron, which required quite a bit of Intent and Spiritual energy on his part.

Alex couldn't help but wonder what the final test of the Formation and Artifact trials would've been had he reached them. If his hypothesis was correct, they would've tested his Intent as well.

An entire day had passed since the test started and Alex was still struggling against the spiritual energy and Intent. It was getting intense at this point, and he wasn't sure how much longer he could keep it going.

Maybe another day at best, but what after that? Should he just faint? Without even completing the test that was to draw the same talisman from the last test?

He didn't want that. He wanted to pass the test, but he didn't want to stop whatever he was doing either. He wanted to have the best of both worlds, as long as it was possible.

He wasn't sure if it was.

"I'll let you know, the other participant from this test has already failed and been sent back out," the woman's soul spoke directly to Alex. "If you don't make the talisman, you will end up like that as well."

Alex was surprised to hear that his opponent had failed, and he was even more surprised by the fact that such information was being shared.

"I will pass, I'm sure of it," Alex spoke out loud. He hoped the soul wouldn't give him an easier time or a harder time than what he had right now.

He continued improving clashing Intent with the soul for another half a day and by the end of it, he felt drained. The mental fatigue had already taken a massive toll on his body and spirit, and he was about to faint at any moment.

However, he still had something to do. He still had the talisman to create. And he knew he couldn't do that while fighting off the constant pressure.

Midnight flew out of his storage ring with only a thought. Alex then held onto it, with the blade pointed upward. New n0vel chapters are published on

The Soul in the distance got concerned and wondered if he was about to attack her. If he was, she would have to immediately disqualify him and throw him outside.

However, Alex did no such thing. Instead, Spiritual energy gushed out of him as if a dam had been broken. If flowed into the sword, surrounding it as it created a spiritual sword and then extended outward from the sharp edges of the blade, slowly surrounding him.

When the spiritual energy surrounded him completely, it formed a strong barrier that pushed off all spiritual energy that was being used upon him. Not a single shred of it remained.

The woman felt a sense of surprise at the technique. 'What is this?' she couldn't help but ask herself. 'What sort of technique allows a Saint to stop my spiritual attack?'

She knew that if she wanted to, she could force the barrier to break, but that would require an effort that only an Immortal could handle. If she used it here, Alex would immediately die the moment the barrier was broken.

So, all she could do was sit back and watch as she could do nothing against the Spiritual technique created by the Weapons God himself.

Spiritual Providence.

With the relief that came from the lack of Spiritual pressure on him, Alex easily created the explosion talisman as the trial had asked him.

Once done, he showed the talisman to the female soul while taking back his sword. The spiritual pressure and Intent were no longer there, and the walls turned white.

He had done it.

Chapter 1520 Surprised Crowd

Alex prepared to leave now that he had passed the test. He placed the talisman into his storage ring and waited for the trial master to send him out.

However, he wasn't immediately sent away. He frowned a little and turned to look at the soul that was now staring back at him rather intently. That surprised him a little.

Unsure what he was supposed to do here, he quickly bowed in respect and said, "Thank you for helping me train."

"That was training for you?" the woman's voice finally drifted into his ears.

Alex nodded softly. "That was a rather opportune moment to improve my Intent. Please forgive me if I did something that I was not supposed to do."

"You certainly did," the woman said. "But I do not care about that right now. I care about something else."

Alex was taken aback a little. "What are you concerned with?" he asked her.

"You did something at the end there," the woman said. "With your sword? You weren't suffering from my spiritual attack. What did you do?"

"Oh, that," Alex answered quickly. "It's a technique to protect one against spiritual attacks."

"What sort of technique?" the woman asked.

"A very good one, I think," Alex answered.

The woman frowned. "You know I'm not asking you what the technique is like. I'm asking what it is and what exactly it does."

Alex had to take a moment to think what he was going to say. After a moment, he understood. "I can't tell you," he said. "It's not a technique I'm comfortable with sharing."

"I'll buy it from you then," the woman said.

"I'm not comfortable selling it either," Alex said with a gentle smile, hoping the woman wouldn't get angry.

"I'm a Level 8 Immortal Talisman maker. You might now know how good that is right now, but if you ever go to the Immortal lands, you will know that this is a rank that not just anyone achieves. And I am willing to share my knowledge of talisman if you—"

"I'm sorry to have to cut you off right there, but I have no interest in giving away anything regarding the technique," Alex said.

"But I am a Level 8 Immortal Talisman Maker. I can make scripts you can only dream of. Do you not want that?" the woman asked.

Alex scratched his head a bit as he spoke again. "Actually, I'm an alchemist so I don't really care about talisman."

"A what?" the woman's face was an incredible sight to see right then as she tried to process what Alex had just said. "An... alchemist?"

"Yes. When I get to the Immortal realm, I'll learn what I can about talismans on my own. If I don't, it doesn't matter to me since I'm primarily an alchemist. Talisman is just a hobby of mine," he answered.

The woman looked at him in shock this time. "Hob- Hobby?" she asked, wondering if she misheard him somehow. "This... is just a hobby for you?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I simply entered here to see how good I was with the talisman, and I'm happy to learn that I'm quite good."

"Good?" the woman asked. 'Good? Does he not know that nobody has passed it all in the last few centuries?'

"I'm sorry, senior, but I can barely hold it all together. I need to rest to recover from my mental fatigue. Would you mind sending me outside?" Alex asked.

The woman stared at him for a few seconds before nodding. She paused right before activating the formation and asked, "Will you come by again? I can teach you more about talisman."

"Maybe I'll come with my mother," Alex said. "She's better at this than I am. It won't be anytime soon though."

"I see," the woman said. "If you want to make the deal I proposed earlier, come back. I'll be willing at any moment."

There was no way Alex was ever going to trade away a technique created by the Weapons God to a mere immortal. Still, he nodded. "I will if I think I need it," he said. "Thank you for everything, senior."

The woman finally nodded and flicked her wrist. The silver teleportation light surrounded him along with the white light that represented how far he had come in the Talisman trial.

He arrived outside, in the midst of many people once again with white light surrounding him. There was a silence around him that wasn't normal at all.

He looked around, seeing everyone's eyes land on him. They were all shocked to their core to see Alex come out victorious in all the trials. The ones who knew he had come out with a very bad result the last time around were even more shocked to see how far he'd come.

They couldn't imagine how he could have improved this much in just a couple of days.

The crowd erupted at once in a loud cacophony of exclamations, questions, and congratulations. They all cheered for him, calling out his name while trying to get close to him.

The soldiers quickly surrounded him, saving him from the crowd's words. He did what he could, smiling back at the crowd before looking away at a figure that walked into the soldiers.

The Gold King was there once again to congratulate him like last time when he had come out with a white light around him. Only this time, the king wasn't smiling at all. His face held a deep sense of shock that he couldn't get rid of.

It emulated the same shock most of the others in the crown held. The inability to come to terms with the fact that the King of the Southern Continent was not just a master of Alchemy and Pills, but also a master of Talisman and Scripts.

They had not known about that before. They did now.

The king quickly scampered to congratulate Alex after having realized that he was staring blankly for a bit too long. He gave kind words like the last time that Alex had to suffer through before being able to voice out the fact that he was abnormally tired.

The king himself led him back to the hotel before leaving him with his elders.

"Your Majesty! You completed the entire Talisman trial?" Yao Ning asked in surprise.

"You have learned a lot from her Highness, haven't you?" Liang Shufen asked. "I never knew your Talisman skills were as good as your Alchemy skills. Why do you always focus on Alchemy?"

"They're not," Alex quickly said. "They're realms apart. My head hurts right now. I'll go rest."

He left the two elders full of questions that they would have to wait for it all to get answered.

Alex got in a meditating position and started cultivating while resting his mind. He couldn't help but find it funny that the two elders thought his talisman skills were as good as his alchemy skills.

That was a disrespect to his Alchemy skills.

The only reason they both seemed similar in skill was because the tests in the trial stopped at a certain difficulty. If the test had continued increasing in difficulty, he could have shown just how great his Alchemy skill was.

Then no one would doubt exactly what it was that he was good at.

Chapter 1521 Painting Trial

Alex was done with 4 of the trails already. He had completely passed through the Alchemy and Talisman trials and had nearly reached the end with the Artifact and Formation trials. He could have returned and tried to see if he could go further, but he saw no point.

There wasn't much to gain by passing a single test in those two categories. It wasn't like he failed because of missing ingredients like he had with the talisman trial.

So, he was intent on moving away from them all.

There were only two trials he hadn't visited yet, and having decided from early on that he wouldn't be visiting the Music trials, the only one that Alex had yet to visit was the Painting trials.

He was quite looking forward to this one. Over the last 6 months since he left Goldheart City, aside from his physical body, his focus had been on painting. He had done a lot of other things at that time as well, but painting was what he came back to each time.

He arrived in the dark room where the painting trail was held, quickly surrounded by black walls all around him. He sat down on the colorless floor and quickly brought out a canvas which he placed before him.

Then he finally looked toward the master of this trial. It was a... deer. Alex was surprised to see a deer standing in the distance where he would have expected a human to stand. This trial master seemed to not care about the fact that he didn't have a human body to mix well with the humans of this world.

The deer was a soul nonetheless, so he hovered there in the distance, waiting for something. A minute passed by before he finally said anything.

"You have all arrived in the Paintings trial, and I see a lot of repeating faces," he said. "I'll address the ones that don't know me yet. I am Zin Gaunhong, the trail master for Painting. Don't let my body fool you, I was an excellent painter when I had a body. As you might know, you don't need human hands to paint."

Alex slowly nodded. Qi could replace hands at a very early stage in one's cultivation.

"Unlike the other trials you have been to, the Painting trial will be very simple. You have to pass exactly 3 tests. If you can complete them all, you will have passed all the tests."

"So, to start, I will give you a very easy test," the Deer said. "Paint me."

Alex paused for a moment. Paint... the deer? That was going to be one of the first 3 tests? He was quite surprised by this test because of how easy it was.

'Just painting? No Intent usage?' Alex wondered. Painting had a rather steep learning curve at the start with many different elements to keep track of. The subject, the background, the colors, the highlights, the shadow, the one, the clarity, the abstractness-there were so many things that one could mess up when they only just started painting.

However, after some time, one could go past this learning curve after having learned everything and easily paint a very good painting. This was very much true for cultivators, and even more so for Alex himself.

In just the first month of training, Alex had already understood the core of painting and could make paintings that were considered the best. So, painting the deer would be no problem for him at all.

He took the Color artifact he had and started creating all the important colors that would be necessary for this painting. Using his knowledge of color theory, he created every single color he could need for this painting and created a palette with it. Then, he went on to paint.

His brush flickered on the canvas, the strokes both thick and thin. He made the deer's head, the deer's antlers, and the deer's body. The deer's current body was transparent bluish-white with some of its original colors peeking through. He captured that.

He gave a slight brown color to its fur, along with some brown color to its antler. Its nose was a tad black and the eyes a deep red. The overall body of the deer was brown, which he added while making sure to neither overshadow the transparency of the art of the bluish-white of the soul.

He waited on the shadows and went on to do the rest of the painting where he drew the background. The background as of yet was a dull black color as everything but the blue soul was darkness to Alex.

He painted the background with black paint, copying as much as he could from what he was seeing. Once he was done with the foreground and background, he moved on to putting the finishing touches on the painting.

There were no shadows to add on the deer precisely, but there were instances where the bluish-white color of the soul was more blue than the rest, like the antlers or fur spots around its body. Its hooves were more blue than normal as well, and so were locations where the deer's skin was cramped a bit, like the neck or the pits of its limbs.

Once completed, Alex moved away from the painting and looked at it from a distance. He looked at the painting intently and then at the deer that floated in the distance. He was happy to see that he hadn't made any big mistakes at all, if any.

The room suddenly changed into a bright red color, surprising Alex. He hadn't even submitted the painting yet, but it seemed as if the deer had seen his art and had considered him passed.

He happily nodded and put the new painting into his storage ring before pulling out another empty canvas. He was ready for the next trial.

He had to wait a while before it began.

"Here is your second trial," the Deer said. "Make a painting with a very strong Intent. It does no matter how complex the painting is. You can leave it for all I care. As long as the Intent it holds is strong, you'll pass."

Intent. That was pretty easy for Alex. He could immediately think of what to draw as well. And he got to it.

Red, Yellow, and Orange shades of colors were prepared according to what Alex thought was necessary and then he started painting.

Fire. Flames. Heat. Burning.

Alex kept in mind what it was that he wanted to draw, and focused his all into it.

The painting itself was simple. It was a small tongue of flame that burned in the center of the canvas. However, the Intent it held was anything but that.

The fire gave off an aura of True Fire Dao, that would appear complex and inconceivable to anyone that did not have it. Everyone including the Deer soul did not have it.

When Alex was done with the painting, pouring his Intent into it as he had learned for the past half a year, he was left with a painting that could be considered to be sent into the Hall of Fame for the Royal School of Painting.

The Red walls turned to Blue at once and he had completed the second test.

Chapter 1522 Third Trial

Alex wondered how many individuals failed the first and second tests. The two tests were diametrically opposite in what they wanted. One wanted to test the skill of a painter, and the other wanted to test the skill of a cultivator.

And Alex had no doubt that the next one was going to be a mix of the two. He wondered how many would pass that one. How many had? He hadn't heard of any passing this final test. Surely it wasn't that hard, right?

Anyone who passed the first two tests would have no problem completing the third one if the task was to do the two tests in one painting. So Alex couldn't help but be curious about what the actual test would entail.

He waited a decent amount before the last test started.

The blue walls around him suddenly lost all color, changing to a bright white color that surprised Alex. Was there a mistake? Had he just passed?

He looked for a hint as to what was going on, and at that moment the Deer spoke to calm everyone down.

"The light had changed to no misguide your colors for the third test," it spoke. "And the third test is here."

"You have 2 days to create the best painting you can with a very strong aura to it," the deer said.

Alex was surprised at the fact that the test was what he had expected. He wouldn't have been surprised if it had been something else.

'But that's so easy,' he thought. 'How many painters complete the trial each time it is open? Hundreds?'

He took his brush and started drawing. He had been to various different cities in the Gold Kingdom, so he decided to draw an icy mountain he saw in one of those cities that had gold shining in most of its cliff walls.

It was in the Golden Mountain range, so one could easily see the gold in it.

Alex began painting it.

A sprawling city at the bottom, with most of its buildings clad in gold. A massive wall that surrounded the city with a barely visible dome around it.

The outside of the city was covered in snow with barely any signs of life peeking through the thick white plane. Beyond the city and the snowfield was the mountain that was the main focus of his painting.

Despite being part of the mountain range, this icy mountain stood alone, dwarfing everything else around it. The top of the mountain was completely white and colors only started showing once they reached a little below it.

Black and gold shined through the spots in the mountain that wasn't covered in snow. About a third of the mountain was covered in this, and the gold almost looked like decoration on the mountain.

Beyond the mountain was the spotless silver moon that forever shined brightly in the night sky.

For the golden bits throughout the painting, he made sure to add every bit of Intent from his Dao of Metal he had into the painting. That was the most important point of the painting, so he did so exactly.

Alex put on the finishing touches to the painting and put down his brush when he was done. He took a deep breath and looked at the painting somewhat satisfied.

The art itself was quite good and the Intent from the Metal Dao was certainly coming through his painting. He had managed to make both of the two things work, so all he had to do now was to wait for the deer to—

"Try again!" the deer's voice floated into his mind.

Alex paused for a moment. "What?" he asked, but the deer didn't seem intent on answering. It was already focused elsewhere, its care for Alex and his painting long gone.

Alex waited in the hope that the deer would say something, but he could only hope. Nothing happened.

'So I failed?' he asked himself. How could he fail? He checked his own painting once more, looking at it from a critical eye. The art looked fine. There was nothing amateurish as far as he could tell, and the aura of the Dao of Metal was certainly sensible from it.

So why had he failed?

"Did I make some mistake I can't see?" he questioned himself. But then another possibility came up that made him frown. "Or is even a painting of this level not good enough?"

If he had to bet, he would definitely bet on the last one. His painting, one that was certainly to turn heads if it was placed in a hallway, was not good enough for this deer.

'So that's how there aren't many individuals that pass the trial with a white glow," he thought to himself. 'This deer must only be happy with a quality that can place you in the Hall of Fame.'

He sighed in disappointment at his failure, but at least he hadn't been sent out. "I have another chance," he thought. "That is good."

Alex brought out another canvas and thought for a while as to draw what exactly. He needed one with more aura, so believed it had to be a fire-related painting. With True Fire Dao, he believed that it was the only one he could place a lot of aura into.

'A fire-related painting,' he thought, waiting for some inspiration, one he hadn't already used before.

Inspiration struck and his mood soured a little. It wasn't something he wanted to remember, but he was inspired to paint it. And it certainly did involve fire so he didn't find any reason to not draw it.

The background was the edge of a barren cliff, beyond which was a slightly brighter but still barren desert. On the cliff were a group of men and women, all half naked, standing around something at the edge of the cliff.

The sun was directly overhead in the sky, but the bright light seemed to have little effect on the dark and gloomy atmosphere in the painting.

Next to the cliff were a bunch of dead bodies, all wrapped up in fur and leather of the best kind. There was one in particular that Alex made the highlight of the painting.

A single corpse that he focused on.

Then, he dipped his brush in bright red paint and pasted it onto the center.

The corpses burned. Fire of red, pink, yellow, and purple surrounded them. The surrounding humans cast a long dark shadow because of the burning pyre at the center.

The fire in the painting felt hot and dangerous, but the death was what made it feel so real. Alex drew and drew and drew as he remembered the day back in the Wasteland, in the Stepstones tribe when he had to watch as the chief burned his daughter's body along with the many that had died in the beast attack.

He felt sadness once again, but he ignored it as he drew and drew until he was finally done.

He let the brush drop to the ground and looked at the complete painting of the corpses that burned in phoenix fire. He could feel not just the aura of fire from this one, but also the aura of death.

This was certainly one of, if not, the best painting he had made since he began to paint.

Chapter 1523 Emotions

"Try again!" the voice of the Deer flowed into Alex at once.

Alex looked up in confusion. "What?" he couldn't help but ask. Had he failed again? With such an incredible painting?

'Hell no!' Alex thought. This was one of the best paintings he had made. Not counting the art, the aura alone would be enough to put it into conversation for placing this painting into the Hall of Fame.

And he had failed with this? He didn't believe it deserved to fail.

"What's wrong with this one?" he asked loudly in frustration. He knew he wasn't going to get an answer but he needed to vent. He needed to find a way to get his frustration with the situation ou—

"Not good enough," the Deer responded, stunning Alex into silence for a moment. "It's an improvement on the first one, but it is still not good enough."

"Why not?" Alex asked. "If you want me to put more aura into it, I'm not sure I can do that. I already used the best Dao I could, so there's not much I can do. Might as well send me out at this point."

"I am here to judge your painting, not your knowledge of Dao. Make one." The deer didn't say anything anymore, leaving Alex to contemplate on the situation.

Alex had to sit down to contemplate what he had to do. Even the painting he made with one of his deepest and saddest memories didn't work. Why? He asked himself.

The answer had already been given to him by the deer. This was a test of painting skills, not of Dao. Putting his knowledge of Dao into the painting wouldn't help him here, not like it had helped him with the second test. If he wanted to place an aura in there, it couldn't be from a dao, but something else.

Something that one could feel through a painting.

Emotions.

He had put aside his emotion for the last painting, focusing his Intent only on the Dao. While that had brought out a painting that could be used to help others learn the mysteries of the Dao, when he really thought about it, it had failed as a painting.

It had some emotion, but nothing spectacular. He had felt so many things while making that, and yet... he had chosen to hide it, so it didn't affect his painting. That had been a stupid choice.

'Do I redraw it then?' he wondered. But his heart didn't want to. He doubted he could bring out the same emotion he had just now. He needed a different source for his emotions that he wanted to paint about.

Should he go with a memory? Or something entirely new but filled with the emotion he felt.

He couldn't decide.

He sat on the floor, trying to come up with ideas. It had only been an hour since the third test had begun, so he had ample time to come up with something.

'Something with emotion... something that comes from deep within me... something I care about.' What did he care about? His parents, his daughter, Pearl, Whisker, his family, his master, his friends, and many others.

He cared about the reason why he was sent here. He cared about why Bai Jingshen chose him. He cared about the immortal realm and the immortals there.

He cared about his cultivation journey. He cared about breaking through.

He cared about...

He realized what he cared about right now. He realized what to draw.

But he didn't move. He sat there, preparing for as long as he could. This was something he couldn't just draw. He had to prepare himself. He had to be ready for what he was going to draw.

He spent the entire day calming himself, calming his heart before he finally began.

When he did, his heart was empty. Completely vacant with nothing there but a single emotion.

Grief.

And he painted that grief.

Alex was hardly aware of what he was painting. He didn't care. He didn't care about the colors, about the art, about the canvas. He didn't even care about the painting

He only cared about taking out what he felt and placing it somewhere. Painting just happened to be the thing that allowed him to do this.

At this moment, his emotion was what was the most important to him. His grief. His feeling of loss. The painting was the outlet.

And he let the emotions flow.

He marked with a black paint here and a green one here. He added a bit of pink on the left side, and some yellow on the right. A bit of white on the eyes with a hint of blue.

He painted what he remembered. It had been a while since he had seen her, but he knew what she looked like. He remembered the young girl that he played with as a child, the only one he cared about, the one that was his sister.

He drew Hannah.

He had tried to let go of the hope of finding Hannah for some time. That was what was stopping him from breaking through for nearly a year now. He knew he needed to give up on the hope, but it was difficult. It was not something he could just let go of.

He couldn't bear the thought of disappointing his aunt, by bringing back the news that he couldn't find her daughter after she had recently received the knowledge of her husband's death.

But Alex couldn't do that anymore. He would have to disappoint her. He would have to come to terms with the fact that finding Hannah was a lost cause.

He needed to understand in his heart of hearts that Hannah was long gone.

So, whatever hope he might have had, he let it flow with his grief and sadness, as he painted them onto the canvas where the young girl's face was now becoming more and more real.

The deer looked in surprise, feeling the aura that came from Alex's painting even before he was finished. It continued keeping its senses on him, carefully sensing through things to see what was going on.

Through just the pages, it could also feel the sense of loss and grief. It could feel the sadness.

It had been a while since the deer had felt emotion this strong being painted into a canvas. The last time... when had the last time been?

A memory of a young man floated in the deer's mind. The deer remembered the painting. A woman and her son sat close to each other, painting something vivid on a canvas. That had been the only painting in a few centuries to have successfully moved it.

And it seemed there was another now.

'Incredible,' it thought and moved on to helping other participants, giving them some hints here and there as it had to Alex the day before.

Alex felt his heart empty up completely, and the final stroke of his brush gave him the cathartic release he had been hoping for such a long time.

He dropped his brush and could only stare at the painting in front of him. The image had been a cacophony of colors, mixed together in an unseemly way. However, somehow, there seemed to be a symphony between them that created an overall picture of a young girl with a bright smile on her face.

Chapter 1524 Sign

Looking at the picture, he felt no more grief. No more sadness. He only felt a melancholic happiness as he remembered the past when he had interacted with her.

He took a deep breath and knew deep inside that he had done it. He had let go of Hannah completely.

"Who is she?" the deer's voice drifted into his mind.

"My sister-my cousin," he quickly answered.

"Why is the image of your cousin that is smiling so widely, giving such an aura of extreme sadness?" the deer asked.

"Because she is very much likely dead now," he said. "This is my way of dealing with the grief early on."

"Do you not know if she is dead or not?" the Deer asked.

"Not really," Alex said.

"Then why do you grief? When you should be hoping," the Deer said.

"Because it was interfering with my breakthrough," he said. "My hope had ended up becoming my Inner Demon."

"I see," the deer said. "So you can break through now?"

"I am confident," Alex said.

"Good luck!" the Deer said.

Alex smiled widely and looked back at the deer. "Thank you." He picked up the brush and the painting of Hannah and placed it into his storage ring. Even as he did, the teleportation aura had already surrounded him.

He let it grab onto him and then disappeared out of the trial hall.

He arrived outside surrounded by white light once again. This time, he didn't wait for the soldiers to come to him. He left on his own.

Even as he walked away, he could hear the crowd that had seemingly lost all sense of understanding of what was happening.

Once was a miracle.

Twice was unthinkable.

But what was thrice? How were they to feel when someone completed three different trials, where passing even one was difficult enough to only have a person or two every few decades?

Even the Gold King was sufficiently shocked to the point that he forgot to go greet Alex altogether. It was only when his subordinates reminded him that he moved. However, by that point Alex had already arrived outside the hotel and entered it.

He tried contacting Alex in the hotel, but the two elders stopped him.

"Our apologies, your Majesty. But our King had commanded us to not let anyone inside," Yao Ning spoke up.

"Even if it's me?" the Gold King asked.

"Even if it's the Azure Dragon himself," Yao Ning answered.

The Gold King was shocked. "His Majesty must be tired then," he said. "I can't imagine what it would require out of someone to complete 3 different trials that are otherwise known as being impossible for most people. He must be completely drained."

The two elders nodded.

"Do you know when I should return?" the Gold King asked.

"I'm sure Your Majesty can make the judgment when he sees the signs," the two elders said. They left, leaving the Gold King out there alone.

"Signs?" he thought to himself. "What signs?" He had wanted to ask that, but the two elders had left before he could.

He returned back to where he was staying and told his subordinates what he was told. "Signs? What signs?" one of the men from the Head Legion who was his subordinate asked.

"I don't know," the Gold King said. "But that is what they said. Surely the King of the Southern Continent isn't trying to not see me by making these excuses, right?"

His subordinates said nothing. The Gold King felt a bit down. He was a new king, he knew that, but he was trying his best. What more could he do? He hoped his status as a new king wasn't what was driving away Alex.

"Ughh... I shouldn't have acted so close. That was probably why he wanted to not see me," he thought and couldn't help but swallow a sigh that was forming in him. "Were they truthful about the sign?"

"The subordinates said nothing.

"Make the judgment when you see the sign," the Gold King repeated to himself what the elders had told him. "What could they have meant by that? Are they going to throw up some colors in the sky or—"

A strange sensation passed through the King, stopping his thought at once. His eyes narrowed a bit and he turned his head to look in a certain direction. His subordinates did the same.

"Is that..."

"Someone is breaking through."

The King looked in surprise. "I have never sensed such a strong sensation when a Saint breaks through," he said. "Not even when my master broke through to the Saint Transformation realm did he produce such a strong result," he said.

"Well, from what I understand, the sensation is strong between each major realm as well as how strong one's knowledge of Dao is," one of the men said.

"And that direction... isn't that where the Southern Continent's monarch resides?" another one asked.

"Is it? Oh, it is," the Gold King realized. "Ah! Was this the sign they were talking about?" he thought. 'That must have been why? He was hurrying to break through. He wasn't running away from me.' That gave him a bit of a relief.

"I see," he spoke to himself. "It seems the King of the Southern Continent is breaking through to the Saint Soul realm.

* * * * *

Alex was surprised when he opened his eyes again and found out that nothing had gone wrong. But then again, maybe he shouldn't have been surprised. Everything he did before was in preparation for this after all.

With so much preparation, the Inner Demon had nothing to use on him anymore. That obstacle had been quite easy to pass this time around.

Alex felt glad, but everything wasn't over yet. He had only passed the Inner Demon's assault. The real breakthrough had yet to happen.

The most important one in a long time as well.

At the start of the Saint Core realm, everything inside Alex's Dantian, aside from the two Yang and Yin sources, hand turned into a golden sphere known as his Golden Core.

Throughout the Saint Core realm, the Golden Core had improved and enlarged in size, growing stronger and bigger with time, giving him more and more cultivation. However, that wasn't all it had done.

At the same time, it had also made a connection with his Spiritual sea, slowly forming a Spirit that would then house it. Now, the spirit had fully formed.

And it was time for the spirit to come out like a bird breaking through its egg to come out to the outer world.

As Alex continued, the Golden Core slowly melted inside the Dantian, dripping gold as it did. With each drip, Alex could feel his cultivation base improving, growing bigger and stronger.

He could feel the Saint Soul realm that he was stepping on.

The more it dripped, the more the spirit managed to show itself. After half of it was melted and turned into Qi once more, the spirit could finally be seen.

Alex saw the spirit inside of his Dantian, and then saw his body through the spirit's eyes. They were both the same. He couldn't help but smile at the sight and feel somewhat proud.

He now had his own Nascent Soul.

Chapter 1525 Nascent Soul

As the Golden Core dripped further and further, more and more of the Nascent soul became visible. The spirit became freer and freer with each drop of Qi that pooled down below.

Alex continued cultivating and doing his best to breakthrough, and each with step he went further than before.

Then, after some time, the last drop of the Golden Core dropped into the massive pool that was underneath it and the Nascent soul was finally free.

A soft ringing sound reverberated throughout his entire body the moment the Nascent Soul came free. The moment he became free.

Alex could suddenly feel his spiritual energy growing stronger, growing thicker. Qi around his surroundings was pulled into his body as if by a vortex and the Nascent Soul used it to improve itself, make it stronger.

It was no different than a newborn baby's first cry, and it lasted no more than a minute. But in that minute, Alex felt his spiritual sea grow much larger and his spiritual sense became even stronger than it already was.

It had always been monstrous, having started improving his spiritual sense since when he was in the Self Tempering realm, and improving it throughout the True realms and most of the Saint realm with his small mask.

Now, it had improved even further, making his spiritual sense that much stronger. He couldn't tell exactly, but he had odd confidence in himself now that he was most likely as strong as a late Saint Soul realm cultivator, if not close to reaching the Saint Transformation realm

He doubted it though.

With another clear ring, the Nascent Soul in his Dantian got into a meditating position and Alex could tell that the breakthrough had become complete.

He had entered the Saint Soul realm.

Alex sat there for a while, looking over himself. Both his Qi and Spiritual energy had gotten far more potent than before, stronger. He let a bit of Qi flow out into his palm and looked at it with a hint of anticipation.

With this strong of a Qi, he could fight Saint Transformation realm cultivators for sure. So long as they didn't use their Immortal Qi that was. There would be no way to do anything to survive that.

He always shuddered when he remembered that clash from 6 months ago.

"At least, this means I don't have to slow down my cultivation progress anymore," he thought. "I can speed it up now that I don't have to worry about anything."

He became happy knowing that his cultivation speed would skyrocket once again, now that it didn't have to be stagnant any longer. However, he had heard that Saint Soul realm cultivators had a harder time cultivating.

But then again, he had heard the same thing about every other realm. This one couldn't be that different. If it was, he would find a way to speed up his cultivation certainly as he always had.

Ignoring that, he focused on the main thing that had improved this time around. His spiritual sense.

'How far does it go now?' he wondered. He spread out a weak spiritual sense around him, seeing how far he could send it out. After a minute or so, trying to hide from other spiritual senses, he was surprised to find that his spiritual sense now spread more than 70 kilometers wide.

That was nearly double what he had been able to do previously.

'So strong,' he thought to himself. That was quite the distance he had captured with his spiritual sense. He had seen past the mountain range, past a large field of snow with travelers walking and flying through the thick snow, making their way to this town and the one next over.

He cut off his spiritual sense just then, letting it linger in the air for a while before disappearing. Then, he focused it back on himself. On the one thing he had been looking forward to for a long, long time now.

His spiritual sense entered his body, looking at his core now. The golden liquid, his Qi, was slowly losing color, turning back into transparent Qi as it always had been. At the bottom, the Yang and Yin sources continued spinning slowly, as it always had.

The Yin bead was slightly stronger than the Yang source, but not very much. At this very moment, it wasn't even converting any of his Qi into the strong Yin Qi just yet. It did show signs of starting, however.

Alex wondered if there was going to be any change in the rate at which it all changed.

He focused on his Dantian for a little longer, then checked the spirit that floated above the Qi in the empty space of his Dantian. His Nascent Soul.

It had the same transparency and hint of blue and white as the Immortal Soul he had seen in the trials. Initially, it had been naked, but now it seemed it was wearing a robe.

The exact robe he was currently wearing.

'So it copies what I'm wearing?' Alex thought for a moment, but that didn't feel right. 'No, it copies my perception of myself. That's it.'

He looked at the Nascent Soul for a little longer before looking even deeper inside. He arrived inside his Spiritual Sea and looked around. It was massive at this point.

The deep and cold waters below him that were the Spiritual Energy was now much, much thicker than it had ever been. The space seemed to have widened a lot more now as well. The edges of this world now seemed so much wider.

"Congratulations," Godslayer's voice flew from his right.

Alex turned to look toward the crystalline spherical spirit that floated next to him. There was a thick layer of black smoke that followed behind him, all of which threatened to dissipate into the air, but for some reason was kept tightly held, as if with a net.

"I didn't expect you to do it so easily," he said. "You've become so much stronger now, with just that breakthrough."

Alex smiled. "Thank you. I've been trying for a while," he said. "Are you handling that Shadow Aura well?"

"This?" Godslayer asked. "It's good enough. Although I would much appreciate it if you could find me a way to convert it to Darkness aura."

"Is it difficult?" Alex asked curiously.

"No, not difficult," Godslayer said. "Just... annoying. I can't move as freely as I want to."

Alex chuckled a little and nodded. "I'll see what I can do," he said. "No promises though."

He looked away from Godslayer and at the massive chunk of floating Silver mountain. It no longer looked like the mountain it had been so long ago. Now, it wasn't even half the size.

Alex had been absorbing its aura rapidly, improving his own Space aura, learning more of Space's truths and laws. If he continued for long, he would most likely be able to learn more Space Daos.

But that would be something for a very distant him to think about. "I'll leave now," he said.

"Yes, go. Cultivate and stabilize your foundation," Godslayer said.

"That's not why I'm leaving," Alex said. "There's something else I have to check."

Chapter 1526 Space

Alex had to go through his chest with his spiritual sense for a while before he found anything resembling what he had been looking for. He had tried to do the same with his spiritual sense many times before and had failed each time.

However, this time around, with such a strong Spiritual sense, he could finally find it deep in his chest, close to his heart. It remained hidden so well, its barrier so strong.

But Alex found it all the same this time.

His Soul Space.

As if using some very strong space laws, his Soul Space had remained hidden from even him. To find it as he had, he had required not just a strong Spiritual energy, but also knowledge of Space itself. If not for his Dao, he would have had to wait for the Immortal realm before he could sense it with his Spiritual Sense alone.

He tried to take a peek inside with his spiritual sense, but it felt so difficult. 'Isn't this supposed to be my Soul Space?' he thought to himself. 'Why can't I see inside?'

He had the strong Spiritual Sense that he was told he would be required to peer through, but it wasn't happening. 'Is it not supposed to happen on its own?' he thought. He remembered the tearing pain he felt in his chest when Senior Yang had taken a look at his Soul Space.

"Do I force my way into my Soul Space?" he thought. That seemed to be the only way. He prepared himself mentally for the pain he was going to face. He hadn't liked it last time, and he was definitely not going to like it this time either.

He took a long and deep breath and sent his spiritual sense in.

Alex's spiritual sense flew into his soul space as easily as passing through a layer of a bubble. "H-huh?" he was surprised. "How?" he was taken aback. He had been expecting to have to fight the barrier of the Soul Space head-on, so when it didn't present itself as a problem, it had caught him off guard.

Alex took a moment to control his spiritual sense and not push it very far. He stopped right where he had entered and looked around the place with his spiritual sense.

He felt nothingness. vacuum. There was nothing in there. He pushed his spiritual sense inside even more, but there was nothing to see at all. Top and down, right and left, front and back, there was absolutely nothing. Not that he could really give any direction to this place.

It was just space. There was no orientation here, other than how he entered. And even that didn't matter since there was nothing for him to see.

Still, he couldn't help but be amazed by what it meant for him to have a Soul Space. A Soul Space, HIS Soul Space. He would no longer need a storage ring or a storage bag at all.

There was no air here, but if he could somehow manage to bring some here, then maybe he could bring the silkworms here and let them stay. If he could make a big enough change, then maybe Pearl and Whisker could come here as well, although he would have to make sure living things could live here.

He was fascinated by his soul space and more than anything the size of it. His spiritual sense was currently reaching over 100 kilometers in all directions when stretched to the maximum with great effort. That wasn't just 100 kilometers in one direction, but rather all.

A sphere with a radius of 100 kilometers, was the area he was currently occupying with his spiritual sense. And somehow, it was all empty. He was supposed to have too many things in here for it to be so empty. That could only mean that there was some other location in his soul space where the items were.

And he knew for a fact that there were more items in here. It was just not where he was. But how did he check the other places in his soul space? His spiritual sense didn't extend further than this. Could he move here somehow?

He hoped there was someone he could ask. Would Godslayer have any idea?

As he was wondering, he caught sight of something when he spread his spiritual sense to the maximum distance he could. He noticed a small rock floating aimlessly in the vast space. He paused for a moment when he realized what it was.

'An ore?' he thought to himself. 'Oh! A tungsten ore. The ore I got from back when I first went to the Endless Tunnel?' He was a little surprised, to say the least. He searched for anything else, but it was only the one that was there for now.

So, he would just have to experiment with the ore for now. 'How do I bring it out?' he thought to himself for a moment. Would it be as simple as a storage bag or a storage ring?

He could only try and find out.

He was already reaching the ore with his spiritual sense, so all he had to do now was call for it to pull it outside. In an instant, it disappeared.

Alex's focus instantly moved outside and he saw the stone appear a small distance away from his chest, landing on the ground solidly in front of him. The formation in the room lighted up, stopping all sound and any potential damage to the room.

"Not bad," Alex said out loudly. "Now, what about sending it back?"

He applied the same technique he would normally and simply changed the target to his Soul Space. Once again, the ore went into him, and Alex quickly followed to go check it.

When he went it, the ore was right there again, and this time it wasn't floating around. Instead, it just sat there, unmoving.

"Okay," he said to himself with a satisfied smile. "What else can I do?"

Chapter 1527 Traversing The Soul Space

After understanding that he could always enter back where he wanted to in his Soul Space, Alex left for a while to go see Godslayer again.

"Hmm? Why are you back so early?" Godslayer asked. "Do you want something?"

Alex felt a little puzzled. "Do you not see what is happening?" he asked.

"I see what you see, and right now I don't see you looking at anything. I assume you're focusing on your Nascent Soul for now," he said.

"No, actually," Alex said. "I do have to see what I can learn there later, but for now I'm focusing on my Soul Space."

"Your Soul Space?" Godslayer's voice was laden with surprise. "Right, you did have that already. Did you finally manage to find it?"

"I did, and I entered," Alex said. "But... it's massive."

Godslayer chuckled a bit. "How massive?" he asked.

The single radius that Alex gave was enough for Godslayer to become speechless for a while. "That's... that's massive," he said. "And it's supposed to be larger?"

"Supposed to, yeah," Alex said. "But I'm not sure how I can move or how I can do anything else. I was wondering if you had any advice."

"Why?" Godslayer asked with a confused tone. "I've never had a—" He paused. "Actually, never mind. I do know a bit."

Alex listened to what he had to do, based on Godslayer's somewhat vague information about Soul Space. From what he understood, it was Godslayer's knowledge from a time when he was roaming the Immortal realms with hosts and whatnot.

Alex took into account what he was told and started consciously moving himself through the Soul Space rather than his spiritual sense.

It took a bit of experimentation, but he managed to figure out that he could move the point where he entered the Soul Space as well. He couldn't tell why he could enter a random point inside the Soul Space and not the edge of it like he would with normal spiritual bags and rings.

He tried to figure out an answer, but the answer was simply too complex for him to figure out. There was most likely a truth hidden here that he would have to work very hard to understand if he even could.

He gave it not much thought after that and started traversing the Soul Space. His spiritual sense still hung around him, sensing everything in a sphere. Next to him, the ore he had found was dragged along by him.

Alex wasn't sure how fast he was moving in his soul space. There was no reference for him to contextualize his speed. Still, he believed he was going rather fast. Faster than he could on a normal terrain at least.

His question was answered half an hour later when he saw something enter the range of his spiritual sense. It moved parallel to where he was moving and moved so fast that it crossed at least a kilometer in a second.

Either the object was moving too fast, or Alex was. He quickly grabbed onto the object with his spiritual sense and carefully checked what it was.

A Saint ingredient.

The red color of the Bloodpine tree leaves that he held with his spiritual sense hadn't lost any color at all, despite being here for as long as it had. He had lost these 25 years ago.

'Almost no loss in energy?' he thought to himself. 'But how? Because of the vacuum?' he wondered if the energy simply didn't leave the ingredient because there was nowhere else for it to go.

'Not bad,' he thought to himself and continued moving.

An ingredient here. An ore there. He even found one of his swords that he had made while he was in captivity. He started getting happy at the thought of getting it all back.

And there were still so many things he had lost that he wanted back.

Despite his speed of travel, it took him a lot of time to go through his soul space.? Senior Yang hadn't been lying when he had told him how large his Soul Space was.

"This has got to be larger than the Central Continent for sure," he thought. "More than twice as large. It's been hours and I still haven't reached the edges."

He was dumbstruck by the idea of a space inside of him that was as large as the continent he was on, and the genuine possibility of it being much larger than that.

He continued touring his soul space for another few hours and in that time he found many of the remaining pills, swords, and many other items he had lost. Most of what he found were scraps, unfortunately. They were either destroyed due to the old mad immortal or were damaged by the destructive Qi wind outside the Central continent.

The ones that survived were out of luck or their sheer strength.

After a while, he also found the hammer and anvil he had made such a long time ago.

Recently, he had been using a normal hammer and anvil that any Saint would use. However, this hammer and anvil were made using Starforged Tungsten, and a lot of it too. Metal Compounding, they were some of the best tools one could use while making artifacts.

He was glad to have found those now. There were a few scratches from what he saw, but nothing that degraded the hammer and anvil in the slightest bit. The same was true for the swords he had found as well, but he had particular care for the Hammer and Anvil. If they were fine, he could make all the swords he wanted to.

Alex continued his journey through the darkness, stumbling onto things here and there. His primary search here had been for 2 things.

The Nine Yang Divine Tree's seed and the World Tree's seed. As long as he found those two, he would not mind missing everything else he had here.

How far had he come now? How much longer did he have to go? Was he even moving in a straight line? Should he be moving all around?

He continued wandering, this time thoughtlessly, gathering what he could, and after a while ended up on something that he had honestly not thought about for years now.

A Sword. THE Sword, the one that Godslayer was sealed in. The one that Alex couldn't put his Qi into. The very one that was the sharpest sword he had ever seen.

It was a sword that he wished Midnight could be compared to in the future. The degree of lethality that blade held was quite enviable for a swordsman like him.

He pulled the sword closer and even brought it outside to look at it. The silver blade shined brightly in the lantern's light, reflecting the light onto the wall in its own shape.

Alex looked at the details on the blade and was surprised to see not a single scratch on it. Even the best of his swords had dents and scratches after what they had all gone through, but this sword was in the most pristine of condition ever.

'This is incredible,' he thought. 'Who could make a sword like this? An artifact god?'

He stared at the sword for a while longer before sending it back into his Soul Space. Then, he continued his journey through it once again.

Chapter 1528 Found It

Alex found what he wanted nearly a day later. He traversed the entire Soul Space for so long that he wasn't even sure how much of a distance he had covered.

However, one thing was for certain.

The size of his inner world was most certainly many times larger than just the Central continent. Many times. And the most incredible part about this was that the size extended not just in length and width, but in height as well.

Just the cross-section of his Soul Space was many times larger than the area of the Central continent. The volume that gave him was… immeasurable as he was currently.

Somewhere within this domain, he had found the World Tree's seed and the Nine Yang Divine Tree's seed. And to his surprise, they were together.

But that surprise was vastly dwarfed by the surprise of what he was looking at right now. In front of him hung the two seeds. The palm-sized seed of the yang tree was on the left and the human-sized seed of the World tree was on the right.

And both of the seeds had sprouted.

Tiny roots had grown out of each of the seeds and were in contact with each other. At the same time, they also had a small sprout on top, their infant leaves coming out from the top.

And what's more, Alex could sense Qi around the tree. The Qi wasn't as strong neither was it a lot in amount. But there was Qi, and Alex could not believe where it originated from.

"No… no way!" he thought to himself. "How can… how is this possible?"

The Qi was being created by none other than the World Tree.

"But… this… wasn't the entire reason the gods were trying to go on a war because of the World Trees seed?" he asked himself. "Wasn't it because they couldn't find any way to get it to germinate?"

That was what Senior Yang had told him after all.

"Then how?"

Alex wasn't certain, but he believed the Nine Yang Divine tree was partly the reason. He could see the brown and thick roots of the World Tree entangled with the thin and golden roots of the Nine Yang Divine Tree.

He could feel the slightest amount of heat coming from the Nine Yang Divine Tree, and when he looked even more carefully, he could see signs of the Nine Yang Divine Tree's roots reaching the World Tree's seed itself.

It was definitely part of the reason, if not the majority of the reason, why the World Tree root had started sprouting.

He couldn't help but frown at this moment. He needed to return to the Central continent and ask Senior Yang what was happening as soon as he could. This was too big a development for him to handle on his own.

"First, I need to make sure they don't wilt or die here," he thought. "Speaking of that, there should have been no sunlight here. How did they grow at all?"

To his spiritual sense, everything looked normal as if there was light all around the objects. He would require actual vision to see inside. He thought of using a recording talisman to see what was happening inside, but he had a better idea.

This was the perfect opportunity to check if Whisker could survive here or not. He could be his eyes, ears, and hand inside.

"You want me to go inside you?" Whisker asked, his confusion clear through the bond the two of them shared.

"Yes, I opened my Soul Space and there's something I need you to check there," Alex answered. "I was hoping you could help me check it."

Whisker had no reason to refuse. "Sure, when do I go?" he asked.

Alex was about to send him in immediately, but he had to stop himself. "It might be a little dangerous," he said. "Let me prepare something for you."

He brought out some blank talisman paper, and some ink, and then started drawing on it. He made runes specifically for this mission that Whisker was going to go on.

There was no air or Qi in his Soul Space, and the majority of the area was a vacuum, so he had to make talismans of protection for Whisker.

A few minutes later, he had done a pretty decent job with the talisman and he gave it to Whisker. "Use it throughout. It will protect you from all external forces and let you breathe in there. I can also control you with my spiritual sense, so I can take you out at any time."

Whisker nodded. "I'll let you know if I need help," he said.

Alex nodded back. "Let's go then."

Whisker used the talisman and a small, golden shield appeared around him, covering him entirely. Alex felt the warmth coming through that shield around Whisker.

Once he knew Whisker was ready, he sent him in.

Whisker arrived in a world of darkness, the vision shared with Alex who hadn't seen the world as such to this point. To his spiritual sense, it did not matter if there was light or not, but through Whisker's eyes, the darkness was terrifyingly deep.

And it wasn't just darkness or shadow either. It was more than that. This was nothingness altogether. It was both a fascinating and horrifying thing for both of them to experience.

Alex followed Whisker with his spiritual sense while looking through the other senses that Whisker could use as well.

Whisker let his whisker do its work. Most of what his whiskers could do was useless in this place where there was nothing, but he could sense the temperature. It was terrifyingly cold.

"Are you fine?" Alex asked, despite knowing the answer.

"Yes," Whisker said, "I don't feel much coldness at all."

Alex couldn't be sure if it was the shield that was helping Whisker, or if it was Whisker's cultivation base. "Be careful anyway," he said. "We're moving toward the seeds next."

He showed Whisker the way, letting him fly through the nothingness for nearly 50 kilometers before he arrived upon the seeds that were always within Alex's spiritual sense's range.

When he got close, Alex saw something through Whisker's eyes. It would have been imperceptible anyway, but here in the darkness, he could see a small amount of dull light coming off of the golden seed.

"There is light," Alex thought to himself. "It's so very mild, but it's there."

The Nine Yang Divine Tree's spout was giving off light, reminding Alex of the fake sun in the Forbidden Field's desert. "It might glow brighter as it glows."

"What's that?" Whisker asked, pointing at something. Alex followed his gaze and saw something hidden within the folds of the roots that he hadn't checked very thoroughly.

Hidden within the many roots was something that appeared to be nothing to the spiritual sense. But to Whisker's eyes, it seemed like a decrepit organic matter.

Alex took a closer inspection with his spiritual sense this time around and noticed what they were.

"The three leaves!" he shouted out in surprise. "Those are the leaves the Yang Tree gave me before it faded away."

He had never known what the leaves were for and had been intending to make a pill for himself when he could. It had never occurred to him at all that the leaves were meant to be nutrition for the Nine Yang Divine Tree.

"It swallowed all the energy from the leaves," Alex said softly. "No wonder why it's sprouted." He looked at the World Tree's seed next. "After sprouting, the roots must've found this seed and took hold. The question now is, did the Nine Yang roots try to swallow this as well? Did the World Tree sprout to protect itself?"

These were questions Alex was curious about, but the answers seemed impossible to gain. So, he kept searching.

"Go look around the seeds, see what else there is," Alex asked Whisker and continued looking around himself. He saw some spirit stones around the two roots, all of which were completely covered by the roots and were impossible to find without searching for them.

Other than that, there seemed nothing between the roots at all, except each other.

Whisker got closer, sensing the mild Qi surrounding him at the moment. "Brother, did you sense it?" he asked. "There's Qi here. Where did it come—"

Whisker's words stuck in his mouth when he saw one of the Nine Yang Divine Tree's roots shoot at him with a speed that was simply ridiculous. It grabbed onto him, draining the energy from the shield around him.

Whisker's face paled in fear.

"Brother!" he shouted for help, but he didn't have to.

Alex uses his spiritual sense to force the root to open up. Inside his Soul Space, his intent was king. The root forcibly opened, letting Whisker leave.

Without hesitation, Alex pulled him out into the real world.

"That was dangerous," Whisker complained. "I don't want to do it again."

He seemed to be on the verge of tears. Alex looked at the pitiful face and sighed. "Fine, I won't ask you to do it again," he said. "Not for a while at least."

Whisker nodded and quickly returned to his beast space, leaving behind the talisman. Alex picked up the talisman and looked at it for a moment before thinking about something.

He threw in the talisman and sent it directly at the two seeds again. The golden roots shot out and grabbed the talisman. Then, right in front of Alex's eyes, the energy from the talisman was completely drained.

"Is that so?" Alex thought. "You want more Qi huh? I'll see how I can help you. I will help you both grow as healthily as possible."

Chapter 1529 Arrangements

The Nine Yang Divine Tree's roots devoured any things that contained energy of any sort. Alex sent in talismans, spirit stones, pills, and useless herbs as well, and it devoured everything that got close.

That was surprising, but he wondered if that alone was good. "Surely it needs actual nutrients," he thought. 'I'll have to get some later.'

He ignored the location of the seeds for now. They had handled themselves on their own for the past 25 years they had been by themselves, so they could handle some time on their own.

Alex did think of throwing in some large pieces of land into his Soul Space to help the seeds take proper root, but he would have to wait until he went to more verdant locations than the Gold Kingdom.

He moved his senses away from the place, leaving to check where his Blood God's Manual was. It ended up being in a remote location, which he took it away from and placed it alongside the other items he had gathered up.

Then, he placed his other items in his storage ring into his Soul Space as well. Once he was done, he had a massive pile of items all ranging from extremely necessary to absolutely unneeded.

Just for the sake of safety, he took away the items, placing them further from the sprouts so that the roots didn't accidentally snatch them away. He wouldn't like it if he lost his stash of ingredients and Saint spirit stones.

After taking them aside, he started separating them based on their importance and what they were. He first separated them based on whether they were Alchemy-related or not.

Everything not related went to one pile, and the rest in another. He put cauldrons on the part that did not belong to Alchemy as it was easier to keep the cauldrons along with the other artifacts.

Then, he started separating them for what they were. Artifacts, talismans, formations, paintings, spirit stones, and anything else that wasn't a pill or an ingredient was separated into their own section.

He made some smaller separations as well, but that was just for the swords and cauldrons for now. He had to separate them to call them out easily when he could, but except that, he didn't find the will to separate the rest.

He thought of doing that when he was next bored, but not before that. He also only separated the alchemy items into pills and ingredients and stopped after that. Separating them further would take such a longer time and he didn't want to do that right now.

After he was done with just the superfluous sorting of his items, he left his soul space, deciding to check on his Nascent soul. However, he didn't find the need to do so. The moment he thought about it, he would already be looking at things from the Soul's eyes.

He was the Soul and the Soul was he. There wasn't much need to learn about the soul on his own, and the elders would most likely give him a better understanding.

He finally stood up, unsure just how long he had stayed here. He took a look at the Voidsand Hourglass in his Soul Space and saw that only 3 days had passed since he had come out of the Painting trial.

He said 'only' because it had felt like he had spent so much time trying to understand what his soul space was like. However, every person on the outside would definitely think that he had stayed in there for far too long.

"Your Majesty," Liang Shufen spoke in surprise. "You're out, finally."

"Ah, I must've made you two wait on me," he said. "I should have notified you before? that I would be taking some time."

"That is alright, your majesty," Yao Ning answered. "Were there any complications on your breakthrough?"

"No, everything went fine this time around," Alex said.

"Then congratulations are in order," the old woman said with a bow. "Congratulations on reaching the Saint Soul realm, Your Majesty."

"I pray that you will reach the Saint Transformation realm soon as well, and then the Immortal realm not long after that," Liang Shufen said.

"Thank you," Alex said with a hint of a smile on his face. He asked them about their experience when they broke through to the Saint Soul realm and how a Nascent Soul affected him.

"It's no different really," Liang Shufen said. "You might think that that you are two different people right now since you have only just started, but soon enough the thought won't even cross your mind."

Alex thought for a moment. He did think he and the soul were two different people, at least at first glance. It was only when he started paying attention that the soul and he thought the same.

"Another thing is that you have to be very careful about your Soul, your majesty," Yao Ning said. "Since your soul had been taken away from your body and given a new form, it can be easily damaged. You will have to train yourself to switch between your body and soul instantly in case of danger."

"I see," Alex said, thinking to himself. There was a period of time in which his body still thought when he meant to transfer the thought to the Soul. It didn't feel much, but Alex was sure this period could be dangerous for him.

He had to be careful and practice to switch between body and soul when he had the chance.

"Your soul is vulnerable," Yao Ning continued. "Throughout Saint Soul realm, you will strengthen your soul, but it won't be enough at all. You will need talismans and other defenses constantly active."

Alex was surprised at how careful they were. He nodded still. "I will do just that," he said. He wondered if he should tell them about his Soul Space, but decided not to do it right now. He would tell them when they got suspicious.

"So," he decided to change the topic. "Is the trial over?"

"It's almost over," Liang Shufen answered. "Most of our Alchemists that did well in the 2 chances they had have given up as the queue to enter was too long. As for the ones that failed later in the trial, they have given up. If we can get about 4 more to give up, we won't have anything to worry about."

"Let them take their test," Alex said. "They can do whatever they want."

"We thought so too," Liang Shufen said. "Still we had to wait for your permission."

Alex nodded.

"Oh and your name is spread far and wide, again," Liang Shufen said.

"It's died down a little, but for the first day, every single newsboard did nothing but show your achievement here in the Trial," Yao Ning added.

"Oh!" Alex said in surprise. "And it's over now?"

"By a lot margin, but some would still do anything to get answers from you," Yao Ning answered. "Speaking of someone trying to do something to get answers, the Golden King had come to visit you multiple times in the last 2 days. Should we let him know that you're awake?"

"No," Alex said. "I will meet him myself."

Chapter 1530 Return

"Your Majesty? You should have told me. I would have come to meet you." The King of the Gold Kingdom spoke respectfully as Alex entered his place of stay.

"My apologies, King Qian. I heard you came seeking for me a few times and had to be sent back," Alex said. "I was busy dealing with my breakthrough's aftermath and didn't think anyone would be looking for me."

"Oh no, it's fine," the king said. "Congratulations on reaching the Saint Soul realm, your Majesty."

"Thank you," Alex said with a slight bow. He wondered if he sensed a hint of envy in the king's voice. Alex wondered if the King knew how old he was and was feeling jealous of Alex's cultivation base.

Qian Yanglin was at least 2 thousand years old and was only in mid Saint Soul realm. If he knew how fast Alex's cultivation base had improved, then it wouldn't be much of a stretch to think he envied him.

"Also, congratulations on clearing all the trials in the Painting trials as well, your Majesty," the King said. "I was not aware of your talent in painting."

"It's... good enough," Alex said. "I wouldn't say painting is what I can do best, but I was taught by the best."

"Right, I heard young Honglui taught you some of it," the king said. "He had done our kingdom proud by teaching you to a level that not many can ever even hope to reach."

"You should be proud of him for his achievements," Alex said with a shaking of his head.

The two kings sat and talked for a while, most of the conversation being King Qian asking a question and Alex answering it. After a while, the conversation reached its end.

"Do you plan on entering the Formation or Artifact trials to get a better result?" the king asked.

"No, I'm done with the trials," Alex answered.

"So you'll go back to traveling the kingdom?" the king asked.

"No, I'm done with that too," Alex said with a small smile. "I'm returning to the Dragon Capital now."

"Oh," the king was a little surprised. "But you've only been here for... what, 7 months?"

"A bit more, but yeah," Alex said. "I don't have anything else I need to visit here. And I have found myself in need to return to the Dragon Capital at once for something. So as soon the trial is over, I will leave with my alchemists."

"I see," the King said with a bit of understanding. "I hope your time here has been wonderful."

"It has."

Alex returned to his hotel room afterward and met up with Jai Heiyun and the others. Jai Heiyun had failed the very last test to take two pills in one cauldron and hadn't tried going in again after the second time.

Two others had reached the same level as her, failing at the final stage. Wu Shun, the alchemist he found in the Hundred Blossom Valley, had reached the 2nd to the last trial before failing. His improvement had been extraordinary as well.

"How did you pass that trial, your majesty?" Jai Heiyun asked. "I think I found the right technique, but my head hurt from having to control multiple things at once. I wasn't even dividing my attention that much more than normal, but somehow I still failed."

"It's all about Intent," Alex said. "You'll have to train your intent when you can."

"How do we do that?" Jai Heiyun asked.

Alex thought for a bit. The easiest method was to fight against someone else's Intent, but that was not so easy to find in this place. He would have to create some of his own.

"On your own, you can just push your Intent to the peak by forcing yourself to push the limits of what you can do. Make many pills at once, in multiple cauldrons. Make pills without break, day after day. That sort of thing. The more you push yourself, the stronger your Intent will be. It's not the fastest method, but certainly the one that doesn't cost you a lot."

"As for the fastest... I'll see what I can do once we return," he said. He had some ideas.

The ones that had yet to be done with the trials returned after 3 days, and Alex prepared to leave. It was time to return to the Dragon capital.

After saying his farewell to the Gold King, Alex used a teleportation platform to return to the Dragon Capital. He had wanted to take the scenic route back, but after what had happened with the Oathbreakers, he rarely got to fly around in the Gold Kingdom.

Most of the time, he was forced to use the teleportation formations.

Alex walked out of the teleportation, looking around at the bustling city that was the Dragon Capital. He got on the carriage that had been prepared for him and left his alchemists, making his way to the Dragon Palace.

The one in the carriage this time had been the old man that Alex believed was the Dragon Emperor's personal guard. The one that went by the name Guqing. Alex had always wondered if he was a member of the Long family or not.

"Senior Guqing," Alex called out to him. "Has the Emperor left closed cultivation yet?"

"No, Your Majesty," the old man said. "His Royal Majesty is still in closed cultivation. If you need something from him, I can help relay the message. I believe he is not as busy as he was before."

Alex thought for a bit. "Can you ask him when he can make some time? I have something important to talk to him," he said.

"I will let him know as soon as we arrive." The old man bowed and the conversation ended.

After returning to the Dragon Capital, some servants took Alex to the Swan courtyard, while the old man went to relay the message. After a few hours, he came looking for Alex again.

"His Royal Majesty has responded," the old man said. "He will see you in 2 days. I hope that is okay."

"That is perfectly fine," Alex said.

For the next two days, he cultivated and got used to his new soul and Soul Space that was made available to him. Then, after 2 days, one of the servants came to relay the information that the Dragon Emperor was waiting for him.

"Let's go," Alex said and followed the servant to the hall.

The Dragon Emperor turned his head to look at Alex as he entered. "I didn't expect you to message me so soon," he said. "Is it about the trade?"

"I'm afraid not," Alex said, pausing for a second before speaking. "Well, it could be."

"What did you want to talk about?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

"You are aware of the things happening in your empire, correct? Namely, the one where the players are trying to return home," he said.

"The one that is spread by that Saint Soul realm girl you brought? Yes, I'm aware of that," the Dragon Emperor said.

Alex was a little surprised, but maybe he shouldn't have been.

"It is about that," Alex said. "I was hoping you could approve it. I was hoping you would approve sending the players home."

Chapter 1531 Once Again

A year passed since the Realm of Trials had closed, and any event remotely as big as that wouldn't take place for another 2 years.

The Endless Shadow Abyss opened every year, but no one truly considered it to be something to look forward to as one did the Golden Auction or the Realm of Trials.

The one taking place in 3 years was the Cave of Frost's opening to the public, but that was still undecided as even after a year and a half, the barrier around the Ivory Kingdom hadn't disappeared.

So, the next big thing to look forward to was the opening of the Transcendent Martial Ground, which was another 6 years later. Without the Cave of Frost, one would consider that there might be a lack of events to bring some excitement to everyone's heart, but something had come that had brought quite a bit of excitement.

The players were returning home.

Alex stood in front of the giant Intercontinental Teleportation formation that was not far away from the Dragon Palace. He looked at the hundreds of thousands of people gathered, ready to return home.

He sought Hao Ya, who had been working night and day to make it happen. "We're ready?" he asked. "Did you succeed?"

"Yes," Hao Ya said. "We tried it last night and it worked perfectly."

"Great," Alex said excitedly.

Hao Ya looked at him curiously. "You're more excited about returning than I am, aren't you?" she asked. "Why haven't you told me why?"

"It's a secret," Alex said and turned toward the formation. At the same time, he looked inside his Soul Space at the two seeds that continued to grow, absorbing everything he threw at them.

Every day, he worried that he would look inside and find it wilted. He wanted to get to the senior as soon as he could.

"I do wish your aunt was here," Hao Ya said. "If little sister Liz was here, we could have completed it in just a month, if that." There wasn't much Hao Ya could do in terms of saving time except try it over and over.

"At least you did it," Alex said. "So we will get to return now."

Hao Ya nodded. "Let's get them all ready to go."

Alex left for a while, going to meet the Crown Prince. With such a massive number of people waiting to be sent back to their homes, he needed to be here to look after everyone.

On top of that, the Dragon Emperor had said that they be allowed to send their soldiers to the Central Continent to see how it was, and why it produced such strong individuals.

Alex thought of not agreeing at first, but he needed people who would look after the central continent for the entire year when so many cultivators would be there.

He most definitely needed all the help he could get to create a peaceful time for the mortals who still lived in the Central continent. It had been 8 years since they had to deal with this, so they wouldn't be exactly ready either.

"Are we starting?" the Crown Prince asked.

After a bit of consideration, Alex nodded. "We can start," he said.

He stood by and watched as the ones in the military created a strict environment and let people make a file to bring everyone to the teleportation formation.

Alex watched them move excitedly and nervously as after over 50 years, they were finally going home. And yet, not a single one of them would ever know what it had cost him to make this happen.

It might have happened on its own in a few years, but no one could take just exactly how long that would take. To make this happen, Alex had to make a bit of sacrifices.

Although, he wasn't sure if he could call it a sacrifice exactly. After all, he was also benefitting from it quite a bit. He was going to go back as he wanted to.

Once everyone gathered, Hao Ya gave the usual lecture she gave to everyone who was about to go home. She explained how the situation back home would be and how they likely wouldn't have a place to stay as their friends and families would be long gone.

Still, the nearly million people gathered there were all looking forward to returning as soon as possible. So, without making them wait any further, Hao Ya let the teleportation begin.

About 20 thousand people disappeared at a time, with Hao Ya going along with them on the very first one to make sure everything on the other side was handled properly.

Alex looked at the many who were excited to be next. He recognized a few faces amongst the ones that were leaving.

Wu Shun, Talia, the golden fox girl he had gone on a date a month ago, and many other somewhat familiar faces were leaving for the Central continent. Alex hadn't been aware so many of them were players.

As the people left one by one, Alex turned to his elders. "You two should head on over to the Enlightenment Domain once I'm gone," he said. "Spend your time learning what you can to improve yourself. I will return in exactly a year," he said.

"As you say, Your Majesty," the two of them replied. Both of them had been ready to say goodbye to their King for some time now.

Alex turned to the Crown Prince. "I'll leave then, prince," he said. "Hopefully the problem with the Ivory Kingdom will have ended by the time I return. I truly don't want to miss the Cave of Frost's opening."

"Don't you have to return to complete the trade with my father?" the Crown Prince asked.

Alex chuckled a bit. "Yeah, that too," he said. "But you can see why I'm excited for one more than the other."

"I suppose," the Crown prince said. "Anyway, we'll see you in a year, Your Majesty."

Alex nodded. "See you then." And he walked away.

He arrived on the teleportation platform with one of the groups. The people there were surprised to see him in the mix and were more than curious about what he was doing there.

However, before anyone could muster up some confidence to speak with him, they felt the tug of something on their body, and at the next moment they teleported away.

Alex arrived in the familiar field that he had always come back to the last 3 times he had returned to the Central continent from various continents.

While others were disoriented, he quickly flew over to Hao Ya, who was handling what she could for the people here. Alex sat by her and looked around at the city and buildings. It had only been 8 years since he had left this place and yet it seemed like many things had changed or upgraded already.

Mortals made such quick advancements that it felt unnatural to him. He waited for another 2 hours for the people to arrive. Once they were all there, Hao Ya gave them the final instruction they all needed.

Then, once that was done, she finally was free to do what she wanted to do. "Let's go meet up with my master."

Chapter 1532 I Will Kill Him

"I was surprised when little Hao told me you wanted to meet me again," senior Yang said. "I did not expect you to want to meet me this early."

Alex had just arrived in the backyard of the mansion when Senior Yang spoke to him all of a sudden.

"Greetings, senior," Alex said with a respectful bow. "I hope you don't mind me returning so early. Something important came up."

"I understand," the senior said in a warm tone.

"Young Alex," the snake walked out of the lake, turning into his human form with a slender body and long black hair with blue robes. His slit eyes tried to be as human-like as they could, but they failed.

"Senior Xuan," Alex bowed toward the heavenly beast. He called out Pearl and Whisker, both of whom respectfully greeted the two.

Senior Yang's eyes widened ever so slightly. "I had heard that he had become a White Tiger, but I didn't expect him to still have a White Cat's features," he said. "Did you see yourself as a cat more than a tiger when you evolved?"

"Umm… I don't know, senior," Pearl said with a hesitating look. He barely remembered thinking about anything when he was going through the pain of evolution. Thinking was the least of what he did.

"Does it matter what he views himself as during his evolution?" Alex asked the senior.

"Oh yes," senior Yang said. "How you view yourself goes into your Intent in keeping yourself one way, and Intent is a very powerful thing you'll find."

"OH!" Alex said in surprise. That made sense. "I have come to notice that Intent are truly quite strong."

"If you have learned some Dao, you will start noticing it in the Saint realm. Most end up noticing it in the Immortal realm," the senior said.

"Congratulations, junior," the snake from the side. "You are one of us now."

Pearl gave a wide smile.

The snake walked close to check on Pearl when his eyes perked up in surprise toward Alex's direction. "Saint Soul realm?" he asked in surprise. "Were you not only in Saint Core 5th realm less than a decade ago?"

"I have made good progress in my time in the Eastern Continent," he said. "That place is truly quite amazing."

"It has stronger Qi than all the other continents combined," Hao Ya said from the back. "They should have already had a good amount of Saint Spirit Vein, but their raid in the Western Continent must have given them more."

"That place is teeming with Saint realms like you wouldn't expect," she finished.

"And yet not a single one is close to breaking through to the Immortal realms," the senior said with a sigh.

"The Dragon Emperor is," Alex said. "He can break through any time he wants. I'm not sure of his chances of succeeding in his breakthrough, but he is ready to begin it at any time. He is at the peak of Saint realm and has been there for many years now."

The senior looked surprised. "I… wasn't aware of that," he said. "Are you certain?"

"Yes," Alex said. "His cultivation base is strong and deep. I have sensed people with cultivation bases up to Saint Transformation 7th realm, and none of them are nearly as strong as the Dragon Emperor's cultivation base. The only ones I've sensed with stronger cultivation bases than him are probably the Immortal beasts I've met with."

"Hmm," the Senior frowned for a second. "Are you confident? Why did he not break through yet?"

"He's a coward," Alex said straightforwardly.

Everyone around him looked at him in surprise. "A coward?" the senior asked.

Alex paused for a moment, thinking through what he just said. "He won't break through because he won't be in control once he leaves. He likes being in power, and he doesn't want to go to a world where he will become the weakest. So for the longest, he has been doing whatever he can to become the strongest he can before he leaves."

"So… he's been preparing all this time, huh?" the senior said with a contemplative look. "Hao Ya, did you meet with him?"

"No, he never showed himself to me," Hao Ya said. "He remained in closed cultivation for a long time, due to a trade he did." She pointed to Alex as she said so.

The senior turned toward Alex. "You made a trade of some sort?" he asked.

"I did," Alex said. "He wanted to learn how to make pills that could create Pill clouds, so I traded him the knowledge for whatever I could get in return."

"Really?" the senior said with a hint of surprise. "I didn't see you as the type to pass along your knowledge to strangers. May I ask why?"

"So I could live and leave," Alex said with a self deprecating look on his face.

The senior frowned a bit. "Live?" he asked.

"He's the damn Emperor of the strongest continent in the realm, and so long as he stays in that place, no one can touch him. If I were to refuse him, I feared what would become of me while I stayed there. I can never be too safe in a place where someone else rules."

"I see," the senior said. "Still, Hao Ya, I want you to go talk to him when you can. See if you can persuade him to break through. You'll have to tell him I'm willing to take him to the Sky God's Palace and make sure he is safe and won't have to—"

"No!" Alex spoke, cutting off the man. Everyone around him was surprised to see him speak over the man. That was a very disrespectful thing to do.

The man slowly turned his head towards Alex and looked at him with narrowed eyes. "No?" he asked without any inflection in his tone.

"No," Alex said with a straight back. "I'm sorry, but I cannot let that happen. I cannot let that man leave this realm this early."

The senior's eyes narrowed this time around. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"The Dragon Emperor, if not responsible, is most likely directly involved in Pearl's parent's death. His grandparents died while the Dragon Emperor ruled, so we cannot let him leave until we know for certain what the truth is," Alex said seriously.

Senior Yang didn't say anything for a while, contemplating those words, and only spoke after some time had passed. "What if he did it? What if he was responsible? What would you do then?"

"Kill him," Alex said as a matter of fact.

The senior gave a surprised look. "Do you think you can do it?" he asked. "You did just say he's the strongest under Immortals."

Alex nodded. "And I will still kill him," he said. "I made that promise to Bai Jingshen, to Pearl. It will take some time for me to get strong enough to be able to contend with him on equal footing. He's very strong right now but he won't grow any stronger. I'm willing to give it my all to reach that point myself."

"If he is in fact responsible for all the harm he's caused Pearl, I will find a way to kill him, one way or another."

Chapter 1533 Important

"I... suppose that option has left me then," Senior Yang said as he looked at Alex and Pearl. He thought of something else to say when the snake spoke up.

"Are you sure he is involved?" he asked. "Make sure to understand thoroughly what you are dealing with before you make assumptions. Heck, don't make assumptions at all. Have proper proof and evidence."

"I don't have evidence yet that he is responsible for anything," Alex said. "Which is why I say he's most likely involved in the things. Still, I have evidence that suggests this notion."

"Well, the most important evidence is the fact that a sword that belongs to his family was found dug into Pearl's mother," Alex said. "He also attacked the Western Continent, so I don't think he's a good person altogether. I do still plan on finding proper evidence before I do anything. If I learn that he isn't responsible for anything then you can use his help to leave, senior."

"I can see that you are not aiming for an answer, which is nice. Having a preconceived notion of what you want as an answer can sometimes hamper your search for proof more than the parties involved themselves," the snake said.

"I will let you deal with the Dragon Emperor as you please," senior Yang took over. "I owe the White Tiger this much for all the help he's provided me."

Alex nodded in thanks. "Sorry for being disrespectful for a moment there senior. This thing is just too important for me," he said.

Senior Yang shook his hands, gesturing to forget about it. "Forget about it," he said. "Let's move on. You were the one that initiated us coming back I hear. Do you require something?"

Alex nodded. "I need guidance on what to do," he said.

The senior frowned a little. "On your cultivation base? On your dao?" he asked. "Surely you didn't come back for just that."

Alex shook his head. "Although I wouldn't mind hearing your opinions on that, what I really want help with is something else," he said.

He took out a talisman, surprising senior Yang. "Your Soul Space!" he said in surprise. "You can access it now?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I became able to a year ago. I've been practicing using it every-no, that's not of importance right now. Please take a look at this."

The man took the talisman Alex provided and looked at it superficially. His eyes narrowed when he realized that it was a vision-recording talisman. He could only wonder what it was that Alex was trying to have him see.

He closed his eyes and used his spiritual sense to read it.

Hao Ya and the snake looked at him for a moment, trying to discern any reaction. Seeing nothing, Hao Ya turned toward Alex. "What are you showing master?" she asked.

Alex simply put up his palm for her to wait.

A few more moments later, the man put down the talisman, his eyes unfocused, his mind in a daze. He tried to speak multiple times, but his words didn't exit his mouth. His mind worked too much for his mouth to catch up to.

Finally, he managed to string together a few words and speak them out. "Is this real?" he asked.

Alex nodded. "It's very much real," he said.

"Where did you find this?" the man asked.

"My Soul Space," Alex said.

"I thought so," the man said in a low voice, not focused on Alex and the others at all. He tugged on his long long, twisting a lock in his fingers as he lost to thought once more.

Hao Ya couldn't hold back her curiosity anymore. "Master, what is going on? What is it that you saw?" she asked.

Senior Yang tossed the talisman toward her, not even paying any attention, letting her look at it. Hao Ya quickly looked at it and gave a confused look. "What is this? I don't understand," she said. She had no way of knowing what she was looking at.

"What is it? Let me see," the snake walked up close and looked through the talisman. He put down the talisman with a slightly questioning look. "I'm not good with plants. Which ones were those?"

"It—"

"No, don't answer," Senior Yang quickly said, stopping Alex in his tracks. He quickly looked at him. "How many more know of this?"

"Everyone in this backyard," Alex said. "I did not dare show any of it to anyone else."

"Good," the man said. "Have your beasts speak an oath to never tell anyone else about this."

"No," Alex refused.

"No?" the man looked surprised that Alex had refused him once again. "I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation, boy. If any information about this is leaked in any manner, you will be dead if you're lucky. If not, you'll be a puppet to someone stronger to make use of what you have."

"I'm not going to force either Pearl or Whisker to swear an oath just for my sake," Alex said. "I trust them fully. They will never betray me."

"They don't have to betray you to have the information leaked," the man said.

"And that would put their lives in jeopardy if they have any oaths," Alex said. "So I won't force them to make any. I'll rather deal with the consequences myself."

The man looked at Alex for a long second before smirking a little. "If you understand what this will mean for you, then it's alright. Do what you want," he said.

"Thank you, senior," Alex said.

"Master, are you gonna tell us or not?" Hao Ya asked.

"No, I'm not," senior Yang said. "Luhei, please leave us alone. I'll talk to you later once I'm done thinking through things."

The snake was a little surprised to see such a reaction. The last time he had been this serious was a year and a half ago when someone from the Immortal realm had arrived.

After the snake moved away, Hao Ya left next. Then Alex took back both Pearl and Whisker and in the end, only the two of them remained.

"I'm hoping you know what I should be doing next, senior," Alex said.

"Not yet," the man whispered, almost to himself before saying. "I will need to look at it directly."

Alex remembered the pain the last time the man had looked into his Soul Space. It hadn't been a fun experience.

"Do it, senior," Alex said. "I'm ready."

Senior Yang paused and looked at Alex. "I... don't think you understand what I'm talking about," he said.

Alex paused. "What do you mean? Aren't you gonna look inside my Soul Space?" he asked.

"Yes, but I can't choose where to appear inside your Soul Space," the man said. "And it's so massive that I can't cover everything."

Alex frowned. "Then how are you planning to look at it?" he asked.

"Simple," the man said. "I'm going to go into your Soul Space."

Alex gasped in surprise. "You're going to directly enter my Soul Space?" he asked.

"Yes," the man said. "But you'll have to be ready this time around. It will be very painful, and the pain will all be spiritual. If things go wrong, there is a chance, however minuscule, that you will die."

Chapter 1534 Inside the Soul Space

"I will die?" Alex asked. He found it hard to believe that he could die just because the man in front of him was going to enter his Soul Space. But then again, this was the only man he knew that knew what could happen if one were to enter another person's Soul Space.

As a disciple of a god who dealt with wind and space, he was most likely the only one in this realm who understood this.

"There is a chance," the man said. "If I were to enter you, you will be burdened."

Alex frowned a bit. "But I wasn't burdened when Whisker and Pearl entered," he said. "They've entered many times and I never felt anything."

"That's because they are not foreign entities to your soul," the man said. "Your beasts are already connected to you through your bond. Any burden you would face with them inside is something you already face even when they are outside as well."

"The beast space in your body is proof of that," he said.

"Ah, I see," Alex said. "So it will be different when you enter."

"Yes," the man said. "Your Soul Space is in part connected with your soul and spirit. When another being with their own Soul enters your Soul Space, you have to bear the weight of their Soul with your own. That includes their spirit, their spiritual sense, and even their Intent."

"And your soul will be especially strong," Alex said softly. "Stronger than anything I've sensed. How does it compare to the Weapons God's Intent?"

The man thought for a bit. "I don't think you'll find it to be very different," he said. "The Weapons God is someone that died a long time ago. The Stone Sword he left behind has lost most of its Intent in the thousands of years that he had been dead."

"I would be an ant to him in his hay day, even now my living Intent would be weaker than his dead one, especially when I don't mean to harm you at all," the man said. "However, Intent is not all you're going to have to bear when I enter."

"You'll have to bear my soul and spirit, and as a Divine Cultivator, it has never been stronger."

Alex took a deep breath out of shock and fear. "A greater pain than that time, huh?" he thought, remembering the day when he pulled the stone sword out of the ground and read the contents carved onto it.

"I've grown stronger since then," Alex said. "It might not be a lot, but I'm sure I can handle you."

"Good, you must," the man said. "If you cannot, your soul will break, your spirit will dissipate, and your consciousness will be no longer."

Alex sucked in cold breath once more out of fear. "Then is it safe at all?" he asked.

The man chuckled a bit. "Don't worry, I intend to get out the moment you ask me for it," he said. "Although I will need you to remain conscious of that. If you feel yourself getting weak, you'll have to let me know. Without your intention, the only way for me to come out of your Soul Space is to break through your Soul Space, at which point you would die."

Alex nodded. "I understand," he said. "I'm ready."

"Alright, as long as you are clear," the man said, slowly taking off his storage rings, noticing that Alex was looking at them. "There are items with spirit in here. Those would burden your soul too."

"Oh," Alex said with a hint of surprise.

"Anyway, get ready," the man said. "Send me in."

Alex nodded and at the next moment the man vanished from in front of his eyes.

The moment the man vanished, Alex felt it, a deep pain in his mind. The pain emanated through his chest and his dantian too. He, the Nascent Soul, was the one feeling most of the pain.

Alex balled his hand into a fist, his fingernails digging into his palm, as he tried his best to handle the pain. It felt as if someone placed a large rock on his spiritual sea and he needed to carry it.

The man hadn't been lying. This was most certainly more painful than when he tried to read the Spiritual Providence skill carved onto the Stone Sword.

After a few seconds, he got used to the pain and looked inside his Soul Space where he found the man staring directly at something in the complete opposite direction of where he should have been looking at.

* * * * *

The man surnamed Yang entered the Soul Space without any fanfare. One moment he was outside and the next he was here, surrounded by darkness that he felt would fit the title of Void far better than the colorful silver and purple world.

He had been inside a Soul Space before, multiple times even. But the ones he entered belonged to his master, the Sky God, and hers was not empty like this, devoid of most things.

He wondered if this was how her Soul Space used to be before he ever met her, before she ever became the Sky God, before the event that was now forbidden to even be talked about.

The Massacre of Gods.

'Stop getting distracted,' he told himself. This was not the time to reminisce. He needed to find the two seeds and learn as much as he could about them in the short time frame he had.

However, he wasn't sure where that was. He couldn't use his Divine sense to check where it was unless he wanted to destroy Alex's Nascent Soul at once. This entire world would crumble if he did so.

He needed to wait for Alex to show him the way. And it was taking him a few more seconds than he had expected him to.

'It should be around here,' he thought. 'The kid wouldn't send me far away.' He tried to sense what he could with just his cultivation base, without bringing out his Divine sense.

Something caught his attention in a certain direction. He tried to look at what it was, but there was no light there. However, it was something that felt both strong and familiar. He couldn't tell why.

'What is there?' he wondered curiously. Was it perhaps the Blood God's Manual?

"Senior!" Alex spoke to him through his spiritual sense. "Please hurry, I can't hold much longer."

"Oh, sorry," the man said quickly, returning to his senses. "I got distracted. Where are the seeds?"

"In that direction."

Alex led the man through the void. As he got closer, he saw a sliver of a golden light peeking through something large. He could see roots that were coming out of the bulbs that were still the seeds, even though there was already a sprout coming above.

"You should stop there, senior," Alex said with a pained voice. "Any further and the roots will try to absorb whatever you have."

"I see," the man said. "The Nine Yang Divine Tree is said to be a creation of the Sun God. It is understandable if it wishes to destroy everything and anything it comes in contact with."

Alex was taken aback. He hadn't been aware of that, but he didn't have it in him to show his surprise at this very moment.

Chapter 1535 Life

Senior Yang remained silent throughout his time in Alex's Soul Space, his face contemplative the entire time, while Alex did his best to survive.

He could feel his spiritual energy depleting with each passing minute, but he could do nothing to stop it. He just had to bear the burden of the senior being inside of him while making sure it didn't deplete to the point that he ended up unconscious.

Thankfully, there was someone frantically crying out in his spiritual sea, after having just woke up from a nap, not realizing what was happening.

Alex should have alerted Godslayer on what was happening, but he had forgotten. But, now that he was awake, he was relying on him to tell him when his spiritual sense was getting too low.

He struggled for a good few minutes, bearing the heaviness on his soul, and couldn't continue any longer. "Senior, you'll have to leave," he said. "I'm reaching my limits."

"Just a bit... fine," the man reluctantly said. He needed more time here, he wasn't nearly done, but he had to leave. It was that or let the young man outside die. And if he wasn't wrong about what he had noticed, he couldn't let that happen. Not now.

"Pull me out," the man said and Alex followed his words, instinctively bringing him out from his Soul Space.

The moment the man arrived outside, Alex felt as if the shackles on his soul had been removed as if he had been allowed to breathe after being underwater for a long time.

He heaved a long sigh of relief and closed his eyes for a while to catch his breath. The relief from his soul unburdening was almost ecstatic.

After a few more minutes, once he had more or less become calm again, he looked toward the man who was deep in thought. He waited for a minute longer, but couldn't contain himself after that.

"Did you find something, senior?" he asked.

"Hmm?" the man got out of his muse. "Oh right!" He thought for a moment longer on what exactly to say and then spoke.

"I think I understand, at least superficially what has happened," he said. "I will need to enter your Soul Space a few more times when you are ready, but for now these are the truths I've found."

"I am not aware if you've noticed or not, but your Soul Space is full of Yang," the man said.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "Yang? I did not sense any at all, and neither did my beasts mention it," he said.

"Hmm," the man paused. "Calling it Yang alone would be wrong. It's not yang, but Yang in an aura that is still Yang and yet a variant."

"I... do not understand what you are saying at all, senior," Alex said. All of those words made sense individually, but together they felt like gibberish.

"Life aura," the man said. "You are aware of this, correct?"

"To an extent," Alex said before his eyes widened. "Are you saying my Soul Space is filled with Life Aura?" He knew Life aura was something that had in part to do with Yang, just as Death aura had to do with Yin. Was this what the man meant?

"I won't say filled, more so that it just exists there. It's very minute and spread out. I would doubt you would be able to feel it even if you want to," the man said.

"How strong would you say it is?" Alex asked.

The man reached into the grassy meadow and tore out a few blades of the grass. He let it fall from his hand. "Barely good enough to grow this much in any particular area," he said.

"That's... not very good," Alex said.

"No, it is not," the man said. "But you are not taking into account how vast the soul space inside of you is. Even Life aura that thin, when put together from all corners of your Soul Space, would be very rich."

"I was once told the Sage of Ten Thousand Treasures took away a Space Stone of a size that could create a Soul Space enough to devour the sun. Yours was smaller than that, but it might still be enough to devour this realm."

Alex's breathing hastened with those words, his eyes gleaming with excitement. The man saw this but said nothing to caution him about how he felt. He didn't have to. Alex calmed himself and asked another question.

"Why is there life aura in my Soul Space?" he asked. "I don't remember owning any treasures that had life aura. Or was I just blind to the aura?"

"No," the man said. "I doubt the Life aura originated anywhere other than your body."

"My body?" Alex asked. "It's a result of the Sun God's body?"

"That's what I believe," the man said. "Otherwise, the aura shouldn't have permeated so evenly. Any object with Life Aura should be heavily concentrated around the aura."

Alex nodded. Still, the words were hard for him to believe. "Does the fact that I have learned the Dao of Death not affect it in any way?" he asked.

"Death is something you learned, Life is something you were born with, it's part of your constitution as the owner of the Sun God's body," the man said. "Throughout history, we have learned that Sun God's body affects one's aspects in certain ways."

"Their body is capable of turning anything to Qi from Space stones and Pill to Beast cores. Their minds are capable of withstanding assault from outside, their spirit capable of devouring other spirits."

"Their Soul Space being filled with vigorous life aura is now just another thing that it is capable of," the man said. "We've never before had one with a body capable of devouring Space stones to form a Sou Space, but that must be another perk of the Sun God's body that none of the previous ones born with that happened to come across."

"So I was just... lucky," Alex said.

"Not lucky," the man said. "Destined. Although one could consider someone destined to be lucky." The man laughed alone.

Alex wasn't of half a mind to laugh. He thought curiously about what he could do with this information. His Soul Space was full of Life aura, so was that why the Yang tree had sprouted roots in there?

"So the Nine Yang Divine tree's seed responded to my Soul Space's life aura and germinated?" he asked the man.

"In a sense," the man said. "Maybe you had a Yang body that helped it feel like at home or something. I cannot tell you the exact reasons why that happened, but yes, it grew. And I can confidently say that it grew before the World Tree."

The man sighed in somewhat disbelief. "The Yang seed much had been looking for more sources of energy, which was why its roots shoot out to grab onto anything," he said. "And in its search, it came across the World Tree seed. Unfortunately for it, the World Tree seed is not a minor thing."

"It is something said to have survived frigid landscape, to devour energy from magma itself to grow," the man said. "The Nine Yang Divine Tree simply activated the World Tree's survival instinct, and most likely forced it to sprout to protect itself when it should have not."

Chapter 1536 Another Possibility

"So... it was all a coincidence?" Alex asked.

"Destiny, maybe?" the man said before laughing a little. "No, I don't know if it was a coincidence. If it was, it is a hell of a coincidence. It could be that it grew thanks to your Life aura too, but I have doubts in that regard. Most likely, the Nine Yang Divine tree's roots threatened the existence of the World Tree, forcing it out of its shell."

"Maybe that was how it was supposed to grow in the first place," the man said, musing to himself. "Those gods should have just tried tossing the seed into hot magma and see what happened. Alas, they were too scared to hurt it and didn't dare. I can't blame them, I would've been the same."

Forced to mature in a harsh environment, was that what it was? Was that how a World Tree seed was supposed to find life? Somehow he didn't think that was correct.

Somehow, he didn't think that was the right set of circumstances. Surely the Nine Yang Divine Tree's roots feeding on its seed could have forced it to sprout, to protect itself, but to naturally grow out, it would need something more.

Alex didn't have much knowledge of World Tree aside from what Senior Yang had told him. His knowledge lacked the trees that were blessed by the true gods.

The World Defying mushroom in parts was a distant descendant of the World Tree. It was so far off the main line that it wasn't even a plant anymore, and yet it had in part a property of the World Tree, albeit twisted to work differently.

The World Defying mushroom changed their energy as per what they came in direct contact with. They changed what they had into something else almost unnaturally.

The World Tree, on the other hand, took all the energy it could come across and turned it into pure Qi. In a way, they were the complete opposites of one another, yet one came from the other.

'That is how she blessed them,' Alex thought before pausing for a moment. 'She?' he questioned himself as a thought grew in his head.

"The World Tree," Alex said. "It was blessed by one of the true gods."

The man looked back sharply when he heard Alex speaking again.

"It was the Moon Goddess, wasn't it?" he asked.

The man looked confused as to why Alex seemed so surprised by his own statement. "Yes, it was," he said. "At least, that is what we believe."

"Then... could the World Tree have properly sprouted when coming into contact with her?" he asked. "Just as the Nine Yang Divine Tree, which was a Sun God's creation, came into contact with me."

"Young man, the True gods are no more," the man said. "All that remains are—"

"Imitations, yes. I understand," Alex said. "I was talking about the Mood Goddess's imitation."

The man paused at that. "Why are you talking about that?" he asked.

"Because I might have met with the current holder of the Moon Goddess's body."

The man gasped. "You met her? Are you absolutely certain?" he asked.

"To be honest, no," Alex said. "I do not know what you know senior, so I cannot tell you if the girl I met had the body you talk about or not, but I can tell you that when I touched the girl to help with her Yin problem, I felt a connection that I instinctively knew belonged to my body and not me."

"It was an ancient connection, which I felt with my master as well, who I think might have been the previous holder of the Moon Goddess' body."

Alex's words surprised the man and at the same time confused him. "Explain to me in detail what happened. What girl? What master?" he asked.

Alex did as the man asked. He explained what he knew regarding his master and the white-haired girl's body. After a minute or two, the man's eyes widened.

"That... that must be the Moon Goddess," he said, remembering some ancient words he had read a long time ago. He was about to say them, but he realized he couldn't. He couldn't tell Alex those prophecies. He couldn't influence his future here. He had too much to do.

He couldn't tell him that throughout the hundreds of thousands if not millions of years since the True Sun God and Moon Goddess had disappeared, the ones that were born with an imitation of their body were always attracted to each other, as if by fate.

And in the hundreds of thousands of years, of the ones that met each other, every single time, one of them was to die, as if by fate.

The day the two met and one didn't die... what would happen then? The man was curious and excited for such a day in the future. At the same time, scared that either Alex or the girl he mentioned would die.

One had already passed away, how many times could he be the survivor of the two?

"If you can," the man spoke. "Try to stay away from her."

Alex frowned a little. "I can't meet her?" he asked. "I was hoping to see if she was my master's reincarnated soul."

The man hesitated a bit. "I do not have the ability to tell whether she is what you think she is or not. I do not even know how real reincarnation is. But still, listen to me, and try to stay away where you can. Or at least, take things slow."

Alex didn't understand, but he nodded. "So... could the World Tree have grown out of her presence or her Yin?" he asked.

"There's a good chance," the man said. "Much better than what I thought the seed did to protect itself."

"I thought so," Alex said. He thought for a bit and asked, "But if the sea isn't protecting itself, then won't it die soon enough? I fear the Yang tree might suck it all away."

"That you don't have to worry," the senior said. "I think the Tree is handling it just fine. From what I see, the two of them are in perfect harmony as of yet."

"Perfect harmony?" Alex asked. "How do you mean?"

"They are giving and taking energy to help each other right now."

"The Yang tree glows with heat, all of which is absorbed by the World Tree to create Qi. The Qi is then absorbed by the Yang tree to turn it to heat. The roots also take and give resources as they need from each other, all of which return back to the cycle in the end, helping themselves."

Alex was slightly surprised. "So... it's a perpetual transfer of energy?" he asked. "They don't need anyone else to grow?"

"No, they do need help to grow," the man said. "Their seeds have enough nutrients for them to grow, for now, there's still food inside there. The seeds are also absorbing the Life aura your body produces."

"While minuscule, they are growing. And if you continue this for long enough, give them additional nutrients, they will certainly mature into the Nine Yang Divine Tree and the World Tree."

"Together at that. That would be a sight to see."

Chapter 1537 Spirit Water

"So, will you take it?" Alex asked the man. "Should I take it out of my Soul Space?" He didn't like the idea of parting with the two seeds, especially the Yang Tree as it was meant to be his.

However, if he had to, he would.

The man thought for a moment, going through everything he had learned.

"No," he said in the end. "There is a chance that both of them will die if I bring them out. I would have to sow them in the ground to let them live and I cannot do that here. I cannot take plants in my storage ring either, they would die."

"But you said they are surviving as they are," Alex said. "That they don't need anything as long as they have each other."

"Maybe," the man said. "I will have to check it all some more, but we don't have to do that. You're the one most likely to enter the Immortal realm next, so you can take the two of them with you."

Alex nodded. That was good enough.

He asked a few more questions to the man. He asked about his Nascent Soul, about his Daos, about swords, about the ones that came from the heavens, and anything else he could imagine.

The man answered all questions easily, without any hesitation.

His Nascent soul would grow along with his cultivation base until it was big enough that it would break free from the dantian and start joining with his body, merging with it, transforming it.

Learning more Daos would make it harder for him to ascend certainly, but the man didn't know if the lightning ever got too strong for one to handle. At best, they would be at the peak of what a person could handle during their tribulation. Only, that would happen multiple times, which was the problematic part.

To improve his sword, he would have to improve his Intent. Alex had learned that, but he was surprised to learn that just improving his Intent wouldn't improve his Sword Intent. One had to train in the sword with the Intent to hone it. A sharp wooden blade could cut far better than a dull wooden blade could.

The man did not know about the ones that came from the heavens. He had assumed they had been for him, but they weren't. And now, he wasn't even sure if they had left or not. Alex had only sensed them leaving for certain because he was close, and he had learned Space aura.

The man congratulated him for learning how to paint, and for being able to produce masterpieces as well as improve his Intent through it.

He explained that the level of artifacts in this realm was not very high and that they were constrained by the mindset of mortals.

The man did not know anything about the Gold and Green aura and why that would be a result of what he did. None of the other continents had that happen to them.

He couldn't guess why the beasts would close their borders. The man assumed it would have been to protect themselves. One of their leaders had died, and they may have done it to defend themselves. Or they did it to not leak the news outside. The man couldn't make up his mind.

He was sorry that Alex couldn't find his cousin.

"I cannot keep my Defensive technique on you," the man said. "The Tiger has made a pact to not harm anyone in this world, so the world is more lax when he uses his Qi. I, however, do not have that luxury. The most I can do is create artifacts that do what I want them to do."

"Even then, I need to be careful," the man said. "I don't think the snake can help you either. He isn't ready to fight the Heavenly Judgment yet, which he will bring down on himself if he uses his Qi. Don't worry, though, I will send a message to the tiger. He will come here some time in the future when he has to."

Alex nodded. The tiger's defensive technique on his body had been destroyed when he fought the Golden Lion back in the Beast Paradise, so he could only wait to replace it on him.

He needed something to protect him while he was in the midst of monsters that could level mountains in a single strike and evaporate a storm for a dozen miles just because of a clash between the two.

A few days passed in which every time Alex was fully rested, he would have to send senior Yang into his Soul Space to learn about the plants as much as he could.

About a month later, they finally stopped.

At that time, the man had learned one crucial thing. The growth of the plants had stagnated and anything they gave to them would only amount to little help. It needed more nutrients.

"For starters, we need spirit water," the man said with a thoughtful look on his face. "Spirit water, and then spirit dews. Although, I'm not sure if the latter can be found or not in this realm."

"What is spirit water?" Alex asked the man.

"Water that is filled with Qi," the man answered. "It should be easy to find."

"Ocean water?" Alex asked in surprise, remembering the city he visited in the Emerald Kingdom where they flooded land with water from the ocean after removing salt and other aspects that would harm a plant.

"Ocean water is too diluted," the man said. "Spirit water is usually found above a spirit vein in a small pond. Although it depends there too."

Alex thought for a moment and his eyes widened in slight surprise. "Wait, I might have something like that," he said, bringing out something.

He presented it to the man, a green flask with liquid inside that amounted to a total of a million liters. "This is Bottomless Jade Flask," Alex said. "It—"

"Collects Qi," the man said curiously. "A flask made out of a Qi Swallowing Jade, how peculiar."

Alex hadn't known that it was a type of jade that had the property to drag in Qi from the surroundings. He had been wondering how it functioned for a long time and had assumed it had to do with some Qi lines he could not see.

The man looked inside to see the water. "How long did you keep it inside your Soul Space?" he asked.

"Ever since I could access it," Alex said. "So... about a year."

"Hmm, and before that, it was outside?" he asked.

"In the ring," Alex said. "But I did occasionally bring it outside just in case it wasn't working inside the ring."

"It wasn't," the man said. "You should have left it out for longer, maybe it would take in more Qi then."

Alex felt a little saddened. He knew he had done something wrong.

"But, placing it in your Soul Space was a brilliant idea," he said. "While it has been there, it has absorbed a lot of the Life aura from its surroundings. While there isn't a lot of it, it's certainly way better than any regular water."

"This should speed up the growth of these seeds by at least half of its current growth rate."

Chapter 1538 Side Effect

Half of the Nine Yang Divine Tree and World Tree's current growth rate. That wasn't half bad.

When the Bottomless Jade Flask arrived in the auction, it was meant for Spirit wines. However, he had seen its usage in growing plants, so he bought it.

He could have never imagined at that time that it would be used to help the Nine Yang Dive Tree and the World Tree grow. That possibility had simply never existed in his mind.

"Actually," Alex quickly said. "I have something else I bought to grow plants." He quickly brought out a few dozen formation flags of various sizes. "This is the Enriching Mist Formation, meant to gather Qi into a small area. What if I used this around the trees?"

The man looked at the rods in front of him, his Divine sense passing through them all. He closed his eyes to see what they really did and nodded. "Not bad, it's quite an amazing creation for this realm. It will do quite well for now. I'll also help make you another one to concentrate Life aura around them. With those two, we won't have to be concerned much longer."

Alex nodded and was about to say something when the man spoke again. "I don't think we can let the two trees remain as they are. They need much more to grow. They need to lay their roots on the ground."

Alex didn't disagree. "So we should plant them on some land?" he asked.

The man nodded. "More than that, we should separate them as well," he said. "Slowly untangle their roots and separate them."

Alex frowned a bit when he heard that. "But they are relying on each other to survive aren't they?" he asked. "That would kill them."

"Not immediately," the man said. "And they have sprouted already either because of you, or each other, or both. Now, they can be taken away if we plan to let them grow."

"What's wrong with letting them as they are?" Alex asked.

The man scoffed a little when he heard that. "The World Tree would devour the Nine Yang Divine tree in no time if we let them stay close," he said.

"While growing, it won't seem like much, but the World Tree is supposed to be large, so large that it is said that one could see the tree before they saw the realm."

"It is said that there were cities built around the world tree in between the corner of its roots, back when they hadn't yet abandoned the place before the war. Each root is as tall as a hills. Mountains at their peak were said to have never come half the size of its height."

"In front of it, the Nine Yang Divine tree would appear as large as an ant to a human. The Yang tree might have been blessed by the Sun God, but it wasn't nearly at the level at which the World Tree was blessed by the Moon Goddess."

Alex couldn't help but be scared thinking of a tree that dwarfed mountains. He had seen large trees, but this was just monstrous if the words were true. And looking at the size of its seed itself, Alex could tell that it was true.

He had to agree that they should separate the two. "How do we do it? How do we separate them?" he asked.

"Don't worry, I will help you," he said. "We have plenty of time."

Over the next month or two, Alex struggled with the man inside his Soul Space from time to time, trying his best to separate the roots by hand.

Each time he did so, he would have to be gentle with the roots slowly pulling them apart from each other. Each time, he failed to complete the task as Alex couldn't handle it any longer and the man had to go back out.

There had been times when he wanted to stay a bit longer, do a bit more, but that would risk Alex's life. He didn't want to do that. There would be problems after his death that the man could not hope to deal with himself.

So, each time, he would leave the task unfinished. The problem that came with that was that every time he left, the roots would go back to grabbing each other again.

Leaving without completing the task meant complete failure and he would have to start it from the beginning.

Thankfully, he had noticed that Alex was able to handle him inside his Soul Space a bit longer each time. He hadn't intended for it, but his presence in Alex's Soul Space had been one of the major training for his Intent and Spiritual Sense. It was a nice little side effect.

The man feared that Alex would end up with such advanced Intent by the end of it all that he would do things that should not yet be possible by Saints.

If he was to be honest, he was looking forward to it.

On the 5th month of being there, Bai Jingshen finally arrived, the behemoth of a white tiger hadn't changed to a human form.

"How are you two here?" he asked when he saw Pearl and Alex in the mansion's backyard.

"Brother Shen, greetings," Alex said.

"Grandpa!" Pearl said enthusiastically.

Bai Jingshen landed by Pearl and stroked his back. "You've grown stronger. Is the Eastern Continent that good to you?" he asked.

"It's mostly Brother's pills," the young White Tiger said.

"Surely," the older White Tiger replied before turning to Alex. "So, what are you doing here? Have you found out anything?"

"We came because of something unexpected I found after opening my Soul Space," Alex said. "My apologies, but we haven't learned all that much about Pearl's mother's death as you might've hoped."

The White Tiger frowned but said nothing in regard to what he thought. "That's okay. There's still some time, right?"

"Yes, there's still 14 more years after I return," Alex said.

"Good," he said. "Take that time to find out whatever you can. However minuscule, find me something. Please."

Alex could hear the desperation in the last word.

"Actually, we did find something, Grandpa," Pearl said. "It's not about mother's death, but something different, another bad news."

"Hmm, what?" the beast asked.

Pearl relayed everything they had learned, however minuscule.

Bai Jingshen was shocked. "My daughter... is dead?" the beast asked, his expression shocked.

Alex could see the hope disappear in the beast's eyes. 'He knew,' he thought. 'He knew this was most likely the possibility, but he had hoped it wouldn't be true.'

That was how Alex had felt about Hannah's survival until he had to give up on that hope for his own sake. He understood.

"Those... bastard," the beast growled with a low rumble.

Alex could feel his skin prick with fear at that voice.

"I will kill those little shits," he said in a low voice. "Screw the oaths. I'll kill them before heaven kills me."

"White Tiger, calm down," Senior Yang spoke. "I know you are mad, but don't lose yourself to it."

"Why not?" Bai Jingshen asked. "Why should I not just carve the flesh of the one that claims himself a dragon and feast upon his entrails? I know he must be the one that did it. I deserve his death."

Chapter 1539 Purpose

The tiger's anger scared Alex. He had seen him angry before, but not this angry. This was killing Intent in his anger that didn't come naturally.

Alex had to step aside in fear of what would happen to him.

Bai Jingshen's fury rose to new heights. His daughter was dead. His son-in-law was dead. His granddaughter was dead. This was an attack on his family and he couldn't stand it.

He burned with anger, the air around his rippling with his Qi that rose from him. He couldn't calm himself. He needed blood. The blood of his enemies was the only thing that could calm him.

That was what his primal instincts demanded.

And with his anger formed something in his forehead. Something that glimmered in golden light, something that flickered so fast that the distracted couldn't notice in time.

Bai Jingshen hadn't realized that he had nearly revealed a very deep secret that he had hidden about himself for the longest time.

"I'm going," he said and turned to leave.

"Brother Shen!" Alex spoke out, but the White Tiger didn't listen to him.

"Bai!" the snake spoke, but he didn't speak to him either.

"White Tiger!" Senior Yang called for him as well, but the White Tiger didn't wait for his words. He flew and ran.

"Grandpa!" Pearl teleported in front of Bai Jingshen, stopping him momentarily. Bai Jingshen looked at him for a moment and shook his head.

"Don't stop me, Pearl. I'll do it. I won't stop for anyone," he said.

"Please don't do this," Pearl said. "You'll die."

"And I'll die have avenged my family," the White Tiger said. "I should have done this from the start, but I let my fear of death stop me."

"And it should," Pearl said in desperation. "Stop, please. I don't want you to die."

"It's too late, my mind is made," Bai Jingshen said, not looking at Pearl anymore. He flew past him, a determined look filling what had been anger a moment ago. He was going to do this.

It was time to end this.

"Stop, Grandpa!" Pearl shouted from the distance even as Bai Jingshen flew to the edges of the mansion, ready to walk out of the formation. "I don't want to lose you too."

Bai Jingshen stopped. The words cut him deep. The final word was too heavy for him to hear from his great-grandson.

I don't want to lose you… too.

He turned around to see Pearl flying toward him desperately, tears filling his face, rolling down his cheek.

"Please don't go," Pearl said again. "I don't want to lose you too. I lost my grandfather and grandmother before I could even meet them. I lost my mother before I got to know her at all. My father is most likely dead too."

"You and Grandmas are my only blood relatives remaining," he said with an ugly cry. "I don't want to lose you. I can't lose someone else again. I'm not strong enough for that."

Bai Jingshen's determination shattered like glass hit by a rock, his anger vanishing like water on a hot stove. Tears filled his face as well, some his own pain, some Pearl's.

He slowly flew toward Pearl who had stopped as he sobbed in the sky. The large White Tiger came next to him placed his right paw on Pearl's shoulder and met his forehead with his own.

"I'm sorry, Pearl," he said slowly. "I was too angry. I didn't think what the rest of you would feel if I died. Forgive me."

The Great-grandfather and Great grandson stayed in the air, silently sobbing as they shared the moment. Alex and the rest arrived moments later and stopped when they saw that he wasn't leaving.

Bai Jingshen looked up from Pearl and saw the others. His eyes fell on Alex beside the other two. He couldn't help but silently curse himself when he saw him.

'Stupid!' he thought to himself. 'How could I have thought about dying? How could I have thought about killing myself just for revenge?'

His purpose in life was much more than this. His was a mission on which balanced the fate of the entire universe. If Alex was the man that his master was waiting for, his purpose, his mission was to bring Alex to the truth so that he may do what no one else could.

That was his purpose. He could not die before he had served his purpose.

'I must take him to the truth,' Bai Jingshen thought to himself. "We cannot die this soon. I'm sorry, let's go back."

Everyone sighed in relief as things calmed down once again.

Alex and the rest left Bai Jingshen to talk with Pearl for a while before he arrived to talk with them.

"I heard Pearl's Uncle tore away the protection I left on you," the White Tiger asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Would you mind replacing it?"

"Sure," Bai Jingshen said. "But later. For now, surely you didn't call me just because of this."

"That is why we called you," Senior Yang said. "That was the only reason. At least back then."

Bai Jingshen's eyes narrowed. "Something's changed?" he asked.

The man surnamed Yang explained everything to Bai Jingshen, who couldn't help but widen his eyes in surprise. "You have the bloody World Tree and the Nine Yang Divine Tree in your Soul Space? How does that even happen?" he asked.

"I can give you a written document on what happened later," the man said.

Bai Jingshen gave him a glare when he heard that. "Fine. I don't really care why," he said. "But this is big. Does the snake know?"

"He's a nobody. He doesn't deserve to know," the senior said.

Alex was surprised to hear the snake being referred to in this fashion.

"But I do?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"If the Godkiller's disciple doesn't deserve to know, I don't know who does," the man said.

Bai Jingshen could only smile. "So, what do we do?" he asked.

"At first I had thought of taking just his daughter and Hao Ya with me, but as things stand, I might have to take him to the Sky God's palace myself," he said.

"Okay," Bai Jingshen said. "As long as it doesn't reignite the war, I don't have any problem with that. What does that have to do with me though? Why tell me the secret?"

"Because I wish to ask you to relieve the burden you've set upon them," the man said, gesturing to Alex and Pearl.

"The burden?" Bai Jingshen asked, eyeing the two of them.

"You've made them seek vengeance on your behalf," the man said. "You've set them on a path which has a high chance of leading them to their death. Can you let them not vie for such a future?"

Bai Jingshen thought for a moment and said, "I think their fate is much stronger than that given what I believe they are going to accomplish. Still, I will let them decide."

The White Tiger turned to Alex and Pearl.

"After hearing all of this. What is it that you two think is the right thing to do?" Bai Jingshen asked. "Speak your mind openly, and I will let you do whatever it is that you wish to do henceforth."

Alex thought for a moment and then looked toward Pearl who simply nodded. No words needed to be spoken between them for them to share their answer.

"We'll continue," Alex said. "There's nothing else to do. I've already given up so much. It's too late to back out now. The only way this ends is with us bringing justice to Pearl and Brother Shen."

"There you go," Bai Jingshen beamed as he spoke. "I have nothing else to say."

The senior sighed. He worried still, but he couldn't say anything. "You will have to be extremely careful then."

"I know," Alex said. "We're doing it slowly and silently. They won't know what's coming for them until it's too late."

"I like the bombastic approach, but this isn't bad either," Bai Jingshen roared in laughter.

Senior Yang gave up in the end and walked away, letting the three talk amongst themselves. Alex told Bai Jingshen about his adventures in the Beast Paradise. His recount was much more elaborate than Pearl's as he had been the one to witness it mostly.

Still, Pearl had remained with the lion for long enough that he might have known more history, which he relayed.

"How are you dealing with the Yin problem? Is it alright here?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"It's fine," Alex said. "I made sure to have a plethora of Yang treasures before I came here, so I can absorb them if I need to. The Yin isn't something we have to worry about yet."

"You are only treating the symptoms, right? Do you know how to get rid of it altogether?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"Senior said that when I reach the Immortal realm, the problem should subside. If it doesn't, I will have two ways to deal with it," Alex said.

"What ways?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"First is to get rid of the Yin bead in my body. If I do that, the problem disappears," Alex said.

"But that brings back your Yang problem, doesn't it?" Bai Jingshen asked. "You never truly treated it."

"Yes," Alex said. "Which is why I'll most likely go for the second solution. I'll absorb a strong Yang energy to improve the Yang source that is balancing the Yin."

"If I am able to bring the two to balance once again, I will have nothing to worry about."

Chapter 1540 A Gift

Alex sat in a somewhat busy diner, with a cup of coffee and some waffles in front of him. He had a newspaper in front of him and something large and rectangular to the side.

He drank his coffee and read the newspaper, watching the lives that the mortals lived around him. A life that should have been his but had been taken away from him without his choice.

He remembered being angry about it back then, but that anger remained no more.

Half a year passed by since Bai Jingshen went back to the Western continent. Alex had asked him to take Pearl with him so he could be with his family in the meantime, but he couldn't do so.

Only his body was strong enough to bear the force of the Qi that barred this world from the outside.

Now, the day of everyone's return to the Eastern Continent was coming closer and closer. Less than a month from now.

The arrival of new people had been something people had expected for half a year before it happened, so they were able to handle the influx of a million new people without much worry.

Especially given the fact that people with cultivation bases rarely ate anything at all. There was no famine or resource problem.

In fact, they brought back resources for everyone to use. However, most of what was brought back was useless and Qi that wasn't under the control of someone's intent was stripped away from everything as the Godkiller's Intent sent it flying to the edges of the continent, only adding to the size of the great destructive qi wall.

A bulky woman with an apron came by him with a clear coffee jar in her hand, half filled with the black liquid.

"More coffee?" she asked.

"Yes, please," Alex said, moving his cup closer to the woman.

The woman sighed and refilled his cup. "You know, this is your 8th cup in the last 2 hours you've been here. That's quite a lot of coffee," she said.

Alex gave her a wide smile and patted his stomach. "Thank you for your worries, but they are misplaced. I can eat anything and not worry," he said.

The woman looked at him with narrowed eyes for a moment. "Cultivator?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said.

"Came with this lot or the last one?" the woman asked.

"All of them," he replied.

The woman thought for a second. "Aren't all of them supposed to come from different continents? And from what I hear, you cannot move to different continents so easily," she said. "You can't have come from all continents, surely."

"A handful of people did," Alex said. "I'm one of them."

"Is that so?" the woman said. "I suppose you'll be returning then?"

"Yes," Alex said. "The day of departure is coming closer. I do not know when I will next return if I ever will."

"Hmm," the woman mused. "You must be visiting for the last time then."

"Yes," Alex said.

"Did you come with someone?" she asked.

"Uhh… you could say that," Alex said. "Maybe not? I can't really explain."

"Sounds complicated. I wouldn't want to learn," the woman said with a chuckle. "Anyway, I wouldn't want to take your time. And I need to return. Have a lovely evening."

The woman left. The sky started growing somewhat orange as the time rolled around to 5.

The door to the diner opened with a ringing of a bell and a girl walked in and took a seat behind Alex, back turned to him.

"You came late today," the woman from before talked to the girl.

"Yeah, the teachers are taking their longest to let us go. They keep saying if we slack, we won't pass the entrance exam, and make us stay an extra 15 minutes."

The woman chuckled. "The same, then?"

"Yes, please," the girl said.

"Entrance exam for college, huh?" Alex said from the other bench. "I remember when I took mine." He chuckled a bit. "Our home's internet was slow, so the questions took their time loading. I thought I had failed, but fortunately, I did well. I got accepted to Oakleaf University."

The young lady turned around. "You are an alumnus of the of the Oakleaf University?" the girl asked excitedly.

"In a way," Alex said. "I went to the university, but before my semester began, I was taken away."

"Oh, you're from the outside?" the girl asked. "No wonder you look so young."

Alex nodded.

"I was from the outside too," the girl said. "But I must now go meld in the society, I suppose. Learn science and math," she said with an exaggerated gesture.

"You should learn science and math if you want to be big," the woman came back with the young girl's food. "Cultivators have no place in this society where cultivation is impossible." She looked at Alex and his empty cup. "More coffee?"

"Actually, no," Alex said. "I was just about to leave."

He got up and turned toward the young woman. He could finally see the girl fully. She had long black hair with wide eyes that held a blue iris. She wore a white top with a long blue skirt and had a bag held around her body diagonally.

Alex smiled and handed over the rectangular package he had been keeping by his side. The thing was taller and wider than her torso.

"This is my early congratulatory gift to you. I'm sure you'll pass the entrance exam with no problem," he said. "Open this with your father."

The girl looked puzzled, holding the large thing with her two hands. She looked toward Alex, her eyes asking questions her voice could not.

Alex simply rubbed her head. "You've grown to become a fine young lady," he said. "Your sister would be proud to see you."

He turned to walk but stopped midway through before turning around. "Also, I can tell you haven't taken the pill yet. Tell your father that now might be a good time to eat it."

Alex placed some money on the counter and walked away.

The girl stayed there, confused, the same for the older woman. She wanted to see what it was, but she had been told to wait. Given that the order had been from a cultivator, she dared not defy it.

She ate her food quickly and left the place. She took the package in her car and drove back to her home, which was on a farm.

She greeted the workers who were leaving, while hurriedly making her way to the house, searching for her father.

Her father was someone who couldn't be called middle-aged just yet. His face made him look no older than in his late 20s. If he were to walk with his daughter on the streets, they would most likely call the two of them siblings more than anything.

The man looked toward his daughter who came rushing into his room with the package in her hand. "You came back late today," he said. "I was going to call you. Did you go shopping?"

"Huh? No," she said quickly, placing down what he had in her hand on the sofa. "Some weird cultivator guy gave me this earlier at the diner. Told me to open it with you."

The man looked back with a confused look. "A cultivator?" he asked. "What did he want with you?"

The girl shrugged. "His words were cryptic for the most part, but… there was one thing," she said. "He said my sister would be proud of me. I'm wondering how he could know."

The father's face changed. "What?" he asked out loud and looked at the package. "The man that gave you this knew about your sister?"

The girl nodded.

The man couldn't stop himself from opening the package. He quickly undid a small rope that tied most of the paper and took the thing out of the package.

Inside was what anyone could have guessed by the shape of the package. A painting.

On the painting were three people, with a couple standing in the back and a girl sitting on a chair in front of the two.

The male half of the couple was a young man with a striking resemblance to the man who held it now. He wore a simple white cultivator robe with blue outlines and some minor patterns

In front of him was a young girl, resembling the girl that had brought the painting. She too wore a simple robe, but this one with green flowers all over

However, neither of the two were looking at either of their own portrait at all. Instead, they stared at the woman who stood behind the girl, left of the man.

She wore a white robe with a transparent shawl around her. It shined bright with its color, but what shined brighter was her loving smile that seemed to look into one's soul and tell them everything was going to be alright.

The girl gasped as tears flowed down her cheeks. "Is that… mother?" she asked. She had never seen her mother except in old, nearly torn pictures. Her face wasn't clear there as it was in the painting.

Her picture in the painting had a soul that a million others could not hold. This was the most precious thing the girl could ever hope to get in her life.

On the frame of the painting was a single note that she saw afterward and picked it up to read while wiping tears from her eyes. On it was a simple sentence.

To Lilin, so she knows her mother will always be with her - Alex

Chapter 1541 Back to Eastern Continent

Over a million people prepared as it was time to return to the Eastern Continent once more. Alex could see signs of mortals wishing to join the cultivators on this journey.

He could see old cultivators that stayed here but did not like life here in the time they remained and wished to return.

He also saw many that came to say goodbye to the ones they would most definitely not see again for a very, very long time, if ever.

Today was the day that senior Yang could finally rest easy, knowing he had made some amends for things he had broken.

Hao Ya was the one that was the one looking over the teleportation on the outside. Since her job was done, she wasn't going to return to the Eastern Continent anymore.

"What will you do next?" Alex asked her as he stood next to her, watching the people walking toward the teleportation formation.

"Focus on my cultivation," Hao Ya said without giving the question much thought. "I've spent nearly half a century helping master with his problems. It's time I live my life for myself."

She turned toward Alex. "You better speed up, or I might be the one to break through to the Immortal realm first," she said with a bit of a chuckle. Her cultivation base was in the Saint Soul 4th realm, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch if she did manage to do just that.

Alex brought something out and handed it to her. "I wish you good luck then," he said.

The girl looked at what she was given and gave a surprised look. "Cultivation pills?" she asked. "You didn't have to. My master can—"

"He can't make pill clouds," Alex said. "Not without revealing himself to the heaven, can he? Use these ones with Pill veins. Unfortunately, I can barely make 6-veined pills without rousing anyone's suspicion on myself."

"If not, I could go for 8-veined pills," he shrugged. "That's the problem with trying to keep my real strength a mystery, I suppose."

The girl looked at the pills for a while before speaking again. "Thank you. Thanks for this."

"I should be thanking you instead," Alex said. "For all you've done for us. All the humans of this continent. They should all be thanking you."

Hao Ya gave a small smile. "Next time we meet, I might be in the Southern Continent," she said. "I will spend some time here, then once master manages to successfully make a teleportation talisman, I will leave this place."

"Why the Southern Continent?" Alex asked curiously.

"To take care of little sister Ronron," Hao Ya said. "She needs me by her side."

"Ah!" Alex said. "Please take care of her."

"I will," Hao Ya said. "Leave for the Eastern Continent without any worries."

Alex nodded and thanked Hao Ya one last time before walking away, mixing with the crowds to go to the teleportation formation on his own.

He had already said his farewells to the Senior Yang and the snake, so there was nothing left for him to do here anymore. His time here had a purpose for which he had come, and the purpose had been fulfilled.

Now, it was time to return to the Eastern Continent and continue his journey there so he could do what he had promised Bai Jingshen, Ren Xiao, all the other wives of the White Tiger, and most importantly, Pearl.

The teleportation roared as the power consumed thousands of people at once. The silver lights gathered around them, grabbing onto every single one of them. Then, at the next moment, they vanished.

Alex reappeared in the Dragon Capital, surrounded by the Azure Imperium's army surrounding the teleportation platform both on the ground and the skies.

They started moving everyone along in a line until they were away from that location in preparation for the next set of people to be teleported there.

Alex was singled out early on by some soldiers and taken away to where his Elders were waiting for them. It had been a year since he had left, so they were more than happy to see him come back in time.

"Elder Yao, Elder Liang, how have the two of you been?" he asked the two.

"We've been good, Your Majesty," the two said. "We're happy you returned at last."

Alex nodded. "I'm sorry I didn't take the two of you. I was sure the senior wouldn't let you two remain in his mansion, so I had to be alone."

"We understand," Elder Liang said. "It might've been better that we didn't leave at all. I managed to gain a Water dao in the time I was here."

"Oh!" Alex gave a surprised look. "Congratulations. What dao?"

Liang Shufen gave a wide smile. "Refraction," she said gladly.

"That's amazing," Alex said. He had yet to learn a single water-related Dao, so he could only imagine how good that was. Having recently learned what he could about gaining more Daos before entering the Immortal realm, Alex was looking forward to learning a few Daos of his own.

Half a dozen more at best. He was sure he could handle such strength from the heavens.

"Welcome back, Your Majesty," the crown prince spoke after a while. His arrival announced the ending of the return of everyone.

Alex turned toward the man. "Crown Prince, it's good to see you again," he said. "How have you been?"

"I've been doing fine," the man said. "Let us return to the palace. I can say I'm positively drained after all this."

Alex chuckled and started moving. "I can only imagine."

The two got onto a carriage that took them to the Dragon Palace which wasn't even that far away. As they went along, Alex asked the Crown Prince what he had been hoping to learn for a long time.

"The barrier... dropped?" Alex asked with wide eyes. He had been hoping for that to happen, but it was still something incredible to hear about. He hadn't very low expectations of it and yet it had happened.

The barrier around the Ivory Kingdom had dropped.

However, the news that came afterward was concerning to Alex.

"Nope, nothing," the Crown Prince answered. "Nothing happened at all."

Alex frowned a bit. "What?" he asked. "How can nothing happen?"

"I don't know," the Crown Prince said. "The Queen herself came to meet his Majesty, and she didn't tell him anything was different."

"Then? What were they doing in the veil for nearly 2 years?" Alex asked.

"Just regular life," the Crown Prince said. "It's confusing really. I can't wrap my head around it. We cannot tell what happened there, or who did anything. Everyone says nothing happened."

"But the barrier is gone and you've checked everything?" Alex asked.

The Crown prince shrugged. "We found nothing," he said. "We might have to wait for a while before the changes start showing up."

"Maybe," Alex said. He wondered if he should ask the man about Immortals, or if that would be giving away too much information.

"Oh right," the Crown Prince said. "I heard that you said you would have to complete part of the trade with my father after you returned."

"Yes," Alex said, remembering. "That is true."

"I see, no wonder my father is out right now," the Crown Prince said. "And no wonder he told me to tell you to find him as soon as you returned."

Chapter 1542 Second Trade

Alex arrived in the resting hall of the Dragon Palace a few hours after his arrival. He had let know the Dragon Emperor of his arrival and was taken to him afterward.

The Dragon Emperor was already there, waiting for him.

"I thought you would come earlier," the Dragon Emperor said. "I had told my son to let you message me as soon as you arrived. Did he forget"

"Greetings to you too, Dragon Emperor," Alex said, sitting next to the Dragon Emperor. "I took my time purposefully."

"Greetings are not needed between us. We only just talked not long ago," the man said, looking at Alex.

"Of course," Alex said with a smile. "To you who had lived for nearly 10 thousand years, a year or two is nothing. But for me it's quite honestly still a long time. Not as long as it would be for a mortal, but my age is still that of a mortal's."

"Showing off?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

"Of course not," Alex said with a chuckle. "Just saying."

The Dragon Emperor nodded, taking to heart no words. "So, why did you make me wait? You said it was purposeful."

"I thought you would need some time to go through the records your soldiers brought back," Alex said. "That was why you sent them away, didn't you?"

"I did," the Dragon Emperor said. "And I got them back as well. I had been intending to go through them later, but you decided to take your time."

"My wait served its purpose then," Alex said.

"Is it true that the country that you come from does not have a sovereign?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "No ruler, no king. Nothing."

Alex nodded. "There were some for a bring period in the past I believe, but they soon disappeared as the land was unified and what emerged was a single government, a group of people that did what the people wanted."

The Dragon Emperor mused. "Why did no one try to become its leader?" he asked. "Every other place has one."

"Not every place," Alex said. "The Northern Continent doesn't have a ruler of any sort."

"Those 5 major sects that they have rule 5 regions of their continent. They are rulers, although they don't name themselves as such," the Dragon Emperor said.

Alex thought for a moment and nodded. "You're right. I wasn't thinking of it that way," he said. He thought for a little longer and came to realize that the Central continent was really just the only place in this world without a ruler who could do things the way they wanted without noticeable repercussions.

As for why it was that way, Alex had some idea. It had to do with the world known as Earth, the place where the humans and the culture of the Central Continent had come from.

"I suppose the reason no one tried to become a ruler is because no one thinks like that. Not having a ruler is normal in the Central Continent, so no one wants to become one if that makes sense," Alex said.

"That makes sense under the context of isolation," the Dragon Emperor. "Your previous continent was isolated, never met with the culture of the outside world. But that is not the case anymore. People who have lived a considerable amount of time outside will have brought back a culture that they're used to. Will your continent still remain the same after this?"

"I hope so," Alex said, before thinking deeply about the topic. He hadn't seen anyone try such a thing, despite the strength they brought back and the knowledge that there are people outside that rule over them.

After considering all the facts, one truth remained in his mind. His continent wasn't without a ruler.

"I don't believe your isolated land is without a ruler," the Dragon Emperor said, following a similar logic that Alex took. "While not an outright ruler, your continent still has a secret ruler that people are afraid to go against. The only reason they don't see him as one is because he never shows himself, except sending a message once in a few years."

Alex didn't nod, but internally he knew that to be true. Senior Yang, whether he had wanted to or not, now ruled the broader aspects of the world.

"Maybe," Alex said.

"You know who it is, don't you?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "You've met them."

Alex nodded. "I have," he said.

"Who is he?" the Dragon Emperor asked curiously.

"I can't tell you," Alex said, somewhat surprised he even got the gender right. Senior Yang wasn't doing his best to hide himself it seemed.

"Why not?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

"If senior wanted to, he would reveal himself," Alex said. "I do not wish to be the one to spread his information when he doesn't wish to. I don't want to be on his wrong side."

The Dragon Emperor remained silent for a while, clearly judging Alex's words before letting go of the topic.

"So, moving on, it is time for you to complete that time of the trade, isn't it?" the Dragon Emperor said.

"Is it that time already?" Alex asked with a hint of chuckle. "I hadn't realized."

"You said you would do it before the Cave of Frost opens up. It's opening up in 2 months from what I hear, so it is about time," the Dragon Emperor said. "I already completed my half of the trade, so it's your turn."

Alex nodded seriously this time around.

The last time he had talked to the Dragon Emperor in order to let the people go back to the Central Continent, he had refused. Even after a lot of discussion, the Dragon Emperor simply didn't want to open up a connection between the two continents that had once been shattered.

As such, he had to give away a bit to the Dragon Emperor to open up the gateway to the Eastern Continent, so he could deal with the situation around the two seeds.

Perhaps because Alex had been considering the importance of the two seeds being dealt with a massive priority, the oath they had spoken on ended up giving a bit more leeway to the Emperor, and Alex ended up trading not just for this part, but also the one 6 years later.

As of yet, he only had the final trade some decade later remaining as the next two had been already settled upon.

It was unfortunate, but it was necessary.

He brought out something from his storage ring. Despite his Soul Space, he wasn't using it all the time to not let people know he had it. At least, he would only use it in private.

From the storage ring came out a white mushroom, the second knowledge he planned on trading with the Dragon Emperor. He placed it before him and spoke.

"This is a—"

"World Defying Mushroom," the Dragon Emperor completed his words.

Alex paused. "You know about this?" he asked.

"Of course, we have many here," the Dragon Emperor said. He narrowed his eyes. "We use it all the time. Surely this isn't what you wanted to trade to me today, right?"

Chapter 1543 Switched Trade

Alex was speechless for a moment. What was he to do here?

"Is this what your second trade is?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "I can't accept that. I already know of the mushrooms. There's nothing for me to gain here."

Alex still didn't know what to say. His first trade was supposed to be the recipes that could help the Emperor make better pills altogether. His second trade was to be the mushrooms.

The third one he had planned on was the Immortal pill-forming technique he no longer used, and finally, in the end, he would hand over the Pill Splitting Qi technique. Since so many of his own alchemists already had it, he didn't think it was such a bad idea to hand it over.

It was incredibly difficult to learn anyway, with complexities that would take a regular saint decades to learn.

Still, now he was stuck on a problem and couldn't help but wonder if the next two were going to become the same.

"I'm… kinda in a stump now. I don't know what to do," Alex said. He worried now. Would he die? Would the oath work backward to punish him for not fulfilling his side of the trade?

After a bit of consideration, he came to the conclusion that he would only die after the 20-year period was over. He still had 14 more years to go. Surely he could come up with something else to give the man, right?

'Dammit!' he thought. Had he provided the mushroom and was refused by the Emperor, he could have gotten away with it. But since he had already accepted what he was given and couldn't return it, Alex was forced to bring up something.

For a moment, he even thought of the later trades that he could pull up. But that wouldn't help him. He needed 4 total trades nonetheless.

'Could it work if I give back the Dragon Medallion?' Alex wondered there. 'No, of course not. I can only give items related to improving his alchemy potential.'

His mind was truly running in many directions to try and overcome this problem. In the end, he had to give up as nothing of worth came up.

"You really use the mushrooms every day, huh?" Alex asked the man, disappointed.

"Whenever I require it," the Dragon Emperor said. "So what happens now? What do you give me?"

"Honestly, I do not know," Alex said. "That Mushroom was what I intended to give you this time around. I think I'll have to use the third thing I was preparing here and try to come up with something in the next 6 years."

"I hope you can," the Dragon Emperor said. "Because I've already paid for two."

Alex nodded. He looked through his storage ring, searching for an empty talisman paper. As he hadn't prepared this beforehand, he had to do it now.

Profound Revolution of Myriad Combination. That was what he was going to give away.

He started writing on the talisman paper, and the Dragon Emperor sat there, watching him. He looked curious as to what he was going to be given.

"This isn't something I already know too, is it?" he asked.

"Uhh… I hope not," Alex said with a bit of a nervous laugh before handing it over to him. The Dragon Emperor took it and read it for a bit before frowning a little.

Alex worried that he had failed again but then the man spoke up. "Is this a pill-forming technique?" he asked.

"It is," Alex said.

"I have my own pill-forming techniques," the Dragon Emperor said. "But it seems this one capitalizes on my knowledge of the details of what goes into making a pill. The sub-components that are never truly seen by anyone."

"So you accept it?" Alex asked hesitantly.

"Hmm? Yes. It is better than what I use," the Dragon Emperor said. "And it seems I don't have to strain myself for each pill."

The Emperor seemed interested in the technique and continued reading through it, trying to learn for a while. Alex sat there, watching him read. At the same time, he tried to see what else he could give away.

The only other thing he could give away was the Supreme Elemental Accord technique, and that was the main thing he had going for himself. He didn't want to give it away.

The Dragon Emperor put down the talisman after a few minutes. "It's truly quite good," he said. "Mind if I ask how you came across this?"

"The senior in the Central continent," Alex told him. It was technically true too. After all, it had come down in a meteor shower, along with the senior.

"Makes sense," the Dragon Emperor said, pocketing the technique. "This is good. You were keeping this for the third trade I assume?"

"Yes," Alex said.

"I see," he said. "It's a shame you chose the mushrooms for the second one. Now you'll have to come up with something else."

"Well, I don't think anything else matters if you manage to form Pill Clouds with what I've given, correct?" Alex asked.

"In a way," the Dragon Emperor said. "But according to the oath, you still have to offer me everything you can."

"I know," Alex said. "And I will."

"I'm curious though, why you chose the mushrooms," the Dragon Emperor said. "I can't see how that helps me at all."

"I mean, it does," Alex said. "I can't form pill clouds nowadays if I can use the mushrooms." If he was in a hurry and didn't have the time to improve the energy of his ingredients, Alex always fell back on the mushrooms.

"What?" the Dragon Emperor asked, surprised. "How can that be?"

"It just is," Alex said. He wanted to change topics to the Ivory Kingdom, but the Dragon Emperor didn't let him.

"The Mushroom is just a substitute for when an ingredient is lacking in amount," the Dragon Emperor said. "How could it possibly help, when you can do the same with the real ingredient."

Alex paused for a moment. "What?" he asked. "What do you mean?"

"World Defying Mushrooms," the Dragon Emperor said. "You use it when you're lacking an ingredient, right? For rare ingredients when you need a lot, you duplicate the ingredient with the mushrooms," the man said. "Half the time, it barely helps me get to 90%."

Alex didn't speak for a long moment before speaking again. "So… let me get this straight, you use the mushrooms to replicate an ingredient," he asked.

"Yes," the Dragon Emperor said. "Why do you act like that isn't normal?"

"Because…" Alex stopped himself from speaking the rest. He was smiling on the inside, happy even. He was excited to learn that the Emperor, and most likely everyone on the continent, had been using the mushroom the wrong way this entire time.

"Why are you smug?" the Dragon Emperor asked. He could see through some of Alex's emotions.

"I'm not smug," Alex said. "Just jubilated. I am happy to learn that I know what my third trade to you is going to be."

The Dragon Emperor was no idiot. "The Mushrooms?" he asked.

Alex nodded. "Let's keep that talk for 6 years later though," he said. "I don't want to give away any more information right now."

Chapter 1544 Snowheart City

Alex teleported directly to Snowheart City, along with his elders and other guards that had been provided to him. He walked out of the building to find an entourage waiting for him there.

The many people there greeted him, along with the woman at the center of them all. The Ivory Queen.

Song Meifen wore a white dress that day, with the only color seen on her body the black of her hair and the reddish pink of her lips. Her smile was one that seemed to brighten everyone's day, and she directed it at Alex.

"I am honored to have Your Majesty finally visit us," the woman said with a bow.

"I'm happy to have met Queen Song again," Alex said.

The woman smiled. "You should have come earlier, Your Majesty," she said. "You truly made us wait."

"I would've come earlier, but... " Alex shrugged.

The woman said nothing. She understood the meaning of his silence.

The barrier.

They got onto a carriage that took Alex and the rest to the palace. Alex looked around the city.

Large curved spires of ancient buildings filled the view wherever Alex turned. They were all of uneven sizes, giving a sort of harmony that usually came with chaos.

The colorful buildings filled both sides of the straight, wide road with giant trees growing on either side. Snow fell from the sky, coloring the land white. Where there was a lava vein, the snow melted, trickling to the side of the road, disappearing somewhere.

Newsboard hung in the sky, announcing his arrival in Snowheart City, as it always did wherever he went. The people on the road stopped and bowed toward the carriage. They couldn't see who was inside, but they knew of it already.

There were no mountains in sight. That was usually a normal occurrence for him. Wherever he went, no matter the Northern Continent or the Gold Kingdom, it was true that where there was snow, there were mountain ranges nearby.

However, in the Ivory Kingdom, most of the land was flat, except for a single mountain range in the east, and that was far enough away that the buildings easily towered over it to Alex's vision.

There was a calmness to this city that he hadn't seen before in any of the other cities he had been to before.

"I asked the Emperor about the barrier," Alex said. "But he told me that it would be better if I heard about it from yourself, Queen Song. Would you mind telling me everything in detail?"

The Queen nodded. "Of course, your Majesty," she said. "But... there's really nothing to tell. There was a barrier that stopped us from moving out, and then after two years, it wasn't there anymore. That's it."

Alex looked at the Queen and tried to discern if there was any untruth to the statement. If there was, she had managed to hide it well. Alex couldn't sense any lies.

"Who created the barrier? Do you know?" Alex asked.

Queen Song shook her head. "As I said, it suddenly appeared one day. We do not know who or why it appeared," she said.

Alex fell into a thought. Did the Immortals do everything in secret, leaving the mortals confused as to why they did or what they did? However, it wasn't as if the Immortals had done everything on their own. They had contact with the humans.

In fact, they had contact with the Queen herself, albeit maybe not directly.

"When the barrier appeared, you were the one that sent out a message that said that no one would have to worry about you in the barrier, correct?" Alex asked.

"Yes, I did," the woman said.

"Why?" Alex asked.

Queen Song looked at him as if he was asking the most obvious question. "To... let the outside world know we're fine. So that they didn't worry about us," she said as a matter of fact.

Alex nodded. "That makes sense," he said. But that wasn't where he was going.

"How did you know that was the case?" he asked her. "How did you know you were safe? A random barrier had after all appeared out of nowhere."

"I knew," the queen said, her voice trailing off a bit. "I just knew..." Her eyes turned sharp suddenly. "You are asking me the same questions his Royal Majesty did when I met him half a year ago. There's something wrong with my explanation, isn't there?"

Alex nodded. "Can you not tell yourself?" he asked.

The queen shook her head. "It feels obvious what I'm saying. It's as if nothing else should be the truth," she said. "I remember the Emperor asking me how I even got the message out as all communication was locked out."

"I was going to ask the same next," Alex said. "How did you do it?"

"I used the talisman to message outside," the woman said, sighing to herself. "Please don't ask me where I got it from. I couldn't answer the Emperor too."

"Yep!" Godslayer spoke from Alex's mind. "Some immortal messed with her memories."

"They can do that?" Alex asked curiously.

"Yeah, it's a simple hallucination trick. You have memory-erasing pills, don't you? This one is simple manipulation. Although..." Godslayer thought for a bit. "To mess with the mind of someone in the Saint Soul realm, that person can't have been a simple Immortal."

"What counts as not a simple immortal?" Alex asked.

"Someone that has learned a specific spiritual technique to mess with someone's memories," the spirit said. "Erasing is easy, but manipulating so that the person isn't aware that their memories are missing is hard. So, it must have been someone talented in such an art."

"I see," Alex said.

"Yeah," Godslayer said. "It's that or... a Divinity."

Alex gulped in surprise. "A Divine realm cultivator?" he asked.

"Their spirit is usually very strong and as a result, they can do things that normal people would find impossible without learning any technique," Godslayer said.

"I see," Alex said softly. He couldn't help but fear which one this was. And on that of that, he couldn't help but worry about whether they had left or not.

"Pills can't do this?" Alex asked, hoping.

Godslayer thought for a bit. "Maybe," he said. "Pills can do many things and I only know of a few. But, it is more likely what I said is true."

Alex nodded. He had to consider all the possibilities.

"Have you found any abnormalities in the people's daily life?" Alex asked. "Any changes that don't make sense?"

"None so far," the queen said. "We haven't exactly settled back to normal since the barrier only lifted half a year ago. People are still trying to find normalcy and catch up on everything they missed."

"Some people are complaining that they missed their only chance at going back home too," she said.

Alex nodded. That was a compromise he had to make to go back to the Central continent. He had hoped everyone would have come out of the barrier half a year before they left, but alas it lasted for another year.

There was nothing Alex could do at that point. Still, it did feel bad that if he had waited half a year longer, they would have all come out.

Chapter 1545 The Cave of Frost

"I have asked every major sect, clan, family, organization, and anything with more than 3 people in it to look out for peculiarities in their daily life," Song Meifen said. "While I haven't told them why exactly they are doing this, I have given some hints that it might be related to the barrier."

"So, if something has changed, even if it's regarding landscape or some resources, we will know quickly," the Queen promised Alex.

Alex nodded, sitting in a grand hall with glowing chandeliers that burned with an iridescent glow but shined only natural light around the hall. There was some furniture in the room, and some ornaments around the room. Paintings filled the wall, but none even half as impressive as what Alex could make on a whim. At least not when it came to Intent and Dao.

Everyone sat on a few couches, surrounding a hearth on one side of the room. Any silence between them was filled with the fire's crackle.

"Were there any problems here, disconnected by the outside world," Alex asked her.

"Aside from missing 3 monumental events in the span of 2 years, none," the queen said with a bit of a self-deprecating smile. "I only found out later that we missed the Mountain Crushing sect's artifact."

"Would you have got it?" Alex asked.

"Maybe," the queen said. "But let's not talk hypothetical. I heard you were ethe one that got it, Your Majesty. How is it?"

"Pretty good," Alex said. "Although I'm not gonna lie, it's extremely expensive."

"Haha! I can imagine. I heard how much it costs. My kingdom would run dry if I used it the way it's intended to," the woman said.

"It is supposed to be run by immortals, using Immortal spirit stones. We are lucky to be using it at all the way we can," Alex said. "Still, I wish it was cheaper."

The queen chuckled a bit. "If you don't mind, I would like to use it for a day or two. I will pay you any reasonable amount for the time I use it," she said.

"I want to say yes," Alex said. "But I would only be ripping you off. You can't see much benefit with just a day or two of its usage. You need to do this for months, if not years before you see any benefit."

"That was most likely why the Mountain Crushing sect fell in my opinion," he finished.

"Hmm," the woman fell to a thought. "I don't think that is the reason. Well, maybe part of it, but not entirely. I think Brother Wan nearly told me what happened once, but he didn't in the end. It didn't sound like it was their fault."

"Oh," Alex said. Maybe there was some other reason that he didn't know about.

They talked for a while longer and the topic came back to Cave of Frost, the reason why Alex was here in the first place. At least one of them.

"There's still some time before it opens," the queen said. "I was wondering why you would want to enter the Cave of Frost, your majesty. It's not something that strong ones like you usually enter. Of course, I'm not saying you shouldn't have come. In fact, I'm happy that you did. I'm just curious."

Alex chuckled a little. "Am I considered strong by the cave's standard?" he asked. "I read that it is mostly used by people to test themselves, to see how far deep they can go. I don't remember it saying that Saint Soul realm cultivators had no reason to come."

"That they have," the queen said quickly. "Saint Soul realm cultivators still are capable of testing themselves against the cold, but I'm sure you have a strong body cultivation now. That changes things a little."

"That does change it a little," Alex said. "But that is something I gained on my own, so I should still be able to test myself right?"

"Oh, absolutely," the queen said. "I wasn't implying that you shouldn't. I was just not aware if you knew what the cave was about. I presumptuously assumed that you would not want to test yourselves against someone else if you knew that you had advantages over them."

Alex shook his head while laughing a little. "No, I'm not really here to test myself, so I'm not really worried about what advantage I may or may not have on the others going in," he said.

"No?" the queen asked. "Then… may I ask why you are going into the cave?"

"I hear it's a good place to learn about Yin," Alex said. "Much better than the Boundless Enlightenment Domain. So, I'm trying to see if I can learn about Yin. Maybe learn the Dao in the process."

The Queen's eyes lightened up in understanding. "Ah!" she shouted. "Dao, huh? That is certainly something Cave of Frost is popular for. Maybe women and some men have learned a lot related to the Yin Dao before. I, myself, have learned a lot from there."

"That's fantastic," Alex said. "I can't wait to go there then."

Alex wasn't expecting much from the cave in terms of learning Dao. He didn't believe the Yin dao was so simple that he could learn it just by being in the cave. Even the Yang dao that he should have been so close to eluded him for such a long time, so Yin dao had to be something similar.

Their talk ended sometime later, and the Queen decided to let Alex and the rest return to where they would be staying for some time. As they left, Alex asked the Queen to help him with something.

"I wish to learn the status of a young girl in a sect that should be close by here," Alex said.

"Hmm? What sect, Your Majesty?" the Queen asked. Her curiosity was quite high, but she maintained a level head.

"The Ice Mist Palace," Alex said. "I believe it was your sect that you came from, correct?"

"It is," the queen said quickly. "I will contact the sect leader there, right away. Who are you trying to find?"

Alex thought for a bit. The memory of the white-haired girl, lying on the bed filled his mind, his thoughts returning back to the connection he felt. He quickly dispelled those thoughts and thought of her name.

He hadn't received her full name, but he had her name, and her family name had to come from her father. So, her name was…

"Yan Shumi," Alex said. "That's who I am trying to find out about."

The queen nodded. "What should I ask them? Should I ask them to come here? I can send someone to get her."

"No," Alex said. "I just wish to know how she is doing. She was ill the last time I saw her, so I've been worried." If it was possible, he would rather not meet her before the Cave of Frost opened.

He wasn't sure how his heart could handle it if after talking to her, he found out she was his Master. That nervousness was still there for him.

"I will check right away, Your Majesty," she said. "I will get back to you once I find out."

Chapter 1546 Evening Mist Lake

Alex reached into his soul space to water the two seeds. The seeds were surrounded in the darkness, dozens of meters apart, such that their roots were not touching each other at all.

Each time they grew larger, Alex was instructed to move them further apart. And they had grown larger in the time he had been in the Central Continent.

Given that he had only known what exactly to do with the seeds after talking with the senior, Alex could now help them much more than the time before.

There were formations all around the two roots. One was the Enriching Mist Formation that he had bought from the Golden Auction. Its job was normally to draw in Qi from the outside and keep it centered at one location.

Right now, Alex was instead using it for that purpose, on top of keeping the World Tree's Qi inside the boundary.

Another formation was something the senior called Borrowing Life formation. It was his own product and he used it to gather Life Energy from his Soul Space to further improve the two seeds.

Their growth was slow but apparent. That was what the senior had said it would be. They were incredible plants that wouldn't grow in the span of a few years. Decades would pass before they could even be considered an actual sprout.

It wouldn't be a surprise if it took them millennia to reach any form of maturity. Alex could only take it all slow, and wait for the trees to grow slowly. He used his spiritual sense to grab onto the Bottomless Jade Flask and poured a bit of the water around the trees.

The trees would take a few days to take in all the water there and grow again. One of the trees turned everything to light, heat, and Yang, and the other one turned it all to Qi.

As a result, their growth was slow and that was why Alex was going to have to wait for a long time.

'Land,' he thought to himself. 'Where will I possibly find the perfect land for this?'

He didn't need a very large land, just a couple hundred meters wide and a few dozen meters deep. But he also wanted it with a Spirit vein inside of it. He had an extra spirit vein on him, but finding a land here without anyone else finding out about it would be hard.

Maybe he could find fertile land during his visit to the Ivory Kingdom. "Ugh, maybe not in the North," Alex thought. "I will have to go south. Ivory won't do it. Silver Kingdom maybe?"

But then he remembered the Great Blightwind region, where all the plants had died and the soil toxic. "Whatever, I'll find someplace certainly."

He wasn't in any hurry yet.

His attention moved away from his Soul Space when he heard a voice coming from outside of his room. Queen Song had returned.

He quickly opened the door and let her in. She walked through the white marble floor, her feet creating a sonorous sound with each step as she arrived in front of the bed he sat on.

Alex could feel the presence of others with her, but it was her alone that was here inside.

"Your Majesty," she said hurriedly. "Can you repeat the name you told me to search? It was Yan Shumi, right?"

Alex nodded. "Yan Shumi, that should be correct," he said.

The woman shook her head. "There is no Yan Shumi in the Ice Mist Palace," she said. "Are you sure that is her name or that is the sect she hails from?"

"That is definitely the sect she's from," Alex said before falling into a thought. "As for her name, maybe I'm mistaken there. I assumed it was Yan Shumi, but if it was not, then… it has to be Bing Shumi."

The Queen thought for a bit. "Are you sure about this? If you don't know her name clearly, I can use other descriptions of hers to find her," she said. "Any notable feature."

"That shouldn't be necessary. It isn't like the person I'm searching for is some unknown disciple in the sect. Her name is Shumi. Her father is Yan Changying, a person I have heard is quite bad at managing his anger. Her mother should be the twin sister of the sect master of the Ice Mist Palace… uhh… Bing… Zheshuang?"

"Master Bing?" the Queen asked with a curious look. "Her… twin sister's child?"

Alex nodded.

"Senior Taizhen's child?" she asked again.

"Ah yes! Taizhen. That was her mother's name," Alex remembered.

The Queen slowly nodded while thinking about a million things. "I will try to contact them again," she said. "I wasn't aware senior Taizhen had a daughter. Did they hide it from me?"

The queen walked away from the room, her sonorous footsteps leaving with her.

Alex returned to what he was previously doing, thinking nothing of what had just happened. He would wait for the Queen to return once again.

The Queen returned 2 hours later, this time her footsteps hurried, disorderly. She didn't have the grace that she had when she left.

Alex opened his eyes to look at her worried look and frowned.

"What is going on?" he asked.

"I am being told that there is no such person as the one you are looking for," she said. "I could have told you that, but I checked just in case, and it's true. Lady Yan Taizhen has never had a child."

Alex frowned. "She most certainly has," he said.

"That's not true," the Queen said. "It's just not. You might have been duped, your majesty. Someone used their name."

Alex nodded. "That is possible," he said. "But I won't agree with that until I've seen them myself."

He got out of the bed. "Let's go," he said. "Let's go to the Ice Mist Palace."

"Right now?" the Queen asked, worried. "It's the middle of the night."

"Doesn't matter," Alex said. "It's important."

He called out his two Elders and they quickly arrived by his side. "What are we doing, Your Majesty?" Yao Ning asked.

"We're going to find a young girl," he said as he continued walking outside the palace.

The two elders looked at each other, worried and confused. "Why are we going to look for a girl in the middle of the night?" they asked.

"Because I say so," he said, not bothering to explain how special this girl was.

The Queen had no power to stop Alex, so instead she went ahead of him and prepared for his departure. However, Alex didn't bother with ships or anything. "We're flying there ourselves," he said and left off.

The two elders flew next to him, and the Queen as well as a few of her subordinates flew by him as well. Together, about 7 of them made their way to the Ice Mist Palace in the dead of night, their path lightened by the silver glow of moonlight on the white snow.

The Queen quickly took the lead and showed them the way to the Ice Mist Palace. Two hours later, they saw they saw a large body of water, large enough to be considered a sea.

Evening Mist Lake.

And on the southern side of the lake, covered in the mist that grew from it, was the Ice Mist Palace.

Chapter 1547 Outside the Ice Mist Palace

The Ice Mist Palace was large. It was one of the greatest sects in the entire Eastern Continent, placing it at around the same level as the 5 ancient sects of the Northern Continent.

Those sects called themselves ancient with just 8 thousand years of history of their own and a few dozen millennia of stolen history. Ice Mist Palace had more than that of its own.

Its strength ran deep and its history deeper.

The mist from the lake covered the entirety of the sect, but light still peered through the mist, giving a very vague and basic outline of the sect.

At the front gates were a few figures waiting for their arrival.

As the 7 of them landed, they finally saw who it was waiting for. Alex looked at them, recognizing a few of the faces from his memory of that time in that courtyard. He didn't know their name at all.

All except the one at the center.

He knew her name well. Bing Zheshuang, Sect Master of the Ice Mist Palace.

"Master," the Queen bowed a little.

"Queen Song," the sect master bowed a little as well.

Neither bowed too low because of their positions, but anyone could tell that they were close. Song Meifen had once been a disciple of the Ice Mist Palace, learning directly under Bing Zheshuang herself. Even becoming a Queen and moving away from the sect didn't destroy that connection.

The sect master's eyes moved to Alex, landing on him for a moment before she bowed again, deeper this time than for her disciple.

"Greetings, King of the Southern Continent," the woman spoke. "To what do we owe the pleasure of having you come here at such a time?"

Alex bowed a little before speaking, "I'm sure you are aware of what I am here for," he said. "Queen Song should have let you know what I am looking for."

The woman's facial expression didn't change much at all as she turned toward the Queen. "All those Questions Your Majesty asked me, was it…"

"It was His Majesty's questions," the Queen nodded. "He wanted me to check."

The woman looked back at Alex and then at the woman standing beside her. She spoke a few silent words, and with some looks of confusion on her face, the woman walked back into the palace, disappearing into the mist.

"Will we just talk outside?" Alex asked. "Will you not invite us in?"

The woman turned back at Alex. "I'm sorry, Your Majesty, but the Ice Mist Palace is a place where only the girls are allowed. No man can—"

"You will make an exception for our King," Yao Ning said loudly, cutting her off. "Surely you won't reject showing hospitality to a King of another continent, would you?"

The woman's face fell just a little, which she tried her best to not show.

"It is just the unwritten law of the Ice Mist Palace, Your Majesty," the Queen spoke up on behalf of their master. "It's just the way things are."

"Then we demand—"

Alex put up his hand before his elders could finish. "Very well, if you want me outside, we can conduct our business outside," he said.

His sword appeared out of nowhere and hovered behind him where he sat on top of it as if it were a chair. He put one leg on top of the other and leaned against his knuckles with the elbow to his knee.

"We can continue."

The sect master saw this and couldn't help but feel bad. Still, she took a deep breath and nodded. "Your Majesty came to get some answers, but I believe I had already answered all of them," she said.

"You did," Alex said. "But I would like to hear it all once again. Where is Shumi?"

The woman gulped a little. "There is no Shumi here," she said. "We checked. There is no disciple by that name."

"Are you trying to hide her?" Alex asked. "Is it because she's your niece?"

"No, I have no niece," the sect master said.

Alex looked at her, letting the silence fill in between them, letting her get more and more anxious. "Will your sister say the same thing?" he asked.

"My sister?" she asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Can you call out your sister? I would like to hear it from her own mouth."

The woman hesitated for a bit. "My sister isn't here right now," she said. "She's away."

"Oh, where?" Alex asked.

"I… can't tell you," the woman said.

"Master, where is senior Taizhen?" the Queen asked.

"She left the sect to go out. The barrier only recently came undone, so she took the opportunity to go out," she said.

"And Yan Changying?" Alex asked.

The woman looked back at Alex, very much confused. "How does His Majesty know about my brother-in-law?" she asked.

"Does it matter?" Alex asked.

"No," the sect master said. "My brother-in-law is with my sister. The couple went out together."

Alex only smiled at that. "Yan Changying and Bing Taizhen… went out together?" he asked. "Last time I saw they were ready to kill each other."

"Last time? Your Majesty, you act like you are close to the two of them," she said.

"Not close at all," he said. "Barely know the two. But, I do have to talk with their daughter, so please, let me meet her."

"Your Majesty, there is no daughter. There is no—"

"I'll stop you right there," Alex said. "I can see this conversation is going nowhere, so I'll stop playing around." He reached into his storage bag and brought out something before putting it over his face.

The Hell Mask.

As black patterns appeared over the white mask, the sect master's eyes widened in shock, forcing her to take a step back.

"You!" she cried out. "But your name…"

Alex put down the mask as it was no longer necessary. "You asked me how you could repay me for what I did," he said. "Well, I'm come asking for my payment, and I want to be paid in truth."

"Where is the girl?"

The sect master had no words to speak. No lies she could speak would fool anyone anymore. But she could speak no more words. Her head slumped to the side, her mind racing to come up with things to say.

In the end, she could only sigh. She reached for a talisman in her storage bag and brought it out. She looked at it for a while before letting it float toward Alex.

"Everything you want to know is written in that talisman," she said as Alex grabbed it.

Alex looked at the talisman, seeing complex runes etched on top of it. He couldn't tell exactly what the talisman was for, but he could see some runes that told him it was a recording talisman.

There was some sort of recording in there.

Alex reached it with his spiritual sense and read what was in there.

And that gave way for the Intent inside the talisman to work on him. Alex heard a deep grumbling laughter as something entered his Spiritual sea before he could even pull his spiritual sense away.

Panic flared through his entire system as he realized that he had done something he should not have done.

Chapter 1548 Fairy

Alex entered his Spiritual sea the moment he sensed something else doing the same. He could feel the pressure building up inside his Spiritual sea and was worried about what was to come.

The moment he entered, he searched for the thing in the gloomy domain of his mind. Staring at the silver mountain, he found a spirit hovering there.

It was the spirit of a woman with long flowing purple hair, wearing a white robe that seemed transparent in most places. She turned her face to look at something that floated toward Alex, her eyes narrowing as she looked at it.

Godslayer arrived next to Alex, and her vision landed on Alex who was next to him. And Alex saw her.

She looked at him for a few seconds, during which Alex's mind went through many different thoughts, one of which scared him to his core.

The woman didn't just have purple hair. She also had deep green eyes, and two pointed horns coming out out from her forehead.

Alex searched for any signs that would tell him that she was a beast, but he could find none. He couldn't doubt himself this time around anymore.

She was most definitely a demon.

Next, he tried to see if she was a soul or just a spirit, but it was hard to tell. He wasn't knowledgeable on this topic, and it didn't feel right to ask Godslayer while she was there in front of him.

The woman's face turned to a smile after those few seconds. "I have never seen a space stone inside someone's spiritual sea," she spoke. Her very first sentence reverberated through his mind, causing the sea below to undulate and splash around.

"And is that a soul or a spirit that has such a large amount of Shadow around it that I can't even tell," the woman said. Godslayer's shadow aura that he kept to himself didn't let her see anything else.

"And you…" she looked at Alex once again. "I can tell that you are the owner of this body, of this world. And I must say… I like your eyes."

Alex was taken aback at those words but he quickly understood what she meant.

"Where did you get them?" she asked.

"Through an inheritance," Alex said. "Left behind by someone who died a long time ago."

The woman nodded. "I should be working, but you are too fascinating to not learn a bit more from before I am gone," she said.

Alex was surprised that despite the pressure he felt, there was no animosity in this woman's presence. No desire to harm him at all. So, he wondered what she was doing here and what she would want from him.

Because one thing was for certain now.

This was definitely the spirit of someone in the divine realm.

"My name is Alex. May I ask who the senior is?" Alex asked.

"You don't need to know," she said. "We will likely never meet again."

"You are in my Spiritual sea, senior. I request that you introduce yourself after having barged into my world," he said.

The woman stared at him for a few seconds which felt like eternity for Alex. With each passing moment, he could feel the pressure pushing him more and more.

But he had learned to handle such pressure from Senior Yang after he entered his Soul Space nearly a hundred times in the time he had been there. He could handle her for an hour longer if this was all he would have to bear with.

The woman suddenly smiled and chuckled a bit. Her laughter echoed through the world, the same laughter she made when she slipped in here.

"You are straightforward," she said. "I like that. You can call me Fairy Xin. I will not give anything more than that."

Alex nodded. "Greetings, fairy Xin. May I ask why you are in my spiritual sea?" he asked.

"If I am in your spiritual sea, it is because you asked about someone that you should not have asked about," the woman said.

'Shumi?' Alex thought to himself.

"Do not worry," the woman said. "I will simply wipe away the part of your memory that has to do with the girl we took away. Everything else will remain intact. You will have felt a minimal amount of damage to your spirit as well."

"Can I ask not to have my memory wiped?" Alex asked. "I would rather not lose anything if that is possible."

"I'm afraid that it's not," she said. "I will have to erase not just your memory, but also the memory of that… thing next to you."

"My name is Godslayer, Bitch!" Godslayer suddenly shouted. "I'm no thing."

"Rude!" the woman's face fell.

"Godslayer!" Alex shouted at him.

Godslayer remained silent for a moment before saying, "Shit! Sorry."

"I suppose I will have to start with the little ball of shadow," the woman glided toward the two of them. Alex moved in front of Godslayer, protecting him. He looked at the woman and quickly spoke.

"Fairy Xin, please calm down," he said. "He didn't mean any harm by those words. He's not used to being good around people."

"Doesn't matter to me. Stand down and let me erase your memory. I don't have much time," she said.

"Please, Fairy Xin," Alex said, thinking of ways to stop her. "May I ask why you came here to this world? This world belongs to the humans after the war, and there is an Azure Dragon here to protect this continent."

"Why should I care about a useless serpent from the beast house," she said. "If he was any good, he would have never been sent to this world." She continued moving toward him.

"Why did you come then? Was it just to take away little Shumi?" he asked. "How did you know she was here? How did you find out?"

The woman said nothing.

"Was it because she has the Moon Goddess's body?"

The woman finally paused and looked at Alex with wide eyes. "How… do you know that?" she asked.

Alex sighed in relief. "I didn't know," he said. "But I had my guess."

"Have you told anyone else?" the woman asked seriously this time around.

"Yes," Alex said. "A couple of people."

"I see," the woman said, her hand to her chin in a thoughtful expression. "If that is the case then I can't let you live."

"What?" Alex asked.

"I must kill you," she said. "I'm sorry. This is too monumental of information to leave at the hand of a mere Saint." Her aura exploded and the pressure Alex felt early on tripled.

He felt as if his world would break at any moment and all would be lost.

"I'm sorry," she still spoke, her voice thunderous now. "I must kill you, and I must find the ones you gave away this information to. Only then can we be safe."

"Only then can our future survive."

Alex grunted in pain, but it was too much. He had never had such a strong person actively try to kill him.

"Alex!" Godslayer's voice flooded his ear. "Fight!"

Alex nodded. There was too much risk to his survival for him to not fight.

The water beneath him floated next to him in the shape of a fist, and Heaven's Impact became the beginning of the spiritual war.

Chapter 1549 Elements

The fist-shaped ball of Spiritual energy hit the woman in the chest, but it did nothing to her at all. She continued gliding toward Alex and Alex retaliated with stronger attacks.

Spiritual attacks he had learned from the Fu clan ancestor flowed out from the sea beneath him, waves of Spiritual energy crashing onto the woman named Xin. They dissipated as quickly as they came.

Then Alex struck out a palm.

A yellow palm strike flew out from his hand, flying towards the woman. The woman's eyes stopped at the color of the palm strike and only destroyed it when it was too close to it.

She felt the destroyed aura dissipate and couldn't help but be surprised.

"Yang?" she asked herself, confused at what she was sensing.

A ball of fire flew next to her when she was caught off guard. She used her energy to push it aside, but just before she could do it, it exploded in front of her, the waves of the attack pushing her back, the head burning her ever so slightly, and the fire aura catching up to her.

"Fire?" she asked. It was another element this time.

Alex punched the next time, 4 golden spears forming from this single punch of his, all flying directly at the woman. His Golden Spear punch struck the woman, a metal aura filling her senses.

"Another one?" she cried out in surprise. "How is this possible?"

Alex could understand what she was feeling right now. His attacks which should be forming due to his spiritual energy had an elemental aura to them. That was something that should have been impossible.

Alex didn't know why that was the case, and neither could anyone else tell him. This was a mystery he would have to figure out himself. But for now, this was a fantastic help to him.

Alex creates numerous icicles around him that are hovered in the air and then lets them shoot out. They shot at the woman, the ice aura striking her.

'Water now?' the woman thought. She couldn't comprehend the situation, despite the years of experience she had. She couldn't understand why a Saint had something, not even a Divinity could have.

One's Spiritual sea was not something that could use Qi, so having elemental affinity to any attack was not possible. But it did, and the woman was dumbfounded all the more for it.

Alex wished he had a sword with him. He could make fake ones, but those wouldn't work. He could only use Sword Intent through them and no techniques. There were so many attacks he could make, but this was all he could do with techniques that didn't use swords.

Still, he didn't stop attacking. One after another, he threw out all the attacks he could at the woman.

Having gotten used to the situation, the woman stopped feeling surprised and started her attack as well.

She wasn't here to kill. The Intent that put her in the talisman was meant to erase the memories of all those who could let someone of importance know what had happened here.

But now that she had realized that Alex knew the identity of the girl they had taken away, she went against her own Intent to kill him. That was what she thought was the best thing to do here.

She started striking, each strike stripping away chunks of Alex's spiritual energy from him. Still, he had a lot for how weak his cultivation base was.

"You're a prodigy," she said. "A pillar of the future. I am saddened that I have to kill you, but for our own future, I will. Please accept that this isn't easy for me either."

She shot around another random attack.

Alex had put forth the All Swirling Elemental Shield by now and the damage he took was the damage his shield took. It wasn't direct damage, but in this instant, losing spiritual energy was equivalent to dying.

The woman's eyes flashed when she sensed the aura in the shield. '5 elements?' she thought. 'And he put out Yang before too. That makes it 6.'

She couldn't believe that he had access to 6 different ones. 'No Yin, however. I wonder why not?' she thought. It hadn't crossed her mind that Alex was only capable of producing the elemental aura he used as a technique.

Alex was hardly ever not on the defensive after the woman focused and she slowly approached him step by step, attack by attack. She could see the water beneath her becoming shallower and shallower with each step of her, with each attack.

And she continued it. It took her only 5 minutes before she was right in front of Alex and she used a strong burst of attack to destroy his shield.

Alex could barely look at her anymore. Even though it was just an avatar, his face reddened with pain, his breathing heavy, his head aching with a thumping noise that wouldn't go away.

"Alex…" Godslayer said softly from far away. He was ready to help, to throw away all the shadow aura around him to attack the woman with what he could.

But he didn't. He was told to stay away.

The woman looked at him with a pitiful look in her eyes. She just looked at him as Alex created another shield in front of him to protect himself, so much weaker than the last time.

"I would have just wiped your memory with barely any damage to your spirit had you not told the others about our goddess," the woman said. "Now, only death awaits you. I'm sorry."

Alex chuckled. "You're not the main spirit of Fairy Xin, are you?" he asked. "You're just a small chunk of her, right?"

The woman looked puzzled. "Yes, I can't even be considered that in reality," she said. "I'm barely anything."

"And yet you dared to be so nonchalant about it all," Alex said. "With this weak spirit, you should have been more prepared. You shouldn't have let yourself be weakened to this level."

"What are you—" the woman's words stuck to her throat as a wave of panic flashed from all around her. She had no Divine sense here And she had not seen this coming.

Yellow fog appeared out from underneath her immediately, grabbing onto her leg, then her torso, her arm, and then her face.

"What is this?" she shouted, trying to use her Divine energy to attack, but most of it was absorbed by the fog. What escaped it was stopped by Alex's shield.

Alex felt life flow back to him as the attack was absorbed and more life flowed back as the rest of her spirit was taken away. She screamed the entire time the yellow fog devoured her and even as this piece of her spirit was torn away, she didn't understand how she lost.

"I hope you won't be this antagonistic if we ever meet for real," Alex said and sighed in relief.

"That was close," Godslayer said from the side.

"Yes," Alex said. "But I had to take the chance. If she didn't think she had the upper hand, she wouldn't have weakened herself, and I don't know I could have absorbed her so easily."

Godslayer nodded.

"And I'm glad I did," Alex said excitedly. "My spiritual energy has improved by not a small margin once again."

There had come a reward for the tedious battle he had just fought.

"You can get excited later on," Godslayer said. "Go deal with what is happening outside first"

"Oh right," Alex said, quickly leaving for the outside. When he arrived outside, he smelled a flowery smell and saw chaos.

Liang Shufen was holding onto him, screaming his name, trying to feed him some sort of pill that she couldn't push through his mouth. In the distance, Yan Ning had the sect master of the Ice Mist Palace at a spear's edge, ready to cut her down.

It was only the people around her that had managed to stop her. The Queen was with her master, asking what she did, shouting at and could only use her vision to see what was happening.

Godslayer nodded.

"And I'm glad I did," Alex said excitedly. "My spiritual energy has her.

"Your Majesty!" Liang Shufen shouted when she saw him open his eyes. Her voice alerted the rest, bringing the other to him to check up on him.

"Your Majesty, are you alright?" Yao Ning asked.

"Your Majesty," Queen Song came to him as well.

"I'm alright," Alex said, slowly moving away from Liang Sufen and standing on his own. He felt the slightest hint of dizziness from his depleted spiritual energy.

He felt a slight buzz from behind him, a small feeling of worry passing through him that he nearly missed. He turned around to find Midnight in the snow.

He couldn't help but smile. He reached out to it and cleared the snow before telling it, and everyone else, "I'm fine. Don't worry."

He put Midnight inside his storage ring and looked around. "Where is the talisman I had?" he asked.

"Talisman?" Yao Ning asked. "We… we saw you fall unconscious, so we destroyed it. Should we not have done that?"

Alex thought for a moment and shook his head. "Never mind," he said and looked toward the sect master in the distance. She was being held by two men, both members of the Head Legion.

She was strong enough to break out at any moment, but she didn't. Alex could see the guilt in her eyes.

"I want to speak with the sect leader privately," Alex said. "Can you all step aside please?"

"Your Majesty, she tried to—"

"Don't worry, I know what I'm doing," Alex said and moved toward the sect master, and the two men moved away from them.

Alex stood in front of her and used his spiritual sense to ask the first question.

"So… your sister, her husband, and their daughter were taken away to the Immortal realm, correct?"

Chapter 1550 No Answer

Bing Zheshuang shuddered at the question that was asked of her. She held her face stern, making sure to not let herself show even the tiniest hint that she knew the answer.

Letting Alex know that she knew what had happened would trigger her oath, killing her instantly.

Alex watched the woman who did her best to remain quiet. He fell into a bit of thought, at which point Godslayer spoke from his mind.

"She can't answer," he said. "That Divine realm woman from before definitely forced her to make some oaths. Look at her, she'll practically die before giving us anything."

Alex agreed. "I especially asked that question because I thought it would give her some leeway in case she was in an oath," he said. "But it seems her oath has more to do with ignoring the fact that Shumi ever existed at all."

"But she can talk about her sister, can't she?" he asked.

Alex nodded and took the question there. "How old is your sister supposed to be currently," he asked the woman, taking her thoughts away from the question. He could see relief fill her face now that she did not have to answer.

"She is the same as me, 6 Millennia old," the woman answered.

"So you can talk about your sister?" Alex asked her.

The woman hesitated but nodded in the end.

"Can you tell me truthfully where she is?" Alex asked her.

The woman thought for a bit and shook her head. "I'm sorry for what I did earlier, Your Majesty," she quickly said. "I did not know what would happen. I was told to hand it over to anyone that—"

Alex gestured for her to stop. "Don't worry about what you did," he said. "If I wanted to punish you, I would've already. Right now, I just want to know what I can."

"I'm afraid I cannot tell you much, Your Majesty," the woman said.

"Is it the oath?" Alex asked.

"There is an oath, but even without it, I would never tell you anything," she said. "If you force me to, I will have to retaliate."

Alex sighed. That was the truth in the end. Family first. She would not betray her sister and niece by telling where they had been taken to if that was dangerous. He thought for a bit and asked another question.

"Did Fairy Xin introduce herself to you?" he asked her.

The woman's face shifted, looking surprised that he even knew the name. Slowly, she nodded.

"Was there anyone else other than her that came?" Alex asked.

The woman kept quiet at that, not answering his question. Alex wanted to ask if it was her oath or just her who was not answering, but he found it unnecessary to ask. He wasn't going to get an answer regardless.

"Fine," he said. "I came here to meet your niece, but since she's not here, I will ask you what I would have asked her."

The woman still didn't say anything, her complicated oath making it hard to talk about anything in this subject matter. Still, her silence was an approval for Alex and he asked the question that burned in his heart for a long time.

"Did she say anything about the name I gave you?" Alex asked her. "Was there any sort of reaction to the name, Yu Ming?"

"Yu Ming? The fake name you gave us?" the woman asked.

Alex nodded. It was technically still his name, but he ignored the technicality for now. He simply waited for the woman to give him an answer.

And her answer came in the form of a head shake that meant no. "We never really talked about you at all," the woman said. "Maybe the others did, but I certainly wasn't there, so I don't know if there was something that happened."

"Dammit!" Alex couldn't help but say it out loud. He had been hoping to get some sort of answer, but there was nothing.

There had been 2 reasons he had used the name Yu Ming back in the Hundred Blossom Valley.

The first was simple. He did not want people to know that he could heal too. He had healed something that no one in the Ivory kingdom could heal, so his name would have most likely spread. If no one else, the Emperor would've heard this feat of his.

He didn't want that.

The second reason was the more important reason. He wanted to use the name Yu Ming so that when the white-haired girl did wake up from her coma, he wanted her to know that she had been treated by him, a person named Yu Ming.

If she was the reincarnation of his master and had somehow retained partial memories of her past life, he hoped to reawaken it with his name. He hoped to bring back Ma Rong if she was still in there.

Alas, it seemed he would never know what had happened.

"Was your niece different after she woke up? Had her personality changed? Anything? Please," Alex asked, but the woman could only stare.

She could not say anything, lest she accidentally acknowledged the existence of her niece. She had vowed to not do that.

"I see," Alex said, realizing he was not going to get any answer. "Very well, I won't bother you anymore then. Take care."

The people that were around them this whole time, watching the two talk with their spiritual senses were confused. They had no idea what the conversation had been about, and the only word they did hear was Alex's sudden curse 'dammit'.

The Queen above all was most confused as this was the sect she had come from, the person in the snow was her master, and yet, nothing of what was happening made any sense to her.

"It seems I was mistaken," Alex said out loud. "Let us leave then."

The sect master of the Ice Mist Palace could only watch in silence as they all walked away. She bowed deeply, happy knowing that she had kept her family's secret safe.

Even if they knew her sister and niece had been taken away, they would never know where to. And that was the most important thing here above all to her.

Even if death came to her, she was ready to hide this information from anyone who sought to know it.

"Your Majesty," the Queen spoke as she flew close to Alex. "Are you alright? What did my master do to you?"

"Will you be reporting this to the Emperor?" Alex asked her with his spiritual sense.

"Even if I don't want to, they are his subordinate," she said, referring to the 3 men and women from the Head Legion that flew next to her. "They will definitely report what happened here today."

Alex nodded. "If you want your master to have an easier time in case of an upcoming investigation, divert their attention toward her sister," he said. "She has spoken an oath to not speak about her niece, and it would kill her if they forced her to."

The Queen's eyes widened in terror. "I see," she said. "I wasn't even aware there was a niece."

"You did," Alex said. "Your memory of it has been erased is all."

Chapter 1551 Cave Of Frost

5 days went by in a flash as the time of the Cave of Frost's opening had arrived. In these 5 days, he took the time to deal with his internal thoughts regarding the girl named Shumi, his master, and the Moon Goddess.

The Demons had taken her away, that much was confirmed. As for where he had no idea. He couldn't even imagine how many different places there were in the Immortal realms where demons lived.

Godslayer spat out a few names while grumbling, like Eclipsing Heaven, Eternal Isles, Mystic Demon realm, Frozen Haven, Infernal Realm, and many others, but he could not tell which one of them it was that the girl had been taken to.

And it didn't matter to Alex either when he truly thought about it.

What was he going to do after finding out? Go to her? Go to a place where Divine realm demons were present? The same demons that most likely had an inborn hatred of Humans.

Alex would have to find some other way or wait until he was strong enough where he wouldn't have to worry about a Divine realm demon.

"How long would that take?" he wondered. For now, he had to focus on the cave and do his best to learn about Yin. That was what he had to focus on right now.

They flew through the air on a large boat this time, the Queen coming with him.

The Cave of Frost's opening wasn't as large a deal as the Golden Auction or Realm of Trial. It barely even got as many participants as the Endless Shadow Aybss, despite the fact that it only appeared once every decade or a decade and a half.

They went through a snowstorm, a strong barrier holding back the destructive air and the chilling snow from the ship. The front of their vision was completely covered up in the blizzard as well.

They were mostly blind to where they were going, but the one that was piloting the ship knew where they were going, so no one was worried.

That wasn't to say no one was on guard. After what had happened to Alex the last time he left King's city, the security had been improved and their attention sharpened.

They were constantly on guard for anything and everything that would come from somewhere. They weren't going to let their guest be stolen like last time.

Half an hour later, the storm parted away, and it gave a view of the Evening Mist Lake spanning hundreds of kilometers wide to the north. Alex looked to the side. The lake looked dark in daylight with no light shining off it as the day was cloudy.

Alex could see people gathering on the eastern side of the lake near a small mound of ice and rock. The Ice Mist Palace to the south was still covered in somewhat of a mist, but it was far thinner than the last time he had come here at night.

The Evening Mist lake only brought out mist in the evening after all.

The ship made its way toward the east where the people were gathered and landed with a soft thump on the pile of snow.

Alex jumped from the ship, landing on the snow down below, his feet sticking in the snow down to his knees. He was surprised to see how much fresh snow it was here. He floated up a bit and stepped on top of the snow and waited for the others to get down.

"I'll go deal with the Cave's opening along with the sect masters," the Queen said. "You will have to wait while we work to get it open."

"You have to open it?" Alex asked.

The Queen nodded. "We can't tell when it will open naturally," she said, pointing toward the snow and rock mound in the distance. "So, we have to push it a little to open towards the end so we can determine the time of entry."

Alex looked toward the snow and rock mounds and saw what she was pointing toward.

The mounds weren't there for nothing. They had holes in them that were completely covered in ice. He could tell what those openings led to. "So that's the Cave?" he asked.

The Queen nodded. "There are multiple entrances, with many different routes inside. But we believe they all go to the same place in the center. It gets colder the deeper you go in there," she said.

"Wait, regardless of length?" he asked. "Are you not judged based on who goes the furthest?"

"Uhh, not really, no," the Queen said. "We simply judge the progress based on the coldness that is recorded through a talisman that we send with you," she answered.

"Ah, I see," Alex said. "That makes sense."

"Anyway, I will leave, for now, Your Majesty," the Queen said. "I need to go help them."

She didn't wait for Alex's approval and went on by herself, leaving him behind with the two Elders and a few other people she had brought along.

Alex walked through the snow, slowly making his way toward the cave. He looked around the place, the canvas of white and black filled only by color with humans.

People wearing robes of all colors sat around in the snow, waiting for the cave doors to open.

Alex went close by and sat.

People turned to stare at him, many noticing who he was, talking to themselves. He had left quite an impression back in the Realm of Trails by completely passing three different trials, a feat that had never happened before. If it had, it had been lost to time already.

"Mostly girls, huh?" Alex said softly after seeing the demographic of the people assembled. Over 80% of them were females.

"Girls are closer to Yin than men, so it is no surprise," Liang Shufen said from his side. "Still, there are more boys than I expected. Surely not all of them are here to learn Yin."

"They're here to test themselves," Elder Yao said. "It's obvious. You can see the look in their eyes. They are ready to test their limits. Although, I am surprised to see many girls with the same fire in them."

Alex chuckled, letting the two of them talk about things while he just listened. More and more people arrived in time, sitting as close to the cave as they could without disturbing anyone.

There were a few that seemed to be wanting to talk to him, but none came forward. There was one girl in particular who kept eyeing him from far away.

He wondered if she had fallen for him or something, but he let go of that thought process. It sounded quite narcissistic of him, even if he was good-looking altogether.

He turned when he heard a loud snap and turned to see something. Of the 8 different cave openings, the ice on one of them had been shattered open, releasing a cold wind that made the outside air feel like a summer breeze.

People stirred, but the Queen spoke out loud.

"No one enters until all of the doors are open." Then, she moved to the other doors and started working with the other sect masters to destroy those as well.

Chapter 1552 Through the Cave

When the last of the cave's ice was shattered, the people waiting to enter stood up, one by one, ready to enter when they were allowed to.

Alex stood up as well.

The Queen let one of the sect leaders speak up, a woman from the Thousand Snowfall sect. She was a beautiful woman, but that was hardly a rarity where they were.

She started explaining the important aspects of the Cave and how they would have to be careful. She talked for a while, but the essence of her speech was simple.

The Cave is cold. Don't die of it. Come back out in the next 2 weeks or you'll die in there.

"This is the talisman that will record the coldness of the place you reach," the woman said. "At the same time, this is also your life-saving measure. Crush this talisman and it will drag you along to a warmer place. Maybe even all the way out."

She pointed toward the many elders who stood by the cave opening. "Get one before you go in."

The many impatient individuals hurriedly nodded and started going in one by one.

The Queen herself brought one to Alex. "Make sure to leave within the next 2 weeks, Your Majesty," she said. "We cannot let you out if the doors are frozen by that time."

"They only open for 2 weeks?" Alex asked.

"We can't tell how long they stay open, but we have figured out 15 days to be the minimum. So we tell people to not stay in any longer," she said.

"Can't I just break through the mound and come out if that happens?" Alex asked.

The woman shook her head. "The ice that forms on the cave openings forms around the wall as well, and it's not normal ice. It's ice with Yin properties, which is why we need to come together to use our knowledge of Yin to break it," she said. "We can't break through a thick one if it closes."

Alex nodded. "Got it," he said. "I will take care."

With the talisman in hand, he walked in through the leftmost cave opening with people slowly walking around him, focused on themselves as they tried to handle the cold.

No one looked at him at all.

Alex brought out Whisker, placing him inside the folds of his robes.

"Why is it so cold?" Whisker complained.

"I told you it would be cold," Alex said.

"Not this cold," Whisker replied.

"Try to survive the cold. And try to learn what you can about Yin," Alex said. "And... do what you want. I don't have much else to say."

His eyes were already wandering around the place, his senses sensing the thick Yin just at the start of the cave. There was frost on the ceiling of the cave, yet to melt entirely, as the ice doors on the opening too had yet to melt.

"So cold," someone said not far away from Alex.

"Was it always this cold?" someone else asked with a worried tone to their voice.

"Maybe they opened it early this time around," the first girl said. "This was definitely not this cold the last few times I entered."

Alex looked at them and then felt the cold himself. He didn't find it as cold as they did, but that didn't mean it wasn't cold. It was a different kind of cold, one that he had gotten used to the last few years.

A cold that came from the presence of Yin, rather than a drop of temperature. Yin Cold.

Alex walked further, the cold increasing very gradually. He wanted to find a spot along the cave where the coldness was just enough that he couldn't go any further, but also where he could get to look into its secrets the most.

For now, that was going to be a lot more inward than he had expected.

Not even 100 meters away from the cave's opening, the cave started slanting, going downward. The lower they would go there colder it was going to be. 'The Yin is pooled up down below,' he thought.

People started sitting down very early on. It wasn't because they couldn't go further along, but rather adapt to the coldness before moving in. It was only the weaker ones though. The stronger ones could go on for much longer before they had to rest.

And someone as strong as Alex would have entered this place multiple times over and would not have needed to come.

Alex came across his first fork in the road and decided to go with the path on the left. He wasn't sure if his feeling was correct or not, but the path on the left felt colder than the right. And he had to keep moving toward the colder side.

After walking for 5 more minutes, he came across a drop nearly 10 meters below. He looked all over and saw that he had come to a giant pocket in the cave that was nearly 50 meters across on all sides, with even the height going over 20 meters.

The ceilings were full of icicles, made entirely out of Yin ice. He flew up to it and punched a single icicle. The cave shuddered in a boom, but the icicle barely showed any signs of cracks at all.

"What?" he looked up, surprised. That was not supposed to have happened at all. "I can't break it?" He had expected it to be tough, but not this tough. The ice was hard, reminding him of the ice back in the cave of the Turtle's domain.

That one was made using Immortal Qi, which was why it had been strong. Was this one made out of something similar as well?

He punched it a few more times, using Qi and heat to help him. In the end, it was the Space Dao that helped him cut through the icicle, which he grabbed.

Then, he reached the bottom and started studying the icicle. Whisker came out of where he was staying and looked at the icicle as well, his whiskers giving him information that a regular human or beast would never even know.

They studied the ice for a while in a corner of the cave. Many people came and went, but no one stopped to look at what he was doing. Everyone was stuck to their own thought.

"Ice..." Alex thought. "I need to know Dao of Cold or Ice before I begin to understand this. While Yin is helping form this, in the end, it is still made up of water. Water Dao, I will have to start there. I don't think I can learn anything else without learning those Dao first."

Whisker had nothing to say.

Alex put aside the icicle. "I guess the only thing I can possibly learn is Yin Dao for now," he said softly. Then he stood up and looked in a certain direction of the cave, towards the shadow where his purple eyes could see a haze of colors.

"You've been staring at me for quite a while," Alex said. "Care to explain, why?"

No one said anything.

"I can see you, lady," he stared directly in her direction.

"Well, I'll be damned," a figure appeared from the shadows. "I didn't expect you to see me this easily."

Chapter 1553 Jiaolun

Alex watched the darkness around the girl disappear as she appeared before him. He looked at her, somewhat surprised.

He didn't know her at all, but he had seen her looking at him from time to time. He had seen her gaze and had even thought that she had fallen for him, which was why she was looking at him.

Had she fallen for him?

The girl looked to be in her late 20s, which by Eastern Continent's standard would put her around 2 or 3 Millennia old. If she was talented, she could be even younger, and if she was a player, she could be so much younger.

Her black hair was tied in a braid, that fell in front of her, contrasting the stark white robe she wore. She was smiling with a look that hid a thousand mysteries.

"May I ask why you are following me?" Alex asked her.

"Yes, but I am not sure if I can answer just yet," the girl said, looking around. "Your Majesty." She added as an afterthought.

"You cannot answer?" Alex asked. He checked her cultivation base. At Saint Core 3rd realm, the girl wasn't nearly strong enough to be his opponent. She wasn't even strong enough to be Pearl's opponent, who had improved a lot in the past few years.

"I can, but maybe not here," she said. "Please continue on with yourself, I will show myself when I think it's right." Then, she slipped back into the shadows, hiding herself with what Alex could now see was a talisman.

The incident was too weird for Alex to just let go of what had happened. He looked in the girl's direction for a bit longer before understanding that she wasn't going to talk to him.

He considered her suggestion and started moving.

wanted pills from him. A girl who had fallen for him. A girl who wanted to learn alchemy or even wanted to be his queen. But none of that seemed right by the girl's attitude.

'She trying to hide our meeting?' he thought. 'Or is she an assassin and wants me to wait until she meets up with her crew?'

All sorts of thoughts went through his head as he continued onward. Throughout his walk forward, he saw many girls and a few men sitting around in the cave, meditating on the mysteries of the Yin.

He looked at everyone carefully to make sure not one of them was going to jump at him out of nowhere. He would not be caught off guard if that was their plan.

The massive cave pocket narrowed the further he went along until it was barely wide enough for him to spread his arms out. The further he went, the narrower it got until the point where he had to turn sideways and slide through.

Thankfully, past that point, the walls grew wider again and seemed to snake its way down into the ground. The Yin here was thick and strong, and not many people were there.

He looked at a large fork in the path again and did his best to check which one was colder of the two. That seemed more difficult here as the Yin in both was potent enough that he couldn't tell the difference between the two.

Still, he tried his best and found himself gravitating toward the one on the right. He had a feeling that the pathway he needed to take was the one on the right. While he was still oblivious about Yin to a certain extent, it would be a lie to say that he hadn't started peering into its mysteries.

Alex turned around, his eyes glowing slightly purple as he stared at the woman that was following. Recognizing that she was still there, he walked through the right cave and continued along.

The cave path once again snaked its way around, going steep once As he walked, he thought of all the things she could be. A girl who and then flat the next. It grew wider again and wider until it was larger than the first cave pocket he had been to.

The Yin here was the thickest it had been in a long time as well. Alex had to actively ignore the cold now as it was getting to him as well. Not only that, the Yin in his dantian was growing as well.

It wasn't a lot and normally he could go on for a week or more without dealing with it. But now, with Yin all around him, if he didn't deal with it early, he might have to deal with problems later on.

However, he didn't sit just yet. He wanted to go to a colder place. Primarily to be in a better place to learn about Yin, but also to torment the girl behind him who still wasn't speaking at all.

"Can you handle a bit more cold?" Alex asked Whisker, who could only shake his head.

"It's too cold. I can only stay safe, brother," he said. "I cannot learn about Yin here if that is what you want."

Alex nodded. "You're still young and weak. You'll have your time," he said. "Rest for now."

Whisker took the opportunity to disappear into the Beast space where he would be safe.

Then, Alex started walking.

He walked friskily, more running than walking, as he made his way through the cave. The coldness increased and he had to bring out his Qi at this point to stop the cold from getting to him, which let him continue further.

The path zigged and zagged, weaving through the ground, always going further into the ground where the Yin was heavy. At this point, there was no man or woman ahead of him.

Everyone had sat down down somewhere to prepare themselves to continue moving, while Alex had walked on without stopping. And he didn't plan on stopping any time soon.

"Stop!" the girl spoke, her appearance visible without the darkness. "Your Majesty, please stop."

Alex turned around to look at her. "Are you ready to talk now?" he asked.

The girl was quivering, her teeth almost clattering as she said, "Yes."

Alex smiled. "Go on then, introduce yourself and why you are following me," he said.

The girl grimaced a little, a brief look of anger showing up on her face. "I understand," she said before throwing a soundproof barrier around them with a formation plate.

Alex waited.

"My name is Jiaolun, and I am here in hopes of getting pills from you," she said.

Alex looked at her, unbelieving. "If someone was here to buy pills from me, they wouldn't follow me all the way here," he said. "Speak the truth."

"That is the truth," the girl said. "But, I am not trying to buy pills precisely. I am trying to persuade you to make some for us."

"Without paying?" Alex almost laughed out loud at the audacity.

"Yes," the girl said. "We provide the ingredients, you make it for us. Our leader said you would most likely do it."

"Your leader?" Alex asked. "Who might that be?"

"Yu Yating," the girl said without stopping.

"Yating?" Alex's eyes flashed as he remembered the name. "You are..."

The girl nodded. "We are the Oathbreakers."

Chapter 1554 Questioning

Alex moved forward sharply, looking at the girl up close. The girl flinched and stepped back in fear, but stopped out of her need.

Alex stopped before he got too close as well. "You are one of the Oathbreakers?" he asked.

"Yes," the girl said.

"And you decided to reveal yourself to me?" he asked. "I will hand you over to the military. There are some members of the Head Legion that came with me."

The girl looked terrified and brought out a talisman that she held onto without using. Alex looked at the talisman and from the faint aura alone, he could tell it was a teleportation talisman, sent to send her somewhere.

If he could get his hands on it, he could most likely find a way to where the Oathbreakers were hiding. He could easily stop the girl from leaving if she used it too, but she didn't know that, so she felt safer.

"O-our leader said you wouldn't do it," she said.

"And you trust your leader that much?" Alex asked the girl.

The girl hesitated but nodded in the end.

"I see," Alex said. "You shouldn't have trusted him on that." His Qi grabbed hold of her, his aura claiming her from all sides.

The girl panicked, realizing that she had messed up. "Your majesty, please—"

"If you thought I was your ally, you are wrong," Alex said, his aura crashing around her even more. Just a little more and she would start crying.

The girl's eyes squinted with pain, her cheeks growing pink from it as well. She looked at Alex, understanding that he would kill her without any doubt if given the chance. She decided to not give him any.

This mission was a failure.

She activated the talisman, silver energy flowing out from around her, grabbing onto her. However, the light suddenly disappeared and she remained where she was. She looked around in confusion and saw the world twist around her, space itself folding as if it were made up of layers.

She looked toward Alex and saw him in control of what was happening. She saw him in control of space itself.

Her fear grew wilder. She did not understand how he did what he did, but now that he had done it, she couldn't fight back. The crushing aura around her would kill her at any moment.

She did not understand how it was that she could leave.

Suddenly, the space returned to normal and the aura around her disappeared as well, her breathing normal once again.

He huffed the cold air around her, fog escaping her lips with each exhale. She looked up in fear at Alex and only saw his mischievous smile. "What did you—"

"I'm sorry," Alex said as he moved toward the girl and helped her up. "Are you hurt?"

The girl was stunned, but she moved back the moment she got the opportunity, arriving at the edge of the soundproof barrier. She looked at Alex and then at herself, confused.

"What is this?" she asked. "Why did you not kill me?"

"Why would I kill you?" Alex asked.

"You were just trying to—"

"I was just trying to see if you were who you said you were," Alex said. "I needed to make sure you're not someone that the Emperor sent to check where I stand against him."

The girl frowned. "Is this some sort of trick?" she asked.

"No trick," Alex said. "I mean every word I am saying right now."

Jiaolun still found it hard to accept everything that was going on. While Alex's suspicion of her had faded, her suspicion of Alex had increased. She couldn't help but wonder if it was a ploy of his to keep her from running away.

Alex brought out something, ignoring whatever she was thinking, and tossed it to her. The girl caught it, a pill bottle, and looked at him with concern.

"What is this?" she asked.

"A Saint Truth Seeking pill," Alex said. "For that extra layer of confirmation that you are what you say you are."

The girl looked at the pill in her hand with confusion in her heart. She opened the top of the bottle and looked at the single pill inside. Inside, she saw a greenish pill with some darker green specks all around the pill.

She looked at Alex and then at the pill. Hesitating, she thought for a moment and then pulled out the pill to eat it. If that was how she had to get his trust, then that was it.

As someone weaker than him, she had no more rights in this conversation than what she was already getting, especially with her teleportation escape method already thwarted.

She swallowed the pill and felt the pill dissolve in her stomach, the energy from it moving through her body, going to her brain. She felt her mind grow dull as if she were drunk, but she could do nothing about it.

Her eyes grew dazed and her mind was not as conscious as she hoped she would be.

"What is your name?" Alex asked her.

"Guan Jiaolun," the girl said, surprised that she spoke her surname. She never gave that away when someone asked for it.

"Are you part of the military?" Alex asked.

"I was a part of the Tail legion," she said.

"Was? Are you not still?" Alex asked her.

"I left the Tail Legion a long time ago to become what we now call ourselves Oathbreakers," the girl said.

"When?" Alex asked.

"Over 50 years ago," the girl said.

Alex's eyes flashed with excitement. That was the time period he wanted to know about after all.

"So you know about the Azure Dragon's status," he said.

The girl paused. She didn't know what to answer.

"You don't have to hide," Alex said. "I know the Azure Dragon is dead. Your oath won't stop you from speaking about it to me."

The girl's eyes widened in shock. "What?" some lucidity returned to her. "Who... who is dead?"

Alex looked at her with a confused look, surprised that she was surprised by the revelation. "Wait, did you not know about it before?" he asked.

The girl shook her head. "This... is the first time I'm hearing about it," she said.

"Huh?" Alex was confused now. He had thought that everyone who became an Oathbreaker had known about the Azure Dragon's death, but as it would seem, that was not the case.

"Then why did you become an Oathbreaker?' he asked.

"Because... " the girl paused abruptly, her face turning to grimace as if she had swallowed something and it stuck in her esophagus.

She could not speak.

"Do you have an oath stopping you?" Alex asked.

The girl nodded, taking a deep breath in relief as she had not been forced to speak about something that was against her Oath.

A truth-seeking pill would force out the truth from her and the Oath would pull it back, hurting her to do so. As a result, it was the worst combination to deal with as someone being questioned.

Alex thought for a moment, curious that she had been made to speak an oath, but it had not been about the Azure Dragon.

He was getting curious about what other events had been in this continent in the past 50 years that had not only resulted in the military being forced into speaking oaths, and at the same time causing people inside it to turn against the Emperor.

Another question to add to the ever-building pile of questions that seemed to surround his journey in the Eastern Continent.

"Can you tell me anything about your oath or the events around it?" Alex asked.

The girl shook her head at first, but then paused and thought a bit. Then she said what she could.

"The Tail Legion were brought out of their waiting to... get... something," the girl said, each word carefully thought of so she didn't go against her oath.

"Oh," Alex said. "And you cannot tell me what this thing is?"

The girl shook her head.

"Was it a bad thing?" Alex asked.

The girl thought and shook her head. "It is not the thing that made me and a lot of us leave, it is the..." the girl thought for a moment and shook her head. "No way of answering."

Alex nodded.

"Did you get it?" he asked.

The girl shook her head. "We were stopped by someone strong," she said.

"Who?" Alex asked.

The girl seemed pained and immediately Alex stopped her, seeing that he was entering oath territory again.

"Alright, tell me what exactly is it that Oathbreakers plan to do?" he asked.

The girl's breathing got harder. This wasn't something she could so easily speak to someone else, but right now she was being forced to.

"To get rid of the Emperor from the throne," she said.

"So you plan to kill him?" Alex asked.

"That is our choice of priority, but if that doesn't work, we will accept forcing him to ascend as a form of victory as well," the girl said. "Either way, he cannot remain on the throne or in this world."

Alex nodded. He asked her a few more questions but got nothing out of it. She had made an oath to neither reveal the status of the Oathbreakers nor where they were all hiding.

"Alright, I understand as much as I am allowed to," he said. "You want pills, but I need something in exchange as well."

The girl nodded. "What do you want, Your Majesty?" she asked.

Alex put up 3 fingers. "I have 3 conditions or favors that I will require to work with your group."

Chapter 1555 Demands

"We're ready to do any favors or demands you want," the girl said with no hesitation. "Our leader sent me knowing you would ask for some things. What is it that you want?"

The girl was ready. She didn't have much on her, but it was enough to provide as a show of trust, whether it be Spirit stones or artifacts or anything else of value.

"First, I want to learn everything about the Azure Dragon and the events that surrounded his death that everyone in your little rebellion group can give me," Alex said.

The girl was taken aback. His first request hadn't been regarding any treasures. "Are you sure he's really dead?" she asked. "Because that would be news—"

"Your leader knows," Alex said. "He just can't tell you because of his oath. Tell him you know about it already and he can tell you it is the truth."

The girl looked stunned. She shook her head quickly, focusing back on the subject at hand. "I'll try my best to gather the information,' she said. "Whoever it is that will meet you next should bring what we can gather."

Alex nodded.

"Secondly, I want you to help me gather information about someone," he said. "Primarily if she is alive or not. I want whatever information you can find on her."

"Who?" the girl asked.

"A girl named Hannah," Alex said. "She's my cousin and is one of the players. She was sent to this continent 50 years ago when the players came, but aside from that, I do not know what happened to her."

"I tried finding information about her on my travel here, but 7 years later, I have come up blank. I fear she is dead. All I want is a confirmation."

The girl thought for a bit and nodded. "We don't really do this sort of thing, but we do have the ability to," she said. "We will find out what we can."

Alex nodded. "Thank you."

"But," the girl said, thinking for a bit. "I will need more. Do you have anything else about her? Where she appeared in, or what sect she got into. Her profession, age, anything works."

Alex felt slightly dejected at the question. "I'm afraid I do not have much to give you regarding my cousin. She was 20 when she arrived here and over 50 years have passed since then."

"I only know little about her time here and what I do will not be very helpful to you," Alex said. "I've tried."

"Still, anything could help," the girl said.

Alex thought for a bit and said, "If she's alive, then her cultivation base should be high. Among everyone here in this world, including me, her cultivation speed should be unmatched. If you do want to find her, you'll either have to search for someone very strong. If not that, search for cripples and dead ones."

The girl nodded. "That is helpful," she said. "We might be able to do something with it. Player and strong... that's a good combination to start with."

"Oh wait," Alex said. "I have a painting. That should make things a lot easier."

"Painting?" the girl got excited. "Why didn't you tell me before? That would help it a lot."

Alex nodded and brought out Hannah's painting from his Soul Space, turning it around for the girl to see.

The girl brought out a recording talisman and looked at the image. Before she even saw the image fully, she could feel the sense of melancholy that came from the painting, the sense of something that no longer was.

She felt sadness emerging deep within her, surprised at the emotion she felt. She hadn't seen many paintings that brought forth such emotions in her.

"That's a good—"

Her words stuck to her throat and her eyes widened in shock.

At first, Alex thought she was caught off guard by her own emotion from his painting. However, when he saw her staring at the painting with great intent, he was confused.

"What is it?" he asked her. "What's wrong?"

The girl shakily lifted her hand, pointing at the painting in front of her. "That girl... that's your cousin?" she asked.

Alex felt his heart skip a beat when he saw her face. "What... what's wrong?" he asked. His hands trembled from a foreboding feeling. This girl knew Hannah.

"You know her, don't you?" Alex asked. "You have seen her before."

The girl nodded. "I have seen her before," she said. She looked up in slight confusion, not realizing that she had spoken without thought. The Truth Seeking pill's effect was slowly leaving her body, but what remained still forced her to speak the truth.

"Where is she?" he asked. "Where did you see her?"

The girl gulped down a mouthful of spit, trying to speak, but nothing came out of her. Her face turned a shade of pink that she hadn't reached before. Veins popped up around her forehead and neck, as her body silently convulsed.

"Come on, tell me," he asked hurriedly, only realizing afterward that she wasn't able to answer. He looked at her and could immediately tell the tell-tale signs of an oath stopping her from speaking.

"Don't answer that," Alex said, stopping her.

He watched the girl breathe in relief and look at him with eyes of gratitude.

Alex's heart was in a million different thoughts so he didn't care much for anything else. He tried to make sense of anything given the information.

The girl had made multiple oaths, some with the Empire, some with the Oathbreakers. Alex wanted to figure out which one this was.

"What do you know about her?" he asked. "Anything."

The girl found it surprising when she could answer something at all, given how broad of an oath she had to speak to hide it.

"She... most likely died... away from the Eastern Continent," the girl said, finding loopholes around her oath to the best of her capability.

"Most likely?" Alex asked. "Did you see her die?"

The girl couldn't answer. He oath stopped it.

"Was this oath forced on you by the Emperor?" Alex asked.

The girl could answer that. "Yes, it was the Emperor."

"And it is the same one that made you quit being part of the Empire's legionnaire?" he asked.

The girl nodded once again.

Alex frowned. "How sure are you that she died?" he asked.

"As sure as the fact that there is a moon in the sky," the girl said.

Alex felt angry. Given that it was the Emperor's orders that the Tail legion was working on and his cousin had been hurt, he couldn't help but feel hatred towards the Emperor that until yet had remained just a possibility.

He took a deep breath and spoke. "Bring me back what information you can about my sister," he said. "I can work with anything."

The girl nodded.

"Finally, my last demand," he said, anger filling his voice after learning that the Emperor had something to do with his cousin's death.

"I will not work if you work toward letting the Emperor ascend. That will not be a victory for me," he said. "My demand is that we have to kill him. No compromise."

Chapter 1556 Deal

The girl's face grew cold at the demand. However, when she took into context that Hannah was his cousin, she could see why he would want it. There were things that she could not tell him, but she knew what the Emperor had done.

"I understand," she said. "But... killing would be difficult; I want you to know that. The Emperor isn't a nobody when it comes to strength. We don't have members that can fight him."

"I'll give you the pills you need to get there," Alex said. "As long as they accept my demands, I'll make them strong."

The girl nodded. It was a possibility that Alex's pills were as good as her leader assumed it to be.

Not everyone had eaten a pill with a pill vein. Not everyone had that luxury. But old records that the legionnaires had been allowed to read did mention something about it making the pill better.

Adding on that the fact that each pill Alex made was 100% in harmony, they had to accept that he could do what he said he could. Still, she wondered about something.

"You're talented, aren't you, Your Majesty?" she asked. "Players like you are supposed to be fast when it comes to breaking through for some reason."

Alex nodded. "Yes," he said. "I'm not bad, I suppose."

"Then..." the girl mused. "Why don't you do it yourself? Eat your pills, get stronger, and in a century or two, you should be strong enough."

At that point, Alex realized something that the Oathbreakers hadn't realized. Or rather, they had realized it and were banking on it most likely, which wouldn't work for him.

In 13 years, he would have given the Emperor everything that the Emperor would need to make Pill clouds. When he did, he would finally be ready to ascend.

That wasn't what Alex wanted anymore.

He wanted to kill the Emperor, so the only thing he could do was get stronger in time to kill him or use help from others who were close to that strength.

The Oathbreakers were the only ones who could do that, and he couldn't tell them what would happen if they didn't hurry, lest they decide to leave.

"Reaching the Emperor's level of strength as myself is near impossible given how long it will take. As I advance, I will become slower and slower. I will have to wait a long time before I can kill him."

"I can't wait. This is not my continent. My family is not here. I wish to see him die for what he did to my cousin. That is it."

"Tell your leader that. If he agrees, tell him to find me with recipes and ingredients for the pills he wants me to make," Alex said. "I'll wait for him."

The girl nodded. "How should we find you?" she asked. "We can't go to the Dragon capital or most capital anymore. The Emperor has improved his surveillance now."

"I am not sure about that," Alex told her. "What methods do you think there are?"

"It's difficult to meet you without your guards or the military around you. The leader sent me because I don't stand out as much," the girl thought to herself. It truly was a difficult situation. She had to give it some more thought.

After a few seconds, she pulled out something. "Take this," she handed over a talisman. "It is destroyed after a single message is sent and can't be reused."

Alex took the talisman. "You want me to communicate through this?" he asked.

"No, that's just there in case we can't come into contact with you and need to let you know," she said.

"Finding you should be easy. You aren't exactly a nobody after all," the girl said. "Meeting you is another mountain to traverse, but we'll think about something. You don't have to worry about that."

The girl smiled at Alex. She trembled a bit, shaking away the cold that she was getting used to. "I'll leave now, Your Majesty. If we're lucky, we'll see each other in the near future."

Alex nodded. "Bring me as much information as you can about my cousin," he said. "Of all my demands, that is the most important."

The girl nodded seriously.

The soundproof barrier disappeared and the metal disk floated into the girl's hand. "It would've been so easy to just teleport back there," she said with a sigh. "Now I have to go somewhere else first."

She brought out a talisman and was about to crush it when she stopped and looked at Alex. "Please don't stop this one."

Alex chuckled a bit. "No, I won't," he said.

The girl nodded. Then, she activated the talisman and teleported away from the location.

Alex sensed some difficulty in her teleportation, which he understood had something to do with the location. The heaviness of the Yin in the area caused her teleportation to slow down a little.

Still, he felt the teleportation aura, trying to understand the intricacies there, but without being the one that was teleported, that was a little difficult.

He was trying to figure out where the girl was being teleported to, where the Oathbreaker's hideout was. In the end, he could only tell the direction she was teleported toward.

South.

He could not tell the distance.

He stood there, alone in his thoughts, allowed to think about everything he had learned today. He felt his eyes moisten a little, now knowing that his sister had died.

But that brought along a question that he couldn't figure out. Why would the Dragon Emperor try and kill his sister?

There was one answer he had, a simple one.

He was afraid of her strength. She was so strong that the Dragon Emperor felt threatened and wanted to get rid of her. Given the condition she was supposed to have, that was an easy answer to get to.

But... was it the right one?

If he had tried to kill her, and she was strong, why was it not known more publically? He understood why the event itself wasn't known, but Hannah should be a popular figure nonetheless.

There were no talks about her disappearance, no talks about her past. There was no information there at all.

Also, no matter what, the Dragon Emperor wasn't petty. He wouldn't just kill someone because they were stronger than him. That wouldn't make much sense given what Alex knew about the man.

'Dammit!' Alex cursed on the inside. Not knowing anything was one thing, but not getting an answer from the people involved was even worse.

'Stupid oaths,' he thought to himself. How he wished they didn't exist. Life would've been so much easier. Just a Truth Seeking pill and he would've gotten all the answers he wanted.

"Tsk!"

He turned around, his emotions slowly fading away and the cold reminding where he was. This wasn't the time to waste on thoughts on his sister.

She was dead and he had grieved for her already.

'Keep moving forward,' Alex told himself and did exactly that, going deeper into the cave. He walked thoughtlessly, the cold bothering him just as much as his thoughts did.

Half a day later, when the Yin cold started becoming harder for him to deal with, he finally stopped and sat down to get used to it before continuing his journey.

Chapter 1557 Stronger Yin

"Just how long is this place?" Alex wondered. He had been walking down the cave with the ever-increasing cold for what felt like days now and still, he didn't reach the end.

Sure the path he walked didn't just go straight to the center, but rather snaked around multiple ways, even crossing into other paths many times.

Many times, it also split into other pathways, and Alex no longer could make judgments on which path he could take to the center based on the coldness. He had to make the judgment purely out of random.

Still, the path he chose never ended, so maybe the tidbit he had heard about none of the pathways mattering, and all leading to the center was correct.

He sat down once again, the floor that was once dry, then frosted, now completely covered in a layer of ice. It wasn't just the ground, but the wall and the ceiling as well.

It was an ice cave at this point, with icicles of nearly 5 meters in length available in some places even. However, they weren't normal ice or icicles, and were, in fact, Yin Ice, making everything much more difficult to handle.

Alex closed his eyes and started adjusting to the increased coldness, learning as much as he could about Yin. That to his surprise had been going on smoothly.

Alex was learning about Yin.

After some time, he opened his eyes, understanding Yin a little bit more, which allowed him to shave off its effect on him. He could go a little further.

Alex took a quick glance in his Soul Space, making sure no Yin had invaded it. Once he was sure, he looked at the timer in his Soul Space, the Voidsand Hourglass, which let him know that only 4 days had passed since he had entered this place.

"I have..." Alex thought for a moment. "10 more days?" No one was sure how long the cave would be open, so that was the amount of time he could stay in there safely.

He stood up to leave, looking in the direction he needed to move toward.

One thing puzzled him about the pathway that he hadn't yet managed to figure out about. How could he see in here?

Cultivators had incredible eyesight, needing barely any light to see things at all. But they still needed some light. This deep underground there should have been no light, and yet he could see.

Were the other cultivators using artifacts to light up the place? Giving him enough to see everything. He didn't believe there were even that many cultivators close to him to begin with.

The coldness he was facing needed either an incredible understanding of Yin to deal with or just an absurd amount of Yang to make Yin useless to himself. And Alex was doing both.

He had learned what he considered a lot about Yin and also brought out Yang from his Dantian. It was a good thing that he had started carrying a healthy chunk of Yang treasures since his Yin problem had surfaced a few years ago.

Thanks to it, he didn't have to worry about being unable to move forward more in the cave. After a few more hours of walking, he sat down to learn more about Yang and did this 3 more times over the course of the entire next day.

Then, around the start of the 6th day, Alex realized that there was some light coming from the end of the cave. There was something at the end that was providing light for him to see, for everyone in the cave to see.

He wondered what it was.

Unfortunately, he had to stop once again as the Yin was getting incredibly dense around here, and cultivating alone was becoming hard as all he would absorb was Yin, and that was not what the Five Yang Divine Path needed to work properly.

Alex used the Yang treasures to fight back the Yin inside his Dantian, but other than that, he couldn't use his cultivation technique for actually cultivating.

So, he was forced to use his Undying Physique technique to cultivate. The sheer speed at which he cultivated using that technique in here was surprising. However, since that technique did use Yin, maybe it shouldn't have been.

Alex cultivated constantly, improving his physique, getting ever closer to that 3rd stage, but that seemed like a mile away. Still, he was traversing a healthy chunk with how he was cultivating down here.

That made him wonder what it was down here that was causing such a thick settlement of Yin to form. As far as Alex could remember, not even the Yin bead had caused such a phenomenon.

There had to be something here. Something stronger than the bead itself. He couldn't imagine something stronger than the bead, but then again, what did he know about the other realms?

He tried his best to understand Yin and once he had enough understanding to bear the Yin around him a little more. He started moving.

He was sure he was now on the final stretch of his journey in this cave. Just a little more and he would arrive at the center.

What was at the center? No one knew. No one had been here. He wanted to know what it was that could cause Yin to gather for so long, so periodically open, and be a great source for learning about Yin to every man and woman out there.

Alex continued walking.

However, he hadn't expected the final stretch to be this hard to walk through. He was there, he could tell. He could see the light bright enough that just around the corner was what he was here for.

But he couldn't move. The cold had gotten too much for him to handle even though he had just started walking again. Even just an hour of walking now increased the Yin by a magnitude that he wasn't ready for.

So, without any choice, he had to sit and dwell on Yin when the destination was right over there.

Thankfully, that also meant that Alex was learning more and more about Yin, to the point that he could tell how close he was to learning about the Dao.

He felt that if could just... if he could just.

Alex felt himself falling in and out of trances as he thought about Yin. Each time, he felt as if he would learn the Dao, but it didn't happen. Each time, he got closer.

In a way, Alex felt it was now or never. So, without hesitating, he pulled out the best Dao pill he had and ate it. He let the pill dissolve into his body and let the trance that came afterward take over him.

His mind grew dull but his thoughts grew sharper. While he had no control over where his thoughts went, they were very clear and concise and as such, having planned on learning about Yin, his mind went in that direction.

He stopped cultivating at this point, and his body stopped producing Qi as well. As he fell deep into contemplation about the laws and mysteries behind Yin, his body froze over, the Yin slowly getting to him.

Yin was a terribly difficult element to learn about. As one of the high elements, it was a rare element to come across in the lower realm and thus was harder to learn about.

Still, as someone who constantly had to deal with the Yin in his own body, he had always understood Yin to a certain degree. Maybe it wasn't at the same level of knowledge as Yang, but it was there.

And coming to this cave, spending days in such a thick world of Yin aura made that knowledge grow exponentially. Throughout the entire time he remained seated, lost in his own mind, Alex managed to get closer and closer to learning the entire truth behind Yin.

After a while, he did.

The world rumbled a deep growl as worldly laws lowered themselves down onto the Evening Mist Lake, reaching deep underneath it in the caves below its surface.

The many women who stood outside the cave's opening looked up in shock, most of them sensing the Yin that was being learned about. There was only a single person there who knew the Yin Dao, and it seemed there was now going to be another one.

The Queen looked up in the sky, wondering who it was. That didn't matter much, however. Whoever it was, they needed the person to get done with it quickly.

After all, 2 weeks had passed since the opening of the cave and it was time for it to end. And they would hate for the person to get lost inside the cave.

Alex was unaware of the situation as he was still in the midst of peering into the Dao, learning more about Yin. It took some time for him to learn it all.

Once he was done, he finally opened his eyes, having fully learned a very complicated dao. The Yin Dao.

Alex felt happiness bubble up inside him. He wanted to smile in happiness but found himself unable to. His entire body was frozen over, and most of his body parts nearly going to fall off because of frostbite.

His dantian was cold as well due to a Yin buildup inside of him.

Alex poured out his Yang, melting away the ice around him, and heating up his body. At the same time, he took out some Yang treasures and dealt with the Yin in his Dantian.

Once he was done, he was finally ready to get up and venture forward.

Chapter 1558 The Center of the Cave

Alex's instinct told him that the center of the whole maze-like cave structure was only a few minutes' walk away. So, despite the cold, and despite the time he had spent on learning the Dao, he had to continue.

He had to see what was at the center as he would never let go of the regret if he ever stopped out here.

"Congratulations on learning a new Dao," Godslayer said. "I thought the next few days after that woman's spirit died would have been normal, but nothing is ever normal with you."

"Thank you for the compliment," Alex said with a chuckle in his voice. "You weren't awake before?"

"I was, but I didn't bother checking what was happening outside," Godslayer said. "Are you in the cave?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I'm about to reach the center of the Yin cave. It is so damn cold though. I had assumed learning about Yin would've removed the coldness but it barely made it bearable."

"Most of the cold is Yin cold, I'm sure," Godslayer said. "You will either need strong Yang energy or Dao to fight it off or need to learn the Dao of Yin cold itself to make it easier on yourself."

"I would've loved to learn about Yin Cold," Alex said. "I wonder why it is so difficult. Is it because I need to learn regular Dao of Cold first?"

"Maybe," Godslayer said. "I don't know much about the cold Dao."

Alex shrugged and continued. "I have a plethora of Yin that forms in my body. I think I will have ample time to dwell on coldness later," he said. "Let us see what lies here at the center."

Turning a corner, he saw a small opening that led to a large cave with a bright blue center. Once he walked through it, he could finally see it all.

Beyond the path was a large opening with brilliant white light glowing in the underground cave. The hollow cave was large beyond Alex's wildest guesses. Nothing he had been to could prepare him for what he had arrived at.

The room was nearly 200 meters wide, circular by design, with even cave walls surrounding it. The circular walls could not have been natural as they were perfectly flat for the most part.

The walls were smooth, with the only imperfections on them being the large indents and inscriptions that took Alex a moment to realize that they were runes. The entire room was in fact scripted all over.

Alex looked around at the floor and the ceiling, all of which were certainly carved as well, but they weren't smooth like the walls, and unlike the walls, they had ice built up on them over the many thousand years that this room had been here.

"So much Yin," Alex thought, entering the room. He could tell that however, this room had come to form, the Yin there was way too much. It was too strong and potent for this place to be natural in any way.

He looked at the center of the room at a small monument that stood there. He wanted to look at what it was up close, but the walls took his attention. He could tell very clearly that they were still working and they were doing something important.

Alex just wanted to figure out what they were. He started at the left side of the opening to the cave and walked around the hollow room, looking through the runes to see what they did.

To his surprise, he came across multiple runes that he didn't have any idea about. Looking closely, he could tell that they were supposed to be combined runes, made out of two or more. He just couldn't tell what that could have been as the extra edges and protrusions from the combined runes had been cut off.

He would have to learn the technique to do this as well as know what it is in the first place to figure out more. For now, he tried to understand what he could.

Going around the room took him no more than 30 minutes, noticing several different pathways to enter this room from all sides, and in that time he could tell a few different things, albeit vaguely due to the lack of understanding of many of the runes he came across.

The runes there were the main reason for the Yin that had gathered in the cave. He had assumed it was a Yin cave due to a natural treasure at the start, but as it had turned out, it was instead this scripted room that forced the Yin to gather here.

"How many millennia has this been doing this?" Alex couldn't help but ask. But even Godslayer had no answer. He watched around, just the same as Alex.

Alex could tell one thing for certain, however, which he had understood as soon as he had started going through the walls.

"Demons built this place," he said. "They had to. Immortal ones at that." He looked around the place and his eyes fell on the small monument about 100 meters away from him.

He could see it clearly, but he wanted to make sure what he was seeing was correct.

He walked across the room, the icy floor doing nothing to stop his stride as he arrived in front of the monument that wasn't even taller than him. He looked at it, a thin triangular object seemingly made out of glass-like black material.

And it was entirely cracked.

It had been destroyed and Alex had no idea why or when. There were words written on it, in a language he could easily read. The Demon language. However, the cracks had destroyed most of the letters and words, so he had to decipher the missing words himself.

Thankfully, Godslayer was there to help him; however much he could.

The words came to him and with some context clues and what he could see of the broken letters, Alex managed to make up a decent sentence. And then he read it.

"This stone shall reveal the one chosen by fate. Place your hand upon this holy relic and the truth will be unveiled. Should the essence of the ones lost to ages reside within you, the forest of the moon shall be filled again as we proclaim you our long-awaited goddess."

Alex said nothing for a long time after reading that.

"Shit!" Godslayer was the first one to speak. "That right there... that's a beacon."

"I guessed," Alex said while in absolute awe. "That monument, it was made for the demons in the Upper realm to find their goddess?"

"It seems so," Godslayer said. "And find they did."

Alex looked around. "So that means the girl had come here," he said. "She had to have arrived in the room and placed her hand on this monument."

He wondered... was this before or after her physical constitution had changed to the Moon Goddess's Celestial Yin body? Either one worked for him.

"Nothing is waiting for us here," Godslayer said. "We should return."

Alex nodded. "We should... but I might have some more time," he said, looking around. "Let me learn some of these runes and see what I can come up with. That shouldn't take very long."

Chapter 1559 Walking Out

Alex went around the place, copying the runes down so he could learn about it later. If not him, he could give it to his mother, so she could learn from it.

"My spiritual sense is struggling in this place," Alex said with a bit of a struggling look on his face. "Is that the room? Or just the Yin?"

"Could be the room," Godslayer said. "But a heavy concentration of Yin or Yang Qi is known to make it impossible for you to properly use your own Qi and senses."

Alex nodded. He was reminded of the Forbidden Fields, where the Nine Yang Divine Tree had taken root, and thus one could not use their cultivation base there at all. It was so difficult to use his spiritual sense there too.

The same was happening here as well but on a much weaker scale. The Yin Qi was strong, but not strong enough for it to stop him from using his spiritual sense and Qi entirely.

Still, it caused problems in other ways. His talisman refused to work properly in the room, so he was forced to take out his brush and start drawing those runes in paint. He had to constantly pump Yang Qi through his brush as the ink froze as well.

Simply remembering might've worked, but he wanted something more than just a memory. A painting would go a long way for him.

The coldness in this room was extreme, and Alex was barely getting by with multiple Daos and a strong physical body. Just sitting down and learning the mysteries again would've helped him learn so much about Yin Cold and Yin Ice.

Alas, he didn't have the time.

Once he was done copying the runes, which took him nearly 5 hours, it was time for him to leave.

He took one last look at the room, his eyes looking for things he had not seen, but there wasn't really anything to hide in this place. It was any moment now that the opening to the cave would close, so he had to hurry up.

He took out the talisman that was supposed to measure the coldness of the room, which would also take him out if only he just crushed it. He decided to not crush it immediately.

He could just run his way back.

So, he chose a random path out of the room and started hurrying.

Outside the cave, elder Yao and Liang started worrying a little. Most of the people had managed to come outside, and those that remained were forcefully dragged outside by remotely activating the talisman they had been given.

And yet, it hadn't brought out their King.

"Why is he not out?" Yao Ning asked the elders around her. "Is there any place inside to get stuck on?"

"No," the others answered her.

"Then... could he still be disoriented from having just learned a Dao?" Liang Shufen asked. "Should one of us go in and get him?"

"How will you even find him? There are hundreds of tunnels here, and days of walking in between," the Queen told her. "You will have to believe in His Majesty. He will make it out."

The openings to the cave had already started sealing, with still a few more hours remaining before they would become unable to fully open the ice. The cold was increasing every minute.

"Something is really wrong with the cave this time around," the Queen said to the others. "Have you ever remembered a time when it barely lasted for 2 weeks?"

"No," another woman answered. "Never have I experienced the cave being this cold. Something must've happened this year."

They still waited for a few more hours, but Alex didn't walk out at all. The elders feared that he would be stuck in the cave. They wondered what they would have to do if that happened.

As far as they could understand from the way the Queen and the sect masters talked, if you were stuck inside, you either had to survive for the next 15 years or so it took for the cave to open, or just die inside.

Neither of the elders believed Alex was going to die inside. Still, they couldn't help but fear a certain possibility of that happening.

Alex hurried as fast as he could, but that still took him hours to get anyway. The winding tunnels of the cave were just too long and took anyone hours upon hours to get anywhere.

He hurried to the best of his ability, while constantly hoping that he wasn't too late. Although, he wasn't sure if he had to worry as much. If the opening had iced up, he could just teleport outside.

It wasn't as if this place was separated spatially, making it harder for him to get out. That lessened his worry quite a bit.

More than half a day later, Alex realized that the light was getting brighter. He was getting close to the surface. No one was around him at this point. He had not seen a single soul.

"I must be the last person," Alex said. "Let's hope I can go past the ice wall and it doesn't somehow obstruct my ability to teleport out."

"You'll be fine," Godslayer said. "Stop worrying."

Godslayer was correct. He had to stop worrying. And there wasn't any reason to worry at all. After all, he had arrived at the surface.

And the opening of the cave was still open, with no ice covering it at all.

"Phew! I think we made it in time," he said, watching the world beyond the opening. He walked out of it, took a long deep breath of a world without much Yin, and immediately paused.

He looked in front of him, 3 young girls who were lazily standing around, who immediately stopped slacking off the moment they saw him.

One pulled out a spear, and the other two pulled out swords, pointing at him.

"Who are you?" one of them shouted. "Where did you come from?"

"Uhh..." Alex looked at the girls, but his attention was taken away by the short buildings all around him. This... wasn't where he was supposed to have come out.

Where had he come out?

"Answer us! Or else we will—"

The woman who spoke stopped halfway through speaking before taking a closer look. "Wait, are you King Alex, of the Southern Continent?" the girl asked.

Alex looked back at the girl speaking. "I am," he said, before focusing on her features. She was a tall woman, with a beautiful feminine face. Her hair was filled with jewelry and she wore familiar milky blue robes that Alex had only recently seen another person wearing.

When he actually paid attention to the girl, he recognized her. He had even talked to her a few years ago, albeit very briefly.

"You are... Su Railin, correct?" Alex asked.

"Your Majesty," the girl said in surprise. "You recognize me?"

"We talked, didn't we? Back during the time when I went to the Endless Shadow Abyss," Alex said. "I remember."

That was a complete lie. That was not why he remembered this girl at all.

The reason he remembered her at all was because she was one of the four girls that the Crown Prince had brought him the information of.

She was one of the Queen candidates.

Chapter 1560 Prisoner

"I'm flattered your majesty remembers me," the girl said, bowing a little. The two other women that were next to her watched their conversation with an awkward look on their faces, not sure what they were supposed to do here.

They had a job to do, but it didn't seem possible to do given the situation.

Alex turned to look at the two other women, who while didn't look like it, were certainly older than him by many years. Most likely centuries.

"Greetings, sisters," he greeted them and the two women quickly greeted him back. They said something to Su Railin and all of their faces grew stern at once.

"Your Majesty, what are you doing here?" the girl asked.

Alex took a look around. There wasn't much to see from where he was, but the thick fog around him gave him an idea of where exactly 'here' was. Still, he acted like he didn't know.

"Where is this place exactly?" he asked her.

"You don't know?" the woman asked him.

"Why should I?" Alex asked them.

They looked at each other, somewhat unsure of what to do. One of them had already secretly sent a message to their sect master and other elders who would arrive here soon enough. But until then, it was their job to find out things.

"This is the Ice Mist Palace. Did you sneak in here, Your Majesty?" Su Railin asked. "This isn't a place you could have randomly stumbled upon."

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "Well, I randomly stumbled upon this place. May I leave now?"

The three gave side glances to each other before looking back at Alex. "I'm afraid you'll have to wait here until our sect master comes back," the oldest of the three said. "We can't just let you leave without figuring out how you came here. It's a matter of the sect's security. I'm sure you can understand."

Alex smiled. "Oh, I can understand," he said. "But there shouldn't be much confusion if the three of your sisters were paying attention." He pointed to the cave opening behind him. "I came out right through there."

"But you never entered," the girls said. "How did you come out of there?"

Alex sat down. "Well, you have all the information. So you might as well guess," he said. "Since I am your prisoner, I'll be here on this cold floor, and wait for your sect master to show up."

The girls grimaced at him calling out for their apparent lack of hospitality, but they weren't sure they could allow him anywhere else. This was a sect that only the girls were allowed in.

Men could never wander here.

Still, they got him a chair and brought some warm drinks to keep him occupied. Alex sat quietly, waiting for the others to show up.

They went silent in waiting, but Su Railin seemed to want to say something. "Your Majesty, is it true that the path to the Central Continent won't open again?" she asked.

Alex looked at her. "It is unlikely it will open in the near future," he said. "If it does, it will need to be done by the emperor and I don't think it will happen."

He looked up at the somewhat sad look on the beautiful face of the girl and felt a pang of guilt. "You must've missed the chance. My apologies," he said.

Many in the Ivory kingdom had missed their chance to go back. She was one of them.

"It is alright," she said. "It's been over 50 years, so there isn't much to gain by going back. Still… I would've loved to do so."

Alex nodded. "Did you have family back home that could've come to this world?" he asked.

"No," the girl said. "I am the lone daughter of my parents and they were never that technologically adept, so I doubt they played the game. 50 years later, they must've already passed away. I just hope that whoever took my place loved them the way I did, and took care of them."

"I'm sure that they did," Alex said. "The one that took your place would have been your clone. As long as there wasn't something to miss on this side, their thoughts and emotions would've been the same as yours."

"If you loved your parents, then she did too. If you wished to take care of them, she did too," he said. "You might've missed your parents, but they never missed their daughter at all."

Su Railin wiped away a single tear that slid down the side of her face, before chuckling a little. "I'm not sure if that is supposed to make me happy or sad," she said.

"How about just content knowing that your parents were not alone?" he asked.

"Yeah… I can do that," she said with a wide smile. "Thank you for your words, Your Majesty."

Alex nodded.

A few minutes later, a small group of women came up to where he sat in the mist, at the edge of the sect. As they got closer, Alex could see the four women.

"Your guys sure took your time," he said, placing down the cup of warm tea and standing up to meet them.

"Your Majesty, thank the Phoenix you're okay," Yao Ning said. "We were afraid you were stuck in there for good."

"I wouldn't miss the chance to get scolded by you, Elder Yao," Alex said and turned to Liang Shufen. "Although, Elder Liang, you should be more worried when your King goes missing."

Elder Liang just chuckled. "Are you made a spectacle of learning the dao, I knew you couldn't be kept inside. Besides, you had a plethora of ways to come out even if you were stuck."

"Well… not a plethora, but I did have a few," he said. "Anyway, this is a nice little place you have here, sect master Bing. It's a shame I had to take the backdoor to get here."

The woman looked stunned, same for the Queen as the two of them most likely understood what it meant for him to come out this way. Still, they couldn't help but doubt it.

"Your Majesty, did one of the tunnels lead you outside?" Bing Zhenshuang asked.

"One of the tunnels, yes. But if you're asking if it was a tunnel on the other side that curved its way toward here, then no," he said. "What we were told before entering the tunnel was true. All pathway leads to the center."

"Then…" the Queen looked in shock at Alex as the possibility in her mind became certain. "Then you reached the center of the cave?"

The question came with shocked glances from the three girls who had waited by him. Su Railin's eyes went wide at the feat that she only remembered being completed once.

Alex looked at the queen and nodded. "I did," he said.

"How… was it?" she asked him, unable to hold in her curiosity. In the millennia she had spent in this place, she had used this tunnel that remained open permanently to enter and learn Yin inside.

As such, she had had a much higher opportunity of learning Yin or reaching the center. And yet, she had never been able to do that.

"Hmm… it was…" he paused. "Would you rather I tell you how it was or would you go there by yourself one day and see for yourself?"

The woman shook her head, having seemingly given up on the possibility of that ever happening. "Not a single person has ever reached the center, your Majesty. Not a single other person aside from you," she said. Her words made apparent how amazing a feat this was.

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "Surely that isn't true." His eyes moved to the sect master's shocked look as he said that.

She saw the look and felt a chill go down her spine. She knew that he knew what she tried to hide the most.

"It is certainly so, your Majesty," the Queen said, oblivious to the meaning behind his words. She was too shocked and surprised to have noticed anything else. "So please, tell us what it is like inside. I would very much like to hear about it."

Alex thought for a bit and started explaining it. Those who didn't wish to hear could cut off their hearing with their Qi, so he had no problem answering them.

The women listened curiously and once Alex was done, they were a little disappointed.

"There is nothing inside? Just a bunch of runes on a wall?" the Queen asked.

"I'm afraid so," Alex said. "That's why I didn't want to tell you. There isn't much to look forward to inside. But, if you are there to learn about Yin then it is an incredible place still."

"I see," the Queen said. She felt… betrayed about the whole thing. And somehow, she didn't feel disappointed about it all. Almost as if she knew this already, from somewhere.

The girls showed the same expression.

Only the sect master showed no sign of disbelief or surprise. She knew how it was all along. Her niece had already told her.

"You three," the sect master said. "Not a single word of this to anyone else. If anyone finds out, I'm punishing you three."

"Yes, sect master," the three said quickly.

Then the sect master turned around to Alex. "Your Majesty," she said. "I'm sorry, but I cannot let you stay in the sect for much longer. You will have to depart."

Alex shrugged. "Sure," he said. "But please answer this. When exactly did you learn about the center of the Cave of Frost yourself?"

Chapter 1561 A Party

"Why did you ask her that?" the Queen asked Alex as they flew back toward the palace.

Even though he was a King, Alex was made to quickly leave the Ice Mist Palace as respectfully as they could. He had wanted to look around the place, but it seemed they truly didn't want him to.

Since he had little authority in this place, he said nothing and left. Not before getting the answer to his question though.

'After she got the evolved constitution,' Alex thought. 'She must have made it to the center after awakening her constitution.' He could see how she then activated the beacon at the center and called people from the higher realms into this world.

Alex wondered how such a thing could exist in this world, but this world originally belonged to the demons anyway, so it wasn't that hard to come up with an explanation.

One of the demons, or maybe even the entire upper echelon, might have set up this place for when their goddess was finally reborn. But then was it a coincidence that they put this place in this land?

Alex thought it would be better to assume that such places were built all over the lower realms.

"What do you think?" he asked Godslayer regarding his thoughts.

"Sounds probable," the spirit said, giving it a bit more thought after answering. "I'm more so questioning why they want their goddess at all."

"It's the goddess," Alex said. "They could do no harm getting her. Still, I'm sad that they got to her so fast. I didn't have the time to figure out if she remembered me or not."

"Don't let it turn into an Inner Demon," the spirit said.

Alex shook his head. "I know it won't," he said. "I'm just a little sad about it is all."

He remembered the white-haired young girl one last time before it was time to forget about her, whether or not she was the reincarnation of his master.

There was no point in dwelling on the past if he knew he couldn't do anything about it. He had to keep moving forward.

Alex stayed with the queen for a while longer, giving her some pills as he had done with all the other monarchs as well as letting her use his Mountain Crushing artifact, before leaving the capital.

He had toured the capital, so he wanted to go tour more of the other cities.

The cities in the Ivory Kingdom were surprisingly more easily accessible than the ones in the Gold Kingdoms. Where one had to fly through mountains and storms to reach other cities, here they just had to fly past a bunch of snow-filled plains.

Not that Alex even got to do so as he was teleported everywhere.

Every new city Alex arrived, he would look at the newsboard and make sure to note that his arrival had been noted. Then, he would stay a few weeks there before moving to the other cities.

He did so for a few months until one day, his plan worked and someone contacted him so discreetly that even he barely recognized someone had met him.

The man appeared as a guard of the City lord in the city and notified Alex about an event that was taking place. He then gave him a talisman that described the event that was being held.

No one suspected anything, but the talisman held another piece of information aside from just information about the event. It held a message from Yan Yating, the leader of the Oathbreakers.

"I have heard about your 3 demands," the man's voice entered Alex's mind through the talisman. "We accept those demands."

"I should note that anything and everything about your first demand, what my people can give you is mostly under oath, so you might end up with barely anything. Still, I will keep up the demand to the best of my ability."

"Secondly, about this… person in your other demand, I did not know such a figure even existed at all, but I can understand what you must be feeling right now. We will try our best to give you what we can find."

"Finally, while I highly disagree with what you ask, I will still accept it," he said. "Find the girl and you can get started. We will exchange the product with the information the next year. I hope you can be done by then. Good luck."

Alex took down the talisman and was surprised at how forthcoming the man was. Still, he had managed to hide everything they had talked about while talking about everything. A normal person coming across this piece of talisman would have had no idea what he was talking about.

Alex read through the talisman once again to make sure he didn't miss anything and then destroyed it completely.

3 days later, it was time to go to this event.

General Fan and 2 other strong soldiers followed Alex to the party. They weren't going to leave them out of their sight no matter where he went. It had been happening ever since he had returned and Alex was starting to believe that the Emperor had a hand in this.

He was almost sure that the Dragon Emperor had started suspecting his involvement with the Oathbreakers. If not, these men were extremely protective of him.

There were nobles and high-ranking figures from all over the city and wide in this small party that the City lord had planned.

At first, Alex had believed that the Oathbreakers had their hand in organizing this party, but it seemed they were only taking advantage of it.

The party was instead regarding the City lord's daughter successfully entering the Saint realm at the age of 200. That was considered fast here and extremely fast everywhere else.

This sort of person would have been considered one of the greatest talents in the Western Continent, and a high-tier talent in the other two continents. In the Eastern Continent, however, she was just an upper middle-grade talent.

Her true talent would show itself once she started her Saint cultivation journey. That was where their cultivation speed would slow down to almost nothing and they would take generations to break through to anything.

If she was able to reach the Saint Transformation realm in 1,000 more years, her name would be sung through the entire continent for generations to come. Alas, Alex could tell that was impossible given how slow her True realm cultivation speed itself was.

He looked around the room, searching for signs of the girl he was supposed to meet, and he knew who the girl most likely was. But he couldn't find her at all. She was nowhere to be seen.

That was until he noticed a girl with a completely different look, but of similar build and height staring at him from time to time from a distance. She was looking for a way to get close without drawing suspicion.

"I'll stay here, you two go mingle with the crowd. Many seem to be wanting to talk with me, but I don't want to talk with them," he told his two elders. "Deal with them on my behalf."

"Yes, Your Majesty," the two Elders said and left.

Alex stayed behind at one corner of the room, looking at the party. "Do you all not want to go get involved in the party?" he asked the Generals and others who followed him. "It's a good party."

"Our job is to look after you, Your Majesty," General Fan answered.

"Still, you can enjoy," Alex said. "I doubt anyone would want to kidnap me in this place." He looked at the soldiers and saw no reaction from them. They hadn't found it funny at all.

"Actually, it might be better if you all stay here," he said. "It deters the others from wanting to come talk to me. I don't want to talk with them."

"Is there a reason?" General Fan asked.

"Too many people," Alex said. "I give way to talk to one and soon we'll have a tidal wave of people wanting to talk to me. It might make me sound bad, but I have no interest in that."

"It makes you sound reasonable, Your Majesty," the General said.

Alex nodded. "We should be leaving tomorrow, yes?" he asked.

"Yes," the General said. "We will be heading to the East Ivory Tundra region starting tomorrow. There are a bunch of cities there."

Alex nodded. "Don't make plans for anything after that," he said. "I want to enter closed cultivation soon."

"How soon, if I may ask, your Majesty?" The General looked at him curiously.

"A month at best," Alex said. "I want to enter closed cultivation. My pills are running low and I need to improve my cultivation too. So I need to make some preparations for the future."

"I see," the General said. "I will plot out routes to only the most important and impressive cities in the tundra."

Alex nodded.

The two elders returned sometime later and spoke about the various people they met. "They seem satisfied getting to talk with us," Yao Ning said. "You don't need to bother meeting them, Your Majesty."

"Good Job," he said. "Can we leave now?"

The General looked around. "I'll tell the City Lord," he said.

Alex nodded and watched him leave. He then turned to Yao Ning who gave a very subtle nod.

A small imperceptible smile formed on Alex's face that the other soldiers had not noticed at all.

He had received the Package from Yao Ning. It was time for them to leave.

Chapter 1562 8th Year

If Alex could make the pills he was requested to make as quickly as he was allowed to, he could have completed the entirety of it in less than 2 weeks. With the involvement of pill clouds, he would need less than 3 months to complete making all the pills.

If he wanted to not arouse suspicion that he was making too many pills at once, Alex would have to spread those out over more than 6 months. And that was exactly what he did.

During his 'closed cultivation', Alex took around 7 months to complete making all the pills. He had to slow down his rate of making pills by making time for his cultivation of all sorts.

His Qi cultivation was still stuck on the 1st realm of the Saint Soul realm, but he was starting to see it coming to a crescendo beyond which he could break through in a short amount of time. As for when that would be, he wasn't yet capable of telling.

Not only did he have to improve his Qi, but he also had to improve his own soul in the Saint Soul realm. As a result, his cultivation speed has gone down a lot over the last 3 years.

Taking 4 years in total to reach just the 2nd realm of Saint Soul was a long time for Alex, but he couldn't complain. There were people around him who waited centuries to go up a single realm after all.

Alongside his Qi cultivation, his Body Cultivation had improved quite a lot thanks to the Mountain Crushing artifact. He had managed to cross halfway through the Saint Core realm with his physical body, getting closer and closer to the Saint Soul realm in physical strength as well.

However, the improvement had come in a burst toward the start, and by now it was starting to get slower and slower. To cross from the 5th Saint Core realm of body cultivation to the 6th Saint Core realm, it had taken him nearly 6 months.

It had to partially do with his body requiring further refinement in the latter realms, and partially to do with him having to slow down on his usage of spirit stones. He had to save them for what was necessary.

His blood aura had no way of improving while he was in closed cultivation and the same was the situation for his Intent and new Dao.

His Sword Intent had no way of improving either. It hadn't had a way to improve for a long time as he hadn't got the chance to train properly. He did not want to let the people here know he could use Sword Aura, and with just the lack of fighting and training in general, he hadn't had the chance to improve it.

But he wasn't worried about it just yet. Soon he would have the opportunity to do just that. Just a few more years was all he needed.

Until then, it was better if he focused on the rest he could easily improve.

Alex left the cultivation room and met up with his elders. They were busy cultivating as well, so they had to stop to meet with him.

"Has anyone come to the Swan courtyard while I was gone?" Alex asked them.

"The Crown Prince came to meet you once, I believe," Liang Shufen said. "But he left after learning that you were busy."

Yao Ning's face twisted into a frown. "Why is your cultivation base the same, Your Majesty?" she asked. "I had assumed you had broken through."

"Hmm? Me?" Alex shook his head. "That was Pearl and Whisker. I haven't broken through yet. I am getting close, however."

They nodded.

"Are we to hand over the pills now?" Yao Ning asked Alex.

Alex nodded.

"Who are these people, Your Majesty?" she asked. Liang Shufen was curious all the same as well.

"I told you," Alex said. "It is better if you know nothing about these people. Anyway, let them know that I plan to visit the Blueheart city for the next few weeks and then to go roam the Azure Kingdom."

"I will," Yao Ning said.

Alex felt quite impatient despite having waited nearly 10 months for this. He went out to visit his alchemists before leaving for Blueheart City.

He hadn't been there for nearly 4 years, and yet it felt like it was just yesterday that he left this place to go to Goldheart city for the auction.

Alex was allowed to fly on the boat on the way to the Blueheart city. Being in the Azure Kingdom, they did not fear random bandits attacking the King of the Southern Continent.

Along the way, Alex couldn't help but feel surreal regarding how long it had been since he had seen his family. Since he had seen his father, mother, and daughter.

7 years he had spent away from them. It was already 3 months into the 8th year as well. A few years of closed cultivation and he would be halfway through his time on this continent.

'When will I return?' he wondered. He didn't want to wait the entire 20 years. He had to kill the Emperor if he was in fact responsible for his cousin's death. He was already someone that Alex hated for potentially killing Pearl's mother, but the situation had gotten even more personal with Hannah's death.

And that person was the one that he had to help become the best alchemist in the realm. There was no doubt in Alex's mind that if the man created a pill with pill veins, it would have all 9 pill veins in it.

He was just that strong.

"Your Majesty, welcome back!" Long Weiyuan greeted Alex excitedly. Next to him was a relatively young woman with long dark-brown hair that flowed behind like a waterfall. She was the queen of the Azure Kingdom, one that Alex hadn't gotten to meet the last time he was there.

"Greetings, Your Majesty. I am the Queen of this Kingdom, Jun Jiaorou. It is my utmost pleasure to meet you." The woman bowed, the gold stacked on her hair threatening to fall out of it.

Alex greeted the two of them and was led inside the palace. They served him all kinds of expensive treats and refreshments before allowing him to rest for a bit.

He had a simple plan for now. He would stay in this city for a few weeks to try and see if the Oathbreakers would come to him. If they didn't, he would move to the other cities, especially ones around the edges of the Kingdom to lure them out.

Once they were out, he planned on swapping the pills for the information.

So, he spent the next few days with the King and Queen, interacting with them as much as he could, thanking them for letting his elders stay there when he was gone.

The couples were more than happy to let Alex stay there for the time being and even refused the pills he gave them as a thank you.

However, Alex managed to force it on them one way or another. They were rather happy to receive it.

3 weeks after that, having not received any sort of message from the Oathbreakers, Alex started his journey to scour the kingdom until one of them found him.

Chapter 1563 The Three Mountain Ranges

Not very different from the other continents, the Eastern continent did not have many mountain ranges either.

Not counting the scattered mountains that were as many as islands in the ocean, there were exactly 3 mountain ranges here.

The most important of these mountain ranges was the Golden Mountain range which was home to over 98% of the gold in the entire continent. As such, they were perhaps the most popular of the mountain range of the continent.

The Golden Mountain range went through most of the Gold Kingdom, its edges touching on the Beast Paradise to the east and part of the northern segments of the Ivory Kingdom to the west.

After that was the Ebony mountain range which was said to be full of natural resources, be it in the form of plants or metal ores. These mountains in general were also some of the tallest mountains out there. The most impressive mountain of the entire continent, the Celestial Peak also lies in this exact mountain range.

The Ebony Mountain range started at the border of the Emerald Kingdom and the Ebony Kingdom around the Middle-Eastern section and wrapped around the eastern shores of the Ebony Kingdom.

Finally, the third and longest mountain range of all was the Silver Mountain Range. It started in the westernmost section of the Ebony Kingdom and made its way through the Silver Kingdom, near the border of the Azure Kingdom, and all the way up to the eastern shores of the Ivory Kingdom.

The mountain ranges were named as such for a long time, so the countries they were located in were named as such as well.

Covering the entire North to South length of the Eastern continent, the Silver Mountain range was the longest of all 3 mountain ranges. And yet, it was the one that people least cared about due to its lack of proper natural resources.

Instead, people had built homes on it, building cities on and around the mountains. One such city was the Skylorn City at one of the highest peaks of the Silver mountain range, surrounded by a deep forest on the eastern side and a desert on the west.

This city, along with a handful of others was considered part of the Azure Kingdom due to the desert to the west being not a good place for human

And this city was the one where Alex had been contacted by the Oathbreakers.

He had been passed along a message by a tour guide while out on the ride, and they wanted to meet him down in the forest to the east. Alex couldn't just sneak out, lest he arouse suspicion from the many strong folks that were here as his guard.

He never trusted them to be anything more than his prison guards.

They had returned from the tour, so Alex was supposed to be cultivating overnight. He had told the group as much and so he had to set up himself as someone that was still here, while he left.

Alex closed his eyes and focused. He used a technique to the best of his ability, separating a layer of Yang from him, transforming it into an ethereal version of him that held the same aura and Intent.

He had made a Yang clone using the doppelganger technique that he rarely got to use nowadays. He placed Whisker in charge of handling the aura while he placed it on top of the Immortal puppet that still wore the damage-measuring artifact on its chest.New n0vel chapters are published on

Once it was all done, Alex took a deep breath and teleported.

He arrived a couple hundred meters away from the guest house that they were staying at. If he had to, Alex could force himself to teleport over a kilometer or two at this point while having his Qi and his Intent increase so much in such little time.

However, that required him to try his best. This one, he was trying to lay low. The moment he arrived in the night city, surrounded by no one, he started walking away as quickly as he could, without giving away who or what he was.

With his face mostly hidden with not just a pulled-down bamboo hat, but also the white Hell mask, he made his way down the city toward the forest.

20 minutes later, he was deep in the thick forest, away from most cultivators who might have wanted to train on the outskirts. He walked unnoticed into the forest and searched for who he was looking for from the start.

To his surprise, they had made no attempt to hide themselves. Alex could see a small group of people, hanging around on the tree, waiting for him. He placed down a small concealment formation that covered not just him but also the men and women that were up on the tree.

A few of them were surprised at the quickly deployed formation, but the others seemed to have guessed it was coming. Or maybe they just weren't surprised.

A man slowly landed on the floor, his face out in the light for anyone who could use to see. "Good evening, Your Majesty,' Yan Yating spoke with a wide smile. "We're happy to have met you again."

"We?" Alex asked, looking around. He noticed the other folks nod toward him in greeting as well, two of whom had been there the last time they had tried to kidnap him. "Well, it's good to see my kidnappers again." He chuckled at his own words before others misunderstood the joke.

"Have you finished what we asked, Your Majesty?" Yan Yating asked.

Alex shrugged. "Have you finished what I asked?" he asked the man.

Yan Yating showed no hesitation in bringing up a talisman and tossing it to Alex. Alex was about to read it when he noticed the runes of the talisman that was given to him and immediately stopped.

Yan Yating spoke a moment afterward. "It is a one-time use talisman as you might've guessed," he said. "You can read through it right now to make sure the talisman has everything you wanted. Or, you can give us the pill and leave with the talisman."

"I will read it right now," he said, but he didn't let his guard down at all. "If you try and do something to me, I will destroy the pills so you can never get them."

"Sure," Yan Yating said. "I wasn't trying to dupe you or anything. We have brought you the information you asked for. Although I should warn you, there wasn't much we could find for you."

Alex looked at the man and then at the others behind him. Not a single one of them seemed to try and do anything.

"Very well, let me see what you got me then," he said and used his senses to look into the talisman. As he started reading the contents of the talisman, a string of information flowed into his mind, starting with the first thing Alex had demanded for his cooperation.

Information on the Azure Dragon.

There wasn't much to go by here, and most of what was written here were repeated information that he had learned already. What he wanted was new information, especially regarding the beast's death, but that seemed impossible to get.

What he did learn was something he hadn't even thought of at all.

The Azure Dragon's corpse had not been destroyed at all. It had remained unmoved in the secret realm where it had died all those years ago, as per the orders of the Emperor.

Chapter 1564 Han Ahlin

Alex paused halfway through his read, wondering what he had just read meant.

'The Dragon died, but his corpse wasn't taken away?' Alex thought. He was not just curious as to what it meant, but also why the Oathbreakers would give him this. On the surface, there was no need for them to give him anything about the Dragon after his death.

On its own, he would ignore it, but together, it was a mystery he needed to solve. He thought for a long moment.

The Dragon's corpse remaining inside the secret realm created a couple of possibilities.

First, the Emperor was most likely still reverent of the Azure Dragons and didn't wish to desecrate his corpse. So, he had left it behind.

Second, the Dragon's body had an Intent to it that made it hard to store in a storage bag or storage rings and bring out.

Third, the Dragon Emperor probably just didn't want people to accidentally realize that the Azure Dragon was dead.

Alex remembered something from a while ago when he was returning from the Brightfalls City to the Dragon Capital. Their pathway intersected the Azure Dragon's secret realm, but they had been made to take a detour.

Was this why? Because they didn't want anyone to accidentally come across its corpse?

'Wait, was the Dragon Emperor involved in the Azure Dragon's death or not?' he thought. He had always had a reasonable suspicion about the fact that the Dragon Emperor had most likely been responsible for the death of the heavenly beast in one way or another, but this made his suspicion not hold as much water.

Or maybe it made it a more solid suspicion. Maybe the reason the corpse was still there meant that the Dragon Emperor didn't want people to find out about the Azure Dragon's death and start making their own judgment on the matter.

What was the point of not telling the general population if he hadn't been involved? Was he afraid of threats from the other continents? Like he had done to the Western Continent?

He was the strongest. His continent was the strongest. And he knew for a fact that the other heavenly beasts couldn't come attack him.

The only reason he had to have been holding back the information was because he had been responsible.

At least, that was what Alex believed, and what he believed wasn't necessarily the truth. He needed more to make proper judgments. He read the rest of the information on the talisman regarding the Azure Dragon, but none sounded helpful.

It especially lacked information about the inside of the secret realm, which he could imagine was under oath to not reveal. That was most likely an oath they had to say even before the entire fiasco.

He skipped over to the next half of the information in the talisman, and immediately felt his heart skip a beat when he remembered it was about Hannah.

Her name was written there in the talisman, but modified to sound similar to the names of this world. Han Ahlin.

'Sister…' Alex thought and braced himself for what he was going to read next.

Han Ahlin had entered a very small sect on the eastern side of the Azure Kingdom, one known as the Winding River sect. However, due to her talent, she had improved so incredibly fast that she had made a large name for herself in the small sect.

However, it was quickly overshadowed by every other player making a big name for themselves. She was just a part of a statistic now.

A year later, she disappeared from the sect. As for where she had gone, no one in that sect knew.

The Tail Legion was brought out of reserve to do something. The information about it was vague, and the most Alex could get out of it was that they were meant to return with some sort of… thing.

A formation flag, a piece of jewelry, a weapon, a shield, or even just a random ingredient. It could have been anything.

During that hunt, they had come across Hannah. The information afterward wasn't there and what was there was not helpful. But that girl named Jiaolun had been one of the soldiers here and that was what had led to Hannah's death.

The talisman burst into his hands as he had finished reading it. The flame disappeared and the dozen or so men and women in front of him stirred as they realized he had finished reading it.

Alex stayed silent for a while, slowly calming what anger he had felt. What was it that the Emperor had been hunting for and why was it with his sister? And why was it that she hadn't just handed it back? Or was it something she could not hand back?

Why was everything about this entire situation so vague? What did he have to do to get concrete answers? Ask the damn emperor himself?

He calmed down a little before looking toward Yan Yating. "Is this all you could find?" he asked.

The man nodded. "Anything and everything about His Majesty, the Azure Dragon is either already public or under oath, so we couldn't find anything more to give you," he said. "As for… that girl that I hear is your cousin, her situation is even more curious."

"What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"I can't imagine why the Dragon Emperor could ever want to go after her. I can't imagine what the thing he is searching for is. I knew this was a thing, but it is only recently that I cared to look into the situation and try to figure out the things inside it."

"Something had happened here that even the folks that do not know about the Azure Dragon's death were forced to go against him," the man said. "I had never bothered to ask what it was exactly that had happened, but thanks to you I have some inkling."

Alex looked at him. "But it still doesn't make any sense," he said.

"No, it doesn't," the man said. "I don't know what it could be that the Dragon Emperor wanted from this girl who was not even 25 years old at the time. All I can imagine is one of the treasures that all the players get when they come to this world."

"Hmm," Alex gave that a thought. "I didn't think of that." However, when he thought some more about it, it didn't make as much sense. "No, that can't be it. The Emperor hunted for the item and came across my cousin. If he knew she had it, he would have hunted for her directly."

"Also, it makes no sense why one would be forced to speak an oath on something of such low importance," he said. "That man has done things that are far worse."

The people thought of it and couldn't come up with a rebuttal. "Well, there's nothing else we can help you with regarding these two, you're on your own," Yan Yating said.

Alex nodded. "What about the third demand?" he asked.

"We will fight to kill, but we cannot guarantee that. He is too strong after all," Yan Yating said.

"I understand," Alex said. He brought out a storage bag and tossed it to them. "There are the pills you wanted. Next time I see you all, I hope it will be the day when the Dragon Emperor dies."

Chapter 1565 A Few Years Later

There was nothing left for Alex to divert his attention to for the next few years. He had learned all he could, and what he couldn't, there was no way for him to learn.

As such, he decided to focus his time and energy on his own cultivation base, improving himself.

The very year after he started that, he reached the 2nd realm of the Saint Soul realm. Three years after that, he reached the 3rd realm of the Saint Soul realm.

His physical body barely lagged behind him as well, reaching Saint Soul's 1st realm by that time. While it was nowhere near his own cultivation base in terms of its strength, the level it had reached was still quite amazing.

Alas, he had ended up using up his reserve of Saint spirit stones with barely any remaining. Fortunately, however, nearly 13 years had passed since he had been in the Eastern Continent and the Golden auction was up in about a year, having repeated from the last 10 years.

He could sell some pills there. Or at least the two elders could. He had to be elsewhere during that time most likely.

Aside from body and Qi, he had made some progress in everything else as well.

The most important progress he made was in his task to downgrade the Immortal Spirit Pill into a Saint grade. He had only done it a couple of weeks ago.

He had tried his best with the Ten Thousand Earth pill as well, but that had turned out to be much more difficult. At the rate he was going, Alex would become an Immortal himself before he managed to turn the pill into a Saint-grade version.

As for the Wood Spiritual Root Improvement pill, that seemed plausible to be completed in the next decade or two. He had made some significant progress, but there was still a way to go.

He had made other improvements in various aspects of cultivation and alchemy, but none in the big ones that mattered like his Sword Intent, Blood Aura, or Dao.

As for the rest, things were going fine.

Pearl and Whisker showed great improvements during the few years as well, cultivating each and every moment. They were both far stronger now.

Alex had planned on remaining in closed cultivation for a while longer but had to leave because Tian Honglui was in the capital and had requested to meet him while he was there.

Since it was already close to the time when Alex would have to stop anyway, he decided to be done with his closed cultivation and go meet the man.

Alex met the man in a small restaurant in the capital that was barely any popular at all. Tian Honglui was sitting in a corner and quickly waved his hands to catch Alex's attention before bringing him over.

Alex ignored the many eyes that fell on him and made his way toward the young painter.

"Your Majesty," the man almost shouted. "How long has it been? I've been wanting to see you again for a while now."

"Brother Tian, I have missed you as well," Alex said. "What brings you to the city?"

"Oh, I came for the Hall of Fame exhibition that they were doing in the Royal School. They wanted me to be there," the man said. "I thought you would be there since it was a big event, but I didn't see you there."

"I was in closed cultivation," Alex said. "How was the exhibition?"

"It was alright," Tian Honglui said. "They focused it more on me than the paintings, but I suppose that's understandable." He shrugged.

Alex chuckled a bit. "The Hall of Fame paintings are good, but it can't be any better than seeing and hearing from the person that made it there 3 times in a row."

Tian Honglui gave a small smile. "You could do it too, Your Majesty," he said. "Alas, I don't think you have the intention to."

Alex shook his head. "I don't have the intention for it," he said. "Besides, I haven't focused on my painting in quite some time, so I don't think I would make it there without some significant attention in that matter."

Tian Honglui shrugged. "Oh yeah, I wanted to ask regarding that, will you sell a painting in the Golden Auction this time around?" he asked.

"Sell a painting?" Alex asked, thinking to himself. "I don't see why I can't do that. I am planning to make some pills, especially for the auction once again. But painting isn't a bad idea."

"Can you help me with mine?" the young man asked. "You have some strong Dao, so I was hoping you could help me with a random painting. Anything will work, I'm trying to challenge myself."

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. "Sure," he said. "I can do that."

"Haha, great," Tian Honglui said excitedly.

The food arrived, a large bowl of soup with chucks of vegetables and meat floating in a dark brown broth with a layer of liquid fat on top.

"I was meaning to ask," Alex said. "Why are we here?" He pointed to the shop. No matter how he cut it, this shop was not a big place at all and was mostly filled with lower-realm cultivators.

"This is my go-to place when I'm in the capital," the young painter said. "Back when I was studying here in the Royal School, my starting years were... let's say not very good for my heart."

"One day, I came here on a whim and ordered this very food. When I ate it, it reminded me of Mother's cooking, back when she was still alive," he said. "That helped me calm down a lot. Since then whenever I was sad or burdened or anxious or in any sort of sour mood, I would come here to wash it away with this soup that reminds me of home. Of a place I could never return to."

The young painter slurped up a spoonful of soup. "My cultivation base is high now and I don't need to eat anything to survive, but still, from time to time, I like to come here and eat this. To remind myself of the days of the past and all the good times I had."

Alex paused for a moment before tasting the soup himself. The soup was barely any good to his tongue after tasting the delicacies the high-level chefs of the Dragon Palace made for him whenever he requested it.

And yet, he couldn't help but feel warm when he swallowed it. He smiled a little and took another spoon and another, and soon he was halfway done with it.

Tian Honglui chuckled a bit and dug into his own soup, chewing on the piece of meat that floated in there.

Alex took a bite of a small piece of vegetable, the fresh flavors not destroyed by the hot soup. He was only about to swallow it when it stuck in his throat, the world seemingly stopping around him.

Tian Honglui continued as if nothing happened, but he too had to pause and look at Alex in surprise when he realized what was amiss. "Wait, isn't that—"

Alex gulped, swallowing his food, and sent his senses outside to sense the storm that formed. One he was so very familiar with.

A pill Cloud was forming outside, and he was not the one making it.

Chapter 1566 9-Veined Pill

Alex knew what was happening. There were no other possibilities. Still, he held out hope and tried to check in the direction of the Royal School of Alchemy. Maybe one of his alchemists had been the one to make the pill.

Alas, they were not. The pill cloud was forming, and it was forming atop the Dragon Palace.

No one around him seemed to notice what was happening at all. Everyone went about their daily life, with only Alex feeling any sort of emotion at all. That was until he noticed that they were just ignoring what was happening.

'They are already used to it,' he thought.

"Your Majesty, how is there a pill cloud when you're here?" the painter asked.

Alex stood up. "I'm sorry, brother Tian, but I must leave for now. I'll meet you a few days later for the painting. It was great seeing you again."

Before Tian Honglui could say anything, Alex was already out of the shop and rushing toward the Dragon Palace. The shadow guards that were sent after him rushed behind him as he ran back to the Dragon Palace.

Alex arrived at the Dragon Palace around the time the third lightning fell and then reached his elders during the 5th lightning that fell from the pill clouds.

"Your majesty," Yao Ning called to him the moment she saw him. "What is going on? Is this not you?"

"No," Alex said. "I think this is the Dragon Emperor. No, it most definitely is him." He didn't know how to feel about it. Seeing someone who was his enemy becoming stronger was not something Alex wanted to see.

However, he had no choice but to continue watching.

The 6th and the 7th lightning did nothing to Alex's spirit, but the 8th lightning made him hesitate and feel anxious. He could make the 8-veined pill. He could do it for a long time since he brought up his blood aura to that level.

However, the level after that was not something Alex could do. The pinnacle of what was possible with pills as a Saint realm cultivator was something Alex knew he couldn't reach for a long time.

And today, he was seeing someone who had never made a pill cloud form before making one.

The Dragon Emperor's very first pill was going to have 9 pill veins. Alex didn't know how to feel about that.

When the 9th lightning fell from the heavens, Alex could only watch in silence as his mind tried to think through the consequences of what had occurred. As someone with nine-veined pills, the Dragon Emperor was going to be a much tougher opponent.

And he had already been the toughest one Alex had ever found. If Alex wasn't wrong, then the Dragon Emperor was already stronger than the Mad Immortal that had kidnapped him all those years ago.

Something changed in the sky that made everyone look up at once. Saint realm cultivators could easily tell what was happening, and even True realm cultivators could tell something was different, though they lacked the understanding to come to a conclusion.

"Is that... a breakthrough?" Liang Shufen couldn't help but ask. Alex was of the same thought as well, albeit he couldn't think of a reason why the Dragon Emperor would be breaking through to the Immortal realms right now.

'Did he figure out how to make pill clouds consistently?' Alex thought to himself. He himself had never really managed to make pill clouds without using the pill separating Qi, and he had yet to give that to the emperor.

The breakthrough aura disappeared all of a sudden, giving everyone a fright, and the day returned to normal once again with no clouds in the sky. To anyone who was already not used to this shenanigan happening every few minutes in the capital from time to time.

No one knew this was the Dragon EMperor doing it this time around, so they never had any inkling of exactly how big this thing was.

After waiting for a few minutes, Alex returned to his room and decided to wait for the dragon emperor to be done with it.

It took him 3 days to meet the Dragon Emperor.

Alex walked into the hall where the Dragon Emperor waited for him, days after he had summoned the pill clouds. Alex made his way toward the seat where the Dragon Emperor was sitting with no sense of urgency or anything.

"Congratulations on your pill cloud, Dragon Emperor," Alex said as he sat on an empty seat opposite the Dragon Emperor. "I hope our trade was what helped you do it."

"It did," the Dragon Emperor answered. "I would thank you for the knowledge had I already not paid for it."

Alex shrugged. "It doesn't hurt to say it though," he said. He hesitated a bit before asking the next question. "Did you... succeed in making a 9-veined pill?"

The Dragon Emperor didn't answer Alex verbally. Instead, he tossed him a pill bottle that Alex swiftly grabbed from the air and opened to look inside. A pill tumbled inside the bottle, one with 9 different lightning scars on it; Alex counted it.

The blue pill gave Alex a sense of surprise and the strong smell wafting away from the pill made Alex realize just how strong the pill was.

"Incredible," he couldn't help but say. "A 9-veined Saint Cultivation pill. This should speed up your Qi cultivation nearly a hundred times if I' 'm not mistaken."

The Dragon Emperor raised an eyebrow at those words. "You are quite fast when it comes to knowing what pill it is just by looking at it," he said.

"The smell is a big part too," Alex said.

"Still surprising," the Dragon Emperor said. "Anyway, I don't believe you came here to look at that pill."

"I was," Alex said. "What did you think I was here for?"

The Dragon Emperor couldn't help but give an untrustful look toward Alex before letting go of it. "You really just came to check my pill?" he asked.

"That and ask you how you managed to do it," Alex answered. "I haven't given you everything you need to make pill clouds, so I was—"

"Oh, but you have," the Dragon Emperor said, cutting off Alex.

Alex paused. "Sorry?"

"You have given me everything I need to make pill clouds," the Dragon Emperor said. "Perfect recipes, brilliant pill-forming techniques, and then the knowledge about the mushrooms. The mushrooms were the biggest part I presume, thought it could be all three."

Alex's eyes narrowed for a long moment as he tried to find lies in the Dragon Emperor's words, but he hadn't been lying. "You really did it..." he said softly. "You managed to learn how to use the mushrooms."

"I had to search around for it," the Dragon Emperor said. "Took me a while to find an alchemist with proper knowledge about that. He was a player too. Do only players know about this?"

Alex didn't say anything.

"Now I don't even know what to trade with you for the next 2 trades," he said. "You already can make pill clouds."

"I can't," the Dragon Emperor said. "What you saw a few days ago was just a coincidence. I have made hundreds if not thousands of pills, and yours was the only information that helped me go past that final barrier, even though I would attribute my current success to luck more than anything."

"Luck?" Alex asked. "What's there to be lucky about? You put in effort and you get the result."

"Yes, but I've been doing that for a long time and will do that for a long time too, and yet I never managed to for pill clouds," the Dragon Emperor said. "It was only after your information that I managed to do anything."

Alex remained silent, blaming himself for giving the information so early. Alas, he couldn't stop it from happening. He had no choice.

"And I still need it to do anything," the Dragon Emperor continued. "I do not know for certain if what I have learned is accurate too. I didn't manage to form another pill cloud."

Alex's eyes perked up at those words. "Sorry?" he asked, surprised. "You... don't know exactly what to do?"

"I'm just guessing out here," the Dragon Emperor said. "I don't have the entire knowledge. Even if I do, I do not know about it. But I doubt it a little. After all, I couldn't make another pill cloud."

"You tried?" Alex asked.

"Why did you think I was so late to leave?" the Dragon Emperor said. "I thought I would rise the glory and form more pill clouds, but it is not as easy as I thought it would be. One needs more than just luck. You need absolute knowledge too."

"That was why I had hoped you were here for another reason."

Alex looked at the Dragon Emperor, realizing only just now what he meant. "You want information on the mushrooms that I have," he said.

"Yes," the Dragon Emperor said. "Let me see if what I found is what I need to have known. I need to learn more and make more pill clouds in the future. I cannot let it all up to chance."

Alex felt a bit of relief when he heard that, but all anxiety hadn't gone. Even if the pill clouds had been accidental, Alex was about to help him once more to make him a better alchemist.

Even though he hadn't intended it before, Alex was now going to have to do the third trade with the Dragon Emperor.

Chapter 1567 A Single Stroke

"Did you do it?" Pearl asked Alex after he had returned from talking to the Dragon Emperor.

"I was supposed to give it to him for the trade anyway," Alex said. "It's only right that I do it before I don't get the chance to. He was this close to figuring out about the mushrooms."

Pearl fell into a thought, and Alex did the same. It was true that they both didn't want the Dragon Emperor to get stronger, but there was no choice on Alex's part this time around.

"What do we do now?" Pearl asked. "If he can make pill clouds frequently, won't he ascend?"

"No, don't worry about that," Alex said. "Those three by themselves won't be enough for him to make pills frequently, and the World Defying Mushrooms aren't that common either."

"He might be able to form pill clouds every 100 pills now, instead of every few hundred," Alex said.

"Didn't my 6th grandma say that pill clouds by themselves are quite rare?" Pearl asked. "He won't need more than what he has to have a good life in the Immortal realms."

Alex nodded. That was what Luo Beihan had told them, but he shook his head immediately afterward. "If I were to give you a recipe for a pill that has a 1 in 10 chance to instantly send you to the next cultivation base, would you take it?" he asked.

Pearl was surprised at the tangent, but he decided to answer Alex anyway. "1 in 10? That sounds like a good pill, doesn't it?" he asked. He didn't know much about pills, but he definitely knew a thing or two about cultivation and how difficult it was to break through to the next realm.

"What if you find out I have a recipe that can guarantee a pill that helps me break through each time," Alex said. "Would you want it?"

"Of course," Pearl said.

"Which one would you want of the two?" Alex asked.

"The one that guarantees," Pearl said.

Alex was about to continue when Pearl cut him off once again.

"I get it now," he said. "Yes, that makes sense. Even though he has every reason to leave right now and now live like a lowly cultivator in the Immortal realms, he won't leave just yet because he knows there is something more lucrative here that he can acquire."

Alex nodded. "Until he gets everything from me that he knows he can use to make pill clouds every time, he won't leave," he said.

"I see," Pearl said. "But he will get that by the end of our 20-year period here, right?"

"7 more years," Alex said with a sigh.

13 years had passed since he had come here. The past 4 years especially had all been a blend in his mind as he had spent all of it cultivating with only ever leaving his closed cultivation once.

And that one time had been to go meet with Jai Heiyun, who he had discreetly sent to find information on his sister's old sect to see what she could find. There was nothing he got out of that except the knowledge that his sister hadn't had much time to spend in this place before she was forced to leave... for some reason.

"We'll have to get stronger," Pearl said.

"Yes," Alex said. "We definitely have to get stronger."

"And we can't have it just be through cultivation," Pearl said. "I need to get stronger, and I want to fight to get stronger."

Alex nodded. He knew he had to get stronger and he needed proper training to achieve that. He was thinking of ways to achieve that.

"We should soon be able to train properly," he said. "Just a few more months."

Pearl couldn't help but look forward to whatever was coming.

Alex went to meet with his elders, having thought of a new plan. He was going to go to Blueheart City for a few months and then head over to the Silver Kingdom after that.

His next few days were going to be spent helping his alchemists and Tian Honglui with his paintings. After that, it was all free for him.

He went to Blueheart City a week later and met with the King there once again. He was welcomed just as respectfully as he had the last time he had come here as well.

It felt like yesterday for Alex, but it had been over 5 years since then. Time moved so quickly when one spent most of it in closed cultivation.

"Your cultivation base surprises me each time, Your Majesty," the King said.

Long Weiyuan was still quite young and had a cultivation base in the mid-Saint Soul realm, which Alex could tell had remained stagnant for a long time. His words were somewhat filled with envy.

"I have some of the best techniques, and best pills, and I get to cultivate in the Dragon Palace," Alex said. "I would not dare show my face if I can't even do this much."

The king only chuckled a bit and said nothing. He knew Alex liked being alone, so he left him after a bit.

Alex took the time to go to the garden where he sat and worked on a painting that he was planning on selling in the Golden Auction that would start in 6 months or so. He ruminated on the actual content of the painting and knew that one with some sort of Dao would sell the best, so he went with that approach.

No one needed to know his thoughts and emotions.

He thought about what he could make for a while before deciding that he didn't need to make anything fancy to give off an aura, he took some golden paint and made a single slash from the top of the canvas to the bottom, splitting the painting into two halves.

It was a simple thing but that didn't mean it was bad. In fact, he was quite proud of it.

"Sword aura... and is that Dao of Cutting?" someone spoke from behind Alex.

Alex quickly turned around to find the Crown Prince standing not far away from him.

"Crown Prince? What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I had some free time before my workload increases in the next few months, so I decided to come here and try to learn some Dao if I could," the crown prince said. He pointed at the painting and spoke again, "That's the Dao of Cutting, right? I'm trying to learn it right now."

"Yes, it is," Alex said. "Do you want to peer in here?"

"Sure," the Crown Prince said and looked at the painting, getting lost in it for a while. His face went through an array of expressions as he tried to figure out a bunch of things.

"There's... something else here," the man said. "I can't tell what it is though."

Alex nodded. He had added Dao of Gold and Dao of Sharpness into the only paint that was the golden line. Sword Intent and Cutting Dao was just the half of it.

He didn't bother explaining it.

The prince stayed there, learning as much as he could before withdrawing his attention from it. "It's so minimal and yet so incredible," he said.

"I'm planning on selling it," Alex said.

"What?" the Crown Prince looked at him. "Without having it be checked if it's viable for the Hall of Fame?"

"I don't particularly care about being put in the hall of fame, so no," Alex said.

"But the hall—" the Crown Prince paused and shook his head. "Whatever. It is your painting after all. I can't tell you what to do or what not to do."

Alex smiled and stored the painting.

"What are you planning on doing next?" the Crown Prince asked.

"I was thinking of retreating to my quarters for now. I might go to the Domain of Enlightenment tomorrow," Alex said.

"If you have the time, do you want to go to the Azure Lake with me?" the Crown Prince asked. "I am planning on going there right now."

Alex thought for a bit and shrugged. "Sure. That works for me."

He left with the Crown Prince and visited the Azure Lake once again. He had been here a couple of times, and it never got any less magnificent. Even now, with the sunset reflecting in its light and the moon peeking through the side, it held the ephemeral beauty of twilight.

The Crown Prince sat on the sand and Alex sat next to him.

"I usually come here with Luoyang, but she's been busy lately, so I couldn't make time for myself to come here," the Crown Prince said. "Well, I can't really put the blame on her alone, I have been quite busy myself."

Alex just listened.

"I used to come here as a child with my mother to watch the sunset. Father was always busy, so she was the only one that could take me here. Then I grew up and started getting busy myself."

"Being the crown prince, my responsibilities were too big you know," he said. "It was only later in my life that I realized what I was missing. I wanted to come here with my mother once more. Me, her, maybe my brother too."

"Alas, she died before I could ever get to do that," he said with a sigh. "I was just too damn busy. I still am. I completely forgot about her death anniversary until 2 days ago."

"I'm a bad son, aren't I?" the Crown Prince asked with a small chuckle as he stared into the fading light of the sun.

The Sun went down beyond the horizon and momentarily gave a bright glow of a million colors beyond dying immediately as if it never existed.

Chapter 1568 The Empress' Death

Alex watched the evening get darker and darker as the light in the sky faded by the second. He could feel that the prince's sadness even from where he sat on the sand.

He turned around to find his solemn look staring into the horizon.

"I'm sorry for your loss, Prince," Alex said from the side. "I can't say how one feels when losing his mother, but I did lose my master early on. Her death had been sudden and unexpected, and it tore me for quite some time."

"Your master?" the Crown Prince asked.

"It was... a long time ago," Alex said. "She was my master for just about a year, and... even with just a year, she became someone close to me, and then I lost her. That was over 50? No, 60 years ago now."

"60?" the Crown Prince thought for a moment. "That was around the time I lost my mother too."

"I heard she was diseased with something incurable," Alex said. "It must've been hard on the Emperor, being an alchemist and not being able to make a pill to cure his wife."

Alex looked away, staring at the blue lake that was as wide as a sea. The lake was created by an Immortal, so the serenity he felt was artificial. He knew it. Still, he couldn't help but enjoy it.

He remembered his master and how she got poisoned. If he had been as good back then as he was now, could he have saved her?

The poison they were both afflicted by was a strong one from Immortal lands, so Alex wasn't sure just yet. There was a possibility for sure still.

He could tell the Crown Prince was lost in his own thoughts as well. As he hadn't said anything.

Or so Alex thought until he looked at the prince again and saw him staring back at him, with eyes filled with confusion.

"Is... something wrong?" Alex asked him.

"What do mean my mother was diseased?" he asked Alex.

Alex paused for a second, not understanding the intent of the question. "Your mother... she died of an incurable disease... right?" he asked. He went through his own memories to make sure he was remembering it correctly.

And he was. The Emperor had told him that the first empress had died some time ago of an incurable disease. That was why he had remarried with a woman he didn't even care about just so there was an Empress next to him.

"My mother was no weakling to die of some disease," the Crown Prince said. "She was the strongest person on the continent, second only to maybe my father. She was even younger than him, so she should count as more talented."

Alex stopped slumping and got straight. "Strongest?" he asked.

"My mother was someone at the peak of mortal cultivation," the Crown Prince said. "I can understand you not knowing about it as we don't flaunt our cultivation bases around, but still... you couldn't believe that she died of some random disease, do you?"

"I believed what I was told," Alex said. "I had no reason to not trust the information."

"And who gave you that information?" the Crown Prince asked, getting confrontational.

"The Emperor."

The Crown Prince was taken aback at the answer. "What?" he asked. "My... father?"

"Yes," Alex said. "Your father. He told me that very early on when I met him. Since no one else talks about the Empress at all, I had no choice but to believe him. Did he lie?"

"Yes," the Crown Prince said without thinking. He seemed lost in his thoughts, trying to understand why his father did what he did.

Alex was curious now as well. He was already surprised to hear that the Empress was as strong as she was, and now the reason for her death had been lied to him as well.

"How did she die?" Alex asked the Crown Prince, bringing him out of his stupor.

The Crown Prince seemed to have a hundred different thoughts going through his head that he had to push aside to answer Alex's question.

"She died during her lightning tribulation," the prince said.

It took Alex a moment to register what the Crown Prince had just said. "Wait... lightning tribulation?" he thought for a moment, and then his eyes went wide in shock.

"WAIT WHAT?!"

The Crown Prince looked at him, thinking that was the appropriate response to the thing he had just revealed. He nodded in return.

Alex looked around, making sure no one was close enough to hear them speak.

"Your mother... she died while trying to break through to Immortality?" Alex asked. In the 13 years he had been on this continent, he had maybe thought of the Empress twice, and in both of those thoughts she was either a mother or a wife.

Never had he thought of her as her own person. And to think such a massive event was hidden from him so close by at that.

He gulped down the surprise and asked, "She failed, huh?"

"Yes," the Prince said. "She was so close to it... and yet so far. Sometimes I wonder if maybe that was why Father didn't try to break through to Immortality."

Alex knew that wasn't the reason, but maybe it indeed was a part of it.

Doing nothing was living. Trying to break through was hanging life on a thread in front of a tall cliff which led to death. The Empress got nothing by trying to break through when she could have perhaps lived for another few millennia with her children and maybe grandchildren.

The two of them got silent and Alex started thinking about everything that he just learned. At first, his mind went over everything he learned, thinking nothing about anything more than that.

But then as he thought more about it, in context with everything else he knew, the things the Crown Prince said had some inconsistencies to it that Alex couldn't put his finger on.

He went through his thoughts, parting the hundreds of strings of thought, until he found the one that led him to a loom at the end of it. This was where the inconsistency in the information was originating from.

"Did your mother go to the ocean to break through?" he asked.

"Ocean? Why would she?" the Crown Prince asked.

"I was just curious," Alex said. "You said your mother went through her lightning tribulation, but if it was on land everyone would've seen it. Which was why I asked."

"She did it on land," the Crown Prince said. "And everyone did see it. Not everyone knows what it was, but they all saw it."

"They all... saw..."

That was what had been bugging him. That one piece of information that he hadn't thought of until now, and the moment he got it, it fit right into place.

That was the missing piece that let him know that the puzzle was wrong from the very beginning.

Because the only lightning strike that had been seen around the time the Empress had died, 60 years ago, was the Heavenly Judgment that Alex believed had killed the Azure Dragon.

"Do you mind telling me where your mother initiated her breakthrough?" he asked.

The Crown Prince shrugged. "She needed a safe space, so Father took her to a place where she would have no reason to worry about outside influence," he said.

"The Azure Dragon's secret realm."

Chapter 1569 Two Keys

Two possibilities went across Alex's mind when he heard what he did.

First, the Crown Prince was lying to him. He was lying about how his mother died and he was trying to hide information about the Azure Dragon's death.

Second, the Crown Prince himself wasn't aware that the lightning strike had been Heavenly Judgment and that there was no tribulation of lightning. It had all been a lie, given to him most likely by his father.

There was another possibility as well, a third one. And that was that the Crown Prince was telling the truth and the the lightning that Alex had thought had killed the Azure Dragon had instead been something that had killed his mother.

But Alex did not find that possibility very probable, so he dismissed it even as it formed in his mind. The two remaining possibilities were what he believed to be the real ones.

He needed more information.

"Oh, is it the same as that painting from the Hall of Fame?" Alex asked. "You've seen that, right?"

"Is it?" the Crown Prince asked. "Hmm, I think it is. I suppose young Honglui managed to grab my mother's final moments in a painting. I never thought of it like that."

"Were you there when she tried to break through?" Alex asked him.

"No, it's dangerous, so only Father went with her," the Crown Prince said. "I only learned that she had died after father returned. He was gone before I even understood what he had said."

Alex could hear the emotion in the Crown Prince's voice, the sound of grief. He felt guilty trying to gain information out of him during his moment of vulnerability, but he had no choice. This was life.

"Did you at least get to say goodbye?" Alex asked. "Before she went to breakthrough."

"She came to me before she went over to His Majesty's realm," the Crown Prince said. "I am given to hold a key to the realm and she needed it to go inside. I wanted to go with her, but she said that it was risky and made me stay behind."

"That was the last time I talked with her," the Crown Prince said. "It is sad for me, but it is sadder for my brother. He wasn't even in the palace when Mother left. He didn't even get to say goodbye."

"He only found out after he came back and decided to leave in anger," the Crown Prince said. "We tell people that he's out touring the continent. That is the excuse father uses too. But I'm sure he's just angry regarding the entire situation and wants to stay away from the palace for as long as he can. He'll return when it's time."

Alex nodded. He didn't care about the second prince right now. No one did. He wanted to learn more about the Empress and especially...

"There's a key to the Azure Dragon's secret realm?" he asked. "It's not a simple teleportation formation to enter the domain? I would have assumed most of the secret realms to be set up that way."

Alex couldn't help but wonder if he could somehow enter this secret realm if he had the key. Could he do it secretly?

Not that he needed it to begin with. He had a Dao of Space and could easily connect the two separated Space to walk from one to the other. Still, the key would most likely help with formations and everything else set

"Yes, but there's more," the Crown Prince said. "From what I hear, the first Azure Dragon was someone quite fancy and wanted something special for his realm of stay. He built the usual teleportation formation and all, but for his son, he made two keys that he could use to enter the realm."

The first Azure Dragon had been the one responsible for making all the different secret realms, Alex remembered. "What sort of key?" he asked. "Is it something like the Dragon Medallion I hold?"

"No, nothing like that," the Prince said. "They were swords. I told you the Azure Dragon was fancy about it. He used actual swords as keys to the realm."

"...what?" Alex asked. He looked at the man, stunned at the words. "Swords?"

"Yes," the Crown Prince said. "You wouldn't think of swords as keys, would you?"

"No," Alex said. "What sorts of swords were these?" His heart beat faster and faster at this point.

"A pair of black and white swords. One was used to teleport someone through different layers of space, and another to tear through that space," the Crown Prince said.

Alex tried his best to show his emotions. "Do you mind if I see it?" he asked. "You have made me curious now."

"The swords?" the Crown Prince shook his head. "I'm afraid that's not possible, Your Majesty. One of the swords was destroyed by the lightning tribulation when my mother died."

"I see," Alex said. "Which one was it?"

"It was the black one, that let them teleport inside," the prince said. "Mother must have kept it with her when she was breaking through. Since nothing of hers survived the strike, the sword died along with her too."

Alex looked at the man, still sad about his mother's death. Each reminder a moment of grief that he hadn't fully dealt with yet. His emotions held clearly on his face.

This man was not lying at all.

'He doesn't know,' Alex thought. He looked at the prince's innocent eyes. 'He doesn't know what happened to the sword.'

The prince might not have known, but Alex did. He knew very clearly what had happened to the sword as he was currently in possession of it.

It was the black sword that had the Dragon Imperium's insignia on it. The sword that carried a teleportation aura around it.

It was the same damn sword that had been stuck on Pearl's mother's body, the one that had killed her when he had ripped it out.

The sword hadn't been destroyed in some damn lightning tribulation during the Empress' breakthrough to immortality. It had been lost when Pearl's mother had somehow been teleported across the massive world to the other side of the realm in the Western Continent.

He had managed to weed out some lies from the truths he had heard today, but still, that didn't answer much. All he could come up with were some conjectures that he didn't want to believe right now

'So I have the key to the Azure Dragon's realm,' Alex thought. That was helpful to know about.

"So only one of the keys remains," Alex said. "Right?"

"Yeah, the white one remains," the Crown Prince said. "Not that we needed them in the first place. We could always use the teleportation formation. Although not anyone can use it of course."

Alex nodded. "Did you get the white one too?" he asked.

"No, my father holds it," the Prince said. "Or wait, was it my brother? It is one of the two. I only held the black sword."

'And now I hold it,' Alex thought. It was fortunate that the prince couldn't sense his sword close by or else Alex's mission would've been compromised a long time ago.

The Crown Prince shook his head. "That's enough dwelling on the past," he said, looking at the dark landscape. "We should return soon."

Alex nodded and left the Azure Lake with more questions than before. Only this time around, he could tell that the questions were reaching deeper and deeper into the truth.

It would only be a while before the answer revealed itself.

Chapter 1570 Silverheart City

Alex arrived west of the Silver Mountain range, in a city that was established in a rocky region with large spikes of stones coming out from the ground all over the space.

The rock spikes were all painted metallic white, representing the Kingdom and the capital through it.

Alex had arrived at the Silverheart City of the Silver Kingdom.

He had arrived alone. That was not to say that he had nobody around him. But all those who were there were there only as his bodyguard. No one was here with him to be here with him.

Yao Ning and Liang Shufen had been sent to the Golden Auction to deal with the auction and sell his pills and paintings. He had let them know not to buy anything unless it was something incredible, as they were lacking funds at the moment thanks to their last big spend.

With the two away, Alex had to come to the Silver Kingdom alone as he couldn't miss the most important event for any Saint realm cultivator on the continent.

The Transcendent Martial Ground was opening in just a few days.

The secret realm opened once every 30 years or so, and unfortunately this time around, it overlapped the Golden Auction. Had it opened just a month later, people could've easily gone to the Golden Auction and made it to it in time.

They would've still missed the Realm of Trials 6 months later, but anyone who cared about the Realm of Trials usually wouldn't care about the Transcendent Martial Ground at all.

Alas, they had to make a choice, and as such many believed that the auction wouldn't be as good this time around. After all, no one in their right might would give up the chance to test yourself and train yourself against the best of the best of the Eastern Continent.

That was still a few weeks away, so he had to come meet with the Queen of the Silver Kingdom, Mao Yingtai.

The woman with peach hair and a petite body gave a charming smile as she excitedly welcomed Alex. She stood outside the city gates, next to one of the protruding silver rocks.

The blue sky was free of clouds, and the summer breeze that blew in from the west made its way to this region as well, moving the tall grass outside the city in a familiar pattern.

"Your Majesty! It's been 10 years!" she said, waving her hands in a wild manner. To her side stood two older men and a young man, all of whom showed little to no emotion.

"Queen Mao, how have you been?" Alex asked the woman as he arrived next to her.

"Absolutely amazing, Your Majesty," she said. "Although, I'm still a little sad you took away my artifact."

"I won it fair and square," Alex said. "You can't call it yours."

The woman gave a cheeky little smile.

"Welcome to the Silver Kingdom, Your Majesty," the young man next to the Queen spoke. "We hope you have a wonderful time here."

Alex looked at the young man, moving his attention to him. The young man had black hair and deep blue eyes, but his face looked ever so similar to the Queen.

"Yingkong, I was getting there," she said before shooing him back. "That's my little brother. Don't mind him."

Alex had thought so. "You can be a queen if you have a brother?" he asked her curiously.

"Hmm? Why couldn't I?" the woman asked in a confused manner.

"You can't if you are married or have kids, right?" he asked her.

"Oh! Yeah, siblings are fine," the girl said. "They don't count as royals though. So you don't have to call him a prince or anything."

The young man sighed behind his sister.

"Anyway, let us go to the city," she said, letting Alex walk up to her so she could take him away. As they started walking, the rest of the group fell behind them.

"Weren't you supposed to be coming through the teleportation formation, Your Majesty?" Alex asked. "What happened?"

"I decided not to," he said. "I was already at the Azure Kingdom, so this is a short distance from there anyway."

"I see," the Queen said. "Ah, are you planning on entering the Transcendent Martial Ground, Your Majesty? You must be. Why else would you come here."

"I am," Alex said. This was a weird change of pace for him when meeting with rulers of the various kingdoms. Everyone tried to be regal about things, but Mao Yingtai seemed to care less about it.

'She wasn't this hyper the last time I saw her,' Alex thought. He wondered if her mood was sour last time due to what was happening in the Ivory Kingdom at the time. He remembered her being quite solemn back then.

"I do plan on going into the secret realm," Alex said. "That is primarily the reason why I came when I did. Otherwise, I would've come after the Golden Auction."

"I see, I see," the woman said. "Do you have any plans on what region you'll be fighting as part of?"

"I plan on remaining neutral actually," Alex said. "That... won't be a problem, right?"

Everyone that went into the Transcendent Martial Ground went as part of a kingdom. And in the end, the points would be tallied up to see which kingdom did the best.

As Alex was part of no kingdom, he wanted to remain neutral.

"But you can't be neutral," the Queen said. "You must be part of a group. That's just how it is."

Alex shrugged. "Then I'll have to take some time to consider," he said. "Do you wish that I join your kingdom?"

"Will you?" the Queen asked excitedly.

Alex chuckled. "We'll see.

They got onto a small flying boat and flew over the castle gates, into the city.

Alex looked down from the boat. The massive city went about its day normally. A few people looked up to stare at him as he passed by, but other than that, no one really cared that he was in the city.

He had been here for too long for people to care about him anymore.

The city wasn't unique to him anymore, the buildings the same as he saw everywhere else. What was unique were the rock spikes outside the city, but that didn't exist within it.

"Have you been to the Ebony Kingdom yet, Your Majesty?" the Queen asked.

"Not yet," Alex said. "I don't make a habit of visiting Kingdoms where I won't have much to do, unfortunately."

"Oh, so you'll be going there after the tournament?" she asked.

"Hmm? What's happening after the tournament?" Alex asked.

"The Harmonious Balance Haven's opening," the Queen said. "I assumed you would want to go there too."

"I don't know..." Alex said. "From what I've read regarding the place, it doesn't give much opportunity to show your skills, unlike the upcoming one."

"No, it is mostly to test your skills," the Queen said. "Whatever, there is plenty of time. You might as well worry about the Martial ground for now."

"I don't know if I will have to worry about it that much," he said.

The Queen turned to look at him with a serious look on her face. "Trust me, Your Majesty. You will want to worry. You are only in the Saint Soul realm. Meanwhile, the strong opponents can go to the Saint Transformation realm. They're just too strong."

"That's alright," Alex said with a smile. "I'm not particularly looking to fight extremely tough opponents. Just those that can help me improve myself."

"Hmm, if you're not intending to win it all, then I suppose you don't have to be that careful," the Queen said. "If you want to remain safe there, I can have my brother stay around you. He's strong enough to defend you all."

Alex looked at the young man who didn't react to him being brought up. The young man had a cultivation base of Saint Soul's 7th realm, making him quite strong.

He was 4 realms higher than Alex, so it wouldn't be an exaggeration on the Queen's part to say he was stronger than Alex. Only if she knew.

They arrived at the palace and Alex settled down in there. He spoke to the queen about a few things and even let her use the Mountain Crushing artifact.

The Queen was very hospitable and more than excited to talk with Alex about his journey as a cultivator. However weak she considered him to be, he was still a very talented person in her eyes.

She especially wanted him to talk about how he became so good at Alchemy. She even wanted him to give lectures on it to the alchemists in her city.

When Alex refused the offer, she changed it to a bet.

"How about we bet on how long you'll last in the secret realm once it begins?" she asked. "I will bet that you will last... 9, no 10 months."

"Is that so?" Alex smiled. "Here, I'll give you an advantage so you can guess again."

He passed along a talisman to the Queen, which he had prepared a long time ago.

The Queen read the talisman with widened eyes. "What is this?" she asked.

"I wanted to ask you to announce this when the secret realm opens up," he said.

"Are you sure? This will create a severe disadvantage for you from the start," she said.

"I know," Alex said. "I know what I'm doing."

The queen gave a thoughtless nod as she looked at the text. "If I'm to take this into account then... you will last 3 months at best.

Chapter 1571 Martial Coast City

Alex heard a knock on his door while he cultivated. He had been cultivating for the past 3 days without any disturbance and hadn't expected to get any for the next 2 days.

He opened the door and let the person walk in.

The one who entered was Queen Mao.

She wore a flawless white robe with silver and gold embroidery creating complex patterns on it. Her hair was tied in a bun, a silver hairpin holding it together along with a plethora of other jewelry all over her body.

Her face had a hint of pink and her lips a darker shade of it, all of which accentuated her already incredible beauty even more.

She looked particularly beautiful today, but there was a different aura about her this time around. Instead of being the playful beauty she was before, now she was a cold beauty.

"Your Majesty, I will need to leave for Martial island very soon. What have you planned? Will you leave with me or will you come later after the secret realm has opened up?"

She had the same attitude as the last two times he had met her, once during the alchemy competition between his alchemists and he Eastern Continent, and once in the golden auction.

"Is something urgent?" he asked.

"No, it's not urgent. I just have to be there to look over the logistics side of things and approve of things. It's a once in a 30-year event, so I can't leave things to other people."

"We are also looking at an unusual number of strong individuals participating this time around, so we have to be more careful," the Queen said.

"More powerful people?" Alex asked. "Players?"

The queen shrugged. "Last time the secret realm opened up, they were still quite weak comparatively, but this time around, everyone has become strong enough to compare with the scions of big families and sects," she said.

"Hmm, I never thought how strong a player could have gotten," he said. "That will be quite interesting to see." 

"So?" the queen asked. "Will you be leaving?"

"Sure," Alex said. "I'll go. There's no reason for me to stay here anyway."

The queen nodded. "We'll leave in 5 hours. I still have a few things to do here since I'll have to stay on the Martial island for the next 2 years."

Alex nodded.

5 hours later, he stood in a teleportation formation with the Queen, her brother, and a few other legionnaires.

They arrived at a city in the west known as the Martial Coast city. It was one of the cities closest to Martial island.

"I'll be away for a few hours, Your Majesty," the Queen said as soon as they were teleported. Yingkong, take care of His Majesty."

"Don't worry, sister," the young man next to Alex said with a bow.

The Queen left them, with a majority of the legionaries leaving with her. Only a few remained behind to escort Alex.

"Do you wish to go somewhere, Your Majesty? Or should we head directly to the place that has been prepared for you?" the young man asked.

"Hmm, I would love to tour this city. I just came out of a 3-day long intense cultivation session, so I want to walk around," he said. "Are there any interesting places here?"

"In the Martial Coast island, the only interesting places would be Martial houses," the young man said. "Dueling arenas. They call it a Martial house here."

"Are they fun?" Alex asked.

"I cannot guarantee that it will be fun, but if you do not like it, we can leave anytime," the young man said.

"That's not a bad idea then," Alex said. "Let us head on over to one."

The young man nodded and together they started walking. Their bodyguards remained far behind them, hidden from the two of them, so no one gave much thought to the two of them once they left the teleportation house.

The newsboard didn't even show that Alex had arrived in the city, which meant that they had no idea at all. Barely a few people even looked in his direction and even then nobody could say with a guarantee that it was him.

So, Alex found this little walk quite free and calming.

"Oh right, I meant to ask. Is something wrong? Your sister didn't seem her cheerful self," Alex said.

"No, no, she's alright. That's just her. She's cheerful one minute and serious the other. She is unpredictable like that," the young man said.

"Oh, so nothing is wrong?" Alex asked.

"No, everything is alright," the young man said. "You will get used to it if you spend some more time with my sister."

"I see, that is good to hear," Alex said before wondering if the Queen's brother was implying something at the end there. He chose to ignore it even if he was.

"How would you rank yourself in terms of strength, by the way?" Alex asked. "In the upcoming secret realm opening."

The young man had a Saint Soul 7th realm cultivation base, making him quite strong. But Alex wasn't sure where he ranked him.

"I will be stronger than a vast majority for sure," he said. "But... I don't believe I will even be one of the 100 strongest in there."

That surprised Alex a little bit.

"Even before the Saint Transformation realm cultivators, which there will be quite a few of, there will be many in the same cultivation base as me, and the remaining two Saint Soul realms."

"Players especially are hard to predict as some have weird techniques that let them bring out attacks far stronger than others in their same cultivation base," the young man said. "With so many players taking part, it will be hard to determine just how many there are that are stronger than me."

Alex looked at him. "How many months do you think you will remain in there?" he asked.

"Hopefully all of it," the young man said with a bit of a chuckle. "But realistically, I will be happy if I can remain longer than a year without having to resort to cheap tricks."

"I see," he said. "You have entered there before right?"

"Past 3 times in a row," the young man said. "I managed to last just 8 months the first time around, 11 the second time around, and 13 months the third time around."

"And 30 years later, you believe it will be good if you survive for just 12 months?" Alex asked.

"The strong players force me to evaluate my potential as such," the young man said with a shrug. "Don't worry, Your Majesty. You'll last for 8 to 10 months certainly. Your cultivation base should let you remain that long easily."

Alex smiled. He didn't tell the young man just what he had been planning, or else the young man would've most likely had a worse reaction than his sister.

Alex looked around at the coastal city, enjoying the warm breeze as they arrived at one of the Martial Houses some time later.

The Queen's brother helped him enter the place discreetly so nobody learned that he was there. After that, he was ready to enjoy whatever this place had to offer.

Chapter 1572 Martial House

A young adult woman with a cultivation base in the Saint Core realm fought a young man with a similar cultivation base.

She used a spear to strike him in close combat, while the young man fought with no weapons and tried to make some space. He crossed his arms, creating an illusory turtle shell around him to block the attack.

Then, he pushed out the turtle shell, sending the woman flying backward, before continuing to keep the distance by attacking her relentlessly.

The area they fought in was a massive arena with barriers all around them, and a few referees inside to judge when a battle was getting too serious and had to be stopped.

"Not bad," Alex said from a room that was separate from most of the open spaces where the audience watched. There were not many separate rooms, and the Queen's brother had managed to get access to one of them quite easily.

"What do you think?" the young man asked. "Who is going to win?"

Alex looked at the match for a few seconds longer and mused on it. "I think the young man is going to win," he said.

"Why?" the young man asked. He had formed his own judgment and wanted to see if Alex had come to the conclusion the same way as him.

"You mentioned betting is a thing here, right?" he asked.

The young man nodded. "You can bet through that," he pointed at a formation at the corner.

Alex shrugged. "That's why I think the young man is going to win," he said. "He has been fighting purely defensively this whole time while trying to let the girl come close to him."

"He acts like he wants distance, but he doesn't fight for it," he said. "From what I can tell, he is trying his best to make it seem like the fight is close while delaying it for more people to place their bets against him."

"After some time, he will most likely use a strong skill to defeat her at once," he said.

Mao Yingkong's eyes flashed with understanding and nodded. "I had assumed you weren't so interested in battles as an Alchemist, but it seems you have a fighter's mind too," he said.

"I would be fine if I didn't have to fight as a cultivator and could live as an alchemist alone," Alex said. "But being a cultivator, we live at the edge of life and death, so being able to save our own hide, it's important to know how to fight."

"I would've assumed you wouldn't need one as a King and an Alchemist," the young man said. "Many should flock to your side to guard you, without you ever having to be a fighter."

"Would you rather fight against every enemy an alchemist makes and protect him? Or would you rather just imprison him and force him to make pills for you as you demand?" Alex asked.

The young man was a little taken aback. He understood what Alex said, and could see his reasoning. "But you're a King. Surely no one would dare try and capture you to forcefully make pills for them."

"I wasn't always a king," Alex said. "But I was always an Alchemist. People would use me if I allowed them the chance to."

The young man said nothing.

"Besides, some ingredients usually end up being in treacherous locations, guarded by strong beasts and whatnot. If you want to be a proficient alchemist, then you need to be strong enough to get them in the first place."

"Oh," the young man said. "I guess I never thought of it like that. I have always only known great Alchemists who walk around with strong defenders. Due to my sister's influence, my social circle doesn't let me deal with lower-level alchemists and their problems."

"That alright," Alex said. His focus quickly changed to the fight below just in time to see the young man throw out a punch with a powerful blast that followed it. Snake-like tendrils shot out in a flash of golden light from the blast.

The woman couldn't cut through them all in time and had a few of them hit her, getting her off her balance. Then the young man sent out a stronger attack, blasting her right onto the barrier, making her lose the fight.

Alex shrugged watching the fight. "Thought so," he said.

The young man next to him nodded as well. He had the same thinking as Alex. "Do you wish to fight as well, Your Majesty?" he asked.

Alex thought for a bit before nodding. "I haven't fought in a long time, so I'm getting a little rusty," he said. "It might be better to shake off some of it before the secret realm opens up."

The young man nodded. "I'll have them find someone that matches your cultivation base," he said and proceeded to call for someone.

"No," Alex stopped him. "Have them find someone weaker, maybe mid-Saint Core realm."

The young man looked a little puzzled. "Saint Core realm? Isn't that too weak for you?" he asked.

Alex shrugged. "I'm planning on holding back a little," he said. "If I fight someone strong, I'll end up losing right away."

The young man looked at him for a bit before shrugging. "Sure," he said and made the arrangements as Alex asked.

The duel was set for after the next battle, so Alex stayed vigilant. Once the battle ended, he left with someone from the Martial house and arrived at the arena.

The woman who took him there explained all the rules that he had to follow. Alex nodded and wore a mask as he appeared on the stage. Opposite him was a young man with Saint Core 8th realm cultivation base.

Alex couldn't help but grimace a little at the sight of his opponent. It was a middle-aged man with thin and long black hair that he had to fight. And he held a sword in his right hand.

'How appropriate,' Alex thought with a sigh. He had asked the Queen's brother for a weaker opponent, but he had ended up finding someone so strong. Alex wasn't sure if he could beat him or not.

He heard no sound from the crown, and the barriers seemed opaque from inside as well so he couldn't see their expressions. Whatever the case, they were most certainly confused right now as to what was going on.

'Whatever, I'll lose anyway,' Alex thought, bringing out Midnight and holding him in front of him. Then, he took a deep breath and did something that surprised the middle-aged man in front of him.

Alex withdrew his cultivation base entirely. He didn't just hide it but rather took it all away, making him appear as a mortal.

"What are you doing?" the man asked him.

"Don't mind me," Alex answered him. "I'm doing my own thing."

The man felt disrespected. "Are you going to fight me without your cultivation base?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said as he held his sword up. "But that doesn't mean I won't be a problem."

His sword glowed white and Sword Qi streamed out of it, flowing around him, surprising the man.

"Sword Aura?" he asked in surprise.

Alex nodded. "Can we begin now?"

Chapter 1573 Sword Match

Alex's Sword Intent had been one of his greatest strengths for a while. Aside from his Qi, which could leap realms to catch up to others at a higher cultivation base, his Sword Intent had been the only thing he had that had been stronger.

Then he had received the Blood God's Manual, and that had brought along another strength that dwarfed both his Qi and Sword Intent.

After that, with how busy he was being a king and trying to come up with pill recipes and learn Daos, he hadn't had the chance to improve it much.

When he first came to the Eastern Continent, his Sword Intent had been somewhere around Saint Core 4th realm. Nearly a decade and a half had passed since then and he hadn't improved at all.

Not that he didn't want to; he simply hadn't had the time to improve his Sword Intent. He couldn't do it without having a somewhat serious fight to improve it at least.

He had improved his Intent at least and that would reflect in the Sword Intent with time, but he had to put some work into it. Just as someone with great intent couldn't establish a strong Killing intent because they weren't murderous by nature, Alex had to train to convert his regular intent to slowly fuel his Sword Intent.

And that was what Alex was intending to start doing right away.

He held his sword up, his Sword Qi flowing out of his sword, covering him, forming Sword Aura.

'Saint Core 5th realm?' he wondered at his own strength. 'Or is it 6th?'

It was somewhere in the middle, and unlike Cultivation bases, it had no clear distinction. As a result, Alex could only guess that it was at the Saint Core 6th realm.

Considering his opponent's strength of Saint Core 8th realm, Alex wasn't sure if he could win or not.

He started the fight with a simple sword slash, sending out Sword Qi. The glowing white blade of energy flew across the arena at the man.New n0vel chapters are published on

The man's sword glowed on its own, showing his own Sword Intent. He struck away Alex's attack, sending it flying toward the barrier to his right. He couldn't help but be surprised at how weak the attack was.

He had sensed Alex's cultivation base, so that had made him think the attack was going to be stronger. When it turned out to be not as strong, he couldn't help but be even more confused.

'What's going on?' the man wondered.

Alex mused on his attack for a few seconds, judging the strength. 'Let's try a few more,' he thought and sent away a few more strikes, all of which were struck down by the man in front of him.

Each time the man destroyed Alex's attacks, his hope for the match grew more and more. 'I can win this,' he thought and lost his sense of fear that he had at the start when he had seen Alex's Sword Aura.

Now, it was his turn to attack first.

The man lunged his sword forward, a sword-shaped attack flying directly at Alex.

Alex's sword glowed bright white and he struck at the attack before it could come close to him. The two attacks clashed in mid-air, and it was clear who was stronger.

The man's attack that had Qi in it was many times stronger than Alex's attack that was merely Sword Qi alone. The incoming attack tore through its opposition and flew at Alex, who managed to step aside in time, dodging it.

Alex struck back another attack, striking at the man with all of his thoughts focused on just that strike. He wasn't just trying to fight. He was actively trying to move his Sword Intent further along the path to improvement.

This attack was the same as all other attacks, but he hoped the next one would be stronger. Stronger and stronger, that was how he was going to improve it.

There were no shortcuts here.

The man did a sweeping attack next, fire blowing out from him in a large area.

Alex saw the attack coming and swung at it, this time using his Sword Aura instead of Sword Intent. The attack landed on the fire, the clash dispersing the energy in all directions.

However, the ones Alex sent had a very strong Intent to them that he had formed a long time ago. One that had been his life motto forever now.

The spread energy quickly got back in line and attacked the strong fire Qi again, all of them moving forward no matter what.

The Sword Qi in the Sword Aura kept moving forward and tore through the attack until only a bit of it was remaining. The remaining bit was so minuscule in strength that Alex could blow at it and disperse it.

The man was surprised that his attack was stopped so easily. He had rarely seen Sword Aura and knew that not all were the same. Even then, all that he had seen were always the same type.

It either cut everything down or protected one from everything. It was rare for anyone to have a unique Sword Aura, and it seemed Alex had exactly that. He couldn't help but frown now.

He had thought that he would win if the fight was going to simply remain at the status they were at now, but Alex had proved that even weaker, his attacks packed a punch that his didn't.

He started getting desperate. So, he started sending out more attacks.

Alex sent out his own attack, all of which contained Sword Aura. The Sword Aura always kept the same property, and so until they were destroyed, they fought off the incoming attack.

As such, even when Alex's Sword Qi had Saint Core 6th realm worth of strength, his overall effectiveness became much stronger. It could almost block all of what the man dished out.

Alex couldn't help but imagine what sort of battle it would be if his opponent had Sword Aura as well, but alas, this man didn't even have Sword Qi, let alone Sword Aura.

The battle stagnated at that point.

Alex's attacks were weaker overall, but the clashes never resulted in either of them getting the upper hand in the end. The battle was getting boring and tedious for the man.

Alex was fine with it. He was focused on improving his Sword Intent, so it didn't matter if he was winning or not. But it did to his enemy.

So, the man took an action that changed the status quo of the match. An action that was a very stupid choice for him.

He went into close combat with Alex.

His thought process was simple. As Alex was essentially a mortal at this point, he could win if he could get close and hit him. Alas, that was the most unfortunate mistake he had made during the entire match.

Alex easily blocked the attack, surprising the man with the strength he carried even when he didn't have a cultivation base. He shook his head at the man, showing his disappointment.

He tossed the man hard, smashing him into the barrier at once, and won the match.

Even so, he was a little disappointed in learning that he would have to spend a lot longer than a single 10-minute match if he wanted to significantly improve his Sword Intent.

Chapter 1574 Martial Island

"No one from the other kingdoms come to this island?" Alex asked the Queen's brother in surprise when he learned about the fact.

"No," the young man said. "It's kind of a thing that has been going on for a long time. People don't want to have to reveal themselves to others from their kingdom, so they usually stay away."

"If you didn't already know, there is a competitive aspect to kingdoms as well in the competition."

Alex nodded. "I knew that," he said. "I just didn't expect them to go so far as they stay in different cities before entering the secret realm."

"If you think that is too much, wait until you find out there are 6 different entrances to the Marital Ground on the Martial Island," the young man said. "Each one for participants from one continent alone to enter."

"That is surprising," Alex said. "So everyone I see here is from the Silver Kingdom, huh? No wonder I haven't seen any familiar faces around. I would've expected to see a few by now."

The man nodded.

They arrived at a courtyard that had been prepared for Alex beforehand. There he waited for the Queen to do what she had to and come back to him when the time for the secret realm's opening was at hand.

The Queen arrived 4 days later, tired from all the work. She met with Alex for a bit before retreating to rest a bit herself. The next day, she came to meet Alex again.

"Your Majesty, are you ready to leave?" the Queen asked with a wide smile on her face. Her happy personality was back once more.

A few large ships had been prepared at the shore of the town, to carry many people to the Martial island where the secret realm was. Alex found that most of the ships had already been filled with thousands of individuals, of which a large portion were going to enter the secret realm.

The rest of them were elders or friends to keep them company.

Alex met with a few important figures with cultivation bases in the Early Saint Transformation realm.

Immortal Saint Pavilion, the Huang Family, and many other big figures from sects and families with bigger names arrived to converse with Alex.

Alex gave them a few minutes to talk about things they were interested in. Most of them invited Alex to visit them if he ever went around to their hometowns, and a large number of them even insisted on buying pills from him directly.

Alex gave some false promises and outright refused where he felt he should. After the people left for their own ships, the ship finally started flying.

"Just 10 more hours until the secret realm opens up, Your Majesty," the Queen said with a giddy expression. "Are you excited?"

Alex couldn't help but nod. "It is quite exciting," he said. "I've been in a lot of secret realms before, but this is the only one where I will have to remain inside for 2 entire years."

Alex didn't count the Demon realm where he had been stuck for 3 years. That was entirely something else.

"I've been to one that takes half a dozen months or more, but even that never reaches a year," he said. "So I'm looking forward to what sort of experiences I'll get."

"I'm sure you will find it all fun, Your Majesty," the Queen said. "I remember the first time I entered. I was merely a young girl with a Saint Foundation realm cultivation base. I got eliminated in just 2 months, hehe."

"It was that difficult?" Alex asked.

"I was just that weak," the Queen said. "Oh right, don't forget about our bet."

"I won't," Alex said. "I hope you didn't forget your side either."

"100 thousand Saint Spirit stones is a lot, but so is surviving 10 months of Transcendent Martial Ground. I hope you're not going to lose too early," she said.

"Wouldn't you actually hope that I lose?" Alex asked.

"Haha, I might want to win, but I also want you to keep your reputation, Your Majesty," the Queen said.

Alex simply grinned and changed topics. "Why don't you join in?" he asked. "Surely there are enough competent men and women outside that you won't have to stay."

The Queen shook her head. "I don't really have any interest in it. As I've mentioned, I used to enter this a long time ago, and I've entered at least 10 times by now throughout the many years," she said. "There's no point for me to enter anymore."

Alex was a little surprised. "You aren't blocked from entering, right?" he asked.d

"No, but we will have an unfair advantage, just because we are monarchs of our kingdom," the Queen shrugged. "Besides, I can't join even if I wanted to."

"Why?" Alex asked curiously.

"Responsibility," the Queen said. "After everyone here enters the secret realm, I have to rush to the Golden Auction this time around. It starts in 2 days and people won't stop entering for another week."

"That sounds like an intense week," Alex said. He enjoyed the view of the ocean he hadn't seen in a long time and watched as the island arrived and went away on his journey.

After 2 hours, the ship arrived at a small, but densely populated city in the middle of nowhere in the ocean. The island was surprisingly tiny, with only a small forest at the center, and a few scattered buildings around the side that made it look like it had human influence.

That and the tens of thousands of people that gathered in and around the island.

The ship landed outside the shore of the island, and everyone had to float away from there.

"Yingkong, take care of His Majesty," the Queen said. "I will go make the final preparation."

The younger brother of the Queen nodded and showed Alex the way to a building in the distance, that seemed particularly larger than many that were surrounding it.

The two of them flashed past many people. Most of them were ordinary cultivators, but Alex noticed quite a few of the military individuals as well.

He couldn't help if they were part of the Body Legion or the Tail Legion.

When he landed at the large building, Alex was surprised to see many figures that he hadn't seen for a long time.

"Your Majesty!" Jin Xiaojian, the Emerald King spoke out loud with a boisterous laugh. "Haha! I'm so happy to see you again."

"King Jin," Alex said with a wide smile. "It has been a while, hasn't it?"

"A decade, Your Majesty," the man said. "You just don't come to the Emerald Kingdom anymore."

"I'm sorry. I haven't had the time," Alex said. "I will try to visit when I have the time."

"Greetings, Your Majesty," the Queen of the Ivory region bowed a little.

"It is great to see you after a decade, Your Majesty," the new Gold King spoke as well.

Aside from them, there was another individual there. One that Alex hadn't seen since the first time he had met them all.

The black-robed King of the Ebony Kingdom, Wan Deming. He bowed deeply and greeted Alex.

"I am happy to meet you again, King Alex."

Chapter 1575 Bets

"I heard you received our sect's treasure, Your Majesty," the Ebony King said. "I hope you'll take good care of it."

"Ah! Right, the Mountain Crushing artifact," Alex remembered. "You were from the Mountain Crushing sect."

"We all belonged to some sect or family," the Emerald King said. "It's not that surprising, Your Majesty."

"How were my pills, King Jin?" Alex asked.

"Hahaha!" the Emerald King laughed loudly. "As expected of Your Majesty. They were incredible."

Alex smiled.

"Wait, pill?" the Ivory Queen looked at Alex. "Your Majesty, I received no pills."

"They were in exchange for me lending money during the previous golden auction," the Emerald King said.

"Ah! That's not fair," the Ivory Queen said. "I didn't even get to make it there."

"I heard your pills were quite amazing, Your Majesty," the Ebony King said. "I regretted missing the auction. Are you still selling some?"

"I am selling a new one in the Golden Auction this time around. I'll let you learn what it is on your own," he said.

"Hmm, I suppose I can't miss it this time then," the Ebony King said. He turned to look in the direction of the Gold King. "Are your people handling things well for the auction?"

"I might be new to the task, King Wan, but I assure you I am making no mistake," the Gold King said. At the start, he had felt out of place in between these old monarchs, but as time passed, he was settling in fine.

"Oh, my intention wasn't to doubt your work," the Ebony King quickly said. "I was just inquiring. If you need some help, let us know."

"I am doing fine, but thank you for your consideration," the Gold King said.

As they talked, the Crown Prince arrived as well.

"Your Highness!"

Everyone stood to bow at one.

"Ah, greetings Your Majesties," the Crown Prince bowed a little. "It seems most of you are already here. Has my cousin not made it here yet?"

"King Weiyuan should be arriving at any time," the Emerald King answered.

"Shouldn't Queen Mao be here at least?" he asked.

"She has to make some final preparations before the secret realm opens up," the Ivory Queen said. "Did you arrive with youngsters from the legions, Your Majesty?"

"Yes," the Crown Prince said. "When did you arrive, Your Majesty."

"It's been about half an hour," Alex said. "They have been here long before me."

"We weren't that much earlier either," the Emerald King said.

"Since Your Majesty is going to enter, I guess you'll miss out on the auction," the Crown Prince said

"My elders will be there, but I will have to miss out on it," Alex said.

"I hope you good luck on the Martial ground then. You can't come out before the 2 years is over," the Crown Prince said.

"If I can help it, I won't," Alex said with a smile. "I have a bet going on with Queen Mao for how long I can last. I intend to last forever."

The Kings gave a surprise look at Alex.

"Ooh, a bet," the Ivory Queen said with a clap. "We should make a bet too."

"What… is on the line?" the Emerald King inquired with Alex.

"I give a lesson on alchemy to the kingdom's alchemists if I lose," Alex said. "If I win, I get 100 thousand Saint Spirit stones."

They all suddenly fell to thought. The amount was quite massive for a simple bet, but with the high risk came a high reward.

"I will make the bet," the Gold King said first. He had enough money to spare. "I will say—"New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex raised his hands to stop him. "I am all in for a good bet, but you should wait for a bit before you hear more details."

Everyone looked at him curiously. What could the detail even be?

The Azure King arrived some time later and the Silver Queen arrived afterward as well. Once they were all there, the Silver Queen revealed the information that Alex had asked her to broadcast.

The betting became harder at that point.

"I won't make a bet," the Ebony King said quickly. The time frame of how long Alex could last was brought down severely with this one piece of information, and that caused everyone's bet to become similar.

As such, he would have to risk a bit too much for nothing.

The Gold King still wanted to bet. "I'll bet a 100 days. 10 more than the Queen Mao," he said. "I believe King Alex can last that long."

The Silver Queen joined in. "I don't want to go lower, so I'll say 5 months instead. Just last 100 days, Your Majesty. You'll be 100 thousand spirit stones richer."

Alex smiled. "I will accept both of those bets," he said.

"200 days," the Emerald King said. "I trust you can last that long even with so many after you."

Alex thought for a bit. He could refuse the bet if he thought it was too much in the King's favor.

"I'll accept it as well," he said. He didn't find it too bad at all. He knew he was going to be weakening himself to train his sword alone, so it was hard to say how long he could last.

It was all a legitimate bet on his part as well.

"180 days," the Ivory Queen said.

"Bet!" Alex said.

"Will you accept 300 days?" the Azure King asked.

Alex thought for a bit. "That's… a little hard to bet on," he said.

"I'll up the spirit stones to 150 thousand," the man said.

Alex's eyes shined. "That's more like it," he said. "That's a deal."

The Crown prince threw his hands up. "I'm not making any bets."

Alex shrugged. "That's alright," he said.

The Silver Queen stood up. "It is time," she said.

The room suddenly quieted down and everyone stood up. It was time to open the secret realm.

The kings left the building and said goodbye to Alex as they all made their way to the various entry points to the secret realm that was assigned to their kingdom.

The tens of thousands of people who had come to the secret realms also waited outside the secret realm in mass. Many flew in the air as there wasn't much place on the land itself.

Alex went along with the Queen's brother and stood on the section for the Silver Kingdom's entrance. The Queen handed him a piece of thick talisman paper.

"You will be the only one of your group, so take care of yourself inside, Your Majesty," she said before leaving.

Alex looked at her fly away. "She didn't explain to me what this is," he said with a bit of a chuckle.

"It's the talisman that keeps score for you inside the secret realm," the brother explained. "You can look inside."

Alex nodded and looked inside the talisman to find a few information.

There were 5 lines of information stored in the talisman.

Name, Acquired Points, Losses, Out of Bounds, and Origin.

His name was set as King Alex, and the next 3 sections were all set as 0 for now.

Alex looked at the Origin and finally understood what the Queen meant by him being the only one in his group.

His Origin was set as 'Southern Continent'.

Chapter 1576 Information

The Silver Queen explained how things worked in and out of the Transcendent Martial Ground.

The Martial Ground was a competitive place where cultivators fought each other, and used a point system to get ahead of others.

Every day inside the secret realm, one could challenge someone else to a duel, which the challenged person could accept or reject, depending on how many times they were challenged.

Accepting a challenge began a duel between the two that no one else could interfere in. The one who won the duel was awarded points based on the cultivation base of the individual they defeated.

Saint Condensation realm cultivators gave between 1 and 9 points.

Saint Foundation realm cultivators gave between 11 and 19 points.

Saint Core realm cultivators gave between 21 and 29 points.

Saint Soul realm cultivators gave between 31 and 39 points.

Saint Transformation realm cultivators gave between 41 and 49 points.

If anyone interfered in another person's duel, they would lose 50 points at once, and the fight between the other two would be considered a draw with neither gaining points.

One could challenge up to 3 times a day for points alone, and any points they won would be added to the 'Acquired Points' section on their talisman.

The second section was 'Losses', and it was what would count as the result of one's duel. If the cultivator won, there would be no change, but if they lost, a single point would be added to it.

The first battle of the day that someone accepted was always considered to be what determined whether the point was added to 'Losses' or not.

Even if one won their first battle of the day, but lost the next 10 in a row, it wouldn't matter. There would be no points added to the Losses section.

A person could only reject upto 3 duels a day, and if they fought no battle by the end of it, they would receive a loss as well.

Even if they weren't being challenged, they were required to go out and challenge others, or else they would receive a loss.

30 Losses in total meant a complete loss for the person. After 30 losses, they were sent out of the Secret realm and could no longer return.

A Loss in the duel was considered when one of the people gave up, or when they were unable to return to battle after some time. However, if they were attacked too harshly, a defensive measure inside the talisman would activate, sending the person in a random direction away from the Duel.

That would cause a person to receive a loss as well as a point in the third category, Out of Bounds.

Once one went outside a certain range during a duel, either by the talisman, or some defensive techniques, or was even sent flying by the enemy, they would be out of bounds of the set dueling area and would thus receive a point to Out of Bounds as well as a Loss.

5 Out of Bounds in total caused the person to lose overall. It was the same as getting 30 Losses.

All of this was made so people would stand their ground and fight others in a duel. The Transcendent Martial Ground was focused on helping people grow as a fighter, so these rules were set in place for a long ago, refined over time.

The Queen went on to explain a few more things regarding how the points system worked, how one could find opponents, and how everyone outside could view their data publicly.

The ones with the top numbers would be shown on a ranking board as well, so if people wanted to impress someone, they would have to make it there.

"The final rankings that appear on the board will be considered for direct seeding in the Continental Tournament, depending on the age limit of 2000 years. So, do your best." the Silver Queen's voice roared through the sky for everyone to hear.

Everyone looked nervous and excited at the same time.

Alex couldn't see all that many people, but there were a few strong ones that he couldn't recognize at all. One of those was even a woman in the Saint Transformation realm, which was very surprising for Alex.

He hadn't expected someone so old to take part. But then again, age meant little for cultivators. He focused on the gate that would open up soon for them to enter, but there was one more thing for the Queen to announce.

"One last thing," the Queen spoke. "This has nothing to do with the Transcendent Martial Ground itself, but we believe you will want to know this."

"The King of the Southern Continent, his Majesty Alex Benton will be taking part, and he has asked me to pass along a message to every single person entering the secret realm," she said.

The crowd whispered with each other and gossiped while Yingkong looked at Alex curiously. He wondered what message he was passing along.

"Whoever wins a match against his Majesty, even if he rejects the match, he will hand over one of these 5 pills to the person," the Queen said.

"A pill for improving your cultivation speed, a pill for healing, a pill for surviving poisons, a pill to improve your spiritual energy, and a pill of temporarily empowering your current cultivation base," she said.

She paused for a moment for the ones below to go over the things. They all were quite shocked at the information and talked amongst themselves.

"For your information, King Alex is a cultivator that his Majesty the Emperor acknowledges as his superior, and you will never find a single person in life or in history that can make a pill better than him."

"Win against King Alex, and you can ask him for one of the 5 pills."

She let the information run through the crowd.

Yingkong quickly turned toward Alex. "Your Majesty, this is absurd. They will hound you like animals. They will all seek you out as soon as we enter."

"That's alright with me," Alex said. "There's a reason I made your sister say all those things."

He looked around at the people who were eyeing him back. They were all looking at him like hungry dogs who had finally found something to eat.

Alex had just become target number 1 inside the secret realm and he couldn't wait for the pressure to forge him in there. 'It will be interesting to see how long I can survive on the sword alone,' he thought.

He had no doubts he would lose most of those matches to a certain degree.

"Now that you have learned this, get ready," the Silver Queen said, catching everyone's attention. "The secret realm is opening."

The entrance that was a large arch shined a silver bright with a swirling aura on it. Experienced fights entered one by one, and everyone moved to it as well.

Alex could sense the teleportation aura on it and knew what would happen next. He stepped onto the swirling energy and a bunch of teleportation aura caught around him.

"See you later, Your Majesty," Yingkong said and disappeared before Alex.

A second later, Alex was teleported as well, into the Transcendent Martial Ground.

Chapter 1577 Transcendent Martial Ground

When the teleportation energy disappeared and the white light mellowed out, Alex found himself standing alone on top of a giant rock.

In front of him was a vast expanse of sparse trees that went on forever. The place he was on itself was filled with thigh-high grass, that Alex stepped on as he stepped down from the rock.

To his right was a grassland that extended forever, and to his left was the same. There were a lot of rocks along the way, and not a single section of the land he saw seemed even at all.

Everything looked so uneven.

He saw glints of light in the distance as people started appearing far away from him. There was only so much land for so many tens of thousands of people to teleport to without coming across someone else.

"Every one of us has been teleported randomly, huh?" he thought, looking around. He turned around when he felt someone's spiritual sense pass through.

Behind him was a woman in a gray robe, with her hair tied in a ponytail. The moment she saw him, she pulled out a spear, holding it out in front of her with a deep look on her face.

She looked at Alex for a long second before speaking. "You are the King, right?" she asked in a rather roguish tone.

Alex looked at her carefully, seeing no jewelry or expensive artifacts around her. She was what he thought she was. A rogue cultivator who was trying her best.

"I am the king you're thinking of," Alex told her. "That thing they said outside, is it true?" she asked. "A pill for beating you in a fight."

"That is true," Alex said. "Are you sure you want to fight me though? You won't win and you will only acquire a loss instead. This isn't a fair fight for you."

The girl's cultivation base was only at Saint Foundation's 2nd realm.

"Shut up! When has anything been fair," she said. "If I win, I want a healing pill. King of Southern Continent, do you accept my challenge?"

Alex felt a slight buzz on the talisman that he had kept inside his robes. They knew that a challenge had been thrown at him, and it was his job to accept or reject. "Very well," Alex said, taking in all of his Qi so none of it remained on him anymore. "I accept."

The buzz from his talisman disappeared. The fight was determined. The girl was a little surprised to see Alex taking back all of his Qi for some reason, but the reason didn't matter to her. Only victory did.

She rushed with her spear the moment she understood that Alex had accepted her challenge to a duel. She only got halfway in between them before she used an attack.

A large burst of light flew out from the spear, that nearly grazed Alex's neck as he leaned to one side.

He was about to strike back to end it all in a single attack when he stopped himself and thought for a moment. The pause gave the girl time to attack once again, and this time around Alex saw the slight white light around the girl's spear.

'Spear Qi?' he thought. 'Not fully formed.'

Alex took one step back and struck the side of the spear, pointing the energy away from him, which blasted into the sky. He dashed over 10 meters backward after that and let the girl have a moment to get back to her stance.

The girl took no time to do so and immediately returned to attack. However, this time around, there stood a large black cat in front of her.

The girl paused at the last second, before moving backward herself.

"What's this?" she asked.

"My beast," Alex said, petting Pearl's black fur. He crouched on one knee and said something to Pearl, before looking away from the fight to look around at various other things.

He could feel the aura in the air fluctuate every second as numerous duels broke out all around the secret realm. People hadn't even finished coming into the secret realm and so many were about to get handed their first loss.

29 more and they would lose.

In a way, Alex was lucky that this weak girl had been his first opponent of the day. As he had accepted the battle, winning it would mean that his duel of the day where he could gain a 'loss' was gone. For the next however many hours it took for the duel to reset, he would not get a single loss even if he lost every single one of the next battles.

And from what he could see, he was going to have to fight many of them.

People from all around him who had noticed him had started streaming toward him. Even kilometers away, people were making their way to Alex. Win or lose, they did not care. Everyone just wanted a piece of the pie that was him.

Pearl's cultivation base was low, especially when considering the average cultivation base of the ones that came to this place was in the mid to high Saint Core realm.

At Saint Foundation 8th realm, which he had only just reached 2 months prior, he was considered weaker than most. Still, that was higher than the girl he was currently fighting.

That just went to show just how out of place the girl was.

He brought out Whisker and placed him on his shoulder. "Do you want to fight her? She's only just a little stronger than you," he said.

The little mouse quickly shook his head, frantically refusing to fight at all. Alex just chuckled a little in response. He sat on the grass and watched Pearl fight as people closed in on him.

The girl tried her best to get around Pearl, to use her spear to damage him in any way, but it became quickly apparent to her that she wasn't gonna win. Pearl was just too strong for her.

Just as she was thinking of what to do, Pearl stopped and stepped away from her, giving her some space. At the same time, the girl felt something appear around her stomach. She reached inside and at the same time, Alex's voice entered her head.

"I admire your courage, but it was stupid to fight me from the start," his voice rang in her head. "Those are some healing pills that I do not need. Give up and take them. You will want to leave this place very soon."

The girl clutched the thing in her robe and realized that it was a pill bottle. Her spiritual sense looked into it and noticed a bunch of pills. Since she had never seen pills Alex made, she didn't understand the distinct lack of pill veins the pills had.

All pills were pills for the girl, and these were the best she had ever received.

She looked up at him, unsure of what to say. She should have been thanking him, but something else came out of her first.

"Why?" she asked.

Alex shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "I guess I felt bad for you. Life hasn't been easy for you clearly, so I would like to make it a bit better if I can."

The girl's eyes widened a little. For the first time in a long time, she felt seen. Someone could see that she had been working hard. "Thank you," she finally said. "I will never forget this."

Alex simply smiled. "You should get away now," he said, looking around at the people who had stopped to watch the two of them.

Pearl was ready to fight too. The girl's hand clutched around her pills. She couldn't let anyone else get it, so she turned around and ran away, going up the mountain.

Alex felt his talisman buzz a little and he brought it out. Looking at it, he had received 12 points. And since he had won the first match of the day, he had no reason to worry about losses.

Pearl got excited as well. It had been a while since he had got the chance to fight to the best of his capability.

Alex saw a green glint from his right side, as someone rushed toward Alex faster than anyone else. "Your Majesty! I, Kang Bouxian of the Hidden Cloud sect, challenge you to a duel," the man shouted.

A few more people arrived, but everyone regretted being after the man. They feared that after one fight, they wouldn't get the chance to ask him for another fight.

Alex saw the people's disappointment and spoke up. "Please wait around, or maybe consider dueling amongst yourselves. I will get to everyone when I can."

Midnight flew out from his storage ring and he held it in front of him. The man who had challenged him had a cultivation base of Saint Core's 7th realm. That was just the right cultivation base he wanted from someone to start training his sword. As Sword Intent filled his sword, he looked at the man who had already prepared a saber of his own.

People moved away from the fight, giving space for Alex and his opponent to battle. At the same time, many started finding their opponents to duel with.

Alex took a deep breath and spoke. "I accept."

The moment those words left his mouth, the man showed off his own Saber Intent, giving a white outline to his saber. Then he began attacking.

Chapter 1578 Battles

Sabers were single-edged swords, usually curved, and not as heavy. As such, they forced the fighters to develop an entirely different fighting style than if they were to fight with swords.

Alex wasn't used to fighting against Sabers given how rare they were. So, he wanted to use the opportunity to see what it was like.

A fiery saber strike flew toward him like a crescent blade, the power of Saber intent within it.

Alex was restricting himself to use only Sword Intent, as such he couldn't send out a Sword slash of his own and had to directly strike down the incoming attack instead. On impact, the saber slash exploded in front of Alex, fortunately doing nothing to him. His body was just too strong to be damaged.

The man in front of him looked surprised and didn't immediately send out another hit. He was wary. Since he couldn't sense Alex's cultivation base, he had no way of telling just how strong he was. As such, he had to test him before deciding on how to approach this fight.

Alex had only one thought at the moment aside from learning how to fight against Sabers. Improve Sword Intent.

It was something he had learned a long time ago and realized once again only just recently.

Long ago, he had created Sword Qi which acted as if they were Sword Aura. That had been due to him not understanding how they worked, and how he had skipped through the levels due to a wrong piece of advice.

It was only later he had learned how to do it correctly. To create sword Intent, one had to train with the sword to a stage where they could channel their Intent through the sword.

To create Sword Qi, one had to improve Sword Intent to a sufficient level.

To create Sword Aura, one had to improve their Sword Qi, which in turn meant one had to improve their Sword Intent all that more.

So, if Alex could improve Sword Intent to a higher degree, then use that to improve his Sword Qi, and then use that to improve his Sword Aura… Wouldn't he reach the next stage with this sword?

Alex shook his head, shaking away the thoughts. 'Don't set expectations. They only lead to disappointment,' he thought to himself and focused back on the battle at hand.

The man with the saber attacked back, sending out a fiery serpent this time around. Alex struck the serpent, destroying it. And then he did nothing again.

"That's not very fun," he spoke softly. If he was to just use Sword Intent, he could only use it when attacking directly or when channeling it through another Qi-based Sword attack. If he wanted to use just Sword Intent, he would need to use Sword Qi, which he didn't want to use as he was focusing on just Sword Intent.

"It seems I will need your help, Pearl," Alex said with a smile. Pearl nodded and rushed forward, attacking the man. The man saw him coming and struck at him, but Alex appeared in between, blocking the attack, and allowing Pearl to land the hit.

He managed to hit the man squarely in the chest, but as he used no Qi, only his physical strength was what hit him. That didn't hurt the man, but that was what Alex wanted.

There was no point in ending the fight too quickly.

The man swung his saber, sending out another attack, and Alex stepped in again, blocking it. Pearl took the opportunity to attack again.

Back and forth, the duo attacked and defended as they saw fit. The man they fought was completely overwhelmed by the two of them, surprised by how ineffective his attacks were becoming.

Not a single attack he made, no matter how large or wide, never hit the beast he wanted to hit. Alex would always come in at the last second and defend him.

The man despaired, and after a few minutes of fighting, he couldn't go on for much longer. "I give up!" he shouted.

Pearl stopped and Alex appeared in front of him. Before he could even say anything, he felt his talisman buzz softly inside his robes.

Checking it, Alex saw that he had now received another 26 points. 'Huh? That's not bad,' he thought. Since there was no way of losing points unless you interfered in someone else's duel or rejected a duel proposed by someone else, Alex believed he would never lose any points.

This method of point systems not only discouraged one from rejecting a duel, it also encouraged one to go out looking for new ones.

Alex heard many people shout out their challenge to him at once, and his talisman buzzed again. He brought it out to check who it was and noticed one man who raised his talisman happily.

"My challenge went through!" he shouted out loud. The others could only move back in disappointment.

Alex looked at the man and his cultivation base of Saint Soul's 1st realm. It would be a slightly challenging fight, but he doubted he would lose.

The fight began and they went on for a while. The man was strong, his power exceeding the Saint Soul 1st realm that Alex sensed he had. However, due to how strong Alex's body cultivation was, he could match that strength just barely.

Pearl fought as well, using both Qi and body this time around as even both of them would not hurt the man at all. The man fought to the best of his ability, and multiple times he could find himself getting close catching Alex off guard when he wasn't ready to defend himself. But somehow Alex kept not taking any damage.

On the contrary, Pearl found almost no openings to attack this man. He was only in the Saint Foundation realm, and the man he was up against was in the Saint Soul realm. The difference was too big for him to keep up. As the fight went on, it devolved into being just Alex defending against the man with little place for Pearl to step in, and so he just stayed out of it entirely.

It was apparent it was going to take him weeks if not months to improve even the tiniest amount. He just had to keep on doing the same thing until he was satisfied.

The fight lasted for 15 more minutes, with Alex keeping the fight going on for as long as he could.

His opponent quickly realized that didn't have a chance at winning at all. No matter how much he fought, the fight was never going to end. Alex was going to continue using him to train himself.

The man realized he wasn't going to get anywhere with this fight. In the end, he was forced to give up.

Alex was surprised when the match ended. He only realized it was over because his talisman buzzed and he gained 31 points. "Oh, thanks for fighting with me," he said with a smile.

The man looked pained at the fact that he had to go on for such a long time just to lose. He nodded toward Alex and walked away.

Alex turned around, looking for someone to instantly ask him for a duel when he realized that he wasn't being challenged. He wondered if they were distracted by something else at first, but a moment later he understood what was up.

They were hesitant.

There weren't many around him by that point. Just 7 or so, and each of their cultivation base was lower than the man he had just fought. It wouldn't be easy to get them to fight.

Alex looked at a girl with a cultivation base of Saint Core 5th realm. He pointed to the girl. "Do you want to fight me?" he asked. To his surprise, the mere act of asking her made the talisman buzz. 'I didn't challenge,' Alex thought, but there was nothing to do. 'I guess I'll have to be careful then.'

He sighed and looked a the girl who seemed surprised by her own talisman buzzing.

The girl looked around at first, confused, then was a little scared. "Umm… I don't think I can win," she said.

"If you can defeat him, I will count that as winning too," Alex said, gesturing to Pearl as he spoke.

The girl looked at Pearl and then back. "Umm…" she gulped. "You won't interfere?"

"If I do, even if I win, I will give you the pill," Alex said.

The numerous people got excited and some even thought of sneaking in to challenge before the girl got to, but didn't.

The girl contemplated on the offer, checking Pearl to see how strong he was, and remembered how he had to step aside when the real battle had taken place earlier.

She saw no reason to refuse.

"I'll do it," she said.

The challenge was accepted.

Alex stepped aside, letting Pearl be the one who fought. Coming to this secret realm hadn't just been for him, but also for Pearl. He had to let Pearl fight his fill. He needed that at least to grow.

It had been a while since the both of them had the chance to train like this. Alex understood that towards the start, it would only be the weaker ones that would challenge him, and later once the weaker ones left, he would get to fight the stronger ones.

As such, it was okay for him to give Pearl the chance to fight right now.

Alex just sat by the grass and watched as the fight went on.

Chapter 1579 Loss

Of the next 5 battles that Alex let Pearl fight, only one person manages to give Pearl enough trouble that he has to take the loss. The person who did so was a girl, who Alex had a suspicion was in fact a player.

The movement skill she used was something even better than anything Alex had. Not that Alex would've had trouble catching her if he had to.

He gave the girl a pill of her choice and decided to let Pearl have a breather. He had been fighting for the past hour straight, so he needed that.

"I'll be the one that fights next, so come at me accordingly," he said to the group.

A few more people had come to him during the time Pearl fought and the group had increased again. Newer folks were more than happy to fight him, not knowing just how strong he was.

So they did.

Half an hour and 5 matches later, Alex won a total of 112 more points. It quickly became apparent to him that keeping track of the points was not going to matter much under the circumstances he had put himself in.

Instead of having to go out looking for points, people came to him to hand it to him.

"Who next?" he asked, looking at the surrounding group that hesitated a lot now. They had seen the sort of fights he won. Even Saint Soul's 2nd realm hadn't been a problem to him.

Alex was a little surprised to see a lack of answers. "No one?" he asked.

Just then, someone flew from far away, arriving at their location with a little grace. He slammed onto the ground, creating a bit of a crater, before walking out of it.

"Haha, greetings Your Majesty." The man bowed a little in respect. "I hope I haven't been late."

"There is no early or late here," Alex said.

The man wore a black robe with azure linings on the inside and had his hair in a ponytail, tied high above him. His face was somewhat handsome, but what people noticed even before that was his muscular build.

Alex was slightly curious as to who the man was. With Saint Soul's 6th realm cultivation, he was clearly no joke.

"Ah, great!" he shouted. "My name is Teng Roukang, and I am the heir of the great Teng family. Certainly, Your Majesty has heard of our family."

Alex nodded. "I have," he said. He had heard of the Teng family of the Emerald Kingdom, but it wasn't to the same degree as the young man might have hoped.

Still, the young man gave a wide grin, knowing that he had been recognized in a way.

"Of course," he said. "Then would it be alright if I request you to a duel?"

Alex said nothing, letting the question linger in his mind for a bit. He saw a problem with accepting the next fight. He would lose.

Losing by itself didn't worry Alex. It wasn't like he was going to lose points or get a Loss. He didn't even care that he would have to give out pills. The problem here was that his loss would be a quick one.

With how strong the man in front of him was, there was little doubt in his mind that he would get anything out of that fight.

'No, I can't judge which fights I can fight and which fights I can't,' he thought to himself. 'I'm here to train. Losing is a part of training, even if I get nothing.'

In the end, Alex nodded.

"I accept your challenge," he said.

The man opposite him smiled and brought out a metal staff with no sharp edges to it. "Let's have a good one, Your Majesty."

Alex said nothing and coated his sword with his Sword Intent, outlining it in bright white. His opponent did the same, coating his in Staff Intent, something Alex had known existed, but had never seen before.

The battle started with the man throwing a casual strike at Alex, which Alex dodged easily by striking it to the side. He dashed in, holding nothing back in sword and body, and struck at the man.

The man swung his staff, striking aside Alex's sword, and was surprised to find it quite tougher than he thought. He was still not aware of what Alex's cultivation base was, but he remembered his father's words, mentioning that the King of the Southern Continent wasn't particularly strong, and was simply gifted in Alchemy.

'Just gifted in Alchemy, huh?' the man thought, striking toward Alex. Alex blocked the staff with his sword and was sent flying back. 'He's quite gifted in fighting too.'

Alex rolled on the uneven ground, stopping only when he crashed into a rock, breaking it completely. He walked off the rubble before anyone had the chance to even think he was injured.

'He's talented, but still quite weak,' the man thought. 'He's a player, so he will catch up to me sooner or later. Good thing it's not now.'

He charged forward, sending a flurry of staff lunges at Alex who had to struggle to defend himself. Alex managed to stop about 70% of those attacks, the remaining 30% hitting him at different parts of his body, fortunately, nothing vital.

There were no wounds —if there were, they were healed-but the pain remained. It hurt quite a damn lot. Alex grunted.

"I must say, you're quite the tough one, Your Majesty," the man said, seemingly having stopped himself from attacking white Alex was in pain.

Alex looked at him. "You're not using your skills, why?" he asked.

The man shrugged. "Because you aren't using any," he said. "I thought to keep it fair."

Alex raised an eyebrow. "Fair, huh?" he asked with a chuckle in his voice. "I will have to thank you for your fairness then. It seems I will last a little longer because of that."

"Are you ready to continue, Your Majesty?" the man asked.

Alex took a deep breath and answered with an attack.

The battle between the two continued for 2 more minutes, during which the man managed to attack Alex in 18 different spots across his body. If the staff had been a spear instead, Alex's body would've been dead by now.

'Still, no broken bones? Are his bones extra tough or what?' the man wondered. He could tell he was hurting Alex, but it didn't reflect in his wounds at all.

That was enough battle. He decided to end it here.

He struck Alex's sword to the side and used the rebound energy to strike him across his left arm. He could hear a satisfying crunch before he sent Alex flying over a hundred meters away.

His talisman buzzed and he won.

Alex didn't go any further than a hundred meters thanks to the mountain's side he was slammed into. His talisman buzzed and he lost, but thankfully the distance wasn't too high for it to be an Out of Bounds loss. That would've been a bad one.

"Urgh!" he grunted in pain and waited as his bones restructured themselves, his wounds healing by the second.

He dragged himself out of the rubble, and then he saw the man land in front of him.

Chapter 1580 Some Free Time

"Your Majesty, are you alright?" the man asked, seemingly worried about Alex. His eyes flashed briefly with surprise at the lack of wounds. And where was the broken left arm?

'Did he already eat a pill?' he wondered.

Alex still had blood all over himself, staining his skin and his clothes. He could send it back inside if he wanted to, but his body had already created the amount of blood he had lost.

"Please forgive me, Your Majesty. I didn't hold myself back at the end there," the man said. Alex could hear panic in his voice, but when looking at his face, he didn't seem as panicked.

'Is he faking it?' he thought. Not that it mattered to him.

"Stop," Alex said. "Your name was Teng Roukang, right?"

"Yes, Your Majesty," the man said.

"Alright then, Roukang. You've won against me, and as promised, I will give you a pill. Which one do you want?" he asked.

The man thought for a bit. "Can I get the one that helps you learn a Dao?" he asked.

Alex's face changed slightly. "I will only give from the 5 pills I promised."

"I see," the man said. "Then… I will take the Cultivation improving pill."

Alex nodded. "Do you have a bottle?"

"Yes."

The man excitedly took the pill Alex handed to him and watched in widejawed awe at the marvelous pill veins he had heard so much about.

"5 veins… is that good or bad?" the man asked Alex.

"It's better than average," Alex told him. "That should increase your cultivation base to… somewhere in the early Saint Soul 8th realm after you eat that. It should last about 3 hours, but I should warn you that you will harm your meridians quite a bit after eating this. You won't be able to cultivate for a week or so."

"I see," the man said. "Thank you, Your Majesty."

Alex nodded. "Thanks for the battle," he said.

"Haha!" the man laughed. "Don't thank me just yet, your Majesty. Our battle hasn't ended yet."

"Hmm?" Alex looked up at him in surprise.

"I challenge you to a duel once again, Your Majesty!" he shouted excitedly, a wide grin on his face.

And then his grin vanished. "Hmm? Why isn't it working?" he asked, bringing out his talisman. He looked at the talisman, confused. He had gotten his points, so the match should have been over. So why wasn't the next one starting?

"Oh right?" he smacked his face with his palm. "I got a little too excited. Haha! I forgot you can't challenge someone to a match again until the next day if you are the winner."

Then, he turned toward Alex. "Your Majesty. You should challenge me," he said.

Alex shook his head. "I already lost to you. There is no merit for me to fight you again right away. I'll fight you once I've improved a little more."

The man looked at Alex for a few long seconds before nodding his head. "If that is so, then it shall be so," he said, turning around. "See you tomorrow, Your Majesty."

Then he flew away.

Alex watched the man fly away, a weird feeling emerging in his heart. He wanted to beat him up for some reason, but he needed to focus on training more. 'He's a good fighter and arrogant. He won't immediately beat me. He's a good training partner for him.'

He just had to ignore the person behind the staff.

Alex looked at his palm, clenching it a little. He could still feel the vibrations from the staff each time it struck Midnight.

"So flexible," he thought. He understood the advantages of a staff after the fight. Every part of the staff was a weapon. Unlike a sword, where one had to align the edge with the target, one could just slam the sword in any and all directions.

Even reverse.

"Still, the lack the sharp edges dulls the impact a lot," he thought. "That was a good experience."

He looked down at the people who were hesitant to close on toward him. He decided to go to them.

Everyone seemed somewhat surprised to see him completely fine. They too assumed it was because of his pills. "Your Majesty, are you alright?" someone asked.

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"I'm fine," Alex said as he snapped his finger, getting rid of all the blood and dirt on himself with ease, returning himself to his pristine condition. "My apologies. We can continue now."

3 more people fought Alex, but all of them lost. After that, no one challenged Alex and he was finally free to leave.

"Finally, some freedom," he thought, walking through the uneven land, making his way to… anywhere. He didn't care. People would find him anyway.

His freedom wouldn't last for long, he knew that. He just needed some time to unwind from the countless battles before the next one came.

Night fell, but the earth still rumbled from the many fights that happened around the island. With how strong his spiritual sense was, he could most likely see the entirety of this island where the Transcendent Marital Ground was set.

He had heard that the island was massive, but he had doubts as to just how massive it was. Could it be larger than the 300-kilometer diameter his spiritual sense could cover?

'No need to alert the strong ones to my location just yet,' he thought and continued.

Unbeknownst to him, his name and skill level were being spread through the secret realm, mostly between friends for now. They were also letting the others know his location, in return for some favors.

Alex's information was becoming a currency that he could never expect it to become.

'He's still following me?' Alex thought, sensing Teng Roukang's senses on him. 'How many pills before he leaves?'

He sensed a few more people coming toward him, some of them people that he recognized from before, some he had never seen before.

Pearl appeared in a flash of light.

"It's time for more, Pearl."

Chapter 1581 Reset

Alex accepted every battle for the next 12 hours, half of them fought by Pearl, and half of them fought by him. In some cases, when someone was too strong for Pearl, but too weak for him, they fought together against that person.

As such, out of nearly 35 different battles they fought through the night, they only lost 3 times in total. Once Alex gave them their pills, they left.

He finally got another breathing period after those battles and got to take a break. He had found out that his location had been spread through the secret realm, so many more would be coming to where he was very soon.

Not to mention that Teng Roukang was still following him while challenging people along the way.

The sun had already risen and was making its up the sky, slowly reaching noon. Around that time, Alex came across a rather large river on a depressed land. There was no flow to the river from what he could tell, and he could see a few beasts flow through it.

"Hmm? Aren't those sea creature?" Alex thought when he saw one of those beasts come to the surface for a few seconds. Curious, he made his way down to the river. As he came close, he could smell the salty air around him, and tasting the water only confirmed his suspicions.

"Oh, it's ocean water," he thought. Now that he thought about it, there was a river that went through the island. "This must be the same river"

Thinking a bit more, he remembered seeing the river go through the middle of the island, or close to it. "Then… I must be around the middle areas of the island."New n0vel chapters are published on

Just then, his talisman buzzed.

Alex looked around, confused at what had just happened. "Huh?" No one had challenged him. So, he took his talisman out to check.

"Oh!"

Reading through it, he understood what had happened.

"It hit reset, huh?" he thought. The talisman had reset, not just for him, but for everyone. A new day had started, which meant a new day of Challenges and a new day of Losses.

'But it hasn't been 24 hours,' Alex thought. It had only been around 20 hours according to his Voidsand Hourglass that he could see in his Soul Space.

"It's noon, so they must have synced the reset with it," Alex thought. "Will the next one be in 24 hours? Or will that be in 20 hours as well?"

"Your Majesty!"

Alex turned around, hearing someone shout for him. Teng Roukang made his way down the slope toward him, stopping only moments before him.

"Hahaha, Your Majesty! We can fight now!" he shouted.

Alex felt his talisman buzz and immediately he hated it. "Couldn't you have come a little later?" he asked. "Now I'm going to have to get allocated a Loss."

"Oh," the man looked at him sheepishly, scratching his head. "We can fight now though, right?"

Alex sighed and brought out his sword. The man grinned as well and brought out his staff. Both of their talismans buzzed as Alex accepted the challenge.

The man rushed at Alex first, stabbing Alex with the butt of the staff. Alex swung Midnight, sending the staff aside. Light flashed as both Sword Intent and Staff Intent clashed.

He made a swiping attack, targeting Alex's feet. Having watched so much of Alex's fight, he had concluded that Alex wouldn't fly for some reason. He didn't know why, but he would use it to his advantage.

Alex flipped back in time, but that was what the man wanted. The moment Alex was still in the air, he ran forward, extending his hand which held the end of the staff, and dropped the other end deep into Alex's stomach.

Alex managed to place his arm in between at the last moment and the attack only fractured his wrist. He landed rather ungracefully and rolled a few times before coming to a stop.

The man was about to continue when suddenly the river exploded with water and a large crab jumped out of it, its claws grasping for Teng Roukang.

The crab was only in the Saint Soul 2nd realm, so it was nowhere near strong enough for the man, but still, it dared to attack him.

The man jumped backward in time and dodged the claws right in time. "Stay out of this, bastard!" the man shouted at the crab, hoping to deter it, only to have to frown.

"Dammit! It can't understand me," the man shouted and attacked the crab.

Alex flicked his wrist a few times to make sure it was healed. The pain still remained, but he endured it and looked at the fight in front of him.

The Crab was a large red crab with spindly legs like those of a spider and had rather sharp claws. "It's not intelligent?" Alex thought. He had known that most ocean beasts, despite reaching the saint realm didn't gain much intelligence.

Even if they did, they would still act like a beast, attacking and killing anything they wanted, making territories, and generally acting like they were still the same beasts without intelligence.

The Wyrm they had to fight before coming to this continent was the same, and this one seemed even worse.

The man struck aside the crab's legs that tried to stab for him and then filled his staff with golden energy, something he hadn't used in the fight against Alex until now.

An illusory staff with golden intricacies was crafted around the regular metal staff and suddenly it grew in size, nearly 10 times as large as the staff, the man swung the illusory staff down on the crab.

The crab was strong for its cultivation base, especially when it came to its defense. Even then, against someone 4 realms higher than it, it could do nothing.

The large golden staff landed on the crab, crushing its hard exterior at once. The pieces of the crustacean stabbed into its body, blue blood pouring out of it. It still lived and now tried to make its way back to the water.

However, just then, Alex jumped on top of it, and stabbed his sword right through it, killing the crab at once. The crab's nascent soul flew away, but Alex let it be. He dug his hand into the crab's body and pulled out its beast core.

"Do you mind if I keep this?" Alex asked the man below who was staring at him.

The man shook his head. "If we can continue our battle, absolutely not," he said as his grin returned to his face.

"Let's continue then."

The two of them fought for another 20 minutes. Alex did his best to fight, but he was hit a few too many times, and once he even got hit in the head rather badly. Thankfully, it didn't crush his brain, or else the man would've gotten the nasty surprise of seeing his head heal right in front of him.

After those 20 minutes, Alex was beaten badly enough that the talisman considered him to have lost the match. The battle was over, and he was awarded his first Loss.

Chapter 1582 Rules

Alex handed over a healing pill to Teng Roukang this time around. "Are you going to challenge me tomorrow as well?" Alex asked.

The man couldn't hide his grin. "It's such an easy way to get pills, Your Majesty. Please don't mind if I do," he said.

"Okay, but can you at least not do it right after reset?" Alex asked him. "I need to win my first match of the day so I don't get a Loss."

"I will try not to," the man said. "I'll see you tomorrow, Your Majesty."

Alex didn't believe he could trust the man's word and was mostly sure that he was going to see him as soon as the talismans reset once again.

He turned around to see another group of people approach him, most of whom were ones that had defeated him yesterday, along with a few more. He couldn't help but sigh as his talisman buzzed again. New n0vel chapters are published on

He couldn't complain though as this was what he brought upon himself. 5 hours later, felt a pained expression. This wasn't working. He had lost 5 times in the dozen or so fights he fought. Pearl had fought 5 of those, and his was the fight that were the longest.

"We aren't getting any time for ourselves," Alex thought. Pearl agreed as well. He needed to do something. He had been left alone for some time, and now was the time for him to come up with something.

"I need a routine. I need some free time of my own," he thought and brought out a canvas. The people who were giving him some free time looked at him, curious about what he was doing.

After spending 5 minutes on it, Alex finished writing everything he wanted from the fights. Once done, he brought out his pupped and After spending 5 minutes on it, Alex finished writing everything he wanted from the fights. Once done, he brought out his pupped and pasted it on its body, letting Whisker control it.

Everyone curiously read what it said.

"What is this?"

[I will only accept battles 5 days a week. The last remaining 2 days will be for me to train and cultivate.

The battles will now be based on a first come first served basis. My Mouse, Whisker, will handle the queue of fighters, so join through there.

If reset hits, I will pause all battles until someone whom I can easily beat challenges me. You can also circumvent this by choosing to give me a Win for the day, for which I will give you a pill. If your Cultivation base is above the Saint Soul realm, You will fight me. If it is between Saint Core 6th realm and 9th realm, Pearl and I will take part together. If it is below that, Pearl alone will be the one to fight you alone.

I will take a 10-minute break after every fight unless it is one where I or Pearl am switching.

Finally, and most importantly, if you do not follow this rule, I will give you an Out of Bounds.]

"Whisker, handle that," Alex said and sat down by the grass, close to the slope that led to the river.

Whisker looked at what was written, took a moment to understand it, and jumped on top of the puppet before speaking to everyone. "Gather around if you want to challenge my brother!"

The people saw the tiny mouse speak to them, surprised that even the mouse had a cultivation base in the Saint realm. They read through the text on the canvas, unsure what to do next.

"Is he making a competition out of this?"

"What does he mean by he will give them an Out of Bounds? Did the kings and Queens give him the power to do that?" "He must be tired of having to fight one after another. Understandably, he needs a bit of a break. I am all up for this sort of setup."

One person ran to Whisker before anyone. "I will challenge him next!" he shouted.

Whisker looked at him and nodded before taking a talisman out. "What is your name and what is your cultivation base?" he asked the man.

Suddenly, the other people started shouting as well, saying they came here before the other person and whatnot. It took nearly 10 minutes for the chaos to turn to order before the first person who came through got to go in.

He was only a weak man with a cultivation base in the Saint Core 4th realm. As such, he got to fight Pearl.

Pearl was improving quite rapidly. The third battle he felt all this time was slowly being quenched and with it came satisfaction he hadn't felt in a long time.

His battle lasted for half an hour, during which he did everything but use the techniques that would give him away as a White Tiger. So he didn't use White Tiger's Domination Body, or White Tiger's claws, or White Tiger's Steps.

Pearl won with his last attack, which was a direct slam onto the man's body. Alex's talisman buzzed and he had won.

Pearl moved to the side to rest and Alex looked toward Whisker. "Who is fighting next?" he asked.

Alex was very happy to have made the rules as he had.

The battles went on accordingly and Alex found himself improving ever so slightly. After nearly 2 days, he could sense that his Sword Intent was touching the threshold of Saint Core 7th realm. By sometime tomorrow, he should have properly landed on the 7th realm.

If he could improve as steadily, he was hopeful about reaching the most he could reach as of yet by the end of the 2 years he had to stay inside the secret realm.

Sufficient time had passed so that people could judge how strong Alex was. As such, more of his information had been passed around the secret realm. At the same time, the ones who had lost had no intention of challenging him again. As such, they had to leave.

The battle was only going to get tougher, Alex assumed, and he was going to have to waste a lot more pills than he had hoped. Still, he hoped his sword improved along with that. Some people left, and some joined, and the fight continued. Pearl got quite a bit of a chance to fight as well, improving him. Night came and went, and day started once again, Alex and Pearl hadn't stopped fighting since yesterday, but the gap they let themselves get had made this training a lot more healthy than it was the previous day.

Alex fought a man in the Saint Soul 3rd realm, fighting sword to sword. He struggled a bit against this man and was certain he would lose, but he intended to stand strong until he could.

As he fought, his talisman buzzed, catching him by surprise. The man's attack managed to land on him during his moment of surprise and he was sent flying back.

His talisman buzzed once again.

"Dammit!" Alex grunted softly. "Did it reset mid-battle?"

He quickly checked the talisman and as he had expected, the talisman had indeed reset at noon. But thankfully, he didn't receive any Loss. It seemed any battle that started before the reset did not count toward the Loss.

Alex sighed in relief and got back up, looking at the people who were waiting for their turn.

"Anyone want to give me a free win?"

Chapter 1583 ¬†First Break

Everyone looked at Alex with a weird looks on their faces. They had all read the rules and they all knew what was coming.

The reset had hit and as such Alex needed a win before he accepted any fight. Many people still wanted to challenge him, as the pills were too great to give up on.

However, no one wanted to be on the wrong side of a King, even disregarding the warning he had written on the rules.

A young man with soft gray hair quickly raised his hands. "Me! Me!" he shouted, catching everyone's attention.

Alex looked in his direction and felt a cultivation base of Saint Foundation's 8th realm. He was quite a weak cultivator.

"Do you want to challenge me?" Alex asked.

"I can get a pill if I lose, right?" the young man asked.

Alex nodded. "Whichever of the five pills you choose from," he said.

"Then I challenge you, Your Majesty," the young man said excitedly.

As someone with such a weak cultivation base, the young man had little chance of making anything of himself in the secret realm. He had simply entered the secret realm because he could and because his sect had a lot of members taking part.

Losing in just a month or two was something he expected from this. All he wanted was the experience. However, along with that experience, if he could also gain some of the best pills in the entire world, then it would not be a waste at all.

Alex accepted the match, and not even a minute later, it was over. The young man gratefully took the cultivation pill he got and walked away to cultivate.

Seeing the young man, many people got new ideas on what to do and started contacting weaker members of their sects and clans so they could get their hands on pills without having to win against Alex.

"10 more minutes and we'll continue again."

And it continued

4 days passed by quickly, and Alex's training was starting to show more signs of success. His Sword Intent grew slow but steady. Pearl also grew slowly, getting more and more used to fighting.

They still lost a lot, and with stronger people coming to fight him, the list simply didn't seem like it would stop at any point.

Thankfully, Alex was starting to be able to drag things out for longer and longer and as such he had to fight less and less overall.

Teng Roukang still came to challenge him, beating him every time. But this time around, he seemed more troubled. He was angry that he didn't get to fight Alex whenever he wanted to. He had to follow the rules too, so he could only wait for his turn to come.

One of those days, he had to wait more than a day before it came. He was quite angry about that and he didn't hide it from Alex.

"Your Majesty, you should get rid of this system. You can't grow by fighting weaklings. You need to be able to fight us strong folks if you wish to grow," the man told him during their latest battle.

"That's alright. I quite like it this way. Gives me the breaks I need," was Alex's answer, and he had definitely not like that.

The 6th reset hit while Pearl was fighting someone. After a bit of a tough battle, Pearl ended up losing against a girl with a cultivation base of Saint Core 5th realm. She was one of the only ones with that cultivation base to win against Pearl now, and it was entirely thanks to her defensive armor.

'I'll have to soon increase the level as which Pearl can fight now,' he thought. For now, the current levels felt fine.

After the battle was over, Alex stood up and looked toward Whisker. "Who is in the losing now?" he asked. Due to the influx of people wanting to challenge him on reset to lose and earn a pill, they had to make a queue there as well.

Before Whisker could answer, an old woman walked forward, ready for the challenge. Whisker nodded his approval and Alex accepted the fight.

The battle ended in just one strike. Alex had begun to efficiently end these battles.

After giving away a healing pill, he looked at the people who waited for their turn. But many already knew it wouldn't come for them today.

"As you all know, this is the 6th day and after every 5 days, I take a 2-day break," Alex said to the ones gathered around. "So, I will be cultivating now. Please do not bother me."

Alex took back his canvas, his puppet, and Whisker before setting up a formation that blocked the outside world. Finding his little privacy, he sat down relieved, and began simply checking before he had anything else to do.

The things that he most desperately needed to check on were the two trees. The Yang tree was a small sapling, giving off some heat and very little light now. The World Tree was also a sapling, but much younger and had its roots move out of the soil they were in, spreading through his Soul Space like tentacles looking to drain anything it could find.

Alex gave the trees some water from his Bottomless Flask, as well as other sources that had nutritional value to the two trees.

Once he was done with them, he looked toward his pile of pills and sighed. He had a lot of pills, but they seemed to no longer be enough for him. If he didn't make some more, at the rate he was losing, he would only have the best pills remaining and he didn't want to give those away.

'I will have to make some when I find the time next,' he thought. For now, it was time to cultivate.

He brought out two cultivation pills and handed one over to Pearl. Since Whisker cultivated through his Undying Physique, he would have to wait.

Quite a bit of Yin Qi had built up in his Dantian, which he could sense quite easily when viewing it through his spirit. His Yin Dao did help mitigate its effect on the body, but it still wasn't good for him to keep it building up.

It could affect his spirit in a rather bad way.

So, without hesitation, he started cultivating. Thanks to the pill he ate, his cultivation speed was rather fast and he quickly got rid of all the Yin in his body.

He sensed the talisman buzz once during the next day and before noon hit after that, he stopped his cultivation session and got rid of the formation plates.

When people got to see him, they all looked at him excited.

"I will take two from the Loss queue. One right now, and one after reset hits," Alex said, letting Whisker get into place once again. "Who is next?

A young man came up and fought him, losing instantly. He happily left after getting his pill.

The rest of the people were barely holding themselves back by the time reset hit again. Once Alex dealt with another one of his Loss matches, he began his fight once more.

Chapter 1584 Prime Disciple of Cloud Iron Sect

Alex saw two girls looking from a side of the crowd excitedly toward him. It took him only a moment to recognize them even though he hadn't seen them for nearly 13 years.

Talia of the Cloud Iron sect had arrived at some time in the last 2 days and was excitedly waving at him. Next to her was the older, much stronger, Fang Yimu; the Prime Disciple of the Cloud Iron sect.

While Pearl fought, he waved at the two girls and beckoned them over.

"Your Majesty! It is very good to see you again," Fang Yimu gave a deep, respectful bow toward Alex.

"Your Majesty, I'm happy to see you again," Talia said.

"Lady Fang, Talia, it's been a while," Alex said. "13 years I believe."

"I saw you when we left for the Central Continent, Your Majesty," Talia said. "I couldn't come talk to you."

"Ah, right," Alex said. "My apologies. I saw you as well, but I couldn't talk to you either. I had a bit of a responsibility at that time."

"That's alright. How have you been doing?" Talia asked.

"Perfectly fine," Alex said. "How about you two? Did you two come here to fight me?"

"We wouldn't dare," the two girls said. "We heard you were here and came to meet you. That would only be right."

"I see," Alex said. "You can try and fight me if you want to. I would be happy to fight anyone."

"Little Talia has no chance of winning against you, and as for me..." Fang Yimu looked around. "It just doesn't feel right taking advantage of you. You should be so much stronger than me for having defeated the sect leader of that abhorrent sect that was killing children."

"I am stronger, but I am also holding myself back to train my sword. You can join in and I won't say anything."

"Hmm, maybe one fight then," Fang Yimu said. "Should I get registered too?"

"That's alright, we can start as soon as Pearl is done with his fight," Alex said. "As soon as we're done in 10 minutes, they shouldn't bother us at all."

"Alright," Fang Yimu said. "But I won't hold back, so you'll have to be prepared for whatever comes."

"That's alright," Alex said. "If I find myself in danger, I'll protect myself. You don't have to worry about me."

"Alright then," Fang Yimu said, taking the thin green sword that was strapped to her waist. "Stay back, Talia. I'm gonna test out how great His Majesty's fighting is."

Alex smiled and looked toward Pearl. "Pearl, end the fight."

Pearl asked not why and used his White Tiger's Roar to send out a spiritual attack to rattle his opponent's consciousness before slamming onto them at full force. With the combination of those two attacks, he won rather simply.

Alex felt the buzz that marked his win and then turned toward the woman again. "Miss Fang, may I challenge you to a duel."

Both of their talismans buzzed.

The woman smiled. "I accept."

Alex's sword glowed with a white outline and so did Fang Yimu's before it filled it all. "Sword Qi?" he looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "I thought the Cloud Iron sect was known for hits Alchemists, not its sword masters."

"I am the Prime Disciple, Your Majesty," Fang Yimu said, getting into a stance. "I have to know a lot of things."

The battle started with a sword slash from the woman who carried just the Sword Qi.?The attack flew in between them rather quickly, arriving right in front of Alex.

Alex found it easy to thwart away her Sword Qi. Despite getting to train it, it seemed her Sword Qi lagged a little behind in terms of strength as well.

'Saint Soul 1st realm? No 2nd realm,' Alex thought. With the woman in Saint Soul's 4th realm, having a Sword Qi in Saint Soul's 2nd realm was not that far off in strength. She was doing quite well, despite mostly being an alchemist.

'She's talented,' Alex thought. It would only make sense as she was the Prime Disciple of the Cloud Iron sect, which was debatably the most popular sect in the Emerald Kingdom.

The woman used a movement technique, arriving next to Alex with a surprising speed. Had it not been for his Demon Eyes, he would've missed her attack. She stabbed with her sword, which Alex stopped with the flat side of the Midnight.

He was still sent backward, dragging dirt along the path he was pushed through.

The girl raised an eyebrow before pulling back her sword and stabbing once more. This time around, 10 different illusory swords formed beside her, all of which came at Alex at once.

Not only were they many, but they were also so strong that Alex couldn't block them. So, he dodged back and away. Most of the attacks missed him, with only 2 landing on him. One he managed to block in time, but the other stabbed through his liver.

It stopped on the other side and couldn't get out of his body thanks to his body cultivation.

"Your Majesty!" the woman cried out in surprise. She had expected him to use his Qi when he was in danger, but he had let himself be stabbed. She panicked a little when she realized she had hurt the King of the Southern Continent.

"I'm alright," Alex said as he stood up.

"But your wound. You—"Her wounds stuck to her mouth when she noticed that there was no wound where she had stabbed him at all. Instead, all she could see was his white skin.

"Huh?"

"I ate a pill beforehand that heals my wounds as I get hurt," Alex lied. "Regular wounds won't even hurt me. You can fight with less care if you want to."

"Is... that so?" the woman calmed down a little. Her heart still raced, but she no longer panicked. She raised her sword once more, covering it with Sword Qi.

"Come on," Alex said, raising Midnight. "Show me more of what a Prime Disciple of the Cloud Iron sect is capable of."

The woman gave a small smile and nodded. Then she attacked him.

This time around, the woman didn't use any Qi and stuck to just her Sword Qi and her swordplay. Alex had already been doing the same, so it turned into a closed-quarters sword fight for the majority of it.

The two danced around each other to the tune of their clashing sword. Alex was surprised at how talented she was in raw sword fights as well, and the woman was surprised at how strong Alex's attacks were despite him not using his Qi at all.

They fought until the end of the 10-minute mark at which point the woman moved back from Alex and spoke. "I should end this so I don't drag this on for longer," she said as her sword glowed brighter and Fire Qi filled it.

Alex nodded and prepared himself to take on the attack.

The girl let out a deep breath and used her attack.

Alex heard a soft phoenix cry as a phoenix flew out of the sword, making its way to him with a terrifying power.

It marked Alex's loss.

Chapter 1585 3 People of Interest

Fang Yumi and Talia stayed around Alex for a while before deciding to leave him. Alex only ever fought Fang Yumi once. If they were going to fight again, it would have to be once Alex was much stronger than he was right now.

Alex accepted that. He too wanted to fight everyone again once he was stronger. For now, he would have to lose out on pills.

For the next 5 days, Alex fought numerous more people, of which 3 managed to get noticed by him.

The first person he noticed was someone called Teng Xuegang. This was a person with a cultivation base in the Saint Transformation 1st realm and was one of the natives of the Eastern Continent to reach such a stage at just 800 years of age.

He was someone Alex had first heard of when he had just arrived in the Eastern Continent and had since only met him for the first time

From what he noticed, he was also someone from the same Teng family as Teng Roukang. But for some reason, they were at odds. Even though the young man himself tried to stay away, Teng Roukang would try and start a fight from time to time.

Alex couldn't tell exactly what he was saying to goad him into trying to start a battle without a challenge, nor did he care. He was curious why the Teng clan wouldn't take someone as Teng Xuegang as their own.

The second person who entered Alex's eyes was a man who introduced himself as Zhao Boqin. He had a cultivation base of Saint Transformation's 4th realm, the same as the Crown Prince.

He was an older-looking man, physically somewhere between in the 40s of a mortal. However, he had the movement of a youth and the power of someone stronger.

He was by far the strongest person Alex had met on this continent, and might as well be the strongest. Even with all of his powers, Alex had little doubt he could win against the man. And he wouldn't even have to use his Immortal Qi, which he would've most likely started creating by now.

From what Alex could get out of him, the man turned out to be a part of the military. He was a leader of one of the battalions of the Talon legion, the ones that were supposed to be the fighters of the continent.

Alex had never seen a member of the Talon legion before. He had seen members of the Scale Legion, the Tail Legion, the Body Legion, and the Head Legion. The Talon legions were the spear of the empire, and they wouldn't easily show themselves.

It was needless to say that Alex lost to him in a matter of minutes. He even lasted that long because the man held back out of fake courtesy for the first minute or so.

He was the only one to leave Alex after fighting just once. The others stayed around.

The last person who caught Alex's interest was a woman from the Immortal Saint Pavilion who went by the name Layla. She was from the Ebony kingdom, and Alex knew exactly who she was.

This was the final of the four girls that the Crown Prince had given him information on. If things had gone differently, they would've met on a date of some sort.

When he first saw that it was this woman that he would have to fight, Alex didn't think much of it. But when the fights started, he was more than surprised.

This woman was capable of skipping realms, just like him and Pearl. Her cultivation base was only Saint Soul 2nd realm from what Alex could sense, but the combat prowess she generated when fighting actually put her around Saint Soul's 4th realm.

It was just 2 realms skipping, which in Alex's eyes wasn't a lot. But she was the only other player he had seen outside of his family that he had seen do it.

He could tell there was something about her body constitution that allowed her to produce as much fighting strength as she did, but he wasn't sure what it was. He wanted to ask her, but in the end, decided not to.

Apart from these 3, many other fighters were quite capable and gave Alex quite a bit of trouble during the battles. But none of them were as extreme as them, so they didn't stand out.

After fighting for 5 consecutive days, it was time for Alex to cultivate again.

Reset buzzed everyone's talisman, and everyone sighed in disappointment at having to wait another 2 days before they had a chance to earn these excellent pills. Many of them had already tried out the pills, and the information about them had spread far and wide.

Quite a few number of people had joined by now, so the disappointment was even larger this time than the last time.

Since the 6th day had started, Alex had to fight one more time and win. Without that, at the end of the day, he would gain a Loss, which he didn't want to get.

"Who is next on the Loss queue, Whisker?" Alex asked.

Whisker gave him a name. The person happily walked out and fought Alex before losing. Alex gave him a spirit pill, and he happily walked away.

Alex took away the canvas and puppet and turned around. Just as he did, he heard someone call out to him.

"Your Majesty!"

The voice was familiar to Alex by now. Teng Roukang was rather loud as a person.

Alex turned around to see what it was that caused him to be rowdy.

"I am next," he said. "Can't we just fight?"

Alex shook his head. "If you're next, we'll fight fight thing in 2 days. Until then, fix your craving for battle with someone else in here," he said, before turning around to walk away.

"But that is not fair," the man cried out. "I only got to fight you once in the last 5 days. I thought I would get it now, but you're walking away."

"If it's not you, it's someone else," Alex said. "Just wait. You'll get to fight me soon enough."

"But this is bullshit!" the man cried out. "Why should I wait? I didn't have to wait the next two days."

People were starting to get curious about what Teng Roukang was doing. Teng Xuegang looked from the side as well.

Alex turned around to look at him. "What are you saying?" he asked.

"The Silver Queen announced that you would accept every challenge, no matter who it is from," the man said. "If you don't, you will give us a pill, right?"

"I did say that, and I am a man of my word," Alex said.

"Then I guess I will have to take my pill one way or another," the man said.

"Your Majesty, let me fight him in your stead," Teng Xuegang stood forward. "I won't?ask you for anything."

"You can fight him on your own accord," Alex said. "I fight my own battles." He looked back at the Teng Roukang. "Go on. Do what you want to do."

The man grinned. "Your Majesty! I challenge you."

Chapter 1586 Out of Bounds

Alex sighed as he felt the talisman buzzing inside of his robe. He looked at Teng Roukang with a rather disappointed face. 'Maybe it was meant to be?' he thought.

He had recognized that Teng Roukang had been slowly getting agitated due to the lack of fights, but he hadn't thought that he would so openly show his annoyance with the new system.

"Stand back," he said to both Pearl and Whisker, who moved away to give Alex some space. Then, Alex turned around toward the excited man.

"What do you think is going to happen next?" Alex asked him.

"Hehe, I don't know," the man said with a small grin. "You're either going to have to accept my challenge or reject me, Your Majesty. Either way, I suppose I'll be getting my healing pill."

The gathered crowd whispered amongst themselves, and Alex could see many become curious if they could employ the same method to get more pills. If this little stunt of Teng Roukang was going to work, everyone would follow suit as well.

The pills were just so good that they were ready to offend the person who made them.

Alex sighed again. "My rules were clear. If you break them, I will give you an Out of Bounds. Are you not worried?" he asked.

"Worried? About what?" the man chuckled out loud. "Your Majesty, did you think you could add mysticism to your cultivation by simply hiding your cultivation base from us? Everyone here that had won against you knows exactly what your cultivation base is."

"Saint Soul 3rd realm. We knew it the moment you lost to any one of us. We were all handed 33 points, you know?" the man said.

Alex knew that, but it seemed they hadn't noticed his reason for not caring. He scoffed a little. "You thought I was hiding my cultivation base to add mysticism?" he asked, slowly letting his cultivation base fill him once more.

Everyone could sense from him what they already knew by now.

Teng Roukang didn't say anything and instead just smiled. "You are delaying the battle, Your Majesty," he said. "Accept or Reject my duel, but do so quickly."

"Very well," Alex nodded. "I accept your duel."

The man smiled and pulled out his staff, ready to fight, his Saint Soul 6th realm cultivation base flaring to overshadow Alex's Saint Soul 3rd realm cultivation base.

He pointed the staff toward Alex, waiting for him to bring out his sword, but Alex did nothing.

"Hmm? Are you not going to fight back?" he asked. "Where is your sword?"

"I don't need my sword to fight you," Alex said barehanded before gesturing for him to come attack him.

The man paused for a fraction of a second to process what he said and then charged as the disrespect in those words angered him. Arrived next to Alex, his staff glowing with golden energy as he tried to hit him with the end of the staff.

Alex parried the staff with his bare hand, sliding it to the side before grabbing it tightly.

Teng Roukang tried to pull on his staff to attack again, but to his surprise, Alex didn't budge at all, and neither did his staff.

"Hmm?" he was confused a little. He tried to pull harder again, but Alex didn't budge at all. Before he could figure out why his staff was stuck right now, Alex pulled on the staff, pulling the man's entire body along with it.

When he arrived next to him, he slammed the open palm of his left hand onto his chest with enough strength to crush a few good ribs.

At the same time, silver threads of light quickly coalesced around the man, emerging from both Alex and the air itself. The threads took practically no time to surround the man and when they did, Alex activated his Dao of Teleportation.

Instantly, the man was teleported over a kilometer away at once. And having been sent that far away, his talisman buzzed at once, giving him not just a Loss, but an Out of Bounds as well.

The man coughed hard, spitting out a mouthful of blood as he felt intense pain in his chest like he had never before inside the secret realm. He felt the ribs pierce his lungs, so he quickly took out a regular healing pill and ate it.

Once his body healed, he quickly checked his talisman just to learn what he had feared. "I... lost?" he couldn't believe it. How had that happened? Not only had he lost, he had been sent out of bounds.

How was that possible?

"What did he do?" The man wanted to know. He needed to know.

He quickly flew back to Alex, but Alex had already prepared his formation barrier and entered it. "What happened?" the man shouted. "Your Majesty! Come answer me."

"You lost," Teng Xuegang spoke from the side. "You can give up now. You lost quite a bit of face too."

"Bastard! I don't want to talk with you right now," Teng Roukang shouted. "Your Majesty!"

"Look at you," Teng Xuegang continued. "So pathetic."

"Shut up!" the man shouted. "I will have you killed."

"Why don't you do it yourself?" Teng Xuegang asked. "I challenge you to a duel."

Roukang felt his talisman buzz and was angered even more. "Stop getting in my way, you—" he had only just turned around to curse when he noticed something that made his eyes go wide.

"That's..." He noticed the staff Teng Xuegang was holding. "That's my staff."

"Is it?" Teng Xuegang gave an evil grin. "I hadn't noticed. Do you want it?"

"Give it back!" the man shouted.

"Then fight me for it!" Xuegang roared with laughter.

Alex was unaware of the commotion happening outside and had already started watering his trees and feeding them. After doing so, he looked at the amount of pills he had again and knew that he had to make some pills this time around.

So, after cultivating for a while to get rid of his accumulated Yin Qi, he proceeded to prepare to make pills.

The first few hours were spent with him preparing the ingredients, bettering it to the point that he wouldn't require the usage of World Defying Mushroom. Once he was done, he started making pills.

When the dark clouds covered the sky and the lightning strikes thundered the secret realm, he did not doubt that everyone had realized he was making pills. If they didn't, they would still come to see what was happening and figure it out afterward.

What he was doing to make pills was certainly going gather even more people to take those pills away from him.

'It's just for now,' he thought. He had steadily been improving, so the amount of people that could fight him would lower. At the same time, he would last longer during fights as he got stronger.

With that in mind, he continued making as many pills as he could before the 2nd day of his break was over. Right before it was over, he fought one more person from the Loss queue to not go into the next day with a Loss.

Then, it was time to train once more.

Chapter 1587 Improvement to Sword

3 months into the training, Alex came across his first bottleneck. It happened around the time when his Sword Intent became equivalent in strength to Saint Soul 2nd realm cultivation base.

The next week and a half, he couldn't improve his Sword Intent at all, and at long last, he had to defer to an expert of some sort. Godslayer.

Alex wasn't sure if Godslayer was an expert on Sword Intent and such, but given that he was a Sword spirit, he would still certainly know a bit. Not to mention his age.

He went into his Spiritual Sea during one of his breaks and found the spirit.

"My Sword Intent isn't improving anymore, what should I do?" he asked him.

Godslayer hadn't been paying much attention aside from a few times he sensed some strong cultivation bases, so he wasn't exactly sure what was going on.

"When did it stop improving?" Godslayer inquired.

"About 2 weeks ago. There hasn't been much change to my improvement, even though I know there must be so much more," Alex answered.

Godslayer thought for a bit and remembered something. "You've only used Sword Intent in your battles, correct? No Sword Qi or Aura?" he asked.

"Yes, I've only been improving my Sword Intent," Alex said. "Why?"

Godslayer gave an affirming grunt. "I know what is happening. You've hit the barrier of how strong your Sword Intent can be," he said. "You haven't stopped improving, but improving will be very slow and difficult from here on out."

"What?" Alex couldn't believe his ears. "I've hit a barrier? What sort of barrier is there?"

"There is usually just one barrier when it comes to improving your Sword, and that is your Intent itself," Godslayer said. "Now, Intent itself depends on your cultivation base a lot of the time, and that is what stops the improvement of one's sword."

"That is why you rarely see people with Sword Intent stronger than their cultivation base, as their Intent is just not capable of moving past the level of their Spiritual Sea. Only in rare conditions like yours do we see Intent stronger than one's cultivation base."

Alex took a moment to understand what was being said to him, but he understood it. "Since Cultivation base determines how much Spiritual Energy one has, and that determines the strength of my Intent, which then is how strong my Sword Intent can be."

"Yes, but there is something else that can be a barrier itself," Godslayer said. "And that is your level of Sword Qi and Sword Aura."

Alex was taken aback. "Huh?" he asked. "What do you mean?"

"When was the last time you trained Sword Intent alone without ever focusing on the other 2?" Godslayer asked.

"Umm… never," Alex said. "Not after I learned them."

"That's the thing," Godslayer said. "You can't grow one too far away from the others. The dissonance between them will cause one to drag the other down. If you want to improve your Sword Intent, bring the other 2 up to speed first. Then you can improve it more."

"Oh," Alex said, a little surprised. "So I was holding myself back from improving by not using Sword Qi and Sword Aura?"

"Yes," Godslayer said. "There is a reason why people need to enter the next stage of Sword so they can become stronger. Gaining Sword Qi isn't just to become stronger, but also to push the ceiling much higher."

"So I should stop what I've been doing," Alex said.

"No, that's not what I said. What you did resulted in a problem, but what you did itself is not a bad thing. Many people train that way. They just know when to stop and move on to the rest to push their ceiling even further above."

"As long as you do that, you are fine too."

Alex nodded to himself.

"Don't worry. Since your Sword Intent is so high up, the others will take no time to catch up, and then you can train the same way once more," Godslayer said.

"I see. I will do that then," Alex said. "Thank you."

"One more thing," Godslayer said before Alex could leave.

"If you want to improve your Sword skill overall, there is one thing you can do to aid your journey," the spirit said.

"Hmm?" Alex was made curious now. "What do I do?"

"Make a sword skill," Godslayer answered.

Alex paused for a moment. "Sword skill? Like… a sword technique?" he asked.

Godslayer nodded. "Better yet, make a bunch of them. Each with a different purpose," he said.

"What sort?" Alex asked excitedly. He had made techniques before, but they had all been random. Never had his techniques been similar at all.

"What sort? That's for you to figure out," Godslayer said. "I cannot tell you what your techniques are. Create one. And don't worry about if they are strong at the start. You are going to be improving them throughout your life along with your sword."

Alex slowly fell into a thought. He couldn't come up with something instantly, so he thanked Godslayer and left his Spiritual Sea. He ate a cultivation pill and started cultivating, but even as he did, he thought through what Godslayer told him.

'My techniques,' he thought. 'I've done that before. I should be able to do it again.'

He thought of a bunch of techniques that he had made. Golden Spear Punch, All Swirling Elemental Shield, and Bursting Blaze were all techniques that were crafted by him.

However, he also realized that all of these techniques were something that were either fusion or already had a base to them.

The Golden Spear Punch was a mix of Iron Fist Punch and the Golden Spear technique.

All Swirling Elemental Shield was a mix between Swirling Water Shield and 5-Elemental Barrier.

Bursting Blaze was his attempt at adding the Dao of Explosion onto a simple Fire slash. If any, this was the one that he could say was his the most of all.

Even then, he didn't feel like it belonged to him.

'A bunch of sword techniques, that do different things,' he thought silently.

Godslayer's final words ran through his head. 'I don't have to make a strong one. Just a good one to start with is enough,' he thought.

The question now was what was he going to make as his first technique?

Alex had a rudimentary idea of what it could be, but he would have to give it some more thought. 'I have to keep the technique simple at first,' he thought. 'But it can't be very simple. It needs my signature.'

Thinking of the techniques, especially what they would do would take some time, so Alex focused on improving his Sword Qi and Sword Aura for the time being.

Sword Qi he used against his opponents for the next few weeks, surprising many, and Sword Aura he used on his own against the puppet to train. New n0vel chapters are published on

He did not want to showcase his Sword Aura just yet to strangers. It took Alex just 2 weeks to improve his Sword Qi and Sword Aura. Since they were up to par, he returned to just using Sword Intent.

However, this time around, it wouldn't just be Sword Intent alone. After all, in the last 2 weeks, he had figured out what his first technique should be as well.

Chapter 1588 Nothing

Alex was surprised when he realized that he only knew 2 Sword techniques that did more than just slashing.

They were the Heavenly Sword Slash and the Bursting Blaze.

He had many other sword techniques such as Penta-Sword Strike, 75 Sword Array, and a few others, but they either used more than one sword or didn't truly require a sword for the technique.

As such he only had 2 strikes that were more than just regular slashes.

One created a lightning strike, and the other created an explosion.

Given he had so little, Alex wanted to create a sword technique that was quite versatile so that he didn't have to worry about missing out.

After thinking for a while, he landed on something.

Instead of making a specific sword technique that tried to include everything, he decided to make a sword technique that could include everything as they were required.

After that, he came across another problem. What type of sword technique should he make?

There were 3 types of Sword techniques from what he could tell. The Offensive type, the Defensive type, and the type that didn't belong to the first two.

Alex wasn't sure if he was right to make the last category, but it felt right. As for right now, he wanted to make an Offensive technique.

An offensive sword technique that was in all essence just the base that he could use to grow it.

Alex sat around with Pearl and Whisker in the barrier, talking with them. "Should it be just a regular slash? That doesn't feel right to me," he said.

"What else can it be?" Whisker asked. "It is just a sword strike, right?"

"Sword strikes don't just have to be slashes," Pearl said. "There are ones that take the shape of swords itself. Others take the shape of snakes, wolves, birds, and so much more."

"That's right, it doesn't have to be just a slash, it can be so much more," Alex said.

"What shape do you want it to be?" Whisker asked. "A Phoenix, like sister Scarlet? Or a Tiger, like brother Pearl?"

Alex thought for a moment. That wasn't a bad idea when he thought about it, but he shook his head. "I cannot do that. It wouldn't fit my plan of making it just a base for everything to be added on."

"Why not?" Pearl asked.

"My mental image of phoenix involves fire. So if I ever want to make a Water attack, I wouldn't be able to make a smooth change since my perception of the attack will still be fire. I can surely get used to it, but I don't want to make it too difficult."

"I need some other ideas," Alex said.

The two beasts thought through what they could and suggested some more ideas, but none felt right to Alex. He simply didn't want to lean in just one direction.

After so many rejected, Pearl and Whisker were blank with ideas.

"I don't think we can do it right now," Pearl said. "Let's try thinking some other time. Maybe we can come up with something that better fits you, brother."

"Why are we complicating things?" Whisker asked. "Is just keeping it a simple sword slash too bad? It doesn't have to be anything else."

"That is true, but I still want my brand—" Alex paused as his eyes narrowed a little. His head tilted in thought. The two beasts stared back at him with curious looks.

"Brother?" Pearl asked.

"Hmm..." Alex made a small sound. "That... could work. I can't tell just yet, but, I will try if I can do that."

Pearl and Whisker both looked at Alex curiously. "Do what?" Pearl asked.

"Hehe," Alex chuckled a little. "Nothing."

He went through some preparation in the free time he had and created the overall idea of what the technique was to see if it even worked in the first place.

He wasn't going to wait until his first match to try and create it.

Unfortunately, Alex didn't have the years to try and come up with the techniques, so he would have to take a bit of a shortcut. That meant using his Qi as well as Dao to form the basis of the technique that he could then copy to make his own.

The most important part of his technique was the Dao of Malleability and the Dao of Sharpness. Using those Dao to shape his Qi was not something Alex had ever had to try to do before.

This was one of the harder things he had to do in life. He struggled a lot, the first few times requiring him to use his Intent a lot.

However, after the first few times, it got easier. Then, he just had to mold the technique until it fit his criteria and then do it without using Dao.

That was the harder bit, but he had confidence in himself.

When it was time to fight again, he was ready. Once he went through someone from the Loss queue, his first opponent of the day showed up.

An older man with bits of white hair on his beard and a bald head challenged him. The man had a cultivation base of Saint Soul 9th realm and was just steps away from entering the Saint Transformation realm.

Alex planned on testing his new technique on him.

The man used two battle axes to fight, one that was capable of using a flame lion-shaped attack, and another that was capable of using a wind eagle-shaped attack. They were the innate skill of the axes.

Alex concentrated before the fight even began. He took a deep breath and focused on his sword. The sword glowed with a white outline at first, and then entirely with Sword Qi.

He released some Qi too, as little as he could afford to give shape to the attack as needed. Without it, the technique wouldn't work at all.

Then, he concentrated on it. 'Smaller, even smaller,' he thought. 'Denser.' He strained all of his Intent to make something happen that would normally require power.

He took a deep breath.

'Become nothing.'

The man used the flame lion attack and Alex slashed diagonally.

The color of his sword dulled the moment the energy surrounding it left it. The man barely saw a flash of light in the air, thin like a thread, if that.

He saw the lion split into two out of nowhere, stopping right there. And then the man felt it on his own body.

Without him realizing when it had happened, the thin attack had landed on his body, sending him flying backward. Blood spurted out from his chest from a deep and thin wound that appeared on it.

The man could barely understand what had happened. All he knew was that he had lost.

Alex remained stunned at the site of the outcome. He hadn't expected the damage to be this high, regardless of how much Qi he had to use.

His talisman buzzed, but he ignored it. He was transfixed at the outcome. The attack hadn't worked as well as he had wanted to, but there was time.

For now, he was happy that he had managed to create a new technique.

Chapter 1589 Practice

Alex wasn't sure what to name the technique he had created. He went through many different names and in the end decided not to name it. He would name it when it was a bit more established.

As he had wished, the technique was only in its base form. Even then it wasn't completely perfected. And he had so much to add to it to create different techniques. He would have to name them individually.

It was better to do that later.

He trained for the next month using nothing but either Sword Intent or this technique. As a result, his fighting prowess grew a lot more as well.

Godslayer hadn't been lying when he mentioned that creating a technique of one's own helped improve one's Sword. In just one month, Alex had managed to improve his Sword Intent to Saint Soul 3rd realm.

It was supposed to have taken much longer the stronger he got, but the sword technique helped him improve at a relatively faster rate.

A month more of practice and Alex had more or less perfected the base version of his sword technique.

A woman stood before him, head full of graying hair and a sword in her hand. She was an elder from some big family that didn't matter to Alex. Her cultivation base was in the Saint Soul 9th realm and even then, she was afraid of what was coming next.

She swung her sword before Alex could, sending out a wave of fiery attack that seemed to target unconditionally. Alex swung his sword, sending a simple, but strong Sword slash made up of nothing but Sword Qi.

The slash didn't completely stop the incoming attack. It couldn't with its Saint Soul 5th realm power. It did, however, lower its intensity so that Alex wasn't harmed even when he took the attack head-on.

He could have run away to dodge it, but instead, he focused on his technique. Intent and Qi poured into Midnight, amalgamating into something incredible.

The woman prepared her defensive techniques. As she knew the strength of what came, she knew how hurt she could be if she didn't.

And then Alex swung his sword diagonally.

The woman had her eyes on his sword, she had been paying attention to it the entire time, but even then she saw nothing. She didn't even see a glint of light.

She did sense the incoming attack. The attack was so fast and so incredibly condensed that it was impossible to sense it with anything but just her senses. Even with the senses, without looking for the attack, she wouldn't have been able to know where it was.

All she could have otherwise sensed was its aura. She would have never known what hit her.

Her defensive technique created a lotus flower below her feet, the golden petals opening around her. There were 12 petals in the lotus flower, spread out in 3 rings with 3 petals in the inner ring, 4 in the middle right, and 5 in the outer ring.

3 petals on the outer ring of the lotus were destroyed at once, and the remaining 3 moved to replace them. When they were shattered without any effort, the attack landed on the middle 4 leaves.

Even this close, the woman couldn't see the attack, only sense it. The shape of the attack was undoubtedly still a slash, but it was so compressed that it felt wrong to call it one.

The thinness of the attack was even lower than the breadth of a hair and the width of the attack was somewhere in between a blade of grass and a snowflake.

Alex had packed so much into so little, that the level of the attack itself had gone up as a result.

The middle petals of the defensive lotus burst into bright golden light and then the inner petals cracked as well. The woman couldn't put up another defense in time and put up her sword to block the last bit of attack.

Her sword bent slightly before she was pushed back by the attack. The power of the attack dwindled past that point, but it still left a mark on her body as the outer robe she wore had a paper-thin cut to it.

She looked up in fear, realizing that there was no way to defeat him anymore.

"I give up!" she shouted quickly.

Alex stopped before he was about to send out another attack and looked at the woman. "Oh... okay," he said, realizing his talisman had just buzzed a little.

The woman nodded toward him and quickly walked away. He watched her as she walked not just back to the group, but away. She was done with this.

He looked at the few remaining people that weren't as strong. He could only sigh. "Do you guys want to continue this? All the strong ones got the pills they could want and left," he said.

The remaining group looked at each other. Few of the ones that were there were there to fight Pearl, and the rest were there to fight Alex realizing they couldn't defeat him.

They were still struggling to figure out how he was ever consistently defeating people so high above his own rank, but they couldn't figure it out. In the end, they realized that they too couldn't defeat him.

It was time to leave.

A few of them bowed toward him and walked away. The remaining were the ones that were here for Pearl, and they were hesitating.

"I won't be staying here since the strong fighters are gone. I'll have to go look out for them as well," he told them. "You guys should leave as well."

They looked at each other a few times and then bowed toward Alex again before walking away. They had gotten all they could hope for in the past 6 months, so it was time for them to move on too.

Alex took back the puppet and the rules and was about to prepare to leave as well when he saw one final person still standing in line. Whisker had already left, so the person alone was there.

The young man looked no older than him and simply stood there with his hands behind his back.

Alex wondered what was going on. "Umm, do you want to challenge me?" he asked. "You can if you want to." The young man wasn't very strong compared to him, so it would be a rather quick fight anyway.

The young man shook his head instead, confusing Alex.

"Then... what do you want?" Alex asked him.

"Nothing," the young man said. "Don't mind my presence, Your Majesty. Or if you do, just tell me. I will move away to give you some privacy."

Alex frowned.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"My name is Shan Wangjiu," the young man said.

"And do you want something from me?" Alex asked him.

"Only if you can give it to me," the young man said, taking a step forward, his eyes bright with hope.

That concerned Alex a bit.

"What do you want exactly?" Alex asked him.

As if being allowed to finally speak, the young man fell to his knees and banged his head on the ground in kowtow.

"I want you to teach me the ways of the sword," he shouted out loud. "Please become my master."

Chapter 1590 Shan Wangjiu

"Uhh..."

Alex wasn't sure how to respond to such a preposterous request. The obvious answer was to reject him, but the man was down on his knees. Heck, his head was slamming into the ground.

He was too taken aback to say anything immediately.

"Master?" he looked up after getting no response.

"Don't call me that," Alex said. "I'm not your master. I haven't taken you as my disciple."

The young man looked disheartened and went back to kowtowing with his head to the ground.

"Stop! I'm not going to accept," Alex quickly said, realizing the man still held hope.

The young man quickly looked up. "Why not? Please. You're so good at it. Teach me," he said. "Just one technique. That technique you used earlier. Just that. I just want to learn that technique."

"I can't teach you that. I'm still working on it," Alex said. "I haven't developed it to its fullest potential."

"Huh? You're developing it?" the young man asked. "Don't tell me you created that technique by yourself."

"Yes, I did," Alex said with a sigh. "Can you leave, please? I'm not taking any apprentice."

"Can I follow you at least?" the man asked. "I promise I won't interfere. And I will stay away if you want me to."

Alex frowned. He didn't think much about letting a man follow him if all he wanted to do was learn his sword. He already had so many people see him fight, so there wasn't much to it.

"Fine, you can follow," Alex said. "But if you ever disrupt me, I will beat you until you are gone from this secret realm."

"Yes!" the young man said excitedly. "Thank you, master."

"I'm not your master," Alex said.

"Haha, then you can't tell me what not to call you. Can you, master?" the young man asked.

Alex failed to see a flaw in his logic.

"What if I told you to call me that instead?" Alex asked.

"You'll be my master?" the young man asked excitedly.

"No," Alex answered quickly.

"Then you can't tell me what to or not to do," the young man said grumpily before crossing his arms.

Alex felt a headache coming. "As long as you don't lie to people you are my disciple, do whatever you want," he said and walked away.

He set up a barrier formation and sat to deal with a few things. It hadn't been more than 3 days since he last did this, so he didn't need to cultivate. As a result, this would be quick as well.

Alex went to his Soul Space to deal with the trees before leaving back outside. After all this time, he was finally free to rest for as long as he wanted to, and there was one thing he knew he needed to do.

His technique had come a long way, so he needed to evaluate it, learn from it, and see if there were ways to improve it.

He closed his eyes and thought through the process of how it was made.

He would gather Qi into a sword and optionally add Sword Qi or Aura into it. Then, he added the Dao of Malleability into it.

Dao of Malleability was normally used to make metals thin and flat, so using it on Qi alone was not something he could casually do. He had to force the Dao to work for so much Qi.

The Intent that he had to use on that alone was not normal, but on top of that, he needed to add the Dao of Sharpness to it too, to make the attack sharper than it was.

Because of the two dao working together, the result became a very thin and flat slash that was incredibly sharp. On some occasions, he even felt it distort space or even cut it when he attacked.

He had some ideas on what he could do thanks to that, but that was for some other days. For now, he just wanted this to be the base version.

He did not make a regular slash with bright colors, or one that took the shape of an object or animal that told the enemy when the attack was coming.

Instead, his was a thin and sharp slash that his opponents wouldn't be able to anticipate. Even when they were looking for it, they would have a hard time finding it.

He didn't yet know how he could hide the attack's aura. That was the one thing giving the attack away when he used it. However, he didn't have any idea of how he could conceal it.

There wasn't any possibility of using the concealment technique for this either. So, he had to let go of it.

"Advantages, it is incredibly powerful," Alex told to himself as much as he did to Pearl and Whisker who were around him. "Due to the incredibly concentrated size, the attack has ended up being stronger than it could ever be."

Techniques were weaker when they had to spread their damage and stronger when it was concentrated. There was also the amount of Qi that it depended on, but regularly, the area of the damage was the determining factor.

As a result, by making the damage area so much smaller, Alex had managed to concentrate that damage on one area, making its effect stronger than it was.

"The downside is that it's too reliant on me heavily spending my Intent on it," he spoke softly. "I have to spend my Intent twice on two Dao, both of which use it heavily. Can I lower it in any way?"

Pearl and Whisker didn't know what to suggest. He had to think all for himself.

"Could I remove Dao of Sharpness?" he thought. "No, but then it wouldn't be sharp. What am I thinking? I need the sharpness. Hmm, what about adding Dao of Cutting instead of Dao of Sharpness?"

He found that idea to hold a little more potential than the other one. But this too he quickly got rid of.

"Dao of Cutting is good, but I'm already using a Metal Dao with Dao of Malleability. Using Dao of Sharpness is much easier than Dao of Cutting under this scenario."

That idea was shut down as well. He came up with some more, but none were good enough.

"No, I guess this is it," he thought. "This is the best I can come up with. Which means I will have to stick to it."

He sighed and nodded to himself. "I will just have to suffer through this for now. Once my Intent becomes stronger, I won't have to work as hard to use this technique."

Having decided that, Alex decided to spend some time cultivating just to rest himself from all the fight he had been through.

His rest period came to a stop when his talisman buzzed and it was time to go look for a fight again.

Alex stood up and took down the barrier. The river he had arrived at 6 months ago was still to his left, and the uneven ground was looking much more open without any people.

Any except Shan Wangjiu. He happily waved toward Alex as he walked out of the barrier.

Alex sighed, turned around, and then walked away.

The young man followed close behind.

Chapter 1591 Searching for Opponents

Alex walked through the river bank, searching for a person to challenge, or for a person to fight him.

Shan Wangjiu followed him, but he stayed far enough behind that he wasn't intruding on Alex even with just his sense. He too seemed to be looking for people to fight.

"Do you want more fights, Pearl?" Alex asked as they walked along. "If you want to fight someone, let me know. I'll challenge them."

They strayed away from the river some 15 minutes later, making their way into a sparse forest with broken trees covering the ground, with craters on the ground large enough to fit a whale inside of it.

Alex stepped over fallen trees and branches, making his way deeper.

"6 months has passed," Alex said softly. "I wonder how many have left."

There were certainly way fewer people than before. "What were the bets they made again?" he remembered. "I should now have 100 thousand Spirit stones from the Gold King, Silver Queen, the Ivory Queen, and the Emerald King. I can get 150 thousand more from the Azure King when I last 4 more months."

He couldn't help but feel happy about having set up the bet. It was an easy way to earn a lot of Saint Spirit Stones, and god knew he needed them after how much he had spent on the Mountain Crushing artifact.

He had wanted to call that artifact something else, but the name had stuck for now. If it was ever going to change, it wouldn't be anytime soon.

"550 thousand Saint Spirit stones," he whispered to himself. "I just have to last 100 or so more days."

He had no doubt he could do that.

Alex saw multiple people in the forest, but each one he saw was a bit too weak for him to want to challenge. As for Pearl, he didn't seem to want to fight right now.

Alex ignored the weaker people until he ran into an older man with short hair, and thin eyelashes. He remembered seeing this man before; he was one of the people who had challenged him and won.

His Saint Soul 6th realm cultivation base had easily dwarfed his Sword Intent and had taken away the, so he had no chance of winning against him in any way.

The man noticed Alex as well and smiled before giving a slight bow. "Your Majesty! So it is true you have closed up shop," the man said.

"I have," Alex said.

"I heard everyone got too weak for you," the man said with laughter.

"That's not exactly true," Alex said.

The man looked at him, wanting to say something when he paused for a moment. Before Alex could say something, the man quickly responded. "Actually, if you don't mind. I'll be on my way."

"Actually, would you mind fighting me?" Alex said with a small smile. "I haven't fought yet."

The man looked at Alex and grimaced a little. "But you're stronger now, Your Majesty," he said. "What good could come from challenging little old me?"

"A new day has started, and I haven't fought yet," Alex said.

"This... are you looking to get done with your Loss match through me?" the man asked.

"I am hoping to," Alex said.

The man pondered for a bit. "Can I get a pill? Like you did for everyone that lost to you?" he asked.

"The shop is shut down," Alex said. "Unless someone challenges me, I don't plan on giving away any more pills."

The man's face twisted. "Then I'm afraid I will have to refuse. Losing 36 points was not fun, but he had to do it. His talisman buzzed and he bowed toward Alex. "Now, if you'll excuse me."

The man walked off.

Alex stood there, surprised that he had been refused. He had accepted so many battles over the past 6 months that he had forgotten one was even allowed to refuse.

The man had lost points for sure, but Alex hadn't gained any. One didn't get points if the other refused.

He sighed a little. "What about my Loss match?" he wondered. He hadn't earned points, but that didn't mean his Loss match should remain there.

But to his disappointment, it was. He still had to fight someone and win or lose. If he didn't do that, he would gain a Loss. "I should get going," he thought.

He was about to move on when he heard the man speak out loud. "Young man, do you want to fight me?" he asked.

Alex turned around to see what was happening and saw that the man he had just parted with had challenged the one that followed him.

Alex looked at the young man and wondered what he was going to do next. The young man simply grinned. "I accept," he shouted loudly, pulling out a sword that was entirely too large for him.

The sword was nearly 2 meters long and almost an entire arm's length wide at the base. It got narrowed toward the front, but not too much until the very end at which point the blade narrowed to a point.

The cross guard of the blade was equally as large as well, and the hilt another arm's length long.

That was an entirely preposterous sword, which somehow reminded him of the steel sword he used when he was first getting started. Except that had been nowhere near as large as this one.

The young Shan Wangjiu hoisted it up on his shoulder. Anyone could tell that the weight of the blade was a bit too much for him to handle normally.

'He's Saint Soul 2nd realm,' Alex thought. 'How heavy is the sword?'

The battle began with the young man charging first. He swung the sword down, the slow blade easily dodged by the man he fought.

The man then used a technique and created a blue blast that sent the young man flying away, leaving his sword behind.

He had lost so very easily. It almost looked like he had given up on fighting from the very start.

The man looked to himself in a satisfied manner and walked away.

Alex, ever too curious, walked up to where the two had just fought. He arrived next to the sword that was half stuck on the ground.

He grabbed onto it and felt something. The weight of the sword suddenly got so much heavier as well. "I see," he thought, understanding what had happened.

Alex closed his eyes and poured out his Intent to pull the sword up. When he did, it had gotten much lighter.

"Master!" the young man rushed back quickly and stopped when he got close. "Woah! You raise it so easily, Master."

Alex ignored the term the man used and continued looking at the sword. "How did you come to acquire this?" he asked.

Shan Wangjiu shrugged. "I had it ever since I started. It was the treasure I got when I first came here," the young man said.

Alex looked toward the young man with surprised eyes. He hadn't expected it, but it made sense when he thought about it now.

"I didn't realize you were a player."

Chapter 1592 Shan Wangjiu’s Sword

"Yes, I am," the young man answered with a grin. "Hehe, Master. You hadn't realized it yet?"

Alex shook his head. "How was I supposed to?" he asked.

"Fair enough," the young man said. "Yes, I'm a player. Why, does that have anything to do with anything?"

"Not with you, but it has something to do with your sword here," Alex said, showing off the large blade toward the young man.

Shan Wangjiu put on a face of surprise. "You truly are strong, master. I was right to follow you," he quickly said. "I've never been able to pick up this sword as easily as you have. Many have tried too, but they had to give up in the end as well."

"Why do you use something that you can't properly use?" Alex asked him.

The young man shrugged. "Because it looks cool," he said. "I remember reading comics about swordsmen with giant swords. They looked epic in those comics, and I wanted to become similar."

Alex couldn't relate, but he could understand what he was trying to say. However, that didn't mean that was a good reason. He had to stifle laughter before it came out.

"So the entire reason you burden yourself with the sword is because… it looks cool," Alex said.

"Uhuh." The young man nodded vigorously.

Alex sighed a little but did nothing more. He wasn't surprised to learn that he had thought using a large sword would make him look cool. He was surprised that he had stuck with it for more than six decades.

"You were about to say something about my sword earlier," the young man said. "Can you continue please?"

"Ah, right," Alex looked back at the sword. "Has anyone told you why you have such a hard time holding this sword?"

The young man thought for a bit and shook his head. "I had a few friends try it out, but none could tell what was wrong," he said.

"What about some seniors or elders?" Alex asked.

"No, no, no, master," he said, wiggling his finger at him. "I might look dumb but I'm very smart. A sword like this, I know it is good. This sort of treasure would be more than enough for anyone to want to steal it. So, I never showed any seniors this sword. I trained with it in secret."

Alex was a little stunned by hearing the young man. It seemed he had more brains than him when they were starting as cultivators. Alex sometimes wondered what would've happened if he kept his knowledge to himself.

"Besides," the young man continued, catching Alex's attention. "I never really had any seniors or elders to show the sword to even if I wanted to."

"No seniors?" Alex looked at him with a confused expression. "What about the higher realm cultivators in your sect, or whatever place you joined."

"Sect?" the man shook his head. "I am a lone wolf, master. I belong to no pack. I joined one early on, but I quickly left it as it was not for me. Too many… rules and strict policies. I would rather be free as the wind."

"When did you leave?" Alex asked.

"Uhh… I was in a sect for half a year," the young man thought. "Then I struggled for another 2 years on my own as a newly abandoned player, and then joined another sect after I wanted to get back on my feet. 3 months after being there, I remembered why I left the first one."

Alex sighed. "I see," he said. "No wonder nobody was there to tell you about your sword."

"Why? Is something wrong with it?" the young man asked before shaking his head. "That's not possible. It's a good news, right? It has to be. I haven't been struggling all these years for no reason, right?"

Alex shrugged a little. "That depends on what you can do with it in the future," he said before swinging the sword around. "This sword… has a Sword Spirit inside of it."

The young man gasped in an exasperated surprise, his hands hiding his mouth and all. His eyes were still wide when he put down his hand and asked, "What's a Sword Spirit?" he asked.

Alex's brows furrowed. "Why did you just gasp if you don't know what a Sword Spirit is?" he asked.

The young man raised his shoulders. "Because it sounded awesome," he said. "That doesn't matter, master. What is a sword spirit?"

Alex sighed. "A sword spirit is a spirit that forms in your sword, either when it was created, or over its lifetime, depending on how well it was used or maintained," he said.

"I want to say this sword was created with a Sword Spirit in it, but it is more likely it became so after someone used it for a long time, pouring their Qi into it, refining it," he said.

"Oh, I tried refining the sword," the young man said. "Many different times too, but it never worked."

"Because the Sword spirit in here doesn't acknowledge you as someone worthy of being its master," Alex said. "You have to tame the Sword spirit first before it lends the sword to be refined by you."

"Woah," the young man whistled. "What then? Would it be stronger? Would I be stronger?"

"Your overall prowess will go up. I know for a fact that fighting with unrefined weapons, especially one that doesn't accept you, makes your damage output lessen a lot," Alex said before pausing a little. "How often have you used this sword?"

"All the time," the young man said. "I even used it the last time I came here."

"You came here last time?" Alex asked with a surprised look on his face.

"Yes," the young man said with a laugh. "I was just a Saint Foundation realm fighter back then."

"I see," Alex said. He was about to hand back the sword when he realized something. He thought for a bit and brought out Midnight.

"Can you hold this for me," Alex asked. "See how heavy it is for you."

"Sure, Master," the young man said, before grabbing Midnight's hilt. Instantly, the weight grew upon the young man and he grunted as he quickly grabbed Midnight with both hands.

He pulled it up, barely keeping it from touching the ground.

Alex looked at the young man in shock. 'He's actually keeping Midnight off the ground,' he thought.

Midnight flew back into Alex and the young man sighed in relief.

"God… damn," Shan Wangjiu took deep breaths. "How… do you fight… with that thing? It's… so heavy."

"My sword is heavy, but that is not the reason why you struggled," Alex said.

"What do you mean?" the young man looked up before his eyes brightened a little. "Wait, do you mean that sword has a Sword spirit too?"

"Yes. One with around the same strength," Alex said. "And from this test, I can tell that your Intent has become a lot stronger after the constant fight with the Sword spirit in your sword."

"If you manage to make the Sword spirit submit, you can finally start your journey as a great swordsman," Alex said.

The young man's eyes were wide as a hawk's. He instantly fell to his knees. "Please teach me how, Master!"

This time, Alex found no reason to refuse.

Chapter 1593 Teaching

Shan Wangjiu walked next to Alex as they made their way through a burning section of the forest. Alex moved his hands once, causing the fire from all around to stop at once. It no longer existed as if it never did.

Not even smoke flew out from the places where the fire was extinguished.

"Woah!" Shan Wangjiu showed surprise. "How did you do that, Master?"

"Fire Dao," Alex answered simply. "Do you know any Dao?"

The man nodded. "Dao of Heaviness," he said. "I can make things heavier if I want to."

"Dao of Heaviness?" Alex thought. "Sounds like a fine Dao."

"It is," the young man said. "But… quite useless as of now. My sword is so heavy that adding any more weight to it won't make sense at all."

"That I understand," Alex said.

"So when are you going to teach me?" the young man asked. "Can we just do it here?"

"Assist, not teach. Let me find someone to fight first," Alex said. "I need to deal with that, and then I can assist you."

"Why not fight me then?" the young man said casually. "I already lost for the day anyway."

Alex paused and turned around to look at the man. He felt like slapping his face for not realizing something so simply had been in front of him the entire time.

"Alright, fight me."

One couldn't even call it a fight. It had ended before it had even started.

Once Shan Wangjiu noticed the missing points, he sighed to himself and looked at Alex once more. "Now can you teach… er, assist me, master?" he asked.

Alex nodded. "Why do you call me master even?" he asked as he searched for an open place without broken trees and branches all around them. "A lone wolf like you should favor not having a master at all, shouldn't you?"

"Being alone doesn't mean I shouldn't have a master," the young man said. "It just means that I don't belong anywhere. Once you teach me, I'll be on my way to becoming stronger all alone."

"So you will get my help and just leave, huh?" Alex asked.

"Uhh… I thought you didn't like my company," the young man said. "Do you want me to stay? I'll stay if you do. I owe you that much."

"I was just messing with you," Alex quickly said. "You can do whatever you want to. But, if you do feel like you owe me, why don't you move to the Southern Continent with me in about 5 years? How does that sound?"

"Southern Continent?" the young man asked. "I will have to think about that."

"I'm not forcing you," Alex said. "Do what you feel is right. I will tell you outright that staying here will give you more opportunity over too."

He noticed an open space, full of short, thick grass. "There," he pointed.

The young man mulled over Alex's request for the first few minutes, but once he was made to sit down and the weapon flew out, all thoughts he held melted away like snow at the first sight of spring.

"Are you aware of what Intent is?" Alex asked the young man.

"Like Sword Intent?" the young man asked.

"No, Intent is more raw. It is a base of your actions, including Sword Intent. It is what makes you use techniques, what makes you use Dao. Intent is what determines the difference between what is living and what is dead."

"Anything?" the young man asked. "Can a stone have intent?"

"It can, from what I hear," Alex said. "Anything can grow to have Intent, although I'm not sure of the mechanics behind it. Qi, for one, is the source of it."

The young man listened to his words intently.

"Since anything with Intent is living, that also means anything living has Intent. And a spirit is far from being dead," Alex explained. "Your sword has a… tug of war with you, each time you want to use it."

"You slam your Intent against it's Intent, and you mostly end up as the loser," Alex said. "I will say it outright. You have nearly no chance of winning against the sword in a battle of Intent."

The young man looked up briskly. "What?" he questioned. "Then how am I—"

"Let me finish," Alex said. "You have strong Intent, courtesy of your battle with the sword, and if you want to win over it, you can fight it with your Intent until the day you succeed."

"But, I suggest you do the opposite," Alex said.

"The… opposite?" the young man asked with a confused look on his face. He thought for a moment and asked, "Do you mean I shouldn't fight with it? Instead, I should… make friends with it?"

"Yes, exactly," Alex said. "Get close to the sword. Instead of trying to force it to submit you, ask it to. I'm sure the sword can see reason. Remember, the sword belonged to someone really strong before you, so it is strong as well."

The young man nodded. "Make friends, right," he thought. "Will that happen fast?"

Alex shrugged "I wouldn't know that," he said. "It all depends on you."

"Ok, ok," he muttered, getting ready to start. He took a deep breath and paused. "What if it doesn't work?"

"Then you go back to the old way," Alex replied. "Fight and force it to submit."

"Right, I should do that," he said. "I can do that."

He sat still and took a deep breath once more before his Qi, Spiritual sense, and even Intent covered the sword that lay by his side. He started talking to it, saying sweet greetings and whatnot.

Alex wasn't sure what he was saying, but he was sure he was doing whatever felt right to him.

He looked around where he was, the forest still around them, and a lake in the distance. Some people passed close by there, but no one ever came to challenge him.

His cultivation base scared most of them away. "I can't leave now," he thought with a sigh. "Not while he's focused on this."

He wondered how long he was going to have to remain here while the young man learned. He wanted to go and find more fighters, but it seemed that would have to wait.

There was so much of the land to still go through, but there was also a year and a half left. So, he sat down on the grass close to the young man and kept waiting.

Night fell soon enough, the silver moon hidden behind the clouds made the night a lot darker than usual.

Alex could still feel the same intensity from the young man beside him, but by now he was getting used to it. Faint lights glowed from the sword sometimes, but that didn't mean anything to Alex.

He called out Godslayer once to ask if he was indeed right in what he had told the young man to do. He knew he was, but he still wanted to make sure.

"The spirit usually copies the Intent of its master," Godslayer said. "Pray that this sword's master wasn't particularly hard to deal with. If not, it should be easy."

Alex nodded. He wanted to ask what Godslayer's master was like, but he felt that was somehow disrespectful. At the same time, Godslayer was always the master in all the times he was held by someone, so Alex wasn't even sure if there was one.

A few hours before dawn, when the night was at its darkest, Alex heard something. His spiritual sense moved out immediately to see what it was that made the noise and saw a group of 8 people making their way through the broken forest.

'That's no ragtag group of people,' Alex thought. Every single one of the people he just sensed wore a robe of white and blue patterns. They were all from the same house or sect.

Their cultivation base ranged from the Saint Core realm at the youngest to one with Saint Transformation 1st realm cultivation base. Alex remembered the person as someone who had fought against him multiple times, winning every time.

He had disappeared some 2 months ago and never returned.

Their trajectory changed after sensing Alex's spiritual sense. They sensed him as well and made their way toward him. They made a swift journey to him, arriving not even a minute later.

"Greetings, Your Majesty. I did not expect to see you here, away from the river bank," the older man with the Saint Transformation realm cultivation realm spoke. The rest of the people remained quiet, only bowing in greeting.

"I left that place," he said, looking at the group. "Are these your juniors?"

"Members of my sect," the man said with a smile.

"Why are you in a group? Are you helping them somehow?" Alex asked, wondering if helping was even possible. If someone interrupted a challenge, one would have to lose points as a result.

"It helps the weaker ones last longer, and get more training in the secret realm," the man said. He looked at Alex for a moment and realized that Alex didn't understand. "If someone comes for them early after a rest, I challenge them before they can get to one of my sect members."

"It's a good way to ward those people off," the man said. "Sometimes, they just leave because they see me. Sometimes I interfere in fights if needed."

He turned back. "Don't worry, though. We're not like those groups that only seek to ruin your time in the secret realm."

Chapter 1594 Acceptance

The old man thought of fighting Alex once, but seeing Shan Wangjiu deep in concentration made him not want to disturb him. So, he left with his group, soon disappearing toward the lake in the distance.

Alex sat back, thinking to himself about what he had just heard about.

"So they've formed groups huh?" he spoke slowly to himself. "Was that why all the stronger ones left not long after fighting me?"

He had assumed they left because they'd had enough of his pills, but now that he heard another possibility, it sounded much more probable.

"What was that about 'those groups?'?" he wondered. 'Ruin my time here?'

Thinking a bit, he could imagine what sort of things people could do after coming together to form a large enough group. If one considered the secret realm a game, then playing together gave one a lot more advantages than playing alone.

"Should I look for people to go around with?"

As soon as the question came to him, Alex shook his head. One or two people he wouldn't mind, but a group of 5 or 10, or even more he couldn't handle. It would hamper his freedom a bit too much.

Like it or not, Alex was as much a lone wolf as the young man behind him claimed himself to be. At least in matters like these.

Not an hour after the sun rose in the east, Alex sensed a significant movement from the young man beside him. Turning around, he noticed him suddenly break out into beads of sweat.

The sword was actively attacking him this time around.

He saw the young man hold tightly onto the sword, even as the budding sword spirit assaulted his mind, dreading if he would accidentally let go.

If he let go of the sword, all the progress he had made over the past day would've been for none, and he would have to start all over again. While that would be fine, the young man understood that if he gave in now, the sword spirit would view him as a weakling who wasn't worthy of it.

The young man wanted to show that he was.

"You know who I am," he spoke out loud suddenly, surprising even Alex. "You have seen my journey. I was 15 when I found you. Not even 70 and I'm already in the Saint Soul realm. Could your previous master have done that?"

His pained face grimaced even more as the sword assaulted him even more. Talking about its previous master wasn't the correct way to gain its approval it seemed.

The young man did the bare minimum to not let it destroy him but never fought back. Fighting back was what he was going to do if nothing worked. For now, he still had his word.

"You wanna see the world? I can show you," the young man said. "You wanna fight the world? I can fight with you. Grow to be the greatest sword of all time? I can make you."

"All you have to do is say yes. Say yes and... and together we can conquer the world."

The young man's face let off a hint of relief. He took the opportunity to say a few more things to the sword. Make a few more promises.

And then, not even 10 minutes after he started speaking, he pulled a droplet of blood out of his forehead and let it fall onto the giant sword.

The sword drank the drop of blood and let out a shrilling cry, which surprised Alex as he could hear it too. It glowed a bright yellow, bright even in the morning sun, and then mellowed out until there was no light.

It kept a light hum for a few more seconds before that disappeared as well. And then the sword shrank. Slowly, it got smaller and smaller until it was only a meter long, the rest shrinking in proportion as well.

"No," the young man said with a grin. "I like you big."

The sword immediately shrank back to its original size and the young man stood up with the sword in hand. He moved it around, surprised how light it was, surprised that he didn't have a massive headache for just using it.

"Haha!" he laughed out loud. "I did it! Master, I did it."

"Congratulations," Alex said, happy to have seen such a thing happen. It was quite a sight to see, which he was sure not many would've seen in this world, much less experienced.

Seeing what he saw reminded Alex of the black sword in his own Soul Space, which he would be more than happy to make submit to himself, if not for already having Midnight.

He also left it alone for the possibility of finding exactly who had used it to kill Pearl's mother. All clues as of yet led Alex to the theory that during some conflict, it was the dead Empress that had killed the White Cat.

That was who had the sword last.

"Woohoo!"

The young man's cheerful shout brought Alex back to the present, making him smile at the young man's happiness. He swung his sword around, ignoring Alex for the moment, practicing a few things.

As he practiced, it became very clear to Alex that the young man had no idea how to even use a sword.

Alex didn't know if to laugh at him or feel pity. "Did you never try to use another sword before?" he asked. "A regular one."

"Why would I? I had one of the best swords out there," the young man said as he slashed diagonally with his sword, almost as if he was copying what Alex did with his new unnamed technique.

He couldn't watch it any longer.

"Stop! Stop!" Alex spoke, and the young man came to a halt.

"Hmm? Oh right," Shan Wangjiu said quickly. "Sorry, I was so excited with the sword. That was probably disrespectful to you, Master."

"It's not about disrespect," Alex said. "It's about your lack of sword skill. It seems as though you have trained in swordsmanship for 2 months during your whole life. The way you swing your blade, you will club a man to death before you manage to cut him down."

The young man nodded, understanding his shortcomings. "Is there something I can do about it?" he asked.

Alex nodded. "Of course," he said. "You just have to practice. I'll teach you and you can be a fine swordsman in no time."

The young man looked up. "You'll teach me?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said with a sigh. "Well, I'm only going to give you some pointers is all. I don't have time to train you all day. I have better things to do than that."

"That's fine," the young man said. "Whatever you can give me. Although, can I get that sword technique you have been using recently? That is what caught my eyes, and why I've been sticking around really."

"That is my creation, and I can't just hand it over to you."

Alex saw the young man's eyes drop in disappointment.

"But, I have quite a few other sword techniques I can teach you that aren't necessarily bad either."

Chapter 1595 A Show of Skill

As Shan Wangjiu swung away his days, Alex made him keep moving through the forest, to the lake and beyond into thick grassland that had more than seen their fair share of battles.

The open space gave way for more people to fight, and Alex managed to find someone after reset who was willing to fight him. The woman challenged him first.

She was with a group as well, although consisting of only 4 people, and had been another one of the people who had fought and won against him. She had to leave to protect her juniors from being needlessly challenged, but now that Alex had come to her himself, she was more than happy to fight with him again.

Alex brandished Midnight, accepting the challenge that was thrown at him.

The woman used no weapon, fighting only with her skills. She started the battle with a spinning spiral of gold and blue energy that she tossed at him.

The strength of the attack was strong enough that if he did nothing, he would most likely die. His physical strength alone wasn't enough to stop the attack, and he had to use Qi to protect himself.

But Alex felt stubborn.

He grinned, sending out a sword slash that exploded the moment it came into contact with the gold and blue energy.

At the same time, Alex moved to the side, sending another strike toward the girl.

Lightning filled her eyes before thunder filled her ears. A bolt of lightning flew in an arc that a sword slash would follow and got close to the woman.

It was stopped by the woman's armor that she wore underneath her robe. Still, she felt the force of the lightning strike, surprised by how strong the technique was.

Alex stood smiling, looking at the woman who failed to grasp why she, a Saint Soul 9th realm cultivator, was taking so much damage from someone who wasn't even Saint Soul 4th realm yet.

She assumed Alex was doing something here, perhaps using some incredible pill that only he had. She even imagined that he must have been hiding his cultivation base the entire time to play the pig in front of them all.

Whatever the case, she wanted to beat him even more now. She no longer fought for just the challenge.

Alex fought, in part for himself, and in part to show the Shan Wangjiu, who was watching from far away, what it was to be a sword fighter as a cultivator.

Due to the lack of close distance between cultivators during a battle, close combat techniques were mostly useless. Things such as footwork, momentum, balance, and a host lot of other things that were important to know as a swordsman were quite useless when it came to a cultivator battle.

He was still planning on teaching them to him, but he was also preparing him for real fights, which he mostly already knew.

Alex swung a fire slash at one of the incoming attacks that was barely stopped. Then he swung again, a water slash making for the woman.

A water serpent quickly formed around the woman, its tail striking all attacks that came toward her.

Alex saw that as an opportunity and stopped pouring Qi into Midnight. His sword carried only a white light that filled it as he swung it at the snake's tail.

The tail slammed the attack away, which was weaker than all other attacks that Alex had thrown at her, but the relentless attacks that came afterward made it hard for the woman to concentrate on her attack.

He was on the defensive, having to stay inside the blue serpent that wrapped around her and wait for an opening that Alex would give her.

But he never did.

Alex felt his head give a soft thump as the early signs of incoming headaches showed itself. So many attacks filled with Sword Qi, one after another, strained his Intent quite a lot.

It wasn't bad enough that a headache started right the moment he began sending them out, but if he kept at it, it was going to do so.

Still, he continued. He continued throwing attacks, training his Sword Intent to become stronger with each attack. The girl saw an opening or two to throw out her attacks, but on the whole, she was kept to the defensive.

She quickly realized that Alex was too strong for her when he wasn't just keeping himself to Sword Intent.

'Just a little more,' she told herself. 'Just a little more and his pill's effect will run out. Then he'll be weak and I'll win.'

She did not want to give up on the fight when she believed she was so close to victory.

At that very moment, she realized, she found a big enough opening. Alex had stopped attacking, allowing her to attack back. Whether it was a mistake or divine retribution for using a forbidden pill, she did not care.

She made a few hand gestures, causing her Qi to move in such a way that she was able to create a large golden bell above her head.

This was a technique that came from one of the players and was now one of the greatest techniques of her sect.

The bell fell on top of her, forming another defensive structure around her. But it wasn't all defensive at all.

She covered her fist with golden energy and punched the left side of the bell from inside. A loud and sonorous sound targeted Alex and Alex only.

It hit him, sending a wave of nausea that came as a result of the sound. It was a mental attack and the woman was sure he would lose because of it.

She saw no sign of a mental defensive artifact, so she was more than sure it was working.

Then, she moved to the right, slamming the other side of the bell, and sent out another sound. This time, however, instead of being a mental attack, it was a Qi attack.

The attack came in the form of a wave, threatening to destroy everything in its path.

Alex released the breath he had been holding all this time, and with it, he also released the sword strike he had been preparing.

The wave split into two out of nowhere, dispersing violently as if a rock to a flock of pigeons.

Before the woman could understand what had happened, the golden bell split into two and then her armor cracked apart as well.

Her chest opened wide with fresh blood leaking out of the wound and she fell to the ground, no snake or bell around her any longer.

The buzzing talisman was the least of her worries as the woman thrashed around in violent pain that made her nearly faint.

It was only Alex who arrived and fed her a pill that she was finally relieved from all of the pain.

"My apologies," Alex quickly said. "I was trying to hold back, but your sudden mental attack made me throw out a stronger attack than I had been expecting to."

Before the woman could say anything, he hoisted her onto her feet and let the rest of her group take care of her.

Without waiting for a reply, he walked away, taking Shan Wangjiu and his dropped jaw with him.

Chapter 1596 Points

Alex strode through a marsh, the stink of the water only masked by the flowers that seemed to grow here. Even though he hadn't been here for it, he still picked up a few flowers that were Alchemy ingredients.

It was a surprise to him they hadn't been destroyed yet.

Close to 10 months had passed since he had entered the secret realm, close to the day he would pass all of the Monarch's bets and earn himself a fortune, despite the circumstances he had put himself in early on.

Although, he had never given much thought to their bets. He always knew he was strong enough to survive for long. The only reason he even gave any thought to those bets was because of what he was going to get in return.

Shan Wangjiu fought with another cultivator in the back, his sword shining with a white outline as he slammed it onto the cultivator multiple times. Even though his Sword Intent itself wasn't as strong, the strength of his cultivation base alone made him quite a terrifying fighter.

Anyone who lasted this long had to be one.

Alex ignored the young man, making his way to find more fighters. Not many had made their way to him these past few months and he missed the constant battles he had during the first 6 months, even if they had been particularly tiring at times.

Once the sound of the fighting behind him stopped, Alex heard Shan Wangjiu call out to him. "Master! Master!"

Shan Wangjiu rushed to where he was and smiled at him. "I won!" he said with a toothy grin.

"Great," Alex said. "Now fight me."

Shan Wangjiu did his best to put up a fight, but against Alex, he was still too weak. Even Alex alone with Sword Intent was too strong for him now, let alone when he was using Qi.

Alex didn't hold back when it came to sword fighting against the young man as he used every opportunity during the fight to teach him. Outside of battles, he wanted to find others to improve his swords on.

The young man lost, but that was expected. Alex won his first battle of the day as well, and that was something good.

This was the method the two of them had come to settle on in the past 3 months. Every day after reset, they would go looking out for fighters.

Alex would fight the strong fighters, and Shan Wangjiu would fight the weaker ones. Whoever it was that fought, they would either win or lose their first battle of the day.

Then, they would challenge each other, gaining a free win for their first match of the day.

Until today, Alex had received only 1 Loss, only the one he received on the first reset. As for the young man, he didn't tell Alex how many losses he had, but he had lost around 7 times in the last few months he had been with him.

Together, they had managed to go over 100 days with only 7 losses in between them. That was quite impressive, Alex thought.

Alex took out his talisman and looked through it.

Name: Alex, King of the Southern Continent

Acquired Points: 31536

Losses: 1/30

Out of Bounds: 0/5

Origin: Southern Continent

"Hey, Shan," he called out. "How many points do you have?"

"Points?" the young man asked and quickly checked. "2483."

"And Loss?" Alex continued.

The young man simply smiled. "Don't worry about that, Master," he said. "I'll stay with you for much longer."

Alex shook his head. 'That's quite the disparity in points still," he thought. He hadn't given much thought to the points for a while now, but seeing how much he was gaining, he felt it wasn't right.

And he had indeed been right in thinking so.

He chuckled a little. "I unknowingly exploited the rules, it seems," he said out loud.

"Exploited? What do you mean, Master?" the young man asked.

"I have more points than that should be possible," Alex told him.

When the young man heard how many points Alex had, he thought he had heard him wrong. He asked him to double-check and was flabbergasted to learn it was real.

"But... but how?" he asked for an answer.

"Whoever made the rules messed up," Alex said. "Or maybe they simply didn't think so far ahead. They never imagined someone like me entering the secret realm."

The young man eyed him with confusion. He wanted him to talk more. Alex did.

"How do you earn points?" Alex asked him.

"Whenever I win a battle," the young man said. It was obvious.

"How many times can you battle?" Alex asked him.

"I don't think there's much of a limit to it." Shan Wangjiu propped his sword on his shoulder, wondering why Alex was asking such a simple question.

"If no one wanted to challenge you, how many times could you battle?" Alex asked.

The young man frowned. "If no one wanted to challenge me? Then none?" he asked.

"No one wants to challenge," Alex said. "Not that they won't accept if you challenge."

"Oh," the young man nodded and thought for a bit. "3 times," he answered. "That's the rule. You can only challenge 3 different times in a single day to earn points. All challenges after that do not give you points."

"Yes, and it is made that way so that a strong cultivator wouldn't exploit his strength and challenge whoever he can," Alex said. "It's a small deterrent to make him choose his first 3 fighters, instead of just challenging any weakling."

"But I ended up having people challenge me all day round, and even come back multiple days in a row. And best of all, I accepted every challenge," Alex said. "So, even on the worst days, I was making points after points."

"I don't think the ones who made the rules ended up thinking one could earn points like this, did they?" Alex asked.

"Hmm, maybe not," the young man said. "Or maybe they left behind a way to get points."

"Maybe," Alex said. "Still, I'm doing quite well thanks to them."

"You are, Master. Those many points and it hasn't even been—" Shan Wangjiu stopped speaking the moment he felt multiple spiritual senses pass through him and focus around them.

Alex looked around and saw a few people from outside the marsh make their way toward them. They landed in front of them, 3 men and 2 women. One of the men was almost as young looking as Alex and Shan Wangjiu, and two of the women looked to be not that old either.

Together, they smiled at Alex and Shan Wangjiu, but not a good smile. It was almost as if they hadn't recognized who he was.

That was not something Alex thought was still possible within the secret realm.

They looked in between the two of them, and with Shan Wangjiu's cultivation base being just 1 realm below Alex, the oldest man of them pointed toward him.

"You! Will you fight me to a duel?" he asked.

Shan Wangjiu hesitated a little seeing the man's Saint Transformation 1st realm cultivation base, but even then he nodded.

"I accept."

Chapter 1597 Wind

Alex saw the group glow up in smiles when Shan Wangjiu accepted the challenge. He took out his large sword and got ready to fight.

The old man stepped forward too and got ready to fight.

Alex watched the fight that never was a fight. It was one man dominating the other with his superior cultivation base. No one was surprised when the old man won in less than a minute.

When Shan Wangjiu had lost and was done with the fight, the old woman walked up front and challenged him.

The young man looked puzzled for a few seconds. "At least let me rest a little," he grumbled before accepting the challenge. The woman was much weaker than the old man, but she was still very much stronger than Wangjiu, and as a result, won her battle against him as well.

She fought for nearly 5 minutes, throwing at him everything she had. Shan Wangjiu came out of the fight breathing heavily. The fight had been short, but he was a little tired and felt drained.

Before he could properly rest, however, the stronger of the younger three, a girl challenged him.

Alex looked at what they were doing with a confused look. Were they trying to force Wangjiu to fight against their weaker ones while tired?

That was the only thing he could think of immediately, seeing the situation. The weakest of the 5 was still quite strong at around Saint Soul's 4th realm, so everyone would have an easy time winning even if they didn't do that.

The fight lasted for nearly 20 minutes, with the girl forcing Wangjiu to pour everything he had out into the battle. Even after he did so, he still lost.

As soon as he lost, just as Alex had expected, the fourth one rushed in and challenged the young man.

"Hell no!" Shan Wangjiu shouted at them. "I won't fight you."

The young man who had stepped forward to challenge with all smiles had his face darkened when he was rejected. He looked confused for a moment before releasing a sigh of understanding.

"We misjudged," he said to the others.

The last girl refused to believe they misjudged. She quickly walked up and challenged him Wangjiu, only to be berated before being rejected. The girl was angry, but she didn't put it out on him.

She turned around, returning to the group.

Wangjiu walked up to Alex, whispering in his ears. "They're mad or something," he said. "What sort of person gets angry after being refused?"

"The kind that doesn't get what they want," Alex said.

"Hmm..." the young man thought. "What do they want."

"As of yet, I'm not sure," Alex said. "But I have a hunch. If it is true, they'll challenge me next."

After talking for a bit, the older man came up to Alex and challenged him. Alex didn't accept or reject. Instead, he asked him a question.

"Do you guys care that I have all 3 of my rejections still left to give out?"

The old man looked at Alex in surprise. "You do?" he asked.

Alex nodded with a smile.

One could only refuse 3 times each day, so Alex had a hypothesis that the stronger people in the group were trying to whittle through the rejections so that the weaker ones could get their points, or even just have a chance to challenge someone weak when they found one.

"But just because I have one doesn't mean I will not accept," he said, drawing out Midnight from his storage. "I haven't met someone as strong as you in a while now. I'm not going to squander away my chances of training. Come on."

Their talisman buzzed and the battle was set.

The old one got ready to fight again, imagining it would be a very quick fight once again. He drew out no weapon of his own and threw out a casual punch that sent out a gust of wind that carried a force with it that didn't feel normal at all.

'Dao?' Alex wondered. He couldn't tell what Dao it was, or if it even was one. If it was, it would be a Wood Dao, and that was his weakest of all the elements.

He had no way of recognizing any of it. His sword flashed, a wave of Sword Qi getting rid of the wind. The old man gave a surprised look before clapping his hands together.

A low hum reverberated throughout the surroundings as it came for Alex. Alex covered his ears with Qi and his mind with spiritual energy.

He felt nothing after doing so. The old man paused again, confused about what was going on. He peered at Alex, trying to search for any sort of artifact that could be helping him, but he didn't recognize any of it.

At this point, the old man didn't know what to do. He pulled out a flat stick with intricate art on it. As if with a snap of a finger, he unfurled it into a beautiful paper fan.

"Oh," Alex said with a surprise. "That looks lovely."

The old man gave no heed to his words and readied an attack. At the same time, Alex put Midnight back into his storage, which confused the old man a little. But he didn't stop.

"I think I'll use this instead," Alex said, bringing out something. "I haven't used it ever in a fight though."

The old man's eyes went wide as Alex unfurled a fan of his own with pictures of clouds drawn upon it. From the fan, the old man could sense quite the intensity.

But beyond that, he could sense his own Dao from it.

"Dao of Wind?" he asked with a look that said he didn't understand what was happening. His eyes became stern and he sent a gust of wind.

Alex made a simple attacking gesture with his fan and winds of green flew out from it, flying toward the old man in the distance.

The two attacks fought each other, one born out of someone with a Dao, and one born out of an artifact that could create the Dao's aura.

In a match of equals, there was no doubt who it would be that would win the fight. There was no way for an artifact to ever be stronger than someone using the might of a Dao they learned.

After all, the heavens would be on their side in that fight.

However, even with the Dao, Alex's attack was stronger than the old man's. And the reason for that was very simple.

This was not a match of equals. Alex was in every way superior from the very start.

The wind of the fan destroyed the winds of the man and flew up to him to attack as well. Having learned the Dao of Wind, the man wasn't as hurt by it as he knew how to protect himself from it.

However, by the time he was ready for another attack, Alex had already taken out his sword once again.

"It's fun using the fan and all," he spoke, giving a gentle smile toward the man. "But I am a swordsman, so I must train with it. And I have much training to do, so don't lose very quickly, old man."

Chapter 1598 Volcanic Eruption

On the 402nd day after entering the secret realm, the ground shook in a roar.

Bird fled and the animals ran. Alex turned to look in the distance and saw a large mountain spew out lava high into the sky. A thick plume of smoke rose high into the sky, lightning crackling from it as if the heavens themselves were angry.

"What was that?" Shan Wangjiu, who had been busy practicing his sword, turned to look in that direction.

"A volcano erupted," Alex said. "I've never before seen such a sight."

He slowly flew to the sky. Not just him, but everyone did the same.

Wangjiu stopped practicing and started watching the sky as it was filled with dark clouds. Many other people were surprised by the suddenness of the situation as well.

"It's in the west," Wangjiu said softly. "Should we go check?"

"I already did," Alex said, turning to look at the young man. "Your spiritual sense doesn't extend as far, does it?"

Shan Wangjiu could only shake his head in horror. He couldn't believe how Alex could see that far. It was over a hundred kilometers away easily. He could only shake his head to get rid of the thought.

There were many things weird with Alex and just one more of it made no difference anymore.

"Why would a volcano erupt so suddenly?" he asked. "I would've expected some rumblings before it did so, but there was nothing."

"It didn't," Alex said quickly. "Zhao Boqin and someone I have never seen before are fighting there. They caused the volcano to explode."

"Zhao Boqin?" the young man turned toward Alex, confused.

"A member of the Talon legion," Alex said. "With Saint Transformation 4th realm cultivation base."

The young man gasped in disbelief. "There was someone that strong in the secret realm?" he asked.

"There is," Alex said. "What I'm more surprised by is that there is someone in here that hasn't lost to him immediately."

Alex could see the ongoing fight not just with his senses, but also his eyes. At a distance of nearly 120 kilometers, Zhao Boqin used a spear to fight a woman with long black hair, with bangs covering all of her forehead to her eyes.

"Fight me like a Legionnaire, Hongxi," Zhao Boqin shouted as he shot a golden dragon through his spear. "Stop running away."

The woman disappeared into the sky above her, hidden in the mist. There she masked herself, fighting back against the golden dragon.

Alex was curious about what was going on. He was more curious that she was another legionnaire. 'Her cultivation base,' he thought. Somehow he was sensing Saint Transformation 2nd realm.

'That shouldn't be right,' he thought. 'How could she survive against him if that was the case?'

But his mind immediately spewed out the possibility. 'She's fighting against someone stronger than herself,' he thought. Even amongst players, this was something special. Only a select few had it, and they could improve their prowess by a certain few realms.

Skipping a realm or two using Dao or certain techniques to improve one's strength of output was normal. But having it be so in everyday life was very, very special.

Some could only do so with a single realm, but there was one man he had met who could skip nearly 3 realms.

Alex couldn't tell if this girl was completely skipping 2 realms or not, but she was close. She was on the defensive in the battle against Zhao Boqin, rarely attacking back, if only to make more distance between the two of them.

Zhao Boqin roared at that and charged even stronger.

'I didn't think he was someone with such a high temper,' Alex thought.

The battle lasted a little longer, but the two fighters left his area of spiritual sense, so he couldn't see them any longer.

"They're gone," Alex said. But the ashen sky remained. Ash would fall from the sky soon enough and cover the ground in soot.

"Let us move too," Alex said. "I saw a few people in that direction. We can see if they are willing to fight."

Shan Wangjiu said nothing but nodded.

Even as they walked, the sky grew red with the sun itself appearing as such. The volcanic eruption was large enough that the ash would soon cover most of the secret realm.

"We're going toward the volcano?" the young man asked after seeing what direction they were walking toward.

"I wasn't intending to," Alex said. "A group of them just happened to be there. But since we are going in that direction, I might as well make use of it. Volcanic soot contains quite a bit of nutrition, so I should gather some."

The young man simply made a sound of agreeing.

As they walked, Alex saw a man walking in the same direction.

"Another fight?" Shan Wangjiu spoke directly into Alex's mind.

"I don't know," Alex replied. "Let's wait and see."

As they continued walking, it became clear soon enough that the two of them were walking in the same direction, and most likely to the same destination as well.

The man arrived close to them and recognized Alex. "Your Majesty," he said softly, his face changing an expression that Alex wasn't sure he witnessed correctly. Even if he did, he did not know what he witnessed.

He recalled the man vaguely as one of the people who fought against him and won. That was very early on though, so the young man wasn't that strong at all. Just Saint Soul 7th realm in cultivation base.

"Greetings, brother," Alex spoke back to him.

"May I ask what you're doing here, Your Majesty?" the young man asked. "Are you two like a group or something?"

"Not exactly," Alex said. "He just likes following me."

Shan Wangjiu shrugged as that was in a way the truth.

"Oh," the man responded. "I'm on my way to see if there are people I can fight. Do you want to join me? 3 gives it a much higher chance."

Alex thought for a bit and shrugged.

"Sure."

There was no point in not joining.

Each person got 3 rejections each day, and if they rejected a challenge, they wouldn't get rejected again. As such, having 3 or more people made it invaluable to find people to fight and not get a Loss in one's account.

There was a day Alex had received a loss like that. It was only a week ago, and they had found no one in their journey who wanted to fight him. Everyone rejected and in the end, Alex decided to take the loss for that.

Shan Wangjiu wanted to take the loss, but Alex could tell that the young man didn't have much longer to stay here if he continued losing. So, he took one for him.

If 4 people were together, one could go to a particular group and challenge everyone until their rejections ran out. Then they could fight.

Alex had learned that over 3 months ago after fighting a group of 5 individuals.

3 wasn't as good as 4 was, but it was better than 2 for sure.

They arrived next to the group some hour later and found nearly 20 people gathered there.

Chapter 1599 Chaos

The sky was a tinge of red in what was mostly black. Darkness had enveloped the land hours after the volcano's eruption.

Alex and the tow walked through the falling ash that gathered around their feet and arrived at their destination; a group of 20 cultivators whose cultivation base went from Saint Foundation 8th realm to Saint Soul 2nd realm.

None of them seemed part of the same group or even part of the same Kingdom. Each one wore a different color robe, and some even seemed like they were rogue cultivators.

'So weak,' Alex thought. He had come to challenge stronger people, but it seemed he was mistaken. None of them were as strong as he had hoped they would be.

Alex didn't feel like challenging any of them.

There people there stirred at his sight and some of them quickly greeted him. Most of them were surprised to see him there.

Alex was only about to reply to their greetings when he was cut off.

"I challenge you!" the man that he had arrived with challenged the strongest of the group. The girl that had a cultivation base of Saint Soul 2nd realm looked at the young man with a slightly angry look before rejecting him.

The man said nothing and moved to the second strongest one. "I challenge you!" he pointed and spoke.

That person rejected him as well.

The young man wasn't done yet.

"I challenge you!"

"I challenge you!"

"Fight me!"

"Come on, let's fight."

"Let us see what you've got."

The man didn't stop at all, going through the entire 20 people before he was completely rejected. But somehow that didn't despite the man. He stood tall with a grin on his face.

"Your Majesty, your turn," the man stepped aside.

Alex thought for a bit and was about to say something when Shan Wangjiu looked at the first girl.

"Will you fight me? You seem as strong as me," he spoke to the girl. He wanted to use every possible instance to fight someone close in power to him.

Not only that, he hadn't done the fight of the day either. It was still late in the afternoon, so he had over 20 hours to search for more fights, but the faster he found someone he could challenge, the better it was.

If not, he would have to accept challenges from people that he couldn't win against. He did not want to do that just yet.

Not when he had barely any more Losses left.

The girl looked at him without a word, considering the challenge wordlessly before shaking her head. She rejected that fight as well.

"The next one. That one," the other man pointed Shan Wangjiu toward a man who was behind the girl who had just been rejected.

"No," Wangjiu said. "He's a little too weak. I want to fight someone strong like her."

"Just do it," the man said. "Why are you here if you won't do it?"

"I just follow His Majesty, nothing else," the young man said.

The man looked at him and sighed. "You're not useful at all," the man said before turning to Alex. "Your Majesty?"

Alex thought for a bit and asked. "Are you guys all done with your day's losses?"

The girl shook her head. "Not yet," she said. "We're hoping to meet someone we can win against so that none of us would have to lose."

"You have 20 people," Alex said. "You will last the next 11 months if all of you share your losses."

The girl shook her head. "That would be true if we had no loss. But we're weaker cultivators and have been relentlessly challenged by stronger cultivators. Now, we don't have that many losses available to us."

"What we do have, we have to make use to last as long as possible," the girl said.

Alex hadn't thought of it that way and nodded a little. "So you haven't fought for today. I was hoping to find someone to fight, but it seems I won't have the chance."

"I'm sorry, Your Majesty," the girl spoke and bowed a little.

Alex shrugged. There was nothing he could do here besides forcing them to fight, and he didn't want that.

"You won't fight, Your Majesty?" the man next to him asked.

"No," Alex said. "I'll see if I can find someone else."

"I see," the man said. "Well, you won't have to go far away. You can fight one of them right here."

Just as he said that Alex turned around, sensing an aura that was quickly moving in this very direction. His spiritual sense covered them and it was a man and two women who were flying in this direction with an incredible speed.

None of the 3 of them were from the same group or sect; Alex could tell at least that.

They arrived and landed next to the man, their faces in a wide grin. "Woah! So many," one of the girls said excitedly before turning toward Alex. "Oh, His Majesty is here too."

Alex was a little curious about how everything was going to play out next. He had an idea where everything was going, so he had to just wait and see.

After they greeted him, they turned toward the group of people, and the girl challenged the strongest girl.

Challenged for the third time, the girl from the large group frowned and rejected the challenge. But immediately the newly arrived man requested a battle as well.

That the girl couldn't reject.

She reluctantly accepted and fought. Against the group of strong individuals, she lost very quickly.

Having won his fight of the day, the man laughed excitedly. But it only lasted as long as it took for one of the girls to call out his name.

"Do it already!" the girl said and the man nodded.

Then, he challenged another person. He was rejected by the next person in line and didn't want to lose. And then, the man moved on to another.

The girl who had just lost understood what was happening. Panic filled her heart at once.

"I challenge you!" the girl turned to one of her friends at once.

The group of 4 realized that she realized as well. "Faster! She'll go through them quickly!" the man who came with Alex shouted.

Chaos began.

A race began to see what would happen faster. Would the outsiders challenge them first after getting rid of their possible rejection, or would the group manage to get done with everyone's first fight by the time it had all ended?

Alex watched in amazement as challenges were thrown around one after another, the grown-up men and women acting like children to do so.

In the end, the outsiders managed to give 4 of the 20 people Losses before everything was calm once more. The 20 of them glared at the 4 of them, and some even glared at Alex and Shan Wangjiu.

Then, the four people turned toward Alex as well.

Alex grimaced. It was fine if they challenged him, but if they challenged Wangjiu, it was very much possible that he would be taken out of the secret realm.

Alex doubted he had any more Loss he could afford to gain.

Chapter 1600 Green Flames

4 Challengers and 2 possible rejections meant Shan Wangjiu would have to fight someone here.

"I challenge you," the man who had come there with Alex and Wangjiu was the first to send out a challenge.

And to Alex's surprise, the man pointed at him.

"You wish to challenge me?" Alex couldn't help but ask curiously. He had expected the challenge to fall on the weaker of the two.

"Yes," the man said. "Do I still get pills when I win?"

"You do," Alex said, hiding his relief from his voice.

'This is good,' he thought. 'As soon as I win, I can challenge Wangjiu and lose to him. He can get saved on getting however few Losses he can still get.'

The thought was fleeting, but it brought Alex some sense of relief. He had been about to accept the challenge when he heard someone else speak next to him.

"Do you want to fight me?" one of the girls with Saint Soul 5th realm cultivation base called out to Wangjiu.

Alex didn't turn around to look at her or Wangjiu, but his spiritual sense reached out to him and told him what he planned.

'I'll finish it quickly. Drag on the rejection and I should be done by then,' he told the young man. Once finished, he turned back to his own challenger and spoke.

"I accept."

"I accept."

Almost at the same time, Shan Wangjiu's voice floated next to him, almost like an echo, surprising Alex.

"What are you doing?" Alex asked, turning to look at the young man. He hadn't realized when it was, but over the past half a year he had been with him, Alex truly had ended up thinking of the young man as more than just an acquaintance.

"What's the point of rejecting, master?" the young man asked with a smile on his face. "I came here to fight and grow. Can't do that without actually fighting, now can I?"

Alex felt a little stunned, and then he smiled.

"You're right," he thought. "You don't need me to save you."

"No, you don't," the young man said excitedly. "I'm not so weak that I will lose without putting up a good fight."

"Your Majesty," the young man that challenged him spoke. "You should focus on your own battle."

He attacked after giving only moments for Alex to pull his attention back into their battle.

Four horses made of dense Fire Qi galloped from in front of the man, running toward Alex at a furious speed. Alex only punched once, four golden spears forming at his punch, each easily targeting the four horses to destroy them.

Not a shred of the horses remained.

The young man looked surprised, but it only lasted for a moment before a serious expression replaced it. He brought out an artifact.

A copper lantern with a black roof and a golden handle at the top with 6 sides of glass hung from the man's hand, with a small flame of green fire burning inside of it without any source.

Alex looked at the flame in quiet curiosity. It reminded him of the Zhou family's White Flame back in the Western Continent before it did Phoenix fire.

'A different type of flame?' Alex wondered. He wondered too what the properties of the flame might be. As an alchemist, he was told he would need unique flames to help him during his Alchemy sessions for better results.

Would this sort of flame help him in any way?

The young man poured Qi into his lantern and one side of the glass opened up, releasing a green flaming bird that flew out of it and charged toward Alex.

The bird seemed nearly corporeal, its form more real than any beasts he had seen made out of Qi. The bird was a hawk with nearly 3 meters of wingspan. Green flames burned from the corner of its eyes that stared at Alex.

The hawk flew right toward him.

Alex did everything in his hand to hold himself back from attacking the bird or destroying it. The only thing he did was make his body more durable with Qi and then let the bird smash into him.

Green flames covered him. Hot fire burned at every inch of his body, prickling all over his skin even though he had the True Fire Dao.

The flames were hot, much hotter than normal flames, but nowhere near hot enough to compare to the Phoenix fire. Also, while it pricked all over his body, it didn't exactly hurt.

The flame had a higher temperature, but that alone should not have made it special. One could just use a technique that increased the temperature of flames or even just use a Dao.

There was something about the fire that was abnormal for sure.

Alex looked for understanding in his Flame Dao and reached it in the Dao of Burning.

Burning.

The fire burned for much longer than normal.

'So that's it,' Alex realized.

Despite the temperature of the fire, it didn't burn what it was on. The parts that it consumed, it consumed slower so that the flames could last for much longer.

'It takes time to burn through things, so the heat ends up dealing more wounds than normal,' Alex thought. 'Not very useful for Alchemy.'

It wasn't even very useful for anything for him given that he had the Dao of Burning in his True Fire Dao.

With but a thought, the flames vanished from all around him. Countering the green fire's traits with his Fire Dao, Alex easily got rid of it all as if it never existed.

Darkness returned in the ash-covered land as Alex stood there with no harm to his body at all.

Everyone, including Shan Wangjiu and his challenger who were supposed to fighting on the other side, looked at him. Some had eyes of fear, some of confusion.

None expected what had happened to happen.

"Your majesty," the young man slowly called out before gulping heavily. "Are you okay?"

"I see," Alex said. "I must have scared you all. I was only inspecting the green fire. No need to get scared. My talisman would've saved me had I needed the help."

The young man in front of him couldn't believe it. His lantern was something he gained after killing someone long ago, who he now guessed was a player. Since then, since he refined the artifact, there hadn't been anyone who was his equal, or weaker than him that could stand those flames.

And yet... Alex had somehow managed to do that while being nearly 4 realms weaker than him. How was that possible at all?

"This is your first battle of the day, isn't it?" Alex asked the man.

The man listlessly nodded. He had been challenging everyone, but everyone had rejected him. He had paved the way for his fellow cultivators to gain the points.

"A shame," Alex said. "I do not know how many losses you have gathered in the past year, but here you will have to gain one more."

"No," the man said softly, the possibility not making sense to him.

"Unfortunately," Alex replied. "You lost your right to win the moment you challenged me."

Chapter 1601 Shan Wangjiu’s Battle

Alex half-heartedly fought his challenger, using Sword Intent alone to fight him. His Sword Intent was just strong enough to match Saint Soul 7th Realm fighters, so it was enough in his eyes.

Most of his attention was focused on Shan Wangjiu who had resumed his fight.

His giant silver sword glowed with Sword Intent, now stronger than ever and matching his cultivation base of Saint Soul 2nd realm.

Fighting against a Saint Soul 5th realm cultivator though was not easy even with it.

The girl used a rather unorthodox weapon. Her two hands wore two massive metal claws, each of which had 4 golden blades coming out of them.

The girl swung her hand and golden slices flew through the air.

Wangjiu prepared his sword, slicing in an arc, sending a wind slash flying in the direction of the 4 golden slices.

The attack he used was the sword technique which was the first good sword technique Alex had learned. It was the Elusive Heavenly Sword technique, which consisted of 3 different Sword slashes.

One used regular Qi, the 2nd one used weaker Wood Qi which could only be used by someone with an Inferior Wood Spiritual Root, and finally one last slash that was the most powerful of all but required one to have a Superior Wood Spiritual Root.

Shan Wangjiu had that and two more superior roots.

The wind attack struck the incoming 4 slashes at once, destroying them all. Carrying his Sword Intent along with them, the attack was strong enough so that nothing followed through.

Shan Wangjiu activated his movement technique. A burst of energy sent him propelling forward for a short distance. He had control over which direction he moved toward, but little in terms of adjustments.

He brandished his sword high above him and slashed down as he arrived next to her.

The girl moved, dodging the incoming attack, but it had been close. The speed at which her opponent moved was not something she could react to in time if she had been careless.

'So fast,' she thought. It was fortunate he made no changes to the course he moved at or she would've been hit.

She swung her claws again, sending more slashes flying toward the young man.

Shan Wangjiu struck aside the slashes before moving toward the girl at a brisk speed. He once again propelled forward in a burst of energy, and this time the distance was too close for the girl to dodge.

She placed her two claws above her, stopping the incoming slash.

Metal rang as the sword hit the 8 blades and the girl grunted. 'So heavy,' she thought in surprise. It was rarely that she met someone using such a heavy sword, and not a single one of them had been this heavy.

Her feet moved, kicking toward the young man. She kicked him in the stomach, but at the same time, lightning shocked her as well.

Wangjiu flew back, crashing onto the ash-covered land, sending it flying everywhere. He felt a burning pain in his stomach where he could feel metal Qi dissipating slowly.

The attack the girl had made had been a random one, but it showed the disparity between the two of them. She was stronger than him easily, and he had to be careful.

The girl on the other hand was hurt much less, but it was still damaged. She was furious in thought that this damage had come for her from someone 3 realms lower than her.

But it felt as if he was 2 realms lower than her. When adding on his Sword Intent, it was as if he was only a realm lower than her.

'What is wrong with these two?' she wondered, her eyes glancing at Alex who was to the side, playing with his challenger. She had joined the group after being defeated by that same man, and now he was being played with.

'We should've never come here,' she thought.

Her distraction lasted not much longer as she saw a red sword slash fly toward her. Sword Slashes were dangerous, so she focused her attention on it, ready to strike it away.

She was a little late, but not enough that she couldn't protect herself. She used her gauntlet with claws again, using the technique carved within it to send out more blade slashes.

The Fire slash struck the golden claw slashes, but this time something was different. The clash resulted in an explosion that rattled the sky. The thunderous sound of the explosion caught her off guard and she even felt a bit of force from it attack her.

'What the hell was that?' she wondered, only for a moment before panic filled her. Through the explosion, through the smoke, Shan Wangjiu propelled himself forward, arriving in front of her.

Water Qi encircled his blade and he slashed, sending a torrent of water down on the girl. The girl protected herself, but it was a little late this time.

The water struck her, sending her flying away. She only managed to stop it a distance away.

Angry, small flowers blossomed around the girl. At first, there were 2, then 4, then 8. Soon there were 16 flowers, that became 32.

More emerged, becoming 64.

Shan Wangjiu wasn't sure what was going on, but he understood somehow that this was a very strong technique.

The flowers the woman made doubled to become 128. Each one was a bellflower, opening up like an upside-down golden bell around the woman. The petals split off from each of the flowers, becoming their own thing.

Then, the girl pointed at the young man and the petals followed her finger.

Hundreds of petals, made of Metal Qi rushed toward the young man like a swarm of insects. The young man stood in the air in panic and only managed to raise his sword in time before he was struck.

Golden color filled the black sky as the torrent of flowers crushed him from all sides. The girl sent the petals until none remained. She did not hold back at all.

If the young man was injured, he would be saved by the talisman. She was sure of that.

The golden light remained in the sky for a moment before dimming, but not all light dimmed. In the lack of the golden light, one light remained.

A green, mostly transparent light that covered the young man in a bubble around him. The young man held his sword in front of him, which too glowed green right now.

The green light of the sword faded and the bubble around him disappeared. The young man looked out from the barrier, breathing heavily. He was more scared than he was hurt.

"It worked!" he shouted softly, surprised even himself. He looked at the sword in glee. "It worked! You did it!"

The sword hummed in silent response.

After refining the sword, the young man had figured out the technique carved into the sword. It was a defensive technique that could be prepared in advance and then launched in battle without having to prepare it once again.

Ever since learning that, the young man had practiced it many times, but one thing had been in his mind all that time.

If he could prepare the technique beforehand, did he have to be the one to use it? The answer had made itself clear today.

He didn't.

The Sword Spirit could use the technique as well.

Chapter 1602 Learn

Shan Wangjiu's excitement didn't lower even as he returned to the fight. He fought, giving his all to the battle, and tried his best to win.

In the end, the cultivation base disparity between him and his opponent made it a little difficult for him to do so. He lost in the end, not because he couldn't fight anymore, but because the talisman he wore deemed that he had lost in the match between the two.

After the girl got used to his tricks, she rarely managed to let him get close, and the barrage of attacks that came afterward sealed his fate.

The group of 4 quickly left before Alex challenged them in revenge or just for point, leaving the rest of them behind.

"Are you alright?" Alex asked Shan Wangjiu who slowly walked back toward him.

"I'm fine," Wangjiu said, wiping the ashes from his clothes. "Did you see that, master? My sword used the technique on its own."

"That I did," Alex said with a hint of a smile forming on his face. "I've had Midnight for a while now, and even it hasn't done something like that, not that I can think of an opportunity for it to."

Wangjiu started paying attention to his sword again, happily speaking to it.

"How many more Losses?" Alex asked him.

"Don't worry, Master. I will—"

"How many?" Alex asked again, this time his voice stern.

The young man paused, realizing the seriousness of his question. He sighed in the end, taking out his talisman before answering.

"1 more."

Alex nodded silently. "I don't have much to teach you anymore," he said. "But since you followed me all this time to learn about my nameless technique, I will do you the honor of giving you your final Loss tomorrow."

"I will be showing you the technique I created. Make sure to do your best to learn what you can from it," Alex said.

The young man's face turned firm, all forms of excitement melting away from him as only grim expression remained. "Tomorrow?" he asked for a moment before shaking his head. "No matter. I will learn what I can."

Alex nodded back.

He turned around to look at the group of 20 that were together on the ashfallen ground, all of whom were still filled with nervousness and anxiety regarding what had just happened that day.

Seeing Alex turn to them, their panic returned in full fury and a few of them began bracing them for a battle.

Alex's eyes went to the girl with the Saint Soul 2nd realm cultivation base.

"Do you mind if we spend the night with you all here?" he asked them. "Just until noon tomorrow."

The girl frowned a bit and Alex quickly added.

"We will leave before the reset happens."

The girl could only sigh. "We can refuse your request just as much as we can reject your challenge, Your Majesty," she said softly. "Please stay. We will consider it our honor."

Alex smiled and sat close by where everyone was gathered.

Shan Wangjiu sat too but away from Alex to focus on the last day he had in this secret realm. At least for the next 30 years.

Alex talked to the girl, trying to learn a bit more about the group, and how people that were not aligned with each other were together here at all.

"We don't belong to the same sect or family, Your Majesty," the girl answered. "But we do have the same goal, which is why we stick together."

"And what goal is that, if I may ask."

The girl shrugged. "To stay in here as long as you can," she said.

Alex was a little stumped. He gave a weird look before trying to think of what that meant. "But you don't fight to gain points, do you?" he asked.

"No, we don't care about points," the girl answered. "Just how long we stay in here."

"But the ranking outside is with points unless I'm mistaken somehow," Alex said. He didn't believe he was wrong, but what would he know? He was an outsider.

"The ranking outside indeed considers points as the system of ranking, Your Majesty," the girl answered. "But not our sects. Not our houses."

Alex's eyes narrowed before widening in understanding. "Ah, I see," he said. "Is there some sort of ranking back in your sect based on how long you last?"

"For some, yes," the girl answers. "Each one's situation is different, you see Your Majesty. In my instance, my Nine Rings sect has promised to give us rewards depending on how long we last inside the secret realm."

"So, I plan on lasting for as many days as I can," the girl answered. "The longer I can last, the best the reward I can get."

"I see," Alex said. "I wish you luck."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," the girl replied. "I will need it."

The girl went on to tell him how hard it had been for them to stay for long. Those 4 that came during the afternoon weren't the only ones that were hunting for groups like theirs.

They went around searching for them as they were weaker and they liked hunting weaker ones as they would last longer because of that. Their group had been hunted like that nearly 20 different times.

Their group had initially consisted of nearly 30, but after so many targeted attacks, they had dropped to 20. And they were constantly lowering in number.

"Most stop after getting a single victory, since that is all that they want," the girl said. "But there are some, like the ones that we saw today who like to get rid of us as fast as they can. They just like attacking us regardless of whether that would help them or not."

Alex nodded vaguely. He talked for a bit longer and in that time 3 more people came to their group to challenge them.

The people only challenged some of the weaker fighters, who no longer had any reason to reject their challenges.

The fight lasted not for long, but the people who came did nothing more after winning and left.

The morning sun shone through the sky, the volcanic clouds already disappearing to almost nothing. The sky still seemed to be filled with smoke, but it mattered little for Alex and the others.

Alex cultivated the entire night and cultivated even as the sun moved up on the horizon. As it got closer and closer to noon, the girl and the others started looking at Alex and Shan Wangjiu warily.

Alex sighed in the end, knowing he couldn't stay there any longer.

"We should be leaving," he said as he stood up.

The girl said nothing else but a small farewell as she bowed toward him. Then the two men flew away, leaving the group by themselves.

"Where do you want to go?" Alex asked Shan Wangjiu.

The young man looked from the sky and saw an open grassland in the distance next to a giant chasm. They landed there and waited for the reset.

"Have you truly taught me everything, master?" the young man asked.

"Everything I can teach as a namesake master," Alex said. "You're not my direct disciple, so I have no reason to pass you everything."

The young man chuckled. "Would be nice though," he said. "What are you still holding back, if I may ask."

Alex thought for a moment and nodded. "You have the Wood, Fire, and Water Spiritual roots, so of those I have taught you everything I know or is useful. But of the techniques that are from other elements or have no need for an element, I have taught you nothing."

Alex pulled out Midnight, which shined with golden light. Alex rotated his wrist around him, moving the sword in an arch, like the hands of a clock.

5 golden swords formed like images left behind by midnight. "This is a technique I couldn't teach you, even though I wanted to," Alex said. The Pente-Sword technique flew out past the young man, flying into the chasm where it struck something with a damning boom at the bottom.

Alex snapped his finger and 74 different swords flew out around him, forming an array of swords circling above him.

Alex let go of Midnight and it flew up to the front, becoming the spearhead of the formation.

"This is a technique that you simply cannot learn because you do not have enough swords to learn it," Alex said. "Although I might end up providing you its weaker version."

The swords all flew back into Alex's storage. All but one.

Midnight remained, and Alex grasped it again.

The young man looked forward to what he was going to see next. An Earth-based sword technique? A Metal-based sword technique? Or a special sword maneuvering skill?

All such thoughts left the man's mind immediately as he saw what Alex did next.

Alex covered the sword in another type of energy, but it was not one that he had ever seen being used like this.

The sword glowed a light white as Spiritual energy covered the sword, forming its shape like a glove to a hand.

"This is one you can learn," Alex said. "But I will not teach you. Consider this my greed to be the only one to use it."

The spiritual energy dissipated from the sword, forcing the young man to gulp at the impossibility of it all. He couldn't imagine such a thing was even possible.

Both of their talismans buzzed at once as the reset was there.

"Finally, there is my new nameless technique," Alex said. "I won't teach it to you, but learn what you can from it."

The young man nodded furiously.

"Your final hour in this secret realm is here," Alex said. "We shall begin."

Chapter 1603 Shan Wangjiu’s Final Hour

Alex stood on the barren land, the chasm to his left. He held Midnight in his right hand, the dark blade with glittering white specks in it made from starforged tungsten.

He stood calm and collected, as if not a single thought concerned him at this moment.

On the other side of him, with the chasm to his right stood Shan Wangjiu. His gray robe flapped in the wind, a look of nervousness and excitement both filling him from head to toe.

He held his sword in front of him which was nearly twice the size of Midnight.

"I'm ready," he spoke with no audible hesitation in his voice.

Alex cracked a small smile. "Then watch carefully."

Shan Wangjiu poured every ounce of his Qi into his sword and it drank it all. It consumed the Qi until it could accept it no longer. Full, the budding sword spirit was half aware that it could use the technique carved into it, should that be necessary.

His face grimaced as Alex started using Qi. What was he doing? How much Sword Intent was he using? What elements was he using?

The young man tried to see it all, learn it all. That was why he was here after all. To learn. To understand what it was that made Alex's technique seem so strong.

The technique that had made him decide to call him master.

The young man was slightly disappointed to see rays of golden light as Metal Qi was being used in it. He had seen those glows before but this was the first time he actively tried to figure out every step.

He was disappointed because someone without any Metal Spiritual would have no chance of using the technique should he ever figure out how exactly it worked.

'Wait,' Wangjiu thought as something caught his eye. Something he hadn't noticed until now.

The Qi being used was of Metal element certainly, but it didn't just come from Alex. It came from the atmosphere itself. From the air, from the ground.

'Dao,' the young man understood. 'He's using Dao.'

If it was Dao, then the young man had a chance. Without a Metal Spiritual root, it was nearly impossible to learn any Metal Dao, the young man knew. And that was what gave him hope.

It was nearly impossible.

Not absolutely.

'If there's a chance, I will find it,' he thought.

His thought lasted only for a split second as he saw Alex's sword move. He got ready for the attack as Alex swung his sword.

And then…

Part of the cliff crumbled and fell into the chasm behind Shan Wangjiu. He stood still, unsure of what happened. He slowly moved his head to the right until he was looking behind him.

He saw a large gouge on the cliff until the end where it crumbled. He gulped a little, looking at the damage.

He hadn't even seen the attack coming.

Judging the trajectory of the attack, the young man knew that it must've passed right next to his hands. Yet he never sensed it at all. Was that what happened to all the people who fought against this sword technique?

He gulped.

All of this time, he had been on the outside watching where he could see the challengers get taken out by the sword strike. He had always wondered how good the technique must've been to do so.

This was the first time it was used against him and he finally understood why they were all caught off guard as if unprepared.

For all his preparations, he hadn't seen it coming at all. No, there was no attack at all. Was there? The young man started getting confused.

"Did you get that?" Alex asked from the front.

The young man could only breathe. "It… I didn't see it at all. It was like… like it didn't exist at all. Not until it struck the ground behind me," the young man said. "Did it teleport or something?"

Alex chuckled. "Nothing of that sort," he said. "I have just been working on compressing it as much as possible. It's also fast on top of that, so you might have missed it."

The young man nodded.

"I'll try to make it weaker now," Alex said. "See if you can stop it."

Shan Wangjiu gulped quickly and nodded. He tried his best to let go of all his thoughts and concentrated on Alex once again.

He saw the golden light, he felt the metal Qi. And he saw the compression.

'The compression,' the young man thought slowly. 'So I should compress it.' That was the only thing he got away from it.

'Do I need Metal Qi to compress it?' he wondered. He didn't think that was necessary, but then what did he know?

'Focus!' he told himself and looked back at the sword.

It glowed with faint light, almost nothing. No doubt all the energy was compressed to the point that nothing leaked. He saw something else he hadn't noticed the first time around.

It was the look of concentration on Alex's face as if he had to force himself to do what he was doing. 'All this time and he still has that face,' the young man thought. 'How much Intent does it require?'

He was catching onto things that he wouldn't have had he remained on the sideline.

"Careful," Alex suddenly spoke. "This is coming for you."

The young man felt a tinge of panic flare up within him which he quickly calmed down and looked in front of him. He nodded slowly and took a deep breath.

He put all his attention into Alex's sword and for the first time, he actually saw the technique through his spiritual sense.

An attack that was thinner than a hair flew toward him, its power seemingly warping space itself where it moved. It cut space with its raw power, but not to the point that space couldn't immediately mend itself.

A thought flashed in the young man's mind to let his sword handle the defense portion, but he felt doubt there. Without waiting, he flared up his Qi and the defensive bubble of the sword formed around him like a protective barrier.

Even through the barrier, the young man saw the attack pass right through it, hitting him in the chest. Pain flared on his right side from the cut that was skin deep and only then did the barrier begin shattering.

The attack had been so sharp that the barrier then took a moment to realize that it had been cut.

Even as Shan Wangjiu fell to the ground, he could only think one thing.

'Incredible.'

His talisman buzzed as he skidded along the floor, stopping right before he fell into the giant chasm. He slowly stood up, his sword still in hand.

'We lost,' he thought and the sword sent back a vague impression of understanding. It was meant to happen.

Light sprung forth from inside his robe as the talisman sent out silver light that quickly covered him. He had reached his limit of 30 Losses.

He readied himself to leave.

Alex appeared in front of him and quickly hoisted him up. "How was it?" he asked the young man.

"Incredible, master," he said. "I can't imagine how you ever managed to think of it"

Alex smiled. "I had a bit of help," he said. "And the Dao I knew helped me create it."

"Dao?" the young man asked. "May I ask which ones?" The Silver light had surrounded him by now, but it didn't seem to tug him along, so he spoke casually.

"3 as of now and I won't tell you which ones. Those are my secrets," Alex said. "If I find I need more, I'll add. At that point, if you are around, I wouldn't mind showing it to you."

Shan Wangjiu gave a dry chuckle.

"3 Dao?" he asked. "That's more than what most people learn in their lifetime and you used it one a sword technique." He shook his head. "It must take a lot of Intent."

"It does," Alex said. "Using Dao simultaneously uses up more Intent than using it one after another as if the heavens do not like the idea of us using it at once. And I have to use 3 at the same time."

"Not all is bad though, it is because of the Dao that the attack is strong. It's because of it that I can do what I can do," Alex finished.

"I see," the young man said and thought of things to ask, but looking at the silver light surrounding him, he feared he didn't have much time. He only had one thing to say.

He bowed deeply with more respect in that bow than to anyone he had ever shown that respect, even to Alex. "Thank you for all that you have done for me, master. You may not consider me a true disciple, but I will always consider you my master."

Alex paused for a moment, thinking of what to say, and then said. "I had as much pleasure teaching you as I could've had in this place. Thank you for being there for me for the past 8 months."

The young man looked up.

"I will meet you again, master," the young man said with a bright smile.

Alex smiled back. "See you again."

The young man felt the tug of the silver energy appear suddenly, missing the small hand gesture Alex had done to no longer keep the young man there.

Shan Wangjiu left the Martial Transcendence ground and Alex was left alone by the chasm.

"Now then," Alex turned around. "Time for more training."

Chapter 1604 Meeting Again

Alex struggled to find any person for Pearl to train against. It had been as such for the past few months, but now it was exceptionally so.

Not a single person remaining was any weaker than Saint Core 5th realm if there were even that anymore. If they were, they were most likely hiding somewhere, inside formations that covered their tracks.

Alex wondered if he should go look for barriers or disturbances in the surroundings.

Pearl walked by his side and Whisker was on his shoulder. With Shan Wangjiu gone from the secret realm for the past 3 months, they were Alex's only companions on his journey through the vast land.

With a size of over a hundred kilometer on all side, Alex was certain there was still places here that he hadn't seen, which he wanted to.

As they walked, Alex sensed something in the distance. There was a disturbance in the sky to the east as if the heavens itself had descended.

"Dao?" Pearl looks to his left. He too sensed it.

"Maybe," Alex said. It was close, as close as 50 kilometers could be to a man, and his spiritual sense reached the aura. He tried to sense for any sort of Dao that descended. He sensed nothing out of the ordinary.

"Huh," Alex said softly, catching Pearl's attention. "Not Dao. Breakthrough."

It was hard to discern between the two and the only difference one could use to figure out which one it might be was to look into the aura and search for a singular aura that was revealing itself to the person trying to learn it.

"It's a breakthrough, I'm certain of it," Alex said. "But quite the strong one. I wonder who is breaking through."

Curiosity took hold of Alex for a moment before he let it go. It would not be right to take a peek at people breaking through, not that he wanted to. He shrugged slightly and left.

He fought a few times along the way in the next 3 days, making sure to not gain a loss. Then, he arrived at a large mountain with no tree but a grassland that sloped upward. He slowly walked halfway up the mountain when he suddenly sensed a few people's aura popping up in front of him.

As if walking out of a fold in space, two men came out not even a mere 100 meters away from Alex up the mountain slope. Until the two of them were seen, Alex hadn't sensed them at all.

That was more than enough to make Alex wonder who they were and what they did to hide themselves so well. It took only a moment for Alex to guess that there was most likely most sort of formation behind the two men.

As for who they were, the old man on the left wore a long-sleeved robe folded halfway up his bicep, which was as well kept as anybody cultivator. His long royal blue robe gave him a look of youth that directly contradicted the gray-haired and gray-beared face the old man had.

Next to him stood a young man that Alex knew by name if by nothing else. Teng Xuegang. He was a young man from the Realms Beyond Sect and had a cultivation base of Saint Transformation 1st realm.

The last Alex had seen of this man had been during the first month of his entrance to the secret realm when he had given Teng Roukang's staff to him. The next time Alex had come out, the young man had no longer remained there.

"Your Majesty," the old man in the Royal Blue bowed in front of Alex. "This one is Long Bolao, of the Imperial Azure family. May I ask why Your Majesty has come to this mountain?"

Alex eyed the man for a few moments, recognizing what his introduction meant. This man was of the royal blood of the Azure Empire, only it was so far gone that he was nothing more than just someone with blood.

However, that didn't make him any less impressive with a cultivation base of Saint Transformation's 2nd realm.

"I came here perchance," Alex said. "I only wished to pass the mountain and see what lies beyond. Nothing more, nothing less."

The old man gave a long look, thinking to himself of something, or maybe communicating to someone, before nodding. "I see," he said. "Then would His Majesty be willing to go around the mountains and the valley if he were to know that it has been occupied?"

"Occupied?" Alex asked curiously. "May I ask by whom?"

"Just a few of us who wish to leave out our time in peace," the old man said. "If Your Majesty needs to win a match with a loss, then this old man can help you with that. I've already completed by matches and—"

The old man's words stuck to his mouth and his face changed. The younger man looked at him too, and a few seconds later, another young man popped out of seemingly nowhere, his cultivation base appeared just the same as the two others.

"Your Majesty!" the young man called out with a smile. "I thought I wouldn't get to see you again."

"Oh, brother Yingkong!" Alex said with a hint of surprise in his face. He hadn't expected to see the Silver Queen's brother here at all.

They had been separated nearly a year and a half ago when they entered the Martial Transcendence ground and this was the first time he was seeing him since then.

"I heard you were still here, Your Majesty, but it's hard to believe it without actually seeing you," the young man said with a happy smile. "My sister must be seething to know that you haven't lost by now."

"I wouldn't know," Alex said but everyone could see that he agreed as well. "You never came to meet me."

The young man scratched his head in a slight hesitation. "I… found out where you were a week or two after we arrived, and by then I saw no point in going to you. It seemed you had everything handled."

Alex nodded.

"Still, it is good to see you again," the young man said.

Alex remembered something. "Didn't you say it would be difficult for you to last an entire year?" he asked him.

"By myself, yes," the young man said. "I decided to join a group, so I can last much longer now."

Alex could see that.

Another figure walked out from out of nowhere, this time a woman. It was Fang Yimu of the Cloud Iron sect.

"Lady Yimu, you're here too?" Alex was surprised to see her there. This was quite the ground.

"It's nice to see you again, Your Majesty," the woman said meekly. "I have been asked to ask something of you."

Alex looked at her curiously. "Go ahead," he said.

"Have you come here on your own, or were you sent here by her, to ask for peace?" Fang Yimu asked.

Alex saw as much as he felt the air around them getting tense all of a sudden. Even Mao Yingkong, who had all smiled previously let go of it to look at Alex.

Alex on the other hand no idea what they were talking about.

"Who is 'her'?" he asked them.

"Shang Hongxi," Fang Yimu said with a stern voice as if that name meant something big.

"Shang Hongxi?" Alex asked her with a confused look on his face. The name tugged something in the back of his head, but he wasn't sure exactly at what.

"Shang Hongxi…" he mouthed the word trying to remember such a person. A woman.

Just then, he remembered where he had heard of the name. He hadn't heard of her full name, but he had heard of Hongxi. "Is she a legionnaire by any chance?" Alex asked the group of 4.

The group looked even more serious, so Alex had to butt in.

"I don't know why she makes you scared, but I only remember the name because it was what was shouted on top of the volcano that exploded a few months back," Alex said. "She was fighting another legionnaire at that time, someone—"

"Me," a voice drifted out of nowhere and a man walked out from inside, making a total of 5 people there. This time around though

Alex couldn't help but show some shock on his face when he saw Zhao Boqin walk out as well. Someone with a cultivation base of Saint Transformation 5th realm.

'5th realm?' Alex thought in surprise. 'Last time I saw, he only had a cultivation base of…'

A thought came to his mind.

"Was it you, brother Boqin, who broke through a few days ago?" he asked the man.

"It was me," the man said with a hint of pride on his look, a smile tugging the side of his lips.

"I see," Alex said. "Congratulations."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," the young man said. "Still, we will have to return to the topic with the same question. Were you sent here by Shang Hongxi?"

"I have never met Shang Hongxi, and nor do I know why she would send me here," Alex said. "As I mentioned to these two, I came here per chance. Due to the lack of people in the secret realm, I've been forced to go around looking for people to challenge. Me arriving here was a result of me roaming as such."

The group of 5 watched him for a few seconds before Zhao Boqin spoke. "I see," he said. "Then you are welcome here, Your Majesty."

Chapter 1605 Leader of the 8th Battalion

Alex found it hard to hide his surprise when he entered the valley where everyone stayed.

Inside was a rather small valley with less than a few hundred meters of distance between the mountains, and in it remained nearly 30 different people, each with a cultivation base in the Saint Soul realm.

Alex found out soon enough that his was the lowest cultivation base of all, even the other lowest being an older man with hair on the fringe of graying, and Fang Yimu, who was younger than a lot of them here.

"Welcome to our group, Your Majesty," Zhao Boqin said, walking down the mountain along with him.

People looked up to stare at the incoming group. Alex looked down at them. He was surprised to find he recognized quite a few of them as well.

Tan Huanglin of the Crystal Dawn sect, a youthful man with a cultivation base of Saint Soul 9th realm stood to one side, talking to a woman next to him.

The woman was a cultivator of the Drifting Demon sect, someone with a cultivation base of Saint Soul 7th realm.

An old man with a cultivation base of Saint Transformation 1st realm stood to one side. He was from the Yang family of the Silver Kingdom.

A woman with ageless beauty followed him with his eyes, someone he remembered only introduced herself as Fairy Gao of the Brushing Glacier sect of the Ivory Kingdom.

Qiao Zhengshen of the Autumn Abyss sect of the Emerald Kingdom glanced at him before looking away. His was a cultivation base of Saint Soul 8th realm.

Other few people looked at him as well, and Alex was surprised just how many he recognized. Either from their feats that made them known throughout the continent, or through their fights less than a year ago when they came to fight him.

He managed to recognize most of them.

He took a deep breath, taking in the power of everyone that was here. Every one of them here was what one would call the greatest of the current generation, even though a few of them seemed a little too old to be considered part of that generation.

"Such a gathering of people," Alex said, looking at everyone. "I had never hoped to see this many strong cultivators gathered in one place. I must say, I am surprised."

Teng Xuegang walked next to him, shrugging as he did so. "Of course, we have to," the young man shrugged. "What else could we do?"

Alex didn't understand what he meant by those words. They held implications that made no sense to him just yet.

'You can just go out, can't you?' Alex wondered. 'Or does this have something to do with the Hongxi girl?'

He walked a little more, arriving by the valley itself, and looking at the many people there. Quite a few of them walked up to him to exchange greetings and most of them returned. A few even looked at him as if he was trying at something.

'God, they're so on edge. Do they think I came here with an ulterior motive,' Alex wondered and then remembered the conversation he had outside the formation. 'Of course they do.'

"What exactly is the problem?" Alex asked the man next to him. He understood that if he wanted to learn more, he was gonna have to dig them out from within these people.

"Surely Your Majesty doesn't know—" Fang Yimu was speaking when she cut herself off and answered herself. "No... they wouldn't target you."

"This girl named Hongxi?" Alex asked.

"Not just her," Fang Yimu said. "The ones that she's formed a group of her own with. Players."

There was a hint of anger in the way she said that not bothering to hide it as much. The others nodded to her words, a slightly hateful look forming on their faces as well.

The situation didn't seem dire as if it was a matter of life or death, but it did make every single one of them get annoyed enough that they did feel hate for the others.

'Players...' Alex mused to himself and was reminded of something. "Where's Talia?"

"Gone," Fang Yimu said without looking back. "She was too weak to begin with, and the girl is an alchemist, not a fighter. She left the secret realm over half a year ago."

Alex was surprised. "You didn't help her or anything?" he asked.

"Why?" Fang Yimu chuckled a little. "There was nothing for her to gain here except experience, and that she got."

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. "Well, as long as she got the experience," he said.

They walked along the valley until they came upon an open spot where Zhao Boqin sat down and gestured for Alex to sit as well. Alex followed his lead and sat down, a few others closing in to try and find if they could hear something.

The man spoke about what Alex did for the past few months, trying to find out if he truly spoke the truth or not.

Alex answered it all without hiding anything, even telling them all about Shan Wangjiu and how he taught him the sword.

"I remember the fellow," one man chimed in. He had met Alex on the outside a few months ago and had indeed seen Shan Wangjiu. "He had a huge sword."

Zhao Boqin nodded. "And was he a player too?" he asked.

"He is," Alex said. "I can guarantee that. Why do you ask?"

Zhao Boqin said nothing, but his silence told Alex what it needed to. 'He still suspects I was working with that Hongxi girl,' Alex thought. The thought was amusing as much as it was annoying.

They would always be on guard against him until they were certain of the truth. Alex didn't know how to prove to them that he wasn't hiding anything.

They talked for a while, a few people asking Alex various questions. To Alex's surprise, quite a few wanted to know about the Southern Continent too.

Alex answered them what he could, even telling them how he came to be the King of the Southern Continent. The beginning of that story was usually a lie, but everything else there was true.

As they talked, Alex managed to divert the story back to what they were initially talking about. "This Hongxi girl," he spoke. "She is a legionnaire too, is she?"

"Yes," Zhao Boqin said, a slight grimace on his face as he said so.

"From what I recall," Alex spoke. "You are a leader of a battalion of soldiers in the Legion, aren't you brother Boqin?"

"I am," the man answered.

"What rank does this Hongxi girl stand in?" Alex asked.

Zhao Boqin took a moment to think if he wanted to answer or not, but decided to do so in the end. "She is one of my soldiers," he said.

Alex was taken aback to hear that. "I'm sorry, your soldier? You mean she's from your battalion?" he asked.

Zhao Boqin nodded grimly.

"That is... certainly surprising," Alex answered. "I would've sworn you two were leaders of the rival battalion in the Talon Legion, the way you were shouting above the volcano at that time."

Zhao Boqin didn't give much of an expression, but he was surprised to learn that Alex had heard that. He hadn't paid much attention to the surroundings back then, so he threw away his thoughts.

"She is part of my battalion, but that doesn't mean she's not my rival," Zhao Boqin said. "I don't know how it is in the Southern Continent's legions, but in the Eastern Continent, the leader of a Legion is the one that has managed to prove themselves the most from that group."

Alex listened intently.

"There are 13 battalions in the Talon legion, and once you join it, you are never transferred elsewhere," the man said, before quickly adding, "not counting Royal decrees, or age that forces a man to leave the battalion. Even then, they usually change the Legion itself, and not the battalion."

"Mine is the 8th Battalion, and after my leader died over half a century ago, I managed to be chosen as the battalion leader. The work I had done and my strength was certainly enough to make enough to get the leader role."

The man seemed so proud to talk about how he came to become a leader of a battalion that he missed the slightest change in Alex's expression and his momentary lack of focus.

'A Talon legion's leader died over half a century ago?' Alex wondered. 'Surely...'

"But then 3 decades ago, that girl joined," Zhao Boqin continued. "She was only a Saint Soul realm cultivator back then, even a weak one, and was of no notice to me."

"But then her explosive growth caught me by surprise. Whatever it is that makes p-people from the central continent that strong," Zhao Boqin said. "After she entered the Saint Transformation realm, she had been eyeing my leader role. And as if god was on her side, the secret realm opened right on time for her to..."

The man sighed. "She's trying to take advantage of that I can't reject any challenges to make me fight her until she beats me. She's trying to show the world that she is good enough for me."

Alex wondered what it was that had to do with him forming a group, but another thing caught his attention first.

"What do you mean you can't refuse?" he asked.

Zhao Boqin paused for a moment and spoke. "Oh right, you don't know this," he said. "It is only known to the Saint Transformation realm cultivators, but people who enter the secret realm with Saint Transformation cultivation base cannot refuse any challenges, no matter what."

Chapter 1606 Rematch

Zhao Boqin went on to explain how due to the lack of rejection, his subordinate named Hongxi had been constantly trying to challenge him to see who was stronger of the two.

While doing so, she had ended up revealing the the truth about Saint Transformation realm cultivators not being able to reject, which made group after group go after them.

To save themselves from such groups, the cultivators had to group up themselves to fight back against the load of people who wanted to win against them.

Not being able to challenge Saint Transformation cultivators, those groups then went to target weaker cultivators who also found safety in numbers.

In the same way, players were also forced to find a group and with Hongxi leading the charge, many of them had ended up going along with her to become a part of her group.

As such, the Player and the ones that were not have ended up having to become separate groups and enemies at this point.

It was a bit to take in, but Alex did it quickly. "Are you sure their group is all Players?" he asked.

"I cannot guarantee it, but if they weren't, they would have come here already," Zhao Boqin said. "As for the ones here, it's easy to tell who is a player and who is not, and they run away. Not that we are targeting them exactly. We just need points."

Alex nodded. It made a lot more sense now.

"Still, to think there was such a hidden rule," Alex said. "Are there any other such hidden rules that I can learn about?"

"None that I know of," Zhao Boqin said as he looked around at his group to see if anyone else knew of something. The rest of them shook their head as well.

"There are tricks and ways to bend the rules without cheating, but none additional ones that only a select few know of," Fang Yimu said from the side. "If there are any, we don't know them."

"My sister would've told you if there were any that were important enough for you to know, Your Majesty," Mao Yingkong said. "Since you don't know any, there isn't any."

"I was just curious," Alex said and turned back to Zhao Boqin. "How many times has Hongxi challenged you by now?"

"A couple dozen times. More than 50 certainly," the man said.

"And is it alright if I ask how many times you've won?" Alex asked.

The man's face flinched a little when he heard that question and sighed. "Around 20? No, close to 30 times. I haven't kept count, but she wins just as much as me. Maybe I win a few more, but it cannot be a lot more."

Alex was surprised. "I didn't expect you to lose so many times," he said. "I have sensed her cultivation base. It was no more than Saint Transformation 2nd realm, was it not?"

Everyone looked at him awkwardly, and Teng Xuegang told Alex something he already knew about.

"That girl can fight 2 realms above her own cultivation base," he said. "She is a menace for sure."

"She is," another one concurred.

"The main problem with her is her movement technique. She's like a slippery eel. Every time you try to catch her, she slips right through you. I can barely ever catch her off guard," he said. "If it wasn't for that, I would have won every single time."

"Now that I have broken through to the Saint Transformation 5th realm, she will not be able to win against me," the man said. "Even if she can fight 2 realms above her, damn her."

Fang Yimu quickly turned toward Alex, a thoughtful and curious look on her face.

"Can't you do the same, Your Majesty?" she asked. "I've heard about you defeating people stronger than you. Although the rumors never made it clear if you were using your cultivation base or your sword."

"I have only just recently started using my Qi after people got harder to deal with. Everyone that remains is too strong for just my sword, so I have to use both of them," Alex said.

"Right," Zhao Boqin said. "You were practicing your Sword Intent the last time I fought you, Your Majesty. How is that going?"

"Pretty well," Alex said. "I've improved a bit but due to people having to go look after their sect and clan members, I was forced to stop what I was doing. Since then the improvement has slowed down a bit."

"Slow progress is progress still," the old white-haired royal man spoke from the side while nodding to himself.

"Do you mind showing me how far you've come along?" Fang Yimu asked. "We did say we were going to fight seriously once you got stronger, didn't we?"

"We did say that," Alex said. "But are you sure you are up for it?"

The girl smiled as she saw through Alex's plot to taunt her. "Let us see which one of us is stronger now, Your Majesty."

The rest of the people in the area looked at the two of them, a few exchanging glances with their peers. A few of them were curious too, and wanted to see just how far Alex had improved. They had thought it weird back when they fought Alex and he refused to use any sort of technique.

Alex and Fang Yimu left the valley, with a few other people following them outside to a location further away from their base. Since this was going to be a somewhat serious battle, they didn't want to destroy the formations and barriers that were necessary for them to stay there.

Nearly 15 people followed them out to see Alex fight, the remaining not bothering to care for him. They had seen thousands of battles, had been in thousands of battles by now, and the prospect of watching another one with a relatively weaker group of fighters didn't make it fun for them.

Fang Yimu limbered up and pulled out her sword. A thin green blade that was always strapped to her waist was pulled out from its sheath. She never liked keeping her sword inside a storage bag.

She pointed the sword toward Alex in the distance, her sword shining white with the power of Sword Qi.

Alex knew she had Sword Qi, and wondered if she had made it stronger as well. She did a lot of time to improve on it.

Midnight flew out into Alex's hand, the black sword pointed toward Fang Yimu. Alex was about to open his mouth when Fang Yimu cut him off.

"Your Majesty, have you fought the first battle of the day already?" she asked him curiously.

Alex pointed to the sky where the sun was a small distance away from the zenith. A sane man wouldn't even call it afternoon yet.

"I've had no chance to fight anyone," he said.

"Neither have I," Fang Yimu said. "Would you mind if we fight despite that? Let there be a stake in this fight."

Alex nodded. "I agree," he said. "That would make it fun."

"It will," Fang Yimu answered. "Then, shall we fight?"

Alex felt his talisman buzz and he gave a nod.

Chapter 1607 Fighting Fang Yimu

Fang Yimu sent out a single sword slash, not meant to do anything but just pry and see how strong Alex was.

Alex didn't do anything until the slash came right next to him and destroyed it when it was right on top of it. It was weak enough that he didn't have to worry about its strength even without using much of his already constrained strength.

"Not bad," Fang Yimu said, sending a slightly stronger sword slash this time, one that contained her Sword Qi as well.

Alex's sword was covered with a white outline this time before he destroyed the attack. 'Saint Soul 4th realm,' Alex said with a bit of a surprise. She had managed to improve her sword by 2 realms since the last time, making it become just as strong as her cultivation base.

'Together she might just have a Saint Soul 5th realm equivalent attack,' he thought.

She was equally surprised to see Alex defeat it so easily and got a little more serious this time around. She moved, her swift movement technique taking her closer to Alex while he was unprepared.

When she was close enough, she sent a sword slash that was as strong as she could make without using any technique. The close proximity and the suddenness of the attack was certainly going to cause Alex some problem.

Or so she thought.

Alex's sword went from having just white outlines to entirely being covered with white light before he swung it at the incoming attack, destroying it so easily that nothing remained in the air.

The girl moved back, shock clear in her eyes. "Your Majesty," she said meekly, not knowing what else to say. "How did you..."

"Practice," Alex said, almost hearing her inner thoughts about what she wanted to ask about.

The girl couldn't believe it at first and thought Alex was joking somehow, but then she remembered the reports of him being able to fight people high above his level.

"You're stronger now, Your Majesty," the girl said. "It seems you're no longer as weak as you appear to be."

Alex gave her a grin. "I never was."

He sent out the attack this time, a single sword slash that contained just Sword Qi. But the strength it contained was around Saint Soul 5th realm.

He had held back a little.

The girl panicked, dodging to the side. The slash vanished into the distance.

Alex looked in the direction it went. 'If only I could make them hone in on the target somehow,' he thought. He would have to work hard if he wanted to make that happen.

He noticed the girl sending out a technique while he was barely distracted. 10 different illusory swords formed in front of her, each an image of the girl's green sword.

He remembered her forming this the last time they fought as well. The stabbing motion required to form these swords was quite unique among the various battles he fought.

The 10 swords flew toward him at once, each holding a strength of Saint Soul 5th realm. That was of no real threat to Alex at all.

He swung his sword, sending out a large Sword Qi slash that devoured all 10 flying swords and continued toward the girl on top of that.

The girl hadn't expected that and had to fight off the attack before it landed on her. She was panting slightly, half out of surprise, half out of fear.

"Were you..." she asked slowly. "Were you this strong the last time we fought as well?"

"With just the sword? No," Alex shook his head. "I hadn't held back anything when we fought that time."

"Then... it really is all progress," the girl said. "Dear god... how is that possible? That's... over 5 realms in just a little more than a year, isn't it?"

"You forget I was training all day and night," Alex said softly. "For 6 whole months, I only got about 50 days free in total without battle after battle."

The surrounding watched made some murmurs as they talked amongst themselves, but none spoke anything aloud. They were getting curious as to how strong Alex was now.

Fang Yimu thought for a bit and nodded. "You're very strong then, Your Majesty," the girl said. "It seems I have to get serious as well."

Suddenly her sword glowed bright red as she poured Fire Qi into it and swung toward Alex.

Alex thought he saw a small image of a sun form behind her when she attacked. He couldn't be sure if it was there or if it was an illusion. The attack wasn't one, so he focused on it for the moment.

He got ready to receive the attack when he suddenly felt something try and bore into his mind. A wave of slight nausea hit him as he realized that the girl was using some sort of Spiritual technique against him.

Her spiritual sense was focused on him as much as the sword was. Still, it wasn't strong enough to stop him from doing what he must.

Alex swung his sword, destroying the incoming flaming slash as his own sword slash flew toward the girl.

Fang Yimu prepared to handle his attack when she suddenly felt a reversal in power as Alex sent out a Heaven's Impact targeting directly at her. He had a stronger attack, but it was reserved for multiple people, instead of just one.

The girl felt the attack coming, and even as it did, she did something. Heaven's Impact landed on her, but it was blocked by something. She suffered some damage to her spiritual sea, but not enough to faint.

She only managed to get a hang of herself when the sword slash appeared in front of her. She blocked it, barely in time before it hit her.

However, in her panic and desperation, she hadn't noticed that Alex had already sent another attack.

This she could not dodge, and in the end was shot down from the sky, losing the duel.

Chapter 1608 In The Valley

Alex was swarmed by people, asking him how he was so strong. They understood that he had been training with his sword, but this was a bit too strong still.

He was challenged by people too. Now that he and Fang Yimu had fought, they could use them to clear their first battles of the day.

"Sure, but I won't give out a pill if you win," Alex said. "Unless you want to make it an actual fight with you having a chance to lose."

Nobody wanted that.

Alex still didn't hold back much, using as much Sword Intent as he could. Fighting these strong people was an incredible chance he wasn't gonna give up just to give them a win.

He did give them a win in the end though, as that was what he had promised. And no one complained about him fighting seriously either as he used nothing more than Sword Intent.

If he had been seriously fighting, there were many other ways for him to make it hard for them to win, but he hadn't.

By the time Alex fought 5 different people, the rest of them had finished their fights with Fang Yimu and there were no more people to challenge Alex. So, they all returned to the valley and sat around.

Alex only talked with them for a little longer before he found his own separate space to cultivate in. He used a formation to make his separate space and let Pearl and Whisker cultivate with him.

He cultivated the whole night and only stopped the next day when his talisman reset once again. He walked out of his formation and went up to the small group that had gathered around Zhao Boqin.

He managed to catch some tail end of the conversation, where the man talked about them having to be careful and taking the long way around. He wondered where these people were being sent to.

Four of them nodded. One of them was Mao Yingkong, and the other 3 people he wasn't close enough to yet.

They stopped talking for a moment when they saw Alex close in and then stopped talking after a brief sentence. The group separated after that.

"What is happening?" Alex asked Zhao Boqin.

"Planning for a hunt," the man said. "We send out a small group each day to fight and come back to let everyone else fight as well. Those 4 are to go out today."

Alex nodded silently. "I heard you talk about a location earlier they had to go to,"?he said. "It seems you already know where to go to."

The man nodded. "There's a weaker group of fighters toward the river in the east," he said. "They are going there to fight them."

"Do you expect trouble?" Alex asked.

"It would be stupid if we didn't," the man replied. "Together with us here, they will fear a bit to attack us directly with my presence. But with just the four of them, they're a much better target.

Alex gave a puzzled look. He understood that they would be a target, but then why was he still sending them?

"Why don't you go with them?" Alex asked.

"If I do, then we will definitely be attacked," the man said. "Hongxi won't let me be out there for even a moment if she finds out about it."

Alex nodded thoughtfully and frowned a bit. "But you're strong now. You should be able to go out without worry, shouldn't you?"

The man gave a surprised look as if he hadn't thought of that himself before shaking his head. "I get nothing from it," he said, shrugging as he did so. "There is no glory in winning against someone weaker than me."

"But you can protect all of them when they go out, can't you?" Alex asked.

"I can," the man said. "But why should I? They're not my problem. They chose to gather around me. They can do whatever they want."

Alex was a little surprised to hear the lack of responsibility in the man's voice. He had thought this man to be a leader of this group. But from what he said right now,?he sounded more like a man burdened with others who couldn't wait to get rid of it.

'He's too strong,' Alex thought. He doesn't care if someone challenges him, as long as it is not Hongxi.' He was sure that was the truth.

The group of four left around the afternoon and returned to the valley after sunset. They had managed to gain a win, so everyone else gained a win too.

No one said anything when Alex got himself a win as well. They had more or less accepted Alex into the group.

Some of them fought Alex from time to time, mostly to get a chance to win a pill or two from Alex. When they found out that he was still doing that after all these months, they were more than excited.

Sounds of battles rang the sky outside the valley day and night, and Alex fought to the best of his abilities, using Sword Intent, Sword Qi, and sometimes even Qi. Although the times he used Qi were rare he focused more on the sword.

Days passed slowly, months gone without anyone noticing.

They would wait until the group that left to get a win returned, and after that people would challenge Alex to get a pill from him. Winning also gave them points, so they were more or less happy with it.

The only interesting parts of the days were when the group that went out returned and told them that they had been attacked. Hearing how they had been attacked and if they won or not was quite fun to listen to.

Those were one of the few days that wasn't monotonous for Alex.

He spent some of his days making pills or painting stuff, but nothing really filled him as much. At least the training was going alright, so he was happy about that.

He had been painting Fairy Gao one day, per her request when suddenly he heard Zhao Boqin's angry shouts.

"God dammit!" he cried out loud. "That goddamn…"

Alex wondered why he was so angry for the briefest of moments before he sensed it as well. Another breakthrough, and a strong one at that.

'Is that… Hongxi?' Alex wondered, looking in the direction where the girl was breaking through. She had surprisingly decided to do it out in the open for everyone else to see.

"She's outside," one of the Saint Transformation realm cultivators shouted. "We should go and wait next to her. Once she's done, we should immediately attack her. Give her a Loss."

"It's close to reset," another one said. "We should be able to make it."

"I'll have to ask you to continue this later, Your Majesty," Fairy Gao said with a soothing voice. "It appears we will have a bit of a showdown."

"Let's go!" Zhao Boqin's hoarse voice took everyone's attention, and people started pouring out of the valley.

Alex took back his items and followed as well.

It had been a while since he had come outside. Most of his days were spent inside the valley, and the only time he did come outside was still on the periphery of the valley to fight with others.

He could've gone outside multiple times by now, had anyone in the valley actually allowed him to accompany them to the various locations they went to hunt for their first fights of the day.

They did not want to inconvenience a King, so Alex had to sit back. Alex couldn't help but wonder at times if they were truly looking after him, or if they were trying to hide where they gained their points from.

The latter seemed much more likely.

The group flew not for long and arrived next to a mountain surrounded by dead trees and broken ground. It was another place, devastated by the battles that seemed to happen every day now.

Alex landed some distance away from the mountain itself where most of the people had stopped. Everyone looked at the mountaintop, where they could see a figure in blue trying her best to break through.

The process had only started less than an hour ago, and this far in, it most certainly took longer than just an hour.

Since she was in the Saint Transformation realm, she had to worry about her spirit growing larger and adapting to her physical body.

Alex wondered how large her spirit was now.

"There's nobody here," one of the people spoke, catching Alex's attention. Alex looked around as well. There truly was no one there, not a single soul.

'Had she come alone?' Alex wondered. Her group was supposed to have been around her. Why was she alone? Or was she the same as Zhao Boqin who cared little for the group that were around them?

Alex found it hard to be concerned with such a matter when Zhao Boqin suddenly spoke up.

"We can't let her breakthrough," he said.

Alex frowned a little when he heard that.

"Brother Zhao," one of them spoke. "You can't attack someone when they're breaking through. The girl might end up going through Qi deviation."

"I don't care," Zhao Boqin said. "She can spend years healing for all I care. It will make me feel easier."

He pulled out a spear, intending to attack. Alex realized he was being serious about it.

"Brother Zhao," he shouted. "Stop! What are you doing?"

But speak as he might, his words did nothing. Zhao Boqin filled his spear with blue Qi and attacked.

Chapter 1609 Familiar

Alex wasn't sure when his sword was out, or when he initiated an attack. By the time he was done, his sword slash flew toward Zhao Boqin, who had to quickly swerve to defend himself.

The attack he had been about to release flew off somewhere else and did not hit the woman cultivating on the mountaintop.

Everyone stared at Alex, not a few with swords in their hand ready to do the same. Alex had only done it quicker.

Zhao Boqin's glaring eyes landed on Alex, his face slowly twisting in anger. "What is the meaning of this?" he demanded. He did not care who he demanded it of.

A few people moved backward out of their fear of the man as his aura flared a little.

Alex stood where he was and looked at the man unblinkingly. "You were about to attack a person that was in the middle of a breakthrough," Alex said. "Not just anyone but someone from your battalion. Don't you see what is wrong with that?"

The man grumbled to himself. He understood what he was doing was wrong. There was no way he wouldn't. But he found it hard to bring himself to speak of it. His anger also made it hard for him to see why it was so wrong in the first place.

"Step out of my way. I will do what I must do for myself," the man said, hefting his spear for another attack.

"No," Alex moved in front of him. "You are trying to destroy someone's cultivation base just because you are inconvenienced by it. I won't allow that to happen."

"You'll stop me?" the man asked, a hint of disgust on his face. "You don't have what it takes to stop me."

"Is that so?" Alex said, hesitating a moment before pulling something out from his storage ring, and showing it to the man. The dragon medallion.

"I command you to stop," Alex said.

Everyone looked at Alex in shock, the medallion in his hand surprising them more than the fact that he stood before Zhao Boqin, who was without a doubt one of the strongest men here.

Zhao Boqin nearly stumbled at the sight of the Dragon Medallion, flustered that he was ordered by someone who had authority only less than the Dragon Emperor and the crown prince.

"How did you..." he couldn't finish the sentence. He wasn't sure if he even had the right to ask that. He gulped a little, getting ready to obey when he remembered something.

A small frown appeared on his face, his mind working hard to remember something that they were told over a decade ago.

"No..." the man said slowly. "No!"

His voice got fiercer at the end. He slammed the tail end of the spear on the ground, standing resolutely. "That will not stop me, and neither will you. Stand aside."

Alex grimaced. He knew this was going to happen, but he had hoped the man wouldn't know more than that. At least, he hoped he didn't know that the legions were not his to command even with the Dragon Medallion.

But it seemed his luck wasn't as good.

"Step aside," the man said again. "I won't say it again."

Alex had only one choice now. The worst choice he could make, but one he had to if he wanted to give the girl any chance at all.

'I must be going mad,' he thought. He had talked about what was right and how it was the right thing to do to let a cultivator safely break through, but he didn't believe that.

If his enemy were ever breaking through, he wouldn't stand aside and wait for them to be done. He would attack them.

It wasn't that serious right now, but still, he had little need to fight for her.

But he did.

'Dammit!' he thought. 'Why does she have to look so familiar!'

That was the feeling Alex had been having ever since he looked at the girl, and he didn't know why. Her face seemed familiar enough but he had no memories of ever meeting her.

He had never even seen her before.

He wondered if the girl was using some sort of technique to make him protect her. That couldn't be the case though, as he sensed nothing. And surely his body wouldn't listen to her so easily while no one else did anything as drastic.

'Screw it,' he thought. 'I'll protect her and then get my answers.'

It was the time to make this desperate choice.

"Zhao Boqin," he called out to the man with no hint of respect remaining in his voice either. "I challenge you to a duel."

The man's eyes widened when he sensed his talisman buzz once and then buzz once again. The challenge had been made, and even without his intention, it had been accepted.

He couldn't reject a challenge.

And this was the first match of the day.

"You..." he growled with a low but heavy voice. The aura of a Saint Transformation 5th realm cultivation base gathering around Alex.

'Stupid!' Alex cursed himself, but it was too late. He brought out Midnight and prepared for a fight.

Zhao Boqin ignored him for a second, wanting to attack the girl regardless while he was in a duel, but he suddenly found a necklace deep in his clothes buzzing with a low sound.

It had blocked a mental attack.

He quickly turned his head toward Alex. "Fine! If you want a fight, here is one."

His spear charged with water Qi all of a sudden, producing an aura that made everyone around him shiver from just sensing it.

Alex frowned as well, and couldn't help but feel scared at the sight of the attack. That wasn't the attack of a Saint Transformation 5th realm cultivator at all.

What he was going to use was the attack of an Immortal.

Through a spear filled with Immortal Qi, the man used his technique. A blue dragon crawled out of the spear, charging its way toward Alex at an inconceivable speed.

Alex knew he had to dodge it or else he would die. He just had to teleport and he would be fine.

But he didn't want to. Not right now. Not while the man was consumed by anger. This was the best chance to beat him.

Mao Yingkong, Fang Yimu, Teng Xuegang, and a few others looked at him with worry. Some were even certain he was going to die. They couldn't even shout for him to dodge as the attack was just too fast.

And Alex remained where he was, but something appeared on his hand.

The attack landed on him and out of nowhere it turned around, charging back to Zhao Boqin who had attacked him.

The man panicked.

He had used all of his Immortal Qi in this one attack and he couldn't protect himself from it.

The blue dragon struck him, destroying a few of his defenses before landing on him. The talisman activated, protecting him and teleporting him away from the location before the man could be hurt even more.

It took a while for people to notice him on the ground nearly a kilometer away. Sprawling on the ground, he bled from all over his body, clearly too hurt to move.

It didn't even dawn on him that he had lost the match.

Chapter 1610 Shang Hongxi

Alex stood where he was, trembling a little, holding onto the Mirror of Barren Truth. He knew what would happen when he activated the artifact, but even then he was quite scared he might get hurt. It was hard to remain calm in the face of an Immortal attack.

The Mirror of Barren Truth was an artifact that returned a single attack that came its way, back toward its originator. It had to be prepared in advance to do so, and Alex had prepared it with Yao Ning, by having her fill it with Immortal Qi.

Had it been anything other than Immortal Qi, the mirror would not have worked at all.

He put back the mirror and looked in the direction of Zhao Boqin, who remained still and wounded on the ground.

"Did he die?" Alex wondered, but a quick sense told him that wasn't the case at all. Instead, the man had only gotten unconscious. As for how long that would be, Alex wouldn't know.

A single 'thank you' floated into his ear before everyone else came to him, trying to ask him questions. They asked him what he did, and some even asked him what the thing he had brought out was.

He didn't answer all the questions but gave enough to quench their curiosities for now. He wondered how much else he was going to have to answer once they returned back to the valley.

On that matter, he wondered if he was even going to return to the valley in the first place. 'I doubt that's happening anymore.'

Alex noticed a few feeding Zhao Boqin something, and his wounds slowly healed. It was the man's own attack, but it sure as hell had done quite a bit of damage. Had he not been teleported away, Alex wouldn't have been surprised if he was dead.

A bit of aura flared from the side and Alex looked in the direction of the girl that was cultivating on the mountaintop. She was close to being done with the breakthrough.

"That's quite fast," one of the men next to him commented. "I wonder if we noticed it a bit too late."

Alex wondered the same as well, but he had a feeling that she was speeding it all up on her own. She had to break through as quickly as possible. She didn't have the luxury to do it any slower.

Zhao Boqin got up in a daze a few minutes later, right around the time the girl was done breaking through as well. She definitely needed to fix up her foundation a little once she was free.

Zhao Boqin was still in a daze when he noticed that the girl was done with the breakthrough and a frown formed on his face. He wanted to go challenge her, but that was when he noticed Alex and remembered what had happened.

He had nearly died to his own techniques.

He wanted to curse at him, but he held his tongue. Disagreeing with a monarch of another kingdom was one thing, but he couldn't call him a bastard or curse him even worse if he wanted to keep his head.

Bigger wars had started with smaller things. He didn't want to start a war. He didn't want to even be in a war.

The last war that took place in this world was 5 thousand years ago. He would be more than happy to keep it that way for the next 5 thousand years still.

He swallowed what he was about to speak and only scowled at Alex.

Alex was about to say something, but even before him, the girl flew out of the mountaintop, landing in the middle of them all.

She wore a blue shawl around her pink robe and stood there almost regally as she flexed her newfound cultivation base.

Everyone stirred backward out of fear. They knew she was strong. Even with her Saint Transformation 3rd realm cultivation base, she could fight people beyond her cultivation base, at nearly Saint Transformation 5th realm.

No one wanted to test her even if she had just broken through to that cultivation base. No one dared to challenge her. It was a foolish thing to even consider.

Alex saw her beautiful face up close and got the feeling that she was even more familiar somehow, although he couldn't remember where he saw her first. For some reason, he thought he saw her in the Western Continent, but that certainly wasn't the truth.

'What is this feeling?' he wondered.

"Leader," the girl spoke, her smooth voice filling the silence that was only filled by the wind brushing the grass before this. "Do you still wish to fight me?"

Her challenge came as a surprise to everyone. After all, she surely wasn't in the condition to fight someone so strong.

But it seemed she wasn't speaking for no reason. Zhao Boqin felt a tinge of anger and a tinge of fear within him hearing her ask that question. She had all but challenged him. If she had, he couldn't have rejected.

"Screw you, Hongxi," he said with teeth gritting against each other. "Don't think you're any closer to beating me in a fair fight."

"Am I not?" she asked in a sweet tone. "Why don't you challenge me then? You can boast that you beat me."

Alex was surprised to see Zhao Boqin's face turn to a grimace and even show a hint of panic. 'Why is he so scared to fight her? They're back on the same level as before, aren't they?'

Zhao Boqin took his time to answer, and that was how long it took for Alex to realize what was happening.

'He's scared,' he thought. 'He's scared of the Immortal Qi she'll be using.'

That was the correct answer in Alex's eyes. The man had just used his Immortal Qi on him, and from the looks of it, he had used it all too. If they were to fight, it was obvious who would be the winner here.

And if he couldn't dodge and had to be instead saved by the talisman, then he would acquire another Out of Bounds, on top of the one Alex just gave him.

"Just you wait!" Zhao Boqin said through gritted teeth and turned toward Alex. He was about to say something but kept it to himself. He knew enough to not let his anger take over him right now.

But his glare told everything that he needed to. He wasn't going to let Alex alone now.

'Now I definitely can't return,' Alex thought.

As Zhao Boqin flew away, many others followed him too. Fang Yimu and Mao Yingkong remained for him to leave too, but he shook his head and they reluctantly left without him.

In the end, all that remained was just him and the girl in front of him.

"Thank you for protecting me, Your Majesty," the girl said with a small bow. "I was in a bit of a pickle there."

"I did what I thought was right," Alex said. He stared at her, trying to figure out where he had seen her before.

The girl ignored his gaze and gave a small smile in return. "I am called Shang Hongxi, Your Majesty," she said.

"You can call me Alex," Alex said.

"Oh right, you're a player," the girl said, as if just remembering. "Then you can call me by my real name as well, Your Majesty."

"Call me Sarah."

Chapter 1611 Sarah

"Sarah..." Alex spoke softly, letting the words roll in his mouth

The word sent a hint of an impression passing through his mind, one that brought up a face that seemed to match somewhat to the face he was looking at right now. Only the woman in front of him seemed far better looking than the one in his memories.

He saw flashes of the woman on a couch, at a dinner table, laughing happily next to a young Hannah and... Emily? Was that what he was seeing?

He realized that the memories he was seeing did not belong to him, but rather his clone. And the clarity in them was as good as the old him could remember by the time he had gained those memories.

The older the memory was, the worse he remembered it. It was even worse than the memories he got through the Inheritance of the Undying Physique and that was only so good anyway. The most clear thing he remembered from those memories was the face of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen before.

Sarah looked at him with a hint of a frown, wondering why he was staring at her so absentmindedly. Was he somehow entranced with her?

'That cannot be,' the girl thought. 'He's a king. But... then again, he's also a man.'

She had to do something. "Your Majesty, are you alright?" she called out loud enough to grab Alex's attention.

Alex's thoughts cleared up and he finally looked at her. "Oh, I'm sorry. I was thinking about something," he said.

"About what?" the girl couldn't help but want to ask.

"I think we used to live together," Alex said. "Back around the time when the game was getting big."

The girl seemed appalled by the mere idea of what he had said. Her face hid no frown and lay it clear for Alex to see. "That is impossible. There are no circumstances where I would live with a man. I'm flattered you think of me that way, Your Majesty. But I'll have to let you know that—"

"You like women, not men," Alex said, a smile tugging on his lips. "I remember that. It's weird that I do."

Sarah's face went blank in horror. "How... how do you know that?" she asked him. "Who told you that? No one should—"

"No one told me," Alex said quickly. "I just remembered it. You told me long ago. Or wait, your clone told me. Wait no, your clone told my clone back in the Central continent. Our clone used to live together."

Alex saw the girl's face switch to disbelief and quickly added. "Not just you and me. We lived with my sister, Hannah, and your friend, Emily. She's my clone's wife now."

"Emily..." Sarah said with a hint of remembrance of something long forgotten. "Emily... she was my friend. I forgot."

There was a tinge of melancholy to her expression, one that was there for what she forgot rather than what she remembered. "I remember a sweet little girl by that name. Maybe what you said is true," the girl said, looking back at Alex with a wide smile.

"Thank you for reminding me what I had forgotten, Your Majesty," she said. "There are few things of the past that I remember now. Having any to remember is a good thing for me."

"I'm happy to be of help," Alex said. "If you have forgotten what you've remembered, you might want to go to the Northern Continent sometime in the future. There is a group of well in the east there that can return you memories of... your... past."

Alex got distracted all of a sudden, his head slowly moving to the left where he sensed multiple people approaching in his direction. It only took a moment for him to sense their cultivation bases, and every single one of them was in the upper half of Saint Soul realm.

Surprisingly, not a single one of them had a Saint Transformation realm cultivation base. Perhaps that was why most of them didn't know about the rules that bound the Saint Transformation realm cultivators in the secret realm.

The group that approached were 7 people, all young men and women, not a single person that looked older than late 20s. There was no doubt in Alex's mind that all of them were players.

Surprisingly, he recognized the person at the front. Well, he had to. There was no way of mistaking a girl with a golden fox mask on her face covering her beautiful features, her braided hair whipping in the wind, shining the many golden ornaments he had on her hair.

It was Ren Wujin, from the Ren Family, from Snowthorn Valley, of the Gold Kingdom.

Also known as The Golden Fox of the North.

Alex had talked to her once, back before the Trials had opened. She had been one of the queen candidates he had to meet. That had been the only time he had seen her.

They landed and everyone hesitated. Ren Wujin pulled out her golden mask, placing it to the side of her face. "Greetings, Your Majesty," she said in a placid tone.

"Greetings, Lady Ren." Alex looked at the others that were gathered there. Of the 3 men and 3 women, he recognized 3 more from when they fought him for pills. 2 were men, 1 woman. He had never seen the remaining 3 before this.

"Your Majesty," they greeted him as soon as recognized or found out who he was as well.

Alex greeted them back as well.

"Sister Hongxi, are you alright?" Ren Wujin asked Sarah, walking close to her. "We sensed something rather violent and had to rush here to check if you were alright. I know you made us stay back, but we couldn't when you could be—"

"I'm alright," Sarah answered, cutting off the girl from speaking too much. "They tried to disturb my breakthrough, or well my Leader did, but His Majesty protected me."

The others gasped, not because Alex had saved her, but because she had been attacked in the first place.

"What sort of monster attacks a person in the middle of a breakthrough," one of the girls with flowing light brown hair asked with unhidden fury in her words. "Sister Hongxi, you should report this to the army. They will definitely punish him."

"They would," Sarah mused before shaking her head. "No need for that. I will defeat him sooner or later, and then the battalion will be mine."

Alex could see the conviction in her face, hear it in those words. "Why do you want to be a Battalion leader so badly?" he couldn't help but ask her.

"I have my reasons," the girl said, not elaborating on it further. She turned to the group that had arrived and quickly said, "Let us return. My cultivation base still needs to stabilize and those people might just return."

The few people nodded and turned toward Alex, wondering. Sarah turned toward Alex as well.

"I'm sorry, Your Majesty," she said with a small bow. "I will have to leave now. We can talk properly when we meet once again."

With a nod, she flew away with the group, none giving him a second look.

Alex couldn't help but be slightly taken aback.

"Did they just leave me here alone?"

Chapter 1612 Freedom

"Why did I think they would welcome me to their hideout with smiling faces?" Alex thought as he walked away from the grassland where he stood. "Of course, they won't let me come with them. I'm someone from the other group. For all they know, we could've just put on a show for them."

Alex sighed as he was all alone once again, having to roam the island on his own.

He looked to the sky, the sun a little lower toward the west. "At least I don't have to worry about fighting for the next 20 or so hours," he thought, walking away.

Worry vanished from him like water on a hot rock. "I suppose this is the best way to go about it."

There was freedom with being alone that he had missed the past few months he was kept in the valley. He had made a lot of advancements in the valley, but being outside was equally as important for him.

Around the time night fell, thunder and lightning marred the sky and heavy rain poured all over the land. Alex found himself covered underneath a large tree where he set up his formations to begin his cultivation.

He cultivated the entire night and hours into the morning as well. He only stopped when he knew that the sun was high in the sky.

Done with cultivating for the day, Alex checked his cultivation base and smiled a little. "I knew I should have fought more," he thought. "It makes such a good difference for my cultivation speed. I should be able to break through in a month or two at this rate."

It was a bit too early in comparison to the times he had taken to break through before. Nearly a year off. It had only been a bit over 2 years since he last broke through, and Saint Soul realm made it harder to break through the higher he went.

But even that seemed to disappear due to the amount of training and cultivation he had managed to go through in the past year and a half.

'2 months might be a bit too early even at the rate I'm improving,' Alex thought. 'Especially if I stop fighting.'

He chewed on that thought for a few seconds.

Pearl and Whisker were standing around him too, both done with their cultivation, and watched him as he grew a weird little devious smile on his face.

"Brother? What's going on?" he asked with a worried expression.

"Hehe," Alex smiled, slowly standing up and stretched. "All this time, I've only ever been attacked. The times I challenged someone had usually been so I could get through my first battle of the day."

His spiritual sense suddenly exploded from him, searching all around him, even attacking formations to look through them.

"But now, that will no longer be true. I will be the one to attack others just because I can," he said.

Hundreds of kilometers around him, people sensed his spiritual sense and many even tried to follow it back to him, but few succeeded.

The ones that did wished they hadn't.

Alex noticed a broad-shouldered man with a heavy axe in his hand, walking up a mountain who immediately grimaced the moment he was locked on by the spiritual sense.

"Let's go," Alex said, taking Pearl and Whisker into their beast space and rushing off.

He arrived on the mountaintop a few minutes later and landed in front of the broad-shouldered man who had his axe held ready for an attack.

"Come on, let's fight," Alex said.

The reset was only less than an hour away, but Alex didn't care about the reset anymore. There was no point in waiting for it if he was going to be fighting night and day.

He had spent enough time inside the secret realm that he would care if he lost the next 30 days of battles in a row and was sent out of the secret realm.

As long as it got him close to a breakthrough, it would've done its job. Improving his sword at that time was just a luxury.

The man looked at Alex, gulping a bit in fear. He had been out here searching for people in groups to fight. The weaker ones would be around here somewhere, and he wanted to find them, so he could call members of his small group to attack them.

He calmed down, happy that he hadn't been challenged after the reset. As long as it was before, he was willing to agree. He had already fought, so why should he care?

"Let's fight," the man said.

Sword struck axe and sounds of metal clashing rang through the land. Alex used only Sword Qi and Intent to fight the man, but he put all of himself in those fights.

The man had a good cultivation base with Saint Soul 8th realm, but even then he felt pressed in that fight. He used different techniques and attacks, but Alex beat through everything, attacking him in close range.

As a result, he had to fight at close range as well.

They fought for nearly 10 minutes, neither party superior to the other one, and neither lost. However, the man clearly recognized that Alex was holding himself back.

Not only was he holding himself back, but he was also not using his Qi at all, which meant he could go on for as long as he had Qi. Alex could go for much longer certainly.

He fought to win quickly, but it was hard. Alex's Sword Qi was a little too strong to just beat at once.

Then the both of them sensed their talisman buzz. Alex smiled and suddenly Qi filled his sword and he slashed.

It was a simple slash, but the man could not block it at all.

'So strong!' was all he could think before the attack sent him flying down into the mountain where he lay in a small crater. It took him a few moments to get out of it.

When he did, Alex was standing next to him.

"The reset is here," he told the man. "Do you want to rest for a bit? Or should we get straight into our next fight?"

Chapter 1613 Silent Travel

"We should fly faster," Ren Wujin said as she and 3 others flew through the sky at what she considered was a rather slow pace.

"Can't," the only man of the 4 said. "I'm already doing all I can to hide ourselves from spiritual senses. If we move too fast, I won't be able to maintain it around us."

He held onto an artifact in his hand, a thick metal ring that seemed as if it was supposed to go around one's head like a band.

"Tsk!" one of the other two girls, someone with bright red hair, made a sound. "How much longer?"

"Should be 10 more minutes, 15 at most at this speed," the last girl with dark hair said. "Don't worry, we went there like this the other day too. We will be there soon enough."

"I'm scared," the red-haired girl said. "He comes out of nowhere and we can do nothing about it."

Nobody said anything.

They continued flying for over 10 minutes and arrived at a small gathering of people that they had found a few weeks ago. They would have to work harder and maybe even change their base if they wanted to find new groups of people.

They walked into a formation and finally, the man among them could drop the barrier he had been keeping up the entire time.

"Alright, we can finally—"

The red-haired girl who was about to speak stopped halfway through when she saw four other people who entered the same as them. It didn't take even a second for all 8 of them to know that they were all there for the same reason.

"It's him!" the dark-haired girl pointed to a figure amongst the group of 4.

It was an old man with a cultivation base of Saint Transformation 1st realm.

"Yang Baijin," Ren Wujin said in a low voice. By now, she knew every member of the opposite group led by Zhao Boqin. This was one of the 4 strongest people in their group.

And their group had none that were stronger.

"What do we do?" the young man with her asked through spiritual sense.

"Do not say anything or reject if you're challenged," Ren Wujin said. "Let me take the lead."

The two girls next to her nodded.

"Did you just find them, old Yang?" Ren Wujin asked the man. Her eyes drifted to the 2 men and the last woman by his side, but her focus was on the man.

None of the other two were Saint Transformation realm. Not that it mattered with one of them just that. He could win against them all if he got the way. Her first thought was running, but maybe there was a greater way.

"Fairy Ren," the old man said in a sweet voice. "How lucky of us to finally find these people. We have been searching for one since our other one seemed close to having to leave."

He gestured to the 15 or so people that were gathered there, the highest of which was still weaker than their weakest.

Ren Wujin thought for a bit, her mind moving through diplomatic words that her father had taught her. "If you want one, I will be happy to let you have them," she said. "Please make your choice."

She pointed to the 15 people gathered in that group too. Not a single one of them said anything. It wasn't their place to speak. Just the fact that they had survived 20 months in the secret realm was enough for them. Not that they could say anything even if they wanted to.

The ones that preyed on their Losses were just too strong. They stayed there listlessly, looking toward the young man in the corner whose turn it was to accept the challenge that day.

The old man looked toward the group that say on the uneven ground and back toward Ren Wujin. "I'm not sure," he said. "I would very much like to gain more points if I can."

Ren Wujin frowned. Did she really have to do it? Could she do nothing else? It didn't seem she had a choice.

"If you want to fight, I will give you a fight," the girl said. She took a deep breath and at the same time, the barrier disappeared.

It was sudden and everyone but Ren Wujin, and the group's leader was surprised. It was her orders and the group's leader was the one that had stopped the barrier from working.

"What are you doing?" the old man asked in a frown.

Ren Wujin simply smiled, and then her cultivation base flared with a strong aura that forced her comrades to move away from her.

"Sister Ren?" the red-haired girl called out. "What are you doing?"

"What are you doing, child?" the old man asked. "If you want to fight me, just challenge—"

He stopped.

"No!" his head whipped to the right as he sensed something.

"NO!" he cried out even more and turned to run, but it was too late.

Alex was coming for them.

Alex had been searching for people to challenge, but it was difficult to find someone to challenge all throughout the day. Because of what he had started doing 2 months ago, it had become difficult to find people now.

They were extra cautious. It seemed someone was not so cautious anymore.

The moment he sensed someone's cultivation base, he left at his quickest speed. He could already sense people running away. He kept track of where everyone went, but his target was just one fellow.

A person who could not believe that Alex could catch up to him.

Alex arrived within range of the man and immediately challenged him. "Senior Yang, let's fight!"

The old man, even as he ran away, sensed his talisman buzzing once and then again as the challenge was accepted on its own.

He stopped and turned around.

"Your Majesty!" the old man said slowly. "Surely you don't want to fight me. I am but an old man—"

"You already accepted," Alex cut him off. "Let us fight and be done with it."

The man didn't know what to say. He had fought Alex before, but each time he had won. However, recently he had started hearing that Alex was much stronger than what he led on to be.

After what he did to Zhao Boqin, the man didn't doubt.

"Your Majesty, I will give—"

"If you give up, I will hunt you day and night until you have 5 Out of Bounds and can no longer remain in this secret realm," Alex said. "Don't think you can run away from me by giving up."

The man gulped. He thought for a bit and nodded. "Fine, if these old bones can give you a fight, then I will do so," he said and brought out a few things.

To Alex's surprise, 3 puppets flew out of the man's storage bag. Each puppet was of a different shape and size. One was thin with a feminine body and held a sword. Another held a shield on its left hand and had a rather large body.

and the last was a puppet in armor that seemed to have rather well-defined features.

"Interesting," Alex said. "Why don't I do the same?"

And then he brought out his puppet.

Chapter 1614 Puppet Battle

Alex took off the artifact that he always had his puppet wear before bringing it out.

The old man gave a surprised look when he saw the puppet as he hadn't heard from anyone that Alex even used a puppet.

"Aren't you going to use swords?" the man asked him carefully.

"Yes, but I've been using swords day and night," Alex said. "It's fun to use something else from time to time. A bit of spice to my days."

He also wanted to check how his control of the puppet was and how it fared against someone who seemed to use the puppet daily. It would certainly not be an easy fight, but he couldn't see himself losing.

Alex had to use his Qi to manipulate the puppet. It was a normal puppet with no skill or technique carved into it. It didn't even have a sliver of his spirit inside of it, like how most puppets seemed to have.

In his case, he had only refined it. The puppet was his, but he couldn't control it as easily.

He looked at the 3 puppets that belonged to the old man and wanted to learn more about how it was made. He had been to the Royal School of Puppets for some time too and knew how puppets were made.

He couldn't help but wonder how good the materials used for this puppet were. He wondered if he should do it much damage. He was also curious about the artifacts the puppets carried, but none more than the puppets themselves.

He moved back, letting his simple puppet stand before him. 'I should get whisker to fight with it someday,' he thought. 'He needs a chance to battle too.'

But the thought didn't last for long as the old man charged without warning.

The thin puppet moved at once, its speed rather frightening, and arrived in front of Alex's puppet. The thin puppet swung its sword, but Alex managed to see through the attack and pulled back his puppet in time.

He made it to punch the small puppet on the side, but the muscular puppet came from the side, slamming into Alex's puppet. Alex made his puppet punch that puppet instead, but a rather golden shield blocked it from touching it.

'Should I put more force into the attacks?' he thought. He could beat it at once if he did so, but he wasn't sure if that was the right choice. That was certainly not a very good choice if he wanted to test out his puppet more thoroughly in this fight.

And hopefully, learn a few things about controlling puppets.

He punched the muscular puppet a few more times, and on one of the strikes, it took the force of the punch and moved backward. At the same time, the lean puppet from before charged in with its sword ready to strike through Alex's puppet's chest.

Alex barely managed to move the puppet to the right at the last moment and the sword passed where the puppet should've been. He noticed the muscular puppet incoming and was about to strike, but instead, he had to dodge the attack as a spear went through where the puppet should've been.

The bigger puppet's shield had disappeared and in its stead, a spear had appeared in its hand. Alex hadn't noticed that amid the battle at all, and only noticed it when it moved to attack.

'I should pay more attention,' he thought.

The lean and thin puppet seemed to be the fastest of the three as it darted after the spear and caught it before throwing it back at Alex's puppet.

Alex smiled.

His puppet suddenly twisted and grabbed the muscular puppet before tossing it to the side. Then, with another unnatural twist of its body, it caught the incoming spear right before it landed on it.

The spear passed under the puppet's armpit before stopping.

Alex made it turn around and held the spear properly. He didn't know how to use a spear at all. Spear was one of the weapons he never cared to try, but he had seen enough people fighting with it to know what he could and could not do with it.

'Defend with the shaft, and stick the pointy end into the opponent,' Alex thought. That was all he needed to know anyway.

The old man frowned. He couldn't believe that Alex's puppet could use his artifact. After all, the spear was refined by him and would only work for him. But never had he imagined that Alex intended to use the spear not as an artifact, but as a simple weapon.

He was going to use the spear for a spear, and nothing else.

His puppet charged without warning as well, dashing toward the muscular puppet. The fat puppet arrived before it, a shield ready in its hand. Alex had seen it appear this time around. There was a spatial pocket inside the puppets, like an attached storage bag.

'That's something,' Alex thought.

His puppet moved fast, arriving in front of the muscular one and stabbing forward, but the muscular puppet's armor came into work, creating a barrier that protected itself. Alex's attack made no more impact with a spear than it did with a fist.

But that didn't matter. It was only a distraction in the first place.

The puppet took off one of its hands and moved to the left, suddenly grabbing onto the sword that was swung toward it.

'Got you!' Alex thought and pulled back the spear to stab the lean puppet. The puppet tried to move away, but it didn't let go of the sword. The old man had only told the puppet to move backward and didn't command it to let go of its sword.

By the time he realized his fault, it was too late.

The spear struck the lean puppet in the chest, sending it flying backward while Alex's puppet held onto the sword. He flipped the sword and caught it by the handle this time around. There was no mark where the puppet had caught the blade at all, not even a scratch.

With a spear in one hand and a sword in another, Alex sent his puppet charging into the other two puppets.

They tried to fight back, but the old man's offensive puppet had already been dealt with, so he could only send the other two into becoming defensive. The fight lasted long just because of that and it took 10 more minutes before the fat puppet with the shield lost, and 10 minutes after that, so did the muscular puppet.

Once all 3 puppets were defeated, Alex threw both the spear and sword toward the old man and waited to accept his concede.

The man didn't wait a minute longer before giving up.

Alex smiled and nodded. "Now go along," he said as he took back his puppet. "I will see you again soon, hopefully."

The old man prayed not.

Alex turned around and looked in a certain direction. Despite the battle here, he had kept a vague attention in all directions, and this one was the one he kept his main focus on.

One of the men that came with the old man had run off in that direction and disappeared.

'So that's where you have all been hiding,' Alex thought. 'Good to know.'

Chapter 1615 Against the Golden Fox

Alex found Ren Wujin not far away, trying to come back to the group of weaker cultivators, probably trying to get done with her first battle of the day.

He could sense her sensing him, but that didn't stop him from flying toward her. Ren Wujin thought of flying away, but on second thought, she stood her ground.

Alex arrived there a moment later and landed in front of her and the group of 15 cultivators. He was about to challenge her when he realized that she had been waiting for him to.

'She's waiting to reject me,' Alex thought. That was certainly the only reason from what he could see.

He wondered what choice he had here. If he just challenged, she would reject and that would be it for the day. But if he didn't then there was no point in him being here.

The girl gave a slanted smile understanding Alex's predicament. He thought for a bit and nodded as he concluded.

"If I let you get done with your first match, will you fight me afterward?" he asked.

The girl frowned a bit. "You will give me that opportunity?" she asked him.

Alex nodded. That was his best choice here from what he could see.

"What if I don't agree to this?" she asked. "Can you stop me from leaving?"

"No," Alex said truthfully. "But I will follow you until you fight me. Or you can lead me straight to your headquarters if you want to."

Alex didn't want to fight Sarah or Zhao Boqin just yet. They had Immortal Qi and fighting those became a bit too difficult. He did want to do that as soon as he broke through, however. He was so close to it.

The girl nodded.

"Fine, I will accept Your Majesty's offer," the girl said. "Please don't go back on it though."

"I won't," Alex said as he stepped back a little to make way for the girl to fight.

It didn't take more than a few minutes for Ren Wujin to fight the man that had been selected to fight today before coming back to Alex.

The two of them flew away from the group of people where they could fight freely.

"If you are ready, we can start, Your Majesty," the girl said. "I wish to make it quick."

"I don't," Alex said, bringing out a sword. "Let's fight."

Ren Wujin nodded in acceptance. This was going to be the first time was going to fight this girl. He wondered how good she was.

Her sword appeared in her hand. A crystalline sword with gold embedded throughout the hilt and a large ruby for the pommel. It wasn't a regular sword by any measure, but it was hard to tell if it was a treasure that could have been handed to her as her first treasure.

Alex had a suspicion that the treasure she had received after coming here was the golden fox mask that now lay on her face.

'Alright then. Let us see why the Ren family would ever want to adopt you as their daughter.'

The girl stabbed her sword, sending a blade-shaped fire attack toward Alex.

Alex, powered with only Sword Qi and Sword Intent, swung at the incoming attack. Since the girl wasn't even a Saint Soul 9th realm cultivator right now, he felt no need to fight her with anything else.

However, when the attack landed on Alex, confidence vanished from him at once as confusion and panic filled him for an instant before he controlled himself.

"That was..." he spoke slowly, mulling over what he wanted to say. "Strong."

The girl said nothing.

He looked at her, giving a knowing look. "It's close," he told her. "But if you fought a capable Saint Transformation 1st realm cultivator, like old Yang from earlier, you would've definitely lost."

The girl frowned silently before nodding. She knew she would lose, that was why she had even dared to grab his attention. Why else would she do something as stupid as shutting down the barrier that hid her and then flaring up her cultivation base?

Her sword flashed again, sending out a strong Fire slash once again. This time, Alex swung too, sending out everything he had to block her.

His Sword Intent and Sword Qi had gotten stronger, but they weren't yet strong enough to fight someone on the precipice of touching the Saint Transformation realm. But he was close to getting them there. Just a month or two more and they would be right there.

Midnight flashed this time, the black blade making a white blur in the air as Sword Qi flew out of Alex's sword, flying toward the girl.

Ren Wujin took back her sword and instead moved her left arm. An amber gem attached to some sort of golden bangles on her left arm flashed, creating a barrier in front of her like a curved shield.

Alex showed a hint of surprise at how sturdy the barrier was as it could hold against his attack. That was surprising.

Another attack flew toward him, quickly transforming into a beautiful bright red image of a wolf.

Alex took no time to send out an attack to destroy it as well. Then, he sent out the next attack.

The two of them fought for a while, throwing out attacks and defending against ones coming for them. Alex didn't think much of it, only recognizing that she most likely had Wood, Fire, and Metal spiritual roots, and liked using Fire the most.

However, after a while, the attacks started getting stronger and stronger. Slowly, it was touching on the precipice of Saint Transformation 1st realm. It might as well be strong enough to battle someone in the Saint Transformation 1st realm with a weaker foundation.

'Oh!' Alex thought when he realized what was causing it. 'She's using Sword Intent. Was she hiding it all this time?'

Alex couldn't see what Ren Wujin looked like at the moment, her face was hidden by the golden mask she wore.

The attacks got increasingly difficult to handle as Alex fought. Her power alone was the same as him without using Qi, but once she revealed it fully, it was stronger. Alex was slowly being pushed back.

The girl looked at him in surprise, but a cold wave of energy got rid of her surprise immediately. She had to rid herself of useless emotions as there was no need for them in this battle.

'Maybe I can win this,' she thought. Whether she could or not, she did not know. But if she gave it her all, then maybe she could.

She moved, her body moving at a sudden speed, like a fox going for a hunt.

Alex tracked her with his eyes and threw out an attack when he saw the slash coming from her direction. He sent out a few more attacks, all of which flew close by her, without ever managing to hit her.

'This is fun,' Alex thought.

He got into another battle where he threw out his attacks as quickly as he could, while Ren Wujin tried to catch him off guard from all directions. But Alex was simply too good at following movement.

His Demon Eyes were just too good for that.

She stopped at the end after dodging one final attack and decided it was time to end the match if she could. Her sword gave a small buzz as the sword glowed in two colors, Red and Green.

The energy mixed together but remained separate for the most part. But Alex had a feeling he could see the red color get brighter.

'Wood-Fire empowerment,' Alex thought. 'In a technique at that?'

He had seen people empower their attacks using energy from other spiritual roots, but this was the first time he had seen an attack where the two energies worked in tandem.

Ren Wujin wasted no time and swung.

The red and green energy quickly turned to an undulating arrow with no uniform shape or size. It flew across the sky, going straight for him. Even at the distance, Alex could tell the arrow was too strong for him without his Qi.

But he felt stubborn, just a little. 'I'll be fine,' he thought, and his sword blossomed into a bright white light that sent off Sword Qi flying in all directions.

Sword Aura enveloped him and the sword, and then he swung.

It was a simple slash that flew toward the simple arrow that came toward him. There were no fancy techniques, no fancy shapes. Just raw power in those attacks.

And then the two clashed.

Ren Wujin felt her heart skip a beat when she saw the Sword Aura for the first time, and then she felt her heart skip another beat when the shockwave of the two attacks clashing went past her.

The bright red and green attack struggled against the Sword Aura and was seemingly strong enough to destroy it. However, no matter how weaker the Sword Aura felt, it didn't budge an inch.

Step after step, it tore through her attack, sending her into disbelief. As she watched, the attack successfully broke past her technique and arrived for her.

She raised her hand to create a barrier, but her skin went numb when she sensed Alex behind her.

Before she could turn around, he struck her in the back, sending her flying into the sword aura in front, where she got hit once more.

After being hit one after another by the two attacks, Ren Wujin felt her mind grow numb, and then darkness took over her mind.

Chapter 1616 Breakthrough

Alex sat by the small hill where Ren Wujin lay unconscious for a while, thinking of how much longer he would need to break through. He was close, he could tell that much.

If he could continuously breakthrough for the next 10 days or so, he was sure he would be ready to break through. Maybe even less. He would have to start cultivating to be certain.

He just wasn't willing to give away 10 days when he could spend them fighting instead. That would bring back the same result. Surely going out to fight was the better option here.

'Just a little longer,' he thought. Once he broke through, he would have less qualms about going out to fight the likes of Sarah and Zhao Boqin. He wouldn't be at their level yet, but he would be close enough.

He saw the girl stir from the corner of his vision and looked over.

Ren Wujin slowly got back up, looking around for a moment, her eyes landing on Alex. Instantly, all memories of what had happened flooded back and she quickly checked herself to see if she was okay.

There were marks on her clothes, some small cuts here and there, some scratches. But aside from that, everything else was in order. She was more than fine.

She couldn't even feel any pain despite falling unconscious.

"Did you feed me a pill?" she asked.

"You seemed hurt," Alex said.

The girl nodded silently, checking herself more thoroughly. She quickly got up. "Thank you," she said. "You won't follow where I go, right?"

"Go," Alex said. "I won't follow."

The girl nodded and flew away without another word.

Alex stayed there without looking where the girl went to. No doubt she would do her best to hide from him after reaching further away and then go through countless troubles to make sure he couldn't find out where she had gone even if he was actively searching.

"I've rested enough," he thought. "Time to go search for more."

Alex barely took a break for the next week or so. If he ever did, it was because he couldn't find anyone to challenge.

To begin with, it was hard to find someone to challenge. Everyone he went to

Usually rejected him. It was only around the hours before the reset that he found people willing to fight him.

Finding people was hard, but once he did, he fought them as well as he could without immediately defeating them. Only that was getting harder and harder too, as the people he fought were usually very weak for him.

His Sword Intent alone had reached a level that only a few dozen people in the entire secret realm could fight him, and they were mostly hiding themselves in two groups.

Once he felt that he had fought enough, it was time for him to break through.

He found a place by a tall tree that still stood while the others around it were destroyed. He stayed close to the tree in its shade and brought out a few things in preparation.

Pearl and Whisker came out, and after them the puppet that sat to the side. A few formation plates came out which he quickly activated, forming a few different barriers that spanned hundreds of meters.

Finally, he placed a book by his left side and his sword by the right. "I'll begin cultivating," Alex said to his two beasts. "If a problem comes up, handle it."

The two beasts looked around and nodded.

The sky grew darker as Alex began cultivating, rain clouds gathering overhead. The wind picked up, replacing the hot wind around them with the cool breeze from the sky. The wind slowly picked up and it started raining.

By the time it was raining, Alex was already deep in cultivation, working toward his breakthrough.

Pearl sat quietly on the ground, ignoring the rain that battered him outside. He could easily not get wet, but he didn't bother with such nonsense.

Whisker, on the other hand, quickly made the Immortal puppet grab him and keep him away from the rain. He stayed in the Puppet's embrace for as long as it would rain.

A few minutes later, Pearl could sense Alex slowly drifting toward breakthrough. The sky had started stirring enough for him to tell. Anyone who saw that would know that someone was either breaking through or learning a dao.

A sudden bang took Pearl's attention from Alex, forcing him to look in the direction of the sound. Whisker poked his head out of the puppet's embrace to look in the direction of the sound as well.

"What's happening?" Whisker asked fearfully. Unconsciously, he made the puppet hold him even more firmly.

"I don't know," Pearl said. "I can take a look, but they will sense my spiritual sense. Should I check outside?"

Whisker thought for a bit and shook his head. "Don't let them know we are here," he said. "We need to keep hiding for the time being."

They looked back toward Alex. He was deep enough in cultivation that it didn't seem like he had time to spare them some thought. But a feeling of reassurance did come through their bond, and that was enough for both of the beasts.

"Let's see what happens," Pearl said. "They might just leave after a while."

"Hopefully," Whisker said. "We should've set up better formations, with formation flags. Formation plates are just not good enough."

Pearl nodded, but only because Whisker had said so. He didn't know enough about the differences between plates and flags to tell why one was better than the other, except for the fact that flags could be set further apart.

"If they continue, they will break through the formation soon enough," Whisker said. "The formation plates just don't hold enough spirit stones to last very long. Brother, hurry up."

And yet the feeling of reassurance continued flowing into them through their bonds.

The first barrier broke open and people spilled in. The barrier that stopped their entry was the only thing keeping them out. As soon as that was destroyed, they had nothing else barring their entry.

3 men and 2 women arrived inside, all flaring with cultivation bases in the Saint Transformation realm. Immediately, Pearl and Whisker panicked.

They had not imagined that the people who entered would be that strong.

All 5 people stared at Pearl and his black fur first. Then it went to the puppet, not even noticing the tiny eyes that watched them through a sliver in the puppet's clutched hands.

Finally, their eyes landed on Alex, the sword that stuck to his right, and the book that lay beside him on his left.

"Ah! So it IS him," the taller of the girls with a blue ribbon in her hair said. She looked back at a tanned man who was their leader. "Are you sure that we should do this, brother Shin?"

"He's been troubling us enough," the leader named Shin said. "There's hardly any hunting ground anymore and he's found us more times than anyone in the last few months."

"He's right," another man with his hair in a bun said. "We kept ourselves from the fight between those two, but because of him, we're having a hard time finding people to not get a Loss. Everyone keeps running away to a different place once they know he's found them."

"What do you two think?" the man asked the last remaining man and woman.

The woman just grunted, making it apparent that she would go with whichever choice they ended up with in the end.

The final man was younger than everyone, but his eyes were looking for a battle. He had to fight Alex a few weeks ago and had since then thought that Alex had only won because he had used some underhanded technique. He wanted some revenge.

His agreement was written right on the face.

The girl with the blue ribbon who started questioning simply sighed. "I still think it isn't right," she said. "But you guys act like you know better than me, so go on."

The man that was the leader took a step forward, his cultivation base sending terror through Whisker and Pearl, despite the steady stream of reassurance that came from Alex.

Neither of the two could understand what it was that made Alex be so reassured that nothing bad was going to happen. The man that stood before them had a cultivation base of Saint Transformation 3rd realm after all.

"I have come before you to challenge you to a duel," the man spoke, his booming voice echoing through the empty thicket of trees.

Pearl was about to say something when he suddenly heard Alex's voice.

"You 5 are players, aren't you?" Alex asked. His speaking in the middle of his own breakthrough surprised them all quite a bit.

The man looked at Alex directly, but there was no sign of his breakthrough faltering at all. 'Such amazing focus,' he thought. It took effort to put one's focus on two things at once.

"We are," the man said. "Is it that easy to tell?"

"I always wondered why the group of players only had a single Saint Transformation realm cultivator," Alex said. "When I fought three of you during the past few months, I was certain there was another group, but you made it hard to find you."

"You made it hard for us to find others too," the man said before chuckling a little. "Yes, we are players, but that doesn't mean we're much different from regular cultivators. If you think that will make us step back, then you're wrong."

A small grin appeared on Alex's otherwise emotionless face. "The chances were little, but I had hoped someone would bite the bait," he said. "Yes, I accept your challenge."

Chapter 1617 Terror

All 7 of the individuals standing in front of Alex looked wary. The 5 that came to attack were one thing, but even Pearl and Whisker felt wary for some reason. They didn't understand what was going on.

"Bait?" the young man with the scornful look asked from the back where he was staying with the others.

The leader said nothing, quietly making sure that the breakthrough that was happening was Alex's. He could feel the roiling energy in the sky that everyone called the heavens. There was no doubt that he was in the middle of a breakthrough.

If he wasn't wrong about what he sensed, then it was even correct to say that the person in front of him had only begun breaking through. So he couldn't understand why it was that he chose to accept the challenge just yet.

The girls looked warily on all sides. "He's joking. There's nothing here waiting to jump on us," the one with the blue ribbons said. The quiet one slowly nodded.

"I think he means himself," the man with his hair in a bun said. "Are you going to attack us yourself, Your Majesty?"

Alex spoke, but the words weren't for the men. "Pearl, step back," he said.

"Brother, but—"

"It's alright," Alex said. "Besides, you were never supposed to be the one doing the fighting here."

Alex didn't open his eyes the entire time, but Whisker thought it was him that his gaze was drifting toward.

"Whisker, I am allowing you to use all you can in this fight," Alex said. "You know what to do."

Whisker did, and he hated it.

He didn't want to fight. He knew how much of a coward he was when it came to directly fighting. For someone who couldn't die, he wasn't sure why he hated conflict so much.

Still, as he felt the wave of reassurance that had flowed until now from Alex disappear, he knew he had to step forward. The aura in the sky had suddenly grown stronger and everyone could tell that Alex had started focusing on his cultivation even harder.

A final wave of command came from Alex, both to Pearl and Whisker.

"Whatever you do, don't let them leave with our secrets."

Pearl nodded and stepped back, going next to Alex so he could protect him when needed. The puppet walked back too and Whisker relinquished all control over it.

"Use the puppet to take care of brother," Whisker said before standing in the midst of the battle. He could hear his tiny heart beating loudly in his eardrums, staring at the people who could squash him with a sneeze.

The five players were quite confused as well. The leader especially was the most confused. The challenge had been accepted and the fight was underway, but Alex wasn't fighting him. Was he supposed to fight a rat?

He looked at Whisker and found it hard to believe a rat like that could have a Saint Realm cultivation base, but even then it was just a rat. On top of that, it was so weak that he could beat it at once.

"Get it over with already," the girl with blue ribbons said. "We need to leave soon."

The man shrugged. "Fine, I will—"

He lost his thought process when he saw what was happening in front of him.

A book that was next to Alex floated right in front of Whisker and suddenly brightened in a crimson glow. It opened, its pages flipping slowly and then the glow got brighter.

Flashes of red streaked his vision as things appeared around him. Each thing that appeared gave an aura of something that scared him. What scared him most was that there were more than just a few of them.

The man watched in horror as an assortment of crimson beasts filled the area around him, each one stronger than the next. What scared him the most was that the beasts that surrounded him were all in the upper Saint Soul realm, with quite a few even being in the Saint Transformation realm.

He could sense 3 that were in Saint Transformation 3rd realm, the same cultivation base as him.

Blood drained from his face in terror. He could not understand just how something like this could ever exist. How could beasts that weren't beasts be so strong?

The Blood Beasts from the Blood God's Manual were normally strong, but over the past few years that Alex had spent cultivating, the improvement in his own blood aura thanks to his cultivation base had made it so that the beasts were also stronger than normal.

Alex had reached Saint Transformation 3rd realm in terms of Blood Aura back when he had left the Beast Paradise. Now, over 12 years later, after going from Saint Core 7th realm to Saint Soul 3rd realm, his blood aura had improved to nearly Saint Transformation 5th realm.

Nearly.

Whisker felt a connection to Alex and through that connection, he felt the connection to all the beasts around him. Each and every one of them remained there, waiting for him to give them a command.

And he gave the command.

The silent command flowed through only 10 of the beasts, no more. But each one of the beasts was in the Saint Transformation realm. And as soon as they came together, they formed a small array, that immediately improved the aura of each beast that stood there.

Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array was quite the array formation.

Terror spread through the five as they couldn't understand how the strong beasts got stronger. Neither did they realize when the first one attacked.

A giant eagle with crimson wings unfurled threw out its feathers of blood at the man. Blood splattered all over the man and around him, battering him with something he was too late to stop.

The other four thought of interfering in the fight, but other beasts around them made them scared to even think of doing so.

The man barely managed to put up a defense when a blood monkey appeared next to him, punching him in the face.

Moving the defense around, the man looked behind him at something else that came for him, but the slam from the monkey shattered his defense in just that one strike.

The man wanted to look back, but the snake in front of him stopped him from doing so. In the end, he was beaten by two beasts before more joined in.

The man tried to fight back, but none of the attacks did anything to most of them, and the three beasts that were stronger than him continued beating him until his talisman buzzed.

The man had lost so pathetically that he didn't even know what to do. And yet, the attacks didn't stop.

"I lost! Stop! I lost already!" he shouted a few times before the attacks halted and he had time to breathe. "Don't hit me, I lost."

Whisker looked at the man confusedly. The match was a little too fast and he had won so easily. He didn't know what to do now.

But Pearl did.

Pearl walked forward, his eyes seeing the man with his hair in a bun. "You were the first to agree with fighting my brother, were you not?"

The young man felt his stomach sink.

"Come and fight us," Pearl said, and the young man didn't even have the right to refuse.

Chapter 1618 Punishment

3 of the five thought they could get out of being challenged by quickly getting done with their own battles, but to their surprise, Pearl challenged each one of them after the other battles were done.

They tried escaping from the place, but with beasts all around, they couldn't even find an escape route. With the formations blocking all but the people from coming in, there was nothing that the people could do that could save them.

Even their spiritual sense was being blocked from going out.

The silent girl and the final young man did their best to fight against Whisker and the beasts, but there was nothing they could do that could win the fight. Even the use of a Fire Dao did nothing to stop the beasts from beating them.

By the end of it, they were all scared and huddled up together to find a path to escape, but with nearly a hundred beasts surrounding them, that was nearly impossible.

"Let us leave!" one of them shouted at Whisker.

Whisker said nothing and remained behind the blood snake.

"Vow to not tell anyone what you saw or heard today," Pearl said. "Not even talk about it amongst yourselves."

"What? What do you mean?" one of the girls asked.

"You wanted to leave right? Then vow," Pearl said. "Otherwise you will remain here until my brother is done sending every single one of you out of this secret realm."

They all felt concerned. They were so close to the end of the secret realm, that they couldn't stop now. They needed all the points they could get to get into the competition that was going to take place soon.

Reluctantly, they made the oath. Pearl waited until he felt the oath fulfilled and nodded. He couldn't see any loopholes in the oath he made, so he saw no problem anymore.

The 5 of them felt the oath take hold of them as well and felt bad about it. A few of them looked at the beasts that still surrounded them and couldn't help but be surprised that they all belonged to Alex.

It was no different from walking around with an army. If only they knew that Whisker had only brought out as many as he did because there wasn't much place to bring out more.

"Put them away," the silent girl spoke while everyone else was gazing around. "Let us go."

"Not yet," Pearl said.

The five of them frowned. "We already made the oath. Do you not trust us?" the leader asked.

"About the oath? I do," Pearl said. "But you will still have to wait."

"You said that you would let us go if we made the oath," the girl with blue ribbons said. "You said we could leave."

"I did," Pearl said. "But not when."

Everyone felt their face drain. "You bastard!" one of them said in a low voice. Pearl couldn't even tell which one of the 5 it was that spoke.

"You should have made sure I could be trusted before you trusted me," Pearl said. He was feeling quite good about everything, especially when he saw the 5 of them grimace at his words.

He didn't think any of the 5 deserved any sort of freedom after what they had done. If it was a regular clash, Pearl would have had no animosity with any of them. However, they had decided to attack his brother while he was in the middle of a breakthrough.

That was a sort of thing that if it was up to him, he would cripple or even kill them for it. But he didn't want to be making those decisions now.

"You'll wait until my brother is done with his breakthrough," Pearl said. "Then he will give out the punishment you deserve."

The five of them could only hold a sullen look as the blood beast surrounded them with no path of escape.

"Just hold on," the leader said in a soft voice. "Don't do anything rash."

Everyone nodded and waited. No one wanted to do something that could get them killed.

They didn't have to wait for long. Alex's breakthrough went smoothly and he was done with it by the time morning came around. He had even taken the time to stabilize his cultivation base before opening them to look at what was happening around him.

He smiled.

"Good job, Whisker. You too, Pearl," he said as he stood up from where he sat and pulled Midnight from the ground before walking up front.

All five of the players quickly got up in a panic, watching Alex walk toward them.

Alex rubbed Pearl before taking Whisker to his shoulder and walked to the front. The Blood God's Manual floated to his hand as well and he held it open, bringing all but a select few beasts back into the book. Just enough remained outside that the people could still not leave.

"You came to ruin my cultivation base and I find it hard to forgive someone for that. I saved someone from the same happening to them a few months ago, and to think it would happen to me too," Alex said. "I was hoping no one would come, but you did, and now you deserve punishment for it. What should I do to you?"

"Your Majesty, we're sorry," the girl with the blue ribbons said. "We were wrong>"

"We're sorry."

"Please forgive us."

"Please have mercy on us."

The other 4 practically fell to his feet the moment he gave them a chance to speak.

Alex looked at them, a disgusted look on his face. He shook his head for a second and spoke. "The mercy you'll see from me is that you won't be crippled. My forgiveness for the fact that you aren't dead. But you will be punished and you will serve it."

"Whatever you say, Your Majesty," the leader said quickly.

Alex thought for a bit. "You will give me 50 wins for my first battle over the course of the next 50?days, each day," he said. "You will make an oath of it."

Chapter 1619 ¬†Close to the End

Alex was done fighting Gyuyin, the young Saint Transformation 1st realm player who was the last person to be done with challenging him. The other 2 men and women had left him alone, running away now that they were done with their oath. Now that Gyuyin was done as well, there was no more oath for him to keep.

"I'm leaving," he said, before quicking turning around to run away. He did not want to remain here with Alex one moment longer.

"Wait!" Alex's words halted his steps and he turned around with a grim expression on his face. "Our oath is done, I will no—"

"Not that," Alex quickly said. "Do you know how long we've remained here? How many days still remain?"

Alex had tried to remember, but he couldn't tell much. He had fought day and night for so long that the battles he fought blended together in his head and would take some time for him to sort through them.

He had hoped the Voidsand Hourglass would tell him how long of a time had passed, but it wasn't capable of telling the exact time, only how many days or hours had passed. If he wanted to know the exact time through it, he would have to have checked the time at the start.

He remembered checking the time sometime before he entered and sometime after. From what he knew, there was no more than a month remaining still. He simply hoped to get a more accurate answer.

The young man gave a thoughtful look and said, "I'm not sure about the exact days that have passed. I haven't kept track of time like the others have, but I'm sure we still have about 10 to 15 days here."

Alex nodded. That was around the same time he thought too. "I see. You can go now," Alex said. "But starting tomorrow, I will fight you if I find you. Make sure to hide well if you want to stay out of my way."

The young man didn't give a hint of a nod before he ran away.

Alex sighed and went back inside the formation that was running to the side. Inside it was the tree under which he had cultivated back then. The large tree still stood tall, unfettered by the fighting of the Saints, giving shade to anyone who sat beneath it.

Pearl and Whisker were fighting close by. Pearl was alone, and Whisker was controlling either the puppet or one of the blood beasts. Sometimes both. The two stopped fighting when Alex walked in, and Whisker watched the blood beast disappear into the book Alex had now held in his hands.

"Are you done with them?" Pearl said.

"Done. All 50 days," Alex said. "We have half a month remaining in this secret realm. It sounds short, but it's long enough to fight a few more people."

Alex knew he could do nothing and he would still last until the end of the secret realm. He felt a bit weird about it all. He hadn't remained in a place like this for such a long time.

The last time he had remained somewhere for 2 years or more was back when Shen Jing, or rather Bai Jingshen had helped him train in the eastern greenscape of the Western Continent.

There had been a time when he had spent 3 years in a secret realm, but for him, only 13 days had passed, so he didn't truly count that.

The Sundering Sanctum was around 8 months, and most other secret realms only held him for a month or two. This was certainly the longest he had remained inside a secret realm.

And from what he had heard, the final secret realm of the Eastern Continent, the Harmonious Balance Haven could last even longer. Not that he knew a lot about that one either. "Are you done with your training then?" Pearl asked. "Done with my training..." Alex mused for a bit, thinking if he had or not. His Sword Intent had become strong enough during the past 50 days when he pushed the 5 cultivators hard, and along with it, so had Sword Qi and Sword Aura.

"I think I'm done with training," Alex said. "I had hoped to see the next level of the Sword, but I don't think I'm ready yet. I wonder what is missing."

He had asked that question to Godslayer before, but Godslayer's answer has been simple.

Complete your technique and embrace it.

Alex had completed his technique, or the base form of it at least. He had created a template of sorts that could be used on its own, but he could also twist the technique a little if need be.

'I have perfected the base technique, haven't I?' he thought. Maybe the fact that he was even questioning it meant that he wasn't done with it. Or maybe he had, and now he just had to 'embrace it.' Whatever that meant.

"I'm sure I'll get there someday soon," Alex said. "It surely can't be much further away."

Alex made up a mind of doing nothing but practicing his technique for the next week. Practice it until his arm wanted to drop off and run away, or until his mind no longer wanted to think straight.

"You two should get back in," Alex said to the two beasts. "Next time you're out, we'll be out of the secret realm."

The two beasts nodded and went away quietly into their respective beast spaces. Once they were gone, Alex moved over to a place where people would find it hard to find them and set up a small formation where he could practice without stopping.

The technique he had created, the one he still couldn't give a name to, required 4 Dao to use now, after months of changes. especially to use. 2 could have done the job, but Alex had added another 2 just because he could.

Dao of cutting and Dao of Sharpness was there for no reason other than to make the attack something that was extremely dangerous. He had thought of using just Dao of Sharpness, but he already had Cutting, so there was no point in not using it.

Other than the two, he had the Dao of Malleability and the Dao of Ductility too. The Dao of Malleability was required to make the attack malleable, to change shape as required, and the dao of Ductility was required to make the attack thin like a thread without it breaking on itself.

Without Dao of Ductility, Alex could only make it so thin without the attack failing to keep its own shape.

Without Dao of Malleability, he couldn't make it thin in the first place. He stood in front of a river he had arrived in front of and readied his sword. He closed his eyes, focusing all his concentration on the attack.

By now, the combination of the four Dao had turned into a technique that he could use on his own, but it still took a lot of Intent to use.

Qi filled his sword and disappeared as if swallowed by the dark sword that was Midnight. However, at the edge of the sword, if someone looked closely, one could find a thin razor's edge light that slowly got brighter and brighter.

'Embrace it!' Godslayer's voice flowed through his mind. He didn't know what it meant, but he did. Sword Aura filled the sword and the outside.

'Embrace it,' Alex told himself. Sword Qi fluttered around him, all appearing from the Sword Aura that was gathered on his sword. However, from time to time, a single Sword Qi appeared amidst the tens of thousands of small motes of light, which disappeared just as quickly.

It happened once every fraction of a second, but that was still too slow and definitely too few for anyone including Alex to notice. But they were there.

They had been there for a few months now.

Alex took a deep breath and opened his eyes. Then, he swung.

The shallow sword slash was about as fast as any regular sword slash, only barely visible even to Alex.

The only reason Alex could even see it clearly was because of his Demon Eyes, which helped him see the strong Golden color of the technique as it passed.

Since 3 out of the 4 Daos used in the technique were Metal Dao, it only felt right for Alex to use Metal Qi in this instance.

The sword slash cut through the river, and the ground on the other side, and Alex even felt it cut through space itself, but space was too solid to stay cut for longer than an instant.

The attack vanished from Alex's eyes, disappearing into the distance. It left no visible damage to the surroundings at all. Alex flew over to check what had actually happened and saw a thin line across the ground on the other side of the river that seemed to have dug into the ground. It was hard to tell just how far deep the attack had gone. 'There's barely any feedback,' Alex thought, but then that was a good thing. After all, the less noise and bombardment there was to an attack, the more efficient it was. No extra energy was being lost.

He nodded to himself and grabbed the sword once again. He had to try it a few more times to train until he didn't have to focus on creating the technique.

It took all of 15 tries before Alex felt as if his head was being hammered from all four sides. He sat down to cultivate and a few hours later, he was ready to go ahead again.

Chapter 1620 ¬†Final Days

"Leader, are you sure we're doing this?" Teng Xuegang asked as everyone started making their way out of the forest where they had made their home for the past 2 months.

Zhao Boqin didn't even look back when he answered. "What else are we going to do here?" he asked. "We have no more than 5 days remaining. It is about time for us to get as many points as we can."

Teng Xuegang said nothing and looked around at the others who were preparing to leave as well. Formations were being undone, and barriers were lifted. The fog that had surrounded them for the better part of the past 2 months had vanished already. "Very well," Teng Xuegang said. "Let us leave then."

No more than 22 people flew out of the forest. No one else remained. They had barely flown for a dozen or so kilometers when they sensed someone arriving. Spreading their spiritual sense, they quickly realized who it was.

"God damn..." Zhao Boqin muttered under his voice, not daring to let the words continue for much longer. He let his rage simmer as the figure became visible to his eyes.

Alex flew directly toward the group of 22 figures, smiling as he arrived not far away from where they were. They had all come to a stop.

"Your Majesty," Zhao Boqin spoke and gave a small bow. A cacophony of greetings floated from the group that stood behind the man.

Alex nodded. "Greetings," he said and then said nothing. An awkward silence fell on the crowd as Alex looked through everyone, and everyone turned to hide from his gaze. They had surely thought he was looking for people to challenge.

They had heard he had started being rather forceful about it for the past week or so.

"I don't see brother Mao or sister Fang," Alex said. "A quite a few more people."

"They lost, Your Majesty. They left the secret realm months ago." Alex looked toward the middle of the group. The voice belonged to the old man who had the royal bloodline in him.

"I see," Alex said. "I'm not sure why I thought they would last longer. I'm surprised so many of you did."

"They were unfortunately one of the ones that fell under your tyranny, back when you didn't care for who you challenged. We had to stay back and they were forced to give up their loss for us," One of the women at the back said in a snarling voice before hurriedly remembering who she was talking to. "Your Majesty," she added.

"No matter," Alex said. "If they were weak, then they deserved to leave."

"Challenge who you wish to challenge and be done with this, Your Majesty," Zhao Boqin spoke in an almost rude tone. "We have things to do."

Alex gave a grin. "I wish to fight you, brother Zhao," he said. "But I will have to keep that thought aside for a day. I wish to see what else happens here first."

The man gave a look of confusion. "What do you mean?" he asked.

Alex simply pointed behind him. "Let's just wait for them to get here, shall we? They're close enough."

Zhao Boqin wasted no time in spreading his spiritual sense and even extended it beyond its regular capability. Nearly a hundred kilometers away, he sensed a handful of people, flying in the direction of the forest they had just left.

Soon enough, one of them would sense their group and adjust their route toward them.

"Hongxi," the man growled a little before taking a deep breath.

15 other people, mostly youths, arrived a few minutes later, and most looked at the gathering with an odd look.

"Leader," Shang Honxgi, or Sarah, gave a deep deep bow as a legionnaire would give her battalion leader. That irritated Zhao Boqin quite a bit.

"Your Majesty," she gave a slight bow toward Alex, almost as if he was an afterthought. But anyone who could see knew that this greeting held more respect than the one she had made to her leader.

That made Zhao Boqin even more angry.

Everyone remained vigilant where they hovered. With so many strong individuals in one place, anyone could start fighting at any time. They came here for that, but Alex's presence made a difference.

Everyone here knew that he was strong enough to handle everyone but their two leaders. And of them, Zhao Boqin had once lost to him. Although most of them believed he could only do it once each battle.

Zhao Boqin also knew that if he had been prepared, he could've dodged the final attack. He was sure of it. "So, who wants to fight me?" Hongxi asked without waiting for anyone to challenge her first. Her eyes drifted between the two men she knew would want to fight her. No one else would.

Zhao Boqin looked at the two of them as well and gave some thought. "I'll fight you," he said. "If His Majesty wanted to fight me, he would've already challenged me, and I want to fight you while you're at your best so there is no doubt that I fought somebody that was weakened."

He turned to look at Alex. "If that is alright with His Majesty," the man asked.

Alex shrugged. "I will fight whoever wins here tomorrow," he said. "I expect the battle to last long." He looked toward Sarah who simply smiled. Her fighting method was more running than fighting, so Alex expected it to take some time. "And the day after tomorrow, I will fight with whoever loses," Alex finished.

Zhao Boqin gave a contemplative look, while Sarah didn't show a hint of what she was thinking on her timeless face. "Leader, we will be the ones to fight first then," she said. She turned around toward her group and spoke in a loud voice. "Our partnership is voided and the group is dismantled," she said. "Do whatever you want from henceforth."

Everyone behind her looked with surprise. They hadn't expected the gathering to be finished just like that. Quite a few of them looked at each other, knowing that they were no longer allies as they were before.

Hidden rivalries started showing face and one person even challenged another that they were flying right next to.

Chaos spread through the group and soon everyone was challenging everyone. "Right, we don't need to be allies anymore," one of the voices behind Zhao Boqin spoke, and without stopping challenged another person.

One man challenged another man. A woman challenged another woman. A man challenged a woman, and a woman a man. The chaos kept spreading.

Soon enough, there were sounds of battle from all around them with only a few staying put without fighting. Those who remained watched the many fights with slack jaws.

Alex was simply amused by the fights and wondered if he should challenge someone too. He saw a woman staring up, a faint Saint Transformation realm cultivation base spreading from her that she seemed to have tried hard to hide.

"Lady Feirong," Alex called out to her. He hadn't talked to her much back when he was staying amongst them, but just enough that he knew who was who.

The girl gave a start when she turned around to find Alex looking directly at her. "Yo-Your Majesty?" she called out hesitantly as if hoping he was going to send her on a chore and forget she existed.

Alex's amicable smile looked anything but to the girl. She was properly horrified. When the words she wanted to hear the least came, the double buzzing of her talisman gave all the answers she needed to make.

Alex turned toward Zhao Boqin and Sarah and gave a quick nod. "I'll see one of you too tomorrow. I'll look forward to it," he said and flew away, with the woman flying behind him to quickly catch up.

Sarah watched Alex fly away and looked down at her leader. The smile on her face dropped a little and her emotions seemed colder. "We can not do this if you want to, Leader," she said. "Just give me the leader role. You know I'll beat you in just a few years. Why spend your precious few years debating on when that will be?"

"You!" Zhao Boqin hated that Shang Hongxi always knew exactly what to say to get him to become mad. If he allowed her to be the leader, he would have to step down and become her subordinate. And he didn't want to be a subordinate. Anything but that.

"If you want to fight, just fight. Win and we'll see. Without it, you're just a dog that does nothing but bark," he said, clearly wanting to rile her up.

"Of course, that is what I want," she said as she brought out a spear from her storage bag. "Let us begin."

Zhoa Boqin brought out his spear as well, and the two of them danced.

Two attacks landed on the two of them at the exact same time. Sarah with her Saint Transformation 3rd realm managed to block an attack from Zhao Boqin. Zhao Boqin with his Saint Transformation 5th realm was once again surprised by just how strong Shang Hongxi was.

Despite the difference in cultivation base, she was on equal footing with him. Still, he was sure he would win this fight.

Neither of them used their Immortal Qi, as that would be kept for when one couldn't dodge it. That was the only way for either of them to win instantly.

Alex watched from the distance as the two of them fought and their fight took them further and further away.

Chapter 1621 ¬†Sarah vs Zhao Boqin

Sarah swung her spear around, creating a gust of wind that carried out a force that few in the secret realm could fight against. Her body moved and the spear moved in a certain other way that seemed to amplify her earlier attack even more.

More and more she danced, and the stronger the attack grew. Zhao Boqin saw the attack and snorted a little. He forced Metal Qi into his spear and swung it forward, a golden dragon rushing forth from his spear, breaking down the attack in one shot.

Sarah said nothing and simply smiled. She just continued sending out more attacks, ones that were more bother than danger.

Zhao Boqin very well knew how she fought, and it irritated him to no end. As the man started throwing out attacks more and more, Sarah started moving away from him so he had to follow him. She attacked him as well but while she was still on the move.

Zhao Boqin tried many times in between to catch her while she ran, but never could he catch up to her at all. Not only was she annoying, she was annoyingly fast as well. He could almost tell what Dao she was using. Something to do with Wind.

If he had Wood Spiritual root, he might have been able to tell. But without it, there wasn't any way for him to tell what Dao she had.

He had two Dao as well. Dao of Sharpness and Dao of Water. The second one wasn't as helpful, but he did apply the Dao of Sharpness to his attack when he could. It was almost a second nature to him now.

His attacks roared like a dragon as they tore the sky and went for Sarah, but Sarah simply dodged them by running away. His attacks didn't reach her at all.

The two fought in the sky and many of the others had already stopped fighitng by now and were watching to the distance where they had went while lost in the battle. "A good attack from brother Zhao and she will most likely lose," one of the young men said. "In a direct clash, he will most likely win."

Alex nodded in agreement.

"But she's not going to let him," a female's voice took his attention. Ren Wujin was sitting close by, watching the battle as well. "Sister Hongxi is going to make him dance around like a puppet."

"He's fought her long enough, surely he's aware how to fight her," another woman said. "He has defeated her before."

Ren Wujin said nothing.

"Have you all seen him fight?" Alex asked. "Does he use talismans or formations during his fights?"

"No," one of the men said. "He's quite straightforward when it comes to fighting. He will use nothing but just himself and his spears."

Alex continued looking at the battle in the distance while a thought crossed his mind.

'Spears,' he thought. 'Is there a reason so many of them use spears.' He remembered that the Dragon Emperor himself used spears. Alex assumed that these legionnaires were either inspired or taught by the royal family and thus many used Spears. He had certainly seen many use swords and other weapons.

The battle continued for a long time. Hours passed by and the two continued fighting. One chased and the other ran, but neither came close to losing or winning.

The battle was getting intense. Sarah thrust her spear and lightning flashed from her spear, targeting Zhao Boqin. Zhao Boqin instead spun his spear and created a barrier of Metal energy that blocked the attack.

As soon as the attack was blocked, he thrust his spear forward, sending a swift attack toward the girl, but Sarah simply dodged it. She spun in the air, the spear spinning around her, gathering wind around her that she sent back.

Zhao Boqin sent out an attack of his own. The two attacks collided midair, surprising him just how strong it was. 'Is she starting to use stronger attacks?' he wondered.

Up until now, the attacks had been enough to be a problem, but not enough to be a danger, but this one was.

He saw a flash of light and knew what was to come next was lightning. He saw tendrils of the lightning strike streak toward him.

Zhao Boqin wasted no time and waved his hand around, creating a shield of water out of nowhere. He had to force the Dao of Water this time around and he could feel the slight ache in his head from using it.

The lightning exploded on the water barrier but was stropped thus.

Sarah saw the opportunity and the wind spun around her. Instantly, they gathered around her, forming Wind spears that rushed forward.

Zhao Boqin only felt it coming and quickly enforced the barrier that was already there. The spears all struck the water barrier, creating points of opening from where some of the spears started breaking through.

The man panicked and fought those spears directly with his spears.

The girl pushed her advantage. She threw more spears and various attacks. On top of that, she continued moving closer and closer, step by step. The closer she got, the less distance her attack had to travel and the harder it would be for the man to dodge it.

Zhao Boqin was so busy blocking the attacks that he didn't even have the opportunity to dodge any of the other ones. On top of that, he could feel something changing about the surrounding.

He had felt it so many times and knew that the girl was using another one of her Dao. He still didn't know what, but he could tell that it was getting harder for him to move his body.

He had been caught now. If this continued, he was going to lose. And yet, he didn't fear just yet. It was true that if she got close enough, he would lose, but there was also the truth that he had one last attack that he could use upon her that she couldn't dodge.

He continued defending, but he waited. He waited and waited, and waited. And then...

'Now!' he thought. Suddenly, his spear glowed blue and a faint image of a blue dragon appeared around it.

Sarah sensed the aura of Immortal Qi and her eyes flashed with surprise and fear. She knew he had it in him, but she hadn't expected him to use it right now. 'So he was truly cornered,' she thought.

Even as the Immortal Water Dragon flew out of the man's spear, green energy surrounded Sarah's spear which suddenly glowed bright white. Her Immortal Qi suddenly turned to lightning once again, this time it held the shape of a feline beast that charged for the water dragon.

The two attacks clashed and the world trembled.

Immortal technique striking Immortal technique was not something the world was able to handle. The clash created a deafening blast and caused the ground beneath everyone to tremble.

Lights of various colors flashed and many even saw the space fluctuate. On the point of impact, space had even fractured, creating tiny openings to the Void that closed as soon as it arrived.

The aftermath of the clash remained a mystery to everyone for a long time.

Chapter 1622 ¬†Contemplation

When the world calmed again, people found Zhao Boqin on the ground, his right arm red with a lightning burn. It was somewhat bleeding, but mostly it was painful.

He also seemed wounded in other locations as well, but none were as bad. At least he wasn't badly hurt, so he brought out a healing pill with lightning marks on it and ate one.

The pain disappeared from the man as bone and muscle started drinking in the pure life energy from the pill, restoring themselves to the point that not even a scar of the wounds remained.

Zhao Boqin slowly got up, his head still in a daze as he looked around at everyone. He was searching for his spear which he couldn't find right now. He had to look around the area to find it.

At the same time, Sarah flew back to the ground next to her leader, her face dark with seriousness as the danger the two were both in just now was not something either could have faced even together.

It was a miracle the two of them had survived. It was a good thing that they ran when they did. Sarah seemed to have just been faster than the two.

"Are you alright, leader?" she asked, helping Zhao Boqin up.

Zhao Boqin gave her a glare, but he didn't refuse the help. He took her hand and got back up before staring at her with a long, careful look. In the end, he bowed slightly.

"I have lost."

He left right away, not letting Sarah or anyone else say anything. He flew far enough before stopping and looking toward Alex. "If after fighting with her, you still want to fight me, I'll come on the last day."

Alex nodded, and the man went away.

Alex turned around toward Sarah and quickly flew up to her. "You managed to escape in time," he said, looking at her curiously. "I'm surprised you didn't get an Out-of-Bounds for running far away."

"I think he got it," Sarah said, gesturing to the leaving man. "He just doesn't want to reveal it to anyone. I doubt anyone even sees him getting sent away."

Alex thought for a moment and nodded. If Zhao Boqin was hurt, then he took the damage. If he took the damage, then he hadn't gotten out in time. It made sense that he could have only survived by having been rescued by the talisman. "They should place some sort of ban on using Immortal Qi inside this place," Alex said in a grumbling tone. "There are no strong individuals here to protect people and the talisman might not always work."

"The Emperor will have to put reforms in place," Sarah agreed. "You should ask him, Your Majesty. You probably get to see him more than all of us combined."

"That's not true," Alex said. "He's usually in closed cultivation." Alex did not like remembering that the Dragon Emperor was so close to making pills with pill veins, and he had only recently helped him become stronger with it as well.

He had thought recently that since he had given ways for the Dragon Emperor to make pills with pill veins, he would maybe not have to worry about the oath anymore. But he could still feel the oath tied tightly inside his spirit.

Whatever he thought, he would have to give the final thing to the man to help him create pills with pill veins without it being left to change.

He would have to give him the Pill-Splitting Qi technique. That was the only way. Even remembering that made Alex feel horrible.

To be forced to give something so incredible to someone who was most likely involved in his sister's murder and even more likely involved in Pearl's mother's death as well. But he couldn't go back on an oath.

The only way to get out of the oath was to most likely kill the man, and as much as he overestimated his own prowess, fighting someone like him was far out of his reach just yet.

The man stood at the peak of the world, and the only people that could possibly fight against him were Immortals who would die in minutes if they even began fighting. What a terrible situation this was to be in.

Alex realized with a start that Sarah had kept on talking and he had missed most of what she had said. He quickly went back through his own memory and caught up with what she had said.

"Yes, I can call him if I need to," Alex answered her. "But the Kings and Queens would be better for this. Or maybe the Crown Prince himself."

The girl nodded. "That is true."

She also revealed that it wasn't normal for people to be this strong in this secret realm. It was unlikely for people entering to be in the Saint Transformation realm in the first place as most who had that cultivation base would rarely show their faces in this realm.

Old people did not like meddling with children after all.

And given that one didn't have Immortal Qi until they were around Saint Transformation 4th realm, or at least normally, there would rarely be people here that had such a high cultivation base.

Zhao Boqin was a miracle in that way that he managed to reach such a high cultivation base in such a quick time. He would have been heralded as the most talented person in all of the land most likely, but the sudden appearance of the Players had destroyed everything that made him remarkable.

What was previously a miracle now became commonplace. Sarah seemed to want to talk about a lot of things, especially about herself. She asked questions to Alex, wondering if his clone remembered more about her.

She had returned to the Central Continent too now a decade ago, but her family was nowhere to be found. She was nowhere to be found.

Alex shook his head. There was only so much memory he could remember.

The girl sighed in disappointment. She seemed to miss home, but at the same time, there was no home. It was an odd sort of melancholy that caught Alex too. At least he had a home to return to.

Home... It had been so long since he saw his parents, his aunt, his daughter. Scarlet was there and so was his master, his senior sister. The 8 elders, his martial uncle. So many people he hadn't met in so long.

How long would it be before he met them again?

'Four years,' he told himself. 'Just four more years and it will all be over.'

He would have to find out more about Pearl's mother and his sister at that time, but he didn't have to fight the Dragon Emperor. He only had to find the culprit and Bai Jingshen would most likely do the rest.

Alex knew he wanted to do it himself, but he would hear to reason when needed.

The day passed by in a blur with Alex spending most of the time talking with Sarah about home and anything else they could think of. Afterward, Sarah left him to cultivate. The next day, once fully prepared, she returned to Alex. And this time, she was ready for battle once again.

That was good. So was Alex.

Chapter 1623 Wind and Lightning

Alex stood in front of Sarah with, a sword in his hand, and calmness in his mind. No thoughts were floating through his mind. All attention of his was focused on the woman in front of him.

The challenge had been made and accepted, so all that remained was for the battle itself.

Sarah stood steady as well, but there was little calmness in her. She had heard rumors about Alex fighting people as strong as Saint Transformation 3rd realm, despite only being in the Saint Soul 4th.

She could only wonder if he was hiding even more. It was time to find out.

She threw out the first attack, a single bolt of lightning flying from her hand, forking in many directions, all of which seemed to redirect halfway through toward Alex.

Alex quickly formed multiple balls of fire around him with his free hand, each of which targeted the lightning bolts. Fire element weakened Wood element, so it was the correct element to use.

Not that many cared about elements during battle or had the right to. The perfect element to use right now would have been Earth, but he didn't have any Earth techniques.

What he did have was Earth Dao, but since it wasn't necessarily an offensive Dao, it wouldn't have helped him. The fire was good enough for now.

With his other hand, Alex swung Midnight, sending a bright orange flaming slash toward Sarah.

Sarah stood there with no fear and simply struck out once, the slash disappeared into motes of light. She could recognize that she was stronger than the two here when it came to Qi.

'Or he is still holding back,' she thought. It didn't sound right, but she had to be careful.

Alex threw out more Fire attacks, while the girl moved wind and called lightning. The attacks were small and frequent, and neither of them could get the upper hand.

Whatever Sarah did, her stronger Qi wasn't strong enough to overwhelm Alex. Fire against Wood was a bad matchup.

Spinning in the air, the spear danced per her instruction. Alex saw a green aura of Wood energy gather around the spear, getting stronger and stronger as she went on. It was quite an incredible technique that built upon itself and improved its damage by a lot.

Alex knew he should do something to stop her before her winds became too strong, but he had to test himself. He had to test his technique.

He had used the techniques many times, but never had it been against someone who was clearly stronger than him.

With a sudden and difficult strain on his mind, Alex felt the flows of Metal Qi surge through his body and gather on the sword in front of him. At the same time, Sword Intent flared in him as well, creating Sword Qi that covered the sword.

The technique didn't take as long to be ready, especially after having practiced it day and night, all throughout the previous week. Now, he could prepare it in half the time.

Even so, it was enough time for Sarah to build up her technique to the point that her attack was most likely going to carry a strong Saint Transformation 5th realm power, if not Saint Transformation 6th realm.

Seeing that Alex was ready to receive her attack, she thrust her spear around her before finally directing all the energy in front of her.

A large gust of wind, visibly green to the naked eye. The wind caused dread amongst many who felt it in the air, and even Alex felt panic at its power.

But he remained calm. He looked at the incoming wind, looked at the girl behind the wind, and then at an empty area where he could throw the attack.

After being sure he wouldn't hurt Sarah, he unleashed the attack.

A thin line only he could see rushed forward, destroying everything in its wake. Wounds were left in Space where the attack traveled, taking a little longer than normal to heal, as if they hadn't realized they had been cut.

The line passed through the incoming wind next, passing through it as if it didn't touch anything at all.

Alex felt the sword attack weaken considerably, but it didn't lose anything other than damage. It flew past the wind, no longer disturbing space, disappearing into the distance where it would dissipate.

The wind that flew toward Alex still held the aura of a strong attack, but Alex knew it was not so. The attack landed on him and then disappeared like water droplets on a hot frying pan.

The attack had only held the majesty of what it once was, not the damage.

Sarah's eyes bulged in surprise when she saw what happened. She couldn't believe what she saw, neither could she believe that Alex had done nothing.

She had seen him swing and had been told that one of his sword techniques was hard to see. But this went beyond just hard to see. The attack was downright invisible to her eyes. Had he even used any technique? But there had been that slash and that had the energy to it, which vanished.

She couldn't understand. Whatever he had used though scared her. 'And here I was wondering why he was giving me time to gather up my power,' she thought. 'He has a damn technique of his own that takes time to prepare.'

She understood that she could no longer give him time to prepare attacks. If she did, he would most likely use the time to prepare whatever attack he had made.

Thinking so, she swiftly flowed together Wood energy around her, creating a lightning bolt that she shot toward Alex.

Alex struck away the lightning bolt with his sword and punched it with his other arm, sending four golden spears flying toward the girl.

Sarah spun her spear and leaves appeared in front of her, created out of nothing but energy that quickly grew to become more and more until there was a thick collection of them in front of her.

The spears slammed into the leaf-woven barrier.

The barrier was shattered instantly, the leaves floating away, but the golden spears were nowhere to be seen either. What she could see was a Palm-shaped yellow attack flying toward her.

Without much thought, wind energy gathered around her as she used a Dao, and at the next moment, she moved away from the palm, easily dodging it.

Alex felt a small shock go through him at seeing her dodge. What should've been a sure hit, she had dodged so easily. And she had been fast as well, very fast.

He doubted he could've seen her move this fast if he had been keeping an eye on him without the Demon Eyes.

'And that Dao,' he thought. 'She did use a Dao, didn't she?'

He had seen green energy drifting toward her from her surroundings, giving her a boost of speed which...

'Is that what is it?' he wondered, looking at the girl to the side, he couldn't tell what Dao she had used by the feel of it, but he had an idea now that he had seen her use it.

'That dao, it is most certainly the Dao of Swiftness.'

Chapter 1624 Wood Element

"I can't tell what either of them are doing," one of the men watching the battle said.

"Sister Hongxi's Dao is quite unique, isn't it? I haven't seen many people with a Dao like hers."

"Did you see what the King did though? I can't tell if I missed the attack or what."

"Me neither. I thought he attacked, but then there was nothing."

"Something did destroy that girl's attack though."

"In the first place, I can't believe they are equal. Is His Majesty hiding his cultivation base?"

In the sky, the fight resumed. Both of them used weaker but quick attacks to try and tire each other, neither daring to let the other have enough time to use a particularly strong technique.

Sarah especially didn't want to let him use the technique that she couldn't see at all. She feared what would happen if he used it and she was too slow to stop it.

Vines sprung forward out of nowhere, flying toward Alex as if to capture him. At the same time, Sarah used her Dao of Swiftness to increase her speed so she was in another location before she used her spear to send another attack flying toward Alex.

A vortex of energy appeared in front of Alex, defending him easily. At the same time, a single swing of his sword destroyed the other attacks that were coming from the side.

Alex quickly spun, sending another sword slash in her direction, one that carried Fire with it. Sarah tried to attack it, but before she could, the sword slash exploded in front of her, sending a shockwave that hit her hard.

She flew back a couple of paces, feeling a low pain all over her body from the explosion. When she looked back up, a bolt of lightning was already flying in her direction.

She barely managed to throw out her own bolt of lightning, and fortunately managed to block the attack. It was a good thing the attack hadn't held much power. She let go of those thoughts before going back into battle.

She knew what wasn't working, so it was time to try out new things.

Wood Qi coalesced around Sarah, grouping together in a few different locations around her. The energy seemed to manifest physically just then, turning into flower buds that had barely blossomed.

5 such buds formed around Sarah, which quickly flew toward Alex upon her command. The attack was fast, but not fast enough for Alex to stumble over them. He quickly attacked them, destroying each one before it came even close, but that was just what Sarah wanted.

Sarah immediately controlled the Wind, sending a gentle breeze toward Alex along the path where the flower buds were destroyed. When the breeze touched Alex, he felt a peculiar smell on it that was almost pleasant to smell.

But of course, he understood it couldn't be anything good if it came from his attacker. Although, he couldn't tell what it was. He took a deep breath to smell it all and got a vague hint of an idea of what it could be.

From what he could tell, it was an imitation of a flower he hadn't seen in this world, but one that existed in his mind. It was a poisonous flower that went by the name of Twilight Rose. It gained its name from its purple and orange colors.

It was a pretty flower with a very beautiful smell. But the smell was the worst part of it. It wasn't poisonous, but it did hinder someone's ability to keep a straight mind. It hindered their ability to pay attention.

That was to say, it was a poisonous flower, primarily used to make drugs that incapacitated even Immortals.

And Sarah was using a technique that was creating an imitation of it.

"Not bad," he couldn't help but say out loud, causing Sarah to give a perplexed look in his direction.

She quickly shot out a few spear attacks, sending spear-shaped wood attacks in his direction, but Alex destroyed each one easily as he had all this time. The girl frowned.

Alex thought he knew what she was thinking about. 'She probably thinks I ate a pill beforehand.' She wouldn't have been wrong to think so, as Alex had presented such a pill during the previous Golden Auction.

Not that he had. His body destroyed all the poison and toxins that entered his system. Even Immortal poisons wouldn't do him much harm right now. However, he wasn't sure what Divine and Celestial-grade poisons would do to him.

Was he strong enough to stop those?

"Did you use this move against him too?" Alex asked. There was no need to clarify who 'he' was.

"A more subtle version of this," Sarah said, her eyes still not moving away from him. "Must be nice being an alchemist."

Alex simply smiled.

They went back into battle, both of them attacking each other in a fervorous frenzy. Colorful attacks marred the sky where they fought, and most of the time, Alex could feel the space shatter where the clash had happened.

During the entire time, Alex kept track of the attacks Sarah used. She has used 4 types of attacks right now.

Plant, Wind, Lightning, and finally Smell. If Alex wasn't mistaken, all of these techniques, while seemingly being different from each other, belonged to the Wood element.

He hadn't known about Smell, but it made sense it would be. He didn't have the time to think about any aura he missed back in the Enlightenment domain.

'All wood,' he thought. He was starting to believe that she even had Supreme Wood Spiritual Root. It surely felt like it.

As he was thinking that, Alex's ears perked up a little, hearing a tone in the air that caused his mind to spiritual sea to roil. He quickly looked up and saw Sarah doing nothing but slowly move about her hands. There was no instrument about her, but she was creating some music.

And it was quite incredible with even just that.

'A mental attack,' he thought. 'And that too with music.'

His purple eyes glowed softly and he could see a hint of Wood energy constantly pulsing around the girl, in tune with the music.

'Hell! Even the music is Wood energy,' he thought.

Wood was without a doubt the most versatile element out of all the elements, including Yin and Yang, having so many seemingly different types of sub-elements within it.

And to his surprise, the girl was using all of it. Even ones he wasn't sure about before.

Music by itself didn't fall under Wood energy, but Sound did. And the girl was making proper use of it all in the fight.

Alex quickly surrounded his mind with spiritual energy, fighting off the sounds that dared to try and daze him.

It was a simple technique he acquired from the Fu Clan ancestor he killed back in the Demon realm. It wasn't very strong, but for the purposes he was using it for right now, it was good enough.

If it became stronger, he had the Spiritual Providence technique.

Having fended off both attacks through Sound and Scent, he rushed back into the fight, this time becoming more serious than ever.

The girl realized that too, and fought hard. Her spear gleamed in the midday sun, flashing all around her as multiple attacks left for Alex. Spears, lightning, vines, wind, everything.

Alex fought it all back, striking each attack precisely, destroying them before it could get close. As he went along, he felt a stiffness around him, making it slightly difficult for him to move around.

When viewing the surroundings with his Demon Eyes, he saw the area around him green with Wood energy that seemed to be stationary. It was very rare he got to see an aura that was stationary.

'Another Dao,' he thought, fighting against the stiffness in the air that refused to move along even when he pushed it. Fighting under such conditions would be very difficult if he couldn't do much.

Fortunately, he found himself able to move quite easily once he started applying the movement technique that caused friction all around him to disappear all at once.

Sarah was taken aback to see him move as if the Dao of Stagnation she had used did not affect him. Dao of Swiftness took overall, and she started moving around quickly as well, fighting.

The battle continued once again, and both Alex and Sarah realized that they were going to have to continue the fight until either one of them ran out of Qi or got brave enough to take a risk and use a strong technique.

Alex decided that he had already received what he came here to get, which was an answer to a burning question he had of whether he was stronger than a Saint Transformation 5th realm cultivator.

He was good enough for most.

So, it was time to end it.

Alex destroyed a vine rushing toward him and stepped back. "I think we should end this," he said out loud, making Sarah stop as well.

Sarah looked at him and gave a grim look. "I don't think I have anything sort of Immortal Qi to defeat you," she said. "I should call my loss, shouldn't I?"

Alex thought for a bit and shook his head. "No, use it," he said. "I would like to see how strong my technique is too."

The girl gave a startled look. "Are you sure? It's Immortal Qi," she said.

"Yes," Alex said as he concentrated on Midnight in preparation for his technique.

Sarah saw his resolution and didn't question it anymore. She watched him prepare, and when she thought he was ready, she shot a lightning bolt toward him carrying the might of an Immortal.

Chapter 1625 Something More

In front of the might of an Immortal, Alex stood alone. All sounds were lost to him, all sight blinded by the brilliant lightning. A tempest of wind and aura buffeted around him, daring to whip him around like a rag doll in a storm.

But he stood still and his focus was all on his sword.

He was given enough time by Sarah, and he used all of it. Even as the attack came, even as every fiber of his being told him the world around him was being torn apart, he still stood there, doing his best to compress as much Qi and Sword Aura as he could into this one strike.

Then, he released it.

A thin black splinter appeared in the space before him where the attack passed through, shown clearly by the bright bolt of lightning that was making its way toward him.

He saw the attack rush forward and cut into the lightning bolt, nearly splitting it in two. Without waiting, he teleported away, disregarding the sudden buzz to his talisman as he watched what happened from where he had teleported away from.

Even as his head ached with agony, he kept looking at the attack and even managed to see the single bolt of lightning fork into two, although both bolts still flew to where he had been.

While he had been unable to do anything to destroy the lightning bolt, he had managed to affect it in some way. For someone with his current level of strength, that was quite an incredible feat.

The lightning bolt flew into the distance, terrifying everyone in the vicinity before it disappeared into nothing.

Sarah still stood in the sky, haggard by an attack that she herself used before trying to desperately search for Alex. As far as she could tell, he had been standing right in front of the attack when she had launched it.

She had been hesitating for the majority of the time, and the only reason she had even gone ahead with the plan to attack was because Alex had a talisman that was hopefully still useful.

She felt her heart settle in her chest when she found the awe-filled Alex on the ground with no visible wounds. She let out a deep breath before going over to where Alex was.

"Your Majesty, are you alright?" she quickly asked.

"Hmm? Oh yeah, I'm okay," Alex quickly replied, although it had taken a moment for him to move his attention from his own thoughts.

"You weren't hurt?" she asked.

"No, I got out of the way in time," he said. "I wouldn't have asked you to use such a strong attack if I had no way of protecting myself."

The girl nodded slowly. "Then why did you..." she paused for a second, checking her talisman quickly before realizing she had won. Only then did she understand why he hadn't attacked her after dodging.

It wasn't long before she found out that Alex had received an Out of Bounds, but with only a day more to go, nobody would truly care about such a thing.

Zhao Boqin watched the two from far away, his mind still going through their battle. A few thoughts went through his head regarding something that only he could know about. The coterie of people surrounding him had no idea what he was thinking about.

Alex talked to Sarah for a while before leaving her to go cultivate. He had tired himself with the battle, and the last attack especially had been straining. He had given everything but all into that last attack.

Giving all he could into it would've meant using strength so strong that it brought backlash to himself.

He could hear battles going on all around him, people fighting in the sky throughout the day and night, and even noticed more people joining. Zhao Boqin and Sarah's battle, and subsequently his and Sarah's battle had most certainly caused tempestuous aura to alert everyone in the entire secret realm.

Not to mention the Immortal attacks that nobody had ever seen being used twice now.

Alex found it difficult to concentrate on cultivating on multiple occasions but managed to go through the night without having to pause.

Early next morning, as the sunlight was taking away the night's dew, Zhao Boqin came up to Alex.

Alex stopped cultivating and looked toward the man, a gentle smile on his face, mirroring the one that Zhao Boqin seemed to be holding at the moment.

"Your Majesty, are you fit for fighting today?" he asked. He sat beside Alex, close enough that they seemed to be together, but far enough apart that a normal voice they spoke in could be heard by everyone in earshot.

"I have been looking forward to our fight today," Alex said before giving a hesitating look. "We will be fighting, right?"

Everyone's eyes and ears perked up at that, and even the ones who were discreetly hearing their conversation now turned fully to stare at the two of them.

Zhao Boqin took his time to answer the question. "Whether we will fight or not will depend on you, not me, Your Majesty," he said.

"On me?" Alex asked curiously. "I already agree to the fight."

"Yes, but you have to agree to something else as well," the man said.

That caught Alex's attention. Curiosity bubbled inside him like milk on a stovetop. It was about to overflow. "Something else? What is this something that I will have to agree to?" he asked.

"A bet!" Zhao Boqin said. He made no show of hiding his voice. It was for all to hear now.

Alex was taken aback. "A bet? On who wins?" he asked, feeling amused about it. "I can accept if it's that. What do you propose the bets to be?"

"Before that, I have to ask," the man said. He took a deep breath and spoke, "You have the Mirror of Barren Truth, don't you?"

Alex looked at the man's serious eyes and slowly nodded. "I do," he said. "How did you know?"

"I have known for a while," Zhao Boqin said. He hadn't known exactly, but after hearing what had happened when he attacked Alex back then and how it reflected back to him, someone had mentioned seeing a mirror come out.

After digging around a bit, he came to learn about a treasure that was sold in the last Golden Auction. Of course, he wasn't going to mention that it had been luck that helped him figure out what the treasure was exactly. Someone who had seen the list of treasures being sold had happened to be there.

"You want my mirror?" Alex asked in a grim voice.

"That's what I want you to agree to before we fight," Zhao Boqin said. "If I win, I take the mirror."

Alex thought for a bit and asked, "What if I win?"

Zhao Boqin knew Alex had no chance of winning, so he didn't care what he would get upon victory. "What do you want, Your Majesty?" he asked.

"Give me a moment," Alex said, his head already running through ideas. "I will have some time to decide what I want exactly."

Chapter 1626 Bet

Zhao Boqin nodded at Alex and stood up to leave. "I'll give you an hour. Please try to think within that time. We don't know when we will be sent out," he said before walking away

Alex nodded and got to thinking.

What could he want from this battle? Did he even want anything?

Zhao Boqin used nothing but his spear, so he didn't even know if he had any other artifacts that were not used regularly. If there were, he wouldn't tell him in the first place.

He had seen the man use some strong techniques, but none of them would be of much use to him, so he didn't want that. He thought of a few other things he could want from the man, but none of them were as good enough to trade for the Mirror.

The Mirror was an incredible life-saving tool after all.

Far off in the distance, Zhao Boqin watched Alex carefully, waiting for him to accept. He had to accept.

He knew much about the Mirror by now, and how effective the mirror was against even Immortals. There was nothing more he could want.

He thought for a bit and quickly called someone over. An older man with streaks of gray and white on his head walked over. This old man was who had told Zhao Boqin about the mirror.

"You're sure that the Mirror cannot be used more than once right?" he asked in a low voice.

"It can be used once every battle, and each time it has to be prepared for the next fight," the man said. "The king must have had someone prepare it with Immortal Qi, but since that has been used up, he cannot prepare it again."

"And there is no chance of Hongxi helping him, right?" he asked.

"I doubt it," the old man said. "They shouldn't have had contact. Besides, you can use Immortal attacks multiple times, can't you? You won't have to worry."

"You're right," Zhao Boqin said. It was hard to say that he could use his attacks multiple times since he didn't have much Immortal Qi. But he could use it at least 3 times if he held back some Qi.

Holding back would be a bad choice against someone with his own strength, but against someone like Alex who could clearly do nothing about it. "As long as he cannot fight against Immortal Qi, I should be fine."

The old man spoke up to agree but kept quiet when he saw Alex turn toward them. Zhao Boqin looked toward Alex and got up.

"Have you made up a decision, Your Majesty," Zhao Boqin asked in a loud voice.

Alex nodded slowly. "I have come to a decision indeed," he said and slowly made his way toward the man.

Zhao Boqin stood up and met Alex halfway through. "So, what is your decision? Will you accept the bet?" he asked.

"I accepted the bet since the moment you laid it before me," Alex said with a smile. "It was the contents of the bet that was stopping me from going forward fully."

"And what is the content to be?" the man asked. "Your Mirror for..."

"For an oath that you will answer two of my questions clearly and without lie, and not tell anyone else what I asked of you. That is what I desire," Alex said.

The man couldn't help but frown. "Oath? Answers?" he asked, looking surprised. "Can I know the question?"

"Not until you swear the oath," Alex said.

The man thought for a bit. "There are things I cannot tell you even if I were to wish to. It is against many laws and my own oath to the empire—"

"I won't make you speak of that which you cannot speak about," Alex said. "Do you still wish to continue with the battle?"

The man looked at Alex, wondering what game he was playing. In the end, he saw no reason to not fight. He knew he was going to win anyway.

"Alright, I accept," the man said. "Should we make the oath to abide by our bets then?"

"Let us do that," Alex said.

Amidst everyone's watch, the two swore their oaths to hold on to each other's demands in the case of either one of them winning.

Things were quite serious at that point, so everyone gathered to watch.

"Since we've made the oath, shall we fight, Your Majesty," Zhao Boqin asked, and Alex agreed.

"Let us fight."

The two flew into the sky, standing on either side.

Zhao Boqin held onto his spear and waited for Alex to bring out his sword as well. To his surprise, Alex didn't bring out his spear at all. Instead, Alex brought out his puppet.

"What are you doing?" Zhao Boqin couldn't help but ask. This was not what he had expected to see happen here.

Alex showed no reaction to the question. He didn't show much reaction to much. The situation had changed.

The reason he wanted to fight the two was to see how far he had come with his Sword and skill. But that had changed. He had gone from wanting to test to wanting to win.

So, he didn't hold back at all.

Zhao Boqin prepared himself as Alex got ready. He watched Alex slam his palm into the puppet and in the next moment, the puppet vanished.

He wondered where it had gone and it was only because of his alertness that he even saw it with his spiritual sense. Somehow, the puppet had arrived behind his back and was already punching him.

He moved forward to dodge, but the puppet still grazed him. The pain that flared in his back was something he hadn't expected to feel from a simple puppet.

He flew forward and turned around, but the puppet was already hot in pursuit. It was next to him even as he turned and punched.

Zhao Boqin used a skill to attack it, but the puppet showed no damage. It took no damage. the man felt his skin go cold as he realized that this puppet was not something he could defeat so easily.

Chapter 1627 Wheel

Zhao Boqin swung his spear, a pillar of water erupting from the tip, smashing into the puppet, but the puppet smashed through it like a carp swimming upriver.

The spray of water everywhere left behind a bright rainbow in the sky, and throw the sprinkles of water, the puppet appeared, punching down on Zhao Boqin.

A sphere of water had already appeared around Zhao Boqin to protect him, and even then he was looking to run away or protect himself some other way.

The puppet smashed through the water shield and still flew toward Zhao Boqin. At the same time, Alex was already attacking him from behind.

The man turned around swiftly, his spear already duplicating in his arms as other golden illusory spears formed that smashed into Alex's attack. He felt the shockwave of the blast push through him. Thankfully, he wasn't pushed back into the incoming puppet.

The battle was harder than the one he had fought with Hongxi, and if there was one advantage he could see about it, it was that the puppet was incapable of using any techniques. If it could, he would've been hurt a long time ago.

Maybe there was another advantage here too. Alex was way weaker than the puppet, so if he got the opportunity, he could take him out. Thinking as much, he got back into the fight.

He weaved under the puppet's punch and struck it dead in the chest with his spear, sending it flying backward in an explosion of golden energy. Even then, the puppet stood unharmed, looking only to come back to attack him.

But that was enough time for him to turn around and attack Alex.

When he did that, however, his eyes went wide with the sight of dozens of swords flying in the air in a weirdly numbered array. They spun around, barely any of the metal in the group gleaming in the bright sun.

He could not tell what the black metal that made the sword was, but seeing it not shine surprised him a bit. That surprise only lasted for as long as it took for fear to settle into hi of just how strong that attack was.

'Bloody bastard was holding back?' he thought in anger, bringing out something from his storage bag at the same time. God knew he did not wish to use it, but seeing what was happening, the only choice he had was to use this or to give up.

And he did not want to give up.

A wheel appeared in his hand, like one taken from a cart. If the wooden wheel was taken from a cart, it would have been a heavenly cart, used to carry gods and kings.

The wheel was golden in color, despite being made up of wood, with 8 symmetrical spokes coming out from a thick circular center painted in brilliant red. The rim of the wheel was golden but had streaks of white in it as if something was written or carved into it.

Zhao Boqin felt wrong about using this artifact. It was something ancient that was close to its end and would be destroyed any day. He did not know how many more uses he had of this.

Still, he had no choice right now.

Qi poured into the wheel and it glowed. The gold got bright, the red more brilliant. And the white scribbles that could have been text glowed bright blue now.

The wheel started spinning all of a sudden, before slowly moving in front of Zhao Boqin to spin on its own, growing larger and larger until it was twice as large as the man who used it.

At the same time, Zhao Boqin looked away from the wheel to look toward the puppet. At the very least, he had to survive that thing. The wheel would protect him from Alex for now.

Alex looked at the wheel and felt a desire to check just how strong he was here. The 75 sword that spun over him spun even faster under his command and a low buzzing sound echoed throughout the sky and ground like a thousand bees buzzing at once.

Thick Sword Qi filled the swords and then Sword Aura, filling them all to the brink. Then, he thought of adding more.

Embrace your technique, was what Godslayer had told him, so he tried to do it. He embraced the thinness of his attack, the apparent nonexistence of it. The compression he had to put on his technique to make it work, all the different Dao that worked together.

He embraced them all and he added to the swords. A low groan escaped his mouth before he could even stop it. Not that he could have with the sudden pain that jolted in his head. Whatever he was doing, it was having some effect for sure.

Whether it was a good effect or not, he had yet to know.

Flickers of light surrounded him, something even he failed to notice. Nobody else did either. They were too small, too compressed. Too... nothing.

Having done all he could short of giving himself a migraine, Alex sent down the attack.

The 75 swords roared with fury, with Midnight leading the rest, as they made their way toward the wheel that floated in front of them.

The crash of the swords on the wheel was the greatest exchange of attacks that had happened in the secret realm, aside from the Immortal attacks themselves.

The explosive force of the swords crashing onto the solid defense of the wheel sent a force drifting through the sky that caused gusts of winds that threatened to clear the skies and uproot the trees underneath.

People were buffeted by the winds and had to shield themselves quickly before looking back.

While Zhao Boqin was busy fending himself off of the puppet, Alex was drilling into the shield with his sword and was genuinely surprised at how difficult it was.

He could tell it was an impressive treasure, but this was beyond impressive. No matter how much he pushed, the wheel didn't budge one bit. It was perhaps the greatest defensive treasure he had seen on someone. It was perhaps even better than the shield the Dragon Emperor had used in this battle, but he would have to wait to find out.

He kept at it for a while and felt something shift on the wheel.

Zhao Boqin noticed it too and couldn't help but frown. The wheel was old and was steps away from breaking, and it already showed signs now.

He focused on maintaining the wheel, but the puppet was still attacking him. He couldn't understand how Alex was keeping track of everything, including the puppet's attacks. He knew it couldn't have been easy, but he still did it.

His forehead was now drenched with sweat from all the stress. Thankfully, relief filled him when he sensed Alex take back his attack. The feeling of pressure lessened and he could focus back on the puppet.

He fought with the puppet, doing his best to hold back against it for a while when he realized that Alex was doing nothing. He fearfully looked back to see where he was.

Alex was still beyond the wheel with his eyes unfocused on the outside world. And in his hand was his sword which he readied for a single strike.

Chapter 1628 The Result

Zhao Boqin had only managed to turn around and empower his wheel when Alex swung his sword.

For a moment, nothing happened. There was no explosion, no glowing lights, no grand display of power. Then, the barrier in front of the wheel split in half. And then...

"No..." a low groan escaped Zhao Boqin's mouth.

The wheel split in half.

The man couldn't comprehend how his wheel could be destroyed like that at all, and even as the thoughts remained in his mind, he sensed something approaching him at the last moment. Alas, it was too late.

Zhao Boqin felt the slash go through his right side, cutting off his arm and part of the shoulder. The talisman only then understood he was in danger and activated its protection feature, teleporting the man some distance away.

The man stared wide-eyed, first at his wounds, then back at Alex, failing to understand what had happened or what had been done to him.

Alex stood where he did, panting hard, with his forehead full of sweat as well. While he had made the attack seem simple, it had been anything but. He had poured into it even more than what he had in the past attack.

Embracing his technique and putting it into the Sword Intent had been weirdly difficult and he wasn't even sure if he was doing it correctly. It had improved the strength of the attack somewhat, so it should have been the correct thing in some way.

It was still a surprise to him when the wheel broke. He had assumed it had much more power in it, but it had either been close to being destroyed on its own or was destroyed because Zhao Boqin wasn't strong enough to bring the best out of it.

It was a miracle he hadn't used Immortal Qi on the wheel. But then he had other ways of winning still.

He still lightly panted as he went over to Zhao Boqin some distance away, who already had a few people surrounding him with his bare right arm showing through the torn robes. He hadn't wasted time eating a pill it seemed.

"Are you okay?" Alex asked the man.

Zhao Boqin seemed dazed, his eyes unfocused. Alex had to ask him again before he realized he was being spoken to.

"What?" he quickly asked before realizing what was being asked. "Ah! Okay, right yeah, I'm... I'm okay. I think."

The people around him gave a grim look, seeing how out of it he was. Some of them eyed Alex apprehensively, and one young woman even stepped away from the group to not have to confront him even on accident.

"How is he?" Sarah quickly walked beside them as well, and a few concerned faces showed through the crown she brought along.

Zhao Boqin opened his mouth to say something when he seemed to realize what he was about to do. Looking around, he quickly stopped himself and said something else.

"I'm fine, you all can leave," he answered.

"But brother—"

"No, leave," the man said.

"We can talk later. Leave me and His Majesty alone," the man said.

Everyone looked toward him then toward Alex and left helplessly.

Alex stood where he did for a while, eyeing the man in front of him, waiting for him to speak. Once everyone was far away, Zhao Boqin put out a sound warding formation and finally asked what he wanted to do.

"Did you cheat?" he asked.

Alex nearly gave a laugh when he heard that. "What makes you think that?" he asked.

"Well, no, not cheat. That wasn't what I meant to say," the man said, furiously scratching his head. "You did something not normal back there. You didn't cheat, but what happened felt unfair."

"I see," Alex said. "You brought out a wheel that clearly wasn't made in this world. I don't know if you should be the one talking about unfairness."

The man grimaced a bit when he remembered about the wheel. "You destroyed my wheel," he said. "I paid good money for that."

Alex shrugged.

The man looked up at him. "Next time we fight, I'll be ready for it," he said.

"Third time is the charm, eh?" he asked before shaking his head. "Enough of this talk. Let's talk about our bet."

Zhao Boqin felt his insides tangle up at the thought of the bet. The oath that knotted itself around him was tightly holding onto his actions, so he couldn't do anything other than slowly nod his head in agreement.

"I will answer any two questions of yours without hiding anything I am not bound by oaths to reveal," the man said. "Nor will I reveal to anyone what questions you asked of me."

That was the oath he had made during the bet. Alex nodded and laid down his own formation to block out sounds. He didn't want to take any chances.

He sat down in front of the man and took a deep breath. He could only ask two questions and he didn't accidentally want to ask something of the man that he could answer without telling Alex something he wanted to know about.

"Around 60 years ago now, the Empress died. Around that time, a bunch of soldiers were taken to the Azure Dragon's domain. What happened before, during, and after that event?"

That was the first question.

Zhao Boqin gave a puzzled look for a moment, thinking to himself about something before a grim expression came upon his face.

"This isn't something we can lightly talk about," the man said.

"I will hear whatever you can tell me," Alex said, speaking slowly so as to not make it a question.

The man grunted for a bit, feeling the oath tighten around him. He had to speak.

"I do not know much," the man said. "I was with my leader at the time, a person named Huang Lumin. We were discussing something when he was ordered away suddenly."

"That was the last I saw of him. After he left, I did not know what happened. All I know is that wherever he went, he died, never to return again. I do not know if he died along with the Empress, but now that I think about it, the timing does match."

The man frowned a bit. "We were told the Empress died during a cultivation breakthrough and were to never talk about it ever again, but we weren't bound by any oath."

"I was made the leader after that, and that was when I found out that it wasn't just my leader that was called away, but many high-ranking members of the army, and almost all of them were dead, with many taking wounds that made them retire entirely."

"Many young blood were brought to higher ranks during that time and I was one of them. The legions became more strict after that."

The man's eyes flashed around, the pieces fitting together in his head. "So they died helping the Empress's breakthrough, huh?" he asked. "I had assumed it was something more sinister. After all, we lost enough military power to cripple us if we had rivals."

Alex said nothing. He let the man have his misunderstandings. That helped him even more. He rummaged through the information a bit, but nothing there was more than what he didn't already know.

At least it was good to know that the empire was weakened thanks to whatever had happened in the secret realm.

"That was good," Alex said and took a deep breath again. "Now, the second question."

Chapter 1629 Inconsistencies

Zhao Boqin wondered why Alex even asked the first question. Not only had he known more than him about the event, he had even revealed to him something he hadn't known before.

It was an entirely weird question to have asked.

'Does he perhaps want to know who died there?' he thought. 'About what they did?'

He would have to wait for this second question to see what Alex wanted to learn about, although he was taking a rather long time to come up with the answer.

Alex went through the questions in his mind multiple times, making sure to get as many answers as he could from it in return. Once ready, he asked.

"A short time after the Empress's death, a group of soldiers were ordered by the Emperor to go after a woman named Han Ahlin to retrieve something. What happened during and after their pursuit of her?"

Zhao Boqin frowned very clearly this time around. He made no effort to hide the disapproving look he held about being asked about something that was clearly the empire's secret. If it ever got out that he had been asked this, he could easily lose his rank, and maybe even his life.

Worse would be if anyone found out he had actually answered these questions. If they found out, that would be the case as the oath was already forcing him to start speaking through the knot that tightened inside him.

"Han... this Han Ahlin... it sounds like a woman's name," the man began. "Is it a woman?"

"She is," Alex said, making sure to show no expression on his face that could give away his nervousness about the questions. The Oathbreakers had already answered both of these questions, so he hadn't expected to learn much, but he still held hope that the man in front of him could at least give him something good to munch on.

However, the man's face was a frown as he fell into thought for a moment. Alex waited, and Zhao Boqin finally looked up, although his face was twisted into a grimace at this point from not having answered.

"I do believe I know what you are talking about," he said. "I was too new a leader, so I wasn't involved in this mission, but I do remember hearing vague orders to get battalions to start moving toward the south for something."

"If you are talking about what I think you are, they weren't after a woman at all. They were after a man," the man said.

Before Alex could ask who it was, Zhao Boqin continued. "I don't remember any names being thrown out. It was secret enough that nobody outside of the mission learned more than a crumb of anything."

He thought for a bit, recollecting some things, and continued answering. "As far as I know, they were after someone, not something, but I wasn't informed directly, so I could be wrong. As for the girl, I never even heard about a girl being involved there."

Alex frowned. What in the hell was going on here? How was the information he received from this man so different from the one he received from the Oathbreakers? This man was bound by the oath to speak the truth, so he couldn't have lied.

The only other reason he found as to why the two accountings of the past were so different was because of the people involved.

Zhao Boqin wasn't involved in the mission, so he couldn't have known much. On top of that, the directly involved Oathbreakers were perhaps much more direly bound by their oaths about that incident.

'So they weren't after sister?' Alex wondered. 'Were they after a man? But then what about the thing they were after? Why was sister involved in this at all?'

More questions ran through his mind when he noticed beads of sweat on Zhao Boqin's forehead and his face going red as if he hadn't breathed for a while. "What's wrong?" he asked curiously. He checked the man closely and found out that he was trying to hide something.

"There's more to the answer, isn't there?" he asked. Alex could feel his heartbeat speeding up. There was more to learn here. "Come on, don't hold back now, or you'll die."

The man did his best to hide the answer, but his oath got the better of him. In the end, he hurriedly let out what he wanted to say.

"The mission went badly and we were called for reinforcement," he spat out.

Alex paused.

"Reinforcement? For one man?" he asked. As soon as the words left his mouth, he knew the answer. It was no one man. His sister was there too.

"I do not know how many there were fighting us, only that they needed reinforcement," the man said. "It seemed dire enough that they needed many of us."

Alex nodded thoughtfully. "Let me guess, you weren't chosen to go because you were too new to it," he said.

"No," the man said to Alex's surprise. "I was chosen. Many of us were."

Alex frowned. Was this man actually involved in his sister's death? "If you went, then you must know more than you're letting on," he said.

"I never went," the man said. "I was ready to, but the reinforcement was stopped from leaving at the last moment."

Alex looked intently, waiting for the next piece of information.

"As it turned out, His Majesty had left the palace to deal with the issue himself."

Alex's eyes went wide in horror. "The Emperor... was directly involved?" he asked. All this time, he had thought that the Emperor had only been someone pulling strings from the shadows, but if he had directly involved himself then...

All the secrecy, all the oaths, it all started making sense why everything was a mystery. The Emperor had involved himself in finding this person and his sister had to die for it.

Fury built up in him. Anger and rage almost made him miss the next information that Zhao Boqin seemed to have casually thrown out.

"An older man who was involved managed to get away, and after that, I never heard anything anymore about the mission. I don't even know what His Majesty could have gotten."

Alex's face changed at those words. "A man got away?" he asked, but Zhao Boqin said nothing. The man felt calm now that he had answered it all, and was no longer required to say anything.

'Someone managed to get away. I should find that person,' Alex thought. Where he could find this person, though, he had no idea. 'And what is it that the Emperor gained from this? What item?'

The original intent for the mission had been the retrieval of a person it seemed. If that wasn't fake information to throw off the others not involved in the mission, what happened to that man? Was he still alive? Was that man and this old man the same person?

Either way, Alex needed to find this old man, but he didn't even know where to begin with. Who could he even ask at this point? Aside from the Dragon Emperor, no one else could tell him anything.

Alas, the knowledge he gained about his sister was even less this time around. Although the rest of the information did build a greater picture that could hopefully help him in the future.

'I can't do this on my own anymore,' he thought. 'I truly need someone to come along and tell me the answers.'

He was feeling tired.

Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw Zhao Boqin muttering something to himself. Something that was not audible, but the expression he held made Alex jump in fear.

He had a deranged look about him and his lips moved incessantly as if he was arguing with himself. It looked very odd.

His eyes suddenly turned toward Alex, and Alex felt trouble coming.

"You know about the legionnaires dying, some more important than others," the man said, glaring directly at Alex. "You are planning something. What are you planning?"

Alex stared back without faltering for a few moments before looking away. "We are done here. You can leave," he said.

"No, you won't be leaving," Zhao Boqin said. His spear was already out on his hands. "You are planning something and I will not let you leave without answering me. You are planning to attack the Empire, aren't you? That's why you want to learn so much about the military's failure over the past few years."

"I have no such plan," Alex said. "Now put away the spear."

"Not until I'm sure you do not plan on attacking us," he said. "I won't let you go without an oath of your own."

"Oath? You want me to promise you that I wasn't really asking about the flaws in your military?" he asked.

"No, make an Oath that you won't hurt the army, the empire, the emperor."

Alex frowned at the last one. There was no way he could ever make an oath to not hurt the emperor. That was the only one who could answer him about both Pearl's Mother and Hannah. If not, he would have to die all the same for them.

He was about to say something when his expression changed once again. His talisman buzzed slightly and a teleportation aura gathered around him.

'Is it already time to leave?' he thought.

Zhao Boqin nodded slowly. "I understand," he said, power flowing into the spear, Immortal Qi gathering in it. "That look on your face is all I need to tell that you plan on attacking us. You will die for this."

Chapter 1630 Cut

Alex didn't have any opportunity to focus on the teleportation aura that gathered around him. He was in a much more hurry to look at the man that was ready to kill him.

Anger swept through him and Midnight appeared in his arm. At the same time, he let out a blast of Spiritual energy that swept through everything in front of him in an area, disregarding how much energy he wasted using it like this.

As the spiritual energy swept past Zhao Boqin, he felt his head grow a little dull, even with his artifact especially meant to stop mental attacks. He pulled back his spiritual sense to protect his spiritual sea and quickly got the reins on his mind back. A moment later, he looked up to find Alex moving away from there, rushing toward the edge of the sound-stopping barrier.

Without pausing, he channeled the Immortal Qi that was already in the spear and shot it toward Alex.

All colors in the world were gone the moment the attack was launched.

A golden dragon rushed out of the spear in a roar, crumbling the space around it as it flew toward Alex in the distance. The world seemed to dim as it flew, shockwaves spreading away from it, that collapsed in on itself as the dragon moved faster than the shockwave itself.

The compounded shockwave let out an even stronger shockwave, all of which perfectly enhanced the attack as it landed on Alex.

Had Alex tried to protect himself, or even just try to move aside, he might have been able to do something. However, moving in a straight line with his back turned to Zhao Boqin, he had no chance of escaping this attack.

The massive dragon struck Alex in the back. And Alex burst like a bubble.

Zhao Boqin was taken aback. It truly was like a bubble. Alex exploded in a burst of light as the golden dragon rushed into the distance. Vile screams rang from outside at the sight of the dragon, and Zhao Boqin wasn't sure if he attacked someone accidentally.

He didn't have the time for such thoughts. Confusion filled his brain. Confusion about what happened and how Alex disappeared into nothing. He let out his spiritual sense to see how Alex had died without blood and guts.

And that was when he sensed the oddity that was right in front of him.

Hidden to the eyes, but not to the senses, Alex was standing in front of him, right where he had been the entire time. And in his hand was a sword with strength that made Zhao Boqin's hair stand on its ends.

He quickly reached for more Qi inside of him, but it was all too late.

Alex swung and the world was cut into two for Zhao Boqin.

Zhao Boqin stared at Alex as the right half of his body slid down first, and then his other half. The two images he saw from each eye were vivid even with the two halves separated at that moment.

It was as if it took a moment for his body to realize that he had been cut into two.

Life left Zhao Boqin's eyes and just like that, he died.

Alex felt a tinge of pain inside his head. Not only had use used regular Qi and Sword Aura while using this technique, but he had added Blood Aura as well to improve its strength just a touch more.

Doing so had left him light-headed for just a few moments. Those few moments were enough for him to slip his control on the teleportation aura that was gathering around him, and it readied to take him away.

Alex said nothing and prepared to leave, but as he did so, he saw a teleportation aura around Zhoa Boqin's body as well. Belated it may be, or even dead, his talisman had activated as it was time to leave.

The two halves of the body blinked out of existence before Alex could even do something. He grunted in frustration at seeing that and left himself to the mercy of the teleportation aura that surrounded him.

Moments later, he teleported out as well.

He arrived on a side of the island, with the ocean in front of him, and not so many people in between them. There were barely 4 people within a hundred meters of him, and even those he did not recognize all that well.

He looked around, searching for dismembered bodies that might have teleported out. However, he didn't notice any of them. Seeing the people around him, he was sure this wasn't the only place they had come out to.

Many people were missing, so there had to be other locations around the island that people were teleported to. He kept his ears wide open to hear sounds of shrieking to see if someone had screamed upon the sight of a perfectly halved human.

He heard no such screams.

A soldier of the army was telling everyone where they should head over to, and Alex quickly followed his direction to move toward the beach. He flew through the sky, making his way toward a ship that was in the distance. It was the only ship there it seemed, and it was waiting for their arrival.

The ship was headed by Mao Yingtai, the Silver Queen. And today it seemed her mood was the serious sort. Alex wondered when she was last in her bubbly mood. To his surprise, he looked forward to that more than this.

The Queen flew to the sky before he could even land on the deck and quickly gave greetings. Before she could get too far with her greetings, however, he spoke up.

"I killed a man," he said.

There was no way people weren't going to find out sooner or later. Many knew he was with the man at the end, and with only him coming out, there would be questions and suspicions soon enough.

He would rather deal with it already.

The Silver Queen gasped in surprise. "Death? In the Martial Ground?" she asked. The possibility sounded preposterous to her, as the talisman would stop all lethal attacks. At least they were made that way.

"The leader of the 8th Battalion of the Talon Legion, Zhao Boqin attacked me just moments ago, and in retaliation, I attacked him as well. My attack was lethal, and he died."

The gasp Mao Yingtai made this time sounded much more serious than the last one. "Your Majesty! A Legionnaire's death, especially someone like him, is too serious a crime that I cannot help you with. This is beyond me."

Alex nodded. "Who will handle it then?" he asked.

The queen grimaced. "I cannot tell you just yet. Let me send word of this. As soon as we reach the mainland, we'll see."

Alex nodded. "I would like to go rest for now," he said. His head still thrummed lightly from using the attack. Embracing his technique was still difficult.

The queen nodded and took Alex to a room in the ship herself and only left once she was sure he was properly settled.

Once privately in his own room, Alex let his guard down and breathed a deep sigh. Whatever came of this problem, he would deal with it somehow.

Chapter 1631 Trial

Yao Ning paced back and forth in the hallway of a heavily gilded palace located in a city known as Truelight City. Her face was in a frown and had been in a frown ever since she had found out that her King had been taken into custody for killing a high-ranking member of the Empire's army.

No one had told her exactly what was happening and those that did only told her that it would be okay, and she should relax.

'Like hell, I can relax,' the old woman thought to herself.

Liang Shufen sat on one of the chairs in the hallway as well, her face grim as well. She bit her fingers in frustration, eyes unfocused as her mind was lost in some thought.?There were other people around her, all important people in their own right, but none seemed to focus their gaze on her at all.

"What are they talking about in there? Why can't be with them?" Yao Ning asked once again, even though she knew the answer would be the same.

No one even bothered to answer her this time around. The old woman's frown only deepened, but she remained quiet. She knew she couldn't go in right now, but she was worried about what they were doing to her king.

'If these people lay a single hand on His Majesty, I swear I will—" her words left her mind when she noticed someone quickly walking down the hallway.

Long Fangyu, the Crown Prince of the Azure Imperium, made his way through the hallway, along with a host of other men following him. He seemed to be silently conversing with the people and stopped when he noticed her.

"Your Highness," Yao Ning quickly bowed. "What is going to happen to our majesty? You cannot keep him captive."

"Lady Yoa," the Crown Prince quickly spoke up. "Please calm down. I will go and see what is happening. I can promise you no harm will come to your King. Be calm."

The woman took deep breaths and nodded.

The Crown Prince left the old woman and walked ahead. He went into the room that had to be opened from the inside, and behind him, the door locked again.

Yao Ning could only pray the Crown Prince did something to help their king.

Alex sat in a rather comfortable chair with a cushioned seat that seemed too warm for the cold. Surrounding him were nearly 40 different men and women.

6 of those were the Kings and Queens who had happened to be there for the Continental Tournament that was to be held in a week or two at best. The rest of them were high-ranking members of the army that had gathered to hear from him.

And they had heard all he could tell.

Everyone whispered amongst themselves, making their own judgment of the situation, planning on what was the right thing to do. They couldn't punish a foreign monarch directly, but he had killed someone so he had to take responsibility for it somehow.

The voices suddenly died when the door opened and the Crown prince walked in. People quickly turned to give their greetings and remained quiet for the Crown Prince to speak.

The Crown Prince looked at the room and frowned.

"You, you, you, you, and you," he pointed to 5 old men he knew to be wiser than most. "Everyone except the kings and the ones I pointed, leave."

The sounds of people walking filled the room and within moments, the room of 40 people dropped to only a dozen. The room became much more quiet after that.

The Crown Prince then went forward and sat opposite Alex on an empty sofa.

"Your Majesty, I would like for you to recount your words on the last day again," the man said.

Alex nodded. "I had asked Zhao Boqin if he would fight me on the last day, so he came and said he would fight me if I agreed to his bet. He wanted my Mirror and I wanted some answers from him."

"He lost, so I went to ask him the questions. Before I could get to the questions, he attacked me with Immortal Qi. I managed to dodge due to remaining careful, and because he attacked me, I did so too. It was in retaliation, only I didn't expect him to die."

"I had expected the talisman to save him."

That was the story that Alex had made and everyone knew about now. He knew everyone would doubt that he didn't ask any questions, but that was the least of the problems for them, so he hoped it would get buried amidst the other problems.

"Do you feel remorse for what you did?" the Crown Prince asked.

"No," Alex said. "He attacked me, so I killed him. I feel no remorse."

"Then why did you give yourself up?" the Crown Prince asked.

Alex gave a frowned look. "What else was I to do?" he asked, laughing dryly as he did so. "Anyone would know I was the one who killed him when the dead body appeared outside. I had no reason to hide."

The Crown Prince frowned when he heard that. "There was no dead body that appeared outside," he said.

The words caused Alex to frown for real this time around. "No body?" he asked with a concerned look. "But I killed him, and I saw the body get teleported away."

"But nothing appeared outside. We scoured the entire island, but there was nothing there," the Crown Prince said.

"Nothing?" Alex fell into a thought. "The hell?"

He had clearly seen the body get teleported away. Did someone get rid of the body when they found it outside? Did someone rob the corpse and want nothing to get tied back to them?

Or... was the dead body just not considered a 'victor' per the Martial Ground's rule, and thus it remained inside the island. If Alex had to bet on one of the possibilities, he would bet on the dead body still being inside.

"You should send someone into the Martial Ground to recover the body then," Alex said. "Not that I should say it to you. You should have sent someone in already."

The Crown prince shook his head. "We cannot just send someone inside. The secret realm won't open for another 30 years, and until then whatever is inside will remain inside."

"Oh..." Alex wondered if he was a little hasty in giving himself up. He nearly laughed at the thought of that. Even if he had said nothing, sooner or later, suspicion would've fallen on him anyway. It was better to get it out of the way from the start.

The Crown Prince pulled out a formation plate and placed it down before asking, "About the questions you wanted to ask Zhao Boqin, can you tell me what they were?"

"I wanted to learn about the Military training, and how it was handled. My own army back home is relatively new, so I wanted to learn more. I had no 2nd questions planned at that time."

"I see," the Crown Prince said and poured Qi into the formation. "Please let us converse among ourselves for now."

The formation opened up to cover everyone but Alex. And Alex could only imagine they were going to come to a verdict by the time they came out.

Chapter 1632 Verdict

"So, what do you say we do here?" the Crown Prince asked the rest.

The dozen or so people looked at each other, waiting for someone to start speaking. Finally, one of the old white-haired men who was made to stay there started.

"Something is odd here," the man said. "How could someone in the Saint Soul realm possibly defeat someone in the Saint Transformation realm? Is anyone aware if he uses special artifacts or some such?"

"I don't think he uses any such artifact," the Emerald King said. "He fought someone stronger than him about a decade ago and he defeated that person quite easily too despite having a lower cultivation base. I believe he can overcome multiple realms to fight someone."

Another old man audibly harrumphed.

"I know of some players that can overcome a realm or two, but this is more than that. How can someone in Saint Soul 4th realm overcome someone in Saint Transformation 5th realm? That is some bloody nonsense if I've ever heard one."

"That does sound quite impossible," another person added.

"No, that is true," the Azure King answered. "One of my older cousins already told me what happened inside. They told me he beat them, but he used a puppet to do so. But he had defeated another girl before that, who had defeated the deceased leader. It is clear King Alex is capable of standing up to someone way stronger than him."

"I have already heard multiple accounts of how strong he is, "the Crown Prince spoke. "There is no doubt he did what he did. Let's move on to whether what he did can be punished or not."

The Ivory Queen spoke this time. "Have you confirmed whether the words he said are true, Your Highness? About it being a retaliation more than anything," she said.

"I am not aware," the Crown Prince said. "Whatever happened between them happened inside a barrier that stopped sound and light, so nobody saw or heard anything. They did mention a golden dragon appeared from the side that terrified so many of them. It was an Immortal attack, that much is confirmed."

"I can confirm at the very least that it was the deceased leader who attacked first once their battle ended," the Silver Queen spoke. She brought out a talisman and handed it over to the Crown prince to look at.

The Crown Prince looked through the talisman and frowned a bit. "They lose 50 points when they attack someone they weren't in a duel with?" he asked.

The Silver Queen nodded. "The deceased leader lost his points first, which meant he attacked King Alex, and then King Alex attacked him, which is why he lost points afterward."

"Can you figure out why he died through this?" the Crown Prince asked. "Wasn't the talisman supposed to protect everyone."

"It was, but it didn't this time around. I'm not sure why," the Silver Queen said.

"Any chances of them receiving an altered talisman?" one of the white-haired men asked. "Someone might have conspired to kill the man. Maybe the girl who was his subordinate. I hear people say that those two fought as long as all of the two years they were inside."

"Not possible," the Silver Queen said. "I handed the talisman to the ones in the Saint Transformation realm myself. If you say someone conspired to kill him, then that implies that I had a hand in this."

The room seemed to grow silent all of a sudden as people very obviously looked at the Silver Queen with such thoughts.

"No one thinks you're conspiring here, Queen Mao," the Crown Prince said. "I've talked to the others, and I hear that the talisman had worked as well as it could multiple times even against Immortal attacks. So unless King Alex used something better than that, there is no conspiracy here."

"Do you trust the others' words, Your Majesty?" another older man asked.

"As much as I can. They all say the same thing, some even swore an oath that they weren't lying. So I have no choice but to trust them," the Crown Prince said.

"Then... I guess it is obvious what should happen now," the man said. "The death happened in self-defense, so we cannot give much punishment except maybe a bit of fine."

"Do you all agree that it was in self-defense and thus wasn't truly murder?" the Crown Prince asked the rest as well. One by one, everyone nodded.

"It is settled then," the Crown Prince said and closed the formation. The barrier around them came down, and Alex was finally visible again.

Alex watched them curiously, and the Crown Prince gave the verdict.

"It has been deemed that whatever happened inside the secret realm, happened in self-defense. Therefore, there is no reason for King Alex of the Southern Continent to be punished," the Crown Prince said. "You are free to leave, Your Majesty."

Alex stood up from his seat. "Thank you for your time," he said and left the room, with a few following behind him.

The door opened and he met with Yao Ning's fervent pacing, which immediately stopped. "Your Majesty! Are you alright? Did they harm you?" she quickly asked.

Liang Shufen was no less slow in standing up from where she sat, quickly arriving in front of Alex.

Alex gave a small smile. "I'm alright, Elder Yao, Elder Liang. There is no reason to worry," he said.

"Did they punish you?" Yao Ning asked.

"What will they do to you?" Liang Shufen asked with a worried look.

"Nothing," Alex said. "They realized that it was in self-defense, so I was free to leave."

The two elders released long sighs in relief and quickly took Alex away from the place to their room to rest.

The Crown Prince walked out sometime later with a sigh. "I'll have to go figure out who to make the next leader here," he said. "You guys probably have your hands full with the upcoming tournament too, don't you?"

The Silver Queen sighed more than anyone else. "I've had my hands full even before this. I should be getting used to this after preparing these dozens of times, but I still feel so stressed each time."

"I'm thankful for what you're doing, Queen Mao," the Crown Prince said. "Anyway, I will be leaving now. I have work to and need to let Father know what happened here. He definitely won't be pleased that this happened while I was ruling in his absence."

"Heavy is the head that wears the crown, Your Highness," the Azure King said.

The Crown Prince chuckled. "You would know, cousin. Anyway, I'll see you all during the tournament."

And he walked away.

* * * * *

In the Martial Ground, within a half-destroyed forest lay a corpse of a man cut in half. There was no doubt that the man was dead, but even so, there was movement there.

A small, blue light drifted from within the body, taking the form of a man identical to Zhao Boqin. The Nascent Soul that left the body moved away from the corpse, unsure who it was, or what it was doing here.

With barely any conscious thoughts, the soul followed the wind, drifting through the secret realm with only a single objective in mind.

However he could, he had to find the Dragon Emperor.

Chapter 1633 The Troubled Dragon Emperor

Long Tiankong, the Dragon Emperor, put the final ingredient of a healing pill he had been making and gestured it around with his hands to control it around the blue and gold cauldron in front of him.

Hand gestures weren't necessary to control Qi. At his level, simply using Intent was all it took to do what he had to do. However, the hand gestures did help in tricking his mind into quickly forming those Intent and he didn't have to pay attention to it.

Those hand gestures had become second nature to him, and it was hard to get rid of it anytime soon. Not that he wanted to.

The Dragon Emperor followed the recipe in his mind to the best of his ability. It was an ability trained over thousands of years, so it was more than good enough for what he was doing.

Countless formations ran around him. Some were as basic as formation to ward off sounds and spiritual sense, to ones that were specific to alchemy like formations to keep the energy in the cauldron from escaping or maintaining heat of the cauldron.

There was even a formation to improve the quality of the ingredients he put into the cauldron, although one could never be sure if an ingredient was good enough past a certain point.

With a few gestures of his hand, the ingredient he had put into the cauldron was completely turned to powder and was ready to be formed into a pill. However, before the powder was to be made into a pill, there was one more thing to do.

He judged the energy in the cauldron and took a deep breath as he tried to focus on whether or not what he was to do next was necessary. He realized that it was.

A white mushroom flew out from his storage bag, a rare ingredient that was said to be nigh impossible to get without tainting. Only a dozen or so untainted World Defying Mushrooms came from a patch of over a hundred.

And it was difficult to find such patches even in the Hundred Blossom Valley. So he had to be careful of when and where he could use it. It wasn't always he could use it, but this time he felt that it was the right time.

A talisman buzzed in the ring on the Dragon Emperor's finger, but he ignored it for the moment. He put the white mushroom into the cauldron and let it burn. Swiftly, the mushroom vanished, not even turning into powder, and the energy that came out of it was tainted by the energy in the cauldron, turning into it.

That was a good sign.

Now that he had used the mushroom, it was time to form the pill.

Qi rushed through the Dragon Emperor's body as he used the Profound Revolution of Myriad Combination technique that had been handed to him nearly a decade ago.

His hands flickered over the cauldron as he caused the powder to combine into minuscule lumps that were too small to see to the naked eye, and then those lumps joined together to form the actual pill.

When the pill formed, the Dragon Emperor's eyes shined brightly as even before it happened, he could tell he had done it.

The crackling of the skies was only a confirmation of what he had thought he had done.

Clouds formed overhead and lightning shone from time to time, causing the Dragon Emperor to look up in anticipation. He quickly recounted the last time he had successfully formed the Pill clouds. It was 5 days ago, nearly 90 pills before this one.

Even with a generous estimation, he had on average formed pill clouds once every 100 pills. That was an incredible achievement. He knew from the few records he had gotten to read that even in the higher realms, finding alchemists capable of creating pill clouds was extremely difficult.

There were things he doubted in the records as he couldn't believe that making pill clouds was so difficult since even he could make them. If they were true, however, that only went on to show just how good it was what Alex could do.

That thought made him frown sometimes. He wanted to know how Alex got the knowledge he did.

Any and all thoughts vanished the moment the first lightning bolt fell onto the cauldron. The Dragon Emperor had been distracted, but it was only lightning from pill clouds. He had come to get used to it by now.

The next 8 lightings fell, each stronger than the last, but none were able to get past his defense. When the pill clouds disappeared, he pulled out the pill from the cauldron with a satisfied smile on his face.

He had managed to form another pill, and these ones were pills with 9 pill Veins. The last he knew of Alex, he had only been able to make pills with 6 pill veins, so he was doing better overall.

The Dragon Emperor put the pill into a small bottle and kept it in his storage ring. He started thinking of what pills to make next when he remembered the talisman buzzing from earlier.

He had to check what it was.

Pulling out the talisman, he sunk his consciousness into it and a while later opened his eyes again. His satisfied look from before had disappeared and a frown had taken its place now.

"It's a shame we lost a legionnaire, but you handled it as well as you could have," he spoke into the talisman. "Did you manage to figure out what questions it was that he wanted to ask?"

A while later, the answer came.

"I doubt this was what he had wanted to ask, but it will be hard to force him to reveal it, so forget about it for now," the Dragon Emperor said. "Reprimand Lady Mao for her carelessness regarding the life-saving talismans, and figure out if other talismans had been lacking, or if there is a flaw in the talisman."

An affirmative answer came from the other side and the Dragon Emperor sent no more messages.

He thought of focusing back on the task at hand, of taking pills, but the thought that a legionnaire had died made him lose all motivation at the moment. The thought that it had been done by Alex made him even more curious about the young man.

"The Phoenix is likely in rebirth, and the turtle and snake are hidden in their own domain."

The words he heard so long ago flowed into his mind again. It was such a distant memory that he wondered why he even thought that.

"A phoenix is reborn," the Dragon Emperor said softly. "And it chooses him. Why? Why does a ruler that has never needed someone under it, chooses to have one now? What is so good about him?"

The Dragon Emperor's eyes were unfocused while he stared at the ceiling as if searching for answers there.

"And it even made him a... a King." That last word was especially hard to speak for the Dragon Emperor. Every time he thought of the word, it reminded him of something else.

Flashes of memories passed through his mind. Memories of a time so long ago that people that were there had all died at this point already.

9 thousand years ago, when he could still be considered a very young man, he had taken a delegation to the Northern Continent to be part of the InterContinental Competition that was being held for the first time.

Only portions of the memories from back then were even clear to him at this point. He would have to search through his memories to recall more about the competition. What was very clear in his head, however, was one of the things he had done on that trip.

Under the direction of the then-head of the Snow Immortal sect, Xue Kuangren, Long Tiankong had visited the westernmost region of the Northern Continent.

A place known as the Nine Wells of TIme.

Few knew he had gone there, and fewer knew what he had seen there. The Dragon Emperor himself forgot most of what he had seen in the earlier wells, but he remembered the prophecy of the final well very clearly.

The words of the prophecy still rang in his ears so very clearly, as if he had heard it just yesterday.

A prophecy that marked his downfall, and subsequently, his death.

The Dragon Emperor frowned when he remembered the prophecy once again. He tried his best to not remember it, but those were the words he remembered most clearly.

'It doesn't matter,' he told himself. 'It's just a bit longer. Just a few more years.'

There was not much longer before he broke through and became an Immortal. That prophecy would certainly not touch him there.

Before that, however, there were just 2 more things he needed.

The first was the final trade he would get from Alex any day now. Once he had that, he would be able to make pills with pill veins a lot more often and that would be enough to be respected in the upper realms.

Even if the lack of pill clouds was exaggerated, he could still do something with it.

It was the second thing he needed that was hard to get. Hidden behind a lock to which he had no key, it was impossible to get that thing.

All he could do was hope that the people he had sent to the other continents would soon find one of the keys.

Chapter 1634 Outside News

Alex sat in his bed, with the two elders sitting on chairs inside the room. They were still worried about him, but hearing that he wasn't to be punished had more than calmed their hearts.

"I'm sorry that you two were stressed because of me," Alex said with a small sigh. "I caused you to worry for me."

"That's our job, Your Majesty," Liang Shufen said.

"Not that you make it any easier," Yao Ning said with a small smile. "Did you kill this battalion leader all on your own? I heard his cultivation base was quite strong."

"We don't know much, Your Majesty, but we do know someone that strong should be too strong for him. Did you use some artifacts? Perhaps the Mirror?" Liang Shufen asked.

Alex brought out the dull mirror and handed it to Yao Ning. "I used the Mirror long ago, against an Immortal attack he made against me," he said. The handing of the mirror told Yao Ning what her job was to be for the next few days. She gladly accepted.

"As for killing him, I did it on my own," Alex said. "Just a sword and a technique I created."

A small smile appeared on his face when he mentioned his technique. It really had ended up becoming quite extraordinary. It was all thanks to Godslayer, so he would have to thank the spirit by quickly finding him some Darkness aura.

Not that it was easy to find though.

The elders were curious, so Alex explained what he thought he could regarding what he did in the secret realm. He talked about the first 6 months when he had to give away pills, about the next few months when he had to take Shan Wangjiu as an honorary disciple, and then afterward when he focused on just himself.

"You get headaches when you use your technique?" Liang Shufen asked curiously. "Why?"

"You're forcing too many Dao at once, Your Majesty," Yao Ning said quickly. "I'm sure it is because of that."

"It's more than that, but I can't explain what it is right now," Alex said. The mixing of 4 Dao at once was certainly heavy on his Intent, but over the past year, he had gotten used to it.

If he used it just as a technique, instead of using the Dao, he didn't even have to use much Intent at all. Although that significantly reduced the effect of the technique.

No, what was giving him those headaches was the 'embracing' he had been doing as per Godslayer's suggestions. He was sure that would come to pass soon as well, but for now, he would have to deal with the headaches.

"Enough about me. How have you two been? Did anything happen in the Realm of Trials or the auction?" Alex asked the two elders, watching the both of them curiously.

"There is good news on the side of the Trials," Yao Ning said with a soft smile. "This time around, 3 of our alchemists managed to get sent out with White light. They had all passed the final test."

"Oh, incredible," Alex said with a look of surprise. Last time it had been just him, so it was great news that 3 had managed to do that.

"5 more passed the penultimate test, and the rest fell behind quite a bit. They are weaker in cultivation base, so I assume it makes sense for them," Liang Shufen followed. She didn't know much about alchemy, so she assumed it made sense that people with higher cultivation bases were better.

That wasn't directly true, but indirectly it meant the same thing. With higher cultivation came higher spiritual strength, and that was what determined one to have greater Intent.

Everything else that mattered was talent, technique, and hard work. Rarely to do with cultivation bases. As long as one was a few realms into the True Realm or the Saint Realm, they could be similar to everyone else in comparison.

"Who were those 3?" Alex asked.

"Jia Heiyun, Zeng Chunwu, and Wu Shun," the woman answered.

Alex was taken aback. "Wu Shun got white?" he asked. A stunned expression lay over his face.

Wu Shun had been an alchemist he had picked up back in the Hundred Blossom Valley after he incorrectly diagnosed Yan Shumi, the girl with the Moon Goddess's body that was taken away.

He had traded with him to get his book of alchemy recipes, and in return, he had taught him alchemy so he didn't make a mistake. That had been over a dozen years ago now.

It was hard to believe the young man had improved so much in such a short time.

"I was surprised too when I found out," Yao Ning said. "Honestly, that young man never struck me as someone who would be that talented. Tells you never to judge someone without all the facts."

Alex smiled. "He did good, but so did the other two. Are they here? I should congratulate them, and maybe give them the recipe for the Spirit pill I made."

"They're not here, Your Majesty," the old woman said. "They're back in the Dragon Capital."

Alex frowned a little. 'The Dragon Capital. Right next to the Dragon Emperor.'

Smoldering anger filled him every time she remembered that the Dragon Emperor had in some way been responsible for Pearls' mother's death and quite directly responsible for his cousin's death.

Still, he couldn't do anything rash for now. Not because he was weak, but because in some way, the alchemist close to him could be taken hostage. At the very least, he would have to wait 4 more years for them to return.

He could do whatever he wanted after that. He could come back with might given to him by Bai Jingshen if nothing else.

"Let them be there," he said, letting go of his thoughts and emotions before smiling a little. "What of the auction?"

"The auction was quite big this time too," Liang Shufen said. "Although, your pills ended up selling for a little less than last time. We still made a lot of spirit stones."

With a nod, the old woman handed over a storage bag, and Alex looked into it. "Ooh!" he couldn't help but say in surprise. "What's that? a million Saint Spirit stones?"

"Close to that," Yao Ning said. "940 thousand."

"Great, great!" Alex said. "It was a good idea to sell more pills this time then. What about items you bought?"

Yao Ning looked toward Liang Shufen, and Liang Shufen brought out another storage bag. "We bought formation flags that could help grow plants as you asked for. Aside from that, there was only one item we could buy."

Alex looked in and found the item in a single glance. It stood out amongst the short formation flags.

A long and golden interlinking chain came out, with glittering runes carved onto each of the individual segments of the chain.

A talisman came along with it, explaining the details of the chain.

"Golden Binding Chain. Needs to be wrapped around someone to activate. Upon activation, it can bind the person and force them to hide their Qi, making them unable to use any techniques for as long as the chain is active."

Chapter 1635 Golden Binding Chain

The Golden Binding Chain at a glance was good. To take someone out of battle just by binding them meant it had to be incredible. But what sort of person would sell something like that?

There had to be some downsides to the chain, so Alex continued reading through the talisman.

The next section of the talisman went into how the chain was activated. A person had to hold onto one end of the chain and continue pouring Qi into the chain to bind the other person.

"That's certainly bad enough," Alex said out loud. Having to constantly grab onto the chain meant you could only use one hand. Some techniques required one to use both hands, so that was a downside to the holder of the chain.

Continuing, he found more downsides. The chain would only work for a maximum of 10 minutes before failing to work for a day again. The talisman mentioned that it was made this way to stop the chain from deteriorating too quickly.

'That's... idiotic,' Alex thought with a frown. 10 minutes was a long time for a cultivator, but it was still not long enough if you wanted to keep someone bounded but not dead.

Another downside was that the chain would only work on someone who didn't use Qi that was stronger than the holder's. If the other person's Qi was stronger, they could break and make the chain useless, so long as they managed to use it before the chain did its thing.

Thankfully, it wasn't all downsides to the chain. There was another good thing about the chain that to Alex outweighed many of its flaws.

If Qi was channeled into the chain while it was being used, before it even bound someone, it could pass through anything nonphysical. It took only a moment for Alex to realize what that meant.

The chain could bypass all defenses that weren't physical. All protective shields and barriers. The only way to dodge it would be to run away or use some sort of artifact to stop it.

"Not bad," he said. "How much did it cost?"

"87 thousand Saint Spirit stones," the old woman said with a sigh. "Almost everything we owned."

"Thank you for getting me this," Alex said. "It will be useful."

Alex put the chain into his Soul Space and then looked at the spirit stones. He took 800 thousand spirit stones and handed the rest to the elders to split amongst themselves.

"What other artifacts did I miss?" Alex asked.

As he had thought it would turn out, he missed many.

A formation artifact that created colors and sounds to disorient enemies.

The gauntlet released a sandstorm that cut through someone's spiritual sense.

Crimson darts that exploded upon impact, but only when they impacted the target chosen by their owners.

A beautiful painting of a river that could be used to summon a river of varying sizes.

A miniature tree that calmed one's mind when cultivating around it.

There were many such items from what Alex heard of the elders. The Elders skipped over the ones that they thought were useless, but still over a month's worth of auction, even the few items they thought were good numbered in dozens.

After a while, the elders stopped and stood up to leave. "You need to rest, Your Majesty. We'll come back tomorrow."

"Wait," Alex said. "Give me the Mountain Crushing artifact. I have been wanting to use it for a long time. I finally have the money for it."

Yao Ning chuckled and pulled out the artifact. "Then I suppose we'll have to come back more than a day later. Let us know when you're out."

Alex nodded and watched the elders leave. After they were gone, he brought out the Mountain Crushing artifact and put enough Spirit stones to last for two days.

Once done, he filled the inside with tiny pieces of Starforged Tungsten ore before getting in himself. Once he began, the artifact closed itself with a lid, and Alex started spinning within.

He hadn't felt this feeling for a while now. With the lack of funds, he had to stop a long time ago and hadn't been able to improve his body.

Now he did.

Dull light shined inside from the lid, a light that Alex had missed the first few years he body cultivated inside. The pain forced him to close his eyes all the time back then, but now he was strong enough that the pain didn't stop him from keeping his eyes open.

There was a circular light shining from the lid of the artifact as if embedded in the lid itself. It was like a glowing rune, but there was no such rune that he knew of.

It wasn't a circle in the first place either. It was a hexagon, that only looked circular because he spun inside the artifact. But his eyes were good enough to notice the hexagon even as he spun.

The shape in exact was a thinly drawn hexagon with some script at the center that wasn't runes. They weren't alphabets either. They were... not something he recognized at all, as if the letters to a language that no longer existed.

Or maybe to one that had never existed.

He wondered what that was. And what he wondered more was... where had he seen that before.

The hexagon tugged at his memory from somewhere, but he had seen so many hexagons in his lifetime that it was hard to tell what exactly this was reminding him of.

But it most definitely was, or the feeling wouldn't be this strong.

'Maybe something from my Clone's memory?' Alex wondered even as he spun. After not being able to remember what he was trying to remember, Alex let go of his thoughts and once more let the artifact do to him as it pleased.

He had thought of the drawing many times by now, so there was no point in trying this time again.

He was lost in his own thoughts afterward, no longer paying any mind to the pain that engulfed his body. He simply drifted into making different plans for what he wanted to do in the future.

There was the competition next, then he wanted to go to the final secret realm if he could make it. He couldn't leave without visiting the Ebony kingdom, so there was that too. And people spoke good things about one of the mountain peaks in the Ebony mountain range, so there was that too.

There was still much to do with only 4 years remaining.

Alex felt surprised when the artifact stopped working. He hadn't realized where time had passed. But when it stopped, he realized that over 2 days had already passed.

He came out of the artifact, his body marred in his own blood. His wounds had already healed at that point, so it was just a matter of removing blood from himself.

He quickly dressed and notified the elders that he was out. When he did, they let him know that the kings and queens wished to meet him soon if possible.

With a simple affirmation, a meeting was set up with the monarchs of all the kingdoms, and Alex made his way to meet them all.

Chapter 1636 Meeting with the Monarchs

Alex took the 550 thousand Saint Spirit stones that were handed to him not long after walking into the gathering of the monarchs.

All 6 monarchs were there, and none looked very happy to be handing away the money, not that anyone would be.

"You cheated, Your Majesty," Mao Yingtai, the Silver Queen said with a pout. "If I had known you could set up your own little system in the secret realm, I would've never bet against you."

It seemed the woman had switched once again, going from a serious woman to a happy little girl.

Alex couldn't hide his grin at all at the situation. He had momentarily forgotten about the bet, so when he was given the money, that was a surprise on top of what he had been given to him by the elders just days ago.

"It's not cheating, Queen Mao. His Majesty just did something we hadn't thought of," the Emerald King spoke. "We should have put some clause in the bet, but alas we didn't."

"It sucks having to give away money in a bet," the Ivory Queen said with a deep sigh. "Would you have considered teaching for that much money instead of it being through a bet?"

Alex thought for a bit and shrugged. "It would've been enough to make me consider. As for if I would, that would depend on my mood and free time," he said.

"You all made me lose 150 thousand in total," the Azure king said. "Do you want to force me to fork out more or what?"

The others gave a grim smile.

"Would you mind just doing it out of pity, Your Majesty?" the Gold King asked. He held a rueful smile and was clear that he had no hopes of Alex accepting.

"I don't know," Alex said. "I might give a lesson or two if I find the time. It will have to be close to when I leave. I don't want to waste my upcoming free time on anything but cultivation."

"Will you not be taking part in the competition?" the Silver Queen asked with an awkward look. "I had been meaning to ask you this question for a while."

"Take part in the competition?" Alex asked with a chuckle. "I killed the strongest man in the secret realm. I don't think I can get much out of the competition, now can I?"

"But you earned the most points, so you would be highest seeded in the competition," the girl said. "If you won't take part then..."

She sighed as she realized there was more job to do now. It was a good thing she hadn't set it all up yet before asking Alex, but things were in motion that would have to be diverted. And it was so close to the competition too.

"You won't take part in the competition?" the Ebony King asked. "It is a good place to showcase your skills if that is what you wish."

"I don't want to," Alex said. "Honestly, I don't even want to go to the competition, but I suppose I will have to. I'll watch a few matches. I want to see how far a few of them will go."

A thought came to him. "Oh right, do those outside the secret realm also join?" he asked.

"You have to meet one of two requirements to join the competition," the Silver Queen said. "You must be no older than 2 thousand years of age, or you must have been one of the last 2000 people to come out of the secret realm."

"Can the one that fails the second requirement join using the first one?" Alex asked.

"They can, which is a problem," the girl couldn't help but sigh as she said. "There are too many this time around. I don't know why, but there are nearly 5 thousand of them. And most of them seem to want to join just for the sake of joining."

"Too many players," the Gold King grumbled. "The next century is going to be difficult with the players slowly edging out everyone with their incredible talents or techniques."

He quickly glanced at Alex before realizing what he had been saying. "My apologies if that offends you, Your Majesty," he quickly added.

"It doesn't," Alex said. "I can understand your frustration with players. I'm a king too, so I have to go through something similar once I go back in 4 years."

An awkward silence drifted through the room as everyone came to realize that Alex wasn't going to remain here for much longer.

"4 years," the Ebony King said with some thought. "Wait, does that mean you won't be taking part in our Secret realm?"

"The Harmonious Balance Haven?" Alex asked. "I heard it was after the competition. Has the date of when it opens been determined?"

"It should open in about 3 years from now and last... well, that one lasts as long as the last treasure is found," the Ebony King said with a sigh. "I need to start going around gathering treasures as soon as the competition is over. That will be a pain."

Alex knew some things about the final secret realm. He knew that everyone there was suppressed to have the same cultivation base, and the objective was to gather treasures inside. He hadn't known that the treasures had to be first gathered outside to send in.

"How do you select who can go in?" Alex asked curiously.

"It depends on the treasures that are sent by the various sects or clans. Depending on the value of the treasures they hand over, they are given a certain amount of tickets to enter the secret realm," the Ebony King said.

"How many tickets do you have in total?" Alex asked.

"Depends on the number of treasures we have, but usually we have no more than 5 thousand entrants," the man said.

"That's fewer than I would've expected," Alex said. Even the Sundering Sanctum took more than that.

"It has to be few," the Silver Queen said. "The formation there uses up a lot of energy to suppress everyone's power. If there are too many, it won't work properly."

"I see," Alex said. That did make sense now.

"If you wish for me to save a ticket for you, I will," the Ebony King said. "But with the secret realm opening on... what? Your final year here. I don't know if you will want to go in. You can come out at any time, but it wouldn't be fun if you had to give up halfway through."

"That would suck," Alex said. "I'll think about whether I want to join or not later. Since I still have 3 years, there is no point in fretting about it now. I will be spending some time in the Ebony Kingdom as a tourist, so I will give you my answer then."

"You must tour the Silver Kingdom too, Your Majesty," the Silver Queen said. "If you don't, I'll get angry. You visited everyone else's kingdom."

Alex smiled and nodded. "I will, I will," he said. "I have nothing else to do after all."

With the Silver Queen appeased, the group of monarchs went on to talk about a few other matters, but soon enough there was nothing more to talk about.

Alex returned to his room and then spent the next few weeks waiting for the start of the Continental Tournament.

Chapter 1637 Tournament’s Start

Alex was dressed in a golden robe with regal embroidery on it representing the red and purple colors of the Phoenix. He walked in a manner fitting a King as he approached the stands that were prepared for monarchs and others of high standing on the continent.

The Gold King, Ebony King, and the Emerald King were already present when he arrived with his two elders.

After a short greeting, the two elders moved a few seats back, letting Alex remain with the three.

The Ivory Queen arrived not long after him, making small excuses for why she was late, but she didn't seem much concerned about what others said.

The Silver Queen had her hands tied with the competition, so she was going to be later than most.

The Azure King and Queen arrived a short time later, greeting everyone.

There were many others that came in between them, but Alex didn't give much thought to those, even if they were people that he knew and recognized. A simple greeting sufficed with most.

The Crown Prince arrived sometime later, and along with him came people that Alex hadn't expected to see arrive.

Xiang Yuxie, the current Empress of the Continent made a regal stride through the stands and made her way to a predetermined seat at the front of everyone.

People stood to greet her, some surprised to even see her here. Soft whispers filled the room as people found it hard to not talk about what was happening.

Xiang Yuxie was the current empress, but she was never treated as one. Since not even the Emperor gave much thought to their marriage besides giving her a son, people quickly forgot about her.

However, even with that, she was still their empress, so they had to be respectful.

Next to her was Long Hanjue, her son. He was in his mid-30s now, no longer the 17-year-old Alex had seen when he first arrived. But he had kept his youthful look thanks to having entered the True realms early on.

Currently, he was in the True Emperor 2nd realm, so it wouldn't be long before he entered the Saint realm.

The Empress made it to her seat after greeting back everyone who greeted her, and the young prince did the same. The Crown Prince sat down beside her on the left.

To her right, the seat remained empty. The Emperor wouldn't be coming, but the seat had to be prepared nonetheless.

The Crown prince struck up a conversation with the others once seated, and Alex quickly lost himself in the talk too. There was still some time before the competition started down below, so they were busy talking.

A while later, another person arrived.

Zhan Luoyang walked softly, bowing her head slightly as she passed in front of everyone, greeting everyone she passed. Her head bowed more deeply in front of the monarchs and even more so in front of Alex.

She gave a soft smile toward her fiance and gave some soft words to the empress before sitting next to the prince. As the future Empress of the continent, she made much talk amongst the people in the back.

As the talk went along, the Ebony king mentioned something about Alex visiting the Ebony kingdom in the future and that seemed to catch Zhan Luoyang's attention.

She turned around to inquire about Alex, asking whether that was true or not.

"In a year or two," Alex answered her. "I promised Queen Mao I would visit the Silver Kingdom first. Once I'm done here, I'll take some time for myself and then head over to the Ebony Kingdom."

"I see," she said, a look of contemplation appearing on her face. If Alex didn't know any better, he would've thought the woman was in a dilemma and was making some important decisions right there.

"If you are free during your travels," she spoke softy. "Would you mind visiting our home? The Zhan Family will love to entertain your stay, Your Majesty."

"Is this coming from you, or Family head Zhan?" the Crown Prince asked his fiancee.

"No, this isn't father," the woman answered quickly and turned toward Alex, her gaze no longer wavering. "I request Your Majesty to visit our family house when you can. The sooner the better."

Alex found the situation a little problematic. She wasn't the first to request Alex to visit their house. There were many others who wanted him to come by their clan or their sects.

But this was the first time someone seemed so adamant, so forceful. Not to mention, the person asking him wasn't a nobody either. She was the future Empress of the land.

She wasn't yet the Empress, but that didn't mean he could stand to offend her. Not that he wanted to either. He liked her company, and helping her with Alchemy last time they were in the Azure King's palace had been fun.

"I will come by when I have the time," Alex said quickly to appease her troubled look. That confused him even more. Why was she so troubled? Was it bad for her if he refused?

"Does this have anything to do with..." he paused for a moment, not knowing if he should voice what he was thinking. Letting others know that he was going to help her with her Level 10 Alchemy test might make others believe that she hadn't done it all by herself.

"It must be to make a pill," Alex said. "I would love to spend some time talking about pills and alchemy with you, Lady Zhan."

Zhan Luoyang didn't show much change in expression, but there was a clear look of relief. "Thank you, Your Majesty. I will wait eagerly for your visit," she said.

The Crown Prince noticed the relief in her as well. "Don't worry, I will bring His Majesty. I haven't met Family head Zhan in a while, so I can meet him again," he said.

"No, you don't have to—"

"Don't worry, it's no trouble for me," the Crown Prince said with a chuckle. "You need not be troubled by it anymore."

Zhan Luoyang was clearly more troubled after hearing that, but now she hid it well enough.

Alex couldn't help but be curious about what was going on here.

All those thoughts disappeared with a loud bang that rang through the sky. Another bang, and then another bang.

Some bangs overlapped and soon it became apparent that strong fireworks were being used outside. Loud sounds of cheers rose through the crowd that was gathered in the arena stand below, and even sounds of large drums rang out through the noise from time to time.

The Competition had begun.

The celebration lasted for a short moment before a large screen appeared all around the arena, one appearing inside the stands that were prepared for the monarchs and leaders.

Mao Yingtai stood aloof at the center of a large stage, wearing an intricately laced silver robe with a flowing shawl around her.

She spoke and her voice echoed throughout the surroundings.

"Welcome to the Continental Tournament."

Sounds of cheers and celebration filled the stands and the voices and drums swallowed everything again.

This was going to be the biggest tournament that Alex had ever seen before.

Chapter 1638 The Tournament

Before the tournament battles started, Mao Yingtai had something else to do. She had to reveal the amount of points everyone had received in the secret realm, especially the ones that were to be seeded in the competition.

There were going to be 16 seeds in total, who wouldn't have to fight until the Top 16 were decided from the remaining. Adding the seeded, there would be another round to finalize the real top 16.

When the points were revealed for everyone to see, gasps of shock ran through everyone in the room, and most definitely through everyone in the stands outside.

Alex stood at the top of the list with nearly 80 thousand points. The closest to him was Sarah with only 29 thousand points. After that surprisingly the leader of the group of 5 tried to attack Alex while he was breaking through.

That man had a total of 21 thousand points.

Alex looked through the list and frowned at the lack of Zhou Boqin in the list. Had they removed him because he had died? Were they trying to hide his death?

Whatever the case, Alex saw no reason to worry.

A simple explanation of Alex not taking part in the tournament was made and the remaining top 16 were given the seed.

Alex remembered most of the names on that list. Every single one of them was someone he had fought. Many of them had even taken his pills while he trained his sword.

After that, they went through a few statistics of the various points based on age, cultivation base, and kingdom.

Surprisingly, the highest number of points gathered in total was by the Ebony kingdom. No one could tell if it was a coincidence, or if it had something to do with the fact that the Ebony kingdom was the largest in size of all the other kingdoms, with few places that weren't inhabited.

After that information was given, the Silver Queen had no reason to remain on the stage anymore and arrived at the stands with all the others.

After a quick greeting, Mao Yingtai slumped on her chair, almost disregarding the Empress and the Crown Prince around her, not to mention everyone else.

"I hate how much work that was," she said in a deep sigh. "At least I'm done with it now."

A few people around her gave her some words of comfort and then focused on the matches that were going to start soon.

The Continental Tournament was going to have over 8 thousand participants from what Alex had gathered, and that was going to take a long time to get through. Perhaps for as long as it would take.

Multiple stages were prepared for the starting battles, and soon they were underway.

Inside the shades stands where Alex and the rest lay, multiple screens had appeared, each focusing on one stage or another. People could only watch the matches through this as all Spiritual senses were blocked from entering the stage.

Battles started and ended, one after another. Many people that Alex did not recognize fought each other, oftentimes one easily coming out in front of the other with ease.

There were a few times when the fighting got tense, and those were the fun ones to watch, but this early on there weren't as many of such fights.

It took nearly 10 days for the first round of battles to end and the 2nd round to start. At that time, Alex saw the few people he cared about watching in the tournament.

Shan Wangjiu, Talia, Fang Yimu, and Mao Yingkong had to fight normally to get through the competition, but it wasn't that difficult for them. After this fight, he knew when they would show up in a fight next.

He left the stands once nearly 14 days into the competition and returned 2 days later. He had made excuses to have to go cultivate, and that was what the people thought he was making. Excuses.

Alas, he truly had to go cultivate. Going for 2 weeks was difficult without dealing with the Yin that gathered in his body. If he didn't do something about it, it would affect his cultivation base.

Not that he could tell anyone about it. It was a somewhat annoying situation in moments like these when people were gathered and could stay there for months without having to do anything.

He couldn't wait until his Qi was strong enough to not get affected by the Yin again.

Shan Wangjiu had a somewhat difficult battle against his next opponent, a man who used a giant war axe as a weapon. Their cultivation base was similar, so it took him a while to defeat the man. There were so many weaker opponents still around, so it was quite unlucky for both of them.

The rest had uneventful matches.

The 2nd round of battle ended faster than last time, in just 6 days. And then the third round began.

Shan Wangjiu had an easy time this time around with his opponent being someone weaker than him. He also seemed to have broken through to Saint Soul 3rd realm after the last battle, so he was doing better.

Talia had a rather difficult battle in the 3rd round. With cultivation in the Saint Core realm, she should have still been considered to be one of the stronger individuals in the competition. However, she ended up coming across someone just slightly stronger than her and ended up losing.

The rest managed to win through easily.

The next few rounds went faster and faster, and after a month with some setup of the hosts, only 256 people remained.

The Top 256 fought, and Shan Wangjiu sadly lost his battle. There were too many stronger individuals around and he couldn't make it past that.

Fang Yimu nearly lost as well, but she managed to make it through with the skin of her teeth.

Mao Yingkong had a much easier time than the rest thanks to not having to fight someone very strong.

Top 128 and Top 64 went by, and on Top 32, Fang Yimu lost against someone with a cultivation base of Saint Soul 8th realm.

Mao Yingkong managed to make it through, but when the true Top 32 was created by adding the 16 seeded individuals, he immediately lost to Ren Wujin, who had become his opponent.

On the final top 16, Alex recognized everyone and had no one he truly rooted for. If he had to name someone, it would be Sarah, but it was easy to see that she would most definitely be the person to win here.

Ren Wujin managed to pass the Top 16 and lost in the Top 8.

Teng Xuegang also lost in Top 8.

The Azure Prince lost in the Top 4.

The finale was between Sarah and the leader of the group that had attacked Alex.

After a fearsome battle that seemed to shake the world itself, Sarah managed to emerge victorious thanks to her quick wits and fast attacks.

Sounds of cheers and noise erupted at her victory, with fireworks and paper lanterns completely lighting up the night.

2 months passed since the beginning of the tournament and finally, it was completed with Sarah's victory.

Chapter 1639 Ticket

The award ceremony for the tournament ended after all the winners in the top 16 received their rewards.

Afterward, Alex found Sarah and handed her a bottle of pills.

The girl looked at the bottle in surprise. "Your Majesty, I cannot take this," she said quickly, but her eyes betrayed how much she wanted it.

"Take it," Alex said. "I announced before I entered the secret realm that anyone who challenges me and wins will receive a pill. You never got your share."

Sarah couldn't help but feel warm inside, and she clutched the bottle to her chest before bowing in thanks.

Alex nodded back and went to meet a few others before finally arriving next to Shan Wangjiu.

"How've you been doing? Are you training daily?" Alex asked the young man.

"I am, master," Shan Wangjiu answered quickly. "I've been training every day."

The people around them who heard Alex being called 'master' couldn't help but give a second look toward the young man. They recognized him from the competition, but not enough for them to know exactly who he was.

That got them perhaps even more curious.

"What do you plan on doing now?" Alex asked him. "Will you join any sects? I'm sure you'll get tons of invites if you just show some willingness."

"You're joking right?" the young man asked, laughing out loud as if the funniest joke had been made. "I'm a free spirit, master. No sect or clan shall bound me. I will go where my heart desires."

Alex couldn't help but admire the man. He wondered what it would be like if he wasn't constantly bound the same way.

As far as he could remember, he had always been bound by something.

Bound to the sect.

Bound to his need to heal his arm.

Bound to his need to return to his mother.

Bound to his need to find his father.

Bound to the Southern Continent.

Bound to the duties and responsibilities that came along.

Bound to a path of revenge.

How much longer was it before he wasn't bound by anything and he too could be a free spirit?

He could only imagine that it would be so after he left this world and went to a higher realm.

'Not much longer,' he hoped.

"Have you made any plans of coming with me to the Southern Continent?" Alex asked him.

The man gave a frown as an answer. It was a hard choice to make for him, and as he said, he didn't want to be bound.

"Forget I asked that," he said quickly. "Do you want to enter the secret realm in the Ebony Kingdom then?"

The young man's ears perked up. "The Harmonious Balance Haven? That costs a lot of money to get tickets from what I hear."

"I'll get you the ticket," Alex said. "Just tell me if you want to enter."

"Absolutely!" Shan Wangjiu answered. "I won't give up on a free chance to enter the secret realm."

Alex nodded and tossed him a small token.

The young man looked at the token in surprise. "What is this?" he asked, but he knew the answer before Alex even said it.

"A ticket to the secret realm," Alex answered.

"You got one already?" Shan Wangjiu asked.

"I thought you would want one, so I asked the Ebony king for it a few days ago," Alex said. "Don't lose it."

"I won't," Shan Wangjiu said with a blank look on his face. After a while, he found the courage to ask the question.

"Why are you helping me so much?" he asked. "I thought you didn't consider me your disciple?"

Alex blinked in surprise before scratching his chin in embarrassment. "Well, I suppose my mind changed while I was teaching you in the Martial ground," he said. "I still don't consider you my disciple, but you are definitely an honorary disciple of mine now. With all that I taught you, you can't be anything less than that."

A wide smile appeared on Shan Wangjiu's face and he showed his teeth in his grin. "Master!" he said in delight.

The two parted afterward, and Alex went to bid farewell to the Empress and the prince as they were to return to the Dragon Capital as well.

"I will leave too, Your Majesty," The Crown prince announced. "Let me know when you are done with your adventure so we can go meet the Zhan Family head together."

"I told you, you don't have to," Zhan Luoyang tried to whisper to the Crown Prince, but her words came more as more hurried than she would've hoped and louder still.

"I gave my words," the Crown Prince. "And now that you're acting this way, I must definitely come."

Zhan Luoyang could only give a small pout before turning toward Alex. "Please don't forget to come," she said. "As soon as you are free to."

Alex almost thought he could hear the urgency in her voice that she didn't want to say. Was he making himself think that? Should he go there right now?

"I will come as soon as I have the chance," Alex said.

The group bid farewell and they left. After that, the kings and queens left as well.

"Finally, I'm free," Mao Yingtai in a tone that was unfitting of a queen. She massaged her shoulder as if to show how tiring it all was.

Alex could imagine how tiring it was.

"When do you plan on going on the tour, Your Majesty?" she asked him.

Alex thought for a bit and answered. "A week later from now," he said. That was decided now.

"Great!" the Queen said. "I'll deal with the leftover work as soon as I can and then we can go together."

Alex looked at her in surprise. "I'm sorry. You're coming along?" he asked.

"Of course," the Queen said. "I've been working hard for the past 3 years in a row. I deserve a break too. And I wouldn't want anything else but a vacation as big as the one you're taking, Your Majesty."

Chapter 1640 Around the Silver Kingdom

The Silver Kingdom had many fantastic locations both on the mainland and the islands for Alex to visit.

They began touring the land from the very north of the Silver Kingdom, in a city known as Frostspire. Giant pillars of ice grew from the ground of this ever-snowing city, with most people finding residence within the alcoves formed from most of these spires.

The city was away from the ocean to its west and was just a few hour's flight away from the frozen mountains of the Silver Mountain range at this time of the year.

The ice spires were large and contained a mineral that could only be found in small clumps in this area of the continent which absorbed light and let it out slowly when the sun was down.

It was similar to the Sunstone that Scarlet lay on all day inside her golden dome, but this wasn't sunstone from what Alex could tell.

Whatever it was, it glowed with the beauty of a million stars, with specs of light glittering inside the somewhat misty ice spires, giving an incredible view for anyone living in the city.

As the city itself was built inside and around the spire, they lacked the need to glow lanterns around the city at night both outside and inside. Only deep inside a house where the sparkling light couldn't reach did people use a lantern.

Alex was fascinated by the city and enjoyed his time at the place along with his elders, the few guards who came with him, and Mao Yingtai who wanted to come here with him.

They spent no more than a week in the city, but that was enough time for Alex to experience the beauty of the city. If he remained there any longer, the mysticism of the city would dwindle, so he found little hesitation within himself to leave this city.

They moved on to the next city, Moonshadow Glde.

The city, if it could even be called that, was built inside of a large forest mostly comprising Silverthorn trees. The houses were set up inside open spaces in the forest and the pathways were also natural pathways through the forest.

The city was a small city compared to even most of the cities Alex had seen,, but it had a mayor, and it was one of the richer cities of the Silver kingdom.

The Silverthorn tree was a tree with wood as strong as steel, whose color almost made one think it was coated in silver. They were great for making artifacts and weapons, and could even be used by Saint realm cultivators.

The tree also produced a corrosive sap twice every year, and they were harvested to be sold throughout the continent. The Silverthorn sap wasn't just an ingredient for poison but was also a necessary ingredient in one of the antidote pills that Alex knew of.

The sap they produced was metallic in color as well, but was more solid than most sap and almost looked like metal balls at a glance. Aside from that, the city also grew various spices that only grew in the Silver Kingdom.

This was another incredible place for Alex to stay in.

Sunlight pierced through the large trees in the forest every morning, bringing broken rays down toward the city, and giving it an ephemeral look. The city folks were kind and hospitable.

With most of the people there having to leave to a sect in another city if they wanted to cultivate properly, there weren't many cultivators that caused problems in that city.

Even if they did, guards were always around to help squash any grievances before they got serious.

Because of the peaceful nature of the city, it was also very much a major choice of destination for any couple on their honeymoon.

More times than not, people congratulated Alex on finding a good wife. Mao Yingtai was quite pretty and she had been hiding her status in the place in fear of being treated not how they wanted, so people easily misunderstood them.

All the residents of the city thought was that they were some young lord and lady of some big city who got married and wanted to come there.

Alex tried denying the first few times, but after seeing how many people had the same misunderstanding, he let them have it.

They left some time later, going south this time to a city called the Ivory Veil.

It was a city in perpetual fog that settled from the warm hot springs that were all around the town. A magma vein ran deep below the surface of the city and the water that sprung out from underneath was always heated when it came out.

The hot springs were said to have an incredible cleansing effect on the body and Alex found that it was no lie when he lay in one of them on his own. Pearl and Whisker enjoyed the place with his as well.

He didn't know how much of a cleansing it did to a body as he had already gone through Mortal cleansing and there wasn't much impurity in his body that his Qi didn't destroy each time he cultivated.

His body was particularly good at destroying things that it considered not good for the body.

Still, he felt fresh as a man who peacefully slept through the night every time he walked out of those hot springs.

After that, they went to Quicksilver Heights, a city on a plateau in the Silver Mountain range.?The plateau the city was built on was perfectly flat as if someone had taken a knife to the mountain and cut off the top half of it.

The city had a few martial houses where battles took place all throughout the year, and many people came to watch or participate in those battles.

Alex stayed there just long enough to see the sights he thought he had to and left.

He visited many more cities after that. Whitejade City, Silverglint City, Freshpearl City, and Pureshore City were some of the best cities he saw throughout the Silver Kingdom, but that wasn't to say that there weren't many other cities with their own beauties to see.

Aside from the cities, he also met many great sects and families, people who were more than excited to host both Alex and Mao Yingtai on their vacation.

Some of the people Alex had met before, some he met for the first time. All of them made sure to only show the best to them.

It took Alex 9 months to get through all the cities in the Silver Kingdom before it was time to leave the place.

"Have you made plans on where to go next?" Mao Yingtai asked him the day they were to leave.

Alex nodded. "I will return to the Capital for a while and then go to the Ebony Kingdom," he said. "I don't have many years to remain here, so I will have to make do with what I have."

The Queen nodded and Alex left the place with his 2 elders at his side. Going through a teleportation formation in the city, he arrived back in the Dragon Capital instantly.

When he did, the sky rumbled with lightning bolts as a pill cloud covered the sky above the palace.

Chapter 1641 Blackheart City

"It happens every other day," Jai Heiyun answered Alex when he came to meet her. "I don't know how he's doing it, but he's been doing pretty well with forming pill clouds. He's very consistent too."

Alex grimaced when hearing that. The Dragon Emperor had gotten good, and he would only continue to get better. "And he wants the final trade next year too," he said softly.

"What trade?" Jai Heiyun asked curiously.

"Not something for you to worry about, child," Yao Ning said from the side. The two elders were grimacing the same as well.

After arriving in the Dragon Capital a week ago, Alex had gone to the palace to stay for a few days. At that time, the servants of the palace had notified the Dragon Emperor of his arrival, and Alex had expected to have to meet the man soon.

However, instead of asking him to meet him, the Dragon Emperor had simply sent a single message.

"I will meet you in a year when we'll have our final trade," he had said.

Alex very much openly frowned now, causing Jai Heiyun to get worried about what was happening.

Seeing that he was causing others to worry, he quickly let go of his expressions and instead put on a simple smile. "Anyway, it is time for me to leave," he said. "Once again, congratulations on your results in the Realm of Trials. Getting white there is no laughing matter."

"It's all thanks to you, Your Majesty," Jai Heiyun said with a proud look on her face.

Alex walked away. He said his goodbyes to the other cultivators once more, including Wu Shun, who was now a better cultivator than most of the ones that Alex had brought along from the Southern Continent.

After saying his goodbye, Alex went to the Teleportation house from where he teleported to the Blackheart City with a small honor guard to keep him company.

Wan Deming, the Ebony king was there to welcome him to Blackheart City, the Capital of the Ebony Kingdom.

Tall black walls surrounded the city with spires inside that grew to be large. While the outside walls were painted black, the inner city was as colorful as every other place.

The bustling city was wide in some places and narrow in others. Plants of various species grew along the sidewalk separating the pedestrian side of the road from where the carriages and carts moved.

Small and large shops selling all sorts of goods and services covered both sides of the roads, and more than once Alex saw people with high cultivation bases walking around the street with a lofty look to them.

Wan Deming wasn't much of a talkative man, but he still put on a simple conversation while they went to the palace. He asked Alex about the Silver Kingdom, and how he liked his time there.

And Alex answered every question without much hesiation as he had truly come to love the places he had visited in his journey.

"Which country do you like the most?" the man asked him.

Alex found it hard to answer the question. Every country had its own good parts and bad parts, and comparing them was like comparing apples to oranges. It was more to a matter of preference than anything, but then that probably was what the man was asking him about.

"I can't choose between the Silver Kingdom and the Emerald Kingdom for now," Alex answered truthfully. "Both of those kingdoms had the most fascinating cities."

"Why not the other Kingdoms?" the man asked.

"The Ivory Kingdom and Gold Kingdom were more snow and mountains than anything, so even while the cities were great, they didn't leave a lasting impression. They were also not as varied."

"As for the Azure Kingdom, it probably had the most amount of cities I visited, but all of those cities were generic cities and they didn't entertain me just as much either."

There was also the truth that he couldn't enjoy the 3 Kingdoms as throughout his time there, he had to constantly think about the Oathbreakers.

Sometimes it was in fear of if they would find him again, and sometimes it was in desperation to see if he could find them again.

After his short explanation, the Ebony king slowly nodded. "Well, I hope the Ebony kingdom will top your list," the man said. "I will be leaving soon to start collecting more of the artifacts from around the kingdom, so I will take you on some of my journey that I know you are going to like."

Alex accepted the proposition. He was interested too.

"Why do I see so many strong individuals walking the street so casually?" Alex asked once the conversation seemed to die a little.

One of the counselors to the King spoke after noticing what Alex was talking about. "Those are people hoping to get a hand on the ticket that is to be sold for the secret realm," he said. "Most of them hope to get a greater chance to buy one by coming early, even if they should know they wouldn't. The tickets aren't to be sold for another year and a half."

"They're just desperate. It's not easy to get your hands on the ticket after all, with so many people looking forward to it," the King said and the matter ended there.

They returned to the palace and the King hosted Alex as well as any other monarch had. They chatted when they had the chance and shared knowledge and stories of their past.

Alex got to understand the king closely and felt like he was a friend. A week later, they were ready to leave for their journey.

"Where are we going?" Alex asked him.

"The Celestial Peak," the King answered.

Alex showed a hint of surprise. He had known about the place and had even been planning to go there himself when he had the chance.

"What are you going to do in the Celestial Peak?" Alex asked curiously. From what he could tell so far, the Celestial Peak was simply the tallest mountain in all of the continent, perhaps the entire world.

As such, people didn't exactly live there.

"We're going to the Blackspine city that is right next to the Celestial Peak," the King said. "There are 2 great families and 2 notable sects in that region. I will deal with them, while you can enjoy your journey to the highest peak of the world."

Alex nodded excitedly. "I would love to go to this peak," he said.

"You will love the sunrise you see from this place," the man said.

Alex was about to say something when he felt like he missed something in those words that he needed to revisit.

"Blackspine City," he said softly. "I have heard this name before, in relation to something else. What was it?"

He tried to go through his memories as the name couldn't have been that much in the past.

"It's not a surprise you've heard of it," the King said. "It's where I come from. Or rather, it's where the sect I used to belong to still is."

That was when Alex finally remembered.

"That's right," he said with a surprised look. "That's where the Mountain Crushing sect is located."

Chapter 1642 Mountain Crushing Sect

The Blackspine City stood on the western side of the Ebony Mountain range, in the shadow of the single tallest mountain in the world, known as the Celestial Peak.

The city itself was moderately large with 2 great families making this their place of residence and 2 other sects lived close to the city as well, about an hour's travel on a carriage from the city.

When Alex and the rest arrived in the city through teleportation, the city was still in shade from the mountain to the east. Those who were here for the first time couldn't help but peer to the east where the mountain stood up tall like a spike out of the ground.

With all the mountain range still in shadow, marred with black, they truly did look like black spines growing from the ground.

"Please let everyone know we are coming," the Ebony King told his subordinate who quickly went to carry out his information. The King then turned toward Alex and asked them to come along.

Alex wandered through the city with the King, slowly going around the place while making their way to a lodge where they would have to stay for the night.

"I thought we were heading over to the Celestial Peak," Alex said with a hint of confusion on his face.

"Oh, it is better to climb the peak at night so you'll be there right around the morning," the King said. "We will head on over very early in the morning tomorrow."

"Ah!" Alex said. "I did remember reading something great about viewing the sunrise."

"Yes," the Ebony King said excitedly. "It's— no, you'll have to see for yourself. It's incredible."

Once the rooms were purchased for the night and for some reason many more days to come, the King left to visit the two great families of the city while leaving Alex behind in the lodge.

Alex had remained by choice as he did not want to visit any random families. The only place he did want to visit was the Mountain Crushing sect and even that was just to ask a few questions.

They remained in the lodge for nearly 5 hours when the King returned to rest for an hour before telling them that they were to leave for the Mountain Crushing sect then.

The sun was glowing orange on the horizon to the west when Alex and the others arrived at the Mountain Crushing sect. While the sect was half an hour away for carriage, to cultivators it was only a few minutes away by flying.

The Mountain Crushing sect was large but most of it was unused land. They held even more land in the past but had to sell it so they could afford to keep the sect running from what Alex heard along the way.

The Ebony King had once been a disciple of this sect, so he knew a bit more about the sect than outsiders.

An elder man with gray hair and beard walked out to greet the two monarchs, and even from just a glance, Alex could tell that the old man had a body that was stronger than regular cultivators.

The old man welcomed the group of them and they walked inside.

The Ebony King started casually conversing with the man while telling him about Alex. When the old man heard that it was Alex who got the Mountain Crushing artifact, he couldn't help but show a surprised look. As well as a slightly saddened look.

The Ebony King handled his business with finding treasures while some other elders entertained Alex in his absence.

Alex talked with them for a while before getting to business.

"As you know, I bought the Mountain Crushing artifact," he said, catching the attention of the elders who were there. "Could I know who here knows the most of the artifact so I can direct my questions to them?"

The elders looked at each other and one of them spoke. "Everything we can tell about the artifact should have been written in a book we provided along with the artifact. Did you not receive it, Your Majesty?" they asked.

"No, I did," Alex said. "I was hoping to ask questions that weren't answered in the book."

"That would be me then," one of the older elders said. "After Elder Gun went to his final closed cultivation nearly half a century ago, I should be the most fitting to answer your question."

Alex turned toward the man. "I hope you can answer my questions then," he said. "My first question is what is the artifact actually called?"

The various elders gave a confused look and turned to look at the man who spoke.

"We do not know," the man answered. "The artifact has been passed through our sect for thousands and thousands of years, and while our sect has managed to remain, nobody knows how they came to this artifact or what it is called."

"Even the oldest records we have call it the body cultivation artifact of the Mountain Crushing sect, and as such it gained its name," the man said.

Alex had expected as much but had hoped to get more. "So you don't know how it came to the possession of your sect either, do you?" he asked.

The old man shook his head.

Alex expected as much too. The Sundering Sanctum —or as the spirit inside of it liked to call itself, the Playground— was also an Immortal artifact, and from what Alex could remember it telling him, it had come from the Immortal world along with a master that migrated here once the Eternal War had ended.

Alex had guessed that this was the same case as well.

"Then, my final questions," Alex said and everyone paid attention to him. Alex knew it was not the right thing to ask, but eh just couldn't help himself.

"What did you do with the artifact that caused your sect to degrade through the years?" Alex asked.

Everyone suddenly stiffened and eyes darted around the room, looking to see who would speak. Perhaps to see who would dare speak.

Alex waited for a few minutes and sighed as he got no answer. That he had expected too, but he at least wanted something.

The King arrived a few minutes later and it was time to leave. They flew in the dark and Alex told him what he had asked them and hadn't gotten any answer to.

The King remained silent for a while before speaking.

"It is unlikely you will ever get an answer to that," he said softly. "At least, they won't give it willingly away as they were told not to."

Curiosity took over Alex and he looked toward the King for more answers. The king was about to continue speaking, but he held his tongue and the rest of the flight continued in silence.

Alex expected to get no answer that day and went to his room to prepare for his climb to the Celestial Peak.

However, deep at night, a knock came to his door.

"May I come in, Your Majesty," the Ebony king requested.

"Come in."

The King walked in and closed the door. He walked up close to Alex and sat down.

"You wanted to learn why the Mountain Crushing sect fell from grace," the king said. "I came to answer that."

Chapter 1643 The Truth Behind the Downfall

"You are going to tell me about the downfall of the Mountain Crushing sect?" Alex asked the King. He hadn't expected to hear anything else about this after today.

"Well, I'm involved in it somehow, so I will," the King said. "But... in exchange, I wish to buy some of your Earth and Fire Spiritual Root enhancement pills."

Alex shook his head, causing the King's spirit to dampen a little.

"I do not have a Fire Spiritual Root enhancement pill. I never had," Alex said. "But if you'll tell me about the Mountain Crushing sect's downfall, I will give the Earth Spiritual Root enhancement pill for free."

The King's spirit returned at once. "Okay, that will do too," said more than happily.

"So... what did happen?" he asked.

The King took a deep breath and started. "The downfall of the Mountain Crushing sect, it... isn't exactly the fault of the artifact you bought," he said. "It is in parts, but it is only the accessory to a much larger cause."

Alex listened to it intently.

"The Mountain Crushing artifact was used carelessly in the past, but the elders had already recognized the slippery slope it created if it was to be let go for long. As such, everyone who says it is the artifact that caused the sect's downfall is completely wrong."

"They were already aware of the problem and were working to amend it."

"The real problem came when this kingdom lost its king," the King said. "Before this was the Ebony Kingdom, it was the Lin Kingdom. When the Lin Kingdom fell, the Emperor put someone to rule over the newly formed Ebony Kingdom."

Alex nodded. That was what he knew about the Eastern Continent before he had come here. There were 5 Kingdoms, ruled by individual Kings, who served the Empire as a whole.

But because of their rebellion, they were all executed, and new kings and queens were put in their places.

"About 4 thousand years ago, when the first King of the Ebony kingdom wanted to abdicate, the Emperor had to look elsewhere to find a suitable candidate," the man said. "Searching around, he found me."

Alex nodded. That was to be expected.

"I was only in the Saint Core realm at the time, but I had lived long enough and had enough experience to handle the kingdom," the man said. "However, instead of just letting me be the next king, the Emperor made a trade instead."

"What sort of trade?" Alex asked.

"In return for me becoming the King, the Mountain Crushing sect was to let him use the Mountain Crushing artifact to improve his physical body," the King said.

Alex felt an understanding forming inside of him. A question he had for a long time was going to be answered here.

"The Mountain Crushing sect accepted his request, and I became the King," the man said. "Except, the sect never realized what sort of bargain they had made until the end."

"Instead of taking away the Mountain Crushing artifact to use elsewhere, the Emperor used it right there in the sect. And the elders were forced to stick to their side of the bargain by helping him body cultivate."

Alex's eyes went wide. "And he made them use it until they used up most of their resources?" he asked.

The King shrugged in response. "He brought 3 Saint Spirit Veins from what I hear, but they were far from enough. He forced the sect to keep using the artifact until he realized his body wasn't going to get stronger without stronger material inside the artifact."

"By the time he had realized that the sect had used most of what they owned," the King said. "Having spent it all on His Majesty, the elders didn't have much remaining for their own disciples, and slowly they had to lower the amount of disciples they took in."

"Being no longer able to body cultivate like they used to, these disciples also started leaving the sect one by one. Even some of the elders left," the King said. "The other sects took advantage too and started expanding, taking over what the Mountain Crushing sect previously had hold of."

"Slowly, the sect had to become smaller and smaller to not break from within. Now, its a husk of its former self, and even the artifact that gave them their name had to be sold so they can continue to keep going," the King said.

Alex remained silent for a while, taking in all the information.

He finally knew that the Emperor's physical body was as strong as one could get using that artifact in the Saint realm. He had always known the Emperor was strong physically as well, but this was better than he had thought.

He would have to worry about that later when the time came.

"Does the Mountain Crushing sect have no chance of a comeback?" Alex asked.

"Only through a miracle," the king said with a dry laugh. It was the sect he was talking about. While he had left it long ago, he still belonged to it one way or another.

Just like Alex would always belong to the Hong Wu sect and the Tiger sect one way or another.

"Is that why they were so hesitant to tell me?" Alex asked the King.

"The Emperor told them to not talk about his presence, so they won't talk about it," the King said.

"Oath?" Alex asked.

"No, but an order from the Emperor is just as good as any oath," the King said. "I shouldn't be talking about it either, but..."

The King shook his head. "That's why I didn't answer it while we were returning. There were those guards, and I didn't want to say anything in front of them."

Alex nodded. "But you did now because of the pill," he said.

"Well, yeah," the King said. "I saw no reason to hide this information. You have the artifact now, so you deserve to know why the Mountain Crushing sect fell. And it was not entirely because of the artifact."

Alex nodded. "So if I make use of it in moderate amount, I will be fine," he said. That was good to know.

The King nodded. "Anyway, I will leave you for now. We have less than 6 hours before we need to climb the Celestial Peak," he said.

Alex nodded and quickly searched through his Soul Space to find the pill he was looking for. He put it inside a bottle and brought it out. "Here," he tossed it to the man.

The King caught the bottle with his Qi and slowly brought it to his hands. Opening the stopper, he saw a 5-veined pill inside. "Not 6 veins?" he asked meekly.

"I made these long ago," Alex answered. "I do not have the ingredients to make one currently. They are very hard to come by."

The King nodded. "Thank you," he said. "I will take my leave then, Your Majesty."

Alex nodded and the King left.

Once he was alone, Alex let a look of hesitation show up on his face.

"Dammit!" he said worriedly. "Not only does he have the strongest cultivation base under an Immortal, he also has the strongest physical body under an Immortal. How the hell am I supposed to defeat someone like that in a fight if it comes down to it?"

Chapter 1644 The Celestial Peak

When Alex was requested to get ready to leave, it was still 2 hours past midnight. He took no time to be ready and within 15 minutes, everyone was gathered outside on the streets where few people still walked and most of the shops were closed.

The moon was out, glimmering like a pale sphere of silver with a piece missing on the side. The spotless moon was otherwise beautiful in the open night.

"Perfect!" King Wan said as he looked to the sky. "No clouds today, so the views will be better than we could've hoped for. You should consider yourself lucky, Your Majesty. It's not every day that we see such a cloudless night."

Alex nodded but said nothing.

"Did we have to leave this early?" Yao Ning asked with a slightly annoyed look on her face. "It's still the middle of the night. When does the sun rise anyway? 5 in the morning?" she asked.

"Today it will rise some 20 minutes past 5 in the morning," one of the subordinates next to the King answered her question.

"So, we still have 3 hours. Isn't this a bit too early?" she asked. "I can see the peak right there. Even if it is the tallest mountain in the world, would it take us more than 20 minutes to fly up there?"

"Senior Yao," the King began speaking. "The Celestial Peak does appear close for us, but it is not so. And we cannot fly all the way up to the peak. We will have to walk a quarter of the way to the peak, which is why we need to leave as soon as possible."

"We cannot fly all the way up there?" Alex asked. "Why?"

The King was about to answer when one of his counselors, a man in a bright purple robe answered. "If you do not know about this, it will be better if you experience this yourself," he said.

The King quickly nodded. "Right, it will be better for you to experience it yourself," he said.

Alex gave a doubtful look but said nothing.

"Should we leave then?" Liang Shufen asked impatiently.

"Yes, we should," the King said and was about to turn around to lead when he seemed to remember something and looked back. "Oh right, I should warn you about something before we leave."

His gaze turned toward the two elders instead of Alex when he spoke again. "If either of you seniors has a Yin-based cultivation or has some Yin constitution, it would be better if you prepared yourself. No one has been harmed just yet because of it, but... they are weakened a lot when they go to the Celestial Peak and take some days to recover themselves."

Alex frowned when he heard that. Neither Yao Ning nor Liang Shufen had a cultivation base with Yin being any vital part of it, but he did. His body constantly created Yin and if something happened to Yin while he was up there, it would be bad.

It would be especially bad if the Yin backfired on the people, and he was an especially dangerous variant of Yin, one that was most likely comparable to Immortal Qi.

"What's so bad about Yin?" Alex asked the man.

"Well, it's like..." the King tried to think of ways to explain. "It's like quenching a red hot iron rod in cold water. The suddenness of what happens makes a woman, and sometimes a man weak afterward."

"Quenching an iron rod?" Alex frowned a little. "Is is the coldness at the top of the Celestial Peak?"

The Celestial Peak could even now be seen without any snow, but anyone who knew about heights knew that the higher you went, the colder it got. The Ebony mountain ranges weren't known for being snow mountains, but at the height that the Celestial Peak was, it very well might as well have been a snow mountain.

Only, because the Peak was so high, even clouds did not reach the top. The celestial peak looked like a sword thrust out of the ground, reaching for the heavens.

"His Majesty spoke wrong," one of the Counselors said. "What he meant to say is the exact opposite. Instead of a red hot iron to water, it would be like pouring drops of water into a red hot iron."

"Ah, right, my bad," the King said swiftly. "I wasn't trying to make a comparison to Yin and Yang when I said that, but with hot and cold, I should have realized. it is exactly this way."

"Yin and Yang," Alex appeared surprised at that. Drops of water to a red hot iron. He understood what they were trying to say. "Is there a lot of Yang at the top of the Celestial Peak?"

That sounded ridiculous. How could a place so cold possibly have enough Yang to cause a person with Yin to have problems? Or was he wrong in considering this place to be cold in the first place?

"If you do not have to worry about your Yin being stripped away for a few days, we should be moving," the King said. "The rest you should experience on your own and find out. Having me tell you everything here will not be much fun."

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. As long as the problem with Yin was only for a few days, he would be fine. In the first place, the only thing Yin had to do with him was his Undying Physique and that was only to improve it.

There was nothing for him to worry about.

They set off immediately, the group of nearly 10 flying toward the Celestial peak.

As they flew, the mountain got closer and closer to them, but even after flying for nearly 15 minutes, they weren't at its feet. They had thought the mountain was close, close enough to reach the peak in a matter of a few minutes, but now they realized how mistaken they were.

The mountain was the tallest mountain they had ever seen, but that was still while they were far away. Nearly half an hour later when they were finally at its feet they realized just how tall the mountain was.

Like look at a cliff wall, the mountain stood tall and erect for thousands and thousands of meters into the sky. Even as he tried to, Alex failed to see the very peak from where he stood. His head was fully tilted back and even with that, it was hard to see the peak that slanted just beyond what was visible from here.

"The mountains surrounding the Celestial Peak are tall by nature, with over 15 kilometers of vertical height, but the Celestial Peak itself stands nearly 22 kilometers tall," the King explained.

Alex gulped at the height. 22 kilometers tall. What the hell sort of height was that?

Even when flying through the sky within the clouds in large ships that crossed continents, the height was never over 10 kilometers, if that. And the height of the Celestial Peak was more than double that.

"There are exactly 5 peaks in the Celestial Peak, each at a lower height, but the one people refer to when they say Celestial Peak is usually the one that is at the very top, the one we will be going for today," the King said. "The lower peaks are for weaker cultivators to claim, so we should have no worries about reaching the top. Although you will still struggle a little even as strong as you are."

Both Yao Ning and Liang Shufen's faces had paled at the height of the mountain. They seemed to both fear something and realize something at the same time, but they didn't bother telling Alex.

From what he thought he saw, what they realized was supposed to be something obvious. Although what it could be, Alex couldn't see.

It was probably a realization that came with age and experience, and Alex didn't have very much of that just yet. He was going to get one today it seemed.

"Let us climb," he said.

With a nod from the Ebony king, they all started flying.

The mountain known as the Celestial Peak was nearly 7 kilometers wide at the widest part, and while sparse trees covered it at the feet, after about the 4 kilometer range, no tree or wildlife could be seen.

Alex could see paths along the top, made by both mortals and cultivators who dared to climb the thing. While most flew, there were still many that climbed on foot.

The mountain itself was full of giant rocks that studded out of the ground, along with winding paths created through years of rain and wind.

Around 7 kilometers, Alex felt the slight lack of air resistance that was always there when they flew and at 9, it was almost nothing. Flying was simple right now and they continued flying upward.

However, when he reached 12 kilometers, the resistance returned. It didn't return immediately, but it was there and it was getting stronger.

When he crossed the 13 kilometers, it was stronger, and at 15 it was now stronger than when flying normally. And unlike regular air resistance, he couldn't even work around it with his technique.

At this point, he understood that there was no regular resistance. His Qi was failing to push him upward. It was still doing a good enough job for now, but at some point, he understood that it would become impossible for him to continue flying.

It was at 17 kilometers when it happened, and that was when they all landed on the side of the mountain, with the remaining climbing to be done on foot.

Chapter 1645 A Barrier

The Ebony king had failed to continue flying a long way down and was pulled up by the multiple Saints around him. With a cultivation base in the Saint Soul realm, he had stopped being able to fly long before Alex did.

The few other saints had failed before Alex too, and only 3 could continue flying beyond the 17-kilometer point, 2 of them being his elders.

"What exactly is going on?" Alex asked once they were all standing on solid, albeit slanted ground. The air here was thin, almost nonexistent and breathing was hard, although not hard for a cultivator.

They were strong enough to last hours without breath so long as they had Qi to keep their body moving. Some cultivators were said to go on for days, but it needed practice.

"This is the most we can fly," the Ebony King said as a matter of fact, but Alex failed to see the point the man was trying to make.

"When did you learn how to fly, Your Majesty?" old Yao Ning asked him with a thoughtful look on her face.

Alex thought for a bit. If his memory was correct, it was around the time both of his masters had taken him as their disciple.

"I was in the Bone Tempering realm, I believe," Alex answered, sending a murmur of surprise through the people. Most people weren't supposed to be able to fly until they were in the Organ-tempering realm.

"And how far could you fly at the time?" the woman asked.

"Just a meter or two off the ground, if that," Alex said. A glimmer of understanding seemed to try and peer through the back of his mind, but he needed a little more.

"And it improved as you got stronger, did it not?" the woman asked.

Alex nodded. "It did," he said.

"How much did it improve?" the woman finally asked.

Understanding poured through him and he finally realized what he had been missing. "Is there still a limit when you are a Saint?" he asked before instantly realizing that there was. He had just felt the limit.

"You're young, Your Majesty, so maybe you haven't had the time to try and find your limits," she said. "Us old folks have lived long enough to sometimes have thought if we could reach the stars. But anyone who did think of that would know that there was only so far you could fly as a Saint. We cannot leave for the star just because we want to."

Alex slowly nodded. He was surprised he didn't know that until now even though the explanation had been right there since he began cultivating. The limits of how far he could fly had been there even when he was a True realm cultivator. And yet, he had somehow forgotten about the limit as the constraints he had unknowingly set on himself made him feel as though he had no limit.

"I wonder why that is," Alex asked softly, although nobody answered him. No one knew it seemed. Either that or he had just asked these people why water was wet. It was something so obvious to these people that there was no point in asking about it.

"It's the same way if you try to make it to the edge I hear," one of the counselors said.

"We should start walking now," the Ebony King said hurriedly, catching everyone's attention. "We don't want to be late."

The path to the Peak wasn't difficult, especially because a path was already made with the thousands of people who visited the top every year. While the path was still rough, there were almost stairs in the mountain.

They weren't made there but rather were carved out of the mountain itself.

Alex and the group saw a few people on the way up, mostly weaker individuals who needed to catch their breath before they continued. The King remarked that those people should have stopped at a lower peak, but aside from that, he said nothing about them.

Alex was very much surprised at the thinness of air at this height, and at times his lungs tried to pull in air only to pull in nothing. It was an extremely weird experience.

They had been walking for nearly an hour, and even then it felt like they were still far away from reaching the peak. Alex could only just start to see the peak as the very slightly curved mountain revealed the peak to him.

His Demon Eyes could already start picking up movements at the top, which surprisingly his spiritual sense could not. There was something… wrong with this place where spiritual sense didn't work.

Alex didn't believe it was the fault of the mountain, but rather the fault of the height in general. Whatever was making them not fly so high was also suppressing the spiritual sense.

He knew that especially well because he could move the spiritual sense in all directions but just up. 'Just what the hell is causing such a phenomenon?' he wondered.

He was so very curious that he had to tell Godslayer.

Godslayer had to be woken up to ask the questions. For the past year, the sword spirit had nothing to do with Alex doing nothing but visiting the various cities. Keeping the Shadow aura around him took effort even for him and sleeping was a good way to conserve that energy.

It took a moment for Alex to tell the Sword Spirit everything, and after taking it all in, the Godslayer answered.

"I don't know what exactly causes this phenomenon, but I do know that it is not only your world where this is. Every other realm from the Bloodhaven to the Divine Sanctuary, from Myriad Spirit realm to the Sky God's palace, even Sun's Talon has this phenomenon."

"It's part of… for lack of a better word, a barrier around the world that does two things at once," Godslayer said.

Alex listened intently.

"First, it is a barrier, or mabye a suppression field, that stops regular cultivators from flying outside of the world. Only when you are strong enough, usually an Immortal would you be able to leave this place and fly into space," Godslayer said.

"It stops us from leaving?" Alex asked. "So we cannot just fly away?"

He wasn't sure, but he thought he remembered someone talking about flying away from one realm to another, only that it was difficult due to the distance. There was no mention of any such phenomenon.

"No, you cannot. Not unless you are an Immortal," Godslayer said. "Although that doesn't mean you can't leave. If you took a boat that could fly you away or had an Immortal help you, you could still leave."

"After all, it is just stopping you to go on your own."

Alex nodded slowly. The Ebony King had been aided into flight for part of the way through. "And what is the 2nd part of the phenomenon?" he asked. He wondered if it was about the spiritual sense, but it seemed likely that it would be part of the first explanation.

"The 2nd one…" Godslayer paused a second, seemingly thinking. "Oh right, it's so simple that you sometimes forget something is even causing it."

And then he spoke a single word.

"Atmosphere."

Alex paused in his step before quickly continuing his walk. "I'm sorry, atmosphere?" he asked.

"Yes," the sword spirit said. "The 2nd part of his phenomenon is that air sticks to one side of the world, the side that had life."

Now Alex had to stop. A few of them noticed his stop but said nothing. Yao Ning appeared next to him, but Alex quickly told her it was nothing.

"What do you mean?" he quickly asked Godslayer.

"You do know that your world is just a large chunk of floating rock where only one side, the flat side had an atmosphere, right?" the sword spirit asked.

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. He knew that, didn't he? But why was this being considered a phenomenon? Where else would the atmosphere be if not the side with life?

Thinking along the vein, he realized that while he knew that to be the case, he never knew why. To him, there being atmosphere on the this side was his version of water being wet.

It just was.

But now that he questioned himself why, he started to see that it was weird.

"The atmosphere stops at the edge of every world, like trapped in a bubble atop the floating rock," Godslayer said loudly in his mind before an almost whisper trickled behind it. "Why do I know that?"

Alex wanted to think about why Godslayer was questioning himself, but another part of what he had said caught his attention. His head jerked to the right toward one of the counselors who had said something that he had ignored previously.

"Lord Jian, it was you who said something about not being able to fly near the edge, right?" he asked. "Did you mean the edges of this world?"

"Oh yes, Your Majesty," the man quickly answered. "I've not tried it for myself, but I've read records of those who tried to reach the edge in the east and they describe an almost similar thing happening where they cannot fly close to it. It was almost as if their Qi failed them."

"But their boat could take them?" Alex asked.

"I don't know. They never went to the edge itself," the man said. "They were afraid of falling into the void."

Alex thanked the man and returned to his thoughts.

So, it wasn't because he was flying too high that he wasn't able to fly any longer. It was because he was reaching close to this figurative barrier that lay across the world.

Chapter 1646 The Edges of the World

Godslayer spoke a bit more about this barrier that was around the world, and how it affected the entire world and was weaker as it got lower.

There wasn't much to learn after that, but at least Alex was now happy to know why there was atmosphere only on one side of the land. That made him want to see the other side.

How did it look on the other side of the world? A place with no air, no life, nothing. He would go there one day, but it would be a long time in the future.

They continued walking silently, a few of them silently panting for more air, failing to get used to the lack of air. They knew they didn't have to breathe, but even then muscle memory took over for the most part.

Alex was the same many times and had to keep himself from trying to suck in air and fail.

The other worlds that glittered in the sky, or what most people simply referred to as the stars, slowly dwindled as dawn seemed to be on the horizon.

"Just 2 more kilometers," the King said. "We should be able to make it."

The moon had moved further to the west as well, so there wasn't a lot of time to go up.

The pathway up got more and more ragged by the distance, and the closer they got, the worse it was. Still, they were good enough for them to continue climbing.

As they climbed, Alex felt a peculiar sensation that he couldn't give a feeling to. It was like a gentle wind caressing his hair, but there was no wind for his face to feel. Something was there but he couldn't tell what it was.

"Do you guys feel that?" Alex asked.

"Feel what, Your Majesty?" Yao Ning asked.

"I don't know," Alex said. "But it is growing stronger I believe. But still, it is very mild."

Nobody knew what he meant. They tried using their spiritual sense, but even with that, they felt nothing. "If you're not feeling well, Your Majesty, we can rest for a while before climbing. Or we can go back down and come back tomorrow."

"No," Alex quickly said. "I'm alright. And this feeling isn't necessarily a bad one either."

But what was he feeling?

Alex decided to continue his climb and see if it became apparent once he was closer to the top. So, the climbing continued.

Around the time they reached the 21-kilometer mark, the sky had brightened to the point that nothing but the moon was visible. Around half an hour more and the sun would rise.

"We should go faster," the King spoke. His voice was soft now, which had nothing to do with his lack of ability to speak, but rather the lack of air to transfer those sounds to their ears.

They picked up their pace and as they continued, the feeling Alex felt got stronger. It got stronger, but it was still very mild. He couldn't tell what he was feeling or if he was really even feeling anything.

After climbing for another 15 minutes, they arrived at the peak.

The peak was a small plateau of around 20 meters of uneven ground and crumbling rock. There were several people there already, all of whom were cultivators in the Saint realm.

A few of them recognized the King and others and made simple greetings, but this was no time to talk with someone else. Just minutes from now, the sun would come up and they would experience something that one could only experience in this place.

Alex found a place without anyone there and sat cross-legged on the freezing dirt. The feeling here was stronger than ever, but he found it hard to focus on it. Especially, he had something else to see in front of him.

Sitting at the edge of the peak, he saw the other side of the mountain range.

The tall mountain cascaded rapidly and a dark land lay below from where Alex could see. Large glowing cities looked like embers floating from a campfire in the night. They were many and far spread, but they were tiny from this height.

From where he sat, he almost thought he could reach the ground in a single step. It felt like he would be jumping down a slightly taller step. He knew how far down that land was, but it felt right at his fingertips.

Beyond the land, which there wasn't much of in his vision, lay the slightly glistening ocean of dark colors. It was only visible thanks to the brightening sky and it looked like the sky itself, reflected in its colors.

There were many dark spots along those waters, like tiny pieces of trash floating in a small puddle. But Alex knew those were islands, and some of those were as large as cities if not countries.

How incredibly small they looked.

As Alex's vision moved forward, in the distance he saw something. His eyes glowed purple and what he saw became clear as daylight. His breath grew slightly haggard at the sight.

He saw the edge of the world.

Like jagged pieces of land jutting out from the ground, they covered the horizon. Their silhouettes were clearly visible with the sun slowly shining behind them.

It was coming out of the horizon and soon they would see the sunrise.

Alex stared at the jagged pieces of land, surprised they were there in the first place. He had heard about edges, but never knew there were lands on those edges. Curious, he asked Godslayer about it.

"Every world has it," Godslayer said. "I don't know how they came to be, but they were tall and they are strong. Not as tall as mountains, but those jagged edges go for a few kilometers in some places."

"Why are they there?" Alex couldn't help but ask.

"To stop the water in the ocean from flowing out," Godslayer said, his tone almost making it seem like it was supposed to be obvious. "If not for that, your world wouldn't have oceans."

"Huh?" Alex asked. "That barrier doesn't stop the ocean?"

"No, only the atmosphere," Godslayer said. "I told you, it's not a real barrier."

Alex nodded thoughtfully. "Thank you for telling me," he said.

"That's alright. You wouldn't know these things anyway," Godslayer said. "I don't even know if you're supposed to know it. Not that there is any purpose to learning about it this early. What can you even do with this information?"

Alex said nothing.

"Now that you do know this, make sure never to attack those lands," Godslayer said. "If you do, the Heavens will destroy you the moment you even show any intention of doing so."

"What?" Alex asked Godslayer in surprise. "Then I should have known about this. This shouldn't have been hidden from us."

"It doesn't matter," Godslayer said. "Not that any of you can go—"

A few shifting of clothes and movements around the plateau told Alex that it was beginning. Just as he understood it, the first ray of light trickled its way past the jagged lands of the edges.

And fear gripped Alex's heart.

Chapter 1647 Intense Sunrise

Alex was terrified for a reason he couldn't understand. But he knew he wasn't alone as Godslayer's terrified shouts came at the same time.

"GUARD YOUR SPIRIT!" Godslayer shouted in his mind. "DON'T LET IT GET INTO YOUR SPIRITUAL SEA!"

Alex didn't understand what was happening, but he quickly took his spiritual energy and placed it around his Spiritual sea. And for better or worse, did the same thing with his Soul Space as well.

He thought of doing the same to his dantian as well, just in case, but it was too late.

The trickle of sunrays turned into a blast, and the full force of the sun hit Alex like they never had.

Yang.

Glorious, burning, raging Yang.

Yang like he had never felt before washed through him, burning away all remnants of Yin that were around him and in him.

During the travel up the mountain, a bit of his Yin had gathered up in his dantian. But with just a second of the rays of sunrise hitting him, they were all gone.

And either to his fear or surprise, the Yin that was part of his Qi now was gone too. All that was left was Yang Qi, and it burned brilliantly in his dantian.

The sunrise itself was magnificent and it lasted nearly a minute before the entire sun was out of the horizon, but the wave of Yang was there for no more than 3 seconds.

And those 3 seconds were enough to leave him gasping.

Alex was holding himself up with his hands behind him on the ground, ragged gasps trying to suck in what air there was at the peak. He didn't have enough focus on the matter at hand to realize that there was no air for him to breathe.

They had told him it would be like drops of water to a red hot iron and they weren't lying. In fact, they had underplayed the severity of the situation. The yang that had hit him just now was most certainly as strong, if not stronger than the one he got from the fruit.

Shouts of cheers came from all around Alex, but he was too busy trying to focus on himself and see what was wrong.

And there was quite a bit of wrong here.

Many years ago, after Alex had eaten the Nine Yang Divine Tree's fruit, his body had gone through an evolution where he had attained the Sun God's Celestial Yang body. However, that had come with a drawback of filling his body with Yang, causing him to heat up, and affecting his everyday life.

And the main cause of it had been the Yang source that still remained in his body like a beacon of light.

The situation was dealt with when he finally found the Yin bead and took it within him to work in tandem with the source, to not only give Yang but Yin as well, causing harmony throughout his Qi, making him stronger.

What would be regular Qi for others was instead a mixture of intense Yin and Yang that controlled each other.

That was why when the Yin had become slightly stronger after healing the young girl with the Moon Goddess's body, the Yin had taken to filling his dantian slowly as it overpowered the source.

However, right now when the wave of intense Yang went through him, it had undone all of that. The Yin half of his Qi was gone, and only Yang remained. Not only that, even the Yin bead seemed to be hiding in fear, and the Yang source took over their balance, slowly causing his entire body to be filled with Yang.

Alex burned with it.

It was bad.

"Are you alright?" Godslayer asked from his mind.

"I'm fine, I think," Alex said. "I might have to leave this place so my Yin can return. I can't think of any other way right now."

"You're not alright," Godslayer said. "I can sense Yang even in your Spiritual sea. What is going on? This is dangerous."

Alex was taken aback and quickly checked. He was still properly protecting his Spiritual sea, but it could stop his own body from interfering as much as he could stop his mind from giving his heart the orders to beat.

"Control your Yang," Godslayer said.

Alex nodded and started doing so. Controlling Yang was not easy, but it was something he could do. Thanks to having Supreme Yang Spiritual root, he could somewhat control the Yang Qi, and that had to be more than enough for now.

Alex took the Yang Qi around him and his body and slowly pushed it down. It was a little difficult, but not so much that it caused a problem. Even as he pushed it all back into his dantian or at least far enough from his Spiritual sea, he could already begin to feel the return of Yin in his body.

It was a bucket in front of a vast ocean, but it was coming back.

"Good thing you closed your mind swiftly," Godslayer said when he felt the burden in the spiritual realm lessened. "Had I not let you know in time, or had you not done it in time, all of the Shadow aura I've been holding on to would've been destroyed at once."

Alex gave a start at those words. He hadn't even thought about the Shadow aura. Hurriedly, he checked the Blood God's Manual where he had been keeping the Death aura, and felt better once he realized it was still there.

It was a good thing he had blocked off the Soul Space too. Although with the size of his Soul Space, it would've been surprising if the strong Yang had found it.

Things calmed down, but it was only calm in comparison to what had happened in the instant of sunrise. He still had raging Yang in his body, and whether it was for good or not, for the first time in what felt like forever, he could feel pure Yang.

Yang to him was always together with Yin, so learning about it had been difficult. But now that he was once again free to feel just Yang, he studied it and soon found himself getting lost in what Yang was.

Time passed and no one came to disturb him. Everyone recognized that he was in a half-trance, learning a few things. It was late at night when Alex came to his regular senses and frowned.

'I need more,' he thought. A good portion of the Yin he had lost had returned, which had made learning about Yang difficult once more.

He looked around and found his elders there, along with a few other people, but the King had left. He had his job to do, but he had left a few of his people behind with Alex.

Alex let them know he was alright, but that he would be spending a day or two more in this place.

Unable to refuse, they left Alex to do as he pleased.

Alex prepared whatever he could to the best of his ability and waited as the sky on the horizon once more brightened slowly.

The intense sunrise would come once again.

Chapter 1648 Yang

Alex was better prepared for the 2nd sunrise that was to come.

The crowd around him was different now, with people leaving and new people coming to visit the peak. Aside from his people, few were the same ones from yesterday.

Not that he had half a mind to memorize who they were.

As the sunlight glittered behind the edges of the land far in the east, Alex took a deep breath and immediately stopped when he realized what he was doing. He was so used to breathing in and out to calm himself that he ended up doing so here as well.

This time around, he would just have to do it without that.

A flow of his spiritual energy wrapped itself around his spiritual sea. He had already put away his Blood God's Manual to a corner of his Soul Space that was far beyond the point where the Yang could touch it.

His Soul Space would be opened just around the Nine Yang Divine Tree and hopefully, that would help it grow a bit. The World Tree wouldn't do too badly to get some sunlight either.

As for his Dantian, there was no point in blocking it out. He was not sure if he could even do it.

As the first glints of light shined through the horizon, and in the next instance, the intense sunlight brought forth another wave of Yang that only lasted 3 seconds.

But those 3 seconds were once more enough for Alex to be left gasping once more.

The feeling of shock wasn't as great as the last time, but it was still intense, and Alex still hadn't gotten used to it.

He quickly controlled himself, getting into a cross-legged position where he closed his eyes and concentrated on the intense raging Yang that burned within him.

Once again, he felt the potent Yang and sent his mind into it, searching for knowledge hidden within its brilliance. A distant warning from Godslayer made him keep part of his attention active to look for problems, but the majority of his mind was lost in searching for the meaning behind Yang itself.

Finding answers now was so much easier than at any other time.

One after another, understanding of Yang poured into Alex.

Yang was light. Yang was life. Yang was vitality.

Yang was heat and it was radiance.

It was the other side of the coin to Yin which he already understood. Understanding Yin should have made it harder to understand Yang, but it somehow helped Alex instead.

Having Yang and Yin intertwine in his body forever left him with an understanding that many didn't. On top of that, having a body that was most supremely related to Yang of all things helped more than he could ever credit it for.

Time slipped by Alex and he became lost in his own search for knowledge. A part of him focused on blocking Yang from entering his Spiritual Sea, but that was the bare minimum it was doing.

He wasn't even sure what was happening in the Soul space. He didn't have the time or luxury to check. He could only hope whatever was happening inside was good. The only thing to worry about there was his book after all.

Alex was taken out of his concentration for the first time when a hit of intense Yang made him stumble back like a scorching sun burning him awake. He hadn't realized that night had come and gone, and the sun had come up again.

He had unknowingly gotten used to the returning Yin too, so when it disappeared once again, it left him surprised.

In a way, it was good that he had been brought out of his trance. He was so close now and he believed he could do it in one single go.

Alex brought out a pill and quickly ate it before returning to his medication so as to not lose the train of thought he had.

Falling back into a trance was easy when one ate the Dao pill. It was even easier since he truly was on the verge of learning everything he could.

Only 3 hours passed since sunrise, and everyone that still remained atop the peak was suddenly alerted when they sensed the Worldly laws. Everyone looked at Alex, realizing it was him, but what surprised them was something else.

Whenever someone tried to learn a Dao, the World Laws descended from the heavens. But this time around, they didn't descend at all. They simply... appeared around them.

It was almost as if they were already in the heavens.

Thousands of different aura coalesced around the people, each one looking surprised. They tried to peer into the aura, trying to see what they were, but every single one of the aura contained mysteries of the world and an answer they couldn't find so easily.

The Worldly laws threatened them to not dare do it again. Or at least that was the feeling everyone got when they tried to learn from it.

It was similar to interfering with someone else's progress in something the Heavens were strict upon, and thus disturbing the heavens wasn't allowed here.

Everyone stood silent where they were, letting the worldly laws concentrate on Alex. They could feel one aura stronger than any other, the aura that they had felt just this morning when the sun came up.

The aura of Yang.

People gasped in surprise when they realized what was happening. Alex was trying to learn the Dao of Yang.

Would he be successful? Would he suffer a failure? People were curious and the inability to be sure pained them.

Yang wasn't like the other elements. Alongside Yin, the two were greater elements that were harder to find and harder to learn about. As such, seeing how Alex was trying to acquire it made them extremely shocked and curious.

With how great of a chance he had been given, Alex wasted no time. He learned everything he could, understanding Yang to its essence, and understanding its fundamentals.

When he opened his eyes an hour later, he had successfully learned the Dao of Yang.

The Worldly Daos remained around him when he opened his eyes, so they were his to study. Even as they receded, he looked through them and found something that he thought he could learn.

But it was difficult to say what it was. It felt like something he was close to now, but the Dao didn't come. Even bits of understanding didn't come by the the Worldly laws simply dissipated into the atmosphere.

They were always there and never there at the same time.

He opened up his lungs and paused. Once again, there was no air. He had to remember. He wasn't fully attentive to the present yet.

He looked at the sky where the sun was a good way up the sky, although noon was still a good few hours away. He calmed himself and looked at the world in front of him.

The brilliant blue ocean and lands of brown and green gave a serenity to the scene that would be hard to find anywhere.

Alex stopped blocking his spiritual sea and let out his spiritual sense. When he did, he realized that the feeling he had felt while he was coming up the mountain had become clearer.

Chapter 1649 Scary Intent

The feeling Alex got that seemed to surround him was... familiar? He wasn't sure if he was correct in thinking that or not, but it did feel that way. At the very least, it wasn't a hostile feeling.

He didn't move. People would start congratulating him and whatnot, so he stayed there like he was still in a trance. As long as they didn't bother him right away, he was okay with this.

Godslayer spoke in his mind though, telling him to focus on his guard and whatnot, but Alex ignored him as well, focusing only on the feeling to see what it was.

He had started feeling this when he had climbed past the point of flight and it had grown stronger. Now, he was feeling it even better.

No, it was his body that seemed to feel it. A vague impression of something softly resonated in the back of his head, and finally Alex realized what it was that he sensed.

Intent.

He was sensing Intent. The Intent wasn't directed at him or the other people, so it was barely a feeling. "Elder Yao, can you feel any outside Intent around you?" he asked the old woman.

Yao Ning heard the message that was sent through Spiritual sense and quickly started concentrating on her. At the height they were, Spiritual sense was highly restrictive, so she couldn't fully use it, but just covering the plateau alone was no problem.

She closed her eyes and concentrated, but no matter how much she did that, there was nothing she could feel. In the first place, could you even feel Intent that wasn't directed at you?

"I feel nothing, Your Majesty," she said. "Are you feeling something?"

Alex said nothing. He was confused enough by himself to make others feel the same. He was feeling Intent that was not being directed at him. Intent with no aura.

That should have been impossible, or at least if it was possible, he had never experienced it before.

But he did feel it now, resonating in the back of his head. Intent that surrounded him. The question now was... whose Intent?

There was nothing around him. Could it be that it was not 'who' but rather 'what'? What's Intent was he feeling?

A thought came to him, almost too profound to be there, almost too... impossible. The feeling had become stronger after he had learned his Dao. Two things had happened right then, and either one could be a possibility.

The first was that he had successfully learned the Dao of Yang, and the Intent had something to do with Yang. As someone with Sun God's Celestial Yang body, it could be that he was sensing some Intent that was left behind by something full of Yang.

That was the lesser possibility though.

The greater possibility in his mind was that what he was feeling had to do with him learning the Dao right here. Or more accurately, him bringing forth the Worldly laws here.

If the remnants of the Worldly laws were what he was feeling, then could the Intent belong to... the Heavens?

That was a scary thought to think. How could the heavens have Intent? Was it really the case of a 'what' and not a 'who' then?

'Heavens have Intent!'

The thought was enough to make everyone weep from fright. Everyone who knew enough thought of the heavens as something real. But at the same time, it was something abstract, and something distant.

But if the heavens had Intent, if heavens could enforce Intent, then didn't that mean the heavens were intelligent enough to be sentient?

Heavenly Judgment, Worldly Laws, Tribulation Lightning, Pill Clouds, and so many more things relied on the heavens. If the Heavens were to suddenly find intelligence and do what they wanted on their own accord... that was a dangerous thought.

"Godslayer," Alex called him. The fear of what he thought he had found out wracked his brain and the thoughts were distracted and slow.

"Are you hearing me, boy? Keep the Yang—" Godslayer had been talking to Alex when Alex's voice cut through him. "What?"

Alex gulped and did his best to not sound scared. "Do... do the Heavens have Intent? Are the Heavens... intelligent?" he asked.

Godslayer said nothing. The floating clear crystal in the Spiritual sea could be angry, surprised, happy or all 3, and Alex wouldn't know what he was feeling at the moment.

Godslayer took his time, and when he finally spoke again, it was a question. "What... makes you ask that, boy?" he said.

"I... I can feel an Intent around me, and I think it was left behind when the Worldly laws came here earlier. It is much stronger than the last time," Alex answered.

Godslayer remained silent for a while longer this time, and Alex got a suspicion that he was hiding something.

"Tell me!" Alex demanded before catching himself doing so. "Please," he added quickly.

Godslayer sighed. "You're too weak for this to be of much concern to you. I don't know how you could find out while being so weak, but forget about what you learned. Many people are known to have created Inner Demons that destroyed them just by learning this fact."

Alex felt a pang of fear go through him. But it was done, wasn't it? He had already learned the truth.

It was indeed scary to learn that the Heavens had intent and could thus currently be or in the future form intelligence at any time. But was it that scary that you would create Inner Demons out of that knowledge?

Alex didn't believe he would.

"That's alright," Alex said. "Your response was an answer on its own. Haha, I won't have to despair in the future since I now know that the Heavens are intelligent too."

Alex felt slightly better and was about to stand up when Godslayer's voice stopped him.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"About what?" Alex asked. "That the Heavens have intelligence? Or might have in the future. I don't know which one of that is true currently, but neither will frighten me."

Godslayer wanted to leave the talks at that, but he found himself wanting to continue. No, he had to continue.

"If you think that misconception is truth, then the shock truly might hurt you in the future," he said, catching Alex's attention.

"Huh? What do you mean?" Alex asked. "Was I wrong?"

"Yes, you're wrong," Godslayer said. "Goddammit, I shouldn't be telling you this."

"What? Tell me!" Alex wanted to know.

He couldn't believe how he could be wrong. There was Intent around him, and it had come along with the Worldly laws. Unless his previous assumption of Yang being the answer was true. But Godslayer acted as if he had the right of it until he didn't.

"The Heavens aren't intelligent, kid," Godslayer said.

"But I can feel the Intent," Alex said. So there had to be a chance it could be intelligent in the future.

"You can, I don't doubt it," Godslayer said. "Even Immortals should be hard-pressed to sense it, but you do and I don't know why, but you have the wrong idea of what is going on."

"Then what is going on?" Alex demanded.

"The Heavens don't have Intent," Godslayer answered, his words thundering in his mind.

"The Intent is the Heavens."

Alex was stupefied.

"...what?"

Chapter 1650 Theories

The Intent was the Heavens. What did that mean?

Alex knew what that meant, or at least thought he did. But surely that couldn't be true, could it? How could that possibly be? The possibility itself felt absurd to Alex.

Intent required intelligence and that came from…

No, what he was thinking could definitely not be possible. He must've been misunderstanding once more. After all, he had made a misunderstanding last time as well.

Surely this time he had assumed something wrong in the process too. It was better to be absolutely sure he wasn't letting his mind roam into places he would rather it not go.

"What do you mean?" Alex asked Godslayer.

He was inside his Spiritual sea now and was looking at the small white crystal sphere with dark clouds of shadow aura floating around him. He had no face and thus Alex couldn't see any expression on his face.

But the sound came from the sphere nonetheless.

"I mean what I said," he said in a deep voice. "The Intent is the Heavens."

"Yeah, you said that," Alex said hurriedly. "But what do you mean by that? Surely you don't mean that the Heavens are a product of someone's Intent."

"That is exactly what I mean," Godslayer said softly. As soft as his voice was though, the confirmation rang like giant gongs in Alex's ears.

The Heavens, the thing that could be said to be the biggest thing of all the worlds was simply someone else's Intent? How was that possible?

And how strong did someone have to be to be that strong?

"Who…" Alex slowly asked. "Who does the Intent belong to?"

Or was it a 'what' again? He had thought the Intent belonged to the Heavens before, but if what they called Heavens was the intent, then who or what did that Intent belong to?

"We don't know," Godslayer said. "It's one of the great mysteries of the world."

"Mystery?" Alex asked. "So people in the other worlds, these so-called false Gods, do they not know the answer either?"

"To my knowledge, no," Godslayer said. "But my knowledge isn't as extensive as those gods. The most I know is what a regular late Divine realm cultivator would be knowledgeable about. Maybe a bit more due to my… circumstances at the time, but not a lot."

Alex was about to speak when Godslayer continued.

"But, I do not doubt that a few of these individuals would have inklings of what is going on," Godslayer said. "I, myself have a theory, although I cannot prove if it is true or not."

Alex was in shock and nearly missed what Godslayer said. After the disappearance of the True Gods, the false gods were the greatest power in the collective realms. And yet, they didn't know who created the Intent.

"Wait, could it be the True Gods?" Alex asked as soon as his thoughts reached there.

"That's… what was I getting to," Godslayer said slowly. "That is my theory too, but proving so is difficult."

"Why is that your theory? Any evidence suggesting it?" Alex asked.

"None that I can think of," Godslayer said. "Maybe I was just thinking about the gods all those years that I believed it to be the case. Mind you, this is not a rare theory."

"Everyone who can feel the Intent once they're strong enough and is aware of the existence of True Gods comes to this very theory. Only they can never prove it," Godslayer said.

"What other theories could there be?" Alex asked. "An existence that was stronger than these True Gods?"

"There are theories of existences greater than them creating this Intent, but those are rare," Godslayer said. "Rather, the major theory is that billions of different weaker Intent are coalescing for a specific goal. In this case, survival. The combined Intent of every human existence of a realm forces the world to form a barrier and protect them."

Alex was slightly stunned. "That's… that sounds plausible," he said. "Subconscious Intent for survival, huh?" He gave it some thought.

As Alex thought, Godslayer spoke once again. "There is another theory too, one that is in some ways major too, but not as strong as the first too."

Alex stopped in his thoughts and paid attention to Godslayer. "What theory?" he asked.

"The possibility that we are wrong about sensing Intent in the first place," Godslayer said.

Alex paused to give his words some thought. They made no sense. "I'm feeling Intent. I'm sure of it," he answered.

"You are feeling something, and I'm not denying there is something out there," Godslayer said. "But are you feeling Intent? Or are you feeling something that makes you think it is Intent?"

"You're going to have to elaborate," Alex said.

Godslayer grumbled for a bit and started speaking. "You put a human's hand over a flame and he screams that it burns. Then you take his other hand and put it in extremely cold ice and he still screams that it burns. Two different scenarios, same result."

"That's what I mean. Something completely different from Intent could be happening here, and we only believe it is Intent because that is the only thing we can associate this feeling with," Godslayer said. "I don't believe that to be the case, but many do."

Alex was stumped for a while. The explanation of something so extravagant was surprisingly… sound. "So these people who have this theory, do they have some idea of what instead could be happening?" he asked.

"They mostly believe that it is just a property of Qi that no one knows about. Something that you don't have to worry about as Qi does what Qi does," Godslayer said.

"Whatever the case may be, whatever made the Heavens had to be someone or something Intelligent. That is the scariest thing here. The possible existence of someone or something so far stronger than you that he could command the world and it would obey him."

Alex shuddered at the thought. That would be scary. But he quickly put the thought out of his mind.

He had to deal with the fact that there were individuals far scarier than him for most of his life already, and he had gone by fine. He would continue to do so.

If they were so strong that they could destroy the world he lived in with a simple command, then there was no point in being scared at all. Scared or not, if that death came, it would.

"Now that you've learned the truth, what do you think?" Godslayer asked.

Alex stopped there for a while, thinking to himself what he thought. The first thing he remembered was the thing that began this whole conversation.

He had felt the Intent, something that even Immortals shouldn't have been able to do. Why?

Was it because he called the Worldly laws so close to where the Heavens were? Certainly not. He had felt it before that, vaguely. The Worldly laws had just made it stronger.

If it was just a property of the Qi, then everyone else should've felt it too.

If it was the human's collective strive for survival, then everyone else should've felt it too.

If it was the True God's Intent, however… yes, that was possible. The Sun God was one of the two True Gods. If he was feeling this feeling because of him then…

"I agree with the theory about the True Gods more than the others," Alex said.

"Oh," Godslayer said. "So you believe the same theory as me then. Did you come to the conclusion on your own, or was it because I said I believed it?"

"I have my own reasoning to believe them," Alex said. "But the other theories have merit too, so I won't dismiss them immediately. It is possible that what is happening is either one of the three theories, a combination of the three theories, all of them, or something entirely different."

"Chose one for your own sake," Godslayer said. "Chose one and let your heart be calm."

"No," Alex said. "I do not need false consolation to be calm. I was scared, and might still be, but the fear I felt was irrational. Fearing this is no different than fearing that the sky would fall. If it does somehow become a problem, then fear will be a luxury."

"For now, I will fear what is right in front of me. The damn Dragon Emperor," Alex said.

Godslayer was astonished by Alex's words. "I…" he slowly spoke. "You should leave."

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. "If there is no more, I will go. I need to check on the plants," he said and quickly looked around. "I should suppress the Yang too."

He disappeared.

Godslayer remained where he stood for a long while before speaking to himself softly. "He handled it so much better than I did," he said before quickly stopping. "I did? When?"

For a while now, bits and pieces of his memories were returning to him. Not from when he was consumed by hatred and went around killing Gods. But one from much before.

Memories he didn't know he had. Memories that he thought should not exist. Since Alex had cleansed the corruption in him so long ago, he was being healed in more ways than one.

His memories were returning to him, and he didn't know if he liked that very much. Sometimes, it was so much better to just know these things without the memories.

Now, he questioned who he was before the corruption got to him. Had he always been like this, or had the corruption changed him?

If he had become different, could he ever return to a time when he was someone else?

Lost in deep thoughts, Godslayer drifted through Alex's Spiritual sea, to see if he could jog some more memories up for answers.

Chapter 1651 Small Changes

Alex first suppressed the Yang aura on his body. To his surprise, it was suppressed into his body so easily. It flowed back into his Dantian without forcing anything else, and quickly let his body feel a lot better.

Alex thought of letting it be and going to check on his plants, but he thought of something. Now that he had both the Yin and Yang Dao, could he do something with the two that he couldn't first do with either of them alone?

A person learning both the Yin and Yang Dao should provide some incredible benefits, right?

Thinking so, Alex connected with the Yang in his body and exerted his will on it. His Intent.

'Turn into Yin!'

He felt the world grow dizzy all of a sudden as a sharp pain pierced through his head. He jerked a bit where he sat and put one hand on the ground to balance himself.

The pain had come too suddenly.

Alex calmed down, no longer using the Intent, and let the pain flow away. It took some time. In the meanwhile, he checked to see what he had done.

A portion of his Qi, a rather significant portion, had turned into Yin Qi. It wasn't strong Yin Qi, just regular Yin Qi, but it was already working its way into mixing with the remaining Yang Qi in his body to bring back the balance that was lost.

The Yin bead in him stirred a little as well and started working just slightly more again, fighting back the power of the Yang source inside of his Dantian.

"Your Majesty!" a voice worriedly called to him.

Alex looked back and saw Yao Ning's grim face. It seemed she noticed that he had grown dizzy.

Yao Ning didn't voice the question in her, but Alex could read it on her face.

"I'm alright, Elder Yao," he said hoarsely. "I just did something slightly stupid in retrospect."

"You always jump into things before looking, Your Majesty," Yao Ning said almost harshly. "You need to stop doing that. You should eat a pill if you're hurt. We should return if the problem is with your cultivation base."

"No, I said I'm alright," Alex said, stopping Yao Ning from speaking further. "But thank you for worrying. You should prepare for departure. We leave in 10 minutes."

The old woman nodded and started speaking with the others.

Alex took one last glance at the old woman, feeling warm in her almost familial love, and returned to what he was doing.

'I shouldn't do that again,' he thought. Converting Yang to Yin directly inside of his body might have been a rather bad idea. Maybe converting it outside was a bad idea too, but he had to check what it would've done, and that was the safe thing.

'Sometimes I think too much before jumping, and sometimes I don't think at all,' Alex thought. 'Elder Yao is right.'

He left the matter of Yin and Yang and looked into his Soul Space next.

Unless Alex wanted to enter his Soul Space through a new space, the opening was almost always the last point of entry he had used. So, when the Soul Space opened, the Yang energy from the Sun had entered directly into the two plants that were now in front of him.

On his left was a nearly half-a-meter-tall sapling of golden plant that now glowed with the brightness of red hot iron. It was brighter than it had been before. That was a positive change, but it was nothing next to what he saw from the World Tree.

The World Tree sapling, not counting the roots, was nearly 3 meters tall now. Even with that height, it was still just a sapling, even younger in lifespan than the Nine Yang Divine Tree.

Even as young as it was, the World Tree seemed vibrant, flowing with vitality. The small piece of land Alex had given it had already been taken over by the tree, stripped of all its resources.

Alex would have to give it a much larger land, but that was for later. There was still a while before the World Tree would require something else.

The changes of the World Tree that surprised Alex had nothing to do with the tree's physical appearance, but rather what it was doing.

The tree seemed to pulse with every passing second, spreading out a soft aura that turned into Qi when it moved far enough away from it.

This was a normal phenomenon for the tree at this point as it had been doing so for years now. But the amount of Qi it was pouring out now was a raging river when before it had been nothing more than a babbling brook.

The Qi lingered around for a good while before they dissipated, no doubt turning back into energy he couldn't sense. Since it had used the Sunlight to create such, the Qi was turning back into light most likely.

Once the tree grew, the Qi it made would last for much longer. Still, Alex wondered if there was a way to make use of the escaping Qi. Something he could do to make the Qi not be wasted.

Without wasting a single second, Alex tore away a piece of land from the already small land the Yang tree was growing on, and put some random seed he could find from nearby.

They were mostly some low-level herbs, but Alex failed to see what they were. He had chosen them from his worst pile since he couldn't afford to grow anything strong enough to disturb the growth of these two plants.

Common plants would have to do for now.

He planted the seeds on that small piece of land and left it floating around the World Tree's sapling, far enough that the World Tree wouldn't consider it a food, but close enough that the Qi still touched them.

Once he did that, he made some more thorough searches to see any problem the intense sunrise had done to his Soul Space. There was certainly a stronger presence of Yang in here, but Alex couldn't tell if it was the sunlight or his newly found Dao.

He looked for the Blood God's Manual next and made sure it had remained in the far depths of his Soul Space. Away from the direct sunlight and away from harm. Once he was sure, he pulled out his senses from his Soul Space.

Alex finally opened his eyes and stood up on the plateau of the Celestial Peak. He stared down at the vast expanse of the realm he was in, the realm he was born in.

He looked at the land, the islands, the ocean, and the edges of the world in the far distance. From the land, everything in the distance looked like a haze, but from up here where the air was very thin, there was little haze to hide his sight.

It would be a long time before he got to see something like this again.

Alex took one last glance at everything and nodded to himself in satisfaction. He turned around, and looked at the elders and the remaining members of the party he had come up here with.

"Let's leave."New n0vel chapters are published on

Chapter 1652 Escape

New n0vel chapters are published on

Zhao Boqin was just a nascent soul now, unaware of many things other than a few critical information about himself.

His soul had been damaged incredibly and thus had lost a lot of himself in that process. But along the way, he had managed to slowly gain back his strength, and with that had come back a few things that were gone as well.

At first, the only thought he had was to warn the Emperor about what he had learned. Even that thought had been vague and nothing more than just a feeling.

He had roamed the Martial Ground to find a way out, but no matter where he went, he couldn't move along in that direction and was forced to find a different route.

Working purely on instinct too Zhao Boqin is nowhere. He spent many days simply roaming the large lifeless expanse of the secret realm. Days passed to weeks which passed to months.

At that time, vague memories of who he was and what he was started returning. He continued his search for an exit, but it wasn't possible with just what he had.

He continued searching and more memories returned, more of him returning along with it. Days after day he grew as a soul until one day enough returned for him to know what he had to do.

Zhao Boqin knew where he was now. Transcendent Martial Ground. He had come to the secret realm and had been killed by the King of the lowly Southern Continent. He hated that man. He wanted to see him dead.

He could remember how much that man made him hate him. Not to mention how much he hated his talent and potential. How dare he have such a thing? His own subordinate was no better.

He remembered the questions the King had asked him and wondered if he could tell others the truth now that he was dead. Unfortunately, it seemed the oath to never tell anyone what he had spoken about still held true.

He could almost feel his soul being wrapped up by some invisible power, threatening to destroy him should he break his oath.

After days more, he started coming to an understanding of what he needed to here.

He was stuck inside a secret realm, and flying around randomly was not going to help him. He needed somebody else's assistance here. Or something else.

After thinking for a bit, he knew exactly the thing he needed to find. He went around the secret realm then, searching for what he knew he had seen multiple times before but was not sure if he remembered the way.

After searching for what felt like days, he finally found it.

His dead body.

His corpse lay in a heap, hidden beneath a fold of grass that seemed to have grown around his body. The corpse was in 2 parts, cut in half. 3 if you counted his missing hand that had been cut as well.

Zhao Boqin didn't know how to feel seeing his corpse. He knew he was dead, or at least had lost his body and had come to be in peace. But seeing his body again brought back the terrible understanding of his lack of a physical body.

What was he to do about this? He wasn't certain at this point. The only thing he knew was that he couldn't let this feeling of him stop him. He needed to continue moving.

He reached for his body, but not for his storage pouch or the weapon that lay right next to him. He knew he wanted to take them, but as a soul, he couldn't take them away with him.

He hated that fact. Even then, he reached for something else.

He reached for the talisman that was given to him when he entered this place.

He found the talisman and at the same time, it seemed as if it had found him as well. The moment the talisman came in contact with what little Qi his Soul had, a wave of silver energy surrounded him.

Was it luck? Was it fate? Or was it just how the talisman was constructed to work? Zhao Boqin didn't know. All he knew was that he had accidentally done what he had wanted to do with the talisman.

He wanted out, and it was taking him out.

In the next moment, the transparent soul found himself on the shore of the island. He could see the ocean water, and hear the splashes.

He was finally outside.

He could finally do what he needed to do as a soldier of the Empire.

* * * * * * * *

Nearly 2 months passed since Alex had been traveling along with the Ebony King, going from city to city to visit all the different locations that were considered 'must visit' in the Kingdom.

The Ebony King had his own work to do there, so he had no problem giving Alex the proper tour as he wanted.

They had arrived in the Darkstone City just 2 hours earlier, and somehow Alex was surprised to find someone had arrived to meet him.

"Your Majesty!" the Crown Prince bowed ever so slightly when he met him once again.

"Prince Fangyu, I didn't expect to see you here," Alex said. He truly hadn't. He was alone in his room in the courtyard that they were assigned to when the man had arrived out of nowhere.

Alex would question how he even knew where he was, but there were too many points of leak for him to care.

"I have been waiting for your arrival to the city for a while, Your Majesty," the Crown Prince said. "As soon as I learned when you would be coming here, I left for this place too. We are to meet with my Fiance a short distance outside of the city after all."

Alex nodded slowly. The man had indeed planned that, but Alex wanted to visit her alone if possible. He could remember the pleading eyes that he could swear asked for him to come alone.

Alas, it seemed he was not going to be alone.

Chapter 1653 Before Departing

"Rest for tonight, Your Majesty," the Crown Prince said. "I'll have Luoyang let her father know that we're coming tomorrow. Family head Zhan would most certainly want to meet you."

Alex was alone after the Crown Prince left him. There were still a few hours remaining before sunset, but he decided to not bother with anything else for the night. He focused on his cultivation.

The Yin bead in his dantian had stopped working as well for the first 2 weeks after his descent from the Celestial Peak, but after 2 months it was back to doing what it did before.

Yin still formed in his body, but he wanted that. That was part of what helped his cultivation scale up so fast. In fact, with his Dao of Yang, he could now force the Yang in his body to slow down the formation of Yin or control it so that Yin formed at a faster pace.

By making the balance between the two work in his body, he could now cultivate even faster. Although controlling Yang and Yin did use up a lot of Intent, leaving him slightly dizzy if he did that throughout the day.

It was a small strain, but throughout the day it added up.

About 5 days of regular Yin buildup had happened in just half a day thanks to the Dao and Alex worked hard overnight to overcome the Yin. The speed of his cultivation couldn't be directly compared to the days he saved, but the speed was proportional and thus his cultivation speed was slightly faster.

The Yang source in his body had stumped him quite a bit after the first few days of descent. He was very much sure that after what he had experienced in the Celestial Peak, it would become better, stronger.

It even had for a day or two, until it released all the energy and returned to becoming what it was before.

Alex had felt what it released aiding him in some ways, but it had not been enough for anything. Sometimes he wondered if it could even be made better somehow.

The Yin bead was an object in his body, but the Yang source was just... a collection of Yang. It was no object at all, so that made it all the more curious for him. He started wondering more about it.

After thinking about it for a while, he had some questions to ask the next time he met Ronron's master.

The night passed rather quickly and the day came not long after. Alex left his room and went to meet his elders. Yao Ning and Liang Shufen were already up and together, sipping on some tea while discussing with each other.

"Maybe one won't hurt?" Liang Shufen asked.

"No, they would be worried," Yao Ning replied. "We can't send messages either."

"That's true," Liang Shufen said. "But he would probably want to—"

Her words cut off when she saw Alex walking toward them. "Your Majesty," said and quickly bowed.

Alex arrived where the two were seated and sat down himself. "What are you two talking about?" he asked.

"We were debating on whether or not to let you stay here for a year or two more should you wish to," Yao Ning said.

Alex was taken aback. "Now why would I do that?" he asked amusingly.

"So that you can enter the secret realm of this land," Yao Ning said. "You want to, don't you?"

"I..." Alex thought for a bit. He did want to go to the secret realm. But...

"No," he decided. "From what I have come to learn about it, it has nothing of importance to me there. I have no reason to search for treasures and even less to compare my strength against others when it's all made the same anyway. Besides, we won't have the time."

The two elders looked at him with a rather surprised expression. "Well, that does settle it," Liang Shufen sad and shrugged toward Yao Ning.

Yao Ning sighed and turned toward Alex. "You're not going to decide that you want to go there at the last minute, are you?" she asked.

"No," Alex said with a bit of a chuckle in his voice. "If I want to, I will go there in the future. Once I'm strong enough, I will have time to visit all the locations in the entire world before I leave for the Immortal realms."

The two elders gave a surprised look again. This time, however, it had nothing to do with Alex, but his mention of the Immortal realms.

"I'm reaching close to breaking through to the Saint Transformation 8th realm," Yao Ning said. "Once I break through, it will be one more realm, and then I'll be on my way to the Immortal realm too."

"For me, it's 4 more realms," Liang Shufen said. She had reached Saint Transformation's 6th realm by now. Unlike Yao Ning, she wasn't physically old and looked rather pretty too.

Yao Ning sighed. "I had given up on trying to become an Immortal a long time ago when I realized that despite my talents, I would have died of old age before I became reached the Peak of the Saint realm. I had lost all hope."

"But thanks to your arrival, I can now once again hope for that," she said. "You have my most sincere thanks for that, Your Majesty," Yao Ning said, bowing deeper than ever.

"You have my thanks as well, Your Majesty," Liang Shufen said as she bowed as well.

Alex felt somewhat taken aback by the reaction the two of them showed. He was only explaining why he didn't need to go to a secret realm. He didn't mean for them to do this.

"You are both welcome," Alex said, and the two straightened back up.

A servant brought Alex some of the tea the two women were drinking and he enjoyed it too while waiting for the Crown Prince to arrive.

The Ebony King arrived before the Crown Prince and explained how he needed to leave.

"I must have made you spend a rather long time with me," Alex told the King. "I apologize for having to make you put me over your duties."

"It is of no matter, Your Majesty. I enjoyed our travels," the Ebony King said. "But now I must speed up my visits again and return to the Capital as soon as I can. With people coming in preparation for the secret realm, I cannot spend too long outside the capital."

"I wish you good luck on your travels, King Wan," Alex said. "I'll see you again in a few months."

The King nodded goodbye and left the room.

An hour later, the Crown Prince arrived in the courtyard along with his fiancee.

"Your Majesty," Zhan Luogang gave a meek little smile and bowed in greeting. "I'm happy to see that you decided to come."

Alex stood up and gave a small bow. "I couldn't not come after you invited me so sincerely," he said. "But why are you in the city? I thought we would be meeting you in the manor."

"She had some talismans to get from the guild in the city," the Crown Prince answered in her stead. "Now then, should we depart?"

Chapter 1654 The Carriage Ride

The Darkstone city was small when compared to many of the major cities in the Ebony kingdom. With only a handful of sects or families living in the vicinity, there wasn't much need for people to come and expand this city.

One could cross from one end of the city to another in just 3 hours of walk. There were smaller settlements outside, with large fields for crops and pasture lands. Half an hour's walk away from that was the manor house of the Zhan family.

The Zhan family was a small family when compared to many of the different clans and sects, and the only reason it even had any sort of authority about it was due to the young lady of the family.

Zhan Luoyang's engagement with the Crown Prince had placed the standing of the family at a much higher place in the empire, and they were slowly improving with time as well.

Alex and the 5 others rode in the carriage, with the rest following in a carriage in front and a carriage behind. Alex sat comfortably in between his two elders while the Crown Prince sat at the center, with Zhan Luoyang to his right and Long Huogang, the Crown Prince's personal bodyguard to his left.

Alex had only met the man Long Huogang a couple of times despite meeting with the Crown prince so many times. Still, he had come to understand just how strong and smart this man was.

He was part of the Head legion like all of the individuals at the top of any command were. But this man in particular was even at the top of the Head Legion.

The Head Legion had exactly 3 Heads.

One head was in charge of everything to do with the Royal family, be it the direct blood or indirect ones. Another head on was in charge of the part of the military that involved itself in more politics than anything.

The final Head was in charge of the military that involved itself with war and the safekeeping of the Empire.

Alex had learned that information by chance through the Crown Prince during one of their many talks and knew that this man was the one in charge of the political side of things.

With the Dragon Emperor in closed cultivation, this man helped the Crown Prince with almost everything while on top of being the body guard.

Alex also suspected that the person who appeared to be the Dragon Emperor's bodyguard, a spindly old man with gray hair, was the one who was in charge of the Royal family.

As for the last one in charge of the war, he had yet to find out anything at all. There were no hints of any sort to his presence at all. He hadn't even seen anyone that could fit the criteria.

At times, Alex suspected it was the Dragon Emperor himself. But that wouldn't make much sense from a structure standpoint. The Dragon Emperor could not and should not be regarded on the same level as the other two heads.

He shook away those thoughts. Maybe he would learn in the future.

"How's your pill coming along, lady Zhan?" Alex asked. "Are you close to becoming a Level 10 alchemist?"

A few eyes moved toward Zhan Luoyang at the corner at that mention.

The woman gave almost no change in expression except maybe a glint of embarrassment, and Alex wasn't even sure if he was seeing it right.

"I'm still years away I fear," the woman said. "But I have been making steady progress. So I should have a pill prepared in the near future. After that, it's just preparing for the test."

"Oh, I would've assumed you already made some pills," Alex said, a little surprised. "Still, I wish you good luck then."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," the woman said. "And I have made some pills, but they're just not to my liking. I'm going to try and make better pills."

"She's made so many different healing pills and antidote pills, but she still argues that she won't take the test," the Crown Prince said. "I've tried talking sense into her that she's good enough, but she just doesn't want to bother."

Zhan Luogang gave a sharp look to the man beside her, before looking aside. "I'll do what I want," she said.

The Crown Prince chuckled a little and held his hand. "Okay, okay. Don't get mad," he said quickly. "Haven't I let you do what you want until now?"

Alex didn't know what to say. "Why exactly are you not taking the test, Lady Zhan?" he asked. "Are you not confident or are you planning to make a wave with your test?"

The girl immediately flushed upon hearing the question.

"She's not like that, Your Majesty," the Crown Prince said. "She doesn't look for fame or power. I don't know why she's not taking the test, but I'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with making a wave. As for confidence, she has plenty."

"It's not either," the woman quickly said. "It's just... I have something occupying my time. I am trying to make many pills in the meantime, and hopefully, by the time I am done with what is occupying most of my time, I'll have a pill I can be proud of to take my test with."

"I see," Alex said, nodding to himself as if agreeing. Truth be told, he had no idea why the woman was wasting her time. She could just take the test, be a Level 10 alchemist, and then continue what she had been doing.

But if she was stubborn enough, then he let her be. He had no reason to change her mind. He had his own problems for now.

The carriage slowed down and Alex peered outside of the window to see a flower field with servants standing to look at the carriage that passed through a large gate.

It seemed they had arrived at the Zhan family's manor house.

She seemed to fall into some thought and shook her head. "

Chapter 1655 Zhan Family Manor

The Zhan Family manor house looked no more extravagant than any regular manor house that Alex had seen. In fact, it was even more moderate in comparison to most. And yet, it held an air of nobility to it that made Alex feel like he had truly come to the house of someone big.

A few people stood where the carriage stopped. One of them was an old man with a bald head and gray mustaches. He wore a creamy white robe and held a smile on his face.

The man was Zhan Laoyin, head of the Zhan family.

The Crown Prince got off the carriage first and directed a wide smile toward the Zhan family head.

"Senior Zhan, it has been a long time," the Crown Prince spoke. "My apologies for not coming sooner."

"Your Highness, there is no need to apologize," the old man said. "I'm just happy to see you again."

"Sisters, brothers," the Crown Prince bowed to the people standing around the family head, who were mostly the family head's children or nieces and nephews. Almost every one of Zhan Laoyin's generation had died by now, so he alone was present there to accept the guests.

Alex walked down, along with the rest and the family head bowed deeply.

"Welcome, Your Majesty," Zhan Laoyin spoke. "I'm honored by your presence."

"Thank you for having me, Senior Zhan." Only after Alex's reply did the man look back up. He smiled slightly and welcomed the other two elders too. He then gave a small nod toward the Crown Prince's bodyguard, and then they were off into the room.

The insides of the Zhan manor house were no better than what it was from the outside. Decorations filled the hallways with gilded lantern holders, paintings, engravings, and whatnot. But none of them stood out.

The hall they were taken to was slightly better looking with a high ceiling made of glass that let in plenty of light. Paintings and tapestries hung around the room's walls, with a soft fire burning in the hearth to the side.

Several people sat in well-cushioned seats, with Alex and the Crown Prince being given the best seats of all. Zhan Luoyang sat close to the Crown Prince rather than her father, surprising Alex a little.

Most people in the room remained silent while the three people with authority in the room conversed with one another.

The Zhan Family head seemed to want to know about Alex and he also seemed to learn about the Crown Prince's recent activities. They talked plenty, and only occasionally would someone butt in to answer something that the family head couldn't immediately answer.

"Not counting sister Luoyang's pills, our biggest source of income has been the herbs and flowers we grow in the back garden," one of the women said when asked about the financial situation of the house.

"Right, right," the family head said. "People don't want to plant alchemy ingredients around here since most expect to buy it when it comes from the Emerald Kingdom, so there is a bit of a market here. Of course, we also sell many spirit fruits and those do quite well too."

The talks stretched for a long few hours with only the three talking. Many left and many came to see them, but there weren't many others involved in the talk.

Alex got to try the spirit fruits that the family sold and was surprised to find out how delicious they were. They were nowhere near what one could find in the Dragon's Palace, but this fruit would still be considered very much acceptable.

Alex told the family about his journey as a player and how he had come to become a King. Of course, what he said was a lie he had prepared since long ago, on he had spread every time he had to speak of his origins.

They left the hall sometime later to go visit the various fields that they had talked about.

Surprisingly, despite not being a large family, the Zhan family held a lot of open land, with most of it being the fields.

There were other houses on the property, either for the servants or for when there were too many guests. On one occasion, Alex even saw a house covered in a barrier so thick that anyone walking past would be very curious as to what it was.

"That's where I make pills," Zhan Luoyang explained. "I also practice with terrible poisons in there, so I keep it blocked off at all times to protect the others from accidentally entering or the poison leaking outside."

"Oh, you are a poison master too?" Alex asked the woman. He hadn't been aware of that, but alchemists learning about poison wasn't that uncommon. In the first place, she had been practicing making healing pills and antidote pills, so learning about poisons was quite useful for that.

Alex looked at the building again, wondering if he should have a place of his own where he could practice safely, away from potential harm to those around him.

He put away the thought for now and continued with the others to go around the house.

Seeing the various things took some time, and by the time they were done, it was already late in the afternoon.

"Your Majesty, you must be tired now," Zhan Luoyang spoke as they returned. "You will most likely want to rest. I'll show you to your quarters."

Alex nodded. "Thank you, lady Zhan," he said and left along with his two elders.

The room they were to take was in the back half of the mansion, in a fancy room worthy of a very important guest. Alex and the others got their own rooms.

The two elders were shown to their room and finally, Alex was taken to his quarters, which was a majestic room with a large bed, intricately carved closet and nightstands, and silk linen and drapes all the room.

"Thank you," Alex told the woman and remained to close the door. But Zhan Luoyang didn't leave immediately.

She waited for a bit, almost hesitating for a moment before she looked around and spoke in almost a whisper. "I'll come later past midnight once everyone has retreated to their rooms, Your Majesty," she said. "Please don't cultivate or put up formations."

She turned to leave, but Alex stopped her.

"Wait, what do you mean?" he asked.

The girl turned around. She gulped a little and spoke. "I will need something of you," she said. "That's why I brought you here to my house. I will give you time until tonight to prepare."

"For what?" Alex asked.

The girl hesitated even more. "I cannot tell you," she said. "Please just wait until tonight. You will know."

She didn't remain any longer and walked away from the room, leaving Alex almost slack-jawed. What the hell was that about?

To call it suspicious would be to call a storm windy. It was so much more than just suspicious.

'What is she trying to do? What is she trying to hide?' Alex wondered. Was she plotting his death? Did she know something about him and was trying to blackmail him in the night?

Many thoughts went through his mind, but most of all, one thought remained true.

He wanted answers.

So, he would do as she said. He would prepare for what was coming.

If it wasn't a trap, he would have nothing to worry about.

But if it was a trap, then she would realize that she had trapped a beast, one that would destroy the trap and kill whoever set up the trap.

Alex did everything he could to prepare, other than telling the elders about what was going to happen. If he did, Yao Ning would no doubt call him impulsive. And she wouldn't even be wrong.

At least, he was thinking through before jumping, even if he didn't know what he was jumping into.

The wait was the most boring part of the entire ordeal, and even that was not as bad as other times as he wondered what was going to happen the entire time.

Midnight had long since passed and the manor was as dead as it could be with everything and everyone asleep.

Then, Alex heard the faintest of tapping on his door.

'I didn't even sense anything,' he thought before slowly walking to the door and opening it.

Luoyang stood outside in a white night robe, holding onto a lantern that wouldn't be necessary for a cultivator.

"It will be better if you hide all your aura," she told Alex.

It was then that Alex realized that she was almost completely mortal to his senses. Not only that, he couldn't even sense her using his spiritual sense. There was some sort of artifact she was wearing that stopped her from being sensed easily.

He could tell there was something wrong in that location now that he saw her stand there, but had he not known, his spiritual sense would've moved past her easily.

'Interesting,' he thought and took in his cultivation base until he felt no different from a mortal as well. His Immortal Concealment technique could've done the task as well, but it wasn't as good at concealing all aura ever since he had reached the Saint realm.

It only made it difficult for others to tell his cultivation base properly.

"So, what are we doing?" Alex asked her.

The woman glanced around. "If you will follow me, Your Majesty." She started walking. "Please don't make a lot of noise."

She walked on ahead and Alex followed her. They had only made it to the back door of the manor house when Alex saw someone standing by the door, almost completely hidden in the darkness.

Alex prepared himself for a trap to be sprung at any time now.

Chapter 1656 Trust

Before the figure could even move out from the darkness, Alex could already see who it was. And that had surprised him quite a bit.

It was the Crown Prince.

'What is going on?' Alex wondered. Were the two of them working together? They had not given him any sort of hints to this.

Either the two were too good. Or…

"You better have a good explanation for what's happening, Luoyang."

The Crown Prince finally walked out and Luoyang gave a slight start in surprise. She had not known he would be there, or at least hadn't expected it.

"Fangyu!" the woman said softly, trying to keep her voice steady. "Wh-what are you doing here?"

"I should be the one asking that," the Crown Prince said. His eyes turned toward Alex. "Your Majesty, what are you doing with my fiancee this late in the night."

Alex was somewhat confused for a second. He had realized they weren't working together, or they were making him think they weren't working together. He couldn't tell which one it was.

If this was a trap by some chance, he had to act as if he had been caught in it.

"I was told to wait until after midnight and follow her when she came for me," Alex said. "I'm trying to figure out what it is about myself."

The Crown Prince turned toward Luoyang. "So, what is it about?"

Zhan Luoyang grew frustrated. This was not how this was supposed to go. Alex was supposed to come to her manor on his own, not with the Crown Prince. She had tried to force the Crown Prince to change the plans many times, but he had stubbornly decided to come here.

And now when she was this close, he was going to destroy all she had worked toward. She could only grow frustrated with that.

She drew in a deep breath and let her emotions calm down. Fear, anger, hesitation. All emotions slowly dissipated inside her and she spoke again.

"Fangyu, please return to your room. This is something I must do. I will explain it to you in the future. I promise I will, but I must do this right now." Her voice was calm and pleading, and full of love too for the man that stood before her.

The Crown Prince looked at her for a long second before shaking his head. "What have you gotten yourself into, Luoyang that you can't even tell me?" he asked. "I'm supposed to be your partner. We're going to be married in a few years. If you will hide things from me, then how am I to trust you."

"Please, you must trust me for now. I promised them I wouldn't tell anyone else," Luoyang said and immediately grimaced.

"Who is them?" the Crown Prince asked.

"I cannot tell you," the woman said.

"Why not?"

"Because I promised them."

"You made an oath?" The Crown Prince frowned at the woman. "What have you been doing Luoyang?"

"No, no oath. Just a promise," Luoyang said. "But I hold my promise dearer to me than I would an oath."

Alex was curious as well. Seeing her be so secretive made him believe she was doing something that others couldn't learn about. Something illegal or maybe even evil. But at the same time, seeing her so honorable made him think she was doing something completely different.

'She's doing something that others would consider bad, but she considers it good?' Alex thought. That made him think of another group that could be considered the same.

'Damn, is she part of the Oathbreakers?' he thought. Those were defectors of the military though, so he didn't know how she could be an Oathbreaker. Did she perhaps meet them outside and decide to be a part?

The Crown Prince thought upon his fiancee's words for a while and nodded. "I'll trust you that you aren't doing anything wrong," he said.

The woman seemed to visibly slacken from relief.

"But, you will have to prove my trust. I will go along with you and see what this is all about," he said. "If I find that you are lying, then… well, we'll see after that."

"That's not how trust works," the woman protested. "You cannot say you trust me and then immediately ask for proof."

"I do now," the Crown Prince said. "You've done a lot of things during these past few years that have made me question what you were doing. But I've trusted you this entire time. But this is too weird."

"If nothing else, then for His Majesty's safety alone, I must go with you," the Crown Prince said.

Luoyang gritted her teeth. Anger seemed to return to her voice when she spoke again. "I'll let you come along if you make an oath," she said.

"I'll make no oath until you've earned my trust again," the Crown Prince said.

"Then give me your word. Make me a promise," she said.

"Regarding what?"

"Promise me that whatever you see tonight, you will not do anything. You will not fight, not report back, or let others know what is happening," she said.

The Crown Prince looked into his fiancee's eyes for a long while before nodding. "So long as my or his Majesty's life isn't in danger, I will only see what you are going to do today. If it is, I will act on it, Luoyang. Even if it is you. I won't like it, but I will act."

"That's alright," Luoyang said. "Nobody's life is going to be in danger anyway."

She sighed in the end. "I can't believe you're making me break my promise for this. You and I are going to have a long talk once this is over."

The Crown Prince was surprised to see her somewhat return to her old self.

"Where's senior Huogang?" the woman asked.

"I told him I was going to your room," the Crown Prince said. "He shouldn't know I'm here."

"Dammit, I hope nobody heard our conversation," the woman said silently, looking around for people.

"The Crown Prince has already set up a formation of sort around us," Alex said. "It's likely a sound-blocking formation."

The Crown Prince gave a hint of surprise. "You're not supposed to be able to notice the barrier while you're on the inside of it," he said before taking out a talisman from his sleeves. "How did you know, Your Majesty?"

"I have my tricks," Alex said. He could see the many flows of green color swirling around the three of them, which would usually be impossible for anyone without the Demon Eyes to notice.

"Good enough," Zhan Luoyang said. "Follow me then."

She walked out of the house and Alex followed her with the Crown Prince behind her. They walked out into the garden and then continued walking. It was a while before Alex realized what they were doing out there.

They were making their way to Luoyang's separated house where she was said to practice with pills and poison. The two couldn't help but wonder what they were doing there.

"What is inside?" the Crown Prince asked.

"You'll see," the woman said. "Don't freak out and remember your promise."

"I'm a man of my word, Luoyang. You know me," the Crown Prince said.

"I do," Luoyang said. "But this will test the strength of your resolve and your word."

The Crown Prince frowned. "Just what is inside?" he asked.

"People that I wanted His Majesty to meet," the woman said. "One is especially didn't want you to meet. So keep your promise."

"Who is inside?" the Crown Prince nearly demanded, but the woman managed to keep her calm.

"You'll see," she said. "Now, let us go in."

Luoyang pulled out a small copper plate that looked like a medallion without a string attached to it and used it to open one of the formations to the house. A small hole appeared on the barrier and she walked in.

Alex walked in behind her, his spiritual sense enveloping the entire house in a second. As soon as he did, he sensed a small large portion of the 2nd floor being covered in formations that blocked other's senses.

That was the only place in the house with a formation hiding it.

"What is there?" the Crown Prince asked after entering.

"You'll see soon," she said. "We're close now, Your Majesty."

Alex nodded and started following her.

Was this really a trap? He sensed nobody else in the house, but that didn't mean there was no trap. He did sense a lack of a formation that blocked spatial displacement, so he could teleport out if he was in trouble.

The Crown Prince walked on ahead, quickly making his way to the 2nd floor where the formation was. When he arrived, he stopped and waited for the other two to catch up.

"Who is there?" the Crown Prince demanded.

Alex felt a single spiritual sense pass through him. Someone was there alright. Based on the strength of the spiritual sense, he wasn't very strong, but those sorts of things could be hidden.

"I know, and I tried to avoid it," Luoyang suddenly spoke. They realized the person inside was sending messages to her.

"He demanded I bring him here. I couldn't bring His Majesty here without him coming along. I had no choice," she said.

The two men looked at her, wondering what she was being told.

"Damn you!" she suddenly said. "Tell him to go if you want him to go. He won't listen to me. He says he doesn't trust me."

"Luoyang, who is inside?" the Crown Prince asked.

The barrier in front of them suddenly faded and a weary-looking youth with a hesitant face stared at the three of them.

At the sight of the young man, the Crown Prince's eyes went wide.

"Brother?"

Chapter 1657 The Prince

'Brother?' Alex thought and looked at the man in front of him.

The young man looked disheveled, weary, and very afraid of whatever was happening. His clothes were simple if not cheap, and he didn't look as though he kept proper care of himself.

He was tall, just as tall as the Crown Prince, and had a slightly thinner face with more pronounced cheekbones. His hair was mostly short and his eyes looked hollow.

Even through all that, he did look somewhat similar to the Crown Prince. He definitely was his brother.

This man, despite his current looks, was Long Huan, the 2nd Prince of the Empire.

"You should not have come here, brother," the young man said with an annoyed look.

The Crown Prince seemed as confused as Alex was. "What is going on, Luoyang? Why were you hiding my brother?"

The woman grumbled and looked toward Long Huah, looking for help.

"Sister Luoyang, just bind him with something. You created this problem, deal with it," Long Huan demanded.

"What is going on?" the Crown Prince shouted even loud. "Luoyang, explain to me."

Long Huan took a long look at his brother before asking something. "How much do you know?"

"About what?" the Crown Prince asked.

"About me, my situation," he said. New n0vel chapters are published on

"About this? I don't know. I wasn't aware you were here until I just saw you, Huan," he said and turned toward Luoyang. "Why were you acting like you were going to be caught when it's only my brother here?

The woman gave a sharp look, almost as if seeing something. She turned around toward the second prince. "I don't think he knows," she said.

"Know what?" the Crown Prince asked.

"About my situation," the second prince said, looking for hints of something.

"Neither of you two is making any sense to me right now," he said. "First of all, why are you here in the Zhan family manor? How long have you been here? I thought you were roaming the empire in secret."

The young man looked at the Crown Prince for a long time before his eyes slowly started going wide. "Dear god! You really don't know. You're not acting, are you?"

"About what?" the Crown Prince was starting to get fed up.

Alex was very curious as to what he had stumbled upon as well. The 2nd prince of the continent was hiding in the manor house of his brother's fiancee? What sort of situation was this?

From what he had been told, the young man was busy traveling the empire, and the one who had told him that was the Crown Prince. Now, it seemed that the Crown Prince himself wasn't aware of what his brother had been doing at that time.

"We don't have time for that," Luoyang spoke up. "If anyone finds out the Crown Prince and the King of the Southern Continent have gone missing from their room, it is going to create a big enough ruckus that people are going to come look in here. Let us do what we came here to do and be done with it."

The Crown Prince frowned. He wanted answers. But before he could speak, his brother spoke up.

"That's right," he said. "We can deal with him coming here later. At least it is good that he doesn't know what is going on. That would've been more trouble than I could handle."

The Crown Prince moved forth and grabbed his brother by the front of his robes. "What the hell is going on? You will explain this to me!"

The 2nd prince looked frightened for a moment, his hands reaching for his storage bag, but he stopped himself when he saw Luoyang arrive.

"Stop it!" she shouted, pulling away her fiance.

The Crown Prince saw the look of horror on his brother's face and stepped back. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to…" He turned around to look at the woman by his side. "Luoyang, I need to know what is happening. Please," the Crown Prince said.

The woman only shook her head. "I promised him to not say," she said.

The 2nd prince stared at his brother and after a bit of deliberation started speaking. "I will explain what is happening, brother. But not right now. There is something more urgent right now."

"What is so urgent?" the Crown Prince asked.

The 2nd prince ignored him and turned to look at Alex. "You must be the King of the Southern Continent," he said, slowly bowing in Alex's direction. "I never thought I would get to meet you. I should have probably gone to meet you when I first learned about you, but I was a little worried that I would be seen by my father's men at the time."

"It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Prince Huan," Alex said. "If you needed something of me, you could've come for me anytime."

The prince grimaced, thinking back to the time when he had ignored the chance. "No matter, it's better late than never," he said. "I hear you are the best when it comes to healing or making pills in general."

"I would say I have a bit of talent," Alex said. While it was a small part of the Alchemy God's Knowledge when compared to the ingredients and alchemy, he still had the medical knowledge of the Alchemy God in his mind.

That was not something one could just scoff at, despite the massive limitation he had on it.

"No need for modesty, Your Majesty," Zhan Luoyang said. "Everyone already knows you're the best. You bested His Majesty in a formal alchemy battle after all."

"You'll be surprised how much the Dragon Emperor has improved in that time," Alex said. Alex had improved as well, but he wouldn't say so.

"Please, come with me," the 2nd prince said. "I am in desperate need of your expertise on this matter."

Alex followed the prince and arrived in front of the door with a barrier on it. The 2nd prince pulled out another medallion from his hand and made a small opening in the barrier just large enough for a door.

Then, he walked in.

Chapter 1658 The Patient

Alex stood outside the door for a moment, still fully prepared for a trap. As he thought, the Crown Prince walked up next to him, stopping for a moment.

The man seemed frustrated, not getting any answers from his fiance or his brother. He looked as if he wanted to say something but thought the better of it and walked inside.

Zhan Luoyang walked up to him as well. "I'm sorry to have brought you here under such a condition. I promised the 2nd prince that I wouldn't tell anyone he was here, so I had to try and bring you here without explaining what you were to do," she said. "I couldn't even tell you that it was for a patient."

"You must've had a difficult time then," Alex said. "Let us go in as well."

The girl nodded and walked in with Alex.

The room inside was simple with a regular bed, some small furniture, and a formation keeping the room warm. Everything else that wouldn't be of need seemed to have been thrown out.

Inside, sitting on the bed was a young woman in light green robes with a green veil covering her face. She had barely any presence in the room at all. Barely any aura to her. It was as if a corpse sat on the bed, but she was clearly alive.

"Your Majesty, this is my wife, and she's been poisoned. Can you heal her?" he asked.

"Your wife?" the Crown Prince seemed surprised. "How come you—"

Luoyang grabbed the Crown Prince's hands and shook her head. "Your Majesty, I've tried to heal her for the past 2 decades and have failed at every point. You are the only hope we have."

Alex looked surprised. "For the past 2 decades?" he asked. "Then you've used the pill recipes I gave you too?"

"I asked those for her in the first place," she said. "I was never trying to make pills for the test. That is why I'm still waiting."

"Oh," Alex said, slightly confused. He turned to the prince. "If she's your wife, then why haven't you taken her to the capital? There should be many poison masters more knowledgeable in poisons to help you."

"Right, Father can help you," the Crown Prince said.

"No," the 2nd prince said resolutely. "Please see if you can heal her."

Alex sighed and nodded. He could hear the Crown Prince whispering something to his brother, but the 2nd prince walked in front of Alex. He arrived next to his wife and took her hands. Then, he started fingering her palm, tracing along it in weird patterns.

"She can't hear us," the prince said. "She can't see us either, or smell us. She can only barely feel us."

Alex felt shocked. "And this has lasted 20 years?" he asked.

"No, longer. Much longer," the 2nd prince said. "She can feel, so I can talk to her this way. She is able to talk back, however."

Alex felt glowing red Qi flow out from the woman's hand, forming shapes in the air. They weren't pristine or even that orderly, but they formed letters and Alex could read them.

"Greetings, Your Majesty!" It wrote.

"What else is wrong with her?" Alex asked, walking close to the couple.

"Most of her meridians were destroyed, but I've managed to heal most of them. There is some sort of problem with her dantian, causing her Qi flow to still be stifled for some reason. Also, she cannot use her spiritual sense for some reason," Zhan Luoyang said.

"I see," Alex said. "I'll see if I can find something else."

So it hadn't been a trap in the end. They were just hiding a patient here. There were many questions in Alex's mind as to why a prince of the Empire would hide with his ill wife in a small house like this for nearly 2 decades.

That made no sense to Alex, but those thoughts would have to come later. With a patient in front of him, his integrity as a healer demanded his attention.

Alex took the young woman's hands, who flinched for a moment before opening up, accepting him. He grabbed both hands and closed his eyes to send his Qi and senses through her body. His senses followed his Qi, going through her meridians that weren't very healthy from what he could sense.

They followed through her body, sensing multiple problems until he reached the Dantian. He prodded the Dantian from the outside and found that something was wrong with it, but had no idea what that was at all.

He tried to figure it out for a bit but could come up with no answer. He didn't sense any poison there, but the Dantian seemed to have blocked itself on its own. That made no sense to him at all. What he could tell was that her dantian was not where the problem was.

He left the dantian and moved up to check her Spiritual sea and why it was being blocked as well. He worried that it was where the poison had taken effect. As his senses moved up, he found his spiritual sense hit some sort of barrier. It was blocked for some reason.

Alex pulled back his senses and found that it was due to something that was around her head. Some sort of earring maybe? Or a jewelry she wore on her hair?

"Is she wearing something to stop outside senses?" he asked.

"Ah!" the 2nd prince cried out. "Her mask. I'm sorry, I forgot."

He quickly walked to them and threw up her veil, revealing an orange mask. The prince took away the mask, inside which was a very wrinkled face, hollow lifeless eyes, and gray-white hair.

Alex saw all that and even with all that change, she looked no different to him than she always had in his memories.

"Sister?" he questioned before crying out in surprise. "SISTER!" He immediately embraced her in a hug.

She was alive. He couldn't believe it. She was actually alive and he had found her.

He had finally found Hannah.

Chapter 1659 Talk

Joy and sorrow intertwined inside Alex, both emotions filling him. But the emotion that overwhelmed him at the moment was happiness.

Blessed happiness flowed through Alex. Happiness at the realization that Hannah wasn't dead. Happiness at the realization that he finally found her.

He could feel tears stream down his face, but that didn't make him let go of her. He hugged her tightly, almost as if afraid that she would disappear if he let go.

He was so lost in his emotions that he didn't even realize when a punch had landed on his guts, sending him flying back.

The Crown Prince caught him before he was sent any further. "Your Majesty," he called out. "Are you okay?" he asked.

His face was a mixture of shock, surprise, and confusion.

Alex wasn't hurt by the punch, just thrown away. There was strength in that punch, but it was only the strength of someone who had only just entered the Saint realms. Hannah wasn't very strong just yet.

Hannah was on her feet, her face showing some anger as well as some confusion. What are you doing? Words floated in front of her.

Long Huan was by her side, holding her and writing something into her palm. Then he turned around toward Alex. "What was that, Your Majesty?" he asked. He wasn't angry, but he didn't look happy either.

"You called her sister," Zhan Luoyang said. "Do you mean you know her?"

"She's my sister," Alex said hurriedly. "Err... Cousin. Us Players are used to calling our cousins the same as our siblings."

"Wait, you're her cousin? Actual blood?" the 2nd Prince asked, before quickly writing something into her hand. A look of surprise appeared in her wrinkled face.

Her hands moved a word appeared in front of her, glowing where it was.

Alex?

The 2nd Prince looked surprised. "She... she shouldn't know your name," he said, before quickly writing down something again. More words floated from Hannah.

Is it really you, Alex? Are you really here?

Alex swelled with happiness and saw more words float in front of Hannah.

What is your mother's name?

Alex chuckled softly. She was looking for proof. "Helen," he said and the 2nd prince wrote the answer into her palm.

Alex could visibly see the excitement and hope to fill Hannah.

I'm sorry. Did I hurt you? Are you alright? I'm sorry I punched you. Words appeared in front of her, barely legible with how much she was writing at once. She was never supposed to be writing this much at once. She wasn't supposed to be writing at all.

Alex walked up to her and grabbed her by the shoulders before making her sit again. He took her hand and held it tightly before looking toward the Crown Prince and Zhan Luoyang.

"Would you mind giving me some privacy?" he asked. "I wish to talk with my sister alone."

The Crown Prince hesitated but nodded in the end. Zhan Luoyang looked back and gave a small smile before walking through the formation and going outside.

"I will leave as—"

"No," Alex quickly said as the 2nd prince tried to walk away.

"But my brother—"

"Stay!" Alex said, putting more demand in his voice than he intended to.

The 2nd prince saw the look on Alex's face and found anger in it. He felt scared. "A-alright," the prince said and sat back down.

Alex's face no longer held any happiness at all. He had found his sister and that had brought momentary happiness, but seeing her current situation made him as angry as he had become at any other time.

"How did this happen?" Alex asked. "How did she get poisoned?"

"We were..." the man started speaking and paused. "No, it is better if you weren't aware of it. You can feign ignorance."

"I know it was your father, damn you!" Alex shouted at the man. "Why did he go after my sister?"

The 2nd prince looked shocked. "How did you know that?" he asked, suddenly getting apprehensive about it all. "Did my father send you?"

Alex saw fear in the 2nd prince's eyes and it was not because of him. "You're afraid of your own father?" Alex found it unbelievable. Surely the Dragon Emperor wouldn't kill his son.

The 2nd prince wanted to say something but lights floated in between them, forming words.

Why are you quiet? Talk to me. How did you come to this continent? I didn't even know you were playing the game. How did you recognize me? My husband called you a King. Are you really a King?

Alex ignored the 2nd prince for a second and looked toward his sister and her hands tightly. He tried to write in her hand, but he didn't know how to do it. How fast should he write? How thick did the letters have to be?

"Can you write for me?" Alex asked the 2nd prince, before belatedly remembering the word Hannah had used for him. Husband. "Brother-in-law."

The 2nd prince couldn't help but get a weird feeling hearing that word. He had never expected to hear anyone say it. He quickly nodded and sat down beside Hannah, ready to help the two communicate.

"For now, tell her I will explain to her in detail why I am here later." As soon as Alex stopped, the 2nd prince started writing his words. "For now, she should know that it is just not me here. My parents and her mother are here as well."

As soon as those words were written, small signs of shock and surprise filled her face. Those wrinkled faces refused to move much, but even with that Alex could read her expression.

Words floated out from her soon enough.

My mother? Aunt and Uncle? Are they alive?

"Yes," Alex answered, the words being written into her hand. "They're alive and doing well. I found them and they're with me in the Southern Continent. As for Uncle Rob... I'm sorry. We heard from credible sources that he passed away."

The words gave a melancholic feeling to Hannah that she couldn't show on her face. Weak lights poured out of her.

It is alright. I had already thought of everyone as being dead. This is more good news for me than you can think. I'm so happy.

Her emotions made her want to cry, but no tears came. Her hollow gray eyes did not move much.

Alex sighed and held her hands tightly, patting it a bit. He looked toward his brother-in-law and wanted more answers from him, but the situation of his sister made him want to deal with her problems first.

"We can talk later," he said. "I will try and see if I can heal her problems for now."

The 2nd prince nodded and told Hannah. Hannah nodded in the end as well.

Once Hannah was ready, Alex placed his two palms on her head and started peering into her mind, ever so slowly and cautiously. He sent his spiritual sense inside, looking for anything that was unusual.

Surprisingly, there was nothing in her mind at all. Alex was perplexed. What was going on?

He had been ready to be disappointed by not finding the poison up here as well, but what made him surprised was that she didn't even have a Spiritual Sea up there.

How the hell was that possible?

Chapter 1660 Diagnosis

Alex stepped back from his sister, taking his space to think of what was happening.

Is everything alright? Hannah asked, worried.

"Tell her it is nothing. I'm thinking," Alex said and stopped thinking about his sister as his sister for now, but as a patient.

If he wanted to cure her, he would have to first understand what the problem was exactly.

"Do you know what poison your father used on her?" Alex asked. A part of him wondered why a poison was even used on her, but he put away the thought. That wasn't important for his deduction of her situation.

"No," the Crown Prince said. "He just… used it and… and that was how she was after that."

"What sort of poison was it?" Alex asked. "Did he feed it to her, or made her smell it or…"

"He splashed a small vial of liquid," the 2nd prince answered. "I didn't see how much. I didn't have the time to focus on her at the time. I was busy defending myself."

"From your father and the Legions? How did you guys sur— no, that's not important right now. I'll get the answers later," Alex said. "I need to know more about the poison. Tell me everything you know."

"Only that it is extremely potent, and 3 men that tried to fight her when she was poisoned simply died when they were near. She survived, but I don't know why," the 2nd prince said.

Alex frowned even more. A poison that could kill others second hand wasn't good enough to kill her? Why? Was it some artifact? Talisman? Pills? Or…

She was Hannah, a blood kin of his family. Hers was a body constitution of the Celestial grade.

"The Nine Revolutions Celestial Body," Alex said softly. "That must be it."'

Senior Yang had explained to him bits of what her body constitution entailed. She had a frighteningly strong body constitution which pretty much made her Heaven's chosen.

The main attribute of an individual with the Nine Revolutions Celestial body was that the person would never need a cultivation technique and never suffer from a bottleneck or Qi deviation. Qi would flow into their body on its own, and after the person revolved their Qi throughout their body 9 times, they would break through right then and there.

It was a frighteningly strong body constitution. And Hannah had it. The body also provided some small benefits such as making one's spirit and body stronger, as well as protecting them against poison.

It was nowhere near as good as what Alex had, but surely that was why she hadn't immediately died and instead had fallen into the position she was right now.

'But why does she not have a Spiritual Sea?' Alex asked himself. As far as he knew, that was not a property of the Nine Revolutions Celestial Body. It had to be a side effect of the poison.

'A poison that damages one's Spiritual sea?' Alex thought. He had to come back to this. He started noting down the other things he currently knew about her.

She couldn't see, hear, or smell.

"Can she taste?" Alex asked the 2nd prince.

"No," Long Huan answered.

"Her sense of touch isn't as good either, I presume," Alex said.

"She used to say she felt numb during the first few years," the 2nd prince replied. "She had gotten used to those sensations by now."

Alex nodded and felt anger brewing inside him that he had to quell. His sister was blind, deaf, and mute. And she couldn't—

Alex paused. Mute?

"Wait, can she not speak?" Alex asked the 2nd prince. "I didn't sense any problems with her vocal cords."

"She can make a sound, but not speak," the 2nd prince said. "Here, let me show you."

He wrote something into Hannah's hands and Hannah softly nodded. Then, she spoke.

Alex only heard garbled words, as if someone had been tongue-tied. "I see," he said. "I had sensed her facial muscles straining to move. I didn't realize her tongue was doing the same as well."

That was another problem to add to the list.

"How well can she move?" Alex asked.

"Pretty well," the 2nd Prince said. "Her body itself is fine. It's just her head and her Qi for some reason."

Alex nodded. He had indeed sensed the Dantian closing off, leaving out only a trickle of Qi. But he hadn't sensed the poison on the dantian, so he had forgotten about it.

He thought some more and realized he had all the information he needed, and now he only needed an answer.

"First of all, let's try an antidote pill," Alex said, bringing out a normal antidote pill that couldn't harm her in the slightest. He brought it next to her.

"We've tried all sorts of pills," the 2nd prince said. "I don't know if that pill—" He paused when he saw the pill veins on the pill. His eyes went wide and he no longer said anything, letting Alex feed the pill to his sister.

Hannah ate the pill and everyone waited.

A wave of energy coursed through Hannah's body, but nothing happened. Alex sensed the energy going through everyone, even her mind, but nothing was removed. He wondered if there was no poison.

Maybe he should have tried the healing pill first.

He fed her another pill and this time there were changes.

The wrinkles on her face disappeared immediately, the hair on her head growing black unnaturally. Her eyes which were grayed out and hollow now had color and moved around.

A gasp leaked from Hannah's mouth, and her hands moved instinctively to touch her face.

"I…" she was surprised to hear her own voice. She looked up and saw Alex. "Alex!" she shouted.

Alex smiled happily. "Sister!" he said. He couldn't hide his joy.

Hannah quickly hugged him. "I can see. I can finally see again," she said. "I can finally cry again."

She was crying.

"Honey?" the 2nd prince called.

Hannah froze and turned around. Her teary eyes looked at her husband. "Honey… you… you look so tired. I'm sorry you had to take care of me all this time," she said, quickly hugging the 2nd prince as well. "You had to suffer because of me all this time."

"That's my duty," the 2nd Prince said. "Don't cry. It's alright now." He was crying himself.

Alex felt teary eyes himself. He should have just healed her from the start. His pills were good enough after a—

"N-no!" Hannah suddenly shouted. "N-n-n—"

Her words croaked in her throat, never leaving.

"Honey?"

"Sister?" Alex rushed to her.

The 2nd prince pulled her away from him to see what was wrong. "No no no no no no…" he slowly spoke. "No, you were healed. What is happening?"

Hannah's wrinkles had returned, her eyes graying again, and her hair turning white. Her face became impassive, the tear stains on her cheek no longer fitting where they were.

"Honey?" the 2nd prince cried out, but even as he did, he understood. She could no longer hear him.

Words floated out from Hannah's hands.

What is happening? I thought I was healed. Alex, Help me!

Alex steeled his face as he realized what was happening. These were the effects of the poison in Hannah's body.

It appeared he had yet to deal with the poison itself.

Chapter 1661 Missing Information

Hannah's body had accepted the healing and then rejected it. No, she had been healed. And then the poison had taken effect again. Why?

Alex frowned as he contemplated the question.

Long Huan sat Hannah on the bed, holding her hand, writing words of consolation into them.

"Ask her if she feels any changes," Alex asked quickly as he thought.

The man wrote what Alex said and an answer came back.

Not much change. Maybe I can sense touch better, but I may be wrong.

So, there was a possibility of her getting slightly better by the healing. Alex would have to remember that. But first of all, he needed to think about the poison.

This was something done by poison. Had it just been her regular body, then the healing wouldn't have made any changes. Her real body knew what she was supposed to look like and this was not it.

'But I used the antidote pill before this,' Alex thought. He had only given the healing pill after that. If there was a poison in her body, it was supposed to be gone by now.

"Has she shown such changes before?" Alex asked the 2nd prince. "When she ate a healing pill or antidote pill, I mean."

"No, none I can remember," the young man said, frowning a little. "And she had eaten many pills. Thousands by now, some multiple times."

"Then my pill couldn't have been a unique pill," Alex said softly. There was one unique part to it though. The pill veins.

They were higher-grade pills altogether. His pills had done something certainly, but then why were they reverted?

His mind kept going back to the thought that there was still poison in Hannah's body. But he had checked it all and found nothing. Not just that, he had fed her his best antidote pill and there was still nothing.

What was going on?

He started pacing back and forth in the room, trying to come up with an answer.

'No, stop thinking about just one part. Think about it all,' Alex told himself. He had gathered all the information he could have required. He needed to find something out of those.

'Her senses are mostly gone, her body can move but is no different from being paralyzed, her spiritual sea is gone, her Dantian is closed, her...' Alex's thought slowed down. Something was happening here. A connection that he was missing.

For some reason, he was sure this was not where the answer remained. He was doing something wrong here, but what? He had all the information, didn't he? What else was there?

He closed his eyes and went through everything over and over and over and over until he found no connections except that maybe her Spiritual sea had disappeared forever because of the poison. He didn't see how it was possible, but there were poisons of the mind, so maybe there had been some sort of effect on her Celestial-grade body.

She had been poisoned with something that killed 2 people just by being close to her, so it had to have been her body that had saved...

Alex frowned all of a sudden and stopped his pacing. Yes, there was something there. He had missed that part. In the thought of healing his sister, he had thrown away every other information to the back of his mind.

Now that he was going through them once again, he was seeing some inconsistencies in his thoughts. A fact didn't make sense to Alex.

"I heard you correctly, right?" Alex asked. "You said my sister was poisoned by your father?"

The 2nd prince grimaced before nodding a little. "I... I'm sorry he did that. I don't know what—"

"No, stop. I don't want to hear any apologies. We'll talk about this in length later, but for now, I need to heal her," Alex said. "Are you sure he poisoned her? You said you weren't paying attention."

"Yes, I'm sure," the 2nd prince said with a frown. "I couldn't pay a lot of attention, but it was easy for me to know who she was fighting. I love her, after all. I wouldn't leave her alone even for a moment."

Alex looked at the 2nd prince for a second before moving his eyes to his sister. "Why?" he could only ask.

"Why? Why do I love her?" the 2nd prince asked. "Well, that's..."

"No," Alex said. "Why did she fight your father? Or more importantly, why did your father see the need to use poison?"

"Because, if he didn't, he and the others would've lost, or even worse, died," the 2nd prince said.

Alex's eyes snapped back to the man. "What?" He thought he heard wrong. "She would've killed the Dragon Emperor?"

The 2nd prince nodded. "I don't know about killing. She's never killed before, but she would've won for certain," he said.

Alex took a moment to take in the information and immediately cursed himself. "Stupid!" he shouted out loud.

The 2nd prince looked surprised and wanted to say something, but Alex stopped him. "I was cursing myself. I'm stupid for thinking I had all the information without asking."

"Oh!" The 2nd prince didn't know what to say. "Okay."

"I'll need the information directly from you. Make sure you answer it correctly," Alex said.

"Sure," the 2nd prince replied. He wondered what Alex was going to ask.

Alex continued cursing himself in his mind before taking a deep breath to calm himself. "What is my sister's cultivation base?"

The 2nd prince thought for a bit. "Right now, it's weak so I can't answer," he said. "But before she had been poisoned, she was a Saint Transformation 7th realm cultivator."

Alex's eyes went wide. "Such a high cultivation base?" he asked. "When was this? Answer me if you can based on when the players arrived."

"It was over 50 years ago," the 2nd prince said, before falling into a thought. "The players had arrived for a year maybe by then? She was cultivating rapidly before, but then she slowed down for a bit. But after that, something happened causing all the players to go into a frenzy, and she changed too. She started cultivating quickly again."

"By the time we had to run away, that was half a year after the change happened," the 2nd prince said.

His sister had fought and nearly won against the Dragon Emperor with a Saint Transformation 7th realm cultivation base with only 20 months of cultivation.

Alex had a hard time wrapping his head around that thought. Could he have been as strong as her, as fast as her, if he had no bottleneck at all?

He usually didn't have a bottleneck for the cultivation itself, but he faced them through Inner Demons. He wondered if his sister had those or not.

Now was not the time for that.

"That was what I was missing this entire time," Alex said softly, but loud enough that the 2nd Prince heard it.

"You know what is wrong?" The 2nd prince looked at him with eyes that held hope.

"I don't know what is wrong, but I do have a guess," Alex said. "I know what to look for now. Can you tell her I'm going to check her body once more?"

Chapter 1662 The Problem

Alex arrived at his sister's side by the time the 2nd prince had told her what he was going to do. Then, he crouched in front of his sister and held her hands, closing his eyes to sense everything around and within his sister.

Hannah was incredibly weak right now, with her Dantian mostly closing up, with only a trickle of it coming out. So, Alex hadn't realized what her cultivation base actually was.

He knew he should have asked, but given how long ago she had been poisoned and had remained without the ability to cultivate, he felt that she had to be weak in cultivation.

At least, he figured that she had to be no stronger than a Saint Foundation realm cultivator. The punch that hurt him barely gave her any strength either, helping to add to the misinformation.

But now that he had heard what her cultivation base was, he knew what mistake he had made. He had assumed her cultivation wrong.

Adding it into the mix with everything else, painted a different picture of the puzzle. A picture so simple he couldn't believe he had missed.

Saint Condensation realm was when one first became a true cultivator by opening their Dantian.

Saint Foundation realm was when they made their Dantian stronger.

Saint Core realm was when they took their previously weak spirit into a golden core inside the Dantian to help it become stronger.

Saint Soul realm was when the spirit came out as a Nascent Soul, stronger than ever.

Saint Transformation realm was when the Soul grew and became one with the body. It was when the body and soul were connected far stronger than they ever were.

When the Soul and Body became equal at the end of the realm, that was when they were finally allowed to become Immortal.

That was the missing piece of the puzzle. His sister was in the Saint Transformation 7th realm, with a soul that was closely connected with her body to a point where a wound in her soul would manifest in the body.

At the same time, an attack on her body would manifest in her soul. It was a dangerous connection, but one that was required if one wanted to become an Immortal.

Then... where the hell was Hannah's soul?

After the Saint Soul realm, the Spiritual sea became a part of the Nascent Soul. While the Nascent soul was part of the body, the Spiritual sea manifested where it always did, in one's mind.

But when the Nascent Soul wasn't there, it couldn't manifest anywhere in the human body.

That was what Alex should have questioned the moment he sensed the missing Spiritual Sea. However, since he thought her too weak, he didn't even consider that she could have a soul, and thus assumed there was a problem with her spirit and not her Nascent Soul.

Since she had no Spiritual sea, it meant her Nascent Soul was missing from her body.

But that should be impossible, as far as Alex knew. If one's Soul wasn't in one's body, the body would fall unconscious. It wouldn't die, but it would be no different from a patient in comatose.

Hannah was showing no sign of that. And her body was showing signs of poison that wasn't present in her body.

'A reflection of the Soul.' Alex understood.

His spiritual sense reached deeper and deeper, looking for anything he might have missed along the way, but he was sure he didn't. What he was looking for had to be in the first place he had looked at and didn't bother checking again.

The Dantian.

The Dantian was closed, which Alex ignored the first time around as an effect of the poison. But now that he was looking at it, it was no effect of the poison. It was something the Dantian was doing on its own.

A person with a Nine Revolution Celestial body, where the body would automatically cultivate them, preparing them for the upcoming breakthrough. There was no way such a body would have a simple Dantian.

This Dantian knew what it had to do in the case of such dangerous poison. Hannah's body knew how to protect her, as it should.

'Her Dantian hid her soul, to protect it,' Alex thought. He was damn certain of that.

"Tell her what I'm about to do next might hurt her," Alex said. "She might not feel anything hopefully, but there is a possibility of pain."

The 2nd prince quickly wrote down what Alex wanted Hannah to know.

Alex wasn't looking and only knew Hannah was ready when the 2nd prince spoke what she had said. Knowing that his sister was ready, he sent his Spiritual sense into the tiny opening to her Dantian and pushed in.

There was some resistance at first. Dantian by itself was not something one could use their spiritual sense to prod in the first place. Pushing one's spiritual sense into a Dantian, even with the person's complete concession to their body, still proved difficult.

Alex tried but found it nearly impossible to send anything in. He would have to use more force.

He took a moment to consider but decided that he had to do it anyway. Hannah was ready for the pain, so he had to do it right now. He couldn't give her false hope of it being done and give her sudden pain.

Hannah grunted in pain as Alex began.

Alex pushed more Spiritual sense into her Dantian, more and more, until he finally made it into it.

As soon as Alex was in, he felt dread.

Poison.

Such an incredibly strong poison.

Alex saw a glowing pool of energy inside the Dantian, surrounded by a dark aura that was the poison. Where was the soul?

Prying inside a little more, Alex found Hannah's soul half dead inside the pool of Qi itself.

That was problematic.

Her soul was damaged, she was poisoned, and her body was hurt.

A spirit healing pill, an antidote pill, and a regular healing pill would be required to treat her. But how was he to make them work?

He saw only one way to make it work and that was to open up her Dantian. But that brought more complications.

Another problem Alex saw was the lack of Qi in Hannah's body. A trickle came out every time she needed to use it, but nothing went in. So, after decades, her Dantian was only half filled with Qi.

Seeing as how it was her Qi that protected her soul from the poison, he couldn't open the Dantian, as that would make her use up her Qi, and cause the poison to take effect.

'I need to close the dantian,' he thought. At least for now, he needed to close it. He would open it later when he was ready to treat her.

'How do I treat her?' Alex thought. He needed to know that firsthand. His senses lay on the poison, feeling it's terrible dread, and he steeled his heart.

"I need this," he thought and used his senses and his intent to grab onto a portion of the poison.

If he wanted to make an antidote pill, he needed to understand the poison first.

Chapter 1663 Testing the Poison

Directly handling the poison turned out to be more trouble than Alex had expected. He had known the poison was strong enough to cause his sister to fall to such a fate, but he hadn't expected to have something similar happen to him at all.

When he finally did touch the poison, albeit with his spiritual sense, he found pain flaring in his senses, as if acid itself flowed in his veins. His pain was momentarily intense, stopping only when Alex let go of it.

He frowned slightly, falling into thought to see what he could do. To see what options he had.

'I have to take out some of the poison for sure,' he said to himself. 'But it will have to be a smaller portion than before. I can't afford to bring out too much.'

His body may have been able to completely burn all of that poison, but his spiritual sense had no such ability. Even then, it as better to just take a bit of it out to check if his body could handle it.

Alex put his spiritual sense to work and started pulling on a very small portion of the poison.

He started pulling it out. The poison separated from the mass, easily being pulled apart. There was no difficulty there, so he continued pulling it out.

As he did, he felt his sister tremble and soon screams followed. He wanted to see what was going on, but the poison was already making its way out of the dantian. He couldn't stop now.

'Hold on, sister,' he thought, and continued, pulling the poison more and more. The trembling and screaming continued for a good minute before it finally stopped. Alex brought out the poison, keeping it wrapped around his spiritual sense.

He couldn't just drag it out like he could his own spiritual sense. The poison was matter and thus needed to follow a path. The only path he could take was through the meridians.

Alex very carefully pulled the poison through his sister's meridians. Last he had heard, the meridians were mostly destroyed as well and had to be healed to regrow. He couldn't afford to break it again.

He was slow and meticulous, but small grunts escaped his sister's mouth from time to time as she was pained. Alex could understand why she was in pain as well. The size of the poison, including spiritual sense was quite large and was for that reason causing her meridians to have to inflate far beyond their normal sizes.

Not to mention these were the meridians of a woman who hadn't cultivated even a bit for the past 50 years. She was getting hurt. This was bad.

Meridians met with blood vessels in many parts of the body, so Alex could move the poison into her bloodstream, in which case the danger of what he was doing would immediately increase tenfold.

He had to be even more careful now.

The poison made its way through her stomach, finding its way to a blood vessel, then went into a channel that flowed toward the feet.

Alex didn't dare send the poison toward the upper half of her body. There were too many important organs there to take that risk.

He could already start to feel the strain on his mind by now. Not only was he doing something that required a lot of focus and Intent, but he was doing it with a poison that was continuously hurting him as he pulled it down to her left thigh.

Alex made a small gesture with his fingers and a cut appeared on Hannah's thigh, one that was thin enough that he would barely notice it for the next day or two. As blood spewed out of the cut, so did a small mass of black poison that Alex had dragged out.

Without waiting, he took the poison into his hand and sent it into his body.

There were 2 tests he needed to perform.

The first test was simple. He needed to see if his body was capable of handling the poison or not.

The 2nd test was to see if a regular antidote pill of his could remove the poison from one's body. Both tests were important, and Alex had to think for a moment as to which one he wanted to do first.

Both would destroy the poison, so it most likely didn't matter which path he took. The poison that was now in his blood suddenly lost all protection around it and attacked Alex's body.

Alex's body fought back. Yang Qi came out of nowhere and destroyed the poison to his surprise. He had expected the poison to fight back a little, but it had been destroyed so easily.

Had that been his body? Or had that been just because the poison was in a small amount? Either way, it probably didn't matter.

The 2nd prince was looking at Alex and had noticed his spiritual sense no longer doing anything. "Any results?" the man asked.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Hmm?" Alex looked up. "Oh, right. I would say there is some success. I have at least figured out where the poison is and why she is being affected. But curing it is still distant."

The 2nd prince was surprised. "You found the poison?" he asked. "Sister Luoyang couldn't do that, and she tried for over a dozen years now."

"I had some luck, I suppose," Ning said. Had she not known to check the Dantian?

"So, what's happening next? Will you try to find the cure?" the 2nd prince asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "But I need to repeat what I did earlier. Please let her know that the pain won't be any less than before. In fact, it might get stronger.

The 2nd prince quickly wrote Alex's words as soon as Alex was inside again. His spiritual sense went toward the poison and started drawing out a slightly larger portion.

The pain Hannah felt this time was stronger than before. She cried and screamed again as Alex pulled the poison through her meridians and blood vessels, before pulling it out of the bloody gash on her thigh.

He took the poison into his own body and took a deep breath to force his body to not heal the poison when he let go of the protection again. Once he thought he was ready, he did so.

The poison remained in his meridians for a bit, trying to damage him, but Alex's Undying body healed all wounds even as the poison tried to hurt him. It moved through his body and slowly made its way to his Dantian.

When it entered the Dantian, that was when the prison showed its true power.

Instantly, Alex crumbled onto the floor. That had been so strong and so intense. His body was fine for the most part, but his Nascent Soul was attacked by the poison when it entered the Dantian1.

The spirit in his body was in pain. He was in pain. The wounds hadn't reflected as they would have for a Saint Transformation realm cultivator, but the spirit was still hurt, and Alex was forcing himself to keep his body from destroying it.

He needed to keep it safe.

The 2nd prince was about to speak when he saw Alex in pain, but Alex stopped him with a hand. With his other hand, he pulled out all 3 different types of pill before eating them one by one to see which would remove the poison.

The closest thing had been the antidote pill, but even it had failed despite having over 6 pill veins to it.

"I don't have anything that can heal the poison right now," Alex said, his face returning to normal.

"Huh? Are you sure?" the young man asked.

Alex nodded. "I took a small part to myself to figure out if I could heal with those pills I ate," he informed the 2nd prince. "It turns out that it doesn't. I need to make a pill from scratch."

The 2nd prince's hope dwindled a bit at those words. "Can you make a pill for it from scratch?" he asked.

"I can only say that I'll try my hardest," Alex said. There was nothing more to promise.

He sealed the poison in his body again and let it remain in a corner of his Dantian for now. He should've destroyed it, but while bringing out the poison from Hannah's Dantian, he noticed that her Dantian and meridians were taking damage by him forcefully pulling out what should've been kept inside.

He had done it two times, and he had used separate routes each time to bring it all to the thigh. As a result, 2 of her 8 possible pathways had been damaged. Considering intersections between the meridians, he wasn't going to take any risk of damaging her body.

On top of that, with his plan to shut down her dantian completely, he had to save this portion of the poison to figure out how to deal with the problem.

"Lady Luoyang, can you come inside for a moment?" Alex called out loud, and a moment later, Zhan Luoyang walked in. Her eyes moved around the three, searching for hints of what they could've done there.

"Any good news?" she asked. The Crown Prince followed behind her, curious about everything as well.

"Maybe," Ales answered the woman. "But for now, I must ask. Do you have any pills or pill recipes that can close off one's dantian?"

"Closing one's Dantian?" the woman frowned. "I don't think I have one—"

"I have a recipe for a pill like that," the Crown Prince spoke up. "But such a pill is considered more poison than healing? Is that alright?"

Alex sighed in relief. He wouldn't need to spend time creating a new pill.

"I need it to stop my sister's situation from getting worse."

Chapter 1664 Trying To Get Answers

Alex read the recipe for the poison pill that was made to shut down one's Dantian. If a person fed on this pill either forcefully or accidentally, then all openings to the Dantian would close immediately, effectively turning the person into a Mortal.

Alex closed his eyes and went through his mind to see whether the pill recipe was correct or not. After a bit of consideration, he nodded to himself. He would have to improve the recipe though.

He didn't want to feed his sister some 70% harmony pill. Considering how good her body was at rejecting poison, that sort of pill wouldn't even affect her.

"I'll make this pill later when I have the chance," Alex said. "For now, I want to hear what happened all this time. How did you two meet? How were you poisoned, everything."

He stared directly at the 2nd prince with a look that said that he would find his answers one way or another.

The 2nd prince gulped and looked toward his brother. Before he could say something, the Crown Prince spoke up. "I'm not leaving. I want to hear what is going on as well. I want to hear what secrets you're keeping from me."

"I can't tell you, brother," Long Huan said. "You're ignorant of what has happened, and it's clear to me. Remain that way and your life may be easier."

"Ignorant?" the Crown Prince glared at his younger brother. "You will tell me what is happening or I will get those answers out one way or another.":

Long Huan looked at his brother, and then at Alex, and frowned deeply. It seemed he had no way of getting out of this.

"Fine, I'll tell you," the young man said. "But you two must swear an oath to not betray me when you hear my story."

"Betray you? What are you—"

"I swear to do not betray you for what you will tell me next," Alex swore. He had no reason to not swear. He already had a good idea of what was coming.

An answer to a question that he had for such a long time now.

The Crown Prince looked at Alex in surprise. He couldn't believe how quickly Alex had sworn the oath. He looked back and saw his brother waiting for him.

"I..." the Crown Prince wasn't sure what he should do here. From the conversation before and the bits and pieces of information he had picked up today, he had come to understand that his brother had done something and had thus gone into hiding.

What he had done was still unknown to him, but whatever it was, was most certainly something bad to have him be hiding in this way.

The side of him that was the brother and the side of him that was the ruler conflicted and he didn't know what to do. Neither of the sides felt right, and neither felt wrong.

What was he to do here? What was his choice?

What was he more? A brother, or a Crown Prince?

A hand lay on his back. "You should hear what he has to say," Zhan Luoyang said. "No, you have to hear what he has to say. It's... important."

The Crown Prince looked at his fiancee in surprise. "You know what he's about to say?" he asked.

"I was in the same situation as you and wanted to tell you that he had come to meet me, but hearing his story made me change my mind. Maybe you'll do so too," Zhan Luoyang said.

The Crown Prince nodded and turned to look at his brother. "I've already promised her not to act on anything I learn in here. She already made me promise all you wanted before I came here," he said. "If you want it in oath, I'll give it to you."

The 2nd prince looked at his brother for a few seconds before shaking his head. "It's alright," he said. "I won't ask for any oaths or promises. I will trust you, brother, to do what is right here."

The Crown Prince's face grew stern and he got ready to hear it.

The 2nd prince took a deep breath and spoke.

"For the past 50 years, I have been hunted by the soldiers of our Empire, sent in secret by none other than our father."

Alex nodded slowly. He could see the pieces fall together.

"What?" the Crown Prince had been expecting something big, but not this. Hunted by their father? He believes it. "You're lying."

"I have been running for more than 50 years, brother. You will not call my struggle a lie," the 2nd prince spoke with hatred in his voice.

The Crown Prince's face grew tense. He lowered his head slightly, shrinking in front of his brother's anger. "I'm sorry," he said quickly. "But it is hard to believe. Why would a father want to hunt you?"

"Because I have what he wants," Long Huan said. "I have what he needs."

The Crown Prince gulped. "What... what do you have?" he asked.

"The Ivory sword," the 2nd prince said.

The Crown Prince's eyes narrowed for a moment confusion filling his face. "I thought you gave that sword to father. So you took it back from him?" he asked.

"Back? What do you mean?" the 2nd prince asked.

"I mean, father had it, didn't he? So you took it back?" the Crown Prince asked.

"Why would father have the Ivory sword? We were given the two swords to keep and protect," the 2nd Prince said.

The Crown Prince was very much confused now. "I'm pretty sure father had implied that he has the sword," he said. "No, he told me he had it right before he told me that you..." His voice trailed off slowly.

"Before what?" Alex asked, leaning forward to hear the answer.

"Before... before he told me that Huan had left for a journey to travel the continent," he said.

The 2nd prince chuckled. "Is that what he told you? It seems he wanted to keep you away from the conflict then," he said.

The Crown Prince felt like he was being played with. What sort of nonsense was this? The Emperor hunting down his brother, all because of a family heirloom?

This made no sense to him. Why would anyone do that?

Alex saw that the conversation was going nowhere so he decided to step in.

"Are you saying the reason you haven't come went back to the Dragon Palace for the past half a century was because your father has been hunting you?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Long Huan answered straightforwardly.

"Why?" Alex asked and stopped the 2nd prince from giving the obvious answer. "Yes, the sword, you said it already. But why? Why would he hunt you for that sword?"

Alex remembered the Crown Prince speaking about his mother on the bank of the Azure Lake, and in that talk, he had told him about the two swords.

A black sword to teleport and a white sword to cut through space.

The 2nd Prince sighed and shook his head. "I do not know why," he said. "What I can tell you is that the sword is exactly what he thinks he needs to become a very powerful Immortal."

Chapter 1665 Old Zhou

The Crown Prince tried to think of how his brother could see a problem at all in his own words. Their father was going to be a strong Immortal. What was so bad about that?

"And you didn't give him the sword?" he asked.

Long Huan shook his head. "Of course not," he said.

"Why not?" the Crown Prince asked.

"Because he's gone mad," the 2nd prince said. "I don't know if it's madness or what exactly, but he's not right anymore. I saw it in his eyes when he asked me for the sword. Have you not noticed it? Or does he hide it well now?"

"I…" the Crown Prince thought about it for a bit. "I don't get to see him that often. He's always too busy in closed cultivation. But still, that's no reason to think father had gone bad or any—"

"He hunted me down when I ran away," the 2nd prince said. "He tried to kill my wife because she fought back. Had it not been for old Zhou, she would've been dead."

"Not only that, he fought with complete disregard for everyone else's life. Everyone was just… a tool to be used. I saw him attack through a person to catch my wife blindsided."

"I don't want to think what would've happened to me, but I doubt it would be anything good. I don't believe he would kill me, but I can see him imprisoning me in the palace for life."

"It was a good thing I ran away," the 2nd prince continued. "I was doing it out of mere instincts, and I realize now that I might have done something good."

That had been what had put his life in danger in the first place, the 2nd Prince had realized that, but he didn't want to think about it.

He turned to look at his brother and found him looking shocked and aghast.

"What did you say about old Zhou?" the Crown prince asked. "He saved you?"

"Yes," the 2nd Prince answered. "He knew he was going to die in the process too, but he acted to save me. I am forever indebted to him."

"Old Zhou saved you? Are you sure about it?" the Crown Prince asked.

Now that he was thinking about it, the Crown Prince remembered that what his father had told him was that his Brother was going on a journey around the world, and Zhou Linfan was going along with him.

He had always been a part of the story that his father had formulated, but it seemed unimportant to the Crown Prince. Now that he was hearing it again, maybe it wasn't so unimportant.

"I'm sorry, who are you guys talking about?" Alex asked. He remembered nobody named Old Zhou in any conversations.

"Old Zhou, he's uhh… Zhou Linfan," the 2nd Prince said. "He used to work in the Palace."

"Zhou Linfan?" Alex thought for a moment. He had heard of that name before, hadn't he? Not just once too. He had heard about his travels with the 2nd prince which was a lie.

He had also heard about Zhou Linfan being a great cook.

"He's the missing head cook from the palace, isn't he?" Alex asked, finally remembering. He remembered not just about him from the Palace, but the Royal School of Cooking as well.

Zhou Linfan was a Level 10 cook.

"Did he die saving you?" Alex asked the 2nd prince.

The 2nd prince said nothing for a moment, looking to his brother for an answer.

"I… don't know if he's dead or not. All I knew was that he was out on a journey alongside Huan," the Crown Prince said. His thoughts were still lost on his father.

Alex started thinking about the information he had received from the Oathbreakers.

Something terrible had happened during that very battle, causing many to leave the military and join the resistance. Was it the sight of a father trying to kill a son for not giving what was his?

Was it the sight of a young girl with a very high potential being poisoned and killed? Or was it the complete disregard for human life?

Attacking someone to catch another person off guard. Using a poison whose presence alone killed two people.

Or maybe it was a collection of everything together that made them worried that they were not doing the right thing. Not everyone felt that way certainly, but it was a significant enough portion that one could be sure they were not entirely wrong in choosing to oppose the Emperor.

Alex took the opportunity to speak again. "If I remember correctly from what the Crown Prince told me a few years ago, the swords you mention are keys to the Azure Dragon's realm, right?" he asked.

The two brothers turned around and slowly nodded.

"You gave your sword to your mother and it was destroyed. What did that sword do again? Teleport?" Alex asked.

"Yes, it helped you teleport," the Crown Prince said.

"Then the White Sword that Prince Huan has should be the one that cuts space, correct?" Alex asked.

"Yes, that's the one I have," the 2nd Prince said, eyeing his brother curiously. He wondered why he would reveal such information to someone else.

"Then I am very much confused," Alex said. "There is a direct teleportation formation to the Azure Dragon's realm, is there not? So what's the need for the sword?"

A sword that cut through space would be handy for anyone wanting to go into or out of any secret realm. The advantage of such a sword was immense. Alex wondered if they saw it that way.

"It doesn't just cut through the spatial barrier around the Azure Dragon's realm, but every other secret realm as well," the 2nd Prince said. "I've given this a lot of thought, but to this day I have failed to see what exactly it is that father could want so desperately that he was ready to kill me if need be."

"I'm sure he wasn't going to kill—"

"He was, brother. I'm sure of it," the 2nd Prince said. "I don't know why, but Mother's death affected him in some way. He's not the same person he was anymore. He changed. I pray that he returns to how he was, but as it stands, I don't doubt he would kill me if it means he would become stronger."

The two brothers started talking with each other, and Alex slowly ignored them. He fell into his thought, imagining how the Dragon Emperor was ever planning to become stronger with a sword like that.

It could be that he just wanted the sword to take away, but the greater possibility was that he thought he needed to use it.

As someone with Dao of Space, he had a better understanding of Space and could create openings in the Secret realm without using any artifact to aid him. If he could do that, how could he use it to become a very strong Immortal?

Considering the Dragon Emperor's fear of death and irrelevancy in the higher realm, whatever he wanted would have to be very strong.

'Does he want to enter some sort of secret realm that houses a lot of treasure?' Alex wondered. 'One that was left behind from the time of the Immortals?'

Did something like the Demon realm back in the Western Continent exist here as well? Or was he not planning on using it on—

Alex froze and his eyes went wide as a very horrifying possibility surfaced in his mind.

Chapter 1666 Why and How

After only a few moments of thought, Alex came to the understanding that there was indeed a place in the Eastern Continent where one could find many treasures that would immediately make one's standing in the Immortal realm higher than it would be on arrival.

A place where the Dragon Emperor was likely to find Immortal artifacts, talismans, and treasures. A place that was so easily accessible, but couldn't be opened because the Dragon Emperor didn't have talent in Space and needed the sword to use.

The Azure Dragon's Soul Space.

Alex feared this was it. He could imagine the Dragon Emperor's greed and could see that with the Azure Dragon's corpse so close how desperately he would want the sword.

When someone became an Immortal, they opened a Soul Space in their body. Once opened, that space would remain there forever unless destroyed. That was what he had been told in the Central Continent by Senior Yang.

Even in death, that Soul Space would not be gone. The only way to get rid of it would be to destroy it completely. But that usually brought forth a possibility of the items inside being destroyed as well.

Sometimes they could just fall out, but most times they would just get destroyed along with the Soul Space.

'So he wants the sword to get the item inside,' Alex thought. 'But doesn't a Soul Space disappear if both the Soul and the body are destroyed? That means the Azure Dragon's corpse must still be inside his realm.'

Alex was certain this was the reason.

He couldn't let the Dragon Emperor have that sword. If he did, he would take what the Azure Dragon had, what Alex was going to trade with him, and then break through to Immortality to run away.

The more he heard the two brothers talking, the more Alex started to become absolutely certain that they were not aware of the fact that the Azure Dragon was dead.

He wondered how they would react if this news was out. He wondered how anyone would react if this news was out in the Empire.

Alex's thoughts paused for a moment as something the 2nd prince said caught his attention. "Wait, what did you say about the Southern Continent?" he asked the man.

"I was there for nearly 40 years. I only came back 20 years ago," the 2nd Prince reiterated his words.

"You were what?" Alex nearly shouted his words. "You were in the Southern Continent?"

"Yes," the 2nd Prince said.

"My sister was there too?" he asked.

"Yes," the 2nd prince said.

"While I was the King," Alex said. "And you didn't come to me? Everyone should have known about my talent in Alchemy by then."

"I did hear about you," the 2nd Prince said. "And I was thinking of coming to meet you, but I didn't want to take the chance. I told you earlier, didn't I? I would've come to you if not for fear of my father's men finding me."

Alex felt his mind go blank. His sister had been in the Southern Continent the entire time, and he hadn't known about it.

"To be honest, I also didn't trust your talent in Alchemy to be better than Father. I grew up knowing his talent was the highest of anyone living, so I found it hard to believe the rumors," the 2nd prince said. "Also, I was worried you would just hand me over to my father. I was certain his men had already met you."

Alex frowned. "They did tell me they were searching for something. Maybe it was good they didn't find you," he said. "If only you had come to meet me."

He sighed but said nothing more. What was done was done now. The 2nd prince didn't know about him and he was right to keep himself hidden.

"So, why did you come back?" Alex asked. "Actually, I don't think I've asked this, but how did you come back?"

"I... I came back to save my wife," he said. "I as planning to do whatever I could to save her. Even going so far as to return to my Father and trade the sword in exchange for healing her."

"But you didn't," Alex said. "Why?"

"I was still hesitant at first, so I met up with sister Luoyang and explained the situation. She told me she would help me and did. I was here for no more than 2 years, however, when the news came that you had defeated my Father in an alchemy match."

"After that, she convinced me not to return and instead wait for you instead," the 2nd prince said. "She's been working hard all this time, trying to heal Hannah as much as she could while keeping it a secret that we're here."

Alex turned to Zhan Luoyang and bowed deeply. "Thank you for everything you've done for my sister. Please give me a chance to repay this favor in the future."

"I did no favor, Your Majesty," the woman said. "I just helped my soon-to-be family."

Alex smiled in return. He planned on giving her everything he gave the Dragon Emperor, but later.

Alex turned toward the 2nd prince. "You've done an incredible job protecting my sister. I cannot imagine how stressful the past few decades must have been for you," he said and bowed deeply. "Thank you."

"I just did what I had to," the 2nd prince said.

"Yes, you did," Alex said. "Now then, you told us why you came back, but not how. As far as I know, the eastern side of the Southern Continent was teeming with soldiers of the Scale Legions. How did you get past them? Also, how did you get to the Southern Continent in the first place? The travel there is treacherous."

"We didn't fly there and back, if that's what you mean," the 2nd Prince said. "We took a shortcut."

"A... shortcut?" the Crown Prince asked. "What did you do? Teleport? You didn't access the Teleportation formation, did you?"

"No, we didn't teleport," the 2nd prince said. "Or wait, maybe you could call it teleportation, I don't know. We came through a very rare place that takes you from one location to another."

"So... teleportation," the Crown Prince said.

"No, not teleportation. This one takes time," the 2nd prince said. "Instead of traveling in this world, you go through another world of bright purple and white, and you appear on the other side."

Alex gasped in surprise at description. "You went through a Voidgate?" he asked the man, amazement clear in his voice.

The 2nd prince gave a surprised look. "I did. How did you know? I hadn't known what the place was called without Old Zhou telling me what it was."

"I know about Voidgates," Alex said. "But I've never seen one. If you've been through one and that took you to the Southern Continent, then... there are two Voidgate in this world that connects the two places."

The 2nd prince nodded slowly.

"Where is it?" Alex asked.

"In the Southern Continent, it's somewhere southwest beyond the mainland. I can give you an approximate map of the place if you give me some time."

"And in the Eastern Continent?" Alex asked.

"Here, the Voidgate is inside the secret realm to the south," the 2nd prince said. "Inside the Harmonious Balance Haven."

Chapter 1667 High Level Poison

"We should leave for now," Zhan Luoyang suggested after a bit more talking. "If people realize we're missing, they might come looking for us."

Alex nodded. "I'll go back too. I need to take the time to study this poison too," he said, feeling the poison that he had kept in his body. It was a good thing that it hadn't been destroyed just yet.

"Please tell my sister that I will come here tomorrow during the day," Alex said. "With a simple mention of me needing to make some pills, I shouldn't cause much attention toward this place."

"That will work," Zhan Luoyang said. "I will take you back then."

Alex nodded. He walked up to Hannah and gave her one last hug before walking away. The Crown Prince still seemed completely taken aback by everything he had heard that day.

They stealthily made it back to their rooms. Before leaving him there, however, Zhan Luoyang remained to say something.

"About the poison, Your Majesty," the woman spoke. "I haven't had the time to figure out what it is, but I have a guess, and I suggest that you be very careful."

Alex nodded slowly. He knew the poison was dangerous. That need not be told. "You know what it is?" Alex asked the woman.

"A guess," Zhan Luoyang corrected him. "Given how difficult of a time we're having because of the poison, I guessed that it was not something normal. I had suspected it being a high-level poison, and now as each day passes by, I become more and more certain that the poison we're dealing with is a Level 10 poison."

Alex's eyes narrowed a bit. "Level 10?" he asked, his mind already searching for the information he knew he knew. A look of understanding flashed through his face.

"Yes," he said slowly. "That is possible."

He remembered the tale of the Level 9 Poison master making a poison so potent that it had killed him the moment he created it. The Azure Dragon himself had to come and deal with the poison and take it away.

Could he have given it to the Dragon Emperor then? And he used it on his sister?

The possibility was there.

Even if that was not the case, the possibility of it still being a Level 9 or a Level 10 poison remained, and that made it quite deadly. Alex had to be extra careful about it. He had to be careful how he approached the entire situation.

After Alex voiced his understanding of the matter, Zhan Luoyang left him and went back to her room.

Alex began preparing the pill for his sister to close her Dantian. That was the most important thing he had to do for now. Even more so than trying to come up with a way to heal her poison.

He knew healing would take some time, so it was necessary to first deal with the symptoms before going for the disease.

Alex had the ingredients on hand, many of which he had used before, so improving the recipe came rather easily. With the ease also came a free time where his mind wandered.

He had still not gotten over the surprise that his sister was here. Had he known that, he would've tried his damn hardest to be here as soon as he could. Hannah was still alive. His aunt would be so happy to learn that. Not just her, but his father and mother would be happy too.

She was poisoned, sure, but he was going to fix it. Wasn't he? Could he fix it if it was a Level 10 poison?

Understanding a poison was mostly easy if you knew what the ingredients were beforehand. If not, then it became slightly more difficult. Based on the effects of the poison, one could also determine what the poison did and how one could fight it back.

If the poison gave a headache, Alex would have to make a pill that stopped the headaches.

If the poison made one's arm numb, Alex would have to make a pill that made the arms's senses overwork to feel it.

Explaining it that way was making light of how difficult it was to make antidotes, but that was the gist of the matter.

To get rid of a poison, one needed to fight back the things that it did, and then destroy it from the system.

'I wonder if the Saint Nullifying pill will do anything,' Alex wondered. It nullified the effects of a pill on a body. Surely a poison couldn't be that different. He would have to see it tomorrow. For now, he needed to think about the poison.

It took merely 2 hours for Alex to come up with a recipe for the pill so that it could create Pill Clouds. After that, he was free to test the poison.

Alex readied himself after a bit and let go of the defense he had put around the poison. As soon as the poison disappeared, it started attacking his body.

Alex held back on his body's ability to destroy the poison and suffered because of it. He could feel the burning pain in his veins like fire walking through it. He could sense his meridians being wounded as the poison made its way along.

But… that was it. Nothing else happened to him at all.

'It has a corrosive nature to it,' Alex thought to himself. 'Corrosive, and freely moving inside the meridian.'

But aside from that, the poison did nothing to the body. New n0vel chapters are published on

'It is a poison that attacks the spirit then,' Alex thought. This part he was a little more fearful about. The prospect of having to reveal his spirit to the poison did not bode well with him.

'Just a bit,' Alex thought and tore off a piece of the poison before sending it into his Dantian. The moment he allowed that, the poison immediately found its way to his Dantian on its own. Alex didn't even have to do anything.

'That's another thing,' Alex thought, memorizing that part of the poison as well.

Then, the poison reached his Dantian, where he left it to do its thing. He wanted to see what the poison would do.

Before the poison could do something, it completely fell apart and died all of a sudden. Alex didn't even have the time to stop that from happening.

"Dammit!" he thought slightly. He had controlled his body from dealing with the poison, and that had been hard. Now, it seemed he was going to have to stop the Yin Qi to do so as well.

The high-level Yin Qi hadn't destroyed the poison but rather made it impotent. Either way, Alex needed to deal with his Yin Qi before bringing the poison.

He protected the ball of poison in his body and started cultivating with his Yang Qi. After half an hour of cultivation, he sensed no more Yin Qi in his body and brought another small ball of poison into his Dantian.

This time around, the poison was more free than last time and thus acted immediately, latching onto his spirit that was inside the Dantian.

Alex finally felt the effects of the poison in full force.

It was maddening.

Chapter 1668 Story

From what Alex realized, the poison's main purpose was one of two things.

It either entered one's Dantian to destroy the Nascent Soul, or it simply sought out the Nascent Soul around the body to destroy it. However it did it, it went after the Nascent soul and destroyed it.

Alex could feel his Soul dying to the presence of the poison and instinctively forced his body to protect itself. The Yang in his body surged the moment they were allowed again and the poison was immediately burned up.

Alex was left breathless. He took in deep breaths, calming the feeling of momentary dread he had felt.

That was a very dangerous poison. To him it was fine, but to anyone else, their death would be instant.

"Level 10... It might just be," he thought.

Hannah had gotten herself in rather dangerous trouble.

Morning came just a few hours later, and Alex relayed what happened the last night to his two elders.

He had expected the two to get angry, but instead, they just sighed. "We can't stop you from doing something reckless, can we?" Yao Ning asked with a resigned look.

Liang Shufen simply gave a rueful smile. "Congratulations on finding your cousin, Your Majesty. Lady Liz will be happy to learn of this."

Alex nodded. She would.

He went to meet with the family head of the Zhan family for a bit in the gardens where the Crown Prince and Zhan Luoyang came to meet with him. They talked briefly and Alex managed to slip in the fact that he needed to make some pill.

Zhan Luoyang took the opportunity to ask him to visit her mansion. And so, around 10 in the morning, Alex was back with his sister.

He spoke with her for a moment before turning toward Zhan Luoyang. "Where should I make the pill? Right here?" he asked.

"Oh," the woman was taken aback. "You weren't making an excuse to come here?"

"I was, but I also need to make 3 pills," Alex said.

"I have an alchemy room with everything you could need. Please come with me," the lady said.

"Actually, if it's alright, I will do it right here. I need Sister to be close by anyway," Alex said.

"But this room has no formations to aid you," the woman said. "It will take time to make some for this room."

"Thank you, but that's alright," Alex said. "I don't really use formations anyway."

Memory floated out of his Soul Space and hovered on top of the floor as Alex began to take out the ingredients he had prepared already.

A fire appeared on its own below the cauldron, heating up Memory as Alex got ready to start making the pill.

Zhan Luoyang looked surprised and sat down to the side, not wanting to leave Alex at all. She wanted to see him make a pill.

The 2nd prince sat to the side as well.

"Would you prefer if I call you something other than brother-in-law? It's a bit of a mouthful," Alex said as the cauldron reached the proper temperature.

"Sorry?" Long Huan was so focused on the cauldron that he nearly missed the question. "Oh, uhh... you can just call me Huan if you want, Your Majesty."

"Brother Huan it is then," Alex said. "Please call me Alex. I'm junior to you in both age and relation."

"Alright," the young man said. "I'll call you Alex while we're alone then. I will still have to call you Your Majesty if we're in the presence of others."

Alex nodded slowly and put the first ingredient in.

"So, please tell me how you and my sister met," Alex asked. "I want to hear all about it. Honestly, had I been told that she was married, or even remembered about it somehow, I wouldn't have had to go around on dates."

"You went on dates to find your sister?" Long Huan asked.

"It sounds stupid, but it was the best I could think of at the time," Alex said. "Please don't mind that. Continue."

"I... I met her by chance," Long Huan said. "I remember I had gone to a shop to buy something, a pill I think? That was when I met her first. She thought I was cutting in line without realizing who I was and spoke some harsh words to me. It was so bad that I could have never forgotten about it."

He smiled to himself.

"Sure I was hiding my identity, but anyone with an eye would know not to mess with me," Long Huan said with a chuckle. "I had so many guards with me there after all. Anyway, she won and left the shop before me."

"I had assumed that would be the last time I met her, but then I met her again a few days later in another shop. She recognized me first actually this time around, and said something about how I had learned and wasn't cutting through lines. If I remember correctly, she said something about 'them' fixing me. I never realized who she was referring to."

'Probably the game developers,' Alex thought. That made sense.

"Your sister truly baffled me. I had met many women by now on formal dates or occasions, most belonging to high-level clans and families. But none were as different as your sister. She truly left an impression on you whenever she met you."

"Once again I thought that would have been the last time, but then I met her again about a week later. It was a coincidence certainly, but I noticed her back then because it was her. I even went to talk to her, get to know her a little."

"I still remember the shock I felt when I reached her back then," Long Huan said.

Alex put another ingredient into the cauldron and stirred it around, half his attention on the story Long Huan was telling.

"She had only been a Common realm cultivator not even 2 weeks ago, and somehow she had managed to enter the True realm."

"The shock was quite hard to handle, so I had some men tail her. When they reported to me that she was breaking through day after day, sometimes even twice a day, I had to meet with her and see what was happening."

"I hadn't realized that there were more such as her at the time, but by the time I learned that she was different, we had already been together. In fact, I was surprised when she asked that I marry her just 2 weeks after we properly met each other."

"I didn't want to refuse, so I accepted. She was beautiful enough, and her speed with cultivation was beyond frightening. But most of all, I liked spending time with her. She wasn't so stiff like so many other girls I met who only saw a prince in me. I liked that about her."

Long Huan smiled a little remembering it all. "I remember her constantly taunting me to continue cultivating or she would leave me behind in the dust. I was so thankful when she finally saw that she needed to slow down."

"Still, despite her slowing down, I knew at that moment that she would always be ahead of me, and I would have no chance of ever reaching her at all."

Chapter 1669 Truth

"How did you come to run away, brother Huan?" Alex asked the 2nd prince. "I'm surprised you were able to get away from your father when you were right there in the palace. He let you go without taking back the sword?"

"I… I didn't have the sword with me at that point," the 2nd prince answered Alex. He stared as Alex put more ingredients into the cauldron, but his gaze was distant. He was remembering the past.

"My mother's death was kept from me for months. I wasn't even aware she was meaning to break through," the 2nd prince said. "So when I was told about what had happened, I left for the palace immediately. I would only come to later realize that I had left my storage bag with Hannah, the one that held the sword."

Alex could see the story coming together. The 2nd prince went back to the palace to mourn for his mother's death and after a while was told to bring the sword. He decided not to and ran away, taking Hannah along with him.

He let the 2nd prince tell the story himself and focused on the pill for the moment. It was soon going to be time to either form it or put the mushroom in, depending on the level of energy inside.

"And I just knew I couldn't help him," the 2nd prince said.

Alex looked back at the prince once he was sure he hadn't made any mistake with the pill. "Are you hiding something?" he asked the 2nd prince.

"What do you mean?" the 2nd prince asked, his expression showing an alarmed look. New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex was sure that he was hiding something and didn't want to say it. Alex wondered what it could be. After thinking for a moment, he decided to do something that was either incredibly genius or incredibly stupid.

To get their trust completely, he decided to tell them what he knew.

He spread his spiritual sense to see if anyone was listening in the room. Once he was certain they were the only ones, he spoke.

"I'm about to tell you something that I fear only the Dragon Emperor and a few others know about. I'm not sure if even the Crown Prince knows of this," Alex said.

Both Zhan Luoyang and Long Huan looked curious. "What is it?" the 2nd prince asked.

"The Azure Dragon is dead," Alex said, letting the weight of the words settle on the two.

Slowly, Zhan Luoyang's eyes went wide in surprise and fear. She was shocked and wanted to question him. However, Alex looked at the 2nd prince and saw his face open wide in surprise.

"You knew about this, didn't you?" Alex asked the 2nd prince.

Long Huan immediately closed his mouth and gulped. "How… how did you know?" he asked.

"It's true?" Zhan Luoyang couldn't believe it.

"It is," Alex said. "I knew before I even came to the Eastern Continent. I cannot tell you how exactly though. That's my secret for now. The question is how do you know?"

Storm gathered in the room, causing the two others from Alex to crawl back a bit. They did not want to get hit by those strikes.

"So, are you going to answer me?" Alex asked and a lightning strike fell on the cauldron. The 2nd prince flinched in surprise, having not been aware that this was going to happen.

Zhan Luoyang on the other hand had been ready for this.

The lightning strike's glow vanished and the 2nd prince saw Alex staring at him, waiting for an answer.

"I… I didn't know exactly that was the case," the 2nd prince said. "I knew for certain much later. What had tipped me off was that on the last day I met with Father, the time when he asked me for the sword, he started talking about the Azure Dragon in the past tense."

"I was confused at first and thought it was because he was drunk. He had let himself get drunk due to his sadness and in that moment he revealed a bit more than he intended."

"Talking about how mother's death had been unavoidable and how many deaths had already paved his path to Immortality. He is going mad, and I don't know why," the 2nd prince sounded sad.

Another lightning strike struck the cauldron.

Zhan Luoyang gulped in fear. "I thought you told me everything before," she said to the 2nd prince.

"I couldn't tell you this. For your own sake," he said. 'I couldn't even tell brother this."

Alex slowly nodded. "So you told your father you were going to get your sword and ran away," he said.

"No, not exactly," the 2nd prince said. "I really did go back to get the sword. It was after I talked with Hannah about what had happened that she told to me wait and contemplate on what I should do."

"Father sent legionnaires after me just because I was taking some time. That was when I truly knew I had to stop him from getting the sword. He was getting mad, I swear."

Alex nodded slowly. He started considering if he should reveal more information and use that to pry out other information he could be hiding. A question came to his mind at the time.

"What reason could the Dragon Emperor have to take his army to the Azure Dragon's realm?" Alex asked the two.

"What do you mean?" the 2nd prince asked. "It was for mother's defense, while she broke through."

"Defense from what?" Alex asked.

"I mean… anything?" the 2nd prince said. "I don't know what goes on during breaking through to Immortality, so they were taking precautions."

"And that just so happens to be the same day the Azure Dragon died?" Alex asked.

"What?" Zhan Luoyang asked.

"What are you implying, Alex?" the 2nd prince asked with a frown. "Are you saying that my Father was responsible for the Azure Dragon's death?"

Another lightning bolt fell on the cauldron.

Alex seemed to sit straighter all of a sudden as his serious gaze fell on the 2nd prince. "That is exactly what I'm implying," he said.

"This is nonsense," the 2nd prince cried out. "My father wouldn't…" He trailed off. As hard as it was, he could see the possibilities.

"That can't be true," Zhan Luoyang said. "Even if it was, His Majesty the Azure Dragon is so much stronger than any Saint cultivator. He would easily win against anyone."

"The Azure Dragon couldn't fight back due to the constraints of this world. If he tried to, lightning would fall from the sky, destroying him," Alex said, turning his head toward Long Huan. "Lightning that one could easily mistake for someone else breaking through to the Immortal realm."

The shock seemed to fill the 2nd prince's eyes. "That's... that can't be."

Another lightning bolt fell into the cauldron. That made it 4.

"That is indeed the case," Alex said. 'At least I believe it to be. You're free to ignore my beliefs."

That would be hard for them certainly.

Alex prepared for another lightning bolt to drop and blocked it. That was 5.

The storm grew thicker and the lightning bolt stronger. There were 4 more to go until the pill was finally made.

Chapter 1670 ¬†Dantian Closing Pill

Alex concentrated on the pill now with the lightning bolt getting stronger. Zhan Luoyang was paying great attention to the matter and did her best to understand how one dealt with a pill cloud.

She could sense the strength of the lightning bolt increasing. The next one that fell was strong enough to kill anyone who was not a Saint Soul realm cultivator. That scared her a lot.

How much stronger was it going to get? Not to mention... Alex's cultivation base wasn't even in the Saint Soul 5th realm yet. Was he going to be fine?

Another lightning bolt fell and the woman could tell that it was too strong for Alex to handle it. But... she also knew Alex was stronger than he appeared to be. And he had to know what he was doing, so she didn't say anything.

Interfering with the pill might backfire on her anyway, even if she intended to help.

The lightning bolt slammed on the cauldron, and Alex appeared to be perfectly fine. He wasn't even worried and simply stared at the clouds for the next one.

With only two more lightning bolts remaining, Zhan Luoyang wondered how much more he could do it. She had heard rumors of the Dragon Emperor being able to call forth 9 lightning bolts. Alex had already handled 7 of them. Could he do the last 2 as well?

The 8th lightning bolt carried with it a strength that could kill anyone not in the Saint Transformation realm, and Alex handled it quite simply as well.

'That was 8 lightning bolts,' she thought. Another one and Alex would have...

She froze at the sight of Alex suddenly bleeding. "Your Majesty?" she called out, afraid. Then, the blood disappeared, vanishing into the cauldron. She couldn't understand what he was doing.

At the same time, she sensed multiple aura appearing out from him. Most she couldn't understand, but she could tell he was using Dao.

'So many!' she thought as her eyes widened. She could not believe how many Daos he had employed at once.

She could sense some sort of Fire Dao, the specificity of which was lost to her. There was also... was that Dao of Gold? She had a hard time telling apart the other dao.

Aside from Water and Fire, her senses-She gasped. Water Dao was being employed too. She couldn't tell how he was using so many. How had he learned so many different Dao even?

Alex could tell his Qi alone was not strong enough for the lightning bolt that was going to come. His Qi was overall of equivalent strength to that of a Saint Transformation 4th realm.

When it came to offense, there were more skills he could use to improve his powers, but as it stood, he couldn't make use of his body cultivation or his Sword aura. All he could make use of was Blood aura and his Dao.

He didn't use his Dao needlessly either, instead adding the different aura together into a technique he already owned.

The All Swirling Elemental Shield.

All 7 elements came together to form the shield. All but the Wood Qi came from his use of Dao, which left him with a terrible headache, but he withstood it for the moment. Using 6 Daos was perhaps not the right idea.

Thanks to it, however, he was sure the final pill would be made.

The lightning bolt fell from the sky, striking the blood aura that covered the pill, destroying it instantly. His Blood Aura was strong, but it just wasn't at the level that the lightning bolt that fell was.

Had he just used that, the pill would have been destroyed.

The lightning bolt's momentum was still blocked slightly, giving some levity to the next shield he had laid beneath it. His actual technique.

The lightning bolt struck the swirling shield, and Alex felt the force of it. He had to most definitely be in the high Saint Transformation 5th realm or early Saint Transformation 6th realm to stop the lightning bolt.

Fortunately, his preparations were just about enough.

The lightning bolt dissipated and his shield vanished. The cloud vanished from the room, leaving silence behind with the only other sound being the people breathing.

Alex took out the pill and looked at it with a smile on his face. 9 different patterns like forking lightning remained on the pill now that it was done.

He had finally managed to make a 9-veined Pill as well.

"Incredible," Long Huan said from the side. "I've never seen anything like this before."

"Neither have I," Zhan Luoyang said. "I... I never realized you were this strong, Your Majesty. You are... stronger than even me."

She couldn't believe the words coming out of her mouth. She was in the Saint Transformation realm, the strongest in the room beside Hannah, and she considered herself weaker than Alex.

"Let's have sister eat this pill immediately," Alex said. "Lady Luoyang, can you leave and let the others know that nothing bad happened here? They might not be aware and might be scared."

"You're correct," the woman said standing up. "I'll return in a bit." She left.

Alex took the pill over to Hannah and stopped for a moment to consider what was going to happen next. "You will need to explain to her what is going on with her and what I'm about to do next."

"Okay," Long Huan said and went over next to Hannah, taking her hand in his and getting ready to write.

"The poison in her is one that strongly attacks one's soul," Alex said. "It doesn't just affect it, it destroys the soul merely by coming into contact with it."

"It can be contained somewhat, but she won't be able to do it. Currently, the poison is inside her Dantian, the same place where her soul is. Her Qi is protecting her soul, and I need to close her Dantian so no more Qi comes out of her anymore."

"Doing so... will make her state worse," Alex said.

"Worse?" the 2nd prince asked.

"She'll practically become a mortal with no access to Qi. As such, she will become weaker and will need to be taken care of more than regularly. We will also need to start feeding her more regularly."

"I think the worst part will be that she will not be able to communicate with us using Qi any longer. It might be better to get her a pen and paper, or teach her sign language."

"Umm... okay," the 2nd prince said, quickly writing down the words into Hannah's hands. Hannah showed no signs of having understood what was said to her for a moment, but then words flew out of her.

Will I get healed after that?

Alex nodded. "I won't stop until you do, sister,"

Hannah put her hands forth for the pill and Alex put it on her hands. Without hesitation, she ate the pill and swallowed it with some difficulty.

She waited for a moment and suddenly felt life escape from her. She sagged where she sat, feeling as if all Qi in her body had left at once.

Her Dantian closed up and she could imagine darkness growing all around her. This was the worst state she had ever been in.

Chapter 1671 ¬†Best Course of Action

Alex watched Hannah grow weaker as she lost even the last of her Qi. She looked considerably older all of a sudden, even more so in her body than her face. Long Huan grabbed her hand and wrote something into it.

Hannah instinctively moved her hand but stopped. No Qi could come out, so she couldn't talk to him at all. She gestured that she was fine, but it barely came across. At least there was one-way communication.

That was better than nothing.

Alex was about to move toward the next pill he had to make when he stopped and considered something. Should he give her a healing pill?

His instinct told him to do it. Eating a healing pill had healed Hannah the other day, even if it was just for a few seconds. She would most likely want that from time to time, but there was another problem with that.

Since it was a healing pill, it could in some ways deal with the poison they had just fed her. The same was the problem with the Nullifying pill, although that was only meant to work for very recent pills.

No, he could not feed her any good pill now. Hannah had to remain that way until he could heal her. "I will have to heal her fast," he spoke in a soft mutter. "You can heal her?" Zhan Luoyang asked. "Do you have any idea how to do that?"

Alex thought for a moment and shook his head. "Not as of yet," he said. "I don't even know if I can make a pill that could help her. If I do, the pill would have to do multiple things at once."

"But a pill with that broad properties won't be very good at treating a poison when compared to a pill created entirely for the purpose of fighting the poison alone," Zhan Luoyang said.

Alex nodded. "I know," he said. "That is my problem in the first place. I do not know more about the poison. I have a vague idea of how it works, but not much. I'm only a Level 7 poison master at best, so I will have to make a pill that deals with just the poison somehow. Make it so potent that it will deal with any poison that harms one's soul."

"Hmm," Zhan Luoyang gave the words some thought. "But then how will you make it work? You mentioned that she can't have her Dantian open, but both the poison and her hurt soul are inside her Dantian. You can't eat two pills at once, but you need the pill to open her dantian too."

Alex sighed. "You're right, there's that too," he said.

"What?" Long Huan seemed surprised. "You fed her a pill to block her Dantian, knowing it would be a problem?" He seemed somewhat angry at the possible implication.

"Yes," Alex said. "But that had to be done. If I knew how to heal her from the start, this wouldn't be necessary. But as it stands, I have to get rid of any possibilities that she could harm herself accidentally while we try to make the antidote."

Zhan Luoyang nodded. "He's correct," she told Long Huan. "Don't worry, that was the right thing to do. But that still doesn't help with the issue that is created. If you cannot open up her Dantian, how are you going to heal her?"

"I've thought about it for a while now," Alex said. "And I think the best possible course of action we can do here is not for me to make a pill."

"What?" Long Huan asked.

"I would very much like to try and make a pill to help her, but I don't know if I'm capable of that. I do not want to be overconfident just because I'm good at making pills. I know my faults too, and I know I'm not very good when it comes to making new pills, specially ones that are meant to be specific. At least, I can't do it without some external aid."

It had been nearly 18 years since Alex had tried to make the Wood Spiritual Root Enhancing pill and was still nowhere close to being able to make it. Unlike the Water and Earth pills, he was working with nothing to jump off of and thus had difficulties progressing far.

"I don't want to spend years trying to make an antidote pill for Sister when I might have other, possibly better, ways to treat her," Alex said.

"What? There are better ways?" Long Huan asked. "What ways?"

"Instead of trying to make a new healing pill," Alex spoke. "We just ask someone to give us one."

"Ask someone? Who?" Zhan Luoyang asked.

"The Immortals," Alex said. "We can ask the Immortals to lend us a pill if they have one."

"Immortals?" Zhan Luoyang gasped. "You don't mean the Phoenix, do you?"

"I do mean her, but I don't think she can help," Alex said softly. "I'll have to take her to the other ones."

"The Tiger is dead, so the Tortoise? You know where he is?" Zhan Luoyang asked curiously.

"Yes," Alex said. "I've met him before."

"Woah!" the woman was very much so surprised.

Alex couldn't help but find her expression quite amusing.

"And this Dantian issue. Will it no longer be a problem if we go to the Tortoise?" Long Huan asked.

Alex didn't correct them by saying that they weren't going to the Tortoise. They were first going to check if Scarlet could help them. If not, they would check if Bai Jingshen had some pills to help them.

If not, they would finally go to the Central Continent to find Senior Yang. He would most likely want to help someone with the Nine Revolutions Celestial Body.

If not, Alex would still be trying to make a pill for her the entire time, so nothing would have been lost.

Long Huan did bring up a good question about the Dantian. That was quite a great problem in the end.

Taking two pills back to back was very dangerous for a body simply because of the chance of the two energies interacting with each other and producing results that could be harmful to one.

However, if Alex took time between feeding the two pills, enough Qi would flow out of her Dantian and the poison would take effect.

He had to somehow make it so that Hannah would take the two pills at different instances, but have their effects take place just one after another with very little time spent in between.

He gave the problem some thought and nodded to himself.

"We should be able to feed her two pills at the same time without causing any side effects," Alex said out loud. "We won't have to worry about the Dantian issue if we do that."

"We can do that?" Zhan Luoyang asked. "How?"

"I say we, but the truth is none of us can do that," Alex said. "We'll have to go to someone to get her aid in this."

"Get to someone?" Long Huan frowned. "Can we trust this person to not give us up to my Father?" Alex chuckled at the question. "Of course she won't," he said. "What mother would do that to her child? Anyway, you should be prepared. We're going to meet your Mother-in-law."

Chapter 1672 Right Now

"Mother-in-law?" Long Huan seemed confused and concerned all of a sudden. He had spent so many years never even considering he had a family on his wife's side, and now that he heard about his mother-in-law, he was feeling nervous.

"Yes, your Mother-in-law, my aunt," Alex said, standing up. Memory was no longer needed as he didn't have any pills to make, so it floated toward him, disappearing into his Soul Space.

Zhan Luoyang noticed that it hadn't disappeared into any storage bag, but wasn't sure where else it had gone. She could only assume a necklace artifact since the thing seemingly floated into his chest.

"I see," Long Huan said. "I will look forward to the day I will get to meet her and the rest of your family."

"Look forward to?" Alex asked. "No, we're leaving right now."

Long Huan was taken aback. "What? Right now?" he asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Or do you have anything else to do in this empire?"

The man hesitated a bit before shaking his head. "No, I have nothing else to do," he said. "But still, leaving right now is a bit…"

"I'll think of a way," Alex said. "You came through the secret realm. How did you enter it when it wasn't time?"

"Anyone can enter it whenever they want," Long Huan said. "Not to mention I have the Ivory Sword to cut through the walls of any secret realm to hide myself if needed."

"Right," Alex said. "Anyway, get ready to leave. Tell my sister we're leaving."

The young man nodded and quickly wrote into Hannah's hands what they were going to do next.

"Maybe you shouldn't hurry," Zhan Luoyang said. "There are many people in the house that can see you leave. If they start questioning and the rumor somehow reaches the Emperor, it will be bad."

"I don't want to wait an entire day just to…" Alex sighed. "Can you dress them in some servant clothes? I will tell the others that I need some ingredients from the city, so I will want to quickly visit it."

"That can work," Zhan Luoyang said. "But I can't get them out without many people seeing it. I should get a talisman to hide them. Our treasury might have a few. Let me go fetch some."

"No need," Alex said and flipped his hands open. Whisker appeared on his hand in a flash of white light, looking around confused. He saw Zhan Luoyang and finally turned around to see Alex and the rest.

"Brother… what is going on?" Whisker asked.

"Ah!" Alex realized in a start. "I'm sorry. I was so taken aback by the whole thing that I forgot to tell you guys."

Pearl came out a moment later as well, the large white tiger looking around confused. His white fur was pristine and without any other color. Alex grimaced a bit, but quickly hid it. These people had already become part of something worse than Pearl's existence, so he had no reason to hide them from him.

Still, Zhan Luoyang gasped. "The White Tiger!" she said loudly, but quickly realized she might have been wrong. There were no stripes on Pearl's body after all.

Pearl looked around and then at himself. A look of panic showed in him as well, but it was quickly squashed when a feeling of calmness flowed to him through the bond. He looked around at Alex and saw a look that said everything was okay.

Then he looked at the situation and was as confused as Whisker was.

"Pearl, Whisker, look at who I found," Alex said, pointing to Hannah. "I found my sister."

Both of the beasts had their eyes go wide. "Brother, you found your sister? This is great news!" Pearl exclaimed.

"Brother, congratulations!" Whisker shouted out loud as well.

They were saddened to learn of their situation, but the overall atmosphere was still one of happiness. They had no doubt that Alex would fix this problem as soon as he could.

"Whisker, go with Lady Luoyang," Alex said, pointing to the woman in front of her.

"Take him and go as far as you can with him from this place, and then find a safe place where we can put them the two of them," Alex said.

"Okay," the woman said. "But then how will we take the two of them?"

"Leave that to me," Alex said. "Just go for now, and tell me when you're there through Whisker. He will relay it back to me."

The woman nodded. "I'll do that," she said. She wasn't sure what she was to do precisely, but she was going to do it.

Before leaving, however, she took out some talisman and handed it over to the young prince.

"Here, I forgot to give them to you yesterday," she said.

"Oh, they were made already?" the young man said with a surprised look. Alex stepped close to see what they were.

"Teleportation talisman?" he asked. He could easily locate the rune for teleportation. It looked somewhat different, but still quite similar to the teleportation talisman he had used to teleport out of the Northern Continent so long ago.

"That is a strong one. You're planning to use this to leave the Empire?" Alex asked.

"These are just failsafe," Long Huan said. "To take us elsewhere if we ever come upon a situation where we need protection."

Alex nodded. "But I see something wrong with the talisman. It only takes you west," he said.

"No, that is how it was made," the prince said. "I'm surprised you can read a talisman this well. Are you knowledgeable about talisman as well?"

"His Majesty completed all the Talisman trial in the Realm of Trials. He is the first one to do so in many decades now," she explained.

Alex ignored his shock. "Why only west?" he asked.

"Because the other direction is dangerous," the young man said. "There is no fixed range on this and randomly teleports you away. North and South would put me either still in the Empire, or in the ocean to fend for myself. East is the same with all of it being ocean or worse, the Edge."

"The West is the longest direction, so it is the safest to run away to," he explained. "A bunch of these and we should be able to make it to the Southern Continent or even the Western Continent."

"Be careful not to fall into the border of the Central Continent though," he said. "That would not be a fun situation."

Long Huan gave him a confused look. He wondered why Alex talked like he knew what would happen there.

"Anyway, I'll leave," Zhan Luoyang said and walked away.

Once she was gone, Alex waited for a moment and brought out Memory again. It would be good to make everyone think he was making another pill. A pill cloud would be quite the distraction, just in case.

He quickly sat down and started making a new pill. It would be a simple healing pill, nothing more. He was quick about it too, seeing Zhan Luoyang calmly, but quickly walking through the garden to make her way to another house separate far in the distance.

Ingredients flowed out from inside him one after another and within minutes another pill cloud formed. Zhan Luoyang reached a small house, seemingly dedicated to just servants, and entered a room in there.

It was time.

Chapter 1673 Teleportation

As lightning bolts fell from the sky on the pill Alex made, Long Huan went up to Hannah and told her they were going to be leaving soon. He started gathering everything that was in the room that the would need when they arrived in the Southern Continent.

One after another, the lightning bolt fell into the cauldron and faded away. After the 8th lightning bolt, Alex stopped and took out the pill, putting it into a bottle.

He tossed the bottle over to Long Huan, who caught it in surprise. "What is this?" he asked.

"Just a healing pill," Alex said. "Anyway, let's get going."

He walked up to the two of them and grabbed them on their shoulders. Then, he closed his eyes and felt his connection to Whisker. There.

Long Huan shuddered as the world transformed around him. The room they were just in changed and they arrived in another room, standing next to Zhan Luoyang who had Whisker standing on her shoulders.

"How did..." he tried to speak, but the shock made him unable to.

Whisker jumped onto Alex's shoulders. "Get a carriage ready and place these two on it," Alex said. "I'll come in a few minutes."

Before Zhan Luoyang could even nod, Alex disappeared from where he stood, appearing back in the room inside the building.

He took Memory back now that he had made the pills and sighed as he understood what had to be done next. He was running away from this continent, even if for only a few days hopefully, but that would most certainly bring about some problems.

Should he tell the Crown Prince what he was doing? After all, the Crown Prince was the greatest authority right now, with the Dragon Emperor in deep cultivation. 'I'll do what the rest say is wise,' he thought. He would need to first tell the two elders what was happening.

Alex left the building and returned to the two elders who were lounging in the garden, talking to a few people. He took them away and explained the situation as quickly as he could.

"We are ready to leave this place if that is what you wish of us," Yao Ning said. "We will take the young lady with us."

Alex nodded. "Thank you," he said softly.

"You don't have to thank us, Your Majesty. That is what our purpose is," Liang Shufen said. "Anyway, let us leave."

The carriage was prepared by the time Alex went outside, his excuse being that he wanted to visit more of the city and go shopping. The servants would be there just to help him navigate.

Two carriages were prepared for that reason. Hannah and Long Huan would ride on the one behind, and in front, would be Alex and Zhan Luoyang.

And surprisingly, the Crown Prince.

Alex hid his frown before it appeared. "Oh, are you going shopping with us, Prince Fangyu?" he asked the man. His eyes moved toward Zhan Luoyang, and a look of resignation was on her face.

"I do not know what you are planning, Your Majesty," the Crown Prince said. "But if you can help my brother be happy, please do."

Alex said nothing but simply nodded. "I'll do my best." Thankfully, there were no soldiers or guards with them aside from Alex's group. Not even Long Huogang was there for some reason. He was supposed to be the Crown Prince's bodyguard, was he not?

The carriage moved and they left the Zhan family manor house.

The road to the city was short, but it felt like the longest journey Alex had ever been on. He worried about what he was going to have to do next.

Alex knew for a fact that the 'guards' he had been assigned were meant to watch him at all times. Fortunately, they hadn't assumed their current situation to be dangerous enough to warrant protection. Either that or the Crown prince had made them stop.

Either way, he was now free of them. But that would only make the Dragon Emperor more suspicious when he learned of him being missing for the next while.

Could he leave behind Yao Ning and Liang Shufen for the sheer illusion that he would return in a day or two? He wasn't sure. He wanted to take them with him until the very end and see what decision was the correct one there.

Not that they would let him go alone. They were his shadows in his journey. Wherever he went, they would too. At this rate, Alex sometimes wondered if they would follow him right to the Immortal lands when he did breakthrough to that one day.

They arrived at the city, and their carriage led them to the building that housed the teleportation platforms. "Where do we go next?" the Crown Prince asked.

"You should go to the Blackheart City," the Crown Prince said. "The secret realm is right outside of there."

Alex nodded before realizing something. "You're not coming?" he asked.

"I will be of no use there," the Crown Prince said. "Instead, I'll stay here and tell everyone you're doing something important and can't return soon. That should help you get some time."

Alex realized that would be quite helpful. "Thank you," he said to the Crown Prince.

The Crown Prince nodded slowly. They quickly got off the carriage and walked into the building where the Crown Prince used his authority to make the next teleportation happen to Blackheart City.

The workers there tried to explain how that would be difficult to do as it was not in their records, but the Crown Prince's presence made them find a way. And they did.

After just 10 minutes of waiting, the teleportation formation was prepared to take them straight to Blackheart City, from where they would go to the Voidgate.

Everyone got onto the formation platform, including Zhan Luoyang who would see them to the very end.

Alex got on top as well, and held his sister's hand on one side, while Long Huan held it on the other. Touch was the only thing she could sense, so the both of them tried to do their best to make her feel safe.

"Thank you, brother," Long Huan said. "I don't know how long it will take me, but I will come back once my wife is healed. Maybe I won't have to fear Father then."

"Do well, brother. I wish you and your wife the best," the Crown Prince said from outside of the platform, nodding to his brother.

Long Haun nodded back and got ready for the teleportation platform to activate.

As it activated, all 6 of the people there saw light shine through the platform. The white light gathered around them, and Alex felt the teleportation aura fill the air.

Then, they teleported.

The Crown Prince watched the 6 of them vanish right before his eyes and knew where they had gone. He sighed a little, wondering why he hadn't let either. 'No, I can't leave. I have to stay back to help them however I can,' he thought. He shook his head and turned around to leave.

As he did, the light behind him flashed once again. He turned around, wondering if something had gone wrong and they had been returned. However, that was not the case at all.

A single man stood on the teleportation formation now, arriving there right after everyone had left.

The Crown Prince's eyes widened in surprise.

"Father?!"

Chapter 1674 The Ivory Sword

Alex and the rest arrived at Blackheart City and quickly left the building that housed the teleportation formations there. Since he had come here last time too, he was aware of where he would have to go to leave.

However, Zhan Luoyang seemed more familiar with the place and was a better guide. Thus, she took out a boat of her own and carried the people away in it.

The 6 of them flew out the Blackheart City, flying into a large field of open land that was cultivated to grow crops and food. Alex could see a large establishment in the distance, a sect he believed to be the Immortal Saint Pavilion. They couldn't be seen by this.

They made their way past the sect and into the distance.

"How far is the secret realm?" Yao Ning asked as she watched the land fly past her.

"It's not far. Just 10 more minutes," Zhan Luoyang said.

"Oh, it's quite close then," she said. "Is it being this close a coincidence? The only other capital city so close to the secret realm is the Blueheart City, isn't it?"

"That is no coincidence," Long Huan said from the side. "Back when the royal family of Lin used to rule this kingdom, long before the rebellion, they transferred their capital city here so they could be closer to the secret realm. I'm not sure how long ago that was, but it still remains that way long past their family's eradication."

"I see," Yao Ning said. She wanted to say they were weird to do this, but then the capital of the Southern Continent too would move to a different place if the Phoenix were to move away. It was not that different.

"The secret realm's formation won't be activated this time around, right?" he asked.

"No," Zhan Luoyang said. "There should still be a year and a half before it opens. And it only activates when it opens."

"And we're going to be sneaking in," Long Huan said, bringing out his Ivory sword.

Alex looked at the sword, slightly in awe at finding the twin to the one that was in his Soul Space. He saw the small indent on the handle of the sword, otherwise easily missed if he were not looking for it; A small serpentine figure coiling around a sword.

The insignia of the Azure Imperium.

Long Huan noticed Alex eyeing the sword and felt immediately defensive of it. However, thinking logically, he found no reason to fear Alex taking away the sword.

"Do you want to see?" he asked Alex.

Alex nodded without thinking. He was indeed very curious about the sword.

"Be docile," Long Huan said as he passed along the sword.

For an instant, Alex wondered why he wanted him to be docile. Was he not calm? But then, the feeling of rejection flowed into him from the sword, and understood. He was talking to the sword spirit inside the sword.

Just like the black sword, this one had a budding sword spirit as well. It wasn't completely formed, but was good enough so that not just anyone who touched it could use it.

Alex wanted to show his dominance with his Intent but decided not to. It wasn't the sword's fault that it didn't want him to hold it. He simply ignored the feeling of rejection and checked for whatever else he could find.

Just like the black sword had the aura of Teleportation, this white sword had the aura of... space. No, it wasn't precisely space. It was a lesser dao than the Dao of Space. After feeling it for a while, Alex could tell that this sword was only capable of tearing down space, and not manipulating it in any other way.

It was quite inferior to what he could do. But for a sword that could give that ability to someone who had no chance of comprehending space, it was a massive boon.

He looked through the ivory blade for a while longer, to try and understand how it was crafted when he heard Zhan Luoyang's words.

"We're here."

Alex looked up. In front of them was a small settlement of sorts with few people in there. He frowned seeing people here.

"That's the gate," Zhan Luoyang pointed to a large metallic arch that shimmered in the midday light. The multitudes of colors it showed reminded Alex of what a wall between the secret realm and the outside world usually looked like from the inside.

He had never seen one from the outside. Secret realms tended to not exist as far as a regular person was concerned on the outside. Space warped around them so they were never an obstacle to be found.

However, it seemed this one was found and was being affected in some way to create that wall. "That metal arch must be some sort of artifact, right?" he asked.

"It is," the woman said.

"And we're going through it?" he asked.

"Dear god, no," she said. "We would be easily seen if we went that way. Prince Huan knows of a way into the secret realm from the side."

"I do," the prince said, turning around. "That way, if we go behind here, we can enter through a forest."

Alex and the rest said nothing, leaving the prince to make the judgment here. He had come and gone from this place.

The group flew away from the small settlement, arriving on top of a forest, where they landed. It was far away from the other place and there were no people here.

"Where now?" Alex asked as the prince started looking around.

"Uhh... it's here somewhere," Long Huan said, looking confused. "I came out in between two trees and I've marked both of them with a cross. We should be able to find it."

Alex frowned a little. Nearly 20 years had passed since the two of them had come back. The entire forest should look different to him. Even the marking he left would have been covered in moss dirt and tree bark.

Alex sighed. He released his spiritual sense at once, surprising the others around him who weren't aware of how strong it would be. They had their spiritual sense out to search as well, but this one felt like a flood moving through their small stream.

Alex located the secret realm easily. As someone with the Dao of Space, it wasn't that difficult after all.

"I found it," he said, pointing in a direction.

The group immediately flew in that direction, landing in front of someplace that was not how Long Huan had described it.

"Alex, this isn't—"

"Try your sword," Alex said simply.

Long Huan was about to argue but decided not to. He simply sighed and sent Qi into his sword. To his surprise, the sword vibrated and as it did, a layer of energy rippled in front of him, showing the existence of the space in front of them.

"It's really here," he said, surprised. Without waiting, he pushed his sword in front of him into the layer of distorted space and cut open a wide gate that led to the secret realm.

"I did it," Long Huan said excitedly. "Let's get in quickly. It won't stay open for very long."

Chapter 1675 Balance Haven

Long Huan took Hannah into the Harmonious Balance Haven, carefully making sure not to have any of her appendages touch the wall of the secret realm which would be unusually sharp.

Alex followed behind them, and then the two elders followed behind him. Zhan Luoyang, however, didn't enter.

Alex stopped and looked back at her. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Come in."

"I can't," she said, a conflicted look on her face. "This is as far as I go, unfortunately."

"You're not coming any further?" Alex asked.

"I can't," she said. "Or I won't have a way to leave. I would be stuck inside the secret realm."

"Stuck inside?" Alex asked in surprise. "I had assumed you would be going all the way. Were you not planning to go to the Southern Continent?"

"I…" She really hadn't been planning that at all.

"Come on, sister Luoyang," Long Huan said. "You've helped us this long. You can't stop now. Besides, your absence can help make Alex's absence look not as severe too."

The woman looked to be in a dilemma for a while, but in the end, she sighed. "I suppose," she said and walked into the secret realm. Her troubled look was still there, but a slight hint of determination peeked through now.

The walls of the secret realm closed back in miraculously after the woman walked in. Miraculous to everyone but one.

Alex turned around and took a proper look at the secret realm that lay in front of his eyes.

The land was uneven, with mountains and cliffs jutting out in every direction. Forests grew atop those mountains and cliffs, with grassland growing on the plains.

Alex and the rest stood atop a large settlement of massive rocks, thrown at the side of a river that seemed to be running dry for now. He settled his footing and looked back at the rest.

"Where to now?" Alex asked Long Huan.

The young man took the lead and looked around. He closed his eyes, spreading his spiritual sense to find the location.

Alex looked at him with curiosity. He had only met this new relative of his just yesterday, but that should've been enough for him to figure out how strong he was. However, no matter how he sensed it, he couldn't tell Long Huan's strength.

He knew for a fact he wasn't very strong. At least, not as strong as his brother. But that would still put him high up in terms of cultivation base. Alex wondered what cultivation base he was in, and more importantly, how exactly he was hiding it so well. The impression Alex got was vague, just like others would through the passive use of his Immortal Concealment technique.

"There!" He pointed toward the south.

Alex's spiritual sense moved in that direction and found a grassland, beyond which was a cave, inside which was the Void. There really was a Voidgate here.

"A Voidgate, huh?" Godslayer's voice flowed in Alex's head. "Interesting."

He made no more comment.

"Let's move," Long Huan took command and carried Hannah in his aura, flying into the sky. The rest followed.

"I don't suppose any of you have been through a Voidgate before, so I realize I should maybe explain it a bit," Long Huan said. "In short, it connects two points in space, creating a tunnel between the two that you can pass through to come out on the other side."

"The travel takes an hour at most and in that time, you will have to let the gate do its thing and take you wherever it wants to. In this case, it will take you to the southwest of the Southern Continent."

"More importantly, however, you will have to make sure that you don't end up using any Qi while you are inside. You might end up causing trouble for our travel and we could get lost in there forever."

Alex heard the things that the prince said, and while he wasn't incorrect in saying what he did, it seemed he didn't know much either. Alex himself didn't think he knew much, but he definitely knew more than him.

Still, all he said was correct, so it was better not to cause confusion by saying things that weren't necessary. As long as they jumped into the Voidgate, they would come out on the other side easily.

"Ah, I see it now," Yao Ning spoke. "I didn't expect it to be hidden from my senses so well."

"It's a crack in space, elder Yao," Long Huan said. "You can't see it easily with your senses. But you can see it pretty well with your eyes once you are close enough. The vibrant colors of purple and sil—" New n0vel chapters are published on

Suppression filled the atmosphere around everyone in the sky and all of a sudden they plummeted from the sky, unable to keep flying. They were pushed down so badly that they couldn't even maintain a graceful downfall. They tumbled through the sky and would land on the ground if they didn't do something.

Alex felt pain flare up in his mind as he tried to use his Dao. For some reason, he had to fight back the suppression to use his Dao at all. He couldn't use his Dao of Teleportation efficiently from up here at all.

He had to quickly think of what to do, and at that time he saw the ground grow closer and his shadow become denser.

'Shadow!' Alex thought. And he teleported. He arrived on top of his shadow using the Flickering Shadow technique, a teleportation technique that he hadn't used for such a long time after gaining the Dao of Teleportation. It allowed him to teleport between shadows, and he could always teleport to his own shadow using the technique, regardless of the distance. Since it was also a technique and not a Dao, the headache that he assumed would come didn't come as quickly as it should have.

Still, he hit the ground with the same momentum as when he was falling, but to a Saint Soul 4th realm Body Cultivator, that didn't matter at all. He got back up immediately, bringing out Pearl to help him.

Once Pearl was out, the two of them used their Qi to slow down the fall of everyone, especially Hannah who was simply a mortal at the moment. Her body was still much stronger than a regular mortal, but she was a mortal nonetheless.

Everyone landed with grace thanks to the two and Elder Yao immediately grunted in frustration. "What was that?" she asked. "Why did we fall?"

"It's the secret realm's suppression field," Zhan Luoyang said, flexing her palm to feel something. "Our cultivation base is suppressed to Saint Condensation 1st realm, I believe."

Alex frowned and checked his Qi. He tried to pour more strength out, but something was blocking that. It was even blocking regular Qi in the atmosphere from becoming too strong. As such, Dao didn't work either.

"Flight is blocked too?" Liang Shufen asked with a frown.

"I'm afraid so," Zhan Luoyang said. "That's how the formation here goes. Still, this doesn't make sense. Why are we being suppressed here?"

As soon as she asked that, someone's spiritual sense passed through the entire secret realm, immediately locking onto them.

Alex sent his spiritual sense back and felt his heart grow cold in fear. He slowly spoke to let them know what was happening.

"The Dragon Emperor is here."

Chapter 1676 Emperor's Arrival

All 4 that heard Alex's voice turned their heads toward the south as they too realized that the Dragon Emperor had come. "No…" Long Huan's face paled in fear.

Zhan Luoyang seemed to have frozen in shock as well. Alex was the same as well. He couldn't understand why the Dragon Emperor was there at all. How could he have come there so soon? Had the Crown Prince given up on them?

That couldn't be. There would have been no reason to let them go only to call his father. There were so many guards around him and he had let them sneak away.

Had the Dragon Emperor been somehow alerted that they had made it inside? That made little sense either. No, now was not the time to worry about these things.

Alex turned around toward the group. "Let's run!" His words brought them out of their stupor. "He's affected by the suppression too. We can get there first if we run."

Alex jumped next to Hannah and carried her into his arms and ran away, letting the others follow behind him. He was fast, much faster than most of the others behind him, who could only look at him in surprise.

They ran past the river, and into an incline, going over a sparse hill to run down the other side. With flight seemingly completely impossible under the current suppression, running was their only choice.

The Voidgate was no more than 10 kilometers away from them, while the Dragon Emperor was some 25 kilometers behind. If they did it quickly, they could make it there before him with just enough time to get into the Voidgate. Alex didn't even consider what would happen if the man followed him into the Voidgate. He would think about the problem after when he crossed that bridge first.

"He's catching up," Long Huan said. "We need to go faster or else—"

The moment he said those words, the suppression field in the secret realm disappeared. They all felt a surge of power and speed all of a sudden and were now fast enough to reach Alex.

Only, the same went for the Dragon Emperor as well.

Alex flew as fast as he could now and could see the cave that held the Voidgate. It was right in front of him. Long Huan was next to him, rushing for the cave as well. He needed to open it right away.

Just then Alex sensed something. "Take her!" he shouted at Long Huan, throwing Hannah over to him to carry. As soon as she left his arm, he teleported immediately.

Alex appeared in the sky far above and brought out Midnight as power enveloped him.

Body, Blood, Qi, Spirit, and Sword came together to form a power in the infinitesimal amount of time he had. There was no time at all to use his nameless technique, so he could only use the technique he could in this brief period he had.

Power flowed into Midnight, activating the technique that was carved into the sword.

God Rending Death Blade.

Alex swung and cut at the massive lightning bolt with the thickness of a tree trunk. He had noticed the Dragon Emperor targeting the cave and had to stop it no matter what.

Alex's attack was strong, very strong. But it was nothing in front of the strength of a Peak Saint realm cultivator.

The lightning bolt was only weakened, and not destroyed, and the weakened bolt still rushed forth, hitting him directly.

Alex was flung down from the sky, slamming onto the ground, creating a small crater. He was dazed for a second before slowly getting back up. He was… fine?

His broken body was slowly healing on the inside. It was fortunate that his body was strong enough and didn't instantly vaporize because of the attack.

He quickly climbed out and shouted, "Quickly, to the cave!"

Long Huan did not stop and ran, while Zhan Luoyang followed him. Yao Ning and Liang Shufen, however, came to check on him.

"I'm fine, run," Alex said, but they wouldn't leave without him.

Alex brought out the Immortal puppet and Whisker to control it if need be. At the same time, he flew away as well.

However, before they could all reach the cave, the Dragon Emperor was already there.

"Stop!" His voice sounded like the roar of a thousand beasts, moving across the land and creating shockwaves.

Long Huan froze when he was right at the cave. Now that his father was this close, he knew cutting open the Voidgate would do no good for them.

Alex frowned. "Start opening it," he shouted back, but the young man still seemed dazed. Instead of bringing out a sword, he brought out a talisman. It seemed he thought the teleportation talisman to be a safer option than the Voidgate.

Alex didn't blame him.

The Dragon Emperor floated in the air, his blue hair flowing in the wind above. He gazed down, his look saying that everyone here was beneath him. The Noble Dragon Spear was on his right-hand

"This is not what I expected to see when I came to meet you, King Alex," he said softly. "Someone told me you might be up to something, something bad for the Empire, but this is something entirely different."

His gaze then turned toward Long Huan.

"I wasn't aware you had returned, that too for nearly 20 years," he said softly. "You should have returned to me, my son."

Long Huan's face looked grim and he didn't even focus on the talisman in his hands. "You… you tried to kill us," he said. "Why would I ever return to you?"

"I never tried to kill you," the Dragon Emperor answered calmly. "I only wanted the sword."

"You tried to kill my wife," Long Huan shouted back.

"A girl you married after meeting for only a month?" the Dragon Emperor laughed out loud. "You were never officially married. Your marriage was never officially recognized."

"We exchanged our vows," Long Huan said. "That is all that mattered, and you still tried to kill her. No, you did kill her. You killed your own soldiers to get to my wife."

"She shouldn't have tried to kill me then." The Dragon Emperor sighed. "If you want to run away, I won't stop you. Go, leave, but leave the sword. I will be gone from this world in just a year or two once I get that sword of yours. You can freely return to the Empire at that point."

"No one will have known that you defied me then. You can come back to be by your brother's side as he becomes the next Emperor."

"No," Alex answered. "That won't be happening."

This was what he had been fearing. The Dragon Emperor would use the sword and leave, without giving Alex and the rest any time to get their revenge.

"Stand aside, King Alex. I will be willing to look away from what you've been doing here," the Dragon Emperor said and was about to speak when Alex cut him off.

"What will you be doing with the sword that it is so necessary?" Alex asked. "It doesn't have something to with the Azure Dragon being dead, does it?"

Chapter 1677 Predicament

The Emperor's eyes changed the moment he heard Alex's words. His face squeezed into a frown as he stared at Alex.

Alex felt a hint of fear inside of him when he saw that. What he said was most definitely not the right thing to say, but it was the best thing he could say in this situation.

"Brother Alex…" Long Huan slowly said. "What are you doing?"

'Go open the Voidgate while he's distracted,' Alex sent a spiritual message directly to the man.

Only then did Long Huan realize why Alex was becoming brass all of a sudden. He was trying to distract his Father.

Was it going to work?

A puppet flew into the cave with Whisker on top of it and landed next to them. Whisker pointed toward the Voidgate without saying anything and turned around to protect the Voidgate in case any attack fell on them.

The 2nd prince dropped Hannah on her feet and walked over to Zhan Luoyang before handing her the talisman. "If it looks like things will go badly, use this and take away my wife from here. Protect her."

He moved away without waiting for an answer.

Alex stared back at the Dragon Emperor, not letting his attention away from him. He needed this bit of time to save his sister and let them go away safely.

"Who told you that the Azure Dragon is dead?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "That is a lie."

"Can you make an oath to prove that he is alive?" Alex asked the man in return, causing him to frown even further.

"You are going too far, King Alex. Do not dig your own grave," the Dragon Emperor said as if advising a child from doing some misdeed.

Alex knew inside that he shouldn't be doing this at all. Enraging the Dragon Emperor would only get him his ire. But it was the only way for the rest to leave.

'Leave already,' he told his elders with his spiritual sense, but they could sense the danger of the situation. They weren't going to back down now.

The Dragon Emperor held his spear tight and was about to say something when his eyes moved away, looking toward the cave. Alex frowned as he sensed the emergence of Space and Time aura from the cave. The Voidgate was open.

"You're not getting away from me, son," the Dragon Emperor said. Just as he was prepared to move, he felt a burning sensation in his mind as Alex struck him with Heaven's Impact.

The Dragon Emperor's eyes widened slightly, feeling the power of Alex's spiritual attack. It was quite strong, but not strong enough to knock him out at all.

'Dammit!' Alex thought. 'Bastard is not even using any artifacts.' Seeing his attack be barely anything more than an annoyance to the man was not fun to see. He could also tell the man planned to deal with the Voidgate first.

"You killed the Azure Dragon, didn't you?" Alex asked. "You and your wife, you murdered him. I am still not sure why."

The Dragon Emperor froze at those words and looked back down at Alex. He said no words, but his face was all that Alex needed.

He was right. He was actually right.

Alex had assumed that this was the case for a while now, but there had been times when the other possibility had been equally as possible. The possibility was that the Azure Dragon had been working with the Dragon Emperor and had somehow died in an accident.

Now, it was clear there was no accident. The Dragon Emperor had all but admitted to being responsible for the murder of the Azure Dragon. The only question that remained now was how Pearl and his mother fit into all of this. Did they just happen to be there? But then why was the Ebony sword stuck in Pearl's mother?

'Hurry up! The gate will close without my sword. I can't go in without you all,' Long Huan spoke into everyone's mind.

The Dragon Emperor took a long and deep breath and released it in a sigh. A sigh filled with dejection frustration and anger.

"I sometimes wonder if we have any choice of our own or not," the man said. Wind buffeted around him as his power surged, causing everyone around him to panic. "I thought you would be different at least, one that is not controlled by fate. And yet, here you are, trying to bring my downfall."

The spear pointed down directly toward Alex. "You should have never called yourself a King." And he released a massive bolt of lightning in the shape of a dragon, one that was clearly filled with Immortal Qi.

Alex was ready to protect himself, but Yao Ning moved before him.

A golden sphere appeared around the woman, formed entirely by Immortal Qi, with 16 different golden tentacles coming out of it which all attacked together. New n0vel chapters are published on

The crash of the two attacks sent Alex falling backward as the world lost all sound and color again. He closed his eyes to the blinding light and yet his senses told him all he needed to.

Space collapsed at the point of impact and reformed just as quickly. The aura created from the attack overpowered every other aura that Alex had been sensing.

Just as Alex was trying to figure out what was happening, Liang Shufen appeared before him and pulled out a flask from inside her storage bag, releasing the water inside of it. The water immediately coalesced in front of them into a shield that blocked another large lightning bolt that fell on them.

Another wave of energy released from the crash of an Immortal attack on an Immortal shield.

"Your Majesty!" Liang Shufen shouted over the sound. "Get to the portal. You need to leave. We will follow."

Alex was going to refuse, but he nodded. He couldn't be stubborn here. He quickly got up and rushed toward the cave, feeling the push of another shockwave between the crash of two Immortal attacks.

Alex panicked on behalf of his two elders. How many Immortal attacks could they defend? He needed to get over to his sister and take her—

Alex froze mid step when he arrived next to the Voidgate and realized there was nobody there at all. The Voidgate was closed, and if anyone had been here, they had likely jumped into it.

The only thing that remained there was a talisman that seemed to have dropped while they ran away.

Alex quickly grabbed onto the sides of the Voidgate and opened it wide, but he couldn't enter just yet. He turned around and tried to peer at the situation outside with his senses.

The Voidgate closed behind him with only a head-sized space open in the end. "Shit!" Alex thought as he came to realize that he needed to keep the space open if the others were to enter with him.

Which meant that he couldn't leave unless both the elders were with him. Frustration built up inside of him and he had to choose exactly what to do.

"I have to bring them here," Alex thought. He would have to grab them and teleport them here. That was the only way the three of them could possibly get out of the current predicament they had fallen into.

Chapter 1678 Escape Attempt

Alex appeared outside the cave, something clutched in his hand, and was once again pushed back by the force of another clash.

The thunderous sound had all but deafened Alex by now and the light had all but blinded him.

Yao Ning seemed to be holding on to the fight in front, using her Hundred Arms Golden Sphere technique to fight off the Dragon Emperor.

Liang Shufen's pretty face looked dark and haggard in the light. Unlike Yao Ning, she didn't have much capability to fight back against the Dragon Emperor. She only had enough Immortal Qi for a few attacks and defenses at most and that seemed to have run out.

Yao Ning would have to be in a similar situation as well.

"Your Majesty! What are you still doing here?" Liang Shufen shouted over the cacophony of blasts at the front. "You should be gone by now."

"Everyone else is gone, and the gate is closed. You guys can't leave without me opening it," Alex said. "I need to take you back."

Liang Shufen's eyes widened and then narrowed in frustration. "How do we get sister Yao to come with us?" she asked. "I don't think she can leave."

Alex stared at the Dragon Emperor in the sky who kept on shooting more and more attacks. Had Yao Ning's technique not been specifically focused on defense against multiple attacks, along with a Dao to reflect the weaker ones, she would've lost by now. Even with that, she only had so much Qi to go around. "Dammit! How much Immortal Qi does he have?" Alex asked, looking at the sky.

"He's not even using Immortal Qi," Liang Shufen answered, her voice laden with frustration and annoyance. "He keeps mixing between the two, and sister Yao doesn't have the time to make changes to her technique at all. Not that she can take a chance on it. She has to put up her best defense just in case."

Alex could understand the problem.

"Elder Yao, I'm coming in to take you away. We need to leave while the Emperor is disoriented," Alex sent to the old woman through his spiritual sense.

"It will be hard to get him distracted," she sent back. "I'm doing all I can to keep him from going after you two."

Alex frowned. "Don't worry, I can do it," he said. "We're coming in."

He grabbed Liang Shufen's arm and teleported into the golden sphere. Then, he brought out his mirror. That would give them the perfect opportunity. Alex waited for the moment the attack would pass and then… "NOW!" The golden sphere went down and Alex put up his Mirror of Barren Truth.

The dragon-shaped Lightning strike that was supposed to land on them was instantly returned back to the Dragon Emperor, the power within it remaining intact as it flew back.

"Let's go!" he bellowed and grabbed Yao Ning's arm to teleport away. But even as he did, he saw her look of horror and realized that somehow, somewhere, something had gone wrong.

The understanding of the mistake came right after.

The attack he had just reflected had been strong, very strong. But it was not an Immortal attack.

Even as Alex understood it, there was no point in dwelling on it. He had already employed teleportation aura, so they could leave. As Alex felt the teleportation happen, however, something happened around him.

The Dragon Emperor simply walked through his own attack, the damage to him being a pitiful amount. He had his hand raised toward Alex, seemingly doing something.

Alex couldn't tell. Not that he bothered to figure it out in his haste. He teleported into the cave in front of the Voidgate… by nearly 5 meters.

"Huh?" Alex cried out in surprise. His teleportation was supposed to bring him right next to the Voidgate, not this far away. "Shit!" He rushed forward in a hurry and quickly grabbed onto the edges of the opening and pulled it open wider.

The cave brightened with the swirling colors inside the Void as Space and Time aura filled the area around them.

"Get in!" Alex bellowed. "Quickly!"

The two Elders wasted no time at all.

Liang Shufen jumped in immediately, disappearing in the glow of purple and silver. Next was Yao Ning. She jumped— An attack landed right in front of Alex on the Voidgate, the force of the impact sending both Alex and Yao Ning backward.

Alex heard his head ring loudly and also felt pain in a few parts of his body that slowly mended itself. He opened his eyes and realized he was outside of the cave, thrown back.

Next to him, the Dragon Emperor landed with his spear in hand and a gloomy look on his face. Alex glared at the Dragon Emperor with all the fury in his heart. However, the Dragon Emperor wasn't looking at him at all.

His eyes were looking somewhere to the side.

Alex turned his ringing head in that direction and saw Yao Ning trying to stand amidst the broken rubble of the cave. Her hands trembled as she tried to get back on her feet, but failed to do so. The Dragon Emperor raised his spear and attacked.

Alex teleported, arriving right in front of Yao Ning. He had enough time to take his mirror out too, just in case it would do something since the last attack he defended was definitely not on par.

Alas, the Mirror was used up, so there was no blocking anything. It would have instead been destroyed by a normal attack if Alex had done that. Instead, he simply stood in front of Yao Ning to give her enough time to get back on her feet.

The attack landed directly on Alex and a thunderous roar filled the world.

Bai Jingshen's gigantic ethereal head floated out from inside of Alex, glowing brightly in the daylight. It stopped the Dragon Emperor's attack, which was most certainly an Immortal attack.

The tiger head floated proudly in front of Alex even after the attack had died and a single voice came from within the head.

"This human is under my, Bai Jingshen's protection. Anyone who dares harm him shall suffer my wrath."

The words hung in the air like a guillotine, ready to strike down at anyone who dared defy it. The tiger's head slowly faded, and Alex watched as the Dragon Emperor's face changed from uncaring to worried to terrified. He had never expected to see these emotions in the face of the Dragon Emperor.

"That…" the Dragon Emperor slowly found his words to speak. "That… that was the White Tiger. Bai Jingshen, yes, the White Tiger. How did you gain his protection?"

Alex remained quiet. There was no point in explaining, and the explanation was likely not going to bring back any result either way.

"ANSWER ME!" the Dragon Emperor screamed, his voice ripping through the air to strike at Alex.

Alex steeled his heart and got ready to fight.

"First a king, then the damn White Tiger," the Dragon Emperor grumbled. "It seems I must kill you once and for all now."

The Dragon Emperor dashed right next to Alex and swung his spear.

"Die!"

Chapter 1679 Downhill

Blood spurted out of Alex, quickly forming into his Blood Armor. At the same time, 123 swords flew out of his Soul Space, with Midnight at the front, all of which formed into an array and struck at the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor used a single attack, a strong gust of air that struck the swords and destroyed the attack.

All the swords fell back, with a few ones that weren't made up of Starforged Tungsten even breaking on impact.

Alex quickly took back all the swords except Midnight and struck again. God Rending Death Blade struck out, but once again a single strike from the Dragon Emperor destroyed it. He didn't even have to use a strong technique to do so.

"There is no reason why you should be fighting back," the man said. "You are too weak to do anything."

Alex moved back and reached out for Yao Ning to teleport with her, but right before he could touch her, he felt the space between him and her expand ever so slightly.

Alex gasped in surprise and had to reach out further, but by that time, the Dragon Emperor was once again on top of him.

The spear struck him on the armor and Alex was sent flying into multiple trees, dragging a large crater on the ground before he stopped somewhere far away. His blood armor was dismissed almost instantly as it lost all of its energy from that one strike, and what little strength he had in his body did nothing to protect him from the attack.

His body worked to heal itself as quickly as it could to save him, the organs that were ruptured and the bones that were broken reverting to how they were before.

Alex saw specks of black and white before his vision returned. His ears still rung from that strike, the sensation of pain not yet letting up. He felt the ground shake again and shockwaves hit him almost the same time. That caught Alex's attention and he pulled himself out of the ground to look back to see what was happening. He was still dazed when he saw that things were not looking very good. Yao Ning had put up her technique once again, creating a defensive sphere with 16 arms floating out to attack in all directions. She fought with the Dragon Emperor, but it was clear she had no chance at victory at all.

She used all she had, her techniques, her artifacts, and any other constructs, but nothing worked against the man who stood above every other mortal in this world.

A single swing of his spear brought destruction and a simple stab brought annihilation.

Yao Ning fought back all the swings and stabs she could, but she was helpless. Alex tried to move to help her in any way he could, but there was nothing he could do against someone whose core was half-filled with Immortal Qi.

Alex looked at his hand. He still clutched the talisman he found inside the cave. Fortunately, it hadn't been destroyed in the attack. With this talisman, he could save her.

Alex focused on himself and looked for the perfect opportunity to teleport into Yao Ning's sphere. Just as he was about to teleport, a forked lightning bolt came toward him out of nowhere.

Alex teleported to the side out of pure instinct and watched the lightning bolt fly past where he had been. Once he knew he was safe, he focused back on saving Yao Ning and turned around just in time to see the scene of terror.

The lightning strike broke past Yao Ning's barrier, striking her. She flew into the distance, crashing into the ground. Even without looking, Alex could tell she was badly hurt.

He needed to save her.

Alex teleported to grab onto her and run away with her, but even as he did, he felt the space expand between where he wanted to be and where he was.

Alex understood what was happening, and he altered his teleportation to match the increasing distance. He arrived right next to Yao Ning and reached to grab her. So close.

The Noble Dragon spear stabbed into Alex's hand, spearing through it into the ground. He was so close, and yet… so far.

The Dragon Emperor raised his other hand and struck out with a bolt of lightning.

The Immortal attack consumed all light and sound as it blasted into the ground. Alex felt the remnants of the attack pass through him, the force ripping away his skin, but his body was unable to move due to the spear that stuck him to the ground.

When everything faded away, all that remained in the ground was a deep hole with not even a body remaining. Alex looked at the hole in horror as the realization dawned on him.

Yao Ning was dead.

"No…" A deep sense of loss filled Alex. "No…"

The Dragon Emperor pulled out his Spear and pointed toward Alex. "I would prefer if you answered my question now. I can't seem to—"

Alex struck out.

White hot fire poured out of his hands, filled with True Fire Dao, burning with a temperature that ignited the woods around them just because of their proximity.

The Dragon Emperor quickly wove a barrier of Air with his Qi, forming a defense. He suddenly felt the barrier warp as space itself warmed around him.

He used his own Dao to expand the space around him, to put more distance between him and the fire.

The fire disappeared a moment later, and what came was a single sword strike that he barely managed to see before it was right next to him. It was so small that it was practically invisible to his senses for the most part.

It managed to break past his barrier of wind somehow, but when it did strike him, it was already too weak. The attack struck him in the chest, creating a small line of wound that bled a few drops of blood, but other than that he was fine.

"Not bad. But you'll have to do more if you want to hurt me in any way important," the Dragon Emperor said. When the dust cleared, Alex was there on the ground before him, staring at the Dragon Emperor intently.

The Dragon Emperor moved to attack him and paused. He tilted his head in confusion.

"Why do I no longer sense your killing intent?" he asked. Then he struck out.

A bright white bolt of lightning struck through Alex, tearing him into millions of motes of light.

"No wonder…" The Dragon Emperor said with an amused expression. "A fake."

He spread his senses and immediately covered the entirety of the secret realm. He first checked the Voidgate to make sure he wasn't there. Then, he searched the rest of the area.

At first, the Dragon Emperor frowned as he couldn't find Alex at all. He worried that he had somehow let Alex go. However, a moment later, he saw Alex pop out of the ground nearly 30 kilometers away from there.

"A ground-based escape technique, huh?" he asked himself. "Not bad."

He moved at a blinding speed and covered that distance in the time it took Alex to cough out the dirt and get back on his feet. Before Alex could realize what was happening, he was once again struck with a weaker bolt of lightning, and the Dragon Emperor stood before him once more.

Chapter 1680 Shock

﻿﻿1680 Shock

Long Fangyu stood before the giant gate of the secret realm, staring at the iridescent colors of the barrier that kept the secret realm out of the regular world.New n0vel chapters are published on

He stared at it, but his eyes did not see anything. His mind was lost in his thoughts, and the only thing he could think at the moment was that he hated himself.

He was a coward, a hypocrite. After gaining his brother's trust that he would not do anything to hurt him, he told his father exactly where he had to go to find him.

He hadn't told the Emperor about his brother. The Emperor had only come there to meet with Alex. But by telling him where Alex had gone to, he had pretty much told his father where his brother was too.

The moment his father said that the king of the Southern Continent might be plotting something, he had lost all sense in him to hold back his information and told his father exactly what he needed to hear.

He had put the empire's priority before his brother.

And now he felt terrible about it.

"No," the Crown Prince told himself. "I can't let this be, can I? I have to go save him. I have to save my brother."

He took a deep breath and entered the secret realm.

The thing he saw when he entered was the destruction of the land inside and only two people in the distance.

His father stood over Alex with his spear pointed at Alex, ready to kill him.

* * * * * * *

Alex clutched the teleportation talisman in his hand tightly, hiding it from the Emperor. He needed to use it to escape.

Small-ranged teleportation, even the Earth Devour technique seemed useless against the Emperor given his usage of Immortal Qi. As Alex was now, the only way to get out of this situation was to use the talisman.

Only when he teleported far outside of the range of the Dragon Emperor could he truly escape?

He asked Godslayer for help, but the Sword spirit was too weak to do anything against the Dragon Emperor.

Alex started up at the eyes of the man whom he hated so much. He had brought so much pain to him and his friends.

The Dragon Emperor was the person somehow responsible for Pearl's mother's death. He was the man responsible for all but killing his sister.

And now, he was responsible for killing Yao Ning, the woman who cared for Alex, the woman who Alex cared for as he would his own grandmother.

The Dragon Emperor had killed her, and that was the reason why the man would die at his hands.

"You wish to kill me," the Dragon Emperor said, pointing the spear down at him. "I understand. We are of the same mind in that. I wish to kill you too. But it seems fate has a different intention of what is to be of your life."

The spear slowly dug into Alex's chest, blood pooling out.

"I had some idea about your Body Cultivator, but it seems you have become unnaturally strong. This cannot happen in merely 10 years with the Mountain Crushing artifact. Tell me, how did you improve your body before this?"

Alex grunted. "The only… the only thing I'll tell you is that one way or another, I will kill you," he spoke.

The Dragon Emperor snorted. "You couldn't kill me even if I let you do it. My body cultivation alone is stronger than most others," he said as he pulled down the spear, cutting more of his flesh. "If you do not wish to tell me about your body cultivation, then it's fine. Tell me about the White Tiger. Where did you gain his protection?"

Alex spat at the Dragon Emperor, but the man simply created a gust of wind that diverted it. Then, with the same air, he slammed Alex's head into the ground, sending specks of black and white to fill his vision.

"I see, then you will not tell me that either," the Dragon Emperor said, anger and disgust filling his mind. "Oh, how I wish to kill you right now. But it seems I cannot kill you."

Alex's attention snapped back when he heard those words. 'Couldn't?' he wondered.

The Dragon Emperor read the confusion on Alex's face. "Yes, I cannot kill you," he answered. "Are you happy you will live?"

Alex said nothing.

"Don't worry. The only reason I cannot kill you is because of your trade. We made an oath to trade with each other. Until our trade is completed, I cannot kill you. If you want to die right now, complete the trade. You will die anyway in 3 years if you don't complete the trade on your end."

The Dragon Emperor started laughing to himself. "Trade and I'll kill you now. Don't and die 3 years later. You do not have easy prospects, do you?" he asked.

3 years. That was a short time, but if Alex could get even that, it would be helpful. Anything to continue living would be helpful.

Then he saw the Dragon Emperor and saw the mania behind his eyes.

"I said I would let you live for 3 years," he said, dragging his spear through Alex's stomach even lower. "I did not say you would be kept as you are until then."

The Crown Prince arrived and saw the horrifying sight in front of him.

"Father! You can't do that," he quickly said. "The Phoenix will kill us."

"Don't worry about the Phoenix, son. She's weak right now," the Dragon Emperor said. "Besides, even if she had her strength, she couldn't come. I can kill this man without any remorse and we would be safe. So long as an Immortal doesn't come for us, there is no one in this world stronger than me and my empire."

"So… you aren't going to deny that you killed the Azure Dragon," Alex said between gasps of air. He was struggling to find a way to escape from all that was happening to him.

"Killed the Azure Dragon? No," the Dragon Emperor said. "At least, that wasn't my intention. It just happened. I'm curious how you found out. Was it Yan Yating? No, he's bound by oath to not answer anything. Even if he broke his oath to the empire, he cannot break an oath to the heavens."

The Dragon Emperor sighed. "I should not be delaying this any further," he said. "If you are the one my prophecy claims to be my downfall, then I must get rid of all chances of you defeating me."

He dragged the spear even below and stopped right above the naval region. Alex felt the pain there and knew what was going to happen.

He heard the panicked sound belonging to Godslayer in his mind that seemed to echo through his mouth.

"NO—"

The Dragon Emperor stabbed down and cut through his Dantian.

Alex gasped as the shock hit him. As if plunged into a pool of ice-cold water, his body spasmed as all the Qi in his body drove into his Dantian, and from there it leaked out.

Alex teleported as far as he could, but that was not as far as he wanted to. His Dao was working, but nothing was coming out of his Dantian. The leaking Qi did not work for him.

"No!" Alex shouted. He tried to heal his body, but it didn't work. Without Qi, the Undying God's Physique did not work. He needed Qi to heal his body.

Blood poured out of his stab wounds. He needed a pill. Maybe a pill could help him if he was fast enough.

The Dragon Emperor's senses were on him as he watched Alex fret around from far away.

Alex felt his mind grow heavy from not just the pain but also the blood loss. His dantian was destroyed, so he was no cultivator anymore. The loss of blood now affected him as it would a regular person.

He lay on the ground, panting, trying to think of something. His mind blanked for a moment, forgetting what he was doing. He needed Qi to heal his body quickly, to heal his wounds.

"Right, pill," he remembered and went to look for a pill. However, when he tried to look into his Soul Space, he found it nearly impossible to get into his Soul Space.

"No!" Alex cried out. His spirit was wounded, either from the stab or from crippling. "No, my pill." He couldn't even enter the Soul Space, let alone find the pill.

The Dragon Emperor watched silently from the distance.

"Father, he'll die," the Crown Prince said.

"No, he won't. We'll take him back once he goes unconscious," the Dragon Emperor said and continued watching.

Alex frantically hit his head to keep himself from fainting. He couldn't faint here. He needs to heal his body. No, he needed to run away.

He remembered the talisman in his hand and used his weak spiritual sense to activate it. But that talisman needed Qi too.

How was he going to get any Qi here? He had no access to his storage and his dantian was broken open. He could not use any Qi from his own body.

"Dao?" Alex thought. He could use Dao, but that wouldn't heal him or activate the talisman. What he needed was Qi and there was no Dao that could give him Qi.

"No…" Alex realized. There was one.

Immediately, he fell onto his pool of blood and held to it. Even as pain flared in his mind from using a strong Intent while his spirit was weakened, he didn't stop.

He employed the Dao of Blood Aura.

The aura in the blood within him and the pool beneath him surged, turning from Blood Aura into Qi. Immediately, his body drank on the Qi, using it to heal his wounds.

But Alex didn't have the luxury. Even as his body tried to heal the wounds on his torso, Alex pulled it away, dragging it into the talisman before it could leak away from his destroyed Dantian.

The Qi formed from the blood outside his body was out of his control, and it was only the ones from within his body that Alex could use. But even that, while very weak, was just enough for him to use to activate this talisman.

The Dragon Emperor's face changed as he realized Alex was doing something. He flew toward Alex immediately, but it was too late. He had given Alex the distance he needed, and that had given Alex enough time.

Silver light glowed around Alex as he used the last of his mental strength to use the Dao to use the talisman. When he knew he had finally done it, his will to stay conscious gave out.

And darkness took over.

Chapter 1681 Out of the Gate

﻿﻿1681 Out of the Gate

The Voidgate opened up and spat out 3 humans and a mouse.

Long Huan grabbed Hannah, and gently lay her on the ground before she could hit it hard. Zhan Luoyang and Whisker, however, weren't used to the workings of a Voidgate that well and didn't realize they were going to be thrown out with such force.

Whisker looked back at the Voidgate in surprise. His brother would have loved to experience that most certainly. The ever-

changing swirls that bent time and space around to throw them out here.

It had been a massive shockwave that sent them into the Voidgate, so Whisker hadn't been ready for what was coming. He wondered what had happened outside that sent them through.

"No, no, no," Long Huan quickly walked up to the Voidgate and stood there with a worried look on his face. "It's closed. The other side is closed. They can't come through."

He quickly brought out the Ivory sword, and dug it into the Voidgate, opening it. However, he hesitated to enter. On the other side was his father and if went through, he would be stuck, that too with the sword.

"I'll go!" Whisker said and turned to jump. However, before he could go through, the Voidgate's entrance enlarged and another figure was thrown out.

Liang Shufen tumbled on the ground of the cave, coming to a halt only when Zhan Luoyang stopped her.

Long Huan didn't understand how she came through. He looked through the Voidgate, ready to catch the other two that were hopefully coming through. But nobody came at all.

Whisker ran up to Liang Shufen who was standing up. "Old lady, where is my brother?" he asked her desperately. "Is he coming?"

"Huh?" Liang Shufen looked back, confused. "They were right behind me. His Majesty had to open the gate for us to get through first. Sister Yao Ning should have been right behind me."

They turned around and waited, hoping that Alex and Yao Ning would make it through. Long Huan communicated with Hannah, telling her what was going on. She would be the most confused among them all without any information.

Hannah panicked when she learned what was happening and how Alex was left behind with the Dragon Emperor on the other side. She knew how strong the man was. She had fought him and he had nearly killed her.

She tried gesturing, speaking, doing anything to convey the urgency in her thoughts, but there was nothing she could do.

The group waited however well they could, but nobody came out at all. In the end, they couldn't help but get worried.

"I'm going in," Whisker said and jumped into the Voidgate.

Nobody even had the time to stop him from leaving.

"Will he be okay?" Zhan Luoyang asked.

"He's a Seeking mouse. If anyone can figure out what happened on the other side without being caught, it would be him," Liang Shufen said.

"But it will take him a while to come back," Long Huan said. "We'll have to stay here for what… 3 more hours? That is if he can come back."

"We'll stay," Liang Shufen said, nervousness filling her voice.

Whisker returned 5 minutes later, appearing out of the Voidgate. When he arrived, he landed safely on the ground. "Brother is not there anymore," he said in a calm voice. "I could feel him in the distance, somewhere, but I don't know where."

"They're not there?" Liang Shufen asked. "What about elder Yao?"

"She wasn't there," Whisker said with a hesitating look "But… I did sense remnants of her aura in the air. I… I don't want to believe it, but… she might be dead."

Liang Shufen gasped, tears filling her eyes.

"There was also a pool of blood, on two spots. One of them was definitely brother's and another one felt like it belonged to a regular human," Whisker said. "There was no corpse."

"No…" Liang Shufen let out a low tone of sadness. Tears fell down the side of her face, dripping onto the sand below.

"Is Alex alive?" Long Huan asked.

"He's alive," Whisker said. "I would know if he died."

"But he's not okay?" Zhan Luoyang asked.

"I… I don't know," Whisker said. "He was too far away for me to tell. I… I believe he might have been taken by the Emperor. I could only tell the general direction through out bond, and not the distance."

"How do you even know all of these things?" Long Huan asked. "You only went away for 5 minutes."

"5 minutes?" Whisker looked up, confusion filling his worried face. "I was gone for nearly 3 hours. I only spent 5 minutes on the other side."

"What?" Long Huan didn't believe it. "How can that be possible? We clearly saw you go into just 5 minutes ago."

Whisker frowned a little.

"I remember hearing brother say something about Space and Time acting weirdly in the Void. Maybe we felt like it was a long time inside, but in fact, no time passed outside at all."

"Is that possible?" Long Huan couldn't help but ask.

"That's not what we should be concerned with right now. What do we do henceforth?" Zhan Luoyang asked. "I doubt we're going to return there. The Emperor might even be setting up watchers to see if we will come back."

"Maybe… maybe if I give this sword to my Father, he will let go of Alex," Long Huan said.

"I doubt it," Liang Shufen said. "If you go, there will be no trading. Your father will just capture you and take the sword from you."

Long Huan realized that would indeed be the case. "Yeah, no. We can't go back," he said in frustration. "I especially can't go back. But then what do we do now?"

"We need to tell sister Scarlet what is happening," Whisker said. "Maybe she can help."

"Yes, let's go," Liang Shufen quickly stood up and got ready to leave.

Long Huan saw the two of them walking out of the cave and quickly followed them. "Wait, who is this Scarlet woman?" he asked.

"She's the ruler of the Southern Continent," Liang Shufen said as she pulled out a boat of her own. "Her Majesty, the Phoenix."

"Oh!"

Long Huan quickly put Hannah onto the boat and gave the direction once everyone was on there. Liang Shufen flew them away.

Whisker pulled out the Immortal puppet from his storage bag. He had put the puppet inside when they were in the void, but here in the ocean now, they would need it.

The dark water spread as far as they could see with small islands being visible in the distance. They were south of the mainland, so it would take a while to return back to the mainland.

Liang Shufen and Zhan Luoyang fought off-sea beasts that tried to attack them, killing them easily. The Immortal puppet wasn't even needed at all.

Long Huan pointed in the distance. "That's the City of Flowers. We're here," he said.

Liang Shufen nodded. Now that she was here, she knew exactly where she had to go. Without waiting for anyone to find out they were there, she made her way to a teleportation building and directly took them to the Sunborn Sanctuary.

When they walked out, they were in the capital city with the golden dome taking over most of the scenery in the city.

Chapter 1682 In the Palace Hall

﻿﻿1682 In the Palace Hall

Liang Shufen took no time to leave the teleportation platform and fly the group over to the Palace. There were more guards and servants in the palace than ever, and many didn't recognize Liang Shufen at all.

Still, there was enough old blood that they quickly started welcoming the woman and started notifying the others of their arrival.

Long Huan followed close behind with Hannah half in his embrace. Whisker rode on Hannah's shoulders and behind them, Zhan Luoyang followed.

This was the first time she had ever left the Eastern Continent, so the changes for her were astounding, to say the least. Most of all, she felt the complete lack in the density of the Qi in this place.

She had heard of the reason why the other continents weren't on par with the Eastern Continent, and she finally got to experience the answer herself.

With such low Qi, it would be hard for anyone to produce fighters as capable as the ones in the Eastern Continent. That only made her more curious about Alex and how he came to be where had been.

"Who amongst the 8 is awake?" Liang Shufen asked one of the servants that was passing by.

"Most elders are in close cultivation, Elder Liang," the servant answered, failing to hide the curiosity of the individuals that were behind the woman. "But Elder Kang and Elder Ren should be available. Ah, Lady Lin is also available."

"Tell them all to meet me in the Palace hall immediately, even the ones that are in cultivation," the woman said. "Also, make sure the information about my arrival does not leave the palace. I will punish anyone who is found to spread the news of my arrival."

The servant gulped in near horror at the demand and nodded quickly.

Liang Shufen continued walking and soon they were all entering the throne room with seats all around. At the front were two seats, a seat of the King, and a seat of the Ruler.

On the seat of the king was the golden crown with rubies encrusted on them.

Everyone sat down around the room, waiting for the people who had been called to arrive.

Footsteps sounded outside soon enough and a young woman quickly walked in.

"Elder Liang, I heard you were back," a young woman walked in. "Is Father back too?"

Ronron wore a white dress with beautiful embroidery on it. She had a green shawl around her, and her hair was tied in a ponytail with a few jewelry on it.

She looked no different from how she did nearly 20 years ago when Alex and the rest had left. What had changed was her cultivation base. She had cultivated as well as anyone could have, and was now in the Saint Condensation 4th realm.

She had broken through to the Saint realm sometime in the past 2 decades.

"Greetings, Princess Maron." Liang Shufen got to her feet and bowed. "I'm afraid his Majesty hasn't returned."

"Oh! Since you came back, I thought…" Ronron sighed. "Never mind then. Did you come back alone?"

Long Huan was immediately confused. "Princess?" he turned to look at Liang Shufen. "Is she Alex's sister?" he asked. That would make her Hannah's cousin too.

"She said Father though," Zhan Luoyang muttered softly. Her confusion echoed Long Huan's confusion as well.

Liang Shufen heard their confusion and sighed. "Let me introduce her. This is Maron Benton, Princess of the Southern Continent, His Majesty's daughter."

"What?" Zhan Luoyang was the first to speak out loud. "His Majesty has a daughter? Wasn't he looking for a wife still? Does that mean there is a Queen too?"

"Oh? Father was looking for a wife?" Ronron asked curiously and turned to Liang Shufen for answers.

"Princess, I'm afraid I cannot answer your questions right now. I need to urgently talk with the other elders," Liang Shufen said.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Ah, I'm sorry if I was disturbing. Can I stay or should I leave?" she asked.

Liang Shufen didn't know what to make her do. She would find out sooner or later anyway. "You can stay," she said with a sigh.

More footsteps rang outside and Liang Shufen looked out. Only, the elders were still not here. Who had come instead was Graham and Helen.

"Is my son back?" Helen asked as soon as she walked into the room. She wore a pretty red robe and looked no older than her early 40s. Her cultivation base had also significantly improved, placing her in the middle of the Saint Foundation realms.

Graham, on the other hand, wore very simple clothes that made him look like a worker instead. He wore a blue robe with no sleeves or collar and showed a lot of chest too. His pants were short too, all of which showed his incredibly built muscles.

"Your Highness, His Majesty hasn't returned," Liang Shufen said, fearing the moment she would have to break the news. Before she could do that, however, Helen seemed to have started paying attention to the ones that were in the room.

"Who are they?" she asked.

"Ah, this is lady Zhan Luoyang of the Eastern Continent. She is engaged to the Crown Prince of the Azure Imperium," Liang Shufen introduced the woman.

"And this is—"

"Are you Alex's mother?" Long Huan asked.

Helen slowly nodded. "I am," she said. It was rare that she got to hear her son's name from someone else's mouth. It was usually 'the king' or 'His Majesty'.

Long Huan took a deep breath and spoke even as another figure walked in. "I am Long Huan, the 2nd prince of the Azure Imperium," he said, before pulling up Hannah from beside him. "And… I'm her Husband."

Helen gave a confused look. "Who is she?" she asked.

Long Huan slowly lifted Hannah's veil and then took off her mask. Her face was extremely wrinkled and her hair was white. But even so, Helen and Graham immediately recognized who she was.

However, before either could move, the newly arrived person had already moved before them.

Liz appeared next to her daughter in an instant, taking her into her embrace. "Hannah!" she screamed in both joy and sadness. "You're back. You're finally back, my child."

Liz's cries filled the room for a long moment. She was very much happy to have gotten her daughter back. She quickly wiped her tears and looked at Hannah before sadness welled up on her face.

"What is wrong with you, Hannah? Why won't you speak?" Liz asked, concerned.

"She cannot speak," Long Huan quickly said. "She… she is poisoned and can't do much of anything at all. She can only feel someone's touches and that's it."

"What?" Liz asked. "What do you mean she's poisoned? Who poisoned my daughter?"

Long Huan gulped. He had been skeptical for a while, but hearing the word 'daughter' come out of the woman's mouth confirmed his suspicions.

This was his Mother-in-law whom he had been fearing to meet for the past some time now.

He had expected many things about his Mother-in-law, many things that could be possible. But one thing he had never expected her to be was young.

Looking at her and then at Hannah, it was difficult to say which one of them was the child, and which one was the mother.

Chapter 1683 Plans

1683 Plans

Long Huan explained Hannah's situation to everyone who was there. By the end, everyone was either gasping or crying at what had happened.

A few of the other elders had arrived during the explanation and were waiting patiently for the rest of the information too.

"Then Alex said he could do something to heal her here and we ran away. But my father found us somehow, and the rest of us managed to get in through the Voidgate, but Alex and the other elder remained on the other side."

"What? What happened to him?" Helen asked, practically demanding an answer.

"We do not know," Liang Shufen said. "We believe the Dragon Emperor might have taken him prisoner."

"What about sister Yao?" Kang Xuefeng asked.

"I don't know," Liang Shufen said. "But... if little Whisker is correct, then sister Yao was killed in the battle. Only his Majesty is still alive."

"No!" Ren Guanting let out a low moan of sadness. She couldn't believe what she was hearing.

"Sister Yao is dead?" Tan Yang asked.

More and more of the elders from the council were making their way into the throne room.

Hou Xinya, Huang Chen, Gong Liuxian, Lei Zhong, and Qiu Jianhong were seated in the room with a look of horror on their faces.

Linlin stood by Helen, holding her up as the bad news came.

Liz sat to the side of her daughter, the two holding each other in their embrace. Long Huan had already told Hannah who was by her side, so she had a million thoughts going through her too.

"So, what do we do now?" Hou Xinya asked. "Do we demand that they give back our King? Will they accept the demand?"

"No, they will want something in return," Gong Liuxian said. "Do we have anything to trade with the Emperor?"

Liang Shufen turned toward Long Huan, who gulped a little. He looked at the faces of those who were angry and those who were saddened and decided to do what he had to.

"My father wants a sword I have," he quickly said. "There is a chance he will accept it in exchange for Alex."

"A sword?" Huang Chen turned toward Liang Shufen for some confirmation.

"We were attacked primarily because of this sword. That's how Lady Hannah came to be poisoned too. The Dragon Emperor very much wants this sword for some reason," Liang Shufen said. "I think His Majesty figured out why that was, but he never bothered to tell either of us."

"Tsk, if only we knew how important this sword was to the Emperor," another elder said.

"What sort of sword is it in the first place?" Liz asked from the side. "Show us."

Long Huan nodded and brought out the silver sword. He then gave a small explanation about the sword, which to his surprise, surprised no one.

"So it's just... that?" Ronron asked, her eyes full of tears.

"Just... just that?" Long Huan asked incredulously. "This can tear through space. It can open Voidgates. How can you call it just that?"

"What's so special about that?" Ronron asked. "I can do that too."

"You... what?" Long Huan refused to believe what he was hearing.

"Now is not the time to bicker, Ronron," Helen said softly. "We need to make a decision, and given how important the decision will have to be, we need to call on Her Majesty."

"You're right, Your Highness," Qiu Jianhong said. As the oldest person in the room now, he would need to make decisions. "Who will take the news to Her Majesty?"

"Let me do it," Linlin said. "I will go."

"I will go with you," Whisker said and jumped onto Linlin's shoulder.

Linlin petted Whisker gently while they left the room. As Alex's direct maid, she knew Whisker quite closely.

The elders started talking amongst themselves with Helen and Graham soon joining in. Liz, however, turned to look at Long Huan who had been fidgeting on his own.

"What did you say your name was? Long Huan?" Liz asked.

"Yes, uhh... Mother-in-law," Long Huan said meekly. Calling such a thing to someone who clearly looked younger than him felt quite weird to the young prince.

"And you are a prince of the Eastern Continent?" she asked.

"I am," Long Huan answered.

Liz seemed to give a lot of thought to those words. Long Huan wondered what she was thinking. Liz muttered something about wells and a crown, before turning to look at the young man.

"I won't accept you as my Son-in-law just yet. Once we're through this and I have my daughter back to normal, only when she tells me with her own mouth that she will agree to keep her marriage with you will I accept this," Liz said. She then turned to Ronron and called her.

"Ronron, come meet your aunt Hannah."

Helen arrived some time later and so did Graham. The others, however, had to wait for Her Majesty to come out and meet them.

Nearly half an hour passed before someone entered the room again. Linlin and Whisker returned, alone.

"Where's Her Majesty?" Qiu Jianhong asked, looking around.

"Her Majesty is not coming," Linlin said. "She told us that she can't come out right now. She's in the middle of her closed cultivation and the next time she came out, we would know about it."

"Huh?" the elders looked at her in surprise. They couldn't understand why Scarlet wouldn't come out when something so big had happened.

"Sister Scarlet is preparing to break through to the Immortal realm. She will come out once she becomes an Immortal," Whisker said. "She also mentioned that before she became an Immortal, she would be pretty useless in this situation anyway as the Dragon Emperor would be most definitely stronger than her. So she needs to do this."

"What about His Majesty then?" Liang Shufen asked.

"We'll have to deal with the situation for now," Whisker said. "But sister did tell us something useful. After hearing all the information we had, she deduced that the Dragon Emperor most likely wants to use the Sword to cut open the Soul Space of the dead Azure Dragon. If he succeeds there, he will be able to acquire all the treasures that the Azure Dragon had."

"Soul Space?" A few of them looked around with a confused look, but the remaining few seemed to know. So the ones that knew explained what a Soul Space was to the others.

"His Majesty opened one too," Liang Shufen said.

"Not that the information is helpful at all."

"Then we can trade the sword certainly," another elder said.

"But we can't just go on a trade like this. We are on the weaker side so the Dragon Emperor can just choose to not trade," another Elder said. "You know how he is. Remember how arrogant he was when he came to propose that we go to war against the Western Continent when we had the chance?"

The elders nodded.

"Then we get help," Whisker said. "It's not just brother Alex that is in danger right now. Brother Pearl is too. So, we should go to the Western Continent right now and ask the White Tiger there to aid us in getting him back."

Everyone agreed unanimously.

"Let's do it then."

Chapter 1684 Orders

1684 Orders

The Dragon Emperor flew out of the teleportation building in the Darkstone City with his son beside him.

The man felt agitated so very much. He had been so close to getting the sword again, and once again it slipped from his hands. And he didn't even get to completely kill the King that he had wanted to.

"Go and find out about the talisman," he ordered the Crown Prince.

Long Fangyu nodded meekly and quickly made his way to the talisman guild. He had told his father about the talismans Zhan Luoyang had received just the day before, and his father seemed to believe it was that talisman that had been used there.

He wondered if it was a mistake to tell his father what had happened the last few days exactly.

The Crown Prince still found himself conflicted on what was the right thing to do there. His duties and responsibilities clashed with one another, making him hesitant to be on either side.

Quickly, he returned back to his father after finding out what the Emperor wanted to know. "You were right father. She did buy a few teleportation talismans," he answered him.

"Do you know where he went then?" the Dragon Emperor asked patiently.

"No," the Crown Prince answered. "It was set to randomly send the person to the east, with little care for where they appeared. The randomness was by design it seemed. But more than likely, if someone used the talisman, they would appear far out in the ocean."

The Dragon Emperor slowly nodded, a thoughtful look appearing on his face. "So there is a more than likely chance that he fell into the ocean," he said. "I should be considering him dead in the state he is in, but I cannot take any chances. I must kill him no matter what."

The Crown Prince looked at his father. Even now, the man wasn't worried that he had attacked the king of a different continent, and only seemed to be worried that he didn't get to kill him properly.

"Tell the Scale legion to comb through the entire ocean and find him," the Dragon Emperor made the command. "He had a strong body cultivation, so the chances of him being alive is high. So, if he's alive, I want to see him back here."

"What if he's dead?" the Crown Prince asked.

"If he's dead, then I want to see his corpse," the man said. "If he's eaten, I want the sea beast that took him down. That boy has enough mysteries about him that even gaining the tiniest bit of it would be very helpful for us."

The Dragon Emperor nodded to himself before going back into the teleportation building to teleport back to the Dragon Capital. The Crown Prince followed behind him, giving him distance.

The Crown Prince followed all the way back to the Dragon Palace while giving out commands that the Dragon Emperor had made. He sent commands to the heads to command the Scale legion to search for the King of the Southern Continent in secret.

He let them know what his status was like and how they should go about finding him.

After following his father for a while, he stopped when the Dragon Emperor did too.

"Those 2 dozen alchemists and guards of his are still in the Alchemy school, are they not?" the Dragon Emperor asked with a thoughtful look on his face.

"I... I believe they still are there," the Crown Prince said.

"Good, make the elders there confine those people to the school. No one is allowed to leave or talk to each other. They are also to not contact the outer world while they're there."

"That's..." the Crown Prince felt a little hesitant, but he had to give up in the end. "I will pass along that message."

And he did.

He hated himself again for being a coward and not questioning his father, but the part of him that was a Crown Prince coldly thought through things and knew that this was the best way to deal with the situation.

They arrived inside the palace, at the hall that his father always liked to remain at in his free time.

The Dragon Emperor lay down on the couch to relax from everything that had happened that day and started to relax.

However, the Crown Prince couldn't find himself relaxing at all. In fact, he was more stressed than even when he asked Zhan Luoyang for her hand in marriage.

"Father, what are we going to do about Huan?" the Crown Prince asked. "Are we going to let him be like this?"

He hoped the answer was yes, for some reason unknown to him.

"I will send some to find him," the Dragon Emperor said. "But our first priority must be the dying King. Once I get rid of that king... I can finally feel safe."

Long Fangyu frowned and thought about what Alex had spoken about while dying. "Father," he called out mid-

contemplation on whether or not to bring up this topic. His mind said he needed to keep it quiet, but his heart said he needed to know what was going on.

His heart won.

"Is the Azure Dragon truly dead?" he asked.

"Hmm?" the Dragon Emperor turned to look at the Crown Prince and scoffed. "How could you not figure out that after all this time? I thought you were better than your brother when it came to these sorts of things."

The Crown Prince felt hurt by his father's words, but this was not the right time to show it. He steeled his resolve and continued.

"And you killed him?" he asked his father. He remembered Alex's words and how his father had killed the Azure Dragon. His father had rejected those claims, but... maybe it was true.

"Of course, I didn't," the Dragon Emperor quickly answered. "Do you think I am stupid to try and kill an Immortal dragon?"

"N-no," the Crown Prince replied quickly. "I just thought... you said you didn't intend to kill him, so that means..."

"He died..." the Dragon Emperor got silent for a second, recalling the memories of that day. "He died after he tried to kill me. He attacked, and a few moments later the Heavens killed him because he dared to attack me."

"He... attacked you?" the Crown Prince asked. "How are you still alive?"

"I shouldn't be," the Dragon Emperor answered. "But I am... thanks to your mother."

"Mother?" The Crown Prince asked. "What do you mean?"

"Your mother jumped in to save me," the Dragon Emperor sighed as he said. "If not for her, I would be dead right now."

"I'm sorry, what? Mother died to... no, mother died to her tribulation lightning," he said hastily.

"We lied," the Dragon Emperor said, not bothering to explain anymore.

"But why?" the Crown prince asked. "Why would she die? Why would the Azure Dragon attack you? Mother went to break through, so why did it all happen? It makes no sense?"

"It all makes sense," the Dragon Emperor said. "Everything makes sense. You just can't make sense of it by yourself."

"Then help me understand," the Crown Prince shouted.

The Dragon Emperor gave him a weird look before nodding slowly. "Fine, if you want to know, you shall know," he said. "I will tell you everything."

Chapter 1685 The Past

?1685 The Past

Nearly 9000 years ago, in the Northern Continent.

The Crown Prince of the Eastern Continent, Long Tiankong, arrived atop the Intercontinental Teleportation formation of the Northern Continent. Alongside him were the delegates of this visit as well as the many participants for the competition that was to be held in the upcoming days.

The Intercontinental Tournament was the biggest event of all time in the world, and the strongest cultivators from all the continents were joining this competition to prove themselves.

Long Tiankong looked toward the front and noticed a muscular man making his way toward him with a group of people following behind him.

"Haha, welcome to the Northern Continent, my Friends," the man gave a loud laugh as he spoke.

The Crown Prince moved forward to speak. "Thank you for welcoming us to your land, senior Kuangren," he said with a small bow. New n0vel chapters are published on

"You are always welcomed, Your Highness," Xue Kuangren, leader of the Snow Immortal sect spoke.

The Crown Prince remained polite to this man, since for all intents and purposes, he was the Emperor of this continent.

"Please, let us clear the formation so more of our friends can arrive," Xue Kuangren spoke and the Crown Prince nodded. Once everyone was away from the formation, it glowed once again, and people of the Southern Continent arrived.

Long Tiankong was a little surprised by their arrival as everyone who did arrive was mostly… weak. They were so very weak. He would've thought they would be stronger.

Then, once they were cleared, the teleportation formation glowed once again and people of the Western Continent arrived. And to everyone's surprise, it was led by a man very handsome man in a white robe with golden hair falling to his shoulders.

Peculiarly, he wore two golden earrings on either side, with a bulbous end to it which held golden spikes.

"Greetings friends, I am Xue Kuangren of the Snow Immortal sect," the man introduced himself to them. "Welcome to the Northern Continent."

The blonde man simply waved his hands. "It's been a while since I've come here. Take care of them in my absence," the man said and disappeared from everyone's presence.

Long Tiankong couldn't help but be surprised by the man's instant departure. How was he so fast? The feeling he got from this man was almost the same one he got whenever he visited the secret realm where Qing Tianchui, the Azure Dragon lived.

'No way,' Long Tiankong thought. 'Was that… the white tiger?'

Others remained in shock as well. It was only after a while that they were led out of there to go away.

"The tournament will take place north of here, in one of the Snow Immortal sect's branches, close to the Domain of the Black Tortoise. Let us proceed."

Large ships were brought out for each of the groups and they left. The path to the North went over numerous snowy mountains, surprising everyone how cold it was here.

Almost all of the people from the Southern Continent and Western Continent had never seen snowy regions, so they were more excited about it than most.

Along the way, Long Tiankong's ship had to go through a strong snow blizzard, that filled everything around them in absolute white. The blizzard lasted for such a long time, that he saw one of the painters that had come along to the tournament bringing out his tools to start painting the blizzard.

Long Tiankong couldn't understand how drawing a page all white could even be considered a painting at all. He decided to ignore it.

Sometime later, they arrived in the city called Heaven's Frost City, named after the branch of the Snow Immortal sect, the Heaven's Frost sect.

The tournament was to start in 5 days, so everyone got some free time for themselves. Long Tiankong wanted to see what a city on this continent looked like, but he was called by Xue Kuangren to talk for a while in the sect's garden.

Their conversation went from how the Dragon Emperor was doing to plans of making more connections between the two continents. It was a rather interesting talk to Long Tiankong who was looking forward to becoming the Dragon Emperor himself once his father was ready to leave the throne to him.

During his time there, Long Tiankong managed to see a beautiful woman walk the garden, surprised by her ethereal beauty.

"Who's that?" he couldn't help but ask.

"That…" Xue Kuangren's face fell a little. "She… she's one of our elders. You shouldn't disturb her."

The woman seemed to have heard the talk and quickly made her way toward the two. She smiled toward the two and folded her hands. "You can introduce who I am to others, you know. I never asked any of you to keep my secret."

The woman turned toward Long Tiankong. "I am Xue Yu'er," the woman said. "You seem like a talented young man, maybe I'll see you again in the future."

Long Tiankong quickly stood and bowed a little. "Greetings, Elder. I am Long Tiankong, the Crown Prince of the Azure Imperium," he quickly introduced himself. He still didn't understand what the woman meant by seeing him again in the future. She made it sound quite an impossibility that could be made possible because it was him.

"Oh, the Crown Prince?" the woman said with a surprise. "Who is the Dragon Emperor now?"

"My father," Long Tiankong said, wondering why it wasn't obvious to the woman.

"No, I meant the name," she asked.

"Long Gongmin," Long Tiankong answered.

"And before that?" the woman asked.

"Long Yuexin was the Dragon Emperor 6 thousand years ago," Long Tiankong answered.

The woman frowned. "Many must have changed, huh?" she thought. "What about Long Rentuan?" she asked.

"That was the Dragon Emperor from 4 generations ago. He reached Immortality and left the realm nearly 25 thousand years ago," Long Tiankong answered.

"Oh, he did? Good for him," the woman said. "That one was a pretty face for sure. I wonder what realm he went to."

"Senior," Xue Kuangren said softly.

"Alright, alright. I'm leaving," she said. "Have fun, little prince. If you do end up in the Spring Water world, look for me. I will help you with what I can."

Then the woman left.

It was a long time before the Crown Prince realized that the woman he had been talking to just then was most likely an Immortal.

Long Tiankong went on the walk around the city as he had wanted to sometime later, going to different shops and establishments to see how they differed from the ones in the Eastern Continent.

He was truly surprised by how much worse the Northern Continent was overall when compared to the Eastern Continent. He knew very well that it had to do with the amount of Qi being much less, but the surprise was still there even after the explanation.

As he continued on his stroll through the city, he ended up in front of a small building that claimed to do something rather interesting.

It claimed to tell one's future.

Interested, Long Tiankong went into the building and quickly found himself sitting in front of a man who looked no older than him, but also somehow the oldest being he had ever seen.

Chapter 1686 The Future

?1686 The Future

Long Tiankong looked at the young man who sat in front of him, wearing simple robes that wouldn't even belong to the lowest servant back in the Palace. The young man had jet-black hair and a rather tired posture.

He had every reason to just stand up and walk away, but something about the man made him want to sit and continue. Now that he was looking at the man, he looked middle-aged too.

No, he somehow looked ageless.

'How is he doing that?' the Crown Prince was very intrigued by the situation. 'Formation? Talisman?' He discreetly looked around the room but found nothing.

"Can you really tell my future?" the Crown Prince asked the future teller. If the Crown Prince was to be fair to himself, he thought he was wasting his time. But this was fun enough that he was fine with wasting it.

"I can tell what I can tell," the young man said. "It is your choice to believe if you want to or not."

Long Tiankong couldn't help but nod. "How do you do this then?" he asked. "Should I give you my hands? Or will you need to grab my head?"

The young man closed his eyes for a moment and opened them, his gaze seemingly looking into the distance rather than at the Crown Prince.

The Crown Prince felt so very naked under that gaze and started feeling awkward. But he didn't move from where he sat and waited for the man to start speaking.

"It is done," he said. "I have seen what I can."

"Oh," the Crown Prince got closer. "What did you see?"

The black-haired man leaned back and put his hands forth. "Pay me first and I'll tell you," he said.

The Crown Prince was a little taken aback. "Pay you first? I want to hear what you have to say before I pay you," he said.

"No, I need to get paid first," the man demanded.

"But what if you speak nonsense? Can I get what I paid back then?" the Crown Prince asked.

"You cannot," the man replied. "As I said, I will tell what I can tell. It is your decision to believe it or not. Now, pay me or leave."

The Crown Prince thought he was being robbed in a rather elaborate way and pulled out a few spirit stones. He dropped them on the man's hands and waited.

The future teller looked at the spirit stones with his deep black eyes. There were exactly 7 Saint Spirit Stones. "Is this all you will pay me?" he asked.

The Crown Prince frowned. He wanted more? Like hell, he was going to get more for this sham. "Yes, that is all," he said.

The man nodded and pocketed the spirit stones and then spoke. "When the sun is swallowed in the middle of the day, while you are on the island where the Dancing Lily blooms, you will find the one you will call your wife."

The young prince was dazed for a few seconds. "Sun is swallowed?" he couldn't help but utter the words back. "What does that mean?"

"I cannot tell you the meaning," the man replied.

"What about where the dancing lily blooms? Where is that island?" the prince asked.

"I do not know," the man answered.

"But you said that is where I'll find my wife. Then do you know who my wife will be?" the prince asked.

"I do," the man said.

"Who?" the Crown Prince asked.

"I cannot tell you," the man said. "Your payment doesn't cover it."

"Just tell me," the Crown Prince said, "here, I'll give you more if you need." He brought out hundreds of Saint Spirit stones.

The man looked at the spirit stones in front of him and shook his head. "You can only have your future told once from me. If you were fated to learn more, you would've paid more at the start. Take your money and leave. Our exchange is now complete."

"Complete?" the Crown Prince gritted his teeth in anger. "What do you mean complete? You told me nothing of importance."

"I told you all I had to," the man said. "Now, will you leave or should I call the guards."

The Crown Prince grumbled something under his breath and quickly got up to leave. He wanted to hear more, but he wasn't going to throw away his dignity to learn more.

Unhappy, he left the building.

Long Tiankong didn't want to go around the town anymore, so he went back to where he had been staying to calm down. He had been just about to forget about it when Xue Kuangren came to talk to him and asked him about his visit to the city.

"Oh right, there was this one shop I went to. One that said it would tell me the future," the Crown Prince said. "Is it real? I feel like I was ripped off or something."

"Future telling? Oh that shop, yes. It probably was a rip-off, but there is a chance of it being true too," the man said.

"Don't you ban such shops? How can you even know if it is true?" the crown Prince asked.

The man sighed. "That man gives all his earnings to the poor and helpless, so we don't really go for him," he said. "If he took a lot from you though, I can send someone to—"

"No, no. It wasn't about the money," the Crown Prince said quickly. "Don't worry about that. I was just concerned regarding whether what I heard was the truth or not."

"Maybe it was, maybe it was not." Xua Kuangren shrugged. "If you really want to know about your future, you should visit a location to the west. A place called the Nine Wells of Time. It can tell you your near future and your distant future."

"Are you being serious?" the Crown Prince asked. "Have you done it before?"

"I have," Xue Kuangren said. "It was what told me I was going to be a Sect Leader of the Snow Immortal sect in just 2 thousand years. And it also tells me that I will face the Immortal tribulation lightning in another thousand years."

"What? How long have you been alive?" the Crown Prince couldn't help but ask.

"If the prophecy is true, I will have broken through to the Immortal realm in less than 3500 years," the man said with a wide smile.

"And... does it tell you if you succeed or not?" the Crown Prince asked. Curiosity was getting the better of him.

"Of course I will," Xue Kuangren said. "I will survive and go on to become so strong that everyone will consider me a threat."

"What else?" Long Tiankong couldn't help but ask.

"Well, the prophecies are vague, so you cannot tell for certain. But there is one that talks about an alchemist of two worlds and two names, who will solve my greatest plight and send me off to a better place," Xue Kuangren said. "I think that means I have to look for good alchemists."

Xue Kuangren laughed and said his farewells for the day, leaving the Crown Prince alone.

Lost in his thoughts, Long Tiankong decided for the next day. He would go visit the Nine Wells of Time.

Chapter 1687 Divinations and Prophecies

?1687 Divinations and Prophecies

Long Tiankong arrived at the hill where the 9 wells were kept. He had thought he had arrived early, but there were many people already visiting the wells even before sunrise.

By the time it was his turn, the sun was already up.

Long Tiankong skipped the first 3 wells as they had nothing to do with the future and started from the 4th one. He knew he was only going to get one chance to go through them each, so he made sure to be calm when drinking the water from that well.

Flashes went through his mind the moment he drank it. Vague images and feelings.

He felt victorious. He saw himself standing proud. He could vaguely feel a feeling of superiority.

The emotions and images faded soon enough as he came out of the short trance.

Long Tiankong stood there, wondering what they meant. Did it have something to do with the upcoming tournament? Were they going to win?

He was told before coming that the first 3 wells that told the future only did so for immediate ones. They would be fulfilled in a short while. Whether that short while was based on anything or not, people weren't sure.

What was certain was that the first well most definitely told the most immediate future. Which meant his future had to be for the tournament.

'So, is this real?' Long Tiankong wondered.

He would have to find that later on. He moved on and drank the water from the next well.

Darkness, fear, love. A woman standing in front of him. Flowers swaying in a field. World ending.

Long Tiankong came out of that trance in shock. A feeling of dread filled him as if what he saw was the last thing he would ever see. It was hard to believe that he had most likely seen his own death.

'No,' he thought to himself. 'That cannot be. I don't want to die so soon.'

His eyes went toward the other wells. He needed to know. He needed to know if there was something after this.

He rushed to the next well and drank its water. Immediately, more visions and feelings filled him.

He was sad for a loss and happy for a gain. He saw the crown and a throne. He saw himself standing atop everyone. He saw a truth that would give him peace.

Long Tiankong came out of the trance this time with a rather solemn look on his face. So, there was more to him than what he saw before, if he was to trust these visions anyway.

'So I'm not going to die?' he thought. Either the two futures contradicted each other, or they were never meant to really be true. There was also the possibility of him understanding them wrong.

Long Tiankong sighed and stopped, looking at the last 3 wells. They were considered the most important ones. The ones that would tell the most important futures in the forms of prophecies. He could leave now and never feel the burden of potentially knowing what was coming.

He could live obliviously.

But no. He had come this far. He knew if he left now, he would regret not knowing what his life would have been.

So, steeling his resolve, he went over to the next 3 wells and jumped into them, one after another, where he heard 3 different prophecies.

When he came back out of the last one, his face was a grim one. He had not liked the last prophecy at all, for it told of his end.

'No, that cannot come true,' he thought. If luck was on his side, then these were just hallucinations of his mind, induced by whatever was in the water.

Thinking so, he left the wells.

Only, 3 weeks later. They were victorious in the tournament, beating every other continent in almost all of the various competitions. His spirits were as high as it ever was, and they all returned back to the Eastern Continent with their heads held high.

It was only when it all calmed down that the Crown Prince realized that the future from the first of the 6 wells had come true.

That troubled him for many days before he came to terms with the fact that what he had seen had most likely been the future, and as such, what was coming next was even more harrowing.

He lived days and days with the single fear of death. The only form of consolation was that if his death was to come, it would come once the other 4 divinations were proven true.

He believed the wells to show one's future in chronological order and as such he had nothing to worry about just yet. That did little to quench his fear of his death though.

He threw himself into other things to occupy his time, one of the main ones being Alchemy. He found himself to have talent in Alchemy, so he trained in it, learning for more than just distraction.

Long Tiankong learned to live with that fear, looking for ways how they could possibly come true.

Some hundred years passed with him feeling this way.

Long Tiankong got ready to depart for the Martial Transcendence Ground for what would most likely be his final time there. He was reaching close to the Saint Transformation realm, and he didn't want to bother with the secret realms anymore.

He had his duties as a Crown Prince to take care of.

Still, one last time, he decided to enjoy it and see how strong he was.

Queen Fen of the Fen Kingdom gave a small introduction to anyone who wasn't aware and let them enter.

Long Tiankong made the most of his days inside the secret realm, fighting those who met and gaining as many points as he could. He fought in the sky, on top of mountains, by the river, on top of trees, and in any other place he could come across.

Then, one day, he came across a field of flowers that gave him a weird sense of having been there before. Even though, he couldn't possibly have come here before.

As an Alchemist, he knew the name of the flower too.

Dancing Lily.

"Hey! You looking for a fight or what?" A voice called him from behind him.

Long Tiankong slowly turned around to find a young woman standing behind him, with a sword in her hand.

This was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. He stared at her, his eyes unblinking. Half of him was surprised by her beauty.

And the other half dreaded what this all meant.

He remembered the young man he had met in the Northern Continent and the future he told.

On the island where the Dancing Lily blooms, you will find the one you will call your wife.

"What's your name?" Long Tiankong asked the woman after a particularly long time.

"Hmm? I'm Jie Tianyue," the woman introduced herself. "Do you need my name to accept my challenge?"

Long Tiankong said nothing and instead thought about something. The prophecy the man had said had included more. It also said—

His thoughts fell apart when darkness took over the land and he looked up to see that something had indeed swallowed the sun.

Chapter 1688 More Divinations Come True

?1688 More Divinations Come True

Long Tiankong stared at the sky as the sun was no more. All he saw up there was darkness, a void of nothingness. He saw death.

There was no sun in the sky. No moon, no stars. Nothing.

He stood watching, wondering if this was how it all ended. If his prophecies that he worried so much about meant nothing in the end as this was where it would all end.

He stood there for nearly an hour before it passed and the sun showed up once again.

Long Tiankong came out of his stupor and quickly looked around the sky, searching for what it might have been. He saw something moving away toward the north. Something... massive.

And to his surprise, the thing nearly blended in with the blue sky, with only a part of its outline showing through at the end. What he saw there shocked him even more, however.

Was... was that... was that a beast in the sky? No, he couldn't even say it was in the sky. It was somewhere beyond the sky, out in the space where no one could go to.

And it was a beast. While he couldn't make much of what he saw, he could make up a tail and two hind legs.

How was there a beast in the sky? How was it alive? How was it breathing?

Long Tiankong couldn't understand what he was looking at. His mind didn't work the way he wanted it to right then.

Finally, he gave up on trying to understand and looked around. He hadn't realized when, but at some point, the girl who had been there was clinging to him, shivering still.

He then realized he was shaking too.

The two comforted each other in silence and later decided to stick together just in case something like that happened once again. Long Tiankong got to know the girl more, and the more he learned about her, the more he realized he did find her attractive, both in appearance and personality.

He didn't care that she was a commoner who had lucked out by being accepted to a sect. He didn't care that she had nothing to her name except for herself.

All he cared about was who she was, and so about 15 years after their first meeting, he asked her to marry him.

250 years after that, Jie Tianyue married the Crown Prince of the Empire and entered the royal family.

Long Tiankong was very happy with what was happening in his life. However, in the back of his head, that one worry lingered, clawing at him slowly, digging deeper and deeper.

Another prophecy had come true. The future he feared was becoming real.

The feeling got worse when another one of the divinations came true.

Nearly 300 years after Long Tiankong's marriage, he ended up having to take over the throne his father left and become the Dragon Emperor himself.

The official reason given for the previous Emperor leaving the throne was that he had had enough of becoming an Emperor and wanted to live the remainder of his life in peace.

However, the real reason had been that the Emperor had fallen during his attempt at breaking through to Immortality.

Long Tiankong was sad about his father's passing but was also happy to see himself become the Emperor. There was never a doubt in his mind that he would become the Emperor, but until it actually happened, there was still a chance that his throne would be stolen by jealous cousins and others of his bloodline.

He was crowned the Emperor with a lot of fanfare that sent the empire into celebration for days. Fireworks shot through the sky at night.

The Azure Dragon himself arrived to bless the coronation.

Cheers, glory, and excitement filled the upcoming day for Long Tiankong. He was busied soon enough with new duties and responsibilities, barely having any time to even worry about the divinations and prophecies.

As an emperor, he made some mistakes here and there, but he learned from them and did better. He performed his duties to the best of his abilities and soon learned just how strong he was.

His words were true and whatever he wanted happened.

However, one problem did occur that he couldn't fix by just being an Emperor. No matter how hard they tried, Jie Tianyue could not get pregnant at all.

At first, they simply thought it was something that could be dealt with some time and small medicines. However, as time went on, they started moving on to more desperate options and ended up needing better treatments.

That was when they finally learned that Jie Tianyue had complications in her body, stopping her from bearing a child. Complications that the empire's renowned physicians and alchemists couldn't heal.

The news soon escaped from the close circles it had to be kept to but was held in from being leaked to the public. However, that had done all the damage it could.

Long Tiankong's subjects started mentioning in his presence that he should get concubines for himself. When told that he didn't love anyone but his wife, they told him that getting a concubine was not about love but about keeping alive a bloodline.

Long Tiankong ignored them all until his own wife started saying the same things.

"Dear, the Empire needs a prince and I cannot give you one," she said. "I know you love me, but you have a duty to the empire too. You must do what needs to be—"

"No!" Long Tiankong said. "I won't. We will have children and we will have 3." He grumbled. No matter how much he hated himself for him, he knew that to be true.

For he had heard it in the first of the three prophecies.

Three shall be your children; Men of honor. The One that rules, the one that leaves, and the one that is left behind.

"We will have them," he said. "I will visit his Majesty and see if he can help us somehow."

The very next day, Long Tiankong used his medallion to visit the Azure Dragon's realm.

The Azure Dragon's realm was one of beauty and majesty. A ring of forest encircled a ring of flower fields that encircled a massive pond, at the center of which was a massive establishment where the Azure Dragon stayed.

The Dragon Palace, in a way, had been made as a replica of this place, but a much worse version of it.

There were many beasts in the secret realm like there always were. The Azure Dragon needed people tending to his place and he trusted the beasts to do it.

Long Tiankong ignored the beasts and walked up to the edge of the pond before bowing steeply in the direction of where the Azure Dragon would be.

"Your Majesty! This humble servant of yours requests an audience," the Dragon Emperor said to the Azure Dragon.

After a short delay, a voice came from close by.

"Stand up, young man," the voice said. "Tell me what troubles you."

The Dragon Emperor slowly looked up at the bright blue-haired man with a handsome face and impeccable proportions, like a man chiseled by the best stonemason.

Qing Tianchui had arrived before him.

Chapter 1689 Change Fate

?1689 Change Fate

The Azure Dragon's blue hair was much more vibrant than the Dragon Emperor's and he also looked a lot younger than him. His soft blue robes seemed to be made of a much better quality as well.

"Your Majesty," the Dragon Emperor quickly spoke. "I-I need your help."

"Calm down," the Azure Dragon said. "What's wrong? Tell me slowly."

"It's my wife," the Dragon Emperor started and explained the situation in its entirety. "Please, tell me what I must do. Is there anything I can do?"

The Azure Dragon let a frown show on his face. "This... is not a matter I am familiar with. I, unfortunately, don't have any alchemy skills despite my roots. You should try asking the senior in the Realm of Trials for now. If that doesn't work, I have a few more ideas."

"The Realm of Trials?" The Dragon Emperor was a little confused. "Ah, you mean the Azure Dragon soul in there? I see, I will do that."

"Go," the Azure Dragon said. "You should be able to enter there with those swords of yours."

The Dragon Emperor nodded. He left the secret realm, leaving for the Xuang Kingdom in the north where King Xuang governed the region of gold. He used his Ivory sword to tear into the realm's spatial walls and entered to find the dragon soul inside of it.

After relaying all he could and asking for help, he was let down in the end when the dragon soul told him that he couldn't help him.

The Dragon Emperor returned to the Azure Dragon's realm and told him all of this.

"Hmm, let me try the other way then," the Azure Dragon said. "Tell your wife to prepare to leave. I will take her to the other monarchs and see if they can help."

"Other monarchs? You're taking her to the other continents?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

"Yes, that is the only way," the Azure Dragon said. "Why? Do you believe it to be a mistake?"

"No," the Dragon Emperor said quickly. "I was just surprised. Please do what you think is best in this situation."

"Get the teleportation formation ready as well. We will leave as soon as possible."

The Azure Dragon left the very next day with Jie Tianyue and didn't return for nearly 3 years. The Dragon Emperor was worried even though he knew he had no reason to.

3 years later, they were back with good news that the Empress had been healed. The Azure Dragon left after the Dragon Emperor thanked him.

"We went to the Western Continent in the end," Jie Tianyue explained. "The Phoenix couldn't help us, so we went over to the White Tiger's place. One of the White Tiger's wives helped me and made a pill for me. I've eaten the pill and it's started restoring me, but it will still take me centuries to get with a child."

"Centuries?" the Dragon Emperor said. "That's fine. As long as we can have children. But... did you really go to the White Tiger?"

"Yes, why?" Jie Tianyue asked, curious. She had noticed for a while that the Dragon Emperor didn't like it when someone mentioned the White Tiger. She had been wondering for a while why that was.

"No reason," the Dragon Emperor said.

"Tell me," Jie Tianyue said. "I know something is troubling you. Just tell me what it is."

"It's..." the Dragon Emperor, after contemplating for a long time, decided to tell his wife exactly what was troubling him.

Jie Tianyue couldn't help but be shocked at the accuracy of the divinations and worried about the prophecies.

"The first 3 have come true already," the Dragon Emperor said. "Now I'm waiting for 3 more."

"That... surely that can't be right," the Empress said. "There has to be a way to stop it."

"I don't know if there is," The Dragon Emperor answered. "It keeps coming true no matter what. It is true."

"No, you're just saying this because of one dead man," Jie Tianyue said. "You should stop trusting him."

"No, I'm not," the Dragon Emperor said before pausing. "Wait, dead man? Who?"

"Didn't you say you learned about this from that leader of the Snow Immortal sect?" Jie Tianyue asked.

"Yes," the Dragon Emperor said.

"Well, he's dead. Did he see his death coming?" the Empress asked.

The Dragon Emperor was shocked. "What? No, that can't be. He told me he would go on to live for a long time," he said.

"He's dead. And he didn't just die, he took his sect along with him. It happened years ago, the Northern Continent is a mess right now from what I managed to gather during my brief visit there," the Empress explained. She had visited the continent with the Azure Dragon to see if the Black Tortoise could heal her.

"Huh? But... but he told me about his..." The Dragon Emperor's mind spun thoughts faster than he could speak. What did it mean that Xue Kuangren was dead? What about his future? About becoming immortal?

Had he lied to him? That couldn't be. He had no reason to lie. In fact, he was even correct on when he would break through to the Immortal realm.

However, he had died. Albeit for the worse, he had changed his fate. He had changed his destiny.

He had overcome his own prophecy.

"Then I can do it..." the Dragon Emperor said softly. A sense of relief filled him as if something very heavy had been lifted off of him. "I... I don't have to be confined to my fate then. I can overcome this."

Jie Tianyue could feel the relief in her husband. "What was it that had been troubling you this much, dear?" she asked him. "What did the prophecies say?"

"The last one told me how I would die," the Dragon Emperor said. "I've been trying not to think about it all this time, but I'm still worried. But... if it is true that I can do something about it then maybe I can change my future."

"What prophecies are these exactly?" she asked him. "The exact words I mean."

"There were 3 of them," the Dragon Emperor said. "The first two went something like this."

"Three shall be your children; Men of honor. The One that rules, the one that leaves, and the one that is left behind."

The Empress gave a surprised look. "So that's why you said we would have 3," she said. "But what does it mean that you would leave behind one? What about the one that leaves?"

"I don't know," the Dragon Emperor said. "We will have to wait for it to come true if we want to know."

The Empress nodded. "The others?" she asked.

"The next one goes: By your hands shall they fall and 7 colorful lights shall take their place," he said. "I have no idea what this means at all."

"7 colorful lights?" the Empress was confused too. "Yeah, that doesn't make sense for me too. What about the last one? The one you say tells of your death."

The Dragon Emperor sighed and spoke the final prophecy.

"Above your realm shall they proclaim your end. A King, A son of a King, and a Tiger pure White."

Chapter 1690 Prince and Kings

?1690 Prince and Kings

Nearly 6000 years ago.

The Empire celebrated the birth of Prince Fangyu. The celebrations lasted for weeks, with many people from outside the Continent coming to give their congratulations to the Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor revealed the prince on his first birthday a year later, and he gave him one of the most important treasures that someone from the Imperial Royal family could hold.

The Ebony Sword.

Nobody really knew what it meant to have that sword. To them, it was just a symbol of the Empire, a heirloom to keep. Still, they celebrated the occasion.

The Emperor was happy with his first son, and the Empress was even happier. With the birth of the prince, they were both relieved from the stresses that had plagued them for ages.

Now, the Dragon Emperor wouldn't be suggested to find himself a concubine every time he met someone important.

As the new prince grew, it gave the Emperor and Empress the time they needed to sort out the other problems that they had been ignoring for a while.

Having learned that one could change their fates if they wanted to, the Dragon Emperor and Empress had begun making plans to protect themselves from whatever was to come.

There were no other concerns for the two than the final prophecy; the one that claimed the Dragon Emperor would die at the hand of a King, a son of a King, and what they figured was the White Tiger.

Whether the prophecy referred to a single being or a group of 3, neither of the pair could tell. What they could tell, they became aware of.

The Dragon Emperor didn't know exactly what to do with the information. If a King or his child was to be trouble for him, then how was he to tell which one it was? He couldn't just get rid of every King... could he?

The preparations were made early by the two as they planted seeds in all of the existing 6 Kingdoms of the Continent. For the Azure Kingdom, he simply manipulated the political situation there to put someone else on the throne.

For the other 5, however, subtle maneuvers weren't going to be of much help. He couldn't get the 5 kingdoms to face a downfall either as someone else would take their place and he would have to worry about them once again.

No, he had to do something forceful, and he did.

Making claims that there was a rebellion being planned and showing proof of it through the seeds he planted, the Dragon Emperor destroyed the royal families of all 5 Kingdoms at once.

The 5 Kings and Queens made their appeals, saying that they weren't planning any such thing; but with the proof in hand, no one could take their side at all. The Kings and Queens were executed, and anyone who could be considered an heir to the throne was killed along with them.

The thorough extermination of so many people was the most extreme thing the Dragon Emperor could have ever imagined doing, and the success of it made him bolder.

The Azure Dragon heard of the event and was very angry with the Dragon Emperor for doing what he did, but after hearing the story that the Dragon Emperor had formulated, he let the situation be.

Still, the Dragon Emperor was now forced to calm an Empire that he had sent into turmoil. He knew the perfect way to do it.

The Kingdoms were changed, and their names were different from before. Instead of being named for their Kings, they were now named after colors.

"5 colors," the Dragon Emperor said softly. "The prophecy mentioned something about 7 colorful lights. We are changing the future." He was very much happier as a person despite knowing what atrocity he had committed.

Now, he was willing to do even more to keep it going.

Nothing eventful happened in the time it took for the Empire to settle from the changes and go back to being how it used to be. Everything was calm now, but one thing did continue to bother the Dragon Emperor.

He had made changes to the Kings and Queens so they wouldn't be a threat. They weren't allowed to marry or have kids, and they weren't allowed to cultivate past the Saint Soul realm. If they wanted to do either, they had to abdicate from the throne and lose their status.

The Dragon Emperor believed it to be the perfect way to deal with the prophecy, but the problem came when he remembered the other Kings that existed.

The Southern Continent would never be without a King with the Phoenix there, and the Northern Continent was governed through sects and had no King either.

So, the only King that did remain was in the Western Continent. The Western Continent was a mixture of many kingdoms, separated by a large expanse of forest.

If his prophecy could ever come true, it would be from those kingdoms. He had to deal with them somehow.

And then, there was the damn White Tiger. What could he even do about an Immortal beast? He knew that the White Tiger couldn't harm anyone in this world, but did he dare take that risk?

Years went by with the Dragon Emperor worrying about it but being able to do nothing. The only thing he could do was hope that he had made enough changes so that the prophecies would have changed by now.

What else was he to do? Kill the White Tiger?

To his surprise, he didn't have to.

Reports reached him soon, but sooner than that the Azure Dragon had already left the continent. When he came back, there were only two pieces of information the Dragon Emperor was handed.

First, the Azure Dragon was wounded and would have to rest to get better for a long time now.

Second, the White Tiger had died in a clash with the other Heavenly beasts in the Central continent.

The Dragon Emperor was stunned. The White Tiger had died? Just like that?

He refused to believe it, but then he had seen how wounded the Azure Dragon was. He would need a lot of time to heal from those wounds.

"The White Tiger is dead," he thought. "He's dead."

Which meant, he now had one of the obstacles in his prophecy gone from it. As for the other Kings, he decided to become bold.

The Dragon Emperor visited the Southern Continent where he met the council of 10 who had formed in the absence of the Phoenix. Whether the Phoenix was dead or not didn't matter to the Dragon Emperor. As long as he could get these people to agree, that would be enough.

He exploited their sudden lack of ruler and strength to make them accept the proposal he made.

Then, the Dragon Emperor visited the Northern Continent, where he met the leaders of the 5 great sects and made the same proposal. These ones accepted it more easily than the council did.

With both continents accepting his proposal, the Dragon Emperor went back to the Eastern Empire and prepared his legions to move along with them.

They were going to attack the Western Continent that was ruled by the late White Tiger, the one who he claimed was responsible for trying and failing to take over the entire world with his evil schemes.

They were going to war.

Chapter 1691 The Agreement

?1691 The Agreement

Yan Yating, one of the Trinities of the Legion heads, led the war efforts against the Western Continent, attacking all the different individual kingdoms in revenge for what the White Tiger had done to the other Immortal beasts.

The cultivators of the Western Continent were strong, but they were nowhere near as strong as the ones from the Eastern Continent. And with 2 other continents behind them, the war was completely one-sided.

Neither the northern countries nor the southern countries of the Western Continent were left alone.

Meanwhile, the Dragon Emperor, along with the Empress, took the Talon Legion to the mouth of the beast itself. They went to attack the White Tiger's domain.

The Dragon Emperor stood in front of what he had been told by his wife was the entrance to the White Tiger's domain and there he took out the Ivory sword and cut into the wall of the Secret realm, creating an opening large enough for the army he had brought along to attack inside.

Their appearance was sudden and their attack violent. The beasts weren't ready or organized when it came to the battle and the Dragon Emperor went on to fight the stronger opponents.

He let his wife handle what he considered minor as compared to the White Tigers themselves. He arrived at the palace sometime later with an elite group of attackers and went into battle.

He personally killed 3 beasts that were strong enough to be considered his equal. One of them was a large Lynx cat, another a snow leopard. The final one was a violent black jaguar who was the strongest that he had to fight against.

The Dragon Emperor had only one job here and that was to kill any and all descendants of the White Tiger. The battle continued for some more time, before a brown-furred white-

stripped Lynx appeared, large and mighty.

Immediately, the Dragon Emperor knew that he was dealing with an Immortal.

"Little human," the Lynx spoke in a sonorous voice that seemed to carry with it an authority of the ages. "Why do you attack us when we have done no harm to you?"

"No harm?" the Dragon Emperor spoke back, fearless, for he knew no Immortal could attack him without killing themselves in the process. "The White Tiger attacked and wounded all of our rulers. He tried to take over the world. We have come back for revenge and compensation."

"My husband did no such thing," the Lynx spoke. "Go back and we will let you be."

More beasts arrived around her. A Lioness, a Snow Leopard, a black Wildcat, a Puma, and a regular tiger stood behind the Lynx, causing the Dragon Emperor to nearly step back in fear.

Every single one of them was an Immortal. The strength here was enough to take over all the Continents had the White Tiger really chosen to do so. More beasts joined then, none an Immortal. But their strength was still a force to be reckoned with.

The Dragon Emperor looked at them and was inwardly happy that none of them were White Tigers. Had even one been such, he would have been troubled.

"We will not leave until we have been satisfied," the Dragon Emperor's voice roared through the secret realm. "The White Tiger attacked the other Immortal beasts and wounded them. However, he died, so it falls under you to make right what he did wrong."

"He did nothing wrong," the Tiger snarled at him.

"Our lord is one of honor. He did not attack the others," the Snow Leopard said.

"They fought—"

The Lynx rose her limb to stop them all from speaking. "What do you want as compensation?" she asked. "Spirit stones? Artifacts?" she asked.

"We want you all to leave this world," the Dragon Emperor said. "Leave and do not return. We do not want another White Tiger."

"That is not up to you," the Lynx said. "The White Tiger will always be one of the four rulers of this world. This is how the treaty was made. But, if that is what you want, then we will leave. Will you stop your attack on this land if we promise to leave?"

The Dragon Emperor looked at the Lynx, surprised that she was agreeing so easily. "As long as you do so," he said. "I want an oath from you that you will all leave with not a single one of the White Tiger's bloodline remaining in this world."

The Lynx frowned slightly. "The White Tiger's bloodline has been in this realm for tens of thousands of years. Their bloodline is diluted and almost nothing, but it exists in many beasts in this forest, including the weakest ones. What you ask of us is impossible."

The Dragon Emperor frowned. Asking them to take every single beast in a forest that spanned half a continent was not feasible at all. "Then take away anyone you can find here with the White Tiger's bloodline that has a True realm or higher cultivation base. And I want all 6 of you Immortals to leave as well."

The Lynx slowly nodded.

"That shall be done within the year," she answered. "Now make an oath that you will take back your armies if I do what I say."

The two reached a mutual agreement and made oaths on both sides.

The Dragon Emperor left the secret realm after that, taking everyone with him. With the oath in place, he had no reason to worry about the White Tiger's family wiggling out of it somehow.

The war had already mostly ended by then with the Western Continent left to ruin. Most of the kings had died, all thanks to the Dragon Emperor's legionnaires who were told to focus on the kings and queens.

They had also looted the Western Continent for anything and everything valuable, leaving behind barely any Saint Spirit stones in the end. It was a shame that they could not loot the Secret realm just as well too, but that was alright.

For now, the Dragon Emperor had done what he could and had gotten rid of every King or White Tiger that could be a threat to him. Now came the time for peace.

The next few thousand years were pleasant for the Dragon Emperor. He lived his life normally, focusing on what he had come to love, Alchemy. He let his son start to handle more and more of the Empire so he learned it for when it was his time to become the Emperor.

2 thousand years later, when Long Huan was born, the Dragon Emperor emperor handed him the Ivory Sword. At the same time, he made it official that Prince Fangyu was to be the Crown Prince.

More time passed and the 2nd prince grew as well, becoming a man who wasn't very interested in ruling and politics. The Dragon Emperor let him do what he wanted.

As for their third son, the Emperor and Empress decided not to have any more. They were fighting prophecies, so they would fight it properly. There would be no third prince.

More and more years passed, until one day the Azure Dragon finally revealed himself to the Dragon Emperor, now completely healed from his wounds.

Chapter 1692 Strange Phenomenon

?1692 Strange Phenomenon

The Azure Dragon's arrival took the Dragon Emperor by surprise.

"Your Majesty, you-you-you are okay? Are you healed?" he asked the man who walked into his palace hall. "I was never made aware that you had healed."

"It took some time," the Azure Dragon said. "I was only healed completely about a century ago and decided to live in peace for a time. I only came out because that bloody man was about to kill himself."

"Yes, we didn't know what to do with the situation at all," the Dragon Emperor said. "It is a good thing you came, or there would have been many other fatalities."

The Azure Dragon tossed the small clear vial filled with liquid in his hand. "Still, that man managed to make quite the poison. I would've needed days to heal myself from this," he said and tossed it to the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor caught the poison and stayed stiff in fear of what the poison would do. "Don't worry, that glass bottle can hold Immortal poisons without any problem. Even if that might be the most potent Saint Poison, it is still not able to do anything to the bottle."

The Dragon Emperor nodded slowly, losing somewhat of his fear of the poison in his hand. "Why are you giving me this, Your Majesty?" he asked.

"I have no use for it, so you should have it," the Azure Dragon said. "You've done well in my absence the past few millennia. I know it was your duty, but take that as my thanks. Use it against your enemies in the future if there are any."

"Thank you," the Dragon Emperor said.

"Anyway, I'm going back to my realm," the Azure Dragon said. "I have someone to spend my time with now. I'll let you meet her if you are free sometime in the future."

The Azure Dragon left.

"Her?" the Dragon Emperor was left stunned. What did the Azure Dragon mean by her? Had he found someone while he was in his secret realm busy healing?

It seemed that the Azure Dragon would be leaving him alone for a while longer, so the Dragon Emperor let him have his fun. He had no more than 1200 years in this world anyway.

Sooner or later, he would be gone from here.

Around that time, the Dragon Emperor started wondering what he was going to do as well. All 3 of his prophecies had been thwarted by now.

He only had 2 sons and planned on no longer having any more children, so he had beaten the first of the 3 prophecies.

For the second prophecy, there was nothing amounting to 7 that rose in colorful lights. Maybe it was something that had yet to happen, but he was quite certain that it was the Kingdoms of his empire that it talked about. And 5 had risen there, not 7.

Even if he did count the Azure Kingdom, which existed since the birth of the Azure Imperium, it was still only the 6th Kingdom. Since the Beast's Paradise was its own thing that he never fell with his hands, there were no 7 colorful lights that rose.

As for the third prophecy, with both the White Tigers and the Kings gone, the Dragon Emperor had nothing to worry about anymore.

Long Fangyu was growing more and more competent with how he handled the ruling of the nation for the minor things where his father was not required. He had worked himself up to the top of the army and was considered the 3rd most important individual in the Empire after the Azure Dragon and the Emperor.

He was considered even more important than the Empress.

Long Huan didn't follow in his father's or brother's footsteps and instead did his own thing. He learned politics and how to rule a nation too, but he never truly learned fighting or war. He was also only slightly better than most when it came to cultivation, and he didn't have any real talent at all.

He wanted to live a normal life, so sometime later, he left the palace to go live on his own somewhere to the south.

Still, it was peace.

And the peace lasted for no more than 2 centuries.

The Dragon Emperor was busy making some pills when suddenly he felt the aura around the world change. He quickly walked out of the palace along with his wife, looking around at the changes that were happening.

Lights of Gold and Green spread through the sky, causing phenomena that came out of nowhere.

The Dragon Emperor wasn't sure what the gold light was, but the green one he could tell. It was... Wood aura?

Winds picked up around the continent and strange harmonies played in the sky. Sometimes, lightning flashed from the clear blue sky as well.

The phenomenon lasted for no more than 20 minutes, but it was enough to make a very long-lasting impression on the Dragon Emperor.

"What was that?" the Empress asked, confused at it all.

"I... don't know," the Dragon Emperor said. He took out a talisman and quickly messaged the Azure Dragon to ask for his help, but no reply came.

"We'll know soon enough," the Dragon Emperor said and sent every one of his subordinates to find the cause of what they had all seen. Soon enough, reports started coming in on weird instances where people appeared out of nowhere, calling themselves players.

They truly came out of nowhere as they had no background at all. Most of them seemed to really like fighting and were very aggressive in nature.

The Dragon Emperor made his people try and find out more about these players who appeared by the thousands in every place. As more and more appeared and their information was gathered, one thing became clear.

These players were very, very talented, and could break through in realms as if it was nothing. Most of them were destroying their cultivation base for sure, but there were enough that were improving at a good rate while maintaining their foundation that they scared the Dragon Emperor.

Thankfully, there seemed to be no King amongst these newly arrived people.

The Dragon Emperor wanted to learn more about them but he had to pause as he was called by the Azure Dragon. Finally, nearly a month later, he sent a message saying he would explain the cause of the phenomenon.

So, the Dragon Emperor, along with his wife, went to the Azure Dragon's realm.

When they entered, they were taken to the flower field outside of the small pond where the Azure Dragon waved for them in his human form.

The two of them went over and stopped when they saw what was next to him.

"You wanted to learn about the phenomena, didn't you?" the Azure Dragon asked excitedly.

"Yes..." the Dragon Emperor said slowly. Was there more to understand? Was it not heralding the arrival of the players?

"Well, that was a birth omen," the Azure Dragon explained with pride.

"Birth Omen?" the Dragon Emperor asked with a shocked look on his face. "Of?"

His eyes moved from the Azure Dragon to the two that lay on the field, basking in the sun.

There lay a large white cat, snuggled next to whom was a newborn white kitten.

"His name is Qing Shouchuang," the Azure Dragon said with glee. "He's my son."

Chapter 1693 Pure White Tiger

?1693 Pure White Tiger

"Greetings, Your Majesty," the White Cat spoke. "I'm Shi Meiyoung. It's a pleasure to finally meet you after all this time."

"Yes, it's a pleasure to meet you too," the Dragon Emperor said. "Congratulations on the son. I assume he's healthy."

"Shouchuang is healthy and strong," the White Cat said, slowly petting the little white kitten that was smaller than the size of her palm.

Shi Meiyoung... the Dragon Emperor found that name a little familiar for some reason, like he had heard of it somewhere.

The Empress sat beside the flower field and greeted the White Cat as well as the newborn. While she started talking to the two, the Dragon Emperor simply looked at them.

He was very much so surprised to see the son of the Azure Dragon. "When you said you found someone to spend your time with, did you mean her?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

"Yes," the Azure Dragon said excitedly. "And that phenomenon was my son's birth, so you should stop worrying about him."

"I'm not as worried anymore," the Dragon Emperor said. "Weirder things have been happening outside. You might not be aware, but people from some other world have started appearing and are very talented."

"Other world?" the Azure Dragon got curious. "From higher realms?"

"Maybe," the Dragon Emperor said. "But they seem to not be as aware of cultivation, so I'm hesitant to say they are from higher realms." His eyes kept moving toward the White Cat and the small kitten for some reason.

There was something there that bothered him, and he couldn't tell what exactly it was.

"Hmm, I'll check what is happening when I have the time," the Azure Dragon said. "Before that, I must do something else. In a week, I plan on announcing my son's birth. And then, we will have to go back to the Beast Paradise so Meiyoung can spend time with her family."

"Ah! Right," the Dragon Emperor finally remembered. "The Golden Lion, Leader Shi, she's his daughter?"

"Yes," the Azure Dragon answered. "She was one of the ones sent here to take care of me when I was weak. We ended up spending time together and got close."

"I see," the Dragon Emperor said. "I did hear something about leader Shi having a child, but I wasn't aware his child was not a Golden Lion as well."

Now that he was saying it out loud, the Dragon Emperor finally realized his cause for confusion as well.

"It's not that surprising," the Azure Dragon said.

"Maybe not," the Dragon Emperor said, his eyes narrowing at the situation. "But this certainly is. How is the son of an Azure Dragon, not an Azure Dragon? In the first place, how did the child even get conceived? Aren't you two quite incompatible to have a child?"

The Dragon Emperor couldn't wrap his head around the event. He whispered the last part. "In the first place, aren't the Azure Dragon's children born from an egg?" he asked.

The Azure Dragon chuckled. "There are trivial facts that everyone knows in the higher realm that you would consider a great piece of information," he said. "We are incompatible as beasts, yes, but a beast's human form lets him achieve a miracle that would otherwise be impossible."

"Your human form?" the Dragon Emperor asked, not understanding.

"You will get what I mean when you go to the higher realm," the Azure Dragon said.

"Okay..." the Dragon Emperor said softly. He had some inkling of understanding as to what the Azure Dragon was talking about. Still, another question kept bothering him.

"How did you end up with a son that isn't an Azure Dragon though?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "I don't mean any offense, but isn't the Azure Dragon's bloodline supposed to be the strongest? How come a cat was born out of you two instead of a dragon?"

"Well, as much as I wanted to have a dragon child, I still only ended up having a cat as my son because his mother's bloodline exceeds mine in the end," the Azure Dragon said.

"That's... not possible," the Dragon Emperor said. "How can an Azure Dragon have a bloodline weaker than a white cat?" He looked back at the mother and child. No matter how good they were, these pure white cats...

Pure white...

"She's not just any cat," the Azure Dragon said. "She holds the bloodline of the White Tiger, one that is significantly stronger than mine. When we return to the Blessed Sun realm in a thousand years, she will go through an evolution ritual that will turn her into a proper White Tiger."

The Dragon Emperor felt as though his entire world had come apart at that word. His eyes slowly moved toward the large white cat and then at the child.

A Pure White Tiger. It was only now he saw his mistake. White Tigers were white, but they also had black stripes on their body. They weren't all white. Which meant... if his prophecy were to somehow come true, it would be because of one of these two beasts in front of him.

The Dragon Emperor felt himself panicking. All this time, he thought he had dealt with his prophecies. He had changed them, he had beat them. And yet, here he was, seeing another one come true right before his eyes.

No, this couldn't be. This couldn't be happening to him again.

"I... I heard somewhere that..." his mind raced. "That is two incompatible beasts end up having a child, the one born usually doesn't have—"

"Oh that, yes," the Azure Dragon said quickly. "It is true that children born from non-compatible beasts mostly don't have the bloodline of either beast, but we won't have to worry about that. You saw the omen, you saw what it said."

The Dragon Emperor couldn't help but nod thoughtlessly.

"My son was born with both Supreme Metal and Wood root," the Azure Dragon said excitedly. "He was born with both the White Tiger and the Azure Dragon's bloodline. He will no doubt create miracles."

The Dragon Emperor looked back at the Azure Dragon in shock. "Supreme Metal and Wood root?" he asked, unable to fathom what was said. "Bloodline of both the White Tiger and the Azure Dragon?"

"Yes," the Azure Dragon said. "All he has to do is grow up and go through both of our family's rituals. I can only imagine the shock on my elder's face."

"I see," the Dragon Emperor said meekly. He looked at the two white cats for the last time and said, "I think we should leave now. There is much chaos in the Empire right now. We will have to be there to handle things. I'll see you later, Your Majesty."

"Oh, you're leaving already? But you just came here," the Azure Dragon said.

"That's alright. We'll meet again soon," the Dragon Emperor said.

"OK then." The Azure Dragon had no reason to stop him. "We'll meet again soon. I'll let you know when I plan to make the announcement."

The Dragon Emperor nodded and left the secret realm. He didn't know how he returned to the palace. All of his thoughts were focused on this very thing. He had worked so many years of his life toward stopping this very thing from happening, and yet... here he was presented with the same problem.

"We can't waste any more time, dear," the Empress said from his side.

"Huh?" the Dragon Emperor looked around. "What?"

"That White Cat," she said. "We have to kill both of them as soon as possible."

Chapter 1694 Oath and Command

1694 Oath and Command

"K-Kill?" The Dragon Emperor looked at his wife in surprise. "But... but he's his Majesty's son. That beast is his soon-to-be wife. We can't kill them."

"What other choices do we have, dear?" the Empress asked. "We've already done so much to escape from your prophecy, what's one more death?"

"But... it's the Azure Dragon's son. I don't know if I can—"

"It's kill or be killed, my husband," the Empress said. "What do you choose?"

The Dragon Emperor grabbed his head in his hand and clutched his blue hair in a grip. The answer was simple. He wanted to live, so he would do anything to live.

The prophecy... was it really coming true after all this time?

Above your realm shall they proclaim your end. A King, a son of a King, and a Tiger pure White. If this was to come true, where were the King and the son of a King?

Or was it referring to the little cat whose father was the Azure Dragon? In that case, was King not a literal term and instead a generic term for a monarch?

Had he been looking at it wrong the entire time?

'No, that can't be,' the Dragon Emperor thought. 'A King means a King. Otherwise, I would have an even larger problem in my hand. In the first place, if the prophecy counted the Azure Dragon as a king, then he couldn't kill me anyhow.'

"We must go for the White Tiger first, the bigger one that's the main threat," the Dragon Emperor said. "The smaller one is too weak to do anything, despite its talents. It won't be a problem for a long time."

"We will still have to take care of it," the Empress said.

The Dragon Emperor nodded before letting a sigh release. "Are we really attacking the Azure Dragon? It feels... wrong."

"Anything for our survival, dear," the Empress said. "We will need to make preparations now. Immortals can't attack us, correct?"

"They can, but not the Rulers. They made an oath to never kill us," the Dragon Emperor said. "If they do, they die."

"What else do we know about them?" the Empress asked.

The Dragon Emperor gave a short explanation of what he knew. "Oh right, the Azure Dragons are known to be close to the element of Space. We will have to be careful about it. I don't know if this Azure Dragon has grasped the Dao of Space, but he must certainly have the Dao of Teleportation. Anyone that is an Azure Dragon is said to know how to use it simply by being its bloodline."

"Teleportation... that will be difficult to deal with," the Empress said.

The Dragon Emperor nodded along with her and thought for a moment. "Actually," a thought came to him. "We do have a way to deal with it. At least, we have a way to interfere in it."

"Interfere?" the Empress asked.

"The Ebony sword," the Dragon Emperor said. "It has the power to interfere with teleportation, I believe. If we can use it, we can stop His Majesty from throwing us out."

"I see, that works," the Empress said and continued making plans. In the end, once everything was decided, it was time to act on it. They needed to kill the White cat and the child before the Azure Dragon could take them away from the secret realm.

The Empress made her way to her son's quarters to meet him before they got ready to leave. Long Fangyu was surprised to hear that his mother was going to try and break through to the Immortal realm and happily let go of the Ebony sword that was in his possession.

The Empress would have been more than happy to get the Ivory sword too, but she didn't have the time to go looking for her second son or wait for them to return.

The Emperor gathered the best of the best to get them prepared for what was basically another war.

Yan Yating, the legion head of War stood before the elite group of soldiers, as they all waited for the Dragon Emperor to command them.

The Dragon Emperor arrived and told them to do one simple thing.

They were all to make an oath that for that day and that day only, the group of them would absolutely follow all of his and his wife's orders without any question and never tell anyone what happened that day.

If they were not willing to do so, they could leave right away.

Everyone had been a member of the military for at least the past 2 thousand years, so nobody had any qualms about following that one rule. So, without any hesitation, everyone took the oath.

"Since you've all made the oaths," the Dragon Emperor said. "Let us move. There's a war to fight."

Everyone enthusiastically went along with the Dragon Emperor. The Empress came along with them and the group of fighters started getting confused. Some asked the Empress to stay behind, but she wanted to fight too. She was, after all, the 2nd strongest right after the Dragon Emperor.

The group of soldiers was still confused about where they were going. Yan Yating started having a really bad feeling.

Then, the Emperor took them to a teleportation formation and used a token only he held to teleport them all into the Azure Dragon's realm.

"Where... where are we, Your Majesty?" one of the soldiers asked.

"We are in the Azure Dragon's realm," the Dragon Emperor told them. "Here, you will find a White Cat and its kitten. Find them, and kill them."

The soldiers behind the Dragon Emperor looked around with a confused look. "Umm, Your Majesty..." Yan Yating started speaking. "What do you mean—"

"You all made the oath to follow my orders for today," the Dragon Emperor said. "Now go do it. Kill anyone that gets in your way."

The soldiers paled in fear, but the oath made them act. Immediately, they flew away from where they were in search of the White cat. They found her lying in the sun and attacked.

In a panic, Shi Meiyoung attacked back as well to protect herself and her son, getting into a fight despite only being in the Saint Transformation 5th realm.

The Azure Dragon appeared in a flash, teleporting from somewhere else, confused and surprised at what was going on. "Stop it!" he shouted. "What are you doing?"

He created a small gust of wind to stop everyone from attacking, making a buffer between the group.

"Your Majesty, please step aside," the Dragon Emperor said. "We will be quick about it."

"About what?" the Azure Dragon asked, appearing in front of one of the attackers who managed to move past the wall of air using a treasure of his. The Azure Dragon simply defended the person's attack, doing nothing at all in retaliation.

"Your Majesty, my apologies, but your wife and son are going to kill me in the future," the Dragon Emperor said with an emotionless voice. "I must get rid of them before they can be a problem."

"You... you want to kill my wife and son?" the Azure Dragon asked in disbelief.

"As I said, please step aside," the Dragon Emperor said. "We'll be quick about it."

Chapter 1695 Azure Dragon's Defense

﻿﻿1695 Azure Dragon's Defense

Qing Tianchui absolutely could not believe that he was hearing something so absurd coming from the mouth of the man before him.

"You… want to kill my wife and son… because they might be a danger to you?" he asked, unsure if he was even hearing it correctly.

"Yes, that is what my prophecy says," the Dragon Emperor told the Azure Dragon. "Your wife and son will be responsible for my death."

"PROPHECY?" the Azure Dragon roared in anger. "You're doing this because of a stupid prophecy?"

"I can understand your feelings, Your Majesty," the Dragon Emperor said. "But I'll have to ask you to put those aside for now and let us do what we came to do."

"You…"New n0vel chapters are published on

"Besides," the Dragon Emperor continued. "You can't fight back. You'll bring the wrath of the Heavens if you continue." He then turned toward his men and gestured for them to continue.

The Azure Dragon immediately reacted, using the least amount of Qi he could to defend his wife and child. "Stop it!" the Dragon shouted at the soldiers. "I am your ruler and you will listen to my command."

The soldiers hesitated for a brief moment, a look of genuine anguish appearing on their faces. Someone even cried, screaming apologies as they continued attacking again.

2 soldiers fell to the ground, writhing in pain for some reason, dead.

The Azure Dragon's eyes widened in shock as he failed to understand what was happening. "What did you do?" he asked the Dragon Emperor. "What did you—"

His words stopped halfway as he turned and teleported, appearing right in front of his wife as a spear was about to go for her heart.

The Azure Dragon grabbed the spear, clutching it tightly as he stared at Jie Tianyue whose eyes betrayed her look of fearlessness. "Stop this!" he shouted at her. "Is this how you two repay me for all I've done?"

"I'm sorry, your Majesty, but this must be done for my husband's survival," the Empress said. "You fight for your partner's life. I fight for mine. Please understand."

Then she employed her Immortal Qi and struck out an attack.

The Azure Dragon quickly attacked her only to redirect the attack. As it was an Immortal attack, he couldn't stop it as easily as he had the others.

The attack flew off somewhere, leaving a resounding boom in the air. The Azure Dragon used the momentary slip in concentration from the Empress to slam his arm into her stomach, pushing her back, but at the same time employing the Dao of Teleportation to send her outside of the secret realm.

Confusion filled the Azure Dragon's face as what he wanted, didn't happen.

The Empress was pushed back by the force of the palm slam. She grunted in pain, but she wasn't teleported away at all.

"What?" he couldn't understand. Why had she not teleported? Why had his Dao failed?

A possibility came to him and he grunted in anger. "That damned sword," he thought before waving away another attack that came toward them.

He looked at the people that attacked him and frowned. Something was going on there too. They weren't listening to his command despite looking as though they wanted to.

"What did you do to them?" he asked the Dragon Emperor who stood in the air, doing nothing. "Why are they like this?"

"I made them follow my command for today," the Dragon Emperor said. "They gave me their oath."

"You… you are a scum!" the Azure Dragon said. "To think I celebrated the day you were born. To think I let your father name you after me."

"Let us not waste our time cursing each other, Your Majesty," the Dragon Emperor said. "We will have plenty of time to do so later."

The Dragon Emperor brought out his spear and joined the fight. He attacked the Azure Dragon— not to kill, not that he could— but to stop him from teleporting to his wife.

He had the Dao of Space Expansion and he used it each time he could to stop him from getting close to his wife.

Meanwhile, the Empress handled the task of killing the White cat and the child, teleporting them each time to attack.

The Azure Dragon tried to fight the Dragon Emperor while protecting his wife from the other attackers at the same time. Each time he focused his attention on one person, another one joined the attack, distracting him.

He used his Intent and spiritual energy to attack some of them, but even attacking with that caused Heaven to get angry at him. He really couldn't do much except defend.

If only he had someone strong to fight against, like the monster from the Central Continent that he had to face all those years ago. He could go all out if that was the case and then worry about his safety later.

The Azure Dragon did what it could, and during some of the times, teleported next to some of the soldiers, sending them out of the secret realm. The Dragon Emperor and the Empress could come in anytime they wanted thanks to the formation of the secret realm and the sword.

The Azure Dragon teleported and stopped the Empress again, but the Dragon Emperor attacked him and pushed him away.

The fight was getting more and more violent, and some attacks were making it past the Azure Dragon's defenses. He was stopping the stronger ones as they were the ones he prioritized, but the weaker ones he could not get to attack Meiyoung.

There was a legion's worth of fighters here, each stronger than the next one. Kingdoms would fall within hours if they were to go to war, and here they were attacking a new mother.

Meiyoung stopped what she could too, but as someone who had only recently given birth, she wasn't fit enough to fight such a battle of life and death. On top of that, she had her child to protect, who she kept under her at all times.

There was blood on Meiyoung's white fur now, with wounds showing in some places. She was surrounded from all sides, attacked all the same.

The Azure Dragon tried to teleport out with her multiple times, but either the Dragon Emperor or the Empress would interfere with his plan by attacking them as he tried to do so.

The Empress's sword especially was a problem as the teleportation aura was disrupted by the sword.

"Damn you!" the Azure Dragon shouted, fighting even more, teleporting out those he could to bless the fighters.

The attacks dropped for a while as the soldiers were distracted. The Azure Dragon sensed the arrival of beasts that worked in his secret realm. They were here to aid.

He was happy, but the happiness lasted for only so long. These beasts were no fighters. They were weak and were only here to take care of the realm while he was wounded.

Against a legion of the strongest humans in this continent, they fell like birds to a volley of arrows. Soon, the beasts were dead, with the only ones remaining being him, his wife, and his son.

As the Azure Dragon stood before the army, he started to understand that he could not only defend. If he wanted to save his wife and son, he would have to risk fighting back.

He would have to risk getting hunted by the Heavens again.

He would have to risk his life.

Chapter 1696 The Judgment Comes

1696 The Judgment Comes

Everyone in the secret realm immediately stopped and gaped as a raging torrent of aura gathered around the Azure Dragon. The sky churned as the wind whipped in every which direction, the aura that should exist causing phenomena rarely ever seen before.

Slowly, his features changed. His limbs grew scaly, his finger turning to talon. He grew a tail that elongated and so did his head.

Two horns grew out of his head, like antlers but striking blue. His body grew thick scales as well, the brilliant azure metallic objects overlapping each other from head to toe. His head grew a snout, with two sets of long whiskers falling from either side of the face.

The Azure Dragon finally revealed his full body in the battle, and it was one of majesty. The resplendent body seemed to glow blue in the sunlight, and the size made him look as though he was ready to swallow a mountain.

Qing Tianchui looked at the ones that were attacking them and then at his wife and son. He would protect them at all costs.

The large aura he had gathered suddenly burned bright and turned into the bright light that left his body, turning into lightning bolts.

Forks of lightning bolts streaked through the air, forking into even more, tinier strikes that struck each and every single one of the people that was there.

The Empress disappeared before any attacks landed on her, flying far outside of the secret realm. She was the only one that escaped the true Immortal attack.

The Azure Dragon's attack was strong enough that the heavens didn't accept it. Immediately, dark clouds rolled into the sky and the Azure Dragon looked up, frowning at what was up there.

Heavenly Judgment had come for him and this time he couldn't hide in his secret realm.

He still focused on the attack, making sure he was continuously using the lightning bolt to tear through their defenses. Whenever he tore through one, he hurt that person enough to incapacitate them and then stopped attacking.

One thing he couldn't do here was kill a human.

If he only attacked, maybe he could get away with two strikes of the Heavenly Judgment.

The first one was strong, but always the weakest. It struck the Azure Dragon, and he used his techniques to defend against it. Still, he came out wounded.

The Azure Dragon roared out in pain. He had no defensive artifacts anymore so he had to take the attack with his own body.

The ones that he did have had been used up for the last Heavenly Judgement he had to go through. This time around, he would have to fight against heaven as naked as a newborn baby.

The soldiers finally got time to breathe as the relentless attacks were stopped on them. They all looked tired and unwilling to fight, but the Dragon Emperor shouted again.

"Go! Kill the cat!" he shouted.

The oath grabbed onto the soldiers and they moved even when they feared death. Perhaps, they moved because they feared death.

The Azure Dragon held onto his pain and gritted his teeth, snarling at the incoming men and women. He then took a deep breath and roared.

Everyone close to him lost their minds at once as the spiritual attack sought to knock them out unconscious. Most of them were indeed knocked out, with only a few surviving the assault.

Those ones still came out of it on their knees, clutching their head as if it were going to explode at any second now.

Even Yan Yating, who was perhaps the 3rd strongest among the humans temporarily lost consciousness before coming back to consciousness with a raging headache.

Perhaps only the Dragon Emperor didn't fall unconscious even for a second amongst the entire group, but he did indeed feel the pain of the attack.

The Azure Dragon huffed loudly, breathing in and out. He looked down at his wife and asked, "Are you okay?"

Meiyoung's body was weak. She had taken too many hits. But with a bit of rest and maybe a healing pill, she would be fine.

She slowly nodded and showed her son underneath her who had red on his fur as well.

The Azure Dragon panicked for a moment but then realized that his newborn son had not been hurt. It was only his mother's blood.

Still, seeing his son in danger enraged him once again, and quickly turned his head toward the few that remained that were still starting to stand up.

The Azure Dragon gathered more aura around him and shot them with lightning once again.

Many fell in an instant as they weren't ready to defend themselves against any attacks. Those that did did not last for a long time. They were weak and without much resources.

Only those like Yan Yating and the Dragon Emperor who had a large pool of Immortal Qi could last long enough.

More and more fell, and the Azure Dragon lessened the attacks he made. The lightning in the sky surged as well, and he knew the 2nd Heavenly Judgement would fall at any time now.

Was that going to be the final one? Or would there be another one after that?

Only the Dragon Emperor and Yan Yating remained in the end, and Yan Yating quickly fell too. The Dragon Emperor lost with no possible defense left and was tossed back like a ragdoll in the wind.

The Azure Dragon stopped his attack and looked at the situation. Only the Dragon Emperor continued to stir. But not for long.

The Azure Dragon took one last aim and shot a lightning bolt at the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor could not stop this attack which landed on his body, sending torrents of pain through him. The fact that the Dragon Emperor had a very strong physical body didn't even matter at all.

He was treated like a training puppet all the same in front of the might of the Azure Dragon.

The Dragon Emperor felt the lightning coarse through his body, ripping apart in places. There were holes in his body now, his arms completely destroyed. He leaned against a rock, all thoughts lost to him.

He had momentarily forgotten what he was even doing here.

His instinct told him that something else was going to happen next and that he should be ready to stop it, but watching the Azure Dragon slowly look up to the sky, he had a feeling that he was worrying needlessly.

The Azure Dragon sighed, feeling the remnant pain in his body. The next lightning strike was incoming and it was going to be a strong one. He wasn't sure if he was going to be able to survive this one, but he hoped he did.

'Let's just hope this is the last one,' he thought and readied himself. He flew toward the sky to take on the lightning bolt.

As he was about to do so, his eyes widened and he immediately looked down.

The Empress had teleported next to Meiyoung while they thought everything was over and were distracted by the Heavenly Lightning.

Before either of them could stop her, the Empress dug the sword she had in her hand deep into the White Cat, stabbing directly where the Beast's core was.

Chapter 1697 Survive and Live

1697 Survive and Live

Shi Meiyoung screamed in pain as the sword dug into her while she was distracted. She was already wounded, and this one was particularly bad too, but on top of that, it also dug right into where her Beast Core was.

Qing Tianchui moved at once, slamming his tail into the Empress, tossing her away to who knows where. He came closer to his wife and saw the sword that was stabbed into her.

The Azure Dragon looked at the stab in shock and horror. He could tell, even without using his senses that the sword had stabbed directly where his wife's beast core was situated at.

"Meiyoung, your—"

The Heavenly Judgment fell for the second time and the Azure Dragon immediately put up the best defense his distracted self could.

The lightning strike still landed on him, leaving behind a brilliant light and a shockwave that tore through the ground and trees on either side of him.

Humans that were close by, unconscious, were thrown away by the wide, and sent elsewhere.

Meiyoung barely managed to stay with her son because the Azure Dragon protected them with his Qi at the last moment, leaving himself vulnerable.

When the thunderous sound faded, it left behind a wounded Azure Dragon, part of whose body was now bare with no scales. He fell to the ground, slumping in a coil around his wife and son, looking at them.

His breathing had long since grown haggard and he looked up. The dark clouds still roiled in the sky. There was more coming.

He could not handle more.

The Azure Dragon looked at his wife, feeling pain for her.

Meiyoung's core was separating from her body as the meridians that connected the two were no longer. Maybe a miracle could save her, but the Azure Dragon didn't know what that would be.

Even Meiyoung's soul was slowly dying, her Saint Transformation realm body feeling the damage of the soul on the body. She could no longer move most of her body, and barely even speak.

He looked at the sword that was stabbing his wife and felt his heart grow cold. Then he looked at his son and knew he had to do something.

"We're both dying," the Azure Dragon said. "But... our son won't have to."

"What can you do?" she asked. She used her weak spiritual sense to talk with her husband

"I can send you two away, but we must give up a lot for it," he said softly. "Our son must give up a lot."

Meiyoung's eyes teared up as she looked down on her innocent son whom she had managed to successfully protect all this time.

"Do what you must," she said. "Save our child, at any cost."

At any cost. The Azure Dragon felt tears flowing down his eyes. Tears of anger. Tears of sadness.

He closed his eyes once, letting the tears stream down

"You must survive Shouchuang," the Azure Dragon said with a hoarse voice, but his voice still roared with the authority of a thousand lightning bolts.

The Sword of Teleportation did not just interfere with someone's teleportation. It absorbed the teleportation aura, storing it for later use.

The Azure Dragon latched onto that aura that had been gathering in the sword for the past however many years and finally used it. The black sword burned white and created a sphere of silver energy around the mother and son.

But unfortunately, that wasn't enough. The aura was strong, but it couldn't get them away from the Eastern Continent. He needed more teleportation aura, and the only place to get that from right now was the Azure Dragon's bloodline and essence.

Unfortunately, the Azure Dragon was completely out of it, destroyed by the Heavenly Judgment.

'I'm sorry, son,' he thought. He felt pain in what he must do.

He reached for his son's body and burned the Azure Dragon's bloodline and essence inside of him, destroying both the bloodline and his Supreme Wood Spiritual root.

Immediately, an immense amount of aura appeared from inside the child, the aura of the potential he would lose.

The Azure Dragon didn't let it go to waste. He grabbed onto it and used the Dao of Teleportation to turn it into Teleportation aura of a magnitude larger than what the Intercontinental Teleportation formation produced.

The Teleportation aura instantly grabbed onto the mother and son. The Azure Dragon wished to leave with them as well, but as the thunder in the sky rang even harder, he knew he couldn't do so.

He would only endanger them instead.

"Survive!" he said with what he could muster. "And Live!"

The light flashed and vanished as the two white cats disappeared from where they were, and teleported away. Teleported to a place where she and their son would be taken care of.

He had sent the two to the White Tiger's domain, for that was the only place he considered safe for the two. No other place could protect them any longer.

A last strand of spiritual sense reached his mind, and his wife's final words spoke out to him.

"Thank you," she had said. "And I love you."

The Azure Dragon could not stop his tears any longer. "Live!" he roared. "My son, you must live."

He looked toward the wounded Dragon Emperor who stared back at the Azure Dragon in shock as though it was him that was going to be his death. In those moments, the Dragon Emperor wondered if he had misread the entire prophecy.

"I shall fulfill this prophecy of yours, Tiankong," the Azure Dragon roared as he had nothing else to lose.

"Because of my wife and son, you shall die today."

The Azure Dragon used what bit of energy he still had and channeled them into a single target technique, ready to obliterate the Dragon Emperor.

The wounded Dragon Emperor could only stare. He had no more power to stop whatever was going to happen next. "No..." he slowly said. "Not like this. I've lost so much for this. I've done so much. I cannot... I cannot die like this."

The Azure Dragon let out the technique known as the Dragon's Breath and threw it at the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor watched as the attack that would kill him was used and—

The Empress appeared in front of the Dragon Emperor, bloodied and beaten, and used what power she had left to move him out of the way.

"NO! Tianyue!" the Dragon Emperor shouted back.

The Empress said something but the deafening blast that followed drowned her words. The Dragon Emperor landed far away from the attack and quickly looked back, but when he did, his wife was no longer there.

The Azure Dragon immediately grimaced and his massive serpentine body started writhing in pain. He had done the one thing he had made an oath not to do 14 Millennia ago.

When he came to this world, he had made an oath to only harm humans when necessary, and never kill. Today he had broken that very oath and the broken oath killed him from the inside.

He felt his soul twist and turn on the inside as it was lacerated apart by the broken oath, quickly torn to shred. Within seconds, the Azure Dragon started dying.

So when the third and final Heavenly Judgment fell from the sky, there was nothing the Azure Dragon could do to protect himself.

And with a loud resounding thunderous strike, Qing Tianchui, the Ruler of the Eastern Continent, the Azure Dragon, passed away.

Chapter 1698 Descent

?1698 Descent

The Empress's death haunted the Dragon Emperor. The words she last spoke, the unknown message left him wondering what it was that she wanted to tell him as she died.

Did she want to tell him that she loved him? Did she want to curse him? What was it that she said? He didn't know, and it haunted him.

His wife, the one who had been together with him for more than half of his life, had died without a last word. And she had died saving him.

He cried in the secret chamber in his palace, where he spent his days, claiming that he needed time to heal his body.

The healing had happened long ago. Now, he just stayed there because the silence made him hopeful that his wife's final words would come through.

The Azure Dragon's son, the little white cat, had most likely survived. Even if it hadn't, he needed to find the corpse at least. He would have to soon give command for some of his people to go look for them.

'The White Tiger…' the words still taunted him. Even after all this time, how was that one single prophecy coming after him time and time again? Had he not had enough of it by now?

He remembered what the White Cat had told him the last time he had seen her. She was the daughter of the Lion Leader of the Beast Paradise. Which meant her mother had the White Tiger's bloodline.

He had to do something about that.

That very night, the Azure Dragon left for the Beast Paradise and met up with the leader of the Lion Colony, Shi Guyong. His wife was indeed a White Cat.

After a few questions about where she had come from, the Dragon Emperor found out that she had been married off here 5 thousand years ago, and she was the daughter of the White Tiger who had died back then.

Shock filled him for a while, overtaken by rage and anger. There had been someone with White Tiger's bloodline living right here and he hadn't known about it.

Without waiting, he attacked the two.

The Dragon Emperor had no reason to fight the leader, but since the leader wanted to protect his wife, he was forced to kill him first and then go kill the White Cat.

The fight was a difficult one, but thankfully the Dragon Emperor had the foresight to set up a formation to hide the auras. Once he killed the two beasts, he made his way to the other beasts to gather them.

Once they were gathered, he threatened them and gave simple instructions.

The Beast Paradise was to close off for a thousand years and no human was to go in and out of the place in any way. Only those with the authority of the Dragon Emperor could be allowed to enter, and even then they had to be placed in scrutiny.

The reason why the beasts closed off their land was never made public and instead a rumor was spread that it was because the players had killed too many of the beasts, prompting them to take desperate measures.

Once the Dragon Emperor returned to his palace, he felt less like he needed to dwell on his wife's death and that it was time to give her a proper funeral.

However, before he could prepare for the funeral, he had been notified of a rather bad news.

Yan Yating and many of the soldiers he had taken to the Azure Dragon's realm recently had defected from the army and had gone into hiding. The news of it was spreading through the legion quite quickly. New n0vel chapters are published on

The Dragon Emperor forced the rumors dead and then went to search for those runaway soldiers. He spent weeks searching for them but did not find them.

The Dragon Emperor didn't bother that most of them were gone, but Yan Yating was the war leader. Without him, the army would lose one of its 3 heads, perhaps the most important one.

Unfortunately, the Dragon Emperor had to return home empty-

handed and made preparations for his wife's funeral.

His two sons were back in the palace when the funeral procedures were done. The both of them believed that their mother had died while trying to ascend to the Immortal realm. What would they say if they knew the truth?

The Dragon Emperor felt alone after the funeral procedures were completed. As if there was nothing more to live any longer. He felt as though what kept him tied to this world was now gone.

The only thing he felt he had left now was to prepare to leave for the Immortal realm himself.

But before that, he needed to be as strong as he could. He could think of one thing.

The Azure Dragon's half-charred corpse was still inside the secret realm that was now blocked off by both humans and beasts. The dragon's body would still hold the Soul Space, which the Dragon Emperor could cut through to gain the treasures he held.

Any little thing could be a big help to the Dragon Emperor.

And for that, he needed the Ivory sword.

He called over his son to have a little talk, to tell him that he needed his sword, but Long Huan seemed to have seen something in him. His second son had recognized that he had changed.

Instead of returning with the sword, he had run off.

The Dragon Emperor hastily sent some of the legionnaires to go after him and bring him back. He didn't even care if his son was back at all. The prophecy always said one of them would leave him anyway. He only wanted the sword back.

But the news came back instead that there was a woman with him who had defeated everyone.

The Dragon Emperor was surprised by the news. Instead of letting the legionnaires send reinforcement, he went along himself.

The woman he saw there was too young to even be called a woman. She was still just a girl, and yet somehow was so very powerful. Her cultivation base had already reached the peak of the Saint realm, although the Dragon Emperor could sense some instability in her aura.

She protected his son, so he fought her to get through to him, but he couldn't get through her at all. For some reason, on just Qi alone, the Dragon Emperor lost.

This young girl had Qi that surpassed him.

The Dragon Emperor feared for his life as he knew if he continued this any longer, he would die. The young girl was way too strong and he could not beat her at all.

He had to fight along with 3 other people to keep her occupied in the first place.

So, in a last act of desperation, he took out the poison the Azure Dragon had given him and splashed it on her when he found the chance.

The poison immediately killed two of his men, but somehow it didn't kill the young girl. She was hurt, but not killed.

He moved to kill her with one last strike, but before he could do so, someone else stopped him.

The Dragon Emperor couldn't believe it at all when he saw the old man that stopped him.

Even his cook was going against him now.

Chapter 1699 Choose

﻿﻿1699 Choose

Long Huan was gone from the continent somehow, and the woman he was with was gone with him. It was only later that the Dragon Emperor remembered that his son had said something about wanting to make a marriage official.

Had he married the girl then? He hadn't been in the right mind to care about that stuff back then. He still didn't.

The cook was gone too, running away. That bastard had lived right under his nose all this time, always hiding how strong he was.

The Dragon Emperor immediately put a stop to searching for the White Cat in the Eastern Continent and instead sent the people to search for them in the other continent.

On top of that, he made a small group of them search for his son and bring him back. If not, they were to at least the Ivory Sword and the Ebony Sword.

Another group of his soldiers, a larger but weaker portion, had left the army once again after he had forced them to an oath of secrecy after what had happened with the fight.

They had gone and were most likely going to go into hiding. He wondered if they would let him be in peace.

Time passed and the Dragon Emperor hid himself from the Empire. He had no desire to rule the empire, but this status of his was what gave him power over it, so he kept it.

However, with it came more problems.

With the lack of Empress, the court officials started pestering him to get another wife. An Emperor without an Empress was not a good thing for the Empire.

The Emperor fought back against those who pestered him for it, ignoring every advice. But the pestering continued whenever he came out of his secluded cultivation.

The Dragon Emperor did not care for this. All he wanted to do now was get as strong as he could in Alchemy, get the Azure Dragon's treasures, and then leave this world.

Years later, while busy practicing Alchemy, the Dragon Emperor gained a very strange piece of news.

In the Northern Continent, Xue Kuangren had died.

The man who was supposed to have been alive all those years ago had turned out to become a false immortal who terrorized the Northern Continent in secret for all of these years.

When the Dragon Emperor learned that it was an Alchemist named Yu Ming who had killed him in the end, he felt as if everything he knew to be true around him changed once again.

The entire reason he had believed that prophecies could be broken in the first place had been because this man had done it. However, that information had turned out to be false all along.

Prophecies could not be defeated at all. If something was fated to be, it would be.

The Dragon Emperor felt a strange sense of peace learning that. If everything was meant to be, then why bother? He would try to avoid dying however he could, but that was all that he would do.

He came out of his closed cultivation and this time didn't bother to ignore the pestering voices that called for him to have an Empress.

He chose one at random from his guard and married her in a small ceremony. The marriage was made public through the Newsboards that were now all over the continent.

That night was the only night he ever spent with the woman he had now made the empress. The only reason he even spent the night with her was because he had to consummate the marriage.

And somehow that one night had given him another child.

Long Hanjue, a son.

He now had three sons and the prophecy was fulfilled. He really couldn't stop it, could he?

The Emperor did not want to take care of this new son and left it for the new empress to handle that task. What even was the point now? The prophecy did tell him that one of his sons would be left behind.

This one was most certainly going to be it.

The other prophecy had come true as well.

By his hands kingdoms and continents fell. And from that had risen other kingdoms and empires.

5 new kingdoms came from what he had done in the Eastern Continent. And it was only as of late that he had found out what he had done in the Western Continent.

Two Empires had formed there, out of the chaos he had left behind. The Crimson Empire and the Luminance Empire.

Two more Colorful lights.

7 in total. Just as the prophecy had said it would.

All prophecies had been completed, all but the final one. The one regarding his death. Was he really just going to let it end that way?

Was he really going to let himself die after all that he had done?

He had destroyed kingdoms and led a continent to ruin. He had killed the one ruler he had always respected and looked up to. His wife had given up her life because of this.

No, he couldn't give up now. Not after all that had happened. Stopping the fight now would mean everything he had done, everything he had lost until now would be for naught.

He couldn't stop now. He shouldn't stop now.

The Dragon Emperor was determined to not let the prophecy come true anymore, even if it meant he had to fight it every single time.

And then he heard that the Phoenix in the Southern Continent had returned, and she had anointed a human to her throne, a young man by the name of Alex.

And he, to his surprise, was an Alchemist who could create pill clouds. And he the phoenix had named a king.

Fate was messing with the Dragon Emperor again.

'Whatever,' he thought. 'I'll just have to deal with it.'

It was time to call this new king and see what he could get out of him. And if by the end he couldn't get him to leave the title 'king', he would just kill him.

* * * * * * *

Long Fangyu's mouth gaped open the entire time his father told him his life's story. What surprised him more was that his father did not try in any way to make his side of the story sound good.

If he had, it was because he believed it to be so.

The truth had left the Crown Prince's mind reeling. All those new information, all the facts re-contextualized was too much for him to take in all at once.

All those kings that had been executed, the beast leader that had to die, his own mother. This was just too much for him.

"Choose whose side you are on now," the Dragon Emperor said.

"What?" the Crown Prince looked up, confused. "What do you mean?"

"Choose, whether you will help me from here on forward, or stand in my way. You will do one or the other and I would rather you tell me right now," the Dragon Emperor said. "This is why I told you everything without hiding. I want you to make the decision right now."

"I… I can't do that. I… I need time," the Crown Prince said. This was truly too much for him. He didn't even know how to feel about the man sitting in front of him. Was this really his loving father?

"Your instinct tells you to do something already, so choose based on that. Instinct can get you to do something that your logic usually tells you is a bad idea. I want to know what your instinct is," the Dragon Emperor said. "Now, answer me."

The Crown Prince gulped. His instinct was simple. His brother was right, and his father was a madman who had not just killed the Azure Dragon and his family but also brought the death of his mother.

How could he ever forgive him for such a thing?

But then… this was the man that his mother had given up her life for. This was who she loved, and this was who she could give her life for again.

No matter how much he despised him right now, he could not find a way to let his mother's sacrifice be in vain right now.

"I'll help you," he said in what felt quick to him. "I'll help you with whatever you need."

The Dragon Emperor nodded. "Good," he said and brought out something. It was a small talisman of some sort with he looked into.

"He is hiding the Dragon Medallion somehow. I can't seem to track it at all," the Dragon Emperor said. "Have them find him as quickly as they can. Search the continent and then move out into the ocean."

The Dragon Emperor stood and left the room after giving the order.

The Crown Prince remained in the room for a long time afterward. What had he just done? How could he have agreed?

This was a horrible mistake, just like all the other ones he had made today. Could he not make a good decision today at all?

His father no longer cared about him, he knew that. But every time he thought about his mother, tears filled his eyes. Her loss still lay heavy on his chest, and she had given up her life for this monster.

He clutched his head in shame.

'I'm not strong enough, mother,' he said softly. 'What should I do?'

Yet no answer would come for him. No help would come. In this place that should have been his home, he was all alone.

And alone he left the room to go see to what his father had ordered him to do. For his mother's sake, he would help the monster today.

Chapter 1700 In a Cave

﻿﻿1700 In a Cave

Alex saw shimmering light above him, rippling through the water he was submerged in. It all moved so very slowly.

He reached out for the light, hoping to grab it, but he continued sinking deeper. Deeper and deeper he went as the light faded and darkness overtook him.

Alex gasped awake. He opened his eyes wide and breathed in deeply to leave the terrifying feeling of death behind. It had only been a dream, nothing else.

He breathed in and out a few more times before calming down. He wasn't dying. He was safe.

He was… safe?

Memories poured in of everything that had happened. From his sister and the others leaving, to Yao Ning's death, to finally his…

The last memory haunted Alex the most. The memory of the spear stabbing through his Dantian. The memory of his crippling.

He couldn't believe it at all. He was crippled.

He stared at the rocky ceiling above him, trying to process his feelings and thoughts. What was he to even think? Everything he had worked toward for the past half a century had been for naught in just one moment.

Alex sighed with dejection.

"Are you awake?" a voice asked.

Alex's eyes went alert all of a sudden. He tried to turn to look, but a sharp pain in his stomach made him stop.

He grimaced. So he was still wounded it seemed.

'Is the wound from my stomach not healed?' he thought. It was a surprising prospect to think about. He had gotten so used to healing within seconds that feeling a lingering pain from a wound made it feel weird.

Alex laid back down so that he didn't agitate his wounds any further. "Where am I?" he asked, in a rather hoarse voice.

"Where you are, I cannot tell you," the man said. "But I can tell you that you are safe, for now."

Alex tilted his head up to see the upside-down image of a man standing in front of something. Alex couldn't see much from this viewpoint, but he saw a lot of white. He also saw fire and smoke beyond the man, but nothing else.New n0vel chapters are published on

"Did you save me?" Alex asked in a solemn tone.

"Yes and no," the man said. "I found you wounded and gave you shelter, so in a way I did save you. But, the one that truly saved you was that beast of yours. He fought dozens of ocean beasts to protect you."

"Had it not been for him, you would've most likely been fish food a long time ago," the man said.

'Fish food…' Alex thought. Was the dream he had seen just now not been a dream then?

"So Pearl saved me, huh?" Alex asked the man.

"Pearl? Is that the name of that tiger-like cat beast with the white fur?" the man asked. "I suppose the name makes sense. Yes, it was him that saved you. By how bloodied and wounded he was, I assume he fought for a long time too. He looked more hurt than you, but then you seem to have been crippled too."

"I have no Qi, do I?" Alex asked.

"No," the man said. "Do you need some time to process this?"

Alex shook his head. "Maybe later. I have more questions than thoughts right now."

"I do too," the man replied. "Your beast disappeared into his beast space before I could ask how you got into this situation. Can you sit up?"

Alex tried. Pain flared from his stomach once again, but he overcame it this time around and sat up, leaning against the wall of what seemed to be a cave.

He was right by the mouth of the cave, the bright light from outside pouring in, letting him see just where he was.

Alex saw the ocean in the distance, past some treetops that were below his eye level. He seemed to be on a mountain of sort with a cave on it.

He turned around as the man in the white robe walked toward him, carrying a small pot in his hands. The man's robes weren't as good-looking as Alex had expected them to be, torn in multiple places.

Alex lifted his gaze from the clothes to the man's face and his eyes went wide in shock.

The man's face was covered in a long white mustache and scraggly white beard, and his unkempt hair made him look more like a beggar than anything. He was also considerably older-

looking than what his voice suggested.

However, that wasn't the main reason why he was shocked.

It was because he recognized the man before him. "It's you!" Alex said.

The old man's face scrunched in what Alex thought was a frown. "Do I know you?" he asked.

"You do," Alex said,"We've met before, um… 18 years ago? You stopped the ship I was in, coming from the Southern Continent to check for something."

"Hmm?" the man narrowed his eyes a little before it went wide again. "Oh, is it you, King of the Southern Continent?"

Alex nodded.

"Ah, I didn't expect to see you again," the man said. "Especially not like this."

Alex wanted to retort about the man's dress but kept quiet on that topic. "Thank you for saving me," he said. "How many days have I been out?"

"3 days, Your Majesty," the man said. "You've been out for 3 days. Most likely because of your blood loss. You were pale as an oyster meat when I first saw you."

Alex could imagine. He had been wounded and had been losing blood profusely. The fact that he had even lived was something else.

The man gave Alex some time to think and brought out a wooden bowl from his storage bag. Then, he poured some soup from the hot pot he had been carrying.

"Here, I'm been making this for the past 3 days," he said.

Alex looked at the bowl skeptically.

"It's good for your body," the old man said. "It's made with Amber seaweed, Dawn Oyster, and many other nutritious ingredients that have been cooked in a brother for a long time. It will give you the strength you are lacking."

"Besides, you're a mortal now," the old man reminded him. "If you don't eat, you'll die."

Alex gave a disgruntled look, angry at those words, but he did feel weak. So, he nodded in the end and slowly drank the soup.

As the soup entered Alex's mouth, he tasted the incredible flavor of the soup, the thick texture of the broth, and the absolute harmony of saltiness and savoriness.

He couldn't put the soup down at all and only did when he finished it all.

Alex breathed out loud and huffed a little before wiping his face. He could feel an incredible warmth flowing through his body, making him feel so much more alert and alive.

It was incredible.

Did it taste so good because he was mortal? Because his body craved for food?

Alex didn't think it was just that.

He looked toward the old man, curious about something.

"Your name," he said slowly. "May I know what it is?"

The old man grumbled a little. "I cannot tell you—"

"It's Zhou Linfan, isn't it?" Alex asked the man and saw his eyes narrow in surprise.

That was all the confirmation Alex needed.

Chapter 1701 The Old Man

?1701 The Old Man

The old man grumbled a bit. "How do you know who I am? Not many should recognize me in my current state," he said.

"Your current state?" Alex asked. "Then… is the hair, beard, and mustache on purpose?"

"Kind of," the man said. "I was also too lazy to take care of it all. Now tell me how you recognized me."

"So you are Zhou Linfan," Alex said and noticed the man's lack of patience. "I've heard about you," he quickly added.

"What have you heard about me?" the man asked. New n0vel chapters are published on

"First, you're a Level 10 cook," Alex said, lifting the bowl in his hands to see that it had been a hint. "One couldn't make something as good as this without being at your level. And I would know as I have tasted some of the finest dishes while I stayed in the Dragon Palace."

The old man gave a slightly angry look at the name.

"And?" he asked. "That is not all, is it?"

"No," Alex said. "There is also the fact you were very strong, which I learned a long time ago."

"That's not enough—"

"And you fought against the Dragon Emperor," Alex continued. "Someone like you wouldn't have had to stay here was it not for the fact that you would be instantly sought out and killed if you went to the continent and lived there."

The old man slowly nodded. "I guess one could make a guess based on all of that," he said.

Alex remained quiet for a moment before speaking, "18 years ago, you stopped my ship to search for something. What were you searching for?" he asked.

"That is none of your concern," the old man said. "Do you want more?"

Alex nodded and put out the bowl. He watched the pure elixir of flavor pour down the downright horrible-looking pot into his bowl that was made by an amateur.

Neither the pot nor the bowl should have ever had the luxury to handle such divine juice. This sort of stuff should have been made in the finest of pots, served in gold.

Alex drank the juice again and felt the same joy as the first time he tried it. It was incredible.

"You saved the Second Prince half a century ago," Alex continued. The old man looked at him with narrowed eyes. "When you saved him, you saved a girl that was with him too."

"I thought the emperor had banned this information," the old man said. "How did you find out?"

"The girl you saved was my cousin I had been looking for the past dozens of years," Alex said. "Thank you for saving her life."

"Your… cousin?" the old man asked.

Alex nodded. "The emperor hasn't made the information public. I barely only found out because I met him and my cousin in the Eastern Continent. They told me everything."

"What?" the old man's eyes widened in shock and horror. "They were caught already? How did they get caught? I have searched every single ship that has passed through here."

Alex gave a satisfied smile. "So I was right," he said. "You were searching those ships to look for whether they had captured the prince and my cousin, weren't you?"

The old man grumbled. "How did they get captured?" he asked.

"They didn't," Alex said. "They returned through the… the Voidgate, which I'm now remembering that it was you who told them where it was."

The old man nodded.

"How did you know it existed?" Alex asked. "Honestly, it is quite hard to find if you're not searching for it."

"None of your business," the old man said.

Alex felt a short burst of laughter incoming at how quickly the man had forgotten all honorifics to use in his presence.

"Why were those idiots back there?" he asked. "They should have known better than to keep out."

"The 2nd prince felt that he had to come back," he said. "He saw no benefit in staying in the Southern Continent."

Alex explained in small detail why the second prince had returned and how everything had come to be in the end.

"The Emperor attacked you?" the man asked.

Alex nodded. "The fact that I'm even alive right now is a miracle given what I've been through," he said. He felt a pang of sadness and regret fill him when he remembered that Yao Ning had not been so lucky.

She had died protecting him, and all he got to show for it in the end was his crippled body.

Was he crippled in every way? He wasn't sure. He had no Qi, that was sure, but there should have been other things he could do, right?

"Can crippled people use Dao?" Alex asked the old man, wondering if he knew the answer.

"They can, from what I know," the man said. "But I suggest you don't try it. You are weak, your spirit is weak. The Intent you would require to use your Dao as you had before could kill you as you are right now."

"Do you mean the wounded me or the crippled me?" Alex asked.

"The wounded you," the man said. "You are still hurt and were only crippled a few days ago. Your spirit should be incredibly weak. You should let your body rest for some time before you dare try to do anything like that."

Alex took in the information and nodded. The man was right.

He looked down at his stomach and only now noticed a small leather wrapping around him. "Can you tell me what my wounds look like? I'm afraid I cannot use my spiritual sense."

"The wound is closing, but it's still there," the man said. "Agitate it too much and it will open. I've put some medicinal paste, so hopefully, it will get better."

"What about pills?" Alex asked the man. "Do you have some healing pills?"

"I haven't carried weak healing pills for generations now," the old man said. "I can't help you."

"Weak? What about Saint healing pills? Those can't be weak, right?" he asked.

"Saint pills?" the man almost looked stunned to hear Alex say those words. "Are you mad? Do you want me to feed Saint Pill to a non-cultivator? Someone that is still wounded from Crippling?"

"Ah!" Alex understood the man's hesitation. "I'll be fine. I have a Saint Soul realm body cultivation. My body can handle those pills. If you could give me one, I would be happy."

The man looked at Alex with another stunned face. "A… Saint Soul physical body?" he asked. "How did you…"

"That's not important," Alex said. "The pill?"

He put out his hand. The man sighed in the end and shook his head. "I don't have any pills," he said. "All I had, I've used up long since, and I don't exactly have a way to restock on them."

Alex sighed. He took off his ring and presented it to the man. "Can you see what is inside?" he asked in a hopeful tone.

The man was surprised to see the storage ring for a second and quickly complied. However, after a minute of trying, he couldn't see anything inside. He would have to refine the ring altogether to see what was inside.

Alex stared feeling dejected. Was there really no way for him to get a healing pill?

Chapter 1702 Thoughts

1702 Thoughts

Zhou Linfan looked at Alex and sighed when he saw his distressed face.

"Don't be so sad," the man said. "I know there are some pills that can even fix your Dantian. You're young. You can get healed and restart your cultivation journey."

Alex looked at the man and nodded. He could get back on his journey, but how quickly could he do that?

"Can you help me get back to the Southern Continent?" Alex asked. "The Second Prince and my cousin should be there too, so you can come along."

"I can't," the old man said. "It is probably because of you and what you guys did, but recently there has been an influx of soldiers searching through the ocean. They keep flying around. We can't leave."

"Soldiers? From the Eastern Continent?" Alex asked worriedly. "They haven't found us?"

"They can't, don't worry," the man replied. "I have a formation constantly running that keeps me from being found. As long as they don't look very carefully, they won't find us."

Alex didn't exactly feel safe, but the man had survived here for the last half a century, so maybe he could trust him.

The old man walked away to place his old pot back on the fire before walking back to Alex. "You should rest now. Once you're up, I'll check to see if I can do something about your wounds again. I'm sorry, but I'm not much of a healer, so I can't really tend to your wounds outside of what I've already done."

"No worries, I am one," Alex said. "Now that I'm up, I can help myself, so long as I have stuff to use."

"Oh, okay," the man said and nodded. "Still, rest for now. I'll search for what I can later on. This island isn't very large, so I might have to go to another one."

Alex nodded and laid back down on the leather that was underneath him. The old man walked outside, leaving Alex alone with his thoughts again.

So he had managed to teleport away and Pearl had saved him in the end. Then this man had helped hide him from the others.

That was some good news at least. So long as he wasn't dead or captured, that was tremendous news. Still, he was now crippled and wounded, and he didn't know what to do.

'I should forget about dealing with me being crippled for now,' Alex thought. 'I need to heal up first. Once I can stand on my own two feet without worrying about bleeding out, I can start dealing with the other problems.'

He was going to have to tackle the situation with care.

Sitting in the cave with nothing to do, Alex's mind wandered off again. He wondered how Pearl was doing in his beast space. Was he hurt? Was he healing?

As a Saint beast, he only needed Qi to heal back to normal, albeit after a long time. Alex hoped to give Pearl a healing pill too. But he couldn't do so right now.

His spirit was weak, and his Spiritual sea was not something he could access any longer. His Soul Space was the same.

Alex doubted either of those things were destroyed when his dantian was broken through. Nascent Souls and Soul Space survived even worse situations.

When a body was entirely destroyed, a Nascent Soul still lived. When a person died, their Soul Space still survived. So, the chances of his being destroyed were low.

But that was not to say that his Nascent Soul was not on the verge of dying and that his Soul Space wouldn't come to some misfortune if he waited too long either.

Also, with the situation he was currently in, Alex wondered what had happened to Godslayer. Was the Spiritual Sea fine? It was fine when his head was gone, but this was a different situation.

It was his cultivation that had disappeared this time, the thing that powered the spiritual sea in a way.

Alex was also worried if his sister had successfully made it back or not. He tried sensing where Whisker was, but sensing things was no longer a thing he could do. His senses were so very dull.

He tried to fall asleep sometime later, but he was too energetic to sleep anytime soon. So, he sat there thinking about what he would have to do in the future. There were no pills with the old man and he couldn't search for his own pill as he now lacked Spiritual sense.

Could he make some? No, that was impossible too. Even if he gave the old man some instruction, making him any good days within the next month would be impossible. He would have a better chance of asking him to take him to the Southern Continent while fighting off anyone who threatened to block their way.

And then as his thoughts wandered again, he once again remembered Yao Ning's death. Her death was going to haunt him, just like his master's death had all those years ago.

Only this one felt a lot more personal somehow.

He had spent less than half a year with his master, while with Yao Ning, he had spent nearly 30 years. Their relationship might not have been as close as he had with his master, but it was still a strong one.

And for destroying that, he hated the Dragon Emperor.

Rage slumbered inside of Alex right then, like embers in the hearth, but that was only because he knew that he could not do anything about the Dragon Emperor right at that time. It would burn bright when the time was right.

Alex closed his eyes as the evening brought in darkness and let himself grieve for the death of the woman who did what she could to save him. He cried and as such let himself fall asleep.

The next morning, Alex woke to some freshly cooked stew. The old man gave him all of it once it was ready, urging him to eat it all.

"Since you told me about your body cultivation, I assumed there wouldn't be any trouble with you eating solid meals," the man said. "I caught some True Silver pikes and added some herbs to it. The fish meat aids somewhat with healing."

Alex nodded as he heard that. "Thank you," he said and started eating. Once again, the dish made by this old man was so incredible that Alex regretted the old man not having proper dishes to cook these meals in.

He took some time to finish before feeling incredibly energized.

"I'll cultivate for the day and make your next meal later tonight, is that alright?" the old man said.

"That's fine," Alex said and watched the old man go deeper inside the cave. "You said the entire island is hidden, right?"

The old man paused and turned around. "Yes, why?" he asked.

"I'm gonna go around the island and look for herbs," Alex said. "Hopefully, I can find ones that will help me heal quickly so I can do what I must."

The old man's eyes narrowed. "And what is it that you must do?" he asked.

Alex gave a small smile. "Let me start with getting healed first," he said. "We can see to the rest later."

Then, he walked out of the cave and went to the forest to search for everything he would need.

Chapter 1703 Healing Paste

The island Alex was on truly wasn't very large. He couldn't see everything from where he was, but what he could see told him that the island was around 3 or 4 kilometers in diameter at best.

He slowly walked down the mountain, walking into the forest that lay just a few minute's walk below.

Entering the forest, Alex felt a sort of odd feeling that he hadn't felt in a very, very long time.

He felt a sense of emptiness that came from his mind not constantly telling him what all the plants were and what they did. If he didn't focus on anything, he wouldn't know anything.

The Alchemy God's Knowledge was still somewhere in the back of his mind even in his crippled form, telling him what he needed to know. That was good news for Alex at the very least.

He looked around, searching for anything that was good. The old man had remained on this island for a long time, so Alex hoped he had missed a few things, but as he went along, he didn't find anything important enough for him to pick up.

After walking for nearly 15 minutes he found an ingredient strong enough for him to use. It was an ingredient that could be used to heal him if mixed with some other ingredients.

He was going to make a paste using it.

Alex continued walking searching for the ingredients he needed and was surprised how much time it was taking for him to find these things. He quickly realized that it wasn't that there was nothing on the island, but that since his perception had been severely limited, it was taking him time to find things.

Without his spiritual sense, he would have to continue searching for things all over the place.

Alex found a few more ingredients, mostly for healing his physical body. He was also searching for ingredients to heal his spirit, but he was having a hard time finding those.

Still, it would seem that even with an island as small as this one, without his cultivation base and spiritual sense, it was going to take him a long time to go through it all.

Alex searched for the whole day and only stopped around the time twilight came along, and that too because the old man came to find him.

Alex returned to the cave, not even having searched halfway through the entire island. There were still 2 more days of searching he would need to go through to cover the entire island.

"Did you find everything you wanted?" Zhou Linfan asked him while cooking something in the pot.

"Not really," Alex said. "But I found enough for now."

He had been carrying the ingredients wrapped around his robes and let them fall to the ground. "Do you have something I can use to make them into a paste?"

The old man brought out a stone slab and a round stone to crush the ingredients. "I've been using this. You can use it too." He handed Alex some clean water too.

Alex thanked the man and started making the pastes. The paste he was making was not something he had ever made before. However, he knew how the ingredients would react with each other, and knew that they would make a good enough healing paste.

Once the paste was ready, he took off the leather that wrapped around his stomach and looked at the wound on his body.

A long gash ran from his chest, all the way to his navel region. The gash around the chest had just about closed up, but the ones on the lower area still needed some time to fully heal.

Alex tore a piece of his robe and used it to slowly wipe away the medicine that was already on there, put on him by the old man, while also cleaning the wound. Once the wound was cleaned, he applied the new healing paste and wrapped it back around with the leather again.

The old man watched Alex do everything by himself and was pleasantly impressed. "You're quite resourceful, aren't you?" he asked, from where he stood next to the pot. "Only half a day and you made a paste far better than I could."

"I may not look like it right now, but I'm still the greatest alchemist below the Immortal realm in this world right now," Alex said, turning to look at the man.

The old man was more than just impressed at that. "Hah!" he laughed out loud, unclear if he trusted Alex's words or not, but he said nothing.

"Is that going to heal you fine? Will it heal your Dantian too?" the old man asked. "I remember hearing that not every healing pill could heal a Dantian."

"No, not every healing pill can do that," Alex said. "Especially, not healing pastes."

"Oh," the old man felt bad. "Then... can you not heal while you are here? I suppose you will have to wait until those soldiers leave before I can take you back to your continent."

"No," Alex said quickly. "I can heal my Dantian if I can find something to improve my spirit. So I need to find anything to improve the current state of my Spirit."

"How will that help with healing your Dantian?" the old man asked.

"It will work for me, I think," Alex said.

"You don't sound confident," the old man said.

"Well... I've never been crippled before, so I don't exactly know if what I'm saying is true," Alex said. "But this is the only thing I can trust right now. I cannot trust others, and only myself."

The old man nodded. He brought the pot over and let Alex eat what he had cooked that day. It was once again a stew with some fish that tasted incredible.

"This should improve your blood flow so that those healing pastes you used work more efficiently," the old man said.

Alex thanked the man. He wasn't entirely correct in what he said, but it was close enough. Besides, the food was once again delicious.

"Once you wake up tomorrow, I will help you find these plants you are looking for. Can you give me a list or something?" the man asked.

"I... can't," Alex said. "There are way too many to make a list, so it is better if I come with you. That way, I might get through it all even faster."

"Hmm... I don't have any problem with that," the old man said. "We can go around the island tomorrow. If we don't find what you're looking for, I can take you to the other islands too. Although, that will need some patience since we don't want to get caught."

"You're not afraid of getting beaten by them, right?" Alex asked. "You're stronger than most of them."

"No, I'm not afraid of them," the man said. "I'm afraid they will contact the Emperor and he will come. He's too strong for me right now, so I can't meet him yet."

"Yet?" Alex asked with a curious look on his face. "That makes it sound like you actually do want to meet him sometime in the future."

"Meet him? Of course I do," the old man said. "How else am I supposed to kill the man?"

Chapter 1704 The Old Man’s Past

?Alex looked at the old man with a start. "You want to kill the Dragon Emperor?" he asked. "Is there a reason?"

The old man looked at Alex seemingly wondering if he wanted to reveal more.

"He murdered my family." The old man's eyes darkened slightly, a look of pain flashing through them as he remembered the past.

"Your family? Why did he do that?" Alex asked. "Did they do something wrong?"

"They did nothing wrong," the man snapped. "They were good people, living a good life. And then, out of nowhere, that bastard accused my father of treason and treachery, using people he planted as proof. He said he was planning a coup."

"They had my father executed, his wives killed, his family slaughtered. None of them were left alive," he said. "And for that, I will kill that bastard, one way or another."

Alex was stunned for a while, partially because of what the old man had to go through, but also because of the words he used. Words like treason, treachery, coup, and execution were no simple words. Together, they told Alex of an event from a long time ago.

"Your father was one of the Kings from the previous 5 kingdoms?" Alex asked.

The old man grumbled a bit before nodding. "My father was Lin Shouzhen, king of the Lin Kingdom," the man said.

"Lin kingdom... that's Ebony kingdom now, isn't it?" Alex asked.

The old man nodded.

Alex took a moment to process all the information. "So that was why you knew about the Voidgate that even the Dragon Emperor didn't know about," he said. "You were a prince of a large kingdom and probably learned it while you were young."

"The Voidgate? It's something secret that has been passed along to our family for a long time. Not many know about it," the man said.

Alex nodded. "Wait, I thought the Emperor had everyone from your family killed. How did you survive?" he asked.

"My mother... she swapped me with one of the servant kids. The poor kid died in my stead," the old man said. "Zhou Linfan was his name that I took up."

"I see... what is your real name?" Alex asked.

"Zhou Linfan is my real name now," the old man said. "Who I was before... I no longer am. So my name does not matter anymore."

Alex did not pry any further, but there was something else that he was curious about. "You seem to have a deep hatred for the Dragon Emperor, and you should hate everyone that was involved with him. Why did you save the 2nd prince?"

"No child should bear the punishment for his father's crime," the old man said. "I won't do what the Emperor did."

"Still, why did you help him?" Alex asked.

"The 2nd Prince... he never liked fighting or cultivation. He was instead interested in simpler things. He would come to the kitchen in the palace quite often to enjoy the food I made. He talked to me and we were close," the old man said. "When I found out he was in trouble, and it had to do with him going against the Emperor's orders, I decided to help him."

"Thanks to your decision, my cousin is alive today," Alex said. "You must really care about the second prince to stay here just in case they get caught."

The old man scoffed a little. "I don't care about the kid so much that I would go so far," he said. "It's not that I want to protect the kid, which I'm not saying I don't. I just don't want the Emperor to get his hands on the thing he wants the most."

"The Ivory sword?" Alex asked.

The old man gave a surprised look. "You know about that?" he asked.

"I learned of it the day I was crippled," Alex said. "The Ivory sword should be safe with the second prince, assuming he safely made their way to the Southern Continent. Their departure had been sudden, so I'm a little worried."

"Don't be worried," the old man said. "There's no point in worrying anyway. Go rest now. Tomorrow will be a long day for you."

Alex nodded and thanked the old man for the food before laying back down to rest.

'He must've made his way up the rank slowly to get close to the Emperor,' Alex thought. 'Did he want to feed the Emperor poison?'

There were many things about the old man's life that Alex didn't think he would be comfortable sharing.

'Still, to think he was a prince,' Alex thought. A prince who took up the name of a servant and now looked no different than a beggar. 'What am I thinking? He's still one of the strongest people I know aside from the Immortal beasts.'

As bad as the old man looked, he was still in the Saint Transformation 7th realm. Or at least, that was what he was nearly 18 years back when Alex saw him for the first time. Although, Alex doubted he could've improved much in the last few years considering he had been alive for many millennia.

'Well, I can't keep thinking about him, can I? I have my own problems to deal with.'

Alex soon dozed off.

He woke up quite early the next day before the sun even rose as nature called. It had been so many years since he had to do something like that, and it felt alien to him.

After another small but delicious breakfast, he and Zhou Linfan went around the island searching for ingredients.

Their method of searching was simple. Alex would look for items in the forest around him while the old man would use his spiritual sense to look around for items far away and describe them back to Alex to see if they were useful.

Alex managed to find a fruit with some spiritual affinity this way and also 3 small herbs that were all but useless. Most herbs that had any sort of effect had unfortunately long since been eaten or taken away by the more intelligent beasts that understood their importance.

Alex finished searching the entire island by the end of the day and didn't find a single thing that he could consider worth the day. Still, what he did find would have to help him for the day.

Every step forward was a step closer to being able to cultivate again.

Once back, Alex ate another short meal. Meanwhile, the old man started meditating and brought out some sort of medallion. It took Alex a moment to realize it was something to control a formation.

"There are still quite a few around," the old man said suddenly. "Around 12 people in 100 kilometers around us. If we are lucky, we won't be seen by them."

"How far do you reckon they can stretch their spiritual sense?" Alex asked.

"The strongest man should be in the Saint Transformation realm. So, I would expect them to cover all the way to us," the old man said. "They won't see anything here, but we'll still have to be careful."

"I'll check again tomorrow, and we can go to an island that is opposite to where most of them are gathered."

Alex nodded. "Let's do that."

Chapter 1705 Spirit Test

?Alex and Zhou Linfan had to stay on the island until late in the afternoon before they found the opportunity to leave.

The island they went to was far enough from the people according to the formations that the old man had set up around the ocean that let them have a general idea of where everyone was in the ocean.

The old man had apparently also learned about formations while training to be a cook. Becoming a cook was what he wanted to do the most, but he also needed something else to become good at, and he had apparently learned formations too.

While he had never taken tests to show his formation skills, the old man believed that if he did take the tests, he would easily become a Level 8 formation expert.

"The area around the island I stay in is always under surveillance, but anything too far away can't be kept permanently working, so instead I decided to set up several small warning formations in a network instead. If a human or ship flies over it, it lets me know who and how strong, and I can know where they are based on which formation activates."

That was the explanation Zhou Linfan had given Alex when asked about the formations that helped him monitor the ocean.

It apparently spanned thousands and thousands of kilometers wide and had yet only had a few of the formations discovered or destroyed.

The island they were on now was much larger than the other island, so Alex hoped he could find the ingredients he was looking for. Any fruit or roots, any leaves, flowers, even barks with any sort of spirit healing capacity would be of much aid to Alex.

They searched through the entire island and managed to find 3 things that could be considered of some quality and brought them back to the main island again.

Alex ate those ingredients raw. He didn't want to dilute or otherwise destroy what effect it had by needlessly cooking it. In the first place, aside from managing fire to release energy, he didn't know what random heat would do to an ingredient when cooked.

"Are you sure you won't get a stomach ache by eating that raw?" the old man asked him. "I can understand the fruit, but you're even chewing the root. At least let me cook the root, I'm used to cooking them for the elderly in the palace."

"That's alright," Alex said. "My stomach can handle it."

He did make sure to chew it all up thoroughly before swallowing. As he ate what he had gathered, he felt his mind clear up just a little. Yesterday hadn't been this way, so he must have eaten something right today.

He finished eating everything and then made more healing paste using what new ingredients he had found that day. Once he applied it, he laid back down, ready to sleep again.

'How much has my spirit healed in 2 days?' Alex wondered. How was he supposed to even tell that? He needed some sort of metric to help him.

"Senior, do you know of any way I can measure how strong my spirit is?" Alex asked him. "Maybe a formation of some sort?"

"A spirit measuring formation?" the old man asked, thinking for a bit. "I... think I know a blueprint for one. But to make it, we'll need an appropriate metal or alloy. I don't know where I can find that in this place.

"How about carving it on the cave wall instead," Alex said while pointing to the wall. "You can connect it to the formation that is already working on the island."

"That... can work," the old man said. "But making formations on rock is so difficult. You have so much less freedom than a metal. Still, I'll try tomorrow. You want to check how strong your spirit has grown, don't you? I'll make it happen."

"Thank you, senior," Alex said and went to sleep.

When he woke up the next morning, the old man was already working on it.

At some point, before Alex woke up, he had managed to scrape the wall of the cave smooth without any lumps or uneven surfaces. Alex sat and watched as the old man brought out a small carving pen to carve out a complex formation on the wall.

Alex had to look at the formation for nearly 10 minutes after the completion to figure out which of the 6 base formations were being used to form this Saint formation.

When he finally figured it out, he was more than impressed with the overall formation.

"Stand here," the old man called Alex, pointing him to a location. "I didn't have the resources to set up a proper control to this formation. So when testing your spirit, it will slowly ramp up on the spiritual attack it does."

"I'll have you take this bowl full of water on one hand, and if you spill even a drop of water in it, I'll stop the formation immediately," the old man said.

Alex walked up to where the old man had pointed and looked at the formation. He laid out his hand and the old man put the bowl of water on it.

Alex took a deep breath and relaxed his hand just enough so that if he wavered even the slightest bit, his arm wouldn't hold up. He wasn't going to take any chances on his spirit when his life and cultivation depended on it.

He took a deep breath and nodded. "I'm ready!"

He felt ready. The things he ate last night had helped him a lot after all. His mind felt so much fresher like he had finally had a good night of sleep after a long time.

The old man looked at Alex and nodded, activating the formation.

Instantly, Alex felt a wave of mental pain that he was so familiar with. It made him nearly stagger, but he did drop the bowl or the water in it.

He persevered. He was stronger than this. He had felt pain before and he was used to it. This was nothing compared to all that pain. He could handle it even as it grew.

Alex wasn't wrong and he did handle the pain... for all of 2 more seconds before he fainted.

It was late in the afternoon when he woke up with a headache and the old man explained what had happened to him.

"I... fell unconscious?" he asked.

"You lasted for 3 seconds and fell," the old man explained. "The water bowl didn't even have the time to fall when you fainted."

"How... how strong was the attack? Did you find out?" Alex asked.

"I checked after you fainted to see if I had mistakenly made it too strong," the old man said. "From what I sensed, it was strong enough that anyone under the Organ Tempering realm would have fainted."

Alex stared at the old man for a long second. "What? Organ Tempering realm?" he asked with a look of horror. "But that is so low."

The old man shrugged. "Hey! I'm surprised that you're not weaker, considering you're a mortal now," he said. "I think your spirit is strong."

"No," Alex said. "I need to be stronger. I need to find better ingredients to heal my spirit even more. So, when do we leave next?"

Chapter 1706 The Better Island

In the following week, Alex went to another island besides the first one and searched through the forest on that island to see what he could find. This island was larger than either of the two before, so he managed to find a few more plants to heal his spirit.

By the end of the week, his spirit had grown to be somewhere on part with a starting Mind Tempering realm cultivator. Since it was in this realm where one's spirit truly became strong, Alex would have to work even harder from this point forward to find more spirit-healing plants.

On the opposite end of his struggle, he had no problem finding items to heal his body and had long since healed all of his wounds. Right now, he was only collecting them for the sake of collecting them.

Since these plants were already there, there was no point in letting them rot in the forest. Not all of them were just for healing too.

Then, the search continued.

For the next 2 days, Alex searched the island completely, and there was nothing else there to be found. It was time to move on to another one.

"Are there no better islands to move to?" Alex asked the old man as they flew back toward the main island.

"There is one large and full of wonderful plants on the other side, but we can't go there until those soldiers leave," the old man said. "We might have to even stay hidden for a few days so they pass by."

Alex frowned at the thought of losing days of potential searching for cures. He grumbled inside, wanting to protest, but he knew better. This was for the best.

"Alright, we will do as you say," he said.

5 days later, the old man finally let Alex know that it was safe enough to leave. There were no more soldiers around the area.

"Finally," Alex stood up from where he sat in the cave. "I was going to go mad waiting."

"How can you go mad staying in one place for just 5 days?" the old man asked. "I'm sure you've spent more time just cultivating,"

"But I'm not cultivating," Alex said. "Also, each passing second is important to me. My future depends on it. I can't have time slip by me and not worry right now."

"At least there is one good news," the old man said. "We're going to go to the big island today."

Alex's eyes widened in happiness. "Really?" he asked.

The old man nodded. "The soldiers moved to the other side, so we can go to that one now," he said. "Hopefully, we'll find what you need, so we can improve your spirit to become as strong as True Realm as soon as possible. Will that be enough for you to do whatever you are planning?"

"I... don't know," Alex said. "I'll have to test when we get there, but I fear that I must restore at least Saint realm level of spirit before I can get anywhere."

"Saint realm... is that even possible as a mortal?" the old man asked.

Alex could only shrug. "I don't really know," he said. "But I'm betting on it. If not... well, I'll have a long path ahead of me."

"Let us pray you don't then." The old man took out his medallion to check one last time and nodded. "Time to leave."

After half an hour of flight above the ocean, Alex arrived on the other island.

"I haven't seen many ocean beasts coming out to attack in this area. Aren't they supposed to be active?" Alex asked the old man.

"It's these soldiers that are forcing them to stay low," the old man said. "The strong ones naturally stay away from land, and those that live nearby are not strong enough to come out when the humans are around."

"Is that so?" Alex asked, nodding to himself. "It's a good thing then. We wouldn't want strong beasts to attack us randomly."

The old man nodded as well.

The new island was mostly flat with a vast land full of forests, both thick and sparse, as well as a grassland that spread far and wide. Even at the fastest, it would still take Alex over 2 weeks to search the entire island.

A satisfied smile formed on his face after seeing it all. "This place looks a lot more promising than any of the other ones. We should be able to find something here."

"I'll look for the things that I know are important or the ones that you collected before," the old man said and began searching the island with his spiritual sense.

Alex found more items in 3 hours in this place than he did in the other islands in entire days. 3 flowers, 2 fruits, one stalk, and 2 sets of roots.

After an hour, he found a plant that grew a select few leaves with some spiritual energy in it. Eating those would give good results.

The old man was making steady progress and was in fact better than Alex at finding everything. Since he could cover such a large area with his spiritual sense, he could see much more area than Alex could.

Even if he wasn't as perceptive of the plants as Alex was, he was still much better at finding them all. So, in the time it took Alex to gather what he did, the old man had already located items nearly 10 times as many.

Alex continued, picking what he could find, but still mostly searching for just the ones that healed his spirit. He also tried to find new plants so the old man could know what to look for next.

Some items were naturally very hard to find, and Alex could only find them either through experience or through the Alchemy God's Intent that still remained in his mind.

They continued searching while the old man brought Alex to the locations where he had found the items. There were some that he needed Alex to pick unless he made a mistake and ruined them somehow.

"These should be enough to help heal your spirit a lot," the old man said. "Should we continue searching?"

"Do you recommend doing otherwise?" Alex asked. "If it is dangerous, we can leave and come back."

"It's not dangerous," the old man said. "It is just going to get dark is all. And you're still a mortal with a wounded spirit, so you'll need much more rest."

Alex thought for a moment and nodded. "I'll do what you say."

"We still have time," the old man said with a smile. "Let us continue searching for an hour longer. We can return afterward."

He spread his spiritual sense through the island again, searching for items that were in there. Since he was further on the island, he could cover more area effectively.

"Oh, there's a spirit—"

The old man frowned all of a sudden and turned around with a dark look on his face.

"What?" Alex asked, confused. "What's wrong?"

"Spiritual sense," the old man said. "Two. They noticed me, but they should be far enough away that they can't sense us properly. What should we do?"

Chapter 1707 A Sudden Trouble

"I'm assuming what sensed you are not beasts?" Alex asked.

The old man frowned, pulling up his medallion. "I don't want to risk spreading my spirit sense to see if they're beasts and humans," he said. "None of my formations returned warned me of any human or ships flying over us, so it couldn't be..."

He slowed down a bit, his face darkening even further. "Dammit!" he cried out all of a sudden.

"W-what?" Alex asked. He was slightly scared by the old man's outburst.

"Two of my warning formations are down on the other side," the old man said.

"You don't get notified when they're down?" Alex asked the old man.

"I'm supposed to, but I didn't receive any. It happens from time to time." The old man sighed and turned toward Alex. "What do we do now? Fight?"

"Are you sure they're coming this way?" Alex asked.

The old man checked the medallion again.

"Yes, they're coming this way," he said. "In fact, they're close enough that they won't have to strain their spiritual sense too. And if we run away, they'll alert the others, I fear. We can't be chased."

Alex nodded. He thought for a bit, worried. "I need to do something about my face," he said softly. "They'll recognize me."

"But I have nothing for that," the old man said.

"The blue flower with the red dots I got a few days ago," Alex said quickly. "I called it the Redspot Tiger Daisy. Bring it out."

The old man nodded, bringing out the flower as said. Alex took the flower, and immediately chewed on it, eating it.

He felt a heat bubble up in his stomach once he swallowed it, a burning sensation from the toxins that were in the poison. It would soon show its effects.

"What did you eat?" the old man asked.

"A mild poison. It messes with your face, turning it purple and swollen. I think it can hide my—"

Alex's face paled, but not because of the poison. The poison in his body was suddenly broken down and converted to its most basic essence, Qi. That Qi then went through his blood vessels directly into his meridians, and before he knew it, it entered his Dantian.

And since Alex's Dandian was still broken, it very quickly flowed out of his Dantian, leaving nothing behind.

Alex felt hollow all of a sudden. It was good news that his body was still fighting against poison, protecting him when he could not. Healing plants and other such plants were allowed to affect his body, but poisons were blocked.

But the timing couldn't be anymore unfortunate.

Alex could only grimace in the end. "It didn't work," he said softly. "I don't know what else to do."

"This is bad," the old man said and turned toward the ocean. He could sense the two figures coming closer even from far away. Their aura was easy to distinguish as they were making a show of it flying there quickly.

"Screw it! There's no need to panic. I'll do something. I'll fight them if it comes to that. In the meantime, you should—"

The old man turned toward Alex and paused as shock filled him. Alex was no longer there at all. He wanted to shout out for Alex, but the two human's spiritual senses covered him.

He couldn't speak and instead returned to looking toward the people who approached. As they got closer, the old man released his spiritual sense and saw the two people as well.

The two people, one man, and one woman were both in the late Saint Soul realm, with the man being in the 9th realm and the woman in the 8th.

They were both typically good-looking, but nothing extraordinary, except maybe for the woman's outlandishly bright green hair. It was a rather rare color for a hair, and probably meant she had more to her bloodline than regular humans.

The old man stood where he was until the two arrived in front of him.

"Who are you and why have you made a show of your arrival?" the old man asked.

"We are legionnaires of the Scale Legion of the Eastern Continent," the man said. "Who are you, old man?"

Zhou Linfan hid a look of pleasant surprise from his face. 'If they are not being hostile... then they don't know about me,' he thought.

During his time in the oceans, he had come to learn that there were 2 types of soldiers he would meet. One that would immediately recognize him and one that wouldn't.

Since he so very rarely went out to cause trouble, his infamy hadn't spread just yet. However, he would've still assumed them to know about him, but they didn't. That meant that someone, most likely the Dragon Emperor, was suppressing his presence here.

The Emperor feared about what Zhou Linfan might end up revealing

This meant, against these 2 soldiers, he didn't immediately have to fight.

"Fellow Daoists, I am called Hao Fangling," the old man said. "I am an elder of the Desolate Mountain sect in the Northern Continent."

"An elder from the Northern Continent? What is an old man like you doing here?" the man demanded. The old man had managed to present himself as someone weaker than the two and thus made the two more arrogant here.

"That's exactly the thing, fellow Daoist," the old man said. "I am not old. I am merely 2 thousand years old."

"What?" the man asked.

"That's right," Zhou Linfan answered. "I'm only 2 thousand years old, but as you can see, my body has somehow aged many more times than it should have. So, I'm here to find a cure for my problem. An alchemist told me to find a flower called the Dawn Fade Camelia, which would help me get rid of this old age."

"Okay, but why are you here on this island?" the woman asked. "Did nobody tell you to get away from this place right now?"

"Leave this place? But I only just arrived," the old man said. "I used a teleportation talisman to try and make my way to the Eastern Continent, but it must have been weak. I arrived about 2 islands that way. I wanted to go to the Eastern Continent directly, but I instead found this wonderful island and am trying to find the plant here."

The two frowned and conversed with each other in secret. After a brief moment, they seemed to come to a decision. "The Eastern Continent is off-limit to any outsiders. We shall allow you to search for what you want on this island for a single day. By tomorrow, when we come to search here again, you must be gone. Understood?"

"The Eastern Continent is off-limit?" the old man asked. "Why is that—"

"You don't need to know," the woman snapped back. "Do as we tell you to or we'll capture you and take you there as a prisoner."

"No, no, I'll do as you say," the old man said. "I'll search this place right away and leave for the north."

"Good," the man said. "You better stick to your word. We'll come check tomorrow."

"Of course," the old man's aid quickly. "You don't have to worry."

The two soldiers nodded and flew away, leaving the old man alone on the island, wondering where Alex had disappeared to.

Chapter 1708 Something Incredible

Zhou Linfan waited for the two cultivators to fly far away and take away their spiritual sense before he showed any sort of concern on his face. He quickly looked around, searching for Alex, even going so far as to open his spiritual sense throughout the island to try and find him.

He panicked when he couldn't find any sign of Alex at all, but just then he sensed something that made him pause.

Right next to him, something rippled. He turned around and was left with a wide jaw as Alex appeared from a fold in space and fell to the ground in front of him, unconscious.

"Young man? Are you okay?"

Zhou Linfan tried to wake Alex up, but he was entirely unconscious. 'What happened to you?' the old man thought as he checked to see if Alex was even alive.

Then he stared at the space where Alex had appeared from. "Space Dao?" he wondered. "Does this kid have the dragon's blood too?"

As far as he was aware, the only way to learn Space Dao was to be able to sense Space Aura first. One could sense Space aura if they spent time around it for a while, but that time would have to be in the centuries if not millennia.

How could a kid who was not a century old learn it to the extent that he could hide himself from the Saint realm cultivators?

"Curious," he said softly. "I wonder how he did it."

He took Alex back to the cave safe and sound and remained hidden there for as long as it would take for the soldiers to leave the area. And as long as it would take for Alex to come back to consciousness.

The soldiers didn't leave in the next 5 days, but at the end of it, Alex did wake up.

He woke up in a daze, unsure of where he was at first. His headache was particularly painful, and standing up made the world seem to spin a little. He looked around at the cave, and then at the old man at the end.

Finally, some of his memories returned. "I fainted?" he asked.

"You did," the old man explained. "After expending your spirit by using the Space Dao, I assume. I was surprised when you came out of nowhere."

"Space Dao?" Alex asked and tried to remember what had happened. "Ah right. I remember. I panicked and decided to hide using the space around me."

"Yes, you did. That surprised me very much," the old man said. "I might have been distracted, but it was surprised because I couldn't sense you use your Dao at all."

"I was either too weak for you to sense anything worth your attention maybe," Alex said. "Or maybe you just can't sense Space aura."

The old man nodded. "I don't doubt that I'm bad at sensing Space aura. But once you had folded space and continued using the Dao, I should have been notified. Even if not that, you are still a mortal with some aura to yourself. When I searched for you, I should have found you, but I didn't."

"It was like you didn't exist at all."

Alex shook his head. "I separated the space immediately around me from the space beyond it," he said. "Essentially, I made a very tiny secret realm where I alone could fit. So you couldn't sense anything that happened inside of it."

Zhou Linfan's eyes were opened wide in surprise when he heard that. "That's... actually incredible," he said. "You made actual secret realms to hide yourself. I wonder if I could've found it if I was searching for it."

"You probably would have," Alex said. "Secret realms aren't that hard to find after all."

The old man nodded. "Still, I must commend you for thinking so quickly and making such a great decision under stress. That was incredible of you."

"Yes," Alex said. "But now I'm back to where I was when I started. Actually, my spirit might be weaker now."

The old man nodded. "Maybe," he said and then produced the items they had gathered that they. "But you have more to work with now, so you can catch up quickly."

Alex nodded.

"Besides, there is nothing for you to do besides stay and eat these anyway. Those soldiers are still around and will likely stay around until they end up concluding that you really did die," the old man said. "Only then can we go out and search for whatever you want more easily."

"You are right," Alex said, reaching for one of the plants the old man produced. His head still throbbed and his stomach cried in hunger, so he decided to deal with both problems at once.

He would have more than loved to eat what the old man could cook, but this was the better thing to do right now.

He ate the items, one by one, letting his body accept the healing spiritual energy that lifted his headache. He ate slowly, and a lot of it. Soon enough, he was feeling much better than before.

"Do you have to eat it all at once?" the old man asked. "You should let your stomach settle first."

"No need," Alex said, slapping his stomach. "My body can handle it."

A few more days passed and Alex finally finished all of it. Then, he tested his spirit's strength using the formation on the wall and was more than happy to realize that he had successfully lifted his spirits to the True Master realm.

That was a lot further up than he had expected to reach when he first started eating the items.

The old man went out of the island twice during the past few days, going out for no longer than 3 hours at most and returning with more items for Alex to devour.

Alex happily ate every one of them, getting closer and closer to the True Lord realm in terms of his spirit. However, the problem that he had assumed was going to show anytime soon was starting to surface.

He was starting to slow down in his progress.

Was it because the items he found were not good enough? Or was a mortal's spirit just that slow to grow?

Alex didn't know which one of the two was the answer, but whichever it was, the result was the same. His spirit was growing slowly, and he needed something incredible to push it up further.

He needed to find an incredible treasure of some sort. "Should I enter the ocean and see if there are some things there?" he wondered out loud. That was a good idea, wasn't it?

The ocean, discounting the beasts that lived there, was an untouched field of incredible resources. So long as the beasts weren't aware of the incredible abilities of many of the ingredients found down there, they would have left it aside.

If he went into the ocean, he would certainly find things that could help him.

"You want to go to the ocean?" the old man asked as he flew down from the air. "That's a bad idea."

Alex turned to look at the man with a start. It was annoying to now know when someone was approaching you or was looking at you with a spiritual sense.

The old man tossed a few more ingredients toward Alex, and Alex immediately started munching at him.

"Why is it such a bad idea?" Alex asked the old man as he chewed on the ingredients."Aside from the fact that I can't breathe there for a long time, of course."

The old man chuckled a bit. "There are many bad things about the ocean, the least of which would be you drowning. The beasts are certainly the biggest problem, but problems such as toxic weeds and other similar things could kill you instantly."

"The ocean is undocumented for the most part, so you never know what is trouble and what is not," the old man said. "Besides. Whatever you would want could only be found on the ocean floor, and I don't know how deep you can go without Qi. I certainly don't plan on going down there."

Alex sighed a little. "You're not wrong," he said. "I suppose I shouldn't think about leaving for the ocean just yet. Let's see if we can find something good on the islands first."

"Ah, that reminds me," the old man said. "I did find something. Actually, I found it the day we were there, but the soldiers came suddenly and I had to stop. Still, I did find something that can be considered good, but I don't know how good it would be."

"What did you find?" Alex asked curiously. "Some treasure plant?"

"In a way," the old man said. "It's a flower that is known for its spiritual ability. You should have heard of it even if you weren't an alchemist to begin with. It's called the Spirit—"

"The Spirit Cleansing Lily?" Alex burst out suddenly.

The old man took a moment to acknowledge Alex's burst and slowly nodded. "Yes, Spirit Cleansing Lily. It's the flower that you can use 3 times to improve your spiritual sense."

"I know," Alex said and slowly sighed as the excitement dwindled from his eyes. "I've already used it 3 times. It won't affect me now."

"Oh... I see," the old man said. "It is more incredible than anything you have eaten the past week, isn't it?

"It is indeed more..." Alex paused as a curious thought floated in his head.

"Now that I think about it, maybe I do indeed have a use for it still," Alex said. "I wonder what will happen if instead of using it normally, I eat the Spirit Cleansing Lily."

Chapter 1709 Consuming the Lily

Alex and Zhou Linfan arrived on the old island a day later when most of the soldiers had gone far away. They quickly made their way to the location where Zhou Linfan had found the Spirit Cleansing Lily.

When Alex did arrive, he couldn't help but show a small glimpse of shock on his face. The place where the Spirit Cleansing Lily grew was a massive flower field with dozens of Spirit Cleansing Lilies at the least.

Counting the flowers alone, there were thousands that were clumped together at about 20 to 40 flowers in a single clump.

Alex slowly landed next to the flower field and looked up close at one of the clumps in front of him.

"You don't have a spiritual sense, so I'll help you," the old man said. "I don't really know how one picks the right lily though, so you will have to help me. I'm expecting you know ho—"

Alex reached for one of the flowers and picked it. The red lily was easily torn away from the batch of lilies it was in, the flower and stalk lying simply on Alex's hand.

The batch of flowers below him did not wilt immediately. They would in a few days of time, but the lack of it right now proved that Alex had picked the right one.

Alex couldn't help but smile.

"You picked the correct one?" the old man asked from behind with a look of confusion. "Was I wrong? Do you not need a spiritual sense for this?"

"You do... normally," Alex said, failing to hide his grin.

"What was abnormal about this one?" the old man asked.

Alex shook his head. "I'm making use of a body cultivation technique that changed part of my physique," he said. The Demon Eyes were still working perfectly fine.

He could see the slight difference in the energy that was in the flowers and knew which one to pick. He didn't even need to get help from the Intent hidden in his mind.

He stood up and looked at the other with his glowing purple eyes. It was annoying that there was a layer of haze in front of him that was formed from the simple energies that were ever present in the air.

If he could somehow train himself to ignore them, then his Demon Eyes' usefulness would skyrocket immediately.

As it was right now, he had to walk over to the individual clumps of flowers and crouch down to see them clearly enough to see which one it was that he needed to pick.

He picked the correct one and moved on.

Along the way, he also taught the old man the way to pick Spirit Cleansing Lily. All one really needed was a strong spiritual sense and a bit of practice.

The old man had to look into the group of flowers and find the flower from amongst it that was different enough that only it could be the real one of the bunch.

Once he figured out which one it was, the job was all but done.

In just a matter of a few minutes, they managed to gather all the Spirit Cleansing lilies in the area and left back to the main island.

There were warning formations that were still broken on the other side, so they had to be careful each time they left.

Returning to the island, the old man gave all of the flowers to Alex and sat down beside him to watch. "I'm curious how it is going to work," he said. "How can eating a plant like this help when it is definitely supposed to be used in an entirely different way."

There was no way there weren't people before Alex who had tried to eat the plant. If it did anything wonderful, people would've known already. The fact that it was unheard of meant that it was most likely not very useful.

"As I said, I've never tried eating these before," Alex said. "So it will be my first time too. I'm not expecting it to improve my spiritual strength past what it was at my peak. I just hope it will help me get back there quickly. I most definitely need that."

The old man nodded. "Go on then, eat it. I can't imagine anything bad happening from this flower," he said.

Alex didn't either. Still, he was nervous. He took a deep breath and gobbled up the first flower. He chewed the flower maybe 3 times before immediately swallowing it, not wanting it to lose any of its precious energy.

His body, almost feeling the incoming plant, worked to consume it. And consume it did.

Alex immediately felt a wave of energy pass through his mind like cool spring water. He felt as though he was jolted awake and the energy kept on flowing through the flower.

That continued for about 3 minutes before it finally stopped and it left Alex breathing ragged breath as he had forgotten to take in a breath for most of that duration.

"This... this is incredible," he thought to himself. He looked around, his eyes focusing on multiple objects at once, something he couldn't do before. His mental strength had definitely improved a lot because of this.

Alex quickly stepped up and walked up to the Spirit measuring formation and urged the old man to start it.

Zhou Linfan hadn't expected Alex to be this much in a hurry and did as he was asked. He activated the formation, ready to close it within a few seconds, at most 10.

However, when the spiritual energy assaulted Alex, Alex remained upright, the bowl of water he was made to hold not even rippling the slightest amount.

In fact, Alex smiled at the mental assault. This was a pitiful amount of damage. The damage continued to build up of course. In 9 seconds. It reached the True Lord realm, where he had last failed.

And then it crossed through to 10 seconds and continued.

And Alex barely showed any signs of frustration at all. He could go on for much longer now.

The old man wondered just how good the flower was. Should he try and eat one as well?

The strength of the formation reached the True King realm, and then to the True Emperor realm. Around this time, Alex finally started showing some struggle. He was starting to feel the burden but could continue for a bit longer.

Second by second, the burden increased until it finally reached the Saint Condensation realm. It was then that Alex truly felt the pain and dropped the water.

Zhou Linfan took no time to shut down the formation and grabbed Alex just in case he fell down.

"I'm fine," Alex said as he held his head. "What did I reach?"

"Saint Condensation realm," the old man said. "Maybe the 2nd or 3rd realm. It's not very accurate."

Alex slowly nodded as he understood something. "I see," he said. "So a Spirit Cleansing Lily has enough energy in it to send a person's spiritual strength directly to a Saint level."

A few things started to make sense and a few more questions emerged in Alex's mind.

It was likely that a cultivator could unlock their spiritual sea with this because of the amount of energy it held within it. As for why they didn't reach that level of strength when opening it, or after their second and third consumption, it may have something to do with their cultivation base being low.

'They don't open their dantian until they are in the Saint realm,' Alex thought. 'Maybe that is what is blocking their improvement through the flower. But at the same time, when you do end up opening the dantian, you're already strong enough to open a Spiritual sea on your own.'

That did bring up the question of why only 3 were allowed. Was there some sort of limit to how many a body could handle before it rejected the lily?

'Or maybe the Heavens just don't want it to happen,' Alex thought. A lot of things could be attributed to the Heavens. 'And this one is descended from the plant that the Moon Goddess blessed.'

Alex wondered what the original plant was and could do.

"I'll eat another one," he told the old man and proceeded to do so. The feeling he got from this one was not as liberating as the last one, but it was still fun.

The old man reached down and grabbed one of the lilies and ate it as well. There was no flavor to the flower, so he chewed down on it with a dull expression and swallowed it.

And then... nothing happened.

"Should I be feeling something?" the old man asked.

"I... have a somewhat special body," Alex told the man. "Maybe only I can do it."

"Huh? You should've told me before," the old man said with a grunt as he spit out the bits of flower petals in his mouth.

Alex ignored the man and waited until he didn't get the feeling of his mental strength improving. Once it stopped, he waited for a few minutes just in case and ate another one.

One after another, Alex ate a total of 42 Spirit Cleansing Lily and by the end of it, he felt almost as good as he did when he was a cultivator.

He made Zhou Linfan run the formation again and tested his strength. He had reached the late Saint Core realm in terms of strength.

That was still quite far from where his spiritual strength had been, but this would have to do.

"This will be enough," Alex said with a look of expectation on his face. "It's time I got my cultivation back."

Chapter 1710 Saint Qi

Zhou Linfan was very much looking forward to what was going to happen, even though he could not perceive what could possibly be happening next.

For the past few weeks that Alex had been here, he had focused his time on getting ingredients to heal his spirit. So, Zhou Linfan could only wonder what was happening next.

"So, what's next? Do we go to find some special plant?" he asked.

Alex looked at the man and didn't immediately answer. Instead, he asked a question. "May I ask why you are helping me?" He had been curious for some time now and wanted to know. "Healing me at first cost you nothing, but you are going well beyond your way to help me now, so I'm curious what is making you help me."

Zhou Linfan showed a somewhat stunned expression as if he had not considered the question himself. "I..." he fell into a thought. "I guess it has to do with the fact that you and I have a common enemy. Maybe, or the fact that you are a King and I don't want the Emperor to kill another king. He has some deep-seated hatred against kings."

"Maybe those are not it either, and I just want the world's best alchemist to return to his former grace. Honestly, I don't know at this point. All I know is that what I have been doing here for the past few decades is no longer necessary and I feel... liberated somehow."

"All in all, I think the best explanation here is that I'm helping you because I have nothing better to do. So, are you going to tell me what you're doing next? Or is it a surprise?"

Alex stared at the old man for a while before giving him a gentle smile. "It's no secret," he said. "It's... not even a good plan actually. I can't tell if it will work or not. I just hope it will work."

The old man was only getting more and more curious now. "What are you going to do?" he asked.

If it was yesterday, the old man would say that Alex had been planning to use his Spiritual sense to pull out a pill from his storage ring to heal his dantian and return to cultivating once again.

However, he hadn't gained his spiritual sense back, and yet somehow he was still confident, so the old man could only wonder.

"How many years have you been here again? 60? 70?" Alex asked.

"About," the old man said slowly. "Why?"

"You've not remained in hiding all the time, have you?" Alex asked. "You must have fought many beasts both on land and sea and got into some serious fights during your time here."

The old man narrowed his eyes. "Why are you asking that?"

Alex put forth his hand. "Can I get one of those beasts' core?" he asked.

"A beast core?" That was the last thing the old man had been expecting.

"Yes, one from a beast that was in the Saint Foundation realm or Saint Core realm," Alex said while gesturing to the old man to hand one over.

The old man was pretty confused and didn't know what one could use the cores for, but seeing Alex ask him for it made him think Alex knew what he was doing. So, he quickly searched for a few cores in his storage bag and brought out one.

A small thumb-sized orb lay clutched in the old man's three fingers, the purple and blue swirl making intricate patterns on its surface. "This is the beast core of a White lion shark that I killed a long time ago. The White Lion shark was in the Saint Core 2nd realm at the time, but that was ages ago. I don't know what you want with this, but I hope this can—"

Alex grabbed the core from the old man's fingers and ate it.

"Wait!" the old man screeched in panic. "What are you doing?"

Alex swallowed the core and took a deep breath. Either something incredible was going to happen next... or he was going to die. He did not want to die.

"Spit it out! Quickly!" the old man said, but Alex had already begun ignoring all outside sound. He quickly closed his eyes and sat down to concentrate on what was going to happen next in his body.

Eating all of those meals and plants had let him know that his body was still capable of converting anything he ate into energy. He didn't need a cultivation for that, only his body constitution.

Alex had wanted to do this using the plants he found on the islands, but eating them didn't give him much energy at all. All healing pills would try to heal him as he was wounded, and he had little control over that energy.

It was only when Alex ate poison that his body converted the poison into Qi. He had realized after eating a few poisons that regular poisons were not going to work for him. He needed Saint-rank poisons.

But he didn't dare find a Saint rank poison to eat. He didn't want to take the risk at all.

That didn't matter, however, as his plan had been from the start to eat a beast core. Poison was just a fun little diversion that didn't pan out.

Alex felt the core lay in his stomach, getting ready to be consumed by his body. Pure energy was ready to flow in his veins, but something was still stopping it.

The Beast Core's spirit.

It was less of a spirit and more of an impression of a spirit, like an Intent of the beast left behind after it died. And that spirit was now starting its clash against Alex's spirit.

This was the entire reason Alex had spent weeks consuming Spirit-healing ingredients. The main thing he needed in his current state was Qi. The easiest way to get Qi, aside from pills, was using a Beast core. And when he ate a Beast Core, he had to battle the spirit hidden within.

Alex could feel the pain in his mind. He didn't know if the beast had shown up in his spiritual sea or not. He didn't know if it was even open or not yet, but he could feel the mental pain.

But he was strong now. He was much stronger than the beast had been when it died. The White Lion Shark's beast core could not possibly compare against Alex's current spirit.

It was annoying that Alex couldn't fight back at all, so all he could do was let the spirit waste all of its attacks on him while bearing through the pain.

He continued sitting with his eyes closed, his clothes drenched in his sweat as he persevered against the endless assault in his mind.

Then it stopped, and as if a floodgate had been opened in his stomach, Qi released through his veins, pumping to not just his dantian, but all across his body.

Alex didn't even have to do anything next. With so much Qi for his body to use, his Undying Physique kicked in immediately and his Dantian began to heal on its own.

All of Alex's effort for the past few days had led to this point, and it had been a success.

Chapter 1711 Return

The First stage of the Undying God's Physique allowed its user to heal any wounds on his body in a matter of seconds, so long as the user had Qi in his body.

The Second stage of the Undying God's Physique allowed its user to heal any major wounds, be it amputation, decapitation, or even crippling, so long as there was Qi in his body.

The Third Stage of the Undying God's Physique allowed its user to heal their entire body so long as the soul survived in some form.

There were in total Four stages to the Undying God's Physique.

Alex felt a sudden feeling of ascension as his Dantian fully healed and he returned to the state of a cultivator once again. The excess Qi in his body finally moved back to his Dantian, and he felt it being affected by the Yang Source and Yin bead inside of his Dantian.

They had laid dormant in him when all Qi had left him.

"What?" a surprised voice came from inside his mind. "What is happening? Kid? Are you okay? Can you hear me?"

Alex's head hurt slightly from having to bear the spiritual attacks of the beast core he ate, but he was happy enough that he could ignore it all.

"Godslayer!" he shouted excitedly in his mind. "How are you? Is everything okay in there?"

"I'm okay," Godslayer said softly. "Were you unconscious all this time? I couldn't see much of what was happening."

"Unconscious?" Alex chuckled a bit. "No, I was crippled. I had lost my cultivation base. Thankfully I have the Undying God's physique so I'm safe now."

"Oh, and what was that—"

"I'm sorry, I'll talk to you later. I need to deal with my problems first," Alex said and ignored Godslayer for the moment. He started focusing on his cultivation base to see if there were any problems.

He immediately brought out all sorts of pills and started eating them one after another to heal himself. Fortunately, there were no major issues that couldn't be fixed with a week or two of dedicated cultivation.

Zhou Linfan watched Alex from the side with eyes as wide as saucers. He couldn't believe what he had just witnessed at all.

Just one moment ago, the young man before him was sweating buckets for some reason, and then the next moment he suddenly had a cultivation base of Saint Soul's 4th realm.

It was incredibly weak at the moment as if he had used up all his Qi, but the cultivation base was obvious to anyone who knew what to look for.

'I thought him surviving after eating the core alone would've been an amazing sight,' he thought. 'But he somehow got his cultivation base back? How the hell is that even possible?'

The old man had seen Alex do the impossible before, but they were small impossibilities. This one was too large to be ignored at all.

He was sure there were people out there who would come to try and kill him just to get this one secret from him.

"How did you do it, young man?" Zhou Linfan asked Alex. "How are you no longer a cripple? Here I was excited to see you heal your dantian, but I never expected to see this."

"I was never going to get back to cultivation," Alex said. "I always planned on getting my cultivation back instead. What I did has to do with my physique too and won't work for everyone though."

"Is this physique learnable or were you born with it?" the old man asked with an incredible look on his face.

"It's what I was born with," Alex lied. He didn't want to give the old man hopes in the best-case scenario, or ideas in the worst.

"What an incredible body you were born with then," the old man said. "What else can you do?"

"I'm sorry, senior, but I'll need to cultivate for a while now. I've only just gained my cultivation base, but my Qi and spirit are still weak. Would you mind if we delay this talk to some other time?"

"Oh, ah... sure," the old man said. "I'll wait for you to be done then."

"Thank you," Alex said and teleported to a different location on the island where he settled and started cultivating once again.

As he had said, his cultivation base was indeed very weak, so he had to eat a cultivation pill and start cultivating. As for his spirit, he had just eaten a spirit pill, and that would aid his spirit on its own.

Alex used the Five Yang Divine Path to quickly cultivate using Yang Qi and used some of his attention to look at his nascent soul that was in his Dantian and then his Soul Space.

His Nascent Soul had been weak but not so weak that there was any danger. As for his Soul Space, it never faced any problem at all.

Even if Alex had died, the Soul Space would've remained there for someone else to take, or for the Void to consume it sometime in the future.

As he cultivated, the grade of his Qi increased once again. Then, he took the opportunity to go visit Godslayer inside of his Spiritual Sea.

Surprisingly, Godslayer did not know what had happened to Alex at all. The last thing Godslayer had seen was Alex getting attacked, and because he hadn't died, he had assumed Alex to be unconscious.

The darkness he faced in here alone was not similar to when Alex had his head blown off, so the sword spirit wasn't very worried this whole time.

However, after finding out what had indeed happened to Alex, he was surprised he hadn't known it at all.

"Undying God's physique? Is that incredible? I thought it only healed your wounds and such," the sword spirit said.

"It heals my dantian too. I wasn't confident it would return my cultivation base to what it was, but I'm glad it did," Alex said.

Godslayer scoffed. "If it can return your dantian to how it was before, then of course your cultivation base will return to the same as well. After all, your cultivation base is based on the strength of your dantian, and the other various situations in your body such as the status of your soul, the status of your Immortal spirit, and such."

"Immortal Spirit?" Alex asked curiously.

"You'll find out soon enough. Focus on healing for now," Godslayer said. "Oh, and thank that kid on my behalf. We both might've died if not for him."

Alex smiled and nodded. "I will," he said and went back out.

Once he was out, it was time to do as Godslayer said.

Alex called out to Pearl.

Pearl came back out with blood and wounds all over his body and fur. The white car looked more red than white now and was so wounded that he could barely stand up straight.

Alex immediately took out a healing pill and fed it to Pearl before taking him into an embrace.

"B-brother?" Pearl asked in a low voice that was full of surprise.

"You can take it easy Pearl. You did well. You saved me," Alex said as he held onto the White Tiger tighter.

"Thank you."

Chapter 1712 Reckless

?After eating a few pills, Pearl was healed as well. Then together, he and Alex started cultivating.

They cultivated without stopping for the next 5 days as it took Alex that much time even with all of his pills to return back to how strong he used to be.

"I should have been close to breaking through to the 5th realm, but that has been pushed back a little," Alex said softly. "I need better cultivation though if I want to fight the Emperor."

"He's strong, isn't he?" Pearl asked. "How can you become strong enough to fight him in a short time?"

"By being reckless, Pearl," Alex sighed. "By being reckless."

He had been giving it some thought but he truly saw no other way to do what must be done. He needed to get stronger and the only way to do that was to do what Scarlet did to become strong once again.

In the same way, all the players got strong quickly, while forcing their cultivation base to not be as stable.

"I'm going to have to start breaking through before I could possibly be ready for it. My Qi quality with increase thanks to that, but the chances of me going through Qi Deviation will increase as well."

"It's dangerous," Pearl said.

"It is," Alex said. "But I must do it."

"Then I'll do so as well," Pearl said. "How do we do it?"

"How else?" Alex asked. "We eat beast cores."

Alex flew away and went to find the old man in deep cultivation inside of his cave. Coming close, Alex could now feel his strength once again.

Zhou Linfan looked no different to Alex than what he had been like when Alex was without a cultivation base. However, now that he had one, the old man felt like a hidden master with a cultivation base so strong that Alex felt threatened to even get close enough.

"Are you finally free enough to come to talk?" the old man asked as he slowly opened his eyes to stare at Alex.

Alex smiled back at the old man and nodded. "Indeed. You must have had a lot of questions, senior. Thank you for your patience."

"I do indeed have a lot of questions," the old man said. "How are you feeling? Anything wrong with your cultivation base?"

"No, everything is fine," Alex said. "I'm as good as I was before I was crippled."

"And your Nascent Soul? Was it hurt? Was it healed?" he asked.

"It's doing good too," Alex answered.

The old man had a lot of questions to ask of Alex, but most of them tread around Alex's secrets, so he couldn't get much answer from Alex.

"You're an alchemist, so can you make me some pills?" the old man asked in the end. "I haven't used a pill in a very long time."

"I... can't make pills right now," Alex said. He couldn't let the soldiers that were flying around know where he was. "But I can give you the ones I have already."

Alex brought out a few pills and handed them over to the old man. "There are some pills to help you with your cultivation, some to heal your wounds, some are antidotes, and some for your spirit."

"Is that so?" the old man asked and took the pills.

"Also," Alex asked. "Do you have any Earth or Water spiritual roots?"

The old man frowned a little. "I do," he said. "I have an Earth spiritual root."

"You should eat one of these and cultivate right away," Alex said, handing over a single pill. "It will help improve your Spiritual root to a Superior one."

"What?" the old man asked in surprise. "There is a pill that can improve my spiritual root?"

"Yes," Alex said. "I would've given you one for Water root too had you had it."

"I don't," the old man said. "Only Metal, Fire, and Earth."

Alex thought of the Flame Mastery technique that could be used to help the man improve his Fire spiritual root too, but that required a large amount of Fire treasure which there was not right now.

The only good place Alex could remember for that was the Fire region around the 13th Volcano in the Northern Continent.

As for Metal, Alex didn't even have a way. He himself only raised it to the Supreme level by accident.

"By the way, how many beast cores do you have?" Alex asked the old man. "I was wondering if you could give some to me and my beast."

"Beast core?" the old man asked with a puzzled look. "But why? You already got your cultivation back."

"My body is capable of converting beast cores to Qi, so I was hoping to eat some and start breaking through," Alex said.

"To the 5th Saint Soul realm?" the old man asked. He didn't think Alex was ready yet. His aura gave off the impression that Alex had only been in that realm for half the time needed.

"To the 5th realm and above. I need to get stronger quickly," Alex said.

The old man frowned upon hearing that. "Does this have in any way something to do with the fact that you want revenge on the emperor?" he asked.

"That... is exactly the reason I'm doing this," Alex said.

The old man couldn't help but sigh in response. "Okay, I understand that you might be very angry with the Emperor right now and want to become as strong as you can, as quickly as you can, to get revenge against him, but that is not the right way."

"Look at me. I have a stronger reason than you to be angry with him. He killed all of my family without cause and made me an orphan. My entire life has been about killing him, but even I know that I'm not strong enough to do so. Not yet."

"Truth is, I might never be strong enough to defeat him, and the only way to get even remotely close to being as strong as him is to rush through my cultivation realm. However, I know that the moment I do that, I have already lost."

"Rushing through your cultivation realm just for revenge is not the right thing to do, young man. Because the moment you do, your loss is all but sealed."

Alex said nothing for a while taking in the old man's words. He could see the logic in that, the wisdom that came from being over 5 thousand years in pursuit of that very goal.

"You are correct," Alex said. "I know that rushing into things isn't a good idea at all, especially when it is your cultivation base."

The old man nodded in agreement.

"However, you are missing 2 pieces of vital information," Alex said.

The old man raised an eyebrow. "And what exactly is that piece of vital information?" he asked.

"First." Alex put up a finger. "You failed to take into account that it is me who will be rushing through my cultivation base, and my body is unique."

"Oho!" the old man was intrigued. "And the second one?"

Alex took a deep breath. "Second, if I don't meet with the Emperor again for a trade within the next 2 and a half years, I will die."

Chapter 1713 A New Plan

"You have to meet with the Emperor again?" the old man asked.

Alex nodded. "Within 2 and a half years," he said. "Actually, it might be closer to 2 years now since so much time has already passed."

"Why?" the old man asked.

Alex sighed. "When I was called for a 20-year-long Alchemy exchange to the Eastern Continent, I hadn't realized that I was being called so that the Dragon Emperor could ask for my techniques and skills."

"I didn't want to give him any, but I was practically forced into setting up a trade with him for it. For the next 20 years, I would give him everything he needs to make Pill Clouds consistently like I do. In return, he would give me something of equal value."

"I was supposed to make a total of 4 trades with him throughout the years. I've made 3 trades by now and need to make my final trade. Since I only have about 2 years of time left, I need to become strong enough to survive when I meet him next."

The old man frowned. "This is certainly bad," he thought. "Can't you take your Phoenix with you to the trade? She can protect you?"

"I can't," Alex said. "The Phoenix can't go to a place without a proper king. With the Azure Dragon dead, the Phoenix can't go with me to the Eastern Continent."

The old man nodded slowly and gave a sad look.

Alex had long since told the old man about the Azure Dragon's death, but the old man was still saddened every time he was reminded of it.

"Then you have to go to him alone?" he asked. "I doubt the Emperor ever plans on leaving his own continent."

"That is why I must become strong," Alex said.

The old man gave the words a long consideration before nodding. "Alright, if it will help you, I will give you the cores," he said. He reached into his storage bag and brought out exactly 9 beast cores.

Alex took the beast cores and looked at them. 3 of them were in the Saint Condensation realm, 5 in the Saint Foundation realm, and the last one in the Saint Core realm.

"I don't want to sound ungrateful, senior, but... is this it?" Alex asked.

The cores in his hands would barely be enough for Pearl to break through to the Core realm. It would not do much for him.

"I'm sorry, but this is all I can do for you," the old man said. "I mean, you can't blame me. My job here is to hide and keep track of what is going into the Eastern Continent. I need to lay low for that and can't just fight whatever beast I come across."

"Those cores are what I got when I was trying to set up the warning formation. Those beasts attacked me and I fought back. I rarely have had a reason to go looking for fights on my own."

"Besides, doing so would be stupid as it would tell everyone where I'm located. I've skipped more fights than I've been in one for the past few years."

Alex could understand. "I see," he said. "I'll make use of this how I can."

He stood up and left the place to go and cultivate with Pearl. Once he was with Pearl, he ate the Saint Core realm beast's beast core and let Pearl eat the other 8 cores however he liked.

The two of them started cultivating after eating it and it was very quickly clear that this was truly not going to work. The Saint Core realm beast was too weak for Alex. Even if he hadn't eaten the core and instead used it to make a Blood Beast, it would've still been too weak for him.

Alex could only sigh in the end. If he wanted better cores, he was going to have to find some outside.

"I will have to go out and fight some beasts."

Thankfully, he didn't think he would feel much guilt killing aquatic beasts to improve himself. These beasts truly gave no care for who lived and who died. Whoever was strong survived and the weak died.

The law of the jungle was actually more prevalent in the ocean than it was in the jungle.

"It's not just my cultivation too," Alex said softly. "I need to improve my Blood, my Soul, my Body, and my Sword. I don't see any way to improve Intent here, but if I can find one, I will."

Alex thought for a long while, planning out what he needed to do, and concluded.

"Fighting in the air will quickly tell all the soldiers where I am," he said. "So, I must instead fight the beasts underwater. It has to be deep underwater where no one would be able to tell if I'm a human or a beast. That should be the best way to go about things."

"Should I come?" Pearl asked curiously.

"No," Alex said. "You aren't strong enough to fight down there, and I don't know if I'm strong enough to protect you. So I will do it on my own."

After making that plan, Alex left Pearl alone and went to tell the old man what he wanted to do. The old man was still not entirely sold on the idea of eating beast cores to improve one's cultivation base, but he didn't completely reject the idea either.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. It was true, and the old man understood it.

"Here, take this talisman." He handed a long-range communication talisman to Alex. "Tell me when you need to come back. The island will be hidden from your senses, so you will need my help to get inside."

Alex slowly nodded. "Thank you," he said.

"You can leave now. Go dive deep underwater and get strong," he said. "But be careful, the sea floor is dangerous. Perhaps much more dangerous than land. The ocean is a world of its own, one the humans have not been able to conquer. The beasts reign supreme there and for a good reason. Always be ready to run if you see the tiniest bit of danger."

Alex nodded. "I will do that," he said. "Thank you for the talisman."

"Now go," he said. "I will continue keeping my eyes on the area around us. If it ever becomes clear to leave for the Southern Continent, I'll let you know and we can leave."

Alex smiled. "Thank you, senior. For all you've done for me," he said. "Please look after Pearl while I'm gone. I'll be back soon."

Saying so, Alex walked out of the island with all of his aura hidden and slowly got into the water.

Despite the hot day with the sun blazing in the sky, the water was icy cold. Alex went underwater and quickly resorted to using his Qi instead of air to sustain himself.

He took a few seconds to have himself get used to this. As he had done the same back in the Celestial Peak, it came naturally to Alex.

Once he was all ready, he dove deeper into the ocean, entering the dark world of aquatic beasts that hadn't been touched by humans in a long, long time.

Chapter 1714 Underwater Battles

Submerged in the coldness of the ocean water, Alex felt a sense of calmness that was hard to find outside of the water.

A sense of calmness and a sense of lurking danger.

The dark water made it feel as though there could be a strong beast right next to him and he would never know. But of course, that was just a feeling. There was nothing around him.

He delved deeper into the water, Midnight already in his hand, and started searching for something to fight. Unfortunately, it seemed that he would have to move further away into deeper territories to find what he was looking for.

The weight of tons and tons of water above Alex put pressure on him that inhibited his movements to a certain extent. His movements were ever so sluggish and his speed ever so slower.

He was sure that the water would also cause his attacks to become slightly weaker just as it already had affected his Spiritual sense. What should have allowed him to sense 10 kilometers around him, now only allowed him a little less than 9 kilometers.

It wasn't a terrible suppression, but it was certainly there, and it was likely that it would get worse the deeper he went into the ocean.

Alex was a few kilometers away from any island and more than a kilometer underwater when the first Saint Beast decided to attack him.

It was a giant fish with 8 razor-sharp fins on either side of its body, a giant grooved fin on its back, and a tail that a nearly three times as large in proportion as a regular fish. At Saint Core 5th realm, the fish wasn't much of a danger to Alex.

Alex did not know the name of this fish. Aquatic beasts were outside the scope of what he had learned in his life. So, he didn't even know if the beast was supposed to be aggressive or not, or if it had some weaknesses.

Alex watched the fish get close to him, and while he knew the fish could speak if it chose to, he was still ready to fight.

All 8 of the fish's fins glowed red all of a sudden and the water around him boiled hot red. Then, all 8 fins struck out at him, as if slashes from a blade.

Instead of defending, Alex willed the fire in those attacks to go out. His Intent went into work and using the True Fire Dao, he fought against the Intent of the fish to wrestle away its control over the fire to easily get rid of it.

The fish was surprised for just a single second before Alex sent out a single sword slash with Sword Qi that instantly cut it in half, not only killing the body but also the soul.

Without a moment's delay, Alex teleported right next to the fish and quickly stored it in his storage ring before moving on.

The Saint Core realm fish had just been a piece of stone blocking his path. Kicking it away, he could continue down his path to find better fish to kill. He was sure he would find so many.

Alex fought 3 more beasts. A fish, a sea mantis, and a snake. Throughout each of those fights, he used nothing but just Sword Qi. Not because he wanted to, but because that was his only choice.

On one hand, the beasts were too weak for him to use anything else. He could just fly next to them and cut them too, but using Sword Qi at least made for some sort of training.

On the other hand, he was still very much close to the surface considering how much deeper the ocean was. He couldn't arouse suspicion among the soldiers that happened to fly above him.

It was only once he was much deeper that Alex was forced to use more than just his Sword.

It happened when Alex came across a nasty-looking fish with bulbous eyes and an appendage that grew out of its head carrying what looked like a red ruby. It even glowed ever so slightly.

Alex felt some sort of spiritual attack whenever he stared at the ruby. Had his spiritual strength been weaker than the Saint Soul realm, he would have most definitely been affected by it.

'What a pretty jewel,' Alex still thought. 'I should get—' He quickly shook his head.

"Is this how you get your enemies?" he spoke directly to the beast. It had been staring back at Alex for a good few seconds, probably wondering if this was a favorable fight for it.

"You weren't caught? You must be strong, unlike what your cultivation base suggests. Are you hiding your aura?" the dangerous fish spoke back into Alex's mind. " You'll make for good food."

The fish's Saint Transformation 1st realm cultivation base flared in an instant and it attacked. A sprout of water jetted out from in front of it, making its way to Alex like a great current.

Alex could not fight this with just his sword, so he was forced to use his Qi as well. He instantly applied the All Swirling Elemental Shield to block the attack and then sent a Heavenly Static Slash to attack the fish.

The lightning bolt struck the fish instantly, leaving behind a path of bubbles from the water that was instantly boiled by the lightning bolt.

The place where the fish was struck glowed red hot and the fish let out a screech. Even as Saint Transformation's 1st realm, the fish was still a weakling to Alex. At least, it hadn't died in a single attack.

Alex moved closer and stabbed the fish with Midnight, before ripping out a chunk of its body as he pulled it out at an angle. The fish gave one last cry before dying.

However, it wasn't dead just yet.

The soul that was in the fish's body slowly appeared with a blue luster to it, seemingly confused about the situation. The souls weren't yet connected with the body enough to know what was happening immediately upon the body's death.

Alex swung his sword and cut the soul in half and watched as the blue light dimmed and the soul dissipated into nothing. He wasted no time in taking this fish's body back into his Storage ring either.

Once the fish was dead, Alex went to search for another one to fight, but to his surprise there were none. Weaker Saint beasts had realized that there was a new boss in the area, so they kept out of Alex's way.

As for the stronger ones, there were none. Any strong beasts set up their own territory, and from the looks of things, the beast Alex just killed had taken up a large portion of its territory.

If Alex wanted to find more beasts, he had to move elsewhere.

Alex felt a small buzz in his Soul Space and quickly looked in to find the talisman that Zhou Linfan had given him had received a message. Alex read into it with no time wasted.

"Heads up! Several soldiers are flying toward a single location in the sea. I think this might be you."

"Oh!" Alex thought and immediately hid his aura. Not only that, he also used his Yang Qi to cover up his body in a way that Alex felt everything around him almost burning.

There were even bubbles forming around his body from the head his body was producing. Thankfully, the water wasn't literally boiling or that would have given away his location more clearly.

Just as Alex was thinking that, a wave of spiritual sense passed around him. It never actually passed through him as anything that did get too close to him would burn up and disappear.

To everyone who was using their spiritual sense at the moment, all they would see was a small blank spot in their sense, and that was if they noticed it in the first place at all.

Unless they knew he was down here, he doubted they would care enough to know that there was a missing piece in the area they had scanned.

Alex waited in the water for a long time before the spiritual senses started pulling again. 'God! How many did the Emperor send after me? He should know nothing more than the fact that I'm a cripple too. Does he want to steal my storage ring or what?' he thought.

He waited until all the senses were gone and then waited some more before moving once again.

This location no longer had any more beasts for him to fight, so Alex would now have to move much further away. There was no time to waste.

He flew in chose a direction at random and went in that direction for a long time, hoping to find a worthy fight. Along the way, he found many beasts that wanted to fight him and eat him, none that were capable of even touching him.

Alex didn't ignore them of course as they were good sources of blood and cores. He killed what he could find. A fish, a snake, a crab, it didn't matter.

After flying for some time, he entered what he thought was another beast's territory. There had been a significant lack of fish swimming around for a short time now.

'Let's see who is here then,' Alex thought and let out his spiritual sense in all directions. When he did so, he noticed something that made his jaw drop.

'It can't be...' he thought and used his senses to look at it closer. It really was it.

'It really is a Fire Coral.'

Chapter 1715 Fire Coral

?Alex hadn't expected to find a Fire Coral in this area of the sea at all. But then again, being a coral, this would be where it would grow.

Surprisingly, he didn't know much about Fire Coral. The only information he did have in his mind was that it was an incredible Fire Elemental treasure and that it grew on the ocean floor around locations with intense fire aura.

'There must be a magma vein around this area then,' Alex thought, and just as he presumed, he found it close by. The Coral drew in the fire aura from that magma vein and used it to grow itself.

The Fire Coral was tiny in comparison to the several regular corals in the coral reefs Alex had seen on the way, with a somewhat glowing red body. It stuck out from the ground, a single coral with many tentacles clumped together and moving around in the water.

'Incredible,' Alex thought. 'I can finally make the pill.'

He quickly dove even further down below, moving toward the coral. By now, he was several kilometers underwater and the pressure was starting to become more than just a small annoyance.

He was going to have to be a bit more careful.

As he dove down, a sense of unease filled Alex. 'Where is the beast around this area?' he thought. This was clearly a territory of something, and yet Alex couldn't find it anywhere.

'Is it hiding itself?' Alex wondered. If it was hiding itself, then Alex would have to find it before it managed to land a sneak attack on him. He was in no mood to be surprised.

'With such an incredible treasure right here, there has to be something here protecting it,' Alex thought. He knew he had caught onto the beast's plan. It wasn't going to catch him off guard.

However, even when he was just a small distance away from the Fire Coral, nothing appeared.

Alex frowned a little. 'Was I wrong?' he wondered. 'No, I can't doubt my instincts. Something has to be here.' Yet the eerie silence of the darkness underwater lingered with only the Fire Coral being a singular beacon of light down there.

Alex waited some more time and slowly closed in on the coral while constantly being ready for the attack. He sent his spiritual sense through the sand beneath him and the water around him to keep a lookout.

Then, he got closer to the Fire Coral, his hands right next to it, ready to grab it. 'So there's nothing?' Alex thought. There was no point in delaying it any longer in that case.

Alex grabbed onto the Fire Coral, and then the Coral exploded.

Alex felt the shockwave shake his organs while the explosion tore away the arm. The amount of water displaced by that explosion was high and the heat alone had caused enough steam to create a giant pocket around the coral without water.

Alex looked at his arm in shock or what was left of it. Everything from the elbow down had been gone, decimated, and the portions above them weren't in much better condition either.

His Undying Physique worked to heal him, but that did not send away the pain he felt from losing his arm just then.

'What the...' Alex found it hard to believe what had just happened. Had the Coral just attacked him? 'A defense mechanism?' he wondered.

Just as he wondered the Coral glowed bright red and its tentacles suddenly grew out around it, leaving behind boiling water wherever it passed.

That was when Alex finally sensed something that the Coral had been doing its best to hide.

A cultivation base.

The Fire Coral had a cultivation base of Saint Transformation's 4th realm.

'Of course,' Alex thought as everything started making sense for him. 'No wonder there was so little information about it. It's not a plant. It's an animal.'

That was the reason for the lack of beasts around this area too. Alex had assumed the treasure to have a guardian protecting it. What he had not guessed was that the treasure was also the guardian itself.

'And it's a damn strong one,' Alex thought.

Now that he knew more about the Fire Coral, killing it and taking it away felt a little wrong. "Let's not fight," Alex said quickly. "Can we talk instead?"

Dozens of fiery tentacles fluttered around the coral, each tentacle glowing on the ground as it passed close by. "What is there to talk about?" the Coral asked sending a mental answer. "You were here to try and take me away."

"I was," Alex answered. "But that was before I knew you could talk back. I don't want to kill someone who only wants to do nothing but defend themselves."

The only thing the Coral had done was explode when he tried to touch it, so it didn't feel right for Alex to just attack the thing. Every other beast he had killed the last few days had been one that had been overconfident and wanted to hurt him first.

This was different.

The coral didn't immediately answer. "Then will you just leave?" he asked.

"Unfortunately, that will be difficult too," Alex said. "Now that I've found you, leaving here without—"

"I've heard enough!"

The Coral wasted no time and attacked. 3 tentacles lashed out strongly, blocking paths of escape for Alex.

Alex struck out with Midnight, sending an attack with Sword Aura that cut through the 3 tentacles that were coming for him. The fiery tentacles dissipated after being cut, with the remnant growing back to full a short moment later.

Alex attacked before the Coral could respond again, sending another attack at the Coral.

The Fire Coral put out all of its tentacles to block and lost a couple of them while doing so. They took some time to grow back, but they didn't wait and attacked with the remaining tentacles.

'It can't move,' Alex realized. The Coral was stuck to its original location and was incapable of changing its location. So, the best it could do was defend when instead it needed to run away.

Alex could exploit this.

He swam back away from the Coral's reach and prepared his nameless attack. The coral frantically tried to attack Alex, but its attack wasn't strong enough to cause him anything more than annoyance once they made their way through the water and struck his body.

After the first explosion, Alex had been constantly enforcing his body with his Qi, so his defense was quite high.

He ignored what little discomfort, or even pain he felt from the attacks, and then finally released his attack.

The only thing to reveal the existence of Alex's attack was the torn space it left while it passed through the water.

The Coral hadn't even realized what had happened when its giant tentacles were cut down, the fire in them dissipating.

Then, they struck its body to the side, cutting off a few tentacles from its physical body.

The Coral realized it was in danger and prepared what Immortal Qi it had to get ready to attack. However, before it could do anything with it, Alex arrived right next to it and grabbed onto the floating tentacles before teleporting away.

Before the Coral realized what had happened, Alex had already gone far away.

Chapter 1716 Time to Return

?Alex swam away from the Fire Coral, leaving it behind to hopefully heal itself. He took a look at the 3 coral tentacles in his hand with a smile and put them into his Soul Space.

'These 3 tentacles should be enough for a single pill,' Alex thought. 'No point in harming a harmless Coral for more.'

He wanted to make a pill out of it as soon as possible, but creating a Pill Cloud in this place would be one of the easiest ways to let the soldiers know where he was hiding.

The only logical choice remaining here was to return to the Southern Continent now that he was healed and make the pill there. He also needed to see to his sister's poison.

'A week more and then I'll leave,' Alex thought. It would take some time to return, so it was better if he gathered resources for the journey back. Once he made up the plan, he continued on his search for more beasts.

He found a place for himself to sit down and cultivate for 2 days before continuing on his journey to fight the beasts and gain more blood and core.

Alex lost himself in the mission, killing anything that was willing to kill him, leaving alive anything that was not. In the week or so he spent fighting in the ocean, he fought over a hundred different Saint beasts, killing almost all of them.

By the end of the week, he had more than enough beast cores to last him on the journey back to his continent.

He was done fighting and he was done cultivating, so it was time to leave the ocean.

He got ready to swim back to the island where the old man and Pearl were, but he didn't remember what direction that was in.

'The hell? Where is that island?' he thought. 'How am I not even sensing where Pearl is?'

The hiding formation set up by the old man was unusually strong it seemed. It even masked his bond to Pearl. He tried feeling the bond once again, but it was too faint to feel anything except the fact that Pearl was okay.

'I need to get closer,' Alex thought, but he didn't know which direction was closer. That was the entire problem in the first place.

He looked up to see if he could see the sun, but it turned out that it was nighttime. Despite this, the water deep down here made even the sun look paler than the stars.

'Should I go out and then look around? That should tell me what direction to go to,' he thought. Going out was a bit dangerous though, and even then he wasn't sure if he could find his way back.

Unfortunately, he hadn't flown up to the surface and had only remained in the ocean.

Alex was stumped for a few minutes, wondering how he was going to get back when he finally thought of something. He pulled out his talisman and contacted the old man, asking for a way back.

"Well, I don't know where you are," the old man said. "I can't come get you."

"Is there anyone caught in your warning formations yet?" Alex asked.

"There are still many. Most are not in the direction you went off to if that is what you're wondering," the old man replied.

Alex quickly nodded to himself. This might work.

"Keep a watch on your formation. I'm going to go up for a few seconds and try to get caught in it. Tell me if something new appears. That should tell me what direction I need to go to go back."

The reply came a while later than usual. "Sounds good, but be careful."

"I will. I will get caught in it in exactly 10 minutes," Alex replied. Then, he made his slow ascent to the surface.

Numerous fish and other beasts swam around the area, but none dared to come for Alex. A few regular fish were curious about him, but even so, they moved far away when he came along.

Alex kept his pace slow so that he didn't accidentally get caught by the formation too soon. 'He did mention that only humans or boats get caught in it, so I shouldn't be worried,' he thought and continued.

Alex had taken his time with the ascent, but still to see that it took him over 15 minutes to make it to the surface, when all the ocean had ever wanted to do was just that, was surprising to see.

He sent his spiritual sense around to find the formation and see where he needed to go, but as he did, he found a distinct lack of anything manmade in the ocean.

'Hmm? That can't be right,' Alex thought and increased the range of his perception, trying to catch any sort of disturbance to the aura in the ocean that might have been caused by a formation.

It took him 2 minutes to find something that he could believably say was the work of a formation and made his way to it.

Arriving up close, Alex took hold of a small sphere of something that was hidden from his senses. He took hold of it and finally saw that it was a small leather sack that was filled with spirit stones and a formation plate inside that constantly ran thanks to the spirit stones.

'So that's why no one has ever found it,' Alex thought. It was hard to even notice the thing in the first place even when you were looking for it. It was unlikely that anyone would ever find it in the ocean.

'It's about time,' he thought and slowly rose out of the water while letting out some of his aura for the formation to pick up. He then took out the talisman to wait for the old man to answer back.

"I saw two blips right next to each other. Was that you?" the old man asked.

"Two?" Alex frowned. Was there another one of these formations close by that he had activated accidentally? New n0vel chapters are published on

"I don't see any other ones. It should just be one singul—"

Alex's words stuck to his throat when nearly 20 spiritual senses locked onto him from the distance. Alex slowly turned around and looked far away to see 3 ships approaching in his direction with people already flying out of it.

'Shit!' Alex thought and was ready to run away when something made him stop. He looked back, starting at the ships. He recognized those ships.

Those giant ships with brilliant azure paint with a golden dragon wrapped around a sword were the signature ships used by the Scale Legion. And the man who was making his way toward Alex was none other than Long Jianyu, the commander who had taken Alex and his people to the Eastern Continent.

Alex wanted to run, but some stubborn part of him wanted to question this man. This man had spent most of his latest time in the Southern Continent, so finding out the situation surrounding that continent would come easiest from him.

"King Alex," Long Jianyu said with a look that said this was all unexpected for him. "I did not expect to be the one to find you here."

Chapter 1717 Attack

﻿﻿"Long Jianyu," Alex spoke the man's name in a somber tone. "Why are you here?"

Alex knew in his heart of hearts that he should be running and that staying here was a bad idea. But the anger he felt inside of him overwhelmed him from making every other decision.

He didn't know why he was so angry. The source of his anger seemed to be a complete mystery to him. Was it because this was the man who had reported to the Emperor about him? Or was it because he had been hunting for his sister the entire time and Alex knew about it?

Alex didn't know and he didn't care to know. He simply stared at the man, waiting for answers.

"Unfortunately, we were tossed away by your people, King Alex. They told us that we were no longer allowed there," Long Jianyu said. "We were saddened to leave, but it seemed that we didn't have to be sad. We were fortunate rather. Them sending us away led us directly to you."

'They sent him away? So they must have found out about my situation,' Alex thought. That was good news. That meant at least someone had returned to the Southern Continent. If someone did, then there was a chance of everyone making it back.

'They mustn't know I had already escaped then,' Alex thought. 'They must still think I'm captured by the Emperor, or else Scarlet or Whisker would've come for me.'

That was no matter. Alex would return to them soon enough.

"I was disturbed when I heard the news," Long Jianyu said. "I would've thought you were smart enough to not try to harm the Emperor and the continent while you were still there. How could you have done anything like that?"

Alex frowned a bit. Was that what was being told about him? That he tried to harm the Emperor and the continent?

"No," Alex answered slowly. "You know that is not true." He looked at the man's face which did not change at all.

And then he understood. "But you don't care at all. You never believed what is being reported in the first place, do you?" he asked.

"The Emperor ordered everyone to find you and take you back to him, rather alive than dead, but I think he more so expects to see you dead than alive," the man said. "Although, my report said you were supposed to have lost your cultivation base. You must have tricked them with some sort of pills."

Alex watched as the soldiers surrounded him, ready to attack. They were all ready, with more flying out of the 3 ships to come to aid if need be. He stared at the nearly 150 soldiers and then back at Long Jianyu, who was their commander.

"Years ago when you came to the Southern Continent, you knew why you were there, didn't you?" Alex asked. "You knew it was for the Second Prince and his sword, didn't you?"

Long Jianyu simply shrugged. "I told you. I don't care what the situation is. I only care what the Emperor orders me to do. I would never dare hurt the prince, but given that it was the Emperor's orders, I would've given him a few bruises if he refused to return with us."

"As for you, I don't care if you are a king or not. Instead of bruises, I will kill you so I can take back your corpse to the Emperor. So, I suggest you don't try anything rash and come with us quietly."

Alex couldn't help but let out a dry laugh. "Kill me? You wish."

A wave of spiritual energy rolled out of his mind like waves, striking an area in front of him with a very strong mental attack. Multiple artifacts glowed as they stopped these attacks, but not all Saints thought it necessary to carry such artifacts.

Those were the first ones to lose their mind, albeit temporarily.

Midnight flew out into Alex's hand and even as people reacted to it, Alex cut down 3 of the weaker saints that were unconscious. Before anyone knew what happened, those 3 dead bodies were already stored in Alex's storage ring.

And he didn't stop there.

Long Jianyu instantly retaliated, sending out a very strong sword slash toward Alex.

Alex swung his sword too, stopping the attack and then teleporting behind another person who was on the verge of falling from the sky.

He placed his left hand on the woman's body and sent out a white-hot bar of fire that burned her body, instantly killing her and the soul inside of her. The skin of the woman flaked away into charred bits while her burnt body fell to the ocean.

Alex frowned slightly at the sight of it all. That was a waste of a perfectly good corpse.

'What a shame,' he thought and instantly went on the defensive as a multitude of attacks barraged all over him.

The strongest soldier in the group was Long Jianyu with Saint Transformation's 4th realm cultivation base. There were a few others with a much lower Saint Transformation realm cultivation base, with a majority of them in the Saint Soul realm, and a few others in the Saint Core realm.

The onslaught of attacks was certainly annoying, but none were threatening enough for Alex to be worried about.

All he had to be worried about was Long Jianyu's attacks. At his cultivation base, he had to have enough Immortal Qi for a single attack, and Alex had to be ready for it.

"Soldiers! Protect your comrades," Long Jianyu shouted. The soldiers that were trying to fight Alex now went toward their unconscious friends to look after them. They started getting them back to consciousness one by one.

Long Jianyu flew toward Alex at the same time and struck at him with a wind slash that contained a very strong Sword Intent. Alex attacked back, sending out a fiery slice of his own, containing Sword Qi in it.

The two attacks clashed, and Long Jianyu's face went wide in shock. Alex's attacks were just as strong as his own.

'So the rumors were true?' He couldn't believe it.

Long Jianyu struck out some more, but Alex kept fighting back against him, even going so far as to make him fight on the defensive by the end of it.

He had heard about Alex being able to fight above his cultivation base, but this was way more than just above. It was far, far above.

Alex dodged a disc-shaped attack that flew toward him and protected himself against pellets of rocks that another soldier threw at him. He then swung an attack with Sword Aura in it and attacked a man.

The man's body was cut in half, but his soul flew out, dazed but unharmed. Alex teleported next to that man and took his body while attacking the dazed soul. The attack cut through the soul and then landed on another soldier, wounding him but not killing him.

"Soldiers!" Long Jianyu roared. "Get in formation."

The soldiers were surprised, but none dared question or be late to the task. Immediately, they all fell to an array, working together to empower the single Long Jianyu in front of them.

Alex had seen this before. As it had happened last time, the 140 soldiers gathered behind Long Jianyu in a certain formation where they used a secret technique to form an array.

The array worked in a way that only the single target of the array would be empowered by it. Last time, there had been 40 soldiers and Long Jianyu's cultivation base had pretty much improved by 2 realms.

Now there were 140. How much was his power going to be improved?

Blood armor formed around Alex and he brought out the Blood God's manual, instantly bringing out over a hundred blood beasts, enough to contend the army in front of him.

The beasts got into a pattern as well, creating the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array. With the hundred of them there, Alex's prowess would increase by 3 cultivation realms.

Would that be enough to fight the man in front of him? It had to be. Alex was going to fight him, one way or another.

Alex saw the giant illusory dragon that formed behind the soldiers as the array activated. He saw the dragon embroidered onto these people's uniforms. He saw the insignia on the ships behind them.

He saw the face of the man without whom they would have never gone to the Eastern Continent. Without whom he would have met his sister a long time ago. Without whom… Yao Ning would not have to die.

Anger filled Alex and he charged in.

However, the man in front of him had grown far stronger than Alex could have ever hoped for him to become.

* * * * * *

Godslayer watched the fight in worry, with the single clash telling him who was stronger here. The Array that the enemies used was very much stronger than Alex's array when the battle was not a war.

"What is going on?" he asked himself. "This kid should be running away, but he's instead fighting. Is he really that angry?"

Godslayer wanted to tell Alex to leave or else he would die. However, seeing the fight in front of his eyes, a different thought blossomed in his head.

"Hmm, maybe I was given this opportunity," he said to himself. "Maybe…"

The pieces were in place, so what more was there left to do?

"I hope this doesn't backfire in the end."

There was no more time to think. It was time to act.

Chapter 1718 Strong Enemy

The Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array had no one singular target. Instead, it improved the prowess of every single individual that was using it in unison.

Compared to that, the array that Long Jianyu and his soldiers used was one that put all of the burden of the battle on a single person, while also making that single person tremendously powerful.

While Alex definitely had the superior technique of all, given that he alone was the target of the people in front of him, the superior technique didn't help him all that much.

Alex swung Midnight, throwing out a fiery slash at Long Jianyu, filled with Dao of Cutting and True Fire Dao.

Long Jianyu attacked as well, his slashes creating massive roots in the sky that clashed against Alex's attacks. There was some sort of dao to the roots and that made it strong enough to overcome Alex's attack.

The two threw out multiple attacks, through which Alex realized that coming out on top would be an impossible task without outside help.

Alex blocked a single attack from Long Jianyu that managed to slip through the barrage and was sent flying backward. He feared that the man in front of him now had a battle prowess of Saint Transformation 7th realm, if not more.

While the 100 blood beasts only gave Alex a bump of 2 realms, the man in front of him had grown by 3 or more realms. This was not something Alex could handle.

'Dammit!' Alex thought. 'How is he so strong?'

He was getting angry at the thought that the man in front of him was most likely going to beat him if he didn't run away. Seeing him had reminded Alex of Yao Ning, whose death he hadn't properly mourned yet. He wanted revenge for her against any of the Eastern Continent soldiers he could find for now, so the thought of not being able to get it was aggravating.

'I will kill them all!' Alex could feel the vexation inside of him growing, and the rage made him want to see every one of the soldiers dead.

"Attack them!" he gave a simple command to his blood beasts who were doing nothing but standing around.

As soon as they were ordered, the Blood Beasts flew toward the group of soldiers behind Long Jianyu, who Alex assumed could not fight back.

At the same time, he himself rushed toward Long Jianyu, taking advantage of the fact that he was somewhat distracted by the many beasts that went for the soldiers.

Long Jianyu wasn't caught off guard and instead attacked back in an instant, blocking the attack that came for him. At the same time, he grew roots that struck Alex in his shoulder, piercing through the Blood armor. It couldn't break through his skin, but it dislocated Alex's shoulder.

Alex switched hands with Midnight and used his left hand to send out an attack while his dislocated shoulder was fixed. At the same time, he watched the beasts arrive upon the soldiers.

If his assumption was right and the soldiers couldn't fight back, then it was going to be a massacre. He wasn't sure if that was truly the case, but Alex looked forward to it.

The soldiers looked scared and none of them moved, but when the first blood beast arrived, they slammed into a large barrier that surrounded the soldiers.

"What?!" Alex shouted in confusion and anger. Then more beasts slammed on that barrier and it became apparent to Alex that there was a barrier protecting the soldiers behind Long Jianyu.

Long Jianyu finally reacted to the beasts and pointed his blade to the side toward a large chunk of the Blood Beasts. Nearly a hundred different sharp roots grew from where he was, and they shot through the sky toward the many beasts.

The beasts Alex had brought out were strong. But against the current Long Jianyu, they were not even a small issue.

The large roots pierced through nearly a dozen different beasts, killing each and every one of the ones it struck in an instant. The Blood Beast's death left behind a bloody mist in the air outside of the glowing barrier.

Alex panicked.

"Retreat!" he shouted at the beasts while quickly attacking Jianyu to catch his attention.

Long Jianyu sent out another set of roots toward the beast as they were retreating and managed to kill half a dozen more. Then he turned back around and stopped Alex's attacks.

"Damn you!" Alex shouted as he swung out more and more attacks, all of which Long Jianyu easily defended against.

Long Jianyu put on a mocking smile as he fought Alex. "You want to kill me?" he asked. "With just this?"

He knew better than anyone just how incredible it was that someone as young as Alex hadn't already died of his attacks. However, mocking an opponent to get them angry enough to start making mistakes was a tried and true formula, and he wasn't going to stop using that just because his opponent was a little talented.

In fact, this seemed like the best time to mock Alex and get him to make mistakes. Long Jianyu wasn't sure why, but Alex was already more angry than he had ever seen him.

'I remember the King of the Southern Continent being a coolheaded man,' he thought. 'What happened that caused him to be this enraged?'

Long Jianyu didn't have all the information of what had transpired in the Eastern Continent that led to Alex being out here. All he knew were pieces of information, which included the fact that Alex was a cripple, and was most likely dead after going against the Dragon Emperor.

Long Jianyu didn't even have the orders to bring back Alex. It was ordered he learned from the other soldiers he met in the ocean after being kicked out from the Southern Continent. He was only following what seemed to be a general order given to everyone.

And now, he was getting close to fulfilling that order.

Long Jianyu looked at the blood beasts that had moved back. Their sudden appearance had surprised him, but he had adapted to the change. He had noticed the fact that it was through an array of these beasts that Alex was strong, but he couldn't go attack these for fear of leaving himself open for Alex.

As he was a single man fighting here, he had to keep his focus on Alex. At least, long enough for the others to make their way here. He had let the other soldiers know where he was, and they were already on their way.

'Still...' Long Jianyu thought as he watched Alex breathe heavily with bloodshot eyes. 'Does he really hate me that much?'

Alex could tell that he was angry and he didn't care about it. His infuriated heart only made him want to kill the person in front of him all that more. He wanted to kill them all.

"Mock me more," Alex said with gritted teeth. "That won't be the last emotion you will show today, but it will be one of the last ones you'll ever show."

Alex felt his muscles tighten as he prepared to attack. Since regular fighting wasn't working against the man, he was going to have to be a lot more reckless.

Chapter 1719 Desperate

Alex fought against Long Jianyu, sending out attack after attack, uncaring of how inefficient his attacks were or how badly he was doing in the fight.

He had a single goal in mind —to kill all the soldiers who were here to kill him or capture him-and he was going to fulfill that goal one way or another. Even if he had to ruin his entire body for it.

Alex and Long Jianyu continued fighting, with Alex always on the losing side, but never actually using. Long Jianyu was must stronger than Alex, but Alex had with him a variety of powers that made it hard for Long Jianyu to easily defeat Alex.

Alex's teleportation was a problem, but it was only a defensive problem and never an offensive problem. He hadn't managed to use his Teleportation skill to teleport into the barrier behind Long Jianyu, and thus the soldiers behind him were safe. Instead, he only used it to dodge Long Jianyu's attacks when it was too hard to handle.

That did mean that Long Jianyu would continue being stronger than Alex, but he would never actually beat him without catching him off guard somehow.

Another problematic thing about Alex's fighting was that he had just so many different Dao that Long Jianyu could never predict just what was coming next.

Long Jianyu only had 2 Dao learned in all of his life. One was the Dao of plants, which had little use in fighting, and the next was the Dao of Roots, which was a little better in fights.

However, those 2 Daos could never be compared to Alex's dozen. Sometimes there would be a Fire attack, and sometimes a Metal. Sometimes he would get attacked with a Yang palm and then another time be attacked with Space itself.

There were also other attacks that Alex used that were annoying for Long Jianyu to handle. He was jealous of Alex's Sword Aura, and absolutely horrified by the continuous mental attacks that seemed to come with every other slash of his sword.

Alongside that, from time to time, there was also a crimson glow to his attack, which improved his power for some reason. Long Jainyu had failed to figure out what it was.

All in all, fighting against Alex was going poorly for him, even though he was winning.

The fight went on for nearly 20 minutes, with each party continuously sending out attacks. Long Jianyu was starting to get somewhat tired from the relentless battle where each attack was the best he could do.

He wanted to rest, but this wasn't the time. Alex was doing much worse than him.

Alex's state was absolutely haggard. His mind was a ball of confusion and madness. He had been using his Dao so much that his head felt like it would split open any second, but he still kept using it. He couldn't think straight at this point and the only thing he could think was that he needed to kill everyone in front of him.

He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. The smell of blood filled his nose and that was all he could smell. An acrid taste filled his mouth, one that Alex hadn't even noticed.

Alex's eyes were not just bloodshot anymore either. Small dark veins were growing in the whites of his eyes. His vision was dark around the corners with only a small section in front of him in clear view.

Alex didn't know what was happening, but he was simply too maddened to worry about it. His only worry right now was how to kill the man in front of him.

He continued his attacks, his might growing more painful each second. Thoughts were distant for Alex now, with only the instinct to kill driving him forward.

As the fighting continued, Alex started taking on more damage than he could handle. His body was wounded all over from the attacks, but they healed instantly, and he could go back to the fight.

He continued fighting, taking on more and more wounds as more time went on.

The first thing Alex stopped using was Dao. He wasn't even aware that he had stopped using Dao. He simply did. That made his attacks very much weaker, while not lessening the pain and madness that filled his mind.

Long Jianyu was starting to get tired too and was quite low on Qi, but his victory was just around the corner, so he continued.

Alex fought for some time and then stopped using his blood in the battle as well. Once his Blood armor was destroyed, it no longer showed up again despite him being able to use it.

As the fighting continued, Alex next stopped using his Sword Aura and Sword Qi, using Sword Intent basically out of instinct.

Around this time, the other soldiers arrived and surrounded Alex.

Immediately, they started attacking Alex from all directions. Alex did his best to stop the attacks, but he was being bombarded all around and in his current state, there wasn't much he could do.

Surprisingly, it wasn't pain that came out on top of all of this. It was anger.

Alex was furious at the situation and lashed out wherever he could, but Long Jianyu was already next to him and stopping any attacks that could be dangerous for the others.

Alex felt himself losing connections to things somewhere in the back of his mind. It took him a while to realize that his blood beasts were also fighting the newly arrived individuals and were doing quite horribly as well.

They were dying one by one while putting up somewhat of a fight, but not one good enough.

"AAAAARRRHH!" he screamed and swung Midnight, trying to cut anyone he could. It didn't matter who he attacked anymore. He just wanted to kill. He wouldn't care if the one he attacked right now was his own beast.

Alex attacked on instinct, his confused mind no longer capable of sustaining thoughts long enough to form a coherent battle plan. There was no skill or technique to his attacks. It was simply random attacks filled with energy that he was already running low on.

Long Jianyu relaxed a lot as the fight continued. He knew that it was only a matter of time before Alex lost. He was on his last leg already and was doing what any desperate animal does when cornered.

Long Jianyu was strong enough now that Alex's suicidal attacks did not matter to him anymore. He simply blocked the attacks, while slashing back.

He had seen Alex's body regenerate from even cut limbs in a matter of seconds, so he wanted to see how long he could continue to do that.

Long Jianyu continued attacking and defending, while the others fought the beasts made of blood. 'Finish that already,' he thought with a hidden sigh. Just how weak was the Scale legion that they couldn't fight against these weak beasts either?

Alex attacked again, his sword swinging directly for Long Jianyu.

Long Jianyu attacked back in defense and the two attacks clashed. Long Jianyu's eyes immediately narrowed in a hint of confusion.

Something was different about the attack just now. He looked at Alex and saw a phenomenon around his body that he had never seen before.

"What... is going on with him?"

Chapter 1720 Blinded Fury

Rage was all Alex felt.

Rage, and a burning desire to kill all those that stood in his way.

Alex swung Midnight and struck Long Jianyu's sword, not even realizing that was what he was doing. The massive clash let out shockwaves that passed beyond the many soldiers that surrounded him.

Long Jianyu's eyes widened in fear. He wasn't mistaken at all. Something was indeed happening here. Alex was getting stronger somehow.

Long Jianyu pushed Alex back and threw out an attack to send him away. The long battle was getting to him. He should have not fought so hard early on.

Alex was hit right in the right thing and had a large wound there. It healed quickly as it always did, but this time around there was a black ooze that was left behind where the wound had healed.

It remained for just a few seconds though, and quickly entered back into Alex's body.

Alex shook his head from the pain. He breathed in and out, letting out dark mist whenever he did. His eyes were getting more and more black veins except for the purple pupils that he got from the Demon Eyes.

It was not just his eyes where the veins were showing up, however. They were now starting to show all around his body.

'What is going on?' Long Jianyu thought as he watched Alex let out haggard breath, like a rabid man. 'Is he using some sort of forbidden technique?'

Alex flew back toward Long Jianyu and started attacking more aggressively. His swings had no rhyme or reason to them, and most of them were even lacking sword Intent at this point.

Long Jianyu fought back, and with each strike, he realized that Alex was growing stronger and stronger, exponentially. This was bad.

"You all, help me!" Long Jianyu shouted before pushing Alex back away from him.

The others left the fight with the blood beasts and came to aid the commander. Many of them let out attacks toward Alex, all of which struck him directly. It created a massive explosion in the sky with winds buffeting against them.

Alex's aura nearly vanished after the attack, almost feeling as though he was near death.

When the smoke cleared and Alex was seen again, he was falling through the air with a missing head, left have, and part of his right torso. His Qi gave out and he fell through the air, falling into the ocean far down below.

Long Jianyu looked around in surprise. He looked to the others who had come to his aid and nodded toward them.

"Thank you," he said quickly as he started breathing heavily himself. The battle had been a hard one and it had taken a lot out of him. He barely had any Qi left at this point. "If you hadn't come in time, I would—"

The water exploded out in a white spray and from underneath it, Alex flew toward Long Jianyu.

Long Jainyu felt the hair on his neck stand on its end as he watched the battle-crazed Alex fly up, leaving behind what seemed like a trail of black aura.

Like a trail of darkness.

"Damn you! Why won't you die?!"

Long Jianyu had nothing left to use that would work against the man in front of him. Nothing but Immortal Qi.

He used his Immortal Qi and he used his Dao of Roots to create a massive root that flew toward Alex at an incredible speed. He aimed for Alex's heart. If he could destroy the heart, he would win.

And with how strong the attack was, there was no chance for Alex to win at all.

His only worry was that Alex would teleport, but he hadn't done so for a while now, so he felt a little more confident.

The roots left behind explosions in the air just by their sheer speed and arrived right at Alex, targeting his heart.

And then, they struck Alex's heart.

The large roots went through Alex's chest, coming out of the other side with a blood mist of the matter that made up the parts of Alex that were where it had it. That included not just Alex's heart, but also most of his ribs, his lungs, and even parts of his stomach and liver.

There was also a suspicious amount of black in the red that was left behind.

The attack was successful, and Long Jianyu left with a breath of relief.

But Alex didn't fall. He didn't die.

His now fully black eyes were staring directly at Long Jianyu and he was still proceeding. The roots tore open the entire left side of Alex's body and passed through while Alex continued up without stopping.

There was now a massive chunk missing from his torso, but his body held and the hole grew smaller in a matter of seconds. Even when his heart was destroyed, Alex came back to the fight again.

"This can't be!" Long Jianyu's burst of surprise was all that he could let out.

Alex burst out with speed as soon as he was away from the root and he arrived right in front of the man. Even as he arrived, he was already mid-swing, and he easily cut through the man in half diagonally.

The two halves of Long Jianyu started to slide off of each other, but Alex was still not done. He swung Midnight again and cut him at a different angle. Then again and again.

Alex only stopped when he was struck by multiple people from the back and was blown away.

Long Jianyu's many pieces fell to the ocean with no one even managing to save him in the end.

And then their eyes fell on Alex who was low on aura but seemed ready to kill them all. He breathed black in and out, and his body was covered in black veins at this point.

Even Midnight seemed to lose its starry luster in his hands now.

Alex grunted like a beast and went back to attack.

Not a single one remaining was even close to being strong enough to fight him. Not alone, not together.

Alex cut through the men like a farmer going through his matured crops. Like a butcher preparing for the morning's sale, he cut through the men that were around him with not a single care for whether they were fighting back or not.

It didn't matter to Alex that he was being attacked. He had stopped using Qi in his defense a long time ago, so all the attacks that landed on him were generally strong enough to hurt him.

However, thanks to the Undying God's Physique, the wounds healed just as quickly as they appeared, leaving behind only the pain of the wound. The pain was the last thing that would bother Alex at this point.

He killed soldiers --men and women-- one after another. It didn't matter to him that they were fighting back. It didn't matter that they were running away. It didn't matter that some of them begged to not be killed.

He killed them all the same, their bodies falling into the ocean to be swallowed by the cold water.

Alex's eyes fell on the group of soldiers who were trying to use their arrays on the other soldiers who were fighting him. However, each one of them was falling to him, so they were pretty much useless.

The group of soldiers panicked and thought of what they could do. But with even their commander falling to Alex, they knew they had no chance. So, the best course of action was to remain in the formation they were in and hope that they would survive here.

The barrier rippled from Alex's single hit. Then he struck it again and it rippled harder. Then, with the third strike, it broke apart.

Instantly, all 140 soldiers that were there started attacking Alex with all sorts of techniques and attacks.

Alex took on every single one of the attacks and flew to the soldiers before killing them one by one.

Many soldiers fled, some unharmed, some very much wounded. Quite a few soldiers had to run away with only their souls.

The majority, however, died to Alex. And he hadn't even used any fancy techniques.

All Alex did was slash them at close combat.

Alex attacked blindly in every direction, cutting those who he knew were close. He attacked based on instinct, hitting everything that moved. The feedback that he got through his sword when he cut someone was the only thing that kept him going.

He continued swinging, hitting whatever he came across. He killed it and moved on to the next one.

Around that point, he started hearing something that broke the peace in his mind that came with the madness.

It was a voice. Whose voice, he did not know. All he knew was that it was a voice. Someone was talking to him.

Alex did not pay any attention. He continued fighting, and when he had no opponents, he moved to find them.

Alex was unsure how long had passed since he had started fighting, but seeing as he had more enemies to fight, he did not stop.

The voice called for him again and again, and that irritated him. Who was calling for him when he had people to kill? If he found that person, he would kill him too.

The voice got loud, loud enough that he could make out the words now.

"Kid, stop!" the voice called.

Alex wasn't sure whose voice it was. He paused for a moment to figure that out.

That was all the help Godslayer needed for what he had to do next.

Chapter 1721 Godslayer's Plan

Godslayer had a simple plan.

By providing the Shadow Aura he had kept around for a long time to Alex, he wanted to use the anger and hatred Alex felt to turn the Shadow Aura into Darkness aura.

Once the conversion was complete, he would take it back.

However, he had miscalculated just how strong Alex's anger would grow to be after being fed by the Darkness aura.

Godslayer was busy the entire time making sure that the Darkness aura was not destroyed by Alex's body. With that, he didn't have enough ability to also take it back at the same time.

He watched Alex fight, consumed by his hatred and the subsequent corruption, killing everyone around him with no mercy. Alex's fight was a reflection of his past self, and how he was.

Following his hatred, Godslayer's only thought was to kill and destroy the gods. Was he this lost too when he fought?

He knew he wasn't corrupted enough that he couldn't think straight back then, but there were still aspects of him that were definitely mutated due to the Darkness. Would this bring him back to how he was?

Godslayer watched Alex fight with no care for his body, nearly giving his own life to satiate his hatred. This was bad.

Alex killed more and more, and soon every human in the area was dead or had long since run away, and the only thing that remained around Alex were the blood beasts.

Lost in his hatred, Alex started attacking his own Blood beasts.

"Stop!" Godslayer shouted when he realized what Alex was doing. "Don't! Those are your own beasts."

But Alex would listen. Darkness had taken over him and all he wanted to do was kill those around him, regardless of who it was that was there.

"What have I done?" Godslayer asked himself in a somber tone as he watched the blood beasts get massacred one by one.

The Blood Beasts were somewhat intelligent at the Saint, so when Alex started attacking mindlessly, they knew they had to do something. They couldn't fight back against their master, however, so they chose to run away.

When all the blood beasts were gone or dead, Alex could only float in the air, looking for new opponents.

Godslayer tried to take back the Darkness aura then. However, before he could do it, something else caught Alex's attention.

The ocean was littered with corpses of the Saints that had been cut apart, and their bodies had long since attracted great beasts from all around the ocean.

Eating the flesh of another cultivator was how beasts improved their cultivation. Eating a beast's core was more valuable, but a Saint realm human was no small feast either.

And today, there had been hundreds that had died at once. This was a great feast for all the beasts that dared to come there. And all those that dared were mostly the beasts that were strong enough to do so.

Unfortunately, their own presence made the feast into a massacre.

Alex didn't care who he killed as long as he got to kill them.

He rushed into the water, massacring the beasts that were down there. There were several strong beasts, all of whom tried to fight Alex, but failed.

There were even beasts in the Saint Transformation realms, but all of them fell to Alex.

"Kid!" Godslayer shouted in the spiritual sea, trying to get Alex's attention.

Alex was getting stronger and stronger and was already reaching a level that was impossible for anyone in this world, without using Immortal Qi. Even the Dragon Emperor would struggle to defeat Alex with the strength he had.

But the strength wasn't pure. It wasn't earned. It came from his corrupted body where the Darkness aura was making him strong in exchange for drawing out his life force.

If it was someone else instead of Alex, they would've started weakening a long time ago due to the corruption. It was only because of Alex's body and physique that it was taking the Darkness aura this long to force him to use up every essence of his body.

"Kid, stop!" Godslayer shouted, but Alex didn't hear him. He continued fighting, killing the beasts around him. The entire ocean was bloodied red at this point and yet he still continued fighting.

"Can you hear me, Kid?" Godslayer asked again. "Stop!"

He continued shouting at Alex, but it didn't seem like Alex could hear him at all. But he didn't give up.

After a lot of shouting, Alex finally stopped. He paused long enough that the Darkness inside him wasn't drying him out.

And that was the moment Godslayer could act.

Instantly, Godslayer started drawing in the Darkness aura. He got back only a tiny amount at first, but that was the hardest part. Once there was less Darkness Aura for him to protect from Alex's body, the more he could focus on drawing in.

As such, the amount of Darkness aura that he managed to draw in grew exponentially with each passing second.

He felt the Darkness aura that came in through Alex and saw how potent it had become after lingering in his anger and hatred for so long.

'That kid really was hiding a lot of feelings underneath his facade of normalcy,' Godslayer thought. If there was anything good that came out of this incident aside from the Darkness Aura, then it would be the fact that Alex had gotten the chance to act on his anger.

That would certainly lessen the burden on him and help him deal with his immediate anger issues.

Alex had thankfully stopped moving altogether, and that aided Godslayer in taking away the Darkness aura without any hindrance.

Alex's body started losing the corrupted properties such as the black eyes, dark veins, and the dark ooze that flowed through his veins.

They were all sucked in by Godslayer, using his Darkness Dao, and they were all now gathered around Godslayer like a thick cloud of Darkness.

Once Godslayer was all done, he finally sighed in relief as he realized that he hadn't been too late.

* * * * * *

The feeling of lucidity that flowed into Alex after listening to the words of the distant voice was one that he would likely never forget. It was as if he had been burning and in pain all this time, and someone had finally decided to pour a bucket of water on him.

His mad rage was slowly dissipating and all that was left was a hollow feeling of nothingness. But even that nothingness was one of the best feelings he had felt in a long time.

Alex felt weak. Incredibly weak. He could tell that he was mostly out of Qi, and didn't even have any blood aura to turn into Qi.

The memories of what he had done returned as he watched the surroundings. All the different bodies of the beasts he had killed floated around him in the water that was murky from all the death.

He took a deep long look at everything, taking it all into memory. What had happened to him?

"Godslayer?" he called out slowly. "What did you do?"

"What I felt I had to," a reply came back. "Although, I'm sorry I wasn't able to stop you in time. You might have killed all of these beasts, but the fault is on me."

Chapter 1722 Act Quickly

Godslayer explained what he had done.

Hearing that he had been the vessel to turn Shadow Aura to Darkness aura did not sit right with Alex, especially given what he had done while lost in his rage. However, that had been the sole reason he was even alive right now.

Alex didn't know whether he should be angry at Godslayer or thanking him. The situation called for both.

"Did it succeed then? Did you gather Darkness aura?" Alex asked.

"Yes!" Godslayer said excitedly. "We just need to find a safe space where I can take in the Death aura from that book and then I can improve myself."

Alex nodded. "That will take some time."

He brought out the talisman from the old man and saw that there were multiple messages asking him what was happening. Alex sent a quick reply.

"Leave the island. I killed many of the soldiers, so we'll need to leave immediately. Come find me."

Once he sent the message, he also called back the Blood beasts through the Blood God's manual. It was a good thing he hadn't brought out all the Blood beasts during the fight, and only enough to complete the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array.

As the next step in the array was to have 1000 soldiers, Alex didn't have nearly that many blood beasts and thus hadn't brought out every single beast The problem, however, was that the ones who were still alive in the book were the weaker ones.

Once he gave the orders, he looked around and knew what he needed to do next.

Alex flew around the murky ocean, gathering all the different beasts' bodies and beast cores. The blood of the beasts had spread around the ocean, so gathering it all was impossible, but Alex did what he thought was right in that certain situation.

He took in the water from dozens of kilometers around him into his Soul Space, dragging in all the different items that he hadn't had the time to search around for.

While he sucked in all the water with blood from the surrounding, the Blood Beasts arrived and fell into the water, getting sucked into Alex's Soul Space as well.

Alex understood what was happening, but didn't stop. He would deal with the situation at a later time when he would deal with this water as well. For now, everything he could take in, he would.

It took him nearly 20 minutes to take in all the water and, by the end, Zhou Linfan was already there, watching Alex in awe. He had only caught a bit at the end, but even that was already surprising enough that his mouth was wide open.

Alex flew out of the ocean, and the man immediately frowned. "Are you alright?" he asked. "You seem... sickly."

Pearl, who had come with the man, looked worried. He could sense Alex's weakened body and spirit through the bond. He flew closer to make sure he was alright.

"No, I'm not fine, but I will be," Alex answered. He looked at his own skin and realized what the man was talking about. He was much paler than usual and his muscles had decrepit just enough that one could see the outline of the bones.

He touched his face and felt the sunken cheek with the cheekbones hard against the flesh. Even the whites of his eyes were unnaturally yellow in complexion.

Alex's body was showing all signs of dehydration and malnutrition issues despite being the body of a high level cultivator.

He had already eaten a healing pill, but somehow that hadn't dealt with all the problems. He would look at it when he had the time, which he didn't do right then.

"Let's go," Alex said and brought out a ship from his Soul Space before jumping into it. "We will soon have legions behind us. Hopefully, the message hasn't been passed just yet."

Alex got into it, and Pearl jumped in as well. The old man still did not understand what exactly had happened, but he accepted Alex's suggestions and immediately hopped onto the boat as well.

Alex took one look at the sky, and then immediately started flying west.

Once they flew off, Alex gave a small summary of what had happened there, how he accidentally ended up meeting the returning soldiers and fought them.

"I used a forbidden technique to fight them," Alex explained. "I nearly died because of it, but I survived too, thanks to it."

The old man shook his head as he sighed. "You seem to have a lot of those things. I'm going to have you explain some of those one of these days," he said.

Alex put the ship at the highest speed he could and flew above the ocean, heading home. Because of the beasts potentially attacking them out of nowhere, all of them had to be incredibly careful.

Unlike those large ships that the Eastern Continent used, Alex's ship did not have any defensive capabilities and, as such, was much more vulnerable.

They could hide their cultivation bases, but it was impossible to hide the aura left behind by a ship that used Saint Spirit stones to fly across the world.

Therefore, Zhou Linfan decided to fully reveal his aura to the surrounding beasts just so that most would become scared and away from them.

There was the danger of potentially stronger beasts being attracted instead, but that was a risk they had to take here. Otherwise, every other beast could come and bother them along the way.

While Alex would accept all those that wanted to fight him with open arms, the Dragon Emperor or a legion of his strongest would be right behind him at any moment.

Thus, he had to run away as fast as he could.

Alex checked his Soul Space during the night after letting the old man handle the traveling and made sure nothing was wrong there. All he could do there was force the Blood Beasts in the Blood God's manual.

Aside from that, there was nothing he could do with what he had lying in his Soul Space and Storage spaces.

Days passed with them flying without stopping. Alex and the old man cultivated in between, giving each other turns to fly the ship instead.

Alex's complexion got better after cultivating whenever he could.

About 10 days into the flight, Alex had been cultivating and the old man had been in charge of handling the flight. Suddenly, the old man's eyes widened in shock and he stood up in a hurry.

Alex stopped cultivating, noticing that something was amiss.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked the old man.

"Something is coming this way. Something strong," the old man said. "Get ready to fight or we very well may die right here."

Alex immediately stood up as well, bringing out Midnight, ready to fight. However, as he prepared, he felt something inside of him and paused.

"Wait," he said slowly. "That's not our enemy."

A few seconds later, Bai Jingshen arrived right in front of the ship in his giant beast form with Whisker riding on top of him.

"Brother!" Whisker shouted out loud. "You're back!"

Chapter 1723 Returned

Alex and the old man left their ship and got onto Bai Jingshen's much larger, much faster ship. Pearl came out to meet his great grandfather and soon everyone was settled on the other ship.

"The little mouse realized you were moving away from the Eastern Continent, so we came to check on you," Bai Jingshen said as he sat on the ship in his human form. "It was a good thing that we did. There is still a lot of land for you to go through."

"Is that so?" Alex asked as he pet Whisker. "You did good," he told the mouse.

Whisker smiled. He liked being complimented.

Next to them, Zhou Linfan watched the entire exchange between Bai Jingshen and Alex with confusion and fear on his face. He could not believe that the beast they met in the middle of the ocean would be the White Tiger himself.

He couldn't understand what the White Tiger was doing here. He was sure that all were dead or had left the world already. On top of that, how was Alex acquainted with the white tiger? Through the phoenix? Was the little fully white cat also a White Tiger?

Many questions ran through Zhou Linfan's mind, but he kept it all to himself. At least, he could start to see the possible sources for all the mysteries that surrounded Alex. He believed everything he did was something handed to him by the Immortals.

"I was never in the Eastern Continent," Alex started explaining. "I had managed to teleport before that, but I was weakened. Pearl helped me survive, and senior Zhou saw me to health."

"I see," Bai Jingshen said and looked back at the old man behind him. "You saved Pearl and this young man. You have my gratitude."

"It was all I could do, senior," the old man quickly said. He could hear his heartbeat through his ears with the White Tiger staring at him.

They continued talking for some time with Alex explaining everything that had happened to him. At the same time, Bai Jingshen also told Alex what had been happening back in the Southern Continent.

"Scarlet is trying to break through to Immortality?" Alex scratched his face with a thoughtful look. "It was about time. What about my sister, Hannah?"

"The poisoned girl? She was taken to my Palace when we realized she was sick, but Beihan couldn't heal her. She does not want to give the weak girl an Immortal Pill because it could destroy her current body."

"At the same time, she believes that she has a recipe that could work on her, but the level of the pill she made would be too low to be any good," Bai Jingshen said. "She said it was imperative that you made the pill instead."

Alex nodded. "Pill clouds could indeed help," he said.

"That and she didn't start because of something the girl said," Bai Jingshen mentioned. "She said something about your aunt being necessary. Apparently, you told them that."

"I don't know if Aunt Liz is really necessary or not, but with the level of healing pills at our disposal, she was necessary."

Bai Jingshen looked at Alex for a long time. "Then you are confident you can heal her?" he asked.

Alex nodded. "Absolutely."

After some time, Alex and the others saw dark clouds in the distance with a large cluster of islands below it. They had reached the Sunless lands, and a few more hours later, they would arrive at the Southern Continent itself.

As soon as they arrived, they went through a teleportation formation and went to the Sunborn Sanctuary. As soon as Alex walked out of the teleportation formation, everyone was already waiting for him.

"Father!" Ronron shouted as soon as she saw her. But before her, Helen was already the first to move. She took Alex into a hug while crying.

"I'm so happy you are okay."

Ronron arrived just a split second late and took him into a hug as well.

Graham was next. He looked worried all over and was glad to see that his son was mostly okay. Alex still looked a little under the weather as the problems caused by the Darkness aura hadn't yet left him.

Liz, the elders, LinLin, and evenWen Cheng and Luo Mei had come to see his return.

Alex could feel tears forming in his eyes. It had been so long since he had seen all of them and they all had grown so much in his absence. It was good to know for a fact that many people cared about you.

Most of the staff from the formation ground had been cleared for some time, so it was just them for now.

After a short period, Alex flew to the palace, with the elders taking care of Zhou Linfan in Alex's stead.

Alex walked into the palace through the front gate and saw the confused and surprised looks of many servants and guards who had been there all throughout the night.

"How many know about the situation?" he asked Linlin.

"Not many. We kept it all close to ourselves as much as we could," she said.

"Why did my master and senior sister know?" Alex asked.

"They... just found out. They helped train the princess, and the princess ended up revealing the information by accident," she said.

Ronron seemed to shrink into her shell. "I'm sorry," she said.

Alex shook his head. "That's alright," he said. "The public do not know, right?"

"No," Linlin said. "Although, I fear they suspect some mishap or disagreement with the Eastern Continent. When we had to force the soldiers of the Eastern Continent to leave, they made quite the show."

Alex felt anger being reminded of Long Jianyu and the others. "Forget about them for now," he said. He looked in a certain direction now that he felt Scarlet close by.

He wanted to ask her how she was doing and how her preparation for Immortality was going on but realized that maybe he shouldn't be bothering her. Instead, he just sent feelings of calmness and relief through their bond to help her not worry about him.

"Your Majesty!" Liang Shufen rushed forward when they arrived in a safer location. "Sister Yao Ning, is she..."

Alex nodded. "She protected me as much as she could," he said in a somber tone and died at the Emperor's hand. He could feel the anger bubbling up again and it had nothing to do with the Darkness Aura this time around.

"We'll have our revenge for her," Alex promised. "But there is a much bigger problem upcoming for us. Well, specifically, me."

"What do you mean, Your Majesty?" Linlin asked curiously.

Alex looked toward Liang Shufen. "Have you told them about my deal with the Emperor?" he asked.

The older woman nodded. "I have, in passing," she said. "What about it?"

Alex shook his head. "I need to go finish the deal with the Dragon Emperor, or I will die."

"What?!"

Everyone erupted at practically the same time. They were all confused and angry that Alex was even thinking of going back.

"I swore an oath for the trade," Alex explained slowly. "If I don't complete this, I will die."

Chapter 1724 Talk

The group of people surrounding Alex gasped at the mention of his possible death. Most did not even believe it to be true, but the ones that did quickly realized the seriousness of the situation.

"But to meet with the man that nearly killed you..." Helen was starting to tear up.

"You don't have to go alone. We will all go with you to this trade," one of the elders said.

Alex looked toward the elder. "And we should all die?" he asked. "You do know that the Emperor will kill us the moment he sees us, right? He already killed Yao Ning."

"Can we ask the Emperor to meet us in the ocean to trade then?" Ronron asked. "If he wants it so bad, he will come, right?"

"He is a coward," Alex answered while shaking his head. "He knows that if he leaves, he will die. So unless he is certain of victory, he won't come. Also, he is not the one who is forced to trade by this oath, I am."

"The only thing the oath forces him to do is trade something of incredible value as compared to the thing I'm trading him with," Alex said. "If he doesn't have anything, he can decline the trade, and he's fine."

"That's a very one-sided trade," Bai Jingshen said. He had already heard about Alex needing to return but hadn't heard about the intricacies of the oath.

"It may be," Alex said. "But it did help me stay alive. He couldn't kill me because our trade wasn't complete."

"But if you go back, he can decline the trade and then kill you, right?" Graham asked.

Alex shrank back a little and sighed. "That is exactly what I fear he will do," he said. "That man is mad, I tell you. He kept saying something about how everything that was happening was about fate. I swear he's not right in the head."

"He might have been talking about his prophecies," someone spoke almost as soon as Alex finished speaking, making everyone turn to look at him.

The white-haired Zhou Linfan realized that everyone's gaze was now at him. As someone who wasn't used to being around these many people for a long time, he shrank back a little.

"What do you mean, senior?" Alex asked curiously.

"The Dragon Emperor's prophecy," the old man said slowly. "If he said something about fate, then he must have been talking about his prophecy."

"His prophecy?" Alex asked. "Can you elaborate?"

The old man shrugged. "I don't know much about it myself either, but when I was eavesdropping on him, he and the Empress seemed to always talk about the prophecies when they were alone."

"I don't know the specificity of the prophecies, but most of what they did was because of the prophecies from what I could tell," he said. "Attacking my kin and the other kingdoms, attacking the Western Continent, and most likely even trying to kill you was because of this prophecy."

"You don't know the prophecy itself?" Alex asked the old man.

Zhou Linfan shook his head. "I don't remember them talking about the actual prophecies whenever I was serving them food," he said. "Sorry, I can't be of much help."

"You said that attacking the Western Continent was partially because of this prophecy?" Bai Jingshen asked.

Zhou Linfan nodded before quickly realizing who it was he was nodding to. "Yes, senior," he answered then.

Everyone fell into thought once the information was out. Alex thought of his own prophecy and realized he hadn't been paying attention to it for a long time now.

The one about his death bothered him whenever he remembered it. 'Could the Dragon Emperor be worried about something like that too?' he wondered. But that was only conjecture. Knowing the prophecy would likely not help him either.

"Let's ignore the prophecy for now," Alex said. "There is still sometime before the time of the trade, but—"

"There are ways to deal with oaths," Bai Jingshen cut in. "Maybe we can do something to yours, like destroy it."

Alex looked toward the White Tiger in absolute shock. "What?" he asked.

Everyone else turned to look at the White Tiger as well, unbelieving of what they had heard. They didn't believe they even heard him correctly.

"Did you say there is a way to deal with the oaths?" Alex asked.

"Not one way," Bai Jingshen said. "There are many ways to do so."

"What ways?" Alex asked, filled with hope.

Bai Jingshen pointed to his earrings. "I can deal with my oaths through this. I can erase them whenever I want to," he said.

Alex frowned. "Then why haven't you done so already?" he asked.

Bai Jingshen gave a short smile. "I am left near to death after going Qi deviation if I try to erase the oaths," he said.

"That's... not very helpful, is it?" Helen asked.

"If it means you won't die, I count it as very helpful," Bai Jingshen said. "If you are willing to lose your cultivation for survival, would you not do it?"

Alex sighed. "If I have to take that route, then I have other ways to do so," he said. "Besides, would those rings even work for me?"

"No. My master made them work exclusively by me," Bai Jingshen said proudly. "I was only suggesting that we try and see if we can find a way to save you without sending you to your killer's den."

Alex understood where the White Tiger was coming from. "Thank you for your suggestion, brother Shen, but we have an entirely different problem even if I am taken out of the equation."

"We have our best alchemists in the eastern Continent, and we need to go get them before something bad is done to them," Alex said. "I hope nothing has happened to them just yet though."

"What if the Emperor tries to use them during the trade," Liang Shufen asked with a thoughtful look. "We wouldn't even be able to reject."

Alex frowned as well. "There are a lot of problems here, and we won't be able to solve it in a single day. For now, we should all return to what we've been doing. Have senior Linfan here be treated like my own guest. As for me, I will go take my rest. I need to take a few days to cultivate to deal with some problems I came across."

Everyone nodded and started leaving one by one.

Bai Jingshen left with Pearl too, and even his parents and Ronron left him. The only people in the hall remaining were Alex and Liz.

She hugged him once again. "You said you would bring back Hannah and you did. Thank you," she said in a tearful voice.

"Right, where is sister?" Alex asked. "And brother Huan."

"I've put your sister in a special room I devised to keep her from aging at the moment. That young man who calls himself her husband should be in his room resting."

Alex smiled. "You don't approve of him?" he asked.

"I just won't call him my son-in-law until their marriage is official," she said and then smiled before patting Alex's head. "Get some rest. We can deal with everything else."

Chapter 1725 Mixture

﻿﻿Alex ate a few pills once he reached his room and sat by the bed, readying to cultivate. Now that he was finally free and not in a constant state of danger, he could finally take his time with his cultivation to deal with the things he had put off.

Firstly, he had to check on himself to see what exactly was wrong with him after the corruption he had gone through.

Checking through himself, Alex realized that he had lost a lot of body mass and had a mostly weaker Blood Essence. Thankfully, everything else that had gone wrong had either been healed by his physique or by the many pills he had eaten along the way.

'Body mass I can deal with immediately, but the Blood Essence will take some time to heal on its own,' Alex thought. He couldn't help but wonder if it was even a good idea to try to improve his blood aura just yet.

'If I try to improve my blood aura, I will have to deal with Blood Essence first, and will end up wasting the blood aura,' Alex thought. It was better to make use of it later. For now, he could do something else.

Alex entered his soul space and looked at the vastly wide floating collection of blood-red water that constantly moved around but never escaped from its own mass. It was nearly 2 kilometers in diameter and had more water than most lakes did on their own.

Inside the water, various body parts of both beasts and humans were floating around. Most of them were cut into perfect pieces by him, but a lot of them were also in irregular pieces as they were being consumed by the beasts themselves.

Alex started the tedious job of going through the beasts and locating the Beast Core to pull it out for his use. It was a struggle at first. Alex wasn't aware of where each beast's core would be.

But as he went through it, he got faster and faster, and by the end of it all, he managed to bring out all the cores from the beasts with none remaining. Alex looked at the pile of cores in surprise.

There were exactly 266 beast cores there, and the most surprising thing of all was that they were all from very strong beasts.

The weakest core there was from a beast in the Saint Core realm, but the majority of the beasts that dared surface during his battle with the soldiers had been either in the Saint Soul realm or the Saint Transformation realm.

Alex quickly moved over the blood and beasts he had gathered in his Storage ring as well and started counting through all that he had.

Together, he now had 133 beast cores from beasts with Saint Core realm or weaker. He had 112 cores from beasts with the Saint Soul realm. And he had exactly 46 cores from beasts with Saint Transformation realm.

That was an amount Alex hadn't ever expected to gather when he had first decided to go to the ocean to train himself. He hadn't even fulfilled his original purpose for going to the ocean and now he had so much beast core and blood that he could only wonder just how strong he was going to be in the upcoming days.

Once Alex separated all the cores, he then moved to separate the corpse parts from the bloodied water. The parts that were taken out from the water were put into two piles.

One pile was for parts that would be useful when it came to alchemy, formations, artifacts, or other constructs. And the other one was for body parts that would not be useful to make anything.

Once Alex finished making the two piles, he started transporting the large mass of corpses toward the World Tree and the Nine Yang Divine Tree. He hadn't had the chance to feed the trees anything good for a long time, and they would most definitely happily absorb everything he gave them.

Eating nothing but the flesh and bones of strong beasts and humans would do them very good as well.

Feeding the plants was just leaving the body parts by their roots. The trees would do their job themselves.

Alex took a short time to deal with the rest of the issues in his Soul Space and then finally left it with the Blood God's Manual following him out.

"Godslayer, do you want to start now, or should we wait?" Alex asked the sword spirit in his mind.

"Give it to me. I've been ready for a few days now."

The spirit floated in Alex's spiritual sea, surrounded by a nearly vile tar-like black substance that surrounded it, along with a small dark cloud that hovered around it. Godslayer's real body, the crystalline sphere was no longer visible to anyone who would look for it at all.

"Okay, I'll do it right now."

Alex reached into the Blood God's Manual with his spiritual sense and used his Dao of Death Aura to control an amount of Death Aura inside of there. He formed a thin line with the aura and slowly dragged it toward his Spiritual Sea.

Opening his Sea to the aura, he let the Death Aura fly into his mental space where he let go of the control.

Godslayer immediately assumed control of all the Death Aura that Alex poured into the Spiritual sea. He started taking it toward himself, adding it to the Darkness Aura that had taken the form of the tar-like substance.

Death Aura became a smoky mixture with the dark clouds, turning the cloud more opaque while also turning into a viscous goo of dark liquid surrounding Godslayer's body.

Godslayer continued taking in everything Alex gave adding it to the pile while continuously taking measure of what he was gathering. Sometime later, he realized that he was nearing equilibrium between the two aura.

"You'll have to stop soon," Godslayer notified.

Alex nodded. A minute later, he stopped pulling out the Death Aura under Godslayer's command and put away the book. There was still quite a lot of Death Aura remaining in the book. He had not even taken out a third of the total amount, but that seemed to be enough for Godslayer.

"You will start absorbing them now?" Alex asked.

"In a minute," Godslayer said. "I need to make some preparations first."

He did something with the two Aura, mixing them to the point that they emulsified together. Alex arrived inside the Spiritual sea and looked at what Godslayer was doing.

The ball of black mass that was Godslayer was surprisingly small, but that was only because most of the Darkness and Death aura had concentrated in his vicinity.

"Once you absorb it all, you will improve permanently, right?" Alex asked the Sword spirit.

"I will," Godslayer said excitedly. "So long as you don't let your body destroy me again, I will remain at that strength and won't drop down."

Alex shook his head while remembering the first time he had met Godslayer. The sword spirit's aura covered the entire sky at that time. Compared to how small that cloud was right now, Alex could only imagine how strong the Sword spirit had been.

The only reason he had even lost was because he had entered his body.

"Tell me, are we going to have to find Darkness aura and Death aura each time you need to improve yourself?" Alex asked the Sword Spirit. "Don't you have another method of improving?"

"As a sword spirit? I have no choice but to do just that," Godslayer said. "The only way for me to grow normally would be to find my body first."

"Your body?" Alex asked, thinking for a moment. "You were in that other sword when I found you, but that is not your body, is it? Where is your real body?"

"I don't know," Godslayer answered. "Since I was put in the Sky God's treasury, it might be in there. It might not be. I have no way of telling."

"Hmm…" Alex thought for a bit. "When we are hopefully done with everything here and ready to break through to the Immortal realm, senior Yang will come with us to the other realm. Do you think he will accept it if I say I want to visit the Sky God's Palace?"

Godslayer remained silent for a while before asking. "And do what there?" he asked. "Ask the Sky God to give you my body back? Or do you plan on stealing it?"

"Umm…"

"Do you know what will be the first thing that will happen there if you go?" Godslayer asked. "That woman will put you in a secluded room and look into your Soul Space and Spiritual sea. Guess what she will see when she does that?"

Alex shrank into his body when he thought of what would happen to him under those circumstances. Having Godslayer and a giant Space Stone in his spiritual sea, and having the two trees in his Soul Space would be a bad thing to show the Sky God as the first thing.

"I guess we shouldn't do that," Alex said sheepishly.

"Alright, now give me space," Godslayer said, having perfectly mixed the two auras. "I'm going to start absorbing them."

"Do you mind moving to the top of the silver mountain?" Alex asked. "I plan on eating a lot of Beast cores so there will be many violent Beast spirits coming into my mind soon. I would not want to bother you with them."

"Alright," Godslayer answered. "I'll let you know when I'm done with it. Don't get into any problem until then."

Chapter 1726 An Uncommon Happenstance

Alex pulled out a cultivation pill and ate it in preparation for the next few days of cultivation. He had already cultivated for nearly 2 years in the Saint Soul 4th realm, so returning to that level wasn't very hard.

As such, his job now was to continue and hopefully break through. Hopefully, he would continue to break through for a long time.

Alex thought of cultivating normally, but with all the beast cores available to him, he decided to use one of them. He took a silvery-pink thumb nail sized core and quickly ate it.

Alex felt the core slide down his throat, past his esophagus, and settle in his stomach. Immediately, his body acted and started consuming the core. Just at that point, Alex felt something enter his Spiritual sea and his mind followed.

At the next moment, he arrived inside his spiritual sea, not far away from the silver mountain atop which Godslayer was cultivating. He made sure to not bring the fight in that direction.

He looked straight to the front where the beast he was to fight had appeared in its spirit form. It was a large eel with a shiny green body that almost looked brown from certain angles.

It had a long fin along its spine that was shiny pink in color and a large tail at the very end with spikes growing out of it. Its mouth was open, showing a thousand different spike-like teeth interlacing with each other.

Alex felt the strength of the beast and knew that defeating it would take no time. "Let's get this done with," he said as he stretched a bit before the fighting started. "It's only in the Saint Soul—"

"Who are you?" the eel suddenly asked.

Alex paused mid-stretch, his eyes wide as he stared at the beast in front of him. It spoke. He was stunned.

"What... did you just say?" Alex asked.

"Who are you?' the eel repeated and looked around at the surroundings, its eyes remaining on the mountain for a short time before moving away. "Where am I?"

'What is going on?' Alex thought, confused. Never before had a beast talked with him when it was just a spirit created from the impression left behind in the beast's core.

"I am Alex," Alex quickly answered, just to get the eel talking. "As for where you are..."

"This looks like a spiritual sea," the beast said suddenly. "But this is not my spiritual sea, is it?"

"No, it is not your spiritual sea," Alex said. "It is mine."

"How did I get here?" the beast asked. "I remember swimming toward something, and..."

Alex was ready to fight the beast, believing that it had remembered how it had been killed. However, it didn't react in any way hostile. Instead, it genuinely seemed confused about the entire situation.

Alex suddenly started feeling bad about killing something that was so genuinely lost. He had already killed this beast when it hadn't attacked him, so killing it again just didn't feel right.

'It's better to get this done with quickly,' Alex thought.

"You're dead." He decided to tell the beast at least that. "I ate your core and now I'm here."

"I... died?" the eel asked in a surprised tone. "How did I die?"

"I am not sure," Alex said.

"I... see," the eel said slowly. "I died... huh? So, this is it."

The spirit of the beast suddenly glimmered a soft blue and started growing transparent. Wisps of smoke made out of spiritual energy floated away from the eel's body, making it more and more transparent.

Then, before Alex could fully take in what had happened, all that was left of the eel was a small cloud of white spiritual energy, rogue to his spiritual sea. As for the spirit of the eel, nothing of it remained.

Alex was more than shocked to see that.

"Did it just... give up?" he asked himself.

Alex swiftly arrived next to the cloud of spiritual energy and put his hand over it, pouring out yellow fog from his body to absorb the spiritual energy. Everything that his yellow fog consumed would then become his own spiritual energy, only making him stronger.

Alex stared at his palm when everything was done, still confused by the entire event. He wanted to ask Godslayer if he knew anything, but the sword spirit seemed plenty occupied with its own cultivation and didn't seem to have paid any attention to what happened to Alex.

Alex shook his head in the end and could feel the trouble outside. He immediately left the spiritual sea and arrived just in time to manage the flood of Qi that left his stomach

The beast's spirit controlled the Qi in the core, and thus it was only after it was defeated that the floodgates would be open and Alex could collect it all.

While the spirit wasn't exactly defeated today, its absence provided the same result.

Alex took control of the Qi he received from the core and immediately used his cultivation technique to pass it around his body. What would have taken him weeks if not months to gather normally, was now collected in just a single second, so Alex had to do his best to not waste any of it.

Thankfully, the pill he ate, combined with his already wide meridians made for the perfect scenario through which the Qi could be absorbed.

Alex spent hours cultivating with the Qi, and the improvement he saw with the Qi was almost unimaginable. It made him wonder why he had even stopped consuming cores in the first place. But of course, that was mostly because this brought stability issues with his cultivation base.

However, at a time like this when a higher cultivation base was more important than its stability, Alex didn't mind using it to break through the many realms that he needed to reach the strength to fight the Dragon Emperor.

At the end of the cultivation session, Alex felt his dantian reach a fullness that came every time he hit a bottleneck. Realizing that it was the perfect time, Alex chose to break through to Saint Soul 5th realm.

The breakthrough lasted no more than a few hours, and that was because he decided to take his time with it. Had he wanted, he could have completed it in just half an hour.

Alex felt his new cultivation base and smiled happily at how strong he had become. He just had to continue this for a while longer.

"I should test with those cores," Alex remembered. "I need to find out if that was a weird scenario, or if those sorts of things happen all the time."

But he was done with cultivation for the time, so testing it was not something he could do at the moment. For now, it was time to leave.

Alex dressed himself in his kingly robes and walked out of the room where the servants were already waiting for him. He asked the servants to call for Linlin first to see if he had anything important to take care of that day.

If he had, he would do it.

If not, then he would go to his aunt and sister and deal with her immediate problem.

Chapter 1727 Checking on Hannah

?"Alex, I heard you were back. Are you alright?"

Alex was on his way to find his aunt when Long Huan met him in the hallway. He seemed to be going in the same direction as well and had met Alex by chance.

"Are you on your way to meet my aunt too?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Long Huan answered with a slightly embarrassed look on his face. "I'm trying to get on her good side. I don't think she likes me very much, so I'm trying to appear better in her eyes."

"Good luck." That was all Alex could say to the man.

Long Huan shrank a little when he realized that he wasn't going to get any help from Alex, but quickly put away those thoughts. "I heard from senior Zhou that he found you. I can't believe the two of you actually met."

"Yeah, he took care of me while I was wounded," Alex said as the two of them walked together, while a few royal guards as well as Linlin walked behind the two.

Long Huan looked back at the guards before speaking with his spiritual sense. "I heard you were crippled too, and then somehow got your cultivation back. When he had told that to the elders here, everyone was confused about how that was even possible. I think they want to learn how you did that."

Alex sighed when he heard that. He knew it would have been hard to hide that fact, but he didn't expect it to get out so soon. 'Should I tell them what happened?' Alex wondered.

His elders already knew a lot about him, including the fact that he had learned a physique where he could lose his head and grow it back somehow. They didn't understand how that was possible, but they understood that it did.

Explaining to them that the same thing worked with his Dantian as well shouldn't be a difficult task, even though that wasn't technically what was happening. Healing a Dantian would allow you to be a cultivator again, but not give you your cultivation back, which the Undying God's Physique did.

He hoped he wouldn't have to explain to them how it truly worked because frankly, he had no idea too. Not a single one of the people who he gained the memories from knew how it worked.

Alex then arrived outside his aunt's quarters in the palace and waited for her to leave.

Liz walked out soon enough and looked at the two men who were in front of her room. She ignored Long Huan quickly enough and took Alex's head in her hands, turning it around to look at his head from every direction.

"You look much better now," she said before slapping him lightly on his shoulders. "You will need to eat something for those muscles though. It will take a while to gain them back if you rely on cultivation alone."

"I plan on asking senior Zhou to make me something," Alex said. "Has he made anything for anyone here?" He posed the question to everyone.

Linlin shook her head quickly enough and Liz gave a frown. "Why in the world would we ask our guests to make anything for us? He's being treated like a guest, being made to feel comfortable and all," Liz said.

"Ah, right." None of them had tasted any food the man-made, so they didn't yet understand what Alex was talking about. "I'll go talk to him later on. For now, we have something more important to deal with."

Liz's eyes sharpened instantly. "Is it about Hannah?" she asked.

Alex nodded. "Where is she? I plan to check on her before I go and talk to Lady Beihan," he said.

"Come inside," Liz said before turning to Long Huan. "Not you."

Long Huan seemed troubled but said nothing against the order. Alex walked into his aunt's room and the door closed behind him.

"Why are you so hard on him?" Alex asked. "He'll just grow to hate you later on."

"He's the man that got my daughter like this. Do you think I should be thanking him instead?" Liz asked in a rather angry tone. She wasn't faking it at all.

"I... suppose he was at fault," Alex said. He understood that he should hate on the man for getting Hannah involved in all of this, but for some reason, he couldn't. After all, Hannah had to have known what was happening, and she had made the choice to go with him too.

Besides, they were married in the first place. Anything that had happened to them was just bad luck, and nothing was done out of maleficence.

"Until my daughter tells me she forgives him with her own mouth, I'm not forgiving him," Liz said. "Perhaps, not even after."

Alex gave a dry laugh and quickly shut that up too when he saw his aunt's glare. "Anyway, where is sister?" he asked, looking around the room.

Liz's room was orderly with a large bed in one corner, with two nightstands on each side. There were multiple rugs in the room with intricate details and tapestries that hung along the wall.

The other corner of the room away from the door was sectioned off with a metallic cube that was lifted above the ground with another two large wooden plants, with multiple formation flags surrounding it completely.

Even from where Alex stood, he could sense a faint sense of aura around the metal box that was so very specific for him.

'Time Aura,' he thought. He couldn't tell what was being done with the time aura just from the sensation he got, but he could tell that time aura was being involved there somehow.

"Is sister inside there?" Alex asked as he walked closer to the apparatus.

"She's experiencing slowed time in there," Liz said. "I use my Dao every day to keep it slowed beyond the capacity of the formation. To Hannah, she entered that room just 3 hours ago, but over a month has already passed."

"That... is a very strong time difference," Alex said with surprise clear in his face. It was nearly as strong as the Timeless Palace in the Demon Realm back in the Western Continent.

"You should stop it," Alex said. "Bring her out so I can check on her."

Liz nodded and walked toward the formation. She first used her Dao to take away the effect she had put on there, then she stopped the formation.

Time flowed back to normal, and Alex could feel the Time aura slowly disappear from the room.

Liz then undid a few latches on the side of the metal box and the front metallic plate flung open, revealing Hannah dressed in a simple white robe, asleep with her head on the side of the room.

"Do we wake her?" Liz asked.

Alex thought for a bit and shook his head. "I'm just going to see how her body is handling the block to her Dantian," he said and moved closer to Hannah.

He clutched her left hand with both of his hands and closed his eyes for a few long minutes. Afterward, he opened them with a bright smile.

"She's doing fine," Alex said. "We'll start once we return. Until then, don't bother using your Dao again. In fact, go cultivate and be ready. You will be the most important in this task."

Chapter 1728 Luo Beihan

Alex only realized that Pearl had been taken back to the Western Continent the day they had returned by Bai Jingshen when he searched for him so he could take him there.

Alex left on his own, even though his subordinates didn't want him to, and quickly flew toward the Southern Forest where the White Tiger's palace was.

He arrived at the formation and was quickly led to Bai Jingshen. After telling Bai Jingshen the reason he was there, he was quickly led to Luo Beihan, Bai Jingshen's 6th wife. That had come as a surprise to Alex when Bai Jingshen told him that.

Wen Meirin, Luo Beihan, and Pearl's great-grandmother, Ren Xiao were initially just concubines. However, after Pearl's ascension to a White Tiger, Ren Xiao needed to be given a better status in the family. Bai Jingshen knew he needed to make her a wife as well, but didn't want to let the other two down, so instead he made everyone his wife.

Now, he had 7 wives and no concubines.

"Young Alchemist, I have been waiting for your arrival," Luo Beihan spoke when Alex arrived in the room she was in. Except, instead of being in her beastly form, she had turned to her human form.

She was a bronze-skinned woman with orange robes and long black hair. She wore a few jewels around her body, but not too much.

"Sit," she said, letting Alex sit next to her.

Alex nodded and sat down opposite her, ready to ask her for the pill recipes. However, before he could ask her anything, the woman spoke up first.

"Tell me, have you learned anything new yet? I'm excited to learn if you've made any improvements to your alchemy that I can learn from," she said.

Alex grimaced a little and shook his head. "Unfortunately not, senior. I might have reached the highest level of alchemy I can reach in this world that I'm capable of with my cultivation realm. Anything more will require me to break through and move to other words."

"Nothing?" Beihan asked unbelievingly before clicking her tongue. "And here I was so excited too."

Alex gave a rueful smile. "I can give you a technique to help you make pill clouds every single time," he said.

The woman's eyes sharpened suddenly. "What did you say?" she asked.

Alex repeated what he said and watched the woman's eyes widen in shock. He could see the beast-like hunger in her eyes to get what he was proposing to give her.

"Are you certain?" she asked.

Alex nodded and provided her with a talisman. "I've given these to so many others. I think you deserve it too. You've helped me so much that I can't think of any other way to repay you. I just hope you won't share it with others very easily."

The woman took hold of the talisman and slowly read it while mouthing the words 'Vortex of Perfection'.

"This is a pill-forming technique?" she asked with a somewhat confused look. "Is it different from the other one you gave me? The Profound Revolution technique."

"It's definitely different," Alex said. "As you can probably see, it is in a way automatic when it comes to forming pills."

"I see," she said and continued reading it.

Alex waited for her to read it all. When it seemed as though she was done with it, he asked her a question that had been bothering him slightly.

"You don't have meridians in the same shape and path as humans do, right?" Alex asked.

"Not when I'm a beast, no," the woman said. "But our human form changes even our meridians to be closer to humans. While it won't be the exact same, it is close enough that we can learn human techniques to use it. The effectiveness of the techique is usually low when copied from humans though."

"Oh," Alex said. "Won't that cause this to be problematic?"

The Vortex of Perfection was the pill formation technique that Alex had created by altering the pill-splitting Qi. Instead of separating a pile into 2 perfect pills, he made the technique to create just one perfect pill from the whole pile.

Since it was the Alchemy God's technique, it was an incredibly frustrating technique to learn that required the person to have the Qi pass through unbelievably complicated pathways just to be used.

That was partially the reason why every alchemist he gave the technique to still found it hard to learn as keeping track of the most minute passageways in one's meridians was strenuous. One would even call it unnecessarily complicated if the end result wasn't so great.

Maybe that was the reason why it was so great at all.

The woman understood what Alex meant by it being problematic and smiled. "Don't worry, I can learn this," she said. To an Immortal, even a few centuries was nothing compared to how long they could live.

"I'm not really concerned about whether you can learn it or not, senior," Alex said. "I'm more so concerned about the effectiveness. If the effectiveness of the technique drops then it might not work as perfectly as its name suggests."

"Oh, that was what you meant," the woman said and put the talisman away. "You don't have to worry about that either. I can have it be changed to fit my meridians as a human."

Alex got curious when he heard that. "How?" he couldn't help but ask.

"Didn't my husband tell you?" she asked. "I remember him mentioning that he told it to you before. That was how you learned it in the first place, he says."

Alex frowned a little. "I'm not sure what you are talking about, senior."

"Dao of Techniques," the woman said. "You've learned it right?"

"Yes," Alex said, and the memories flooded back. "Oh! Right..."

The entire reason Alex had learned Dao of Techniques in the first place was because Bai Jingshen had told Alex about it when he was training him in the Luminance empire as Shen Jing.

Alex only now remembered Bai Jingshen mentioned that he had learned the technique too.

"Oh, so you plan on having him change it for you," he asked. "But it will still take him a long time."

"You don't worry about that," she said. "You worry about your cousin. That young girl needs to be treated quickly."

She brought out two talismans and a bunch of wooden boxes.

"This is the recipe for the pill that can heal your sister's poison. I had a hard time tracking it down, and an even harder time tracking down these ingredients."

Alex took the recipe and ingredients.

"And this one is for opening up her dantian," she said. "I don't know if you have one or not, but I prepared it just in case. That young girl that came with your cousin told me that you would be needing one."

"Lady Luoyang did?" Alex asked. He hadn't seen her after returning. "I have a recipe for that, but this is highly appreciated too. Thank you."

"No need to thank me for this," she said. "After what you've given me today, I wouldn't mind if you told me to give you everything I owned."

Chapter 1729 The Two Pills

Alex alone returned to the Southern Continent sometime later and immediately went to his room to start making the two pills.

He first spent his time going through the recipes to make sure they were the perfect as they could be. Thankfully, pill recipes from the Immortal realm seemed to always be as perfect as they could be.

Once that was sorted out, Alex then spent some time adding energy to the ingredients, preparing them before he made the pill. Adding energy to the ingredients took some time overall, but as Alex grew in cultivation base, the process became faster and faster.

What would have taken him an hour during the early days, now took no more than just 20 minutes. To go through all the ingredients he had with him currently, it took him 40 minutes.

Once everything else was done, Alex finally started making the pill.

The pill he made first was called the Heavenly Opening pill: a pill that was used to expand and open one's meridians and dantian. It was primarily a pill that supported one's ascendance to the Saint realm when sometimes the Dantian wouldn't open up as it was supposed to.

In that instance, this pill was given to the person to help them transition into the Saint Realm without any problem.

The recipe for the pill included some unconventional ingredients like the Roots of a Fluorescent Tulip plant that had died for at least a year and 3 petals of the Yellowtail Lotus that were recently pollinated by the Rockhoney Bee.

The rest of the ingredients, however, were common.

Alex took a few minutes to follow the recipe and used up all the ingredients he had. The energy in the cauldron told Alex that he would not need the World Defying Mushrooms, so he proceeded to use the Vortex of Perfection technique to form the pill.

Outside, clouds gathered in the sky with small crackles of lightning occasionally flashing as they prepared to fall onto the Palace.

Many of the servants looked up in surprise, but surprise was all they showed before they went on their way. Even the newer servants showed no change as such an event had become incredibly common in the palace by now.

The pill cloud formed inside the room as well and Memory was struck with a brilliant bar of pure white light that left behind a bluish hue where it passed.

Alex easily protected the pill against the first bolt of lightning.

He waited for a bit and then the second one fell as well, which he protected his pill from just as easily.

The next few lightning bolts were also pretty simple for Alex to protect the pill from, all the way up to the 7th lightning bolt.

The 8th lightning bolt required someone to have the cultivation base of Saint Transformation realm to even begin to stop the lightning bolt.

It fell, and Alex stopped it as well. By now, his pill had 8 veins, and he waited for the last one.

The last time Alex had gotten 9 pill veins was when Alex made the pill to close his sister's dantian. At that time, he had used all techniques he could to enforce the defense inside the cauldron against the falling lightning bolt as its strength would be in the Saint Transformation 5th realm.

However, since Alex was in the Saint Soul 5th realm now, with the battle prowess of Saint Transformation 5th realm, he did not feel the need to use any techniques or other auras to aid him.

He was confident with using just his Qi.

Alex didn't trust his confidence this time around as his sister's life was on the line. He did just use his Qi to protect the pill overall, but underneath it, he also employed various defensive techniques just in case.

The final bolt of lightning fell and struck Alex's first layer of defense, which was just his Qi. The strongest lightning bolt from a Pill Cloud produced a terrifying light and sound as the thunderous roar scared many of the servants and guards around the palace.

Everyone had subconsciously been counting the number of bolts, so when the pill cloud did not stop with the 8th bolt and instead had the 9th one fall, everyone was more than surprised.

Normally, they were used to having no more than 4 or 5 lightning bolts each time something like this happened. However, seeing 9 lightning bolts fall, each one stronger than the next made them wonder just who it was that was making a pill.

Many of the individuals instantly guessed that it was Alex, and even then they were surprised. Most of the elders hadn't been aware that Alex could even do that. 9 was said to be the most number of lightning bolts one could bring down during a pill cloud.

With all 9 bolts having struck by now, the pill cloud indeed dissipated. The people outside wondered what sort of magnificent pill was being made in the palace.

Alex watched with wide eyes but also a smile on his face as the various defensive techniques he had used underneath the layer of pure Qi remained intact. That meant that he was now indeed capable of making pills with 9 veins with nothing but just his Qi.

Alex excitedly took out the pill and looked at the 9 pill veins for a moment before putting it into a pill bottle. Then, he took a small break of two minutes and began preparing for Memory to make the healing pill.

The healing pill was called the All Jade Healing pill: a pill that cleared all poison and any other effect from one's body and healed it at the same time. It was especially effective in fighting poisons that harmed one's spirit.

Alex followed the recipe given to him and used up all the ingredients he was given to make the pill. He had to be extra careful this time around as this was the only set of ingredients.

The pill cloud formed once again as it always did, and threw down lightning bolts that Alex effortlessly defended against. He only had to put any effort into the final one, which he once again defended against with just his Qi.

As soon as the pill was done, Alex took out the pill from the cauldron and took it along with him as he quickly walked out of the room in a hurry.

Several individuals gathered outside his door, mostly elders, hoping to get a chance to talk to him about cultivation pills. However, Alex quickly got past them without waiting to hear them.

He made his way to his aunt's quarters and knocked on the door.

Liz opened the door and gave a serious look when she saw Alex. "Are we starting now?" she asked.

Alex nodded. "You seem ready, so we can start," he said and walked in without asking.

Hannah lay asleep on the bed, her wrinkled face showing no emotion as she rested.

Liz arrived right beside Alex and looked at her daughter as well. "Should I wake her up?" she asked.

"Please do," Alex said. "It might be better if she is awake."

Liz walked right beside Hannah and gently shook her, waking her up. Hannah woke up to confusion and quickly started waving for whoever was closest. She touched her mother and quickly moved to her face to recognize her.

It was only after she knew it was her mother who woke her up that she calmed down. She started waving around to try and talk to her mother, but Hannah had no way of communicating her words to anyone else.

With her incapable of using Qi at the moment, her only mode of communication had been ripped away from her, and she had no other methods to communicate.

"Damn boy! He could have at least taught her sign language when he had years to wait around," Liz complained. She found another problem to assign to her son-in-law that she did not want to claim as one just yet.

Hearing her call Long Huan a 'boy' made Alex nearly snicker. A woman who was only just past her first century of life was calling someone over 2 millennia old a boy.

It was weird to think that Long Huan had a mother-in-law who was many, many years younger than him.

While Alex had his thoughts run amok with such thoughts, Liz had started explaining to her daughter what was happening and what was going to happen next.

Immediately, Hannah sat up straight and started moving her hands around as if to try and touch something. She also tried to speak, but her vocal cords could not form any coherent words. All that came out of her throat was discordant sounds.

Still, Alex immediately realized that she was reaching for him.

Unlike the others, Hannah had not been told just what had happened in the past month and more. She had only known that Alex had been left behind in the Eastern Continent, and since then she had spent the entire time in just the past few hours where she had fallen asleep.

She had fallen asleep with Alex missing and had woken up with him ready to fix her.

She had only just found out that he had indeed survived the entire ordeal and was more than happy to learn that.

Alex walked up to Hannah and sat beside her where she took hold of him and hugged him as she cried in relief. That continued for a minute or so before Liz spoke up.

"Alright, what do you need me to do?"

Chapter 1730 Healing Starts

"Do you understand her situation?" Alex asked.

Liz nodded. "Something about the poison being stuck in her dantian where her soul is protected by her Qi, so you closed off the dantian so that the Qi did not escape."

Alex nodded in return. "Then do you understand why it is troublesome to treat her?" he asked.

"We can't destroy the poison because her dantian is closed off. And we can't open the dantian because then the Qi could escape in great amounts and the poison could kill her."

Alex nodded again.

"So what do we do about it?" Liz asked. "The lady Luoyang said that eating the two pills at once would not work since the effects of the pills would destroy each other."

"It will end up producing a different result is what will happen, but saying they destroy each other is not far off," Alex confirmed for her.

"Then?" Liz asked. "What is it we do?"

"Sister needs to eat the pills with enough gap in between them that they don't conflict with each other," Alex said. "We cannot let the two effects mix together."

"But that won't work," Liz said in an exasperated tone. "We just talked about it."

Alex sighed. "If you let me finish, I would have told you that while she will eat the pill at different instances, it will affect her at the same time."

"How?" Liz asked.

"That is what I want you here for," Alex said. "I hope you can slow down time in her dantian. More accurately, after the dantian takes in the energy from the pill, I want you to slow down time for everything inside of it. The poison, the Qi, the soul. Everything. Can you do that?"

"In just the dantian?" Liz asked. "No, not even that. Just the inside of it?"

Alex nodded. "If the time there is slowed, we will have sufficient time to have sister eat the second pill which will help her. Honestly, I've already done my part with making the pills. Now it is all in your hand."

Liz felt the sudden pressure of her daughter's life being on her hands. "I..." she wanted to refuse, but she knew for a fact that she was indeed the best for the job.

She took a deep breath, calming her heart in the process, and opened it to show the resolution she had brought herself to. "I will do it," she said. "Let me test it on your first."

Alex nodded and let his aunt use him as a test puppet.

Using one's Dao in a particularly small area or a large area came with its own problems. While larger usage of Dao simply required one to have more Intent to use, smaller areas required proficiency in using the dao. The user couldn't just call for the dao and have it work.

As such, Liz needed proficiency in using her Dao for what she had to do next. On top of that, she had to use the Dao on just a small organ inside of her daughter's body. The Dantian was no bigger than a fist and was hidden behind layers of skin, muscle, and fat, all of which were hard to see through with the spiritual sea as a living human body rejected all spiritual sea.

So, not only did Liz have to slow down time in a small area, she had to find the area in the first place, making the problem compound upon itself.

Alex explained how to find a dantian in a human body. Since using spiritual sense directly didn't work, one had to follow the path through the meridians to finally reach the dantian at the end.

Liz practiced it on Alex and Hannah a couple of times just to find the dantian. Then, once she was done, she practiced using her Dao on Alex to slow down the Qi inside.

Alex felt the Dao of Time Stagnation being used on him; he felt the time aura surround his dantian. As the Time aura entered his body, Alex felt a sense of sluggishness through his body, one he couldn't have explained, had he not known what was happening.

"What are those?" Liz asked with a struggling look on her face. "They are rejecting my Dao."

"Hmm?" Alex wasn't sure what she was talking about. So, he concentrated on his soul and looked through its eyes. While he couldn't see any changes immediately, he realized that the information his spirit and his body gained were coming at a different rate.

While minutes passed outside, only a few seconds passed in his dantian. The time stagnation was most certainly working. He then looked for what his aunt was talking about and saw the Yang Source and Yin bead spin around at an inconsistent speed, almost as though they weren't sure if time really was being slowed or not.

"You can stop," Alex quickly told her aunt outside, and Liz let go. She sat back on the bed, breathing heavily as the usage of Dao had taken a lot out of her.

She took minutes to calm down and at the end of it, she was now confident that she could do it.

"Where are the pills?" she asked.

Alex brought out both the pills and pulled out the first pill. "I'll open her dantian," Alex said. "You get ready to stop it from releasing any Qi."

Liz nodded and prepared.

Seeing her aunt ready, Alex fed Hannah the first pill and helped her swallow it. "It's activating. Get ready," Alex informed.

Liz was ready. Her eyes were closed and she entirely focused on her spiritual sense to feel the flow of energy toward the dantian.

The energy flowed down Hannah's meridians moving to every part of her body, expanding them as they went along. Then, it arrived at her dantian where its effect started showing.

As soon as the energy fell on the dantian, it started opening.

At that very moment, Liz sent her spirit to the edges of the dantian and used her Dao on whatever was inside. She had been warned against the poison, so she did not dare enter the dantian entirely.

The Dao of Time Stagnation landed on just the inside of the dantian and not on the dantian itself. So, the opening of the dantian was not stopped in any way.

Alex sent his senses into Hannah's body to check on its status. The 9-veined pill truly had a lot of energy to spare, so there was still a bit going through her body.

"How long?" Liz asked through gritted teeth. Over a minute had passed, and she was still continuously using her Dao on that one small specific area, which was causing her a lot of mental duress.

"Just a little longer," Alex said, keeping watch on the energy level.

Another minute passed and Liz kept at it. Sweat flowed freely down the side of her face, dripping down to her knees while she continued using her dao with the same effectiveness.

Alex looked at Hannah's body and waited until all of the energy had either done its work or had gone stale and dissipated out through her body, no longer affecting anything.

That was the moment he fed her the second pill.

Chapter 1731 Unforeseen

?"Anytime now," Alex alerted his aunt as the pill he had just fed Hannah started activating inside of her body.

Hannah convulsed a little and let out a slow grunt while doing her best to stop herself from moving.

Liz's attention was almost entirely on the dantian, focusing all her will to stop both the poison and Qi from escaping Hannah's body. She could not focus on the energy that was flowing through Hannah's body and had to instead rely on Alex's words to know when it was the right time to stop doing what she was doing.

Alex watched Hannah's body slowly take in the energy, heal what was wrong, cure what had been diseased. Hannah's body was already showing incredible changes in just the first few seconds of taking the pill.

Her white hair was slowly gaining back its color, her face was losing its wrinkles as well. Alex could see all the changes and became hopeful, but kept his attention on the energy of the pill and followed it through Hannah's meridians.

With Hannah's just expanded meridians, the energy moved swiftly, passing through all nooks and crannies of her body, making its way down to the dantian.

He patiently followed it, knowing that his aunt struggling more and more, and watched the energy arrive upon the dantian.

"It's almost here," Alex said watching the energy go closer and closer to the dantian, waiting for it to enter.

"NOW!"

Liz stopped using her Dao just as the healing energy made its way into the dantian. By the time she pulled her senses out of the dantian, the energy had already gone in.

Now, all she could do was watch and hope that the pill did its—

"NO!" Alex's panicked scream startled her.

"Wha-what?" Liz cried out.

Alex felt terror run through him. He did not know what to do with the current situation that he had not thought of before.

Liz had been slowing down time in Hannah's dantian, and that had kept the Qi inside at bay from leaking out. However, the moment time flowed back at a normal rate, the Qi inside Hannah's dantian gushed out.

And while doing so, it swept away the energy that was making its way into Hannah's dantian as well.

While Hannah would have been capable of reversing that instantly as soon as she got control of her Qi again, that would be too late as the poison would destroy her spirit.

Alex did not know what to do at all. No, he had to do something, and there was no time to think at all.

Instantly, he used what his instinct told him was the best thing he could use. He instantly used the Dao of Space to separate the space inside Hannah's dantian such that only her spirit was caught in it.

Doing so effectively made it so that Hannah's body no longer had a spirit or a soul, so she simply fell unconscious. At the same time, the poison leaked out of Hannah's dantian as well and started attacking everything it could find.

Alex felt his head burn as though someone was dripping acid directly into his brain, the corrosive poison dissolving all that was in his head. Using a dao at such a small scale, and having himself be attacked by the poison at the same time was not something Alex could handle at the same time.

He cried out in pain, unable to even explain what was happening.

Liz didn't know what had gone wrong, only that something had. Had the pill not worked? Was it defective? Or had some other problem come up?

The pill was provided to them by an Immortal alchemist, so Liz had no doubt that it could work. So, she believed that something else must have happened for the pill to not work.

Should she slow down time again? If so, should she do it around Hannah's dantian again?

Suddenly, she felt Hannah's cultivation base grow back again and her aura return. Qi had escaped just as they had expected and it was truly rushing back.

'Qi rushing out...'

It only took an instant for Liz to guess what the problem was.

'Shit!'

Liz made a split-second decision to do something that would hopefully work. She placed her left hand on her daughter's chest, next to her heart, and then the other one on her dantian.

Then, she employed a single Dao on all of Hannah.

Dao of Temporal Acceleration.

Time sped up for Hannah, all of her body moving at twice the rate as before. Her blood pumped faster and the Qi in her body moved around quickly.

If what she thought had indeed happened, then having her daughter's Qi circulate quickly would return the medicinal energy back to her dantian.

Just as she hoped, it indeed seemed to work. Hannah's body showed a change that was very much suggestive of what she had thought. Her half-healed body instantly showed improvements and went on to be entirely healed.

Liz slowly took away her arms, breathing heavily as she did. Using two temporal dao back to back was difficult even for her. She took long deep breaths and watched her daughter's body return to normal.

Hannah's hair was now completely black and her fair skin had no wrinkle. Her body seemed somewhat scrawny and pale, but that was something that could be dealt with easily.

'What about the poison?' Liz wondered. 'Is it all gone?'

Should she check? She had been warned not to try and sense the poison as it was dangerous. "Alex, is she healed?" she asked and turned toward Alex, only to see his forehead full of thick veins and sweat, with his eyes all bloodshot.

Alex could feel the pain of the poison attacking his mind, but even then he hid his sister's soul in a fold in space. It was only when the poison stopped attacking him that Alex realized that the poison was no more.

He looked through her entire body and found no trace of any poison at all. The pill had done its job.

Liz was about to call out to Alex when he relaxed and spoke back on his own.

"She's... healed," he said and finally stopped. He took long, deep breaths and felt relief flow all through him. He had saved Hannah's soul from being attacked.

The instant he let go of the Dao, Hannah's soul returned to the Dantian.

Alex continued keeping his senses on her body and saw the changes inside of her dantian as the soul started growing. The soul first grew to be the side of the entire dantian as seemed as though it would soon be too cramped for it.

However, the soul simply phased through the dantian and grew outside of it until it was about a third the size of the entire body where it stopped.

Alex frowned when he noticed that. It wasn't supposed to stop right here. However, his thoughts quickly strayed away when Hannah opened her eyes and her body moved.

She slowly got back up, but before she could even be all the way up, Liz instantly took her into a hug.

Hannah tried to speak, and for the first time in a long time, she could form words again.

"Mother?"

Chapter 1732 Healed

"Mother~!"

"My child~!"

Hannah and Liz wept on each other's shoulders for a long time before either decided to check on Alex who had slumped on the bed with a look of relief on his face.

Liz quickly pulled him back up. "Alex, are you alright?"

Alex nodded. "I'm fi—"

"Alex!" Hannah shouted and took her younger cousin into a hug. "Thank you," she cried out. "Thank you so much."

Alex paused for a second before a smile formed on his face and he returned the hug. Tears slowly dripped the side of his face as well. "I'm happy... I'm happy that you're finally healed, sister. I'm happy I didn't fail."

"You didn't," Hannah said, a smile forming on her face. She let go of Alex and wiped her tears before giving a wide smile.

Then, she started looking around the room, at the two people, at herself. She could finally see. She could finally hear. There were so many small smells in the air that she had never noticed. Even her breathing got so much better.

"I'm... really healed," Hannah said as she took a moment to fully take in the information. She sat on the bed, remembering the time from the past, all before she had been injured and poisoned.

She let out a deep sigh of relief and the smile returned on her face. She looked up.

"Where is my Huan?" Hannah asked.

Liz immediately frowned and put on a slightly annoyed look. "Do you still want to see him?" she asked. "Even after all that he put you through?"

"Mother," Hannah spoke. "What are you talking about? I'm not the only one who suffered all these years. Huan has been suffering along with me as well."

"He suffered nothing. You're the one that was poisoned. Nothing happened to him," Liz sharply replied.

"No, but he's been with me at every step. What do you think would've happened to me if he left me after I was injured? He could've done that and he would've been burden free. Instead, he's been helping me all this time."

"You don't know how much he suffered for me, mother. He went around looking for a cure for my problem. Every day he would go out looking for pills to feed me, even when he knew there would be people out looking for him. It was because of him that I survived all this time."

"For 70 years he did that, mother. 70," Hannah finished.

Liz's face turned gloomy and she looked down. "I'm just angry that because of him my daughter had to suffer. He put you in danger, and I won't forgive him for it."

"Then don't, mother," Hannah said. "But please remember that he helped me too. And I love him. Even if you don't care about him, care about your daughter's feelings."

Liz grumbled something under her breath. "Fine!" she finally spoke out loud. "I won't trouble him anymore."

Hannah let out a sigh of relief she had been holding back, before realizing something. "Have you been troubling him?" she asked.

"N-no," Liz said quickly before turning toward Alex who was trying to hide a smile. "What are you looking at? Shouldn't you let the others know about the good news? Your parents and the others will want to hear this."

"Right!" Alex left the room to tell the others the good news.

Within minutes, Liz's room became lively.

Graham, Helen, Ronron, Alex's clone, and Emily gathered in the room, along with a few elders who had come to congratulate everyone.

Helen took Hannah into her embrace and cried as though she had been returned her own daughter. "I'm so happy, Hannah. You're finally healed," she cried out.

"I'm so happy to finally see you, Aunt Helen," Hannah said while she cried as well. "And you too, uncle."

"I'm happy too, my child," Graham said while wiping the few tears that had wet his eyes.

"Sister..." the older Alex said, unable to hide his tears at all. He walked forward and grabbed Hannah's hands, placing his forehead on them.

Hannah slowly smiled. "I didn't believe it at first, but it seems it truly is," she said as she turned toward the real Alex. "You truly do have a clone."

"I'm still me, sister," the clone Alex said.

Hannah took him into an embrace. "Yes, you are."

The older Alex cried for much longer than the others did. He was the only one who had truly lost her as the clone Hannah, the only one he thought existed, had died for him.

So, seeing Hannah come back to life again was almost as momentous as seeing his mother and father again.

Emily was happy too. She had spent her university days living with Hannah, and then later met her more after marrying Alex.

She had been sad to lose Hannah as well, so seeing her alive filled her with tears.

Hannah looked around the room and her eyes fell on Ronron. "Is that you, Ronron?" she asked. She had only known the young girl by touch since her arrival and had been wanting to meet her.

Now, she finally got to see her.

"Aunt Hannah," she called out.

Hannah coughed a little. "A-aunt... right. Um, I don't think I'm going to get used to that anytime soon," she said. "Come here, Ronron."

Ronron walked up to Hannah.

"Ah, what pretty eyes you have," Hannah said. She cupped Ronron's face with her two palms and pulled her close to kiss her on the forehead. "I would've loved to meet you while you were young. You're already a young lady."

Ronron gave a small smile.

Hannah then looked around and frowned a little. "Where is my Huan?" she asked.

Liz sighed. "He's afraid of me," she said and turned toward the door. "You can come in."

Long Huan poked his head in through the door and looked inside finally. He was about to question if he had been called when he saw Hannah standing in the room, all healed.

He walked in instinctively.

"Hannah!" he called out, shocked and surprised.

"Huan!" Hannah called out as well.

The two of them fell into each other's embrace and cried while calling each other's names.

"This is not a dream, is it?" Long Huan asked, looking around.

"It's not," Graham said with a soft smile.

Long Huan clutched onto Hannah even more tightly.

Hannah had to let go of him first as Long Huan did not seem to want to do so at all. It was as if he feared that letting go would revert everything that had happened.

Hannah turned back around toward her family.

"I should have been the one to introduce him to you all first, but it seems that all slipped past me," Hannah said. "Still, this is Long Huan. My husband."

Everyone smiled and nodded.

But Liz did neither. "No, he's not," she said.

Hannah's face fell a little. "Mother, please. You can't—"

Liz put up her hand. "Let me finish," she said. "He's not your husband because you haven't been married yet. The best he is is your fiance."

"If you want to call him your husband, do it after the marriage," Liz said and turned toward Alex. "You will need to prepare for your sister's marriage. Can you do that?"

Alex nodded. "Absolutely."

Chapter 1733 Preparations

?"If I might interject," Qiu Jianhong of the elders spoke out loud.

Everyone's eyes turned toward him with a curious look on their faces.

"Elder Qiu," Alex said. "Do you have something to say?"

"Yes," Qiu Jianhong said before turning toward Hannah. "I congratulate the young lady Hannah for having completely healed, but I must let you know that you cannot have your marriage right now."

"What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"Your Majesty," the old man turned back toward Alex. "Before we think of marriage or any other thing, we need to prepare for a funeral."

"A funeral?" Alex asked with surprise before understanding. "Right… Yao Ning's funeral. I thought you guys did it already."

"We had no confirmation that she had died before you returned your Majesty," Tan Yang spoke up. "Or maybe, we were deluding ourselves into thinking there was no evidence to suggest her death. But it has been confirmed now, so we have been waiting for you to completely heal before we move on that."

"Is this about the elder who I heard died in order to save us?" Hannah asked.

Alex and the rest nodded.

"Then I agree," she said. "Our marriage can wait. It's for show only anyway. Let us give the elder the proper funeral she deserves."

Everyone nodded.

"Go make all the preparations you need to make," Alex ordered. "Tell her family about it too. Let them be the ones to do it."

The elders nodded, but they were still somewhat hesitant about it all. "Your Majesty," Hou Xinya called out. "If we hold a big funeral, the people will realize what is going on. Do you let the news spread?"

Alex thought for a moment. Was there any reason to hide the news? There would be panic and unrest for sure if the regular citizens found out that the Emperor of the Eastern Continent had killed one of their strongest individuals.

Alex shook his head. "Give Yao Ning the biggest funeral you can," he said. "As for the truth, let it spread. Tell them we'll have our revenge too. There's no point in hiding it anyway."

After all, within the next 2 years, either he was going to kill the Dragon Emperor or die trying.

'For what he did to my sister, and what he did to Yao Ning, he deserves it,' Alex thought.

"Will you all leave please," Alex said. "I have to check sister to make sure there are no more problems with her health."

People started walking out, leaving behind congratulations and well wishes.

"Do I leave as—"

"You can stay, brother Huan," Alex said and quickly closed the door when only his close family remained.

"Didn't you say you checked her already? You said she's fine," Liz questioned.

"I did, but…" Alex motioned toward Hannah. "Look at her cultivation base. I want to see what is up with that."

"What is up with what?" Hannah asked, looking at herself.

At the same time, the rest of the family checked it as well, not understanding the situation.

The only person who seemed to have realized anything was Long Huan, who gasped the moment he saw it.

"Saint Transformation 3rd realm?" he cried out in concern. "How is this possible? She is supposed to be in the peak of the Saint Transformation realm."

"That's what I wanted to check," Alex said and had Hannah sit back on the bed so he could check.

He started scouring her dantian with his spiritual senses and saw the Soul again, which was about a third the size of her entire body.

He continued looking around for any other signs of trouble before pulling back his senses with a frown.

"What? What's wrong?" Hannah asked, worried for herself. "Am I okay?"

"You are okay," Alex said. "But it seems that poison took a lot out of you. You must have been hurt by it, and your soul must've been damaged."

"Because the Saint Transformation realm is so connected with the Soul, the damage your Soul took reflects on your cultivation base too."

"In other words, the poison forced your cultivation to regress," Alex said.

"Is that… very bad?" Helen asked from the side.

"Not very bad," Alex said. "Sister's cultivation base has dropped, but that's all there is. She is still able to continue on her cultivation journey and reach the cultivation base she had before."

"That's a relief," Liz said. "As long as there are no long-lasting problems. It's fine."

Hannah nodded. "That's alright," she said. "I can get back to my original cultivation base any time I want."

"I wish I had your speed too, sister," Alex said with a sigh before leaving to do his job as a King of the entire continent.

There were many things that needed his hands that the elders couldn't decide, which had been put off for a long time.

Hannah's return to health had been spread amongst the small group of people who were close to Alex, so they had come to meet her and give her well wishes.

Zhan Luoyang arrived with old man Zhou Linfan.

"Little sister!" Zhan Louyang's eyes widened in happiness seeing the healthy Hannah. "Congratulations."

"Forgive me, child. I should have arrived to aid you much sooner. That way you wouldn't have to have gone through all that trouble in the past," Zhou Linfan said after meeting Hannah. "Still, to make up for it, let me make you some meals that will bring your body back to life. That ki— I mean, his Majesty has already asked me to do so for him, so I can do it for the both of you."

Wen Cheng, Lang Shun, Luo Mei, and her husband, Du Yuhan arrived sometime later. They were the ones most close to Alex, so they had received the news a little earlier.

Alex introduced his master, his martial uncle, and his senior sister to Hannah, and they started sharing all the stories they had about Alex.

Kong Yuhan, Wan Li, Zhou Mi, and Fan Ruogang were much later, but they still came to meet Hannah.

Hannah spent her days with her family, learning about what they had been doing the entire time. Hearing about the past made her happy and sad.

While she had already known that her father was dead, hearing how her mother had found that out had brought back the grief once again.

Liz stayed by Hannah's side the entire time, not letting her out of her sight. She had finally had her child returned to her, so she wasn't going to let her go any time soon.

The funeral preparation had been completed in 5 days, and a pyre had been prepared in the Skyfire City, in the Yao clan's ancestral ground.

This was the family that Yao Ning had been born to, so it was only right that her end was here as well. While nothing of Yao Ning's body had been present for the funeral, people had still gathered around items that they associated with Yao Ning which they were going to burn in her name.

Alex and the rest arrived at the funeral ground, and their arrival marked the beginning of the funeral.

Chapter 1734 An Unannounced Arrival

?Everyone began giving some words about the late Yao Ning, whatever they could offer.

The 9 remaining elders came forward and spoke, and so did Alex. Graham said some words as well, and so did a lot of other individuals who had known Yao Ning throughout her life.

The rest said nothing and stood there, listening to everything the others had to say.

After they were all done speaking, the head of the Yao clan burned the funeral pyre, leaving behind a silence in which only the crackling sounds of the burning fire were anything that could be heard.

The somber atmosphere was occasionally broken with a few sniffs, but other than that, there was nothing anyone else said.

Alex closed his eyes, praying for a better future for the old woman who had died to protect him. 'If reincarnation truly is real, may you have a happy life in the next one and all your dreams come true.'

He could feel his eyes moistening up and his nose starting to heat up. Something seemed to clog up his throat as if it laid heavy in there.

After a while, Alex looked up with a blazing resolution in his eyes. 'I will find you justice, Yao Ning.'

Once the fire died down, the Yao clan's head gathered the ashes and put them on a small urn before taking it up to Alex.

"Your Majesty!" he bowed slightly in Alex's presence. "Do you wish to take it with you?"

Alex thought for a short moment and shook his head. "She is of your family. Keep her."

The family head nodded. "To be honest, I believe she thinks of you and the other elders as family more than us. It has been a long time since anyone she knew lived in our family, and she herself had no offspring."

Alex shook his head. "Even so, you are of her blood, and she deserves to lay with her family," he said as he turned to look at the many gravestones that jotted out from the land.

"Let her stay here," Alex said.

"As you say, Your Majesty," the clan head said.

Alex looked at the urn and bowed slightly before walking away from the Yao family's ancestral ground. The rest of his family followed him, with Helen and Liz still wiping their tears even as they walked out.

They had only gotten to know the woman for a short period of time, but they had still remembered her enough that her death affected them.

The other elders also followed Alex out of the ancestral grounds to the front of the Yao family's home where carriages were already prepared to take them all to the teleportation formations.

Everyone boarded the carriage one by one and made their way out of the Yao Family's grounds.

Halfway through their travel, Alex got a direct message from Ren Guanting who was ahead of him in another carriage.

"Your Majesty, we have a problem." An urgent tone of her's told Alex that it was no normal trouble.

"What is it?" Alex asked her.

"A ship has arrived on the eastern shores, and they carry a group of soldiers from the Eastern Continent. They are demanding that you and their prince show up."

"What?" Alex shouted out loud, surprising his family.

"What? What is going on?" Helen asked in a somewhat worried tone.

Alex shook his head. "Don't worry," he said. "It's for me."

He teleported out of the carriage and quickly called out the elders to talk to them.

"I just got the message, Your Majesty," Ren Guanting said as she arrived, along with the other elders.

"When did they arrive?" Alex asked her.

"It should be sometime around the end of the funeral. Our soldiers sent us the message within moments of their arrival and their demands just as soon as well."

"What do we do?" another elder, Hou Xinya asked.

"They want me, so I'll go," Alex said. "But brother Huan…"

Alex was perplexed wondering if it was a good idea to take Long Huan with him.

"Could we ask Brother Zhou to come and help us?" Qiu Jianhong asked. "I'm embarrassed to say, but he is the strongest person we have at the moment with His Majesty Bai Jingshen back in his continent."

"Let them know," Alex said. "See what both of them decide to do."

By the time the carriages arrived at the teleportation ground, they were all informed of the situation and had come to a decision as well.

Alex had decided to go along with Liang Shufen, Qiu Jianhong, Ren Guanting, and Kang Xuefeng.

Aside from the 4 elders, Long Huan, Zhou Linfan, and surprisingly, Hannah had also decided to follow them to the east.

While others would consider Hannah weak with Saint Transformation's 3rd realm cultivation base, Alex knew that his sister was capable of much more. With a Celestial rank body, she was capable of fighting individuals multiple ranks higher than her, and even as she was, she was one of the strongest humans they had.

Perhaps, she was the strongest human in the Southern Continent at the current moment, even stronger than Zhou Linfan.

The rest of Alex's family were sent back to the palace where they would remain safely.

Alex and the rest teleported to Watchhill City where the Eastern Continent's soldiers had arrived at.

"Have our people immediately do a thorough search of the area. Capture anyone whose cultivation base is Saint realm or higher, and have them be investigated before letting go."

"If they refuse to answer, have someone order the Royal Alchemy hall to make as many Saint Truth pills as it needs to find out where they are from. I fear that some spies from the Eastern Continent will start coming through in secret now."

"As you say, Your Majesty," the 4 elders quickly replied as one and started making arrangements on their own.

Alex arrived on the sandy beach where the soldiers of the eastern continent were gathered in an orderly group with everyone wearing the bright azure blue uniform.

At the front was a slightly older woman in a similarly blue, but somewhat darker uniform with gold and silver intricacies in her uniform, defining her higher status.

Alex stood before that woman and looked at her. He didn't recognize her at all. He waited for her to talk.

The woman's face flashed a look of surprise and awe. "It really is true," she said softly before giving a grin. "I was told you had healed after being crippled, but you did not just that. You got your cultivation back as well."

Her casual tone got a few of the elders to get angry.

"How dare you speak with His Majesty that way. Get on your kn—"

Alex motioned for the elder to stop, before looking at the woman and at the nearly 200 different soldiers that were behind her.

"Is this all?" Alex asked his elders.

Instantly, spiritual senses blasted out from the elders as they searched through the sky for any more ships that were hiding in plain sight, or ever in the distance. They even checked within the ocean, but these were all there were.

Alex nodded when he received the answer and looked toward the woman. "Is this all of you?" he asked.

"Yes," the woman said. "This is all we need." She sounded confident, and it likely came from her Saint Transformation 6th realm cultivation base.

"Who are you?" Alex asked her.

"My name is Ying Weishu, and I am the Commander of the 3rd Batallion of the Talon Legion," the woman said proudly.

"Did your Emperor send a single Talon legion battalion to hunt me?" Alex asked. He took a step forward. "Does he look down on me?"

"We are enough for the task he has sent us for," the woman said, her face not changing.

"Is that so?" Alex asked as he took another step closer. "So he sent you here to just die? That sounds wasteful of him."

"Die?" the woman scoffed. "We won't die. We are strong."

Instantly, auras buffeted Alex from behind the woman as the 200 soldiers released their cultivation bases at once and created an array to empower the woman in front of them.

Instantly, the woman's battle prowess rose by nearly 3 entire levels, putting her comfortably in the Saint Transformation 9th realm zone.

The 4 elders instantly flew next to Alex to protect him and the other soldiers followed suit as well. However, Alex put up his hand to stop them.

Then, he took another step forward. "And do you think this is enough to kill me?" he asked. "Are you unaware of what happened in the sea?"

He stared right into her eyes.

The woman finally felt a hint of fear. She had heard of what Alex had done in the ocean, killing nearly 300 soldiers in total.

They had all said that Alex had used some sort of forbidden technique to empower himself, but no one was exactly sure.

"I… I'm sure I can beat you," she said quickly. "I'm sure I can beat every one of you."

Alex smiled. "Are you willing to bet your life on it?" he asked. "Then come attack me."

The woman's eyes narrowed and she felt something was wrong.

"No," she quickly answered. "We're not here to fight." She couldn't drag this out any longer. "We are just messengers for His Majesty the Dragon Emperor. We are here to deliver a message from him to you, King Alex."

Alex took a step back, finally curious.

"What message?"

Chapter 1735 The Message

?Ying Weishu reached into her storage and produced a wooden chest. She put the wooden chest on the sand below her and produced two talismans.

Her eyes shifted to Long Huan in the back and she looked a little conflicted at that moment. "Your Highness, His Majesty wishes for you to return to the Empire. Will you follow me?" she asked.

"No!" Long Huan stepped forward. "Tell Father that I do not wish to aid him in his atrocities."

The woman sighed. "Then I have a message to deliver to you as well," she said and threw the talisman in their direction.

Zhou Linfan moved forward and caught the talisman, quickly checking to make sure it was not something harmful. Once he confirmed that it was not a threat, he let Long Huan have it.

"And this one is for you, King Alex," the woman said, handing off the other talisman.

Alex took the talisman and quickly made sure it didn't instantly explode on him to kill him. But of course, it was just a simple talisman to carry on a message, just as the woman had claimed she had come for.

"Is this from the Dragon Emperor?" Alex asked the woman.

"They both are," the woman said. Suddenly, her improved upon power disappeared as the array behind her fell apart.

Everyone quickly looked to see what had happened, but it seemed to have been done at the woman's command.

The woman slowly smiled and said, "That is all from me for today." She quickly flew away from the beach, flying back into the ship. The rest of the 200 soldiers followed her back to the ship as well.

"My job here is done, so I will take my leave. I think we will meet again soon, King Alex."

The large ship then took to the skies and flew off into the ocean without waiting for anyone to check the message. That didn't bode right with Alex and the others.

"Your Majesty," Qiu Jianhong quickly walked up to Alex. "You shouldn't put yourself in danger like that. Why did you try to anger that woman? What if that woman attacked? You would've most likely died."

"I was testing her," Alex said as he turned back toward the elder. "I just needed to check if they were here to kill me or not."

"Putting yourself in danger accomplishes that in no way. Will you risk death just to check if they were here to kill you? Aren't you just asking to die?" the old man asked. "You might heal from being crippled, but your healing should still have a limit."

Alex turned to the old man and gave a warm smile. "I know," Alex said. Then slowly, Alex's face distorted, appearing as though a haze. Then, from the haze showed up a blank face with no features at all.

In fact, the entire body dissolved into nothing and Alex was nowhere to be seen. All that remained was a puppet with Whisker on top of it, holding onto a talisman.

Qiu Jianhong and the other 3 elders took a step back in surprise. "Huh? What is going on?" one of them asked.

"I know not to put myself at risk," Alex's voice came out of the talisman, clear and loud. "That's why I let the puppet approach her instead of myself."

"I'm not stupid enough to get that close to a potential enemy," Alex's real voice emerged from the sky above them where he put away his invisibility technique and slowly drifted down to the ground.

"Your Majesty?" Qiu Jianhong and the other elders watched with slacked jaws. The other soldiers were the same as well.

"I... didn't sense anything," Hannah said with wide eyes.

"This kid... did he hide himself in space again," Zhou Linfan wondered. It was similar to the time back when the two soldiers had come upon him.

Long Huan had no idea what to say at all in the situation. He was sure he had scoured the area Alex had appeared out of nowhere from. Even if he had hidden, his aura should've at least been visible to the crowd.

Alex landed on the sand and pet Whisker's head. "Good job," he said. "You're getting better at mimicking me."

"Hehe," Whisker gave a silly smile and jumped onto Alex's shoulders. Alex took the talisman from the Immortal Puppet's arms and put the puppet into his Soul Space.

"Oh, so you weren't in danger?" Qiu Jianhong asked. "You should have let us know earlier. When did you even switch?"

"I've been practicing to quickly switch with my doppelganger," Alex said. "I'm glad it works."

"It... surely does," the old man said.

"Your Majesty," Liang Shufen called out.

Alex and the rest turned toward her, only to realize she was pointing at the chest on the sand. "I can't see what is inside."

Alex turned back around and his senses landed on the chest in front of him even was a little surprised to see his spiritual sense unable to enter the wooden chest.

"Heavenly Silkworm's threads?" he asked. That was the only thing he knew that could stop one's senses from seeing into objects. He recognized the wood itself to be from a somewhat ordinary tree, so that was not it.

"Must be," Liang Shufen said. "Let me open it. Your Majesty, stay back just in case."

Alex didn't bother arguing and moved back. He had the talisman to read while they worked to see what was inside.

Alex sent his senses into the talisman and heard the message that spoke directly into his mind. It was the Dragon Emperor's voice.

"My congratulations for surviving. I was afraid you would die, and thus our trade would be rendered incomplete. I have been looking forward to our final trade and how it will help me create Pill Clouds at will."

"Since you've survived, you should be returning to me soon enough. If my idiot son hasn't decided to return by that time, bring the sword along with you. You can use it in our trade."

"I know you will come for the trade, but I do not know if you will bring the sword. Just to be certain, I have decided to send the gift along with this message. I hope it will work to persuade you."

"Unless you want even better gifts in the future, you will bring my sword."

"I'll see you soon."

Alex frowned. "Gift?" he looked at the chest in front of him.

Liang Shufen was still looking around just in case there was some sort of danger to the chest, but no matter how much she looked, she couldn't see anything.

"Unlock it," Alex said with a somber face. "There is no danger." He was sure of it.

"But Your Majesty, I—"

"It's from the Dragon Emperor, he won't risk killing me just yet. Open it," Alex said.

Liang Shufen frowned and nodded. She undid the two wooden latch in front of the chest and slowly lifted the lid of the chest.

She had only partially opened it when immediately a thick scent of blood filled the breeze. Everyone froze in their track and looked at the chest.

Alex felt his heart beat faster. He feared that he knew what the gift was.

Chapter 1736 The Gift

The thick scent of blood overpowered every other scent in the air, causing waves of fear to spread among the people people that were on the beach.

"What is it?" one of the elders asked in a hurry, walking forward to check on the chest. Even as he did so, Liang Shufen had already opened the chest fully, revealing the contents for everyone to see.

Multiple gasps of horror ran through the small group when they saw the content. Liang Shufen stepped back in both stunned horror and anger. She turned around to say something but stopped as Alex walked up to the chest.

Alex stood before the wooden box, looking into it. Inside the chest were cut-off heads of about 2 dozen individuals.

He struggled to keep his anger in check and trembled where he stood, his hand wanting to find the Dragon Emperor and kill him right then.

"Who are they?" Zhou Linfan asked after coming to the front. He looked inside the chest and shook his head.

"Our soldiers," Alex said. "They served as guards for the Alchemists that were taken to the Eastern Continent for the Exchange event. If I'm not wrong, all of them were killed."

"Dear god..." Hannah reacted when she heard the news. She looked into the chest just once and turned away. She couldn't bring herself to stare into it more than just that once.

"Your Majesty," Liang Shufen called for him in a hurry. "What about our Alchemists? I don't see their corpse in there."

"They should be safe," Alex said. "For now."

He handed the talisman over to the elders to read, and each one of them slowly went through it to see what it said.

"Gift?" Qiu Jianhong's face twisted in anger. "That bastard! I knew he was a horrible human the first time I saw him. To think he would do something like this."

"Is this in retaliation for what you did to his soldiers, your Majesty?" Ren Guanting asked.

"I don't think so," Alex said. "He just did that to convince me to bring back the sword."

Alex turned toward Long Huan who had at some point arrived to see the horrible display of death crammed in the small wooden box.

His eyes were wide in terror as well, finding it impossible to believe that his father would stoop so low.

"What did your talisman say?" Alex asked the man.

"He wants me to return and bring the sword along with him," Long Huan said.

"That's it?" Alex asked.

"In essence, yes," Long Huan said. "But he also says that if I do as he asks, he will heal Hannah of her injuries, and subsequently... make me the Emperor when he finally leaves."

Alex's eyes sharpened at the last bit of information. "What do you want to do?" he asked.

"I don't understand why he would say that to me," Long Huan said. "My older brother is the Crown Prince. He will be the Emperor in the end. Or is my father willing to discard brother just to get his hands on the sword?"

Long Huan looked conflicted.

Hannah arrived by his side and took Long Huan's hand into her own, helping him calm down.

Alex took a long breath and turned toward the elders. "Take that away and give them all a proper funeral," he ordered. "Find their families and compensate them fairly."

"What should we tell them?" one of the elders asked. "I do not think it is a good idea to tell them that the Emperor of the Eastern Continent killed them."

Alex shook his head. "There is no point in hiding it anymore. Rumors will have already spread. I returned earlier than I should have. We held a funeral for Yao Ning. There is no stopping the rumors. Instead, just let everyone find out the truth."

"Let them know that the Dragon Emperor is a heinous man who has done heinous crimes. For that, the Southern Continent will go to war against him."

The elders started at the order. "Your Majesty, do we really..."

"Do it," Alex said. "Announce it. We're declaring war against the Eastern Continent. Prepare for it. I do not know when it will be, but it will be soon."

The rest of the people felt agitated, not knowing what they should do. Still, the elders nodded and promised to do as Alex told them.

Alex then turned toward Long Huan and Zhou Linfan.

"If the Southern Continent fights the Eastern Continent, who will you fight for?" Alex asked them.

Zhou Linfan stroked his long beard. "I do not know who I will fight for, just who I will fight against," he said. "No matter who fights in this war, I will fight the Dragon Emperor himself."

Alex smiled and nodded before turning to Long Huan, waiting for his answer.

"I... I would rather not have either side fight," Long Huan said. "I'm not for or against either side in this war."

Alex stared at him for a long second before asking a question. "So would you do anything you can to stop this war?"

"I would," Long Huan said.

"I see," Alex said. "Then please hand over the Ivory Sword."

Long Huan froze. "What?"

"The sword, please give it to me," Alex asked.

Long Huan looked confused, and so did everyone else on the beach. "How... will that help stop the war?" he asked.

"I'm not trying to stop the war," Alex said. "I'm trying to stop you from potentially stopping it. If you take that sword to your father, he will have no reason to entertain the war. He will instead simply get what he needs and leave this world. I cannot let him do that."

"I won't give it to him," Long Huan said.

"I want to trust you," Alex said. "But I would rather not have to for something so crucial and then have you betray my trust."

"Alex!" Hannah tried to speak.

"Please don't interfere in this, sister. The Dragon Emperor has nearly 2 dozen of my Alchemists hostage, and he says that he will kill them unless I bring the sword to him."

"What?" Long Huan's eyes went wide. "You want to take the sword to him?"

"I'll bring it to him along with the war," Alex said. "I will see to it that my alchemists are safe, and then kill him. Now please, the sword."

Long Huan seemed conflicted at the choice he had been given. He didn't want to hand his sword back to his father either through him or through Alex, but with Alex's alchemists on the line, he wasn't sure.

Long Huan pulled out the silver sword and held it tightly. "This sword... it's my only remaining connection to my family, to my blood. I..."

Alex sighed and pulled out a blade.

Hannah immediately stepped in front of Long Huan to protect him and brought out a sword of her own to stop Alex.

Alex gave her a weird look. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"No, what are you doing?" she asked. "Are you trying to threaten—"

"That sword!" Long Huan suddenly cried out and pushed Hannah out of the way before walking up to it.

"How... how do you have it?" he asked with his eyes as wide as saucers. "How do you have the Ebony sword?"

Chapter 1737 Preparation Begins

﻿﻿Everyone around Alex gave him a curious look when they saw the sword in his hands. Their haze intensified especially when they realized what was going on.

"I found this sword back when I had just started my cultivation journey in the Western Continent," Alex said. "Your father must have told you that it was lost when your mother died during her breakthrough to the Immortal realm, didn't he?"

Long Huan frowned. He slowly nodded, trying to make sense of where the conversation was going.

"By now you should know that the Azure Dragon is dead and his death happens to be on the same day as your mother's," Alex said. "You should have some thoughts about that."

Long Huan remained silent, saying nothing. Still, his thought went through all the possibilities, and some he simply did not like.

"Pearl's mother was brought to the Azure Dragon's realm as a servant from the Beast Paradise," Alex said for everyone to hear. "There she had Pearl, but she happened to get caught in the crossfire between the Azure Dragon and whatever it was that the Dragon Emperor was trying to do."

"She was attacked there, and it was this sword that attacked her. I don't know why, but this sword must have somehow activated, sending her to the Western Continent, where she died while saving Pearl."

Alex lifted the sword in his hands. "For years, I have wondered who the owner of this sword is, and the only hint I had to go with was the emblem on the sword. I knew only that it belonged to the royal family of the Eastern Continent."

"That was why I accepted the request regarding the Alchemy exchange. That, and to find Sister, if I could. I found sister, of course, but I believe I also found the person who killed Pearl's mother."

"No…" Long Huan spoke in a hoarse voice. "My mother, she…"

"She was the last person to hold the sword. And she went into the Azure Dragon's domain with this sword. I do not know what happened inside, or who killed who, but this much is obvious."

"Pearl's mother died, and it's your parents that are to blame."

Long Huan felt his throat go dry. He was simply incapable of forming any words to speak.

"I…"

"This has been a symbol of my search for Justice for Pearl's mother, and I have yet to find it. And still, I am handing this to you in exchange for the Ivory sword. Because that is how much my Alchemists mean to me."

"Pearl's mother, while I care for her very much, is dead. But the Alchemists are alive. If there is a chance I can get them back, or a chance to not risk their death, then I will do it."

"So, will you trade this sword with me or not?" Alex asked.

Long Huan stared at the black sword for a long time, thinking about something, and finally spoke, only to ask a simple question.

"If my father gets his hands on the sword, he will get what he wants," Long Huan said. "How will you or anyone stop that?"

"I plan on saving my Alchemists, but I also plan on not letting the Dragon Emperor have all that he wants," Alex said. "Don't worry, brother Huan. I will only do what is right. Your father will not get what he wants. I will do my best to make that happen."

After a long consideration, the young prince finally pulled out the white sword and handed it over to Alex.

Alex took the Ivory sword and handed back the Ebony sword.

Long Huan stroked the side of the Ebony sword, feeling its slickness. "My brother was supposed to keep this with him until he became the Emperor and then he would give it to his children. I was supposed to hand the Ivory sword over to his next son too."

Alex patted the man on the shoulder. "Don't worry, everything will be alright," he said and looked back at the now-closed chest sitting on the sandy beach.

"Let us return."

The Southern Continent boiled into chaos and panic following the declaration of war against the Eastern Continent. The regular civilians feared war, while the soldiers prepared for it.

The military that Alex had prepared after his succession to the throne had now grown to be nearly 30 thousand soldiers large, with 1 in every 5 soldiers being in the Saint realm.

Most of them were newly ascended to the Saint realm, but the older ones had still made steady progress. However, this much would not be enough at all for the war.

Alex knew he too needed to go train, but he didn't have the time for it. There were things that he needed to put into motion before he got back to training again.

He started making pills all day long after returning, leaving the capital in a constant thunderstorm that never rained.

He passed along the pills to all who needed them so they could become stronger faster. He made all sorts of pills, from Healing pills to spirit pills.

He even made a pill using the Fire Coral that he had found in the ocean. He had been very worried when making that pill, but thankfully, it had come out with 9-veins as well.

Of course, Alex alone could not do everything either, so his family started helping as well.

Helen had grown to become a capable alchemist in the time that Alex had been gone and was now capable of making pills with Pill Veins as well.

She was the perfect person for Alex to transfer his skills to as not only did she have the highest talent out of anybody he knew, but she also had the Five Elemental Yin-Yang spiritual root, making her the only person who was capable of learning Supreme Elemental Accord technique.

At the same time, Liz helped him slow down time so he could recover faster.

Graham trained in the Mountain Crushing artifact, showing tens of times better results with the same amount of time put back into the artifact compared to everyone else.

Hannah cultivated on her own, improving rapidly, despite her foundations requiring her to spend time developing it.She had skipped through realms rapidly to arrive where she had before and now she needed to take her time.

The elders took the pills Alex provided as well and started going into deep cultivation in preparation for the war as well.

The different guilds that Alex had created started working harder to provide more pills, talismans, and formations as well.

Everyone else worked hard in preparation for a war that was imminent.

Still, the chaos and panic continued to grow, with everyone wanting answers left and right. They wanted peace for their lives and that was not something Alex could give them right away.

He reassured everyone that war wouldn't envelop in the Continent and no harm would fall upon them, but that didn't work for these people.

They needed something better, and Alex could not give it to them.

Thankfully, Alex didn't have to.

Tranquility would soon befall their land again for their Queen had graced the continent with her presence. And she did so amidst a show of thunder and lightning.

Scarlet had finally left the dome and was now finally going to break through to the Immortal realm.

Chapter 1738 Scarlet's Lightning Tribulation

﻿﻿Scarlet flew north, away from any human settlement to break through to the Immortal realm. She had fought through her Mental Demon, so all that was left was for her to deal with the Lightning Tribulation.

For that, Scarlet went to the wasteland, way in the north where no humans lived. There in a small crater, where she had gone through her rebirth, she was going to break through the Immortal realm as well.

Alex and a few of the others arrived in a large ship and stood far enough away to watch, for the first time in their entire life, see someone break through to the Immortal realm.

Scarlet had been holding back her breakthrough for a while to reach this place and now that she was finally here, she let go of it.

Immediately, dark clouds formed in the sky, sparking with lighting inside, quickly turning the entire area dark with them.

The atmosphere was surreal and the aura chaotic. The heaven seemed to gather overhead, scaring all the humans that stood on the deck of the ship.

"So this is what a tribulation lightning cloud looks like," Qiu Jianhong said meekly.

"The aura… it scares me," Ren Guanting spoke.

"This is very much scarier than the time I broke through to the Saint realm," Alex said softly. "It's as if the heaven is purposefully trying to stop you and not just because it's something it must do."

"Your Majesty, did you give Her Majesty the lightning pills?" Tan Yang asked. "That should help her a lot during the tribulation."

"I thought so too," Alex said. "And I offered it to her, but she claimed that she didn't need it." He turned back around toward the people. "Don't worry, she has already once broken through to the Immortal realm, so she knows what she is doing. Have some faith in her."

Everyone slowly nodded and looked to the front as the first tribulation lightning made its arrival.

The giant bolt of hot white lightning with an aura of purple surrounding it flew down into the desert where Scarlet unfurled her giant red wings and took the brunt of the attack.

The sudden boom that followed seemed the rock the world with even the air forcing Alex and the rest to step back. They had remained nearly 2 kilometers away in the sky, and somehow even at this distance, the lightning bolt was giving them quite the shock.

"That… was strong," one of the elders said behind Alex.

"Just 2 more realms and this is what I have to face in my next breakthrough?" Zhou Linfan asked, staring at the sky. "I will die."

"I'm sure you aren't meant to face the lightning with Saint Qi at all," Alex said. "At this point, all of Scarlet's Saint Qi has evolved to become stronger. While they aren't at the level of Immortal realm, they are much closer."

Alex remembered the madman from the Northern Continent who was halfway done with his Immortal realm breakthrough. Even without being an Immortal, his Qi was so much stronger that not a single one of the elders or a group of them could defeat him.

"As you survive the lightning, your Qi gets stronger too," Alex said slowly. "Allowing you to be much stronger and ready for the next lightning bolt."

As he said that, the sky rumbled with the heavens preparing the next bolt.

Alex looked at Scarlet, worrying slightly. Even if he knew she had gone through this once already, he still couldn't help but feel the need to worry.

After all, with the lightning tribulation in progress, there was only one of two outcomes.

Either Scarlet was going to become an Immortal, or she was going to die.

While there was the chance of her becoming a False Immortal by failing, because she was a Heavenly beast, the heavens would not be much lenient on her.

The second purple lightning struck down from heaven with a resounding book and this time Scarlet let out a phoenix cry before it even hit her.

A fiery shield of multicolor appeared before her, bearing the burden of the lightning bolt, completely stopping it.

She stood taller once the second lightning bolt disappeared. She looked to the sky, ready for more.

When the third lightning strike fell, Scarlet created the fiery shield again, protecting her from the lightning bolt once again. However, this time the shield hadn't done its job as well as it had the last time.

She needed to change her tactics for the next one.

As the 4th lightning bolt prepared to fall, Scarlet flapped her wings just once. Nearly a hundred different feathers of colors ranging from yellow to red to purple flew around Scarlet, forming a whirlpool of feathers around him.

When the lightning bolt finally fell, the feathers instantly burned with phoenix fire and combined into a large, singular fire that took the shape of a burning phoenix and flew into the sky.

The attack struck the lightning, dissipating it even before it could fall all the way through.

The people watching on the ship cheered for Scarlet, even though she couldn't hear them. They were happy to see their Queen doing well, but this wasn't all. There was much more to be done now.

The feathers flew around Scarlet again as she prepared the same attack as the last time, known as the Phoenix Feather Storm.

The attack flew into the sky and struck the 5th lightning bolt,but this time it was the Lightning bolt that destroyed it instead, but had difficulty doing so.

The remaining energy in the bolt was not even as strong as the first bolt, and that Scarlet had handled with just her body.

When the 6th lightning bolt was ready to fall, Scarlet used both the fiery shield and the Phoenix Feather Storm at the same time.

The two techniques together managed to stop the lightning bolt from falling all the way through.

Scarlet breathed somewhat roughly. While only 6 lightning bolts had fallen, she had to use multiple techniques, back to back, causing her a bit of trouble.

She was still mostly fine, however, and could continue easily.

Only, for the 7th lightning bolt, she couldn't do with the Phoenix Feather Storm or the Fiery Shield. She needed something stronger and better.

Scarlet took a deep breath and used a technique. It was a difficult technique to use as it required some time. But thankfully, there was enough time between the tribulation lightning that she had the time for it.

Instantly, 8 different balls of Phoenix fire appeared around Scarlet, each of which caused a tempest of hot air to move around it. It wasn't just hot air, but heat reaching temperature so high that it caused the air to ripple, creating mirages all around.

Scarlet quickly became the center of a tremendous sandstorm as sparkling shards of glass formed from the melting sand that were quickly cooled down once they buffeted outward.

Alex and the rest quickly parted the sandstorm carefully and looked inside.

The balls of fire had now transformed into certain egg-like shapes and they continuously rotated around Scarlet herself who burned with Phoenix fire.

And then the 7th lightning bolt fell.

Chapter 1739 The Dao Lightnings

﻿﻿The 7th lightning bolt came crashing down from the sky, leaving behind a pillar of light. It arrived upon Scarlet, but even before it could hit her, one of the eight eggs flying around Scarlet immediately flew toward the lightning bolt.

The moment the egg struck the lightning bolt, the two attacks exploded. A massive amount of energy was released from the clash, sending shockwaves to spread for dozens of kilometers.

Alex and the rest were buffeted by the energy as well, and each one of them was surprised that Scarlet now had the power to stop something like this.

"Just 2 more," one of the elders said, his prayer in the words clear to everyone.

"She can do it," another one said.

"Not two more," Alex said. "There's many more to go."

A few of the people showed surprised expressions. It appeared that they weren't aware of how a lightning tribulation worked.

However, the ones that did, the elders, nodded. "2 more and she can be free from danger," the first elder said.

Just as they were talking, the 8th lightning bolt prepared to fall.

Scarlet had her 7 eggs floating around her that she prepared for the next 2 lightning bolts. She was starting to feel the tired feeling she remembered having the last time she did this as well.

The lightning tribulation asked a lot out of the body for how short it relatively was.

A person could go on for hours fighting someone else, but when it came to lightning tribulation, just a few attacks left everyone tired and weak.

Scarlet's Qi constantly moved inside her body, absorbing the energy left behind by the Tribulation lightning bolts. The absorbed Qi slightly improved her Qi, sending her closer and closer to the Immortal realm.

When the 8th lightning bolt fell, she sent the next 2 eggs into the sky, both of which landed on the end of the falling lightning bolt and instantly exploded.

Another explosion sent a force of air and energy crashing down on Scarlet and she had to protect herself from it. Not only that, she also had to maintain her technique and the 5 other eggs she still had floating around her.

This was a technique she could only use once in a fight, and she could let the eggs get wasted just from some shockwaves.

She felt the remaining energy from the lightning bolt flow into her body, making her Qi slightly stronger. She felt even more tired now like all she wanted to do right now was go to sleep.

But not yet. She had more to go through.

She screeched loudly, letting out a melodic phoenix scream. The fire around her burned brighter and so did the eggs.

All 5 of the eggs started revolving around her even faster as Scarlet prepared for the final of 9 tribulation lightnings.

The moment the final purple lightning flashed in the sky and streaked its way down, Scarlet sent all 5 of the eggs flying into the sky at once.

The five eggs met the 9th lightning bolt, and the world lost its colors. The explosion from the crash nearly broke the fabric of reality itself as space cracked all around the explosion.

Everyone was forced to look away as the bright light that formed from the explosion nearly blinded them all. The sound of the explosion echoed back from the dunes in the distance, and the sand in the air slowly settled.

When the dust was mostly gone, everyone saw a ragged Scarlet standing firmly on the ground with the sand underneath her molten from the heat of her body.

It was still bright red and slowly turning to glass, but no one's eyes remained on it for long. They all looked at Scarlet and worried for her.

She seemed tired, but there was more to come.

The sky rumbled in a warning. Purple lightning flashed within the clouds and slowly an aura gathered in the sky.

No one dared to send their senses up there, but Alex could see the aura that gathered, or more precisely, he could see its color.

A bright yellow aura filled the sky, slowly coalescing together to converge on a single point in the sky.

Alex frowned a little at the sight of the aura as he understood it to be something related to the Yang aura. However, he couldn't tell what aura it was. It was not one of the regular ones that everyone knew it seemed.

The aura took some time to get together and when it finally converged into the one small spot, it slammed onto the ground with a thunderous noise.

Scarlet was ready.

She took flight, streaking directly into the air, and she used a technique.

Unyielding Prominence Spark.

Her beak grew bright red, shining like the first ray of light at the dawn, and she struck the lightning bolt with it.

Another round of wind and aura buffeted the audience in the distance who had to protect themselves. They quickly searched for Scarlet and found her back in the crater where she had begun.

Her feathers were in disarray and she seemed slightly hurt but was otherwise fine.

Alex looked to the sky as another aura started gathering. If the first one was yellow like a midday sun, this one was bright red like an evening sun.

'True Fire Dao,' Alex thought. It took him no trouble to recognize this one. 'So… whatever she had learned previously was weaker than this?'

That told him nothing as the True Fire Dao was something clearly at the peak of what Dao could be. He hadn't yet known of a Dao that could be stronger.

The red aura in the sky converged onto a single point and then streaked down from the sky once again.

Scarlet had her talons out this time, both talons glowing bright white with light, and then she flew to the sky once again, striking the lightning bolt with her talon.

The force behind this lightning bolt was clearly much higher than the previous one and even Alex felt the fear flowing through his and Scarlet's bond. She was scared this time around, maybe even a little hurt.

But the good news was that she was alive. That was all that mattered.

The dust settled and Scarlet was on the ground, tired and hurt from the breakthrough.

"That's weird," Alex said when he saw that. He turned toward one of the elders and asked, "Isn't the individual who breaks through to the Immortal realm supposed to be healed of all injury at the end of it?"

"They are," one of the elders replied.

"Then why is she—"

Alex's words stuck to his throat when his gaze turned to the sky and saw the dark clouds with lightning still hovering in the sky above them.

And he didn't see only the clouds.

He saw aura gathering in the sky once more. A multicolored cloud of aura formed in the sky, swirling with red, yellow, and purple energy like the colors in a Phoenix fire.

Alex frowned at the sight. He remembered something similar happening during his breakthrough when heaven produced all the Daos he was about to learn and created an aura surrounding it to threaten him.

Was this that?

The answer arrived as soon as the question formed in his mind.

The aura started converging into one point, ready for a third lightning bolt.

Chapter 1740 The Immortal Queen

There was another lightning bolt forming in the sky. A third Dao lightning was ready to strike down on Scarlet at any moment.

Alex looked to the sky in utter shock.

Dao was not something that was easily learned by anyone. For a regular person. Learning a single dao was considered amazing. Learning two was considered brilliant. Learning anymore made people think the individual was a heavenly genius.

In Scarlet's case, while she had only technically had 2 Dao Lightnings, the second one was for the True Fire Dao, which meant she had learned enough Fire Dao that she had managed to piece together every other Dao related to Fire and learned the entire concept.

So, in a sense, she hadn't learned one dao, but multiple. As such, Alex had found it acceptable that only two Dao lightning would fall upon her and not more.

However, upon seeing the third Lightning bolt, he was surprised that Scarlet had learned even more than that, making her quite exceptional. It contradicted the information that Scarlet had said about herself from time to time in Alex's presence.

The Heavenly Beasts that came to rule the world for 10 thousand years were actually individuals of average talent. The real geniuses of the family were never sent away on such a useless venture outside. They were kept hidden and trained so they could become a robust pillar for their family.

Had Scarlet just fallen through the heavenly beast's net and considered untalented, when she actually was quite talented? Or were the heavenly beasts just such great creatures that even this much talent was considered average at best?

That was very surprising for Alex, but one thing that surprised me more right now was the aura in the sky.

The Dao lightning was supposed to fall in order of just how difficult they were to understand and just how much stronger than Heaven considered the dao to be.

If this Dao lightning was falling after the True Fire Dao then... was there a Dao that Scarlet knew which was better than True Fire Dao?

Scarlet's body suddenly started burning again with bright light, and the world seemed to dim in response to her brightness. A mass of aura buffeted the surroundings around her, causing a tempestuous storm to spread away from her.

Scarlet's body started to glow bright white as the fire burned even more. The heat from her body reached to the people on the ship, forcing them to use their cultivation to stop it.

At the same time, Scarlet's body grew bright to the point that no one could keep their eyes open anymore. Everyone shied away from the light, waiting just for what happened next.

The light dimmed and little and then grew again. Then an explosion followed it.

The strongest explosion that anyone had ever sensed just yet shook the ship that everyone stood on, sending the entire thing backward with a lot of force.

At the same time, the sound from the explosion was strong enough that it sent everyone's ears ringing.

It was a long time before anyone opened their eyes again. Alex was the first of the few to do so and he looked at the aftermath of the explosion.

The dark clouds were parted by the explosion, leaving a small opening in the sky through which rays of sunlight fell to the ground.

One such beam fell on the center of the storm in the ground, falling onto Scarlet, who was now bloodied and weak. She was hurt and in extreme pain, but she was alive.

She struggled to stand up and looked to the sky again.

The clouds rumbled a deep roar and lightning flashed some more. Aura gathered in them once again, but this time around Alex was very much sure that this aura was just a show.

He could sense Dao of Yang and some sort of separate time aura that was its own thing. There were a few other very much weaker aura, signifying just how far away Scarlet was from understanding those Dao.

The sky continued to rumble some more and then started parting away subsequently. At the same time, everyone felt as though the heavens swooped down from the ground to embrace Scarlet's wounded body.

Immediately, her body began to heal, her strength returning. At the same time, her body automatically started cultivating and they absorbed the energy that came down to her.

Her Qi grew stronger and stronger until a point was reached where in a single moment, they jumped from being Saint Qi to Immortal Qi.

A sonorous ringing sound rippled out from Scarlet's body and she let out a deep phoenix cry that harmonized with the first sound, making a beautiful melody.

Scarlet's body erupted with power, and she took the sky immediately. She flew around the wasteland, letting out her phoenix cries as she did so.

"Let us return," Alex said and the ship quickly flew back toward the Sunborn Sanctuary.

Even though they were nowhere fast enough to catch up to Scarlet, they could hear Scarlet's deep cries all the way through.

Alex looked down from the ship and saw people stopping to do everything they were doing so they could look to the sky in bright surprise.

Alex could hear their cheers all the way from the ship. They cheered for Scarlet and her strength, whether they were from the wasteland or from the mainland.

People praised their Queen and what she stood for. Everything that Alex had been trying to prevent for the past month or so and had failed to do was now done by Scarlet with just one flight.

Her presence gave the peace of mind everyone needed to go about their day even though they knew that War was right around the corner.

Alex and the group soon lost Scarlet due to her speed and returned to the palace. They had only been back in the palace for just a few minutes when they heard Scarlet's sonorous cry once again.

Everyone felt the aura of an immortal approach them in the palace as Scarlet walked through the hallways.

Every man, woman, and child that was in the palace at that time couldn't help but gawk back at her in absolute disbelief.

She walked with her own two feet, her delicate white arms swinging rhythmically at her sides, while she held her beautiful face up high.

A red robe fluttered around her body, seemingly tailored for her exact body. Her red hair curled down to her shoulders, framing her face, and accentuating her glossy red lips.

She arrived before Alex and the others as they were making their way to the palace hall. Everyone had stopped in their tracks now, and they were staring back at Scarlet and her divine beauty.

To some, it was a nostalgic sight from a past so long ago that even memories seemed vague to them.

To others, it was an entirely new sight, one that they had not expected to see at all.

Every single human in the hallway fell to their knees as soon as Scarlet arrived before them.

"Long live the Queen," Qiu Jianhong said out loud.

"Long live Her Majesty," the others followed.

The Southern Continent, after 5 millennia, had finally gotten back their Immortal Queen.

Chapter 1741 In The Throne Room

Scarlet stared down at the men and women who knelt before her. Everyone ranging from the Elders to Zhou Linfan to Alex's family, including Alex himself, knelt in front of her.

"Rise!" Scarlet ordered and everyone slowly got back up.

Alex could feel the strong aura that moved around Scarlet, the aura that made him believe that even if the sky fell tomorrow, she would keep them safe.

It was a very reassuring aura.

"Congratulations, Your Majesty," Alex spoke first.

The others followed quickly, giving their own congratulations to Scarlet with a look of reverence in their eyes.

Scarlet smiled slightly. "Thank you," she said as she looked at her hands. "I can finally fit in with you all, don't you think?"

"Uhh... you will still stand out, one way or another," Alex said. He looked at her face and was surprised at just how beautiful her human face was.

He remembered seeing it before once, but it was just an image from someone else's memory. The real thing was obviously extremely better.

Scarlet turned toward the other people down the hallway who had stopped to stare at them all. Most were in awe at what was happening without understanding it at all, but some had understood and were in more awe because of that.

"Let us all find some privacy," Scarlet said and started walking toward the throne room.

Everyone followed quickly and filled up the palace hall. Even there, many congratulated Scarlet for not just her breakthrough but also her new appearance.

Soon, Scarlet started to find all the words of congratulations annoying.

"Let us move to other topics," she said, sitting atop the throne where Alex usually sat in her absence. With her present there, he was seated on top of another throne, but a smaller one.

Scarlet turned toward Alex and said, "Now that I'm done with my cultivation, I can take upon my responsibility as the Queen. You will be free of most burdens. You should be able to use this free time wisely, can't you?"

"I will make the most out of it," Alex said.

"I must admit that I do not know much aside from what Whisker has told me and what I could figure out by your actions. Do fill me in on what I have missed while I was in closed cultivation."

Alex followed her request and gave her a short but detailed summary of what had happened until now, including how he survived and what had been done to those guards.

"We've declared war, so everyone is preparing for a battle," Alex finished.

Scarlet frowned a little and her eyes unfocused a little. "I might have been able to help a little but my oaths strengthened again after I broke through earlier," she said softly.

"Hmm? What do you mean?" Alex asked.

"Nothing," Scarlet quickly said. "Do whatever you can. Our primary focus is to bring back those alchemists who are held hostage by the Emperor. Our secondary objective is to take revenge for Yao Ning and our soldier's death and for the Dragon Emperor trying to kill our King."

"However, we also must be realistic here," Scarlet said as she turned toward Alex. "I'm going to be honest, the chances of us winning is... very low."

"I know," Alex said with a grimaced look. "That is the one thing that has been worrying me this entire time. The Dragon Emperor is strong, but he's not the only strong person there."

"Even his Legion has strong individual, that on their own would be on par with our strongest fighters. But on top of that, they have that special array that makes them gain so much strength at once."

The elders slowly nodded. That would indeed be a problem.

"We have an array too," Scarlet said. "You have one, don't you? How good would that be?"

Alex thought for a bit. "If... if our soldiers don't have to stray from the battle and can fight all together in a single location, we can improve everyone's power by 4 realms."

A wave of small shocks ran through the room, emerging from people who weren't aware of the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array.

"How many minimum for that?" Scarlet asked.

"10 thousand," Alex said. "We have 3 times that number right now."

Scarlet nodded slowly. "But they are much weaker still compared to the Eastern Continent," she said. "I might be able to help with that though, but we still need to—"

The door to the room opened and Bai Jingshen strutted in proudly, followed behind by his seven wives and Pearl.

"My apologies, I couldn't wait for someone to announce my arrival," he said as he walked to the front. The elders quickly stepped away from their seats, making room for the 8 new 'humans' to sit.

Scarlet frowned a little. "You really don't have much etiquette, do you?" she asked.

Bai Jingshen simply laughed. "I felt your breakthrough from the Western Continent and came to congratulate you. Don't mind my lack of etiquette for that."

The other 7 women beside Bai Jingshen respectfully bowed toward Scarlet and gave her their congratulations.

While Scarlet was still much weaker than them, she was still a Heavenly beast, a mighty Vermilion Bird, and was thus While Scarlet was still much weaker than them, she was still a Heavenly beast, a mighty Vermilion Bird, and was thus deserving of their respect.

"Sister Scarlet? Whoa! You're a human now? Congratulations on breaking through to the Immortal realm," Pearl said with a bright voice. "I'm so happy for you."

Scarlet sighed and couldn't be mad anymore. A small smile formed on her face. "Thank you, Pearl."

She looked back at Bai Jingshen with a slight frown back on her face. She didn't remember sensing any spiritual sense from him at all, so she wondered how he even knew where they were gathered. Had he just followed the aura?

"Why did you hurry to get here?" she asked. "Surely you didn't come here this quickly just to congratulate me."

"No, we were all ready to come anyway," Bai Jingshen said. "Your breakthrough just gave us the excuse to leave. We have a stake in your upcoming war, and so we wanted to help too."

"We? You are going to lend beasts for this war?" Scarlet asked. "I... don't remember many strong beasts remaining in your realm."

"I have a few," Bai Jingshen said. "I can lend you about 20 strong beasts for most of the leaders of the many legions. They will come in handy."

"That will be very helpful," Scarlet said. "Still, this is not quite enough, is it."

"If we could somehow drag him out of the Eastern Continent, I could easily deal with him. But so long as he stays in there, he is out of my reach," Bai Jingshen said with an annoyed look on his face.

"For now, we just need to find a way for them to deal with him on their own," Scarlet said.

"Don't tell me you're helping. I should be fine as long as I'm not instigating the war, isn't it?" Scarlet asked.

"Maybe," Bai Jingshen said. "Still, I would be careful if I were you. Give them the resources and knowledge, but don't give them any commands."

Scarlet slowly nodded. "Damn these oaths."

Chapter 1742 Squid

"We will give you the resources," Scarlet told Alex. "The rest, unfortunately, you will have to plan yourself."

A few minutes after that, the meeting was over.

Alex left the throne room, making his way back to his room, slightly frowning at the thought of getting no help in terms of the ideas of warfare

He would have to rely all on himself to plan the entire war and how he would go about it.

That was a troublesome situation. Surely a nearly 20 thousand-year-old Immortal would know a lot more than him, a mortal who wasn't even 100 years old.

Alex frowned, but worrying wasn't going to help him. He needed to make a concrete plan, but that likely wasn't going to help him either since the Dragon Emperor was most certainly better at coming up with war tactics.

'No,' Alex thought. 'No matter how much I plan, it will all come down to nothing if we can't kill the Dragon Emperor. What we need more than anything else right now is for me to have a strong enough cultivation base to fight him.'

Zhou Linfan was guaranteed to aid him in battle, as he was going to help them in the war entirely just so he could fight and kill the Dragon Emperor.

Hannah was the other person who could fight, and by the time of the war, she would most likely be stronger than the Dragon Emperor too. However, she had no battle skills and it was unlikely that the Dragon Emperor would even dare fight her and put others to distract her.

Not to mention, Hannah hadn't killed anyone before, so that put extra pressure on her which wasn't good during battle.

Aside from the two, there weren't many others who could fight the Dragon Emperor and survive. In the end, Alex was the only last one who could fight, so if he wanted to defeat the Dragon Emperor, he needed to be ready.

Alex was back in his room and had started cultivating once again. He hadn't had the chance to properly cultivate for the past month as he had forced himself to make as many pills as he could for everyone that could need it.

Now that Scarlet was out and about, he decided to leave that task to his mother and finally get serious about his own cultivation.

He was going to break through as soon as he could and force himself to keep doing that even when his cultivation base hadn't properly stabilized.

So, for that, he had to eat another beast core.

This time, the core he ate was from a beast in the Saint Soul 7th realm, and it quickly became apparent what beast it was when a squid formed in Alex's spiritual sea.

Alex was about to attack it when he paused and remembered the last beast core he had eaten. That beast had talked and seemed somewhat aware of who it was. Was this beast the same?

"Can you talk?" Alex asked the squid.

The massive squid turned around slowly, its unusually high 22 tentacles floating around in the air, as though it was in the water.

The squid looked at Alex, and suddenly its color changed to red. "You killed me!" it shouted out of nowhere, surprising Alex, and attacked immediately.

It used its spiritual energy to form spheres of water around itself, from where spears of water were shot toward Alex.

Alex quickly created a shield in front of him, blocking all the attacks. But the squid attacked again.

"I'll kill you!" it shouted.

Alex fought back, defending, trying to understand what the situation was. Last time, the eel hadn't realized what had happened and Alex had to tell it that it had died.

This time around, however, the beast knew it had died and it wanted to kill Alex for it.

'Why so different?' Alex thought. The only difference he could see between the two beasts, other than their slight cultivation base difference was the fact that the eel had died suddenly during Alex's rampage.

As for the squid, it had attacked Alex before the whole ordeal and Alex had killed it just because he was searching for battles for blood and core.

'It remembers our fight?' Alex thought. Maybe that had given enough time for the core to take on the impression left behind by the nascent soul of the beast.

'So it is the timing that matters?' Alex thought.

He quickly got rid of the beast, killing it in just 2 more attacks once he thought he understood the situation. After that, he appeared back outside in his real body and started cultivating as the tremendous amount of energy from the beast's core flowed in through his meridians.

Alex cultivated as much as he could using the Qi from the beast core for nearly 2 days before it ran out. By that time, he felt as though he was halfway through the next bottleneck, and with a significantly strong beast core or two, he could enter the next realm.

That... should not have been a right feeling at all.

Alex frowned. He knew cultivating quickly had its downsides, but... why couldn't he find any? He cultivated for a while longer, searching for instabilities but found nothing again.

'This is so weird,' he thought. What was going on?

'I have to ask someone,' Alex thought.

He found one of the elders first and talked to him about his situation, but the elder had no idea what Alex was talking about.

An instability in one's cultivation base was supposed to be apparent for anyone who had properly hit a bottleneck and broke through beforehand. In Alex's case, he should have been fully aware.

If he didn't, then something was most certainly wrong with his cultivation base. Or maybe most certainly right.

Alex thought for a bit and decided to ask Scarlet next. As a beast, she would be more aware of how it was to cultivate using a beast core.

"We don't cultivate using beast core," Scarlet answered. "In fact, our body simply absorbs the beast's core and makes us strong on its own. It... just happens. Maybe the same is true for you too?"

Alex frowned a little at the information. "Do you have to break through manually when you eat a beast core or does it just happen too?"

"It just happens," Scarlet said.

"Then that is not the same as for me," Alex said with a sigh. "I should be feeling a feeling of instability, but I don't. I'm worried it's a false promise from my body and if I accept this, I will have problems in the future."

"Honestly, I don't know," Scarlet said. "You should ask Bai Jingshen. He knows more than I do thanks to his master."

"Oh... okay," Alex said. "I'll go to him."

Alex found out that Bai Jingshen had left on a trip with his wives to go see the rest of the continent while they were there.

They had left Pearl behind with Helen and the rest so he could spend his time with them which they had taken away for the past few months after his return.

However, at a single call from Pearl, the White Tiger arrived back in the palace within minutes.

"What do you need help with?" Bai Jingshen asked. "This better be worth it for me to leave my wives alone on the trip."

Chapter 1743 Stability

Alex explained his situation as clearly as he could to Bai Jingshen, and Pearl listened to it completely from start to end.

"Stability, huh?" Bai Jingshen said with a thoughtful look. "I know a thing or two about this. I'm sure I can explain what is going on with you."

"Oh, please do tell, brother Shen," Alex asked.

"Your cultivation base feels stable because of a simple reason," the White Tiger said, and Alex listened intently, hoping to make some revelations.

"The reason being... it is stable."

Alex frowned a little and questioned the analysis. "It is stable?" he asked. "It certainly feels like it, but surely it can't be so."

"It can be so," Bai Jingshen said. "Do you know what stability means in a cultivator's cultivation base?"

Alex frowned a little. Stability was an abstract thing that he could only explain with a feeling or whether it was or not. Could he explain what it was?

"I'm not sure exactly," Alex said. "I must admit I've taken it for granted all this time."

Bai Jingshen nodded. "All do. But it is only the ones that understand it that can go far with their cultivation base. Even Immortals usually don't care about this, but my master taught me this very early on, so I knew this from childhood."

Alex's eyes widened slightly. Was he going to learn more about the so-called Godkiller? He was interested in whatever bits of information he could find about this being.

"First of all, let us start with a simple question that I'm curious if you can answer," Bai Jingshen said. "Why can you cultivate faster than your peers."

"Uhh... because I am talented?" Alex asked. "Because I'm a human? Pure humans are better at cultivation."

"Yes, but why? What does it mean that you are talented? You surely know it's not referring to your ability to learn skills or dao. It's talking about your body's potential, but what does it mean that you have potential? What exactly is that potential?"

Alex was stumped. "I don't know," he said. "I never thought about things that deeply."

Bai Jingshen nodded. "Then let me ask you another question," he said. "You should have a better understanding of this one. What needs to happen before you are ready to enter the next cultivation realm."

Alex thought for a moment. "Let's see. The main thing is that our Qi must improve in quality and our Dantian should become more spacious."

"And?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"And?" Alex asked back. "There's more? I don't know. Do meridians have to improve perhaps? I don't suppose the Spiritual Roots improve at all."

"They do not, but Meridians do. And they are not the only ones," Bai Jingshen explained. "Your body has to improve too. Your skin, your bones, your organs, your muscles, everything has to improve slowly."

"How else do you think your spiritual sea expands as your cultivation improves? How else does your blood aura improve as your breakthrough?" Bai Jingshen asked.

Alex felt many things click into place in his mind and his eyes went wide in shock at the revelation. "I hadn't even thought about that. Is the improvement to one's body and spirit not a benefit of one's rise in cultivation base, but a requirement instead?"

Alex had always thought of improvement to one's body to be something rewarded for reaching a higher cultivation base.

"It is in a way both," Bai Jingshen explained. "Your body only improves when it is ready to be improved, just like your Qi. But you have to prepare it to improve, which is where the stability factor comes along."

"If you only improve your Qi, and not the rest of your body, you will have higher Qi when you breakthrough, but Your body won't get the benefit. And when your body doesn't get that benefit, you can tell exactly what is wrong with it. That is what instability is."

"You need at minimum a better dantian to improve your Qi and reach the next level. You can do so without it if you force it, but that means you will have to stay in the next realm for a longer period of time fixing that."

"Past that, you need better meridians. If meridians aren't robust, you will only go a few realms before they can't handle the force of your own Qi."

"For body, I believe you have more flexibility than your dantian and meridians, but they still need to be improved. In the end, it is your body that will have to handle being constantly filled with Qi, and if the Qi is too strong, it will destroy itself."

Alex nodded continuously as Bai Jingshen spoke, slowly understanding the intricacies of what he had been unknowingly doing, what everyone had been unknowingly doing this entire time.

"Qi deviation, in the end, is just your own body seizing control of your cultivation base and reverting it down to a level where it can handle it again."

Both Pearl and Alex were left standing in shock as cultivation as a whole itself became clearer.

Bai Jingshen could see the wheels in their head turned and smiled.

"Now, can you tell me what it means to be talented in cultivation?" Bai Jingshen asked, bringing back the first question.

Alex had some thought about it now. "Talented usually means one is capable of cultivating fast or hitting bottlenecks fast. Which means their body must be accepting Qi fast, raising in level quickly."

Alex looked up. "That's what it means, right? That would make sense that they don't have to work as hard to get the same result."

Alex could understand now why humans were talented. Their body, skin, muscles, and all were capable of being refined using Qi much more than a hybrid's body was.

Bai Jingshen nodded. "Now, going back to your original question as to why you don't feel an instability. I said it is because your body isn't unstable. That is because while you did break through not long ago and are forcing your way through to the next realm, your body is already strong enough to handle the incoming breakthrough. Your mind is already so far stronger too."

"Not to mention, your blood should be so much stronger than everything else. So, there is little for your body to get ready for before you yourself are ready to breakthrough."

Alex nodded the entire time. "So that is why I don't feel any instability," he said. "That... is very good to know."

"You're lucky in that you can you don't need to cultivate everything at once. You can cultivate your body if that is lacking, improve your spiritual energy if that is lacking, or deal with your blood. Others don't have that luxury."

"I understand," Alex said. "Thank you for explaining this all to me, Brother Shen."

Bai Jingshen stood up straight. "Since I'm done here, I'll be leaving. My wives are waiting for me,"

"Thank you," Alex said with a bow.

Bai Jingshen flew away, leaving Pearl and Alex alone.

"What now?" Pearl asked. "Are you going to go back into cultivation?"

Alex thought for a bit. "No," he said. "Since I have the luxury of choosing what I want to improve, I think it is about time I start dealing with all the blood I have gathered."

"I can't let it slowly lose energy inside my Soul Space. Time to make use of it."

Chapter 1744 Absorbing Blood

The nearly 3-kilometer wide sphere of floating blood-red water had remained in the darkness of the void inside of Alex's soul space that it almost looked as though it was something made of smooth red marble instead of being liquid.

There were no fluctuations to the object, no disturbance of any sort. In a world with no gravity, it had found its shape a long time ago.

The water was also tens of thousands of kilometers away from anything else in his body, so it had remained perfectly safe until now.

However, Alex did wonder if the life energy that his Soul Space seemed to form all the time had caused any problem. He hoped not.

Alex had tried figuring out if there were ways to bring out just the blood from the bloody water, but he couldn't find any. So, he was now forced to do it the normal way.

Alex brought out Memory and made it as large as he could, which ended up being as large as his entire room, then, he filled it with the bloody water and jumped inside it, sinking to the bottom of the cauldron full of water.

Then, he absorbed all the blood aura that was inside of the water.

During the first few minutes, Alex wasn't even sure if anything was happening. It was only afterward that he felt the faintest blood aura flowing into his body and only then did he know that he was doing the right thing.

He continued absorbing, albeit very slowly due to the diluted concentration of the blood in the water, and kept it going for nearly 2 hours. By that time, he realized that he had cultivated all that he could using the blood in the water. Whatever remained, while still full of Qi, was useless for Alex's blood.

'Is should give this to the two plants,' Alex thought and took back all the water.

He refilled it after a while again and restarted again, going for 2 more hours, absorbing as much blood as he could.

Alex's blood aura was already as strong as Saint Transformation's 5th realm, so the improvement he showed was so very slow that it felt as though he was wasting his time.

But Alex knew he wasn't wasting any time with this, so he kept going. He cultivated for days in a row and didn't even manage to go through just a quarter of the entire amount of blood he had.

'I'm being limited by the size of my room,' Alex thought. While Memory had expanded to fill the entire room, it could grow to be much larger still, so Alex had to use a more spacious place.

After talking to Scarlet, he went to the dome to be in closed cultivation for a few months in total so that he could get through the massive ball of water in his soul space.

Alex cultivated nonstop for 2 more months, going through as much water as he could in the time. He absorbed over 30 thousand liters of the bloody water in a single day, each day.

And yet somehow, the amount in his soul space never seemed to end at all. He had taken in just a bit too much water in the hope of getting all the blood he would have wasted.

While he absorbed 30 thousand liters a day, the total water in his Soul space had originally been 10 billion liters. Which meant that at best, in 1 month, he could only go through a thousandth of the total water.

'This is going to take a long time,' Alex thought. 'Maybe I don't have to absorb it all.'

That was the only solution he had in this situation as unfortunate as it was.

Alex gave up on the water for some time and started absorbing the pure blood instead that he had gathered from the few beasts and people he killed while he wasn't in a frenzy just yet.

The amount of blood in Memory was barely a tenth of the total volume it could handle with its current size, and yet, the potency was off the charts.

Alex could spend another 3 months with the blood water and not absorb half as much blood aura as this small amount of blood gave.

Alex half submerged himself in the blood, ignoring the smell around him, and focused entirely on the Blood Absorption technique.

Slowly, the technique began working, and like thirsty beasts finally given water, Alex's body drank the blood aura like the sweet nectar of life itself.

There was a lot of aura to process and a lot of improvements to be made, and his body did it with gratitude.

Alex felt the improvement in his blood slowly go past the Saint Transformation 5th realm and into the 6th realm, and even move slightly past that by the time there was nothing more to be absorbed.

Alex left the cauldron and took in all the blood to feed to the plants. Then, he sat on the ground of the forest in the dome and started cultivating right there.

He had spent plenty of time absorbing blood and had finally improved, so it was time to improve his cultivation base as well to match his blood cultivation in strength.

Alex ate another beast core to cultivate. This time around, it was a core he knew he hadn't killed while he had been sane. The reason for choosing one such as that was to experiment on exactly if he was correct or not.

He wanted to see if the beast remembered him or not.

The seahorse beast that formed in Alex's mind did not recognize him at all. It was different from the first beast in that it seemed quite arrogant and much less confused, but it hadn't recognized Alex like the squid had.

"I'm dead, aren't I? How did that happen?" the Seahorse asked.

It seemed it was still aware of its own demise, just not the situation surrounding it.

"I killed you," Alex said simply.

The seahorse got angry and attacked Alex. The next instant, it was dead.

"Well that was different," he said to himself. "So it's not just impression, but their personality too. This one wasn't confused but angry. I will have to do a bit more experiments."

Alex appeared back outside and absorbed the energy of the core that now flowed through his body. It was a lot of energy from one core and he absorbed it all thoroughly, improving everything he needed to.

He cultivated the next two days with that energy and at the end of it, he felt ready to break through, although due to the side effect of the exceptional cultivation pill, he had to wait a week to cultivate again as his meridians were very stressed right then.

Alex spent the next week underwater once again, improving his blood aura just that much.

Then, when he was ready, he cultivated for the next 2 days using no external aids this time, and by the end broke through once again.

Alex had now reached Saint Soul 6th realm.

He still had around a year left before he needed to go back to the Eastern Continent, so he decided to keep going and see just how far he could go with his cultivation in that time.

Chapter 1745 Quick Progress

Alex decided to break through to the Saint Soul 7th realm as fast as he could. However, by the end of the Saint Soul 6th realm, Alex felt the instability return to his cultivation base.

It was still only a feeling, but it was a feeling he understood and recognized immediately.

"What is unstable?" Alex wondered. It wasn't right, but he decided to stop and do an experiment to see what was up.

It had only been a month since he had last broken through, so a lot could be a problem. In this case, it was time for him to go through each problem and check.

Alex first made a list of all the things that could give him the feeling of instability in his body.

Mainly, there were 5 things in general that one could improve before their cultivation base was stable.

They were Dantian, Meridian, Blood, Body, and Spirit.

When all of these aspects of one's being were ready, only then did a person feel their cultivation base be stable.

Alex knew for a fact that Dantian was the most important, followed by the Meridians. But of the last 3, he did not know the order of importance at all.

Maybe it was dependent on what needed more help. Maybe there was none more important than the other? Or maybe he just had more to learn about these three.

Alex knew for certain blood was important, not because of Blood aura, but because of Blood Essence.

"What is my instability from then?" Alex wondered. He decided to try out and improve everything one by one until the instability went away.

First came his body.

Alex got the Mountain Crushing artifact back from his father, who had been using it for the past many months with a very impressive result.

While his cultivation base had yet to hit even the Saint realm, his body cultivation had already crossed the threshold of the Saint Transformation realm and went beyond it.

Especially with the artifact that Alex had brought back, the improvement he had shown was so massive, that Graham had legitimately become one of the strongest individuals in the entire Southern Continent.

After bringing back the Mountain Crushing artifact, Alex spent a week doing nothing but improving his physical strength.

He had been in Saint Soul 5th realm back in the Eastern Continent and hadn't had the time to improve since then, so this time around he stayed in the artifact until he reached Saint Soul 6th realm with his physical strength.

Once he reached that level, he stopped and checked if the instability still remained in his body.

It did.

'That was not it then?' Alex wondered.

Alex very much doubted it was his blood, but he still spent a week absorbing the bloody water inside of him and improved ever so slightly.

That made no changes to the instability he felt at all either.

Then, it was time to check his soul and spirit.

Alex didn't even bother trying to check if his Spiritual strength was the problem. That was simply not the case and he knew that for a fact.

His spiritual energy was enough to shame a man in his mid Saint Transformation realm and it improved each time he absorbed a beast core, so it only got better.

Even if Alex wanted to, there was nothing he could do to improve it significantly in a small period at all. The hell mask that he used had stopped showing effect long ago, so he had given it to his family for usage.

His Soul on the other hand was something he didn't know how to improve or if it could even be improved.

Alex's nascent soul had grown in size the past year and would continue to grow until it would intangibly occupy the entire dantian.

Alex knew of no way to improve a Nascent Soul other than just cultivating, so he could only do that.

Alex ate a pill and cultivated normally in the end for 3 days before the instability he felt disappeared from his body.

He investigated a little and came to the conclusion that it had in fact been his meridians that had needed to improve.

Alex knew that his Dantian was constantly being refined even when he wasn't cultivating, so that had not been it. Because of the way his body converted regular Qi into Yin Qi, and then he had to draw in Yang Qi to deal with that Yin Qi, the cycle strengthened his Dantian more than he could explain.

Besides, if his Dantian, something that held the Yang source and Yin bead had indeed required to be ready for just the Saint Soul 7th realm, even if it had the Saint Transformation 7th realm equivalent strength of Qi, it would have been laughable.

His Nascent Soul had not been the answer either, because Soul, just like Qi, was something that improved after the breakthrough.

So in the end, Alex came to the conclusion that it had in fact been his meridians that had stopped him from progressing.

Once Alex figured that out, he got back on track with his cultivation schedule, using the beast core only once in a while to give himself a massive boost instead of each time.

Following the routine, within the next 2 months, he managed to reach the Saint Soul 7th realm as well.

Alex's improvement came at a quick rate as he continued at a steady pace and reached the Saint Soul 8th realm after 3 and a half months of cultivation.

Then after that, he ran into a bit of instability once again and had to take a slightly longer time to deal with it, which ended up taking him about 5 months.

Alex's speed in cultivation was fast, but that was not the only thing he had been focusing his time on.

Alex did 2 very crucial things in between his cultivation, or whenever he could find the time.

First, he improved his body cultivation as high as he could. For the past year, he had focused as much time as he could squeeze into his breaks to cultivate this way.

In fact, from time to time, he had even asked his aunt to employ a time-dilation field so he could stay in the Mountain Crushing Artifact for days without having to worry about wasting too much time.

He could only do it once every 2 weeks or so, as using that much time aura left Liz with a headache and a need to take some rest.

Secondly, Alex focused on making blood beasts. With so many cores with him, he had to make as many beasts as he could make.

Alex even requested Bai Jingshen to get him some if he could, and the White Tiger brought back a few dozen beast cores.

The beasts that came from the cores that Bai Jingshen brought back were surprisingly similar to the beasts that lived in the Demonic Forest of the Northern Continent.

Alex asked him if that was where he found these cores, but the Tiger wouldn't answer.

In the end, Alex could only focus back on himself and proceed to break through to the Saint Soul 9th realm, however long it may take him to do so.

Chapter 1746 A Different Experience

When Alex was ready to break through to the Saint Soul 9th realm, there were less than 5 months before he had to absolutely leave for the Eastern Continent.

He sat alone in his room, preparing for the final cultivation session he would sit down for that was not just to regain some Qi.

He took out a pill in his hands and looked at it for a while, before placing it back into his storage. He was so close to breakthrough that he didn't need it.

What he needed was a Beast core that would help him push himself to the edge and further. There were still a few cores that he hadn't turned into a blood beast yet, and of those he chose one from a beast that was in the Saint Transformation 1st realm.

This was the first time he had eaten a core of a beast in the Saint Transformation realm and he wasn't sure what to expect.

Alex ate the beast's core and closed his eyes as his mind pulled him into his Spiritual Sea.

Alex's vision sharpened in the bright but cloudy atmosphere of his spiritual sea, with the silver mountain to his right, now smaller than ever before, and the deep ocean of spiritual energy beneath him.

In front of him, a being formed out of Spiritual energy, taking the shape of what looked like a turtle but with no shell. It had a long neck ending on a circular head, 4 flappers for its limbs, and a short tail, while the remaining body was simply that of a turtle without its shell.

It was a smooth-skinned beast with no scales and a gray body.

The beats floated in the air as if they were swimming in the water itself.

Alex didn't remember killing this beast, so it had to be one of the ones that he killed during the time he could not remember much of.

"I... am not me," the beast spoke slowly. "This is not a soul, is it?"

That was the first time a beast had managed to figure that out without even knowing they had died.

"This is not your Soul," Alex answered. Now that he thought about it, he didn't know if the souls of the beasts had even survived. Most likely they had not.

"No, it's not," the beast replied looking around the spiritual sea. "I remember a battle and you were there. Are you dead too? Or is this your Spiritual sea?"

Had the beast's intelligence grown somewhat past the phase of being obsessed with their emotion at the moment of death?

Saint Soul realm beasts did show that improvement too, but not on the level of the beast in front of Alex.

'What is this?' Alex thought. He got a weird feeling about it all. It was as if... as if he was talking to the real beast that was alive.

"This is my Spiritual sea," Alex answered. "And I was the one that killed you."

The beast turned its head around to Alex sharply, causing Alex to prepare for the fight. "You killed me?" the beast asked.

"I did," Alex answered.

The beast frowned for a moment. "I don't have the final memory of what happened. Did I attack you? I must have been stupid to attack someone so strong as you."

"I... wasn't in my right mind, so I'm not sure," Alex answered. "Chances are I just killed you because you were there."

The beast's eyes remained expressionless for a moment as it simply said, "Oh!"

"You don't seem angry?" Alex asked the beast.

Alex had eaten so many beast cores now that he knew what the beast would do if it were a Saint Soul realm beast. Those beasts mostly acted on emotions.

Most beasts that found they had died, and did not know Alex was the one that killed them would usually be sad. Some would even give up on life just like that.

Meanwhile, those who knew Alex had killed them usually got angry and tried to fight Alex.

However, this beast was breaking the conceptual mold that Alex had formed for the beasts. Were Saint Transformation beasts just that more smart past their death?

"Well, I am angry," the beast said. "But you killed me, and have now trapped me within your spiritual realm. I have no place to get angry again. You would simply kill me."

The beast looked at Alex with pleading eyes. "Please don't kill me," it said. "I have died, but let me live like this in your spiritual realm, at least for a while."

Alex was beyond surprised at this point. Never had a beast begged for him to not kill it inside his spiritual sea before.

Alex didn't even know what to do at this point. Killing a beast that not only had died without any fault but also begged not to be killed was hard for him.

"Fine, I'll let you stay," Alex said after careful consideration. He couldn't see what problems the beast could cause him, and he didn't have the heart to kill it just yet.

Instead, Alex decided to finish up his cultivation base and come back to deal with this problem.

However, when he tried to leave, he found himself unable to.

"Hmm?" Alex frowned. He tried to force himself to leave, but something kept him grounded in the Spiritual sea.

Alex thought for a bit and slowly turned around in horror. It was the beast. He couldn't leave because it was alive.

Its presence was what had brought him here, so if he wanted to leave, he would have to get rid of it.

Alex felt bad, but it was something he had to do. "I'm sorry," he told the beast. "It appears that I cannot leave you alive."

"But you just said..." the beast's eyes were filled with sadness.

"I'm sorry," Alex said. A tempestuous yellow fog escaped from all around him, making its way toward the beast.

The beast stood still, watching the fog slowly drift toward it.

"So beautiful," it said softly as the fog consumed its spiritual body and what little intelligence remained of it.

The fog retreated back into Alex just as quickly as it had escaped and disappeared into his body.

Alex felt a significant improvement in his spiritual sea. Not only had it become stronger all of a sudden, it had also become just that much more wider.

Finally, Alex could leave.

He threw all the emotions and thoughts out of his mind and went back outside where the beast core had begun spreading out its Qi throughout his body.

Alex took the Qi and started cultivating with it. Back and forth, the Qi went around his body, improving every little aspect of his body as it needed to.

At the end of it all, with nothing but a simple will from Alex, the Qi in his body suddenly improved, placing himself on a higher cultivation base.

He had finally arrived in the Saint Soul 9th realm.

Just one more breakthrough would place him in the Saint Transformation realm. However, Alex decided to stop there.

Next would come the Inner Demon, and with a war on the horizon, Alex could not take the chance at all.

Chapter 1747 Pearl

It had been a while since Pearl had broken through to the Saint Core 3rd realm. He had forced his way through his cultivation base, just like Alex had, but his result hadn't been as good.

So, he was a little worried about the upcoming battle. He wanted to help in the war, but he was so weak. Would he even be of any help?

His days had been filled with nothing but cultivation, training, and spending some time with his family. It had been a while since he had seen Alex too, as he was cooped up in his room, cultivating forever.

Pearl was done with another cultivation session and walked out of his room. He went on to check on Helen and the rest before he returned to his grandmothers.

He walked through the palace, feeling the serious atmosphere. None of the servants seemed to be on a particularly happy moon as war was imminent. Most of them were worried about what would happen to them and the continent if the war was lost.

Not only that, many of them had family members in the army that would be taken to war. That was another worry they felt.

Pearl understood their feelings. His own life and many of the lives of his loved ones were hanging on this war as well.

"Mother!" Pearl called when he arrived at Helen's door.

The door opened on its own and a tired Helen peeked out. "Oh, Pearl. Did you come to check on me?" Helen asked. "Come in."

Pearl walked in and saw three cauldrons constantly working. Helen worked on one of them, and on the other one was whisker, focusing as he was in the middle of making a pill.

The third one was for Zhan Luoyang, who had started making pills to aid the army.

At first, she had been quite hesitant about the idea of aiding the people of another continent, but over time she had changed and had been fully accepting of the fact that she needed to do this.

"Do you still have a lot to do?" Pearl asked Helen.

Helen stretched a little. "A lot, yes. A lot," she sighed. "It's never-ending, unfortunately. I keep doing it and more works keep piling up."

She turned around. "What have you been doing, cultivating?" she asked.

"Yes," Pearl said. "Is Father not back?"

"No," Helen said. "He's still keeping away while I need to focus here. I think he's with Ronron nowadays. He said he was going to help her learn how to fight."

Pearl slowly nodded.

Graham had become a strong fighter in the past many years, training each and every day. Since his cultivation base wasn't any good, he was learning to fight physically and had apparently gotten a lot better at it.

Pearl had only seen him in training and not a real battle, so he wasn't sure.

After staying with Helen for a few minutes, Pearl left. Helen needed to get back to work, so Pearl had no reason to remain there at all.

Whisker had kept working hard the entire time he was there, his attention not breaking even once.

Pearl went to go meet with the others. He met up with Liz and saw how she was training hard as well. She had fully planned on helping in the upcoming war, so she was ready for whatever came.

Hannah had reached the peak of the Saint Transformation realm some time ago, so all that was left for her now was to train to fight.

She was still quite amateurish at it, but she kept on training. Long Huan was the same as he never had any interest in fighting, and thus he was training constantly these days.

Zhou Linfan had been the one who trained both of them.

Graham and Ronron were nowhere to be found in the palace. They were most likely training with the army outside the city, and Pearl had no intention of going there right now.

He went to meet Old Alex and Emily and then made his way to his grandmothers.

"Pearl!"

He heard someone calling him in the corridor outside the palace and followed it to see Scarlet walking toward him.

"Sister Scarlet," he called back with a soft smile. "How are you?"

Scarlet walked in her human form, followed by a few of the elders who were always around her.

"Don't mind me, how are you doing? It's been a while since I've seen you. Is your cultivation going well?" she asked.

"I've been making steady progress, Sister," Pearl said. He looked at Scarlet again and couldn't help but feel a little jealous seeing her.

'If I could cultivate just as fast too,' he thought. But of course, Scarlet had only been able to cultivate so quickly because she had once been at this cultivation base and knew the ins and outs of her cultivation journey here.

She knew when she could push herself and when she had to slow down for the sake of her progress. Pearl didn't have that knowledge. He would only end up ruining his cultivation base if he tried that.

"Where are you going?" Scarlet asked. "To meet Alex?"

"Brother? No, I'm going to—"

Pearl paused for a moment. He hadn't noticed it at first, but now that he was focusing on it, Alex was in the direction he was headed.

'But that is the guest area? Did brother go to meet grandpa?' Pearl wondered.

"He's only just broken through. I wonder what he wants with Bai Jingshen now," Scarlet asked. "Anyway, I have matters to take care of. I'll see you around, Pearl."

"See you later, Sister," Pearl said and quickly made his way toward the garden where Bai Jingshen and his wives would be out enjoying the sun.

As Pearl approached, he heard tidbits of what was being talked about.

"—is our one chance though," Ren Xiao spoke.

"I'm somehow both interested and scared of this," Bai Jingshen said. "Are you sure it's possible?"

"I'm very certain," Alex said. "I have done it many times and it has happened every single tim—"

Alex turned around to look at Pearl and his smile widened. "Pearl!" he called out.

"Brother, you're done with your breakthroughs?" Pearl asked as he made his way toward Alex.

"Yes," Alex said and poured out some aura. "Saint Soul 9th realm, see?"

"Congratulations," Pearl said.

"Thanks," Alex said. "Unfortunately, I will have to stop here since I will have to face the Inner Demon in the next one. I most certainly do not wish to face any right now."

"I see," Pearl said.

"Actually," Bai Jingshen suddenly spoke. "I think Pearl is the one that should decide. He has more right to that than we do."

"I wouldn't have done it without his permission in the first place, but you're right. He should be the one that decides it in the end," Alex said.

Pearl looked at both his brother and his great-grandfather, entirely confused.

"Decide? What should I decide?" Pearl asked.

"Your brother here has brought us quite the proposition. Hear him out," Bai Jingshen said.

Alex turned back to Pearl and stared into his eyes.

"Pearl..." he spoke softly. "Do you want to meet your mother?"

Chapter 1748 The Choice

?"See... my mother?" Pearl asked. "What do you mean?"

Alex explained the situation around what happened when he ate a beast core. He had been surprised to find nothing of the sort happened when a beast ate a core, and it was only him.

Even Bai Jingshen had been surprised to learn that the core could return the spirit of the beast that had long since died if Alex ate it.

"What do you say?" Bai Jingshen asked Pearl. "If he does eat it, you can meet your mother. However, at the same time, the only thing that remains of your mother will be gone as well as he will absorb the core."

"I cannot leave my Spiritual sea without the beast inside dying," Alex said. "So if we do this, it can only be done once."

"Will... will she recognize me?" Pearl asked.

"Of course," Alex said confidently. "Pearl, it's your mother. Have some faith in her."

Pearl nodded and thought for a bit.

"Child, you don't have to be pressured to do it," the Lynx answered. "You can say no if you feel you're not ready."

"Pearl, we can wait if you need time," Ren Xiao spoke as well.

"No," Pearl said quickly. "I already thought of my mother as long dead. If I get the chance to meet her once again, I'll do it. But... wouldn't it be better to do it once we're back from the war? We can tell her that we got revenge for her."

"Pearl, do you really think your mother will care if you did something like that or not?" Bai Jingshen asked. "If you want to meet with her, meet with her now. There is no reason to wait."

Pearl gave the words some more thought and nodded. "I'll meet with her right away."

"Let us go to some other place then, someplace where we can be sure we won't be bothered."

Alex took the group of 9 beasts into the dome and started preparing for their arrival into their spiritual sea.

He hid Godslayer as well as he could behind the massive mountain and told the group to not move around at all and to stay in one place.

As 8 of the 9 beasts that were going to enter his mind were Immortals, he couldn't take the least bit of chance on them using their Spiritual energy inside his mind.

Alex sat down to get ready and brought out the Beast Core that belonged to Pearl's mother. He smiled as he remembered the first time he had brought out this core.

Pearl had followed the scent out and had started nibbling on the core that was a little too big for him back then.

Pearl seemed to smell it there too and gave a surprised look. While he didn't remember, it seemed his subconscious did.

He got closer to the beast's core and looked at it with wide eyes.

"This is my mother's core?" he asked. He remembered seeing it a long time ago, but it had been so long since he had last seen it.

To be fair, it had been a long time since Alex had seen it as well.

It had remained in Alex's storage bag for the longest time until Alex had fought the madman back in the Northern Continent.

At that time, his storage bag had been ripped away from him and the contents had been scattered around.

Some had dropped where they had fought, some had been destroyed by the violent Qi that surrounded the Central Continent, and finally, the remaining ones had disappeared into his Soul Space.

The core had ended up in his soul space as well.

It was only when Alex had gained access to the Soul Space that he found this beast's core floating in the vastness inside of him.

He had kept it safe since then, and today he was going to be putting it to use.

Alex had initially thought of making a blood beast out of the core but thought it would be horrible for Pearl to see a version of his mother who had intelligence and no memory of who he was or why he was important to her.

Instead, even if it was just once, he decided to let him meet the real her, so the memory of his mother would forever live with him.

"Are you all ready?" Alex asked.

The Immortal Beasts nodded, followed by Pearl just a little later. Pearl had been the most nervous about what was going to happen next, so he appeared quite hesitant.

"Then, please enter," Alex said and opened his spiritual sea for everyone.

All 9 of the beasts sat down and closed their eyes. One by one, their Spiritual sense touched onto Alex's spiritual sea and they entered inside.

Pearl came in last.

Alex felt the heaviness in his mind as if extra weight had been put on his head for no reason. Even when each one of these Immortals was trying their best to not put a burden on Alex, their presence itself was quite the burden for him.

Still, it was no different from just something being a little too heavy. There was no pain attached to the discomfort.

Once they were all inside, Alex looked at the core of the White Cat and gave a respectful bow toward it before eating it.

He swallowed the core, and instantly, his presence was ripped away from his body and dragged into his Spiritual sea where all 9 of the beasts were gathered in their beast form.

Bai Jingshen stood at the front, admiring Alex's Spiritual sea. Behind him, his 7 wives were doing the same as well.

Bai Jingshen's eyes were already fixed on the silver mountain that hung safely in the sky, a thing he knew as to exactly what it was.

"Your body is very special," he said, noticing Alex's arrival. "I can't imagine how you absorbed the Space Stone. I can't imagine how you even began to sense the aura."

"It's not even half the size it used to be," Alex said regarding the mountain while desperately wishing that Bai Jingshen didn't prod about it much more. He didn't want Godslayer's presence to be known.

Pearl stood alone on the left, looking at the front where he knew his mother would appear.

Slowly, a white mist coalesced in the distance, drawing everyone's attention toward it.

"Is it really happening?" the female tiger asked.

"It really is," the snow leopard said. "If I knew such a thing was possible, I wouldn't have eaten my mother's core after she passed away."

The form of the mist grew more and more solid and in the end, it took the form of a giant White Cat, that looked not much different from Ren Xiao or Pearl.

The women gasped in surprise.

"She looks so much like Meirong," Ren Xiao said as she started tearing up.

The White Cat looked around, surprised, and then her eyes fell on the gathered group.

She looked at them all and looked rather confused. Her eyes then fell on the only human in the group, but she didn't recognize him at all.

Finally, she looked at the young White Cat and felt some familiarity. When she looked closer, she couldn't believe her eyes at all.

"S-Shouchuang? Is that you?"

Chapter 1749 Shi Meiyoung

"Shouchuang?"

The words caused a feeling to arise deep inside Pearl. The voice alone gave him vague memories, but the words... that word gave him a memory of a past that had long since gone from his mind.

He remembered when he first heard the words. It was during the time when he had been struggling inside the blood pool where he underwent the ritual to evolve into a White Tiger.

He did not know what the word meant at all, but this word had been spoken back then.

Shouchaung.

'You must survive, Shouchuang!'

The hint of memory returned again and with it a thunderous roaring sound. Pearl shook his head but he could still remember it.

'Survive and Live!'

He had forgotten those words once he was done with the ritual, but now he remembered it again. Who had been that person? It did not sound like a woman's voice at all.

"You... are Shouchuang, right?"

The White Cat looked perplexed and even started tearing up.

"Mother," Pearl said slowly. "You... recognize me?"

"You're really my Shouchuang!"

Shi Meiyoung had the biggest smile on her face even as tears flowed down her cheek. She moved and arrived in front of Pearl in an instant and took him in a hug.

She laid her head on Pearl's body and held him tightly.

Pearl didn't know what to do at all, but the familiar feeling he got from being taken into a hug made him want to cry. He reached around with one of his arms too and hugged her.

Tears started flowing through his eyes as well.

Shi Meiyoung choked a little on her own tears as she finally let Pearl go and looked at him all throughout. "Look at you, you're so grown up, Shouchuang. I can't believe you really are my son."

"How did you recognize?" Pearl asked.

Shi Meiyoung gave a small smile. "Of course I would recognize you, you're my son," she said as she stroked his head with her paws. "Also, you are the last memory I have of right now, so seeing you I recognized you immediately. I would never not realize who you are, Shouchuang."

"Shouchuang..." Pearl spoke slowly. "Is that... my name?"

Shi Meiyoung gave a weird look. "Of course," she said. "Is that... not what you are called now?"

"I was young when you... when you died," Pearl said. "I did not know what I was supposed to be called at all. So I was named Pearl."

"Pearl?" Shi Meiyoung asked. "That's not a bad name I suppose."

She continued stroking Pearl's head as the two looked at each other. "How many years has it been since I died?" she asked. "I... did die, did I not? This does not feel like my soul at all."

"70 years, more or less," Alex answered from the side.

"70 years..." Shi Meiyoung said and finally looked away from Pearl. Her eyes fell on Bai Jingshen and she finally let go of Pearl.

"Who might you be?" she asked.

"Do you not recognize me?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"Not really," Shi Meiyoung said with a slightly rueful smile. "I only know that my grandfather is a White Tiger, but he has long since died, so I do not know who you are."

"I did not die, child," Bai Jingshen said. He stepped toward Shi Meiyoung, along with the other 7 beasts, and stopped when he was right in front of her.

"It is me," he said. "I am Bai Jingshen, your grandfather."

Shi Meiyoung's eyes went wide in shock. "You are?" she asked, unable to believe it. "But you were supposed to be... I was told you were..."

"Whoever told you this was mistaken. That is not their fault, everyone believed I had died," Bai Jingshen said as he kissed her forehead. "I never thought the cub I saw back then would be so grown up."

Shi Meiyoung gave a look of surprise. "We've met before?" she asked.

"Of course," Bai Jingshen said. "Did your mother not tell you? That is when you got your bloodline."

"Oh!" Shi Meiyoung said. "I... wasn't aware. She did tell me there was a secret to my bloodline, but never told me what it was."

"I see," Bai Jingshen said. "She must have done it for a reason then. That matters not at the moment. Here, meet your Grandmother."

Ren Xiao was already in shambles with tears streaming down her face nonstop. Before Shi Meiyoung could even turn around, the large cat was already hugging her deeply.

Alex watched from the side as the reunion brought a tear to his eyes as well. Once Ren Xiao talked with Shi Meiyoung, the others approached and started talking to her as well.

Shi Meiyoung was beyond happy to meet the entire family. Not only was her son still alive, he had grown up, and now she got to meet her grandfather whom she had heard so much about, as well as her grandmothers.

It was a while before she questioned how any of this was even possible.

The group explained what was happening, and how they had brought her back to life. By the time they explained it all, Shi Meiyoung understood that this was something temporary.

In fact, this wasn't even her at all. What she was now was just a fragment of a memory the core remembered of her being. Still, even with all that, she was happy.

She was so very happy to see her child grow up to become what she had always hoped he would be.

Shi Meiyoung turned to look at Alex finally. "You're not the young man I met, are you? You look nothing like him," she said.

"Ah, that was me," Alex said quickly. "I looked different back then."

Due to the game 'character creation' system, he had indeed looked a lot different than what his original body was back then, and that was all the white cat had known.

"You remember that day?" Alex asked her.

"Vaguely," she said. "I remember being hurt and meeting a young man who tried to protect me despite being wounded himself. I don't remember much aside from that, but I must have asked you to take care of my son. Thank you for not abandoning him when he was a child."

"Of course," Alex said. "I promised you I would, so I did. It is only right."

"Still, you do not know how happy I am right now to learn that my child is not only alive, but doing well. He's even managed to become a White Tiger," she said proudly.

Pearl gave a wide grin.

"I hear you can do this with any beast whose core you get?" Shi Meiyoung asked Alex.

"Um, yes," Alex said. "As long as the beast is above Saint Transformation realm, it should be possible."

"That is not a problem," the White Cat said as she put on a saddened face. "Shouchuang's father must have died by now. If you can somehow get your hands on his core, please help Pearl meet him. I'm sorry to make another request so soon, but this one I must beg of you."

"No, no, I will do it," Alex said. "Just tell us who he is, and we'll do our best."

"Who he is?" Shi Meiyoung gave a weird look. "Do you not know?"

Everyone shook their heads.

"Shouchuang's father is Qing Tianchui," she said. "Ruler of the Eastern Continent, the Azure Dragon."

Chapter 1750 The Past

The shocking news left behind the silence that perpetuated as time went on. Each and every person there looked at Shi Meiyoung with various emotions plastered all over their faces.

Bai Jingshen's eyes were wide, his wives tried to hide their shock, and Alex simply struggled to understand the possibilities surrounding the situation.

As for Pearl, he had the most number of emotions passing through his mind. Shock, surprise, confusion, happiness, sadness. Every possible emotion he could feel at the moment was all passing through his mind one after another and they left behind a blank face instead.

Shi Meiyoung looked back at everyone. "Were you guys... not aware?" she asked.

"We had no way of knowing," Bai Jingshen said as he nodded and gave a look of understanding.

"But you should have guessed, right?" Shi Meiyoung asked. "Shouchuang was born with the bloodline of both the White Tiger and the Azure Dragon. He has both Supreme Metal Root and Supreme Wood Root."

"He... does not have a Supreme Wood Root," Bai Jingshen said. "And he most certainly does not have the Azure Dragon's Bloodline."

"But... but he's..." a look of thought spread across Shi Meiyoung as she contemplated something. "He must have destroyed it."

"He?" Bai Jingshen asked. "Qing Tianchui?"

"He teleported us away," Shi Meiyoung said. "He must have done something to Shouchaung's bloodline then."

Pearl had been listening to the conversation, but his mind was all focused on the single bit of information he had received through all of this.

His father was the Azure Dragon. The same Azure Dragon that had died long ago.

He had always known or at least believed his father to be dead. He had no hopes of ever seeing his father in this lifetime at all.

However, hearing who his father was, and understanding the things that had most likely happened to him, the things that had most likely happened to his family, was not something he could come to terms with so quickly.

His mind reeled with all the knowledge he received back in the Eastern Continent.

His mother had died at the same time his father had died, and close enough to that period, his grandfather and grandmother had died in the Beast Paradise as well.

The Dragon Emperor was involved in his father's death, even though he claimed to not be the one to do it. It was all that man's fault.

Now, more than ever, he wanted to kill the man. He wanted to sink his teeth into his throat and rip his spine out from the front. He wanted to swipe at the man's chest and pull out his rips. He wanted to kill the man in any way possible.

However, Pearl was weak. He was so weak that he couldn't even avenge his own parents. What was all of this talent and potential good for if he could do nothing with it at all?

His fury increased and the emotions all combined together to reach a crescendo.

And something happened.

"Pearl!" Bai Jingshen's voice snapped Pearl out of his thoughts.

He turned around to look at Bai Jingshen who was staring at him with wide eyes.

"You..." Bai Jinshen had noticed something.

"Yes, Grandpa?" Pearl asked.

Bai Jingshen stared at Pearl for what seemed like a long time before he stopped staring. "Don't do that again," he said. "Never do that again."

Pearl was confused. 'What did I do?' he wondered.

None of the others were aware of what Pearl had done either. They were all surprised by Bai Jingshen's sudden shout.

"What... happened?" Shi Meiyoung asked, looking worried.

"Nothing," Bai Jingshen turned around. "Go on. Tell us how you two met."

After the battle 5000 years ago in the Central Continent, the Azure Dragon had been wounded heavily enough that if he waited for the Heavenly Judgment, he was sure to die. So, he decided to hide in his secret realm for centuries and centuries, healing himself.

He had pills to help him heal, but cultivating with a weakened body still took time and it was after generations that he was finally back to being as strong as he was.

Once he was fully healed, he had decided to deal with the Heavenly Judgment that stopped him from leaving the secret realm.

The Azure Dragon fought the Heavenly Judgment and came back injured but free of the lightning. Then, he spent another few centuries trying to heal himself from that.

All in all, 2 millennia had passed by the time he had healed himself, and was finally everything was back to normal.

That was when he had realized that in his 2 millennia of negligence, his beautiful secret realm had been completely destroyed and the beautiful floral gardens and pond were all beyond his control.

Even the palace that had been built in the center of the pond had long since been destroyed.

So, with little need for consideration, the Azure Dragon asked the beasts of the Beast Paradise to send him helpers to help maintain his realm and palace.

That was when Shi Meiyoung had first met the Azure Dragon.

On the very first day, Qing Tianchui had noticed the thick White Tiger's bloodline flowing inside of the White Cat and had taken an interest in her.

He had questioned her about her lineage and quickly found out that she was the granddaughter of Bai Jingshen.

Qing Tianchui had never been close to Bai Jingshen, but after his sacrifice in the Central Continent, he had come to think a great deal of him.

The beast was a martyr for the world and as such the Azure Dragon decided to treat his granddaughter with proper respect.

There were times when Qing Tianchui wanted to take Shi Meiyoung to her grandfather's home, but there never really was a proper time.

They kept delaying it, and before they knew it, thousands of years had passed. And in that time, the two of them had only grown closer.

While Qing Tianchui had initially been interested in just Shi Meiyoung's lineage, over time he had come to be interested in her as an individual.

The love between a tiger and a dragon was considered worthless, for it would not give fruit to anything. They were simply so incompatible.

However, out of some freak chance, they had managed to do the impossible. And out of the bloodline of the two greatest beasts to ever live in all of the realms, came a child born with both.

"When Shouchuang was born, the world glowed with the color of metal and wood, and we knew he wasn't just special to us. He was a special child for the entire world."

Shi Meiyoung's eyes glowed with happiness when she spoke those words almost as though she could perfectly envision the day her son was born.

"If someone told me this without the proof being right in front of me, I would've never believed them," Bai Jingshen said. "But it is real."

"He is," Shi Meiyoung said with a warm smile.

Pearl could still not believe that his father was the Azure Dragon, ruler of the Eastern Continent.

"And then?" Ren Xiao asked. "What happened after that? How exactly did you come to... die?"

Chapter 1751 A Promise

?The hidden story behind Shi Meiyoung's death surfaced as she told everyone everything she knew.

"I was wounded by that woman, the empress. Shouchuang's father did what he could to protect us both and teleported us away, which was how we arrived on this side of the world."

"However, even then I already knew going to die. I was steps away from death with my soul fading slowly. I did my best in the end to save Shouchuang and that was when this young man came to save me. And the rest you know."

The look on the beast's face had long since changed to that of anger.

"That bitch!" the Lynx shouted. "To think attacking the Western Continent in our husband's absence was the worst we thought the two of them could do."

"She was the one responsible for killing my granddaughter," Ren Xiao said. "If only she was alive, I would..." She let out a low growl.

"Such an ungrateful bitch. We healed her when she couldn't have a child. This is how she chose to repay us?" the tiger said.

The others let out all sorts of colorful curses and descriptions to call the empress too.

"She is... dead?" Shi Meiyoung asked after hearing about them talking about her.

"Yes, she is dead," Bai Jingshen said. "But the Emperor is still alive. Don't worry, we'll do something about him."

"We'll avenge you, Mother," Pearl said. "I will avenge you."

Shi Meiyoung turned around, wide-eyed with a look of horror in her eyes. "What?" she asked.

"I will make sure—"

"No!" she said sharply. "You will do no such thing."

"Huh? But he killed you, mother. He... he... I have to avenge your death. Father's death. If I don't do that, how will I—"

"Shouchuang!" Shi Meiyoung spoke loud enough to get Pearl to flinch back in fear. "Your father and I didn't sacrifice our lives protecting you so you could do the same to avenge our deaths in return. Child, we don't want you to die."

"We want you to live your life, free of any burden. Please, promise me you won't do that!"

Pearl's mouth was open but he couldn't form any words. He was speechless, completely taken aback by his mother's insistence.

"I—"

"Shouchuang, Pearl, promise me. Promise me you won't do anything reckless. Don't do anything that will get you killed," Shi Meiyoung said. Halfway through her words, she had tears forming in her eyes, slowly dripping down the path that had dried up around her eyes.

"Grandfather, please help him see sense. Grandmother, please don't let Shouchuang die. Seniors, I beg you to help my child," Shi Meiyoung begged.

She turned toward Alex. "Even if you have to force him, don't let him kill himself."

Pearl looked around at the entire entire group that stood around him, begging them with their eyes.

For the past 20 years, they had made Pearl the one to look for his mother's killers. Now that he had finally figured out exactly who it was that they needed to get their revenge on, he couldn't be told to not do it.

It was just too cruel.

"Shouchuang," Shi Meiyoung called him. "Look at me."

Pearl turned his head back to his mother. "Promise me! Promise me you won't try to get revenge on my behalf."

"I..."

"Promise me," Shi Meiyoung insisted.

Pearl couldn't say no anymore. "I... I promise," he said. He knew he hated the words as soon as he said it, but he meant it with all of his heart. "I promise... I won't try to find revenge."

"Good!" Shi Meiyoung said, feeling glad.

"Child?" Bai Jingshen suddenly spoke, catching everyone's attention.

"Hmm?" Shi Meiyoung looked up and then at herself. "Oh... am I... dying again?"

Her body started to fade away slightly, slowly turning transparent. Wisps of white energy flew out of her body one at a time, each turning into mists of spiritual energy.

"M-mother?" Pearl spoke urgently. "What is happening?" He turned around toward Alex. "Brother, do something. Please."

Alex wondered if his body was somehow unconsciously absorbing Pearl's mother and forcing it to stop doing whatever it was doing, but that had not been the case at all.

It was just something that was happening all on its own. Whatever was going on, Alex had no fault in it.

"I... I can't stop it," Alex told him. "I'm sorry."

"NO!" Pearl shouted. "Mother, no. Please don't leave me."

"Shouchaung! Oh, my dear Shouchaung," Shi Meiyoung spoke in a soft voice. "I might be gone, but I will always be with you. I'm always here with you."

Her body grew more transparent and she could feel herself disappearing.

"I wanted to talk to you about your father," she said. "I wanted to tell you all about him. You would've loved him, Shouchaung. He was an amazing person."

"Mother, you can tell me all about him. We... we have time," Pearl said as she hugged his mother's body. "I have so much to tell you about as well. My journey, Brother's family. I have another mother now, a Human mother. And a father too. I have a brother who is a mouse and a sister who is a Phoenix. I... "

"That is excellent, Shouchuang," Shi Meiyoung said with a mournful smile. "I wish... I wish we had more time. I can... feel my body growing weaker... by the second. I'm... once again going to leave you alone."

Pearl started crying, sniffling next to his mother. "Don't leave me, mother. Please."

"I'm sorry, Shouhuang. At least," Shi Meiyoung said slowly. "At least, I'm not leaving you... completely alone this time."

She turned her head toward the rest. "You have taken good care of my son," she said. "Please continue... doing so."

Ren Xiao rushed to Shi Meiyoung and took her for a hug, licking the side of their head in love. "You didn't have to ask. Of course, we will take care of your child."

Shi Meiyoung gave a satisfied smile and turned to Pearl, seeing his crying face. She had been trying to put on a brave face for Pearl, but seeing his tears made her cry once more.

"I'm... I'm sorry, Shouchuang. I should have been there for you. Both your father and I, we should have... We failed you. I'm sorry we couldn't be there for you."

"No!" Pearl said. "Don't be sorry, mother. You have nothing to be sorry about. It is because of you that I am alive today."

Shi Meiyoung licked her son's face. "Don't hate us for what we did," she said.

"Never!" Pearl answered.

"I... I would've loved to see you grow, loved to see who you would have become. You're special... Pearl. You... are something that has never before existed in this world, something unique. A child... of impossibility."

Shi Meiyoung's body faded even more and more. Pearl tried to talk to her, but she could no longer hear him. It was just her own voice that she could hear.

"You will become the strongest, Shouchuang. Your future... is limitless."

"So... do your best," Shi Meiyoung said. "And remember... I will always be there for you. I love you... my son."

Shi Meiyoung's body fully faded away into a mist of spiritual energy, leaving behind her final words, a declaration of unending love for her child.

Chapter 1752 Preparation for War

Pearl remained weeping next to Ren Xiao, who also wept. The other 6 female beasts sobbed in the back as well, and even Bai Jingshen wiped his eyes as they were filled with tears.

Alex found it difficult to not tear up as well.

They remained that way for nearly 5 minutes before Bai Jingshen turned toward Alex. "Thank you," he said softly. "If not for you, we would not have gotten to talk to her at all."

"That's alright," Alex said. "Anything for Pearl."

Pearl turned around too. "Thank you, brother," he said. Everyone else gave him words of gratitude as well.

One by one, the beasts started leaving Alex's Spiritual Sea, and Alex felt the weight lift from his mind. It was a sensation of freedom that he would have never felt unless something had bogged down his spiritual sea.

Pearl looked at the mist of white energy that floated in the air and dropped one final tear before putting on a brave, smiling face. "I love you too, mother."

He too then disappeared from the spiritual sea, leaving Alex alone.

Alex could tell now that Shi Meiyoung had been gone from his Spiritual sea, he was free to leave. In fact, he needed to leave quickly, or else there would be trouble for him.

However, seeing the vast cloud of spiritual energy, he knew that he couldn't let it go to waste. Even if it was the energy that formed Pearl's mother, he needed to take it in. Letting it go would just be a waste.

So, he raised his hand, and the yellow fog released from his palm, moving toward the foreign element in his Spiritual sea and attacking it. Whatever it attacked and destroyed, it consumed, turning it into Alex's own power.

Alex felt his spiritual energy grow once again, becoming stronger and vast. It was a noticeable improvement and that made him feel quite happy.

He didn't linger on the thought of happiness and quickly came back outside. The moment he was out, he instantly employed his cultivation technique and started absorbing the absurd amount of energy that came from Pearl's Mother's core.

The White Cat had been in the Saint Transformation 4th realm, and that was a massive enough jump in the amount of energy Alex was used to getting from the cores.

Without hesitation, he pulled out a pill to help him with cultivation and ate it. Soon enough, he was deep in cultivation, giving no thought to the happenings of the events around him.

Pearl was still sobbing and so was everyone else. But Bai Jingshen had long since stopped feeling sad. Instead, a look of worry, confusion, awe, and incredulity filled his face as he looked at Pearl.

'A child of impossibility,' he thought as he remembered his granddaughter's words. 'Without a doubt.'

"Pearl," he called for him.

Pearl turned around. "Yes, Grandpa?" he asked.

"Come with me, I need to have a talk with you," Bai Jingshen said.

Pearl wiped his tears and looked at his grandpa. "What do you want to talk to me about?" he asked.

Bai Jingshen's wives were staring back at them now, curious what they were talking about.

Bai Jingshen looked at them and shook his head. "This has to be only you and me," he said. "I can't say it out loud before I know for certain about something."

"Okay," Pearl said and followed Bai Jingshen, who took him away. The remaining beasts looked around confused, but quickly they too left.

Now, the dome was all empty, except for Alex who cultivated for nearly 4 days in total. By the time his cultivation had come to an end, he could feel that the speed of his cultivation had brought back some feeling of instability, and it was quite the strong one this time.

"Wow!" he couldn't help but say. "There was just so much energy there."

He had cultivated too much and too quickly. Even then, he had progressed quite far into his Saint Soul 9th realm. At the rate he had progressed, he was certain, that if he really went for it, he could reach the Saint Transformation 1st realm within the deadline without a doubt.

That was if he could pass the Inner Demon easily. If not, he would regress in his cultivation base at the most important time of his life.

It was a big risk to take, and Alex wasn't sure if he wanted to take that risk.

"I... I should take my time with the decision," he said to himself. "For now, let me deal with this feeling of instability."

Alex went by his time for the next few months either improving his body, Qi, and blood, or going around making sure the preparation for war was going well.

With Scarlet not involved in any of it, the elders had been looking after it all, so now Alex dealt with what he could there.

Pearl came to talk to Alex during one of those times and expressed his wish for the war. "I want to keep my promise to my mother," he said. "I want to kill that man, but the promise is more important to me. What should I do?"

He seemed to be very conflicted with his thoughts.

Alex petted Pearl's neck. "Don't worry, I'll think of something. I will have you involved as much as I can while still helping you keep your promise to your mother."

Pearl gave a small smile. "Thank you, brother," Pearl said.

Alex pat him on the back. "Come on. We have somewhere to go now. This might help us a lot during the war."

4 months passed easily, and the time of battle was drawing close. As time closed, Alex's chest felt heavy as well as the oath inside of him slowly tightened.

With not much time remaining, he decided it was time.

Alex gathered the nearly 20 thousand soldiers that were ready to go to the war. The remaining soldiers wanted to go as well, but they were simply too weak to be of any use in the war.

As such, only the stronger ones were being taken to the war.

A giant ship hung in the air, with modifications inside to hold all the soldiers inside of it. It hung in the air, glittering with all sorts of runes and formations that were ready to be used.

Alex looked down at the gathered soldiers, at the gathered beasts, his father, his aunt, his sister, his brother-in-law, Zhou Linfan, the elders, and everyone else who wanted to fight in the war.

The war was not just one of revenge, but also one of rescue. So, Alex spoke.

"Today is the day we have been waiting for," he shouted at the top of his lungs. "Our brothers and sisters were killed, even I was nearly killed, and many more of us are being kept hostage."

"The Dragon Emperor thinks he is the strongest and thus can do anything. Will we let him?"

"NO!" a resounding shout returned.

"Will we let him trample on us?" Alex asked.

"NO!"

"What will we do?" Alex asked.

"We will kill him!" "We will kill them all!" They all shouted.

"I wish you all luck and pray that you all make it out of this war alive," Alex said. "But fear not if you won't. Even if you die, your death will mean something."

"We will kill the Dragon Emperor."

Chapter 1753 Through the Voidgate

Alex stood alone on an island to the south of the Southern Continent. This was the island with the Voidgate through which everyone had come from the Eastern Continent.

Now, Alex was going to use it to get back to the Eastern Continent.

He walked into the small cave on the island, faint silver and purple light glowing up the sides of the wall.

He stared into the small and beautiful opening that led into the Void. He stopped right in front of the Voidgate, feeling the aura of Space and Time gently hover in the area.

Alex's chest felt heavy at the moment, out of both trepidation for what was to come and the tightening of the oath that he had made to the Dragon Emperor.

His mind lay heavy as well, making him suffer a little.

His cultivation was at the peak of the Saint Soul 9th realm at the moment. He had tried his best and had been ready to break through too. But he simply didn't want to risk anything, for he was sure that the threat the Dragon Emperor posed to him was one that he could not easily take away from his mind.

Alex took a deep breath, thinking about everything he had planned. There were a lot of plans, and a lot of moving parts, and any of them could go wrong.

He had to be ready for anything going forward from here.

He reached out with his hands and tore open the Voidgate to be wider. A stronger aura of Space and Time flowed out of the Voidgate, and the Void brightened the cave with its dichromatic light.

Then, Alex jumped in.

Immediately, he was back in the Void, a place he had come to a long time ago and had not been in for the past 30 years.

Alex swam through the empty space within the swirling lights that surrounded him, moving him like a fish through an ocean current.

The swirling energy both seemed ridiculously far from him and at the same time, so close that they were practically right in front of him.

He moved through the void, feeling the effect of both space and time.

Alex had a vague understanding that somehow the space was being shrunken in here. That was even without the knowledge that the distance between the two Voidgates was quite low.

He could somewhat understand the mysteries behind the aura within the channel. Only, they were still impossible to figure out entirely.

The Time aura in the Void certainly did something as well. Given how he was told that it would take him 3 hours in here, but barely any time would have passed outside, he could guess that time was stretched in here to be longer.

Even with that knowledge, there was nothing Alex could figure out from the time aura. He tried to close his eyes and see if he could find anything out, but the constant pain in his mind made him unable to focus entirely.

Still, he felt both aura at the same time and was lost in his thoughts.

Space and Time aura were two things that were meant to be impossible to sense unless you spent a lot of time around it, and even then it was impossible.

Somehow, Alex had managed to sense the both of them.

He had been able to sense Time aura thanks to Scarlet; the bond with the Vermilion bird had allowed him to sense Time aura.

However, he had always assumed that sensing Space Aura had been his own talent even since he absorbed the entire Space stone.

Only now, he was beginning to understand that might not have been the case at all. Just as Scarlet helped him with Time Aura, his ability to sense Space aura must have come from his bond with an Azure Dragon.

His bond with Pearl.

Azure Dragons had an inborn talent to detect Space aura and Teleport, just as Vermilion Bird had an inborn talent to detect Time aura and go through Rebirth.

'No wonder Pearl could learn Teleportation dao so easily,' Alex thought. 'If he still had his bloodline and Supreme Wood Root, he probably wouldn't have required that.'

His thoughts led him to many places, as the 3 hours that required for him to arrive on the other side of the Voidgate passed very quickly.

Alex realized that he had arrived at the other Voidgate that connected this spatial tunnel inside the Void and was ready to go out.

The other side of the Voidgate was in the middle of nowhere, floating like a crack in space.

As Alex neared, the crack widened up on its own and he was tossed outside of it.

Alex flew outside of the Voidgate, straight into a bright barrier that was held around the Voidgate. At the same time, Alex felt his cultivation base severely drop all of a sudden from the peak of the Saint Soul realm to just the peak of the Saint Foundation realm.

He also felt a pressure on his Spiritual sea that further burdened his already burdened mind.

Even before Alex could orient himself at where he had arrived, numerous spiritual senses landed on him at the same time.

"It's him!" a few voices called out.

Alex turned and saw a group of 20 or so cultivators that appeared out of nowhere, staring down at him.

"I'm flattered," Alex said. "Did the Emperor make you all wait for me?"

A single cultivator flew to the front while the rest remained behind, all of whom started using their battle array to empower the singular person who had moved forward.

The man who moved forward was someone Alex didn't recognize, but his dark blue robes were enough for Alex to tell that he was someone high in the military.

Seeing his attitude, Alex was certain the man was even a Battalion leader most likely.

"His Majesty did indeed say you would most likely take this route. You can stay here. We will call the His Majesty right away," the man said.

"I would rather you not," Alex said with a gentle smile, hidden behind which was a threat.

"I suggest you stay," the man spoke back. "Or would you rather be beat up and be forced to stay? Either way is fine for me."

Alex gave a happy grin. "Hurray! Fight it is."

He teleported instantly, arriving next to the man as he kicked him from the sky into the ground. A glow of energy, born from a talisman, protected the man on the ground, but he still grunted in pain.

"Activate it!" the man shouted.

Alex was ready for whatever bad was coming next, but what came instead was a flow of energy as the suppression field around him slowly disappeared.

His cultivation returned to him, and at the same time, the cultivation of the man below him returned as well.

The man stood back up, dusting off the dirt from his robe, and flared the Saint Transformation 5th realm cultivation base that was increased to nearly the 7th realm due to being the focus of the array.

"I see we will have to do it the hard way," the man said. "It is a good thing His Majesty allowed us anything short of death."

The man brought out a giant hammer and prepared for battle.

Chapter 1754 Notice of Arrival

?The man flew back up to Alex, his hammer glowing with bright brown energy, as he swung down on Alex.

Alex felt the aura of the attack, and could even sense the Earth Dao that was being poured into the attack. He used the Earth Dao himself, improving the Earth Qi in his body to the most he could, and then used the Jade Body Technique.

His body glowed with soft brown light as he put up his left hand to stop the hammer.

The hammer slammed onto Alex's left hand and the clash created an explosion that nearly destroyed the barrier surrounding them.

The leader felt the rebound pass through the hammer into him and was more than horrified at the feeling he got from it. It was as though he had hit an anvil.

"You should've used your Immortal Qi when you had the chance," Alex spoke, completely unhurt from the attack as he moved a fist toward the man.

The man tried to move back out of pure instinct, but Alex had moved long before he had any idea of what was happening at all. Not to mention, Alex wasn't even punching him at all.

He was in fact slashing at him with a sword that existed in the man's senses but not in his vision.

The Spiritual sword cut through the leader's neck and suddenly the leader lost the connection between his body and mind. He felt incredibly weak and fell to the ground, in which instance Alex actually punched him.

The man landed on the ground with a massive boom. At the same time, Alex let out a wave of spiritual energy, hitting everyone in the area, and knocking out all the 20 soldiers that were forming the array.

Not everyone lost consciousness, but all were too weak to do anything at all.

Alex quickly dealt with them all, feeding them pills that would make them fall into a coma that would last for a day.

He could kill all of them if he wanted to, but he had decided not to. Not only were these soldiers just following orders, but keeping them alive would give them value as hostages. Whoever they were, they had to be important since they were this strong.

Alex looked toward the barrier that surrounded him next. There were two different formations being run here, one that belonged to the barrier, and the other that belonged to the formation that resisted the suppression field of the Harmonious Balance Haven realm.

Alex destroyed the first one, keeping the second one active, and then searched through the entire secret realm with his spiritual sense to see what he could do now.

There were many participants in this year's secret realm opening, so Alex had many people he could use for what he had to do next.

* * * * * *

An entire year had passed since the Harmonious Balance Haven's official opening, and by the rate of the participants that had come out, it would last for no more than another year.

The Ebony King sat in his room, cultivating, and waiting for everyone to come out of the secret realm.

Everyone who came out had a chance to show what treasure they got inside the secret realm, and either sell that treasure to the sect or family that had put it in there in the first place for something in return or take it for themselves.

So, there were many representatives of such families and sects waiting outside the gates of the secret realm.

The Ebony King's eyes opened when another person walked out of the secret realm. It was a young woman, who surprisingly seemed to be in a distraught status.

'Did she fail to get any?' he wondered. The tickets to the secret realm cost any person a lot, so it was a sad deal anytime someone walked out without anything.

People reacted to the woman's arrival and were looking to see what treasure she brought out.

However, before she could even speak, two more people ran out of the secret realm, both in a similar state of distress.

The Ebony King stood up concerned. 3 people coming out at once was quite a coincidence. This late in the game, people coming out together always caused—

Another person came out, and then another.

By the time the 7th person came out, the first woman who had arrived started speaking.

"It's... It's King Alex of the Southern Continent!" she shouted. "He's attacked the soldiers."

"He's demanding an audience."

"He wants to trade with the Emperor."

"He wants the Emperor to come meet him."

Multiple people started speaking at once, creating a buzz in the surroundings as everyone tried to understand what was going on.

Before the Ebony King could move out, his two subordinates, who were really just his puppeteers sent to him by the Emperor, moved out. They arrived before the group and questioned everyone to get coherent information about what had happened.

The information was simple.

King Alex of the Southern Continent had arrived in the secret realm somehow, had killed a few of the soldiers in the secret realm, and was now demanding that the Dragon Emperor come to meet him or he would kill their soldiers.

The two members of the Head Legion immediately went into the secret realm and made their way toward where the soldiers would have been gathered.

When they arrived, they saw the scene of destruction as well as a strong barrier, beyond which Alex and the soldiers were.

The soldiers were all bloodied and seemed unconscious, their bodies piled on top of each other. Around them were 3 demonic beasts, bodies made of all crimson as though they were blood, and in front of them was Alex sitting with his eyes closed.

"You are not the Emperor," Alex's voice came from inside the barrier. "I have come to the Eastern Continent to trade with your Emperor. Where is he?"

The two looked at the surroundings, and one of the old men spoke. "If you had come for the trade, then why did you kill our men?" he demanded.

"They tried to attack me. That is what they deserve," Alex said. "Now, please relay the message to the Emperor. I do not have much time remaining."

The two frowned at the order, but there was nothing they could do. It was the Emperor's orders to let him know about Alex once he had arrived.

So, they sent a message as it had been requested.

* * * * * *

Inside the Dragon Palace, the Dragon Emperor sat in closed cultivation, waiting for the day Alex would return.

Alex had no choice but to return after all thanks to the trade that he had made with him.

He had been waiting as such for the past year, and finally, the day had come. He had received the message that said that Alex had arrived.

The Dragon Emperor walked out of the palace. "Find my son, and tell him to come with me," he ordered one of the servants, who quickly left to find the Crown Prince.

A minute later, Long Fangyu arrived next to his father.

Long Fangyu no longer looked as a prince should. He had long, unkempt hair, an unshaven face, somewhat hollow cheeks, with sunken eyes.

His body seemed to droop a little as he walked as well.

"Yes, Father?" he asked in an emotionless voice.

Long Tiankong looked at his son and shook his head, but he said nothing about his appearance.

"Come with me," he spoke as he walked away. "That King is here."

Chapter 1755 Half an Hour

"King Alex is here?" Long Fangyu asked. His face showed a hint of surprise, an emotion he hadn't felt in a while now. He walked quickly, following his father to wherever it was that he was taking him.

"He's arrived through the Voidgate as we assumed he would," the Emperor said.

"Is he... alone?" the Crown Prince asked. "Is Huan with him?"

"I don't think so," the Emperor said. "But it doesn't matter. So long as he has brought us the sword, your brother can stay in the other continent for as long as he likes."

Long Fangyu looked at his father, a glimmer of disappointment and animosity flashing through them before he suppressed them immediately.

The Emperor quickly flew out of the palace, making his way to the teleportation building with the Crown Prince and several of his subordinates right behind him.

The Emperor suddenly felt a talisman deep inside his storage ring buzz once again. He brought out the talisman, only to be surprised that it wasn't a messaging talisman.

Instead, it was a talisman that detected the presence of the Dragon Medallion.

"He truly is here," the Emperor said softly and used the talisman to see where Alex was. However, once again, the Dragon Medallion's presence disappeared.

"Where is he hiding it?" the Emperor felt stunned. He couldn't imagine how Alex was able to hide the medallion. Was he using some sort of talisman? Even that shouldn't have been able to hide the Medallion's beacon.

He would learn soon enough.

The teleportation building already had people ready to teleport, but with the Emperor's arrival, they had to delay it for the others to let the Emperor teleport away.

The Emperor teleported to the Blackheart city and flew toward the Harmonious Balance Haven as quickly as he could. The area surrounding the Harmonious Balance Haven had been cleared for the Emperor's arrival.

The Ebony King walked forward and greeted the Emperor, but the Emperor ignored him and looked at his two subordinates.

"When did he arrive?" he asked them.

"About half an hour ago is our best guess, Your Majesty," one of the men answered. "We notified you 15 minutes ago, and we believe he has been present in the secret realm for about 15 minutes before that. He is waiting for you, Your Majesty."

The Emperor nodded but didn't move. Instead, he thought for a moment. "He came alone?" he asked the two.

"Yes."

"Is he by the Voidgate?" the Emperor then asked.

"Yes, he's established a formation around the Voidgate and has our people hostage," one of the two subordinates said.

"I see," the Emperor said. "Have the Scale Legion in the ocean pay extra attention to what is going on there. His coming here alone is suicide, and I do not believe he is dumb enough to do that."

"He will be coming with people that will help him. They will either by coming from the ocean, or from that Voidgate," the Emperor said. "Has he revealed the Ivory sword yet?"

"I have seen nothing," one of the subordinates answered.

"Then there must be someone on the other side, waiting to come with the sword. Be ready, we might have a large-scale battle on our hands."

"Should we bring more people, Your Majesty?" one of the soldiers behind the Emperor asked. "It might be dangerous with you alone."

"I doubt they have anyone that strong to deal with me," the Emperor said. "Still, get who you can right now to come with me inside. If a fight breaks out, leave the King for me. Don't kill him too soon."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"Oh, and shut down the suppression field," the Emperor said. "Otherwise we will be on equal playing field."

The Emperor finally walked into the secret realm, followed by everyone else who was standing outside. Their arrival halted whatever fights or games were going on inside the secret realm amongst the participants.

Everyone watched in shock as the Emperor and his group flew through the secret realm, making them wonder just what was happening.

Not everyone knew about Alex's arrival just yet.

The Emperor quickly flew to where the Voidgate was, now no longer a secret spot because of the destruction that had surrounded the area.

The Emperor saw Alex inside a formation and landed outside of it, looking inside. The barrier seemed to stop all senses, and beyond that, there was some sort of hazy energy surrounding Alex, as if he was cultivating a very weird technique.

The Emperor found that suspicious, but he wasn't sure just what was suspicious about this hazy energy that surrounded Alex.

"You have arrived."

Hearing Alex's voice, the Emperor felt a hint of hope for what was to come in his future. Power.

"I'm sorry I took an awfully long time to respond to your... gift," Alex said. "But I have arrived in the Eastern Continent, just as you asked. I hope you aren't going to give me another gift now."

The Emperor scoffed. "Your little alchemists are fine. I haven't touched them if that is what you're worrying about. I will let them go once I get my sword. Speaking of which, do you have it?"

"Can you maybe wait for half an hour more?" Alex asked. "I planned for the trade of the sword to begin an hour after I arrived. We still have some time."

The Emperor snorted. "So, you didn't dare bring it with you. Who is going to bring it? The Phoenix? She can't come here. Or are you planning to fight on your own, like you did on the ocean? I would like to see what it was that you did to kill my soldiers."

"Half an hour," Alex said and kept silent.

The Emperor looked around in a bad mood. He saw the bloodied soldiers on the ground, with 3 beasts that stood atop them, ready to kill them.

"I heard about these crimson beasts," the Emperor said. "My men said they were made up of blood. Is that true?"

"They're called Blood Beasts, so yes," Alex answered. "Are you interested?"

"Quite," the Emperor said. "I'm also curious how you managed to get your cultivation back. As far as I remembered, you were clearly crippled."

"We are all curious about something, aren't we?" Alex said. "I am curious about a lot of things too. But we will have time to discuss that soon. Just half an hour more."

The Emperor felt restless. It was all right there, but he had to wait.

"What about the other trade?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

"That is the trade that is keeping me alive. I would be stupid to trade it right away. That would of course have to come at the end," Alex answered. "As I said, just a little while longer, Emperor."

One of the Emperor's subordinates moved forward. "Your Majesty, more of our soldiers are making their way here. Should we let them come?" he whispered.

The Dragon Emperor thought for a moment and nodded. "Let them come," he said before turning back toward Alex. "Alright, let us wait. Just half an hour more."

He sat down right where he stood, and so did the others. They waited for the next half an hour to pass.

Chapter 1756 Time Up

?More of the Dragon Emperor's soldiers arrived in the secret realm, seemingly prepared for when a battle broke out. The many participants of the current competition had been told to leave the secret realm for some time as well.

Long Fangyu waited with his father, his eyes on the barrier in front of him, but his mind somewhere else.

He couldn't believe over 2 years had passed since that day when he found out the truth of everything. All the words his father had said that day, they all flowed right back into him.

His father was a criminal, a murderer, someone who had gone against the Azure Dragon himself, and yet here he was still without any consequence.

He was even going to kill another King just because a prophecy said so. The prince felt even worse than he had for the past 2 years.

'Mother, what should I do?' he thought. Why was he so bad at choosing any sides and sticking to it?

The Emperor waited for half an hour to pass. He wanted to talk more with the King about many of the things he had surprised everyone with, but it seemed the young man didn't want to talk, so the Emperor let him be.

Time slowly passed and the half hour was gone. The Emperor waited for someone to come out of the Voidgate once the time had passed, but even as they waited, nobody flew out at all.

The Emperor waited patiently, but even as minutes passed by, nobody came.

"Your time is up. What is happening? Where are your men?" the Dragon Emperor finally lost his patience and asked.

"Who?" Alex asked.

"Your men," the Dragon Emperor said again. "Where are they?"

"What do you need with my men?" Alex asked back.

"You bastard! Are you playing with me?"

The Dragon Emperor stood up in anger. As he did, the hundreds of people that had gathered behind him stood up as well, ready for whatever command they were to be given.

"Where is the person that is to bring the Ivory sword?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "Why has he not arrived yet?"

"I do not know what you mean, Emperor. Nobody is bringing the Ivory sword. I brought it with me myself. I will be the one trading it after all," Alex said.

The Emperor felt as though he was being played with. "What nonsense is this?" the Emperor asked. "Did you not say earlier that someone was going to come from the Voidgate with the Ivory sword?"

"I never said that," Alex replied. "I only said that I was going to trade you with the sword half an hour later, as I had planned for the trade to begin an hour after I had arrived."

The Emperor and his subordinates frowned. They couldn't understand what was happening, but they all knew they were being played with somehow.

"And it has been an hour," the Dragon Emperor said. "So let us trade the sword. Or do you wish for the alchemists to die?"

"Of course not," Alex said. "But can we wait just a little while longer? Just a bit more."

The Emperor's anger peaked. "Break down that damn barrier!" he shouted at his subordinates. "Don't let him escape."

"Yes, Your Majesty!"

His subordinates immediately dashed forward and started attacking the barrier with a barrage of attacks. One after another, the bombardment of multicolored attacks left the barrier constantly rippling and weakened.

Then, in less than a minute, the barrier shattered like glass, the pieces disappearing into motes of light even as they fell to the ground.

Immediately, the Emperor's subordinates flew beyond Alex, covering his escape to the Voidgate.

The Emperor smiled a little when the barrier was broken down and walked toward Alex. "There is nowhere for you to hide. Just bring out the sword, and whatever it is that you wish to trade with me in regards to the oath."

Alex said nothing. In fact, he didn't even seem phased by the entire event. He still sat cross-legged, his eyes closed and the hazy aura around his body constantly obscuring his image.

The Emperor stood right next to Alex and slowly his smile faded. He looked at the soldiers that were supposed to be injured or dead, and not a single one of them was. Everyone seemed unconscious at best, but they were all still breathing.

As for the Blood Beasts that looked so menacing, all of them had a cultivation base of the Saint Foundation realm. They only looked menacing visually, but their aura made them pathetically weak.

Finally, the Emperor looked down at Alex and his unmoved body.

Something was wrong.

"What is going on?" the Emperor demanded as he grabbed Alex by his robes, but somehow he felt his palm miss the robe entirely.

The Emperor frowned and reached deeper, only for his entire arm to be swallowed into Alex's body.

"No..." the Emperor said quietly. His aura suddenly buffeted around him and the image of Alex in front of him flickered for a second before slowly dissipating.

What remained afterward were just two talismans on a small stump. One was a talisman for speaking, and another was a talisman to receive sounds and images from the surroundings.

"Oh, wow!" Alex's voice came out from the talisman. "Hahaha! I can't believe you actually fell for this. Since you are already duped, would you mind telling me where my Alchemists are?"

"Where are you?" the Emperor asked instead.

"I asked first," Alex said. "My alchemists?"

"AARGH!" the Emperor shouted and punched the talisman and the stumps, instantly destroying everything there. "RAARGHH!"

He continued shouting in anger.

His subordinates watched him in horror, realizing that their Emperor had been played with.

The Emperor took a deep breath and a look of pure hatred filled his face. "Find him," he said slowly. "He shouldn't have left the place yet. Find him!"

"Yes, Your Majesty," most of the soldiers instantly sprinted off.

"The rest of you, have the alchemists in the Dragon Palace be gathered right away. I'm going to kill them all."

The members of the Head Legion looked around at each other before quickly nodding. Then, they all proceeded to leave the secret realm.

* * * * *

Alex arrived in the Dragon Capital, flying atop a small Immortal sailing vessel that gave him speed that surpassed even the fastest ship that he had seen to date.

The ship was red, purple, yellow, and orange, the colors of the Phoenix; it was gifted to him by Scarlet once she had finally been able to access her Soul Space as well.

'This ship truly is incredible,' Alex thought as he landed outside the Dragon Capital.

He had teleported to the Brightfalls city in the Emerald kingdom and had then flown straight in this direction from there.

What had once taken him half a day of travel, now took him only half an hour with the new ship.

Alex was already disguised, so he made his way into the capital, finding his way to the Royal School of Alchemy.

He had no idea where his alchemists were kept, but he hoped they would be in the school. As such, that was the first place he had to start searching from.

Thinking so, he arrived at the school and went in.

Chapter 1757 Search In The School

Alex casually made his way through the Royal School of Alchemy, wearing on his chest a metallic '6' to denote his Level of alchemy, which he had made just to infiltrate this place.

As everyone walked around with a level on their chest, walking around with one of his own helped him not stick out in the school.

He kept his head down, one that still burned with pain, as he walked past many of the students. None of the students there turned to look at him at all. He crossed the many buildings on the way and arrived at the other side of the school where his alchemists were kept.

Arriving close to that area, Alex slowed down and became less casual. He started being more careful who he came across and searched to see if his alchemists were around at all.

As he got closer to the building, he slowly pulled out Yang aura from within him and encased himself with it to hide himself from anyone's senses.

Then, he directly teleported into the building in the distance where his alchemists would be kept.

Alex arrived in an abandoned building and looked around. He checked his surroundings and realized this place had long since been empty.

His alchemists weren't here at all. He spread his senses to the other rooms and found those all completely empty as well. There weren't even any formations running in any of the rooms at all.

'They're not here,' Alex thought. He frowned a little as he understood the situation.

'They've been moved,' he thought. 'But to where?'

Alex didn't know about any prisons in the Dragon Capital where they could be.

If they were in some other

Whisker flew out of his Beast Space and stood in front of Alex on the ground.

"Can you help me search if the alchemists are kept in some other area in this school? They're not in their regular place," Alex said. "And hurry, the Emperor knows that I'm not there now, so he should already be searching for me everywhere."

"Okay," Whisker said and ran away from Alex, melding into the walls and disappearing away.

Alex rubbed his head as the pain continued to increase. How much longer could he hold?

He sneaked out of the front door and walked away from the building, acting as though nothing was wrong. He wanted to check the other buildings before he left, so he made his way to the opposite side of the land.

He went to 3 different classes, checked the faculty room, and entered the library to check for his alchemists, but it was certain now that they weren't there.

It was already close to being half an hour since he last talked to the Emperor, so he couldn't delay it any longer. 'Dammit!' Alex thought.

Just as he thought of leaving the school, he saw an image from Whisker who was looking at a young man in the middle of a library, seemingly reading up on some books.

"Good job!" Alex said as a bright smile appeared on his face. He quickly made his way toward where Whisker was and found the young man who was reading in the library.

"Wu Shun!" he called out to him hurriedly, while in a whisper and sat opposite to the young man.

The young man quickly looked up and frowned as he saw a face he did not recognize at all. "Who... might you b—"

"It's me, Alex," Alex quickly said. "Are you alone?"

Wu Shun's eyes widened. "You... Your Majesty, is that really you?" the young man asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "Where are the other alchemists? I couldn't find them."

"You came to save them?" Wu Shun asked. "They were taken away. I believe they are in the Palace right now."

"Taken away to the palace?" Alex frowned. It seemed he was going to sneak into the palace. Was that even possible? "How did you survive?"

"They didn't take me as I wasn't part of the group of alchemists that arrived with you, Your Majesty," the young man said. "They don't realize that I was taught by you as well."

"Good," Alex said. "I'll go now. I have to save them. I'll see you later."

"Yes, Your Majesty," Wu Shun said quickly. The young man looked with an expression of awe as Alex left. He couldn't believe that the King of another Continent, who was known to be a criminal for stealing Empire treasure and running away had somehow managed to sneak all the way into the capital itself.

"Incredible," the young man thought. Realizing that some big things were going to happen next, he closed the books. Just as he was about to leave, he heard a loud voice spread through the entire sky.

"King of the Southern Continent!" the voice spoke with massive intensity. "If you want your alchemists alive and well, you will present the sword that belongs to the Royal Family right now."

Alex stood in the middle of the meadow as he was walking out and looked toward the eastern sky where the Emperor hung in the air with a few dozen men behind him, and his Alchemists, all of whom seemed very docile at the moment.

Alex frowned.

He noticed that it wasn't just the Emperor who was speaking, but also there were newsboards all around spreading the same message throughout the continent.

"You have 15 minutes to make yourself known to any of my soldiers. If you do not, I will kill all of your alchemists."

'Dammit!' Alex thought. It seemed that was all he could do sneaking around. 'I should be happy part of the plan went well at least.'

He slowly walked out of the school, taking his time as he thought of a new plan with a mind that constantly felt as though on fire.

* * * * *

"Father, are you sure he is even here?" Long Fangyu asked his father. He looked back at the 20 Saint realm alchemists who were only of half-mind at the moment, clearly given some sort of poison or pill to make them half-conscious.

"He is here," the Emperor said. "I do not know what he is planning, but he is here. He couldn't have talked through that talisman otherwise. And he definitely used his Dragon Medallion. I do not believe he was using someone else to mess with me."

Long Fangyu said nothing to that. There wasn't anything he could say. He only hoped that if someone did come with Alex, he hoped that it was not his brother.

"Your Majesty," a woman from the Head Legion moved forward. "We know where the medallion was used."

"You found out? Where was it?" the Emperor asked.

"He used it to authorize an immediate teleportation to the Brightfall city in the Emerald Kingdom."

The Emperor frowned. "The Brightfalls city?" he asked. "Did he not want to directly teleport here, in case we ended up meeting him?"

"We can't be certain of his motives," the woman answered.

"At least it is confirmed that someone did come here with the medallion. He won't be far away either," the Emperor said. "Pass along my message to everywhere. I won't be played with anymore. Either he arrived in the next 12 minutes, or they will die."

Chapter 1758 First Trade

Time passed by the minutes, and the Emperor continued flying in the sky, waiting for any sort of message of Alex's arrival. With the newsboard continuously sending out messages all around the continent, he had to have known by now what was happening.

As the minutes came to an end, the Emperor could wait no more. It was time to stick to his words and kill these alchemists.

"I'm here."

Alex spoke at the very last second, flying slowly up toward where the Emperor and the rest were in the sky.

He floated close enough to them and yet far enough that he couldn't be surprised. His spiritual sense was constantly on the lookout for anyone trying to sneak close to him.

The Emperor was a little surprised to see Alex arrive in front of him. He hadn't expected Alex to be in the capital. Had he sneaked in before they had put a temporary stop on the teleportation buildings?

"Is this really you?" the Emperor asked in a cold voice. "I do not want any more surprises."

Alex pulled out the Ivory sword in his hand. "It's me alright," he said and pulled out something else. A talisman.

"No funny business or I will be gone before you can say anything," he said as he waved the talisman around.

"A teleportation talisman? That will be no problem," the Emperor said. "Nobody does anything without my order."

"Yes, Your Majesty!" A congruous response came from everyone standing behind the Emperor.

"That should do it right?" the Emperor asked.

"That should do it," Alex said. He looked at the Emperor's subordinates. There were about a hundred different of them here. If he did it right now, could he kill the man?

'No, let's save the alchemists first, and then deal with the trade. I can't kill him before that otherwise,' Alex thought.

"Are my alchemists safe?" Alex asked.

"As safe as they can be. They're half-conscious so that they won't act. It should leave their system in a day or two at most."

Alex slowly nodded. That was a good thing. "Then let us trade."

"Alright, give me the sword," the Emperor said.

"No, give me my Alchemists first," Alex said.

The Emperor gave an unhappy look. "I won't do that. I can't trust you." He looked back at the alchemists, thinking about something.

Alex shook his head. "Same here. I can't trust anything from a man like you." He so wanted to tell everyone about what he knew of the man, but he couldn't let it all blow over just yet.

He had to wait.

A long pause settled between the two of them before the Emperor said. "Let's make an oath then. Neither of us will attack each other or run away for 5 minutes after this trade."

Alex thought for a moment. The trade itself was fine, but making him wait was...

"Sure, I'll make the oath."

The two sides spoke the simple oath one by one where Alex had to hand over the Ivory sword and the Emperor had to hand over the alchemists without hurting them. During or after the trade was completed, neither side was allowed to attack each other for the next 5 minutes either.

"Let them go," the Emperor ordered.

One by one, the alchemists were sent forward, who unintentionally flew toward Alex in their thoughtless state.

Alex caught each one with his Qi and checked on them to make sure they were alright. Thankfully, they were just slightly intoxicated and there was no threat to their life.

"Now the sword," the Emperor said.

Alex looked at the Ivory sword for a second and sighed as he passed it along to the Emperor. The sword flew in an arc and landed right in the Emperor's hands.

The Emperor looked at the sword, feeling the spatial aura that vaguely surrounded the sword, and smiled. That was indeed the Ivory sword that he had been looking for for the past 70 years.

Finally, it was in his hand. The thing he had wanted the most would be his in just a couple of minutes.

Long Tiankong couldn't help but hold a wide smile on his face as he stared at the sword. "Thank you for bringing this back to me," he said and looked away from the sword toward Alex.

"I'm not going to lie," he said. "I am surprised you gave this to me. It appears I did a good thing that I did not kill your alchemists when I wanted to. I might have had to work harder to get the sword back."

Alex gave Jia Heiyun an antidote pill and watched her slowly get back her consciousness. It seemed antidote pills worked on whatever it was that they had consumed.

"You seem busy," the Emperor said. "I'll talk to you in a bit then.

The Emperor flew back down toward the Palace, leaving Alex and the rest in the sky.

"Your Majesty?" the man's subordinates called out in a confused voice.

"Just make sure he doesn't do anything stupid. I will be back in a bit," the Emperor said and left.

Alex looked at the Emperor leaving and gave a scornful look.

"Your Majesty?" Jai Heiyun called out to him. "You're here? No! Why are you here? Please tell me you didn't come for us."

"Don't fret about it," Alex said. "I am forced to come here because of an oath I made long ago. Me coming here had nothing to do you guys."

Alex handed over a bunch of antidote pills to Jai Heiyun and had her take care of the other 19 alchemists.

Alex then turned toward the group in the sky consisting of the Crown Prince, members of the Head Legion, and other soldiers.

"Prince Fangyu," Alex called out slowly. "How have you been? Has life been fun since you gave up your brother?"

Fangyu's face showed a look of despair and dark thoughts seemed to cloud his mind. He looked down, unable to answer, and said nothing.

Alex looked at the rest of the subordinates. "Are you people aware of where the Emperor is going right now?" he asked.

"That is of no matter to any of us," one of the men said.

"It is," Alex said. "Are you guys aware that the Azure Dragon is dead? And your Emperor had a hand in that."

A look of shock, surprise, and doubt flashed through each and every face in the sky.

Those who were shocked and in doubt were hearing something this preposterous for the first time in their life.

However, the ones who were surprised were clearly surprised because they hadn't expected Alex to know the secret.

Alex was somewhat shocked himself. "So most of you do know?" he asked. "And you still follow that bastard?"

"Do not talk about our Emperor that way!" one of the men shouted back and was about to attack but stopped himself at the last second, remembering the Oath the Emperor made on their behalf.

"The one you should be following should be the Azure Dragon," Alex said. "And yet you do not care about him at all it seems."

"I bet none of you even care that your Emperor is on his way to desecrate the Azure Dragon's corpse by stealing all of his treasures."

Chapter 1759 The Emperor’s Anticipation

?A bunch of the lower-level soldiers that were gathered around looked at each other and at their superiors, trying to judge whether the words coming out of Alex were in any way true.

"He is currently on his way to the Azure Dragon's secret realm, and you're going to just let him?" Alex asked. "He and the Empress were responsible for the Azure Dragon's death 70 years ago."

"Don't listen to him," one of them said. "Do not listen to the enemy's words. That is the first thing you should remember during the war."

A bunch of discordant yeses came from the soldiers that were getting confused. Their look of confusion faded away and a look of determination filled them instead.

'Shit!' Alex thought. He was relying on some of the Eastern Continent's army to turn against each other to hopefully win the war, but it seemed as though that was not happening.

At least, it wasn't going to happen on a small scale like this.

Alex frowned fully as he thought of what he was going to do next. He had made the vow to not attack or run away for the next 4 or so minutes, so he was going to have to wait for that to pass.

* * * * *

A young man trained in spear with a woman, constantly fighting her but never getting close to getting an upper hand at all.

They fought purely with spears, with neither side using any Qi, so the fight should've been mostly close, but the young man still failed to win against the woman.

The two of them trained in the gardens at the back of the Dragon Palace, the place that stretched for a few kilometers in all directions.

The entire garden was filled with soft grass underfoot and an array of flowers and fruit filling most of the area to the back.

The woman looked as though she was in her late 30s, and the young man looked no older than in his early 20s.

The woman stopped halfway through a stab and flung her spear upward, disarming the young man. She then quickly turned around and bowed.

"Your Majesty," she said, speaking nothing further.

The Emperor strode past the massive back door of the palace, ignoring any of the servants who were bowing to him.

He walked into the garden, walking straight to where the two of them were training.

The young looked at the approaching Emperor as well and stopped reaching for his spear. He showed a flash of surprise to see the Emperor coming his way.

"Father," he asked, walking forward. "Is something wrong outside? Should I--"

"Move aside, boy. Don't waste my time!"

The Emperor shoved the young man away, walking past him, not even looking back to see his fallen son on the ground.

He was a blur that soon vanished deep into the flower field and then disappeared in a burst of light.

The young man sat on the ground, looking toward where his father went, and felt dejected. He then turned toward the woman and felt anger bubbling in his heart to see that she was still bowing at the Emperor.

"Why do you keep doing this, Mother?" he asked. "He's your husband. You are the Empress. You do not have to act like you're his servant. Act like the damn wife you are."

The woman said nothing and slowly looked back up. This woman had long since given up any hope of being the real Empress of the Eastern Continent.

There had once been a fire inside of her, once had the soul of a fighter and a leader, who wanted to do good for the empire. However, after being chosen to be nothing more than a puppet to be placed on the throne, only there to do nothing but fill the seat. She had long since lost her vigor.

She thumped her spear to the ground with a loud bang. "Pick up your spear. We continue training."

* * * * * * *

The Emperor teleported into the Azure Dragon's secret realm.

Everything that had happened since he gained the Ivory sword had been a blur in his mind. How had he entered the palace? How had he reached the teleportation formation? How had he arrived here?

Everything was a jumble of information his mind had put aside for the sheer burning glorious sun of anticipation that brightened his thoughts at the moment.

He could tell in the back of his mind that only one of the two main tasks that he needed to had been done. He knew there was another thing he had to do.

He had to kill the king so that his prophecy didn't come true.

However, he could care little for that at the moment. The only thing he cared about was wondering what magnificent treasures there would be held in the Azure Dragon's soul space.

If he could get even the weakest Immortal weapon, he could easily kill the King right away, not that he needed it or anything.

So long as the King did not run away, he could kill him. However, if he did get a particularly strong weapon, then he could maybe even be able to fly out into the other continent and contest against the other Immortals.

He walked through the peacefully haunting overgrown meadows of the Azure Dragon, never maintained after the battle so long ago, blossoming with innumerable flowers nourished by the blood of the Saints and the Immortal.

He had to leave the Azure Dragon's body in the secret realm for the past 70 years as there was nowhere to keep it.

The body itself could most likely be held in another storage treasure, but the fact that the Azure Dragon had a Soul Space made it impossible for it to be put away somewhere.

From what he could understand, a space could not be put inside of another space. Had it not been the case, he would have long ago taken the body elsewhere.

Flying up to the lake, he arrived at the spot where he had put the Azure Dragon's body inside of the lake itself.

Or rather... where it should have been.

The Azure Dragon's corpse was no longer where it should have been.

* * * * *

Alex failed to hide the pain from his face. It had been a while and his mind hurt him more and more by the second. He couldn't even eat a pill to heal it as it wouldn't do much right now.

But that was nothing to worry about. The 5 minutes was coming to an end.

The 20 alchemists floated around Alex, waiting for something to happen. They weren't sure as to what just yet, but they had been warned by Alex to prepare to be teleported.

Alex looked at the soldiers in the distance one last time as he stared at the Voidsand Hourglass in his Soul Space and counted the time.

"Does anyone here wish to defect the Dragon Emperor and fight by my side?" Alex asked the soldiers. "You have learned what I told you, so I will give you that chance."

Everyone gave him weird looks, some even scoffed and ignored him.

Alex simply shook his head. He brought out a talisman to empower his voice to reach a distance that it wouldn't have normally.

And then he spoke.

Chapter 1760 Declaration

?Long Tiankong, the Dragon Emperor, stood atop the lake, his senses looking all around for any signs of formations or artifacts hiding the Azure Dragon's body.

In the first place, he couldn't even imagine who could have come here in the past 70 years as he and he alone had the one key to the secret realm.

Without the teleportation key, a medallion, that he kept in his storage, there was nothing he could think of that would allow one to enter the domain of the Azure Dragon.

Just as he thought that, he realized that was not true in the least. There were indeed more things that could aid one in entering and existing a spatial pocket such as this.

There were two swords, in fact, and one of them was with him right now.

But it hadn't always been.

A flicker of thought passed through his mind, one that had been bothering him for a while after his subordinates had told him, but he hadn't put enough consideration for it to come up with anything useful.

Before him, Alex had the sword. But he couldn't have had the time to come by here, could he?

"Brightfalls city..." the Emperor said softly. That was the city Alex had gone to before coming to the Dragon Capital. Why had he gone there?

It was in the Emerald Kingdom, up at the border, next to the Beast Paradise. Had Alex wanted to teleport to the Dragon Capital, he could've gone to any other city, and not Brightfalls exactly.

And that was when it hit the Emperor.

If one were to fly from the Brightfalls city and not take the teleportation formation along the way, they would end up at the Azure Dragon's realm.

Which meant... Alex had most likely been through here and had taken the Azure Dragon's body.

There were many things Alex could do, and hiding himself from the soldiers that surrounded the secret realm for a constant watch would most likely not be able to catch him if he wanted to hide away from them.

"But no," the Dragon Emperor told himself. "He couldn't take away the body at all. Even if he dragged it outside, there are soldiers in the area. Even if he could hide himself, he couldn't have hidden the body at all. How could he have—"

The Dragon Emperor's head turned downward, and he stared at the sword in his hand. Alex had that sword before him.

Alex had come here, with this very sword, and... he knew what the Dragon Emperor's plan was.

"And he must have done it himself," the Emperor realized. "He carved the Soul Space. He took them out."

The Emperor turned, rushing to the teleportation formation to teleport back to the Palace. He was very much certain now.

Alex had the Immortal treasures he wanted. And the Emperor had left him alone.

'No!' he thought. 'I can't let him get away. I can't let him teleport again.'

The Emperor was played with back at the Harmonious Balance Haven, where he had been distracted by Alex while he had done this all.

He didn't want to believe that not just had he been duped into being in the wrong place; he had been duped into letting Alex free entry into the Azure Dragon's realm and to his treasure.

As soon as he arrived back in the Dragon Palace, he didn't bother walking back outside. He directly flew into the sky, hoping that he wasn't too late.

He looked up and saw his subordinates gathered there, and not far away from them, so was Alex.

Alex held onto a talisman in his hand.

'Is he about to teleport?' the Dragon Emperor wondered.

And then Alex spoke.

"I am King Alex of the Southern Continent. To all those that look up to your Emperor, Long Tiankong, I will now tell you his crimes."

Alex's voice boomed in the sky, traveling dozens and dozens of kilometers in all directions, filling the ears of every person in the Dragon Capital and beyond.

Everyone had already stopped what they were doing to look at the sky because of the Dragon Emperor's earlier. And now they were ready to hear Alex's words.

"6000 years ago, your Emperor killed 5 Royal families, belonging to the Kingdom of Lin, Kingdom of Jang, Kingdom of Xuang, Kingdom of Fang, and Kingdom of Fen, by manipulating truths and using deceitful tactics to false fully accuse those kings and queen of treason when they had done nothing of those sort."

"5000 years ago, your Emperor led an army to the Western Continent, to raze it to the ground, to destroy all that was strong and good in that continent, under the lie that he was doing it in revenge for the White Tiger attacking the Azure Dragon, when the White Tiger had instead saved the Azure Dragon."

"70 Years ago, your Emperor then handled the death of the Azure Dragon and his wife, Shi Meiyoung, when he attempted to kill their newborn child."

"69 Years ago, your Emperor attacked his own son and daughter-in-law, and nearly killed the both of them."

"2 years ago, your emperor killed my subordinate, a guest of his in cold blood, and nearly killed me as well."

"Not even a month later, he apprehended my alchemists, and killed all the soldiers that had come along with them, sending their heads to me as a gift."

"I am sure there are many other crimes that can be associated with this man, but these are the only ones that I know of."

"And therefore, as one chosen of the Phoenix, I declare this man an enemy of the realm, and make the Judgment of death on him."

"Anyone who follows him and his commands shall bear the same judgment from me as well."

Alex looked at the Dragon Emperor who had flown to the sky with anger in his eyes, but had to stop himself because of his previous oath.

But Alex had been counting and the 5 minutes were just about to ber over.

"This is war! I have come for your head."

He raised his right hand forward as though presenting something, and his mind, which had been laying heavy on his head, suddenly felt free of all burden.

And above him appeared a colossal ship of nearly 300 meters and 100 meters in width, with a bulbous center that was around 150 meters in diameter.

The Dragon Emperor's eyes widened in shock as he felt thousands of people inside the ship, all of whom were appearing outside.

Thousands of people surrounded Alex in seconds, all in formation, all in uniform.

A foreign army had arrived within the heart of their empire, and a war had been declared.

Alex pulled out Midnight and pointed toward the Dragon Emperor and his subordinates. He took a single deep breath.

'I have delayed as much as possible, but I can do nothing much longer,' he thought. 'It is all up to the rest you. Hurry.'

He then stared at the group in front of him as the Oath to not attack for the 5 minutes disappeared from his chest.

"Charge!"

Chapter 1761 Trade

﻿﻿Upon Alex's command, hundreds of people charged toward the Emperor and his subordinates, beginning the war.

"Fight!" the Emperor shouted at once as well. He had understood what had just happened. A war had been declared and the enemy had infiltrated into their midst.

The two sides clashed in the middle, and an explosion of discordant lights and sounds filled the skies of the Dragon Capital, sending the entire capital into a frenzy.

Many soldiers of the empire flew up to defend their empire, but a few remained behind, unsure if they should help at all.

They had heard the crimes that their Emperor had apparently done, and while they could ignore most of it for the sake of the empire, they could not ignore the one that claimed that the Azure Dragon was dead, and the Emperor had been responsible for it.

If that was indeed the truth, then… they would have to think about which side of the battle they had to fight on.

However, as it was, they most likely had to go help the Emperor just for the sake of the Empire.

Alex stood in the middle of the battlefield, somewhat surrounded by the other army. As the leader of the war, he had to lead these men into battle and thus joined the battle himself.

Bodies fell left and right around him, blood-curdling screams sounding every other moment. Death filled the air around him at each second as more fighters joined the war.

Alex thoughtlessly swung his sword to the side, killing a middle-aged soldier who was coming for him. The man had been in the late Saint Soul realm and had most likely expected to kill Alex with a sneak attack.

That was just not happening with how strong Alex was now.

Alex strode forward toward the Dragon Emperor.

5 strong enemies surrounded him as he approached closer, each one of whom seemed to stand in front of him with the barest hint of hesitation as to whether they would kill him or not.

They all knew there was one final trade of some sort remaining that Alex had to be alive during so that their Emperor could get something, but that did not matter to them mostly at the moment.

A war had been declared, so priorities were different now. They needed to deal with threats before caring about any sort of trade.

They intended to kill Alex.

One of the people came for Alex, swinging a hefty axe down on Alex.

Alex looked at the man with a single glance, giving no more response than that.

A hammer appeared out of nowhere as Qiu Jianhong slammed it against the man's axe, neither of the two gaining any advantage over the other.

"If you're going to go for our King, you have to go through us!" Qiu Jianhong said with a loud harrumph.

A blast of ice-cold water in the form of a raging snake landed on another man who was trying to attack Alex with an arrow.

The man was forced to redirect his attack at the last moment to protect himself.

Ren Guanting floated beyond Alex to open a path for him.

Gong Liuxian got into a sword fight with another of the people who had been targeting Alex, easily fending off the person.

Huang Chen arrived closely behind, stopping another person in their tracks with a barrage of many earthen Qi attacks.

Hou Xinya took a shield to block a bolt of lightning that came Alex's way, taking on the final of the 5 individuals that were surrounding Alex.

"Go ahead, Your Majesty," Liang Shufen arrived behind him, sending a stray attack in the distance at another soldier who had joined the fray. "We will handle the rest."

Alex nodded and slowly made his way toward the Emperor, who stood with a few old people who had yet to join the battle. As members of the Head Legion, they needed to manage the battle as well as stand in defense of the Emperor.

These old men had brought out their talismans at some point and were furiously sending messages to their Legions to come at once. They needed more people right away.

Alex stood in front of these people, ignoring them and looking directly at the Dragon Emperor.

The Emperor's face was black with fury and hatred. His eyes were bloodshot since long ago, and he had been barely holding himself back from slaughtering every single person in front of him.

The only reason he hadn't was because a hint of fear stopped him from doing so. If they had come for him, then there was a reason they were confident.

He had to figure that out before he joined in blindly.

"You have it, don't you?" he asked. "You took it already."

Alex gave a mocking smile. "Whatever could you be talking about."

"You know damn well, you brat!" the Emperor spoke in anger. "Hand it back right now."

Alex shrugged. He reached into his storage ring to take out a talisman, which disappeared from his hands the moment it appeared. In the next instant, it arrived in front of the Emperor, surprising the group of old men who were to protect him.

They acted immediately, but the Emperor had been faster than them. He took the talisman from the air and looked at what it was. It was a recording talisman and it recorded something.

He dug his senses into it and read what was recorded inside of it. He took a moment to read it all, his look of anger and hatred fading for a moment to show signs of shock and absolute disbelief.

He wanted to learn more about what was recorded there, but he was unable to. His oath compelled him to not learn what was inside the talisman before he was done with the trade.

"How is this possible?" the Emperor said softly. "A—"

The Oath forced him to stop speaking about whatever it was that he had read in the talisman.

Alex smiled.

The Emperor took a moment to recollect himself and spoke again.

"So this is what you offer for the last trade," the Emperor said. "You have been keeping this from me for all this time."

"You keep the best for the last, don't you?" Alex asked. "Let's you enjoy it all the more."

The Emperor looked down at the talisman and then at Alex. "I understand better now why you are so good at making pill clouds consistently. This… could even be considered cheating."

"I have given you what you asked for," Alex said, feeling the knot in his chest slowly disappear.

It was as though he had been drowning for a long time, and someone had finally pulled him out of the water. He could finally remember what breathing was like.

"Now, what will you give me in return?" Alex said. "And remember, it has to be double the worth of it in return."

The Emperor was way too stunned to think of anything. How was any of this possible at all?

A technique that could perfectly create a pill to its highest potential Harmony. A technique that could do the same, but with two pills at once. And finally, a technique to improve ingredients to become the best they can be prior to being used.

All three of the techniques that Alex had given to the Emperor were something that had left the man speechless.

However, the thing that left him the most shocked was the fact that every single one of these techniques had come from the first man to have ever reached the peak of Alchemy.

The Alchemy God.

That simple knowledge made the techniques be worth many times more valuable than anything Alex could have ever made it be.

It became so valuable that the Immortal treasures that Alex had stolen from the Azure Dragon started looking as if nothing more than something a child would play with.

This was realms higher than any Immortal treasures he could imagine. Perhaps, it was comparable to a Divine treasure.

'I need this anyway I can,' he thought and looked at Alex.

"What do you want in return for this?" he asked.

"What can you offer that is double what this is worth?" Alex asked the man.

The men surrounding the Emperor were surprised at what was happening. People were dying left and right in the battle behind Alex, and yet they were there just talking.

The Emperor wondered what it was that he could offer for something like this. If he was being honest, there was really just one answer.

He looked back up and threw the talisman back at Alex.

Alex took it without any surprise. He had expected this to happen from the very beginning.

"So you give up," he said. "Our trade is over."

"No," the Emperor said. "Not just yet. I will pay you what that thing is worth, but you'll have to wait a while longer."

The Emperor pulled out his spear. "Until then, let me give you the battle you so desire," he said. "Men, prepare to fight."

Alex shook his head. "This was out of my expectations," he said. "But it is a good thing I came well prepared."

Two people appeared out of his Soul Space in a flash, standing next to him on either side.

Hannah stood to Alex's left, and to his right stood Zhou Linfan.

Zhou Linfan looked at the Emperor and his eyes blazed with fury.

"Finally," he spoke in a low, growling voice. "I have the chance to kill you."

Chapter 1762 Lin Xiaojing

?The Emperor had gone through multiple shocks in just the last few minutes.

First, Alex had somehow taken away the entirety of the Azure Dragon's treasure and body, something even he was incapable of.

Then, he had declared war against him and his empire. That was something the prophecy had said would happen, but it hadn't completely happened, so there was some solace there.

After that, Alex had brought out a ship full of thousands of people, ready to fight in the war that had just been declared. Their soldiers were surrounding the ocean, waiting for any army from the Southern Continent trying to sneak in, but to his surprise, they were already there.

Then, there was the surprise that Alex had given him with the trade. The techniques he had been presented alone had been something of a great shock, but what was more shocking was the fact that they apparently came from an individual from the higher realms who called himself the Alchemy God.

Finally, the arrival of these two new individuals had him reeling in shock. He was still unable to figure out how these people were being kept hidden, but that didn't matter.

What mattered was the fact that he recognized both of the two new people

The first one was someone who used to be his cook but had become his enemy for some reason. The Emperor still had no idea why that had happened.

However, that was not what truly shocked him. What shocked him was the presence of the young woman whom he recognized and feared so much.

The first time he had seen Hannah, he had nearly been killed. He knew the only reason he hadn't died back then was because of the young woman's relative inexperience when it came to battles and killing another.

However, her eyes were different now from back then. The thin black sword in her hand seemed ready for blood as well.

The Emperor felt a chill in the back of his neck, coursing through his spine.

Zhou Linfan pulled out a clean purple sword and charged for the Emperor without a single instance of hesitation.

One of the Emperor's subordinates moved up front, ready to protect their emperor, only to be sent flying away in a single swing from Zhou Linfan.

That was when they realized that Zhou Linfan had a cultivation base in the 8th Saint Transformation realm, just a single realm lower than the Emperor himself.

There was no one here capable of fighting him in a single battle, other than the Emperor himself.

Long Tiankong brought out his Noble Dragon spear as well as his Golden Dragon shield and flew into battle.

Zhou Linfan's body and his purple sword glowed with a soft white edge all around as something seemingly glimmering formed around him.

He struck the Dragon Emperor with his sword, creating an attack that sensed blasts of crystals flying at the Emperor.

The Emperor put up his shield, creating a golden barrier in front of it, blocking all the attacks at once. He struck back with a lightning attack, which Zhou Linfan surprisingly blocked rather easily.

The Emperor gave a look full of hate. "Zhou Linfan! Why do you fight me?" he asked. "I am your emperor."

"You are no emperor of mine," Zhou Linfan said. "You stopped being one the moment you killed my father, my mother, and the rest of my family. You killed all of my kin, so for that, I shall destroy you here today."

The Emperor's eyes widened slightly at the words. The words 'kin' and 'destroy' triggered something in the back of his head.

"Who... who are you really?" the Emperor asked. He feared what he was going to hear next.

"I am Zhou Linfan, but there was a time when I had a different name. I was Lin Xiaojing, son of King Lin Haoming of the Lin kingdom," Zhou Linfan said loudly. "For the injustice you brought to my family and kingdom, I shall kill you here today."

The Emperor felt another sense of fear from those words. Not only had a king made the declaration that he would be killed today, but so had the son of a king.

'No!' the Emperor thought. This was not going to happen to him. He looked around, wildly searching for the final of the three.

'No, as long as there is no White Tiger, I'm safe,' he thought and fought back against Zhou Linfan.

Alex looked at the fight in the air, standing outside of the battle. Zhou Linfan had requested that they don't interfere until they needed to, so they were staying behind.

He turned around, looking at the battle behind him. The chaos in the sky made it impossible to tell who was winning right now.

There were far too few soldiers on the Emperor's side while Alex had brought nearly 10 thousand of them. While his army was weaker, the overall strength they had was way more than the Emperor's army.

However, that was slowly changing. More and more soldiers of the empire were flying from far away or through different teleportation formations, making their way into the battle.

They were adding to their numbers slowly, but surely. Soon enough, he would be outnumbered here.

'Come on guys! I need the help,' Alex thought desperately.

"Alex, how is the situation?" Hannah asked him. "Can we kill him?"

"I've done my half of the trade, so I don't believe I will be in any trouble if he does end up dying," Alex said. "So you're free to do so if you can."

Half a minute later, Zhou Linfan fell back with his breathing in disarray. "Alright, I admit. I can't beat him alone," he said.

"Very well," Hannah spoke. "I shall aid you."

The Emperor was rearing to fight more, but when he saw Hannah move, he instantly lost all anger, and instead fear gripped him.

"Move back!" he shouted immediately. "Form the array."

The few subordinates that had hung around the Emperor immediately got into formation. An illusory golden dragon appeared behind them, floating around the group of people that then empowered the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor's aura rose tremendously, making him way more powerful than he already was.

Alex felt a hint of shock at the increase in strength. He was confused for a second, but thinking about it afterward, some things made more sense now.

Unlike the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array, which accounted for the number of people involved in the array, it seemed this array involved not the number, but the strength of the people involved in the array.

That was how despite only having half a dozen individuals around the Emperor, the Emperor's aura had still improved so much.

"He's stronger," Alex said softly. "Be careful."

"I will," Hannah said and moved forward to aid Zhou Linfan in his battle against the Emperor.

Alex looked at them go, and while he wanted to fight too, he couldn't. He had to let Hannah and Zhou Linfan tire the man out a little before joining in.

For now, his eyes were on another person far beyond the Emperor and the people in an array, who was staring at everything with a dull look in his eyes.

Alex moved toward the Crown Prince.

Chapter 1763 Leader of the Battle Array

Sounds of thunderous clashes filled the skies of the Dragon Capital as cultivators on both sides of the war fought to their best capacity.

Colorful explosions left behind a horrifying sight of death as bodies fell from the skies at every moment. Some were burnt, some frozen. Some were wrapped in vines, some cut in half. Some were filled with holes and some were simply intact but with no life in it.

A deathly aura filled the skies of the Dragon Capital as Alex's army used their upper hand to rend the life out of the empire's army.

It was a sad sight to anyone outside of the war, horrifying even. Neither of the armies was fighting for anything more than just what side they were on. Some believed in the cause of war, but most were fighting only because they had been ordered to do so.

A young woman charged forward with her spears, her eyes filled with the blood that seeped down her forehead. She stabbed her enemy, killing him as she stabbed him through the heart.

She pulled out her spear as the body slowly fell from the sky to the ground below. She huffed loudly and felt her head ringing from the pain.

She reached for her storage bag to pull out a healing pill when someone slashed her from behind, causing a terrible injury to her back.

Before she could turn around, however, the person who attacked her had been dealt with by a young fighter whose eyes were cold with fury.

8 golden tentacles hovered around Yao Bujiang, each attacking relentlessly at everything around him. He wasn't a very strong fighter, but over the past few dozen years, he had managed to reach a cultivation base of the Saint Soul realm, and he was using that cultivation base to now avenge the death of his ancestor, Yao Ning.

"Go to the ship, you're horribly wounded. Get some rest," he gave out the order to the bloodied woman and went on his way to fight.

The woman thought for a bit and nodded, flying back toward the giant ship that hovered in the sky.

Many attacks, intentional or simple mistakes, landed on the front and sides of the massive ship that her king, Alex, had brought to the Eastern Continent.

However, barriers around the ship stopped all attacks.

The woman was still surprised about how she had ended up here. For the past 3 hours, she had been in a world of darkness where she wasn't allowed to use her spiritual senses in the least.

Then, 3 hours later, she was on the Eastern Continent. Her king had done something pretty much impossible and that gave her hope that the result of this war would be something good.

She flew into the ship, disappearing past the barrier, very much protected in there.

The Empire's army was struggling in the war. They were few in number and had been taken by surprise, so they had lost a lot of people already.

However, that was not to say that the future looked grim for them. Continuous streams of help were coming from all over the continent as all of the Legions rushed to help.

Very soon, the paradigm of the war would be flipped on its head and it would be the Eastern Continent who would have the upper hand.

Several of the leaders of the legions or strong individuals had already established groups of newcomers to aid them with an array of formation.

Given the strength of the people fighting in front of them, if they established a battle array and attacked, the chances of their victory would rise by a lot.

So they did exactly that.

Several of the elders from the councils as well as the leaders of Alex's army noticed that as well. They had known about what would happen here and had been prepared for it the whole time.

So, as soon as more and more battle array popped up around the battlefield, the army started fighting in cohesion as well.

The war had caused the army to be in disarray, forcing the soldiers to fight in smaller groups. However, under the orders of the elders, every single soldier there started establishing the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array to begin fighting.

There was an issue with the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array in that it had two components to the array. Almost every battle array had that, and it did too.

The two components were all the individuals that would be involved in the array, and the leader who would handle it all.

Without the two components working in tandem with each other, the battle array could not be used at all.

The battle array that was taught to the soldiers was the half that belonged to the first component. They were never taught the part that belonged to the leader, for a leader needed to be chosen wisely.

The battle array could technically be used even without a leader, as all they had to do was remain in a certain area and share their aura with every other person in the array.

However, communication between those groups was nearly impossible when the number was as massive as it was now. That was why they needed a leader.

Normally, the one at the helm of it all would be Alex. But he could not involve himself in this battle at the moment.

The next one that would take the Leader's role was Whisker, but he wasn't there at the moment either.

So, a third person had to emerge to help establish the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array.

Graham flew in the air, his bare tanned arms glistening with sweat in the sun as he wore a single blue and green gauntlet on his right arm.

The gauntlet looked metallic, but it was not made up of metal at all. In fact, it was made from the scales of a lizard that was born with traces of the Azure Dragon's blood in its bloodline.

This was the Dragonheart Gauntlet that Alex had bought in the Golden Auction a long time ago, and finally, Graham was making a debut for it.

He stood in front of the ship, a leader of the army, and charged into battle.

Alongside him, thousands of soldiers rushed into battle as well while forming an array.

With ten thousand total soldiers under Graham's command, the power of each and every single individual fighting on behalf of Alex increased by nearly 4 realms.

Each and every soldier suddenly became a menace for their opponents to handle and the tide of the battle surged in favor of the Southern Continent again.

Graham wore not only the gauntlets but also a boot made specifically for him to help fly in the air with incredible speed.

Even with that speed, he could see everything clearly. His purple Demon Eyes gave him a kinetic vision that would put the vision of most saints to shame.

He flew across the battlefield and landed a direct punch on one of the leaders of a small battle array.

The crushing noise of the man's skull under Graham's fist was his introduction to the battlefield.

"Shall I make a few more greetings?"

Chapter 1764 To The Beasts

Pearl arrived at the Lion Colony, after flying as fast as he could for nearly half an hour.

Senior Yao, the black jaguar next to him, breathed loudly as he had been forced to give more than everything he could to help Pearl come all the way here as fast as they could.

After Alex's arrival in Brightfalls City, he had called him and Pearl out as they had another task.

They had to get the aid of the beasts in the Beast Paradise to fight on their side.

Given Pearl's newfound identity and his previous connection to this place, it was deemed that he was the best choice to come here and persuade these beasts to fight on his behalf, to avenge his father and mother.

Pearl wasn't sure if he would have instead gone with Alex to the secret realm where his father had died. He wasn't sure if he wanted to see that or not.

However, what he wanted did not matter at the moment. What mattered was what he and Alex needed. What they needed was help, and he was here to get them some.

"Young lord, is this the Lion Colony?" the Jaguar asked Pearl.

"Yes, this is my mother's home. The place where my grandmother was married to," Pearl said with a somber voice. "Let us go, Senior Yao. My uncle should be in there somewhere."

Pearl flew toward the village with familiar buildings. He had come here nearly 20 years ago and hadn't returned since then. It was good to see that nothing had changed.

A young beast flew out from the colony to check on the intruders.

"Who goes there?" the beast asked.

It was a young Night Lynx with glowing yellow eyes. It looked at Pearl and stopped for a second as it had never seen a beast like him before in his life.

Pearl didn't remember seeing this beast back when he had been here 20 years ago either.

"My name is Pearl. I'm here to meet the Colony Leader. Is senior Xiongwei around?" Pearl asked.

"He is around. What colony are you from?" the Lynx asked.

"None. We came from outside. Please hurry, we don't have much time," Pearl said.

"From outside? How did you... Outsiders are not allowed entry," the Lynx said quickly. However, given that the outsider was a beast, he wasn't sure if the rules still applied or not.

"Stay here, I'll get the leader."

The Lynx flew off and less than a minute later, Zhu Xiongwei, the leader of the Lion Colony, Pearl's uncle, came flying out. He was surprised to see Pearl arrive on his own, without Alex with him.

"Pearl? Is that you?" the Lion asked. "My god have you grown in just 20 years? It's nice to see you again, my child."

"Uncle, it is nice to see you too," Pearl said.

The Lion walked up to Pearl and petted him along the back of his neck in a gentle manner. He then looked at the jaguar next to him and gave a small bow in greeting.

"May I ask who this is?" the Lion asked Pearl.

"This is senior Yao. He is a trusted subordinate of my great grandfather, Bai Jingshen," Pearl said quickly. "Uncle, I'm sorry, but I do not have much time to waste on formalities."

"You're in a hurry? What's wrong?" the Lion's eyes narrowed in seriousness.

"Uncle... I found out who killed my father and my mother," Pearl said. "It was the Dragon Emperor."

The Lion stood still in shock, his head moving ever so slightly as he tried to make sense of the situation. "The... the Dragon Emperor? Why... why would he kill sister Meiyoung?"

"Because of me," Pearl said softly. "The Dragon Emperor tried to kill me because he was afraid of me for some reason, so my father and mother gave up their life in order to protect me."

The Lion's face slowly grew pale at first then grew dark as a look of hatred filled him. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"I spoke to a remaining will of my mother," Pearl said. "She explained everything to me."

The Lion looked up. "Sister Meiyoung did? Can I talk to her?" the Lion looked hopeful.

Pearl shook his head. "I barely got to talk to her at all," he said. "She is no more, but in that conversation we had, she explained to us what had happened. It was the Dragon Emperor who tried to kill me and ended up bringing death to my parents."

"So, in revenge for that and many other atrocities he has committed, my brother had waged war against the Emperor himself. He has arrived in the Eastern Continent with an army and they will start fighting any moment."

"That human is? I see. What do you need from me? Why have you come to talk to me?" the Lion asked.

"I was hoping you could help gather the 7 leaders so I could persuade them into sending aid to my brother. He has come with an army, but there are too few people in the army to fight against everyone in the Eastern Continent. So he needs help."

"As such, I came to Beast Paradise to hopefully gather an army of beasts to help my brother."

The Lion frowned slightly. "That... that might be a little difficult. While what you say does indeed make me want to help, the other leaders have no reason to fight the Dragon Emperor. They will call this your personal vendetta and try to remain out of conflict."

"As I promised you before, I tried many times to gather them to talk to them about the situation from many years ago when they decided to close the Beast Paradise."

"I tried to figure out what the cause was, but they've been tight-lipped this whole time. I'm not sure how much help they will be."

Pearl shook his head. "You just gather them, Uncle. I will persuade them. I am sure they will want to talk to me. And they will have reason to help me too," he said.

"Really?" the Lion asked. "Are you sure you can persuade them?"

"I can," Pearl said. "For I have brought them information that it was the Dragon Emperor who killed the Azure Dragon in the first place."

The Lion's face was a shade of pure shock. "What?" he asked. "The Dragon Emperor killed the Azure Dragon?"

The Lion had known long ago about the death of the Azure Dragon, or at least his being missing. However, this was the first time he had heard about the killer.

"I will gather them right away," Lion said and quickly sent a message all around for the other 6 beasts to gather at his place immediately.

Within minutes, Pearl could feel the aura of many beasts rushing toward them at a speed only possible for the beasts that were in the late Saint Transformation realm.

The Ox, the Eagle, the Lizard, the Elephant, the Swan, and the Deer arrived at the Lion colony and were greeted by the Lion.

"Leader Zhu, what is the important thing that needs to be discussed?" the Lizard asked.

"Please come into the council chambers," the Lion spoke. "We have something urgent and of utmost import to talk about."

Chapter 1765 A Talk

A thin wisp of golden light that streaked out from Hannah's sword struck the Emperor, sending him nearly 20 meters backward in the sky.

Zhou Linfan jumped in like a raging maniac and slammed his sword onto the Emperor as well.

The Emperor lifted his shield to block the attack and then retaliated with a spear attack that created 20 different illusory lightning spears.

Hannah appeared in front of Zhou Linfan, defending him as the attack was too strong for him.

The Emperor glared at the both of them. He hated just how much of a fool he was being made in this battle.

Thanks to the Dragon Array behind him, his power had now grown to become equal to that of the girl before him. He had to add a few more people to the array, but that was worth it.

However, even though he had somehow managed to become equal, he still saw no chance of defeating her.

The naive, inexperienced girl from back then was no more. The girl that stood in front of him now was at least experienced enough to not get taken aback at every instance of battle.

"Is this how you act in front of your Father-in-law?" the Emperor asked.

Hannah scoffed. "Don't kid yourself, Long Tiankong. You are not my father-in-law. Never were, never will. Even after I officially marry your son, you will only remain someone who I can only call by name, never a relation between us."

The Emperor scoffed as well. "You were better when your mouth was shut," he said and threw out a white-hot bolt of lightning strike.

Hannah's sword glowed golden and she cut through the lightning strike, breaking it apart into motes of energy that dissipated in the air.

Zhou Linfan attacked from the side, taking the Dragon Emperor by surprise. Only, the Dragon Emperor was expecting the attack. He was on the lookout for any attacks from every side.

He ever had his senses on Alex who had approached his son. As long as he wasn't caught off guard, the Emperor would certainly come out of this battle ahead.

'I just have to continue for a while longer' the Emperor told himself. 'My soldiers will all arrive soon.'

When his 100 thousand soldiers were all here, they would easily defeat the army of 10 thousand soldiers from the Southern Continent.

As such, his victory in this war was tied to time as well. It was a battle of attrition for him at this point. Last long enough, and he would win.

* * * * *

Alex stared at the Crown Prince who flew a few distance away from him, a dark look covering his previously handsome face.

"You look like you lost some weight," Alex said. "I wasn't aware that was possible for a cultivator without getting severely wounded. Were you wounded?"

Long Fangyu didn't answer. "Why have you come, King Alex?" he asked.

"To talk to you," Alex answered.

"No, to the Eastern Continent. Why did you return? Why not just spend your time in peace in the Southern Continent?" the Crown Prince asked.

There was barely any emotion in his voice when he asked those questions. If any, there was a hint of curiosity and maybe a pinch of sadness that somehow did not make sense to Alex.

"I have a trade to complete with your father," Alex answered. "You should know about that already."

"That's a lie," Long Fangyu said. "You didn't have to personally come to the Eastern Continent for that. You could've sent someone else. With both the sword and the talisman that you gave father. Why did you come with an army instead and decide to wage war on our Empire?"

"Ah! That's what you're asking," Alex said and looked away for a moment. He looked at the war, and then the Emperor's battle.

He had let Zhou Linfan attack him first because that was what he wanted. He was looking for revenge, and this was one of the conditions for his help.

Hannah had started fighting as well, and her job was to do the best she could. The more she wore down the Emperor, the better it was.

As long as she could force the Emperor to use up all of his Immortal Qi, Alex could join the fight and aid her.

Alex turned back toward the prince and spoke. "Do you believe the words I spoke regarding your father's crime?" he asked. "That he was responsible for every single one of what I said. I can swear an oath if you want to."

The Crown Prince grimaced slightly and shook his head. "No need," he said.

Alex gave a look of surprise. "So you're aware that I'm correct?" he asked. "That's a surprise. I thought I would have to speak an oath and all to make you believe me."

"Why didn't you speak an oath to make the soldiers believe your words?" the Crown Prince asked. "You should know that it would help you tremendously."

"I know," Alex said. "But I decided not to. What good is a handful of soldiers that turn against their own friends just because they can now believe my words? They would only be in a dilemma as to whether to fight or stay out of it."

"I want them to fight, and I want them all to fight your father. I don't know how many will decide to fight on our side, but I want to make a massive turn, instead of just a couple hundred soldiers that could hear me earlier."

The Crown Prince's eyes narrowed. "Are you... are you waiting for more soldiers to gather before speaking your oath?" he asked.

The Crown Prince couldn't believe that it was quite the smart idea.

"Something like that," Alex said. He decided not to mention that he wasn't going to speak the oath at all.

It was not that there was no point in him speaking an oath to confirm the Dragon Emperor's crimes. It was just that there was someone better who could do it.

"If you know all of these things, then may I assume that you are on your father's side through and through?" he asked as he held Midnight in a stance. "I had hoped you would go against your father. If not for me or any of the other crimes. At least for your brother."

The Crown Prince's eyes sharpened at those words. "My brother... where is he? Is he back in the Southern Continent?" he asked.

Alex shook his head. "I can't leave a prince out of the war raging in his empire, can I?" he said.

The Crown Prince looked around the battlefield, searching for his brother. But he saw him nowhere.

"Where is he? Where is my brother? Is he on the ship? Please tell me he is alright," the Crown Prince asked.

"He is alright," Alex said. "And no, he is not on the ship or on the battlefield. I'm afraid he is doing something rather important at this very moment. Please wait a couple of minutes. I'm sure you will hear from him very soon."

"In the meanwhile, will you tell me clearly whose side you are on? I'm afraid you are confusing me a lot."

Chapter 1766 Ying Weishu

The Crown Prince charged Alex with an attack, screaming in rage as he did so.

Alex made a simple stroke with his sword and destroyed the spear attack that was coming his way. He then attacked back, hitting the Crown Prince in the chest, leaving a long bloody gash with the sword.

The Crown Prince was blasted away, and he fell from the sky, losing the battle in a single exchange of attacks.

'What the hell?' Alex thought. 'Did he not want to fight? Why did he charge me then?'

The thought confused Alex, but he quickly got rid of the thought, turning around to deal with the Emperor when suddenly an attack streaked up through the side, landing on him.

Alex protected himself at the last second using Midnight and slowly put down the sword to see who had attacked him.

An older woman stood some distance away from him with with nearly 400 different soldiers behind her in a cluster, and a floating illusory dragon moving around them.

Alex recognized her. It was the same woman who had brought him the 'gift' 2 years ago on the eastern shores of the Southern Continent.

"Ying Weishu, was it? Commander of the 3rd battalion of the Talon Legion?" Alex asked the woman.

"I did not think you would remember me," the woman said. "Your ego seems too big to hold someone small like me."

"You are indeed small for me," Alex said turning around. "You were a messenger back then, so I left you alive. Have you come to die this time?"

The woman's mocking smile faded slightly, and she put on her real emotions as she looked at Alex in hatred. "Don't think too highly of yourself just because you managed to sneak into the empire with an army. Separated from your people, you are only just looking to die."

"Let's see how being with your people helps you here."

He started the fight with a sword slash that sent out a fiery attack that flew toward the woman.

The woman thought nothing of the attack at first, simply throwing out an attack to stop it. However, when the attacks clashed together, they created a large enough explosion that the shockwave from them sent shivers down the woman's spine.

'How is his attack so strong?' she thought. She used her senses to look at Alex and try to figure out just what it was he was doing to become so strong, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.

From the reports she remembered hearing, the people who survived the massacre in the ocean mentioned something dark and terrifying around him when he fought with mindless rage, but this was not that.

Globs of icy cold water formed around the woman, each one turning slowly spinning as they shot forward toward Alex.

Alex looked at the attack and put his hands forward as well. Water Qi flowed out of his body as well, consolidating in multiple spots around him. However, instead of water, they formed icicles.

Alex used the Infinite Heavenly Ice Spear art, only it was altered slightly enough that it didn't just use Water to form the ice. It used Yin as well.

He had spent some time after his visit to the Celestial Peak to adapt the new technique to add Yin to it as he had just learned Yin dao back then. In the past 2 years, he resumed the improvement process and finally formed a full technique that used the Infinite Heavenly Ice Spear art as a base but formed the Ice using water and Yin.

As such, the icicles that formed around him were far colder than normal, and thanks to his Dao, they were slightly stronger than normal as well.

Each icicle shot out at an extreme speed, smashing into the globs of water that were moving in his direction. He broke through the attack easily, destroying all of the incoming projectiles.

However, he didn't stop there.

There was a reason the Infinite Heavenly Ice Spear art had the word 'Infinite' in it. So long as Alex had Qi, he could keep the technique running, using the icicles without any stop or pause.

He did not need to restart the technique after a while or anything. Once started, it continued relentlessly, and Alex directed all of that toward the woman.

The woman formed a barrier realizing that something was wrong and started protecting herself. She defended herself to the best of her capacity.

Some of the icicles flew past her, smashing into an invisible barrier in front of the group of 400 soldiers that flew behind her and formed an array that empowered her.

The icicles sent ripples throughout the barrier, nearly destroying it, but they didn't. The barrier had protected them all splendidly.

As Alex attacked, he looked at that very barrier, trying to understand how it was being used. The attack power he had right now was comparable to someone in the peak of the Saint Transformation realm for anyone who didn't use an Immortal Qi.

As such, there weren't many barriers that could outstand Alex's attack at all. Even regular barriers would be destroyed by a single icicle, and yet this one stood strong.

Alex saw two possibilities as to why the barrier was as strong as it was.

The first possibility was that there was an excellent Formation master in the Eastern Continent who made such perfect formations that its efficiency could be good enough to be a barrier to this power.

However, Alex doubted this was the case for two reasons. One, there were too many such formations currently forming all around the battlefield.

Each leader forming such an array was using the formation, and there was no way there were so many incredible formations created.

If there were, Alex would have known the names of the ones.

Second, Alex could not see the formation plate or flags that could be used to produce this formation. Even if there was some hidden, it was pretty much impossible for it to lose out of Qi to use when clearly not connected to a Spirit vein.

As such, Alex believed the second possibility to be the more likely one.

The barrier that formed around the people in the battle array was not due to a formation, but rather a technique.

And if Alex had to guess, it was a group technique. Meaning, it was the result of an array as well.

Whether the array was the same one empowering the single person or not, Alex did not figure it out just yet.

'If only Brother Huan knew more about the army,' Alex thought. This would have all been so much easier.

In the end, the man was never interested in learning about the army of his empire and was interested in other things.

A surge of water formed in front of Alex suddenly, bringing him out of his thoughts. Alex felt the terrifying power behind the tidal wave that made its way toward him in the air.

He attacked the water with his icicles, and while they disrupted the wave somewhat, an Immortal attack was simply too much for Alex to deal with.

Instead, he simply teleported out of the attack's path, arriving right behind the woman, ready with an attack.

Chapter 1767 Reinforcements

Midnight glowed bright white as Sword Aura filled it fully, and somehow glowed with black light as well as Yin Qi flowed out of his body and filled Midnight at the same time.

The woman realized that Alex was behind her, but wasn't fast enough to protect herself at all.

Alex slashed.

God Rending Death Blade.

A crescent slash of pure black light landed point blank on the woman's back as Midnight tore through her clothes and her skin, lacerating her back muscles until it came out of the other side.

The slash dug deep inside her, tearing through the rest of her body, sending her flying away along with the attack.

The woman screamed in pain as Alex's Sword Qi attacked her back relentlessly. And the darkness and death aura, formed from the God Rending Death Blade technique made it impossible for the woman to heal so very quickly.

Alex paused and looked at the woman after the attack, surprised that she wasn't cleaved in half entirely. He was sure that would have happened when he attacked her from this close.

'Damn! Her Immortal Qi must have increased her natural defenses even without any techniques,' he thought. That was certainly a problem he would have to deal around with.

For now, since the woman was so wounded, he could just kill her before she took her healing pill.

Alex was about to go after the woman when he sensed someone flying toward him. He turned around quickly, Midnight ready to attack the person.

At the last moment, however, instead of attacking, he created a barrier to stop the man from hitting him.

Zhou Linfan crashed into the barrier, only then managing to stop himself. He let out a soft grunt before looking back to see Alex.

"Thank you," he said. "That bastard is a little too strong for me now."

Alex looked away from the man, toward the fight between the Dragon Emperor and his sister.

Hannah seemed to be in deep concentration as she fought the Dragon Emperor and the Dragon Emperor was managing to fight her on equal footing as well.

They exchanged attacks with neither side coming out on top.

Zhou Linfan slammed his crystalline sword onto the barrier that surrounded the group of 400 soldiers who were empowering the woman.

Alex looked away and toward the woman who was slowly getting back up. It was time to deal with her first. He took a deep breath, concentrating everything he had on him in this one single attack.

The woman ate a pill quickly and took a cold breath as the pain of her healing back sent electric jolts through her body.

Immortal Qi, which was in small amounts now, coursed through her body, making her feel more alive and well than she truly was.

She felt the aura change somewhat around a figure nearby and looked up to see that it was Alex. She saw him concentrating and realized he was using a technique.

Anger flooded her and she made some simple gestures with her two hands before placing both palms in front of her, as if holding onto something invisible.

Immortal Qi flooded her palm, coalescing in between them to form a very powerful concentration of water and converged and strengthened on its own until it glowed bright blue.

Suddenly, she lost all sense of the aura that was skyrocketing in front of her. She feared that Alex had moved away from her again and looked up, only to see him still flying ahead of her.

He had lost all of his aura somehow and was in a position as if he had just attacked her.

But there was no attack. There was no—

The concentrated ball of water in her hand suddenly burst apart as the woman saw something not just cut through it, but also cut through her fingers, into her palm.

Then, before she realized it, whatever it was that attacked her, cut through her as well.

The ball burst into a massive ocean fountain of water, and when it disappeared, all that was left behind was the corpse of the woman cut perfectly in half, her eyes still wide open as she didn't even understand how she was dead.

Alex took a deep breath to stabilize himself and his somewhat aching head. He had gotten a lot better at using his nameless technique without taking too much time or too much headache.

He turned around and looked toward Zhou Linfan, who had stopped attacking to watch him with eyes of shock.

Zhou Linfan couldn't believe how quickly Alex had dispatched someone who was currently stronger than he was.

The soldiers inside the barrier were currently horrified to see their leader dead. However, not as horrified as they should have been.

Alex wondered if they trusted in themselves enough to survive. That was when he noticed it.

Alex teleported right in front of Zhou Linfan, creating an All Swirling Elemental Shield in front of him.

Lashes of fire struck the barrier and destroyed it easily. Thankfully, that gave Alex enough time to grab Zhou Linfan and teleport away.

They arrived closer to the main battlefield from where the two of them could see a newly arrived group of fighters. No, there was way more than just one.

Alex placed Midnight on his back as if sheathing into a sheath that hung on his back. He stopped a spear stab going right for his spine and spun around quickly, cleaving the man that attacked him in half.

The regular soldier had thought he had caught Alex off guard, only to die on a simple counterattack.

Another soldier attacked him just the same, but that had only been a distraction for someone else to shoot him with an arrow from far away.

Zhou Linfan placed his arm to the side, the crystalline formation of Qi surrounding his body stopping the arrow.

Alex looked around, noticing the situation for the first time.

"There are too many members of the army here," he said softly. "We're being outnumbered."

Zhou Linfan looked around. "Our soldiers are being pushed back. This is bad. We will enter a stalemate soon. And if the soldiers continue pouring in as they have, we will be on the losing side soon enough."

"Our element of surprise has run its course," Alex said, dodging another attack to take out the woman who was coming for him with a hammer.

He punched her with his left hand so hard that the woman ended up having her face crushed inward, the shards of her skull piercing through the back of her head.

Alex couldn't guarantee that he had killed the woman, but he didn't have the luxury to check. More attacks came for him and Zhou Linfan.

As they were important figures in the battleground, he was a primary target and was thus constantly under attack.

Alex and Zhou Linfan moved back, joining their army.

"At least your father seems to know what must be done to overcome this problem," Zhou Linfan said, nodding in a direction toward the city.

Alex looked down at Zhou Linfan's gesture, and far away in the city that now looked deserted, Graham had brought along a group of soldiers to attack the building with the teleportation formation.

As long as they could destroy that building, they could limit the amount of reinforcements the army got for the time being.

Chapter 1768 Whisker at Work

Whisker scuttled along the side of the road, his aura completely gone from all around him. He looked at the sky in the distance where the giant ship hung in the air, and tiny humans in the sky fought like gods, sending tremors through the city.

Most of the city had evacuated already. Since everyone was a cultivator, it didn't take the people to close the shop and leave immediately.

It took Whisker a moment before he arrived at the building he had been looking for.

'Finally,' he thought. He was supposed to have found it long ago.

His little whiskers moved in the wind, sensing all sorts of information through them. He got simple information like sight, smell, sound, and even taste of whatever was in the air through his whiskers, and he got some more complex information such as temperature, pressure, and such.

On top of that, he sensed any sort of elemental or non-elemental aura all around him, giving him an accurate idea of where he was and what sort of place he was in.

This feature was the main reason Seeking Mouses were so sought out for. Their ability to gain so much information through their whiskers and then relay it back to the cultivator that owned them made them invaluable during many expeditions where every other step had to be taken with thoughtful care.

Whisker slowly moved forward toward the building, sensing the complete lack of any sort of formations beside a barrier that had been put up to defend them from any attacks that might come down from the sky.

A simple shadow step using the Flickering Shadows technique sent Whisker inside the barrier, and he continued his investigation.

Arriving at the window of a room, Whisker looked inside. The room had 3 people inside, two men and a woman, all of whom looked to be in their middle ages.

Whisker tried sensing their aura, but it was difficult from outside the window. He needed to either get inside or send his senses inside, neither of which he could do right at the moment.

He couldn't attack these people who were bound to be strong by himself anyway. He needed to drag them out.

He looked through the window for a short while longer before rushing back outside the formation, running to a building just a couple of buildings down the road.

Long Huan stood still with a young man who had a giant sword resting on his shoulders.

"Senior, what did you see?" Shan Wangjiu asked Whisker.

The young man whom Alex had taught sword skills back in the Martial Transcendence ground was now with the two of them.

During Alex's search for individuals in the Balance Haven realm to cause chaos while he escaped, he had found Shan Wangjiu as a participant in there thanks to a ticket Alex had managed to get for the young man.

Once Alex told him what he was doing there, Shan Wangjiu was more than happy to lend aid to his master.

During the 15 minutes that Alex was given to announce his presence to the emperor, he had taken Whisker, Long Huan, and Shan Wangjiu out, giving them a small task.

The task had taken some time to get to, but now they were ready to do it.

"I checked the building and there are 3 people inside. But there's a barrier covering the building. I can go in, but I don't know if either of you can make it in or not," Whisker said.

"Can you close the formation by any chance?" Shan Wangjiu asked.

"Maybe," Whisker said. "I have some knowledge in breaking formations, but that is only if they're using formation flags. If they're instead using a formation diagram carved into a large stone on the round itself, I can't do it."

"No, I don't think they have that," Long Huan said. "That building wasn't built long ago with proper care. It was hastily built for what it needs to do, and that only happened after the other people started showing up."

"On top of that, I can take us in. The only problem is I can't stop my aura, so they will find us immediately if we enter."

"Can you not call us 'other people'?" Shan Wangjiu said from the side. "We're humans, just like you."

Long Huan gave a small grin as an apology before turning back to Whisker. "What about the people in there?" he asked.

"I only saw through the window, but the three I saw were 2 men and 1 woman," Whisker said. "I can't speak to their strength, but if we rush in, we should be able to take them by surprise."

"Well... we'll see about that," Long Huan said. "Let's move."

Whisker jumped onto Long Huan's shoulders and rode him all the way to the building. They all arrived at the building and just as they did, a woman walked out of the building at the same time. Their eyes met and Long Huan couldn't do what he was about to do at all.

It was the woman that Whisker had seen from the window. She stopped in her tracks, looking at the two humans, completely ignoring Whisker.

"Who are—"

Long Huan stood up straight. "I am Long Huan, the second prince of the Empire. As someone of the Head Legion, you should recognize me," he said quickly.

The woman's eyes narrowed. At first, she wondered if she was being pranked or something, but the longer she looked, the more she was certain that the man in front of him was telling the truth.

"Your Highness," the woman said. "What brings you here to our headquarters?"

"Me and my friend here need passage inside," Long Huan said.

"Oh, is that so?" the woman asked with a gentle smile but remained unmoving. A moment later, the other two men that were inside the building walked out, both of them looking at the prince while nodding.

Long Huan grimaced a little. This wasn't going just as he had planned.

"Are you going to stand there or let me in?" Long Huan asked. "Surely you're not going to deny my order, are you?"

"Hmm, I'm not sure, Your Highness," the woman said. "We have been informed that you are an enemy of the empire now and you are to be captured on sight."

As the woman said that, four other people arrived down from the sky, outside of the barrier.

Shan Wangjiu took his long sword, brandishing it as he prepared to fight. The ones in the sky looked strong, but so was he.

Long Huan looked at the woman in front and the two men, slowly judging their power. They were in the Early Saint Transformation realm, meaning they were stronger than every single one of them here.

Long Huan sighed and looked toward Shan Wangjiu. He placed his left hand on the young man's shoulders and looked at the sky as he brought a black sword out.

"Those aren't the ones we will be fighting," Long Huan said and activated the Ebony sword. In a snap, he appeared beyond the barrier, teleporting right behind the three people.

"They are!"

Before the three could even turn around, Whisker had already pulled out 3 wooden puppets to deal with them.

Each of the three puppets was an Immortal puppet.

Chapter 1769 Some More Time

As soon as the three puppets appeared, they slammed into the three people, knocking them away. Two of them flew toward the barrier uncontrollably and surprisingly slipped right past the barrier without encountering any difficulty.

The barrier either didn't allow people from only entering, or had no problems with people leaving it. Or, these two had some sort of tokens that let them go in and out of the barrier without being stopped.

The other four that were flying outside quickly caught the two that were tossed outside, but those were already knocked out, some of their bones surely broken by the impact.

Whisker had the puppets grab the last person who slid across the ground close to the barrier and drag them back. The man who had remained inside was very clearly knocked out, maybe even was already close to death.

Even a simple attack by something that was used by Immortals to train against was not something so simple.

Whisker ran up to the man and started searching for something. He grabbed the man's storage bag and tossed it toward Long Huan who quickly grabbed it.

Long Huan looked inside briefly before quickly rushing into the building. He had only gone in for a few moments when he heard loud bangs coming from outside.

"They have started attacking the barrier," Shan Wangjiu said. "We should finish what we're here to do and leave quickly."

"Yes," Long Huan said as he stood before a platform that was clearly a base of control for a lot of different formations. He looked around frantically, trying to understand what did what.

Whisker looked at it too, recognizing a lot of the base formations. He started explaining what he thought some of these formations did.

Long Huan also finished looking through the man's storage bag and managed to find a small golden medallion with an inscription of a giant cube at the center.

He closed his eyes and poured his senses into the medallion.

There were more loud bangs on the outside, taking away some of his attention, but not enough. Shan Wangjiu said something once again, but Long Huan ignored it as he looked at what he saw.

"Yes, got it!" he said and tried to do something, only to end up failing. "Ah! It will take some time. Dammit!"

There was one small problem, it seemed. He was at the headquarters and he had the authority to do whatever he wanted here thanks to the medallion he received. But even then, it would take time for him to manually go over each of the connections allowed to him through the medallion to disconnect them.

"Some time?" Whisker asked.

Long Huan nodded. "Don't disturb me now. I'll start working on it immediately."

As Long Huan lost himself in the medallion, Shan Wangjiu realized that the noise coming from outside had not only intensified, but someone had managed to sneak in as well.

He instantly rushed outside and so did Whisker.

Shan Wangjiu launched out a golden sword slash, filled with Sword Qi onto one of the men that had entered with a small medallion on his hand.

The man managed to easily defend himself, but in doing so was stopped immediately.

Whisker sent out the puppets again, and started fighting the two people that had come in.

Nearly a dozen other fighters had gathered outside the building smashing onto the barrier with every attack they could.

With the two new opponents down, Shan Wangjiu looked to the sky with a grim smile on his face. "We will be okay, right?" he asked. "The barrier will hold?"

As strong as the three puppets were, they could not defeat the swarm of a dozen Saint before they could kill Whisker.

Whisker remembered what Long Huan had told them. This building was new, and thus the formation was most likely not connected to a spirit vein.

Which meant there was only a limited amount of Spirit stones for it to use before it ran out of power.

Now, all they could do was hope that the barrier could hold on long enough for Long Huan to do what he had come here to do.

* * * * *

The war in the sky seemed to slow down a lot as the number on either side came to be close. The stalemate increased and no one got any upper hand on the other side.

The Eastern Continent's soldiers slowly moved back, acting upon orders made by some higher-ups. What was once a disorderly army due to being surprise attacked, was no longer that.

As more of their army came to help, the army got into formation, fighting as they were meant to.

Hannah was still fighting with the Dragon Emperor, neither getting the upper hand on the other.

Hannah let out a stream of chill mist from her sword, slashing with it at the emperor as though she were using a whip.

The Dragon Emperor put up his shield to block it and sent out a torrent of water toward Hannah.

Hannah swung her sword, the stream of mist slapping the torrent of water out of the air, before retaliating with another quick attack.

The Dragon Emperor fought back, equally angry and annoyed at the situation. He was angry that he needed so many people behind him just to make him strong enough to fight a girl who wasn't even a century old.

He was supposed to be one of the strongest people in the entire world and seeing someone who was clearly stronger had made him a lot more angry.

He had spent so many of his days improving himself inside of his palace, but that hadn't worked at all, it seemed. He had only just managed to fight her to a standstill thanks to the help he had.

'Her battle prowess is too strong,' he thought. 'This fight will go nowhere.'

His people were also constantly telling him to fall back. The Dragon Emperor decided to comply.

He raised his Noble Dragon spear and called upon thunder and lightning from his body. The power of Wood Qi turning into lightning surged through his body and he fed it all into the spear.

Then, he stabbed forward, attacking with not just regular Qi, but Immortal Qi. He had been saving it all this time just in case he needed it, and this seemed like the best time.

Hannah's eyes widened in surprise and she quickly changed into using Immortal Qi as well. The mist forming in her sword solidified, turning into extremely cold ice that covered her sword.

She drew it all back and then slashed.

Ice and lightning exploded in the center, sending out a massive shockwave that sent people flying away.

Both Hannah and the Dragon Emperor were also pushed back by the force, and thrown into the distance.

The Emperor used the moment to go back to his people as many others slowly closed in to form a wall to stop Hannah from going after the Emperor.

Hannah looked at them with gritted teeth and looked back to see more people closing in on her. Disappointed, she turned around and flew away, leaving the battlefield to meet up with the rest of her people.

She could tell that the status quo of the overall battle was slowly changing.

Chapter 1770 Negatives and Positives

Graham fought in the sky, slamming his fist against the barrier of someone's technique, shattering it to punch the person on the other side.

The man was sent flying away, hurt but not dead.

Graham's shoes activated and he gained speed to shame a Saint. He arrived right next to the man and punched downward through his chest.

Just as he was about to do so, a sharp pain in his mind caused him to lose a bit of concentration and he missed the attack entirely.

"Step back a little. Move a little to the right. Two steps sideways down toward your left. Do not move forward..."

Graham's mind simply subconsciously sent out orders to everyone who was connected with him through the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle array.

He wasn't giving actual word-based orders but rather something that was just feeling-based, not dissimilar to how a young beast would communicate with someone with whom it had bonded.

Graham simply threw out suggestions using the Battle Array itself and anyone using the Battle Array that was not the leader would understand intuitively just what it was they had to do as long as they had the slightest bit of intelligence.

Graham frowned as the pain in his mind flared once again.

He had spread the army wide and thin for himself to come down here to fight the people who were running the teleportation formation. As such, the stress on his mind from having to handle everyone was slowly increasing.

No matter that he had practiced for this a long time when it was the real battle, he was still incapable of properly handling all 10 thousand soldiers.

Without reaching the saint realm, he just wasn't equipped to control the soldiers in a relaxed manner.

Something came for Graham from the front.

Graham's spiritual sense wasn't good enough to comprehend the thing due to its speed, but his glowing purple eyes which were capable of supreme kinetic vision allowed him to see the thing that was moving toward him in what his brain processed as something slow.

A dark brown snake with yellow spots on its body and light green wings nearly half its length in wingspan was coming at Graham with his mouth open.

Graham grabbed the snake even as it tried to bite him, stopping its fangs merely inches away from his face. Venomous purple liquid dripped down the snake's fangs as it was ready to poison him.

A sharp tail lashed onto Graham's body from the back, lacerating his robes as something rattled away.

Graham grimaced a little but he didn't let out any sound. He grabbed the snake's jaw and maw even tighter and started pulling it apart.

The snake screamed as it was torn apart with bare hands. It tried using some wind attacks to free itself.

Everything hit Graham directly and none did anything.

The half-torn body of the snake only fell for 2 seconds before Graham took its body and stuffed it into his storage bag. He knew his son needed blood and cores.

He had been doing this for a while now, with both men and beasts.

Something struck Graham's head, but not really his head. He could feel something hitting his mind, an attack so strong that his weak spiritual sense wasn't even capable of locating it.

However, despite the strong attack, his mind resisted it rather easily.

He had known for a while that due to his unique physical conditions, there were things he would never be able to do that even the worst cultivators would have no hard time doing.

The heavens had cursed him so that even after nearly 3 decades of using the best pills and best cultivation techniques, he had never been able to breakthrough the cultivation realms fast enough to reach the Saint realm just yet.

However, as a counter to that very curse, the heavens had also given him some blessings as well.

He was protected from any sort of poison or toxins. He was protected from any sort of spiritual attack or effect. And he was granted the capacity to improve his physical body at a rate that defied all logic.

There were both positives and negatives in what he had received from his body, and it was about time he stopped focusing on the negatives and used his positives to live a better life.

Graham shook his head, easily getting rid of even the most minor inconvenience that came with the spiritual attack. He looked at the man who he had missed his attack on, who had used the spiritual attack on him just now.

He dropped from the sky like a meteor, going straight for the man below him.

The man looked up in surprise, quickly forming a technique in his hands as red glowing energy filled his open palms. A flower-

shaped blast of fire was launched upward, which grew the further above it went.

The Dragonheart gauntlet activated and fake weight was added to Graham's body as he smashed through the attack, destroying it easily. Before the man could even realize what had happened, Graham slammed into his body and delivered a devastating blow to his rib cage.

The man's body broke apart into blood and bones, spilling everywhere. Graham stood up bloody, and as he did, a small blue soul floated out of the man's body, unsure of where it was.

Graham reached for it to grab it, but the soul simply passed through his hands with some difficulty and disappeared far away.

Just because he had yet to enter the Saint realm, his body's Qi was just too weak to interact with the Nascent souls in any meaningful way.

"Tsk!"

Well, just because he was going to forget about the negatives of his body, the negatives weren't going to forget about him.

Graham's eyes moved toward the building that was some distance in front of him that was still active. New soldiers were continuing to come out in groups.

Thankfully, they were not coming out in a stream. That was a good thing, but Graham definitely had to close this formation quickly. If not, they would be run down by the new soldiers.

Graham felt the pang of pain again in his mind. Outer attacks surely couldn't hurt him as much, but he had little capacity when all the pain was his doing.

Still, he was the leader of the entire army, and he had to control them.

While he was slightly distracted, many soldiers gathered close to him, but not around him. Instead, they clumped up together and soon enough Graham could see the floating image of a golden dragon around them.

An old man with gray hair stepped forward, holding a simple yet incredible staff in his right hand.

"I am Li Baiquang, leader of the 9th battalion of Talon Legion. With whom do I have the pleasure of fighting?" the man asked.

"Graham Benton, no ranks," Graham said as he stood straight, his sweat-covered muscle gleaming as if a sculptor's masterpiece. He looked at the man in front of him, slightly worried. He could tell this was going to be a difficult fight.

At that very moment, a voice drifted down from the sky into his mind.

"I will assume control of the array now, Father," Alex said. "You just let loose."

Chapter 1771 The Gathered Leaders

Pearl stood next to his uncle, the group of other 6 leaders from the various colonies sitting on massive seats in front of him. It was just him and the 7 leaders in the room. Senior Yao had been made to stay outside as not everyone was allowed inside.

The leaders quickly got themselves comfortable and looked at the Lion.

"Leader Zhu, what is going on? What is the emergency?" the eagle asked, with her azure wings folded around herself as she sat closely.

"You made it sound like it was a life or death situation," the Lizard said.

The rest didn't speak and only nodded. Instead, their eyes flickered from time to time toward Pearl. They were certainly surprised by him being here.

They didn't recognize him at all. They had no idea who he was. However, what got them to look at him was what he was.

They weren't yet sure if they were looking at a tiger with white fur or a cat. Either way, there were possibilities there and both of them seemed concerning to them.

"Leaders, are you aware of my older cousin, Shi Meiyoung?" the lion asked. "She was the daughter of the previous leader Shi Guyoung."

"Shi Guyoung's child, the white cat," the swan spoke. "We do remember her. Senior Guyoung brought her to some of our meetings when she was a child. He loved showing off his daughter to everyone."

"She was the granddaughter of the White Tiger who died in the Eastern continent, wasn't she?" the Deer asked. There was a sort of glimmer in the 6-eyed deer that one couldn't immediately see.

It wasn't just her. It seemed many of the beasts were thinking about something that they didn't speak out entirely.

"This is Pearl," the lion introduced. "He is the son of my cousin Shi Meiyoung, and he had come here with some information and a request."

"What information? What request?" the Lizard asked.

Pearl stepped forward. "I'm sure every one of you remembers the human alchemist who came here nearly 20 years ago," he said and looked at everyone.

"Of course," the Ox said with a loud laugh. "That was an incredible human. The pills he made were so good that I managed to finally break through after being stuck in my realm for nearly a century."

"His pills were indeed incredible," the Elephant said, slowly nodding its large head.

"Yes, we remember him," the Eagle cut in. "What is the point?"

"I am bonded with him and he has come to the Eastern Continent in a war against the Dragon Emperor, to kill him for all the atrocities he has committed over the thousands of years."

"However, he can't do it alone, and he needs your help," Pearl said. "Thus, I have come here to request your aid. Please help my brother fight in this war and help him defeat the Dragon Emperor."

The room was filled with silence for a moment as not even anyone's breathing could be heard at all. They all simply stared at Pearl, thinking of what to say or what to do.

"Is this the emergency?" the Lizard asked. "This is a joke. We do not meddle ourselves with the doings of the Dragon Emperor. The human world is its own. We have long since closed out border to it and we won't act on it."

"He is correct," the Eagle said. "We can't accept what you say."

"Same," the Elephant said.

"Do you want to get away from your human, child?" the Deer asked. "We will ask him to break his bond with you if you wish. As senior Guyoung's grandson, that much is something we can do for you."

The swan lowered its head. "That we can do, but not the war. We cannot endanger ourselves for someone else's benefit."

The Ox simply shook its head.

"That's not true," Pearl said quickly. "You will not be doing this for someone else. You will do this for yourself and your ruler."

The beasts looked up toward Pearl.

"What do you mean?" the Swan asked.

"My brother, Alex, has come to the Eastern Continent to bring judgment on the Dragon Emperor for all the atrocities he has done," he said as he looked around.

"The Dragon Emperor killed the Azure Dragon, your ruler. Will you not fight to avenge him?"

The Lion slowly nodded. This was what he had been waiting for. The beasts only thought about themselves and did little to help the humans when it came to that.

However, when the matter changed to that of beasts, they would act. Especially when they realized that the Azure Dragon had been killed by the Dragon Emperor, they would be forced to act.

He looked at the surprised faces of all 6 other leaders and simply waited for them to continue.

"How… how do you know that?" the Eagle asked.

"We've known that for a long time. My great grandfather, Bai Jingshen, the ruler of the Western Continent let me know long ago that the Azure Dragon had been dead in the Eastern Continent. Because of that, he hasn't been able to come here to avenge my mother, who too died at the Dragon Emperor's hands."

The many beasts looked up in horror. "Your mother was killed by the Dragon Emperor?" the Deer asked.

"Yes," Pearl said in a solemn voice.

"Why did you not say that?" the Deer asked.

"My mother's death has nothing to do with any of you," Pearl said. "But the Azure Dragon's death should. Please, come with me and help my brother in his war. He does not have enough soldiers to win in this war."

The beasts remained silent for a while, looking at each other.

"What's wrong? Why are you not saying anything?" the Lion stepped forward. "It is the Azure Dragon! He is dead, so why are none of you jumping straight to battle? Or do you wish for proof? Pearl, speak an oath to make them believe. I don't think they will—"

"No need for the oath," the Eagle stopped them immediately. "The young cat will only end up hurting himself because of the lie."

"It's not a lie," Pearl said.

"It is," the Eagle said. "The Dragon Emperor never killed the Azure Dragon."

"He did," Pearl said. "He—"

Pearl paused and looked at them all with a look of shock. "You guys know," he said slowly.

The Lion looked around. "What? What are you talking about?" he asked Pearl.

"The Dragon Emperor," Pearl said slowly. "Technically, the Dragon Emperor didn't kill the Azure Dragon. Technically, the Azure Dragon killed himself by trying to stop the Dragon Emperor."

"While that does make it so that the Dragon Emperor killed the Azure Dragon, that is not the truth when it comes to speaking the oaths," Pearl said slowly and looked at the beasts. "You know this."

The Swan sighed. "We do," she said. "We've known this… for a very long time." New n0vel chapters are published on

"How long?" the Lion asked. "And why was I not made aware."

The Deer shook its dead. "Because we were afraid you would go out seeking revenge if you knew everything."

"What… everything?" the Lion asked.

The Deer sighed. "The Azure Dragon… is not the only one that the Dragon Emperor killed," she said. "That very night… he also killed your Uncle and aunt."

The Deer turned toward Pearl. "He also killed your grandparents."

Chapter 1772 Long Tiankong’s Hope

The Dragon Emperor stared at the status of the battlefield in front of him.

Numerous fights still raged there, but the number had lowered significantly in the past few minutes as everyone slowly moved back to their own side, using the moment to heal and cure themselves.

Some even began cultivating to get back what Qi they had lost in the battles. He looked at Alex far away behind his army as well as Hannah and felt anger brewing inside of him.

"What's the situation?" he asked Long Huogang, the Crown Prince's bodyguard, a man who was one of the three heads of the Head Legion.

Guqing, his personal guard, was too old and weak to be involved in the war, so despite him being one of the other 3 Heads of the Head Legion, he had been made to step back for the moment.

He still stood behind the Emperor, just in case someone else came to attack him. Even weak, he would give away his life to defend the Emperor.

"8 of the 23 battalions of the Talon legion have arrived, along with many other legionnaires from Tail legion. Only the stronger ones from the Body legion have been called for now, the weaker ones being forced to fly here instead of using the teleportation formation to not waste time for people who do need to come here."

"People have resorted to teleporting to nearby cities to fly over as well, but it appears it will take an hour or two for most of them to arrive."

"For the situation before us, the worst of the battle has ended. Their number advantage over us has dwindled and is completely gone now. Once we get more soldiers, we can start a retaliation attack."

"Unfortunately for them, they can't keep on bringing soldiers like we do," Long Huogang said.

The Dragon Emperor slowly nodded, looking at the battlefield with an observational mind.

"Have you noticed the White Tiger yet?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

Long Huogang's eyes spun back toward the Emperor in shock. "The White Tiger?" he asked before quickly looking back at the battlefield. "I haven't noticed any white tigers. Is there one?"

"I haven't noticed any as well," The Dragon Emperor said. But he knew that the White Tiger, like all Immortal beasts, was capable of changing its body to appear a human.

He gritted his teeth when he remembered the handsome young man he saw long ago back in the Northern Continent when he first teleported there for the Intercontinental Tournament.

He hadn't seen any White Tiger on the battlefield and that gave him some hope. He had been worried that the White Tiger had somehow been capable of bypassing his oath to come here to attack them.

'As long as he isn't here, I can be safe,' the Dragon Emperor told himself.

"Slow down the attack," the Dragon Emperor said. "Hold back wherever possible. Let them tire themselves while we gather more people into the battle. We will turn this into a war of attrition."

The Dragon Emperor looked up at the large ship that hung in the air. "That ship is their only safe haven. We have to destroy it if possible as well. Otherwise, they could just run away in the end. We can't let them do that."

"Yes, Your Majesty," Long Huogang said and went away to pass along the orders based on the Dragon Emperor's desire.

'Just you wait, you little brat,' he thought. 'I will beat you until you're weak and alone, and then I'll take what you have.'

A new feeling of hope and anticipation bubbled inside the Dragon Emperor's heart. He envisioned himself standing in front of hundreds of thousands of Immortals, all of whom praised him while he floated above them, giving away pills left and right.

They sang songs of cheers in his name.

Long live Long Tiankong whispered in his mind.

Long live the Alchemy God.

* * * * *

Liz stood still, unmoving, unbreathing. Next to her, Hao Ya did the same, neither moving nor breathing.

A few moments passed and they finally breathed again. "Let's go," Hao Ya said and started walking again. New n0vel chapters are published on

Liz followed behind.

In Liz's hands were 3 talismans made with brilliant care by Helen for the purpose that was decided that she would have to do to help.

Pearl would be off doing one thing, and so would Whisker and Long Huan. Similarly, she had another job as well.

Only, her job was way more dangerous than any of the others.

She and Hao Ya stood right below the battlefield, slowly making their way to the massive Intercontinental Teleportation formation to get it active again.

One of the talismans on Liz's hands glowed softly and she paused. Hao Ya had been paying attention to the talisman as well, so she paused as well.

They both stopped breathing and moving again.

The talisman was specifically designed in a way that it would react to someone's spiritual sense when it was focused around them.

So, when it glowed up to let them know, both Hao Ya and Liz stopped themselves to make themselves appear as though nothing more than some random object among the thousands of other objects that would be.

They were also fully invisible using one of the other talismans, and the third talisman actively hid their aura as well, making it impossible for them to be noticed by anyone not actively searching for them.

When the talisman stopped glowing, they moved once again and finally arrived upon the massive Intercontinental Teleportation formation.

Hao Ya had worked with it previously, so she knew just where it was that she needed to act. She found a small set of teleportation formations that were used as the setting for the main formation.

The formation itself acted as a formation node, allowing changes to be made to the overall formation without changing much of anything to it at all.

"Ah, bad luck," Hao Ya said softly. "They changed the settings entirely from last time."

"Will there be a problem?" Liz asked.

"Somewhat," Hao Ya said. "I'll have to fine-tune the settings again."

"How long will that take?" Liz asked.

Hao Ya sighed. Last time, it had taken her a year to get it right. This time, she knew what right was, so it would take her much less.

"Slow time just for me," Hao Ya said.

Liz complied and suddenly Hao Ya's hands were moving lightning-fast around the console, as she did things that Liz barely caught.

She stopped suddenly with a thumbs up and Liz let go of the Time Dao.

"This one is done," Hao Ya said.

"Oh, that's fast," Liz said and then looked around the massive Intercontinental Teleportation formation. "Uhh… the western continent's formation had 8 nodes, did it not?"

Hao Ya nodded.

"It did," she said.

Liz sighed at the confirmation. That meant they would have to go around the entire circumference of the Teleportation formation and change the settings on the remaining 7 nodes around the place.

"That's gonna take a while," she said.

Hao Ya nodded and got back up. "We better hurry along then. Let's get this done within the hour if possible."

Chapter 1773 Darksteel

Li Baiquang, leader of the 9th battalion, struggled to figure out just how he could win against the man in front of him.

He had exchanged a few attacks with Graham, and even with just that, he could tell that defeating the man would take more than just someone in the Saint Transformation 8th realm.

Graham breathed deeply as well. The man in front of him was quite strong. He wasn't someone he could simply defeat in a couple of hits.

It was going to take more than just that.

Li Baiquang, the old man, rushed forward and slammed down his staff from a distance. The staff suddenly manifested a large illusory version of itself that swung down at Graham.

Graham put his two arms above him and defended himself. He felt his knees dig into the ground due to the attacks, but aside from that nothing happened to him.

Graham dashed forward after that, throwing a Wood attack using his Dragonheart Gauntlet, letting the enemy distract himself with that attack.

The old man swung his staff, hitting the wood attack away, and quickly created wooden roots that streaked out of the ground to catch Graham as he flew forward.

Graham easily burst the roots apart with just his physical force and slammed his fist onto the old man.

A single talisman floated out of the old man's body, slowly glowing with a barrier around it. It dissipated a moment later and the talisman burned itself away.

It was a single-use talisman and its expense caused the old man some grief. That talisman had been quite expensive when he bought it in the Golden auction a long time ago.

Graham moved back quickly as the staff swung back toward him. He put his hands to his side to protect himself as the staff grew inside and hit him again.

A wood-Qi barrier appeared and broke at the same time as Graham protected himself. The barrier technique provided by the gauntlet wasn't very good in this battle, unfortunately.

Graham was sent flying away, but not hurt seriously enough to worry about anything.

He stopped and looked back in time to activate his shoes and run out of the way of another attack.

A lightning bolt flashed past him, striking the ground right behind him.

At the same time, Graham closed the distance between them once again and went in for a punch. The gauntlet activated and fake weight was added to his attack.

A wall of vines appeared before the old man, seeking to protect him, but it failed.

Graham's attack broke past the entangled vines and punched the old man in the chest, sending him flying back.

The old man hit the barrier that was formed around the soldiers who were empowering him. He quickly got back up, looking toward Graham with a hateful sneer on his face.

"You are quite strong," he said. "I can't believe someone like you has no ranks at all."

"That's the truth," Graham said. He didn't want to tell anyone that he was Alex's father just on the off-chance that everyone swarmed him just so they could force Alex to make a wrong decision in the heat of the battle.

"I know you are weak in cultivation," the old man said. "Tell me, how did you improve your body to be this strong?"

"Through sheer determination and grit," Graham answered. "So, are we going to keep talking or will we fight?"

He was keeping his attention on the outside as well, but no one seemed as though they were going to help in this fight. Whatever Alex was doing, he was making sure there were enough fighters in the area to keep the others occupied.

"I don't have to keep fighting," the old man said with a snort. "I just have to keep you distracted long enough so that we have enough soldiers to overwhelm you all. What? You thought our only way of victory was to defeat you?"

"No," Graham said. "But thank you for confirming what you were planning on doing. It seems I cannot afford to waste a lot of time either."

The old man frowned. He wondered what Graham was going to do.

Suddenly, a deep black sword appeared in Graham's hand. A large, heavy sword with a slightly curved edge on one side that was unimaginably sharp.

The sword sparkled with glittering bits in the dark material, as though looking at the starry night in the sky.

The large sword looked extremely uncomfortable to handle, but in Graham's massive hands, it somehow looked normal. As if such a large sword were meant to be held one-handed.

Graham held onto his sword that his son had made for him. Alex had made the sword according to what would be effective for him and had done something toward the end that Graham still struggled to understand.

He called it Bloodforging and had taken Graham's blood essence to make it.

The sword was apparently eternally bonded to him until he died and would grow a sword spirit if given enough time.

Graham couldn't tell if anything had happened to the sword at all, but he did trust his son, so he could only wait and see the benefits of what had been done to his sword.

"A sword?" the old man raised an eyebrow in surprise. "You're a swordsman, huh?"

"This is the first time I'm using Darksteel in actual combat," he said. "Let us see just how helpful a sword is to a swordsman in battle."

As soon as Graham said it, he felt an aura surround him softly as something whispered in his ears. He could hear faint sounds that sought to affect him in someway, but he only scoffed it away.

"No wonder you were sitting around doing nothing," Graham said. "You were trying to affect my mind, was it?"

The old man frowned immediately. He couldn't understand how someone so weak in cultivation could resist his Song of Binding.

Graham rushed forward without waiting and swung Darksteel with both hands, striking the old man sideways.

The old man rushed backward to get out of the range of Graham's attack since Graham had no way of attacking him as long as he was out of range.

At the same time, he sent out a blast of lightning with Immortal Qi that flew directly at Graham.

Graham's eyes saw the lightning blast form in the man's hands and then come for him. The light of the lightning brightened everything around him, leaving shadows everywhere at the same time.

Graham acted at once and teleported.

With the Flickering Shadows technique, he arrived behind the man and swung his sword.

The man reacted in time and put up a defense, but even as he did, Graham added fake weight into his attack and swung.

The already heavy Darksteel, swinging with added fake weight made it so that the attack Graham made was one of the strongest he had ever made.

Darksteel cleaved through the defensive technique, then through the man's body, and surprisingly, even his Nascent soul.

In one attack, he blasted the man into many bits, destroying all of him at once.

Graham looked at the aftermath with wide eyes as he himself hadn't expected to be this strong.

Chapter 1774 War Resumes

Alex looked down to where his father was and smiled as he saw that his father had come victorious against the person he was fighting against.

Alex had wanted to go help him, but that would just bring the attention of the entire army in that direction and he needed to keep their attention here for the most part.

Soon, Graham and a few other soldiers managed to take hold of the teleportation building, shutting it down for the time being.

No more soldiers came to aid the Dragon Emperor from the teleportation formation anymore, so only those who had managed to teleport in were able to help the empire in the war.

Unfortunately, enough soldiers had already come in that the battle wasn't going to be as easy as Alex would've hoped for it to be.

The Emperor's army created layers in front of the Emperor that they would have to beat to get across to the Emperor.

There were 3 layers in total, each acting in unison as though the same body. These people had a lot of training when it came to just war, something the Southern Continent lacked a little.

Alex's soldiers were in war formations too, but they weren't sure how strong it would be against the enemy. This was their first war in millennia, so there was nothing for them to compare this information with.

Still, they hoped that the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array would be enough to overcome any other disparity that they had.

Alex saw the many groups of soldiers on the enemy side forming clumps where they were ready to use the Dragon Array to empower someone.

Alex could see who would probably be the target for that. There were about 20 different strong individuals that could be improved upon.

Alex sent a mental note to everyone strong to target those 20 people.

"Get ready!" Alex bellowed as loudly as he could so that his entire army to hear him over the sound of the battle that still raged all around him. "The real war starts here."

Everyone got their weapons and attacks ready and looked at the enemy army who seemed ready to get into the fight as well.

"Attack!"

"KILL THEM ALL!"

Both Alex's and the Dragon Emperor's voices mixed together on the battlefield, causing each and every soldier to charge at once.

Alex led the charge, flying directly toward one of the strongest people he could sense on the battlefield.

The person he noticed was a relatively old man with long flowing gray hair with a small golden artifact pinned onto his tied-up hair in the back.

A bone white halberd appeared in his hand and an illusory golden dragon appeared around a clump of soldiers behind him, pushing the man's Saint Transformation 6th realm cultivation base up to Saint Transformation 9th realm.

Alex attacked first, throwing a Golden Spear Punch which sent 4 golden spears flying at the man.

The man swung his bone-white halberd, creating a layer of golden barrier around himself, which he used to completely protect himself from the attack.

The spears landed on the barrier and were destroyed in an explosion of golden Qi and shockwave. At the same time, the man swung the halberd forward like a spear, the tip of it suddenly extending far beyond its normal reach.

Alex parried the attack with Midnight, redirecting it to the side before swinging back with a fiery slash that he used with Sword Aura.

The attack flew across the sky like a red crescent moon, striking another golden barrier that the old man had put up in time.

Only this time the barrier exploded in such a way that the old man was forced to take the brunt of the damage.

The old man was pushed backward, and he looked up at Alex with a somewhat shocked look on his face. Something had caused the fire attack to become intense at the end there.

He had thought it was Alex's Sword Qi, but at the same time, it also felt as though some power of Dao had been added to the attack.

The old man ignored his concerns at the moment, focusing on the battle at hand. He had no luxury to give thought to his concerns right now.

Alex attacked again, this time throwing a lightning slash at the old man.

The old man didn't try to defend the attack. Instead, he dodged and let the group of soldiers behind him take the attack. With the barrier that they gained from their technique, they could more or less handle all attacks thrown their way.

The halberd in the old man's hand suddenly glowed bright gold as he used another attack.

Alex swung back with a golden sword as well, making his weapon clash against the old man's.

'Come on. Use it already.'

Alex was waiting for the old man to use his Immortal Qi. As long as he could dodge that and be sure that the old man no longer had any more Immortal Qi to work with, Alex could charge at him without any care and kill him.

The two of them exchanged a few more attacks before Alex realized that the old man wasn't going to actively seek to kill him unless Alex did something to threaten him first.

As the understanding fell upon Alex, his sword glowed bright white before colors took over the surface. To anyone not aware of what was going on, the attack looked as normal as it always had.

Alex swung the sword and it flew in the old man's direction. The old man flipped his halberd, causing a whirlpool of golden energy to form in front of him, which quickly sought to consume the incoming attack.

The two attacks landed and the old man felt the difference in the new attack.

The golden ornament that was pinned to his hair buzzed with a dull ringing sound and the old man realized that he had been attacked with a Spiritual attack.

However, he hadn't sensed the attack coming at all.

Alex swung again, sending another attack. The old man used an attack of his own to contend with Alex's, and the aftermath brought another spiritual attack, one that affected him directly.

It was so strong that his artifact hadn't been able to completely block the damage.

The old man flew back in panic, and another attack flew toward him. He dodged it, but then Alex dashed in the direction he dodged.

Alex charged toward the old man like a meteor, and with no choice, the Old man quickly used the Immortal Qi in his body to pour into his halberd and struck out.

The Immortal metal attack struck Alex, and the illusion fell apart into motes of yellow light.

"Wha—"

Before the old man realized, Alex had already appeared behind him and struck him. A barrier appeared before the old man to block Alex's attack. However, for some reason, the same barrier that had done quite well to block most of the attacks before was torn apart like paper from this final attack.

In one fell sweep, Alex cleaved through the old man entirely, killing him and his soul at once. As a result, he found a pathway to go past the first layer of soldiers to make it to the next one.

Chapter 1775 Isolated

Hannah couldn't be stopped by pure strength, so instead she was being stopped by numbers. Multiple people were sent to fight her, and that was something she wasn't very practiced with.

Attacks hit her left and right, and while they did little to damage her, she couldn't make it past the group of soldiers that had come for her.

Her spiritual sense was constantly active, searching in all directions for everyone and everything. She sensed her opponents around her, the Emperor who was ready to fight, her mother who was far away below them working on the teleportation formation, the other fighters that were on her side, and finally Alex.

She saw through her senses how quickly Alex defeated his opponent and moved up. However, in doing so, he also separated himself from the group.

She wanted to go help, but she was distracted.

* * * * *

Zhou Linfan fought a woman who called herself a battalion leader of the Talon Legion, but he had no idea who she was.

Whoever she was, she was supposed to be far too weak to deal with him. Her cultivation base was supposed to have been improved to Saint Transformation 9th realm at best with the array behind her, but somehow she was keeping up with him, stopping him from defeating her.

Zhou Linfan had some idea of why that was happening. He looked at the weird straw doll that the woman kept hanging by her chest, which was projecting some sort of technique that caused his attacks to get dampened.

The strength he got from being in the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle array was being countered with this weird artifact that he had never seen or known of before.

He couldn't even guess where it could have come from.

Zhou Linfan had spent the majority of the past 70 years outside the continent on a small island in the middle of the ocean. As a result, he was not very used to the idea of players and the amazing techniques and ideas they brought along.

It took a while for Zhou Linfan to even guess that the artifact might have belonged to a player that the woman had somehow received in the end.

"That little thing surely can't last forever," Zhou Linfan said and continued fighting. He noticed Alex moving on and getting surrounded, but that was something he would have to deal with on his own.

* * * * * *

Qiu Jianhong smashed against a water barrier with his large hammer, using the Dao of Wood to weaken the water-based defense to get past the person he had come across.

He had noticed Alex's predicament and wanted to go be of some help to his King, but the pathway ahead wasn't easy at all.

He had to continue fighting for himself instead of someone else.

Ren Guanting, Gong Liuxian, Huang Chen, Hou Xinya, Kang Xuefeng, Liang Shufen, Tan Yang, and Lei Zhong were in similar situations where they couldn't get to Alex.

As such, everyone started fearing for Alex's survival as he was further away from any of them.

* * * * * *

The soldiers in the Dragon Array that empowered the old man whom Alex had just killed started dispersing to go join other arrays where they could empower other people.

When Alex saw where they had gone, he noticed many of the array turning to face him with 10 different such fighters coming for him.

Other soldiers were flying toward the Dragon Capital at this very moment, so they didn't worry about how much power they were using to stop him.

As long as they succeeded in killing Alex, it would all be over.

Alex stopped moving and looked at them all, his eyes and senses scanning every single one of the soldiers that were empowered by the array.

Not a single one of them was weaker than Saint Transformation 8th realm at all. Nearly 3 thousand soldiers were dedicated to empowering these 10 people.

Curiosity filled Alex as to why not all of the 3 thousand soldiers weren't aiding just a single person. That person was bound to be super strong if they just did that, but they hadn't.

Had they done that, the war would look a lot different this early on.

Alex wondered what it was about the array that forced them from not using too many people. He was sure if he dug deep enough at the formation, it would show cracks in its usefulness.

For now, he had the 10 super-strong cultivators to deal with.

"How do you do, King Alex?" one of the 10 people asked.

Alex looked at the relatively youthful man and frowned a little. "Do I know you?" he asked.

"In passing, nothing much," the man said. "Would you mind giving up? I don't know if you've noticed or not, but you're surrounded, and it will take a while for your friends to catch up."

"Give up? Why would I do that?" Alex asked. "Why even ask me to do such a thing? Do you not want to just kill me?"

"We've been ordered to negotiate and try to get you to surrender on your own, first," the man said, his eyes flickering to Hannah and the others to make sure they were out of the way.

"I'm not going to surrender, so you might just come for me," Alex said. "No point in wasting time, do you think?"

The other 9 leaders turned toward each other, each one nodding to themselves as there was nothing more to talk about. They weren't going to beg Alex to stop or try to use their words to win this war. They only talked because the Dragon Emperor wanted them to talk of this first.

"Very well," the man said and brought out a spear. "Since you are trapped in here with us, you can forget about escaping. You can't even teleport out of here."

Alex realized that was true. It wasn't that he couldn't teleport at all, but there seemed to be a large barrier he had to get through to reach the Dao on the other side.

Something, most probably a formation, was making it harder for him to manipulate space.

"I see," Alex said. "You have come with quite the careful preparation to catch me off guard. I can't teleport, huh?"

"Thank you for your compliments. Now, please die," the man raised his spear to attack.

"It is quite the wild coincidence that you would go out of your way to catch me off guard," Alex said as a small smile appeared on his face. "Because I did the same."

"What do you—"

Flashes of light surrounded Alex, 23 in total, as beasts of all variety appeared around Alex.

Wildcats, leopards, tigers, bulls, horses, and many other beasts appeared from Alex's Soul Space where they had remained hidden all this time.

After bringing out his soldiers, he kept the beasts inside to create a false sense of weakness around them to catch the enemies off guard.

That was exactly what he wanted, and that was exactly what happened.

Each of the beasts here was stronger than Saint Transformation 5th realm in cultivation base, so as soon as they entered the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array, their cultivation prowess immediately went up by 4 realms.

The sudden appearance of these beasts caused what was an awful situation for Alex to turn into the best counter attack.

And just to add some salt to the wounds, Alex brought out the Blood God's Manual and summoned another 300 strong beasts.

Chapter 1776 The Reply

﻿﻿The sudden arrival of the beasts and the blood beasts caused a massive stir within the enemy's ranks. The 2nd layer of their formation was immediately disrupted as the majority of the soldiers there had to turn their attention toward Alex and the beasts.

It wasn't just them, but even the other soldiers from outside the formation had to switch their attention to them.

Immediately, a massive battle broke out right there, one that shifted the paradigm of the war instantly.

Alex gave the simple order of 'fight' to the 300 blood beast and charged upon the enemy himself.

A far more chaotic battle raged on the battlefield as the beasts occupied a majority of the soldiers in the second layer as well as part of the first and third layers.

The beasts that Alex had brought were the best of the beasts that Bai Jingshen had sent along with Alex. They were the strongest of what the Western Continent had for fighters, and only these few were what the White Tiger could afford to send while his oath was still active.

Thankfully, each one of these 20 beasts was supposed to follow Alex as if he were their master so that they didn't implicate the White Tiger in return.

As soon as the chaos of the battlefield returned, Alex departed from where he stood. He immediately flew in between the many battles, trying to still find his way forward.

He could see the Emperor in the distance. He just had to go through here.

A middle-aged woman attacked him from one side while he was somewhat distracted. At the same time, another older man attacked him from another direction.

Alex used the All Swirling Elemental Shield to block one of the attacks easily and destroyed the other attack before it even got too close.

He teleported, arriving behind the woman, who seemed to have been expecting that. She turned around instantly, bringing out a talisman that sent out an attack of its own.

Alex was struck by the attack and pushed backward. The woman prepared Immortal Qi to attack Alex when suddenly a beast slammed onto her from the side.

The leopard that had attacked had been ordered to fully listen to what Alex said, and follow his command as though he were the ruler of the world.

"Are you okay, young human?" the leopard asked Alex as he came close to him. The leopard looked around, trying to figure out a way of escaping from this place.

"Did you not use your Immortal Qi to attack her?" Alex asked as he watched the woman turn back around and charge toward them with vengeful fury.

Alex also instantly sensed the man behind them who seemed to have readied an Immortal attack to throw. Just as Alex turned around to look at him, the attack was loosened.

The massive golden trident flew through the sky, coming for him.

The leopard suddenly roared, letting out a massive blast of earthen Qi, using Immortal Qi to fight Immortal Qi.

Alex closed his ears at the sudden sound next to him and teleported quickly to an advantageous position from where he could easily kill the woman.

He teleported beside her once again, and while she had been ready for him this time too, she was surprised to find out that the person she was attacking was only an image and nothing more.

Her face changed belatedly as she realized that Alex was somewhere else. Before she could put back her defense, a deadly attack carved through the middle-aged woman, killing her.

Alex quickly made sure that the Soul of the woman was dead too before the body fell to the ground below. He took one last look at everything around him before moving toward the 3rd layer.

Suddenly, an ominous feeling filled Alex quickly as it spread out from his senses. When he checked the source of the ominous feeling, he realized what it was.

The Dragon Emperor was missing.

Alex doubted that the Dragon Emperor would leave at all. Which meant the Dragon Emperor had joined the fight somewhere as well.

With tens of thousands of soldiers fighting all around, it was difficult for Alex to—

A terrifyingly mighty power caught onto Alex, suppressing him with its aura, while making him completely unable to move at all.

Alex overcame the suppressive aura from the Dragon Emperor, and struck back, surprising him.

The Dragon Emperor's eyes widened in somewhat shock as he refused to believe that Alex could overcome his cultivation base's suppression.

"Let me congratulate you first of all," the Emperor said. "You have come prepared to fight me. But you are too young to do so. Even as far as you have come, you are nothing but a puppet for me to play with."

A river of Qi flowed out of the Dragon Emperor, traveling into the spear he held. Lightning crackled softly around the spear and the Dragon Emperor looked down on Alex again.

Unlike Alex, the Dragon Emperor hadn't yet completed his side of the trade and had been bound by oath for quite some time. As such, the Dragon Emperor felt great hesitation in attacking Alex just as it was.

So he spoke.

"The technique you sought to give me was incredible," the Dragon Emperor said. "But I will have to refuse it. It is simply too valuable for me to give something in return for it."

The Dragon Emperor felt the suppression leave his body following his words. He was no longer bound by the oath. As soon as he realized that, the lightning power in his spear improved immediately and he stabbed it forward.

A massive dragon-shaped bolt of lightning went straight for Alex.

Alex looked at the incoming lightning bolt, the speed of which seemed quite slow for his eyes. He acted immediately and space twisted around him.

Alex disappeared into a fold of space past where the attack passed through, flying into the distance. The space untwisted itself and Alex reappeared.

As soon as he was out, he sent out some attack of his own. Unfortunately for him, the Dragon Emperor was being empowered by a lot of strong individuals, and as such his power was quite high.

The Dragon Emperor realized he couldn't just attack and instead decided to catch onto Alex first. He created vines and roots manifest around him in the air and sent it all toward Alex.

However, before it could come anywhere close to Alex, a simple fiery slash landed on the vines and roots, and instantly exploded.

The technique used right then was Alex's technique, but he had not been the one to use it at all.

"Are you alright?" Hannah arrived next to Alex, looking at him worriedly.

"I'm okay," Alex answered and quickly looked back to where his sister had come from.

Two dead bodies were falling from the sky even as she had appeared here.

The Dragon Emperor's lips turned to a sneer as he looked at Alex and Hannah. "If you two think you are going to make any difference at all, then you are very much mistaken."

The shield appeared on his hand as well. Lightning crackled on the spear once again.

"He's stronger than before," Hannah said softly. "Hemight have more help than usual."

"That doesn't matter to us," Alex said. "Since we're this far in, it's time to go all the way. We'll kill him here if possible."

"Alright," Hannah said and held tight onto her thin sword. "Together?"

"Together!"

The two of them attacked the Dragon Emperor at once.

Hannah attacked first, sending out a bunch of Ice spears at the Dragon Emperor as she used the Infinite Heavenly Ice Spear technique to attack the Emperor.

Alex teleported to the side, far away from the Emperor and his sister's attacks, and used the Dao of Space and Dao of Cutting to send out an attack that cut through space itself.

The Dragon Emperor instantly understood Alex's attack. While he protected himself from Hannah's attack using his shield, he sent out an attack in Alex's direction, intercepting the incoming attack.

The two attacks landed together, creating a rather strong clash in the middle.

Alex teleported again, moving to the other side of the Emperor. He maintained a lot of distance as he understood that the Dragon Emperor had the ability to extend the distance at which he teleported.

Far away, a few meters of extra teleportation did not matter to him at all. However, close up, if he was somehow forced to teleport right where the Emperor wanted him to, that would be quickly troublesome.

As such, Alex stood attacked from far away.

The Emperor quite efficiently fought through both Alex and Hannah's attacks, defending against both and sending back more attacks in retaliation at the same time.

He found it quite difficult to retaliate well enough to destroy either Alex or Hannah without the other one being to disturb him somehow, but he also didn't let himself get caught in their attacks.

The three of them fought for nearly 10 minutes before the status of the battle slowly began changing.

The Dragon Emperor slowly got stronger and stronger.

Alex was very confused about how the man was getting stronger as time went on. However, he quickly realized the reason.

He looked to the side with the many strong cultivators who had formed an array for the Emperor and saw that there were new faces added to them.

He quickly looked at the situation of the war and realized they were once again no longer on an equal footing.

Enough time had passed that even without the teleportation formation, the soldiers from nearby cities were now beginning to arrive in bulk.

Chapter 1777 Sword Array

"He's getting stronger," Hannah messaged Alex directly using her Spiritual sense. "What do we do?"

Alex felt the sudden burst of Immortal Qi from the Emperor and teleported next to his sister, who quickly formed a water shield to protect the two of them.

He was protected from the might and the shockwave of the Immortal attack, something that was starting to look mundane the more he saw it being used.

It was still dangerous, but it simply didn't feel as grand anymore.

He looked far away where the group of nearly 500 strong soldiers had formed the Dragon Array for the Dragon Emperor.

"They keep adding to their numbers," Alex replied to Hannah. "Even though the teleportation formation is gone, more fighters are joining. The number is low for now, but something needs to change soon or we will lose."

Hannah's dark sword burned with bright firelight, as she gracefully swung her sword around. Bright flower petals blew out from her sword, twisting in the wind as though spinning in a horizontal spiral as they moved toward the Dragon Emperor.

When they reached the Dragon Emperor, they burst on his shield, causing multiple small, but strong bombardments that he had to protect himself from.

"The only good thing about the array seems to be that they can't improve the power of our Immortal Qi," Hannah said. "If his Immortal Qi had somehow gotten stronger, then I would've been in trouble right now."

Alex nodded. He was not yet sure if the lack of improvement to the Immortal Qi came from neither of them actually being in the Immortal realm, or if it was because the world they lived in did not allow for an Immortal to exist without hiding himself.

It could also have nothing to do with either of those and just be a flaw of the array where the cultivation base could not be improved beyond what the majority of the individuals had in the array.

"Should we go attack them then?" Hannah asked Alex.

"No," Alex said. "Their defense will be strong. And we can't afford to divert our attention anywhere except for him. Either we both leave, or neither of us do."

Zhou Linfan was still being tied down far away, unable to come to help them.

Alex felt more and more powerful individuals enter his spiritual sense, meaning more and more soldiers were coming to help them.

It was a miracle perhaps that none of the sects or other organizations had sought to come help. Or maybe they had and the soldiers were given priority for teleportation.

Alex wished it was the first. If it was the latter, they could be in quite the situation.

"Is Huan doing okay?" Hannah asked Alex as she sent out another attack to keep the Emperor busy.

Alex closed his eyes for a second, seeking to see through Whisker's eyes.

"He must be still working," Alex answered. "He'd be fine."

Alex stepped out from behind Hannah and brought out a large number of swords, making them all fly around him. They slowly came to fly next to him in a sort of cone-like spiral pattern, forming his sword array.

The 21 Sword Array he received after killing a member of the Jin clan back in the Western Continent was something Alex had already guessed belonged to the senior from the Central Continent.

It was something that had come down in the meteor storm, and as such it was an incredible treasure for anyone who owned it.

The array formed 3 layers of swords, with 3 at the front, 6 in the middle, and 12 at the end. The sword that attacked were the ones in the front and the purpose of the sword in the middle and the back was just to support the ones at the front.

Learning that, Alex had managed to improve that technique a long time ago, adding another 2 layers of swords to the array with 21 swords on the fourth layer and 33 swords on the fifth.

Each additional layer increased the difficulty of handling the array, as it came with a mental burden. Which was why Alex had stopped at 75 swords in total.

However, after all these years, it was time he added some more.

6 layers of swords flew in an array, with 48 swords on the 6th layer. However, Alex did not have enough good swords to make up the entire number at all.

As such, he had to use substitutes.

A faintly glimmering white spiritual sword appeared at the first layer, along with Midnight. Next to it, a blood sword appeared, one that was the strongest Alex had created yet.

Alongside those, Alex also made a lot of swords made from just Qi or blood to fill the rest of the layers to make a total of 123 swords, turning the technique into 123 Sword Array.

The Dragon Emperor watched the hundred-plus swords fly in front of Alex, each gleaming with a Sword Aura of the strongest variety he had ever seen.

He frowned a little but welcomed the attack.

The swords spun around, blazing with Qi and aura, and flew directly toward the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor put up his shield and activated a golden barrier. The sword crashed into the shield, and the Dragon Emperor realized just how mistaken he was about the force behind the attack.

The barrier shook for a second, rippling as though ready to break. The Dragon Emperor instantly poured in some Immortal Qi to shield and barely stopped the attack from destroying it.

Even with the Immortal Qi, the Dragon Emperor could tell just how strong the attack had been, and it didn't look like it was stopping.

The sword array spun on top of the shield, drilling into the barrier that now held quite easily. However, having to constantly put up Immortal Qi to stop the sword wasn't something the Emperor wanted.

At the same time, Hannah moved to the side and started sending out a barrage of Ice spears at the Emperor again.

The Dragon Emperor moved his spear at once, empowering it with light lightning, and sent out an attack where the lightning bolt forked into dozens of different smaller lightning bolts, each one of which destroyed the many icicles while moving for Hannah.

Alex poured his intent into the attack and put some more power into the spinning swords while adding his Spiritual energy to the attack more and more.

The Dragon Emperor didn't notice it at first, but slowly he could feel his head start to grow somewhat cloudy, and his reflexes becoming slightly slower.

He instantly employed the Dao of Space Expansion to increase the distance between him and the attack and used the opportunity to escape.

"Swarm them!" he ordered at the same time and many of the free soldiers came for Alex and Hannah.

Alex and Hannah started fighting the new soldiers and quickly realized it was going to take a lot to go through these soldiers easily.

At that very moment, a long and loud ringing sound echoed throughout the battlefield, causing many of the people to look at what was making the sound.

"That..." one of the soldiers slowly spoke. "Is that the Newsboard?"

Chapter 1778 Newsboards

﻿﻿"God damn!" Shan Wangjiu cursed softly. "We might die at this rate. Is he still working?"New n0vel chapters are published on

Whisker looked at the sky outside the walls of the building as well, watching over the dozens of people that had gathered around, shooting their attacks at the barrier.

The barrier had held pretty well so far, but it was starting to show signs of having been weakened. Whisker was ready to fight, but there were simply too many people outside.

His 3 puppets would not be helpful in such situations at all.

The barrier rippled against under the attacks outside, and a bit of energy passed through as well.

"Get ready to fight, I suppose," Shan Wangjiu said and held up his great sword, preparing to fight.

Whisker sighed slightly and prepared himself as well. He regretted not bringing more puppets, but there was only so man that Alex managed to request from the spirit of the Playground which was the Sundering Sanctum.

Just as they thought all hope was lost, a long sonorous ringing sound flooded the city. It came from seemingly all around them.

Whisker was confused as to what was happening for a second and looked around only to realize that it was what they had come here for.

He saw the large, glowing hexagonal body fly into the air in the distance.

"Whisker, I need the talisman!" Long Huan's message flowed into Whisker at once.

Whisker teleported through the shadows, arriving next to Long Huan in no time at all. "Did you do it?" he asked.

Long Huan nodded. "I managed to overcome all the ones in all cities," he said. "They are ready for broadcast."

Whisker quickly pulled out a talisman and handed it over. "What is that sound?" he asked.

"A sort of alert," Long Huan explained. "It is there to let people know that some sort of important announcement is going to be made and that they should come watch it."

"Great!" Whisker said loudly. "That works perfectly for us."

"It does," Long Huan said. "This newsboard stuff is incredible."

He took the talisman and placed it over a specific portion of the board in front of him. Then, he closed his eyes and started focusing on the console in front of him again.

He slowly lost himself to the task and no sooner focused as he activated the talisman that was on the console, sending the information on it throughout the entire Eastern Continent.

* * * * * *

From the Dawn Islands in the east to the Martial Islands in the west. From the fragmented cities of the golden mountain range to the north, to the fishing villages in the south.

Each and every single place that had a decently sized population and was close to the main continent had a Newsboard installed in it.

It was a convenient way to transfer news and other necessary information across the entire Empire at once without having to send it to individual parties that lived in these cities and hope it spread through with enough time.

This idea that was brought to the Empire via the players was one of the more significant changes they had made to the empire.

And now, that very change was going to make history.

The sonorous ringing sound of the floating Newsboards drew the attention of everyone who had been hoping to gain some information about the situation in the capital.

The last thing they had heard was that the Dragon Emperor had requested the king of the Southern Continent to give himself up, wherever he was.

After that, the Newsboard had gone silent for a while, showing local news all throughout.

However, at some point that had changed as well. As if someone else had gained control of the Newsboard, it had suddenly gone silent.

At the same time, soldiers were flying to the teleportation formation one after another as though something terrible was happening somewhere far away.

As such, the people of the Eastern Continent were waiting with burning curiosity to see exactly what was happening in the Capital.

And now it appeared before them.

As the ringing stopped, everyone watched the giant boxes floating in the sky suddenly throw out large transparent screens that showed something blue.

The sky.

In the sky floated a handful of specks of people. The vision zoomed in and they could see exactly what it was. The sound came through.

Talia of the Cloud Iron sect gasped when she saw Alex in the sky, along with the Emperor and his subordinates.

Ren Wujin, the Golden fox of the Ren Family, watched the recording in the sky with expressionless eyes.

Qiao Zhengsheng of the Spears Peak sect took a moment to hear just what was being said.

They could hear a trade where the Emperor had to give back the alchemists while Alex handed over the Ivory sword.

"How does he have the sword?" Bing Zheshaung, leader of the Ice Mist Palace asked with a confused expression on her face.

"That is something only the princes are supposed to have, isn't it? Why does King Alex have that?" Tan Huangling asked his fellow painters who only shook their heads.

"Did he harm one of the princes to get that sword? Is that why we haven't seen or heard from one of them for so long?" Mao Yingtai, Queen of the Silver Kingdom asked with a serious expression on her face. "He didn't seem like it during our travels."

After the trade was done, the Emperor left the sky for a bit and silence filled the air. The vision suddenly jumped as Alex asked a single question to the ones that remained behind.

"Are you guys aware that the Azure Dragon is dead?" Alex asked.

The single sentence sent the entire continent roiling with madness.

"That can't be," an elder of the Jin family said in the Gold Kingdom.

"How could His Majesty be dead? He was seen just a couple of centuries ago, wasn't he?" the prime disciple of the Beast Supremacy sect said.

"Why would he lie so blatantly?" Long Weiyuang, the king of the Azure Kingdom wondered with a frown. He had stopped along the way to the Dragon Capital to see what was happening with the Newsboards in the cities along the way.

King Jin of the Emerald Kingdom could only watch in shock. "Is this true?" he asked his advisors, but they said nothing and simply watched.

And then came the next sentence that broke their minds.

"And your Emperor had a hand in that."

The world was sent into roiling madness upon the utterance of that sentence.

"What nonsense is he speaking?"

"How dare he make such fraudulent claims?"

"The Emperor killing the Azure Dragon? What nonsense is this? Who is in charge of showing this message? Stop this right now."

However, none of the people who worked on the local Newsboards had any control over what was shown or said in the current broadcast.

The only way to stop the message would be a destroy the Newsboards that floated in the sky.

Many did that, destroying it just because they understood something was wrong there.

However, even with that, many still kept going.

After all, the people's curiosity had been piqued, and it wasn't until they learned everything that they were going to let the information go.

Chapter 1779 Relayed News

﻿﻿The Newsboards drew everyone's attention, even the ones that were not initially trying to look at it.

The news that the Dragon Emperor had somehow killed the Azure Dragon was a big enough news that made the continent come to a halt.

People gasped in disbelief, many crying out in the horror of the situation, the ones with more self-control trying to find reasons why the Dragon Emperor would possibly do that.New n0vel chapters are published on

The last thing they knew about the Azure Dragon was that the Azure Dragon had been involved in some sort of big incident that involved the other rulers and had been gravely injured.

After that, they hadn't heard anything from him at all. He had apparently been seen leaving his realm a few times, but it was hard for everyone to trust the news as there weren't any proper credible sources.

The same was true with the news they were hearing at the moment. They could hear Alex give the information, but it was hard to believe that was the correct information.

They had no reason to trust the Newsboards either. Still, they were drawn to it like moths to a flame, and as they continued watching more information was revealed.

Alex claimed that he would tell everyone of the Emperor's crimes. The sound rang through the many cities that still had the Newsboards running.

The first thing Alex spoke about was the massacre of the Five great royal families nearly 6000 years ago by claiming that they were trying to start a coup where they would overthrow the Empire and form their own separate kingdoms.

Alex claimed that they had done nothing of that sort, and it had in fact been the Emperor who had manipulated the truth using deceitful tactics to make vile accusations against the kings and queens to get rid of them.

"Is that true?" a person asked someone next to them.

"How would I know? This sounds like bullshit to me."

An old ancestor from an old clan stood up from where he had been sitting. "I knew it!" he shouted. "I knew something like that had to have been happening back then. I didn't see how the sweet Queen Fang could ever plan on doing something so heinous."

Another ancestor somewhere else contemplated on the information, trying to judge it with his memories.

He remembered the event back then had in fact been rather hastily handled. He also remembered thinking that it was rather sad that all the descendants of those families had been killed as well.

He had seen no reason why those poor children had to die.

With this new information, many of the things in the past slowly made sense. They understood that the emperor must have been trying to stop something. What that was, they didn't know yet.

Not everyone believed those words. In fact, few did. The majority were still of the mind that what was being shown on the Newsboard was just propaganda from the King.

However, that didn't stop them from wanting to continue watching it and see the drama unfold.

The next information Alex gave them was about the battle in the Central continent and how the contents of those battles had been wildly changed by the Emperor to serve his purpose to attack the Western Continent, and that in fact, the White Tiger had been the good guy all along.

Many thought back to when they were taken to the Western Continent to fight against the people there. It had not made sense to many why they had to fight the humans just because their ruler had a nasty idea.

That thought made them believe what was being said was in fact true.

"But there's no proof."

"Isn't the King Alex under the Phoenix ruler in the Southern Continent? He would know the answer, right?"

"But we don't know if he's lying or not."

Conversations broke out, and Alex continued in the Newsboard where he stood before the Emperor's subordinates, calling out the Emperor's crimes.

70 years ago, your Emperor then was responsible for the death of the Azure Dragon and his Wife, Shi Meiyoung, when he attempted to kill their newborn child.

The sudden bit of information left the people in shock. Hearing that the Azure Dragon had died was shocking enough, learning that he even possibly had a wife and child that had been killed was even wilder.

"His Majesty had a wife and child? How did I never hear about this before in my life?"

"I'm only finding this out myself."

Everyone seemed vastly confused by the sudden bit of information. What was even more confusing was that Alex had said that the Emperor had tried to kill a newborn child. The Azure Dragon and his Wife had just died just because.

"How could the Azure Dragon possibly die just like that? Even if he was weak, he would still be stronger than the Emperor, wouldn't he?" a young man questioned in front of many people who gathered.

"It is possible that His Majesty was greatly injured as he was said to be 5000 years ago," someone else answered.

"But wasn't he healed? We know His Majesty was seen around a couple of times."

A sudden discourse covered many cities and landmarks where people were gathered. Some knowledgeable ones tried to explain the situation as well.

"Immortals cannot attack another human, or else they would have to face the wrath of the Heavens," old ancestors, sect leaders, and such started explaining to their juniors.

As they explained, they themselves remembered what they knew and were shocked beyond belief.

"If… if an Immortal tries to kill someone, the Heavens attack them with lightning bolts as punishment known as the Heavenly Judgment," they explained, and as they did, they remembered the strong lightning strikes that shook the world.

Was that 70 years ago?

Immediately, they started sending out people to find records of what had happened 70 years ago.

Some in fact remembered themselves and quickly relayed the information to others themselves.

"70 years ago, there had in fact been 3 lightning bolts that had dropped in the region around the Azure Dragon's secret realm. Was that what it was?"

"Wasn't that supposed to be for the Empress?" someone else reminded.

"That's… true, but I have always wondered how the Empress could have died in just 3 lightning bolts. It never made any sense to me back then at all."

Similar doubts and curiosities caused many people to look up information all around.

And as they did, Alex in the Newsboards spoke once again.

69 years ago, your Emperor attacked his own son and daughter-in-law and nearly killed both of them.

"The Emperor attacked his son? Which one?"

"That can't be true. Why would the—"

The scenery in the Newsboards suddenly changed from one of Alex and the sky to one of a dark room with a handsome young man standing in front of them all.

Many were curious about who they were looking at, but a few recognized him instantly.

"Greetings, everyone," the young man spoke. "I am Long Huan, the second prince of the Empire. I am the prince who you heard King Alex just saying."

"And as such, I would like to confirm what has been said. Everything King Alex mentioned as of yet, is in fact true."

Chapter 1780 Long Huan's Message

Leaders of many great sects and the heads of many big clans watched the display with unexplained emotions as Long Huan began speaking.

"That is the second prince," one of them said.

"Could be an illusion. Using a technique, pill, or whatnot," someone else said.

"I always wondered where the prince was all this time," an elder of the Immortal Saint Pavillion said. "We only ever saw the Crown Prince, so I had assumed he had been tied up with things in the palace. Is this really him? And he's speaking against his father?"

Several of the people still had a lot of doubts as to even who the person on the screen was, not to mention what he was going to say.

The Emerald King watched the broadcast with intent eyes, trying to discern what the truth of the situation was.

The Gold King refrained from talking at all amidst his advisors who were already telling him to destroy the Newsboard in the city.

The Ivory Queen looked to the sky with clear eyes, doubts and hopes both slowly clouding her vision.

The Silver Queen had already destroyed the broadcast as per her advisor's advice and was now getting information relayed to her through a talisman from her brother who was in another city.

The Ebony King's advisors had long since left him with the Emperor, so he was free to make any decision at the moment. And the decision he made was to let the broadcast run without anybody stopping them. In fact, he actively ordered people to punish anyone who tried to do so.

Many soldiers were stuck around cities watching the broadcast, their loyalties being tested at the moment.

The atmosphere around the empire felt as though major changes were going to happen very, very soon.

* * * * * *

Long Fangyu, the Crown Prince, lay on his back on the ground, staring at the sky where the battle had reached another level of chaos.

People fought and died and continued fighting. Blood and corpses rained from the sky every moment.

He watched a young woman with twin tails get pierced by a spear through her back by an old man with gray hair who looked old enough to be her grandfather.

The same old man was hit in the head with 2 arrows and was shot by a middle-aged man with a round face.

The middle-aged man got attacked while distracted and a lightning bolt struck him from the front. He managed to survive, but he had to run away to live.

The Crown Prince watched the man fly away wounded to the giant ship that belonged to the Southern Continent's army, wherein he disappeared.

The Newsboards in the distance showed images of Alex and words he spoke earlier before the battle began. So, the Crown Prince saw no reason to pay any attention to it.

It was only repeating information he had already learned about. Not to mention, it wasn't even that good at spreading the knowledge as everything that came from Alex was nothing more than claims and rumors with no evidence.

Long Fangyu knew the truth, and he knew what was being told was right. But he also knew there would be nothing that this simple message would be able to—

Long Huan appeared on the screen and began talking all of a sudden.

The Crown Prince heard his brother's voice and quickly got up from where he was.

After being struck down by Alex, Long Fangyu had fallen onto a house and had collapsed on its roof. He had remained in the rubble, unable to muster up any motivation to fight or help anyone.

However, the single instance of his brother's voice shook him out of his stupor and gave him purpose again.

"Huan!" he whispered to himself and looked at the message. Was this a recording that Alex had brought back? Was this not his brother? What it perhaps some—

The Crown Prince looked at the background and frowned a little. He recognized the background. That was the building where the Newsboards were controlled from.

The Newsboard headquarters.

"Long Huan is here?" he asked himself.

"Fangyu! Stop wasting your time," a voice came from far away in the sky.

The Dragon Emperor, having gotten some free time away from Alex and Hannah was now focused on the Newsboards with an angry look on his face.

"Father?" Long Fangyu looked up.

"Go and check who that is at the Newsboards headquarters," the Emperor said. "If it's your brother, bring him back. If it's not, kill him. Take the soldiers with you."

Long Fangyu wanted to say something, but he wasn't sure what he would. In the end, he could only nod and obey his father's command.

* * * * * *

"I am here to tell you all the information I can about what happened in the past," Long Huan said. "It all started when the Azure Dragon had a child with his new wife, and gave birth to a child."

"I am sure you all remember the day the child was born. It was the day when the sky was filled with gold and green, a birth omen for the incredible child of the Azure Dragon."

"For the child born was born between a Dragon and a Tiger, and was a Tiger himself."

"After the—"

A loud explosion caught Long Huan's attention. He looked to the side and sent out his spiritual sense to check on things. The barrier was weak, but it was still holding.

"Are you guys okay?" he asked Whisker and Shan Wangjiu, both of whom were scared but ready to fight.

"Just do your thing," Shan Wangjiu said. "We'll give you your time, however we can."

Whisker was simply too focused on the barrier being destroyed at any moment now to even reply.

Long Huan took a moment to gather himself and nodded, before turning back toward the console. And he continued.

"The child of the Azure Dragon terrified my father for some reason, so he went to kill him. It wasn't just him either. My mother and several soldiers were taken too."

"In the secret realm, they tried what they could to kill the child. The Azure Dragon fought back but because he was an Immortal and had made a vow to not kill humans, he couldn't fight back properly."

"My father and mother sought to take advantage of that fact, but it went poorly. The Azure Dragon fought with all his might and..." Long Huan took a deep breath. "And he died in the end. My mother died during that battle."

"You might have heard that she had died during her breakthrough to the Immortal realm, but that is incorrect. She died during the fight against the Azure dragon."

Another explosion rang loudly outside, sending terrifying shockwaves through the ground. Long Huan was sure the people viewing this could see the shaking as well.

"But that is not all," he continued. "My father killed the Azure dragon, but he wasn't done with that. He wanted to steal from the Azure Dragon and to do that, he needed the Ivory sword. The sword that I was given from my birth."

"When I found out what had happened and ran away with the sword, refusing to hand it over, my Father attacked me as well."

Chapter 1781 Battle Outside the Headquarters

"We were attacked by the Empire's soldiers. I nearly died. My wife was poisoned and nearly killed as well. She..."

Long Huan continued broadcasting his side of the story while Whisker and Shan Wangjiu stood outside, ready for the imminent collapse of the barrier.

"We might actually end up dying now," Shan Wangjiu said as he looked up and counted the number of people. "Damn, when did it become 17? Weren't there just 12 not even a minute ago."

Whisker watched another person join in and start attacking the barrier. The barrier flickered on and off with many of the attacks slipping in through the cracks. Whisker had to use the three puppets with him to protect himself from the attacks that came past the barrier.

"King Alex's subordinate was killed by my father," Long Huan's voice rang through the sky. "And her only crime was that she dared to stop my father from killing me again."

"Damn!" Shan Wangjiu said. "Did that really happen? Did one of Master's subordinates die?"

"Yes," Whisker answered. "She died protecting brother."

"That sucks," Shan Wangjiu said. "She must have been an incredible woman for Master to—"

The barrier shattered entirely as specks of broken energy that formed the barrier showered upon Shan Wangjiu and Whisker.

The two of them looked to the sky with a look of both horror and acceptance as they saw the nearly 20 soldiers slowly descend down toward them.

Shan Wangjiu immediately took a record of them all and was sad to see that the weakest two of the group were the only ones he could possibly take.

And the possibility that he would get to fight only these two cultivators in a fair round of combat was incredibly slim. It was pretty much impossible.

"Well, time to pay back Master," Shan Wangjiu said and his sword glowed bright as he filled his giant sword with Sword Qi.

Whisker got into one of the three puppets which he brought back to protect the entrance to the second prince. The remaining two he immediately sent to fight.

The puppets jumped into the sky and punched toward two of the cultivators.

One of the cultivators managed to dodge out in time. The puppet quickly turned around to attack, but the momentum it could create while descending was nowhere near strong enough to make use of its Immortal grade.

Due to the lack of place to push itself off of, the puppet was near enough useless in front of all these high-ranking soldiers.

The puppet tried to go for a punch again, but the soldier managed to send out a sword slash and struck back the Immortal puppet.

The other of the two puppets, however, managed to land a solid blow on the chest of one of the cultivators who were the first to enter.

When the punch connected with the cultivator, everyone, including the cultivator himself, could feel the force behind the punch of the attack as the sound of bones cracking was violently loud.

The sound came first and then the pain as the body of the cultivator was flung to the sky, quickly disappearing from sight.

It was unlikely that the man who had just been attacked was in any way hurt enough for the wound to be fatal. However, it was also hurtful and damaging enough that it was unlikely that the man would return to fight at all.

Both of the puppets quickly returned to the ground to continue fighting.

Shan Wangjiu locked in on one of the weaker cultivators and immediately sent out a sword slash. The young woman who was his target barely managed to react in time to be able to block it.

Another cultivator right next to her sent out a ball of fire toward Shan Wangjiu who immediately had to use up the skill of his sword to create a golden barrier that stopped the attack.

With just the first instance of battle, he had to use his sword's hidden technique. How was he supposed to survive this in any way?

"Master, are you really not going to send anyone to defend this place at all?" Shan Wangjiu softly murmured as he used the opportunity of the shield's activation to protect himself from the barrage of attacks.

Long Huan noticed that the fight had begun outside. He could hear the sounds of clashes and explosions all around him, the shaking ground making him shiver with each shockwave as every other one could be the one that hurt him.

He was getting close to finishing what he was talking about. He had to continue.

Whisker sent out the two puppets to fight for a while. As long as they were fighting on the ground, the puppets showed more potential as they were entirely physical, and having something to work off of gave them a great boost in strength.

Up in the air, they were only as strong as the Qi of the person that controlled them. But down here, they were untouchable.

The two puppets swam through the remaining 17 cultivators as though they were adults playing against children.

A skull cracked open from one of the kicks, and another person had his chest blasted open from another punch.

Another man had his shield broken in half and tossed away, while the other one used his Qi to stop the puppet in place and failed.

The group of cultivators began fighting the two puppets and tried their best to survive.

Seeing the situation, Shan Wangjiu thought he had some hope. However, that hope was lost the moment some of the cultivators began ignoring the puppets entirely and leaving their comrades to deal with them.

Shan Wangjiu prepared to fight, but he knew he would only die.

"Leave!" Whisker shouted at him. "Brother said to leave everything and run away if we are losing. Go."

Shan Wangjiu turned around toward Whisker while in a sort of dilemma. But survival quickly won over.

"I'm sorry," he shouted and ran away from the place, leaving Whisker alone behind with the puppets to deal with them.

Whisker let the two puppets fight them out and stop them from entering the door while he and the final puppet rushed into the room with Long Huan.

Long Huan turned to look at Whisker. "Is it time to go?" he asked.

Whisker nodded. "We must leave," he said.

Three soldiers managed to sneak through the door and arrived inside. They saw the prince and retrained their weapons a little while still showing hostility.

"Your Highness," the two said softly.

Long Huan's eyes showed anger and annoyance. He was so close to finishing it all. He just had the oath to speak to prove to everyone that everything he had said until now was true.

And yet, it was too late.

He pulled out the Ebony sword. "Let's—"

His words were drowned by a large explosive sound as dust filled the room they were in.

Sounds of more battle filled outside, and before the dust had even settled in the room, someone had entered.

"I'm glad I made it in time," an older voice spoke as the man turned toward Long Huan. "How have you been doing, Your Highness?"

Long Huan's face glowed up in surprise.

"Senior Yan!"

Chapter 1782 Yan Yating

Before Long Huan stood a tall man with a muscular build and a square face. His hair and beard were cut to perfection and his black robes slowly undulated toward the bottom.

Whisker looked at the man and recognized him the moment he saw him. Just as soon, he realized what was happening outside as his senses saw the commotion.

Several of the soldiers had arrived on the grounds outside the building and were now fighting the other cultivators.

Immediately, Whisker took back the fighting puppets and stopped them from attacking just about anyone.

The puppets flew back inside, arriving next to Whisker, who was now staring at the newly arrived figure in black.

"Senior Yan!" Long Huan spoke out in surprise.

Yan Yating had arrived with the Oathbreakers.

* * * * *

Alex watched as several hundreds of strong soldiers joined the mix of the battle, wearing black robes, and started fighting against the Empire's soldiers.

The Emperor was very much confused about what was happening at first, but Alex understood more than just anyone else. After all, it was he who had called the Oathbreakers.

Long ago when Alex had first made a pact with the Oathbreakers, in return for giving them all the pills he could, they had to come help when it was time to kill the Emperor.

He had received a single-use talisman from them all this time, so when it was obvious that he would have to fight the Dragon Emperor, he made use of that talisman and called the Oathbreakers.

Alex understood at the time that because the Oathbreakers could not use the teleportation formation, as they were all living a life in hiding, they would take some time to get here.

Thankfully, he had stalled the Emperor's army long enough that they had a chance to arrive.

And what a moment they had arrived in.

Hannah was starting to get worried that Long Huan would get captured or hurt because of what she was seeing with the displays on the Newsboard. Everyone could see that time was of the essence.

She had wanted to go help him herself, but she understood that if she left at that moment, all their effort would effectively be gone as Alex would be alone on the battlefield and would then be forced to run away.

As such, she had to stay behind.

There were others that she wanted to go help Long Huan, but everyone was busy.

Zhou Linfan was surrounded by many strong soldiers. The elders were fighting against strong opponents. Her Uncle was busy defending the teleportation building. And, her mother was down below dealing with the teleportation formation.

There was no one that could have helped Long Huan at the moment.

That was why when she finally saw him getting help, she let out a loud breath of sigh.

"He's safe," Alex told his sister. "Let's focus on our job now."

"Yes," Hannah said and went back to fighting the Emperor again, redoubling their effort.

* * * * * * *

All the people around the continent who had been watching the Newsboards were waiting to see what happened to the person that they were almost absolutely sure was the second prince.

The loud explosive noises and the constantly shaking images from the other side let the people know that the prince was in a dangerous place.

More than once, he looked away with a worried face. Until a large explosion filled the room with dust. When the dust settled, they could see the second place smiling widely as he spoke about someone called 'Senior Yan'.

Nobody knew who Senior Yan was. Many tried to, but few came to the right conclusion.

That was until Yan Yating himself stepped into the image and the world saw exactly who he was.

Many people didn't recognize him. The juniors, especially the players, had no way of recognizing him at all.

However, the older generation knew him well. They knew him very well.

This was a man who had once shaken the empire. Known as a heaven's genius, he had crushed many strong fighters from a young age, becoming a well-known figure in the Empire.

He had become extremely famous after singlehandedly crushing an entire sect that had taken offense to him and had started coming after him.

His fame had dwindled once he joined the army of the Empire and busied himself with his duties and training. However, even then, his name would occasionally shake the empire.

The last time something of him had sent people into shock was over 5000 years ago when he had come to become one of the three heads of the Head Legion.

That was when Yan Yating had been appointed as the War Head of the entire army, the person that everyone was to rely on during times of war.

Yan Yating had done a fantastic job with the war against the Western Continent and his fame had grown there too. But he was a man who never sought the limelight once entering the army, so his name slowly faded into becoming just one of the many.

However, those who remembered the past knew for a fact in the entire continent, aside from the Emperor himself, this was the strongest man alive.

And what surprised these old men the most was that Yan Yating was alive. After all, there had been news that the man had somehow died during some accident along with a lot of soldiers.

No one knew the details, only that people had died.

However, seeing that the man was clearly alive caused those old men and women to become very much confused.

"Listen to His Highness," Yan Yating's voice flowed through the image in front of every Newsboard all around the Empire. "The Emperor you all revere is not one that deserves your reverence. He is a coward and a hypocrite who has done such heinous things that it is a surprise it has taken this long for it to come out."

"Everything you have heard today, from what His Majesty Alex has said to what His Highness, the second Prince has said, they are all true."

"I, and many others like me, were forced to swear an oath to hide the truth from you. However, now that the truth is out, nothing stops me from attesting to the truth."

"I and my fellow brethren could not serve under such an emperor, so we vowed to fight against him."

"We are the Oathbreakers, and today we have come to fight for what we believe."

"Long Tiankong is not my Emperor. Long Tiankong should not be your Emperor either. My fellow friends, you have all heard of everything that man has done. If you stand by and do nothing after hearing everything, you will be just as responsible for everything horrible as he is."

"Rise up! Fight against the tyrant. Fight against the man that killed your true ruler."

"Rise and fight, just like we will be."

Yan Yating looked toward Long Huan. "Let's go. Those with a heart will hear our call."

Long Huan nodded and looked at the image one last time.

"Please, we need your help," he said and took a deep bow. The image blinked out, and silence filled the entirety of the Empire.

And in that silence burned a fire hot enough to scorch the skies.

Chapter 1783 Understanding

Yan Yating walked out of the building with Long Huan, with Whisker trailing behind with the three puppets.

Shan Wangjiu flew back from where he had run off to and rejoined them as well.

Several of the fighters outside, who had been there to take the second prince away, were now made to submit by the newly arrived Oathbreakers.

The level of strength of the Oathbreakers was on a different scale.

Yan Yating looked at all of them and asked, "Do you wish to fight us, or will you help us?"

Many of the soldiers glared at him, but a few of them looked around, searching for their comrades to see what they were doing.

Once the first person spoke and said they would help, the others followed. However, simple words alone weren't going to help them.

"Speak an oath to aid the Oathbreakers and the Southern Continent's army in to fight against Long Tiankong," Yan Yating said. "Only then will you be allowed to join."

Long Huan watched as the soldiers' eyes widened with horror and they hesitated once again. "Why are you guys hesitating? You already heard what my father did," he said. "Are you still going to fight alongside the man who killed your true ruler?"

As he said that, Long Huan's eyes slowly drifted toward a newly arrived figure.

Long Fangyu floated halfway up the ground, his body bloody and extremely dirty. His disheveled hair and clothes did not fit that of the Crown Prince at all.

Yan Yating took a single step forward to stand between the Second Prince and the Crown Prince. "Your Highness," Yan Yating said with a monotone voice.

"Senior Yan," the Crown Prince said and gave a simple nod.

Yan Yating could already tell something was wrong with the Crown Prince. He looked sick and as though he hadn't had anything to eat for a long time.

"Brother," the Second prince moved beyond Yan Yating even as the man tried to stop him. He stopped once they were merely 5 meters apart.

Before he could act, Long Fangyu lunged for Long Huan.

Yan Yating moved at the same time, having been ready to protect the second prince at any moment.

After hearing the information that the second prince had provided, Yan Yating had become all but certain that his incident was what had forced a lot of the soldiers to give up on the army and defect.

Yan Yating never truly understood what that had been previously as no one was allowed to speak about it thanks to their oath.

Some understanding of the situation had been formed in his mind once Alex forced him to gather everything about the attack after he brought Hannah's portrait to them.

And now, hearing the pieces of information that had previously been blind spots in his understanding, he knew exactly what had happened back then and why the soldiers had defected.

Forcing a group of soldiers to fight their own prince, especially the one that was known to not be involved with politics but instead in scholarly behavior had caused the soldiers to defect.

While not something as bad as the Azure Dragon dying, this was certainly something that too could make a soldier distrust their own higher-ups and Emperor.

As such, now that he had finally seen the Second prince, he wanted to protect him at all times, which he was going to do at that very moment.

Only, when he was halfway forward, he noticed something and slowed down, letting the Crown Prince get to the Second Prince.

Long Huan was attacked by the Crown Prince with a big hug as the Crown Prince grabbed him into an embrace and held him tight.

Long Huan was still in a state of shock, so he hadn't reacted just as quickly. "B-brother!" he finally spoke once taken to a hug.

"I'm so happy," Long Fangyu said as tears streamed down his dirt-filled face. "I'm so happy you are okay."

"I am," Long Huan said. "Have... have you been worried about me all this time?"

Long Fangyu nodded and continued holding his brother.

Long Huan paused for a moment and slowly raised his hands to grab his own brother as well. He gave him a tight hug to let him know he was okay, before pulling him away.

"Brother, are you okay?" Long Huan asked as he was horrified to realize that the blood on Long Fangyu's body had in fact come from a fresh wound that had yet to be healed.

He quickly pulled out a healing pill and handed it over to Long Fangyu.

"Eat this!"

He fed him the pill and watched in relief as his brother's wound disappeared.

As Long Fangyu healed, Long Huan looked past him at the state of battle. He could now see the newly arrived figure aiding Alex's army.

The sudden arrival of the Oathbreakers did little to change the tide of the battle immediately from what Long Huan could see, but they were still of great help.

"Brother, did you hear what I said before?" Long Huan asked. "We need to stop Father somehow. He... he isn't what he used to be."

"No," Long Fangyu said. "He... he is still the same person he has always been. He just doesn't bother hiding who he is anymore."

Long Huan was a little taken aback. He had thought that he would have to argue a little to get his brother on his side, but it seemed that his brother knew quite well about the situation.

"Okay," Long Huan said. "Then you will fight with us, right? If you join us, the other soldiers will certainly find more reason to join us."

"I..." Long Fangyu looked down, not able to look at his brother in his eyes. "I cannot do that. I... I must help father, regardless of whether what he is doing is wrong or not."

Long Huan took a long moment before responding with a single word. "What?"

Long Fangyu held the face of a saddened individual as he continued staring down. "I know what father is doing is wrong, but I can't bring myself to not help him."

"Why?" Long Huan asked.

"Because of Mother," Long Fangyu said, seemingly getting a little bit of his fighting will back. "Because mother helped father. That was her last wish. I... I cannot go against what she wanted to do."

Yan Yating looked at the Crown Prince and sighed.

"You said... you said you knew everything," Long Huan said. "Then do you know what mother did as well?"

Long Fangyu glanced up with a confused look on his face before nodding.

"Then do you know that she was there the day that the Azure Dragon died?" he asked.

The Crown Prince nodded. "Father told me everything after you left last time," he said.

"Then you must know that mother was an accomplice as well. She was there to kill the Azure Dragon's child," he said.

"I do not wish to speak ill of the dead," Yan Yating spoke from the back. "But your mother was more than just an accomplice. She was the mastermind behind the entire thing. It was all her idea. Your father had merely agreed to do it."

The two brothers looked back at Yan Yating.

"She was the most active one there. She was the one who constantly tried to kill His Majesty's child. Your father tried, but nearly not as much as your mother."

"I... didn't know," Long Huan said. "I... I had only thought that father had involved her in some ways."

Long Huan's head snapped back toward his brother. "Did father tell you the truth there too?" he asked.

Long Fangyu nodded after a while. "I don't believe he lied about anything. He was very clear with me about everything."

"Then you must know he is wrong," Long Huan said. "Help us, brother."

"But..."

"It shouldn't matter to you that he's our father anymore. He tried to kill me, brother. He didn't care that I was dead. The person we thought was our father is long gone,"

"But... mother would've wanted us to help him," the Crown Prince said. "Mother, she..."

"Brother! Have you not been listening? Mother isn't a good person either," Long Huan said. "She's just as bad as Father."

Long Fangyu's face changed to anger for the smallest second before a look of horror settled on his face. He fell to his knees with his head in his arms.

"Oh god! You're right," Long Fangyu said. "You're right."

Long Fangyu broke down into tears as what he had always understood, but refused to believe, had finally broken past that barrier and settled on him.

"Here, brother," Long Huan took out something and handed it over to Long Fangyu.

A beautiful black sword fell into Long Fangyu's hands, one that Fangyu recognized immediately as it had been something he held onto since the day he was born.

It was his sword given to him after he was born to be kept by him as the first prince of the empire.

Looking at the sword, tears broke down Long Fangyu once again, as this was the last thing he had given to his mother.

At some level deep in his mind, Long Fangyu had always blamed himself for his mother's death. Had he not given his mother that sword, maybe she would've still been alive.

That guilt he held was what made him want to help his father for the sake of his mother. However, seeing the sword and understanding his own flaw, Long Fangyu wanted to do better.

"You should never stop loving mother, brother," Long Huan said. "But at the same time, you are also allowed to realize that she was a bad person. One does not stop you from understanding the other."

Chapter 1784 A Chat

As Yan Yating watched the two brothers reconnect, he heard Whisker speak to him from the side.

"My brother wishes to speak with you," Whisker said.

"Your brother is the King, right?" Yan Yating asked. He was almost sure, but it was better to ask.

Whisker nodded.

"Alright," Yan Yating said, looking around at the battlefield. "Where is he? I can't see him?"

He took a preliminary survey of the battlefield and saw that the Southern Continent's army was mostly losing before they had arrived.

Not that their arrival helped much either from the looks of it. It had only delayed the inevitable when it came to the fate of the battle.

He wondered how much of a help he could be.

"Wait, I see him," Yan Yating said and frowned slightly.

Alex was in the middle of a terrible battle with him and the girl from the picture Yan Yating saw fighting a group of terribly strong soldiers that had surrounded just the two of them.

Past them, Yan Yating could see the Dragon Emperor doing nothing but floating silently. It looked as though he was trying to recuperate from whatever fight he had fought.

"Should I go there or will he leave that fight?" Yan Yating asked Whisker.

"My brother can hear and see everything I can," Whisker said. "I will act as the intermediary between the two of you for communication."

"Okay," Yan Yating said curiously, wondering how any of this worked.

"Thank you for coming," Whisker said. "I'm glad you could make it in time."

Yan Yating raised an eyebrow in surprise. He could tell it was not the mouse speaking, but Alex who was communicating through him.

"Well, I only did as I promised," Yan Yating said. "I'm sorry we couldn't come sooner, but you know how it is. As outlaws to the empire, we cannot exactly take the teleportation formation."

"I understand," Whisker said. "I messaged you as early as I did, knowing you would need some time to arrive. I hope you have grown stronger these past few years thanks to my pills."

"That you are right about," Yan Yating said. "Do you require some aid? You seem to be in a troubling situation."

"No," Whisker answered. "I can handle myself. I'm trying to get to the Emperor, but there are too many of these people to fight through without significantly reducing my own fighting prowess."

"I see," Yan Yating said.

"Since I will be indisposed for a while, I hope you can take over my soldiers and have them coordinate in this war. I hear you used to be quite good at that," Whisker said.

"Leave that to me," Yan Yating said. "I'll handle everything."

"Thank you. Whisker there will aid you too. He will handle the array my army is holding, so you can tell him what you want the soldiers to do. I'm afraid your soldiers won't be able to participate in our array. I hope that is not too big of a problem."

"Nope, none at all," Yan Yating replied.

"Thank you. I'll talk to you later," Whisker said and looked up. "My brother has gone back to fighting. Let us move closer to the battlefield so I can take over the array."

Yan Yating's eyes narrowed slightly. "Forgive me, but you look quite weak. Are you sure you can handle all of those soldiers?" he asked.

"Leave that to me," Whisker said. "I'm not very good when it comes to fighting, but everything else I'm quite good at."

Whisker jumped onto Yan Yating's shoulder and spoke out. "Brother Huan, we need to go."

Long Huan finally turned back from his brother with somewhat misty eyes and wiped them as he nodded. "You're right, we need to move," he said. "Come on brother. We should leave."

"Before we leave," Yan Yating said as he turned around toward the few soldiers that were on the ground beside them, bound by the Oathbreakers that had come with Yan Yating to this place. "Will any of you speak the Oath now?"

"I will!" one person shouted immediately.

"I will too," another person said.

One after another, the soldiers on the ground started speaking oaths. In the end, only 3 were left who refused to speak the oaths at all.

"Why do you hesitate?" one of the Oathbreakers asked. "Are you still uncertain if that is true?"

"Look at us," another one spoke. "There's a reason why we went against the empire. Come on! Grow some brain."

One of the people on the ground was a slightly older man with thinning hair. He looked up with a hateful look on his face as he stared at Yan Yating.

"Why should we listen to betrayers? You broke your oaths to the Empire, and yet you ask for us to speak one to you?"

The man spit at Yan Yating's feet.

Long Huan looked at the old man. "We're only telling you to do what is right," he said. "Or do you still not believe our words?"

"It doesn't matter, young prince," the man said. "It doesn't matter whether what you say is true or not. We serve the Empire and the Empire belongs to the Emperor."

"The Empire belonged to the Azure Dragon, who my father killed because of what? Greed?" Long Huan asked. "Do you not serve the Azure Dragon then?"

"What has the Azure Dragon ever done for us?" the man asked. "What has he done except sit around in his realm, doing nothing? At least the Emperor looks after the Empire. He helps its people as he should."

"You say the Azure Dragon was killed, but what difference did that make? If he was worth anything to the Empire, his absence would have been devastating. Instead, his death went unnoticed. That Immortal beast has nothing to do with me, so I will speak no oaths on its behalf."

Long Huan remained silent, unable to think of what to say.

"Is that what the rest of you think as well?" Yan Yating asked the remaining two who refused to speak the oaths.

They looked at him from the ground, with heads held as high as they could go.

"We will speak no oaths."

"We would rather die than help you."

The several others who had decided to speak the oaths gasped in surprise. They had not expected such a pushback at all.

"Very well," Yan Yating said and turned to look at the Oathbreakers that were gathered there.

"Have everyone who wants to speak the oath and fight on our behalf," he ordered. Then he stared at the three. "As for those who refuse, don't kill them. They aren't who we are after. That is only the Emperor."

The several Oathbreakers nodded. "So what should we do?" one of them asked.

"Cripple them," Yan Yating said. "They can stay alive and bear witness to the future that they spit on themselves. Let's go."

"KILL US, COWARD! KILL US!"

The shouts from the three rang loud, but none looked back at them. Yan Yating let the rest of the Oathbreakers handle the oath and flew off to the battlefield along with Long Huan and the rest to finally join the real battle.

Chapter 1785 Coordinating the Battlefield

Yan Yating stood close to the giant ship that flew outside of the battlefield, as he overlooked the battle.

Whisker had immediately taken control of the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array and was now the one leading the entire army by himself. "Let me know where you wish everyone to go. I can tell them what to do."

"Just a second," Yan Yating said as he took a quick count of the soldiers he could see.

There were upwards of 9 thousand soldiers that were brought by Alex, a few hundred beasts, and around 500 Oathbreakers.

On that count, he could see that the strength of the 9000 soldiers wasn't that high when compared to the opposing soldiers, but the array that was being used had somehow improved them all.

"So we have 9000-something soldiers in total huh? A lot less than I would've hoped for," Yan Yating said.

"We have over 10 thousand," Whisker said quickly. "Even without counting your soldiers."

"How can you be certain?" Yan Yating asked.

"Because of the array," Whisker said. "I can tell the total count. It's just over 10 thousand, but it is 10 thousand. I'm counting those beasts in that though."

"I see," Yan Yating said. "9 or 10 thousands, makes little difference. The Empire seems to have close to 20 thousand and more are still coming."

"20 thousand," Whisker said softly. "How are we not losing just yet?"

"Thank your stronger fighters," Yan Yating said. "They're forcing many of the battalions to form an array to help their leader. So not all the soldiers are fighting. But we have to be quick about it."

Immediately, Yan Yating started giving out orders on how to attack. He was more used to commanding armies that were fighting on multiple fronts, but this one would do fine as well.

The army pulled back a little to reconvene and advanced forward together to attack as a single unit instead of everyone fighting at their own pace.

Even the elders started following Yan Yating's orders, doing as he said.

Yan Yating gave special focus to the strong individuals on the battlefield as they had to be taken extra care of. A single Immortal attack that caught anyone off guard would be a devastating blow to the entire army.

The group of 10 thousand soldiers split into 10 different groups, each led by one of the 9 elders and Zhou Linfan who hadn't managed to break through to the front.

He started setting coordinated attacks to get through the enemy formation that was in somewhat of a shamble. Despite his disappearance nearly 70 years ago, the empire hadn't bothered finding a new Head of War, it seemed.

Even then, Yan Yating could tell that the battle wasn't going in their favor. New soldiers were constantly joining, adding to the number on the opposite side.

Thankfully, a lot of them had decided to join their side as well and were happily helping them fight the other side. The numbers were little, but every single help counted.

"What is happening?" Long Huan asked suddenly as he looked to the side. He had witnessed something rather strange, and it was happening all around the battlefield.

Soldiers were leaving the battlefield, one by one, walking far away to the side and simply sitting there, watching the battle from afar.

"Tsk!" Yan Yating made a little sound in disgust. "We're giving them two choices. Join us and help fight your father, or stay out of the battle altogether. They are choosing to stay out of the battle."

"Your soldiers are persuading the Empire's army to stand down?" Long Huan asked.

"Yes," Yan Yating said. "Thanks to what you did, the process seems to be going much more smoothly than I could have done so by myself."

"Oh... good," Long Huan said.

Long Fangyu stood to the side, watching the battle with blank eyes. Everyone who was fighting on the other side was his soldiers. And yet, here he was doing nothing. He wanted to do nothing.

Wouldn't it be so easy if he could just stay out of the battle too?

But no, that would be too simple. For the past few years, he had known his life was anything but simple.

"I'm going to go and try persuading the others too," Long Fangyu said and moved ahead.

Long Huan thought for a bit and nodded. "I'll go do the same," he said and followed his brother to the battlefield.

Yan Yating returned to governing the battlefield, constantly giving out orders which Whisker helped make easy to transfer via the connection he had through the Array.

The battle continued with many getting wounded in the process, having to move back from the battlefield. When they were injured, the soldiers usually flew back into the giant ship that floated in the sky.

Yan Yating was quite curious about what was happening inside the ship since everyone went in there. "What are they doing in there?" he asked Whisker.

"Resting and healing," Whisker answered.

Yan Yating tried peering in, but strong formations blocked all spiritual senses from entering, so he couldn't see through it.

Time passed as he focused all of his attention on dealing with the battle as more and more soldiers continued piling on the other side.

Even though many knew the truth and were being persuaded by their colleagues and comrades to fight against the Dragon Emperor, only a few accepted to switch entirely to the war.

A good chunk of them decided to sit on the sidelines and watch the battle unfold, while the majority still decided to fight on the side of the Emperor.

Yan Yating took a quick count of the field and realized that while their side had grown by about 2000 more soldiers, the enemy's side had instead increased by 1000 soldiers. And that was including the soldiers that had died, or had left the battle entirely.

"Dammit!" Yan Yating cursed softly. "Even though we are converting many and causing many to step out of the war, there are still many that continue joining. And more keep coming on too."

Soon the enemy would have about 25 thousand soldiers, nearly double of what they had.

The Oathbreaker's arrival on the battlefield had been crucial, but unfortunately not as critical as Yan Yating might have hoped.

"We need something more," he said softly. "Something stronger."

He quickly turned to the side, Qi ready to shoot out an attack when he realized that the person approaching them wasn't there to attack him.

"How's everything going on?" Graham asked, arriving next to the two.

He was bloodied from head to toe, some of which were his wounds, but more of it came from the people he killed.

Yan Yating sensed the weak cultivation base on Graham and was surprised, but what he was more surprised about was the fact that he was even here in the first place.

"Why are you here? Weren't you the one dealing with the teleportation building?" he asked, looking down to where they should have been.

"Alex told me to stop guarding it," Graham said. "So, I left."

Yan Yating's face was a mask of confusion at first. However, when he saw a group of people walk out of the teleportation formation, his eyes widened in surprise.

"A risky choice for sure," he said. "But not a bad one."

Chapter 1786 New Arrivals

Alex teleported next to an old man in the distance, arriving at his side where the old man would have to twist his body around to protect himself.

Alex slashed once, creating an explosion in front of him that immediately covered the old man in flames of terrible might.

He stepped away from the flames as an attack flew toward him carrying the might of a Saint Transformation 9th realm cultivator.

As Alex dodged it, a person flew at him, trying to drive a spear through his heart. Hannah's sword flashed and a storm of Water Qi moved past the person that was about to attack Alex.

Two more soldiers had to come to protect the person at the last moment.

Alex took the opportunity to teleport back toward his sister who was holding on her own.

"Are you okay?" Hannah asked.

"I'm fine," Alex answered.

"I see Huan back there," Hannah said. "I don't think we're making it to the Emperor this way. We need to back down."

Alex didn't want to do that at all. He released a soft sigh as he tried thinking of what choices he even had. The number of soldiers that had gathered at the Emperor's side had continued increasing and even though they had killed a few, more battalion leaders were joining the battle, causing them to slow down on their progress toward the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor was in the distance, relaxed next to his soldier as he watched the battlefield with cold eyes. He had been resting while Alex and Hannah had been continuously fighting for the past many minutes.

This was bad. Even if they managed to break through these soldiers somehow and arrived in front of the Dragon Emperor again, they would be tired and low on Qi, while the Dragon Emperor would be well rested and ready to fight again.

Alex couldn't let that happen.

With a part of his senses, he could see the entire battlefield. While he had only been focusing mostly on the battle, he still had part of his senses looking out for any abnormalities in the war, and he had long since been waiting for one.

His father had left the Teleportation building on his word and now the teleportation formation was free to be used once more. And it was being used.

One by one, people were coming out of the teleportation formation just as he had hoped. At first, it had been the soldiers who had been diligently waiting to be transferred to the other side for quite some time.

That had added to the number of soldiers on the battlefield once again. However, because of what his father had done there, most of the soldiers had instead chosen to fly directly to the capital.

As such, most of the teleportation buildings were empty. So, what came from them afterward were not soldiers, but instead, people who had heard the words of the second prince, and heard the battle cry of the soldier who had been betrayed by his Emperor.

They were people who had come to, hopefully, aid Alex and the army opposing the Dragon Emperor.

And of course, these weren't just any regular people. They were the ancestors, clan leaders, sect masters, family heads, elders, and anyone strong enough to handle their own in the war.

They were high-ranking individuals of the cultivation society, and they had arrived just as Alex had hoped.

"We should start moving back," Alex messaged Hannah and started fighting to slowly move back again. They would have to reconvene with the army and destroy the opposing army together before moving for the Dragon Emperor.

As Alex and Hannah started making their way back through the many soldiers that surrounded them, fighters gathered on the battlefield, all of whom looked toward someone to look to.

Yan Yating quickly approached everyone and asked them to stay aside for a moment as he could tell that the newly arrived people didn't wish to fight right away.

Instead, they wished to confirm that what they had heard was true. They gathered in a group of nearly 5000 strong within 10 minutes and nearly demanded the truth from both sides of the battlefield.

They had enough people with them, that both sides of the war felt the urgency to stop and wait before this was resolved.

"Fellow Daoists, thank you for coming here," Yan Yating spoke with a small bow toward the many people who were gathered there.

His heart skipped at the sight of many recognizable figures, all of whom had influences and fame of their own.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm The leader of the Heavens Cleaver sect and his two great disciples stood to the side with their chests puffed proudly.

The master of the Ice Mist Palace flew with a group of fairy-like female cultivators next to her, all of whom were in the Saint Transformation realm.

The ancestor of the Realms Beyond Sect, who once used to be its sect leader, had arrived with the sect leader and a few elders of the sect.

Similarly, many other sects and families had arrived and were now waiting outside the war for someone to approach them and tell them what was in fact true. They wanted proof and so they waited for it.

"Brother Yan," a person moved toward Yan Yating. It was an ancestor from the Huang Family of the Silver Kingdom. "It is good to see you alive. Would you mind explaining what is happening? Why it is that you, who we had thought dead, are now back? And why you are against the Emperor?"

"I believe I have explained myself perfectly already. Long Tiankong did something horrible and now he must be punished for it," Yan Yating said.

"By horrible, you mean the Azure Dragon's death? Is the Azure Dragon truly dead?" another person asked.

"Yes," Yan Yating said. "I cannot do anything more than confirm what you already heard. I am bound by oaths to not speak of the horrible matter that happened that day where I was forced by another oath to participate in."

Many looked at Yan Yating with a look of pity, but many also looked at him with a look of doubt.

"And what about everything else that has been said about the Emperor? Is that true too?" someone else asked. "His Highness, the second prince, if that was even him, said a lot about His Majesty."

"I am not aware of everything else, but I can assure you that it is more than likely true," Yan Yating said. "I was not there, but many of my colleagues who left the Empire's army after me can surely confirm it all to you."

"Yan Yating!" a voice called out suddenly.

Yan Yating turned around and saw a figure approaching him and the group from the distance.

Long Huogang, one of the three Heads of the Head Legion, arrived next to the group.

"How dare you go against His Majesty," the man pointed toward Yan Yating accusingly as he spoke. "Do you have no shame?"

"My shame was wrenched away from me the day your Emperor made me do what I did not wish to do, Long Huogang," Yan Yating said. "And I see that you've left yours behind. You still chose to assist him even after knowing the entire truth."

Chapter 1787 Truth

Even as war raged right next to them, another smaller and verbal war was erupting where the newly arrived cultivators had gathered.

Long Huogang, the Empire's only working Head in the war, was speaking against Yan Yating, who was once the Head of War himself.

The two of them spoke, trying to convince the cultivators to come to their aid, but none could successfully persuade the cultivators.

Long Huan arrived a moment later, leaving his brother, who had been trying to convert the soldiers into fighting against their father.

The gathered cultivators looked at the prince, and one ancestor moved forward. She brought out a talisman and spoke, "This is a talisman to remove all illusions and lies. May I use it on you?"

"Go ahead," Long Huan said.

The old woman threw the talisman at Long Huan and activated it. Instantly, the talisman burned away as it left an aura behind that gathered around Long Huan.

Long Huan felt the aura move around him and seemingly settle on his surface before rapidly fading.

"No, that is the prince alright," the woman said. "Second prince, are you any sort of compulsion to speak what you speak?"

"I am my own man. No one is compelling me to say what I am saying," Long Huan said. He could feel the energy of the talisman somewhat take away his ability to lie, which he fortunately didn't have to do.

"Then your words regarding what your father did is correct?" someone else asked. "Did the Emperor kill the Azure Dragon?"

"He did," Long Huan said.

Several of the cultivators gasped in surprise as they realized that what was being said was true. They all then looked toward Yan Yating and Long Huogang.

"Senior Huogang," one of the senior cultivators spoke. "Would you mind telling us what reason the Emperor might have had to do what he did?"

"What he did is already bad enough that he will have to immediately abdicate his throne," someone else said. "We cannot stand the murder of our true ruler and let his murderer sit on the throne."

"Yes," someone else shouted, and soon enough many of the people that had gathered there were of one tone.

"That is true," the senior cultivator that had first asked the question said. "However, if there was a reason why he did it, a good one, then maybe we can stop at just abdication. There won't be any need to punish him."

At those words, many of the people slowly nodded their heads as they understood the purpose of the question.

"I..." Yan Yating began to speak but a look of pain flashed through his face. "I cannot tell you. I am bound by the oath that the Emperor forced upon me that day."

"I already told everyone through my message," Long Huan quickly said. "His Majesty, the Azure Dragon had a son. My father wished to kill him, so he attacked the secret realm with many soldiers who were bound by oaths and could not leave."

"Many died that day, and many others were forced to speak another oath to never speak of that day again," Long Huan said. "The Azure Dragon died during that."

A quiet murmur passed through the cultivators as they took in the information and tried to make sense of the situation.

The people seemed to take the information in stride, but their beliefs were shattered when Long Huogang asked a single question.

"Were you there that day, Your Highness?" the man asked. "Were you there to witness what happened?"

"What?" Long Huan asked. "No, I wasn't."

"Then how would you know what happened?" Long Huogang asked.

Instantly, many of the cultivators looked back at Long Huan as a new layer of confusion and distrust passed through them.

"Senior Yan," Bing Zheshuang of the Ice Mist Palace spoke. "You mentioned that you were all forced to speak an oath that day?"

"Yes," Yan Yating said.

"Then... why does His Highness know what happened that day?" she asked him.

Yan Yating paused for a moment and turned around toward Long Huan. He wasn't sure how anyone else had accurate information from back then.

"I..." Long Huan tried to answer, only to find himself stuck once again. It wasn't as though he didn't know the answer, or that he would have to lie to make up an answer.

It was just that these people would not accept the answer that he was going to have to give to them. And he wasn't sure how well they would take that information.

With no choice, Long Huan spoke.

"I received that information from Alex," he said.

"You were told this by the King of the Southern Continent?" someone asked.

"Surely you didn't help wage a war against your father just because of another King's words," someone else said.

"Are you sure you weren't played, Your Highness?" someone else asked.

Doubt was heavy in the air, and distrust was slowly growing as well.

"That I might have received knowledge from someone," Long Huan said. "But do you doubt when I say that my Father tried to kill me?"

"He didn't try to kill you, Your Highness," Long Huogang said. "He simply wanted to stop you from running away."

"And he nearly killed me back then."

Long Huogang sighed. "He merely sought to get back the Empire's treasure that you ran away with."

"He nearly killed my wife," Long Huan shouted back.

"That was because she was killing our soldiers," the old man said. "His Majesty merely tried to stop her."

"You know damn well that is not true," Long Huan said as he looked ready to kill the old man.

"And what of me?" Yan Yating spoke as he turned toward Long Huogang. "Do you claim that I and my fellow soldiers turned against the Emperor for no reason as well."

"Stop your squabbling!"

A drowning voice covered the entire battlefield as the Emperor flew high in the distance and spoke from there.

"Long Huan, I'm disappointed in you," the Emperor said before looking at Yan Yating. "And I expected better than this from you, old friend."

Yan Yating could only growl in response.

"The rest of you," the Emperor addressed the gathered cultivators. "Since you are here, come assist us in this war. Help us drive the foreign army from this land."

Many of the cultivators looked at each other, unsure what to say or do. The leader of the Immortal Saint Pavillion stepped forward and bowed toward the Emperor.

"Your Majesty, we apologize but we cannot aid you just yet," he said. "The accusations made against you are severe enough that we cannot just look past it. If you wouldn't mind, please enlighten us to the truth."

"The truth?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "The truth is simple. I shall prove it to you all at once."

The Emperor took a single second to take in a deep breath and spoke out loud.

"I, Long Tiankong, Emperor of the Azure Empire, did not kill the Azure Dragon, Qing Tianchui. If I am lying, may the heavens strike me down."

The war seemed to pause after the Emperor's words as silence filled the earth.

And just as well, it filled the sky and the heavens as well, for they did not rumble, and they did not strike him down.

Chapter 1788 Lies

The Emperor's declaration immediately caused the many cultivators gathered to switch their opinions immediately. Seeing as that the heavens had in fact no come down proved to them that the Emperor had in fact not killed the Azure Dragon.

"No, that's not true," Long Huan quickly said. "He wasn't the one who made the kill, but it was his actions that led to the death of the Azure Dragon. He was involved in that kill."

"I had no hands in the Azure Dragon's death," the Emperor said. "I swear to the heavens on that."

Both Yan Yating and Long Huan turned to look at the Emperor who had just spoken another oath. Only this time, he had spoken a false one.

"Why would you... why would you lie?" Long Huan slowly asked. Even as he did, confusion filled his mind.

How was this possible? Why was his father still alive?

The gathered cultivators looked toward him with a surprised look as well. They turned around toward Long Huan and Yan Yating. "This is not what you told us."

"No, no that's not true," Long Huan said. But beyond that, he couldn't say anything. It did not make sense to him why his father wasn't hurt by speaking a clearly fake oath.

Had he somehow not spoken an oath? Had he created an illusion or a clone and made it say that oath? No, that would still hurt the original person speaking the oath.

Questions filled Long Huan's head, and not a single answer came.

Yan Yating was in a similar situation, but he had a feeling that he understood just what had happened. If what he thought was true, then that would make the Emperor a much more despicable person than he had ever imagined.

"Senior Yan, what is happening?" Long Huan asked. "How is my father lying?"

Long Huan hadn't been present for the Azure Dragon's death, so every information he knew had been secondhand. Given that his father had successfully spoken an oath regarding the Azure Dragon's situation, he was starting to have doubts spring up inside his own heart.

"Your father is speaking the truth, so the oath isn't hurting him," Yan Yating said.

"But... isn't that a lie?" Long Huan asked.

"What is truth and what is lie, it all depends on your father," Yan Yating said as a look of anger appeared on his face. "Therefore, whatever he is saying right now, he believes with all of his heart to be the truth."

"Oh my god!" Long Huan could only utter these few words.

"This is a command from your Emperor," the Dragon Emperor shouted. "Attack those rebels and opposing army. Save your Empire."

"Stop!"

Someone rushed just as soon as the Dragon Emperor finished ordering.

"He's lying," Long Fangyu flew up toward the group. "The Emperor is lying."

The group of cultivators were surprised to see the Crown Price there.

"Crown Prince, what are you doing here?" Long Huogang asked. He was the Crown Prince's bodyguard regularly, and it was only today that he had been forced away from the young prince.

He had assumed that the prince was safely at the back of the army. He hadn't realized at what point the prince had left the safety and had come here.

The Crown Prince ignored the man and looked toward the cultivators. He opened his mouth to speak.

"Long Fangyu!" the Dragon Emperor suddenly shouted his name. The world reverberated with his words and the Crown Prince felt himself shaken to his core upon hearing his father call for him.

He turned around, his heart beating a million times a second, as he looked at his father far away.

A look of anger and disappointment filled the Dragon Emperor's eyes. "What are you doing there, Fangyu? Return here right away."

Fangyu made a tight fist, trying to hold on to what little sense of self he still had while trying not to be scared by his father. But that was harder than he thought.

The fear he felt from his father's words was not something he had ever expected to feel.

"Fangyu!" the Dragon Emperor shouted.

"Crown Prince, come to me," Long Huogang said as he gestured for Long Fangyu to move.

Long Fangyu looked at him, and then at his father in the distance. Almost subconsciously, his body started to move.

"Brother!" Long Huan grabbed his brother by the arm. "What are you doing? Don't listen to him."

Long Fangyu paused and looked at his brother. His eyes then moved to the hand that grabbed him.

It wasn't a tough grab, but a simple one. There was no force in that grab at all. He could tell that his brother did not want to hurt him at all.

"No..." Long Fangyu said softly. The feeling of loneliness, as if he was alone in this world with no one beside him was slowly melting away.

"What?" Long Huan asked.

Long Fangyu's head snapped back toward his father. "NO!" he shouted.

Both the Dragon Emperor and Long Huogang looked at Long Fangyu in surprise.

"Crown Prince," Long Huogang said softly.

Long Fangyu pointed at his father. "You killed the Azure Dragon, Father," he shouted. "Even though your hands were not the ones that took his life, you are responsible for his death."

"Crown Prince—"

Yan Yating's sword flashed, the blade pointing toward Long Huogang. "Let him speak."

Long Fangyu lifted his chest to speak. "You tried to kill his child. All that the Azure Dragon did was try and protect his child. It was a tragedy that he died in return for trying to protect what was his."

"That is nonsense, Crown Prince," Long Huogang said quickly. "His Majesty already swore an oath to prove his side of the story."

"Then he is a fool who cannot see what wrong he's done," Yan Yating said.

"If my Father has spoken an oath, then so shall I," Long Fangyu said. "My Father and Mother were responsible for attacking the Azure Dragon and his family, subsequently forcing the Azure Dragon to fight back, at which point he died to Heavenly Judgment. This was information I learned directly from my Father's mouth. I swear this by the heavens."

The Crown Prince's sudden proclamation sent ripples throughout the gathered cultivators as well as the new ones that continued arriving.

At this point, even the soldiers that were staying on the sidelines of the war were focusing on this.

After hearing the two sides of the battle, the gathered group did not know who to trust at all. Both sides had spoken the oaths and that was all they could force them to find the truth. And yet the truths clashed.

Skimming through the words, the people started finding some flaws in them. They especially doubted the Crown Prince now as what he promised had been what he learned from his father.

There was a big chance that the Emperor had lied to him, which he took for truth.

"Have you people still not decided on the truth when you have so many clear indications?"

Alex suddenly appeared before them and asked.

"We simply need to be certain is all," one of the older men in the group said. "As of yet, we aren't even certain that the Azure Dragon is dead or not. There is no clear information."

"Is that so?" Alex asked. "Then here is your answer."

Alex raised his hand forward and brought out the corpse of the Azure Dragon.

Chapter 1789 Proof

1789 Proof

At nearly 5 meters wide and over 200 meters long, the corpse of the Azure Dragon was a behemoth of a body that floated above many of the individuals on the battlefield.

The sudden appearance of the corpse of the Azure Dragon caused battles all around to slow down and move away.

Nearly no one had seen an Azure Dragon before and now that they were looking at once, it was a corpse of one.

Wounds filled the corpse's body, scars completely ruining what would've been a majestic beast while alive. Burn marks from the lightning bolts scarred most of the body and some parts of it were even missing.

The Azure color no longer remained on the corpse, and it was now a dull blue color than anything.

The corpse floated high above Alex as he showed it to everyone.

Most were stunned to see the corpse at all, but it was only the Dragon Emperor who had any other thought in this situation at all.

The Dragon Emperor couldn't help but wonder why the Azure Dragon's body was solid at all. He looked for damages on the body and was surprised to not find one.

Sure there were many wounds to the physical boy, but what the Dragon Emperor searched for was in fact a wound that Alex would've had to place on the corpse to steal from the Azure Dragon's Soul Space.

However, there was no such wound at all. The Emperor tried looking hard for it, but he couldn't find it at all. If he had to guess, the Dragon Emperor would say that the Soul Space of the Azure Dragon was intact and without any attempt at gaining its content.

The Dragon Emperor was still stunned by the fact that the Azure Dragon's soul space was still active. After all, if a beast's Soul Space was still alive, it could not be kept anywhere easily.

Be in a storage bag or storage ring, Soul Space could not be fitted at all. If they tried to place something with Soul Space or any other spaces inside the ring or bag, they just wouldn't be accepted.

Which was why it was so surprising when Alex brought out an intact corpse with the Soul Space still working. The Dragon Emperor could only imagine how exactly it was possible.

When he thought that Alex had brought the ship out from somewhere as well, he started to get jealous regarding just what sort of treasures Alex could be wearing for this. He was more than looking forward to gaining anything and everything from Alex when this war ended.

"Here is the Corpse of the Azure Dragon that you doubted was dead at all," Alex said. "Do you still have any doubt?"

Many shook their head obviously, while the others were still drawn to the Azure Dragon's physical body.

"Then ask yourself, how could your Ruler, a being from the Immortal realm, could have died?" Alex asked. "You already have the answer."

Many turned to look at the Emperor when Alex said that. Alex did too.

"Dragon Emperor, this is your chance to fully prove yourself innocent," Alex said. "Swear that you and your wife weren't forcing the Azure Dragon to fight back to defend his own family. Swear that you didn't nearly kill your second son and his wife just because they took away the one sword that could help you get your wishes to carve open the Azure Dragon's body and gain it."

The Dragon Emperor looked at Alex with a seething look on his face. He couldn't wait to kill him at all. Everything else was something he could handle once Alex was dead.

"Swear the oath!" Alex shouted in a chant and everyone that understood him got on it, asking the Dragon Emperor to say it.

The Dragon Emperor looked at everything and sighed when he realized that he couldn't force these people to do anything.

"Fine! Do whatever you want," the Emperor said. "But if you will fight me in war, I will kill you all without mercy."

He turned to leave but as he did, he looked at Long Huan and Long Fangyu.

"As of today, the Crown Prince of the Empire shall be my third son," he said loudly. He didn't even remember the poor boy's name enough to say it in the immediate announcement.

When the Dragon Emperor turned away, Long Huogang quickly flew away as well and started managing the Empire's army.

As soon as Alex took back the Azure Dragon's corpse once again, he felt a sudden increment in a bit of mental suppression as well as a very mild ache.

He could most definitely live with the pain for a day or two, but any more would be uncomfortable and unnecessary.

Next, Alex looked at the gathered cultivators. "You have come as per my request. I thank you all for that," he said. "I hope you will be willing to provide me with all the aid I can require."

"We have seen what we must," one of the older cultivators said. "I cannot tell you about the others, but I will most definitely help you where you need it."

"Thank you," Alex said and walked away.

Graham flew up to Alex and said a few small things regarding the numbers and everything around the battlefield.

"They have double our numbers," Alex said. "But we have triple their fighting will."

Alex looked toward Yan Yating who was making some plans in his mind. "Have you come to any conclusion yet? How is the situation?"

"With the new cultivators joining, we can survive for a few hours at best. We will need more miracles to stay alive longer than this," Yan Yating said.

"Don't worry, there will be miracles," Alex said. "I've sent someone to bring a miracle."

Yan Yating curiously looked at Alex but got no answer in return. In the end, he could only focus forward.

Alex took a deep breath and hoped that Pearl was doing alright.

Then, he rushed back onto the battlefield to fight.

Chapter 1790 The Beasts' Choice

After learning about how his mother and father had died at the hands of the Dragon Emperor, Pearl had thought that his hatred for the man could not go any higher.

It was only now that Pearl was realizing just how incredibly wrong he had been.

"My grandparents were killed by the Dragon Emperor too?" Pearl asked in a stunned voice.

The Deer, who had told him that, nodded.

Pearl looked toward the rest of the group and most could only look away in shame.

"What is the meaning of this?" the Lion stood up from his seat, walking to the middle of the gathering. "What do you mean that my uncle and aunt were killed by that human emperor?"

"That is the truth, Leader Zhu," the Lizard spoke. "That is unfortunately the truth."

"Why am I only just hearing about this?" the Lion demanded. "If my uncle and aunt were murdered then I should've been made aware. Why would you not tell me?"

"To protect you," the Swan said. "As we said, if we told you the truth, you would rush to attack the Emperor. That would only add one more dead beast to the list, nothing more. And we know how hot-headed you are. You would absolutely attack them."

"It doesn't matter what I would do or wouldn't do," the Lion said. "It is my right not only as a nephew to the previous leader but also as his successor to know how he had died. Hell, it is my right the Leader of the Lion Colony to know the truth that all the leaders already know about. So I ask you all this again, why was I not made aware?"

Pearl was still stunned by the information he had just learned about his grandparents. A million thoughts went past his head, morphing each time he thought he had a grasp on one, leaving him speechless.

It was only a while later that he realized he had stood still without talking. Somehow, no one had noticed this behavior from him. They all seemed focused on something else.

"It was on that day when the massive lightning strikes filled the southern skies near His Majesty's secret realm," the Eagle started speaking. "Everyone was concerned what those lightning strikes were, but no one knew enough to make any logical conclusions."

"Later that night, we sensed some faint but strong and violent aura in the distance. We weren't very concerned at the moment as the aura was very vague and hard to tell where it had come from."

"It had come from the Lion Colony," the Ox took over. "We couldn't tell at the time, but given the direction, it is obvious in hindsight."

"You didn't go check?" Pearl asked.

"There was nothing to check," the Swan said. "To us, the aura could have been anything. Besides, it was so vague that it wasn't worth checking. We only ever remember it because we realized what it had been just hours later."

"We were abruptly notified to gather outside our colonies and meet the Dragon Emperor alone," the Ox said. "When we arrived at the location, we met with a bloody and wounded Dragon Emperor who notified us what had happened."

"He had killed Leader Shi and his wife; he straight up told us that. That man... he had no remorse at all. Looking at him, you wouldn't even believe that it was the same day when his wife had died."

"And?" the Lion asked. "What happened when you met him? If he was wounded, you could have attacked him, right?"

"We couldn't," the Lizard said. "We were still shocked by Leader Shi's death when we learned that the Azure Dragon had died that very day as well. He told us how he hadn't wanted the Azure Dragon to die, but he still had."

"Wounded as he was, he was still very much stronger than us. If we had tried to attack him that day, he would kill us without mercy. We... chose to keep our lives instead that day," the Elephant spoke up.

"And what? You let him get away just like that?" the Lion asked. "He told you that the Azure Dragon was dead due to him. He told you that my uncle and aunt were dead due to him. And you guys simply let him walk all over you and leave without even trying to fight back? Are you all that much of a coward?"

"We are pragmatic," the Deer answered. "What choice do you think we had? Kill the Dragon Emperor?"

"Yes!" the Lion said.

The deer shook her head. "Think about this. If we had hurt the Dragon Emperor in any way, let alone kill him, he would have come back with an army 10 times what we could muster even with our weakest forces combined. Our paradise would have been destroyed within days. Yes, we wanted to attack the Emperor, but we needed to take care of ourselves."

"Instead of trying to do anything to the Dragon Emperor, we decided to save ourselves. The Dragon Emperor had demands, and we chose to meet them."

"What demands?" the Lion asked.

"Simple demands, ones that went into effect the very next day," the Deer said. "We were to close our land to the humans. And we were to never talk about the Azure Dragon or the Lion Leader's death to anyone else."

"And that was it?" the Lion asked. "You said yes and you forgot all about my uncle and aunt, his Grandparents."

The leaders looked toward Pearl whose eyes had grown teary by this point. He was close to weeping after hearing about his grandparents.

The last time he came, he had learned about his grandparent's death. But he was led to believe that they had died due to some cultivation problems.

The eagle floated next to Pearl and put her wings around Pearl, slowly rubbing his back. "I'm sorry you had to learn it this way, my child," she said.

Pearl quickly wiped his tears and looked up. He looked at all the leaders, including the Eagle next to him, and said, "You were afraid that you would be wiped out if you fought back because you don't have the numbers. But you do have one now. My brother is in a battle with the Dragon Emperor right now. You can feel the battle from here, I'm sure you can."

The leaders all looked in a certain direction. They had long since sensed the turbulent aura that could only be Saints fighting each other.

"He has a lot of soldiers fighting alongside him, but he needs more. If we add your numbers to him, then we can win. We can defeat the Emperor for all the crimes he has committed until now."

The leaders looked around for a moment or two and then slowly shook their heads. "The other continents are not strong. Your brother will lose, even if we join. It is better if we protect ourselves," the Lizard said.

The others gave a hesitant nod.

"How... how can you be like this?" Pearl asked.

"If this is all, we would like to return," the Ox stood up to leave.

"No, this is not all," Pearl said. "If a request won't work with you all, then I will make commands."

"I, Pearl, son of Shi Meiyoung and Qing Tianchui, command you all to rally your beasts to join my brother in the war."

Chapter 1791 Indecisive

﻿﻿Pearl's sudden authoritative voice surprised the group of Saint Transformation beasts that were gathered in the room. However, it did not surprise them nearly as much as the information that came with it did.

Qing Tianchui. That was not a name that was commonly known amongst the beasts. However, the ones that were gathered here were of the strongest and knew very well who that name belonged to.

The Azure Dragon.

They looked at Pearl with shock clear on their face.

"Young one, what did you just say? Say that name again," the Lizard demanded.

Pearl stood upright with his head held high. "You heard me correctly," he said. "I did not wish to have to resort to this, but if I must then I will."

"My mother, as you know, is Shi Meiyoung, daughter of the late Shi Guyoung. My father… is Qing Tianchui, ruler of the Eastern Continent, the Azure Dragon."

"How is that possible?" the Elephant asked.

"Your mother was a cat, like you, wasn't she?" the Swan asked.

The Lion was plenty surprised by this revelation as well. "Pearl, what are you saying?" he asked.

"My mother was a cat with the blood of a White Tiger, which I now have," Pearl said. "My Father was Qing Tianchui, Azure Dragon. I cannot tell you how I was conceived, but I was, and I am here. In the absence of my father, I am this Continent's ruler, and I will demand that you listen to me."

"This is nonsense," the Elephant said. "If you wanted to lie, you should have made it a better lie."

"It is not a lie," Pearl said. "My father is the Azure Dragon. He and my mother were killed by the Dragon Emperor because he wanted to kill me. I have come back to avenge their deaths, but I cannot do it alone. I need your help."

"Pearl, are you being truthful right now?" the Lion asked. "Are you… are you really the son of the Azure Dragon."

"I am," Pearl said. He saw the doubtful faces of the beasts gathered and continued, "I swear by the heavens that I am speaking the truth. My father is Qing Tianchui."

The beasts froze in their place when Pearl spoke the oath and nothing happened to him.

"How… how is this possible?"

"A cat, even if she was a tiger, should not be compatible with a dragon. This doesn't make sense," the Elephant said.

"But he just swore, so it is true. Unless it is only he that believes it, but I do not believe that to be the case," the Swan said.

"In the first place, why did the Emperor come to kill his grandparents? We never figured that out," the Eagle said from next to Pearl. She quickly turned toward Pearl and asked, "Did you say that the emperor attacked your mother because of you?"

Pearl nodded. "He was there that day to kill me. I do not know why as of yet, but he feared my existence for some reason. My father tried his best to protect me, but he couldn't do it as he was bound by the oaths and his status in this world. He died protecting me, and so did my mother. Now I have come seeking revenge along with my brother, but I cannot do this alone. I need all of your help."

The beasts looked at each other, and they could see that the other beasts were starting to believe Pearl's words.

"Do you have any guess why the emperor might have been after you?" the beasts asked.

"I do not know," Pearl said. "But… seeing as he not only went after me and my mother but also my grandmother, I would say he is after the beasts that hold the White Tiger's bloodline."

The beasts gave a slight nod as it made sense. "So you not only are the son of an Azure Dragon but also carry the bloodline of the White Tiger?" the Lizard asked.

"I don't just carry it," Pearl said. "I am a White Tiger."

"What are you talking about? You're clearly not—"The Ox was only halfway through speaking when his eyes widened in shock. He was only now noticing Pearl's physique.

The other beasts noticed what they had so easily disregarded as well.

Without the stripes, Pearl who was introduced as the son of a White cat, appeared a White cat to everyone. However, upon seeing him with the newly revealed bit of information, they could finally see that despite the black stripes, they were in fact looking at a White Tiger.

"My god!" the Swan was fully wide-eyed. "It's true."

The Eagle quickly stepped away from Pearl and looked at him in wide-eyed horror. "My lord, please forgive me," she said, quickly bowing to Pearl as she moved back.

"You do not have to treat me differently just because I'm a White Tiger," Pearl said.

"No, no," the Eagle shook her head. "You're not just a White Tiger, you are the son of the Azure Dragon as well. Please forgive us for any disrespect we may have shown you today."

Pearl sighed a little and looked at everyone in the room who gazed at him with fear and reverence on their faces.

"I'm sorry for not telling this to you sooner, Uncle," Pearl spoke to the Lion. "I only just learned about my father half a year ago."New n0vel chapters are published on

"No, no, it's alright…" the Lion said. He was pretty shaken about the entire thing as well.

The Existence of a beast born from both with the bloodline of two heavenly beasts was an impossibility to everyone's eyes. And Pearl had ended up evolving into one as well.

This was truly something incredible that everyone got to witness.

"Now that it has come to this, I hope you will accept my request or my command, and start gathering your beasts so we can leave right away," Pearl said. "Uncle, you should return quickly."

"Yes, right away," the Lion said and started moving. However, even before he had reached the door, the Lizard spoke.

"I'm afraid that is still not possible, my lord." The Lizard has his head down in a bow, and his words were one of respect, but his actions were not. "I still believe that going to this war is a suicide. Even if it is you who commands us, I cannot accept this."

"Neither can I, my lord," the Ox spoke. "I do not wish to see my beasts dead."

"What are you saying?" the Deer suddenly spoke. "The young lord has asked us to help, and this is the best chance for us to help him. Sure there will be some deaths, but that is the price we must pay for revenge. That is the price we must pay for freedom."

"I'm with Sister Lu on this one," the Swan said. "I say that we fight."

"We absolutely must fight," the Elephant said.

The Eagle grimaced a little. "My beasts are weak. I cannot accept this command, my lord. Please forgive me."

Pearl stared at the beasts with absolutely no idea what to do at all.

After all that he had done to convince them, the beasts still didn't come to a decision to help him at all.

Chapter 1792 Special Mark

The Lizard, the Ox, and the Eagle were the three leaders who did not wish to fight.

The Swan, the Elephant, and the Deer absolutely wanted to fight to get revenge on the person who killed their ruler.

It was needless to say the Lion wanted to fight as well.

4 out of the 7 leaders of the beast colonies wanted to go kill the Dragon Emperor. However, all decisions from the leaders must be unanimous or else the beasts couldn't act.

Each of the beasts sat back down and started talking amongst themselves to try and convince each other why they had to do the same as them.

"He was our ruler. We have a requirement to avenge him," the Deer said. "How can you just stay by and give up on such an opportunity to kill him?"

"It is useless," the Lizard said. "We have no clue how strong the Southern continent's army is, but we know for a fact how strong the Azure Empire's army is. The Dragon Emperor will have prepared for the army long ago. And he had nearly a hundred thousand different soldiers.

"He won't have that many," Pearl quickly said. "The Dragon Emperor doesn't know that an army is coming. He isn't prepared for whatever is happening right now."

"Listen to him," the Deer said. "We have a chance."

"Sister Lu, even if we have a chance, we can't possibly have enough beasts to fight against the Dragon Emperor. If he chooses to run away, how are we going to keep him trapped? We would have no choice but to let him go. Then, he will come back a day later after gathering his army of a hundred thousand strong soldiers and then we will just die."

The ox turned around toward Pearl. "Young lord, we wish to help you, but you can see just how bad an idea this is. Beating the Dragon Emperor is difficult."

"If he runs, we can follow him. How difficult would that be?" Pearl asked.

"That's not so easy. That man killed both your grandmother and grandfather the day he was injured by your father, the Azure Dragon. And they were both just as strong as us right now," the Ox said. "He's strong. It is better to not act at all."

"I will be honest," the Eagle spoke, turning to the Lizard and the Ox. "I would join the young lord if I or any of my beasts were capable. But we are weak, so going there for us would be suicide."

"It would be suicide for us too," the Lizard said. "I don't think you guys understand just how dangerous fighting the Emperor is, even with all the help we would get."

"But you don't have to fight the Emperor yourself," Pearl quickly said. "You will be fighting regular soldiers, who should be all weaker than you at the current time. The Emperor himself, we have people who can handle him."

A wave of nods and looks passed throughout the room as the beasts nodded toward each other as they heard Pearl speak.

"Does the Southern Continent have strong fighters?" the Lion asked. "Should we move quickly to help them?"

"Yes!" Pearl shouted in an exasperated tone. "We wasted so long with just me coming here, and then waiting for all the leaders to arrive. I thought that would be all, but you guys are wasting even more time."

"What is there to think about? If you are worried about the soldiers behind the Dragon Emperor, don't be. They too will be in the same situation as you. They will have found out about my father's death and will be making their choice to turn against the Emperor."

"Even if not all of them choose to defect from the empire's army, enough will so that the Emperor's army will be too weak to do anything."

"And we can make it stronger by you joining them," Pearl said. "And if you are worried about the Emperor running away, don't be. There is no place in this world that the Emperor can run off to that my brother won't find him."

"And if he dares to run out of the Eastern Continent, he will only be putting himself into my grandfather's maw. So, the best course of action for you all right now, no matter if you are weak or strong, is to help my brother."

"This is both a request and command on my part."

The Lizard and Ox hesitated a little.

"I... I accept," the Ox said after a little while. "I will help you, young lord."

Pearl nodded and turned toward the lizard. "What about you?" he asked.

"No," the Lizard said. "I still believe this is a bad idea. We are already doing fine. The Emperor won't come for us as long as we don't do anything reckless. But if we attack him and we somehow fail, the entire beast paradise will be in danger. I cannot allow that to happen."

The Eagle took a deep breath and said, "I shall help you. My colony will not be of much use to you, young master, but I alone shall help you."

"Thank you," Pearl said.

The Lizard looked toward the Eagle with wide eyes. He then looked toward all the other beasts.

"You guys have lost your mind. Why are you choosing to throw away peace for nothing?" the Lizard asked.

Pearl's eyes sharpened.

"Nothing?" he asked. He couldn't believe just how easily the lizard was treating his and his family's life to be. Anger filled Pearl that very instant.

It was very rare for him to get angry, but today he was. He was so angry that he ignored the warning Bai Jingshen gave him that day.

He took a step forward. "Are you saying the life of my grandparents is nothing?" he asked, fire burning behind his golden eyes.

The Lizard hesitated. He wanted to say something but something caught his eyes. He looked at it for a moment, wondering if he was seeing it correctly.

"Are you saying the life of my parents is nothing?" Pearl asked, coming even closer. As he moved, the lizard felt a rather oppressive aura all of a sudden, and the thing he had noticed had become stronger and more noticeable now.

Pearl stepped forward again, arriving next to the Lizard.

"Are you saying that my life and the life of my brother and his people is nothing? That all the hardship we go through, all the pain and sadness, it is nothing? Our tears are of no value to you, is that what you mean?"

The oppressive aura in the room had grown to a strong enough level that all the Leaders showed grimaces on their faces as well as looks of surprise at the thing that they saw.

On Pearl's forehead, where it had previously been empty, a small golden mark had appeared. The mark looked like some sort of word, but no one in that room could read it at all.

"Speak!" Pearl said, sending shivers through the Lizard.

"I..." he stared at the mark on Pearl's forehead and the oppressive aura that surrounded him as though he was in front of someone who could kill him with a single glance.

"I..." the lizard saw no choice anymore. "I will do it. I will gather beasts to help you, my lord."

Pearl stared into the eyes of the Lizard for a long second before withdrawing his aura. The glowing mark on his forehead vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared.

Pearl could imagine how angry his great-grandfather would be if he found out that he had used the mark. He had been scolded before when he had nearly used it inside Alex's mind in the presence of his family.

Bai Jingshen had told him what it was and had taught him to control it. but just because he could control it didn't mean it was something he could use as easily as he had done just now.

'That was necessary,' Pearl told himself. He had to use the mark for intimidation, even though that was not its primary purpose.

Once the mark vanished, Pearl's head snapped back toward the Lizard. "Good," he said and looked to everyone. "Go and gather your beasts. We will be leaving as soon as possible. The way back is long as well. We cannot waste any more time."

The beasts nodded and quickly ran out to go back to their Colony. Since they were already in the Lion colony, the Lion could take things slowly.

Pearl went to talk to the jaguar, but before he could, the Eagle came to talk to him.

"Senior Ying," Pearl said with a small bow.

"Young Lord," she gave a small bow in greeting as well."

"Why have you come to see me? Do you truly not have any beasts that can help me?" Pearl asked.

"I have a few, but I've already told them to gather through my talisman. they should be preparing to leave as we speak," the Eagle said.

"I see. Then go on ahead. Why did you come to seek me?" Pearl asked.

"You mentioned something at the end there about how we would be late and the journey ahead is long," the Eagle said.

"I did," Pearl said. "Why? Did I say something wrong?"

"You said what you know to be true, so I came to add my piece of knowledge to yourself," the Eagle said.

"What knowledge?" Pearl asked.

"Our journey ahead doesn't necessarily have to be long," the Eagle said. "There is a way to make it short."

Pearl's eyes flashed with intrigue. "Go on. I'm listening."

Chapter 1793 Terrible Battle

Tan Yang, one of the remaining 9 council elders of the Southern Continent died from a sword slash to the back while he was overwhelmed from two other sides.

Alex saw it happen with his peripheral vision and saw the moment of death through his spiritual senses. The moment the elder died, Alex felt something else break inside of his heart.

First, it had been Yao Ning, and now Tan Yang.

He looked to the side and saw Gong Liuxian struggling with another battalion leader who was empowered by a strong array behind her.

Far away, Lei Zhong was being beaten badly, unable to muster enough strength to keep protecting himself.

Alex looked for more, but someone attacked him at that very moment, forcing him to focus his attention back on the battle.

The man before him fought with no weapon but just an artifact that carried an open flame. The flame burned hot, but merely hot enough to be trouble for a regular cultivator.

To Alex, it was no different from ordinary flames.

Still, the flames carried with them the power of a cultivator that was beyond Saint Transformation 9th realm at the moment.

Alex was strong too, thanks to the array, but he had unfortunately come to find out that he could only be so strong beyond a certain level. It was almost as if there was some sort of bottleneck on how strong one could get in the world with borrowed powers.

Beyond the 9th realm, the improvement diminished rapidly such that it mattered little.

Alex could see nearly 400 strong Saints powering this one person. Had this person been capable of handling more power, they might have given him more, but perhaps that might have been useless to begin with.

There were very few people as strong as him on the battlefield, and they were focused on the four strongest people fighting on behalf of the Southern Continent's armies.

The four being Alex, Hannah, Zhou Linfan, and Yan Yating.

Alex didn't know where the other three were yet. He could search, but that would take away from his focus.

A blazing ball of yellow flame released from the man's hands, flying toward Alex while leaving behind trails of swirling hot air that twisted the world seen through it.

Alex immediately employed his True Fire Dao and caught onto the fireball before it even got too close. Using the Dao, he had more authority toward fire and could steal control of the ball from the other person.

Alex would have to fight his opponent mentally to do so, but in a battle of Intent, he doubted he could lose.

As Alex thought that, his eyes narrowed slightly when he felt the tremendous Intent behind the attack. He tried to wretch away the fire, but he came empty-handed and with a slight headache.

He looked toward the opponent and found him not even breaking a sweat at all.

Alex could not believe that there was someone with such a stronger Intent than him. However, when he really thought about it, that seemed a bit impossible.

Even if the man did have a stronger Intent, he would not be standing so freely. Which meant, that the Intent wasn't coming from that man at all.

It belonged to the flat chalice-like artifact where the yellow flame perpetually burned.

Looking at the treasure, Alex could tell that it was the treasure that gave away the Intent. Was it an Immortal treasure?

Alex let go of the struggle and simply struck the ball of fire with his sword, destroying it. He was pushed back with a significant force but jumped right back into battle.

He fought against the man, dodging and preparing at every instance for what may be his final attack. Meanwhile, the man seemed to tease Alex into using his strongest technique to defend against potential Immortal Qi attacks, which he used very sparingly.

Taking too long here would lead to Alex's loss and subsequently his death. So, Alex decided to fight harder without caring for his spare QI at all.

The man fighting Alex was strong, but he was also nothing more than a person with a single trick. All he could do in the battle was use his artifact, which was clearly very strong but pretty much useless against Alex once he knew what to do with it.

Alex dashed forward as assuredly as he possibly could and swung his sword through the midsection of the man's torso.

The man created a barrier of flames using Immortal Qi, just as Alex had hoped.

Alex teleported, but that was old news to these people by now.

The man located him nearly instantaneously, using the Immortal Qi in his body to empower the artifact once again and shoot out massive flames at Alex.

Alex teleported at the last second again, saving himself from the attack.

The blast of yellow fire caught empty air and the man felt an attack from behind him. Without even turning around, he sent a flame attack toward Alex, only to be shot at by one at the same time.

The two balls of fire exploded into a large array of colors, sending the man back in a disorientation. When he tried to orient himself, he realized that it had been too late.

Alex swung just once and the man's body was cleaved in half completely, the artifact that burned with the yellow fire being destroyed with it.

Alex rejoiced in the death of his opponent for a split second before it was time for him to fall back and see how he could help. Any person he could help was a person he could save.

He moved back from the battlefield of the war and took a good look at the situation and who he could help.

He saw Hannah and Zhou Linfan who weren't having as much trouble as he was worried for them. They were much stronger in general than everyone else, so they had survived easily.

Alex was about to look for others when Liang Shufen walked past him with an arm that was cut off and a leg that was as though it had been crushed completely.

"Elder Liang, are you alright?" Alex asked.

"I'm... I'll be fine once I go to the ship," she said and sighed as she turned around. "We can't do this alone. Even with all those that had been added, we're still getting overwhelmed."

Alex nodded. "As we increase in number, the enemy increases too," he said. "I will help who I can see, not that I can see many people from here."

"Brother Kang is dead," Liang Shufen said. "I saw him get punctured with many roots at once. He had very dead."

Alex remained silent, although his face trembled with emotions as memories passed him.

"Elder Tan is dead as well. I saw him get cut down by her," Alex said, pointing to a woman who had started attacking the weaker people on the battlefield.

Alex intended to go for her, but Huang Chen made it there first. Alex, instead, focused on finding everyone important to him.

As he did, he realized something troubling.

Graham was missing from the battlefield entirely.

Chapter 1794 Twilight

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm "The battle seems to be going poorly," Hao Ya said as she and Liz made their way to the final of the 8 consoles.

Liz looked to the sky, a worried look clear on her face. She had seen people dying above her, a lot of them soldiers from the Southern Continent. She had seen Hannah and Alex go fight who she now understood to be the Dragon Emperor and then get caught within a group of strong opponents, seemingly unable to find a way out.

Multiple times throughout the day her heart sank in her chest and a cold tingle passed through her spine, but thankfully the kids were still alive.

But for how long would that be? She didn't know.

Minute after minute, more and more soldiers were arriving to aid the Dragon Emperor, while the people who came to aid Alex were few and far in-between.

They needed help.

They needed her and Hao Ya to do their job quickly.

"Finally, there," Hao Ya spoke as they came across the final console. Within seconds, Hao Ya was kneeling before the console, working on it as fast as she could.

There was nobody who was free enough to search for them, but Liz still kept hold of the three talismans in her hand and looked to the sky where the battle continued.

The terrible battle rained upon the world blood and death that anyone had rarely ever seen before, if not never for the past 5 thousand years.

Death was on both sides of the war as well as the cries of the survivors. Some lost their hands, some their leg. Some were missing eyes and ears, and some had a hole through the side of their torso that they tried to fix by eating a pill.

It was terrible all around.

All except for the Dragon Emperor. That man stood in the sky, watching over the entire battle without actually taking part in it.

Why would he? If things continued like this, he was definitely going to win.

Liz cursed the man with all her heart.

Time was slow for her at the moment, both her and Hao Ya. She had been constantly keeping a field of slowed time around her using her Dao, which no one was able to sense at all.

Using the slowed time to their advantage, Hao Ya had been working a lot faster than what it would have normally taken her to complete this whole thing.

What felt like a few minutes passed for Liz while the battle above them continued all the same.

She could see her daughter fighting an older woman who attacked with frost arrows from far away. She saw Alex fighting someone who used some sort of fire artifact.

Her brother fought off to the side against someone as well and seemed to be somewhat struggling with it. There were wounds on his body, but he managed it for now.

Even the young man, who she was starting to come around to as being her Son-in-law, was busy fighting some weaker fighters far away.

"How much longer?" Liz asked.

"A few more minutes," Hao Yao said without breaking focus. "I'm right about done with this."

Liz continued waiting.

Just as Hao Ya requested, a few more minutes passed, with each minute getting them closer and closer to completing the entire thing.

As she did that, Liz suddenly sensed a strong energy up above her and turned to look.

In the sky, an explosion of some sort was sending ripples toward them.

Hao Ya had to force herself to stop as well and looked up to see the source of the ripple. There were many clashes that caused explosions and sent shockwaves, but this one was very close to them.

And this one was made by Immortal attacks.

When the shockwaves reached Liz and Hao Ya, they were forced to instantly put up everything they could to protect themselves.

As neither of the two were in the Saint Transformation realm yet, the force that rained down on them was strong enough that if they weren't careful, they would die.

Liz could only put up the most basic of defenses, but Hao Ya was different. A small palm-sized flat ring appeared on her hand which she quickly threw out before them.

The ring suddenly expanded as it moved away from them and the four quarters of the ring moved in four different directions, creating a beautiful golden barrier at the center.

The force of the shockwave hit the artifact and suddenly vanished as though completely made inert by the artifact.

The two girls were safe, but in protecting themselves, they had revealed themselves completely to anyone who was paying attention.

There were quite a few people who were mostly free in the battle. All they were doing was staying next to someone in an array to empower just one person.

One of them noticed their treasure and his senses came down toward them.

Hao Ya and Liz were still, but this time the person was looking for them. In a teleportation field that was supposed to be completely empty, they stood out like a sore thumb.

The man pointed toward them and shouted something that was completely drowned by the various explosions. Within moments, several other people noticed them as well and a group of people split off from the array, coming down for them.

"They found us," Liz said urgently to Hao Ya.

Hao Ya looked up with a frown. "I'm so close," she said.

"I'll handle those who I can," Liz said, putting away the talismans. There was no point in holding to that anymore. "Make sure to keep yourself safe."

Hao Ya nodded.

Liz stopped the Time Dao she was using on Hao Ya and fully focused on herself.

She took a deep breath and pulled out her sword. It was a thin blade, similar to her daughter's, but the handle of the sword was slightly different as it was carved to look like a curved hourglass.

Twilight.

Liz activated her Time Dao to speed up time for herself such that everything else appeared very slow.

Then, she took off.

The Dao of Temporal Stagnation was the first Dao she had ever learned of the three Time Daos and was the one she was most proficient with.

As such, she liked using it much more than any of the other ones.

Time seemed to come to a relative stop for everyone but her as Liz flew through the sky at what the others perceived to be near instantaneous movement.

Liz arrived right in front of the first person, and even as he pulled up his sword, hers was already upon him.

She carved through the man's chest, leaving a large gash behind. The man screamed out in pain from the wound, and as Liz moved away, his voice grew distant and slow.

Unfortunately, she was a little too weak to kill him in one strike.

Fortunately, she wasn't done just yet.

Liz quickly turned back around and drove her sword through the back of the man, forcing the blade into the man's heart as his screams came into sound once again.

The man coughed a mouth full of blood, and as Liz pulled the sword back out, he slid away from her, falling down slowly as Liz moved away from him and went for the others.

Chapter 1795 Temporal Daos

The Dao of Temporal Stagnation and the Dao of Temporal Swiftness were two sides of the same coin. As time was relative, slowing down time for one thing meant increasing it for something else. As such, the Daos were named after the effect they created, rather than what they did.

The Dao of Temporal Stagnation in fact sped up someone's time, and in doing so, it slowed down the world around them.

Liz employed this very Dao to move as quickly as she could to try and kill all the soldiers that came flying down toward her.

There was a problem with using her Dao, however. It was a problem with most Time dao in general. Time Dao in general heavily relied on Space to apply their effect.

Whether it be the Dao of Temporal Stagnation or the Dao of Temporal Swiftness, the user needed to specify a certain area of space where said dao would be applied.

It was a simple thing to deal with when doing some regular task like cultivation or something stationary. However, when the user started moving with the Dao active, they had a whole heap of problems to deal with suddenly.

As Time Dao was based on space, one had to constantly move the entire space around with them so they could keep the effect of the Dao on them.

Or else, they would end up leaving the field where the Time Dao was active.

While it all sounded complicated, it was in fact much simpler in use. As the Heavens helped someone when they employed a Dao, Liz could simply just Intend for the Dao to be used in the way she wanted, and it would.

The problem that came along with that was that she would have to constantly use a lot of Intent to keep it going. The Intent she had to use generated an enormous amount of mental pain that simply could not be generated by anything that was still.

So, when fighting with her Dao actively, Liz had to make sure she finished it quickly, or else she would be in a world of pain very soon.

Another problem that came with using her Dao, not related to the Dao itself, was physical resistance from the world around her.

While she moved quickly, the world moved at the same pace. So to move through something as fast as she was moving, she had to introduce a layer of space around her where the air could enter her area of Dao and not introduce a lot of resistance for her.

Liz did have the Fluctuating Friction dance that she had received from Alex quite some time ago, and while she could use it on air, the air wasn't the only thing that she had to worry about.

Human bodies became as sturdy as a rock when she hit them while slowing down the time around her. Similarly, attacks and barriers became much more problematic to deal with as well.

To overcome this problem, Liz needed to extend the area of her Dao more than just herself by a fair amount. In doing so, however, she allowed her enemies to enter her Dao and start moving at the same rate as her.

While that worked quite well for catching people off guard, if they had fast reflexes, her Dao became quite useless.

Liz needed to fight at close range as any attack she threw out would escape the range of her Dao and return to normal time. So, she flew right next to the other person who had flown down to attack her.

Liz could see the eyes of the woman on her long before she was close. Time may have slowed down for her enemies from her perspective, but they were still cultivators.

The reflex and reaction speed these people had were simply unimaginable.

As Liz arrived close, the female soldier, who was already beginning her attack, moved quickly as if with new life and stabbed her Metal-Qi-infused spear forward to attack Liz. Twilight moved in a sinuous line, moving past the stab and digging into the woman's chest only to be met with a harsh clang.

The woman wore some sort of metal armor underneath her robes that completely negated Liz's attacks.

'Shit!' Liz thought as she quickly moved back away from the woman who returned to stagnation once again. She then flew back toward the woman and aimed for her head.

As she arrived, the woman returned to speed once more. However, that was only for a split second as the woman's spear slowed down to a crawl.

Liz felt her head burn with pain as if being split right open as she employed the Dao of Temporal Swiftness on the woman while still within the Dao of Temporal Stagnation.

Liz put all her energy into Twilight, which glowed with bright white light thanks to her Sword Qi, as she plunged it deep into the woman's head.

As she did, she let go of the Dao of Temporal Swiftness on the woman so that her sword did not suddenly slow down when it came into contact with the woman.

As she did, the woman returned to speed, only to see a sword going straight into her head.

Twilight exploded with energy as it ripped apart the woman's head while making its way back out. As the woman died, a blue illusory soul appeared back out, which Liz dispatched with haste.

She took the woman's body and stored it into her storage for her nephew, and went on to fight the other people that had come down to fight her.

The rest of the people were similarly strong as the other two she fought, so after a few moments of battle, they all died as well.

Having killed everyone, Liz moved back down toward Hao Ya to help her, only to notice more people flying toward them.

Only, these ones were in the Saint Transformation realm and much stronger than the ones she fought before.

The first group was sent to deal with annoyances on the battlefield. The second group was being sent to deal with a problem.

Liz's cultivation base was stronger than most people here at Saint Soul 7th realm. With her battle prowess, she could fight someone in Saint Transformation 1st realm. Using her Dao, she could even push that up to Saint Transformation 2nd or 3rd realm.

However, of the people coming down, she could see that one of them was in the Saint Transformation 5th realm. He was a complete monster when compared to anyone else she could fight with, and there were people behind him as well.

The man came barreling down through the sky, slowed down only to Liz and Hao Ya thanks to Liz's dao.

"There are more coming, and they're strong. What do we do?" Liz asked.

"I'm so close," Hao Ya said. "I just need a couple of minutes at best."

Liz felt troubled and quickly slowed down time as slowly as she possibly could. This would help Hao Ya gain enough time to finish her thing for certain.

As for what happened once they finished, Liz had no idea at all. She could only hope that Hao Ya had some ways to save her.

Chapter 1796 Done

As Liz focused her all on the temporal manipulations to give Hao Ya more time, Hao Ya did all she could to make the final changes to the console.

She had realized what was happening long ago and was doing her best to finish in time what she had started.

She worked as quickly as she could, manipulating the basic formations into multiple sections that were created into the array of formations that was the console.

Time passed, second after second as Hao Ya worked the hardest she had ever in a long time. She completely forgot about the danger she was in, focusing only on the work at hand.

Liz kept an eye outside, with her mind burdened and in pain due to her using her Dao at the rate she was. She saw the Saint Transformation realm enemies were moving at a pace where they would be atop them in minutes.

But of course, they wouldn't come all the way down there. Instead, they would attack them from far away, which was exactly what they did a minute later.

Bright colorful lights slowly gathered around the fist of the man at the front as he punched down toward Liz and Hao Ya.

Liz could feel the force of the attack that flew toward her, burning bright with Fire Qi, and with heat enough to melt rocks.

The strength behind the attack was such that anything it touched would be dead within seconds.

Liz looked at Hao Ya with her peripheral vision and saw her still working. She couldn't leave at all. She had to stay and protect her as what she was doing was very important.

Liz prepared her sword and sent out a Heavenly Static Slash flying through the air. The crescent blade of lightning flew past the bubble of sped-up time, going beyond into the normal world where everything felt slowed down to Liz.

Her attack slowly moved up while the fiery punch made its way down. It took a long time for them to come into contact. When it did, it created an explosion of energy, of which the majority was Fire that still came toward Liz.

No matter how much she had tried, the attack was still coming toward her.

"Done!" Hao Ya spoke suddenly and got up from where she was. She turned around and quickly assessed the situation they were in. Without missing a beat, she once again brought out the flat ring from her storage and tossed it forward.

As soon as the ring flew outside their bubble of slowed time, it expanded once more to create a barrier to protect them.

"It's alright. You don't have to struggle anymore," Hao Ya said. "Put down the bubble."

Liz looked back in surprise. "Are you serious?" she asked.

"Yes," Hao Ya said, staring intently at the barrier before them.

Liz could feel herself getting closer to losing consciousness, so she decided to agree with Hao Ya. The bubble of slowed time around them disappeared and the world around them returned to sound and movement.

The explosive sound reached them immediately, followed by the fiery explosion. Just as it was about to hit them, however, the barrier in front of them stopped the power, and slowly shrank back to its normal size, now growing much more brightly than before.

Hao Ya looked toward the sky at the man who had remained flying in a bit of surprise and activated the ring once more.

This time, however, the ring didn't expand at all. Instead, the bright glow of the ring slowly moved away from the metal and concentrated on the center area.

All the force from before had been absorbed by that artifact, and now it was releasing the collected force toward whoever Hao Ya desired it to go to.

In this instance, her target was the man at the front.

A blinding light shot out from the artifact, blazing its way up toward the man.

The man realized what was happening and quickly created an illusory shield made out of fire to defend himself.

The attack struck the man's shield and exploded into a bright mass that covered a large area around the man.

When the light diminished and the smoke cleared, the shield was still active with the man not facing a single bit of damage from the attack.

Hao Ya smiled.

He wasn't meant to.

That attack had only been a distraction. The real attack was what she used right afterward using a necklace that hung around her neck.

A spray of water Qi burst out of her necklace at a blinding speed, arriving in front of the fiery shield at once, destroying it before anyone even realized what was happening.

The water Qi struck the man, killing him in body and soul at once, leaving not a single shred of his existence behind.

That had been a powerful attack, something that was capable of killing any regular human in the world were she able to catch them off guard. She could have perhaps even been able to kill the Dragon Emperor with it, but desperation had called for her to use it here.

Not that she was confident the artifact could hurt someone with as high a body cultivation as the Dragon Emperor.

The necklace that Hao Ya held corroded away after she used it, leaving behind only the single large blue jewel that would have to be repurposed into another necklace later on.

She didn't know why that was the case, only that it was. After all, it was something that her Master had made for her personally.

The soldiers in the sky looked at Hao Ya and Liz in absolute awe and despair as they came to the misunderstanding that the people below were more powerful than them.

As such, even the early Saint Transformation realm soldiers stopped and quickly called for someone else's attention.

A man with a solid blue beard and hair flew down from the sky, his cultivation base flaring at Saint Transformation 9th realm, if the girls weren't mistaken.

In fact, for some reason, they believed that the man that came down was much stronger than just Saint Transformation 9th realm.

Liz blinked, her purple eyes glowing bright as she saw the colors in the sky. Multicolored aura followed the man, all of which came from a small group of people that flew in the sky.

There was an array behind the man and his strength.

Hao Ya started hesitating as the man approached. She had a few artifacts on her still, but she wasn't sure if it would be useful at all.

She had a single artifact to protect her and teleport her back to her master were she to ever come across an Immortal, and she did not want to use that at all.

The other soldiers that had called for the newcomer were now floating behind the newcomer, waiting for his command.

"Young ladies, for whatever reason could you be here at this time of the day," the man asked as he slowly pulled out a large, two-handed ax, ready to fight.

However, before he could proceed to question the girls, his eyes moved behind him from where Graham barreled down toward him from the sky.

Chapter 1797 Ethereal

Graham had noticed the sudden reappearance of his sister and Hao Ya below on the teleportation formation and had thus fought his opponent as hard as he could to defeat him.

As soon as he was done with that fight, he rushed down to protect them regardless of the fact that the person who was making his way down was quite strong himself.

One of the people beside the ax-wielding man noticed Graham and quickly pulled out a spear to kill him.

He moved forward, charging his attack as he shot out a large illusory spear formed out of water Qi toward Graham.

Graham held the giant Darksteel, which glowed with the faintest white outline, as he used his Sword Intent to give his all in the attack.

Graham swung Darksteel as the water spear arrived right in front of him, giving no sense of threat to his attack at all. And yet, when the attack landed, he destroyed the Water spear so very easily and made his way beyond toward the man who attacked him.

The man quickly pulled out a talisman to protect himself and created a barrier using it.

Graham swung his sword once again and smashed the barrier in, destroying it in a single swing while also cleaving the man in half with a single attack.

With a person who was only in the early Saint Transformation realm, he did not have to worry about the fact that they would have Immortal Qi at all.

As the cleaved corpse of the man fell from the sky, the various other soldiers slowly brought their weapons, worried, but ready to fight.

The man wielding the ax quickly put out a hand to stop them all.

Then, he moved forward a little, clearly vigilant, and stared at Graham for a long moment. He wondered what treasure Graham was using to hide his aura. The man believed that Graham was playing at being weak so as to catch others off guard.

After a long moment, the man smiled. "You guys go deal with the women. If you can't beat them, try to just keep them from leaving. I'll handle him and be right there," the man said.

"Yes, leader," the few soldiers said.

"Leader?" Graham asked. "A battalion leader? No wonder you are so strong."

"I am Yu Ha--"

"I don't care," Graham said. "I do not need to know who you are to fight you."

"Oh, but won't you want to know who will kill you?" the man asked as his large double-handed ax glowed with soft golden energy.

Graham prepared his Darksteel with a soft glowing white outline and prepared as well. "I've been through a fate worse than death already. I will gladly welcome it when it comes for me," he said. "But that day will not be today."

The man smiled with a wicked smile. "We'll see about that."

The two attacked at the same time and started fighting.

* * * * * *

Down at the large platform for the teleportation formation, both Liz and Hao Ya were somewhat glad that someone had come to save them from the person who was so obviously going to overpower them.

At the same time, they were both worried for Graham as he wasn't very fit to fight someone at the peak of the Saint Transformation realm and perhaps a little beyond in terms of strength.

Not to mention the Immortal Qi such a person would have was not something Graham could so easily ignore.

But, this was not the time for them to get distracted.

Despite the fact that the stronger of the people had been stopped, the others were still coming down for them, and these were people who were going to be hard to handle, let alone kill.

"We need to let Alex know what is happening," Liz said quickly and looked up to search for him, but his battle had led him somewhere she could not immediately find amidst the tens of thousands of people.

And she didn't have the time to search. The people were right upon them.

"I'll try to save you if they use Immortal Qi. Other than that, I won't be of much help," Hao Ya said as she brought out a brilliant green sword with an emerald sheen that looked as though it came right out of an Immortal's treasure.

It was a treasure that her master had given her when she had successfully evolved her physique from a Divine rank physique to a Celestial rank physique a long time ago.

She had been handed this very sword that day and had been told about its origin: a treasure created by one of the many that had held the name of the Artifact God.

This one was a little special in that it was one of the final few swords the Artifact God had made before he had vanished from the world.

There were some texts that suggested that the 'Artifact God' could even have been the Sage of Ten Thousand Treasures himself.

The name it was given by that god was Jade Fang, and today was the first time Hao Ya was using it in a serious battle.

As the people from the sky came down close enough to target them, Hao Ya moved.

She activated her short-range movement technique, the Seven Misty steps, teleporting 7 times in a short burst to arrive right before the man as she swung her thin sword.

A verdant green energy appeared from her sword at the same time as she swung it. The energy from her sword was weak, but when the energy from the attack came into contact with the energy of her enemy who had used a technique to protect himself, a burst of vines suddenly appeared around him, capturing him with the vines.

The vines were rather weak in terms of strength, as they were formed primarily by Hao Ya's Qi, which was quite weak. As such, they were easily destroyed by the man.

Realizing that he had no reason to worry, the man stabbed forward with his spear at Hao Ya.

At the same time, the woman that was next to the man came to attack Hao Ya as well, throwing a sword slash formed of fiery energy.

Both attacks came for Hao Ya, but she remained still, not moving at all. Instead, her body suddenly glowed a soft green light, slowly becoming see-through as both of those attacks came for her.

Hao Ya was not just see-through at all. Her entire body had become ethereal at that very moment, and all attacks that came for her simply passed through her without hurting her in the slightest.

The two soldiers looked at Hao Ya with absolute shock as they tried to see what sort of treasures she was using to do such a thing.

But of course, there was no treasure that Hao Ya was doing. This was something she had been capable of doing long ago since she began her cultivation journey.

She could make her body illusory so that no attacks could hurt her at all. No weapon or physical attacks could touch her at all.

That was the boon she received when she was born with the Spiritborne Ethereal Physique.

Chapter 1798 Danger

The Dragon Emperor remained aloft in the sky, overseeing the battle. For the past many minutes, he hadn't had to fight, so he freely watched the battle with the complete understanding that he was going to become the victor in this war.

He had absolute confidence.

After all, short of an Immortal himself coming to kill him, there was no chance for anyone in this war that could potentially kill him at all.

He watched Alex, Hannah, and Zhou Linfan fight in the distance, and slowly his eyes moved toward the battlefield below where a new fight was being fought.

He noticed Graham, Hao Ya, and Liz.

He watched Liz fight with swift movement, attacking and surviving the soldiers who were clearly stronger than her by a long shot. That was an incredible feat that she showed, but her strength made it so that she couldn't come out victorious in this battle.

His eyes then moved to Graham, who struggled in his fight against the ax-wielding leader.

The Dragon Emperor watched with amusement as that fight was more close combat than what would be expected of a cultivator.

'That man cannot use Qi properly, can he?' he thought. 'Is he a body cultivator?'

The thought made the Dragon Emperor even more curious about Graham. Given how the battle was going, Graham was bound to die within a couple of minutes.

He would have to remember to retrieve the treasures from this person's body later once the war was over. He needed to figure out how he was possibly cultivating his body to such a degree.

The Dragon Emperor wanted to find out if there was a cheap option he didn't know about. He wanted to learn about it if he could.

That was the most Graham was able to make the Dragon Emperor think about him.

Graham and Liz were nobody in his eyes, but Hao Ya was someone he very clearly remembered. He would never forget someone like her at all.

After all, she was the disciple of the Immortal who lived in the Central continent and was in charge of managing the teleportation formation back then.

So, the moment he laid his eyes on her, the Emperor's heart grew cold with fear. He saw where they were and remembered what she was capable of. Putting the two thoughts together, the Dragon Emperor was only able to think of the worst-case scenario.

Was that young girl trying to set the formation so she could teleport that very Immortal here?

"No..." he said softly. He couldn't let something like that happen at all. If the Immortal came and killed him, that would be the worst of all situations.

Before he knew he was doing it, the Dragon Emperor brought out a spear and flew toward them to fight.

* * * * * * *

Graham struggled in his battle against the man with the ax. Not only was the man stronger than him physically due to his Qi, but he was also very fast, making Graham unable to hit him most of the time.

The man swung his ax, sending a cleaving attack down toward Graham. Graham moved back just in time to dodge and activated his shoes to arrive next to the man to slash at him.

Darksteel glowed suddenly and grew large to become a towering sword as it came down on the man.

The man twisted his ax and swung upward quickly, clashing metal with metal. A loud ringing sound filled the battlefield before an explosion of light filled it suddenly as the man used an attack through the ax.

Graham was sent flying backward with his body littered with cuts from Dao of Cutting that came with the explosion of energy.

He stopped himself from flying too back and quickly focused his attention back on the man who was attacking him again.

Graham moved away from the attack and went around to attack the man front the side. However, the man wasn't caught off guard at all and sent his attack flying directly toward Graham.

Graham quickly put all he could into his sword and slashed down on the attack as hard as he could.

Another eruption of energy sent Graham flying backward with more wounds on his body. And this time, he felt a sharp pain in his chest as though a bone of his had broken.

It had been a long time since he had felt such pain.

As Graham tried to stop himself from flying too far, he heard a cry from behind him.

"Brother, dodge!"

It was Liz's voice.

Even as Graham spun through the air, his Demon Eyes saw two of the soldiers Liz was fighting turn around to attack him while he was unsuspecting.

The two attacks came for Graham, and even as he tried to protect himself, the attacks landed on him. Another explosion covered him completely and the soldiers rejoiced.

As they did, Graham flew out of the explosion, his body covered in no new wounds at all. His sudden arrival caused the soldiers to panic and prepare more attacks, and as they did, Liz moved from behind, attacking one of them.

They were strong enough that her attack did nothing to them, but it caused that one person to be slow to protect himself.

The massive Darksteel fell on the man, killing him at once. As for the attack that the other man used, Graham took it to the chest and scoffed it as though it was nothing.

The man stared in panic but was relieved as his leader came flying down toward Graham and Liz.

Liz immediately created a large bubble of slowed time as the man who was coming toward them seemed to slow down considerably.

"Kill him," Liz said, and Graham nodded.

The last of the two men that were attacking Liz died just as simply.

"Thank god!" Liz said as she breathed loudly. "You saved me, brother."

"Are you okay?" Graham looked at his sister, and Liz nodded.

"Focus on him," Liz pointed toward the incoming man and used the opportunity of slowed time to search for Alex in the sky.

Thankfully, she found him standing alone, looking down toward them. He seemed to have noticed what was happening down here.

"We have completed the formation," Liz sent him the message. "Hao Ya says the medallion to activate this formation lies with the Dragon Emperor, so I don't know what happens next."

While she sent the message, it would only be received by him a while later due to the time difference.

After that, Liz turned her head toward the battle ahead. As she did, off in the distance, she saw the Emperor who flew toward Hao Ya who was still in the middle of fighting her two enemies.

"Hao Ya!" Liz cried out. "She'll die."

Graham's eyes moved to look at Hao Ya in the distance, but they swiftly returned toward the man before him as he tightly gripped onto the Darksteel with his own two hands.

As scummy as it was, he had to protect himself and his sister here first. Hao Ya would have to protect herself.

"I wish her luck," Graham said and turned toward the ax-

wielding man.

His battle was here.

Chapter 1799 Defenses All Around

Graham dashed out of the bubble of slowed time, an attack already in motion as he did so. Fake weight added into his fist through the Dragonheart Gauntlets added so much force to the swing that Graham couldn't believe it.

The moment he arrived outside the bubble, he met with a bit of resistance in the air, but not enough that it could stop him.

The man that moved so very slowly outside the bubble suddenly came to life and moved incredibly fast as well, swinging down his giant ax as he did so.

The two metal weapons clashed and the world shuddered from the force of their impact.

Graham felt the attack rebound throughout his body, the force seemingly wanting to break all of his bones.

The other man felt the rebound as well, as though he had suddenly struck something so hard that his attack was meaningless.

He quickly pulled back and checked his ax and was thankful that there were no chinks from the ax that had been torn off.

Quickly orienting himself from the clash, the man went back into battle with Graham.

* * * * * *

The Dragon Emperor arrived directly on top of the two soldiers who were fighting Hao Ya and attacked Hao Ya.

Hao Ya noticed the attack coming for her and quickly turned her body illusory once more as the lightning bolt from the Dragon Emperor passed through her body.

The Dragon Emperor's eyes narrowed for a moment, seeing how easily Hao Ya was dealing with their attacks by simply becoming ghost-like. Several thoughts passed through his head at once and he struck out once again.

The wind whipped toward Hao Ya, nothing dangerous, but extremely forceful.

Hao Ya remained where she was, the wind doing nothing to her.

At the same time, the Emperor made a soft ringing sound that floated toward Hao Ya.

A hairpin that hung on her head, holding the flowing locks of hair glowed softly and Hao Ya realized what was happening.

The Dragon Emperor realized as well.

Mental attacks were something that could hurt Hao Ya.

Instantly, the Dragon Emperor used his Immortal Qi as well as all the Intent he could muster to create a musical note that carried with it his Mental attack, which hit Hao Ya before she could make any move.

Hao Ya's hairpin glowed, but there was only so much it could handle. When the hairpin reached the limit of how much it could handle, the attack instead hit Hao Ya.

When it did, Hao Ya simply lost consciousness and fell from the sky. As her body fell, her concentration on keeping her body illusory was gone as well, and her body returned to a solid form that could take damage.

"As I thought so," the Dragon Emperor said softly and raised his spear toward the falling Hao Ya. "Die!"

A massive bolt of lightning hit her instantly, striking her in the chest. It was no ordinary lightning attack either that had hit her, but rather an attack that used Immortal Qi.

The Dragon Emperor had no time to spend on taking things slowly. The worst-case scenario of the situation was too grim for him to do so.

He was going to kill the girl before she could do any shenanigans to bring the Immortal here.

Suddenly, light burst from Hao Ya, coming from deep inside her, a light so bright that it seemed to darken the world around her.

"You who dare to harm my disciple, be ready to face my wrath," a low voice spoke from within the light that came from Hao Ya.

The Dragon Emperor listened to the voice, wondering if that was the voice of the Immortal who lived in the Central continent.

Just then, something shot out from inside her.

Instantly, the Dragon Emperor employed the dao of Space Expansion to put as much space in between him and the attack and quickly pulled out a life-saving treasure from within his storage ring.

An image of an Azure Dragon appeared from a talisman, roaring as it did so, and sent out an attack toward the incoming light.

The two Saint Transformation realm soldiers that were standing nearby were instantly vaporized with not a soul of theirs remaining.

The two attacks struck each other, and the light won, reaching forward until it landed on the Azure Dragon's head and destroyed both the head and itself in the clash, scattering green motes of light in every direction.

The Dragon Emperor remained and breathed heavily, watching in horror as the attack that was coming for him disappeared within those motes of light.

He took deep breaths, trying to calm himself, but the fear remained within him as the glowing light still shined from within Hao Ya.

Suddenly, the light seemed to float out of her, turning into what looked like a sun. Dark and white clouds appeared around the sun, and the world seemed to turn blue in the process.

As if what they were looking at was the sky itself.

The sun's glow vanished, turning into nothing more than a golden illusory orb that swiftly fell down toward Hao Ya. As it fell, it grew, becoming larger and larger, until it was much larger than Hao Ya herself.

It passed through her, putting her inside of it. Once she was safely inside, the golden orb glowed brightly, to the point that no one could stare at it anymore.

Then, just as quickly, the light disappeared and Hao Ya was no longer there on the ground.

The world returned to light and color. Sound returned as well, but the sound of fighting had long since stopped. People stared down at what had happened and were too surprised to do anything.

The Dragon Emperor quickly got a hold of himself and turned around to look at the others. He saw the leader with the ax and gave him an order.

"Kill that man!" he shouted and turned his head toward Liz who had stopped to stare at what had happened to Hao Ya as well. Without waiting even a second, the Dragon Emperor poured Immortal Qi into his spear and sent out another massive bolt of lightning flying toward Liz.

Liz reacted quickly, slowing down time as soon as she could. But no matter how slow time was, lightning still moved too quickly for her to get out of the way.

She was all but certain that she was going to die.

Graham noticed the attack barely before the lightning shot out and could do nothing.

As he was distracted by the lightning, the leader with the ax raised his ax up high, pouring all of his Immortal Qi, Intent, and whatever else he could into this single attack.

Even as Graham turned his head around to try and react to what was happening, the man came down with the ax, going for Graham's head.

Neither the brother nor the sister were in a situation where they could protect each other or themselves.

Both attacks landed on Liz and Graham, respectively. And at the same time, two massive illusory beasts appeared on both of them.

A White Tiger's illusory head appeared from Liz and roared, instantly destroying the lightning bolt.

At the same time, phoenix wings appeared from Graham's back, covering him and protecting him from the attack.

Both the leader and the Dragon Emperor watched with furious gazes as their attacks that were meant to kill the two ended up being for naught.

Chapter 1800 Key

Liz and Graham were saved at the last moment by defensive techniques they had received from both Bai Jingshen and Scarlet.

The appearance of the images of two Immortal figures sent waves of awe-inspiring sensations throughout the crowd. The behemoth of the face of the White Tiger and the fabulous wings of the Immortal Phoenix made the people temporarily forget that they had just seen another such image right before even.

The Dragon Emperor saw the two images, and completely ignored the wings of the Phoenix and instead looked at the White Tiger's face.

Both fear and anger roiled his face as the last thing he wanted to see in this war was the face of the one who would fulfill the prophecy.

Even before anyone had come back from their shock, the Dragon Emperor poured more Immortal Qi into the Noble Dragon Spear and sent out another bolt of lightning toward Liz.

As an Immortal, there was only so much help one could provide in the lower realms before the Heavens of the lower realm decided that you were meddling in the business of those that did not concern you.

As such, neither Bai Jingshen nor Scarlet was capable of providing too much help even just defensively. Bai Jingshen had been able to provide 3 such defensive measures, and Scarlet had been able to provide just 2.

As for who those 5 were going to be, it was unanimously chosen to be people who simply could not die. As Alex's father and aunt, neither Graham nor Liz could die.

Only, Liz felt that she was going to die now as the Emperor sent out his lightning attack once again.

Graham turned around, using the opportunity to fly toward his sister, but there was no speed he could produce that could get him there in time.

As he started turning, the man he fought quickly strengthened his arms and readied his ax once again to bring it down on Graham.

Liz slowed down time as much as she could to give herself time to escape, regardless of the fact that she knew that was impossible. As she did, she saw something flash before her in a silvery light.

She looked beyond the bubble of her slowed time and saw a flat rectangular object appear before her. A mirror, which stood before the oncoming lightning strike.

And it was already activated.

The lightning bolt struck the mirror and was instantly reflected as it flew crashing back toward the Dragon Emperor.

At the same time, the man who was ready to kill Graham felt some sort of motion to his right that his senses could not see.

As he turned his head to look, a sword appeared from invisibility and slashed. The man couldn't even react in time as the nameless technique cut through his body, and the attack flew toward the Dragon Emperor in the distance.

The Dragon Emperor quickly pulled out the Golden Dragon Shield and activated it using his Immortal Qi to create a thick barrier to stop his own attack that was reflected.

He bore the full force of the attack with his shield and also felt something crash onto the barrier from the right that he could not see.

It had been strong, not as strong as the lightning bolt that was reflected, but enough to give him some concern that he would have to check later on.

Once the attack was fully stopped, the Dragon Emperor put down his shield and quickly took an assessment of the situation.

The very first thing he noticed was his own lack of Immortal Qi. At the realm he was, half of all of his Qi was Immortal Qi. Once spent, he would only gain it back through a long stretch of cultivation.

Just standing around gave him nothing more than Saint Qi, which while strong, was not what he could rely on in this battle.

He would have to cultivate properly later on.

The second thing, and perhaps what was more important, that he noticed was that both Liz and Graham were gone from the battlefield, and the only one that was standing there was Alex.

The Dragon Emperor got ready to kill him while keeping in mind the shenanigans that Alex could still pull. He quickly looked around for Hao Ya and was starting to become certain that she was nowhere in the vicinity at all.

Alex seemed poised and ready to fight him as well.

"So you know you cannot kill me," the Dragon Emperor said. "Is that why you decided to try and call the Immortal over? To help you with your war?"

Alex gave a small grin. "Do you believe I would have to call the Immortal to defeat you?" he asked.

The Dragon Emperor frowned slightly. Something was wrong with Alex that the Emperor could not tell. It was as though the person he was looking at currently did not exist.

'Am I being played with again?' the Dragon Emperor thought. He was almost sure that the Alex he was talking to did not exist. After all, where there should have been Alex in his spiritual sense was instead a massive void.

'Where is he?' the Dragon Emperor thought and looked around down below around the consoles of the formation. He wasn't there either.

"What is it that you plan to do?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "I know you had the girl do something with the formation. I don't know what, but she was trying something."

"She was indeed doing something alright," Alex said as he slowly floated down from the sky. "She was helping me fix the formation so that it was ready for use."

The Dragon Emperor scoffed. "Even if she completed in fixing it or whatever, how do you plan on using it?" he asked. "The key to activating this formation is with me, and will forever be with me."

As he finished speaking, he searched the surrounding area carefully with his senses to see if Alex was hiding elsewhere. However, no matter how much he checked, he couldn't find any signs of anyone being present below him.

Alex landed on top of the formation and answered. "That is true," Alex said. "You do have the key to activate it. But sadly for you, there is more than one way to activate a formation."

The Dragon Emperor's eyes narrowed a little.

Alex blazed with Yang Qi as he poured all he could into the stone platform below him. The ground buzzed softly.

"What... what are you doing?" the Dragon Emperor demanded. He was starting to realize that he had been talking to the real Alex the entire time.

"I would've been in trouble if there was a seal on the formation," Alex said. "But a lack of a simple activation key cannot stop me."

"No, stop!" the Dragon Emperor shouted and prepared to attack. Even as he did, he felt the space around him twist and turn as he realized that he was standing in the teleportation formation that was about to activate.

As quickly as he could, the Dragon Emperor flew out of the range of the teleportation formation and watched as the entire formation came alive.

Alex alone stood at the center as he stared up at the Dragon Emperor and gave a smirk as the lights swallowed him.

"See you in a bit."

Chapter 1801 Return to Battlefield

﻿﻿The Dragon Emperor remained stunned in the air some distance away from the teleportation formation as the light faded and Alex disappeared.

He witnessed the scene with some feelings of anger, horror, and confusion.

Anger at the fact that he had even let something like this happen. Horror at the thought of what the result was going to be. And an overall confusion on why Alex had been able to activate a formation despite the lack of a key.

He had heard clearly what Alex had said at the end there. He had said that he needed no key. How was that possible?

Those were but fleeting thoughts for the Dragon Emperor, however, as another concern overtook his mind very soon.

What was he going to do next?

Alex surely hadn't left the battlefield, running away somewhere to save himself. He planned on coming back. It was what he planned on coming back with that concerned the Emperor.

Before that could even happen, he had to stop it.

The Intercontinental Teleportation formations were created long ago by the Immortals that came with the first Heavenly beasts that settled on this world.

As such, the formation platforms were created using materials not known to mortals and one equally as difficult to destroy.

The choice for that had been in an attempt to stop any mishaps and mischief that could be done to it in the years to pass.

The Dragon Emperor knew this and knew just how difficult it was going to be to destroy this. And after destruction, the chances of it being recreated were none as well.

Still, it was something that had to be done.

Destroying the platform would not stop Alex from teleporting back into the Eastern Continent. But it would stop him from teleporting right here in the Dragon Capital.

And any delay would certainly work in the Dragon Emperor's favor.

Such thoughts passed through the Dragon Emperor's head in the blink of an eye as he raised his Noble Dragon Spear to attack the formation platform in an attempt to destroy it.New n0vel chapters are published on

As he did, he felt an aura of fire slow toward him from the side. His senses saw the attack even before it arrived toward him, forcing him to react on instinct as he fired the attack he prepared toward that attack.

The crescent-shaped fire attack was destroyed by the many spears made out of wind that the Dragon Emperor shot out.

The two attacks created an eruption of energy and light in the sky and from within them came down Hannah, like a barreling attack herself.

Her thin black sword glowed by her side, one that she named Starweaver, and sent out another fire attack.

Before the Dragon Emperor knew it, he was already roiled in another battle with her.

"Fight!" he shouted as loudly as he could in between the attacks. "And destroy the teleportation formation."

The war that had been seemingly paused by the appearance of the Immortal images once again went back to full speed as people fought and killed each other.

The ones that fought for the Dragon Emperor fought to kill the opposing army and destroy the formation platform below if they could.

The ones fighting alongside Alex fought to defeat the Dragon Emperor's army and protect the formation from the other attacks.

As such, not many were able to do anything to the formation at all. That was not to say no one could do anything.

Quite a few people still managed to slip passed their opponent or find a gap in battle to send out an attack as their Emperor demanded. They struck the formation platform below.

However, such measly attacks could do little to destroy what had been created by the Immortals. These few people would have to work a lot harder and a lot longer if they wished to destroy any of these at all.

The battle raged hot and heavy for a few seconds and the Emperor started pushing back Hannah with his attacks.

Hannah and the Emperor were about the same strength now thanks to all the aid they got from their respective arrays. And because there were such small gaps in terms of how strong one could be once they were past the Saint Transformation 9th realm when aided by others, they were both practically at a tie by this point.

However, perhaps because Hannah wasn't as experienced as the Emperor, or because she had been fighting for a long time without rest, she had grown a little dull.

'Or is she just not fighting seriously?' the Emperor wondered. 'Is this wench just buying for time?'

Hannah threw out another attack, which the Dragon Emperor quickly destroyed.

"What can I give you to stop you from fighting me?" the Dragon Emperor asked.

"Your head!" Hannah shouted as she sent out another attack.

The Dragon Emperor defended himself with his shield and launched back another attack.

Hannah created a swirl of Water and blocked the attack.

"I will become an Immortal soon. And then I will leave this realm, and you and my son can become the Emperor and Empress of this realm. You don't have to fight me," the Dragon Emperor said.

"You tried to kill me," Hannah said as she attacked again. "You tried to kill your own son, you scum!"

The Dragon Emperor blocked the attack. "It appears there is no coming to an understanding with you," he grunted. "Die!"

As the Dragon Emperor attacked once more, he felt the familiar sensation in the air of ripples of space being moved around. He didn't know the Dao of Space at all. But the minute amount of the Azure Dragon's bloodline that was within him, helped him sense space to a certain degree.

And he could tell for a fact that the teleportation formation had just accepted a teleportation from another location.

Realizing the possibility next, the Dragon Emperor let out his attack toward Hannah and immediately ran away to hide among his people

If an Immortal was really coming, then he needed all the help he could get.

Hannah blocked the attack and was about to attack again when she noticed the Emperor running away. Then, she felt the aura beneath her and looked down just in time to see a glimmering flash of silvery light that covered the area.

It covered the entire platform all over.

The sudden appearance of the light distracted everyone once again as they all stared down to watch what was there.

When they looked, they saw an army.

Over 15 thousand strong men and women stood tightly around the teleportation platform, each one wearing the uniform of a soldier from the Southern Continent.

Each one of them looked around, feeling the strong Qi and aura of this place, orienting themselves to the new area.

They looked up at the sky and saw the many people that were battling. In their center was Alex.

Alex slowly took flight, and behind him, his soldiers did the same.

He looked toward his army, the gravely wounded and beaten soldiers stood tall with pride.

"My apologies," Alex said to them. "It took me longer than I would've hoped for to get your colleagues here."

He looked toward the enemy group of soldiers and smiled. "Now then, shall we continue?"

Chapter 1802 Despair

There was a limit to how many people Alex could carry within his Soul Space, even if they dampened every little Intent and Spiritual sense.

As such, from the very beginning, the idea of bringing along a group of soldiers to the other continent had been a bad one.

After testing a bit, Alex had realized that he could only carry about 5000 soldiers without feeling anything for his normal day-to-day life.

At 6000, he felt discomfort, and at 7000 his mind felt heavy. At 8000 and 9000, he truly started feeling pain.

At 10 thousand, his mind felt as though it had somehow immolated itself.

When coming up with plans to attack the Emperor, the first plan he had was to just take Hao Ya over there secretly and have her fix the formation so he could teleport the others.

However, he quickly realized how big of a flaw that plan had. It relied entirely upon the fact that no one would know about his presence in the Eastern Continent, and somehow be able to come into this guarded area with cultivators all around and somehow manage to teleport soldier after soldier over.

That would never work. Instead, he had to bring the soldiers over there directly, which didn't work either as he couldn't take all of the nearly 30 thousand soldiers in any way.

So, instead, he came to a compromise with the two plans and mixed them into one. He would take as many soldiers as he could, and then bring the remaining through the teleportation.

Since he needed 10 thousand soldiers to form the next level of Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array, that was how many soldiers he decided to take in the end.

It was a miracle that things went all according to plan. And now here he was, standing around with over 25 thousand soldiers, facing an opponent with close to 30 thousand of them.

The gap which seemed too massive just a minute ago, now looked almost as if it didn't exist at all.

Alex felt a great deal of hope surface inside of him. This was it. He was going to do it. He was going to win the war.

He stared at the enemies who looked with frightened faces and knew that if everything went according to plan, they were going to win.

* * * * * *

The Dragon Emperor felt a lot less fear at the situation than he would have expected himself to feel. What he felt more than fear was annoyance.

Annoyance at the appearance of another large number of reinforcements to the enemy army. They first had the strong beasts that came to aid them, and then the many cultivators that were entranced by his son and his previous war Head's words. Then, now there was another massive chunk of the army here.

The Dragon Emperor could only feel annoyed.

Even so, a sense of happiness and relief filled him as he realized that no Immortal had come with Alex at all. That was the main thing he had been dreading about in the first place.

As long as the Immortal wasn't here, the Dragon Emperor felt no fear at all. Sure there were a lot of enemies now, but that meant nothing to him.

He had more soldiers here and with decent tactics, they could still win this. Even if the soldiers somehow lost, the Dragon Emperor had another backup plan ready to go into action.

Something he knew none of the others could ever stop him from doing.

The Dragon Emperor looked at his soldiers and saw hints of fear in their eyes. He didn't need to give them any orders. Some people were already doing that for him.

However, either because they had missed it, or were deciding to ignore it completely, there was something they were not doing.

"Break up the arrays," he gave the order.

"Your Majesty?" Long Huogang, who was working as the General for this war turned toward the Emperor with a look of shock on his face.

"Do you disagree, Huogang?" the Emperor asked.

The man looked around quickly, trying to come up with an answer of some sort that wouldn't dissatisfy the Emperor.

"What is it?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "Speak your mind. I order you to."

The man took a deep breath. "It's like this, Your Majesty. Our soldiers are on the whole stronger than the enemy, but the enemy has an array that seems to make everyone stronger than they are, instead of just a few people."

"As such, a select few individuals are a lot stronger than we can handle if we break up all the arrays," the man said.

The Emperor thought for a moment and knew it to be correct. He felt angered at the thought of his enemy having something better than he did, but that could not be helped right then.

"Fine, only the leaders of the—"

Just as he was making his decision, the Emperor felt a surge of aura expand from the distance, arriving suddenly and violently.

He turned around, looking in the direction of the aura, only to realize it was coming from beyond his palace, from the backyard.

Just as he wondered what it was, he saw specks of something covering the air which quickly became visible for what they were.

Beasts.

A swarm of beasts flew out of the Dragon Emperor's own palace, making their way toward them.

The Dragon Emperor was confused and concerned, and he wondered exactly what was happening. He could not understand why there would be beasts coming out of his palace.

Just as he was thinking about it, he saw the beasts more clearly as they came closer, and he recognized a few of them.

He recognized the leaders of the beasts.

The Lizard, the Ox, the Elephant, the Deer, the Eagle, the Swan, and the Lion were at the front of the swarm of nearly a thousand beasts, who made their way toward the battlefield.

And then the Emperor's eyes went wide as he noticed who else was at the front of the swarm of beasts.

A mighty tall beast with the body of a tiger, the face of a cat, and a fur of pure white flew surrounded by the many beasts.

'No...' the Dragon Emperor said softly as he recognized what it was that he was looking at.

The beast was different from the one he remembered attacking. In fact, this one didn't look like a female at all. Instead, it was a male.

'The child,' the Dragon Emperor thought.

"No..." he said out loud that time around as he saw the beasts come and stop near them.

All this time, he had been trying to do what he could to stop this very thing from happening, and somehow it was still here.

The soldiers around the Emperor looked at him with concern as they didn't understand what worried him. They looked toward the beast, and still, they understood nothing.

Only the Dragon Emperor himself understood the extent of despair he felt at that very moment. His worst fear in his life, one that thought he had stopped but knew deep down was just a matter of time, was coming to life.

The prophecy was becoming true.

Chapter 1803 Declaration

The Beast Paradise had a teleportation formation that linked directly to another teleportation formation in the backyard of the Dragon Palace.

Created during the reign of the first Emperor, the two formations were created to maintain a deep connection between the beasts and the humans and remember where the leaders of the beasts had come from.

Over time, the connection had become more and more shallow until it was nothing but a piece of formality that one had to maintain.

And even that formality the current Dragon Emperor broke by forcing upon the beast's rules and orders that they had to follow.

The teleportation formation itself was left alone and the beasts had used that very formation to quickly come here from the Beast's Paradise.

Pearl flew with the group of beasts and arrived next to the battlefield, slowly stopping only some distance away as he stared at the man that he had come to this war for.

Despite staying in the Eastern Continent for nearly 18 years with Alex, Pearl had never seen the Dragon Emperor with his own eyes. Forever it was just through recordings in talismans. They knew he could not appear before the Emperor at the time and for that reason never came face to face with him.

As such, this was the first time Pearl was laying an eye on the Dragon Emperor.

He watched the tall, middle-aged man with a silky-thick blue beard and flowing blue hair. His face held a level of calmness but his eyes betrayed the anger and frustration he felt at Pearl's appearance.

"You..." the Dragon Emperor growled softly.

Pearl took a few steps, separating himself from the swarm of beasts to stand out amongst them. He looked at the plethora of humans, some who knew who he was, most of whom didn't.

He took a deep breath, calmed the hatred in his heart that seemed to want to consume him, and spoke with a voice loud enough to be heard by not just the people on the battlefield, but also the people far away who were either hiding or watching.

"Long Tiankong!" Pearl spoke.

The man did not deserve a title in his opinion. Nor did he deserve any sort of deference.

"I will assume that you know who I am. After all, you tried to kill me when I was only a newborn child."

Pearl's words caused many of the people on either side to look around in confusion. They couldn't understand this new element at all.

However, a few of them remembered information that was already provided to them and were starting to slowly piece together answers.

"For those who do not know me, let me introduce myself. I am Pearl. I am a brother to King Alex of the Southern Continent, his bonded beast," Pearl said.

The words caused a layer of surprised murmur to pass through the group of people whose fighting had come to somewhat of a stop.

The Emperor's eyes shot toward Alex, finally gaining a level of understanding where he had learned all that he had. He knew not what thing Alex did to get the memories out of a child, but that made more sense than Alex finding out the information out of nowhere.

"I am also the Great Grandson of Bai Jingshen, ruler of the Western Continent, the White Tiger," Pearl said.

His words sent another wave of gasps and whispers, but this one wasn't as big as the last one. After all, everyone could see what exactly Pearl most likely was.

"However, most important of all, I have yet another identity," Pearl said. "Yet another connection that I only came to learn about just the last year. Perhaps, the most important identity I have."

"To the people of the Eastern Continent, I am Qing Shouchuang, Son of Qing Tianchui, the one you know as the Azure Dragon," Pearl said.

Pearl let the information linger.

The Dragon Emperor frowned as soon as the information was out, and the people who had guessed it already were more than shocked to find their guesses confirmed.

As for the people who had expected nothing at all, this piece of information hit them like a hammer. Numerous shouts rang around them, some claiming what Pearl was saying as false, some praising him for it, while some simply wanted proof before they believed anything."

"If you want an oath from me, then you shall have it," Pearl said. "I am named Qing Shouchuang at birth and am the son of the late ruler of the Eastern Continent, Qing Tianchui, I swear this upon the heavens."

The world stirred but nothing fell from the sky to strike Pearl. The world remained still, proving to everyone that what Pearl said was the truth.

"That is correct," Pearl spoke. His words cut through the deep silence that hung in the air. "I am the son of the Azure Dragon, the late ruler of the Eastern Continent. In his death and the lack of another Azure Dragon, I become the sole heir to that throne and am thus the new ruler of your kind."

"To those who still fight on behalf of this man, you must know of his crime by now. If you do not, know that he was responsible for the deaths of my father and mother. As your rightful ruler, I command you all to fight against him and his men immediately."

Pearl's eyes then turned toward the Emperor and his voice grew vicious. "For you, Long Tiankong, I have no words to speak but this. You tried to kill me when I was a child, but the sacrifice of my father and mother helped me survive."

"Today, I have come to pay you back for that sacrifice. Today, I bring you vengeance, and I bring you death."

His words thundered throughout the world with a tiger's roar. A flicker of something appeared on his forehead for a fraction of a second before disappearing, and his words were heard by every person that was in the air and all around.

Whisker recorded what was happening once more as it would be something useful for Alex later on. Or maybe they could even use it right away to send more messages throughout the empire.

With Pearl's arrival and declaration, there may be more hands willing to help them in this war.

Soldiers that were on the sideline slowly stood up and looked toward Pearl and then the war. The war was no longer between the Southern Continent and their Emperor whom they no longer wanted to follow.

It was now between the heir of the Azure Dragon and the one that killed the Azure Dragon. There was more reason to the battle now, more meaning to what they were doing.

As for the soldiers that were fighting on the side of the Emperor started having second thoughts. They were unsure what exactly it was that they should do here.

Quite a few of them started leaving the army, defecting right in front of them. As for the rest, they were still on the side of the Emperor as the Azure Dragon meant little to them.

They turned to their Emperor, hoping to find an answer in their time of doubt. When they saw him, they were disheartened to see that their Emperor as well was filled with questions himself.

Chapter 1804 Free

I bring you death.

Those were the last words that the Dragon Emperor wanted to hear from the mouths of the White Tiger.

He stood still, unsure if he was stunned or simply lacking in all emotion. He thought what he felt now was the numbness that came with the understanding that everything was over and there was nothing he could do anymore to prevent what he had tried preventing for a long time

Another prophecy was going to be true, wasn't it?

A tinge of pain came and went away as he remembered his wife who tried her best to stop this very thing from happening. In the end, it seemed all they had done was just delay the inevitable.

Maybe it wasn't even that. Maybe it was all just meant to happen this way, and they were all pawns to fate, unable to change what the future held for them.

The Emperor's body slacked as he saw the beasts around Pearl started to fly toward them, charging at them with the intent to kill.

He saw the opposing army begin fighting once again. His heart was simply not in it.

What else did he even have to care about? The prophecy was here and it was true.

Above your realm shall they proclaim your end. A King, A son of a King, and a Tiger pure White.

He turned to look at Alex. The King.

He looked at Zhou Linfan. The Son of a King.

And then he looked at Pearl. A Tiger with pure white fur.

He then looked down at the city that was the heart of his empire. Above his own realm.

"Is this really it?" the Dragon Emperor thought. "Am I destined to die like this? Do I have no chance of survival?"

A part of him refused to believe it. A part of him, that was forged by his wife's love for him told him to fight this thought, but truth overcame all feelings for him at the moment.

No thought remained but the single one. The words of his prophecy went through his mind over and over and over and over as if trying to haunt him with it anew.

A King. Death. A Son. Pure White. Proclaim. Your realm. A Tiger. The words of his prophecies rang loudly like an alarm in his head, and he couldn't help but hear it all as clearly as he had the first time all those years ago.

As the words went over and over in the Emperor's mind, he started accepting that maybe he truly was going to die this time around. He didn't want to, but maybe—

The Emperor paused. What was this?

As the words played in his head, a thought that he had never considered surfaced in his mind, formed by the repetition of the words of the prophecy.

How had he never considered this possibility?

All this time, the Emperor had been focused on the 'who' of the prophecy and had taken the rest of its meaning to be that someone would come and kill him in the future.

It was under this context that he based every action of his from the start. But what if he had been wrong from the very beginning? What if he had simply misunderstood what the prophecy was about?

The wording of the prophecy did not say that he would die at the hands of those three. It only said that they would proclaim his end. While 'End' could mean a lot of different things for the Emperor, he had decided that it was his death that it pointed to.

Perhaps, long ago, he might have considered some other alternative possibilities to the word 'End' in his prophecy, but that was not what surprised him right now.

The thing that made him reconsider everything right now was the word 'Proclaim'.

Above your realm shall they proclaim your end.

They had come, and they had indeed proclaimed his end. They had declared war against him and had called for his death.

But that in no way meant that he was going to die, did it?

The prophecy made no claims beyond the proclamation as to what was going to happen to him. The proclamation itself was the end of the prophecy.

Beyond that, the Emperor was a free man.

The Emperor felt his heartbeat faster and faster. Excitement filled his body, excitement that he had never felt in the longest time he could remember.

He felt free. Free as a bird out of its cage. Free as a fish who escaped the bait.

Free as a man who had escaped the clutches of fate and destiny.

New life reinvigorated the Dragon Emperor, new life filled him with purpose. Many had died in this path for this exact moment and it had come to pass.

Now, it was up to him to honor everyone who died for him. It was up to him to live and survive.

He regained his focus and saw the beasts and the men attacking his group of soldiers at once. Long Huogong was giving orders, but many of the soldiers seemed hesitant to fight at all.

They were not sure whose side they were supposed to be fighting.

The Dragon Emperor took a deep breath.

"Soldiers!" he shouted, immediately catching the ears of every single soldier on the battlefield and outside.

Many of the soldiers fought while lending an ear to him.

"I will not tell you who to choose today. Make the choice of your own accord," the Dragon Emperor said. "But know this, for the past 7 millennia, I have been your sole Emperor. The Azure Dragon has never done anything for you, he has never even known that you existed."

"It was I who ruled this empire. It was I who brought peace and prosperity into this empire. I may have done many things in the past, but I have never acted against the greater good of the empire."

"So when you choose me, choose to know that it is I who holds your best interest at heart," the Dragon Emperor said. "And if you don't choose me, and choose the enemy. Choose them knowing who you make an enemy of."

The Dragon Emperor's aura exploded as might beyond what any of the soldiers had ever sensed from a mortal making their minds shudder. Many of them reflexively fell back into rank and continued fighting for the Emperor.

A few still defected, but the number was far less than it would've been had the Emperor not spoken at all.

The Emperor looked at the armies. His number was now less than the enemies after the beasts were mixed into the battlefield. But he saw no problem in that.

On average, his soldiers were much stronger than the average soldier in the enemy's army. So, he could let them fight without much worry.

"Soldiers, break array and join the battle," the Emperor ordered and the many soldiers that were aiding their leaders commanded.

"Your Majesty," Long Huogang tried to protest, but the Dragon Emperor cut him off.

"Prepare everyone for battle," the Emperor said.

Long Huogang looked back at the 400 or so strong saints that were staying in an array, constantly empowering the Emperor.

"Everyone?" he asked.

The Emperor nodded. "Everyone!" he said and went into battle.

Chapter 1805 Sneak Attack

"Are you alright?" Alex quickly flew over to Pearl and asked.

Pearl looked at the beasts that had just left for war. He turned toward Alex as he arrived next to him.

"Was I late, brother? I hope everything is alright still," Pearl said as he looked around, searching for people he cared about. He felt a relief when he saw Liz and Graham in the distance, wounded, but safe.

He tried looking for some other people he could recognize, but the war had restarted after his arrival, and everyone had started moving once more.

"We have a lot of losses," Alex said. "The numbers are not fully in yet, but we should have lost nearly 1500 soldiers in total. 3 of our elders have died as well."

Pearl gave a saddened look. "I'm sorry. I should have come earlier," he said.

"You weren't any later than I was," Alex said. "I only just brought the soldiers over from the Central Continent too. So don't think those deaths are because of you. Besides, we all came because we decided to. To do what is right."

Pearl nodded.

Alex looked at the thousands of beasts that moved toward the war and took notice of their aura. Most of them were quite strong, with about 30 or so beasts in the Saint Transformation realm.

'Those are a good addition to the army,' Alex thought. The other soldiers who had turned against the Emperor were also a good addition now. He looked back at Pearl.

"What do you plan to do now?"

Pearl looked at the battlefield and said, "My mother made me promise that I wouldn't go out looking for revenge, but I'm already here. I'm weak and don't have much of a cultivation base, but I must fight no matter what."

"After coming all this way, I cannot hide behind others still," Pearl said.

Alex nodded. "Go fight who you can, but take care of yourself. The moment you know you aren't safe, run away," he said.

Pearl nodded.

"Let's go."

Alex and Pearl went back into the war, joining it as everyone started fighting with full force.

"What is the situation?" Alex asked Yan Yating through Whisker.

"We have the upper hand in number, but the strength of the opposition still dwarfs us in most of the places," he said. "If we are to not suffer many casualties, we should immediately begin attacking the upper echelon of the army and destroying the chain of command from the top."

Alex nodded to himself. "I'll go fight the stronger—"

His words cut off as 3 soldiers came for him, flying past the beasts and other soldiers, specifically targeting him.

Alex pulled out Midnight immediately and attacked back, destroying 2 of the three attacks that flew toward him immediately.

As for the last attack, he simply took it to the face and came out of it with no damage.

They seemed to be ignoring Pearl, thankfully, who had joined the battle in the distance.

"It seems like I have found my opponents for now," Alex sent a message. "Keep me informed about the situation."

"I will be joining the fight soon as well. I will have my subordinates replace me in overseeing the war," Yan Yating said. "Given how strong I am, it makes no sense for me to just sit around and—"

The man's words cut off.

Alex didn't know why he had stopped speaking, but this was no time to give thought to those words. He turned around, swinging his sword as he let out an attack that flew toward one of the two men that were attacking him.

The man was in the Saint Transformation 6th realm and seemed quite strong. What surprised Alex was the fact that the man was in fact the cultivation base he had, and didn't have any sort of aid for him.

It took him only a moment to realize that the man didn't have anyone protecting him.

The attack Alex threw the man's way was so strong that the man was forced to use his strongest attack to protect himself.

A gust of brown wind created sand all around the man, which coalesced into a spike of sorts that immediately flew toward Alex's sword slash.

Alex felt the panic that he felt every time someone attacked with Immortal Qi. Taking the cue, he immediately moved out of the way, making his way toward the woman who was readying an attack.

He took a deep breath and sent out a Yang Palm attack that flew toward the woman. This woman too didn't have any support behind her and had to use a life-saving treasure to save herself.

Just then, Alex felt someone teleport behind him as he felt the aura of teleportation and the fluctuations of space in the air.

Other than that, Alex could not feel anything else about the person that appeared at all.

If not for his ability to recognize manipulations in space, he wouldn't have even known that the man was there. There was absolutely no aura that came out of the man at all.

Alex's senses still caught onto the man and saw that he was already mid-swing with his sword even as he teleported. The attack had been so fast that Alex had no chance of defending himself at all.

Alex sensed the lack of aura and Qi in the attack in everything but the man himself. His sword glowed softly, but that didn't produce any aura at all.

The entire attack landed on the other person not noticing anything. This was an assassin's attack.

Alex saw the sword and the swing with his senses, and even as it was too late to do anything about it, he knew what he had to do in this case.

He let out a strong Intent, not to stop the man, but to stop the defensive energy deep inside him from surfacing. As for the attack itself, he took it head-on without any defenses.

The attacker felt the feedback on his sword as it seamlessly cut through Alex's neck, severing his head in that one single strike.

Blood spurted from Alex's headless torso while the head itself flew into the air to the side.

The man wasn't done just yet. Just to finish the attack, he sent his sword through Alex's chest, driving it into his heart.

As he stabbed, he felt something crunch within Alex's robes, almost like a metal that was very strong but brittle at the same time.

He felt little resistance again until after the sword came out on the other side when it struck something and broke it through Alex's robes on the other side.

Tiny pieces of crystalline ruby seemed to break off from Alex's body, confusing the man. He gave it a closer look and realized that it wasn't ruby at all, but something similar in color and yet perhaps harder than it.

He reached into Alex's back following his sword and took out what his sword had broken into. He pulled it out into the sun and saw the crimson translucent piece of a solid object that he had never seen before.

However, the smell of it told him exactly what it was.

"Is this... blood?"

Chapter 1806 Headless

1806 Headless

"How is blood this solid?" the man asked himself while holding onto the piece of blood armor's part. "How is blood this strong?"

He crushed the solid blood and found how solid it was. He could crush it now, but earlier it felt even harder. It was as though the blood had lost its hardness over time.

He let the crushed blood drop from his hands, and let the powder float into the wind and get taken away.

"Brother Gangjin, you did it!" the woman moved toward Alex's corpse, holding onto an activated formation plate, and smiled at the man with wide eyes. "And just in time too. I thought I was going to die."

The other two men that had been fighting Alex came closer too and congratulated the man.

"Did you kill the Nascent Soul too?" one of the men asked.

"No," the man named Gangjin replied. "It hasn't appeared from his body. "I wonder why."

"You should just crush his Dantian to be safe. Maybe it is still sticking in there."

The man thought for a moment and nodded. "It's better to be sure," he said. "Has anyone noticed us yet?"

"No, I activated the barrier the moment his head came off," the woman said. "I do not know if someone noticed it or not, but we have to hurry either way."

"You're right," the man said.

He looked back at Alex's headless corpse and took a deep breath as he had done what everyone wanted to be done. Now, to make sure he was truly dead in body and soul, he had to destroy the soul too. So, he pulled the sword back.

Or at least he tried to.

The sword had seemingly been caught in something and couldn't be pulled back. He tried a little harder and still he couldn't pull it.

'What the hell? Did it get stuck in that hardened blood?' he wondered. He couldn't believe that he would have to use Immortal Qi to pull out a sword too.

All four people's attention instantly shifted toward the side as a large snake appeared in the formation out of nowhere, completely made of blood and nothing else.

"It's this man's beast," the woman said. "It must have realized he was attacked and come back to protect him."

"Well, what are you waiting for? Go attack—"

The man's words were cut off as he felt something happen in a moment when he had let his guard down. He slowly looked down and saw that 5 spikes, made entirely from blood, had dug deep into his chest and abdomen.

Blood spurted out of the man's mouth as he realized that his heart and his Dantian had been pierced by these spikes of blood.

'What happened?' he thought with numbed emotion. He couldn't tell if someone else had done something or if Alex had a defensive technique that was set to launch after his death.

"How did I—"

He looked up and saw similar gazes from one of the men and the woman, who were looking down at their own chests as more spikes had pierced through their bodies as well.

Only one last man had a protective barrier around him that had activated from a talisman that he kept in his body at all times.

It had stopped all of the spikes made out of blood that were entirely coming out from Alex's body. The spikes pulled back into Alex's body, disappearing all at once.

As for the people that were attacked, their bodies started losing control over their Qi and they started falling down even as they desperately tried to find a healing pill for themselves.

The final remaining man wasn't sure what had happened, but he knew that Alex's corpse had done something just now. He took his spear and got ready to attack, only to have to turn around for the blood snake that was making its way toward him.

The Blood Snake had an aura that made the man think it had a cultivation base of Saint Transformation's 9th realm. As someone in the Saint Transformation 6th realm himself, the man had no way of fighting against the beast in any capacity but a single one.

He reached into the body and pulled out the remaining Immortal Qi and sent out a terrifying attack at the Blood Snake.

The Blood Snake opened its mouth, creating a pool of blood in front of it, and attacked. The attack was a Water attack, that now used Blood instead.

It was a rather terrifying attack at Saint Transformation 9th realm, but the attack it faced was in the Immortal realm.

That single attack destroyed the blood attack that the Blood Beast made and then destroyed the beast itself. The blood beast disappeared in a rain of blood with no more aura to sustain itself.

A single bead of hardened blood, that was the core of the beast, crumbled and floated away into the wind.

The beast died in that one attack, but the man had no chance to take a break. Something was happening to Alex's body, so he turned around to confront him.

Just as he did, Alex swung his sword and cut the man's head off before stabbing him through the Dantian to kill his soul as well.

Alex pulled Midnight out and swung it to get rid of the blood coating it. He reached for the man's falling body and took it into his Soul Space.

He looked down at the 3 other falling bodies teleported next to them and swiftly killed the ones that weren't dead before taking their body as well.

He let the formation plate fall down and felt the barriers of the formations pass through him as it fell.

A few people saw him reappear and gasped when they saw how he was.

His head had grown back swiftly, but a sword still stuck out from his chest, right from his heart.

Alex grabbed the sword from the hilt and pulled it out slowly. The hole it left behind healed quickly and a layer of hardened blood covered it immediately as the Blood Armor reformed below his robes.

Alex looked at the sword and realized that it was quite a nice sword. He stored it as well and paid attention to his surroundings to see if someone else was going to come attack him.

It didn't seem as though they were. Most people were busy with their own fights. Only a few paid attention to his arrival and that too perhaps only because they saw the Snake fly into something and disappear.

"Brother, are you okay?" Whisker asked through his bond.

"Yes, I'm fine. I was ambushed, but I killed them," Alex said. He couldn't help but wonder if he alone had been their target because they knew he couldn't use Immortal Qi.

Alex then took a moment to look at his body. He had found something quite fascinating today.

When he let his head get cut off, he assumed that he would have to wait until it grew back on. He knew it would only be a split second when he would black out before coming into consciousness.

However, the moment his head was cut off, instead of blacking out, his consciousness had been transferred into his Nascent Soul instead.

Chapter 1807 Convert

﻿1807 Convert

Even with his head cut off, Alex could still sense the world around him through his Nascent Soul.

There had been many instances when Alex had killed a Saint with a soul and that soul had innocently flown out of the soul, completely unaware of the world around him.

However, that hadn't happened to him at all. He wondered why that was.

Was it because his body was special? Was it because his mental strength was quite stronger than most people? Or was it because of the Undying Physique which made it so that his body wasn't truly dead even with his head cut off?

Any of these possibilities, or a combination of these possibilities could have done what had happened to him just then.

However it had happened, his soul had gained consciousness, and through that soul, he had realized that he could still control parts of his body.

He couldn't physically control his body, but he still had overall control of what it did. He could even control the Undying God's Physique to stop himself from immediately healing.

That had been great to know, but what truly shocked Alex was the fact that he could somehow control his blood as well.

Perhaps due to the nature of Blood God's technique or because of the Blood Aura dao he had learned, he was capable of controlling only just his blood while his consciousness was only in the soul.

He could also control the blood beasts that were far away, but that was less surprising. After all, in a way, those beasts were bonded to him through blood as well.

With this information, Alex had acted the way he did. He killed the people who had attacked him, and now it was time to move on to other fights.

There was no luxury for him to wait around and fight.

"Brother!" Whisker's frantic voice suddenly came to Alex and he got worried.

"What is—"

He sensed a strong aura from a distance and turned around quickly in that direction to see the Dragon Emperor wielding his Noble Dragon Spear aloft in the sky, power radiating from it as lightning crackled around the spear, and he launched the attack.

In front of that attack stood Long Huan, who had simply no way of defending himself against an Immortal attack.

* * * * * *

Long Huan had been working alongside his brother for some time to try and convert people to not fight for his father.

As the Emperor's son, even though he was on the other side of the war, the soldiers still found it hard to attack him with the intention to kill. So more time than not, he found the opportunity to just talk to those people.

Long Huan stumbled upon a wounded soldier who was out of place in the war, having somehow been separated from his group of soldiers, and was trying to find a way back to that group.

The fearful man turned his spear and attacked Long Huan the moment he came anywhere closer, but Long Huan quickly struck the man's spear away with his sword, having been clearly stronger than the young man.

"Brother, I'm not here to hurt you," he quickly said and took a few steps back to make the man trust him a little.

"Your… highness?" the man saw him and couldn't believe that he attacked the prince.

"Listen to me, you don't have to fight. This is not your war," Long Huan said.

"I… but…" the man looked around, anxiety filling his every move. He did not want to die like he had seen so many do today.

"Brother, you are wounded. Do you have no healing pills with you?" Long Huan asked.

"I… I do," the man said. "I mean I did. I ate a few already to heal myself, but the more I ate the more I needed to eat to heal myself the next time around. Now, my healing pill is not working for me."

Long Huan blinked with surprise. He had only heard about pills not working as they were intended to after too much use and had never seen that actually happen.

'How many healing pills did this man have to eat for the pills to become ineffective?' he wondered.

"Listen to me, you won't die here," Long Huan said. "This isn't your fight, so you can simply leave this place. But if you want to fight for something good, you should fight on our behalf."

"We have a lot of pills, pills that will work on you to heal you," Long Huan said. "If not, we have other ways of quickly healing you."

The man looked at Long Huan as if trying to search for words of deceit, but he couldn't find anything.

"What… what's the catch?" the man asked. He had no doubt there had to be one. There was no way someone would simply give something to him without expecting something back.

"Simple. You either vow to leave this battlefield entirely or you vow to fight for us," Long Huan said. "If you leave without fighting, we will let you go. If you join us, we will heal you immediately. Those are the only catch."

The man took a few deep breaths and looked at his wound. He had been cut across his arm, with a wound that went from the side of his biceps all the way down past his elbow.

He had been bleeding profusely for some time now. If not for the fact that he was a cultivator, he would have long since died of blood loss.

"I can heal you say?" the man asked.

"Yes," Long Huan said. "We have a method to heal you even without pills."

"And I just have to speak the oath for today?" he asked.

"Yes," Long Huan said excitedly. Things were going in the right direction now. He hoped to find more people when doing this, but every single change mattered.

Instead of killing someone, converting someone against the empire was a more devastating blow.

"I…" the man slowly spoke.

Long Huan nodded, urging him to continue.

"I swear on the heavens that I will fight alongside your soldiers today, once I am healed fully," the man said.

Long Huan smiled. "Great! That is all we needed from you," he said. He was happy that this man chose to fight instead of leaving the battle. He didn't mind when people left the war, but if they joined them instead, that was a much bigger help.

"So, how do I heal now? You have a pill?" the man asked.

Long Huan nodded and looked at the man's wound. Since there were no missing limbs, he decided to not give him the pill.

"To get healed, go to the—"

Blood sprayed across Long Huan's face, cutting him off mid-

sentence. Long Huan stared in front of him at the man who had been ready to turn and saw a spear sticking out from the front of his face.

"My empire does not need a coward like you who switches sides," the Emperor said and swung his spear sideways. As he did, the man slid out of the Emperor's spear, immediately exploding into nothingness as the man died without a corpse.

Chapter 1808 A Chance

Long Huan's face was a mixture of shock, horror, and fury. He was simply speechless to say what he wanted to see. All he could do was stare at the place where the man's body had exploded and turned to dust.

How easily had that man died, and that too while he was about to do the right thing?

Long Huan slowly turned his face toward his father, who now stood right in front of him with not a single emotion for the man who had just died. He did not even feel sadness for losing a subordinate or remorse for killing someone who wasn't even fighting anyone.

He stared into the eyes of his callous man and felt his shock subside as the hateful emotions took over slowly.

How long had it been since he had come face to face with this man before him? Long Huan remembered the last time he had been alone with him was when he was asked to return the Ivory sword.

Today, the man had the Ivory sword, so there was nothing that Long Huan had that he could give back to him.

The Dragon Emperor slowly floated toward Long Huan, and Long Huan instinctively started floating back.

"Are you afraid of me?" the Dragon Emperor asked his son.

"Why would I not be?" Long Huan asked. "You just killed an innocent man before me with no thought."

"This is a war. Everyone here is innocent and not at the same time," the Emperor said. "How innocent do you think you yourself are?"

Long Huan didn't answer. This wasn't the time for a conversation. He needed to run away. But he couldn't see an opening at all.

Everyone around him was busy with their own fights. He could see Hannah far away, caught in a fight with half a dozen different people. He could see Zhou Linfan, similarly caught in another fight.

Every single person of any worth was fighting someone already. He wanted to look for a way out, but even that wasn't there.

"Are you scared I'm going to kill you?" the Dragon Emperor asked Long Huan.

Long Huan turned around. "Forgive me if I find your presence threatening to my life. You haven't been exactly safe for me these past many years," Long Huan said.

The Dragon Emperor gave a small smirk. "You would've been dead had I truly tried to kill you," the man said. "But I didn't, that's why you are still alive. Even with your wife, with the army I had that day, I could've killed you easily. You're only alive because I chose not to."

Long Huan's eyes narrowed. "Do you want me to thank you for not killing me?" he asked in a mocking tone. He wasn't sure why he was doing what he was doing, but he couldn't stop himself from taking that tone with his father.

The Dragon Emperor stared at his son for a solid second and shook his head. "I still don't understand why you care so much about the life of someone else over your literal father. Do you care that little of your own blood? Did you care that little about me?"

"You know I didn't," Long Huan said. "But you changed. You are not the father I knew. Or at least, you are not the father you acted yourself to be in our presence before. You led Mother to her death by attacking the Azure Dragon. She would've still been alive had that not happened."

"She was the one who suggested—"

"I don't care," Long Huan cut him off. "We are long past that talk now. Mother made her choice and she died for it. I'm not going to make the same mistake and aid you with your heinous crimes."

"You eradicated entire royal families without any reason. You attacked an entire continent for no real reason. I should have known you were not a good person from the start. I'm just glad to have figured it out before it was too late. I'm not going to let you have your way anymore."

The Dragon Emperor simply closed his eyes and sighed. "Are you the one that leaves..." he said softly. "Or are you the one that is left behind?"

"What?" Long Huan asked. He could hear his father clearly, but the words made no sense to him. Leave? Left behind? What did that have anything to do with what was going on?

"I'm certain now that you are not the one that stays, whatever that means," the Emperor said. "But still, I will give you one last chance."

"I'll let you come to my side. Come back to me and I'll let you and your friends alone. You can have your wife too, I won't do anything to her either. Since I've taken away your brother's right to the throne, you can become the next Emperor."

Long Huan's eyes narrowed. He couldn't believe that his father would actually think he would still come back.

"I don't care about this attack on me either. I have nothing to fear here. All that I will be taking from here is the corpse of that king and that stripeless tiger. No more people need to die beside them."

"So, what do you say? Will you need time, or can you make the decision now?"

Long Huan thought for a moment. He didn't have to think as to what his answer would be. That was something that easily came to him. What he thought of instead was how to run away. He needed time and this seemed the best way to get some of it.

He searched for people who could help him, but even as his senses searched throughout the battlefield, he could see no help coming.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm There was no one here that could help him.

And as despair set upon him, he heard his father's voice.

"I thought so," the Dragon Emperor said. That was all the confirmation he needed.

Long Huan tried to move back, but an aura from his father caught onto him. He tried to struggle out of it, but the aura was simply too strong.

"Whichever of the two you are, I do not care anymore," the Emperor said.

His spear appeared by his side and immediately a terrible aura surrounded the man. Lightning crackled all around the spear as the Dragon Emperor poured his Immortal Qi into it.

Long Huan paled as he watched his father prepare the attack. He gulped in fear, but there was nothing else he could do.

He was going to die.

"Goodbye, son," the Dragon Emperor said and launched the attack.

A pillar of bright white streaked toward Long Huan in a split second and in the very next second it exploded into bright fiery light.

The Dragon Emperor protected himself against the bright light and took a moment to see what had just happened.

Right before Long Huan had been hit, someone had appeared and used an Immortal attack to protect him.

The Dragon Emperor saw the figure and gave a rather surprised look when he saw what the figure held.

Long Fangyu stood before his brother, having arrived in time to protect him using none other than the Ebony sword itself.

Chapter 1809 The Right Choice

Long Fangyu's sudden appearance didn't surprise the Dragon Emperor nearly as much as the sight of the Ebony sword that he held in his hands.

The last time he had seen that sword had been in his wife's hands, who had died to protect him. After that, the sword had been as good as gone for him.

He had tried sending people out to search for the white cat and the sword, but finding his own son soon took precedence and he soon forgot about the sword entirely.

However, looking at it now, he could only wonder how his son came across the sword.

A thought came to him and he realized that the sword must have been brought by the White Tiger that came to declare war against him.

"I see," the Dragon Emperor said slowly. "So you must have been working with them for a long time. I wonder how I missed all the signs."

Long Fangyu breathed with difficulty. The shockwave of the explosion with Immortal Qi had been rather difficult for him to handle with regular Qi.

Given how weak his cultivation base was, there was little Immortal Qi in him. What he had, he had already used to protect his brother. Now, there was nothing in him to fight against his father.

The only choice was to run away. Even as he moved to leave, the Dragon Emperor's spear crackled with thick bolts of lightning.

"Long Tiankong!!" someone screamed from the side.

The Emperor didn't need to look away to know that it was the chef who screamed. The Golden Dragon Shield appeared in his hands and he poured his Immortal Qi into the shield as well while he shot out with his spear at the same time.

Long Fangyu grabbed onto his brother even as the bolt of lightning came toward them.

The Dragon Emperor's lightning bolts sprayed into many different bolts as they streaked across the sky toward anyone it could find, regardless of whether they were fighting for him or not.

Long Huan felt the force of the lightning bolt land nearby, but at the same time, he was teleported away, no longer in danger.

Where he had been, the dozens of bolts of lightning sprayed forward, hitting many people in the way beyond where they had stood.

One of the bolts of lightning came for Zhou Linfan as well, but he struck aside the attack and came barreling at the Dragon Emperor where he knew deep in his heart that he would not leave until the Emperor was dead.

* * * * *

As soon as they were teleported away, Long Huan quickly checked the surroundings to see that they were at a safe distance.

He had only noticed that they were way back within the Southern Continent's safe zones when he noticed his brother slowly falling.

He turned around and reached out for his brother instinctively, grabbing onto him to keep him aloft.

"Brother, are you alright? Did you overuse your—"

Long Huan's face took on a look of horror as he saw what was before him.

Long Fangyu staggered a little, his mind growing heavy, his thoughts escaping him even as he tried to grab onto them. He looked down slowly, looking at a giant wound on his chest where the lightning had struck him, blasting through the armor he wore.

He felt nothing at the sight, nothing at the fact that he was in incredible pain.

He saw his brother open his mouth to say something, but Long Fangyu heard nothing. In fact, the only thing he could hear was a long ringing that didn't seem to want to stop.

His vision was fuzzy as well.

He felt something around his face and saw his brother's hands forcing something into his mouth. He tasted nothing but he did feel something slide down his throat.

A wave of feelings returned to him, and his mind sharpened momentarily, letting him properly think as to exactly what was going on.

That was all that was needed for Long Fangyu to know what was happening.

'I'm going to die,' he thought. He could feel his senses slowly shutting down and his mental faculties leaving him. He tried to assess the situation and quickly realized just what was wrong with him.

His Dantian had been struck by the attack, and while he wasn't sure if he was crippled or not, he could tell that his soul was terribly wounded to a point where if he didn't recover soon, he would die.

'Do I have a pill to heal souls?' he wondered.

Even as he did, his mind slowly started shutting down. A body was only the reflection of its spirit in the end. As the spirit was wounded, his body couldn't do much either.

Thoughts went through his mind, memories flashing by. He couldn't stop them.

'I have to... I have to..' He had to do something, but he couldn't remember what. His mind wasn't working as capably.

He looked up, his fuzzy vision seeing a newly arrived figure.

A woman with black hair caught onto his head as he was moved away. He looked at her face, unable to recognize who she was exactly.

He was taken into the ship, not that he recognized it immediately. He saw the passing metallic features and arrived in a glowing room full of people

Something warm touched his skin and Long Fangyu looked to the side. A mass of red, yellow, and purple moved around fuzzily in front of his eyes as he felt the warmth coming from it.

'Fire?' He thought. somehow, the answer to what that was came to him simply.

Phoenix Fire.

The woman from before grabbed onto him and he felt something drop down from her onto his face.

Tears.

"Luo... yang?" Long Fangyu slowly spoke.

"I'm here," Zhan Luoyang spoke through her tears. "Just wait, someone has gone to get the King. He will get you a pill to heal your souls right away."

After more than an hour of ongoing war, the stock of healing pills that she had had become small long ago. She had a few healing pills for the body, but since Phoenix Fire didn't heal the spirit, those ones had long since been fully consumed. So, there wasn't anything Zhan Luoyang could give her fiance to eat at the moment that could save him.

Fangyu could hear none of what she said, but he could see her trying to reassure him. He reached out for her with his bloody arms and touched her cheeks.

He found it reassuring to have her be with him right now. His eyes moved toward his brother to the right who was more agitated than anyone at seeing him like this.

He could see how genuinely the two cared for him.

He could feel his mind slipping faster and faster. If he didn't do it now, he wouldn't have the chance later on.

While holding onto Luoyang, he reached for his brother and grabbed his hands tightly.

"Huan... Luoyang... I'm sorry," he spoke with a struggle. "I... I'm glad... at least at the end... I... made the right... choice."

"Brother?" Long Huan called out. "BROTHER!"

"Fangyu, no," Luoyang shouted as well.

However, no matter how much they spoke his name or called out to him, Fangyu could no longer respond to them. His wound to his soul had gone beyond the point where he could stay alive.

And just like that, the once Crown Prince of the Eastern Continent died.

Chapter 1810 Stalemate

Alex received the knowledge of the Long Fangyu being wounded and needing help just a few moments before he teleported away from the battlefield to the outside of the ship.

He quickly flew onto the ship, but by the time he arrived inside, he could already hear the wailing screams of Long Huan and Zhan Luoyang who were crying over Long Fangyu's body.

His eyes widened in shock as he went forward and leaned down to send his senses over the body.

Dead.

Without a doubt, Long Fangyu had died.

The wounded soldiers around the room were looking at the situation with a look of pity and sadness.

Alex found it a little difficult to believe the situation.

"I'm... sorry," Alex said softly. "I was too late."

Luoyang couldn't say anything. She didn't find any capacity to do anything but cry.

Long Huan looked toward Alex with tears streaming down his face. "His soul... his soul was wounded in the attack. We didn't have any pills," he said.

Alex held a grim look. "What about all the other pills?" he asked.

Long Huan shook his head. "Most of the pills have already been used," he said. "There wasn't any for my brother."

Alex grimaced at the words. He looked in front of him at the Phoenix fire which everyone was using to heal themselves throughout the battle.

The ship was specially created to bring this fire along for the war, with a Spirit vein being burned down below to keep this fire going.

This fire was meant to heal most minor wounds, but Alex knew from the start that this wouldn't heal wounds to the spirit or the soul.

'Dammit!' he thought to himself. He should've thought to bring more pills along for healing souls. That had been a mistake on his part.

"Why were you late?" Long Huan asked.

Alex couldn't help but put on an apologetic look. "I'm sorry, I was deep in a battle," he said.

After seeing that the prince was saved by his brother, and seeing Zhou Linfan join in a deadly fight with the Emperor, Alex's focus had been to keep people from interfering with that fight.

Zhou Linfan's job was to do his best to tire the Emperor and kill him if he could. And everyone worked to his work from being disturbed as it had been multiple times in the past.

Had Alex not started another fight, he could've maybe made it back in time.

"What happened? I thought you and your brother made it out of your father's clutches," Alex said. He remembered seeing them teleporting away. The splitting bolts of lightning had covered a large area and had somewhat blinded him at that moment. It was only the teleportation aura that told Alex that they had made it away.

"He was hit before we could leave," Long Huan said, his voice seething with anger.

He looked around and caught onto the sword that lay near his brother's dead body. The Ebony sword.

He held onto it tightly, as his face became a mask of fury. "I'm going to kill him," he said softly. "I'm going to kill my father."

He stood up, but Alex caught onto him. "Brother Huan, don't be reckless. Senior Zhou is fighting him right now. You can't do anything even if you go there."

Zhan Luoyang stopped crying and looked to the side as she realized something was going on.

"Let go of me," Long Huan shouted. "I'll go kill him."

"Young brother Huan," she tried to speak, but Long Huan spoke even louder than she could.

"He killed my brother, his own son. I must kill him. I must see him dead with my own eyes. He must die at my hands," the prince shouted.

"He will die, but if you go there right now, you will die too. Calm down for now," Alex said, but the prince tried to shove Alex aside to move out.

"Please, brother Huan," Alex tried speaking, but the man used all he could to push Alex aside and moved past him.

Alex sighed, seeing that he had no other choice at all. He let out a spiritual attack, using Heaven's Impact at that moment to render Long Huan unconscious.

Alex grabbed onto his body as it fell and slowly laid him down by Zhan Luoyang. "He'll be unconscious for a few minutes. Please look after him while he wakes up," he said.

Alex then reached into his Soul Space and brought out a few pills that healed soul-based injuries. "I'm sorry I couldn't make it here earlier, and you have my condolences, but we do not have the time to mourn. The war rages outside and people are wounded by the minute. I need you to help them however you can. Please."

Zhan Luoyang took onto the pills that Alex handed her over, a measly 20 pills, but even a single one would've been able to save her Fangyu's life had it been in time.

Luoyang nodded. "I will do what I can," she said as he wiped the tears that hadn't stopped streaming down her face.

Alex stood up straight and looked at the phoenix fire that burned within the ship, feeling bad that it did not heal soul injuries.

He shook his head in the end and turned around, walking back out of the ship to go back to the fights where the battle had reached a crescendo with Zhou Linfan and the Dragon Emperor tearing through the skies to hopefully kill each other.

* * * * *

The Dragon Emperor and Zhou Linfan had come to add an odd sense of stalemate in their battle. They continuously fought each other, but neither of them got an upper hand on each other at all.

The problem lay in the fact that Zhou Linfan's regular Saint Qi was now much stronger than the Emperor's Saint Qi due to him being part of the Hell Emperor's Array.

As a result, the Emperor was forced to use Immortal Qi to fight against Zhou Linfan's attacks as there was nothing else that could bridge the gap between their Saint Qi.

At the same time, Zhou Linfan struggled in the same way that his powerful Saint Qi had no way to bridge the gap against the Emperor's Immortal Qi and was thus forced to use Immortal Qi himself.

As such the Emperor and Zhou Linfan were both forced to fight with nothing but Immortal Qi, and as a result neither of them were coming anywhere close to beating each other.

As such, there was all but one path to victory in this fight.

Whoever could make the other person run out of Immortal Qi first won.

Neither of the two knew how much Qi the other person had. Neither of them knew how long each of them were fighting. All they knew was their own limit, and they were both willing to push it to the limit.

Zhou Linfan knew he wasn't going to back down, and the Dragon Emperor knew there was no way for him to back down.

As such, the two of them fought with every might in their body.

"I will avenge my father and my Kin, Long Tiankong!" Zhou Linfan shouted. "Today is the day you die."

Chapter 1811 A Few Attacks Remaining

Zhou Linfan remembered the days of the past when he sat with his mother as she taught him how to cultivate. He remembered playing games with his brothers and sisters, all of whom let him win. He remembered talking to his father who promised him that he would one day become a great person.

Those days were destroyed as the Emperor executed his father and then called for the deaths of every one of his family.

Within just a month, everyone and everything that he held dear to his heart was dead and everyone smiled for it.

There was no meaning to their deaths, no reason for them to lose their lives. And they had, and it had all happened because of the man in front of him.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm Long had he awaited for this moment. Long had he prepared in silence, waiting for the day he got to kill this man.

The day was finally here, and Lin Xiaojing, as he was named at birth, would not let it go ever again.

Crystalline spikes grew out in the air around Zhou Linfan, surrounding him as a total of 8 spun as a group around him.

Zhou Linfan pointed forward and the crystal spikes flew toward the Dragon Emperor.

Empowered by Immortal Qi, the Dragon Emperor pulled up his Golden Dragon shield, and defended himself against all the 8 spikes. He felt the terrible blowback that came with having to defend an Immortal attack, but throughout this fight, he had been feeling it.

He slowly put down the shield and looked at Zhou Linfan who prepared another technique.

The Dragon Emperor had come to the understanding that Zhou Linfan was going to fight him until the bitter end, and as such he needed to make sure he lasted longer with his Immortal Qi than his enemy did.

But therein came the problem as the Dragon Emperor had no idea of the reserves within Zhou Linfan. As such, he had to take every step with caution, using only the necessary amount of Immortal Qi to fight back.

An illusory water snake the size of the Azure Dragon himself came flying toward the Dragon Emperor, with the strength of an Immortal.

The Dragon Emperor thought of using his shield again but stopped himself.

The shield, while amazing, was only a Saint treasure. While using Immortal Qi itself wasn't much of a problem through it, using it to continuously defend against Immortal attacks very quickly chipped away at its durability, until the time when it would simply be destroyed.

That was the last thing the Emperor could allow to happen to the shield. There was something very important in the shield that he needed it for later on, should the necessity come for it.

He could not let it be destroyed so easily.

The Dragon Emperor shot out a lightning bolt through the Noble Dragon Spear, which took on the appearance of an Azure Dragon as it flew toward the incoming Water snake.

The clash of the two beasts let out a terribly cataclysmic bright light in the sky that darkened anything not in it.

The Dragon Emperor defended against the exploding energy that came from the impact and took a moment to look within himself.

'This isn't good,' he thought. His Immortal Qi reserve was getting lower and lower, and now, it was close to emptying. He couldn't help but frown at the sight.

Zhou Linfan's rage continuously burned within him. But it had been burning for thousands of years at this point, and he had long since learned how to keep a cool head throughout all the swirling emotions inside of him.

He saw the Dragon Emperor's frown through the subsiding colors of the explosion and immediately clocked onto the fact that the emperor was low on his reserve of Immortal Qi.

'Finally,' he thought. It was about damn time. It was a very good news, especially given the fact that he too was running low on his own Immortal Qi.

'3 more attacks?' Zhou Linfan thought as he assessed how many more rounds of attacks he could make using his remaining Immortal Qi. '5 if I can use it efficiently.'

There was no need to use large attacks, and simple attacks that struck just a single person were enough in this instance.

Each attack counted at this point.

A crystalline aura covered his body, formed not of Immortal Qi. Then, he created a single sharp spike out of the crystal using Immortal Qi and shot forward.

'First one,' Zhou Linfan thought.

The Dragon Emperor shot out a single bolt of lightning and destroyed the incoming attack. It had been a very small bolt of lightning and made it evident that the Emperor was trying to do the same thing as him.

Neither the Dragon Emperor nor Zhou Linfan even dared to try to dodge the attacks. They knew without a doubt that unless they could teleport, running would get them nowhere and instead get them killed instead.

One could not expect to run faster than an Immortal attack after all.

'Second,' Zhou Linfan thought and created another crystal spike. That was the weakest attack he could do with certainty that it would kill the Emperor.

The Emperor fought back with another lightning bolt too. That too was the least Qi consuming attack on his side.

The Dragon Emperor stared at Zhou Linfan, wondering the same thing that Zhou Linfan did.

'We'll see who runs out first,' Zhou Linfan thought and immediately used the same attack again.

The Dragon Emperor hesitated for a moment but quickly attacked back, sending another bolt of lightning at the incoming attack.

The two attacks clashed and the explosion sent back a weaker, but still strong shockwave throughout the battlefield.

Zhou Linfan paused his attacks for a moment, ignoring the thousands of other explosive noises that came from all around the battlefield. He stared at the Dragon Emperor, trying to discern that this new face of his meant.

The Dragon Emperor showed signs of anger in his face which beforehand had been calm. There was also a sense of frustration and fear, and Zhou Linfan dared not believe he was seeing what he was.

He felt at his own reserve of Qi. He had plenty of Saint Qi, but Immortal Qi, now he only had enough for 3 more attacks.

That was the only thing he could believe in right now. Himself.

He created another crystal spike and shot it out toward the Emperor.

The Emperor's hand shook a little with which he held onto the Noble Dragon Spear. He felt at his own Qi and knew this was the only thing he could do under the circumstances.

He used his Immortal Qi and sent out another lightning bolt.

The bolt streaked through the sky like white-hot fire and struck the incoming spike in the air, shattering it into a million tiny sand-like dust.

The explosion was something both of them had been accustomed to by now, so the moment the explosion occurred, Zhou Linfan created his 5th crystal spike and shot out.

The Dragon Emperor noticed the incoming strike and he took on a grim expression as he used a massive amount of Qi to quickly produce a defensive shield.

Zhou Linfan saw that and smiled erratically.

The Dragon Emperor was all out of Immortal Qi.

Chapter 1812 Instinct

﻿﻿It was clear to Zhou Linfan that the Dragon Emperor had run out of Immortal Qi completely, while he could still use two more attacks.

There was a chance that the emperor was acting as though he was out of Immortal Qi to lure Zhou Linfan in, but that would be an incredibly stupid thing to do given that he would have to risk his life by not using his Immortal Qi at this point.

The crystal spike streaked through the air, making a beeline for the Emperor and the massive shield he had created.

As the crystal spike flew, Zhou Linfan could see something happening to the spike. It was as though the spike was moving away from where it was meant to attack.

A simple thought from Zhou Linfan was enough to redirect the attack, but that was something that came to Zhou Linfan as an instinct. An Immortal attack was truly too strong to control halfway through.

Still, instinct and Intent were enough for the crystal spike to land on the Dragon Emperor and break through the barrier he had formed using many techniques.

It easily broke through it like a rock to a glass window and struck the Dragon Emperor on the other side.

The Dragon Emperor had done something at the last moment, or maybe he had done something from the very start to lead to that moment. Whatever he had done, the attack from Zhou Linfan had been diverted ever so slightly.

Instead of hitting him in the head, chest, or Dantian, the spike hit the Dragon Emperor to the side on his right arm.

The arm and part of the Dragon Emperor's chest had exploded, enough to gravely wound him, but not enough to die.

The Dragon Emperor's eyes widened in pain and shock and he quickly looked toward the Zhou Linfan. Without hesitation, he pulled out a pill from his Storage ring on his left hand.

The pill looked simple with no pill veins and just a cloudy blue color to it. It also didn't have strong Harmony to it from what he remembered hearing.

But that mattered little to the Dragon Emperor as he quickly ate the pill and dove down to grab his spear as it fell.

Zhou Linfan saw the Dragon Emperor eat the pill and knew he couldn't let the man heal. He had to kill him before he could find any help.

He thought of attacking another crystal spike but now knew that it wasn't reliable. He had to kill him with a more reliable attack.

Dao of Crystal filled and surrounded Zhou Linfan's sword as he poured all of his remaining Immortal Qi into this one attack. There was little remaining anyway, and as such this would be his last Immortal attack.

He didn't have to glance around to see if anyone else would interfere in this attack, as he knew everyone else was busy with their own fights, and his friends had worked hard to keep this space free from any interference.

With that thought, he rushed toward the Dragon Emperor who had only just managed to grab onto his spear.

His eyes turned toward Zhou Linfan, the look of pain and fear still clear in his bright blue irises.

Zhou Linfan experienced the moment slower than it happened. He saw the face of the man he was to kill with his sword. He saw his emotions. He saw how he could rid the world of this man with but a single attack.

He swung the sword down and saw the Emperor quickly try to point the spear toward him even though he was already there.

Zhou Linfan saw lightning start to crackle from the shaft of the spear where the Dragon Emperor had grabbed onto it, but he need not fear it. After all, his Saint Qi defense was much stronger than the Emperor's Saint Qi attack.

He saw the lightning move forward toward the tip of the spear from where it would attack and by that point, his sword was already closing in on the Emperor's neck.

Even as it closed in, Zhou Linfan felt something wrong. Something deep in him told him that if he didn't defend himself, he was going to die.

The thought itself formed after his instinct had forced Zhou Linfan to drive the sword toward the spear that burst out with lightning.

The two attacks clashed in close combat and the resulting explosion of energy sent Zhou Linfan flying through the sky, unable to stop himself.

He crashed through 5 buildings before coming to a stop on a barrier around the 6th building. He hadn't even realized that he was knocked downward at all.

Zhou Linfan's body ached all over and he opened his eyes to see that he had been wounded so badly that his clothes were soaked with blood within moments.

He reached into his storage bag and pulled out a 9-veiled healing pill to quickly eat it. As his body was healed by the pill, he felt a sense of fatigue come over him.

It took him a moment to realize that it was not fatigue that he was feeling, but just the feeling of becoming weaker due to no longer being in the Array. His aura was weaker than before.

He joined back into the array and was notified instinctively that he needed to move up from the ground to get to a better position so he could find more flexibility with the array.

'What happened?' Zhou Linfan thought as he flew upward and immediately sensed the Dragon Emperor flying downward with his head held up high with a look of superiority and a perfectly healed right hand.

The right side of his robe was empty, but through it revealed a mighty arm that held onto the spear.

But none of that shocked Zhou Linfan as much as it did the man's aura. There was a subtle power in the man's aura that Zhou Linfan could not ignore.

In fact, the Dragon Emperor was doing nothing to hide that at all. It could be said that he was even showing it off.

Zhou Linfan couldn't help but shrink back in fear. He looked at the man with a look of sheer shock as he understood what he was sensing.

Immortal Qi.

A massive amount of Immortal Qi.

"You… you were hiding it," Zhou Linfan spoke out immediately, only to realize that was wrong. The amount he felt was too much to be something that the Emperor hid.

It was almost as though the Emperor had instead regained Immortal Qi that he had lost. But how was it possible?

"No," Zhou Linfan corrected himself. "You replenished your Immortal Qi. How… how is that possible?"

There was simply no way for a Saint to replenish his Immortal. After all, one had to cultivate for a significant time to convert Saint Qi to Immortal Qi. There should be no way for a person to just gain back Immortal Qi at all.

"The answer is as simple as the question itself, Chef Zhou," the Emperor said. "There is no reason to overthink these things."

"How did I replenish Immortal Qi? Well, that is of course because I ate an Immortal Qi replenishment pill. Simple, wouldn't you say?"

Chapter 1813 Dishonorable

﻿﻿Immortal Qi Replenishment pill.

The words alone took Zhou Linfan into a state of utter amazement. How simple a solution that was to a problem every Saint Transformation realm cultivator faced when they started forming Immortal Qi.

He wondered why he didn't have such a thing. There were multiple immortals that he had come across in the past 2 years. Why did he not think to ask that from the man?

He wished he knew such a thing was even possible.

More thoughts raced to surface in his mind, but even as he did the Dragon Emperor stirred in his vision and he saw the spear glow bright white as lightning crackled through it.

Deep and powerful Immortal Qi filled the Noble Dragon Spear and Zhou Linfan understood that his death had come.

There was not a chance that he was going to live through this. Not on his own.

'I should have asked for protection from the Immortals too,' he thought. He regretted not having any protection at the very moment.

"You fight well," the Dragon Emperor said. "But you were always a better chef. The moment you escaped my death sentence, you should have lived your life in peace, never to come in front of me. You could have maybe survived a little longer than this."

The lightning crackled bright and the Emperor gave one last word.

"But, since you wish for it, I shall deliver you to your kin. Now, die."

He launched the attack.

A Tiger's roar filled the sky as the lightning bolt was stopped by the giant head of a White Tiger that appeared out of nowhere.

When the lights and aura subsided, the Dragon Emperor saw Alex standing before Zhou Linfan, panting heavily as he had come so close to death.

He knew Bai Jingshen's protection would defend him from the attack when he teleported in, but feeling the aura of the Immortal lightning strike right in front of him was not something Alex wasn't to feel so close to him.

The technique that the Dragon Emperor used to create this lightning bolt attack clearly used the Dao of Lightning, so there was a layer of added strength this attack had compared to anyone else's lightning bolts he had fought against in the past many hours or even years.

The Emperor stared at Alex with a stunned expression for a few moments before his face twisted into hatred.

"Damn you!" the man shouted and readied another attack to launch toward them, but he sensed the oncoming attack from his side and was forced to defend against it immediately.

He tried to use his Dao of Spatial Expansion to disrupt Alex's teleportation, but there was nothing he could do as Alex teleported away.

"Damn you!" the Emperor shouted, but he couldn't give thought to Alex much longer.

He turned to the side and watched as Yan Yating closed in on him, his sword burning with red hot fire.

"Long Tiankong," he spoke in a deep voice.

"Oathbreaker," the Dragon Emperor said. "Do you really intend to kill your emperor, whom you made a royal vow to always keep alive and follow?"

"I made the vow to follow a righteous man," Yan Yating said. "Not someone like you who would go behind the back of His Majesty, the Azure Dragon to try and kill his wife and son. Someone, who would force his own army to take part in atrocities that they would never wish to be part of."

"You are no Emperor of mine, Long Tiankong, and as such, no vow I made to the empire stands to stop me from killing you here today."

The Emperor scoffed. "I knew I should have changed the vow to be one that was made to the heavens. I will change it going forward," he said and then paused.

"Or perhaps not," he said. "What need is there for me to have any men behind me after today? Once this war is over, I shall have no need to stay in this world or require anything of its occupants."

The Emperor looked to the sky. "My path ahead is up there, in the world of Immortals where I shall make a name of my own," he said and thought about the things that he nearly got from Alex.

'The Alchemy God!'

"You will die long before it."

Yan Yating swung his sword and began his battle against the Dragon Emperor.

* * * * *

Hannah fought the man in front of her, a man she had come to learn as Long Huoyang, the general of the enemy army.

There were legions and legions under this man's command in this war, and as long as he died, there would be chaos within the enemy ranks.

She wanted to go fight the Emperor, but the task was equally as important.

Her blade was a hurricane in her hands, like a snake that twisted and turned to attack her opponent.

She fought at a close distance with the man, making it hard for him to react to her attacks in time. It was a double-edged sword too as it affected her reaction too, but she was the stronger of the two in general, so she came out on top either way.

She struck out with a fiery sword slash, attacking the man even as he attacked back with his own. The two attacks clashed, but hers was meant to explode upon impact.

The explosion technique she had learned from Alex helped her keep the man on his toes as he tried his best to fight, but he couldn't do that.

Unlike the others, he did not have a high cultivation base and thus did not have that much Immortal Qi.New n0vel chapters are published on

He had hidden behind his troops all this time, but caught on his own like this, the man could do nothing.

Hannah struck him again and stepped back a little to say something.

"I hear you were the Crown Prince's bodyguard," she said.

"So what of it?" the man asked and swung out another attack, which Hannah stopped quickly.

"Isn't a bodyguard meant to protect his master?" she asked.

The man's eyes narrowed. "Speak not in circles, wench," he said. "Say what is in your mind or do not speak."

Hannah gave a grim look. "Do you not feel any shame at what has happened then? Do you not feel any pain?" she asked.

The man felt a hint of a news in her words and suppressed his shock. "I said speak not—"

"Do you not care that the Crown Prince is dead?" Hannah asked. "Long Fangyu was struck down by his own father just earlier."

Long Huogang paused at the last moment and stared with deadened eyes at Hannah as shock overtook him. "The Crown Prince—"

Hannah's sword dug deep into the man's chest as she dashed forward and attacked while his mind was distracted by the news.

The man tried to attack but Immortal Qi exploded from Hannah's sword, instantly destroying his body as blood rained down on the ground.

Hannah looked at where the dead man stood and knew what she had done would be considered dishonorable by many, to use underhanded means.

But this was war, and she had learned this very day to kill. So, kill she did, one way or another.

She left the place, moving toward Alex, knowing that she had done her work in sending disturbances throughout the enemy forces.

Chapter 1814 Weak

Alex teleported out with Zhou Linfan, arriving at a safe location. Both Alex and the old man panted as if they had just survived death in mere moments.

"Are you okay?" Alex quickly asked the old man, pulling out a few healing pills to feed him.

Zhou Linfan caught Alex's hand and shook his head. "I'm fine. I am not wounded," he answered and took a large gulp again as he realized how close he had come to dying just then.

"What happened out there?" Alex asked. "I wasn't paying all of my attention to your battle, but I could still see that the Emperor was having a hard time in your fights. Was he playing with you?"

Zhou Linfan shook his head and looked toward the patch of sky where the Dragon Emperor and Yan Yating now fought with loud noises and bright colors.

"He was out of Immortal Qi," Zhou Linfan said. "I was so close to killing him because of it. But... he ended up eating a pill to replenish his Immortal Qi. And he got the upper hand on me instantly."

Alex stared at Zhou Linfan with wide eyes and turned to look at the Dragon Emperor in the distance. "He ate a pill to replenish his Immortal Qi?" he asked. "I can't believe that he has a pill like that. I can't imagine there being a pill capable of doing that."

"He didn't use Saint Pill," Zhou Linfan said through a grim expression as he could understand why Alex was confused. That had been part of his own confusion at first as well.

"He didn't use Saint Pill? What does that mean?" Alex asked. He wondered if he had misunderstood Zhou Linfan's words and that the Dragon Emperor had eaten something entirely different.

"He ate an Immortal pill to replenish his Immortal Qi," Zhou Linfan said in the end.

Alex remained with his stunned expression for a long time before he shook his head. He must've heard wrong. "Sorry, what did you say?" he asked.

"You heard me," Zhou Linfan said. "He ate an Immortal pill."

"That's impossible," Alex said.

"He told me he did," Zhou Linfan said.

"But that shouldn't be possible," Alex said again.

Zhou Linfan frowned. "He told me what he did himself. Are you doubting my ears?" he asked.

"No, I..." Alex churned out thoughts in his mind, trying to look for an explanation. "You were lied to. That's the only explanation."

"What makes you say that?" Zhou Linfan asked, sensing something went on here that he hadn't considered.

"Saints can't eat Immortal pills," Alex explained. "They would die if they did."

Zhou Linfan paused. Only now did his mind clear enough to realize that he had been wrong in his thinking.

Eating Immortal Pill to replenish Immortal Qi was simple, but only to Immortals. To Saints, it was a deadly matter.

"So... he lied to me?" Zhou Linfan asked.

"He must have," Alex said. "That or... no, he must have lied. The Emperor is a master alchemist himself. He wouldn't make the mistake of judging a Saint pill as an Immortal pill."

"I see," Zhou Linfan said. "He lied to me... but why?"

What reason did a killer have to lie right before killing off the person they were talking to? It made no sense to Zhou Linfan at all. It wasn't as though the Dragon Emperor expected him to survive that attack.

Alex was in a similar mindset, looking out at the Emperor, wondering both if or why he lied. He wanted to immediately dismiss the question of if he lied, but he held onto it, looking for answers.

The main question at the moment still remained the question of what pill did the Emperor eat.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm "You sure it was a pill?" Alex asked.

"Absolutely," Zhou Linfan said.

"Hmm, does he have a Saint Pill recipe that can provide him with Immortal Qi instantly?" Alex wondered, looking out toward the Dragon Emperor. He knew for a fact that one could not make anything with Saint Qi to produce something that could rival Immortal Qi.

It would need something else on top of it, and that usually came from the person's own being. Like how the Darkness element corrupted a person and consumed their Qi and flesh to give them power, Immortal power with Saint materials required a similar sacrifice.

Any such sacrifice would be so clearly visible to anyone looking for it.

However, no matter how much Alex looked for it in the Dragon Emperor's actions, he could not find the telltale sign of him undergoing any such phenomenon.

'How can it be? How can he not show any signs?' Alex wondered. How could one make a pill great enough to instantly form Immortal Qi in someone using items that did not give some pushback to the person consuming it?

As he thought in that matter, the first question he had in his mind drifted right back again.

'Did he lie at all?' he wondered.

He could not imagine the Dragon Emperor telling the truth regarding the secret to his instant replenishment but thought some more in that direction to see if he had missed something.

Eating an Immortal pill was bound to kill someone, that much Alex was sure. Immortal pills had just way too much power in them for anyone to easily consume them and...

A thought bubbled up from deep within Alex's mind.

Was it possible for Immortal pills to not have much power in them? Just a tiny hint of power, something a man who was used to using his Immortal Qi could use.

'Weak Immortal pill,' Alex thought and his eyes widened at the possibility.

Making an Immortal pill that was weak by nature was something Alex knew to be impossible. However, the possibility of an Immortal pill that was weak as a result of being a failure was in fact possible.

Everyone sought far and wide to have the highest harmony in any pills they could get, but what if one could go in the other direction?

An Immortal pill with less than 10% harmony, maybe even just 5%. Such a pill would be too weak to do anything to an Immortal but to a Saint...

"That bastard!" Alex couldn't help but curse out loud. He wondered if he had just figured out something that only a few people knew. This was something he would have to test when he had the time.

Hannah arrived and asked Alex about Long Huan. Knowing that he was being looked after by Zhan Luoyang made her feel good. They then told her about how the Emperor had regained Immortal Qi.

"Do we not have such pills?" she asked Alex, only to be replied with shaking heads.

"What do we do then?" she asked with a worried expression. "If he can keep replenishing his Immortal Qi, beating him will be impossible."

"I don't think he can," Alex said. Just the Pill impurities from the pills that Dragon Emperor ate alone would take years to cleanse.

"You don't know that for certain," Hannah said and Alex nodded. It was true that they had to work with the worst-

case scenario in mind.

"I had prepared something if things got really bad," Alex said and sighed. "While they aren't the worst they can be, I fear it might be time for me to use that thing."

Chapter 1815 One Pill

Both Hannah and Zhou Linfan stared at Alex with curious looks on their faces.

"What are you talking about?" Zhou Linfan asked. "Do you have something we can use? Did the Immortals give you something?"

"They didn't give me anything," Alex said. "I made it myself."

Alex brought out a small ceramic bottle from his Soul Space and presented it to the two of them.

"Inside this is a pill that can temporarily grant you the power of an Immortal," he said

Both Hannah and Zhou Linfan narrowed their eyes as they didn't trust Alex's words.

"I'm sorry, the power of an Immortal?" Hannah asked.

Alex nodded.

"Is that... different from Immortal Qi we've been using all this time?" Zhou Linfan asked. He imagined it was different but failed to see how at the moment.

"It's different, very different," Alex said. "After all, the Immortal Qi you use cannot be compared to that of a true Immortal."

Zhou Linfan thought for a bit and nodded. He could tell just how weak he was compared to Scarlet back when she had just broken through to the Immortal realm.

Her Immortal Qi had been so much more vigorous than his own.

"My Immortal Qi should be stronger than the Emperor's right now," Hannah said. "But I can't do anything with it against him. I think he's being empowered with Dao that stumps any advantage I have over him, leveling the playing field."

"Your Immortal Qi is stronger?" Alex asked with a surprised look on his face. He thought for a bit and saw some truth in that.

'She can skip realms,' Alex thought. That was most certainly the reason why her Immortal Qi was so much stronger.

"But you can't win against him, can you?" Alex asked.

Hannah reluctantly shook her head. "My lack of any sort of Dao is holding me back," she said.

Alex sighed. "I'm sure you'll learn some one day," he said. "We have plenty of pills for you to try later on."

"Let's forget about Dao for now," Zhou Linfan said. "What about that pill? Are you telling me that pill can bring forth the power of a True Immortal?"

Alex nodded. "Fully," he said. "Maybe even past just a newly ascended Immortal, given that I made this pill with 9 pill veins. It's at a level that even Immortals could eat and find some tiny benefit from it."

"The closest a Saint pill can come to comparing to an Immortal Pill, was it?" Hannah murmured.

"Then it's a good pill," Zhou Linfan said. "But I sense your reluctance in using it. What's wrong with it?"

"It's a forbidden pill in a way. Its downsides are many times worse than what it offers. It is bad," Alex said. "Maybe... maybe even fatal."

Both Hannah and Zhou Linfan gave a grim look when they heard Alex speak.

"Fatal, you say," Zhou Linfan asked, looking out at the battle between the Emperor and Yan Yating.

The rest of the war was slowing down.

Hannah's killing of Long Huogang had disrupted the enemy formation and the enemy was being picked off one by one. Many were changing sides mid-battle, screaming oaths to stop fighting at the top of their lungs.

As their numbers dwindled, Alex's army became stronger and stronger in comparison and the war was moving very much in their favor.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm Unfortunately, victory required them to kill the Dragon Emperor and until he drew the final breath, the war would continue.

"Are you sure it is fatal?" Hannah asked.

"The soul of the Dragon that taught me this pill recipe told me that whoever ate this pill would gain the power of an immortal temporarily, but they would also end up damaging their body in the process."

"The closer you are to Immortality the less damage you take, is what the Dragon Soul told me," Alex said. "But I fear that might have been for a normal pill. For a 9-veined pill, even close to Immortality, it would do irreversible damage at the very least. Hence why I call it fatal."

"If we have no choice in the end, I will eat this and fight him," Alex said. "Hopefully, I am strong enough that whatever it drains from me to make me immortal, I will stay alive in the end."

"How many of those pills do you have?"

"One," Alex said.

"One?"

"The pill requires part of a Fire Coral to make, which is extremely difficult to find. I only found one on accident when I was in the ocean with you," Alex said. "So, there is only one pill. Not that I thought I would need more since I alone would be taking it."

"But you aren't even Saint Transformation realm yet," Hannah said. "To make you an Immortal, the pill would have to draw out a lot from you. Let me eat it instead."

"No," Alex said.

"I have the highest cultivation base," Hannah said. "I am the most fit out of anyone here."

"No," Alex shook his head vigorously. "You might have a higher cultivation base, but I have more strengths for the pill to draw from. My Spiritual energy, Blood aura, Qi, and even my physical body, all of them together make me stronger than a normal Saint Transformation 9th realm cultivator. I should be the one to eat it."

"But I have Immortal Qi. If it draws from my Immortal Qi to give me strength, then I will—"

"Sister, I'm not giving this to you. You lived with a ruined body for 70 years. I'm not letting you go through something like that again," Alex said.

Hannah knew that she did not want to go through the same either, but she also didn't want Alex to eat the pill. She didn't know what to say or do.

"I'll eat the pill," Zhou Linfan said.

Alex turned toward the man and quickly shook his head. "You're even weaker than me, senior," he said. "I'm the only one who has the highest chance of survival after eating this pill."

"I don't care about surviving," Zhou Linfan said. "All I care, all I've ever cared about is killing that man there. If I have to give my life to do it, I'll happily do so."

Alex was about to refuse when Zhou Linfan spoke again.

"How old are you right now? 80? 90? You're not even 100 years old," he said. "Meanwhile I've lived for 6 thousand years at this point. 6 thousand years, working toward a single goal of revenge. Do not deprive me of this now."

Alex hesitated. "But senior, you're already so weak. If you eat this, I'm afraid..." he let the words hang.

Zhou Linfan nodded. "You said yourself that the power it gives will be the same for anyone," he said.

He then extended his hand forward. "Give it to me. You know you don't want to eat it. Deep down, you know this is not where you want to die. You have so much to live for, both of you."

Alex remained silent.

"I'm going back to fight that man one way or another," Zhou Linfan said. "At least give me this power to kill him."

Alex stared into the man's eyes and saw the resolve he had prepared for himself. So, he hesitated no longer.

He handed Zhou Linfan to temporarily become an Immortal.

Chapter 1816 Coming to an End

"When should I use it?" Zhou Linfan asked with the pill in hand.

"As late as possible," Alex said. "I do not know how long you can handle the energy in that pill. So the later you do it, the better."

"So you don't have a time frame?" Zhou Linfan asked.

"Senior, truthfully, I don't even know what that pill does exactly," Alex said. "All I can be certain of is that it will draw from you and itself to bring out the powers of an Immortal. That is the only pill that exists in this world, so it is hard to tell exactly how it will work."

Alex had some idea of what would happen by looking at the ingredients and how they were working. His Alchemy God's Knowledge allowed him to internally visualize what the pill would do.

But with 9-veins in the pill, he had to amplify everything

overall, making his understanding of the events from the pill

not match the reality. He had a feeling that such issues would

be solved when the Alchemy God decided to let him learn a

few more things in the future.

"You should move back, Alex," Hannah said. "You need to get to

safety."

Alex looked at the battle that raged out there and nodded.

He had known since before he came, since before he sought

to bring war, that he would most likely not be the one to kill

the Dragon Emperor.

He not only knew it wouldn't be him, he knew that it couldn't

be him. He had suffered at the hands of the Emperor, but not

as much as the other's hand.

Yan Yating had lost soldiers and friends following the Dragon

Emperor's commands when he did not want to.

Hannah had been made to live a torturous life without any

senses for 70 years.

Zhou Linfan had his entire family killed by the emperor.

These were men who deserved to kill the Emperor. Everyone

else, including him, came nowhere near to be as deserving to

kill these people.

He wanted to kill the Dragon Emperor for the dead soldiers

and Yao Ning, but even so, he found himself accepting the fact

that the Dragon Emperor was not his to kill.

Even Pearl, who was more deserving, had let others kill the

man, so Alex could only do the same.

He walked away from Hannah and Zhou Linfan, returning to

his army who were defeating more and more of the Emperor's

soldiers to bring the war to an end.

Alex met up with Whisker and his father who were together

handling the army in the absence of Yan Yating.

"How is the fight going? Does it look winnable?" Graham asked

his son.

Alex nodded. "There is a good chance we will win," he said and

turned back toward Zhou Linfan. He could tell that the man

was looking for an opening to attack and Alex wondered when

that would be.

"Any minute now," he said softly.

He then turned back to his father and Whisker. "How is the

situation here? What are our losses like?" he asked and

readied himself for the answer.

Graham gave a saddened look and gave the worst of the

information first.

"We've lost 4 elders," Graham said. "2 are critically injured, but

it is possible they will make it through. As for the remaining 3,

they are still fighting out there."

Alex felt immediate pain when hearing the numbers. 4 elders

had died aside from Yao Ning. That was 5 in the span of 2 or so

years.

Alex looked around at the battlefield and noticed Qiu

Jianhong, Gong Liuxian, and Ren Guanting among the many

who still fought, despite being wounded.

"Who are the two injured?" Alex asked.

"Elder Liang and Hou," Graham said.

"I see," Alex said.

'So Liang Shufen and Hou Xinya are still alive,' Alex thought.

'That means senior Huang Chen, Kang Xuefeng, Tan Yang, and

Lei Zhong died in this war.'

Alex couldn't help but develop a sour feeling at the thought of

them dying. But that wasn't even all the information at all.

"Who else died?" Alex asked.

"From our soldiers, we have confirmed the death of 900 right

now. There are most certainly more dead than that, but that

information will take time to come," Graham said. "The war is

still ongoing."

Alex nodded. The war was still ongoing.

"You guys handle things here, I'll go check on the wounded

and see if I can do anything for them," Alex said and rushed

toward the ship.

Alex walked in and saw his aunt helping the others under Zhou

Luoyang's guidance.

Long Huan stayed brooding to the side, not looking anywhere

at the moment, lost in his own thoughts.

Alex wanted to go talk to him, but he hurried to the two

elders who were hurt.

He saw both Liang Shufen and Hou Xinya lying next to the

phoenix flames, healing. They were awake, but at the same

time not very conscious of the world around them.

Both of them had lost body parts that they hadn't generated

yet and seemed to be in extreme pain. He quickly sat beside

them and checked their situation.

The good news was that they had stabilized and their situation

was under control, but he didn't understand why they were

still hurt.

"I just gave them a pill to heal their soul a while ago," Zhou

Luoyang said. "Once that energy is gone from their body, I will

give them the healing pill."

"I see," Alex said. "Do you have enough pills?"

"For body, yes. but not for the soul," Zhuo Luoyang said. "I'm

already low on them despite what you gave me just a while

earlier."

"They should have a few," Alex pointed toward the elders.

"Have them give you theirs once they are conscious again."

Liz walked up to Alex. "How is it out there?" she asked. "How

is Hannah?"

"Sister is fine," Alex said. "The war itself is concluding, but the

Emperor is still alive and well, and until he comes down, I'm

afraid it won't be over."

Alex looked toward the prince to the side and gestured a

question.

"Don't worry about him," Liz said. "I won't let him do anything

stupid."

"I won't do anything stupid," Long Huan said in a grim tone.

His eyes were red with hatred, and there was a tension in his

face from him constantly gritting his teeth. Stains marked his

cheeks where his tears had yet to dry.

He looked up at Alex.

"Is my father yet unhurt?" he asked.

"He was close to getting killed earlier, but he ate a pill to heal

himself," Alex said.

Long Huan's eyes moved as his mind raced to get information.

"You have to be careful. My father has the accumulated

fortunes of the Azure Empire at his side. While not everything

is with him, he is sure to carry many lifesaving treasures with

him. Killing him outright will be difficult."

Alex nodded. "He's used a few already I believe," he said.

Long Huan got up from where he sat. "Then he must be close

to dying. Let's go," he said. "I wish to be there to see him die."

Chapter 1817 Pearl’s Command

Yan Yating's sword slash took the form of a giant four-legged beast that flew across the air toward the Emperor.

The Emperor's spear attack was one that always took the shape of a dragon.

The two attacks clashed in the sky and the world seemed to lose its color upon impact. Reality warped where the two attacks touched each other and ripples were sent through space that broke and reformed immediately.

"How long do you wish to keep this up?" the Dragon Emperor asked. "You cannot think that you can beat me by fighting straight, can you?"

The Dragon Emperor sent out another attack, throwing tendrils of lightning in all directions, attacking not just Yan Yating but also every other location that the attack could land on.

Most of those who were attacked were people who were too weak to protect themselves and had to hide behind others.

The Dragon Emperor could see that his army had lost the

battle, so all that remained was for him to win the war. So, he

started attacking more recklessly, without a need to worry

about who the stray shot landed on.

Yan Yating did his best to stop all the attacks, but the attack

was too vast for him to get to all of them and stop them. He

had to rely on the people behind him to protect themselves.

The only good thing that came through this was the fact that

the Dragon Emperor was wasting more Immortal Qi than he

needed to.

Yan Yating, as a Saint Transformation 8th realm cultivator, had

maybe 35% of his Qi as Immortal Qi. The Emperor, just one

realm higher, would have nearly 50% of his Qi be Immortal Qi.

That discrepancy was something that he had to fight through.

Yan Yating had been notified by the others that the Emperor

had regained all of his Immortal Qi back, so he had to be

careful.

'Let him use his Qi without any thought,' Yan Yating thought.

'The more he uses, the better my chance of besting him.'

The Dragon Emperor was a being that had haunted him for

the past 70 years, so he was more than ready to get it all over

with.

He returned once again to attack the Dragon Emperor and

force him to use more of his Qi.

* * * * *

Pearl flickered and appeared in four places at once, each one

of him dashing toward the woman that had charged in wildly

to attack him.

She had a crazy look on her face and a wild grin, and she kept

saying that she wanted to kill him to get on the Emperor's

good side.

Thankfully, she overestimated her strength in front of him as

he too had a battle prowess far beyond what the others saw of

him.

The woman created a vortex of fire in front of her, with the

tail end of it facing one of the four Pearls.

She stared at each of the four Pearls at once, attacking the

one 2nd from the left.

The vortex turned sharper and launched a fiery arrow toward

that one Pearl.

Pearl's body glowed bright golden just as the attack landed on

him, and stopped the attack.

The woman smiled. "Haha!" she shouted. "You can't hide from

me."

A ball of fire appeared in her hands and she launched it toward

Pearl. The fire took on the shape of a diving hawk and

slammed against the same Pearl she attacked earlier.

The Pearl that was attacked suddenly turned illusory,

disappearing into motes of golden light that spread toward

the other three Pearls that still remained on the field, who

kept charging at her.

One of the Pearl arrived right in front of her and swung his

arm at her. His paw glowed bright golden as well as he used

the Golden Tiger Claw technique etched into his bloodline

The air seemed to hold behind a streak of glowing light where

the claw passed and the woman quickly used a defensive

talisman to protect herself at the last moment.

A burst of energy appeared from the talisman, fighting back

the incoming paw strike. And in that burst of energy, Pearl

disappeared once again.

He turned into motes of golden light that flickered back into

the two other Pearls who had arrived in front of the women as

well and they both attacked.

The woman had already fought back and she found it difficult

to bring herself to do so at just this moment. Still, she

concentrated raw Qi in her hands and pushed it toward the

Pearl on the left.

The Pearl on the right attacked her and instantly swiped his

claw through her face, ripping away a chunk of her face.

The woman screamed and tried to fly back, but golden lines

appeared from Pearl, like wires that caught the woman in it,

stopping her from moving any further.

His claw glowed once again and he swung it at the woman's

head once more.

This time, the woman's face caved in, crushing her skull

entirely. Her body died at that instant.

The other Pearl had already turned into motes of life, entering

the real Pearl, becoming once.

The woman's body slumped under Pearl's binding, and a small

blue illusory soul flew out from her body.

Pearl roared at the soul and it crumbled into motes of light,

dying just there.

"Good fighting, young lord," someone spoke from behind

Pearl.

Pearl turned around and saw the leader of the Lizard colony

moving toward him. He then looked around the battlefield and

saw many of the other beasts smiling toward him.

They had been waiting patiently for him to be done with his

battle.

"You are only at Saint Core 7th realm, and you can kill people

in the Saint Soul realm. You truly are the son of his Majesty,"

the Lizard said.

"Why have you all stopped fighting?" Pearl asked.

The blue Eagle moved toward Pearl. "Young lord, the battle is

all but done," she said, pointing toward the few fights that

happened here and there.

"We have won, young lord," the Lizard said.

Pearl felt the intense aura of battle coming from a distance far

away. He looked at the fight between the Dragon Emperor

and Yan Yating.

"No," he said. "It's not over."

He pointed toward the Dragon Emperor. "As long as he is alive,

the battle is not over."

The beasts looked toward the Dragon Emperor too and

grimaced. "We're afraid we are not that useful in that regard,"

the Deer answered. "We're not strong enough to contend

against him."

"No," Pearl said. "But you will make for a fine annoyance."

Pearl raised his voice and spoke to every beast, both from the

Beast Paradise and the ones that were under his great

Grandfather.

"Everyone in the Saint Transformation realm, listen up!" he

roared a command. "If you have any Immortal Qi in you, do

not keep it. Attack it at that man. Distract him with all the

power you can muster."

The beasts looked toward the Dragon Emperor, with great

consideration in their face.

"Attack him all at once, so we may kill him," Pearl shouted.

"This is my command as the ruler of the Eastern Continent.

Go!"

Chapter 1818 Getting Close

﻿﻿The Dragon Emperor felt pressured as beasts from all around the battlefield started targeting him with attacks that were too strong for him to ignore.

They were thankfully far away that he could dodge the attacks instead of having to deal with all of them, but to dodge everything was all but impossible.

So, he had to constantly fight back other attacks while fighting against Yan Yating at the same time. He started worrying a little that if he didn't focus in the battle enough, he would take a hit from a stray Immortal attack and instantly die.

Thankfully, due to having been an alchemist for thousands and thousands of years, the Dragon Emperor had learned ages ago to split his concentration into multiple things at once.

Focusing on everything at the same time was difficult, but not impossible due to that.

The Dragon Emperor pulled out a talisman from his storage ring and threw it to his left. A glow of energy burst out from the talisman, instantly forming a shield next to him that could protect him from either 2 or 3 Immortal attacks.New n0vel chapters are published on

On the other side, he applied his Dao of Space Expansion to expand space to the point that the attacks simply didn't land on him as they were meant to.

He then created a cage of lightning around him on the left side, protecting him from the attacks from that very side.

Finally, he sent out a burst of lightning attacks that split into many smaller tendrils of lightning bolts that struck almost all of the remaining attacks that came for him, including the one that Yan Yating used on him.

Two attacks landed on the shield formed from the talisman and was destroyed. The Emperor immediately replaced it with something else to protect himself.

He didn't have many treasures to protect himself from Immortal attacks. The strongest one he did have, he had used it already to protect himself against the attack from the Immortal in the Central Continent.

Now, he was running out of it all.

'If things continue like this, I will lose,' the Dragon Emperor realized and the truth of his impending doom became real to him for the first time.

Hatred filled him at that very moment. 'It's alright,' he thought. 'I just have to kill them all.'

* * * * * *

The many blood beasts flew back to Alex. Of the 300 that he had sent out, only 130 had returned. Most of the beasts ended up dying in the battle due to their lack of versatility when it came to fighting.

The one that he was saddened the most to see die had been the blood beast formed of the great 6 winged feathered Wyrm, which he had killed on his first journey to the Eastern Continent.

Yao Ning had been the one that had weakened the beast and he had killed it. As a beast in Saint Transformation's 5th realm, it had been one of the strongest Blood Beasts he had, and now they were no more.

The blood beasts flew into his Blood God's Manual, disappearing under the eyes of everyone that surrounded him.

Zhou Linfan looked at it with curious eyes. "I hope you can someday teach me how to use those things too," he said.

Alex smiled. "I'll have to see if it is possible or not," he said. "If it is, I don't mind aiding you a little in it."

Zhou Linfan smiled. The conversation helped him get his head out of the thoughts that he was most likely going to die in a few minutes.

He did not want to think about that.

Pearl stood next to Alex, the black jaguar standing some distance away, completely void of Immortal Qi. They stared at the battle just the same as the rest of the people around them.

"He's under pressure," Hannah said, staring at the sky where the Dragon Emperor fought. "He's struggling."

Alex nodded. "Our moment of opportunity draws near," he said. "We cannot mess this up."

"Let the others attack him first," Hannah said. "Let him use all of his treasures."

The others that surrounded the three were yet unaware of exactly what they were planning. They had not told anyone about the pill besides themselves.

Graham flew up to Alex.

"It's done,' he told him. "The war is over."

Alex turned around and was surprised to see that to be the truth. "I see," he said. "Please have everyone that is wounded immediately taken care of. Have all the alchemists start making pills if pills are lacking."

Graham nodded and quickly sent the orders around.

"What do we do with the prisoners?" Graham asked once his orders were followed.

Whisker jumped off Graham's shoulders and onto Alex's, staring off into the skies just like the many others.

"We took prisoners?" Alex asked.

"Everyone who didn't give up is a prisoner, I fear," Graham said. "And there are many of them."

"Have the ones that aren't wounded keep an eye on them," Alex said. "Also, take care of the wounded from the other parties too. Not just our own."

"We're already doing that," Graham said. "I'll relay the rest of your orders. Finish things here."

Since the active elders were busy attacking the Emperor as everyone else, Graham was alone in being the one to deal with the immediate aftermath of the war.

Liz appeared a while later, watching the spectacle before her with wide eyes. Long Huan followed her and stared at his father as well.

"He's still not dead?" Long Huan asked.

"Huan!" Hannah immediately took him into a hug, holding his head tightly. "I heard what happened. I'm so sorry."

Long Huan felt the tears coming back once again and held tightly onto his wife.

Liz walked up to Alex. "What's going on? How is he still alive when the war is over?" she asked in disbelief. She had very much expected the Dragon Emperor to die by this point.

"We're working toward it," Alex said. "We just have to wait a little longer."

They stared at the sky patiently. After a while, it was clear to them that it was time.

* * * * * *

The Dragon Emperor took out a giant metallic plate that appeared on the emperor's side, immediately defending him against one of the attacks.

The other attacks were dealt with by him.

'Dammit!' the Dragon Emperor thought. He had run out of every protective measure and was now just one step away from using everything.

He didn't want to use the very last thing as he wanted to wait for what he would have to do once he used it, but he was being forced closer and closer to it.

He threw out another attack, sending tendrils of lightning all around him, exploding all the incoming attacks at once.

What nobody understood was that the Dragon Emperor had not just converted part of his Qi into Immortal Qi through the Immortal pill. He had converted all of his Qi.

So, he had a lot more to use than what people imagined. And he could tell that Yan Yating had almost run out.

He focused on the 7 incoming attacks and sent out another attack, while also targeting Yan Yating at the same time.

Suddenly space trembled around the Dragon Emperor and Zhou Linfan teleported right next to him with his sword ready to swing.

As reflected in the sword, the Dragon Emperor could see his demise.

Chapter 1819 Pure Power

The moment the Dragon Emperor stopped using his defensive treasures to protect himself was the moment Zhou Linfan knew that the time had come.

He pulled open the stopper from the ceramic pill bottle and and smelled the faint aromatic, almost cinnamon-like odor that came from within the bottle.

He lifted the bottle and poured the single pill into his mouth. He tasted the somewhat spicy taste of the pill and at the next second, he swallowed it.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm At the first second, the pill simply went down to his stomach, doing absolutely nothing. But as the pill began dissolving in his stomach, the energy that the pill contained started pouring out from within him.

And the energy that came out was something that he could not believe.

Zhou Linfan's face changed immediately, a dreadful look surfacing as he felt the terrifying energy move through his body, giving a sensation of a hungry predator walking through a valley where only prey lived.

And no matter how much the predator ate, it was still hungry at the end.

The energy started devouring Zhou Linfan from the inside, first devouring his Qi, and then his body.

Veins popped up all over his face and neck as golden red light crept through the veins, leaving behind smoke that came out of the man's pores.

Alex and the others moved away from Zhou Linfan to give him space as they saw the change that came to him. Alex watched in shock full of horror at the changes that were appearing on Zhou Linfan's body.

Zhou Linfan's skin started looking older and older, with dark spots appearing on them as though parts of his skin were dying because of the pill.

Zhou Linfan grunted and gritted his teeth as the pain became nearly unbearable. Black and white specks floated around in his vision, spots of light making it hard to see everything clearly.

He felt his throat burn while a loud ringing sound drowned every other noise in the sky where he flew.

Once his Qi and Body were devoured, the pill's energy started devouring his soul as well, making him weaker and weaker.

Zhou Linfan couldn't even tell if the energy had reached his dantian or not. He couldn't tell how much longer he would remain a cultivator.

Things changed, but one thing remained the same.

Pain.

Pain filled every inch of his body, a constant pain that he got used to very quickly. Once he overcame the pain and difficulties that came with the pill, he finally noticed what he had gained from the pill.

Power. Pure unadulterated power.

He lifted his sword and saw his white knuckles, his lack of muscles as it was all eaten away. But even with that, he had power.

However, he could tell it would not remain for too long. The pill he ate was just way too strong for him to be able to survive on it any longer.

If he didn't act right away, it would all be for naught.

'Just 1 attack,' Zhou Linfan thought. That was all he needed.

"Get me there," he said through gritted teeth. "Now."

Alex nodded and acted as per their plan.

He palmed Zhou Linfan on the back, putting aside the immense panic he felt at the uncontrolled Immortal strength that emanated from the old man, and poured Teleportation Dao into the man.

Surprisingly, there wasn't much resistance for Alex at all. He could understand that whatever power was given to Zhou Linfan, it was not Qi or any sort of aura. It was simply power in its purest form.

Pure energy.

He activated the teleportation formation and sent Zhou Linfan away.

Zhou Linfan teleported with his sword already swinging and saw the scenery in front of him change from a large open area before him to having the Dragon Emperor right in front of him.

The Dragon Emperor turned to look at him even as he arrived and saw the wild look of horror and fear that appeared in his eyes.

'That's it,' Zhou Linfan thought. 'That is what you will feel as you die.'

Then with his last thought, he attacked the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor had been prepared for many attacks, but this one had still caught him off-guard. Even so, his thousands of years of training and battle instinct acted up at the same time to help him in his situation.

The Dragon Emperor didn't even have to wonder what was happening with Zhou Linfan to know that if he didn't do anything, he would die for certain.

So, the very first he thought he had was to distance himself from Zhou Linfan and his sword swing.

The Dao of Space Expansion worked in but a moment to add space between the Dragon Emperor and Zhou Linfan. He pushed it to the limit to pour enough space between the two of them that despite initially being right next to each other, by the very next instant, he and Zhou Linfan were nearly a hundred meters away.

However, even that much distance would be nothing for Zhou Linfan in his current situation to kill me, that much the Dragon Emperor knew for certain.

He wanted to fuel his spear with Immortal Qi and attack back, but he had just done so to fight back against Yan Yating and the others who were distracting him.

Not to mention, instinct told him that even if he used any technique, he would still die if he did not protect himself.

As such, the Dragon Emperor reached into his Storage Ring and pulled out the Golden Dragon shield that he had put away in fear of losing durability throughout the battle.

Even as he pulled out the shield, Zhou Linfan was already upon him, swinging his sword down on him.

The Dragon Emperor's eyes widened in fear, for if this did not work, he would die.

Zhou Linfan could feel his life racing away from him with each moment, so he could not waste any longer. He saw the shield appear between him and the Dragon Emperor, but it was only a Saint shield. Without the Dragon Emperor using Immortal Qi, it was useless.

So, he swung down hard to kill the Dragon Emperor through the shield.

His sword, empowered by the Dao of Cutting and the Dao of Crystals, was so strong at the moment that it was unlikely that there had been any Saints in the past tens of thousands of years that had been as strong as he was right now.

Zhou Linfan's sword passed through the Golden Dragon shield as easily as though he were back in the kitchen slicing through butter.

There was barely any resistance to the shield as it was cut down and the sword landed on the Dragon Emperor.

The sword struck the Dragon Emperor on his left shoulder, cutting through it with slightly more difficulty than the shield. Even so, there was barely enough resistance for Zhou Linfan.

He watched as his sword cut through the Dragon Emperor's left shoulder, digging deeper through the chest until it was right next to his heart.

The Dragon Emperor looked at Zhou Linfan through the broken shield, and even as he came close to being killed, he believed it with all his heart.

He wouldn't die here.

Chapter 1820 Golden

﻿﻿To Alex's eyes, it all happened in an instant.

The moment he sent Zhou Linfan away, he saw a distance grow between him and the Emperor that he quickly covered and swung his sword down.

Alex saw the Golden Dragon shield appear out of the Dragon Emperor's storage ring, but it seemed useless as Zhou Linfan cut through it and the slash landed on the Dragon Emperor's chest and then…

A bright golden glow covered his eyes.

* * * * * *

The sudden glow that appeared in the battle was bright enough that it forced every single cultivator to shade their eyes from the glint, unable to see exactly what it was.

It was only when the light disappeared that they saw what had happened.

* * * * * *

Zhou Linfan was right about to cut the Dragon Emperor's heart when he felt some sort of disturbance right in front of him.

The shield that he had cut through suddenly started glowing. Within a split second after being cut, they glowed so bright that Zhou Linfan could not see anything before him.

At the same moment, he felt as though he was blinded, the light turned into a force that pushed him back at the same time.

The pushback came with a power that terrified Zhou Linfan. Had it not been for the power his body had generated at the moment, he was sure that he would have died.

He stumbled through the air and barely managed to keep himself from tumbling further as he looked back at the bright glow of light.

What had happened?

Zhou Linfan felt his death approaching. He could feel the power in his body slowly leaving him as there was nothing more of him for the energy to devour to empower him.

He was dying.

He started falling through the sky as he didn't even have anything to keep him afloat. As he did, he saw a golden sphere that had appeared where the Dragon Emperor had been.

A golden sphere with a golden dragon that swam around it.

'Did he die or not?' Zhou Linfan wondered. 'I cut through his heart, didn't I?'

He was certain he had gotten to the heart, but the bright light made it impossible to tell if he had actually cut through it or not.

His senses were already diminished due to the pill, so telling what had happened on top of that was damn near impossible for Zhou Linfan.

Yan Yating caught Zhou Linfan as he fell and felt his body burn hot with energy, the yellow in his swollen veins slowly subsiding, leaving behind a badly injured and skinny Zhou Linfan.

Yan Yating was horrified to see what was happening to him. He knew not about the plans involving the pills.

Zhou Linfan was caught, but he was still dying. He could feel his mind become slow to process things, the world seemed more hazed than anything. And all that remained in his mind was the question of whether he killed the Emperor or not.

His own mortality came second place to the desire to know if he had completed his lifelong dream or not. He prayed that he had.

Alex teleported right next to Zhou Linfan and brought out a pill from his Soul Space. He didn't know if this pill would in any way help the old man or not, but he hoped it would.

It was a nullification pill, meant to remove any effect from any pill that one might have eaten. It was a simple pill meant for situations such as when one ate a face-changing pill, or when one needed to stop cultivating halfway through while their cultivation enhancement pill was still continuing.

Stopping a pill that gave someone the power to become Immortal was not in its repertoire.

Still, Alex fed the old man the pill, forcing it down his throat so he could swallow it as Zhou Linfan seemed unable to do so.

Zhou Linfan's body calmed a lot after eating the pill, but the state in which it was in didn't make the situation any better.

Alex grabbed his skinny wrist, touching bone through the skin, and felt his heartbeat.

There was barely any blood in the man, so the heartbeat his body produced was very faint as well.

"How… did I do?" Zhou Linfan's voice rasped as he tried looking up toward the sphere.

Flecks of light swam in his vision constantly, making it hard to see.

"I…" Yan Yating looked at the golden sphere as well. He tried forcing his senses into the sphere, but he couldn't see anything inside. He could not notice anything at all.

"You did well," Alex said and looked up as well, less so to look at the sphere, and more so to hide his grimace.

He had no idea what had happened at the final moment when Zhou Linfan used his attack, so he didn't yet know if the Emperor was dead or not.

Something had clearly protected him, but it could very well be true that the Dragon Emperor was dead on the inside. Alex wondered if there was any way to find the truth at all.

"Hold him," Yan Yating said. "I'll finish this."

Alex took hold of Zhou Linfan and watched as Yan Yating flew toward the golden sphere and let out a fiery slash, combined with the powers of his Immortal Qi.

The crescent fire hit the barrier and the golden dragon that swam around the sphere roared as it fought back, destroying the attack before it could land.

Everyone who was looking at it was surprised.

Yan Yating couldn't believe what he witnessed, so he continued attacking again and again, only to be blocked by the barrier.

Yan Yating sensed more attacks from behind him and moved away so as to give a clear field for everyone else to attack.

Every single attack that landed on the barrier was somehow defended against completely.

Alex took Zhou Linfan back to regroup with everyone else.

"What is that?" Alex asked as soon as he arrived, looking toward Long Huan for any sort of answer.

"I… I do not know," Long Huan said. "I have never heard about any techniques of this sort."

Alex frowned. How could he have this strong of a technique that he could stand against hundreds of attacks from everyone?

Attacks drowned out the sky in multicolored explosions, and yet at the end of it all, the golden sphere still stood.

"Not technique," Zhou Linfan said in a low rasping voice as he drew in some breath. "Artifact. Shield."

Alex heard those words and realized what had happened. "The shield you cut apart?" he asked. Was it what had activated?

He looked down at the old man who was now near death and remembered that he needed to help him heal. With his body, as it was, nearly dead and crippled, a healing pill would kill him.

As such, Alex teleported into the ship and let the old man rest near the Phoenix fire.

"Please… tell me I killed him," Zhou Linfan said. "I must… I must have…"

"Worry not," Alex said as he rested his palm on the man's chest to help him calm down. "I'm sure he is dead. If not, he should be at death's door because of you. As for the rest, we can take it from here."

Chapter 1821 Unclear Situation

﻿﻿Alex rushed out of the ship, quickly making his way back to the group that was staring at the golden sphere where the Dragon Emperor was most likely inside.

"Any changes?" Alex asked.

"Nope, none," Yan Yating said. "No matter how much we attack, we can't seem to put a mark on the sphere at all."

Alex frowned. "We can't even be certain if he's dead or not," he said. "We'll have to act under the impression that he is still uninjured and recovering inside the sphere."

Alex turned and gave an order to everyone who could hear him. "Stop attacking!" he shouted. "Reserve your strength for when he comes out."

Many of the people stopped attacking, but a few didn't know if they should follow his command or not. Alex wasn't their ruler, so they were uncertain.

"His words as my words," Pearl shouted toward the ones, especially the beasts who hesitated. "Do what he says."

The beasts stopped attacking.

A few of the ancestors of the many families and sects that had appeared on the battlefield made their way toward Alex to understand the situation even better.

The sect master of the Ice Mist Palace, Bing Zheshuang was the first to speak.

"Your Majesty, have you any idea what is going on, or what we should be doing instead of attacking?" she asked Alex.

Alex shook his head. "I do not know what is going on with that sphere, just that we cannot seem to budge it even the slightest," he said. "For now, look after your people and make sure they are unhurt. If they are wounded and you lack pills, hand over some resources, our alchemists will make the necessary pills for you."

"That won't be required, your Majesty," the woman said.

The others asked a few questions too, some even wanted to meet Pearl directly. A few went up to Long Huan and asked him about Long Fangyu, giving their condolences before leaving the place.

Alex turned to Long Huan when they were finally free and asked if he knew anything about the golden barrier that had appeared or anything about the Golden Dragon shield.

"Both the Golden Dragon Shield and the Noble Dragon Spear are artifacts that the Dragon Emperor is supposed to possess when they ascend the throne," Long Huan said. "It is only then that anyone learns about those artifacts. I cannot tell you what is special about either of those artifacts with just my own knowledge."

"I do believe the Golden Dragon shield is a lot older than the Noble Dragon Spear though," Yan Yating spoke from the side.

"Yes," Long Huan said. "The Noble Dragon spear was something that was only awarded to my family some few generations ago. However, the Golden Dragon shield has been in the family since the very first generation."

"I cannot tell you whether this information is true or not, but it is said that the first Azure Dragon who sired the first Dragon-human hybrid, the first Dragon Emperor, gave his son the shield during the day of his coronation."

"If that information is to be trusted, then that shield is over 80 thousand years old," Long Huan said. "Who knows what mysteries it holds."

Alex thought for a bit. A shield that was given by the Azure Dragon to his son. He could see how powerful a defensive treasure that would have been.

'But how strong is the shield? Is it a good idea for me to have stopped all the attacks? What if I have to spend days here?' Alex wondered. Questions filled his mind and yet no answers surfaced that would satisfy him.

Some few minutes passed and elder Liang Shufen flew up to Alex with a talisman in her hand. Her wounds had been fully healed by now, and she seemed only tired and not else.

"How are you feeling?" Alex asked her.

"I'm feeling much better, your Majesty," she said. "Just a day or two of cultivation and I will be back to my peak again."

Alex nodded and took the talisman that was handed to him.

"And this is?" Alex asked as he looked into the talisman. As he did, he quickly saw many different numbers.

"The death toll," Liang Shufen said in a grim tone. "I assumed you would want this."

Alex nodded. Nearly 4000 people had died in the battle, all on his side. That included not just his soldiers, but also the beasts, the people from the different sects and families that came to help, and the soldiers that had turned against the empire to help their army.

Nearly 3000 of those were saints.

"So many dead," Alex thought.

The number of people that had died in today's war nearly quintupled the amount of saints that were in the Western Continent. The number had been devastating.

Alex passed the talisman for the others to look at when they asked for it. A dark atmosphere settled around all of them.

After a minute or so, Hannah spoke.

"We can't stay like this, doing nothing," she said. "We can't attack him or do anything to him, so we should prepare for something else."

"What do you suggest?" Alex asked.

"I'll go cultivate," she said. "I can have my Qi back and be ready to fight him when he comes out of that defensive barrier."

Alex thought for a bit and nodded. "I should do the same," he said. "In fact, we should all do that."

Alex turned toward Liang Shufen. "Have the soldiers quickly clear up the battlefield and go into the ship. They should be ready to leave now that everything but the main task is done. All of the soldiers are not required here anymore."

Liang Shufen nodded. "I'll do as you command, your Majesty," she said and left.

Alex turned back around toward the others. "We should find a place to—"

His words hung in his mouth as he sensed something stir in the surroundings. Hannah slowly turned as well, her senses just as sharp as Alex's, searching for what was happening.

Before the others could sense anything, they all heard a small buzzing sound coming from the direction of the Dragon Emperor's golden sphere.

"What is happening?" Yan Yating asked with a curious look. "It's barely been 15 minutes since he was in there."

The others looked to see what was going on as well. Everyone, including the soldiers who were supposed to fly into the ship, stopped in their tracks to witness what was about to unfold before them.

As they watched, they saw the golden dragon on the surface of the sphere stir and agitate. The dragon then suddenly roared and started deforming. It wasn't just the dragon, but the entire sphere that began deforming.

Then, as if poked from the inside with something sharp, the sphere stretched until it could stretch no longer and popped open.

The sphere broke like a glass sphere, shattering into many shards that slowly turned into motes of golden light that drifted into the air and vanished.New n0vel chapters are published on

And from within it appeared the Dragon Emperor in a tattered robe, revealing his body underneath that was devoid of a single scratch.

There was no wound on him at all.

Chapter 1822 Worst Case Scenario

"He's out," Liz said.

"And completely unhurt," Yan Yating said. "Didn't your friend nearly kill him?"

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm Alex stared at the Dragon Emperor, not answering anyone else's answers. He looked at him, searching for something. Some sort of answer to what he had felt earlier.

"He must have eaten a healing pill," Pearl said. "He can make 9-veined pills just like brother can. He should have healed instantly."

"We shouldn't waste any time," Long Huan said. "We must attack now."

Long Huan wasn't the only one thinking that way. Everyone else who was autonomous to a certain degree had the same thoughts.

Their entire plan from the beginning was to wait for the Dragon Emperor to appear before attacking him. Since he was out, there was no need for any of them to wait anymore.

It had only been 2 seconds since the Emperor had come out of the golden sphere and people were already beginning to attack him.

Alex stared at the Dragon Emperor, still confused about what he had sensed just earlier, the feeling still vaguely present in the place.

It was somehow a familiar feeling as though the man had just learned a Dao, while not learning any dao at the same time.

'Dao...' Alex thought. Immediately, his eyes whipped up to the sky, staring at the sunlight that slowly started getting drowned by something that appeared out of nowhere.

"No..." Alex said softly.

He looked down and toward the many people that were beginning to attack.

"STOP!"

"DON'T ATTACK!"

Hannah had realized what was happening at the same time as Alex. While she didn't have as much knowledge about everything as Alex did, she had still been present that day to witness what had happened.

As a result, she was familiar with the feeling she got from the current situation.

She knew what was happening and that place of dread inside of her.

Many of the people heard their cries at once and stopped their attacks despite the confusion they felt toward the commands.

However, a few still didn't let out their attacks, for it was too late for them to do so.

The Dragon Emperor reacted to the attacks, attacking with his Noble Dragon spear to create many tendrils of lightning bolts that struck each and every attack that came his way.

Beyond that, he didn't retaliate.

He didn't need to.

The 8 people who had ended up attacking questioned why they were made to stop, only to get the answer from the giant stir that happened above them.

They looked up and saw the sun get blotted out by dark clouds that quickly filled them. And there, they felt something great, something terrifying stir.

They had only a moment to see a flash of light before 8 gigantic purple bolts of lightning fell from heaven, striking each one of them precisely.

They did not even have the time to defend themselves.

The force of the lightning bolt forced many people to move far away, as the shockwave from the strike alone made many of them cough up blood immediately.

When the light was gone, all that remained were 8 different charred bodies belonging to the 8 people who had attacked.

The ones that had stopped their attacks could only shiver at the thought of the same happening to them as well.

"What... what happened?"

"What is going on?"

"Why were they attacked?"

Many of the people were unaware of the phenomenon that had occurred before their eyes. The ones that did understand did not look at the 8 dead bodies, but rather toward the Dragon Emperor, looking at him in an entirely new light now.

"He's doing it," one of the ancestors spoke out loud. "He's really doing it."

"After 10 thousand years..." another one said, disbelieving what he saw.

"What is going on, ancestor?" a few of the younger cultivators asked, the situation unclear to them. "What is the emperor doing?"

"He..." The ancestors looked to the sky where the dark clouds crackled to lightning, glowing sections of the sky in bright purple.

"He is entering Immortal Tribulation," they answered.

"The Dragon Emperor is going to break through to Immortality."

Alex and Hannah were the only ones of the present group that were both present for an Immortal ascendance as well and were strong enough to sense its incoming.

Had Zhou Linfan still been present, he might've sensed it as well. Yan Yating, who had the same cultivation base as Zhou Linfan, had unfortunately never seen someone try and break through to Immortality before, so he wasn't able to tell the early signs of the tribulation beginning as well.

"Alex, what do we do?" Hannah asked. "He's going to start breaking through to Immortality."

Alex didn't know what to say. Whatever was happening now had been his worst-case scenario, and it was for this very scenario that he had prepared the False Immortal pill.

However, he could tell that he had not been prepared enough, for the pill had been spent and the worst-case scenario was only just coming up.

"Do not attack him, anyone. Do not show aggression toward the Emperor or you will be struck by the heaven," Alex shouted for everyone to hear. This one point was something he didn't have to say. Everyone with half a brain had already known what would've happened.

"The tribulation lightning bolts will be strong. Far stronger than any of the Immortal attacks you saw or faced. Move away lest you wish to get hurt by the shockwave upon impact."

Everyone that was standing around immediately started moving away. They had to move at least a few kilometers away, placing them nearly toward the center of the city, away from the Dragon Emperor who flew close above the palace.

By now, even the palace had evacuated long ago, so nobody remained in the area.

"How did he fight his Inner Demon so quickly?" Pearl asked as they all flew far away.

"He has been prepared for this day for ages to come. He has had a long time to prepare his psyche for the breakthrough to the Immortal realm. Perhaps that is why he was able to complete it so quickly," Alex said.

That was the only way Alex could see that it was possible.

"Alex, what do we do? This is bad," Hannah asked in a worried voice. There was a hint of fear in her voice that Alex was afraid would show in his own voice.

"The only thing we can do is pray that he fails, isn't it?" Alex asked. What else was there that they could do?

"We need to evacuate this place. If he breaks through to Immortality, we are doomed," Graham said. "We can make it outside the continent and ask for Scarlet or Pearl's great-

grandfather to come help us. They will be strong enough to beat him, so he won't dare follow us."

Alex nodded.

"Yes, that should be our first course of action," he said. He looked at the Intercontinental teleportation formation that was near where the Emperor was breaking through.

It was unfortunate, but they couldn't use that at all.

"Tell everyone to move out of the Eastern Continent right now," Alex ordered. That was the only way everyone was going to survive this day.

Chapter 1823 Dilemma

﻿﻿Upon Alex's orders, the ship began moving out immediately. They wasted no time and left the capital, flying toward the eastern ocean.

The ship carried with it everyone injured and weak. As for the remaining people, they began flying themselves.

The beasts as well as the others that were from the Eastern Continent began flying back toward their home, perhaps to hide there or to take away their family and go hide.

As everyone began leaving, Alex, Hannah, and the rest were the last ones to leave.

lightsΝοvεl ƈοm Hannah looked toward Long Huan and her mother and helped them move from the area. As she did, she turned out to look back toward Alex who kept staring toward the Dragon Emperor who was ready for the first bolt of lightning.

Pearl was beside him, looking toward the Dragon Emperor all the same.

"Alex?" Hannah called out to him, confused. "What are you doing? We need to leave."

"Should I?" he asked, his voice unfocused.He continued staring toward the Dragon Emperor.

"What are you talking about? We need to leave," Hannah said.

"Al, come on. We should hurry," Liz said.

Alex finally turned around. "If we leave, if I leave, it's all over," he said. "I can't let it be over just like that."

"King Alex," Yan Yating looked at Alex. "We must leave now. Whether he fails or not, we will figure it out once we are safe. We need to hide and reassess our situation before returning."

Alex shook his head. "There is no reassessing happening. There is no second chance here. This is it," he said. "If we don't finish what we came here for today, we will never get that chance again."

"Surely that's not…"

Yan Yating wanted to argue about it, but he knew just as well as anyone else that what Alex was saying was the truth.

Alex turned to look toward his family. "If we leave now, he won't come after us. He is too scared of the other immortals. Instead, he will leave this world immediately and go to an Immortal world that we would have no idea about. He would forever escape from our grasp."

He looked at each person that remained in their eyes. "This man has done so much to us all. Put us through so much hurt and sadness. We cannot let him leave just like that, not after everything we sacrificed to get to this moment."

"We owe it to every single person that died today that we finish what we started," Alex said. "We owe it to them that the Dragon Emperor die today. Whether that is before he becomes an Immortal, during that, or after it."

The first of the lightning bolts fell down the Emperor who casually destroyed it with his own lightning bolts. The two attacks clashing together sent out powerful gusts of wind throughout the surroundings that threatened to whip them away with it.

Hannah stood before the weaker ones of the group and stopped the force from affecting them.

"Brother," Pearl spoke at that moment. "It is true that I wish to see him dead for everyone he killed, but I do not wish to see you die because of that. We have lost those who died to him, but we cannot lose more in revenge if revenge is impossible."

Alex nodded. "I understand that more than anyone," he said. "That is why I sent away everybody. But there has to be something we can do."

"What is that?" she asked. "Attack him before he breakthrough?"New n0vel chapters are published on

"No," Alex said immediately. "That will only make us a target for the heavens. Now that his breakthrough has started, it will only end when he either fails, stops, or succeeds."

If the Dragon Emperor failed, he would then be too weak to survive any person in their group, that was if he survived failure itself.

If he instead had some artifact or talisman to hide from the heavens, like how Xue Kuangren did, he would still be lacking Qi and be wounded in the immediate second. There was no way he would stop the breakthrough unless he was entirely wounded.

In that case, too, Alex and the group had an almost guaranteed chance of victory.

However, that was not what any of them thought was going to happen. Failure or abeyance of the breakthrough was out of the question in their mind as the Dragon Emperor had been planning for this for thousands of years at this point.

As such, what they all believed they had to deal with was none but an Immortal Dragon Emperor at the end of it all.

"How are we going to beat him when he becomes an Immortal?" Hannah asked. "Fighting him at that point would be just asking for death."

"I know," Alex said, his mind already rushing through the many ways he could find ways to defeat the Dragon Emperor using all the resources he had at his disposal.

He had already used the Mirror of Barren Truth and the White Tiger's protection on him had been used as well. There were no defensive techniques on him and that made the situation all the more dangerous.

Not to mention, he had sent the ship away. He had to do it so everyone could survive. However, in doing so, he had lessened himself of another advantage he had for himself.

He could no longer use the Hell Emperor's formation to give himself or anyone fighting on their side a boost in strength.

With such disadvantages, Alex still didn't see any way he could defeat the man at all.

Even his cultivation base only put him around Saint Transformation 9th realm, making him stand before the giant gap that would be between the Saint realm and the Immortal realm.

Even with the arrays, he wouldn't be able to bridge that gap.

"But…" a thought came to Alex. "What if I break through as well?"

It was a simple thought that he would've come across sooner or later. Alex's first instinct was to ignore the thought. That was a thought he had for a long time now, ever since he reached the peak of the Saint Soul realm.

To break through to the other realm would come with a burst of power that would be quite handy for him, but at the same time, it came with a possibility of failure, which was why Alex had chosen to ignore this pathway for a safer one.

There was simply too much riding on the success of this war that he couldn't allow for a chance of failure due to his own cultivation base regressing at an unfortunate moment.

However, at this moment, the consequence of remaining where he was and the consequence of failing brought absolutely no changes in their situation.

What did make a change was success. If he broke through, there was a chance he would reach a strength where he could fight against the Dragon Emperor without worrying about instantly dying.

Without reaching the next realm, Alex wasn't sure how much stronger he would be. But he had to take the chance, the leap of faith.

It was now or never.

As the 2nd bolt of the tribulation lightning fell from the sky, brightening the entire world in its purple glow, Alex knew what he must do.

He had to break through to the Saint Transformation realm.

Chapter 1824 Only Chance

The thought was like a worm, digging into his brain, refusing to move out no matter how much Alex tried to force it.

He had to break through. That was the only chance he had at surviving this all.

"I will break through," Alex said immediately and turned to look at every one. "I will try and break through right now. If I can, we might have a shot at this."

"What?" Hannah asked. "Now?"

Alex nodded.

Liz flew in close. "You are trying to break through? Now?" she asked with a worried look.

"No time to talk," Alex said and immediately flew down to the ground where he began preparing a spot where he could cultivate and breakthrough.

As he did, Hannah landed by him. "Should I try and breakthrough too?" she asked. "If I can breakthrough..."

Alex looked at her. "You don't have any Dao," he said.

"No, but what if I don't need it?" she asked. "I've never needed anything to break through. I just... did."

Alex paused. "But it still took you time, didn't it?" he asked.

"Oh yeah, it took me time for the breakthrough process itself," she said. "But that should be the same for you too."

"Then is your cultivation base ready for a breakthrough?" he asked. "If it was, you should have broken through by now."

"I..." Hannah didn't have an answer to that. Her body hadn't yet told her that she was ready to break through.

Was that because she had still time to stabilize her body before pushing toward a breakthrough, or because she had yet to learn a Dao, she was unclear.

"Don't try to force your breakthrough," Alex said and heard the third bolt of lightning fall from the sky. "Besides, breaking through would mean fighting that, and you don't even have half of your Qi with you right now. It would take your body enough time to gather that."

Hannah sighed. "Fine, I won't break through," she said. "Sit down and begin. I'll protect your area from any outside interference."

"Thank you," Alex said and started settling himself in the circle.

Liz landed right next to them, quickly arriving to their side. "You won't have the time to break through on your own," she said. "Let me aid you. Failure or success, it would be better if you did it quickly."

"Ah, that would be very helpful," Alex said. "Thank you, Aunt Liz."

"Wait," Hannah quickly said. "But if you begin breaking through within slowed time, won't that hamper your Qi gathering rate?"

Alex pulled out a monster core from his Soul Space. "I won't have to worry about Qi," he said and ate the core.

As the core dissolved in his stomach, Alex slowly lost himself to the core's spirit and stopped interacting with the outside world.

As soon as Liz noticed that, she used her Dao of Time Stagnation to speed up everything around Alex such that everything else to him would appear as though it had been slowed to a crawl.

Hannah watched him and saw his body seemingly vibrate from the outside perspective and opened his eyes just as quickly.

'So fast,' she thought. She knew it was supposed to take Alex some time to deal with the monster that appeared in his mind. For him to destroy it and reappear meant that he had dealt with it instantly thanks to her mother's time bubble.

Another lightning bolt fell behind her and she turned around, watching the Emperor deal with that one as well.

4 out of the 9 lightning bolts had fallen onto him and had been dealt with. Now, Alex had just enough time until the Dragon Emperor dealt with 5 more bolts and a few more based on how many Daos he knew.

Hannah could only wonder if that would be enough time for Alex to break through.

As she thought, she sat down as well, calming her body and mind as she began cultivating as well. Her method of cultivation was very simple. All she had to do was want to cultivate, and her body would facilitate it.

This would do nothing for her to break through, but that would let her gather a bit more Qi, and in that time, maybe allow her to gain a bit of her Immortal Qi back.

Was that helpful at all? She didn't know. But there was nothing else she could do more than that.

* * * * *

Many of the people who had been flying away chose to return to the war-torn battlefield where a few of their leaders still stood.

Many of them were soldiers and oathbreakers, but there were a few beasts in there as well who wished to be by their young lord's side.

The golden lion of all was the one that flew to Pearl as soon as he could, and senior Yao was by his side the entire time.

Graham flew back as well, carrying with him Zhou Linfan who had refused to run away as he was already on death's door. If nothing, he wanted to see what happened to the Dragon Emperor to the end.

He did not want to die without knowing what happened to him.

Graham saw Hannah standing in front of a small barrier where Alex cultivated, standing next to whom was Liz. He did not know what was happening there, but he understood he couldn't disturb them.

So, he flew up to the elders that had remained behind there as well.

"What is he doing here? He will die," Qiu Jianhong said when he saw the feeble body of Zhou Linfan that Graham carried in his arms.

"He insisted that he come here since he was going to die either way," he said. "I couldn't let him die without giving him his final wish."

Qiu Jianhong wanted to say something but restrained himself. "I suppose that is fine," he said instead. "I would've done something in the same situation."

There was a tone of relenting in his voice, which Graham could tell the source of.

In coming for revenge on one of his closest friends, he had lost 4 more. This was a devastating time for him and his fellow friends, who didn't even have the time to mourn for those who had passed in this war.

Qiu Jianhong had most likely wondered what his friends would've wanted and wondered if they would choose to do the same thing had they been given the chance. They most likely would have.

"His Majesty is trying to break through," Liang Shufen explained the situation to him.

Graham didn't know whether that was a wise choice or not, but since they had already begun doing it, there was nothing he could do.

He saw the bright light from the lightning strike and heard the sound a few seconds later that came along with a strong gust of wind.

Three of the five remaining elders moved to stop the force from hitting the dying Zhou Linfan who stared at the Dragon Emperor far away.

He could not see him, but he knew him to be there.

'Fail,' Zhou Linfan thought. 'Fail, you evil bastard.'

Zhou Linfan began crying but his body was devoid of most fluid to even produce any tears. He could only remain there, supported by others, constantly cursing at the Dragon Emperor so that he failed.

Chapter 1825 Why I Must Fight

"You know you are going to die, right?"

Alex heard a voice speaking to him from all directions and yet a specific place all at once.

He tried to look for the source of the voice, but his eyes wouldn't open. He tried to sense it, but he found that he lacked spiritual sense.

"Failure is inevitable. Death is inevitable," the voice said. "Why fear the inevitable? Welcome it as though it were your lifelong friend. Once you accept the inevitable, there will be nothing to fear."

Alex heard the voice again. It echoed from every direction he tried to focus on. Who was speaking? And why was the voice so familiar?

Alex had a feeling he had heard this voice before, a long time ago. And yet, he also had a feeling that he heard this voice every single day. Every single waking moment, he would hear this voice.

Just what was going on?

"Just give up. Give up and be free from all burden," the voice said.

Give up?

Why was this voice telling him to give up? Should he give up? Giving up felt so easy.

"No," Alex said out loud.

Why? Why did he refuse to give up? Alex couldn't understand, but something told him that he had to refuse this. He could not give up.

Give up on what exactly? He was not sure.

"You know what you must do right now. It is not too late. Take your family and your people and leave right now. If you do, you will survive. If not, everyone you know and love will die."

"You know what to do."

I know what to do.

Alex had a faint idea of what he must do. If he left right now... if he left... leave where?

'The Eastern Continent,' he thought. A piece of the puzzle was solved. If he left the Eastern Continent he would... be...

Memories were hard to touch for him at the moment. He wanted to remember, but something blocked every attempt at the moment.

He would be... free? Was that it? Free. Free of what?

'Immortal.' The thought came to Alex almost naturally.

What immortal?

He heard a distant thunder. He saw a flash of bright light.

'Lightning?' he thought and another word came to his mind. 'Tribulation lightning.'

Just as quickly, the rest of the information flowed right through to him.

'Immortal breakthrough,' he thought. 'The Dragon Emperor.'

"The Dragon Emperor is breaking through to the Immortal realm," he said as he finally remembered what was happening.

"Yes!" the voice replied. "You understand what is going on. Then you must understand what you must do as well. Run away."

"Run away?" Alex asked. "I cannot. I should not. I have to—"

"Fight?" the voice asked. "And die? And kill all your family and friends along just for that?"

"I must fight," Alex said.

"Why?" the voice asked.

"For revenge. For what the Dragon Emperor has done to us," Alex said.

"What has he done to you?" the voice asked.

Memories were more clear now, crisper. As though whatever was stopping him from viewing these memories wanted him to see them now.

He remembered the horrifying state his sister was in. He saw the state in which Pearl's mother died right in front of him. He saw how Yao Ning had her body destroyed right in front of him.

"A lot of things," Alex said. He was about to list them out when the voice spoke again.

"Your sister? The Dragon Emperor did that to her. That was not something he did to you," the voice said. "Pearl's mother? Again, that is not you."

"He killed Yao Ning right in front of me, and I was crippled by him just after that," Alex retorted.

"Yao Ning was killed, yes. But you were simply wounded. Crippled? With your Undying physique, who could cripple you? You came back so easily, didn't you?"

"You have no need to kill yourself just to get revenge for somebody else."

'This person does not know what he is saying,' Alex thought. 'It doesn't understand why I must fight.'

"Oh I do understand," the voice remarked. "For honor, is it not? For glory. To tell the world that you killed the Dragon Emperor, the man hailed as the strongest human in the entire world."

"You just want your name to spread. That is it. You do not wish for revenge. You do not wish for justice. You're not in it for the reasons you claim you are. All you want is to appear righteous while you kill a person deemed the strongest."

Alex paused after hearing those words. 'No,' he thought. 'That's not why I'm doing it, right? I'm doing it for my sister, for Pearl, for Yao Ning. Not for... not for...'

The words were getting to him. He started to doubt the reason he had come to the Eastern Continent

For dozens of years, he had heard about the Dragon Emperor. The man who ruled the Eastern Continent. The man who led a war against the Western Continent. The only man to have survived for nearly 10 thousand years as a saint without reaching the end of his life.

The Dragon Emperor was an iconic figure in the world. Perhaps the greatest person to have ever lived here besides the Immortals. He was a legend.

Was he here to destroy that legend? Was he here to kill the Dragon Emperor and make a legend of his own? Become an icon of power in the world just like the Dragon Emperor.

Alex started to fear that deep down in his heart, that might have been the case. He had never thought about it, but what if that was the truth?

What if revenge and justice were words he used to blind others into giving up their lives for him, while all he ever wanted was to best the best?

"No," Alex said in a fervent tone. "That is not it. That is not why I waged this war. That is not why I fight this impossible fight."

"Then why do you fight?" the voice asked.

"I fight because this is the right thing to do. I fight because if I don't, more will suffer in the same way everyone else has in the past. I fight because the crimes of the Dragon Emperor are too big to leave him alone."

"I fight because if I don't, who will?"

His voice came out as a roar that spread in all directions at once, echoing all throughout the vacant space of his mind.

He had come to understand just what was happening finally. He was dealing with his Inner Demon.

This was perhaps the first time it had taken him this long to realize he was dealing with an Inner Demon. He had not been prepared for it this time as he had in the past.

'I am going through a breakthrough,' Alex thought. 'I don't have time. I must hurry up.'

Of course, knowing that he was dealing with an Inner Demon wasn't going to help him much at all. That was just how it was.

"So you have told me why you fight this battle," the Inner Demon spoke. "Then tell me, is this a fight you can win?"

Chapter 1826 I Can Win

Is this a battle you can win?

The Inner Demon had hit Alex where it hurt the most. From the very beginning, the chance of victory had been ridiculously low. However, he had still come all this way for Hannah, for Pearl, for Yao Ning.

In fact, the entirety of the battle depended on Hannah and Zhou Linfan. He had never been part of any sort of planning where he was the one that would beat the Dragon Emperor.

At the very least, he would be someone who would keep the Dragon Emperor busy while the others killed them. Due to his teleportation powers, it became somewhat safe for him to engage the Dragon Emperor, which was why he had even chosen to do something like that at all.

In the case that the others could not do it, he had prepared the pill that he would eat and deal with him.

Now, the people who were supposed to beat the man had failed to do so, and the pill he had prepared had failed to serve its purpose.

And the worst of it all, the Dragon Emperor was only going to get stronger now after all of their planning had failed.

What was the last resort here? Why had he chosen to fight his unwinnable war?

'I should be able to win,' Alex thought. He didn't have much expectations, but he had hope. Not in himself, perhaps, but he had hope.

"You will win against an Immortal?" the voice asked. "Do you know how strong an Immortal is? How powerful they can be?"

The voice paused, allowing Alex to answer.

But there was nothing Alex could say.

How strong was an Immortal? Well, the truth was he did not know. He knew they were strong, very strong. But the peak of their strength was not something he was clear about.

In fact, there was no way for him to know just how strong an Immortal was as none of the Immortals he knew had ever gone all out.

They never had to.

They were just that strong.

And now, was he going to fight someone like that? And he intended to win on top of that?

Fear crept in through Alex, just as the Inner Demon wanted him to.

There was a side of Alex that knew he was dealing with an Inner Demon and that he should not fall into its traps. And yet, there was a side to him, a much larger one that simply did not care at the moment.

It did not matter to him that he was dealing with an Inner Demon as the threat it posed on him took all of his focus away from it.

From time to time, Alex even forgot he was in this situation because of an Inner Demon.

'How can I win against an Immortal?' Alex thought. The question kept going through his mind over and over and over. Each time he thought of it, he thought of an answer to it.

Each time he thought of an answer, he realized immediately how stupid that answer was and how it would not work at all.

An array was not the answer. A subsequent breakthrough was not the answer. His Blood aura was not the answer. His Dao was not the answer. His mental strength was not the answer. His Body cultivation was not the answer.

Was his Qi an answer then?

That thought let Alex ponder for a bit. He focused as much as he could on his thoughts, ignoring the feeling of dread. The moment he gave in to those feelings, he knew that he would lose to the Inner Demon.

That was the moment he would fail the breakthrough, and most likely go through a Qi deviation. He could not allow himself that at the moment.

'Think, think, think.'

It became a chanting in his mind as he tried to answer the question that brought the fear.

How could he beat an Immortal Dragon Emperor?

'Qi,' Alex thought, returning back to the possible answer after going through so many other answers. Could he do it through his Qi?

His Qi made him stronger than he was by nearly 9 realms. At Saint Transformation 1st realm, it would make him 9 realms stronger.

Unfortunately, that wasn't how it worked at the chasm between two major realms.

The chasm between two minor realms and two major realms was inconceivable. Just because Alex was stronger than Saint Transformation 9th realm, did not mean that he had the strength of an Immortal.

He lay somewhere within the vast chasm between the two realms, and as such, despite breaking through to the next realm, he would not reach the Immortal realm with his strength.

He would have to be at least in the Saint Transformation 3rd or 4th realm to properly contend with someone who had just become an Immortal.

At least, that was his experience from before he had reached the Saint realm.

If that was the case then, how was he supposed to bridge the gap if he did manage to break through?

Was there a chance? Or was this all leading up to a failure nonetheless?

"It's a good idea to cut your losses and run," the voice spoke to him. "You cannot win this. Not with your Qi, not with your Dao, not with your blood. No amount of strength you conjure can match the Dragon Emperor."

"No, it can't," Alex said in a toneless voice.

"That's right," the voice said. "There is no path to victory. Only to death."

"I can't win," Alex said. The truth began to settle. "I can't win"

"Yes," the voice said. "You understand finally."

"I can't win..." Alex said once more. "On my own."

It was such a simple revelation, something he would've thought of the moment he came across the problem had he not been drowned with doubt and fear by the Inner Demon.

"I can't win on my own," Alex said. "I will need all the help I can get, whether that means using all of what I can do, or if I have to get help from the outside."

"You will still lose," the voice said.

"No, I will win," Alex said. "I must."

"There is no guarantee of that," the voice said.

"I do not need one," Alex said, confident in his own thoughts. "I know what I'm doing. I know why I must fight, so I will continue the fight."

"I was worried for a second that I would stand no chance against him, but that is not true. I can fight him. I'm certain that I can even win him under certain conditions."

"I can never know if I can win if I never fight him," Alex said. "There is no stopping now. I can only keep moving forward."

Alex did not need to listen to the voice again. He did not need to hear it say another word, for he knew that he had defeated the Inner Demon with his words.

He simply understood it as he slowly came out of the trance he had been, unknown about the time that had passed.

Without a moment's waiting, Alex continued with what he was doing, moving toward the breakthrough.

Chapter 1827 The Emperor's Breakthrough

Hannah sensed the moment Alex came out of the trance he had fallen into. She felt a hint of relief deep inside her when she sensed that as that told her that Alex had beaten his Inner Demon.

That was the most troubling part of Alex's cultivation every time, so the fact that he managed to succeed meant that as long as nothing from the outside affected him, he was going to break through to the next realm.

At any other time, this would've been a lot more than just a simple hint of joy. It would have been a profound sense of happiness.

However, at this moment, with what she saw before her, she found it hard to be very happy.

The lightning bolt fell from the sky and the Dragon Emperor fought through it. He was beaten and somewhat wounded, but he stood victorious against the tribulation lightning bolt.

He had successfully survived all 9 tribulation lightning.

'Why did you take so long, Alex?' Hannah worried. 'Are you going to make it in time at all?'

* * * * * *

The Dragon Emperor took a deep breath, ignoring the burning ache that emanated all throughout his muscles, deep into his bones. How long had it been since he had felt the pain of this level?

Even when he lost his arm or when he was nearly cut in half, the pain was not like this.

There was a special pain to this tribulation lightning that was a product of the pain itself, the tiredness he felt, and the significant lack of Qi he had in him.

Each time he protected himself from the bolt of lightning, his Qi got stronger, but in that same process, they became less as well.

As time went on, by the time he was done dealing with all 9 lightning bolts he knew would fall during this tribulation, there were only a few more attacks he could do with the remaining Qi.

The Dragon Emperor didn't eat a pill to heal or to gain his Qi back. He had a feeling that if he did that right now, the lightning tribulation would get harder all of a sudden to compromise for him using external means.

He could only do this with what he started with.

He took another deep breath and held onto his Noble Dragon spear tightly, feeling his regular Qi which was now nearly as powerful as his Immortal Qi, as it surged through him into the spear.

Bright sparks of lightning bolts forked out from the spear.

The Dragon Emperor had noticed long ago that Alex and the rest had remained to fight him. He wanted to kill them all right now if he could, but he couldn't let his focus switch from this moment.

He had to give his all for the next bolt of lightning that came down.

The sky crackled and shot another lightning bolt. This time, it held within it an aura of Wood energy, shooting down from the sky with an unimaginable power.

The Dragon Emperor shot back his bolt of lightning, shooting at it with an attack mixed with his Dao of lightning and Spear aura.

The attack burst the sky with bright light, exploding the air with a large shockwave that sent out a force that shook the very ground.

The Dragon Emperor felt the aura of the heavens fall on him again, the dao of Wood emanating from it. At the same time, he felt the Qi in his body reduce and become stronger.

'How many more?' the Dragon Emperor wondered. There were 2 more Dao lightning to go through. He hoped that he had enough Qi to fight against those 2 attacks.

He prepared once again and the next lightning bolt formed. This one was for the Dao of Lightning itself.

The Dragon Emperor felt a little more confident. This was the Dao he used the most and knew the most, so he feared it would be the strongest for some reason.

He only knew Dao Lightnings were as strong as the Dao one understood, so that was what he assumed it to be.

The bolt of lightning fell and the Dragon Emperor launched his attack at the same time, leaving enough Qi for one more attack.

The lightning bolt took the form of a dragon as it flew toward the incoming bolt of Dao lightning.

The glowing dragon struck the incoming Dao lightning, and the crash let out a roar that shook the ground once again.

The Dragon Emperor felt the direct force of the rebound and stumbled to the ground, being forced to prop himself up with his hand.

He took heavy breaths, his chest heaving violently as he took in mouthful of air into his lung at every moment. His ears rang from the clash and he had to shake his head to keep himself from only hearing it forever.

He pulled himself up by his spear, slowly getting himself back into the moment. It wasn't over just yet, he couldn't let himself falter like this.

He checked the Qi in his body. It was very, very low.

However, it would be enough for just one more attack.

'Here goes nothing,' the Dragon Emperor thought and poured all of his Qi into this one attack.

The sky roared with thunder as the heavens prepared the final attack to send down on the Dragon Emperor.

Space aura filled the sky, the Dao of Space Expansion being woven into the next attack.

'Is this my strongest Dao then?' the Dragon Emperor wondered.

All of the remainder of his Qi flowed into his Spear, not a single bit remaining on his body to protect himself from the rebound. He had no choice but to do just that.

Long Tiankong looked at the sky and waited. When the lightning bolt fell from the sky, he let out his attack as well.

His attack roared as it flew to the sky, directly on the path to attack the falling lightning bolt. The two attacks struck each other, and momentarily, the Dragon Emperor lost all sense of self and person.

Then the loudest sound he had ever heard came from the clash, shaking the entire continent because of it. The Dragon Emperor felt himself pushed back by the force, immediately being flung away like a broken kite.

He skidded along the ground for nearly 200 meters before being stopped by the walls of a building. He was beaten and bloodied and in a hell of a lot of pain.

However, even through all that, the Dragon Emperor grinned. He ignored his pain, the black spots that swam in his vision, he ignored the constantly ringing eardrums.

All he did was focus on the very moment in front of him. He had done it, finally.

After 10 thousand years, after millennia of waiting for this one moment, he did it.

He closed his eyes and ignored what happened in the sky next. He could feel a strong aura gathering, enough to kill him, but he knew nothing would be happening to him at this very moment.

The Dragon Emperor simply remained there like a broken ragdoll until the moment he could feel what happened next.

He had stepped into the Immortal realm, and there would be the merging of body and soul for him to fully enter it.

Chapter 1828 Staying Behind

Yan Yating stared in awe at the tumultuous aura that fell from heaven, directly onto the Dragon Emperor. He watched as the Dragon Emperor pulled himself out of the rubble and sat down to cultivate in the aura.

"Did he... did he do it?" he asked, somewhat unsure about the current situation. He had never seen or read about any Immortal breakthroughs, so he was unclear on a few of its aspects.

"He did it," one of Alex's elders who were standing next to him said.

Yan Yating turned around to see that it was Ren Guanting who had spoken. "Is this it then?" he asked. "Is he an Immortal now?"

"Pretty much," she said. "He has entered the Immortal realm. All he has to do now is cultivate for a few more minutes to gain back all the Qi he expended while breaking through."

Her words were a grim reminder of the truth of the situation for anyone who hoped it to be something else.

"We have to go then," Yan Yating said. "If he did breakthrough, then we are doomed. We must go and hide. He certainly can't stay in this world for long."

He started to move and looked toward the people that were part of the Oathbreakers. He was about to order them to leave along with him when he noticed that the elders had not budged at all.

"What are you doing?" he asked Alex's elders. All 5 of the elders held a grim expression on their faces, clear that they were more scared than they would care to admit. And even so, they didn't move at all.

For a moment, Yan Yating even wondered if they were all so scared that they couldn't move.

Qiu Jianhong finally turned around and looked toward Graham. He flew up to him and used his aura to take Zhou Linfan from his arms.

"We will look after him, your Highness," he said. "You should leave now. This battlefield is not something you can handle with your cultivation base."

Graham's eyes widened slightly. He looked at the elders and then down below where his son, his sister, and his niece were.

"I... I can't leave," Graham said. "Not while they all stay."

"I'm sorry, but you are not as Strong as they are. You are not as strong as we are," Qiu Jianhong said. "If we are only comparing regular Qi, then maybe you could contend with us, but with Immortal Qi in play, there is no way for you to remain here any longer."

Qiu Jianhong then looked toward the Dragon Emperor. "And things have become worse than that for you. We have an Immortal to worry about now."

Graham frowned for a moment and was about to say something when Liang Shufen spoke up.

"Your Highness, His Majesty won't be able to do anything here if he has to worry about you. I don't know what he is planning, but any plan he does have will become useless if you or anyone is taken hostage by the Emperor."

"We cannot speak for the others, but you certainly must protect yourself here. You must go," she said.

Graham took a deep breath in and then sighed. He understood what they were saying and the importance of those words. He could see that they were right, and yet the thought of leaving part of his family right here did not sit right with him.

However, what could he do here? Nothing. There was absolutely nothing he could do.

"Please take care of my family," Graham said. "Take care of yourselves too."

"We will do our best," Qiu Jianhong said and sent Graham away.

Graham activated his boots and flew away from them as fast as he could. Within moments, he was far away, becoming nothing more than a flicker of light in the distance.

Yan Yating watched the entire exchange between the elders and Graham and said, "You guys are equally as weak in front of an Immortal. Why do you guys stay?"

"Because our King still fights," Ren Guanting said. "As long as his Majesty is on the battlefield, we will remain here to help him."

"But that is a suicide," Yan Yating said. "You know that right?"

"We will happily throw away our lives if it means that His Majesty will be okay," Qiu Jianhong said.

Yan Yating watched all 5 of them hold the same expression, the same desire, the same intent. He couldn't help but be reminded of the days when he had such unwavering loyalty too.

There was a time when he would die to protect the Dragon Emperor. When he would just into the jaws of a beast because his emperor ordered him to.

Those days were gone after the incident, and he had turned into a cynical man who would only do the right thing when it served his purpose. If not, he wouldn't mind kidnapping a King from another country too.

Seeing these people, he started wondering when it was that he had changed. How come he didn't even realize that he had changed?

He turned around. "Things here will get very serious from this moment. Every other step will be death even when you're not the one walking. If you wish to, you can leave now," he gave an order to the Oathbreakers behind him.

The Oathbreakers were not the only ones there, there were other beasts, and many of the ancestors and elders from the many sects were present as well, not to mention the soldiers that had defected from the armies to join Alex's army in this battle.

They too listened to Yan Yating.

A few of them began leaving, flying away in haste as they understood the severity of the situation. Quite a few still remained, especially the Oathbreakers.

They had joined the Oathbreakers because they wanted to go against the Dragon Emperor. They couldn't go against their own beliefs at this moment.

They would stand and fight.

Yan Yating was surprised by the amount of people that had decided to stay behind. There were nearly 300 Oathbreakers and 600 soldiers from the previous tens of thousands who had chosen to remain behind to see it all to the end.

Yan Yating felt pride in all of them, seeing them be ready to face death if it meant sticking to their morals and their beliefs.

His eyes moved toward the beasts. Of them, only the weaker ones had left, and even those were only gone because they were ordered to. The rest remained behind, ready to give their life in this battle if the situation called for it.

He saw them stand around Pearl in a half circle, ready to follow his command or protect him.

Yan Yating remembered the day he was forced to attack the Azure Dragon's realm. He remembered it vividly. And in those memories was an infant white cat who had been wronged so badly.

He couldn't help but feel a sense of relief seeing that infant white cat become a massive White Tiger who would continue his father's legacy.

Then, Yan Yating felt an eruption of aura coming from behind him as the skies cleared away to give way to sunlight. And gleaming in the sun flew the only person to become an Immortal in tens of thousands of years.

The Dragon Emperor was ready to fight back.

Chapter 1829 Breaking Through

Alex felt a change in his state.

He saw the world through his inner eye, the one that belonged to his nascent soul. What he saw was a world of glowing light, a mass of Qi that filled his vision and all.

And then it began shrinking.

More accurately, he began growing. The Soul began growing.

Alex's nascent soul got larger and larger until it could no longer fit in the Dantian at all. As if a chick inside of an egg, his Nascent soul broke through the non-physical barrier that kept his soul inside the Dantian, and started growing even more.

Outside of the dantian, the world he saw was dark. But still, he could see some lights here and there, like thin glowing wires that formed latices all around the sky.

He saw the many meridians glowing all around him.

As he did, he felt a sort of connection forming between him and the meridians. He soon became aware that it wasn't just a connection between him and the meridians, but rather his entire body. He could only see the meridians, but there was everything else too for him to connect with.

Saint Transformation realm was when the Nascent soul grew out of the Dantian and started connecting with the physical body. It was the realm that was truthfully nothing more than preparation for when one would become an Immortal and fully combine their body and soul into one pure being.

Alex had begun his journey on that very thing. He had entered the Saint Transformation realm.

But, he had only just stepped into that realm. His foundation wasn't stable and if he left right now, there was a chance he could destroy everything he had worked for.

He needed a bit more time. He hoped he wasn't too late.

* * * * *

Hannah stared at the open blue sky as the worldly aura emanated vibrantly down toward where she stood. Instead of coming for her, it had come for Alex, who had just begun breaking through to the Saint Transformation 1st realm.

She was unclear at what point of the breakthrough he was in. Breakthroughs for her were much different than it was for everyone else.

Still, seeing the worldly laws told her that it wouldn't be long before he was done with it. Given that he was in a bubble of sped-up time, it wouldn't take him too long before he was done with it.

Maybe a minute or two at most.

She feared that she didn't have that time.

She stood up, bringing out Starweaver into her hand as she stared at the man who moved toward her.

The Dragon Emperor stood nearly 100 meters away from her, his Immortal power blinding everyone's senses with its glorious power.

He held a haughty appearance now, as though the world itself was beneath him at this point.

"If you move out of your way, I won't hurt you too badly," he said. "There's only so many people I fear I can kill before I'm forced out of this world."

Hannah's eyes narrowed at those words. Was he lying? Or was he confirming that he was going to be forced to leave if he did anything that the heavens deemed unsuitable for this world?

She had wondered if he would be struck by Heavenly Judgment for killing mortals, but since he was a mortal of this world, there was also a possibility that the heavens wouldn't be so cruel in its judgment and instead choose to do something else.

The Dragon Emperor's words made her more certain that was the case.

The Dragon Emperor gave a small smirk after seeing that she chose not to answer.

"I see," he said. "Then I will deal with you swiftly."

Hannah barely managed to catch his movements and struck back with her Immortal Qi at the last moment.

Her fiery slash exploded against a bolt of lightning and she felt the force of the impact smack back at her, nearly pushing her back had she not protected herself. Her eyes showed a look of fear at the fact that the Dragon Emperor's Qi had been so much stronger than she had imagined.

The Dragon Emperor was somewhat surprised as well. He hadn't expected Hannah to survive his attack. But then, she had been stronger than a regular Saint even when they were in the same realm as him, so he understood there was something special about her.

He sensed the skies to see if the attack had roused the heavens. It had not. He could go on for more.

"I will commend you on surviving that," the Dragon Emperor said. "But how much longer can you do so?"

The Dragon Emperor pointed his spear toward her and used an attack.

Tendrils of lightning bolts forked out from his spear tip, moving in all directions. However, instead of attacking everyone, it targeted just her.

The bolts of lightning were each strong enough to kill Hannah with a single strike, so she had to act immediately to protect herself.

They staggered as they arrived, giving her just enough time to fight back.

Hannah improved her defense with the Jade Body technique and then started using fire attacks all around her to protect herself.

She struck two lightning bolts on the left, before attacking the one on the right.

She stabbed the one that came from above her and then created a Swirling Water shield to protect herself from two more from the right.

She barely managed to slice at the one that came for her from below her, but because of that, she was struck by the one of the ones that came from above.

Hannah cried out in pain, feeling the burning on her skin when it had struck. She quickly fought back two more before another one hit her.

Hannah was continuously pushed back, one after another, but she remained there, fighting back. She wasn't wounded so badly that she couldn't retaliate, but it was slowly getting to that point.

A barrage of attacks struck more of the lightning bolts that made her way, destroying them as they came. Hannah still felt the force of the attack even after it was destroyed, but it was not enough to wound her.

Hannah moved a few steps back to gather herself and looked at the colorful motes of light in the sky where everything had crashed into each other.

She sensed the elders and many of the Saints that had remained behind attacking the Dragon Emperor, destroying his attacks.

Thousands of attacks were used to fight just a single person.

The Dragon Emperor stood untouched by the attacks and simply smiled.

"If you all wish to fight me, I shall let you join," he said and pointed his spear toward the sky. Everyone prepared for his attack, but nothing came from him.

Even so, everyone felt the hair on the skin stand on its end. Their hair slowly began lifting up on its own, as if attracted by something.

They looked up and as they did, they realized what was happening.

Hundreds of thousands of bolts of lightning rained down from the sky upon the Dragon Emperor's command, attacking every single person who had chosen to remain behind.

He was single-handedly going to destroy everyone on the battlefield.

Chapter 1830 Hannah’s Last Stand

People fought to defend themselves from the many bolts of lightning that fell down from the sky and managed to do so barely at the expense of what little Immortal Qi they had left.

They also protected those who would have otherwise died on the onslaught and fought back against every bolt of lightning that fell from the sky.

The elders and Yan Yating protected Zhou Linfan and Long Huan who had remained behind, the stronger soldiers protected the weaker ones, and the beasts protected the weaker beasts.

Pearl was protected by both his uncle and Senior Yao.

Hannah moved to protect her mother and Alex, fending off every bolt of lightning that rained down from the sky.

By the time the lightning rain came to a stop, every single person who was strong enough to mess with the Dragon Emperor was in shambles.

They were low on their Immortal Qi and without much means to protect even themselves if they needed to.

The Dragon Emperor frowned a little as he saw the situation. He had intended for the attack he did to be weak. Not only was a stronger attack going to force him to use a lot of Intent, but it would also kill a bunch of people, which was not something he wanted to do before he could get to Alex.

Still, he had expected some to die, and seeing everyone alive made him feel unhappy.

'Is this the extent of how powerful attacks can be in this realm?' the Dragon Emperor thought. 'Perhaps there is a limit to how strong I can make the attacks using nothing but Intent and Dao.'

In the end, he had to rely on his own Qi if he wanted strength in this world, it seemed. He felt the Qi inside of him and sighed, knowing that he had no means to get his Immortal Qi back once he spent in on this world.

At that point, he could only leave this world and go on to the new one.

'That's alright,' he thought. 'This is plenty.'

He pointed his spear toward Hannah and launched another attack.

Hannah was beaten and tired from all the previous attacks, but she still fought to defend herself. Because if she fell here, her mother and Alex would die, along with everyone else.

She had to continue fighting.

Hannah poured everything she had remaining into her attacks, going into what to her felt like a long battle ahead.

Attack after attack, Hannah was pushed back during the fight, never truly losing but always coming up short during the battle.

The Dragon Emperor continued without much bother, throwing one attack after another, keeping Hannah on her feet until the moment she could no longer fight.

It had to be said that Hannah was doing much better than he could have imagined her to do. If he wasn't using Dao or Spear Qi in his attacks, she maybe would've had a chance to stand toe to toe with him in this battle, perhaps even overcome him.

Alas, she was too new to battle, too new to cultivation itself. And that was the reason she was going to lose today.

No one else dared come between their fights, so the Dragon Emperor was free to deal with her all on his own.

His target in the end was still Alex. So long as he could get to him and get all the things that he owned, he need not spend a single second more killing anyone else.

None of these people mattered to him in the end.

The Dragon Emperor continued striking back, pushing Hannah right back against Alex. She was bloodied and tattered and on her last leg, and yet she still fought.

He smiled and used a stronger attack.

Hannah enlarged Starweaver, striking at the incoming attack with all the remaining Immortal Qi she had, but that was useless in the end.

The remainder of the lightning attack struck her in the chest, sending her fly past the other two on the ground, as she stumbled through the ground a long time before coming to a stop.

Hannah grunted out in pain, feeling the world grow numb all around her, her mind failing to remain awake. She tried to stand up, to reach for her mother and Alex, but she was too wounded.

All she could do was grunt in pain as she remained on the ground, still.

The Dragon Emperor looked at the people in the sky, a silent crowd staring at him from the distance, none daring to move before him.

Many of them wanted to run toward Hannah, but every single one of them feared his spear. Standing out at the moment, when they were so low on Qi meant death to most of them.

The Dragon Emperor scoffed at their cowardice and moved his eyes toward Alex who still remained on the ground with his eyes closed.

Liz looked at him from behind him, her eyes red with fury as she glared toward him.

The Dragon Emperor remembered her. She was the one who had helped set up the teleportation formation and then was saved by the White Tiger's power.

He hated remembering that. Even after his prophecies had all come and passed, he still hated the White Tigers.

He pointed toward her and let out an attack.

* * * * * *

Liz saw the Dragon Emperor ever so slowly raise his spear and knew he would attack her and Alex at any moment. She looked down at her nephew and saw that he still needed quite some time to finish his cultivation after his breakthrough.

There was no time for that at the moment.

She needed to give him that time.

She wished she knew how to stop time itself, to put the entire world on hold while she alone moved.

But alas, she understood the impossibility of that task. She understood that there was no such thing as stopping time.

What there was, though, was the fact that one could slow down time so much that it would be nigh indistinguishable from stopped time.

And so she acted.

Her mind was put to the test as she burned every single Intent that was in her body, pouring every scrap of mental strength she still held inside of her into this one Dao.

Even as the Dragon Emperor pointed the spear, he seemed to be frozen in time. Everything was frozen in time, all but herself and Alex.

Liz felt her mind melt because of the burden that had come upon her. She had used the Dao of Temporal Stagnation to the most she could, to the most she ever had, and then held it there.

Her mind was a battlefield where the only one winning was pain, but she still held onto her wits. She held onto her wits for just long enough to give Alex the time he needed.

And as Alex opened his eyes, done with his cultivation, she knew she had done what she needed to do.

"Fight..." She wished to say more to him, but her mind gave out on her in the end and she slipped into unconsciousness.

At the same time, the bubble of nearly stopped time came to an end, and the world moved once again.

The Dragon Emperor's attack launched and it came toward Alex.

Chapter 1831 Never Alone

Alex took in the world as he opened his eyes and saw what was before him. Even as the bubble of slowed time came to an end, he could see the Dragon Emperor launch his bolt of lightning that came for him at an impossibly fast speed.

It was simply too quick for him to do anything else but teleport away. If he remained, the strength of the lightning bolt would have been sure to kill him.

However, at the moment it wasn't just himself he could think about. Liz, who had fallen unconscious behind him, would die as soon as he teleported away.

Whatever split second Alex had to make a decision ended up being not enough for him to make a good one. All he could do at that moment was hope he didn't die from the attack, and hope that protected his aunt somehow.

He belatedly began using his Qi to strengthen his body while knowing it was useless when suddenly something appeared in a flash in front of him.

Pearl teleported between him and the bolt of lightning, standing tall as the Immortal attack struck him.

As soon as it struck him, a glow of golden light sprang out from him, taking the form of Bai Jingshen's head, which roared loudly once again.

This was the third and final protection Bai Jingshen had put on anyone, and Pearl had decided to use it to protect Alex using it.

"Pearl!" Alex spoke out loud, stopping his Qi halfway before he wasted it.

"Brother!" Pearl shouted, ignoring his great grandfather's roaring head before him. He turned around and quickly ran back to Alex. "Are you alright?"

"Yes," Alex said with a sigh of relief. "You saved me."

"I'm glad," Pearl said. "Can you fight or should we leave?"

"Take her away, I will fight," Alex said as Midnight flew out into his hands. His stronger Saint Qi filled him now, making him nearly as strong, if not stronger than every single person on the battlefield.

The only one who could be said to be stronger than him without using Immortal Qi was Hannah, and she too wouldn't come close to his strength once he used everything else he had up his sleeve.

The Dragon Emperor shot Bai Jingshen's roaring head once again out of frustration, but the head easily protected Alex and the others against the Dragon Emperor's attack.

Pearl flew up to the unconscious Liz and turned to look toward the Dragon Emperor. "I shall wait for your death," he said and teleported away with her.

"Damn the White Tigers," the Dragon Emperor said under his breath. "Why must they all seek to place themselves before my path to stop me."

Alex watched Bai Jingshen's head slowly fade away, knowing he was to fight at any moment. He took a deep breath as he made his final preparations.

The Blood God's Manual flew out and the remaining blood beasts that were stored inside the manual flew out as well.

Whisker appeared from where he had been staying as well, and jumped onto one of the man-beasts, pulling out the 3 Immortal puppets.

"Brother, do you need these?" he asked.

Alex's eyes narrowed. He hadn't thought about the puppets for a while, because he had never intended to use them in the actual fight.

The Immortal puppets would only be physically strong. Because of that, they were quite useless when they had to be used in the skies unless the person using them had strong Qi.

Alex doubted even Hannah with her Immortal Qi could not use the puppet to show their true strength, so there was little chance it could be much use to Alex at first.

But defense-wide, they probably could be used from time to time.

Alex stored the puppets in his Soul Space and turned to face the Dragon Emperor amid the disappearing motes of light.

The Dragon Emperor's eyes narrowed, seeing Alex be ready to fight him.

"Are you going to fight me? All on your own?" he asked, a look of amusement flashing within all the anger and hatred he showed on his face. "Do you think you can beat me just because you broke through to be a little stronger?"

"Can I beat you? I do not know. All I can do is try, so I will fight you," Alex said.

He brought out a few pills just as he said that and consumed them one after another, letting the energy within them suffuse into his body one after another.

As he ate those pills, the Dragon Emperor noticed a weird aura emanating from Alex. He could not tell what the aura was, but it gave him a bad, sickly feeling.

His eyes narrowed to figure out what was happening, and as he did, he saw something. Black veins grew out from Alex's eyes, going through his cheeks, down to his neck.

Soon, his entire body was covered in dark veins.

"As for whether I'm fighting alone," Alex said. "I never was."

The Dragon Emperor got a little serious. He had heard about this thing from his subordinates, this forbidden technique of sorts where Alex had gotten ridiculously strong.

He had every reason to worry about this.

'So it came from pills, huh?' the Dragon Emperor thought. 'I will see what pill it is that would make him so strong. I will take that recipe for myself, along with everything else.'

Alex felt the power course through him, the aura of Death and Darkness mixing through him, consuming what he gave it, while it empowered him.

And thanks to Godslayer's incredible control, it would not go overboard like it had during his time in the ocean. This was the perfect way to make himself strong without sacrificing too much.

Only, he didn't have too much time.

"There is only so much in your body I can use without completely taking over or ruining our body itself," Godslayer said. "And I cannot take over your sword as I am too strong for the spirit within it to handle me now. All you can do is use what I give you appropriately."

Alex nodded internally. "How long do you think I can handle?" he asked.

"I cannot tell you right now," Godslayer said. "But whatever the amount is, it should be enough to send that man to his death's door. Everything else will either fall upon you or luck itself."

Alex put on a resolute look. "I'm not dying here," he said. "I have plenty more to do."

"Good," Godslayer said. "Now go win."

"I will," Alex said.

The pills he had eaten were affecting his body as well at the same time.

The Spirit pill enhanced his spiritual energy while making it replenish just faster. The Lightning Resistance pill helped him take less damage from Lighting attacks. And finally, a Saint Replenishment pill, to replenish his Qi as he fought.

Alex could have eaten more pills, but he dared not eat anymore due to the danger of those pills conflicting with each other. They would even be useless thanks to the corruption on his body draining away everything to make him all that more powerful.

Realizing there was nothing more to do, Alex sent powerful Yin Qi into Midnight, empowered by Godslayer's corruption, and used his first attack in his battle against the Dragon Emperor.

God Rending Death Blade.

Chapter 1832 Strong

Qi, Blood Aura, Spiritual Energy, Sword Aura, Dao of Yin and Cutting, and the sheer power provided to him through Godslayer's corruption, poured into the technique carved into Midnight's body.

The God Rending Death Blade technique.

A sword slash of pitch black flew out from Alex, making its way toward the Dragon Emperor who had readied himself against anything dangerous.

A bolt of lightning flew out from his spear thrust, turning into an illusory white and blue dragon that moved toward the black sword slash.

The two attacks clashed at the center, creating an explosion of black and white light, where neither of the two came close to winning against each other.

"What is this?" the Dragon Emperor watched the result of their clash in horror. "How is it this strong?"

Just as he thought that he sensed something coming toward him from the explosion. A weak attack flew out that the Dragon Emperor easily swatted away. However, the meaning behind that left him stunned.

Alex's attack had not just contended with his own attack equally, it had surpassed his attack in a way, which was simply preposterous to him.

Alex was pleasantly surprised by the result as well.

"Yes! You have a chance," Godslayer shouted in Alex's mind.

Alex smiled. "I do."

Alex flew through the explosion before him, preparing another attack. He swung another sword slash toward the Dragon Emperor, this time without using the technique that was carved into Midnight.

He used Bursting Blaze, pouring the True Fire Dao into his attack, letting out an explosive attack that rendered the Dragon Emperor's attack null while letting him know that he was the weaker attack.

Alex punched, sending out four Golden Spear that launched toward the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor fought back with a defensive attack, creating a cage of lightning to surround him, which defended against all of Alex's attacks.

The lightning cage vanished and he let out an attack, sending many dozens of somewhat weaker lightning bolts toward Alex.

Alex moved back while using the Infinite Heavenly Ice Spear Art to form icicles all around him that were short toward each of the forked lightning bolts that came down upon him.

A single icicle was a little weaker but two were enough to destroy the lightning bolts.

And Alex could use as many as he wanted.

The surrounding people watched in awe at the fight, not a single one understanding how Alex had become so strong all of a sudden.

A single breakthrough was not supposed to make someone so much stronger, was it?

Hannah stared at her little cousin, surprised at how easily he dealt with the many lightning bolts. She had the same technique as him, but in the heat of battle, she hadn't remembered to use it to fight back against the lightning bolts.

There was an instinctual battle knowledge that came with having been in a lot of battles, and Hannah knew she lacked it. It was only now that she was seeing how much she lacked it.

Previously, Alex had been forced to fight while holding himself back. He was stronger than almost everyone even before the breakthrough, but their Immortal Qi could kill him at any time, so he couldn't constantly be offensive and had to remain vigilant for Immortal attacks.

However, due to whatever he was doing, that shackle on his fight had come off, and there was no longer a fear him of an Immortal attack.

He could finally show his fighting prowess to the fullest and it shocked everyone that had stayed back to watch.

Pearl had a wide grin on his face as he watched the faces of the shocked beasts. 'That's my brother,' he thought as he watched Alex make an Immortal stand on his toes in this fight.

Glowing golden wires rushed to capture the Dragon Emperor, empowered with the Dao of Metal and Ductility. It wrapped around the Dragon Emperor, but he used his Dao of Spatial expansion to expand the space between him and the wires, slipping out of it easily.

At the same time, he moved his spear, creating a whirlwind around him, as he fought back against the incoming sword slash.

A feeling of death permeated from most of Alex's attacks, that the Dragon Emperor was starting to feel and recognize. It was an aura that permeated a battlefield or a location with a lot of deaths, all of which he had been plenty to.

He started to recognize it, which only made him wonder just how the hell a young man like Alex could have ever come across so much death to create this aura.

He even wondered if that was not the case, and instead, it was Alex who was dying, creating that aura.

The Emperor would hope more than anything else that was the case.

He still couldn't understand just how it was that Alex could fight against him with more than equal prowess. He was an Immortal, empowered by the highest power that one could afford to use in this land.

And somehow, Alex was keeping up with him despite being nowhere close to an Immortal. The worst part about it all was that Alex wasn't even using Immortal Qi. As a newly broken-

through cultivator, he wouldn't even have it.

That only made the Dragon Emperor fear just how strong Alex would have been in a couple of years, had he left the man time to grow.

It was great luck that the Dragon Emperor had somehow put the man on a 20-year time constraint to show himself before him. If not, he might have had to fight against someone who could kill him with a single swing of his sword.

The Dragon Emperor preemptively attacked, sending out a sweet melody all around him. It was an attack he rarely had to use, as he was too strong to have to bother with techniques like these.

However, it seemed that he had to do so today.

Alex heard the sweet melody and gave a twisted grin. He swung back immediately, ignoring the melody to fight back.

The Dragon Emperor's eyes widened and he quickly retaliated. The explosion this time was close enough that he felt a strong shockwave fall onto him.

And in that shockwave was a weak little mental strength that flew to attack him.

The Dragon Emperor felt his mind ache a little from the attack, not enough to harm him, but enough to be of minor inconvenience.

But that told him something that he had feared was true from the start.

'His attacks have spiritual energy attached to them,' he thought. 'If I get hit directly with that alone, I will be in trouble.'

The Dragon Emperor flew back, creating some distance between himself and Alex, while Alex slowly followed behind.

The Dragon Emperor moved even further back, growing more and more away from Alex, forcing Alex to follow even more.

And when he thought it was enough, he immediately stopped moving and brought out a small vial. At the same time, he stopped using his Dao, forcing the expanded space he had been leaving behind to collapse immediately, pulling both him and Alex face to face at once.

Before Alex could react, the Dragon Emperor sprayed the remaining contents of the vial onto Alex.

Chapter 1833 Immortal Level

The Dragon Emperor immediately felt the terror in his own body as the smell of the poison he sprayed on Alex was enough to get him to feel some prickling in his body.

He was a damn Immortal, and somehow this Level 10 Saint poison was making him feel it. There was a level of danger to this poison, which was why he had been forced to use it.

It was a shame to be certain. He had wanted to learn more from Alex, maybe keep his Soul if he could. But seeing as how the situation had come down to, the Dragon Emperor was now content with killing him and taking the things he had on him.

'I hope the Alchemy god stuff is not something in his mind. That would be a true shame,' the Dragon Emperor thought.

He moved away from Alex, watching his stand in place as the poison landed on him. Any time now, he would fall dead.

'He might have the power of an Immortal, but his body is still that of a saint. His body hasn't been improved by Immortal Tribulation yet,' the Dragon Emperor thought. 'He is sure to—'

Alex shook his head and opened his eyes. There were no whites in his eyes, only blackness, but his purple iris glowed bright and they stared at the Dragon Emperor like glowing gems in an abyss.

Alex stood still, watching the Dragon Emperor.

The Emperor wondered what was happening, why Alex wasn't falling down. He wondered how he could stand still when there had been others who had died just from the scent alone. How could he remain alive for so long?

Alex finally jerked up, his body convulsing slightly before he released a long breath. Then, he took it all back in, taking in a long breath before smiling.

"I dealt with a small part of that when healing my sister, and that had been quite something by itself. To think I would have the privilege of being poisoned by this amount," Alex spoke. "I didn't think how difficult it would be to neutralize it with my current condition. I had to be careful, but I did it."

He looked back at the Emperor with a wide grin. "Did I keep you waiting?" he asked.

"How?" the Dragon Emperor asked, his mind unable to comprehend the reality. "How did you heal that poison? You ate no pill!"

The Dragon Emperor's eyes were wide. Had Alex eaten a pill beforehand meant precisely for this pill? But how could he protect himself so easily? How could he not even feel pain? The poison was supposed to attack his nascent soul specifically. How did you survive that?

The Dragon Emperor wondered, but no answer came.

And he couldn't think for long either.

Alex threw out many swords at the same time, creating more with blood, Qi, and Spiritual energy to add to it

With Midnight at the forefront, the sword formed the 123 Sword Array and launched toward the Dragon Emperor.

Roots grew out from the sky around the Dragon Emperor, rushing toward the incoming sword to slow them down. At the same time, the Dragon Emperor sent out a bolt of bright blue lightning that struck the incoming swords.

In contact with the sword, something weird happened to the woods that had grown out of the air. Before they were even destroyed by the swords, the woods started rotting, dying as they came in contact with the aura around the sword, and the dying wood did little to provide any sort of stoppage for the swords.

Then the lightning bolt and the swords struck each other, creating a large crash that shook the ground.

Alex felt the force of the attack crash back into him, but he kept his focus on the sword and pushed it further.

The sound from the swords continued to be loud as they kept drilling toward the Dragon Emperor, who did his best to stop the sword from reaching him.

When they were too close for comfort, when he began to sense the effect of the attack on his mind, he finally resorted to a stronger attack.

Lightning coalesced around him in an instead, and spread out from him in all directions, sending out a wave of unimaginable power that struck the swords and sent them flying away.

The Dragon Emperor had been forced to resort to a technique that he was only supposed to use when surrounded as it used entirely too much Qi, and that made him angry.

Whatever happened next, he didn't care. He decided to go on the offensive as he couldn't let Alex dictate the flow of the battle.

He rushed toward Alex with his spear just as the many swords arrived back at Alex.

Alex grabbed Midnight from the group of swords, letting the others fly past him as he clashed directly with the Dragon Emperor's spear strike that contained nothing but pure Spear Qi and strength.

Alex's sword held nothing more than his strength and the powerful aura that Godslayer's aid was providing him right at this moment.

The two clashed and the metallic clang made the space around them shatter for a split second. Alex felt the void from where he clashed against the Emperor and quickly pulled back his sword to go for another swing.

The Emperor's eyes widened slightly, unable to understand whether the strength Alex put out came from his current situation, or was his physical strength just as good as well.

They clashed again, and again, with neither of the two overcoming the other person. Then, Alex started pouring Sword Aura into his attacks, to try and hurt the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor launched a lighting bolt from right in front of Alex, and Alex teleported immediately, arriving behind the Dragon Emperor as he used his next slash.

The slash landed on the Dragon Emperor's back, hurting him, but not wounding him far too much. New n0vel chapters are published on

The Dragon Emperor felt the pain of the strike but got right back into the battle. The two of them fought, and where they fought the ground turned to rubble.

The glorious capital of the Azure Empire had long since been destroyed in the war, but the fight between two Immortal-level figures simply pulverized what had previously only been somewhat broken.

Alex used every power he had in his arsenal at the moment except for his Yang attacks, which barred him from using the Yang Palm technique, his ability to hide himself from his senses, and his doppelganger technique.

Because Godslayer aided him with his Death and Darkness aura, which currently rushed throughout his entire body, he was unable to use anything that required Yang Qi, as it would completely weaken Godslayer's power.

Even the poison he had to deal with earlier, it had taken him time to destroy it as he had to specifically target them with what little Yang Qi he could use in his body without weakening Godslayer's help.

As the fight continued, with the Dragon Emperor being wounded multiple times, Alex heard Godslayer's words in his mind.

"You have to finish this quickly. There is not much time," he spoke. "I'm already running out of what I have gained. Any more and it will be reduced permanently from me again."

"You have to finish this quickly."

Chapter 1834 Not Much Longer

Godslayer's words reminded Alex that there was a deadline to this fight. He didn't have too long to fight, so he either had to defeat the Dragon Emperor within that time or wound him enough that even after Godslayer could no longer help him, it wouldn't matter to him.

Alex wondered how long exactly he had, but that was not an answer Godslayer could give him precisely.

The Dragon Emperor stared at Alex, looking at his body where his attacks had landed on a few times. There was not a single hint of wound on him, instead being blocked by some sort of armor underneath him.

On the other hand, he was himself wounded multiple times, his robes in tatters from the many attacks.

It was a blessing that he was in the Immortal realm and thus he didn't remain wounded for very long.

As an Immortal, both body and soul were merged to become one, so when he was wounded on either one, so long as the other wasn't wounded, one would reflect upon the other, quickly bringing them back to the original shape.

If a body was wounded, the soul would reflect upon it, quickly healing the body. If the soul was wounded, the body would reflect upon it, healing the soul.

The only way to truly harm an Immortal was to hurt them on both body and soul at once.

The Dragon Emperor was unhappy at the fact that Alex was doing just that. His attacks not only held enough power to wound his body but there was also spiritual energy to wound his soul at the same time.

Thankfully, the spiritual energy was weak enough that it couldn't hurt his soul too much, and the Dragon Emperor could heal it.

However, if this continued for too long, there would come a point where he wouldn't have enough spiritual energy of his own to heal his Soul, and at that point, the damages would start becoming permanent.

And as an Immortal in a world of non-immortals, the Dragon Emperor had no method of healing himself at that point. There were no healing pills for him, no enhancement pills.

At that point, he would have to rely upon the 9 veined pills, which while had a chance of working on Immortals, were something that would be considered trash by them.

The Dragon Emperor created a whirlwind around him, sending the wind whipping toward Alex, while also preparing his second attack with a lightning strike.

Alex cut through the wind with a black slice of energy while also targeting the Dragon Emperor with it.

The lightning bolt struck the sword attack and created an explosion. At the same time, the Dragon Emperor flew out from the side, using another bolt of lightning to attack Alex.

Alex teleported away, arriving at a different location, and attacked the Dragon Emperor again, sending the two into another few minutes of back-and-forth attacks where both got hurt a little, but neither came out on top.

The Dragon Emperor steadily lost his Qi, with the only method of gaining it back being a gamble with a 9-veined pill, which he didn't have many of, less of which were related to Qi replenishment.

Alex could steadily feel his power diminishing as well. From being at a level where he was consistently getting the upper hand in the clash, he had come to a point where he could only tie against the Emperor.

Soon enough, he would start losing. He couldn't let the fight drag on to that point.

The Dragon Emperor seemed to have realized something similar as well, so he forced Alex to use more and more power.

Alex began supplementing his attacks with more things than what he had been using. He started adding more Daos other than Dao of Cutting and Yin, which was what primarily powered his Sword slashes that contained the power of Darkness and Death.

He added the Dao of Death, only to realize that he did not need it. Godslayer's Dao of Death was stronger than his, and thus it was useless for him to use it in this instance.

He used Dao of Sharpness from time to time to put power into his slices, but those were something he chose to replace with his other, more powerful Dao.

Alex used Dao of True Fire Dao consistently, forcing back the lightning bolts every time the Dragon Emperor used them. Then, he started using Dao of Space in addition to Dao of Cutting, to create a sword slice that contained with it a power to carve through Space itself.

The first time he used that in the battle, the Dragon Emperor nearly lost his entire arm. He only survived at the last moment when he sensed the slicing space aura and moved away instantly.

After that, he started bringing out the Ivory Sword to fight back against Alex's space dao attack.

The Ivory sword was capable of cutting through any space as long as it was powered by someone capable, so with the Dragon Emperor's Immortal Qi, it was capable of cutting through the sharp Dao of Space itself.

The two came to a standstill after another long battle, with Alex getting even weaker even though he was using more Dao.

However, at the same time, the Dragon Emperor was using less and less Qi. It was either because he wanted to preserve it or because he was running out of it.

Alex continued his attacks regardless, intending to hurt, maim, or kill the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor fought back while slowly coming to a realization. He had partly ignored it because of the battle, but there were many people and beasts far away from Alex, currently doing nothing but watching the battle.

And of those beasts were beasts made up of blood. And at that moment, they were flying in a certain pattern, constantly changing as Alex fought him.

'They're in an array,' the Dragon Emperor thought. He had learned long ago that Alex's army was in an array, empowering everyone to become stronger.

He hadn't expected Alex to be stronger using something like that at this very moment. New n0vel chapters are published on

'This bastard. He was getting help from elsewhere and I didn't even notice it,' the Dragon Emperor thought.

He used a lightning attack toward Alex and at the same time, raised his spear toward the sky, calling down lightning at the beasts far away.

Alex realized belatedly that the Dragon Emperor had done that and sensed the death of many of the blood beasts that had been hit by the lightning bolts.

A drop in the number of beasts alone was fine, but it was not just the blood beasts that had died.

Whisker, who had been controlling the beasts the entire time died as well, killed by one of the strikes.

Alex was too focused on the battle, so he could not control the beasts and thus the blood beasts ended up no longer forming an array.

Alex felt the aura around him from the Hell Emperor's Divine Battle Array disappear and he became even weaker than before.

The Dragon Emperor noticed that and smiled as well.

"Let's see how long you can continue now that your support is gone."

Chapter 1835 Weakened

The loss of the Array made it difficult for Alex to continue fighting the Dragon Emperor the way he had before.

The attacks were much stronger for him now, and the chances of being critically injured were a lot higher.

Alex fought still, using every ounce of what power he had remaining to fight back. Godslayer still helped him a lot, but it wasn't much now.

The Dragon Emperor started feeling relieved as Alex became weaker. He wasn't very much weaker, surprisingly, almost as though the aid he had received from the beasts hadn't improved his power all that much.

Still, what strength he had lost entirely changed the tide of the battle, making the Dragon Emperor come out on top in every instance.

The Dragon Emperor started fighting more freely, defending and attacking using the minimum strength he had to muster while he watched Alex slowly lose strength even more.

"You're going to die," the Dragon Emperor said. "I can let you live if you want."

Alex fought back against the spray of lightning, his infinite ice spears struggling to destroy a single bolt with 3 of them when before he had done it with 2.

Alex sent back an attack of his own, empowered by everything he could muster at the moment, trying to stay strong in the situation.

He ignored the Dragon Emperor's words as those were just temptations that his enemy thought would work on him.

"I can let you live," the Dragon Emperor said. "As long as you give me everything you have. All the techniques you own, all the artifacts, all the knowledge. Especially that—"

His words came to a stop abruptly, making the Dragon Emperor realize that he couldn't speak about the Alchemy God's techniques out loud. He was not allowed to share what he had received or what he was going to receive for another 80 years per the initial argument.

"I will give you nothing, nor do I want anything from you," Alex said. "But if you do wish to give me something, I wouldn't mind your head on a platter."

The Dragon Emperor grinned. "I wasn't going to let you live in the first place either," he said. "There is not a chance either you or that white tiger lives to see the sunset today."

The Dragon Emperor came lunging at Alex, and Alex took a deep breath.

"Godslayer," he said softly. "This will be our final attack together. Please withdraw after this."

"I can still help you," Godslayer said in a surprised voice. "It's not much, but I can help you."

"Thank you, but you've done all you can," Alex said. He could see signs of fatigue show up in the Dragon Emperor's movement as well, he was clearly acting to show as though he was ready to continue this fight forever.

"Let me handle the rest."

Alex poured everything he had into his single, final attack while he had Godslayer's help. Godslayer agreed and poured all the power he had to give into this one attack as well.

Midnight glowed with dark light as everything started converging on it as the Dragon Emperor approached. Alex truly put in everything.

Flashes of white light flickered around in his vision as he watched Sword Qi appear out from his sword, surrounding him as he poured in Sword Aura.

At the same time, here and there, hair-fine Sword Qi began appearing all around him. They were at a far lower amount than the Sword Qi that appeared due to Sword Aura, and they began spreading around him.

They disappeared as soon as they went anywhere far away from him though.

This had been happening for a while now, but even now, Alex failed to notice it entirely. At some subconscious level, he could tell he was reaching some sort of barrier that he had to push through, but on the outside, he could not realize anything at all.

The Dragon Emperor felt the aura of the incoming attack and immediately realized that he had to be serious.

Alex swung Midnight.

God Rending Death Blade.

A pitch-black sword slash that was nearly 3 meters long and as thick as his thigh streaked across the air, making its way toward the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor held back nothing, using his Spear Aura in this attack, along with his Dao of Lightning. The bolt of lightning destroyed the space it moved through, striking the incoming black sword slash.

A pillar of light rose to the sky as their two attacks clashed with each other, leaving behind a space that was in tatters for a while before it began fixing itself.

When the explosive aura and light disappeared, the Dragon Emperor quickly looked toward Alex, only to realize he had disappeared from the air.

"No!" he shouted out loud in terror. He sent his senses crashing all around him, reaching hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers in a single search.

He hadn't realized just how strong his spiritual sense had become, and using it he searched for where Alex had disappeared to.

Somehow, he could not find him anywhere.

'Where did he go?' the Dragon Emperor thought. 'Did he teleport away? How far did he teleport away?'

The Dragon Emperor couldn't sense anything, but for some reason, he found it difficult to believe that Alex could have teleported away.

After all, every single one of his people was still here. Had he teleported away, they would have certainly run off with him.

'No, he has to be—'

A sudden fluctuation in space next to him told the Dragon Emperor that something was happening to him. He sent his focus in that direction, sensing whatever there was in that location.

He didn't sense anyone or anything, but he could feel a build-

up of aura that should not have been possible.

Without a thought, he pointed his spear in that direction and shot out a lightning bolt.

His lightning bolt exploded just in front of him as something struck it, destroying it right there.

The Dragon Emperor expanded space and moved out of the way, noticing something finer than a strand of hair fly past him, leaving behind a trail of finely cut space that only he could sense.

His eyes snapped in the direction of where the attack had come from, but he could see nothing. He tried to sense someone there even though he was incapable of doing it.

The Dragon Emperor frowned, not understanding what was happening. He tried to use another attack when he sensed another movement of space behind him, and this time a large yellow palm flew out toward him.

The Dragon Emperor moved quickly, creating multiple roots to grow out from the air, striking at the palm as though a spear. The roots struck through the palm, destroying it with somewhat ease.

Once destroyed, the Dragon Emperor searched for the source of the attack, but he was completely at a loss once again.

'What is happening?' he wondered. 'How the hell can I not sense or see anything? What kind of bullshit is this?'

He didn't sense space fluctuations this time around, but he did sense the sudden appearance of a black sword slash.

The Dragon Emperor fought back.

'It's him. It's absolutely him,' he though. 'But where the hell is he?'

Chapter 1836 Battle of Attrition

"What is going on? Where is his Majesty?"

Yan Yating was confused about Alex's current situation, needless to speak of the many others that were around him. Watching the Dragon Emperor fight empty air made them feel curious as to what was going on.

Hannah and the Elders remained quiet, not saying anything. They could feel the strong spiritual sense that surrounded them and they understood that anything they said would end up being heard by the Dragon Emperor.

Still, Hannah worried about Alex. Not only had he lost whatever had given him strength earlier, but he had also lost a few of his blood beasts, rendering him a lot weaker than he was previously.

As the situation was, it was a miracle that Alex hadn't died to the Dragon Emperor at all. But, did he have any chance of winning at all now that he was weakened?

Neither Hannah nor the others around her could think of any way Alex could defeat the Dragon Emperor now that he had lost his advantage.

Could he possibly defeat him through a battle of attrition?

* * * * *

The Dragon Emperor felt himself tremble with rage, the fires within him burning hot with a pure will to kill Alex.

Attacks flew out of every other direction at him, causing him to only be able to react. He wanted to attack Alex, but finding his location was simply impossible.

He could only sense the location of where the attack appeared from. By the time he was done dealing with the attack, there would be nothing of note there at all.

The Dragon Emperor saw a sword slash fly toward him, a weaker one, and decided to not deal with it. Instead, he focused on where Alex saw, taking a clean hit to the right side of his body.

His defense was just enough that the sword slash only managed to cut no more than an inch into his body. The wound was painful, but it allowed him some time to see where Alex was.

He managed to locate an irregularity in the location. He sensed a sort of emptiness in his spiritual sense like there was a spot that he could not focus his attention into.

He had sensed this a few times before, but it disappeared just as quickly as he sensed it, and now he wondered if this was something.

The Dragon Emperor tried to follow it with his senses.

Another sword slash appeared toward him, and this one he couldn't afford to let hit. It was somewhat stronger, so the Dragon Emperor attacked back, destroying the attack before searching for the emptiness.

He sensed it just as another attack flew out.

4 golden spears flew out of nowhere, coming for him. The Dragon Emperor fought back with a stab of his spear, which created illusory wind spears form around him, all of which struck the other spears, destroying them easily.

The Dragon Emperor searched for the emptiness once more, finding it quite fast this time around.

Without waiting, he shot out a bolt of lightning in that direction.

Something flew out from that direction at the same time, striking the lightning bolt as the two destroyed one another. The force of the lightning bolt was still stronger as such the residual energy continued moving toward where the Dragon Emperor had targeted, but by that time, there was nothing there.

The Dragon Emperor quickly sensed more locations and found the emptiness.

He struck out once again.

* * * * *

Alex was currently invisible with his aura completely concealed and his his physical body concealed by the burning Yang Qi that surrounded his body.

With Godslayer no longer helping him, Alex could now use his Yang energy once again, and by using it, he was capable of doing more than just fighting straight forward.

He started attacking while hiding so that the Dragon Emperor could never openly fight and only be able to react.

Alex knew that the Dragon Emperor did not have much Qi to work with, so he had to force the fight to drag on while he chipped away at the Emperor.

He could see a single path to victory here, and that involved one of two things.

Either the Dragon Emperor had to be distracted somehow, or he had to be weakened to a point where he could not defend himself.

At either point, he was certain he could kill the Dragon Emperor. It was just that bringing him to that point was a difficult task at the moment.

Alex wanted to distract him, but that seemed impossible, so he resorted to weakening him.

Attacking from invisibility was working quite well. He was keeping the emperor on his toes in the fight, not letting him relax one moment.

He was also not getting attacked as a result of the Dragon Emperor not knowing where he was, and that was an advantage. He wished he could use stronger attacks, but he didn't have time for those right now.

The moment he stopped attacking, the Dragon Emperor could go attack his friends and families, and that could be trouble.

It was a surprise to him how difficult the Dragon Emperor was having with the battle at first. Had it been the Western Continent, where getting to the Saint realm was nearly impossible, he would have been found by their Qi long ago.

However, since the concept of Qi Sense itself was not something prevalent outside of the Western Continent, nobody really used it.

The Dragon Emperor, who had entered the Saint realm and opened his Spiritual sense 9000 years ago certainly didn't.

Things were going fine until the Dragon Emperor attacked him right where he was. Alex fought back and moved to a different location.

Was it a coincidence?

It wasn't. The Dragon Emperor attacked where he was once again.

'I've been found,' Alex thought, but he could continue this for much longer. Just because the Dragon Emperor had found a way to know where he was, didn't mean that he had absolutely won.

Alex teleported and struck at the Dragon Emperor from another side.

The Dragon Emperor sensed the fluctuations in space and turned around in time to counter Alex's attack.

Upon attacking, Alex sent out a Heaven's Impact as well, hitting the Emperor with a mental attack that he hoped was just enough to make him not see where he was disappearing.

Every split second he caused the emperor to lose, would be what he gained himself to attack him.

The Heaven's Impact did little to the Dragon Emperor with a spiritual sense of belonging to an Immortal, but Alex found it helpful enough.

He attacked a couple more times, forcing the Dragon Emperor to fight back as well.

And then, the Dragon Emperor did something that caught Alex off guard.

Suddenly, a tempestuous wind appeared around the Dragon Emperor, covering the entire area.

Alex wondered what was happening for a moment, only to realize it just as the Dragon Emperor's head turned toward him.

'Shit!'

The Dragon Emperor was using his Dao of Wood to fill the area around him, so he could more easily sense the place where it wasn't.

In a way, he was establishing his own method of Qi sense. And because of that, he could now easily locate where Alex was.

Chapter 1837 To Protect

﻿﻿A bolt of lightning appeared in Alex's direction so suddenly that he had no time to focus enough to produce a powerful attack that could help him survive.

'Shit!' Alex thought, realizing that his location had been found out by the Dragon Emperor. He reacted to the sudden attack from the Dragon Emperor by pulling out his Puppet to fight back. That was the only thing he could do to protect himself.

The Immortal puppet appeared out from his Soul Space, blocking that one attack. The Immortal Puppet was strong enough to defend against the attack, but it held absolutely no power to stop Alex from suffering from the shockwave from the clash.

The puppet itself had no way to protect itself from being blasted away as well and was flown far away from Alex. Thankfully, that gave Alex enough time to teleport away.

He appeared in a new location, only to realize that the entire area was filled with an aura of Wood Dao, whose slightest disturbance let the Emperor know where he had appeared.

Another bolt of lightning flashed toward Alex, and Alex swung Midnight to fight back this time around. He had been prepared for the attack and thus had enough time to do so.

The result ended up being his loss in the clash with a weaker, but still lethal, bolt of lightning flying toward him.

Alex teleported out of the way once more, dodging the attack.

The explosion had caused a big enough stir that the Dragon Emperor didn't know where Alex had teleported to, but it only took him a second to do what he had done before and find him once again.

As soon as the Dragon Emperor found him, roots grew out from all around Alex, trying to capture him.

Alex swung back against the root, cutting through them before teleporting away once again.

The Dragon Emperor recognized the location he had teleported to and attacked once more.

Not being able to hide his location suddenly made it far more difficult for Alex to fight the Emperor. He was already weakened due to losing Godslayer's help and the Array, and now even his tactic of attacking and running away was failing him.

The Dragon Emperor continued to find him.

Alex wondered what his choices were here. Could he stop hiding and fight normally? He was already losing after all. Maybe if he asked Yan Yating, he and the various other Oathbreakers could form their Dragon Array and help him.

But at this point, even that wouldn't be as useful to defeat the Dragon Emperor. And besides, he couldn't show himself now.

'He's spending a lot of Intent, a lot of Qi to try and locate me each time,' Alex thought. 'If I continue doing this, even though he has found me, he will have spent all of his Qi.'

The Dragon Emperor was already tired from the fight, Alex was certain of that. The only thing remaining now was to find that one chance, that one delay, that one mistake from Dragon Emperor which he could use to kill him.

However, no matter how much he tried to fight, the Dragon Emperor seemed to not be able to lose his focus on the battle at all.

Alex simply had no time to focus on the one attack.

lightsΝοvεl ƈοm * * * * * *

The Dragon Emperor was still quite confused by how Alex was surviving a battle against him. He could not imagine how a man who had only just entered the Saint Transformation realm was actually managing to survive in a fair fight against him.

There were no more people helping him and the forbidden technique or pill he had used before had long since ended.

And yet his attacks, which seemed to be an amalgamation of many types of aura, were actually capable of keeping his Immortal Qi from killing him.

'What secrets does he hold? What is it that makes him so strong? A pill? A technique?' the Dragon Emperor wondered. He was beginning to think that there were a lot more secrets to Alex than what he had been led on.

'I should finish this quickly,' he thought.

* * * * * *

"Can't we help him? He's there somewhere," Qiu Jianhong asked his fellow elders and the others beside him.

"I don't have my Immortal Qi now. It's all run out," Ren Guanting said.

"I do have some, but I do not know how much of a help I can be," Yan Yating said, frowning constantly. "If I could just see him, we could form an array to help him right now."

"You should have done so earlier," one of the beasts said.

Yan Yating said nothing. He did not believe Alex needed it earlier. He didn't think there was a need for the array earlier. But now…

Hannah's eyes snapped open. She had been cultivating the entire time, gaining back what little Qi she could. Her suddenly open eyes stared in the distance toward the Dragon Emperor.

Everyone turned toward him at the same time.

The Dragon Emperor was turned toward them with his spear pointed at them.

"He's trying to—"

Someone began speaking and before they could even finish it, the Dragon Emperor let out a bright bolt of lightning toward them, an attack that was stronger than any they had to deal with before.

If struck, most of them were going to die for certain.

* * * * * *

Alex fought the Dragon Emperor continuously and felt as though the emperor was starting to get more and more agitated in the fight.

He started becoming more reckless, and more aggressive. It wasn't like him at all.

'Is he running out of Qi?' Alex wondered. 'Is he trying to end it as fast as he can?'

Alex himself was on his last leg now, with only a fraction of his entire Qi remaining, and that was with the replenishment pill he had eaten.

The Dragon Emperor was certainly in a similar situation as well.

They were both beaten and tired, so it was understandable if the Dragon Emperor wanted to end the battle right then.

Only, the Dragon Emperor's spear wasn't pointed toward him when he teleported next. He prepared his attack to throw at the Dragon Emperor and noticed that the Dragon Emperor was going to attack the people far away.

His sister, his aunt, Pearl, the elders, and many other people were gathered there.

What was he to do?

Should he use this opportunity and kill him now that he had the chance, or should he go help?

'Sister can stop it, I'm certain,' Alex thought. He had to trust his sister, right?

But the last time she had fought, she had been beaten bloody. Was that even enough time for her to heal? Did she even have Immortal Qi ready?

Hers was the only Immortal Qi that could even hope to defend against the Dragon Emperor. Everyone else's Immortal Qi was just as strong as his current combined attacks.

They were powerful, but they were nothing against an Immortal.

Should he send the Immortal puppet perhaps? Or should he—

The Dragon Emperor shot a bolt of lightning.

"Fuck!" Alex cried out and teleported far away, appearing before the bolt of lightning and bringing out the puppet, ordering it to attack the bolt of lightning that was coming toward him.

The Puppet acted instantly, punching the incoming bolt of lightning. The puppet barely did anything. It was blasted away the moment it came into contact with the lightning bolt, with the remaining power still coming toward Alex, a far stronger power.

Alex swung Midnight, attacking what was left after the puppet's attack.

Fighting something that powerful that close caused a gigantic backlash that Alex could not handle at all.

Immediately upon impact, Alex's blood armor was completely cracked open, all the blood aura in it disappearing as the crimson flakes fell off of it onto the ground.

The force slammed onto Alex's body, doing more damage which the armor couldn't protect him from. The slam caused his skin to break open in many places, and his bones to snap in half.

Alex felt the blow hit his head and saw flecks of black light swim in his vision for a second, the entire world turning colorless for a moment.

Even as Alex lost his mind for a moment, his Undying Physique acted immediately. He began healing using what remaining Qi he had to deal with the wounds and broken bones.

Even as it healed, something else struck him once again.

The backlash from his clash with the attack had wounded him at first, but he hadn't managed to destroy the incoming lightning bolt at all. A part of it had still remained, a non-lethal, but strong one, which struck him even as he healed.

The pill to resist lightning attacks did quite a lot to protect him when he was struck, leaving Alex would less wound than he would've had without it.

He could heal from it easily, he just needed some time.

Unfortunately, he had no time.

Alex's mind had only come back to him for a second when realized what was happening before him.

The Dragon Emperor came behind the bolt of lightning, piercing with his spear toward him.

Alex moved to fight back, parrying him at the last moment with Midnight, only for the Dragon Emperor to easily be parried and slash him with the Ivory Sword.

Alex used the Teleportation Dao to run away, but even as he did, the sword cut into the affected space of the teleportation dao and slashed through it.

Alex still teleported away, but where he arrived, his body slid down from shoulder to waist.

Chapter 1838 Stored

Alex teleported far away to the right, his body sliding in half as both halves fell from the sky, slamming hard into the ground.

The half of Alex with his intact Dantian, the half where his soul was at the moment, started growing, using the Qi in his body.

Alex could experience everything through the soul, so he used what little blood his body still had to draw the Qi from it and use it to heal himself.

Even as he did, the Dragon Emperor landed by his side with a slam, sending dust everywhere.

He huffed loudly, his body moving lethargically. He had been affected extremely by how much Qi he had to expend for that last attack.

Fortunately, he had been successful with it.

"You're like a little worm," he said, watching Alex's slowly growing body. "No matter how much I kill you, your body still continues moving."

Midnight trembled a little on Alex's right hand as if wanting to move on its own. But there was nothing Alex could do at the moment.

The Dragon Emperor started chopping up his body as it healed, almost as a sport.

"You've cultivated your body to quite the extent," he said softly. "It is perhaps stronger than mine was before I ascended."

He chopped up more of Alex's body.

"Where is your ring?" the Dragon Emperor asked, looking at his hand. He cut away Alex's hand holding Midnight and looked at it.

"Hmm, must be on the other half of your body," he said and pulled the bloody body out of the rubble.

Alex's absolutely dead half came toward the Dragon Emperor, his eyes wide open and staring blankly outside.

He pulled the ring from his finger. "Finally, this is mine," he said. He didn't have the time to check whether everything he needed was there or not.

It would take him a lot of time to break through Alex's refining and gain full access to the ring.

"I have to be certain," the Dragon Emperor said and began searching for something.

Alex panicked very much. Whenever he tried to heal his body, the Dragon Emperor cut it away, wasting more of his Qi.

'I can't die like this,' Alex thought. 'This is not how I'm supposed to die.'

He thought of a way he could still survive. If someone could come and fight him, someone strong. Could Hannah help him?

Alex didn't know who could help him right now. Either way, he had to help himself first. He needed to get the Dragon Emperor away from himself.

'The Immortal Puppet?' Alex thought. He had 3 of them, and he had used two already. Could he use the last one?

He tried to pull the Immortal Puppet out, only to realize he no longer had a connection with his Soul Space.

'What?' Alex wondered. 'What is going on?'

The Soul Space was supposed to move along to his Soul once his body was dead, was it not? That was how it worked.

Only, was his body dead right now? His was an Undying body, that could truly never be dead. Could it be that perhaps the other half of his body, which had been cut away held the Soul space still?

The Soul Space was physically supposed to be near one's heart, and his heart was definitely on the other body right now.

If he used his spiritual sense to reach for it, he could do it. He would alert the Dragon Emperor to his Nascent Soul's survival, but that was a risk he was willing to take.

He had to. There was no other choice.

Just as Alex reached for his other body, the Dragon Emperor's senses reached into his dantian and found him.

A spear thrust into his body, tearing open his naval region so that the Dragon Emperor could reach into it and pull out Alex's Nascent soul.

Alex resisted the Dragon Emperor, trying to fight his grasp, but as a Nascent Soul, there was truly nothing he could do at the moment.

The Dragon Emperor roared with laughter at Alex's pathetic situation. "I told you that you would not win. You did not listen to me," he spoke toward Alex. "This is what comes of that."

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm Alex's soul heaved heavily as though taking in deep breaths.

"Don't fear," the Dragon Emperor said. "You won't die just yet. You still have many things to teach me. I will draw every single secret out of you, I will learn every technique, every skill, every knowledge that you have. And then I will become a strong Immortal, perhaps even as great as the Alchemy God. And only then will you have my permission to die."

The Dragon Emperor put Alex's Nascent Soul into his own storage ring. Once Alex's soul was gone, finally he let out a long sigh of relief.

It had been a long and arduous day, with the sun far down in the sky than it had been when he had left his palace today.

He picked up Alex's sword and looked at it. He could feel the intense weight and a small hint of resistance on the inside that could not resist him.

"Not a bad sword. I could make good use of you," the Dragon Emperor thought and put Midnight into his storage ring.

He looked toward Alex's corpse next and shook his head. There was nothing more there that he wanted to take away.

He took a deep breath and looked inside himself to see what his situation was. He was nearly dried up of all Immortal Qi.

This would not do. He had to leave this place now that he had received everything he had.

He spun quickly, his spear moving with him to strike back against an Immortal attack that came for him.

Hannah arrived next to him, her eyes red with fury. She looked at the ground next to the Dragon Emperor and her eyes flashed wide open in shock when she saw Alex's lifeless corpse.

She had kept hope that Alex wasn't dead. That he was only cut in half. He could recover from such damage easily. He had shown that he could do that quite a few times previously.

However, seeing his body like that, she could tell that not even his soul remained in that body. It was dead.

Shock filled her, but it was anger that moved her.

"I will kill you," Hannah said in a low voice, moving Starweaver around to attack the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor fought back, knowing there wasn't much he needed to do to win this. She had already lost against him, he could do it once again.

Compared to Alex, Hannah was too straightforward to be of any trouble.

He charged his spear with the remaining bits of his Immortal Qi, ready to attack Hannah.

Just as he did, he felt his finger grow hot. He could not ignore what was happening and turned his head to look at his finger.

For some reason, his Storage ring which was usually supposed to be dark in color, was now glowing bright white with silver light for some reason.

Not only did it glow, but it also started trembling for some reason. The Dragon Emperor knew not what was happening to it.

Chapter 1839 The Chance

Alex found himself in a dark place with no air, no light, nothing. His spiritual sense was the only thing he could use in this place, and with that, he could see how large the space was.

The space he was in was no more than a couple of dozen meters in diameter, no larger than the throne room back in the Phoenix palace.

Alex got a feeling that the space was needlessly constricted, as if space was squished together to make this place instead of placing it properly. The inside of a Storage ring was certainly a weird place that Alex got to sense only after being on the inside.

This storage ring was filled with all sorts of minor treasures and objects that the Dragon Emperor had collected over the years. Not many of them were worth much to Alex though.

Anything that couldn't help him save himself from this situation was pretty much useless.

Alex could sense the barrier of the space and knew the outside world remained past the barrier. He could maybe use the Dao of Space to break past the barrier and move out too.

As he thought that, he sensed his sword fly in and quickly went to grab it. A faint sense of helplessness came from Midnight's spirit, one which Alex could empathize with.

"I know, buddy. I know," he said with a sigh. "I am worried about what to do as well. I do think I can go outside if I use my Dao, but... as a soul, I'll have a hard time doing anything even if I do escape."

Alex wasn't certain if he could do anything, but anything he wanted to do, he had to do it before the Dragon Emperor killed everyone he loved, or decided to instead leave this world for another.

Godslayer had been quiet since Alex used his final attack, so Alex knew he couldn't get any help from there.

'No, I can't wait to consider my options. I have to act now!' he thought. He reached out to tear open the space with his Intent, but before he could, something happened that stopped him in his tracks.

Motes of light that Alex could see through his senses flew into the dark and vacant space, making their way toward him.

He was not sure what that light was, but whatever it was, it was moving toward him.

Alex seemed worried at first, not knowing what was happening. But as the light got closer, a thought struck him. A thought so wild that even in his wildest dreams he had not considered it at all.

When the light touched him, Alex knew what it was.

* * * * *

Hannah had seen it happen just before the Dragon Emperor decided to attack her. Something weird, something she didn't think she'd ever seen before.

For whatever reason, Alex's corpse which had been completely dead started glowing softly. Suddenly, most of his corpse turned into bright light, disappearing from right in front of her, going somewhere she could not see.

It happened so silently and so fast, that the Dragon Emperor did not even realize what had happened.

What he did react to was instead something on his finger a second later as his storage ring started glowing brightly.

* * * * *

'My body? How?' Alex thought as the motes of light surrounded him and turned into his physical body, starting with his dantian which grew around his soul, before the rest of it grew back.

Alex had no exact reason why this was happening, but he did have an idea, a connection he had made when he saw the motes of light fly toward him.

The 2nd stage of the Undying God's Physique was something that could heal him from any and all wounds so long as there was Qi for him to heal from.

However, at the 3rd stage of the Undying God's Physique, one didn't need Qi. All one simply needed was the soul to survive and the body would grow on its own as well.

While Alex was certain that he hadn't reached the 3rd stage just yet, he was very, very close to it.

He had certainly reached a point that even if his body was dead, but not completely destroyed, if his soul survived, his body could grow back.

That was the only explanation Alex had as to why his body was growing back at the moment. As for why the motes of light had come to him from outside, Alex had an even more concrete idea.

After all, he had seen something like this happening many times before. That was exactly what happened to Whisker's body when he died.

Each time Whisker was dead, his body would turn into motes of light, flying back into his beast space.

Was this what happened at this stage when the soul was separated from the body? Did the body follow the soul to heal back? Just like Whisker's body jumped to his beast space where the bond was concentrated on to reform his body?

Alex was damn certain that was the case.

And that made him very happy. As soon as his body formed, Alex sensed that everything had come back, which surprised him.

The motes of light had brought back not just his body, but also the Yang source and the Yin bead that were in his dantian.

Not only that, it also brought with it his remaining Qi and blood aura. Alex instantly used all of his body's Qi to heal himself, even forcing his blood aura to turn into Qi.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm All but one minute amount. of Qi. The small amount he was going to have to use next.

He healed his body within moments and held Midnight, ready to leave. Only, right before he was about to leave, the space shuddered with pressure and cracks started forming all around him.

There was a strain in the space it simply could not handle, and Alex only realized a moment later why.

"My Soul Space!" he thought.

A smaller space could not hold a larger space inside of it. That was something very obvious to anyone who knew anything about space.

That was the reason why storage rings couldn't be stored inside of other storage bags or storage rings.

Similarly, that was the reason why the Dragon Emperor had failed to take away the Azure Dragon's corpse because he could not put the corpse with the larger Soul Space into the ring's smaller space.

Most of the time, this rule was not something one had to even think about. After all, placing larger space into smaller space was quite simply impossible. One did not have to worry about failing to do the impossible.

However, in this particular case, Alex's body had followed him into the ring's space, reforming inside. And the moment it had finished reforming, Alex had regained his connection with his Soul Space.

And his was a Soul Space that nothing could contain.

Alex sensed the deteriorating space and knew at any moment it would all crumble. He took Midnight and poured the last of his Qi into it.

This was the chance he had been waiting for. This was the distraction that gave him time to prepare for the one attack that he now had a name for.

This was the time he was going to kill the Dragon Emperor.

Chapter 1840 Sword Intent

Sword Intent was all one needed to become a master of the sword even at the highest level. Whatever the pathway asked for, it was not something one couldn't accomplish by simply improving their Sword Intent.

That was something one only realized when they reached a high realm with sword mastery. Along the way, they believed they were doing something different, but all they were doing was using their Sword Intent.

Alex knew that Sword Intent was all that mattered on one's journey with the Sword, but he had always been told this. He had yet to learn that it himself.

But he was on the verge of doing so.

The world seemed to grow still for Alex as he closed his eyes, focusing on his attack. He poured all of his remaining Qi, the tiny amount he had kept behind for this one attack, and prepared.

The attack alone would not be enough for him, so he pulled out a bit more from his body. As there was nothing else to draw the Qi from, Alex reached out to the Yang source to pull a little more out.

Using the Yang Source to give him aid left the Yin Bead to take advantage, but that mattered little for Alex at the moment. He had to use what he could to make sure that his one attack would work.

Midnight vibrated violently as it got the Qi, having never received something like this before.

There was no Blood Aura for Alex to use, but he did have Dao and Spiritual energy, which he poured in one after another.

Then, he poured in his Sword Intent.

Sword Intent flowed onto Midnight, covering it completely.

Sword Intent was simply Spiritual energy too, but it had changed to become something else, so it word alongside Spiritual energy too.

After being covered by Sword Intent, Midnight glowed softly with a white outline around it. As the Sword Intent further converged on the sword, it had nowhere else to go but stack onto itself, until it became thick enough to become Sword Qi.

At this point, there was enough Sword Intent on the sword, taking the form of Sword Qi, which could be used as an attack itself from far away.

Sword Qi glowed much brighter, covering Midnight in its glow now, becoming much brighter than before.

As the Sword Qi converged, Alex put in more Sword Intent without realizing it. This one was what he considered his sword's properties, which in actuality was just another form of his Intent.

The Intent to never give up, the Intent to keep moving forward. It created more Sword Qi, only this time there was no room for it in the sword.

So, the Sword Qi started jumping out of the Sword, moving around Alex as the glow covered him, ready for his action to follow where the rest of the attack went.

That was what Sword Aura was. It was Alex's Sword Aura.

But Alex was not done yet. There was yet one more Intent he had to pour into the sword, something that had not reached the level of either his regular Sword Intent or what he considered his sword's property.

This was the Intent born within him when he tried to embrace his technique as Godslayer had told him.

Alex did just that.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm The sword skill Alex made was something unique to himself. It was a technique born out of a will to use a technique so strong, so concentrated, and yet so small that one couldn't see it.

Embracing that very technique had caused his technique's property to become a new Intent for him to use.

The new Sword Intent was strong enough that when used, it created Sword Qi. However, since Alex had nowhere to place it on Midnight, it appeared around him instead, appearing as thin, imperceptible little slices that glowed and dimmed rapidly.

Alex was still in the early stages and couldn't produce enough of the Sword Intent to have enough Sword Qi around him such that they didn't disappear as they arrived.

At his level, creating a constant flow of such Intent was asking for a bit too much.

Not only was he using the technique itself, and Daos, but he was using 3 different Intents at once, which due to his cultivation base was not something he could easily use.

But Alex persevered. He ignored all of the strain in his mind, focusing only on this one attack as the world around him crumbled.

The crumbling reached a crescendo, and in one fell sweep, the entire thing shattered, forcing everything out into the open.

Alex appeared in the outer world and saw the Dragon Emperor. Then, he charged for him.

* * * * *

The Dragon Emperor's spear was crackling with bright blue lightning, ready to strike, but the glowing ring caused him concern.

Without hesitation, he drew out the ring from his finger, reacting to volatility with quite a significant amount of precaution, and threw it far away from him.

Thanks to his reaction, the Dragon Emperor was protected from what fate he would've had if he had kept it on him.

A sudden explosion came from the ring as the Space Stone inside of it shattered, releasing space all around them so fast that it left behind a spatial shockwave.

A Space Stone of the size of the ring the Dragon Emperor had held in a space of an amount that was far more than what he could use as storage due to refining issues.

The true size of the space inside that Space Stone was nearly as large, if not larger than the entire Dragon Capital.

And the appearance of such a large space into the outer world out of nowhere was bound to produce some visible effect.

The visible warping of space moved outward from where the space appeared, moving in all directions.

Hannah was slammed by the space, her body contorting in weird ways as the space moved past her. The space pushed and pulled and fractured around her body in many ways, which she barely survived thanks to using the last of her Immortal Qi to protect herself.

Had she not had Immortal Qi, or had the Dragon Emperor not thrown the ring far away, she would have absolutely died in this place.

The Dragon Emperor reacted faster than Hannah, sensing the Spatial ripple before even seeing it, and used the Ivory sword in his left hand.

He poured Qi into it, slashing at the incoming spatial blast, perfectly cutting it all such that none hurt him at all.

As the blast moved past him, he was about to sigh in relief when he saw something glow in the distance.

From the broken space of his destroyed storage ring, all sorts of treasures and objects he had stored over the years fell all around the city.

Some were destroyed in the sudden appearance, but the force there was not so much that everything died. In fact, the force there seemed much weaker than what the people far away had to deal with, and they had all survived.

However, there was one thing among everything else that the Dragon Emperor was surprised to see.

Glowing bright yellow, covered in a sword aura, Alex appeared where the new space had appeared and flew toward the Dragon Emperor.

Chapter 1841 Endless Severing

The Dragon Emperor's eyes went wide in shock. He could not believe that he was seeing Alex once again. How was that possible? Had he not just destroyed his body himself?

How was he alive like this?

"WHY WON'T YOU DIE?!" the Dragon Emperor shouted, his face burning with fury as he took the crackling spear and used the power he had stored in it toward Alex.

He shot out the strongest attack he could muster right now, one he was going to use to kill Hannah, which he was sure was more than enough for Alex as well.

Alex flew toward him even as the lightning bolt moved toward him.

And then the two of them clashed.

A wild grin appeared on the Dragon Emperor's face for a moment before it changed, turning to one that just had a horrifying realization.

When the lightning bolt hit Alex, Alex hadn't protected himself. The Dragon Emperor was certain he had killed him for now, certain that Alex could not survive such a blast.

However, what he saw instead was that when the lightning bolt did strike Alex, Alex disappeared, leaving behind just a blank puppet that took the strike.

The Dragon Emperor had been duped. Just like earlier today when he was called to the secret realm, this Alex had been nothing more than an illusion.

A distraction.

As for the real Alex, the Dragon Emperor sensed him teleport right behind him.

The Dragon Emperor didn't sense Alex. Alex was still hidden from his senses. What he did sense was a frightening aura that he carried with him now.

That, and the small slices that had started appearing around his body for some reason that he found difficult to protect himself against.

The Dragon Emperor sensed it but didn't realize what it was.

Had he had the time to check it properly, he would've recognized this as the next stage of Sword Qi.

At this stage, the Sword Qi formed not just around the person who used it, but also further away from him, covering a large enough area.

The Sword Qi created an area of its own that helped the user become stronger while he was surrounded by it as it was all Qi for him to use.

This was the next stage of the sword that Alex had finally stepped into nearly 50 years after learning Sword Qi and Sword Aura.

This was the stage of the sword known as the Sword Domain.

The Dragon Emperor moved his spear immediately to stop Alex, but even as he did, Alex was already halfway through his swing.

The Dragon Emperor had no time to prepare for an attack. All he could do was use the spear to parry the attack. His battle instinct only awarded him with just that while his body strengthened itself with what little Qi was flowing through it.

The Dragon Emperor wished he had left for the Immortal realm already, but perhaps it was not too late. Perhaps he could do it once he survived this one attack.

As long as he could parry this, he could run away.

But there was no parrying this attack. The Dragon Emperor knew that deep in his heart the moment he sensed the strength coming from Alex's sword.

This was a strength far beyond anything he had sensed on the battlefield at all. It was no strength a human had ever produced in the ten thousand years of his life.

This was a level of power that the Dragon Emperor had sensed once, and only once. And that was when he had attacked the Azure Dragon.

This was the power of a true Immortal. Not a power like the Saints who used their pseudo Immortal Qi in a fight and called it an Immortal Qi. It was not like his, who had only just stepped into the Immortal realm.

This was the power of an Immortal who had been in the Immortal realm for a long time, one who had reached realms beyond the first and was very much stronger.

That was the strength he felt from Alex's very attack. It was far beyond what he could have ever expected anyone from this realm to be able to produce.

No doubt, this was the power of his Immortal Qi.

One received Immortal Qi in the Saint Transformation realm around the 5th realm. If one was lucky, they would gain it around the 4th realm.

However, from time to time, there would be people who could turn their Saint Qi into Immortal Qi much earlier than that.

In Alex's case, he could do it as soon as he entered the Saint Transformation realm.

That was the reason why he had been so late to his breakthrough, why he had nearly let Hannah die while protecting him.

Breaking through to the Saint Transformation realm was good, but that was not enough to ensure that he would win. He needed a far more concrete power to kill the Dragon Emperor.

And this tiny bit of Immortal Qi had been the one thing that he had been preparing since the very beginning of this fight.

And now, he finally had the opportunity to use it, alongside the strongest attack he could use it right now.

His technique concentrated on Midnight, becoming a powerful force that seemed unstoppable, a power that could cut through all things, no matter what they were.

That was what he had wanted this technique to be when he first created it. That was what he had wanted this technique to do.

This technique which had been nameless for a long time, now had a name for it that Alex believed to accurately describe what it was.

Alex swung Midnight and released the technique.

Endless Severing Strike

The attack seemed to suddenly disappear, becoming nothing. But the aura it carried was still there, that frightening aura.

The Dragon Emperor put his Noble Dragon Spear to protect himself but that could not do anything against this attack.

It broke in half immediately upon impact, not even reducing the attack by any measure.

The sword strike landed on the Dragon Emperor, and even his body failed to do anything. The sword sliced right through him, cutting him all the way from his head down through his groin.

The sword passed past him, cutting through space itself as it moved far away, cutting endlessly as nothing could stand in its way.

It disappeared into the ground, sinking deep within it as it kept on cutting. It would only stop after it had cut through hundreds of kilometers deep underground.

The Dragon Emperor was still conscious, his body still not realizing what had happened. He looked at the broken spear and wondered why he wasn't dead.

He then looked at Alex and suddenly his vision split into two as one side of his body started sliding down the other side.

The Dragon Emperor wanted to speak, to say anything, but he couldn't do so. It only registered to his body a second later that he had even been cut at all.

As the two halves of the Dragon Emperor slid down on either side, the soul that had merged with his body was cut into two halves as well.

As such, the man who had lived for ten thousand years, the strongest human in the world, the first human to become an Immortal in over ten thousand years, the Dragon Emperor, Long Tiankong, died.

Chapter 1842 Dead

As the Dragon Emperor's body fell to the ground on either side, his innards spilling out with blood gushing from the cut-open wound, Alex moved right over him, ready to strike again.

However, even as he was ready to attack, he paused as he realized there was no need to do so. The Dragon Emperor was dead, and he had killed him.

Alex felt his body grow weak all of a sudden, the strain of using his Immortal Qi in his current state was something he hadn't expected to take a lot out of him.

He used Midnight to keep himself standing and he breathed heavily while making absolutely sure that the Dragon Emperor was dead.

"His soul," Alex said in a rasping voice. "Sister, check his soul."

Hannah finally woke out of her stunned stage, looking away from where the Dragon Emperor's body lay and toward Alex. It took her a moment to comprehend what he asked for and quickly sent her spiritual sense into the dead body.

There was nothing in there.

"He's gone," she said. "He should be dead. At least, I cannot sense any soul."

Alex didn't think he could be certain himself. It was an Immortal body where the soul was supposed to have merged with the body itself, until when the body was destroyed.

He did not know if there was information he was missing about Immortals, so he decided to be certain on his own.

He took the Dragon Emperor's body and stored it in his vast Soul Space.

As soon as he put the Dragon Emperor's body into his Soul Space, he knew at a deep level that the body took over more space than simply what it occupied.

'He grew a soul space when breaking through to Immortality,' Alex thought. 'That soul space is still there.'

Alex wondered if the Emperor would've died on his own had he had time to understand more about his body so that he could use the Soul Space more easily.

If he had placed him inside his Soul Space, he was bound to have died immediately with his world breaking.

"Alex..." Hannah whispered softly. "He's dead, right?"

Alex did not sense the mental strain that came from a spirit or soul being in his Soul Space. He nodded.

"He's dead," he said.

"You did it!" Hannah shouted, immediately running over to him to hug him. "You killed him."

"I did," Alex said, looking at his own hands. He had killed the Dragon Emperor, the strongest man in the entire world with his own hands.

Pearl teleported right next to them, his eyes wide and full of shock. "Brother, are you alright?" he asked in a panic. "I saw you... I saw you die. Your body..."

"Right!" Hannah said. "You were dead. I saw your body, but then it..."

Alex smiled. "We can talk about that later," he said. "I'm very tired right now."

Hannah caught him around the arm.

"What about the Emperor?" Pearl asked in a worry, wishing to hear the good news, but not expecting it.

"He's dead. I killed him," Alex said.

Pearl felt his heart beat faster. "Is that... the truth?" he asked.

"It is," Alex said, bringing out the corpse to show him. "I've confirmed it, Pearl. He's dead. Your mother and father can rest in peace now. Yao Ning can rest in peace now."

Pearl's vision blurred as tears gathered around his eyes. They rolled down his soft fur, one by one as he began sniffing and crying.

"We did it, brother," Pearl said. "We really did it."

"We really did it," Alex repeated.

Several other people started arriving. Yan Yating, the elders, Long Huan, and various others.

One by one, they learned that the Dragon Emperor was dead.

Hannah moved toward Long Huan, holding him by her side. Long Huan didn't know how to feel about the entire thing.

Not only had he lost his brother today, he now lost his father too. After his mother had died, these two had been his only family remaining, and they had both died today.

He did not hate his father. At least, he did not think he did. After all, if he had hated him truly, would he be feeling bad for him at the moment?

But there were definitely grievances and his father was too far gone to be saved. After all he had learned about him, he saw no justice for everything his father had done than his death.

Still, he did not want to see him like this.

Long Huan fell to his knees and started weeping, crying over the last blood family he would ever have.

"They're all dead," Long Huan said. "Everyone. My family, they're all dead."

Hannah hugged him from the side, slowly rubbing his back as he cried. She could feel tears forming in her own eyes because of her pain for him.

"You have me," Hannah said softly. "You have us. It will be alright."

Alex watched the second prince cry and felt somewhat bad for him, but not a lot.

This man had killed so many people that he would never feel bad for his death at all.

"Your Majesty!" one of the elders quickly called out to him, andAlex turned to see it was Ren Gaunting.

"He's dying," Ren Guanting said, pointing to Zhou Linfan.

Alex quickly walked up to Zhou Linfan, kneeling by his side where Zhou Linfan lay on the ground. "Senior Zhou? Can you hear me?" he asked, holding onto the man's hands.

He used his spiritual sense to check the man's state and was horrified to learn that he was beyond saving. The man was on his last breath, his body destroyed by the pill he had let him eat.

"Senior, can you hear me?" Alex asked again.

The man's lips moved ever so slightly, but nothing came out. He didn't even have the strength to speak anymore.

"He's dead," Alex said, delivering the message directly into Zhou Linfan's mind. "The Dragon Emperor is dead."

Zhou Linfan's mouth stopped moving.

"It was all thanks to you, senior. Because you forced him to break through, it gave me the time and motivation to break through myself, which allowed me to finally kill him."

"If not for your sacrifice, we wouldn't have made it, senior," Alex said. "It was all thanks to you."

The old man's lips moved, curving into a small but satisfied smile.

"You can rest now, senior. You have done what you set out to do. Your family has been avenged," Alex said.

A single drop of tear slid down the side of Zhou Linfan's eyes and he breathed his last breath.

Alex felt the life slip out of the old man's, dying as if nothing was keeping him fighting to stay in this world any longer.

He had let go.

Alex clutched his hands tighter, feeling the hint of sadness growing in his heart. "They say reincarnation is real,' he said. "If it is, I will pray that you can live a happy life in your next incarnation, senior."

Alex stood up and bowed deeply in respect for the man without whom today's victory would have never happened, and in hopes that he may rest in peace henceforth.

Chapter 1843 News

﻿﻿People paid their respect to the dead Zhou Linfan, taking a moment to mourn his death.

The destroyed Dragon Capital was silent all the way through aside from a few sniffs here and there as people mourned the loss of their friends and families.

The entire city was in ruin, with the area around the Dragon Palace completely decimated after Alex's fight with the Dragon Emperor.

Some sections of the schools had survived, but a lot were still destroyed and had to be rebuilt. Buildings that were away from the school and the palace had been relatively untouched.

The only thing around that location that was pristine from start to finish was the Intercontinental Teleportation formation.

Liz hugged Alex and patted his back. "I'm so happy nothing happened to you. I was so worried," she said while wiping her tears.

"I'm okay," Alex replied. "How about you? How are you feeling?"

"I'm feeling okay now. The headache is mostly gone," Liz said.

"I have received a message, Your Majesty," Qiu Jianhong spoke up close by. "Our people have met with Her Majesty. They are in the oceans outside the continent."

Alex nodded. "That's good," he said. "Deliver the news that we have become victorious here and the war has ended."

"That has already been done, Your Majesty," the elder said.

"I see, then have the soldiers return. There are many here that need the Phoenix fire. And there are alchemists in that ship that need to be put to work immediately. Many here can still be saved if we get to them quickly."

"Not to mention, we just won a war. We need to do a bit of looting, don't you think?" he asked.

"We're looting, Your Majesty?" the elder gave a weird look.

"Not from the living," Alex said. "But I doubt the dead mind if we take what they left behind. They won't be using it after all."

"I see. I will send the message, Your Majesty," the elder said and went to do as he was told.

Alex moved over to where Pearl was next.

Pearl was surrounded by the beasts, who were talking among themselves. As Alex got closer, he could hear them speaking about their losses and how much it cost them to move against the Dragon Emperor.

He also heard something about Pearl's Grandparents being happy now that their murderer had died.

"What?" Alex asked, arriving next to them. "Were Pearl's grandparents killed by him too?"

"Yes," the Lizard colony leader said. They had been killed by him after he had killed His Majesty.

"And you guys waited until now to fight back?" Alex asked.

"It's alright, brother," Pearl said. "They are ashamed as well. They know what they did was wrong. They came to help us in the end and that is all that matters right now."

Alex sighed and nodded. "I suppose," he said. "How are the losses in your group? What about the injured?"

"There are a few," the Eagle said. "We lost sister Xiang and brother Niu, and quite a lot of others. There are also many injured, but they have been sent back to their homes, so they should be healing there."

'Xiang and Niu…' Alex thought for a moment. 'So the White Elephant and the Ox died?'

Two of the Colony leaders had died in the battle, it appeared.

"I will have my alchemists make some pills and have them sent over to you all immediately," Alex said.

"What about your pills?" the Lizard asked. "You make quite the pill, don't you?"

"I will need days to be back to where I need to be to make those pills. You will have to do with my alchemists until then," Alex said.

"I see," the Lizard said. "That's a shame. We've used up the pills you sold us last time, and were hoping to get some of it."

Alex gave a small chuckle. "Some other time," he said. "It will be a while before I choose to sell any pills. That is if I even decide to come back here."

"Your Majesty," someone called out from far away.

Alex turned around to see who it was and saw Yan Yating approaching him quickly.

He waited until the man landed next to him and walked over to him. "What happened?" Alex asked.

"Huh? Oh no," Yan Yating gave an awkward smile as he shook his hands to gesture that there was a mistake. "I didn't mean to call you. I was calling him."

He pointed behind Alex.

Pearl looked back, blinking in surprise. "Me?" he asked.

"Yes, Your Majesty," he said. "We were hoping that you would make the announcement of the result. The continent deserves to know what has happened, and I couldn't think of anyone better to deliver that information."

Pearl thought for a moment and nodded. "What must I do?"

Pearl left with Yan Yating to record the announcement that would be spread through the continent soon enough.

Alex left the beast and went over to where his sister and the 2nd prince were sitting on top of a small rubble together.

"The ship will be returning soon. We should go there once it comes back," Alex said. "We should prepare for your brother's funeral."

"My brother's…" Long Huan said softly. "Everyone is dead."

"Not everyone, we're not," Hannah said. "Cry if you must, but don't say you have no one."

"And truly not everyone is dead," Alex said. "You still have a brother."

"What?" Long Huan looked up. "My brother?"

"Your little brother. The emperor's third son should still be alive. You still have a blood relative," Alex said.

"My brother? Right, I had another one," Long Huan said. "I forgot since he wasn't even born when I ran away."

"We'll find him," Alex said. "We should bring him to the funeral too."

Long Huan nodded.

The ship returned some time later and the now mostly healed soldiers started flying out.

Graham quickly ran over to them all, looking all around at everyone. "Is anyone hurt? Are you all alright?"

"Yes, Uncle," Hannah said.

"We're fine," Alex said.

"Where's Pearl? Where's Whisker?" Graham asked.

"Pearl is handling something right now. As for Whisker, he's resting in his beast space," Alex said. "Please excuse me, Father, I should go help the elders with the clean up."

"I'll help you too," Graham said and walked along while Hannah, Liz, and Long Huan made their way to the ship.

Meanwhile, Pearl was done recording the announcement which soon began playing on the Newsboards all around the continent.

Soldiers also copied the information into separate talismans and took it with them to spread to the places where the news boards were not present.

"I am Qing Shouchuang, the son of the Azure Dragon Qing Tianchui. Long Tiankong killed my father and mother in an attempt to kill me over 70 years ago. Now, after all this time, I have managed to get my revenge."

"Hear this, Eastern Continent. This is coming to you from the son of your true Ruler. The Dragon Emperor is dead. The war is over," Pearl declared.

The piece of news spread like wildfire throughout the continent within minutes.

And above the Dragon Emperor's own realm did Pearl proclaim that the Dragon Emperor had died.

Chapter 1844 Earring

The empire's soldiers acted immediately upon the orders of Long Huan, the oldest remaining descendant with royal blood. Most people listened to Pearl, but those who didn't listened to Long Huan.

It was either that or leaving the army altogether, which many did as well.

Using the empire's army, they began spreading not just the news about the war and their new leaders, they also started quelling any and all problems that might have arisen in the period of war.

There were many cities that had decided to rise up against the Emperor after learning everything they did, wanting answers. Then there were places where the citizens of that city had attacked the city officials for either not showing what was being shown through the newsboards, or trying to threaten them into not going to help against the Emperor in the war.

These uprisings needed to be quelled in peaceful ways, so the Oathbreakers and the many new additions to their rank chose to do just that.

Aside from that, the soldiers also had the task of relocating the many displaced individuals because of the war. Thankfully, the war itself had happened just in the Dragon Capital, and that too on the side of the Dragon Capital where there were no residents.

Even so, many of the people had to leave that area, and most of their houses and properties had been destroyed. While it would be hard to compensate them, they still needed to be taken care of.

Those that ran away from the city weren't very far away. They were gathered around the grass plains about 50 kilometers away from the city, waiting for the war to be over.

The soldiers went to help just them.

Long Hanjue, along with his mother, and many of the others who worked or lived in the palace were found on the other side of the Dragon Capital, toward the north.

They were brought back, and Long Huan met his younger brother for the first time then.

Long Huan couldn't believe how similar his younger brother looked to Long Fangyu. Not everything was the same, but there was a resemblance.

"Father is dead," Long Huan told his brother. "He was slain in battle, killed by the King of the Southern Continent. I aided him in that."

Long Hanjue remained silent for a while, giving only a single nod in response.

"Do you hate me for it?" Long Huan asked. "I helped father get murdered. Do you despise me for it?"

He looked to both the empress and his brother.

"Biologically, the Emperor was my father," Long Hanjue said. "But the truth was, he never truly was my father. He never held me in his arms. He never taught me anything. He didn't even look at me when we met."

"Sometimes I wondered if he even remembered I existed," Long Hanjue said. "So, no. I do not despise you, brother. While I never hated him or wanted him to die, like you might have. I never loved him either."

"He never loved me, so why should I love him back?" Long Hanjue said. He pointed to his eyes which were as dry as ever. "See this? This is the number of tears I shed for his passing. Nothing."

Long Huan couldn't help but feel the pain hidden behind Long Hanjue's voice, the sorrow of losing a man he so wanted to love, but could never bring himself to. A man that was nearly a father, but never was."

He reached out and gave his brother a deep hug. "It is just the two of us now," he said as he tightly gripped his brother's shoulders.

Long Hanjue simply nodded.

The empress to the side shed some tears, but those were not tears for the passing of the Emperor but rather tears for seeing her son be loved by someone in the family for the first time.

The Emperor never cared for his son, and Long Fangyu put himself to work to forget about his mother's death. As a result, from childhood until now, Long Hanjue has been alone.

However, for the first time, he had someone who truly looked at him. Someone who truly cared for him. Someone who would hug him and call him a brother.

Seeing this, she couldn't help but feel a wave of relief wash over her. The Dragon Emperor's death meant that she no longer had to continue the facade of what she was.

She was no empress to the Empire. She was just a pawn, used by the heads of the Head legion to give the Empire a figurehead to be placed on the throne next to the emperor.

In the end, all she was was a servant. Nothing more.

Today, with the Dragon Emperor's death, she had been released from her shackles.

Finally, today, she was free.

* * * * * *

Alex and Pearl met up with Bai Jingshen and Scarlet outside of the Eastern Continent, pulling out the bisected corpse of the Dragon Emperor.

The Dragon Emperor was now fully pale, his body mostly shrunken after death, a husk of what he used to be.

"He is dead, brother Shen," Alex said.

Scarlet flew next to Alex, holding his hands with her human hands.

Alex felt pulsing energy move into him, healing energy. Scarlet was directly providing it to him without using Phoenix fire.

Bai Jingshen looked at the corpse before him with his human eyes. "So this was the man that killed my Granddaughter?" he asked.

"And grandmother," Pearl added. "He killed my grandfather and grandmother too."

Bai Jingshen's eyes blazed with fury upon hearing the words. "I see," he said. "Then I cannot have him die just like that."

The beastman pulled his right earring and placed it in his palm before him. As he did, the earring began glowing.

Suddenly, a monumental aura erupted from the earring, pouring out with bright light that caused everyone but Bai Jingshen to reel back in surprise.

Alex barely managed to watch it after a moment, activating his Demon Eyes to the most he could at the moment.

What he saw with his Demon Eyes active sent shock reeling through his mind.

The energy that had been produced by Bai Jingshen's earring consisted of almost all elements, including space, time, and many more that he simply could not understand.

It was an amalgamation of everything out there, and it slowly fell into the body before them. The light disappeared all of a sudden and they all saw the Dragon Emperor's corpse slowly gain life.

Almost as though the Dragon Emperor was coming back to life, his body gained muscle and his skin grew color.

And yet the corpse was still a corpse, bisected still.

Then suddenly, Alex's mind reeled in shock as he sensed a small spiritual impression coming from the corpse.

Bai Jingshen clutched onto the ring and did something. As soon as he did it, a spirit with the body of the Dragon Emperor flew out of the corpse, going directly into Bai Jingshen's palm.

Bai Jingshen caught the spirit and quickly stored it in his Soul space. With the spirit gone, the corpse returned to its previous state, with a shrunken body and pale skin.

Alex, Pearl, and even Scarlet watched in wide shock as they could not understand what had just happened.

Chapter 1845 A Legacy

Alex understood his own shock at what he saw, but sensing waves of shocked emotion coming from Scarlet's bond surprised him even more.

What had Bai Jingshen done that caused an Immortal to be completely shocked?

"What is that? What did you do?" Scarlet asked.

Bai Jingshen placed his earring back on his right ear. "One of the many little things I can do thanks to my master," he said. "But I can't do this many times, so there is that."

"You resurrected him? What happened?" Scarlet asked.

"No, not resurrection. A true resurrection can only happen mere moments after one's death, maybe half a minute while the soul is still returning to where it came from," Bai Jingshen said. "What I did instead is akin to what he can do with Beast Cores."

"Me?" Alex asked, thinking for a moment. "What I get from beast cores are just impressions. Are you saying you drew an impression from this man's corpse?"

"Yes," Bai Jingshen said. "His soul was dead, but there is still spiritual energy in his body that hasn't dissipated just yet. Not all the way at least. The skill I used allows me to gather those fragments, empower them, and create a spirit from it with memories and experience of the person I get it from."

"The more spiritual energy there is, the more I can gather. I'll have to see how much of him is remaining in there still," the White Tiger said.

"Why would you want to make him alive again?" Alex asked. "Don't you want him dead?"

"No, I want him hurt. I want him crying, and I want him begging for his life without ever being able to die. An eternity of torture will not be enough for the man who killed my daughter and granddaughter," Bai Jingshen said.

Alex sensed the hatred in his words and said nothing.

"Grandfather," Pearl said with a solemn look. "Couldn't you... couldn't you have done the same with Mother? We could have—"

"I'm sorry, child, but that wasn't possible. This only works on those recently dead, and it needs a body. This artifact my master gave me did not have one where it worked on beast cores."

"I see," Pearl said with a saddened look.

"In fact, I tried it on your mother. I went to her grave to try and get something of her back, but it was already too late by the time I had come back from that other world. She was dead for far too long. I'm sorry," Bai Jingshen said.

"No, no, don't be sorry, grandfather," Pearl said quickly. "I already got to meet Mother, so I'm not sad. Besides, you tried your best, that is all I could ask for."

Scarlet gave Pearl a big hug. "You're the best, Pearl."

Pearl smiled widely. "Oh right, I was thinking of something," he said. "Since I'm the son of the previous ruler. Can I invite the two of you to the Eastern Continent? Will that work?"

Bai Jingshen shook his head. "That won't work. Unless your father told you explicitly that he was leaving the continent in your hands if he was ever absent, it wouldn't work. I fear your mother might have been who he chose, if any."

"We can still try," Pearl said.

Bai Jingshen was about to say something when he paused and shook his head. "Sure, go on."

Pearl stood up tall. "Grandfather, sister Scarlet, I welcome you to my land," he said.

Bai Jingshen looked toward the Eastern Continent and gave a rueful smile.

"It didn't work," Scarlet said. "Just the thought of going to that land tightens the oath around my chest."

"Is that so?" Pearl was a little saddened.

"Hey! If it was so easy, we wouldn't need to have stayed outside while we feared how you did the entire time," Bai Jingshen said. "So it's alright."

"I suppose," Pearl said and put up a brave front. "I still have many things to do in the continent. Turns out, being a ruler is not so easy. I'll have to return now. I'll see you all later."

The others chuckled a little and let Pearl return. Alex flew back with him, making his way back to continue dealing with the aftermath of the war.

It took 2 days for the soldiers to be certain that they had left behind nothing after taking away everything that had scattered throughout the capital after the war.

This not only included treasures, but also corpses and beast cores as everyone knew just how important it was for their ruler.

They also gathered the corpses of their comrades to return them to their families for the funeral.

Alex looked at the number of dead once again and sighed. It was a lot less than he had expected when he came here, perhaps thanks to the war being a surprise.

But it was still a lot more than he could afford to lose. A single life was too many to lose. Especially when they fought for him.

Alex could only sigh once again.

"Your Majesty, we're ready to leave."

Alex turned around to see the elder Qiu Jianhong standing beside him with a slight bow.

"Everything is done?" he asked.

"Yes," Qiu Jianhong said. "Everything that would require the soldiers at least. I fear there are more things to be done here still for you."

Alex nodded. "Let us return for now. I'll deal with other things later," he said and stood up.

He called for the others to come with him, but Hannah and Liz refused. They were going to stay behind with Long Huan to help him handle everything here.

Alex understood. "Take care of Pearl for me while I'm gone," he said. "He might be a little more overwhelmed than everyone else."

"Of course," Liz said. "Don't worry about him."

Alex nodded and left.

The Southern Continent's massive ship flew through the skies of the Eastern Continent, the color of the phoenix fire prominently displayed on the side of the ship.

Many people all around the empire came out to watch them fly back, the victors of the war.

Alex stood on the deck of the ship, looking down at every single person. He had found the time to cultivate and was now back on his full cultivation.

As such, he released an aura around him, a frightening aura that scared every single spiritual sense that came close to it.

He stood atop the ship like a demon of battle, a power that defeated the strongest person in the world. His would be a name that would spread through the continent for generations.

Men would speak his name in hushed tones, mothers would use his name to scare their children at night.

Sleep soon or the Phoenix regent will come for you at midnight with his long claws and his sharp fangs.

As the ship flew, with Alex atop it, it left behind a legacy for him. A legacy of war and death.

But there was something more to it than just that, for the people knew the truth now. Fearsome he may be, he was still a savior to many of the people.

However people felt about him, one thing was true. Because of what he had done here, his name would go into the annals of history here for thousands and thousands of years to come.

Chapter 1846 Back Again

Alex returned to the Southern Continent with the rest of his soldiers.

Helen and Ronron as well as Emily and the older Alex were more than happy to see Alex and Graham return well and alive.

Upon his return, Alex announced their victory over the Eastern Continent, sending a wave of excitement and celebration throughout the country.

But of course, it wasn't all happiness and joy. Many had died, and their funerals were held.

Alex and the elders set up a massive funeral pyre in one of the cities outside of the capital city and made their farewells with the departed.

Soon after, Alex entered closed cultivation, hiding away for nearly a week before he came out. When he came out, he was much stronger than before.

Alex felt his own strength, his Blood Aura, which had improved by nearly 2 realms, placing it close to reaching the Saint Transformation 9th realm. A little more and he would reach it.

He had not just absorbed all the blood that had been gathered, but also their blood essence, improving his power all that more.

Most of the people didn't have that strong blood, but the Dragon Emperor had been immortal at the end, and his blood was way better than anyone else.

Linlin bowed as Alex walked out.

"How's everything going, Linlin?" Alex asked. "Have the things I asked for been prepared?"

"We have managed to amass quite a few alchemists to make pills for the beasts as you have asked. They are ready to be taken to the Eastern Continent," she told him.

"Good," Alex said. "What about our own soldiers? How are they doing? Have they been healed?"

"Everyone is doing quite well," Linlin said. "The loot we had gathered from the Eastern Continent has been given to the soldiers as you had asked, so they are quite happy."

"They helped us, they need some reward," Alex said. "Have every single one of the soldiers who fought in the war be promised a Dao pill. It will take some time to make it for all of them, but just promising it shouldn't cause much problem."

"Dao pill?" Linlin asked. "Wouldn't that require a lot of that one flower—"

"Soul Elucidating Tulips, we can grow more of those," Alex said. "I believe that flower should be more readily available than it is. Although, growing it would require a lot of resources."

"I see," Linlin said. "Your aunt has come from the Eastern Continent too. Would you like to meet her?"

"Aunt Liz is back? When?" Alex asked.

"Yesterday evening. She is waiting for you in her room," Linlin said.

"Let us go meet her then."

Alex arrived at Liz's room and waited for a while for her to come out.

"Ah, you're finally out. I was worried I was going to have to wait far longer for you to come out. How are you feeling now?" Liz asked.

"I'm doing well," Alex said. "Actually, far better than well. Anyway, did you return for good? Where is sister?"

"No, I returned to get you," Liz said. "They have set the Dragon Emperor and his son's funeral for tomorrow, and they are asking for you to come to it."

"The Dragon Emperor is getting a funeral?" Alex asked.

"However bad the man may be, he was still Long Huan's father. So he feels compelled to perform some sort of ritual for the dead. But it's more so for his brother than anything."

"I see," Alex said. "We'll leave tonight then. Linlin, have all the pills and other aids prepared for me when I leave."

"Yes, Your Majesty," Linlin said and started communicating with other workers to do as he had asked.

Liz looked at Linlin and leaned in a little closer. "I think at the rate she is working, she's going to get overworked," she said.

Alex looked at her aunt with a confused look. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"The elders, have gone into closed cultivation after their return, so that leaves most of the workload on the poor girl's shoulders. I fear it might be too much," Liz said.

"I see. I did not consider that," Alex said.

"Linlin!" Alex called her out.

"Yes, Your Majesty?" she replied.

"What are my master and martial uncle doing at the moment, do you know?" he asked.

"Senior Wen and Senior Lang? Senior Lang should be working in the royal alchemy guild. As for Senior Wen, I believe he only cultivates. He should be close to reaching the Saint realm, so there isn't much he does."

Alex nodded. "Have the two of them come to the palace and aid you. They have experience in managing things as sect leaders and sect elders, and they can help you a ton. Don't overwork yourself."

Linlin gave a small smile. "I will do as you ask, your Majesty."

Linlin left Alex, leaving him to do what he wished on his own. She was supposed to stick by him at all times, but times were as such where she was needed in all places where he couldn't be.

Alex decided that it was time to promote her to the job that the Elders did. That and it was time to hire more people worthy of taking care of a continent in his or Scarlet's absence.

Later that evening, Alex arrived at the Voidgate to the south of the Southern Continent, along with his mother, father, aunt, and daughter.

Helen and Ronron made implications that they wished to see the Eastern Continent too, so Alex decided to take them with him.

The Voidgate swallowed all 5 of them at once, and both immediately and 3 hours later, the 5 arrived inside the secret realm in the Eastern Continent.

Alex tore through the walls of the secret realm, coming out on the other side, where a group of individuals waited for his arrival.

The King of the Ebony kingdom welcomed Alex with a bow.

"King Wan, I did not think you would be here to welcome us," Alex said.

"I was going to leave for the capital when I heard you would likely be coming too, Your Majesty. So I decided to wait for you," he said.

"I see," Alex said.

"I do not believe I know any of the individuals behind you, Your Majesty," the king said.

"These are my family," Alex said and introduced his family to the King.

King Wan was stunned to realize that Alex had a family. His family members were kept secret during his first visit, so no one had even realized.

Most of all, King Wan was surprised was Ronron. He wondered if there was a queen he was hiding too. Not that he could ask Alex.

"The teleportation is primed up for us to leave right away," the king said.

"No," Alex shook his head. "We won't be teleporting to the capital. My family wishes to see the Continent, so we will be going there the normal way."

"All the way to the capital?" the king asked. "But it will take you at least 6 hours even on the fastest boat."

"That's alright," Alex said. "We have plenty of time. Do you wish to come with us too?"

Chapter 1847 The Funeral

Alex's family of 5 and King Wan made their way through the Ebony Kingdom, from where they would go past the Ebony Mountains to enter the Azure Kingdoms, to make their way to the Dragon Capital.

King Wan sat quietly on the ship while the people around him talked about the various beautiful sceneries and landscapes of the Eastern Continent.

"King Wan, I do not see your two guards with you. Where are they?" Alex asked.

"Every advisor that had been placed alongside us has been called back to the capital. We have been left without them since the war ended and you... you killed the Dragon Emperor."

That was something the man still found quite hard to believe.

"I see. Also, I'm curious. You had those weird rules that the Dragon Emperor set upon you. Are you free of those?" Alex asked.

"Honestly, I'm not sure. Not that it matters to me," the King said. "As soon as this is all over with, I plan on abdicating. I got this throne while allowing the Dragon Emperor to actively ruin the sect that brought me up. I wish to return to them and help them return to prominence once again."

"I see," Alex said. "I wish you all the luck for that."

With the silver moon hanging high in the sky, Alex and the rest made their way through the illuminated land of the Eastern Continent, arriving at a large campsite where the palace used to be previously.

Long Huan and Hannah welcomed them all, giving them their places to stay.

"How are you holding up?" Alex asked. "I know it can be a hard thing."

"I'm doing... honestly, I'm not doing that well," Long Huan said. "I thought I would be fine, but then... then I went through my brother's belongings and..."

Alex narrowed his eyes. "What's wrong?" he asked.

Long Huan sighed and gestured for Alex to come inside the tent with him. Alex walked in, leaving his family with Hannah, and went to talk with the prince.

"I found this in my brother's belongings. It... explains why my father did the things he did. As far as I can understand, it all seems to be true," Long Huan said and handed Alex a talisman.

Alex took the talisman and read through it. As he read it, he was completely taken aback by the information he found written in it.

What was written itself was nothing more than ramblings, thoughts of the departed crown prince wondering why he was doing what he was doing.

He hated himself a lot for not standing up against his father, but he also thought he was doing what his mother would have wanted him to do.

The Empress' death had dealt a big enough toll on him that his sense of what is right and wrong when it came to her had been extremely biased from his perspective.

Alex felt pity for the crown prince. A part of him hated how pathetic he seemed to not stand up for what was right, but the larger part of him wondered if he would've done the same if he was in his shoes.

If it was him and his mother in this scenario, wouldn't he have tried to do what she would've wanted him to do?

He decided to ignore these weird moral questions that he had no time to think about. Instead, he went through the entire text, pulling out the facts he wanted.

What he found being written in there was a lot about prophecies. It listed out the many prophecies that the Dragon Emperor had received from the Nine Wells of Time in the Northern Continent.

Most of those prophecies weren't properly noted, but the most important one of them was.

It was the final prophecy that claimed how the Dragon Emperor's end would be brought by a King, a Son of a King, and a White Tiger.

Alex placed the talisman back down, his heart beating heavily after learning the information.

"Are you sure this is all true?" Alex asked Long Huan.

"I don't imagine why it would be false. And it explains the things that happened in the past or what my father did. Like executing the previous kings and queens, making the new ones unable to have any children, and so on."

"It also explains why he went against the Azure Dragon to try and kill Pearl."

"He tried his hardest to try and overcome the prophecy, but it seems it came true in the end nonetheless," Long Huan said. "I never thought he was the type of man who would let prophecy dictate his actions, but it turns out he always had been the man."

"My brother learned about it after we left, and my mother seems to have known about it for—"

Long Huan paused his words when he saw Alex's shock-

stricken face. "Alex?" he called.

"Hmm, yes? Sorry, what were you saying?" Alex asked.

"What's wrong? You... look worried," Long Huan said.

"I..." Alex took a deep breath. "I'm a little worried indeed. Excuse me, I think I need some air."

Alex walked out of the room, somewhat concerned about what he had learned. The Dragon Emperor had learned his prophecy from the wells, just like he had, and had tried to stop it completely.

Alex had ignored most of his prophecies lately simply because the chances of them all coming true was a lot less considering prophecies itself could not be trusted all that much.

However, the Dragon Emperor's prophecies had indeed come true. Had that been just a freak chance, or were the wells just that accurate?

Was his own mortality something he had to think about now?

Alex closed his eyes and took a deep breath to calm himself. 'The Dragon Emperor tried to stop it and failed miserably. If it is meant to happen, there is nothing I can do to stop it,' he thought. 'Even if it means that I know how I will die.'

The other prophecies mattered little to him. It was only the prophecy of his death that worried him, and now, he understood that he couldn't worry about it.

At least, he couldn't go the same route as the Dragon Emperor.

After a few more hours passed, it was time for the funeral.

The funeral of the previous Emperor and his first heir was broadcast throughout the entire continent for everyone to see. Most of the Newsbaords had been fixed and put back to work, so it was put to work.

Long Huan and Long Hanjue were the two who did the ritual for the funeral while others simply sat watching. Zhan Luoyang, as the Crown Prince's fiancee was also in some way a major part of the funeral too.

The Empress was there too, wearing fully black, but she did not say or do a single thing throughout the entire funeral. It was as though she had come to the funeral of someone she barely knew.

In a way, that was true.

The funeral ended by the time the sun was two-thirds of the way to the zenith and bodies of the dead were cremated.

Everyone gave one final bow to the dead and left.

Chapter 1848 Meeting

Alex teleported to the center of the Beast Paradise, arriving somewhere west of where Pearl was. Pearl was close enough that he could sense him now.

Following the bond, Alex went in the direction of Pearl, arriving outside the Lion Colony. Alex quickly met up with Pearl and the Golden Lion, getting their share of news about what had happened here in the past week that he had been gone.

Once Alex had left, Pearl had become the true ruler of the Eastern Continent, now making decisions for everything. However, after just 2 days of doing that, he had come to understand that ruling was not for him

Instead, he decided to leave that task to whoever was better at it. On the human side of things, he let the humans deal with it. On the beast's side, it had already been working on its own, so he let the 7 beasts do what they were always doing.

Only a small thing had changed now. The Beast Paradise was no longer closed to the humans. They could come freely if they wished to, and the beasts were free to leave and mingle with the humans if they so wished to.

With the Dragon Emperor dead, the beasts had no reason to keep their borders locked and allowed the humans to come and meet them.

After Alex's arrival, the colony leaders quickly come together, wishing to see what he had brought. Most of them still looked weak and wounded. The Elephant and the Ox colonies had new representatives, that was another Elephant and Ox.

"My apologies, leaders. I know you have been expecting some very good pills, but I haven't found the time to work on the pills, so this is all you will be receiving for now."

The beasts took the pills and looked at them. There were healing pills, antidotes, and a whole host of other pills, but none of them had pill veins.

They did not doubt that the pills were good but without the pill veins...

"I... suppose we don't have any grounds to demand for pills with pill veins," the lizard said. "We thank you for these pills."

Alex gave a small nod. "I will be making some pills soon, so within a year or so, I should be able to come back with a whole host of pills. I only hope you guys can give me what I want at the time."

The beasts gave a curious look. "What... is it that you want?" the eagle asked.

"A sapling or a seed of the Heavenly Mulberry tree," Alex explained. "As you guys are aware, I have the Heavenly Silkworms, and I have been feeding them Mulberry leaves all the while I can, but I do not have an infinite stock of the Mulberry leaves, and honestly, I fear they will die if I don't restock soon enough."

"That's... we will have to talk about it," the Lizard said. "The Heavenly Mulberry trees are not—"

"I'll give you one," the Lion said. "I believe there are a few saplings with me right now. There's no guarantee that they will all mature to become trees, but I can give you 3 of them and see how you fare with them."

Alex gave a wide grin. "Thank you, senior Zhu," he said.

"Please do not call me a senior, King Alex," the Lion said. "Truth is, with what you've been able to accomplish, you are our senior now."

"Nonsense," Alex said. "You are Pearl's uncle. Just that relation alone makes you my senior."

The lion was about to say something, but instead, he simply smiled.

The meeting was over not long after, and the beasts returned to their colonies after taking their share of the pills. Once everyone was gone, Alex looked toward Pearl.

"Have you gone to the place where you were born?" he asked.

"To my father's realm? Yes. There are a few beasts in there right now, taking care of that place as it hasn't been in some time now," Pearl said.

"Then, are you ready to see your father now?" Alex asked.

Pearl froze, unable to answer. Alex had proposed the same question to Pearl briefly before he left the Eastern Continent. At that time, Pearl simply didn't know if he wanted to see his father's corpse.

However, now that he had time to think over it and mull a little, he was certain that he wanted to see him.

"I'll see him," Pearl said and got ready.

Alex made a small thought and Pearl disappeared into his Soul Space.

Pearl's presence gave Alex no feeling of something else coming into his mind. As Pearl was bonded to him, the amount of spiritual burden he took from Pearl being there was already something he took from his bond with him.

As such, there was nothing more that Alex felt when Pearl entered his Soul Space, which he would've sensed if someone else entered it instead.

Pearl arrived in the darkness, feeling the lack of air. Surprisingly, there was some vague sense of gravity. Or at least, there was a sense of where down was.

Pearl felt a small force from inside his body that wanted him to let go of the breath he was holding, but he kept holding on to it.

That was a simple force he could ignore. Pearl also ignored the somewhat cold nature of Alex's Soul Space and looked around the search of what he had come here for.

Being Alex's beast did not free him from being totally unburdensome when using spiritual sense and a lot of Intent, so Pearl chose to not use those at the moment.

There was a glowing tree far in the distance, like a glowing star at night, giving off dim light to everything. That light gave an outline to a massive object that was merely a hundred meters away from him.

Pearl looked and saw the body of the beautifully scaled behemoth coiled in front of him. His blue scales shined somewhat in the dim light, the charred parts barely visible.

His head was giant, nearly the size of Pearl's entire body, with two thick horns growing out of it. Two long whiskers floated from the snout too as Qing Tianchui's dead body peacefully stayed there with his eyes closed.

Pearl looked at the face of the Azure Dragon for the first time. For the first time, he saw his father.

'Father...' Pearl thought and got closer to his father's corpse. Seeing the perfectly still corpse of the Azure Dragon, feeling the absolute lack of aura from his body, made Pearl feel sorrowful all of a sudden.

Tears filled Pearl's eyes and he nuzzled the side of his father's snout, rubbing his head alongside his father's head.

He wondered what it would've been like had he had the chance to be raised by his father and mother. What sort of a beast he would have become.

Because of the Dragon Emperor, he lost the chance to know his father and mother as he grew, to be close to them.

At the very least, he wouldn't miss that chance right now.

Pearl nestled close to his father's curled-up body, moving within the fur, and stayed there for as long as he could.

Chapter 1849 The Mulberry Saplings

Alex gave Pearl plenty of time to be with his father while he went to meet the Lion to get his Mulberry tree saplings.

There were a few that were growing in the restricted section of the Lion Colony with the larger Mulberry trees growing there.

There were about 7 different saplings in total from what Alex could see in the place and was a little surprised to see so many of them.

"I gave you a seed before, what happened to it?" the Lion asked. "Did it die?"

"I haven't had the chance to grow it," Alex said truthfully. "For the past 20 years, I've been going here and there, never remaining in one place. I needed to be back home to grow it. Now that I have that freedom, I think I will have the chance."

"You are quite greedy to ask for more saplings when you already have a seed," the Lion said. "But then, it is true that the chance of a seed of a Mulberry tree maturing from a single seed is very little."

"How long do Mulberry trees survive?" Alex asked.

"About 40 years or so?" the Lion said. "That's the average at least. Some can be less, some can be more."

Alex nodded and crouched in front of the 7 saplings. "So you have to constantly grow a new one or you will run out of it, huh?"

"That is the problem, isn't it?" the Lion asked with a bit of a chuckle.

Alex looked through the saplings, some which were merely germinated, some which had been growing for a few weeks or a month at least.

One was even nearly as tall as Alex's knees.

"That one is nearly dead," the Lion said, pointing to the tall sapling whose leaves were dryer than the rest.

Alex got close to the plant and took a look at the leaves. He sent his spiritual sense through the plants and got some information back.

"They are very nutrient hungry, aren't they?" he asked. "You must not have enough nutrients for all of them."

"The nutrients we get come from the young beasts feeding on random herbs and that getting absorbed by the saplings. We fertilize this land through that, but it is never certain which sapling will consume it, and which one will die even through it."

Alex nodded. "I believe each one of the saplings is different," he said. "Not in a way that they are different plants, but in a way that they are lacking different things and they need it."

Information about the Heavenly Mulberry trees was flowing through his mind from the Alchemy God's Knowledge, and his Dao of Plant Growth and Dao of Five Elemental Interaction were helping him understand more about the situation.

"The Mulberry plants require specific energy or combination of energies in their sapling form to grow. If you can provide it, you will put the missing piece of the puzzle, making it grow into a mature Heavenly Mulberry tree," Alex said.

The Lion looked surprised. "Are you certain that's the case?" he asked.

"Positive," Alex replied. "Although, I'm having a hard time telling just what this plant is lacking. Give me a moment please."

He closed his eyes and used his spiritual sense to analyze the dying plant as much as he could. At the same time, he used the Dao of Plant Growth to aid in the plant's growth.

The Dao of Plant Growth did give Alex the power to grow any and all plants, but it was certainly a great help to something that was already growing.

If compared to a human child, it couldn't provide the child with the necessary nutrients to grow. But it could help the child's body become better at metabolism or be better at absorbing every nutrient that came his way, sending nothing to waste.

Using the Dao of Five Elemental Interaction, Alex sensed what combination of energy was inside the plant at that very moment.

Somehow, Alex found it incredibly difficult to sense energies in the plant, which made sense to him considering the Mulberry trees were a big part of what made the Heavenly Silkworm's threads so good at blocking spiritual sense.

Still, this wasn't a mature plant, and Alex got exactly what he wanted after trying hard enough.

"A combination of Fire and Earth. More earth than fire," he said out loud.

"What?" the Lion asked.

"The energy combination," Alex said. "That is what this sapling needs. Have your young beasts eat something with a lot of Fire and Earth energy inside of it, just for this sapling, and see if it comes back to health."

The Lion gave Alex's words some thought and nodded. "How about the rest? Can you tell me what they would need? You said each one was different." New n0vel chapters are published on

"Yes, let me check," Alex said and started going through the saplings. It took him a while to go through the rest of the 6 saplings, but after the first few, he had gotten a firmer understanding of how to search for what he was looking for, so toward the end, he completed it in less than 10 seconds.

Alex told the Lion all the combinations of energies that each of the saplings would require, and the Lion nodded enthusiastically.

"We won't change what we're doing right now just in case you are wrong, but I will have the requirement for just this dying sapling changed. If it shows improvements, I will immediately have the rest of the saplings follow the same requirement. Is it possible for you to teach me how to look for these things?"

"Do you know the Dao of Plant Growth or the Dao of Five Elemental Interaction?" Alex asked.

The Lion shook his head. "If we ever have someone like that, I'll have them sent to you to learn," he said. "For now, you can take any of the three saplings you want."

Alex nodded and took three of the saplings, placing them into his Soul Space. Just as he and the Lion walked out of the restricted section, he heard Pearl communicate to him through his bond.

"Brother, I have a request," Pearl spoke.

"Just ask," Alex said, wondering what it was that Pearl wanted from him.

"Can we hold a funeral for my father?" Pearl asked.

Alex nodded. "Of course. We can do that. We should do that," he said. "Should we wait until we leave or do you want to hold it here? Your great-grandparents won't be able to come here if we do it here."

"We can do it in both places," Pearl said.

"Where do you want his grave to be?" Alex asked.

"In neither place," Pearl said. "This was where he lived, but this wasn't his home. I'm certain there is a grave out there for him back where he came from. We won't have to make one for him here. I just wish to hold a funeral."

"I see," Alex said. "Do you wish to cremate him or… I suppose burial is out of the question."

"I don't know," Pearl said in a solemn voice. "What do you think is the right choice? I don't want his body to remain like this all. He is dead, so he should be put to rest."

Alex thought for a moment. "I… have an idea, but I'm not sure if you will like it or not."

Chapter 1850 The Decision

Alex's suggestion for what could be done with Pearl's father's corpse was simple and even quite beneficial for Alex himself and the others. And yet at the same time, it was as though he was trying to take advantage of the Azure Dragon's death.

The two conflicting feelings made it hard for Alex to even suggest this option to Pearl, to begin with, but after hearing that he did not wish to bury his father, he decided to ask Pearl.

Pearl gave a lot of thought to what Alex proposed, not getting angry at him for suggesting what he did. Instead, he decided calm-headedly that maybe that would be the proper thing to do.

In a way, if he were to do this, his father could forever be close to him when he needed him.

With Pearl deciding to do it, Alex gained the confidence to do what had been decided.

So, he began his preparation.

He was now going to feed the Immortal body of the Azure Dragon to the World Tree.

Alex had fed multiple things to the two great plants in his Soul Space by now. Both the World Tree sapling and the Nine Yang Divine tree had fed on plenty of saint human and beast corpses that Alex had gained either in his fight in the ocean or from the war.

They had helped the two plants grow plenty big with the Nine Yang Divine tree almost as tall as him above the root, and the World Tree nearly 10 meters tall even when just a sapling.

Even the Dragon Emperor's corpse had been fed to the World Tree. However, it hadn't given as much result as Alex would've hoped for it to.

He had a feeling that whatever Bai Jingshen had done to take away the Dragon Emperor's 'spirit' had drained the body of a lot of its original energy.

So, the only thing he had left to feed the World Tree that was of any value to it now was the Azure Dragon's body.

Pearl remained inside the Soul Space to watch everything that was going to happen. With the amount of Qi he had in his body, he could survive there for a week or so without any problem, so long as he didn't expend too much energy.

There were 2 tasks that Alex needed to complete before he could feed the Azure Dragon's corpse to the plants.

First, he had to take the Beast Core out. The Azure Dragon's core was still inside his corpse, so before that was fed to the World Tree, it had to be taken out.

That core was the only way remaining for Pearl to speak to his father just once, so Alex was not going to let the World Tree consume it, even if that would be for the better overall.

Secondly, there was the matter of the Soul Space that was inside of the Azure Dragon still. Alex needed to take out whatever treasures there were inside the Azure Dragon too.

So, without much time to waste, he got to it.

Alex started with the Beast Core, trying to take it out from the Azure Dragon's wounded corpse. He sent his spiritual sense into the beast and searched for where the core would be.

On a regular-sized beast, it would be an easy task. But on a beast the size of a small house, it took some time for Alex to find it.

Sending spiritual sense through an Immortal corpse was harder than he had thought it would've been.

Once Alex found the location of the Beast Core, he had to pull it out. But no matter how he willed it, the Beast Core wouldn't come out at all.

In a way, He was supposed to be the god of the world inside his Soul Space. He could move things around with just a thought. But the Beast Core seemed to reject this Intent of his.

It ignored any mental command Alex put on it, as though it had a thought of its own.

Alex realized that the minute impression left behind by the Azure Dragon's Soul was causing this problem. There were two choices left for Alex.

The first was to ask Pearl to help him dig it out, but that choice was immediately thrown out of the window as Alex was not going to make the son desecrate his father's corpse.

So, he had to do it himself.

Midnight blinked out and in of the Soul Space, arriving right next to the Dragon's corpse which Alex tried his best to use to dig out the beast's core.

He pushed Midnight into the Azure Dragon's corpse, trying to make his way inside the corpse. However, Midnight could barely even cut through the hard scales on the dragon's body. There was simply no way for Midnight to pierce through the Dragon's skin.

Alex wondered if he had to pull the corpse out and use his Qi to aid him in this task. He had his Immortal Qi ready to use, so he could do it.

But then he would have to go somewhere else and he did not want to reveal the corpse to any of the beasts in the beast paradise.

Instead, Alex decided to use something else. Something that was in a way much weaker than Midnight, but in some other way, much much stronger.

Alex took the slim sword he owned and sent it close to the Dragon's corpse. This sword was the same sword that he could not use his Qi through, the same one that had been used to trap Godslayer before he had taken over Alex.

The sword was incomprehensibly strong and inconceivably sharp, a treasure that Alex simply did not know what to do with. If it ever accepted Qi, there was a chance he would have never even created Midnight.

But since it did not, it was in a weird state where it was extremely powerful, but also had very few use cases.

Alex used the sword and sent it flying into the Azure Dragon's corpse, successfully piercing the tough scales.

'Finally,' Alex thought and made a larger incision around where he pierced it, large enough that he could now use the sword to pluck out the beast's core from inside.

The beast core that came out was slightly larger than regular beast cores, but not by much.

As it flew out, Alex could finally control it much easier than when it was inside the corpse.

The beast core flew toward Pearl, letting him hold on to it for the moment.

Pearl took the beast core and moved aside. "I will get to meet Father through this, right?" he asked.

"Of course," Alex replied. "As soon as I have enough strength, we should be able to do it."

Pearl nodded with a sad smile.

Alex felt Pearl's sadness through the bond but didn't let it affect him. There was much more to do right now.

He looked toward the Azure Dragon's chest next, feeling a bubble of space inside there without even having to sense it with his spiritual sense.

That was the Azure Dragon's Soul Space, the thing that the Dragon Emperor had fought for.

"Let us see what it was that the Dragon Emperor died for."

Chapter 1851 Inside the Soul Space

To take the treasures out of the Azure Dragon's Soul Space, Alex had to do nothing but force his Dao of Space around the slim sword's blade and cut into his chest through it.

He had to cut deep within the chest where the Soul Space was and bring the treasures out through there.

Given how easy the task was, Alex completed it immediately, cutting through the Azure Dragon's soul space. As soon as the Soul Space was torn open, Alex sent his spiritual sense into the Soul Space and began dragging everything that was inside of it out.

Unfortunately, there weren't many things inside of the Azure Dragon's soul space. It appeared that either he had kept his items somewhere else, or he had spent most of his treasures somewhere else.

"He went through two Heavenly Judgments," Alex said softly. "And he had to fight the Godkiller himself. It's understandable he doesn't have that many things."

Pearl floated next to the group of treasures that had come out. "This isn't too many?" he asked.

"I doubt it is too many for Immortals," Alex said. He looked through the.

A few pills, a few minor treasures, some destroyed pieces of treasures, some small ingredients, some talismans, and finally some spirit stones.

There were also a lot and lot of empty wooden boxes, bottles, and what not.

There were not many spirit stones in there, just a couple hundred to a thousand. It didn't seem that impressive to Alex, but that was only until he checked what sort of spirit stones they were.

"Wait... is that Immortal Spirit stones?" Alex asked as he felt the aura coming out from the Spirit stones. His heart started beating faster and faster.

"No way! That's... that's Immortal Spirit stones," he said. The spirit stones were much stronger and far more potent in aura than regular Saint spirit stones. Not only that, they glowed brightly as well, lighting up the rest of the treasures around there.

"I don't recognize much of the rest of the items here," Alex said, looking through the rest.

Most of the pills were Saint pills, which he immediately recognized, but there were 2 Immortal pills too, just based on their aura.

There were certainly no pill veins to them, which made the pills much worse than they could be.

Alex looked through the treasures, especially the broken ones, which he realized were bits of metal that formed a spear of some sort. It was a green spear and seemed to be of much better quality than what the Dragon Emperor used.

Only, it was completely broken.

'There is some space aura to it,' Alex thought. Whether that was because of the metal or because of the owner, Alex did not know.

"We can try and see if we can repurpose this broken spear into something for you to use. I don't know if I can do it right at this time though. Might have to wait until I'm an Immortal," Alex said.

"I can wait," Pearl said. "I wouldn't mind even keeping it just like this. I am fine with that too."

Alex said nothing and went on to look through the rest of the treasures. Two of the treasures were teleportation treasures. Alex could tell that by the aura, but he would have to check it more to see what they were.

There was one treasure similar to his Mirror, which was a ring of some sort. Alex did not know what that did either, but could tell that it was 'empty'. He would have to test it out later as well.

"No formations," Alex noted. "I wonder if he used it all up to protect himself during the first Heavenly Judgment." In the same way, there weren't many healing treasures either, as well as no sort of defensive treasures.

What remained in the end were just some talismans.

A few of the talismans were communication talismans, which Alex had little use for. There weren't many talismans with the Azure Dragon that were of much use to Alex it seemed.

All except for a single one. This one seemed very special in the sense that the Azure Dragon had kept it safely in a wooden box that itself could be considered a treasure.

If not for the fact that Alex could only use his senses in his Soul Space and had already seen through the box, he would've certainly wondered if the box held some sort of power.

He looked inside the box and frowned. The talisman was simply incomprehensible to him. Of course, there were runes that he perfectly understood, but those were minor runes.

He had no idea what the major runes that were the basis of the talisman were or how they functioned. As a result, he simply did not know what this talisman was about.

'Maybe mother knows?' Alex wondered, but that seemed impossible too. He had read the talisman book that his mother had received and the runes in this talisman were not recorded in that book.

He had come across a talisman he simply did not understand. "I might have to ask your grandfather what this is," he said to Pearl. "As it stands, I have zero clue."

He put the box aside, letting it all gather around Pearl for the moment, while he began moving everything in that location close to where the plants were.

It was time for him to do with the corpse what he had said he would. It was time to give the corpse to the World Tree.

Alex had debated upon which of the two trees, he should give the corpse to for a while now, finding the benefits of giving either one of the plants.

However, in the end, he realized that it simply did not matter which plant he gave it to as the end result was the same.

The World Tree took in energy to grow and used the excess to turn into weak Qi, which would permeate its surroundings, captured by the formation Alex had created around the trees.

Similarly, the Nine Yang Divine Tree took in the energy to burn itself brightly like the sun, releasing light just like a sun.

The Qi from the World Tree would help the Yang Tree in the end, and the sunlight from the Yang Tree would help the World Tree in the end.

It was a constant back and forth of energy, of which only part of it was given to the outside world as of this moment.

So, it did not matter which one got the corpse, as the other one would receive the benefit too. The only reason Alex chose to give it to the World Tree instead was because the World Tree had so much more to grow and would need every little help it could get.

So, Alex decided to help it instead at the moment.

Pearl followed his father as they moved toward the bright light. Far away, it appeared as though they were looking at a burning tree, that got closer and closer as they moved.

This close, Pearl could feel the sunlight on his face, feel the tiniest hint of heat on his face. The Yang tree burned like a true sun.

"This is the furthest you can safely go, Pearl," Alex said. "Say your goodbyes here, and I can complete the rest."

Chapter 1852 Growing

Whisker appeared in the Soul Space, moving next to Pearl while he said his final goodbye. Whisker remained next to him as a brother and a friend for Pearl during this time.

After Pearl finished saying his final goodbyes to his father's corpse, Alex pushed it away toward the formation that was around the World Tree.

The corpse got closer and closer to the World Tree, and when it finally reached it, the World Tree's free roots moved around the corpse, capturing it and taking it in.

The roots slowly wrapped around the entire corpse and started pulsing as they began absorbing the corpse.

"It will take some time," Alex said. "It took about 5 hours to fully take away the Dragon Emperor's body. It should take much longer now."

"That's alright. I'll stay and watch," Pearl said.

Alex said nothing and let Pearl do that.

Pearl watched as the roots slowly took away his father's body, completely hidden from his sight. They had completely wrapped their roots around his giant father's coiled-up body, and they shrunk slowly, but visibly, which let Pearl know how long it would take.

Pearl had thought he would only be watching his father's body go away, but to his surprise, he also saw the tree start moving and growing.

It got slightly bigger each time the roots shrunk around his father's body.

The 10-meter-tall tree was growing, getting closer to 11 meters and maybe a little more. It wasn't just growing tall, but also somewhat wide, as the branches grew around it, and leaves grew out of it.

Pearl didn't use his spiritual sense, so he couldn't tell what was happening around the tree right now. Whisker could perhaps tell the situation with his whiskers, but he would have to go closer.

Unbeknownst to them, the tree was giving off Qi, as it always had. But unlike the other times, this Qi was slightly better and stronger.

Until now, the Qi coming from the tree had improved, getting closer to the strength of what a Mind Tempering realm cultivator would have in his body.

But now, it had improved once more. With Pearl's father's incredible Immortal body, the Tree was getting closer to releasing True Disciple realm Qi.

The best part about these Qi was the fact that if they were left out long enough, they would break down to become weaker and weaker until they turned into nothing but the energy they came from.

As such, everyone in the true realm, and below it, could easily absorb the Qi around the tree.

It wasn't just the World Tree that seemed to show any change either. The Yang Tree began glowing much brighter as well.

It wasn't only glowing bright, but hot as well. Pearl could feel the heat from the tree growing ever so slightly. Whisker could tell exactly how much hotter the tree had gotten thanks to his little whiskers.

That heat was of course going to go back into the World Tree to turn into Qi again, continuing a loop.

8 hours passed in a flash, and the World Tree's roots finally opened up, revealing a complete lack of anything. Not even the bones had remained.

Tears fell down Pearl's face once again as he saw that nothing remained again of his father. "Brother, it is done."

Alex watched through Whisker's eyes, seeing the complete lack of anybody within the World Tree. The World Tree had grown taller, becoming a bit taller than 12 meters.

It had been growing for all this time, and with just a single Immortal Corpse, it had grown by 20% more. Alex wondered how much more he could make it grow by feeding it whatever else he could come across.

Maybe the Immortal spirit stones?

'No, that won't do. I need those,' Alex told himself. He would have to take it slow with growing these plants.

'But I absolutely need some place to grow the tree. Some place where I won't have to gather the Qi around using formation, and can actually put it to good use.'

Alex would have to think a lot about that.

"In a way, my father will forever be with the tree, won't he?" Pearl asked.

"In a way," Alex answered.

"We can come visit your father whenever you want, brother," Whisker said to Pearl.

Pearl nodded slowly.

The three of them remained there, watching the slow transaction between the World Tree and the Yang Tree as they reached equilibrium again while remaining far enough away from each other.

"Do you wish to stay there for a while?" Alex asked Pearl.

"No, I'll be leaving," Pearl said. Both he and Whisker flew out of Alex's Soul Space

As soon as they were out, they took a deep breath, feeling the breath of air fill their lungs. Being inside without any air was a very weird experience for Pearl at least.

Whisker was more used to it as Alex sent him inside multiple times to check on the trees as his own Spiritual Sense was absorbed by the trees if he got too close up to them.

Once they were out, Alex looked toward Pearl. "Go to your uncle and tell him what you want to do. He should help you prepare for the funeral."

Pearl nodded and left to meet his uncle. He returned a while later and told Alex that it would take a day at least to make the preparations since the Azure Dragon's funeral wouldn't be something simple.

It might even take longer if the entire continent were to be made privy to the event, which Pearl decided to make happen.

Given how many of the people of the continent had fought on his father's behalf in the war, it did not sit right with him to make the funeral just something for himself.

The entire continent looked up to his father, so it was even necessary in a way.

With Pearl's uncle doing all the necessary preparation, Pearl returned with Alex to meet the rest of the family.

Helen and Ronron were more than happy to see Pearl doing well. They hadn't seen him since he had left for the war, so they were more than worried for him.

Pearl felt a warm feeling grow inside of him, as he remembered that while he had lost his father and mother, not everything had been lost just yet.

He had more people in his family than just his father and mother. A smile formed on his face.

While Pearl remained with the others, Alex went to meet up with Long Huan, who had requested that he come to his tent.

When Alex arrived, he found a gathering in the tent, one that made him wonder just what was happening.

There were not just Long Huan and Hannah in the tent, but also Long Hanjue, Yan Yating, and several other leaders of the army and legions, as well as many other people that Alex did not recognize.

He got curious about such a large gathering.

"What exactly is going on here?" he asked.

"Your Majesty, thank you for coming," Yan Yating said. "With you here, we may be able to finally decide the future of the empire."

Chapter 1853 Future of the Empire

Alex raised an eyebrow.

"The future of the Empire?" he asked. "What exactly do you mean?"

"We are deciding on who should be the next ruler of the empire, of the continent," Yan Yating said. "And we are not sure who to choose for it."

"And what do you need me for?" Alex asked. "I'm a foreign kingdom. I should have no say in these matters."

Some people Alex did not recognize nodded greatly at his words, but the ones that were closer to Alex did not. That made Alex quite curious.

Hannah gestured him to a seat that was open close to them, and Alex went and sat. "Can I learn what the exact situation is?" he asked.

Seeing Alex join the conversation made many of the people uncomfortable. Someone who could kill an Immortal had a lot of leverage in any conversation and everyone knew it immediately.

"Of course," Long Huan said. "The situation is this. We are trying to choose the next emperor, and we cannot decide who exactly it should be. I say it should be my younger brother, but there are many that suggest that I should be the one since I'm older."

Alex narrowed his eyes. "You don't want to be the Emperor?" he asked.

"No," Long Huan said. "I... never had such a desire."

Alex thought for a moment and nodded. From everything he had heard about Long Huan, he never seemed interested in matters regarding the empire or ruling, so it made sense why he didn't want to do it now.

"But you must do it anyway," Yan Yating said. "You are the older of the two brothers. I admit that it would be okay for Prince Hanjue to become the Emperor too, but he's too young for it. He isn't even 40 years old. There is so much more for him to learn before he becomes one."

"What about the Empress?" Alex asked. "She can rule while the young prince learns to become an Emperor."

"She made her intention to leave the royal family known after her father's funeral. She is not even an empress anymore," Long Huan said.

"I see," Alex said, thoughtful about the situation.

"Prince Huan, you must take the throne," Yan Yating said, a few other people nodding in agreement.

"No, we must follow the ruling of the family. In the event that an Emperor passes away, the throne is given to the crown prince," one of the people said, someone that Alex did not recognize. He didn't even wear a soldier's uniform.

'Someone from the Royal blood?' Alex wondered. The man was old, so the chance that he was trying to take the throne for himself was impossible.

But seeing how close he was to the third prince, there was a chance that he was trying to put the third prince on the throne and control him from the shadows either through suggestions or by force.

It would be hard to prove what it was that he wanted without forcing him to eat a pill. Would that be going too far? Alex did not want to actively interfere in their matters.

Yan Yating sighed. "But the Crown Prince is dead, that is why we are choosing one of the other two princes to become the Emperor," he said.

"That is not true," the other man replied quickly. "While it is true that the first prince is dead, he was not the Crown Prince at the time of his death. The Emperor had revoked the first prince's right as the crown prince, and given it to prince Hanjue."

"Because of that, after his passing, legally, the throne should be passed to Prince Hanjue," he said.

That brought up more arguments about what was legal, and what was not. Whether they should stick to the Emperor's words or not was also questioned.

Yan Yating was clearly against everything that the Dragon Emperor himself said, but more than that, he did not want to hand the country over to a prince he knew little about.

The argument went on for a while as Alex watched and heard everyone's arguments. Some put up good arguments, while some did not.

Alex looked at Long Hanjue, who felt very much out of place in such matters of importance as he had always been left behind from such stuff.

"Alright, everyone stop!" Long Huan shouted, causing everyone to pause their argument and look at him.

Long Huan sighed and turned toward Alex. "What do you suggest should be done?" he asked. "Please tell me you can help make us the decision."

Alex bit his lower lip in thought. Then he looked at the third prince. "Everyone keeps saying how they either want the third prince to become the Emperor or how they don't want him to, but I don't see anyone asking what the third prince wants."

"Prince Hanjue, what is your thought on this matter? Do you wish to become the next emperor?" Alex asked.

Long Hanjue looked at Alex with a hint of shock on his face, unable to form any words immediately. "I... I will do what is best for the Empire," he said. "I will let the others make the decision."

"If you were to take the throne right now, do you think you will become a good emperor?" Alex asked. "Just yourself, without any aid from anyone beside you, do you think you'll make the correct decisions for the Empire?"

The third prince paused, unable to answer. "I..."

"Please do not tell the prince what to say," Alex spoke, looking toward the man who was slowly moving his spiritual sense toward the prince. Alex could not hear what he was saying, but he could sense what the man was intending to do.

The man turned toward Alex in surprise and then immediately started fearing for his life as Alex stared directly into his eyes.

He did not want to die.

The prince looked around for a while and said, "My father never gave me a single moment to spend with him. What time I had, I mostly spent it with my mother, who taught me how to read, write, fight."

"And none of those lessons included anything more than a cursory glance into how one ruled a kingdom, and nothing more. As such, I will say that I have zero understanding of what it means to be an Emperor and what is required of an Emperor. I would say if I end up becoming an emperor, without outside assistance, I will not make a very good Emperor."

Alex nodded and turned toward Long Huan. "Looks like you have your answer, Prince Huan," he said. "Either give the throne to someone who knows not how to rule or let this be the end of your empire and let the kingdoms rule on their own. What do you say?"

Long Huan was taken aback. "I can't let the Empire be destroyed just like that," he said. "It must continue."

"Then continue it," Alex said. "You are a much better candidate for that than your brother. You have much more experience than him in every instance."

"As for not wanting it, you have no choice. Rarely does anyone get to do something they love," Alex said. "You'll just have to suck it all up and do what is correct."

Chapter 1854 Azure Dragon's Funeral

Long Huan thought for a long while, wondering if Alex was correct.

"I wasn't taught to be an Emperor," he said.

"Neither is your brother, and he's spent all of his life in the palace," Alex said. "In the end, you will have to step up. As for not knowing how to be an Emperor, that's okay. You can learn on the job. I surely did."

Long Huan felt a little better hearing that.

"I am also worried that I might not be able to remain an Emperor for too long, so it would be pointless for me to become one right now," Long Huan said. "I wonder if I should still be it."

"Why would you not be an Emperor for too long?" Alex asked curiously.

"Because I'll be leaving for the Immortal world soon," Long Huan said. "Aren't I?"

The words left the crowd in a stir. To speak so casually of becoming an Immortal was not something someone did after all.

Most people had in fact completely given up on becoming an Immortal.

Alex was slightly taken aback as well. He looked toward his sister and realized that he was indeed correct. "Hmm, that's true," he said. "But you have some time. Use it to give your brother some time to learn what it means to be an Emperor. So when you leave, you can leave the throne for him."

Long Huan nodded. "You are not wrong. Maybe I should do that."

The rest of the people were surprised at how easily Long Huan expected to go on to become an Immortal. But once their eyes turned toward Hannah, they realized that he wasn't speaking nonsense.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm Reaching the peak of the Saint realm at an age that wasn't even a full century was something completely unheard of to everyone in the room.

Even Alex was behind on his cultivation compared to his sister. She was truly a talent out of this world.

"Then it is settled," Yan Yating said. "Henceforth, you will be the next Emperor, Your High-no, Your Majesty."

Yan Yating got onto one knee, bowing. As soon as he did, the others followed suit, quickly getting down on a knee.

Long Huan remained seated and speechless for a while before he stood up and spoke. "You have called me your Emperor, so there is no backing down for me now. I am your Emperor, and I will do my best to rule as wisely as I can. I will no doubt make some mistakes along the way, so I hope many of you will be there to help me along the way. Let's make the best of this situation."

"Yes, Your Majesty!" everyone shouted at once.

"Prepare the Coronation."

The preparation for the coronation went underway, delayed somewhat to complete the funeral for the Azure Dragon that Alex mentioned not long after.

To Long Huan, the funeral of the Azure Dragon was clearly a bigger deal than his own coronation, so he was going to work with the beasts to give off the greatest farewell for the Azure Dragon.

Quickly, the date for the Azure Dragon's funeral was set. It was to happen 4 days later. As for Long Huan's coronation, that was to happen a week later.

Alex took his family around the Eastern Continent for the next 4 days and went around the many kingdoms, meeting the kings and queens whose situation had changed a whole lot after the war.

The counselors had returned to them once the empire had overcome its initial turmoil, but because they had no one giving them any orders, they were truly just counselors at this point without anything else to make the King do.

They were no longer the puppets of the Emperor, who themselves were puppeteers to the many Kings and Queens.

Ronron was more than surprised at every location she visited. She had been to many places, but none were as good as the places in the Eastern Continent.

The energy was much stronger, the aura more vibrant, and she enjoyed every single minute they traveled around the country.

"Father, do you think I can bring Papa and Mama here someday? I'm sure they will love it," she said.

"I'm sure they will too," Ning said. "Once everything has calmed down, we can do that. There are so many more that would love to come here on a visit, I'm certain.

At that time, Alex also understood the overall situation of the Empire, seeing what his war had done.

Because the war had been isolated to just one city, the other cities hadn't been as affected by it. Even so, the aftermath of the war was visible.

The lack of soldiers, the closed stores, the sorrowful faces of the people. The war did have an effect, for better or for worse.

Alex returned to the Azure Dragon's secret realm on the fourth day of his travels, coming back in time for the funeral.

Pearl had remained back, aiding the beasts and the humans in preparation for it.

A massive pyre had been erected in the flower fields, the woods stacked to look sort of like a coiling dragon.

All sorts of figures were called from all around the world to come to witness the funeral of an Immortal beast.

Kings, queens, high-ranking soldiers, merchants, ministers, sect masters, elders, clan heads, ancestors, and all other sorts of people had arrived on that morning.

The funeral was broadcast through the Newsboards, so the entire continent could see it.

The Lion stepped forward to speak some words.

"Today, we are gathered here to not only mourn the loss of our ruler but the loss of a father and a husband."

The Lion gave a long speech, speaking heartful words for a beast that was in a way related to him.

"We thank you for everything you have done for us. And we wish that you forever rest in peace."

The Lion bowed.

Everyone bowed.

They bowed for a long instance before it was time to burn the pyre. A torch was brought to Pearl from the side, and handed over to him for it was his right to burn this pyre.

Pearl touched the pyre with the torch and it immediately caught on flames, engulfing the entire thing within seconds.

Pearl stepped back a little and watched as the silhouette of a Dragon burned. He watched silently, hearing the crackling of fire as wood burned in front of him. He did not cry. He had already said goodbye to his father, so he did not have any reason to cry.

Alex reached out with his hands and used the True Fire Dao to control the flames. Immediately a fire dragon rose from the burning pyre and uncoiled itself as it circled them.

Gasps rang around from everyone who saw it. Alex made the dragon encircle the sky a few times before making it fly away far into the stars before it vanished.

Pearl watched the silhouette of his father leave. He could not hold back his tears any longer. He wailed, tears streaming down his white fur reflecting the fire within them.

The people finally realized what the Dragon Emperor had done by killing the Azure Dragon.

The world watched a son mourn for his dead father.

Chapter 1855 The Coronation

﻿1855 The Coronation

Long Huan's coronation was broadcast as well, shown to the world 3 days after the Azure Dragon's funeral as he took the crown on his head and became the Emperor of the Eastern Continent.

The world celebrated along with him, fiery creations of dragons flying around the sky. People danced and feasts were given out in many locations.

Long Huan stood tall and proud as the Emperor.

As the Emperor, Long Huan immediately made 2 new decrees.

Firstly, he made Long Hanjue the Crown Prince and heir to the Empire and gave him the Ebony Sword as proof of it.

That caused people to be very surprised as Crown Princes were usually those who were direct descendants of the Emperor. It was very, very rare that the Emperor's brother was the next in line for the throne.

It almost suggested that Emperor knew he could not have any children and that was why he had done that. Those rumors were certainly going to start without a doubt.

Secondly, he revoked all requirements his father had placed on the Kings and Queens of the other kingdoms.

Most people were not aware of what these requirements even were, but those who knew were not surprised by it.

The requirement in the first place was placed so that Kings and Queens would not have any family to pass down their throne to, and thus be reluctant to create any sort of coup.

Of course, now that it was revealed to everyone that even the coup from the past was a sham created by the Dragon Emperor to get rid of the existing 5 kings, it was certain that the requirement would be gotten rid of.

Once the two decrees were made, Long Huan stood tall once more, promising the people that he would be a fair and wise Emperor.

lightsΝοvεl ƈοm "It would've been so much better had you been there," Helen said to Hannah, who sat with the entire family in the VIP section of the audience.

"I wanted to, but because Mother insists that we are not officially married yet, I cannot yet appear as the Empress," Hannah said. "We will have to have a marriage ceremony."

Liz sighed to the side. "I have one daughter. I'm not going to miss out on her marriage. Aren't you happy at least that I am allowing you to marry him?"

"Allowing?" Hannah asked. "There was a chance you weren't going to allow him?"

"Of course," Liz said. "He's so old."

Hannah laughed a little, causing Liz to laugh a little as well.

"I still can't believe that you are going to be an Empress now. At first, when that prophecy told me I would have something to do with the crown in the future, I thought it was fulfilled when Alex became a king. But now, it might be because you are going to be an Empress."

Alex felt his heart skip a beat when he heard that. 'Right, Aunt Liz did tell me something about her future having a crown,' he thought.

"How many of your prophecies have come true, Aunt Liz?" Alex asked.

"Mine? Hmm… I don't know," she said. "Truth is, I don't remember most of what I heard from those wells. I had yet to enter the Saint Realm when I first went to the wells, so most of my memory from that time is gone."

"Also, the last 3 wells simply didn't work on me, so I have nothing to take from there at all," Liz said. "It was weird, but I assumed it had something to do with my body. Since they are both time-related, you know."

Alex nodded softly.

"What are you talking about?" Helen asked.

"The Nine Wells of Time. It's a well in the Northern continent that can tell you your future. If you go to it—"

"No one will go to it," Alex said, quickly shaking his head for the others. "It's a place that tells you the future, but not all future are good. Sometimes, it tells you a bad one, and you don't want that sort of mental burden."

"Surely it's not that bad," Liz said. "So many people from the continent use it. They don't show any problem at all."

"They…" Alex frowned. That was correct. There were hundreds of people that visited the well every day, so there should be chaos in the Northern Continent either about how amazing the wells were, or how horrible they made life.

And yet, he never heard a single person back there talk about it. He had lived in that continent for 5 years before he even decided to check it.

'That's weird,' Alex thought. Why was there nothing from them? Why were the people not constantly doing things based on their prophecies?

Something was wrong.New n0vel chapters are published on

"So, should we go get our prophecies or not?" Helen asked. "Is it still bad?"

"I don't know," Alex said. "I might have to go to the Northern Continent some point in the future and check if I find anything."

The coronation ended but the celebration did not. People celebrated for 3 days non-stop, with parties happening all around the continent.

A new emperor had risen, so it took a while for everything to go back to being calm again. At the end of the 3 days, it was time for Alex and the rest to return.

"Come right away when you want to, or send someone to get me," Liz said to Hannah. "I will come right away."

"I will, mom. You don't have to worry. I'm an adult now," Hannah said.

"You'll never be adult enough for me," Liz said. "Alright, prepare for your wedding however you want to and then call me. I will come immediately."

"It might take some time, but we'll be sure to let you know well in advance," Long Huan said.

"It feels wrong to leave you here, but taking you away feels even more wrong. Take care of yourself, Hannah. And don't push yourself to become an Immortal. You have plenty of time," Helen said.

"I won't, Aunt Helen," Hannah said.

"We'll see you next during your wedding then," Graham said. "Take care of yourselves."

"I'll come visit you often, Aunt Hannah," Ronron said. "I promise you won't be very lonely."

"I will wait for you all," Hannah said with a big smile.

Alex walked next to Hannah and Long Huan and brought out a few pills for them. "There are some healing pills, some antidotes, and some cultivation pills. Most of these should be used by Brother Huan, but you should use these Dao pills sister."

Hannah took the pills. "Is this what you were talking about?" she asked.

"Yes, I will have to make more, but these are the ones I have for now," Alex said. "Don't take them whenever you want. Take them when you feel like you are close to learning a Dao but can't quite get it. This puts you in a state of mind where it is easier to look into the mysteries of the Dao."

"Thank you, Alex," Hannah said. "I will make the most out of this."

Alex nodded. "See you both later then," he said and walked toward the ship. After a final wave and goodbye, the group flew south to return to the Southern Continent.

Chapter 1856 Scarlet's Answers

Alex held Midnight in the open garden with his eyes closed as he concentrated on sending all of his Sword Intent into the sword. Midnight glowed brightly to signify the presence of the Sword Qi.

Alex added the next Intent into the sword and specks of Sword Qi started flowing out from it, quickly surrounding his immediate vicinity, creating Sword Aura.

As it happened, Alex continued pouring in more of his Intent, this time the Intent of him embracing his sword. This was the most important part.

He had to focus all of his mental energy on adding this Intent while already using the other 2 Intents, but he still forced it to happen and that created flashes of very thin light around him.

He tried to take notice of those sparks, those Sword Qi that were forming around him, but it was difficult. He could not take away his attention as well as he thought he could.

Thankfully, he didn't have to do it for too long. He stopped all of his focus and opened his eyes, looking around him. Sparks of sword Qi vanished, but as they vanished, he saw some of them.

Like hair-thin fractures in space, those sword Qi were nigh impossible to see with one's eyes unless you were looking for them in the first place.

All the Sword Qi winked out around him, and Alex sighed. "That was Sword Domain, wasn't it?" he asked.

Scarlet sat on a chair off to the side in the garden with Whisker on her lap, who she slowly pet.

"It... I want to say it is Sword Domain, but it feels to me like you are still not capable of fully creating it. Maybe you are not in there yet? I'm not very knowledgeable when it comes to weapons, so I can only tell you what I've seen," Scarlet said.

"People in your realm didn't have weapon domains a lot?" Alex asked.

"You might not have noticed but beasts usually don't use weapons," Scarlet said. "Especially ones with a strong bloodline. They have pride in their bloodline and refrain from using any sort of weapons."

"Pearl's father had a broken spear staff in his Soul Space. Did he not use a spear?" Alex asked.

Scarlet thought for a while. "Well, the ones that were chosen to come here weren't really that talented, so our elders didn't care much what we did. Maybe he decided to learn Spear here? I couldn't tell you. He never used it during the battle 5000 years ago, and we were never close enough that we could tell what the others used or did not."

Alex was slightly taken aback. "You guys weren't close before coming here?" he asked.

"We might have seen each other here and there during the thousands of years we were alive, but no, we did not know each other before we were chosen to come to this realm. It was only in the days leading to our departure that we even learned each other's name," Scarlet said.

"That... is wild to me. I don't know why I thought the four heavenly beasts were close like families," Alex said.

"No, we are not that close," Scarlet said. "The elders obviously are close with each other and know each other, but our palaces are on different sections of the realm, farther away than the entire length of this realm. So we don't really get to know each other a lot."

Alex was surprised. "I always imagined the four heavenly beasts living in a giant city, all in different mansions, but in the same area."

"You're just wrong in the scale of things is all," Scarlet said.

"I guess," Alex said. "Anyway, that was Sword Domain, or at least the beginning of it, right?"

"Yeah, we can call it the beginning. You're stepping into it. A bit more cultivation base, a bit more practice, and you should be able to do it," Scarlet said.

Alex nodded with a bright smile. "I will have to try my hardest then," he said.

"Okay," Scarlet said. "You didn't bring me here to let me see your Sword skills certainly. Why am I here?"

"I did call you to help me understand if it is Sword Domain that I was using," Alex said. "I didn't want to have to go to Brother Shen for something so simple. But, I suppose I have something more to ask of you."

Alex brought out a bunch of stuff and started showing it to Scarlet. The items floated in the air around Scarlet, and she looked at each of them with her bright red eyes.

"We got these from the Azure Dragon's Soul Space. What is good and what is not?" Alex asked.

Scarlet looked at the pills first. "Those are just some healing pills. You can give me those," she said and took the pills.

"What? You should ask Pearl for it. It belonged to his father," Alex said.

"Oh... right," Scarlet said and put the two Immortal pills back where she took them from. She looked at the broken bits of green metal.

"Is this the spear you were talking about?" she asked. "Not a bad metal. I wonder how much it cost him to buy this."

"These two are escape treasures," Scarlet said as she took two circular treasures made up of metal. They were what Alex noticed to have an aura of Teleportation around them.

"Escape treasures? So they are for teleporting away?" Alex asked.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm "Yes," Scarlet said. "But not just any type of escape though. This is not like those talismans you can get. These treasures, you can set a location you want to teleport to, and when you use it, you will be teleported there."

Alex thought for a bit. "Wait, so they are escape treasures, but you choose where you escape to?" he asked.

"Yes," Scarlet said.

Alex was surprised. "That's... that's incredible," he said.

"Not really," Scarlet said and then made a thinking face. "Actually, it is quite good for humans, I suppose. These treasures are made using Dragon scales and the Azure Dragons use their Space and Teleportation Dao to make these, so they are quite freely available for anyone who can afford it in the Land of the Blessed Sun."

"And this?" Alex asked, pointing to a ring to the side.

Scarlet looked at the ring for a bit. "This..." she thought for a bit and poured some Qi into it. "I see. As I thought, this is a ring where you can store a single attack and can use it without any delay."

"Just like the Mirror," Alex said excitedly. "And the attack can be from anyone?"

"Yes," Scarlet said.

Alex got happy. "Will you store one of your attacks in it for me?" he asked.

Scarlet looked at him in the eye and shook her head.

Alex was taken aback. "Why not?" he asked.

"What if you accidentally kill someone?" she asked. "I would die."

"Oh... right. You should be worried about that," he said. "Alright, no worries. I will save one myself then."

He looked at the other things that floated around and grabbed the box with the talisman inside that he couldn't read.

"This is the one I wanted to ask you about," he said. "What is this?"

Chapter 1857 The Treasures

Scarlet looked at the box and took it, opening it. Looking inside, she smiled a little.

"You recognize it?" Alex asked.

"Recognize it?" Scarlet asked, chuckling a little. Then, she reached into her own Soul Space brought out an almost identical box, and opened it.

Inside it was the same talisman as the other one. Alex couldn't hide his surprise. "You have it too?" he asked. "What is this?"

"This is our ticket back home," Scarlet said. "A direct Inter-realm teleportation talisman that will teleport us right into the inter-realm teleportation receiving platform the Land of the Blessed Sun."

Alex looked at the talisman in utter awe. "This... this will take me right to your home realm?" he asked.

"Yes," Scarlet said. "Wait, no, not you. There are similar talismans made for everyone's use, but this one specifically is made to only be used by someone who has the Bloodline of one of the Heavenly beasts. You could have used it if you still had the White Tiger's bloodline, but now I fear you must let either me or Pearl use it."

"I see," Alex said. "And does this work from anywhere?"

"Anywhere," Scarlet said.

"I see," Alex said, thinking for a bit. "So you all have it?"

"All of us are given one before we are sent to the mortal realms," Scarlet said. "Why? What's wrong?"

"Why didn't the Black Tortoise use it to leave this place then?" Alex asked.

"They are separated right now, so they only have one chance to use it," Scarlet said.

"Yeah, but they will always be separated. Whether now or later, it's the same thing," Alex said.

"Not for the elders. To leave before your time was up, the elders would be furious. Since they can, they are staying here until their time is up before they leave," Scarlet said.

"Won't their Heavenly Judgment be a problem?" Alex asked.

"Yes. They will have to do something about it themselves," Scarlet said.

Alex nodded and looked at the talisman before him. "I wonder why the Azure Dragon did not use it to escape," he said. "Or even if he couldn't leave, I wonder why he didn't use it to send his wife and child away. That would've certainly been a safer decision, wouldn't it?"

"I wouldn't be so sure," Scarlet said. "Qing Tianchui would have to be stupid to send a child that is the greatest miracle of an epoch along with a Saint beast that holds in her the bloodline that threatens the entire upper echelon of the White Tigers. He did the right thing sending Pearl and his Mother to the Western Continent."

"It was a shame that the teleportation formation on that side was destroyed. Had it not been, maybe she could've been saved."

Alex nodded. "I would never have found Pearl then," he said.

Scarlet placed her talisman back into her soul space. "I suggest you give that to Pearl," she said. "He's the only one that can use it anyway."

Alex nodded. "I'll do it when he returns from the Western Continent," he said. "It might take some time for the funeral to go through."

Scarlet got up and Whisker scurried out of her lap, jumping onto Alex's. "I'll go now. You must want some time to cultivate or use that ring."

"Right, I will take some time here," Alex said.

Scarlet left.

Alex looked at the three treasures before him, the two circular medals and the ring. He wore the ring and took one of the medals to use it.

He began using it and quickly realized a problem that Scarlet hadn't mentioned to him. She had told him that one had to mark a location they wanted to teleport to using this treasure, but she had never mentioned how difficult it was.

Alex poured his Qi into it and it did not activate at all. Surprised, he tried it again with no result. He was confused for a bit, wondering if the treasure was defective.

Then, he poured the tiniest fraction of his Immortal Qi that was all he had, and the treasure finally activated. Instantly, Alex felt something happening with the treasure and around it.

He could feel the energy gathering up in the treasure, wanting to go somewhere. Alex understood that it needed to be released to mark the location, so he chose the place he was currently at as the location.

The energy flowed out of the treasure in his hand and onto the ground below him, marking it. However, Alex could somehow tell that this wasn't enough. To truly mark this place as his destination for the teleportation, he would have to do what he did for a long time.

"Argh! It would've been so much easier if I had a lot of Immortal Qi. I might even have been able to use it in just a few sessions," Alex said as he let out a loud sigh.

"You'll get more Immortal Qi as you go, brother," Whisker said from the side.

Alex nodded. "What do you think we should do with the other one?" he asked. "Use it to mark a different location?"

"What about giving it to sister Hannah?" Whisker asked. "Or Alex nodded. "What do you think we should do with the other one?" he asked. "Use it to mark a different location?"

maybe to Ronron?"

"Ronron can't use it. By the time she is able to, she will already be in the Sky God's Palace," Alex said with a sigh. "I should give it to sister then."

Alex then looked at the ring and wanted to use it too, but he was out of Immortal Qi, so there was nothing he could store in it for now. He would have to do that once he cultivated.

'That's going to take some time,' he thought. He sat down right there to cultivate and see if he could get back his Immortal Qi quickly, but he was stopped promptly as Linlin walked into the garden.

"Your Majesty, everyone is gathered in the palace hall. We are waiting for just you now," Linlin said.

Alex opened his eyes, a confused look flashing through them. "Who are gathered?" he asked.

"Umm, the candidates?" Linlin said. "To replace the elders."

"Ah!" Alex said as he remembered. "That was today? God, time's been moving so fast for me."

"Yes," Linlin said. "They are all gathered and are waiting for you. If you wish to, I can have some of the other elders to the task. They have said that they are ready to come out if the palace needs them to."

"No, let them rest for as long as they can," Alex said. "Once I begin my closed cultivation soon, I won't be around much and they will have to handle everything."

He stood up.

"I'll go to Mother and help her with the pills, brother," Whisker said and ran away, leaving Alex behind.

Alex looked toward Linlin. "Let us head toward the hall then."

Linlin walked behind Alex as he walked to the palace hall and saw nearly 60 different people gathered in the room, each with a cultivation base in the Saint Soul realm.

No one was below that, but no one was above that either.

Everyone immediately stood and bowed in respect toward Alex. Alex nodded.

"You have come to hopefully be a replacement for the 10 Council elders, so I will hold you all to a high standard," Alex said. "I wish you good luck."

Chapter 1858 Learn More to Know Less

Alex sat in the grass, facing the morning sunlight that fell on his face. Beside him was Pearl, who lay on his stomach with his eyes closed. Close to them was Bai Jingshen who remained in a stance not that different from Pearl. Only, he didn't have his eyes closed.

They had just finished the Azure Dragon's funeral on this side, making a grave for him right next to where Pearl's mother lay.

Now that they were done with that, they were enjoying what was left of the morning.

"What do you have left to do?" Bai Jingshen asked. "You should focus on just breaking through to Immortality from this moment onward, shouldn't you?"

"I have a few more things I still have to do," Alex said. "I feel they are a little important, but I can't be very sure without doing it."

"What sort of things?" Bai Jingshen asked.

"I want to learn a few more Dao. At least Water and Wood Dao if nothing else. I have to go to the Northern Continent for a small task, and then there is the matter of finding land for the trees to grow on. There are a lot more things to do now that I'm thinking about it," Alex said with a sigh.

"How is your cultivation coming along?" Bai Jingshen asked. "Are you doing it as fast as you can or are you taking time?"

"I'm taking my time. I see no reason to hurry up, and I want to make my body reach nigh Immortal realm before reaching there with my Qi," Alex said.

"A Body and Qi of the same strength before reaching the Immortal realm will help you a lot in the Immortal realm certainly," Bai Jingshen said.

Alex nodded. There was also the matter of improving his spiritual strength and his blood aura, but he didn't mention that. That didn't have much to do with Immortality.

"I suppose I'm still thinking of what I need to do before I become an Immortal," Alex said. "And the more I think, the more things end up becoming apparent to me. I fear I haven't even thought of half the things I need to do."

"You do realize that you don't have to do all the things before becoming an Immortal. Some you can do after becoming an Immortal," Bai Jingshen said.

"Yes, but I'll have to leave this world at that time, and that is what I'm worried about mostly," Alex said. "Once I leave, coming back would be... difficult. That is if I even decide to come back."

Bai Jingshen nodded. "What does Senior Yang say?" he asked. "Have you asked if he's okay with you waiting a long time before reaching Immortality?"

"I actually haven't been to him since the war," Alex said. "I need to go, but I've been very busy lately. I should head there soon."

"You do that," Bai Jingshen said. "Also, regarding your Dao. How many Dao do you know right now?"

"My Dao?" Alex asked, quickly counting through things. "Either 23 or 16, depending on if my True Fire Dao counts as a single Dao or multiple Dao. I think they count as single."

Bai Jingshen's face was one of incredulity. He knew Alex had a lot of Dao he had learned, but to think he had learned 16 of them, with one of them being a True Dao. That was simply incredible.

"You're going to have a very difficult time breaking through as it is without learning any more Dao," he said with a bit of a chuckle in his voice. "But given how strong your Immortal Qi is, maybe you can afford to do just that."

"Can I?" Alex asked. "Wouldn't learning more cause the lightning bolts to become stronger?"

"They both get stronger with each new one and are strong proportionally to the strength of the Dao you learned. So if you have 16 dao, by the time you get to the True Fire Dao's lightning bolt, it will be very strong."

Alex frowned. That was not what he had wanted to hear. "What do I do then?" he asked. "I cannot just die when trying to break through. After all this, it wouldn't be good."

"No," Bai Jingshen said. "But I do have an idea to make it a little easier."

"What sort?" Alex asked excitedly.

"Instead of making the True Fire Dao your 16th bolt of lightning, have it be at a lower number. Don't your tribulation to grow in power by that much," Bai Jingshen suggested.

"I'm not sure I follow," Alex replied. "Are you saying I can choose when to fight a tribulation lightning? Is it not something the Heavens decide."

"I did not say you can choose. I said you should lower how many lightning bolts you get in general," Bai Jingshen said.

Alex was a little confused. He could tell that the White Tiger was trying to get at something, but he wasn't sure exactly what.

"Lower the amount of lightning bolts... that means I have to lower the amount of Dao..." Alex said softly.

Bai Jingshen smiled. "Do you have 23 Dao or 16?" he asked.

Alex looked up and was about to answer when he realized finally what the White Tiger was talking about.

"You want me to combine my Dao?" he asked.

"You finally understood," Bai Jingshen said. "If you can lower the amount of Dao you have by combining a few, you can certainly have room to learn a few more and still have a viable chance at becoming an Immortal."

"I can combine Dao?" he asked before smacking his own forehead. "Of course, I can do that. I think the only one I can combine right now is the Metal Dao?"

"You have the Supreme Metal Root, don't you? What Metal Dao do you have left to learn? Try and focus everything on that for now, and lower your number by a bit. If there are more that you can combine, that would be great as well."

Alex quickly listed the Metal Dao he had learned.

Dao of Metal

Dao of Sharpness

Dao of Ductility

Dao of Malleability

Dao of Cutting

"Five, huh? I'm sure you can learn the remaining 5," the White Tiger said. He told Alex what the rest were.

Dao of Conduction

Dao of Reflection

Dao of Rust

Dao of Magnetism

Dao of Alloy

"I already have Heat Conduction, so I should learn Dao of Lightning Conduction, and I can mix the two to make Dao of Conduction. As for the other four, I will have to try," Alex said.

"You have the Supreme Metal Root and a talent I have never before seen. If anyone can learn them all, it is you," Bai Jingshen said.

Alex nodded.

"I will try my best," he said. If he could successfully learn those, he could reduce the number of Dao lightning by an entire 4 bolts. That would make a massive difference in his survivability.

"That makes me a lot less worried about the future, brother Shen. Thank you," Alex said.

"No worries," the White Tiger said with a hint of a secretive smile. "Seeing you grow strong makes me a lot less worried about the future as well."

Chapter 1859 Learning Some More

After returning from the Western Continent, Alex focused all of his free time on learning the Metal Dao.

He also cultivated on the side, improved his physical body, and took a lot of pills when he could. He had already recruited a lot of people to handle the continent, and Scarlet was around herself, so he wasn't required as much.

After nearly 3 months of struggling to learn a Dao, Alex finally managed to learn the Dao of Alloy.

Dao of Alloy came to him as he was already used to making metal alloys while creating artifacts. Since he had an understanding of that, after focusing on just that aspect of the Dao for a while, he was able to learn it.

He spent the next 2 more months trying to learn another Metal Dao, but he was simply unable to. However, it wasn't as though there wasn't any progress.

At the very least, Alex understood why it was that he wasn't learning these new Dao.

Dao of Magnetism was something he simply couldn't learn in such a short time. He would have to spend a lot of time trying to understand it before he could learn that Dao.

Dao of Reflection was in a similar state as well where he simply couldn't learn such a Dao in such a short amount of time without any additional help.

Dao of Rust and Conduction, however, were different cases from what he could understand.

Dao of Rust wasn't just about metal, but also in part about water. Since metal needed water to rust in most cases, without knowing something about water in general, he couldn't progress further in rust.

In a similar way, the Dao of Conduction requires one to know both the Dao of Heat Conduction and the Dao of Lightning Conduction. Alex didn't believe one had to know the two Dao to learn the Dao of Conduction, but he would have to learn it somewhat.

Since he already learned the Dao of Heat Conduction, he could focus on the Dao of Lightning Conduction, which required him to learn the Dao of Lightning.

Alex would've probably been in a lot of trouble had he been required to try and learn Dao of Wood, but Dao of Lightning was something he could do.

He had the shattered pieces of the Noble Dragon Spear that the Dragon Emperor used, which had been infused with the Lightning Dao for so long that it emanated its aura even when it was broken.

Alex began studying the broken treasure as much as he could. After another 3 months or so, he understood enough secrets about the Dao of Lightning even with his frankly trash Wood Spiritual root that he managed to learn the Dao of Lightning Conduction.

Thanks to that, the two Dao merged into one to become the Dao of Conduction. Alex was down to needing 3 more Metal Dao to complete the True Metal Dao.

Alex decided to take some time for the rest as time was all he had. He had received messages from his sister and Long Huan that their wedding date had been fixed and that it would happen in half a year. So he needed to be ready for that.

Alex left the palace, as he had every few weeks ever since he returned from the war, and went to the Sundering Sanctum. He was invisible all the way there and broke into the playground when no one noticed him.

He arrived in the secret realm, looking at the stable space all around him. There was no longer any broken space in here that led to the Void.

The Playground itself was still very damaged from the Void, and so for the past two decades when Alex had been gone, the Sanctum had been opened for fewer people, with the winner being decided based on who got to the top and jumped out first.

The top of the tower was open due to the Void breaking away everything, and so it was too ruined to the fixed.

Alex walked into the playground and the human spirit appeared at the base floor, bowing to Alex as he arrived inside.

"Welcome back, Master Alex," the Spirit greeted.

"How are you doing, playground?" Alex asked.

"Just waiting for the day when you will take me away," the playground spirit said with a sigh.

Alex gave an apologetic smile in return. "Sorry, I don't have much time in the day to spend everywhere. I promise I will bond with you soon enough. I can almost tell you that at the rate I'm going, it will happen in 5 years."

"That is indeed good news," the spirit said.

Alex chatted with the spirit for a while before leaving the secret realm. While he could bond the playground from the inside, it simply didn't feel correct to do it that way.

He needed to go out of the secret realm where part of the playground was sticking outside of the spatial pocket and then try to bond it from there.

Alex landed on the roof of the large building that was a historical landmark for the people of this city and the continent in general and began bonding with the playground.

Had the Playground been a simple treasure without a spirit inside of it, Alex could've refined it a long time ago. But given how strong a spirit there was inside of it, he had to bond the spirit instead, and then could he refine the treasure.

That was what was taking Alex so long. Alex poured his Qi into the playground, slowly letting the artifact recognize his Qi. He had been doing this for enough time that it accepted his Qi without much pushback.

There was some, but not so much that Alex needed to worry about failure. This was just a matter of when and not if.

He had arrived sometime in the morning and by the time he was ready to call it a day, it was already noon.

Alex thought for a moment and decided to pour his Immortal Qi into the playground too. Maybe that way he could speed up the bonding procedure.

He hadn't used it before today, having always been forced to either spend his Immortal Qi in his Mirror or his new ring or maybe in the teleportation escape dials that he now had two of.

He began touching the tiny bit of Immortal Qi he had and poured it into the playground, washing it with the intense power of his Immortal Qi.

The playground shuddered for a moment, recognizing a power that it hadn't received for a very, very long time. It stopped as soon as it started, but Alex could tell it had been quite successful.

He smiled and stood up, ready to leave. Just as he was about to say goodbye to the playground, he suddenly went blind.

Or so it felt to Alex because of the sudden loss of light. Instead, he could still see, but everything was very dark.

"The hell is..."

He looked around and then looked to the sky to see where the sun had vanished too, to see how dark the cloud was that blocked out the sun.

There was no cloud in the sky. No light. No star. No moon.

It looked as though everything in the sky had been swallowed by the abyss, and all they could see was eternal darkness.

Chapter 1860 Primordial

﻿﻿The darkness that covered the sky was not a simple one. Just its presence alone was enough to send despair through Alex as he understood whatever was happening was not normal.

lightsΝοvεl ƈοm He looked down from the sky and into the darkened land. It took him a moment to understand that not all of it had darkened. There were places far far away that were still in sunlight.

The sun hadn't vanished as his instinct had first told him. Still, a complete lack of light to be in this place, scared Alex a lot.

'What is going on?' Alex wondered for a moment. Was something come their direction? Was someone using a strong technique to devour light in their direction? Or was it some sort of phenomenon?

Could it be a Birth Omen even?

Just as Alex wondered he saw the sunlight slowly get brighter in the north, and it seemed to move in his direction.

Alex watched as the sunlight followed all the way to where he was and crossed him, filling the world with light again.

There was still a massive spot of darkness in the south that continued south, and Alex stared up to see just what it was that caused the shadow.

He looked to the sky and his heartbeat stopped for a minute as shock filled him in totality.

In the sky was a silhouette of a beast far above the atmosphere where he had no chance of flying. Alex could only tell it was a beast because of the limbs that came out of its sides and a long tail.

Aside from that, he couldn't tell exactly what sort of beast it was.

But for a beast to roam the sky above, to fully swallow all light and leave them in total darkness, Alex could only wonder what it was.

He didn't wonder for long.

He left the Sundering Sanctum immediately, flying back toward the palace on his Immortal ship that flew fast enough that he reached the palace in just 2 hours.

He quickly flew in and went to find Scarlet.

Even as he went there, he could already hear the conversation about the darkness and what it was. It wasn't just him that had seen it. The entire continent was in shambles right now.

Scarlet was in the throne room when he arrived, sitting on the throne with her hand on her head.

"You're back," she said. "Where were you?"

"In the Sundering Sanctum," Alex said. "Where the shadow passed through."

"Oh, so you were there?" she asked. "I've released a statement saying it was nothing, but people don't seem to be calming down. Most think the world is coming to an end."

Alex could hear a hint of frustration and disappointment in her voice.

"It is nothing?" Alex asked.

"Yeah, it's nothing," Scarlet said. "People shouldn't be worrying about it."

"How can it be nothing?" Alex asked. "I saw a beast up there. A massive one at that. Everyone must've seen it, just like me. It was above the sky."

"I know," Scarlet said. "I'm telling you, it's nothing."

"Why are you certain it's nothing?" Alex asked, curious.

"Because it's dead," she said. "That thing you saw, it's dead. It's just a corpse floating around in space from a time long past, from a primordial era."

Alex continued listening. There was information here that he was hearing for the first time, so he waited for Scarlet to explain it all.

"They are called Primordials. They are massive creatures the size of a continent from a time long before the war. From a time of which we do not have any record of," Scarlet said. "We don't know where they lived, but they are dead now and their frozen corpses just fly around in space, drifting forever."

"From time to time, they eclipse the sun or the moon, but that is it. There is nothing more to them."

Alex thought for a while, trying to take in this new information.

Primordials. He had never heard of them before.

That made him realize just how much more there was in this world that the Immortals knew as trivial information that was shocking to him. Just how much more did he have to learn in the Immortal world?

"Tell me more about these Primordials."

Scarlet shrugged and told him what little she knew about Primordials.

There were no more Primordials in the world. Beings of that size simply did not survive anywhere. However, it was said that the bloodline of Primordials did live on, and there were apparently many beasts that still had these bloodlines.

Aside from the Heavenly Beasts blessed by the Sun God, these Primordial bloodlines were what ruled the beast world.

Qilin, Three Legged Crow, Dragon-Turtle, Roc, Headless Immortal, Moon Rabbit, Yellow Dragon, Midnight Phoenix, Flying Raindragon, Flood Dragon, Heavenly Dog, Fox Spirit, and Thousand Miles Horse were some of the names that Alex managed to catch as Scarlet named them.

All of these beasts were dead, but their corpses still floated all around the space, and their bloodlines still flowed through the beasts in the Immortal realm.

Alex left the throne room after a while, his head buzzing with all the new information he had received.

He went back to his room and began cultivating while digesting all the new information. He was out of Qi due to having tried to bond the Playground, so this was all he could do.

After 2 days of non-stop cultivation, Alex left to make sure the continent had calmed down. It seemed as though Scarlet had lied and told them that it was an illusion, caused by some sort of phenomenon that she had been performing, and thus no one had to worry about it.

She didn't find any shame in saying that as by the time another Primordial flew above them, every single person in this world would have been long dead. That was how long it took for the Primordials to pass through.

Scarlet didn't even know the last time such a thing had happened in the Southern Continent. It was likely not a single Phoenix that had come to this world knew about it.

After everything calmed down, Alex went back into his daily routine and began making pills. There were a lot of requirements for pills as he had promised a Dao pill for every single person out there.

The plan to plot a lot more Soul Elucidating Tulips had long since been underway, so all that was left was for him to make the pills.New n0vel chapters are published on

Aside from making pills, Alex also continued his research into making the pill that would improve his Wood Spiritual root. It was something he began researching nearly 20 years ago, and finally, it was coming to an end.

Another month went by and after focusing all of his time on just making the Wood pill, Alex finally perfected the recipe.

Since he had perfected it, Alex created the pill, a full 9-veined Wood Spiritual Root Improving pill, and ate asit.

He felt the intense energy of the pill he made go into his body and affect the Wood spiritual root in his body, slowly improving it.

By the time the pill wore off, Alex had ended up significantly improving his Wood Spiritual root.

Chapter 1861 A Short Trip

﻿﻿Alex tested his Spiritual Roots on a formation to see how much the Wood's Spiritual Roots had grown.

Somehow, it was still the weakest of his Spiritual roots, but it was far from being horrible. It was still not at the level where he felt comfortable calling it a Superior root, but it had advanced enough that he didn't have to constantly worry about it being too bad.

Maybe he could learn the Wood Dao now too. He didn't believe it all that much though.New n0vel chapters are published on

After testing the pill on himself and being confident of its success, Alex made a lot more Wood Spiritual Root Improving Pills and gave them away to everyone who needed it.

After handing it over, Alex gave the recipe of the pill away to the Royal Alchemy guild so everyone could learn it and help improve the status of the people all around the continent.

After providing the recipe, Alex returned to trying and learning the remaining 3 Dao, which he struggled a lot to try and do.

His Aunt Liz went and returned from the Eastern Continent once again, coming back with more information about the marriage.

No more than 4 months remained before the wedding, and it appeared that Hannah wanted to send that very information to the Hao Ya as well, who was inside the Central continent and hadn't left since disappearing mid-war.

Alex sighed as he remembered that he needed to go to the senior Yang and had been too busy to do so.

"I'll go to the Central Continent and tell them about it, " Alex said and went to find Ronron to tell her about it.

Ronron was the princess of the palace and would always be surrounded by many guards and servants to see to her needs.

She didn't want any of it, but she couldn't send them away either and was forced to be around them. Her cultivation base was coming around nicely, having reached the Saint Realm some time ago.

Her method of cultivation which required her to find only Wood energy was quite annoying, but being a princess had allowed her to get all of this and more.

She got to train as much as she wanted to, with her Grandfather constantly training her in combat. She had already far surpassed him in cultivation, but Graham's physical strength made him way too formidable for her to beat him anytime soon.

Alex arrived where they were training, with many young men watching her train, supposedly hoping they could court her if they were given the chance.

Alex's arrival threw water in their plans and they quickly left after greeting him.

Alex watched Ronron and Graham train for a while before coming to a stop. She could not get a single hit in on Graham.

"Father," she called out to him with a shortness of breath still audible in her voice. "It is unusual for you to come to these matches of ours."

"I didn't come to see you train, although it was quite entertaining," Alex said. "I came to tell you that I'm going to the Central Continent. If you wish to see your master, go change and we can leave."

"Master? I can leave in this," Ronron said. "We can leave now."

A few of the servants began protesting, but Ronron had already walked on ahead, leaving them behind.

Alex shrugged. "We'll return in a bit, Father."

Graham nodded and left to train with the other soldiers that were ready to fight him.

Alex flew to the Intercontinental Teleportation formation from where he and Ronron teleported to the Central Continent.

They teleported to an open field that was set up as a teleportation receiver by the senior.

Ronron cringed a bit at the feeling of the world. A place without Qi, a place where she felt something was stealing her Qi from within her.

One needed a strong Intent to fight against this stealing.

"Let's go," Alex said and flew toward Senior Yang's mansion, arriving there within a few minutes.

Ronron looked at the mansion and sighed a little. "How long has it been since I came here? 22 years? 23?" she asked.

She had spent her time away from this place for so long that she felt some of her memories of hers here become vague.

It gave her a nostalgic feeling to return to this place.

She walked in, remembering where to go as if she had been here just yesterday. Walking into the mansion, she quickly arrived at the backyard, with Alex following behind her.

"Master!" Ronron shouted upon seeing the man who sat cross-

legged in the garden.

Senior Yang smiled upon seeing Ronron. "Ronron! I did not expect to see you here," he said. "When I sensed the teleportation, I thought it would've only been your father."

Alex walked forward and bowed a little. "It is a pleasure to meet you again senior. Please forgive me that I didn't come quicker to thank you for your help during the war."

"That's alright," the man said. "I only did what I did because I believed it to be the right thing to do." He then turned to Ronron. "Come on, sit. Tell me more about what you've been up to."

Ronron smiled and went up to the man to sit beside him and tell him about her life in the palace. Alex went up to them and sat beside them as well.

Ronron spoke for a long time, while both the men simply stayed and listened.

Alex looked around the backyard, seeing the small pond in the distance where the Snake was supposed to be. But he wasn't coming out of it at all.

He noticed the lack of Hao Ya as well.

"Where is sister Hao Ya? And Senior Xuan?" Alex asked.

"Oh, I've sent them to do some survey around the continent," the man said. "Because the existence of the world outside is common knowledge now, people have been constantly asking to leave this place and go to the world outside."

"So, I've sent them out to survey the public and see if their proposal is worth accepting."

Chapter 1862 Separate

﻿﻿"People wish to leave now?" Alex asked. "When did it start?"

"It's been happening for a long while now. It's nothing new," the senior said. "It's mostly people that used to live out there realizing that they do not like to live like a regular human when they could fly and live forever."

"It's tough to realize that you could have a long life, and instead you are dying in this isolated continent."

Alex nodded as he listened to the senior. "If you will come, the Southern Continent will accept it."

"I believe most know where they wish to go. Don't concern yourself with it. It will still take a year or two for this all to be complete. Tell me more of what is going on with you."

Alex gave a soft smile. "Nothing much. Just living my life how I can now that the war is done and peace is back," he said. 'My apologies for not coming sooner. I just… time slipped by me because of everything I needed to do."

"That's alright," the man said. "I expected nothing less from a King. You have a lot of responsibility on you. At least you found the time to come."New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex nodded. "I came because my sister is getting married and she wished that I call sister Hao Ya to her wedding."

"Was little Hannah not married already?" the man asked with a somewhat confused face.

"This is just a wedding. My aunt simply wouldn't accept their marriage without the two of them going through a ceremony where she is present."

Senior Yang gave a look of understanding. "I see. It's because of Liz. Where is Hannah though? If she was to invite Hao Ya to her wedding, I assumed she would've come herself."

"Oh, my sister is in the Eastern Continent right now," Alex said. "Because both the Emperor and the Crown Prince died in the war, brother Huan ended up becoming the Emperor and she is all but the Empress now."

"Little Hannah? Now that's surprising," the man said.

Alex realized that the senior knew very little about the aftermath of the war and quickly told him everything. He hid a couple of things, mainly his Undying physique while giving the information.

It was unlikely that the senior did not know about his healing capabilities, but no one needed to know that he could have his soul ripped out of him and he could still come back.

He knew partly from his memories that the Undying and a few of his subsequent inheritors were people whom the Humans hated very much in the war. He did not wish to get the knowledge out that he was such a being's inheritor.

Alex told the man the rest of it, including the Sword Domain.

"You have started creating your own Sword Domain? That is an incredible feat," the man said, doing little to hide his amazement.

"Even Immortals struggle to create their own Sword Domains for the longest of time and you somehow did it as a Saint. If you were born in one of the Immortal realms, you would've been taken in by one of the many ancient sects around the world already."

Alex smiled after hearing the praise. Ronron smiled even more, hearing how great her father was.

They talked for a while long, with Alex talking about the Primordials and seeing if he could get some more information from this man. He certainly knew a lot more than Scarlet ever did.

"Primordial's shadow?" the man asked curiously. "Did one pass through the Southern Continent?"

Alex nodded.

"I see. And I assume the Phoenix told you about them?"

Alex nodded again and told him what Scarlet had mentioned.

"She certainly told you everything you needed to know about them," he said. "They're dead and they're floating around the world."

"Are they all that massive?" he asked. "I heard that they are the size of a continent."

"No, not all. Most, but not all," the man said. "There are a few Primordials that are no bigger than a city and some that are no bigger than a house. You usually don't hear about them because most people don't know about Primordials aside from the ones that are out there in the space."

"I see. I wonder how often I will see it in the Immortal realms," Alex said.

They spoke for a while before Alex realized they should be leaving back soon. However, before Alex could say that, the senior said something that made him stop.

"I wanted to talk to you about something. I thought I would wait for a while longer, but I realized that I must talk to you about it now," he said.

Alex was a little taken aback. "What is it about?" he asked.

"About my departure from this world," the senior said. "All this time, I had thought that I would leave this world when you become an Immortal. But I've changed my mind now."

Alex narrowed his eyes. "Do you not wish to leave?" he asked.

"No, I wish to leave earlier than that." The man looked to the sky as he spoke. "I believe I will leave with your sister Hannah when she becomes an Immortal."

"With my sister?" Alex questioned. "Why with her?"

"Because she will be quicker than you in becoming an Immortal," the man said.

"There's no guarantee to that though," Alex said. "My Sister, while she has an incredible method of improving her cultivation, has yet to learn a single Dao. I fear it will take some time before she can learn those Dao and then leave this place."

The man took in the information and nodded. "Even if she is slower, I will still go with her," he said. "I have thought a long time about it and I realize that I shouldn't be leaving with you."

"Okay…" Alex said slowly. "Why is that?"

"Because of who you are and what you carry with you," the senior said. "I cannot let the two trees get into the hands of someone we cannot trust when we leave. So instead, we will have to leave separately."

Alex pondered on the reason for a bit and it did not make any logical sense to him. "Senior, aren't I supposed to keep these with me until I find a safe place to plant them?" he asked. "It thought that was the reason I was carrying it in the first place."

"You did, and you still are. That is why it will be dangerous for you to come with me," the senior said. "When I leave this place, I will either end up at a land controlled by the Humans or the Demons."

"If I end up in a place controlled by the Demons, I will have a chance of making my way back to the Sky God's Palace more easily."

"But if I end up in a human-controlled Immortal land, there are bound to be people waiting for me to leave. So the moment I arrive there, every faction, sect, family, or fanatics I have wronged will be on the lookout for me. Every Immortal land will be ruled by at least some of them, and if they capture me, they will certainly search the people I arrived with."

"If I were to leave with you, they would find the trees immediately. However, if I were to leave with your sister or anyone else for that matter, even if they find me, they will not find anything with the others I came with, in which case they will all be safe."

Alex frowned hard upon hearing this suggestion. "It feels like a dangerous plan. My sister will be risking her life to bring you up there. Not just her, everyone that will leave with her will be risking it."

"They will not," the man said quickly. "When we arrive, there will be hundreds of scouts from every single sect, guild, and society in the area of the receiving formation platform, trying to recruit you all."

"These men trying to find me, they're not savages. They will be thinking about their own reputations and will never harm the newly arrived Immortals. As soon as they search for your sister and everyone else with her, they will let them go."

Alex couldn't let go of his frown. It just didn't feel right to let his sister take on the risky task while he did nothing.

The man could see this. "Just think about it like this. If you and I were to get captured together, we would be in a lot more trouble than if I were not to be with you."

Alex nodded. He understood that part. "But then you can go with someone else, can't you? It doesn't have to be my sister."

"I still have to take Ronron with me," he said. "She has to go with me, and Hao Ya. Her presence alone will be enough deterrence to stop people from attacking anyone she is with. After all, nobody wants to antagonize a possible future Sky God."

Alex thought for a bit. "What about the beasts?" he asked. "In less than a thousand years, they will go back to their world. Can you not go with them?"

"Thousand years is too long," the man said. "You will reach Immortality in what? 20 years? Even if we estimate others to take a lot longer, in the next 200 to 500 years, this world will start generating more immortals than it has in the past 50 thousand years."

"At that point, the people out there will recognize that the Godkiller does not care who comes or goes. So, Immortals and Divinities will start pouring here at that point, in search of me."

"I must leave this place long before that."

Chapter 1863 Emily

Because of his worry about being caught and having to give both of the two plants over to the people who caught him, the senior didn't want Alex to come with him.

The World Tree and the Nine Yang Divine Tree were far too important of a treasure for it to get into the hands of the wrong people.

Because of the lack of Qi in the world, as soon as someone with the wrong intentions got their hands on the World Tree, they could use the tree to get stronger themselves and could restart the war to try and gain the remaining Immortal realms and spirit realms they didn't get their hands on before.

That was the reason why he wanted him and Alex to leave separately.

"I don't know how possible it is for you, but I want you to leave this world as late as you can," the man said. "Let some other people start breaking through to Immortality first so the Immortal world can begin having precedence of Immortals coming out of this realm."

"This world hasn't had many Immortals in a long time. It's not just this one but also the few others that belong to the Humans that haven't had people reaching Immortality. The war has had negative results in people's cultivation, so if you suddenly go, they will be curious how you did it."

Alex thought for a long moment and nodded. He began understanding pieces of what the senior was saying. He gave his words some thorough thought and understood why it was important that not just anybody get their hands on the World Tree.

"Henceforth, you will have to live in obscurity," the senior said.

Alex let out a deep sigh and nodded. "I will do that," he said. "I think it is time for us to leave now."

"Actually, Father..." Ronron spoke slowly. "Can we... visit home?"

"You want to go to the farm?" Alex asked.

"I want to see how Lilin is doing," Ronron said.

"Ah. We can go there."

The two of them left the mansion and made their way far away to the northwestern corner of the habitable land where their farm was.

It had been such a long time since Ronron had come back, and so much had changed in just that time. The city back home had become bigger, with skyscrapers high enough to reach the sky.

A lot more people lived in the city, and even the point past the city, the desolate area where few houses were had many more houses in them now.

The road was fully pitched now, not a single essence of the dirt road from the past remaining. Big houses grew all around the area.

As they came upon the house through the sky, they could see that the farm had grown to become so much larger now.

"Do you want to go in or just watch from outside?" Alex asked Ronron.

"Let's just watch from afar for now," she said, searching around for her half-sister.

She saw a 20-year-old girl, sitting on the porch of the mansion with an infant on her lap that she rocked to sleep.

Ronron gasped. "She's a mother," he said softly, surprised at how quickly that had happened.

"She ate the pill," Alex said softly. The two pills he had given them would make them age slowly enough that they could live on for nearly a thousand years.

"Can we go down?" Ronron asked.

"Sure," Alex said and they slowly drifted down from the sky.

As they came down to visible height, people noticed them and pointed at them from the farm. Some began running away, and one man even ran to the front, with an actual sword in hand.

"Stop!" Lilin quickly said and ran to the front. She stared up at the two of them, her eye not moving away from Alex.

"It's you, isn't it?" she asked slowly. "The one I met all those years ago at that diner."

"You remember me?" Alex asked as he landed and looked at the young girl.

This close, he could see Emily's features on the young girl, which looked a lot like the features Ronron had.

The man at the front, a young man in his late 20s, slowly put down his sword as he realized that Lilin recognized the people.

"Honey, you know them?" he asked.

"Only the man," Lilin said.

"Lilin, do you not recognize me?" Ronron asked.

Lilin turned around. "You know my name?" she asked and looked closely at Ronron. There wasn't much to tell her who Ronron was, but there was one distinct feature that she would never not recognize.

Ronron's green and silver heterochromatic eyes were just too memorable for the girl to have forgotten in it in just 20 years.

"Sister Maron?" Lilin asked, a gasp releasing from her voice.

"You do remember me," Ronron said with a happy smile. "I was afraid you might have forgotten me."

"I... I could never forget," Lilin said. "Si-sister, what are you doing here?"

"I came to check on you. See how you were doing," Ronron said, gleeful in her expression. Her eyes moved to the child that Lilin held in her arms. "Is that..."

"Oh! This is little Emily," Lilin said. "She's 14 months old now."

"Emily..." Ronron looked at her half-sister. "You named her after mom?"

"Y-yes," Lilin said. "There's a picture in the house. He gave me the picture last time. He didn't tell me who he was at the time though."

"Are you the father?" Alex asked the young man with the sword.

"I-I am," the young man said.

"What's your name?" Alex asked.

sword.

"I-I am," the young man said.

"Logan," the young man said.

"I see. Are you a cultivator? You hold the sword like one," Alex said.

"I used to be before I came here about 25 years ago," the young man said.

"Where were you from in the outside world?" Alex asked him.

"Uhh... from the Northern Continent. I used to be an outer disciple in the Snowing Tempest sect," he said.

Alex nodded slowly.

"What cultivation base had you reached? And why did you decide to come back here?" Alex asked him.

"True Master 4th realm," the young man said. "I... ended up eating a bad pill during one of my breakthroughs and went through a severe Qi deviation, destroying most of my meridians."

"I see," Alex said and looked toward Lilin. "May I hold her?"

"Of course," Lilin said and handed over the infant in her arms.

Alex carried the baby with a small smile on her face, looking at her sleeping face.

"She's beautiful," Ronron said, watching from the side. "Can I hold her too?"

"One moment," Alex said and closed his eyes. He focused his spiritual sense on Emily and looked through her body. When he was done, a look of understanding swept through his face.

"Congratulations. Your daughter is born with spiritual roots. Should she ever wish to, she will be able to cultivate," Alex said.

"Really?" Lilin's eyes widened in surprise. Tears streamed down her face as she gasped and held her mouth in surprise.

"My daughter can become a cultivator?" Logan asked. "Is that true?"

"It's true," Alex told them. "She has a bright future ahead of her."

Chapter 1864 A Decision

"Does that mean we should leave this place? We should go to the outside world?" Logan seemed somehow both hesitant and looking forward to the prospect of going back to the cultivation world.

"Well, that's your choice," Alex said as he shrugged a little. He handed the infant over to Ronron, who carefully took the child and slowly started rocking her.

"Talk among yourself, see if you like it. If you do, you can leave this place. I hear many others wish to leave here, so the talk is already underway"

Logan nodded slowly. "Many do wish to leave. I, myself, would've asked to leave long ago had that been possible. And then Emily came around and I completely forgot about everything. Now that you say Emily has a chance at a life I lost, I think it will be better for us to leave, regardless of how dangerous life might be for us out there."

"I'm not so sure about that," Alex said absentmindedly. He realized now that he had the power to do it, he should return some things to how they always used to be. It would be slightly difficult to do it on his own, but he had ideas and he certainly had help.

"Forgive me, sir. I've tried to, but I don't think I still know who you are," Logan said.

"I told you before," Lilin quickly whispered. "This farm belonged to his family. He is the person whose clone married my mother's clone."

"And I am their daughter. In a way, Lilin here is my half-sister," Ronron added.

"I'm sorry. It's been so long since you guys left that I didn't realize it was you," Logan said, bowing slightly in apology.

"Where did you get the sword?" Alex asked curiously.

"This thing? I brought it back with me when we came back," he said.

"May I?" Alex reached out for the sword.

"Of course," Logan said and handed over the sword.

Alex took the sword and swung it around a little to the side, judging the sword. A small smile tugged the side of his lips, almost as though Alex found something funny that was not really funny.

"Cover your ears," Alex said to everyone, and everyone quickly moved to cover their ears. Ronron used Qi to block the sleeping infant's ears and even as she did that, the world slowly ripped at her Qi, taking it away, and forcing her to use more Qi.

Alex flicked at the sword and a loud sonorous ringing sound suddenly assaulted everyone's ears. Like a large gong being sounded right next to them, it was a bit too loud for any of them to comfortably sit through.

The sword vibrated for a few seconds, the ringing sound slowly pitching higher and higher until it reached a pitch that nobody could hear, and then stopped.

Alex handed back the sword. "It's quite the sword."

"Thank you," Logan said, taking back the sword with a weird look on his face.

"What was that about?" Ronron asked secretly.

"Nothing, I was just testing the sword to see if it was good," Ale replied, causing Ronron to raise an eyebrow.

"Is it good?"

"Absolutely. I can't tell if it's an Immortal rank sword, but its certainly better than a Saint rank for sure. If that sword has a Sword Spirit, it would be bound to be considered an Immortal rank sword, I'm certain of that."

Ronron barely hid her surprise. "How could he come across something like that?" she asked.

"How do you think?" Alex asked,

Ronron didn't know.

"Your master. He gave everyone some sort of treasure. This was his," Alex said.

"Lilin? Logan? Are you guys okay?" a middle-aged man came rushing out of the door.

"We're okay," Lilin answered back.

"What was that damn sound just now? Woke me right up from my nap," he said and arrived outside, stopping only when he noticed Alex and Ning.

"We have guests, Dad," Lilin said with a small smile.

"B-brother Alex?! Young Maron too. You came back?" the man was more than surprised to ask.

"Brother Yanshi. It's been a while. How have you been?"

Ever since Alex and the rest had left the central continent to go live in the Southern Continent, Fan Yanshi had been the sole owner of this farm, given to him by Alex's father at the time of their departure.

Fan Yanshi had been struggling at that time, having come back to a home where there was no home, so for his sake and his daughter's sake, he needed the place.

That had been over 20 years ago now, and the man still hadn't forgotten the help he had received from Alex and the rest. New n0vel chapters are published on

Just the pill that made him live for 1000 years was enough for him to be in eternal debt to Alex. So when he saw him again, he immediately broke down into tears and started thanking Alex.

Alex helped the man calm down and began talking to him. Time passed as they talked, and the day slowly turned to night.

Lilin and the rest insisted that Alex and Ronron must stay the night there so, Alex reluctantly stayed back.

Alex took the time to learn more about the mortals and listen to how things were going on in this place. Hearing it directly from everyday people painted an entirely different picture of the situation than hearing it from an Immortal who heard it from somebody else.

People were frustrated at the moment because they wanted to leave, but there was simply no way for them to do so. They had come to understand about the thing that was keeping them trapped inside, the massive wall of Qi that encircled the entire continent.

That made them feel like livestock or prisoners, being kept in one place, unable to leave.

They hated that they were first taken away without their consent, and now that they wanted to, they weren't being allowed to.

Many of the cultivators that had decided to come back had also changed their minds in the past 20 years. The world outside was dangerous, but there were also many opportunities.

It simply felt wrong to sit around here doing nothing, while there were people flying in the sky, who were strong enough to cut through a tree in the single stroke of a sword.

Not everyone wanted to leave, but almost all of them wanted the opportunity to do so.

After talking with the group until late into the night, Alex walked to the guest room where he would be staying the night.

He lay on the bed, thinking through everything. In the end, he came to a conclusion.

Now that there were no more oppositions in this world who would deliberately act against everyone else's interest, everyone would certainly agree to the conclusion Alex had arrived at.

The next morning, Alex and Ronron woke up and got ready to leave.

There was a heartfelt goodbye between the two sisters, with tears shed for each other once again.

"Regarding little Emily, there should soon come a day when you will be able to freely leave. Until then, let her live a normal life here. She will appreciate it."

After all, he was going to make it so that the world returned to how it was 5000 years ago. He was going to make all the Intercontinental Teleportation formation fully functional once again.

Chapter 1865 The Wedding

﻿﻿After returning to Senior Yang's place again, Alex and Ronron met up with Hao Ya and Xuan Luhei.

After chatting with them for a bit and explaining what it was that Alex wanted to make happen, they returned to the Southern Continent.

Once back, Alex focused most of his time on his cultivation and Dao.

Soon, 4 months passed in a flash and it was time for him to go to his sister's wedding.

The Eastern Continent was in a roar of excitement as their Emperor was getting married. The day of the event itself was the biggest day the Eastern Continent had in a long time, somehow even bigger than the war last year.

The Dragon Capital was all but completely rebuilt from the ground up. The Palace was back in place, along with every other school that had taken damage.

Most of the buildings in the commercial district had been brought back up as well.

Alex and his family, along with many other people arrived at the Dragon Capital, everyone ready for Hannah and Long Huan's marriage.

The day of the wedding arrived.

Hannah wore a beautiful red robe on the day of the wedding, completely sewn with gold threads with gems added to it to make it look all the better.

Long Huan wore a thick red coat, studded with more jewels than a commoner could see in his lifetime, with his Ivory sword hanging by the side of his waist.

The two of them together made every single person out there look completely dwarfed in terms of beauty.

The ceremony for the wedding itself was short, barely 3 hours. As they completed the traditional rituals for marriage and shared their vows, the wedding was completed.

Hannah glowed with happiness as she held Long Huan's hands and stood before the world as his wife, and the new Empress of the Eastern Continent.

The one even happier than her was Liz, who both smiled and cried at the same time. In fact, all the women who had come along began crying, including Helen, Emily, and Ronron. It would be a lie to say that Alex didn't tear up himself.

While the wedding lasted 3 hours, the celebrations would last for so much longer. There were feasts given out all throughout the continent to everyone who wanted one.

Alex and the rest started giving out gifts. There wasn't much his family or the rest could give, but he could.

Alex gave Hannah the metal disc he had gotten from the Azure Dragon's Soul Space. It was the teleportation escape artifact, which would be of a lot of help to Hannah in the future.

Hao Ya gave a gift as well. Alex saw the gift, a book, but he didn't know what it was about.

He waited until he was alone with Hao Ya before inquiring about the gift and learned that the book was a treasure that one could only find in the Immortal world.

It was called a Dao book that helped one learn a new Dao. It wasn't something as simple as a book that explained the Dao itself, but rather a book where each page consisted of some individual Dao that a person would have to learn through.

The book was a collection of the various Dao auras that someone else that to use their Intent to put into it. Given how each page had a separate Dao aura, there had to be at least a few different people who had used the book to place aura into it.

According to Hao Ya, this was one of the more expensive treasures that her master owned, one that he did not steal. This was an incredible treasure, and senior Yang had given it to Hannah.

'It's akin to the entire Dao domain of the Azure Kingdom being confined into a single book,' Alex thought. The idea alone made him wonder just what he could do if he had ever gained something like this.

But then again, he already had way too many Dao. His problem wasn't that he could learn Dao, but that he needed to learn less.

Meanwhile, Hannah needed to learn the Dao, so she needed that book.

It wasn't just Hannah who would be using that book in the end. It was a gift to the couple, so Long Huan would certainly make good use of the gift as well.

After the wedding, Hannah had to make a few visits around the continent to show herself as the new Empress, so Alex and the rest could go with her or remain there alone.

Alex decided to visit the Dao domain now that he had the chance. He brought along all those who wished to come with him.

Nobody stopped him from entering. Nobody dared to. The knowledge of the Emperor's death was still fresh in the mind of many and they did not wish to anger his killer.

As such, Alex and his family could freely enter the Dao Domain and remain there as long as they wanted to.

Alex went through the section with the section with Metal Dao and began going through the remaining Metal Dao to try and see if he could learn them all.

He became fully focused on it, forgetting everything else about the surroundings and thinking only of the Dao.

He felt the aura coming out of the paintings and the artifacts and spent hours sitting by them, trying to peer into their truth.

The more one learned parts of a Dao, the easier it was supposed to be to learn the rest of them. But even after having learned 7 of the 10 different Metal Daos, Alex still struggled to learn the last 3.

That was until a week later when Alex managed to stumble upon a truth in one of the Dao that he had been looking for for the past year.

He understood what it was that made a metal attract another metal. He understood how two metals could repel each other. In a way, he understood how magnets worked.

Thus, Alex rushed off to the buildings that were provided for everyone who entered the domain.

He took half a day and learned the Dao of Magnetism.

Alex was one step closer now to learning the entire Metal Dao. He wanted to sit around and learn more, but he needed to leave.

He had asked Long Huan for a special meeting with all of his court officials present, and it had been granted.New n0vel chapters are published on

So, Alex needed to go back and be in this court.

Alex left behind his family and elders in the Dao domain to learn for a little while longer. He wasn't worried about anyone hurting them.

In fact, people were so afraid of them that they moved to another painting or artifact when they went to see it. Not to mention, they were the Empress' family, so they wouldn't attack them anyway.

On top of that, there was hardly anyone strong enough to attack them even if they wanted to.

Alex returned to the Dragon Palace and met back with Hannah and Long Huan before proceeding to their throne room which was now filled to the brim with all sorts of people.

Chapter 1866 The Court Meeting

﻿﻿Alex greeted Yan Yating and saw the member of the royal family who wanted to put Long Hanjue on the throne. Long Hanjue himself was present in the court, getting familiar with the workings of the court.

"Now then, let us begin our court," Long Huan said and turned to Alex. "King Alex, what is it that you wanted to discuss with everyone present?"

Alex stood up and nodded before addressing them all. "The matter I wish to speak about with you, with all of you, has to do with the Intercontinental Teleportation formation," he said.

As soon as he said those words, people immediately began murmuring speculations of what it could be about.

"I won't keep you in the dark. I wish to bring the work back to how it was 5000 years ago before the central continent was devastated in the battle of the beast."

"I wish to make the world a smaller place again, by making the continents connect once more through the teleportation fields."

As soon as Alex finished speaking, many of the people began saying how it wasn't such a good idea. They were worried about the cost of maintaining such formations, they worried about the influx of new people that would come from other continents and were even worried that criminals could easily leave should they wish to if this was to let happen.

Their concerns were valid, but not so critical that it could hinder the entire operation.

"Over 5000 years ago, that was how the world worked," Yan Yating said. "People always teleported between different continents, sharing resources and whatnot. I was there back then when it was common place, and so were a few of you. You should remember that none of what you said was true back then, and neither would it be now."

"What about the cost?" someone asked. "Wouldn't it take a lot to travel between continents? The greater the distance, the more it costs to teleport around. We'll destroy our spirit vein."

Yan Yating paused. He was about to refute, but it was true that was to likely be the case. He turned to look at Alex to see what he had to say about it.

"We'll return to how it was back then fully. You will teleport to the Central continent first and then make leave for another place from there. To lower the consumption rate of the teleportation formations, we can limit to a teleport every 4 days or so."

"The logistics of it will have to be thought about later, but it can be done. Even if not that quickly, just allowing people to teleport to other continents once a month will help them a lot."

Alex's words made the people reconsider.

They talked for a while longer before coming to an almost unanimous decision to reopen the teleportation formation, but only under the condition that they could send their soldiers to the central continent so they could check who could come and who couldn't.

lightsΝοvεl ƈοm Alex was more than happy to comply with such a requirement. In fact, he had thought of doing the same thing.

"This will also mean that many of the people you once called 'players' will return to this or the other continents again," he told them. "You will have to be ready for that."

The court officials were more than happy to learn that there were more of the people where Alex and the others had come from.

Once the decision was made, Alex assured them that he would get the approval of the others on the other 2 continents and contact them back. Once everything was set up, they could happily reopen the Intercontinental teleportation once more.

Alex returned to the Dao domain once again, learning about the metal Daos once again.New n0vel chapters are published on

His mother had already learned 3 dao before this, all pertaining to Fire, which came from her constantly practicing alchemy. And now, she had learned 2 more.

She had learned the Dao of Burning and the Dao of Destruction.

Ronron had ended up learning the Dao of Wood while Alex wasn't present, and Liz got closer to understanding something other than Time Daos.

The others showed improvements as well, but none learned a Dao like Helen, who learned the 2 Dao in one sitting. Many people, including her family, seriously underestimated the talent that lay within this woman.

Graham was perhaps the only one other than the older Alex and Emily who came nowhere close to learning any Dao.

His cultivation base was simply too weak, and his talent not that high, for him to learn a Dao while in his True realm. He would have to reach a higher cultivation base and try again.

Everyone left the Dao domain, letting Alex remain alone to concentrate on the Dao. It was unclear how long it would take for him to learn all his remaining Dao, so they left him and went back to the Southern Continent.

Alex spent days upon days learning the mysteries behind the two remaining Dao and got closer and closer to learning them. When he felt like he had gotten very close, he decided to try his hands and see if he could perceive the rest of the mystery in his tranced state from the pill.

As he had hoped, he truly did end up learning one of the Dao. It was the Dao of Reflection that he learned, which left him with one final remaining Dao to learn.

Alex wasn't in a hurry to learn the Dao of Rust, but he still spent some time learning this dao. The more he peered into the mystery, the more he realized how intertwined this Dao was with the Dao of Water.

As a result, the more he learned this dao, the more he learned about the mystery of water itself.

As time went on, Alex began to realize that he would have a much easier time learning the Dao of Rust if he learned the Dao of Water first.

He didn't even have to learn the Dao, but simply peer into some of the mysteries as he had with the Dao of Lightning to learn the Dao of Lightning Conduction.

Thankfully, this was the domain of Dao, so Alex had no trouble finding the treasure that consisted of the aura of the Dao of Water.

He began learning through this Dao, seeing what he could learn, but as he did so, he came to realize that the treasure wasn't as good as he had thought. Either it had grown weaker over time, or it was simply not that good to begin with.

Thankfully, there was another place where he could learn the Dao of Water, and it was even far better than the one here.

Alex left the Dao domain and arrived at the shore of the Azure Lake, a lake formed using Dao of Water from many different beasts and humans to fill the entire thing.

It was a phenomenal location that was also a treasure in its own right.

Alex sat on the shore of the lake and peered into the setting sun as the red color reflected over the surface of the lake.

He sat there peering into the mysteries of water, trying to learn just enough so he could learn the Dao of Rust. Unfortunately for him, he was a bit too talented.

As such, he ended up learning the Dao of Water instead.

Chapter 1867 Another Dao

﻿﻿After learning the Dao of Water, there was nothing that kept Alex in the Eastern Continent anymore.

He went to meet Hannah and Long Huan one last time and passed on the message about how it would be her who would take Senior Yang with her when she went to the Immortal world.

"I will have to do that? Not you?" Hannah asked.

Alex shook his head. "He wants you to be the one to do it," he said.

"Why me?" she asked.

"Because you will most likely be reaching Immortality earlier than me," Alex said. "He just wants to leave as soon as he can."

Hannah thought for a moment and nodded.

Alex did not tell her about the trees. There weren't many that knew about the trees, and he wanted to keep it that way. Especially given that there were ways to get information out of a person without them even intending to.

The only people who knew about the trees as of now were Pearl, Whisker, Scarlet, Bai Jingshen, and Senior Yang.

Hao Ya knew that he ate the Nine Yang Divine Tree's fruit, giving him the Yang source, but that was it. She knew nothing about the World Tree.

And Alex would rather it all be kept that way.

"But won't it be dangerous for me? How many people am I taking with me? 4?" she asked.

Alex quickly counted. "Actually, more like 7."

"SEVEN?" Hannah was surprised. "How seven?"

"You, brother Huan, the senior, Aunt Liz, my parents, and Ronron," Alex said. "Wait, if you have to take Hao Ya with you, that will be by 8. And if Ronron insists that we take her parents too, that will be 10 for you."

"Wait, why am I taking so many?" Hannah asked. "That sounds impossible for me."

"It's not impossible," Alex said. "The senior told me about it. The closer one's cultivation is to the Immortal realm, the easier it will be to take them away using the natural ascension process."

"There have apparently been instances where an Immortal has taken away entire clans to the other realm because it is just that simple."

"That doesn't sound very simple, honestly," Hannah said.

"Yeah… Ronron's parents will be a problem. They are completely mortals, and the heaven apparently doesn't like it when you take people with you who are either not closely related to you, or too weak to ever go away themselves."

"And you can't take any?" Hannah asked.

"I'm afraid not," Alex said. "I'm not even supposed to leave quickly. I have to wait a while before I reach Immortality."

"Why is that?" Hannah asked. "Alex, what's going on with you? You're being secretive."

"I have to be, sister. I'm sorry, I cannot tell you," he said with a sigh and stood up. "I will leave now. You should talk to the senior when you get to in a few years. Until then, work hard and learn all your Daos."

Hannah frowned, but she nodded. "I'll do my best."

Alex nodded and left.

An hour later he arrived back in the palace in the Southern Continent, where he once again began his tiresome days of trying to learn a Dao.

The Dao of Rust was very close to him to fully understand it, and the Dao of Water he needed to do so was something he already learned.

lightsΝοvεl ƈοm So all that he really needed now was time.

Alex learned the Dao of Rust some weeks later, right after which he combined all the Metal Daos he understood to form the True Metal Dao.

The event was a big one, compared to all the other times someone had learned Dao in the palace.

10 different Dao came from the sky at once, settling on him as they intertwined to give him this new dao.

Now, the total number of Dao he learned had gone down from 16 to 13. That was an incredible thing he had done.

Now that he had learned what he had, he began helping Pearl with his own Dao. Pearl picked up things far more easily than Alex did when it came to Metal Dao.

He already had the Dao of Metal, Dao of Sharpness, Dao of Malleability, Dao of Ductility, and Dao of Conduction. He was missing the other 5, which he was sure he was going to learn.

Apparently, Bai Jingshen had been teaching him about the other Daos, letting him learn all at the same time so that he could gain all those Dao at the same time.

Alex didn't have to worry about Pearl because of that, but he still helped him where he could. He let Pearl read the aura of his True Metal Dao, helping him learn the rest of it sooner.

Pearl left for the Western Continent after learning the Dao of Alloy, promising that he would learn it all in just the next few years.

Alex tried spending his next few weeks on his own, but there wasn't much he could do here, which led him to a lot of boredom. He filled his open hours with making pills, as many as he could, and even that didn't fulfill him as much.

So, he began thinking of what he could do with his time. A few thoughts came to his mind, but none made him excited.

He would train his Sword Domain, but he had plenty of time to do that. He could improve the Pill Splitting Qi to work for 3 pills at once, and maybe even more, but he also could do that in the many years he still had.

He began thinking about what else he could do that would take a lot of time to learn, and came upon something that he hadn't thought about in a long time.

It was certainly something that would keep him from becoming bored, but at the same time, it was also something that he himself deemed evil.

But the wish to learn it overpowered any sort of moral reasoning he had. Alex knew he needed to still be ethical about it all, so he needed to think about it a little longer before he decided to do it for real.

"I can't think about this right now," Alex thought. "I need to focus on the teleportation formations first.

Pearl would've already told Bai Jingshen about his plans now that he was there, so it was time for Alex to go talk with the people in the Northern Continent.

While he talked about the formation, he could also take the time to check just what the hell was up with those wells, and how it was that no one in the other continent was that surprised about the prophecies.New n0vel chapters are published on

After deciding as such, he went to tell Scarlet what he was doing so he could get her approval. Once he received the approval, it was time to leave.

There were so many people he could take, but the less he took, the easier it would be on him. After thinking for a while, he decided that he would have to take his Aunt Liz with him, and her alone.

So, after talking to her, Alex got on his super fast ship and made his way north of the Southern Continent.

Chapter 1868 To the Northern Continent

﻿﻿Alex and Liz flew through the massive wasteland of the Southern Continent, the land that now worked together with the mainland without any restrictions.

After Alex ascended the throne, and Scarlet returned to her rightful place as the ruler, the wasteland was brought back under the continent's rule, and people of the wasteland started gaining benefits that were previously unknown to them.

5000 years was a short time for a cultivator, but for mortals without Qi, it had been so long that most of them did not know any other life than the one they had already.

As such, despite being able to go anywhere they wanted to, and be able to become a cultivator, most of the people in the desert still suffered to become a body cultivator.

There was still a disparity between the two sections that Alex did not know how to deal with.

After passing the Southern Continent, both he and his aunt could immediately see the Central Continent in the distance.

It was so close that in less than a day, they could reach the continent even if they flew just by themselves. On the Immortal rank ship that Alex owned, they could do it in a matter of hours.

This was the first time Alex had come to see the Central Continent from this close from the outside. As such, he was surprised by the fact that the entire continent was in fact not surrounded by Qi at all.

It was part of the continent, a very large section no doubt, but there were still regions outside the wall that were habitable if anyone wished to stay out there.

Of course, the only thing that inhabited those areas were wild beasts without much strength as no Qi could reach that region without being sucked into the vortex that was the wall of Qi created by Godkiller.

Alex's purple eyes glowed and he saw the multicolored Qi encircling about 80% of the land. The area where the Qi passed was very barren and completely decimated with nothing growing there.

Alex remembered that day in the past when he had been teleported directly into this barrier. The teleportation talisman he had used back then had intended to teleport him to the Southern Continent's intercontinental teleportation formation, which would've accepted his arrival.

However, because Alex needed to take with him everything the mad immortal had stripped away from him, he had expended too much of the teleportation energy at the time, which caused him to only teleport halfway to the Southern continent, placing him right in the wall of Qi.

Alex sometimes wondered what his life would've been like had he teleported to Sunborn Sanctuary directly instead. He would've never met Scarlet. He would've never been a king. He likely would've never even found his father without help from the council members.

The last 40 years of his life would've been so different.New n0vel chapters are published on

Alex's ship passed through the side of the Central Continent and as they passed, Alex once again remembered the pain from having been in the Qi wall.

'I wonder if I can withstand the pain now,' Alex wondered. If that was the truth… could he perhaps use this place to body cultivate?

He would have to try when he returned. If it was possible, he would have a way to cultivate without spending an exorbitant amount of spirit stones to do so with the Mountain Crushing artifact.

The ship flew past the Central Continent and even just half an hour after that, Alex came upon the first of the islands that one would count to be part of the Northern Continent.

"This is part of the Forever Isles," Liz said. "I don't think I ever came this far, but my master took me as far as she could to this place to help me train."

"Right," Alex remembered the period when his aunt had to go train, and thus he was by himself for about a year and a half.

More islands popped up beyond the first one, and the further they traveled, the more there were.

In just a matter of few more hours, they laid their eyes on the Northern Continent.

Arriving on the Northern Continent, Alex immediately beelined for the Blazing Earth Sect. It took an hour longer for them to arrive at the sect, given how far it was from the shore.

As they arrived at the sect, Alex and Liz got off the ship and walked up to the front gates.

Liz walked up ahead. "Is senior Tai Guan in the sect currently?" she asked the guards.

The guards looked at both Liz and Alex and were more than curious about who they were. The ones that remained on the outside were just in the True realms, so they were not aware of who they were exactly.

"I believe Ancestor Tai is out of closed cultivation. May I know who the seniors area so I may send a message to her?" one of the guards asked.

"I am her disciple Li Zhumei. Please notify her of my arrival. At the same time, notify sect master Bai of our arrival as well."

"Promptly!" the guard said and disappeared, another one quickly replacing him.

Alex and Liz waited for no more than 5 minutes before several strong spiritual senses scanned them, none strong enough to be of any threat to either of them.

Alex was strong and all, but Liz wasn't any weaker either. Her cultivation base was lower than theirs, but her battle prowess would put her toe to toe with any of them.

Bai Qiyi, the sect master of the Blazing Sect arrived first, followed by many elders and ancestors, one of which was Tai Guan, Liz's master.

They arrived outside the gates and stood before Alex and Liz quickly bowing in greeting.

"We are honored to have you come to our sect, senior Alex," Bai Qiyi greeted as he bowed.

Alex was slightly taken aback as everyone from the Blazing Earth sect immediately bowed toward him. It was no simple bow either, but one of extreme respect.

At first, Alex wondered if they were still in gratitude for killing the Mad Immortal all those years ago, or perhaps for the alchemy lecture he gave before he took everyone to the Central continent.

But looking at their face, he realized that was not the case.

"Has news of the Eastern Continent traveled here too?" Alex asked.

"A long time ago," Bai Qiyi answered.

"We had people leave the Eastern Continent just to tell us about what had happened there," Tai Guan answered.

Alex nodded slowly as he understood. They weren't just bowing in respect, but also in fear.

After all, before them stood the man who had killed a proper Immortal.

"We have come here to ask something from all of you," Liz spoke. "I hope you will hear us."

"Of course," Bai Qiyi said. "What is it?"

Alex shook his head. "It will be better if I speak to everyone at once," he said. "Please help me gather everyone in the continent who has any sort of influence at all. This matter needs to be discussed as soon as possible."

Every one of the elders and ancestors wondered what the matter was, but none dared ask Alex what he didn't want to freely give.

Bai Qiyi nodded. "I will send the messages right away."

Chapter 1869 Talk of the Wells

The entire continent gathered at the Blazing Earth sect within the day. Sect master, ancestors, and any notable figure did not wait even a single second after getting the notice that Alex, the King of the Southern Continent, slayer of an Immortal, had come to the continent and had asked for their audience.

Every single one of them was in the Saint Soul realm, which was the highest anyway had managed to reach in the Northern Continent.

There were many that reached even higher realms, but over time in the past thousands of years, the Mad Immortal had killed every single one of them, causing the Northern Continent to be much weaker.

They were now the third weakest continent, right above the Western Continent, and barely had a history of no more than a thousand or so years.

The nearly 100 different newly arrived gathered at a secret hall in the Blazing Earth sect where Alex addressed them and explained why he was there.

The people there brought up similar concerns as the one in the Eastern Continent did, only there were fewer of them this time around, and most of them agreed that it was a good idea.

Still, everyone was reluctant to do so. They were worried that the spirit veins would lose their Qi too quickly if they continuously allowed the teleportation formation to be used, causing them to lose one after another vein.

This was the same concern that the Eastern Continent had as well.

"We can measure how much Qi is required for a single teleportation to the Central Continent, and from there decide how often we want to use it," Alex said. "If we do that, it should be fine."

The others nodded, agreeing to his words.

"If you all agree, then I will assume that we should go forward with this," Alex said and watched everyone.

Everyone slowly nodded, and by the end, it was a unanimous agreement. They had come to an agreement in less than 5 minutes.

"Is this all you gathered us here for?" one of the ancestors from a big family spoke. "I thank you for calling us here, but... I do not see why most of us needed to come here. If just the 5 great sects agreed with you, we couldn't disagree."

"Your input is still helpful," Alex said. "And the more minds there are, the quicker we could get through all the pros and cons of the situation."

"I... see," the old man said.

"Also," Alex added. "I have something very important to ask of you all. This is very important, so I hope you can answer me as honestly as you can."

"We will be honest." Many of them gave the same sentiment.

Liz sat behind Alex wondering what there was left to talk about. Was the teleportation formation not what they came to talk about?

"I want to ask all of you if you visited the Nine Wells of Time. If you have what was the prophecy that you heard? If you can't answer me that, at least tell me how important the prophecy was to your life, or if it came true at all."

Alex's questions caused a stir among the crowd.

"Nine Wells of Time?"

"That was so long ago I don't remember what it was I saw back there."

"I hadn't reached Saint realm back then. I don't recall anything."

"I don't think there was anything important in my prophecy."

They all talked one by one and as Alex listened to them, he understood that most of them had simply no idea what they had learned.

"I believe my prophecy was something about me surviving a very bad fight," one of the ancestors said. "I think that was fulfilled when I fought Xue Kuangren and survived."

"Mine was that I would win some sort of competition," another person said. "I did win a few competitions in my life, so I consider that fulfilled."

"Mine was too cryptic. Something about foxes and horses. I never understood what it meant in the end."

More and more people talked about it, and Alex frowned as he heard every single one of them.

"Let's ignore the visions for now since you can interpret them in anyways," Alex said. "What about the prophecies? What words did you hear from the final 3 wells?"

"I heard nothing. It didn't work for me."

"Me neither."

"It worked for me. I remember the words 'Forged by wind and earth' in my prophecy, but I can't recall the rest."

"Wait, some of you didn't hear it?" Alex asked.

"The final 3 wells don't work for everyone," Elder Xuan of the Frozen Heart sect said. "You just have to get lucky."

"Hmm?" Alex was taken aback. "Is that true?"

A lot of people nodded.

"How many of you remember hearing something?" Alex asked.

About 2 dozen among all the people claimed they had heard it. It was far less than Alex had expected. That made him wonder what it was about the wells that made it work for some and not for others.

Alex talked to just those who did hear anything and tried to figure out what it was that they heard. Unfortunately, that wasn't of much help as most didn't remember.

The ones that did remember didn't know if their prophecies had come true or not just yet. They never focused on it much and it was cryptic enough that there had been hundreds of such events that they could tell had been fulfilled in such a way.

There was one common thread between a few, which was about the defeat of Xue Kuangren, or so it sounded like.

In the end, Alex decided it would be for the better if he went and checked on the wells himself.

He brought his aunt along to the wells, as she was the only one with Time dao and perhaps could help him understand a few things.

The two of them arrived at the wells and were allowed to go anywhere they wanted without having to stay in a line.

Alex walked in, and as soon as he did, he could feel the thick Time aura that emanated from the wells.

"I can't believe there was so much time aura here," he said softly.

"And I can't believe there was such a strong Dao aura here. What is this? I can't put my finger on it," she said softly.

"You don't know what the Dao is?" Alex asked.

"I've never sensed this before," she said. "Back when I came here, I was barely beginning to understand Time aura itself."

Alex got curious about what Dao it was that his aunt was sensing. "Let's go see what is up with the last 3 wells. Maybe you will catch something."

They walked over to the three wells and stood before them in, surrounded by a thick Time aura. Liz sat on the ground and began focusing on the aura.

Alex stood next to her, focusing on the aura too, seeing if he could sense something from it at all.

As he did so, he felt a different sort of Time aura envelop him for a second, confusing him.

Then he heard a voice speak from all around him.

"What is your name, child?"

Chapter 1870 A Person

Alex looked around, searching for the voice. He looked at everyone who stared at him from afar, seeing if they were the ones who spoke.

However, none of the people he looked at seemed like they were communicating with him. Also, there was something very weird about the voice he heard. It came from everywhere around him, instead of just coming from inside of him, which is what it usually sounded like when someone communicated in a spiritual sense.

Was this even someone speaking through their spiritual sense? Or was this more of an artifact or a talisman?

"Who is speaking?" Alex asked, releasing his spiritual sense to search for the voice, to see if he could find anything.

However, just as he did that, his spiritual sense stopped right outside of him, hardly moving beyond just the surface of his head.

Something blocked its movement so badly, and yet Alex did not feel any sort of suppression on his at all. The only thing he felt was the Time aura that surrounded him, and...

Alex suddenly realized what was happening around him. He hadn't paid attention because of the voice, but something was happening that took him by shock.

The entire world seemed to have fully frozen while he alone could move. He looked down to the side and saw that his aunt was fully frozen as well.

Alex could not believe how that was possible, especially given that he could not see who it was that did so. On top of that, his aunt being stuck in time was certainly not something he had ever thought could happen to her.

As Alex tried to calm his shocked heart, the voice spoke again.

"You do not need to understand who I am. If you are worried, I will tell you that I am not your enemy."

The voice sounded as though it belonged to a man, but Alex could not be certain. It sounded distorted enough that it could belong to a woman too.

Alex used Demon's eyes to see the surrounding aura, and couldn't see anything different at all. The person who was speaking to him was not using anything that used any sort of elemental Qi.

Was it Spiritual energy then? How come he did not sense it?

"Will you answer my question?" the voice asked again.

Alex had no reason to believe whoever was speaking was his friend, but somehow, he felt that there was nothing he could do to hide who he was.

If the person wanted to know who he was, they would.

"I am Alex, king of the Southern Continent," Alex said. "I am honored to be contacted by senior."

"Are you visiting the wells to receive a prophecy?" the voice asked.

"No," Alex answered truthfully. "I came to understand how they work."

"You should know how they work," the voice answered. "They tell you the prophecy."

"Yes," Alex said. "But they only work sometimes, and those prophecies seem vague and unimportant. Meanwhile, I and someone else received a very explicit and significant prophecy. I am trying to find out why that is the case."

There was a long silence where the person did not speak at all. And then they said, "Should I tell you?"

"Tell me?" Alex asked, confused for a second, before he realized what he meant. "Do you know the answer?"

"I do," the voice replied.

"I will appreciate if senior tells me anything," Alex quickly replied, hoping to get the person to keep talking.

"The first of the 6 wells is simple. They are created to do what they do, to show a glimpse of your past, your present, and your immediate future."

"But the last 3 are created with great care. These wells are meant to tap into the fate of a certain person, and look far into their future."

"Not only them but anyone who has their fate entwined with that person in any major way, it sees the future of those people too, telling them the prophecy as well."

Alex frowned slightly as he heard the explanation. 'Fate?' he wondered. He also wondered who this certain person was.

"Is this person you are talking about... me?" Alex asked.

The person went silent for a while before speaking again. "I cannot tell," the voice said. "There is a good chance that the person whom these wells are meant for is you. But at the same time, it could also be that you just have your fate entwined with the actual person a lot. It is difficult to tell which one is the truth."

"Or rather, there is no truth until the future has come and passed."

Alex paused for a moment. 'So... these wells were meant for me, or someone I am close to?' he thought. It seemed uncertain that the person this well was meant for was someone other than him. After all, the Dragon Emperor had a prophecy and his fate was intertwined with his.

'Or it could be Pearl too,' Alex thought, but he refused to believe it. Pearl had close to no influence on the continent, where a lot of the people had gotten some prophecies.

Alex wondered for a moment if it was his aunt, but given that she hadn't received any prophecies, it did not seem like it would be her. At the same time, that also went on to disprove that the person might be him.

Why was it all so confusing?

"What are the chances that it is me?" Alex asked in the end, wanting to know.

"If you had asked me this question over 20 years ago, I would've told you yes," the person said. "But things have changed since then, and the likelihood of that person being you is a lot less now."

"Lot less?" Alex asked. "Why?"

The person did not answer.

"Senior?" Alex called out.

"Thank you," the person said suddenly. "I am not sure what it was that you did at that time. But because of you, I don't have to suffer anymore."

Alex was way too puzzled to tell what the person was talking about. "Senior, who are you? Are you a human? A beast? A spirit? What are you? Where are you?" he asked.

"She will protect you. Give her the weapon."

"Pardon?" Alex asked.

"Blood of the kin, you must take it. That is the only way."

"Senior?"

"Lost from the world, they cannot survive for long there where the sun doesn't shine. Take them away."

Alex did not understand what was happening. Why was the voice suddenly rattling nonsense at him now?

"Ruby, Emerald, Amber, and Sapphire. Are there 3 jewels or 4? It is not the reunion you thought it would be, but it is the most important one."

The voice stopped at that point, pausing for a long time. Alex let the voice take the time.

"Goodbye, young friend. We shall meet again on the ivory steps where the gods tread."

The Time aura disappeared, and the slowed time vanished from around him. The world moved back to normal.

Alex's spiritual sense spread to over 150 kilometers instantly, but no matter how much he searched for the voice, he did not find it.

The person, if there was one, was gone.

Chapter 1871 Blocked

Alex remained stunned for a moment, trying to wrap his head around what had just happened.

He looked toward the well, wondering if what he had heard had been the spirit of the wells. How else would one be able to use Time Dao around him without being next to him?

However, the fact that he couldn't sense anything of that sort from the well discouraged his guess. He couldn't help but wonder if there truly was a person or a beast who did this.

Either way, spirit or human, the one that had talked to him just now had been a very strong individual.

Liz suddenly gasped and reached down to stop herself from falling.

"Aunt Liz," Alex quickly grabbed her, worried.

Liz gasped for air like a person drowning. She heavily breathed in and out for a few seconds before calming down.

Alex had already pulled a few pills out for her just in case, but Liz shook her head before her breathing started becoming normal.

"Are you alright? What happened?" Alex asked.

"Did you feel it? Did you hear him?" she asked.

Alex's eyes narrowed. "Who?" he asked, wondering if his Aunt had been contacted by the same person.

"Someone talked to me just now," Liz said. "So powerful. I couldn't do anything. His control of Dao was so much stronger than mine. How is that possible?"

Liz seemed to be talking more with herself than with Alex. Whatever had happened to her had left her shocked.

"I—"

Alex stopped suddenly, pain flaring in his mind as though something heavy and sharp crashed into his head, stopping him from speaking his mind.

He wanted to tell his Aunt that he too had heard someone, had been stuck in slowed time, but he found himself completely unable to do anything about it.

Alex paused for a moment, unsure what was happening. He felt normal again now that he wasn't saying anything, the headache vanishing as though never a thing. But when he tried to speak again, he felt the same restriction in his words, the same headache flare up again.

"Kid, what is going on?" Godslayer's voice filled his mind. "Whatever you are doing, stop."

Alex was stunned. If even Godslayer could feel what was happening, then there was only one thing that was possible that had been done to him.

The person who had spoken to him earlier had used his Intent to force Alex to not say anything about their conversation or meeting.

Alex was terrified to learn that he wasn't even forced to speak an oath and was made to deal with the repercussions of one.

"How was he so strong?" Liz spoke softly.

"If you're okay, we should get out of here." Alex lent a hand to his aunt, helping her get up.

Liz stood up, looking toward the wells. "We should definitely leave," she said. "That person told me that I would regret it my entire life If I tried to learn a Dao here. Why did he say that?"

Alex frowned, wondering what that was about.

"Did you feel nothing? Hear nothing?" Liz asked.

Alex could only deny it in the end. He could not say anything. That only made him curious why it was that the person bothered to stop him from saying anything while leaving his aunt alone to do whatever she wanted to do.

They left the area soon after, flying back toward the Blazing Earth sect. As they flew Alex thought about the incident again, wondering what exactly it was that

'What was he rambling about at the end there?' Alex wondered. Those sentences he spoke at the end one after another, felt nonsense to Alex at first. But the more he thought about it, the more it became apparent that they were in fact prophecies.

Alex went through those sentences over and over, seeing if there was any meaning to them he could derive, but just like the other 3 prophecies he had heard before, these ones were fully incomprehensible to him as well.

Alex sighed in the end, not knowing what to do with the information.

Godslayer wanted answers too in his head, but Alex couldn't give him any, so after a while, Godslayer went back to being silent again.

The two of them arrived back in the Blazing Earth sect, where Liz spent some time chatting with her master and sect elders.

Alex was left alone upon his request.

They stayed in the sect for a few days as there was no hurry to leave. One of the days, Alex took his aunt to the north, to go and meet the senior again.

The Black Tortoise was a lonesome being, who forever stayed in his secret realm by himself. He had barely any visitors, so whenever someone came to meet him, he was more than happy.

The Black Tortoise spoke gladly, chatting with Alex about anything and everything he wanted to. Alex had brought information about his brother, so he was more than rejoiced to hear that.

Apparently, the Black Tortoise wasn't as lonely as Alex had thought it was. From what it said, Bai Jingshen came and chatted with it from time to time.

He told Alex that he had already learned about his victory at the war in the Eastern Continent.

"I cannot begin to believe that the young man I met all those years ago at random was someone who would go on to become just a strong figure in less than a century," the giant tortoise said. "I should've guessed though. After all, you had the blood of a White Tiger with you at that time. You were no simple human."

Alex couldn't help but smile.

He talked to the tortoise about a few more things, letting him know that he wanted to open the teleportation formations, and if he had his approval.

The Black Tortoise had no qualms about what Alex wanted to do. So, gaining his approval, Alex returned to the Blazing Earth sect once again.

They remained in the sect for no more than 2 days after returning and on the 3rd day, it was time for them to leave.

Liz said her goodbyes, saying that she would come again, and that would be before she left for the Immortal worlds.

Alex handed over a bunch of talismans to the elders from all around the continent who had come to see him off.

The elders took the talismans curiously. "What are these?" one of them asked.

"Pill recipes," Alex said. "For every Saint pill and lower I know of."

"WHAT?!" A few of them shouted at once.

They quickly looked through the talismans to see what type of pills there were, and they were more than surprised to see the incredible pill recipes that Alex had given him.

From Dao pills to pills that improved Spiritual roots, there were all sorts of pill recipes that Alex gave them.

"Why are you giving these to us?" one of them asked. "Do you wish for something in return?"

"No, nothing," Alex answered. "I will become an Immortal soon, and thus, I have nothing to gain from hoarding these recipes for myself."

"So, I give them to you in hopes that they will help improve the status of the cultivators here instead. After all, the Northern Continent is very much behind on Alchemy from the other continents."

The elders and sect leaders became emotional after looking at all the pill recipes. They were shocked too, seeing all the different possibilities that the pills presented.

Most of them didn't even realize something like that was possible. Especially the Dao pill, which would be so incredibly useful given that they had an entire mountain full of Soul Elucidating Tulips.

As they looked through the talisman with excitement, one of them stopped on a talisman when they came across something that was not a pill.

Looking closely, the person realized that they were looking at a technique and not a pill recipe. Checking more thoroughly, their breathing became haggard as they realized that the technique they were looking at was an Immortal rank pill formation technique.

"Your Majesty! This… is this a mistake?" the person asked, showing the talisman. He so wanted to not talk about the talisman, but he had to be careful just in case this was a sort of test where Alex would take it all back if they failed to mention it.

Alex smiled. "No, it is not a mistake. What would be the point of giving you all of these pills, if you fail to make anything good out of it?"

"Use the recipes well and make high-level pills. Xue Kuangren troubled you for a long time, so it is about time you catch up to the other continents you have left behind." New n0vel chapters are published on

"Oh yeah, one last thing. Please do not tell anyone that you got these recipes from me. Tell people you unearthed them from some Snow Immortal sect treasury you just found or something. Just keep my name out of it.

The many gathered individuals looked at each other in confusion, but they all nodded in the end. They then bowed gratefully as Alex and Liz got onto their ship and left.

"why did you decide to not take credit for the pills?" Liz asked as they flew across the continent, approaching the ocean.

Alex sighed. "Senior Yang told me that I needed to begin erasing my name from the public consciousness. I need to become somebody unknown again so that my name doesn't spread through the Immortal realm because of what I've done."

"So, I decided to no longer stand out in the world," Alex said. "Unfortunately, I think I will have to take more drastic measures if that is truly the case."

Chapter 1872 Breakthrough

After returning from the Northern Continent, Alex spent some time cultivating. He hadn't spent cultivated much when he was over there, and it was getting close to when he could break through to the next realm.

So, before he did anything else, he decided to break through to the next realm.

Because Alex hadn't forced himself to reach the next realm as he had done before the war, it took a lot longer than he expected to reach the bottleneck.

So, after a month of close cultivation, Alex finally managed to break through.

His breakthrough was simple and quick. There was no trouble, and he reached the Saint Transformation 2nd realm easily. After spending some time on post-cultivation after a breakthrough, he left his room to go see how the situation was around the palace.

Linlin waited outside his room as always and immediately began giving him the information.

The newly hired officials were working as usual it seemed and some of the elders had come out to help and lighten the workload. The continent had entered its state of peace now, to the point where he wasn't even needed for most things.

The alchemists under him had shown a lot of progress too, apparently. The Wood pill he had given them a recipe for had been made many times, and the high-ranking soldiers and officials in the empire had been provided with a pill already, given that they had Wood's spiritual root.

"Some of the soldiers have reported their dissatisfaction with the situation," Linlin said. "Since only the ones with the Wood root have received the pill, the ones without it feel like they are ignored."

"That's… a problem certainly." Alex rubbed his chin and decided to have the alchemists mass-produce the Earth pill and the Water pill as well. Although, the required ingredients for the pills would be hard to find.

'But I don't have the pill for Fire and Metal,' Alex thought. 'Should I spend my time on it?'

Thinking about it, it would certainly be of great help to everyone if he could make it. But, given how long it had taken him to make the Wood pill, he feared he would have to spend all of his time on just that.

'No,' he thought to himself. 'The wood pill was difficult because my wood spiritual root was trash. I have significantly superior Fire spiritual roots, and Supreme Metal roots. I should be able to make a pill faster.'

Thinking as such, Alex decided to make a mental note of what he needed to do in the future. Of course, he would need something more for his family and friends.

Linlin moved over to talking about his family next, who didn't have anything new going on with them.

Graham trained all day. Ronron went between cultivating and training. And Helen spent her time practicing making better pills and talismans, with Whisker who was by her side at all times.

Scarlet remained inside the dome for most of the time now since she wasn't needed much at all.

"Your aunt has returned to the Eastern Continent to visit the Emperor and Empress there," Linlin said. "As for the others, there's nothing new."

"What about my master and Martial Uncle?" Alex remembered. "Are they doing well under their management roles?"

Linlin gave a small helpless grin. "Senior Wen Cheng adjusted well to his new role, but I don't think senior Lang Shun had much managerial experience. He was overwhelmed by the work we had, so he returned back to focusing on alchemy."

"I see. That's alright. My master is doing well though, right?" he asked.

"Yes, senior Wen Cheng is fitting in well. If he can cultivate quickly, he can even get a better standing among the new officials."

Alex looked at Linlin. "He's not doing well with the others?"

"Umm… it's less that he's doing bad, and more that it's clear that the only reason any of the others respect him at all is because he is your master. Nobody says it, but they all know that he got his job only because of his relation to you."

Alex frowned, finding a hint of anger burn within him, but he let go of it. There was no lie in those words. It was indeed true that Wen Cheng had gotten this job just because of Alex.

Wen Cheng would have to struggle with the disrespect until he could prove them otherwise. If Alex helped, he would only be proving their point.

Alex listened to more of what Linlin had to say and got a general idea of what was going on. He nodded in the end, having listened to everything. New n0vel chapters are published on

"Oh right, have you taken a break yet, Linlin?" Alex asked. "You work every single day. Do you take breaks at all?"

"I work during the day, and I'm free at night always, your Majesty," Linlin said.

"Still, you need to take some breaks. How long has it been since you went to see your family? Has it been years?" Alex asked.

"My family comes to visit me from time to time in the city. I meet with them when they do come," she said.

"That won't do." Alex felt offended. "Go visit them. Take a month or two off, and go be with your family. And focus on your cultivation too. You won't be spending all your time in the palace; you'll have to become an Immortal soon."

Linlin gave an awkward smile. "I do not know if it is possible for me to break through to Immortality. I am fine with being a—"

"No, you're not fine," Alex cut her off. "Being so close to me all this time, you have received tremendous benefits. There should be no doubt in your mind that you can reach the Immortal realm."

"Now go and complete what urgent work you have and prepare for your vacation."

Once Alex said that he left to go and see his family and others.

He arrived in his mother's room and saw her making a few pills along with Whisker, and a young girl who appeared to be only in her early adolescence.

Despite being nearly 30 years old, the girl appeared very young.

"Yumin, are you here to practice Alchemy?" Alex asked.

"Your Majesty!" The girl quickly stood up and bowed. "I did indeed come to learn alchemy from the master."

The girl was Kong Yumin, the daughter of Kong Yuhan and Zhou Mi. Back in the Hong Wu sect, she had been training under his mother, so after she had come here with her parents, she still sought out training from his mother from time to time.

"Learn well," Alex said and sat beside his mother, watching her make pills.

There was simply nothing wrong with the way his mother made pills. Being the only other person with 7 elemental spiritual roots, alongside Alex, she had been able to learn the Supreme Elemental Accord.

It had taken her quite some time to learn that and the Pill Splitting Qi, but she had done that by now.

She wasn't as good at fixing recipes, but she was very good at following them. And with everything else the best she could use, Helen too had started making pills with pill veins.

Once she improved her cultivation base, she would be able to higher grade pills.

Chapter 1873 The Hexagonal Sign

Alex needed to wait for Pearl's return with a confirmation before he went back to the Central Continent. So he spent his waiting time cultivating.

He cultivated his Qi and his body. There wasn't much he could do to improve his Spiritual energy or his Blood aura, so he ignored those. And since he had only just broken through to the Saint Transformation 2nd realm, there wasn't much he could do to cultivate his Qi either.

So, Alex focused on cultivating his body instead.

He cultivated the Undying God's physique and the Demon Eyes while also cultivating his body.

Alex wasn't aware how long he had before the Demon Eyes reached the next stage, but he was certain his Undying God's Body was reaching the 3rd stage in the near future.

As for body cultivation itself, Alex didn't put up any excuses and cultivated it as much as he could.

With the Mountain Crushing artifact and the Immortal Spirit stones he had gained from Pearl's father, Alex could easily use the artifact to train for a long time.

Alex's body got stronger day by day, each day he trained in the artifact.

As he trained in the artifact every day, a few curious thoughts struck him.

First, because the artifact ran using a formation at the base of it, Alex tried using it with his Qi. Regular Qi wasn't strong enough to run the formation, and because of that, Alex had never been able to run the artifact.

However, now that he had Immortal Qi, he wondered if he could use it.

Alex used his Immortal Qi to see if he could activate the formation, and to his pleasant surprise, he could.

There were some problems, of course. He didn't have nearly enough Qi at the moment to keep the formation running for more than just a few minutes.

Also, he needed to continuously keep a stream of Qi going into the formation, which was very difficult when one was tumbling inside the artifact, being lacerated on all sides by sharp rocks.

While it wasn't useful right now, once Alex had a bit more Immortal Qi, and a lot more experience inside the formation, it was sufficed to say that he wouldn't be needing any more spirit stones to cultivate.

As such, Alex decided to slow down on his body cultivation so he could allow his father to use the spirit stones they had with them.

The other thing that got Alex curious was the small glowing sign on the roof of the lid on the inside of the formation.

The lid only covered the artifact when it activated, so it wasn't until one was using it that they saw the sign inside.

Alex had caught the sign after he had learned to focus inside the artifact despite the pain. He had noticed the sign for some time now, and for the longest time, he had wondered where he had seen the sign before.

The sign was a small hexagon, with something illegible written in the center. In fact, Alex wasn't even sure if that was a text at all. Best he knew, it could only be some scribbles.

For the longest time, Alex was not sure what it was or where he had seen it before. But recently, he had come to remember where exactly he had seen it.

So, he left the palace to confirm the matter.

He arrived in the Sundering Sanctum, disappearing into the artifact. The artifact spirit greeted him once again and started making small talk.

"I can already feel my connection with you, master." The spirit had a gleeful look on him as he talked with Alex. "Just a few tries more and you can take me away."

Alex nodded. "I will return in a bit. I need to check on something."

He disappeared from the first floor of the playground he was in and arrived at the floor underneath the first floor. This was the location with the many formations that worked in tandem with each other to keep the Playground running.

Alex looked around at the many formations and noticed the small elevated section of the floor that was always there. He quickly walked up to it without messing with any of the other formations and stood before it.

At the center of the elevated floor was a small indent on which was a hexagonal wooden plate that snugly fit into it.

At the center of the hexagonal plate was the same illegible writing Alex saw from the Mountain Crushing artifact.

'Finally,' he thought. After so long, he had finally managed to recall just where it was that he had seen the shape and the writing.

The memory of the item was always there in his mind, but he had seen it in passing and thus had a hard time remembering just where he had seen it.

After returning here quite a few times in the past years now, he had come to remember a lot more about it and thus recognized the hexagonal sign.

Now that he did recognize it, Alex wondered what exactly it meant. A few ideas came to his mind, but none was apparent enough to be the truth.

The best guess Alex had at the moment was that the symbol was a sort of mark that was given to artifacts of a certain rank.

Maybe it was similar to how pills gained pill veins. This could certainly be the same, but instead of the heavens doing it, it was some cultivator who judged the quality of the artifact.

Alex didn't know if that was the case or not, but that was where he had to stop with his assumption at the moment.

Alex asked the playground's spirit once he returned, but the spirit wasn't aware of anything in regard to the room below or the hexagonal symbol.

Alex spent some time with the spirit afterward before going back to refining the playground.

His Qi now passed through the entire artifact so smoothly that it almost felt as though there was nothing there at all. There was no blockage, no resistance. Just a steady flow of Qi throughout the body of the artifact.

Just a few more days of this and the playground was bound to be his.

Alex returned to the palace and found Scarlet, whom he asked about the symbol, but it seemed Scarlet wasn't aware of such a symbol. At the very least, she helped confirm that it wasn't some sort of mark that determined the quality of the artifact.

That left Alex with no real assumption of what the mark could be. There was only one way he had to find out about it now.

Pearl returned from the Western Continent some days later. Bai Jingshen had prepared the Western Continent's teleportation formation to be used as needed, and Pearl delivered that information to Alex.

"So we are all but done."

There wasn't much left for Alex to do except maybe help Hao Ya look through the formations and check them to see if they were properly set to teleport people to the appropriate location.

"I should learn how the formation works too," Alex thought. It was about time he returned to the Central Continent once again.New n0vel chapters are published on

Chapter 1874 Daoist Title

Upon Ronron's reiteration of what she had done when she had come to the Central Continent, Emily wanted to go visit too.

In a way, she had always regretted leaving the young Lilin without a mother, even though technically she herself was her mother.

Just because she wasn't the one who gave birth to her did not mean that she wasn't allowed to be her mother. After all, Alex hadn't been responsible for conceiving Ronron, and yet he still acted every way her father did.

So, after hearing that Alex was once again returning to the Central Continent, Emily showed great intention in wanting to come here.

The older Alex decided to come too, fully supporting his wife in whatever it was that she wanted to do.

Since both of her parents were going, Ronron wanted to go too. Given that she would most likely be coming back with her sister this time around, she would stay there for as long as she could.

As such, when it was time to go, Alex was not alone anymore.

They teleported away from the capital, arriving in the Central continent.

Ronron took her parents with her back to the farm, while Alex went alone to the senior's mansion.

Arriving at the mansion, he met both Hao Ya and the senior Luhei there, along with Senior Yang.

Apparently, the group had been waiting for half a year now, having completed all of their preparation. All the surveys had been completed and the result was a majority vote to be able to leave the Central Continent.

"People are desperate now. Outside, you don't think much time has passed, but a year in here is just too long for these people."

Alex nodded after hearing senior Yang's words.

"The people who were in the minority, did you choose to not leave or did they protest against everyone being allowed to leave?"

"A mix of both," Hao Ya said. "Most of them are scared of what the world will come to if they are allowed to come and go as they please."

"That is an understandable worry," Senior Luhei said from the side.

"It is obvious that people will be scared, but we have already given our words and people have chosen what they want to do. So, within the next year, we should begin sending out people as you say."

Alex nodded. "The preparations are complete on my end too. No one is against the idea and the teleportation formations are ready to be used."

The senior gave a sigh of relief. "I will send you and Hao Ya to the Eastern Continent tomorrow. We will need to make sure the formations have no problem."

"I don't think there are any problems, but we will check it anyway," Hao Ya said.

The senior looked at Alex. "Come sit. We have some time before we leave. Tell me about what you've been doing. Your progress."

Alex began talking with the senior, giving his side of the story as to what he was up to.

He told the man about his Daos he had learned in that time, and how he had been training. He wanted to tell him about the incident at the Nine Wells of Time, but the Intent still made him unable to speak of it.

"I broke through recently, so that is steady progress," Alex said.

"Take your time. As I've mentioned before, you need to be inconspicuous when you leave. Once there is precedence of people leaving this world, they won't focus on you so much."

Alex nodded. "I wanted to talk to you about that actually," he said. "You told me to become inconspicuous, to fall into obscurity, but I don't know how I can do that. I've done so many things that I fear people will talk about me forever."

The senior nodded. "It is impossible for people here to forget you. But you can make them talk about you less. If say, for example, you were to fake your death today, within 15 years, people would stop talking about you. Within 30 years, many would stop considering your name as anything other than the long list of names in their heads of influential figures."

"Within 100 years, people would stop talking about you. At that point, when people do go to the other world, they won't talk about you at all."

"In the end, that is what you want. You want people to forget about you as anything more than a simple figure from the past."

Alex thought about it for a moment and nodded. Becoming obscure right away was difficult, but in the future, there was a possibility.

"And you must use a title from the start instead of your name," the senior mentioned. "That will help you not get recognized."

"A title? What title do I have?" Alex asked. "I don't suppose King of the Southern Continent works."

"No, not that sort of title. A Daoist title," the senior said. "Not everyone chooses to use a title of that sort, but there are many that use it to hide their name, usually to hide their origins."

"You should think of one too."

"Do you have a title, senior?" Alex asked.

"No," the man said. "If any, I am the Sky God's disciple. That is my title."

"I see," Alex said. "I will think about it then."

They talked for a while about the importance of Daoist Titles, and Alex came to understand how useful it was. If someone did not know your name, they were quite hesitant to move against you, given that you could be from any large family.

There was no name that came to Alex immediately that he wanted to use as his Daoist Title, but he wanted 'Sun' to be involved in it somehow. That much he understood.

As they spoke, Alex managed to change the topic to what he had wanted to talk about.

He quickly drew the symbol he saw in the Mountain Crushing Artifact and the Playground artifact with his Qi and showed it to the man.

"Do you recognize this?" Alex asked the man, and even without receiving an answer, he knew the man knew what it was. His eyes had just changed too much for this to be unknown to him.

"How do you know this symbol?" the senior asked. "Did someone tell you?"

"I found this carved into two artifacts. One of which I own, and the other I'll own soon," Alex said.

"Both are Immortal artifacts?" the senior asked.

Alex nodded. "Are they a mark for Immortal artifacts? I didn't think it was," he said.

"They are not," the senior said. "That is the mark of the person who created those two artifacts."

"Oh, so they're made by the same person?" Alex asked. He wondered if it was made by some Artifact God, which was why the man was so surprised.

"Who made these?"

"The Sage of Ten Thousand Treasures," the man answered as soon as Alex asked.

"The Sage of—" Alex paused, his eyes widening instantly.

"Godkiller?"

"The very same," Senior Yang said.

Alex looked at the symbol hovering in front of him. The hexagonal shape with the illegible text at the center.

That was the symbol of the man-no, THING who Bai Jingshen called his master.

Ning Ruogong.

Chapter 1875 3rd Major Spirit Realm

"The treasures I have belongs to the Godkiller?"

Alex fell in awe at the thought that he had something belonging to a man that scared every single person in existence.

"Belongs... isn't the right word," Senior Yang added. "You simply own something that he made. It didn't belong to him as he never had any use for whatever treasure it is that you have."

"Oh, so he only made them and never used them?" Alex asked.

"That's correct."

Alex felt his excitement lower a bit. "Still, to have something that was made by the Godkiller, I should still consider myself lucky."

"Not really," Senior Yang said once again. "You do realize his title is the Sage of Ten Thousand Treasures, right? So he has had a lot of treasures."

"Ten thousand..." Alex thought. "Maybe I shouldn't be so excited by just getting one of the ten thousand."

"And that number isn't even correct," senior Yang said. "From what I've read of the history, the Godkiller gained the title of the Sage of Ten Thousand Treasures long before he even started making artifacts. In fact, the treasures he owned or made number in the hundreds of thousands if not millions."

Alex gave an awkward smile. It appeared that he had put a bit too much importance on the treasures he had when in the end, the Godkiller probably hadn't even thought much when making them.

"Was the Sage of Ten Thousand Treasures also the Artifact God?" Alex asked. "Or did he never try to become one?"

"He became the Godkiller long before he even had a chance to fight for the opportunity to become an Artifact God. It is unsure if he would've become one if he tried to, but we will never know now. I believe he could have been based on the evidence we have, but who knows."

"There have been many Artifact gods since then, and thus it is unclear just how good the Artifact God during the Godkiller's era was."

There wasn't much Alex needed to hear after that much, so he moved on with his topic, talking about various other matters that he wanted more information on.

One of the many other things Alex had been very curious about was the many realms that existed in the world.

He had learned long in the past that there were 33 Immortal realms and many other weaker realms which Godslayer believed to be around 70.

He wanted to learn more about them, and what names they had. More importantly, he wanted to know the name of the world he lived in.

After hearing about the different Immortal realms like the Land of the Blessed Sun and Sky God's Palace, Alex wanted to hear the name of the realm he lived in.

"There is no name for this world," the snake answered from the side.

"No name?" Alex asked. "There has to be a name certainly. How else would you know what you are talking about?"

"There were a total of 18 spirit realms that were won over by the Human army after the war. 6 of them were large, 12 of them small."

"Your realm is of average size among the 6 large ones. So, your realm is simply referred to as the 3rd Major Spirit realm."

Alex looked at the snake with an expression of disbelief. "That's it?" he asked. "3rd Major Spirit world? There is no actual name?"

"There was a name previously, or we believe there was. But too much was lost to the war, and we could not recover all the names."

"The humans had also won the spirit realms from the demons, and they decided to not name them afterward. So, they are referred through numbers instead."

Senior Yang nodded. "The humans did not care enough about the spirit realm they won in war except as a place where they could send their growing population to thrive."

Alex couldn't help but feel a little irritated at the fact that his world didn't have a proper name.

They talked throughout the night before it was time for them to go to the Eastern Continent.

Early morning, Alex and Hao Ya teleported to the Eastern Continent, arriving right before the Dragon Palace.

Immediately, Alex met up with Hannah and Long Huan, explaining to them what he was doing there. After learning that he was there to test the formations before they could be officially opened up, they gave them full permission.

Hao Ya spent some time around the formation, checking on whatever it was that she needed to check on. That reminded Alex that he needed to learn about these formations and how to fix them if something broke by some chance.

Hannah had been doing great as the Empress of the continent. She had more than gotten used to what it was that she needed to do, the same for Long Huan.

"Sister, the senior wants to speak with you," Alex said. "If you have the time, you should come speak to him with me."

"With me?" Hannah was a little taken aback, but she didn't refuse. "Can my husband come?"

"Sure," Alex said. "I don't see why he can't come. But I don't think his guards can come though. I mean, they can come, but they won't get to meet the senior without his permission."

"Okay," Hannah said. "I can get there."

Alex nodded. "By the way, how is your training going? Have you learned any Dao?" he asked.

"I'm getting close to learning some Fire dao. I can feel it. I just need a little more time, and maybe a little more help, then I will be able to do it."

Alex thought for a moment and nodded. "I think I have the perfect spot for you to do that," he said.

A day later, the teleportation formation was ready to take Hannah and Long Huan back to the Central continent along with Alex and Hao Ya.

Liz did not go with them this time around, deciding to return to the Southern Continent directly instead.

After Alex took his Aunt over to the Voidgate, he returned and teleported into the Central Continent.

They went to the mansion immediately, and as expected, only Hannah and Long Huan were allowed to meet with the senior.

The guards weren't forced to remain outside the mansion, but they also couldn't go to the backyard where the senior stayed.

Hannah finally met the man she had heard so much about and was surprised to see him be nothing more than a human.

Similarly, senior Yang was more than excited to meet with the person who had the Nine Celestial Revolution body.

They talked for some time, discussing how it was Hannah who would have to take him to the Immortal realm.

Hannah had her gripes with this idea, afraid that she couldn't take so many people at once. But listening to the senior say that she would be more than capable of doing so, she decided to trust him.

After talking for some time, it was time for them to decide what was next.

Alex suggested that they test the formation for the Northern Continent next and asked Hannah to join him on the journey there.

Hannah agreed, so along with Long Huan and the guards, she went over the Northern Continent next.

Chapter 1876 Revisiting the 13th Mountain

Hannah looked around the almost desert-like landscape surrounding the teleportation formation in the Northern Continent.

"Everyone kept telling me how most of the Northern Continent is filled with ice and snow. How come it is a desert instead?" she asked.

"This southern section is like that," Alex explained. "If you go north, you will have snow and ice all around you. You can even sense the snow from right here."

Spiritual sense spread from Hannah like giant waves in the ocean and reached out in all directions.

She nodded in the end, seeing all the snow. "I see," she said. "What do we do now? Do we just return?"

"Sister Hao Ya will do some tests here on the formation. We should let her do it. Meanwhile, I think the people of this continent would be more than excited to meet with the Emperor and Empress of the Eastern Continent."

Alex took Long Huan and Hannah over to the Razing Earth sect, who were more than terrified to have such individuals come to their sect unannounced. They were afraid that their hospitality would not be of the same level as it could have been had they known these people were coming.

Hannah's cultivation base was easy to sense for anyone who wanted to as she didn't hide it like Alex did. So, the moment they saw her, they were certain that she was the second strongest person they had sensed until now.

The only person stronger was the Mad Immortal.

Hannah learned that this was the place where her mother had trained and lived after she arrived on the Northern Continent, so she felt a little more connected with this place.

At the same time, everyone except for the sect master and Tai Guan newly learned that she was the daughter of their very own Liz, which surprised them to no end.

They were more than shocked to learn that Liz had a daughter who was the strongest living human in the world at the moment. More so, she was the Empress of the strongest Empire in the world as well.

That was more than enough to make them treat Hannah as well as they did Alex, perhaps even better.

After a day of being there, Alex took Hannah over to the volcanic mountain ranges not far from the Blazing Earth sect.

12 active volcanic mountains formed a circle with a valley at the center that was prime with Fire aura and treasures with Fire energy in it.

At the very center of it all was a teleportation formation that took one into a secret realm where the 13th volcanic mountain lay inside.

This was where Alex had improved his Fire Spiritual root the first time around using the Flame Mastery Scripture, and this was where he was going to let Hannah do the same as well.

After Hannah's mention of how far she had come in learning Fire Dao, Alex realized that the problem might have been with her Spiritual roots not being good enough to help her learn the Dao.

Hannah had 3 spiritual roots, which were Fire, Water, and Earth. She also had partly Yin and Yang spiritual roots, but they were so very weak that Alex wasn't even sure if he could improve them at all.

Of the 3 roots, all of them were good, but not good enough. Alex had already given her the pills for Water and Earth spiritual root improvement, so it was about time he helped her with Fire spiritual root as well.

Hannah had learned the Flame Mastery Scripture by heart now and was ready to use it to improve her Fire Spiritual Root.

Whisker came out, quickly using his Qi to stop himself from being burned as well. Since he had a Fire spiritual root, he began improving it as well.

Alex sat by Whisker's side all the while he and Hannah were focused on improving themselves. Alex didn't just spend his time there doing nothing; he also used the skill to improve his own Fire Spiritual Root.

Alex couldn't improve his spiritual roots. That was simply impossible given that he had already made it as good as he could with the resources available to him right now.

However, what he could do was check just how the Fire energy affected his spiritual root when he used the skill, and form a pill based on just that.

Alex had a feeling that if he knew enough about formations or scripts, he could perhaps emulate the same effect as the skill using just those things. That way, even those without the skill could improve their Spiritual root.

Unfortunately, he only has such knowledge regarding Pills, and as such he could only make pills to make such improvement.

Whisker was done improving his spiritual root after half a day, at the end of which he returned to his beast space to rest.

Hannah took much longer than him.

Hannah spent nearly 3 days improving her Fire Spiritual root, making Alex wonder why she was taking so long. He remembered his spiritual root improvement taking no longer than a single day, which made him worried that she was doing something wrong.

However, just when he was beginning to think that he needed to help her, he sensed the world move above him and looked up as he saw a gargantuan swirl of colors come down from heaven and land on Hannah.

Alex moved away, leaving Hannah free to learn the Dao.

Alex sensed the aura that leaked from the massive cacophony of energy and sensed the Heat and Fire aura. She was learning two Dao at once.

Alex waited long enough, and at the end of it all Hannah opened her eyes having not just improved her Spiritual Roots, but also having learned 2 new Dao.

If she wished, she could leave for the Immortal Realm right away.

Alex decided to let the others come here and improve their Fire Spiritual root too. His mother needed to improve her spiritual roots. So did his master, and so many other people he knew.

Hao Ya was done checking the formation, so they decided to teleport back to the Central Continent.

Upon returning, Hannah left to go meet with the older Alex, Emily, and Ronron, and go see her uncle's old house.There were also graves of her clone mother and father that she wished to visit.

Long Huan left with her, taking all the guards with him.

Alex remained behind as it was time to go to another continent tomorrow morning.

Since there was some time, Alex requested that he be taught how the teleportation formations worked and how he could fix them should they ever break after Senior Yang was gone.

"Hao Ya had told me that she doesn't wish to leave with me when I leave this realm," the senior said. "So, she will remain behind long enough to explain everything to you."

Alex was a little surprised. "Sister Hao, you are staying behind?" he asked.

"I am going to become an Immortal myself and leave on my own," Hao Ya said. "I wish to do my own thing."

Alex was surprised, but he couldn't argue against her wishes. "That's commendable," he said. "I wish you the best of luck then."

VACATION NOTICE!!!

Chapter 1877 The Great Discussion

Alex returned from the Western Continent, with Hao Ya testing the teleportation formation there too. This time around, he sat with her to see just what she did.

Hao Ya's job was to test more of the physical aspects of the formation, to basically stress test the consoles that were around the formation.

She hit the thing with hammers, dug around the soil, and did whatever else she thought would be natural damage and see if that affected the console in any way.

When all was tested and done, they returned to the Central Continent again.

Alex spent the time learning more about the formation in the special room. Unlike the other formations out there, the formation in the Central Continent was a little more crude than usual.

Because the original formation had been damaged by the Yang energy from the fruit of the Nine Yang Divine tree that rebounded back here, the senior had to use other materials to reform the formation, which wasn't as good as the other four.

"How exactly did the Yang energy come here? I'm still a little confused about that," Alex mentioned as he was taught.

"There was a connection with your body and here, both through connecting you to your clone, and connecting your storages with a simple teleportation formation that sent whatever you discarded here, such as books you 'learned' or Spirit stones you converted."

"We believe your Yang energy activated one of those on its own, and teleported a portion of it here," the senior explained. "It wasn't so much that I could not handle it, but just enough that everything was destroyed and we had to start over."

Even when Hao Ya went to the Southern Continent, Alex stayed behind and learned about the formation. He learned about how to maintain the formation and how to remake it should he ever need to.

"Surely I won't have to remake the formation," Alex laughed a little. "We plan to have quite decent security all around, so that sort of thing won't be needed."

"Oh, it won't be others who will force you to remake the system. You will have to do so yourself," the senior said. "Every so often, you will have to switch the Spirit Vein underneath the formation so it doesn't get destroyed. When you do that, you need to remake everything."

"It's more of reassembling than a remake, but you'll have to do it nonetheless," the senior said.

"We have to replace the spirit veins?" Alex asked. "Do they dry up too quickly?"

"After a few hundred or so uses, they need to be replaced," the senior said. "Since they can't regain the Qi they lost, they end up shattering into Spirit Stones at the end of it all."

Alex understood why it was important for him to learn how to reassemble the formation, and maybe even remake some parts if they break in the process of disassembly.

"Is there a way to fix this problem at all?" Alex asked.

"Unless you can get rid of the Qi barrier surrounding this continent, no," the senior said.

Alex gave an awkward smile. Surely the senior wasn't expecting him to do such a thing. How could he even begin to destroy such a turbulent mass of Qi?

Alex thought for a moment and looked at the senior. "Do you know of a way to destroy the barrier?" he asked. "Can it be done at all?"

"I... don't believe so," the senior said. "Even if you somehow manage to remove the entire barrier, the Intent will still remain, and that Intent will reform the barrier in time again."

"The only way to destroy it is to destroy the Intent and then destroy the barrier. I could destroy the Intent, but anything I do will reveal myself to this realm and it will force me to leave immediately."

Alex wondered if he could chip at the Intent piece by piece. He wondered if he could improve his Intent this way at all.

He had been somewhat planning on using the Qi to body cultivate. Now, he had a way to hone his Intent as well.

Hao Ya returned a few days later and gave her a sign of approval on the whole matter. The formations were ready for use.

The entirety of the Central Continent immediately got the message, which spread like wildfire. And the news was far better than they had expected.

In one month's time, the teleportation formations were to be opened to the world, and they would remain open forever, with people allowed to leave whenever they wanted to.

No one had to hurry. Everyone could take their time.

During that month, heavenly beasts from all 4 outer continents along with humans that were represented by them were called to the Central continent for one final meeting.

Pearl represented the Eastern Continent, with Long Huan and Hannah sitting in the meeting with him.

Bai Jingshen represented the Western Continent, and he had surprisingly brought Fu Zexian, Emperor of the Crimson Empire, and Wei Gumin, Emperor of the Luminance Empire. Both of those individuals were surprised to see Alex there and were even more surprised to see his cultivation base.

When they began hearing about what he had done, their heart those individuals were surprised to see Alex there and were even more surprised to see his cultivation base.

could barely hold back from sounding audible.

Five of the elders from the Northern Continent had come alone, represented by no beast. Or so they thought until they met with Xuan Luhei, the snake, and were surprised to learn that they were looking at their ruler.

The snake explained why he hadn't come back, and how there was another ruler back in the Domain of the Ruler still.

Finally, Scarlet arrived from the Southern Continent and Alex sat in the meeting beside her.

This was the first time in a long, long time that ruling figures from all four continents had met in one location. The last time such a thing had happened was most likely 14 thousand years ago when the 4 Heavenly beasts came down from heaven.

The meeting was to discuss how the formations were going to work. They were to discuss the frequency of its usage, the order in which it was used, and how they were going to protect it from misuse.

The group discussed for a long time and ended up deciding on a few key facts.

The other continents were to use their formation to send people just once during the first week of each month. How it was chosen who would go would rest at the hands of each of the continents.

Those people gathered in the Central continent after the 1st week would be sent out on the 2nd week. The remaining 2 weeks would see no use from the formation unless there was something urgent that needed its use.

People belonging to the Central Continent got priority during teleportation. There were other rules put into place, all of which were to protect the Central Continent from any ill-intended cultivators.

Several groups of individuals from all four continents were brought in as security and management to help with this problem and any other that mind come up.

Then, a month later, the teleportation formations were finally opened, and people began leaving for the other continents.

VACATION NOTICE!!!

Chapter 1878 Fully Refined

Alex returned to the Southern Continent once the teleportation formation began letting people travel across the world once again.

He needed to prepare the continent for both the arrival and departure of many of their figures.

Ronron and the rest had not yet returned, choosing to remain behind for a while longer for young Emily to live her life in peace.

Once coming back, Alex was swarmed with work once again, work which he had been neglecting for quite a while now.

It was nearly 2 weeks before Alex could focus on his own personal tasks such as cultivation and making pills. He also had to go visit the Sundering Sanctum to take away the playground. Any day now, it would be done.

In preparation for the playground being removed, Alex began giving tasks to the formation masters from the Royal guilds to begin coming up with formations that could be used to form another testing ground for the ones that would miss out on the Playground once Alex took it away.

The Playground was mostly in tatters anyway, so it was a good idea to create a new one.

Alex gathered knowledge from the Spirit of the Playground himself to hear what sort of tests there were and what sort of rewards there were to formulate this new trial ground he was preparing.

With all the formation masters working in tandem with Alex looking after their every task, within 3 months, they managed to create everything necessary for the trial ground.

Then, it was time to set it up.

Alex took the formation masters along with many other cultivators to the secret realm. Once inside, Alex let them stay out of the playground while he began refining it one last time.

This was what he had been waiting for. This was what everything he had been doing had led to.

Alex took a deep breath and immediately poured all of his Immortal Qi into the large spire.

The ground shuddered immediately, causing many of the onlookers to step back in fear. Alex felt the pulsating energy rebounding from the playground back into him, a constant vibration that told him it was working.

Then, the entire spire starts glowing with a faint blue aura about it, causing everyone to look at it in awe.

Alex looked at the playground and smiled before stepping back. A deep resonating sound rang out from the large building, like a gong just seconds before it stopped ringing.

Then the light faded and the sound disappeared. The ground stopped shuddering.

Alex moved back toward the Playground and reached out with his hand. The ground shuddered again. Only this time, people could see why that was.

The massive behemoth of a playground, the spire that broke past the spatial pocket itself to reveal its body to the outside world, the sundering sanctum that became the source for the title of the city it was in —The First Shadow— began shrinking.

Rocks crumbled around the playground, dropping out from where the Void and spatial fractures had destroyed its outer body. The rest of it continued shrinking.

It shrank and shrank until it was no more than the size of just a single-storied building, a size nearly a hundred times smaller than its original size.

The air of awe and mystique was clear among the many formation masters and workers that had come to work on the trial ground.

Alex touched the nearly shrunken playground and heard the spirit's words in his head. "You've finally done it, master. Congratulations."

"Thank you, spirit," Alex said with a proud smile.

The playground flashed and it disappeared into Alex's Soul Space.

Alex turned around to face the dozens of stunned cultivators.

"Well, don't just stand there. Go do your job."

"Yes, Your Majesty!"

Alex remained in the secret realm for another day, looking over those people's work before returning to the palace where he spent some time talking with the Playground spirit to try and learn what he could from it.

"I know a few things, but nothing I can say exactly I fear," the Playground spirit spoke to Alex.

"Did you know you were made by the Sage of Ten Thousand Treasures?" Alex asked. "Or Godkiller, as he might be better known."

"I did not know that," the spirit said. "I was aware that whoever created me had to be someone incredible because my first master mentioned something about how lucky he was to have me made."

"Your first master, do you have any information on him?" Alex asked.

"I do know a bit, even though I as a spirit hadn't formed back then. He was the family head of a minor family in the Divine Thunderforge Realm. He wasn't anyone important and from what I can recall, he died after failing to overcome his Immortal Tribulation."

"After that, I was passed from one person to another, before the final person who got me came to this realm and set me up in the secret realm."

Alex found the name of the realm a little interesting.

"Divine Thunderforge Realm, was it? What other realm have you been to?"

"Not counting this one? 3 in total. Divine Thunderforge realm, Sprint Water World, and Divine Sanctuary."

Alex continued chatting with Playground for a while longer before moving on with his day.

The next few months were all spent away between him trying to cultivate and watching over the creation of the new trial ground.

Nearly 8 months after the inception of the idea, the new secret realm was finally ready. And so, Alex announced the news that within the next 6 months, the secret realm would open and accept people for the first time.

And it wouldn't just be open to humans, but beasts as well. Pearl and Whisker were both ready to take part in it.

The 6-month period was given so people could prepare themselves. Not only that, it was given so people who had left the continent could return in time.

So, when the 6 months passed, the secret realm opened.

On the opening day, nearly 20 thousand people gathered at the large ground where the Sundering Sanctum used to stand, casting its giant shadow throughout the land.

Its absence was noticed, but not despised.

Alex gave a small speech before opening the secret realm and letting everyone in.

This secret realm was certainly more tedious than just the Playground. Because every test needed an examiner, there had to be nearly a few hundred different individuals who made an oath to be impartial in their judgment before testing the participants.

The entire secret realm worked exactly like the Playground did, with people going up and down each time, failing only when they couldn't pass the same level 3 times in a row.

The entire trial ran for 4 months in total, in which Pearl and Whisker failed on levels 33 and 37 respectively.

Pearl couldn't go past the level that asked him to craft something, and Whisker couldn't go past the level that asked him to fight something.

The winner of the trial was a young woman who was the daughter of a player. She gained the reward that was prepared for the winner, and everyone was sent out afterward. New n0vel chapters are published on

Then, the secret realm was closed off for another 10 years before it would be opened once again.

VACATION NOTICE!!!

Chapter 1879 Announcements

10 years had passed since the war in the Eastern Continent, and the world was more peaceful than ever. In fact, the world flourished with new blood as new, talented cultivators popped out all around the world as the Central Continent was reintegrated back into the world.

Their arrival had created some chaos, but that was something people got used to very quickly. Nobody thought anything else new would happen in the meantime, only for 2 very weird announcements to be made by the King of the Southern Continent in the Southern Continent.

First, anyone with Saint Core realm or above was asked to donate their blood. In doing so, they could ask for any pills to be made, so long as there was a recipe and they had gathered up the materials.

These pills would all be created by King Alex himself, so one could only expect the very best in return.

Exchanging blood for Pills was a weird concept to most, but those in higher places knew that Alex was capable of using his own blood in battle, so at least they understood what was going on.

It was the second announcement that stumped them all around.

In the capital of the Southern Continent, was created a house for the elderly and those terminally ill. So long as they consented to giving their corpse for research purposes after they were dead, the kingdom would give them and their family anything they wanted in return.

This announcement was the one that got people scratching their heads. They simply couldn't understand what reason Alex would have to gather the dying, or what reason he would have to research their corpse.

In fact, many even called it immoral and unethical to do any sort of research on the dead, but given how all the choice in the matter was handed to the dying, no one could fault Alex on anything.

So, within weeks, there were tons of people who went over to the capital for either of the announcements.

By the end of the month, the place Alex had opened for the dying had been full with all 2000 rooms filled, the rest having to wait.

As for blood, thousands upon thousand liters of blood were gathered each day, with many wanting various types of pill in return, all of which Alex had to make for them.

By just the end of the first month of opening this program, Alex owed nearly 3500 pills to everyone.

Alex felt relieved that he hadn't asked for people lower than the Saint Core realm. Had he done that, people would have instead ended up making him make over 10 thousand pills in total.

Alex began making the pills, about 90% of which he already had a recipe for. People were given a list at the start to let them know what pills required what ingredients.

Many of the others came with their own recipes. Those were the ones Alex had to spend some time with. New n0vel chapters are published on

It was a blessing that Alex had focused his time on the Pill Splitting Qi to improve it to make 3 pills at the same time. He was working on his way to making the technique split the powder into 4 pills, but he hadn't reached there yet. It would take some more time.

Working on 4 cauldrons at once, making 12 pills at the same time, Alex made about 600 pills a day on average.

In the days when there weren't too many recipes, his efficiency was high, making about 900 pills a day. The day when the recipes varied, he could only make about 300 pills a day.

With that speed, he spent a week making all the pills for the blood gathered in a month and handed it over to the people who were in charge of this operation.

For the rest of the month, he was free to do what he needed to do.

With so much blood gathered in one place, Alex finally got to improve his blood aura. It had stagnated at around Saint Transformation's 7th realm for nearly a decade now, and he could finally push it further for the last 2 realms.

It would've been much better if he only took blood from people in the Saint Transformation realm, but that was simply not possible given the fact that the Southern Continent didn't have many Saint Transformation realm cultivators.

The Eastern Continent did, and soon Alex would have to open part of this operation there as well. But that was a task for the future him.

Alex absorbed all the blood aura he could from the blood he was given, gaining enough aura to be on the precipice of reaching Saint Transformation's 8th realm.

Even with all the blood he had gathered, it wasn't enough to push it that far ahead. Thankfully, this was only the first month, and he still had a few years left.

Alex had been in the middle of cultivation when Linlin messaged him. On the 39th day of opening the house for the dying, someone had finally died.

Alex walked out, leaving his room to go to the dome where the body was already delivered. Everyone stayed out while Alex walked in with the body alone.

Many wondered what he was going to do, and what research he was planning on with the corpse. Alex couldn't tell them. If words got out of what he was planning to do, the world would immediately enter a period of chaos and bloodshed.

Alex took off the cloth of the corpse and saw a woman in her late 40s who had died. There was a talisman next to the corpse explaining who she was and how she had died.

'Qi deviation leading to wounded spirit, huh?' Alex thought. He looked toward the woman's corpse and gave a bow of respect to the dead.

Then, he stripped away her clothes and began his research on the corpse.

Since this was the very first corpse he was dealing with, he needed to be thorough with what he did. He could make all the mistakes he made, but he would have to learn from them so he didn't repeat them again.

Alex brought out a scalpel, made by himself using various durable materials he had. Using the Dao of sharpness and cutting, he cut the woman from the bottom of her ribcage all the way down to the naval region.

He cut around the skin to flay it open, revealing the bloody innards.

Alex looked at the thing he had opened up the skin to reveal. The Dantain.

More importantly, Alex had opened up the skin to reveal the spiritual roots.

He saw the meridians branching away from the dantian, hiding within muscles and organs, making their way throughout the body in thousands and thousands of tiny vein-like structures.

Now, Alex was going to have to try and pull it all out in one piece.

This was what the research he was doing was. Since that day nearly 30 years ago when he had gotten the memories of the man who had been researching this very subject, Alex had wanted to do it.

He wanted to succeed in taking the spiritual root out of a person without destroying it so that he could place it into another person.

Alex wanted to learn how to successfully perform a Spiritual Root transplant.

VACATION NOTICE!!!

Chapter 1880 Some Training

Alex stood on the sandy beach of one of the remote islands, Scarlet standing far away from her with her hands behind her back.

"Come on, try and hurt me."

Alex smiled and nodded before instantly using what little he could of Sword Domain. Hair-thin Qi flashed all around him, nearly 10 meters in all directions of him.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm Scarlet stood further away than 10 meters, so she could not feel the effect of the domain. She could however see the brief lifespan of the Sword Qi that continued forming and dying one after another.

"You need to maintain them longer," she said. "And you need to spread them further away from you too."

"I know," Alex said between grunts. "This is all I can muster a the moment."

Scarlet shrugged and gestured for him to attack. Alex rushed forward to do so.

As soon as Alex appeared close enough to her, Scarlet began feeling the effect of the domain. The thin Sword Qi began cutting all around her, trying to draw blood.

Thankfully, as an immortal, Scarlet's physical body was just too strong for the Sword Qi to cut through them. Her body wasn't strong because of body cultivation, of course, simply Immortal Qi.

That was enough for her to just stand there, taking in all the attacks. A regular Immortal would've suffered quite a bit by now, of course, but she was a Heavenly Beast and thus had much stronger Qi than normal.

Alex swung next, Midnight releasing a golden arc of an attack as it moved toward her.

Scarlet moved her hands gently and illusory feathers appeared all around her, coalescing to form a shield of bright and burning feathers.

Alex's attack was stopped without much hassle, but that did not stop Alex. He continued attacking, one more after another. Each one of the attacks was different. Each one of the attacks was meant to teach him how to use his Sword Domain with every type of attack.

Alex brought out 125 swords, adding Sword Qi to all of them before sending them toward Scarlet.

Scarlet reached out with her hands, her fingers looking as though a bird's talon before she clawed at the incoming swords. The swords clattered as they dismantled from the formation, spreading every which way.

Alex grabbed Midnight from the falling swords and did a Heavenly Static Slash. Thanks to a better Wood root, he could now use Wood attacks without worrying about wasting his Qi. Even his Wood roots were as good as anyone else's now after all.

They fought for some time before Alex had to stop. He had been holding himself up through all the mental pain he suffered from keeping up the Sword Domain.

He still hadn't reached a level where he could use it without any backlash from it.

He sat on the sand, breathing heavily as he waited for the mental pain to subside. Scarlet came by his side and sat down.

"You're improving. You last much longer now despite the pain. Either your Intent is getting stronger, or you are just becoming more tolerant of the pain. Either way, it's an improvement for sure."

Alex couldn't keep his laughter inside of him. "Thanks."

"But you need more," she said, turning back to look at their battlefield.

The sand-filled beach was littered with thin cuts that were strong enough to create sharp lines of separation in the sand.

She turned back to Alex. "You need to be able to use this without getting someone you care about hurt. You need to control your Qi and hone your Intent so you only hurt who you want to hurt. Otherwise, that Sword Domain will only end up being a detriment for you."

Alex nodded. "I'm trying, of course. Let me first become able to handle it without any pain," he said.

"Of course, that's the first matter," Scarlet said before nodding. "You're right, I'm skipping steps here."

After resting for a bit longer, the two went back to fighting once again.

Scarlet was on the defense the entire fight, as she couldn't become offensive against Alex at all. She did not wish to risk Heavenly Judgment for something as simple as training after all.

Her and her fellow Heavenly Beast's oaths gave them a lot more leeway them stay in this realm despite not belonging to this world. If Scarlet was someone who did not vow to harm anyone from this world and to die if she killed them without appropriate reason, she would've died 5 times over by now since she met Alex.

She had done just too much once she became an Immortal, things she would have been very hesitant to do previously.

After training for some time, they rested once again. Alex breathed heavily, looking toward Scarlet.

"I remember something. You used a technique with 8 fire eggs during your breakthrough. Can you teach it to me? Or any other techniques you have for that matter," Alex asked.

"The Vermillion Immolation Egg technique?" Scarlet asked. "That's one of my bloodline techniques, along with many other techniques of mine that I use."

"Yes, those. Can I learn those?" Alex asked.

"I don't think you heard me correctly. Those techniques are bloodline techniques," Scarlet repeated.

Alex paused for a moment. "What are you saying? I can't learn them if I don't have the Phoenix's bloodline?" he asked. "Any of them?"

"Unfortunately, that is exactly what it means," Scarlet said. "So unless you are a Vermillion bird, you should forget about it."

"Do I need the Vermillion Bird's bloodline or just the Phoenix fire?" Alex asked.

Scarlet thought for a moment. "You will need the Vermillion Bird's bloodline. Without the bloodline, there is no Phoenix fire."

"Can't I just learn the fire?" Alex asked. "I've tried doing it a few times, and every time I do it, I find myself unable to peer through all of its mysteries."

"Well, the very first thing you need is to sense the Time aura, which I know you are capable of, but you don't know the specifics. Until you get down to the specifics, it will be difficult for you to learn Phoenix Dao in any way."

Alex sighed. He had tried learning the Phoenix Fire many different times, even drinking Scarlet's blood a few times to get her Bloodline. But each time he was stumped.

With the True Fire Dao, it should've been easy for him to copy the Phoenix Fire. Only, Phoenix Fire wasn't only made up of Time dao and True Fire Dao.

There was more going on with the Phoenix fire, but he couldn't figure it out at all, other Daos he did not recognize. Until Scarlet told him what those were, it would take him a while to recognize them all.

"I'll get it somehow, you know," Alex said. "One way or another, with your bloodline or not, I will find a way to form my very own Phoenix Fire."

Scarlet gave a wide grin. "I'll be waiting for you to do that then."

Alex got a message on his talisman as they were about to go for a third round of battle. He took out the talisman and read the information.

"Someone else died again. I need to get back," Alex said and prepared to leave.

Scarlet didn't argue. "Let's go."

VACATION NOTICE!!!

Chapter 1881 More Blood

Alex walked out of the dome, carrying with him an urn. Within the urn were the ashes of the person he had just experimented on.

He could not send the corpse back to the person's family, all flayed and missing spiritual roots, so instead he chose to give them a funeral and have the ashes delivered to the family.

The family consented to this from the very start when their dying were registered to the house for the dying, so they would have no qualms with this.

Alex handed over the urn to one of the people waiting for him and walked away.

Following him, Linlin walked out as well and began reporting.

"We have an influx of people donating their blood, Your Majesty. Letting the Saints of other continents donate their blood as well was a good idea, but the amount of pills you need to make had increased by a lot."

"How many do I need to make?" Alex asked.

"8700 for this month," Linlin mentioned.

Alex paused. "I'm sorry, what?" he turned around. "8700? How?"

"Many saints came from all around the world, Your Majesty. Your pills are very popular worldwide," Linlin said with a somewhat proud smile.

Alex couldn't help but frown a little hearing that. He was supposed to be losing fame all around the world to slowly fade into obscurity. Instead, he was becoming more and more well-known.

'This isn't good,' he thought. 'I will have to deal with it somehow soon.'

"The people that came were quite strong too. Nearly half of them were in Saint Soul realm or above," Linlin mentioned.

Alex stopped and turned around. "That many? There must be a lot of blood then."

"Yes," Linlin said and brought out the Bottomless Jade Flask. "This is how much we've gathered this month."

Alex took back his flash and peered inside. To his surprise, there were nearly 20 thousand liters of pure blood.

"No repeaters, correct?" Alex asked.

"None who have donated in the past 3 months were allowed to donate again," Linlin said.

Alex couldn't help but feel excited thinking about all the blood. "I might actually end up reaching the 9th realm with this."

Since he began accepting blood half a year ago, Alex had managed to go from the peak of Saint Transformation 7th realm to the peak of Saint Transformation 8th realm with all the blood he had gathered.

With the flask full of blood in his hand, he hoped to go to the realm beyond. Alex couldn't help but wonder what would happen when he reached the peak of Saint Transformation 9th realm with Blood Aura too.

Would it by any chance trigger a Lightning tribulation?

He had heard about how there came a point where even through Body Cultivation, one could become an Immortal. He had asked Bai Jingshen and Senior Yang about this and learned that at a certain point, one could not go further without becoming Immortal.

To become an Immortal, one of course had to bring down an Immortal tribulation, which even Body Cultivators could. Alex wondered if that was the same with Blood aura as well.

Graham had learned of this too, and had long since stopped improving his body, focusing only on his cultivation base. He was close to reaching the Saint realm now, and would within the year.

He hadn't stopped cultivating his body because of the fear of becoming an Immortal, but because at the end of the day, one still needed to learn a Dao to become an Immortal, which Graham had yet to do.

So, beyond a certain point, there was simply no improvement when trying to body cultivate, which forced Graham to stop.

Until he learned a Dao, there was no point in doing that, and as such he focused on his Qi cultivation instead.

Alex already knew about what happened when one reached the peak of the Saint Transformation realm in strength with Spiritual energy or Sword Intent. He had asked those questions before.

One simply had to wait to become an Immortal some other way before they could advance on that route.

'I'll have to ask Scarlet about it later.'

None of Alex's family were in the palace at the moment.

After Lilin's arrival many years ago, with her husband and young daughter, the palace had grown quiet with everyone doing their own thing.

As such, to bring some join into their life, Helen had decided that it would be a good idea for them to go on a vacation around the world.

So, every member of his family and friends in the palace, except him, had left to go travel all the other continents. From what Alex understood, they had gone to the Northern Continent first, where Alex had advised the ones with Fire Spiritual root to improve it in the 13th Volcano.

After that, Helen had mentioned that they would be heading over to the Western Continent, where Helen wanted to say her final goodbye to her master and members of her sect as she wouldn't be visiting them ever again.

He had been notified some time ago that they were going to head there soon. He wondered if they already had.

"I'll go make use of this blood," Alex told Linlin. "Then I'll have to start making pills."

He sighed as he thought of the numbers. "I might have to spend 3 weeks making this pill. I will barely get any break."

"Should we ask them to stop?" Linlin asked.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm "No, I'll let you know when to stop. I need to keep this going for some more time." Alex stored the flask in his Soul Space. "You can go back to work. I'll see you later."

"Actually,Your Majesty," Linlin quickly spoke. "There is one more thing. Your aunt is back from the Eastern Continent, and says that she wants to talk to you."

Alex paused. "Is it urgent?"

"No, but it did sound important."

Alex nodded. "Thank you. I'll visit her first then."

Alex headed toward his aunt's room, arriving there sometime later.

"Why is your cultivation speed so slow? Wasn't it fast before?" Liz asked the moment she saw Alex.

"It is fast by comparison," Alex chuckled as he answered. "I'm taking my time. That's why it is slow. And it appears I should congratulate you on entering Saint Transformation as well."

"Yes, I did," Liz said excitedly.

"So, what is the important talk you wanted to have with me? I was about to go into closed cultivation for about a month," Alex said.

"I heard everyone is out touring the world. You will have to call them back soon, or have them go to the Eastern Continent."

"Why is that? Is something happening there? Something to do with sister?"

"Yes," Liz said. "Her birthday is coming up in about half a year, and she wants to celebrate it."

"Okay..."

Nobody celebrated anybody's birthday in the cultivation world. Alex wasn't entirely sure why Hannah would want to. "Is there a reason why she wants to celebrate it?"

"Of course," Liz said. "Once she got to go back to the Central Continent, she did some calculations and found out that her next birthday is her 100th birthday."

"So, she intends to celebrate her 100th birthday with all her family."

VACATION NOTICE!!!

Chapter 1882 Hannah’s 100th Birthday

Alex walked out of the Harmonious Balance Haven and teleported to the Dragon Capital.

As he walked out of the teleportation formation, he was introduced to an atmosphere of pure joy and celebration.

Lanterns hung all around, and?sounds of drums spread through the city. Tall flags flapped in the wind and a constant voice kept shouting 'Hurray' at every few intervals.

Alex was genuinely surprised at how celebratory the capital had become for his sister's birthday.

The news had spread like wildfire apparently, the Empresses' 100th birthday being a vastly important ordeal given how status and strength.

Not only was she the Empress, but she was also the youngest known cultivator who had reached the Saint Transformation 9th realm.

The one that was most certain to reach Immortality next.

Alex met a group of soldiers who were there to escort him to the palace. They looked at him and were in awe at his Saint Transformation 4th realm that he had reached some weeks ago.

They knew he had only been at the Saint Transformation 1st realm when he had killed the Immortal Dragon Emperor, so who knew what went through their head when seeing him in a realm higher than back then?

The legacy of him that spread throughout the Eastern Continent was not something he could remove easily. He had to deal with it some other way.

'So much for obscurity,' Alex thought. The more the days went on, the more he realized just how wrong he was in regards to people forgetting about him.

With the feats he had done, that was not?something that was?likely to happen without any big move on his part.

Alex arrived at the palace and was quickly taken to where the Emperor and Empress were.

"Sister, Happy 100th Birthday!"

Alex hugged Hannah as soon as he arrived at the hall.

"Thank you so much!" Hannah spoke back in glee. "Well, the birthday is still not for 2 more days, but thank you."

"You seem very happy," Alex said. "Is there any particular reason for that?"

"No reason." Hannah shrugged her shoulders. "I'm just happy. I might be 100 years old, but that's infancy for a cultivator. I'm allowed to be childish sometimes."

"I can't argue there."

Alex greeted Long Huan, who seemed quite happy as well. He had improved quite a lot since Alex last saw him, his physique itself changing to be more stern and dependable. As though the burdens of being an Emperor were something that changed him.

He had also reached the Saint Transformation realm, it seemed. That would help Hannah a lot when it was time for her to take everyone away.

That reminded Alex.

"How's your progress with your Dao, sister? Have you learned anything since back then?" Alex asked.

"Quite a lot," Hannah said. "I don't have anything to do except learn some Dao, so I've ended up learning almost all of the Fire Daos, 2 Water Daos, and the Dao of Earth."

Alex was taken aback slightly. "You've learned almost all the Fire Daos?" he asked.

"Yes," Hannah said proudly. "I still have to learn the Dao of Boiling and Dao of Melting, but that shouldn't take too long if I'm not wrong. I should learn it within the next 2 years."

"Wow. What about the 2 Water Daos? Which ones did you learn?"

"Dao of Softness and Dao of Water," Hannah answered. "I tried learning others but I find water Daos harder than fire Daos for some reason. I cannot understand why."

Alex had no answer for that.

"So you have..." Alex quickly calculated in his mind and continued, "9 Dao right now, and that will go down to 4 if you learn 2 more. That sounds... lovely."

"How many do you have?" Hannah asked.

Alex could only sigh. "13."

Hannah put on a worried look. "Are you going to be alright?" she asked. "I hear the more Dao you have, the more dangerous it is."

"Don't worry. I can deal with it," Alex said. "I'll be alright."

Hannah nodded.

"So... 2 more Dao and you will try to break through to Immortality, huh?" Alex said.

"Yes," Hannah said. "Just 2 more Dao."

They left the hall, going to the Swan courtyard where Alex's family was staying at the moment.

Everyone welcomed him with open arms.

Alex hadn't seen a lot of them in over a year now, so he was more than happy to see them all. Ronron excitedly told him about their extended adventures throughout the continent, asking him if he had seen the many places she saw.

Alex shook his head. He hadn't explored the Western or Northern Continent like he did the Eastern Continent during his 20-year stay here.

Those were places he had to survive in, with each day needing him to do something to get to the next. He didn't have any time to go explore.

However, now that he was to be freer soon, he would certainly go visit a lot of different places no doubt. Although, that would have to wait for a while.

Helen talked about her visit to the Luminance Empire, where she met his master once again.

Qin Shan was still the sect master of the Flowing Brush sect and seemed to have improved in his cultivation a lot. Although, Helen had long since surpassed him with herowncultivation base, which certainly surprised the man quite a lot.

Helen related other information that Alex wasn't privy to, none of which was of much interest to Alex. Although he was indeed happy to know that everyone from Scarlet City was doing well.

Alex went on to talk with the others and stopped by to talk with young Emily. In the time he hadn't seen her, she had grown to be a young girl of around 12 years old, which made her mature enough where she formal when talking to Alex.

Alex was surprised to see that the girl had begun cultivating, although she was still only at the very start.

Two days passed, and finally, it was the actual day of Hannah's birthday. The two days were filled with a lot of celebrations, but this was the one where it all peaked.

Long Huan and Hannah had prepared food of all kinds to be enjoyed. Wines brewed for thousands of years had been opened for this occasion and celebrated.

Long Hanjue joined in on the celebration as well, happily eating and drinking along with everyone.

They laughed with each other, cried while remembering their days long gone by, and wished it could all stay like this forever.

"I wish Dad was here," Hannah said with a sad face. This was the first time in a long time Hannah had missed her dad.

Liz hugged her deeply. "Me too, girl. Me too."

The celebration lasted for the entire day before they decided to stop around midnight.

"That was fun," Alex said. "But that's enough celebration for a lifetime."

Most of the adults turned toward him and stared at him with a weird expression on their faces.

Alex looked back at them. "What?" he asked. As soon as the question left his mouth, he realized just 'what' it was.

"Are wereallydoing this again?"

His 100th birthday was coming up within the next 3 years as well.

Chapter 1883 Something for the Family

Alex returned to the Southern Continent with his family and decided that it was time he spent some more time with them. With Hannah nearly learning the True Fire Dao, it would be any time now that his family would have to leave.

Because of that, he had to make a few integral decisions, the first of which was to stop accepting any more blood and dying people next.

The house of the dying stopped accepting dying people right away, while the blood was to be stopped about a year from now.

Alex still needed quite a bit of blood to reach the peak of the Saint Transformation realm with his blood aura, so he would have to accept it for now.

He was now spending less time on his?own?matters, and more time on his family. Who knew when he would get the time to spend with them this freely once they left?

Still, there were things Alex wanted to give them before they left, things that would help them once they were up there.

Alex desperately wanted to give them the Undying Physique, but there was no way such a thing was possible at all. He could leave behind an inheritance right now, he understood that much. But to do so would be to severely cripple one's spirit or soul, sending them close to death.

Alex sometimes wondered if the 8th Undying God would've survived the ambush by the Immortals had he still had an unwounded soul. It had been an injury to his spirit that had killed him.

The Undying Physique was not just a regular technique. It was a technique tied directly to his memories and the Intent of the many that came before him, which also made it impossible for him to pass it to anyone else.

Alex wondered if he could overcome this in the future, but the ones that held these techniques before him were Divinities and Celestials. He would have a very difficult time breaking through those Intents.

Alex forgot about passing on the Undying body for now and focused on some other things.

There was one thing he wanted to give everyone, so he began working on it in his free time.

Perhaps because Alex had a Supreme Metal Root, or perhaps because he had a True Metal Dao, the understanding of what would be required to create a pill that would improve a Metal Spiritual Root came easily to him.

Alex was surprised himself how easy it had been, needing him to spend no more than a single year going through every single ingredient with metal energy and then putting them together in a way that helped improve Metal Spiritual roots.

It also helped that he had already done something similar with 3 roots before this.

On the day he made the Metal Spiritual Root Improvement Pill, Alex immediately got into his make another pill as soon as he could.

It would most likely not be as efficient or perhaps not easy to make this pill, but he would try it. There was little time before his family would leave for the Immortal lands.

Every single person in his family or?in?the close circle received a pill from Alex to improve their Metal root. Of course, Ronron didn't receive one and neither did anyone who didn't have a metal root.

Whisker was one of the ones to not receive it as well. He had Yin, Earth, Fire, and Wood roots, all of which except Yin had been improved by now.

The Metal pill Alex made was just as good as any of the other pills he had made, which meant everyone's metal spiritual root immediately entered the Superior range.

Alex gave the recipe over to his mother and had her create some more to be handed over to the soldiers. They had been waiting for this for quite some time now.

Alex had made a promise to give them both Metal and Fire spiritual root improvement pills, the first of which he had fulfilled now.

Honor dictated that Alex directly move on to create the Fire Pills next, but because everyone with a Fire spiritual root in his family had been sent to the 13th mountain, he decided to go another direction.

Instead of a Fire Spiritual Root Improvement Pill, he decided to make a Yang Spiritual Root Improvement Pill.

This was going to be a difficult one for sure, primarily because ingredients with Yang energy as their main energy were harder to come by than other ones, causing Alex to not have as many resources to work with.

He also didn't have a True Yang Dao, which could be bad for him, but he believed it would be alright. He had the Dao of Yang after all.

Not to mention, with his Supreme Yang Spiritual root, it was difficult to imagine that creating the Yang pill would be that much of an impossible task.

Alex focused his everything on making this pill. By now, he had already stopped accepting blood from saints as well, freeing up all of his time for this.

The only other thing he spent his time on, aside from with his family, was on the corpses of the ones who recently died.

The dead didn't wait for him, so he had to drop everything to experiment on them as soon as they died. He had to do it while the organs were still somewhat alive.

It wouldn't make for much of a transplant if they were dead.

Weeks passed, days flying by in a blur.

Alex entered a monotonous state where all he did was work on the pill, spend time with his family, and maybe experiment on a corpse if there was an emergency.

Other than that, there was nothing else he had to do. Scarlet and the many new elders he had hired a decade ago took over everything else.

Alex got some news from time to time, telling him what was going on in the outside world, none of which interested him any longer. One piece of information that he did pay attention to was the fact that his sister had learned another Fire Dao, and was now just one step away.

After months passed in the same way, Alex finally made a breakthrough in what he was doing. He had successfully managed to find the right set of combinations from the ingredients which was the last step he needed to push him in the right direction.

After a few more weeks of experimentation, Alex managed to create a perfect recipe for a Yang Spiritual Root Improvement pill, finally making everything he had worked for in the past year and a half worthwhile.

He immediately began making those Yang pills, all of which were 9-veined, and handed them over to his close family and friends.

Nearly everyone in his family had Yang Spiritual roots, albeit most of them were so weak that even calling them Inferior would be overselling them.

With the pill from Alex, many of them either reached the Superior rank or were close to it.

Now that Alex had made both of the pills he thought his family needed before they left, there wasn't anything else that needed his urgent care.

So, ignoring everything else, Alex decided to spend all of his time with his family.

Chapter 1884 A Unique Opportunity

Alex wanted to try making Fire Spiritual Root Improvement pills next, which he had promised his soldiers. Along with that, he also thought of making Yin Spiritual Root Improvement pills.

However, because he did not have the Supreme roots for either of those, he was not so confident in making them before his family was to leave.

Based on his estimate, it would take him at least 3 years to make just the pill for Fire Spiritual root alone.

lightsŒùŒøvŒµl ∆àŒøm Alex chose to spend that time with his family instead. He hoped they could make any and all improvements to their bodies on their own in the Immortal realm once they left.

Alex spent time with his mother, learning from her what he could, teaching her what he knew.

He spent time with his father, fighting from time to time, talking the other time.

Ronron liked to spend time with her sister and train her as much as she could before she had to leave, and Alex inadvertently ended up spending time with her that way.

He became very close to the young Emily who now went by just Emi instead. It was a much easier way to figure out who one was referring to as the two Emilys would often be together.

Lilin couldn't cultivate, but seeing Emi be able to cultivate made her happier than anyone else. Logan was by their side at all times too, looking after his wife and daughter.

Ronron also spent a lot of time with her parents as well, the older Alex and Emily. It had been decided that neither of the two wished to burden Ronron by following with her to the other realm, and would instead be staying behind.

They were mortals anyway. The Immortal world was not a place for them.

Ronron was not happy with their decision, but she respected it all the same. There were many days when she cried with them, saddened that she would have to leave them.

She would have been devastated had she had to leave all on her own. Thankfully, there were more following her along in this journey.

The days passed by without much action until the day a few months later when Alex received the news that Hannah had learned her final Fire Dao, allowing her to gain the True Fire Dao.

She was ready for a breakthrough.

"She will do it soon," Liz said after she passed along the information. "In 2 months, she says. They have to deal with many matters in the Empire before she is able to leave."

"We should tell the senior," Alex said.

"Someone is already on the way there to give him the information. He knows."

There was nothing more for Alex to say.

Two more months and Hannah would break through to Immortality. Then, his family would leave. He alone would have to stay behind.

There wasn't much time left.

A few weeks passed and a message came to Alex's talisman, one from his people. He took it out and read that there had been another death in the house of the dying, and his corpse was going toward the dome.

He left for it promptly.

He arrived outside the dome and paused when he saw the corpse.

There were 2 of them.

"2 corpses?" Alex asked.

"They died within minutes of each other," one of the people who brought the corpse said. "Complete coincidence."

"Alright, I'll take them."

Alex took both of the corpses inside of the dome and began working on them.

He needed to be quick about it, having to take out the spiritual roots from each one immediately. He had gotten enough practice that he was certain he could do it in under a minute.

Alex took out a small knife to cut through the first corpse when he paused. He took a step back and looked at the two corpses.

There were two of them with him right now, which he was taking for granted. There were only so many things he could do with a single corpse. But with two? The possibilities multiplied.

Immediately he went for the corpse on the left, quickly cutting out the stomach to reveal the dantian.

"1, 2, 3, 4..." He counted something in there.

He then walked over to the other corpse and cut it open in the same way. He counted for that too, coming up with the number 3.

There were 4 different Spiritual Roots in the corpse to his left and 3 on the one to his right. After quickly checking all the Spiritual roots, Alex recognized that the Water and Wood roots on the person with the 4 spiritual roots were not available for the person on the right.

Which meant, he could finally learn how to actually transplant those roots to another body.

There were 2 roots, so he had 2 choices with this. Technically he had 3 if he wanted to bring another root from the 2nd body into the first, but the first body's dantian would be destroyed soon, so there was no point.

Alex immediately cut into the Water root on either side of the dantian, taking it out from the man's stomach, and slowly pulling out all the myriads of meridians it was attached to.

Alex knew that not all of the meridians needed to come out for this to work. But the more he got out, the better it was.

Meridians from both the torso and the upper parts of the legs were pulled out. As Alex pulled on them, slowly but firmly, they came out longer and longer.

Thousands upon thousands of tiny red threads-like meridians were pulled out of the body, which started snapping at some point as they were too entangled in the corpse to pull out completely.

As a lot of them snapped, Alex made the decision to be done with it. A minute had passed and he had brought out enough of the meridians that he knew any more time he spent here would be wasted.

He switched over to the other corpse, swiftly cutting open small holes on the dantian where he could fix the base of the roots.

The roots themselves were the four major meridians that came out of the base, which split into dozens and then hundreds and then thousands of tiny meridians.

Once the base was put into place, Alex began the task of placing it all back into the new body.

This was a task he had never done before, and it was a task he would rarely get to do in the future.

One by one, Alex poured the tiny meridians through the man's cut-open stomach, sending half above the dantian, and half below it.

Alex had experimented with these spiritual roots enough to know approximately where all the meridians were supposed to go. He tried to send them in that exact pattern.

He spent a long time doing so, spending nearly 10 seconds to put all the meridians in the right place, in the right order.

Alex looked at the result and was happy to see that not too many things had gone wrong in his trial.

Only... how was he supposed to know now if he had succeeded or not?

Chapter 1885 A Surprise

"Hmm... that's unfortunate."

As seconds passed, Alex became aware that he simply had no method of testing whether what he had done would be a success or not.

The memory he had seen of the man who did these experiments first told him that in the book he had read about these experiments, this was how he would succeed.

Only Alex wanted more than just memories from a memory. He wanted factual evidence this would work, but it appeared that it wasn't going to work.

In the end, to figure out if a Spiritual Root transplant worked, he needed to try it out on a living, breathing human being. Only then would the body take in the spiritual root and adapt to it.

Alex was certain to never get a chance to do that, at least not here. He felt horrible even thinking about experimenting with living humans. That was horrible and had been why he had killed the previous man who had done it with children.

The only one Alex could do something like this would be with his enemies, and there were none of them at the moment.

The only possible person he could do it with was himself in the end, and he already had all 7 roots. There would be no way in hell he would ever experiment on himself, even if he physically could, to transplant another root on himself.

This experiment had now hit a dead end. There was no moving forward without using morally questionable means.

Alex still finished what he started. The experience of placing the meridians and spiritual roots into another body, albeit a dead one, was still quite valuable. It was useful knowledge to use later if the need ever arises.

After finishing his experimentation, Alex tore away all the Spiritual roots from the person, storing them in an ice-filled container, along with all the rest of the spiritual roots he had taken before.

He wasn't sure if he would ever need them, but if he did, he would have the ones right here. Hopefully, because he had taken them out just minutes after the person's death, they would all still be working when he needed them.

Alex burned the rest of the corpse, taking out two urns of ashes to hand over to the people who had brought them. Then, after some deliberation, he decided to stop experimenting on people.

Alex made an announcement that he would stop taking dying men and women now. The ones that were there were returned back to their family, to spend the last of their days with them.

Once that matter was settled, Alex went to his family to spend what few days there were.

Hannah arrived in the Southern Continent a few weeks later, along with Long Huan, as a complete surprise to most of them.

Alex was one of the people surprised at her appearance. But somehow Helen, Liz, and Ronron seemed to not be surprised at all. They even seemed to be expecting it.

"I thought you had more time before your breakthrough, Sister," Alex said. "Are you done with the matters in the Eastern Continent? Are you going to try and break through now?"

Hannah chuckled when she heard that. Helen and Liz laughed too, letting Alex know something secretive was going on between them.

They had been doing something that they hadn't thought to let him know. But he had been with them most of the time, what could it be that they had hidden from him?

"You forgot, didn't you?" Hannah asked with her hands crossed in front of her. "And here I thought you would be excited too."

"What did I forget?" Alex asked. As soon as he did, he remembered something and turned toward his mother. "Wait... I thought I said no. I didn't want it."

"Well, I want it, and you can't refuse now," Helen said with a wide smile and turned around. "Alex, come here. Stand by him."

She pulled the older Alex away, placing him next to Alex as they stood side by side, the same person in two ages.

Something exploded and confetti fell all over the two Alex.

"Happy 100th birthday!!"

"Happy 100th birthday!!"

"Hurray!!"

Birthday wishes and celebratory cheers came from all around the two Alex, letting them know what day it was. Neither of the two had remembered it at all, nor had they made any plans for it.

They didn't even know what date it was this time around when compared to the Central Continent. The two places didn't share the same calendar, so figuring out their birthday was a nearly impossible task.

Alex didn't want to celebrate a birthday like Hannah did, where the entire continent celebrated with her. However, just her friends and family were more than welcome.

"Happy birthday, Alex!" Wen Cheng, Luo Mei, and the rest came around to celebrate his birthday.

"Happy birthday... Master," Scarlet said, teasing him.

"Brother, Happy Birthday!"

Pearl and Whisker were more than happy to celebrate Alex's birthday.

Bai Jingshen and his wives, Hao Ya, the elders, and many others came to his birthday celebration that lasted the entire night.

Not many knew of this party, not even inside the palace itself. However, those who knew it celebrated it to the fullest throughout the whole night.

Alex's 100th birthday was a night to remember.

Only, Alex knew it wasn't his 100th birthday, but rather his 97th. Because of the 3 years he spent inside the Demon realm, he wasn't the age everyone thought he was.

But of course, there was no point in revealing this information, and technically he had been born 100 years ago, so it was all the same in the end.

Once the celebration ended, Hannah and Long Huan returned to the Eastern Continent for one last time.

There was a small matter of passing the throne to Long Hanjue, and Hannah would be able to break through immediately.

"When I return, we will immediately leave," Hannah told everyone before she left. It seemed she did not plan on staying behind for too long as an Immortal.

She was going to become an Immortal and leave right away.

Long Hanjue's ascension hadn't been officially done, but unofficially, he was now the emperor.

For the past 15 years, Long Huan had been helping his younger brother learn as much about ruling as he could, so all he could do now was trust that his brother would become a good Emperor.

As Hannah and Long Huan made their own preparation, Alex's family did the same as well. It was about time they were going to leave, so they began spending their final days together, saying their goodbyes to the ones that would be separated from them.

They were going to leave immediately, so they didn't have much time together.

Hannah came back and let them all know that she was now ready to break through. That was the final thing remaining before they all left this world.

Everyone, human and beast, followed Hannah all the way to a remote island south of the Southern Continent.

Nearly everyone who was close to anyone had come to watch Hannah's breakthrough.

Hannah took a deep breath and nodded to herself.

"Let's begin."

VACATION NOTICE!!!

Chapter 1886 Hannah’s Tribulation

Hannah sat in the middle of the island, far enough away from everyone that she could not harm anyone even if she intended to.

She remained seated and took deep breaths as she let her body do the thing. It was time to break through, and so her body knew what needed to be done for that.

Qi surged through her body without her command and slowly elevated her cultivation base step by step until it touched the threshold of Immortality.

It hung on that threshold, not moving back, but not moving further either. It remained there, waiting for Hannah's Intent.

Hannah chose to go beyond, and so her body followed.

Hannah felt a distinctive change in her body, but before she could even fully realize what the change was, she fell into a lull, attacked by the Inner Demon.

Hannah had been ready for this for the longest time. She had gone through every scenario the Inner Demon could use against her, every weakness she had, and tried to deal with the problems and get rid of them.

She hadn't managed to get through all the problems that plagued her heart, but she had prepared for this enough that the Inner Demon could not stop her.

Hannah opened her eyes and looked to the sky as the tribulation cloud began gathering all over the sky.

Alex and the rest looked to the sky, happy that Hannah had overcome her Inner Demon, worried that she now would have to fight against the Tribulation lightning.

Starweaver appeared in Hannah's hands, the thin sword glowing with an outline of white as Hannah prepared her first attack.

The first tribulation lightning bolt fell to the ground at the same time as when Hannah attacked. Her attacks carried with them the power of Immortal Qi, and that easily dealt with the first of the lightning bolts.

Hannah felt the aura from the destroyed lightning bolt gather around her. It went into her, merging with her Qi, improving them, condensing them.

Hannah had been prepared for this. She had been prepared for her Qi to lessen as she went on and become stronger at the same time.

She looked back up at the sky, ready to fight another lightning bolt.

Most people chose to use their regular Qi first and keep the Immortal Qi for the latter lightning bolts, ones that they weren't certain they could beat with their regular Qi.

However, Hannah was strong enough and had enough Immortal Qi that she could go through most of the fight against the tribulation lightning without running out of Immortal Qi.

By the time she did run out, what was left would be refined to the same level her Immortal Qi would be, so there was no point in holding back right now.

As one lightning bolt after another fell from the sky, Hannah fought each one, using mostly Fiery attacks to protect herself.

Second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth.

She destroyed six lightning bolts in total before she even felt like she struggled at all.

"She wants to save her Qi for the later bolts," Bai Jingshen said softly. "She shouldn't be doing that. Get through the 9 bolts first. They are the most important ones."

Liz grabbed the railing of the ship so tightly that it started cracking underneath her strain.

Long Huan quickly grabbed her hands. "It will be alright, Mother-in-law. Your daughter will do just fine, watch."

Hannah's Starweaver weaved through the air, sending out a large, fiery bird that flew up just as the seventh lightning bolt fell from the sky.

The attack and the lightning bolt clashed, sending out ripples of energy and aura in all directions. Bai Jingshen and Scarlet worked to protect them.

"Just 2 more," Long Huan said softly and looked toward the sky. No matter how much of a sturdy front he tried to put, he was still worried about Hannah.

Everyone was.

The eighth lightning bolt fell from the sky and Hannah stopped it with a Bursting Blaze. An explosion of fire lit up the world in fiery light before sunlight took over once again.

Hannah's body looked weak, and she took ragged breaths, but she wasn't hurt at all. Her clothes were fine, not a singe on them.

She stood tall once again and took deep breaths as she felt the Qi inside of her. The Qi had all concentrated to the point where they were indistinguishable from her Immortal Qi.

In fact, it was hard to say if she even had the pseudo Immortal Qi from before, because what she felt right now was all Qi that was ready to take the next step.

The skies crackled with lightning, thunderous booms trying to scare her from fighting back. Simple puffs of water would not be able to stop Hannah today.

A portion of the Qi filled her body, and she used a portion of it on the sword. True Fire Dao filled her once again as she waited for the final of the 9 lightning bolts to fall.

When it did, she struck back.

The explosion immediately sent Hannah kneeling on one knee as the force of the attack tried to break her. But she stopped it from breaking her. She stopped it from winning over her.

She stopped it from defeating her.

In fact, she defeated it.

Hannah stood up, a look of stern resolution apparent on her face. She felt the Qi in her dantian stir, become denser and settle.

She had become an Immortal.

The first 9 lightning bolts were what one had to overcome to become immortal. Her Qi had reached the point at which it could be called a proper Immortal Qi.

Hannah felt a stir in her body as the Body and Soul began to merge. She also felt a stir in her chest, where her Soul Space was beginning to open.

Only they didn't happen.

Just because Hannah had reached the Immortal realm did not mean that she got to keep it. She had to fight for her right to keep her Qi and anything else she gained through it.

She had to fight for her right to keep her status as someone who had stared into the hidden mysteries of the world and taken it into her own control.

It was time to fight the Dao lightning.

Hannah was low on Qi and she couldn't just take a pill in the middle of the battle. Not at this stage without causing more trouble for herself with the Heavens. She had to use what she had left.

'4 more attacks,' Hannah thought and got ready once more, preparing her Qi to fight what was going to come down from the sky next.

Her eyes turned purple, the world in the sky abuzz with brown aura. Aura of Earth Dao. They all began coalescing toward the center-right above her, and she timed the coming of the lightning bolt.

When the first of the Dao Lightning fell, Hannah reacted at the same time, attacking the sky herself.

A fire burned out of her sword, burning with a heat that was hotter than anything she had ever felt before, and it struck the incoming lightning bolt.

The world was filled with red and purple colors once again.